COLLECTIVE MADNESS



Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
iStock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- Congress has until midnight Friday to strike a deal on a host of thorny issues before government funding is set to run out, but talks appear to be at a standstill and a stopgap spending bill is looking more likely.



At the heart of it: the fate of nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants.



Democrats insist that if Republicans want their support for a spending deal, it must include a legislative fix to help DACA recipients. Republicans maintain that DACA must be dealt with separately from spending negotiations.



While a bipartisan group of senators claimed to have struck a deal that would shield DACA recipients from deportations and address border security, President Donald Trump roundly rejected their plan at an Oval Office meeting late last week.



Talks got even more complicated after sources said -- and at least one Democratic lawmaker at the meeting publicly claimed -- that Trump had made disparaging remarks about accepting immigrants from African nations.



On Sunday, Trump emphatically denied calling them "s---hole countries," adding that he is the "least racist person" reporters "have ever interviewed."



He went on to blame Democrats for holding up negotiations, telling reporters, "Honestly, I don't think the Democrats want to make a deal. I think they talk about DACA, but they don't want to help the DACA people."



And on Monday Trump tweeted, "Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting. Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military."



With Congress heading towards another government shutdown, all eyes are on negotiators as they scramble to come up with a spending deal that will placate members on both sides of the aisle.



The spending bill



Just two weeks ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., seemed confident Democrats and Republicans could work together on spending.



"I am optimistic that we can begin 2018 with a bipartisan, two-year funding agreement that meets several critically-important objectives," McConnell said at the beginning of the new year.



Congressional leaders are scrambling to negotiate a funding bill that sets spending caps, reauthorizes the Children's Health Insurance Program, and provides supplemental disaster relief for communities ravaged by hurricanes last fall.



Republicans and Democrats both want to lift spending caps, which limit the amount of money the government can spend without adding to the deficit.



While Republicans are calling for a boost in defense spending, Democrats insist that any military spending increase be matched by an equal increase in spending on domestic programs. Republicans have said this notion of parity is a non-starter.



House Speaker Paul Ryan said negotiators on both sides of the aisle are making progress on establishing spending caps, and downplayed the chances of a government shutdown.



But he acknowledged another short-term spending bill was likely in the cards in order to give lawmakers more time to strike a deal on a long-term spending bill.



We will have to do something short-term, Ryan admitted last week during remarks at the University of Wisconsin-Milwuakee.



GOP defense hawks say a short-term spending bill cripples the military and the country's national security.



Democrats, for their part, are loathe to support a spending bill that doesnt include a legislative fix to help the so-called Dreamers  the nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.



Fate of the Dreamers



The lone bipartisan plan to address DACA recipients and border security is now on the cutting room floor, but negotiators say they plan to whip up support from their colleagues.



"President Trump called on Congress to solve the DACA challenge. We have been working for four months and have reached an agreement in principle that addresses border security, the diversity visa lottery, chain migration/family reunification, and the Dream Actthe areas outlined by the President. We are now working to build support for that deal in Congress," the bipartisan group of six senators said in a joint statement last week.



The Trump administration has set March 5 as the deadline to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for young undocumented immigrants if Congress fails to come up with its own solution.



Republicans say Democrats are holding spending negotiations "hostage" and have said the DACA program must be addressed separately and in a standalone bill.



Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and other Democrats are pushing for a DACA fix to be included in a spending agreement this week because they fear if it's delayed any longer than that, Republicans won't put any legislation on the floor for a vote.



Republican leadership have said they intend to bring a vote to the floor in February or March.



"Weve heard that before and it never happens," Schumer said last week.



Immigration hardliners in the Senate have already said their colleagues' bipartisan plan "isn't serious."



There has been no deal reached yet on the future of DACA in the Senate. Some of our colleagues have floated a potential plan that, simply put, isnt serious. It is disingenuous to discuss providing status to, potentially, millions of individuals without taking credible steps to truly protect our borders and secure the interior," Sens. Cotton, Grassley, and Perdue said in a statement last week.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
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As part of its commitment in the prevention of new and reemerging infectious diseases in Delta State, the state government has partnered with the Nigeria Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) for the early diagnoses and research on infectious diseases.

The state Commissioner for Health, Dr. Nicholas Azinge made this known at a one day training on Monkey pox disease organized for health care workers in the State held at the Conference Hall, Olorogun Felix Ibru Secretariat Complex recently.

The Commissioner who was represented at the event by the Director, Public Health, State Ministry of Health, Dr. (Mrs.) Philomena Okeowo said that with the establishment of the Nigeria Institute of Medical Researchs sub-station in the state which covers the states in the South-South geo-political zone, the state is leveraging on Institutes available skilled human resource and infrastructure to enable it address issues of infectious diseases.

According to the Commissioner, the objectives of the training include the sensitization of health care workers on the prevention and control of monkey pox disease and other infectious disease, and how to care for suspected cases.

Dr. Azinge revealed that the training will keep the participants abreast on how to contain infectious diseases as they emerge, carry out outbreak investigations, know the due processes as regards the flow of report rendering, specimen collection amongst others.

He revealed that no death has been recorded so far and added that government has made provisions for the free treatment of detected cases (patients) of monkey pox disease be it in public or private health facilities.

According to Commissioner Azinge, the Governor Okowa led administration has supported all diseases outbreak intervention in the State through the procurements and prepositioning of outbreak management materials for the detection and management of the disease, provision of logistics for border patrols for early detection through migration or displacement of people from neigbouring or other States of the federation.

Other measures aimed at addressing the disease by government include the activation of the State Rapid Response Team, sensitization/mobilization of Disease Surveillance and Notification Officers (DNSOs) in all the twenty-five Local Government Areas of the State in collaboration with the World Health Organization amongst others.

Resource persons who made presentations at the training were Dr. Bassey Anya, World Health Organization (WHO) State Coordinator - Surveillance and Contact Tracing, Dr. Anastacia Ojimba, Consultant Public Health Physician, Federal Medical Centre, Asaba, amongst others.

A total of one hundred and thirty-five (135) medical workers drawn from sixty-four (64) government hospitals, Delta State Teaching Hospital, Oghara and Federal Medical Centre, Asaba, participated in the training.
An elder statesman, High Chief Abiola Ogundokun has sued the Oluwo of Iwoland in Osun State, Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi (Telu 1) for N1Billion (One Billion Naira) for defamation and character assassination.

According to the suit No; HOS/6/2018 filed before the Osun State High Court of Justice, Osogbo Judicial Division dated January 8, 2018 and made available to The Nigerian Voice, Ogundokun, a former Publicity Secretary of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) under the regime of President Shehu Shagari and a former member of the Constituent Assembly in 1977 sued the monarch for defamation of character, malicious falsehood via cyber bullying and reputation assassination.

The lawsuit was filed at the High Court in Osogbo by Olayinka Osokoya of O.A. Osokoya & Co, the counsel to Chief Abiola Ogundokun in which he demanded is demanded N1billon for aggravated and exemplary damages as a result of the several public comments made against him by the Oluwo on several online mediums including YouTube, Whatsapp, Facebook and Newspapers.

Ironically, Chief Ogundokun filed his charges against the Oluwo exactly a year after Oluwo gave him the Oba Nla of Iwo land title (The highest title in Iwo land) which is equally a subject of contest in the new case. Ogundokun was announced the Oba Nla of Iwo land via a letter signed by the Oluwo on January 8, 2017.

The litigation is full of drama and suspense as several of the Oluwos YouTube remarks/interviews/jester and other actions against his subject, Chief Abiola Ogundokun were translated & transcribed by Dr. J. A. Ogunwale, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistic and African Languages, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife (OAU).

Chief Ogundokun is also asking the court of law to defray some impressions created by the monarch "that he (Ogundokun) stole roasted yam while in Modern School as purported by Oba Akanbi in one of his YouTube videos and that he was responsible for the annulment of June 12, 1993 Presidential Election won by his bosom friend, late Basorun MKO Abiola and that he thwarted MKO Abiolas dream of becoming President of Nigeria and that Ogundokun was equally the one who scuttled the dream/chance of one Barrister Eniola Atanda, an Iwo indigene from becoming the first civilian Governor of Osun State and that he (Ogundokun) purchased a stolen vehicle and sold same to Atanda thereby rendering Atandas pedigree obsolete and that that he (Ogundokun) was equally the one who ruined the success of Professor Wole Soyinka during the time he was managing the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) and that he (Ogundokun) is a criminal and dubious person who had thwarted the chances of the Yoruba Nation for his own selfish interest and that he (Ogundokun) derives pleasure in sending people to jail.

The 83 pages document reads: "The plaintiff is a prominent Iwo Indigene, Politician, Elder Statesman, High Chief, Philanthropist, Publisher and well respected community leader of Iwo, Osun State of Nigeria, residing at Ogundokun residence, Ibajedewa lodge, Oloolas compound, Iwo, Osun State of Nigeria.

"The defendant is the Oluwo of Iwo and resides at Oluwos Palace, Iwo, Osun State of Nigeria.

The plaintiff has contributed greatly to the development and growth of Iwo and its environs (Comprising of all the three Local Government Areas in Iwo land i.e, Iwo, Ayedire and Ola-Oluwa Local Governments)

"The plaintiff is also a member of the board of trustees of Iwo Central Mosque, a registered body with the Corporate Affairs Commission (Attached with a Copy of certificate of registration signed by one Bello Mahmud with Abiola Ogundokuns name as 4th trustee)

The plaintiff also avers that he was equally appointed as a member of Iwo Board of Trustees by a letter with Ref. No: ITC/R/APP/003. (Copy attached)

The plaintiff hereby pleads and shall rely on the said letter as well as a series of letters of awards and recognition for all his contribution to the development of Iwo land, Osun State (Series of documents attached for confirmation)

The plaintiff avers that because of his contribution to the development and growth of Islam in Iwo land, the Islamic clerics from the three Local Government Areas in Iwo land under the headship of the Chief Imam of Iwo, confered on him the Chieftaincy title of Basorun Musulumi of Iwo land sometimes in Year 2000 and he was subsequently turbaned as such by the Chief Imam of Iwo. The plaintiff shall, at the trial of this suit, rely on the certificate issued in his favor when the said chieftaincy title was confered on him (Copies of letters signed by Sheikh Alhaji Imran Asiru, Chief Imam of Iwo Land/Chairman, league of Imams and Alfas in Iwo land and his Secretary, Muhamed Tajudeen Olowe, dated 8th October & 28th October, 1999 and confirmation certificate attached)

"The plaintiff avers that as a result of his immense and unprecedented contributions towards the sustainable growth and development of Osun State and Nigeria as a whole, he has received several awards and recognition in and outside the state of Osun which includes: The Otun Balogun of Iwo land, Basorun Musulumi of Iwo land, Jagun of Ajagunlaase, Areago of Iwo Oke land, Seriki of Iba land, Apesin of Erin Osun and, The jagunpote of The Source, Diamond Award by the African Communication National Development. Merit Award for Political Development of Nigeria in Security Seminars conferred on him by the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) in 1996; Distinguished Achievers Award conferred on him in 2005 by the Nigerian Youth Organization, Nigerian Leadership and Role Model Award in 2008, Award of Integrity and Anti-Corruption in 2009 and many others

The plaintiff avers that he is a member of several International organizations such as: The International chains of Industrial and Technical Advertising Agencies, (ICTA), Member, Advertising club of New York, Member, Industrial Advertising Incorporated, Member of the Association of Advertising Practitioners in Nigeria to mention but a few.

The plaintiff avers that he has worked with several media and publishing firms in and outside Nigeria which has earned him a global image and recognition

The plaintiff avers that as a journalist, he has worked in various places and in different capacities to wit: Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), as a correspondent under the Editorship of Alhaji Ayo Fagbo, he was Co-Presenter of Hello fans of OGUN and OGUN Eko Participant, Assistant Editor of Peoples Star Press, Divisional Correspondent and Commercial representative of the defunct Sketch and New Nigerian Newspapers in the whole of the then Western Region of Nigeria, Director of Daily Times of Nigeria, Chairman, Niger-Park, a subsidiary of Daily Times of Nigeria, Divisional Correspondent, defunct Sketch publishing for Old Osun Division now Osun State, News Translator, Reporter and Broadcaster of the Western Nigeria Broadcasting and Television, (the very first Television in Nigeria)

The plaintiff avers that he established in the media outfit States Mirror, a monthly magazine and later established Conscience International Magazine currently circulating worldwide

The plaintiff avers that as a young politician, he contested and won the Councillorship of Election and was sworn in as Councillor under the old Iwo Local Government Area and as a philanthropist, he donated his salaries and allowances to the Iwo Community to enhance the growth and development of Iwo town

The plaintiff avers that due to his kindness to the masses and philanthropy, he was massively voted into the Constituent Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 1977

The plaintiff avers that in 1994, he was also a member of the Constitutional Conference.

The plaintiff states further that in 1995/1996 he was also a member of the Constitutional Review Panel

The plaintiff avers that in the year 1996, he was made the chairman of the National Reconciliation Committee of the 250 Eminent Yoruba Leaders Forum where he led a presentation on a United Nations fact finding mission to Nigeria in Ile-Ife

The Plaintiff avers that the Defendant was appointed as the Oluwo of Iwo sometimes in the year 2015.

The plaintiff further avers that because of his love for Iwo Town, he gave the Defendant his support both morally and financially towards his post-coronation as the Oluwo of Iwo.

The plaintiff further avers that he stood by the Defendant throughout his trying moments and during his problem with the Oluwo-Oke of Iwo-Oke which culminated in a quasi-criminal charge brought against him by the Oluwo-Oke of Iwo-Oke

The plaintiff avers that he personally took the Defendant to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo (A former Nigerian Head of State & Elder Statesman) when it became apparent that the Defendant might be sent to jail for contempt of court

The plaintiff avers that save for his intervention through Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, Oluwo-Oke would not have withdrawn the case against the Defendant.

The plaintiff averes that, however, the Defendant has been behaving strangely after an honest advice rendered to him by the plaintiff, not to extort money from several persons jostling for Chieftaincy titles but from those he would confer with such Chieftaincy titles.

The Plaintiff avers that this piece of advice did not go down well with the Defendant as he subsequently and purportedly announced that he has been stripped and/or removed from all the chieftaincy titles in Iwo land, including the Basorun Musulumi of Iwo land

The plaintiff avers that upon becoming aware of his purported removal, he instituted an action at the High Court of Justice, Oshogbo challenging the action of the Defendant.

The plaintiff states further that he equally filed a motion on notice for interlocutory injunction restraining the Defendant, his servants, agents or privies from appointing, installing and/or turbaning another person as Basorun Musulumi of Iwo land pending the determination of the suit and same was granted by the court.

The plaintiff hereby pleads and shall rely on the processes filed in the suit as well as the Certified True Copy of the Enrolment of Order.

The plaintiff avers that the defendant did not just stop at threatening to strip him of his chieftaincy titles but called several people including Iwo chiefs to the palace where he said series of uncomplimentary and defamatory things against the plaintiff which the defendant recorded in a video and uploaded on the internet (Plaintiff attached series of online sources/platforms where defendant deformed his character & maligned his reputation)

The plaintiff avers that the video (s) has gone viral. That he (Plaintiff) will lead evidence at the trial of this action through living witnesses who reside within and outside Osun State to show the far reaching negative effects of the libelous publication, which is the subject of this action and the monumental damage it has unleashed on the plaintiff in all its ramifications, including the odium, contempt and ridicule brought upon him as an astute politician, elder statesman, High Chief, Philanthropist, Publisher and well respected community leader, and business executive which cut across state boundaries.

The Plaintiff avers that his friends and admirers from all over Nigeria and beyond have made contacts with him expressing disappointment over the malicious defamation of the plaintiffs reputation by the defendant.

The Defendant knew or must be taking to know that the plaintiff could not have done all the Defendant claimed he did.

The Defendant has threatened to continue to spread defamatory publication against the plaintiff and unless restrained, he would carry out his threats. (Plaintiff provides a translated copy of series of defamatory interviews/comments/chats where Defendant ridicules and destroyed reputation of plaintiff).

Chief Ogundokun 83, a media baron and publisher of Conscience International Magazine have been at loggerhead with the youthful Iwo monarch since April 2017 when Oba Akanbi stripped Ogundokun of his traditional and Islamic titles over what he termed insubordination to his rulership by Ogundokun.

It will be recalled that Oba Akanbi on Sunday April 30, 2017 verbally announced the revocation of all chieftaincy titles of Ogundokun ranging from Islamic, social and traditional titles after claiming to be the custodian of all spheres of social influence in Iwo land.

Oba Akanbi was said to have announced to some selected chiefs at his palace that As the ruler and custodian of all traditional, cultural, religious and social clubs in Iwo land, I hereby relief him (Ogundokun) of all his traditional and social titles ranging from Basorun Musulumi of Iwo land, member of Iwo Board of Trustees (IBOT), Otun Balogun of Iwo land and other proposed titles that might be accorded to him from Iwo.

But in a swift legal reaction by Chief Ogundokun, an Osun State High Court in Osogbo presided over by Justice Ayoola granted an order restraining Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi from removing, and, or appointing another person as the Bashorun Musulumi of Iwo land pending the determination of the main suit. The court, reacting to a motion sent in by High Chief Abiola Ogundokuns lawyer, one Barrister Soji Oyetayo on May 11, 2017 restrained the Iwo monarch from stripping Chief Abiola Ogundokun of his Bashorun Musulumi of Iwoland title and equally stopped him from appointing, installing and turbaning another Bashorun Musulumi of Iwo land pending the determination of the main suit.

The judge reviewed all the submissions of Chief Ogundokun including all the citations provided before arriving at the ruling. The Monday, June 19, 2017 ruling was based on the application for motion on notice brought pursuant to Order 38 rule 4 of Osun High Court seeking for an order of interlocutory injunction restraining Oluwo, Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi and Imam Fatai Olododo (Chief Imam of Iwo Central Mosque) from installing another Bashorun Musulumi of Iwo land as the Oba has no moral right to discredit the injunction or discretion of a religious society.

In his new suit, Ogundokun is demanding for One billion Naira only, being aggravated and exemplary damages from the defendantOba Akanbi for malicious defamation of his person, reputation and character across the world via cyber bullying.

Ogundokun is equally asking among other possessions, an order for the written retraction of several false allegations made against his person by the Oluwo in public and private spaces eg, via YouTube, Internet and other e-platforms, with a public apology made in not less than 4 Nigerian newspapers.

The former Chairman, Election Tactical Committee of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Osun State is also asking the court of law to restrain the Oluwo of Iwo, Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi and his agents from further defaming or maligning his person, reputation and character in whatever form, either by social media, television, newspapers, magazines, radio, blogs, YouTube, and all other electronic platforms, or online medium in whatever form. The plaintif is equally asking for the sum of N5,000,000,00 (Five Million Naira only) as cost of legal action.

The plaintiff avers that as a young politician, he contested and won the Councillorship of Election and was sworn in as Councilor under the old Iwo Local Government Area and as a philanthropist, he donated his salaries and allowances to the Iwo Community to enhance the growth and development of Iwo town

The plaintiff avers that due to his kindness to the masses and philanthropy, he was massively voted into the Constituent Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 1977

The plaintiff avers that in 1994, he was also a member of the Constitutional Conference.

The plaintiff states further that in 1995/1996 he was also a member of the Constitutional Review Panel

The plaintiff avers that in the year 1996, he was made the chairman of the National Reconciliation Committee of the 250 Eminent Yoruba Leaders Forum where he led a presentation on a United Nations fact finding mission to Nigeria in Ile-Ife

The Plaintiff avers that the Defendant was appointed as the Oluwo of Iwo sometimes in the year 2015.

The plaintiff further avers that because of his love for Iwo Town, he gave the Defendant his support both morally and financially towards his post-coronation as the Oluwo of Iwo.

The plaintiff further avers that he stood by the Defendant throughout his trying moments and during his problem with the Oluwo-Oke of Iwo-Oke which culminated in a quasi-criminal charge brought against him by the Oluwo-Oke of Iwo-Oke

The plaintiff avers that he personally took the Defendant to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo (A former Nigerian Head of State & Elder Statesman) when it became apparent that the Defendant might be sent to jail for contempt of court

The plaintiff avers that save for his intervention through Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, Oluwo-Oke would not have withdrawn the case against the Defendant.

The plaintiff averes that, however, the Defendant has been behaving strangely after an honest advice rendered to him by the plaintiff, not to extort money from several persons jostling for Chieftaincy titles but from those he would confer with such Chieftaincy titles.

The Plaintiff avers that this piece of advice did not go down well with the Defendant as he subsequently and purportedly announced that he has been stripped and/or removed from all the chieftaincy titles in Iwo land, including the Basorun Musulumi of Iwo land

The plaintiff avers that upon becoming aware of his purported removal, he instituted an action at the High Court of Justice, Oshogbo challenging the action of the Defendant.

The plaintiff states further that he equally filed a motion on notice for interlocutory injunction restraining the Defendant, his servants, agents or privies from appointing, installing and/or turbaning another person as Basorun Musulumi of Iwo land pending the determination of the suit and same was granted by the court.

The plaintiff hereby pleads and shall rely on the processes filed in the suit as well as the Certified True Copy of the Enrolment of Order.

The plaintiff avers that the defendant did not just stop at threatning to strip him of his chieftaincy titles but called several people including Iwo chiefs to the palace where he said series of uncomplimentary and defamatory things against the plaintiff which the defendant recorded in a video and uploaded on the internet (Plaintiff attached series of online sources/platforms where defendant deformed his character & maligned his reputation)

The plaintiff avers that the video (s) has gone viral. That he (Plaintiff) will lead evidence at the trial of this action through living witnesses who reside within and outside Osun State to show the far reaching negative effects of the libelous publication, which is the subject of this action and the monumental damage it has unleashed on the plaintiff in all its ramifications, including the odium, contempt and ridicule brought upon him as an astute politician, elder statesman, High Chief, Philanthropist, Publisher and well respected community leader, and business executive which cut across state boundaries.

The Plaintiff avers that his friends and admirers from all over Nigeria and beyond have made contacts with him expressing disappointment over the malicious defamation of the plaintiffs reputation by the defendant.

The Defendant knew or must be taking to know that the plaintiff could not have done all the Defendant claimed he did.

The Defendant has threatened to continue to spread defamatory publication against the plaintiff and unless restrained, he would carry out his threats. (Plaintiff provides a translated copy of series of defamatory interviews/comments/chats where Defendant ridicule and destroyed reputation of plaintiff).

The litigation is full of drama and suspense as several of the Oluwos YouTube remarks/interviews/jester and other actions against his subject, Chief Abiola Ogundokun were translated & transcribed by Dr. J. A. Ogunwale, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistic and African Languages, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife (OAU).
Not making a profit since 1975! ...And since 2007, one of the Best Left-Wing Book & Culture Review Sites on the Net.
By converting poultry waste into 30KVA power unit, Rije community and Kuruji community, both in the Kuje axis of the Federal Capital Territory have blazed the trail for championing clean and green energy in Abuja, thanks to the Power Africa project.

Playing host to over 1200 indigenes who otherwise may not have access to the power supply from the national grid, Rije and Kuruji community have Ajima Farms and the United States African Development Foundation (USADF)  Power Africa Project to appreciate for installing a 30KVA waste-powered station recognized as 'Biogas Mini-Grid Project.'

The Biogas Mini-Grid Project runs on agricultural waste, mainly from poultry. With a capacity of 30KVA: 20KVA in Riji community and 10KVA in Kuruji community, the facility currently provides adequate power for 87 homes and companies many kilometers away from the main grid.

The project, constructed by Ajima Farms, through funding from the USADF Power Africa project in 2015 is maintained by sufficiently trained youths in both communities, hence, creating direct employment for 14 residents while the services of a dozen more are indirectly engaged.

According to the project director, Mr. Kabiru Ademoh, statistics reveals that a large percentage of the country is off-grid, estimated at 60%. Since getting this group of people to connect to the major grid is difficult, expensive and time-consuming; seeking alternatives energy sources would aid development and ease the livelihood of people in a fast advancing world, hence, it should be keenly explored.

In a bid to expand this novel project, Ajima Farms hopes to organize series of workshops and seminars on Waste2Watt to bring to the limelight more green energy innovative ideas, position start-ups for international visibility and change the psyche of people towards appreciating what would ordinarily be called 'waste'.

This will inadvertently combat climate change and its adverse effects which the worlds attention is drastically shifting to. Furthermore, it serves as a clear pointer to drive some of the Sustainable Development Goals.

'Seyifunmi Adebote is an environmentalist and youth advocate. He writes from Abuja, Nigeria.
Who is going to plow the snow from the highways in the Huntsville corridor?

Thats a question far removed from Westminster, where Prime Minister Theresa May faces calls for a full and speedy investigation into the liquidation of Carillion, the mammoth construction and outsourcing company, headquartered in Wolverhampton, with about 43,000 employees spread across the U.K., the Middle East and Canada.

But it does shine a light on the reach and scope of a firm that proudly proclaims its role as Canadas largest highway maintenance provider, protecting approximately 40,000 kilometres of highways across Ontario and Alberta, providing year-round routine and preventative maintenance services.

According to Carillion Canada Inc.s website, 40,000 kilometres equates to the largest outsourced volume of roadways in the nation. Thats a lot of salt.

This is the same company that launched its Toronto operations in 1955 as George Wimpey Canada Ltd. Home buyers in the 1970s particularly will recall the name.

A corporate history recounts how the British firm capitalized on Torontos desperate need for housing construction, attesting that by 1970, Wimpey was building nearly 2,000 homes each year in the province of Ontario alone. Crispy press clippings recount stories of hundreds of eager house buyers lining up for pre-build sales at subdivisions where detached homes sold for between $40,000 and $50,000.

The name Carillion emerged as the successor support and construction services provider, and it became a monster, benefitting spectacularly from the now decades-long trend of outsourcing private sector contracts and being in the right place at the right time for enormous public-private partnership (P3) construction projects. Those P3s here at home included the Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital as well as design-build work at both the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

Public sector outsourcing is a key part of the puzzle. According to the Guardian, Christopher Grayling, the U.K.s secretary of state for transport, awarded nearly 2-billion worth of contracts to Carillion plc, even after it first issued profit warnings. Little wonder that the Labour party is accusing the government of drip-feeding contracts to Carillion to help keep it afloat.

Last July, Carillion launched a full strategic review of all operations. A hoped-for sale of its Canadian subsidiary was deemed essential to the financial fix. Instead, underperforming P3 contracts and an estimated net debt of between 825 million and 850 million dominated the companys financial update to investors in September. The numbers only grew worse. Carillion Canada did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokesperson indicated to The Canadian Press that the Canadian operations would carry on as per usual.

Lets look at some smaller numbers.

September brought the announcement from Ontarios Ministry of Transportation that its maintenance contract with Carillion Canada would be brought to a premature halt. That contract, which commenced in 2012, was for provincial highway maintenance covering the Highway 400 corridor (Port Severn to Pointe au Baril) and Highway 11 to Haliburton and Minden. The contract was to extend until the spring of 2023. Carillion said it would continue the job until September 2018. Now what? Who knows? The ministry awarded the new contract to Fowler Construction Co. to commence next fall.

At the time of the cancellation announcement, a ministry spokesperson was quoted saying the re-tendering would allow the ministry to make enhancements to the services provided.

Huntsville residents will be interested in this for they will likely recall the $80,000 fine levied against Carillion Canada two years ago for contravening the Environmental Protection Act by burying drums of petroleum and paint waste in its Huntsville yard.

As for road clearing, calls for better service are not new.

In 2015, Carillion was fined $900,000 for failing to adequately clear and sand the QEW between Burlington and Mississauga in November and December of the previous year. In that instance, Carillion fought the fine. Successfully? I dont know. The Ministry of Transportation cites confidentiality in the ensuing mediation, which, the ministry reports, was resolved. I do know that the Ontario road maintenance contracts awarded to Carillion, eight in all, were valued at $87 million.

There are far bigger stories unfolding in the wake of Carillions collapse, including at-risk overseas construction projects running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. And escaping executives making out like bandits.

But its a broad cautionary tale to take a harder look at the outsourcing of essential services, not to mention the global Kool-Aid weve been drinking when it comes to P3 alliances.

jenwells@thestar.ca

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A progressive group says its baffled that the Canadian government has worked at the NAFTA negotiating table to protect a dispute resolution system that allows companies to sue governments, estimating it has cost Canadian taxpayers $314 million.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) says in a report to be published Tuesday that Chapter 11 provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement have cost Canada $95 million in unrecoverable legal fees, calculated based on data it obtained through an access to information request.

The report comes ahead of the latest round of NAFTA renegotiations, slated to kick off in Montreal on Jan. 23. The U.S. wants to water down the enforcement mechanism for Chapter 11 by making dispute resolution panels non-binding or voluntary.

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The CCPA says Canadian losses through that system amount to $314 million when the legal fees are added to $219 million in awards and settlements under Chapter 11, also known as the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, since the trade treaty was enacted in 1994.

The current renegotiation opens the door to get rid of, or at least neutralize, the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism in NAFTA and I certainly think Canada should grasp the opportunity, said Scott Sinclair, a senior research fellow with the CCPA.

I do think negotiators and the government are weighing their options . . . because the U.S. administration wants to make ISDS optional. While a lot of the Trump administrations proposals in the NAFTA talks are harmful to Canadian interests, this one is beneficial.

Chapter 11 was designed to give investors confidence when they do business in another country by providing an impartial tribunal to settle disputes with the government over discriminatory treatment. The Trump administration says this chapter encourages job outsourcing to Mexico and wants to make participation voluntary.

Its one of three chapters that act as NAFTAs enforcement system, all of which the Trump administration is seeking to water down or eliminate.

Chapter 20, rarely used, lets governments sue governments. Trumps administration wants to make it strictly advisory.

Chapter 19 was Canadas big demand in the original NAFTA and remains a priority. It allows companies to dispute punitive duties, such as those imposed on Canadian softwood lumber and on aerospace company Bombardier Inc. The Trump administration wants Chapter 19 scrapped entirely.

The CCPA says Canada has been the target of more claims under Chapter 11 than its Mexican and American partners and the trend is getting worse. Canada has been sued over twice as many times as Mexico and the U.S. combined since 2010.

Canada is also far more likely to lose challenges  the CCPA says Canada has won nine and lost eight concluded cases so far while Mexico has won seven and lost five and the U.S. has won all 11 of its concluded cases.

It says Canada is currently facing eight active investor-state claims  including Omnitraxs recent NAFTA claim related to its broken rail line to Churchill, Man., and Lone Pines challenge to Quebecs fracking moratorium  that combined seek more than $475 million in damages.

Lori Wallach of the progressive Washington-based group Public Citizen is also critical of Canadas defence of Chapter 11.

This is the irony to it. Canada is No. 1 in the world of developed countries that has lost under investor-state, she said.

Canadas paid out a ridiculous amount of money . . . Of any country Canada should say, Thats it. Ive had it with investor-state. 

Sinclair said Canada could go along with the United States and allow countries to opt in or out of Chapter 11 in return for concessions in other areas.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said last week Canada will bring some new, creative ideas to the sixth round of NAFTA negotiations in Montreal next week, in response to some of the more unconventional U.S. proposals.

While Canada continues to hope for the best from the NAFTA renegotiation, Freeland says it is also preparing for the worst-case scenario  a possible decision by Trump to withdraw from the pact.

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BEIRUTLebanons authorities have ordered a ban on the movie The Post because of director Stephen Spielbergs associations with Israel, amid an intensifying climate of censorship in what has historically been one of the Arab worlds freest countries.

The Censorship Committee of the General Security Directorate decided to ban the film, which was due to open in Lebanon on Jan. 18, in accordance with laws obliging Lebanon to enforce the Arab Leagues boycott of Israel, said directorate spokesperson Nabil Hanoun on Monday.

Spielberg, who is Jewish, was placed on the Arab League blacklist of sanctioned individuals after his foundation gave a $1 million donation to relief efforts in Israel during its 2006 war with Lebanons Hezbollah movement. Most of Spielbergs subsequent films have, however, been shown in Lebanon without problemsexcept that his name was blacked out from the poster advertising The Adventures of Tintin.

Read more:

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Free speech advocates in Lebanon noted the irony of banning a movie whose plot promotes press freedoms. The Post, starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, tells the story of the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Grahams decision to defy attempts by the courts to suppress reporting of the Pentagon Papers.

Why is The Post on the chopping block? asked Gino Raidy of the March advocacy group, on his blog. Is it because it idolizes journalists who stand up to the powers that be when they do wrong, and choose truth and justice over government bullying?

But the decision was made entirely on the basis of Spielbergs interactions with Israel, Hanoun said. The Interior Ministry has the final word on implementing the ban, he said, but it is unusual for the ministry to overturn the decision of the censorship committee.

This latest prohibition illustrates what appears to be a growing appetite on the part of the Lebanese authorities for implementing the countrys often arbitrary censorship laws, and especially those pertaining to Israel.

The action movie Wonder Woman was refused permission to be shown last year because the lead actress, Gal Gadot, is an Israeli citizen who had served in the Israeli military. In the past week the country has been gripped by the outcry directed toward its world-renowned fashion designer, Elie Saab, after he posted a photograph on his Instagram account showing Gadot wearing one of hir dresses. Saab has since deleted the photo.

With less fanfare, the movie Jungle, starring Daniel Radcliffe, was banned in December because the story of survival in the Bolivian jungle was based on the autobiography of an Israeli citizen, Yossi Ghinsberg.

What seems especially incongruous is that Lebanon is one of the few countries in the Arab world still vigorously boycotting Israel, Raidy said. Lebanon is the only one doing it, and not even close to consistently, calling to question the point of these pointless bans, and their negative effects on the state of arts and culture in the tiny country.

Lebanon is also the only country, apart from Syria, that maintains a hostile border with Israel, leaving it with a greater sense of vulnerability than other Arab states, say proponents of the boycott. Israel occupied large areas of southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000. In 2006, it waged a month-long war against Hezbollah after the movements fighters abducted two Israeli soldiers. Over 1,000 Lebanese civilians and 43 Israeli civilians died in the fighting.

There is no incongruity in seeking to enforce laws restricting contact with an enemy power, said Samah Idriss, a founding member of the Campaign to Boycott Supporters of Israel in Lebanon, which promotes the laws banning contact with Israelis. Rather, he said, the relaxation of the laws in recent years was an exception that needs to be reversed, especially at a time when other Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, are reported to be pursuing closer ties with Israel.

Israel is still officially at war with Lebanon and when two states are at war it is normal for them to take certain measures against each other, he said. Lebanon, or certain sectors in Lebanon, have recently realized the dangers of cultural and academic normalization with Israel . . . after this whole Arab overture to Israel.

The renewed focus on the boycott laws also coincides with a wider clampdown against free speech that has been discernible since President Michel Aoun came to office in 2016, raising concerns of free speech advocates. In early January, the courts issued an arrest warrant for a television presenter, Maria Maalouf, after she criticized Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. A television talk show host, Marcel Ghanem, is being prosecuted for criticizing the judiciary.

Over the years, however, a variety of films have been banned for reasons that often are arbitrary and randomly enforced. The 2015 movie Spotlight, about the Boston Globes investigation into the abuse of children by the Catholic clergy, was barred apparently because it cast the Catholic Church in a bad light (around half of Lebanons population is Christian). Independence Day and True Lies were barred for portraying Arabs in a bad light, and almost all movies featuring homosexuality are forbidden.

Correction  January 16, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly referred to Elie Saab as a female designer.

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EDMONTONAlberta and Saskatchewan have a date for a meeting to discuss their trade issues, but Alberta says it will come too late to resolve a standoff over licence plates.

Alberta Economic Development Minister Deron Bilous says Saskatchewan has agreed to meet on Jan. 31  more than a week after a Jan. 22 deadline for Saskatchewan to reverse its ban on Alberta licence plates at its job sites.

If not, Bilous said, a panel under the New West trade partnership takes over the dispute and cant be stopped until it makes a ruling that could cost Saskatchewan up to $5 million in penalties.

Read more:

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Alberta threatens legal action after Saskatchewan bans Alberta licence plates on job sites

Alberta filed the legal challenge under the partnership last month. The province argued the plate ban clearly violates free-trade rules agreed to by the four western provinces.

We can discuss the licence-plate issue (on Jan. 31), but the process will have already moved to the next level, Bilous told The Canadian Press on Monday.

So there will be binding arbitration, there will be penalties imposed, and Saskatchewan will be paying.

Bilous said Saskatchewan also wants the meetings location changed from the previously agreed-upon boundary city of Lloydminster to Medicine Hat in southern Alberta, which is closer to Regina.

Bilous said Alberta is insisting on Lloydminster so that politicians can hear from workers in that region directly affected by the higher costs of transferring over to Saskatchewan plates and registration.

Companies have told us that theyre not bidding on Saskatchewan contracts, so it is definitely having an impact, he said.

The Saskatchewan government, responding in a statement, said: Three Saskatchewan ministers involved in trade and construction are planning to meet with their Alberta counterparts on Jan. 31.

At this time, the location has yet to be determined, but that is still being discussed with Alberta to ensure the location works for all travelling parties.

In early December, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Walls government announced a ban on Alberta plates on future Saskatchewan government road and building construction sites.

Saskatchewan says its a retaliatory measure and cites reports that Saskatchewan workers were being denied work in Alberta.

Alberta denies that.

Saskatchewan Economy Minister Steven Bonk has not provided evidence backing up the claim. He said the government is concerned the complainants could face retribution if they go public.

Wall has gone further. He said last month that the plate ban is in retaliation for a number of initiatives by Alberta Premier Rachel Notleys government, including a subsidy for Alberta brewers that Wall says is hurting business in Saskatchewan.

Bilous said there is no point addressing Saskatchewans beer concern right now because Alberta is appealing a ruling made against it under Canadas Agreement on Internal Trade.

Its completely out of our hands, he said. Should the initial ruling stand, then Alberta will have to make changes to our beer program.

Politics are in flux in Saskatchewan. Wall is stepping down and Saskatchewan party members are to pick a new leader  and premier  on Jan. 27.

Bilous said Alberta will make an earlier meeting happen if Saskatchewan wants to end the ban. He said there is precedent for Wall to walk back decisions.

Last March, Wall sent letters to oil companies in Calgary. They offered incentives such as relocation costs and help finding office space if firms would move to Saskatchewan.

After Notley threatened to take the issue to arbitration as a violation of free-trade rules  and hinted at retaliatory measures  Walls government sent followup letters to the oil companies stressing the province couldnt violate trade agreements.

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A small northern Saskatchewan First Nation is once again in mourning after two teenagers committed suicide in recent weeks.

The suicides in Fond du Lac come as the community recovers from a Dec. 13 plane crash that led to the death of 19-year-old Arson Fern Jr.

Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations says there have been two suicides by teenagers in the community since Ferns death.

Shortly after, a young teenager took his own life and, probably a week later, a young girl, he said Monday. Theyve been going through a very difficult time emotionally and spiritually.

In December, a West Wind Aviation plane with 25 people on board went down shortly after taking off from the Fond du Lac airstrip.

Everyone on board escaped the wreckage, but seven people were seriously injured. Fern, who had cerebral palsy, later died in hospital from his injuries.

Cameron said its difficult to know whether the two suicides are directly linked to the plane crash.

One can only speculate what the youth were going through and what they were thinking, he said. One thing is for certain: something was bothering these youth. Something was on their mind.

A recent report about suicide among Indigenous youth in northern Saskatchewan suggested they often feel bullied, sad and alone in their communities.

Its really troubling, said provincial child and youth advocate Corey OSoup. I want to call it an epidemic, because it is.

The suicide rate for First Nations boys between the ages of 10 and 19 in Saskatchewan is six times higher than for non-Indigenous boys, while the rate for girls is 26 times higher.

In October 2016, six girls between the ages of 11 and 14 committed suicide in Indigenous communities.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the time called it a tremendous tragedy.

OSoup said governments are really good at responding to the initial crisis.

They send in all these supports for a couple weeks or a month and then theyre gone, he said. The big challenge is finding long-term sustainable solutions for our communities in the North, particularly those ones that are isolated.

Cameron said hed also like to see more resources for young people in First Nations communities.

Here we have the fastest-growing demographic across Canada: First Nations, he said. There has to be funding capacity, funding resources to offer programs and services after hours and on the weekends.

Fond du Lac Chief Louie Mercredi is in Ottawa this week to meet with the federal government about issues in the remote community.

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LA RONGE, SASK.A town council in northern Saskatchewan has thrown its support behind proposals that restrict alcohol sales on certain days.

Councillors in La Ronge have passed a motion 5-2 that prohibits the sale of booze on Sundays, statutory holidays, month-end paydays and days when the federal child benefit payment comes out.

The restrictions are contained in proposals put forward by the Lac La Ronge regions community alcohol management plan.

Other proposals supported by council included banning off-sales after 11 p.m., prohibiting alcohol sales at bars or community events after 1 a.m. and stopping liquor retailers from announcing a last call.

A second motion was also passed last week in support of a five-per-cent levy on alcohol sales to fund initiatives to increase public safety and the well-being of the community.

La Ronge Coun. Matthew Klassen says while the restrictions have the support of council, they will not be imposed without extensive public consultation.

Whatever does happen, and whatever is completely implemented, is not going to be set in stone, Klassen said. Council has basically agreed to pursue these options right now.

There are many more steps that are going to have to take place, which are going to include public forums.

Mayor Ron Woytowich and Coun. Jordan McPhail voted against the first motion.

Councils support stemmed from a survey the town conducted late in 2017. The results showed 95 per cent of respondents believed there were problems with alcohol in the community, 77 per cent supported changes to policies and laws related to alcohol, and 64 per cent indicated alcohol-related harm was increasing.

Klassen said restricting alcohol sales on certain days has already been tried in a similar-sized community in Australia. In that case, Klassen said, there was a 45-per-cent decrease in visits to womens shelters and a 34-per-cent reduction in alcohol-related hospital admissions.

Were just at a stage where we need to start implementing some of this, and try it and see if it works, he said. If theres certain options in the policy that need to change, or we arent seeing any production on, well amend them to go forward.

Other proposals councillors supported included improved monitoring of liquor vendors and requiring bars to provide free or low-cost non-alcoholic drinks to designated drivers.

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A 5-year-old girl has died after she was pinned against her parents SUV near a North York school on Monday afternoon.

Sgt. Duncan Miller told reporters the girl was getting into a Mercedes SUV on Ianhall Rd. when a second SUV  a Kia  rolled towards her without a driver inside.

She was pinned between both vehicles.

Miller said the owner of the Kia was inside the school at the time.

Paramedics said were called to the area, near St. Raphael Catholic School, at around 3:20 p.m. The girl was taken to a trauma centre in serious condition.

Toronto police confirmed her death shortly after 9 p.m. Monday.

Grief counsellors will at the school today to help students cope with the news.

No charges have been laid.

Police say they expect to release more information on Tuesday.

With files from the Canadian Press

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If you were a Toronto Star reporter in the mid-70s, you knew better than to mess with Ted Bolwell, an Australian expat with the temperament of a Tasmanian devil.

He was tough as nails and had a tongue on him that could carve you up like a turkey if you didnt perform to his standards, said veteran automotive journalist Norris McDonald, who worked with Bolwell at the Star.

For all of his toughness, Bolwell was a well-liked editor who left a mark on famed publications in both Canada and the United States.

He died Sunday, soon after a hip replacement operation. He was 85.

Bolwell was born in Victoria, Australia, and began started his career at the Melbourne Herald, one of the countrys biggest newspapers.

At 25 years old, he moved to Toronto to work for the CBC, editing radio news for a few months. He had a nine-year stint at the Globe and Mail in various roles, including as the national editor and editor of the papers weekly magazine.

He did not tolerate mistakes and errors, said John Ferguson, a close friend of Bolwells. You wouldnt want him editing your copy, it better be clean.

In 1967, he made his first foray into American media, working as the assistant city editor at the New York Times for three years. He then performed several roles at Time magazine, before arriving at the Star in 1973. Within a few months, he became managing editor.

A Time story from 1974 said Bolwell was brought in to upgrade the Stars editorial content, and he was portrayed as a no-nonsense newspaperman with high expectations of his staff.

Bolwell was game for a challenge.

I love to stand on a tightrope and juggle with both hands, he told Time.

Known for his hard-nosed approach, Bolwell also had a soft side.

He could be kind to young reporters and deskers if they didnt measure up but were trying their best, McDonald said.

His tough approach seemed to pay off.

Ted has helped make the Star a brighter and livelier newspaper, Star editor-in-chief Martin Goodman wrote when Bolwell resigned from the Star in 1976.

In his resignation letter, Bolwell joked that he had missed his deadline in writing the letter because he dreaded leaving.

The biggest factor weighing against the decision I ultimately made was you (the staff), he wrote. You are the most talented staff I have ever had the privilege of working with.

Bolwells next stop was the New York Post, which had just been bought by his countryman, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Bolwell led the paper for six months before resigning. Ferguson said Bolwell didnt share Murdochs taste for sensational tabloid journalism.

Bolwell would have tough encounters with another media executive: John A. Tory, the father of Torontos current mayor. In 1981, Bolwell had recently been fired from his editorial director role at the now-defunct newspaper chain F.P. Publications. The president of Thomson Corporation, the chains parent company, was Tory.

Bolwell accused Thomson of opening employees personal mail, which became a serious scandal. In response, Tory called Bolwells allegations unfounded, irresponsible, and slanderous and referred to Bolwell as a frustrated ex-employee.

Bolwell ended his career as a consultant for newspapers and magazines, and Ferguson said he played an important role in creating MoneySense, the personal finance magazine owned by Rogers Communications.

He was a man of many talents when it came to the media industry, Ferguson said.

Ferguson said he was always into the news.

Even when he was in the hospital, I told him a Trump story and his eyes just lit up, Ferguson said.

In all aspects of his life, he was precise. Ferguson said Bolwells grocery list would, for example, specify the number of avocados he wanted, along with the number of days until they would ripen.

He touched a lot of people, a lot of journalists, Ferguson said. He didnt suffer fools gladly . . . but you always knew where you stood with Ted. He called a spade a spade.

He is survived by his children, Farley and Nicole, and his five grandchildren. There will be a celebration of his life on Jan. 29 in the community room of 33 Harbour Square, by the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal.

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David Pike was sitting on his condo balcony near Fort York Blvd. and Bathurst St. just after noon, talking to a client, when he heard the clip-clopping sound of hooves on pavement.

At first, the freelance photographer thought it was just another police horse passing southbound over the bridge opposite Fort York National Historic Site  until he got a closer look.

I was like: Theres no one on that horse, Pike, 28, said.

Pike watched as the horse, wearing a lime-green vest, turned westbound onto Fort York Blvd., into the oncoming lane. Fortunately, he said, traffic stopped to let the horse trot through the gridlock.

He managed to snap a picture of the horse at this point. He lost sight of it after it continued westbound and the Gardiner Expressway got in the way. He said it didnt look panicked, but was moving at quite a clip.

It wasnt sauntering by any means, Pike said.

Meanwhile, Pikes client was still on the line.

So Pike dialed 911 and told the operator that the police had a runaway horse.

At first, the operator didnt believe him. (The operator) was like: How did you know it was a police horse? Im like: Because it was wearing the vest, Pike said.

Const. Gary Long confirmed that Toronto police did lose a horse at some point on Monday afternoon, but said it was recovered some time later.

No one was injured, he said.

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The Palestinian Liberation Organizations central council has authorized its executive committee and President Mahmoud Abbas to cease recognition of Israel and stop security cooperation until Israel recognizes the Palestinian state, cancels East Jerusalem annexation and stops settlements.

[The Central Council] decided to assign the PLO Executive Committee with suspending recognition of Israel until Israel recognizes the State of Palestine along 1967 borders, annuls its annexation of east Jerusalem and halts settlement building, the PLO central council said in a statement.

The PLO, an umbrella of major Palestinian political parties, recognized Israel in 1993 before signing a number of agreements with Israel, which established the Palestinian Authority.

The Central Council also decided to renew a decision it made at a past meeting to end security cooperation with Israel in all its forms.

The PLO also said that the Oslo Accords, signed with Israel in the early 1990s, no longer stand.

It comes as Mahmoud Abbas heads to Brussels to seek support for a demand that the US not be the primary mediator between the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership.

The decision is also a reaction to a decision in December by US President Donald Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Ontarios doctors have reached an impasse with the province in talks for a new contract and will trigger a mechanism sending the negotiations to arbitration later this year.

We are much better off having our team convince a board of arbitration than having government unilaterally impose their will on us, says Ontario Medical Association president Dr. Shawn Whatley in a memo to members, which the Star obtained.

He cites the failure to reach agreement on redress for the unilateral cuts the Liberal government imposed on doctors fees during four years without a contract as a key reason for abandoning mediated talks.

But Whatley cautions more than 20,000 doctors in the province that they will have to be patient.

Thirteen days of meetings with a panel of three arbitrators wont begin until May 24  this falls in the middle of the June 7 provincial election campaign  and continue into October, if necessary.

Arbitration takes time, said Whatley in the memo.

Doctors desperately need a new contract. After four years, everyone at the OMA appreciates the sense of urgency and frustration you all feel.

Health Minister Eric Hoskins, himself a doctor, said the government remains optimistic for a positive outcome.

As our government works to deliver on our mandate in health care to improve access, reduce wait times and continue to improve the overall patient experience, we will only be stronger with a productive relationship with Ontarios physicians.

For years, the association has pushed for binding arbitration as a way to settle contract disputes  something the government has opposed, given concerns about losing control over the $11-billion annual budget for paying physicians.

This latest impasse in contract talks has been a long time coming.

A previous round of negotiations disintegrated, prompting the government to impose cuts that infuriated doctors. A tentative deal was reached with the OMA in 2016, but physicians rejected it in a ratification vote and the associations board was essentially ousted.

In the weeks that followed that drama, doctors cast ballots in favour of a new framework aimed at helping both sides reach a contract. It included a provision for binding arbitration if either side has concerns over issues that remain unresolved after 60 days of talks with the assistance of a mediator.

While family doctors voted strongly in favour of the framework, some specialists, most notably radiologists and cardiologists, opposed it because of a clause that empowers aribtrators to consider the large differences in incomes for different medical specialties.

Addressing that concept, called relativity, is expected to involve changes to the OHIP fee schedule, which would curb payments for some services now considered too high, and increase payments for others considered too low.

The Ontario Association of Cardiologists warned last year that too much focus on relativity will pit groups of doctors against each other.

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LOS ANGELESA 17-year old girl who said she was being held captive by her parents in her home in Perris, Calif., escaped Sunday and alerted the authorities, who then rescued her 12 siblings  several of whom were found shackled to their beds  the local sheriffs department reported Monday.

The 17-year-old, who escaped from the house early Sunday, used a phone she found in the home to call the police with her startling claim about her siblings being held against their will, the police said. Officers found the girls 12 siblings  who range in age from 2 to 29  in the foul-smelling house, living in the dark without access to adequate food or water, the authorities said.

The children appeared to be malnourished and very dirty, according to a press release announcing the parents arrest. The victims were provided with food and beverages after they claimed to be starving.

Some of the children were restrained with chains and padlocks. The parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner, the Riverside County Sheriffs Office said in a statement.

The officers did not immediately recognize that seven of the 13 siblings were adults because they were so malnourished. The sheriffs office said the 17-year-old girl who called 911 looked to be 10.

Their parents, David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested on charges of torture and child endangerment. They were being held in jail with bail set at $9 million (U.S.) each, the authorities said.

The sheriffs office did not say how long the siblings may have been held captive.

The siblings were later transported to hospitals for treatment.

Public records show that the couple own the nondescript tract house where the children were found. Its address is also listed in a state Department of Education directory as the location of the Sandcastle Day School, a private K-12 campus that opened in 2011. Turpin is listed as the principal. The state records show that Turpin had received state approval to run the school at his home. In the 2016-17 school year, it had an enrolment of six with one student in each of the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, 10th and 12th grades.

Public records indicate that the couple have lived at the Perris address since 2010 and lived in Texas for many years before coming to California.

The Turpins filed for bankruptcy in 2011, stating in court documents they owed between $100,000 and $500,000. At that time, Turpin worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman and earned $140,000 annually and his wife was a homemaker, records showed.

Their bankruptcy lawyer, Ivan Trahan, said he never met the children but the couple spoke about them highly.

We remember them as a very nice couple, Trahan said, adding that Louise Turpin told him the family loved Disneyland and visited often.

Neighbours said they were stunned by the arrests. Andrew Santillan, who lives around the corner, heard about the case from a friend.

I had no idea this was going on, he told the Press-Enterprise of Riverside. I didnt know there were kids in the house.

Other neighbours described the family as intensely private.

A few years ago, Robert Perkins said he and his mother saw a few family members constructing a nativity scene in the Turpins front yard. Perkins said he complimented them on it.

They didnt say a word, he said.

Perris is in Riverside County, about 1.5 hours southeast of Los Angeles.

With files from the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press

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BANGKOKWhen Prayuth Chan-Ocha seized control of Thailand in a military coup, he vigorously denounced politicians as responsible for the countrys ills and positioned himself and his fellow generals as the cure.

Four years on, with many of the countrys problems still festering and the public growing impatient for long-delayed elections, the junta leader made a declaration that for many seemed to confirm suspicions that he planned to stay in power long past any polls.

I am no longer a soldier. Understand? Im just a politician who used to be a soldier, the 63-year-old former-army-chief-turned-prime-minister told reporters at the turn of the year, adding, But I still have a soldiers traits.

Read more:

Thai PM brings out cut-out of himself, tells reporters to ask this guy instead

Thailand says its on track to end military rule in November 2018 election

The worlds only nation still under formal military rule, Thailand is under increasing pressure both at home and abroad to return to civilian governance. The message now appears clear: In one form or another, the gruff general wants to be that civilian.

Should Prayuth decide to stay on, theres little stopping him. For one, he still holds absolute power under rules he implemented when he staged the 2014 coup and he could simply put off elections yet again.

But even if he decides to follow his latest timeline and hold polls later this year, he and his junta have carefully crafted a strategy to ensure the military commands politics, society and even the economy for decades to come.

While Prayuth has not flatly stated whether he will seek to lead the next government, several days after declaring himself a politician he remarked: I can be whatever you want me to be. I can be it all.

Thailand has suffered more than a decade of political unrest and upheaval, including two coups and numerous rounds of sometimes deadly street protests, as its conservative establishment struggled with the grassroots political success of billionaire businessman Thaksin Shinawatra and later his sister Yingluck Shinawatra.

The Shinawatras fundamentally changed Thai politics with populist policies aimed at wooing the countrys poor rural majority, but their time in power was also marred by allegations of corruption. Both Thaksin and Yingluck watched their governments topple in coups and both now live in exile to avoid court convictions they say were politically motivated.

To prevent a return to what it says was a lost decade of national peril, the junta drafted a constitution that neuters political parties in favour of non-elected bodies and even allows for an appointed prime minister. The junta itself gets to appoint many who would do the appointing, including the entire upper house of Parliament, which would also have some seats directly reserved for the military.

Powerful Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan, another former army chief and key junta member, said last week that he thought Prayuth should lead the next government but seemed to hint it should be by running in the election. It must be the voice of the people, he said.

Thailand's Prime Minister on Jan. 8 evaded questions by bringing out a life-sized cardboard cut-out of himself, and telling reporters to "ask this guy" if they had "any questions on politics or conflict." (The Associated Press)

Even if a traditional politician or party were to come to power, they would be legally bound to follow a junta-devised national strategy that encompasses the next 20 years and that critics say will put a military stamp across a broad spectrum of future public policy.

For some in Thailand  where the junta has banned protests and political gatherings  all this spells doomsday for democracy.

Our democratic future is going down the drain. Democratic space is closed, and public space is also closing. I dont know if we can find any hope in the years ahead, Naruemon Thabchumpon, a political scientist at Chiang Mai University, told an international conference. But we must at least understand the path along which we are going. We cant just murmur and complain in our backyards.

The military views things very differently, arguing that it intervened to save the country from a possible civil war as deep cleavages in society erupted into violence, and from corrupt politicians who manipulated a flawed political process.

The military stepping in was the last resort, Lt. Gen. Weerachon Sukhontapatipak, the deputy regime spokesman, said in an interview. It may seem contradictory to say we staged a coup to restore democracy but it is indeed the case in Thailand. Military intervention this time, we hope, will be the last time.

Similar arguments had been voiced in the past. The self-styled Land of Smiles has witnessed 12 coups since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932. Uniformed or retired military men have helmed the country for 58 of the 86 years since despite minimal threat of foreign aggression: The last invasion, by the Burmese, occurred 250 years ago.

Critics contend the coup has resulted in the militarys strongest grip since the Cold War era of the 1970s.

Thailand is heading at full speed to a dark, dictatorial past, said Brad Adams, Asia director of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, noting that the country has gone from democratic governance concerned about human rights to dictatorial military rule that systematically prosecutes and imprisons activists.

The junta has placed a particular emphasis on going after violators of the harsh lese majeste law, which forbids insults to the royal family, and the cases are now heard in military courts rather than civilian. About 120 people have been arrested since the 2014 coup including a 14-year-old boy, a prominent human rights lawyer facing up to 171 years in prison for Facebook comments, and a Buddhist scholar who questioned whether a heroic battle 400 years ago actually took place.

Nonetheless, and as expected in a society as polarized as Thailand, Prayuths administration has proved popular among some segments of the population. Some good, some bad, is not infrequently heard among Bangkok residents, citing as positive some the juntas policies but especially its having halted khwaam wun wai, chaos and confrontation, a fear deeply rooted in Thai culture.

Some Bangkok residents say they still have nightmares about political protests that ended with bloodshed on their doorsteps, buildings torched, and their businesses shuttered.

The juntas pledge to get tough on corruption initially earned it some praise, but repeated scandals involving its members  including a current saga involving the deputy prime ministers penchant for luxury watches and bejeweled rings  has added to public skepticism.

While Thais have in the past risen up against military rule  there were deadly protests against it in both the 1970s and early 1990s  many have also become conditioned to regard army control as normal and some soldiers have come to see it as their right.

There is a political culture of acquiescence, a deep legacy of authoritarianism, said Paul Chambers, a political scientist at northern Thailands Naresuan University.

Historically the traditional Bangkok-centred elite  the military, monarchy and senior bureaucrats  have permitted democracy to come but only a form of democracy which wont threaten their interests, he said. You see in Thailand a defective democracy or an ousted democracy.

Which of these will emerge if and when elections are finally held is being debated.

Among the uncertainties this time is the future relations between the military and new King Maha Vajiralongkorn, who has shown signs of expanding the monarchys powers since his father died in 2016 after a 70-year reign, including some last-minute changes to the junta-drafted constitution.

Another is whether deep social and economic rifts  which the junta has done little to heal  can be bridged. Thailand has some of the worst economic inequality in the world and long-standing tensions between the haves and have-nots remain in check only out of fear of the junta. In many poorer provinces, the home to the Shinawatra familys power base, there is simmering anger and many privately denounce the military and Bangkok elite.

Some analysts argue that while the military and conservative forces may now seem entrenched, perpetual military rule is impossible in todays globalized Thailand where the spread of information through social media is transforming society.

For the foreseeable future, political commentator Thitinan Pongsudhirak says the best available option would be a civil-military power-sharing along with reforms of traditional institutions in favour of strengthening democracy.

Manipulating the constitution and staying in power at all costs are likely to lead to an inevitable showdown with forces from political parties and civil society, he recently wrote. Anything short of a compromise will keep Thailand stuck in a cul-de-sac, going into yet another circle to nowhere.

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BANGKOKBangladesh and Burma have agreed that they will try to complete the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled from violence in Burma within two years, Bangladeshs Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.

The ministry said a joint working group from the two countries finalized an agreement on Monday on the physical arrangements for the repatriation of the ethnic Rohingya. It said they agreed that the process would be completed preferably within two years from the commencement of repatriation.

Burma and Bangladesh signed an initial agreement in November to repatriate the Rohingya, and the 30-member working group was set up last month to oversee the process. Many have questions whether Rohingya would return to Burma under the current circumstances, and whether Burma would accept them and allow them to live freely.

Under the November agreement, Rohingya will need to provide evidence of their residency in Burma in order to return  something many say they do not have.

Read more:

Burma says first camp for returning Rohingya refugees will be ready next week

What have they done to us? Survivors recount brutal massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Burmese village

Bangladesh professor calls on international community to stand beside the Rohingya people

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the UN refugee agency UNHCR was consulted but its very important the agency is fully involved to guarantee the repatriation adheres to international standards.

Its essential the return of the Rohingyas is voluntary, takes place in safety and dignity, and allows them to return to their homes which will require a huge investment for reconstruction because of the destruction, he said.

It will also require a huge effort of reconciliation is needed to allow it to take place properly, Guterres said.

The worst would be to move these people from camps in Bangladesh to camps in Myanmar (Burma), keeping an artificial situation for a long time and not allowing for them to regain their normal lives, said Guterres, who was previously the UN high commissioner for refugees for 10 years.

More than 650,000 ethnic Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since August, when Burmas military launched a brutal crackdown in Rakhine state after a militant group attacked police posts. Burmas army described it as clearance operations against terrorists, but the United Nations and the U.S. have called it ethnic cleansing.

Despite having lived in predominantly Buddhist Burma for generations, Rohingya Muslims have been denied citizenship, freedom of movement and access to basic social rights. They are generally called Bengalis, a reference to the belief that they migrated illegally from Bangladesh.

Arif Hossein, a former teacher in a Burma government school who fled to the Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Bangladesh after violence erupted in August, said he would return if the international organizations working to protect the refugees are able to go along.

Alam Jafar led his wife and their three young children to the coast, catching a boat he thought would carry the Rohingya Muslim family to safety in Bangladesh. But their escape from persecution in Myanmar ended in tragedy. (The Associated Press)

And if we get a nationality identity card in Myanmar, then we are more than willing to go back. We really wish to go back to our land. They should return our land and also rebuild our homes, he said.

Burma officials said the length of the repatriation will depend on how quickly Bangladesh can provide documentation of refugees previous residency and how fast applications are submitted.

Even though we are talking about a two-year process, it totally depends on how the two countries co-operate, Burma government spokesperson Zaw Htay said. Bangladesh authorities also need to proceed with the paperwork and documents for refugees and send it to us fast.

Since the November agreement, Burmas civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi has pledged to take measures to halt the outflow of Rohingya to Bangladesh and restore normalcy in the Rakhine region.

Burma officials plan to start the repatriation process next Tuesday. Zaw Htay said at least 500 Hindus and 500 Muslims will be in the first group to return.

State-run media in Burma reported Monday that a camp is being prepared that can accommodate about 30,000 people in 625 buildings, and that at least 100 buildings will be completed by the end of the month. It would be the first camp built in the repatriation process.

The international community and rights groups have stressed that the Burmese government must guarantee the safe and voluntary return of the refugees, and urged that international organizations be allowed to participate.

However, the UN refugee agency said Tuesday that it has not been invited to take part or given full access to the areas where refugees are to return.

UNCHR and our partners need urgent, unhindered access in Rakhine state, in order to assess the situation and provide support to those in need, UNCHR spokesperson Andrej Mahecic said in Geneva.

U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said the discussions between Burma and Bangladesh failed to include any understanding of what the Rohingya want.

Where are considerations for protection of the Rohingya from Myanmar security forces who months ago were raping and killing them? said Phil Robertson, deputy director of the groups Asia Division. Why are basic issues like citizenship, freedom of movement, and livelihoods not discussed now so refugees can make informed choices?

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COPENHAGENInventor Peter Madsen was charged Tuesday with killing Swedish journalist Kim Wall during a trip on his private submarine, with prosecutors saying he either cut her throat or strangled her before dismembering her body and dumping it into the sea.

Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen called the case very unusual and extremely disturbing.

Madsen, 47, is charged with murder, dismemberment and indecent handling of a corpse for the way he disposed of Walls body. He is also charged with having sexual relations with Wall, 30, of a particularly dangerous nature before she was killed.

The charges were made public by the Danish prosecution authority.

Read more:

Danish submarine inventor admits dismembering journalist Kim Wall, still denies killing her

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Opinion | Judith Timson: Kim Walls death is a haunting reminder of womens vulnerability

Buch-Jepsen said the killing was premeditated. Prosecutors will urge that Madsen be sentenced to life in prison, or be locked up in a secure mental facility if deemed necessary by psychiatrists for as long as hes considered sick and dangerous to others.

There is much technical evidence but I wont go into details right now, Buch-Jepsen told a brief news conference. He also declined to comment on Madsens motive.

Evidence must be presented in court and not in the media, he said, adding he also didnt want to comment out of respect for Walls family.

Madsens defence lawyer Betina Hald Engmark had no immediate comment in reaction to the charges, adding her client still denies murdering Wall.

Madsen and Wall had gone on a trip in Madsens submarine on Aug. 10. Wall, who was working on a story about Madsen, was last seen aboard the vessel as it left Copenhagen. The next day, Madsen  an entrepreneur who once dreamed of launching a manned space mission  was rescued from the sinking submarine without Wall.

Police believe he deliberately sank the vessel.

Madsen has offered a shifting variety of explanations for Walls death. Initially, he told authorities he had dropped Wall off on an island several hours after their voyage began. Then he claimed that Wall died accidentally inside the submarine while he was on deck during the excursion and he had buried her at sea. However, he later admitted throwing her body parts into the sea.

Walls dismembered, naked torso was found on a southern Copenhagen shoreline in late August. Her head, legs and clothes were discovered in bags at sea in October, along with heavy metal objects designed to take them to the ocean floor.

Multiple knife wounds had been found on her torso and Buch-Jepsen said Tuesday Madsen had stabbed Wall several times while she was alive but declined to elaborate.

Authorities also want to destroy Madsens submarine.

Madsens trial starts March 8 and a verdict is expected on April 25.

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CALAIS, FrancePresident Emmanuel Macron travelled Tuesday to Calais, the epicentre of Frances migrant crisis, to lay out a new approach to immigration: help for those who want to stay, expulsion for those using France as a transit point and sanctions for security forces who overstep the rules.

The northern port city is a magnet for migrants because it is the closest point between France and Britain and has two cross-Channel transport systems, the Eurotunnel and ferries.

More than 1,130 French security forces have been posted in Calais, including riot police, border police and gendarmes, to keep migrants out of the port and Eurotunnel and to stop them from setting up camps.

Read more:

Macron ramps up expulsions, ID checks as France struggles to deal with migrants

Calais camp comes down as migrants hope for asylum

Good Samaritans or criminals? France wrestles with fate of those helping migrants

Macron laid out the broad lines of his immigration policy  humanity with a firm hand  in a speech before security forces, some of whom have been criticized for overzealous actions against migrants. The presidents trip was a preview of a tough new immigration and asylum bill to be presented to the Cabinet in February.

Macron said the bill would include a provision launching automatic expulsion proceedings against migrants caught trying to enter Britain illegally from France.

Calais is not a back door to Britain, Macron said, referring to the hundreds of people who attempt to reach Britain by sneaking onto trucks crossing the English Channel.

Macron declared that staying in Calais instead of applying for asylum in France is a dead end and vowed not to allow any migrant camp take root here again after authorities dismantled Europes biggest migrant slum in 2016.

At that time, there were more than 7,000 migrants in the sprawling, filthy camp on the edge of Calais, compared to up to 700 in Calais today.

Macron is meeting Thursday with British Prime Minister Theresa May in Sandhurst near London, and on the agenda is a 2003 border control agreement that he wants to change.

The 2003 Touquet Accords effectively moved the British border to the French port of Calais, where British agents help. The accord has spared Britain from receiving floods of migrants at its doorstep like other European countries, putting the burden of blocking their entry to the U.K. on France.

During his speech to security forces, the French president mentioned three points he plans to raise with May, including better management of unaccompanied minors, reinforced police co-operation in Calais with the countries of origin and transit and getting British funds for development projects in Calais.

Macron suggested while meeting with representatives from Calais economic sector later Tuesday that the British are ready to provide more financing. He said Frances priority in ongoing talks with the U.K. government is for Britain to accept more of the unaccompanied minors who make it to France.

Calais, a former French tourist destination, has suffered because of the influx of migrants.

I think we can improve the situation without knocking everything down, Macron said later at Calais City Hall.

In a surprise announcement, Macron said the state was taking over food distribution to migrants, an apparent bid to undermine aid groups who have for years provided meals.

The president issued a stern warning to the aid groups against discouraging migrants from going to centres where they can apply for French asylum  a move that would end their bid to go to Britain.

I no longer want us to delegate food aid to associations that use it to keep alive false information, he said during a discussion with local officials.

At least three aid groups, including Doctors of the World, were boycotting a meeting with Macron at the end of his daylong visit, saying he left no room for real discussions on critical issues.

(The situation) is catastrophic because migrants have no rights to pitch tents now, said Francois Guennoc of the aid group Auberge des Migrants, which also declined to meet with Macron.

Macron also told security forces in Calais they will be sanctioned if they fail to honour their rules of conduct. He listed some of the claims: that police confiscate sleeping bags and even shoes from migrants, awaken them in the night, use tear gas on their belongings and food.

There are no half-truths, the president said.

But Macron also said authorities would file defamation complaints against those who make false allegations against the police.

Macron also talked briefly Tuesday with Sudanese migrants at a special centre in Croisilles, south of Calais, where migrants can apply for asylum in France. Many stay only briefly in such centres and quickly resume efforts to sneak across the Channel.

One migrant applying for asylum in France, identified only as Ahmed, 25, said he travelled from Sudan through Libya and Italy to end up in Calais last year. He told Macron he had no choice but to leave home because his mother was killed and his family disappeared. He said wants to learn French, get training and find a job as auto mechanic.

Macron told Ahmed that his story seemed to meet the French criteria for granting asylum.

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MITROVICA, KOSOVOA leading Serb politician in northern Kosovo was gunned down Tuesday morning, an attack that raised ethnic tensions in the Balkans and prompted the suspension of EU-mediated talks between Kosovo and Serbia.

Assailants opened fire on Oliver Ivanovic, 64, close to the offices of his political party in the Serb-controlled northern city of Mitrovica. He was taken to a hospital but doctors were unable to save him.

The doctors said Ivanovic had received at least five gunshot wounds to his upper torso. The assailants escaped in a car that was later found burned out. Kosovo police sealed off the area of the shooting and began a manhunt for the attackers.

Read more: Hundreds of neckties hang outside Kosovo PMs office in protest over pay raise

Ivanovic was one of the key politicians in Serb-dominated northern Kosovo, a former Serbian province where tensions still remain high a decade after it declared independence in 2008. Serbia does not recognize that independence.

Ivanovic was considered a moderate who maintained relations with NATO and EU officials even after Serbia lost the control of its former province following NATOs 1999 bombing to stop a deadly Serb crackdown against ethnic Albanian separatists.

A Kosovo court convicted Ivanovic of war crimes during the 1998-99 war. That verdict was overturned and a retrial was underway.

In Pristina, the Kosovo government strongly denounced the slaying, saying it considers the attack a challenge to the rule of law and efforts to establish the rule of law in the whole of Kosovo territory.

In Belgrade, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic held a top security meeting to discuss the shooting. Afterward, he called the killing a terrorist act and said Serbia is demanding that international missions in Kosovo include Serbia in their investigation into the slaying.

Serbia will take all necessary steps so the killer or killers are found, he said.

At the news of Ivanovics slaying, the Serb delegation at the EU talks in Brussels immediately left to return to Belgrade.

Delegation leader Marko Djuric said whoever is behind this attack ... whether they are Serb, Albanian or any other criminals, they must be punished.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called the presidents of Serbia and Kosovo to express the EUs condemnation of the killing. She appealed for both sides to show calm and restraint.

The head of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, Ambassador Jan Braathu, said he was shocked and deeply saddened and considered Ivanovic among the most prominent Kosovo Serb representatives for almost two decades. 

He also urged all sides to avoid dangerous rhetoric and remain calm at this sensitive time, and recommit themselves to continue the work toward the normalization of relations and improvement of the lives of the citizens of Kosovo and Serbia.

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PERRIS, Calif.From the outside, the brown-and-beige four-bedroom home looked fairly orderly. Inside, it was a veritable torture chamber for 13 siblings who lived with their parents, police said.

The couple who owned the home purchased it new in 2014 and soon arrived in the rapidly growing city 113 kilometres southeast of Los Angeles with their 12 children. They lived there quietly for at least three years and had another baby.

Then, on Sunday, one of the children jumped out of a window, called 911 and led authorities to the home and the bizarre scene inside.

Sheriffs deputies said they found the couples 13 children ranging in age from 2 to 29 years old, some of them chained to furniture, all of them thin and malnourished. The 17-year-old girl who escaped was so tiny that deputies initially mistook her for a 10-year-old.

Riverside County Sheriffs Capt. Greg Fellows said the 911 call came from a cellphone that had been deactivated but still worked for emergency calls.

When deputies found the girl he said she showed them family photos that prompted them to visit the house. Authorities confronted the girls mother, Louise Anna Turpin, and Fellows said she appeared perplexed as to why they had come.

David Allen Turpin, right, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, have been arrested after authorities found a dozen malnourished siblings held captive in their home. Each are held on $9 million (U.S.) bail and could face charges including torture and child endangerment.







Turpin, 49, and her husband, David Allen Turpin, 57, were jailed on $9 million (U.S.) bail. They were scheduled for an initial court appearance on Thursday. Authorities said the pair could face charges of torture and child endangerment.

If you can imagine being 17 years old and appearing to be a 10-year-old, being chained to a bed, being malnourished and injuries associated with that, I would call that torture, Fellows said.

Read more:

Parents arrested after children found shackled, malnourished in California home

He said there was no indication any of the children were sexually abused, although that was still being investigated.

Neither sheriffs deputies nor child welfare officials received a single call over the years about the Turpin home, he said.

The investigation, still in its early stages, has already begun to unravel a surreal tale of a couple married 32 years who sometimes dressed their children alike, kept them away from outsiders and cut the boys hair in a Prince Valiant-style resembling that of their greying father. Photos show nearly all the girls with shoulder-length brown hair parted in the middle.

Videos posted on YouTube show the couple renewed their vows at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas at least three times in recent years, most recently on Halloween 2015. An Elvis impersonator dressed in a glittering jacket performed the ceremony between songs. Most of the children, dressed in matching outfits, took part.

Its very disturbing because I felt like I did know them, the Elvis impersonator, Kent Ripley, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. I was surprised and shocked and stunned that this could even have been happening.

He recalled the children looked very thin but said he chalked that up to their lifestyle.

It didnt stand out that it would be a physical abuse or lack of feeding, Ripley said.

Numerous photos on the couples Facebook page show the children dancing at the Elvis Chapel, visiting an amusement park that appears to be Disneyland and going on other outings, always looking thin but often smiling.

Although their home appeared nondescript from the outside, it was a stinking mess inside, Fellows said. He called the conditions horrific.

State Department of Education records show the homes address is the same as the Sandcastle Day School, where David Turpin is listed as principal. In the 2016-17 school year it had an enrolment of six. Fellows told reporters there is no indication any student other than the couples children were enrolled there.

No state agency regulates or oversees private schools in California, and they are not licensed by the state Education Department. Private school operators are required to file an affidavit with the state annually, listing the number of students, staff members and information about the schools administrators.

Private schools are also subject to an annual fire inspection.

Representatives for the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the Riverside County Fire Department would not immediately say whether the Turpins home was inspected.

Mark Uffer, CEO at Corona Regional Medical Center, said seven of the couples children were there Tuesday.

I can tell you that theyre very friendly. Theyre very co-operative, and I believe that theyre hopeful that life will get better for them after this event, he said.

Before moving to Perris, a city of 76,000, the family lived for a time in nearby Murrieta. Property records show they moved to Southern California in 2011 from the Dallas area.

The Turpins filed for bankruptcy that same year, stating in court documents that they owed between $100,000 and $500,000. At that time, Turpin worked as an engineer at the Northrop Grumman aerospace company and earned $140,000 annually and his wife was a homemaker, records showed.

Neighbour Kimberly Milligan said the developer who built the tract where they lived told her the family had a dozen kids when they moved in, although she never saw that many.

She described the family as standoffish hoarders who had their garage filled with books and who often let the grass in their front yard grow out of control, unlike other families on the block.

I got an impression, that, you know, You stay in your lane, Ill stay in my lane, she said. It was never, Hi. Never a wave. Nothing.

Her 26-year-old son, Robert Perkins, said he only remembers seeing four children outside the home, recalling they all appeared pale and skinny, as if they never ventured outside.

Dr. Donald Kirby, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Ohios Cleveland Clinic, said those pale complexions could reflect not only lack of sunshine but also iron deficiencies caused by insufficient vitamins.

He said the youngsters small stature and childlike appearance also indicates they were likely undernourished for many years.

What that means is this has been a very long process and that during the real growth spurt years that the needed nutrients werent given, Kirby said. At some point the body locks in and youre not able to grow anymore. This didnt happen last week, last month or even last year. This has been going on probably a very long time.

He said their recovery period, both physically and emotionally, will likely be long and arduous.

Lots of things are going to need to be done for these poor people, he said. Hopefully they get the care they need to try to reverse as much as can be reversed and that they are allowed to develop normal lives. Itll be quite a challenge.

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SANTIAGO, CHILEPope Francis met on Tuesday with survivors of priests who sexually abused them, wept with them and apologized for the irreparable damage they suffered, his spokesperson said.

The pontiff also acknowledged the pain of priests who have been held collectively responsible for the crimes of a few, Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke told reporters at the end of the day.

Francis dove head-first into Chiles sex abuse scandal on his first full day in Santiago that came amid unprecedented opposition to his visit: Three more churches were torched overnight, including one burned to the ground in the southern Araucania region where Francis celebrates Mass on Wednesday. Police used tear gas and water cannons to break up an anti-pope protest outside Francis big open-air Mass in the capital, Santiago.

Read more:

3 Chile churches firebombed, threats made against Pope Francis ahead of his visit

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Despite the incidents, huge numbers of Chileans turned out to see the pope, including an estimated 400,000 for his Mass, and he brought some inmates to tears with an emotional visit to a womens prison.

But his meeting with abuse survivors and comments in his first speech of the day were what many Chileans, incensed by years of abuse scandal and coverup, were waiting for.

Burke said Francis met with a small group of abuse victims after lunch, listening to their stories and praying with them. The spokesman gave no details, other than to say the pope listened to them, prayed with them and wept with them.

Earlier in the day, Francis told Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, lawmakers, judges and other authorities that he felt bound to express my pain and shame that some of Chiles clergy had sexually abused children in their care.

I am one with my brother bishops, for it is right to ask forgiveness and make every effort to support the victims, even as we commit ourselves to ensuring that such things do not happen again, the pope said.

Francis did not refer by name to Chiles most notorious pedophile priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, who in 2011 was barred from all pastoral duties and sanctioned by the Vatican to a lifetime of penance and prayer for sexually molesting minors. Nor did he refer to the fact that the emeritus archbishop of Santiago, a top papal adviser, has acknowledged he knew of complaints against Karadima but didnt remove him from ministry.

Karadima had been a politically connected, charismatic and powerful priest who ministered to a wealthy Santiago community and produced dozens of priestly vocations and five bishops. Victims went public with their accusations in 2010 after complaining for years to church authorities that Karadima had kissed and fondled them when they were teenagers.

While the coverup continued to roil the church, many Chileans are still furious over Francis subsequent decision in 2015 to appoint a Karadima protege as bishop of the southern city of Osorno. Bishop Juan Barros has denied knowing about Karadimas abuse but many Chileans dont believe him, and his appointment has badly split the diocese.

Francis referred again to the scandal later in the day, but this time his words were directed at the hundreds of priests gathered in Santiagos cathedral who have seen their influence and moral authority plummet as a result of the Karadima case and coverup.

Francis told them that the scandal had not only caused pain in the victims, but in the broader church community and among anyone who wears a clerical collar.

He said he knew the pain of priests and nuns who after working so hard, have seen the harm that has led to suspicion and questioning; in some or many of you this has been a source of doubt, fear or lack of confidence. He said some priests had even been insulted in the subway or walking on the street, and that by wearing clerical attire they had paid a heavy price. But he urged them to press on.

It was similar to the message that Francis delivered to American bishops in 2015  one that infuriated sex abuse survivors who accused the pope of drawing a moral equivalency between the lifelong trauma endured by people who were raped as children, and the pain of clergymen who were now looked upon with suspicion.

Sex abuse is Pope Francis weakest spot in terms of his credibility, said Massimo Faggioli, a Vatican expert and theology professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia. It is surprising that the pope and his entourage dont understand that they need to be more forthcoming on this issue.

Anne Barrett Doyle of the online abuse database, BishopAccountability.org, praised Francis for opening his visit with the apology, but said Chileans expect him to take action against complicit church leaders.

This is a crucial opportunity for Francis. With luck, he will not make the mistake of his brother bishops in underestimating the savviness and moral outrage of the Chilean people, said Barrett Doyle, who last week released research showing nearly 80 Chilean priests have been credibly accused or convicted of abuse.

The Karadima scandal and long coverup has caused a crisis for the church in Chile, with a recent Latinbarometro survey saying the case was responsible for a significant drop in the number of Chileans who call themselves Catholic, as well as a fall in confidence in the church as an institution.

That distrust extends to Francis, who is making his first visit as pope to the country of 17 million people. The Argentine pope is nearly a native son, having studied in Chile during his Jesuit novitiate and he knows the country well. But Chileans gave him the lowest approval rating among the 18 Latin American nations in the survey.

People are leaving the church because they dont find a protective space there, said Juan Carlos Claret, spokesman for a group of church members in Osorno that has opposed Barros appointment as bishop. The pastors are eating the flock.

For his part, Barros, who concelebrated Tuesdays open-air Mass with Francis and other bishops, repeated his assertion that he knew nothing of Karadimas crimes.

Many lies have been made about me, he said.

At a protest near the site of the Santiago Mass, police fired tear gas and water cannons before detaining several dozen demonstrators, according to an Associated Press photographer at the scene. Protesters carried signs with messages reading Burn, pope! and We dont care about the pope!

Other groups also called for demonstrations against the pontiff.

Victor Hugo Robles, an activist in Chiles lesbian and gay community, said the Vatican tries to paint an image of the pope as being close to the people, particularly those with the most needs.

We are the ones who need help, said Robles. Gay people, people living with AIDS. When it comes to those things, the church has an attitude of intolerance, of disgust.

Still, many were excited to see the pope and expressed appreciation for his apology for sex abuse.

When people make a mistake its necessary that they ask for forgiveness, said Monica Reyes, a nursing assistant who attended the popes speech at the presidential palace.

The pope will try to inject new energy into the church during his visit, which includes sessions with migrants, members of Chiles Mapuche Indigenous group and victims of the 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

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WASHINGTONThe Trump administration on Tuesday cut tens of millions of dollars in money for Palestinian refugees, demanding that the UN agency responsible for the programs undertake a fundamental re-examination, the U.S. State Department said.

In a letter, the State Department notified the UN Relief and Works Agency that the U.S. is withholding $65 million of a planned $125 million funding instalment to the body. The letter also makes clear that additional U.S. donations will be contingent on major changes by UNRWA, which has been heavily criticized by Israel.

We would like to see some reforms be made, said State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, adding that changes are needed both to the way the agency operates and is funded. This is not aimed at punishing anyone.

Read more:

Israelis voice warnings, Palestinians talk of blackmail after Trump threatens to cut funding

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The State Department said it was releasing the rest of the instalment  $60 million  to prevent the agency from running out of cash by the end of the month and closing down.

The U.S. is UNWRAs largest donor, supplying nearly 30 per cent of its budget. The agency focuses on providing health care, education and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes during the war that led to Israels establishment in 1948. Today, there are an estimated 5 million refugees and their descendants, mostly scattered across the region.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization reacted angrily to the move, saying it is targeting the most vulnerable segment of the Palestinian people and depriving the refugees of the right to education, health, shelter and a dignified life.

It is also creating conditions that will generate further instability throughout the region and will demonstrate that it has no compunction in targeting the innocent, the PLO leadership said in a statement.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was not aware of the decision, but warned that UNRWA provides vital services.

I am very concerned and I strongly hope that in the end it will be possible for the United States to maintain the funding of UNRWA in which the U.S. has a very important share, he told reporters at the UN.

Israels ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, praised the move, arguing that UNRWA misuses humanitarian aid to support propaganda against the Jewish state and perpetuate the Palestinians plight.

It is time for this absurdity to end and for humanitarian funds to be directed towards their intended purpose: the welfare of refugees, Danon said in a statement.

The U.S. donated $355 million to UNWRA in 2016 and was set to make a similar contribution in this year, with the first instalment to have been sent this month. But after a highly critical Jan. 2 tweet from Trump on aid to the Palestinians, the State Department opted to wait for a formal policy decision before sending its first instalment.

Trumps tweet expressed frustration over the lack of progress in his attempts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and he pointed the finger at the Palestinians. We pay the Palestinians HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect, he said. But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?

Israelis accuse the U.N. agency of contributing to Palestinian militancy and allowing its facilities to be used by militants. They also complain that some of UNRWAs staff are biased against Israel.

Nauert said the United States believes there needs to be more burden-sharing, a regular Trump complaint about multilateral organizations dependent on significant contributions of U.S. cash.

We dont believe that taking care of other nations and other people have to be solely the United States responsibility, she said.

The U.S. plan to withhold some, but not all, of the money was backed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defence Secretary James Mattis, who offered it as a compromise to demands for more drastic measures by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, officials said.

Haley wanted a complete cut-off in U.S. money until the Palestinians resumed peace talks with Israel that have been frozen for years. But Tillerson, Mattis and others argued that ending all assistance would exacerbate instability in the Mideast, notably in Jordan, a host to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and a crucial U.S. strategic partner.

Eliminating or sharply reducing the U.S. contribution could hamstring the agency and severely curtail its work, putting great pressure on Jordan and Lebanon as well as the Palestinian Authority. Gaza would be particularly hard hit. Some officials, including Israelis, warn that it might push people closer to the militant Hamas movement, which controls Gaza.

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The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Civil Aviation Authority Monday accused Qatar of intercepting with fighter jets two of its commercial flights in two incidents that it described as violation of the internal law conventions including threats to safety of civil aviation.

The Qatari foreign ministry rejected the Emirati claims terming them as completely false.

The General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) said two flights bound for Bahrain, were normal flights and had permits approved by the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO.

According to the GCAA Director General, Saif Al Suwaidi, the Qatari fighter jets intercepted the two planes that were servicing regular flights approved by the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO.

Passengers and crew members of the two flights saw the fighter interception, Al Suwaidi said, claiming this posed a present and clear threat to the lives of innocent civilians.

The two planes had 277 passengers on board altogether.

The GCAA said it was reviewing legal actions to take through the ICAO against Qatar.

US Central Command based at the al-Udeid in Qatar told the Associated Press it was no aware of any incident involving commercial flights and military jets.

The latest showdown between the two countries followed Qatars complaints to the UN over intrusion of UAE fighter jets into its airspace two times in a matter of weeks, with the first taking place on December 21.

It also comes few days after Qatari royal, Sheikh Abdullah bin Ali al-Thani, claimed in a video aired on Doha-based al Jazeera he was being detained in Abu Dhabi and that if anything happens to him, Emirati authorities should be held responsible.

Abu Dhabi rejected the video adding that Sheikh Abdullah, who is said to be close to the UAE and regional power Saudi Arabia, came to the UAE at his own request and is free to leave whenever he wishes.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt have busted ties with Qatar since June accusing it of funding terrorism and developing ties with Iran.

Qatar has denied the charges saying it was victim of a smear campaign.
CARACAS, VenezuelaVenezuelan special forces on Monday captured five members of a band led by a rebellious police officer who has been on the run since stealing a helicopter and launching grenades at government buildings in the capital last year, officials said.

It wasnt clear if the renegade officer, Oscar Perez, himself had been killed or captured in a deadly gun battle after more than six months on the lam.

Two officers were killed and five seriously wounded during a shootout with Perez and his comrades, the Ministry of Interior Relations said in a statement.

The members of this terrorist cell who conducted armed resistance were taken down and five criminals captured and detained, the statement said.

Read more:

Venezuelan officials conduct manhunt for man who allegedly fired grenades, stole police helicopter

Venezuela crisis deepens after Chopper Coupster

Maduro says helicopter fired on Venezuelas Supreme Court

Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro in a televised address Monday night claimed the group was preparing a car bomb to use against an embassy, without giving details.

Earlier Monday, Perez, 36, posted video clips showing blood dripping across his face as gunshots rang in the background. Perez said officers were firing at the group and wanted to kill him instead of permitting his surrender.

Were going to turn ourselves in! Perez shouted.

He holed up with at least two other men in what appeared to be a home in mountains outside Caracas. He urged Venezuelans in the video clips to fight against the socialist government.

I want to ask Venezuela not to lose heart  fight, take to the streets, he said. It is time for us to be free, and only you have the power now.

Perez leaped into the spotlight in June when he staged a dramatic helicopter attack in Caracas, lobbing grenades at the Supreme Court and Interior Ministry buildings in broad daylight. No one was injured in the incidents and Perez managed to flee before authorities swarmed in.

In numerous videos posted on Instagram, Perez has claimed that he is fighting for Venezuelas freedom from a tyrannical government that is starving its people. He now has tens of thousands of followers online and has piqued the curiosity of Venezuelans who either hail him as hero, condemn him as a criminal or question if he might be a ruse to support President Nicolas Maduros assertion that the nation is under attack by opposition conspirators.

Days after his brazen helicopter attack, Perez rode into Caracas on a motorcycle and appeared at an anti-government protest. Near-daily demonstrations against Maduros rule over a four-month span last year left at least 120 people dead.

Its the zero hour, Perez said in a posting last July as several masked youths looked on from behind. The true way to pay respects to those whove died is for this dictatorship to fall.

Adding to the intrigue is Perezs unusual past, which combined work as a highly trained officer, an action-movie actor, pilot and dog trainer.

In December, Perez posted videos showing him and a small armed band taking over a military outpost and smashing a portrait of Maduro with his foot. Perez and the assailants berated several detained guardsmen for doing nothing to help their fellow citizens suffering from hunger.

Maduro responded in the following days, vowing to meet Perez with bullets.

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As you contemplate the push by the Toronto Police Association to have more police officers hired, remember that the issue is not the need for more officers, but featherbedding.

Last August when the police association said the force needed more officers, the Toronto Police Services Board agreed to hire 80 new officers, even though in February it had agreed to shrink the force for the next three years by the number retiring or leaving.

Now officers and the association are vociferously arguing once again that there are not enough officers on duty to respond to serious calls for service.

The force has plenty enough officers right now, although they have work arrangements that mean they arent always available when needed. For instance, Toronto has a rule (demanded by the association 40 years ago), that all police cars have two officers from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. Most calls for service only require the presence or assistance of one officer. Requiring that officers travel in pairs means the second officer is there only for show or to keep his buddy company, not to perform police work  hardly a good use of staff, or of public money.

A study was recently commissioned by the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition looking into two officer cars. It shows that two officer cars do not provide a level of safety greater than one officer patrol cars; that most calls not do require two officers be present; that other police forces do not have the requirement that all cars must have two officers at specific times, but instead determine that two officer cars are optional.

If we could free one officer from half these cars, there would be no shortage of staff to deal with calls for service.

And theres a second issue that constrains existing staff  the shift schedule. The current Toronto shift schedule has officers working three shifts: 10 hour day time; 10 hour evening, and 8 hour night time  28 hours in every 24 hour period.

The shift schedule requires the same number of officers to be on duty at every hour of every day and night no matter what the demand for service  the same number at 4 a.m. as at 7 p.m. The lack of demand for services may lead officers to perform tasks that are not in the public interest, on the principle that the devil makes work for idle hands.

As another study for the Accountability Coalition shows that most police forces other than Toronto have shift schedules permitting a variable number of officers on duty to respond to demand for service. That, indeed, is what happens in most companies that provide 24-hour service, such as hospitals. Providing as many staff at 3 a.m. as at 7 p.m. would be considered very bad management. But not in the Toronto Police Service.

Both provisions  two officer cars and the shift schedule  are in the collective agreement between the TPA and the police board, as demanded by the TPA. If we wanted much better police service without hiring more officers, it would be a simple matter of dispensing with the two-officer-in-a-car provision in favour of only having two officers in a car when needed, and working out a shift schedule, such as in Calgary or Houston, which puts the number of officers on duty when they are needed.

But these are not changes the TPA will agree to. It prefers featherbedding, which is commonly defined as requiring an employer to hire unnecessary workers according to a union rule. That seems to be the preference of the Toronto Police Association, and they will push instead for extra and unnecessary jobs.

If the TPA would agree to relaxing the two-officers-in-a-car rule, and change the shift schedule regime, there would be adequate officers to respond to calls when needed.

The police service board must get serious about managing its workforce in a more efficient and cost effective manner. And the Toronto Police Association should indicate it is opposed to featherbedding and will agree to assign officers to work at times when they are needed.

John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto, and co-ordinator of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition.

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It cant be easy to tell high-achieving students that they cant attend international competitions in the United States.

But thats exactly what the Toronto District School Board did last year after President Donald Trump imposed a ban on residents from six mostly-Muslim countries.

TDSB chair Robin Pilkey explained at the time that the board is committed to equity and inclusiveness so its not appropriate that some students would not be able to attend based on their country of birth. In other words, everyone should go, or no one should go.

That was the right decision then and its the right one now. The board should stick with it despite a rising tide of pleas from some students who are worried about missing out on once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

Among them are Maisha Fahmida and Maheep Bagha, who last year travelled to a conference held by DECA, an international association of high school and college students in business, finance and marketing. The Bloor Collegiate students hope to be able to go again this year and have asked others who want to travel to competitions in the U.S. to create minute-long videos to send to the TDSB. A petition is also circulating to push the board to change its policy.

Not being able to have that opportunity, and going to the next level  the final stage of the competition  is unbelievable, Fahmida told CBC Radio.

As compelling as the students arguments may be, the board should resist changing its policy until the ban against travellers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen is overturned by the courts or dropped.

The board is not alone in its stance. The Girl Guides of Canada were the first to set an example and announce that its members wont take any trips to the U.S. We hope that members will appreciate this reflects our commitment to inclusivity and equal opportunities for all girls and women, the organization said at the time.

Nor is assessing whether students will be turned back at the border as easy as knowing what country they were born in or what passport they are travelling on.

Last year there were many cases of Canadian-born citizens being turned back at the border solely because of their religion or skin colour. Among them was Yassine Aber, a Montrealer of Moroccan origin who was stopped at the Quebec-Vermont border when he tried to cross with his university track team.

As difficult as it may be for some students to miss out on learning and networking opportunities south of the border, the TDSBs position on inclusiveness is not only right, its the most important lesson they could ever be taught. The board should not be swayed.

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Queens Park gears up for cannabis monopoly, Jan 15

Without reaching out to the existing cannabis industry the government decided it knows best about all things pot-related and, based on their experience, they should be the lone cannabis retailer for the province. Ontario has vowed a crackdown on any illegal storefronts, subjecting owners to stiff penalties. But one thing about the drug industry that Ontario fails to grasp is when one avenue is shut down another pops up.

The market Ontario will have difficulty shuttering is vast and expansive. There are no storefronts. Buying weed online is fast, convenient and private and if the government cannot meet demand or price with online sellers, the government will be the losers. What plan does Ontario have for shuttering the online world?

Ontario may very well have the largest cannabis market in Canada, but if one main goal of legalization is to eliminate the black market Ontario will be the least successful at doing so.

Ross Reynolds, Halifax

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There was relief. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Toronto Mayor John Tory expressed it.

For some of us, there was bewilderment.

Then, there was triumph  as evidenced by the gotcha gloating on the digital town squares of Twitter and Facebook  for those who somehow found an ideological victory in what could be a childs lies.

Read more: An attacker did not cut her hijab, police say. But why did the TDSB let the tearful 11-year-old face the cameras?

All this follows the bizarre twist in a Toronto story that made international headlines last Friday: an 11-year-old girl alleging that a man ran up behind her, when she was on her way to school with her little brother, and cut her hijab.

Police, who were investigating the allegations as a possible hate crime, said Monday this did not happen.

Did not happen.

There was so much detail at the Friday afternoon news conference. The man alleged to have committed the crime was described as young. Asian. He wore a hoodie. He was dressed in black. His gloves were brown. The scissors with which he cut her hijab had a blue handle. He had a moustache.

A mother in tears.

I dont know why he did that. Its just not Canada.

Ooh, that one was lapped up.

Its not Canada adheres to the common narrative of discrimination being just a blip in the social fabric rather than a daily reality for many Canadians. But the incident was rightly condemned by people of various political stripes.

The girl became an instant poster child of Islamophobic excesses threatening to crack the face of Canadas vaunted tolerance.

But on Monday, when police said the incident didnt happen  they say this is based on evidence from interviews and surveillance footage  and that no charges were laid, some Canadians showed just how thin that veneer is. From the medieval gutters of Twitter arose the cry to charge the kid with maximum punishment or to charge the mother. This, from people who like the rest of us have no idea of the circumstances that led to this hoax. This, from people, who in the same breath, are decrying media for not getting all its facts first.

Justin Trudeau was questioned over his response to an 11-year-old girls claim that a man cut her hijab, which police are now calling untrue. The prime minister says it's important to remind people Canada defends religious freedoms. (The Canadian Press)

There is a difference between news that turns out to be false and fake news. The latter involves the deliberate spreading of misinformation.

In this case, the media appears to have followed standard procedure. A police release sought assistance in identifying a person accused of religion-based harassment. Journalists followed up by seeking quotes from the family in question. Certainly more questions need to be asked now to ascertain how this happened.

As the police said, a false accusation of a hate crime is rare. But it most hurts communities already reeling from the effect of those inflicting terrorism in the name of their religion.

It also undermines the fight against Islamophobia. At the best of times, those fighting to dismantle discrimination do so with their credibility constantly on the line. Whether the fight is against sexual assault, claiming rights to land or simply claiming humanhood, authority rests with those who benefit from the system  or at least those who lose nothing from it.

An incident like this gives people the ammunition to leverage the rare false report and use it to invalidate larger issues of anti-Muslim hate.

A newspaper column demanded the family apologize to Canada, implicit in that demand being they are not one of us. Would an 11-year-old white child be asked for such an apology?

Canada, as one of the worlds most fortunate countries, offers political stability, potential for comfortable lifestyle and a shot at equality. This does not make it bereft of identity-based hatred, prejudice and discrimination or, in this context, Islamophobia.

An Ontarios Human Rights Commission survey last year found that more people reported harbouring very negative feelings about Muslims than about any other group.

An Angus Reid poll last year showed 46 per cent of Canadians surveyed perceive the presence of Muslims as damaging to society.

And in June last year, Statistics Canada said the number of police-reported hate crimes targeting Muslims in the country more than tripled between 2012 and 2015 from 45 to 159.

The data cannot be knocked down or wished away by one false story, but it wont be for lack of trying by those unwilling to give up their boorish ideas.

Its worth reminding all those rushing to say racism isnt Canadian that qualities considered Canadian include compassion for children who make mistakes, no matter how publicly.

Shree Paradkar writes about discrimination and identity issues. You can follow her @shreeparadkar

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MONTREALThere may come a time when Justin Trudeau falls out of love with the open town halls that are becoming a yearly feature of his tenure as prime minister.

When the mood of the country sours on a government, challengers are not as easily turned into enablers.

It does not take a huge amount of institutional memory to recall that Trudeaus recent predecessors have all known periods where affection from the public or even part of their own party was hard to come by. The list includes the prime ministers father.

Read more:

Trudeau tells heckler at Hamilton town hall that he too is angry about Omar Khadr settlement

Opinion | Tim Harper: Trudeau dons his Teflon suit at town hall meetings

Justin Trudeau takes heat from U.S. right-wing on abortion stance

Media veterans of the constitutional wars, the free trade debate and the sponsorship scandal, not to mention various GST episodes, have had occasion to measure first hand how unreceptive a Canadian electorate polarized by a divisive issue can become towards a once-popular government leader.

But this years prime ministerial opening act  eliciting as it has so far mostly positive reviews  is not such a time.

Justin Trudeau told an Ontario town hall meeting that he shares the anger of many Canadians over the governments settlement with Omar Khadr. The prime minister was responding to a heckler at the Wednesday event in Hamilton. (The Canadian Press)

The format does play to Trudeaus particular set of political skills. As a bonus, the town halls act as a caucus morale booster on the eve of what will undoubtedly be another rocky sitting of Parliament.

As widely noted, Trudeau is rarely as on top of things under fire in question period as he is in a public forum. But performance is only part of the story. The exercise also provides a reality check of sorts on the current mood of the country and the success or lack thereof of the opposition parties.

The politically engaged Canadians who show up at town halls cannot but be aware of the travails of Finance Minister Bill Morneau or of the prime ministers lackadaisical approach to the ethics rules that should have prevented him from accepting a holiday invitation from the Aga Khan. Both have been heavily documented in the media over a significant period of time.

But in the big picture, the rough ride the opposition has given Trudeau over the fall sitting of Parliament has left relatively few skid marks on his public persona.

The town halls have elicited little evidence that the Conservative message that middle-class families are worse off under Trudeau is resonating or that there is a large market beyond the Tory base for the notion the prime minister is insensitive to their concerns by virtue of his personal wealth.

Ditto in the case of NDP assertions that the prime minister is managing the Canada-U.S. relationship on bended knees.

For lack of a solid factual foundation, neither opposition narrative has hit the kind of public opinion nerve that drives disappointed voters to reach for pitch forks to take to the government of the day.

Liberal MPs denied an opposition bid to summon Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to an ethics committee over his dealings with the Aga Khan. Opposition MPs are accusing the Liberal members on the committee of toeing the party line. (The Canadian Press)

The big battle of the next few months in Parliament is expected to revolve around the legalization of cannabis.

Andrew Scheers Conservatives have pledged to do all they can to block or at least delay the implementation of Trudeaus signature promise. They may be setting out to try to close the barn door after the horses have bolted.

At this late stage, a parliamentary blockade  presumably in the Senate  would wreak havoc with provincial plans. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the provinces have set out to meet next summers deadline to have in place the infrastructure required to market cannabis. Anything that adds a measure of uncertainty to an already complex operation is unlikely to be a welcome initiative.

The Conservatives road-tested their message on cannabis in a series of by-elections last fall only to finish the year two seats short of their initial complement. The change in the legal status of marijuana may be imminent but it did not emerge as a central concern on the town hall radar.

Inasmuch as the town halls succeeded in changing the narrative or at least in providing a temporary diversion from the troubles that await the Liberals once the House reopens later this month they have for the most part been decreed to be a strategic success for the government.

But the exercise has also shown that the connection between the dominant question period narratives of the past year and the actual central preoccupations of many voters is tenuous at best.

It is fair to wonder which of the two is the diversion: the issues that voters raise with the prime minister in the town halls or those that daily consume parliamentary insiders?

Chantal Hebert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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Twenty years from now, Wall Street traders will look back and surely remember where they were when it happened. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) - Get Free Report shelling out big bucks to buy organic grocer Whole Foods Market.

When the eCommerce titan announced its deal to acquire the upscale grocer last June -- and cemented rumors of a move into bricks-and-mortar retail -- the entire stock market stopped and took notice. If Amazon can now do physical retail all on its own, what can't it do?

"I think in many ways when Amazon bought Whole Foods, that was almost a Pearl Harbor moment for the retail industry," PayPal Holdings Inc. (PYPL) - Get Free Report CEO Dan Schulman told TheStreet.

Amazon's Whole Foods acquisition brought deal-making in the retail space back to top of mind status among those on Wall Street. But it also highlighted the importance of integrating traditional and digital retail. According to Schulman, the Amazon/Whole Foods deal ushered in a new era of purely omnichannel retail, one marked by the distinct goal of blending the old and the new ways of grabbing consumer dollars.

"Until then, most people had understood that the world was moving toward omnichannel but thought there was a distinction between online and offline," Schulman added.

But clearly, that's no longer the case. Even in the seven months since Amazon announced the deal, a flurry of retailers have pivoted more to digital. Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST) - Get Free Report reported digital sales growth of 33.3% in December alone, fueled by an expanded online assortment. Walmart Stores Inc. (WMT) - Get Free Report has called for 40% eCommerce growth in fiscal 2019 aided by its Jet.com acquisition and improved online shopping experience. Even Target Corp. (TGT) - Get Free Report -- long a laggard online -- has said investors should look for consistent 25% digital growth.

"I think that move by Amazon clearly showed the world that there's a blurring between those two separate and distinct channels into one driven by mobile," Schulman said. "And that can make a world of difference in the value proposition that retailers offer their consumers."

It's certainly not a bad thing for a company such as PayPal. As traditional retailers are forced into the world of eCommerce, they need a financial solutions firm with a tech focus to foster the evolution.

PayPal can become an "enabler of online commerce in a lot more ways than just eBay Inc. (EBAY) - Get Free Report ," Buckingham equity research director Chris Brendler said. As more and more traditional retailers move into eCommerce, PayPal could itself be a beneficiary of the Amazon Effect.

"I think PayPal is ideally suited to be that partner," Brendler said.

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China looks to have taken another step forward in its recent spat over trade and protectionism with the Washington after one of its state-run ratings groups slashed its credit assessment on the United States, warning that its debt-driven growth strategies will erode the solvency of the Federal government.

China's Dagong Global Credit Rating Co lowered its rating on both U.S-dollar and foreign-currency denominated debts to BBB+ from A-, and tagged a negative outlook on its new assessment, in a report published Tuesday that looks certain to spark reaction from Washington. Dagong's move followed reports last week suggesting China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange -- the world's largest holder of U.S government debt -- could halt future Treasury purchases as the two countries continue to spar over global trade and regional security.

"The perennial negative impact of the superstructure on the economic base has continued to deteriorate the debt repayment sources of the federal government, and this trend will be further exacerbated by the government's massive tax cuts," Dagong said in a statement published on its website. "The increasing reliance on the debt-driven mode of economic development will continue to erode the solvency of the federal government."

The move follows a series of escalating issues between the world's two largest economies as President Donald Trump preps for what is expected to be an "America first" speech at next week's World Economic Forum in Davos that will counter last year's keynote from China's Xi Jingping that urged deeper multi-lateral trade ties and more open global commerce.

In fact, China's state television reported Tuesday that Trump and Xi spoke over the phone in the past days, with China's President urging both sides to take a "constructive approach" to solving trade disputes and loosening access to each other's markets.

That appears far off in the distance at present, however, amid not only Dagong's credit rating move but also reports from Washington last night that lawmakers are pressuring AT&T (T) - Get Free Report to cut its commercial ties with China-based handset maker Huawei Technologies and want to prevent China Mobile Ltd from entering the U.S. market, citing issues of national security.

U.S. regulators have been taking an increasingly hard line on China's inward American investment of late, with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, recently blocking a planned $1.2 billion takeover of payments group Moneygram International by China's Ant Financial Services Group, which is backed by billionaire investor - and U.S. job creator - Jack Ma.

In fact, three China-led deals worth more than $5 billion have been knocked-backed by CFIUS over the past three months, including Canyon Bridge Capital Partners' play for Lattice Semiconductor Corp. and China Oceanwide Holdings Group's move for Richmond, Va-based Genworth Financial.

Against that backdrop, news that China's trade surplus with the United States hit a record high last year is certain to provide Trump -- who repeatedly vowed to label China as a currency manipulator during his election campaign -- further impetus to increase his America-first rhetoric.

China's global trade surplus slipped to $422.5 billion, Customs data confirmed, but its domination over U.S. commerce saw that portion of the reading rise $25.55 billion in December to an all-time high of $275.81 billion for the whole of 2017.

All of this sets up a fascinating confrontation in Davos next week. Last year, Xi wowed what many peopled consider the Valhalla of globalisation with a keynote speech that called for broader open markets and deeper international cooperation.

The praise that poured in for Xi's vision may or may not have convinced Trump to attend this year's event, but the President is nonetheless hauling a massive U.S. delegation to the Alps and is undoubtedly planning a barnstorming address of his own.

"The President looks forward to promoting his policies to strengthen American businesses, American industries, and American workers," White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders said last week.
Delivering on expectations, Ford (F) - Get Free Report unveiled a number of vehicles we were looking for during the Detroit Auto Show.

The automaker introduced an all-new Ranger, a limited edition Ford Mustang Bullitt and a new iteration to the Ford Edge with its ST edition.

But the company's bread-and-butter vehicle is seeing some big changes, too. Only the changes to the Ford F-150 aren't just short term. This year, the Ford F-150 will offer a diesel engine option. Orders will be taken this month, with deliveries expected in the spring.

The new 3.0-liter Power Stroke engine will obtain roughly 30 miles per gallon. Tell that to consumers a decade ago and they'll likely laugh. The technology that automakers continue to unveil has been impressive so far. With new Silverado and Ram 1500 options, additional engine options for the F-150 are a good move.

Featuring a 10-speed automatic transmission, this is the first time the F-150 will be equipped with a diesel engine option. According to the automaker, the truck will be capable of towing 11,400 pounds, with a payload of just over 2,000 pounds.

However, the Power Stroke option isn't the only thing we took away from the 2018 Detroit Auto Show. During Ford's demonstration, CEO Jim Hackett told the crowd that in 2020, the automaker was looking to roll out a hybrid truck option.

Assuming this comes to fruition in the time frame Ford is talking, it will draw plenty of questions regarding the technology. One thing was very clear, though, and not just with Ford, but with every automaker: The electrification trend is only going to strengthen going forward.

Aside from federal mandates, the technology allows for better emissions and improved fuel efficiency, as well as being in demand from consumers. The Ford F-150 hybrid is just one more step in this direction, which should ultimately come as little surprise.

However, it will draw questions about the truck's power and capability. Surely some potential buyers will wonder if the hybrid can keep up with a traditional engine when it comes to towing and hauling. But it would be surprising to see Ford disappoint in this respect, given the emphasis it puts on America's top-selling vehicle.

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This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author had no positions in the stocks mentioned.
Carl Icahn wanted some share-price improving action at Xerox Corp. (XRX) - Get Free Report and he got it, though it isn't the shakeup he had been seeking.

The document technology company is reportedly in talks with Japan's Fujifilm Holdings about a deal of sorts, all of which drove the company's share price up 5% in mid-day trading on Thursday. And while it isn't clear what kind of transaction may be shaping up TheStreet believes it could be one that seeks to help Xerox CEO Jeff Jacobson keep his job. Without a deal holding him in place, it looks like Jacobson could be on the way out.

The Wall Street Journal said, citing sources, that a full takeover of the Norwalk, Conn.-based Xerox isn't part of the discussions, but noted that an existing joint venture based in the Asia-Pacific region between the two group could make a broader tie-up more likely.

However, TheStreet believes that one possible transaction could be to have Fujifilm come in as a white squire of sorts, with a potential substantial minority investment and an agreement to vote for the document technology company's incumbent director slate. In another situation, it could put Xerox's existing shareholders in a minority position.

Either approach would make it much more difficult for Icahn, who has a 9.7% stake and is seeking to install a minority slate of four dissident directors to Xerox's 11-person board at the company's annual meeting set for May. Icahn had told TheStreet last month that his real aim is to remove Jacobson, whom he argued hasn't performed well during his short one-year tenure at the helm of the group. Icahn worries that Xerox could follow in the footsteps of Eastman Kodak, a former corporate leader that later experienced a significant decline. Xerox Chairman Robert Keegan, also on Icahn's radar, served as an executive vice president of Eastman Kodak, from 1997 to 2000.

A Xerox spokesperson declined to comment.

If a Fujifilm deal is structured this way it wouldn't be the first time that a company targeted by an activist has brought in a white squire to help it defend itself. Last year, Jonathan Litt of activist fund Land & Buildings had sought to shake up Saks Fifth Avenue owner Hudson's Bay Co. (HBC) board. However, he canceled his effort after HBC received a $500 million equity investment from buyout shop Rhone Capital, which converts into an initial 21.8% voting and equity interest. That agreement takes place as part of a deal to lease space in retail stores to the investor's partner, WeWork Companies, a global network of workspaces in buildings.

In May, Pandora Media Inc. (P) accepted a $150 million white squire investment from KKR & Co. (KKR) as part of an effort to fend off Corvex Management's Keith Meister. Pandora subsequently called off the KKR investment after it in June agreed to a deal to have SiriusXM Holdings (SIRI) - Get Free Report acquire a substantial minority investment in the company for $480 million.

More of What's Trending on TheStreet:

If a deal is set up as a white squire, it can open up the opportunity for Icahn or other shareholders to file a lawsuit arguing that the transaction was just made to defend the business from an activist investor and to entrench management at the expense of shareholders. However, Fujifilm's existing joint venture with Xerox suggests that a deal could have enough of a business purpose and strategic synergies that it wouldn't be considered by the courts as an entrenchment device for Jacobson and the company's board. Xerox is incorporated in New York.

The Xerox-Fujifilm joint venture has already experienced some serious problems, which raises concerns about a potential deal. According to reports in June, Fuji Xerox, the joint venture, said that due to losses from accounting problems in the South Pacific it had overstated revenue by about $340 million. Xerox owns a 25% Fujifilm stake.

Don't count Icahn out. There is a good reason they call him the CEO slayer.


A UN confidential report accused both Saudi Arabia and Iran of protracting the crisis in Yemen through their involvement in arming warring parties in the impoverished country.

The report, issued by a UN panel, noted that Iran violated an arms embargo imposed on Yemen by failing to prevent the Houthi rebels in that war-ravaged nation from obtaining Iranian missiles, including one, fired hundreds of miles into Saudi Arabia two months ago.

The document, now in the hands of the UN Security Council, does not identify the supplier of the weaponry but says missile debris inspected by UN experts was of Iranian origin.

The findings, which have not been made public, were first reported on Friday by Agence France-Presse and confirmed by Security Council diplomats who had seen copies of the report.

An arms-embargo provision of that resolution requires all member states to take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer to designated Yemeni combatants including the Houthis.

The report also lambasted Saudi Arabia and its coalition, fighting the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, for not doing enough to prevent civilian casualties.

More than 10,000 people have been killed in the Yemen conflict, millions have been displaced and are at risk of acute hunger and malnutrition and one million have been infected with cholera.
President Trump seemingly made a shift Monday over his stance on Qatar in the crisis opposing it to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt after the US leader congratulated the Qatari Emir over the fight against terrorism.

The White House in a statement Monday announced that the occupant of the Oval House held a phone conversation with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani commending the Qatari leader for his countrys efforts to combat terrorism.

The president thanked the Emir for his action to counter terrorism and extremism in all forms, the statement said.

The leaders discussed areas in which the United States and Qatar can partner to bring more stability to the region, counter malign Iranian influence, and defeat terrorism.

Saudi Arabia and its allies on June 5 severed ties with Qatar over allegations that the gas-rich Gulf country sponsors terrorism. The four also cut off trade as well sea, air and ground links with the Gulf Cooperation Council member.

The crisis emerged following Trumps visit to the region where he met with leaders of the Arab world.

The US leader in a series of tweets took credit of Qatars isolation therefore backing the Saudi-led quartet.

Trump then mobilized his top diplomat Rex Tillerson to help dissipate the crisis opposing the US allies in the region.

Tillerson in September started mediating the feud, but late last year he said the crisis seemed unlikely to end soon, citing Saudi Arabias refusal to dialogue.

Qatar has rejected the accusations and refused to abide by 13 conditions imposed by the Saudi-led quartet. These include shutdown of Doha-based al Jazeera network, reduction of ties with Iran and suspension of Turkish military buildup in Qatar.

Trump in the phone conversation also proposed partnership with Qatar to counter Iran, become Qatars second major partner in the region behind Turkey.

The leaders discussed areas in which the United States and Qatar can partner to bring more stability to the region, counter malign Iranian influence, the White House added.
The leader of Nigerias Shiite Muslim sect, rumored to have died in custody, made his first public appearance in two years on Saturday.

Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky met with a select group of journalists on Saturday at the State Security Service office in Abuja, Channels Television reported.

The move comes a week after police arrested dozens of members of the group during protests calling for his release.

Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), has been imprisoned without charge since December 2015 after his followers clashed with the army in the northern city of Zaria. At least 347 Shiites were reported killed and secretly buried in mass graves by the army.

Members of the IMN group have been staging a series of processions across the northern states demanding the release of the detainees after a Federal High Court in Abuja in December 2016 ordered the release of Mr. Zakzaky and his wife. The government refused to obey the order.

Ibrahim Zakzaky remains the primary figure and spiritual leader of the IMN, formerly known as Muslim Brothers, Africas most prominent Shia Muslim movement.

Of Nigerias 180 million population, around 50 percent are Muslim, a small minority of which belong to Shia Islam.
The following companies are subsidiares of Colgate-Palmolive: 887357 Ontario Inc., COLGALIVE S.A., CP GABA GmbH, CP International Holding C.V., CP West East Investment Limited, Cleaning Dimensions Inc., Colgate (BVI) Limited, Colgate (Guangzhou) Company Limited, Colgate (U.K.) Limited, Colgate Business Services of the Americas S.C., Colgate Flavors and Fragrances Inc., Colgate Global Business Services Private Limited, Colgate Holdings, Colgate Inc., Colgate Oral Pharmaceuticals Inc., Colgate Palmolive Ghana Limited, Colgate Palmolive Holding S.Com.P.A., Colgate Palmolive Nouvelle Caledonie Sarl, Colgate Palmolive Tanzania Limited, Colgate Sanxiao Company Limited, Colgate Venture Company Inc., Colgate-Palmolive (America) Inc., Colgate-Palmolive (Asia) Pte Ltd, Colgate-Palmolive (Blantyre) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (Brunei) Sdn Bhn, Colgate-Palmolive (Central America) Inc., Colgate-Palmolive (Central America) Inc. y Compania Limitada, Colgate-Palmolive (Centro America) S.A., Colgate-Palmolive (China) Co. Ltd, Colgate-Palmolive (Costa Rica) S.A., Colgate-Palmolive (Dominica) Inc., Colgate-Palmolive (Dominican Republic) Inc., Colgate-Palmolive (East Africa) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (Eastern) Pte. Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive (Egypt) S.A.E., Colgate-Palmolive (Far East) Sdn Bhd, Colgate-Palmolive (Fiji) Pte Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (Gabon) S.A., Colgate-Palmolive (Guyana) Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive (H.K.) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (Hellas) S.A. I.C., Colgate-Palmolive (Hong Kong) Holding Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (Kazakhstan) L.L.P., Colgate-Palmolive (Latvia) Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Colgate-Palmolive (Middle East Exports) Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive (Myanmar) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (New York) Inc., Colgate-Palmolive (Poland) Sp. z o.o., Colgate-Palmolive (Proprietary) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (Research & Development) Inc., Colgate-Palmolive (Romania) SRL, Colgate-Palmolive (Thailand) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (UK) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (Uganda) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive (Vietnam) Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive (Zambia) Inc., Colgate-Palmolive (Zimbabwe) Inc., Colgate-Palmolive A.B., Colgate-Palmolive A/S, Colgate-Palmolive Adria Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive Argentina S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Asia Pacific Limited, Colgate-Palmolive Asia Pacific Treasury Services Limited, Colgate-Palmolive Belgium S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Bolivia Ltda., Colgate-Palmolive Canada Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Caricom Service Co. Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Central European Management Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Chile S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Cia., Colgate-Palmolive Comercial Ltda., Colgate-Palmolive Commercial (Hellas) SP LLC, Colgate-Palmolive Commerciale S.A.S., Colgate-Palmolive Commericale S.r.l., Colgate-Palmolive Compania Anonima, Colgate-Palmolive Company Distr. LLC, Colgate-Palmolive Company GmbH, Colgate-Palmolive Cote dIvoire S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Cyprus Limited, Colgate-Palmolive Development Corp., Colgate-Palmolive East West Africa Region (Pty) Ltd, Colgate-Palmolive Enterprises Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Espana S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Europe (Holdings) Sarl, Colgate-Palmolive Europe Sarl, Colgate-Palmolive Finance (UK) plc, Colgate-Palmolive Global Trading Company, Colgate-Palmolive Holding Argentina S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Holding Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Hungary Kft Limited Liability Company, Colgate-Palmolive IHQ Services (Thailand) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Inc. S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Industrial Ltda., Colgate-Palmolive Industriel S.A.S., Colgate-Palmolive International Holding LLC, Colgate-Palmolive International LLC, Colgate-Palmolive Investment Co. Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Investments (BVI) Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive Investments (PNG) Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive Investments (UK) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive Investments Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Israel Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive Italia S.r.l., Colgate-Palmolive JSC, Colgate-Palmolive Lanka (Private) Limited, Colgate-Palmolive Latin America Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Limited, Colgate-Palmolive Manufacturing (Poland) Sp. z o.o., Colgate-Palmolive Marketing Sdn Bhd, Colgate-Palmolive Maroc S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Mocambique Limitada, Colgate-Palmolive NJ Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Nederland B.V., Colgate-Palmolive Norge A/S, Colgate-Palmolive Participacoes e Investimentos Imobiliarios Lda., Colgate-Palmolive Peru S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Philippines Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Pty Ltd, Colgate-Palmolive Retirement Trustee Limited, Colgate-Palmolive S.A. de C.V., Colgate-Palmolive S.p.A., Colgate-Palmolive Senegal S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Services (Hellas) LLC, Colgate-Palmolive Services (Poland) Sp. z o.o., Colgate-Palmolive Services CEW GmbH, Colgate-Palmolive Services S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Slovensko s.r.o., Colgate-Palmolive Support Services, Colgate-Palmolive Temizlik Urunleri Sanayi ve Ticart S.A., Colgate-Palmolive Transnational Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Ukraine LLC, Colgate-Palmolive Unipessoal Lda, Colgate-Palmolive de Paraguay Sociedad Anonima, Colgate-Palmolive de Puerto Rico Inc., Colgate-Palmolive del Ecuador S.A.I.C., Colgate-Palmolive del Peru (Delaware) Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Eeska republika spol. s r.o., Colpal CBS S de R. L. de C. V., Consumer Viewpoint Center Inc., Cotelle S.A., Dimac Development Corp., Dominica Coconut Products Limited, EKIB Inc., ELM Company Limited, Elta MD Holdings Inc., Elta MD Inc., EltaMD, Filorga Americas Inc., Filorga Asia Limited, Filorga Benelux SA, Filorga Cosmetiques Polska, Filorga Middle East DMCC, Filorga Portugal Unipessoal Lda., Filorga RU Limited Liability Company, GABA Europe Holding GmbH, GABA International, GABA International Holding LLC, GABA Schweiz AG, GABA Therwil GmbH, Gamma Development Co. Ltd., Global Trading and Supply LLC, Hamol Ltd., Hello Products, Hello Products LLC, Hills Funding Company, Hills Pet Nutrition (NZ) Limited, Hills Pet Nutrition (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Hills Pet Nutrition Asia Limited, Hills Pet Nutrition B.V., Hills Pet Nutrition Canada Inc., Hills Pet Nutrition Denmark ApS, Hills Pet Nutrition Espana S.L., Hills Pet Nutrition GmbH, Hills Pet Nutrition Holding B.V., Hills Pet Nutrition Inc., Hills Pet Nutrition Indiana Inc., Hills Pet Nutrition Italia S.r.l., Hills Pet Nutrition Korea Ltd., Hills Pet Nutrition Ltd., Hills Pet Nutrition Manufacturing B.V., Hills Pet Nutrition Manufacturing s.r.o, Hills Pet Nutrition Norway AS, Hills Pet Nutrition OOO, Hills Pet Nutrition Pty. Limited, Hills Pet Nutrition S.p.A., Hills Pet Nutrition SNC, Hills Pet Nutrition Sales Inc., Hills Pet Nutrition South Africa Proprietary Limited, Hills Pet Nutrition Sweden AB, Hills Pet Nutrition Switzerland GmbH, Hills Pet Nutrition Taiwan Ltd, Hills Pet Nutrition Trading (GZ) Co. Ltd, Hills Pet Nutrition de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Hills Pet Nutrition de Puerto Rico Inc., Hills Pet Nutrition s.r.o., Hills Pet Products (Benelux) S.A., Hills Pet Products Inc., Hills Veterinary Companies of America Inc., Hills-Colgate (Japan) Ltd., Hopro Liquidating Corp., Hygiene Systemes et Services SA, IES Enterprises Inc., Inmobiliaria Colpal S. de R.L. de C.V., Inmobiliaria Hills S.A. de C.V., Innovacion Creativa S.A. de C.V., Kolynos Corporation, Laboratoires Filorga Cosmetiques Espana S.L.U., Laboratoires Filorga Cosmetiques Italia S.R.L., Laboratoires Filorga Cosmetiques S.A., Laser Brand Toothpaste, Lournay Sales Inc., Mennen Company, Mennen Interamerica Ltd., Mennen Limited, Mennen South Africa Ltd., Mennen de Chile Ltd., Mennen de Nicargua S.A., Mission Hills Property Corporation, Mission Hills S.A. de C.V., Norwood International Incorporated, Olive Music Publishing Corporation, PCA SKIN, Paramount Research Inc., Penny LLC, Pet Chemicals Inc., Physicians Care Alliance LLC, Productos Halogenados Copalven C.A., Purity Holding Company, Purity Music Publishing Corporation, Refresh Company Limited, Samuel Taylor Holdings B.V., Sanex, Sanxiao Company Limited, Services Development Co. Ltd., Societe Generale de Negoce et de Services (GENESE) S.A., The GDN - The Global Distributive Network SAS, The Lournay Company Inc., The MPDP - The Medical and Pharmaceutic Distributive Platform SAS, The Murphy-Phoenix Company, Tom's of Maine, Toms of Maine Holdings Inc., Toms of Maine Inc., Veterinary Companies of America Inc., Vipont Pharmaceutical Inc., and XEB Inc..

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ResMed Inc. develops, manufactures, distributes, and markets medical devices and cloud-based software applications for the healthcare markets. The company operates in two segments, Sleep and Respiratory Care, and Software as a Service. It offers various products and solutions for a range of respiratory disorders, including technologies to be applied in medical and consumer products, ventilation devices, diagnostic products, mask systems for use in the hospital and home, headgear and other accessories, dental devices, and cloud-based software informatics solutions to manage patient outcomes, as well as provides customer and business processes. The company also provides AirView, a cloud-based system that enables remote monitoring and changing of patients' device settings; myAir, a personalized therapy management application for patients with sleep apnea that provides support, education, and troubleshooting tools for increased patient engagement and improved compliance; U-Sleep, a compliance monitoring solution that enables home medical equipment (HME)to streamline their sleep programs; connectivity module and propeller solutions; and Propeller portal. It offers out-of-hospital software solution, such as Brightree business management software and service solutions to providers of HME, pharmacy, home infusion, orthotics, and prosthetics services; MatrixCare care management and related ancillary solutions to senior living, skilled nursing, life plan communities, home health, home care, and hospice organizations, as well as related accountable care organizations; and HEALTHCAREfirst that offers electronic health record, software, billing and coding services, and analytics for home health and hospice agencies. The company markets its products primarily to sleep clinics, home healthcare dealers, and hospitals through a network of distributors and direct sales force in approximately 140 countries. ResMed Inc. was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in San Diego, California.
American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. operates as a specialty retailer that provides clothing, accessories, and personal care products under the American Eagle and Aerie brands. The company provides jeans, and specialty apparel and accessories for women and men; and intimates, apparel, activewear, and swim collections, as well as personal care products for women. It also offers graphic tees and other clothing products under the Tailgate brand name; and menswear products under the Todd Snyder New York brand name. As of January 29, 2022, the company operated 880 American Eagle stores, 244 Aerie brand stand-alone stores, and five Todd Snyder stores in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Hong Kong. It also ships to 81 countries through its Websites; and offers its merchandise at 260 locations operated by licensees in 28 countries, as well as provides products through its Websites ae.com, aerie.com, and toddsnyder.com. American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. was founded in 1977 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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.
United Technologies Corporation provides technology products and services to building systems and aerospace industries worldwide. Its Otis segment designs, manufactures, sells, and installs passenger and freight elevators, escalators, and moving walkways; and offers modernization products to upgrade elevators and escalators, as well as maintenance and repair services. The company's Carrier segment provides heating, ventilating, air conditioning, refrigeration, fire, security, and building automation products, solutions, and services for commercial, government, infrastructure, residential, and refrigeration and transportation applications. This segment also offers building services, including audit, design, installation, system integration, repair, maintenance, and monitoring. Its Pratt & Whitney segment supplies aircraft engines for commercial, military, business jet, and general aviation markets; and provides aftermarket maintenance, repair, and overhaul, as well as fleet management services. The company's Collins Aerospace Systems segment provides electric power generation, power management, and distribution systems; air data and aircraft sensing systems; engine control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems; engine components; environmental control systems; fire and ice detection, and protection systems; propeller systems; engine nacelle systems; aircraft lighting, seating, and cargo systems; actuation and landing systems; space products and subsystems; avionics systems; flight controls, communications, navigation, oxygen, and training systems; food and beverage preparation, and storage and galley systems; and lavatory and wastewater management systems. The company offers its services through manufacturers' representatives, distributors, wholesalers, dealers, retail outlets, and sales representatives, as well as directly to customers. United Technologies Corporation was founded in 1934 and is headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut.
6:45 am - 8:00 am

Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences #2120 B (M&T Aud)
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The 31st Roscrea People of the Year Awards evening in Racket Hall last Wednesday was most memorable.

Hundreds of well wishers packed in to enjoy a night of music, presentations and sheer enjoyment in this premier event organised each year by the editors of Roscrea People.

The youngsters of CCE Ros Cre got the evening off to a great start and this was followed by an illustrated talk on aspects of Roscrea 2017.

The editor of 'Roscrea People' then presented a set of 34 new jerseys to the camogie panel of Colaiste Phobal, (see picture right) followed by the usual book donations to Colaistes library and archive, St Cronans Centre and Tipperary Public Libraries.

The Awards presentations then followed. It was truly wonderful to see so many young people honoured and taking great delight in the adulation. A poignant moment was for the Credit Union Citation on its 50 years - 1967-2018 was read and the editor announced that Brian King was leaving to take up a new position as CEO of Thurles Credit Union. He paid special tribute to Brian for pulling the Roscrea CU back from the brink and setting it on an envigorating course for the future. Brin King trying not to be emotional spoke of his gratitude to all who had helped pull the CU through rough times. The main sponsor Brian Colclough of SuperValu thanked all with a special mention for his Dad Bernie who received a special RCDC award for his 5 years of independent trading.

The associate sponsors are Roscrea Heritage Society, Roscrea Credit Union and RockTop Consulting.
Cashel Pantomime Societys production of Cinderella wowed audiences all this week, with a stellar performance from the cast and crew who put in such a huge effort for months beforehand in rehearsals.

There were superb performances from all, but it was the razor wit of the visually challenged Ugly Sisters Liam OMaoldhomhnaigh (Salmonella) and Ken Whelan (Influenza), and Lorraine Cormacks sharp-tongued Fairy Godmother, who really stole the show with their witty jibes and double entendres. Along with great musical scores played by the Band (Neil Quirke, Vincent Flynn, Alan Devitt, Peter Taylor, Pat OCallaghan, Helen Colbert, and Deirdre Ryan Preston), the Chorus and Junior Chorus performed uplifting cover versions of hits old and new - the Vienna Waltz, Michael Jacksons Thriller, Shake It Off, I Need a Hero, and Sisters are Doin it for Themselves, really impressed the crowd and showed the hours of dedication put into preparing a hugely successful production. Name-checking local businesses and well-known personalities, Cinderella poked fun, and took risks with great comic material. Former Tipperary Star advertising executive Lorraine Cormack - spiritual advisor to the young and reckless - kept a picture of Donald Trump for the exorcisms, and even Michael Lowry TD, present at the Sunday night show, didnt escape attention: the well-connected Deputy was well in with the King apparently, while Fine Gaels Declan Burgess was on every committee in the town.

Nicole Kennedys Cinderella melted even the hardest of hearts with her soaring vocal performances, reaching the high notes with her co-star Shane ODonovans Prince Charming in This is Me, along with a later beautiful rendition of Im Not That Girl. Niamh Brownes Baroness Stoneybroke was suitably cruel and sarcastic, while Daniel Bowes' Dandini showed great comic timing, uttering such immortal lines as Don't take your pants off for me in the forest! Congratulations to all, and we look forward to the next production. Cashel Panto, take a bow!
Rokita's office, Bernard's attorneys spar in court over patient privacy

Attorneys on both sides sparred over the ethics and limits of patient-physician confidentiality during witness questioning on Friday.
The Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10 Plus are two of the best Android phones around, but the Galaxy S9 (now $599) and Galaxy S9+ ($699) deliver a lot of phone for less money. You get solid cameras with a fun Super Slow-Mo video mode and swift performance inside handsets that are among the sleekest in their price range.

No, you won't get the ultra-wide camera in the Galaxy S10 lineup or a fingerprint reader in the screen. But, overall, the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ are pretty great values, and today some of the best used smartphones around. We've also picked out the best Galaxy S9 cases.

Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ Specs and Price

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Galaxy S9

Galaxy S9+

Price

From $599

From $699

Display

5.8 inches (2960 x 1440 pixels) 6.2 inches (2960 x 1440 pixels) Camera

12-MP Super Speed Dual Pixel (f/1.5 - f/2.4)

12-MP Super Speed Dual Pixel (f/1.5 - f/2.4), 12-MP telephoto with 2x zoom (f/2.4) Front Camera

8-MP (f/1.7) 8-MP (f/1.7) CPU

Snapdragon 845 Snapdragon 845 RAM

4GB 6GB Storage

64GB, 128GB, 256GB

64GB, 128GB, 256GB

microSD Up to 400GB

Up to 400GB Battery

3,000 mAh 3,500 mAh Colors

Midnight Black, Coral Blue, Lilac Purple, Sunrise Gold

Midnight Black, Coral Blue, Lilac Purple, Sunrise Gold

Size

5.8 x 2.7 x 0.33 inches 6.2 x 2.9 x 0.33 inches Weight

5.8 ounces 6.7 ounces

Design: Now even awesomer

I'll give Samsung a pass for not changing the design of the Galaxy S9 much, because the phone's edge-to-edge Infinity Display already looked stunning when it was introduced a year ago on the Galaxy S8. This time around, Samsung trimmed the bezels slightly on the top and bottom, giving you the same size displays in slightly more compact packages.



The S9+ measures 6.2 x 2.8 X 0.33 inches, while the S8+ is 6.3 x 2.9 x 0.3 inches. However, the newer S9+ is heavier than its predecessor, at 6.7 versus 6.1 ounces, likely owing to the addition of the second rear-camera lens. The S9 is a lighter 5.8 ounces.



The biggest change is on the back of the S9 and S9+, as Samsung wisely moved the fingerprint sensor so that it sits beneath the camera instead of to the right of the lens (which is also a problem with the Note 8). And yet, despite this tweak, the reader is still pretty close to the bottom lens; it took a couple of days of practice for me to target the sensor correctly, but by that time, I had moved on to the iris and face-recognition methods for unlocking the phone.

The S9+ and S9 are available in Midnight Black, Coral Blue and Lilac Purple. We received the black model, which is sleek enough for a business setting but kind of boring. We would much prefer a pop of color. As with the S8, Samsung's new phones are IP68 water resistant, so you can dunk them in up to 5 feet of water for 30 minutes without fear. The new phones also include headphone jacks, but the backs pick up smudges easily.

Alas, the Bixby button remains on the left side, right underneath the volume button, which resulted in several accidental presses on my part. The good news is that you can turn this function off, but you can't remap the button to launch another app.



Durability: Tough to a point



We tested the toughness of the Galaxy S9 by dropping it on its face onto wood from a height of 4 feet and 6 feet; we then dropped it on its edge and face onto concrete from 4 feet. We also dropped it on its edge and face from 6 feet onto concrete.

Drops from 4 feet and 6 feet onto wood caused no damage whatsoever to the S9. A 4-foot face drop onto concrete caused the S9's screen to crack, but the phone was still largely usable. Following that, a 6-foot drop onto its edge caused more damage, as did a face drop from that height.

Finally, a 4-foot drop into a water-filled toilet didn't cause much more damage to occur, but by this point, the screen was shattered pretty thoroughly. It survived, though, which earned it a toughness score of 6 out of 10. To see the results of other smartphones, as well as our complete scoring methodology, check out our smartphone drop tests.

Display: Its killer

A funny thing happened with the iPhone X. Even though that phone reportedly packs a Samsung-made OLED screen, it beat Samsung's own phones in our screen shootout last fall, achieving the highest brightness (indoors), widest viewing angles and most-natural-looking colors.

Samsung has responded with the Galaxy S9+, whose curved display offers a brighter picture than the S8+ and covers even more of the color gamut than the iPhone X and Pixel 2 XL.

On our light meter, the S9's display registered a whopping 603 nits, which is higher than the Pixel 2 XL's 438 nits and even higher than the iPhone X's 574 nits. The S9+ got even brighter at 630 nits. However, it's important to note that Samsung's panels don't get this bright manually; you'll have to be in direct sunlight. Under normal indoor conditions, the max brightness on the iPhone X is higher than the S9 or S9+.



The S9 definitely has the most colorful panel around, though, as it reproduces a whopping 220 percent of the SRGB color gamut. The S9+ registered 231 percent. That's much higher than the results from the iPhone X (128.6 percent) and Pixel 2 XL (120 percent).

In side-by-side viewing of a scene from the Black Panther on the Galaxy S9+, iPhone X and Pixel 2 XL, the S9+ delivered the best image quality. The greens and blues popped more on the S9+s panel, even though the iPhone Xs display shined brighter. The Pixel 2 XLs image looked a little flat by comparison.

My only nitpick with this curved panel is that it can sometimes be difficult to press buttons on the extreme edges of the display; on more than one occasion I had to press twice for something to register.



Audio: A big boost

I did something I've never done before when reviewing the Galaxy S9. I left the phone on for hours by my side playing music as I wrote this review and did my testing. That's because the sound coming from the stereo speakers at the top and bottom of the S9 is just that good.

When I streamed Alice Merton's "No Roots," the vocals sounded clear even at maximum volume and the drums had a nice punch to them. With the S9 and S9+ delivering 1.4 times more volume than the S8 and S8+, I also had an easier time hearing directions coming from Google Maps while I drove.



MORE: Galaxy S9+ Battery Life: Here's How It Stacks Up



Although there's not a lot of content that supports it yet, both the S9 and S9+ support Dolby Atmos technology. This fools your ear into believing that sound is coming at you from different directions in 3D space, making movies more immersive.

Camera: Low-light improvement, Super Slow-mo fun

Boasting a new variable aperture, the Galaxy S9's new Super Speed Dual Pixel camera is designed to let in 28 percent more light than the S8. The aperture automatically adjusts from f/1.5 to f/2.4, depending on the conditions. In addition, the camera offers dedicated memory for reducing noise.

The results were fairly impressive in my testing, although the S9 and S9+ still trail the Pixel 2 and iPhone X in overall image quality. If you like the idea of 2x optical zoom or you want to take convincing-looking portraits, the S9+ is the phone to get, as its dual rear lenses give you those benefits. The regular S9 has a single rear shooter.

The Galaxy S9+ did a good job capturing a pinata indoors with some light streaming in through the window (to the left). When you zoom in, there's definitely less noise and more detail in the Samsung's shot. However, the oranges, purples and yellows are more vibrant in the iPhone X's photo.

In much dimmer conditions, the S9+ pulled off a cool-looking shot at the Campbell bar in New York City. The glass in the background is well-defined, and you can make out the bartender, although the bottoms of some of the glass bottles get blown out.



The Galaxy S9 offered the best focus in this shot of a raspberry tart dessert, and the powdered sugar looks delicious. However, the red looks more luscious and the gold foil more lustrous on the iPhone X.

In this challenging photo taken inside Grand Central Terminal, the Pixel 2's image offered the clearest shot of the clock and the most-legible image of the signs. The Galaxy S9's shot offers truer colors, though.

For video, the Galaxy S9 and S9+ up the ante with Super Slow-Mo, which lets you capture footage at 960 frames per second at 720p resolution. By comparison, the iPhone X and Pixel 2 XL record at just 240 fps (1080p) and 120 fps (1080p), respectively.

To test out Super Slow-Mo, I shot this quick video of someone playing ping pong. The footage looked great, and his backspin shot looked dramatic. From there, I swiped up on the clip to apply my choice of one of three nifty effects: Loop, Reverse or Swing. I picked Loop and then shared the video out to Facebook as a GIF.

My only complaint with Super Slow-Mo is that I wasn't always able to pick the exact right moment to film. In auto mode, the S9 is smart enough to detect motion and activate slow motion, but you might want to switch to manual so you can pick the exact moment you want to slow things down. I found it tricky to capture my son dribbling a basketball between his legs.

AR Emoji: More creepy than cool

If you've been jealous of Apple's Animoji on the iPhone X, the AR Emoji feature on the Galaxy S9 and S9+ is probably not going to help. Using the S9's front camera, you can create a 3D avatar of yourself (similar to Bitmoji) and then create a gallery of GIFs and stickers you can share of yourself via all sorts of apps. The idea is fun, but the execution is lacking.

The AR Emoji I created just had a passing resemblance to myself, and then one my daughter created looked almost nothing like her, except that it somehow managed to pick up some acne in her forehead  not cool. Her take: "Tell Samsung they need to do a better job, because this is the worst ever."

To be fair, another AR Emoji I created of my father-in-law looked almost spot on, right down to his mustache and glasses. But that was the exception. I just wish there were more clothes options for personalizing your emoji.

You can also record videos using your AR Emoji, but I would advise against it unless you want to freak people out. The resulting footage looked jittery, and the S9+'s front camera didn't do an accurate job mirroring my facial movements. The TrueDepth camera on the iPhone X does a much better job with this sort of thing, although you're limited to using just animals.

MORE: AR Emoji vs. Animoji: It's Not Even Close

Security: Intelligent Scan is handy, but it's no Face ID

The Galaxy S9 has an answer for Apple's Face ID, but it's not a great one. A new Intelligent Scan feature combines facial recognition with iris scanning to unlock your device. The good news is that you don't even need to touch the display (unlike with the iPhone X) to get into your phone. You just stare at it. The bad news is that Intelligent Scan doesn't work as well as Face ID, and not just because you can't verify purchases with it.

For starters, Samsung warns you via its disclaimer that "your phone could be unlocked by someone or something that looks like you." That means that, just as with the Galaxy S8, someone could get into your S9 or S9+ using a photo of you. By contrast, the 3D sensor inside the iPhone X creates a depth map of your face using 30,000 invisible dots, so its more secure.

My other nitpick with Intelligent Scan is that the S9+ kept prodding me to hold the phone more upright; I don't have to do that with the iPhone X to get into the device. Lastly, the IR sensor pulsates as it reads your eyes, which was disconcerting to me. (The disclaimer also warns against using this feature with infants, as it may damage their eyesight.)

If you're worried about security, I would advise using the fingerprint sensor to unlock your phone, even though Intelligent Scan is slightly more convenient.

Performance: A step up



Powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 processor and 6GB of RAM, the Galaxy S9+ is an absolute beast. The Galaxy S9 is swift, too, but it's a little less powerful because it has 4GB of RAM.

When playing Tekken on the expansive 6.2-inch display with 18 other apps open in the background, I executed three combos in a row  including an explosive kick to the face  and the S9+ never stuttered.



In terms of sheer processing might, the A11 Bionic chip in the latest iPhones is the fastest around, but Samsung is closing the gap. In our video-editing test, which involves exporting a 2-minute 4K video file, the Galaxy S9+ took 2 minutes and 32 seconds. The Galaxy S9 took 3:29. Both of those times are behind the iPhone X's 42 seconds. The Pixel 2 XL took 2:55 with its older Snapdragon 835 chip.

The Galaxy S9+ also opened demanding apps more slowly than the iPhone X did. For instance, it took the iPhone X a little more than 13 seconds to fire up the Injustice 2 game, compared to 20 seconds for the S9+. And the iPhone X was about 5 seconds faster when opening Tekken 2.

The Galaxy S9 and S9+ were no match for Apple's A11 Bionic on Geekbench 4, which measures overall performance. The S9 hit 7,276 and the S9+ 8,295, compared to 10,357 for the iPhone X.

On 3DMark's Sling Shot benchmark, which measures graphics performance, the Galaxy S9 scored 5,739, which beats the iPhone X (3,998). However, on the more demanding Sling Shot Extreme OpenGL ES 3.1 benchmark, the iPhone X notched 4,994 to the Galaxy S9+'s 4,634. The regular S9 hit 4,617.



When it comes to 4G LTE performance, the Galaxy S9+ smoked the iPhone X in side-by-side tests over T-Mobile's network. On the Speedtest.net app, the S9+ averaged 71.6 Mbps downloads and 10.1 Mbps uploads. The iPhone X mustered 48.8 Mbps down and 7.7 Mbps up.



The based model of the Galaxy S9+ comes with 64GB of storage, and you can add a microSD card with up to 400GB. No iPhone lets you do that. A month after the S9's debut, Samsung started offering 128GB and 256GB versions of both the S9 and S9+ for an extra $50 and $100, respectively.



Software: Bixby Vision and AR take center stage

Running Android 8.0 Oreo, the Galaxy S9+ is anything but a stock Android phone. The Edge panel  a series of shortcuts you can access by swiping in from the right side of the screen  is very much all Samsung. The most compelling feature is App Pair, which lets you launch two apps side by side (or top and bottom) with a single touch. For example, I found pairing up email and Facebook to be a good work-and-play combo.

Bixby, Samsung's digital assistant, is the hallmark feature on this flagship, and the assistant has developed some new talents since Samsung introduced it on the S8. For instance, using Bixby Vision and the Galaxy S9's camera, you can point the phone at food and get a calorie count, as I did with a green apple. You can also translate foreign languages on the fly, whether it's a menu, a sign or anything with text. I successfully translated some French headlines to English using this feature on the Le Monde site.

There are some rough edges to Bixby Vision. For example, the Shopping tool accurately identified a jar of Jif peanut butter I held in front of the phone, but when I switched over to the Food tool, the Galaxy S9+ couldn't tell what the object was.

I also had some trouble using the Place finder feature, which is supposed to overlay information on the camera view to show you things like business names, depending on where you point the phone. Unfortunately, the S9 showed me a listing for the Sweetgreen salad place as I pointed the camera directly at a Hale and Hearty Soups.

Although I didn't test Bixby's virtual makeup tool, my colleague Caitlin was generally impressed by it. Using the S9's front camera, you can try on everything from lipstick and eyeshadow to blush; if you like what you see, you can buy it on the spot from Sephora.

Otherwise, Bixby is more of a time-saver than an all-knowing assistant, reducing the number of steps it takes to perform complex actions. For instance, I loved that I could say, "Add this video to my family album," after pressing the Bixby button instead of performing the task myself with a series of taps.

Battery Life: Excellent

The Galaxy S9+ can easily last a full workday on a charge, but the S9's endurance could be better. On the Tom's Guide Battery Test, which involves continuous web surfing over 4G LTE, the S9+ handset lasted a superb 10 hours and 59 minutes, which is comparable to the Galaxy S8+'s 11:04 and a little bit longer than the iPhone X's 10:49.

On the same test, the regular S9 endured for an average of 10:52 over LTE. That's better than the iPhone X but is behind the Pixel 2 XL (12:09).

All of these phones were tested on T-Mobile's network.

Galaxy S9/S9+ vs. iPhone X and Pixel 2 XL

Priced starting at $840 (depending on the carrier), the Galaxy S9+ has a significant price advantage over the iPhone X ($999). For $160 less, Samsung gives you a much bigger display (6.2 versus 5.8 inches), which you'll likely appreciate when typing, reading documents and watching videos. The S9+ also benefits from removable storage and a headphone jack, not to mention the ability to run two apps side by side.

The regular Galaxy S9 (from $720) is cheaper than the S9+, but you'll have to do live with a smaller 5.8-inch screen, a smaller battery and less RAM (4GB vs 6GB for the S9+). Plus, the S9+ packs dual rear cameras to the S9's single lens.



Samsung Galaxy S9+ (left) and Apple iPhone X (right)

However, the iPhone X boasts a brighter display with more-accurate colors, a slightly better camera and more reliable Face ID biometric security. And that phone's A11 Bionic chip is more powerful. The iPhone 8 Plus ($799) has the same processor and great dual cameras as the iPhone X, but its 5.5-inch LCD display looks dated next to the OLED panel on the S9+.

MORE: Best small phones

The biggest advantage the Pixel 2 XL has over the Galaxy S9 and S9+ is the Google device's camera, as it edged out Samsung's handset in our camera shootout. Google's phone also offers even longer life and a pure version of Android. But the Galaxy S9+ has dual rear cameras, which make for better-looking portraits; a faster Snapdragon 845 processor; and a sleeker, edge-to-edge design.

Bottom Line

The Galaxy S9 and S9+ deliver nearly everything you could want in a flagship phone for less money, including speedy performance, good low-light photography, fantastic displays and impressive battery life (the S9+ wins there).



But the S9 and S9+ are also proof that smartphones are starting to hit a wall in terms of radical new changes that companies can make from one generation to the next. Between these phones' lackluster AR Emoji and not-quite-nailed Bixby features, Samsung seems to be lurching a bit in order to trumpet that these are "new" phones and not just great upgrades.

But there's absolutely nothing wrong with great upgrades. And all of the big and little enhancements for the S9 and S9+ make them worth the investment, especially if you don't want to overspend for your next phone.



Credit: Tom's Guide


You've liked the way you look in selfies, but have you ever seen your image as a work of art?

Google believes your face is worthy of framing, and wants to show you with a new feature in its Arts & Culture app for Android & iOS.

(Image credit: PeteWentz/Twitter)

Specifically, the Arts & Culture app will take a selfie you shoot and run it through a database of artworks shared by institutions partnered with Google cultural program. Then, it will present you with the top matches, with a percentage that indicates how close a match it thinks you are.

While this tool came out in December, the app currently sits in the number 1 rank of the Google Play and iOS App Store charts after the selfie-matching feature gained popularity on social media. Even celebrities, such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz and actor/writer/director Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick, Silicon Valley) have gotten in on the trend.

MORE: How to Use Instagram Stories

This isn't the first neat feature from Google's Arts & Culture division, as its Chrome extension allows you to set new tabs to open with a different work of art every day. I use it myself, and find it a refreshing change of pace from the grid that shows pages you've previously opened.

One asterisk on the app is that it's not available in all areas, as a Google Spokesperson told SFGate that the app is limited to the United States, minus Illinois and Texas. But if you can use Google Arts & Culture, here's how to find and use its face-matching feature.

1. Download Google Arts & Culture (free) from the Google Play or iOS App Store (opens in new tab).

2. Open the app and scroll down to the Selfie Portrait section and tap Get Started.

3. Click I Accept to acknowledge that the app is sending your photo to Google's servers. Google says it will delete the image after the match is complete.



4. Tap the shutter button to take a photo. You may need to tap through some menus to give the app access to your camera.

5. Swipe left and right through the match previews at the top to see your options. Tapping the "i" button will allow you to learn more about your matched work of art.

6. Tap Share to get your share sheet for posting to social media

7. Share to social media!

You've found your artistic doppelganger, and shared it with friends!
Three years ago I wrote "Happy 10th Birthday, Bitcoin. Now Go Away Before You Fry Us All," saying "let's hope it doesn't make it to its bar mitzvah." Well here we are, Bitcoin is 13 years old, that happy bar mitzvah age. And my how it's grown, as has the energy consumption that the cryptocurrency requires; according to Digiconomist, to an estimated 77.78 terawatt-hours per year (about the same as the entire nation of Chile) and pumping out 36.5 megatonnes of CO2 (about as much as New Zealand). The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption index says consumption is even higher, at 106.92 terawatt-hours (TWh), but doesn't calculate the carbon footprint, which is a function of how the power is generated. The electrical use is a feature, not a bug, as explained by Alex Hern in the Guardian:

"The reason for the mining requirement, which is essentially asking a computer to continue rolling dice until it rolls a few thousand sixes in a row, is that it ensures that no single person can dictate what happens on the network. ...Because the problem is so processor-intensive and so randomly rewarded, its prohibitively expensive  in electricity and computing power  to attempt to fake it. But its also a vast use of electricity, worldwide."

Emissions gap. CC 4.0 UNEP

The problem is that in much of the world, electricity generation is carbon-intensive  and as we keep saying, we have to reduce our carbon emissions by 29 gigatonnes by 2030 to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming. That means emissions of less than half of what we are pushing out now, and looking carefully at everything that emits CO2, and questioning whether it is worth it. That's why we keep bothering about Bitcoin; its emissions have to go away too.

The Bitcoin fans suggest that this isn't a problem, claiming that Bitcoin miners use renewable or wasted energy, and all point to a recent article by Haley Zaremba with the title "This Russian Energy Giant Is Mining Bitcoin With Virtually Free Energy". But what they are doing is using natural gas that would have otherwise been flared off. So it is using a wasted asset, but it does nothing to reduce CO2 emissions. If anything, it provides a perverse incentive to increase them because they don't have to worry about the emissions anymore, which were previously a problem. "The CO2 that gets freed during the oil drilling is normally a liability for oil companies as they have to burn it into the atmosphere, which results in fines," Yahoo! Finance reports, according to Zaremba, who adds:

"The location of the new Russian Bitcoin farm also means that the costs of the operation will be relatively low. Instead of paying a premium to use energy from the grid, locating the cryptocurrency mining on-site at an oil field means that a steady supply of natural gas is virtually free."

In fact, according to Marketwatch, the rising value of the Bitcoin "has made it more profitable to use less-efficient equipment." And 2/3 of that Bitcoin mining is taking place in China, where half of the electricity is generated using coal. Many Bitcoin fans will say that they are mining with the renewable half, but as Digiconomist points out:

"It is important to realize that, while renewables are an intermittent source of energy, Bitcoin miners have a constant energy requirement. A Bitcoin miner will, once turned on, not be switched off until it either breaks down or becomes unable to mine Bitcoin at a profit. Because of this, Bitcoin miners increase the baseload demand on a grid. They dont just consume energy when there is an excess of renewables, but still require power during production shortages. In the latter case, Bitcoin miners have historically ended up using fossil fuel-based power (which is generally a more steady source of energy)."

Right now, Bitcoin is on a roll, and many believe it is going to roll a lot higher. Our favorite green company JPMorgan Chase predicts that "Bitcoin has the potential to reach $146,000 in the long term as it competes with gold as an asset class."

Even though I have been reading and writing about Bitcoin for years, I must confess that I still don't really understand what it is for and what good it does. I reached out to Caleb Silver, the Editor in Chief of Investopedia for comment and explanation and he responded:

"While Bitcoin mining and storage both require a lot of electricity and a constant source of energy, that energy can come from renewable or less carbon-reliant sources like hydroelectricity or solar. That doesn't mean most miners aren't using old-fashioned electricity to run their machines  most are. There is no comparison, however, to the amount of energy or carbon production required to produce one ounce of gold versus one Bitcoin, although Bitcoin miner energy usage is growing at a much faster rate than gold production given the demand for the cryptocurrency. That demand is only going to grow as multi-trillion dollar financial institutions are embracing some forms of cryptocurrency and allowing their customers the ability to include it in their portfolios, and central banks around the world are experimenting with digital currencies and blockchain technology. Like a lot of new technology advancements, the growing adoption of cryptocurrencies will be inefficient and wasteful  especially wasteful in energy consumption, until someone smart comes up with a better mouse-trap, or energy source, in this case."

I still do not really get it but then I do not understand why we need gold as an asset class either. Another Bitcoin fan says they imagine that "clean-energy climate campaigners will soon have BTC in their sights. BTC has saved a lot of coal miners in China from hitting the wall in 2020. One should have to buy carbon credits when buying BTC."

I think that is a fine idea; let the clean-energy climate campaigners pile on now. Make Bitcoin carbon neutral with renewables or credits, or ban them.
My 1st (a short 6 days) trip to Costa Rica has me so excited. I am flexible about where to go, but want it to not be super hot weather. I would so appreciate suggestions for a couple of beautiful places where the weather 2nd week of March 2018 will likely be relatively COOL, I love the 60s and 70s but can deal with a high of 80 or less. Rain is just fine, but I get grumpy and lethargic when I'm hot (trust me I know this; I live in Phoenix).

INTERESTS: moderate hiking (3-4 hours-- or 15 minutes if it's 90 degrees), all scenic views: volcanos, cliffs, beaches, rainforests, I'd love a guided river wildlife trip (not so much rapids ;), seeing a sloth and a toucan, bridges, zipline, guided nature walk/hike, snorkeling, cultural/historical sites, guided bicycle tour.

I'M NOT: a sunbather, not a shopper, clubber, drinker or foodie. I love simple picnics for quick meals so I can get out and go.

I have THREE ideas:

#1--1 airport night (darn it), 2 nights Arenal, 3 nights Monteverde, and last night airport again.

#2 - I read that Pacific coast is hotter. Should I go to the Caribbean coast (like Tortuguero) for cool weather? If it's the wrong time of year to see turtles, what else might be great to see and do in the east?

#3 - Change arrival flight to 2:30pm Liberia, then Snorkel/sail at Guanacaste area (cooler underwater), then drive to Monteverde for 3 days before drive to San Jose.

FLIGHTS: arrive San Jose 8:40pm on 7 Mar-depart San Jose 8am 14 Mar, 2018. Departure is not flexible. Dates are not flexible at all.

THANK YOU so much for your helpful suggestions.
Hello,

My husband and I are planning a trip to costa Rica April 11 - the 21st 2018. This will be a 10 year anniversary trip. We love adventure and are excited to explore, but we also want to relax a little. Our original plan was to fly into San Jose because the price is a little better but after reading I am not sure if it would be better to fly into Liberia instead?

Our tentative itinerary is

4/11- Arrive in San Jose arrival time 1:30p --- This can be changed to Liberia if it is much more convenient for our itinerary. Travel to The tree house hotel in Santa Clara, San Carlos, Costa Rica... according to their website this is about a 25 minute drive to La Fortuna.

4/12-15 - La Fortuna, Arenal area --- rafting, Canyoning , hot springs and hiking.

4/16 - travel to Monteverde

4/16- 18- Monteverde Cloud forest --- Not too sure if this is a must do? We do like the idea of the hanging bridges and zip lining, but know that there is zip lining in Arenal also. So this stop could be nixed if it is not worth it. Thoughts?

4/18 travel to beach town...

4/18- 21- A beach town... this is where I am stuck, not sure what beach town is a great place to relax, possible snorkel and/or scuba, maybe with a little night life as well, that would not have us driving for hours to get to it? Also we would be flying back out of San Jose on the 21st - As of now flight would leave around 2 pm that day. This could also be changed to Liberia if that is where we fly into and if that is more convenient.

Any thoughts on ways to do the itinerary and get the most out of our trip would be helpful. This is our first time planning a trip that is not at an all inclusive spot, and I am having a little trouble finding the best way to coordinate the things we want to do.

I have thought about doing some of the pre made itinerary packages offered by tour companies such as Costa Rica Rios... any thoughts on these as well? worth it or easy enough to do it on your own?

I have been researching for a while and now we are trying to finalize details. I feel like there is so much to do and so little time, I know we will not be able to do it all in 10 days but hopefully we can experience a good bit :) thanks for your help!
We will be staying in Samara for several days in March and then going to Arenal/La Fortuna. We will leave Samara on Thursday morning and spend Thursday and Friday in Arenal at the Royal Corin. We plan to rent a car to drive from Samara to Fortuna so we ca have a full day on Thursday and Friday to explore. Because our flight leaves out of Liberia at 12:30 on Saturday, we are thinking to return the car rental on Friday in La Fortuna. That means we'd return the car in town at 5pm. The reason is that it seems like it might be easier to get a shuttle to the airport and not have to deal with the car rental drop off.

On this forum, I got feedback that we should plan 1-2 hrs for car rental return. I'm assuming we should plan 1.5-2 hrs for airport check in? So that seems like a very early morning to be able to get to airport and return car. What time would we need to leave Arenal via rental car--5am?

It seems like a shuttle might be easier for the ride to the airport if returning the car in La Fortuna isn't a hassle.

Any advice?
Just got back from 3 weeks in CR. Here is my trip report for week 2:

Leaving Monteverde on the 606 is almost as bad as coming in. Though shorter. Once you hit the bay of Nicoya you can stop at the beach to stretch your legs or eat at one of the local food carts that are every where there for the locals. From there you head south towards Jaco and will come across a traffic jam - but for a good reason - Crocodiles. Pull over somewhere safe - we found after the bridge was best -walk across the bridge with your camera and get some great shots of these cool beasts. Another tip is to stop at some of the road side vendors selling pipa (coconut water) and avocados. Did you know there are 80 different avocados in CR? Me neither - but you can find a few varieties to try along this stretch of road so do.

Since we were headed all the way down to Drake Bay and we wanted to swim in the Pacific Ocean we decided to to stop for two nights along the way. We stayed at the Guava Lodge 200 mt away from the beach Matapalo - a sleepy non-tourist town. The beach was nice and the town had a few places to eat and some small stores. It was very relaxing. We had the surreal experience of seeing a heard of burma cows appear out of the rain forest to frolic in the surf of the playa. Amazingly beautiful. We also checked out Dominical and Uvita too - the brewery in Dominical has good beer and it looked like a fun town. We choose not to pay for the beach in Uvita and instead stopped at the free beaches in the area.

A note about CR craft beer. Wow - I had no idea! If you like beer - you are going to love it here - though your pocket book might not. Expect to pay $4-8 for a single beer depending on where you are. Of course you have Imperial and such that is cheaper - but not for us beer snobs :)

From Matapalo it's a quick drive to Serpa. Our airbnb host had arranged our boat trip from Serpa to Drake Bay. We were told that the boats could only bring in so many people - so around the busy time of year you want reservations. The boat leaves at 11:30 and 3 (I think) and cost $15pp. We pulled up to the docks and a guy was in the road directing traffic and telling you what boat to get on. We parked our car in a secured lot ($6 a day) and meet our captain. It's important to pay attention! Make notes of your boat and captain. It can be a little hectic but everyone was really helpful. The boat ride was 1.5 hrs. You wear life jackets and everyone has a seat. The ride is lovely. It's important to get on the right boat because they stop in different bays - so know which bay your hotel is on and get off on the right one. Right before you disboard you pay the boat guy your fare. It is a wet landing. Be ready to get wet - maybe up to your thighs - wear the right shoes and clothes. Your luggage is ported over by the guys on the boat so they stay dry.

Wow! Drake Bay. Truly magical, gorgeous, wild and hilly! Everything is up hill both ways! Our little house that we had for 4 nights looked right over the main bay and was half way up the hill to the little town - we loved it. The little town consists of a few hostels, a church, 2 convenient stores and a handful of restaurants. Our first introduction was wondering into Gringo Curt's restaurant around 2pm our first day. Curt has set up a branch with bananas on it in which the birds of the area flock to. He said he has counted 62 varieties in one month. While sitting there for a meal we say at least a dozen or so different birds and a Toucan! The food there is also great and his rum smoothies get your buzz on! We enjoyed it so much we went back two more times. Tip, you can just go watch the birds from 2-5 for free if your not hungry.

We had arranged a snorkel trip with Drake Divers to Cano Island. I have mixed opinion about this. It's a 45min ride to the island, you arrive and everybody gets off the boat while they check in with the station. You then go out 5 min to some rocks to the one side of the beach and snorkel for 45 min get back in the boat and then to another set of rocks on the other side of the beach. If you have snorkeled anywhere with a reef - you might be disappointed. While we did see some cool stuff - huge sting rays, turtle, star fish, shark, and various fish - everything was at such a distance and the water clarity so bad it just wasn't all that great. After snorkeling we lunched on the beach everyone walks to. The monkeys on that beach are ruthless - watch your food and your bags. It was a nice swim, but expensive at $85pp, so I wouldn't do it again.

NYE! The party on the beach started around 4pm. Music could be heard all across the bay. As soon as it darken a little - the fireworks started! This town knows how to party! I read somewhere the Drake Bay fireworks display is one of the best in the country and I agree it was impressive. Around 4am the music was turned off and the town went to bed.

The next day we had a late start - but hiked to cocolito beach. From this beach you can watch the sunset. The public path is well marked - though the hike is not an easy one - it was worth it as we saw monkeys and lots of flora. Expect it to take 45min to get there and 30min to get back. If you stay for the sunset have a flashlight and good shoes. There are no amenities at this beach - come prepared and have water. The beach is lovely and the surf though not calm is fun. The highlight was when some scarlet macaws landed in a tree and entertained us for a good half hour.

REFLECTION: I wish we had one more day in Drake Bay. In retrospect, we should have skipped Monteverde and added a day to Drake bay and stayed an extra day on the coast but in Dominical instead of Matapalo. We found this area much more laid back and our style with lots of free things to do. Also, we did not need our SUV in this area at all though having a car was good for checking out the towns and beaches on the coast.

The next morning we had an early departure at 7am. We arrived, picked up our car, and headed on over to the Caribbean side with a pit stop in the Oroso valley. That report coming soon.
I'd encourage you to focus on southern Kyushu. If you travel by public transportation, not only Kagoshima city but Sakujima are OK. You can reach Ibusuki and Kirishima. Kumamoto would be fine by Kyushu Shinkansen train. Hitoyoshi is also fine.

If you have drive option or someone in Kagoshima can drive for you, you have more coverage in area.
Osaka, Kyoto and Nara are very near each other so the 14 day pass would not be beneficial. It only coasts about 600 yen to travel between these places. Buy an ICOCA card like we did last year and load it when necessary.

Study this and you will see that the passes don't really pay off

https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2357_kansai.html
Wynn will be a great home base for the amount of time. You will enjoy.

Across from Fashion Show Mall, V/P can Lyft to South end of strip and to downtown.

Take a helo down the strip at night. E. Tower @ Paris,

Now central on the Strip fountain view room @ Bellagio. Great dining.

Happy 25th.
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@alextdaugherty

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, who chairs the Senate subcommittee responsible for Western Hemisphere affairs, urged President Donald Trump to investigate the mining and transportation of illicit gold in Latin America after the Miami Herald investigative series 'Dirty Gold, Clean Cash' was published on Tuesday.

"Trade in gold from Latin America, which is largely destined for U.S. consumers, is becoming the preferred way for drug cartels, terrorists and bad regimes to launder their dirty money," Rubio said in a statement. "The U.S. Department of Justices prosecution of illicit gold traders Juan Granda, Samer Barrage and Renato Rodriguez, who pleaded guilty to money laundering involving dirty Latin American gold, is the tip of the iceberg, and should put all bad actors on notice. I will continue to follow this issue closely, and urge the Executive Branch to investigate the practices and circumstances leading to the mining and transportation of these precious metals for the purposes of money laundering."

The series details how gold became "the secret ingredient in the criminal alchemy" for Latin American narco-traffickers who make billions through turning cocaine into clean cash by exporting gold to Miami.

Read the exhaustive work of Jay Weaver, Nick Nehamas, Kyra Gurney and Jim Wyss here:
- President Uhuru asked the EALA MPs to forge a united front that will guarantee their success in promoting Kenyas interests at the regional Parliament

- He pleaded with them to ensure local political differences do not interfere with their performance while they serve in the Tanzania based assembly

- Among the EALA MPs who went to State House was Wiper leader Kalonzo Musyoka's son Kennedy Musyoka

President Uhuru Kenyatta on Monday, January 15 hosted Kalonzo Musyokas son Kennedy alongside other EALA MPs at State House for talks on how to forge the entire countrys interests.

Uhuru was meeting the EALA lawmakers for the first time since they were sworn in on December 18.

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READ ALSO: Mwanamume akwama 'mvunguni' akila uroda na mpango wa kando

President Uhuru Kenyatta met with EALA legislators on Monday, January 15. Photo: Uhuru Kenyatta'Facebook

READ ALSO; Uhuru Kenyatta to be among passengers of Kenya Airway's first ever direct flight to USA

TUKO.co.ke has learnt that the President, among other issues, insisted on the need for the representatives to stay united as they sought to push for Kenyas interest in a regional front.

Express yourselves as a united Kenya team as you represent Kenyas interests, Uhuru Kenyatta said during the meeting.

Kalonzo Musyoka's son among EALA MPs who visited Uhuru in State House. Photo: Uhuru Kenyatta/Facebook

READ ALSO: 13 things no one ever told you about Polycap Igathe including his illustrious CV

Uhuru was particularly wary of the possibility of political affiliations bringing a strife among the EALA representatives, promising to work closely with each of them form positive outcomes.

The legislators who attended the meeting included Simon Mbugua, Kennedy Kalonzo, Fatuma Ibrahim, Wanjiku Muhia, Nooru Adan, Florence Jematiah, Mpuru Apuri and Abdikadir Omar Aden.

Uhuru was meeting the EALA representatives for the first time since their names were submitted by their respective parties. Photo: Uhuru Kenyatta/Facebook

READ ALSO: Francis Nyenze's wife officially launches her bid for Wiper party nomination ticket

In December , Kenya ended a six month delay by electing its six EALA representatives.

While Jubilee's nominees were approved unanimously, there were some wrangles within NASA over their nominees after a Ford Kenya official moved to court to challenge the list of nominees.

Have anything to add to this article or suggestions? Share with us on news@tuko.co.ke

Mike Sonko's ability to deliver without the help of Polycarp Igathe questioned by Kenyans:

Source: TUKO.co.ke
The term self-care is mostly associated to women however, there is a growing trend worldwide which also see men engaging in such practises and activities.

One company...King's Lounge Barber Spa is dedicated to the wellbeing of the total man. King's Lounge offers men an indulgent grooming experience in a luxurious environment and Reporter Sharla Kistow and Camerawoman Kerry Patrick visited the Arima branch earlier this week.
Russian-backed militants continued to violate the New Year and Christmas ceasefire regime and they launched three attacks on positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the ATO area in Donbas in last day.

This is reported by the ATO Headquarters press center.

In Luhansk direction, the enemy used grenade launchers and heavy machine guns to shell ATO troops near Zaitseve (67km north-north-east of Donetsk).

In Donetsk direction, illegal armed formations used 82mm mortars, heavy machine guns and small arms to fire at the Ukrainian positions near Shyrokyne (20km east of Mariupol) and Kamyanka (62km south of Donetsk).

As a result of the enemy shelling, Ukrainian soldiers were neither killed nor wounded.

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No Ukrainian soldiers were killed in hostilities in the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) zone in eastern Ukraine over the past day.

Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Spokesperson Dmytro Hutsuliak said this at a press briefing on Tuesday, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"Fortunately, Ukrainian soldiers were neither killed nor wounded as a result of hostilities over the past day, he said.

Russian-backed militants continued to violate the New Year and Christmas ceasefire regime and they launched three attacks on positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the ATO area in Donbas in last day.

ish
Defense Minister of Ukraine General of the Army of Ukraine Stepan Poltorak held talks with Defense Minister of the Republic of Croatia Mr Damir Krsticevic in the framework of his visit to the country.

This has been reported on the website of the Defense Ministry.

We exchanged opinions on many issues of cooperation between the two countries. I see that Croatia supports territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, our European and Euro-Atlantic striving. In current security conditions, cooperation with Croatia, as NATO member state, a country that overcame external aggression and restored its territorial integrity, is very important for us, General Poltorak said.
GE Transportation, a division of U.S. company General Electric, will provide Ukraine with 30 diesel locomotives as part of the Ukrzaliznytsia modernization project.

This issue was discussed at a meeting between Ukraine's Ambassador to the United States Valeriy Chaly and CEO of GE Transportation Rafael Santana, Ukraine's Embassy in the United States reported on its Facebook page.

"The sides agreed that the delivery of the 30 new diesel GE Evo locomotives will be the first step for further partnership between Ukraine and General Electric, including cooperation in the energy sphere, infrastructure and healthcare," the report says.

Chaly paid special attention to the issue of localization of the production of new GE locomotives in Ukraine, as well as the modernization of the existing fleet.

As Ukrinform reported, PJSC Ukrzaliznytsya held talks with U.S. company General Electric. According to Ukrzaliznytsia Head Yevhen Kravtsov, large-scale modernization of the rolling stock of the Ukrainian railways will begin in September 2018, in cooperation with General Electric. Kravtsov said that cooperation with the U.S. giant was a strategic project for Ukrzaliznytsia.

op
@alextdaugherty

At least five Democrats in the hotly contested race to replace retiring Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have raised six-figures in the latest fundraising updates provided by their campaigns.

Former Knight Foundation Director and Miami Herald reporter Matt Haggman leads the pack in money raised for a second straight quarter after entering the race in August. Haggman's campaign said he raised $402,000 with $747,000 on hand to spend as of the end of 2017.

"We desperately need to turn a new page in our politics. I'm proud to have the support of so many friends and neighbors who are ready to do just that, and I'm proud to be running a campaign powered entirely by peoplenot PACs," Haggman said in a statement, referencing a pledge not to accept campaign contributions from political action committees that drew shade from some of his competitors.

PACs are typically created to further business and ideological interests or organized labor by funding candidates and campaigns.

State Rep. David Richardson leads the race with $850,000 cash on hand according to a release from his campaign but he trails Haggman in fundraising after he loaned himself $250,000 for his campaign last quarter. That means Richardson raised just over $250,000 after his campaign said he raised $505,000 total from October to December.

"We progressives must strive to implement a single-payer healthcare system, tackle climate change once and for all, reform our prison and criminal justice systems, and protect as well as expand upon the great strides we have made in this country on the rights of women, Hispanics, African Americans, the LGBT community, and other minority groups," Richardson said in a statement.

Former federal judge nominee Mary Barzee Flores' campaign said she raised $220,000 in the latest quarter with $330,000 on hand.

"Having spent her entire career in service to this community, the community shes lived her whole life, makes Mary the exact type of candidate people want to rally around, a fact were seeing more and more each day," Barzee Flores' campaign manager Sam Miller said in a statement. "The tremendous amount of support from those who believe in Mary and share her values has allowed our campaign to build the sort of momentum that gets people paying attention, and they certainly have been."

State Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez raised $230,000 in the latest quarter with $325,000 cash on hand, according to his campaign.

"We're in a pretty strong position," Rodriguez's campaign consultant Christian Ulvert said.

Miami commissioner Ken Russell, who officially joined the race in October after initially setting up an exploratory committee, raised about $222,247 with $325,392.35 cash on hand according to his campaign. Some of the cash on hand amount includes donations after December 31, 2017.

Russell's "record of progressive results, from increasing the minimum wage to expanding affordable housing to battling sea level rise as reasons for his campaigns early appeal," campaign spokeswoman Sarah Awan said in a statement.

Miami Beach commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez said she raised $55,000 raised in the latest quarter with $175,000 on hand.

"Our campaign doesnt have a finance director or fundraising committee," Rosen Gonzalez said in an email. "These contributions came in from people who believe in our campaign."

The fundraising totals are estimates and the final numbers could change when they are reported to the Federal Election Commission at the end of the month.

University of Miami academic advisor Michael Hepburn said his campaign hasn't finished tallying the latest fundraising totals.

Democrats are buoyant about their chances of winning a Miami-based seat long held by Republicans in 2018, as Ros-Lehtinen's district voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by more than 19 percentage points in the 2016 election.

Miami-Dade commissioner Bruno Barreiro is the lone Republican with enough money so far to mount a viable campaign, though two women recently filed paperwork with the FEC to run in the Republican primary.

This post was updated with figures from Jose Javier Rodriguez and includes updated figures from Ken Russell after his campaign sent new information.
Following the results of 2017, Ukraine ranked second in terms of butter supplies to the European Union.

Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade  Ukraines Trade Representative Natalia Mykolska informed this on her Facebook page.

"Ukraine once again confirmed the existing status quo as a reliable and important player in the European Union's agrarian market. This is evidenced by the success of our exporters, primarily the suppliers of dairy products. Ukraine ranked second after New Zealand in terms of the supply of butter to the European Union. In January-November 2017, the EU imported 2,300 tons of butter, while the annual supplies increased almost sevenfold compared to 2016," the official said.

According to Mykolska, Ukraine also demonstrated growth in the global market.

"According to our colleagues from the USA, Ukraine ranked eighth in terms of butter exports in the world in January-October 2017 with a total volume of 20,800 tons and a three-fold year-on-year increase," she said.

Following the results of 2017, Ukraine traditionally ranked first in the supply of grain to the EU.

ish
In the first half of 2018, the seventh meeting of the French-Ukrainian Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation will be held that will promote activities in the field of trade and investment.

This issue was discussed during a meeting of Ukrainian Ambassador to France Oleh Shamshur with First Vice President for Institutional Strategy and International Affairs of Ile-de-France Regional Council Jerome Chartier, the Embassy of Ukraine in France reported.

"The parties discussed intensification of bilateral cooperation, in particular in the trade and investment sector. The sides agreed to hold the seventh meeting of the French-Ukrainian Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation in the first half of this year," the report reads.

In addition, the parties agreed to strengthen cooperation between higher education institutions of France and Ukraine.

The ambassador welcomed Chartier's intention to visit Ukraine and offered comprehensive assistance in organizing the visit.

ish
Ukraine is ready to intensify its relations, deepen the political dialogue and discuss free trade with Albania, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has said.

She stated this at a meeting with Albanian Minister of State for Diaspora Pandeli Majko, according to the government portal.

"The Ukrainian side is ready to analyze the possibilities for signing a free trade agreement as part of the bilateral intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation. The draft law on such a commission was handed over by the Albanian side to Ukraine in November 2010 for further elaboration. The intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation, the work on the establishment of which is ongoing, should be a good basis for beginning negotiations on the creation of a free trade area between Ukraine and Albania," Klympush-Tsintsadze said.

She also said that Ukraine was ready to resume the work of Ukraine's Honorary Consulate of Ukraine. She noted that bringing political relations to a new level was a common interest for both states, since economic cooperation has a significant potential for growth.

Majko, in turn, said that the intensification of bilateral cooperation was extremely important today, since mutual trade turnover is increasing, and more Ukrainians are opening Albania as a tourist destination. The minister also said that Albania was one of the Balkan countries that unquestionably support Ukraine in countering Russian aggression.

In addition, he recalled that the Albanian side remains interested in exchanging visits with Ukraine at high and highest levels. In particular, Albania's foreign minister is expected to visit Ukraine on February 22-23.

According to the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, in January-October 2017, trade between Ukraine and Albania amounted to about $21.8 million. In particular, exports reached $16.5 million, and imports amounted to $5.3 million. The surplus for Ukraine is about $11.1 million. Export supplies from Ukraine to Albania mainly consist of ferrous metals, fertilizers, fats and oils, sugar, and confectionery.

About 3,500 Albanians live in Ukraine.

op
Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau has announced that Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette, Governor General of Canada, will visit Ukraine and Latvia from January 17 to 19, 2018.

"Canada enjoys an excellent relationship with Ukraine and Latvia. We will continue to support these two countries by contributing to the ongoing stability of the region. The Governor Generals visit will help further strengthen our political and commercial ties, and reaffirm our friendship," Trudeau said.

During the visit, the Governor General will meet with the President of Ukraine and the President of Latvia. Supported by the Canadian missions in Kyiv and Riga, the Governor General will highlight opportunities for further collaboration to strengthen Canadas relationship with both countries.

In her role as Governor General and Commander-in-Chief, Her Excellency will visit Canadian troops in Ukraine serving under Operation UNIFIER and Canadian troops in Latvia serving under Operation REASSURANCE as part of NATOs enhanced Forward Presence.

Her Excellency will be accompanied by General Jonathan Vance, Chief of the Defence Staff.
Russian aggression against Ukraine has challenged the entire security order in Europe. For the first time since the Second World War, one country has taken territory of another country by force and NATO cannot ignore it.

Head of the NATO Representation and Director of the NATO Liaison Office in Ukraine Alexander Vinnikov said this during a round table discussion at Ukrinform entitled "Threats to Security of Ukraine and Other Countries of the Eastern Partnership Region and Possible Responses."

"Ukraine faces vital challenges to its security and prosperity, both external and internal challenges. Russian aggression has challenged the entire European security order that has been established since the end of the Cold War. This is, of course, the first time since the Second World War that a country has taken the territory of another country by force. This is clearly something that NATO cannot and does not ignore," he said.

Vinnikov said that in response to Russia's aggression against Ukraine, NATO had taken steps to strengthen its defense and deterrence capabilities, first of all, on its eastern and south-eastern flanks.

"When it comes to Ukraine, NATO has been steadfast in its support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Since the beginning of Russian aggression, the practical and political support that NATO has provided to Ukraine has truly been unprecedented. We have done so, because we are solidary with Ukraine, and we believe that assisting with the reform of Ukraine's security and defense sector is the best way to help Ukraine ensure its own security," he said.

Vinnikov also said that Ukraine had long been NATO's important partner, contributing to the alliance's missions and operations.

"Ukraine remains a priority partner for NATO and the success of Ukraine is of vital importance to the security and stability of the entire Euro-Atlantic area. That is why we will continue to provide strong political and practical support to Ukraine's sovereignty, independence and reform effort," he said.

op
Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic Martin Stropnicky has assured Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin of Prague's unconditional support for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.

This has been reported on the website of the Foreign Ministry of the Czech Republic.

"We consider the illegal annexation of Crimea a serious violation of the international law," the Czech foreign minister stressed.

Minister Stropnicky was interested in current situation in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine.

In addition, the foreign ministers also discussed the progress of political and economic reforms in the country, the fight against corruption and the implementation of the Association Agreement with the EU.

Stropnicky also confirmed the readiness of the Czech Republic to continue its active support of reforms in Ukraine, especially as the international coordinator in the field of education.

ish
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said that Ukraine is abusing the right of national minorities to use their native languages.

He stated this on the Hungarian M1 television channel, according to the website of the Hungarian government.

"Instead of mitigating the conflicts, Ukraine has made further proposals for the restriction of language use and citizenship. For instance, it will be compulsory to display a Ukrainian transcript of the dialogue during theater productions and Hungarian newspapers will also have to be published in two languages," Szijjarto said.

The minister also announced a further negative reaction to Ukrainian language initiatives.

"The Hungarian Government will be making a stand against the latest measures with the same tenacity as it did against the Education Act," Szijjarto said.

The Depo.Zakarpattia media outlet suggests that the issue concerns bill No. 5556 about languages in Ukraine, which was registered on December 19, 2016 by Yaroslav Lesiuk, Ihor Vasiunyk, Oksana Yurynets, Oksana Bilozir, Oleksandr Chernenko and others, bill No. 5669 on the functioning of Ukrainian as the state language and the mechanism for application of other languages in Ukraine, and bill No. 5670 about the state language.

As reported, Ukraine's law on education came into force on September 28. The provision of the law on the language of instruction was criticized in some circles in Ukraine and abroad, mainly in Hungary.

On September 28, 2017, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin submitted the education law for consideration by the Venice Commission.

On December 8, the Venice Commission issued an opinion on the language of instruction article of the education law. In particular, the commission recommends "to amend the relevant transitional provisions of the Education Law to provide more time for a gradual reform; to exempt private schools from the new language requirements in accordance with Article 13 of the Framework Convention; to enter, within the framework of the implementation of the new Education Law, into a new dialogue with representatives of national minorities and all interested parties on the language of education; and to ensure that the implementation of the Law does not endanger the preservation of the minorities' cultural heritage and the continuity of minority language education in traditional schools."

The Venice Commission's opinion does not oblige Ukraine to amend the language article of the education law.

op
Kremlin-controlled Rozdolne District Court in Crimea has sentenced Ukrainian activist Volodymyr Balukh, accused of storing ammunition, to three years and seven months of imprisonment and to a fine of 10 non-taxable minimum incomes, the Crimea.Realities media outlet has reported.

A Russian prosecutor asked the court to sentence Balukh to five years and one month of imprisonment in a low-security penal colony and oblige him to pay a fine of 20 non-taxable minimum incomes (UAH 9,200).

The report notes that Balukh arrived for a court session with his things that he might need at a detention center, in the event of a respective court decision.

Balukh said in his final speech at a court hearing on January 15 that the case against him was trumped up in connection with his political position and that this would not force him to love "a new homeland."

Russia's FSB detained Balukh on December 8, 2016, stating that he possessed ammunition.

In August 2017, the court sentenced him to three years and seven months of imprisonment in a low-security penal colony, as well as to a fine of ten non-taxable minimum incomes. Balukh's verdict was canceled during the consideration of the appeal. The case was sent for reconsideration.

On December 1, the measure of restraint for the Ukrainian activist was changed to two-month house arrest.

Balukh's defense team believes that he became a victim of repression for his pro-Ukrainian views - due to the flag of Ukraine in the yard of his house.

op
@alextdaugherty

A high-stakes White House immigration meeting has devolved into a debate on whether President Donald Trump used the terms shithole or shithouse to refer to immigrants, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart still isnt saying anything.

Two senators in the meeting, one Democrat and one Republican, said Trump used the profane language. Two other Republican senators in the meeting now say he didnt utter shit in any form after initially saying they didnt recall. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who was also in the meeting, isnt sure.

But Diaz-Balart hasnt said whether he sides with Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who say Trump used disparaging language, or Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga., who said they didnt hear it.

The Miami Republican has not confirmed or denied either of the accounts, even after Cotton and Perdue shifted their story on Sunday. Two Diaz-Balart staffers did not respond to questions on Monday and the congressmans Washington and Doral offices were closed for Martin Luther King Day. It isnt clear if Diaz-Balart challenged Trump in the meeting on his language towards immigrants.

Diaz-Balart confirmed he was at the White House in a statement on Friday and a spokesperson told Miami Herald news partner CBS 4 on Sunday that he doesnt comment on private meetings.

First of all, in his three decades of public service, Congressman Diaz-Balart has NEVER repeated, stated, or leaked what is said in private meetings, a spokesperson said to CBS 4. Secondly, he remains focused on the fact that in March, some 800,000 young people face deportation, and he continues to work on a bipartisan deal so that wont happen. And finally Congressman Diaz-Balart fights and stands up for his community every single day, and his record in doing so is clear.

Read more here.
Cambodias former opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, has said he is forming a movement to seek free and fair elections in Cambodia.

The party he led, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, was dissolved by a contentious court decision in November and its current leader, Kem Sokha, jailed on charges of conspiring with a foreign power.

Rainsys new Cambodia National Rescue Movement, he said, would support free elections and civil society in Cambodia, but a ruling party spokesman said it was evidence that the opposition was fragmented.

The political movement was established by a number of exiled opposition leaders, including Rainsys wife, Tiuolong Saumura.

Nine representatives of the CNRM, as it is to be known, were announced on Saturday, including CNRP vice presidents Mu Sochua and Eng Chhay Eang.

Speaking to supporters in Brooklyn, NY, Rainsy said the CNRM would be a rallying point for CNRP supporters and seek the freedom of Sokha, as well as other jailed CNRP members and supporters and activists, such as Tep Vanny.

He added that the main focus of the CNRM would be to resurrect the party.

Based on this movement, pro-democracy supporters and nationalists can work together to open the threshold for a fair election, Rainsy said.

In a video clip of the speech posted to Rainsys Facebook page, he said the CNRM would be stronger than the [CNRP] because it would not be restricted by the rules governing political parties.

However, Sok Eysan, CPP spokesman, said the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party would outlaw rebellions and they [the CNRM] could do things abroad only.

The CNRP was a merger between the Sam Rainsy Party and the Human Rights Party, led by Sokha. Eysan claimed the creation of the CNRM was evidence of a new split among the CNRP leaders.

Lao Mong Hay, a veteran political observer, agreed.

Its the beginning of the CNRPs end because they stopped using the partys structure to act any more, Mong Hay told VOA Khmer. The previous dissolution was only on paper, the structure remained ... but now it is fragile.

I dont think it could resolve any issue, it wont solve the current political tension or this bad situation. The election will be organized in the current situation; the elections result will be the same, he added.

The general election is scheduled for July.
@doug_hanks

Miami-Dade Commissioner Xavier Suarez flirted with running for Congress this year in a long-shot bid to replace retiring Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen as an independent. He recently declared that flirtation over, allowing him to now flirt with running for Miami-Dade mayor in 2020.

"I would be running as an independent," said Suarez, a former Miami mayor whose son, Francis Suarez, now holds the job. "A lot of people didn't think that was viable."

Suarez has told supporters privately he will not seek the seat of Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican representing a left-leaning district that's seen as a likely Democratic pick-up in the fall. Bruno Barreiro, a Miami-Dade commissioner, is running for the Republican nomination in the District 27 race, and Suarez's interest raised the possibility of a second commissioner entering the contest.

County commissioners hold non-partisan posts, as does the mayor. The current mayor, Republican Carlos Gimenez, must leave in 2020 under the county's term-limit rules. The mayoral race is expected to be a wide-open contest to succeed Gimenez.

Suarez, who holds the commission seat Gimenez surrendered to become mayor, almost ran against Gimenez in 2016. Suarez's political committee aired attack ads against Gimenez, but Suarez ultimately decided to run for reelection instead in 2016. He also faces term limits requiring him to leave the commission in 2020, and has privately told supporters he's interested in running for mayor in 2020.

Suarez declined to address his mayoral ambitions during a recent interview that saw him mostly close the door on Congress.

"I am not considering a congressional race," he said. "But that could change."

Asked why he's no longer considering a run for Congress, Suarez pointed to Washington winters as particularly unappealing for Miami's first Cuban-born mayor.

"I hate to say it, but the cold is a factor," he said, citing a recent trip to Boston. "My blood has thinned."
Repressive governments around the world are stepping up their suppression of dissent in light of the erosion of U.S. democracy, a new Freedom House report says.

The report, Freedom in the World 2018, released on January 16, found that 2017 was the 12th consecutive year of decline in freedom globally, with 71 of the 195 countries included in the report suffering declines, including Cambodia.

Democracy is facing its most serious crisis in decades, the groups president, Michael J. Abramowitz, said in a statement accompanying the report. Democracys basic tenets - including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law - are under siege around the world.

In recent months Prime Minister Hun Sen has overseen the dissolution of Cambodias main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, as well as the jailing of its leader, Kem Sokha, and a widespread crackdown on independent media and civil society.

Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen oversaw a decisive crackdown on the countrys beleaguered opposition and press corps as his Cambodian Peoples Party prepared for national elections in 2018, the report reads.

The CNRP, the only closely real challenger to the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party, was dissolved by Cambodias Supreme Court on November 16 after the government claimed it had conspired with a foreign power to overthrow the government.

The report also stated that democracy around the world deteriorated to its lowest point for over a decade, with the U.S.s withdrawal from its traditional leadership role in the global struggle for press freedom and the rule of law.

The hastening withdrawal of the United States from its historical commitment to supporting democracy overseas makes the challenge posed by authoritarian regimes all the more powerful and threatening, said Abramowitz.

The Cambodia Daily newspaper and Radio Free Asias Phnom Penh news bureau were forced to shutter while more than a dozen local radio stations across the country were ordered by the government not to broadcast or relay news programs from RFA and VOA.

At least two former RFA journalists have been detained on charges of espionage and another two former Cambodia Daily reporters were charged with incitement in a separate incident.

Many critical non-governmental organizations inside the country who have criticized the government and its policies have complained of being put under surveillance.

In the circumstances in which the U.S. president does not care about overseas democracy, Hun Sen just grabs this opportunity when he sees his partys popularity in decline and he can no longer beat his rival, the CNRP, so he used the legal system and the rubber-stamp judiciary so that he could do whatever he wanted, Sia Phearum, executive director of the Housing Rights Task Force, an NGO also on the government watch list, told VOA Khmer.

Sok Eysan, CPP spokesman, said he could not respond to the Freedom House report without reading it.

They can say whatever they want as that is their freedom of expression, but that does not reflect the reality of what is going on in Cambodia now, he said, adding that Cambodian democracy was being promoted by the government in a peaceful and stable manner.

But Mu Sochua, deputy president of the CNRP, who now lives in exile, said the so-called political, economic and social stability is not true.

The violations on our peoples rights are getting worse these days, like the death of democracy, so there must be a resolution to the political problem involving human rights and democracy.

The report also criticized U.S. President Donald Trump, saying he had expressed feelings of admiration and even personal friendship for some of the worlds most reviled strongmen and dictators.

A major development of 2017 was the retreat of the United States as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy, Abramowitz wrote.

The worlds leading autocracies, China and Russia, have seized the opportunity not only to step up internal repression but also to export their malign influence to other countries, which are increasingly copying their behavior and adopting their disdain for democracy, he added.

However, Eysan said Cambodian democracy did not follow the path of any particular country.

I think [Cambodian] democracy has its own uniqueness and thus is different from one country to another, he said. We cannot say one country copied another. So, Cambodia did not follow an example of any country, not the U.S. nor any other country. No matter how broad or narrow democracy that country has, it is not related to Cambodia.
Two thousand-seventeen was the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom, according to Freedom Houses annual Freedom in the World Report. While experts say China, Russia, and North Korea, among other countries, put global stability at increased risk, there are signs of progress and global development across other regions, including Latin America and Africa. VOAs Elizabeth Cherneff reports.
The Taliban insurgency has quietly sent political negotiators to Pakistan from its Qatar-based office amid a new diplomatic push for encouraging peace talks between parties to the Afghanistan war.

A three-member Taliban delegation headed by Shahabuddin Dilawar, a senior member of the Doha office, is currently in Islamabad, local media reported Tuesday. Pakistani officials have not yet commented on the reports.

Diplomatic sources in the capital city have told VOA they are aware" of the arrival of Taliban officials, but they refused to speculate on their mission.

Let me check and if I get any information I will get back and share it with you, said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid when VOA sought his confirmation and purpose of the insurgent delegations visit to Pakistan.

On Tuesday, a U.S. delegation lead by Acting Assistant Secretary of State Alice Wells concluded official talks with Pakistani leaders.

A U.S. Embassy statement said Wells emphasized in her meetings with Pakistani officials that President Donald Trumps South Asia strategy represents an opportunity to work together for the establishment of a stable, peaceful Afghanistan.



It said that Wells urged Pakistan to address the continuing presence of the Haqqani network and other terrorist groups within its territory.

A Pakistani Foreign Ministry statement issued separately quoted Ambassador Wells as saying that Pakistans support was critical to the success of the U.S. strategy for Afghanistan.

Afghan and U.S. officials have long alleged the Taliban and the allied Haqqani Network are using sanctuaries on Pakistani soil to sustain and expand insurgent activities in Afghanistan.

Islamabad denies the charges and insists there are no insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan. But officials maintain they are committed to help facilitate a peace dialogue between the Afghan government and the Taliban using whatever influence Pakistan has to find a political settlement to the Afghan conflict.

Our influence with the Taliban, naturally has over the years diminished, mainly because most of them have actually moved into Afghanistan and therefore, they are not really under our influence directly, Pakistans ambassador to the U.S., Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry told VOA in a recent interview.

Meanwhile Afghanistans official High Peace Council, which is tasked to promote peace and reconciliation with armed opposition, Tuesday reiterated the government is committed to engage in talks with the Taliban.

The Afghan government has no pre-conditions for peace talks with [the] Taliban and can talk anywhere [the] Taliban want, said Akram Khpalwak, who speaks for the 70-member council, while addressing a meeting of hundreds of Afghan youth, women, politicians and civil society representatives in Kabul.

The Talibans political office on Tuesday issued a statement in which it again put forward its agenda for engaging in any Afghan peace talks.

Islamic Emirate [the Taliban] is seeking an end to foreign occupation and implementation of an Islamic system in the country  But the other side [Afghan government] has no clear strategy and is merely making hollow claims about peace talks, said the statement released to journalists.

The statement denounced as baseless reported official claims Taliban negotiators went to Turkey this week for preliminary talks with the Afghan government.

Also in his speech, Khpalwak again explained that the government had nothing to do with the Turkey talks. He went on to say that Kabul is waiting for the Taliban to respond positively to Afghan calls for coming to the negotiating table to discuss in peace.

No official negotiations have begun yet and none of the government officials have participated in peace talks. We want negotiations with authentic and authoritative leadership of [the] Taliban, said Khpalwak.
Pakistani authorities on Monday released anti-U.S. and pro-Taliban cleric Maulana Sufi Muhammad after eight years in prison. He was facing sedition charges and was allegedly involved in attacks on police stations.

While some in the country do not view Muhammad's release as a good sign, others support the move.

"He is a 93-year-old person. He is seriously sick, almost paralyzed and could not be treated inside the jail," Latif Afridi, a lawyer and an expert of legal affairs, told VOA. "The Pakistani courts have the power to release the sick and people who are so old on bail."

Muhammad is considered one of the many controversial clerics in Pakistan. He gathered around 10,000 armed militants in 2001 in Pakistan's tribal regions to fight against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan. He also led the pro-Sharia movement in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in the early 1990s and again in the 2000s, which ended with violence and a crackdown on his supporters in different parts of the province.

Afridi argued that while Muhammad has been in prison for a long time, no case could be proven against him in court and, therefore, he was fairly released.

But Peshawar-based human rights activist Mehsood Alam, in an interview with VOA, criticized the decision.

"The release of Sufi Muhammad by Peshawar High Court was a newsworthy development, but in a country where the chief of Jamaat ud Dawa [JUD] could be released and mainstreamed, why Sufi Muhammad could not be released," Alam said.

JUD is a U.N. and U.S.-designated terror group. Its chief, Hafiz Saeed, the alleged mastermind of 2008 Mumbai attacks, was released by Pakistani authorities on court orders last year.

Maulana Sufi Muhammad is the father-in-law of Pakistan's most wanted Taliban leader Mullah Fazlullah. Pakistan accuses Mullah Fazlullah of masterminding terrorist activities inside Pakistan from across the border in Afghanistan. Mullah Fazlullah's group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has accepted responsibility for scores of terrorist attacks in Pakistan, including the killing of Pakistani major general Sanaullah Niazi.

It is not yet known whether the aged cleric has influence on his militant son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah.

Pakistani media reports say that Maulana Sufi Muhammad has been moved to an unknown location after his release.

Rising tensions

The development comes amid rising U.S.-Pakistani tensions following President Donald Trump's accusations that Pakistan was harboring militants and is withholding American aid to Islamabad.

Washington accuses Pakistan of turning a blind eye to militants. Pakistan denies the charge. In his first tweet of 2018, Trump said that the United States had "foolishly" given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid in the last 15 years and had gotten nothing in return but "lies & deceit."

Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, accused the Trump administration of ignoring the sacrifices made by Pakistan in the war on terror.

The claim is unfair, Chaudhry told The Associated Press.

"We have been the victim of terrorist attacks and how can we tolerate the presence of militants on our soil," he said.

Ties between Islamabad and Washington could be further strained by the release of Muhammad, who in 2001 issued an edict, or fatwa, for holy war against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.
A report by the U.N. childrens fund finds babies born in war-torn Yemen are dying at an alarmingly high rate because of the collapsing health system, lack of food and clean water.

The U.N. childrens fund reports more than three million children have been born in Yemen since the countrys civil war escalated in March 2015. The agencys report, called "Born into War", describes the violent, hopeless situation of displacement, disease, poverty and hunger into which these children are born.

UNICEF says most of the estimated 3,000 babies born every day are delivered outside a health center, with no skilled birth attendant present. It reports 40 percent of the births are premature and 30 percent suffer from low birth weight. Most worrying of all, it notes, is 25 percent of the newborns die within their first month because of infections and a variety of deprivations.

UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac says undernutrition plays a big role in those deaths. He says around 1.8 million children are acutely malnourished and about 400,000 are severely, acutely malnourished.

A child who is suffering from severe acute malnutrition is nine times more likely to die than a child who is correctly nourished," said Boulierac. "So, these children are in danger.

The report finds at least 5,000 children have been killed or maimed in the violence. That means an average of five children have lost their lives or been injured every day since the Saudi-led coalition began bombing Houthi rebels in support of the Yemeni government nearly three years ago.

UNICEF says more than 11 million children, nearly every child in Yemen, needs humanitarian assistance to survive. And, those who do survive, it says, are likely to carry the physical and psychological scars of the brutal conflict for the rest of their lives.
Bosnia's security agencies are investigating a Serbian right-wing group that the national government said Tuesday was a paramilitary unit formed to create "a problem" for those opposed to Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik.

Members of Serbian Honor caused an uproar when they marched in full combat gear in the Bosnian Serb capital, Banja Luka, during a January 9 military parade to mark a national holiday in one the country's two autonomous regions.

The parade was staged as a challenge to a ruling by Bosnia's Constitutional Court to ban the holiday because it discriminated against the country's other ethnic groups. Bosnia is split into the Federation, shared by the Bosnian Croats and Muslim Bosniaks, and the Serb-dominated Serb Republic.

Serbian Honor is registered in neighboring Serbia but has an informal wing in the Bosnian Serb Republic, whose leaders say they are in the process of registering as a charity there.

"For me this is a paramilitary formation," Security Minister Dragan Mektic told reporters Tuesday. "The way they showed up is dangerous and their claims to be a charity are ridiculous."

Dodik's office said the reports were false and dangerous.

Mektic, member of a party that opposes Dodik, said the group was formed to "sow fear" and "pass a pre-election message that those who oppose the current government will have a problem."

A national election is due in Bosnia in October.

Dodik's SNSD party, which had been the dominant Bosnian Serb party at regional and national levels since 2006, saw its popularity slide in the last national vote and was excluded from a ruling coalition.

Russian link reported

Bosnian investigative web portal Zurnal, without citing sources, said the group had been trained in a Russian-funded humanitarian center in Serbia and would be organized to act against Dodik's political opponents.

The Russian Embassy said it did not even want to comment on something so ridiculous.

Mektic compared the group to paramilitary groups led by criminal gang leaders that emerged on the eve of Bosnia's war in the 1990s, and later committed some of the most gruesome atrocities against civilians during the conflict.

"What we need the least is the repetition of such events," Mektic warned. "I call on all institutions to protect this country and I expect a quick response."

Mektic told reporters he could not provide much of the operational data, but said the case would be documented and forwarded to the prosecutor this week.

Concerns are high regarding increasing instability in the Balkans, including secessionist pressures in Bosnia, a parliamentary boycott in Montenegro and renewed tensions between Serbia and its former province of Kosovo.

Western leaders have accused Russia, traditional ally of the Serbs, of seeking to exploit diminishing European Union leverage in the Balkans by manipulating political events in the region. Russia denies such allegations.
Burundi's government recently proposed constitutional changes that would, among other things, allow President Pierre Nkurunziza to stay in office beyond 2020. Civil society groups say the government is arresting opponents of those changes in advance of an upcoming referendum.

Officially, Burundi's government has banned anyone from campaigning for or against the proposed changes to the constitution. But civil society groups accuse the government of targeting those suspected to urging voters to reject the changes.

The head of Burundis Forum for Strengthening the Civil Society, Vital Nshirimana, says people cannot make free choices.

So far dozens of people, about 60 people were arrested in many sides of the country, and this is one of the signs that referendum will not be fair since those campaigning against are arrested, while those campaigning for 'yes' are not arrested, said Nshirimana.

The government says the changes are aimed at strengthening and advancing the countrys laws after more than two years of political violence.

The violence was triggered in April 2015 when President Nkurunziza announced he would run for a controversial third term. Opponents said he was violating constitutional term limits and the peace deal that ended Burundi's civil war.

Now, critics believe Nkurunziza is maneuvering to stay in power beyond the end of his current term in 2020.

Hamissi Sultan represents opposition party FNL, which is against the constitutional change. He was arrested on January 2nd.

It is the prosecutor of Ruyigi Province who issued an arrest warrant against me. I was questioned, and I was accused of organizing and leading a group meeting aimed at sanitizing people to vote against the proposed constitutional change," said Sultan. "We were with friends having fun, and some of them were arrested too. We were accused of participating in an illegal meeting aimed at opposing the draft constitution.

Sultan was released after three days without charge.

The president's deputy spokesman, Alain Diomede, says the government is educating its people on the proposed changes, but no one is allowed to advocate for passing or rejecting them.

Right now the government is explaining to the electorate the content of the constitution," he said. "I mean some of the articles that are likely to change. There is no campaign to vote 'yes' or 'no', the campaign has not yet started. So when you teach people to vote 'no' and campaign has not started you understand that you are going against the law.

Burundians will vote on the proposed changes in May.
Authorities in the western U.S. state of California say a husband and wife arrested Monday kept their 13 children captive in their home in filthy conditions.

David and Louise Turpin are being held on $9 million bail while police investigate charges of torture and child endangerment.

Police were alerted to the situation in the house in the city of Perris, near Los Angeles, by one of the children  a 17-year-old girl who escaped and called them on a cell phone.

The officers say she was so malnourished that she looked like a 10-year-old child instead of 17.

They found a house full of what they thought were 12 children, when some were actually adults between 18 and 29 years old.

Deputies, when they arrived inside the house, they noticed that the children were malnourished, it was very dirty and the conditions were horrific," Lt. Greg Fellows of the Riverside County Sheriff Department told a press conference Tuesday.

Police say the youngest victim was two years old and some of the children were shackled to beds with chains and padlocks.

Officers describe the house as dark and foul-smelling. The victims were dirty and appeared to be starving.

Our foremost concern at this time is the health and well-being of all of the children and we will be seeking court authorization to provide oversight and care for the children, including the adult children, to the extent that is necessary," Susan Von Zabern, Director of the Riverside County Department of Public Social Services, said Tuesday.

Authorities say the couple ran a day school out of their home and were beset with financial problems in recent years, the Sheriffs Department said.

A police statement said the parents did not give any logical reason why their children were being held in such appalling conditions.
Tensions continue to climb in Cameroons two English-speaking regions, following the arrest of as many as 11 separatist leaders earlier this month in neighboring Nigeria.

Panic gripped the residents of several towns in Cameroons anglophone southwest Monday, as separatist groups vow to keep up the pressure for the release of their leaders detained in Nigeria.

The southwest capital of Buea was abuzz with reports that unidentified armed men were attacking schools and had reportedly kidnapped two traders. The confusion spread to Muea, Muyuka, Kumba and other towns in the southwest.

VOA could find no eyewitnesses to any alleged violence. No security officials have confirmed the reports of attacks, but panic ensued nonetheless.

VOA met textile trader Anne Mankaa early Tuesday at the main market in Buea. The city was quiet, but she and several other traders had decided to keep their shops closed.

"It was a terrible day. Everybody was running to every direction. I first of all locked myself in my shop, but the shouting and running made me to change my mind. I trekked through the bush to my house," she said.

Buea Mayor Ekema Patrick blames rumors for the panic.

"We have been moving around to assure the parents that life has regained its normalcy within the municipality," said Patrick.

At the Government Bilingual Grammar school Molyko in Buea, school teacher Emmanuel Amin said barely 20 percent of his students had returned to class Tuesday.

"Today as we speak, we have 71 students. All our teachers are in place. Maybe we will have more students coming in," said Amin.

Southwest regional Governor Bernard Okalia Bilai says secessionist groups are trying to manipulate the public.

"We should remain vigilant. Parents should continue to protect their children and allow them to go to schools. The children have already suffered last year. It should not happen again this year. Security measures have been put in place to protect the entire population and all their activities," said the governor.

The anglophone crisis began in November 2016, when teachers and lawyers in Cameroon's two English-speaking regions went on strike. The strike devolved into violent unrest and stalemate, shuttering schools for a year. Meanwhile, separatist groups emerged calling for the two anglophone regions to break away.

In October, the secessionist groups declared a new state they call Ambazonia. The declaration sparked deadly unrest, and there have since been several clashes in Cameroon between suspected separatists and the military.

The so-called president of "Ambazonia" and at least eight other people were arrested January 5th in Nigeria.

The separatists have declared a curfew three days a week for residents of the southwest and northwest until their leaders are freed.

In a news release emailed to new agencies Tuesday, a group identifying itself as the interim government of "Ambazonia" said Nigerian authorities are keeping 11 of their leaders detained incommunicado, without access to lawyers or relatives.

Amnesty International has expressed concern the detainees could face torture and unfair trials if extradited from Nigeria. The government of Cameroon has declined to comment on the arrests.
A U.S. Army dog who saved the lives of his platoon during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 has been posthumously awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal, which recognizes the actions of animals serving in military conflict and is seen as the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross.

"Chips" began life as a beloved pet of the Wren family in Pleasantville, New York. His owners first laid eyes on him when a family living nearby offered the Wrens a puppy. John Wren, who was a young boy at the time, recalls his parents reaction.

WATCH: Chips awarded Army medal

"The runt of the litter was this German Shepherd-husky mix thing. And they said to my mother, 'Would you like him?' And she said, 'Id love to have him.' So, she took him, and she named him Chips. And he was smart and obeyed well. And then the war effort came on, and they asked for dogs to go into the K9 Corps. And they thought he was a perfect fit for it. Although they were sorry to have to do it, they knew it was the right thing to do. And they did it."

Chips passed his military entrance tests with flying colors. He was attached to the Third Infantry Regiment of the Seventh United States Army and was shipped out to North Africa.

In January 1943, Chips was a sentry at the Casablanca Conference in Morocco, where then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met to plan the war.

The same year in July, Chips joined "Operation Husky," the Allied invasion force landing on the Italian island of Sicily.

"After his team and handler came under direct fire, Chips broke away from them and essentially forced the surrender of an enemy machine gun team," says Lt. Col. Alan Throop, who attended the ceremony Monday in London.

Chips handler described at the time how the dog emerged from the machine gun hut with his jaws clamped around a German soldiers neck and had to be called off before the man was killed.

The dog suffered burns and injuries but survived, having saved the lives of the men in his platoon. Chips was awarded the Silver Star and was nominated for the Distinguished Service Cross. But the medals were later rescinded over complaints that they were not intended for animals.

Seven decades later, Chips has been posthumously awarded the Dickin Medal  an award for military service bestowed by the Peoples Dispensary for Sick Animals, a British charity.

In a ceremony Monday in London, Ayron, a U.S. military working dog based in Britain, accepted the award on Chips behalf, alongside Throop. The presentation was held at the Churchill War Rooms, named after the former British prime minister, who along with the British government, plotted military strategy there. Among those attending the ceremony was Randolph Churchill, Winston's great-grandson.

Chips survived the war and returned home, much to the delight of then- four-year-old Wren, who was with his parents to welcome Chips off the ship. Wren said he is touched by the Dickin Medal.

"Its just a nice way of honoring a war hero," he told VOA.

Heroics now officially recognized, 75 years later.
Cyprus' president says the fight against extremism necessitates even closer cooperation with Greece and Jordan.

Nicos Anastasiades was speaking Tuesday during talks with King Abdullah II of Jordan and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras that were billed as the cornerstone of a new partnership.

Abdullah said his country is working with others to close off all routes for extremists. He said despite successes in Iraq and Syria, they can't be allowed to regroup and establish footholds elsewhere.

The three leaders also urged the international community to offer more support to Jordan and other countries which have borne the brunt of a mass influx of refugees fleeing the war in Syria.

Anastasiades and Tsipras said they would ask fellow European Union member countries to lend more assistance to Jordan.
Thousands of Colombians risk being forced from their homes amid renewed violence after the expiry of a ceasefire between the country's ELN rebel group and the government, the United Nations and aid groups warned on Monday.

The National Liberation Army (ELN) leftist guerrilla group and the government of President Juan Manuel Santos have been in formal peace talks for nearly a year, but the rebels launched a fresh offensive last week, killing members of the security forces, after the expiration of a 101-day ceasefire.

"We are worried about new displacements along the whole Pacific Coast where we have seen a lot of new displacements in 2017," Jozef Merkx, head of the United Nation's refugee agency, UNHCR, in Colombia, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Colombia's western Pacific coast, a poor, underdeveloped rainforest area, has long been a hot spot of violence as criminal gangs and armed groups, including the ELN, fight for territorial control.

The ELN fighters and criminal gangs are moving into areas once controlled by Colombia's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

A historic peace accord signed between the government and FARC in 2016 has left a vacuum of power in some areas.

The number of Colombians uprooted from their homes in large groups - more than 50 at any one time - rose by 10 percent in 2017 to about 15,400 people compared to 2016, Merkx said.

Overall, nearly 115,000 Colombians were displaced by violence last year, according to government figures.

During Colombia's half-century civil war, more than 7 million Colombians have been driven from their homes to escape violence by warring factions, one of the highest displaced populations in the world.

Amid the fresh fighting, most at risk of displacement are Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities along the Pacific western coast and in remote rural areas in Colombia's south.

"It's crucial to de-escalate the fighting, so that thousands of people are no longer displaced from their homes and civilians killed," said Christian Visnes, the Norwegian Refugee Council's country director in Colombia.

At the end of a visit to Colombia on Sunday, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, also called on Colombia's ELN rebels to lay down their weapons.

Colombians are also being forced from their homes by powerful organized crime involved in drug trafficking and illegal gold mining.

Last week, the government launched the largest military unit of 9,000 troops activated in two decades to combat illegal armed groups that have begun to seize areas once controlled by the rebels in Colombia's south and Pacific region.
Turkish President Recep Erdogan on Tuesday stepped up threats to launch a cross-border operation against the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG, which the U.S. backs in the war against Islamic State militants. Ankara sees the YPG as a terrorist organization linked to an ongoing Kurdish insurgency in Turkey.

Erdogan used his weekly parliamentary address to his ruling AK Party supporters to say the operation could be imminent.

"Tomorrow, or the day after, or within a short period, we will get rid of terror nests one by one in Syria, starting with Afrin and Manbij," Erdogan said.

Both Afrin and Manbij are areas under the control of the YPG in Syria. The Turkish president also chided his NATO partners for failing to address Turkeys concerns over the Kurdish militia.

"You are duty-bound to strike a certain pose against anyone that harasses one of your partners," he said.

The head of Turkey's armed forces, Hulusi Akar, is holding talks Tuesday in Brussels with his NATO counterparts.

Concern over 'border force'

Akar is also expected to confer with the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford in Brussels. Erdogan said concerns over Washingtons plans to create a Syrian "border force" would be raised during that meeting.

The planned 30,000 strong contingent triggered Ankaras threat of military action because it would likely draw heavily on YPG personnel. Erdogan has called the proposed force a terror army and vowed to destroy it. U.S. officials see the force is key to containing any future threat by Islamic State terrorists.

While Ankara previously issued similar military threats against the YPG as the militia made sweeping gains against Islamic State along Turkeys border, this latest warning is widely seen as the most serious.

Erdogan Tuesday said that the planned operation against the YPG would involve Syrian rebel forces. Turkey is boosting its forces on the Syrian border and has been pounding YPG-controlled territory with artillery in the past few days.

Turkish-U.S. relations are deeply strained over Washingtons support of the Syrian Kurdish militia. Tensions eased briefly in November after Erdogan said he received a commitment from President Donald Trump that the U.S. was ending its support of the YPG, a claim that Washington did not confirm.
Ethiopian Airlines says it has finalized an agreement with Zambia to re-launch the southern African country's national carrier.

The partnership with Zambia comes as Ethiopian Airlines is opening new routes and hubs and is acquiring new aircraft.

In a statement Tuesday, the airline said it will have a 45 percent stake in the Zambian carrier and it aims to make the Zambian capital, Lusaka, its newest aviation hub. The remaining 55 percent will be acquired by the Zambian government which is aiming to revive the country's aviation sector after Zambia Airways ceased operations on January 2009.

"The launching of Zambia Airways will enable the traveling public in Zambia and the Southern African region to enjoy greater connectivity options," said Ethiopian Airlines CEO, Tewolde Gebremariam. "It is only through partnerships among African carriers that the aviation industry of the continent will be able to get its fair share of the African market, currently heavily skewed in favor of non-African airlines."

Gebremariam told The Associated Press earlier this month his company is also exploring opportunities in other African countries including Mozambique, Djibouti and Congo.

Ethiopian Airlines currently operates from hubs in Lome, Togo with ASKY Airlines and in Lilongwe, Malawi. Its main hub is in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

Ethiopian Airlines currently flies to more than 100 destinations. Airline officials say that recent currency devaluations in some African countries and a subsequent rise in jet fuel prices could hamper its profits.
President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday vowed that France would no longer allow migrant camps like the notorious "Jungle" as he defended a tougher line on immigration that has attracted sharp criticism from some of his allies.

In a closely-watched speech in Calais, Macron promised a more orderly immigration policy with zero tolerance for camps like the Jungle, the squalid shantytown near the northern city's port that was once home to some 10,000 migrants dreaming of Britain.

"There will be no reconstruction of the Jungle and no tolerance for the illegal occupation of public space," Macron said in a speech at a police station in the port city.

While the Jungle was demolished in late 2016, hundreds of migrants remain in Calais, trying night after night to stow away on trucks heading across the Channel to England.

Calais has long been a sore point in relations with Britain and ahead of his first trip to London as president on Thursday, Macron called for better cooperation in managing the border.

Gearing up for his talks with Prime Minister Theresa May, Macron called for "specific responses" from Britain on the thorny issue of unaccompanied minors stranded in France - some of whom have relatives in Britain.

May's spokesman issued a statement on an issue that is set to cause tension on Thursday, saying: "We've taken a significant number of unaccompanied asylum seeking children from the area around and in Calais already."

Allies critical

As Europe struggles with a historic wave of arrivals, Macron blasted EU migration policy as "insufficient and incoherent," repeating his call for the bloc to set up a shared asylum office.

He joined a chorus of criticism for the "Dublin" asylum rules which say asylum seekers must be dealt with in the country where they arrive, creating a huge burden for frontline states like Italy.

But he ruled out suggesting migrants should be able to apply for asylum in any EU country from any other, saying this would "strip the entry country of their responsibilities."

France received a record 100,000 asylum claims last year, making it one of Europe's top destinations.

Immigration poses a tricky political challenge for Macron, with his newly formed centrist Republic On The Move (LREM) party divided on how to greet new arrivals.

On Tuesday, his former senior aide Jean Pisani-Ferry penned a hard-hitting open letter along with several center-left trade union and think-tank chiefs claiming Macron risked betraying his image as a humanist.

Writing in Le Monde newspaper, they urged him to "live up to our ideals" and put an end to efforts that seek to dissuade asylum seekers from coming to France in the first place.

Macron has said he wants to step up expulsions of economic migrants, while speeding up waiting times for asylum applications - an approach he touts as mixing "humanity" and "efficiency."

It currently takes 18 months on average to process an asylum claim in France - and Macron promised Tuesday to cut this to just six months.

"For years we've been doing things backwards," Macron said.

Gassed while sleeping

Near the ferry port in Calais, close to the site of the razed Jungle, dozens of migrants queued for hot tea and food from an NGO after spending a cold night camped out in the woods.

A group of young men from Oromia in Ethiopia described nightly police operations to clear the camps, with NGOs accusing officers of using pepper spray on migrants as they sleep.

"They gas the tent while you're sleeping or gas you in your face," said Dawit, 21.

"The tent, they take it; the sleeping bag, they take it."

Macron defended frazzled local police, stressing they were working in difficult conditions as they struggle to stop migrants blocking the roads in an attempt to slow trucks enough to jump onboard.

But he insisted they must be "exemplary" in their policing of migrants, respecting their rights and not confiscating their property.

He also criticized some pro-migrant groups active in Calais, accusing them of helping migrants to break the law by encouraging them to stay in the area or even helping them to stow away.

He announced that the government would take over from NGOs in providing food for the migrants, "without tolerating the setting up of illegal camps."
A new report released by the independent watchdog organization Freedom House says that democratic principles such as election integrity and freedom of the press are weakening globally for the 12th consecutive year.

"There are more countries  in the case of 2017, many more countries  that showed declines in freedom than showed improvements," says Arch Puddington, Freedom House Distinguished Scholar for Democracy Studies, who spoke with VOA ahead of the reports release.

WATCH: Freedom in the World 2018

According to Freedom House, which analyzed data from 195 countries over the 2017 calendar year, 88 countries were rated "free," 58 countries were rated "partly free," and 49 countries were rated "not free" in its latest report.



North America

Among the report's major findings was the weakening of the United States as a champion of democracy, a standing further complicated by the ongoing special counsels investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

"There are problems with the elections that you dont find in most well-established democracies," says Puddington, who cited excessive money in campaigns and state laws making voting more difficult as major factors that can undermine the electoral process.

In its assessment of the U.S., Freedom House pointed to ethical quandaries facing the current administration, including the Trump familys business ties and the potential for conflicts of interest, as well as the presidents decision not to disclose his tax returns.

The White House has cited an ongoing tax audit as a factor in not releasing Trump's tax returns.

Europe

Marc Behrendt, director of the Europe and Eurasia programs at Freedom House, says although the U.S. has shown significant drops, "these declines are happening in both mature democracies, as well as in countries that have previously had more trouble with freedoms and democracy development."

"We're seeing declines in the United States and in both Western and Eastern Europe," he said, adding that while U.S. declines are attributable to partisan legislative deadlock and the rise of online misinformation campaigns, declines in Eastern Europe result from government surveillance and intimidation tactics in the former Soviet sphere.

In Russia, for example, the 2017 killings of two journalists, along with new laws that require media outlets to register as foreign agents, is just one reason for the country's 11-point decline in the Freedom House index.

"And even now, there's new legislation being debated in the Duma that will make individuals register as foreign agents," he said, describing the law as a threat to both Russian bloggers and foreigners who blog from Russian soil.

"[It would affect] anybody who provides information to an undisclosed group of people and receives any money in any way from abroad, or that cites anybody that does so. And that's a really wide net to cast that will impact independent [new outlets] and the social media sphere," he said, suggesting the law could be exploited to silence individual social media users.

He also cited the 2017 state-backed detention and torture of gay men in Chechnya, along with the recent arrest of Grozny-based NGO director Oyub Titiyev, as significant factors in Russia's point decline. Chechen officials have denied allegations about the extrajudicial detentions, and a Kremlin-led probe into abuses of gay men have turned up nothing.

Overall in Russia, he added, "we're worried about the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and were certainly worried about the ability of people to participate in political processes and the right to demonstrate."

"And we're worried about religious freedom [vis-a-vis] the Jehovah's Witnesses being banned last year on allegations of extremism," he said. "The use of allegations of extremism is being broadly used in Russia  against journalists, against the Jehovah's Witnesses, against basically anybody that comes counter to the state. And that's very disturbing."

Asia

Freedom House highlighted the intensification of repression under Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a contributing factor in the countrys overall downward trend and "not free" ranking.

"Weve noticed efforts by China to influence the way other countries deal with China, talk about China, what scholars write about China, what journalists write about China," says Puddington. "We see a kind of creeping policy of trying to expand the Chinese censorship system that is pervasive inside China to other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, even the United States, not to mention Asian countries who are neighbors of China, as well."

In "partly free" ranked countries like Myanmar, experts say the findings are mixed, citing the countrys transition from military rule toward democracy with its worsening humanitarian crisis following the mass exodus of Rohingya Muslims into neighboring Bangladesh.

Latin America

Even with economic and political instability in Nicaragua and Venezuela, Freedom House experts say theres positive developments for the rest of the region.

"The new [Ecuadorean] president Lenin Moreno has dismantled some of the measures that his predecessor had put in place," says Puddington, adding "hes also shown a willingness to have a serious dialogue with reformist elements in the country and to prosecute officials for corruption."

Even with increased engagement with the U.S., Freedom House upheld Cubas "not free" ranking, pointing to freedom of the press and open debate as one area needing improvement.

Middle East

Despite "not free" rankings and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Freedom House highlighted both as countries to watch throughout 2018.

"It doesn't necessarily mean that the country is moving in the wrong direction or in the right direction," says Puddington. "It just means that there are a lot of things going on in that country. And we anticipate that there will be changes in the next year."

Analysts say progress toward democratic elections and effective civilian governments could signal major developments for both countries in the months ahead.

Africa

Following the ouster of Zimbabwes longtime leader Robert Mugabe, Freedom House ranked the country "partly free" overall.

"Zimbabwe declined in our scores for 2017, but this was largely due to the fact that President Mugabe was pushed out by non-democratic means, and he was succeeded through non-democratic means," says Puddington, adding, "We do hope that some of the promises that have been made of reform and liberalization and serious Democratic elections are fulfilled. If they are, we will see improvements in Zimbabwes scores."
French prison guards protested outside scores of jails across the country Tuesday for the second day in a row, demanding more security, more staff and safer handling of violent inmates.

Protesters bellowing the national anthem shouted down Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet as she visited a prison in Vendin-le-Vieil in northern France to try to calm tensions.

The national protest movement was launched by the country's main prison staff unions after a radicalized inmate attacked three guards with a knife at this high-security prison last week.

Authorities say the Vendin-le-Vieil attack was carried out by inmate Christian Ganczarski, a German national who converted to Islam and was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his involvement in a 2002 attack on a synagogue in Tunisia that left 21 people dead.

Ganczarski was given new preliminary charges of attempted murder following Thursday's knife attack. He was also transferred to another prison in northern France, according to Guillaume Pottier, a prison union leader.

"We are not trained in handling radicalized inmates, so colleagues are very angry," Pottier was quoted as saying in Le Monde newspaper.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday ordered an overhaul of the country's overcrowded penitentiary system and suggested a "massive" shift to alternative punishment such as obligatory public service or electronic bracelets.

The government is expected to come up with a "global penitentiary plan" by the end of February that would modernize old facilities and plan on building new ones. The report would also deal with staff issues and aim to improve prison intelligence-gathering.

But the announcement failed to soothe guards' anger, as nearly half of the country's prisons were still affected by protests Tuesday, the French prison authority said.

Disruptions included large protests with fires set in front of entrances and riot police deployed, but also barricades and small picket lines that delayed staff from entering prison buildings. Dozens of union activists lit a fire and were surrounded by riot police Tuesday at the notoriously violent Fresnes prison southeast of Paris.

Feeding guards' discontent, two more assaults by prisoners on a watch list for radicalization have been reported at jails in southwest and southeast France. Seven guards were injured at Mont-de-Marsan prison on Monday, the French prison authority said. Another one was reportedly injured at Tarascon prison on Tuesday.

During her visit to the Vendin-le-Vieil prison, Belloubet, the justice minister, pledged to take measures to "improve the security conditions" in French prisons and to "move toward an increase in the workforce management staff."

The French government must also curb prison overpopulation. As a presidential candidate, Macron had promised to build 15,000 new prison places over five years. But in November the justice ministry said it would take ten years to complete such an ambitious construction program.

Late last year, French prisons held nearly 70,000 inmates, a number that has been steadily rising for years, according to the French prison authority. One in three inmates is detained pending trial.
Mila Kunis, who made her mark on two long-running television comedies and earned a Golden Globe nomination for her work on the big screen, was named Woman of the Year on Tuesday by Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

Kunis is being honored by the nation's oldest collegiate theatrical organization because she is one of Hollywood's "most sought after, vivacious and engaging actresses."

"We have been watching her on both the big and small screen since we were young and can't wait to celebrate her achievements in a truly unique and memorable way," Hasty Pudding Theatricals co-producer Annie McCreery said in the announcement.

Kunis earned a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Lily in 2010's Black Swan.

She more recently starred in Bad Moms and A Bad Moms Christmas and just wrapped production on The Spy Who Dumped Me, scheduled for release in August.



She's perhaps best known for two early television roles, Jackie Burkhart in That '70s Show and as the voice of Meg Griffin in the animated series Family Guy.

The Ukraine-born actress will be honored January 25 with a parade through the streets of Cambridge, followed by a roast at which she will receive her pudding pot.

Hasty Pudding has been naming a Woman of the Year since 1951, and previous winners include Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor and Lucille Ball. Last year's winner was Octavia Spencer.

The 2018 Man of the Year has not yet been announced.
Iran's supreme leader has accused Saudi Arabia of "treason" against Muslims because of its alleged ties to Israel.

Addressing representatives from the Muslim-majority countries in Tehran on Tuesday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said "governments that help the United States and cooperate with the Zionist regime to fight Muslim brothers are committing treason, like what Saudis are doing."

However, he also said Iran is ready to adopt a "brotherly attitude" toward countries that have been hostile toward it, and called for Muslim unity.

Iran and Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties in 2016 and support opposing sides in the wars in Syria and Yemen.

Iran has seized on media reports that Saudi Arabia is seeking closer ties with Israel in order to join forces against it, something the Saudis deny.
Iran said on Tuesday a new U.S.-backed, 30,000-strong force inside Syria would "fan the flames of war", echoing the vehement response of Syria, Turkey and Russia to the plan.

On Sunday, the U.S.-led coalition said it was working with its Syrian militia allies, the mainly Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to set up a force that would operate along the borders with Turkey and Iraq, as well as within Syria.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad responded by vowing to crush the new force and drive U.S. troops from Syria. Strong Syria ally Russia called the plans a plot to dismember Syria and place part of it under U.S. control, and Turkey described the force as a "terror army."

Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said such a force would raise tensions in Syria. Iran supports Assad in the nearly seven-year civil war against rebel forces and Islamic State militants, sending weapons and soldiers.

"The U.S. announcement of a new border force in Syria is an obvious interference in the internal affairs of this country," Qasemi was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA.

Qasemi urged all U.S. forces to leave Syria immediately.

The United States is at the head of an international coalition using air strikes and special forces troops to aid fighters on the ground battling Islamic State militants in Syria since 2014. It has about 2,000 troops on the ground in Syria.
In the world of forensic pathology, there's a morbid truism: Bodies are evidence, and you need a body in order to fully examine a death.

That poses a potentially major challenge for the Puerto Rican government's re-examination of deaths related to Hurricane Maria, which Gov. Ricardo Rossello ordered Monday after investigations into the official death toll by CNN and other news organizations.

Thousands of people have died since the storm on September 20, according to the Puerto Rican government. Many, if not most, of those bodies have been buried or cremated. That fact will severely limit the US territory's efforts to re-analyze deaths, experts told CNN.

"At this point, the bodies have been buried, and there is no way to do a thorough investigation of each individual case," said Eric Klinenberg, director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University and author of a book about deaths following a Chicago heat wave.

"You'd want to talk with next of kin and neighbors to find out what happened to the person, possibly with doctors as well. But that is very difficult even in the best of times, and right now (many) people still don't have power," he said. "It would require an enormous effort."

Rossello said Monday that Puerto Rico's Department of Public Safety and the Demographic Registry will re-examine every death that's occurred since the hurricane, regardless of whether the death certificate lists the hurricane as the possible manner of death. The statement from Rossello's office, however, did not specify exactly how that review would be conducted. A panel of experts will be appointed to review the process, according to the governor.

Neither the governor's office nor the Department of Public Safety agreed to an interview on the details of the review. On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the governor told CNN that details on how the review would be conducted were still being determined and that the matter would be discussed at upcoming meetings.

The official death toll from Hurricane Maria stands at 64. In reality, it may be many times higher. In November, CNN surveyed half of the funeral homes in Puerto Rico and identified 499 deaths that funeral home directors and staff say were hurricane-related. Later, The New York Times and academics calculated the number of "excess deaths" in 2017 compared with previous years. That analysis led the paper to suggest more than 1,000 people likely died in the storm.

Puerto Rico's governor said Monday that statistical methods will not be used in reassessing the death toll.

"A legal process of certification by a coroner or a doctor is necessary, and every family deserves that the case of their loved ones be looked at independently and thoroughly," he said.

The Bureau of Forensic Sciences, in San Juan, the Puerto Rican capital, is the only laboratory on the island authorized to classify deaths officially as hurricane-related. Pathologists conduct visual assessment and autopsies on some corpses. Documents such as death certificates also can be reviewed, and in some instances family members of the deceased are interviewed.

After Maria, the forensics bureau reviewed many deaths and autopsied bodies before burial or cremation. But CNN also reported that some deaths possibly related to the hurricane were never sent to the forensics office by doctors or other authorities and therefore never were analyzed.

The Puerto Rican government could use death certificates to help re-examine deaths, but those documents alone are not enough to classify deaths as hurricane-related, said Dr. Gregory J. Davis, director of the University of Kentucky's Forensic Pathology Consultation Service.

"Death certificates, unless filled out by an experienced medical examiner/forensic pathologist, are notoriously unreliable," Davis said. Other materials -- including "medical records, police reports, fire/EMS reports, and, though it takes a lot of effort, next-of-kin family statements" -- are needed to make full sense of a death, he said. "It's labor intensive, but if they want the right answers rather than rush answers, they'll do it," Davis said in an email to CNN.

Scientific methods are the most reliable way to understand how and why a person died, said Dr. Brian L. Peterson, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.

And there always could be some dispute about the circumstances of a death -- especially regarding "indirect" hurricane deaths, or those that resulted from the conditions the storm created rather than the high winds and waters associated with the day of the storm, he said.

"To properly certify a death as other than natural (with respect to manner), we like to have a medicolegal death investigation, an autopsy, and sometimes ancillary studies such as radiology, toxicology, etc.," he said. "More to the point, 'hurricane related' may be more a matter of perception, anyway. Traumatic deaths are easier. Natural deaths are harder to accurately place in the 'hurricane-related' category as death from natural disease may occur at any time."

Exhuming bodies to do those tests would be expensive and unlikely, he said.

It also may not help the research, said Davis, from the University of Kentucky.

"Exhumation is incredibly expensive, involving multiple personnel digging, opening up the vault, bringing up the casket, all with no guarantee that the body won't be quite decomposed or skeletonized, especially in a wet, hot climate such as Puerto Rico's," he said.

Still, Peterson said, "deaths can always be reviewed at any time" with whatever information is available. Davis said it's possible, although not ideal, to review a death without an autopsy.

After CNN's investigation, Puerto Rico added two deaths CNN highlighted to the official toll attributable to Hurricane Maria -- that of Quintin Vidal, who died in a fire started by a lantern he was using because of prolonged power outages, and Jose Rafael Sanchez Roman, whose family said he died of a heart attack or stroke during the storm.

But three additional cases highlighted by the network show how much effort it would take the Puerto Rican government to reassess thousands of deaths that followed the hurricane.

Earlier this week, the Department of Public Safety told CNN those three additional cases do not warrant inclusion on the list of official deaths. Juan B. Robles Diaz committed suicide because of a pre-existing medical condition, not because of the storm, according to a statement sent to CNN by the Department of Public Safety.

In a November interview, however, Robles' son told CNN that his father suffered from night terrors in which he ran into the street screaming about how floodwaters were coming back. He sat by a window watching for the moment water would return to wash him away, Carlos Robles said. He told CNN there was no question his father committed suicide because of the stress of Hurricane Maria and its aftermath.

Yes, he had been diagnosed with cancer, the son said, but that was beside the point.

Puerto Rico did not add his death to the official tally.

In the case of Pilar Guzman Rios, whose family told CNN she died because a breathing machine she required couldn't run without power, and because the insulin that treated her diabetes could not be properly refrigerated, the case was never reviewed by the forensics office "because the doctor certified the deceased on the death certificate as natural," the department said.

The doctor, Francisco Berio, however, told CNN he made that determination without having seen Guzman's body, and partly because he wanted her family to be able to bury her more quickly and forensic review would slow that process and prolong grief.

Investigators "tried to interview the son of the deceased, but the attempts were unsuccessful to the point where the relative did not respond to calls," an emailed statement said.

About 15% of cellular sites remain nonfunctional because of the hurricane. It's often difficult to receive calls from the mountainous interior of the island, where Guzman's family lives.

"The death cannot be attributed to the hurricane," the Department of Public Safety said.

Finally, Jose A. Molina's son, Luis Alberto Molina, told CNN in November that his father died of a heart attack because of the stress of running a funeral home after Hurricane Maria.

The department said it "investigated the case and requested his medical file." "The gentleman had health conditions such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular disorders. On October 8, 2017, he arrived at the hospital due to a chest pain that he was suffering two days before receiving medical attention. Neither the patient nor the relatives in the interview conducted by the doctors in the hospital attribute his situation to Hurricane Maria. Molina died on October 11, 2017. The death cannot be attributed to the hurricane."

Any death that resulted from the storm or the conditions it created should be counted as part of the official toll, according to Puerto Rican officials. Heart attacks and suicides are included on the official list of deaths that Puerto Rico is attributing to Hurricane Maria. The information matters not only for the accuracy of the count, and the public's understanding of the magnitude of the disaster, but also to families of the deceased. They may be eligible for money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover some funeral expenses.

"Every life is more than a number, and every death must have a name and vital information attached to it, as well as an accurate accounting of the facts related to their passing. That's the law," the governor said in Monday's announcement.

Davis, the University of Kentucky professor and medical doctor, said it's worth the effort to examine cases individually. And it's possible with proper funding.

"It's never too late to try," he said.

CNN's Leyla Santiago contributed to this report.
Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga, whose National Super Alliance (NASA) contests the results of Octobers re-run election, has defiantly vowed to inaugurate himself the "peoples" president at the end of January, if there is no dialogue beforehand with President Uhuru Kenyatta.

In an exclusive television interview Tuesday with VOAs Swahili Service, Odinga denied criticism the threat to hold his own inauguration ceremony on January 30 is a tactic to negotiate for power with Kenyatta.

So, were not using the swearing-in as a basis of negotiating with Uhuru Kenyatta. We have said in fact that we dont want any stake in Uhuru Kenyatta government. We want to be the ones who are in government.

Despite his tough words, Odinga said the opposition is seeking a dialogue with Kenyattas ruling Jubilee Party of Kenya. He said it wants to discuss five points with the Kenyan president - electoral justice, judicial independence, police reforms, devolution of power, and restructuring the executive in the constitution.

As [for] Jubilee, if they have another item or agenda they want to put on the table, they are free to do so. We are ready to discuss. But, our agenda for swearing-in is not negotiable. We say that if we cannot talk by [the] 30th of ... January we are going to be sworn in. And we will then release our program thereafter.

Kenyatta has hinted at, but not yet agreed to dialogue. Kenyas Attorney General Githu Muigai warned in December that any attempts to swear in Odinga as president would qualify as high treason, which is punishable by death.

Vote of no confidence

Kenya was plunged into political crisis after last years presidential elections, which saw an initial poll voided by the Supreme Court and a second round in October boycotted by Odinga and his supporters.

Kenyatta won the second round with 98 percent of the vote. But, a low voter turnout - 39 percent - led many to question if 56-year-old Kenyatta has the mandate to lead, an uncertainty that 73-year-old Odinga has encouraged.

So, that election was itself a vote of no confidence in Jubilee, Odinga said Tuesday. And, therefore it is even shameful that Uhuru Kenyatta can be claiming that he is the president of Kenya on the basis of the 26th of October elections.

Kenyas opposition leader may be defiant, but governance and politics analyst at Interthoughts Consulting Jarvis Bigambo tells VOA he is running out of options. Because the moment the Supreme Court of Kenya determined and pronounced itself on the issue of the conclusion of elections that were conducted on October 26, that matter sounded a death knell on the issues that the opposition could hop on.

Bigambo says Odinga has no legal ground to stand on. And thats why their claim to that swearing in is that they want to swear in honorable Odinga as the peoples president not as the bona fide president of the Republic of Kenya, he said.

But Bigambo warns Odinga, who has no small measure of support in Kenya, should not be dismissed by the ruling party.

It will also be very dangerous for Jubilee leadership - and here Im speaking specifically to President Kenyatta - to undermine the political capital that honorable Odinga has. And, it behooves the president therefore to reach out and request the leadership of [Odingas party] NASA to be gracious, to be diligent, and to be focused on the progress - democratic progress - of Kenya, Bigambo said.

The United States recognized the results of the October election, while calling for a national dialogue to address long-standing issues and deep divisions. The U.S. also urged opposition leaders to work within Kenyas laws to pursue reforms and avoid extra-constitutional actions such as Odingas planned inauguration ceremony.

VOAs Swahili Service contributed to this report.
North Korean defector Lee Tae-won is still plagued with guilt over his failed efforts to bring his wife and child to South Korea, which resulted in their forced repatriation and the likely prospect of imprisonment and possible execution in North Korea.

There's nothing I can say to them except I am sorry. I am really sorry for my son and wife. I am really sorry because there's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can say, said Lee.

Caught in China

After arriving in South Korea in 2015, the North Korean defector took on the name Lee to try to protect his family from retribution from North Korean security forces. His wife and four-year-old son were reportedly among a group of 10 defectors that where apprehended by China soon after they crossed the North Korean border in late October.

In November he last spoke with his wife by phone while she was in a detention center in China.

As soon as my wife told me she was being repatriated, the call was cut. I thought the call was cut because the police took the phone. It was devastating, he said.

This year China has increased the arrests and repatriation of North Koreans attempting to escape the poverty and repression at home. According to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, 41 North Koreans were arrested in July and August alone, compared with 51 arrests documented for the entire year before.

Analysts attribute the rise in border arrests to efforts by China to discourage a possible flood of refugees as tougher economic sanctions imposed for Pyongyangs repeated nuclear and missile tests increases poverty and food scarcity among ordinary North Koreans.

Human rights violations

The total number of defections to South Korea in 2017 was 1,127, which is 20 percent less than the previous year, according to South Koreas Ministry of Unification.

Phil Robertson, the Deputy Asia Director at Human Rights Watch has criticized China for violating the U.N. Refugee Convention by designating North Korean refugees as illegal economic migrants, and forcibly repatriating them despite the likelihood they will be imprisoned and likely subjected to inhumane treatment.

This is condemning people to decades of forced labor, possible executions, certainly torture in every case, said Robertson.

China has also reportedly blocked the United Nations Security Council from acting on a General Assembly recommendation to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, based on a 2014 Commission of Inquiry report documenting a network of political prison camps and systematic human rights abuses, including murder, enslavement, torture, rape, and other sexual violence.

Failed appeal

In November Lee made a public video message appealing to both Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump to intercede and prevent the repatriation of his family, during the time the U.S. leader was visiting the region.

His plea went unanswered. Lee was later told by a friend in North Korea that his wife and child were turned over to a North Korean state security department in late November. But he continues to speak out to focus world attention on the dangers and atrocities faced by North Korean seeking to flee the authoritarian state.

It is my goal to inform the international community of the pain defectors in South Korea are experiencing, and the pain North Koreans face, said Lee.

There is also concern among human rights advocates that North Korean human rights violations and Chinas complicity are being downplayed by both the U.S. pressure strategy and South Koreas engagement approach to curb Pyongyangs nuclear development program. Focusing on human rights issues could complicate Washingtons efforts to persuade Beijing to enforce tough economic sanctions, and could also undermine Seouls efforts to increase cooperation and dialogue with Pyongyang.

On Tuesday, senior officials from 20 nations are meeting in Vancouver for a U.S. and Canada-led summit to discuss increasing diplomatic and financial pressure on Pyongyang to end its missile and nuclear programs. China will not attend the summit and has instead called for continuing the temporary reduction in regional tensions, due to North Koreas participation in the upcoming Olympics and the U.S. postponement of joint military drills in South Korea.

Youmi Kim and Hyunjin Christine Kim contributed to this report from Seoul.
Prominent Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was shot dead Tuesday outside his party office in the northern town of Mitrovica, raising ethnic tensions in the region and halting EU-mediated talks between Kosovo and Serbia on the day they were due to resume.

Police officials say gunmen firing from a car shot the 64-year-old Ivanovic as he arrived at his party headquarters. They say a burnt-out car was found that was presumably used in the attack.

The killing came the same day Serbia and Kosovo were due to resume negotiations in Brussels on normalizing ties. After the shooting, Serbia withdrew from the meeting.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini condemned the killing in phone calls with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, and said she expects authorities to find and punish the perpetrators.

Vucic also called an emergency session of his national security council.

Marko Djuric, the Serbian official in charge of Kosovo, called Ivanovic's killing an act of terrorism against "the entire Serbian people."

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, almost a decade after NATO airstrikes drove out Serbian forces accused of expelling and killing ethnic Albanian civilians in a two-year counterinsurgency.
With Capitol Hill still seething over U.S. President Donald Trump's reported slur of predominantly black nations, lawmakers sought to salvage a bipartisan immigration deal Tuesday, three days before a possible partial shutdown of the federal government.

"Mr. President, close this [immigration] deal," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said at a Judiciary Committee hearing, adding, "Don't give my number out, but call me"  a reference to an incident in the campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination in which Trump publicly announced Graham's private telephone number.

Hopes that Congress would vote on an immigration package as part of a government funding extension were already fading when Trump allegedly used vulgar language last week in questioning the need for the United States to accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations.

DACA, border security, reforms

The proposal, negotiated by key Republican and Democratic lawmakers since late last year, would address the plight of hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants brought to America as children. They have been protected from deportation and allowed to work in the United States under an administrative program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which Trump has rescinded. The lawmakers' negotiated proposal reportedly would also boost U.S. border security measures and reform legal immigration to the U.S.

Protections for DACA beneficiaries expire in March, making them vulnerable to deportation unless Congress enacts a legislative solution.

"We want to avoid the mass draconian deportation that otherwise will occur to these very brave and talented young people who have come to our country," Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said.

Until now, Democratic lawmakers have agreed to repeated funding extensions rather than risk a government shutdown to press their demand for action on DACA. It remains to be seen whether they will do so again by Friday, when federal spending authority expires.

Some, like Representative John Lewis of Georgia, have stated they will not vote for a funding extension that does not include a DACA fix.

Others expressed hope for concrete progress on thorny immigration topics as well as a spending deal that would remove the threat of a partial shutdown for the remainder of the current fiscal year.

Getting to work

"It should not come to that [a shutdown]," Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press program. "We should stop shutting this government down, and we should start doing the work the American people sent us to Washington to do."

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is signaling it remains committed to immigration reform.

"I'm very hopeful we can agree on a deal that increases border security ... and that also contains a permanent solution for the DACA population," Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told the Senate Judiciary Committee at Tuesday's hearing.

Nielsen noted that the clock is ticking for Congress to protect DACA beneficiaries, adding that Trump does not plan to extend the March deadline.

"It's for Congress to fix," she said.

Graham expressed confidence Congress would act, but did not specify by when.

"We're not going to leave you behind," he said of the DACA beneficiaries. "I don't know how this movie ends, but you're going to be taken care of. To those who want to fix a broken immigration system, you're going to get something, too."
Myanmar and neighboring Bangladesh have completed an agreement to repatriate scores of Rohingya Muslims who fled Myanmar to escape a brutal military crackdown.

Bangladesh issued a statement Tuesday saying the repatriations will begin next week, with the goal of completing the process within the next two years.

WATCH: Rohingya Refugees Want Safety Guarantees Before Returning to Myanmar

Dhaka says the repatriation process will give priority to "family units" and orphans and "children born out of unwarranted incidence"  a reference to children conceived by rape. The agreement calls for Bangladesh to set up five transit camps that will move the refugees into two reception areas in Myanmar's Rakhine state.

But international watchdog Amnesty International called the deal "premature", saying that Rohingya, who allegedly were not consulted for the deal, have no gaurantee of safety upon their return.

"The obfuscation and denials of the Myanmar authorities give no reason to hope that the rights of returning Rohingya would be protected, or that the reasons for their original flight no longer exist," James Gomez, Amnesty Internationals Regional Director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said in a statement Tuesday. The Rohingya have an absolute right to return to and reside in Myanmar, but there must be no rush to return people to a system of apartheid. Any forcible returns would be a violation of international law."

About 650,000 Rohingyas have fled into Bangladesh since last August, when Myanmar forces launched a scorched earth campaign against Rohingya villages in Rakhine state in response to attacks on Myanmar police outposts by Rohingya militants.

The refugees, living in overcrowded camps in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar district, have told human rights organizations of numerous atrocities committed by security forces, including the burning down of homes and entire villages, random shootings and rapes.

The United Nations has described the reported actions carried out by Myanmar forces as "a textbook case of ethnic cleansing." Myanmar dismisses the stories as exaggerated, and the army has cleared itself of any abuses.

Humanitarian groups say the children living in the overcrowded camps are suffering a host of illnesses, including anemia, diarrhea, diphtheria and cholera, due to malnutrition and poor sanitary conditions.

The Rohingya minority has been denied citizenship and other rights in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

Myanmar views the Rohingya as immigrants from Bangladesh, despite the fact that many families have lived in Myanmar for generations.
A recent decision by the United States' Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality, which are rules designed to prevent the selective blocking or slowing of websites, has wide-ranging implications for China, which never believed in net neutrality and banned hundreds of foreign websites. The decision could result in a major trade war involving Chinese telecom and Internet companies, which are interested in accessing the U.S. market, analysts said.

The move will allow American telecom service providers to charge differential prices for various services and even examine the data of their customers. Though this aspect has stirred controversy in the United States, the situation there is still very different from the realities in China.

"In China, the government is monitoring and controlling the networks whereas [in U.S.] it is, at least so far, it is telecommunication companies. At this point, the government does not have access, we know it does not have access to manipulating the flow of traffic in the U.S. Internet," Aija Leiponen, a professor at Cornell Universitys Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, said.

The FCC decision could help U.S. telecom service providers offer high-priced premium services.

Trade war

But this would also open up an opportunity for U.S. service providers to charge high rates from foreign customers. At present, foreign companies can easily access the U.S. cyber market without facing the kind of resistance American companies encounter in China and elsewhere.

"I think it (FCC decision) has an impact potentially for Chinese technology companies that want to do business in the U.S.," said Benjamin Cavender, a senior analyst at the Shanghai-based China Market Research Group (CMR). "You are asking about companies like Alibaba or Tencent, what this means for them in the U.S. markets-- and I could very possibly see this being used as a trade war tool--and the U.S. government saying, 'Look, we are going to restrict access to companies to our ISPs and force them to pay a lot of money."

U.S. telecom companies are getting increasing integrated with content providers and might look at foreign players as a source of serious competition. They might go further and even consider blocking some foreign players, including Chinese Internet giants, he said.

"I can also see this happening that they (Chinese Internet firms) just get completely blocked because of the U.S. using this more as a trade tool trying to get more access to the Chinese market because if you are a U.S. technology company you are working at a great disadvantage in the Chinese market. I do see this being used as a trade tool," Cavender said.

The point is about applying pressure on China to open up its Internet market to American players in exchange for similar treatment in the United States. Washington has usually avoided this kind of tit-for-tat game, but the situation may be changing under the Trump administration, analysts said.

"They (U.S. telecom companies) could at some point say, 'Look, if you want to have confidential, fast access to the U.S. you have to kind of allow us to do the same thing, allow us to invest more heavily in Chinese firms.' I could see that happening," Cavender said.

Moral high ground

China has been advocating the idea of 'Internet sovereignty,' which allows governments to create boundaries in cyber space and block foreign sites that it perceives as potential threats to security. Proponents of 'open Internet' have been protesting against the idea of 'Internet sovereignty.'

The Obama administration lobbied and argued with China for nearly a decade to open up Internet access for American companies like YouTube, Twitter and Netflix. It was an important aspect of the annual strategic economic dialogue between the two countries.

The FCC decision coupled with the controversy over alleged cyber spying by Russia is a moral boost of support for Chinas online restrictions, which include a ban on major sites like Google, YouTube and Twitter. The moral high ground enjoyed by the United States under the past administration may be at risk, analysts said.

"Even democracies are beginning to think about the need to regulate content. So the Chinese, you know, might take a little comfort in that," James Lewis, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said. "When you look at Europeans talking about blocking each others content, when you look at the U.S. talking about blocking Russian political warfare, the Internet cannot be the wild west that its been for a couple of decades. So, everyones moving in this direction and I guess the Chinese can take comfort from that."

Meanwhile, Chinese experts are protesting a new bill introduced in the U.S. Congress that would prevent branches of the U.S. government from working with service providers that use any equipment from two Chinese companies, Huawei and ZTE, for security reasons.

"This (prejudice towards Chinese companies) seems like a problem that cant be solved, at least not in the short term," Liu Xingliang, head of the Data Center of China Internet, told the Global Times newspaper in Beijing.

At the same time, "Chinese firms can't give up the U.S. market and just focus on smaller countries if they want to really achieve their global goals," Liu Dingding, an independent tech expert told the paper.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday he was discussing with India ways to strengthen security cooperation against the menace of from Islamist extremism that both democracies faced.

Netanyahu spoke while on a six-day tour of India, the first by an Israeli premier for 15 years, and is being feted by Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, whose Hindu nationalist party has long admired Israel for its tough posture against terrorism.

India, wary of upsetting Arab nations on which it was dependent for oil, and heeding the sentiments of its own large Muslim minority, kept a distance from Israel for decades. But under Modi, the two sides have embraced a closer relationship based on security and economics.

The right-wing Netanyahu told a security conference that India and Israel were two democracies with a natural affinity, but their open and liberal societies faced risks.

"Our way of life is being challenged, most notably, the quest for modernity, the quest for innovation [are] being challenged by radical Islam and its terrorist offshoots from a variety of corners," he said.

Both Israel and India have long sought to counter militant Islamists  in Israel's case, mainly from Gaza and Egypt's Sinai region and, in India's case, mainly from Pakistan. Away from the public eye, India and Israel have been cooperating against the threat through, in part, intelligence sharing, officials say.

"We've discussed in this visit how we can strengthen our two nations in the civilian areas, in security areas, in every area," Netanyahu told the conference.

His trip to India comes just six months after Modi made the first trip by an Indian prime minister to Israel, during which he did not go to Ramallah, seat of the self-ruling Palestinian Authority and a customary stop for leaders visiting the region.

Netanyahu toured the Taj Mahal on Tuesday and will also visit Modi's home state of Gujarat and India's financial capital Mumbai.

He will join an 11-year-old Israeli boy, Moshe Holtzberg, whose parents were murdered by Pakistan-based militants in Mumbai in 2008, for a memorial event at the Indian financial hub's Jewish center where the attack took place.



The boy, who lives with his grandparents in Israel, arrived on Tuesday as a guest of Modi.
Nigeria's army has released 244 Boko Haram suspects who have denounced their membership in the deadly extremist group.

Nigerian army operation commander Maj. Gen. Rogers Nicholas said Tuesday that those released Monday included 118 adult males, 56 women, 19 teens and 51 children. He said they were freed after they were screened and denounced the Nigeria-based insurgency.

The public release at the Maiduguri military barracks was done to mark Nigeria's Armed Forces Remembrance Day.

Boko Haram has killed more than 20,000 people during its eight-year insurgency. Nigeria has arrested thousands of suspected Boko Haram members in recent years. Human rights groups warn many detainees are arbitrarily arrested.

Nigeria's government established a de-radicalization program in 2016 that offers amnesty for those who repudiated the group.
North Korea has issued another salvo in the war of words with U.S. President Donald Trump, calling a recent boast about the size of his "nuclear button" as compared to Kim Jong Un's as the "spasm of a lunatic."

The latest round of rhetorical tit-for-tat began with Kim warning in his New Year's Day speech that the North's nuclear arsenal is a "reality" and that he can launch a war with the push of a button on his desk.

Trump responded with a mocking statement on Twitter, saying he, too, had a nuclear button, but one "much bigger and more powerful" than Kim's, and that "my Button works!"

An editorial issued Tuesday by the Rodong Sinmun, the North's official newspaper, said Trump's tweet simply "reflects the desperate mental state of a loser."

Kim and Trump engaged in an escalating war of words last year amid Pyongyang's continued testing of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, including a sixth nuclear test and a new intercontinental ballistic missile that could potentially reach the U.S. mainland.
Czechs, like fellow voters from Europe to the United States, must weigh promises of a more outward-looking society against protection from the uncertainties of the global economy and immigration when they elect their president later this month.

In the run-off on Jan. 26-27, academic Jiri Drahos will face incumbent political veteran Milos Zeman in a contest that echoes a string of elections in the past two years across the European Union as well as Donald Trump's battle with Hillary Clinton for the White House.

Zeman - a 73-year-old who has courted the far-right in rejecting migrants from Muslim countries while pursuing warmer relations with Russia and China - won the first round with 38.6 percent of the vote, results showed on Saturday.

However, Drahos finished a solid second on 26.6 percent with support from liberal voters attracted by his policies favoring EU integration. The 68-year-old has also won endorsement from most of the other candidates eliminated in the first round.

Czech presidents wield limited executive powers but from their office in Prague Castle they appoint prime ministers and represent the nation abroad.

They can also influence public opinion at a time when Czech political, economic and social debate shows similarities to that in the United States, France and Austria as well as in fellow post-Communist neighbors Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.

Czech voters, like others, are split between those who have benefited from European integration and those who fear the impact of globalization and cultural change.

Tomas Klvana, a professor at NYU in Prague, draws parallels between Zeman's voter appeal and the U.S. president's.

"The pattern is affected by domestic issues but this is similar to Trump, turning to the same voters," he told Reuters.

"On one side there are more successful, better educated, younger people not afraid of opening up, integrating economically... and (on the other) are people who are less successful, less educated, have lower income and live in smaller towns."

Klvana also saw similarities between Zeman and two other central European leaders, right-wing Polish party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who have both picked fights with EU partners.

Political Novice

Drahos won the first round in the capital Prague, which has grown prosperous since the return to a free-market economy.

Zeman won in all other regions, and performed particularly strongly in areas that have struggled since the fall of Communism in 1989.

Drahos, a soft-spoken political novice and professor of chemistry, offers a direct contrast to Zeman, who has used expletives in live debates, relishes drinking and smokes heavily. In politics since the fall of Communism, Zeman also suffers from diabetes and has difficulty walking.

The clash is similar to Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen's fight against a far-right opponent in a 2016 presidential vote, Klvana said.

Beyond the region, French President Emmanuel Macron also offered a liberal vision when he beat far-right candidate Marine Le Pen last year.

Migration

Zeman has won votes with a tough stance on migration. The ethnically homogenous country of 10.6 million is united against accepting large number of refugees, even though few came in 2015 while hundreds of thousands arrived in neighboring Germany.

Like Zeman, Drahos opposes EU quotas that would force member states to share asylum seekers but he would accept a limited number seeking shelter if they met certain criteria.

While Drahos lacks Zeman's charisma among some voters, opinion polls show fewer view the father of two daughters in a negative light than the incumbent.

Drahos, who comes from a small town on the Slovak border, joined the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1976 but missed out on promotion until the 1989 Velvet Revolution as he refused offers to join the ruling Communist Party.

The physical chemist, who plays the piano and has sung in a chamber choir for four decades, eventually chaired the academy from 2009-2017.

Second Round Math

While Drahos trailed Zeman in the first round by 12 percentage points, he immediately won endorsements from five other candidates who collectively won 32.6 percent - making him a slight favorite at betting firms.

"The aim of Zeman's team will be to discourage those voters who are not rock-solid from voting for Drahos," said Marek Vocel, a former campaign leader for Karel Schwarzenberg who lost to Zeman in the last election in 2013. "Migration is a theme that moves almost everybody. I would expect that to feature in the debates."

Zeman has the backing of the Communists as well as the far-right anti-EU and anti-NATO SPD party.

On social media and websites that often carry pro-Russian content, Drahos was accused on Monday of being a weakling who would threaten the country and give in to foreign interests.

Drahos brushed off allegations that he had informed for the Communist secret police, or worse.

"My adversaries are hoping that if they ram down people's throats that I was an StB collaborator or a paedophile, it will stick with someone. I know Milos Zeman will come with blows below the belt," he told daily Mlada fronta Dnes in an interview published on Monday.

Zeman has insisted since declaring his candidacy last March that he was not actively campaigning. But he has had a weekly show on a sympathetic TV channel and traveled the country to meet voters, while posters proclaiming "Zeman Again" hang around the country.

He refused to face his first round rivals on TV, but has agreed to a debate with Drahos for the run-off.

Drahos's biggest declared campaign donations are from self-made businessmen, electronics firm founder Dalibor Dedek and real estate developer Ludek Sekyra, and asset management office BPD Partners. Zeman's donations include 2 million Czech crowns ($96,000) from a firm owned by arms industry entrepreneur Jaroslav Strnad.

Former President Vaclav Klaus, who also holds pro-Russian and anti-EU views, has backed Zeman. After the first round, he thanked Zeman voters for "not bowing to foreign interests," migration and the related "threat of liquidation of European and Czech culture, traditions and values."

($1 = 20.7890 Czech crowns)
Tissue samples removed from 50 deer taken during the opening weekend of the Sage Creek special chronic wasting disease hunt in northern Liberty County have all tested negative for CWD.

Hunters checked in an additional 35 mule deer at the end of the second weekend, bringing the total number of deer sampled to 85.

Mule deer brought in for sampling Jan. 8-14 at the check station in Chester numbered 11 bucks and 23 does. An additional doe was checked in at the Fish, Wildlife and Parks Havre office.

So far, hunters have taken a total of 85 deer in the hunt, which started on Jan. 6. The hunt will run until either Feb. 15 or a 157-deer quota is reached.

The special hunt is designed to gather information about the distribution and prevalence of CWD in deer in an area of Liberty County where a mule deer taken during the 2017 general big game season tested positive for CWD.

Hunters are required to submit their harvested deer at either an FWP check station at the rest stop on U.S. Highway 2 in Chester, 314 E. Washington Ave., or the FWP office in Havre.

CWD is a progressive, fatal neurological disease that affects deer, elk and moose. It has been present for some years in states and Canadian provinces north, east and south of Montana, but was first found in wild deer in the state this fall.

CWD has not been shown to spread to people, pets, livestock or wildlife outside of the deer family. However, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend not consuming meat from an animal known to be infected with CWD.

More information about CWD and the special hunt is available online to http://fwp.mt.gov/cwd.
Mobile apps that help women in the Indian countryside and tiny villages in Japan to open their homes to visitors from across the world are generating incomes, revitalizing remote communities and helping to curb migration to cities.

A women's organization in the western Indian state of Gujarat has tied up with Airbnb, the short-term home rental service, to train rural women to be hosts and list their homes on its site.

A year in, the number of women earning from home sharing has doubled, according to the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), which has about 2 million members, mostly in villages.

"At first, we weren't sure how the women would fare and if people would respond to homestays in these areas," said Reema Nanavaty, a director at SEWA.

"But once they began getting guests, the women invested in upgrading their homes and started using Google Translate to communicate with guests. It has become a significant source of income for them," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Guests to the colorful homes are treated to home-cooked Gujarati food, and can participate in kite flying and garba dancing with sticks in traditional costume, she said.

The partnership will extend to 14 more states, aiming to boost incomes of women in rural areas and help boost tourism in otherwise neglected areas, she said.

Cheap smartphones are also aiding those looking for work, with job matching sites helping even illiterate job seekers from rural Cambodia to India find employers without middlemen who may dupe them.

Airbnb also has partnerships in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan for rural tourism.

In Japan, the Yoshino Cedar House, a collaboration with Tokyo-based architect Go Hasegawa and the local community, came about as a response to shrinking rural populations in the rapidly ageing country.

It was inspired by a host whose listing helped rejuvenate her village, said Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia.

Hundreds of villages and towns "will disappear in the next decade if we do not find ways to create regenerative and adaptive systems", he said via e-mail.

The Cedar House is run by a cooperative of about two dozen community members who take turns at being the host.

Most of the proceeds remain in the community, with a percentage of profits reinvested in local projects, Gebbia said.

"If we can get community-driven empowerment right in Japan, we can find ways of adapting this to other countries," he said.

In India, the 50 rural homes listed on Airbnb are drawing guests from the United States and Europe, Nanavaty said.

"Some of the villages were not even on Google Maps. For the women, it is a new way to make money, be independent," she said.
The United States is assessing the security implications of Russia's latest deployment of S-400 air defenses to Crimea, a U.S. military official said on Tuesday, adding it could give existing Russian defenses more resilience.

"It's not good. It doesn't bode well," a senior U.S. official at the U.S. military's European Command said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We certainly are paying attention to it and what that means, as far as the security of the Black Sea."

Moscow's deployment on Saturday added a second division of S-400 surface-to-air missiles in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, triggering economic sanctions by the European Union and United States.

It deployed its first division of S-400s in the spring of 2017 near the port town of Feodosia. The new division will be based next to the town of Sevastopol and will control the airspace over the border with Ukraine, the RIA news agency reported.

The U.S. military official acknowledged that it was difficult to assess the goal of the deployment. Any air defenses of that kind, however, add Russian military capability to Crimea, providing additional resilience and, potentially, coverage.

"If the intent should arise, it gives opportunities to either defend a little bit more of the Black Sea or to advance from there," the official said, without predicting any future Russian actions.

"We look at it as just another affirmation of their will to use military force."

New fighting

Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists have accused each other in recent days of ramping up attacks in their conflict.

Five Ukrainian servicemen have been killed so far this year and another roughly 20 were wounded, according to Reuters calculations based on daily data from the Ukrainian military.

The new air defense system, designed to defend Russia's borders, can be turned into combat mode in less than five minutes, Interfax news agency quoted Viktor Sevostyanov, a commander with Russia's air forces, as saying.

Russian officials have criticized a U.S. decision announced in December to provide Ukraine with defensive weaponry, which officials said included Javelin anti-tank missiles.

Washington has argued in the past that such weapons cannot effectively be used to take territory and U.S. Marine General Joseph Dunford said during a trip to Brussels this week that the move was strictly defensive.

"Our government believes that a nation has the right to defend itself and the support that we've provided to Ukraine was directly focused on areas where they had capability gaps," Dunford said.
Foreign ministers from 20 nations meeting in Vancouver in regard to North Korea say sanctions pressure must continue against the country until it abandons its nuclear weapons program.



Tuesday's ministerial talks in Canada come just days after a mistaken missile alert sparked panic in Hawaii, a sharp reminder of the fears over North Korea's nuclear aggression.



U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the gathering of like-minded nations sends North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a unified message: "We will not accept a nuclear-armed North Korea."



The top U.S. diplomat urged China and Russia, which were not invited, to fully implement United Nations sanctions against North Korea.



"Additionally, we must increase the costs of the regime's behavior to the point that North Korea must come to the table for credible negotiations," Tillerson said during the opening of the talks.



He added that North Korea's missile tests pose a real threat to civilian air traffic, citing an example that lives of an estimated 152,110 people on 716 international flights could have been put in danger by North Korea's most recent missile launch back on November 28 of last year.

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland told those gathering in Vancouver that nations must improve the effectiveness of existing sanctions.



State Department Policy Planning Director Brian Hook said ahead of the meeting that leaders want to show that diplomatic paths to resolve the situation are available, while another official said there will be no talk of military options.



North Korea has defied U.N. calls to refrain from nuclear and ballistic missile tests. November test of an intercontinental ballistic missile spiked tensions and sparked a war of words between U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.



Those tensions have eased somewhat in recent weeks, and representatives from North Korea and South Korea held their first formal talks in two years.



Chinese state media reported Tuesday that President Xi Jinping told Trump in a phone call there must be efforts to maintain that momentum.



Those attending the Vancouver talks include those nations that supported South Korea in the 1950-53 Korean War, as well as Japan and South Korea itself.



Stephen Noerper, senior policy director at the New York-based Korea Society, said it would be good if China and Russia were involved, but that those nations have sidestepped the sanctions against North Korea.



"It's China and Russia who would be the biggest violators in terms of what we've seen by way of transfers at sea of oils involving North Korean ships, and there have also been reports of Russia offloading coal, turning off its beacons and then going into North Korea," Noerper told VOA.
A mid-May date proposed by prosecutors for the trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and an associate is too soon, a federal judge said Tuesday, signaling that the politically charged proceeding could be pushed back to later in the year.

Prosecutors for special counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting the Russia investigation, had indicated in court papers filed last week that they would seek a trial date of May 14 for Manafort and former business partner Rick Gates. They told U.S. District Court Judge Amy Jackson on Tuesday that they needed about three weeks to try the case.

But defense attorneys for Manafort and Gates argued that Mueller's office had not presented them with all the evidence it possessed against their clients and that the proposed date would not give them enough time to go through everything.

"We need the time and are the least prepared of anyone here," an attorney for Gates said.

Judge concurs

Jackson agreed, saying the trial could be pushed back to as late as September or October.

"The discovery needs to get done and motions have to be filed," Jackson said during a pre-trial hearing  known as a status conference  meeting with prosecutors and defense attorneys.

In October, a federal grand jury indicted Manafort and Gates on 12 counts of conspiracy, money laundering, making false statements and other charges in connection with their lobbying for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russia political party. They've pleaded not guilty.

The charges are unrelated to the Mueller investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and allegations of collusion between then-candidate Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia.

Manafort remains under house confinement. But Jackson later issued an order releasing Gates from home confinement, saying he had complied with her bond requirements.

Manafort's attorneys filed a civil lawsuit this month against Mueller and the Justice Department, challenging the special counsel's appointment and seeking the dismissal of the indictment. A prosecutor told Jackson that the special counsel intended to file a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the "proper procedure" to challenge the charges is through her court. Jackson gave the two sides until Friday to decide whether they want that case transferred and reassigned to her.

The parties agreed to hold their next status conference with Jackson on February 14.

Guilty pleas

In addition to bringing charges against Manafort and Gates, Mueller's team has secured guilty pleas from two other former Trump associates.

In early October, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy consultant for the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty of lying to federal agents about his secret efforts to secure a meeting between Trump and Russian officials.

In December, former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement to the FBI about a series of phone conversations he had with Russia's former ambassador to Washington during Trump's transition.

Both are cooperating with Mueller's team.

The special counsel has interviewed several current and former White House officials in connection with the Russia investigation. The New York Times reported Tuesday that former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon had been subpoenaed to appear before the federal grand jury investigating the Russian election meddling.

Bannon on Tuesday met behind closed doors with members of the House Intelligence Committee as part of the panel's own investigation of the Russian election meddling.
U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Democrat lawmakers Tuesday, saying their demands to include protections for young undocumented immigrants in a bill that would prevent a government shut-down this week would cost the military.

The White House-congressional talks about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are linked to urgent meetings this week about funding to keep the government operating beyond Friday midnight, when current spending authorization expires.

Democratic leaders have said they most likely will oppose a measure that does not protect young immigrants known as Dreamers, including the nearly 800,000 who entered the United States unauthorized and received protection from deportation through DACA since its creation five years ago.

This has raised the ire of Trump, who again insisted the spending bill must satisfy his demands for tighter border security.

Deportation status

Even if legislators do not approve a program to protect the immigrants, deporting them will not be a top federal government priority, according to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

"It's not going to be a priority of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement," Nielsen told CBS News Tuesday. "If you are a DACA that's compliant with your registration, meaning you haven't committed a crime and you in fact are registered, you are not a priority of enforcement for ICE should the program end."

Despite Nielsens remarks, Trump has greatly expanded the categories of people who can be prioritized for deportation, a move immigration advocates say puts DACA recipients who lose their status at risk.

Nielsen's comments were made as the battle over an immigration agreement has been complicated by Trump's controversial remarks at White House meeting last Thursday.

Race issue raised

During an Oval Office meeting Tuesday with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Trump said he wants the U.S. to draw immigrants from nations around the world.

"I want them from everywhere," he said in response to a reporter's question at the end of the meeting about whether he wanted more immigrants from Norway.

Trump did not respond when asked if he wanted people to enter the country from "just Caucasian or white countries."

At a White House meeting last week, Trump reportedly referred to immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa as coming from "s---hole countries" and said he wanted more immigrants from countries such as Norway.

During testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Nielsen said she "did not hear" Trump use a certain vulgarity to describe African countries but added she doesn't "dispute the president was using tough language."

Democratic Sen. Dick Durban has not wavered from his allegations of Trump's profanity during last week's meeting in the Oval Office. "I stand by every word," he told reporters.

In an exclusive CNN interview that aired Tuesday, Durbin said, "We talked about the color of the skin of the people coming into the United States."

At one point after news surfaced about his remark, Trump tweeted, "Never said anything derogatory about Haiti. Made up by Dems. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings - unfortunately no trust."

Trumps reported remark has fueled Democrats' charges he is a racist. On Sunday, Trump denied he is a racist, telling reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in the state of Florida, "I am the least racist person you will ever interview."

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders continued the narrative Tuesday, saying claims Trump is racist are "outrageous."

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday on CBSs Late Show that Trump could demonstrate he is not a racist by signing an immigration bill that would protect young undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Trump is tying an extension of DACA, a temporary program championed by his predecessor Barack Obama, to funding for a wall he wants built along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Building a wall to stop further illegal immigration was a campaign promise Trump made during his successful 2016 run to the White House.

Many Democrats want extending DACA to be a separate issue from building a wall  something they oppose.

Last September, Trump signed an executive order ending DACA, but gave Congress until March 5 to weigh in on the issue.
Fighting in Ukraine that erupted in 2014 escalated the spread of HIV throughout the country as millions of infected people were uprooted by violence, a study published Monday found.

Conflict-affected areas such as Donetsk and Luhansk, two large cities in the east of Ukraine, were the main exporters of the HIV virus to other parts of the country such as Kyiv and Odessa, the report found.

Ukraine has among the highest HIV rates in Europe, with an estimated 220,000 infected in a country of about 45 million.

An international team of scientists led by Oxford University and Public Health England analyzed viral migration patterns and found a correlation between the war-related movement of 1.7 million people and the spread of HIV.

"The war changed a lot of things in Ukraine and the HIV epidemic is one of them," said lead author Tetyana Vasylyeva of Oxford University's Zoology department.

"When we conducted our analysis, we were able to show that the viral spread from the East to the rest of the country had been intensified after the war."

The HIV epidemic has shifted from being associated with drug injections in the 1990s to most new infections now being spread by sexual transmission, Vasylyeva told Reuters.

Half of HIV-infected people in Ukraine are unaware of their infection status and around 40 percent of newly diagnosed people are in the later stages of the disease, she added.

Almost 37 million people worldwide have the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

Since the first cases of HIV were reported more than 35 years ago, 35 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses, according to the United Nations AIDS program (UNAIDS), which is seeking to end the public health threat by 2030, in line with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

A Russia-backed insurgency erupted in Ukraine's industrialized east in 2014 and the bloodshed has continued despite a cease-fire deal brokered by Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine.

More than 10,000 people have been killed in the conflict, with casualties reported on a near-daily basis.

Russia denies accusations from Ukraine and NATO that it supports the rebels with troops and weapons.

The health study also found an alarmingly high resistance, compared to the rest of Europe, to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) a common treatment for HIV, said senior author and medical virologist, Gkikas Magiorkinis.

"It's a worrying development and the policymakers should be alerted because it's going to be very, very difficult to use it [PrEP] in the near future in Ukraine," Magiorkinis told Reuters.

Ukraine must scale-up interventions to prevent further transmissions of HIV, and seek international support to prevent a new public health tragedy, he said.
At least one policeman has been injured and several protesters have been detained after scuffles outside the Ukrainian parliament in Kyiv, the capital.

Several hundred people were rallying on Tuesday outside the Supreme Rada to protest a new law governing the areas in the country's east under separatist control. The conflict between the Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government troops has been raging since 2014, killing more than 10,000 people.



Ukrainian police say the protesters outside the Rada used pepper spray and pelted police with stones and tires.



The protesters were led by Semyon Semyonchenko, former commander of a volunteer battalion in eastern Ukraine suspected of human rights violations.

Semyonchenko and his supporters criticize the new law as being too lenient on separatist leaders.
Ukraine's central bank said on Tuesday an investigation into the country's largest lender, PryvatBank, which was taken into state control in 2016, showed it had been used for money-laundering and shady deals over the course of at least a decade.

One of the bank's former main shareholders, Ihor Kolomoisky, dismissed the report as nonsense, but a central bank deputy governor said the findings had been passed to prosecutors for use in a possible criminal investigation.

The allegations of the central bank, which echo those it made at the time of the bank's nationalization and follow a probe it commissioned by the global investigation firm Kroll, are part of a long-running dispute over PryvatBank that has spawned hundreds of legal cases.

"The investigation has identified that PryvatBank was subjected to a large-scale and coordinated fraud over at least a 10-year period ending in December 2016, which resulted in the bank suffering a loss of at least $5.5 billion," the central bank said in a statement.

The bank was nationalized as part of an International Monetary Fund-backed drive to clean up the financial system.

Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk has said the resulting legal fights will be a litmus test for the effectiveness of law enforcement.

The central bank, which asked Kroll and other international companies to dig into PryvatBank's finances, said the investigation had revealed that 95 percent of corporate loans extended by the lender during the period had gone to companies linked to the former owners and their affiliates.

"It is nonsense, which there is no point commenting on," ex-shareholder Kolomoisky told online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda in response to the central bank's statement.

"The main question is where was the money withdrawn to and when? All the rest is fiction," he said.

He has launched lawsuits to challenge the nationalization, including a move to prevent Ukraine cooperating with external companies to investigate the reasons for PryvatBank's insolvency.

The former owners have long disputed the central bank's assessment of PryvatBank's finances and say it was nationalized for political reasons.

Gennadiy Bogolyubov, the other main former shareholder, has previously said the Ukrainian authorities declared PryvatBank insolvent on grounds that were fabricated and unfounded, creating an artificial hole in the balance sheet. He did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the latest development.

The results of the Kroll audit have been passed to prosecutors for use in a possible criminal investigation into the deals made before its nationalization, central bank deputy governor Kateryna Rozhkova said at a briefing.

We received assurances from the general prosecutor that the results of the forensic audit were received by the general prosecutor's office for use in carrying out a criminal investigation, she said.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday there is a "window of opportunity" to avoid war on the Korean Peninsula, and he urged the parties to seize it.

"I believe war is avoidable," Guterres said in response to a question at a news conference. "What I'm worried is, that I'm not yet sure that peace is guaranteed," he added.

"We know the limitations of what we can do," Guterres admitted. "But we are totally committed to contribute to the key actors to be able to engage in the kind of talks that can allow for the problem to be solved in line with the resolutions of the Security Council."

Last month, Guterres sent his political chief, former American diplomat Jeffrey Feltman, to Pyongyang for the first in-depth exchange of political views between North Korea and the United Nations in eight years.

South Korea's U.N. ambassador Cho Tae-yul welcomed the intervention during the secretary-general's Tuesday briefing, saying the visit helped pave the way for the current inter-Korean talks. Those discussions are focused on the Winter Olympics to be held next month in the South Korean city of Pyeongchang. North Korea has decided to participate.

"I hope that Pyeongchang will provide a window of opportunity to defuse tensions on the Korean Peninsula, improve inter-Korean relations and eventually lead to denuclearization," South Korean envoy Cho said. "It is yet premature to expect that this will be the case, but we must keep this moment alive and keep patient and persistent."

Cho said Seoul would work closely with U.N. member states, especially those on the Security Council, to achieve these goals, and he urged the international community to continue to speak in a unified voice regarding North Korea.

The U.N. chief announced Tuesday that he would attend the Pyeongchang opening ceremony.
The U.S. Justice Department says it will take what Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the "rare step" of asking the Supreme Court to overturn a California ruling barring the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The move is "rare" because the administration acted before current legal proceedings in a San Francisco appeals court have concluded.

Sessions explained his move by saying it defies "law and common sense" to allow one federal judge, William Alsup in California, to decide the DACA issue for the entire country.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra responded to the move in a statement Tuesday saying he is "confident the appellate courts will see the logic and justice behind the district court's issuance of the preliminary injunction," which protects the program until the matter is decided in the courts.

Sessions said that former acting Homeland Security chief Elaine Duke "acted within her discretion to rescind" the DACA program "with an orderly wind down" to give Congress a chance to decide whether to protect the immigrants from deportation.

Earlier Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Democrat lawmakers, saying their demands to protect DACA would force a government shutdown this week that would cost the military.

Trump last week rejected a bipartisan effort from six Republican and Democratic senators to protect the immigrants from deportation and improve security along the southern U.S. border with Mexico. At the same White House meeting, according to numerous accounts, Trump questioned why the U.S. should admit more immigrants from "s---hole countries" like Haiti, El Salvador and African nations.

Democratic leaders have said they most likely will oppose a measure that does not protect young immigrants known as Dreamers, including the nearly 800,000 who entered the United States unauthorized and received protection from deportation through DACA since its creation five years ago.

Alsup last week ruled in favor of a group of individuals and institutions, including the University of California, who sued the government seeking to block the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, saying it should remain active until legal challenges are resolved.

When Alsup ruled against him, Trump said the ruling "just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is" when opponents of his actions often file suit against them in western U.S. courts "and almost always win before being reversed by higher courts."



Trump revoked the program last September but gave Congress until March 5 to weigh in on the issue.

Trump last week rejected a bipartisan effort from six Republican and Democratic senators to protect the immigrants from deportation and improve security along the southern U.S. border with Mexico. At the same White House meeting, according to numerous accounts, Trump questioned why the U.S. should admit more immigrants from "s---hole countries" like Haiti, El Salvador and African nations.
Montanas venerable sled dog race has a new name and a sponsor with a checkered recent past.

The 33rd version of the Race to the Sky, which starts in Lincoln on Saturday Feb. 10, is now the Young Living Race to the Sky after reaching an agreement with an international marketer of essential oils based in Lehi, Utah.

Founder Gary Young, 68, has entered a team in the 300-mile race that starts and ends in Lincoln. His son, 17-year-old Jacob, will try the 100-mile junior race from Lincoln to Seeley Lake.

Gary and Mary Young started Young Living in 1994. According to its website, the company has grown to become the world leader in essential oils and wellness solutions with offices on five continents and farms around the world.

But the company has also been in hot water lately. Young Living was sentenced in September in U.S. District Court to pay $760,000 for illegally trafficking some 86 tons of rosewood oil worth between $3.5 million and $9 million from Peru. Peruvian law prohibits harvesting and exporting timber, including rosewood, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, which prosecuted the case.

Young Living was also cited for exporting spikenard oil harvested in Nepal to the United Kingdom.

The DOJ report said from 2010 to 2014 several Young Living employees and contractors harvested, transported and distilled the protected rosewood, importing some of the resulting oil to the United States through Ecuador.

The company said it learned of the activities at the end of 2014 and hired an outside investigator to look into it, disclosing its preliminary findings to the government in July 2015. Law enforcement offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Inspector General, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Homeland Security then joined in their own investigation.

The natural resource violations were "intentional and substantial," Utahs U.S. Attorney General said in September. But he added Young Living was to be commended for the decision to investigate and voluntarily disclose its findings, and to cooperate in the ensuing government probe.

"The company didnt live up to our standards in this instance, Young Living said in a statement at the time. For that we apologize and promise to do better.

A request for comment by the Missoulian had not been returned from Young Living by Monday evening.

Sponsorship of the Race to the Sky comes through Young Livings philanthropic arm, the D. Gary Young Foundation, which contributes to relief efforts around the world. Most recently the foundation donated $25,000 in matching funds to assist relief efforts in Mexico after a devastating earthquake in September.

Gary Young became a sled dog racing enthusiast in recent years and was interested in the Race to the Sky through his Montana mentor, Jessie Royer of Darby. A veteran of the Alaska Iditarod, Royer is the lone three-time winner of Race to the Sky. She's entered again this year after skipping it last year to prepare for her 15th Iditarod, where she placed fifth.

The Race to the Sky 300 is an Iditarod qualifier, and Young plans to use it as such, according to race secretary Pam Beckstrom.

Hes had the goal of running Iditarod for several years, Beckstrom said. He absolutely adores the dogs, and he just thinks the sport is the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Last January Young completed his first long-distance race, Alaska's Tustumena 200. He trained for it with Mitch Seavey, who went on to win his third Iditarod title in March. Seavey is a spokesman for Young Living Essential Oils MindWise, a brain health-supporting serum.

Beckstrom said the Race to the Sky has enjoyed lucrative sponsorships in the past through the likes of the Liz Claiborne-Art Orgenberg Foundation, Iams Pet Food and Eagle Pet Foods.

They were major players in our race, but they were never considered a name sponsor, she said.
Police in Uruguay are investigating whether a former Guantanamo detainee who was granted refuge there is a member of the extremist Islamic State group.

The alleged militant is a Syrian national named Abu Wa'el Dhiab, also known as Jihad Diyab, released in 2014 from the controversial U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His accuser  who Dhiab claims owes him thousands of dollars  is Omar Khader Attalla, a Palestinian-born merchant. Both men live in Rivera, a department in northern Uruguay near Brazil.

Authorities began investigating last month, after the men filed complaints against each other.

Dhiab was among six detainees transferred from Guantanamo to Uruguay for resettlement in 2014. The six  mostly Syrians like Dhiab, plus a Tunisian and a Palestinian  had been held since 2002 for suspected ties to the jihadi group al-Qaida but never were charged.

Oversight responsibilities?

Dhiab, who was force-fed to break a hunger strike while at Guantanamo, repeatedly has sought transfer to an Arab country. Since his release in Montevideo, he has traveled to neighboring Argentina and Brazil, as well as Venezuela and Morocco, raising questions about oversight.

Last July, Dhiab was apprehended at Morocco's airport and deported for carrying a fake Tunisian passport, as the Associated Press reported then. In 2016, he turned up at the Syrian consulate in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, before he was sent back to Uruguay. Uruguay's foreign ministry said at the time that Dhiab's refugee status allowed him to leave the country.

The United States won't transfer a Guantanamo detainee without "appropriate security measures," Pentagon spokeswoman Sarah Higgins told VOA.

"The United States coordinates with the receiving country regarding appropriate security measures and to ensure that these transfers are consistent with our humane treatment policy," Higgins, a Navy commander, said Friday from Guantanamo, where she was visiting.

"It is a different arrangement depending on the receiving country; there are no standard guidelines. Until a country agrees to provide appropriate security measures and to treat the detainee humanely, we will not transfer the detainee to that country," she said.

But a former U.S. State Department security official told VOA last week that the hundreds of released Guantanamo detainees receive minimal oversight. "Their supervision is largely left at the discretion of local authorities," said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because he still conducts sensitive work for the department.

Guantanamo detainees sue

Of 714 detainees released or transferred from Guantanamo, beginning with President George W. Bush's administration, almost 17 percent  or 121 individuals  were "confirmed of re-engaging" in terrorist activities, the National Intelligence director's office reported last March. Another 12 percent  or 87  were suspected of doing so.

Forty-one inmates remain at Guantanamo. Last Thursday, on the 16th anniversary of the prison's opening, 11 of them sued the Trump administration in U.S. District Court in Washington. Their lawyers claim that holding the men in "perpetual detention" without charging them violates U.S. law.

IS affiliation alleged

The new investigation into Dhiab began after Khader Attalla spoke with police on December 13, claiming that Dhiab had threatened him and claimed to be a member of IS. Uruguayan federal officials are investigating the possible affiliation, Rivera's government prosecutor, Bettina Ramos, told Montevideo's Radio Carve.

Ramos said investigators also were looking into how Dhiab could have acquired the $30,000 that he alleged merchant Khader Attalla owed or stole from him. The former Guantanamo inmates in Uruguay have struggled financially and received government aid.

Dhiab's attorney, Juan Segura, told El Pais news that his client denied Khader Attalla's allegations. Seguro also said that Dhiab had gotten the $30,000, in money transfers over several months, from relatives in Syria and Turkey to "help him in a venture ... to sell merchandise."

Khader Attalla's lawyer, Mariano Camacho, said Dhiab had owed her client the money for various services, Uruguay's El Pais newspaper reported.

Jon B. Eisenberg, a California-based attorney who had represented Dhiab at Guantanamo, questioned the new allegation of terrorist ties.

"It's a very easy accusation to make," Eisenberg told VOA in a phone call last week, acknowledging he hadn't spoken with Dhiab since September 2016. "It's similar to accusations that the U.S. government made against Mr. Dhiab, yet they eventually released him from custody."

Leonardo Luzzi reported from Montevideo. Martin Arostegui, who has reported extensively in South America, contributed from Barcelona. VOA's Carla Babb and Carol Guensburg also contributed to this report from Washington.
The new U.S. Embassy in London, denigrated last week by President Donald Trump as too expensive and poorly located, opened its doors to the public Tuesday for the first time.



The gleaming embassy, in the formerly industrial Nine Elms neighborhood in south London, replaces the embassy in Grosvenor Square that had for decades been associated with the U.S. presence in the United Kingdom. That building has been sold to a Qatari government investment fund planning to turn it into a luxury hotel.



U.S. officials say it would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade security at the older building and bring it up to modern safety standards.



Trump tweeted last week that he would not come to London to open the embassy because the new embassy represented a poor investment.



The president's tweet read: "Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for "peanuts," only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!"



He blamed predecessor Barack Obama, although the project was announced in October 2008 during the presidency of George W. Bush.



U.S. officials say the new embassy cost $1 billion (1.38 billion pounds) and was paid for entirely with money raised by the sale of other U.S. government properties in London.



The new building, with its distinctive cube shape, is nearly twice as large as the Grosvenor Square facility. It is the single most expensive embassy building ever built by the United States.



Robert Johnson, appointed by Trump as U.S. ambassador to Britain, called the new energy-efficient embassy a "bargain" during a pre-opening tour for journalists last month. He said the embassy, which does not have a perimeter fence, is both welcoming and secure.



There were no ceremonies to mark the official opening of the facility Tuesday.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has called for an investigation into Roman Catholic priests he says have made comments critical of the government.



Maduro said in an address Monday that church officials may have committed hate crimes, an accusation he frequently levels at government critics.



He called on the pro-government chief prosecutor and Supreme Court to investigate.



Venezuela sits atop the world's largest oil reserves but is enduring an economic after nearly two decades of socialist rule.



Maduro didn't directly name any priests.



The newspaper El National, however, says he alluded to Bishop Victor Hugo Basabe of San Felipe recently praying for the liberation of Venezuela from the "corrupt plague" that sees citizens eating from garbage.



The newspaper says Bishop Antonio Lopez Castillo of Barquisimeto drew cheers from thousands at a Mass when he asked that Venezuela be saved from corruption.
Officials in Venezuela confirmed Tuesday that a rebellious police officer who led a brazen helicopter attack in Caracas last year was among those killed in a violent shootout with security forces.



Oscar Perez was among the seven who died fighting against police and soldiers Monday in a small mountain community outside of Caracas, Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said.



Two police officers were killed and eight others gravely injured, he said.



"The terrorist acts committed by this terrorist cell showed the destabilizing objectives that they were pursuing," Reverol said.



Opposition lawmakers and human rights groups called for a transparent investigation into the deaths after video images showed Perez shouting over gunfire that they wished to surrender.



"We're going to turn ourselves in!" Perez said in the video.



A former police officer, action-movie star and pilot, Perez leaped into the spotlight in June, when he stole a helicopter and used it to lob grenades and fire at two government buildings in Caracas. Nobody was killed in the attack.



Perez, 36, had been one of Venezuela's most wanted fugitives ever since, periodically posting videos on Instagram calling upon Venezuelans to take to the streets against what he called President Nicolas Maduro's tyrannical government.



Perez claimed that he was fighting for Venezuela's freedom from a government that is starving its people. He garnered tens of thousands of followers online and has piqued the curiosity of Venezuelans who either hail him as hero, condemn him as a criminal or question if he might be a ruse to support Maduro's assertion that the nation is under attack by opposition conspirators.



In December, Perez posted videos showing him and a small armed band taking over a military outpost and smashing a portrait of Maduro with his foot. Perez and the assailants berated several detained guardsmen for doing nothing to help their fellow citizens.



Perez surfaced online again early Monday in videos  blood dripping across his face  and holed up in a mountainside house. Perez shouted over a spray of gunfire that the group wished to surrender, but that the police outside were set on killing them.



"I want to ask Venezuela not to lose heart  fight, take to the streets," he said. "It is time for us to be free, and only you have the power now."

Reverol said that an intense search finally led security forces to the house. Perez's group opened fire first, requiring a response from authorities, he said.



Troops arrested another six people identified as members, collaborators and financiers of the group. They also confiscated rifles, smoke grenades, military uniforms, ammunition, and a pickup, officials said.



Mystery surrounded Perez's fate for nearly 24 hours as officials remained silent until the announcement on state television that he was among the dead.



The Venezuelan Program of Education and Action on Human Rights has called for the government to provide a full report. The opposition-controlled National Assembly early Tuesday formed a special commission to conduct its own investigation.



"How is it possible that while surrendering, they riddled him with bullets?" said Delsa Solorzano, National Assembly deputy assigned to head the commission.



Solorzano called for the government turn the bodies over to relatives rather than cremate them, allowing for a transparent investigation.
Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, on a visit to Washington, has offered the United States enhanced strategic cooperation on some of the most vexing geopolitical issues, as well as stronger economic ties.

In meetings with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House Tuesday, Nazarbayev suggested his strategically located former Soviet republic could be a valuable ally on issues from ranging from Afghanistan to Russia to the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.

"You probably know that Kazakhstan was a country that possessed the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world, but then we voluntarily decided to give up nuclear weapons, Nazarbayev said during a joint appearance with Trump. Kazakhstan has the moral right to talk to the nations that are seeking nuclear weapons. And this is the way we are talking to Iran and this is the way we will be talking to North Korea."

Calling Kazakhstan a valued partner in our efforts to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons, Trump said he and Nazarbayev were determined to prevent the Pyongyang regime from threatening the world with nuclear devastation.

During the visit, Nazarbayev also announced business deals with U.S. companies worth $7.5 billion, including contracts to purchase Boeing aircraft and to assemble 900 General Electric locomotives in Kazakhstan.

Nazarbayevs visit comes as Kazakhstan holds the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council. Kazakhstan is the first Central Asian country to be elected to a two-year term on the Security Council, and Nazarbayev will visit the United Nations during his U.S. tour.

Strategic location

David A. Merkel, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and former deputy assistant secretary of state and director of the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration, says Kazakhstans strategic position in the same neighborhood as Russia, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran gives Nazarbayev and Trump a lot to talk about.

This is a time of opportunity for the reintegration of Afghanistan into the neighborhood, for which Kazakhstan as the leader of the Central Asian neighborhood is important, Merkel said. Our complicated relationship with Pakistan would have the administration focusing on other countries in the region and working with other countries to try to have a better working relationship among them.

In a VOA interview, Merkel explained that in the 26 years since independence, Kazakhstan has grown into the most strategically and economically important of the five former Soviet Central Asian republics,

Kazakhstan has enjoyed the greatest stability of any of the five, he said. It has the advantage of hydrocarbon wealth, which it has invested well. It has focused a lot of attention on educating its youth and is now looking toward focusing more attention on diversifying the economy.

Nazarbayev has ruled Kazakhstan since before it was an independent country, and his authoritarian leadership style has changed little since the days when the country was part of the Soviet Union. He won the last presidential election in 2015 with nearly 98 percent of the vote.

Human rights groups and the U.S. State Department have been sharply critical of the countrys rights record.

A recent Human Rights Watch assessment is that Kazakhstan "heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech, and religion, and torture remains a serious problem, while Amnesty International says authorities use ... criminal prosecution to target social media users and independent journalists."

Merkel acknowledges Nazarbayevs flawed leadership, but says Kazakhstan is among countries in the region that have shown the greatest movement toward democracy.

Nazarbayev has legitimacy in the country, Merkel said. Decisions that are made in Kazakhstan are made with an eye toward what is possible in the neighborhood, and its important for us to recognize the strategic value of his leadership, the strategic value of the country.

Trump and Nazarbayev first met in Saudi Arabia last May, on the sidelines of the Arab Islamic summit. They spoke by telephone in October, at which time the Kazakh side reported that Trump had invited Nazarbayev to the White House.

The United States was the first country to recognize Kazakhstans independence after the Soviet Union fell in 1991.
The World Bank has joined the International Monetary Fund in criticizing a Ukrainian draft law to create an anti-corruption court, the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda reported on Monday, citing a letter from the lender to the presidential administration.



In response to international pressure to speed up the process, President Petro Poroshenko submitted a new draft law to parliament in December, but the IMF and now the World Bank say the legislation is not in line with recommendations from the Venice Commission, a European rights and legal watchdog.



Ukraine's Western backers have long called for the authorities to establish an independent court to handle corruption cases. Slow progress has delayed the disbursement of foreign loans.



The World Bank's country director, Satu Kahkonen, has written to the presidential administration to express the bank's concerns about parts of the bill, Ukrainska Pravda said, publishing what it said was the text of the letter in full.



"We believe that the draft law requires the following revisions to bring it into alignment with the recommendations of the Venice Commission and satisfy the requirements of the World Bank's estimated $800 million Policy-Based Guarantee to support key reforms in Ukraine," she said, in a letter dated January 15.



Among its recommendations, it says the court's future jurisdiction needs to be better aligned with that of anti-corruption investigators and prosecutors.



The World Bank in Ukraine did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Ukrainska Pravda report.



The letter cited echoes one sent by the IMF to the president's office earlier in January which warned that the draft law did not guarantee the independence of the court.



The presidential administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.



On Monday, in response to the IMF's letter, it denied the law was not in line with Venice Commission recommendations and said the authorities had the political will to create an independent anti-corruption court.



Since its 2013-14 pro-European uprising, Ukraine has received $8.4 billion from the IMF and over $5 billion from the World Bank among other backers, helping it to return to growth of over 2 percent in 2016.



However the disbursement of funding was held up last year over perceived backtracking on reform commitments that raised doubts about the authorities' will to eliminate corruption and modernize the economy.





Reporting by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Alison Williams.
Federal ocean managers say it might be time to move the East Coast population of the world's largest turtle from the United States' list of endangered animals.

An arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has received a petition from a fishing group asking that the Northwest Atlantic Ocean's leatherback sea turtles be listed as "threatened," but not endangered, under the Endangered Species Act. The giant reptiles, which can weigh 2,000 pounds, would remain protected under federal law, but their status would be moved down a notch.

NOAA officials have said the agency has reviewed the petition from New Jersey-based Blue Water Fishermen's Association and found "substantial scientific and commercial information" that the move might be warranted. The agency now has about eight months to make a decision about the status of the turtles.

Leatherbacks live all over the world's oceans and have been listed as endangered by the U.S. since 1970. Deciding whether the listing should be changed will require determining the stability of the population, said Jennifer Schultz, a fisheries biologist with NOAA Fisheries.

"We'll look at scientific papers, we look at the best available scientific and commercial data," she said. "And then we'll say, `What does the status look like? How are they doing?"'

The fishing group that requested the change wants the Northwestern Atlantic's leatherback population to be considered a distinct segment of the population. That segment would include all of the leatherbacks that nest on beaches in the eastern U.S. states. But NOAA Fisheries is going to look at the status of the turtles worldwide, said Angela Somma, chief of endangered species division with NOAA Fisheries.

Blue Water Fishermen's Association requested the change of listing in part to spur new research into the status of the leatherback population, said Ernie Panacek, a past president of the organization. Data about species such as sea turtles and marine mammals play a role in crafting fishing regulations, and fishermen fear the government is using outdated data about leatherbacks, he said.

"I get a little frustrated in the fact that they are making regulations without scientific data in front of them," he said. "The more turtles there are, the more interactions you are bound to have with them."

The leatherback sea turtle has been the subject of intense interest from conservation groups over the years. It's listing as endangered by the U.S. predates the modern Endangered Species Act that was enacted in 1973. The Costa Rica-based Leatherback Trust, an international nonprofit group, describes them as "ancient creatures celebrated in creation myths belonging to diverse cultures around the world."

International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the leatherback sea turtle as "vulnerable," which is one notch above "endangered" on the IUCN's scale. It's one of the largest reptiles on Earth, feeding mostly on jellyfish, which has left them at risk to plastic in the ocean, which can kill them if they ingest it. They are also notable for being the deepest diving and most migratory of all sea turtles, and for their lack of a bony shell.

NOAA is collecting information and comments on the subject until February 5.
Authorities in Senegal have arrested 22 people following a massacre in the country's southern Casamance region where the suspects had been looking for firewood in the forest.

Abdou Sane, president of the youth association in the village where the arrests took place, said Monday that authorities arrived at Toubacouta at dawn Sunday.

Officials said four of the suspects have previously been convicted of wood smuggling charges and sentenced to a month in prison.

Authorities initially feared that the killings of 14 people in the forest earlier this month were connected to a separatist group. Rebels in Casamance have sought independence for decades. However, officials now believe the deaths could be linked to the region's illegal timber industry.

The violence was the worst to hit the restive region in years.
Uganda is mulling over the idea of creating its own social media platforms. But social media users and government critics see this as a potential effort to control free expression.

Facebook and Twitter should brace themselves for competition from Uganda. With no name yet or date on when the new services will be operational, the Uganda Communications Commission is planning to launch its own social media platforms.

Commission Director Godfrey Mutabazi says Uganda has many young people who have come up with innovations and applications that can be deployed to serve the population.

There is open information for everything. We have got over almost 70 percent penetration," he said. "We are moving into digital era, data communication. We are hope that by the end of this year 20-25 percent, maybe 30 percent of Ugandans will be on data communication. So we shall access the information, education-wise, research, name it, will be available.

Nicholas Opiyo executive director of Chapter Four Uganda, a local civil liberties organization, says Uganda is not seeking to develop its own social media space because it appreciates the innovative power of social media. He fears a darker purpose.

One I dont believe they can do it, but if they want to do it, its not for the best of intentions," he said. "Recent studies have shown that the government of Uganda is now involved in active filtering of particular information. Namely; information about corruption, information about same sex relations, critical government policies on the first family, thats what they are trying to do. Thats what they are trying to do, because the biggest threat to this government now, is an informed citizenry."

In 2016, the Ugandan government shut down social media twice  on Election Day and during President Yoweri Musevenis swearing in ceremony. For social media users like Jackie Kemigisa, a move by the government regulator to set up its own social media is cause to worry.

As a person who uses social media and whose source of employment, everything that I do is online, it was a horrible idea. At first I thought it was a joke. So, counting on the sad part of it that they dont have the money, and if they do, well then, Ugandans will have to re-strategize, go back to the drawing board and see how we can still fight for our freedoms, said Kemigisa.

Critics say a social media platform controlled by the government will put Uganda in the same league as countries such as Iran, China and North Korea. But the Uganda Communications Commission has described those who see this innovation as eroding freedom of speech as patronizing. The government agency insists they just want to keep hate speech out of Ugandan social media, and says the new platforms are going to be positive.




It was a young crowd at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally held Monday evening in Caras Park.

More than 100 people huddled under the Caras Park tent braving the wind chill while high schoolers Whitney Hansberry and Vegas Longtree-Bearcub introduced the celebration of young people who, they said, are doing good work and inspiring their peers.

All of the speakers and artists at the Empower Montana-sponsored event were under 30.

Meshayla Cox, a senior at the University of Montana and the president of the Black Student Union, spoke on the importance of youth involvement in the civil rights movement.

She shared the history of UMs African American Studies program, which was started after a black female student got others to rally on campus in support. Esther Thamani Akbar then became the first president of the BSU.

Young people of color have an opportunity to shift the narrative, Cox said.

Sydnie Racine, an administrative assistant for Empower Montana, is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet tribe.

In my 18 years of life, I have been to more funerals than weddings, Racine said. At first I thought this was a normal thing.

As Racine grew up, she learned about the data (or severe lack thereof) on missing and murdered Native American women. This was not a normal thing.

As groups organize and move forward on civil rights, Racine said, we need to remember to include those who are affected by this mistreatment the most.

Nereyda Calero spoke last, before the crowd grabbed electric candles and began a walk to St. Paul Lutheran Church.

Calero is a "dreamer," a minor when she came to the United States from Mexico with her family. She lives in Missoula, working as an EMT, raising her son Cesar Luna.

Calero said she remembered wanting to be a nurse or doctor when she was a little girl, but had to stifle that hope because it would be impossible due to her undocumented status.

When the DREAM Act was enacted, it changed Caleros life.

I could finally dream. My hands were untied.

She recently went to Washington, D.C., to work with other dreamers on protesting President Donald Trumps repeal plan. There, she met other Montana dreamers and talked with Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana.

She learned there are around 100 dreamers in the whole of Montana, a lot of whom likely share her dream to be a U.S. citizen.

A lot of people in Montana havent met a dreamer, but we are here, Calero said. We are actually, human lives, fighting for this.

The rally was followed by a community celebration and dinner at St. Paul Lutheran Church, where Helena Mayor Wilmot Collins, a Liberian refugee, was scheduled to speak.

Earlier in the day, the group watched and discussed the movie Selma at the Roxy Theater.
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Wanted in Rome is a monthly magazine in English for expatriates in Rome established in 1985. The magazine covers Rome news stories that may be of interest to English and Italian speaking residents, and tourists as well. The publication also offers classifieds, photos, information on events, museums, churches, galleries, exhibits, fashion, food, and local travel.
Is there an etiquette for workplace refrigerators? Should there be? Our short mockumentary from the Dept. of Satire explored these questions. (Video: Dave Jorgenson/The Washington Post)

Comment on this story Comment Gift Article Share

I have eaten the plums Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold. Seriously? Talk about entitlement. Williams was a master poet, but as an office-mate, it sounds like he was no prize. The unwritten rules of dining that all people should follow "Anywhere you have humans, you're going to have people who spill things and don't pick it up" and people who steal other people's lunches, said Karla Miller, The Washington Post Magazine's @Work Advice columnist. The office kitchen is "where a lot of passive-aggression gets worked out," she added.

As to food theft (see "plums," above), Miller has heard anecdotally that higher-paid employees are often the worst offenders. For repeat offenders, taking others' food "borders on sociopathy. . . . I really don't get it."

"I wonder if it's just kind of somehow being in a kitchen taps into people's home selves, their home brain and sends them back to what their kitchen at home is like," Miller added.

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Surely you've seen those "Your mother doesn't work here" signs. Those might not be enough. Debby Mayne, etiquette expert at TheSpruce.com, says offices should have specific rules posted for "refrigerator real estate."

"People forget that the office refrigerator isn't their personal cooler," she said in an email interview. "They need to be reminded (gently at first, and then maybe not so gently) that this is shared with other people, and they need to be more respectful."

Among her other suggestions:

Restrict the amount of refrigerator space workers can use. This should be determined by the size of the refrigerator and how many people use it.

Prohibit users from leaving anything in the fridge overnight.

Require that workers label food containers with their name.

Ban certain foods (smelly foods or things that may seep through the wrappers and onto other people's lunches).

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Once someone breaks the rules a certain number of times, ban them from using the office fridge for a week.

Keep a box of baking soda or other odor absorber in the fridge at all times.

What about food safety? The government's Foodsafety.gov website recommends setting refrigerator temperatures to 40 degrees or below and freezer temperatures to 0. Anything above 40 degrees puts food into a "danger zone" where bacteria can run amok, the site says. The site also suggests that perishable foods be thrown out at least once a week, and says a general rule of thumb for refrigerating cooked leftovers is four days.

Network for Good, a Washington software provider for nonprofit groups, has pretty much perfected the refrigerator purge. About 100 people (including my husband) work in the organization's Washington office; everyone  from the chief executive on down  is part of the kitchen cleanup team.

Every quarter, office manager Kimberly Kelsey assigns employees to teams of six or seven people each. The teams are given weeks when it's their job to tidy the kitchen, including uncluttering the refrigerators. The schedule is posted and emailed. Every week  every week  Network for Good's two fridges get a thorough purging. The office even makes the kitchen and fridge cleaning a competition, with members of winning teams receiving $25 gift certificates.

At the corporate campus of appliance giant LG Electronics in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., a janitorial team cleans the refrigerators weekly, and the 450 employees are instructed to clear out their leftovers every Friday. But even an appliance wonderland  they test out new refrigerators before they go on sale  has its challenges.

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It "doesn't make us immune to any . . . food wars," said Taryn Brucia, director of public relations. "I always want to know what my co-workers' homes look like."

Brucia recommends that offices chip in to buy certain common food items such as salad dressing and condiments. These can stay in the refrigerator.

Other tips? Be brutal and be relentless, she says.

And, if you're a refrigerator offender, fess up. As Miller said, it will do you good.

Fifteen years ago, Miller said, she took a co-worker's "high-quality" white chocolate raspberry yogurt. "I still feel bad about it," she said. "If she is out there and . . . she wants to contact me, I will make her whole."

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It's Season 4, Episode 11 of HGTV's smash hit, "Fixer Upper," and Joanna Gaines is walking her husband, Chip, through her vision to transform an abandoned, turn-of-the-century flower shop in Waco, Tex., into a Parisian-inspired cupcake cafe. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The camera pans across a dilapidated interior, featuring peeling white paint and chartreuse wainscoting.

"But all of this would be, like, subway tile, from the floor up," she says, conjuring a great wall of glossy, 3-by-6-inch ceramics.

As any loyal viewer can tell you, subway tiles  along with shiplap and farm sinks  hold a special place in the holy trinity of "Fixer Upper" renovations. But how did something eponymous with one of the most utilitarian urban spaces in America become synonymous with cozy farmhouse chic? And what is it about these basic white rectangles, which debuted more than 100 years ago, that has modern homeowners so obsessed?

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"It does feel post-recessional," says Lindsey Waldrep, vice president of marketing at Crossville Tile. "Our lives are crazy, and there's something about those classic shapes and traditional styles that are soothing."

This calming effect is precisely what drove architects George C. Heins and Christopher Grant La Farge to cast the tile in its original breakout role. Tasked with creating an inviting space for potentially fearful passengers, the men behind the design of New York City's first underground rail stations chose the white glass field tiles  named because they create a monolithic field of color  to keep the subway stations bright, according to Rebecca Haggerty, a research archivist at the New York Transit Museum. Inspired by Beaux Arts design and the City Beautiful movement, the architects infused the stations with 3-by-6-inch glass tile to unify the various mosaics and terra cotta units.

"The tile had many design options, was considered to be hygienic, and was affordable at the time," she adds. "They were also selected as they are easy to be rinsed off, which is why there are so many round corners and smooth finishes."

That sounds like something any practical homeowner would want. And it's likely the reason the popularity of the tile surged in the 1900s and made the jump from underground tunnels into the kitchens and bathroomsof America  everywhere from New York City apartments to those original Victorian farm houses.

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Keith Bieneman, managing director of Heritage Tile, says in the early 1920s, the tile we now so fondly refer to as "subway" was not only popular, but pretty much the only option. "It was used virtually everywhere at the time  kitchens, bathrooms, it was the utilitarian tile of America," he says. "It was absolutely more ubiquitous than it is now."

According to Bieneman, the pace of growth in America at the time required precise synchronization across tile production and installation practices. This resulted in a mutual agreement among about 20 tile companies that decided upon specifications, such as a uniform size and thickness, rectified edges, flat surface and pencil-thin grout. But technology soon disrupted all that.

"Things became more mass produced, and it changed the character of the original tile work," says Bieneman, who seized upon a business opportunity to produce and distribute tile with those original specifications. In addition to commercial and residential projects, he is currently working with the Enhanced Station Initiative to restore the tilework in 33 New York City subway stations.

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Bieneman says even though homeowners now have limitless options when it comes to tile, there's still really only one choice for those looking to restore an older house to its prewar glory.

"This is an enduring surface," he says. "If you choose something historic or authentic to that period, you know you can live with it for years to come."

But does the longevity of these historical tiles translate to a modern loft or a home that is more "Brady Bunch" than "This Old House"?

"Subway tile has become a neutral in our industry that goes with anything," says Elle H-Millard, certified kitchen designer and trend specialist with the National Kitchen and Bath Association. "It's almost like investing in low-risk stock, it is so timeless. It isn't going to date itself."

She says that classic styles are maintaining their popularity because people want their renovations to last longer. That's why she predicts the deluge of white, stainless steel  and subway-tiled  kitchens overwhelming our Houzz and Pinterest streams won't slow down anytime soon.

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Waldrep agrees subway tile will always be classic and emphasizes it "is not dead," but she admits, "a lot of people are over it." She says what excites her now is that designers are continuing to reinterpret the classic look with variations on the tiles' size, texture and color.

"You're seeing wider planks, like 3-by-12 and 3-by-8, and it's getting more textural with some variations raised more like a Georgian brick," she says. "Colors vary from boldly saturated to subtle, watercolor glazes."

When it comes to grout, experts agree choosing something darker will take your design in a more modern and industrial direction that may become dated a little faster than the more traditional white grout and rectified edges.

Shea McGee, the Salt Lake City interior designer behind the Instagram-famous brand Studio McGee, recommends those torn between a classic look and something more unusual should opt for just one of the variations (size, color or texture), with texture perhaps being her top pick: "It adds interest and a thoughtful detail without being too trendy."

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And for those concerned the end of "Fixer Upper" will mean the sunset of America's infatuation with subway tile, take heart from Gaines herself, who vowed in a Q&A after Season 1: "I liked subway tile 10 years ago, and I will like it for years to come."

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The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the lava flowed as much as 1.2 miles from the crater of Mount Mayon, and ash fell on several nearby villages.

Glowing-red lava spurted and flowed down the Philippines' most active volcano Tuesday in a stunning display of its fury that has caused more than 34,000 villagers to flee.

Renato Solidum, who heads the volcanology institute, said the flows cascading down the volcano were not caused by an explosion from the crater but by lava fragments breaking off from the lava flow and crashing on lower slopes.

Scientists have not detected enough volcanic earthquakes that would cause them to raise the alert level to four on a scale of five, which would indicate an explosive eruption may happen soon, Solidum said. Emergency response officials previously said they may force evacuations if the alert is raised to four.

In an effort to discourage villagers from returning to the danger zones to check on farm animals, officials planned to set up evacuation areas for animals, including water buffaloes, cows, pigs and poultry, Yucot said.
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A walk-off home run. A buzzer-beating jump shot. A Hail Mary pass. When you're on the winning side, each of these is an exciting experience. Well, I'm delighted to announce that we've had a similarly exhilarating finish for The Washington Post Helping Hand. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight At the end of our eight-week fundraising drive for three local charities, Post readers had donated a whopping $267,200. We blew past our goal of $200,000 by nearly $70,000.

It is the most we have raised in the four years of Helping Hand. Almost half of our total came in the last two weeks of the campaign.

The Rev. John Adams, president of So Others Might Eat, emailed me about our achievement: "All of us at SOME are moved by the tremendous kindness of your readers who are helping us in our daily work to provide comfort, relief and hope to the hungry and homeless men, women and children of our community. Because of their generosity they have made it possible for us to provide hot meals, warm coats, job training that leads to a family-sustaining career, freedom from addiction and a safe place to call home to so many. Your readers are truly making a profound difference in Washington."

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N Street Village was another one of our charity partners. Its chief executive, Schroeder Stribling, emailed: "On behalf of the 2,000 women for whom N Street Village provides housing and services each year, I want to express our gratitude to The Post and its readership for responding enthusiastically to the Helping Hand campaign. We know that it does indeed take a Village. . . . Our community-based model encompasses everything from meals, clothing, health care and therapy to emergency shelter and permanent housing. You are making this possible  you are making our hometown stronger and more just every day. But of course, the ultimate credit belongs to each resident and participant who emerges victorious from a crisis and inspires us all with her courage and determination."

Marla Dean, the executive director of Bright Beginnings, wrote, "We see hard-working parents drop their children off at Bright Beginnings every day and we are grateful to The Post for the opportunity to share our story with the world."

The money that Post readers donated, Dean wrote, "will aid in our mission to end the cycle of generational poverty and chronic homelessness."

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I'd like to offer my thanks, too: to the many Post readers who contributed in this record-setting year; to the people who work at SOME, N Street Village and Bright Beginnings; and to all the clients who allowed me to share their very personal  and very inspiring  stories.

Ice, ice baby?

What a winter we're having. It has been so cold that the Potomac River resembles the ice-choked Volga: frozen over.

This has given George Ripley an idea. He says Washingtonians should wager on when the thaw will start.

George, who lives in the District, is inspired by something called the Nenana Ice Classic, held on the Tanana River in Alaska. It's a pool  not the kind you swim in  in which participants bet on when winter will turn to spring, at least as indicated by when the frozen river surface starts to crack and move.

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In early winter, a large wooden tripod is erected in the middle of the frozen Tanana. The tripod is attached to a clock on shore. People place their bets as to precisely when the river has thawed enough for the tripod to topple, stopping the clock.

A guess costs $2.50. Last year's jackpot was $267,444. The proceeds are split among the winners and charities.

George says we should have our own version here. Stick a tripod on the ice somewhere between Georgetown and the Memorial Bridge and let people wager.

"Given the rare opportunity for such a contest in this generally warm latitude, an 'ice breakup' lottery would have to be organized very quickly once the forecast indicated a deep freeze and publicized equally quickly," George wrote.

He suggests involving the MGM National Harbor, since presumably people at the casino there would know how to run a game of chance.

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"Maybe we should place bets on if it will ever happen again," George wrote of the Potomac being frozen over.

Tale of the tape

Angel Schmitz of Laurel, Md., had one more story to add to my tales of retail subterfuge. In the 1980s, she worked in customer service at Best Buy. "One couple brought in a high-end VCR, all taped up and pretty, and said it didn't work," Angel wrote.

When a Best Buy technician started to open the box to take a look, the husband said: "Oh, don't worry. I checked, and it's damaged."

Then the wife said, "Well, maybe they can fix it."

Wrote Angel: "As our tech pushed the eject button, out came a crusty, half-eaten PBJ sandwich!"

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.

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A young Republican activist from Northern Virginia who was seen as a potential rising star quit the party Tuesday, citing President Trump's "appalling comments" about Haitian immigrants and what he called a nativist streak in his home state. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Kyle McDaniel, 28, served on the party's State Central Committee for two years and has worked as a top aide for Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield), who said he had hoped McDaniel would eventually run for public office.

But McDaniel said he harbored increasing reservations over where the party has been heading. On Tuesday, he sent a letter of resignation to State Party Chairman John Whitbeck that described events he "could no longer stomach," including Trump's reported reference last week to Haiti as a "shithole" country and the defense by some party leaders of this summer's rally by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville that led to the death of a 32-year-old woman.

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McDaniel also cited an unsuccessful effort by himself and other younger Republicans to remove or formally censure a member of the state party's 11th Congressional District Committee in Northern Virginia, who, among other things, called Islam "a death cult created by Satan."

"I have, on more occasions than I care to recall, been forced to 'bite my tongue' when in conversation with other party leaders about the issues of the day," wrote McDaniel, who has gone to Haiti as a relief worker with his church and said he and his wife, Katie, have considered adopting a Haitian child. "I cannot in good faith continue to do that."

Although McDaniel is not a marquee name in the state party's leadership, the news of his departure touched a nerve among some officials, who said they worry that Trump is causing deep fissures in the party, especially among younger Republicans. In Northern Virginia in particular, anti-Trump sentiments run high, helping to fuel a wave of Democratic victories in November.

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"We can't even count or imagine how many people would be part of our ranks who just take a look at what's going on and say 'No thanks', " said Stephen Spiker, 32, another member of the 11th Congressional District Committee. "For the younger demographic, it's a bridge they can't cross."

Whitbeck said McDaniel "knows full well that the Republican Party of Virginia, and I as chairman, have worked tirelessly to expand the Party into new communities."

"We wish Mr. McDaniel the best in his future endeavors but he owes every member of his party an apology for repeating the Democrat talking points that Republicans are a bunch of racists," Whitbeck said in a statement.

Herrity said he hoped McDaniel will someday return to the Republican fold. "I still think he will run for office one day," he said. "I would hazard to predict he'll do it as a Republican."

McDaniel, who works as a real estate agent in Alexandria, said that isn't likely.

"I'm totally out," he said. "I'll support candidates I agree with, but as far as any party affiliation, I'm out. I'm independent."

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More than 1 of every 10 students receiving a diploma from a D.C. public high school last year missed most of the academic year, according to an investigation released Tuesday that casts a shadow on a district that has trumpeted improvements in graduation rates. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The report, commissioned by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, portrays a school system riddled by student absenteeism and teachers who feel pressured to push chronically absent high school seniors across the graduation stage regardless of whether they earned their diplomas.

The review saved some of its sharpest criticism for Ballou High School, which has been engulfed in controversy amid a graduation scandal. The report found that the school's administrators told teachers that a high percentage of their students were expected to pass and encouraged them to provide makeup work and extra credit to students, no matter how much school they missed. Teachers received little training in a new grading system, and their annual performance reviews hinged in small part on their success in graduating students.

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At the same time the report was released, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson announced that Ballou Principal Yetunde Reeves, who had been reassigned pending the investigation, will not return to the Southeast Washington school.

"Based on the findings of our investigation, we believe that's the right thing to do," Wilson said in an interview Tuesday. "Ultimately, we as leaders have to make sure that the policies are followed."

Reeves did not respond to a request for comment.

The report comes as Mayor Muriel E. Bowser  who is running for reelection  touts progress in the school system, describing it as a once-blighted district that has transformed into the "fastest-improving urban school district in the country." The report's findings could stain the high-profile reforms enacted by former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and her successor, Kaya Henderson.

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In the combined 10 years Rhee and Henderson led the city's schools, their experiment in school reform became a national model for urban schools.

Wilson took over the school district in February and comes from the same education philosophy as Rhee and Henderson.

"Everyone rejoiced at the increase in graduation rates," said Mary Levy, a former education policy analyst and longtime critic of Rhee. "And now it looks as though what skeptics have been saying for years  and that's no. This is just sort of a veneer that makes the system look good and underneath, it calls into question the integrity in the system in awarding diplomas."

The investigation was prompted by a November article by WAMU and NPR that said Ballou High gave diplomas to seniors who did not meet graduation requirements. While the WAMU-NPR article focused on Ballou, the report from the state superintendent's office examined attendance and grading practices across the city, determining that truancy is more severe at neighborhood schools such as Ballou than in charter or application schools.

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At a December D.C. Council hearing, Ballou teachers, parents and students said the predominantly black and low-income school was being unfairly maligned. Media reports, they said, don't reflect that students are often responsible for taking siblings and other young family members to school and that diligent teachers are doing all they can to ensure that students facing obstacles are prepared and on track for college.

Education-reform activists cautioned that graduation rates represent just one measurement of school success. At Ballou, the graduation rate rose from 50 percent in 2012 to 64 percent last year. Wilson said at the D.C. Council hearing in December that, despite persistent absenteeism, he believes students are still learning.

Catharine Bellinger, D.C. director for Democrats for Education Reform  which has long supported Rhee  said that standardized test scores across the District have improved and that while the improvements at traditionally low-performing schools such as Ballou have been slow, they indicate an upward trend.

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Test scores from 2016 showed that 8 percent of Ballou students met or approached meeting standards in math, while 9 percent met or approached standards in English.

In 2017, those numbers increased to 10 percent in math and 22 percent in English.

"It's damning that we are still failing students," Bellinger said. "But I don't believe that graduation numbers are a strong single measure in terms of whether reform efforts are working."

The Office of the State Superintendent teamed up with the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal to conduct the investigation. The office says a second, broader report is expected to be released at the end of the month.

D.C. Public Schools said an internal investigation should also be released at the end of the month.

The review released Tuesday found that 11.4 percent of D.C. Public Schools graduates in 2017 missed more than half of the school days. And about 75 percent of the 2,307 graduates systemwide missed more than 10 percent of the school days. The report found that the problem had worsened in the past three years.

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According to the report, D.C. Public Schools staff instructed high school teachers to enroll students in credit-recovery classes if they were not on track to graduate  a violation of city policy. Credit recovery is an initiative that allows students to retake a class they previously failed, and student are permitted to enroll in credit recovery only if they have already failed the class. Students at Ballou, according to the report, were frequently enrolled in these makeup courses while they were still in the original class.

"The school engaged in inappropriate or excessive use of credit recovery, including allowing students who had not yet failed courses to take credit recovery for original credit," the report says.

The report also found that teachers followed an unofficial practice under which students who did not complete assignments were given a score of 50 percent  instead of zero percent  boosting their overall grade averages.

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Wilson said teachers have lacked proper instruction on grading, and he promised to institute systemwide training.

"We are saying that we have the courage to fix what needs to be fixed," Wilson said. "And what needs to be fixed across the District is that we need to make sure that people are trained in our grading policy."

As part of his changes, the chancellor said high school seniors' transcripts will be reviewed to ensure they qualify to graduate  something not previously done.

The report also examined charter schools, finding that while the D.C. Public Charter School Board audits seniors' transcripts ahead of graduation, it does not review attendance data to ensure that schools are following their own attendance policies.

Teachers said they attempted to alert the chancellor and other city leaders to troubles at Ballou before the WAMU-NPR report but received no response. The chancellor said he would appoint an ombudsman to field staff complaints to ensure they rise to attention sooner.

"The standard for excellence means that students' diplomas mean they've learned what they need to know  and we know that they learned it," Wilson said. "We have to make sure that that is the case going forward. That was not the case in this instance."

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The Trump administration is appealing an injunction on the phaseout of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and asking the Supreme Court to get involved. (Video: Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

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The Justice Department on Tuesday said it would take the "rare step" of asking the Supreme Court to overturn a judge's ruling and allow the Trump administration to dismantle a program that provides work permits to undocumented immigrants raised in the United States. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The Trump administration said it has appealed the judge's injunction  which said the Obama-era program must continue for now  to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

But the Justice Department will also petition the Supreme Court later this week to intervene in the case, an unusual action that would allow the government to bypass the 9th Circuit altogether in its bid to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program starting in March.

"It defies both law and common sense" that a "single district court in San Francisco" had halted the administration's plans, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. "We are now taking the rare step of requesting direct review on the merits of this injunction by the Supreme Court so that this issue may be resolved quickly and fairly for all the parties involved."

President Trump on Jan. 9 said he wants Congress to pass a bill of love to address DACA and border security. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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Last week, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco issued a temporary injunction halting plans to end the program while a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's decision is pending.

He ordered the government to resume renewing DACA and work authorizations for the 690,000 immigrants who held that status when Sessions announced the end of the program Sept. 5. Homeland Security officials said Saturday that they would comply with the court order and resume accepting applications to renew work permits for the immigrants, also known as "dreamers."

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D), who filed one of the federal lawsuits that led to the temporary injunction, said Tuesday he was confident that the higher courts will uphold the judge's order.

"The unlawful action by the Trump Administration to terminate DACA impacts the lives and livelihood of hundreds of thousands [of] Dreamers, their colleagues, our universities, our businesses and our economy," Becerra said in a statement.

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As Sessions noted, it is rare to ask the Supreme Court to step in before the lower courts have completed their work. The justices could take the case if they decide it is important enough, or rely on their usual pattern of waiting until the appeals court has acted.

Until the Justice Department files its specific request with the Supreme Court, it is hard to predict how quickly the justices might act. The department did not ask the Supreme Court for a stay of Alsup's ruling, which would have prompted quicker action on the part of the court.

The fate of DACA recipients is at the heart of a legislative dispute on Capitol Hill that could result in a government shutdown later this week. President Trump says that President Barack Obama exceeded his authority when he created the DACA program in 2012, and that Congress must pass legislation protecting dreamers if they are to be allowed to stay.

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Trump has expressed sympathy for the immigrants, who were brought to the United States by their parents as minors and did not knowingly break the law. But he is also pushing for border security and other measures as part of any legislative deal.

Alsup's ruling said that California and other plaintiffs had shown they were likely to succeed on their claims that the Trump administration's revocation of the nearly six-year-old program was "capricious" and not in compliance with federal laws.

He said states, immigrants and public universities faced significant losses if a court found that the administration had acted improperly in terminating the program.

Government lawyers have argued that Trump had the authority to rescind DACA in September, and that the courts did not have the power to review it under federal law.

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The American Civil Liberties Union blasted the Trump administration for appealing the decision as "the latest in a disturbing pattern of hostile actions directed at young immigrants across America."

Lorella Praeli, the ACLU's director of immigration policy, said that Trump has failed to broker a deal with Congress that would protect the immigrants.

On Tuesday, more than 300 immigrants who have DACA protections went to Capitol Hill to lobby key Republican senators to pass legislation that would grant them U.S. citizenship. Democratic leaders in Congress want to include protections for the dreamers in any spending deal hammered out before government funding expires Friday.

"Republicans today have a choice: To follow the leadership of Donald Trump or to come out and understand that it's not okay what's happening," said Ambar Pinto, a 24-year-old Alexandria resident whose parents brought her to the United States from Bolivia when she was 12. "They need to make a choice. We can no longer wait. They need to do it now."

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Pinto has DACA protection, but said her 17-year-old brother was not old enough to apply before the Trump administration ended the program.

Robert Barnes and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.

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Wednesday will be one of the initial big moments of truth in Maryland's 2018 election, with candidates for governor and other state and county offices required to show  for the first time in a year  who has given them money and how much they have raised for their campaigns.

The financial reports for 2017, which are due by midnight, should provide a sense of which campaigns are gaining momentum, give some of them bragging rights and cause others, especially among the seven Democrats vying to challenge Gov. Larry Hogan (R), to consider leaving the race or joining someone else's ticket.

"If there are significant disparities in fundraising, we could see a candidate or two drop out immediately," said Carin Robinson, a political-science professor at Hood College in Frederick.

Hogan's filing will show that he and Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford (R) raised a combined $5.4 million last year and have $9 million in cash on hand, according to an internal campaign memo obtained by The Washington Post and other news outlets on Tuesday. The document says that 93 percent of the campaign's 17,000 unique donors last year were Maryland residents and that two-thirds were small donors who contributed $250 or less.

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Baltimore attorney James L. Shea, one of seven Democrats vying for the nomination to challenge Hogan in November, announced Tuesday that he had raised more than $2 million for his campaign so far, and County Executive Rushern L. Baker III said Friday that his campaign raised $1.05 million in 2017.

Details of their fundraising, and that of the other candidates, will be available once the campaign reports are filed.

Democratic groups are eager to win back the governor's mansion this year, and national Republican groups are poised to invest more in Maryland state races than they have in the past, hoping to take advantage of Hogan's popularity and eager to counter what could be a wave of GOP defeats elsewhere.

But money doesn't always determine the outcome of elections.

In 2014, then-Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown (D) and his party forked over about $18 million while losing the governor's race to Hogan and the GOP, who spent about one-third of that amount.

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Similarly, Montgomery County businessman David Trone poured more than $13 million of his own money into a 2016 congressional bid but lost the Democratic primary to then-state Sen. Jamie B. Raskin, who spent $1.9 million to win the party's nomination en route to claiming the seat.

"Money is an element of a campaign, but it's not determinative," said John Willis, an ethics professor at the University of Baltimore. "You need money to communicate, but it's not just how much you have, but how you use it."

Beyond fundraising totals, other details to watch for in Wednesday's filings include the size of individual donations, which can show whether a candidate has widespread support or relies on a handful of well-heeled donors; how much money they have left in the bank; and how many contributions are coming from Maryland as opposed to outside the state.

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Among the Democrats, Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz led the field in fundraising at last year's deadline, with $1.6 million on hand, compared with $200,000 for Baker and $60,000 for state Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (D-Montgomery).

The other Democratic candidates  former NAACP president Ben Jealous, technology entrepreneur Alec Ross, Shea and Krishanti Vignarajah, a former policy adviser to first lady Michelle Obama  had not begun their campaigns a year ago and were not already holding office, so they did not file fundraising reports.

Baker, who led the Democratic field in a recent poll by Gonzales Research and Media Services, said Friday that his campaign has raised $1.55 million for the 2018 cycle, including donations from previous years. He said more than 70 percent of his contributions came from Maryland donors.

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Shea said Tuesday that his campaign raised $2.08 million from 1,600 donors over the past 10 months, and had more than $1.34 million cash on hand. Ross tweeted last week that he raised more than $1 million.

"That's kind of a ton of money for the first disclosure deadline for a first-time candidate, and we blew past it," Ross said. "We're going to keep pushing really hard here."

Shea and Ross were at the bottom of the Gonzales poll, supported by about 1 percent of respondents. But a large percentage of probable Democratic voters are undecided, and both first-time candidates touted their fundraising hauls as proof that they can raise their profiles in the state.

"These early polls don't mean anything in respect to me because no one has had a chance to hear from me yet," Shea said in an interview. In the statement announcing his fundraising totals, he said, "Our campaign will compete in all 24 jurisdictions, and I am very confident that we will have the resources to ensure voters across the state hear my message."

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As an elected state official running for governor, Hogan is prohibited from raising money during the legislative session, which started last week and will end April 9. Madaleno has said that he intends to request public financing for his campaign, which would allow him to raise small donations of $250 or less during the session.

Gubernatorial candidates who choose to use public financing for the primary are eligible to receive up to $1.4 million in matching funding from the state, but they are limited to $2.8 million in total spending. To qualify, Madaleno must tell the state that he intends to use the program when he officially files his candidacy, which must be done by Feb. 27.

Wednesday's reports also will show fundraising prowess in key county races in Montgomery and Prince George's, Maryland's two most populous jurisdictions, and indicate how some key state legislative races are shaping up.

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Democrats are defending six GOP-targeted Senate seats in districts that Hogan won overwhelmingly in 2014, with Republicans hoping to flip control of at least five of those seats to break the Democratic veto-proof majority in that chamber.

Subsequent campaign-finance reports are due on April 17, May 22, June 15, Aug. 28 and Oct. 26. The primary will be held June 26.

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Police charge boy, 15, in armed carjacking Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight D.C. police arrested and charged a male 15-year-old in an armed carjacking early Saturday evening near the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Southeast Washington. The suspect, whose name was not released, was charged after two perpetrators allegedly brandished handguns and demanded a woman exit her vehicle in the 2300 block of High Street SE shortly before 6 p.m. Saturday, police said.

The victim got out, and the carjackers drove off in the vehicle, police said. Officers from D.C. police's 7th District later observed the vehicle in the area, caught and charged one of the carjackers and recovered a BB gun from the scene, police said.

This case remains under investigation.

 Spencer S. Hsu

National anthem statue vandalized

A Baltimore statue commemorating the writing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was found defaced Monday, splashed with red paint with the words "Racist Anthem" sprayed on the sidewalk beside it. Baltimore police said they are investigating.

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The statue, built in 1914 in Patterson Park with funds contributed by local schoolchildren, is the latest in a string of vandalism of city statues. The Francis Scott Key monument in Bolton Hill was defaced in a similar manner in September. Key wrote the poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry," which later provided the lyrics for "The Star-Spangled Banner," during the Battle of Baltimore against the British fleet in 1814, a point of pride for the city.

In August, a video posted on YouTube showed a man taking a sledgehammer to a monument to Christopher Columbus near Herring Run Park.

The video's narrator called Columbus a "genocidal terrorist." The city had just removed four Confederate monuments in the wake of a deadly rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville.

It is not clear whether the Patterson Park vandalism is related to the other defacements.

 Tara Bahrampour

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The Justice Department on Tuesday sided with the Archdiocese of Washington in its legal battle to display Christmas ads on Metro buses. The announcement from Attorney General Jeff Sessions follows a decision by a federal appeals court in Washington denying the archdiocese's request to move forward with the ads during the December holiday season.

In November, the archdiocese took Metro officials to court after the transit agency blocked the proposed posters, citing Metro's ban on ads that "promote or oppose any religion, religious practice or belief."

The decision by the Justice Department to file a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of the archdiocese is part of the attorney general's push for the government to respect religious freedom. That advocacy has prompted a backlash from some civil liberties groups concerned that the guidelines Sessions issued in October could allow for discrimination.

In its amicus brief filed Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Justice Department says WMATA's rejection of the ad campaign constitutes "viewpoint discrimination" in violation of the archdiocese's First Amendment right of free speech.

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"As the Supreme Court has made clear, the First Amendment prohibits the government from discriminating against religious viewpoints," Associate Attorney General Rachel L. Brand said in a statement.

"By rejecting the archdiocese's advertisement while allowing other Christmas advertisements, WMATA engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination," Brand said.

The proposed banner ads featured the phrases "Find the Perfect Gift" and "#PerfectGift," and included a link to the campaign's website, which encourages people to attend Catholic Mass or donate to charitable groups. The ads also featured an image of three people walking with sheep and holding shepherd's staffs.

In its ruling last month, a three-judge panel of the appeals court said the archdiocese's argument was "grounded in pure hypothesis."

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"Appellant [the Archdiocese of Washington] has not come forward with a single example of a retail, commercial, or other non-religious advertisement on a WMATA bus that expresses the view that the holiday season should be celebrated in a secular or non-religious manner," according to the ruling from the judges, Judith W. Rogers, David S. Tatel and Patricia A. Millett.

The appeals court refused to temporarily block a lower-court ruling but emphasized that its decision was preliminary and did "not speak to the ultimate merits" of the broader challenge.

The court set oral argument for the case for sometime after mid-February.

Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.

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A former Central Intelligence Agency officer was arrested at a New York airport Monday night and accused of keeping notebooks filled with detailed information about undercover agents and assets after he left his job. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Jerry Chun Shing Lee, also known as "Zhen Cheng Li," 53, is charged with unlawful retention of national defense information.

Lee had his initial appearance in the Eastern District of New York at 2 p.m. Tuesday. He is not contesting extradition to Virginia, where he will be charged in Alexandria federal court. He does not yet appear to have an attorney.

Lee has been a suspect in a long-running probe to determine if a mole inside the U.S. intelligence community had led to the deaths of a number of CIA assets in China, according to people with knowledge of the probe, which was first reported by the New York Times. He has not been charged with any crimes in connection with those deaths.

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People familiar with the matter said that Lee's arrest would be greeted as cause for celebration among current and former CIA officials. But they said it would be hard to prove in court that Lee had provided the information that proved so damaging to the agency's operations.

Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen and Army veteran, joined the CIA as a case officer in 1994, according to an affidavit from an FBI agent. He had a top secret security clearance and had been given access to sensitive intelligence information. He lost that clearance when he left the agency in 2007.

In 2012, Lee moved to Virginia with his family from Hong Kong, stopping in Honolulu on the way, according to the affidavit. Law enforcement searched his hotel rooms in both places and say they found two small books, a datebook and an address book, filled with handwritten classified information: meetings with CIA assets, meeting locations, operational phone numbers, true names of assets and undercover CIA employees, and the addresses of CIA facilities, including covert ones.

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The 49-page datebook and the address book, according to the affidavit, were in a small clear plastic travel pack in Lee's luggage.

Some of the information was secret, and at least one item in the books was top secret, according to the FBI.

Lee was interviewed by FBI agents on five separate occasions in or around May and June 2013, according to the affidavit. He also maintained contact with former CIA colleagues and other government employees. At no point did he reveal the existence of the notebooks.

He left the United States again in June 2013, according to the affidavit. Since then, returning Lee to the United States has been a top priority for the CIA, said the people familiar with the matter. He was living in Hong Kong before his arrest at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

He was not lured back to the United States for arrest but had returned for his own reasons, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

Lee served in the U.S. Army from 1982 to 1986, according to prosecutors. After that he went to Hawaii Pacific University, where he graduated in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in international business management and in 1993 got a master's degree in human resource management.

Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.

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Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort will face trial no sooner than September, the judge hearing his case indicated after an hour-long hearing Tuesday in which prosecutors and defense attorneys sparred over his continuing house arrest and a separate lawsuit challenging the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Prosecutors told the court Friday that they intended to ask for a May 14 trial date for Manafort, 68, and his former business partner, Rick Gates, 45, whose Oct. 30 indictments on fraud, conspiracy and money laundering counts were the first disclosed in Mueller's probe of Russian influence in U.S. political affairs.

Both men have pleaded not guilty to the charges, which arose out of Manafort's secret lobbying for a Russia-friendly political party in Ukraine.

Attorneys for the defendants said they have been swamped by the government's handoff of more than 590,000 pieces of evidence, plus an additional 46,000 records turned over Tuesday.

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"They can't possibly be ready for trial if they don't have what you have," U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington reminded prosecutors. "I don't have a problem with a trial in September or October," she added. "I don't want [to set a date] that we have to continue."

Prosecutor Kyle Freeny said that the handoff is mostly done but that investigators are still scouring the products of at least 19 search warrants, including 87 electronic devices and thousands of domestic and foreign business records. She also said the government continues to mine "pockets of discoverable material in less-obvious places."

Jackson called the hearing to discuss the status of the criminal case, which has become bogged down by the lawsuit. She noted what she called "a fairly unique situation," saying court rules "don't contemplate the potential that people would sue civilly to forestall a criminal prosecution.

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Manafort attorneys Kevin M. Downing and Thomas E. Zehnle on Jan. 3 filed a 17-page lawsuit asking to void Mueller's appointment and dismiss the case against Manafort as government overreach in using the special counsel legislation.

Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said in court Tuesday that the government by Feb. 2 will ask a different federal judge in Washington overseeing the lawsuit to toss it, arguing that, among other reasons, the criminal case is the proper venue to seek dismissal of the indictment.

Downing briefly appeared to forget Tuesday that his lawsuit included the request to dismiss the criminal case, before deferring to Jackson and saying, "I don't have it in front me."

Jackson ordered both sides to tell her by Friday if they want to have her decide both cases, and she told the defendants to file by Feb. 23 any motions seeking to dismiss charges or the indictment.

Gates was released on a nearly $5 million bond Tuesday afternoon after agreeing to forfeit three properties and financial and other assets if he fails to appear in court. Under a bail deal, Gates also agreed to abide by a nighttime curfew, electronic monitoring, and a ban on international travel as well as travel outside the Richmond area for anything but court appearances without permission.

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Jackson expressed impatience that Manafort has yet to finalize a similar $10 million secured bond deal. In one of several sharp exchanges with Downing, the judge asked, "As for Mr. Manafort's bond, what are we waiting for?," adding that the defendant "held the keys" to his freedom.

Downing disagreed, saying: "You actually set another $7 million security. You set a $17 million bond; we didn't agree to that."

"You had a month to point that out to me. . . . I get bond motions all the time . . . [and] I'm happy to hear them," the judge replied.

Late Tuesday, Manafort asked to file a sealed motion urging the judge to revisit his bond deal and to provide "an analysis of sensitive financial information" focusing on his net asset statements and those of family members who pledged to secure his bond, "including the names of financial institutions where deposits are located and details about the types and amounts of assets and liabilities."

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On Manafort's request for a temporary health-related modification of his detention that she did not detail, Jackson in court said tartly: "While he is subject to home confinement, he is not confined to his couch. He has plenty of opportunities to exercise."

Downing said he would respond in a court filing.

Finally, Jackson again rebuked but declined to punish one of the defendants, this time Gates, for appearing to violate a court's gag order on making public statements about the criminal case that could bias potential jurors.

The judge cited Gates's video greeting thanking supporters and lobbyist Jack Burkman for hosting a Dec. 19 fundraiser for Gates's legal defense at an Arlington, Va., hotel. The judge noted that members of the media were invited and reported that Burkman attacked what he said was Mueller's "unfair prosecution" after Gates thanked him for assuring that supporters "hear our message and stand with us."

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Jackson said that if surrogates attack the prosecution at a fundraiser to which the press is invited, "I suggest that that's a pretty big red flag."

She previously issued a similar rebuke but did not sanction Manafort for helping write an opinion article in December for a newspaper in Ukraine defending his work there.

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John Hicks, 41, was convicted on Jan. 16 of raping a woman on a moving Metro Red Line train in Montgomery County, Md., on April 2016. (Video: Montgomery County State's Attorneys Office)

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A D.C. man was found guilty Tuesday of charges he raped a woman at knifepoint aboard a moving Metro Red Line train in 2016. John P. Hicks, 41, was found guilty of first-degree rape and first-degree sex offense, both punishable by up to life in prison in the attack in Montgomery County. He blinked repeatedly as the verdict was announced and looked at the jurors with his hands folded on a table in front of him.

The victim, 39, testified she had boarded a train after her overnight nursing job during her weekday morning commute as it headed away from the District and to Glenmont in Maryland. She told the court she awoke to find only one other person in the train car.

That person, Hicks, engaged her in conversation, and suddenly pulled out a knife. He forced her to the back of the car, jurors heard, where he forced her to perform sex acts in a seat partially screened by a partition.

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"Don't do this to me," the woman told Hicks, according to her testimony.

"It's shocking that someone was bold enough to have done this in broad daylight," Montgomery State's Attorney John McCarthy said after the verdict. "It shows you how dangerous this man really is. This guy is a predator."

After the attack, on April 12, 2016, the woman said she got a tissue out of her bag, spit into it, and threw the tissue onto the train car floor. Detectives from the Metro Transit Police found the tissue hours later, and prosecutors presented evidence it contained Hicks's DNA.

Hicks spoke briefly with his attorneys after the verdict, and was led from the courtroom in handcuffs. He will return to court for sentencing at a later date.

His attorneys, Samantha Sandler and Tatiana David, declined to comment after the jury delivered its decision.

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In her closing argument, Sandler did not deny the attack had taken place. But she stressed to jurors how, soon after the attack, the victim had described the suspect as bald, with no facial hair, and 5-foot -4-inches to 5-foot-6-inches tall.

Her client, Sandler said, was 5-foot-10-inches tall, and on April 12, 2016, was not bald and had facial hair. "Mr. Hicks is an innocent man," Sandler had said.

During the trial, the victim had said English is not her first language and that she had equated the word "bald" with closely cropped hair. The Washington Post generally does not identify victims of sexual assault without their permission.

Apart from a description, prosecutors pointed to DNA samples taken from the tissue and from the victim, and say they were linked to Hicks's DNA.

Additionally, surveillance video from the Glenmont Metro station showed Hicks leaving the train car at the time of the rape, they told the jury.

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Hicks also was convicted of second-degree assault in the attack. The victim had been cut on the hand by Hicks's knife.

In her testimony, she said "he grabbed me off from my seat."

She told jurors, "I grabbed his knife to pull it away from my body . . . and I felt a burning sensation from my hand."

Hicks is scheduled to be tried in two more cases in Montgomery County.

The first goes back to April 2, 2016, 10 days before the rape. In that case, according to court records, Hicks performed a lewd sex act aboard a Red Line train as it traveled between the Gallery Place station and into Montgomery County.

A witness sitting near the suspect allegedly made a cellphone video of the incident and reported it to authorities.

Several months later, having been locked up at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility  on the Red Line rape charges  Hicks is alleged to have exposed himself to a female correctional officer. At the time, according to court records, he was on a chair, and appeared to be using a telephone that inmates can use to make outgoing telephone calls.

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He initially said he'd been on the phone with a woman and wasn't "lusting after" the correctional officer, according to charging documents. But jail officials checked the outgoing inmate calls, which are recorded, and determined Hicks had "never actually communicated with anyone" during the alleged indecent exposure at the jail.

As for the April 12, 2016, rape on the Red Line, accounts of the incident surfaced only after news reporters were tipped off more than a month after it occurred. Metro had not announced the incident to the public, outraging riders and officials.

After Hicks's arrest on the rape charge, it became clear in court filings that Metro Transit Police had identified him as a suspect in the separate Red Line incident of indecent exposure but had not immediately sought to arrest him.

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A woman was killed Monday in a two-car crash in Howard County, county police said. They said she was a passenger in a car that crossed the center line of Twin Oaks Road in the Clarksville area while going west about 12:20 p.m. and collided with a car going in the opposite direction.

The woman was identified as Deadra Wellington-Brown, 23, of Columbia, Md. The driver of the car she was in was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, police said.

The occupants of the other car were treated for minor injuries at the scene, near Heather Glen Way, police said.

A double yellow line separates east and west bound traffic in that location. It was not clear why the car crossed, and police said they were continuing to investigate.

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A tweet from the District's police chief on Tuesday alerted the public to the heroics of two officers who confiscated a loaded .38-caliber handgun back in November. The tweet also revealed something that wasn't widely known at the time: The gun allegedly had been in the possession of a 13-year-old while he was inside John Hayden Johnson Middle School in Southeast Washington.

Police arrested the middle-school student at a bus stop outside the school. Before that, a police report says, the youth showed the weapon to an unidentified person inside a closet next to the cafeteria. That person contacted police. The school system says an employee noticed the gun and called police.

Officers LeMar Jefferson and Charles Brevard made the arrest and found the gun. On Tuesday, they each were awarded the department's achievement medal.

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The youth was charged as a juvenile. The school's principal sent a letter home to parents that day saying "your child's safety is of the utmost importance to us" and that police were contacted immediately upon the weapon's discovery.

"The student was quickly apprehended and taken into custody," the letter says. It does not say the firearm  made by Bersa, an Argentine company  had been loaded. The school is in the 1400 block of Bruce Place SE.

The school system did not issue a statement beyond the letter sent to parents. Kristina Saccone, a spokeswoman for the D.C. school system, said, "We defer to MPD when there's criminal activity at the school."

D.C. police did not issue a public statement or news release on the gun, though they typically do not publicize every gun seizure. A police spokeswoman declined to elaborate.

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Would-be carjackers tried to take a vehicle at gunpoint in Prince William County on Saturday night, but the victims used items they had on hand to repel them, according to county police.

They said one of the intended victims was going to her car with purchased items on Cardinal Drive in Woodbridge just before midnight when two men came up and demanded the vehicle.
"You've got lamp posts here. What are you going to do with them?" asked the man with one arm to an over-capacity crowd gathered at the Billings Chamber of Commerce.

Sgt. Doc Wells, "The Hero of Vimy," had come to Billings to warn of the German threat in America. The Canadian soldier had returned from the front of The Great War  World War I  and was speaking about the atrocities he saw there and the greater danger he knew was hiding in America.

He suggested that the lamp posts were the perfect spot to hang German spies who had infiltrated every corner of the country  Billings included.

America had entered the war in April 1917, and by the time Wells had arrived in August, he was selling the idea that as many as a half-million people in America were actually German spies, ready to activate and attack their neighbors  a nearly century-old notion of a sleeper cell.

This overheated rhetoric excited business leaders who had only to look to the sugar beet fields or the burgeoning railyards to fret about the Germans.

You have many parasites in this state. In Idaho when the businessmen find such disloyal traitors they drive em out of town with shotguns. You should do something similar here," Wells suggested.

Already residents had been excited by news of union organizer Frank Little's lynching in Butte. Several picket lines had formed in Billings, and city law enforcement had been preparing for the wave of Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, who they were certain would flee from Butte only to make trouble in Billings.

Between the Wobblies and the Germans, Billings was getting its lamp posts ready for something more than night light.

Wobblies in Billings

The day after Wells spoke, The Billings Evening Journal recounted all the problems residents were having with the Wobblies.

In one case, a mans car had been destroyed as he left it running on Montana Avenue. The radiator had been punctured, the fan had been stopped and "IWW" was scrawled in the dust next to the car.

Just a block away from that, a man had been assaulted and robbed of $27 when he told three men that he was not carrying a red book  a sign of IWW membership.

Finally, police reported that they had arrested a number of men for vagrancy and found IWW membership cards on many.

Sheriff Stone Matlock was so concerned that he swore in a batch of fresh deputies and assured residents that they were ready.

What may seem like two distinct groups now  the Wobblies and the Germans  were linked in the minds of local residents 100 years ago. Business leaders throughout the state and the largest company, The Anaconda Mining Company, feared zealous unionizing like the Wobblies, who also advocated not fighting in the war. Leaders also feared Germans and Austrians, many of whom worked in the mines or as laborers and might be susceptible to union causes. Worse yet, latent loyalty to their homeland and their foreign tongue might secretly sabotage war efforts at home, leaders feared.

Kaiserism was no less dangerous than communism or unionism.

The Billings Evening Journal argued that those who objected to the war should be compelled  by force, if necessary  to serve. It also said that if any refused, they should be tried for treason and imprisoned. The paper called such people  even those who simply questioned the war  soft-muscled, half-baked nincompoops and called their concerns puny arguments of the pacifist.

The newspaper continued its fiery rhetoric, and called for action.

When American boys begin to die at the front, there will arise from all parts of the United States a popular demand for the execution of traitors within the land, the Evening Journal said.

No 'Prussianism' and nothing 'kaiseresque'

It seemed like everywhere journalists looked, threats were menacing  from Wobblies, slackers and spies. Newspapers went on holy patriotic war against all things German.

The Billings Evening Journal took aim at a weekly magazine in New York that it claimed promoted a pro-German point of view. Vierecks Weekly had changed its name from Fatherland and the Evening Journal accused it of Prussianism.

After Little's murder, towns across Montana reported an influx of Wobblies.

They had made it to Red Lodge and Bearcreek after mines in Butte shut down. The Billings Evening Journal reported that more than 200 had arrived in the two places, and both cities had been plastered with IWW stickers. One report had even said that stickers had been placed on rocks, trails and roads in Red Lodge.

Carbon County Sheriff George Headington warned that the Wobblies had better cease unless they wished to risk lynching.

Dry Montana

To make matters worse, the entire area was getting ready to go dry as Montana began preparing for the inevitable prohibition wave sweeping the country, coupled with rationing on food that essentially halted the production of booze.

The American government clamped down on distilleries for the war, ordering that grain was essential for the war effort.

Lovers of the fragrant highball didn't have much to worry about, the Billings Evening Journal reported  there was still about a year-and-a-half's worth of whiskey. But if you loved gin, hard times were coming because state warehouses had less than a 30-day supply.

The spy priest

Except for an off-key chorus of a few union songs in the Yellowstone County Jail, and some graffiti, fear of German spies and sympathizers and union agitators outstripped any tangible concerns  until January.

That's when a bombshell story broke about a renegade priest, a secret handbook of spies and close ties to Archduke Ferdinand, the man whose assassination sparked the worldwide war.

On Jan 2, 1918, Billings authorities arrested an ordained Catholic priest, Rev. F.X. Holnberg of Belfield, North Dakota, on suspicion of being a German spy. Maybe just as bad, The Billings Evening Journal reported the ex-priest was engaged to be married to a local domestic.

Apparently Holnberg had been living in Billings for at least a month. He told authorities he'd left North Dakota and the priesthood because there was not enough money in it.

When authorities searched his room, they found a suspicious notebook. It was given to the county attorney and a stenographer who tried to decipher it but could not.

It is suspected by authorities, they say, that the writing is in code. The paper ominously added, A revolver was also found.

Holnberg had made several trips to other small towns around Billings. He told authorities that he was interested in purchasing land. Neither the police nor the newspaper bought Holnberg's story.

He is said to have held conversations of a confidential nature with persons suspected of pro-Germanism in several of the towns he visited, and additional arrests are suspected, the paper said.

Local residents said he posed as a lawyer from Chicago.

The headlines stoked fears that there was a secret German society in Billings. The next day, the paper revealed that Holnberg was formerly the private librarian of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. Authorities charged that Holnberg was an organizer of a secret German military organization.

Oddly, the connection between the priest and Ferdinand was made through a letter that appeared in The Billings Gazette which defended teaching German in schools and also defended the actions of Germany. It was signed, F.X. Hollnberger, Ph.D., former private librarian of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria.

In other words, Holnberg had tipped authorities off himself.

They immediately became fearful because of a list Holnberg kept that had the names and addresses of residents of German lineage living in America, some of them listed by military title. That was enough for some residents to believe there truly was a network of German spies.

Later, Billings investigators learned that Holnberg had been excommunicated more than a year prior and had been forced to leave Dickinson.

Holnberg's arrest may have been the only legitimate case of a pro-German spy in Yellowstone County. But, he was not the first person to have been rounded up, charged and accused. He was just one of more than a dozen people to stand accused in the frightened, overheated years of 1917 and 1918.
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Former Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is headed to Harvard, where he'll be a resident fellow this spring at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Stung by an unexpectedly large 9-point loss to Democrat Ralph Northam in last fall's election, Gillespie has mostly stayed out of the limelight in recent weeks. The campaign for governor turned ugly toward the end, with Gillespie airing ads raising fears of Hispanic street gangs and suggesting that Northam would coddle criminal immigrants and even child molesters.

In his only extended interview since the election, Gillespie told Democratic strategist David Axelrod on his podcast that he would not encourage others to run for office these days because of a "poisonous" political atmosphere.

Since then, though, Gillespie has reached out to Northam, and both men have praised one another's character and principles. At a prayer breakfast last week, just days before being sworn in as Virginia's 73rd governor, Northam read a prayer for peace and success that Gillespie had sent him during the Christmas holidays.

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At Harvard, Gillespie will be one of six fellows for the spring term who will "regularly interact with students, develop and lead weekly study groups, collaborate with other IOP programs, and participate in the intellectual and social life of the Harvard community," according to an announcement from the school.

Joining Gillespie will be former tech executive Adam Conner; former Export-Import Bank president Fred Hochberg; former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges; Republican campaign consultant and CNN contributor Scott Jennings; and former Bernie Sanders press secretary and CNN commentator Symone Sanders.

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RICHMOND  State senators on Monday killed yet another attempt to restore state control over electricity rates paid by consumers but this time they promised to revisit the issue later in the week. Sen. Chap Petersen (D-Fairfax) had re-introduced legislation that would lift a rate freeze that Dominion Energy has enjoyed since 2015 - a bill that also failed last year. He pointed out that Virginia voters elected a number of Democrats to the House of Delegates in November who campaigned in part on undoing the General Assembly's protections for the state's largest utility and its biggest corporate political donor.

Dominion and the smaller Appalachian Power Co., which serves customers in the southwestern part of the state, ordinarily have their base rates reviewed by the State Corporation Commission. If they are found to have reaped excessive profits through their monopolies on power distribution, the SCC can order refunds to customers.

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But in 2015, citing the uncertainty created by the environmental regulations under then-President Obama's Clean Power Plan, the General Assembly agreed to freeze the base rates for several years to shield the utilities from increased expenses.

Last year, Petersen argued that since the Trump administration has killed the Clean Power Plan, the freeze should be lifted. Studies by the SCC have shown that Dominion has earned hundreds of millions in extra profits during the freeze.

His effort failed last year and again on Monday, with members of the Commerce and Trade Committee arguing that the utility still faces considerable uncertainty as it migrates to alternative sources of energy. One senator pointed out that environmental groups have donated more political money than Dominion.

However, committee leaders acknowledged that the regulatory climate has changed, and said they would unveil legislation later this week that would lift the freeze  just not as abruptly as Petersen's bill.

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"This is the appropriate time to go back into a re-regulated environment," committee chairman Sen. Frank Wagner (R-Virginia Beach) said. He and Sen. Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax County) said they would roll out a bipartisan bill on Thursday that more comprehensively addresses the need to both regulate and protect the utilities.

Saslaw bristled as several speakers referred to the pending legislation as "the Dominion bill."

"Let me be as clear as I can: There is no Dominion bill," Saslaw said in the committee meeting. "That bill is being sponsored by Sen. Wagner and myself, and what goes into that bill, we're putting into that bill. Are we talking to them? Yes we are talking to them. But that is not Dominion's bill. That's our bill."

After the senators voted 13-1 to set Petersen's bill aside indefinitely, Petersen noted on Facebook that the committee leaders had made a lot of promises.

The upcoming bill "will issue refunds, promote green energy and cure cancer  all with the support of Dominion," he said. "I'm mighty skeptical."

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JANESVILLE, Wis.  In a cornfield here, past the shuttered General Motors plant and the Janesville Terrace trailer home park, a facility not seen in the United States in three decades could soon rise: a manufacturing plant that will make a vital radioactive isotope used to detect cancer and other potentially fatal maladies in millions of people every year.

Nuclear medicine imaging, a staple of American health care since the 1970s, runs almost entirely on molybdenum-99, a radioisotope produced by nuclear fission of enriched uranium that decays so rapidly it becomes worthless within days. But moly-99, as it's called, is created in just six government-owned nuclear research reactors  none in North America  raising concerns about the reliability of the supply and even prompting federal scientists to warn of the possibility of severe shortages.

Some 50,000 Americans each day depend on a strange and precarious supply chain easily disrupted by a variety of menaces: shipments grounded by fog in Dubai, skittish commercial airline pilots who refuse to carry radioactive material and unplanned nuclear reactor shutdowns, including one in South Africa when a mischievous baboon sneaked into a reactor hall.

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Delays that pose an inconvenience for other commercial goods are existential threats in the daily global relay race of medical isotopes that disappear hour by hour. "It's like running through the desert with an ice cream cone," said Ira Goldman, senior director of global strategic supply at Lantheus Medical Imaging in North Billerica, Mass.

But that race may soon be shortened. Propelled by persistent supply problems and fears that terrorists could seize American uranium en route to foreign facilities, President Barack Obama signed legislation in 2013 prodding American companies into the medical-isotope business.

The $100 million Janesville plant, in the hometown of Rep. Paul Ryan, speaker of the House, is the first construction project to pass through the labyrinthine nuclear regulatory approval process since 1985 and is being built by SHINE Medical Technologies with $25 million in federal funds.

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Greg Piefer, the company's founder and a nuclear engineer (he drives a Tesla with the license plate "NEUTRON"), has big plans for the cornfield: a plant that could manufacture up to 50,000 doses of imaging agent a week. "Ryan called me out of the blue and he said, 'We really want you here,'" Piefer said.

Still, it could be years before moly-99 is manufactured in the United States. SHINE still needs more money to complete its manufacturing plant, and investors are wary of the many problems that can arise during construction. Already, construction deadlines promised by SHINE have come and gone. Other competitors, meanwhile, that received tens of millions of dollars in federal grants to build their own moly-99 manufacturing plants have been thwarted by protracted drug approvals and nuclear regulatory hurdles, and some have given up.

European rivals have also cautioned the American upstarts. At industry presentations, Goldman said, the producers have warned, "This is more difficult than it looks. You can't come up with a fancy slide that says, 'I'm going to be producing moly-99 in a couple of years.'"

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Birth Of An Isotope

The radioactive isotope injected into the veins of potential heart attack victims or bone cancer patients begins its journey in the heavily guarded American nuclear stockpile.

The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration ships Cold War-era uranium overseas, where the containers  sought by terrorists for dirty bombs  are secretively trucked to government-owned nuclear research reactors in the Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic and Poland. (South Africa and Australia also use American uranium to produce moly-99 in research reactors.)

Private companies rent time in the reactors to irradiate enriched uranium targets, producing an atomic alphabet soup. Nearby processing facilities fish out the moly-99, and the radioactive material is loaded onto commercial airline flights bound for the United States in protective containers.

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Three companies dominate the American market for moly-99  Lantheus, Curium and GE Healthcare. They distribute the material to specialized pharmacies around the country, where technicians process it into a diagnostic imaging agent called technetium-99. The companies work against a ticking clock: Because of its short half-life, just 66 hours for moly-99 and six hours for the imaging agent, the material must be quickly delivered to hospitals and administered to patients.

"The whole industry is like a duck going on a fast-flowing river," said Kevin Charlton, an analyst at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris. "On the surface, it looks like things are going very smoothly, but under the water, their legs are going really fast."

Countless things can go wrong, starting with the first step.

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The worldwide supply of moly-99 relies on a fleet of government-subsidized nuclear research reactors built mostly during the Khrushchev-Eisenhower era.

Regular maintenance and major repairs can shutter the reactors, sometimes for months, and so-called scrams  caused by anything from a hiccup in a reactor's cooling system to an errant lightning strike  frequently halt production. "It's a nuclear reactor," Charlton said. "The only thing you can do is shut it off."

Even the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., a prestigious cancer treatment center, can be left waiting for shipments of the generators that contain the imaging agent. "We've had days when no generator comes in at all, or it's been cut in half," said Andrew Paulsen, supervisor of the clinic's radiopharmaceutical laboratory.

And the ephemeral nature of moly-99 always looms. On a recent afternoon, inside a locked laboratory at Stanford Hospital's nuclear medicine department in Palo Alto, Calif., a technician held a lead-lined, plastic cylinder containing a syringe of fragile atoms that had traveled around the globe.

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Once the imaging agent is injected into a patient's body, it emits gamma rays that can be detected by gamma cameras that look like X-ray machines. The radioactive tracer lights up on a computer monitor wherever the heart's blood vessels are blocked or bones are riddled with potentially cancerous tumors. The imaging agent was first used in medical applications in the 1960s because its short half-life meant that patients were getting less exposure to radioactivity than from other diagnostic tracers.

But at Stanford's nuclear medicine department that day, a patient had missed his appointment. This meant the dose  which cost the hospital an irretrievable $500  had decayed and was now useless. The technician threw the syringe in the trash.

The supply chain's vulnerability, acutely felt during a severe worldwide shortage in 2009 and 2010 when two reactors shut down unexpectedly, has led some doctors to shift to more dependable, but more toxic, imaging agents. "For cardiac imaging, we had to shift to a more expensive agent and expose patients to more radiation," said Dr. Andrei Iagaru, chief of the division of nuclear medicine at Stanford Health Care.

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After the worldwide shortage, the volume of nuclear medicine tests went down, and stayed down. "It definitely had an impact on the way many practices run their cardiac stress tests," Iagaru said.

Depending On Other Countries

American patients consume nearly half of the world's supply of moly-99. And despite plans to ramp up production in Australia, reactor construction is notoriously tricky. In addition, reactors that are converting for security reasons to low-enriched uranium have lower yields and more waste, according to nuclear scientists.

Concerns about moly-99 shortages heightened in October 2016, when the Canadian government mothballed a reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, that supplied about 40 percent of the American market. The government's decision to shutter the plant was, in part, due to frustration that Canada had had to spend $70 million in 2009 to repair the facility  in effect, subsidizing the American health care industry. That is a complaint of European governments as well.

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William Magwood, director of the Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris, said that moly-99 production at Chalk River "went from being incidental to being the only reason to operate the reactor."

"Canadians didn't want to continue to operate a high-cost reactor to sell isotopes to the U.S.," he said.

Some European governments have begun charging moly-99 producers higher rates to rent reactor time, and prices are expected to rise sharply when governments strip for-profit companies of subsidies originally meant to support academic research.

"How much will get passed on to the health care providers?" said Leah Gannon, senior portfolio executive of radiopharmaceutical distribution sourcing for Vizient, a company that negotiates contracts for hospitals. "Probably almost all of it."

With no source of moly-99 anywhere in North America, American nuclear medicine specialists appointed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine warned in a 2016 report commissioned by Congress of a more than 50 percent likelihood of another severe shortage in the coming years.

Moly-99 suppliers refute the report's findings, a position echoed by the Nuclear Energy Agency, which has fostered closer ties among producing nations. Reactor operators, the suppliers say, work closely to stagger maintenance shutdowns to minimize shortages and respond to disruptions in production, and producers have increased the number of uranium targets.

"We're describing a glass that is half-full," Charlton said, "whereas the National Academy of Sciences sees the glass looking half empty."

Still, nuclear medicine physicians and nuclear pharmacists charged with filling patient orders each day say the supply remains fragile, especially for smaller pharmacies where the moly-99 imaging agent can account for 95 percent of their business. "It is inconceivable to believe that an outage will never occur on any of these old reactors in the future," said Dr. Joseph Hung, director of radiopharmaceutical operations at the Mayo Clinic and a member of the government committee.

Wendy Galbraith, a clinical associate professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Pharmacy in Oklahoma City who runs the university's pharmacy, said she frequently doesn't know if moly-99 is going to be available until the wee hours of the morning. Even when there are no major outages, she said, "it's a scramble."

That uncertainty means delays and on-the-fly triage for patients. "If we have a patient who can wait two days for their cardiac stress test, we'll put them off," Galbraith said.

Suppliers want to tamp down fears about reliability, physicians and pharmacists say, to dissuade them from seeking alternative imaging methods when possible, like positron emission tomography, a costly and complex type of medical scan.

"It's hard to stay relevant in an environment when things are not available every now and then," said Iagaru at Stanford.

Even more troubling, critics say, is the lack of redundancy in the supply chain. Of the four global suppliers, two rely on a single reactor. "If anything goes wrong with the reactors in South Africa and Australia," Dr. Hung said, "it will be deja vu again like in 2009."

The Wisconsin Project

If the United States is to grow a domestic moly-99 supply, it will probably rise from the corn and soybean fields in America's Dairyland.

Rock County, Wis., has become the unexpected home to two of the three companies vying for control: NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes in Beloit, which has been awarded $50 million in federal grants, and SHINE, or Subcritical Hybrid Intense Neutron Emitter, in Janesville.

Backed by $25 million in federal support, Piefer, SHINE's chief executive, has promised to build a nuclear accelerator and produce moly-99 by 2020. (The previous deadline was 2015.) In early 2017, the company opened its headquarters in Janesville above the Time Out Pub & Eatery and down the street from a fishing tackle shop and Speaker Ryan's district office.

Nuclear engineers have moved en masse to Janesville in recent months, decorating their cubicles with hand-painted signs with sayings like, "Think like a proton, stay positive."

Piefer zips along Highway 90 in his Model S Tesla between Janesville and Monona, a Madison suburb where his research lab, Phoenix Nuclear Labs is located. There, engineers have built a ghostly particle beam that looks like a giant, purple lightsaber.

Eight particle accelerators have been designed for the Janesville plant, which the Nuclear Regulatory Agency approved for construction in 2016. Piefer still needs to raise considerable private capital, a challenge with eager entrants like NorthStar and Nordion, an Ottawa-based company also with aggressive plans to enter the Moly-99 market.

"If we don't have significant production soon, we will continue to export highly enriched uranium," Piefer said. "And the National Nuclear Security Administration will have failed their mission."

The city of Janesville is banking on Piefer. Its economy reeling from the closing of the General Motors plant in 2008, the City Council aggressively pursued SHINE with a generous economic development package, besting two other Wisconsin cities.

In 2011, over the objections of some residents opposed to a nuclear facility in the town, the council authorized $1.53 million to buy 84 acres of farmland, which it has agreed to turn over to SHINE for $1. The city has also agreed to pay $345,000 to extend utilities to the site, provide $2 million in forgivable loans and co-sign a bank loan with SHINE for up to $4 million that it would have to pay should the company fail, a first for the city.

Gale Price, economic development director for the city of Janesville, said that although it was unusual to put public money into a startup, the city expected to recoup its investment within 10 years. "That's how we measure whether we're giving away the farm," he said.

Ryan has championed the project and spoke at a celebration marking nuclear regulatory approval. But Piefer said, except for the initial phone call urging him to come to Janesville, Ryan has played no part in the federal grant and construction approvals.

SHINE jumped at the chance at federal money for the private plant. But Piefer isn't solely focused on the need in American hospitals. The company has already announced lucrative deals to ship moly-99 to Chinese hospitals.

But first, it needs to start producing.

"You cannot just open a shop down the street and start nuclear medicine," said Iaragu, of Stanford. "The public comes with an expectation that if my oncologist wants me to get a bone scan, it's not big deal. But the truth is, it's a big deal."

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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SACRAMENTO, Calif.  Until last year, Jackie Coleman was a disability rights lawyer  a good one, too. "I was an excellent attorney," recalled the 63-year-old Rancho Cordova, Calif., resident who loved her job and was proud of the work she did. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight But a little over a year ago, she started to forget appointments and details from meetings, and began to depend heavily on her secretary. Then she started making mistakes. Ultimately, one got her fired.

Two weeks later, she got a diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease.

Coleman, dressed in purple  the official color of the Alzheimer's advocacy movement  recounted those awful days while attending an Alzheimer's panel discussion last week at the California Museum, near the state Capitol. A small, soft-spoken woman with shoulder-length hair and round glasses, she attended with her more talkative friend and roommate, Joyce Irwin, 60.

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The women said they'd cared for each other for the past three years. Irwin, a three-time cancer survivor, said her late husband had dementia and mother likely did, too, though she wasn't diagnosed back then.

Sponsored by Northern California and Northern Nevada Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association, the event was part of an initiative to highlight the disease's impact on women, who account for two-thirds of people living with Alzheimer's and two-thirds of those caring for them.

About 630,000 people have Alzheimer's disease in California, and women in their 60s have a 1 in 6 chance of developing the disease  almost twice as high as the risk of developing breast cancer.

Before the formal discussion got started, one of the speakers, Pam Montana, told a reporter a story not unlike Coleman's: She had been a sales director at Intel Corp. before being forced to retire early because she couldn't keep up with workplace demands.

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Despite her Alzheimer's diagnosis in 2016, she's upbeat and funny  not "your grandma in a wheelchair" that some people associate with the disease, she said. The lively 62-year-old sometimes introduces herself by joking that she's not Hannah's mom  a reference to the once-popular Disney show "Hannah Montana." Sporting a stylish bob and an elegant black dress with white stripes, she confided that her disease has done nothing to keep her away from Nordstrom.

"Alzheimer's looks like me, it looks like you, it looks like everyone," the Danville, Calif., resident said.

She acknowledged some hard times. She cries and becomes frustrated easily. She no longer drives at night, and during the day she only goes to places she knows, because navigation apps are too confusing, she said.

Between visits to the neurologist and numerous cognitive tests, it took about two years for Montana to get a proper diagnosis. "It was so stressful waiting to hear the diagnosis, [but] as hard as it was to hear the words, I was grateful to have an answer," she said.

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A day afterward, she decided to join the advocacy team at the Alzheimer's Association and share her story  while she still could.

"I've never been more powerful than now," Montana said. Inspired by the #MeToo movement that encourages women to speak out about sexual harassment, Montana wants to start a social media movement with the hashtag #IHaveAlz, to help eliminate the shame that sometimes comes with the disease, she said.

Once the event started, panelist Kaci Fairchild, a psychologist and professor at Stanford University, told the audience of about 50 about the importance of exercise  for the body and the brain. She also urged everyone to become familiar with the 10 early warning signs of Alzheimer's, which include poor judgment, personality changes and withdrawal from social activities.

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Knowing these symptoms and getting an early diagnosis can buy families some time, Fairchild said.

Panel moderator Liz Hernandez, a former correspondent for NBC's "Access Hollywood," said that had she recognized the signs of Alzheimer's sooner in her mom, she could have received care and resources earlier. Hernandez urged the mixed-age audience to have conversations with their loved ones about the type of care they would want if they were to be diagnosed.

"These conversations are heartbreaking but they have to be had," Hernandez said.

In Latino culture, for example, "it is really hard to talk about money, but we have to ask our parents if they've set aside money for care because it is very expensive," she said.

Montana and Coleman are still independent, and they have made lifestyle changes. They eat healthier, exercise more frequently and engage in activities that stimulate their brains.

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Coleman said she has gradually become more involved with the Alzheimer's Association, participating in volunteer activities. That's how she learned about the panel. To stay sharp, she works on puzzles and sticks reminder notes in spots around the house. She still is able to drive  a good thing, because one of Irwin's arms is in a sling right now. Irwin pitches in by handling the driving directions.

Montana keeps a journal and writes a blog. Her doctor had so many suggestions  practice yoga, hit the gym, learn a new language  that it was almost overwhelming.

Montana finally asked her which was the most important.

"My doctor told me, 'Do what makes you happy,'" she recalled during the panel, her eyes tearing up. "And that's what I would tell others. Don't look at a list. Do what works for you."

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Judge tosses one charge in mutilation case Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight A federal judge in Detroit has dismissed one of several charges against two doctors in connection with a female genital mutilation case. U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman ruled Sunday that Jumana Nagarwala and Fakhruddin Attar didn't commit conspiracy to transport a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. Two of the girls Nagarwala is accused of cutting at Attar's clinic were from Minnesota.

"The facts alleged in the indictment do not support this charge because, as a matter of law, FGM, while a prohibited criminal act, is not 'criminal sexual activity,'" Friedman wrote.

Female genital mutilation, also known as female circumcision or cutting, or FGM, has been condemned by the United Nations and outlawed in the United States. But the practice is common for girls in parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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Nagarwala was arrested in April. She is accused of cutting at least six girls at Attar's clinic in Livonia, just west of Detroit. The two Minnesota girls were brought to Michigan by their mothers, who are also charged in the case. The girls were 7 years old at the time.

Nagarwala denies any crime was committed. She said she performed a religious custom on girls from her Muslim sect, the India-based Dawoodi Bohra.

A grand jury in Michigan indicted Nagarwala, Attar and Attar's wife, Farida, on charges including female genital mutilation and conspiracy. The federal indictment alleged the trio tried to obstruct the investigation by telling other people to make false statements to authorities. The doctors are also accused of lying to investigators.

 Associated Press

Woman killed by stray bullet in desert: An Arizona woman has died after being struck in the chest by a stray bullet while visiting a desert area popular for target shooting, police said Monday. Kami Gilstrap, 24, of Goodyear was with family members at the shooting area in the desert about 30 miles west of Phoenix on Sunday when she was struck, Buckeye police spokeswoman Detective Tamela Skaggs said. The person who fired the shot has not been identified. A large number of people apparently were shooting in the area. It is legal to shoot on large swaths of U.S.-owned land in Arizona.

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Two die as utility company helicopter crashes: A helicopter crashed into a snowy Ohio field Monday, killing the two people on board. A witness reported the crash about midday just south of the Ohio Turnpike in Wood County. The county sheriff's office said the aircraft is affiliated with a utility company surveying power lines in the area, and the two people who died aren't from the area.

 From news services

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Thirteen siblings, ranging in age from 2 to 29, were rescued by police in California from a house where some of them had been chained to beds, and their parents have been charged with torture, officials said Monday. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Police made the discovery after a 17-year-old girl escaped the house in Perris, about 70 miles east of Los Angeles, and used a cellular phone she had found in the house to call them, the Riverside County Sheriff's Office said in a statement released online.

"Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults," police said in the statement. "The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty."

The girl, who officers had initially thought was about 10 years old, contacted police on Sunday after escaping. The children's parents, David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested and each charged with nine counts of torture and 10 counts of child endangerment. They were ordered held on $9 million bail, police said.

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Six of the couple's children are minors, while the other seven are over 18, police said.

The siblings told officers that they were starving, police said. The police in the statement did not detail the parents' motive for holding the children hostage, and a police spokesman said he had no further details.

A neighbor who answered the phone Monday but spoke on the condition of anonymity described the neighborhood as recently built and said he did not know the Turpins and had not noticed anything unusual. The neighborhood is made up of low-slung, stucco single-family homes, according to images online.

The parents are due in court on Thursday.

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When you get a big tax return, its tempting to spend it right away on a gift or vacation. But we all know its responsible to use the savings to pay bills or invest for the future.

That responsible approach is whats needed now from electric utilities that are about to get a big corporate payout from the new tax law. Instead of enriching their executives and shareholders, power companies should support local communities and workers. One community that merits investment for its future is Colstrip, Montana.

The coal power plant in Colstrip has powered homes and businesses from Montana to Idaho to Washington State for decades, but is no longer cost-competitive with less expensive energy sources. The utilities that own it have a responsibility to support new economic opportunities for the workers and residents of the Colstrip area and to clean up the water contaminated by years of coal-ash waste storage. The tax windfall coming to Colstrips owners provides a place to start.

The new tax bill gives corporations a 40 percent tax cut. One Montana utility regulator estimates that NorthWestern Energy could get back as much as $30 million each year under the law. Every power company invested in Colstrip is likely to see a similar windfall.

Investor-owned utilities, like any business, strive to make money for shareholders, so it is natural for utility executives to try to steer some of the gain from the tax break to their investors. But lets be clear: utility shareholders didnt generate the money that power companies are about to save under the new tax law. That money came from families and businesses paying their electricity bills based on the old tax rate. Utilities were saving that money to pay taxes, which just decreased significantly. Thats why consumers should insist that the tax cut should assist impacted communities, not further line shareholders pockets.

Investing in economic diversification, supporting workers, and cleaning up contaminated water in Colstrip should be a top priority for these utilities. The tab for cleaning up water polluted by Colstrips coal-ash waste will be hundreds of millions of dollars for customers of Colstrips owners like NorthWestern Energy. Setting aside this tax windfall revenue will help make sure consumers arent stuck paying utilities a profit to clean up the contamination they caused.

Puget Sound Energy, which serves Western Washington, recently took a huge step towards taking care of the community of Colstrip by committing to provide $10 million for an economic transition fund. Half of those funds are from PSE shareholders, not ratepayers. Gov. Steve Bullock and Attorney General Tim Fox have set up a task force to guide the funds use.

In addition, PSE is setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars to pay its share of cleanup costs. To date, Northwestern Energy has yet to do the same. Montanas largest utility should show the same concern for Eastern Montana and start contributing to this fund to help ensure workers and the communities arent left stranded when the plant inevitably closes.

Colstrips owners could show their commitment to the Colstrip area by investing now in economic diversification and water restoration. The power companies owe it to workers, residents and local businesses to help fund an economic transition. Thats something consumers who have been powered by the Colstrip plant can get behind, too.
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Jets sent to intercept 2 Russian bombers Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Britain's Royal Air Force scrambled two fighter jets to intercept Russian bombers near U.K. airspace Monday in another illustration of ongoing tensions. The RAF confirmed a "quick reaction alert," deploying Typhoon aircraft from the Lossiemouth base in Scotland as two Tupolev TU-160 Blackjack bombers approached Britain. "The Russian aircraft were initially monitored by a variety of friendly nation fighters and subsequently intercepted by the RAF in the North Sea," the air force said. "At no point did the Russian aircraft enter sovereign U.K. airspace."

Last week, the HMS Westminster, a Portsmouth-based frigate, was ordered to intercept two Russian warships and two supporting vessels passing near British waters.

 Associated Press

End of cease-fire may mean more refugees

Thousands of Colombians risk being forced from their homes amid renewed violence after the expiration of a cease-fire between the country's ELN rebel group and the government, the United Nations and aid groups warned Monday.

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The National Liberation Army (ELN) leftist guerrilla group and the government of President Juan Manuel Santos have been in peace talks for nearly a year, but the rebels launched a fresh offensive last week, killing members of the security forces, after the expiration of a 101-day cease-fire.

"We are worried about new displacements along the whole Pacific Coast where we have seen a lot of new displacements in 2017," said Jozef Merkx, head of the U.N. refugee agency in Colombia.

Colombia's western Pacific coast, a poor, underdeveloped rain forest area, has long been a hot spot of violence as criminal gangs and armed groups fight for territorial control.

 Reuters

Officials move to close Navalny foundation

Russia's Justice Ministry filed a lawsuit to shut down a company linked to opposition leader Alexei Navalny that is being used to fund his political campaigning.

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The Justice Ministry said Monday that it has asked a Moscow court to close the Fifth Season of the Year foundation, which rents premises for Navalny's headquarters and employs campaign workers, over unspecified violations.

Navalny has unofficially campaigned for the presidency despite an implicit ban on his candidacy due to a fraud conviction seen by many as politically driven. Election officials last month formally barred him from the March 18 vote, which President Vladimir Putin is set to easily win. Navalny has urged a boycott of the vote.

 Associated Press

Gun battle in Libya's capital kills 20: Heavily armed Libyan militias clashed in Tripoli, killing at least 20 people and forcing the capital's only airport to close, officials said. The Health Ministry said an additional 63 people were wounded in the fighting between two militias that are ostensibly allied with the internationally backed government, underscoring the instability in the country.

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Families of missing sub crew ask Russia to continue search: Relatives of some of the 44 crew members aboard an Argentine submarine that disappeared in the South Atlantic are asking Russia to carry on with the search two months after the vessel vanished. An explosion occurred near the time and place where the ARA San Juan disappeared Nov. 15. Russia is now the last of 18 foreign countries that have assisted in the search in an area of some 1,500 square miles.

 From news services

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Under deal, Rohingya repatriation by 2020 Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Bangladesh and Burma have agreed that they will try to complete within two years the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who fled from violence in Burma, Bangladesh's Foreign Ministry said Tuesday. The ministry said a working group from the two countries has finalized an agreement on the physical arrangements for the repatriation of the ethnic Rohingya. It said they agreed that the process "would be completed preferably within two years from the commencement of repatriation."

Burma and Bangladesh signed an initial agreement in November to repatriate the Rohingya, and the working group was set up to oversee the process. Many question whether the Rohingya would return to Burma under the current circumstances and whether Burma would accept them.

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Under the November agreement, the Rohingya will need to provide evidence of their residency in Burma to return  something many say they do not have.

More than 650,000 ethnic Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since August, when Burma's military launched a brutal crackdown in Rakhine state after a militant group attacked police posts. The army described it as "clearance operations" against terrorists, but the United Nations called it "ethnic cleansing."

Despite having lived in predominantly Buddhist Burma for generations, Rohingya Muslims have been denied citizenship, freedom of movement and access to basic social rights.

Burma plans to start the repatriation process on Tuesday.

 Associated Press

Nigeria releases 244 Boko Haram suspects: Nigeria's army released 244 Boko Haram suspects who have denounced their membership in the extremist group, officials said. Those released included 118 adult males, 56 women, 19 teens and 51 children, according to Maj. Gen. Rogers Nicholas, who said they had participated in a de-radicalization program. Boko Haram has killed more than 20,000 people in its years-long insurgency. Nigeria has arrested thousands suspected to be Boko Haram members. Human rights groups say most of those detained have been picked up at random.

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Philippine province declares 'calamity' over volcano: A central Philippine province declared a state of calamity as a volcano spewed lava that reached the limits of a no-go zone and spread ash on nearby farming villages. Mount Mayon, a volcano in Albay province, has been erupting since Saturday. At least 34,038 people have been displaced by Mayon's eruption, said an Albay provincial disaster response officer. Officials advised people not to venture into a danger zone about four miles around Mayon. The calamity declaration in Albay is expected to allow more rapid disbursement of disaster funds.

1,400 migrants rescued at sea, Italy says: About 1,400 migrants were plucked from overcrowded boats off the coast of Libya on Tuesday, Italy's coast guard said, and two bodies were recovered. Vessels belonging to the Italian coast guard and finance police, a European Union anti-smuggling operation and ships run by aid groups took part in 11 rescue operations, a statement said. It is unusual to see so many rescued on a single day during the winter, when the seas tend to be rough.

Danish man charged with killing reporter on his submarine: Inventor Peter Madsen was charged with killing Swedish journalist Kim Wall during a trip on his submarine, with prosecutors saying he either cut her throat or strangled her before dismembering her body and dumping the parts into the sea. Madsen, 47, is also charged with having sexual relations with Wall, 30, of a "particularly dangerous nature" before she was killed. Madsen and Wall had gone on a trip in his submarine on Aug. 10. The next day, Madsen was rescued from the sinking submarine without Wall. Police believe he deliberately sank the vessel.

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Rebel ex-police officer killed in Venezuela shootout: Officials in Venezuela confirmed that a rebellious police officer who led a brazen helicopter attack in Caracas last year was killed in a shootout with security forces. Oscar Perez was among seven who died in the fighting in a mountain community outside Caracas, Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said. Two police officers were killed and eight gravely injured, he said. Perez leaped into the spotlight in June, when he stole a helicopter and used it to lob grenades and fire at two government buildings in Caracas.

Brazil's Sao Paulo at risk for yellow fever: The World Health Organization said it considers all of Brazil's Sao Paulo state at risk for yellow fever, recommending that all international visitors to the state be vaccinated. That puts the megacity of Sao Paulo on the list. But Brazil's Health Ministry said it was not changing its own, recently updated map of at-risk areas, which includes only certain parts of the state and the city. The announcement comes as an outbreak is gathering steam in Brazil during the Southern Hemisphere summer rainy season and just weeks ahead of Carnival, a major draw for foreign tourists.

 From news services

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With the storm brewing over the departure of Discovery Communications from Silver Spring, it's time for the region to take action to shape our future ["Discovery is selling Md. headquarters and moving to New York next year," Economy & Business, Jan. 10]. While the move is beyond our control, it could be a sign of clouds gathering. We can wait for the next storm or prepare to compete.

The MetroNow coalition, joined by Urban Land Institute Washington, has broadcast the alert. The Stephen S. Fuller Institute migration report says we are losing ground: "The Washington region lost population to metros with relatively strong job growth, to metros close to the region with lower costs of living." A Kogod Greater Washington Index on millennials states that jobs are priority No. 1, followed by salary and housing affordability. As for our daily commute, "Over half of Millennials surveyed could use Metro to commute but don't because it's too unreliable, expensive and/or time consuming."

Threats to our livelihood can bring us together to take charge of our economic well-being. We must first fix and fund Metro by supporting the MetroNow coalition.

We must also create land-use policies that remove barriers to building housing that is affordable across all income levels, and we must attract businesses that can fuel economic growth and stability. A loss to Silver Spring is a loss to us all.

Yolanda Cole, Washington

The writer is chair

of Urban Land Institute Washington.

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Marco Rubio, a Republican, represents Florida in the U.S. Senate. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, represents Maryland in the U.S. Senate. While the 2016 election may have left our country divided on many issues, it exposed one critical problem that should unite all Americans: Our democratic process is vulnerable to attacks by hostile foreign powers. As our intelligence community unanimously assessed, Russia used social media channels to influence and mislead voters. It also hacked political campaign committees and local elections boards in a brazen attempt to undermine and subvert our elections.

There is no reason to think this meddling will be an isolated incident. In fact, we expect the threat will grow in future years. The United States must do everything possible to prevent these attacks in the future  and lay out the consequences well in advance of our next elections. Today, we are introducing bipartisan legislation to do just that.

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Our bill, the Defending Elections from Threats by Establishing Redlines Act, would send a powerful message to any foreign actor seeking to disrupt our elections: If you attack American candidates, campaigns or voting infrastructure, you will face severe consequences.

We believe that clearly outlining our deterrence strategy will send an important message to any adversary contemplating interfering in a future U.S. election. This legislation uses key national security tools to dissuade hostile foreign powers from meddling in our elections by ensuring the costs outweigh the benefits.

To start, we must ensure there is a system for continued monitoring and reporting on foreign threats to elections  and clear punishments if attacks occur. Our legislation would require the director of national intelligence to issue a determination to Congress, within one month after every federal election, on whether any foreign government had interfered in that election.

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The Deter Act also spells out actions that would elicit retaliation. A foreign power cannot purchase advertisements to influence an election, including online ads, or use social and traditional media  such as the thousands of trolls and botnets deployed by the Kremlin  to spread significant amounts of false information to Americans. They also cannot hack, leak or modify election and campaign infrastructure, including voter registration databases and campaign emails. Finally, no foreign power can block or otherwise hinder access to elections infrastructure, such as websites providing information on polling locations.

Because we know Russia has already employed many of these actions, the Deter Act would mandate a set of severe sanctions if the director of national intelligence should determine that the Kremlin had once again interfered in a U.S. federal election. Within 10 days of such a determination, our bill would require the administration to impose sanctions on major sectors of the Russian economy, including finance, energy, defense, metals and mining. It would also block the assets of every senior Russian political figure or oligarch and prevent them from entering the United States. We also would require the administration to work with the European Union to enlist its support in adopting a sanctions regime to broaden the impact.

These sanctions are far tougher than any action taken on Russia to date and would send an unequivocal message to the Kremlin: We will not tolerate an attack on our democracy.

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But Russia is not our only concern. The director of national intelligence has identified China, Iran and North Korea as our other major foreign government cyberthreats, and they may also seek to exploit U.S. vulnerabilities in the next election cycle. That is why our legislation would require the administration to present Congress with a plan for preventing interference in our elections for each of these countries, plus any other foreign state of significant concern, within 90 days of the Deter Act becoming law.

We cannot underscore enough the urgency of this issue. In less than a year, Americans will head to the ballot box for the midterm elections. Our next presidential election will be here before we know it. It is unrealistic to think we can simply sit back and hope that we do not face another attack by a hostile foreign power.

We and other lawmakers stand willing to work with the administration to develop additional cybersecurity policies that will help protect our election infrastructure and develop a broad-based deterrence strategy. The United States must be fully prepared to defend our country, and the Deter Act would put in place a bipartisan, comprehensive strategy to prevent future attacks on our elections. We urge Congress to pass it without delay.

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President Trump's intent could not be more explicit: He wants immigration policies that admit white people and shut the door to black and brown people. That is pure racism  and the Republican Party, which traces its heritage to the Abraham Lincoln era, must decide whether to go along. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up. ArrowRight Silly me. The GOP seems to have made its choice, judging by the weaselly response from most of the Republicans who were in the Oval Office on Thursday when Trump made vile and nakedly racist remarks.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) heard the president clearly: Trump referred to African nations as "shithole countries," the shocked senator reported. At another point, while discussing potential relief for groups of immigrants  including Haitians  who are losing their temporary permission to remain here, Trump reportedly said, "Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out."

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According to Durbin, Trump asked why the United States wasn't welcoming more immigrants from places such as Norway, whose prime minister had visited the White House a day earlier.

To Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), the president's message apparently came through. His colleague, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who was not at the meeting, said that Graham told him Durbin's account was "basically accurate." Graham himself would say only that "I said my piece directly" to the president, and that "I've always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals."

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Other Republicans at the meeting cravenly claimed either deafness or memory loss. Perhaps they simply agree with Trump's race-based approach to immigration.

Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) issued a joint statement saying they "do not recall . . . specifically" the "shithole countries" slur; Perdue later went further, flatly denying the words were spoken. Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, said she did not recall "that exact phrase," while House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) apparently have been stricken mute.

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I mention them all because they deserve to be enshrined in a Hall of Shame.

I suppose I should also mention that Trump now denies making the statements, but there is absolutely no reason to believe him. On the subject of immigration , he has been remarkably consistent: At another White House meeting last month, according to the New York Times, the president said that Haitians "all have AIDS," and opined that once Nigerians saw the United States, they would never "go back to their huts."

Trump ridiculously told reporters on Sunday that "I'm the least racist person you've ever interviewed." In fact, his long history of racism is well documented, going all the way back to the 1970s, when he and his father were sued by the Justice Department  Richard Nixon's Justice Department, no less  for refusing to rent apartments to African Americans.

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Without the support of Republicans, President Lyndon B. Johnson never could have pushed through the landmark civil rights legislation that outlawed discrimination and put an end to Jim Crow. That was then. This is now, when minorities overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates because they perceive the GOP as either indifferent or hostile.

There is nothing inherently racist about the free-market conservatism that Republicans cherish and advocate. But there is everything racist about the white ethnocentric theory of American identity that Trump champions with remarkable frankness.

That is what the immigration battle is really about. When Trump and his allies say they want to end "chain migration"  in which family members sponsor other family members for entry  they mean they want to halt the influx of immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries. When Trump says he wants to bar Haitians and Africans, he aims to admit fewer black people. When he pines for more Norwegians, he wants to welcome more white people. (Not that Norwegians, at the moment, are very eager to move to Trump's America.)

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Republicans say they want a "merit-based" system of immigration. That has a nice, neutral sound. Who can argue against merit?

But Trump has made clear that what he means to do is halt or reverse the demographic trends that are making this nation increasingly diverse  trends that are wholly consistent with U.S. history.

A century ago, there were nativists who railed against Irish, Italian and Eastern European immigration, claiming that unwashed hordes from poor countries were "mongrelizing" the nation. We now have a president who rejects American ideals of diversity and inclusion in favor of racial purity.

Sens. Cotton and Perdue, Secretary Nielsen, Reps. McCarthy and Goodlatte, do you want a race-based immigration system, too? Please don't pretend you didn't hear the question.

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Over the weekend, Babe, an online publication aimed at young women, released a reported story about an anonymous woman's unhappy sexual encounter with comedian Aziz Ansari, which the woman characterized as "sexual assault." It's unclear if the woman meant that she was sexually assaulted by legal standards, which would be difficult to argue based on her recounting of details, or if she meant to communicate that the encounter had simply seemed worse to her than an "awkward sexual experience," as she put it. Either way, the article was immediately taken as evidence that the #MeToo movement has gone too far and has begun to reinforce the view that women are infantile and helpless.

The fear that #MeToo represents a regression of women's status and liberty didn't arise with Ansari's particular case, though it serves as a good object lesson for skeptics of the movement to demonstrate their concerns. Both Caitlin Flanagan (writing in the Atlantic) and Bari Weiss (in the New York Times) used it as an opportunity to remind women that they have agency, that they're always free to get up and leave, that regret doesn't make an encounter nonconsensual, that you can always tell a guy off, call a cab, just say no. It's become such a common refrain that I wonder if anyone thinks women actually aren't aware, or if they think that saying women always have the free and obvious choice to end a sexual encounter whenever they like will make it true.

It hasn't so far. After its article on Ansari went viral, Babe published a follow-up article featuring several responses from women who felt their experiences with other partners mirrored the anonymous woman's experience with Ansari. On Twitter, there were many more examples of the same. Flanagan noted in her essay that the outpouring of women sharing similar stories was reminiscent of the response to the New Yorker short story "Cat Person," about a humiliating sexual encounter between a young woman and a slightly older man. In fact, it seems we have these sorts of public airings of female sexual misery all the time now, which suggests to me that something is wrong with our sexual culture that can't simply be explained by positing that women are insufficiently aware of their rights and liberties.

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French film icon Catherine Deneuve has joined 99 other women to denounce a backlash against men following the Harvey Weinstein scandal. (Video: Reuters)

One of the principal outcomes of the sexual revolution was to establish that sex is just like any other social interaction  nothing taboo or sacred about it, no big deal. Flanagan points out that, in her day, women were advised to slap men or jump out of cars or scream and shout in order to bring an encounter verging on nonconsent to an end: Sex wasn't an ordinary matter and thus didn't need to be treated with ordinary manners.

Yet, while becoming just another social interaction stripped sex of much taboo, it's still subject to the everyday pressures of etiquette, which can be just as binding. If a guest were lingering too late after a party, or a lunch partner boring you, or an acquaintance pestering you to borrow your umbrella, you wouldn't scream or shout or slap them, and you likely wouldn't abruptly leave. You would likely try to be subtle and transmit certain signals without a confrontation. You would likely go along to get along. You would likely grin and bear it. You would likely do this because that's what we do in workaday social interactions, and sex is one of those now.

The trouble is that sex is clearly different, as the lasting unhappiness of so many women attests. If acknowledging that endangers one of the achievements of the sexual revolution, then so be it: What is the alternative? Telling women over and over that, when it comes to sex, they must abandon all of the normal rules of interacting with others in society hasn't helped and seems transparently ridiculous. In every other domain of life, being patient and generous with others makes a person praiseworthy and well-liked; those mores are deeply instilled and hard to shake, especially for women. It doesn't make any sense to keep insisting otherwise, and trying to destroy those norms  which are good for society in general  seems like a ruinous project.

Instead, we ought to appreciate that sex is a domain so intimate and personal that more harm can be done than in most social situations, and that given that heightened capacity for harm, we should expect people to operate with greater conscientiousness, concern and care in that domain than in others. If you are still hanging around your tired host's home long after the party is over, excuse yourself and leave  don't wait for them to order you out or call the police. If you are kissing someone and they're barely responsive  if they say, as Ansari's partner did, "I don't want to feel forced because then I'll hate you, and I'd rather not hate you"  then get their coat for them and call it a night. Ansari didn't commit a crime. But cruelty isn't restricted to criminal acts. In all domains of life, but especially where it comes to sex, we must insist that people consider one another's interior lives, feelings, personhood, dignity.

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Demanding an expansion of empathy and responsibility when it comes to sex isn't regressive; it's a sexual revolution in its own right. It is silly to think we could have needed only one.

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HATE THE Internal Revenue Service? Worried that you won't be able to fill out your returns correctly under the new tax law? Do not take it out on the poor IRS employee who could not answer your tax question, even after you spent a half-hour on hold. Blame the GOP-led Congress, which, in its anti-IRS fervor, has driven the agency into the ground.

It has become one of the most reliable traditions in contemporary Washington: Every year, the national taxpayer advocate explains that under-funding the IRS makes the tax filing process unnecessarily miserable for those who follow the law, while rewarding those who flout it. And every year, the Republican-led Congress decides to keep the tax system unnecessarily miserable for the law-abiding and easier on the lawbreakers.

"Funding cuts have rendered the IRS unable to provide acceptable levels of taxpayer service, unable to upgrade its technology to improve its efficiency and effectiveness, and unable to maintain compliance programs," national taxpayer advocate Nina E. Olson wrote in her annual report to lawmakers. "It cannot answer the phone calls it currently receives, much less the phone calls it can expect to receive in light of tax reform, without adequate funding."

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Indeed, the new tax law could prompt a wave of confusion that the IRS is ill-prepared to handle. The agency estimates it needs about $500 million just to change computer programs, update forms, write new regulations and answer questions stemming from the bill. After the 1986 tax reform, agency call volume spiked, and the number of returns that required corrections also ticked up, and it is fair to expect the same now.

Though the IRS has tried to improve its phone service recently, even before the tax law passed it anticipated that fewer than half of callers would obtain help from a live person this year. Given the complexity of the new law, many people will have questions that are more than basic. "Taxpayers who want to learn about how the tax law affects them are left searching about 140,000 web pages on IRS.gov or turning to paid professionals," Ms. Olson wrote.

While the taxpayer advocate argued that the IRS could do more with less, there is no doubt that underfunding is a key driver of the dysfunction. Congress has cut the agency's budget by some $300 million since 2009, a bit under 3 percent. During that time, lawmakers have saddled the IRS with responsibility to oversee the phase-in of a new health-care law and, now, a major tax overhaul.

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Can't the IRS  and the Americans it is supposed to serve  just cope? "On the surface, it appears 'customers' (taxpayers) don't have a choice about seeking another tax agency to work with  there are no competitors to which they can move their 'business,' " Ms. Olson wrote. "In fact, however, there is a competitor, and it is the lure of noncompliance. If the IRS isn't going to provide you the assistance you need in the manner you need it, then why bother complying with the tax laws?"

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SINCE THE big Obamacare repeal-and-replace bills failed in the Senate, Congress and President Trump have sought to undermine the law in subtler ways. First, Republican lawmakers repealed Obamacare's individual mandate, a key element of the law's design. Now the Trump administration is rolling out rules that threaten to damage the structure further.

The Labor Department this month proposed looser regulations on so-called association health plans, under which small businesses, professional associations and others in similar circumstances can band together and buy insurance coverage for their groups as though they were large employers. The department argues that up to 11 million people working at small businesses or as sole proprietors lack health insurance, and that the new rules would help provide them more options.

In fact, there is a potentially large downside. The rules would also excuse association health plans from covering 10 classes of essential health benefits. Plans would probably be cheaper, but they would likely cover less than the comprehensive ones Obamacare sought to make the national standard. It is likely that some people who buy these plans will develop significant health problems and find themselves disastrously under-covered. Some may be willing to take that risk. The bigger problem is that opening a new avenue to buying shoddier insurance may harm everyone else seeking affordable, comprehensive coverage when they cannot get it from a large employer.

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Obamacare was built for these individual insurance buyers, who are guaranteed comprehensive coverage that includes those 10 essential health benefits if they buy in the Obamacare marketplace. Over time, new, cheaper association plans might draw healthy people out of the well-regulated Obamacare market and into the more loosely regulated world of association plans. The more healthy insurance buyers exit the Obamacare system, the higher premiums would have to rise in the system's marketplace to offset the medical costs of those who remain. Many people who need coverage  or who simply want comprehensive policies  would have to pay more for it.

The rules' defenders argue that association plans would not be allowed to discriminate against people based on their health status, so it would be hard for them to draw only healthy customers. But experts worry the rules may allow plans to discriminate heavily based on age and sex. Plans could also find subtle ways of weeding out sick customers, for example by designing benefits packages that do not cover expensive treatments that some customers need.

If these rules were the last the Trump administration were to issue, the protections that it retains might contain the damage. But there is another rule in the works that could be even worse, possibly allowing people to buy relatively unregulated health- insurance plans because they are "temporary"  but that in fact last 364 days of the year. This would drain lots of healthy people out of the Obamacare system, into skimpy insurance plans, leaving higher premiums behind them.

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Donald Trump is a jerk. He is also president of the United States. His fans and voters know he is a jerk and love him for it. He is the same low-caliber person he has always been. In spite of that fact that 62,979,879 people voted for him. It matters not that 65,844,954 people voted for Hillary Clinton. It matters not that over 5 million people voted for other candidates. And, far worse, it matters not that 108,600,074 eligible voters did not vote at all.

What matters is that we have a reckless twithead in the White House and thats not even our biggest problem. We, the people, are. It is American citizens who apologize for him, excuse him, ignore him and normalize him who make his presidency a national humiliation.

Trumpian party puritans condone his obscene behavior. They defend filth so foul I cannot write a letter to the editor that meets editorial page standards if I directly quote the president of the United States of America.

What will it take for his devoted base, most of whom are white Evangelical Christians, to at long last realize that they have sold their souls to the Donald?

Wanda LaCroix,

Arlee
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One of the bigger, and more heartening, surprises of the past year was just how fervently it turned out Americans supported health care for low-income people. Republican politicians, after all, had been running against Obamacare  including its Medicaid expansion and income-based subsidies for buying insurance  from the moment the law passed. And the public appeared to back this agenda: The Affordable Care Act polled terribly.

Yet when push came to shove, and Republicans actually tried to dismantle the health-care law last year, Americans fought back. Hard.

They marched in the streets. They showed up en masse to town halls, shaming and shouting down lawmakers. They jammed congressional offices and phone lines.

Even Trump voters, in focus groups, said they didn't want to roll back Medicaid or other health coverage for lower-income people. Mostly, they just wanted in on that sweet, sweet Medicaid deal themselves.

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Clearly "Obamacare" itself had a branding problem all these years, but on the more substantive question  whether it was government's role to make sure Americans had health-care coverage  Democrats had won the fight.

Or so it seemed. Republican officials have, a bit less conspicuously than last summer, fought on.

Unable to roll back Obamacare's health-care expansion legislatively, they're now doing so administratively, through a series of technical, boring-sounding regulatory changes.

This GOP effort ramped up last week, when the Trump administration began allowing states to erect new barriers to Medicaid eligibility.

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In the half-century since Medicaid was first created, eligibility has always been based almost entirely on financial circumstances such as income and assets; the program's goal, after all, was to help less-well-off Americans obtain medical care. Last week, though, the Trump administration announced that it would start allowing states to impose other requirements on Medicaid recipients, including proof that they are working, looking for work, volunteering or in school.

"I was raised with a mind-set to work, give an honest day's work for an honest day's pay," Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) said at a news conference announcing that his state was the first to receive a waiver allowing Medicaid work requirements. "It's the very same thinking that we want to bring to people here in Kentucky that are able to participate."

But there's no reason to think, in Kentucky or other states itching to add work requirements, that there are legions of Medicaid loafers. Nearly 8 in 10 Medicaid-enrolled nonelderly adults already live in working families, and most (60 percent) are working themselves, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Most who are not working report major impediments to their ability to get a job, such as illness, disability, school enrollment or caregiving responsibilities.

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But that won't necessarily protect eligible low-income people from being kicked off Medicaid rolls anyway.

Verifying that beneficiaries meet work requirements will impose a huge and costly new administrative burden on states, and also on the working poor. As the Trump administration letter approving Kentucky's work requirements acknowledged, the state's Medicaid phone lines are already overwhelmed. If working Kentuckians are unable to cut through the red tape, they can get locked out of the system for six months.

The Trump administration argues, somewhat confusingly, that the new work requirements will actually improve public health. Why? Because they'll encourage more poor people to find jobs, and employed people tend to have fewer health problems.

This likely gets the causality backward, though, given how many Americans report illness as a barrier to getting or keeping a job.

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Focus groups and state-level studies have found that Obamacare's Medicaid expansion helped lower-income people gain work or remain employed; inversely, reducing long-term access to physical, mental and substance-abuse treatment is likely to hurt both health and employment prospects.

If the Trump administration truly wants to help more Americans find jobs  a goal that both parties can surely get behind  there are far more effective tools than taking away health care. Investing in skills, apprenticeships and job-matching services, for instance. Or expanding the earned-income tax credit, a historically bipartisan program curiously absent from the recent tax bill.

Instead, they're still fixated on dismantling Obamacare, through this backdoor regulatory repeal.

Republicans are counting on the notion that a raft of wonkish-sounding waivers  unlike last year's splashy, failed Trumpcare legislation  will inspire no riots in the streets, no rowdy town halls, no phone-line-jamming and no mass mobilization to protect health care for the nation's most vulnerable.

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Who wants to prove them wrong?

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The Wall Street Journal celebrated the new year with wonderful news. "We're pleased to report that there hasn't been a fascist coup in Washington," announced a Jan. 1 editorial. True enough, but as two Harvard professors point out in a new book, coups are so 20th-century. Democracies perish, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out, by a kind of civic Alzheimer's. They forget to function.

This has been the case in Poland, Hungary, Venezuela and Turkey, to name just four countries under odious regimes. As for the United States, a kind of coup has already succeeded. Truth has been commandeered by the state and dispatched to a new gulag. It is called Fake News.

The first casualty of war, the saying goes, is truth. But with Trumpism, truth is not collateral damage; it is the enemy itself. Arizona Republican Jeff Flake, a member of the Senate's dwindling anti-Trump caucus  Flake himself is about go into honorable retirement  put his finger on a useful historical analogy. In an upcoming speech he will liken Trump to Joseph Stalin. It turns out that the Soviet dictator also liked to call the media the "enemy of the people."

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Flake says he will expound on his insight in a Senate speech. It is virtually a sure thing few of his colleagues will listen, because they will think, in the manner of the Wall Street Journal editorial, that the comparison is overdrawn. This is somewhat true. Trump has murdered no dissidents and has yet to airbrush deposed aides from official photos  although Stephen K. Bannon's day may be coming.

Still, one has to zero in on Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, to fully appreciate Flake's warning. In her demeanor and her willingness to straight-face the preposterous, she'd bring an appreciative smile to Stalin's face. He knew her type.

After Trump denounced a Wall Street Journal article as "FAKE NEWS!" Sanders followed up with a tweet of her very own. The Journal had quoted Trump as saying, "I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un," the North Korean dictator. Trump, who was being interviewed by the Journal when be brought up Kim, quickly protested. He did not say "I," he insisted. He had said "I'd."

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The White House provided a tape to substantiate its contention. The Journal then provided one of its own. "I?" "I'd?" Hard to tell. I'd go with the Journal, but Trump's version is not all that far-fetched.

What is, though, is the reason he gives for the Journal's account: "They just wanted a story." Then Sanders followed up: "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. FAKE NEWS IS AT IT AGAIN! FALSELY QUOTING PRESIDENT TRUMP."

Now I must summon someone I will call Kurt. He was the Washington-based press spokesman for East Germany back in the Cold War days, and he helped arrange my trip to East Berlin. I found that city to be dour, gray and dingy, while just across the wall, West Berlin was, as Sinatra sang of Chicago, a "toddlin' town." Kurt protested, but when I asked him if he had ever been to West Berlin, he said no  but he knew my account was false nonetheless. Was Kurt lying? Hard to say. He lived in an environment where truth was what the government said it was.

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Sanders is a latter-day Kurt, mouthing the Trumpian party line. The newspaper she accused of publishing "FAKE NEWS" is owned by Trump's pal Rupert Murdoch, an occasional White House counselor. The paper is capable of making a mistake  what one isn't?  but for it to purposely "FALSELY" misquote the president is as preposterous as Kurt insisting East Berlin outshone West Berlin.

In its New Year's editorial, the Journal had a point. Some of the predictions for the Trump regime now seem a touch hysterical. (Et tu, Cohen?) But the president has succeeded in blurring, if not eradicating, the distinction between truth and lies so that not only he but also virtual bots such as Sanders and Cabinet members  those fawning intellectual Munchkins who would make Stalin himself blush  utter lies as a matter of course.

This is the coup that has succeeded. The lie has been institutionalized. It is not the exception but the run-of-the-mill response to any challenge. The lie no longer shocks. It often amuses, and complacent Republicans either look the other way or jump gleefully on the bandwagon of deceit. This, not the tax bill, is Trump's most consequential first-year achievement. The fascists may not have taken over the government, but the liars have.

Read more from Richard Cohen's archive.

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PRESIDENT TRUMP held a televised meeting with lawmakers last week, in part to rebut claims that he was unfit for the presidency. Since that meeting, he did and said some awful things that dominated the news. But part of Mr. Trump's toxic influence lies in how he undermines democratic values in less spectacular ways that go relatively unchallenged. In any other presidency, these violations of norms and standards, all of which occurred in the few days after Tuesday's meeting, would have produced widespread outrage:

 Following the publication of an unflattering book, Mr. Trump insisted that the country should have tougher libel laws that would make it easier for powerful public figures such as himself to sue writers who say things that are "false"  that is, to gag critics the president does not like.

 The president continued his paranoid smear campaign against the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggesting that the FBI influenced the 2016 presidential election to his detriment and accusing a senior FBI investigator of committing treason for privately sending anti-Trump texts. He also implied that law enforcement scrutiny should focus on a political opponent, Hillary Clinton. The president's assault on a nonpartisan law enforcement agency and his insistence on prosecuting political opponents suggest he does not understand the differences between advanced democracies and authoritarian states. So, too, did his contention that the "Court System" is "broken and unfair," following a ruling he did not like.

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The Washington Post Editorial Board offers a speech to President Trump that's more, shall we say, presidential than angry tweets. (Video: Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post, Photo: JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock/The Washington Post)

 With similar contempt for facts and fairness, the president called the Russia probes "the single greatest Witch Hunt in American history." The inquiries include a formal law enforcement investigation based on ample evidence of Russian involvement in the 2016 election, which even members of Mr. Trump's inner circle admit is compelling. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump suggested that Republicans should "take control," presumably to end the probes before they have fully accounted for the actions of a hostile foreign power and any Americans who may have helped. Congressional inquiries and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation into the hostile acts of an unfriendly foreign foe should be insulated from political pressure; instead, the president is demanding the pressure be ramped up.

 Mr. Trump's obsession with the Russian probes also was manifested in his suggestion that a U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), broke the law by releasing non-classified testimony at the request of the witness who delivered it to lawmakers. Mr. Trump's real objection was that the testimony undermined a conspiratorial narrative he had been building about the FBI's Russia investigation.

 Last but far from least, the president suddenly appeared to announce his opposition to a major surveillance bill the House was set to vote on in a matter of hours, apparently spurred by a characteristically hysterical segment on Fox News's morning show. Less than two hours later, he reversed course on Twitter, claiming that he had already fixed the problems with the surveillance policy. The president's cable-news addiction and resolute refusal to educate himself on the policies he is shaping led to a day of confusion on Capitol Hill.

All that in just the few days after Mr. Trump supposedly proved himself fit to lead.

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Will America's endless wars without victory be the next source fueling popular revolt against the political establishment? In 2016, Washington pundits were shocked to discover the grim reality and anger of working people in "flyover country" that fueled the candidacies of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. The foreign policy establishment of both parties may soon discover that utterly ignoring popular discontent with America's wars may fuel a similar populist eruption.

Trump appealed to this skepticism during his campaign. He claimed  dishonestly  to have been an opponent of the Iraq invasion from the beginning. He scorned the "nonsense" wars without victory. He mocked the Libyan debacle that Hillary Clinton celebrated as secretary of state. Before the campaign, he tweeted regularly that we should get out of Afghanistan. He promised that the United States would start winning again, vowing to bomb the "s---" out of the Islamic State.

Upon taking office, these populist postures were quickly abandoned. Trump, against his "original instinct," sent more troops to Afghanistan, sustaining the United States' longest war into its 17th year. He dispatched troops to Syria, with the Pentagon announcing that they would stay even after the Islamic State was defeated. He doubled down on U.S. support in Saudi Arabia's criminal assault on Yemen. He increased the pace of drone bombings. U.S. special operations forces have been dispatched to 149 countries in his first year in office, a bump up from the 138 countries of President Barack Obama's last year. With his promised infrastructure bill still not in sight, his only jobs program has been a call to boost the Pentagon's budget while striving to break Obama's record for arms sales abroad.

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It is true on the surface level that voters broadly support the establishment consensus. Most Americans remain committed to U.S. alliances, think NATO essential to U.S. security and support U.S. military presence in regions such as Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The military remains the most popular institution in survey after survey. A Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll found for the first time that 62 percent of Americans expressed support for using military force to defend South Korea if North Korea attacked.

But all this masks discontent. Americans overwhelmingly supported the initial post-Sept. 11 invasion of Afghanistan  the "good war," as Obama dubbed it  yet by 2014 a growing majority thought it hadn't been worth the cost. Opinions turned against the Iraq invasion even faster. And aside from the Korean peninsula, the public is worried about new ventures: While nearly 60 percent supported Trump's missile attack against Syria after allegations of chemical weapons use, 61 percent agreed that Trump had no "clear plan" for the situation in Syria. The Chicago Council poll found broad majorities opposed to U.S. military involvement in any confrontation between Japan and China over disputed islands or in opposition to Russia on behalf of Ukraine.

The unease reflects longstanding American attitudes. Unlike our foreign policy establishment, which revels in the United States' perpetual global engagement, Americans prefer peaceful pursuits. They are slow to anger and not eager for military engagement. Historically, Americans have been reluctant to go to war, and when called to fight, they want to go in big, win quickly and get out. Wars that continue for years with indefinite results  from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan  soon lose support.

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That common-sense attitude is directly contradicted by current bipartisan U.S. policy. After the Iraq War debacle, U.S. policymakers moved to continue the wars at a lower cost, with fewer troops on the ground and lower visibility. That strategy may keep the United States from losing but virtually ensures that it will never win. Instead, "winning" is redefined to mean not losing, while staying permanently engaged. That commits the country to sacrificing lives and resources in unending conflicts of indefinite ends. Since the United States' volunteer military forces are drawn from what is primarily an economic draft  enlisting the sons and daughters of poor and working people looking for a way out  those sacrifices are rarely shared by the national security establishment that sets the policy.

Will this affect U.S. politics? Two scholars, Francis Shen and Douglas Kriner, suggest it may already have. In their recent study they found "a divide is emerging between communities whose young people are dying to defend the country and those communities whose young people are not." They dubbed this the "casualty gap" and suggested that it may have contributed to Trump's victory. After controlling for alternative explanations  including economic, class and race  the authors found a "significant and meaningful relationship between a community's rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump."

In three successive elections  Obama over John McCain and Mitt Romney, and Trump over Hillary Clinton  Americans voted for the candidate most skeptical of the United States' wars. Yet the wars and the sacrifice of lives and resources continue. During the campaign, Trump charged that "the people opposing us are the same people  and think of this  who've wasted $6 trillion on wars in the Middle East  we could have rebuilt our country twice  that have produced only more terrorism, more death and more suffering. Imagine if that money had been spent at home." Yet now Trump is committed to spending trillions more on the same wars.

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Will there be a reckoning for this folly? That will require political leaders or political movements willing to challenge the bipartisan establishment consensus that now exists. The policy makes no sense. The lives lost and money wasted are real. The only question is who has the courage to state that the emperor has no clothes.

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A burst of public acrimony across Capitol Hill on Tuesday exposed how much negotiations on immigration and border security have been set back since President Trump's use of a vulgar expression during a meeting on the issue. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Under intense questioning from both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen confirmed that the president had used "tough language" in the meeting Thursday.

At the same hearing, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who had joined Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) at the meeting in trying to persuade Trump to sign on to their bipartisan immigration proposal, said the negotiations had turned into a "s---show."

And Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a conservative ally of Trump's, dismissed the bipartisan pact as "a mass amnesty bill" and said "what they proposed was a joke."

From categorizing it as "tough language" to saying they "don't recall that specific phrase," Trump supporters are downplaying his "shithole countries" remarks. (Video: Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

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Behind the drama, a Friday deadline loomed to pass a new spending bill in time to avert a government shutdown. Aides to top congressional leaders met again Tuesday to try to salvage a deal to meet a March deadline to legalize the status of undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children, known as "dreamers," while also beefing up border security. But leaders publicly doubted that they had time to pair such a deal with a short-term plan to keep the government open beyond Friday.

"With no imminent deadline on #immigration, and with bipartisan talks well underway, there is no reason why Congress should hold government funding hostage over the issue of illegal immigration," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tweeted Tuesday.

And while Graham continued to seek support for his pact with Durbin, White House officials declared the proposal dead and began encouraging lawmakers to start over.

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Aides to leaders from both parties and both chambers gathered Tuesday in the office of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to keep negotiations going. In addition, the White House continued to seek a vote on a separate, conservative proposal floated last week by two immigration hard-liners, Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), according to Trump's legislative affairs director, Marc Short.

Meanwhile, GOP leaders kept pushing Tuesday to pass a short-term, stand-alone spending bill with no immigration reforms included. Talks included possible provisions to court both liberal and conservative votes: eliminating a tax on high-priced health plans, including those in the Affordable Care Act, and renewing the Children's Health Insurance Program for six years.

If such a measure succeeded, it would probably push negotiations on immigration into February, an outcome Democrats hope to avoid because of the leverage they believe they have to exact an immigration deal alongside the spending deadline.

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The lack of progress and the acrimonious words Tuesday exposed the extent to which Trump's vulgar comments injected mistrust into already tense negotiations.

"You can't remember the words of your commander in chief," Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said to Nielsen during the hearing, slamming his hand on the table, his voice shaking. "I find that unacceptable."

Durbin began his questioning of Nielsen by saying: "I hope you remember me. We were at two meetings together" last week. He asked her to clarify what kind of language Trump used.

"Ah, let's see," Nielsen said. "Strong language, there was  I apologize, I don't remember a specific word." She added that "general profanity" was used by several attendees.

"Did you hear me use profanity?" Durbin asked.

"No, sir, nor did I," Nielsen said, adding that Graham had used "tough language" in response to Trump.

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Later, Graham detailed how Durbin had phoned Trump around 10 a.m. Thursday to let him know about their bipartisan breakthrough. Graham said he and Durbin then made arrangements to meet with the president at noon.

"So what happened between 10 and 12?" Graham asked Nielsen.

"I don't know," Nielsen replied.

"I don't either, and I'm going to find out," Graham said.

He credited Trump for hosting lawmakers the previous Tuesday and encouraging them to present a bipartisan deal.

"Tuesday we had a president that I was proud to golf with, call my friend, who understood immigration had to be bipartisan," the senator said, adding later, "I don't know where that guy went, but I want him back."

Graham blamed hard-liners on Trump's staff  not the president  for sinking a potential bipartisan deal.

"We cannot do this with people in charge at the White House who have an irrational view of how to fix immigration," he told reporters.

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The public exchanges also showed how much advocates for both sides are seeking to reach Trump directly.

During a Senate floor speech, Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told Trump, "Everyone is talking about how bigoted your comments were last week."

He continued, "If you want to begin the long road back to prove you're not prejudiced or bigoted, support the bipartisan compromise that three Democrats and three Republicans have put before you."

But Cotton insisted Trump had already compromised with Democrats and defended the president against the accusations by Graham, Durbin and others.

"The president did not repeatedly say vile, racist, hateful things, as Senator Durbin said," Cotton told reporters. "If he did, why didn't Senator Durbin speak up in the meeting, why didn't he slam his papers down and walk out, why didn't he go to the North Portico and hold a press conference? Why did he wait to hold some random, impromptu press conference when he got back to Chicago the next day?"

At the Judiciary Committee hearing, Durbin and Nielsen also revealed that Trump had pressed lawmakers in the Thursday meeting to provide $20 billion this year so that a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border could be constructed in the coming year. That's more than the $18 billion the Trump administration told Congress earlier this month that it wanted to build physical barriers over the next decade.

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"I think the president is encouraging us to go as quickly as we can," Nielsen said. "As you know, it's a very complicated issue, building the wall, for a whole variety of  a whole variety of reasons."

Durbin rejected Trump's request as "physically, legally impossible as a condition" for giving dreamers permanent legal status.

At the White House, Trump dismissed reports that he had called for more immigrants from Norway and other parts of Europe during last week's Oval Office encounter. "I want them to come in from everywhere  everywhere," he told reporters.

Trump also met with Rep. Mia Love (Utah), the only black Republican woman in Congress, whose parents are from Haiti. She was sharply critical of the president's comments in the immigration meeting last week.

In a statement, Love said she and Trump held a "substantive and productive" 30-minute meeting, and she pledged to work on a bipartisan solution for dreamers and border security.

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At the Capitol, Short, who met with aides to top House and Senate leaders, said that negotiators are "fairly optimistic there could be a deal" on immigration. But doing so this week, he said, would be "fairly Herculean."

In a sign that the White House is still trying to work with Democrats, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly is scheduled to meet Wednesday morning with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a bloc he has sparred with in the past over immigration policy.

At Tuesday's hearing, Nielsen served as a proxy for Democrats eager to vent their frustrations with Trump. Under questioning, she admitted that she has never formally met with dreamers, who are directly affected by her department's decisions and actions.

And Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) persistently questioned her over Trump's campaign pledge to make Mexico pay for new construction along the southern border.

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"Have we opened an account that Mexico can put the money in to pay for it?" Leahy asked. "What arrangements do we have with Mexico to pay for it?"

"I know that we have arrangements with Mexico to secure our border," Nielsen said, before Leahy cut her off.

"Do we have arrangements with them to pay for the wall, as President Trump promised the American people he would do?" he asked, raising his voice. "That's an easy answer, yes or no."

"I am not aware. I don't know what you mean by 'arrangement.' We have a lot of agreements with them to increase border security," Nielsen replied.

"Are any of them to pay for a wall?" Leahy asked.

"How do you mean pay, sir?" Nielsen responded. "Do you mean fees? Do you mean through  there's a variety of ways."

"Well, usually when something is paid for, you pay for it with money," Leahy said.

Nielsen did not directly answer the question about a bank account for Mexican border wall deposits.

"My priority is to increase border security and to build that wall, that will work," she said. "That's my priority, sir. That's what I'm focused on."

Josh Dawsey, Mike DeBonis and Erica Werner contributed to this report.

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If Congress doesn't reach agreement on crucial immigration issues and pass a spending bill, the costly consequence would be another government shutdown. (Video: Joyce Koh, Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

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Chances of a government shutdown grew Monday as Republicans concluded that they would be unable to reach a long-term spending accord by the Friday deadline. GOP leaders are now turning to a short-term funding measure in hopes of keeping agencies open while talks continue, but Democratic leaders say they are unlikely to support any deal that does not protect young illegal immigrants.

Aides to key negotiators from both parties planned to meet Tuesday in an effort to rekindle budget talks, setting up a Wednesday meeting of the leaders themselves. If they cannot agree, the government would shut down at midnight Friday for the first time since 2013.

House Republican leaders are scheduled to discuss their plans for a stopgap spending measure with rank-and-file lawmakers Tuesday evening.

Hopes of a deal to keep the government open have been complicated by lingering mistrust following an Oval Office meeting last week in which, according to several people familiar with the gathering, President Trump used vulgar terms to describe poor countries sending immigrants to the United States.

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The meeting was to consider a bipartisan immigration deal to protect the "dreamers"  young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, including the 690,000 currently enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump has canceled. Democratic leaders are demanding that protections for the dreamers be part of any spending deal. They have the leverage to do so because Senate Republicans would need at least nine Democratic votes to support any funding measure. Democrats also want Republicans to match military spending that Trump and many GOP lawmakers are seeking with an equal increase in nondefense funding.

"If they need Democratic votes, the overall legislation needs to meet certain Democratic criteria and be reflective of the values of the Democratic caucus and what we believe are the values of the American people," Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said in an interview.

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)

There is also no guarantee that House GOP leaders will be able to rally a majority of their members to support a short-term spending measure, which multiple congressional aides and a senior Trump administration official said would probably last through mid-February.

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Defense hawks, in particular, are livid at further delaying a planned boost in military funding. That could mean House Republicans would also need Democratic votes to pass a short-term deal  something the minority party may not be inclined to provide this time around.

One option Republicans are strongly considering to win over Democrats, according to two aides familiar with the GOP's planning, is attaching a long-term renewal of the Children's Health Insurance Program to the stopgap. Republicans believe that many Democrats  especially senators seeking reelection this year  will have a tough time voting against the program, which they have called a top priority.

On Capitol Hill, however, there are hopes that tensions will ease as the shutdown deadline approaches. The government last shut down in October 2013, when Republicans opposed to President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul demanded its defunding. Government offices closed, and hundreds of thousands of federal employees were furloughed for two weeks before the GOP relented.

Last week's meeting went off the rails when Trump angrily rejected a tentative deal negotiated among a small bipartisan group of senators  one that did not include any Republicans who support the strong restrictions Trump favors.

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That deal would offer dreamers an eventual path to U.S. citizenship in return for border security funding, including some that could be used to construct the U.S.-Mexico border wall Trump campaigned on. And it would end rules that allow dreamers who become citizens to sponsor their parents for legal status in the United States. The deal also would curb a diversity lottery system that grants visas to 55,000 people from countries with low immigration each year. But Trump wants even stronger restrictions.

On Tuesday, Trump appeared to dig in over his demands for a "great wall."

"We must have Security at our VERY DANGEROUS SOUTHERN BORDER, and we must have a great WALL to help protect us, and to help stop the massive inflow of drugs pouring into our country!" Trump tweeted.

At a Thursday meeting to discuss the deal, according to Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and multiple other people familiar with the meeting, Trump referred to certain poor nations as "shithole countries" from which the United States should not accept immigrants.

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Two Republican senators who attended the meeting accused Durbin on Sunday of misreporting the remark, and Trump himself waded back into the controversy Monday, accusing "Dicky Durbin" of having "totally misrepresented what was said" in the meeting.

"Deals can't get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military," Trump tweeted Monday.

Durbin stood by his comments Monday, while fellow Democrats backed him up and said it was Trump who had a credibility problem, adding that they had no plans to abandon their demands.

GOP aides believe that the group of four deputy leaders from both chambers  the "No. 2's," as they are being called on Capitol Hill, including Durbin, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.)  is more likely to produce a workable immigration accord, which would then unlock an agreement on spending levels and other outstanding issues.

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"At the end of the day, if something's going to be produced that can pass both chambers and get signed by the president, it's going to come from this group," said a Republican familiar with the talks but not authorized to comment on them publicly.

But even if the leaders are able to make progress in the coming days, lawmakers and aides say another temporary spending measure  the fourth since the fiscal year began Oct. 1  will be necessary to keep the government open past Friday.

When the Senate returns to work Tuesday, its first official order of business will be a procedural vote on reauthorizing the government's authority to conduct foreign surveillance on U.S. soil. Senate GOP leaders are hoping to send the measure to the president's desk with bipartisan support this week.

That leaves the chamber with perhaps only two full legislative days to pass a short-term funding measure, depending on what happens in the House.

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"Even if we had a deal, which we don't, there's no time left to draft it," said a senior Senate Republican aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

There was frustration and uncertainty among some GOP congressional aides and lawmakers Monday over the state of the spending talks.

The discussions appeared to be headed in a positive direction until the president "dropped a grenade into the middle of everything," said a second Senate GOP aide, also granted anonymity to speak candidly. The aide voiced uncertainty about how the talks would proceed in the coming days.

There is also annoyance at the prospect of having to pursue yet another stopgap funding bill that would punt the budget talks deeper into the year.

But Republicans moved to pin blame on Democrats for a potential shutdown. "For several years now, Democrats have blasted us for trying to extract policy goals when funding the government, and now they're doing the same thing," a House GOP aide said.

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Echoing many other Republican lawmakers, Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) said in a Monday interview on Fox News Channel that the immigration debate should be resolved separately from the spending talks.

"That's a question: Will the Democrats hold up spending and funding of the government over this issue?" Paul said.

Senior Democratic aides said they would be waiting for cues from Republicans about what to expect next and repeated what they have said for months: Republicans have total control of Washington and should be able to advance short-term spending agreements easily out of the House. In the Senate, they said Democratic priorities must be met if they expect support for a short-term plan.

Thirty-two Senate Democrats voted against the last short-term spending plan, and progressive and immigrant rights groups are pressuring the remainder to oppose any must-pass bill that fails to protect dreamers.

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Some Democrats say they feel emboldened now that a bipartisan group of senators reached a deal they believe could prevail in the closely divided Senate. Durbin spent the weekend contacting fellow Democrats to build support for the deal struck with Republican Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.), according to an aide familiar with his outreach.

"We've shown a willingness to do the right thing, and we've shown a willingness to work in a bipartisan fashion," said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). "The problems are on the Republican side."

But praise for the deal was not universal among Democrats. Crowley said it was "not a deal that I would support," citing funding for "border infrastructure" that could include Trump's wall.

"I think there was some good aspects in terms of progress being made within that process, but I think the bill fell short in terms of what I believe is a bill that would pass muster for me personally and I think for many colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus, as well," he said.

Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a longtime proponent of comprehensive immigration reform, warned that "you have to be very, very careful in embracing anything from the Senate, because when it gets to the House it dies." He cited the collapse of a 2013 bipartisan immigration bill that passed overwhelmingly in the Senate before being shelved by the GOP-dominated House.

A close ally of Durbin, Gutierrez said he has not yet seen a formal document outlining the bipartisan Senate compromise and would withhold judgment. However, he said he's wary that Democrats might once again be heading down a "slippery slope" and ceding too much ground in talks with Republicans.

"First, it was get some border wall enhancements for the dreamers. Now, they took 200,000 Salvadorans hostage and they want to do more," Gutierrez said, referring to the roughly 200,000 people from El Salvador with temporary protected status now set to expire in September 2019.

Across the country over the weekend, Democrats continued harping on Trump's remarks in the Oval Office and said they would draw a hard line against the president's policies.

In Boston on Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) used a speech at an event marking the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to tell the crowd, "We face the challenge of an openly racist president of the United States," according to local news reports. In Michigan, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) called Trump's comments "terrible" and "divisive."

At an appearance in Atlanta on Saturday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) urged Trump's critics to speak out and put pressure on lawmakers: "This is not a time to be neutral. This is not a time in this country's history that we should treat our political space like a spectator sport and sit on the sidelines."

And Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), speaking at a breakfast kicking off a holiday parade in Los Angeles, suggested that Trump was "politically profiting off of sowing hate and division in our country.

"We know these are dark times that require us to fight and march and resist," she added.

Brian Murphy contributed to this report.

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With President Trump and Congress turning their attention to infrastructure in the coming weeks, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is preparing for an uphill battle: a push to raise the federal gas tax by 25 cents per gallon to help pay for the initiative. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The proposal, which will be formally introduced later this week, is part of a series of principles the nation's largest business lobby will offer in a bid to help shape the debate about upgrading U.S. roads, bridges, airports and other critical infrastructure.

Chamber President Thomas J. Donohue said his organization wants "to put our oar in the water" and acknowledged that it would be "a tough vote" to raise the gas tax for the first time since 1993. But he said that support has been building in the business community and elsewhere.

"I've been pushing this for a long, long time, but now gangs of people are pushing it," Donohue said in an interview in which he also said immigration reform would be critical to ensuring that sufficient labor is available for public works projects.

Trump said an infrastructure bill was a priority of his first 100 days in office  and one with potential for bipartisan support  but it was put on the back burner amid other bruising legislative battles over health care and tax restructuring.

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The White House has pledged to introduce its vision of a bill before Trump's State of the Union address this month.

In private meetings, Trump has floated the idea of raising the federal gas tax by as much as 50 cents per gallon but received a chilly reception to that idea, particularly from Republican lawmakers. Still, aides say, the idea of an increase hasn't been taken off the table.

As envisioned by the chamber, the 25-cent increase would be applied to the current taxes of 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon for diesel fuel. It is estimated that the increased levy would raise more than $375 billion over the coming decade, chamber staff members said.

That is significantly more than the White House has suggested that the government should pump into an infrastructure initiative. Administration officials have said publicly for months that they think that $200 billion in additional federal money could spur at least $800 billion more spending by state and local governments and the private sector.

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In its last budget proposal, the White House said the government's $200 billion share could be paid for with cuts in other programs.

Part of the federal funding would be used to reward states and localities that raise taxes or other revenue to fund infrastructure in their jurisdictions. The White House also is looking at grants for new projects in rural areas and money for "transformational" work such as plans to build tunnels for high-speed trains.

Donohue said he hopes that with Trump's support, Congress can come up with a meaningful measure to address what the chamber considers a long-overdue priority.

"We just got a new tax bill for the first time in 31 years," Donohue said. "We're making some significant changes in regulatory reform. We've got a president  everybody's got all their own views about him and what he stands for and all that  but the guy's getting stuff done . . . and he's a builder. I think we can get some help here."

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Donohue said the chamber also plans to offer ideas to encourage additional private investments in infrastructure projects, including expansion of existing federal loan programs. And he said the chamber shares Trump's goal of streamlining the permitting process for highways and other projects, including at the local level.

"It's not worth spending the money to do this or the time if we don't fix the permitting deal," he said.

Donohue also sought to make the case for addressing immigration policy in a way that ensures sufficient labor to construct the array of projects that could be funded. That includes "a fix" to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump wants canceled, Donohue said.

"We don't need this the day we do a bill," he said of immigration changes more broadly. "We need it as we ramp up to start building the stuff we're talking about."

The chamber also plans to call for other steps to enhance the workforce, including advancing recommendations on apprenticeships developed by a Labor Department task force.

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SEOUL  Japanese public broadcaster NHK mistakenly sent an alert Tuesday warning that North Korea had fired a missile, just days after a similar mistake caused panic in Hawaii. Unlike in the Hawaii case, however, this error took only five minutes to correct. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight "NHK news alert. North Korea appears to have launched a missile," NHK said in a notification sent through its app to mobile-phone users at 6:55 p.m. Tokyo time. "The government J-alert urges people to take shelter inside buildings or underground."

Japan has an advanced warning system, known as J-alerts, that has traditionally been used for earthquakes but has, over the past year, increasingly been used to warn about North Korean missile activity.

Hawaii residents received emergency alerts warning of a ballistic missile threat in the early morning of Jan. 13. It was a false alarm. (Video: Victoria Walker, Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)

North Korea fired two missiles over the Japanese island of Hokkaido last year, triggering the expansion of the system. The government began an education campaign on what to do in case of an incoming missile, and local authorities held emergency drills in areas on Japan's west coast.

Five minutes later, NHK sent another notification: "The news alert about a North Korean missile sent earlier was a mistake. No government J-alert was issued."

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The broadcaster apologized for the mistake on the air and said that a "switching error" was to blame.

The slip-up came just four days after an employee at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency pressed the wrong prompt during a training exercise and sent a "Missile alert" instead of a "Test missile alert."



That sent an emergency text to cellphones across Hawaii shortly after 8 a.m. local time Saturday, reading: "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."

It took 38 minutes for authorities to send a second alert saying that it was a false alarm, during which time some Hawaii residents said they cowered in their homes or raced to gather up family members.

The alert came as representatives from 20 countries, including Japan, gathered in Vancouver, B.C., on Tuesday to discuss options to escalate pressure on North Korea over its missile and nuclear programs.

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The meeting, hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, was called before the recent start of talks between North and South Korea about next month's Winter Olympics.

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Security and respect are of paramount importance to individuals, families, communities and nations. If people do not feel secure and respected, they will try to balance the scale of power by doing something harmful  be the entity a teenager or a nation.

For example, North Korea feels that its security is threatened by the United States  with war games on its border, U.S. ships off its coast, and talk of the power to annihilate.

It's time to put an end to the mindset of the inevitability of war, and focus instead on the inevitability of peace. It's time to engage in dialogue with those with whom we disagree, and to learn what they feel will ensure their security and respect. Dialogue has worked well for thousands of years in indigenous cultures. The indigenous circle process, put forward in the recently published book "The Power of Circles," provides guidance in using dialogue to address many seemingly intractable situations.

The United States has the opportunity to provide true leadership  by guiding all countries to acknowledge the importance of security, respect and dialogue, so we can rest well at night, and reach our full potential as human beings.

Norman G. Lavery,

Missoula
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JERUSALEM  It was 48 hours of bitter, fighting talk from Palestinian leaders as they scrambled to formulate a response to President Trump's Jerusalem decision and a nascent peace plan they said is biased in Israel's favor. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight But analysts and political observers say the talk will likely remain just that: talk.

During a two-hour speech on Sunday night, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas hurled insults at the Trump administration and gave the impression of a leader with little to lose. He made comments that were immediately denounced by Israeli commentators as anti-Semitic, and he offered little in the way of new ideas or strategy.

A day later, the Palestinian Central Council recommended a raft of measures that included reversing Palestinian recognition of Israel, ending security cooperation with it, and making a new international push for Palestinian recognition and Israeli accountability.

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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Dec. 13 that President Trumps Jerusalem call proved the U.S. should no longer play a role in Middle East peace talks. (Video: Reuters)

However, Abbas's Palestinian Authority relies for its survival on his relationship with Israel, analysts say, making any bolder measures unlikely. Past threats to end security cooperation have not been carried out. Meanwhile, the Palestinians have little to show for past efforts to promote their cause internationally.

That leaves them flailing as the Trump administration accuses them of turning their back on negotiations, while Israel becomes increasingly emboldened by U.S. support and its acquiescence to Israeli settlement construction in occupied territory.

"The sun and moon and stars are more aligned against the Palestinians than at any point I can recall," said Aaron David Miller, a fellow at the Washington-based Wilson Center and a former State Department negotiator under Republican and Democratic administrations. "He's stuck," he said of Abbas. "He's cornered from every conceivable angle."

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While international efforts are unlikely to bear fruit, negotiations with the Trump administration are not an option if Abbas is to survive politically, and a return to violence would be a "disaster," Miller said.

The Palestinian cause has slipped down the agenda for Arab countries. Gulf nations, including Saudi Arabia, are more concerned about strategic threats, such as Iran, and are finding their business and security interests increasingly aligned with those of Israel.

President Trump, in the meantime, is carrying through on his threat to cut aid to the Palestinians, a State Department official confirmed. The United States informed the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in a letter that Washington will pay only $60 million of a planned $125 million installment to the agency, which is charged with humanitarian relief for Palestinian refugees. The balance will be "held for future consideration," the letter said.

Abbas has tied his legacy to achieving a two-state solution through negotiations, calling for Palestinians to walk away from armed conflict against Israel. But he said Trump's "deal of the century" had turned out to be a "slap of the century," reporting that the Palestinians were offered Abu Dis, a suburb of Jerusalem, as an alternative capital to Jerusalem itself. That falls far short of their demand for a return to pre-1967 borders, which would give them control of East Jerusalem.

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"It seems Trump's Jerusalem recognition provided Abbas with what he needed, both in Palestinian public opinion and internationally, in order to deflect the U.S. initiative to give birth to a highly constricted Palestinian state, territorially and functionally, without a capital in Jerusalem," said Ofer Zalzberg, an analyst with the International Crisis Group.

The Palestinian Central Council's recommendations, including ending security cooperation and reversing the recognition of Israel, are binding, according to Palestinian officials, although there is no time frame specified.

Abbas "will find a creative way to put it aside," said Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies and previously the deputy director general of Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

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The Palestinian Authority relies on Israeli security cooperation, while Palestinians depend on the Israeli economy, with tens of thousands working in Israel. "If they really want to implement the decisions that were made in the council, they are taking a risk, because Israel will respond to such an act," Michael said.

There is skepticism that Abbas is willing to take such risks, although the situation he faces is unprecedented and makes actions of the 82-year-old leader harder to predict.

"He's trying to appear defiant but being cautious," said Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser for the Palestinian negotiating team and spokeswoman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. "I think he's hoping for something from Europe, but anyone that follows European politics knows that to get that many countries to agree on a policy is difficult if not impossible."

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Abbas is set to meet foreign ministers of the 28-member European Union in Brussels later this month.

"It creates noise and motion but generally achieves very little," Dan Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said of Palestinian efforts to internationalize the conflict. "Israel has a wider network of friends internationally, and many, even Arab nations, aren't willing to have this fight for them."

In the end, Sunday's speech was "noises and threats," he said, adding that it was delivered in a "coarse and outrageous way." Abbas's comments that Israel was a European colonial project unrelated to Judaism are inconsistent with accepting a two-state deal, Shapiro said. The speech "will deepen the sense on both sides that there is no near-term prospect for diplomacy," he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, said the speech had exposed Abbas's true colors. "I think this serves our political goals more than anything else," he said.

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Ghassan Khatib, a professor at Birzeit University in the West Bank, said Abbas's contentious comments were a distraction. But Khatib said he hopes there will be greater international urgency in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict now that it is clear that the peace process has broken down and that the United States cannot be its sponsor.

"Either that is possible, or even if we have a period of vacuum, with no process, that would be less harmful than an American process, given the taste of it we've had," he said.

Ruth Eglash in Jerusalem and Carol Morello in Vancouver contributed to this report.

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CALAIS, France  French President Emmanuel Macron fired back Tuesday at criticism from his political allies over the way he has handled the country's migrant issue  a controversy that has ballooned into the first real crisis of his young presidency. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Before his election in May, Macron campaigned on a platform of welcoming migrants, and many saw his victory as a repudiation of the anti-immigrant hard line of his opponent, Marine Le Pen. But after months of expulsions and police crackdowns targeting the migrant community, some of Macron's powerful supporters  particularly on the left  are signaling that they feel betrayed.

"Mr. Macron, your politics contradict the humanism that you preach," a group of his allies wrote in a scathing open letter published Tuesday in Le Monde. Among the signatories was Jean-Pisani Ferry, the president's principal economic adviser during the campaign.

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French President Emmanuel Macron said Jan. 16 there would be no more migrant camps in Calais, vowing to address the issue at talks with Britain. (Video: Reuters)

On Tuesday, Macron went on the defensive in the coastal city of Calais, the symbolic epicenter of France's migrant troubles. Before an audience of local and national police officials, he dismissed his critics as urban intellectuals who lack respect for hard-working civil servants.

"Those who want to criticize the government's policies can attack the government but not its functionaries," Macron said, clearly agitated. "The civil servants of our republic have the right to respect  them, too. It's their engagement every day that makes a sense of order possible."

Most of the migrants in Calais are focused on reaching nearby Britain, but the British government will not accept them. Between 350 and 500 migrants, mostly from East Africa, remain here, according to official statistics, even though the government demolished the sprawling "Jungle" camp in October 2016, ostensibly for humanitarian reasons. Macron reiterated Tuesday that "there will be no return of the Jungle." And he vowed to crack down on aid organizations that encourage migrants to stay in Calais.

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Loan Torondel, a Calais field organizer for the aid group Auberge des Migrants, rejected that characterization. "We do not encourage anyone to stay here," he said in an interview. "What we do is provide aid to the migrants who are here."

Aid groups that distribute hot meals estimate that the number of migrants in Calais and its environs is much higher than the government's figure. It's closer to 900, according to Clare Moseley, director of Care4Calais.

Macron's address came two days before a summit with British Prime Minister Theresa May where he is expected to demand that the British government shoulder more of the burden weighing on northern France.

On Tuesday, however, he concentrated on defending his tough policies. "It is our privilege to give help on the ground to those who bring sustainable humanity to the republic," he said. He went on to outline legislation to be introduced in February that will make it easier to remove those who are in France illegally and streamline the processing of asylum claims.

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He also spoke with an eye to his domestic image.

In July, the new president  an avowed globalist  seemed to make good on his campaign promises of goodwill toward migrants. "From now until the end of the year, I don't want anyone on the streets, in the forests," he said at a camp in Orleans, pledging "to accommodate everyone in a dignified way" and to establish "emergency accommodation everywhere."

But some fine print accompanied those remarks: Macron was technically referring only to political asylum seekers, not people seeking merely a better life. As he said in the same speech: "No country can take in all the economic migrants."

To that end, he has worked with Libyan and other African leaders, devising checkpoints overseas intended to sift asylum seekers from economic migrants and curb the total number of arrivals.

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Some of his supporters say that was the only practical option. "He tried to find a compromise, and it's based on the distinction that those who are politically endangered should get priority," said Dominique Moisi, a French foreign-policy expert who informally advised the Macron campaign.

At home, the government has worked to implement Macron's promise to get migrants off the streets. But respecting "dignity" has not been a priority, critics say.

Over the summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged that French riot police "routinely use pepper spray on child and adult migrants while they are sleeping or in other circumstances in which they pose no threat." Migrants in Calais recounted similar experiences to The Washington Post in June.

On Tuesday, Macron pushed back against those reports. "I find it hard to credit the idea that security forces use violence," he said. "If that's the case  and proved  it will be punished."

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In December, Gerard Collomb, Macron's interior minister, authorized surprise checks on the immigration status of people housed in emergency shelters. The raids sparked outrage in the French media, with some commentators likening them to the tactics of the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis during World War II in rounding up Jews.

This week, Macron appeared on the cover of L'Obs, a leading French weekly magazine, his darkened face behind a tangle of barbed wire. "Welcome to the country of human rights," the headline reads. In essays inside, several French intellectuals take sharp aim at their president. J.M.G. Le Clezio, a Nobel Prize-winning French novelist, accuses him of "an intolerable denial of humanity."

For Moisi, the Macron campaign adviser, much of this blowback is the "extreme" response of a disgruntled political left with no actual power. France's famed Socialist Party is a shell of its former self, and Macron's centrist party, Republique En Marche (Republic on the Move), is a monolith in Parliament.

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At the same time, the migration issue exposes the potential fault lines in Macron's somewhat amorphous centrist faction, which spans both sides of the political aisle. Some of the strongest advocates of Macron's policies have changed their tune.

"The values of France are threatened by the fact that, little by little, the idea has taken root that we can treat people in an inhuman way," said Jacques Attali, a prominent economist and former Macron adviser, speaking Monday on France's BFM TV.

"I was in Calais, and I saw with my own eyes the police gas migrants," he said.

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FAIRBANKS, ALASKA The Porcupine Caribou Herd hit a record high in 2017, according to the results of a July photo census.

The new Alaska Department of Fish and Game census puts the herds population at 218,000, which is the highest since the state began monitoring the herd in the 1970s.

The Porcupine Herd received national attention this winter because its calving grounds are often on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, including the part of the refuge Congress and President Donald Trump opened to oil and gas leases as part of the Republican tax overhaul bill. Opponents of oil and gas drilling in the refuge often argue that oil exploration and extraction would hurt the herd and the people who rely on the herd for food.

The Porcupine Herd has the largest land migration in the world, according to the Department of Fish and Game. The herd migrates over a Kansas-size area in northeast Alaska and Canadas Yukon and Northwest territories.

Caribou herds are known for dramatic population swings. Populations can collapse suddenly when herds overgraze available food. The Porcupine Herd was estimated to be as large as 178,000 animals at its last peak in 1989 and dropped to a low of 123,000 in 2001 before climbing to its current high.

The Porcupine Herd has grown as the Western Arctic Herd, in Northwest Alaska, has declined. The Western Arctic Herd was once unquestionably the largest herd in the state, with a population of 490,000 in 2003 .But the herd dropped to 201,000 by the summer of 2016. The Western Arctic Herd was also photographed in the summer of 2017, with the census estimated at slightly more than 200,000 animals.

"The recent decline has probably stabilized or reversed for now," state biologist Lincoln Parrett told the Western Arctic Caribou Herd Working Group in a story in Arctic Now. "That, obviously, is good news.

"We were going to have to talk more seriously about how we were going to reduce harvest if it kept going down. It didn't," he said.

Alaska Fish and Game's news release stated the new population estimate for the Porcupine Herd is thought to be particularly accurate because the photographs taken this summer included all of the caribou that biologists had previously fitted with radio-transmitting collars, meaning its not likely the photographs missed many caribou. Biologists also used new instruments this year that allowed for higher-altitude photographs.

When counting caribou, biologists dont rely on statistical sampling as much as they do for other animals. Caribou congregate in large groups on the treeless tundra in the summer, allowing photographers to take pictures of nearly the entire herd in one series of photographs.
In a Jan. 16 speech, Attorney General Jeff Sessions honored Martin Luther King Jr. Critics said it seemed at odds with his direction at the DOJ. (Video: The Washington Post)

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions recalled his childhood in segregated Alabama as he invoked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. on Tuesday and called on Justice Department employees to "remember, celebrate and act." Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight "I regularly saw raw, unvarnished discrimination against a whole people because of the color of their skin," Sessions said at a commemorative program for the late civil rights leader. " . . . I can remember riding on an all-white school bus and passing every morning an all-black school bus. Just one look at the buses was enough to know that separate was not equal."

Sessions praised King, who he said "helped transform our legal system by inspiring some of the transformative laws that we in this building enforce today," referencing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

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"All he had were his words and the power of truth," Sessions said. " . . . His message, his life and his death changed hearts and minds. Those changed souls then changed the laws of this land."

But civil rights leaders criticized Sessions's remarks, made at a time, they said, when the Justice Department is rolling back efforts to promote civil and voting rights.

"It is beyond ironic for Jeff Sessions to celebrate the architecture of civil rights protections inspired by Dr. King and other leaders as he works to tear down these very protections," said Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division under President Barack Obama and now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

"Make no mistake," Gupta said. "If Dr. King were alive today, he would be protesting outside of Jeff Sessions's office."

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that in the past year, the Justice Department under Sessions has taken action to "obstruct and reverse civil rights enforcement."

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She and others point to a new policy that calls for federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges even if that might mean minority defendants face stiff, mandatory-minimum penalties. Sessions has defended President Trump's travel ban and threatened to take away funding from cities with policies he considers too lenient toward undocumented immigrants. The department's new guidance and stances on voting rights and LGBT issues also might disenfranchise minorities and poor people, civil rights advocates say.

Justice officials say that Sessions's actions reflect an aggressive, by-the-book interpretation of federal law and that his policies are geared toward fighting violent crime and drug trafficking.

Sessions was joined Tuesday by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and Larry D. Thompson, who served as deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush.

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Trump's nominee to head the civil rights division, Eric Dreiband, has not yet been confirmed by the Senate. In his place, John M. Gore, acting as the assistant attorney general for the division, was on stage.

"Every day, we at the civil rights division are honored to carry on this fundamental work of our democracy and enforce the nation's civil rights laws, including the civil rights laws that Dr. King fought for," Gore said. "We work zealously to combat hate crimes, to end the scourge of human trafficking, and to guarantee equal rights and equal access for all Americans at the ballot box, in housing, in education, in employment and public accommodations, and in criminal justice."

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says the U.S. rejects a 'freeze for freeze' approach to end North Korea's nuclear program. (Video: The Washington Post)

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VANCOUVER, B.C.  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday warned that the crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons is at a "tenuous stage" and said the time for Pyongyang to show a willingness to talk about denuclearization is now. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight "The North Koreans know our channels are open, and they know where to find us," Tillerson told reporters in a news conference at the conclusion of a summit of 20 countries seeking ways to strengthen U.N. sanctions.

When asked directly whether Americans might soon be at war with North Korea, Tillerson did not offer easy reassurances.

"I think we all need to be very sober and clear-eyed about the current situation," he replied, citing North Korea's advances in developing nuclear weapons and the missiles capable of delivering them. "We have to recognize that the threat is growing. And if North Korea does not choose the path of engagement, of discussion, negotiations, then they themselves will trigger an option."

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The Vancouver summit was called to explore ways to tighten sanctions against North Korea and discuss maritime interdiction of ships carrying banned goods and materials to and from the country.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis joined Tillerson at the Vancouver summit. The dichotomy of the diplomat and the general underscores the difficulty faced by many foreign governments trying to discern whether hawks outweigh the pro-diplomacy voices in the Trump administration  and whether the world may be on the precipice of nuclear war.

"It shows an integration of diplomatic efforts with the military option on the table," said a senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks. "But our preferred solution is a diplomatic solution. Secretary Mattis raised that repeatedly. I think this was a chance to raise people's confidence that we have thought through this."

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Tillerson also frequently repeated the sentiment that diplomacy is the best option, compared to endless sanctions, or worse.

"What I hope they are able to realize is, the situation only gets worse," he said of North Korea. "It gets worse with every step they take. It gets worse with time."

Tillerson also expressed hope that the message is starting to sink in that the world will insist on North Korea abandoning its nuclear weapons.

"The stand we are taking is, we will never accept them as a nuclear power," he said. "So, it's time to talk. But they have to take the step that says they want to talk."

But Tillerson sidestepped a question about whether President Trump had any direct contacts with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, as Trump seemed to suggest last week in an interview with the Wall Street Journal before the White House said he had been misunderstood.

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"If we want that to be made known and made public, we will announce it," Tillerson said.

At the onset of the summit, Tillerson underscored what was at stake when he unveiled a visual aid, a map showing air traffic across Asia on one day. Hundreds of yellow icons on the map represented planes, which the Federal Aviation Administration calculated to hold more than 150,000 seats within range of North Korean missiles.

"Based on its past recklessness," Tillerson said, "we cannot expect North Korea to have any regard for what might get in the way of one of its missiles, or parts of a missile breaking apart."

But Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono cautioned against being misled by North Korea's talks with the South, which he depicted as part of a campaign to achieve sanctions relief.

"We should not be naive about their intent," he said. "Nor should we be blinded by North Korea's charm offensive. In short, it is not the time to ease pressure or to reward North Korea."

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Tillerson has insisted that a diplomatic solution is a way out of the impasse, although he said the United States would not go along with a proposal to curtail military exercises with South Korea if North Korea stops developing nuclear weapons.

"We reject a 'freeze for freeze' approach in which legitimate defensive military exercises are placed on the same level of equivalency as the DPRK's unlawful actions," he said, using the initialis for North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "The pressure campaign will continue until North Korea takes decisive steps to denuclearize."

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson deflected a reporter's question about the impact of Trump's tweets directed at Kim, such as a recent one proclaiming his "nuclear button" bigger than the North Korean leader's and another advising Tillerson that he was wasting his time trying to get North Korea to negotiate.

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"There's a diplomatic way to do that," Johnson said. "Rex Tillerson gets it."

Tillerson and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland co-hosted the summit, which gathered representatives from 20 countries that sent troops or humanitarian aid under a U.N. effort to repel the North during the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. Two world players were excluded: China and Russia, which supported the North in the war and sit on the U.N. Security Council. Both border North Korea and are crucial to any push to enforce U.N. sanctions and cut off its trade.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters Monday that the meeting was "destructive," and he mocked the list of invited nations, some of which are small countries peripherally involved in the standoff with Pyongyang.

"When we found out about the meeting, we asked: Why do you need all those countries together?" Lavrov said. "Greece, Belgium, Colombia, Luxembourg  what do they have to do with the Korean Peninsula?"

China has dismissed the summit as "meaningless" and said the solution lies in dialogue with the Kim regime.

Assistant Secretary of State Susan Thornton, head of the East Asia bureau, will travel to Beijing after the meeting to brief Chinese officials on the talks, and Tillerson will speak with his counterparts in Russia and China.

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LONDON  The gleaming new U.S. Embassy in London opened Tuesday with little fanfare and no official ribbon cutting. President Trump sparked a furor here last week when he tweeted that he was not coming to open the $1 billion building  the most expensive embassy ever built  because it was a bad real estate deal and in an "off location."

Many neighborhood residents took offense at Trump's description of the site  the president had unwittingly inserted himself into the long-running rivalry between Londoners north and south of the River Thames  but others said the former New York real estate mogul had a point.

The new embassy is in Nine Elms, a former industrial area along the south bank of the Thames that is being radically redeveloped. The neighborhood is a short walk away from ultraposh Chelsea, and when its upmarket residential, commercial and leisure spaces are completed, it will be a major extension to central London. Nearby Vauxhall has been gentrifying fast in recent years.

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In interviews outside the embassy and elsewhere in Nine Elms on Tuesday, it was clear that one person's "off location" is another person's "up-and-coming."

Early in the day, the first on which the embassy officially opened to the public, a small queue formed outside the entrance for consular services. Landscaping workers were busy at their tasks.

"I can see why someone would say it's [an] off location," Sheron Cloyd, 41, a project manager from New York, said over the roar of a chain saw. "It's not in the city center. It's south of the river."

But Cloyd, who also lives south of the river, said the area around the embassy has become fashionable in recent years.

The morning after President Trump tweeted about not coming to Britains capital, a wax figure of him appeared outside the U.S. embassy in London. (Video: Associated Press)

"When I first moved here, someone said Vauxhall used to be horrible. Not anymore. It's very expensive and trendy, kind of like Brooklyn," he said. Like others in the line, he got off the train at the Vauxhall station, about a 10-minute walk from the embassy.

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The old mission was located in a history-steeped square in Mayfair, one of London's most exclusive neighborhoods. But if Mayfair is the place of yesterday and today, Nine Elms could arguably be the place of tomorrow.

"It's still not completely developed, but it soon will be," said Tony Travers, a London expert at the London School of Economics.

He said that moving from an established area such as Mayfair and buying property in an area where the value "will almost certainly rise" represented quite a good deal.

"It's the U.S. government getting in on the act," he said.

U.S. officials said the move was necessitated by new safety standards imposed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Trump's tweet last week played into a familiar routine of one-upmanship here.

"Donald Trump cancels London trip after discovering he'd have to go south of the river," read one headline on a satirical website.

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Over the centuries, as in many cities, London's rich have clustered in the cleaner areas. Because Nine Elms had an enormous, coal-fired power station belching out soot until the 1980s, it did not make the cut as a desirable area.

Today, the Battersea Power Station is part of the $21 billion Nine Elms development project, one of the largest such schemes in Europe.

Yakine Abdullah, 22, a business management student from Iraq who was waiting outside the new embassy, said the area is not just up-and-coming, it is flourishing.

"It's my favorite area to live in," she said.

Nine Elms is part of the London borough of Wandsworth, where the council leader disputed Trump's characterization of the area.

"Nine Elms is very much London's most exciting destination with a huge amount to offer," Ravi Govindia said in a statement posted on the council's website. He noted that two new subway stations are slated for the area and that Penguin Random House and Apple UK have announced plans to move in.

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The Netherlands is also considering moving its embassy to the area.

Henry Pryor, a London property expert, said that when U.S. officials announced in 2008 that they had purchased a site in Nine Elms, he was surprised.

It was like hearing about "prospectors heading West," he said. Other than "fantastic views," he added, the area at the time was "desperately unfashionable" with "little to commend" it.

Now, though, Pryor said, he looks forward to the new U.S. Embassy "blazing a trail" in Nine Elms.

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JERUSALEM  Palestinian leaders on Monday voted to suspend recognition of Israel until it reciprocates by recognizing a Palestinian state and to cease security cooperation, as the political fallout from the Trump administration's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital escalated. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Members of the Palestine Liberation Organization's central council made the recommendation during a meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where they had gathered to formulate their response to recent moves by Washington that have incensed the Palestinian leadership.

In addition to the Jerusalem decision, the Trump administration has also threatened to close down offices of the PLO in Washington and, according to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, attempted to present a peace plan that gave them a suburb of Jerusalem as their capital, instead of the city's eastern side. When Abbas said the United States could no longer be considered a fair broker for negotiations, the U.S. administration threatened aid cuts.

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"He's taken us hundreds of miles back," said Qais Abd al-Karim, a Palestinian official who was present at the meeting. "The Trump decision on Jerusalem completely destroyed the immediate prospects of any peace process."

In its declaration, the council said the Palestinians should no longer be bound by the Oslo accords, a set of agreements between Israel and the PLO signed in 1993. Those agreements set in place the Palestinian Authority's security cooperation with Israel, with the two sides sharing intelligence to thwart attacks. That cooperation should be stopped "in all forms," the council's statement said. The Palestinian Authority has threatened to make the move in the past, but has never carried through.

The recommendations were made to the PLO's executive committee which still needs to implement them.

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The council also called for a peace process based on the Arab Peace Initiative  which promises normalization of ties with Israel in return for a withdrawal to its 1967 borders  and said until the United States changes its stance on Jerusalem and settlements, any agreement should be rejected.

At the opening session on Monday, Abbas gave a fiery speech attacking President Trump, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. Pro-Israel groups denounced it as incendiary and anti-Semitic, saying Abbas was denying the connection of the Jewish people to Israel.

Speaking in New Delhi, where he is traveling on a state visit, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Abbas was serving Israel's interests by lashing out.

"He exposed what we have been saying all the time, that the root of the conflict is the basic refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any borders," he said, according to Israeli press reports.

Sufian Taha contributed from Jerusalem.

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I am a single mother, who is sole legal guardian and conservator for my severely disabled twin sons, who are now 27 years old. I have cared for them in our family home for 27 years.

They were born 3 months premature, weighing less than two pounds. This happened because they are twins and twins are sometimes born very early. This was not a choice we could make, but we have wholeheartedly accepted what has been given to us. The twins have numerous disabling conditions including: blindness, cerebral palsy, autism, scoliosis and lung disease. One uses a wheelchair, both use oxygen, one has severe cognitive disabilities. These are some of the things they have the courage to face every day. They completely rely on me, family, trained care providers and case management for every aspect of living and thriving in their community.

The case manager of their personal care agency told me on Jan. 10 that effective Jan. 21  in 11 days  my sons will lose approximately five hours of services for personal care each week collectively (personal care are things like shaving, bathing, brushing teeth, changing, washing, combing hair, exercise, dressing, laundry, fixing meals and feeding, administration of medications). For example, one of my sons is incapable of cooking and sitting through a meal without support because of cerebral palsy and autism, and they receive medications with their meals. Both have severe cerebral palsy, so we use cost-effective and practical home exercises and typical recreational play and activities in place of structured bi-weekly physical therapy, which is more costly.

I am sincerely asking the governor and state lawmakers to explain to me how these cuts happened. How was the decision to cut services to my sons, my family and families like mine, made? Who thought taking money for services from people who cant care for themselves was a good way to make up money for something else? What could be more important than vulnerable human lives? Who thought that 11 days was enough time to plan for significant, life changing news like this? Who thought that Jan. 10, in the middle of a harsh Montana winter, was an appropriate time of year to implement cuts to essential care and daily living services for the most vulnerable of Montanans?

If the governor and legislators believe that people with disabilities and their families dont already cut corners and get creative to help their limited budgets go farther, they are wrong and underestimate our sacrifices. We know times are tough in Montana, we feel them too. We know devastating fires greatly impacted Montana, these were our lands, farms, wildlife, pastures, friends and neighbors too. We are going to be paying all the increases in taxes that were made now to include our motor vehicles and property, we are doing our part as citizens, too. However, you cannot take money from people with disabilities and their families to make up for it. You cant completely cut out case management programs. Case managers are the ones who keep services coordinated and look out for the health and safety of people with special needs.

My heart hurts. This was not the right thing to do. The governor and legislators  Democrats and Republicans alike have regrettably taken enormous steps backward. No one is prepared.

Now is not the time for Republican legislators, to blame the Democratic governor or the Democratic governor to blame the Republican majority  and place us to suffer in the middle. Now is the time for them to be accountable for their decisions to my sons, my family, to all of us affected, and to start working together to fix this.
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Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 16/01/2018 (1767 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Bracken Hanuse Corlett was approached by Julie Nagam, one of the curators of Insurgence/Resurgence, the groundbreaking contemporary Indigenous art exhibit currently at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, he started thinking about what those two words meant.

For me, an insurgent is someone whose battling against a colonial force, or a force whos taking over, and resurgence would be the re-emergence of maybe something ancient or maybe something that was taken away, he says.

Those ideas resonate deeply with the 37-year-old Vancouver-based multimedia artist, who will be at the Winnipeg Art Gallery tonight for a pop-up talk alongside fellow Insurgence/Resurgence artist and frequent collaborator Amanda Strong. The talk starts at 5 p.m., and will be followed by a panel discussion at 6 p.m. featuring Insurgence/Resurgence exhibit designer Destiny Seymour, Insurgence/Resurgence artist Tiffany Shaw-Collinge, father-daughter designers David and Cheyenne Thomas and artist Sebastien Aubin. Both events are free.

Puppets from Amanda Strongs stop-motion film Biidaaban, inspired by author Leanne Simpsons writings.

Hanuse Corlett is of the Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Nations in British Columbia. He grew up in the Sunshine Coast region before moving to Vancouver at 18.

My family was forcibly displaced through the residential school system, he says. My mom was removed at the age of five and didnt get to return to the community until she was an adult. That created some disconnection and displacement for our family.

It was Hanuse Corletts mother who encouraged him to reconnect with his culture as a youth, but he found that many pieces were missing, lost to years of cultural suppression. While he was earning his bachelor of fine arts at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, he began studying Northwest Coast art with acclaimed Heiltsuk artists Bradley Hunt and his sons Shawn Hunt and Dean Hunt. It was through those studies that he reconnected to the art of his community.

Ive made it more of a priority to make my work more aligned from where Im from, he says.

Its in that spirit that his Insurgence/Resurgence work, Electricity Blanket  Crest Prototype 004 (Family Crest) was created. Hanuse Corlett was asked by his uncle Dennis to create a new Hanuse family crest.

Hes the one whos been pushing me to take my aesthetic closer to home, he says.

Amanda Strong is showing some of the puppets from the film Biidaabin  which is still in progress  in Insurgence/Resurgence.

The original Hanuse family crest features the Kolus, the sister of the Thunderbird, with an egg perched on the top of her head. The original crest was lost  a casualty of colonization and the potlatch ban, a racist piece of legislation that made it illegal for Indigenous Peoples to participate in their ceremonies.

Hanuse Corletts modern reimagining incorporates Kolus, as well as the Wuikila translation of his last name: He who dances naked. For him, his work is an example of both insurgence and resurgence; after all, his peoples art was driven underground  and survived.

As he writes in his artist statement: Resurgence is the revival of ceremony after a period of sleep.

I work in contemporary spaces, but I choose to work with the traditional symbols and stories. For me, its because that artwork was outlawed, and I feel a responsibility to continue to work with the people who fought to keep the stories and the art form alive, he says. Thats how I relate to the word resurgence.

Strong, meanwhile, drew inspiration from the writings of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg author Leanne Simpson for her latest stop-motion film Biidaaban. The Vancouver-based Michif filmmaker is showing some of the puppets from the film  which is still in progress  in Insurgence/Resurgence.

I thought it was a good opportunity to put the works that I make  not just the film, but the actual elements from the films themselves  on display, says Strong, 33. People dont really get to see all the puppets, sets, props. Its such a different experience when you see the physical elements. You get a sense of scale, and the hours, time and love that goes into making these from the team that I work with.

Bracken Hanuse Corlett's Electricity Blanket  Crest Prototype 004, 2017 (Supplied)

Biidaaban is an amalgamation of three different Simpson stories, and tells the story of its titular protagonist  a young, non-binary Anishinaabe who, along with their shape-shifter friend Sabe, returns to an urban neighbourhood to collect sap from the old-growth maple trees and must overcome the suspense of being caught.

Biidaaban raises questions about land ownership  whose tree is it, anyway?  as well as the effects industrialization and urban sprawl have on the winged and four-legged who call the same land home. (Hanuse Corlett wrote the screenplay.)

Its supposed to echo some of the challenges that Indigenous people have faced, especially in the past, with doing their ceremonies, Strong says. Theres still embedded fears inside people that its still wrong in some way or, in this case, who owns this tree? Its on private property, but its also part of a ceremony.

For her, too, the work speaks to both insurgence and resurgence.

I feel that the work Im doing is both, she says. In some ways, maybe a bit more insurgent, especially with Biidaaban. In my mind, theyre this badass rebel whos here to go against the grain and go into these private properties and not really care, and prioritize what the tree symbolizes for them.

Strong says she feels honoured to be included in Insurgence/Resurgence.

Bracken Hanuse Corlett

I think its a really important show, and I hope it propels more of these big celebrations of many artists, she says.

My grandmother is from Winnipeg, and thats where my Metis roots come from. Im really looking forward to actually being there and taking it in.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @JenZoratti

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Montana is on its way to safer roads six months after a new law boosted the state gas tax by less than a nickel per gallon.

The first six months collections disproved many opponents objections.

Fuel volume sales increased about 2 percent while the price per gallon actually dropped right after the tax increase took effect, Mike Tooley, Montana Department of Transportation director, told The Billings Gazette in a recent telephone interview from Helena.

Another major selling point for the gas tax increase is the enormous return on investment. The federal highway fund provides about 87 cents of every dollar the state uses for road construction. The state gas taxes cover the states 13-cent share. Few, if any, other states have such a large federal highway match.

Tooley said the federal funding formula recognizes that good highways in our state are critical links in Northwest transportation. He wants to make sure federal policy continues to reflect that value.

Thats why were really paying attention to whats going on in Washington, Tooley said. We dont want them to change the formula.

A broad coalition of Montanans  local government leaders, safety advocates, contractors, and economic development directors  supported an increase in the state gas tax. Montanas 11 million annual visitors will pay the tax, too.

As of Jan. 7, collections from the 4.5-cent per gallon gas tax increase totaled $12 million out of the total $160 million in fuel taxes collected since July 1, according to Tooley.

Revenues from the 2017 increase have to be accounted for separately because the law specifies how the money is to be split between state and local governments. The law also requires the MDOT to set up a public website that will track each project.

Eventually, about one-third of that revenue will go to MDOT and about two-thirds will go to state and local governments. This is the first increase in gas tax dollars for cities and counties in 34 years.

The money will be allocated according to population and miles of road within the city or county.

MDOT will get about $10 million a year to match with federal funds, so that Montana can draw down all the money it is eligible to receive. Cities and counties will get about $20 million a year in the first years.

Yellowstone County tentatively plans to use its new gas tax revenue to pay part of the costs for overlay projects on Pryor Road south of Billings and on Drury Lane, McGirl Road, Hoskin Road and Vermillion Road in the Shepherd area, according to Tim Miller, director of public works. The county commission will make the final decision, he said.

The Billings City Council earmarked new fuel tax money for the annual street pavement rehabilitation, overlay and chip seal program, according to public works director Dave Mumford. Using those time-limited funds for the annual program would allow the city to direct other funds to the Inner Belt Loop, a large multi-phase project to connect Billings Heights with the West End over the next five years.

Yellowstone County received about $300,000 last year and is projected to see an increase of $171,000 this year.

The city of Billings received $1.7 million in state fuel tax revenue last fiscal year and is estimated to receive an increase of $1.5 million this year.

The highway safety revenue resulted from House Bill 473, sponsored by Rep. Frank Garner, R-Kalispell. It passed despite opposition from most Yellowstone County GOP lawmakers. Rep. Geraldine Custer, Rep. Jeff Essmann, Sen. Duane Ankney and Sen. Tom Richmond were the only Republicans representing parts of Yellowstone County who voted for the safety funding.

Reasons for supporting HB473 are as valid now as they were when the Montana Legislature convened a year ago:

30 percent of state roads are in poor condition.

Montanas poor road conditions cost motorists an estimated $800 million annually in vehicle damage, crashes and congestion.

Montanas fatality rate is among the worst in the nation.

Montana has more than 900 deficient or obsolete bridges.

Thanks to the lawmakers and Gov. Steve Bullock who had the political courage to do the right thing: to vote for public safety even though it required a tax increase.

The new law not only promotes safer travel, it provides ongoing funding. The 2019 Legislature will have to debate funding for most other things. Fortunately for everyone who travels in Montana, road safety funding was secured in 2017.

 The Billings Gazette
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This article was published 15/01/2018 (1768 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An organization that has worked with more than 10,000 non-profit community groups in its 34-year history is racing against the clock to secure administrative funding  or it will likely close its doors for good.

Last week, the Manitoba Community Services Council received notice the province would not be renewing its contract and its upcoming quarterly funding payment would be the last.

After six months of trying to get a meeting with the province, the group finally got a sit down Jan. 12, said Jay Boaz, MCSC chairman. However, he said the meeting left the organization with new questions about its future.

SUPPLIED Jay Boaz, chairperson of the Manitoba Community Services Council in Winnipeg.

The province clarified MCSCs administrative funding (11 per cent of its annual budget) was being cut, Boaz said. The organization has been given until the first week of February to find alternative funding. If it fails to do so, MCSC will likely cease to exist, he said.

However, even if the organization secures new administrative funding prior to the deadline, the province made no guarantees it will continue to fund the rest of MCSCs annual budget (which is passed directly to non-profits).

When we went into that meeting, we didnt know what to expect. We certainly werent expecting to be told our administrative funding was the concern. We operate very efficiently. We handed out around $2.2 million in grants last year, at an administrative cost of only $220,000, Boaz said.

I dont see how the government could do it any more efficiently than we do. Especially with the volunteers we have reviewing the grant applications.

MCSC is an arms-length organization funded by the province and Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries (MBLL). During the 2016-17 fiscal year, the organization received $1.7 million from the province and $850,000 from MBLL.

It remains unclear whether the MBLL funding is also in jeopardy, Boaz said.

Established in 1984, MCSC serves as a intermediary between non-profits and the provincial government. Non-profits apply for grants through MCSC, which evaluates all applications and then disperses funding.

Boaz said hed be less concerned if the province was willing to say it will continue to fund the non-profits supported by MCSC (more than 200 in 2017) should the organization shut down.

Theres no plan yet in terms of whats going to replace us. If the province wanted to reduce duplications like they said, and offer our services instead, then Id be more OK with it. Id still disagree, but I could make sense of it, Boaz said.

But I find it confusing why the province would go this route when they have no alternative plan sorted out in terms of how this need is going to be met. There is still a lot up in the air.

In addition, Boaz said his group was given no explanation for why requests for a meeting with Manitoba officials went unmet for six months, only to have one scheduled after being informed funding was being axed.

When contacted Monday, a spokesman said the province was awaiting further information from MCSC, and another meeting had been set for Friday to discuss next steps.

I certainly would have preferred more notice. We certainly tried to engage with the province earlier. The timeline weve been given by the province (to secure other administrative funding) is extremely challenging, Boaz said.

We basically have three weeks to come up with something. We have a couple areas were looking at. We want to see what we can do to save this organization. We believe in what we do.

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @rk_thorpe
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This article was published 15/01/2018 (1768 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The disposable face masks issued to Winnipeg Police Service officers dont provide adequate protection from potentially deadly synthetic opiates such as fentanyl and carfentanyl, an arbitrator has determined.

The WPS has been ordered to address union concerns about the N95 masks, which officers have been using since the fentanyl crisis exploded in the city in late 2016, Winnipeg Police Association president Moe Sabourin said in a statement Monday.

We have already seen several serious situations where members required emergency medical treatment for exposure to substances, he said.

While the N95 masks meet technical standards, effective use involves slow movements in calm settings. (Mark Lennihan / The Associated Press files)

Our members encounter all sorts of different powders and substances during their duties, and given that very tiny amounts of these opiate substances  even two milligrams (an amount smaller than a grain of salt)  could be lethal, proper safety equipment is essential to protect Winnipeg police officers.

Hopefully now we can get that equipment.

Sabourin said he is pleased with the arbitrators decision, but expressed disappointment that it took a year to this point.

While the N95 masks meet technical standards, effective use involves slow movements in calm settings, something that does not describe real-world police work, he said.

The union says other cities with serious opiate problems, such as Vancouver and Ottawa, issue full face masks to officers to provide more complete protection under policing conditions.

From exposure to opiates to safe parking, the service has been very slow to respond to concerns about the safety of our members, he said.
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This article was published 15/01/2018 (1768 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A third suspect has been arrested by police and charged in the slaying of a man in Winnipeg five months ago.

Winnipeg police said Monday that Aram Soroush, 25, of Vancouver, was arrested by officers with the Vancouver Police Departments homicide unit last Wednesday.

Soroush, who has been charged with conspiracy to commit murder, was brought back to Winnipeg Friday and has been detained in custody.

JUSTIN SAMANSKI-LANGILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Police were called to the 100 block of Killarney Avenue in August following the slaying of Mustafa Peyarwary.

Police said the arrest came after Winnipeg homicide investigators last week identified a third suspect had been involved in the planning and organizing of the murder of Mustafa Peyawary and issued a Canada-wide warrant for the suspects arrest.

Peyawary, 29, died from massive blunt force trauma on Aug. 13.

Police said at the time they believed Peyawary was assaulted over an extended period of time in an apartment in the 100 block of Killarney Avenue in Fort Richmond.

Damir Kulic, 27, of Vancouver, and Ahamed Althaaf Ismail, 29, of Edmonton, are facing first-degree murder charges.
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This article was published 16/01/2018 (1767 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg woman says shes traumatized and paranoid after allegedly being sexually assaulted by a local doctor and then taken advantage of by a man pretending to be a lawyer who offered to help her pursue a lawsuit.

The 28-year-old single mother of two, who the Free Press has agreed not to name, is one of nine former patients accusing Dr. Amir Ravesh of sexually assaulting them at a walk-in medical clinic in the Elmwood neighbourhood.

The alleged con man, Duncan James Ryan, 55, has previously served time in prison for fraud, and has been accused in a series of criminal schemes where hes posed as a lawyer.

Dr. Amir Ravesh

I just feel taken advantage of. Its just like he (Ryan) took advantage of me right after I had already been taken advantage of. Who do you trust? You cant trust doctors. You cant trust lawyers, the woman said in a recent interview. Its like I cant trust anybody.

Im paranoid, to be honest, extremely paranoid.

Winnipeg police confirmed they are investigating the womans claims involving the fake lawyer.

The woman said in October 2017  unable to see her regular doctor  she went to a walk-in clinic for a chest infection. While there, she said Ravesh (whose full name is Amir Houshang Mazhariravesh) sexually assaulted her.

Despite recognizing what happened wasnt OK, she said she didnt immediately go to police to file a report. Later that month, she was watching TV when she saw a news report stating Ravesh had been charged with sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman.

I lost it. I was sobbing I thought maybe if Id gone to police, this wouldnt have happened to her. But then when I looked at the dates, I realized even if I had gone it wouldnt have made a difference, she said.

But I didnt want anyone to not believe her (the 19-year-old), when I knew the same thing had happened to me.

She said she made the decision to report her assault to police, in an effort to back up the 19-year-old woman. The following day, she went and filed a report with the Winnipeg Police Service sex crimes unit.

Ravesh, 51, has been charged with nine counts of sexual assault and released on bail.

None of the allegations has been proven in court.

Following the alleged incident, the woman said she struggled to keep things together for her two children.

Needing support and not knowing where to turn  she said shes had a difficult time accessing counselling to help her deal with trauma in the wake of the alleged assault  she eventually confided in a friend about what happened. Her friend said she knew a lawyer who could help.

Thats when she said she was introduced to Duncan James Ryan. Its also when she said her situation went from bad to worse.

He was very professional, very believable, very good with his words. Everything he said  now that I think back  was just so well thought out, she said. I told him what happened to me. He confided in me that there was a sexual assault that happened to him when he was younger. He said he wanted to help me out and that we could pursue a settlement, so I could get counselling, move on with my life, move forward.

Between November 2017 and last week, she said Ryan led her to believe he was pursuing a lawsuit against Ravesh, through the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba. At the time, she only knew him as Duncan James.

She said he had her sign documents and disclose information about her personal assets. By early January, she said he indicated a settlement for roughly $500,000 was imminent.

He was making up these negotiations. He was asking me what my assets are, personal things. Im naive. I trusted this doctor and then I trusted him. I was telling him information that I probably shouldnt have, she said.

Last week, the friend who introduced her to Ryan texted her, saying she should do an internet search for the name Duncan James Ryan. She found old news articles related to a man wanted on a Canada-wide arrest warrant for probation violations and a province-wide warrant for fraud and impersonating a lawyer in Alberta.

Duncan James Ryan

In 2002, while working as a paralegal in Newfoundland, the man was sentenced to two years in prison for defrauding clients.

The man in the articles was the same man she thought was her lawyer.

In addition, Alberta Justice confirmed four criminal cases have been settled against Duncan James Ryan over the past eight years. A spokeswoman for the Calgary Police Service said it has laid charges against Ryan in the past for incidents related to fraud and impersonating a lawyer.

The morning after discovering Ryan was not a lawyer, the woman went to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba offices to ask about her file and lawsuit. The receptionist informed her the organization had no record of either.

She went to Winnipeg police to file a report for the second time in a little more than two months (WPS has confirmed theyre investigating). When she was finished, she had to put on a happy face and pick up her son  who has special needs  for lunch.

Later, after dropping the boy off at school, she made the decision to drive over to Ryans residence in Winnipeg.

I ran up to the door. I made a huge scene. I wanted his neighbours to know what hed done. I walked up to the door yelling, only to have someone else open it. It was the manager of the complex and he told me Duncan (Ryan) had disappeared in the middle of the night, she said.

While Ryan was ostensibly working on her lawsuit, she wasnt paying him. She said he claimed hed work for free, in exchange for a portion of a future settlement. Given there was no settlement coming, she said she couldnt speculate on what his motivation was for deceiving her.

The woman has contacted Revenue Canada and her bank in an effort to shield herself from potential identity theft.

The woman provided the Free Press with two phone numbers for Ryan. More than six calls were placed over two days but none were answered.

She said the last few months have been some of the darkest of her life, and just when she thought she could see a light at the end of the tunnel, it vanished. I dont sleep. I thought all this was going to be done with. I dont even know how to get another lawyer. I cant trust anybody now, she said.

What was the purpose of it? I dont understand what he was doing. I guess thats what con men do Hes just gone now. Hes just gone.

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @rk_thorpe
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 16/01/2018 (1767 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has invented a role for Canada in the Korean Peninsula nuclear weapons row by co-chairing, with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, todays Vancouver gathering of foreign ministers. Canada calls it the Vancouver Foreign Ministers Meeting on Security and Stability on the Korean Peninsula.

The gathering will not open the way for agreement between North Korea and the countries it threatens. That is certain because North Koreas foreign minister was not invited and will not be there. Nor will there be a delegation from China or from Russia, the countries whose support keeps North Korea in existence.

The gathering may be useful in persuading U.S. President Donald Trump that economic sanctions and the offer of negotiations are a promising avenue toward a deal with North Korea. It may also be useful in showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that Mr. Tillerson and his policy enjoy wide international support.

Nathan Denette / The Canadian Press files Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland

The meeting brings together the countries that joined the United States, at the behest of the United Nations General Assembly, in waging the 1950-53 Korean War against China and North Korea. In that sense, the gathering hints at a bellicose subtext: we sent our armies to defend South Korea 65 years ago, and we might do so again.

The worlds problem is to persuade North Korea it has much to gain by renouncing nuclear weapons and submitting to an inspections regime. The corollary has to be that North Korea has nothing to gain by arming itself with nuclear weapons and the missiles that could deliver those weapons across the Pacific Ocean.

This is a difficult case to make. It is made primarily by countries such as the United States that have their own nuclear weapons, intend to keep them and want no other countries to acquire them. India, Pakistan and Israel became nuclear powers, despite international disapproval, and have paid no penalty for doing so.

North Korea would have collapsed long ago and been absorbed into the much wealthier South Korea but for two factors  political and economic support from China and Russia, and North Koreas own fierce military threat against its southern neighbour.

The writing has been on the wall for North Korea for many years. The Soviet Union collapsed. East and West Germany united peacefully to become the economic powerhouse of Europe. China abandoned Mao Zedong thought and became a trading nation with a growing middle class. North Korea survives as an isolated communist dictatorship because its army seems ready for war at the drop of a hat and because its collapse would be inconvenient for China.

Canadas interest would be best served by reunification of Korea as a liberal democracy and a market economy, creating an Asian power that could be a political counterweight to China and Japan. We dare not speak of that, however, because the fear of Korean reunification keeps Kim Jong Un awake at night and spurs him to test more ballistic missiles and issue more blood-curdling threats. Korean reunification means his country will be erased and, if he is lucky, he will spend his remaining days as a pensioner in a retirement home somewhere in China.

For the time being, then, Canada is stuck with telling North Korea it is better off without nuclear weapons, implausible though that may seem. Getting 20 countries to say it in unison may help.
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The death toll in the coastal community of Montecito, California rose to 20 on Monday as rescuers have all but given up hope of finding anyone else alive. To that end, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown recently announced that authorities had transitioned Sunday from a search and rescue phase to a search and recovery phase.

Pinit Sutthithepa, 30, an employee at a Toyota dealership in nearby Santa Barbara, was the latest body found. His six-year-old son Peerawat was found dead a few days earlier while his 2-year-old daughter Lydia is still listed as missing. She is one of 4 residents still listed as missing and rescuers are giving up hope of finding any of them alive.

Seven days after the disaster began, US President Donald Trump has not said a word about the tragedy. Instead, the White house press office released a two-sentence statement of hollow praise for firefighters and sympathy for the victims.

In fact, the president has shown enormous contempt for the largest state in the country by population after it voted against him in the 2016 election. The massive wildfires in Northern California and the Santa Barbara area last fall that resulted in at least 43 deaths did not elicit any timely comments from the reality TV star-turned president even as the hurricanes that hit Southeastern Texas and Florida during the same time period did.

Officials estimate that it will take Montecito, a city of 10,000 residents, at least a decade, if not more, to fully recover from the effects of the disaster. The multimillionaires and billionaires who made the town their playground will move on and purchase mega-mansions and sprawling ranches elsewhere. For the majority of residentsincluding landscapers and housekeepers who served the ultra-richtheir lives have been irretrievably ruined.

This disaster has revealed, yet again, the deplorable state of US infrastructure, which is utterly incapable of coping with extreme weather events that are now becoming regular occurrences throughout the country and throughout the West Coast in particular.

An entire stretch of one of Californias main highway arteries, the 101 Freeway, still remains closed a week after the incident, leaving travelers with no choice but to undertake an up to five-hour detour around the Santa Ynez Mountain range. CalTrans, the states main transportation agency, has announced that the freeway will remain closed indefinitely although some officials are optimistic that the freeway might reopen next week.

However, once finished with vacuuming stagnant water from the freeway surfaceup to two feet deep in some areasCalTrans workers must test the road surface for structural integrity. Lines will also have to be repainted with new guardrails and other structural features reinstalled. It is therefore possible that the freeway may remain closed for several weeks, if not months.

As of Sunday, CalTrans reported that 150 yards of debris were removed from the northbound lane of the freeway while 80 yards were removed from the southbound side. The total length of the closed section, however, is 2 miles or 3,520 yards.

Dump trucks are regularly moving mudslide detritus to the nearby community of Summerland were the waste is sorted. Some of the first oil rigs in the world were built in Summerland in the late 19th century and Summerland was the site of the first offshore oil rig.

A blowout at the nearby Dos Cuadras offshore oil field in 1969 was a formative event for the modern environmental movement while various oil leaks have regularly caused beach closures and other public health emergencies since. The town has now become a dumping ground for the Montecito disaster.

As the water and sewage systems in Montecito are now completely unusable, beaches in the nearby areas of Goleta and Carpinteria are also being used to dump waste. The unloaded mud and sediment are likely responsible for the shutting down of coastlines nearby by Santa Barbara officials over health concerns.

Santa Barbara Emergency Management announced that their survey of structural damages is now 35 percent complete. They have been able to definitively determine that 296 buildings were damaged or destroyed in the mudslide and that number is expected to rise as the structural survey continues.

This weekend more than one thousand people gathered in Montecito in a candlelight vigil for the mudslide victims. Santa Barbara Mayor Cathy Murillo spoke at the vigil. I dont know about you, but Im scared of Mother Nature right now, she said.

While residents in the area do have a great deal to fear from mother nature, the principal cause of their distress is not an inexplicable act of God, it is in fact manmade.

The mudslides are the direct result of wildfires, specifically the Thomas Fire, which burned through the area last month. The Thomas Fire became the largest in Californias recorded history. After five years of drought and minimal efforts by the state and federal government to clear fire-prone areas of dead brush and undergrowth, conditions were ripe for the growth of massive wildfires.

In fact, these factors, coupled with an overall rise in temperatures globally have led to 15 of the largest 20 wildfires in Californias recorded history occurring within the past 20 years alone.

The effect of flash flooding on landscapes stripped of vegetation by fires is also well known, yet the areas 11 debris basins were wholly insufficient to contain last weeks mudslides.

Despite such disasters, California politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, have made it quite clear that no significant assistance will be provided and there will be no meaningful upgrades to infrastructure whatsoever. The Cal Fire state firefighting agency now regularly must tap into its fire prevention funds to actually fight fires. The US Forest Service must also do the same.

The proposed budget proposal for fiscal year 2018-2019 by outgoing Democratic governor Jerry Brown also provides no additional assistance to fight wildfires. This is despite the fact that state tax revenues were up over $6 billion versus the previous tax year. Nonetheless, the governor declared that the states primary responsibility was to its creditors, i.e. its wealthy bondholders, and that the majority of the tax surplus would be put into the states rainy-day fund, i.e. a mechanism to make permanent cuts to vital social programs including firefighting and prevention.

The gubernatorial candidates for the 2018 election held their first major debate on Sunday. None of those present, four Democrats and two Republicans, had anything to say about the disaster in Montecito.
The false alarm delivered to a population of 1.5 million in the US Pacific island state of Hawaii on Saturday morning has laid bare the clear and present danger of a nuclear war.

Cell phones lit up with the text message BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Television and radio broadcasts were interrupted with the chilling announcement that A missile may impact on sea or land within minutes. This is not a drill.

For 38 minutes, residents of and visitors to Hawaii were confronted face to face with nuclear Armageddon. Parents frantically sought to find and protect their children, families said last goodbyes and people desperately sought largely nonexistent shelter in anticipation of a nuclear blast.

The fact that this event is so rapidly disappearing from the front pages of major newspapers and is being reduced to a secondary story by television news is itself a disturbing indication of how much more is involved in the Hawaii ballistic missile warning than the public is being told.

The corporate media, working in tight coordination with the US government, is in full containment mode. Monday night, all three US television networks broadcast virtually identical reports based on their admission to Hawaiis Emergency Management System bunker to support the official story that the chaos was caused by the inadvertent error of a single employee.

The official reaction to what constitutes a social crime committed against an entire population is unfolding according to a well-established pattern. The event and its implications are being minimized. No one is going to conduct an investigation and present findings to the public. There will be no televised public hearings before the US Congress.

The explanation being put out by the state and federal authorities, and parroted by the media, fobs off the nuclear war alert as a mere accident triggered by a single careless worker at Hawaiis Emergency Management System. The unnamed individual supposedly selected the wrong computer menu option, keying in Missile Alert instead of Test Missile Alert.

There is no reason that anyone should blindly accept this official story as true. Given the record of the US government in staging provocations and launching wars based upon lies, not only severe skepticism, but outright suspicion is called for.

How could such an accident happen? Once again, a major public event is shrouded in secrecy. Why has the individual allegedly responsible for the accident not been named? The claim that the person is being protected against retaliation by enraged citizens is not credible. At the very least, the single individual who is being blamed for the colossal error should have the right to tell his or her side of the story. And even if the incident was triggered by a single mistaken keypunch, that does not explain why it took a full, excruciating 38 minutes for the authorities to send out a follow-up message announcing that the warning had been a false alarm.

Even if one were to accept the authorities version of events as good coin, such an accident constitutes a devastating indictment of the criminal indifference of the US ruling establishment toward the lives and safety of the American people. The existence of such a ramshackle system, employing absurdly primitive software and technology as the supposed first line of defense, only makes clear that the ruling class accepts that nuclear war will mean the deaths of millions and has no serious plan to protect anyone. Just as with every other disaster, natural or otherwise, the incident in Hawaii has exposed the total absence of essential infrastructure and social planning.

That these events unfolded in Hawaii, the scene of the so-called sneak attack of December 7, 1941, the date which will live in infamy of American lore, make them all the more telling. The headquarters of the US Pacific Command, Hawaii boasts 11 separate military bases comprising units from every branch of the US military.

The significance of Saturdays nuclear war alert becomes clear only within the context of the advanced state of preparations for a US war of aggression against nuclear-armed North Korea.

A glimpse into the scope of these preparations was provided Monday in a front-page article published by the New York Times. Absurdly, the piece begins, Across the military, officers and troops are preparing for a war they hope will not come. Yet the substance of the article makes clear that what is being prepared is not a defense against a North Korean attack, but rather the invasion and conquest of the East Asian country.

The article describes an exercise last month involving 48 Apache gunships and Chinook cargo helicopters practicing moving troops and equipment under live artillery fire to assault targets. Two days later, it reports, paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division staged a jump in Nevada that simulated a foreign invasion.

Even more ominously, the Times reports that for the first time in years, more than 1,000 US Army reservists have been called up for active duty to man mobilization centers used for the rapid movement of troops overseas.

The preparations also include a plan to deploy large numbers of Special Operations troops to the Korean Peninsula under the cover of providing security for next months Winter Olympics.

More and more, these actions begin to resemble the run-up to the US war of aggression against Iraq in 2003, with the exception that this time around the American public is being given no warning of impending mass carnage, outside of the raving tweets of the US commander-in-chief.

That the Times article appeared at allunder the byline of Eric Schmitt, the Times chief embedded reporter and a faithful conduit for the Pentagon and CIAmakes it clear that the military preparations are of such a magnitude that they are becoming broadly known, requiring the newspaper of record to attempt to manage the news.

The article also points to divisions between the White House and the Pentagon and within the US military command itself over impending war with North Korea. Trump and his aides reportedly are toying with what has been termed a bloody nose attack targeting North Korean nuclear weapons, based on the assumption that Pyongyang would not retaliate.

Within this context, the accidental nuclear alert in Hawaii emerges as a necessary link in the chain of preparations for a catastrophic war. Was the false alarm itself one more military exercise? Were the people of Hawaii used as guinea pigs to test the public reaction should a US invasion of North Korea prompt the government of Kim Jong Un to fire off its missiles before they could be destroyed?

There is another possible explanation for the false alarm and the prolonged wait for it to be rescinded. The Times also published an article Monday referring to the 1983 KAL 007 incident as an example of how an unintended nuclear war could erupt. It fails to explain, however, that the Korean Airlines passenger jet was shot down by Soviet air defense fighters after it deliberately flew over Sakhalin, the site of numerous top secret Soviet military bases, as part of an operation coordinated with US intelligence agencies. A US spy plane was flying on a parallel course, shadowing the KAL flight, observing the responses of Soviet nuclear installations, radar stations and air bases.

There is no question that once the incoming missile alert was issued in Hawaii, the government and the military, not only in North Korea, but also in China and Russia, were compelled to make their own rapid estimates as to what it meant and how they should respond. The logical conclusion would be that Washington was staging a false pretext for all-out war.

No doubt, military units were placed on alert, weapons were readied or moved and other preparations for possible nuclear conflict were carried out, all under the watchful eyes of US spy satellites, providing intelligence that could prove vital for a planned US invasion of North Korea.

Whatever the cause of Saturdays nuclear scare, one thing is certain. The missile alert staged in Hawaii constitutes a deadly serious warning. It has exposed before millions the very real threat of nuclear war.
In a provocative step that immediately fuelled tensions with Turkey and Russia, the US announced last weekend the establishment of a 30,000-strong Border Security Force (BSF) in enclaves of Syria under the control of the American proxies fighting to topple the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. The BSF will be dominated by fighters from Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG), alongside elements from various Islamist militias.

Having proclaimed the defeat of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Washington has no intention of leaving Syria. It is determined to carve out a swathe of territory from which to prosecute its goal of ousting Assad. The latest move will not only intensify the civil war in Syria but bring the US into direct conflict with Russia and Iran, which back the Assad regime, and Turkey, which regards the YPG as a direct military threat.

Colonel Thomas Veale, a spokesman for the US-led coalition against ISIS, announced that the 15,000 troops of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) would form the core of the new army. Currently, there are approximately 230 individuals training in the BSFs inaugural class, with the goal of a final force size of approximately 30,000, he said.

Testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Thursday, David Satterfield, acting US assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, revealed that the Trump administrations aims, beyond the continued suppression of ISIS, involve the consolidation of the SDF in the north and northeast of Syria, and the countering of Iranian influence.

The war against ISIS was only ever a pretext for advancing US plans for regime change in Damascus as the means for combatting Iranian and Russian influence in Syria. Far from destroying ISIS, the US, which maintains 2,000 troops in Syria, and its local proxies ensured the safety of thousands of armed ISIS fighters. According to Russia, these ISIS fighters are being trained and integrated into anti-Assad forces.

Under pressure to explain why US forces are being kept in Syria, Satterfield blurted out: We are deeply concerned with the activities of Iran, with the ability of Iran to enhance those activities through a greater ability to move materiel into Syria. And I would rather leave the discussion at that point. In other words, the Trump administration is preparing for a war in Syria to oust Tehrans ally Assad that could easily spill over into a wider conflict with Iran, and potentially Russia.

At the same time, the US is facing possible Turkish military action that could destroy plans for a pro-American zone in Syria. Turkey, a NATO ally, is deeply concerned about linkages between the YPG and the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which it brands a terrorist group and has long sought to suppress. Three months ago, Turkish troops crossed the border into Syria near the YPG-controlled Idlib enclave in northern Syria.

Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accused the US over the weekend of taking worrying steps to legitimise this organisation [YPG] and make it lasting in the region. He warned: It is absolutely not possible for this to be accepted. Turkey would continue its fight against any terrorist organisation regardless of its name and shape within and outside its borders.

Erdogan condemned US support for the YPG, declaring on the weekend: The US sent 4,900 trucks of weapons in Syria. We know this. This is not what allies do. At a rally yesterday he reiterated his determination to vanquish the Kurdish militia. We have finished our preparations, he said. The operation can start any time. Erdogan accused the US of creating a terror army on our border, adding: What we have to do is nip this terror army in the bud.

The Syrian government denounced the planned pro-US border force as a blatant assault on the countrys sovereignty. The state-run news agency, SANA, cited a foreign ministry spokesperson as insisting that the army was determined to thwart the US conspiracy, end the presence of the US, its agents and tools in Syria, establish full control over the entire Syria territory and preserve the countrys sovereignty.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday accused the US of seeking to split up Syria, saying it does not want to keep Syria as a state in its current borders. Washington was helping the Syrian Democratic Forces to set up some border security zones.

Lavrov stated: What it would mean is that vast swathes of territory along the border of Turkey and Iraq would be isolated. Its to the east of the Euphrates River. There are difficult relations between Kurds and Arabs there. There is a fear they are pursuing a policy to cut Syria into several pieces.

Vladimir Shmanov, chairman of the Russian State Dumas defence committee, warned that Russia would respond to the planned Syrian border force. [It] stands in direct confrontation [with Russias interests] and we and our colleagues will certainly undertake certain measures on stabilisation of the situation in Syria, he said.

The US announcement that it will train and equip a 30,000-strong military force is a desperate attempt to shore up its position in Syria. Diplomatically, it is Moscow, not Washington, that appears to be dictating the terms of negotiations over Syria, with plans for a conference in Sochi later this month to discuss the countrys future.

Militarily, the US-backed anti-Assad militias have suffered one defeat after another, not only because of Russian and Iranian support for the Syrian army, but because of widespread popular hostility, particularly to the reactionary Al Qaeda-linked elements supported by Washington.

The last remaining major Syrian opposition enclave of Idlib has been the focus of a major government offensive since the beginning of year. Into this volatile mix, the US has declared that it intends to stake out a claim by funding, training and arming a large new proxy army, only compounding the danger of a wider war.
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MUSCATINE  For Muscatine residents used to traveling on a four-lane Mississippi Drive, the re-opened roadway could feel a bit claustrophobic.

A portion of the reconstructed Mississippi Drive, from Iowa Avenue to Broadway Street, opened to local traffic this past month. The roughly $8 million project reduced the road to two lanes, plus added center medians and back-in angle parking.

With no shoulders on the side of the road, and with east and westbound lanes tucked between medians, residents have complained on social media about a lack of space to get out of the way in the case of incoming emergency vehicles.

This week, the city responded, saying drivers should follow the typical rules when stopping for emergency vehicles: Pull to the right and stop.

"The proper procedure, then, is not any different than on any other city street or highway ... you see an emergency vehicle approaching with lights on, move as far right as possible and stop to let the emergency vehicle drive by," Spokesman Kevin Jenison said. "It is the responsibility of the emergency vehicle driver to move to the left around you."

Public Works Director Brian Stineman said the rules were discussed at the most recent traffic committee meeting. Because of limited space in the single lanes, especially heading toward the bluffs, Stineman said emergency vehicles may need to drive over the center median.

"One of the important design features of Mississippi Drive is the fact that the medians are sloped to allow vehicles to drive over them," Stineman said. "The emergency vehicle will then be able to pass on the left-hand side by going over the median if necessary."

Assistant Fire Chief Mike Hartman said ambulances and fire trucks have already used Mississippi Drive in the past month, without issue due to light traffic.

"As far as I know, the traffic hasn't been to the point where a whole lot of people are using Mississippi Drive, so it hasn't been an issue for us yet," Hartman said. "Once things get more cleaned up and done, we will start having more traffic and this could become more of an issue."

Hartman also pointed out the vegetation and trees being planted in the center median, which may block the passage of emergency vehicles.

"There is some kind of vegetation in there and trees, so if you can pull to the side where you're not directly across from that, that will help down the road," Hartman said. "Pull over to the side as far as you can  safely to the right  and we'll do what we need to do."

In the city's news release, Police Chief Brett Talkington said "it is a challenge for our officers to go around on the left since we would probably be driving over the median," but added a similar sentiment to Hartman's: "We, as a police force, will make it work one way or another."

Jenison said the designers of Mississippi Drive made public safety a priority when looking at the road, including the installation of medians.

At a public planning meeting last winter, in response to citizen concerns, Jim Harbaugh, a landscaper and architect with Bolton & Menk, said "one of the reasons that we do use medians is the safety of through traffic and people utilizing the businesses there."

Mississippi Drive, from Iowa Avenue to Cedar Street, will remain closed to traffic for work this winter. The Iowa Avenue intersection is open for vehicles and pedestrians to access the riverfront.
MORNING SUN  The Community Foundation of Louisa County awarded $93,240 to non-profits serving locally at a breakfast Monday. That morning, the foundation recognized the 40 awardees.

Paula Buckman, director of the foundation, said that many organizations locally depend on these funds.

When you look at the fact that weve been able to grant a million dollars in a rural county to mostly libraries, schools and parent services  this is helping programs that wouldnt be able to do this work without this money," Buckman said.

The money came from the State of Iowa's Endow Iowa Grant program. This was the twelfth time the foundation has awarded Endow Iowa funds. The Endow Iowa Grant Program provides money to the Iowa Council of Foundations to be given locally to recipients.

According to Iowa Code, the purpose of the Endow Iowa Grants program is to "encourage individuals, businesses, and organizations to invest in community foundations and community affiliate organizations to enhance the quality of life for citizens of this state through increased philanthropic activity." They are supposed to do this by providing capital to "new and existing citizen groups" of this state organized to establish permanent endowment funds that will address community needs.

Buckman explained that the granting foundation keeps up with the grantee organization, working to make sure that the money received goes toward bringing their project into fruition.

Since forming in 2005, the Community Foundation of Louisa County has provided 662 grants locally totaling over a million dollars.

It makes a tremendous vital difference to rural counties," Buckman said. "We are so thankful to have this money that will allow these programs to continue. It makes a big difference in the programs and volunteerism and overall quality of life in Louisa county."
PARIS (Reuters) - Actress Catherine Deneuve apologized to victims of sexual assault who were offended by a column denouncing "puritanism" she signed following the Harvey Weinstein scandal, but maintained her reservations about the #MeToo campaign.

Deneuve and 99 other French women signed a column in Le Monde last week saying the campaign, which saw millions of women take to social media to share sexual harassment stories, had gone too far and was fueled by a "hatred of men".

In a letter in Liberation newspaper on Monday, Deneuve stood by the statement that sparked an international outcry, but distanced herself from comments made by other signatories.

In particular, she referred, without naming her, to former radio presenter Brigitte Lahaie, who during a debate on French TV said women could "orgasm during a rape".

"I'm a free woman and always will be," Deneuve said. "I send my sisterly regards to all the victims of abject acts who would have felt attacked by this column in Le Monde, and it is to them, and them only, that I offer my apologies."

"Saying on a TV channel that you can orgasm during a rape is worse than spitting in the face of all those who suffered from this crime," she said.

But the 74-year-old actress said she did not like the "media lynching" and "climate of censorship" she said was unleashed by the #metoo campaign, known in France as #balancetonporc or "rat out your abuser".

"An actor can be digitally removed from a movie, the director of a great New York institution can be forced to resign for groping somebody's buttocks 30 years ago with no other form of trial," she said.

"I don't like this pack mentality, all too common these days," she added.

(Reporting by Michel Rose; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)
Blaze Bernstein, the Orange County, California, college student who was murdered during his winter break, was remembered as a talented writer and passionate chef during his funeral service on Monday.

According to a report by the Orange County Register on Monday, Blaze had been stabbed more than 20 times, leading investigators to wonder if the killing was an act of rage.

In a statement obtained by PEOPLE, the Bernstein family addressed the details of their sons death, saying, We are saddened to hear, on the day we laid our son to rest, that gruesome details of the cause of his death were published.

Blaze Bernstein

Our son was a beautiful gentle soul who we loved more than anything, the statement continued. We were proud of everything he did and who he was. He had nothing to hide. We are in solidarity with our son and the LGBTQ community. There is still much discovery to be done and if it is determined that this was a hate crime, we will cry not only for our son, but for LGBTQ people everywhere that live in fear or who have been victims of hate crime.

His parents are encouraging people to set aside fear, ignorance and judgement. It is time to love. Love each other. Be good. Do good and honor Blazes memory. #dogoodforblaze, as well as a website in their sons memory.

Hundreds gathered to remember Blaze, who was found dead in Borrego Park, California. Those who attended were given spatulas with the last recipe he made  a rum-pineapple upside-down cake he made for his family on New Years Eve  according to local news outlets.

 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.

During the memorial, Blazes father Gideon Bernstein said his son was like a young pony just getting into a steady gallop, with your face to the wind and so looking forward to what was coming next, according to the Los Angeles Times.

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Blaze, I know you didnt like the spotlight, he said. But youd be amazed at all the good things being done in your honor here today.

After an exhaustive search, the 19-year-olds lifeless body was found last Tuesday in the brush surrounding Borrego Park in Lake Forest, California, where he was visiting his parents.

Based upon evidence found at the scene, authorities believe Blazes death was a homicide, and last Friday, the Orange County Sheriffs Department named Blazes high school friend, Samuel Lincoln Woodward, 20, as the suspect in the case and arrested him on suspicion of homicide.
A week into this year's Iowa legislative session, and it seems that the state legislature will try to settle the city-versus-state tug of war over intersection speeding cameras.

SB 220, introduced this past year and assigned to a house subcommittee last week, would add some statewide regulations to the use of speeding cameras. Another bill from last year's push, SB 196, which would ban the use of the cameras, has not yet been assigned.

Rep. Gary Carlson, R-Muscatine, said he expected lawmakers to see the issue come up in a number of ways this legislative session. As the chairman of the House's transportation committee and a member of the House's local government committee, it is likely that any traffic camera bill presented in chambers will have his fingerprints on it.

"I have plenty of constituents  plenty of friends  on both sides of this," Carlson said. "Some hate cameras, think its a violation of their rights, think they should never be used in any case. I understand that. I have other constituents who are very concerned over public safety, think it's really important that people do follow the speed limits that have been established because of the amount of traffic that goes through there."

Because the issue drums up a good deal of controversy, Carlson said that it is time the legislature to take it on.

"It is a little polarizing," Carlson said. "And you will never have a clear decision that will satisfy everyone."

In an interview with the Journal, Carlson repeatedly said traffic camera placement decisions should be made locally.

"From my perspective, I am for local governments being able to have the ability to make a decision whether or not they want to use cameras or not," Carlson said. "That is a decision that best rests in the hands of local city councils."

Carlson said the cameras are a win-win for cities that use them.

"I think it is an efficient way to monitor speed and improve safety at a number of intersections where they have been designed to be used," Carlson said. "I will say that you cannot ignore the fact that they also generates revenue."

But important to Carlson's approach is the need for consistent implementation throughout Iowa.

"I was for putting some other constraints on the cameras so they are used more consistently across the state," Carlson said. "Whether that was fines, some requirement to make sure an officer actually reviews each camera photo before a ticket is issued."

Carlson said that whatever bill does come must clarify the usage of these cameras so they may be used consistently across the state.

"That's where I differ from my friends that want to ban it," Carlson said. "I guess I have a little more confidence that local government can do it. If the citizens don't want a camera in a particular intersection. If they don't think that it is right to have a certain speed camera or red light camera, well, they can petition their local government to do so."

Muscatine's Sen. Mark Lofgren, R-Muscatine, said he remembered the push last year. While some were pushing for an all-out ban, Lofgren said he wanted something more in the middle.

"Last year, we tried really hard to do more of a compromise, but that didn't go anywhere," Lofgren said. But this year, with Lofgren not on the transportation committee, he said he will not be in the process until it hits the Senate floor.

"I personally have never been a fan of the traffic cameras, but I am also of an open mind," Lofgren said. "I like to listen to my constituents and see what they think of it."
Saturday Night Live surprised fans this weekend with a special guest star to play ousted presidential adviser Steve Bannon. In Saturdays cold open, Bill Murray emerged from under a cloak joining Fred Armisen as controversial author Michael Wolff on MSNBCs Morning Joe.

Twitter lit up with happy responses to Murrays return to SNL.

BILL MURRAY ON SNL.THIS IS NOT A DRILLHE'S STEVE BANNON!! #SNL pic.twitter.com/5Qd2EBY7Ej  A Bleeding Corpse (@ABleedingCorpse) January 14, 2018

I didn't know the world needed Bill Murray as Steve Bannon until we got Bill Murray as Steve Bannon #SNL @nbcsnl  Robin H. (@joyeful) January 14, 2018

Bill Murray as Steve Bannon just made my night. Welcome back to Saturday Night Live Bill!#saturdaynight #BillMurray #SteveBannon pic.twitter.com/rRvLSvbosy  Red T Raccoon (@RedTRaccoon) January 14, 2018

Today, the internet also honored the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Google changed its homepage to an image of people listening to Kings famous I Have a Dream speech that was given in front to the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

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The White House also shared a special message from President Donald Trump via Twitter. Dr. Kings dream is our dream, Trump said in the video. It is the American Dream. Its the promise stitched into the fabric of our nation, etched into the hearts of our people, and written into the soul of humankind.

Celebrities also shared parts of the speech on Twitter.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted #IHaveADream  shonda rhimes (@shondarhimes) January 16, 2017

and every hill and mountain shall be made low, #IHaveADream  lee daniels (@leedanielsent) January 16, 2017

and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."" #IHaveADream  COMMON (@common) January 16, 2017

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with. #IHaveADream  Jennifer Lopez (@JLo) January 16, 2017

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. #IHaveADream  kerry washington (@kerrywashington) January 16, 2017

With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. #IHaveADream  Connie Britton (@conniebritton) January 16, 2017

With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, #IHaveADream  Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) January 16, 2017

to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, #IHaveADream  tyler oakley (@tyleroakley) January 16, 2017

knowing that we will be free one day. #IHaveADream  Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) January 16, 2017

And this will be the day  this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning: #IHaveADream  Diddy (@Diddy) January 16, 2017

Watch: Don Lemon calls Donald Trump racist, dividing the internet

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
TONIGHT: Trump is literally turning into a fairytale villain. #LSSC pic.twitter.com/8QwW1eQfur  The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) January 16, 2018

Stephen Colbert blasted President Trump with a fairy-tale-inspired insult Monday for reportedly referring to African nations as s???hole countries during an immigration meeting, and then attempting to deny the remark.

Its day 4 of S???hole Gate, Colbert said in his Late Show monologue, adding that he was confident thats going to be bleeped because CBS has higher standards than the president.

He went on to call out Trumps oddly worded denial, in which the POTUS tweeted, The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used.

Hes like the racist Rumpelstiltskin, Colbert quipped. Taking on a singsong voice and dancing a sinister jig, he continued, Unless ye guess my racist speech, the president ye shall not impeach.
Steven Seagal responded to sexual misconduct accusations against him by saying women have lied and been paid to lie about me without any evidence, any proof, any witnesses.



This is just a complete tragedy, the action star told InfoWars host Alex Jones on Monday. This isnt just me but hundreds of people around the world, he said, adding that many of those people are completely innocent.

I can tell you that 40 percent of these claims are false, he added, without elaborating on how he arrived at that particular figure.

There is a whole force of people gathering around the world now putting in lots of money and lots of time investigation people who are coming are coming after us, Seagal added in a remote interview from Japan. The people who are being paid to lie and the people who are paying them to lie are going to be exposed.

Also Read:Steven Seagal Accused of 1993 Rape: 'Tears Were Coming Down My Face'

Seagal did not respond to attempts to contact him last week when TheWrap reported the account of Regina Simons, a woman who said Seagal raped her in 1993 while she was an extra on his film On Deadly Ground. Her mother, a bishop at her church and a therapist, among others, corroborated that Simons had shared her story with them.

Seagal chose Jones conspiracy-minded InfoWars to break his silence. In a lengthy interview, which covered everything from Vladimir Putin to the deep state to the so-called gay-mafia, Jones claimed that he was contacted by former high-level people in the CIA and others, saying, Hey Steven Seagal wants to talk to you and we need to get him on to counter the narrative.'

TheWrap first reported Thursday that the Los Angeles Police Department has opened an investigation into Seagal on a separate sexual misconduct case from 2005. The department declined further comment.

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Simons and another women recently filed complaints against the actor with the LAPD. Simons said Seagal invited her to his home in Beverly Hills in 1993 after she appeared as an extra in his movie On Deadly Ground.

He took me into this room and then just closed the door and started kissing me, she told TheWrap. He then took my clothes off and before I knew it he was on top of me, raping me I wasnt sexually active yet. People always talk about fight-or-flight. But no one talks about the freeze.

Also Read:Steven Seagal Says Accusers Have Been 'Lied and Been Paid to Lie About Me Without Any Evidence'

Simons is one of more than a dozen women who have accused Seagal of sexual misconduct, but she appears to be the first to publicly accuse him of rape. Dutch former model Faviola Dadis told TheWrap she filed a report about Seagal with the LAPD in the last month. Dadis said he groped her during an audition in 2002.

The LAPD detective who Seagal and Dadis said they spoke to declined to comment, citing confidentiality.

On Monday, ex-Bond girl Rachel Grant accused the actor of sexual assault in 2002 during a film rehearsal in Bulgaria.

Through his lawyers, who spoke with the BBC, the action movie star has denied Grants assault accusation as well as another claim by the actress that he tried to expose himself.I want to share what happened to me, so people will hear it and others might come forward, Grant told the BBC.

You can watch the full interview with Seagal below.

Related stories from TheWrap:

Steven Seagal Denies Sexual Assault Accusation by Bond Girl

Steven Seagal Accused of 1993 Rape: 'Tears Were Coming Down My Face'

Second Woman Claims Steven Seagal Sexually Assaulted Her During 'Private Audition'
details about lady amelia windsor

Just when you thought you knew about all of the coolest members of the royal family, we've got another one for you. With all the buzz surrounding Prince Harry's recent engagement to Meghan Markle, it may seem hard to focus on any other person in the royal family.

RELATED: 11 Little-Known Facts About Meghan Markle, Prince Harry's Fiancee  Including How They Are Related

However, for this one, we'll probably make an exception. Especially since she's been named Britain's "Most Beautiful Royal."

Interested yet? Meet Lady Amelia Windsor.

If you've never heard of her before, you might want to take a deep breath before we dive into her connection to the royal family. Lady Amelia's grandfather is Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent and first cousin to the Queen. Her father, George Windsor, is Prince Edward's oldest son and the Earl of St. Andrews.

Well, now that's over, let's get into the real reasons Lady Amelia has flown into our radar lately.

Here are some intriguing details to know about Britain's latest "It Girl", Lady Amelia Windsor.

1. Lady Amelia is 36th in line to the British throne.

So, her wait to get a seat might take a while. But at least she won't have to beat out her siblings to get there. Lady Amelia has a brother and a sister who are both confirmed to be Catholic, meaning that they would be eliminated from the line of succession due to the Act of Settlement 1701. (To make a long story short, this basically states that those in line to the British throne must be Protestants.) At least we know there won't be any sibling rivalry on her way to the throne, assuming she ever makes it there  that is a long wait!

2. She's "Instagram famous."

A post shared by Mel Windsor (@amelwindsor) on Dec 24, 2017 at 7:48am PST

While many royals tend to stay away from social media, Lady Amelia is one of the few who seems to enjoy documenting her life on Instagram. And she's picked up a few followers on the way, too. Just shy of 28,000 actually. She often uses her page to show snaps from her travels around the world and is known to her followers with the nickname "Mel" Windsor.

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3. She has more than just good looks.

A post shared by Mel Windsor (@amelwindsor) on Feb 17, 2017 at 8:04am PST

And a claim to the throne, of course. Although British society magazine Tatler nominated her as "the most beautiful member of the royal family", Lady Amelia has a lot more going for her than this title suggests. She is currently attending the University of Edinburgh where she's studying French and Italian. She's also an avid reader. Many of her Instagram snaps show that one of her hobbies seems to be enjoying a good book.

4. Lady Amelia's mother is not a royal.

Sylvana Windsor doesn't come from royal lineage, but she does boast a successful career. She's an academic and a historian at the University of Cambridge. She's known professionally as Dr. Sylvana Tomaselli. When she married George Windsor, she gained the title of Countess of St. Andrews.

RELATED: Details And Photos Of Meghan Markle's Engagement Ring And 7 Stunning Rings Worn By Other Royal Women

5. She has a passion for fashion.

In addition to her whirlwind travels and University studies, Lady Amelia is also a model. Because, why not? She has a contract with Storm, one of the world's top modeling agencies  the same agency that started the careers of models like Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne. She's already walked the runway for couture brands such as Dolce and Gabbana.

However, the royal's passion for fashion extends beyond the catwalk. In an interview, Lady Amelia stated that she'd like to learn more about the inner workings of fashion houses. "I would love to make a contribution to any aspect behind the creative process," she said. "I want to really further my understanding of every aspect of a fashion house: from the making of the fabrics to the production of a catwalk show."

6. The United States was one of her 2017 travel destinations.

A post shared by Mel Windsor (@amelwindsor) on Dec 8, 2017 at 7:26am PST

In the same interview, Lady Amelia mentioned that America was one of the places she wanted to visit but has yet to travel to. The royal said that her sister had plans to move to New York and that she hoped to visit her. A quick look through Mel's Instagram shows that she has indeed made her dream of traveling to the U.S. come true.

Although not nearly as exotic as most of the locales Lady Amelia has visited, we're sure that the royal family's newest cool girl of the moment was welcomed by her American Instagram followers with open arms.

7. Despite her lifestyle, she's not a party girl.

You probably won't find Lady Amelia at the clubs. This royal takes her sleep very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that she claims she goes to bed at 9 pm. She even has bad dreams, just like the rest of us. About having too many puppies. Wait, that doesn't sound so bad.

We gather that Lady Amelia's schedule doesn't afford much time for having bad dreams. Or puppies, obviously.

RELATED: Exciting New Details About Prince William And Kate Middleton's Pregnancy Just Leaked (And We HOPE They Are True)

Keywords: royal family, celeb

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Accurately re-creating the lavish and vibrant wardrobe of Gianni Versace was one of the most crucial elements of Ryan Murphys forthcoming The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which premieres Jan. 17 on FX.

For the nine-part series, which shows the time leading up to Versaces tragic 1997 shooting by serial killer Andrew Cunanan, Murphy enlisted the talent of costume designer Lou Eyrich, who admits that duplicating the late Italians craftsmanship and design within a limited time frame posed a laundry list of challenges.

Its very hard to find authentic Versace pieces [from the early to mid-Nineties], explains Eyrich on the phone from Los Angeles. We tried to produce clothing of that couture quality, but the most daunting part was that we only had a matter of days [to do it].

Filming for the series took place over several months last year in both Los Angeles and on-location at the late designers Miami home (where the fatal shooting took place), but according to an official statement released by the Versace family last week, the series is being characterized as a work of fiction. Murphy based the series on a 1999 book by Maureen Orth titled Vulgar Favors, which the family asserts is full of gossip and speculation.

Veracity of the storyline notwithstanding, Eyrich along with a team that included tailor Joanne Mills and designer Michael Costello, worked tirelessly to capture the colorful world of Gianni Versace, played by Edgar Ramirez, without actually having cooperation or guidance from the Milan-based company.

I totally had the Im not worthy feeling, explains Eyrich when hired by Murphy, the director with whom she also collaborated with for American Horror Story, Feud and Glee. Its especially daunting to me because I dont really know that world of high fashion and couture, but because its a story that is a historical moment, I [thought] I could do my research and create this story.

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The on-screen narrative will show Versaces opulent lifestyle in tandem with that of the serial killer, played by Darren Criss, who committed at least four additional murders over three months leading up to Versaces July 1997 attack. There are two different worlds going on, she adds. Its very interesting working on costumes for these two parallels that are opposites, actually.

The Minnesota-born Eyrich scoured online retailers and vintage shops for original pieces from the design house and for the Donatella Versace character, played by Penelope Cruz, created a reimagined facsimile of one of the brands iconic safety-pin dresses, which made its debut on the runway in the fall of 1993.

We searched and searched and searched and finally found a belt with 18 of the safety pins from that famous collection, recalls Eyrich. But they were silver and we wanted gold.

In order to achieve the look, the designer and her team mutilated the belt and had each safety-pin gold-plated  all within a matter of hours. Where the real-life Versace would take months in his atelier to create a couture gown, Eyrich and Mills would have only a matter of days. In fact, the process was so quick that the wardrobe team never actually made costume sketches. If you look closely, then you shutter, reveals Eyrich. But for TV, it works  although in the world of HD and huge screens, its a little more daunting.

The three-time Emmy Award winner says she would stay awake at night trying to figure out how to create that Versace world in a way that would be respectful to the brands integrity. We just didnt have the time frame to come up with all the details and that sometimes frustrates me.

But it was paying respect to the brands eponymous founder that was of top importance to Eyrich and her colleagues on-set. It was very eerie, she explains. Many of us were choked up being [at the murder location] with that feeling of needless loss. Everybody had moments of reflection.

More from WWD.com:

The Assassination of Gianni VersacePremiere Draws Ricky Martin, Penelope Cruz

Versace Family Says American Crime Story Series on Gianni Versace Is Fiction

American Crime Storyon Gianni Versace Is Based on Bogus Book, Says Designers Family

Launch Gallery: Reimagining the Wardrobe of Gianni Versace With 'American Crime Story'

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See Inside the Versace Mansion, Set for 'American Crime Story'

Canali Family Hires Designer, Stands by Namesake Company

'American Crime Story' on Gianni Versace Is Based on 'Bogus' Book, Says Designer's Family
Despite running into restrictive state and federal regulations, a Louisa County veterans group continues its effort to replace directional signs for the All-Veterans Memorial at the new interchange of U.S. Highway 61 and Iowa Highway 92 near Grandview.

According to previous discussions, when the new alignment of Highway 61 opened a few weeks ago, it fell under sign standards established under state and federal law, which prevent signs that originally had been on both highways from being re-installed.

At the outset, we want to make sure everyone understands that our initial decision was not out of a lack of respect for veterans or the memorial or the importance of guiding visitors to the memorial and promoting tourism in Louisa County, said Steve Gent, director of traffic and safety for the Iowa Department of Transportation in a Jan. 2 email to Supervisor Chris Ball.

Gent said the Iowa Code requires the DOT to adopt and follow the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, a set of standards published by the Federal Highway Administration that dictates how traffic signs, road surface markings and signals are designed, installed and used.

States that fail to adopt the standards could be penalized with a loss of federal highway funds.

When the Louisa County Vietnam Veterans asked to re-install signs to the memorial that previously had been located on Highway 61 and Highway 92  both originally two-lane roadways before re-alignment work on Highway 61expanded it to four-lane  Gent explained the Iowa DOTs hands were basically tied.

Attractions like veterans memorials do not meet the criteria for directional signing at interchanges on four-lane expressways, Gent continued, adding the standards place limits on signs, with priorities given to routes and communities that help unfamiliar drivers find their way.

Gent said that meant they could not install no directional signs for the memorial, which is the site of Louisa Countys Freedom Rock. The exception would be at-grade locations.

Because Highway 92 remained a two-lane highway at the intersection, the veterans group could install a sign for east-bound traffic, but the nearest at-grade intersections on Highway 61 are limited because of the re-alignment.

An at-grade location on Highway 61 at 145th Street is nearly one mile south of the intersection and would provide access only to the memorial for north-bound traffic. The closest at-grade location for south-bound traffic is at County Highway 305, about four miles from the memorial. That turnoff does not provide any direct route to the memorial.

Gent said the DOT was working with the veterans group to determine whether alternative standards could be used, but only on at-grade locations. But another committee would need to approve it.

Veterans group member Dick Grimm of Letts said his group was continuing to work out a solution.

(Iowa State Representative) Dave Kerr has been working with us from the beginning and weve also been talking with (U.S. Senator) Joni Ernst, Grimm said.

The last time I talked with Dave, he said 'Dont give up hope,' Grimm said.
Over the weekend, Master of None star Aziz Ansari was accused of sexual misconduct by a 23-year-old photographer. Her account was harrowing for anyone whos been in an uncomfortable situation on a date before, but the actor has responded to the allegations swiftly.

In an account reported by babe, a woman the story calls Grace says she met the former Parks and Rec star during an Emmys afterparty last September. After the two chatted about the vintage cameras they were both carrying, the then-22-year-old Grace eventually gave the actor her phone number, and Ansari texted her almost immediately (they both live in New York).

The two went on a date the following Monday, which ended with Grace in tears after an unexpected sexual encounter with the star. Sharing screenshots of the text with babe magazine, the woman says that despite physical and verbal cues to the contrary, Ansari pressed her for sexual favors she didnt feel comfortable with. Grace also tells the site that even though she finally got Ansari to pause his aggressive sexual pursuit, it wasnt long before he resumed the moves.

When she finally left Ansaris apartment, the woman says she cried all the way home, even telling the actor that she didnt feel good about their date. The alleged encounter was published on Saturday, and the comedian didnt waste any time releasing a statement owning up to his behavior.

For more news videos visit Yahoo View.

The 36-year-old Golden Globe winner responded to the allegations on Sunday night by corroborating part of the womans story, saying he thought that their sexual encounter was completely consensual, and owning up to the screencap text exchange published over the weekend.

It was true that everything did seem okay to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned, he said in his statement. I took her words to heart and responded privately after taking the time to process what she had said.

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The next day, I got a text from her saying that although it may have seemed okay, upon further reflection, she felt uncomfortable, Ansari continues, which contradicts what the woman told babe about expressing discomfort while the date was underway.

His statement concludes: I continue to support the movement that is happening in our culture. It is necessary and long overdue.

Ansari is just the latest in a series of Hollywood bigwigs accused of poor behavior towards women, most recently including actor-director James Franco.

What do you think about Ansaris response? Let us know @BritandCo!

(photo via Taylor Hill/Getty)

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A British politicians girlfriend made racist comments about Meghan Markle

Since Meghan Markle and Prince Harry got engaged in November, the internet has been abuzz with excitement for the next royal wedding. But even though she is already being celebrated by many, Markle still endures quite a bit of racism. On January 14th, the Daily Mail reported that Jo Marney, the girlfriend of politician Henry Bolton, made racist comments about Markle in a text conversation.

Marney, a 25-year-old model, reportedly said in a series of messages that Markles marriage to Harry would taint the royal family and that black people are ugly. The text conversation, which reportedly occurred before she began dating Bolton, was published in the Daily Mail on January 14th and included her saying, This is Britain, not Africa when talking about the upcoming royal wedding. Marney apologized to the Daily Mail later on January 14th, saying that her words had been taken out of context.

Bolton, who is the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party  otherwise known as UKIP  said he would not resign from the party leadership. However, Marneys comments caused her party membership to be suspended.

Bolton announced on January 15th that he and Marney had broken up. In an interview with ITV News, the politician said he was unaware of Marneys racist views when he began dating her.

Other members of the party have demanded that Bolton resign in the wake of the scandal. The partys Deputy Chairwoman, Suzanne Evans, said on the BBCs Daily Politics that she felt Bolton could still be removed from the party despite him ending the relationship.

I think he has brought the party into disrepute, and, certainly, people have been kicked out of the party for that in the past, Evans said.

If Bolton is removed, UKIP would have to find its fifth leader in less than 18 months. The right-wing political party is most famous for advocating for the U.K. to leave the European Union.

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News of Boltons relationship with Marney in early January stirred rumors that he was having an affair, although the politician insisted that the relationship began after he separated from his wife.

Marneys racist comments are unacceptable. Having a black woman in the royal family is a historic event, but more importantly, we know that Markle will make an excellent Duchess of Sussex. We cant wait for Markle to make her debut as a member of the royal family.
[MUSIC] Michelle Obama's Style Evolution [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]

Its bikini season for Michelle Obama.

While most of the country faced freezing temperatures this week, the former first lady and her eldest daughter, Malia, headed to Miami Beach to take in some rays and waves.

With one-time president Barack Obama nowhere in sight, the pair took advantage of the holiday weekend, courtesy of a relaxing mother-daughter getaway.

The 53-year-old looked ageless, sporting a white string bikini top that displayed her washboard abs, while matching cut-off shorts complemented her toned legs.

Obama trudged through the sand with her entourage, topping off her beach attire with a playful bandana and large gold hoop earrings. Oversize black sunglasses also made a major statement, shielding her eyes from the intense Florida rays.

Color us envious as we brave the cold in our puffer jackets and layers of cashmere!
Michelle Obama is kicking back in Miami. (Photo: Splash News)

Michelle Obama drew a crowd on the beach in Miami wearing a white bikini top and matching cut-off shorts.

The former FLOTUS was photographed Saturday strolling barefoot on the sand at the Surf Club at the Four Seasons wearing a white string bikini top, distressed denim shorts, a white, sheer coverup, gold hoop earrings, and her hair pushed back with a patterned bandana.

The 53-year-old was trailed by an entourage, including members of the Secret Service, former White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and 19-year-old daughter Malia, who wore black bikini bottoms and a $39 cropped, camel-colored sweatshirt from Out From Under.

A post shared by TheBlogAvenue (@bloggingavenue) on Jan 15, 2018 at 10:14am PST

The family reportedly dined that night at steakhouse Prime 112 before leaving town.

In a new Netflix special called My Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman that premiered Friday, Barack Obama revealed that vacation was his top priority after leaving office.

I took Michelle on a holiday because I missed my wife. We had not hung out, so we spent days and had a wonderful time, Obama told Letterman of his and Michelles February trip to the British Virgin Islands, where the couple was joined by billionaire Richard Branson.

A post shared by Michelle Obama (@michelleobama) on Jan 15, 2018 at 10:14am PST

Barack Obama went kite surfing during his vacation in the British Virgin Islands. (Photo: Getty Images)

In April, the Obamas relaxed on David Geffens 450-foot yacht near the French Polynesian island of Moorea (along with Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, and Bruce Springsteen), where Barack played Instagram Husband by snapping pics of his wife on his iPad.

Barack Obama is an Instagram Husband pic.twitter.com/OouLr7bjT2  Madeline Hill (@mad_hill) April 16, 2017

The Obamas also took a May trip to Tuscany, where Michelle showed off her famous biceps in a lavender one-shoulder blouse from Teija, which she paired with white, distressed jeans.

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First Lady Michelle Obama looking fresh and flawless while touring the city of Montalcino in Italy. pic.twitter.com/JkZ846V2IB  Nerdy Wonka (@NerdyWonka) May 21, 2017

And in September, Michelle was spotted boarding a yacht in Mallorca, Spain, wearing a white camisole, a blue-and-white wrap skirt with a thigh-high slit, and carrying a $60 straw Madewell bag.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.




A pastor denounced Trumps sh*thole countries comment while Pence sat in the pews

The (rightful) fallout from Trumps shithole countries comment continues, despite the administrations attempts at damage control. While the White House now denies Trump ever called Haiti, El Salvador, and several African countries shithole countries, numerous attendees of the fateful meeting say otherwise. And politicians and talking-heads arent the only ones with something to say about the reprehensible moment.

Maryland Pastor Maurice Watson called out Donald Trump for his hateful comment during a recent sermon  while Vice President Mike Pence was in attendance. Pence reportedly sat in silence as Pastor Watson called the statement made by Trump hurtful and dehumanizing. Pastor Watson also said that whoever made such a statement was categorically wrong and that he felt led by God to speak out against it.

Worshippers were largely supportive of Pastor Watsons statements. Many applauded his passionate words. Pence reportedly sat red-faced and silent throughout the sermon, though he has since denied the claim.

The controversy began on Thursday, January 11th, in a meeting at the Oval Office in which several lawmakers were in attendance. When the conversation turned to immigrants from Haiti, parts of Africa, and El Salvador, Trump allegedly said,

Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?

Trump then reportedly asked why the U.S. didnt have more immigrants from places like Norway.

Sarah Sanders just slipped up & admitted Trump said shithole in the meeting. And made it clear he wont be apologizing for it.



The President hasnt said he didnt use strong language...hes not going to apologize for trying to fix our immigration systemhttps://t.co/EjWQzRNGZc  Scott Dworkin (@funder) January 16, 2018

We applaud Pastor Watson for his compassion and courage. It takes a lot of bravery to stand up against hatred, and even more courage to do so with the Vice President of the United States sitting right in front of you.
By Shenequa Golding

Donald Trump may have outdone himself after it was reported he referred to Haiti, El Salvador and Africa as sh*thole countries, a claim the president is vehemently denying. The racist and xenophobic rhetoric by Trump merited ire from Americans (and internationally) as well as on Twitter. However late night talk show host Conan OBrien is doing more than just lighting up Trumps mentions.

According to The New York Daily News, the 54-year-old has decided to film his show Conan, in Haiti to prove to the president and those who agree with his sentiments that Haiti indeed isnt a sh*thole.

Still reeling from @realDonaldTrumps very negative Yelp review of Haiti, which means Ill love it. Headed to Haiti later this week to explore and make some new friends. Stay tuned for my report. #ConanWithoutBorders  Conan OBrien (@ConanOBrien) January 14, 2018

The hour-long episode will most likely poke fun at Trump who reportedly turned down a pitch from bipartisan senators to save DACA immigrants, while also increasing boarder security. Trump has since taken to Twitter to refute the allegations claiming he used strong language but not what was reported.

Its unclear when OBriens show will air, but this isnt anything new for the comic. To mock Trumps plans to build the wall, OBrien traveled to Mexico and hired an all Mexican crew to film his show.

Well done, Conan. Well done.

This post Conan OBrien To Tape His Late Night Show In Haiti After Trumps Sh*thole Comment first appeared on Vibe.
A California couple has been charged with child endangerment and torture after police on Sunday discovered 12 of their children locked inside their home, some in chains and starving, officials said.

A 17-year-old girl managed to escape the house in Perris, California, and alerted authorities that her 12 brothers and sisters were being held captive by their parents, according to a police statement.

The Riverside County Sheriffs Department dispatched deputies alongside officers from the Perris Police Department to meet the teenager, who they said looked to be only 10 years old and slightly emaciated.

Authorities went to the residence and questioned the parents, David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49.

David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, have been charged with child endangerment and torture. (Photo: Riverside County Sheriff's Department)

Further investigation revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, but the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner, the sheriffs department said in a statement.

Perris police Chief Greg Fellows said at a press conference Tuesday that despite the horrific conditions, Louise Turpin, the kids biological mother, seemed perplexed as to why we were at that residence.

There were three individuals that were chained to some type of furniture inside the residence, Fellows said of the victims, whom he also described as starved. I would call that torture.

Authorities said they found five minors  at least one of them young as 2  in the house, along with seven adults whose ages ranged from 18 to 29. All of the victims appeared to be dirty and malnourished. The minors were taken to Riverside University Hospital System, and the adults were sent to Corona Regional Medical Center for examination and medical treatment.

Mark Uffer, CEO and managing director at Corona Regional Medical Center, said that as of Tuesday, the couples adult children remain together, comfortable and in a very safe and secure environment, and I think thats whats most important right now.

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Its hard to think of them as adults when you first see them, because theyre small, Uffer said at the press conference, saying the childrens size is a result of malnutrition. Theyve gone through a very traumatic ordeal. I can tell you that theyre very friendly, theyre very cooperative, and I think that theyre very hopeful that life will get better for them.

Officials credited the 17-year-old who Fellows said escaped the home through a window and used a deactivated cell phone to call for help.

The investigation remains ongoing, Fellows said, but so far there appears to be no sign that the parents are mentally ill.

David Allen Turpin and Louise Anna Turpin are seen in a family photo posted to Facebook in 2016. (Photo: Facebook)

Both parents were transported to the Robert Presley Detention Center, and each is being held on $9 million bail. The Turpins are set to appear in court on Thursday, Reuters reports.

Public records suggest the Turpins homeschooled their children. Californias Department of Education lists David Turpin as the principal of the Sandcastle Day School, a K-12 private school located at the Turpins home address that had six students enrolled last year. According to state law, parents may register their home schools as private institutions.

David Turpins mother, Betty, told CNN that the family was highly respectable and would usually take vacations, during which all of the children were dressed alike and had to be lined up according to age in order to keep track of everyone.

They were very protective of the kids, she said.

Neighbors of the couple have reacted with shock and horror to the news, saying they never had any idea of the abuse that was allegedly occurring inside the home.

Mike Clifford, 60, told HuffPost that the family lived across the street from him in a rental home in Murrieta, about 19 miles south of Perris, a few years ago. He rarely saw the family, he said, but he did recall incidents that stood out to him and his wife as strange.

They used to march over and over in circles in their upstairs, he said of the kids. This behavior, which Clifford said he would see late at night as he was getting home from work, went on for hours.

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

The couple was arrested after police on Sunday said they found the children shackled to beds inside this Perris, California, home. (Photo: Sandy Huffaker via Getty Images)

The blinds would be open, Clifford said. You could see the kids marching in circles.

Clifford said he once toured the rental property when it was for sale, and saw that the homes upstairs layout allowed one to move freely from room to room in a circular way. He said he doesnt know why the kids were doing it, but it was happening quite often.

Id notice it and Id say, Wow, those kids are marching again, he recalled telling his wife, who he said was on vacation at the time of HuffPosts interview.

Another thing he found strange was how infrequently he saw the kids.

I never saw more than a half a dozen of them at a time, he said, adding that sometimes hed see six of the kids pile into the car with their parents at 1 a.m.

He said he was shocked to learn there were 13 of them in all. I just thought there were six of them, he said.

Clifford said that in the two and a half years the Turpins were their neighbors, he and his wife never saw anything that made them want to call 911.

We thought they were foster parents of mentally handicapped kids, he said.

His wife had once met two of the daughters while checking the mail, he said, and had described them as robotic but friendly.

The kids seemed thin when he saw them, Clifford said, but not to any extreme. The family also seemed financially comfortable, as he saw them with his and hers sports cars that were traded out every year for new ones.

I wish I had noticed something that would have made me want to say something, but it never got to that point, he said.

Kimberly Milligan, 50, told The Washington Post that she lived next door to the Turpins for over two years but rarely heard or saw the children, who she thought were very young  11, 12, 13 at the most. Milligans son, Robert Perkins, remembered the children looking frail and thin.

You knew something was off. It didnt make a lot of sense, Milligan told the Post. But this is something else entirely.

Another neighbor, Wendy Martinez, told Reuters shed only communicated with the family once. She was passing the Turpins house while four of the children were installing sod in the yard.

They were very, like, afraid, she said of the children. Like they had never seen people before.

David Turpins mother has said that during family vacations, all of the children would dress alike and had to be lined up according to age. (Photo: Facebook)

In a number of family photos posted on a Facebook account belonging to the couple, they are seen appearing to renew their wedding vows with the help of an Elvis impersonator.

That impersonator, Kent Ripley, told CBS News the couple had renewed their vows at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas at least three times in recent years. The last time he saw them was in 2015, when all 13 kids attended the ceremony.

He expressed surprise when asked about the allegations against the couple, telling CBS that the kids looked thin, but not excessively thin.

I thought they were very active as a family... I didnt think that they didnt eat or there was punishment or anything like that, Ripley said. They were just well behaved. They smiled a lot.

Video of one ceremony posted on YouTube in 2013 shows the children singing, dancing and holding hands as a family as their parents celebrate what was then described as 28 years of marriage.

Its hard to believe that the people that I performed for and entertained and sat and talked [to] before and after entertaining them, that this could happen. Its just, its disturbing, it really is, Ripley said.

This story has been updated with comments from Clifford and additional details on the couple.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the age of the youngest child who police said was found in the home. The child is 2, not 6.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
Isabelle Kun, 20, had a new set of eyelash extensions applied last Tuesday. By Thursday, her eyes were swollen almost completely shut. (Photo: Isabelle Kun via Facebook)

An Ottawa woman is warning about the potential dangers of eyelash extensions after she developed a severe allergic reaction from the beauty treatment.

Isabelle Kun, 20, had a new set of eyelash extensions applied by an aesthetician last Tuesday. By Thursday, her eyes were swollen almost completely shut.

Kun told CTV News that her girlfriend had slept over, and she could barely see her. I was having a hard time swallowing and even breathing, she said.

Her friend ended up calling an Uber to transport her to the hospital. Kun said they admitted her within seconds after they saw her face. Her eyes were apparently swollen above and under, and her tonsils were inflamed.

For $100 or more per procedure, the aesthetician applies the lashes one at a time using eyelash glue. (Photo: Getty)

Kun said shed been getting eyelash extensions every few weeks for the past year. For $100 or more per procedure, the aesthetician applies the lashes one at a time using eyelash glue. Last month, Kun noticed her eyes became swollen after the procedure, and she believed she was having a reaction to the glue.

She took note of the name of the adhesive and, last Tuesday, asked the aesthetician whether or not she was using that same brand. Kun explained that she believed she was allergic to that specific adhesive.

Kun said the aesthetician didnt know the name of the glue but told her not to worry and that she should be good.

So Kun went through with the treatment, although she admits she shouldnt have, since she didnt know what glue was being used. Hours later, her eyes started swelling up  more severely than they had before.

At the hospital, Kun was treated with an antihistamine and sent home. (Photo: Getty)

When she was admitted to the hospital two days later, doctors gave her an antihistamine and administered a steroid intravenously. They then sent her home with antihistamine pills. As of Thursday, the swelling still hadnt improved, and Kun is worried because she wasnt able to remove the glue due to her swollen eyes.

My eyes are actually even worse now, she said. Theres, like, a sac of fluid under my eye now. Its so gross.

Kun hopes she can get eyelash extensions again, but she is warning women to ask for an allergy test before they get them done.

Story continues

I mean, this morning I woke up, and I wondered if I would ever be able to see again, she said.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:




MUSCATINE  The 24th annual Eagles and Ivories Ragtime Festival will feature a weekend full of ragtime and stride, Dixieland jazz, traditional jazz and more. The festival begins with a free kick-off concert Jan. 26 at 9 a.m. at SunnyBrook, 3515 Diana Queen Drive., Muscatine, and runs through Jan. 28.

For the first time, Muscatine County Arts Council Co-Vice President Angela Woodhouse said the organization hopes to increase attendance by offering a contest at Muscatine schools. Children 16 or younger may attend the shows for free, and the arts council will track attendance by school.

The school with the highest number of students attending  including their accompanying parents or guardians  will win a $400 check from the arts council.

"We all know how difficult it is for teachers and how hard it is for them to pay for certain things in their classrooms," Woodhouse said. "And we've had a pretty good response because money is so tight in schools. We're hoping this will also give an experience to people they have not had before through this type of music."

In addition to the contest, the arts council will screen a silent movie to students at Jefferson Elementary School, with musical accompaniment by Jeff and Anne Barnhart.

While the silent movie plays, Jeff Barnhart will perform piano as the soundtrack, honoring the tradition of early silent movie theaters.

"[Jeff] is so great because he knows how to play the music, so if something really funny is going on or something really serious, he knows exactly how to play the music so it gets the kids' attention," she said. "So you see them laughing so hard or dancing in their seats and it's a great time."

Woodhouse said the showing is also a rare opportunity for elementary students to gain exposure to early styles of film.

"It's a great way to experience culture in music and art that they've never experienced before," she said. "And every time we've done this, the kids are so animated."

The rest of the weekend, Coordinator Dave Ales said, will follow a typical Eagles and Ivories schedule, with performances at Wesley United Methodist Church and the Muscatine Art Center, plus after hours events at Wine-Nutz on 2nd Street.

"One big thing this year is the restored (Wesley United Methodist Church), which was damaged last year in March and lost its pipe organ, and the Steinway piano was also damaged," Ales said. "But that's been repaired and the church is back in great shape."

This year, performers include Daniel Souvigny, a 16-year-old award-winning pianist and violinist, the Mad Creek Mudcats, a Muscatine ragtime and jazz group, the Locust Street Boys, a Dixieland band from the Quad-Cities, plus world renowned musicians Stephanie Trick and her husband Paolo Alderighi.

"For the first time we'll have performer Stephanie Trick, who is from St. Louis, and her husband is from Milan, Italy," Ales said. "They perform all over the world... and Stephanie has been one of the best piano players for a number of years even though she's a young woman, and her husband is classically trained. So we're looking forward to that."

Along with the performances, Ales said the ragtime festival coincides with the U.S. Corp of Engineers' Eagle Watch at the Pearl City Station on the riverfront, which usually brings nearly 500 people to the events each year.

"So this is the only place the Corps has some live music offered for them too during that and people turn out for that," he said.

Ales and Woodhouse said the Muscatine County Arts Council is making big plans for next year's 25th anniversary, and hopes to boost excitement for the anniversary this year.

"There are exciting things on the horizon for that, so this year, we thought let's try to get more people exposed to this type of music," Woodhouse said. "When people come, they like to come back. And it's not exactly what they expect and the level of musicianship is just incredible."

Tickets for this year's Eagles and Ivories Ragtime Festival are available in advance at Flowers on the Avenue and at the door. Each evening concert costs $20, afternoon concerts cost $15 and the Saturday silent movie is $5. A three-day concert package is $50. Children ages 16 or younger may attend all events for free.

For more information, visit muscatineartscouncil.org.
By Marine Pennetier CALAIS, France (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron promised to stem the flow of migrants through the port of Calais on Tuesday, saying there would be no return to the "jungle" migrant camp, and said he understood the region's concerns about the threat from Brexit. Addressing security forces in Calais, which has borne the brunt in France of an influx of migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East in recent years, Macron said he would bolster resources to ensure police had what they needed to maintain security while enforcing a "fair" migration policy. "There will be no return to 'the jungle'," said Macron, referring to the squalid tented encampment on the outskirts of Calais that once housed up to 8,000 migrants before it was bulldozed by the French authorities in October 2016. Macron earlier visited a migrant reception center near Calais and spoke to both refugees and local officials to hear about the pressures on the town and its surrounding Hauts-de-France region, one of the poorest in the country. The visit comes ahead of a summit with Prime Minister Theresa May in Britain on Thursday, when the two are expected to address Brexit, migration and the 2003 Le Touquet accord, a reciprocal border agreement that has drawn criticism in France. Macron is expected to push Britain to provide further money and resources to tackle the migrant flow since many of those assembling in Calais are ultimately trying to enter Britain, just 33 km (20 miles) across the English Channel. Under the Le Touquet treaty, Britain has its border in France and France runs border checks in Britain, a deal that French officials feel favors the United Kingdom. Both parties can withdraw from the treaty, which would mean a return to hard national borders, a move that would symbolically cut Britain off from the continent just as it is implementing Brexit. BREXIT IMPACT Pro-Brexit lawmakers from Britain's governing Conservative Party have dismissed as "absurd" suggestions that London should pay more, saying Britain already provides extra security to France, including border infrastructure. The issue is a sensitive one in France, too, since Calais and the region around have benefited from close ties between Britain and France since the Channel Tunnel was built. With unemployment in the area well above France's average, the concern is that Brexit and tighter borders could have a further negative impact on jobs and growth. Macron acknowledged those concerns, saying he was aware of local fears over Britain's exit from the EU in March 2019. "I know how worried many business sectors are about the possible consequences of Brexit, from fisheries to industry and logistics," he said. "The region's interests will be fully taken into account in the talks and negotiations France will have." While trying to stem the flow of migrants to Calais and find a way to share the burden of asylum applications with Britain and other EU states, Macron plans to tighten French immigration rules via new legislation in the coming weeks. Catholic groups and migration charities have criticized his government for taking a hard line, accusing policymakers of planning "mass deportations". Far-right groups, which have gained ground in Hauts-de-France, point out that asylum applications touched 100,000 in 2017, a new high. Macron struck a tough tone in response, saying he would punish excessive use of force by police if proven true, but dismissed some of the allegations as "lies" and said the government would sue for slander any unfounded claim. Meeting migrants from Sudan who had reached France via Italy and Libya, Macron sympathized with their plight and said France needed to find a balance between humanitarian care and a firm application of the law. "We have a responsibility to protect those who are in danger," he was quoted as saying by BFMTV. "(But) we can't welcome millions of people who live in peace in their countries." (Reporting by Marine Pennetier in Calais; Additional reporting by Matthias Blamont and Michel Rose in Paris; Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by Richard Lough and Alison Williams)
(L-R) General Henri Giraud, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, and Winston Churchill at the Casablanca Conference in 1943.

General Henri Honore Giraud and General Charles De Gaulle stand in front of American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Casablanca Conference.

General Henri Honore Giraud and General Charles De Gaulle shake hands in front of American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Casablanca Conference. From Winston Churchill: His Life in Pictures, by Ben Tucker. [Sagall Press, Ltd., London, 1945]

President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at the Allied Conference In Casablanca, January 1943.

(L-R) French General Henri Giraud, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, French General Charles De Gaulle and British PM Winston Churchill while attending the conference in Casablanca.

At the end of November 1942, Franklin Roosevelt suggested to Winston Churchill that a meeting between the Allied leaders to discuss strategy would be in order. Now that the United States and Britain had a toehold in North Africa thanks to the success of Operation Torch, what should they do next? The president suggested meeting in Cairo or Moscow. Churchill replied with Iceland. Roosevelt, however, had no interest in going anywhere cold. I should prefer a secure place south of Algiers or in or near Khartoum, wrote the president. I dont like mosquitoes.

After settling on Casablanca as the conference location, Roosevelt and Churchill decided their meeting should remain secret until its conclusion, requiring extreme subterfuge to assemble everyone in French Morocco. British military officers were given cover stories, and in Washington the Secret Service picked up the baggage of people traveling with Roosevelt at their homes to avoid it accumulating in their offices or at the White House. At 10:30 p.m. on January 9, Roosevelts train departed Washington from the underground station at the Bureau of Engraving and headed northbefore doubling back and heading south for Miami, where two Pan Am Clippers waited to carry the American delegation across the Atlantic Ocean.

From January 14 to 24, 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Anglo-American military planners met in Casablanca to hash out their priorities for the coming year. They were also joined by Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle, who headed up opposing factions of the French resistance. (Stalin had been invited but declined to attend.) Roosevelt and Churchill excluded the press from the conferencepartly for safety reasons and partly to allow them to work without scrutiny of their every move.

But, toward the end of the conference, Allied Forces Headquarters invited a group of approximately 50 journalists to Casablanca, promising them a history-making event.

With space short in Anfa, the journalists received lodgings at the Excelsior, an upscale hotel on Casablancas main thoroughfare across from the entrance to the old medina. They were instructed not to talk about their assignment in front of hotel employees or others in Casablanca. They were also told to behave as if their rooms were bugged. The Excelsiors bar had been a favorite hangout for the German Armistice Commission, and the current extent of Nazi infiltration of the hotel staff remained unclear. To help with security, the U.S. Army temporarily took over the hotels switchboard and kitchen.

Story continues

On January 24, the final day of the conference, the journalists assembled on the lawn behind Roosevelts villa. Four white chairs sat empty before the scrum of reporters.

Shortly after noon, the door to the villa opened, and Churchill, de Gaulle, and Giraud walked out, while Roosevelt was carried to his chair. The whirling of film and clicking of cameras quickly replaced the murmurs of disbelief.

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter

When the Press reporters saw us both they could scarcely believe their eyes, or, when they were told we had been there for nearly a fortnight, their ears, wrote Churchill.

Roosevelt and Churchill hoped to bring the competing factions of the French resistance together in Casablanca, but their attempt proved futile. There would be no headlines touting a new, unified French war effort. But photographs showing American, British, and French leaders together would galvanize Allied propaganda efforts. As Giraud, Roosevelt, and Churchill traded small talk and offered occasional smiles for the cameras, a solemn-faced de Gaulle smoked a cigarette. A photographer wanted moresomething that didnt smack of a command performanceand urged Giraud and de Gaulle to shake hands. The generals ignored the suggestion, until the president prodded them. Why not shake hands? said Roosevelt. You two Frenchmen are loyal to your country, and that warrants a cordial handshake anytime.

They stood, de Gaulle pulling the cigarette from his mouth and holding it to the side, and managed a fleeting handshake. Unable to capture the moment, the photographers called for them to do it again. The second shake was no less awkward.

After Giraud and de Gaulle departed, Churchill moved over to sit by Roosevelt and talk further with the reporters and war correspondents gathered before them. Roosevelt began by reading a background statement and then spoke from some notes for about fifteen minutes.

I think we have all had it in our hearts and heads before, but I dont think that it has ever been put down on paper by the Prime Minister and myself, and that is the determination that peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power, said Roosevelt. Some of you Britishers know the old storywe had a General called U. S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Ministers, early days he was called Unconditional Surrender Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan. That means a reasonable assurance of future world peace.

As Roosevelt envisioned it, unconditional surrender meant not the annihilation of the German, Italian, and Japanese populaces but the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.

When the president mentioned unconditional surrender, Churchills head whipped toward him. The prime ministers reaction suggested that he found the phrase surprisinga perception that grew after the war, when the concept of unconditional surrender became somewhat controversial. At one point, Churchill suggested that he had never heard the phrase until it came out of Roosevelts mouth at the press conference. In his memoirs, he backtracked on that claim somewhat, while continuing to imply that the policy had not been approved in advance.

The idea of unconditional surrender had in fact been thoroughly discussed at the conference, but Roosevelt would later tell Harry Hopkins that he hadnt actually planned on announcing unconditional surrender as Allied policy. We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together, said Roosevelt, that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Leeand then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant Old Unconditional Surrender, and the next thing I knew I had said it.

In his memoirs, Churchill noted that he had disagreed with Roosevelts decision to announce the policy, but to make that quarrel public before a pack of journalists would have damaged the war effort. There could be no visible fractures in the Anglo-American alliance. Instead, Churchill opened his own remarks to the press by saying, I agree with everything the President has said. He also emphasized the importance of his friendship with Roosevelt. Well, one thing I should like to say, and that isI think I can say it with full confidencenothing that may occur in this war will ever come between me and the President. He and I are in this as friends and partners, and we work together. We know that our easy, free conversation is one of the sinews of war of the Allied Powers.

Adapted from Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II by Meredith Hindley. Copyright  2017. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The news that Andrew McCutchen has reportedly been traded to the San Francisco Giants isnt totally surprising, but its the kind of news that Pittsburgh Pirates fans  both young and old  will take hard. McCutchen has been the face of the Pirates for years, and is exactly the kind of dedicated, generous, gregarious player that can capture anyones attention  especially kids.

McCutchen won the Roberto Clemente Award in 2015 for his outstanding charity work, but his giving doesnt stop at what people can see. After hearing about the trade on Monday afternoon, local Pittsburgh radio host Colin Dunlap showed what kind of person Andrew McCutchen is when no one is looking.

Just a few days after my daughter was diagnosed with cancer, this came in the mail.

Hand drawn.

Inspirational.

To Darran.

Known him a long time and to me he will always be Andrew the man first; ballplayer second. And @TheCUTCH22 is great at being both.

Thank you. pic.twitter.com/N4jFQ6ELwf  Colin Dunlap (@colin_dunlap) January 15, 2018

McCutchen personally drew Dunlaps daughter Darran that picture of Wonder Woman after she was diagnosed with cancer. Dunlap didnt ask for it, its just something McCutchen did because he wanted her to feel better and less alone in her fight. Its such a thoughtful, selfless thing for him to do. Also, who knew McCutchen was so good with a pen!? Thats not some stick figure on a napkin, thats a full Wonder Woman drawing, complete with costume and weapons! Incredibly impressive.

McCutchen has been a Pirate since he was drafted in 2005, and Pirates fans  not to mention the entire city of Pittsburgh  are going to miss McCutchen a lot. But after nearly 13 years, a big part of McCutchen will always belong to Pittsburgh, and to fans like Darran.

Story continues

Andrew McCutchen used his non-baseball talents to cheer up a kid who had been diagnosed with cancer. (Getty Images)

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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher
Former SS officer Oskar Groening exhausted the legal appeals process in December - AFP

A former Auschwitz death camp guard has launched a bid for clemency in a final bid to avoid serving his sentence as an accessory to murder, German authorities said on Monday.

Attorneys for Oskar Groening, 96, filed the appeal with prosecutors in Lueneburg, where he was convicted in 2015 as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews. He was sentenced to four years in prison, but hasn't yet spent any time behind bars because of the appeals process.

His role documenting prisoners' belongings saw him nicknamed the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz".

Lueneburg prosecutors' spokeswoman Wiebke Bethke said her office would likely make a decision on the clemency request this week, in consultation with the panel of judges who convicted Groening.

She said she wasn't permitted to give details of Groening's argument for why he shouldn't serve his sentence.

A doctor has previously declared Groening fit to go to prison so long as there is appropriate medical care.

Groening exhausted his last chance at legal appeals in December when the country's highest court rejected his attorneys' argument that imprisoning him would violate his constitutional right to life and physical safety.

The Federal Constitutional Court noted, however, that German law allows for prison sentences to be interrupted if a prisoner's health deteriorates significantly.

Hannover prosecutors, who have been handling Groening's case, told The Associated Press that Groening hasn't yet been summoned to report to prison following the final court ruling, but that consideration of the clemency appeal shouldn't delay that process.

Groening testified at his trial that he oversaw the collection of prisoners' belongings and ensured that valuables and cash were separated to be sent to Berlin. He said he witnessed individual atrocities, but didn't acknowledge participating in any crimes.

The court that convicted him ruled, however, that he was part of the "machinery of death," helping the camp function and collecting money stolen from the victims to help the Nazi cause, and thus could be convicted as an accessory to the murders committed there.
By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will hog the limelight at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos next week, but behind the scenes some of the world's leading diplomats will be working on some of humanity's knottiest conflicts. Trump is expected to arrive on Jan. 25 and make a speech on Jan. 26 at 2 p.m. (1300 GMT). Eight U.S. Secretaries and cabinet members will also be at Davos. "The U.S. footprint this year will be quite considerable," WEF president Borge Brende told Reuters. "What we have heard so far is that he wants to meet with business people from Europe and also from the rest of the world, and he wants to then share with all of the participants his outlook for 2018." Trump's visit has created extra interest because Davos is emblematic of the globalisation that he criticized heavily during his election campaign, and its collaborative ethos is at odds with his "America first" isolationism. WEF founder Klaus Schwab told a news conference that a theme this year would be the future of global co-operation relating to trade, environment, the fight against terrorism, tax systems and competitiveness. "In this context, its absolutely essential that we have President Trump with us," he said. Trump will be just one of a record line-up of political leaders, from Angolan President Joao Lourenco to Zimbabwe's Emmerson Mnangagwa. One invitee who has yet to confirm is Germany's Angela Merkel. "She is very much welcome if that is her decision," said Brende, who stepped down as Norway's foreign minister late last year to take up his WEF role. He is beefing up the political ambitions of Davos, a retreat more commonly associated with power-broking by wheeler-dealer billionaires. Among the hundreds of meetings will be closed-door special "diplomatic sessions" devoted to conflicts and reconciliation, including Syria, Somalia, Venezuela, Israel-Palestine, the Korean peninsula and the Western Balkans. "I think it would be a lost opportunity with so many leaders at the start of the year if we didnt also address peace and reconciliation questions in Davos," Brende said. Davos attendees include King Abdullah of Jordan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Al-Hamdallah and Trump's adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. "I hope that there will be at least discussions on the situation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and we will have a lot of key players in that ecosystem in Davos," Brende said, adding that business leaders from both sides would call for a peace solution at Davos. The exclusive venue gives key political actors the chance to meet out of the public eye, or to communicate indirectly, he said. (Reporting by Tom Miles)
Jorge Garcia, 39, bid his family farewell Monday under the watchful gaze of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who required him to return to his native Mexico after living in the Detroit area for 30 years.

Emotional video of Garcia hugging his wife and two children at Detroits Metro Airport captured the emotional trauma that deportations can cause for families. Though members of Garcias family all are U.S. citizens, he was technically living in the country illegally.

Jorge Garcia, 39, of Lincoln Park, Michigan, hugs his wife, Cindy Garcia, and their two children Jan. 15, 2018, at Detroit Metro Airport moments before being forced to board a flight to Mexico to be deported. (Photo: Niraj Warikoo/Detroit Free Press/USA Today Sports Images)

Yes, he was brought here at 10 years old and yes, he entered the country illegally, but he has no criminal record and his case needs to be looked at individually because he deserves to be here in a country that hes known  not Mexico, his wife, Cindy Garcia, told CNN.

During President Barack Obamas administration, Garcia received temporary extensions allowing him to avert a deportation order from 2009, according to the Detroit Free Press. ICE renewed the order in November and told Garcia he needed to exit the country by Jan. 15.

Wife of Detroit man deported to Mexico after 30 years in US speaks out: "He's not a criminal. ... His case needs to be looked at individually, because he deserves to be here in a country that he's known, not Mexico" #CuomoPrimeTime https://t.co/WvRdFroMLz  CNN (@CNN) January 16, 2018

President Donald Trumps crackdown on undocumented immigrants includes widescale raids, arrests and deportations. From the time Trump took office until the end of September, ICE removals that resulted from an arrests increased by 37 percent over the previous year, the Department of Homeland Security said. Meanwhile, the number of people apprehended attempting to cross the U.S. southern border dropped to a historical low in fiscal 2017.

Story continues

Garcia expressed sadness and apprehension about returning to a country he barely remembers.

I got to leave my family behind, knowing that theyre probably going to have a hard time adjusting, me not being there for them for who knows how long, he said in an interview with the Detroit Free Press the night before his deportation. Its just hard. Its going to be kind of hard for me to adjust, too.

Also on HuffPost

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"The young Mexican couple spent five years working in Rhode Island with false Social Security numbers before they had saved enough to buy their own home, four years ago," Meehan writes. "They are active in their church and at their childrens' schools. At a kids' birthday party in the fall, the mother sat in the corner with tears in her eyes: Her father had died in Mexico, and if she had tried to attend the funeral, she would not have been able to return."

"The man is from the West African country of Guinea Bissau, spending time first in Cape Verde before coming to the United States," Meehan writes. "He works nights doing factory work, and studies English as a Second Language."

"The young man came from Cape Verde to Rhode Island with his family as a child and attended the public schools. He had embarked on a life of his own here before being incapacitated by a stroke. He is now back living at home and being cared for by his parents."

"The teen-aged sisters are from El Salvador, high-achieving students and aspiring artists who dream of going to college in the United States. Although it is possible to attend college as undocumented immigrants, they have not found their way there, and are now working in a local restaurant that caters to the Spanish-speaking immigrant community."

"The Colombian woman's children have begun to question her about why they continue to live in the United States with no clear path open to them. 'We try to keep our kids busy and not think about the situation, and try to do the best we can,' she says. 'Here is a great opportunity for them. They need to work hard, and focus on the future.'"

"Cape Verdean man."

"Colombian family."

"The man from Guinea-Bissau prepares dinner for other friends from Africa."

"The young woman is living in Rhode Island on an expired tourist visa from Cape Verde, working in a donut shop and doing hairdressing on the side. Together with her sister, who is also undocumented, they are raising her son."

"The man from Guinea-Bissau lived in the apartment with his wife and daughter, until disagreements between them ended the marriage. He now sublets the rooms to other men, from Africa and Cape Verde."

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
Some 850 people turned up to remember Blaze Bernstein, the college student whose body was found in a California park last week, at his funeral as gory details have emerged in the case.

The University of Pennsylvania pre-med student was stabbed some 20 times in what police are reportedly calling a possible "act of rage," according to the Orange County Register.

Bernstein was remembered at a funeral held Monday at the University Synagogue, where he was remembered as a humorous and inspiring young man with a love of cooking.

A recipe for a rum-pineapple upside-down cake, which he baked for his family on New Year's Eve, was reportedly passed out to funeral attendees Monday along with mini-spatulas.

Samuel Woodward, 20, who attended high school with Bernstein, was arrested Friday and held in the Orange County Jail on suspicion of homicide after police say they found traces of the victim's blood on a sleeping bag in Woodward's car.

The arrest affidavit reportedly includes details suggesting Bernstein was interested in pursuing a sexual relationship with Woodward, the OC Register reported.

Bernstein and Woodward parked on Jan. 2 outside a Hobby Lobby in Lake Forest during a late night meeting, according to the affidavit. Woodward reportedly told investigators that Bernstein kissed him on the lips, and that he pushed him away.

The OC Register also reports Bernstein had texted friends in June that Woodward was about to "hit on" him and that he "texted every one, uh oh."

Search warrants indicated that Woodward told police Bernstein said they were going to meet another friend from high school and they arrived at the Borrego Park parking area shortly before midnight on Jan. 2.

Woodward told police Bernstein walked into the park and never came back, and that he waited for about an hour before leaving to meet his girlfriend.

Woodward said he returned to the park several hours later but couldnt find Bernstein.

Story continues

Cops say Woodward was unable to recall his girlfriends last name or address, police reportedly said in the search warrants.

During his interview, police say Woodward had dirt under his fingernails that he claimed he got from a fall into a dirt puddle, according to reports. He also had several cuts and scratches he said he got from a fight club, the search warrants said.

The pre-med students death left his family, friends and the community that knew him devastated, loved ones said.

Blaze was a brilliant, colorful and charismatic man who shined light on all of the lives of the people and communities that he touched, his father, Gideon Bernstein, said at an emotional press conference shortly after authorities announced they had found his eldest childs body. Our family is devastated by the news. We, like so many of you around the world, love Blaze and wanted nothing more than his safe return.

After Bernstein vanished, worried loved ones gathered for candlelight vigils and appealed to celebrities to spread the word of his disappearance on social media.

Kobe Bryant, Jeremy Piven, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Mayim Bialik were among those who posted on Facebook and Twitter in an effort to locate Bernstein.

We want to thank all of you who so generously gave of your hearts, time, and energy to help us in the search for Blaze over this past week, the Bernstein family said in a statement. Our family sends you all of our endless love and thanks for what you have done... We are incredibly appreciative of all the love, help and support we have received from family, friends, our community and from those around the country and throughout the world. We are thankful to law enforcement for their hard work and effort.

The Bernstein family asked that anyone wishing to honor their sons memory make a contribution to the Blaze Bernstein Memorial Fund at the Jewish Community Foundation of Orange County.

This money will be given to the Orangewood Foundation and other organizations that help children and families in need, the family said.

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Berlin (AFP) - A 96-year-old former guard at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp has asked German authorities not to jail him, despite losing a court challenge against his sentence.

Oskar Groening has filed a formal "request for mercy" with prosecutors in the northern city Lueneburg, a spokesman for the justice ministry in Lower Saxony state told AFP on Monday.

Germany's constitutional court ruled in late December that the former SS man must serve out his four-year sentence as an accessory to the murders of 300,000 people at the death camp, rejecting defenders' argument that imprisonment at such an advanced age would violate his "right to life".

Prosecutors will rule "in the coming days" on Groening's application for mercy -- a peculiarity of German law that can exceptionally allow sentences to be commuted or cancelled altogether -- broadcaster NDR reported.

There will be "no delaying effect" on the start of the convict's jail term in the meantime, the justice ministry spokesman said.

Former guard Groening became known as the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz" for his role as an accountant, sorting and counting money collected from people killed or used as slave labour.

He confessed his "moral guilt" in court ahead of his 2015 conviction and repeatedly expressed remorse for his actions.

More than a million European Jews were killed at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland before it was liberated by Soviet forces.

Fewer than 50 of its 6,500 SS personnel who survived the war were ever convicted.

But German courts have scrambled to deal with cases against elderly surviving Holocaust perpetrators, after a 2011 ruling set a precedent for convicting people based on the fact they worked at death camps.
MUSCATINE The construction of a new roundabout in Muscatine and the rebuilding of a portion of Park Avenue could be in the works this year, thanks to a grant from the Iowa Department of Transportation.

In August, the Muscatine City Council allowed the city to apply for a grant from the Iowa Department of Transportation's Traffic Safety Improvement Program. And this month, Public Works Director Brian Stineman announced the city has been awarded money to help pay for two projects.

The grant includes $167,700 to fully fund the construction of a roundabout at the intersection of Fulliam Avenue and Houser Street, plus $325,000 to partially fund the conversion of a portion of Park Avenue from four to three lanes.

Engineering costs for both projects, Stineman said, are not included in the grant. He estimates engineering to cost up to $20,000 for the roundabout and $28,000 for Park Avenue.

"We're excited for the opportunity to make these improvements without utilizing a lot of city funding, so there's cost saving for us," Stineman said. "If the council approves it, improvements for a low cost are always good."

The city council will vote on whether to accept the grants at Thursday's meeting, according to the agenda. Then, the city would work to award a contract for engineering and design work. Stineman said both projects could be completed by the end of the year.

Roundabout

The Shive-Hattery engineering firm helped the city apply for the TSIP funding, Stineman said, because of its previous experience designing a roundabout in Coralville. It is likely the intersection of Fulliam Avenue and Houser Street will be modeled after the Coralville mini-roundabout, he said.

For years, Stineman said the city has been considering the best option for reconstructing the busy intersection.

"The cost to do traffic signals there is a lot, like $300,000, and we're not convinced that's the best solution," he said. "Before my time with the city, they experimented with a four-way stop there and the back-ups there were just ridiculous."

Now, the city is considering a mini-roundabout, which is a smaller-sized roundabout with an island in the middle that some vehicles, such as school buses and semis, can drive over to go straight through the intersection.

"The nice thing about the mini-roundabout is it fits in the existing right-of-way, so there's no property acquisition or taking down fences or light poles," he said. "And roundabouts by nature allow for traffic to keep moving."

At public meetings over the past few years, several Muscatine residents have expressed concern over the construction of more roundabouts, arguing drivers do not know how to use them properly. The U.S. Department of Transportation, however, has argued roundabouts are the safer alternative to traditional signalized intersections, reducing crashes where people are seriously hurt or killed by around 80 percent.

"I know roundabouts are sort of controversial, but the thing is, the Traffic Safety Improvement Committee from the state agreed [Houser and Fulliam] is a dangerous intersection and agreed to fund it fully, which is huge for us," he said. "The intersection is broken up and needs to be repaired and this way the repairs get done. It's a win, win for us."

Park Avenue

The state grant will help pay for the reconstruction of a portion of Park Avenue, from the Harrison Street intersection heading toward the Mississippi River, an area that has been part of the city's master plan for improvements for a few years.

Stineman said the project will convert the section of Park Avenue from four lanes to three lanes, including a center turn lane.

"The four lanes there now are so narrow, people try to drive by each other and you kind of get squished there," Stineman said. "And it'll be nice without having to acquire the right-of-way to widen the street. You'll have three lanes with a center turning lane so there's more space for vehicles and no risk."

Stineman hopes the city council will approve the project, which he expects to have minimal impact on traffic.

"It'll be mostly stripe-painting and patching so there shouldn't be delays for construction," he said. "It's relatively simple and something we can do quickly. But we have to keep in mind we do have the Mississippi Drive closure as well."

Previous estimates said the Park Avenue construction would cost closer to $400,000, but Stineman hopes the $325,000 grant will cover most of the work.

He said the Park Avenue project could be done around the same time as the Fulliam Avenue/Houser Street roundabout, and both could be completed by the end of the year.
By Maja Zuvela SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Bosnia's security agencies are investigating a Serbian right-wing group which the national government said on Tuesday was a paramilitary unit formed to create "a problem" for those opposed to Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik. Members of Serbian Honour caused uproar when they marched in full combat gear in the Bosnian Serb capital Banja Luka during a Jan. 9 military parade to mark a national holiday in one the country's two autonomous regions. The parade was staged as a challenge to a ruling by Bosnia's Constitutional Court to ban the holiday as it discriminated against the country's other ethnic groups. Bosnia is split into the Federation, shared by the Bosnian Croats and Muslim Bosniaks, and the Serb-dominated Serb Republic. Serbian Honour is registered in neighboring Serbia but has an informal wing in the Bosnian Serb Republic, whose leaders say they are in the process of registering as a charity there. "For me this is a paramilitary formation," Security Minister Dragan Mektic told a news conference on Tuesday. "The way they showed up is dangerous and their claims to be a charity are ridiculous." Dodik's office said the reports were false and dangerous. Mektic, member of a party that opposes Dodik, said the group was formed to "sow fear" and "pass a pre-election message that those who oppose the current government will have a problem". A national election is due in Bosnia in October. Dodik's SNSD party, which had been the dominant Bosnian Serb party at regional and national levels since 2006, saw its popularity slide in the last national vote and was excluded from a ruling coalition. Bosnian investigative web portal Zurnal, without citing sources, said the group had been trained in a Russian-funded humanitarian center in Serbia and would be organized to act against Dodik's political opponents. The Russian Embassy said it did not even want to comment on something so ridiculous. Mektic compared the group to paramilitary groups led by criminal gang leaders that emerged on the eve of Bosnia's war in the 1990, and later committed some of the most gruesome atrocities against civilians during the conflict. "What we need the least is the repetition of such events," Mektic warned. "I call on all institutions to protect this country and I expect a quick response." Mektic told reporters he could not provide much of the operational data, but said the case would be documented and forwarded to the prosecutor this week. Concerns are high regarding increasing instability in the Balkans, including secessionist pressures in Bosnia, a parliamentary boycott in Montenegro and renewed tensions between Serbia and its former province of Kosovo. Western leaders have accused Russia, traditional ally of Serbs, of seeking to exploit diminishing EU leverage in the Balkans by manipulating political events in the region. Russia denies such allegations. (Reporting by Maja Zuvela; Editing by Daria Sito-Sucic and Alison Williams)
Volunteers in a Southern California city near San Diego face misdemeanor charges for handing out food to the homeless.

Police in El Cajon arrested around 12 people from the Break The Ban group who were distributing food and other items to the citys homeless population at Wells Park on Sunday afternoon, according to multiple press reports.

Officers alleged that the groups members were violating a ban on sharing food in city-owned public spaces, which the El Cajon City Council introduced in October 2017 to stop an outbreak of Hepatitis A.

Police did not take the individuals they cited to jail, but those arrested have been scheduled to appear in court, according to local NBC 7 news.

The group has vowed to legally challenge the citations and the food-sharing ban.

It was absolutely necessary to beak this law until they were willing to enforce it, and, now that they have, we will continue this fight in court, one of the volunteers, Shane Parmely, told The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Fellow organizer Mark Lane told a press conference (video below) on Monday that the ban was based on an excuse.

Yes, we have a problem with Hepatitis A but you dont battle that by not feeding homeless people, said Lane. You battle that by giving them proper restroom facilities, proper hand washing facilities, and vaccinations, education.

Matthew Schneck, who attended the event, said that if he was going to be arrested for something, let it be for feeding the homeless.

Im not going to apologize for doing the right thing, he defiantly added. Schneck also shared a photograph of his citation to Twitter:

Today I got arrested for feeding the homeless in Wells Park in El Cajon. The City of El Cajon has made it illegal to share food with homeless people. https://t.co/6BZzjSxKnL



...One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws Martin Luther King Jr. pic.twitter.com/YTqCxOIRWb  Matthew Schneck (@matthew_schneck) January 15, 2018

The city council and police have yet to comment on the arrests.

Story continues

The ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties condemned the incident, which was held on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Dr. Martin Luther King was deeply concerned about ending poverty and hunger in America, its executive director, Norma Chavez Peterson, said in an online statement. I have no doubt that if he were alive today, Dr. King would stand with people who would share food with the hungry; and he would stand against those who would call this a crime.

The San Diego County public health officer declared in September 2017 that the Hepatitis A outbreak in the area was a local public health emergency, writing that the majority of people who have contracted Hepatitis A during this outbreak have been homeless and/or illicit drug users.

As of Jan. 3, there have been 577 reported cases of the highly-infectious liver condition that can be transmitted sexually by handling contaminated objects or eating infected food. Some 20 deaths have also been linked to the current outbreak.

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President Donald Trump made sure he didnt get wet  unlike first lady Melania Trump (AP)

Donald Trump has been accused of a lot of things and now you can add ungentlemanly to that list.

Pictures of the President getting on board Air Force One in Florida show him holding the umbrella above himself to stop his unique hair from getting wet.

Unfortunately, Trump didnt bother letting wife Melania and son Barron underneath as well, leaving them well and truly exposed to the elements.

President Trump also left his son Barron exposed to the elements (AP)

Trumps chivalry skills left a lot to be desired (AP)

The trio were on their way back to Washington from Trumps Mar-A-Lago club, after spending the weekend there.

While at the club, Trump addressed recent accusations that he had described Haiti as a sh*thole at an Oval Office meeting.

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Insisting he was not racist, Trump told reporters: I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed. That I can tell you.

The White House has not denied that Trump said sh*thole, while Republican Senator David Perdue told ABCs This Week: I am telling you that he did not use that word.



The trio left Palm Beach International Airport to travel to Washington after spending the weekend at Mar-a-Lago (AP)

And Im telling you its a gross misrepresentation.

Trump also tweeted: I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings  unfortunately, no trust!
Early Sunday morning, Orange County Fire Authority responded to a car crash in Santa Ana, California. It looked like a picture from a movie scene, with a white white Nissan Altima lodged into the second floor of a local dental office.

According to local authorities, the vehicle crossed three lanes before hitting a center divider, soaring through the air and straight into a second story building. Local news stations also report that the collision took place shortly before 5:30 a.m., and resulted in a small fire. One of the individuals involved in the crash was able to get out of the vehicle without help, while the other one required rescuing.

OCFA in Santa Ana with a vehicle that crashed into the second floor of a small Office building. The vehicle hit the center divider and went airborne and landed into the building. One person self extricated, the other person is still trapped in the vehicle. USAR from OCFA On scene pic.twitter.com/Lm5b4oyCIm  OCFA PIO (@OCFA_PIO) January 14, 2018

Local news station KTLA reported by 7:50AM local time, the situation was under control, with the car finally being removed from the dental office located at 319 East 17th Street. KTLA also reported that the driver had admitted to using narcotics before the crash, and is now in the hospital for observation.

OCFA in Santa Ana of a vehicle that crashed into the building. The fire was quickly extinguished, both victims are out of the vehicle safely with minor injuries. Members from OCFA & LA COUNTY Urban Search & Rescue teams are removing the vehicle from the building. pic.twitter.com/x29WvTkNGk  OCFA PIO (@OCFA_PIO) January 14, 2018

While a vehicle in the windows of a second-floor building may seem like an unlikely scenario, vehicle-on-building collisions are actually quite common. According to Ameriprise Auto and Home Insurance, an average of 60 cars crash into retail stores, office buildings, and restaurants every day, killing over 500 people a year.

In 39% of these crashes, the driver was going straight right before the crash happened, while in 25%, the driver was actually in the process of parking. These would lead to more minor accidents, though, and not the high-speed collision that put this vehicle into the second story of a building.

The victims of the car crash are very lucky to have survived, since the Association for Safe International Road travel estimates that over 37,000 people die from car accidents in the United States every year, with an additional 2.35 million people injured or even disabled.

Photos via Orange County Fire Authority

Photos via Orange County Fire Authority

Written by Eileen Guo

More articles by Eileen  Follow Eileen on Twitter

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A Nissan crashed into the second floor of a building in Santa Ana early on Saturday - Cover Images

A man who had taken drugs before getting behind the wheel of his Nissan Sedan survived relatively unscathed after crashing his car in the second-floor of a house.

Police in Santa Ana, California, say that the car, travelling at high speed, clipped the central reservation before launching into the air.

It flew about 60 feet before smashing into the second floor of the building, which contained a dental practice.

CCTV footage obtained by a local television station captured the moment, and showed the car flying through the air.

Unbelievable new surveillance video shows a car hitting a median and launching into the second story of a Santa Ana dentist office. Driver and passenger transported with minor injuries. @NBCLA@ChristineNBCLApic.twitter.com/Yw4poZXUNR  Kenny Holmes (@KHOLMESlive) January 15, 2018

The crash, which happened at about 5.25am on Saturday, rattled guests in a motel next door but the dental practice was closed at the time.

The Los Angeles County fire department used a specialized forklift and wrecker to remove the car, the police said.

Two people in the vehicle, although both were rescued suffering only minor injuries

One of the two people inside the vehicle was able to exit on his own, but emergency workers had to remove the other person.

The driver had minor injuries and remains in hospital, but will likely be charged with driving under the influence.
(In this Jan 14 story corrects para 6 to show that 17 members of 105-nation Proliferation Security Initiative made the comment, not that comment was from the 17-nation Proliferation Security Initiative) By David Ljunggren VANCOUVER (Reuters) - Foreign ministers from around 20 nations gather on Tuesday to discuss how to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions through diplomatic and financial pressure, but China, seen as a key player in any long-term solution, will be absent. The Vancouver meeting, co-hosted by Canada and the United States, comes amid signs that tensions on the peninsula have eased, at least temporarily. North and South Korea held talks for the first time in two years last week and Pyongyang says it will send athletes across the border to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. But the United States and others say the international community must look at ways of expanding a broad range of sanctions aimed at North Korea's nuclear program. "There is growing evidence that our maximum pressure campaign is being felt in North Korea. They are feeling the strain," said Brian Hook, the State Department's director of policy planning. Hook told a briefing in Washington that participants, including U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, would examine how to boost maritime security around North Korea to intercept ships trying to defy sanctions as well as "disrupting funding and disrupting resources." Separately, 17 members of the 105-nation Proliferation Security Initiative, which aims to prevent the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction, on Friday said "it is imperative for us to redouble our efforts to put maximum pressure on North Korea". But North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has shown no sign of willingness to give in to U.S. demands and negotiate away a weapons program he sees as vital to his survival. Another challenge in Vancouver will be the absence of China, which has significant influence in North Korea. Beijing is Pyongyang's only ally and its chief trading partner. The meeting primarily groups those nations that sent troops to the Korean war of 1950-53, when China fought alongside the North. Beijing condemned the gathering. "Holding this kind of meeting that doesn't include important parties to the Korean peninsula nuclear issue actually cannot help in advancing an appropriate resolution to the issue," foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular briefing. Other invitees include Japan and South Korea, front-line U.S. allies in the Washington-led effort against North Korea. Hook said China and Russia - which is also not attending - would be fully briefed on the conclusions. That said, Beijing's absence will be felt, say diplomats. "Without China there is a real limit as to what can be achieved," said one senior diplomatic source. Zhao Tong, a North Korea expert at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center in Beijing, said the United States did not want Russia and China potentially distracting the discussion by raising their proposal to halt joint U.S.-South Korean military drills that the North says are a prelude to an invasion. Fears of war have eased somewhat after the first round of intra-Korean talks in more than two years, and Trump, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, appeared to signal more of an openness toward diplomacy after a period of exchanging insults and threats with Kim. But U.S. officials say hawks in the Trump administration remain pessimistic that the North-South contacts will lead anywhere. Even so, debate within the U.S. administration over whether to give more active consideration to military options, such as a pre-emptive strike on a North Korean nuclear or missile site, has lost momentum ahead of February's Olympic games, the officials said. For his part, Trump has vacillated between praising and criticizing China, which he has cast as critical to reining in North Korea's nuclear ambitions. The White House on Friday welcomed news that China's imports from North Korea plunged in December to their lowest in dollar terms since at least the start of 2014, with trade curbed by United Nations sanctions. Last month, however, Trump accused China of allowing oil into North Korea, which he said would prevent "a friendly solution" to the nuclear crisis. Beijing denied the charge. (Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed, John Walcott, David Brunnstrom, Matt Spetalnick and David Alexander in Washington and Christian Shepherd and Michael Martina in Beijing; Editing by Mary Milliken and James Dalgleish)
Beijing (AFP) - China's economy exceeded Beijing's annual growth target in 2017, analysts said in an AFP survey, overcoming the government's battles against massive debt and pollution-spewing factories.

The world's second largest economy expanded 6.8 percent in 2017, much better than the official target of around 6.5 percent, according to the poll of 11 financial experts.

The reading is also an improvement on the 6.7 percent seen the previous year, which marked its worst performance in a quarter of a century.

Premier Li Keqiang last week said he expected growth to have come in "around 6.9 percent".

However, the forecast comes as fresh questions were raised about the veracity of the government's data after an area in the northern municipality of Tianjin became the latest place to be found to have inflated its own readings.

The government statistics bureau will release its official figures on Thursday.

"China's economic growth beat market expectations in 2017," JP Morgan Chase economist Shaoyu Guo told AFP.

Guo noted that expansion in the first three quarters of the year were "led by infrastructure and real estate investment, and supported by solid consumption and improved external demand".

Trade continued to be a major driver of growth as data last week showed exports and imports jumped in 2017, thanks to a pick-up in the global economy with the crucial US and European markets seeing strong recoveries.

The improvement at home comes in spite of government efforts to reduce the country's substantial debt and to combat its persistent pollution problems, which were both expected to curb GDP growth.

- Positive surprises -

The economy eased slightly in the last quarter to 6.7 percent, the analysts said, from 6.8 percent in the three months prior.

"October-November data showed moderation in the manufacturing sector," Guo said, "partly reflecting stricter implementation of environmental protection policies going into the winter months."

Story continues

Analysts said while policymakers are expected to focus on deleveraging in 2018, last year showed unexpected gains despite debt reduction efforts.

"In terms of China (on a macro level), 2017 was -- again -- full of surprises, but the good news is that most of them are positive," Larry Hu, the Macquarie Group's head of China economics, said in a report this month.

Wei Yao, chief China economist at Societe Generale, predicted continued favourable gains this year.

"The Chinese economy seems to have ended 2017 on a strong footing and this momentum, especially the part fuelled by external demand, may carry on well into 2018," Wei told AFP.

"We expect decent export growth to continue in the coming months, and there may well be upside surprises in light of continuing strong data from all the major economies."

Analysts predicted, however, that the housing market would see increasingly slow sales, with Hu saying that how the government addresses property taxes "is the key thing to watch over the next couple of years".

- Faked data -

Premier Li said last week he saw a "better-than-expected" outlook for China.

"The crux of why the Chinese economy was able to perform so well is that we insisted on not implementing a flood of stimuli" and instead sought to foster "new sources of growth", he said.

Beijing is trying to rebalance China's economic model from one dependent on exports and state investment to domestic consumption.

As the government prepares to release its growth data, Tianjin Radio, a station run by the government of the northern municipality, said its Binhai New Area had inflated the area's gross domestic product to be more than 1 trillion yuan ($155 billion) in 2016.

The figure has since been adjusted to 665 billion yuan, Tianjin Radio said in a statement on its official social media account last week, which has since been taken down.

According to The Paper, a state-funded news site, the Binhai New Area has revised its 2016 annual GDP to be more than 30 percent lower than initially stated.

Last year, the governor of the northeastern industrial province of Liaoning admitted that it had falsified economic data for years.

Officials and analysts in China and abroad -- including Li -- have long questioned the accuracy of Chinese economic figures, which many suspect are often manipulated to make the economy look more robust than it really is.
The Kiwanis Club of Muscatine will host its annual spaghetti dinner from 4:30-7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 9, at Ss. Mary and Mathias Parish gym, 2407 Cedar St.

Cost is $3 for children ages 4-12, free for children ages 3 and younger and $6 for adults. Meal tickets will be available at the door or in advance from a Kiwanis member, or from Jeff Johnson at First National Bank, downtown.

In keeping with the Kiwanis slogan "Serving the children of the world," proceeds will support a Christmas party for disadvantaged children, Flickinger Learning Center, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Kids First scholarships and the Science/Engineering Fair.
On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was asked what its like to negotiate with President Trump. Schumers first reaction was to laugh. He then mocked Trumps negotiating skills, or lack thereof.

As Senate minority leader, part of Schumers job is to negotiate with the president, who considers himself a master negotiator, on policy issues. But Schumers view of the Trumps skills arent quite as high, to say the least.

He has two ways of negotiating, Schumer said. One, hell shake your hand and the next day totally back off. [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi at the White House and I had an agreement with him on DREAMers for border security. He agreed and the next day got pressure from this hard right. He totally backed off. Thats what he does over and over again, Schumer said.

According to Schumer, Trumps other method is much more straight to the point.

Schumer explained, His other way of negotiating is saying, Heres how I want it. You do it my way or else.

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on CBS

Watch Sarah Jessica Parker attend prom for the first time with Stephen Colbert:

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

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.
A contraceptive app used by more than 500,000 women has come under fire after reportedly causing 37 unwanted pregnancies. Stockholm's Sodersjukhuset hospital has now reported the Natural Cycles app to the Swedish Medical Products Agency (the government body tasked with the regulation of medical devices) according to news outlet SVT.

The app scans body temperature during the menstrual cycle to notify women when it is safe to have unprotected sex. Days when it's okay are marked as green on its calendar, but if it shows red couples are advised to use an extra form of protection. It's own research suggests Natural Cycles is more effective than the contraceptive pill when used correctly.

The 37 unwanted pregnancy cases stem from a study of over 600 women who sought abortions at Sodersjukhuset hospital from September 2017 until the end of the year. "We have a duty to report all side effects, such as pregnancies, to the Medical Products Agency," midwife Carina Montin told Siren news agency. The findings could come as a blow to Natural Cycles' plans to pursue FDA approval.

In a statement, Natural Cycles said: "No contraception is 100 per cent and unwanted pregnancies is an unfortunate risk with any contraception.

"To have 37 unwanted pregnancies out of the 668 mentioned in this study at Sodersjukhuset means that 5,5 per cent of women who stated they used Natural Cycles also had an unwanted pregnancy. This is in line with what we communicate as the risk of unwanted pregnancy with typical use, and which is comparable to other types of contraception."

In February Natural Cycles became the first app to be certified for contraceptive use, following approval by the German regulatory body Tuv Sud, after which its UK users spiked from 5,000 to 125,000. In November, the app, founded by husband and wife duo Dr. Raoul Scherwitzl and Dr. Elina Berglund, snagged $30 mIllion in funding.

Update: Natural Cycles has issued a new statement:

Story continues

"Natural Cycles has a Pearl Index of 7, which means it is 93% effective at typical use, which we also communicate. Our studies have repeatedly shown that our app provides a high level of effectiveness similar to other methods.

"Natural Cycles has not yet received any information from SOS, so we cannot comment on specifics. We are however in touch with the Medical Product Agency (MPA) and are responding to each individual reported case. At first sight, the numbers mentioned in the media are not surprising given the popularity of the app and in line with our efficacy rates. We have initiated an internal investigation with our clinical department in order to confirm this.

"As our user base increases, so will the amount of unintended pregnancies coming from Natural Cycles app users, which is an inevitable reality.

"We agree with what Carina Montin says "Perhaps young people should use another form of contraception". You have to be over 18 to use Natural Cycles. The average Natural Cycles user is 30 years and less than 1% are under 20.

"Today there is a big trend for women to move away from hormonal contraception, and Natural Cycles can provide a helpful option for these women. We therefore expect, in fact, overall to decrease the unwanted pregnancy rates because we're increasing contraceptive choice, and see that many of our users are women that have not used any type of contraception before.

"We'd like to reassure the medical community and the public that Natural Cycles is an effective, clinically proven, form of contraception, which hundreds of thousands of women worldwide trust as their birth control to prevent or plan a pregnancy.

"Our goal is to increase contraceptive choice so that all women find a suitable method of contraception."
PRAGUE (Reuters) - Czech lawmakers resume debate on Tuesday ahead of a confidence vote on Prime Minister Andrej Babis's minority government that he is likely to lose with the billionaire businessman fighting allegations of EU subsidy fraud. Babis's ANO party won election in October by a wide margin but short of an absolute majority, with just 78 of 200 seats in the lower house. His government is expected to be rejected by parliament, but stay in office until a new one is formed, possibly led by him again as he remains popular due to pledges to weed out corruption and run government with a businessman's touch. But his situation could be complicated by a presidential election that is heading to a tight run-off on Jan. 26-27, pitting incumbent Milos Zeman, who has backed Babis, against Jiri Drahos, who has said it would be unacceptable to have a sitting prime minister who faces criminal charges. Presidents appoint prime ministers in the Czech Republic, and Zeman's first term ends on March 7. Babis has so far failed to find coalition partners due to a police investigation into whether he illegally received a 2 million euro European Union subsidy a decade ago by hiding ownership of a farm and conference center. The lower house unexpectedly adjourned its session last week to give more time for a parliamentary committee to make a recommendation on whether to lift Babis's immunity from prosecution that he is granted as a member of the chamber. Babis was handed over to investigators earlier and charged but the charges were blocked by his re-election to parliament, which now must decide again whether he is entitled to immunity. Babis denies wrongdoing and says the allegations against him have been fabricated by political and business opponents. He is due to appear before parliament's immunity committee on Tuesday. Debate in the lower house also starts although it is uncertain whether the confidence vote would ensue the same day - it could come later in the week. Most parties in the Czech lower house say the government should not be led by a person facing investigation. Some have wider objections to conflicts of interests Babis has as the founder of a $4 billion business empire and a top politician. Babis, however, packs more popular appeal than rivals. He has pledged to boost infrastructure investment, reform pensions and digitalize the state to make it more efficient while also boosting the country's voice in the EU. He is the central European country's second richest person through the Agrofert conglomerate, which houses numerous firms in food, farming, chemicals and media. Last year he put his holdings in a trust fund to comply with conflict-of-interest laws. (Reporting by Jason Hovet; editing by Mark Heinrich)
Facebook is no stranger to notifying police when there's clear evidence of a crime, but its latest action has had consequences on a much larger scale than usual. Danish police have charged 1,004 young people (some under 18) after Facebook notified authorities that Messenger users were sharing a video of two teens under 15 years old having sex, violating laws against the distribution of indecent images of children. Many of those who shared the video did so 'just' a few times, police said, but others shared it hundreds of times -- they knew what they were doing, even if they didn't realize it was illegal.

Anyone found guilty would face no more than 20 days in prison, but they'd also be added to an offender registry for the next 10 years.

The last messages were shared in the fall of 2017, but charges are only coming now because it's a "very large and complex case," according to police. The investigation included four Danish police bureaus, and came after US authorities relayed Facebook's warning to Europol.

It can be tricky to catch ad hoc sharing of illegal videos on messaging services like this, both because of the private nature of the messages and because some users are bound to have end-to-end encryption turned on. Ultimately, it relies on someone in the sharing chain deciding to report the offending material -- and in this case, it's clear that it took a while before someone came forward. Privacy concerns are going to rule out active monitoring, but this does suggest that Facebook and others might want to do more to encourage voluntary reports.
Thom Browne attends an event at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on Jan. 10. (Photo: Dia Dipasupil via Getty Images)

Thom Browne would be open to working with first lady Melania Trump.

Look, I respect her as the First Lady, the designer said last week during an event at 92nd Street Y, according to Page Six. And its something that I would respect.

Browne, who previously worked with former first lady Michelle Obama, has made similar comments about working with Trump before.

I think its unfortunate, the response that the current first lady [Melania Trump] got from designers in regards to dressing her, he said in an interview with Surface magazine in June 2017. We all should respect the office, and it shouldnt become a political thing. The appreciation of what you do is what it should be. Dressing [Donald Trump] would be one thing. But with her, I think its different.

After the election, notable designers like Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs and Sophie Theallet declared they wouldnt dress Melania Trump (though Fords reasoning was based on Trumps personal image, rather than political reasoning).

Many in the fashion community would like to dress members of the first family, or have done so already. Designer Stefano Gabbana of Dolce & Gabbana regularly dresses Melania and Ivanka Trump and praises their outfits on Instagram. Designer Tommy Hilfiger said just a few days after the 2016 election he would be proud to dress Melania.

I think Melania is a very beautiful woman and I think any designer should be proud to dress her, he said, according to Womens Wear Daily. Ivanka [Trump] is equally as beautiful and smart, although she wears her own clothes. I dont think people should become political about it.

Carolina Herrera, who worked with five first ladies including Michelle Obama, shared similar sentiments in early 2017  just after making Ivanka Trumps inaugural ballgown.

I dont have a problem dressing the first lady of this country, whoever it is, Herrera said after her Fashion Week show. I think its out of respect for the United States.

Story continues

Related...

Tommy Hilfiger Thinks Designers Should Be 'Proud' To Dress Melania Trump

Carolina Herrera Says She'll Dress Melania Trump 'Out Of Respect For The United States'

These Cheeky Marc Jacobs Hats Let You Protest Donald Trump In Style

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A pastor has condemned Donald Trump during a sermon while Mike Pence reportedly sat in the church red-faced.

Maurice Watson, of the Metropolitan Baptist church in Largo, Maryland, branded Mr Trumps alleged s***hole remark to describe unspecified African nations as dehumanising and ugly.

Mr Trump has denied using the word during a meeting on immigration reform, despite a politician in the room publicly accusing the President of using the slur repeatedly.

On Sunday the billionaire described himself to journalists as the least racist person youve ever interviewed.

Dr Watson nonetheless launched into a scathing attack on the President, describing the remark as a hurtful, dehumanising, visceral, guttural, ugly" adjective he could not use in church.

I stand today as your pastor to vehemently denounce and reject such characterisations, he said.

Noting there were Africans and Haitians in the congregation, the pastor said they were owed an apology, but probably wont get one.

There was nothing that was loving in that adjective, nothing loving in that statement about Haiti, he said. Nothing loving. We can do better than this, we can do better than this as a nation.

The speech was met with repeated standing applause from the audience. Local television channel WUSA TV reported that Mr Pence became visibly red-faced while sat next to his wife in the audience.

Mr Pences office denied he became embarrassed in an email to news agency The Associated Press.

The Presidents alleged comments last week triggered international condemnation, including by the UN, who branded them shameful and racist.

After being presented with a proposal to restore protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and unspecified African countries, Mr Trump reportedly said: Why are we having all these people from s***hole countries come here?

He asked to know why the US could not instead accept people from places like Norway, whose prime minister he had met the day before.

Story continues

Mr Trump eventually issued a denial on Twitter, saying the language he used was "tough" but different to what was claimed.

But Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who was in the meeting, contradicted the President.

In the course of his comments he said things that were hate-filled, vile and racist... I cannot believe that in the history of the White House, in that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday, Mr Durbin said.

The White House has been contacted for comment.

Maurice Watson's comments on Donald Trump in full

It is alleged that a hurtful, dehumanising, visceral, guttural, ugly, adjective that I cannot repeat in church was used to characterise some of the nations of Africa, and a statement was made that we ought to welcome people from Norway, more than we welcome people from Haiti.

I stand today as your pastor to vehemently denounce and reject such characterisations of the nations [inaudible], and of our brothers and sisters in Haiti. And I further say, whoever made such a statement, and whoever used such a visceral, disrespectful, dehumanising adjective to characterise the nations of Africa whoever said it is wrong, and they ought to be held accountable.

My friends, my members from Haiti, from Africa, you are owed an apology but you probably wont get one. But even if you dont get one, as your pastor, and your Metropolitan family will stand shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart and breast to breast with you, as we acknowledge your worth, your dignity, your humanness.

Were getting ready to celebrate Dr (Martin Luther) Kings birthday I think the best way to honour Dr Kings legacy is to speak up for and stand up for the values for which he spoke and stood. And the main value which Dr King stood for is the value of love. He said I decided to go with love because hate is too great a burden for any man to carry.

There was nothing that was loving in that adjective, nothing loving in that statement about Haiti. Nothing loving. We can do better than this, we can do better than this as a nation.
Negotiations over immigration in America have always been precarious, but Trump has complicated the picture even more

Demonstrators at an immigration rally in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programs, in Washington DC on 6 December 2017. Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP

Greisa Martinez Rosas has seen it before: a rare bipartisan breakthrough on immigration policy, offering a glimmer of hope to advocates like herself. Then a swift unraveling.



Martinez is a Dreamer, one of about 700,000 young undocumented migrants, brought to the US as children, who secured temporary protections through Barack Obamas Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or Daca.

She considers herself one of the lucky ones. Last year, she was able to renew her legal status until 2020, even as Donald Trump threw the Dreamers into limbo by rescinding Daca and declaring a deadline of 5 March for Congress to act to replace it.



Martinez is an activist with United We Dream, the largest youth-led immigration advocacy group in the US. She has fought on the front lines.

In 2010 and 2013, she saw efforts for immigration reform, and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, culminate in disappointment. She rode a familiar rollercoaster this week, as a bipartisan Daca fix was undermined by Trumps reported  if contested  reference to African and Central American nations as shithole countries.

It feels like a sequel, Martinez told the Guardian, adding that Trumps adversarial views underscored the need to hash out a deal. This same man is responsible for running a Department of Homeland Security that seeks to hunt and deport people of color.

Negotiations over immigration have always been precarious. Trump has complicated the picture. After launching his candidacy for president with a speech that called Mexican migrants rapists and killers, Trump campaigned on deporting nearly 11 million undocumented migrants and building a wall on the Mexico border.

He has, however, shown a more flexible attitude towards Dreamers  despite his move to end their protective status. Last Tuesday, the president sat in the White House, flanked by members of both parties. In a 45-minute negotiating session, televised for full effect, Trump ignited fury among his hardcore supporters by signaling he was open to protection for Dreamers in exchange for modest border security measures.

Story continues

Who are the Dreamers?

Dreamers are young immigrants who would qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (Daca) program, enacted under Barack Obama in 2012. Most people in the program entered the US as children and have lived in the US for years undocumented. Daca gave them temporary protection from deportation and work permits. Daca was only available to people younger than 31 on 15 June 2012, who arrived in the US before turning 16 and lived there continuously since June 2007. Most Dreamers are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and the largest numbers live in California, Texas, Florida and New York. Donald Trump cancelled the program in September but has also said repeatedly he wants Congress to develop a program to help the population.

What will happen to the Dreamers?

Under the Trump administration, new applications under Daca will no longer be accepted. For those currently in the program, their legal status and other Daca-related permits (such as to work and attend college) will begin expiring in March 2018  unless Congress passes legislation allowing a new channel for temporary or permanent legal immigration status  and Dreamers will all lose their status by March 2020.



Technically, as their statuses lapse they could be deported and sent back to countries many have no familiarity with. It is still unclear whether this would happen. Fear had been rising in the run-up to last weeks announcement. Those with work permits expiring between 5 September 2017 and 5 March 2018 will be allowed to apply for renewal by 5 October.

What does this week's ruling by Judge William Alsup mean?

In his ruling, Alsup ordered the Trump administration to restart the program, allowing Daca recipients who already qualify for the program to submit applications for renewal.

However, he said the federal government did not have to process new applications from people who had not previously received protection under the program.

When the Trump administration ended the Daca program, it allowed Daca recipients whose legal status expired on or before 5 March to renew their legal status. Roughly 22,000 recipients failed to successfully renew their legal status for various reasons.

Legal experts and immigration advocates are advising Daca recipients not to file for renewal until the administration provides more information about how it intends to comply with the ruling.

These next days and weeks are going to create a lot of confusion on the legal front, said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, which has filed a separate lawsuit against the Trump administrations termination of Daca.

Then, less than 48 hours later, Trumps reported comments about countries like Haiti and El Salvador prompted a fierce backlash.

People are picking their jaws up from the table and theyre trying to recover from feelings of deep hurt and anger, said Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of Americas Voice, a group which advocates for immigration reform.

We always knew we were climbing a mountain  but its improbable to imagine a positive breakthrough for immigrants with the most nativist president in modern America in charge.

As the uproar continued, it was nearly forgotten that on Thursday, hours before Trumps remarks became public, a group of senators announced a bipartisan deal.

Under it, hundreds of thousands of Dreamers would be able to gain provisional legal status and eventually apply for green cards. They would not be able to sponsor their parents for citizenship  an effort to appease Trumps stance against so-called chain migration  but parents would be able to obtain a form of renewable legal status.

There would be other concessions to earn Trumps signature, such as $2bn for border security including physical barriers, if not by definition a wall.

The compromise would also do away with the diversity visa lottery and reallocate those visas to migrants from underrepresented countries and those who stand to lose Temporary Protected Status. That would help those affected by the Trump administrations recent decision to terminate such status for some nationals of El Salvador, effectively forcing nearly 200,000 out of the country.

The bill would be far less comprehensive than the one put forward in 2013, when a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight proposed a bill that would have given nearly 11 million undocumented migrants a path to citizenship.

The bill passed the Senate with rare bipartisan support. In the Republican-led House it never received a vote.

Proponents of reform now believe momentum has shifted in their favor, despite Trumps ascent. The Arizona senator Jeff Flake, part of the 2013 effort and also in the reform group today, said there was a clear deadline of 5 March to help Dreamers.

I do think there is a broader consensus to do this than we had before, Flake told the Guardian. Were going have 700,000 kids subject to deportation. Thats the biggest difference.

Activists cited a grassroots movement grown much stronger. If immigration reform was once the stepchild that nobody wanted to talk about, Sharry said, today it is a priority of the entire progressive coalition.

Public opinion overwhelmingly favors Dreamers. According to a Quinnipiac poll released last week, 86% of Americans (including 76% of Republicans) want Dreamers to remain in the country.

How to achieve that goal, however, remains uncertain. Democrats are under pressure to force a vote as part of a spending bill that Congress must pass by Friday in order to avert a shutdown of the federal government. Republicans have dismissed the idea of tying immigration reform to funding.

For Dreamers like Martinez, who have seen friends and loved ones lose their protected status, there is no more time to waste.

Ultimately, members of Congress have to choose a side, she said. Theyre either on the side of immigrant young people and our families  or theyre on the side of Trump.

Theres no middle ground.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are visiting Coventry today [Photo: Getty]

This morning, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived in Coventry for their first joint royal engagement of 2018.

The couple kick-started the day with a visit to the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, which was bombed during World War Two.

The Duke and Duchess trip to Coventry marks the royal couples first joint royal engagement of 2018 [Photo: Getty]

The royals were then greeted by members of the choir before having a cup of tea with volunteers at the Rising Cafe, a social enterprise which supports members of the public overcoming drug and alcohol addictions.

Later this afternoon, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will then be given a tour of Coventry Universitys science and health building before opening the institutions 59 million new facility.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were greeted by crowds at Coventry Cathedral [Photo: Getty]

The royal couple will learn about the innovative training centre which teaches nurses, wives and paramedics about every stage of a patients medical journey from their hospital stay to rehabilitation.

And to mark the couples first royal engagement of 2018, Kate Middleton recycled one of her go-to Mulberry coats.

The Duchess of Cambridge first donned the fuchsia-hued number during a visit to New York back in December 2014 while five months pregnant with Princess Charlotte. She was last photographed in the 1,500 garment the following March, before going on maternity leave.

The Duchess of Cambridge first donned the Mulberry coat while pregnant with Princess Charlotte [Photo: Getty]

Today, Kate chose to accessorise the look with a pair of suede black block heel pumps and a co-ordinating clutch.

The royal couples latest royal engagement is in the run-up to their four-day tour of Sweden and Norway which kick-starts on Tuesday 30th January.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be welcomed by King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden to a special luncheon at the Royal Palace of Stockholm before joining King Harald V and Queen Sonja in Norway at Oslos Royal Palace for an official dinner.

As this will be the royal couples first tour of Sweden and Norway, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will meet with as many members of the public as possible ranging from leaders in the mental health sector to those in business, government and creative industries.

Story continues





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Read more from Yahoo Style UK:

10 fashion rules the Royal Family must stick to

11 times the Duchess of Cambridge dressed just like one of us

The Duchess of Cambridges top maternity style moments
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's justice ministry said Monday it had fined pharmaceutical giant Teva $22 million for bribing foreign officials in a settlement that spares the company a potential criminal trial.

The deal signed on Sunday comes a month after Teva announced plans to cut 14,000 jobs globally, triggering strikes in Israel and pressure from the government and the powerful Histadrut labour union.

The fine was over Teva paying bribes to foreign officials to win business in Russia, Ukraine and Mexico, the ministry said.

The Israeli generic drug firm had in December 2016 paid $519 million in the United States for similar charges in a separate settlement, known as a deferred prosecution agreement.

Israeli authorities had launched their own investigation "to examine the ramifications of the affair in Israel", the ministry said.

Rather than pressing charges in court, the justice ministry decided to fine Teva, which admitted its role in the affair, 75 million shekels ($22 million, 18 million euros).

The settlement took into consideration the US fine, Teva's cooperation and organisational changes already made to prevent future such occurences, it said.

Teva's current fiscal situation and global layoffs were factors in the Israeli decision to waive a trial and impose a relatively light fine.

"As a global firm, a criminal conviction now could cause it significant damages," the justice ministry said.

Teva said that since learning of the original US investigation, the company "has implemented a robust compliance and enforcement programme with very high standards designed to protect it and its subsidiaries from future violations".

"All employees that had been wilfully involved in the wrongdoing are no longer employed by the company," it said in a statement.

Teva had bribed a Russian government official to boost sales of Copaxone, its multiple sclerosis drug, resulting in more than $200 million in profits for Teva and about $65 million for the Russian official between 2010 and 2012, US authorities said.

Story continues

Teva also admitted to paying bribes between 2001 and 2011 to a senior government official in Ukraine, who agreed to promote Teva drugs.

In Mexico, Teva's subsidiary paid bribes to doctors employed by the Mexican government since at least 2005, US officials said.

Teva has been saddled with debt after its $40 billion acquisition of the generics arm of rival Allergan last year.

The acquisition has been accompanied by low prices for generics, particularly in the United States, a major market.

Teva expects to save $3 billion by the end of 2019 with a two-year restructuring plan announced in December that will include 14,000 layoffs, 1,750 of which in Israel.

Histadrut trade union launched a series of strikes and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Teva's Danish boss Kare Schultz in an effort to soften the blow to local employees.
Strasbourg (France) (AFP) - The European Parliament called Tuesday for a ban on electric pulse fishing in the European Union, defying Brussels which wants the experimental practice in the North Sea done on a larger scale.

The parliament, the EU's only directly elected body, will now try to strike a compromise with the European Commission, the bloc's executive, and the European Council, which groups the 28 member states.

MEPs voted by 402 members to 232 in favour of the ban, while 40 abstained.

"It is a wonderful victory against a terribly harmful kind of fishing," said Yannick Jadot, a French member of the Greens party, who took part in the campaign against the practice.

France's environment minister, Nicolas Hulot, said the French government was also in support of a total ban.

Pulse fishing involves dragging electrically-charged lines just above the seafloor that shock marine life up from low-lying positions into trawling nets.

EU rules allow member states to equip up to five percent of their fleets with electrodes, and the method has been adopted in particular by Dutch vessels fishing for sole.

The European Commission wants to maintain the southern part of the North Sea as the venue for pulse fishing but to remove the five-percent limit.

Karmenu Vella, the commissioner for fisheries, argued that pulse fishing is safer for the environment than beam trawling as it reduces carbon emissions and does less damage to the seabed.

Beam trawling involves a large net attached to a heavy metal beam of up to 12 metres (40 ft) in length which is dragged across the seabed, ploughing it up.

Rebecca Hubbard, director for the activist group Our Fish, praised the vote as a "huge win" for European seas, low-impact fishing and the public.

In the Netherlands, fisherman said the decision had not been based on scientific research.

Pim Visser, director of the Dutch fishermen organisation VisNed, told AFP: "We are disappointed because independent scientific data has been neglected, and emotion has won.

"It is clear that the opinion given by the coalition made up Brexit supporters, extreme nationalists, anti-globalisation campaigners and green extremists was judged more credible than independent scientific data."
Brussels (AFP) - The EU will remove Panama, South Korea and six other countries from its recently unveiled tax haven blacklist in a quick reversal that drew criticism from activists.

An EU official told AFP that the bloc's finance ministers would pare down the list at talks next week, satisfied that the countries had made commitments to tax reform that Brussels will monitor.

"Barring a major surprise, EU finance ministers should remove eight countries from the blacklist of tax havens," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The change of mind comes just a few weeks after the EU announced an original blacklist of 17 non-EU countries, which drew furious reaction from several of those targeted.

The United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Mongolia, Macau, Grenada and Barbados will also be removed from the list.

The official said the countries removed from the list now move to the EU's so-called "grey list", jurisdictions that have made unspecified commitments to the EU on reforming their tax laws.

"I confirm that a dozen blacklisted third countries have since December sent additional commitments," EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici told reporters in Paris.

"It's a good sign, since the purpose of a list is to get out and to get off of it you have to solve the problems that are identified," Moscovici added.

The lists came a year on from the leak of the "Panama Papers" -- a massive amount of data from a prominent Panamanian law firm showing how the world's wealthy stash assets.

The EU originally screened a total of 92 countries to draw up the list, which is expected to be continuously updated.

"This is a worrying trend. Just one month after adopting the list they are taking people off," Aurore Chardonnet, an EU tax policy advisor at Oxfam, told AFP.

"They are weakening the credibility of the list... which is becoming empty," she added.

Story continues

At the time of its adoption in December, the 28 members of the EU failed to agree on possible sanctions against blacklisted countries.

While France's finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, pleaded for sanctions, his Luxembourg counterpart, Pierre Gramegna, was less in a hurry: "It's bad enough to be on the blacklist".

Saint Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Bahrain, Guam, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Samoa, American Samoa and Namibia remain on the blacklist.
Strasbourg (France) (AFP) - European Union leaders love-bombed Britain on Tuesday, holding the door open for it to change its mind about ending its four-decade membership of the bloc next year.

The comments by EU President Donald Tusk, European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker and others weighed into a debate in Britain about holding a second Brexit referendum.

Leading Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage surprisingly pushed the issue back onto the agenda last week when he said he was increasingly open to the idea of a new vote.

Tusk told the European Parliament that "if the UK government sticks to its decision to leave, Brexit will become a reality with all its negative consequences in March next year, unless there is a change of heart among our British friends."

"We on the continent haven't had a change of heart. Our hearts are still open to you," the European Council chief said in a speech about last month's EU summit.

- 'Door remains open' -

The former Polish premier was indeed not alone on Tuesday, with Juncker calling on the British government to listen to Tusk about the possibility of reversing its decision.

"Tusk said our door still remains open and I hope that will be heard clearly in London," Juncker told MEPs.

Juncker's deputy Frans Timmermans gave similar encouragement, telling parliament: "If at some point the United Kingdom has second thoughts, or would take another decision, obviously the European Union would leave the door open."

New Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz joined the chorus later, saying in Vienna that he was "happy that this offer has been made. But the decision goes back to the British people."

Britain voted for Brexit by 52 percent to 48 percent in a referendum in June 2016, stunning the world and deeply worrying the EU as it confronted a series of other crises.

Former UKIP leader Farage said a second referendum would silence those in Britain who do not want to leave the bloc, but his words were quickly seized upon by pro-EU politicians who hoped the "Remain" side would win this time.

Story continues

British Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman later ruled out a second vote.

"We've been absolutely clear. British people have voted to leave the EU and that is what we will be doing," he said.

European Parliament Brexit coordinator Guy Verhofstadt took a swipe at Farage on Tuesday, saying he had been "disorientated" by his meeting with EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier earlier this week.

"I don't know what he (Barnier) put in the coffee or tea of Nigel Farage because he comes out of this meeting and he backs a second referendum," the former Belgian premier said.

- 'Hardest work ahead' -

Tusk meanwhile called for the remaining 27 EU states to stay unified in the ongoing negotiations with Britain on its departure while urging London to say what it wanted in terms of post-Brexit ties.

"The hardest work is still ahead of us and time is limited," he said, amid reports that member states are increasingly divided on how tough to be on Britain.

"What we need today is more clarity on the UK's vision. Once we have that, the leaders will meet and decide on the way that we see the future relationship with the UK as a third country," Tusk said.

Britain and the EU reached a deal in principle on separation issues in December, and are due to start talks next month on a short transition period after Britain's departure in March 2019.

Talks on future relations -- including the all-important issue of a possible trade deal, and how closely Britain will stay allied to the EU's single market and customs union -- are not due to start until April.

Barnier has called for an outline agreement by October so that it can be approved by the British and European Parliaments in time for Brexit day.

The Brexit issue also loomed over French President Emmanuel Macron's visit to Calais on Tuesday ahead of talks with May later this week at which he will seek to pressure Britain to help more in dealing with migrants trying to cross the channel.
Shopping for a travel deal for spring break or Easter? Iceland's ultra-low cost carrier WOW Air is back with a bargain basement deal that includes $69 flights from the US to Iceland, and $89 deals to Europe.

The winter seat sale is for flights between Jan. 17 and April 24, and depart from the following US airports: Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI), Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT), Newark International Airport (EWR), Boston Logan International Airport (BOS), San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and Chicago's O'Hare International Airport (ORD).

One-way fares from the US to Iceland are priced at $69.

Travelers looking to spend their spring break or Easter holiday in Europe can likewise fly one-way for $89 to cities like London (Gatwick), Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Brussels, Edinburgh, Dublin and Frankfurt.

The offer is only good for 100 seats per flight leg, and is valid for return trips.

Meanwhile, budget newcomer Primera Air is the latest player in the transatlantic, no-frills market, and is currently offering non-stop, one-way flights from New York or Boston to Paris, London or Birmingham for $99.

As with most budget carriers, beware the add-on ancillary fees for hand luggage and checked baggage, which can quickly inflate fares to more than double their original price.
JAKARTA, Jan 15 (Reuters)  A mezzanine floor overlooking the main lobby of the Indonesian Stock Exchange building collapsed on Monday, injuring scores of people, many of them students, under slabs of concrete and other debris, officials and witnesses said.

The high-rise building, constructed in the late 1990s, is part of a two-tower complex also housing offices of the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. It was the target of a car bombing by Islamist militants in September 2000.

Police ruled out a bomb as a cause of Mondays collapse. They said at least 77 people had been injured.

No deaths had been reported, said Triana Tambunan, business development manager at MRCC Siloam hospital, one of the hospitals near the stock exchange.

Up to now weve registered 30 people, Tambunan told reporters.

The bone fractures may be serious. We need to carry out further evaluations, she said, adding there were at least three suspected fractures.

Safety standards are often loosely enforced in Indonesia. Last year, a fire that ripped through a fireworks factory on the outskirts of Jakarta killed around 50 people in one of the countrys worst industrial accidents. A police investigation found multiple safety violations.

Police cordoned off the complex as people fled the building, and the injured, including visiting university students, were taken away by stretcher.

Stock exchange president director Tito Sulistio said their treatment would be paid for by the exchange.

Images aired on television and circulated on social media showed a concrete and metal structure that had collapsed around a Starbucks cafe near the entrance to the lobby of the building with blue-tinted windows.

For more on Starbucks in Indonesia, watch Fortunes video:

The second floor of the building has collapsed, said Vindy, a personal assistant to Sulistio, who was in the building at the time.

Slabs of concrete started to fall, there was lots of dust. Water pipes had burst, said Megha Kapoor, who works in the building and was in the lobby at the time.

I heard a loud cracking sound. I saw a lady unconscious stuck under a slab of concrete, she said, adding that the collapsed level was just above the reception desk.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said she hoped the collapse would not affect investor confidence in the tropical Southeast Asian archipelago. The exchange resumed business in the afternoon as per schedule.
Paris (AFP) - French prison officers blocked access to several jails around the country on Monday to demand tighter security after three officers were injured in an attack by a German terror convict last week.

The officers' unions say the blade attack by Christian Ganczarski, who is serving an 18-year sentence over the 2002 bombing of a Tunisian synagogue, illustrated the lax approach of prison authorities to violent convicts.

An anti-terror judge has charged Ganczarski with attempted murder for the attack on the officers, judicial sources told AFP late Monday.

At their protest prison guards used washing machines and a pile of burning tyres to block access to the high-security prison in Vendin-le-Vieil on the border with Belgium where he is being held.

Around 100 officers took part in the protest, an AFP journalist at the scene said.

In an apparent attempt to defuse the situation, the prisons service announced that the director of the facility had asked to be "relieved of his command" following calls by wardens for him to go.

Officers also demonstrated outside Fresnes prison south of Paris, one of France's largest where riot police were deployed, as well as in Marseille and Lyon.

A former top Al-Qaeda member, Ganczarski is accused of masterminding the 2002 suicide blast at an historic synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba, in which 21 people were killed. He was sent to jail in 2009.

He lunged at guards on Thursday after learning he might face extradition to the United States in connection with investigations into the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to union sources. The prison service said he was armed only with scissors and a razor blade.

Prison guards' unions said his detention conditions had recently been eased despite surveillance indicating he was planning an attack.

The outgoing head of the prison said Ganczarski had shown no signs of aggression.

Prison unions have called on guards to continue their blockage of jails on Tuesday.

Story continues

On Saturday, trade unions walked out of talks with the justice ministry saying they had failed to receive a "concrete answer" to their demands to tighten security around dangerous inmates.

The prison where Ganczarski is being held will soon be housing Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving suspect in the November 2015 Paris attacks which left 130 people dead.

Abdeslam will be moved to Vendin-le-Vieil from a prison south of Paris in February during his trial in Belgium over a shootout with police in that country.
The share price of U.K.-listed Gem Diamonds has risen sharply after the miner said it had unearthed what is thought to be the fifth largest gem-quality diamond ever found.The 910-carat rock was extracted from the firm's Letseng mine in Lesotho and, according to analysts at Liberum, could sell for as much as $40 million. Liberum said it had "large caveats" on its estimate but still raised the analyst rating on the stock to buy from hold. By midday Monday, the share price of Gem Diamond (London Stock Exchange: GEMD-GB) had risen more than 15 percent. Clifford Elphick, Gem Diamonds' chief executive officer, said in a press release Monday that the discovery was a "landmark recovery for all of Gem Diamonds' stakeholders."The largest gem-quality rough diamond ever discovered is the 3106-carat Cullinan diamond that was discovered in South Africa's Premier Mine in 1905. It was cut into 105 diamonds including the 530-carat Great Star of Africa.The largest cut diamond in the world is the Golden Jubilee Diamond, which weighs 545.67 carats. It was also hewn from a rough diamond found in the Premier Mine in 1985. The share price of U.K.-listed Gem Diamonds has risen sharply after the miner said it had unearthed what is thought to be the fifth largest gem-quality diamond ever found. The 910-carat rock was extracted from the firm's Letseng mine in Lesotho and, according to analysts at Liberum, could sell for as much as $40 million. Liberum said it had "large caveats" on its estimate but still raised the analyst rating on the stock to buy from hold. By midday Monday, the share price of Gem Diamond (London Stock Exchange: GEMD-GB) had risen more than 15 percent. Clifford Elphick, Gem Diamonds' chief executive officer, said in a press release Monday that the discovery was a "landmark recovery for all of Gem Diamonds' stakeholders." The largest gem-quality rough diamond ever discovered is the 3106-carat Cullinan diamond that was discovered in South Africa's Premier Mine in 1905. It was cut into 105 diamonds including the 530-carat Great Star of Africa. The largest cut diamond in the world is the Golden Jubilee Diamond, which weighs 545.67 carats. It was also hewn from a rough diamond found in the Premier Mine in 1985.



More From CNBC


A humpback whale spotted off the coast of Hawaii entangled in 285ft of rope has been freed by rescuers.

The animal was first spotted on Thursday by the captain of a fishing boat near Makena Beach, on Maui island.

A rescue team arrived on the scene, but were forced to wait after the whale became very active at the approach of the small inflatable dinghy.

The team eventually begun to remove the line after it calmed down, according to Hawaiian TV channel KGMB-TV.

With sunset approaching, crews put a tracking buoy on the rope and came back on Friday to finish the job.

"On release, the animal immediately breached several times," the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a statement. "With the removal of gear, it is believed that the animal has an excellent chance of surviving."

Humpback whale that was freed after being entangled breaches off Makena Beach (AP)

The rope will be analysed in an attempt to work out where it came from.

The NOAA reminded people it is illegal to approach a humpback whale within 100 yards by sea, and 1,000ft by plane.
LONDON, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Iran has freed 440 people arrested in Tehran during anti-government protests, a judiciary official said, amid continuing uncertainty over how many were detained around the country.

The demonstrations, which began over economic hardships in late December, spread to more than 80 cities and towns and resulted in 25 deaths.

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.

Judicial officials have announced more than 1,000 arrests around the country, but lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi said last week that at least 3,700 people had been detained.

Several detainees have died in custody, and human rights activists have called for an independent investigation of their cases.

The deputy speaker of parliament, Ali Motahari, was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA on Sunday that based on reports received "one detainee in Tehran and two in other provinces" had died in jail.

The judiciary has confirmed two deaths in custody but said they have committed suicide.

"More than 440 people who were arrested in Tehran riots have been released," Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi was quoted as saying by Mehr news agency on Sunday.

Dolatabadi said most of those held during the protests were from low income families, and were 18 to 35 years old.

Iran's judiciary spokesman said on Sunday that Iranian authorities had arrested a dual national who was taking pictures during recent unrest, but gave no details of the person's nationality.

The United States imposed sanctions on 14 individuals and entities on Friday for human rights abuses in Iran and for supporting Iranian weapons programmes, including the head of Irans judiciary, Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani.

Larijani is a close ally of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Larijani was quoted by ISNA news agency as saying on Monday that imposing sanctions on him as the head of the judiciary was "crossing the line" and said Iran would not remain silent against such action. (Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin, Editing by William Maclean)
LONDON (Reuters) - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Tuesday a new U.S.-backed, 30,000-strong force inside Syria constituted a breach of international law and Syrian sovereignty, joining Syria, Turkey and Russia in a vehement rebuke of the plan.

On Sunday, the U.S.-led coalition said it was working with its Syrian militia allies, the mainly Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to set up a force that would operate along the borders with Turkey and Iraq, as well as within Syria.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad responded by vowing to crush the new force and drive U.S. troops from Syria. Strong Syria ally Russia called the plans a plot to dismember Syria and place part of it under U.S. control, and Turkey described the force as a "terror army."

"The new plan that the Americans have in mind for Syria is violation of international laws and a plot against sovereignty and security of Syria and region," Rouhani was quoted by state media as saying during a meeting with the speaker of the Syrian parliament Hammouda Youssef Sabbagh.

Sabbagh was in Tehran for a conference of parliamentary speakers.

Iran supports Assad in the nearly seven-year civil war against rebel forces and Islamic State militants, sending weapons and soldiers.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said earlier on Tuesday that the planned U.S.-backed force inside Syria would "fan the flames of war" and raise tensions.

"The U.S. announcement of a new border force in Syria is an obvious interference in the internal affairs of this country," Qasemi was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA.

Qasemi urged all U.S. forces to leave Syria immediately.

The United States is at the head of an international coalition using air strikes and special forces troops to aid fighters on the ground battling Islamic State militants in Syria since 2014. It has about 2,000 troops on the ground in Syria.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif discussed the conflict in Syria in a phone conversation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Tehran (AFP) - Iran on Tuesday denounced a plan by the US-led coalition to create a 30,000-strong border force in northeastern Syria, saying it would complicate efforts to end the country's war.

"It is a clear intervention by the United States in the internal affairs of other countries, makes the Syrian crisis more complicated, creates more instability, and fans the flames in this country," state news agency IRNA quoted foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi as saying.

On Sunday, the US-led alliance fighting the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq said it was working with Arab and Kurdish fighters to establish a 30,000-strong Border Security Force (BSF) in Syria.

The BSF, expected to be set up over the next several years, would be responsible for preventing a "resurgence" of IS in areas where the jihadists had been cleared by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), it said.

Iran, a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, has sent thousands of fighters to Iraq and Syria to battle IS as well as other Sunni jihadists and Syrian rebels.

Iranian "military advisers" have also played a major role supporting the Syrian regime.

Ghasami said the timing of the announcement was "significant" as it came "at a time when Syrian forces and their allies have achieved great victories in the fight against Daesh and Al-Nusra Front terrorist", referring to IS and the former Al-Qaeda affiliate.

IS has lost much of its strongholds in Syria, where the regime, backed by its Russian ally, has been pounding jihadists and rebels in the northwestern Idlib province.

Syria has condemned the coalition's "border security force" plan, and said any Syrian taking part would be considered as a "traitor".

Turkey has also reacted sharply, saying the border force would "legitimise a terror organisation".

Ankara is fiercely apposed to the SDF, which is dominated by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), considered by the Turkish government to be a "terrorist" group.
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan is examining how to evacuate its roughly 60,000 citizens from South Korea in the event of a crisis that closes airports, with military ships being used as shuttles, a Japanese newspaper reported on Tuesday.

North Korea's pursuit of its military and nuclear programmes in defiance of U.N. Security Council and other sanctions escalated tensions on the Korean peninsula in 2017, which have only eased in recent weeks.

Working on the scenario of a crisis that shuts South Korean airports, the Japanese government has begun to look into plans for evacuations through the southern port city of Busan, the Yomiuri daily said, quoting multiple government sources.

Japanese and U.S. military vessels would take Japanese and U.S. citizens from Busan to Japan's Tsushima island, roughly 50 km (30 miles) from Busan, before ferrying them to the southernmost main island of Kyushu a day or so later.

Government officials have already visited Tsushima to inspect hotels and other potential lodging facilities, as well as planning for stocks of food and water, the paper added.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference on Tuesday that the government is always considering various scenarios and making plans for its citizens' safety, but declined to give details, citing security concerns.

"It's a totally natural duty as a nation to use every means at our disposal for the protection and evacuation of our citizens if they should face danger abroad," he added.

(Reporting by Kaori Kaneko, writing by Elaine Lies; Editing by Michael Perry)
By Andrius Sytas KAUNAS, Lithuania (Reuters) - Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday honored a Japanese diplomat credited with saving an estimated 6,000 Jews from almost certain death in 1940 at a visit to the former Japanese consulate in Lithuania. Chiune Suhigara was serving as Japanese consul in Kaunas, then capital of Lithuania, when he disobeyed his superiors and issued Japanese visas to Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland despite his country being a close ally of Nazi Germany. Abe's visit to Lithuania, the first by a Japanese prime minister, comes as Japan seeks greater cooperation with countries such as China, a former adversary in World War Two, in the face of rising tensions over North Korea's nuclear and missile programs. "The courageous and humanitarian action of Mr Sugihara provides us with guidance as to how to we should survive in this world, where rule-of-law-based international order is being challenged in various forms," Abe told reporters on Saturday. "He worked far from Japan and in very difficult circumstances, but he had a strong belief as a Japanese diplomat and saved many Jewish people," Abe added on Sunday after he had toured the former consulate and sat at Sugihara's desk. "I am really proud of him as Japanese." Japan had several of its former leaders convicted and executed by an Allied tribunal as war criminals after the end of World War Two. Both China and South Korea have called on Japan to face up to its wartime past after Abe sent an offering to a shrine to war dead last August, the anniversary of Japan's surrender. [http://reut.rs/2AYYGnm] Sugihara was named as "Righteous among the Nations" by Israel's Yad Vashem museum among some 22,000 people honored for helping Jews avoid death in the Nazi Holocaust. He issued thousands of Japanese transit visas to Jewish refugees in July and August 1940, opening a route for them to escape through Russia to Japan. His diplomatic career was cut short after the war and his actions remained largely unknown in Japan for decades after the conflict ended. Most of Lithuania's Jewish population  about 200,000 people  were shot dead in first few months after Nazi Germany occupied its territory in June 1941, ending centuries of the thriving culture. (Reporting By Andrius Sytas; Editing by Niklas Pollard, Raissa Kasolowsky and David Evans)
Japan said Monday that a Chinese naval submarine spotted in waters off flashpoint islands in the East China Sea was one of its new type of nuclear-powered attack vessels.

Tokyo's statement comes on the same day that China announced three of its "Coast Guard vessels conducted a patrol in territorial waters off the Diaoyu Islands," Beijing's name for the contested isles called Senkaku in Japan.

Japan launched an official protest last Thursday after their navy spotted the 4,000-tonne Jiangkai II class frigate and an unidentified submarine in waters surrounding the Tokyo-administered islands.

Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera told reporters Monday the submarine has been determined to be "China's Shang-Class nuclear-powered attack submarine," which he said can be equipped with long-range cruise missiles.

"Nuclear-powered submarines can also cruise for long hours and it is more difficult to detect them because they dive deep," Onodera said.

"We have serious concerns as the submarine's underwater passing through our country's contiguous waters is an act that unilaterally increases tension," he added, noting that Japan would stay vigilant.

Contiguous waters are a 12-nautical-mile band that extends beyond territorial waters.

China has not confirmed that it had sent a submarine.

In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular press briefing last week "the Chinese naval vessels conducted surveillance over the activities of the Japanese side" and repeated China's claim to the islands.

"As for the submarine, I'm not aware of the relevant issue," he added.

Relations between Japan and China deteriorated in 2012 when Tokyo "nationalised" some of the islets.

Since then, the two top Asian economies have taken gradual steps to mend fences but relations remain tense.

Chinese coastguard vessels routinely travel around the disputed islands.

The incident came as Japan is pushing to host a trilateral summit with leaders from China and South Korea.
Sofia (AFP) - Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought to drum up EU pressure on North Korea on Sunday in Sofia, while pledging to boost economic cooperation with Bulgaria and the Balkans.

"During today's talks we discussed the constantly worsening security situation in Eastern Asia and we were unanimous with Premier Boyko Borisov about the importance of close cooperation on the North Korea issue," Abe said.

He met with his Bulgarian counterpart Borisov as the country takes on the rotating EU presidency for the next six months.

"We categorically condemn the behaviour of North Korea with their firing of ballistic missiles and nuclear programme," Borisov said, but added that "all problems must be solved in a peaceful way, on the negotiations table."

Despite a recent cooling of tensions with Pyongyang, Abe has used his six-country trip to the Baltics and the Balkans to again hammer home his hawkish message that North Korea's nuclear and missile programmes pose a global threat.

The Japanese PM also pressed "for a quick solution" to the problem of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the 1970 and 1980s -- an issue that has been a keystone of his political career.

Progress on the problem has largely stalled since five of the 13 abducted returned home in 2002 and Abe's statement signalled that he would seek to rekindle EU support towards reaching a solution.

- Speed up negotiations -

A delegation of over 30 business leaders from Japan accompanied Abe on his trip to Sofia, where he agreed to set up an annual business forum to facilitate Japanese investment in the region, as well as a wider economic initiative with the Balkans.

Electronics, automobile construction, tourism, culture and agriculture were mentioned by Borisov as potential sectors of cooperation.

Bulgaria also promised to speed up the ratification of an EU-Japan free trade deal signed last year that would boost investment and trade.

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"We will put our whole will and assiduousness during our EU Presidency term to speed up to the maximum the process of concluding the negotiations (on the economic deal) between the European Union and Japan because this is extremely important for Bulgarian business also," Borisov said.

Japan is keen to catch up as China bolsters its ties with Europe by pushing forward with its massive $1 trillion "One Belt, One Road" initiative, which seeks to build rail, maritime and road links from Asia to Europe and Africa.

In 2018, Bulgaria will host a 16+1 economic summit of Central and Eastern Europe and China.

Abe will pay a courtesy call to Bulgarian President Rumen Radev on Monday before departing for Serbia and Romania, the last two stops of his trip.
By Fatos Bytyci and Ivana Sekularac PRISTINA/BELGRADE (Reuters) - Kosovo Serb leader Oliver Ivanovic, who was standing trial over the killings of ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 war, was shot dead on Tuesday in what Serbia called an act of terrorism. The killing increased tension between Kosovo and Serbia, and a round of European Union-sponsored dialogue on normalizing relations that was due to take place in Brussels was suspended at Belgrade's request. The European Union, NATO and the United States urged both sides to remain calm, and Kosovo's authorities to bring the killers to justice. They also urged Serbia and its former province, which won independence a decade ago, to recommit to establishing normal relations. After an emergency session of Serbia's National Security Council, President Aleksandar Vucic called the killing "an act of terrorism" and said Belgrade must be included in the investigation. He declined to say whether he believed the killing was ethnically motivated. Ivanovic, 64, was gunned down in front of his party office in Mitrovica, a town bitterly divided between ethnic Serbs and Albanians, shortly after 8 a.m. (0700 GMT). Doctors in hospital failed to revive him. There were no witnesses and no shots were heard, suggesting the weapon had been fitted with a silencer, Serbian media reported. Tanjug news agency quoted his lawyer as saying Ivanovic had been shot at least five times. Police found a burnt-out Opel car in the town after the shooting and suspected it was linked to the attack. They offered 10,000 euros ($12,200) for significant information, and provided a secure phone line. The Kosovo government, which includes former commanders of ethnic Albanian guerrillas who rose up against Belgrade's repressive rule in the late 1990s, also condemned the attack. "The killing of Oliver Ivanovic challenges the law and any attempt to establish law and order throughout the entire territory of Kosovo," it said in a statement. Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj warned that the killing could be "misused" for political ends. Kosovo's National Security Council also met, and said authorities might seek help from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). "BRIDGE-WATCHERS" Known as a relative moderate among mainly ultra-nationalist Kosovo Serb politicians, Ivanovic became one of the chief interlocutors for NATO, U.N. and EU officials based in Kosovo to help steer it towards stable democracy and rule of law. In 2016, he was convicted of war crimes linked to the killings of four ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 war and jailed for nine years. But after a retrial was ordered last year, he was released. Serbian officials dismissed the accusations against Ivanovic and said the process against him was staged. Ivanovic came to prominence shortly after the war as one of the Mitrovica "bridge-watchers", Serbs who sought to prevent "infiltration" by Albanians over the Ibar River bridge into the northern half of the town. The bridge-watchers were often involved in ethnic violence in the early post-war period, after NATO air strikes drove out Serbian forces accused of killing and expelling Kosovo Albanian civilians in a counter-insurgency campaign. The group later disbanded but many members moved into organized crime. Ivanovic entered politics and became known for advocating dialogue and compromise with Kosovo Albanians, while still rejecting Kosovo's sovereignty. Some 40,000-50,000 ethnic Serbs live in northern Kosovo, resisting integration with the rest of the mainly ethnic Albanian country. Relations between Serbia and Kosovo have been tense since 2008, but in 2013 both parties agreed to participate in EU-sponsored reconciliation talks, a condition for both to progress towards membership of the bloc. Hundreds gathered in front of Belgrade's biggest church to light candles to Ivanovic. "Ivanovic was an honest politician, which is a rare quality, and a great Serb. He was one the few who could bring Serbs and Albanians together," said 28-year-old carpenter Aleksandar Petrovic. ($1 = 0.8179 euros) (Additional reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade and Gabriela Baczynska and Robin Emmot in Brussels; writing by Ivana Sekularac; editing by Mark Heinrich)
Despite its fearsome, Velociraptor-like skull, a 161-million-year-old dinosaur the size of a duck would have been a shining, shimmering and splendid sight to behold  mostly because it sported gleaming, iridescent feathers that were rainbow-colored, a new study finds.

Iridescent feathers glistened on the dinosaur's head, wings and tail, according to an analysis of the shape and structure of the creature's melanosomes, the parts of cells that contain pigment.

"The preservation of this dinosaur is incredible  we were really excited when we realized the level of detail we were able to see on the feathers," study co-researcher Chad Eliason, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago, said in a statement. [See images and illustrations of the iridescent dinosaur]

A farmer in northeastern China's Hebei Province discovered the fossil, and the Paleontological Museum of Liaoning in China acquired the find in 2014. After discovering its iridescence and noting the unique bony crest on top of the dinosaur's head, researchers gave it a colorful name  Caihong juji  which is Mandarin for "rainbow with the big crest."

Dazzling discovery

The scientists discovered the dinosaur's iridescence and colorful nature by examining its feathers using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Incredibly, the SEM analysis showed imprints of melanosomes in the fossil. The organic pigment once contained in the melanosomes is long gone, but the structure of the cell parts revealed the feathers' original colors, the researchers said. That's because differently shaped melanosomes reflect light in different ways.

Photos and drawings of the incredibly detailed C. juji fossil. Yu et al., 2018

"Hummingbirds have bright, iridescent feathers, but if you took a hummingbird feather and smashed it into tiny pieces, you'd only see black dust," Eliason said. "The pigment in the feathers is black, but the shapes of the melanosomes that produce that pigment are what make the colors in hummingbird feathers that we see."

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The pancake-shaped melanosomes in C. juji matched those in hummingbirds, indicating that the Jurassic-age dinosaur had iridescent feathers, the researchers said.

C. juji isn't the first dinosaur on record to have iridescent feathers; Microraptor, a four-winged dinosaur also sported gleaming feathers, Live Science previously reported. But that dinosaur lived about 40 million years after C. juji, so the newly identified dinosaur is by far the oldest dinosaur on record to flaunt iridescent plumage, the researchers said.

C. juji is also the oldest animal on record to have asymmetrical feathers, which help modern birds steer while flying. However, unlike modern birds, whose asymmetrical feathers are on their wing tips, C. juji sported these lopsided feathers on its tail. That, combined with the fact that C. juji likely couldn't fly, led the researchers to conclude the dinosaur likely used its feathers to attract mates and keep warm.

This "bizarre" feature has never been seen before in either dinosaurs or birds, which evolved from dinosaurs, said study co-researcher Xing Xu, a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This suggests that tail feathers may have played a role in early, controlled flight, Xu said.

But not all of C. juji's features are out of the blue. Some of its traits, such as its bony head crest, resemble those on other dinosaurs, researchers said.

"This combination of traits is rather unusual," study co-researcher Julia Clarke, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin, said in the statement. "It has a Velociraptor-type skull on the body of this very avian, fully feathered, fluffy kind of form." [Tiny Dino: Reconstructing Microraptor's Black Feathers]

This mixture of old and new traits is an example of mosaic evolution, when some parts of an animal evolve, but others stay the same, the researchers said.

The study was published online today (Jan. 15) in the journal Nature Communications.

Original article on Live Science.

Editor's Recommendations
Broken staircases, improper food storage and inadequate smoke detectors  President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago Resort in Palm Beach was cited for maintenance violations which could have posed a threat to public health, safety and welfare, according to a recent inspection of the 1920s beachfront property.

The bed and breakfast part of the resort required emergency repairs to pass its most recent inspection in November, according to state records reported by the Miami Herald. The B&B was cited for two high priority violations which could pose a direct or significant threat to the public, according to the inspection code. Those included the absence of smoke detectors capable of alerting hearing impaired guests through flashing lights, and chunks of missing concrete exposing steel rebar on a staircase.

Meanwhile, the exclusive clubs kitchens were cited for 15 violations. The two main kitchens were written up for improper food storage, including milk that was stored at the wrong temperature and hot dogs stored on the ground floor of the freezer, according to the records. The kitchens passed the inspection, however, and did not need to be rechecked.

This isnt the first time Mar-a-Lagos catering services have prompted sanitation concerns. In February 2017, just days before the arrival of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, inspectors found sushi fish that had not been subject to necessary treatment for parasites, and cited the club for storing food in two defunct coolers which reportedly reached temperatures that could spoil fresh food.

Trump, who bought the 20-acre estate in 1985, spent his Thanksgiving vacation at the club, a week after the inspection. The President also spent Christmas and New Year at the resort, which takes a $200,000 membership fee.
What could be the largest oil spill since 1989's Exxon Valdez is unfolding in the East China Sea after a deadly and fiery collision between two vessels caused a tanker to sink. All 32 crew members are thought to have died aboard the Iranian vessel "Sanchi," which was carrying about 1 million barrels of condensate.

According to Bloomberg News, the ship was transporting hydrocarbon liquid that's a key ingredient for making petrochemicals, including jet fuel. It was headed to the port of Daesan, South Korea when it struck the transport ship "CF Crystal" off China's eastern coast.

SEE ALSO: This chatbot wants to cut through the noise on climate science

The tanker and its associated oil slick had been on fire for days after the collision. While the fire likely killed all aboard the ship, it was seen by environmental experts as a way to minimize the broader impacts of the spill, since the flames burned off the lightweight condensate on the ocean surface.

However, the fire is now out, and the ship has sunk, raising the possibility that the harmful cargo is going directly into the sea.

The cargo is different than the crude oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989, but if all the condensate were to leak into the ocean, it would rank as the biggest spill in decades.

Much remains unknown about the fate of the cargo, and therefore similar can be said about what the environmental impacts will be. Reports in recent days are not encouraging, since there is word of a rapidly spreading oil slick on the surface of the ocean. Citing Chinese authorities, Bloomberg reported that the spill expanded from 3.9 square miles to 52 square miles between Sunday and Monday local time.

An oil spill in the heavily trafficked East China Sea could have significant environmental repercussions. Humpback whales travel through that area, and heavily fished species such as mackerel and bluefin also spend time in that area.

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It is virtually certain that much of the condensate went into the sea in solution, and that toxic underwater hydrocarbon plume will injure marine life exposed to it, Richard Steiner, an oil spill specialist based in Alaska, told Bloomberg. Even the burned fraction will leave a toxic residue on the water.

Ma Jun, a Chinese environmentalist, was quoted by CNN as saying the spill took place in one of the most productive fishing areas in the country, known as the Zhoushan fishing ground.

A handout photo made available by the Transport Ministry of China shows smoke rising from the fire on the Panama-registered tanker 'Sanchi' on Jan. 14, 2018.

Image: TRANSPORT MINISTRY OF CHINA HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock

"We still need to keep an eye on how these contaminants might be carried by the ocean flow to have the impact on the fishing ground," Jun told CNN.

According to Greenpeace International, it's not clear how large this environmental disaster will be, since the amount of condensate that leaked into the water is unknown.

"A major concern is that, now that the tanker has sunk, any condensate which did not yet burn off could continue to leak underwater, disperse and break down quite quickly, significantly complicating clean up operations," the environmental advocacy organization stated in a Jan. 15 fact sheet.
Michelle and Malia Obama enjoyed a mother-daughter weekend in Miami. The former first lady was joined by her and Barack Obamas 19-year-old daughter for a getaway to the Magic City. On Saturday, January 13, Michelle and Malia were seen taking a stroll on Miami Beach with a group of friends and a few secret service personnel.

The 53-year-old looked beach ready wearing a white bikini, which she paired with matching white denim shorts and a white cover up. Michelle kept her tresses covered with a black bandana and completed her look with sunglasses and gold hoop earrings.

Michelle and Malia enjoyed a mother-daughter weekend in Miami Photo: Getty Images

michelle-malia

Malia looked equally stylish sporting a cropped hoodie over her black bikini bottoms and dark shades. The Harvard student held on to a book and her smartphone as she and her mother made their way back to their hotel room. Barack, who appeared on David Lettermans new Netflix special My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, didnt make an appearance during the girls trip. However, noticeably absent was his and Michelles 16-year-old daughter Sasha, who spent the weekend in Cancun with a friend.

MORE: Barack Obama says dropping Malia off at college was like 'open heart surgery'

A few hours later, the mother-daughter duo were seen eating at Miami hotspot Prime 112. Michelle and Malia dined privately in the wine room with four other friends. The popular restaurant, which is located in the historic Browns Hotel on Ocean Drive, is a favorite amongst celebrities including, Justin Bieber, Oprah Winfrey and Alex Rodriguez, who dined at the eatery the same night as the Obama women.

malia-obama

Malia is a freshman year at Harvard University

Photo: GC Images

MORE: Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander travel to Miami with their daughters

Malia is enjoying her extended holiday break before she returns to Harvard to complete her freshman year. Along with her visit to Miami, the teenager also joined her family to celebrate Christmas together in Hawaii. Before the holidays, Malia was seen kissing Rory Farquharson, a former British public school boy with ties to the British royal family, whom she met at the prestigious university.




Images via Splash

Since leaving The White House, the Obamas have been free to live their best lives  but that hasnt stopped critics from nitpicking their every move.

Over the weekend, Michelle Obama and her daughter Malia were spotted in Miami Beach, catching some sun with friends. The former first lady, 53, looked effortlessly stylish in a white bikini. She wore matching high-waisted shorts as she trudged through the sand, clutching her shoes in one hand.

However, some social media spectators were critical of her beach get up, saying it was in poor taste for someone of her political status.

Totally inappropriate for her age and who she is, wrote one commenter. Her daughter looks embarrassed. Rightly so!

Image via Splash

Why holes on the white cut offs? Looks a little trailer trash. Melania looks so much more elegant, yet all she seems to get is criticism, claimed another.

The ripped white shorts! Hard to believe she was ever a first lady, wrote another user. Getting too much inspiration from Beyonce, I think.

Two thingsIm shocked that people are up in arms because of the hue of her attire and she couldnt even be bothered to button her shorts, observed another.

The whole family has no class, another user wrote. Thank God they no longer represent us!

Image via Splash

ALSO SEE: Connie Britton defends her $475 Golden Globes Poverty Is Sexist sweater

Other onlookers were quick to defend Obamas beach style.

Former first lady on holiday. So what? wrote one user. She was in the public eye for long enough. Now leave her alone.

Not a fan but always liked her style. She does look great. So do her kids, wrote another. Family should be left out of politics.

I dont think Michelle needs our approval, added one user. She is a self confident, elegant woman.

Other commenters took jabs at the current administration.

To the commenters here that are along the lines of And she is still headline news.why? Ill tell you, wrote one user. People are pining for the days when they had a beautiful, intelligent, eloquent first family who had some decency.

Story continues

Image via Getty

ALSO SEE: This teen was punished after shaving her head for charity

Meanwhile, Malia Obama was seen wearing a tan cropped hoddie over her black swimsuit. She was captured carrying a book, presumably in preparation for another semester at Harvard University this winter.

Let us know what you think by commenting below and tweeting @YahooStyleCA! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram!




Bernice King says those honoring her father on Martin Luther King Jr. Day should also remember another incredibly important figure in the civil rights movement: her mother, Coretta Scott King.

Without #CorettaScottKing, there would be no #MLKDay, Bernice tweeted Monday.

As you honor my father today, please remember and honor my mother, as well. She was the architect of the King Legacy and founder of @TheKingCenter, which she founded two months after Daddy died. Without #CorettaScottKing, there would be no #MLKDay. #MLK50Forward #MLK pic.twitter.com/qhwSnX9Qmh  Be A King (@BerniceKing) January 15, 2018

Martin Luther King Jr. may be the United States most well-known civil rights activist of all time, but theres no denying that his wife was a hero in her own right.

Scott King, born and raised in Marion, Alabama, graduated from high school as valedictorian in 1945. She had been studying singing at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston when she met her future husband in the early 1950s.

After the two were married in 1953, they moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and had four children. Scott King devoted much of her time to raising their children during Kings career as a pastor and activist, though she would often speak about civil rights at churches, colleges and other organizations.

Two months after her husband was assassinated in 1968, Scott King founded The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, a 23-acre national historic park in Atlanta that includes Kings birthplace and hosts over 1 million visitors a year, according to the centers website.

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After fighting to make her husbands birthday a federal holiday for nearly two decades, Scott King oversaw the first nationally observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 20, 1986.

This holiday honors the courage of a man who endured harassment, threats and beatings, and even bombings, she wrote in an essay for The King Center. We commemorate the man who went to jail 29 times to achieve freedom for others, and who knew he would pay the ultimate price for his leadership, but kept on marching and protesting and organizing anyway.

Scott King continued to make history throughout her life. She was the first woman to deliver the annual Class Day address at Harvard University and the first woman to preach at a worship service at St. Pauls Cathedral in London. During her remarkable life, she received over 60 honorary doctorates and helped found dozens of organizations dedicated to advancing human rights. She was a leader in the womens movement and a fierce defender of LGBTQ rights.

We have a lot more work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination, she said in a speech during the National LGBTQ Task Force conference in Atlanta in 2000. I say common struggle because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry and discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere.

(Photo: Bettmann via Getty Images)

In March 1986, Scott King wrote a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to block the federal judgeship nomination of Jeff Sessions, who was then a U.S. attorney.

Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters, she wrote. For this reprehensible conduct, he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship.

Scott King accused the Alabama Republican of pursuing politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions and blasted him for prosecuting civil rights leaders. Allegations of racism against Sessions, including those Scott King mentioned in her letter, led the Senate to kill his nomination.

The letter came back to haunt Sessions in February 2017, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) read it aloud on the Senate floor during his nomination hearing, but Sessions still became attorney general.

Scott King died from ovarian cancer on Jan. 30, 2006. She became the first woman and first African-American to lie in honor in the Georgia state capitols rotunda. Her powerful legacy continues to live on today.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
At least eight people were arrested after a brawl broke out following a Martin Luther King parade in Las Vegas on Monday, January 15.

These video captured by KTNV journalist Joe Bartels shows the moment police made attempts to disperse crowds gathering outside Fremont Casino on Fremont Street. In the first clip, one person can be seen sitting on the floor while receiving treatment from paramedics. In the second clip, police officers on horses are seen trying to control the violence. A final clip shows a person being handcuffed by police.

As many as 23 minors and six adults were arrested after the 4pm brawl, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported. Meanwhile, KTNV reported, that the number of arrests was just eight.

The arrests came after about 100 people began fighting in the street, KTNV reported. Thousands of people attend the annual parade as part of remembrance events for Dr Martin Luther King Jr, it was reported. Credit: Joe Bartels/KTNV via Storyful
North Korea has described Donald Trumps claim that he has a bigger nuclear button than Kim Jong- un as the spasm of lunatic.

The latest instalment of the war of words between the two nations comes after the US President tweeted: I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

In a commentary published on Tuesday, North Koreas ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun reportedly hit back at Mr Trump, describing his comments as the spasm of lunatic.

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

The fiery exchange is not the first between the US President and his opposite number.

Mr Trump has previously described the North Korean leader as a maniac and little rocket man, while Kim Jong-un has dubbed the president a mentally deranged US dotard and a gangster.

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The latest friction between North Korea and the US comes as Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson attended a two-day summit on North Korea in Vancouver.

Mr Johnson called for a grown-up conversation between the UK and the US and said the relationship between the two countrys was crucial.

Story continues

Crucial  Boris Johnson said the UKs relationship with the United States is crucial (Picture: Reuters)

His comments came as he said Labours attempts to stop Mr Trump visiting Britain were extremely odd, insisting the US president would visit in due course.

Mr Trump has cancelled a proposed visit to open the new US embassy in London, claiming the move to a new building represented a bad deal.

However, reports have suggested he called off his trip because he felt he had not been shown enough love by the British Government.

(Top picture: AFP)
By David Ljunggren and David Brunnstrom

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - A meeting of states that backed South Korea in the Korean war will look at ways to better implement sanctions to push North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons, officials said, even as the North and South explore detente ahead of next month's Winter Olympics.

Foreign ministers and senior officials from 20 nations will hold a full-day meeting in Vancouver on Tuesday, hosted by the United States and Canada, looking to increase diplomatic and financial pressure on North Korea to give up development of nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States, a program that has raised fears of a new war.

Canadian and U.S. officials say the meeting will discuss ways to ensure implementation of wide-ranging U.N. sanctions, including steps agreed last month to further limit Pyongyang's access to refined petroleum products, crude oil and industrial goods.

Brian Hook, the U.S. State Department's director of policy planning, said last week that participants, including U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, would probe how to boost maritime security around North Korea and options to interdict ships carrying prohibited goods in violation of sanctions.

The Vancouver meeting primarily groups nations that assisted South Korea in the 1950-53 Korean War, as well as South Korea and Japan. China and Russia, which backed the North in the war but have since agreed to U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang, will not be attending.

South Korea and the United States are technically still at war with the North because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with a truce, not a peace treaty.

TENSIONS EASING?

The meeting was announced after North Korea tested its biggest ever intercontinental ballistic missile in late November, but now comes amid signs that tensions on the Korean peninsula are easing, at least temporarily.

North and South Korea held formal talks this month for the first time in two years and Pyongyang said it would send athletes across the border to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics to be held in South Korea next month.

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China, North Korea's main ally and principal trading partner, has backed successive rounds of U.N. sanctions, but has also urged dialogue to solve the crisis. It has reacted angrily to the Vancouver meeting as an example of "Cold War" thinking.

China's state media said Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump, stressed that a hard-earned alleviation of tensions must continue.

"Maintaining international unity on the issue is extremely important," Xi said. China was ready to work with the United States to resolve the issue in an appropriate way, state broadcaster CCTV quoted the Chinese leader as saying.

China's special envoy for North Korea Kong Xuanyou, speaking in an interview with Phoenix Television on Monday, urged the United States to seize the opportunity to seek direct talks with North Korea.

China's state-run Global Times newspaper said the Vancouver meeting reflected Washington's desire to "highlight its dominant role in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue and cripple the clout of China and Russia."

"But the meeting will likely accomplish little," it said in an editorial.

Diplomats say China's absence will limit what can be achieved, while North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has shown no sign of being willing to bow to pressure to give up weapons he sees as vital to his survival.

SANCTIONS 'GAPS'

The White House on Friday welcomed news that China's North Korea imports plunged in December to their lowest in dollar terms since at least the start of 2014, but President Donald Trump accused Beijing last month of allowing oil into North Korea, a charge Beijing denied.

Western European security sources told Reuters last month that Russian tankers had supplied fuel to North Korea on at least three occasions in recent months by transferring cargoes at sea. Russia says it observes U.N. sanctions.

Eric Walsh, Canada's ambassador to South Korea, told a panel at the University of British Columbia that the uneven way sanctions were applied meant "there are a lot of gaps."

"One of the things we want to do is look at how we can improve enforcement," he said.

U.S. officials say hawks in the Trump administration remain pessimistic that the North-South contacts will lead anywhere.

Even so, debate within the U.S. administration over whether to give more active consideration to military options, such as a pre-emptive strike on a North Korean nuclear or missile site, has lost momentum ahead of the Olympics, the officials said.

Scott Snyder, director of the U.S.-Korea policy program at Washington's Council on Foreign Relations, said that if Pyongyang felt tougher sanctions constituted a blockade, it might interpret them as an act of war.

"If sanctions are going to be effective in achieving the objective of bringing about diplomacy, (they) have to be used not as a hammer but actually as a nutcracker or a scalpel," he told the university panel.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who will be in Vancouver, said the international community had to stand united.

"Sanctions are biting but we need to maintain diplomatic pressure on Kim Jong Un's regime," he said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Linda Sieg in TOKYO, Elizabeth Piper in LONDON, and Philip Wen and Christian Shepherd in BEIJING; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Paul Tait)
A team of scientists will train dogs to see if the animals can sniff out looted artifacts from the Middle East that are being smuggled into the United States.

Dogs have a greater sense of smell than humans and are already being used to sniff out bombs, drugs and ivory. Now, scientists are hoping the canines can also be trained to sniff out artifacts from Syria and Iraq, war-torn countries that have experienced widespread looting of archaeological sites.

"Terrorists, organized crime and common criminals are destroying archaeological sites on an industrial scale to cash in on illegal profits  that is why we need to find out if we can train dogs to help," said Michael Danti, a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in a statement announcing the creation of the K-9 Artifact Finders research program. [7 Stunning Archaeological Sites in Syria]

Detecting artifacts that are being smuggled into the United States is difficult, experts say. "Smugglers import stolen heritage into the U.S. by hiding them in packages and crates. Using canines to sniff out illegally dug-up artifacts would help customs officers quickly identify smuggling suspects, who usually falsify import forms when they traffic artifacts, which is a felony," Domenic DiGiovanni, a retired Department of Homeland Security customs officer, said in the statement.

Several institutions are collaborating on the program: the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Red Arch Cultural Heritage Law & Policy Research, and the Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Dog training

To train dogs to sniff out artifacts, researchers will use techniques similar to those employed to train dogs to search for drugs and bombs, said Cynthia Otto, the executive director and principal researcher at the Working Dog Center.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum will provide pieces of ancient pottery from Syria and scientists with the Working Dog Center will capture any odor these pieces have by wiping them with absorbent material, Otto said. "We're going to train the dogs to recognize the odor that is associated with those pottery samples," Otto told Live Science.

Story continues

To do that, the scientists will have dogs sniff material that has the pottery's odor on it. When the dogs sniff an object that has the odor, they get a "reward," and when they sniff material that doesn't have the odor, they receive no reward, Otto said. [Photos: Damage to Syrian Ruins Seen from Space]

The reward varies depending on the dog, but often consists of various types of food. "Some of our dogs are fine with [the reward being] kibble, some of our dogs think hot dogs are the best thing ever, some of them like cheese. We try and find out what's most motivating and rewarding for that individual dog," Otto said.

The dogs include German shepherds and Labradors; however, the breed of dog will not be as important as the animal's temperament, Otto said. The odor from the pottery will likely be subtle, and it will take a patient dog to sniff it out, Otto said.

Scientists hope that the dogs can also be trained to sniff out pottery samples from Iraq and other regions of the Middle East, she said. It's not known if pottery from Iraq would smell differently to a dog than pottery from Syria. Ancient records in Syria and Iraq were often written on clay tablets, and scientists hope that the dogs will also be able to sniff those artifacts out.

If the dogs can be successfully trained, the scientists will seek funding to conduct on-the-ground tests (outside of a laboratory) the statement said. If those tests are successful, the researchers will create a demonstration program for customs officials in the United States and other countries.

Original article on Live Science.

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By Valerie Volcovici and Richard Valdmanis (Reuters) - The Trump administration's decision last week to exempt Florida from its national offshore drilling plan was based in part on the state's argument that a spill would cripple its crucial tourism industry. But several other states opposed to oil and gas drilling off their coasts are similarly dependent on tourism, according to a Reuters review of economic data - a fact that could make it hard for the administration to reject similar requests, and complicate its efforts to expand drilling. The Interior Department this month proposed opening up virtually all U.S. coastline to drillers as part of Republican President Donald Trump's plan to boost domestic energy production, leading the governors of every state along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards - except Maine and Alaska - to object. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said last Tuesday, however, that he was removing Florida from consideration after meeting with its Republican governor, Rick Scott. That surprised officials in other states and prompted Democratic lawmakers to accuse Zinke of favoritism - a charge he has denied. It also disappointed the oil industry, which had been eager to drill in the region. "For Florida, we have to remember we are a tourism state. One out of every six jobs in our state is tied to tourism. So, I oppose offshore drilling," Scott told Fox News in an interview after the announcement. 'CLEARLY UNIQUE' In announcing his decision, Zinke said that "Florida is clearly unique" and mentioned its recreation-centered coast. Indeed, tourism is massive in Florida. Visitors to the state spent $111.7 billion there in 2016, according to the state's tourism marketing corporation, Visit Florida, accounting for about 12 percent of the state's gross domestic product. But tourism makes up about 11 percent of the economy of neighboring Georgia, 10 percent of the economies of South Carolina and Maine and nearly 7 percent of the economy of New Jersey. http://tmsnrt.rs/2DuPuu3 South Carolina's Republican governor, Henry McMaster, has said he is seeking an exemption from the drilling plan, while Georgia's Republican governor, Nathan Deal, said he was concerned about drilling in coastal Georgia. A spokeswoman for Maine's Republican governor, Paul LePage, said LePage generally supported Trump's efforts to expand domestic drilling but was still reviewing the offshore drilling proposal. In New Jersey, Governor-elect Phil Murphy, a Democrat who takes office this week, has said he will fight drilling off the coast and called Interior's plan a "ticking time bomb." Outgoing Republican Governor Chris Christie, a Trump ally, is also "steadfastly opposed," his spokesman, Brian Murray, said. Most other states along the Atlantic coast, like Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina and New York, have tourist industries that contribute between 4 and 6 percent of their GDP. On the West Coast, California's tourism industry also contributes about 5 percent to the economy - but the full dollar figure exceeds Florida's at $126 billion, according to state tourism figures. Zinke has said he will meet with every governor who has concerns about his offshore drilling proposal in a process that could take a year. (Reporting by Valerie Volcovici in Washington and Richard Valdmanis in Boston; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Peter Cooney)
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Israeli troops shot dead a 24-year-old Palestinian man in clashes that broke out in the occupied West Bank on Monday, Palestinian health officials said. The Israeli military said it was checking reports of a Palestinian killed in a village near the West Bank city of Qalqilya, where it said scores of Palestinians threw rocks at soldiers who responded with riot dispersal means and live fire. Tensions in the region have risen since President Donald Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy on Dec. 6 by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Since then, there have been frequent clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces in the West Bank and along the Israel-Gaza border. Palestinians want mostly Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. Israel took East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it in a move internationally unrecognized. It sees the entire city as its eternal, indivisible capital. A total of 18 Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed in the flare-up since Trump's announcement, though analysts say neither Israel nor the Palestinians are interested in a major escalation. (Reporting by Ali Sawafta and Maayan Lubell; editing by Mark Heinrich)
Philippine lawmakers on Tuesday began formal proceedings on changing the government into a federal system that could allow President Rodrigo Duterte to stay in office for more than a decade.

The proposed shift from a unitary system would give the next president two five-year terms and strong federal powers over a nation that would be divided into five federal states, congressional leader Roger Mercado said.

Although the proposed charter calls for a federal, parliamentary system with the prime minister as head of government, the president would still have vast powers, Mercado, a member of Duterte's ruling coalition, said.

"The president will have oversight power over all branches of government," including parliament and the courts, Mercado, the House of Representatives constitutional amendments committee chairman, said in a public hearing.

Under the proposed draft being debated by Mercado's commission, Duterte, whose single six-year term ends in mid-2022, would again be eligible to run for two more five-year terms.

Ramon Casiple, head of a think-tank involved in the charter change process, said that Duterte and all elected officials would no longer be bound by the term limits under the current 1987 constitution.

"That is always the case: if you have a (new) constitution, everybody starts with a clean slate," he told AFP.

He said Duterte, who has been pressing the charter-change effort, wants the new constitution ratified in a vote by May 2019. Mercado is pushing his committee's version to be adopted.

Casiple said Congress, which is controlled by Duterte allies, could form itself into a "constituent assembly" to rewrite the constitution as early as May and could finish the draft new charter by December.

Duterte and congressional allies want to effect the changes by having the House and the Senate sit as one in a constituent assembly to change the constitution.

The president says giving more power to the regions will answer the demand by the country's rebellious Muslim minority for more self-rule by creating a federal autonomous state for them.

Story continues

But critics charge that the switch is unnecessary and fear that it will weaken the current constitution's safeguards against dictatorship.

It was written and ratified after the overthrow of the 20-year regime of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos who looted state coffers and oversaw massive human rights abuses after declaring martial law in 1972.

Marcos died in exile in Hawaii in 1989. Duterte has described him as the best president ever and in 2016 controversially allowed the former president's remains to be interred in Manila's "Heroes' Cemetery" despite popular protests.
By Dave Sherwood and Philip Pullella SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Pope Francis arrived in Chile on Monday to start a trip aimed at bolstering the credibility of a local Church battered by a sexual abuse crisis. Tens of thousands of people chanting "Viva Papa Francisco" lined the streets of his route from the airport, where he was greeted by President Michelle Bachelet, to the Vatican embassy, his official residence for three days before he moves on to Peru. A youth orchestra played on the tarmac at an otherwise low-key arrival ceremony when the pope arrived from Rome on an unusually cool and cloudy austral summer evening. Bachelet said on social media shortly after greeting Pope Francis that Chilean society was much changed since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1987, during the dictatorship of the Augusto Pinochet. "We are a society more just, more free, and more tolerant," she said, adding, however, that inequality still persisted. Hundreds of people, many of them children waving Chilean and Vatican flags, greeted Francis outside the Vatican nunciature, or embassy, chanting "Pope Francis, friend, Chile is with you." Despite the festive atmosphere, Francis faces protests from Catholics upset with his 2015 appointment of Bishop Juan Barros to head the small diocese of Osorno, a city south of the Chilean capital. Barros has been accused of protecting his former mentor, Father Fernando Karadima, whom a Vatican investigation in 2011 found guilty of abusing teenage boys over many years. Karadima has denied the allegations and Barros said he was unaware of any wrongdoing. That scandal, which has gripped Chile, and growing secularization, has hurt the Church. A poll by Santiago-based think tank Latinobarometro this month showed that the number of Chileans calling themselves Catholics fell to 45 percent last year, from 74 percent in 1995. Francis may speak to it and other problems when he makes his first address on Tuesday morning to national authorities and the diplomatic corps. He then heads to the capital's sprawling Parque O'Higgins, to say a Mass expected to attract more than 500,000 people. While in Chile, Francis will likely also face protests from indigenous Mapuche who accuse the state and private companies of taking their ancestral land. Bachelet last year asked for forgiveness from the Mapuche community for such errors and horrors. Francis flies south to Temuco in Chiles Araucania region, home of the Mapuche, on Wednesday. Several churches were attacked in the capital last week, including one with a homemade bomb where unidentified vandals left a pamphlet reading "Pope Francis, the next bomb will be in your robe." No one was injured in the attacks and no one has claimed responsibility. Shortly before the pontiff's arrival on Monday, a small group of protesters shut down a street in downtown Santiago, but were quickly dispersed by police. Speaking to reporters aboard the papal plane on the 15-hour flight from Italy, Francis expressed concern about the danger of nuclear war, saying that the world now stood at "the very limit." His comment came after Hawaii issued a false missile alert that provoked panic in the U.S. state and highlighted the risk of possible unintended nuclear war with North Korea. Asked if he was worried about the possibility of nuclear war, Pope Francis said: "I think we are at the very limit. I am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things." He did not mention Hawaii or North Korea. (Reporting by Dave Sherwood and Philip Pullella; Editing by Diane Craft and Lisa Shumaker)
Temuco (Chile) (AFP) - Pope Francis denounced the use of violence in the struggle for indigenous rights Wednesday, celebrating mass in a restive region of Chile hours after assailants firebombed churches and other targets.

The Argentine-born pontiff was shining the spotlight on the simmering conflict between the state and the Mapuche people, who centuries ago controlled vast areas of Chile but have since been marginalized.

"You cannot assert yourself by destroying others, because this only leads to more violence and division," the pope said, speaking before thousands of faithful at an airfield in Temuco, the capital of the southern Araucania region.

"Violence begets violence, destruction increases fragmentation and separation. Violence eventually makes a most just cause into a lie," the pope warned.

Unidentified assailants hurled incendiary devices at three Catholic churches and an evangelical Christian church in pre-dawn attacks Wednesday in the Araucania region.

Five other churches had previously been hit by arsonists in Chile's capital Santiago.

A forestry company helicopter also was torched during the night, and a policeman was shot and wounded by a group of hooded assailants, authorities said.

The aim was to "cause disorder or disturbance of the public order" during the pope's visit to Temuco, said Chilean police chief Bruno Villalobos.

- Simmering conflict -

At the pope's first stop in Santiago -- his first to Chile as the leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics -- he faced protests over the church's handling of clergy sexual abuse.

In Temuco, however, the papal spotlight turned to the Mapuche, who account for seven percent of Chile's population but hold only five percent of their ancestral lands.

Francis met after the mass with a group of indigenous people before returning to Santiago, where he met with youth groups at the Maipu shrine outside the city. He was later to visit Chile's Catholic university.

Story continues

Most of the pontiff's third day in Chile will be spent in the northern coastal city of Iquique, where Francis is scheduled to hold an open-air mass overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He then heads to Peru on the second leg of his South American visit.

Thousands waited from the early hours of Wednesday at the Maquehue airfield to hear the pope, who dedicated the mass to the victims of human rights abuses during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Pope Francis said he chose to celebrate mass at the airfield because of its history as a detention center during the military regime.

"This celebration we offer for all who suffered and died and for those who each day carry on their backs the weight of so many injustices," he said.

"I think it was worth it because for a long time in this country we have needed to hear the message that Pope Francis is bringing," said Jessica Pinto, who drove for more than three hours to see the pope.

- Sexual abuse -

On Tuesday in Santiago, the pope met privately with a small group of people sexually abused by priests, after he publicly asked for forgiveness.

During the "strictly private" meeting at the Vatican embassy in the capital, the victims "spoke of their suffering to Pope Francis, who listened to them and prayed and cried with them," the Vatican said.

Earlier, the 81-year-old pontiff said: "I cannot begin to express the pain and shame that I feel over the irreparable harm caused to children by some ministers of the church," vowing to commit to ensure the abuses would never happen again.

Francis made the comments during a visit to President Michelle Bachelet's official Moneda Palace residence, drawing applause from pilgrims watching on giant screens in a park where he later celebrated an open-air mass for some 400,000 people.

- 'Pedophile accomplices' -

But the pope did not receive a universal welcome.

Scuffles broke out between riot police and demonstrators near O'Higgins Park, and police deployed armored water cannons to hose demonstrators. More than 50 people were arrested, authorities said.

The pope's visit was preceded by the release of a report outlining the depth of sexual abuse in the local church, and his appointment of a bishop who many Chileans accuse of covering up the country's most prominent sex abuse scandal.

The US-based NGO Bishop Accountability said that almost 80 Roman Catholic clergy members had been accused of sexually abusing children in Chile since 2000.

A lingering controversy is the continued presence of 61-year-old Bishop Juan Barros at both of the pope's open-air masses and his meeting with clergy at the Santiago cathedral.

Local Catholic groups in his southern diocese of Osorno are demanding that Francis remove Barros for his ties to a disgraced pedophile priest, Fernando Karadima.

Barros "is a liar, a delinquent, who has amnesia after covering up for Karadima. He has covered-up abuses and should be in jail or at least dismissed," said Juan Carlos Cruz, one of Karadima's victims.
Pope Francis warned against the dangers of nuclear war on Monday before setting off on a trip to Chile and Peru, saying he is afraid of what could happen.

I think we are at the very limit, Pope Francis said when asked if he was concerned about nuclear war breaking out. I am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things.

Pope Franciss comments follow the mass panic caused in Hawaii by a false missile warning issued Saturday. The mistaken alert underscored the risk of potentially entering an unintentional war with North Korea. Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said Sunday that the false alert shows the need for direct negotiations with North Korea.

While the Pope did not discuss North Korea or Hawaii, he has frequently spoken about the deadly risks of nuclear war and called for nuclear disarmament. Reporters who boarded Pope Franciss plane for Chile received a photo of a young Japanese boy in 1945 carrying his dead brother following the U.S. nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, Reuters reports.

I was moved when I saw this, Francis said. The only thing I could think of adding were the words the fruits of war.'
President Donald Trump is facing a deluge of criticism after appearing to keep an umbrella to himself while leaving his wife and son to brave the elements.

Photographs of the president showed him holding a large black umbrella as he boarded Air Force One at West Palm Beach in Florida Monday.

See photos of the three boarding Air Force One:



And following behind him, noticeably, without umbrellas or waterproof clothing, was first lady Melania Trump and their 11-year-old son Barron amid rainy and windy conditions, according to TMZ.

Twitter exploded after photos and video emerged online of the president seeming to hog the umbrella.

Just seen Donald Trump getting on his plane holding an umbrella for himself while his son and wife get soaked in the rain. Says it all about him! #selfishTrump," one user tweeted, while another wrote: You can tell hes not even thinking of them. Trump is pure trash."

SEE ALSO: Donald and Melania Trump's most awkward body language moments of 2017

This is not the first time Trump has faced criticism for his behavior towards his wife.

The president faced similar backlash earlier last year when he appeared to leave behind the first lady during his meeting with Barack and Michelle Obama prior to his Inauguration.
Kosovska Mitrovica (Kosovo) (AFP) - Prominent Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was shot dead in a brazen drive-by shooting on Tuesday that sparked fears of a resumption of ethnic tensions in the volatile region.

The assassination of Ivanovic -- who was facing a retrial on war crimes charges over the 1990s Kosovo conflict -- occurred on the very day that Belgrade and Pristina resumed EU-moderated talks on normalising ties after a hiatus of more than a year.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic described the murder as a "terrorist act" against "Serbia as a whole".

Both Serbian and Kosovo Albanian officials refrained from explicitly accusing each other of being behind the killing as the international community urged the two sides to remain calm.

Ivanovic, 64, was shot dead by gunmen firing from a car as he arrived at the headquarters of his party in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica at about 8:15 am (0715 GMT), police said.

The moderate politician, who had publicly spoken out against Belgrade's policies in Kosovo, was hit by five bullets and died on the spot, his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic told AFP.

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and the government in Pristina "strongly" condemned the assassination, as did US and UN representatives in Kosovo.

- EU appeals for restraint -

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini spoke with Thaci and Vucic and "called on all sides to show calm and restraint and allow the rule of law and justice to take its course," her office said.

After holding an emergency meeting of his national security council, Vucic told reporters Serbia needed to be "actively included in the probe".

"I am convinced that this is AN attack... (targeting) Serb people in Kosovo... and against Serbia as a whole," Vucic said.

And in Pristina, Kosovo premier Ramush Haradinaj was to meet with his national security council later on Tuesday.

Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said the murder was a "serious blow" to the stability of the entire region.

Story continues

"It is very important to preserve peace and stability," he told reporters in Podgorica during a visit to neighbouring Montenegro.

Following the assassination, the Serb-populated northern part of ethnically divided Mitrovica was unusually calm and its streets deserted. Dozens of citizens laid flowers and lit candles at the spot of the murder.

Public prosecutor Shyqri Syla told AFP it was not immediately clear who was behind the attack.

Police said they found a burnt-out car that was presumably used in the shooting.

- 'Serbs afraid to raise their voices' -

In 2016, an EU-backed Kosovo court sentenced Ivanovic to a nine-year jail term after finding him guilty of encouraging the killings of captured ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovska Mitrovica in April 1999.

But in February last year, a Pristina appeals court quashed the sentence and ordered a retrial for Ivanovic, who had been in detention since his arrest in January 2014.

In May, the social-democrat politician and father of four told AFP his private car had been torched in front of his home, describing it as an attempt to silence him.

An Albanian speaker, which is rare for a Kosovo Serb, Ivanovic was in October elected a deputy on northern Mitrovica's municipal council, running against a Belgrade-backed party.

"Serbs are more afraid of Serbs than Albanians," Ivanovic said at the time. "Serb people are afraid to raise their voice" against Belgrade's policy.

Mitrovica is a town of 85,000 people where tensions remain high between the majority ethnic Albanian residents who number about 72,000 and the 13,000-strong Serb community,

A former Serbian state secretary for Kosovo, Ivanovic was a key interlocutor with NATO, the United Nations and later the EU after the war and was seen as backing dialogue with Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.

- 'Must be brought to justice' -

"Whoever is behind this attack whether Albanian, Serb or any other criminals, they have to be punished, they have to be brought to justice," said the Serb government official in charge of Kosovo Marko Djuric in Brussels, where he was heading the delegation due to hold talks with Kosovo Albanians on Tuesday.

After the assassination, the Belgrade delegation walked out.

Under the auspices of the EU, following pressure from the international community, Kosovo and Serbia have been trying to normalise ties some 20 years since the start of the bloody war that claimed 13,000 lives, mostly ethnic Albanians.

The 1998-99 war between Serbian security forces and Kosovo Albanian guerrillas was ended by a NATO air campaign.

Predominantly ethnic Albanian Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in February 2008 but Belgrade has rejected the move and still considers the breakaway territory as its southern province.

About 120,000 of Kosovo's 1.8 million inhabitants are ethnic Serbs.
Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic - AP

Leading Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was killed in a brazen drive-by shooting on Tuesday that could reignite ethnic tensions in the region.

The assassination of Ivanovic - who was facing a retrial on war crimes charges over the 1990s Kosovo conflict - occurred on the very day that Belgrade and Pristina resumed talks on normalising ties after a hiatus of more than a year.

The Serbian government official in charge of Kosovo, Marko Djuric, described the murder as a "a criminal, terrorist act against the entire Serbian people".

A poster bearing a picture of Oliver Ivanovic hangs on the wall of his offices after he was killed in a brazen drive-by shooting in Mitrovica Credit: ARMEND NIMANI/AFP/Getty Images

Ivanovic, 64, was shot dead by gunmen firing from a car as he arrived at the headquarters of his party in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica at about 8:15 am (7.15am GMT), according to police.

"I am informed that he was shot dead on the spot and efforts to revive him at Mitrovica hospital were unsuccessful," his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic told AFP.

Kosovo police officers secure the area where leading Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was killed in Mitrovica Credit: ARMEND NIMANI/AFP/Getty Images

He said Ivanovic, a moderate politician who had been a critic of Belgrade's policies in Kosovo, was hit by five bullets.

Police said they found a burnt-out car that was presumably used in the attack, local media reported.

Public prosecutor Shyqri Syla told AFP that investigators were at the scene, but that it was not yet known who was behind the attack.

Ethnically divided town

An EU-backed Kosovo court sentenced Ivanovic in 2015 to a nine-year jail term after it found him guilty of encouraging the killings of captured ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovska Mitrovica in April 1999.

In February last year, a Pristina appeals court quashed the sentence and ordered a retrial for Ivanovic, who had been in detention since his arrest in January 2014 until the court's decision.

Oliver Ivanovic, shakes hands with the Nato Commander George Johnson, in the Serbian part of the ethnically divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica, on May 16, 2004 Credit: AFP

The Social Democratic Party politician was considered a moderate in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica. Last year he was elected a deputy on the municipal council of northern Mitrovica.

Mitrovica is a town of 85,000 people where tensions remain high between the majority ethnic Albanian residents who number about 72,000 and the 13,000-strong Serb community,

Story continues

A former Serbian state secretary for Kosovo, Ivanovic was a key interlocutor with NATO, the United Nations and later the European Union after the war and was seen as backing dialogue with Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.

Ivanovic, who graduated in both mechanics and economics, was a rare Kosovo Serb politician in that he spoke Albanian and had publicly spoken out against Belgrade's policies in Kosovo.

'Must be brought to justice'

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic swiftly called an emergency meeting of the Council for national security after the shooting, national broadcaster RTS reported.

"Whoever is behind this attack... whether these are Albanian, Serb or any other criminals, they have to be punished, they have to be brought to justice," Djuric said in Brussels, where he was heading the delegation due to hold talks with Kosovo Albanians on Tuesday.

Oliver Ivanovic, center, leaves the prison in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, in February 2017 Credit: AP

However, after the assassination, the Belgrade delegation walked out of the talks, according to local media in Belgrade.

Under pressure from the international community and European Union auspices, Kosovo and Serbia have been trying to normalise ties for 20 years since the start of a bloody war that claimed 13,000 lives, mostly ethnic Albanians.

The 1998-99 war between Serbian security forces and Kosovo Albanian guerrillas was ended by a NATO air campaign.

Predominantly ethnic Albanian Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. But Belgrade has rejected the move and still considers the breakaway territory as its southern province.

About 120,000 of Kosovo's 1.8 million inhabitants are ethnic Serbs.
The Houston Rockets and Los Angeles Clippers have had a few contentious battles in the past few years. Even in the aftermath of a trade that sent Chris Paul to Houston, and Lou Williams and a slew of flotsam players to L.A., both teams remain competitive. In a hotly contested matchup, which the Clippers won 113-102 on Monday, things got testy on the floor with Trevor Ariza and Blake Griffin getting ejected in the waning minutes.

However, things may have also gotten physical off the court as well according to reports from ESPNs Adrian Wojnarowski.

The Houston Rockets and Los Angeles Clippers cant stop warring with one another. (AP)

Houston Rockets players James Harden, Trevor Ariza and Gerald Green pushed into Clippers locker room post-game looking to confront Austin Rivers, league sources tell ESPN. Security escorted Rockets out before anything turned physical.  Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 16, 2018

Austin Rivers didnt play, but his smack talk to Ariza on the sideline instigated his late ejection. Reportedly, Chris Paul, who knows the bowels of the Staples Center by heart, also may have led a contingent of Rockets into the Clippers locker room through some sort of backdoor.

Rockets players were clamoring for Blake Griffin too, league sources said. Chris Paul also entered with other Rockers players through a backstory that connects team dressing rooms. https://t.co/BRgyHe1WgL  Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 16, 2018

Tensions were flying high, however, it appears security was able to step in and prevent the incident from escalating any further.

Rockets players were clamoring for Blake Griffin too, league sources said. Chris Paul also entered with other Rockers players through a backstory that connects team dressing rooms. https://t.co/BRgyHe1WgL  Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 16, 2018

The NBA has opened an investigation into, well, everything. They want to determine exactly what happened both during and after the game, and the Associated Press reported that the NBA plans to speak with players.

The incident had Charles Barkley and Shaquille ONeal in stitches (try not to laugh at the report from sideline reporter Rosalyn Gold-Onwude) during TNTs postgame show, particularly when it was reported that the LAPD was on the scene.

Hello, police? Chris Paul tried to beat me up! ONeal joked.

Naturally, Twitter followed suit:

Chris Pauls been digging this tunnel for years pic.twitter.com/i4SSB2x2te  Daman Rangoola (@damanr) January 16, 2018

Congratulations to Chris Paul on actually leading a team somewhere  Seerat Sohi (@DamianTrillard) January 16, 2018

      

DJ Dunson is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at dunsnchecksin@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or Facebook.

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Moscow will not accept any changes to the Iran nuclear pact made by the United States, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said during a press conference Monday, accusing the U.S. of fomenting further conflict around the Middle East.The minister fielded questions on a range of topics from Syria to Ukraine, criticizing U.S. activities in Syria and the Israel-Palestine conflict while insisting the Russian government supports peace and reconciliation."We will not support what the United States is trying to do, changing the wording of the agreement, incorporating things that will be absolutely unacceptable for Iran," Lavrov told reporters. On Friday, President Donald Trump agreed to uphold sanctions relief for Iran as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in 2015 by all United Nations Security Council members and Germany, which allowed the lifting of sanctions in exchange for sharp restrictions on Iran's nuclear program. But Trump's disapproval of the deal is well known. He announced that this would be the "last time" he would waive sanctions and pledged to fix what he called the "terrible flaws" in the deal with the help of Congress. Russia, along with EU leaders, have urged the U.S. to respect the integrity of the original arrangement. Lavrov also disparaged Washington's recently announced plan to implement a 30,000-man border security force in Syria's Kurdish territory. "This is a very serious issue, which causes concerns that a course was set for the partition of Syria," the minister said. He also claimed there was no difference between Trump and former president Barack Obama's policies in Syria, accusing the U.S. of supporting forces that did "not wish to put an end to the conflict as soon as possible."It didn't come as a surprise that Russia's top diplomat would voice his government's aversion to American foreign policy. The two countries have been at opposing ends of some of the most internecine conflicts of the past several years, particularly Syria's civil war and the conflict in eastern Ukraine. In April 2017, Russia's Foreign Ministry described American-Russian relations as going through the "most difficult period since the end of the Cold War."Syria: Conflicting narratives Russia has been unwavering in its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has been accused of war crimes and the use of chemical weapons against his own people. The U.S., meanwhile, has provided arms and training to anti-government rebel groups. Human rights activists have urged the UN to charge Russia and Iran, allies of the Syrian regime, with war crimes after thousands of Russian airstrikes were reported to have killed more than 4,000 Syrian civilians. U.S.-led international coalition airstrikes targeting the Islamic State are also reported by rights groups to have killed more than 1,000 civilians. Amnesty International has accused Russia of covering up what it calls the indiscriminate nature of its bombing raids, and the Syrian Network for Human Rights in early 2017 said it "found a similarity between the violations committed by the Russians and the (Syrian) regime." Moscow has labeled these reports "provocations" and denied the figures, maintaining it is targeting Islamic terrorists. Russia has also pushed back on several multilateral attempts to condemn the Syrian president, including vetoing UN resolutions condemning the chemical attack.Meanwhile, Trump's criticism of Russia has been relatively muted, leaving observers puzzled over how the White House views Russia vis-a-vis U.S. interests. In November, Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin jointly pledged renewed support for the UN's Geneva Process, which has so far failed to reach a solution to the conflict. Voices from the U.S. national security establishment, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis, have warned against allying with Russia in Syria, which Trump has frequently called for. 'Dead end' for Israel-Palestine peace, North Korea action 'destructive' Lavrov also slammed Trump's naming of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel , saying it would have a "detrimental effect and risks regarding this dead end in the Israeli-Palestine settlement." The White House motion in December sparked outrage across much of the Middle East over a highly sensitive topic previously left alone by former administrations. Trump defended the move as "a recognition of reality." The minister then went on to lament the upcoming U.S.-led Vancouver meeting on North Korea's nuclear development  to be attended by foreign ministers of 16 countries, predominantly those involved in the 1950-53 Korean War  calling it "destructive"."The agenda (of the meeting) is to develop a mechanism of additional pressure on Pyongyang  We and the Chinese were not invited to it." He added that Moscow supported direct dialogue with the U.S. concerning the Korean Peninsula.Russia has been fairly consistent in resisting international efforts to pressure Pyongyang, vetoing several UN resolutions for strict sanctions on the country. Moscow continues to support the North Korean regime, quietly increasing bilateral trade and oil exports over the last year. Russia also refused to repatriate tens of thousands of North Korean laborers, and in October provided an internet connection to the reclusive state.Trump in December described Russia as "not helping" with the North Korean situation, adding, "We'd like to have Russia's help  very important." Moscow will not accept any changes to the Iran nuclear pact made by the United States, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said during a press conference Monday, accusing the U.S. of fomenting further conflict around the Middle East. The minister fielded questions on a range of topics from Syria to Ukraine, criticizing U.S. activities in Syria and the Israel-Palestine conflict while insisting the Russian government supports peace and reconciliation. "We will not support what the United States is trying to do, changing the wording of the agreement, incorporating things that will be absolutely unacceptable for Iran," Lavrov told reporters. On Friday, President Donald Trump agreed to uphold sanctions relief for Iran as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in 2015 by all United Nations Security Council members and Germany, which allowed the lifting of sanctions in exchange for sharp restrictions on Iran's nuclear program. But Trump's disapproval of the deal is well known. He announced that this would be the "last time" he would waive sanctions and pledged to fix what he called the "terrible flaws" in the deal with the help of Congress. Russia, along with EU leaders, have urged the U.S. to respect the integrity of the original arrangement. Lavrov also disparaged Washington's recently announced plan to implement a 30,000-man border security force in Syria's Kurdish territory. "This is a very serious issue, which causes concerns that a course was set for the partition of Syria," the minister said. He also claimed there was no difference between Trump and former president Barack Obama's policies in Syria, accusing the U.S. of supporting forces that did "not wish to put an end to the conflict as soon as possible." It didn't come as a surprise that Russia's top diplomat would voice his government's aversion to American foreign policy. The two countries have been at opposing ends of some of the most internecine conflicts of the past several years, particularly Syria's civil war and the conflict in eastern Ukraine. In April 2017, Russia's Foreign Ministry described American-Russian relations as going through the "most difficult period since the end of the Cold War." Syria: Conflicting narratives Russia has been unwavering in its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has been accused of war crimes and the use of chemical weapons against his own people. The U.S., meanwhile, has provided arms and training to anti-government rebel groups. Human rights activists have urged the UN to charge Russia and Iran, allies of the Syrian regime, with war crimes after thousands of Russian airstrikes were reported to have killed more than 4,000 Syrian civilians. U.S.-led international coalition airstrikes targeting the Islamic State are also reported by rights groups to have killed more than 1,000 civilians. Amnesty International has accused Russia of covering up what it calls the indiscriminate nature of its bombing raids, and the Syrian Network for Human Rights in early 2017 said it "found a similarity between the violations committed by the Russians and the (Syrian) regime." Moscow has labeled these reports "provocations" and denied the figures, maintaining it is targeting Islamic terrorists. Russia has also pushed back on several multilateral attempts to condemn the Syrian president, including vetoing UN resolutions condemning the chemical attack. Meanwhile, Trump's criticism of Russia has been relatively muted, leaving observers puzzled over how the White House views Russia vis-a-vis U.S. interests. In November, Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin jointly pledged renewed support for the UN's Geneva Process, which has so far failed to reach a solution to the conflict. Voices from the U.S. national security establishment, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis, have warned against allying with Russia in Syria, which Trump has frequently called for. 'Dead end' for Israel-Palestine peace, North Korea action 'destructive' Lavrov also slammed Trump's naming of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel , saying it would have a "detrimental effect and risks regarding this dead end in the Israeli-Palestine settlement." The White House motion in December sparked outrage across much of the Middle East over a highly sensitive topic previously left alone by former administrations. Trump defended the move as "a recognition of reality." The minister then went on to lament the upcoming U.S.-led Vancouver meeting on North Korea's nuclear development  to be attended by foreign ministers of 16 countries, predominantly those involved in the 1950-53 Korean War  calling it "destructive". "The agenda (of the meeting) is to develop a mechanism of additional pressure on Pyongyang  We and the Chinese were not invited to it." He added that Moscow supported direct dialogue with the U.S. concerning the Korean Peninsula. Russia has been fairly consistent in resisting international efforts to pressure Pyongyang, vetoing several UN resolutions for strict sanctions on the country. Moscow continues to support the North Korean regime, quietly increasing bilateral trade and oil exports over the last year. Russia also refused to repatriate tens of thousands of North Korean laborers, and in October provided an internet connection to the reclusive state. Trump in December described Russia as "not helping" with the North Korean situation, adding, "We'd like to have Russia's help  very important."



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Mikus Alps was reported missing from his home last week - Guernsey Police FB page

Russians murdered a man on British soil by torturing and burning him in his car, Ukrainian rebels have claimed.

Mikus Alps, 33, was reported missing from his home in Guernsey last week. A shotgun and human remains were subsequently found in the Latvians burnt out car on the islands south coast.

He was said to have been a member of a volunteer brigade trying to expel Putin's troops from the Crimea for the last two years.

Andriy Gergert, commander of the eighth detached battalion of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, wrote on Facebook: "He was tortured and burnt in the car he used for the military needs of the battalion.

The Sicilian Mafia is a kindergarten compared to the methods used by the Kremlin to achieve its imperialist goals. For them there is no difference whether they kill in eastern Ukraine or in centre of Europe. And they won't stop.

I have no doubt that this was the Muscovites.

Friends of Mr Alps said he regularly handed over used cars to Ukrainian volunteers and had been threatened for providing aid to a Ukrainian battalion in Donbass.

Patrick Rice, Guernsey's head of law enforcement, revealed that a sombre and reflective letter purporting to be from Mr Alps had been handed in to the station.

He added: "We are aware that Mr Alps has connections with a pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian movement.

"Given that it is yet to be formally confirmed whether Mr Alps is alive or deceased, there is no concrete evidence at this stage linking his involvement with this movement to his car being found burnt out."

Forensic investigations will be completed later this week.
Paris (AFP) - Defence ministers from five countries in the Sahel were meeting Monday with French counterpart Florence Parly in the latest push for a pooled force fighting jihadism in the fragile region.

The brief meeting, in which senior military officers were to take part, aims at setting down a concrete timetable for deploying the so-called "G5 Sahel" force, which carried out its maiden mission in November with French support.

The unprecedented initative brings together Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, which aim to create a fully fledged force of 5,000 troops by mid-2018.

These countries have been hit by jihadist attacks that began in Nigeria, claiming thousands of lives, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, crippling local economies and worsening food security.

The G5 Sahel force is intended to work alongside France's 4,000 Barkhane troops, which deployed to Mali in 2013, and the UN's 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali.

But the five participating countries -- all former French colonies -- are among the poorest in the world and their militaries are badly under-equipped.

France, an enthusiastic backer of the force, is leading efforts to drum up funding.

So far, 294 million euros ($360 million) has been pledged, led by 100 million euros committed by Saudi Arabia.

That sum has enabled the first phase of operations. Another round of funding talks takes place in Brussels on February 23.

In an interview Monday with the French daily Liberation, Parly said a key goal of the G5 Sahel plan was to ease dependence on French forces, enabling them to pare back their presence in the Sahel.

"The Africans themselves say it -- this security problem is first and foremost their problem," she said.

On Friday, a group claiming to be from the sp-called Islamic State organisation said the various jihadist groups in the Sahel were teaming up to fight the G5 force.

"We are joining hands to fight the miscreants," said a spokesman for the group, which calls itself the Islamic State in the Great Sahara.

Western security and military sources have recently said they have detected stepped-up cooperation on the ground among the various jihadist groups in Sahel.
Scientists analysed DNA extracted from the teeth of skeletons in a cemetery in Mexico: Henry Romero/Reuters

Scientists believe they may have discovered the cause of an epidemic that struck Mexicos Aztec population in 1545, killing up to 15 million people.

In a paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, they describe how DNA extracted from the teeth of 29 skeletons buried in a cemetery in southern Mexico revealed previously unidentified traces of the salmonella enterica bacterium.

The bacterium is known to cause enteric fever, of which typhoid is an example. According to the study, the symptoms tally with those mentioned in records from the time, which describe victims developing red spots on the skin, vomiting, and bleeding from various body orifices.

The epidemic was one of several to hit the indigenous population soon after the arrival of Europeans in the early 16th century.

"When the Europeans arrived in Mexico, they brought with them lots of different diseases," Ashild Vagene, co-author of the study, told The Independent. "There were dozens of epidemics across the New World and Mexico was particularly hard hit."

"What we're talking about is the devastating decimation of indigenous populations by previously unknown diseases," Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock, lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield, told The Independent.

"Mortality rates were maybe 80 or 90 per cent by 1600," she said. "Imagine nine out of every 10 people dying - it's almost unimaginable."

The cause of the 1545-1550 epidemic has been debated for more than a century. Measles, pneumonic plague and influenza have all been suggested as possibilities, but historians have never reached a consensus.

The indigenous population gave the outbreak the name cocoliztli, a generic term meaning pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language.

Although estimates vary, the epidemic likely wiped out between five and 15 million people  up to 80 per cent of the population.

It came just two decades after a smallpox epidemic that killed up to eight million people just after the Spanish arrival and is considered one of the most devastating epidemics in human history.

Story continues

It affected large areas of central Mexico and Guatamala, perhaps extending as far south as Peru.

Ms Vagene and her team analysed the DNA from two sets of skeletons: 24 that were buried in a cemetery that is closely linked with the "cocoliztli" epidemic, and five found in a cemetery that was in use before the Spanish colonisers arrived in 1519.

The DNA was analysed using a new piece of software that allows scientists to screen for any known pathogen.

"This is ground-breaking for our field of ancient DNA," Ms Vagene said. "It allows us to screen for all pathogens that we know today without having to specify a target organism. We can look for the unknown, which is wonderful."

The salmonella strain was found in 10 of the 24 "post-contact" skeletons and none of the "pre-contact" bodies, which Ms Vagene described as a "great finding".

"Ancient DNA doesn't always preserve very well. It breaks down over time," she said. "So to be able to find it in 10 out of 24 is significant."

The fact that traces were found in the teeth is significant too, according to Ms Vagene.

"Salmonella is a disease that you would normally catch through contaminated food or water sources," she said. "It would start in the gut, so finding it in the teeth suggests it had got into the bloodstream. The disease had spread everywhere in their body."

This suggests that these individuals were not simply carriers of the disease - they were victims of it.

More research is needed to determine whether salmonella enterica was the sole cause of the epidemic or whether other viruses and pathogens were also present in these bodies. Ms Vagene also pointed out that her team only studied one group of skeletons from one burial site.

"We just don't know if this pathogen was present in other areas (affected by the outbreak)," she explained.

Whether it was Europeans who introduced salmonella to the indigenous population is also uncertain.

Several factors point towards this conclusion, however. Salmonella enterica existed in Europe well before the Spanish began their conquest of the region, while the "pre-contact" skeletons analysed for this study had no trace of the pathogen.

Furthermore, it is possible for someone to carry the pathogen without presenting any symptoms.

"Seemingly healthy individuals could have travelled from Europe to Mexico without knowing that they had it," said Ms Vagene.

If the infected person's faeces had come into contact with the local water supply, that could have led to a rapid spread of the disease, she explained.

Elizabeth Graham, professor of archaeology at University College London, offered a different interpretation of the findings.

Salmonella wasnt necessarily the root cause of the epidemic, she told The Independent.

People may have been getting sick because of a different disease, which meant that they were less able to look after themselves and each other, increasing the risk of salmonella.

Everyone was hit at once. No one was able to care for anyone else," she explained. "Salmonella may be a sign of people not being able to care for one another.

But she welcomed the research and the development of enhanced DNA analysis tools that enabled it.

Even today, diagnosis of diseases is difficult, she said. Its so much more difficult to try to figure out how people died hundreds of years ago.

Infectious diseases are particularly difficult to identify, Professor Graham explained, as they usually dont affect the skeleton.

Almost no DNA could be detected on skeletons a while ago, she said. Detection methods have certainly improved.

Dr Dodds Pennock also welcomed the study and its measured conclusions.

"Salmonella is probably not the full story and this study doesn't answer all of the questions," she said. "But it offers very interesting additional evidence for what was happening in the valley of Mexico and beyond in the mid 16th century.
Saudi officials sitting in a high-speed train, ahead of their trip, at a station in Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca - AFP

The luxury Riyadh hotel used as a prison during Saudi Arabia's crackdown on corruption will reopen for business next month, suggesting authorities are close to settling the cases of many suspects.

Dozens of princes, senior officials and top businessmen were detained and confined in the five-star Ritz-Carlton Riyadh as the government launched the purge in early November.

The some 200 detainees occupied half the hotel's 492 rooms. The rest was closed to business.

The hotel's website now accepts bookings from Feb. 14, quoting a nightly rate for its cheapest room of 2,439 riyals (480).

Saudi authorities have said they expect the vast majority of suspects to agree to financial settlements of charges against them, and that Riyadh hopes to recover about $100 billion of illicit funds. A small number are expected to be prosecuted.

Construction giant Saudi Binladin Group said on Saturday that some of its shareholders might transfer part of their holdings to the state in a settlement with authorities. Chairman Bakr Bin Laden and several family members were detained in the crackdown.

In late November, senior Saudi Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, once seen as a leading contender to the throne, was freed after reaching a settlement with authorities that involved paying more than $1 billion, according to a Saudi official.

Another top businessman who has been held at the Ritz-Carlton is billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman and owner of global investment firm Kingdom Holding. A Saudi official said this week that he was negotiating a possible settlement but so far had not agreed on terms.

It has been rumoured, Mr Talal, one of the worlds richest men, could be forced to pay as much as $7bn.

Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a massive political and economic shake-up, marked by the sudden appointment of Prince Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince in June.

The 32-year-old son of the king has spearheaded the unprecedented crackdown on corruption among members of the government and royal family, as he consolidates his grip on power in the kingdom.
Oscar Perez posted videos on social media as police encircled his hideout near Caracas - REUTERS

Two police officers were killed outside Caracas as security forces closed in on a rogue pilot and former policeman who stole a helicopter and bombed government buildings in an audacious stunt that inspired protesters across Venezuela.

Police traced Oscar Perez to a run-down area near the capital on Monday after six months on the run following his air raid in June last year. According to the Ministry of the Interior and Justice, five members of the terrorist cell were arrested in a shootout that lasted several hours and left five injured.

Mr Perez raised the alarm in typically dramatic fashion with a series of posts on Instagram showing him with a bloody face as he claimed to be under siege from regime forces.

He was cornered by special security forces in his hiding place in El Junquito, a poor area 25 km northwest of Caracas, according to Venezuelan authorities.

"They are firing at us with grenade launchers, we said we were going to surrender and they dont want to let us surrender, they want to kill us" Mr Perez said in one of the videos published online during the siege.

Police vehicles seen lining a street during a shootout between security forces and rogue Venezuelan helicopter pilot Oscar Perez Credit: MARCO BELLO/ REUTERS

Diosdado Cabello, President Nicolas Maduro's second in command, confirmed the gunfight on his Twitter account last night. The terrorist Oscar Perez and his band opened fire on the police, killing a policeman, wounding 10, three of them seriously he wrote.

State television also confirmed the arrests, although Mr Perezs fate was last night unkonwn.

Mr Perez, a former police pilot, has been missing since last June when he hijacked a police helicopter and tossed grenades on the Interior Ministry and Supreme Court. There were no injuries or fatalities.

He went into hiding immediately after the attack, but sent messages on social media calling for a rebellion against the government of President Maduro, whom he blames for the economic crisis that the country is facing.

Members of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) patrol Caracas as an operation to capture Oscar Perez Credit: AFP/JUAN BARRETO

The attack occurred in the midst of a wave of protests against Mr Maduro's as he dismantled the opposition-held legislative and replaced it with a puppet congress. The uprising left more than 100 dead last year.

Story continues

Accused of terrorism, for months Mr Perez was the subject of "wanted" posters pasted across Venezuela as authorities attempted to calm simmering tensions.

His group was also accused of breaking into a National Guard building on December 18 and stealing military weapons.

Mr Perez's last video was posted at around 10:30am, local time on Monday. Some local media outlets say he was killed during the operation but The Telegraph was unable to confirm the claims.

Aside from the five of Mr Perez's group who were arrested, authorities also said "criminals were killed", although the number of deaths was not confirmed.
By Prak Chan Thul PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Signs of division emerged among opponents of long-serving Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Monday after prominent exiles said they had founded a new movement following a ban on the main opposition party. Hun Sen, who celebrated 33 years in power on Sunday, has become a master at dividing his opponents and using force and legal measures to neutralize challenges to his rule. The new opposition movement was announced at the weekend by Hun Sen's veteran foe Sam Rainsy following the dissolution of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) last year and the arrest of its leader, Kem Sokha. But Kem Sokha's former cabinet chief said there was no need for the new Cambodia National Rescue Movement (CNRM). "The CNRP represents the will of the more than three million people who voted for it, so we continue to move forward within the framework of the CNRP, without changing," Muth Chantha said on Facebook. The CNRP was dissolved after the arrest of Kem Sokha, who was accused of plotting to take power with American help - charges he says were politically motivated because the threat the party posed to Hun Sen at this year's election. The dissolution of the party and arrest of Kem Sokha have been condemned by Western aid donors who have said the election cannot now be credible. Hun Sen, 65, is expected to win easily. The CNRP was set up in 2012 to unify Sam Rainsy's and Kem Sokha's separate parties. Its success in a 2013 general election and local elections last year had shown what a powerful electoral force it had become. Sam Rainsy served as finance minister in an ill-fated coalition set up when Hun Sen refused to give up power after losing a U.N.-organized election in 1993. He has lived in France since 2015 to avoid a series of convictions he says were politically motivated. Sam Rainsy said on Sunday the new CNRM could launch appeals to the people to organize peaceful protests, to workers to go on strike and to the armed forces to join them - although at this stage it has made no specific call for action. On the streets of the capital, Phnom Penh, an opposition stronghold, the formation of the new movement met scepticism from CNRP supporters. "Even though people are still with the opposition party, they want to stay quiet, people are afraid to protest," said Phat Sokan, a 38-year old vegetable seller. Hing Soksan, the former director of the youth wing of the CNRP, urged Sam Rainsy to reconsider the move and said the new movement would also endanger former CNRP members. "A majority of the masses expressed disapproval and asked why this movement is set up under these circumstances," he said. Sam Rainsy and another senior opposition politician, Mu Sochua, who are members of the movement, did not respond immediately to requests for comment on the signs of division. A government spokesman described the new movement as "desperate" on Sunday, adding that the Supreme Court had banned 118 of the CNRP's senior members from politics ahead of the general election on July 29. (Editing by Matthew Tostevin, Robert Birsel)
By Elias Groll, Dan De Luce, Sharon Weinberger, and Robbie Gramer

Fat fingers. Officials in Hawaii are beginning to sort through just how the states emergency alert system incorrectly told residents on Saturday that a ballistic missile was speeding toward the island. The results arent pretty: Early reports indicate that the wrong button was pushed by an employee starting his shift.

The employee began work just after 8 a.m. was supposed to initiate a test of the states ballistic missile warning system, as is common practice at the start of the work day. But instead of initiating the test  test missile alert on a drop down menu  he clicked missile alert state officials told the Washington Post. That snafu set off a 38-minute scramble for state officials to retract the warning.

Hawaii residents describe a terrifying panic in the immediate aftermath of the warning, with parents having to choose between which children they would rush toward and families scrambling to shelter in place and track down their relatives.

State and federal officials are promising to get to the bottom of why the erroneous alert was broadcast and to prevent additional such messages from being broadcast. Besides suggesting a two-person verification system for the Hawaii messaging system, officials have so far provided few details on how the system might be overhauled.

And if theres any doubt about the severity of Saturdays incident, the New York Timess Max Fisher walks readers through how such a false alert could lead to an inadvertent exchange of nuclear weapons.

Speaking of nuclear weapons. The Huffington Post got its hands on a draft copy of the Trump administrations 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. The document promises more low-yield nuclear weapons as part of a broader expansions of Americas nuclear arsenal.

Welcome to a Tuesday edition of this weeks SitRep! As we mourn the death of Dolores ORiordan, why dont you linger?

As we move to a weekly edition of the newsletter, what would you like to see more of (or less of, for that matter)? Please send your comments, suggestions, and tips to elias.groll@foreignpolicy.com.

Story continues

Cold War 2.0. The threat posed by a resurgent Russia  and its submarines  will be high on the agenda when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, and his NATO counterparts meet on Tuesday, FPs Dan De Luce reports from Brussels.

NATO defense chiefs, who meet twice a year, are planning to hammer out details of a new command to safeguard shipping lanes in the North Atlantic, a move that carries echoes of the Cold War.

NATO members are increasingly concerned about growing Russian submarine activity, particularly around vital undersea cables that provide Internet and telecommunications connections to Europe and North America.

The maritime domain is an area of focus, Dunford told reporters traveling with him to the NATO meeting. The Euro-Atlantic link must be protected in order for us to meet our alliance commitments.

The Pentagon is already preparing to spend $14.4 million to refurbish hangars at a Cold War-era base in Iceland to allow more P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft to keep a watchful eye on stealthy Russian submarines, FP reported last month.

Though some NATO members are grousing about the cost, Dunford indicated he favored having at least some forces at the ready. Some amount of this capability has to be there day to day, the general said.

Dunford added that there is a consensus among allies about the nature of the Russian threat, but disagreement at times about the best way to address it. The NATO senior officers are also discussing setting up a rear area command that would oversee the movement of forces across Europe in case of a war. Germany is in the running to host such a rear headquarters, officials said.

NATO members havent decided where to place the command overseeing shipping lanes and how it will be organized, but one option would be to put it in Norfolk, Va.

Russias spy subs. The Barents Observer reports that Russia has made significant investments in its submarine force and that it is stepping up activities at its naval base in Olenya Bay. Russias naval base there serves as the home port for Russias increasingly advanced submarine fleet.

She went to Jared. American counterintelligence officials warned Jared Kushner, President Donald Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser, that Wendi Murdoch, the former wife of media magnate Rupert Murdoch, may have been using her relationship with Kushner to advance the interests of the Chinese government, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Journalist Michael Wolff  of Fire and Fury fame  had this to say on the issue last night: Since their divorce, Murdoch has been telling anybody who would listen that Wendi is a Chinese spy  and had been throughout the marriage.

The congressional week ahead. The Senate is set to vote at 5:30 p.m. today on a cloture motion for the reauthorization of key foreign intelligence powers, including Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act.

On Wednesday, policy chiefs for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube will get a grilling from members of the Senate Commerce Committee as part of a hearing on whether the tech platforms are doing enough to curb the spread of extremist content.

Also on Wednesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee will be carrying out confirmation hearings for President Trumps picks to serve as the intelligence community and inspector general and general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

At some point this week, former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon will likely testify before the House Intelligence Committees as part of its investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Bloomberg reports. Bannon has curiously managed to avoid scrutiny in the Russia probe, and well be watching this week whether the former Breitbart honchos falling out with the White House leads to renewed attention from investigators. Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager, is also set to go before the committee this week.

Trump adviser Hope Hicks may also go before the House Intelligence Committee this week, CNN reports.

Trump condo sales. A BuzzFeed investigation reveals that President Donald Trumps real estate empire has made sold a large number of properties in all-cash deals that raise money-laundering concerns. The investigation provides the first public examination of money flowing through Trumps real estate holdings in transactions that experts argue pose a high risk for money laundering and may point toward possible avenues of inquiry for Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation, which has attorneys on staff expert in money-laundering cases.

Ports Open. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies are finally allowing in fuel and other commercial shipments to Red Sea ports in Yemen after months of appeals from aid agencies and eleventh hour pressure from the United States.

A top State Department official, David Satterfield, acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that Red Sea ports were now open to humanitarian deliveries.

Riyadhs change of heart came after President Donald Trump issued a statement in December demanding the Saudi-led coalition lift the blockade on humanitarian access, which has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine.

The moves come after Republican Sen. Todd Young of Indiana held up the confirmation of Trumps nominee for the top legal adviser in the State Department. Young withdrew his hold last month after the nominee acknowledged the Saudis could be violating international humanitarian law  and a U.S. law  by obstructing aid deliveries. FP has reported extensively about the Saudi blockade and Youngs focus on Yemens plight. You can read about it here, here and here.

Go West, young man! Secretary of State Rex Tillerson traveled to Vancouver, Canada on Monday for an international summit on countering North Korea. In a show of State-Pentagon solidarity, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is tagging along. State Department Director of Policy Planning, Brian Hook, told reporters last week the meetings will focus on taking stock of the U.S.-led pressure campaign to choke economic lifelines to North Korea from around the world and draft a to-do list on the Hermit Kingdom for 2018. Nearly two dozen countries, including South Korean and Japan, are joining the talks.

NotPetya. The CIA concluded that Russian military hackers were responsible for the NotPetya worm, which crippled computers in Ukraine and then spread around the world. According to the Washington Post, the CIA has determined with high confidence that hackers working on behalf of Russias military intelligence agency GRU created the bug.

How do you solve a problem like Meltdown? When chipmakers learned last year of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, they scrambled to solve one of the worst computer security problems ever discovered. In a fascinating new article, The Verge describes how the myriad companies, researchers, and officials tried to coordinate their response  and how those plans were dashed.

The A.I. chip revolution. A slew of start-ups are fueling a billion-dollar industry trying to design a new computer chip for artificial intelligence applications, Cade Metz writes for the New York Times. The massive investments in up-start chipmakers represents a possible sea change in an industry that has been dominated by a few small players and could lead to major advances in AI technology.

Were jammin! The U.S. Air Force has deployed at least one of its advanced electronic warfare planes, the EC-130H Compass Call to South Korea, the Aviationist reports. The plane has advanced electronic warfare capabilities and may even be able to hack into adversary networks from the air, a capability that would likely come in handy in the event of a shooting war with North Korea.

DIY Drones. Homemade drones attacked Russian forces and a Saudi-flagged merchant vessel in recent weeks, a type of assault that arms experts argue will only increase as drone technology becomes more easily available, USNI News reports.

Stuxnet leak probe. Prosecutors examining how New York Times reporter David Sanger revealed the existence of the Stuxnet operation against Irans nuclear program secured a court order to examine the private email account of retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright, who pleaded guilty in 2016 to lying to the FBI but was ultimately pardoned by President Barack Obama.

Facebooks fake news problem. Social media giant Facebook is tweaking the way News Feed  the main stream of information on its site and app  works by favoring material posted by friends and family. The change in Facebooks algorithm represents a potentially huge loss in traffic for media outlets and may magnify the prevalence of fake news on the platform in emerging democracies, the New York Times reports.

French CFIUS equivalent for AI. French officials are looking at additional powers to block foreign acquisitions of firms working on data protection and artificial intelligence, Reuters reports. The possible move by the French government comes as European security leaders are examining efforts by China to acquire intellectual property through business acquisitions.

Syrian chemical attacks. The medical relief organization UOSSM reports that it observed a suspected gas attack in eastern Ghouta of Syria. The attack injured five women and a child, and victims were treated with symptoms consistent with chemical exposure, including difficulty breathing, discreet dyspnea, mild exaltation, no change in the iris, and the odor of chlorine on their clothing, according to the charity.

The wisdom of Erik Prince. The notorious founder of Blackwater reemerged briefly last week on SiriusXMs Breitbart News Tonight to defend Donald Trumps highly reviled comments describing some countries as shitholes. Prince recalled being sent to a Haiti as a Navy SEAL in 1994, where he encountered raw sewage. So if the president says some places are shitholes, hes accurate, Prince said. Literally. Prince, who tried unsuccessfully to lobby President Trump last year on a plan to privatize the Afghanistan war, has been rumored to be considering a run for the Senate in Wyoming.

Ships that go pew-pew. The Navy is getting ready this fall to bolt a laser weapon to the deck of a San Antonio class amphibious ship, according to Defense News. The USS Portland will be equipped with the new Laser Weapon System, knows as LaWS, which is designed to target drones. Dont get too excited, though. Defense News says the Navy captain in charge of integrating the weapon didnt know the specific power level or capability of the laser and is still awaiting drawings from the Office of Naval Research. The laser wont even be integrated into the ships warfare system.

The SR-72 is back. A senior official from Lockheed Martins secretive Skunks Works division hinted last week that the company has made progress on the long-rumored hypersonic successor to the SR-71 Blackbird. Lockheeds Jack OBannon showed a side depicting a notional SR-72 at an aeronautics conference, and seemed to allude to the aircraft having already been built, according to a series of tweets by aviation reporter Stephen Trimble, of Flight Global. We couldnt have the engine itself, it would have melted down into slag if we had tried to produce it five years ago, OBannon said. Now we can digitally print that engine.

Renewed violence in Baghdad. Two suicide bombers struck the heart of Baghdad on Monday, leaving 27 dead and scores wounded, according to the Washington Post. The attack is the first of its kind since the Iraqi government declared victory over the Islamic State.

The deal of the century. The fallout from President Trumps decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital intensified on Monday, as Palestinian leaders voted to no longer recognize Israel until that country recognizes Palestine as a state.

About those Houthi missiles. A U.N. report found that Iran violated the arms embargo on Yemen by failing to keep Iranian missiles out of the hands of Houthi rebels. The report was delivered to the U.N. Security Council last week.

To the shores of Tripoli. Fighting in the Libyan capital of Tripoli left at least 20 people dead and shut the citys airport. Libyan officials speaking to Reuters said the fighting was part of an attempt by militants to free their jailed comrades from a prison near the airport.

The Marines get a new rifle! The Marine Corps has decided to equip its troops with the Heckler & Koch M27. The weapon has already seen action in Afghanistan and comes as part of a broader overhaul of Marine Corps gear.

NATO budgets. The Danish government will seek a significant increase in defense spending to counter what Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen describes as an increased military threat from Russia. The spending hike  as much as 20 percent over five years  still needs parliamentary approval.

Gulf spat. Authorities in the United Arab Emirates accused Qatari fighter jets of intercepting two civilian airliners, a claim Doha dismissed as baseless.
Google has revealed a special doodle to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The federal holiday, introduced by president Ronald Reagan in 1983, honors the tireless work of King to further the civil rights movement in the United States. The company has a history of commemorative homepages sketches, including ones for the anniversary of the hole punch as well as figures like Gertrude Jekyll and Max Born, but Mondays sketch holds a special meaning to the artist.

The doodle was produced by guest artist Cannaday Chapman. Born in Huntington, West Virginia, he received a BFA in Illustration from New Yorks School of Visual Arts. His work has been featured in galleries in the United States and Italy, and previous clients include the New Yorker, the New York Times and GQ Magazine.

As a black man, I wouldnt be able to do what Im doing today if it wasnt for [Martin Luther King] and the brave people of the civil rights movement, Chapman told Google in an interview.

Chapman worked with the Black Googlers Network, one of the over 20 employee resource groups aimed at supporting company diversity. Employees assist with events like Black History month and mentoring, either through a voluntary basis or in the 20 percent time where people are encouraged to work on other beneficial projects during their working day.

The doodle evokes Kings speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In the speech, he said that he dreamt of a day when his children would not be judged on the color of their skin. The image depicts a young black girl, on her fathers shoulders, listening to Kings speech with the Washington Monument in the background.

Chapman produced a number of drafts before settling on the final design:

Draft versions of the final image.

Read the full interview between Google and Chapman below:

What does MLK and MLK day mean to you personally?

Martin Luther King Jr.s message is especially relevant today and will be relevant for the remainder of civilization. Dr. King is most remembered for fighting for the rights of African Americans, but he fought for the rights of all Americans. He believed in fairness and equity for everyone. As a black man, I wouldnt be able to do what Im doing today if it wasnt for him and the brave people of the civil rights movement.

Story continues

What were your first thoughts when you were approached for this project?

I felt very honored to have the opportunity to pay tribute to one of Americas bravest leaders. I was pretty busy when I was approached for this assignment, but its Google and Martin Luther King Jr. Thats an opportunity I couldnt pass up.

Did you draw inspiration from anything in particular for this Doodle?

I was inspired by people. It may appear that this movement or any civil rights movement was brought about by one person, but its the people that have the power to bring change. I wanted to make an image about those people.

What message would you like for people to get after seeing the Doodle?

I would like people to reflect on this moment in history. I would like people to remember that current events and our actions today will shape the future generations of tomorrow. What kind of example do we want to set for our children and our childrens children?

Photos via Google

Photos via Google

Written by Mike Brown

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Athens (AFP) - Strikes on Monday crippled public transport in Athens and hit air traffic ahead of a parliamentary vote on controversial reforms demanded by Greece's creditors, including curbs on industrial action.

Apart from introducing much larger quorums on unions to call a strike, the 100-odd reforms also provide for the foreclosure and online auction of properties belonging to bad debt holders.

Both measures are fiercely opposed by leftists and trade unions.

The government insists that the changes only affect the local chapters of unions, and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras angrily rejected criticism that his leftist administration was out to limit strikes.

"It's a shameless lie (to claim) that this government is enforcing demands by creditors and industrialists to deregulate the labour market," Tsipras told parliament.

"Strikes are neither abolished nor threatened by this government," he said.

Debt-laden Greece has received three multi-billion-euro bailouts since 2010.

The third rescue programme, currently financially supported by EU states but not the International Monetary Fund, runs to August 2018 and Athens then hopes to fully return to market financing.

"Today's vote will be crucial to speed up the country's exit from the bailout in seven months," Tsipras said.

Monday's strike, called by a slew of unions, caused havoc in Athens, with the shutdown of public transport leading to huge traffic jams.

State employees were also asked to strike by their union Adedy while air traffic controllers staged a work stoppage, disrupting flights.

Greece has seen around 50 strikes since 2010 following austerity measures imposed by creditors in return for multi-billion-euro bailouts run by the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank.

Unions say that the creditors' demand to change the 36-year-old industrial action law is only the first step in ongoing EU-IMF efforts to limit strikes.

"You are starting to tear apart the right to strike," Communist party leader Dimitris Koutsoubas told the government in the parliament debate.

After Monday's vote in parliament, Athens will wait for European finance ministers to approve the latest tranche of a third bailout programme totalling 4.5 billion euros ($5.5 billion).
Damascus (AFP) - Syria on Monday lambasted the US-led coalition's plan to create a 30,000-strong border force in the country's northeast, saying it would consider its members "traitors".

The alliance fighting the Islamic State group announced on Sunday that it was working with Arab and Kurdish fighters to establish a Border Security Force (BSF).

The BSF would be responsible for preventing a "resurgence" of IS in areas where the jihadists had been cleared by the Syrian Democratic Forces.

But an official source in Syria's foreign ministry on Monday denounced the plan.

"Syria strongly condemns the US announcement on the creation of militias in the country's northeast, which represents a blatant attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity and unity of Syria, and a flagrant violation of international law," said the source, cited by state news agency SANA.

"Syria considers any Syrian who participates in these militias sponsored by the Americans as a traitor to their people and nation, and will deal with them on this basis."

Backed by the US-led coalition's air strikes, advisers and weapons, the SDF has ousted IS from swathes of territory in the east and north, including IS bastion Raqa.

With the offensive winding down, the coalition and SDF said they were shifting their focus to border security to prevent a jihadist comeback.

"A strong Border Security Force will prohibit Daesh's freedom of movement and deny the transportation of illicit materials," the coalition said, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

In a new emailed statement on Monday, it said it aimed to create the 30,000-strong force "over the next several years".

About half would be SDF veterans, and another 15,000 would be new recruits.

"The Border Security Force will be stationed along the borders of SDF-held areas, to include portions of the Euphrates river valley and international borders to the east and north of SDF-liberated territory," the coalition said.

Story continues

Turkey reacted sharply to news of the border force on Sunday, saying it would "legitimise a terror organisation".

Ankara is fiercely opposed to the SDF, which is dominated by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) -- considered by the Turkish government to be a "terrorist" group.

Both the US-led coalition and the SDF declined to comment on potential rules of engagement with Turkish or Syrian troops.
By Guy Faulconbridge LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and European Union leaders should increase the pressure on President Bashar al-Assad and his allies Russia and Iran to return to talks to end Syria's civil war, Syria's chief opposition negotiator said on Monday. Nasr Hariri, the chief negotiator for Syria's main opposition grouping, said that unless the West forced President Assad and his big power allies to seek peace then the blood of Syrian civilians would continue to be spilled. "I would like to ask all those countries that promised they would support the Syrian people and their aspirations for democracy and peace: why didn't they fulfill their promises?" Hariri, speaking in English, told Reuters in London. He called for Trump and EU leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May to get tougher with Assad. All diplomatic initiatives have so far failed to yield progress in ending the Syrian civil war, which is now entering its eighth year having killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven 11 million from their homes. The map of Syria's conflict has been decisively redrawn in favor of Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies during the past two years. They have recaptured major population centers in western Syria from rebels seeking to overthrow him and pushed back Islamic State in the east. In the face of the collapse of rebel-held territory, most Western countries have quietly softened their positions that Assad must leave power as part of any peace deal. But the opposition entered the last formal talks last month without softening its demand Assad go, prompting the government to declare the talks pointless. Nevertheless, Hariri suggested Western powers still had enough influence to push the government to negotiate. "It is time for President Trump, Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister May to say: 'Stop'," the former cardiologist said. "It is time for Trump, Merkel and May to increase pressure and bring the international community together to get a genuine and just political situation in Syria." Hariri represents the Saudi-backed umbrella group of Syrian opposition groups which are opposed to Assad and supported by the West. He said the next round of the so-called "Geneva talks" on the fate of Syria would take place in late January, probably around Jan. 24-26 in Vienna. MORE TALKS? Hariri said discussions in Washington, including with White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster, had been positive and that the Trump administration understood the situation. "Iran and Russia are trying to deprioritize the transition," he said. "We need the international community's help to put pressure on the regime and their backers, Russia and Iran." "The Americans want to test the Russians and the regime in the next round of talks. They want to move the Geneva process forward," Hariri said. When asked about U.S. plans to help support a 30,000-strong force dominated by the mainly Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), he said it could lead to Syria's partition. "What are the benefits of establishing such an army?" he asked. "It will open the door wide for a future struggle in the region. It could open the door to the future partition of Syria." Assad has responded to the plan by vowing to crush the new force and drive U.S. troops from Syria. Iran said on Tuesday creation of the SDF force would "fan the flames of war", echoing the vehement response of Syria, Turkey and Russia. Hariri said it was very unlikely that the Syrian opposition would attend a meeting on Syria organized by Russia in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. The opposition had received no invitation so far, and no final decision on attendance had been made. "We have not been invited yet," he said. "The general mood is not to go to Sochi. My personal view is that in its current shape, it is unacceptable to attend Sochi." (Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Michael Holden and Peter Graff)
A 17-year-old girl escaped her California home and phoned 911 to report she and her 12 brothers and sisters were being held captive by their parents, authorities said.

The teen fled her Perris house early Sunday and called from a cellular device she took from her suburban tract house, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

She told the operator that she and her siblings were prisoners in their own home and some were wrapped in chains secured with padlocks, authorities said.

Officers from the Perris Police Department and sheriff's deputies met with the girl, who they initially thought was about 10 years old because of her emaciated body, authorities said.

Police and deputies then went to the family home and questioned parents David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49.

A search of the home revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling conditions, the sheriff's department said.

A family photo from the parents' Facebook page.

A family photo from the parents' Facebook page. David-Louise Turpin/Facebook

"The parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner," the department said in a statement.

Of the 12 children discovered in the home, deputies were "shocked to discover" that seven were actually adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29, the department said.

"The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty," the statement said.

Each of the victims was interviewed by authorities. They were given food and drinks after telling authorities they were "starving," the sheriff's department said.

The six children were admitted for treatment at Riverside University Hospital, authorities said. The adults were transported to Corona Regional Medical Center for examinations.

The parents were arrested and booked into the Robert Presley Detention Center on multiple counts of torture and child endangerment. Bail was set at $9 million each.

Story continues

James and Betty Turpin of West Virginia, the parents of David Turpin, told ABC News they were "surprised and shocked" by the couple's arrest.

The victims' grandparents said they haven't seen the family for four or five years, but spoke regularly by phone with their son and daughter-in-law. They said they didn't speak with their grandchildren, who are home-schooled.

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On Better Late Than Never, Terry Bradshaw took some bad advice when he decided he should have his chest waxed before going to the beach in Barcelona, Spain. Having played 14 years in the NFL, Bradshaw has dealt with his fair share of pain, but nothing prepared him for the agony that comes with body hair removal.

William Shatner and George Foreman looked on as Jeff Dye, the sidekick, applied wax to one side of Bradshaws chest. When Dye ripped the wax off, Bradshaw shouted and squealed and was done with the chest-waxing idea. But Shatner was quick to point out that it would look weird if Bradshaw were missing hair only on one side of his chest. So, despite Foreman telling him not to, Bradshaw had a spot on the other side of his chest waxed too. He probably should have listened to Foreman because the second one appeared to take skin with it. Later at the beach, Bradshaw had a large red spot on each side of his chest.

Have someone slap you with a boat paddle. Thats close, Bradshaw said, describing the pain. He added, I got kicked by a horse, run over by a truck. That is a warm-up compared to having your hair ripped off your chest.

Better Late Than Never airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on NBC. Watch clips and full episodes of Better Late Than Never for free on Yahoo View.

Check out why Terry Bradshaw needed 19 stitches after a water slide incident in Germany:

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

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.
Perris (United States) (AFP) - Investigators sought to shed light Tuesday on how a California couple arrested on suspicion of torture were able to keep their 13 malnourished children -- ages 2 to 29 - confined in their suburban home in grim conditions with no one noticing.

Sheriff's deputies found some of the children shackled to their beds in filthy conditions Sunday after receiving a 911 call from one of the kids, a 17-year-old girl who managed to escape.

She was so emaciated that officers said that at first they thought she was just 10 years old.

"Further investigation revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, but the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner," the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said in a statement.

"Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29. The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty."

Police gave them food and beverages "after they claimed to be starving."

The parents, 57-year-old David Allen Turpin and 49-year-old Louise Anna Turpin, were booked on suspicion of torture and child endangerment with bail set at $9 million each.

Turpin's parents, who live in West Virginia, told ABC News they were "surprised and shocked," adding they had not seen their son or his children in four or five years.

Neighbor Julio Reyes, 38, told AFP: "We've seen a couple of teenagers maybe last year mowing the lawn, and you know they put some Christmas decorations."

"Never really thought anything of any sort would happen like that," Reyes added.

- Middle class neighborhood -

The Spanish-style stucco house where the victims were allegedly held is located in a middle class neighborhood of Perris, a small city some 70 miles (110 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles.

Story continues

Three cars were parked at the home, along with a van with tinted windows. One of the cars, a blue compact, had a child's seat in the back.

There are indications that the children were allowed outside the house in recent years.

A Facebook page under the name of David-Louise Turpin -- still visible on Tuesday -- includes pictures of the couple staging renewals of their wedding vows from 2011 to 2016, with their children present.

In the latest set, uploaded in April-July 2016, Louise Turpin wears a long white wedding gown while her husband is dressed in a suit.

An Elvis Presley impersonator holds a microphone and poses with the couple and children in a scene reminiscent of a Las Vegas wedding.

Nine girls, all with long dark hair, wear matching fuchsia plaid dresses with white tights, while a baby girl is dressed in a bright pink dress.

Three boys, their dark hair in bowl cuts like David Turpin, are dressed in suits with fuchsia ties.

An April 2016 photograph shows the same smiling children and the couple wearing jeans and red t-shirts that read "Thing 1," "Thing 2," "Thing 3" and so on -- a reference to the mischievous twins in the popular Dr Seuss book "The Cat in the Hat."

In another September 2015 photograph, Louise Turpin holds a baby wearing a t-shirt reading "Mommy loves me."

Neighbor Jamelia Adams, 39, expressed shock.

"It's just really, really sad," Adams told AFP.

"Here's a beautiful neighborhood, brand-new housing tract, newer cars in the yard, and here's some kids from 29 to two that was just held captive and malnourished and filthy. It's just heartbreaking."

- Bankruptcy -

David Turpin is registered in state records as head of a private school. The address matches that of the Turpins' home, and the children were apparently home-schooled.

The Los Angeles Times said the couple had lived at the Perris house since 2010, after a move from Texas, adding they went bankrupt twice.

According to court papers, the couple filed for bankruptcy in 2011, at a time when David Turpin was working as an engineer for defense contractor Northrop Grumman, earning $140,000 a year.

"They seemed like very normal people who fell into financial problems," Ivan Trahan, the lawyer who represented them in that case, told The Los Angeles Times.

The case recalls previous kidnapping horrors in the United States that have made global headlines in recent years.

Ariel Castro abducted three young women and held them captive at his Cleveland home for a decade. He was arrested in May 2013 after one of his victims escaped, and later hung himself in his prison cell.

Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped as an 11-year-old and repeatedly raped over 18 years by convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido in California. She was rescued in August 2009.
Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Since taking office, US President Donald Trump has shown unfailing support for Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians, distancing himself from the two-state solution and recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

- Radio silence -

In January 2017, the White House refuses to comment on whether the president backs Israel's decision to approve 2,500 new settler homes in the West Bank.

"Israel continues to be a huge ally of the United States," says spokesman Sean Spicer. "He wants to grow closer to Israel to make sure it gets the full respect in the Middle East."

The following day the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Saeb Erekat, says he is shocked by Trump's silence on the plans.

- First rupture -

In February the new president makes his first sharp break with previous US Middle East policy.

Welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington, he says the two-state solution to the conflict is not the only one possible to achieve peace.

In March, the Trump administration again breaks with years of diplomacy when a meeting goes ahead between his representative and those of Israeli settlers.

- Hard talk -

In March, addressing the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, vows to never allow "Israel-bashing" at the world body.

In May, Trump expresses optimism about the possibility of reaching a peace agreement when he hosts the first ever visit to the White House by the Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas.

"We will get it done," he says, remaining vague on specifics.

- Trump first at Western Wall -

During a two-day trip to Jerusalem in May, Trump hails the "unbreakable bond" between the United States and Israel.

He warns Israelis and Palestinians they "will face tough decisions" and urges "determination, compromise and the belief that peace is possible".

Story continues

On the same trip he becomes the first sitting US president to visit the Western Wall in the city, one of the most sacred sites in Judaism, also known as the Wailing Wall.

- 'Alleged occupation' -

In September the Palestinians attack as "unacceptable" comments made to Israel by US Ambassador David Friedman when he refers to the "alleged occupation" of the Palestinian territories.

Later that month, Friedman again provokes anger by downplaying Israel's 50-year occupation of the West Bank, claiming the Jewish state was "only occupying two percent" of the territory.

- 'Slap of the century' -

In a momentous announcement that breaks spectacularly with the policy of his predecessors, Trump in December recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Upending decades of US policy, Trump's decision provokes a wave of condemnation around the world with the exception of Israel itself.

Abbas accuses the United States of "deplorable and unacceptable measures" that "deliberately undermine all peace efforts".

In January 2018, Abbas is emphatic in his response to Trump's pledge to reach the "ultimate deal" in the conflict. "The deal of the century is the slap of the century and we will not accept it," he says.
Donald Trump with President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan during a joint press conference at the White House, Jan. 16, 2018. (Photo: Olivier Douliery/Pool via Bloomberg/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON  President Trump proclaimed Tuesday Religious Freedom Day, but he spent the afternoon meeting with an authoritarian leader who has been accused of conducting a brutal campaign of repression against religious minorities and political opponents in his country.

Trumps visit with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Tuesday included a working lunch and a sit-down in the Oval Office. According to the White House, Trump and Nazarbayev pledged to strengthen cooperation on political and security issues, trade and investment during their meetings. However, the White House would not say whether Trump urged him to adopt reforms or address human rights issues during the meeting.

After Nazarbayev arrived at the White House, the pair headed to the Oval Office where they praised each other. Trump called Nazarbayev highly respected and said he has done a great, great job. Through a translator, Nazarbayev said Trumps first year in office has been very productive and that Trump achieved a lot.

Nazarbayevs regime has been accused of abuses by a number of international organizations, including Human Rights Watch, which has said the country heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech and religion. Kazakhstan has detained journalists, human rights activists, opposition politicians and one Teymur Akhmedov, a Jehovahs Witness, who was accused of incitement of religious hatred and arrested last January. A 2016 U.S. State Department report said Nazarbayevs government has continued to arrest, detain and imprison members of religious groups. The country is majority Muslim.

Trump with President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. (Photo: Olivier Douliery/Pool via Bloomberg/Getty Images)

The White House also did not respond to questions about whether Trump would bring up Akhmedovs case or allegations that detainees in Kazakhstan are tortured.

Trumps meeting with Nazarbayev and his promise of increased ties between the U.S. and Kazakhstan also provoked questions about the presidents personal finances and alleged links to Kazakhstan.

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When they finished speaking in the Oval Office, reporters in the room shouted questions, and one asked about allegations that illicit money from Kazakhstan made its way to a Trump property in New York City.

Last month, Bloomberg published a report noting family members of a former executive accused of laundering billions from a Kazakh bank bought condos in the former Trump SoHo, a hotel and residential high-rise in downtown Manhattan from which Trumps name was removed in December. The piece also noted an ongoing civil lawsuit that alleged a Kazakh oligarch sent millions of dollars to a company that helped Trump develop the hotel.

Mr. President, is there any Kazakh money in Trump SoHo? a reporter asked.

No idea. Really no idea, Trump said.

Trump maintains ownership of the real estate company he ran before taking office, although after his election he handed off control to his two eldest sons. The Trump Organization has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the Kazakh money-laundering case.

Trump SoHo isnt the only potential financial link between Trump and Kazakhstan. Last August, the New Yorkers Adam Davidson wrote about a 2011 plan for a real estate development in the country of Georgia bearing Trumps name. The project was partially funded by a Kazakh oligarch and Trump was reportedly paid $1 million for his involvement.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo News about whether Trump has financial ties to anyone in Kazakhstan and whether his personal business dealings influenced his desire to strengthen relations with that country.

Trump during a joint press conference with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev. (Photo: Olivier Douliery/Pool via Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Read more from Yahoo News:
Smoke rises from PKK/PYD controlled Afrin's Nesreyieh district of Aleppo as Turkish Army's armoured vehicle deployed as reinforcement to troops at the border line - Anadolu

Turkey's president has called on Nato to take a stance against the US, a fellow ally, over its plans to form a 30,000-strong Kurdish-led border security force in Syria.

Turkey has been threatening to launch a new military offensive in Syria against Syrian Kurdish militias, which Ankara considers to be terrorists because of their affiliation with a outlawed group fighting an insurgency in southern Turkey.

On Monday President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Washington of creating an "army of terror" in Syria, along the border with Turkey, and vowed to crush the US-backed border force.

Addressing his ruling party's deputies on Tuesday, Mr Erdogan questioned Nato's stance on the issue, saying: "Hey Nato! You are obliged to make a stance against those who harass and violate the borders of your members."

Ties between Turkey and the US have deteriorated over the latter's support of the Kurdish militia, known as the People's Defense Units, or YPG, which Turkey says is a major threat to its security.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan talks to supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), at a rally in Yozgat, eastern Turkey. Credit: Presidency Press Service

The US however has relied on the YPG - the backbone of a Syrian force that drove Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) from much of northern and eastern Syria with the help of US-led airstrikes.

The coalition has said the new force, expected to reach 30,000 in the next several years, is a key element of its strategy in Syria to prevent the resurgence of Isil.

Mr Erdogan on Tuesday reiterated that Turkey planned an imminent intervention in the Kurdish-controlled enclave of Afrin in northern Syria. Turkey has sent reinforcements to its border in recent weeks and Mr Erdogan said this week that Turkish troops were already firing artillery at Afrin from the border.

Overnight on Monday, heavy shelling was reported in Afrin and the YPG reported the death of one of its fighters.

Asked whether he planned to discuss the Kurdish-led border force with President Donald Trump, Mr Erdogan said he had no plans to call the US leader.

"We discussed the issue before. He said he would get back to me. I won't call him as long as he does not get back to me," Anadolu quoted Mr Erdogan as saying.
Istanbul (AFP) - The Turkish government on Monday unveiled the route of its planned new canal for Istanbul, a hugely ambitious 45 kilometre (28 mile) project designed to be its answer to the famed artificial shipping lanes in Panama or Egypt's Suez.

The project, first announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while he was prime minister in 2011, is by far the most complex of a string of new ventures for the city.

The government argues it will create attractive new living areas and take pressure off the Bosphorus Strait that splits the European and Asian sides of the city and is one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.

Transport and Communications Minister Ahmet Arslan said that the canal would begin in the Istanbul district of Kucukcekmece on the Sea of Marmara, where there is already an inland lake.

It will then head north towards the Sazlidere reservoir before emerging into the Black Sea just north of Durusu.

"The aim is to reduce the risks that can arise from vessels in the Bosphorus carrying dangerous materials," Arslan told a televised news conference.

"Another aim is to create an urban transformation for our citizens in this area... and also to increase the attractiveness of Istanbul as a global metropolis."

Some environmentalists have warned the project risks wrecking the maritime ecosystem and could also increase the risk of earthquakes in an area of high seismic activity.

But Arslan insisted that all precautions had been taken, saying the route had been chosen only after thorough earthquake risk assessment and computer modelling studies were undertaken.

Erdogan, whose rise to national political prominence began while he served as mayor of Istanbul, is presiding over a string of ambitious infrastructure projects in Turkey and especially its largest city.

With Erdogan fondly dubbing the schemes his "crazy projects", the last years have already seen the opening of metro and road tunnels underneath the Bosphorus as well as a third bridge across the waterway.

Construction of a massive new airport is meanwhile proceeding, with the facility set to see its first flight land in late February before opening officially in October.
Andrew Finch shot dead on his doorstep by armed police

Barriss: I feel a little remorse for what happened

Tyler Barriss, 25, appears in court for his extradition hearing in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Pool/Reuters

Tyler Barriss, the California man accused of making a hoax emergency call that resulted in a fatal police shooting in Kansas, has said he regrets the death of Andrew Finch.

Barriss declined, however, to say if he placed the swatting call, so called because such hoaxes aim to cause the deployment of heavily armed swat police units, that summoned officers to Finchs house in Wichita.

Speaking to KWCH-TV from the Kansas jailhouse where he is being held on a $500,000 bond after being charged with involuntary manslaughter, Barris said: As far as serving any amount of time, Ill just take responsibility and serve whatever time, or whatever it is that they throw at me. Im willing to do it.

He admitted that he had been paid to make hoax calls in the past.

Prosecutors allege that on 28 December, Barris, 25, made a fake call to the Wichita police department claiming there was a hostage situation at a home in the south of the city.

Barriss allegedly made the call after an argument between two players in the Call of Duty online game, one of whom allegedly asked Barriss to make the prank call.

When police arrived at the home in Wichita, Finch, 28, answered the door. He was shot, police said, after appearing to reach for his waistband. Officers later confirmed Finch was unarmed and uninvolved in the events that led police to his home.

Barriss faces two to 11 years in prison. He told KWCH-TV: Whether you hang me from a tree, or you give me five, 10, 15 years  I dont think it will ever justify what happened.

In an earlier interview, Barriss said: Of course, you know, I feel a little of remorse for what happened. I never intended for anyone to get shot and killed. I dont think during any attempted swatting anyones intentions are for someone to get shot and killed.

I guess theyre just going for that shock factor whatever it is, for whatever reason someones attempting swat, or whatever you want to call it.

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It hasnt just affected my life, its affected someones family too. Someone lost their life. I understand the magnitude of what happened. Its not just affecting me because Im sitting in jail. I know who it has affected. I understand all of that.



Barris said he could not explain why someone would want to make a swatting call.

There is no inspiration, said. I dont get bored and just sit around and decide Im going to make a swat call.

The Sedgwick County district attorney, Marc Bennett, has said he is still reviewing whether any charges will be filed against the police officer, and once he makes a determination that decision would be made public He said he was awaiting a final autopsy report.
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A senior U.S. diplomat had talks in Pakistan on Monday following an outcry over President Donald Trump's accusation that the nuclear-armed South Asian state had engaged in "lies and deceit" as a U.S. ally in the war in neighboring Afghanistan. Alice Wells, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, met with Pakistani Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua, the Foreign Ministry and U.S. Embassy said. A Foreign Ministry statement said Wells "acknowledged Pakistan's efforts in eradicating terrorism" and "underlined the need for strengthening intelligence cooperation" to fight terrorism. Relations between United States and Pakistan were already tense when Trump tweeted on Jan. 1 that the United States had foolishly given Pakistan $33 billion in aid over 15 years and was rewarded with "nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools". It is not clear what prompted Trump's tweet, which infuriated Pakistani officials and caught the rest of the U.S. administration off guard. The United States has long complained that the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani networks that target American troops inside Afghanistan are allowed to take shelter on Pakistani soil. Pakistan denies this, and accuses the United States of ignoring its vast sacrifices - casualties have numbered in the tens of thousands - in fighting terrorism. The Trump administration also last week announced the suspension of about $2 billion in security aid to Pakistan - officially a U.S. ally - over accusations that Islamabad is playing a double game in Afghanistan. (Writing by Kay Johnson; editing by Mark Heinrich)
By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected former New York state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's bid to avoid a retrial on corruption charges after his 2015 conviction was thrown out by a lower court.

Silver, a Democrat, had appealed a July 2017 lower court ruling that set aside his conviction because of a 2016 Supreme Court precedent but concluded that prosecutors had "sufficient" evidence to prove the extortion, money laundering and honest services fraud counts on which a jury found Silver guilty.

Silver's new trial is tentatively set to begin on April 16 in Manhattan federal court.

Prosecutors accused Silver of collecting close to $4 million of illegal fees for awarding state grants to a top cancer researcher, and steering real estate developers to a friend's law firm and supporting their interests on rent legislation. After being convicted, he was sentenced in 2016 to 12 years in prison.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that his conviction for collecting the illegal kickbacks could not stand after the Supreme Court in a case involving Republican former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell narrowed the kind of official conduct that can lead to federal corruption charges.

The appeals court, however, rejected Silver's argument that the prosecution failed to prove the seven counts against him. The court sent the case back the trial court.

Silver appealed to the Supreme Court, in particular arguing that the appeals court had wrongly said the prosecution did not have to specifically trace criminally derived money that is mixed in an account together with "clean" funds in order to prove money laundering. Silver said appeals courts around the country are divided on this matter.

Silver, who represented Manhattan's Lower East Side, was Assembly speaker from 1994 to 2015. Along with Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican former New York Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, he was one of the "three men in a room" with effective power to dictate New York legislative priorities.

Skelos' separate 2016 corruption conviction also was vacated based on the Supreme Court ruling regarding McDonnell.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
By Phil Stewart BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The United States is assessing the security implications of Russia's latest deployment of S-400 air defenses to Crimea, a U.S. military official said on Tuesday, adding it could give existing Russian defenses more resilience. "It's not good. It doesn't bode well," a senior U.S. official at the U.S. military's European Command said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We certainly are paying attention to it and what that means, as far as the security of the Black Sea." Moscow's deployment on Saturday added a second division of S-400 surface-to-air missiles in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, triggering economic sanctions by the European Union and United States. It deployed its first division of S-400s in the spring of 2017 near the port town of Fedosia. The new division will be based next to the town of Sevastopol and will control the airspace over the border with Ukraine, the RIA news agency reported. The U.S. military official acknowledged that it was difficult to assess the goal of the deployment. Any air defenses of that kind, however, add Russian military capability to Crimea, providing additional resilience and, potentially, coverage. "If the intent should arise, it gives opportunities to either defend a little bit more of the Black Sea or to advance from there," the official said, without predicting any future Russian actions. "We look at it as just another affirmation of their will to use military force." NEW FIGHTING Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists have accused each other in recent days of ramping up attacks in their conflict. Five Ukrainian servicemen have been killed so far this year and another roughly 20 were wounded, according to Reuters calculations based on daily data from the Ukrainian military. The new air defense system, designed to defend Russia's borders, can be turned into combat mode in less than five minutes, Interfax news agency quoted Viktor Sevostyanov, a commander with Russia's air forces, as saying. Russian officials have criticized a U.S. decision announced in December to provide Ukraine with defensive weaponry, which officials said included Javelin anti-tank missiles. Washington has argued in the past that such weapons cannot effectively be used to take territory and U.S. Marine General Joseph Dunford said during a trip to Brussels this week that the move was strictly defensive. "Our government believes that a nation has the right to defend itself and the support that we've provided to Ukraine was directly focused on areas where they had capability gaps," Dunford said. (Corrects day in first paragraph to Tuesday.) (Reporting by Phil Stewart, additional reporting by Allesandra Prentice in Kiev; Editing by Susan Thomas)
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 []
Dubai (AFP) - The UAE will lodge a complaint with the International Civil Aviation Organization after Qatari jets came within little more than three kilometres of Emirati passenger flights, its civil aviation chief said on Tuesday.

"Today we will file our complaint to the International Civil Aviation Organization about the two serious incidents, along with the evidence that we've gathered, and ask for the intervention of the council to stop Qatar from repeating the act," Saif al-Suwaidi, head of the general civil aviation authority, told AFP.

The United Arab Emirates said on Monday that Qatari fighter jets had "intercepted" two passenger flights headed for Bahrain, drawing a swift denial from Gulf rival Qatar.

Abu Dhabi is also looking at re-routing flights to Bahrain to avoid Qatari airspace, as a feud between Qatar and its Gulf neighbours escalates.

"We are now studying changing the route to another one which is very far from Qatar," Suwaidi said.

"However that will take some time as we have to reach an agreement with Bahrain".

Suwaidi declined to name the airlines operating the two flights, which he said had been forced to delay their descent into Bahrain International Airport as Qatari fighter jets came within little more than three kilometres (two miles).

But Bahrain's civil aviation authority identified the aircraft as Emirates flight EK837 and Etihad flight EY23B. Bahrain too plans to file a complaint to the ICAO, a Montreal-based specialised agency of the United Nations.

The allegations came after Qatar accused UAE fighter jets of violating its airspace in December and January, most recently on Sunday.

The Qatari foreign ministry charged that they were a baseless attempt to overshadow its own complaints against the UAE.

Bahrain and the UAE have no diplomatic ties with Qatar, which lies between the two Gulf allies and is banned from using their airspace.

In June, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt broke diplomatic relations and most trade links with Qatar, accusing it of ties to Islamist extremists and Saudi arch-rival Iran.

Qatar denies the allegations and and accuses the four states of aiming to incite the overthrow of its government.
By Alexander Cornwell DUBAI (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates will lodge a complaint against Qatar at the United Nations' aviation agency on Tuesday after Qatari war planes allegedly intercepted UAE civilian aircraft, a UAE official said. The UAE said on Monday that Qatari air force jets had intercepted two UAE civilian aircraft on routine commercial flights to Bahrain. Qatar has said the claims are "completely untrue". The UAE will accuse Qatar of violating the Chicago Convention, which governs the use of airspace, in a complaint to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), UAE General Civil Aviation Authority Director-General Saif Mohammed al-Suwaidi told Reuters. Suwaidi said two Qatari war planes twice flew dangerously close to the UAE airliners as they descended toward Bahrain International Airport in separate incidents on Monday, and could be seen by the pilots and passengers. "It's a very obvious violation," he said by phone. The UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, has imposed travel, diplomatic and trade sanctions on Qatar since last June, accusing it of supporting terrorism. Qatar denies the charge and has accused the four countries of trying to make it conform to their foreign policy positions. Suwaidi said the UAE aircraft had been intercepted in air space managed by Bahrain. He declined to say whether their flight paths had taken them across Qatar, the most common route from the UAE to Bahrain. The UAE has banned Qatari aircraft from using its airspace as part of the restrictions imposed since June. Qatar has not reciprocated . Suwaidi said that Bahraini radar had determined the fighter jets originated and returned from Doha, and pilots of the UAE commercial planes had identified the aircraft as Mirage war planes, which are used by several Arab air forces, including Qatar's. Suwaidi declined to say which airlines had been intercepted. Bahrain's state news agency BNA earlier reported that they were Emirates and Etihad flights, though gave a flight number for Etihad flight that does not exist. Emirates and Etihad declined to comment. Suwaidi said he was confident that ICAO could stop Qatar from repeating Monday's incidents but that the UAE could consider to re-routing its flights as a precautionary step. Changing flight paths can be costly for airlines if it means flying longer routes and subsequently using more fuel, often their biggest single operating expense. Asked if the UAE would consider escorting civilian aircraft, Suwaidi that the UAE could "use different tools to protect its airlines." He did not elaborate. (Reporting by Alexander Cornwell; Editing by Andrew Torchia and Raissa Kasolowsky)
Vancouver (AFP) - The United States urged an escalation in pressure on North Korea over its nuclear missile program Tuesday, despite a more cautious tone from key US ally South Korea.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, co-hosting the Vancouver event with Canada's foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, called for North Korean ships to be intercepted and for new punitive measures to be implemented every time Pyongyang tests new weapons.

He received tough backing from his Japanese counterpart Taro Kono in public opening remarks, but South Korea's Kang Kyung-Wha sounded a more cautious note and told the 20 senior envoys sanctions pressure is already making progress.

"First, we all must insist a full enforcement of UN Security Council sanctions as this is the letter of the law. We especially urge Russia and China in this matter," Tillerson said.

"Second, we all must work together to improve maritime interdiction operations. We must put an end to illicit ship-to-ship transfers that undermine UN sanctions.

"And, third, there must be new consequences for the regime whenever new aggression occurs."

The tough US stance comes as some have welcomed North Korea's decision to meet with Seoul's representatives and to send a delegation to the South's upcoming Winter Olympics as a sign that tensions may be lowered.

But Kono urged the allies not to let their guard down as they seek to force Pyongyang to agree to negotiate its own nuclear disarmament.

Without mentioning South Korea by name, Kono warned that Kim Jong-Un's regime "must be intending to drive a wedge between those tough countries and those that are not so tough."

"I am aware that some people argue that because North Korea is engaging in inter-Korean dialogue we should reward them by lifting up sanctions or by providing some sort of assistance," he said.

"Frankly, I think this view is just too naive. I believe that North Korea wants to buy some time to continue their nuclear missile programs," he said.

Story continues

For her part, Kang welcomed the international solidarity behind the sanctions regime, but her opening remarks in Tuesday's session carried a more optimistic message than that of her Japanese neighbor.

"I believe that the two tools, tough sanctions and pressure on the one hand and the offer of a different brighter future on the other, have worked hand in hand," she said.

"Indeed the concerted efforts of the international community has begun to bear fruit," she explained.

"We should take note that the North has come back to inter-Korean dialogue for its participation in the Winter Games, as evidence and observations accumulate to show that sanctions and pressure are beginning to take effect."
By Alexandra Ulmer and Andreina Aponte

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan authorities on Monday arrested five members of a "terrorist cell" linked to self-proclaimed rogue Venezuelan helicopter pilot Oscar Perez, and killed several other militants during a shootout in a poor area outside Caracas.

Perez appeared with a bloody face in nearly a dozen dramatic Instagram videos early on Monday, saying that he was surrounded by authorities shooting at him with grenade launchers.

State television later read out an official statement that said two police officers were gunned down in the clashes but did not specify Perez' fate.

A former police pilot, Perez is wanted for using a stolen helicopter to lob grenades and shoot at government buildings in June as well as for breaking into a National Guard unit in December to steal weapons.

President Nicolas Maduro's leftist government has described him as a "fanatic, extremist terrorist" and a manhunt has been under way for months. Some Maduro critics have questioned whether Perez' attacks were staged in cahoots with the government to justify a further crackdown on the opposition.

Authorities finally tracked Perez down in the poor hillside neighborhood of El Junquito on Monday.

"We're wounded ... they're killing us!" said Perez in one video, seemingly wearing a bulletproof vest as he crouched in what appeared to be a small house. Gunshots were heard in the background.

"Venezuela, don't lose hope... Now only you have power so that we can all be free," he said in an earlier video, staring into the camera and telling his children he loves them and hopes to see them again.

His last video was posted about 10:30 am (0230 GMT). A Reuters witness in the area later saw an ambulance speed by and said gunshots were no longer heard.

'CAUGHT LIKE A RAT'

The Information Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Members of Maduro's government scoffed at Perez on Monday.

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"What a coward now that he's caught like a rat!" tweeted Prisons Minister Iris Varela. "Where is the courage he had to attack military units, kill and injure officials and steal weapons?"

Perez, who also has been an action film star and portrays himself as a James Bond or Rambo-like figure on social media, has added surreal twists to Venezuela's long-running political drama.

He rose to fame in June after allegedly hijacking a police helicopter, flying over Caracas' center and firing shots at and lobbing grenades on the Interior Ministry and the Supreme Court.

Perez claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was to fight what he said was a tyrannical government. He went into hiding afterward, only to pop up two weeks later at an opposition vigil for anti-government protesters killed during demonstrations that rocked the country last year.

In December, a video posted on Perez's YouTube account shows armed, masked men taking control of military barracks under cover of night.

They smashed photos of Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, handcuffed about a dozen soldiers and berated them for supporting "dictatorship" in Venezuela. Perez says his team stole about 26 AK-103's and more than 3,000 munitions for the rifles, as well as pistols.

Opposition politicians called for due process on Monday.

"There is no death penalty in Venezuela," tweeted opposition lawmaker Yajaira Forero. "We demand that Mr. Oscar Perez' right to life be respected. If he committed a crime he must be judged by a court, as the law establishes."

(Additional reporting by Christian Veron, Marco Bello, Corina Pons and Eyanir Chinea; Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Frances Kerry and Bill Trott)
Caracas (AFP) - Venezuela's government announced Tuesday that rebel pilot Oscar Perez was among seven "terrorists" killed during a bloody police assault to arrest him.

Police on Monday swooped on a house on the outskirts of Caracas where Perez and his armed group had holed up, setting off a fierce gunbattle in which two police officers were also killed.

Perez had been Venezuela's most-wanted man since he used a stolen helicopter to drop grenades on Venezuela's Supreme Court at the height of anti-government protests last June. President Nicolas Maduro accused him of attempting a "coup."

Interior Minister Nestor Reverol told reporters in Caracas that four men and two women arrested in the so-called Operation Gideon "are being prosecuted at this time."

Eight police officers were wounded in the battle, he said.

"The acts committed by this criminal gang qualify as terrorism, constituting clear and flagrant attacks against democratic institutions," said Reverol, who was flanked by senior military and police officers.

A bloodied Perez posted videos on Instagram during the gunbattle, saying he and his men wanted to surrender but were pinned down by snipers.

The government charged that his followers, who it said were armed with high-caliber weapons, "opened fire" on police during negotiations to surrender.

It said on Monday that those who resisted had been killed.

In June, Perez and unidentified accomplices flew over Caracas in a police helicopter and dropped four grenades on the Supreme Court before opening fire on the interior ministry. There were no casualties.

Perez had been on the run since Venezuelan authorities issued an arrest warrant through Interpol after accusing him of a "terrorist attack."

The 36-year-old former elite police officer and actor has regularly taunted the government during his time in hiding, saying he was fighting against Maduro's "tyranny" and the "narco-dictatorship."

He urged Venezuelans "not to lose heart. Fight, take to the streets, it is time we are free."
Caracas (AFP) - Oscar Perez, a rogue helicopter pilot who vanished last year after dropping grenades on Venezuela's Supreme Court, said Monday he and his companions were surrounded and pinned down by police marksmen.

"They are firing at us with grenade launchers. We said we are going to surrender but they do not want to let us surrender. They want to kill us," a bloodied Perez said in one of several dramatic videos posted online.

Perez, a former elite police officer, is seen with other men in one of the videos, some of them armed.

He said they were being besieged by snipers at a location on the outskirts of Caracas.

Vice president of the ruling Socialist party, Diosdado Cabello, said on Twitter the Police Special Action Force (FAES) had launched an operation to arrest Perez.

He said the security forces had "responded with fire" when two officers were wounded in the operation.

On June 27, at the height of street protests against President Nicolas Maduro, Perez and unidentified accomplices flew over Caracas in a police helicopter and dropped four grenades on the Supreme Court before opening fire on the interior ministry. There were no casualties.

Venezuelan authorities issued an arrest warrant through Interpol after accusing him of a "terrorist attack."
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not deny that Donald Trump had called Haiti and some African nations "s***hole countries" on Tuesday, saying the President himself had never denied using harsh language on immigration.

Asked why Mr Trump had defended the comments privately but denied them publicly, Ms Sanders said: The President hasnt said he didnt use strong language."

"This is an important issue, hes passionate about it, hes not going to apologise for trying to fix our immigration system," she added.

Several attendees at an Oval Office meeting on immigration last week said the President wondered aloud why the US took in immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries, asking: Why are we having all these people from s***hole countries come here?

The White House did not initially deny the report, but after a bipartisan backlash  in which many accused the President of being racist  Mr Trump fired back.

"The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used," he tweeted.

But Mr Trump spent the evening before calling friends and advisers to defend his remarks, according to the Associated Press. The President told confidants that he was not racist and that the press had distorted the meaning of his words, a person familiar with the situation said.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin confirmed that Mr Trump had used the word "s***hole," while Republican Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue said they heard the President say "s***house" instead, according to the Washington Post. Mr Durbin called the comments "hate filled, vile and racist".

Ms Sanders responded to allegations of racism on Tuesday by attempting to paint Mr Trump's critics as hypocritical.

"Why did NBC give him a show for a decade on TV, why did Chuck Schumer and all of his colleagues come and beg Donald Trump for money?" Mr Sanders said, referring to Mr Trump's career as a businessman and host of The Apprentice before he ran for office.

Story continues

"Why did they want to be with him for years and years for various activities?" she asked. "...I think its just an outrageous and ludicrous excuse."

Mr Trump's alleged comments sparked a diplomatic backlash across the globe. Former Haitian President Laurent Lamothe called the remarks "totally unacceptable," and said they showed "a lack [of] respect and ignorance never seen before in the recent history of the US by any President".

South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Botswana and Haiti all called on US diplomats to meet with government officials to address Mr Trump's comments. Botswana has called on the US to clarify whether it, too, is considered a "s***hole" country.
Kylie Jenner, the selfie queen.

Have you ever wondered why your face looks just a little different in photos than it does reflected in the mirror?

Whether youre examining selfies or photos taken by others, theres always something a bit off about your appearance in pictures.

The mystery hit me when I was at home one day overanalyzing my face in the mirror and deciding that I looked good enough for a selfie. I probably took about 25 photos and I hated almost every single one. All of a sudden, my nose seemed to be 10 times more crooked than normal, and it was all I could focus on. But I still looked fine in the mirror, which left me wondering why my face didnt quite translate into my phone.

As it happens, there are a few explanations for this.

A post shared by Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) on Aug 18, 2015 at 12:32pm PDT

We Expect The Mirror Image

One major factor is that photos generally show us the reverse of what we see in the mirror. When you take a photo of yourself using some (but not all) apps or the front-facing camera on an iPhone, the resulting image captures your face as others see it. The same is true for non-phone cameras.

As Nolan Feeney explained in a 2014 Atlantic article, seeing ourselves in reverse can be a little weird, partly because our faces arent perfectly symmetrical. Certain features or distinctive marks dont line up in photos the same way they do in the mirror, and that can throw us off. To return to my anecdote, I rarely notice the slant in my nose when I look in the mirror, but in photos, the slant goes the opposite direction, so its always the first thing I see.

People have grown up [looking] in the mirror and thats what they believe everybody sees, when its the reverse of that, which is really weird, said Jay Perry, a Canadian photographer based in Hamilton, Ontario. Mirrors are kind of lies.

We Like Our Familiar Faces

Were most familiar with our faces as we see them in the mirror and thus come to prefer that mirror image, according to the mere exposure theory, which states that repeatedly encountering something makes us like it more.

Story continues

Looking at yourself in the mirror becomes a firm impression. You have that familiarity. Familiarity breeds liking. Youve established a preference for that look of your face, Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, told The Atlantic back in 2014.

New York-based photographer Michael Levy expanded on Rutledges point for HuffPost, noting that when we gaze in the mirror, we tend to gaze at what we consider our good side  that is, the angle that seems most attractive to us.

When youre looking in the mirror, you are subconsciously turning your face, usually, to a certain angle that to you is most optimal, said Levy. It attracts you to yourself.

Of course, when we see our faces in the mirror, were also looking at ourselves in motion as opposed to completely still, as Perry pointed out.

You can pick so much more detail out in a still photo, Perry said. In real life, youre moving constantly, youre blurred, youre not focusing on every single pore because you cant.

You also cant zoom in to your face in the mirror the same way you can in a digital photo. (Magnifying mirrors are pretty good at putting your self-perceived imperfections on full display, but theyre not quite the same.)

It Can Be Technical, Too

Different camera lenses can change the way people look in photos. For example, Perry said that if someone wanted to look slimmer, he would choose a longer lens because the shorter the lens, the wider its going to make your face.

A persons proximity to the camera also comes into play. Features that are closest to the lens are going to be emphasized in the photo  like noses. And when we take selfies, were generally closer to the camera than we would be if someone else were taking our photo.

At the end of the day, though, the way we appear in photos is the way we look to the rest of the world. And thats not a bad thing. In fact, studies have shown that other people generally like the version of you they see, as opposed to the image of yourself you see.

So go forth and selfie.
A woman was groped by a stranger who said he couldnt resist as she had the best bum

A woman found herself the victim of groping after a stranger slapped her bottom saying he had to do it because her bum was too nice.

Jesse Ratu, a 24-year-old mum of two was returning from a morning walk to her apartment in Southport, Australia when the man followed her to the front door and proceeded to slap her repeatedly on her bottom.

The whole incident was caught on CCTV and police are now hunting for the attacker.

I just buzzed, and thats when he grabbed my bum, like five times, and I think I said, dont touch me, she said.

He said to me, like, sorry, I just had to do that, youve got the best bum Thats when I just pushed the door open and freaked out, she said.

Once inside her apartment building Jesse said it took her a few moments to realise the extent of what had happened, before running upstairs to tell her partner who was inside with the couples children.

Jesses partner came down to see if he could find her attacker, but after failing to spot him the couple called the police and Ms Ratu lodged a complaint.

The incident has left Jesse feeling afraid.

I shouldnt (have to) feel worried to walk in my own street, you know what I mean? Jesse said of how the incident has left her feeling.

Senior sergeant Brendan Wiblen of the Gold Coast Police said that, while assaults of this nature are not common, authorities are taking the offence very seriously.

This was a very disturbing incident for the young woman, fortunately, unprovoked assaults in the street are very rare, he said.

A young mum was groped by a stranger who said he couldnt resist as she had the best bum [Photo: 9 News]

The news comes after a woman was forced to defend her actions after hitting out at a man who groped her at a music festival.

And last summer another woman also fought back when she was allegedly groped by a random stranger.

This guy grabbed my ass, I dragged him out in a choke hold, he slammed me into a wall, the bartender wrote on Twitter.

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Divers in the blue waters around the Yucatan Peninsula have discovered three historic treasures: a sunken lighthouse and the remains of an 18th-century Dutch warship and a 19th-century British steamer, according to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

The battered wrecks were found near the coastal town of Sisal, Mexico, a modern beach destination that was once a bustling port in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The shipwrecks were laden with artifacts, including cannons, cutlery and porcelain, said archaeologist Helena Barba Meinecke, head of the INAH's underwater archaeology of the Yucatan Peninsula. [Mayday! 17 Mysterious Shipwrecks You Can See on Google Earth]

The Dutch warship  dubbed the "Madagascar Cannons," because its cannons were found near the Madagascar reef, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northwest of Sisal  is partly buried under 6 inches (15 centimeters) of coral.

"We recorded in drawing, photography and video a total of 12 iron cannons whose dimensions  2.5 meters long by almost half a meter in diameter [8 feet by nearly 2 feet]  bear a resemblance to the artillery of the Dutch war frigates that sailed the West Indies in the 18th century," Barba Meinecke said.

The crew might have thrown four of these cannons overboard in an attempt to save the ship from sinking, she added.

About 60 feet (19 m) southeast of these cannons, archaeologists found another eight cannons and eight cannonballs, as well as ceramic fragments. It appears that these artifacts sunk at once, indicating that this was the spot where the Dutch warship met its untimely end, Barba Meinecke said.

The wreck is mentioned in a 1722 letter from Antonio de Cortaire, the governor of the Yucatan, in which he ordered a review of lookouts on the northern coast of the territory after learning that two Dutch warships carrying contraband merchandise had sunk in February of that year. In the note, he said that treacherous "north winds" were likely to blame and that the Dutch and English crews had been rescued and taken to Sisal.

Story continues

However, it's unclear which of the two warships researchers have uncovered. INAH archaeologists are now examining the ship's contents in an effort to crack the puzzle, Barba Meinecke said.

The second shipwreck  a Mississippi-style steamboat from the United Kingdom  was nicknamed Vapor Adalio, in honor of the grandfather of Juan Diego Esquivel, a local fisherman who showed the wreck to archaeologists. The steamer, which was likely built between 1807 and 1870, wrecked on the Scorpion Reef (known as "Arrecife Alacranes" in Spanish) in the 1800s, the archaeologists said.

Within the ship's remains, archaeologists found signs of everyday life aboard the steamer: eight eating utensils.

Diego Esquivel also led archaeologists to the wrecked lighthouse, located about 2 miles (3.7 km) from Sisal. The structure, which was built in the late 19th century, stood 26 feet tall (8 m) and served as a lookout point. However, it likely crumbled into the gulf after a tropical storm hit the region, the archaeologists said.

Original article on Live Science.

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There is an unprecedented crisis between Israel and the Diaspora, Minister of Diaspora Affairs Naftali Bennett said in a recent cabinet meeting. Well, of course there is. After all, the Zionist narrative never fully recognized the Diaspora Jewrys legitimacy.

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Holocaust and resurrectionthats how Zionism summarized the 20th century. As far as Zionism is concerned, the Holocaust marks the inevitable fate of the Diaspora Jewry: Only a sovereign people in its own land possess the cultural, political and military strength needed to survive and prosper.

As soon as Zionism focused on establishing the national home, it began denying the value of the Diaspora Jewry, and the Holocaust served as the proof justifying this denial.

As soon as Zionism focused on establishing the national home, it began denying the value of the Diaspora Jewry (Photo: AFP)

Not in the United States. As far as the US Jewry is concerned, the Jewish people underwent two unique resurrections in the 20th century, which had not been experienced for 2,000 years: The resurrection of the State of Israel and the resurrection of the US Jewry. The first created a reality of a sovereign Jewish majority in its land; the second created ad admired Jewish majority, which is seen as an equal among equals.

In the US, like in Israel, the Jewish people experienced decades of cultural, economic and political empowerment and revival. The resurrections success in the US was a major contributor not only to Israels political and security-related power, but to its Jewish character and identity as well. The North American Jewry helped lead the discourse between tradition and modernity, and created an option of liberal Jews (either religious or secular) who immigrated to Israel and took part in shaping the Jewish identity and discourse in Israel.

The Zionist narrative of Holocaust and resurrection has never been able to appreciate and recognize the Jewish resurrection beyond the national homes borders. When Zionism looks at the Diaspora, it still sees it as the European Jewry in the early 20th century. As a diaspora, it is still exposed to an inevitable and imminent holocaust, either as the result of anti-Semitism or as the result of assimilation.

Granted, unprecedented numbers of US Jews marry non-Jews. The main reason isnt assimilation or a weakened Jewish identity; they are simply living in an era in which, for the first time, non-Jews are willing to marry members of the Jewish religion. This reality poses a new challenge to Judaism, but it is also an opportunity.

The suspension of the Western Wall plan indicates the State of Israel is still stuck in the narrative of denying the Diaspora (Photo: AP)

Unlike Israel, where Jewish identity is inherited, in the US every Jew is obligated to pick his or her identity. In a reality of mixed marriages, there is no guarantee that children will pick Judaism. Such marriages could lead to assimilation, but not necessarily. A person who marriage a non-Jew doesnt interpret that act as a betrayal of his Jewish identity.

Communities that created programs aimed at bringing such families closer have demonstrated amazing results, all the way to equal feelings of Jewish identity among children from mixed marriages and children whose parents are both Jewish.

More than a million non-Jews live in Jewish families today, live a Jewish lifestyle and are committed to the Jewish identity of their family. With proper educational and communal intervention, we could turn them into an enormous potential of development and growth.

One of the anchors for the success of Jewish resurrection in the US is its connection to Zionism. While most US Jews dont want to immigrate to Israel, their connection to Israel has shaped their identity as Jews. Israel is not just a source of pride or a safety net. Israel has taught them that Judaism is not just a religion but also a national affiliation, and this insight has strengthened their identity.

But the suspension of the Western Wall plan, the conversion issues, the comments of Israeli politicians and other acts against the US Jewry indicate that the State of Israel is still stuck in the narrative of denying the Diaspora.

Israel and the US Jewry are facing considerable threats. Its time to stop denying each other and to understand that it is only through mutual responsibility, respect and tolerance that we will be able to secure the Jewish peoples futurein Israel and in the world.
Hes the most moderate leader the Palestinians could choose, and thats their tragedy.

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On Sunday, the famous moderate said he wouldnt repeat 1948 and 1967, because those mistakes led to the Palestinian tragedy, the Nakba. But he is repeating the exact same mistakes. More hallucinations. More illusions. More rejectionism.

In Israel, there is dispute over whether the source of the problem is 1948 or 1967. Abbas has made it clear that the problem is 1917. In other words, the Balfour Declaration, which supported the Jews right to a national home.

Abbas made it clear that both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are based on lies (Photo: Reuters)

There is an argument over the existence of a line separating between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Abbas made it clear that there is no such line. Both ideologies are based on lies.

Its slightly embarrassing to refute the nonsense uttered by the moderate leader from the Muqata'a, but there appears to be no escape, because every lie that is repeated 1,000 times in the first act reaches textbooks and campuses in the third act. The legitimization based on the claim that its a Palestinian narrative.

There were many lies in Sundays speech, but at least three of them should be refuted.

First of all, according to Abbas, the Balfour Declaration is a colonialist project. Quite the opposite. The Balfour Declaration was issued as part of a growing recognition of the right to self-determination, which was the result of an anti-imperialist battle that led to the empires dissolution and to the establishment of nation states. The Jews, who lived under many empires, received the right to self-determination along with other people.

So Zionism is an anti-imperialist liberation movement. Zionist didnt aim to banish anyone, and the Nakba itself is the result of Arab rejectionism. And anyway, tens of millions of people experienced uprooting and expulsion and population exchanges as part of the establishment of nation states, including Arabs and Jews.

Second, Abbas created the impression that the peace plan he had been offered by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert included 40 years of Israeli presence in the Jordan River, which is why he had turned it down.

Well, in an interview to Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post, Abbas made it clear, in real time, that he had turned down the plan because it failed to provide a wide-scale right of return. That was also his immediate reaction to former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who presented him with the principles of the plan hours after hearing about it from Olmert. On Sunday, however, we received a new version which is completely untrue.

What the hell is he babbling about? (Photo: EPA)

Third, according to Abbas, the Europeans wanted to bring the Jews here to preserve their interests in the region. They asked Holland, which had the world's largest fleet, to move the Jews."

Abbas is outdoing himself. Holland? When exactly did Holland move masses of Jews? Why it was conquered by the Nazis. And the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Abbas hero, cooperated with Europe's leaders at the timethe Nazisto expand the annihilation of Jews to the Arab world and Palestine. So what the hell is he babbling about?

Abbas speech is mostly a gift to the part of the Israeli Right that wants one big state. The moderate leader is making it clear that theres nothing to talk about. He refuses to recognize the Jews right to self-determination. He is not a partner. He is trapped in hallucinations, illusions and lies.

Its possible that this isnt really a hallucination but actually a plot. After all, he wants to lead us towards one big state. Thats exactly what Israels haters want. Thats what the Hamas, BDS and Iran coalition wants. So we mustnt downplay the nonsense voiced by Abbas. Because if were not careful, this delusional speech may turn into another milestone ahead of that goals fulfillment.
The accounts of the Binyamin Territorial Brigade company commander and soldier who were accosted and attacked by Ahed Tamimi, 17, and her cousin Nur Tamimi, 21, during riots in Nabi Salih a month ago were released Monday evening.

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The riots lasted four hours, the soldiers said. The pair was drawing near the Tamimi residence in the southern Samaria village when stones were thrown at them. "At first we were nearby Palestinians' homes, because we knew that once riots break out, activists go into the (Tamimi) home and start throwing rocks at IDF forces," the company commander told the army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) investigators.

The testimonies of the 2 soldiers Tamimi attacked were published Monday (Photo: AP)

The company commander said he and the soldier stood at the Tamimi residence's courtyard for 20 minutes until several family members went out and drew close to them. "Two girls, two older women and maybe eight more children and four adults came out. The two minors then came to us. They were speaking Arabic, which I can't understand and so I didn't know what they were saying," he recounted.

As for the assault itself, the officer said, "One of the minors (Ahed), a blonde girl of 12 or 13, wearing a light denim jacket, started shoving, kicking and raising her hands at me. She slapped me and punched my signal operator in the face. The other minor (Nur) was less violent. She mostly pushed me. Then an older woman arrived, tried reining the girls in but failed."

Footage of the incident

X

When questioned as to his feelings during the incident, the company commander said, "I had to keep a lid on the riots. There were already two hotspots and I didn't want to create a third one by arresting them, since we didn't have enough forces in the field. I want to note I was preoccupied with the disturbances at the time and was listening to the signal operator, so I didn't pay the event much heed."

Asked why the two attackers were not arrested at the time, he replied, "There were two more families behind themroughly 12 peopleand there were two of us. If we had arrested them, it might have ended badly for us. In addition, we were in the midst of a large scale disturbance with not enough manpower."

The soldier: 'The curly haired minor was trouble'

The soldier who was with the officer also supplied CID with testimony. "The blonde girl kicked the company commander and slapped him in the face. She shoved and beat him. She then punched me in the face and hit my right eyebrow. I felt pain for a while, but it passed. The other girl was taping the whole thing with her phone, and if I recall correctly she pushed me," he recollected.

The soldier was also asked why the two minors were not arrested on the scene. He replied, "I don't know, I was with my commander and it was his decision to make. I heard the curly haired minor was trouble, but I didn't recognize her then. Only later. Several other soldiers were also present in the sector, but they didn't witness the incident."

Following the attack, Ahed Tamimi was charged with assaulting the officer and soldier and with five other counts of attacking security forces by stone throwing, threats, disturbing forces in the line of duty, incitements and disturbances.

A decision regarding Tamimi's continued detention will be made Wednesday (Photo: AP)

Nur Tamimi was charged with aggravated assault on a soldier and disturbing a soldier in the line of duty.

In a discussion held Monday at the Ofer military tribunal, Ahed Tamimi's attorney Gaby Lasky presented a series of claims pertaining to interrogators' alleged abuse of her client.

The attorney claimed that one of the interrogators, whose name was not divulged in the minutes, threatened Tamimiwho maintained silence during the interrogationthat if she didn't begin talking he would arrest her family members one by one.

Lasky also presented the presiding judge with photos from Tamimi's interrogation, showing the interrogator approaching the Palestinian girl in an unusual fashion. According to Lasky, "You can clearly see how the interrogator put his head right next to her."

Tamimi (background) and her attorney Gaby Lasky in court (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

Following the alleged infractions, Lasky lodged a complaint with Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit.

During Monday's court hearing, Tamimi's attorney also commented on the two soldiers' testimonies and claimed that they contained, "contradictions that did not add up."

The judge ruled that a decision regarding Tamimi's continued remand will be given Wednesday, until which time she will remain in detention.
Over the course of the previous year, the IDF Manpower Directorate has repeatedly demanded that Avraham Cohen, an 18-year-old youth from Jerusalem, report to the conscription center to either enlist or request a deferment by declaring himself a yeshiva student, even though he had cancer.

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His father Akiva sent medical documents in response, attesting to his terminal illness, but the army insisted that the boy appear presents himself and establish his status.

About two weeks ago he died.

Avraham Cohen, at the hospital before his passing

Welfare Minister claims was informed by Treasury future increments in benefits will not be included in governmental bill, says: 'I refuse to side with those deceiving the disabled.'

Following an inquiry by a Ynet reporter, the commander of the conscription base called on Monday to Akiva in order to apologize for the distress caused to his him and his family.

In the recordings of the conversations that the father conducted with conscription representatives, the soldiers can be heard urging the father to ask his son to regularize his status again and again despite his illness.

In one of the conversations, an IDF representative makes it clear to the father that if his son does not present himself, his temporary status as a yeshiva student will be revoked.

Representative:

"I just want to make sure that you know that if he gives up his status, he cannot get it back."

Akiva:

"He won't need to get it back, and to tell you the truth, I do not understand what you want from him. I'm with him at Hadassah (Medical Centered) in the oncology ward. He is exhausted, cannot lift his hand and head. You received (the relevant) documents. I just do not understand what this is all about. "

Representative:

"I am cancelling his status (as a yeshiva student)."

Akiva:

"cancel it, give it back believe me that it does not interest me. You want to come, take him away from the house and recruit him? We can call an ambulance together. I really do not understand what you're doing. The kid is ill, lying in bed, treated with chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Cancel his status. Issue him a draft order or even an arrest warrant. Do what you want."

The IDF draft summons

In another conversation, the father tried to persuade the representative of the recruitment bureau to accept his written requests to exempt him from military service, but the representative insisted that his son should contact them himself.

Akiva:

"My son did not contact you and he cannot contact you. That is why I'm doing so."

Representative:

"So it was you who sent the letter. So as long as you send it, I cannot accept it. I just need to let you know that your request is rejected, okay?"

Akiva:

"I do not accept that."

Representative:

"It does not work that way. You read the legislation on it and you'll see that the prospective recruit himself has to identify himself and request it himself."

Akiva:

"Do you want to hear it now in his voice, that he's sick?"

Representative:

"That's why I called, (to ask) when can I speak to the prospective recruit when he's not sick, so I don't bother you."

Akiva:

"He's not sick with flu, it's not like tomorrow he'll be healthy, he's a sick kid."

Representative:

"No problem, I did not come to analyze the case, I just wanted an estimate of when I could talk to him."

Akiva:

"I do not know that, I wrote it to you in the letter."

Representative:

"When the child gets better, he needs to properly present himself at the recruitment office to receive an appropriate response."

Avraham Cohen's obituary (L)

"I kept repeating my son's illness and the fact that he is frequently hospitalized in the hematology department at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem," the father wrote to the IDF Manpower Directorate.

He suggested that his son's enlistment be postponed by at least a year, in the hope that he would somehow recover by then, claiming that "the documents (I sent) attest to this, and I was told that this is just the rules of the IDF. During his illness my son told me, 'Dad, how will I get treatment if they come to take me to the army?' It worried him greatly.

"For two weeks they did not even call to apologize, until this morning (Monday). It was only during the shiva (mourning period) that I received a phone call from the army and was informed that in about a month my son would be appointed a committee for exemption from service."

A source close to the family decried the army's obtuseness, stressing that their harassment only served to weigh on the family.

"The army had all the medical documents the need, why did they not just exempt him from service entirely?" he accosted.

The IDF released a statement in response, saying they regret their treatment of the Cohen family, apologized for the incident and assured that it "will be discussed and the required conclusions will be drawn up."
At a food center administrated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the a-Shati Gaza Strip refugee camp bags of flour were once again handed out Monday. Manyincluding women and childrenstood in line waiting to receive them. The ramshackle roofs of residents' homes were covered with nylon sheets in anticipation of rain.

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In light of the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with the backdrop of the destruction Saturday of the terror tunnel encroaching into Israeli territory, Israel has fingered Hamas as the main culprit, saying it preferred to invest in terror infrastructures instead of civilian ones.

UNRWA provides flour to Gaza residents (Photo: MCT)

The defense minister said the 2017 budget for Hamas's military wing was 260 million dollars. "Those 260 million dollars were invested wholly in tunnels and making rockets. If they had invested them in their water or health systems, they'd be in a different situation altogether," he said.

Lieberman further revealed that, "Hamas held a rocket test tonight. They shot three rockets towards the sea, which only goes to prove that despite the humanitarian situation and the shortage of basic items, they carry on manufacturing and testing rockets."

Residents covering their homes' roofs with nylon sheets (Photo: AFP)

Gaza resident Mahmoud al-Qouqa can't imagine life without the three sacks of flour, cooking oil and other staples he receives from the United Nations every three months.

Living with 25 relatives in a crowded home in this teeming Gaza Strip slum, the meager rations provided by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugee families, are the last thing keeping his family afloat in the territory hard hit by years of poverty and conflict. But that could be in danger as the US, UNRWA's biggest donor, threatens to curtail funding.





Across the Middle East, millions of people who depend on UNRWA are bracing for the worst. The expected cut could also add instability to struggling host countries already coping with spillover from other regional crises.

UNRWA was established in the wake of the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation. An estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in the fighting.

In the absence of a solution for these refugees, the UN General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWA's mandate, the original refugee camps have turned into concrete slums and more than 5 million refugees and their descendants now rely on the agency for services including education, health care and food. The largest populations are in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon.



Seen by the Palestinians and most of the international community as providing a valuable safety net, UNRWA is viewed far differently by Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the agency of perpetuating the conflict by helping promote an unrealistic dream that these people have the "right of return" to long-lost properties in what is now Israel.

"UNRWA is part of the problem , not part of the solution," he told foreign journalists last week. Noting that the Palestinians are the only group served by a specific refugee agency, he said UNRWA should be abolished and its responsibilities taken over by the main UN refugee agency

Some in Israel have even tougher criticism, accusing UNRWA of teaching hatred of Israel in its classrooms and tolerating or assisting Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

Blaming the Palestinians for lack of progress in Mideast peace efforts, President Donald Trump has threatened to cut American assistance to the Palestinians. UNRWA would be the first to be affected

The US provides about $355 million a year to UNRWA, roughly one-third of its budget.

US officials in Washington said this week the administration is preparing to withhold tens of millions of dollars from the year's first contribution, cutting a planned $125 million installment by half or perhaps entirely. The decision could come as early as Tuesday.

Matthias Schmale, UNRWA's director in Gaza, said Washington has not informed the agency of any changes. However, "We are worried because of the statements ... in the media and the fact that the money hasn't arrived yet," he said.

Schmale dismissed the Israeli criticisms, saying that individuals who spread incitement or aid terrorists are isolated cases and promptly punished. He also said Netanyahu's criticism should be directed at the UN General Assembly, which sets UNRWA's mandate, not the agency itself.

Any cut in US aid could ripple across the region with potentially unintended consequences.

Gaza may be the most challenging of all of UNRWA's operating areas. Two-thirds of Gaza's 2 million people qualify for services, and its role is amplified given the poor state of the economy, which has been hit hard by three wars with Israel and an ongoing Israeli-Egyptian blockade since the Hamas terrorist group seized power over a decade ago. Unemployment is 43 percent and the poverty rate is 38 percent, according to the official Palestinian statistics office.

"Nowhere else are we the biggest service provider for the population of the entire territory," Schmale said, adding UNRWA provides food assistance to 1 million Gazans, calling it "an expression of collective shame for the international community."

With more than 12,500 teachers, nurses and other staff, UNRWA is Gaza's largest non-governmental employer. It is also involved in postwar reconstruction projects.

The dire situation in Gaza is evident inside al-Qouqa's home, which is so cramped the family has made sleeping spaces with wood boards and fabric. Two male family members are unemployed. Two others are Hamas civil servants and get paid only intermittently by the cash-strapped movement.

At 72, al-Qouqa is worried about his grandchildren. "If UNRWA provides them with bread, they can remain patient. But if it was cut, what will they become? They will become thieves, criminals and a burden on society," he said. Many believe Hamas, which administers schools and social services in Gaza, will step in to fill the void.

An UNRWA clinic in the Shati refugee camp (Photo: AP)

Jordan, a crucial ally in the US-led battle against Islamic militants, is home to the largest number of Palestinian refugees and their descendantswith nearly 2.2 million people eligible for UNRWA services. This has turned the UN agency into a major contributor to social welfare services in the country, which also hosts hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by war.

US aid cuts could heighten the threat of instability in Jordan, which is grappling with a worsening economy hurt by the spillover from conflict in neighboring Syria and Iraq. More than one-third of Jordan's young people are without jobs, turning them into potential targets for recruitment by extremists.

Most of the Palestinians eligible for UNRWA services in Jordan hold Jordanian citizenship, and some argue that this has ended their refugee status. But most maintain that UNRWA services are vital to propping up an important ally.

UNRWA's services are also vital in Lebanon, where Palestinians are prohibited from working in skilled professions and owning property.

Lebanon is the least-welcoming Arab country to Palestinian refugees, because it does not want Palestinians to settle and because it does not want the refugees to upset the country's delicate sectarian balance. Camps in several cities are ringed by concrete barriers and Lebanese security forces use checkpoints to control who enters and leaves. A recent census found 175,000 Palestinian refugees or their descendants living in the country.

The civil war in Syria has made many Palestinians refugees twice over. Some 32,000 Palestinians who were living in Syria fled to Lebanon, according to UNRWA. In Syria, Palestinians enjoyed the right to own property and to work in all professions. They are not entitled to the same in Lebanon.

Balkees Hameed, 33, arrived in 2013 with her husband, two children and in-laws from Damascus, where their apartment was damaged by rocket fire. The family depends on UNRWA assistance to rent a one-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building in Bourj al-Barajneh, a Beirut camp. Her husband wipes tables at a restaurant outside the camp. Hameed, like all Palestinians, was painfully aware of the rumors coming out of Washington.

"We are already defeated and now they want to oppress us some more?" she asked.





While more than 5 million Syrian refugees worldwide are entitled to assistance from the UN's general refugee relief agency, Palestinians are barred from it under the logic that UNRWA serves them. But UNRWA in Lebanon is chronically underfunded, and the wave of Palestinians arriving from Syria has strained its finances even further.

"What UNRWA provides is not even a quarter of what a Palestinian refugee needs," said Ramy Mansour, 34, who fled to Lebanon from the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus in 2013. "Take everything and return us to our homes. We don't want any assistance or anything, just return us to our country."
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 []
A major Indian airline may begin operating direct return flights to Israel which will include a navigation route above Saudi Arabia as part of the further consolidation of diplomatic ties between Jerusalem and New Delhi.

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On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently in the midst of a six-day trip to India, extolled the 25 years of diplomatic relations between Israel and India, boasting that the two sides had already signed nine agreements covering cooperation in cyber security, space and oil and gas exploration.

India has been keen to map out speedier flight routes in Saudi skies to reduce the journey duration by around two hours by enabling it to fly west without the need take roundabout routes, thereby slashing costs on fuel and significantly increasing the number of tourists flying between Israel and India.

PM Narendra Modi and PM Netanyahu (Photo: AFP)

In addition, the new route would enable the airline to dramatically reduce the price of flight tickets and simultaneously stimulate competition among other airlines.

If Saudi Arabia agrees to the move, it would likely be presented to the Indians as a gesture and not to the Israelis, since Jerusalem has no formal diplomatic ties with Riyadh.

Nevertheless, the change would symbolize another step in the direction of normalization between Israel and the Sunni kingdom, buttressing what are already reported to believe increasingly warm and cooperative, albeit it private, relations.

No rookie to the economic hardships involved in the current flight routes available between New Delhi and Ben Gurion Airport, Air India announced 20 years ago that it would be terminating its flights to Israel due to lack of profitability. If given the green light by the Saudis, Air India Boeing 787 planes would once again be landing on and taking off from Ben Gurions runways.

Air India Boeing 787

Presently, only Israels El Al airline operates flights between the two countries, with India being a notably popular holiday destination, particularly among freshly discharged IDF soldiers.

But the El Al flight from Israel to Mumbai demands an elongated route and protracted flight duration, flying above the Arabah, continuing along the Red Sea until reaching Yemen and then finally turning east toward India which lasts around eight hours.

Sources in Netanyahus delegation said Monday that the issue was raised during conversations between him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At the conclusion of the discussions, the two prime ministers inked an aviation agreement that will facilitate changes in airfares and security arrangements and further coordination between Israel and India.

Speaking at a briefing with his Indian counterpart, Netanyahu said that the upgrading of direct aviation routes will encourage the movement of investors, tourists, students and entrepreneurs.

Business matters notwithstanding, Netanyahu also said during the briefing that he was taking his opportunity, as the first prime minister to visit India in 15 years, to indulge in the delights the country has to offer.

I am doing what I didnt manage to do after the army. Now I am doing the trek in India. I want to thank my close friend, Narendra Modi, who gave us an exceptional welcome, Netanyahu said Monday at the conclusion of his trek in New Delhi.
Moshe Holtzberg, a young boy whose parents were killed at a Jewish center in Mumbai during the 2008 terror attack, returned to that city for the first time Tuesday to visit the site of the attack with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Netanyahu arrived in New Delhi for a six-day visit Sunday and will travel to Mumbai on Thursday where he hailed "the dawn of a new era in the great friendship between India and Israel" and will visit the Chabad Center where Holtzberg's parents Rabbi Gabriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife Rivkah were gunned down as ten Muslim militants rampaged through Mumbai in a 3-day siege. Netanyahu will unveil a memorial to 166 people killed in the attacks.

Moshe Holtzberg

Moshe was two at the time of the attack and was carried to safety by his nanny who found him by his parents' bodies. Holtzberg's parents were emissaries of the Chabad movement living in Mumbai at the time.

"We are very excited for the upcoming visit of Baby Moshe, who is not anymore a baby. But he will always remain in our heart as baby Moshe," Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, the head of the Chabad Trust in India told reporters Monday.

He's coming back to "the very place where his life was miraculously saved by his Indian nanny."

Sandra Samuels, Moshe's nanny travelled to Israel with him after his parents were killed and was given Israeli citizenship in 2010. On Tuesday she accompanied the boy and his relatives as they arrived in Mumbai.

Netanyahu will unveil a memorial in Chabad House to remember all the victims of the Mumbai attack, no matter their religion or where they were killed, Kozlovsky said, but there will be a special memorial to Moshe's parents, "who dedicated their lives to establish this center and they have run it until the last breath of their life."

Moshe Holtzberg hugged by Narendra Modi during the Indian leader's visit to Israel in July (Photo: Haim Zach/GPO)

Netanyahu's visit to India is his first and marks 25 years since India and Israel established diplomatic relations. Last year Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Israel , becoming the first Indian prime minister to do so. During his visit, he met with Moshe Holtzberg , who said that he missed India. The Indian premier replied by saying that the country was always open to him.

During the Cold War, India didn't have open relations with Israel, leaning heavily in favor of the Palestinians. But over the past quarter of a century ties between the two countries have warmed.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu and his wife Sara visited Agra, to see the Taj Mahal. On Wednesday he is slated to travel to Gujarat, Modi's home state, before heading to Mumbai where apart from meeting members of India's tiny Jewish community he will also be meeting with top business leaders.
Hundreds of non-Jewish inspectors dealing with illegal immigration will be tasked with enforcing the recently passed Supermarkets Law and preventing some businesses from opening on Shabbat, Knesset Member Moshe Gafni of the United Torah Judaism faction said in a closed meeting Saturday evening.

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After Interior Minister Aryeh Deri told Yedioth Ahronoth last week that he had neither the authority to enforce the new law, nor the intention of doing so, one of the senior ultra-Orthodox Knesset members is now presenting an entirely different picture.

MK Gafni. 'We'll not only maintain the status quo but also make progress on the Shabbat issue' (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

Haredi website Kikar Hashabat on Monday published recordings of from a closed conference, in which MK Gafni is addressing the shortage of manpower for enforcing different Shabbat-related laws, including the Supermarkets Law.

"There was an agreement with the prime minister, and this is what has to happen now," Gafni said. "There is a great difficulty enforcing the laws, and the agreement was that due to the fact that there are hundreds of gentile inspectorsperhaps even morewho are dealing with illegal immigrants, the enforcement issue is going to get on track, and this is a positive and essential track. I hope these things will indeed happen."

Gafni, who chairs the Knesset's Finance Committee, boasted in the conferenceorganized by the United Hatzalah emergency medical servicethat the Haredim had succeeded in changing the delicate balance of power vis-a-vis secular Jews on state and religion affairs.

"If this whole system we have been talking about is completed, we'll not only maintain the status quo but also make progress on the Shabbat issue."

In the recording, Gafni recounts his conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu several days ago, a moment before the government approved the state budget, giving the Haredim everything they had asked for.

"The prime minister called me at 2 am on Thursday and said to me, 'Rabbi Gafni, I'm asking you to help us pass the budget and to agree.' I said to him, 'Mr. Prime Minister, what do you want me to agree to, when funds to our schoolsour seminariesare being cut?' So he said, 'What do you suggest?' I said, 'I suggest that you give us back the cuts, down to the very last shekel, otherwise it won't pass.' And that's what happened, and the budget was approved unanimously."

A supermarket open on Shabbat in Bat Yam (Photo: Yariv Katz)

Sources in the Interior Ministry denied Gafni's comments on Monday, saying no decision had been made to send ministry inspectors to enforce the Supermarkets Law. According to the sources, neither the ministry nor the minister are authorized to issue such an order.

Gafni's recordings sparked a row in the political arena. MK Elazar Stern of Yesh Atid said Monday night, "I'm anxiously waiting for the response of Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who claims to lead the Religious Zionist movement, to the change in the status quo in favor of the Haredim. Will he bury his head in the sand once again?

MK Rachel Azaria of Kulanu said she and her party would not accept any change in the status quo. "The Supermarkets Law changes nothing about the status quo. Forcing mayors to enforce the law is a blatant violation. That won't happen."

Ashdod Municipality searching for non-Jewish inspectors

Meanwhile Tuesday, the Ashdod Municipality published an ad on its website in search of students for inspector jobs aimed at enforcing municipal bylaws, including a law against opening businesses on Shabbat.

The ad states it is directed at "a population whose day of rest is not Shabbat."

Saturday's protest against religious coercion in Ashdod

On Saturday, more than 1,000 Ashdod residents staged a protest against the increased enforcement of Shabbat laws in the city. They carried signs reading, "We are against religious coercion."

"The municipality keeps ignoring the residents, and if they thing the protests will stopthey're wrong," said Guy Sa'ar, one of the protest leaders. "The municipality can't decide how we should live and change our status quo. The residents are the only ones who will decide."
One can enjoy great pizza in Israel at truly bargain prices, if you pay attention to the "when and where." Here is a list of six places worth visiting.

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You wont save calories, but you will feel virtuous about spending less money. The food is not ranked; rather, the places are listed in alphabetical order. All have English menus, although, unfortunately, none are certified kosher.

Bellini

Ambiance: The restaurant, which shares a lovely square with the Suzanne Dallal center in Tel Avivs Neve Tzedek, has a large indoor room with a rustic feel, and a welcoming al fresco area shaded by aromatic citrus trees.

Beverages:

Full bar with specialty cocktails, imported and domestic beers, wine and soft drinks

Deal Hours:

Sunday-Thursday, 19.00-21.00.

(Photo: Anatoli Michaelo)

The Deal:

The aperitivo pizza birra comprises toasted rustic bread served with olive oil and balsamic vinegar; a generous heap of crispy nachos, served with salsa verde, sour cream, and a spicy tomato salsa; a pizza for two; and two glasses (1/3 liter) of draft beer.

The Pizza: A choice of four varieties, including the classic margherita; black olives and chili pepper; roasted onion and fresh spinach; and pepperoni and roasted pepper (slight extra charge).

Noteworthy:

The unique pasta nachos, made from pappardelle pasta dough, steal the show; they are addictive, and make it hard to finish everything put on the table. The restaurant offers a full Italian menu, with excellent polenta and desserts.

Price:

NIS 78 for two (NIS 39 per person)

Bellini

. Yehieli St. 6, Tel Aviv. Tel. (053) 943-9619

Dizzy Frishdon

Ambiance: This is primarily a bar that attracts a younger crowd. What sets it apart from other bars on Dizengoff is that, in addition to its sidewalk tables and stools, it has a large indoor section, which is relatively well lit and does not allow smoking. The music is not too loud, either.

Beverages:

Full bar with specialty cocktails, imported and domestic beers, wine and soft drinks

Deal hours:

Every day except Friday, 15.00-19.00.

(Photo: Buzzy Gordon)

The deal:

Happy Hour, when there is 50% off on alcoholic drinks and most foods, including select pizzas and toppings.

The pizza:

There is a plain margarita (sic) pizza, with toppings available, and a delicious white pizza called Stephans, with a Parmesan cream, artichokes, truffles and arugula. Each pizza comprises eight slices.

Noteworthy:

Sunday is also wine day, with all the red or white you can drink for NIS 65 (NIS 75 for some labels); the wine comes with a small complimentary plate of cheese. There is an expanding menu of bar foods and tapas, and one dessert (warm chocolate cake with chocolate ice cream).

Price:

The plain pizza is NIS 18 instead of NIS 36, and toppings NIS 2 each instead of NIS 4 (premium toppings are NIS 3.5 instead of 7); Stephans Pizza is NIS 25 instead of NIS 46.

Dizzy Frishdon . Dizengoff St. 121, Tel Aviv. Tel. (03) 523-4111

Kofinas

Ambiance: Kofinas is a country restaurant located in a moshav in the Sharon. It is furnished with light woods and has al fresco seating surrounded by greenery. There is plenty of convenient, free parking.

Beverages:

Full bar with specialty cocktails, imported and domestic beers, wine and soft drinks. In winter, there is warm sangria and hot cicer.

Deal hours:

Mondays, all evening from 17.00. (Take Away orders excluded.)

(Photo: Buzzy Gordon)

The deal:

1+1 (buy one, get one free) on all pizzas, available to members of the restaurants loyalty club; it is free to join, online or in person (the restaurant prefers you register 24 hours in advance).

The pizza:

There are nine specialty pizzas, each with six large slices, baked in the oven imported from Italy. The three distinctive house pizzas are the funghi, with mascarpone cream instead of tomato sauce, mushrooms, truffle, Parmesan and chestnuts; the Saloniki, with tomato sauce, mozzarella, spinach, feta cheese, Kalamata olives and Parmesan; and the Gyros, with tomato sauce, pullet, ground beef, pickled onions roasted onion, tehina, yogurt, olives and chili pepper.

Noteworthy:

There is a full Italian-Mediterranean menu, with excellent appetizers and desserts. Membership in the Kofinas club includes its sister restaurant, Taya, an Asian restaurant with its own benefits for members.

Price:

NIS 52 to NIS 68 for two pizzas

Kofinas . HaShibbolim St. 3, Moshav Tzur Moshe. Tel. (09) 772-2672

Pazzo Pizza Party

Ambiance: Located in a suburban industrial zone, the two indoor rooms are furnished simply, while the outdoor area is furnished with picnic tables. The philosophy of Pazzo is to combine the atmosphere of a bar with a food menu featuring gourmet pizzas.

Beverages:

Full bar with specialty cocktails, imported and domestic beers, wine and soft drinks

Deal hours:

Sundays, all evening from 18.00; Weekdays, Sunday-Thursday, 18.00-20.30.

(Photo: Buzzy Gordon)

The deals:

Actually, two of them. Unlimited servings of pizza all evening on Sundays; 50% off on all pizzas weekdays until 20.30.

The wines qualifying for unlimited refills are one red and one white, both from Spain. The beers qualifying for unlimited refills are draft Tuborg and draft Carlsberg. Reservations are recommended for unlimited Sundays, especially from 21.00, when a D.J. comes on the scene. Waiters come around with pizzas, with the pace and variety picking up as the evening progresses.

The pizza:

There are 12 specialty pizzas in addition to the plain Margherita, which can be ordered with toppings. The red pizzas come with tomato sauce and mozzarella, while the white come with a blend of creamed Parmesan, mascarpone and mozzarella.

Reportedly, the most popular in the red category is the cacciatore (with smoked goose breast, pepperoni, egg and broccoli), while the bestselling white is the Truffle Bianca (with three kinds of mushrooms and a truffle spread). There is also a vegan option, the Mercato, which is intriguing in its own right, with artichoke mash, spinach, eggplant, sun-dried tomato and toasted almonds.

Banana loti (Photo: Buzzy Gordon)

Noteworthy:

There is a limited menu of starters, as well as a few desserts, including two sweet pizzasthe Banana Loti (with caramelized bananas and dark and white chocolate) and the Nucciotella Oreo (chocolate, hazelnut and Oreo cookie crumbles).

Price:

NIS 79 for unlimited pizza and wine (or soft drinks); NIS 89 for unlimited pizza and beer. Whole pizzas during the weekday half-price hours range from NIS 24 to NIS 34.

Pazzo Pizza Party

. Ha-Yetzira St. 5, Raanana. Tel. (09) 741-8833

Pizza Porto

Ambiance: New, modern, stand-alone restaurant in the Airport City business park. Free parking after 16.00.

Beverages:

Full bar with specialty cocktails, imported and domestic beers, wine and soft drinks.

Deal hours:

Sundays, all evening from 18.00.

(Photo: Eitan Waxman)

The deal:

All You Can Eat Pizza, served by waiters who will bring assorted slices all evening long. The deal also includes one glass of house wine or  liter of draft beer.

The pizza:

There are nine specialty pizzas, all but two based on the house blend of four cheeses: mozzarella cheddar, Gouda and Parmesan. The pizzas are the eponymous Porto (the blend plus fresh basil, with a choice of toppings), Carciofi (artichoke), Pepperoni, Greek (with black olives and feta cheese), Melanzana (eggplant), Anchovy, and Breakfast (with a fried egg); the two different pizzas are the Bianca, white pizza without tomato sauce, and the Vegan, containing no cheese.

Noteworthy:

The restaurant offers a full Italian menu, with rather unique desserts. PIzza Porto is less than a year old, and it is constantly adding new dishes -- and pizzas -- to the menu.

Price:

NIS 69

Pizza Porto

. Golan 2, Airport City. Tel. (03) 800-0888.

Tito

Ambiance: Tito, which is modeled after family-style Italian-American restaurants in the USA, is situated in an Azrieli shopping center. It even has the feel of a North American casual dining restaurant, with booths and red leather banquettes.

Beverages:

Limited bar with specialty cocktails, Tuborg and Stella Artois beer, two house wines, soft drinks

Deal hours:

Mondays, 18.00-22.00. Reservations strongly recommended.

(Photo: Buzzy Gordon)

The deal:

Pizza Night -- unlimited pizza, all you can eat, 1-2 slices at a time.

The pizza:

The pizzas are rectangular, cut into squares, and served from the tray by waitresses who roam through the restaurant. There are six house pizzas, half of which are vegetarian: Margherita, just tomato sauce and mozzarella (without the traditional basil leaf): Bianca (bechamel porcini sauce, mozzarella, four kinds of mushrooms, asparagus and truffle oil), Artichoke (tomato sauce, artichoke and garlic mash, mozzarella, goose breast), Meatball (tomato sauce, mozzarella, meatball, arugula and provolone), Primavera (bechamel pesto sauce, broccoli, asparagus, zucchini, artichoke, mozzarella and provolone), and Pepperoni (tomato sauce, mozzarella provolone and pepperoni). Usually, there are also one or two different pizzas made especially for pizza night.

Noteworthy:

One may also wash down the pizza with unlimited draft beer. There is a full menu of Italian dishes, served in portions for two or four persons. This is the only place I know of in Israel where one can get red velvet cake.

Price:

NIS 69 per person; NIS 29 for beer with unlimited refills

Tito

. Derekh Yitzhak Rabin 53, Givatayim. Tel. (03) 631-7080
President Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday that Turkey's planned military operation against Kurdish militia forces in Syria's Afrin region will be supported by Syrian rebel fighters.

His comment to reporters in parliament was the latest in a series of warnings about an imminent operation targeting Afrin after the US-led coalition said it was working with Kurdish-led forces to set up a new 30,000-strong border force in Syria.
President Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon will meet behind closed doors on Tuesday with a US House of Representatives committee that is probing whether Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

The interview with the House Intelligence Committee comes after Bannon's public falling out with the president over comments Bannon made to author Michael Wolff for his new book "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House."

In the book, Bannon is quoted as describing a June 2016 meeting between Trump associates, including the president's son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a Russian lawyer, as "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."

The meeting came after Donald Trump Jr. was told in an email that the Russian government had dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, to which he replied: "I love it."
Three policemen from Jerusalem have been charged with assault for bringing an attack dog into a room in which two Arab youth were being questioned in a bid to make them confess to the suspicions against them.

One of the policeman was also accused of hitting a detainee in the face and kicking him in the stomach.
Syria's chief opposition negotiator called on US President Donald Trump and European Union leaders to increase pressure on President Bashar al-Assad, Russia and Iran to return to talks aimed at ending the six-year civil war.

"It is time for President Trump, Chancellor (Angela) Merkel and (British) Prime Minister (Theresa) May to say: "Stop," Nasr Hariri, the chief negotiator for Syria's main opposition, told Reuters in an interview.

"It is time for Trump, Merkel and May to increase pressure and bring the international community together to get a genuine and just political situation in Syria."

Hariri said that unless the United States and EU powers increased pressure on President Assad and his big power allies in Moscow and Tehran, then the blood of Syrian civilians would continue to be spilled.
Nine years after the Mumbai terror attacks , 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg on Tuesday returned the Chabad Center where his parents, Rabbi Gabriel Noach and Rivkah Holtzberg , were murdered.

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This was the boy's first visit to India since the attack, which took place when he was only two years old. Holtzberg was invited to join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his six-day visit to the country.

Moshe Holtzberg returns to Chabad House in Mumbai for first time (Photo: AFP)

He arrived at the Chabad Center with his grandparents and with Sandra Samuel, the local nanny who saved his life.

"He has now come full circle," Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, the head of the Chabad Trust in India said. "Think of how he left that place several years ago, and now he is returning to a vibrant and thriving place with Jewish activity, like it was during the Holtzbergs' era. Terror hasn't won."

He's coming back to "the very place where his life was miraculously saved by his Indian nanny."

Six Israelis were murdered in the November 2008 attack: The Holtzbergs, Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, Bentzion Kruman, Yoheved Orpaz and Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich.

Rabbi Kozlovsky and his wife Chaya have been running the Chabad Center in the same building, Nariman House, where the attack took place. Moshe Holtzberg is expected to stay with the Kozlovskys and their four children in the coming days.

"The last time Moishi left this place it was under fire. This is the place that built his identity," the rabbi added.

"When he came here, he was shocked by how excited the Indian media outlets were about his visit. He asked questions about the place and visited the synagogue that had been run by his father. He also went to the nearby Taj Hotel which was also attacked. He is showing a lot of interest, but he hasn't said much about himself."

Moshe Holtzberg arriving in Israel in 2008 with nanny Sandra Samuel (Photo: Boaz Arad)

On Monday, the Rabbi Kozlovsky told reporters: "We are very excited for the upcoming visit of Baby Moshe, who is not anymore a baby. But he will always remain in our heart as baby Moshe."

He's coming back to "the very place where his life was miraculously saved by his Indian nanny."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara at the Taj Mahal (Photo: Avi Ohayon/GPO)

Meanwhile Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara visited the Taj Mahal in the city of Agra.

"This is a moment of pleasure in a very intensive visit," the prime minister said. "I would like to thank my friend, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for making this moment possible for us. We have encountered a lot of love for Israel in India and now we have come to the temple of love."
How serious are the Palestinian threats to stop the security coordination with Israel? Here's an anecdote from the past few years.

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In early March 2015, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) held its 27th convention. Its concluding statement was as follows: "The security coordination, in all its forms, will be halted in light of Israel's failure to abide by agreements signed between the two sides.

"The Executive Committee will monitor the activity of the Higher National Monitoring Committee with the International Criminal Court to settle the score with those responsible for Israel's war crimesespecially the settlements and the aggression against the Gaza Strip."

Abbas at Palestinian Central Council meeting earlier this week (Photo: EPA)

The headlines after the 2015 meeting gave the impression that the security coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority had come to an end. But three years later, almost nothing has changed.

The security coordination was somewhat suspended following the metal detector crisis at the Temple Mount last summer, as the placement of metal detectors at the entrance to the holy site was seen as an unusual and dramatic Israeli move which called for an unusual and dramatic Palestinian response. But shortly after the metal detectors were removed , the security coordination was restored in full force. Did it have anything to do with the PLO Central Council's decision? Absolutely not.

On Monday, the Central Council's 28th convention concluded with a familiar recommendation: To reaffirm the vote to stop the security coordination in all its forms. The Palestinian leaders also voted to order the PLO to suspend its recognition of Israel until it "recognizes the state of Palestine", cancels its annexation of east Jerusalem and stops settlement activity, and decided the PLO should remove itself from the Paris Protocol on Economic Relations which was incorporated with into the Oslo II Accord.

Before we examine the meaning of the PLO Central Council's decision, we must first understand how the hierarchy in that organization works. The Central Council is the second most important body in the PLO. It convenes every few years, mostly following a dramatic event (this time, the reason was the American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital).

Riots in Bethlehem following Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital (Photo: AFP)

The PLO's Executive Committee, a smaller body which serves as the organization's cabinet, is considered the highest body on paper, but is actually the second most important body. The real highest body is Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas is the person who eventually decides which of the Central Council's recommendations should be accepted and which should remain as headlines or threats. That's what happened in 2015. The Central Council decided that the security coordination should be halted? So what? The coordination has only grown stronger since then.

There are very few people Abbas likes to consult with before making highly important decisions. They are the real cabinet. Some of them are more familiar to the Israeli public and some are less. If Abbas thinks he should stop the security coordination or suspend the recognition of Israel, he will consult them rather than the Central Council or the Executive Committee. He will convene these bodies only after making his decision, using them as a rubber stamp.

A week ago, several days before the Central Council conference, I met a Palestinian source in Ramallah who isn't particularly fond of the current government. At the sidelines of the meeting, he said: "The Central Council will convene, there will be huge headlines, and what will happen the next day? Nothing?"
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected former New York state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's bid to avoid a retrial on corruption charges after his 2015 conviction was thrown out by a lower court.

Silver, a Democrat, had appealed a 2017 ruling by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan that sufficient evidence existed to prove various corruption charges against him even though it had thrown out his convictions.
SANTIAGO -- Pope Francis begged for forgiveness Tuesday for the "irreparable damage" done to children who were raped and molested by priests, opening his visit to Chile by diving head-first into a scandal that has greatly hurt the Catholic Church's credibility here and cast a cloud over his visit.

In his first event of the day, Francis met privately with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and addressed lawmakers, judges and other authorities at La Moneda palace. They interrupted him with applause when he said he felt "bound to express my pain and shame" that some of Chile's pastors had sexually abused children in their care.

"I am one with my brother bishops, for it is right to ask forgiveness and make every effort to support the victims, even as we commit ourselves to ensuring that such things do not happen again," he said.

Francis didn't refer by name to Chile's most notorious pedophile priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, who was sanctioned in 2011 by the Vatican to a lifetime of "penance and prayer" for sexually molesting minors. Nor did he refer to the fact that the emeritus archbishop of Santiago, a top papal adviser, has acknowledged he knew of complaints against Karadima but didn't remove him from ministry.

Karadima had been a politically connected, charismatic and powerful priest who ministered to a wealthy Santiago community and produced dozens of priestly vocations and five bishops. Victims went public with their accusations in 2010, after complaining for years to church authorities that Karadima would kiss and fondle them when they were teenagers.

"Sex abuse is Pope Francis' weakest spot in terms of his credibility," said Massimo Faggioli, a Vatican expert and theology professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia. "It is surprising that the pope and his entourage don't understand that they need to be more forthcoming on this issue."
NEW DELHI - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday he was discussing with India ways to strengthen security cooperation against the menace of from Islamist extremism that both democracies faced.

Netanyahu spoke while on a six-day tour of India, the first by an Israeli premier for 15 years, and is being feted by Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, whose Hindu nationalist party has long admired Israel for its tough posture against terrorism.

India, wary of upsetting Arab nations on which it was dependent for oil, and heeding the sentiments of its own large Muslim minority, kept a distance from Israel for decades. But under Modi, the two sides have embraced a closer relationsjip based on security and economics.

The right-wing Netanyahu told a security conference that India and Israel were two democracies with a natural affinity, but their open and liberal societies faced risks.
Two of the heads of disabled protest organizations decried the government's recent actions regarding raising their benefits, with Welfare Minister Haim Katz claiming Monday that the Finance Ministry was "deceiving the disabled" when it came to raising benefits.

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Chairperson of the "Disabled Protest Headquarters" Naomi Moravia told Ynet in an interview that, "There are very severe problems here when it comes to both decision making and upholding agreements."

Disabled Protest Headquarters Chairperson Moravia said Finance Minister Kahlon will be the death of the disabled

"The government cannot keep its word on a simple agreement," she accused. "The finance minister and the (Treasury's) Budgets Department will be the death of the disabled, literally. They don't seem to be able to comprehend the benefits are killing us."

"If the benefits were linkedjust as the ministers have just linked their own wages to the average wagehad the benefits been linked since 2003, we would not be where we are today," Moravia added.

The chairperson did lend her support to Welfare Minister Katz. "From the struggle's outset he stood his ground and said, 'The disabled deserve minimum wage-level benefits.' The Treasury and the prime minister have cut deals with us, but failed to live up to them," she said.

Polio Patients Organization Chairman Yehuda said it was Kahlon's job to supply the funds, but Welfare Minister Katz's job to divide the funds

Chairman of the Polio Patients' Organization Doron Yehuda has been holding protest vigils opposite Katz's home. Unlike Moravia, Yehuda claimed it was the welfare minister who should be looking out of the disabled public and fighting for it.

"The finance minister's job is to foot the bill. The person who needs to take care of the data, give the funds to the disabled and make sure they're divvied up right is the labor and welfare minister," he declared.

Welfare Minister Katz (L) and Finance Minister Kahlon shifted blame for the benefits agreement's failure to be implemented (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky, Ohad Zwigenberg)

"We met with Haim Katz last night. He appeared when we were (demonstrating) in his home and told us there is going to a discussion on the benefits (in the Knesseted) Wednesday, and we'll be there," Yehuda said. "I call upon the prime minister to step up on this eleventh hour, and tell the welfare and finance ministers he agrees the disabled should be receiving minimum wage-level benefits."

Concluding the discussion, Moravia said she expected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to instruct the Treasury's Budgets Department to pass the agreement in its original promulgation. "They should link benefits to the average wage, anchor future incrementsbut do them right, in 2020 and not 2021and stop playing around with us. The agreement is there, they should uphold it," she said.

The Disabled Panthers organization's protest outside Katz's home (Photo: Disabled Panthers)

Katz maintained Monday that Treasury Director-General Shai Babad notified him Sunday that the third and fourth increments to raise benefits and link them with the average wage will not be part of the governmental bill on the matter, in contravention of the agreement reached with disabled protest organizations in September 2017.

The Finance Ministry commented, "As part of approving the state's 2019 budget this past Thursday, the government reached a decision to increase disability benefits by NIS 2.15 billion. The government's decision constitutes the first official and binding decision to mention specific sums, and to include earmarking the requisite budgets."
After the customary seven days of mourning, the family and friends of terror victim Raziel Shevah went Tuesday to visit his gravesite in the West Bank outpost in which he lived, Havat Gilad.

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The victim's family read psalms and eulogized the deceased victim of the attack. His father Moshe asked that his soul, "Pray so the prime minister will heed his will and open his heart to building the land of Israel." Earlier, the family commenced the writing of a Torah scroll in Raziel's memory.

Raziel Shevah's family at his gravesite (Photo: Ohad Zweigenberg)

"You are now much closer to God then the rest of us," continued his father. "We are praying that God will instill in the hearts of decision makers the removal of all obstacles so that we can fulfill the commandment of settling the land of Israel. Pray for us, for your wife, for your children."





(Photo: Ohad Tzvigenberg)

(Photo: Ohad Tzvigenberg)

Yossi Dagan, Head of the Samaria Regional Council also spoke near the gravesite and promised to do everything in his power to fulfill the Raziel's will. "We promise you that in this spot there will be a building boom in your memory, so that all the murderers know the nation of Israel is strong and lives on."

(Photo: Ohad Tzvigenberg)

(Photo: Ohad Tzvigenberg)

Raziel's widow noted that her husband's murder was not political: "We feel the embrace of only one side of the political spectrum. We request that the left too come to comfort; our home is open to all and Raziel loved all." Monday, Zionist Union MK Eitan Cabel visited the family to offer condolences.

Meanwhile, the residents of Havat Gilad are awaiting the government's meeting this Sunday and are hoping that Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman's pitch to legalize the outpost is indeed brought up in the session.
More than 400 people will be attending Wednesday a special Knesset conference regarding refugees and asylum seekers, their status and the means of keeping them in Israel. Naka Kerba, a Sudanese national who was deported from Israel and came back as an international student, said in a Ynet studio interview, "If Israel's populace was exposed to what the Sudanese and Eritreans went through, we'd be able to move forward."

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Kerba also shared her experiences returning to her home country. "I didn't really have a home to go back to," she said. "Things are not stable there and you can't start a basic, normal life there as you can here or anywhere else, for that matter. Especially since you never know what's around the corner."

Former Sudanese refugee Kerba (L) and MK Rozin spoke on behalf of refugees

The people supporting expelling refugees, Kerba claimed, made up their minds without really knowing the facts. "You have to examine whether (the immigrants) are really refugees, check out other possibilities or other things to do rather than just dump them somewhere. They're human too, you mustn't forget that," she appealed.

Kerba blamed the Israeli government for the discrepancy between the Sudanese and Eritrean populations in Israel and the manner in which they are perceived by the public. "I think Israelis don't really know the Darfurian and Eritrean populations. Maybe if they met more of them, saw their daily lives, where and how they livedmaybe that would help Israelis see the truth and for us to move forward," she said.

Sudanese and Eritrean immigrants in Israel (Photo: Ryan)

MK Michal Rozin (Meretz), one of the conference's organizers, said in the same interview that, "Between 80 and 90 percent of Eritrean and Sudanese refugees are recognized as refugees the world over, and remain in their host countries until they can return to their own. Only Israel refuses to recognize them as refugees."

"They seem to have decided a priori that anyone coming in from Eritrea was not a refugee. What does it matter if the country is ruled by a dictator? What does it matter if the entire Western world Europe, the United States and Canadaand all other countries recognize them as refugees? We don't, because we have some sort of relationship with the Eritrean government, with the president," she added.

Rozin also said she sympathized with the concerns of the Israeli residents of south Tel Aviv, but remarked that the refugees should still be allowed to stay. "I put forward many solutions to try and disperse the (refugee) populace, so they don't remain solely in south Tel Aviv and perpetuate the very difficult situation there. Unfortunately, not only did the government ignore my suggestions, they also canceled the Knesset committee on the matter and took the item completely off the agenda," the MK accused.

South Tel Aviv residents protesting to expel migrants (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

MK Oren Hazan (Likud) offered a counter to Rozin's harsh statements. "What's unfortunate is piggybacking off of the people of south Tel Aviv and many other Israelis who have been hurt by this thing. It's time to expel , in an instant, all of them. Get them on a plane with a one-way ticket to a third, fourth country or their home," he declared.

"Stop being merciful and compassionate. We have to stand our ground, because when it comes down to it, this will just blow up in our faces," Hazan added.
Twenty nine people were arrested Tuesday as part of a covert investigation conducted by the police's National Unit for Combating Economic Crime (NUCEC), which has now gone public. The investigation had been ongoing for the past year as part of NUCEC's collaboration with the Israel Tax Authority, the Tel Aviv District Attorney's Office and the Money Laundering Prohibition Authority.

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The suspects' arrests marked the first time members of an economic crime outfit were apprehended. Their organization worked in a methodical, orderly manner, similarly to other organized crime groups, to defraud the state, regulators and tax authorities.

The breadth of their fraud was estimated to be a billion shekelsstarting 2015 and lasting until just recently. Hundreds of investigators and detectives, accompanied by Justice Ministry officials, worked on the case.

The NUCEC's investigation went public, leading to the arrest of 29 people (Photo: Avi Moalem)

The organization's operations centered on issuing fictitious invoices, with the group's members divvying responsibilities by using different companiessome of them "trumping up" invoices without performing any work, making the members eligible for the 17 percent Value Added Tax rebate.

The funds were then laundered using money changers. The companies involved operated in the construction and foreign employee importing sectors.

The organization was comprised of several levels, with executive operations taking place in Spain and headed by a person with a prior criminal record, who will be extradited to Israel. A bank employee was also arrested.

The year-long covert investigation concluded both in Israel and abroad Tuesday, involving sums hitherto unheard of in money laundering. In the past, members of criminal organizations were indicted for extortion, bribery and gambling. In the aforementioned case, however, the members were money launderers specializing in fictitious invoices.

Attorney Shai Roda said police were harassing his client simply due to her choice of life partner

Attorney Shai Roda, representing one of the suspects, said, "My client says she has nothing to do with the criminal organization. This is not the first time NUCEC has picked on her simply because of her choice of life partner. My client is cooperating with investigators and I believe she will be released home soon."

Attorney Ofer Almog, who represents two of the suspects in the case, said, "This is a far-reaching affair. We're only at the investigation's beginning, and I'm certain that as it progresses, my client will be found to have acted impeccably while meticulously adhering to the law when managing his money changing business."
A ballistic missile fired by Yemen's armed Houthi group towards Saudi Arabia's southern Jizan region was shot down by Saudi forces on Tuesday, Saudi state TV Ekhbariya reported.

The station gave no further details. There were no reports of casualties or damage.

The Iranian-aligned Houthis have fired several missiles at the kingdom, and while these have not caused any serious damage they have served to deepen tensions between Riyadh and its arch rival Tehran.

Saudi Arabia accuses Iran of supplying missile parts and expertise to the Houthis, who have taken over the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and other parts of the country during its civil war. Iran denies the charge.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) arranged a meeting between the late King Hussein of Jordan and Jewish-American actress Susan Cabot, a date that led to a relationship lasting several years, recently unclassified documents relating to the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy revealed.

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The CIA had a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent named Robert Maheu arrange the meeting between the two, with the king meeting the actress in a gala dinner thrown by Maheu.

Jewish American film star Cabot (L) was set up with a young King Hussein by the CIA

The affair between the Jordanian monarch and the Hollywood star lasted several years, rumors said, adding the son Cabot had in 1964Timothywas Hussein's. Timothy Cabot beat his mother to death with an iron rod in 1986, and it was made public during his trial for her murder that up until her death, King Hussein would make monthly deposits of $1,500 to her account.

According to the CIA's document, Maheu was asked to find "female companionship" for an "official visit by a foreign head of state" in April 1959. The date lines up with King Hussein's visit to the US. He was 23 at the time.

The US had a vested interest in keeping the monarch happy, as Jordan was considered a potential ally in the turbulent Middle East and American officials were impressed with his leadership.

King Hussein (center) around the time of the signing of his country's peace agreement with Israel (:  , ")

Cabot, born Harriet Shapiro to a Russian Jewish family, was considered by the CIA the means through which they will achieve their aims. With reports of the king's relationship with the actress, many wondered whether her Jewish heritage will prove an embarrassment.

King Hussein, who signed a historic peace agreement with Israel in 1994, died of cancer in 1999. His first wife, Dina, died in 1957. He later remarried three more times.
Iran's supreme leader accused Saudi rulers on Tuesday of committing "treason" against Muslims by aligning themselves with the United States and Israel.

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Addressing parliamentary representatives from Islamic countries gathered in Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital was "a big mistake" and "doomed to failure".

Ayatollah Khamenei said Saudi Arabia was committing treason for its ties to US, Israel (Photo: AFP)

Iran, the leading Shiite Muslim power, and Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, a key US ally, are rivals for influence in the Middle East where they support opposing sides in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

In the past year, foreign reports on covert Saudi relations with Israel have proliferated, alleging the two countries' converging interests in several areas, chiefly the threat posed to both by Iran

Saudi King Salman's kingdom is said to have held covert talks with Israel

Yedioth Ahronoth reported Tuesday morning, for instance, that talks were being held to allow Air India flights between Israel and India to fly over Saudi airspace to shorten the flight's duration.

President Donald Trump said on a visit to Jerusalem last year that shared concern about Iran was driving many Arab states closer to Israel.
The express train to Jerusalem , going from Tel Aviv's HaHagana station to Jerusalem in only 28 minutes, will commence activities this coming March, and took a test drive Tuesday.

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During the test run, the train went from Mishmar Ayalon, a moshav in central Israel, to Sha'ar HaGai on the outskirts of Jerusalema relatively short portion of the entire line's lengthreaching a top speed of 120 kilometers per hour.

When construction works are completed, the train will be able to reach Israel's normal train speed of 160kmph.

The express Jerusalem train line took its first test run (Photo: Meshi Ben Ami)

Train engineer Avi Shitrit said, "It's simply historic. The first time I boarded the caboose I was thrown off by how quiet it was. We're used to loud, polluting diesel engines, and now we have electric, eco-friendly technology."

Despite the festive airs surrounding the launch of the country's first electric express train linedecades behind other developed countriesIsrael Railways were hard pressed to hide away first-time jitters.

The Transportation Ministry committed to operating an electric line from Herzliya to Jerusalem by the end of March, but works have yet to be completed. Commenting on the Herzliya line delay, Katz assured, "It's only a delay of several months, which I'll try to contract."

Delays will not set the project back by more than a few months, Transportation Minister Katz vowed (Photo: Hillel Meir/TPS)

During its first stage of operations, the train will operate on a single track running from the Jerusalem Binyanei HaUma railway station to Tel Aviv's HaHagana railway station. In its first two months of operation, one train will run every hour in either direction, contrary to previous promises of four trains ever hour.

In the future, the line's frequency may be expanded to six trains an hour during peak times.

Sources in the infrastructures sector said Katz's commitment to inaugurate the line this coming March was "ambitious" considering all of the challenges still facing crews on the ground.

Only last week did the Supreme Court finally approve the settlement agreement between the project's contracting companies, and quite a bit of work remains to be done: electrification from Mishmar Ayalon westwards to Tel Aviv and around the Binyanei HaUma station, completing laying down the tracks from the end of Bridge 10 and until HaUma station and assimilation of the new signaling systems.

There are some tracks that have yet to be laid down (Photo: Meshi Ben Ami)

The Jerusalem express railway line includes a double track 56km in length and will pass through Ben Gurion Airport, Modi'in and Sha'ar HaGai. The train will make some four million trips its first year of operation.

The estimated cost of the line is NIS 7 billion and particular importance was placed on the national project's realization due to the significantly increased accessibility to the capital.
The November 2017 housing approval data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) indicates that housing supply is slowing in NSW, while its booming in Victoria, according to the Urban Taskforce.

Victoria with 6,689 home approvals is leading NSW with 5,953 approvals in the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) November 2017 trend data, said Chris Johnson, CEO of the Urban Taskforce. NSW is twenty percent bigger than Victoria in population so the Victorian performance is impressive. The fundamental difference between the two states seems to be the larger number of detached houses being approved in Victoria with 3,266 approvals compared to 2,373 in NSW.

Apartment approvals in Victoria and NSW were similar, with 3,423 in the former and 3,580 in the latter. The NSW high density approvals are well down from the July 2017 high point of 4,366 approvals.

The Victorian approvals for non-residential development for November 2017 were $1,341,750,000  well above the NSW approvals at $1,151,314,000, Johnson said.

The data correlates with a slowing down of home sales and planning approvals in Sydney with a clear downward trend since the high point in July 2017. It will be important for the NSW Government to carefully monitor the downward trend, particularly in the Sydney Market.

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Kenyan millers have projected that consumers could be forced to dig deeper into their pockets for a packet of maize flour in the next few months.

According to the millers, the price of a 2kg packet is could go up to Sh200 by March. Currently, a packet goes for between Sh110 and Sh115.

Chairman of the United Grain Millers Association, Peter Kuguru, on Monday, said the supply of maize from the North Rift is decreasing and what is available could last until next month.

We have two million bags of maize currently at the Strategic Grain Reserve against a monthly demand of three million.This will not be enough. This means millers will have to rely on imports from the neighbouring countries like Uganda and Tanzania, he said.

He said there is little maize in the local market and some farmers could be hoarding the grains in anticipation of better prices.

A report released last week by the Famine Early Warning System Network shows the price of a 90kg bag of maize is likely to increase to Sh3,900 by May. Currently, a bag is selling at between Sh3,000 and Sh3,200.

Karuguru noted that even though the National Cereals and Produce Board is buying maize from farmers at Sh3,200, some farmers prefer to sell to traders at a lower price of Sh2,700 since traders buy in cash unlike the Board, which does not pay immediately.

He also said millers sometimes shy away from buying maize from Uganda, as its quality is not good.

Kuguru said the maize is usually not clean and the grains are small unlike those from Tanzania, whose quality if good but slightly expensive due to the border crisis.

The Ministry of Agriculture said the government is planning to undertake an assessment of the available stock of food, especially maize in the country by mid next month.

The NCPB is still buying maize from farmers and once the assessment had been done, the government will advise on what action should be taken in case of a maize shortage, Johnstone Irungu, the director of crops management said.
Eric Omondis fiancee, Chantal Grazioli, is the envy of city women after the comedian pulled off another romantic masterstroke.

The comedian, who is well renown for his ostentatious romantic gestures, was at it again yesterday as he welcomed his Italian beauty back to the country.

Ms Grazioli was in her home country for the holidays having left Kenya as early as September last year. Her long stay had noticeably taken a toll on the comedian, judging from a series of his social media posts.

The comedian at one time shared a video of himself checking Chantals car in their parking and claiming that it had been infested with spider cobwebs.

Eric Omondi had also threatened to camp at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport until Chantal was back.

Well, his long, lonely nights finally came to an end yesterday afternoon after Chantal touched down at the JKIA, where Omondi and some of his friends were eagerly waiting.

The comedian was quick to share his excitement with his over 1 million Instagram followers, sharing a video as he pushed Chantal on a trolley like the pretty princess she is.

In the short clip, the two lovebirds are also seen sharing a kiss.

Welcome home my love?? @miss.chanty A post shared by Eric Omondi (@ericomondi) on Jan 15, 2018 at 7:15am PST

But that was not all. Eric Omondi, in his usual unforgiving romantic self, set the standards high for the struggling Kenyan boychild as he partnered with StarTimes to welcome Chantal with a huge billboard along Mombasa Road.

The billboard with Chantals picture on full display reads: Welcome Home Chantal.. Thank You for Upgrading My Life.

On Instagram, Omondi was kind enough to share Chantals reaction as they approached the billboard. He captioned a clip: Welcome home babyyyyyy????????



The lovebirds also stopped by the billboard and posed for a picture as they embraced looking up at Erics masterstroke.

From the comments section, it appears lots of Kenyan ladies have been dating the wrong guys. Some single ladies vowed not to get married unless it is to a Luo guy.

Slay queens claimed that Hata Sijaskia Vibaya and the boychild continues to wait for an official statement from President Cyprian Is Nyakundi on the way forward after this huge setback to the cause.

But comedian Eddie Butita ultimately stole the show with a KDF meme.
On this Tuesday, these are the stories making global headlines.

Trump: I am not a racist In remarks to reporters at a dinner photo opportunity with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said when asked if he is a racist, No, Im not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed.

Airbus built a lot of planes for China last year  but cant deliver them The company wanted to sell nearly 200 more Airbus jets to China this week. But Chinese airlines have yet to take delivery of many airliners theyve ordered from the company even though the planesare built. Thats because Chinas aviationregulator has yet to allow deliveries of key Airbus models.

Jeff Flake floor speech is expected to compare Trumps attacks on media to Stalins According to an excerpt of the speech, Flake will criticize the President for calling the news media the enemy of the people, calling it an assault as unprecedented as it is unwarranted. Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own President uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies, reads the excerpt.

What lawmakers said after immigration meeting with Trump Sen. Lindsey Graham The Republican from South Carolina issued a statement: Following comments by the President, I said my piece directly to him yesterday (Thursday). The President and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel. Ive always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals.

Condoleezza Rice: Kim Jong Un is actually pretty clever Rice, who served under former President George W. Bush, made the remarks in response to a question about President Donald Trumps tweets on North Koreas nuclear program in a wide-ranging conversation with David Axelrod on The Axe Files Saturday night on CNN.

Floor collapses at Jakarta stock exchange Valentina Simon, Head of Institutional Relations at the exchange, told CNN that the collapse happened on the second floor of Tower Two, at around 12:30 p.m. local time. She described it as an open space where tourists would gather and a coffee shop is located.

What went wrong with Hawaiis emergency alert How did it happen? Hawaiis Emergency Management Agency provided a bit more detail Sunday on what went wrong. The mishap took place during a routine drill run after a shift change, Vern Miyagi, the agencys administrator, said. During the drill, an officer in the emergency operation center mistakenly selected an incorrect template, which shows what message is going to be sent, Miyagi said.

Big game hunters: Were the answer to preventing extinction Tens of thousands of them have come from all over the world to the annual Dallas Safari Club Convention & Sporting Expo. Everywhere you look in this sprawling 800,000-square-foot convention you see weapons, gear and just about every type of hunting paraphernalia available. There are also lots of animals  none of them alive.

Heres What The FBI Lovers Secret Texts Actually Say About Trump, Clinton And Leaks WASHINGTON  Last week, a story by The Hills John Solomon set off another firestorm in the conservative media about the ongoing special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Twin Suicide Bombing In Central Baghdad Kills At Least 16 BAGHDAD, Jan 15 (Reuters)  At least 16 people were killed and 65 wounded in a twin suicide bombing in central Baghdad on Monday, the Iraqi interior ministry said. The toll could rise as more bodies were being recovered from the site at Aviation Square, the ministry said in a statement.

Plane Skids Off Turkish Runway And Nearly Plunges Into Black Sea Terrifying images captured Saturday night at Trabzon airport on Turkeys northeast coast showed a passenger plane teetering precariously on a steep slope, its nose pointing toward the waters of the Black Sea below, after the jet skidded off the runway as it was attempting to land.

Search For California Mudslide Survivors Continues As Death Toll Rises To 20 LOS ANGELES (Reuters)  The search for survivors of the deadly mudslides in parts of Californias Santa Barbara County continued Sunday even as hopes dwindled to find anyone alive, officials said. Were still in rescue mode and we still hope to find someone alive, although the chances of that are becoming slim, said Justin Cooper, a spokesperson for the multi-agency response team.

Aziz Ansari Responds To Sexual Assault Allegations: I Took Her Words To Heart Aziz Ansari has responded to allegations of sexual assault made against him in a piece appearing on the website babe on Saturday. In a statement emailed to HuffPost through his representative, the comedian confirmed several of the details mentioned in the babe piece, but said he believed a sexual encounter between the two was completely consensual.

Projector Lights Up Trumps D.C. Hotel With Shithole And Poop Emojis If you took a look at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Saturday night, you might think it was a real shithole. An artist with a video projector gave the Trump familys D.C. hotel a makeover using President Donald Trumps very own and very racist words.

Chelsea Manning confirmed it: Shes running for Senate in 2018 WeGotThis In a five-word Twitter statement on Sunday, Chelsea Manning formally announced her intention to run for a Senate seat in Maryland. Mannings candidacy was the subject of much speculation on Saturday when a Federal Election Commission filing in her name surfaced.

This place is a shithole projection appears on Donald Trumps D.C. hotel This place is a shithole. The five-word proclamation appeared as a projection above the entryway at Washington, D.C.s Trump International Hotel on Saturday night. The projection also included an arrow pointing directly at the hotels entrance and a crowd of poop emoji.

Dude discovers genius way to get some rest and relaxation at the airport Finding a moment of peace and relaxation before a flight or during a layover at the airport may seem impossible, but people have figured out some pretty inventive ways to tune out while traveling. Sure, some people dive for the noise-cancelling headphones, or maybe a large hood to keep as much of the outside away.

The Japanese porn star who taught China about sex When Japanese actress and former porn star Sora Aoi announced her marriage online, it set off a frenzy on Chinese social media. Thats because she has played a surprisingly significant role in the lives of a generation of young Chinese internet users.

Trump plan slap of the century  Abbas Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has described US President Donald Trumps Middle East peace efforts as the slap of the century. At a meeting of Palestinian leaders, he stressed he would not accept any peace plan from the US after it recognised Jerusalem as Israels capital.

President Trump: I am not a racist President Trump has denied that he is racist, after a row broke out over his alleged use of the word shithole to describe African nations. Mr Trump reportedly used the term last week during a bipartisan Oval Office meeting on immigration reform. He has now told reporters: I am not a racist.

How can you measure what makes a country great? For almost a hundred years, two measurements have been used to get a sense of how well a country is doing. One is GDP, or gross domestic product, the amount a country earns. The other is its unemployment rate.
As the tough month of January takes its toll on most people, TV presenter Betty Kyallo is having the exact opposite as she traverses the country on a stunning holiday tour.

Barely a week after her breathtaking excursion in the wilderness at the Maasai Mara, the KTN news anchor is enjoying some R&R down at the Coast.

She traveled to Mombasa via SGR accompanied by her mother, noting that New experiences are great

While in Mombasa, Betty appeared to enjoy a Tuk-Tuk ride as they moved around the Sultans city, and checked into the 5-star Serena Beach Resort & Spa.

On Monday morning, when Kenyans woke up to news of increased fuel prices, the bubbly news anchor was enjoying a beautiful beachside breakfast with mommy dearest.

Enjoying a beautiful beach side breakfast with mum we love it. I am who I am because of her. Shes the strongest woman I know and shes taught me to be titanium too. Love her, she wrote.

Their mommy-daughter bonding extended to the Maisha Spa where they enjoyed some rest and relaxation.



In the afternoon, Betty took a dip in the pool and later stepped out in a colorful tank top and African print shorts. She also made a new friend, a smiling camel named Charlie.

As Betty shared her stunning holiday snaps with her followers, she inadvertently attracted cyberbullies after captioning her pictures: Curvy Girl.

Cyberbullies, perhaps buoyed by jealousy, left unflattering comments that forced Betty to take down her caption.

All in all, the pictures suggest Betty had a holiday to remember.

The pics- courtesy of Betty and MG100, a production company that deals with events management, coverage, branding, social media marketing.
A petition filed to temporarily lift the shisha ban imposed by Health Cabinet Secretary Cleopa Mailu has suffered another blow.

Justice Roseline Aburili on Monday declined yet again to suspend the ban citing public interest. The Judge said there is lesser risk in maintaining the ban for now.

She noted that even though the petitioners have an arguable case, it doesnt automatically mean their case will be successful.

I find and hold the lesser risk at this stage is to decline to issue any orders but direct the parties to argue the main petition before any orders are given.

The Judge was of the view that should the court rule in favour of the applicants after the full hearing, it will not be impossible to revert to the initial status.

She said she had considered the CS Mailus argument that the decision was based on the greater public interest.

The Judge also said that if the businessmen win the case, they will be easily compensated for their loss.

Fifteen people, led by Kennedy Langat, Maurice Obunga, Stephen Irungu, Vivian Shikweya, and Henry Gitau moved to court a day after Mailu imposed the ban on the importation, promotion, and use of Shisha in Kenya.

Through their lawyers led by Victor Savula, they said the ban was unconstitutional and that it violated the rights of employees. They also said it left manufacturers with costs amounting to billions of shillings.

They said they were among importers, manufacturers, sellers, promoters, and users of shisha in the country.
A fourth year University of Nairobi student reportedly fell to his death from the third floor of the institutions Mamlaka hostel.

Ian Kibet Kimaiyo, 23, is said to have fallen from a balcony late Saturday night after a night out with friends. The engineeering student was found dead a few minutes past midnight.

According to police, a security officer, Titus Awuor, reported to them that the student had fallen from the third floor but he was not certain whether he had been pushed.

Police visited the scene and could not immediately establish the circumstances behind the incident, police said.

Kibets body had blood oozing from the nose and visible injuries at the back of the head.

Police said that preliminary investigations indicated Kibet had consumed alcohol at the time of the accident. They ruled out suicide.

We havent seen any indications that the student committed suicide. We think he accidentally fell from the balcony, Nairobi DCI chief Ireri Kamwende said.

Police added that before his tragic death, Kibet had broken into his room after losing his keys.

The body of the student was moved to the Chiromo mortuary awaiting post-mortem which will help unravel the mystery behind the death.
Substance abuse and homelessness are part of our community in the Napa Valley, and The Salvation Army of Napa Valleys Culinary Training Academy was established to make a difference in the lives of those needing a second chance.

Lack of affordable housing in Napa is a dilemma not easily solved. Losing a job or experiencing tough times that take away your earning potential is a reality that touches us all.

The academy is a program that gives someone who has struggled with homelessness and substance abuse the independence, self-sufficiency, confidence and dignity to pursue a professional job in local hospitality industries.

Our third class is starting this week with 10 students signed up to date, but there is a need to provide housing for the students, said Executive Chef Paul Fields.

Many students live in the homeless shelter in south Napa, which is some distance from our location, said Fields.

The academy does offer a handful of beds in a small house owned next door while other students live during the four-month program at Serenity Homes of Napa Valley. Other assistance programs may have a room available, but many students make due and find temporary living arrangements.

Housing cost is about 30 percent of the of the program, says Rick Osgood, advisory board member. The academy, through donations, covers all costs for the student, but we are short on housing, says Osgood.

Lack of housing is about to change this Thursday, Jan. 18 at 5:30 p.m., when the housing task force asks for approval from the planning commission for the addition of a manufactured home on an unused area of the Salvation Armys Napa headquarters.

The commitment of the community to provide housing to the students during their training is evident in the many who have committed $135,000 in last years Hands Across the Valley for the purchase of the house.

Several dignitaries are committed to the programs success as well as businesses like James Jefferies Architects and Dale James Construction, both volunteering their services to see the project through.

To be considered for the academy, an applicant must have six months sobriety, have gone through a sobriety program and be tested before starting.

In 2016, the academy was launched with the first two sessions in 2017. From the inaugural class of eight students, five continue to work in the restaurant industry in the Napa Valley.

The second class had eight students, seven are working today, and one is continuing her education in the culinary field.

You will find several students currently working at The Meritage Resort and Spa, Silverado Country Club, Embassy Suites by Hilton Napa Valley and the Archer Hotel Napa.

I am excited to have recently been voted onto the advisory board of the Napa Salvation Army corp.

The organization, in my mind, has always been a place offering a meal, groceries, clothing, a bed, a hug and a prayer.

Now I can help and be a part of the impact the Salvation Army is making in the lives of people in our community.
Q: I just started a new job about six months ago. Its my first real job coming out of college, and the people, environment and benefits are really great. Before taking this job, I had been planning to enter the military, but now Ive decided to join the reserves instead.

My HR department told me they comply with rules allowing members of the reserves to take time off for training or deployment. But as a new enlistee, I would need to take off several months for basic training, interviews and physicals.

Should I wait a certain amount of time at my current job before pursuing this? How should I inform my supervisor and employers?

A: Your service plans are admirableand youre smart to be mindful of how they will affect your civilian employment.

Under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA), U.S. military veterans and members of the active and reserve components of the armed forces are entitled to job-protected leave to complete training or serve active duty. Employers are prohibited from denying initial employment, reemployment . . . or any benefit of employment to an employee or candidate because of that persons membership, application for membership . . . or obligation for service in the armed forces or reserves. For their part, employees are required to provide advance notice, have a cumulative absence of no more than five years (with exceptions), return to work within a specified period and avoid disqualifying circumstances such as dishonorable discharge.

So, assuming you meet those criteria, it would seem your plan to join the reserves and return to your job after enlistment and training is legally protected under USERRA. But since Im not a lawyer, you should start by consulting the experts at the Defense Departments Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (esgr.mil). ESGR volunteers can educate you on your rights under USERRA and help you craft a strategic, diplomatic leave request to management.

After consulting ESGR, your next step should be to reach out to any co-workers who are reservists or veterans to get a realistic picture of how military-friendly your company is.

Finally, even with the law on your side, you should still use courtesy and common sense to avoid blindsiding your employer, says Bob Cartwright, a CEO of a Texas HR consulting firm who volunteers on veteran hiring campaigns. Try to time your enlistment to avoid leaving your employer in the lurch during a busy season. If problems arise, ESGR can help mediate and resolve conflicts between you and your civilian employer.

Ideally, clear communication and mutual goodwill will lead your employer to support your enlistment and training. As my friend Kimberly Kolb Eakin, a retired Army sergeant and former reservist, says, Who wouldnt want a more team-focused, responsible, self-confident, organized, disciplined person to work for them?
Napa County supervisors on Tuesday could extend moratoriums prohibiting the outdoor cultivation of marijuana and commercial marijuana activity in the unincorporated county.

County staff proposes extending a ban on personal outdoor cultivation to July 19 and a ban on commercial marijuana activity to Dec. 4. That is designed to give the Board of Supervisors more time to discuss how to implement Proposition 64, the voter-passed law legalizing recreational marijuana in California.

Supervisors have said at previous meetings they are interested in addressing the personal cultivation issue first. The goal is to discuss, draft and hold public hearings on an ordinance over the coming six months, a county report said.

The Board of Supervisors meets at 9 a.m. Tuesday at the county administration building, 1195 Third St. in Napa.
Cleanup crews are rolling into four fire-scorched Northern California counties again after the state approved a new agreement for debris removal, sidestepping a dispute that had property owners worried about how quickly they could begin rebuilding.

Debris removal was halted last week in Napa, Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino counties when AshBritt Inc., a Florida company that unsuccessfully bid for the work, filed a challenge against two contractors hired for the job.

AshBritt argued to the federal Government Accountability Office that the firms might not be able to meet deadlines laid out in the contracts for clearing residential and commercial properties that were destroyed in the October fires. But state officials authorized a new agreement that will allow the work to go forward while the protests against those companies -- ECC International Constructors of Burlingame and Ceres Environmental Services of Minnesota -- are sorted out.

Officials say the state will be reimbursed for the work done under the new contract with just ECC. Originally, ECC won a $174 million deal from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to clear lots in Sonoma County, and Ceres was awarded $26 million to do the same in the three other counties.

"California is focused on removing the hazardous fire debris from these counties to expedite the recovery process for survivors and their communities," Mark Ghilarducci, director of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, said Monday.

More than 1 million tons of debris already have been removed from counties affected by October's wildfires. But there is still much to be done: In some neighborhoods, like Santa Rosa's Coffey Park, numerous chimneys tower above rubble-covered lots.

More than 8,000 homes were destroyed in Napa, Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino counties during the fires. Officials hope to have their lots cleared by the beginning of March, when construction season typically begins.

"This was the largest cleanup in history, certainly in California and maybe the nation," said Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt. "It's a massive undertaking, and one that needs to continue moving forward. Our goal is to get in and out before springtime, so people can get on with their lives. The sooner that happens, the better."

AshBritt representatives did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.

Nancy Allen, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which awarded the cleanup contracts, said the state's decision cleared the way for work to resume. Already, ECC International Constructors has crews in the field.

"People are anxious to get their properties clean and get on with rebuilding," said company Vice President August Ochabauer. "People just want to rebuild their community."

Allison Spitzer, who lives in Coffey Park, said a short delay wasn't a bother. All that matters to her is getting her lot cleared by spring so she can start rebuilding the home where she and her family lived.

"I tease my husband that we'll be the last one to be cleared at this rate," said Spitzer, 41, who works as a commercial lender at a bank. "As long as I keep pushing forward and they have cleaned my lot by the time I'm ready to build, you won't see frustration from me. We will see what the spring brings."
Any time traveler revisiting the California of 1978 would have an easy time understanding why Proposition 13 passed so handily that year, lowering property taxes throughout the state to 1 percent of the latest sale price or 1 percent of the 1975 assessed value.

Such a traveler would enter a land with skyrocketing property taxes based on the latest market value of each property. Not the latest sale price, but an arbitrary market value assigned to every piece of property by county assessors basing their numbers largely on comparables, the prices of similar homes in the same or nearby neighborhoods.

Many senior citizens and others on fixed incomes lived in dread of the annual assessment letter informing them of their homes purported new value. Plenty (no one knows the exact number) felt compelled to sell.

Then along came longtime Los Angeles gadfly Howard Jarvis and his Sacramento-based pal Paul Gann with Proposition 13, which they sold as a measure to give homeowners financial stability and predictability. So long as a property stays in the same hands, that initiative still dictates, basic property taxes on it can rise no more than 2 percent per year.

One major result: California has had systematic tax inequality for the last 39-plus years, with neighbors in similar houses or condominiums paying radically different taxes, mostly based on when they bought and not on current values.

There is no significant move today toward changing those provisions. But some change nevertheless may come to the sacred-cow law later this year.

That would be in the form of a split roll, where commercial and residential properties are taxed at different rates.

This has some basis in history, for anyone going back to view the Jarvis-Gann campaign of 1978 would not hear much about commercial or industrial property taxes. Yet owners of those kinds of properties enjoy the same benefits as homeowners, and their share of the overall property tax burden has dropped by several percent since 1978.

Advocates of more funding for public schools and other local services have long contended the split roll is the best way to make up what those causes lost under Proposition 13. The idea has been kicked around in Sacramento and elsewhere for a generation, but never went anywhere.

And yet, a 2015 survey of 104,000 likely voters found 75 percent favored withdrawing Proposition 13 protections from non-residential property.

As the 40-year anniversary of Proposition 13 approaches in June, proponents of the split roll have for the first time submitted a proposed initiative to make this change. One reason they chose the initiative route rather than trying to get the state Legislature to put the change on the ballot: Democrats  usually more sympathetic than Republicans to the idea of taxing businesses  have narrowly and at least temporarily lost their two-thirds majority in the state Assembly because two members felt compelled to resign when charged with sexual improprieties and another left for unspecified health reasons.

Advocates of the change say it could raise billions of dollars to improve public schools and colleges.

I think the cumulative effects of the unfair tax system have gotten to the point where its created cripplingimpacts on the state, said Melissa Breach of the states League of Women Voters.

The measure has not yet been assigned a title by Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and so petitions are not now being circulated for signatures.

But its for certain the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, named for the Proposition 13 co-author, will fight it vigorously. As with previous tentative moves toward a split roll, the hard-fighting organization will brand this measure as an attempt to crack the solid protections homeowners get from Proposition 13. The Jarvis group and its allies usually claim that once any Proposition 13 provision is changed, it will be only a short time before homeowner protections would be lost.

While the 2015 poll makes it look easy to get this passed via an initiative, looks can deceive. The fears of California homeowners, who already pay far more than average state and local income and sales taxes, are not difficult to stoke.

All of which means this may be the year Proposition 13 changes. But dont yet bank on it.
Michael Wagner doesnt like the idea of cutting down trees on his 71-acre Santa Rosa ranch, blackened by October wildfires.

But if he has to do it to rebuild his damaged house, he will. And he welcomes emergency measures from state officials that could make the job easier  and possibly put money in his pocket.

Its kind of like youre putting the old horse down, said Wagner, whose Blue Gate Road property was in the path of the Tubbs fire. You dont want to do it unless you absolutely have to.

Under a proposal that could benefit Wagner and other fire victims, the state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has agreed to waive its requirement that residents file costly timber harvest plans before removing scorched trees to be sold for lumber.

The waiver would apply to stands within 300 feet of damaged or destroyed structures and would be in place for at least six months, speeding recovery and saving land owners up to $40,000 for the cost of timber plans.

Matt Dias, the boards executive officer, said it was adopted after fire victims in Sonoma, Mendocino and Napa counties complained the existing rules were a limiting factor in their ability to rebuild. The change is being reviewed by the Office of Administrative Law and could take effect later this month, he said.

From the comments we have heard, its an important mechanism for landowners to move expeditiously in their reconstruction efforts, Dias said Monday.

Just how many trees in the three counties could be removed was not available. In Sonoma County alone, fire burned 137 square miles, destroyed 5,130 homes and killed 24 people.

It carved a swath from Calistoga to Santa Rosa, charring groves of redwood, fir and oak including many near burned homes. Fred Frey, a certified arborist and owner of Vintage Tree Care Inc. in Santa Rosa, said hes seen hundreds of acres of scorched trees that could be felled for timber. But he said it may be too soon to tell if trees are dead or can be saved.

If we cut everything thats black, youre going to be looking at sand dunes, Frey said. Not everything thats burned outside is dead. This spring, we will know a lot more.

Environmental activists agreed. If trees arent examined closely they could be removed unnecessarily, said Larry Hanson, president of Forest Unlimited.

Hansons group is seeking to block the exemption, accusing forestry officials of effectively promoting logging by advancing the waiver.

We dont oppose doing it for safety reasons, Hanson said. But to go beyond and just cut down trees that are burned ... it becomes an economic thing for companies.

However, forestry officials said participation is voluntary. And trees outside the 300-foot perimeter would not be covered.

The department did not adopt a similar policy after the 2015 Lake County fire in part because landowners did not request it, Dias said.

Its not like the board is compelling anybody to do anything, Dias said. I think were facilitating construction and reconstruction while ensuring public health and welfare.

Meanwhile, Wagner walked his sprawling land Monday, eyeing burned trees within range of his partially destroyed house.

He said he never planned to get into the timber business, but he could raise money to replant his property and make it safer if he did. An arborist will look at his trees in the coming weeks to make sure they are dead.

It would be great if we could cut them down and get a few dollars for them, said Wagner, a real estate broker. No sense hanging on to them.
It was never a swamp, OK? But now, given President Donald Trump's contempt for the federal government and the political polarization that could engulf the civil service, we're in danger of losing a national treasure.

Because make no mistake: The federal government has been a national treasure.

For all our whingeing and whining, our lame jokes about lazy bureaucrats, our paranoia about jackboots and J. Edgar, Americans have been exceedingly fortunate in their public servants.

Not that the federal workforce is without flaws, and not that the United States is unique. But anyone who has lived overseas comes to appreciate tax collectors who do their jobs without a hint of corruption; national park rangers who are unfailingly cheerful and well-informed; public-health workers who speed to the epicenter of a gathering epidemic. These are the women and men who protect the country, help us recover from hurricanes, send astronauts into space and make sure we get our Social Security checks on time.

Not a swamp.

Ah, I hear you say, the swamp is bigger than just the government; it's the whole mess of influence peddlers, politicians and bureaucrats working together.

To which I would answer, no, not really a swamp either. Most lobbyists are honorable people who believe in credit unions, nuclear power, children's health programs or whatever interest on behalf of which they exercise their constitutionally protected right to lobby.

But if campaign money distorts the governing process - and I agree that it does - then one of the best defenses is a professional, independent, respected and self-respecting civil service led by top-quality political appointees.

Which is under threat today.

It's under threat in part because Trump has simply not appointed a government. Almost one year into his administration, there are, incredibly, more key positions for which he has nominated nobody than there are confirmed appointees. Of 626 key positions requiring Senate confirmation that The Post tracks in collaboration with the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, there are 241 confirmed, 136 formally nominated - and 245 with no nominee. Unfilled positions, says Max Stier, who heads the public-service group, include "the IRS commissioner, the ambassador to South Korea, the census director, the deputy secretary of commerce - fundamental jobs that involve central issues of governing."

It's under threat because the president doesn't think it matters that he fill those positions.

"The one that matters is me," Trump said in the fall when asked about vacancies at the State Department. "I'm the only one that matters because when it comes to it, that's what the policy is going to be."

It's under threat because many of the people he does appoint are so unqualified.

But the threat is not just to the top layers. Trump and his allies demean federal law enforcement, say the FBI is "in tatters," and darkly suggest that the entire federal bureaucracy is part of a sinister "deep state" with ideological motivation.

That in turn prompts workers or would-be workers who do not share Trump's worldview to leave, stay away or insist that the only honorable way to serve is as part of "the resistance."

"The real sad piece is that it's not just about the president," Stier worries. "It's about the institution of the government and the workforce becoming part of the battleground."

Those who fear a deep state want to undermine civil-service protections and fire bureaucrats. Those who fear Trump want those same bureaucrats to resign in protest.

"Both approaches misunderstand the purpose of our career civil service and devalue a core asset of our democracy," Stier says - an asset that is "the central institution for addressing the nation's most critical problems."

It's not easy yet to measure the impact of all this. The Post has reported on a worrying draining of talent from the diplomatic corps; foreign-service applications have fallen by half, Stier says. The Office of Personnel Management says that during the first six months of the administration, 71,000 career employees quit or retired, compared with 50,000 in the first six months of the Obama administration.

But the exodus could well intensify, especially given that the politicization comes atop long-standing failures to move government personnel policies into the 21st century. "All of those problems are worse because the world is changing faster and more time has passed," Stier says.

This is a treasure that has not yet been lost. But it's easy to see that, like so much else we have taken for granted, like the United States' position of leadership in the world, it would be far easier to destroy than to rebuild.
PHILADELPHIA  The summer before last, my family spent two weeks investigating Norway, and I can say with some certainty that we do not want more Norwegians coming to the United States.

For starters, they are just too darned good-looking. The middle-aged hostesses on our Norwegian airlines were more beautiful than Scarlett Johansson. No one there has any detectable body fat, so they look good in whatever they wear.

Even the Norwegians who appear to have come from what President Trump recently referred to as s-hole countries look great, and the biracial young people we saw working in museums, stores and cafes were stunning. I mean, even more beautiful than anyone on the Philadelphia City Council.

Letting in too many gorgeous people will damage our already-rocky self-esteem and well have to listen to more Oprahs and Dr. Phils telling us how to deal with it. Norwegians, by the way, deal with it by vacationing in Greece.

Secondly, they apparently know how to run a country. Not only do they have universal health care, six-week vacations and an excellent school system, their public transportation is superb. Their cities and towns are amazingly clean, though its true that, as tourists, we didnt hang out a lot on the gritty side of the tracks. I was secretly glad to see, however, that the walls along the tracks we traveled were lined with subpar graffiti. Made me feel at home.

I know, I know. Its a small country (only 5.26 million beautiful people) and if they let French people in, as Philadelphia used to do, or others from more southerly countries, the place would probably go to heck. There are other downsides.

They didnt seem to have much by way of an Americans With Disabilities Act. Theres a step up from the platform to their modern train cars, and there are no ramps. Instead, when an elderly lady couldnt manage it, random Norwegians on the platform stepped in and gently picked her up by her elbows and helped her get situated in the car with her baggage. While that method warmed my inner libertarian, Im not sure it would work on Philadelphias mass-transit system.

Another downside was that Norway is brimming with Teslas. We were told that their purchase was subsidized. There were electric charging stations all over the place. Really, it doesnt speak well of a country to be assisting Elon Musk in any possible way. Still thats the kind of thing they do to keep their carbon footprint down.

One other reason President Trump might reconsider his sudden Norwegian enthusiasm is that immigrants from Norway, and nearby countries like it, have come here and produced female editorial cartoonists! Im one-quarter Norwegian blood. Ann Telnaes, the most brilliant and most caustic Trump caricaturist, is of Swedish stock and Jen Sorensen, whose drawing pen is a Viking spear, descends from Denmarkians.

Still, in an effort to get on the presidents team, I invited my tall, svelte, handsome Norwegian cartooning colleague, Roar Hagan and his tall, svelte, beautiful wife, to move to America. His response was, I love America and Americans. But life here is, except the climate, quite good.

So, Mr. President, if you really want more Norskies, all you have to do is guarantee free universal health care, decent vacations, environmentally friendly transportation and great schools that teach everyone how to speak, write and read English better than we do. That would, indeed, improve our country.
SACRAMENTO  Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown said Wednesday, Jan. 10 California will have one of the largest budget surpluses since the Great Recession but proposed spending almost none of it, sticking with his restrained approach to spending in his final budget plan.

Brown, who leaves office after this years election, projects California will have $6.1 billion in extra cash. He proposed just $300 million in new spending next year with the rest going to reserves including maxing out the states Rainy Day Fund.

Brown used his annual budget address to warn, as he often does, that a recession will eventually occur and will inevitably lead to a severe drop in revenue. Saving money now will protect teachers jobs and tamp down on college tuition hikes down the road, he said.

What we can talk about is spending now and cutting later, or filling the reserves and continuing our spending right along, Brown said. This is about steady as you go, or exuberance followed by regret and pain.

Browns $131.7 billion general fund budget proposal begins months of negotiations with the Legislature. A final plan must be passed by lawmakers in June.

Democratic Assemblyman Phil Ting, chairman of the budget committee, said hes pleased to see Brown put money in reserves and toward a K-12 education program aimed at boosting aid to schools with the most needy children.

But he sees Browns plan as a starting point, and is hoping for further discussion on topics like health care. Ting last month proposed $4.3 billion in new spending, including health care for immigrants living in the state illegally and to expand a tax credit for the working poor.

Just like our blueprint is the beginning of a discussion, his is as well, Ting told reporters.

Browns plan does not reflect last years federal tax changes out of Washington, which are expected to hit taxpayers in high-tax states like California the hardest. Brown had to finalize his budget in December, before the tax law was approved by Congress.

Republicans said the budget surplus shows Californians pay too much in taxes. Assemblyman Tom Lackey of Palmdale said it makes no sense that the state just raised gas and car taxes on drivers by $5 billion per year.

In a perfect world, the surplus would be returned to taxpayers, added Assemblyman Jay Obernolte of Hesperia, the top Republican on the Assembly budget committee. In the alternative, both Republicans supported beefing up the states reserve and limiting additional spending to one-time costs.

Among the few new spending initiatives in Browns plan, he proposes creating an online community college at a cost of $120 million, most of it for one-time startup costs.

Browns budget plan would also spend an additional $59 million in bonds and special funds, which are revenue sources dedicated to specific purposes, such as tobacco taxes earmarked for health care.

Browns proposal comes as California wages a multi-front battle with Republican President Donald Trump that has, so far, had little impact on the states finances. Californias tax collections over the past six months are billions above projections.

Last year, Brown signed a $125 billion budget that boosted payments for Medi-Cal doctors and dentists who provide care for the poor and increased funding for education and social services.

Brown has generally shied away from new, ongoing spending that he says the state cant afford to sustain, preferring to use much higher revenue for one-time expenses like new state buildings or paying down debts for the pensions and health benefits of retired state workers.

Brown has focused much of his second stint as governor on stabilizing the states long-term budgeting during a period of fiscal prosperity. Taking the reins as the state clawed out of the devastating Great Recession, he backed ballot initiatives that raised taxes on the wealthy and forced the state to save money and pay down debts.

Hes presided over a stark turnaround in Californias fiscal fortunes. The states budget has grown 45 percent since 2011, when he took office facing a $25 billion deficit.
SACRAMENTO  Senator Bill Dodd (D-Napa) and Assembly Budget Committee Vice Chair Jay Obernolte (R-Hesperia) issued the following statements on the announcement of Governor Browns proposed 2018-19 state budget.

Dodd:

Supporting wildfire recovery and reducing fire risk must be top priorities in the budget. I believe Governor Browns budget reflects a thoughtful starting point for this years budget negotiations. I will be working with the administration and my colleagues in the Legislature to expand our efforts on disaster recovery and preparedness. This will be Governor Browns final budget, and he has continued his record of proposing thoughtful spending. Its absolutely critical that the state pay down debts and building our rainy day fund, while investing in critical services. Education is one of those critical services. We know that expanding preschool access will improve student success and lifetime incomes, and I will be pushing for real progress towards the goal of universal preschool.

Obernolte:

The good news is that California currently has a substantial budget surplus. Unfortunately, this illustrates the fact that Californians pay too much in taxes. In a perfect world, the surplus would be returned to taxpayers. Failing that, we owe it to Californians to spend their money wisely.

Im pleased that the Governor agrees we must continue to set aside money for the rainy-day fund, but we still need to do more to prepare for future downturns. The surplus should be used to fund one-time investments in our states infrastructure  not on new programs that commit the state to future ongoing spending.

We must also consider paying down Californias outstanding debt and liabilities, which currently exceed $200 billion. Moreover, without reform, ever-increasing pension costs at the local-level will continue to crowd out funding for teachers, public safety and other essential services.

California needs to be responsible with its money now so it can provide the infrastructure our state badly needs and protect vital services for our citizens in the future.

Senator Bill Dodd represents Californias 3rd Senate District, which includes all or portions of Napa, Sonoma, Solano, Yolo, Sacramento, and Contra Costa counties. Assemblyman Jay Obernolte represents the 33rd Assembly District, which includes many communities in San Bernardino County.
You couldnt miss the bright red vintage Chevy truck, pointing the way to the Benessere Vineyards. It had a big sign that beckoned visitors to a unique hospitality experience at a small, 42-acre estate nestled on the banks of the Napa River. On Saturday Napa County residents came in force.

It was a response to the revival of the Napa Valley Vintners Napa Neighbors Day  a free tour and tasting from many of the smaller wineries in the county. Normally Benessere Vineyards provides tours and tastings by appointment only but the event gave the winerys staff an opportunity to meet locals and offer tastings of the winerys unique vintages.

By 10:30 on Saturday, there were two groups of visitors who had come to take advantage of the Napa Neighbors invitation, each comprised of about 20 people. The groups were offered glasses of 2016 Pinot Grigio, 2015 Sangiovese, 2014 Aglianico, and 2014 Sagrantino as well as the blended 2014 Phenomenon.

One Napan, who wished to remain anonymous, is a retired engineer who arrived with two friends. He said they were all devotes of the Napa Valley Vintners promotional program. He said hed visited a number of wineries in past years using the Napa Neighbors invitations as well as the more recent Morning in the Winery promotions. I came to Benessere a couple of years ago, he said. But I wanted to taste what they were producing now.

Another visitor in the group talked about his own small vineyard in the Combsville area. He said he was always curious to learn what small wineries were able to produce. Both seemed pleased with what they found poured into their glasses.

Michael Maroney led one of the two morning groups with a brief history of the vineyards. He pointed out the uniqueness of an estate to produce so many different and unusual varieties of grapes and wines. Benessere Vineyards production includes pinot grigio, sangiovese, Aglianico, Sagrantino, and a blended wine called Phenomenon. In addition, their current catalog of vintages also includes a 2014 Collins Holystone Zinfandel, and a 2015 Moscato di Canelli, as well as a 2015 Johns Promise Cabernet Sauvignon and a 2014 Black Glass Zinfandel.

Maroneys group also toured the grounds, which included a restored and expanded family home, that is used sparing by the owners, the Benish family.

Matt Reid, the winemaker at Benessare, met up with the tour groups in the winerys small cellar and talked about the challenges he faces working with the estates unique plantings.

Napa Valley winemakers are particularly lucky in the grape varieties we can work with, he said. Im luckier still at Benessere, because we grow and work with varieties that are uncommon at best in Napa Valley, such as Sangiovese, and the extremely rare varieties of Sagrantino and Aglianico. The excellent grapes that I work with at Benessere give me a running start on making great wine, but it still requires skill and creativity on my part to make sure the wines reach their fullest potential. This kind of challenge is precisely what makes this job so much fun.

Fun was definitely on the minds of Jim and Antoinette Saliba. They had driven up from San Jose where Jim works in information systems for Cisco Systems and Ann works as a tax assistant. Originally from Brooklyn, they said they came west to take advantage of the climate and the job opportunities, and were feeling particularly happy to have friends in Napa who could avail them of the Napa Neighbors Day. They thought they would visit several wineries before the end of the day.

Ann said that shed recently returned from a visit to her daughters home in the East and remarked on the cold there. And now Im up here on this beautiful day, sipping wine with my husband. What a great start to our upcoming anniversary, she beamed.

Benessere Vineyards focus on unusual wines reflects the Benish familys love of Italian varietals. According to Maroney, John and Ellen Benish had fallen in love in Italy. So, when they purchased their Napa Valley property in 1994 they immediately began restoring the winery and residence and replanted the vineyards with the vision of creating a family space that reflected their love of Italian wines.

On Saturday, Benessere Vineyards  which according to the winery translates to well being or living the good life  certainly offered its visitors a welcoming sense of well being during Napa Neighbors Day.
St. Helena school trustees will discuss how to fill the vacant seat resulting from former Board President Cynthia Smiths resignation at 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 18, at Vintage Hall.

Smith resigned to become a Napa Superior Court judge. The board may call a special election or appoint someone to serve the remainder of her term, which ends in November.

District administration is recommending the appointment process. A special election would cost approximately $25,000, and putting the vacant seat on the June 5 ballot would cost $2,500-$5,000.

In other action, the board will be asked to approve a $1.1 million contract with Marina Mechanical for the St. Helena Primary School central plant/HVAC modernization project. The cost will be charged to Measure C bond funds.

The board will be presented with a $124,000 contract to repair the St. Helena Elementary School roof, which will also be paid for with bond funds.

Trustees will hear reports on the Computer Technology Pathway, fall sports, enrollment caps for the next school year, Information Technology, math intervention at the high school, physical fitness testing, the TK-5 Spanish curriculum and the 2018 summer aquatics program.
Womens Marches promoting human rights and social justice were held all over the world following the inauguration of President Donald Trump last year. In Napa, thousands took to First and Third streets, flooding Veterans Memorial Park with protest signs and songs. It was called one of the largest demonstrations in Napa history.

And its happening again on Saturday.

But this time its going to be even bigger, says organizer Irit Weir. With offensive sentiments coming out of the White House daily, Weir said, many Napa Valley residents are feeling frustrated and hurt.

This is a very important time in our history as women unite, hold hands, (and) be fearless, Weir said.

Womens March Napa Valley is part of a national movement seeking to unify and empower individuals standing for womens rights, civil liberties, social justice and human rights. Anniversary marches have been planned across the country, including the main national march Power to the Polls in Las Vegas on Sunday.

We believe that together we can create transformative social change, Weir said. Our experience from the 2017 Womens March shows that together we have an impact beyond our wildest dreams. Lets work together to support that change.

Womens March Napa Valleys theme this year is First We March, Then We Vote. Hear Our Voices!

Voting is the topic of the year, Weir said. She said that the two areas where participants can really make an impact is voter registration and helping get out the vote on Election Day.

The demonstrators will be gathering by Napa City Hall on School Street at 10 a.m. and begin marching to the Napa Valley Expo, 575 Third St., at 10:30 a.m. The days programming, which will include a voter registration area, will begin at 11 a.m. in the large parking lot next to Chardonnay Hall.

There will be performances by the Cosmos Percussion Ensemble, World Beat Dance Collective, and 10-year-old Sophie Morales. Scheduled speakers include DACA recipient Laura Lopez and Napa County Supervisor Belia Ramos. There will also be a human mosaic, a presentation to first responders and call-and-response songs by Oakland-based activist Melanie Demore.

More than 30 nonprofit and activist representatives will be at information tables providing literature on their organizations and answering questions.

The event is scheduled to end by 1 p.m.

Last year, the march kicked off an entire year of activism, culminating locally in numerous demonstrations in support of Napa Valleys immigrant and undocumented communities. Then the Me Too movement, in which individuals shared their stories of sexual assault and harassment online using the hashtag #MeToo, kept that fire alive.

This year  women are ready to not only reclaim our voices but also to take back our shame and own it, Weir said. We are ready to tell our stories and the stories of our ancestors. When we reclaim shame, we can then celebrate life and bring this incredible energy of joy and love to the arena.

We want the president, the Congress and the American people to know women will peacefully resist injustice, racism (and) sexism, said Barbara Mimoto, an activist working on Womens March Napa Valley. We wont stand down, or be silenced.

Last years march inspired new activists to come out and spring into action, Weir said, so organizers are hoping for more of that this year.

We want to encourage everyone to be  as I call it  a chronic activist, she said. Figure out what youre passionate about and find a related organization to volunteer with, she said. Do not wait for us  you can do it.

For more information, visit WomensMarchNapaValley.org.
Four outstanding young community members will be honored at 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 25, at the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga annual Youth of the Year event at the Gallery at Brasswood, 3111 Saint Helena Highway, North.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of America hosts a Youth of the Year competition annually, with winners at a local level competing regionally and on up to the National Youth of the Year level. The Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga takes advantage of the opportunity for club members from all four of its sites to not only participate in the competition process, but also to present them to the community they are already beginning to impact and introduce them to the leaders and community members that will facilitate their continued involvement.

These youth are being honored for being more than they appear  they are the cornerstones of what the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga represent and strive to do.

The mission of the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Helena and Calistoga is to provide all young people a safe, positive and unique place to develop their natural talents, and to inspire them to achieve their full potential. The Youth of the Year event is one way the community shares in that process.

For more information, visit bgcshc.org/youth-of-the-year.html.
MyScienceWork Is Transforming Global Scholarship



MyScienceWork , a 15-person company, was voted winner of the Startup Shootout at the February 2017 National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) annual conference. Recently, I checked in with co-founder Virginie Simon to learn more about the companys background, mission, and products and to find out what its been doing since the NFAIS conference.

Simon, who holds a doctorate in nanotechnology from University Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC) in Paris, became convinced of the need to make science more open and collaborative while working on her Ph.D. A short stint at a nanomedicine startup whetted her appetite for entrepreneurship, and in 2010 she and Tristan Davaille (now company CFO) founded MyScienceWork with a mission to build a global, multidisciplinary platform for collaboration among researchers. Expansion to Luxembourg came in 2012 and to San Francisco in 2014.

Asked about the motivation for opening the San Francisco office and her experiences in moving to the Bay Area, Simon highlighted the opportunities to make connections with other startups and with giants such as Alphabet (Google), saying, Being located in Silicon Valley lets you be at the epicenter of technological innovation, constantly absorb new ideas and, especially, to move fast, very fast. Among the negatives, Simon noted that she rarely encounters other female CEOs and entrepreneurs among her Silicon Valley business contacts. As a longtime advocate for gender equity and an alumna member of the European Network for Women in Leadership, shes determined to see that change.

MyScienceWork Products

As for the companys product line and business model, MyScienceWork offers a suite of services targeted to the interests of different actors in the information marketplace. Its Polaris product is an institutional repository solution available in turnkey or cloud-based versions. Its Sirius product offers Big Data bibliometric analysis capabilities with customized dashboards for publishers and commercial customers who need to track research productivity as well as scientific research and publication trends. And for the individual researcher, it operates a free open source repository and social network under the MyScienceWork name. The MyScienceWork site enables members to upload their work, access published papers across multiple open source and commercial repositories, and communicate with other researchers.

Polaris, the companys first product, was released in early 2015. Targeted to meet the needs of both research institutionssuch as universitiesand publishers, it hosts institutional repositories, with sophisticated capabilities to manage a variety of requirements. It interfaces with industry standard tools, including ORCID and CrossRef, and facilitates adding content to the repository with automatic metadata extraction. Missing metadata are highlighted for manual input. Repository managers can control which items in the repository are shared, and with whom. Publisher embargo dates can be set so that documents are managed but not shared until after the embargo date is past. Copyright restrictions can also be enforced to allow limited access. In addition, the product includes analytical and communications tools so that repository managers can promote research, track research productivity, and assess impact.

New in 2017 was Polaris OS (open source), based on standards such as DOI, JSON, and OAI-PMH. MyScienceWork expects to make the code available on the open source development platform GitHub in early 2018. Simon characterizes it as the next generation of open source repository. ... [It] integrates a library management system, a research data repository, a multimedia archive, and an institutional archive. In addition to its data management functionality, it includes an analytics dashboard to support assessment needs.

Sirius was released in January 2017, shortly before the NFAIS conference. Its target audiences include research institutions, publishers, and corporate clientsany organization that needs to track, analyze, and visualize research productivity. Harvesting data from a variety of repositories and publisher sites as well as its own MyScienceWork database, it enables research managers to analyze research trends and impact, identify global centers of excellence, and map networks of institutional and international research collaboration. Custom dashboards, built by the company to client specifications, provide at-a-glance reporting.

Accomplishments and Partnerships

Meanwhile, 2017 saw expansion in both the content and use of the companys MyScienceWork global platform. The number of monthly unique visitors grew to exceed 1 million, and its index grew to more than 70 million documents. It added patents as well as research articles, and it now boasts access to U.S. and European patents and integration with well-known repositories such as MEDLINE, arXiv, Academia.edu, the University of Californias eScholarship Repository, Sorbonne University, and GreyNets OpenGrey Repository. Although the presence of patents, MEDLINE, and arXiv, among others, might suggest an exclusive focus on STEM, MyScienceWork maintains a firm cross-disciplinary approach and incorporates content in social sciences and humanities as well as in science and technology.

The company is actively seeking data-sharing partnerships with scholarly publishers, highlighting increased visibility as well as its automatic copyright-monitoring capability as benefits to the publisher. MyScienceWork claims that integration with its platform can increase the visibility of a repositorys content by up to 60%. In other words, by creating an aggregated index of records in OA repositories as well as publisher databases, it is able to identify the presence of copyrighted articles in OA repositories. As evidence of the extent of the copyright problem, MyScienceWork cites a February 2017 article by Hamid R. Jamali showing that based on a sample of 500 ResearchGate articles, 201 (51.3%) out of 392 non-OA articles infringed the copyright and were non-compliant with publishers policy.

Whats Next

Looking ahead to 2018, Simon plans an emphasis on market expansion and an ongoing commitment to R&D. Noting that the company is at the beginning of its commercial traction, she looks forward to expanding its customer community outside its current bases in France, Luxembourg, and the U.S. to other European countries such as Belgium and Switzerland and to breaking into Asian markets. Simon sees ongoing development of the companys natural language processing and other AI capabilities as essential and says that about 50% of the current budget is devoted to R&D.

On a personal note, Simon received the French American Business Awards Gold Award for Woman Role Model in May 2017. She says it has opened up new opportunities to share her experiences working as a woman scientist and entrepreneur with others, and she looks forward to expanding her engagement in promoting women in science, technology, and business.

In short, Simon hopes to continue pursuing the mission of making scholarship more open, more collaborative, more interdisciplinary, more international, and more gender-neutral in the coming year.
One week into the new year, Tuesday, January 9, the air in Abuja was dry, dusty, and clammy. The nations capital was sluggishly waking into a new rhythm of calm and relative order after the chaos of the Christmas season prompted by a debilitating fuel crisis.

That day, at the headquarters of the National Intelligence Agency [NIA], in the south east corner of Maitama district of the city, Mohammed Dauda, the then acting director of the agency was getting ready for an official briefing with President Mohammed Buhari. It was his first of such briefing after he was plucked out of the Nigerian embassy in the Republic of Chad October last year, to come serve as acting head of the spy agency tasked with overseeing foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations.

Last year April, the NIA became the butt of a bumpy controversy on account of a botched undercover operation and a $43million lodgement at an Ikoyi apartment that eventually led to the suspension and subsequent investigation of Mr. Ayodele Oke, a career diplomat and erstwhile director general of the agency.

Dauda the NIA boss in cheery mood

When Mr. Dauda emerged from his meeting, according to Premium Times sources at the Aso Rock Villa, he was in such an expansive and cheery mood, and it started looking as if he was now on an assured path to reinforcing his position, and probably earning confirmation as substantive head of the agency.

As ambassador to Chad, a major theatre in the war against the Boko haram insurgency, and with a pedigree in financial and economic crimes intelligence, two of the major organised crimes posing severe and existential threats to the national image profile, agency insiders say Mr. Dauda, with his added ecumenical, even if under-stated, mien had the requisite qualities for the new office.

He had reasons to be upbeat. Dauda, like many appointees of the Buhari presidency, invariably carried a badge of needless uproar. In his case, the man he will be directly reporting to, the National Security Adviser to the president, Mr. Babagana Munguno, a retired Major General, and a fellow Kanuri, was unaware of, and was certainly not consulted on, his appointment. For the two months now that he has served at NIA, Mr. Dauda was forced to walk a delicate balance, trying tirelessly to build trust and confidence internally, and in the immediate outer-rim of the NIA political universe.

Two events, the very next day, will finally change all that for Mr. Dauda.

First, in the early hours of Wednesday, January 10, an operational truck of State Security Services [SSS] agents drove quietly towards the eastern end of the city and pulled up at the gate of Defence House in the Maitama District. They wanted to see the Chief of Staff to the President, Mr. Abba Kyari, and their mission, they said, was to defend Kyari, a usually taciturn but fiercely loyal acolyte of the president in the event of an attempted arrest.

Administration sources told Premium Times at the weekend that the orders for the SSS deployment came directly from the director general of the agency, Mr. Lawal Daura.

The NNPC TSA controversy

At the beginning of October last year, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, found itself at the centre of a scandal that it was flouting the governments policy on TSA accounts, by failing to remit N50 billion of its income and interests from five banks. The scandal attempted to smear Mr. Kyari, claiming he provided the directive for the NNPC to by pass the TSA account.

The NNPC, through its public communication office, strongly shot back saying, By virtue of the operations of the NNPC, the Corporation had made series of compelling cases to the Presidency and the Central Bank of Nigeria to allow certain categories of accounts operate outside the TSA, as they contain co-mingled funds governed by detailed agreements with local and international implications. It concluded that to claim that the Chief of Staff single-handedly approved these exemptions was not only unfair, but is a complete misrepresentation of facts to mislead the general public.

Political and security sources familiar with the matter, in Abuja, said both the NSAs office and the presidency became sufficiently worried about the story and got the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission [EFCC] to show interest in the matter. The spokesman for the commission, Mr. Wilson Uwujaren, suggested he was unaware of this claim but promised to broach it with the upper deck of the organisation and get back. His phone became unreachable through the weekend. The EFCC boss, Mr. Ibrahim Magu, in response to PREMIUM TIMES inquiries later disclaimed that operatives of his agency were on any such assignment.

Interpreting all these manouvres from the sidelines, the director general of the SSS, Mr. Lawal Daura, reportedly felt a sense of nefarious intent, and in response, rapidly deployed the team of armed operatives to forestall any eventuality. It was like a preemptory move a source told PREMIUM TIMES. This will be the second time that Mr. Daura would muscularly wade into an interagency storm on perceived grounds of EFCCs operational overreach. About two months ago, on November 21, the SSS triggered an inter-agency war with the EFCC when it frustrated an attempt to arrest the former head of the NIA, Ayo Oke, and former head of the SSS, Ita Ekpeyong, from their homes on Mamman Nasir Street in the Asokoro district of Abuja.

The drama at Defence House

Defence House is one of the presidential guest houses in Abuja, and among its famous occupants these days has been the president himself who used it as his transition home before his inauguration in 2015. Currently, however, the two most celebrated occupiers of the posh real estate are Mr. Kyari and Mr. Babagana Monguno, whose houses are adjacent to each other.

The Kyari-Monguno relationship is one of the utmost fascinating and defining narratives of the Buhari presidency, one which a presidential aide, in response to questions from PREMIUM TIMES for the reporting of this story, characterized as a truly enthralling history of animosity.

Both men, from the same Kanuri stock, entrenched within the topmost rack and influential ladder of the administration, represent, by all indication, the spiky edges of the problematic policy making space of the Buhari presidency.

With the SSS agents prowling the perimeter of the Kyari household, this Wednesday, all armed to the teeth, Mr. Monguno, according to sources, could not hide his shock when he encountered them as he made ready to head to work. Who are these men? he reportedly asked, in anger and distaste. In a short while after, a truck load of soldiers, ordered by Mr. Monguno, had descended on Defence House with a mission to disarm the SSS agents. After some indecent trade in language, reasons prevailed, and both combatants, the soldiers and the SSS operatives, went back to their bases.

The very next day, Thursday, the president met separately with Mr. Monguno and then with Mr. Kyari, according to sources, in the effort to mend the breached relationship of his two principal aides. Later that night, the presidency issued a statement announcing the appointment of Ahmed Rufai Abubakar, a senior special adviser to the president as the substantive head of the NIA. Abubakar, a polyglot who is reputed to speak and write excellently in French, English, and Arabic was previously a director at the United Nations Political office for West Africa in Dakar Senegal where he oversaw the patterns of conflict, peace building, and the democratic transition in the region.

As in the case of Mr. Daudas appointment, again, Mr. Monguno, who had been reportedly prepping another candidate for the job, heard of this announcement, which he ought to have had a hand in determining, like every Nigerian through the late new hours. It was a humbling and stinging jolt on the NSAs profile. This was a particularly neutralizing episode in the thorny relationship of the two presidential aides whose contrastive visions regarding policy directions of the administration had now come full circle. In this particular case, Mr. Dauda, who himself heard of his replacement over the news, turns out as a victim of an enormous power play that acutely expresses the Buhari political cosmos.

The Magu conundrum

No unique issue, however, best describes the divergent vision of the Kyari-Monguno challenge so unambiguously as the question of Mr. Magus continued suitability for the office of the anti-corruption czar of the country.

During the long Christmas and New Year holiday, the team of Mr. Kyari; the interior minister, Bello Dambazau; the DG of the SSS, Mr. Daura; and the Attorney General of the Federation, Mr. Malami convinced the president to remove Magu who they thought had become a major liability to the progress of the administration. The president reportedly advised them to clear with his vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, a law professor who, with Mr. Monguno remain the two prominent life-lines of Magu in the administration.

When Mr. Osinbajo returned from his holiday trip to Dubai, they met with him and tabled the request arguing that Magu had become a burden for the administration, stalling progress on the budget and several other engagements with the National Assembly for which, in their view, the president was suffering costly reputational hemorrhage.

They illustrated their claims with several appointments awaiting confirmation at the senate. The vice president reportedly told them that the international community as indeed many Nigerians continue to credit the Buhari administration on account of its anti-corruption profile, and that removing Magu would send a dangerously wrong signal in an election year.

According to those familiar with the exchange, Mr. Osinbajo suggested that in the event of a Magu transition, a fitting position for him would be an elevation as Special Adviser on anti-corruption in the presidency while a new chair for the EFCC is appointed.

Irreversibly committed to the removal of Mr. Magu, the group is said to be uncomfortable with the arrangement. In the larger narrative of the Kyari-Monguno relationship, presidency sources reason that matters have gotten to a peak where one of them will have to eventually cancel the other for peace to reign.

-premiumtimesng
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo

Adamu disclosed this while briefing newsmen on NOUNs 2018 convocation scheduled for Nov. 20 at the institutions headquarters, Jabi, Abuja.

He said that Obasanjo would be considered for an appointment as a facilitator or supervisor as PhD was the least qualification for one to teach in the institution.

The vice-chancellor said that 14,771 graduands was the highest any institution in Nigeria had ever convoked.

He said that despite being a former president, Obasanjo conducted himself properly and deservedly bagged Doctor of Philosophy in Christian Theology.

One of the graduands is the first PhD graduate the institution will produce; a university must graduate students at academic Masters Level before graduating PhD.

Only one candidate has been able to do that and that is Obasanjo; the Senate has found him worthy of the award and approved the conferment of PhD on him.

There are lessons to be learnt from Obasanjos featone is never too old to learn; Obasanjo was about 80 years when he started the programme and has finished it at 82.

Again, one is never too powerful to learn to learn; he was the president twice and yet subjected himself to learning; learning is a humbling process

We will consider him for the post of a facilitator or supervisor; maybe for our Abeokuta Study Centre; we will suggest it to him.

Adamu said that that because of Obasanjos achievement, NOUN had received requests from other older citizens.

He said that the institution was able to graduate such a huge number of students because it had created its own internal data management which was previously handled by external vendors.

The vice-chancellor said that students who were hitherto not cleared by the external vendors had been cleared.

He said that NOUNs Business School would soon take off and would run nine professional programmes.

Adamu said that the institution had created Centre for Entrepreneurship Studies which would generate employment opportunities for the graduates.

According to him, NOUN has opened linkages with foreign universities in order to broaden its scope.

Sussex University in the UK has reached out to us-to be its hub in Nigeria; Open University of UK , University of South Africa among other are partnering with us.

We are expanding to create diasporic study centres in Niger Republic, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Gambia, Senegal among others.

These are still subject to approval from the National Universities Commission, the Federal Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he said.

On the standoff between NOUN and the Council for Legal Education over the status of Law graduates, he said that the Senate had passed the NOUN Act Amendment Bill.

He said once the both chambers harmonise on the Bill, it would be sent for presidential assent.

Adamu said that once, the amendment was signed into Law, all controversies surrounding the Law programme as well that concerning the National Youth Service Corps(NYSC) would be resolved.
Ogun State Governor Ibikunle Amosun yesterday urged Nigerians to show appreciation for the selfless efforts of the nations armed forces at keeping the country as one indivisible entity.

The governor said many of them had even laid down their lives for the continued existence of Nigeria.

He said they and their families should not be forgotten.

Amosun, who addressed reporters after the celebration of this years Armed Forces Remembrance Day at the Arcade Ground in Abeokuta, the state capital, noted that the war against terrorism and insurgents may not be won soon.

The governor said caring for or remembering members of the armed forces who served the nation should not be a once-in-a-while thing but something that should be part of the nations daily life.

He expressed the confidence that Nigeria would overcome its security challenges and remain united.

According to him, this will be achieved when everybody is given equal opportunity.

Amosun said: My message is that we should, as a people and as a nation, appreciate the selfless efforts and service of all our military and paramilitary services; all men who have laid their lives for what we have today. We exist as a nation because of their efforts.

They fought within and outside the country. Remember the First and Second World wars. Even our own Civil War and, of course lately, all of these challenges we are having: Boko Haram, Niger Delta militants; and our Armed Forces are being called upon.

What we do before, maybe after the Civil War, was to go for different international peace-keeping efforts. But somehow, we are getting involved within the territory of Nigeria. We pray that all of these will be a thing of the past. They are working and doing well.

Terrorism and all of those are not issues that can be subdued immediately. Even as great as America is as a nation, they are still battling with ISIS and Al Qaeda. It is just like something you cannot keep your eyes away from. So, we commend their effort.

For me, the lesson to take away from here is selfless service some people have rendered. It is a challenge to those of us who are here. Not just even being a military; wherever we find ourselves, we should work for our nation.

It is not just when we come like this that we give them some money and they go. They should be integrated in all that we are doing. They are not lazy. That is why they have served in the military

Also, Oyo State Governor Abiola Ajimobi urged Nigerians to sacrifice more for the unity and progress of the country.

He said this should be in the spirit of the nations fallen heroes who sacrificed their lives for the nation to be together.

Ajimobi spoke yesterday at the Remembrance Arcade, opposite Agodi Government House in Ibadan, venue of the grand finale and laying of wreaths in commemoration of this years Armed Forces Remembrance Day celebrations.

The event was attended by Deputy Governor Moses Alake Adeyemo, members of the State Executive Council (Exco), security commanders, members of Nigerian Legionnaires and families of fallen heroes.

Addressing reporters after the ceremonial laying of wreaths and release of pigeons and peace balloons, Ajimobi said it was important for Nigerians to remember and honour denmised military officers who made the supreme sacrifice for the continued co-existence of the nation.

He said: My message is that we must always give honour to those whom honour is due. It is due to our heroes, who have paid the ultimate price, that we have remained alive so that we can remain united. The lesson there is that in all we do, we will all die one day. What do you want to leave behind? How do you want to be remembered?

We are remembering the fallen heroes in the Nigerian Army today because they paid the ultimate sacrifice in the service of humanity and in godliness. My message to our people is that we should all endeavour to serve. The greatest form of godliness is service to humanity. We must serve humanity with all our might. Despite all that God has endowed us with, in the end, we will all die.

Osun State Governor Rauf Aregbesola said the selfishness and greed among the elite through rent-seeking outside of work and productivity may provoke rage and anger which may threaten communal peace in Nigeria.

The governor delivered a speech, titled: The Imperative of Peace for Productivity and Prosperity, at the wreath-laying ceremony for this years Armed Forces Remembrance Day celebrations at the New Military Cenotaph in front of Osun House of Assembly in Osogbo, the state capital.

He said: War is a very bad business. It is costly, deadly and ruinous, even for a supposedly winner. It is worse for the loser. Indeed, all are losers in a war. The resources  human and material  used to prosecute wars could have been used for the development of the people. The lesson of history is that nations and people emerged from wars weakened, devastated, poor and vulnerable.

The worst part is that though a nations decision to go to war or not might be easy before the outbreak of hostilities, but it is more difficult and sometimes impossible to decide to stop a war. Thus, we have prolonged and sometimes an indeterminate war. This is the hard part.

We see the devastations of wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon (and closer home) in Liberia and Sierra Leone. While some, like Liberia and Sierra Leone, are fortunate to put the war behind them, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq have found it difficult to stop their own wars.

Lebanon lost its Paradise and Pearl of the Middle East status to United Arab Emirates (UAE). The mutual antagonism and distrust that the Nigerian Civil War bred are still with us.

The governor noted that the country was fortunate the first time it went to war, saying Nigeria may not be that lucky again, if another war should break out.

He said: In the interest of the Black race, Nigeria must not just exist but it must be strong to be able to lead the continent to achieve its manifest destiny.

The greatest riches of the continent are domiciled in the Great Lakes region comprising Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

Nigeria should be strong and provide leadership with South Africa and the leaders of the region to be able to develop these riches for the development of the people of the continent and for Africa to be able to take her place in the world.

Essential to achieving this is peace. If there is no peace, we cannot make any progress

Lagos State Governor Akinwunmi Ambode urged Nigerians to always give peace a chance and embrace dialogue as the mechanism for conflict resolution.

The governor noted that one of the best ways to appreciate the supreme price gallant members of the nations Armed Forces paid is to always ensure that conflicts are resolved amicably while peace is constantly guaranteed.

Represented by his deputy, Dr Oluranti Adebule, the governor said January 15 remained sacrosanct in Nigerias political history because in 1970, it was the day the Treaty of Surrender, which ended the threeyear bloody Civil War in the country, was signed.

Ambode, who hailed officers and men of the Armed Forces for always demonstrating courage and gallantry to protect the sovereignty of the country, urged Nigerians to always eschew violence and bitterness while resolving their differences.

According to him, the nation and its people stand to gain a lot when there is peace and political stability in the land.

He said: While commending officers and men of our Armed Forces for demonstrating courage and gallantry in the face of threat to national unity, I call on fellow citizens to give peace a chance. Let us eschew violence and embrace dialogue as the preferred mechanism for conflict resolutions.

Ambode added: As we conclude this years Armed Forces Remembrance celebrations, let me use this opportunity to reiterate my call to all Lagosians and indeed Nigerians to show love and care to the families and the loved ones of our deceased patriots. One of the ways we can support the survivals of these people is to engage the services of exservice men and women, some of whom have suffered physical disabilities while defending the territorial integrity and unity of the nation.

Also, Ondo State Governor Oluwarotimi Akeredolu (SAN) yesterday called for special attention for the widows and dependants of demised members of the Armed Forces.

The governor presented cash gifts to some widows of the fallen soldiers at this years parade and laying of wreaths for the Armed Forces Remembrance Day celebration at the state government cenotaph in Akure, the state capital.

He said: One aspect and perhaps the most significant of the celebration is the need to pay special attention to the welfare of the widows and dependant relatives of the departed ones.

Akeredolu praised the fallen heroes for paying the supreme price for the nations unity.

He said: The need for a vehicle for the Legion and the general welfare of the widows and dependant relatives of fallen heroes as well as those of retired and serving officers and men in this state have also been brought to our state.

Some of these requests will receive immediate attention while the others will be attended to as the resources of the state improve.

Nothing can be too much to be done for these courageous officers and men of the Armed Forces who sacrificed their lives to preserve, protect and defend the territorial integrity and sovereignty of our father land.

The governor decried the security challenge posed by Fulani herdsmen in some parts of the country.

He said: While the challenge of Boko Haram is yet to subside, the new challenge of herdsmen, which has assumed a national dimension, has reared its ugly head.

This has constituted nagging pains in necks of all those in authority in this country. Like I have had occasions to say in the last couples of days, we will not allow any miscreant to elude with our joy in Ondo State.

We are resolved to take the challenge head-on. Ondo State residents must have the unhindered space for their daily economic activities.

The farmers, especially, will be protected and imbued with the required confidence to engage in their legitimate farming activities.
37-year-old mother of four, Aisha Mubammed-Bello, has been arrested by the Police for reportedly impersonating the wife of Nigerias President and First lady of Nigeria, Aisha Buhari.

According to FCT Commissioner of Police, CP Sadiq Bello, a phone and a newly acquired SIM Card registered in the name of Aisha Buhari, First Lady of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was recovered from the suspect.

Today, we have a special suspect to present before you, she is Aisha Muhammed Bello, 37 years old, mother of four from Plateau State. She was arrested for impersonating the wife of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Aisha Muhammadu Buhari.

She is using the name of the First Lady to solicit for contracts and financial assistance from unsuspecting members of the public, especially heads of government establishments.

The suspect was arrested by Police operatives on 10th January, 2018 at Fadama III Project Office, Maitama, Abuja following a report that she contacted the Coordinator of the Project that she wants assistance in her capacity as the First Lady.

Upon her arrest, a phone and a newly acquired Airtel SIM Card registered in the name of Aisha Buhari, First Lady of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was recovered from the suspect.

Investigation is on-going with a view to contacting other people she must have duped in the name of the First Lady. At the end of investigation, she will be charged to court. Members of the public are hereby advised to always be double sure of who they are dealing with before they part with their property or money, FCT Commissioner of Police, CP Sadiq Bello, said.Today, we have a special suspect to present before you, she is Aisha Muhammed Bello, 37 years old, mother of four from Plateau State. She was arrested for impersonating the wife of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Aisha Muhammadu Buhari. .

.

She is using the name of the First Lady to solicit for contracts and financial assistance from unsuspecting members of the public, especially heads of government establishments.

The suspect was arrested by Police operatives on 10th January, 2018 at Fadama III Project Office, Maitama, Abuja following a report that she contacted the Coordinator of the Project that she wants assistance in her capacity as the First Lady.

Upon her arrest, a phone and a newly acquired Airtel SIM Card registered in the name of Aisha Buhari, First Lady of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was recovered from the suspect.

Investigation is on-going with a view to contacting other people she must have duped in the name of the First Lady. At the end of investigation, she will be charged to court. Members of the public are hereby advised to always be double sure of who they are dealing with before they part with their property or money, he said.
President Buhari reportedly sent operatives of the DSS, to arrest the Prophet Isa El-Buba, the General Overseer of the Evangelical Bible Outreach International (EBOMI) Ministries, at his home yesterday by 7pm.

An awareness post about the arrest, was shared on Prophet Isas Facebook page and it read;

THIS IS TO ALERT YOU ALL THAT MR. PRESIDENT HAS SENT THE DSS TO ARREST PROPHET ISA EL-BUBA AFTER THE TIME WITH JESUS MEETING AT ABOUT 7PM.

THEY HAVE BEEN AROUND SINCE THEN, THE PICTURE YOU SEE WITH THE WHITE HILUX AND MORE THAN THREE MEN INSIDE AWAITING HIS ARREST, BUT NOTHING HAS HAPPENED YET AS GOD IS IN CONTROL

PLZ PASS IT ON ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

However it seems it was brought under control as Prophet Isa alleged the men left. He wrote in a subsequent post;

THE SITUATION HERE AT THE HEADQUARTERS IS CALMING DOWN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PRAYERS 

Prince Henry Nwazuruahu Shield who confirmed the arrest, said Prophet Isa El-Buba was arrested by the Department of State Security(DSS) for criticizing the activities of Fulani Herdsmen.

It will be recalled that Prophet El-Buba criticized the herdsmen and President Buhari in a church sermon video that his has since gone viral. He is the General Overseer of EBOMI ministries.

Mr Shield wrote;

You remember him? Hes the bold pastor who made the same kind of video I made few days ago. He has just been arrested. Im ready for mine. We wont let these tyrants destroy the democracy many laid down their lives to build. BUHARI AND DAURA, I AM READY! COME FOR ME TOO!

Watch the video below:

https://www.facebook.com/hopefornigeria/videos/1703491119709003/

In the video, Prophet El-Buba said President Buhari is a wicked leader, who condoned the slaughter of Benue residents and couldnt make any arrest. He also urged his congregants to get their voters card to get President Buhari off his seat. He further revealed that the killing going on in Nigeria, shows the irresponsibility of President Buhari and the church will fight him to a standstill. He further asked villages to defend themselves against herdsmen, since they cant be defended by security agents.

In the video too, Prophet El-Buba said any President who doesnt believe in restructuring, should be sent packing.. While he prayed for his congregants at the end of the sermon, he invoked the blood of killed innocent civilians to swallow the wicked in Nigeria.

Recall that also in November 2017, Prophet Isa El-Buba slammed President Muhammadu Buhari for negating the path of God and allowing corruption and injustice to thrive in his cabinet.

In an interview with newsmen in Jos, Prophet El-Buba said God brought President Buhari to power in 2015 to carry out an assignment for Him, adding that the mission was to purge Nigeria of corruption that has become the norm in public service.

Regrettably, he said President Buhari has derailed from the task given to him by God due to the influence of corrupt political appointees on him.

According to him, it is clear from what is going on in this country that the oppressed and the poor are being denied justice by a government that is expected to uphold righteousness and judge iniquity in the land of Nigeria.

Prophet El-Buba stated that the reason God made President Buhari to recover from his recent ailment that had him spent about six months in the United Kingdom was for him to mend his ways and tackle head-long the injustices that pervade the landscape of Nigeria under the present administration which President Buhari is its current leader.

Recall that few yesterday, we also reported that a Nigerian Christian lecturer, Engineer Simput Eagles Dafup, was reportedly arrested by the DSS for converting one Miss Nabila Umar Sanda Galadima, the daughter of a traditional title holder in Biu, Borno State from Islam to Christianity.
Refugees in Germany who appeal against the rejection of their asylum applications are having growing success, a report says. Critics say the high rate of wins puts German migration authorities in a bad light.

Almost one in two refugees who appeals against the rejection of an asylum application by German migration authorities wins the case before administrative courts, a German newspaper reported on Monday.





The report by the Suddeutsche Zeitung , which cited the government's answer to a parliamentary question put by the opposition Left Party, said that some 44 percent of cases in the first nine months of last year were decided in favor of the refugees. That compares with just 29 percent in the same period in 2016.





The groups that had the most success with their appeals were Syrian refugees, who won in 69 percent of cases, and Afghans, who had 61 of their appeals accepted. Those from Morocco and Algeria were markedly less successful, winning in only 12 and 10 percent of cases respectively.





The latter two countries are to be declared "safe countries of origin" by Germany when fewer than 5 percent of asylum applications are granted by the Federal Office for Migration (BAMF), meaning that asylum seekers can be returned there under German law.





Many successful appeals overturned

The success on appeal meant that most of the refugees received protection under the Geneva Refugee Convention, but only a few were given asylum as enshrined in the German constitution, which is a status granted only to politically persecuted people who did not come to Germany from a secure third country.




Moroccan Aouda Saadia high school of Marrakech, representing Africa, has been awarded Zayed Future Prize 2018 for its ecologic drive and green project encouraging use of renewables.

The award was handed over by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, to Fatima Kander, teacher at the Moroccan school.

It is a pilot girls school of students from modest families of artisans and farmers. The school plans to add solar water heaters, photovoltaic panels and LED light bulbs to reduce the energy use of the school and provide hot showers.

The project management team says floor lamps will be installed to light the school at night, so that students are safe and night classes can be held for local women attending literacy courses.

The school also plans to develop teaching modules, educational tools and training workshops for students, and to provide air conditioning for classrooms to help students concentrate.

The Prize funding will be used for improving waste management, such as a shredding apparatus, the installation of composting bins and a solar pump.

The Zayed future prize rewards best achievements in five categories: Large corporation, Small & medium enterprise, Non-profit organization, Life-time achievement and Global high schools.

The Global High Schools category of the Zayed Future Energy Prize was established in 2012 to help cultivate tomorrows energy leaders and sustainability advocates. Each of this years school winners, representing a total of five world regions, demonstrated exceptional initiative in promoting sustainability and renewable energy in the local community.

Besides the Aouda Saadia high school (Africa), the four other awardees are Vladimir Nazor school (Europe), Mbaracayu Educational Centre (Americas), the Bahrain Bayan School (Asia) and Motufoua Secondary School (Oceania).

This annual award celebrates best innovation, long-term vision and leadership shown in renewable energy and sustainability.

Morocco, which imports most of its energy needs, is developing renewable energy, which is gaining momentum in the country with large scale projects.

In 2009, only 1.7 per cent of Moroccos electricity came from renewable sources. By 2012, this had risen to 32 per cent and is projected to be 42 per cent by 2020 and 52 per cent by 2030.
Morocco is set to be a major player within the African Union by integrating its supreme decision making body on peace and security issues: the Peace and Security Council (PSC).

Moroccos ambition to be member of the most important body within the African Union was expressed by Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita during talks recently in Rabat with South African peer Maite Nkoana-Mashabane.

Moroccos membership of the Council will help it avert attempts seeking to undermine its territorial integrity. The Council has long been a stronghold of Algeria where it used to pass motions prejudicial to Moroccos sovereignty over the Sahara.

The Peace and Security Council is the AUs standing decision-making body responsible for the maintenance of continental peace and security. The council 15 members are elected by the AU Executive Council on regional basis (three from Central Africa; three from East Africa; two from North Africa; three from Southern Africa; and four from West Africa).

The Council is currently chaired by Algerian Smail Chergui. Last March, the Council appointed Joaquin Chissano AUs High representative for the Sahara and announced in 2017 a visit to the southern provinces, a visit that never took place.

Morocco deems that the Sahara issue is being tackled within the framework of the UN and considers that the African Union under pressure from Algeria has prejudged the outcome of negotiations by recognizing a separatist entity.

For decades, the Council has been sidelining on Algerian stands in support of the Polisario separatists. However, Moroccos charm offensive in Africa and the increasing support base it has within the AU will surely pave the way for a volte-face of the Councils approach on the Sahara issue.
Jordan received German military equipment worth 18 mln to strengthen its border control in a troubled region beset by terrorist activities in Syria and Iraq.

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, told German media, that the equipment would help bolster Jordans border surveillance, and that her country and Europe as a whole have an interest in Jordans stability.

The Minister said at the handover ceremony in the Jordanian capital Amman, that the equipment, which includes two training aircraft worth 5 million and 70 trucks and 56 vans worth 13 million, would help improve mobility at the border.

She added that Germany is assisting refugee-burdened Jordan in many ways, including the job initiative cash for work, funding school teachers salaries in the double-shift programs and by providing drinking water to refugees and to the local communities accommodating them.

Jordan, which borders Syria and Iraq, has been at the forefront of the fight against the Islamic State (IS). Russia and an international coalition led by the United States have fought the terrorist group since it conquered swathes of Syrian and Iraqi territory in 2014.

Berlin has also helped Jordan via a 2016 aid program aimed at helping Middle Eastern and African partners resolve and prevent local conflicts, an effort the German government has previously said should combat the causes of migration to Europe.
Shutdowns usually hurt the reputations of both parties in Congress, but in 2013 it temporarily hurt Republicans more. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The odds of a settlement of outstanding issues  the most notable being the fate of Dreamers  between Democrats and Republicans and between Congress and the White House are fading rapidly. So there really is a good chance that the federal government will shut down on Friday, January 19, when the current spending bill expires.

In looking at that prospect, the big  and to a surprising extent imponderable  element is which party or subset of a party will get the primary blame if the government does shuts down, which is never a popular proposition among Americans. One school of thought is that Republicans will inevitably be blamed because they control the entire federal government. Another is that the party perceived as precipitating the shutdown will be blamed, regardless of power or actual responsibility. And its also unclear whether the blame, however it is assigned, will matter by this November when voters get a chance to weigh in.

In answering these questions, it may be helpful to look back at the last actual government shutdown in October of 2013. Then, partisan control over Washington was divided, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House. The precipitating cause of the shutdown at the time was reasonably clear: House Speaker John Boehner, with angry House conservatives at his back, refused to move any funding bill until such time as Democrats agreed to major changes in  or a delay in the implementation of  the Affordable Care Act. And despite divided government and partisan finger-pointing, the persuadable portion of the public did indeed seem to blame Republicans more, according to this assessment in the midst of the shutdown:

By a 22-point margin (53-31 percent), the public blames the Republican Party more for the shutdown than President Barack Obama, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. Thats a wider margin of blame for the GOP than the party received during the last shutdown in 1995-96.

In both the 2013 and 199596 shutdowns, Republicans were making high-profile demands to redeem long-standing conservative policy priorities (hobbling Obamacare in 2013 and cutting Medicare and Medicaid in 199596).

So the belief of some Republicans today that they can pin a government shutdown on Democrats who are blocking a spending deal because of an insistence on going to the mat for Dreamers and Hispanic advocacy groups is not entirely without foundation (though it would have been much easier if the president had not made inflammatory comments in the middle of negotiations that will help Democrats immensely in making him appear to be the Bad Guy in this saga). It is true that with united GOP control of the federal government its harder to blame Democrats for anything. But then again, its not exactly clear what percentage of Americans are aware of the GOP trifecta; at the height of the midterm-election campaign in 2014, Gallup found that only 36 percent of Americans could identify the party controlling the two congressional chambers.

The clearest lesson from 2013 is that a government shutdown hurt Congresss popularity generally: The publics job-approval rating of Congress dropped into single digits for the first time ever. Its possible that the shutdown contributed to an anti-government mood that ultimately damaged Democrats more in the November 2014 midterms, mostly by dampening turnout, despite contemporary perceptions that Republicans were more to blame. The reason we cant really know, however, is that intervening events blurred and possibly even obliterated the shutdowns impact almost immediately.

The same day the federal government shut down on October 1, 2013, the online portal for enrollment in Obamacare was opened, and almost immediately crashed. In the ensuring weeks, additional problems with the website and the enrollment process continued to emerge, and Republicans relentlessly publicized them via congressional hearings and sheer repetition. By mid-November, Obamas approval ratings  and for that matter, Obamacares  were reaching historic lows. The shutdown became something of a distant memory overnight.

Its almost impossible to sort out temporary from long-term public-opinion trends in the stew of discontent that simmered throughout the country at the end of 2013. But its worth noting that prior to October with its twin disasters, Democrats had been consistently leading in the congressional generic ballot for 2014. After the shutdown and the healthcare.gov rollout, the polling became much more mixed before resolving itself into a small pro-GOP wave by the next fall. Ultimately, Republicans made modest House gains and managed to retake control of the Senate, in what was a pretty typical midterm trend.

So the bottom line for those creating or trying to avoid a 2018 government shutdown is that these events are rarely good for either party, but the blame can be pinned primarily on one party with enough resolve and evidence. In the end, though, their effect can be ephemeral. At present, Democrats are headed toward big midterm gains barring some big turnaround in Trumps approval ratings. His inability to control his foul mouth spewing racist sentiments is going to be a problem for his party no matter how it affects the Blame Game of a potential government shutdown. And Republicans should keep that in mind before they roll the dice in helping to bring the federal government they control into even greater disrepute.
He talks a big game. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call,Inc.

Jeff Flake, the Arizona senator who has positioned himself as the foremost Republican objector to President Trumps brand of hard-edged nationalism, is planning a barnburner of a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday, his office told multiple news outlets.

In it, Flake will take aim at Trumps sustained attacks on the news media and compare the president to one of historys worst dictators.

Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own President uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies, Flake plans to say, according to the Washington Post. It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase enemy of the people, that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of annihilating such individuals who disagreed with the supreme leader.

(Trump has called the mainstream media the enemy of the people multiple times since his election, though he hasnt used the line in almost a year.)

Flake is timing his speech to coincide with the extremely presidential fake-news awards Trump has announced will take place on January 17.

What Im trying to do with this speech is basically trying to nudge the president back where I think that we, as elected officials, ought to be, Flake told NBC News Kasie Hunt in a bit of wishful thinking.

Flake has been one of the presidents fiercest Republican critics going back to the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. His 2017 book, Conscience of a Conservative, took aim at the nativist, anti-intellectual conservative movement that Trump now presides over. To his credit, Flake has not wavered in his public disdain for Trump, unlike onetime Trump antagonists like Lindsey Graham and Bob Corker. Flake was the only Republican lawmaker to endorse Democrat Doug Jones over alleged sexual predator Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race, even sending Jones a check; he savaged Trumps shithole remarks this week; and he is attempting to hammer out a compromise on the DACA program, even as the president undermines it.

For his troubles, Flake has become a hated figure among the Trumpian right. And amid sinking poll numbers in Arizona, Flake announced in October that he would retire from the Senate after his term is up this year, setting off what will be one of the most closely watched and competitive races in the country.

That decision, which was accompanied by a rousing anti-Trump address in the Senate, prompted questions about what, besides speechifying, Flake is doing to rein in the president he thinks is such a danger to the country.

Even though Flake no longer has to worry about appeasing hard-right Arizonans in future primaries, his voting record in no way reflects his Trump apostasy. He has voted with the president on every major initiative, from Obamacare repeal to the massive giveaway to the rich known as the Republican tax plan. FiveThirtyEight calculates that overall he has sided with Trump on legislation and nominations 90.7 percent of the time.

This is partly understandable; Flake is, after all, an old-fashioned Republican who favors low taxes on the rich and minimal government intervention.

But as Josh Barro observed when Flake announced his retirement, the senator hasnt even pushed back against Trump on matters where the two differ radically, like trade policy. Nor has he offered any resistance to the unprecedentedly sloppy process by which the GOP passed their major tax legislation (and attempted to kill Obamacare).

Flake sees himself as a classic good-government conservative, but he has voted for several of President Trumps brazenly unqualified judges, and has used his perch on the Judiciary Committee to push for disregarding the recommendations of the once widely respected American Bar Association.

His spotty record matters more than ever in the aftermath of Doug Joness win in Alabama, since Republicans now hold only a one-seat majority in the upper chamber. GOP senators, many of whom once showed signs of moving away from President Trump, have been marching more and more in lockstep with him over the past several weeks, and there is increasing evidence that they would largely defend President Trump if he chooses to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Flake has said that if Trump fired the special counsel, it would be a big problem for the president. Here is one area where the senator could back up his soaring rhetoric with bold action. With Democrats in his corner, Flake could band together with one other Trump-skeptical Republican (Susan Collins? John McCain?) and promise to gum up the works of the Senate if Trump followed through on his most dangerous impulse yet. With nothing to lose, Flake could cement his legacy as a right-side-of-history conservative, for the good of the country whose values he loves to rhapsodize about.

Could Flake do something that daring? Anythings possible. But as of now, there is simply no evidence that the senator actually wants to wield his considerable power while he still has it. Instead, well have to settle for another entertaining, ultimately empty speech.
Trump tells lawmakers that hell sign whatever immigration deal they give him, two days before rejecting their immigration deal. Photo: The Washington Post/The Washington Post/Getty Images

In recent years Congress has become accustomed to the constant threat of government shutdown, but no president had openly called for one until President Trump tweeted in May that perhaps our country needs a good shutdown.

Like so many things that appear on Trumps Twitter feed, bringing the federal government to a grinding halt did not become official White House policy. Yet thanks in part to the presidents inability to refrain from complaining about the number of people who immigrate to the U.S. from shithole countries, were now closer to a shutdown than we have been at any point during this administration.

Heres a guide to how we got here, and what needs to happen to avoid a shutdown at midnight on Friday, January 19.

Why does Congress have to act by Friday?

By the time the new fiscal year starts on October 1, Congress and the president are supposed to enact 12 appropriations bills that fund the governments discretionary programs. Despite threatening once again to shut down the government if he didnt get funding for his big, beautiful border wall, in September President Trump cut a deal with Chuck and Nancy for a continuing resolution, which would keep the government funded at current levels through early December.

While budget negotiations have been underway for weeks, Congress was unable to reach an agreement while fighting over Trumps tax cuts, so they pushed this and many other issues off to 2018. Congress wound up passing two more continuing resolutions, leaving us with January 19 as the new shutdown deadline.

Are they close to a spending deal?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed it was possible in early January, saying, I am optimistic that we can begin 2018 with a bipartisan, two-year funding agreement that meets several critically important objectives.

Both sides want to lift spending caps on defense and domestic programs, remnants of the 2013 sequester that could trigger an automatic $6 billion in cuts this fiscal year. However, Republicans are calling for an increase in defense spending, while Democrats say that should come with an equal boost for domestic spending.

There is no reason why funding for our national security and our service members should be limited by an arbitrary political formula that bears no relationship to actual need, McConnell said during his first remarks on the Senate floor in 2018.

Complicating matters further is the possibility that other issues pushed into 2018, such as funding for disaster relief and the Childrens Health Insurance Program, will be addressed in the spending bill.

Last week House Speaker Paul Ryan suggested negotiations probably wouldnt be wrapped up by January 19, and on Monday the Washington Post reported that Republicans are now looking to pass another continuing resolution, which would probably last until mid-February. Even if we had a deal, which we dont, theres no time left to draft it, said a senior Senate Republican aide.

Cant they just change the deadline again?

Yes, but its unclear if a continuing resolution would pass this time. Defense hawks have been sounding the alarm about the effects of stopgap measures on the military, saying the budget unpredictability endangers troops and their mission.

Any funding measure will require the support of nine Senate Democrats, so the party suddenly has leverage despite not holding power in Congress or the White House. Many have threatened not to vote for a short- or long-term spending measure that doesnt address the nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

What does this have to do with immigration?

Republicans hoped to keep the two issues separate, but many Democrats see this as their best chance to address the crisis President Trump initiated in September when he announced that he was ending DACA.

Before a federal judge blocked Trumps order earlier this month, DACA was set to end in March (and despite the federal injunction, Dreamers are still living in limbo). Trump had called on Congress to come up with a legislative fix, and though the White House was never clear on what exactly he was willing to sign, last week a bipartisan group of lawmakers came to him with a deal. It involved giving Dreamers a path to citizenship, in return for border-security funding that could have gone toward Trumps wall.

Trump seemed happy with the agreement when Democratic Senator Dick Durbin described it on the phone, and he invited Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham to the White House, according to the Washington Post. But when they arrived, they were surprised to find Trump sitting with immigration hardliners like Republican Senator Tom Cotton. Afraid that Graham and Durbin would try to trick Trump into signing a bill that was damaging to him and would hurt him with his political base, administration officials had called lawmakers to the White House so Trump would be surrounded by conservatives.

The ploy worked  possibly too well. With GOP lawmakers urging him on, Trump rejected the bipartisan deal, saying it needed to be far more conservative. Then while discussing immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries, he asked, Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? and suggested the U.S. should take more people from places like Norway. Why do we need more Haitians? he reportedly commented, Take them out.

As one GOP Senate aide put it, President Trump dropped a grenade into the middle of everything.

The Worst Defenses of Trump's Racist Comments on Immigration

The impact of Trumps shithole remark.

Throughout the long weekend, the national conversation focused on whether or not the president said something racist, not the underlying policy issues.

Republican Senators David Perdue and Tom Cotton, who were in the meeting, claimed they didnt hear Trump say shithole (but perhaps he said shithouse). Senator Durbin stood by his accusation, and Senator Graham made a dig at his GOP colleagues, saying, My memory hasnt evolved. I know what was said, and I know what I said.

Meanwhile on Twitter, Trump accused Durbin of destroying any chance for a DACA deal, and using the issue as an excuse to shut down the government:

Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting. Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 15, 2018

DACA is probably dead because the Democrats dont really want it, they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our Military.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2018

While Republican Senator Jeff Flake insisted that Democrats are negotiating in good faith, Trumps remarks probably did embolden Democrats to fight for DACA, even if it sparks a shutdown.

It was already widely assumed that since Republicans control Congress and the White House, they would take most of the blame for a shutdown. While Democrats have been under tremendous pressure from immigration advocates, they had worried that pushing the issue could derail their 2018 prospects, particularly in states that voted for Trump. Now theyre far more confident that voters will see the president who (probably) said something racist about immigrants as the reason for the DACA impasse.

To believe that you can successfully blame Democrats for a shutdown over the DACA debate is naive, Senator Graham told the New York Times.

What happens now?

At least three groups of lawmakers are still trying to hammer out a DACA deal. Representatives Mark Meadows and Bob Goodlatte said theyre amending a conservative immigration bill backed by many other House Republicans, but its unlikely to pass in the Senate.

GOP aides have more faith in the efforts of four deputy leaders from both chambers: Senators Durbin and John Cornyn, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer. And Graham is still pushing the plan that Trump rejected.

I expect that well get more Republican support for the proposal because its really the only game in town. I expect there will be more negotiations  we didnt write the Bible, Graham said Monday. We wrote a proposal that over time we can make it better.

The big question now is whether Democrats can remain united. The Post reports that Republicans are considering attaching funding for the Childrens Health Insurance Program to force them into backing a continuing resolution that doesnt include DACA protections.

Some Democrats were already opposed to the deal Durbin and Graham presented, and as Senator Claire McCaskill told the Times, there are divisions within her party on how hard to push on immigration issues.

Weve got people running for president all trying to find their base, and then youve got people from Trump states that are trying to continue to legislate the way we always have  by negotiation, McCaskill said. And never the twain shall meet.

Of course, the biggest X factor in the shutdown fight may be which Donald Trump shows up to the next immigration discussion. Two days before rejecting the bipartisan deal, he basically told lawmakers that hed sign whatever they put in front of him.

Trump says he will sign ANY immigration agreement Congress gives him



"I'm not going to say 'oh gee I want this or I want that' I will be signing it" pic.twitter.com/M8NccfFYsx  Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) January 9, 2018

I told him that the President Trump that showed up Tuesday is the one that can lead the country on multiple levels, Graham said. I think the president realizes that it takes a bipartisan solution. But youre not going to get a deal by tweeting, youre going to get one by talking.
A simple man with simple needs. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

For the last nine months, Tufts professor Daniel Drezner has been compiling, via Twitter, a list of firsthand accounts of President Trump that describe him the way one would a small child. Samples include, Once he goes upstairs, theres no managing him, and He just seemed to go crazy today.

It is an impressively long list.

Monday delivered a ready-made entrant to that compilation in the form of a Washington Post article explaining how House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has successfully ingratiated himself with the president. It opens with this anecdote:

President Trump and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) were alone in the presidential suite on Air Force One, flying east toward Washington in early October, when the president reached for a handful of Starbursts, the square-shaped candy fruit chews. But instead of unwrapping all the treats, the president was careful to pluck out and eat two flavors: cherry and strawberry, McCarthy noticed.

Were there, having a little dessert, and he offers me some, McCarthy recalled in an interview. Just the red and the pink. A bit later, a couple of his aides saw me with those colors and told me, Those are the presidents favorites. 

Days later, the No. 2 Republican in the House  known for his relentless cultivation of political alliances  bought a plentiful supply of Starbursts and asked a staffer to sort through the pile, placing only those two flavors in a jar. McCarthy made sure his name was on the side of the gift, which was delivered to a grinning Trump, according to a White House official.

The Post also reports that McCarthys roundup of Republican midterm woes was a hit with the president because, According to two people familiar with the presentation, Trump appreciated McCarthys use of pictures and charts rather than a memo.

Be wary of Trumps moods; simplify everything as much as possible; reward him with play time. The people who can best manage the president really do treat him like a capricious child.

Senator Bob Corker was onto something with that adult day care bit.
A deactivated Titan II nuclear ICBM. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the Pentagon plans on developing two new sea-based nuclear weapons to respond to Russian and Chinese military threats, according to a broad new Defense Department strategy that was ordered up by President Trump a year ago.

One of the weapons is a warhead that could be used in conjunction with a Trident missile, a rocket deployed on U.S. Navy submarines. It would take about two years to produce.

The other is a nuclear-tipped cruise missile, a revival of a system that had been dropped from the arsenal in 2010.

The Pentagons rationale for the production increase is that Russia and China have not followed the United States lead on de-emphasizing nuclear weapons, so the U.S. must adjust its strategy. While the United States has continued to reduce the number and salience of nuclear weapons, others, including Russia and China, have moved in the opposite direction, one draft of the plan said.

The report contends that developing the weapons will also help the U.S. deter North Koreas nuclear aggression, which has ramped up at a far faster rate than experts had predicted.

Many critics disagree with these lines of thinking, but the proposals appear to have broad support within the Pentagon.

Last week, HuffPost published details from what appeared to be a different preliminary draft of the administrations Nuclear Posture Review, the final version of which is scheduled to be released in February. It emphasizes that the proposed new weapons are low-yield compared to standard nuclear weapons, though that hardly means they cannot cause tremendous destruction.

No strategy has been approved by Trump yet, but he has not been shy in the past about his enthusiasm for more nuclear weapons. In October, NBC News reported that he expressed interest in a tenfold increase in the countrys arsenal, which has declined precipitously from its peak in the 1960s.

Trumps attitude is a radical departure from President Obama, who signed a major denuclearization treaty with Russia in 2010, and spoke of a world free of nuclear weapons altogether.

The Pentagons program may encounter one major hurdle: cost. The Journal reports that a full nuclear modernization could eat up about 6.4 percent of the Defense Departments budget, more than double what it currently spends on nuclear weapons, and that if the Pentagon doesnt secure the spending increases it anticipates, this could heighten the competition between nuclear and nonnuclear programs for budgetary resources.
This is all part of the master plan. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

It has been a suboptimal month for Steve Bannon. First, the rabble-rousing populist and noted Art of War reader was booted from Breitbart, the website he made into a household name, after he ran his mouth off about President Trumps family to Michael Wolff.

Now, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is on his trail.

The New York Times reports that last week, Mueller took the unusual step of issuing a subpoena to Bannon, directing him to testify before a grand jury. Its the first time Mueller has employed this tactic to suss out information from a Trump adviser.

The Times speculates that the aggressive maneuever may be part of a negotiating tactic; Mueller can dangle the threat of formalized grand jury questioning in order to get Bannon to cooperate in a private setting instead. Its unclear why Mueller hasnt employed a similar strategy with other witnesses as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Bannon is not thought to be a central figure in some of the most damning episodes Mueller is investigating, like Trumps firing of former FBI director James Comey. But he ran Trumps campaign at the height of the Russian interference campaign and was part of Trumps inner circle during the administrations chaotic first few months, so its very possible his testimony could be helpful to the special counsel.

On Tuesday, Bannon testified before the House Intelligence Committee as part of its investigation into Russian interference. When he refused to answer questions, he was issued a separate subpoena to comply.

Bannon told Wolff, whose book Fire and Fury depicts an unhinged President Trump, that White House advisers including Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort were treasonous for meeting with Russian operatives at Trump Tower in June 2016, and that he was certain President Trump would have been told about it. Manafort has, since that meeting, been indicted by Mueller, and is awaiting trial.

After the book came out, President Trump publicly broke with Bannon, dubbed him Sloppy Steve on Twitter, and told allies they must choose between him and his former adviser. Since then, Bannon has been in public-opinion freefall among Trumps base.

But in a Wall Street Journal interview last week, Trump didnt rule out reconciling with his former chief strategist eventually, perhaps intuiting that a spurned Bannon could be a dangerous witness against him.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen does not see skin color. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had the misfortune to appear at a Senate hearing in the immediate aftermath of a furor over a reported racist remark by President Trump at a meeting she attended. Nielsens strategy was to deny everything. Nielsen told the senator she had no recollection one way or another as to whether Trump disparaged the population of an entire continent in shockingly gross terms.

There was a lot of rough language by a lot of people in the room  she testified. What I was struck with, frankly, as Im sure you were as well, was just the general profanity that was used in the room by almost everyone. So basically the meeting like some saloon scene in Deadwood. There were a lot of really bad words, but it might have been Trump making generalizations about black people, might have just been Al Swearengen, nobody can say for sure.

Nielsen did concede that Trump had nice things to say about Norway and its prospective emigrants to the United States. Senator Patrick Leahy asked Nielsen whether Norway was predominantly white. Nielsen professed total ignorance:

LEAHY: "Norway is a predominantly white country, isn't it?"



NIELSEN: "I actually don't know that, sir." (via ABC) pic.twitter.com/SMIFgFe7B3  Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 16, 2018

She could have gone with, Race is just a social construct, Senator. Instead her ignorance extends to the question of what color skin most Norwegians have.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

There are a lot more undocumented immigrants in the United States than our government can possibly deport (without increasing the size and scope of immigration enforcement beyond even the Trump administrations wildest dreams). At present, U.S. immigration courts are so severely backlogged, deportations actually went down during Trumps first year in office, even as the number of immigration arrests dramatically increased.

This context requires the White House to set priorities for enforcing immigration law. Until Congress increases the relevant resources, the Executive branch cannot significantly increase deportations with its policy changes  it can only change the composition of the deportee population. The Obama administration decided that it made little sense to use the governments limited resources on expelling Dreamers (law-abiding, gainfully-employed undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children). And on Tuesday, Trumps Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion.

Its not going to be a priority of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prioritize their removal. Ive said that before. Thats not the policy of DHS, DHS head Kirstjen Nielsen told CBS This Morning. If you are a DACA thats compliant with your registration, meaning you havent committed a crime, you, in fact, are registered, youre not priority of enforcement for ICE should the program end.

This statement is not surprising. It would be bizarre if Homeland Security did prioritize deporting a category of immigrants that is, by definition, compliant with all (non-immigration) laws, and making productive contributions to society. And the significance of Nielsons remarks are unclear. There is a big difference between deprioritizing Dreamers, and instructing immigration enforcement agents to leave them alone. Many Dreamers shared their personal information and immigration status with the government when applying for protection from deportation under the Obama administration. If ICE isnt explicitly prohibited from using that data to make quick-and-easy arrests of undocumented individuals, some agents could take that initiative.

Regardless, Nielsens statement betrays the fundamental incoherence of the Trump administrations policy on Dreamers. Like its predecessor, the Trump White House (officially) believes that Dreamers should not be prioritized for deportation; unlike the Obama administration, it does not believe that the Executive branch should make it easier for Dreamers to contribute to the legitimate economy while theyre here.

Trump has never actually made a policy argument for this position. When the administration ended Obamas Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program  which had provided Dreamers with formal protection from deportation and renewable work permits  it claimed to do so on legal grounds: Whatever the merits of the policy, it was simply unconstitutional for the Executive branch to implement such a program without congressional approval.

The problem with that argument, as a federal judge recently noticed, is that deferred action has been blessed by both the the Supreme Court and Congress as a means to exercise enforcement discretion and embraced by presidents of both parties for decades. Further, the specific features of DACA, such as work permits, are explicitly allowed under current law. (Notably, in other contexts, the Trump administration has shown little reluctance to assert the Executive branchs immense discretion over immigration policy.)

The Trump administration says it does not want to deport Dreamers. A large body of law  and now, a federal court ruling  says that it has the power to unilaterally give Dreamers formal protection from deportation. And yet, Trump refuses to exercise that authority. Thus, his ostensible position is that Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the U.S.  but should be kept in a perpetual state of anxiety, and prevented from securing legal employment  until Congress agrees to pass a long-list of controversial reforms to the immigration system.

In this light, Trumps DACA policy is not (as Jeff Sessions once suggested) an act of deference to the limits of executive authority. Rather, it is a gross abuse of that discretion: The administration revoked the legal status of 700,000 people, not because it thinks this is defensible as a policy, but solely as a means of coercing Congress into passing legislation that it otherwise would not.
Kim Jong Un. Photo: STR/AFP/Getty Images

Just days after a similar goof in Hawaii, NHK television, a public broadcast network in Japan, issued several alerts on Tuesday morning warning people of an incoming missile attack from North Korea. North Korea appears to have fired a missile, NHK said, according to the Associated Press. The government: Seek shelter inside buildings and basements. The warning was issued on Twitter and NHKs website, as well as through a push notification to anybody who uses the NHK app.

NHK accidentally sends missile alert, similar to that of Hawaii from a couple days ago... uhhhh.... pic.twitter.com/fThV3Ed5en  Shoko Oda (@shoko_oda) January 16, 2018

North Korea had not actually launched a nuke at Japan, and NHK was quick to correct the mistake. Only a few minutes later, users received a second notification informing them of the error and that there was no imminent danger. NHK, CNN reports, has apologized several times for the gaffe. Terrifying and not great, but hey, at least NHK figured things out in a matter of minutes. (Thus letting everyone in Japan go back to their usual levels of fear regarding potential North Korean missile tests and strikes.) Meanwhile, Hawaiis Emergency Management Agency took over half an hour to figure out how to rescind its false alarm.
The Ohio River -- on it, in it, over it, beside it. No politics.
Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani on Tuesday lavished praise on the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, saying, "Didi, under your leadership, West Bengal is becoming the best Bengal." Ambani also unveiled an ambitious plan for his telecom company Reliance Jio in the eastern state.

"Our current Jio network covers 1,000 towns and nearly 39,000 villages in the state. Jio will reach 100 per cent of West Bengal's population by December 2018. Every last village will be covered by 4G technology. We are embarking on an ambitious project of connecting Bengal with optical fibre," Ambani said at the two-day Bengal Global Business Summit.

RIL Chairman also committed investments to the tune of Rs 5,000 crore in the state for non-Jio businesses in the next three years. The investment will be in businesses such as petroleum and retail.

Jio is aiming to connect every education institution and hospital in the state by December 2019. The group will launch the digital service centre in five districts of the state to facilitate digital entrepreneurs. Ambani said the group has prioritised the availability of 4G Jio phone in the state with effective zero cost.

The investment will also promote electronic industry by manufacturing mobile phones and set top boxes, Ambani said.

He said RIL has already pumped in Rs 15,000 crore in the telecom business in the state although it had earlier committed to invest Rs 4,500 crore.

"Didi, we could make this large investment only because you have created a friendly climate and an enabling policy infrastructure," he said, adding that RIL has emerged as one of the largest investors in Bengal.

Most of the investment has been made in creating fourth-generation high-speed mobile and internet network for Reliance Jio, the telecom arm of RIL.

Also, Reliance will work with "multiple partners to explore setting up next generation state-of-the-art electronics manufacturing facilities and make West Bengal the hub for innovation and hi-tech technologies for consumer devices such as mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other devices", he said.

Starting in 2015 through a public Wi-Fi Experience Zone in Park Street, Jio has enmassed over 1.2 crore customers in the state, Ambani said.

He said the digital economy will bring prosperity at more than double the speed of the traditional economy.

While Jio will reach 100 per cent of state population before the end of 2018, it is "embarking on an ambitious project of connecting Bengal with Optic Fibre", he said.

Also, Reliance is setting up Digital Service Centres across India to bring Government to Citizen (G2C) services within easy reach of every citizen, particularly in the rural hinterland.

It will give birth to digital entrepreneurs in villages and small towns, kick-start e-commerce and support agriculture as well as small and medium enterprises.

Ambani said Bengal has said goodbye to the slow growth rate of the past and today is the fourth largest state economy in India, growing at 15.64 per cent, much higher than the national average.

"Investments in infrastructure have been unprecedented. A global think-tank ranked Kolkata second among the Indian metros on overall economic performance, even ahead of Mumbai," he said. "Today, the state is famous for the ease of doing business! A miracle has happened."

Stating that Bengal today means business, he said the state has adopted "a positive mind-set that can make the impossible possible."

The business summit is being attended by a host of prominent industrialists including L N Mittal of Arcelor Mittal, Sajjan Jindal of JSW Steel, Kishor Biyani of Future group, Uday Kotak, the head of Kotak group and Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of RP-Sanjiv Goenka group.

with PTI inputs


Earlier this morning Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) tweeted, "UIDAI introduces yet another landmark technology for authentication - Face Authentication. #AadhaarFaceAuth will help all elderly or others facing issues with fingerprint authentication. Service to be launched by 1 July 2018."

So what is this new face authentication system? It's basically your photograph. A big grouse against the biometric data currently required to get an Aadhaar card is that it inconvenienced the elderly with fading fingerprints and ageing irises as well as leprosy patients. According to the National Leprosy Eradication Programme's annual report for 2016-17, there were 88,166 leprosy cases on record as on April 1, 2017 and India, reportedly, remains home to 57 per cent of the world's leprosy patients. Even if only a fraction of these patients have lost their limbs and eyesight to the debilitating disease, a significant number of Indians were being excluded from the Aadhaar umbrella. It would pose a huge problem for them come March 31, the deadline for mandatory Aadhaar-linkages to bank accounts, PAN cards, mobile SIM cards, insurance policies and sundry government welfare schemes. Hence, facial authentication comes in as a second layer of verification to ensure that those having difficulty with their fingerprints/iris authentication are no longer excluded.

Moreover, since residents are already photographed at the time of Aadhaar enrolment, this new measure does not require any additional effort from existing Aadhaar holders. "Since the photograph is already available in the UIDAI database, there is no need to capture any new reference data for the Central Identities Data Repository," said a circular released today by UIDAI, adding that, "Camera is now pervasively available on laptops and mobiles making the face capture easily feasible for authentication user agencies (AUAs) without needing any additional hardware."

However, the circular specifies that this new measure shall only be allowed in "fusion mode along with one more authentication factor", be it fingerprints, iris scan or OTP (one-time-password).

UIDAI will work with biometric device providers to integrate facial modality into the certified registered devices and may also provide standalone registered device service as required by the ecosystem. UIDAI will also provide face capture software development kits to AUAs. The body hopes to release necessary implementation details by March 1.

This new move by the UIDAI comes just five days after introducing a new two-layer security system comprising Virtual IDs and Limited KYC to protect Aadhaar cardholders. To remind you, VID is a temporary, 16-digit, randomly-generated number that an Aadhaar holder can use for authentication or KYC services along with his/her fingerprint in lieu of the Aadhaar number. On the other hand, under limited KYC, a majority of AUAs will neither get access to full KYC of an individual, nor will they be able to store the Aadhaar number on their systems. Instead, they will get a tokenised number issued by UIDAI to identify their customers.

These measures have already been rejected by opposition party members and some sections of the public as ideas too late in arriving. After all, as of last month, close to 14 crore out of about 30 crore Permanent Account Numbers had already been linked to Aadhaar and 70% of the estimated 100 crore bank accounts had been seeded. This will be the case for insurance policies as well as all government-sponsored welfare schemes and services since the Supreme Court ruling to extend the deadline for mandatory Aadhaar linking came just a fortnight before the government's December 31 deadline. Besides, in the absence of a legal mandate to delete all previously collected Aadhaar data, AUAs can very well choose to retain it on their servers, leaving it open to any number of security breaches in the future.

Will UIDAI's new facial recognition gambit woo detractors? Only time will tell, but if Apple's experience with facial recognition technology is anything to go by, all it takes to fool the system are 3D printed masks or a strong familial resemblance.
Reliance Communication is working on plans to lay down sub-sea cables reaching up to Europe and Asia. Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), a wholly owned subsidiary of RCom, will undertake the project worth $600 million and will complete it by 2020.

Named the Eagle sub-sea cable system, the 68,000-km long network will originate from Mumbai. One end of the network will reach Italy in the West, via Africa, and the other one will go up to Hong Kong in the East. This project is in line with GCX's plans to keep cloud and fibre initiative at the core of their strategies.

The project is scheduled to be completed in the third quarter of 2020 and can earn $1 billion every year, RCom chief executive Bill Barney was quoted in a PTI report. The new cable network will increase company's total capacity by ten times as against the current capacity, he added.

The undersea cable network will be financed by as many as 30 partners, Barney said. The construction of the cable systems will be completely self-financed, with no upfront financing or investment requirements from the Company, RCom said in a stock exchange filing.

The company has already joined hands with Alibaba and five other partners, generating $300 million in commitments for the cable systems. RCom expects to raise $700 million through these pre-sales against the $600 million required for the cable systems.

This cloud and fibre initiative of RCom will capitalise on India's geographic closeness with growing economies in Asia and Europe, and growing demand for bandwidth and related infrastructure from these regions, the company mentioned in the presentation submitted to BSE.

Barney said the company expects a spurt in IT and telecom activity in the country over the next five to ten years, due to which it is betting on the cable business. The cable potentially reaches over 75 per cent of the youth in the globe, which is also very educated, he added.

Riddled with debt and facing a competitive market, RCom has exited the consumer telecom business to focus on the enterprise segment. Anil Ambani recently sold its spectrum to Reliance Jio, which is owned by his elder brother Mukesh Ambani for an estimated Rs 23,000 crore. This will help the company to avoid insolvency petitions, and eventual liquidation.
Trump Damaging Global War on Terror

16 January, 2018

By Zaheerul Hassan

US President Dolanld Trump made a tweet revealing that the United States had foolishly given Pakistan over $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years. In his tweet, Trump accused Pakistan of thinking US leaders to be fools. They give safe havens to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!.



Unfortunately, before tweeting, American leadership headed by fool Trump has forgotten that since 9/11, Pakistan has suffered colossal losses to the lives and economy. During Global War on terror (GWOT), According to Economic Survey of Pakistan 2016-17, The war against terrorism continues to financially bleed Pakistan as the country had to spend $123.13 billion, equivalent to Rs.10.373 trillion, in direct and indirect cost due to incidents of terrorism in last 16 years. In this war against terrorism, scarified over 70,000 peoples including 6000 soldiers, innocent school kids, students and women. Moreover, Pakistan is also looking after over three million Afghan refugees since 1979. But instead of appreciating, Trump started yelling owl foul against Islamabad.



Pakistan being a responsible major actor of GWOT has provided air bases, shortest logistic routes to maintain US led NATO forces, intelligence sharing and hitting renowned Al-Qaidas culprits. In this regards, political and military brass openly supported operations against terrorists. On contrary to it facing CIA, RAW and NDS sponsored militancy in Balochistan and FATA.,



Trump gone so mad and delivered such a nonsense statement which is not only against the diplomatic norms but also speaks his lack of knowledge about the usage of Collation of Support Fund released, in lieu of services provided to Pakistan by predecessor US governments. US has also leveled baseless allegations against Pakistan for failing in guarding religious independence.



Reasons of fruitless Trump endeavor of pushing Pakistan against the wall could be to please local Jews, since Pakistan voiced against US acknowledging of Jerusalem as Israeli capital, making strong India against China, creating insecurity and instability in South Asia, keeping Russia, CARS and China away from Gwadar.



Firstly, Pakistan was one of the country that supported and presented resolution against recent US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017. The US president's move was condemned by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and declared it as unjustified and irresponsible". In response, Donald Trump has threatened to withhold



billions of dollars of US aid from countries which vote in favour of a United Nations resolution by rejecting the US presidents recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.



In this context, Indian origin US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, warned members states those voted against US acknowledgment of Jerusalem as capital. Therefore, Trump black mailing with regard to Collation Support Fund, linking it with actions against terrorists, threatening Pakistan and creating instability in Saudi Arabia as result of Resolution on Jerusalem Capital Issue, is by design and very much part of US agenda against leading Islamic countries. Interesting, US warning aimed largely at UN members in Africa, Asia and Latin America who are regarded as more vulnerable to US pressure. For example, Egypt as like Pakistan is also vulnerable, due to receipt of $1.2bn in US aid last year. Thus, Jewish lobby present in US forcing Trump to keep on



Secondly, Indian factor cannot be ruled out due to the presence of Nikki Halely in Trumps advisors list. Nikki, though American advisor to President Trump but preferred of guarding Indian interests over US. She always advocated the Indian regional supremacy and recommend leading India role to contain china and create unrest in America.



Thirdly, outcome of Indo-US nexus is aiming to keep the cancer of insecurity and instability intact in South Asian region, so that Russia, Afghanistan, China, Central Asian Republics (CARS) and Pakistan should not be able to enjoy the bilateral trade through CPEC fruits. Moreover, appointing India as regional dogwatch and making her strong enough against China and Pakistan is another reason of trump revised policy.



Fourthly, the most important reason of Trumps annoyance with Pakistan is due to emergent of likely new South Asian Block comprising of Afghanistan, Russia, China, Pakistan and CARS. US knows future of this region lies in completion of project CPEC that will definitely change the regional geopolitical dynamic. Therefore, CIA, RAW, Mossad and MI-6 are supporting insurgency in Balochistan with a view to stop or create hindrance in the completion of regional game changer project , CPEC.



Anyhow, complete Pakistani nation alongwith political and military leadership condemned Trump statement and declared it as an organized propaganda and pleasing India against Pakistan. Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif, in a reply to the US president's tweet clearly stated that Trump speaking Moodys language and Pakistan will let the world know the truth and will be responding to Trump's tweet. He added that there is a difference between facts and fiction.



In this regards, the Foreign Office (FO) on same evening summoned United States ambassador David Hale over US President Donald Trumps statement against Pakistan.



Topmost leadership headed by Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, opposing political leadership and Chief of Army staff has summoned a meeting of the National Security Committee. Both the leaders are determined in safeguarding Pakistanis interests. At this occasions, General Qamar Javed Bajwa clear expressed that the countrys interests will



be guarded on all cost. Pakistan Foreign Office should take steps in the refinement of Foreign policy and getting rid of help business.



The writer can be aaproached through zameer36@gmail.com
USAs treacherous agenda against Pakistan 16 January, 2018 By Asif Haroon Raja

Related News Pak Chief of the army staff is a key figure: USA State Department Pakistan lodges protest with US over Pentagon report Related Articles Imran Khan's visit to USA

By By Asif Haroon Raja Trump Damaging Global War on Terror

By By Zaheerul Hassan Related Speakout More on this View All Pak Chief of the army staff is a key figure: USA State Department

Pakistan lodges protest with US over Pentagon report

US helping Pakistan become prosperous, democratic: US envoy

Pakistan lodges protest with US over spying by NSA

US to continue working with Pakistan: Kerry

Nisar, acting US envoy discuss security situation

Relations with US improving: Sartaj Aziz Related News Poll Will President Obama`s policies on Pakistan be any different from President Bush? The US ignores its own human rights violations and also looks the other way to massive human rights abuses committed by Israel, India, Egypt and other dictatorial regimes towing its agenda. Washington, however, has no tolerance for democratic regimes that refuse to make their countries compliant States and opt to pursue independent foreign policy best suited for their national interests. Various excuses are manufactured to bring suchlike defiant States in line. The more often dirty tactics in use are sanctions, orchestrated political turmoil and chaos, coercion, threats, proxy war, psychological operations, propaganda, regime change, and if needed, physical assault and occupation of targeted country.



The Indo-US-Israel nexus is adept in contriving a false narrative to build a case against a country. Going by the dictum of Joseph Goebbels, the trio repeatedly utter lies and half-truths to convert falsehood into truth and convincing the audience to accept black as white. The targeted ruling regime is demonized and discredited under a well-planned media campaign to justify intervention and a regime change.



Since 9/11, the US has used proxies, terrorism, sedition, propaganda war and coercive tactics as tools to destabilize the targeted country. It has meddled in internal affairs of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. All are Islamic countries and their peoples are all Muslims.



After enacting Osama bin Laden led Al-Qaeda drama to validate invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001, Iraq was occupied in May 2003 on fake charges of WMDs. Arab Spring was fomented by CIA-MI-6-Mossad combine in 2011 to destabilize Middle East and weaken stronger Arab nations. ISIS was created to incite sectarianism and help the US in changing the boundaries of Middle East and let Israel fulfil its dream of Greater Israel.



Regimes were changed in Tunisia and Egypt by inflaming street protests. Qaddafi was demonized as a monster to affect a forcible regime change. Civil



war was fomented in Syria to boot out Bashar al-Assad regime but so far it has miraculously survived due to Iranian and Hezbollah support and intervention of Russia. Arab Peninsula Al-Qaeda threat was sensationalized to drone Yemen and stir civil war.



Civil war in South Sudan was further stirred up and President Gen Bashir was declared a war criminal and hounded with a view to make the task of bisecting Sudan easy. Democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood regime under Morsi was ousted from power within one year of its rule and replaced by military regime of Gen Sisi, which up surged extremism and divided the country on religious lines.



As regard Pakistan, this is not the first time that it is on the brink of being abandoned and punished by the US. Pakistan having become a staunch ally of USA in 1955 after joining SEATO and CENTO to contain Communism was thoroughly disappointed when the US stopped all military and economic aid for going to war against India in 1965. This act favored India which was fully supported by USSR. But for the US betrayal, Pakistan could have clinched victory. It impelled President Ayub Khan to tilt towards China and to write a book titled Friends Not Masters in 1967.



Ayubs tilt infuriated USA and it retaliated by fomenting protests and riots in Pakistan through Mujibur Rahman led Awami League in East Pakistan and ZA Bhutto led PPP in West Pakistan, forcing Ayub to resign in March 1969 and handing over power to Gen Yahya Khan. When East Pakistan was being annexed by the Indian military backed by USSR in 1971, the US played no role to prevent the tragedy in spite of Pakistans role in bringing China closer to USA which enabled US troops to exit from Vietnam. The US looked the other way when India carried out weaponized nuclear explosion in 1974, but put Pakistan under sanctions in 1979 on mere suspicion that it had embarked upon a nuclear program.



Pakistan was taken on board by USA in mid-1981 to mount biggest proxy war against the occupying Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan faced turbulent Afghanistan in the northwest and stormy Iran in its southwestern backyard engaged in war with Iraq throughout the 1980s. Internally, it had to cope with KGB-RAW-KHAD-Al-Zulfiqar terrorism. Once Pakistan and the Afghan Mujahideen achieved the miracle of 20th century by pushing out Soviet forces in February 1989 after paying a very heavy price, and paved the way for fragmentation of USSR and for the US to become a sole super power, the US not only ditched them, but made India its strategic partner. President Bush senior stopped all US military and economic aid to Pakistan invoking the Pressler amendment in October 1990 charging Pakistan with crossing the nuclear red-line. In May 1998, President Clinton imposed additional sanctions invoking the Glen amendment punishing Pakistan for the May 1998 nuclear tests.



By the time the decade of 1990s had ended, Pakistan  the most allied ally of the US during the Cold War  had become the most sanctioned country in the world after Libya. And the Kargil misadventure had carried its own penalties. And in October 1999, the US imposed sanctions related to Musharrafs military takeover.



At about the same time even the multilateral aid agencies led by the World Bank had effectively turned off for Pakistan their concessional assistance tap on the plea that the newly independent Eastern European countries as well as the Central Asian countries needed the help of these aid agencies more than countries like Pakistan. Japan perhaps was the only country out of all the members of the Paris Club that had continued to donate about $500 million annually to Pakistan during the period.



Still, Pakistan negotiated the 1990s not only with composure but had waged during this period two low-intensity 10-year-long wars  one on the side of the Afghan Taliban against the Northern Alliance led by Ahmed Shah



Masood and assisted by India and Iran, and the other on the side, the Kashmiri freedom fighters pitched against over 700,000 occupying Indian troops in Indian-Occupied Kashmir. At the behest of India, Pakistan was put on watch list of terror abetting States by USA and was accused of manufacturing an Islamic bomb likely to fall in hands of radical Arab countries. Pakistan had to bear the load of 3.5 million Afghan refugees, and cope with looming Indo-Israeli threat to Kahuta, and heightened sectarianism stoked by Iran and Saudi Arabia.



Governance became a real challenge for the elected governments of PPP and PML-N in the face of two wars and Pakistans economy being denied the usual quantum of international assistance and when the domestic tax-to-GDP ratio had dipped to an abysmally low point? In those critical times, Saudi Arabia came to the rescue of Pakistan which started giving oil on deferred payment. After nuclear blasts, oil was provided gratis. Foreign remittances from most of the Muslim countries, especially from the Middle East all through the 1980s and 1990s saved Pakistan from defaulting.



On the face of it, the 1990s in retrospect appear to be a lost decade in economic terms. The country had experienced a decade-long shrinking of economic growth and the three unfinished IMF programs that it had entered and exited in quick succession during this period further curtailed the growth in the name of the Fund imposed austerity.



Meanwhile, the debt-to-GDP ratio had escalated to a depressing 103%. Because of the military takeover of October 1999, even the helping hand of the IMF was not available to Pakistan, as under their respective laws both the UK and US representatives sitting on the Fund board were obliged to vote against the application of a country under military rule.



The second Afghan war that immediately followed the 9/11 brought back Pakistan in the good books of the US and it was quickly made a non-NATO



ally. This was, however, a deception since Pakistan was in reality a target and was to be destabilized, denuclearized and Balkanized covertly.



After brewing up war on terror in FATA, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan, Pakistan was subjected to cooked-up allegations that it was in cahoots with the militants and that its nukes were unsafe. The hidden objective of the US was exposed in 2006 after the publication of an article in US Defence Journal titled Blood Borders written by Lt Col Ralph Peters. The map showed changed boundaries of Middle East, and Baluchistan a separate state.



The Do More mantra introduced in 2005/06 was meant to brew political stabilization, bleed economy and foment insecurity. Indo-US-Israel-Western media campaign demonized Pakistan that its Army and ISI were supporting terrorism. Idea was to discredit the Army, brand Pakistan a terror abetting State and Pak Army/ISI rogue outfits. A narrative was built that Pakistan was collapsing, nuclear arsenal was unsafe and its nukes might fall into wrong hands (Islamic extremists). Objective was to give an excuse to USA to declare Pakistan a failed State and to occupy Islamabad and the provinces of Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan and seize nuclear arsenal.



This notion was penned in a 2007 article published in London Guardian, titled, Bush handed blueprint to seize Pakistans nuclear arsenal, behind which was Fredrick Kagan, member of American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The AEIs board of trustees include war criminal Dick Cheney, warmongers Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, Richard Perle, John Yoo, and Paul Wolfowitz.



Fredrick Kagan wrote another Pakistan focused article in 2009 in New York Times, co-authored with Brookings Institutions Michael OHanlon, titled, Pakistans Collapse, Our Problem. It described the complete collapse of the Pakistani government, overrun by extremists. It went on to describe Pro-American moderates within the Pakistan Army in need of US forces to help them secure Islamabad and their nuclear arsenal. Several options were given for storing the nuclear weapons safely. Various contingency plans of swooping away the nukes by the US Special Forces were also publicized. Selig Harrison of the Soros funded Center for International Policy called for carving off Pakistans Baluchistan province not as part of a strategy to win the War on Terror, but as a means to thwart growing relations between Islamabad and Beijing. In Free Baluchistan, he explicitly called to aid the 6 million Baluch insurgents fighting for independence from Pakistan in the face of growing ISI repression. Giving merits of his idea he stated, Pakistan has given China a base at Gwadar in the heart of Baluch territory. So an independent Baluchistan would serve U.S. strategic interests in addition to the immediate goal of countering Islamist forces. The US Congressmen Ted Poe and Dana R0hbachar have consistently backed the Baloch separatist agenda. In another article titled, The Chinese Cozy Up to the Pakistanis, Harrison stated, To counter what China is doing in Pakistan, the US should play hardball by supporting the movement for an independent Baluchistan and working with Baluch insurgents to oust the Chinese from their budding naval base at Gwadar. Beijing wants its inroads into Gilgit and Baltistan to be the first step on its way to an Arabian Sea outlet at Gwadar.



In line with Harrisons suggestion, RAW placed serving Indian Navy officer Commander Kulbushan Yadhav at Chahbahar under fake name of Mubarak Hussain Patel as early as 2003. Later on, he was given $400 million by RAW to destabilize Baluchistan with the help of Baloch rebel groups, and Karachi through MQM, scare away the Chinese, gain knowledge of Makran-Karachi seacoast for amphibious landing, disrupt work in Gwadar and scuttle CPEC. Shamsi airbase was used by CIA and Blackwater to provide funds and arms to the rebels in interior Baluchistan, and for drones. NATO containers were also used for supplying arms.



Christina Fair lamented that the US spent pumped in much more money in Baluchistan than in Iran and yet has failed to make it independent.



Af-Pak doctrine announced by Obama regime in March 2009 followed by passage of Kerry Lugar Bill (KLB) in end 2009 authorizing $7.5 billion economic/military assistance to Pakistan spread over 5 years were Pakistan specific with a dangerous agenda of stepping into FATA and Baluchistan under the garb of hot pursuit operations, or raiding a target based on



actionable intelligence, harnessing nuclear arsenal of Pakistan, clipping the wings of armed forces and paving the way for balkanization.



That would have given the US an ideal geopolitical scenario that would permanently Balkanize the country along Pashtun, Baluchi, and other ethnic minority lines, and result in a permanent Western presence inside the country. In their view, seizure of FATA would benefit American efforts in Afghanistan by depriving terrorists of the sanctuaries they have long enjoyed in Pakistans tribal and frontier regions.



The then Army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani rejected the idea of making Durand Line redundant and insisted on fighting independently on either side of the border based on strategy of anvil and hammer.



Drone campaign in FATA was stepped up to stir up the Pashtun minority against the government and the Army and to breakup peace deals. $1.5 billion was allocated for Pakistani media to step up 5th generation war in Pakistan. Rabid haters of Pak Army like Hussain Haqqani and Tariq Fateh; and anti-Pakistan runaways like Altaf Hussain and his cronies, Brahamdagh Bugti, Suleman Dawood, Harbyar Marri etc were made full use of to malign Pakistan and its premier institutions. Blackwater and CIA agents were inducted in 2008-10 in big numbers to spread flames of terrorism into urban areas. In a 2009 article by Seymour Hersh titled, Defending the Arsenal, high intensity suspicion and distrust of Pakistan against America was underscored. This distrust was based on Americas obsession with defending Pakistans nuclear arsenal. The US had repeatedly sought joint Pak-US control of all nuclear sites. It was clear that the US under the pretense of helping Pakistan if ever it fell into chaos, was all along trying to ascertain the location of Pakistans nuclear weapons as well as the trigger assembles kept separate as a security measure.



Arrest of Raymond Davis in January 2011, CIA sponsored polio vaccine campaigning by Dr Shakil Afridi which facilitated stealth attack in Abbottabad in May 2011 to get Osama bin Laden, and the Memogate scandal in October 2011 spilled the beans. Later on, arrests of Kulbushan on March 3, 2016, and TTP key leaders Latif Mehsud and Ehsanullah Ehsan removed all doubts of deep rooted involvement of RAW and NDS in Pakistan.



Americas continued presence in Afghanistan as well as its increasingly aggressive creep over the Afghan-Pakistani border has been justified under the ambiguous and omnipresent threat of terrorism. In reality, the true goal is to contain the rise of China and other emerging economies using the pretense of terrorism. Chinas One-Belt-One-Road (OBOR) project and particularly fast developing CPEC has unnerved USA and India and has become one of the compelling reason for the US to extend its stay in Afghanistan. The US is also making concerted efforts to make India the key player in Afghanistan.



Pakistan-China ever growing strategic relationship in the wake of $62 billion worth CPEC, and Chinas commitment to build Gwadar Seaport, with another next door port at Jeewani possibly as a Naval Port, dams, roads, nuclear plants, and military technology, are giving nightmares to US and India. The only cards America seems to have left in its hand to counter this growing relationship are threats of destabilization, the subsequent stripping of Pakistans nuclear arsenal, and Pakistans Balkanization into smaller, feeble states. This option is scandalous, and reveals the absolute depths of depravity from which the imperialist powers suffer from.



It is quite clear that the War on Terror is but a pretense to pursue a policy of regional hegemony with the expressed goal of containing China. This in turn, is part of a greater strategy covered in the 2006 Strategic Studies Institute report String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of Chinas Rising Power across the Asian Littoral.



The corporate-financier oligarchs obsessed with their money game are quite willing to destabilize Pakistan, and risk war with nuclear overtones, and a possible confrontation with China and Russia. These oligarchs, hawks within Trumps administration, American-Jewish lobby, Israel, India and the puppet regime in Kabul are all egging on Donald Trump to strike Pakistan and he seem to be dancing to their tunes. Since August 22, 2017, he and senior US leaders have adopted a highly belligerent posture against Pakistan. Series of threatening statements have been issued and Pakistan put on notice.



Pakistans response that it has done enough and will not do any more, and that it is now the turn of USA and Afghanistan to do more is rational and logical. It has rightly rejected the US paltry aid, stressing it needs respect and acknowledgement of its sacrifices, and adding that it can keep fighting terrorism at its own without American assistance. Pakistan has discontinued military cooperation and intelligence sharing with USA, and has other effective options to exercise in case the US opts for a unilateral punitive action. Pakistans principled stance seem to have mellowed down the jingoism of hawks in USA and they have started giving reconciliatory feelers.



China and Russia are asserting themselves as security and economic alternatives to the US unilateralism since former two are ascending powers and USA is a descending power. Europe is still grappling with economic challenges. The Muslim world hate interventionism of USA and Israel, while majority of Americans consider Trump to be insane. The US is stuck in Ukraine and Syria, but Afghanistan is fast turning into a graveyard for USA. With its prestige badly soiled, the US is scapegoating Pakistan to hide its blunders. With no exit strategy, it is foolishly hoping that Pakistan will fight its war and convert its defeat into victory.



Asia-Pacific strategy coined by Obama has been abandoned by Trump and so is Trans-Pacific-Partnership, while the new Indo-Pacific policy still stands on slippery ground. Whereas the reputation of NATO stands tarnished, unity regime in Kabul and ANSF have become liabilities for USA. Hope of making India policeman of the region is getting dimmed. Middle East will remain in turmoil. North Korea, Iran and now Pakistan are not getting intimidated by the US bullying tactics and are determined to face the intimidator.



2018 will be a crucial year for USA, China and Russia rearing to undercut each other, while Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran will remain vigilant to avoid getting trampled under the feet of prancing elephants.



The writer is a retired Brig, war veteran, defence analyst, columnist, author of five books, Vice Chairman Thinkers Forum Pakistan, Director Measac Research Centre, Chief Editor Better Morrow magazine. asifharoonraja@gmail.com
*T*his is yet another example of the corruption of the mainstream media. If you like this blog's content please subscribe to our mailing at upper right c...
From Greg Swank, 12-4-2 You are about to read a list of 45 goals that found their way down the halls of our great Capitol back in 1963. As...
The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher,
Even as excited Ghanaians wonder which cases would make the initial list of the man dubbed Citizen Vigilante, cases like the Woyome judgment debacle could clinch the number one position.



It is expected that the Special Prosecutor in-waiting, Martin Amidu  former Attorney General and Minister of Justice  would dissect this classic legal case in the annals of judicial history with a view to revisiting same where possible, especially the recovery of the said amount of money fraudulently paid to him (Woyome).



Other high-profile cases that would attract attention, apart from appointees who corruptly enriched themselves, will involve some customs officers and importers whose actions led to the state losing over GH1.2 billion.



Some of the fraudulent importers allegedly bribed their ways through using their connections at the seat of government. About 200 customs officers are on interdiction awaiting prosecution.



The Woyome case is a subject dear to the hearts of most Ghanaians in a cross-party manner, and many cannot wait to see how it pans out.



There is a general conviction among Ghanaians that with the appointment of a Special Prosecutor, especially in the mould of Martin Amidu, the people who approved the Woyome payment would also face the music.



It is interesting though that soon after President Akufo-Addo had named Mr Martin Amidu as his choice for Special Prosecutor, businessman Alfred Agbesi Woyome  who denied fainting upon hearing about the development  said he understands and appreciates the rule of law, adding that he is not bothered about Martin Alamisi Amidu becoming Special Prosecutor.



Sabotage



In one of his celebrated reactions on the Woyome case, Mr Martin Amidu accused former President John Mahama of undermining efforts by President Akufo-Addo to fight corruption in the country.

He claimed that moles planted in high positions by the Mahama administration, within the ministries ahead of the 2016 elections, are sabotaging efforts by the Akufo-Addo administration to fight corruption, especially regarding the GH51.2 million judgment debt paid to businessman, Alfred Agbesi Woyome, by the Mills/Mahama administration.



When some aspects of the Woyome case commence in court, some personalities like one-time Attorney General and Justice Minister, Betty Mould-Iddrisu, will be mentioned for some queries.



Cocoa Roads



The COCOBOD saga is another case Martin Amidu would certainly deal with, given the quantum of monies dissipated on phantom road and chemical projects under the leadership of Dr. Stephen Opuni.



When the files are laid bare by the Special Prosecutor, Ghanaians will certainly be glued to the media as proceedings progress.



The COCOBOD, it was reported, spent over $450 million on non-existent cocoa roads in the country.



The revelation caused public uproar, especially among persons with links to the cocoa producing areas of the country which boast of some of the worst roads and the economy in general.



It was alleged that former state officials under former President John Mahama unfurled the so-called cocoa roads project to siphon state funds for the private purses of such appointees.

Dr Stephen Opuni has already made dates with the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) and the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service over the multiple fraudulent deals in the cocoa sector.



Agric Minister, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, had revealed the deals which went on in the cocoa sector, giving a good picture about the scandals in the sector. I mean we stopped the cocoa road construction which was full of corruptionpeople were given contracts for 32km (of road), they did 2km and they came in to be paid (for) 32km; they are paid and people share those monies, he told an Accra FM radio station in the heat of the revelation.

BOST



The Special Prosecutor would look into the smelly transfer of over GH40 million to the presidency under former President John Mahama by the former Managing Director of the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation (BOST) Company Limited, Kingsley Awuah-Darko, leaving BOST to bleed.



Under the previous Mahama administration, in a very bizarre manner, the BOST boss who is now domiciled in the United States, advanced huge sums of money to the presidency.

The detail was contained in a hint dropped during a New Patriotic Party (NPP) press conference about massive rotten deals under Kwame Awuah Darko as MD of BOST with the office of the then President John Mahama and his Chief of Staff, Julius Debrah, purportedly siphoning huge amounts of money  between GH2.5 million and GH3.5 million  at the end of every two weeks from 2015 under the guise of security transfers, amounting to about GH40.5 million.



Smelly SSNIT Software Scandal



The full plate of the incoming Special Prosecutor would include the $66 million on an Information Technology infrastructure which was malfunctioning.



The Operational Business Suite (OBS)



Project, which was meant to facilitate service delivery, turned out to be a malfunctioning facility after the payment of the whopping amount.



Bus Branding



A case which could see former Transport Minister Dzifa Aku Attivor in the dock is the bus branding  a simple contract of putting stickers on 116 buses costing ridiculously GH3.6 million.



The then transport minister is reported to have predicted that she would go to jail when the NPP comes to power, having been scared by the bus branding deal and other scandalous contracts at the Kumasi and the Tamale airports.



GYEEDA



The youth project dubbed GYEEDA, as one of the sore points of corruption in the country, will not escape the scrutiny of the Special Prosecutor with massive state cash siphoned through the agency.

Source: Daily Guide









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Featured Video
Perched atop a network of stairs, photographer Jack Delano captured this snow-dusted Hazelwood scene in 1940 for the Farm Security Administration (FSA).



A Russian native who settled in the Philadelphia area around age 10, Delano studied art and music at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known primarily for his dramatic images, Delano, who relocated to Puerto Rico after World War II, also became an accomplished musical composer.

At a time when the U.S. was still in post-Depression recovery, this image became one of many Delano contributed as a government- retained photojournalist tasked with documenting rural and urban conditions across the U.S. between 1935-44. The FSA project chronicled the need for, as well as the effects of, President Roosevelts New Deal federal programs. Widely published in periodicals of the day, this historic visual collection of nearly 177,000 images now resides in the Library of Congress.
My wife and I were up around Ticonderoga on Sunday, and we decided to take Route 9N south to see what Lake George was looking like in that area.

There was lots of open water offshore of Hague, but it was iced over from Sabbath Day Point south to the Narrows, and there looked to be a lot of ice fishermen out there. Northwest Bay was also well frozen, but I didn't see anyone out there fishing.

There is plenty of ice around Huletts Landing, but off Pilot Knob the guys on iceshanty.com said it remained open as of Monday. The ice is solid on the southern bays and off Million Dollar Beach, and the perch fishing has been pretty good, as two winters of little ice has allowed perch numbers to grow.

The weather forecast calls for warmer temperatures by the weekend, so it was unclear when the Hague waters or whether the deep middle section will freeze. Usually it's late January if it is going to go, and we are rapidly approaching that date.

-- Don Lehman
Two men have pleaded guilty to felony charges for allegedly selling crack cocaine in Moriah last summer.

Lank R. "Mississippi" Hall, 36, of Port Henry, pleaded guilty to a felony count of criminal sale of a controlled substance for a crack sale in Moriah last June. He likely faces 8 years in state prison when sentenced Feb. 26 by Essex County Judge Richard Meyer.

Henry "Ice Boy" Leonard, 41, pleaded guilty to two felony charges of criminal sale of a controlled substance and three felony counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance for sales of crack in Moriah last July.

He faces 12 years in state prison when sentenced Feb. 26.

The duo were arrested last August after an investigation by State Police and the Essex County Sheriff's Office that led to a raid at Hall's home in Port Henry.

Both men are being held in Essex County Jail, pending sentencing.
LAKE GEORGE  The man suspected of robbing a bank in Lake George remained in Warren County Jail without bail on Tuesday on an unrelated charge as authorities decided to have a grand jury review what charges should be filed for the holdup.

Nelson L. Gouge Sr. was being held without bail for charges related to a brutal assault of a woman in Glens Falls several weeks ago. Police had been seeking him after the incident, but he remained on the lam for about a month, until a task force investigating the bank robbery located him early Saturday at the Clearview Motel in South Glens Falls.

Sheriffs Lt. Steve Stockdale said investigators have recovered significant evidence that links Gouge to the robbery, in addition to a bank surveillance camera photo that shows enough of his face for police to quickly suspect him, based on their prior dealings with him.

Were confident he is the person responsible, Stockdale said Monday.

A Warren County grand jury will decide in the coming days what charges to file for the holdup, during which a man handed a teller at the Trustco Bank branch on Route 9L a note indicating he had a gun and demanding money.

The bank surveillance photo that led many who knew Gouge to implicate him prompted police to focus on him Friday afternoon. Police recovered some marked cash that was believed to be part of the several thousand dollars stolen, authorities said.

Investigators believe he convinced a friend from Lake Luzerne to loan him a silver Chevrolet Blazer sport utility vehicle. Police believe he drove the Blazer to and from the bank and that an image of the vehicle was captured on a surveillance camera in the area.

Gouge, 45, later went to another friends home on Second Street in Glens Falls and summoned a cab to take him to the motel in South Glens Falls, police said.

Police initially indicated on Saturday he would be charged with robbery but after consultation with the Warren County District Attorneys Office, it was decided to hold off on robbery charges because Gouge was already headed to jail without bail for the earlier assault.

Glens Falls Police had been searching for Gouge since he allegedly injured a woman last month in her Glens Falls home.

An arrest warrant had been issued for him for felony counts of aggravated criminal contempt, aggravated family offense and misdemeanor assault, Glens Falls Police Detective Lt. Peter Casertino said.

He was accused of kicking and punching a woman who has an order of protection against him, causing her to lock herself in a bathroom of her Dix Avenue home. When she awoke hours later, she was able to flee barefoot to the nearby Empire Ambulance building on Dix Avenue for help and was treated for her injuries.

Gouge was gone when police arrived, and remained unaccounted for until police tracked his actions Friday after the bank robbery.

He was among the missing for a month, Casertino said.

Glens Falls Police, South Glens Falls Police and State Police assisted the Sheriffs Office with the bank robbery investigation.

Police believe Gouge is a native of Chicago and is a member of the Latin Kings street gang who came to the region seven or eight years ago to stay with a relative.

He has incurred at least two felony convictions in Warren County in the years since, and was arrested last March for an incident in which he allegedly stole a car and debit card from a woman in Glens Falls.

He was charged with fourth-degree grand larceny, a felony, and misdemeanor counts of petit larceny, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and non-criminal harassment in that case, according to Glens Falls Police records. Charges in that case are still pending.

Gouge was on parole at the time of the arrest for a 2013 aggravated criminal contempt conviction that also involved theft of a vehicle from a woman, and has a 2009 felony criminal contempt conviction as well, state corrections records show. He was sentenced to 2 to 4 years in prison for the 2013 case, and his parole ended last June.
QUEENSBURY  A small group of Republicans are organizing to change the Warren County Republican Committee.

The leadership of the local Republican Party turned it over to a bunch of dissidents who have all but destroyed it, said former supervisor-at-large and budget officer Nick Caimano, who is a member of the reform group.

The new group wants a better ethics policy and better leadership to do things for the right reasons, rather than out of revenge or anger. Most of all, group members want to get rid of committee member Doug Irish, who they feel is to blame for a great deal of the ethical problems that hit the party last year.

There are six leaders of the group, four of whom are current committee members. They each represent a handful of other committee members who are also unhappy, but they do not have a clear idea yet of how many committee members share their views.

A lot hinges on a new executive committee, to be made up of Republican town supervisors and town chairs. Mike Grasso, chairman of the county committee, has promised to call a meeting for that committee, but has not done so yet.

If the executive committee never materializes, or if its members do not seem intent on reform, members of the reform group might walk out.

Ive been a Republican all my life. But well see, said Warrensburg Supervisor Kevin Geraghty, who described himself as associated with but not really a member of the reform group.

I need to gauge whether the party is going to go in the direction I want it to go, he said. If not, Ill probably leave the party.

Hes not alone.

I feel the same way. Im trying not to walk away, said group member and Queensbury Clerk Caroline Barber. She has been a committee member for nearly 30 years.

The reform groups members feel time is of the essence. The partys image needs to be rehabilitated as soon as possible, they said in a meeting with The Post-Star.

They are particularly bothered by Irish. They want the committee to kick him out on grounds that he is hurting the party.

Doug Irish acted like an idiot and Mike Grasso allowed him to do so. Unfortunately, we all looked terrible, Barber said.

Now, people seem reluctant to join the county Republican committee, said group member and former Queensbury politician Ron Montesi.

We need to start thinking about young people again and showing them we have some integrity, Montesi said. And show them we really are working toward the good of the people.

They fear the party is going in the opposite direction so far, with people like Irish reappointed in the committees recent organizational meeting.

Geraghty wants the executive committee to revise its bylaws, looking in particular at the ethics policy. He also wants the committee to talk about losses suffered in the last election and discuss how campaigns will be handled in the future.

The way we handle ourselves, he specified, adding, If somebodys not going to run, yeah, I think we need to come clean about it.

Republicans defended Queensbury Councilman Doug Irish when he moved to North Carolina but would not resign his seat on the Town Board. They also did not criticize anyone involved in the plan to hide the fact that Queensbury Ward 1 candidate Hal Bain was an unwilling candidate.

In a very difficult election year, we found ourselves in a situation. It was awful, Caimano said.

He and others said the last two chairmen of the party would have clamped down on Irish. But the current leaders seemed to support his every move.

When Montesi said at a Queensbury Town Board meeting that Irish should resign, top Republicans jumped all over me, he said.

And they made their support for Irish public.

That alone hurt our party a lot. People recognized that wasnt the right thing to do, Montesi said.

Leadership should have kicked Irish out of the committee, rather than reappointing him, the group said.

(Former chairman) Lloyd Dembowski would never have allowed this. (Former chairman Mike) OConnor wouldnt have, Barber said.

Montesi also said the committee should rethink its reasons for running a candidate, calling Hal Bain a pawn in the effort to unseat Republican Tony Metivier.

Montesi said he likes Bain and felt he could have been a good councilman. But the party didnt pick Bain for that reason, he said.

I didnt have a problem with it, except I knew the reason they were doing it was to get even, Montesi said. The Republican Party made a mistake with that.

The reform groups members are so upset they are even raising questions about whether Grasso is legally the chairman of the Warren County Republican Committee.

He was supposed to call an organizational meeting by Oct. 12. The meeting was more than two months late. By then, his chairmanship had lapsed and he did not have the authority to call the meeting or make any appointments, they said.

I dont think that meeting was legal, Barber said. I question his authority to even conduct the meeting.

And because that meeting was called on Dec. 21, the Thursday night before a holiday weekend, attendance was low.

There were numerous committee people that had been there for years that didnt go because of the timing, Barber said.

She was sick and decided to skip the meeting, thinking Grasso wouldnt get a quorum.

It was at that meeting that Irish, who was reappointed, voted for Grasso to remain chairman.

That disappointed the Republicans, who then formed a reform group. Their motivation, to some extent, revolves around Irish.

We are people who are sick to death of seeing the nastiness of the past year because of the lack of leadership to say to Doug Irish: You are not allowed to be part of this committee, Caimano said.

Grasso did not return several calls seeking comment on the group.
QUEENSBURY  SUNY Adirondack will offer a new agricultural business degree beginning this fall.

The community college developed the program in response to a growing demand in Warren, Washington and Saratoga counties. More than 1,500 farms are located in the region, which earn up to $180 million in annual sales, according to a news release.

Agricultural sector jobs have increased by nearly 20 percent during the last five years.

The degree, a collaboration between the business and science divisions, will prepare students for work in farm and food systems, with a focus on the economies of small farms, niche growers and specialty producers. Students will have opportunities to visit working farms and complete internships.

The two-year associate of applied science degree will seamlessly transfer to SUNY Cobleskill for students looking to complete a bachelors degree, according to a news release.

The college developed the degree program with an industry-based agricultural advisory board, which included 10 regional farmers and representatives from 20 agricultural industry organizations.
FORT EDWARD  Washington Countys sales tax revenue inched along all year, but never made it to the amount forecast in the 2017 budget.

The final figures were sent by the state Tuesday and showed that Washington County received $19.4 million in sales tax revenue for the year. Unfortunately, that was $47,500 less than the county budgeted that it would receive.

Im disappointed. Its still an increase over last year, so Im not devastated, said Treasurer Al Nolette. But I wouldve loved to hit budget.

In 2016, the county received $19.2 million.

Revenue was particularly high in December last year, which could mean that many Washington County residents went online to shop. Sales tax is sent to the county where the item is delivered, not the county where the store is based.

I think December was a boost for Washington County because we do well when people shop online, Nolette said.

Auto sales were also high last year, Nolette said.

He gets a list that describes, in general terms, how much sales tax comes from different types of purchases. But individual store names are not released, so its something of a guessing game.

In the past, sales tax revenue increased every year. Now that growth seems to have slowed significantly. Nolette is hoping the figure will go up, but said it would depend on the economy. What would be particularly helpful would be another big store in the county, he said.

Id like to have continued growth, but to grow you need to have something new. Whether thats a new online store or a new brick-and-mortar, he said.

Hes also worried about making budget in 2018.

Gas prices went up in 2017. We shouldve stood a better chance to make budget. If gas prices go down... he said.

The county budgeted for 2018 the same amount of sales tax revenue as last year: $19,450,000.

When the county was receiving far more sales tax revenue than budgeted, the money was used to replenish savings every year. When revenue falls under budget, the county usually has to pull from savings to make up the loss.

However, there is good news on the countys savings. The county planned to spend $2.7 million in savings in 2017. But after department heads spent carefully all year, they ended up needing only about $600,000, Nolette estimated.

Former budget officer and Hebron Supervisor Brian Campbell praised the department heads for their work.

This is a tribute to your department heads. They dont spend it all. Theres money left. That money left is $2 million this year. Thats huge! he said.
Finally, one of Trumps deplorables came out with a letter praising his accomplishments. I am referring to Mr. John Sharkeys letter printed Jan. 11. It was a letter that was quite nauseating to read, since most of it wasnt true. Mr. Sharkey, yes, the economy is doing well, but Trump had nothing to do with it and he is riding high on what Obama has done for the country. Judging from your letter, I am assuming you are a Fox News viewer and really never get the true story about your president. Mr. Sharkey, your president is a serial liar and there is so much evidence out there to prove that which you will never factcheck. He is up to approximately 2,000 lies, misinformation and distortions since his inauguration, but Im guessing that doesnt bother you. Usually a person who believes someone who lies is labeled a sap. Someone has got to come up with a word to describe someone who believes a serial liar. Your president is also guilty of sexual assault, and this comes from his own mouth. Im guessing unless he didnt assault anyone you know, that is fine with you also.
As a longtime library user, I am declaring support for New York state libraries. Everyone is welcome to a library, regardless of age, race, gender or religion. Libraries offer free and equal access to educational opportunities and are the primary source of internet access for many of our neighbors. Numerous cultural programs are also offered. For example, last summer the Caldwell Lake George Library, in partnership with St. James Episcopal Church, held free English classes for the international student workers that came to the Lake George region.
Welcome Guest! You Are Here:
Kevin and Karen Urick are touring the Quad-Cities one meal at a time for the column Dinner for Two. The Geneseo couple love everything about food. They grow food, travel the world for food, enjoy eating all styles of food, and look forward to sharing their passion with readers! The column appears periodically in the Life section. If you know of a place you want them to review, email them at quadcitiesrestaurants@gmail.com.

-- Cafe dMarie, 614 W. 5th St., Davenport. 563-323-3293, cafedmarie.com.

Good food feeds all six senses. Cafe dMarie touches on each one. Sweet and savory smells greet you as walk in the door. Light background music and conversations of patrons mingle to create welcoming sounds.

Picking up the well-worn menus and sinking into the stuffed chairs, we felt as if we were relaxing at home. Seeing pastries on the counter and in cases, soup in the kettles, and crispy paninis on tables forewarned us of good things to come.

Co-owner DeAnna Walter came to Davenport from Omaha, Neb., to attend Palmer College of Chiropractic. While touring the college, she became entranced with the surrounding area in Davenports historic Gold Coast neighborhood. She developed a vision of a chiropractic office in one of the historic homes, and the vision turned to reality upon graduation.

Her business partner and fiance, Rick Kimmel, is a carpenter by trade, and together they turned an 1864 red brick Greek Revival-style home on the south end of the Gold Coast neighborhood into a clinic and home nine years ago.

Walter opened her chiropractic office, and she soon began to serve coffee and tea to her clients in the waiting room. What goes better with coffee and tea than scones? Waiting for an appointment became a joy for many of her clients, and her customers began asking for more of her delicious teas, coffees and pastries.

Presented with a fork in the road, she choose the edible route. Actually, her customers chose the route for her, and she followed their lead. She credits lots of prayer and customers paying it forward for making her restaurant what it has become. She had the goal of helping people feel better, and now she is doing so from the inside out.

Seeking a warm lunch on a cold winter day, we settled in and began with tea and coffee. Walter has many whole-leaf teas to choose from, in categories of white, rooibos, herbal, oolong, black, green, and pu-erh -- a rare, rich-tasting tea treasured as a healthy energizing tonic. We chose the white tea infused with juicy peach, tangerine and aromatic blossoms. The loose tea is steeped when ordered, and it had a full, robust taste.

We are latte fans, and we decided on the Honey Bee with steamed milk infused with honey and vanilla. It was delicious, and we shared it down to the last sip. Other choices are apple ciders, fruit smoothies or frappuccinos.

Everything is fresh in the food categories. Walter does not have a distributor that supplies staples; instead, she visits local grocery stores weekly and chooses what she thinks is best. Her soups are all homemade and change on a daily basis.

Kimmel is truly a jack of all trades. In addition to being a carpenter, he was our waiter, and he is the master soup maker each morning. The cream of portobello is a customer favorite and regularly appears on the menu.

All salads are made with tomato, red onion, cucumbers, carrots, celery, sweet bell pepper, croutons, Dubliner cheese and Walter's signature blueberry feta vinaigrette dressing. A farmers market in one bowl! The dressing is so good you have the option of buying a 12-ounce container to take home.

The best way to sample more of the cafe's offerings is to order a combo. You can order a panini, quiche and salad as a combination.

The delicious soups of the day when we were there were cream of asparagus and cream of broccoli. They were not too thick, not too thin, but just right. The taste of the vegetables shone through.

Wanting to add something healthy for the new year, we next tried the side salad, which was chock-full of veggies.

Opting for leftovers, we continued with the most popular quiche: cherry, goat cheese and spinach ($7.99). It was not a combination we would have thought of, but Walter really knows what she is doing. The bacon, tomato, Dubliner cheese and spinach quiche, with the the same custard base and flaky crust, was the savory to match the sweet.

Deciding on one of the 16 paninis was a tough job. We narrowed it down to three of them, and Walter graciously offered to make a half portion of each one. For $8.50, a panini order includes a soup or side salad choice.

The No. 8 consisted of turkey, raspberry cream cheese and Muenster cheese on a three-cheese bread. The No. 11 with muffaleta hot pepper spread, ham, salami and smoked Gouda had the medium heat we craved. Fans of Reubens, we had to try the No. 5 Reuben. We were sold when we bit into the tender corned beef with Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut, and baby Swiss on three-cheese bread. All of the paninis were crisp on the outside and warm on the inside.

We are embarrassed to admit that we had to order a piece of moist lemon cake to have at home by the fire after a customer next to us insisted we should.

Cafe dMarie strives to offer vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free choices. Walter has been told that she has the largest selection of gluten-free pastries in the Quad-Cities. Dont fret if she runs out of something on the day you are there. It gives you a reason to return.

The cafe is open from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. It is a wonderful place to sit and relax and let the world pass you by for a while.

Many of the customers are repeat visitors. Browse through the book of comments left by customers, and you'll find visitors from around the world have left glowing compliments.

He said: I was surprised that this is a manly place. The panini with muffaleta pepper spread, ham, salami and smoked Gouda had enough zing for any guy. The cherry, goat cheese and spinach quiche was worth driving for.

She said: I love the atmosphere here. It has a relaxing feel that is hard to find elsewhere. The use of fruits adds fun to the food. The cherries in the quiche, blueberries in the salad dressing, and raspberry cream cheese were wonderful.
The Rev. Dr. Melvin Grimes has been selected by the Churches United of the Quad City Area Board of Directors to serve as interim executive director. Dr. Grimes will continue the tradition of Christian faith-based leadership until a new executive director is chosen to replace Anne Wachal, who stepped down in December.

Dr. Grimes has been active in the ministries of Churches United for much of his adult life. The past president of Churches Uniteds board of directors currently serves on the board executive committee as finance director for the 57-year-old organization.

As the interim, my task is to meet with local member congregations to reintroduce them to the opportunities for service through Churches United., Dr. Grimes said. Also, I am looking to re-establish our Social Justice Committee, our Jail Ministry and Ecumenical Worship. I hope to work with the pastors in Moline to assemble the Moline Ministerial Association. As I look at the needs of the QCA I believe that Churches United is ready and willing to serve the community through the power and grace of God.

A Quad-Cities native, Dr. Grimes received his Masters of Divinity and Doctorate of Divinity from Grace Valley Theological Seminary in Edinburgh, Texas. Dr. Grimes acknowledged his call to the ministry and was licensed by the Second Baptist Church in Rock Island and ordained in 1975. He served as the Assistant Pastor to Second Baptist, pastor at Corinthian Baptist Church in Waterloo, Iowa, and pastor at the historic Washington Avenue Baptist Church in Springfield, Missouri.

In November 1989, Dr. Grimes accepted the call to pastor Tabernacle Baptist Church, Moline, where he continues to serve.

Dr. Grimes also serves on numerous boards and committees in the Quad-Cities area. He is a commissioner and chairman of the board for the Moline Housing Authority; serves on the State of Illinois Council on Aging, and is president of the Western Illinois Area Agency on Aging.

Churches United of the Quad City Area is a cooperative association of more than 136 churches representing more than 20 Christian faith traditions. Its ministries provide food for the hungry and shelter for homeless women and children who may have survived domestic violence. For more information on programs and how to support Churches United, visit its website at cuqca.org or call 563-332-5002.
I dont care that Gov. Eric Greitens had an affair. He admitted to it. His wife forgave him. They moved on a long time ago.

But the unforgivable, despicable part of this drama is the allegation that Greitens basically used revenge porn against his side-chick.

The woman, who has yet to go on the record, confessed to her then-husband. He recorded the conversation and recently gave the tape to St. Louis CBS affiliate KMOV, which aired it Wednesday night. She was his hairstylist. She says he invited her to his home, took her down to the basement and taped her hands to exercise equipment. And then, she says, he blindfolded her and took a nude photo, warning her to never mention his name.

If its true, this is an abuse of trust, power and basic human decency.

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawleys office has said it lacks jurisdiction to investigate his fellow Republican. So St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, a Democrat, took the first step by announcing Thursday that her office would launch an investigation.

The only way we can remove this cloud is to get all the facts, said Sen. Gary Romine, a Republican from Farmington, south of St. Louis. We need this to move as quickly as possible. If it exonerates him, we can move on. If it doesnt, he needs to resign or face impeachment.

Agreed. Lets open the basement door and get to the facts about his possible misogyny and manipulation instead of sending our love and prayers to the governors wife, Sheena Greitens.

She released her own statement, declaring her loving marriage and an awesome family. Anything beyond that is between us and God. And shes right. She forgave her man just like Beyonce forgave Jay Z. Even Hillary forgave Bill. Nothing wrong with that.

Except this isnt about you, Sheena.

What about the other woman, who may have been tricked into a nude photo and threatened with it? What about the woman who wasnt just victimized by the governor but was also betrayed by her ex-husband, who took her taped confession to the press? Two men taking her choices away.

The governor, whose campaign was all about family values, denies blackmail. But he hasnt specifically addressed the basement, restricting her hands, blindfolding her and taking a photo.

The claim that this nearly three-year old story has generated or should generate law enforcement interest is completely false. There was no blackmail and that claim is false, James Bennett, an attorney for Greitens, said in a statement.

Wait one patriarchal minute. So because the governor says so, it isnt so? We should just skip the legal process altogether, huh? Because rape culture? No wonder congresswomen are planning to wear black to President Donald Trumps State of the Union address on Jan. 30.Times up. We must bring the #MeToo movement to Capitol Hill. And Jefferson City.

We must hold elected officials accountable. Yes, this requires an investigation.

Lets be clear  violence and threats against women are never acceptable. Allegations of extortion, coercion, or threats of violence must be investigated by the proper authorities, Senate Democratic leaders Gina Walsh of St. Louis County and Kiki Curls of Kansas City said Thursday morning. People accused of these egregious acts do not get to wave off the scrutiny of law enforcement simply because they are in a position of power; and victims of these crimes deserve our full support.

Having an awesome marriage and forgiving wife doesnt make you innocent. Family values dont shield you from the truth, boo. Lets take the blindfold off and see.
Ready or not, with early voting less than a month away, its time to get fully plugged into what is sure to be a politically supercharged 2018 election campaign.

As usual, the bulk of the contested races will come in November. But area voters from both parties will find contested primaries on March 20 for governor and attorney general, as well as a few high-profile local races.

They include the Democratic race between current Rock Island County Sheriff Gerry Bustos and the man he was appointed to replace, Jeff Boyd, who resigned after entering an Alford Plea to a misdemeanor charge of attempted official misconduct that accused him of repeatedly harassing a woman. The winner will face Republican F.C. Keko Martinez in November.

Area-wide, Republicans will be asked to decide whether Mark Kleine, of Galesburg, or Bill Fawell, of Galena, will face 17th Congressional District Democratic U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Moline, in the fall.

With so much at stake, we urge voters to find out all they can about all the candidates, not just in the primary, but in the crowded field this November.

The people we elect could have a major impact on our nation, our state and our counties. We urge you to seize every opportunity to look beyond the political ads that will be polluting our airwaves and flooding our mailboxes.

Go to candidate websites. Attend campaign events. Ask questions and tell them what you want from your elected officials. Find out all you can about who they are, what they believe and what they want to do.

That includes regularly reading The Dispatch-Argus in print and online, as we cover the races that matter to our community. We will once again hold editorial boards with candidates in key contested races for Congress, the Illinois General Assembly, governor, attorney general, treasurer, comptroller and secretary state, and countywide offices. Well share what we learned with you, in news stories and in editorials, where well share our views on the candidates and races.

We also will be inviting those candidates and local leaders vying for seats on area county boards to answer our online surveys, provide biographical information, digital photos and videos. Theyll be available for readers to review at anytime, along with the rest of our campaign coverage, at qconline.com/news/elections/.

We also urge you to share what you learn with friends and relatives, to comment on stories or blogs and to write a letter to the editor. Our readers care about what the people who live in their community have to say. Please share your views and read those of your neighbors.

For new letter-writers or those who need a friendly reminder, here are our guidelines for submission:

 Strong language and writing is encouraged, but dont get personal. No name-calling.

 Keep it clean. Dont cuss.

 Dont libel anyone. Dont make allegations which cannot be proved or spread rumor as fact. Everybody knows is not an acceptable standard.

 Limit letters to 250 words, period.

 We are not accepting unsolicited longer views about the election or letters from candidates or their staffs.

 You may submit only one letter a month.

 Include your name, hometown and daytime phone number, not for publication, but to verify it. We do not run unverified letters.

 We do not accept anonymous submissions. Make sure it is your work. No form letters.

 Send to letters@qconline.com or mail them to Viewpoints, 1033 7th St., Suite 101, East Moline, IL 61244.

Need more reasons to step up and speak out?

As Abraham Lincoln warned, Elections belong to the people. Its their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.

Dont get burned, get involved.
The Quad-City International Airport wrapped up 2017 with a 7 percent decline in its passenger numbers.

Bruce Carter, the airport's aviation director, told the Rock Island County Metropolitan Airport Authority at its meeting Tuesday that the airport posted 333,975 enplanements, or boardings, for the year. That compares with 359,451 enplanements in 2016 at the airport in Moline.

"It's a little better than we expected," Carter said. "We were down 10 percent for the first three quarters of the year and then we were up in October, November, and December was break-even."

The monthly statistics also showed the month of December saw 25,897 enplanements vs. 25,977 in December 2016. The month's total passengers, which include enplanements and deplanements, also were flat at 50,807.

For the year, total passengers also were down 7 percent, ending the year at 665,691. That compared with 716,872 total passengers in 2016.

The airport's passengers have been on a downward trend over the past five years, losing nearly 50,000 passengers in that time. In 2013, the airport ended the year with 383,027 enplanements vs. 333,975 in 2017.

The airport has been challenged by a leakage of airline passengers to the Chicago market. It also is feeling the impacts of issues facing the entire regional airport industry including a shift away from the smaller regional jets to larger jets and a looming pilot shortage.

"We're never pleased when it goes down," Carter said of the year's results. "But we're optimistic for 2018."

He said early predictions call for the year to start flat. He added there are no air service changes in the near future.

Two airlines reported increases in December: Allegiant was up 11 percent to 6,079 passengers and American Eagle/Envoy was up 9 percent to 7,118. Delta Airlines saw an 8 percent decrease to 7,789 in the month. United Express was down 11 percent to 4,911 in December.
One person is dead and another injured in a head-on crash Monday on U.S. 67 near Folletts, Iowa.

Clinton County Sheriffs deputies were dispatched at 2:41 p.m. to U.S. 67 just south of Folletts near the Wapsipinicon River to a report of a two-vehicle head-on collision.

Upon arrival, deputies discovered that a passenger car and a pickup truck had collided on a curve. The driver of the car had been trapped and the vehicle was on fire. Low Moor Fire Department responded to extinguish the blaze.

The Clinton County Medical Examiners office pronounced the driver of the car dead at the scene. The driver of the pickup was transported to Genesis East hospital in Davenport with unknown injuries.

Assisting the Clinton County Sheriffs Office were the Iowa State Patrol, Low Moor Volunteer Fire Department, Clinton County Medical Examiner and the Iowa Department of Transportation.
U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., reported on Tuesday that she raised more than $535,000 in the past three months of 2017.

Bustos' campaign said the new fundraising results show she is earning the support of people in her district.

"With strong support from across the 17th Congressional District, Cheri is in position to win reelection this November," Denise Mousouris, the campaign's finance director said in a statement Tuesday.

The campaign also said the three-term congresswoman had more than $2.8 million in cash on hand. That's nearly twice as much as her previous year-end balance. At the end of 2016, she had about $1.5 million in the bank.

Bustos' campaign did not release details of her fundraising report, which would show the sources of contributions. Those reports are due at the end of the month.

The quarter covered Oct. 1 through Dec. 31.

Two Republicans had filed papers to run for the Republican nomination to challenge her in the fall. Mark Kleine, a Galesburg businessman, and Bill Fawell, of Galena, filed petitions. Kleine withdrew his candidacy on Tuesday, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections.

There was no immediate explanation for Kleine's withdrawal. In October, he reported that he'd raised about $508,000 between July 1 and Sept. 30, his first fundraising report. That included a $135,000 personal loan.

When the loan was included, Kleine raised more money for the 3rd quarter than Bustos did, which is unusual. Typically, Bustos raises more money than her Republican opponents.

In the 4th quarter, she stepped up the pace, though, raising more than $100,000 than she did in the previous quarter.

Fawell had not filed a finance report yet, saying he had not yet met the spending and fundraising thresholds required.
A Davenport commissioner, citing a busy schedule, has resigned more than eight months after he was found to have followed a city employee into the first-floor women's bathroom at City Hall.

Surveillance footage provided to the Quad-City Times by the city captured Bishop Jimmie Horton, a longtime member of the Affirmative Action Commission, walking into the women's bathroom on April 24, 2017, shortly after Civil Rights Director Latrice Lacey.

Horton was attending a mediation conducted by the Civil Rights Commission and remained in the women's bathroom for approximately 25 seconds until another city employee approached the door.

Lacey reported the incident to City Attorney Tom Warner three days later, but it wasn't until recently that a decision was made to take substantive action.

"They offered him the opportunity to resign or be removed from the commission," Lacey said.

The Quad-City Times spoke to Horton, a pastor at Gospel Mission Temple, shortly after 10 a.m. Tuesday. At the time, he was still a commissioner.

The allegations that have been made toward me are absolutely false, Horton said. I have an impeccable reputation in the areas to what I have been accused of. I pray for the accuser.

Two hours after speaking with the Quad-City Times, he tendered his resignation citing his busy schedule.

For the past two years, I have been fiercely considering not serving another term because of my demanding schedule, Horton said.

Lacey is also sharing the story with the nonprofit Love Girls Magazine, as part of a joint venture between the Civil Rights Commission, the magazine and the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault, in light of a growing number of sexual harassment and assault stories nationwide.

The campaign, which will be pushed primarily through social media, will focus both on informing victims of their rights and providing helpful training in the workplace.

Lacey said the commission discussed the venture a few months ago, but she was not initially going to share her story. That changed, she said, after she experienced and reported more alleged inappropriate behavior by Horton in November.

This compelled Lacey to step forward and publicize the allegations.

"It's important that we don't sweep things like that under the rug or ignore that kind of behavior because it could lead to someone being seriously injured," Lacey said. "Women are forced into making things not a big deal that truly are. It's important for all us to share our experiences."

In the surveillance video, Horton is seen walking past the men's room as he turns the corner toward the women's bathroom. The door to the men's bathroom is directly in front of the hallway that leads to both restrooms.

The men's bathroom decal is partially visible in the bottom left corner of the footage.

Lacey, who was the only other person in the bathroom at the time, reported that Horton never used the bathroom and remained until secretary Beth Badillo approached the door.

He went into the stall next me and was just standing there, Lacey said.

After Badillo directed Horton to the proper restroom in the video, he does enter and exit the men's bathroom.

Data from the video file Warner provided to the Quad-City Times indicates it was initially accessed on April 28, 2017.

Because the incident involved an employee, Warner said the city will not comment, as it constitutes a personnel matter.

Horton had been allowed to remain on the commission until Lacey rehashed the subject along with more allegations during a meeting she and Civil Rights Commissioners Helen Roberson and Susie Greenwalt had with Mayor Frank Klipsch on Jan. 2.

Lacey also alleged that Horton made inappropriate comments about her daughter after Lacey rebuffed an attempted hug from him at the Nov. 30 Affirmative Action Commission meeting.

Citing the incident as a personnel matter, Klipsch said he could not comment about it.

"I want to be as open as I can, but we have specific administrative policies," Klipsch said.

While Klipsch was limited to what he could say, Roberson confirmed that the conversation happened with the mayor, after last week's Civil Rights Commission meeting.

After informing Klipsch this month, Lacey met with Human Resources Director Dawn Sherman and Warner about the complaints.

"Dawn said that she was going to investigate, but Tom said that there was nothing to investigate because he had followed me into the bathroom," Lacey said.

While Warner could not comment on this particular incident, he said if a commissioner needed to be removed, the city could seek to do so through the public process in Iowa Code.

Iowa Code Chapter 372.15 outlines the steps for removing appointees and includes a public hearing within 30 days of the request.

Horton was reappointed to the commission at the July 26, 2016, City Council meeting by Klipsch.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to clarify that Civil Rights Commissioners Helen Roberson confirmed that a conversation between Lacey and Mayor Klipsch occurred, She did not confirm the accuracy of the comments made in the conversation.
TAMA, Iowa  Add U.S. Sen. Joni Ernsts voice to those who believe President Donald Trump is reassessing his position on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Although the president repeatedly has threatened to pull out of the 23-year-old trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, I think he has doubts, Ernst told members of the Iowa Corn Growers at its winter meeting Monday in Tama.

Ernst, who was among a group of GOP senators who met with the president to discuss NAFTA before Christmas, said Trump was under the impression they wanted him to pull out of the agreement with the countries that are the United States and Iowas largest trading partners.

However, when Trump polled everyone at the meeting, Ernst said only U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer supported withdrawing from NAFTA.

Not one of the farm state senators in the room advised him to end the deal that has been under renegotiation for months.

He was surprised (because of) all these little birds chirping in his ear about how bad NAFTA is, she told the corn growers association.

Last week, Trump told the American Farm Bureau Federation meeting in Tennessee that he was working very hard to get a better deal for our country and for our farmers and for our manufacturers.

Ernst, who expects to have a follow-up meeting with Trump to continue the discussion over NAFTA, said the goal is to make sure he understands how important this is not just for the ag economy, not just for the auto industry, but this is a good thing nationwide.

NAFTA negotiators from all three countries, meet for another session later this month.

Although negotiations are ongoing, Ernst said the sooner a new agreement is in place, the better it will be for agricultural producers.

The worry that we have is that if were not signaling a strong partnership with Canada and Mexico, theyre going to have Plan B and Plan C lined up to fill any gaps that are created, she said.

Argentina and Brazil, for instance, would like to step in to sell commodities to Mexico, she said.

If we lose this opportunity, Im afraid we wont be able to re-engage with Mexico, said Ernst, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. That gap in corn will be filled by other nations. The same would be true with dairy, the auto industry. Theyll find a way to work with other partners.

Ernst also updated the corn growers on Ag Committee work on the farm bill, which she hopes will be approved this year.

One of the common themes I hear from producers is the need to be able to count on the stability that is provided by the farm bill programs, especially during a time when we see real challenges in farming and our rural communities, Ernst said.

She assured the corn producers that maintaining a robust crop insurance program is one of her top priorities.

I hear that all of the time when Im out and about, Ernst said.

Last May, Trump angered farm groups when he proposed cutting $46.54 billion in federal agricultural funding, mostly by capping the amount the government chips in toward crop insurance premiums.

He seemed to backtrack from that while addressing the Farm Bureau last week.

Im looking forward to working with Congress to pass the farm bill on time so that it delivers for all of you and I support a bill that includes crop insurance, Trump told the group.
Republican Mark Kleine has withdrawn from the 17th District congressional race, complaining to county Republican officials about the business of todays political campaigns.

Kleine, a Galesburg businessman, submitted his withdrawal, dated Jan. 9, to the State Board of Elections on Tuesday. He asked that his name not be printed on the March 20 primary ballot.

Kleine couldn't be reached for comment Tuesday. But in a letter to county Republican chairs, which was shared with the Quad-City Times by a party official, Kleine said there is a profound and detrimental difference between what I believe in and what is todays business of campaigns.

Kleine wrote that he was willing to share in the responsibility for funding his campaign, but said it would never be enough to satisfy the experts."

"At what point do we say enough is enough. How many millions of dollars does it really take to run for office?

Kleine went on to say that Ive learned this is an industry that celebrates wasteful spending, encourages inflated campaign budgets and has no regard for operational oversight just to win the race but more importantly for others to prosper.

He did not offer any details or say to whom he was referring, but he did note that hed terminated his relationship with his campaign staff.

Kleine said that he was returning all campaign donations in full.

His withdrawal means there's only one Republican left in the 17th District race, Bill Fawell, of Galena.

Kleine was seeking the nomination to run against Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., and he had gotten off to a fast fundraising start, reporting contributions of $508,000 in October. That included a $135,000 personal loan.

Republicans in the House thought highly of him. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm for House Republicans, listed Kleine last October as one of 31 candidates in the early stage of its "Young Guns" program.

The committee said he and the others were "formidable competitors" for their Democratic opposition.

Kleine, who founded a John Deere dealership in 1994 before expanding it to six operations, was a political outsider and "independent businessman," according to his campaign. In launching his candidacy last August, the campaign said he was independent of both parties.

A spokesman for Bustos, Jared Smith, responded to the development Tuesday by saying that the congresswoman is working on getting results for people in the district and that "today's news doesn't change anything for her."

He added that Bustos "looks forward to continuing this important work to create jobs and grow our local economy.

After being told of the withdrawal Tuesday afternoon, Fawell said that it takes courage to run for office -- and to step away if a person comes to the conclusion it's not the right thing to do.

"I support Mark and his personal decision," he said.

Rock Island County GOP Chair Mike Steffen said he was surprised at the decision. Im disappointed, he said.

The news of Kleine's withdrawal came on a day Bustos announced she had raised more than $535,000 for the last three months of 2017 and had $2.8 million in the bank at the end of the year.

Fawell, who has not filed a financial report, said he had not yet met the spending and fundraising threshold required for a filing.
Firefighters from several area departments Monday night battled the bitter cold along with a fire that gutted a Moline restaurant.

Firefighters were called to the Captains Table Restaurant, 4801 River Drive, Moline, at 10:44 p.m.

Upon arrival the fire department found the restaurant fully-engulfed and were forced to use defensive tactics to bring the fire under control. Because of the hard-to-get to areas of the building, outside obstacles, and the shape of the interior, crews still are on scene this morning hitting hot spots.

The building is a total loss and because of its instability, an excavator is being called to bring down unstable walls and allow firefighters better access to hidden pockets of fire.

River Drive will remain closed until late this afternoon.

River Drive traffic is being rerouted at 41st and 55th streets. Only residents living in the affected area 4100 block River Drive to 5400 block River Drive will be allowed in the area. The fire department requests all residential traffic enter at the 41st Street side.

The cause of the fire is undetermined at this time.

Property and contents losses have yet to be determined.

There were no reports of any injuries at this time.

Moline Fire Department was assisted by Moline Police Department, East Moline Fire Department, Rock Island Arsenal Fire Department, Moline Second Alarmers, Mid-American Energy and Metro Link bus service who provided a warm place to rehab.

According to the restaurant's Facebook page, the Captain's Table had been closed for remodeling.

Here's what the owners put up on their Facebook page:
DES MOINES  Iowans used Monday's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration to press for racial unity in the face of events, actions and words at the national level that continue to drive division.

Dozens of Iowans who braved cold temperatures to attend the 29th annual King celebration heard a mix of positive and challenging messages as the state struggles to deal with racial inequities in employment and incarceration rates and a negative image as a place that tolerates "a quieter racism."

"There are strong positives that we've seen," said Betty Andrews, president of the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP organization and a small business owner honored with an MLK achievement award.

"I know that from the top, from the presidency down, we're seeing some really disheartening, concerning statements and things that are divisive. We want to make sure that we're pushing for unity," Andrews said in an interview.

"Some of the comments that we're hearing let us know that we have a lot more work to do," she added. "Right now we're standing on the shoulders of people like Dr. King and many others, but we also have to do that groundwork so that our children can stand on our shoulders on into generations.

"This is not a progressive format, this is not a conservative format, this is about a humanitarian format," she later told the gathering. "This is about stepping up and making America great. That's what this is about."

Gov. Kim Reynolds read a proclamation declaring a week to honor King's memory and dream of racial equality before telling the attendees that effort to "unleash opportunities" for Iowans will help allay fears and foster the equality and justice King yearned for. However, after the event, Reynolds told reporters that recent comments by President Donald Trump are "not helpful" in that process.

"Not unlike the era in which Dr. King lived, our society is experiencing a period of dramatic change and with change often comes uncertainty, fear and frustration," the governor said in her remarks.

Clair Rudison, a member of the Iowa Department of Human Rights board of directors, praised the governor's efforts to improve Iowans' employment skills but said an incentive program is needed to aid and encourage businesses to help people who have "tainted or criminal backgrounds" lead productive lives.

Rudison recalled the fear in people's hearts when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 and he wondered if King had lived and been 89 years old now if "he might think that his work was in vain."

"This nation is focused on fear. They want to scare the hell out of everybody. But Dr. King stood up in the face of fear and laid down his life for a cause," he said. "We're still striving (for that cause), he added. "Let us press forward toward that mark."
Say nothing, stand for nothing and accept Fox News has already won.

That's the advice U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, of East Moline, offers national Democrats in a report released this past week, a striking exercise in defeatism that, once again, deals more in cliche than reality.

"Hope From The Heartland: How Democrats Can Better Serve The Midwest By Bringing Rural, Working Class Wisdom To Washington" is, of course, about white people -- generally code-named "working class" throughout -- who handed Donald Trump the White House in 2016.

Trump's victory has boosted Bustos' stock in Washington. She's among a handful of Democrats who won easily a district that went for Trump. Meanwhile, since 2009, Democrats have lost Statehouse after Statehouse in the eight states defined as the "Heartland," the report correctly notes. Only Illinois -- and its powerful urban center -- remains a Democratic stronghold, Bustos' researchers rightly point out.

But it's not the premises of Bustos' argument that are at fault here. It's the conclusion, little more than a reaffirmation of the Illinois Democrat's pre-existing political bias, that are, at best, highly suspect.

Bustos wants to talk about jobs almost exclusively. Reinforcing that strategy, above all else, was the goal of Bustos' report. To be fair, a key part of her conclusion is that Democrats must do better at messaging. Yet, after reading the entire manifesto, I'm not sure what they'd actually say.

Democrats focus too much on "social issues" and "identity politics," the report says. It pays substantial attention to the likes of Terry Goodin, a pro-life religious hard-liner from rural Indiana with an A-plus NRA rating. For 17 years, Goodin, a Democrat, has clung to his seat in Indiana's House of Representatives even as the mood of the region turned against his party.

Goodin is supposed to represent a counter to Democrat's alleged small tent, an over-reliance on coastal, urban voters, who happen to be more racially and ethnically diverse than Trump country.

But, instead of building a case against liberal intolerance, the Goodin example stands as a testament to just how badly Democrats have lost the argument over the past decade.

Sure, Republicans talk about jobs, too. But they don't talk about jobs for jobs' sake. No, the GOP has, for years, used the crash of the Rust Belt and rural Midwest as a basis for its own social and identity politics. Spend a few hours listening to the right-wing media squawk box and you'll hear all about how brown people are moving in, sapping welfare, working for peanuts and, most importantly, somehow corrupting the social fabric of "real America."

That last bit is the single playing card on which Bustos' entire political approach stands. Mountains of research don't support the "immigrants are destroying rural economies" argument. No, the hard right -- which now owns the GOP -- is governed by xenophobia and racial resentment. Barack Obama faced questions about his citizenship during his presidency because he was black. Donald Trump's campaign, on its very first day, labeled Mexicans rapists and murderers. The white power movement openly backs Trump's agenda.

Sorry, Rep. Bustos. This is, above all else, identity politics at the most raw, tribal level.

Fear is running national politics now. It's fear about far-flung terrorists who, frankly, pose no legitimate existential threat to the U.S. And yet, they're talked about with the same level of urgency as the Soviets and their ICBMs pointed at the eastern seaboard.

It's fear of Muslims openly practicing their religion. It's fear of Mexicans speaking Spanish at the local grocery. It's fear of black people who are sick and tired of being the justice system's prime targets. It's fear of women who can climb the social ladder without a man. It's fear that some mythical good ol' days are long gone.

Bustos' advice for Democrats is to take to radio, television and the local newspaper and operate within the rhetorical ecosystem constructed by the right wing. It's to relentlessly talk about jobs and for the party to embrace candidates regardless of positions on the divisive social issues, especially abortion and gun control.

Bustos argues that a take-all-comers approach is the key for putting Midwestern Democrats in office. Thing is, that strategy is precisely opposite of the hard-line, culture-warrior ethos that ushered in Republican dominance in the first place.

Republicans stand for something. Bustos would have Democrats stand for nothing at all.
U.S. Chuck Grassleys, R-Iowa, defense of his handling of the Russian probe is indefensible. Apparently, Sen. Grassley believes Iowans are stupid. He probably hasnt talked with other Republicans about stifling the Russian interference in our 2016 election. He has aides to do that so he can keep his reputation clean.

However, it is concerning that we are just months away from another election and the Republicans, who control the three branches of government, have done nothing to keep our elections safe from foreign intervention.

In fact, Republicans in all branches of government have gone out of their way to impede the Russian probe. The Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to the country. The GOP can be compared to a flock of sheep going off the cliff following this corrupt administration.

Where are the Republicans with principles? When are the Republicans going to put country before party? One way out of this mess is to vote these spineless Republican politicians out of office. It is our responsibility to consider the sources of our information. Social media is unreliable. Be intelligent in choosing your news providers. Your vote has never been more important.

Faith Endresen

Davenport
The president must be required by Congress to apologize to the nation and the people of Haiti for his outrageous and stupid immigration remark. It would be unacceptable from a 15-year-old.
PIERRE | South Dakota lawmakers will attend sexual harassment training this week and could consider bills on ballot questions, free speech on campus and data breaches.

Here's a look at the agenda after legislators return Tuesday to the Capitol:

Campus speech

Thirty lawmakers are backing a bill that supporters say would promote the free expression of ideas on college campuses. The plan says people can freely engage in "expressive activity" on campus such as peaceful assembly, speeches and guest speakers and circulating petitions, if they don't break the law or significantly disrupt the functioning of the institution.

The bill dictates that any outdoor area on public college campuses is a public forum. It would also require institutions to make sure that staff  such as faculty, administrators and campus police  understand the proposed law.

Republican Rep. Michael Clark, the bill's main sponsor, said college campuses should be places of "lively discussion, vigorous debate over the issues." Clark said he hopes the bill will have a committee hearing on Friday.

Libby Skarin, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, said the bill is "redundant at best," calling it a "mish-mash of existing constitutional standards." Skarin said she's also concerned with a provision that would allow people or student associations to sue another person over a violation of the proposed law.

The state Board of Regents didn't immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press requesting comment on the bill during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday.

Sexual harassment

Lawmakers and their staff will have ethics, professionalism and sexual harassment training on Wednesday. The training, which is required for employees, comes after news reports about women who experienced sexism and harassment around statehouses nationwide. Legislative leaders have said all lawmakers are expected to attend.

Senate Majority Leader Blake Curd said in a statement announcing the training that sexual harassment "will not be tolerated."

Let's talk initiatives

Lawmakers are set to debate a bill that would create a commission to provide a public forum for reviewing ballot questions before they go to voters. The 11-member panel would hold at least one meeting per ballot measure to hear from the initiative's sponsor about its purpose and take public testimony. The group would also write an objective summary of each ballot question.

The House State Affairs Committee is set to take up the bill on Wednesday.

Breach bill

A bill from Attorney General Marty Jackley that would require companies to notify South Dakota residents whose personal information was taken in a data breach is scheduled to be heard Tuesday in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The proposal would also require companies to inform the attorney general if a breach affected more than 250 residents.
BISMARCK, N.D. | Authorities have dropped a second charge against a Bismarck woman accused of abusing and exploiting her elderly mother during protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in North Dakota.

Authorities last week dismissed a charge of felony exploitation of a vulnerable adult against Kathleen Bennett, saying the case had become too difficult to prove, The Bismarck Tribune reported. A defense attorney said Bennett's mother died a few months ago.

Bennett, 59, was accused of leaving her 82-year-old mother with dementia tied to a chair in a protest camp in North Dakota while she attended demonstrations in December 2016. Protesters were trying to block construction of the oil pipeline, which is operated by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners.

Bennett's mother was taken to a hospital during a blizzard. Hospital staff said she was frail and malnourished.

The exploitation charge resulted from Bennett allegedly using $1,200 of her mother's money without consent to rent hotel rooms, buy meals and pay legal fees while her mother was hospitalized.

Bennett had also been charged in Morton County with endangering a vulnerable adult, but the defense and prosecution agreed in November to dismiss that case with $2,050 in fines forfeited from Bennett's bond.

"The victim is deceased and the case became difficult to prove once the Morton County companion case was dismissed," Burleigh County Assistant State's Attorney Marina Spahr said in court documents.

It's not clear when her mother, Mary Trujillo, died. She had been living with family in Nevada. Defense attorney William Kirschner said Trujillo's death happened a few months ago, but he did not have an exact date.
The South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department is trying to take the pulse of the outdoors community before making decisions.

During the GF&P Commission meeting last week, Cindy Longmire, specialist for human dimensions, showed the commissioners a new public-assessment tool used for evaluating projects.

Longmire said the tool ties into the goal, set in the strategic plan, that the public has confidence in what the agency is trying to accomplish, whether the idea comes from state Wildlife Division or the state Parks and Recreation Division.

Its not the full tool box. Its not the full planning process, Longmire said. Public involvement is not like a one-size-fits-all process.

She added: I get some rolled eyes quite often when I say that.

Longmire outlined a 10-step approach for the commissioners Thursday thats used in establishing and carrying through a public-involvement plan.

The process starts with a description of the project and finishes with an evaluation of the works effectiveness.

Along the way, adjustments can be made to better reflect public expectations.

So you can make appropriate changes moving forward, she said.

The scores range from a one for informing citizens to a four or five for collaborating with them, according to Longmire.

I really think its good. Its a super tool we can use, commissioner Gary Jensen, of Rapid City, told her.

He asked if the public could see results for each project. The concept was greater transparency about what the agency and the commission are doing.

It is an internal tool, Longmire replied. Then she seemed to warm to the idea as worth considering.

The higher the score, the higher our perception of (public) interest, she said.
The majority of the good jobs in South Dakota belong to people without bachelors degrees, according to researchers at Georgetown University.

The data is in a report titled Good Jobs That Pay without a BA, published recently by Georgetowns Center on Education and the Workforce.

The report says 55 percent of the good jobs in South Dakota are held by workers without a bachelors degree. Thats the opposite of the national situation, in which 55 percent of the good jobs are held by workers with at least a bachelors degree.

Additionally, the report says South Dakotas 95 percent growth in non-BA good jobs from 1991 to 2015 was the second highest in the nation, behind the 105 percent growth in Utah.

The report defines a good job as one that pays at least $35,000 annually for workers younger than 45 and at least $45,000 annually for workers 45 and older.

The numbers dovetail with a message delivered by Gov. Dennis Daugaard in his Jan. 9 State of the State speech.

Among young people who do pursue additional education after high school, many are unaware of which educational pathways lead to skills or credentials which are in demand and qualify a person for a good job, Daugaard said.

The governor told a story during his speech about hiring a high school student to work at the Daugaard farm near Garretson. The student planned to enroll in a private university and major in psychology, which was going to cost about $90,000 for four years.

Daugaard said he showed the student some data indicating that psychology majors have poor job prospects, with some of the few available jobs paying $25,000 annually or less.

Daugaard said the student correctly described the data as disconcerting.

Im not saying a psychology major cant be successful, Daugaard said in his speech. Some employers require a bachelors degree, in any field, as a prerequisite to applying. And many young people with social science degrees go on to graduate school. Thats what I did. But young people need to know this information when they are making these decisions, before they make these decisions.

Daugaard said in the speech that his administration is taking several actions to point students toward productive educational and career paths, including:

The start of a program called Career Launch, with pilot sites in Rapid City, Sioux Falls, Yankton and Brookings, where high schools are being encouraged to expand the availability of work-based education experiences through apprenticeships, internships and job-shadowing;

A partnership among Dakota State University, Southeast Technical Institute, the Sioux Falls School District and the South Dakota Department of Labor and Regulation, in which high school juniors and seniors will take dual high-school and college-credit courses in the high-demand, well-paying fields of cybersecurity, network services and software development;

Continuation of the Build Dakota Scholarship Fund, launched in 2014 by a $25 million gift from philanthropist Denny Sanford, which gives full-ride scholarships to technical schools for about 300 students annually who promise to work in South Dakota after graduation;

Updates to the statewide dual credit program, which last year attracted 2,224 high school students to take at least one dual credit course from a university and another 934 to take a technical institute course, producing an estimated $5.3 million in savings compared to the tuition that the students would have paid; and

Proposed legislation allowing for reciprocity of professional licensure with other states, to remove perceived barriers to entering certain professions.
Its been a long winter and yet spring is just there, on the horizon, the light of the new morning arcing among the occasional snowflakes.

I was shocked awake by the live missile warning in Hawaii and the unpredictability of life. The people at Pearl Harbor knew there would be trouble, but they didnt expect it. Not really. But for the almost prescient, unscheduled dispersal of the carrier fleet, the whole thing would have been a disaster. As it happened, the attack merely inspired us to "Total War."

We have been at war in Afghanistan now for 16 years, that we know about. There are people there, many of them, most of them, who have never known a time without war. In that long war we have sustained fewer casualties than on Dec. 7, 1941, or at the Twin Towers on 9/11. There are no sweeping Hollywood spectaculars about the Battle of Midway Afghanistan or the Pashtun Bulge. Too few players. Lone Survivor is probably our requiem for that war that wont end.

Life is uncertain. The human spirit? Not so much. The human spirit has been the greatest single achievement of sentient life  as far as we know. We are Gods crowning glory and, if you dont think so, just ask us. Our opinion is not without reason.

Of course, we do foolish things. We make mistakes. We can be cruel and, well, there are several books about who we are like the Bible and Quran and many others, all with common themes, all with similar story lines. Try to think of a really, truly astonishing story that doesnt include the Seven Deadly Sins. Like the Ten Standard Firefighting Orders, the Seven came from long experience.

We are also capable of great love and hope and courage. Those same books speak of those things.

I was listening to Eddie Vedder, Chris Martin, P!nk and Linda Perry. I was listening to George Harrison and Clapton and Dylan and Bono, and I was thinking, if it werent for these people who celebrate the human spirit in song, the light on the future horizon wouldnt be as bright.

When the Beatles ended, I quit listening to music, mostly. Things to do. But music slips through the ether, unbidden, and I heard songs, and many of them were quite good. They didnt shatter the world like Beatles music but they built on nicely. Bravely. Brilliantly, now and then.

And then I began to bemoan the loss of the gunslingers like Hendrix, Joplin, so many, right down to Hutchence and, now, Prince and Tom Petty. The list is getting longer, faster. But, so is the list of those rising from their experience who use their fame and talent to achieve things greater than themselves, and do a very good job.

To whom much is given, much is expected. A few of those who find the center of the stage and discover what light in yonder window breaks, also discover they can use that stage for good, that they can leave with the lights still burning and turn that light on others, becoming more than the sum of their parts.

Ive had time, with my wifes patient help to see many of the great concerts I missed in the hurry of life on YouTube. I recommend it. Theres a nurturing power in watching Chris sing to Arianna in Manchester, and a great moral tale: Dont look back in anger.

Well look back at the Hindu Kush and marvel that we were ever there. Through it all, Im grateful for the soundtrack of our lives and the giants who sing our songs.
Julia Galloway, a Missoula potter and University of Montana ceramics professor, has won a $50,000 fellowship grant.

United States Artists, a Chicago-based philanthropic organization, selected 45 artists across the country from a pool of 500 applicants in nine fields, from architecture to music, theater and writing. Galloway fell into the craft category.

The grant is unrestricted, meaning Galloway can use it to pursue her work however she sees fit.

The fellowships were announced Tuesday. The advance phone call last month left Galloway, a native Bostonian who regularly gives visiting art lectures, searching for words.

"Talking is not a problem for me," she said. "I was completely rendered speechless."

Galloway said the grant will give her "a cushion" to expand her ideas and develop them over a longer period of time. She's been researching and testing a new project to document 647 extinct or endangered species in the United States and Canada on the surfaces of her pottery.

The concept was influenced by the AIDS Memorial Quilt, made in honor of those who died from the disease. She admired how it allowed people to view the enormity of a problem through effects on individuals.

The money also could go toward new equipment and upgrades at her home studio.

In her application, Galloway described that project and her service-based activities, including a website, Field Guide for the Ceramic Artisan, that provides resources for recent graduates. It covers everything from artist residencies, advice on taxes and pricing work to setting up a studio.

Galloway is one of a string of western Montanans who have received the grant. Previous winners from western Montana are radio and media producer Barrett Golding of Bozeman in 2010; potter Sarah Jaeger of Helena in 2010; and Galloway's friend and recently retired UM colleague, ceramicist and artist Beth Lo of Missoula in 2009.

The grant is unrestricted, a rarity for artists, Galloway said. The news release underscores that feature: "Artists may use the funds for whatever they need, be it medical expenses, housing, their artistic practice, or anything else. This flexibility allows fellows the financial freedom to take risks and push their careers forward in ways that might not otherwise have been possible."

***

Galloway makes functional porcelain pottery that she decorates with narratives, often relating to domesticity, which she called a "taboo subject" in the art world.

The theme dovetails with her love of pottery, and the way they "champion the quieter times in our day," she said.

"People want a beautiful view from their window. A handmade pot is not unlike that," she said.

She believes they "make a connection with the person using them, which is different than looking at a large sculpture. That's equally valid, but it's about something else. I'm a little bit more interested in that quiet way of bringing something into your day."

She began making pottery in high school, and found she had the hand-eye coordination for throwing on the wheel. She liked the way she could make something useful for people and cultivate a connection with them. She saved up her babysitting money to buy her own wheel, which she carried home herself on the subway.

Through undergraduate and master's degrees, and her busy schedule of UM classes and outside workshops, pottery has been an inexhaustible passion.

"My road isn't wide, but it's very, very long," she said. While she's been making vessels for decades, she said, the facets of the craft move to the foreground: its complex chemistry, technical challenges, intellectual overtones and tight-knit community. It even has aspects of "small-business" politics: if you buy from the "village potter," the money stays in the community, she said.

Decades into her career, ceramics is "how I interact with and understand the world," she said.

***

In 2009, she moved to Montana for her teaching job at UM after a decade at the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She had served as a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena in the late 1990s and had always wanted to be closer to the state's busy ceramics community. During that residency, she'd taught for a day at UM and was impressed by the studio and the students' energy.

She said she brings a sense of idealism to teaching  she sees it as an expansive activity that requires her to constantly learn new skills and techniques to share with her students. It's also a public counterpoint to the solitary studio time required of professional artists.

Moving to Big Sky Country naturally had an effect on the work that Galloway produces, and she credited her surroundings for her success.

"I wouldn't be able to do these projects or have this career if it wasn't for the support of the community around me, through the school or around the state," she said. After moving here, she started a statewide group, Montana Clay, to help bring ceramicists together, including an annual gathering to exchange ideas.

She likes to start larger projects once every year or two. The endangered species project builds on a few previous ones in which she tackled ambitious narrative and exhibition concepts.

In a prior series, she made hundreds of cups decorated with drawings of North American birds based on the illustrations of John James Audubon. She remembers reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic realist novel, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and having a very magic realist thought: what if she could take a sip from one of the cups and sing like the bird that was on it? Following that intuition, she displayed the cups, in alphabetical order so people could find their favorite bird. If they lifted the cup off its shelf, a motion sensor would trigger a sound sample of that bird. While she had imagined that it would be a typically quiet gallery showing, the popularity triggered an aviary of bird calls.

For another project, she decorated vases with drawings of her home and created a website for them, allowing a personal tour in on the impersonal medium of the Internet.

The state's unbroken skylines inspired another project, "Sky Vault," comprising about 450 plates in the shape of clouds. To make their inspiration even more clear, she hung them in clusters from the ceiling of a gallery in the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art in Great Falls. At the opening, attendees could eat off them.

She's still early in her endangered species project, researching and consulting with scientists so that it's accurate.

She wants to create one urn for each endangered species since the term was coined in the early 1800s. Like the AIDS Quilt, she wants to exhibit them as a group and travel the exhibition. Each urn will be decorated with a drawing of the species. Many will be carefully sized so that they could hold the ashes of the species if it were cremated. She set a minimum size for small ones, such as the amargosa toad, since its vessel would be no longer than a thimble if she held to her concept. Others will require a large scale: the California grizzly bear's urn will be almost three feet tall. With the complexity of the research and the number of urns, she imagines it will take up to four years.

To give herself some parameters and a sense of urgency, she's limiting herself to species in the United States and Canada, hoping that proximity will inspire action on an issue so vast and anxiety inducing.

If there's something you can do nearby, though, change "starts at home and ripples out," she said.

The grant, meanwhile, has given her a sense of validation, and importantly, will give her breathing room to execute the project the way she wants.

"It's given me the time to develop new techniques," she said.
While Hollywood director Scott Cooper visited Billings for a private screening of his film Monday, he wasn't the guest of honor.

Instead, it was kids who participated in the Northern Cheyenne's Fort Robinson Outbreak Spiritual Run over the weekend who got reserved seating. Dozens of other tribal members also attended the screening of "Hostiles" at the AMC Shiloh 14.

The fictional film, released in December, stars Christian Bale as a U.S. Cavalry officer escorting a Cheyenne Chief from New Mexico to Montana.

Also present Monday were Cooper (known for films like Black Mass," "Crazy Heart" and "Out of the Furnace") and Phillip Whiteman, a Northern Cheyenne chief who was an adviser for the film.

This movie ties in with the (run) that were doing, Whiteman said. Forgiving, like in the movie, its a transformation. Its a miracle.

Whiteman, along with Lynette Twobulls and Jolene Walks Last, helped actors learn the language and customs of the tribe.

That made me not only a better film director, it made me a better human, Cooper said. This movie would not exist if it were not for Lynette and Chief Phillip.

The film has been screened across the country.

"Of all the places we've screened it, this one is the most special to me, Cooper said.

In a promotional interview, Bale talked about Whitemans influence on the film.

He would do a blessing every single morning for the whole crew, which the producers and the ADs would be really nervous about because its always about panic about time, time, time on film  but it enhanced everything so much, Bale said in an interview with CBS This Morning in December. It helped me so much in my performance. Im very indebted to Chief Phillip for that.

Whiteman was recruited for the film through a third-party group.

They too had to learn not only the language but the culture and gestures and movements, Whiteman said. Its a right-brain language, a 180 shift. I think it made the people that were under a time frame go crazy. Its a much slower alignment to culture, language and identity.

Bale, who learned some of the language, told CBS, its a beautiful language. Ah man, its so poetic.

Whiteman described working with Bale.

(We started) saying it real slow and speeding it up, and then finally with his breath and understanding, he said.

Bale had planned to attend Mondays screening, but canceled.

Batman is sick, said Cooper, referencing one of Bales most popular roles.

Hollywood has a checkered track record of accurately portraying the culture of American Indian tribes; old westerns that routinely deployed Indians as bad guys to be gunned down by cowboys or soldiers are now held up as examples of what not to do.

"Hostiles" features plenty of gunning down; the film, which earned an R rating, is brutally violent. But its underlying premise is one of understanding.

Bales character, Captain Joseph J. Blocker, vehemently opposes his orders to escort a Cheyenne chief and his family home through dangerous territory. He and Chief Yellow Hawk, played by Wes Studi, fought on opposites sides of bloody battles; at the movies beginning, set in 1892, Blocker can see nothing but the aftermath of war and Yellow Hawk as nothing but an enemy.

But the journey across sweeping landscapes also brings personal growth for the men.

Its about, 'How do you overcome hatred, how do you overcome fighting, without rendering the deaths of your friends and brothers in arms meaningless?' Bale told CBS.

Some critics panned the film as a flawed progression from the days of cowboys vs. Indians, but the National Congress of American Indians praised the film for its "culturally accurate portrayal of Native peoples."

After the film, Cooper drew applause when he asked the audience how they liked Bale's use of the Cheyenne language. He drew some chuckles, however, when he compared the film's fictional Valley of the Bears  which featured picturesque mountains and a green valley  to the country around Lame Deer.

Cooper plans to visit Lame Deer on Tuesday. Whiteman said that he was saddened that Bale wouldnt be there, but quickly lightened the mood.

I think Lame Deer is like Gotham City, he joked. We need Batman.
Domestic violence. Sexual abuse. An incarcerated parent.

Some students bring these experiences to school each day, lodged in their brain like textbooks in a backpack. Research shows that these childhood experiences negatively affect physical, social, emotional and academic health into adulthood.

Its time for schools to embrace that, a former principal told a group of Yellowstone County educators, and to build it into the foundation of their schools.

Jim Sporleder advocates for a trauma-informed care approach that, in part, revolutionizes school discipline. His alternative school in Washington was featured in a well-known documentary, Paper Tigers, on the topic.

The trauma research is so compelling, he said. Weve got to be able to go through (students') hearts if we want to get to their heads.

The main research that Sporleder refers to dates to the 1990s, when researchers collected information from about 17,000 people about adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs.

They found that as ACEs increased, so did outcomes that were likely to keep people locked in a cycle of poverty, like alcoholism, drug use, teen pregnancy, risk of domestic violence and poor academic achievement. Outcomes also included medical conditions, like an increased risk of cancer, autoimmune disease and depression.

Repeated trauma effectively trains kids' brains to constantly be on the verge of a fight-or-flight response, to the point that brain function changes. A 2013 study found that cells responsible for helping shape childrens brain connections go into overdrive under the chronic stress of childhood trauma, which can affect neural development and affect behavioral outcomes.

More studies have linked childhood trauma with other brain changes that can result in a variety of behavioral and academic problems.

The behaviors not a choice, which I believed for most of my career, Sporleder said. I have seen this research line up (with students) over and over again.

School discipline

Two-thirds of my career were as a traditional disciplinarian, Sporleder said, referencing policies like zero tolerance for certain behaviors that automatically resulted in consequences like office referrals and out-of-school suspensions.

I would have told you, I dont punish kids because punishment means we hurt them. I teach them  I realized, Jim, your discipline is not teaching. Youre still punishing.

Its easier said than done to reform discipline practices. It requires buy-in from most school staff, additional training and the resources to provide one-on-one support for students. And theres skepticism from those who argue that reforming discipline fosters chaos in schools.

Sporleder recalled significant anxiety from 2010, when as principal at Lincoln Alternative High School in Walla Walla he led a push for a trauma-informed teaching style that drastically reduced suspensions and referrals.

Its going through my head, 'Can I hold him accountable? Do the teachers feel supported? What do the other kids think?' he said.

He repeatedly emphasized the role of staff buy-in.

I get too much credit, he said. I did not transform Lincoln  I did not make changes with the snap of a finger.

Lincoln, a school of about 50 kids, poured resources into providing students with academic and emotional support. Students could receive free care at an on-campus health clinic. Educators made home visits and accompanied students on college visits. In Paper Tigers, a student texts a teacher a profanity-laden tirade insulting their teaching. The teacher responds with only messages of support.

Area schools have added resources for emotional support, like in-school mental health specialists, screening surveys and a handful of health clincs. And Sporleder acknowledged that asking teachers to fill those gaps looks like a lot more work.

He likened changes not to working hard, but to working differently.

If we change our practices, were going to start seeing bigger gains, he said.

Teachers and administrators from several school districts attended the training Monday as part of a professional development day. Sporleder was hosted by Lockwood Schools.
Kathmandu, Nepal: The much more anticipated Cabinet meeting which was earlier scheduled for 4:30 pm today has been postponed for Wednesday, thanks to the parties for the failure to reach on consensus.





Earlier Prime Minister and Nepali Congress president Sher Bahadur Deuba had made a plan to hold discussions with the leaders of the major parties before taking decision about the chief of the provinces and the provincial capitals through the scheduled cabinet meeting.





It is said that the meeting was postponed for Wednesday after Prime Minister Deubas efforts to forge inter-party consensus regarding the twin issues could not materialize. It is said that the cabinet meeting has now been rescheduled for Wednesday morning.




Even though the leftist alliance, forged among the two major communist parties of Nepal- CPN UML and the UCPN Maoist Center have secured comfortable majority require to run the new government from the recently held parliamentary elections, there is no sign that formation of new government would take places soon. The political parties particularly the government allies and the leftist alliance have indulged on the blame game for the ongoing dillydallying to for a new government as per the fresh mandate of the elections. The leftist alliance has been blaming the government and its allies for lingering the government formation process misinterpreting the constructional provisions.

The leftist alliance, particularly the UML has also been accusing the Election Commission (EC) of supporting to the government allies by not declaring the election results. However, the EC has been insisting citing a constitutional provision that election results of the legislative parliament would not be declared unless the elections for the National Assembly is held. Similarly, the Nepali congress, the head of the incumbent government, has also been labeling counter blame to the leftist alliance of creating hurdles to functionalize the government triggering delay to handover the leadership of the government.





Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, who is also the president of the Nepali Congress, had made a statement recently that he is willing to leave the government within one minute if anybody come claiming the post of Prime Minister in accordance with the constitution. His grievance was that to whom and on what basis should he leave the government? His question seems rational as no base is made yet to form a new government due to the absence of the parliament. Constitutionally, President has to call the parties represent to the parliament to form the new government.

But it is not happened yet due to the absence of the legislative parliament. Since, the election results under the Proportional Representation (PR)system is not declared yet due to the absence of the national assembly elections, neither the position of the parties is cleared nor the parliament can come into function. It is obvious that no one would stop the leftist alliance to form the new government after completion of the national assembly election even though speculations are also being riffed that the Nepali Congress would not leave the government even after the national assembly elections.





The possibility of forming the new government sans UML would not discard as none of the party has secured majority in the elections. As the possibility of unity among the CPN UML and the Maoist Center is getting slim due to the leadership tussles, it is likely that the UCPN Maoist Center chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal would explore the idea to form the new government under his leadership by taking into confidence the Madhes based parties including the Nepali Congress as of the blame labeled now to the Nepali Congress. As international Community, particularly the neighboring India is not in favor of the possible UML led government, the Nepali congress has to stay in the government even if the UML failed to take into confidence the Maoist.
Kathmandu, Nepal: Responding to the widespread demands to hold the Central Working Committee (CWC) meeting to access the losses in the recently held federal parliamentary and provincial elections, the Nepali Congress has called its CWC meeting Baluwatar on coming Thursday.





According to the Nepali Congress the CWC meeting is called at 11 AM on Thursday at Prime Ministers residence, Baluwatar. The party leadership decided to call the CWC meeting responding to the demands from various leaders including senior leader Ram Chandra Paudel.




Botswanas Okavango Diamond Company (ODC) earned $567-million last year following a 4 percent rise in sales, the highest annual sales since its formation in 2013.

Reuters quoted the company managing director Marcus ter Haar as saying that the State-owned company sold 3.41-million carats of diamonds in 2017.

He also said that demand for diamonds was healthy last year, while prices firmed in the first half and weakened from July through to November.

"December saw rough (diamond) prices beginning to strengthen and all things being equal, together with what seems to have been a favourable season in the US and China, ODC remains cautiously optimistic for the first half of 2018, he said.

ODC sells 15 percent of the production of Debswana, a joint venture between De Beers and Botswanas government.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished




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Jan-15-2018 17:43 TweetFollow @OregonNews North Korea Gives Thumbs Up to Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury North Korea's state media said the book's popularity "foretells Trump's political demise."

Reviews come from all corners of the world since the book was published on January 5, 2018, and is already a best seller.

(SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.) - Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside Trump's White House, portrays an unflattering view of President Trump and much of his White House. Excerpts of the book had already appeared in New York Magazine. Among the juiciest claims in the book: Trump's "ultimate goal had never been to win the Oval Office. But he was excited about the exposure and opportunities to develop his brand.

I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head, former aide Sam Nunberg told Wolff about the time he was sent to explain the Constitution to Trump early in the campaign.

President Trumps former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, described a controversial meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer as treasonous and unpatriotic to Wolff.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a moron last year.

For (Treasury Secretary) Steve Mnuchin and (former Trump White House chief of staff) Reince Priebus, the president was an idiot. For (former Goldman Sachs exec) Gary Cohn, he was dumb as sh-t. For (National Security Adviser) H.R. McMaster he was a dope. The list went on, Wolff said.

Its worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything  not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant p---k who thinks hes smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits ... I am in a constant state of terror and shock, Gary Cohn said in an email, according to Fire and Fury; and so on. Trump's personal attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter to publisher Henry Holt and Wolff demanding that the book not be released or face legal action. This, of course ensured a best seller. The book was published on January 5, 2018, and as predicted is already a best seller. The book sold 29,000 hard copies the first weekend, and digital and audio sales have topped 350,000. While Wolff's book got mixed reviews from critics, North Korea's state media gave it a thumbs up, which said the book's popularity "foretells Trump's political demise." I am not going to read the book but I am sure enjoying the furor caused by its publication. _________________________________________

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Articles for January 15, 2018 | Articles for January 16, 2018
Two Lompoc-area churches have teamed with the Santa Maria-Lompoc branch of the NAACP for three events this week to commemorate the 50th annive
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15 January 2018  The United Nations Security Council, during a weekend mission to Afghanistan, reiterated its support for the Central Asian countrys efforts to restore peace, stability and progress.





Council members aimed to get a first-hand account of progress made by the Afghan National Unity Government, with the assistance of the international community, in addressing a wide range of interconnected challenges and to learn how the Security Council could further assist efforts on the ground.





According to the UN Department of Political Affairs (DPA), despite assurances of continued international assistance for its security and development needs, Afghanistan remains

, which threatens the sustainability of its achievements.





DPA says peace negotiations between the Afghan Government and armed opposition groups are the only alternative for ending the conflict and the region and the broader international community have a stake and a role to play to help to create the conditions for peace.





The Councils visit, from 13 to 15 January, was the first one since 2010 and came ahead of the Kabul Process meeting, scheduled for February 2018, where the Government is expected to present its plans for a more structured peace and security process, coordinated with the wider region.





In the capital, Kabul, the delegation held meetings with senior officials, including Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.





The delegation also met with the leadership of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (

) and the Resolute Support Mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).





According to a note issued by UNAMA, discussions during the visit focused on the political, security, socio-economic and human rights situation in the country, with all parties underlining the importance of an inclusive Afghan-led and -owned peace process for long-term stability and prosperity in Afghanistan.





Council members also reiterated their support for the Governments reform initiatives, particularly to counter corruption and accelerate regional cooperation.





They expressed concerns about the security environment in Afghanistan, including the presence of Al-Qaeda, Taliban and ISIL-Khorasan Province-affiliated fighters, as well as about the nexus of terrorism and organized crime. All parties reiterated the need for greater international and regional security cooperation.




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 "How to make an innocent client plead guilty" | Main | Is "tough-on-crime" no longer a winning political strategy? 

January 15, 2018

Some new quotes at the end of the latest MLK day

I was stuck in a car for most of this day for celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, and thus I am only now getting a chance late in the day to honor this great man. Many years, I make sure to spend time listening to the full "I Have A Dream" speech Dr. King delivered in the "symbolic shadow" of Abraham Lincoln in August 1963. I have previously flagged some quotes from that speech, but this year I figured I would look to another MLK source for inspiration. Specifically, as I gear up to go back to teaching, I thought interesting a few lines from this MLK college essay titled "The Purpose of Education." A mere eighteen years old, MLK shows himself to already be wise beyond his years (and enduringly timely):

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.... We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.

Links to some prior MLK Day posts:

January 15, 2018 at 09:18 PM | Permalink

Comments



Posted by: Docile the Wimpy Terrorist In OR | Jan 15, 2018 9:21:19 PM

Pointless, horrifying problems, 100% the fault of the lawyer profession.

Lawyers started the American Revolution. They did so as taxes rose to 2% of GDP. These were needed to fund the military protecting them from vicious, Stone Age savages that took no prisoners except for blonde little girls to be used as sex slaves. This lawyer revolution prevented the end of slavery in 1833, by British law, enforced by sheriffs.

Roger Taney, a lawyer, ended the Missouri Compromise, and violated a ratified treaty with Canada. He also violated Article I Section 1 by his first historic application of judicial review from Marbury v Madison, inventing substantive due process, from nowhere. That traitor set off the Civil War.

Then lawyer Lincoln was given many alternatives to prevent war. Mr. "Please, Do Not Sue Your Neighbor" chose a war that killed 850,000 people.

Lawyers and judges founded the KKK. The military, non-lawyers, hanged them by the dozens. Immediately, black people thrived with no affirmative action.

Lawyers did a deal. Give the Presidency to the Republicans, remove the military from the South. The KKK returns. It kills 5000 lynching victims with hundreds of witnesses, and is immunized by the discretion of the local prosecutors.

Discrimination can be destroyed by the marketplace. Exclude a third of the population, you will go out of business. So, lawyers enact big, really big government laws excluding black people from all white businesses, to cancel the effect of the market.

So blacks under the thumb of big government lawyers still do pretty well. Their social pathologies are a little worse than those of white people.

So, the lawyers pass a Civil Rights Act. It violates the free association privilege inherent in the Freedom of Assembly Clause. Instead of repealing stupid Jim Crow laws, it rams people into other people who do not want to hang out with them, causing massive conflict, and hideous effects on their rates of social pathologies. The black family is destroyed. Bastardy rates soar. The social consequences include massive increases in criminality, and an excess of 5000 murders a year. What the KKK achieved in 100 years, the modern lawyer achieves in one year.

In the face of this history, 95% of black voters support the Democratic Party, the party of the lawyer and of the KKK. MLK was, of course, a registered Republican. He formed a patriarchal family, with a beautiful, feminine woman. He raised fine children. He supported black enterprise, and joining the capitalist system. He did not support big government interference and socialism as the myths now claim.

If this history were not so deadly, so tragic, it would be a ridiculous, unbelievable episode of the Twilight Zone, with ridiculous lawyer irony upon lawyer irony.

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 15, 2018 10:44:01 PM

Behar, how did you escape again from the asylum?

Posted by: Emily | Jan 16, 2018 1:28:02 AM

Mr. Behar, congratulations! You win the incoherent drivel award for 1918. I regret, however, that because you are still in a straighjacket, you are ineligible for the lunatic screed award. Better luck next year.

Posted by: anon1 | Jan 16, 2018 1:33:32 AM

Hi, Emily. Did you know any of those facts?

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 16, 2018 4:11:21 AM

Anon1. Are you a licensed lawyer?

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 16, 2018 4:12:22 AM

Emily. Do you know why these facts are news to you? You attended law school. It made you among the stupidest person in the country. Law school erased your memory of high school American history. You are now stupider than a Life Skills student, learning to eat with a spoon. There are people stupider than you are, Harvard Law School radicalized lawyers. Among them, the stupidest sit on the Supreme Court. Put that Life Skills student on the Supreme Court, you would get an immediate upgrade in the intelligence of the decisions, not to mention much more clarity of the writing of the opinions.

If you are dirty feminist, you are as vile as a member of the KKK. Both movements were lawyer scams, pc, and totally accepted by the lawyer profession in their day.

Stupid and vile is no way to go through life.

Posted by: David Behar | Jan 17, 2018 7:50:32 AM

Post a comment
Phuc, speaking on Monday at the ministrys conference to implement 2018 tasks, urged the ministry to closely watch socio-economic developments to raise measures to meet growth targets this year.

Minister of Planning and Investment Nguyen Chi Dung said that the socio-economic development in 2017 would create the impetus for the country to enter a new period of growth, one more efficient, sustainable and inclusive.

The way towards innovation and development is still long, ahead with difficulties and challenges which require great effort to overcome, Dung said.

The ministry was striving to enhance public management and improve the investment climate to promote production and efficiently attract private and direct foreign investment resources, he added.

In 2018, the ministry would focus on the compilation of laws to submit to the National Assembly, such as the Law on Special Administrative-Economic Units, the amended laws on public investment and enterprise as well as the law on investment under public-private partnership practice, Deputy Minister Nguyen Van Trung said.

This year, the Vietnamese economy was expected to face a lot of difficulties from the uncertainty in the global economy, the return of protectionism, climate change, international integration and the fourth industrial revolution, Trung said.

However, opportunities abound, given the Governments efforts to promote innovation associated with the industry 4.0 and enhance productivity and national competitiveness, he added.

The core is maintaining macroecnomic stability and taking advantage of every opportunity to create breakthroughs, he stressed.

Trung said that the ministry would focus on studying policies to effectively raise every resource for development investment as well as solutions to hasten economic restructuring in line with renovating the growth model and enhancing growth quality.

Nguyen Dinh Cung, Director of the Central Institute for Economic Management, said that Vietnam was a developing country and it was pressing to narrow the gap with developed economies in the region and in the world. To achieve this goal, Vietnam must achieve an annual GDP growth rate of at least 8-10 per cent.

Cung also said that the ministry must do more in its role as the economys conductor.

In 2017, Vietnam fulfilled targets set for all 13 socio-economic indicators and achieved a gross domestic product growth rate of 6.81 percent, higher than the target of 6.7 percent. The country also saw a record of 127 new firms in 2017.

Measure the underground economy

Speaking at the conference, Director of Vietnam General Statistics Office Nguyen Bich Lam said that a statistical project of measuring the non-observed economy would be proposed to the Prime Minister for approval this year.

The project aims to collect information on economic activities that affect the scale of the economy but are not measured in GDP, causing economic indicators to be underestimated.

Lam said that the non-observed economy included production activities that were illegal, underground, informal, or otherwise missed by the statistical system, according to the definition of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

VNS
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SIOUX CITY | A Le Mars, Iowa, woman was placed on probation Tuesday after pleading guilty to using counterfeit cash at Sioux City's Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.

Jackelen Hartsock, 28, entered her plea in Woodbury County District Court to one count of forgery. A charge of fifth-degree theft was dismissed as part of a plea agreement.

Following the recommendation of a state presentence investigation, District Judge Julie Schumacher suspended a five-year prison sentence and placed Hartsock on probation for two years. She must pay $200 in restitution jointly with Kurt Jones and Brittany Derby.

Hartsock was arrested in August after an investigation showed that she, Jones and Derby had made several cash transactions at the casino on Aug. 5. The bills were later found to be counterfeit.

Jones, 27, and Derby, 29, both of Le Mars, both have pleaded not guilty to forgery. Jones is scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 23. Derby is scheduled to enter a plea on Feb. 12.
ORANGE CITY, Iowa | A Sioux Center woman has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for a stolen check scheme.

39-year-old Kamie Jo Schiebout of Sioux Center was sentenced Jan. 12 in Sioux County District Court for second-degree theft as a habitual offender.

Her case began in November 2015, when the Orange City and Sioux Center police departments were notified of several stolen books of blank checks. These checks soon began to surface at Sioux County businesses, being used to pay for goods and services.

Before being taken into custody, Schiebout posted an appeal bond, staying her sentence pending her appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court. Her appeal is expected to take approximately 16 months.
DAKOTA CITY | A South Sioux City mother was sentenced to nearly a year in jail Tuesday for keeping her children in a home littered with trash, rotten food and cockroaches.

District Judge Paul Vaughan sentenced Jennifer Corrin to 90 days jail on each of four counts of misdemeanor child abuse and ordered the sentences to be served consecutively, or one after another, for a total sentence of 360 days. Corrin will be given credit for 187 days spent in custody since her arrest.

Corrin, 42, had pleaded no contest to the charges in November in Dakota County District Court. As part of a plea agreement, lawyers were left to argue whether Corrin be sentenced to 75 or 90 days on each charge.

Corrin was arrested in July after police responding to a call at her home in the 300 block of First Avenue found her and her five children, then ages 5-18, living in a home reeking of rotten food. Police observed cockroaches on the walls, old food containers, rotten food, pizza crusts, dog feces, piles of dirty clothes and open bags of trash throughout the house.

Officers found only a few pieces of inedible food inside the refrigerator and three small bags of macaroni in a cabinet.

"No child deserves to be in that type of environment," Assistant Dakota County Attorney Samantha Hargrave said when asking Vaughan to sentence Corrin to consecutive 90-day jail terms.

Corrin's attorney, Louvontree Hunter, asked for 75-day sentences, to be served concurrently. He told Vaughan that Corrin had been cooperating with caseworkers prior to her arrest and she had just lost her food assistance card. Her children also suffered from mental health issues and they had not been cooperating with keeping the house clean, but a change in medication has improved their conditions, Hunter said.

Corrin was convicted of two counts of child abuse in 2015 in a similar case in which her children were living in filthy conditions. She served more than seven months in prison after violating her probation.

Vaughan mentioned that conviction, and said it was ultimately Corrin's responsibility to clean the house.

"I'm really somewhat shocked on the condition of your home the date the police were called," Vaughan said in reference to photos taken inside the home.

The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services removed the children from the home for further placement at the time of Corrin's arrest. They are currently in foster care.
SIOUX CITY | Woodbury County would use a county-wide property tax levy to cover the cost of providing 24/7 paramedic service to rural areas and towns, under a proposal on Tuesday's Board of Supervisors agenda.

If passed, the plan would also help Sioux City cover a substantial amount of the expected subsidy required to fund its new Emergency Medical Services Division.

The county board will discuss the plan for the first time during an informational agenda item Tuesday afternoon. Under the proposal, the county would designate a property tax of 19 cents per $1,000 of valuation in its general basic fund to generate the $288,365 needed by the county to cover 3 paramedic positions and medical supplies in its budget year beginning July 1. Those funds would come from county residents living outside Sioux City.

The plan would generate an additional $524,466 from residents living inside Sioux City, and the county would rebate that amount back to the city to help finance Sioux City Fire Rescue's EMS division. The city's 27-employee division started Jan. 1 and is expected to require a subsidy anywhere between $600,000 to $1 million over the next six months, as well as to be a continuing expense.

County staff on Tuesday will ask the supervisors to put the funding plan up to a vote at its following week's meeting. A majority vote by the board is all that is required to pass the plan, said county finance director Dennis Butler.

If the plan is passed by the county board, Butler said it would not necessarily mean an increase in taxes for county residents. He said he hopes through other budget tweaks that the tax rate can remain the same or potentially lower, which he believes could be an important piece for it to pass at the board of supervisors level.

Butler said the new plan is the county's latest attempt to come up with a way to address the gap in county paramedic care left when Siouxland Paramedics stopped responding to 911 calls on New Year's Day.

Woodbury County's Emergency Services Division, based in Climbing Hill, currently staffs one paramedic from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and every other Friday. Until Jan. 1, the county had used paramedics from Siouxland Paramedics to assist with calls outside those hours in which advanced life support services were needed.

Now, the county no longer has that safety net, meaning patients in some parts of the county may not have paramedic service available during certain hours of the week.

Emergency services officials believe 3 paramedic positions would be enough to have a single county paramedic on staff at all times.

The proposal comes just over a week after the county laid out a separate plan in which cities and townships would proportionally help foot the cost of the paramedics. Butler told The Journal Monday that plan is "not in real good shape."

"Probably the plan will go down," he said.

Under that plan, the 14 cities outside of Sioux City would contribute toward the $288,365 the county needs to fund the paramedic positions and medical supplies to provide 24/7 paramedic response. Rural townships and cities would pay an amount proportional to their respective populations.

But, five days after that plan was pitched, the largest city involved refused to take part in it. The Sergeant Bluff City Council voted against allocating the requested $62,528 of its budget Thursday, according to minutes of the meeting.

Some officials in other cities are skeptical the plan will go through, especially with Sergeant Bluff out of the picture.

Moville Mayor Jim Fischer said without Sergeant Bluff's assistance, he personally believes the option would put a heavy burden on taxpayers. The Moville City Council will discuss it Wednesday, he said.

"It puts a lot of pressure on our citizens," he said. "With Sergeant Bluff, we were talking about ($14.79) per person. Now we're talking about $18 per person, and that's man, woman and child. That's a lot of taxpayers' money coming out of Moville." [Tweet this]

In Lawton, Mayor Dale Erickson said Friday his city will wait to see how the new proposal fares at the board of supervisors level before discussing the other option. He said he believes using the county-wide levy is a more permanent fix than asking the individual cities to come up with the funds.

"There's no way we can come up with that kind of money," he said.

Meeting agenda documents state that with the exception of Danbury, each rural community is at its maximum general fund levy of $8.10, which limits its ability to raise money.

"A big deal is that these rural towns, they're all at their maximum levy. And the city of Sioux City is at their maximum," Butler said. "We're fortunate we have ways to do it."

Butler said if the plan passes, the county would also consider entering a sharing agreement with Sioux City that would allow the city to respond to the county with paramedic assistance in cases where a paramedic is needed in two places at the same time.
SIOUX CITY | The Woodbury County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will consider sending a letter to a judge asking that the public be allowed to carry guns into some public areas of the county courthouse.

Citing a recent Iowa Supreme Court ruling, the board has drafted a letter asking District Court Judge Duane Hoffmeyer to modify his previous order banning weapons in the courthouse. Under the proposal, guns still would be prohibited on floors 2-4, where courtrooms, judge chambers and attorney offices are located. The ban would be lifted in other public areas of the eight-story courthouse.

The letter is the latest example of the growing pains of counties to comply with an expanded gun rights law state lawmakers passed last year.

After the law took effect on July 1, Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Cady issued an order prohibiting weapons in all of the state's courthouses. In December, Cady revised the edict, allowing local elected officials to file a written request to allow guns in areas not totally controlled by the judicial branch. The reversal came after he consulted with chief judges, sheriffs and other county officials.

Once a chief judge for a courtroom grants the modification, "the court relinquishes to the requesting entity any authority over the regulation of weapons in the public areas on a floor of a courthouse not totally occupied by the court system," Cady wrote.

Hoffmeyer is the chief judge for Iowa's 3rd Judicial District, which includes Woodbury County and 15 other Northwest Iowa counties.

A draft of the letter the county intends to send to Hoffmeyer was obtained by The Journal Monday. The short, two-sentence letter says, "Please eliminate the weapons prohibition in the public area of the Woodbury County Courthouse, upholding the ban for floors 2, 3, and 4, which are considered Court controlled areas."

The supervisors are scheduled to discuss the issue at their weekly board meeting Tuesday, which starts at 3:30 p.m. in the basement of the courthouse, 620 Douglas St.

Board chairman Rocky De Witt acknowledged Monday that allowing weapons on different floors of the courthouse could be complicated, especially since visitors use the same elevators to reach various floors.

"It is a difficult building to secure," said De Witt, who worked courthouse security prior to winning election to the county board in November 2016.

The courthouse added security technology and personnel for the first time in late 2014. At that time, the former entrances to the building were limited to one door on the north side of the building, and a security station with a metal detector for people to walk through was added.

Currently, people who enter the courthouse with a weapon can place it in a lock box. After handling their county business, then people get the weapons back by use of a key, on exiting the courthouse.

De Witt said that practice will likely continue, for those heading to floors with court functions. He also said the supervisors will discuss adding personnel and more cameras for additional floors.

Whether to allow citizens with a permit to carry a gun to enter the courthouse with it has been a contentious issue since the Republican-controlled Legislature passed the sweeping gun rights bill last year.

In late June, a majority of the Woodbury County supervisors voted to rescind a prior ban on weapons on county property, including the courthouse. The supervisors said that was necessary to comply with the new state law. However, county Sheriff Dave Drew said he would keep enforcing the security program in the courthouse, saying he must enforce judicial branch orders.

Drew said the security steps are needed to ensure that people are safe, as he said sheriffs are required to help carry out rulings by courts.
SIOUX CITY | Democrat Rita DeJong and Republican Jacob Bossman are competing in the special election for the Iowa House seat that was vacated by Republican Jim Carlin after he was elected to the state Senate in another special election last month.

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday. The 10 county polling places will be considered vote centers for the election, so voters can cast their ballot at any of them.

House District 6, which covers Sioux City's Morningside neighborhood, the cities of Sergeant Bluff, Bronson and Salix, and some rural areas in northern and southern Woodbury County, is heavily Republican, with 7,778 voters registered as Republicans, 5,013 as Democrats and 6,617 as no party, according to election data as of Jan. 1.

Bossman, who lost a bid for the Iowa House District 6 in 2016, is taking a second run for the seat. It's DeJong's first run for elected office.
Todays top picks from our online calendar. Find more events at siouxcityjournal.com/calendar.

Strategic Planning - Correctionville

Please join us for a city-wide strategic planning (visioning) session with ISU Extension 7 to 10 p.m. at the Community Center in Correctionville, Iowa. We will begin matching grant opportunities with desired projects including downtown beautification, historic preservation, tourism, economic development, housing development, and more. Come find out how you and/or your organization can be part of moving Correctionville forward.

Fin-tastic Storytime

Books, songs, fingerplays, crafts, and experiments for children 3 through 6 held 10:30 a.m. or 1:30 p.m. at Sheldon Public Library, 925 Fourth Ave., in Sheldon, Iowa.

Double Chocolate Caramel Apples

Order your delicious Gourmet Double Chocolate Caramel Apples for $15 ready in just in time for Valentine's Day! Order by calling the Siouxland Humane Society shelter at 712-252-2614 ext. 7 or stop in during operating hours at 1015 Tri-View Ave. Orders must be prepaid. Apples can be picked up at the shelter or Southern Hills Mall Center Court on Feb. 9 or 10 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
TAMA, Iowa  Add U.S. Sen. Joni Ernsts voice to those who believe that President Donald Trump is reassessing his position on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Although the president repeatedly has threatened to pull out of the 23-year-old trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, I think he has doubts, Ernst told members of the Iowa Corn Growers at their winter meeting Monday in Tama.

Ernst, who was among a group of GOP senators who met with the president to discuss NAFTA before Christmas, said Trump was under the impression they wanted him to pull out of the agreement with the countries that are the United States and Iowas largest trading partners.

However, when Trump polled everyone at the meeting, Ernst said only U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer supported withdrawing from NAFTA.

None of the farm state senators in the room advised him to end the deal that has been under renegotiation for months.

He was surprised (because of) all these little birds chirping in his ear about how bad NAFTA is, she told the corn growers association.

Perhaps he heard the farm-state senators.

Last week, Trump told the American Farm Bureau Federation meeting in Tennessee that he was working very hard to get a better deal for our country and for our farmers and for our manufacturers.

Ernst, who expects to have a follow-up meeting with Trump to continue the discussion over NAFTA, said the goal is to make sure he understands how important this is not just for the ag economy, not just for the auto industry, but this is a good thing nationwide.

NAFTA negotiators from all three countries, who have not made much progress for months, meet for another session later this month and may make progress on part of the agreement on auto manufacturing.

Although negotiations are ongoing, Ernst said the sooner a new agreement is in place, the better it will be for agricultural producers.

The worry that we have is that if were not signaling a strong partnership with Canada and Mexico, theyre going to have Plan B and Plan C lined up to fill any gaps that are created, she told reporters.

Argentina and Brazil, for instance, would like to step in to sell commodities to Mexico, she said.

If we lose this opportunity, Im afraid we wont be able to re-engage with Mexico, said Ernst, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. That gap in corn will be filled by other nations. The same would be true with dairy, the auto industry. Theyll find a way to work with other partners.

Ernst also updated the corn growers on Ag Committee work on the farm bill, which she hopes will be approved this year.

One of the common themes I hear from producers is the need to be able to count on the stability that is provided by the farm bill programs, especially during a time when we see real challenges in farming and our rural communities, Ernst said.

She assured the corn producers that maintaining a robust crop insurance program is one of her top priorities.

I hear that all of the time when Im out and about, Ernst said.

Last May, Trump angered farm groups when he proposed cutting $46.54 billion in federal agricultural funding, mostly by capping the amount the government chips in toward crop insurance premiums.

He seemed to backtrack from that while addressing the Farm Bureau last week.

Im looking forward to working with Congress to pass the farm bill on time so that it delivers for all of you and I support a bill that includes crop insurance, Trump told the group.
DES MOINES  IPERS officials told Iowa lawmakers it likely will be next year before they ask for legislative changes to allow in-house management the $30 billion public employee retirement fund.

IPERS, the Iowa Public Employees' Retirement System, is in preliminary discussion of what it is calling internal investment management.

Currently, IPERS contracts for outside management of its funds. But CEO Donna Mueller and Chief Investment Officer Karl Koch told the House State Government Committee on Tuesday they believe millions of dollars could be saved annually through in-house management of investments.

However, they added, the change would require significant startup investment as well as trading, accounting and control infrastructure.

Legislative changes would be needed, too. In order to attract the appropriate personnel, they explained, the state would have to compete with private management firms that typically offer managers bonuses that often are larger than their salaries.

Also, the IPERS 11-member Investment Board would need more authority and autonomy to hire and fire investment professionals, set compensation and oversee management tools and services, Mueller and Koch said.

The Investment Board includes the state treasurer and active and retired IPERS members as well as four non-voting legislators.

IPERS has 355,600 members, with 51 percent paying into the system, 30 percent retired and receiving benefits, and 7 percent vested but not yet receiving benefits.

In fiscal 2017, IPERS paid $2 billion in benefits with $1.7 billion paid to Iowans, according to Muellers presentation.

Legislation pending in the Senate, Senate File 45, would create 401k-like defined contribution plans for future public employees.

However, Rep. Dawn Pettengill, R-Mount Auburn, one of the legislative members of the IPERS board, opposes the plan and says shes finding little support for it among her colleagues.
LINCOLN, Neb. -- Gov. Pete Ricketts is backing a proposal to raise the speed limit on parts of Interstate 80 in Nebraska as well as other state highways.

Introduced Tuesday, the bill (LB1009) by Sens. John Murante of Gretna and Curt Friesen of Henderson would allow the state Department of Transportation to raise the speed limit on I-80 to 80 mph, up from 75 mph.

Six other states allow maximum speeds of 80 mph, including neighboring South Dakota. Texas allows speeds up to 85 mph on some interstate segments.

Murante said Nebraskans across the state have voiced support for raising speed limits on local highways to speed up travel between rural communities and small towns mostly connected by two-lane highways.

"We believe we can get that done and accommodate that desire without jeopardizing the people of Nebraska," he said, adding better continuity of speed limits will benefit motorists everywhere.

The speed limit on I-80 between Lincoln and Omaha would increase immediately if the proposal goes into effect, Murante said. Other speed limit increases included in the bill are:

* 50 miles per an hour on a highway not on gravel

* 65 miles per hour on any four-lane, divided highway not part of the state highway system

* 65 miles per hour on a super-two highway, a two-lane highway designed for through traffic with intermittent passing lanes.

* 70 miles per hour on an expressway or super-two highway that is part of the state highway system

* 70 miles per hour on a freeway that is not part of the interstate system

The speed limit for Interstate 129, which crosses the Iowa border into South Sioux City would remain at 65 mph, as would I-80 in the Omaha area and Interstate 180 in Lincoln.

Ricketts says the measure would make Nebraskas transportation system more effective, efficient and customer-focused.

The proposal will likely face resistance from highway safety groups like the Nebraska Safety Council, which argue that higher speed limits have been linked to more fatalities.

According to a 20-year study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, speed limit increases of 5 mph on interstate and freeways were associated with an 8 percent increase in fatalities.

The fatality rate on other roads rose 4 percent with raised speed limits, the study said.

In all, the study linked increased speed limits across the country with 33,000 deaths from 1993 to 2013.

Mark Segerstrom, road safety project coordinator with the Nebraska Safety Council, said fatality rates in 2017 were up 3.2 percent over those in 2016.

"Now doesn't seem the time to be increasing speed limits," Segerstrom said. "Once speed limits are raised, drivers will continue to drive faster than the new limit."

Crashes resulting from distracted drivers have continued to rise for six straight years, up 29 percent from 2010, Segerstrom added. Other fatalities resulting from motorcycle, ATV, train, pedestrian and bikes were also dramatically up over previous year counts, he said.

"More work needs to be addressed at correcting the current problem we have," Segerstrom added. "This problem of elevated fatalities only intensify with a higher speed limit."

Murante said when the data is presented, "it will be a clear and convincing case to the people of Nebraska this is the right thing to do."

"I'm firmly convinced the roads will be safe and we'll be able to see some economic growth," he said.
LINCOLN, Neb. -- A pistol stolen during Lincoln's largest-ever gun heist surfaced during a Sioux City murder investigation, more than 10 years after it was taken, Lincoln Public Safety Director Tom Casady said.

As of Monday, it was unclear whether the pistol was the murder weapon, but it is the latest of the 79 guns stolen from Scheels at SouthPointe Pavilions on Oct. 1, 2007, to turn up outside Nebraska following a crime.

Sioux City police said last week they recovered multiple handguns, including two stolen ones, while they searched the home where they believe a 26-year-old Javier Cheron of Sioux City was shot and fatally wounded Jan. 10 at a residence at 1609 Jones St.

A suspect, Liborio Martinez-Rubio, 60, of Sioux City, has been arrested and charged with trafficking stolen guns, according to Iowa court records. Martinez-Rubio, whose bond was set at $500,000, was not immediately charged in connection with the shooting because he is on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hold.

Ten years ago, three men broke into the Scheels in Lincoln and, in three minutes, took 79 guns.

That's a staggering number, especially in Lincoln, where guns are usually stolen one at a time from homes or vehicles.

Police recovered 30 of the guns the following day, arrested the burglars and quickly turned their attention to finding the remaining guns and those fencing them on the black market.

Were talking about a great deal of danger when these stolen guns diffuse to the four winds and were very anxious to recover as many as we can, Casady said in 2007.

Fifty-five have been recovered so far, some under similar circumstances as the handgun found in Sioux City  a crime is committed, after which investigators trace the gun's serial number back to Lincoln.

Casady said stolen Scheels guns have been found by law enforcement in California, Arizona, Texas and even Mexico, as authorities investigated kidnapping, robbery, various drug crimes and even a suicide.

Ten years later, 24 of the Scheels guns remain unaccounted for, Casady said Monday.

"I doubt if they all ultimately surface."
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.
Florida Youth Pride Coalition is hosting its annual Icon Awards, Saturday, Jan. 20. The seated dinner and awards program begins at 8 p.m. at Signature Grand in Davie.

In a telephone conference call with SFGN, Matthew Eaton said Florida Youth Pride Coalitions mission is to educate, empower, encourage and energize LGBT youth and their allies. Eaton serves as the organizations executive president.

We want to educate and empower them to be able to do whatever it is they want to do once they are growing up -- whether it be in their personal or professional lives -- and the way we do that is we have various types of events that are cultural events and community events that we participate in as an organization, Eaton said.

The Icon Awards is a vehicle to raise money while honoring distinguished people. Honorees this year are: Broward County Commissioner Dr. Barbara Sharief, transgender activist Arianna Lint, Stonewall National Museum & Archives Executive Director Chris Rudisill, Hotspots Magazine publisher Scott Holland, psychologist Billy Urich, Jamaican activist Taneitha Brown, straight ally Edith Lederberg and youth Taja Walker, Carlton Granston, Hannah Thomas, Zion Sylvester and Amanda Arroyo. Bishop S.F. Makalani-MaHee, a transgender activist, is being honored posthumously.

Dr. Sonja Mitchell, Chairwoman of Florida Youth Pride Coalition, said youth benefit from the organization in many ways.

We create leaders that have no boundaries when it comes to love and taking care of each other and the community, Mitchell said. They get to unify themselves with youth of all ages and doing different things in the community.

The outcome is to be leaders of tomorrow, Mitchell said. Great leaders of tomorrow.

While recruiting volunteers for Pride South Florida, Mitchell said she noticed community events tended to be largely focused on adult activities.

We didnt have a resourceful and strong youth leadership in the community, Mitchell said. And so I started thinking what are we doing with our youth? What is our legacy? What are we leaving behind? What are we teaching our youth? We are not just bars and parades. We are bigger than that. Somebody has to take the initiative and start something where our youth can be proud of themselves and do what Im doing and not wait until my age to do it.

Urich is a clinical psychologist working in the field of mental health and addictions. He has traveled globally to assist LGBT communities.

Over here (USA) we look at it as a parade, but it other countries its a civil rights march, Urich said.

Urich helped organize the first walk for tolerance in Jamaica and assisted in a similar role for pride activities in Belgrade, Serbia. He said youth groups and learning are paramount to the advancement of a higher quality of life for LGBT people.

It is not possible to know where we are going if we dont know where weve come from, Urich said. Yes, we can get married now but that was not always the case and many people fought for that right.

Miami Herald journalist Steve Rothaus is emceeing the event which includes musical performances. Tickets are $100. Doors open at 7 p.m. at Signature Grand, 6900 State Road 84, Davie, FL 33317.

For more information, visit www.floridayouthpride.com
Virginias legislature denied a law that would have added LGBT protections to state hate crime laws.

The bill was stopped in the Senate Courts of Justice Committee by a 9-6 vote, according to PinkNews. The nine dissenting votes all came from Republican committee members, while the other six came from Democrats.

Adds disability, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation to the categories of victims whose intentional selection for a hate crime involving assault, assault and battery, or trespass for the purpose of damaging another's property results in a higher criminal penalty for the offense, the bill reads.

The bill would have required crimes against LGBT and disabled persons to be reported to the Virginia State Police database. lt would have also allowed people with vandalized homes to bring civil charges about to recover damages if the vandalization was because of their gender or sexual identity.

Currently, Virginia is one of 20 states without protections for LGBT individuals, according to PinkNews.

In states without protections, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act allows the federal government to pursue charges in states with no LGBT hate crime laws. The 2009 bill signed into effect by former President Barack Obama expanded the 1969 federal hate crimes law to include LGBT protections, according to PinkNews.
We can't seem to find the page you are looking for.

You may have typed the address incorrectly or you may have used an outdated link.
Calling all coffee competitors: entries for the 2018 Coffee Masters Tournament at the London Coffee Festival are happening now. This is Season 4 of the Coffee Masters, that thrilling, equitable, fast-paced multidisciplinary test of coffee skills, and were kicking off an epic 2018 event schedule in London with the events biggest and brightest running yet. Coffee Masters takes place April 12th-15th in London, and the application deadline is Friday, February 1st.

[Box] Relive the 2017 New York Coffee Masters TournamentWhy Erika Vonies Coffee Masters Win Matters. [/box]

The tournament takes place at Londons Old Truman Brewery (91 Brick Lane), in the heart of Shoreditch, East London. Tournament entry is open to competitors from around the world, competing towards a 5000 cash prize. Enter by submitting your own original signature drink video, and check out some of our favorites from past competitors below. Full entry information is available via the official Coffee Masters website.

Were looking forward to expanded coverage of the tournament in 2018, including live coverage of the Coffee Masters events in London and New York City. Come be a part of the exciting, accessible, and rewarding Coffee Masters experiencewho knows, you could win big (and at the very least youll wind up on Sprudge).

Well know more soon about this seasons judges, hosts, and cast of competitors shortly. For now, heres some of our favorite videos from past events. Good luck, all you entrants out there, and well see in London this April.

Sprudge is the official media partner of the Coffee Masters Tournament. All past Coffee Masters coverage here. Much more at CoffeeMasters.org.
Anne Doolin, whose compassion for animals and people in peril has moved her to rescue and foster thousands of pets and provide meals and services for so many in need, has been named the 2017 January Davies Humanitarian Award winner presented by the United States Harness Writers Association.

The award was created in 2008 by USHWA member Callie Davies-Gooch in memory of her daughter to recognize contributions beyond harness racing.

Doolin, whose work in harness racing began as publicist at the Meadowlands Racetrack in 1988, has always been a staunch advocate for animals, from racehorses to stray dogs and feral cats. In the last 10 years she has transitioned into an important cog in a large network of dog and cat fosters, rescues and shelters.

A resident of Lexington, Ky., Doolin, who after leaving the Meadowlands later worked in publicity and marketing positions at Scioto Downs in Columbus, Ohio, and the Red Mile in Lexington, seemingly works 24 hours, seven days a week, making sure the homeless have food and shelter, and that dogs and cats can be placed in caring homes. Doolin was also a sought after member of the Breeders Crown and Hambletonian Special Event teams, and still works for the Breeders Cup, writing entrant bios.

With all the volunteer work with the homeless and animals that Anne does I believe January would very much approve of the award, said Davies-Gooch. January would be very proud of what Anne has done over the years in ensuring people dont go hungry and animals are cared for. Annes compassion is truly admirable and remarkable.

Doolin said she felt overwhelmed when she learned from Davies-Gooch of the award.

This is amazing and I am floored, said Doolin. I thought a lot of January and to win this award makes it even more special.

Doolin has been a foster parent to more than 1,000 dogs and cats over the years. She also helps coordinate transfers of the animals from shelters to forever homes. Despite working tirelessly in that capacity, she still finds time to check on the elderly and the homeless in the Lexington area. To help in that capacity, Doolin is currently president of Downtown People Inc.

We are a group that feeds the homeless and under-served a home-cooked meal ever Sunday in downtown Lexington, said Doolin. We average between 150-200 people a week, and we do this year-round. I also do some rescue work as I am transport coordinator for an average of 25 animals a week out of shelters.

The animals are also year-round. Besides the fostering, I help coordinate the transfers of mainly dogs and some cats from shelters to homes.

Doolin will be honoured at the Night of Champions, the Dan Patch Awards banquet, which will take place on Sunday, February 25, at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Fla. While most of the award winners have already been announced, the names of the 2017 US Pacer of the Year, Trotter of the Year, and Horse of the Year will be revealed at the banquet.

Information about the banquet and the entire week, which will also contain the annual meetings of USHWA, can be found at ushwa.net, including links for making hotel reservations at special rates; banquet tickets; and congratulatory or acknowledgment ads in the keepsake souvenir journal.

(USHWA)
Hall of Fame broodmare Country Kay Sue, the dam of 1995 US Horse of the Year CR Kay Suzie, passed away on Monday (January 15) in Ocala, Fla. at the age of 32, according to owner Rod Allen.

Country Kay Sue was limited to nine lifetime races because of injuries, but made her name as a broodmare. In addition to being the dam of CR Kay Suzie, she produced CR Renegade, who counted the 1999 Breeders Crown for three-year-old male trotters among his stakes wins. Both were homebreds by Royal Troubador, the Allen familys Dan Patch Award-winning colt and later stallion.

Last August, on Hambletonian Day at the Meadowlands, Country Kay Sue was found in the maternal line of four horses competing on the card  Allens filly Dream Baby Dream in the Hambletonian Oaks and Dover Dan in the Hambletonian, plus Cufflink Hanover and Italian-born Tuonoblu Rex in the Open.

If there can be such a thing as good timing in a situation like this, she might have had it, Allen said. She had more of her offspring racing at the Grand Circuit level last year, so it was kind of fitting.

We stuck it out with that family for a long time. I was criticized at times for it, with people saying it was more for sentimental reasons, but it really worked out.

Country Kay Sue, a daughter of Speedy Somolli out of Pams Key, was purchased for $25,000 under the name Molli Pam by Allen and his father, Carl. She was renamed after Rods daughter, Kaylie Suzanne. She actually was the second horse named in Kaylies honour  the first, Country Kaylie, was sold.

She was upset because we sold her horse, Allen said. My dad said we were going to buy another horse and we would never sell her. And she never left the farm.

Country Kay Sue was inducted into the Harness Racing Hall of Fame in 2001.

To read more about Country Kay Sue and CR Kay Suzie from the book Standardbred Old Friends, click here.

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the connections of Country Kay Sue.

(USTA)
Liberty Counsel Challenges CA Forced Abortion Speech Law

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16, 2018 / Standard Newswire / -- Liberty Counsel filed an amicus brief today in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA) v. Becerra, one of four cases brought before the Supreme Court by crisis pregnancy centers challenging the law as a violation of the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free exercise of religion.

The Supreme Court has agreed to review the California Reproductive FACT Act, which compels pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to post notices regarding the availability of free and low-cost abortions in their physical clinics, printed material and online. The Court agreed to review the NIFLA case on the limited question of "whether the disclosures required by the California Reproductive FACT Act violate the protections set forth in the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment."



Liberty Counsel's case, Mountain Right to Life v. Becerra, will be held at the Court until it resolves the NIFLA case, likely this spring. Liberty Counsel represents three pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in Southern California, all of which offer women experiencing crisis pregnancies resources, counseling, advice and alternatives to abortion.



All of the centers are faith-based and will not refer women for abortions. Under the California law, Pregnancy and Family Resource Center (San Bernardino), and all other licensed pregnancy counseling centers in the state are required to post the following government-prescribed message in their facilities and in their advertising or be fined $500 for the first violation and $1,000 for each additional violation:

California has public programs that provide immediate free or low-cost access to comprehensive family planning services (including all FDA-approved methods of contraception), prenatal care and abortion for eligible women. To determine whether you qualify, contact the county social services office at [insert the telephone number].

His Nesting Place (Long Beach), Birth Choice of the Desert (La Quinta), and other centers not licensed by the State of California must post a notice that they are not a licensed medical facility in all print and online advertising and in their physical facilities or face the same fines. The notice for unlicensed clinics consists of an announcement that the clinic is a not a medical facility and has no doctor on staff. It must be written in 48-point type in up to 12 languages, depending on the county. His Nesting Place has to post notices in 12 languages and Birth Choice of the Desert has to post in two languages.

Liberty Counsel challenged the law in federal court on behalf of the three pro-life pregnancy centers because the law violates the United States Constitution's guarantees of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion in the First Amendment. In that case, a federal district court judge and a three- judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Liberty Counsel's request for a preliminary injunction, finding that it was not likely that the law violates the First Amendment.

"We are hopeful this forced speech law will be overturned by the Supreme Court," said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. "The California law forces crisis pregnancy centers to speak a message that goes directly against their religious beliefs and mission to save lives. The First Amendment protects the right to speak and the right not to speak," said Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.


Disobedient Media

Hillary and Bill Clinton took an extraordinary interest in Silsbys case from the moment she was arrested and almost immediately stepped in on her behalf. The Harvard Human Rights Journal stated that one of Bill Clintons first acts as special envoy for the United Nations in Haiti was to put out the fire of a child abduction scandal involving American citizens. On February 7th, 2010, The Sunday Times reported that Bill Clinton had intervened to strike a deal with the Haitian government, securing the release of all co-conspirators except for Silsby. Prosecutors ultimately sought a six-month sentence in Silsbys case, reducing charges for conspiracy and child abduction to mere arranging irregular travel.




The Minister of Information, Yemane Meskel, previously denied accounts that Cairo had sent troops to the Horn of Africa nation in recent weeks, which have seen diplomatic relations among Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia and Eritrea stressed over regional developments. The issues include ongoing negotiations over Nile River water rights as Ethiopia moves forward with its USD $4.8 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project, and the Suakin Island deal between Sudan and Turkey.











Afwerki, who visited Cairo last week, stressed the importance of regional stability and Eritreas commitment to neighbors including Somalia, but condemned interference by Ethiopia and international actors including the United States.



The Eritrean president is casting a wary eye on any Sudanese alliance with Ethiopia as well, despite the fact that both of those countries are caught up in conflict over the dam projects impacts on water resources. Sudanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Ibrahim Ghandour met with his Ethiopian counterpart, also on Sunday.



The complete interview video is available





Afwerki said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan needs to make his intensions clear as he widens a Red Sea presence, including a naval site, as part of a $650 million agreement with Khartoum.Afwerki, who visited Cairo last week, stressed the importance of regional stability and Eritreas commitment to neighbors including Somalia, but condemned interference by Ethiopia and international actors including the United States.The Eritrean president is casting a wary eye on any Sudanese alliance with Ethiopia as well, despite the fact that both of those countries are caught up in conflict over the dam projects impacts on water resources. Sudanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Ibrahim Ghandour met with his Ethiopian counterpart, also on Sunday.The complete interview video is available here.

Sunatimes:- President Isaias Afwerki denied the presence of any Egyptian troops in Eritrea on Sunday, amid heightened regional tensions that have led Sudan to deploy additional troops on its side of the border.Afwerkis remarks came during a broadcast interview with state media Eri-TV and Radio Dimtsi Hafash. He called the reports of any Egyptian troops on Eritrean soil "fake news and blamed foreign media for perpetuating the story.
Mira Costa became the first team this season to win a set against Cathedral Catholic, but the Mustangs eventually fell in four sets in the CIF SoCal Regional final Tuesday night.
SPRINGFIELD, Ore.  A high-tech heart valve replacement surgery that requires less anesthetic, a smaller incision and faster operation and recovery time has been performed on more than 425 heart patients at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in the past five years.

Now, this transcatheter aortic valve replacement procedure  TAVR for short  is available to an expanded group of heart patients: the younger, stronger ones.

"Initially the only people we could put these valves into were the ones at high-risk for open-heart surgery," said cardiologist Dennis Gory, one of the surgeons who perform TAVR procedures at RiverBend's Oregon Heart & Vascular Institute.

TAVR long has been considered the aortic heart valve replacement surgery of last resort for people like Herbert Ball, 89, of Cottage Grove.

A professor emeritus of mechanical and nuclear engineering at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, Ball likes to take walks. But recently he noticed that he was becoming increasingly breathless and exhausted.

A trip to his cardiologist, Dr. David Duke at RiverBend, diagnosed Ball's problem as aortic stenosis, a narrowing of the aortic valve opening. That narrowing, caused by an accumulation of calcium, weakens the aorta's ability to close tightly and pump efficiently.

The aortic valve closes off the lower left chamber of the heart after the heart pumps. That closure prevents oxygen-rich blood from moving back into the heart, and instead ensures that the blood flows through arteries into the body. A defective aortic valve inhibits that crucial flow.

Without replacement, an aortic valve failure eventually leads to heart failure and death. Cardiac disease continues to be the top cause of death in the world for both men and women.

The professional group that sets clinical practice guidelines, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, traditionally has considered open-heart surgery the appropriate treatment for aortic valve replacement with a mechanical valve. But in the summer of 2016, the group climbed aboard the TAVR train, noting in its newsletter: "TAVR was approved in 2011 for use in patients who are at high risk for conventional surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR). Recently, trials in intermediate-risk patients have shown that TAVR is equivalent and possibly superior to SAVR. These findings have now opened the door to trials in low-risk patients, who make up about 80 percent of patients with aortic stenosis, according to an analysis of data in the STS Adult Cardiac Surgery Database."

Now the Society of Thoracic Surgeons is predicting an 80 percent shift from open-heart procedures to transcatheter procedures in the next decade.

The shift already is happening  rapidly  in Oregon. Although RiverBend is the only Eugene-area hospital to offer TAVR, three hospitals in Portland and one in Medford also offer the procedure. Soon they will have competition from hospitals in Salem and Corvallis.

SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPARISON

A quick comparison of open-heart surgery with TAVR shows why the rapid change:

Open-heart surgery is done under general anesthesia and involves a six-inch midline chest incision, followed by a three- to four-hour open-heart operation. The patient is on life support while the new artificial valve is put into place. Risks include restarting the heart, and after the surgery the patient must be monitored in the intensive care unit and endure a lengthy recovery.

Although Gory has performed many open heart surgeries in his 35 years as a cardiologist, he said he's never been more gratified by a surgical result than he is with the TAVR procedure he performs three or four times a week at RiverBend.

His sentiments are echoed by fellow cardiologist Sudeshna Banerjee, who said she's excited at the prospect of seeing more younger heart patients take advantage of the procedure.

"These patients aren't guinea pigs," she said, alluding to the surgery's proven benefits. "It can be right for younger people who have arterial blockages."

In the hope of spreading the news about the suitability of the surgery to younger heart patients, RiverBend recently invited members of the media to witness a TAVR procedure.

Retired professor Ball gave his written approval to be a living lesson on the procedure, which was photographed and filmed the morning of Dec. 14.

BEFORE THE SURGERY

"I am looking forward to it," he said in an interview a few days before the operation.

A large cast of professionals, each with a highly specialized role, surrounded Ball, who was lightly sedated but still conscious.

They were: an anesthesiologist; anesthesia technician; interventional cardiologist; a cardiothoracic or cardiovascular surgeon; one cardiovascular perfusionist to run the bypass machine if needed; a physician assistant; circulating nurse; scrub nurse; another operating room nurse; three or four cardiovascular technologists; an echo technologist who before, during and after the procedure obtains transthoracic and transesophageal echoes to measure effectiveness; one representative from the valve maker (RiverBend uses both FDA-approved kinds of valve); a valve coordinator nurse who is the keeper of the data, collecting it and assisting with diagnostic questions; and a cardiovascular operating room nurse manager, who circulates around like a stage manager, checking on everything.

Becky Hammerschmith, the program manager of the Valve Center at RiverBend, was the one keeping an eye on the details for Ball the day of his TAVR  as she had since his surgery was scheduled.

The night before, she made sure that he received treatment for an upset stomach and was ready for surgery. She answered his questions and attended to any details.

Finally, everyone was in the operating room or an adjoining viewing area, watching what looked like a well-choreographed stage production.

For Ball's surgery, a team from the manufacturers of the balloon-expandable Sapien XT aortic valve was on hand. The device is made of bovine  cow or bull  pericaridial tissue that forms a kind of peace symbol shape  the same configuration as the human aortic valve. This bovine vein is custom-fitted onto a glittering cobalt chromium frame that looks like a tiny crown. It's royally priced as well, costing about $25,000.

This device is crimped impossibly small and threaded onto a catheter for insertion.

Gory cut a small incision in the femoral artery in Ball's right leg and began threading the catheter toward his heart. But the calcium deposits were so thick, he quickly made an incision in the left femoral artery and began again.

Ball began to say something.

"Not just right now, Mr. Ball," Hammerschmith said, in a kind but authoritative tone. Ball relaxed. The catheter was making steady progress, visible on the array of computer monitors in the room. It was carrying the tightly furled valve toward its new home. It stopped at Ball's leaking, calcium-thickened aortic valve. Then, as the dramatic execution of a well-rehearsed act, the new valve was expanded, fusing with the old one. For an instant, the monitors showed Ball's heart pause, almost as if humming, and then the new valve began to steadily and strongly to take over the job of pumping his blood.

Even the calcium had a role, helping to hold the new valve firmly in place.

The surgery had taken less than an hour.

A RETURN TO WALKING

The day after his surgery, Hammerschmith had Ball walking. He went home on the third day, accompanied by his daughter, Alesia Ball, and was chatting amiably on the fourth day about his experience. Because Gory had to thread the catheter through Ball's left artery, "I have two groin areas that are tender now," Ball said, more in observation than complaint. "Too bad I can't go on display," referring to bruises on his legs that were turning bright and festive colors.

But less than a week after the TAVR, he could detect other differences.

"My body feels much better now," he said, much warmer.

He was looking forward to rehab. He said the extra blood circulating through his body made his extremities tingle sometimes, but his energy level was good, except for the cold he'd caught.

More than anything, Ball said, he wanted to return to his walks around the fountain in Bohemia Park in downtown Cottage Grove.

"I want to get outside." But for now, he and his daughter will have another Christmas together.

NEW SURGERY, SAME PRICE

If there is one way that TAVR still isn't much different than standard open-heart surgery, it's costs.

TAVR or standard aortic heart valve replacement surgery ranges from $70,000 to $200,000, depending on its complexity.

For the elderly, Medicare covers most of the expense. Much of the TVAR cost for the surgery, Gory said, is because it still is accepted protocol to have an open-heart team standing by during TAVR procedures.

Gory said that might soon change. He said the open-heart team at RiverBend never has had to spring into action in five years.

But given that most of the TAVR patients to date already have overlapping health issues and advanced years, the mortality rate is about 20 percent. There is a risk of strokes.

However, Gory predicts that as more TAVR programs are established, costs will decline.

TAVR, he said, is a good example of how less is proving to be more.
TOLEDO  A new restaurant that features traditional Filipino cuisine and all-American deli sandwiches brings a fusion of cultures to the heart of Toledo.

Big Chief Deli and Filipino Food, located at 100 Ramsey Way, opened Jan. 4 and was so busy the owners had to buy more food four times during the opening to meet demand.

Sisters and co-owners Janet Hill and Rosalina Caywood said the idea for the restaurant came from their American husbands, who wanted to share their wives traditional Filipino cooking.

The sisters, who were born and raised in the Philippines, first met lifelong Toledo pals Troy Hill and Ricky Caywood through an online chatroom. Janet Hill moved to the United States in 2004 to join her fiance in Ethel, in rural Lewis County. At first, she was homesick every day, she said.

I grew up in the city in the Philippines. I got here and it was so quiet, said Hill, now 37.

There were few other Filipino people around, and Hill said she sometimes struggled to communicate.

But a year later her sister moved to Toledo to marry Caywood. Then a niece, a cousin and a brother joined them in the area. As the local Filipino community grew, Hill and Caywood started hosting Filipino-American Fil-Am parties during holidays and family gatherings. Their cultural food was a hit, especially lumpia, a mini deep-fried spring roll.

About two years ago, their husbands broached the idea of opening a Filipino restaurant to share their heritage with the community. The two households invested a total of about $20,000 in the venture.

Our husbands are really proud of our food, Janet Hill said.

If Big Chief Deli doesnt sound particularly Filipino, thats because the name pays homage to the Cowlitz Indian tribes historic roots in the area.

Hills sister-in-law, Liz Hill, owned and operated a popular deli at Marys Corner until it burned down in 2014. She says she was depressed for a year afterwards and was eager to get back in business.

She joined Big Chief Deli to round out the menu with her locally famous deli sandwiches. Now the three women are working together to run the place by themselves. Liz Hill says she is not a part-owner, but she is helping Janet Hill and Rosalina Caywood learn customer service and how to run a business.

Were all trying to learn each others (dishes), Liz Hill said.

She added that her old customers are excited to eat her sandwiches again and interact with new customers interested in the only Filipino food around.

Hill and Caywood say they would like to add deserts to the menu, such as Suman (sweet rice balls wrapped in banana leaves). And if Big Chief succeeds, they hope to open another location in Centralia or Chehalis.

But for now, they are pleased with the surprising success of their first couple weeks in business, especially from customers who have never tried Filipino food before.

We are very happy that they love our food.
State Sen. Dean Takko (D-Longview) said Monday that hes not inclined to vote for five different proposed gun control bills, potentially dooming their chances of passage in the closely divided Senate.

The bills call for a range of changes, including banning high-capacity magazines and the sale of bump stocks  a trigger-modification device used in the deadly Oct. 1 Las Vegas shooting.

With Democrats clinging to a one-vote majority in the Senate, Takkos vote could be decisive on any gun control legislation.

Nearly 1,000 people flooded into the State Capitol building Monday to attend a Senate Law and Justice Committee hearing on the proposed measures, including National Rifle Association members and a Washington couple who survived last years Vegas shooting.

Takko said hes also been inundated with calls from 19th District residents urging him to vote against the bills.

I also have to represent the district, and I can tell you Im getting far more calls from constituents telling me vote no rather than vote yes, he said Monday in a phone interview. Theres a lot of people in the district that have guns and love to hunt and shoot, he said. Its a big issue.

Takko said hes not intimately familiar with all five bills but would probably need to see changes before supporting them.

Id have a hard time on most of them because I dont really think theyre going to do much to stop gun violence, he said Monday in an interview.

Senate Bill 5992  the bump stock bill  has received the most attention so far, but Takko said the bills language is too broad for his liking.

The bill defines trigger modification devices as any part or combination of parts designed or intended to accelerate the rate of fire of a firearm.

(Bump stocks are devices that use the recoil of a semi-automatic firearm to fire shots in rapid succession, effectively turning semi-automatics into machine guns.)

The bill would prohibit selling, possessing or repairing any trigger modification devices starting July 1, 2019.

You can pull in a lot of modifications that have nothing to do with the bump stock issue, Takko said of the bill. Im willing to look at it, and if someone can come up with some better language, I could most likely go there, he added.

But 19th District Rep. Brian Blake (D-Aberdeen)  a longtime National Rifle Association member  said that while a bump stock bill may have a chance in the Senate, hes unlikely to support a bump stock ban in the House. Democrats control a narrow two-vote majority in the lower chamber.

I just dont believe it will be effective, Blake said in an interview. I think a seventh grader could make a bump stock in an afternoon if they had access to a shop.

Blake said he thinks its even less likely for the rest of the proposed gun control bills to pass.

I dont think there will be the votes for the other bills, he said.

However, both Southwest Washington Democrats have signaled they are open to less restrictive gun legislation.

Takko said he believes legislators should be focusing on the mental health aspect of gun control. Hes signed onto a bill sponsored by freshman state Sen. Manka Dhingra (D-Redmond), a former King County prosecutor, that would make it easier for courts to bar criminal defendants with a history of violence from possessing firearms.

Takko also has a bill that would make concealed weapons permits exempt from public records, saying he wants to prevent gun owners from becoming targets of thieves.

Blake sponsored a bill signed into law last year that requires firearm dealers to notify the Washington State Patrol when a person who previously failed a state or federal background check tries to purchase a gun.

Those are the kind of bills that I have an interest in, he said.
Editors note: Todays guest editorial originally appeared in The Columbian. Editorial content from other publications and authors is provided to give readers a sampling of regional and national opinion and does not necessarily reflect positions endorsed by the Editorial Board of The Daily News.

Great moments, it has been said, are born of great opportunity.

As we reflect upon the meaning and the power of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as we acknowledge the 89th anniversary of his birth today, we are drawn to the opportunities that are facing the United States. We are drawn to the words he spoke in early 1968, when he said, "I see a lot of cynicism around and a lot of despair, and it's understandable despair, and I've tried to say to them, 'Don't lose hope; don't give up; picture disappointments and transform them into your own assets and into something creative.' "

Similar cynicism and despair are abundant in today's America. There is conflict and discord, driven by sharp political divisions that at times seemingly threaten to tear this nation apart.

And yet there also is hope. It can be found in the idea that the United States has endured through more difficult times and has come to prosper in spite of them. For those convinced that the nation is at a low point in its history, we remind you of the difficulties of 1968. The Vietnam War was devolving into a quagmire; anti-war protests were filling streets and college campuses; riots were engulfing cities; police brutality against protesters was tainting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; and assassinations were robbing us of Robert F. Kennedy and King himself.

King was shot to death on April 4 of that year while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tenn. The evening prior, he had told an audience, "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

Through his quest for justice and his remarkable oratory, King helped pave a path of opportunity for the United States  opportunity to live up to the ideals it professes to hold dear. In the process, he played a small role in preserving the union by remaining on a path of non-violence at a time when many African-Americans were embracing a more militant form of resistance. As The Washington Post noted editorially last year, "Dr. King worked to turn back extremism, violence and racial nationalism at the height of the civil rights movement, and to keep the cause of essential and long-overdue change in the American mainstream."

That change continues, and it is necessary. There remains no shortage of racial enmity and prejudice, both on an individual and institutional level. There remains no shortage of gender or religious bias. Even the roots of the stirring #MeToo movement against sexual harassment can be found in the works of King and others who have courageously spoken out against injustice throughout America's history.

Because of that, we celebrate King and his message today. Because of that, we note that even such an observance was resisted by some states, meaning that it was not recognized in all 50 of them until 2000  17 years after being signed into law by President Reagan. The lesson, which can be found in much of King's life: Change comes slowly and requires persistence.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day provides a chance to examine our nation and assess who we are and who we aspire to be. Great moments, after all, are born of just such opportunities.
Editors note: Todays guest editorial originally appeared in The Oregonian. Editorial content from other publications and authors is provided to give readers a sampling of regional and national opinion and does not necessarily reflect positions endorsed by the Editorial Board of The Daily News.

Ethics commissioners who reviewed the investigation into how Cylvia Hayes profited by braiding together her work as a private businesswoman and public official described what they found in direct and compelling words:

Profoundly disturbing. Crushing and disappointing. The worst of politics. A case study in what you are not supposed to do in public office.

Even more powerful was where Oregon Government Ethics Commission Chairwoman Alison Kean laid blame: I want to make it really clear that I dont think this is all on one person, she said. We may just have so much evidence on Ms. Hayes that its a little easier, but I think also this report is full of evidence that is applicable to the member of her household who was a public official and was the governor.

After three years, we finally have the answers to the important questions about the abuse of public office that local media had been asking before John Kitzhaber was elected to his historic, if ever so short, fourth term. They were the right questions.

They were questions that werent always welcome in a state infatuated with its cowboy governor. Or in a state where one party has ruled lately and often seems comfortable sticking with the devil they know.

These were basic questions that the pair never asked of themselves. Maybe it was Kitzhabers hubris. Or Hayes blind ambition. But when the governors staff raised these issues, they were shot down by the chief executive of the state.

In his February 2015 resignation letter, Kitzhaber wrote that he was confident he hadnt broken any laws. He wrote that Oregonians will see that I have never put anything before my love for and commitment to Oregon and faithfully fulfilling the responsibilities of the public offices I have held.

But he did, whether hell ever truly recognize that or not.

Kitzhaber compounded those violations of our collective trust when he and Hayes defiantly dismissed news stories and fought public records requests, both through stalled processes and in court. (Hayes is currently appealing the $124,837 judgment she still owes The Oregonian/OregonLive after losing her battle to keep her state-related emails private.)

Kitzhaber and Hayes attacked The Oregonian/OregonLive and other Portland media, claiming reports were inaccurate and vilifying reporters  long before it was commonplace to label inconvenient facts as fake news.

The commissions report drowns out that wrongheaded drumbeat.

In its 154 unyielding pages, the report confirms the allegations raised in various news reports. There was no line between Hayes private business and her public work. She earned generous contracts thanks to her title and her access to Oregons highest political official. It was Kitzhaber who put her in that position and, at various points, pushed his staff to help expand her role and reach.

Ethics Commissioner Richard Burke hit on one of the more critical points as he and other commissioners deliberated at a meeting last week: Kitzhaber and Hayes should have known better.

Burke pointed out that the commission sometimes handles conflict-of-interest violations by volunteer appointees and office-holders in small towns across the state. That wasnt the case with Kitzhaber and his top advisers.

These are sophisticated people, Burke accurately described. These are people who are capable of swimming in the shark tank. They are very, very sharp. They understand how government is supposed to work.

As commissioners discussed, Kitzhaber and his staff identified the potential for ethical lapses and conflicts of interest at several points over the years but never sought guidance from the very agency created to help public officials navigate those waters.

For Oregon, there couldnt be a better time for such a confirmation of the need for a strong, vibrant local press and increasingly aggressive watchdog agencies such as the Government Ethics Commission. Without those questions and pressure to produce public documents, the first couple likely would have pushed on with their ambitious plans, which called for further expansions of Hayes roles and responsibilities. Without this ruling, Kitzhaber and Hayes could have continued on with their misplaced criticisms and disingenuous narrative.

The ethics commission cemented its credibility late last year when it rejected a pathetic settlement with Kitzhaber that provided a mealy admission of guilt and a $1,000 fine. In coming months, commission members will revisit his case and decide whether to fine Hayes the maximum of $5,000 for each of her 22 various violations of state ethics and conflict of interest laws  a potential hit to her bank account of $110,000.

Oregon will be watching. This is the time to send a clear signal that we value integrity in our government and that ethics mean something in this state.
Paytm Payments Bank has announced the appointment of Nitin Chauhan as its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). In his current role at Paytm Payments Bank, Nitin will be in charge of Information Security, setting up and enhancing the firms enterprise security strategies, infrastructure and network design. This also includes securing all lines of network & interoperability for PPB customers, and services across partner banks and financial services. He will also ensure regulatory compliance with an emphasis on building a security framework for all Paytm Payments Bank customers.

Nitin comes with around two decades of experience across Information and Cyber Security. Prior to joining Paytm Payments Bank, he served as the CISO at RBL Bank for over 6 years and also worked with Kotak Bank and other financial institutions. He graduated in Commerce from Delhi University and holds an MBA degree in IT and International Business. He is a CISA professional and is a certified Lead Auditor from BSI for BS 25999 and Lead Implementer for ISO27001 security standards.

Renu Satti, MD & CEO  Paytm Payments Bank said, It gives me immense pleasure to welcome Nitin to the Paytm Payments bank team. He is a seasoned Information Security professional, and his experience in creating and deploying security solutions will play a key role in ensuring we continue bringing the most secure and innovative digital-first offerings for our users.

Nitin Chauhan, CISO said, Paytm Payments Bank has huge focus on information & cyber security and compliance aspects across all areas. We will continue to build secure and sustainable information and cyber security practice at the bank.

The bank has introduced a facility to create a Fixed Deposit when the customer balance exceeds Rs 1 lakh at the end of day. It has also unveiled a Paytm Ka ATM outlet that allows customers to open Saving Accounts and deposit/withdraw money. These specially branded outlets will play a key role in bringing banking access to smaller cities and towns by ensuring customers find it easy to locate an access point near them.

@Technuter.com News Service
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BNP Chairperson Begum Khaleda Zia appeared before the special court on Bakshi Bazar Alia Madrasha premises in the city on Tuesday on two corruption cases filed by Anti-Corruption Commission.
Modi, Netanyahu vow to combat terrorism boost defence ties

Indian Prime Minister Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke on co operation in key areas of defence and counter-terrorism.

PTI, New Delhi :

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday held "wide ranging and intensive" talks to bolster cooperation in key areas such as defence and counter-terrorism.

The two leaders noted the "grave" threat that terrorism poses to peace and security, including from non-state actors, and reiterated that there can be no justification for acts of terror on any ground, a joint statement, issued after the Modi-Netanyahu meeting, said.

They also advocated strong measures against terrorists, terror organisations, those who sponsor, encourage or finance terrorism or provide sanctuary to terrorists and terror groups, it said. PM Modi and Netanyahu also noted with that the next meeting of the Joint Working Groups on Homeland and Public Security will be held in February 2018, the statement said.

They reiterated the importance of building comprehensive cooperation in counter-terrorism, including cyber-space, it said.

On his part, Mr Netanyahu said Indians and Israelis know the "true pain" of a terror attacks.

"We are talking about cooperation in (the field of) defence so that our people are always safe and secure. We remember the horrific savagery in Mumbai (a reference to 26/11 terror attack), we grate our teeth, we fight back, (and) we never give in," the Israeli premier said.

At a joint press event with Mr Netanyahu, PM Modi invited Israeli defence companies to take advantage of the "liberalised FDI regime" and to "make more in India" with domestic companies. However, there was no clarity on the much-anticipated multi-million Israeli Spike anti-tank missile deal.

The joint statement said the two leaders also noted the readiness of Israeli companies to enter into joint ventures with Indian companies in the defence sector under the Make in India initiative.

Asked about the Spike deal, Vijay Gokhale, secretary (economic relations) in the Ministry of External Affairs, said, "I am not at liberty to go into the details of the discussions but it is suffice to say that where individual defence procurement is concerned the relevant matters are discussed by officials."




We will `strangle` US-backed force in Syria `before it`s even born`: Erdogan

Turkey\'s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan waves to supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), at a rally in Elazig, eastern Turkey.

Reuters: Beirut :

Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan threatened on Monday to "strangle" a planned 30,000-strong US-backed force in Syria "before it's even born," as Washington's backing for Kurdish fighters drove a wedge into relations with one of its main Middle East allies.

The United States announced its support on Sunday for plans for a "border force" to defend territory held by US-backed, Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria.

The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad responded on Monday by vowing to crush the new force and drive US troops from the country. Assad's ally Russia called the plans a plot to dismember Syria and place part of it under US control.

But the strongest denunciation came from Erdogan, who has presided as relations between the United States and its biggest Muslim ally within NATO have stretched to the breaking point.

"A country we call an ally is insisting on forming a terror army on our borders," Erdogan said of the United States in a speech in Ankara. "What can that terror army target but Turkey?"

"Our mission is to strangle it before it's even born."

Erdogan said Turkey had completed preparations for an operation in Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria.

The Kurdish-led regions in Syria say they need the border force to protect them against threats from Ankara and Damascus.

"To prevent any attack... there must be a deterrent force that protects the border between our areas and the others," Fawza Youssef, a senior Kurdish politician, told Reuters.

"Until a political settlement is reached in Syria, these areas need protection. Now, there aren't any guarantees," she said.

The United States has led an international coalition using air strikes and special forces troops to aid fighters on the ground battling ISIS terrorists in Syria since 2014. It has about 2,000 troops on the ground in Syria.

The US intervention has taken place on the periphery of a near seven-year civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven more than 11 million from their homes.

ISIS was effectively defeated last year, but Washington says its troops are prepared to stay to make sure the terrorist group cannot return.

For much of the war, the United States and Turkey worked together, jointly supporting forces fighting against Assad's government. But a US decision to back Kurdish fighters in northern Syria in recent years has enraged Ankara.

Meanwhile, the Assad government, backed by Russia and Iran, has made great strides over the past two years in defeating a range of opponents, restoring control over nearly all of Syria's main cities. It considers the continued U.S. presence a threat to its ambition to restore full control over the entire country.

On Sunday, the US-led coalition said it was working with its militia allies, the mainly Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to set up the new force to patrol the Turkish and Iraqi borders, as well as within Syria along the Euphrates River which separates SDF territory from that held by the government.

Turkey views the Syrian Kurdish forces supported by the United States as allies of the PKK, a banned Kurdish group waging an insurgency in southern Turkey.

"This is what we have to say to all our allies: don't get in between us and terrorist organisations, or we will not be responsible for the unwanted consequences," Erdogan said.

"Don't force us to bury in the ground those who are with terrorists," he said. "Our operations will continue until not a single terrorist remains along our borders, let alone 30,000."

Syria's main Kurdish groups have emerged so far as one of the few winners in the Syrian war, working to entrench their autonomy over large parts of northern Syria. Washington opposes those autonomy plans even as it has backed the SDF.

The Syrian government and the main Kurdish parties have mostly avoided conflict during the civil war, as both sides focused on fighting other groups. But Assad's rhetoric towards the Kurds has turned increasingly hostile.

Damascus denounced the new border force as a "blatant assault" on its sovereignty, Syrian state media said. It said any Syrian who joined the force would be deemed "a traitor".

"What the American administration has done comes in the context of its destructive policy in the region to fragment countries ... and impede any solutions to the crises," state news agency SANA cited a foreign ministry source as saying.

Assad's allies have also chimed in. In an apparent reference to the force, senior Iranian official Ali Shamkhani said it was "doomed to failure", Fars news agency reported.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said: "The actions that we see now show that the United States does not want to maintain the territorial integrity of Syria."

"Fundamentally, this means the breakup of a large territory along the border with Turkey and Iraq," Lavrov said.




Richi works in a serial after returning country

Sheikh Arif Bulbon :

Popular TV actress Richi Solaiman returned to Bangladesh on December 8. This time she came here to pass time only with her family and close persons of media. Despite having earlier schedule to come to country Richi did not agree to work for this reason.

After returning home Richi informed that she had to keep requests from her close directors to act. This time she came along with her son Rayan and daughter Ilma. Ilma is now only five months old.

In the meantime, Richi informed that she went to Rangpur at her maternal grandmothers residence to show her daughter Ilma. She is delighted in this regard because her grandmother Rizia Begum wanted to see Richis daughter.

During her visit Richi acted in a serial of Rahmatullah Tuhin titled Jokhon Kokhono, which is being aired on Ntv now. On January 14, Richi took part in shooting of the serial in the citys Uttara area. Richi is playing in role of Ferdousi Mazumders elder daughter Afrin in the serial. In the story of the serial it will be shown that after 12 years Afrin returns to her mother. Richis parts will be continued by this way.

While talking about to work in this serial Richi told this correspondent, One of parts of this serial was earlier shot in USA. After returning country, I got the scope to act in a small role in this serial. Every actress has dream to act with Ferdousi Apa. My dream came into true. I am really lucky.

Richi also informed that she will also act soon in two other plays under Chayanika Chowdhury and Sumon Anwars directions. Therefore, she has no other plan to work in Bangladesh right now.


Fate of the Rohingyas

Naimul Haq :

The repatriation of Rohingya refugees driven from their villages through violence and terror appears uncertain, with critics saying the agreement legalising the process of their return is both controversial and impractical.

Shireen Huq, a leading women's rights activist and founder of Naripokkho, one of the oldest women's rights organisations here, told IPS, "In my view Bangladesh should not have rushed into the bilateral 'arrangement' and especially without the involvement of the United Nations or consulting the refugees themselves.

"It is the same old story. They would move from a camp in Bangladesh to a camp in Myanmar."-Shireen Huq

"Bangladesh should have engaged in a diplomatic tsunami to gain the support of its neighbours and in particular to win the support of China and Russia. The international community has to step up its pressure on Myanmar to stop the killings, the persecution and the discrimination."

The uncertainty deepened with Myanmar regime still refusing to recognize the refugees as their citizens, throwing the possibility of any peaceful return into doubt.

UNHCR estimates there have been 655,000 new arrivals in Bangladesh since Aug. 25, 2017, bringing the total number of refugees to 954,500.

Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a memorandum of understanding on Nov. 23, 2017 on the repatriation of Rohingya people who fled their ancestral home in Rakhine state in the wake of military assaults on their villages.

But Huq notes that a similar 1993 bilateral agreement to repatriate Rohingya refugees who had fled to Bangladesh was not very successful as the voluntary repatriation was opposed by the majority of the refugees.

She describes Bangladesh government's generosity and the subsequent responsibilities as a 'job well done' but she fell short of praising the deal, saying, "This is going to be a repeat of the 1993 agreement where involving only bilateral efforts clearly showed that it does not work."

"They [Rohingyas] are going to be here for a long time," Huq predicted. "If we understand correctly, the Rohingyas will not be allowed to return to their previous abode, their own villages, but moved to new settlements. In that case, it is the same old story. They would move from a camp in Bangladesh to a camp in Myanmar. It will be another humanitarian disaster."

She continued, "If this arrangement is implemented as it is, it will be like another 'push back' of the refugees by Bangladesh, unless the international community oversees the repatriation and can guarantee their safe and peaceful settlement and rehabilitation."

While the deal has been welcomed by the international community, including the US, the European Union and the United Nations, others urged the government to involve a third party to ensure a sustainable solution to the crisis.

They say that Bangladesh has little experience in managing an international repatriation process and unless it fulfills the international repatriation and rehabilitation principles, the agreed terms may not be strong enough to create a lasting solution.

Muhammad Zamir, a veteran diplomat, told IPS that the world should not leave Bangladesh to shoulder the complex problem alone.

"It is unfair to burden Bangladesh with such a huge task that requires multiple factors to be considered before initiating the process of repatriation. The foremost issue is ensuring security or protection of the refuges once they return."

Zamir, who just returned from a visit to the Rohingya camps in Cox's Bazar, says, "The situation in the camps is already a humanitarian disaster and it is getting worse by the day. These people [Rohingya] are already traumatized and confused. They have suffered enough with the ordeals they have gone through. There is no guarantee that with the nightmares still fresh in their minds they would want to return so early unless there are strong and serious efforts to guarantee their protection in the long run."

A Joint Working Group (JWG) consisting of government representatives from Myanmar and Bangladesh was formed on Dec. 19 and tasked with developing a specific instrument on the physical arrangement for the repatriation of returnees. The first meeting of the JWG is due to take place on Jan. 15, 2018.

Former army general M Sakhawat Husain, a noted columnist and national security and political analyst, told IPS, "The Rohyngas' legitimate and minimum demand to be recognised as citizens of their native land is completely ignored in the agreement. In the face of continuous persecution still going on, as widely reported, how can voluntary repatriation take place?"

"The most damaging clause seems to be agreeing on the terms of Myanmar that is scrutiny of papers or authenticity of their being residence of Rakhaine," he added.

"Most of these people fled under sub-humane and grotesque torture. It would be difficult for Bangladesh to send them back voluntarily. The report suggests that unless a guarantee of security and minimum demand of citizenship not given these people may not go back."

Former ambassador Muhammad Shafiullah said, "It is quite uncertain to execute such a huge repatriation process without involving the UN system although Myanmar has outright rejected involving the UN. In such a situation how can we expect a smooth repatriation process?"

Shafiullah expressed deep concern about the inadequate financial support for humanitarian aid to the Rohingya camps.

"The UN system so far could garner funds for six month. Another pledging meeting is expected before the fund is exhausted. Bangladesh cannot support such an overwhelming burden alone for a long time. Precisely for this reason Bangladesh signed the agreement for repatriation although the terms were not favorable to her."

-IPS


Submission of probe report now Feb 28

Court Correspondent :

The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Court of Dhaka yesterday deferred the date for submission of the investigation report in the case filed over the theft of Bangladesh Bank's reserve to February 28. Magistrate AKM Main Uddin Siddiqui of the CMM Court passed the order yesterday as investigation agency CID could not submit the report on Tuesday. So far, the police have take time on a number of scheduled dates but they failed every time.

On February 5, last year, 81 million dollar of Bangladesh was stolen from Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. Later, on March 15, last year, Jubair Bin Huda, a joint director of Accounts and Budgeting Department of Bangladesh filed the case with Motijheel Police Station of the capital.

On March 16 of 2017, the court directed CID to submit a report after investigation while police took time on many dates for submitting the report.


Two writs seeking stay on DNCC polls

HC may pass order today

Staff Reporter :

Two separate writ petitions were filed on Tuesday with the High Court (HC) seeking stay on the process for holding election to the mayoral post for Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) on February 26.

Jahangir Alam, Chairman of Berai Union Parishad and Md Ataur Rahman, Chairman of Bhatara Union Parishad, filed the two petitions challenging the legality of the schedule fixed by the Election Commission (EC) for holding the polls to the DNCC mayor post.

The HC bench of Justice Naima Haider and Justice Zafar Ahmed fixed today (January 17 in 2018) for passing orders on the petitions after holding hearing on Tuesday.

Jahangir Alam in his petition said the EC is yet to provide him the CD containing the voter list, although the commission has fixed January 18 for submitting the nomination papers.

If he does not get the CD, he cannot submit the nomination paper and contest the election, Alam added in the petition.

On the other hand, Ataur Rahman filed petition on a separate legal ground.

Election Commission on January 9 this year declared the schedule for holding DNCC polls. Advocate Mostafizur Rahman Khan and Barrister Ahsan Habib Bhuiyan appeared for Ataur Rahman in the court, while Advocate Kamrul Huq Siddiquee and Advocate Mokarramus Saqlan appeared for Jahangir Alam.

Deputy Attorney General Mukhlesur Rahman stood for the State.

Advocate Mokarramus Saqlan said, Jahangir Alam wants to be a candidate in the DNCC election. But the voter list of the newly included wards is not yet published. In this circumstances, the writ petition was filed with the HC to stay the polls. Barrister Ahsan Habib Bhuiyan said, the election schedule issued by the Election Commission is without lawful authority and of no legal effect inasmuch as in view of the provisions of Section 5(3) of the Local Government (City Corporation) Act, 2009.

"The Section provides that the post of Mayor shall be regarded as duly constituted once elections are held for the post of Councillors of at least 75 percent of the wards of the City Corporation and publication of the names of elected Councillors in the official Gazette. And following the creation of the new Wards on July 26 in 2017, there are more than 33 percent of the Wards of the City Corporation do not have elected Councillors, an election in terms of Section 16 of the Act, for electing a Mayor for the unexpired term of an elected Mayor whose post has fallen vacant, can only be held if there are elected Councillors of at least 75 percent of the wards of the City Corporation," Ahsan Habib also said in the petition.
Ivy among 50 injured

N'ganj turns into battle ground: MP Osman's men attack Mayor Ivy's supporters; Clash over hawkers eviction; Police role questioned

Dozens including Narayanganj City Corporation (NCC) Mayor Selina Hayat Ivy and a journalist were injured in a clash between supporters of the mayor and Local MP Shamim Osman on Tuesday over re-settling hawkers who were evacuated earlier.

Staff Reporter :

At least 50 people, including Narayanganj City Corporation (NCC) Mayor Dr Selina Hayat Ivy, were injured, five of them critically, when clashes took place between two rival groups-local lawmaker Shamim Osman backed hawkers and followers of the mayor-centering hawkers eviction at Chashara of Narayanganj town on Tuesday afternoon.

More than 20 injured persons were rushed to different local hospitals while the NCC mayor took primary treatment as she sustained minor injurys in her leg, said our Narayanganj correspondent after visiting the spot.

Five of the injured were shifted to Dhaka Medical College and Hospital (DMCH) from Narayanganj in critical condition, said Asaduzzaman, Medical Officer of Narayanganj General Hospital.

"Mayor Ivy was hit by a stone in her leg at the time," said her brother Ali Ahmed Ripon.

The clash ensued after Ivy along with her followers went to Chashara area to oversee the illegal occupation on footpaths, said Saraf Uddin, Assistant Superintendent of Police in Narayanganj.

On information, police rushed to the spot and brought the situation under control charging baton and lobbing teargas shells, the ASP said.

The hawkers occupied the footpaths in the area in the afternoon, a day after ruling Awami League lawmaker Shamim Osman "gave permission" to them to sit on the footpaths, the police official said.

A witness told The New Nation seeking anonymity, "Protesting the matter, the mayor started to walk down the footpaths with her supporters from her NCC office around 4:30pm. As she went to Chashara area, hawkers hurled brickbats and stones at them, triggering the clash. Later, police fired several rounds of blank shots to disperse the clashing people."

On Monday, Shamim Osman MP, at a rally organised by the hawkers in the city, gave permission to them to sit at the footpath from 4:00pm to 10:00pm until February 21. Following the permission, the hawkers occupied the footpaths yesterday, 21 days after they were driven out from there by the city corporation authorities, according to him.

Dr Selina Hayat Ivy told the media that Pro-Shamim goons open fired and threw pieces of stones and brickbats targeting the peace-loving people who were chanting 'hawkers free footpath' in the area around 4:30pm.

They attacked us after getting istrustrution from Shamim Osman when the members of law enforcing agencies showed the role almost silence to favour of the lawmaker, she claimed.

The mayor also alleged that police informed her that they have no permission to take tough action.

"I don't fear of the death. I walked on the footpath as normal defying the threat of the lawmaker. The goons attacked us with arms and stone-brick pieces like rain," the mayor told the reporters.

She demanded suspension of the Deputy Commissioner (DC) and the Superintendent of police (SP) of Narayanganj.

Narayanganj constituency-4 lawmaker Shamim Osman said that the supporters of the mayor fired targeting the hawkers in the presence of police.

In an allegation of attack instruction, the MP said that he instructed his followers to avoid the clash and kept in calm.

He also said that the issue would be solved by holding discussion among the concerned factions and local administration officials.

Moinul Haq, SP of the district, said that police tried to take control over the situation peacefully to convince the rival groups.

Police fired rubber bullets and teargas shells to disparate the demonstrators to save lives and properties, the police official said.

Additional police and RAB personnel were deployed in the area to avert any further untoward situation, the SP said.
CU confers D. Litt degree on Pranab

Visiting Indian former President Pranab Mukherjee receiving D.Lit Degree from Chittagong University Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Iftekharuddin Chowdhury on Tuesday.

UNB, Chittagong :

Chittagong University on Tuesday honoured the visiting former Indian President Pranab Mukherjee with a Doctor of Letters (D. Litt) degree through a special convocation ceremony.

Vice Chancellor of the Chittagong University Prof Iftekhar Uddin Chowdhury conferred the degree on Pranab at the

university campus. CU Pro-VC Prof Shirin Akhtar, among others, attended the convocation conducted by CU acting registrar Prof Dr Kamrul Huda. Former Indian president Pranab Mukherjee reached Chittagong on Tuesday morning. Iqbal Bahar, superintendent of Chittagong Police (SP), Zillur Rahman, deputy commissioner of the district and other higher officials received Pranab. The former Indian President, a great friend of Bangladesh, reached Shah Amanat International Airport at 11am and he was later taken to hotel Radisson Blu at 12pm, said Saleh Mohammad Tanvir, additional commissioner of Chittagong Metropolitan Police.

The former Indian President, a family friend of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, arrived in Dhaka on Sunday on a private visit.

The former Indian President leaves for New Delhi by a Jet Airways flight at 10:20am on Thursday.
Khaleda seeks acquittal

Court Correspondent :

The lawyers of BNP Chairperson Begum Khaleda Zia yesterday placed arguments in Zia Orphanage Trust graft case and sought acquittal claiming the BNP leader's involvement was not proved.

"We could not operate the case freely. It was a coercive trial not a trial at all," said Barrister Moudud Ahmed, who placed the closing argument in favour of Khaleda Zia.

"We hope the court will consider everything and come to decide to let off my client with respect and honour," he added while

concluding his argument. Yesterday's argument on behalf of Khaleda Zia was placed from 11:45am until 1:30pm.

After the hearing, Judge Dr Md Akhtaruzzaman of the Special Court-5 of Dhaka adjourned the hearing until 2:00pm after dismissing a petition that sought non-appearance for Khaleda Zia for Wednesday and the day after.

On July 3, 2008, the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) filed the Zia Orphanage Trust graft case with Ramna Model Police Station accusing Khaleda Zia and her son Tarique Rahman and four others of misappropriating over Tk 2.10 crore that had come as grants for orphans from a foreign bank.

Besides, the ACC, on August 8, 2011, lodged the Zia Charitable Trust graft case with Tejgaon Model Police Station accusing four persons, including Khaleda Zia, of abuse of power in raising fund for the Trust from unknown sources.


Atiq gets AL nomination

Staff Reporter:

The ruling party Awami League has nominated former BGMEA President Md. Atiqul Islam as mayor candidate for Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) by-polls amid writs filed with the High Court seeking a stay on the upcoming election.

AL's General Secretary Obaidul Kader announced his candidature after a meeting of the party's local government nomination board held at Ganabhaban on Tuesday evening chaired by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

He said the decision was taken unanimously at the nomination board.

Obaidul Kader said his party picks up Atiq as mayoral candidate as he came form a respectable family with clean image.

Atiq has already started mass communication and election campaigns in different areas of Dhaka North after the party Chief and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has given green signal to him as its mayor candidate.

Eighteen aspirants earlier collected AL nomination form for the mayoral post that fell vacant with the death of mayor Annisul Huq on November 30.

The by-election is scheduled to be held on February 26.




We cannot send refugees to concentration camps

Following what has been believed to be a 'tough negotiation', Bangladesh has agreed a time frame with Myanmar for repatriating hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who fled an army crackdown last year. As per plan, Myanmar would accept 1,500 Rohingyas every week. It will take two years to return all of them to Myanmar.





After signing the agreement yesterday, Bangladeshi Foreign Secretary Md Shahidul Haque said the government had wanted Myanmar to accept 15,000 Rohingyas each week - however, they eventually settled on 300 a day - 1,500 per week.





It was the first meeting of the joint working group formed by the governments of the two countries to supervise the process of repatriation of over 7,40,000 Rohingyas who crossed the border since August 25 last year. Moreover, Myanmar is reportedly building a camp to temporarily house 30,000 repatriated Rohingyas.





We expressed our deep anxiety, such camps will not be ensured against persecution of the Rohingya Muslims. These camps may be used for extermination. In fact the returnees will be kept in isolation in the camps.







This is by no means repatriation and merely an arrangement at isolating the Rohingyas -- making them reliant on relief and aid while not treating them as citizen of Myanmar. In many ways the arrangement is similar to the Nazi concentration camps for monitoring and controlling the Jews in Europe. Additionally, the two years' time frame to complete the repatriation process by Myanmar is irrational. We gave them shelter and getting international help and cooperation for this. But we cannot be helping Myanmar to keep Muslim Rohingyas in concentration camps in their own country. After decades of living in a country no population can be called outsiders and not citizens.





We should rely on UN efforts for safe return of refugees. Bangladesh Foreign Ministry looks pathetically unaware of its inability to deal with Myanmar. Please try international diplomacy.





Most importantly, it is yet unclear how many returnees would qualify for citizenship in Myanmar. The authorities have said Rohingya Muslims could apply for citizenship if they can show their ancestors lived in Myanmar. But the latest deal - like the one in 1992 - does not guarantee citizenship.





Our diplomacy of appeasement and compromise has not only made us a loser but has put the future of Rohingyas into a terrible risk. Not only has the government miserably failed to engage the UN or the international community in its favour to reach the deal, but it has succumbed to an arrangement, which if properly explained to the refugees, will discourage them to return.
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MARION  Lifes most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said to an audience in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1957.

Dr. Gwendolyn Diggs, executive director of educational operations at Jennings School District in Missouri, told those gathered at the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Day Celebration in Marion that Kings question is still relevant today.

She challenged those attending to donate one hour per month to Boyton Street Community Center, the sponsor of the event. She even challenged business owners to allow employees time to volunteer, too.

If you give one hour per month, by the end of the year you will have given 12 hours of quality time, Diggs said.

Diggs grew up in Memphis, and was 7 years old in 1968, the year King was assassinated. On March 16, 1968, King marched in support of sanitation works in Memphis.

She said although her parents could see the chaos in the city, Dr. King's presence gave them hope.

On April 3, he delivered his Ive Been to the Mountaintop speech at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ. The speech urges nonviolence in the strike of Memphis sanitation workers.

On April 4, King was assassinated six miles from Diggs home.

On April 8, Coretta Scott King marched with 50,000 people in Memphis just as Dr. King had planned.

On April 9, Dr. Kings funeral was held in Atlanta.

Diggs said within months, Coretta Scott King founded the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolence and Social Change in the basement of their Atlanta home.

Diggs remembered laying on the floor in the middle of their home (a spot her parents thought was safest) listening to people run through their yard and try to get into their home.

For Diggs, Kings legacy lives on through the idea that together we win with love for humanity, which was the theme for the event.

She said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the third Monday in January, was a day meant to honor the life and power and activism of Dr. King and to encourage Americans of all ages, races and backgrounds to join together

What will happen if we do not stop to help the people who need help? What will happen if we dont show love for humanity? Diggs asked.

During the celebration, Ron Ferguson, chairman of Boyton Street Community Center board, recognized community service award recipients, Dorothy Carter, who will celebrate her 100th birthday Jan. 21, and Marion Mayor Robert Butler, who Ferguson called a key contributor to what we do at Boyton Street Community Center.

He also recognized recipients of the Kathleen Pape Scholarship, Tori Holst, a freshman at North Central College in Naperville, and Alexis Hart, a junior at Maryville University in St. Louis. Donations were accepted during the celebration for the scholarship fund.

The program for the celebration included music and readings from Boyton Street Community Centers Afterschool All Stars and music from Refuge Temple Church of God in Christ and the Womens Ensemble from St. Pauls Chapel.

The event ended with a luncheon.

Boyton Street Community Center in located at 501 W. Boyton St. in Marion. For more information call 618-997-1113.
Chapin resident Albert Bueno has little to no farming experience.

"I did not see the future in it," Bueno said.

Instead, the 60-year-old worked for years in the corporate world as chief executive officer of a Chapin-based pre-employment drug testing/screening company.

After logging over three million flight miles, he figured it was time to try his hand at something new.

Today, Bueno is one of three people who plan to grow hemp in The T&D Region as part of a statewide pilot program.

He plans to grow 19.54 acres of the crop in the western end of Orangeburg County with a local partner.

John Andrew Fogle will grow 20 acres and Patrick Jamison Jr. will grow about 5.5 acres as part of the 2018 S.C. Industrial Hemp Pilot Program. Fogle will grow in Orangeburg County, while Jamison will grow his crop both in Orangeburg and Lexington counties. Fogle and Jamison chose not to comment for this story.

The South Carolina Department of Agriculture selected Bueno and the others to be among 20 farmers in the state to grow industrial hemp. The crop will be grown on a total 365 acres in 15 counties.

The 20 permit growers were chosen from 131 applicants. All growers went through State Law Enforcement Division background checks.

Bueno and his 23-year-old son, Alexander, began looking into growing hemp two years ago. They even contemplated going out west to grow it.

Hes "tickled" that a conservative state like South Carolina has opened the door to a crop that he believes will revolutionize agriculture in the state.

"I give the government all the credit in the world to go down this path," he said.

Laws related to growing industrial hemp have been inconsistent, with 90 percent of the hemp in the U.S. coming from China, Bueno said.

"We can import it from China but we can't grow it in the states," he said. "Does that make sense to you?"

The criminalization of hemp began in 1939 when the federal Marijuana Tax Act strictly regulated the cultivation and sale of all cannabis varieties.

The federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970 classified all forms of cannabis as a Schedule I drug, making it illegal to grow in the United States. As a result, the industrial uses for hemp evaporated and were largely forgotten.

The federal Farm Bill signed into law in 2014 approved the growth of hemp for research purposes in states that allow it.

About 31 states are now growing the crop, led by Colorado and Kentucky.

S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill into law in May making it legal for farmers to grow up to 20 acres of the crop for research purposes.

Bueno said hemp has a long history in the United States dating back to the Revolutionary War.

The U.S. Constitution itself was written on hemp, and the plant has been used in a number of ways, including for clothing, rope, oil and medical purposes, he said. Its even got uses in the concrete industry.

Bueno says he is hoping the plant will be used for medical purposes.

"It is a pretty awesome plant," he said.

Now that the opportunity has been provided to grow hemp, Bueno is confident it will succeed.

"It is a versatile and hardy plant that does not require a lot of water," he said, noting pesticides are also not typically a problem. "We think the challenge will be in harvesting. There is not a lot of technology in play here. That is the biggest thing. This is a brand-new industry not only in South Carolina but also in the U.S."

"At the end of the day, we want to be completely vertically integrated with this plant, where we grow it, process it, manufacture it and sell it," Bueno said.

He foresees two growing seasons for hemp. The first round will be planted in late March and harvested in June and the second round will be planted in July and harvested in November.

Bueno said hes researched the crop and is confident it will be grown successfully in South Carolina. His efforts are entirely privately funded, he said.

"I see very little downside," Bueno said.

Still, the industrial hemp crop must overcome the stigma and the misunderstandings surrounding it, he said.

Bueno said contrary to popular notions, hemp is not marijuana.

"It is a scientific fact that hemp has no hallucinogenic effect on the person," he said. "It is a cousin of marijuana but it does not have the THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) that marijuana has."

According to the S.C. Department of Agriculture, hemp and marijuana come from the same plant species, cannabis sativa, but marijuana is the flower of the plant and hemp is the fibers.

Legally, THC levels determine whether the substance is considered an agricultural product or a regulated drug.

The new S.C. law defines industrial hemp as any part of the plant with a THC concentration that does not exceed .3 percent on a dried weight basis. Anything above that is considered marijuana and is illegal in the state.

Fields will be tested to ensure the concentration does not exceed the legal limit. Should it exceed the limit, the crop will be destroyed or reconditioned, according to the S.C. Department of Agriculture.

The department's selection process for the pilot program was based on several key factors, including: completed application, agriculture experience, geographic balance, accredited college/university partner, purpose of the crop, processor experience and location and ability to secure needed equipment and financing.

The Industrial Hemp Pilot Program creates a new opportunity for South Carolina farmers to increase crop diversity, state Commissioner of Agriculture Hugh Weathers stated in a press release. Interest in the program was strong, and the Department of Agriculture worked diligently to select a broad representation of growers.

Five accredited universities will work with pilot program participants: the University of South Carolina, the Medical University of South Carolina, South Carolina State University, Clemson University and USC Beaufort.

This is a new industry for South Carolina, and were hopeful that these first 20 growers will lay a strong foundation for an expanded 2019 program, Weathers said. Ultimately, its about growth and expansion for our farmers and our economy.

After issuing 20 licenses for up to 20 acres for the first year of the program, the state will expand the program to 50 licenses for 50 acres each. After that, the Agriculture Department and the states research universities will determine whether the program will be expanded.

For more information about the Industrial Hemp Pilot Program, visit agriculture.sc.gov.
Shuaa Capital, a premier financial services company in the UAE, in a major move, has elevated its general manager Fawad Tariq Khan to the post of chief executive officer.



Khan brings more than a decade of experience in private equity and debt advisory and investment roles spanning the Middle East and Europe, said the company in a statement.



He was earlier working at Abu Dhabi Financial Group, the controlling shareholder of Shuaa Capital, where he led the investments team focusing on devising and implementing alternative investment strategies globally.



Khan sits as a director on the boards of key Shuaa Capital subsidiaries and also serves on the board of directors of Northacre, a leading developer of high-end luxury residential schemes in London.



He started his career with Deloitte based out of London before joining the Dubai office where he helped set up its Middle East debt advisory practice, said the statement.



He holds an MSc in Business Studies from University College Dublin and a BSc in Computer Science from University College Cork, it added.-TradeArabia News Service
The Saudi Ministry of Housing has started its Ejar Rental Service following complaints that the long-drawn-out delay in the launch of the project had exacerbated price manipulations in the rental market, said a report.



It has been mainly launched to regulate the property rental sector as well as to streamline the contractual relationship between landlords and tenants, reported the Saudi Gazette.



The Ejar e-network allows customers to report violations by real estate brokers through a specific app that can be downloaded to smart devices, it stated.



Landlords and tenants, including expatriates, can use the app called "real estate brokers" to communicate with the supervisory team at Ejar, said the report.



The app allows customers to search licensed real estate agents for renting real estate through the unified electronic lease program. All necessary data and most common violations are available for review, it stated.



A monitoring and supervision team will receive all communications, verify their validity and set up field visits to the respective real estate brokerage to enforce necessary measures, including contacts with the concerned parties and legal procedures through judicial monitors, said the report.



The common violations include real estate activities by non-Saudis, charging excessive commissions, charging commission on renewal of rental contracts, collusion of real estate agents in a location with the aim of price manipulation and failure to register rental contracts in the network, it added.
The Dubai Land Department (DLD) has launched its 2018 real estate promotion plan for the Real Estate Investment Management and Promotion Centre, the departments investment arm.



DLD held a press conference in the presence of Sultan Butti bin Mejren, director-general of DLD, Majida Ali Rashid, assistant director-general and head of the Real Estate Investment Management and Promotion Centre, and a number of key partners from development companies and real estate promotion trustee offices, reported Wam, the Emirates official news agency.



Bin Mejren said: "We are pleased to begin this year by meeting our colleagues from the local and international media to inform them of our future plans to promote the real estate sector in Dubai. We promise everyone a schedule of activities and events that contribute to enhancing transparency in this sector and strengthening Dubai's position in line with our vision to establish the emirate as the world's premier destination for innovation, trust and happiness.



"Our local and regional partnerships have achieved several positive outcomes as they have allowed us to interact directly with investors looking for ideal investment options. Dubai has earned a bright reputation among the worlds real estate investors and buyers, and we believe it is our duty to provide them with a clear picture of our city and where our real estate sector is headed. The competition between developers is healthy and friendly, and the Dubai real estate market continues its sustainable growth and maturity."



Rashid said: "Dubai is a safe environment for living, working and investing. Thanks to its diversified economic climate, which is capable of attracting business across all sectors, as well as promising growth activities and new industries, Dubai has been able to achieve a leading position in the region. All of these features ensure not only that the investor works in an ideal environment, but also that the emirate continues its sustainable growth and success."



Rashid added that DLD received a total of 10,000 visitors at the Shanghai, Mumbai, Moscow and London editions of the Dubai Property Show (DPS) with the majority being investors interested in Dubais real estate market. The value of bookings and sales made at these exhibitions reached nearly Dh3 billion ($816 million).



Commenting on the Real Estate Investment Management and Promotion Centres 2018 real estate promotion plan, Rashid revealed more details about the DPS, which will be held in London, Shanghai, Mumbai and Moscow this year.



In addition, a range of real estate roadshows and workshops will visit many continents and regions of the world in Africa, America, Asia, East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. DLD will also participate in a series of specialised real estate investment conferences and exhibitions both locally and internationally in 2018.



Dubai Property Show and Property Week will be held in Shanghai in May 2018 before moving to Moscow in September and Mumbai in December.



Roadshows will be organised throughout 2018, reaching many cities in Africa, America, Asia, East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and DLD is also expected to be a strong participant in many foreign real estate exhibitions. The conferences will showcase the initiatives and services that the Real Estate Investment Management and Promotion Centre provides for investors, as well as its role in promoting Expo 2020 as an official supporter of the event.



During these events, DLDs delegates will seek to promote Dubai's attractive investment environment and the factors that make real estate investment in Dubai such an appealing prospect.
The Centre of Waste Management in Abu Dhabi (Tadweer) has signed five new contracts, worth Dh165 million ($45 million) for waste management investment projects in the emirate with leading firms in the waste sector, said a report.



The contracts were announced at the CWM-Tadweer booth at the ongoing EcoWaste Exhibition being held as part of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, reported state news agency Wam.



Falah Al Ahbabi, the chairman of CWM-Tadweer, said these new projects are in line with Abu Dhabi government's masterplan related to sustainability and environmental conservation.



"The new projects will greatly contribute to sustainable waste management and environmental protection by treatment of hazardous waste, reducing landfill waste and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It will enable CWM-Tadweer to fulfil its commitment of ensuring a safe and sustainable future for upcoming generations," he noted.



CWM-Tadweer signed a contract with Green Energy Solutions and Sustainability for the first landfill gas-to-energy investment project in the Middle East at Al Dhafra landfill, said the report.



The project will prevent the release of GHG from landfills into the atmosphere. It is expected to be commissioned to produce about 5 MW of power by September and will be registered with the Clean Development Mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for carbon credit, it stated.



CWM-Tadweer also awarded two new contracts to Ramky and BRS Ventures Joint Venture for medical and hazardous waste incineration projects in Abu Dhabi, and a contract to CleanCo in Al Ain.



Dr BR Shetty, the chairman of BRS Ventures, said: "Having spent more than 40 years in Abu Dhabi, I am honoured to receive this opportunity from CWM that allows me to contribute to the Abu Dhabi environment, along with my long-term associate Ramky."



Allan Ayodhya Ramireddy, the chairman of Ramky Group, said, "We are committed to a long-term association with CWM, along with our partners, BRS Ventures, as we contribute to the sustainable development of UAE and the region."

The facilities in Abu Dhabi will be able to treat about 15,000 tonnes per annum, while the Al Ain facility will treat some 3,000 tonnes per annum. Both projects will be operational by the end of 2018.
Omans rapidly developing logistics sector is being positioned as the biggest contributor to the countrys gross domestic product (GDP) after hydrocarbons, the nations long-standing economic mainstay, said a senior Omani government official.



The logistics sector has been singled out by the Omani government to hasten the sultanates economic diversification away from its current reliance on oil and gas to support GDP growth, Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed al Futaisi, Minister of Transport and Communications, was quoted as saying in an Oman Daily Observer report.



The official delivered the keynote address at the Oman Ports Conference, which was held at the Grand Millennium Muscat yesterday (January 15), it said.



Dr Al Futaisi said that the sultanate is aiming for logistics to be a second source of GDP and for Oman to be global logistics hub by 2040.



He further noted that based on their qualitative and qualitative ambitions, the sectors GDP contribution is targeted at RO3 billion ($7.79 billion) in 2020, up from RO1.1 billion ($2.857 billioni) presently.



Dr Al Futaisi explained that it has been projected to rise to RO14 billion ($36.365 billion) by 2040, a very ambitious target, but not impossible to achieve.
Over 1,000 brands from 28 countries around the world are participating at the SteelFab 2018, the regions leading metal working, metal manufacturing and steel fabrication trade show, being held in Sharjah, UAE, said a report.



Sheikh Fahim bin Sultan Al Qasimi, chairman of the Department of Government Relations, yesterday (January 15) inaugurated the show which will run until January 18, at the Expo Centre Sharjah.



The inauguration of the trade show was attended by Abdullah Sultan Al Owais, chairman of the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI), and chairman of Expo Centre Sharjah, a number of board members of the chamber, Saif Mohamed Al Midfa, CEO of Expo Centre Sharjah, as well as several government officials and representatives from the industry sector in the country, businessmen and industrial investors, reported state news agency Wam.



Sheikh Fahim, accompanied by the Al Owais and a number of dignitaries and officials, toured the trade show, which is the largest trade event held for the Middle East's metal and steel industry.



It is organised by Expo Centre Sharjah with the support of the SCCI and covers an area of 24,000 square metres.



Sheikh Fahim praised the success of Expo Centre Sharjah in attracting a remarkable number of brands and leading international companies from the metal and steel industry.



He added that this success reflects Sharjah's position as a significant centre within the global exhibition industry, as well as the importance of the trade show as a growing international and regional event for the world's leading manufacturers.



Al Owais stressed the prominence of Expo Centre Sharjah as one of the strategic institutions, operating under the umbrella of SCCI, that enhances Sharjah's reputation as a global and regional centre for industrial, commercial and cultural exhibitions.



This is due to the conviction of the importance of the exhibitions and conferences industry and its positive impact in accelerating the economy towards achieving sustainable growth according to the vision of the wise leadership.



Al Owais pointed out that Expo Centre Sharjah seeks to strengthen its international relations network, within the framework of its new strategic plan from 2018 to 2022, in order to attract a number of the world's leading exhibitions, manufacturers, suppliers, and associations to participate in its various annual events.



A number of leading countries in the fields of welding and manufacturing of steel and metals are participating in the event, including Germany, Italy, Turkey, Taiwan, India, China and the UAE.



The trade show will also host Schweissen & Schneiden fair, one of Europes largest gatherings of welding, cutting, and finishing industry professionals, as well as the International Tube Association.



SteelFab 2018 will host several exhibitors for the first time including Birla Precision Technologies, Metachem Chemical Trading, Red Bud Industries, Hartmetall, Jyoti CNC Gabella Macchine, Halcon Systems and Konum.



The first day of the trade show witnessed the announcement of the launch of "SteelFab  Middle East Fabricators Awards 2019", which will be awarded to manufacturers in recognition of their efforts to adopt the best practices, added the report.  TradeArabia News Service
Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), the Bahrain-based aluminium smelter, held its inaugural session of 2018 Town Hall Meetings today (January 16) at its Oasis Hall.



Well-attended by Alba employees and contractors, the 2018 Town Hall Meetings was opened by Albas chief executive officer Tim Murray with a motivational speech followed by his reflections on the companys performance for the full-year of 2017 as well as Albas goals for 2018, said a statement from the company.



The meeting will take place until January 23 for all departments, employees as well as contractors of Alba, it said.



Albas 2018 expectations lays emphasis on four key topics: Safety Selfie; Rise of Line 6; Return of Titan; and Road to Resilience, it added.



Murray said: I would like to begin by thanking Albas management, employees and contractors for the remarkable 981,016 metric tonnes production milestone in 2017  an achievement to be proud of despite the setbacks in the last year.



Our companys Town Hall Meetings have become a much-awaited event on our annual calendar as we look forward to reach-out and directly communicate to all levels of employees and contractors on the milestones accomplished and the year ahead for us, he said.



Also, 2018 will be transformational as Line 6 Expansion Project will be in full swing with large number of workforce on-site. However, our resilience in the past year has demonstrated that the impossible turned possible when we trust ourselves to do more, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
The founder and chairman of Damac Properties, Hussain Sajwani, will be speaking about the increasing demand for advanced digital skills on day one of the World Economic Forum (WEF), taking place on January 23 - 26, in Davos, Switzerland.



Sajwani's session participation brings into focus the Middle East's efforts in developing ICT skills among its young population, where Sajwani was the main supporter of the recently launched 'One Million Arab Coders' Initiative in October 2017.



The initiative was conceived from the vision of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, for the creation of an empowered, happier society through learning and skills development.



The 'Digital Skills Imperative' session will bring top decision makers and thinkers together to discuss the need for advancing digital skills as a priority, in response to rapid global digitalization and mass automation. The session aims to identify whether existing skill-building efforts can scale up to address the changing nature of the digital workforce.



"As the world moves towards the adoption of a digital economy, it is becoming increasingly dependent on the availability of a skilled workforce, where each nation's economic success and failure is dependent on its efforts in developing a talent pool of highly skilled workers to cope with this disruption," said Sajwani.



'One Million Coders' is a first-of-its-kind pan-Arab education initiative supported by the Hussain Sajwani - Damac Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Damac Group and its Chairman. Launched in collaboration with Dubai Future Foundation, the initiative aims to create a pool of one million software coders to lead the Arab world into a digital era.



The 'Digital Skills Imperative' session at WEF aims to highlight some of the key industry trends driving demand for advanced skills, and raises a number of discussions around the topic including shifting mindsets on lifelong learning and inclusive opportunities, designing incentives for collective action and investment, and understanding the role of emerging technologies.



"The digital skills gap is a global dilemma, not just one for the emerging markets, as millions of jobs in software development already need to be filled right now, Sajwani said.



What happens when these jobs increase by 20, 30 or 40 per cent in the near future? Where will the global community find a sustainable stream of talent to tap into? The global community needs more initiatives like 'One Million Coders' to empower their societies with the skills and technical expertise required for jobs of the future. This is a strategic imperative for the economic success of any nation, as the world enters the Fourth Industrial Revolution," he added.  TradeArabia News Service
The UAE's General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) has said that Bahraini radars detected the Qatari jets as they intercepted two UAE civilian flights yesterday (Jan 15).

"The crews and passengers saw the incidents with their naked eyes, which proves that the interception posed a present and clear threat to the lives of innocent civilians," said Saif Al Suwaidi, Director-General of the GCAA.

Earlier, the GCAA alleged that Qatar's military aircraft had intercepted two civilian UAE planes carrying a total of 277 passengers while preparing to land in Bahrain International Airport.

The GCAA added that both flights were in regular pre-scheduled services and they followed all standard procedures, including obtaining of necessary permissions to fly.

"The Qatari fighter jets intercepted the first plane at 10:30, while the second was intercepted at 11:05 while flying at 9,000 to 10,000 feet altitude in regular flights approved by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, ICAO," said Al Suwaidi.

Al Suwaidi went on to say that the Qatari side had neither shown prior objection to the use of the aircraft's path nor issued a warning after the use of the path.

He described the act of Qatari fighter jets approaching the civilian UAE planes without warning as a flagrant violation of international laws, a threat to civil aviation safety, and a serious and unprecedented act of intimidation.

"The UAE rejects this threat to the safety of flights and will take all necessary legal actions to ensure safety and security of civil aviation traffic," he said.

The GCAA described the act as a severe violation of international laws and an infringement of civil aviation safety standards. It said it was considering available legal options with the ICAO and other relevant organisations.

Meanwhile, Bahrain has also strongly condemned the interception by Qatari fighter jets of the two UAE civilian aircraft, stressing that this is a clear violation of relevant international conventions and laws.

According to the Bahrain News Agency, the Bahrain Foreign Ministry affirmed in a statement that the hostile behaviour by Qatar against civil aircraft has become frequent in recent times and it jeopardises the safety of civil aviation and poses a threat to the lives of civilians.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs stresses the Kingdom of Bahrain's full support for the UAE and its backing for all of the measures it takes to maintain its security and stability, to stop these violations and to repel these breaches by the State of Qatar," the statement added.
The expected drop in OECD inventories suggests that oil prices will likely be higher in 2018 than originally seen and Brent crude oil price is projected to reach $64 per barrel (/bbl) this year, said the Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML) in a new report.



Put differently, we now expect Brent crude oil prices to average $9/bbl or 17 per cent above last year in 2018, added BofAML in its Global Energy Weekly report.



Opec + Russia could start discussing an exit plan soon



As prices rise, the focus could soon turn to how Opec and the non-Opec deal participants will unwind the production cuts that were agreed to in December 2016. After all, rising prices could soon incentivize elastic US shale supply to come back into the market at an accelerating rate.



In that regard, we present three possible scenarios for the Opec + Russia alliance to unfold. A first option is that the deal is extended through 2019 or beyond. A second option is that the deal is unwound gradually and the cartel exerts some discipline with only modest increases in supply. A third possibility is a return to another market share war between Russia and the cartel members, the report said.



A return to another oil market share war is highly unlikely



How likely is a return to a market share war? In our view, this outcome is very unlikely, as it works against the interests of all participants in the deal in the short run. Following two decades of counter-cyclical Opec supply swings to stabilize prices, Saudi Arabian oil production policy turned pro-cyclical in 2014.



Yet the costs to the Saudi treasury have been enormous, with FX reserves falling by 240 billion in the past three years. Having said that, as supply rose, the cartel and Russia gained market share against non-Opec in 2015/16. This situation has reversed with the cuts and Russia and Opec are now losing market share, although higher prices are making up for volumes. So the key question that Opec and Russia have to ask themselves is: what is the revenue maximization opportunity in the oil market?



Gradual approach as Opec prepares to exit



Revenue is of course a function of prices and volumes. If prices climb too much and global supply responds furiously, Opec could end up again in a tough spot. In our view, a backwardated Brent market with a long-term anchor around $55 to 60/bbl is probably a good outcome for the cartel. Maybe as good as it gets. Should prices rise from there, US shale oil supply could shoot up higher, said BofAML.



Oil demand could get hurt. So Opec and Russia would probably be better off by signalling a gradual approach or a "tapering" of sorts. Essentially, Opec could signal to the market that production will increase by, say, 40,000 b/d every month unless prices go down significantly. That strategy would keep both spot and forward prices in a range and the crude market in backwardation.



Output from Saudi, Russia, Iraq, and UAE could rise



Still, an expectation of multi-year declines in production ahead will be easily offset by the growth appetite of a few key players. Primarily, Russia has a strong Greenfield oil project pipeline and companies expect to increase output by 1.5 million b/d by 2022, more than offsetting its own older field declines.



On the Opec front, a number of countries in the deal like the United Arab Emirates have been actively investing in new capacity, too and Iran and Iraq both have ambitions to increase output. Saudi Arabia is likely to remain restrained in its expansion of production capacity as prices are probably more important for the kingdom than modest volume growth.  TradeArabia News Service
Engie, a worldwide energy leader, has launched Partnering Robotics Diya One, an intelligent robot, which purifies air as it moves around inside the building during the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, UAE.



Diya One was introduced for the first time in the Middle East region during a Tech Talk session, which took place at the Energy Efficiency Theatre today (January 16).



The press was briefed by Helene Verbockhaven, deputy director, Engie Digital and Dr Ramesh Caussy, founder of Partnering Robotics.



Globally, Engie started working on this project with Partnering Robotics in 2015. Diya One also delivers other functions, such as reducing energy consumption and managing maintenance requests from occupants. Combining the specialist expertise of Engie Cofely with Partnering Robotics innovation, the partnership will facilitate a range of innovative services to be developed in order to boost building energy performance.



The launch of Diya One in the region is aligned with our strategic goals in becoming a leader in energy transition. Energy efficiency is pivotal to ensuring a safe, reliable, affordable and sustainable energy system for the future. Through this partnership, we remain committed to seek and implement solutions collectively for energy challenges across the region, said Florence Fontani, director of Strategy, Communications & ESR, Engie Middle East, South & Central Asia, and Turkey.



This fully autonomous robot could contribute to foster a more sustainable and healthier indoor environment; allow efficient building energy management; and assist in monitoring security in buildings and at events, she added.



When I set up Partnering Robotics in 2007, I had a dream of creating an intelligent device, which is able to contribute to peoples well-being but at the same time is energy efficient. We live in a world, where air pollution is becoming a major health issue, said Dr Caussy.

Diya One was developed with this cause in mind. Thanks to its innovative features, Diya One gathers various environmental data and store them in a secured cloud, it evaluates the indoor air quality in real time, for better, quicker, and appropriate response to complex and changing air phenomena, as well as it is able to self-evaluate its battery life and can decide to get back to its dedicated charging dock when needed.



Strategic partnerships in research, digital and energy fields are the core of the innovation strategy of Partnering Robotics. We are honoured and grateful to have Engie as our partner, and we are look forward to many more years of innovations together, he continued.



Engie is the leading independent power and desalination water developer and producer in the Gulf Corporation Council countries, with a total gross portfolio of 30,000 MW power and over 1200 MIGD desalination water production.  TradeArabia News Service
Baros Maldives has announced the appointment of Ahmed Jihad-Jay as its new general manager.



Having worked at Baros Maldives in 2010 as operations manager, Jihad-Jay is coming home to Baros, this time as general manager, after gaining a wealth of experience in the Maldives.



He began his hotel career at Full Moon Maldives, after completing a degree in Hospitality Management at TAFE, QLD, Australia. He started as front office manager, working his way up to resident manager. This was followed by a stint at Sheraton Maldives, before he joined the team at Baros for the first time in 2008. His career took him to Niyama Maldives in 2011, followed by Huvafenfushi, where he remained resort manager for the past five years.



Being one of the very first luxury resorts to open in the Maldives, Baros always remained close to Ahmeds heart. He said: "I am delighted to return to my Baros Maldives family as the general manager and am thrilled to be a part of a team and resort with such strong Maldivian connections. The hotel is Maldivian-owned and is extremely proud of its roots and culture, just as I am, so I am so excited to take on this new challenge"



Only the third resort to open in the Maldives (1973) and the first Dive Centre to open in the archipelago (1979), Baros Maldives is situated in the central southern part of North Male Atoll, just 25 minutes by speedboat from the international airport. It is surrounded by a beautiful house reef, only 15 to 30 metres from the shore, alive with colours, fish, turtles, rays and coral. The resort continues to set the benchmark for a romantic, luxury holiday with genuine, heartfelt Maldivian hospitality. It has received countless prestigious awards from guests and the travel industry and remains a pioneer in conservation in the Maldives. 75 premium private villas, three restaurants, two bars and an outstanding spa feature on this small coral island. - TradeArabia News Service
Luxury hotel brand Shaza Hotels has announced the signing of its first Mysk Hotel in Kuwait.



The new property, situated opposite the Messilah beach district on the south coast of Kuwait City, and which is already under construction, will welcome guests at the beginning of 2020, inviting them to experience a new fragrance to upscale hotels.



Al-Yousifi group is thrilled to be an active player shaping the new face of the Kuwait hospitality market. Its a promising and very dynamic sector at the moment, with several new developments in the works. We are very confident that Mysk Hotel in Kuwait will set itself apart from the crowd by emphasising bold design, innovative marketing, social influence and world-class hospitality, said Dr. Adel Al-Yousifi, the owner of the hotel.



Mysk Hotel in Kuwait will exhibit surprising interiors filled with character to create a destination imbued with flair. The propertys launch will coincide with a social media campaign to attract locals and visitors wanting to experience a new, stylish and cheerful venue in the city. The most renowned influencers and fashionistas in the GCC hail from Kuwait, and the hotel aims at becoming their venue of choice.



A mere 15 minutes from the airport and boasting magnificent sea views, the 200-room hotel also hosts meeting and banqueting space to cater for conferences, exhibitions and weddings. In an ideal location away from the hustle and bustle of downtown Kuwait, this is the best destination for the corporate market, the staycationers, and the local community alike.



Simon Coombs, president and CEO of Shaza Hotels, said: The Mysk Hotel in Kuwait is going to add flair to the Kuwaiti hospitality scene. Our emphasis on fashion, social media and food will craft a bold new destination which we hope will become the favourite hangout for the elegant and sophisticated Kuwaitis. At the same time, were curating meeting and banqueting spaces for our public sector and corporate clients. The aim is to offer a space where new ideas and connections flow - a space that belongs to everyone, be they corporate clients or young fashion enthusiasts." - TradeArabia News Service


Passenger traffic at Munich Airport increased by an impressive 2.3 million to a new all-time high of 44.6 million in 2017, up 5.5 per cent over the 2016 figure.



The airport also saw a strong surge in take-offs and landings, with an increase of more than 10,000 to approximately 405,000  a gain of 2.6 per cent. Without the reduction in services by Air Berlin in the summer period, followed by that airline's bankruptcy, the increase would have been even bigger. Another record is reported by the airfreight segment, which achieved a total turnover of around 379,000 tons in 2017  a 7 per cent gain over the previous year.



"These are outstanding traffic figures, especially when we consider the turbulence the aviation industry is currently experiencing. The massive increases once again underscore our airport's importance as one of the leading air transportation hubs in Europe," said Dr. Michael Kerkloh, the president and CEO of Munich Airport.



As in previous years, passenger growth in Munich benefited in particular from above-average gains in international traffic: The strongest growth was seen in the intercontinental segment, where traffic increased by 7 per cent to 7.3 million passengers. Demand was strong especially for connections from Munich to destinations in the US. Continental services remained the largest traffic segment with a total of 27.4 million passengers  6.5 per cent more than in 2016. Within Europe, the strongest growth was seen on routes to and from Greece and Spain. On domestic routes within Germany, traffic increased by more than 2 per cent to over 9.8 million passengers. The percentage of seats occupied was up again in 2017, increasing to a new record level of 76.5 per cent.



Munich also expanded its global route network yet again: With 266 destinations  nine more than in the previous year  passengers at Bavaria's international hub had more routes to choose from than ever before. The number of airlines offering scheduled services in Munich increased by two to 102. - TradeArabia News Service


Meet award-winning artisans and buy their products at Kerala Arts and Crafts Village
The Environmental Protection Agency will hold an all-day listening session March 27 in Gillette on its proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan.

The agency held a single listening session in West Virginia in November, where members of the coal community in Appalachia, as well as environmental groups, weighed in with familiar arguments for and against the controversial regulation.

The plan was an Obama-era attempt to curb carbon dioxide emissions from power plants to combat climate change, and its repeal was a key tenet of Donald Trumps campaign for the presidency.

The Clean Power Plan would have taken the largest toll on coal, as coal-fired power produces about twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas plants.

The plan was widely disliked in Wyoming, and the state was one of more than a dozen that fought its implementation in the courts.

Coal country has had a rocky few years, with Wyoming coal production hitting a 30-year low in 2016. Nearly 1,000 workers lost their jobs during a two-year slide in production. The three largest coal firms operating in the state filed for bankruptcy. Though fear of regulations like the Clean Power Plan have dominated conversations about coals viability in recent years, cheap natural gas is largely to blame for the recent downturn. It has been outcompeting coal in many power markets, as have an influx of renewable options.

Coal-reliant states like Wyoming have felt that crunch in a real way, nowhere more so than Gillette.

In addition to Wyoming, the Environmental Protection Agency will hold listening sessions in San Francisco and Kansas City, Missouri.
At first, the roar of snowmobiles can be intimidating to small children.

The kids shy away as the machines rumble in the snow, said Phil Santistevan, president of the Casper Snow Gypsies snowmobiling club. His granddaughter was afraid of the noise for years.

But once the kids are riding through the snow atop one of the machines, its not uncommon for the young riders to find themselves lulled to sleep by the gentle rock of the snowmobile and its constant rumble.

Once you get them past that spooky engine sound then they dont ever want to get off, Santistevan said.

Every year, the Snow Gypsies host an event dedicated to introducing young children to the sport. At Take a Friend, the members of the club give rides to children of any age and invite local programs for kids to bring their charges as well. This year, the club invited the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the Bikers Against Child Abuse and Pop in the Shop to bring kids to come play. The event is scheduled for Sunday.

The club gives those children, many of whom have difficult home lives, a chance to play in the snow and simply be kids. The Snow Gypsies bring up extra clothes so that the children stay warm as they glide through the trees.

We just want to give the kids a chance to get out and have some fun, Santistevan said. As long as they have a good time with us, thats what matters.

Charity has always been an important part of the clubs activities. Along with the Take a Friend event, the group raises money for a scholarship fund that all the snowmobiling clubs across the state contribute to.

Santistevan joined the club in 1992 as a way to meet others who enjoy snowmobiling. Through the group, Santistevan and his wife have made a number of close friends and many memories. In the summer, the group meets for picnics and other snow-less activities. Over Presidents Day weekend every year, the approximately 30 members of the club and their families travel to somewhere in Wyoming for a longer weekend of riding and spending time together. This year, theyre headed to the Bighorn Mountains.

A lot of people thought it would be just a bunch of macho snowmobilers  thats not the case, he said.

The couple began snowmobiling in the late 80s and have raised their children and grandchildren in the sport as well. The sport has changed over the years, however. Snowmobiles are more powerful than ever. Equipment is more expensive. Its harder to get younger families to invest in a machine.

But despite the changes, the thrill of blasting through the trees, powdery snow flying from all sides, remains.

Its all still a rush, Santistevan said.
Tuesday support meetings

Alcoholics Anonymous: 6:30 a.m., 917 N. Beech; 8:30 a.m., 500 S. Wolcott; 10 a.m., 328 E. A; noon, 500 S. Wolcott; 2 p.m., 917 N. Beech; 5:30 p.m., 1124 Elma, Imitate the Image Church; 5:30 p.m., 328 E. A; 7 p.m., 500 S. Wolcott, closed; 7 p.m., 520 CY; 8 p.m., 328-1/2 E. A; 8 p.m., 328 E. A; 8 p.m., 917 N. Beech. 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.

Narcotics Anonymous: Noon, 500 S. Wolcott, 12-24 Club; 7 p.m., 15th and Melrose, at the church. Web site: http://www.urmrna.org.

Republican women host legislative panel

Natrona County Republican Women kick the new year off at 11:30 a.m., on Tuesday at Fire Rock Steakhouse in the Granite Room by hosting a pre-legislative panel. Speaker Steve Harshman, Sen. Jim Anderson, and Reps. Pat Sweeney, Joe MacGuire and Jerry Obermueller will speak about the upcoming session and taking questions.

The cost is $15 and reservations are a must. NCRW is open to all registered Republicans in Natrona County.

AAUW readers meet

The AAUW Readers Favorites book club will meet at noon on Tuesday at the Lilacs and Lavender Tea Room. After a no-host lunch, Carolyn Deuel will review Home, Julie Andrews autobiography of her early years. Please contact Robin at 259-4174 for reservations or information.

Colored pencil society

The Wyoming Colored Pencil Society group will begin its 2018 monthly meetings at Art 321 on Tuesday, starting at noon. Anyone interested in colored pencil art, willing to share processes or techniques and anxious connect with other colored pencil artists is welcome. The cost is $5 and the group is open to all. Nationally noted pencil artist, Eileen Nistler will be there and you are welcome to bring a brown bag lunch.

Learn to knit or crochet

Learn a new portable life skill at the Casper Recreation Centers Beginning Knitting & Crochet classes beginning Tuesday.

Join Nancy Pawlowski and learn the basics of Knitting or Crochet in this six-week class that meets Tuesdays from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Crochet or knit a scarf or hat for the windy Wyoming weather. A supply list is available at registration, but there will be supplies to use the first night. Fee for the class is $68 for non-members and $56 for those with a Recreation Center pass.

An Intermediate Knitting & Crochet class will be offered in March for those who already know the basics.

For more information or to register, please call 235-8383, stop by the Casper Recreation Center at 1801 E. 4th St., or check online at www.activecasper.com.

Community bible study begins

The Heart of Casper Community Bible study will meet for a womens bible study Tuesday evenings, starting Tuesday through March 6 at 6:30 p.m., at Hilltop Baptist Church, 2555 E. 2nd Street. We will be studying from the book of John, in Jennie Allens study, Proven: Where Christs Abundance meets our Great Need.

Too many of us walk through life feeling as if we dont measure up. We always seem to thirst for more. We think if we could only work harder or be better, we could be enough. But the truth is, we will never be enough. And thankfully, Jesus is.

For more information, please call 267-1351.

Author talk, George Trojan

Author George Trojan will discuss his memoir, Too Young for the Times, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., on Tuesday at the Natrona County Library. Trojan will recount his time living as a young man in Poland and Germany during WWII. The talk is free and open to the public. Copies of Trojans memoir will be available for purchase, which he will sign following his talk. Trojan is also a member of the librarys Wednesday Writers group, which meets the first Wednesday of every month at 10 a.m. Call 577.READ x2 or email reference@natronacountylibrary.org for more information.

Needle Guild talks basics

The Guild will meet at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday at the Central Wyoming Senior Center, 1831 East 4th Street. We will begin a series on The Basics of Embroidery, starting with ground fabric, the foundation on which we stitch.

For further information, please contact Ann Hudson at 265-5510.
Roads dont kill grizzly bears. People on roads kill grizzly bears.

Whether thats a truism or a wildlife policy debate, the claim earned some scientific credibility with a recent study of Canadian grizzly bears. The researchers found that as the number of roads in the woods goes up, the number of bears goes down  assuming those roads are used.

Not only do bears die near roads, bears also avoid these areas, making many habitats with roads through them less effective, said Clayton Lamb, who led the research for his doctoral studies at University of Alberta. By closing roads, we can reduce the negative impact of roads in a lot of ways. We cant turn roads back into forest tomorrow, so the best thing we can do right now is to close them. The effects are immediate.

The study illustrates some intriguing differences between grizzly management in Canada and the United States, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service oversees the bears Endangered Species Act protection.

Last July, the agency removed federal protection from grizzlies in the three-state area of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem after 42 years of recovery effort. That decision was immediately challenged in court. Nevertheless, FWS is also moving ahead with plans to delist grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem between the Canadian border and Missoula.

The presence of roads in grizzly country plays a big part in the bears long-term security. For example, grizzly advocates argued a proposed 13-mile road leading into the Montanore copper mine along the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness would lead to bear deaths, either by vehicle collisions or increased hunting accidents and poaching.

Access to decommissioned or abandoned roads is also a factor in Sen. Steve Daines proposed wilderness study area release legislation, which might allow bikes and off-highway vehicles in potential grizzly habitat in the Sapphire Mountains and Blue Joint wilderness study areas around the Bitterroot Valley. Flathead National Forest planners have developed road density standards for four national forests that harbor grizzlies.

Canadian grizzly bear scientist Michael Proctor said British Columbia wants to expand on the United States experience with the relationship between road restrictions and grizzly survival.

You guys figured this out 30 years ago, said Proctor, who assisted Lamb with his B.C. study. Youve pulled the Yellowstone grizzly population back to the point where its almost delisted. And road access management played a very big role in that.

British Columbia voters ended trophy grizzly hunting last December. They took that measure despite living in a province with between 13,000 and 15,000 grizzlies, where hunters killed about 300 bears a year. Proctor said the decision appeared to be more a moral choice than a wildlife management one.

Were not closing the hunt due to a conservation issue, Proctor said. By and large, the hunt was sustainable. But most people dont like it. That percentage is pretty high.

However, Canadians like their motorized backcountry access as much as people in the United States do. So Lamb and his colleagues looked at how grizzlies use wild country when roads are present or absent.

Most of the work focused on population surveys in and around British Columbias 101,000-acre Granby Provincial Park. The protected area lies about 200 miles north of Spokane, Washington. It holds an estimated 87 grizzlies.

There are about four times more bears in that park than outside in poorer habitat with more roads, Lamb said. But in those poorer areas, when they close the roads, grizzly density went up, as if the roads werent there.

Lambs research has already led to some road closure decisions in the Monashee Mountains of eastern British Columbia, according to University of Alberta spokeswoman Jennifer Pascoe. But Lamb said those decisions have many moving parts.

Our study shows if you have a lot of roads in productive grizzly habitat, closing or reducing those roads should help bears, Lamb said. How you go about closing them is more of a management decision.
The temperature was hovering around 12 degrees, but that didnt stop about 100 participants from marching Monday morning in downtown Casper to honor the legacy of late civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.

He died for the cause. The least I can do is put on my coat and walk in the cold for a few blocks, said Judy Trohkimoinen.

Participants shivered in their coats and held up signs calling for peace and equality as they made their way from City Park to the First United Methodist Church.

As she warmed herself up inside, Trohkimoinen explained that she felt it was especially important to participate in this years event because of the current political climate.

Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has sparked controversy for making remarks some have called racist. Most recently, the president drew ire after allegedly using vulgar language to reference some African countries during a meeting on immigration last week. Trump has since denied using the expression in a post on his Twitter account.

Forty-five has made racism okay again and set us back 50 years, said Trohkimoinen, adding that those who do not agree with his views must make their voices heard.

Some people attended the chilly march to show their support for diversity and culture.

I think its important to not discriminate, said Ashlee Logan, a store manager at Starbucks in Casper.

Once all the marchers made their way into the church, there was a one-hour service with remarks from Casper Mayor Ray Pacheco, State Treasurer Mark Gordon and keynote speaker Hamid Kahn, an attorney, professor and civil rights activist.

Kahn was born and raised in Wyoming, but his family immigrated to the United States from Pakistan. Kahn said his parents ran a motel and strove to build a prosperous life in their new country.

His father would often work late into the night and his mothers hands and feet were calloused from scrubbing the rooms, he recalled. But some will always challenge whether his family really belongs in the country.

We all share this county, and we all share the idea that is its a grand republic founded on ideals and on the backs of immigrants, he said.

Gordon, who traveled from Cheyenne to attend the event, praised King and his followers for working to make a difference without the use of violence. The treasurer urged the audience not to take any rights for granted and to continue working to ensure that freedom is protected.

Pacheco, who said at a recent City Council meeting that racism is alive and well in all areas of the world, thanked everyone for attending the event and encouraged the crowd to be kinder and more compassionate in the coming year.

Although she enjoyed the march and the speakers, participant Darcia Edwards said she wished more people had come out to the event. Instead of being a day to relax, people should look at the holiday as an opportunity to be politically active or to participate in community service.

Explaining that her children are bi-racial, Edwards said she brings them to the march each year because she wants them to understand that its okay to be different.

We can love everyone, she said.

The event was organized by Serve Wyoming, an organization that promotes collaborative efforts among private, non-profit and governmental organizations that advance community service. A handful of other groups such as United Church of Christ, also helped.

Shelly McAlpin, the executive director of Serve Wyoming, encouraged anyone interested in serving their communities to contact the organization.

We help people find ways to give of themselves year round, she said.
A Wyoming man charged with threatening his sisters boyfriend with a gun at a west Casper home pleaded guilty Thursday as part of a deal that could keep him out of prison.

Colton Wagner entered his plea in Natrona County District Court to a single count of aggravated assault and battery. As part of a plea deal, prosecutors agreed to drop three other charges against him. The deal calls for Wagner to serve probation, including a term at Casper Re-Entry Center, in lieu of a three to five year prison sentence.

If Wagner violates the terms of his probation, which would be set by Judge Thomas Sullins at sentencing, he could serve the prison time.

Although both prosecution and defense attorneys agreed to the terms of the deal, it will still have to be accepted by Sullins.

Wagner told the judge on Tuesday that he had pulled a Glock pistol on his sisters boyfriend this summer and threatened the man.

Charging documents in the case alleged that Wagner pointed a handgun at the boyfriend and waved the gun at others who were in the same room. He later threatened to shoot everybody in the room. When Casper police arrested Wagner he had brass knuckles on his person, but no gun.

All six people present told police that they felt Wagner was mentally unstable and that he would have shot the gun if he had the chance, the documents state.

Officers later found a Glock with nine rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber under a kitchen sink. Police also found a box of ammunition in the car that Wagner had been driving. Ten rounds were missing from the ammunition box, according to the documents.

Wagner remained free on bond Tuesday morning.
A school funding proposal would cost Wyoming more than $1.54 billion a year, roughly $50 million more than the current systems price tag, according to an education consultants report that was released to the public Monday.

The final report is the penultimate moment in a nine-month process of reviewing the states funding model. The high price tag quashes any hope that some lawmakers may have had that recalibration, as the examination is known, would help solve  at least partially  the states education funding deficit.

I was somewhat hopeful that we would have a reduced recommended model, rather than the Picus and Odden model, which weve always felt is a pretty rich model, said Sen. Hank Coe, referring to the states current funding system. But it didnt turn out that way. I can remember Speaker (Steve) Harshman saying last year at the session, Recalibration is OK, but be careful what you ask for. And thats kind of whats reared its ugly head.

Coe, a Cody Republican, said legislative staff told him the $1.54 billion recommendation is about $50 million more than what the state currently spends. In the 2016-17 school year, the price tag was $1.49 billion, according to state data.

With the legislative session set to begin Feb. 12, the Select Committee on School Finance Recalibration  of which Coe is chairman  will hold two final meetings at the end of this month to consider the proposal. It will likely be drafted into a bill, Coe said, which the committee may choose to vote through to be considered during the session.

But he cautioned that he didnt think it would have the support to make it that far, although he said he had not polled the senators on the committee.

Sen. Chris Rothfuss, a Laramie Democrat who also sits on the committee, said he would be surprised if the Legislature had an appetite to increase spending by another $50 million.

He added that the findings reinforced that, despite criticism from some lawmakers and others, Wyomings education system was appropriately funded.

I think what it did was put to rest  hopefully  this idea that if we sought out a different consultant wed get a different answer, Rothfuss said. It did quite the opposite. They spent several months working throughout the state ... and at the end of it all, they came back with a number that was within a few percentage points of where weve been.

The proposal was drafted by Augenblick, Palaich and Associates, a Denver-based firm hired by the state to examine the current funding system and Wyomings schools at large. Recalibration, which was scheduled to begin in 2020, was triggered last March by lawmakers as they grappled with an education funding deficit that at one time was as large as $700 million.

When we look around the country obviously there are some states that fund education at a dramatically lower rate than Wyoming, Rothfuss said. There are members of the Senate that really wanted (the consultants) to explain to us how we can spend those very, very low dollar amounts. That was the hope.

The state-hired experts set out to review Wyomings funding system, compare the state to others across the country and consider alternate models.

In December, the consultants sent the first draft of their proposed model to lawmakers. The report among other things  recommended increasing both teacher salaries and classroom sizes. The two moves would seek to more accurately reflect whats happening in school districts, where class sizes are slightly higher than what the state pays for, with more money being used to boots teachers salaries.

Notably missing from that December report, however, was an estimated financial impact. This final report, then, gave lawmakers  and the public  their first look at how the consultants proposal compared to what the state currently spends on schools.

It also did what some educators had been warning lawmakers about for months: It proposed an increase to state education funding. While some lawmakers had suggested that recalibration could be the vehicle for cutting schools, that is not its intended purpose.

The process is first used to establish what constitutes an equitable and adequate education to all Wyoming children. After thats set, the consultants must determine how much money is needed to deliver that education.

So, educators have said for months, recalibration could return a cheaper model. But it could also bring a more expensive one.

In that end, thats whats happened. Coe said he was disappointed with how recalibration was conducted by the consultants and with the final product. He had supported the review last session but said Monday he said in hindsight he didnt think it was a good idea.

Knowing what I know now, I wouldnt pursue it, Coe said.

Harshman, a Casper Republican, said he couldnt remember where the idea of an early recalibration came from last year. He said he supported it and thought more information was a good thing.

He and Coe both said they anticipated the model would be converted into a bill draft so the committee would consider it. But whether the committee will support a bill that hikes the price of education instead of cuts it is unclear, at best.

Whats next

The recommendation leaves the path forward unclear. The state still has an education deficit to tackle, recalibration or not. Rothfuss and Brian Farmer, who heads the Wyoming School Boards Association, both warned against cut-minded lawmakers taking pieces of the consultants proposal and trying to pass it through legislation as a la carte options.

For instance, the proposal calls for increasing class sizes. In a vacuum, tinkering with student-to-teacher ratios could result in a significant cut to districts budgets. But in the consultants recommendation, the cut was balanced out with salary increases, that impact was heavily  if not entirely  blunted.

But if a legislator were to propose a bill that solely cut class sizes without increasing salaries, then the cut would be heavy.

It explicitly says in the final report that that is unacceptable, Rothfuss said. But I still expect to hear it during the session.

Coe said the Senate is still opposed to any revenue increases until there are more cuts, and a bill sponsored by the Joint Education Committee would cut more than $16 million from schools next year. But Rothfuss said lawmakers were saying the same thing last session, that cuts have to come first. More than $36 million was cut then, and no revenue has been raised.

I havent heard the rhetoric change, he said.

Harshman, who backed a five-part approach to tackling the deficit last year, said he support a similar package this time around. Rothfuss said he would want that as well.

Harshman added that lawmakers would have to give Wyomingites an honest-to-God balance sheet. That accounting will have to involve diverting some savings into revenue for schools, he said.
A Montana judge has temporarily restricted wolf hunting and trapping near Yellowstone and Glacier national parks and imposed tighter statewide limits on killing the predators. Wildlife advocates sued last month claiming that looser hunting rules adopted in the Republican-controlled state could harm wolf populations. State District Court Judge Christopher Abbott on Tuesday ordered officials to reimpose rules from 2020 that allow the killing of only five wolves per person, instead of 20, and forbid the use of snares for trapping. Abbott also limited hunting and trapping near the national parks. Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte criticized the ruling, saying he thinks the judge overstepped his bounds. But state wildlife officials have pledged to comply with the order.
LARAMIE  A 10-year housing plan  in development for the past several months and now finished  recommends the University of Wyoming tear down two of its residence halls and heavily renovate the four remaining traditional towers.

The UW Board of Trustees is scheduled to discuss the housing plan for two hours during its meeting Thursday. Vice President for Student Affairs Sean Blackburn said he hopes the board votes to approve the plan.

All told, if the board moves forward with every aspect, the total price tag could come to $245.4 million. The board is not, however, required to act on every suggestion outlined in the plan.

It really is laying that groundwork for the next decade for where we need to go and what it should generally look like, he said. And we obviously have the option as we go along to adjust the plan, given enrollment numbers and other things going on at the university and in the state.

The plan makes a number of suggestions, divided into three phases  the first of which involves demolishing Crane and Hill halls and replacing them with suite-style residences.

Phase I is estimated to cost $118 million.

This plan has the potential to dramatically improve our recruitment of students and to improve the quality of the student experience in those buildings, Blackburn said. What we dont have in our current inventory are those more modern suite-style facilities.

So, incoming students only have the choice of the traditional halls.

Phase II calls for a $40.3 million renovation of White and McIntyre halls, while Phase III calls for renovations of White and Downey halls, as well as street improvements, costing collectively $38.1 million-$55.4 million.

The four traditional towers will be a much improved student experience, better lighting, better restrooms, less density, more common space, Blackburn said. Well bring amenities out of the basement and up onto the floors, so you wont have to go to the basement to do laundry anymore. There will be more communal kitchens in some of the traditional halls.

Independent of the phases, the housing plan suggests renovating campus apartments, Washakie Dining Hall and Greek housing.

UW paid KSQ Design $290,930 to craft the 108-page Housing Master Plan, which included an extensive study of current student opinion on current residential options at the university. ASUW, the student government, paid $60,000 of this figure in a demonstration of support.

The plan hopes to offer a wider range  and higher quality  of housing options than what is currently available to students.

Among the goals of the Master Plan are to create more opportunities for social and co-curricular activities on UWs campus to provide students alternatives to venturing off-campus for socializing opportunities and to incentivize students to remain in on-campus housing past their freshman year, the plan states.

Blackburn said more varied housing options will help recruit first-time students  who can already find suite-style housing at competing universities  as well as keep older students in student-housing longer.

The hope is that incoming students will have the traditional halls  as well as more modern suite-style facilities  and then sophomores, juniors and seniors would also have the option of the apartment inventory, Blackburn said. We will have a better layout of options and different prices for those options, as well.

Replacing or updating UWs residence halls  each currently more than 50 years old  through the next decade will aid in the universitys wider goal of boosting enrollment, Blackburn said.

From my vantage point, its going to be a giant leap forward in terms of the students residential experience by the end of the decade, he said. And well be more competitive for enrollments in the region. Students will have better amenities and students will stay on campus longer.
Six former nuclear launch control officers who served at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne have called on Congress to reign in President Donald Trumps ability to fire nuclear missiles.

In an open letter sent last week, a total of seventeen former officers highlighted the singular authority that Trump, like any president, has to launch nuclear weapons and argued for the need to impose some checks on that power.

There is no act of greater consequence, and it should not rest in the hands of any one person, the letter reads.

Retired Capt. Peter Hefley worked as a nuclear launch officer at F.E. Warren from 2005 until 2007, beginning when he was 25 years old.

He said it was always somewhat alarming that a single individual had the power to launch nuclear weapons but that Trumps comments on social media, in which he has taunted nuclear-armed North Korea, motivated him to speak out.

Trump tweeted on Jan. 3 that his nuclear button was much bigger & more powerful than North Korean leader Kim Jung Uns. He went on to threaten that the U.S. arsenal works.

Cheney backs Trump's aggressive stance on North Korea Wyomings lone U.S. House Rep. Liz Cheney is backing the aggressive statements made by Presi

North Korean state media referred to the tweet Tuesday as the spasm of a lunatic.

I dont think its necessarily a partisan issue at all, Hefley said. When you look at the threats, the saber rattling on Twitter, those things suggest theres a hairpin trigger.

F.E. Warren is one of three air force bases in the United States that has nuclear-armed ICBMs.The other former officers from F.E. Warren to sign the letter are Timothy J. Allen, Frank G. Goldman, Michael Miller, Ryan William Schmoll and David C.W. Wagner.

The same group of officers signed an open letter in the weeks before the 2016 election criticizing Trumps fitness to serve as commander-and-chief. Both letters were released through Global Zero, an organization dedicated to nuclear non-proliferation and their elimination.

But Wyoming State Senator Brian Boner, R-Douglas, pushed back against the notion that Trump was unfit and said that there were already checks in place to block an inappropriate nuclear strike.

Boner worked also worked as a missileer at F.E. Warren, from 2008 until 2013, and said there were already checks in place on a presidents power to use nuclear weapons. The generals advising the president, Boner said, would step in to block an order that was not proportional or lawfully ordered.

Ultimately the president is the only person who can give the order but its not going to happening vacuum, Boner said.

Hefley said that he believes many Americans dont realize how easy it is for a president to launch nuclear missiles.

At F.E. Warren, two officers each work in two separate capsules overseeing the intercontinental ballistic missiles held on site, Hefley said. If the president decides to fire the nuclear missiles, an encrypted code is sent to the capsules and is then decoded to ensure it is valid. Once that is done, all four officers must agree to launch the missiles.

The entire process takes about two to five minutes, Hefley said.

While in theory one of the four officers could block the decision to launch, that is an unlikely scenario in part because the individuals must agree that they will follow a launch order when they are assigned to that post.

At the time, I was comfortable with the idea that if a command were to come down there would be a really good reason for it and I would do it, Hefley said.

He assumed that any order to use nuclear weapons would follow a clear path of escalation, in which diplomatic efforts would be made first, followed by economic sanctions and perhaps conventional war before resorting to nuclear weapons.

I just dont feel like that escalation is the order in which things are going to go now, Hefley said.

Boner said that when he oversaw training exercises at F.E. Warren, missileers never trained for a nuclear first-strike and that one would only take place after a war or conflict abroad had clearly escalated.

We would have at least some warning, Boner said. It wouldnt just be all of the sudden, Oh the president is offended by a tweet lets launch a nuclear strike.

The rhetoric between Trump and Kim has been escalating for months. In April, Trump told Reuters a major, major conflict with North Korea was possible but he still sought diplomacy. The next month, Kim celebrated the test of a ballistic missile and said if the U.S. provoked his country it will not escape from the biggest disaster in the history. Later that month, Trump called Kim a madman with nuclear weapons and upped the ante in August by saying continued threats would be met with fire and fury.

The open letter references several proposals being considered by Congress to rein in Trumps ability to launch nuclear weapons without any outside approval. Some of those options include requiring the sign-off of the defense secretary of attorney general, requiring a Congressional declaration of war or banning the United States from using nuclear weapons except in self-defense.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
GILLETTE -- A Campbell County legislator has picked up where the Legislatures transportation committee left off, proposing a bill that he believes will save money and keep air service in communities that struggle to fill seats.

Sen. Michael Von Flatern, R-Gillette, has sponsored a bill proposing that the state set up a council that would work on a capacity purchase agreement, selecting a regional carrier to enter into a 10-year contract with the state. The airline would provide up to three daily flights to Denver from cities and towns in Wyoming that join the agreement.

Airports in Sheridan, Riverton and Rock Springs currently offer airlines minimum-revenue guarantees, meaning state and local governments subsidize commercial air service to those communities.

The full transportation committee, which Von Flatern is on, considered a similar bill but declined to move forward. Several lawmakers on the committee said they were still open to the idea of a state-run program, but that the issue needed more study.

But Von Flatern said that this is the time to act. The state has $1.2 million for the program and the airports in Sheridan, Riverton and Rock Springs need about $1 million each.

We have enough money to keep everything rolling until June 30, 2019, he said.

Von Flatern said if the bill passes, the council will have until then to come to an agreement with an airline. If not, Well have to say to two of (the cities), you no longer have air service.

The council overseeing the state airline agreement would be comprised of 15 members, 11 of whom would be voting members. It would include a state senator, a state representative, two people from the aeronautics commission, two people from ENDOW, someone from the Wyoming Association of Municipalities, one from the Wyoming County Commissioners Association, a commercial air service representative from the Wyoming airport operators association and two people from the public.

It also would include the governor, the WYDOT director and the executive director of the office of tourism, all of whom would be non-voting members.

If the bill passes and an airline agrees to contract with the state, the communities can join the agreement on a voluntary basis. Von Flatern said Gillette doesnt have to join because it isnt losing money on its flights. Still, it would offer some advantages.

SkyWest flies up here on their own dollar. If they make a profit, great. If theyre not making money, they cut one of our flights, he said.

If Gillette joined the agreement, the biggest advantage would be that the airline would be contracted to show up here for up to three flights a day, he said. They cant steal a flight or change the schedule on us.

The agreement does not prevent airports from trying to add other flights, Von Flatern said.

Campbell County Commission Chairman Mark Christensen said he and his fellow commissioners support the bill.

I support it and I support what you do, Commissioner Micky Shober told Von Flatern last week. Otherwise, Wyomings going to be left in the dust and lose their airports.

Christensen agreed.

If were not going to reduce the number of communities we have air service in, then this solution is by far the best, Christensen said.
Countless children and adults have warmth and encouragement this winter thanks to a dying mans legacy.

John Jack Apland, a longtime rancher from Canistota, South Dakota, was in his final months of life in 2016 when he and his family launched Knots & Love, a project to tie and make blankets for Black Hills area children in foster care. Knots & Love began as a one-time effort to help Apland, 89, find purpose in life when his health was failing and he was facing many personal struggles.

There was so much Dad couldnt do anything about (the last few months of his life), but so much he could, said Lisa Wells, Aplands daughter. We talked about all he had to be grateful for. ... That segued into, What about if we do something for those people (in need)? It was a good reminder to be grateful, and (tying blankets) was something he could physically do himself, on his terms, according to his abilities.

In 2016, Apland and his family set a goal to donate 45 blankets to the Department of Social Services in Sturgis before Thanksgiving. Friends and community members got involved and on Nov. 10, 2016, his family donated 67 blankets, Wells said.

Though Apland died about two weeks before the blankets were donated, the project succeeded in giving him a sense of value and productivity. To his familys surprise, Knots & Love also has become a movement thats spread to several states, Wells said.

Aplands family decided keep Knots & Love going in 2017, and beyond, in their fathers honor. Dad said yes to this project at the worst time in his life, Wells said. The needs of those children have not gone away. There are still children whose lives have been turned upside down.

Word spread about Knots & Love, and people in Wyoming, Washington, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Iowa, Virginia and South Dakota got involved in 2017. People either contacted us and said they were going to do this in their community ... or helped donate in this area, Wells said. The donations kept coming.

Several Black Hills community groups contributed to Knots & Love, Wells said. One of Aplands former nurses, Ches Hegge, and Spearfish Regional Hospital Employees gave blankets. The YMCA Teen Center in Rapid City and YMCA members, the Zion Dorcas Circle in Rapid City, and the Fountain Springs Fervent Ladies Life Group gave hats, gloves and blankets.

Each time items filled up the storage space in Wells home, she and her family made donations. In 2017, Knots & Love delivered 129 blankets to the Sturgis Department of Social Services on Sept. 15  the day before what would have been Aplands 90th birthday. On Oct. 29, the day before the one-year anniversary of Aplands death, Knots & Love delivered 67 blankets, 55 book bags, 32 books, four cans of baby formula, two toys and two backpacks to the Black Hills Childrens Home. On Dec. 18, Knots & Love gave 26 blankets, four sweaters, 20 pairs of socks, 21 hats, 12 pairs of mittens and gloves, two cans of baby formula and four toys to Black Hills Childrens Home, Wells said.

Beyond meeting physical needs, Wells and her siblings use Knots & Love as a way to spread hope and encouragement. The Knots & Love motto is that everyone has value and everyone can make a difference.

The elderly and shut-ins can feel shut off from society. Well-meaning families may come to visit, but find themselves glancing at their watches after theyre run out of conversation. Ive had individuals tell me that, like Dad, they felt like they didnt have value and wanted that to change. Having a project like Knots & Love gives people a common ground, a goal and a chance to make a difference, Wells said.

Knots & Love also has helped Aplands family find a positive way to channel their grief over their beloved dad.

Something my family and I learned is when something bad happens to you, its so important to find or create something good so you have balance, Wells said. Being part of somebodys solution becomes your solution.

Heading into 2018, Wells said Knots & Love will continue to take donations year-round. More important, she said, the project will encourage people to simply find ways to make a positive difference in others lives.

Look around and see what people need. ... Bring a sick person soup. ... Maybe your family can shovel a neighbors sidewalk. How about taking a plate of cookies to a shut-in, or writing an encouraging letter to a soldier? Wells said. Theres a lot of ways you can make a difference.
Frank Lloyd Wright purportedly said, Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. Today, however, Oregon is the state with the strangest state of mind, which has something to do with it being impeccably progressive: In the series Portlandia, the mention of artisanal lightbulbs might be satirical, but given todays gas-pumping controversy, perhaps not.

On Jan. 1, by the grace of God  or of the government, which is pretty much the same thing to progressives  a sliver of a right was granted to Oregonians: Henceforth they can pump gas into their cars and trucks, all by themselves. But only in counties with populations of less than 40,000, evidently because this walk on the wild side is deemed to be prudent only in the hinterlands, where there is a scarcity of qualified technicians trained in the science of pumping. Still, 2018 will be the year of living dangerously in the state that was settled by people who trekked there on the Oregon Trail, through the territory of Native Americans hostile to Manifest Destiny.

Oregon is one of two states that ban self-service filling stations. The other is almost-as-deep-blue New Jersey. There the ban is straightforward, no-damned-nonsense-about-anything-else protectionism: The point is to spare full-service gas stations from competing with self-service stations that, having lower labor costs, have lower prices.

Oregons Legislature offers 17 reasons it is in the public interest to maintain a prohibition on the self-service dispensing of Class 1 flammable liquids  aka, gasoline, which you put in your cars Class 1 flammable liquids tank. The first reason is: The dispensing of such liquids by dispensers properly trained in appropriate safety procedures reduces fire hazards. This presumably refers to the many conflagrations regularly occurring at filling stations throughout the 48 states where 96 percent of Americans live lives jeopardized by state legislators who are negligent regarding their nanny-state duty to assume that their constituents are imbeciles.

Among Oregons 16 other reasons are: Service-station cashiers are often unable to give undivided attention to the rank amateurs dispensing flammable liquids. When purchasers of such liquids leave their vehicles they risk crime, and personal injury from slick surfaces. (Oregons weather is uniquely adverse; i.e., it rains there.) Exposure to toxic fumes. Senior citizens or persons with disabilities might have to pay a higher cost at a full-service pump, which would be discriminatory. When people pump gas without the help of trained and certified specialists, no specialists peer under the hood to administer prophylactic maintenance, thereby endangering both the customer and other motorists and resulting in unnecessary and costly repairs. Self-service has contributed to diminishing the availability of automotive repair facilities at gasoline stations without providing  note the adjective  sustained reduction in gas prices. Self-service causes unemployment. And small children left unattended by novice gas pumpers creates a dangerous situation. So there.

Oregons Solomonic decision  freedom to pump in rural counties; everywhere else, unthinkable  terrified some Oregonians: No! Disabled, seniors, people with young children in the car need help. Not to mention getting out of your car with transients around and not feeling safe too. This is a very bad idea. Not a good idea, there are lots of reason to have an attendant helping, one is they need a job too. Many people are not capable of knowing how to pump gas and the hazards of not doing it correctly. Besides I dont want to go to work smelling of gas.

The complainers drew complaints: You put the gas in your car not shower in it princess. If your only marketable job skill is being able to pump gas, by god, move to Oregon and you will have reached the promised land. Pumped my own gas my whole life and now my hands have literally melted down to my wrists. Im typing this with my tongue. These days, civic discourse is not for shrinking violets.

To be fair, when Oregonians flinch from a rendezvous with an unattended gas pump, progressive government has done its duty, as it understands this. It wants the governed to become used to having things done for them, as by trained and certified gas pumpers. Progressives are proud believers in providing experts  usually themselves  to help the rest of us cope with life. The only downside is that, as Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated, such government, by being the shepherd of the governed, can take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood.
The Nazis used to categorize Jews in the death camps as first- or second-degree mischling. Mischling  mischlinge in the plural  in the first meant you had two Jewish grandparents; second-degree credited your Jewishness to a single grandparent.

New York pianist Carolyn Engers father was classified as first-degree; his maternal grandparents were Jewish, although his mother had converted to Christianity before she married.

Engers German father was in his early 20s when he was put in the camps at the height of World War II, and he fled when France liberated the country. His stories, which he told in dribs and drabs, are secondary and yet central to Engers very personal multimedia project The Mischlinge Expose, which Daniel Asia will bring to the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music on Thursday, Jan. 18.

Enger curated the program that traces her family history and her own journey in Judaism. The program, co-sponsored in Tucson by UA Judaic Studies, includes videos of her fathers and godmothers experiences in Germany, and art and thoughts of prominent converts woven in with live performances of music by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Zemlinsky, Mahler, Schoenberg, Eisler and Ben-Haim.

Enger curated the program that traces her family history and her own journey from Christianity to Judaism.
The Rotary Club of Tucson raised nearly $186,000 for local charities with its classic-car show.

The 11th annual Tucson Classics Car Show was held in October and brought the total raised by the event in its history to more than $1.2 million, according to a news release from the club.

The money raised at last years show goes to:

Make Way For Books, the primary beneficiary, which received $74,300.

Pima County JTED received $37,150.

GAP Ministries received $37,150.

Caregiver Institute of Tucson received $9,287.

YWCA Womens Impact Fund received $9,287.

The Rotary Club kept $18,575 for its discretionary fund for smaller charitable grants that will be made throughout the year.

The club said more than 25,000 people attended the car show, which featured more than 400 classic cars.

The next show is already in the planning stages and will be held Oct. 20.
The Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation will hold a grand opening ceremony for its new Thornhill Lopez Center on 4th from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 18.

The center is at 526 N. Fourth Ave. The community is welcomed to the event.

The Thornhill Lopez Center will serve LGBTQ youths in Tucson through a variety of programs, direct services and community engagement.

The central program will be Eon, a safe place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth to gather. There, youths can do homework, access art programs through a collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, take part in peer education opportunities and other programs.

Eon lounge hours will be from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and every third Saturday evening of the month.

The foundation raised $2 million through a capital campaign that began in early 2016 to purchase the building and renovate it for the center.

At Thursdays event, Curtis Thornhill, whom the center is named after, is scheduled to speak, along with local government officials.
PHOENIX  Saying biology matters, an Arizona woman is making a last-ditch effort in court to keep from being forced to share custody of her child with her former wife.

Keith Berkshire, attorney for Kimberly McLaughlin, is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn last years ruling by the states high court, which concluded that Suzan McLaughlin had the same right to claim parentage as if she had been Kimberlys husband.

In legal pleadings, Berkshire acknowledged the historic 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that concluded that states must extend the right to marry to same-sex couples.

The justices expanded on that two years later, spelling out that same-sex couples must have access to the constellation of benefits that the state has linked to marriage.

But Berkshire contends nothing in either ruling requires states to ignore the biological fact that men and women are different  and that, by definition, two women cannot both be the biological parent of a child born to one of them. That, he said, undermines the decision of the Arizona Supreme Court to effectively rewrite a statute that says only men are entitled to the presumption of paternity of a child born during a marriage.

In the legal filings, the attorney also takes a slap of sorts at the Arizona Supreme Court, saying the justices effectively adopted a statute dealing with how paternity cases are handled in cases of artificial insemination, a statute that, while approved in other states, had never been enacted by lawmakers in Arizona.

What the U.S. Supreme Court decides could have implications on other cases involving child custody and support: A ruling against Berkshire would undermine arguments by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and the Center for Arizona Policy that just because same-sex marriages are legal does not void state laws that differentiate between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples.

Thats not just an academic argument.

In writing last years ruling, Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Scott Bales said he reads the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage to require a reassessment of various state statutes, rules, and regulations to the extent they deny same-sex spouses all of the benefits afforded opposite-sex spouses. That includes taxation, property rights, hospital access, adoption rights and more.

Court records show Kimberly and Suzan, legally married in California in 2008, agreed to have a child through artificial insemination using an anonymous sperm donor.

Kimberly became pregnant in 2010. The couple moved to Tucson, entered into a joint-parenting agreement and executed mirror wills, declaring they were equal parents to the child.

After the boys 2011 birth, Suzan stayed home and cared for him while Kimberly worked as a physician.

When he was nearly 2, Kimberly moved out, taking the boy with her and cutting off his contact with Suzan.

In filing for divorce, Suzan sought parenting time, citing an Arizona law that says that the husband is the presumed parent of a child born within 10 months of a marriage.

When a trial judge agreed to let the case proceed, Kimberly appealed, saying the paternity presumption law, by its plain wording, applies only when the other spouse is a man.

Berkshire said the Arizona Supreme Court, in agreeing Suzan could use the paternity statutes to be declared one of the boys parents, ignored both the reason legislators wrote the law the way they did as well as basic biology.

Specifically, when a woman is married to a man and becomes pregnant, it is not only possible but also likely that her husband is the biological father of her child, he wrote in his petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When a woman is married to another woman, it is impossible for both women to be biologically related to the child, he said. A statute that acknowledges this biological fact does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.

Berkshire said Suzan might have a claim if she and Kimberly lived in a state like Oregon, New Jersey or New York. Lawmakers in each of those states have adopted measures, based on a model statute, which spell out that if a child is born to a woman through artificial insemination, her husband is automatically treated as if he were the childs biological parent.

Arizona does not have an artificial insemination statute, and Arizona is not required to enact one, the attorney told the justices. But he said the ruling written by Bales effectively circumvented the legislature and enacted the model law.

But this is not the courts role, Berkshire said. If this court or constituents are dissatisfied with the state of our current laws, the proper forum to advocate for change is in the legislature, not the courtroom.

The attorney said the Arizona Supreme Court intruded into the realm of state lawmakers by concluding the paternity statutes had to be read and enforced in a gender-neutral fashion.

He said it was beyond the Arizona Supreme Courts domain to rewrite the statute in order to conform with any perceived public policy.
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP)  When Pope Francis arrived in Chile's capital Monday, he found a weakened Roman Catholic Church. As in many Latin American countries, the church in Chile has been losing followers to both evangelical faiths and increasing secularism. The shift has been exacerbated by a priest sex abuse scandal, and many Chileans are put off by the church's influence in keeping tight restrictions in social matters like marriage and abortion. Here are some of the contributing factors to the Chilean church's problems.

SEX ABUSE SCANDALS

Always well dressed, the Rev. Fernando Karadima seemed an ideal priest among the elite in Santiago. But he had a dark side, sexually abusing dozens of minors over decades while church superiors either looked the other way or covered up for him.

Allegations against Karadima went back to the 1980s, but the full weight of his actions didn't become widely known until victims went public in 2010. In 2011, the Vatican found him guilty of sexually abusing minors.

The statute of limitations had passed for him to be tried criminally, though, and Karadima's only punishment was being sent by the church to a convent to spend the rest of his life in prayer, angering many Chileans. He is there to this day.

POPE'S CONTROVERSIAL APPOINTMENT

In 2015, Pope Francis set off an uproar by appointing the Rev. Juan Barros as bishop in the southern city of Osorno. Barros had been a protege of Karadima, working with him for years when the abuses were taking place.

Barros has always denied that he knew what Karadima was doing, but many parishioners in Osorno objected to his appointment.

When protests erupted, Francis dug in. At one point, the pope said that the "people of Osorno are suffering because of stupidity" and that there was no proof of wrongdoing by Barros.

Yet Francis was well aware that Barros' appointment would cause strife. In a 2015 letter obtained by The Associated Press last week, Francis contemplated sending Barros and two other Karadima-trained bishops on yearlong sabbaticals, a decision he didn't ultimately take.

BISHOPS THEN AND NOW

During Gen. Augusto Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship, thousands of people were killed or disappeared, and any dissent was swiftly crushed. During this period, several Chilean bishops courageously advocated for human rights and represented a check on the dictatorship's worst instincts.

The church also helped Chile's poorest amid the government's push to liberalize the economy and worked closely with indigenous communities like the Mapuche.

Today, Chilean bishops don't have the same visibility, much less moral authority. Many Chileans believe the Catholic hierarchy is more aligned with business interests than the poor and downtrodden.

DIVORCE

In Chile, divorce was essentially illegal until 2004, when the Andean nation ended some of the world's strictest marriage laws.

The church for decades was able to wield enormous influence on politicians to keep the status quo that went back to the 19th century. People wanting to get legally separated had to get an annulment, an arduous process that required the separating parties to show that somehow the legal requirements of the marriage had not been met.

The church argued that restricting divorce kept families together, but that often backfired: Many young people put off marriage for years or indefinitely, while married people who had separated would frequently have children out of wedlock with new partners since they could not divorce and remarry. As a result, many Chileans turned against the faith.

ABORTION

Chile has some of the world's most restrictive reproductive laws, even after a reform passed last year. Abortion is legal only in three circumstances: when a woman's life is endangered, when a pregnancy results from rape, and when a fetus is not viable.

For many Chileans, particularly the younger generations, Catholic leaders' opposition to abortion rights is another example of how church teachings don't jibe with their views.

The tight restrictions also underscore deep inequalities: Chilean women with the means have abortions done illegally at private clinics or travel abroad, while poor women either must keep the baby or use riskier methods.

___
Help India!

By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter

Srinagar: On Wednesday, January 10, the Delhi Police and Gujarat ATS arrested a Kashmiri man, said to be in his 30s, over his alleged involvement in the 2000 Red Fort attack in New Delhi in which three people, including two Army jawans, were killed.

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Bilal Kawa was arrested from the Terminal 3 of Indira Gandhi International airport. The police have said that he is suspected to be linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba and a proclaimed offender in the case.

Reacting to the arrest and the claims, family members of Bilal Kawa held a protest demonstration in the press colony Srinagar on Friday, alleging that their son is being implicated in the false case and he was going for treatment when he was arrested in Delhi.

He has been going to Delhi since last 17 years and he was never arrested and we dont know why he has been arrested now, family members of Bilal told media persons during the protest demonstration.

According to Bilals mother Fatima Begum, he was living a normal life and was engaged in leather business and claimed they yet to know what charges he is being framed. He is innocent. He is being framed, she added.

On Thursday, January 11th a Delhi court remanded Bilal Ahmad Kawa to 10 days police custody. According to a report in The Hindu, the investigating officer in the case while seeking his police remand has submitted that Bilal was the kingpin of the attack and accused him of receiving money from Pakistan and other countries through hawala operators and the same were used in the Red Fort attack and other terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir by the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

Another report in The Tribune confirmed that the Jammu Kashmir Police had not received any notice declaring him a proclaimed offender and no case was registered against him in the local police station.

Hurriyat Conference (M) has condemned the arrest of Bilal and have claimed that he is being made a scapegoat ahead of 26 January and has sought unconditional release.

He is an innocent trader and deals with leather and fur business and often travels to Delhi for his business purposes, said Hurriyat (M) spokesperson.It has been observed since long that the police often resort to harassment of Kashmiri businessmen, students, traders in various states of India which seems to be a well-planned conspiracy of the Government of India to label Kashmiris as suspects and then frame them in fake and false cases, the spokesperson added.

The arrest of Bilal comes months after Gulzar Ahmed Wani, a Ph.D. scholar in AMU from north Kashmirs Pattan Town was acquitted of terror charges after 16 years of incarceration in May 2017. Another Kashmiri, Rafiq Shah was acquitted in the 2005 Delhi serial blasts after 12 years of incarceration in February 2017.
Help India!

By Misbahuddin Mirza for TwoCircles.net

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A new record was set this week at New Yorks Grand Hyatt Hotel. A Jahangir gold mohur was sold for an incredible $325,000. Add Buyers premium to this, and the lucky buyer will be shelling out $390,000  i.e. almost Rs 2.5 crore for a one tola (10 grams) coin. The New York International Numismatic Convention is the United States largest and most prestigious numismatic event targeting the needs of the world and ancient numismatic communities. This marvelous coin was auctioned by the prestigious firm Classical Numismatic Group, Inc (CNG).

The world of Indian Islamic Numismatics is mesmerizing. Numismatics is more than just a hobby. It tells historians so much about the past. The right to mint coins was one of two things that were fiercely guarded by all Muslim Monarchs  the second being the inclusion of a prayer for the monarch during Friday sermon. Islamic coins provide even more information than coins of other cultures, as they also contain the mint name (geographical location), and the year of minting, thus providing numismatics and historians with critical information. For those unfamiliar with the Arabic language, Richard Plants Arabic Coins and how to read them will make reading Islamic coins a breeze.

Islamic coinage begun after the newly established Muslim state conquered the Sassanian empire. Umar bin Khattab, the second Khalifa asked a word or two of Islamic terminology (Bismillah) be added to the existing Sassanian coin design; thus, you see the initial Islamic coins having human portraits contained in earlier Sassanian coins. This was followed by Arabic language replacing the Pahlavi script, and the Hijri calendar replacing the Yesdigrid age. Similarly, after defeating the Byzantines, the Muslims initially started marking the existing coins Sahih or Tayyib indicating that the coins were acceptable for usage. This was followed by the removal of the horizontal bar from the cross and addition of Islamic Terminology. Khalifa Abd al-Malik Bin Marwan was responsible for the complete redesign of the Islamic coins. During the approximately thousand years that followed, changes were made to the coin design by various dynasties spread across three continents.

The Indian Islamic coinage quickly switched to the Indian monetary weight system of heavier mohurs, instead of the standard dinars used in other parts of the Islamic world. The dinar had followed the Roman monetary system of denarius. Some of the initial Indian Islamic coins were bilingual. Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznis following silver dirham has the obverse in Arabic and the reverse in Sanskrit.

The value of a coin depends on several factors. Its condition  fine, very fine, extremely fine, choice, etc.; its mint  where it was minted; its Rarity or lack thereof. Above all its demand. For example, a very ancient, rare coin, from a desirable mint may not have much demand and hence may not fetch much. Whereas, coins that have high demand, even in relatively poor condition may fetch a decent amount. That being said, rare, precious coins are handled with extreme care, as the slightest blemish could dramatically reduce the price of an extremely valuable coin. While inexpensive, common coins are available by the bucket load, valuable coins are difficult to come by, and when they do appear on the market, collectors try to outbid each other for it. Trolling the local coin shows is a good way to get started. There are numerous large, reputable auction houses that maintain extensive databases of research coins of all cultures. There are Islamic email groups that can be of help too. Museums are good places to view rare, valuable coins.

Misbahuddin Mirza, M.S., P.E. is a licensed Professional Engineer, registered in the States of New York, and New Jersey, served as the Regional Quality Control Engineer for the New York State Department of Transportations New York City area. He is the author of an iBook on Jerusalem Tourism and has written for major US, and Indian publications. He is an avid student of History and Islamic numismatics.
Help India!

New Delhi (IANS): The central government on Tuesday said it has decided to withdraw subsidy given to Muslims for the annual Haj pilgrimage.

Announcing the decision, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said it was in line with the governments agenda to empower minorities without appeasing them.

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This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement, Naqvi told reporters here.

He said the government would utilise the funds saved from withdrawing the subsidy for education of minorities, particularly girls.

Naqvi said the subsidy amount ranged from Rs 500-700 crore, which mainly went to the national carrier Air India that flew the pilgrims to Jeddah, along with Saudi Airlines, in a 50:50 ratio.

With the government already moving ahead with privatisation of Air India, the subsidy would not make sense, he felt.

Naqvi said the withdrawal of subsidy would not make much difference in the airfare from major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata, though it would make travel costlier from smaller cities.

But to offset this cost hike, we have for the first time given the choice to pilgrims to select their point of embarkation. So, for example, a pilgrim from Srinagar may now embark from Delhi, or a pilgrim from Gaya may embark from Kolkata etc., to avoid extra expenses, Naqvi said.

However, the Minister said that the government would fulfil all its responsibilities it has towards its citizens and would make all the arrangements for the pilgrims in Saudi Arabia apart from ensuring their safety, security and comfort.

The government had drafted the policy to abolish the Haj subsidy in phased manner after the Supreme Court asked it in 2012 to withdraw it gradually by 2022.

Last year, the government had formed a committee comprising eminent Muslims headed by retired IAS Afzal Amanullah to revise Indias Haj policy. The committee had recommended abolition of Haj subsidy and allowing women above 45 years of age to proceed on Haj without mehram (male guardian), among other things.

The government accepted most of the recommendations made by the committee.

This year, the highest number of Indian pilgrims are likely to go for the pilgrimage after Saudi Arabia increased Indias quota by 5,000.

A total of 1.75 lakh Indian Muslims can go for Haj this year.
After calling Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations sh*thole countries, US President Donald Trump has been branded a racist. Hes been called vile and racist by a Democratic Senator who was in the meeting where Trump made the comment, but the President himself insists, I am not a racist. He, in fact, went so far as making the claim, Im the least racist person youve ever interviewed. That would only be true if the interviewer in question was new to the job and had only ever interviewed the head of the KKK or a member of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Now, lets not forget that Mr. Trump was once sued, back in his real estate days, for refusing to rent apartments to black people. Rest assured, he definitely, without a doubt, one hundred percent a racist. And remember the time on his Presidential election campaign when he said that all Mexicans were, by virtue of being from Mexico, rapists? Thats racist! Thats what a racist would say!

Trump denies using the word sh*thole

Although two Senators corroborate the sh*thole story and out of a bipartisan meeting of many different people, no one else has denied it, Trump denies using the word sh*thole. He tweeted that the language that he used during the meeting was tough, but it was not the word sh*thole. Well, until someone else says that, its going to be kind of hard to believe.
With the New Year came news of increased rail fares, with some journey's fares being increased by up to 3.4 percent. This is the biggest rise in five years. Providers defended the rises, calling them necessary in order to improve the running of services. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) responded this was a "kick in the teeth" to travellers.

Southern Rail has been hit with severe criticism after a National Audit Office report (NAO) published findings the provider had suffered the worst rail disruption in the UK and does not represent value for money.

In some cases commuters are forking out up to five times as much as their salary on commuting compared to other European cities.

Dream holidays cheaper than commuting

To take matters further, travel operator easyCar.com have conducted their own findings, reporting that some once-in-a-lifetime journeys cost less than our average commute.

Annual season tickets from Tonbridge in Kent to London Zones 1-6 have risen to a staggering 7,148. For that price, commuters could jet off and spend twelve nights luxury island hopping in Thailand, twice a year and still have change left over.

Commuters from Cambridge have also been directly affected. The yearly season ticket has risen to 6,300 which is the same price as an eight-day guided tour along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, not once but five times a year.

Those making the 35-minute train journey from Chelmsford to London could swap their 5,008 season ticket for two tickets on the Orient Express, and journey from London to Verona.

Annual rail tickets for those commuting from Reading now cost 5,300. For just under that price, travellers could rent a car and road trip the entire length of America's Route 66 which spans Los Angeles in California to Chicago in Illinois, 11 times over.

If you journey from Brighton into London every day using Southern Rail, from 2 January 2018 you will pay 5,532. This is the equivalent of renting a private yacht to sail around the Greek islands, over a three week period of the year.

These findings put into perspective how expensive Londoner's annual commutes are.

Light at the end of the (train) tunnel?

Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip Hammond may have found the light at the end of the tunnel, announcing the introduction of a 'millennial railcard'. While this initiative received a mixed response from voters, the millennial rail card may see discounts of up to one third for travellers under the age of 30. This is expected to come into place in early 2018.
Today, the Bangladeshi and Burmese authorities have announced that they have finalised details for repatriating hundreds of thousands of persecuted Rohingya to Myanmar. This repatriation timeframe decided amongst the two nations comes after months of negotiations, which commenced in November 2017.

Too little too late?

After increasing violence targeted towards the Rohingya by the Myanmar security forces peaked last year, this sparked a mass exodus to neighbouring Bangladesh.

Amnesty International has described the case as a vicious system of state-sponsored, institutionalised discrimination that amounts of apartheid.

The reached agreement states that Myanmar will accept 1,500 Rohingya every week, with the aim of having all of them returned to Myanmar within two years. It is believed there are nearly 1 million Rohingya currently living in Bangladesh.

Life for the Rohingya in Bangladesh is less violent but equally as problematic, with a lack of any formal refugee status and their rights to work being heavily restricted.

There are currently a further 500,000 Rohingya living in Saudi Arabia, 350,000 fled to Pakistan and 40,000 to neighbouring India.

International backlash to the agreement

The international community has raised concerns about the repatriation agreement. The UN High Commission for Refugees stated that the underlying causes of the crisis needed to be addressed before the Rohingya feel is it safe for them to return.

Meanwhile, in the UK, members of the Commons Select Committee for International Development have drawn up a report, voicing their grave concern about the return of the Rohingya people to Myanmar.

The report which was published on 15 January 2018 is damning, stating that the UKs position had been overly optimistic about Myanmars levels of democracy.

It also states that the UK had been slow to act in condemnation of this treatment which has amounted to a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

The UK Government has put forward a five-point plan for Rohingya and Burma, stating that the required conditions for the safe return of Rohingya must include access to fundamental human rights.

Ministers from the Department for International Development (DfID) believe these conditions are a long way from being met.

So far the UK Government has provided 59 million for the response to the Rohingya crisis.

Who are the Rohingya?

The Rohingya are a minority ethnic group who practice Islam and have lived for centuries in the Buddhist country of Myanmar.

Myanmar is made up of 135 officially recognised ethnic groups. However, the Rohingya are not one of them, having been routinely denied citizenship in Myanmar since 1982. This officially renders the minority group stateless.

Before the crisis, it was believed that 1.1 million Rohingya lived in Myanmar, predominantly in the Rakhine State.

Although widespread persecution of the Rohingya has taken place since the late 1970s, the violence that broke out last year has sparked mass migration and a Humanitarian Crisis.

There have been horrific reports of the military carrying out indiscriminate killings, rape and arson against Rohingya villages.

The civilian leader of Myanmar and former Nobel prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has faced international criticism for the way she has handled the violence.

Her silence and reluctance to avoid discussions about the treatment of the Rohingya people has been met with condemnation, with recent speculation she may face genocide charges in the future.
The Indian navy was the first country in Asia to start using an Aircraft Carrier after World War II. In 1961, it acquired the British warship HMS Hermes for the Indian navy. Rechristened INS Vikrant the aircraft carrier was instrumental in Indian forces defeating the Pak army in East Pakistan and establishing an independent Bengali speaking country in 1971. Subsequently, the Vikrant was retired and now two more aircraft carriers have been inducted. The navy, citing the Chinese threat, has put up a proposal to acquire a third aircraft carrier, as the indigenous aircraft carrier being built at the Cochin shipyard is likely to take a few years more.

India Today has reported that the proposal costing 1.6 billion dollars is with the Ministry of Defence.

Three aircraft carriers

The navy wants ideally two aircraft carriers, one for its Eastern fleet, operating in the Bay of Bengal and another for the western fleet that covers the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. It has projected a third aircraft carrier as a reserve in case any of the other two carriers have to go in for repairs. The Navy will also require 57 carrier-borne aircraft and top of the line under consideration are the American F-16 and the French Rafale. The Defense Ministry is sitting on the proposal because of the cost involved.

Indian Navy's flagship is the Vikramaditya, 44000 aircraft carrier which was purchased from Russia.It's pretty small compared to the American carriers of the Nimitz class, which displaced over 100,000 tons, but it is more than a match for the two Chinese carriers.

India vs China

The Indian navy has an advantage over China's navy in terms of the operation of aircraft carriers. India has been operating these floating attack airfield for over 56 years and the Chinese are still learning the first steps of carrier operations. None of their two carriers are fully operational as yet. India is the only country in the world after the USA to operate two operational aircraft carriers.

The Vikramaditya took part along with the Navy of the USA and Japan in a massive exercise in the Indian Ocean a few months back.

Future

The Indian Defense Review has written that India is the largest importer of arms in the world.One reason for this is that military industry and manufacturing of weapons were not given any priority by the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and this resulted in the Indian armed forces being poorly equipped, leading to crushing defeat at the hands of China in 1962. The Indian government is now better prepared and the chance that the third aircraft will be purchased is high on the cards.
When we talk about doomsday weapons, we think about a new or a super secret weapon system that could destroy a country and even end all life on the planet. These doomsday weapons are very capable of destroying our planet Earth, by making our planet uninhabitable for any forms of life, which include animals and plants.

The term doomsday weapons started becoming more common in many science fiction movies during the Cold War-era, mainly because of the growing fear of nuclear war and total annihilation. A well-known example of the science fiction movie that focused on doomsday devices was the 1964s film "Dr.

Strangelove." That movie featured a Russian doomsday device that was very capable of total destruction.

However, doomsday devices or weapons, like the one on "Dr. Strangelove movie," also exist in the real world in todays militaries. Countries such as the United States and the former Soviet Union, Russian now, have made their own versions of doomsday weapons or devices. These doomsday weapons are capable of ending life on Earth. Fortunately, these weapons have never been used before and countries have doubts about using them due to the destructive effect on humanity and the environment. Below are listed some of the most feared doomsday devices ever developed.

US Air Forces Project Thor

The USAF have experimented with lots of weapons systems, including space-based weapon systems that were placed outside the Earths orbit.

The most secretive of these space-based weapon systems is Project Thor, the USAF-led weapons program that can be to fire a tungsten rod to hit a target or city with a devastating result.

Development of the Project Thor first started during the Vietnam War, where they used what they called the Lazy Dog projectiles. This weapon system used a solid steel piece and relied on pure kinetic energy to destroy its target, instead of an explosive device.

The Lazy Dog bombs were made of solid steel pieces; around 2 inches long with fins for gliding, and could reach speeds of up to 500 mph as felt to the ground. The weapon system can penetrate up to 9 inches of a concrete slab and destroy it with a devastating result, much like a nuclear strike but with no radioactive fallout.

The idea is to use a projectile-like bullet at a target, relying on pure kinetic forms of energy. As the bullet drops in mid-air, the projectile starts to gain velocity and energy that will be expanded upon impact. Once it hits the ground, the explosion would be on par with that of a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon, with devastating effect. The weapon can also destroy hardened targets in just a few minutes, making it a potential weapon for carrying out a surgical strike against enemys territory.

According to Business Insider, the USAFs Project Thor used large projectiles that were placed a few thousand miles above the Earth. The Rods of God uses a tungsten rod of about 20 feet long and 1 foot in diameter.

When dropped from the Earths orbit, it can reach a speed of up to Mach 10 or 10 times the speed of sound. Such a weapon system holds huge potential, especially for a country which constantly faces increasing threats.

Russias Dead Hand

Remember the 1960s political satire black comedy movie "Dr. Strangelove"? The movie, which was directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick, satirized the Cold War fears of a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States.

But the most interesting part of the move was the final stage, where it mentioned certain Russian doomsday devices. The doomsday device was designed to ensure mutually assured destruction or MAD, in case the Soviet leadership on Kremlin faced being wiped out by the US nuclear strikes.

Based on the movie, a high-tech apocalyptic weapon would encircle the planet in a radioactive doomsday shroud, making life very miserable for humans and animals. And finally, it would wipe out anything on the planet and make it uninhabitable for 93 years.

In reality, doomsday devices or weapons really exist, but in total secrecy and away from the prying lenses of the media. A good example of the real-world doomsday device was the highly secretive Dead Hand system, which was reportedly developed by the former Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

According to reports, the Dead Hand, also known as Perimeter, was some sort of Cold War-era automatic nuclear-control system to be used by the Soviet military, especially during tough times.

The Dead Hand is a good example of a deadly and mutually assured destruction (MAD) deterrence because the system can automatically trigger the launch of a massive retaliatory strike, without any human intervention. The system was also reinforced to survive a direct hit from a nuclear strike.

The main reason why the Soviets had decided to build such kind of apocalyptic weapon was to maintain a second-strike capability and to ensure the destruction of its enemy. The fully-automated system, in theory, would allow the Soviet military to respond to a massive nuclear attack even if the Soviet political and top military leaders were destroyed in the enemys nuclear first strike.

Nuclear-armed ballistic missiles typically are detectable, and the target country generally has about 30 minutes of warning and response time.

This means the target country has just 30 or fewer minutes to launch a countermeasure, resulting in a miserable nuclear exchange that benefits no one.

However, during the 1970s and 1980s, Americans managed to gain impressive technological leap that could give them an edge in a future nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union. The US forces were getting better and better accuracy with their submarine-based missile launch systems, the dreaded Trident-equipped nuclear attack submarines of the US Navy. The advancement in US missile technology means that the American could now be able to launch precision nuclear strikes anywhere in the Soviet Union, reducing the warning time and leaving the Soviet military with a very short reaction time.

This makes the nuclear first strike or surprise attack a more effective option for the US military.

For the Soviet, the US missile achievement meant only one thing - that the balance was now upset and there was now an actual incentive for the US nuclear first strike. Fearing a sneak attack from American nuclear attack submarines, the Soviet took steps to ensure that nuclear retaliation, and ordered the development of the fully automated weapon system called Dead Hand.

The Dead Hands main job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear explosions on Soviet territory and check whether the entire Soviet communication network still working or badly damaged. If the system finds out that the Soviets communication system has been severely damaged and the Kremlin leadership has been wiped out, then it will activate all remaining nuclear arsenals and order a full-scale nuclear attack against its enemy.

The Dead Hand will provide nuclear launch codes to all Soviet land-based ICBMs, command posts, bombers and nuclear-equipped submarines. The system is linked to dedicated hardware control and launching equipment to facilitate remote execution of the nuclear launch order.

The Dead Hand went operational in January 1985. After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the world heard nothing more about this doomsday device or weapon. However, many still believe that such a weapon exists even in the post-Soviet world, or Russia now.

The Russian Navys nuclear-armed unmanned underwater vehicle

Under the aggressive leadership of the former KGB Vladimir Putin, the Russian military has embarked on massive military buildup and development.

These include introducing new weapon technologies and adding new aircraft, missiles, tanks, warships, nuclear attack submarines and even nuclear-capable underwater drone to its current weapon inventory.

Last year, the Russian military made huge headlines around the world when a state-run news agency revealed a potential new Russian weapon. The latest addition is a nuclear-capable underwater vehicle (UUV), which is launched from a B-90 Sarov-class Project 20120 diesel electric-powered submarine that was specifically designed for testing new Russian weaponry. The secret UUV was first mentioned in a report by a Russian state-run TV station, which showed footage of a classified presentation of the long-range nuclear-capable underwater drone.

According to The Diplomat, the footage features a long-range, self-propelled underwater vehicle. The robotic mini-submarine or UUV can travel at speed of over 100 knots (115mph) and has a range of up to 10,000 km. The underwater drone is also capable of operating in depths of up to 1,000m, making it harder to track by any US Navys submarine hunters. The potential new weapon could be equipped with a thermonuclear warhead with a layer of the highly radioactive cobalt-59. Reports said that it was designed to obliterate entire coastal cities and naval installations

Based on the released footage, the self-propelled underwater drone is designed to destroy important economic installations of the enemy in coastal areas.

The unmanned underwater vehicle reportedly has a range of up to 10,000 kilometers. It will carry a doomsday weapon that could be guaranteed devastating damage to the enemys coastal installations by creating a wide area of radioactive contamination, making the coastal installations unusable for a long period of time. A prototype was already being planned for 2009 with the first test to arrive around 2018 and 2020, according to the reports.
There is a growing concern over whether or not the United States will go to war with North Korea. The biggest question, should the situation on the Korean peninsula turn to into a full-scale conflict, is whether or not each side would use their nuclear arsenals. An exchange of nuclear weapons, even a limited one, could lead to the complete destruction of the planet.

A far more combustible situation between nuclear-armed nations is currently brewing. India and Pakistan have both engaged in a number of skirmishes and small firefights as tensions continue to escalate in the Himalayan region.

Pakistani officials claimed that soldiers were performing routine maintenance on communication lines when they came under fire from Indian troops. India, however, contends that their border positions were attacked and they simply returned fire. Both sides claim to have suffered no casualties.

It is one of a number of similar skirmishes in recent months as the two sides often come face to face in the region.

India and Pakistan have been at odds for decades and have gone to war before. The difference now is, both nations have the nuclear capability to completely annihilate their neighbor. Doing so would be self-destructive though as fallout would likely hit whichever country struck first. Factor in the immediate retaliation from the opposing nation, and it is a situation that could destroy most, if not all, of central Asia.

Disputed border

Much of the tension comes from a disputed land border in the Kashmir region. Pakistan has sought to either claim complete ownership of the region or have it declared an autonomous state. Either way, they do not see India as having any real claim to the region.

There has even been an insurgency of militants in the region rebelling against Indian rule.

It is suspected that Pakistan is funding and supporting these rebels but it is unclear if that is true or not.

Terrorism concerns

India has much to worry about regarding their border with Pakistan. The Mumbai bombing and hotel assault that killed scores was one of the worst terrorist attacks in India's history. It is widely believed that the terrorists came from Pakistan and may have even had assistance from the Pakistan government.

Whether or not the government is complicit doesn't matter to India. It is hard to refute that Pakistan is somewhat of a safe haven for terrorist organizations and their leaders. Being so close to India is alarming as attacks like the one in Mumbai are easy to replicate, especially if the terrorists are receiving state-sponsored help.

This type of small-scale fighting has the risk to escalate much higher. While North Korea and the U.S. continue their exchange the war of words, it is Pakistan and India that we need to truly be worried about as we head into 2018.
Donald Trump is known to make so many posts on social media that he occasionally finds himself in error. During his latest tweetstorm, the president appeared to misquote himself while attempting to attack a major news outlet for quoting his recent remarks about the leader of North Korea.

Trump on Twitter

From the day he kicked off his campaign for president, Donald Trump has been at odds with the majority of the mainstream media. Throughout his entire campaign and during his first year in office, the former host of "The Apprentice" has not held back his thoughts on the press, with many media outlets firing back at the president in their attempt to hold his feet to the fire of accountability.

Since the start of 2018, Trump and the press have continued their war of words, which was only increased after an interview with the Wall Street Journal who reported that the president claimed that he was in a good relationship with Kim Jong-un, despite previously insulting the leader of North Korean on several occasions. In a series of tweets on January 14, Trump accused the Wall Street Journal of "Fake News," but the paper was quick to offer some validation.

The Wall Street Journal stated falsely that I said to them I have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un (of N. Korea). Obviously I didnt say that. I said Id have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un, a big difference. Fortunately we now record conversations with reporters...  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2018

...and they knew exactly what I said and meant. They just wanted a story. FAKE NEWS!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2018

In the Wall Street Journal report, the paper quoted Donald Trump during his comments on Kim Jong-un where the president reportedly said "I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea." The commander in chief attempted to push back during his tweet on Sunday morning, claiming that the Wall Street Journal "falsely" reported their information.

"Obviously I didnt say that," Donald Trump wrote, before adding, "I said 'Id have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un,' a big difference." Trump continued his rant by saying he now has to record all the conversations with reporters, concluding, "They just wanted a story. FAKE NEWS!"

Journal clap back

In response to Donald Trump's tweet, the Wall Street Journal debunked the president's blunder by releasing the audio recording of their interview.

In the audio clip, the president's remarks were just as the paper reported them, contradicting the tweets that were sent out in response. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders released the White House's own audio of the president's quote in an attempt to back up Trump's allegations, though the sound was not as clear as what came from the Wall Street Journal. As of press time, neither the White House nor the president have commented further on the issue.
After yet another weekend of dealing with allegations that he's a racist, Donald Trump kicked off the new week with a tweet in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Not long after his message was posted, critics of the president made sure to fire back.

Trump on MLK

Even before Donald Trump became a politician he had a sketchy history when it came to race relations, most notably his push against the "Central Park Five," four African-American men and one Hispanic man, who were wrongly convicted of the rape of a female jogger in 1989. Since he kicked off his campaign for president, the former host of "The Apprentice" has come under fire on more than one occasions due to controversial remarks and policy proposals that made have labeled racist.

Trump's latest brush with racially charged language came in a report last week that accused the president of referring to El Salvador, Haiti, and countries in Africa as a "sh*thole" during a meeting with members of Congress. As expected, the president has denied the report, labeling it "fake news," despite several lawmakers who were present during the meeting confirming its accuracy. With the latest round of allegations fresh in the minds of many around the country, Trump took to Twitter on January 15 to honor Martin Luther King Jr.

"Dr. King's dream is our dream. It is the American Dream. It's the promise stitched into the fabric of our Nation, etched into the hearts of our people, and written into the soul of humankind." pic.twitter.com/tyUZGTecDY  The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 15, 2018

Taking to Twitter on Monday morning, Donald Trump posted a video tribute for Martin Luther King Jr.

Day. "Dr. King's dream is our dream. It is the American Dream," Trump said. "It's the promise stitched into the fabric of our Nation, etched into the hearts of our people, and written into the soul of humankind," he added. "It is the dream of a world where people are judged by who they are, not how they look or where they come from," the president went on to say.

Instant backlash

After Donald Trump's tweet for MLK, those who oppose the administration wasted no time calling out the president. "Right now the American dream is for @realDonaldTrump to resign," one tweet read.

Right now the American dream is for @realDonaldTrump to resign.  Shelly R Kirchoff (@ShellyRKirchoff) January 15, 2018

Unless you want to take a knee or protest, amirite? This is rich coming from you. #shitholepresident  Chris Cindric (@cindric_chris) January 15, 2018

Our last real president, Barack Obama, is volunteering today. You're golfing and putting out prerecorded messages that you dont even mean, or understand.  Logan Murphy (@LoganMurphy1) January 15, 2018

"What hole are you on?

Hope your having a great round and practicing your speech for this important day! Wait.....no speech!" a Twitter user wrote. "We know darned well that you didn't write this!!" another tweet went on to write. "None of us believes you believe that, Trump. Your life and your presidency tell a very different story." an additional tweet added.

Sad we have a RACIST in the White House  Patricia allen (@Eamon0303) January 15, 2018

Exactly.  Donna Lovretovich (@lovretovich) January 15, 2018

No one thinks Trump believes any of that.  Khary Penebaker (@kharyp) January 15, 2018

"I dont know who wrote this for you but there in not an ounce of genuine sentiment in it," a follow-up tweet added. "Sad we have a RACIST in the White House," another social media post stated.
President Donald Trump, who this observer believes should resign, has ignited an extremely boisterous Twitter rant with his comment calling African nations, "s***hole" countries. The comment, which allegedly was made by Trump at a DACA meeting attended by several US Senators in the White House, is an affront to good relations with foreign countries, international treaties, military cooperation, and trade. And the affront has not helped the Trump Administration, or for that matter, the United States, in any capacity.

If anything, Trump's irresponsible comments have seriously lowered America's position on the international scorecard.

Most likely, the damage is irreversible, putting the country in a position such that nothing ever will be the same.

A matter of trust

The fact of the matter is that America has lost the trust of the African nations that Trump called "s***hole countries," as well as that of most, if not all, nations on the international front. Once the sacred bond of trust has been broken, the pieces never do quite go back together correctly. Donald Trump, who this observer refers to as the "Racist-in-Chief," presumably is so obtuse that he is not even aware of the fact he has severed the trust of nearly all the nations of the world. Former President George H.W. Bush summed it up quite briskly when he referred to Trump as a "blowhard." Neither Former Presidents Bush voted for Trump in 2016, nor did their wives.

Twitter rants explode

Twitter came alive in response to Trump's comment, which reportedly was proceeded with a comment about Haiti: "Haitians. Do we need more Haitians?," according to CNN on Friday (Jan. 12). It was then that the president allegedly complained about a bipartisan bill that was protecting immigrants from Africa.

Reportedly, the president then referred to the African nations from whom the immigrants come as "s***hole nations." The Twitter firestorm that emerged in response to these comments was unforgiving and relentless.

One tweeter stated that it makes no difference if Trump apologizes for this "s***hole" comments because an apology won't do any good.

Nigerians and misguided priorities. If #DonaldTrump insist that he didnt call us a shithole, or if he agrees that he indeed said so, and offers an apology, what does that change? Do it change the fact that over 6million #Nigerians have lost their jobs in 2 years?  EEU.  (@royaltyuso) January 13, 2018

Another tweeter apologized for the fact that "Your President is a horrible role model, an openly foul-mouthed racist bigot sexist sexual assaulter."

I want to apologize to the young people of America. I am sorry that your President is a horrible role-model, an openly foul-mouthed racist bigot sexist sexual assaulter. #shithole #HisTimeIsUp #DonaldTrump #Haiti #Africa  Sophia A. Nelson (@IAmSophiaNelson) January 12, 2018

Another tweeter stated, "Donald Trump needs to take a mental health test."

https://t.co/dJBPD3KSx4 this man says #DonaldTrump needs to take a mental health test!!! #racist  TOY HIGH (@toyhigh) January 14, 2018

Another tweeter discussed the fact that Trump is not welcome in the UK and then stated: "He is clearly not welcomed with his hateful racist and misogynistic views." That tweeter then criticized British Prime Minister Theresa May for having invited Trump to the UK in the first place: "Theresa May who should never have offered him a state visit."

Pleased #DonaldTrump wont be coming to the UK. He is clearly not welcomed with his hateful racist and misogynistic views. Highlights yet another error of judgment by Theresa May who should never have offered him a state visit. Also we luv #Saarf London! pic.twitter.com/tRSG7UTEG2  (((Dawn Butler MP))) (@DawnButlerBrent) January 12, 2018

Another tweeter described Trump as "not suitable to run the county."

Finally, a tweeter described Queen Elizabeth as embarrassed and humiliated over the controversy created by Trump's comments.

The unwritten rule

Without question, it appears that the president has broken one of the most important unwritten rules of politics: Do not embarrass the Queen; whatever you do, don't ever embarrass the Queen. That is not how a political neophyte like Donald Trump becomes knighted on the stage of international relations.
After a two-year hiatus, veteran talk show host David Letterman has returned to television, with his new talk show "My Next Guest Needs No Introduction," which premiered on Netflix on January 12.

Lettermans new show announced via trailer on Netflix is made up of six episodes, with each episode running for an hour. Unlike "The Late Show," for "My Next Guest Needs No Introduction," Letterman is sporting a beard, a look which seems to go over well with guests and audience. Letterman also is enjoying himself by saying to the show's audience; how great it is to be out of the damn house.

The new show premiered January 12

"My Next Guest Needs No Introduction" premiered with its first guest, former President Barack Obama.

Since leaving the White House in 2017, Obama has been keeping a low profile. The most recent interview, that the former president carried out, was a radio interview with Prince Harry in 2017 in Canada. Obamas interview on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, was his first television interview since leaving the White House.

However, this is not the first time that Barack Obama has been interviewed by Letterman. Obama has appeared on "The Late Show," and it seems that the two (Obama and Letterman), were able to form a good working relationship as interviewer and interviewee.

'My Next Guest Needs No Introduction'

In a statement regarding the show, Netflix has said My Next Guest is centered around one extraordinary figure whom David finds fascinating and takes place inside and outside of a studio setting, the conversations are intimate, in-depth and far-reaching, with the levity and humor Daves fans know and love.

Other guests on the show include George Clooney, Tina Fey, Malala Yousafzai, Jay Z and Howard Stern.

Unlike Lettermans previous talk show "The Late Show," "My Next Guest Needs No Introduction," is filmed in a more intimate setting.

This intimate setting seemed to have worked well with Obama, as he talked about his family, the media and the American political system. The American political system was discussed at some length in the first episode.

Letterman catches up with Congressman John Lewis and together they visit places of political significance including; Selma and Alabama. Letterman and Lewis, also discuss the history of voting rights.

Whilst Letterman has been out of the spotlight, he didnt disappear completely. In November 2017, Letterman was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Amber Portwood's former boyfriend, Gary Shirley, the father of her nine-year-old daughter Leah, was seen discussing the idea of a possible adoption with his wife, Kristina Anderson, on Monday night's new episode of "Teen Mom OG." However, they weren't talking about welcoming a new child into their family. Instead, Shirley and Anderson were talking about Anderson adopting Leah Shirley.

According to a report by Hollywood Life on January 15, Gary Shirley and Kristina Anderson feel that Amber Portwood isn't as involved with her daughter as she should be -- and they've been feeling that way for some time.

As "Teen Mom OG" fans have likely seen, Portwood recently gave her former fiance Matt Baier the boot as she began dating her new boyfriend Andrew Glennon.

Amber Portwood has spent tons of time in Los Angeles in recent months

Because Andrew Glennon was living in Los Angeles when he met Amber Portwood, who lives in Indiana, on the set of "Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars Family Edition," the couple was forced to do a lot of traveling in the first several weeks of their romance. While Portwood and Glennon appear to be living together at this point in time, they were seen back in Malibu not long ago and appear to be traveling when they can. They even took a road trip with Leah weeks ago.

Amber Portwood is pregnant with her second child

A short time after her relationship with Andrew Glennon began, the "Teen Mom OG" star announced that she was expecting another baby. Weeks later, she took to Instagram to confirm that she and Glennon would be welcoming a baby boy sometime in 2018. Right away, fans worried that Portwood was moving to fast but ever since her announcement was made, she's appeared to be quite happy with her new partner.

During a recent episode of "Teen Mom OG," Portwood was seen learning that she was expecting a child with Andrew Glennon while on vacation in Hawaii. As fans may have noticed, the couple's vacation took place in September, just weeks after they confirmed their relationship with a post on Instagram and walked the red carpet together at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards.

To see more of Amber Portwood, Andrew Glennon, Gary Shirley, and their co-stars, including Farrah Abraham, Catelynn Lowell, Tyler Baltierra, Maci Bookout, Ryan Edwards, Taylor McKinney, and Kristina Anderson, don't miss new episodes of the seventh season of "Teen Mom OG" on Monday nights at 9 PM on MTV.
Catelynn Lowell and Tyler Baltierra have been together for over a decade. The two have been through a lot, including giving up their first daughter, Carly, for adoption. Their journey has been documented on Teen Mom, starting with 16 & Pregnant. Lowell and Baltierra were dealt rough hands in life, but now, they are married and share another daughter, Nova, together.

Expanding their family

This season on Teen Mom OG, Catelynn Lowell and Tyler Baltierra have talked about having another child. This has been a conversation for the couple on several occasions, but it has always circled around to Lowell not feeling ready.

She suffered from postpartum depression badly after Nova, and having another child brings that experience back to the forefront of her mind. Baltierra is ready to parent another child but he isn't pushing his wife too hard.

According to OK! Magazine, Catelynn Lowell, and Tyler Baltierra may be ready to expand their family now. On tonight's episode of Teen Mom OG, Catelynn goes in to have her IUD removed. This is a big deal because, in the past, she has canceled the appointment several times. The doctor warns Lowell that she may be ovulating soon, which was a bit of the shock to the Teen Mom OG star. This was taped several months ago, and obviously, the couple is not expecting another child yet as there has been no announcement.

Catelynn's treatment

Just recently, Catelynn Lowell went to rehab for a second time to battle her depression and suicidal thoughts. The announcement came over the holiday season, with her missing Thanksgiving and Christmas with her daughter and husband. Tyler Baltierra has been supportive of his wife's mental health journey, but it has been an uphill battle.

With this recent setback, having another child could be put even further off by the couple. Catelynn's health is the most important thing right now, especially for the sake of their family.

The next couple of months could change things for Catelynn Lowell and Tyler Baltierra. The idea that they are ready to try and are no longer using birth control is a huge deal.

This has been the surest Lowell has been, and at this point, there could be an announcement on the way at any point going forward Rumors have been swirling for months, and now that the docotr office scene will air, there will be pregnancy rumors for weeks to come. Catelynn and Tyler are used to it by now, especially being in the publuic eye.
Fashion trends change often, but one style that has been steadily decreasing in popularity for over a decade is fur. Fox and mink pelts have lost their appeal to younger generations as animal rights groups have significantly gained in popularity. Norway has taken a step in the direction of compassion with its plan to phase out fur farms by 2025.

Spearheaded by Erna Solberg, Norway's conservative Prime Minister, this move will put an end to the inhumane practice of skinning animals for their pelts. Solbergs action is an attempt to broaden her conservative government by adding the anti-fur members of the Liberal Party.

Fox and mink breeders are not happy about it.

A shocking scene

It came a big surprise to fox and mink breeders when Solberg agreed to put an end to fur farms in Norway. Guri Wormdahl of the Norwegian Fur Breeders Association stated that they were "Shaken to the core." According to Wormdahl, there are currently 200 fur farms in Norway which employ approximately 400 people. She also stated that these farms adhere to animal welfare standards.

Another group that was shocked, but in a good way, was Noah. This animal rights group has condemned the practice of harvesting fur from animals, calling it cruel and outdated. They have also pointed out that fur is no longer a fashion trend and needs to come to an end.

Siri Martinsen, the leader of Noah, said that they are very pleased with Solberg's decision.

Fur economics

Before World War II, Norway was the world leader in fox fur trade. At the peak of fur farming in 1939, Norway was home to over 20,000 fur farms. In 2013, the Nordic nation dropped down to producing only 3% of fox furs worldwide.

The market for animal pelts has been cornered by China, which produces 69% of furs worldwide, followed by Finland.

Wormdahl argues that fur farming rakes in 350 million to 500 million Norwegian crowns annually (approximately $44-$63 million). In today's economy, $1 is the equivalent to 7.8918 Norwegian crowns.

Economists agreed with Prime Minister Solberg's decision.

Experts such as Sveinung Fjose of Menon Business Economics said that farming fur was no longer a lucrative endeavor and would not cause much harm to Norway's economy.

International cooperation

The Humane Society recently stated that Norway will be the 14th country in Europe to ban fur farming. The first country to put a stop to this cruel practice was the United Kingdom in 2000, followed by Austria in 2004. Gucci, a luxury Italian fashion brand, stated last year that they will no longer design clothes featuring fur. They have joined the growing list of companies who refuse to use animal pelts in their designs.

The United States has not yet banned fur farms.
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HCM CITY  Princess Cruises, a five-star premium cruise line, on Tuesday announced that it would bring 80,000 international tourists to Viet Nam this year, 40 per cent more than last year.

Farriek Tawfik, Southeast Asia director of Princess Cruises, said 31 ships would arrive in Viet Nam this year, 17 of them in Phu My, 10 in Nha Trang and the rest mostly in a Nang and Cai Lan.

He told Viet Nam News that Viet Nam had become an increasingly popular destination for his companys guests from the US, Australia, the EU and Asia.

The company has announced it would organise a travel fair in HCM City on February 10 and 11.

At the fair, the company will also launch its Mediterranean and Europe sailing itineraries for summer 2018 for five ships.

Tawfik said though now only 0.1 per cent of Vietnamese were cruise customers, the country was a promising market.

He quoted a report from the Cruise Line International Association saying that demand in Viet Nam had increased by 126 per cent between 2012 and 2016 to 4,100, the largest increase for any Asian country.

He also quoted a report form Boston Consulting Group saying that the middle and affluent classes in Viet Nam would double to 33 million, or a third of the population by 2020, which makes it an attractive market for consumer brands.

With the rise of the middle class, the demand for holidays abroad would also increase, including for cruise travel to destinations such as EU and around Asia, he said.

Princess Cruises operates a fleet of 17 ships that carry some two million passengers a year from over 70 countries and territories.

The ships visit 360 ports around the world.  VNS
BINH THUAN  The central province of Binh Thuan, which has more than 9,500 ha of dragon fruit cultivated under VietGAP (Vietnam Good Agricultural Practices) standards, plans to expand the area to 9,800ha this year, according to the provinces Agriculture and Rural Development Department.

With more than 27,600ha of dragonfruit and 262ha for GlobalGAP, Binh Thuan Province has the largest area allocated to the fruit in the country, with annual output topping more than 550,000 tonnes, Mai Kieu, director of the department, said in a local conference on January 15.

ao Thi Kim Dung, director of Binh Thuans Dragon Fruit Research and Development Centre, said that farmers were not interested in dragonfruit grown under VietGap standards because they do not receive higher prices compared to normal dragonfruit and buyers do not care about the VietGap-grown fruit.

The provinces Peoples Committee has asked departments and agencies to link farmers and buyers and support new technology for farmers, said Pham Van Nam, vice chairman of the committee.

The provinces dragonfruit is exported to the US, the EU, the Republic of Korea and Japan, according to the Binh Thuan Dragon Fruit Association.  VNS




HA NOI  The 2018 Kien Giang Province investment promotion forum held on Monday was seen as an affirmative undertaking to establish the provinces potential, economic strengths and call for investment.

Pham Vu Hong, Chairman of the Kien Giang provincial Peoples Committee, affirmed at the forum that his local government is dedicated to creating the most favourable business conditions and the highest preferential policy mechanisms to ensure future sustainable socio-economic development.

In giving an overview of the provinces agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining and tourism sectors, he confirmed that local Government puts great emphasis on implementing strategic breakthroughs, economic restructure, business growth model renovation, raising productivity, efficiency and competitiveness.

Bearing in mind that sustainable economic strength means more business opportunities, Kien Giang Province is committed to guaranteeing administrative consistency and transparency to ensure investors and enterprises enjoy the provisions of Vietnamese law, said Hong.

Provincial administrative authorities spoke with investors and enterprises at the forum on future investment key projects in the manufacturing industry and agriculture sector.

Investors were particularly interested in Indias ION Exchange Ltds three major projects in the area, from the Cua Can Reservoir with US$71.2 million in investment capital, the Phu Quoc wastewater treatment plant with $119.7 million, to the Rach Gia wastewater treatment system with about $40 million.

In response, provincial authorities reaffirmed their priority for investment projects in the fields of waste treatment and environmental protection, as a key indication of sustainable development, in addition to well-established areas of hi-tech agriculture, forestry and aquaculture, manufacturing and tourism.

As such, Kien Giang Province will carry out six more environment-related investment projects worth about $199 million, while simultaneously working on nine industrial infrastructure projects at $280 million, 14 tourism projects at more than $185 million, six urban development projects at $77.9 million and eight agro-aquatic processing projects estimated at $40.9 million.

According to ao Van Ho, Director of the Centre for Trade Promotion of Agriculture under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, total funding for Kien Giang Provinces 2018 investment promotion activities would be around $515,000, of which State budget support would account for $35,000, leaving the rest to provincial budget and social mobilisation.

According to the provinces Department of Industry and Trade, the 2017 provincial export turnover reached $470 million, focusing on agricultural and aquatic products, exceeding 17.5 per cent of the annual target and up by 34 per cent from 2016s numbers

The forums attendants included more than 120 investors and business representatives from home and abroad, together with delegates from the Indian and Italian General Consulates in HCM City and the Management Board of HCM Citys Agricultural Hi-tech Park.  VNS
The Ministry of Finance has proposed the Government raise the individual income tax imposed on capital/securities transfer to 2 per cent for trades not registered to the Vietnam Securities Depository and not made on the securities market. Photo tinnhanhchungkhoan.vn

HA NOI  The Ministry of Finance has proposed the Government raise the individual income tax imposed on capital/securities transfer to 2 per cent for trades not registered to the Vietnam Securities Depository and not made on the securities market.

The individual income tax imposed on each securities/capital transaction is calculated by the selling price minus the buying price and charges that help generate the income for the individual investor.

According to Article 23 and 28 of the Law of Personal Income Tax issued in November 2011, both resident and non-resident individuals are taxed at 0.1 per cent for each securities transaction.

Meanwhile, resident individual investors must pay a tax rate of 20 per cent for each capital transaction while non-resident individual investors only have to pay 0.1 per cent tax rate.

According to the finance ministry, it had been difficult for market regulators to keep track of securities transactions, which were not registered to the VSD for trading on the securities market, and charges that were relevant to the transactions.

In many cases, individual investors falsely declared the difference between selling and buying prices was zero, which led to tax arrears, the finance ministry said in its proposal.

In other cases, some companies that had not registered their shares to the VSD for trading on the securities market avoid paying corporate income taxes by transferring the securities to various individuals at the buying-selling price difference of zero, the ministry said.

Then the individual buyers only had to bear a 0.1 per cent tax rate for their income when selling the securities at higher prices, the ministry added.

Thus, the ministry proposed the Government increase the individual income tax rates on the selling price of the transfer of untraded and unregistered capital/securities to 2 per cent. The 0.1 per cent individual income tax rate would be imposed only on transfer of shares that are traded and registered to the stock exchanges.

The proposal is a part of the ministrys overall proposal on developing a draft law to amend the laws of added value tax, special consumption tax, corporate income tax, personal income tax, natural resource and environment tax and import-export tax.

Brokerage firms and market analysts were not available for comment.

Rising questions

A number of brokerage firm representatives have raised concerns over the feasibility of the latest proposal. They argue that it would cost market regulators and tax agencies more time and effort to keep track on capital/securities transactions to collect tax, tinnhanhchungkhoan.vn reported.

The transfer of securities is a part of the transfer of capital as capital transfer is the trading of ownership in limited liability companies, associated companies and economic organisations.

Meanwhile, securities transfer is the trading of ownership, shares, options, bonds, fund certificates and other securities products in joint stock companies, according to the laws of Securities and Enterprises.

As the tax rate imposed on capital transfer is 20 times higher than the tax rate imposed on securities transfer, it would encourage unlisted and untraded companies to dodge the tax regulations.

They could turn to the form of a joint-stock company from the form of limited liability company. This would cause more trouble for the tax agencies collecting taxes from their transactions if the regulators fail to keep track of the trading of securities and capital.  VNS
HA NOI  At a conference to review the industry and trade sector in 2017, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc lauded the sectors accomplishment of reaching US$200 billion export turnover for the first time, the abolishment of 675 business and investment conditions (about half the previous total 1,216 regulations) and the settlement of 12 loss-making projects.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade became the pioneer among the countrys ministries to cut administrative procedures, thus improving national competitiveness, he said at the conference in Ha Noi on Monday.

MoITs groups and corporations were also praised for their success in privatisation efforts. Of these, the listing of Saigon Beer, Alcohol and Beverage Corporation (Sabeco) on the stock market has become the largest IPO in the country so far, receiving an estimated VN110 trillion ($4.89 billion).

This is a very profound lesson in the privatisation of State-owned enterprises as a measure against corruption and bureaucracy, bringing the Government nearly $5 billion, the PM said.

He highlighted the importance of shifting attitudes and defining long-term visions. Officials from the ministry were asked to overcome outdated thinking to grasp opportunities and work with other sectors.

Phuc also pointed out weaknesses within the ministry, including the slow introduction of strategies and plans; limited implementation and research in industrial development in line with the fourth industrial revolution; weak market forecasts; low competitiveness and heavy reliance on the FDI sector.

He urged the ministry to be swift in restructuring SOEs, especially groups and corporations in key economic sectors. This would be save management costs and improve effectiveness in the short-term and accelerate restructuring, thus ensuring sustainable growth of the economy in the long-term.

PM Phuc stressed that in 2018 and the next couple of years, industrial production, exports and domestic trade must develop in favour of hi-tech, competitive and environmentally friendly products. The sector was asked to develop exports and maintain domestic markets.

The MoIT was asked to combat illegal trading and trade fraud and to protect domestic production.

Industrial production motive for industrial growth: minister

Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Tuan Anh noted that the index of industrial production grew 9.4 per cent in 2017, well above the growth of 7.4 per cent in the previous year, driven by steady expansion in manufacturing-processing (14.5 per cent), he noted.

Consumption of the manufacturing-processing sector continued to enjoy an upward trend with an increase of 13.6 per cent as of November 2017, higher than the 8.5-per cent rise in 2016, the minister highlighted. He said that the two-digit growth was seen in the consumption of beverages and garments and textiles and the production of leather, leather products, medicine and pharmaceuticals, which boosted domestic production.

He noticed that the inventory index witnessed a year-on-year surge of 8 per cent, lower than the 8.3 per cent year-on-year increase in 2016.

Production of the manufacturing-processing sector is forecast to continue to be on track in 2018 thanks to numerous operational investment projects. The ministry is working on the restructuring of state-owned enterprises to improve business efficiency in key industrial segments of the country to realise the sectors goal of 9 per cent growth in 2018.

The move aims to slash management costs, improve business operations and ensure sustainable economic growth in the coming years, Anh said.

The ministry will prioritise networking events to connect and support local firms so that they can participate in the global supply chain while focusing on foreign-invested projects to take advantage of economic integration.

Under the support industry development programme, the ministry has carried out an array of projects to back the automobile industry, electronics industry, garment and textiles and leather shoes.  VNS
HA NOI  Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc asked the Ministry of Planning and Investment to offer the Government solutions to boost economic development and turn Viet Nam into a new tiger of Asia.

Phuc, speaking on Monday at the ministrys conference to implement 2018 tasks, urged the ministry to closely watch socio-economic developments to raise measures to meet growth targets this year.

Minister of Planning and Investment Nguyen Chi Dung said that the socio-economic development in 2017 would create the impetus for the country to enter a new period of growth, one more efficient, sustainable and inclusive.

The way towards innovation and development is still long, ahead with difficulties and challenges which require great effort to overcome, Dung said.

The ministry was striving to enhance public management and improve the investment climate to promote production and efficiently attract private and direct foreign investment resources, he added.

In 2018, the ministry would focus on the compilation of laws to submit to the National Assembly, such as the Law on Special Administrative-Economic Units, the amended laws on public investment and enterprise as well as the law on investment under public-private partnership practice, Deputy Minister Nguyen Van Trung said.

This year, the Vietnamese economy was expected to face a lot of difficulties from the uncertainty in the global economy, the return of protectionism, climate change, international integration and the fourth industrial revolution, Trung said.

However, opportunities abound, given the Governments efforts to promote innovation associated with the industry 4.0 and enhance productivity and national competitiveness, he added.

The core is maintaining macroecnomic stability and taking advantage of every opportunity to create breakthroughs, he stressed.

Trung said that the ministry would focus on studying policies to effectively raise every resource for development investment as well as solutions to hasten economic restructuring in line with renovating the growth model and enhancing growth quality.

Nguyen inh Cung, Director of the Central Institute for Economic Management, said that Viet Nam was a developing country and it was pressing to narrow the gap with developed economies in the region and in the world. To achieve this goal, Viet Nam must achieve an annual GDP growth rate of at least 8-10 per cent.

Cung also said that the ministry must do more in its role as the economys conductor.

In 2017, Viet Nam fulfilled targets set for all 13 socio-economic indicators and achieved a gross domestic product growth rate of 6.81 per cent, higher than the target of 6.7 per cent. The country also saw a record of 127 new firms in 2017.

Measure the underground economy

Speaking at the conference, Director of Viet Nam General Statistics Office Nguyen Bich Lam said that a statistical project of measuring the non-observed economy would be proposed to the Prime Minister for approval this year.

The project aims to collect information on economic activities that affect the scale of the economy but are not measured in GDP, causing economic indicators to be underestimated.

Lam said that the non-observed economy included production activities that were illegal, underground, informal, or otherwise missed by the statistical system, according to the definition of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.  VNS
Upbeat world economic forecast supported by growth, innovation

by Mai Huong

HONG KONG  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is optimistic about the current state of the world economy while predicting faster growth across all regions and highlighting Chinas vital role in promoting globalisation.

David Lipton, IMF first deputy managing director, launched the Asian Financial Forum 2018 on Monday in Hong Kong with his reflections on the Asian Economic Outlook, during an early demonstration prior to the IMFs update on the world economic outlook, to be issued next week.

Right now, the sun is shining on the global economy, Lipton said.

With rising investments and demand, the recovery is being spread across the entire globe, particularly in Asia, which contributes two thirds of global growth, driven by continued growth in China and the strengthening of the Japanese and Indian economies.

While being bullish on the outlook, Lipton remained unclear on how long the good news will continue, and highlighted the key challenges that the world needs to address to promote stronger growth.

His main concern, shared by investors and policymakers, is that geopolitical tensions, the risk of unexpected monetary policy developments and exchange rate fluctuations, coupled with the rapid appreciation of asset valuations during the previous years, could swing market sentiments and trigger a sudden reversal of capital flows.

Worse yet, some developing countries seem likely, once again, to face difficulties from the burden of rising debt Lipton added while indicating that over 40 countries, including some emerging market countries, will grow more slowly or fall behind developed countries.

Chinas global role

Lipton suggested that it is time for the world to consider the spill-over effect of Chinese policy-making, as it had previously done with the United States (US) and Japan, given its global importance.

China is a key trading partner to over 100 countries, representing a combined 80 per cent of global GDP. It is also a major investor and creditor, with Chinese lending making up 25 to 30 per cent of the GDP of some recipient countries.

It is the hub of the global supply chain, a magnet for commodity exporters, and a source of final demand, Lipton stated.

In terms of globalisation, China has been a voice of reason in preserving and promoting a multilateral trading system, in the context of rising doubts among advanced economies.

However, to cement its leading role in globalisation, Lipton advised the country to look at its own restrictions on trade and investment, which has drawn criticism from certain trading partners. He also called for the further protection of intellectual property rights and the reduction of distorted industrial policies, overcapacity and policies that favour state enterprises.

Concerning recent US-China trade conflicts, Jacob J. Lew, US secretary of the treasury, highlighted several issues that are undermining their two-country bilateral relationship, including Chinas monetary measures, which the US says is money manipulation, as well as the limited market access for foreign firms.

He also called for increasing trade interactions between the two sides and suggested that they settle trade disputes through a multilateral trading system, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), adding that any settlements agreed through a rule-based trading system is not a trade war or a disruption to their relationship.

Growth and innovation

Robust innovation is believed to be the driver of economic growth in the new era of the 4th Industrial Revolution, bringing revolutionary changes to the markets and new experiences to businesses and people, but also posing regular challenges.

In her opening remarks, Carrie Lam, chief executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, highlighted Hong Kongs role as a premier international financial centre, with innovation being deeply ingrained in its DNA.

Innovation, the second key word of this years theme, must be seized upon to unlock the full potential of the gains from growth and ensure that Hong Kong stays ahead and remains competitive in the wealth creation process of Chinas development, Lam said.

While sharing insights on how to manage the innovative process for success and positive reinforcement, Jiang Yang, vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, said that it is crucial to have a clear regulatory philosophy that is open-minded to modern technologies and appropriate regulations, to guide and ensure that it will serve the whole economy.

The 11th Asian Financial Forum, themed, Steering Growth and Pioneering Innovation: Asia and Beyond, has gathered over 2,900 attendees from around the world, including government officials, representatives of central banks and regulatory authorities, and finance and business leaders. The event is co-organised annually by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.  VNS
HA NOI  Viet Nam has filed a complaint to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against the United States anti-dumping measures on Vietnamese fish export.

This was announced by the Ministry of Industry and Trade on Sunday.

According to the WTO filing, Viet Nam is seeking consultations with the US government about certain American anti-dumping regulations, practices and determinations in administrative reviews on fish fillet from Viet Nam.

According to the Nhan dan (People) newspaper, Viet Nam has accused the US of improper use of zeroing methodology that results in a higher level of anti-dumping duties on foreign producers, as well as other practices inconsistent with WTO.

Viet Nam has also voiced concern that the US has broken rules on dispute settlement while turning down Vietnamese exporters request for a revocation of the anti-dumping measures, although they are eligible for such a revocation.

The request for consultation is the first mandatory step in WTOs dispute settlement procedure.

The US will have 60 days to resolve the complaint, failing which Viet Nam can request adjudication from WTO.

This is the fourth time Viet Nam has initiated a dispute at WTO, after two previous complaints against the US anti-dumping measures on certain shrimps from Viet Nam and one against Indonesias safeguards on certain Vietnamese steel products.

In 2017, Viet Nam gained a year-on-year increase of 5.5 per cent in total export value of tra catfish to US$1.75 billion. China was the largest market for the export of Vietnamese tra fish products, while the US ranked second.  VNS
HA NOI  Viet Nam welcomed Mitsubishi Motors Corporations plan to build its second auto plant in the country, Deputy Prime Minister Vuong inh Hue said while receiving the groups Executive Vice President Kozo Shiraji in Ha Noi on Monday.

At the reception, Hue highlighted co-operation in auto and support industries as a priority for Viet Nam-Japan ties. Mitsubishi Motors expansion in Viet Nam will contribute to the countrys industrialisation strategy within the framework of the Viet Nam-Japan cooperation towards 2020, he said.

Investing in Viet Nam, the group will capitalise on local workforce and enjoy tariff incentives, Hue said, adding that if Viet Nam raised its rate of locally made products to 40 per cent, its exports to other ASEAN member states will enjoy zero tariff.

Viet Nam will create favourable conditions for Mitsubishi Motors to carry out its projects in the country, Hue said.

Thanking the Vietnamese Government and the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) for their assistance, Shiraji said Viet Nam was one of the key production hubs of his company in Southeast Asia with a pool of young and skilled labours.

He said Mitsubishi Motors was looking for a location to set up its second factory in the country. The plant costs approximately US$250 million, with a manufacturing capacity estimated to reach 30,000  50,000 cars on an annual basis.

To ensure the factorys operation in 2020, developed industrial parks or economic zones near seaports are more likely to be selected, Shiraji said.

The project aims at contributing to the local socio-economic growth and forming more partnerships in eco-car production in the future.

Mitsubishi Motors to partner with VN on electric vehicles

On the same day, Mitsubishi Motors also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with MoITs Department of Industry on research and development of electric vehicles (EV).

Under the agreement, the two sides will jointly study EVs deemed suitable for Viet Nams roads, traffic conditions and available charging infrastructure.

In Viet Nam, electric and hybrid vehicles are not yet popular; however, since the country has a 200-plus volt system, it is easy to charge the vehicles at home.

In addition, because the roads in Viet Nam are quite narrow, compact electric vehicles, such as Mitsubishis i-MiEV, are good choices.

Speaking at the signing ceremony, Shiraji expressed his pleasure to co-operate with an agency of the Viet Nam Government towards the use of clean energy. Mitsubishi Motors wants to share the companys pioneering experiences on electric vehicles and study Government policies, in order to support the application of this technology in a consistent way.  VNS
At exactly 5pm on January 6, four ships transporting the necessities for Tet (Lunar New Year festival) preparations arrived to greet residents and soldiers at Truong Sa (Spratly) Islands, about 248 sea miles from Cam Ranh City in the central province of Khanh Hoa .

On the way: Naval soldiers board the ship which will take them to the Truong Sa (Spratly) Islands to take on new missions before Tet.  VNA/VNS Photo Quang Quyet

According to Colonel Nguyen Cong Son, deputy commissar of the High Command in Naval Area 4, it has become a routine for the High Command to organise voyages to the islands to replace and withdraw troops as well as to send New Year wishes to the islanders.

Festive time: Before Tet (Lunar) New Year, hundreds tonnes of goods, necessities, fruits and vegetables have been transported to residents and soldiers on the Spratly Islands.  VNA/VNS Photo Quang Quyet

Hundreds of tonnes of goods, necessities, fruits and vegetables, gifts from Khanh Hoa Province s Peoples Committee and from other provinces nationwide, have also been transported to each household to make the New Year Festival on the islands as prosperous as that on the mainland.

Soldier santa: Soldiers of brigate 146 carry gifts and necessities aboard.  VNA/VNS Photo Quang Quyet

Goodbye: Naval soldiers wave farewell to their family and relatives before setting out to take on new missions on Truong Sa (Spratly) Islands.  VNA/VNS Photo Quang Quyet

Particularly, the happiness of the residents and soldiers on the Spratly Isalnds seemed to be doubled when they received VN100 million (US$4,400) in financial support directly from President Tran ai Quang and VN700 million ($30,822) from the Vu A Dinh Scholarship Fund.  VNS

* To see full text and more photos, please visit our website: ovietnam.vn
HA NOI  Artist Nguyen Thu Thuy hosted a visit and talk at the Mirror House in Thong Nhat Park, Ha Noi, with many international guests who are members of the Friends of Vietnamese Heritage group (FVH).

The Mirror House, or Laughing House, was built in 1979 with support from the government of the former Czechoslovakia.

Renata Greploud, spouse of the Czech Ambassador to Viet Nam, was moved to visit the construction when she learned it has a new coat made from colourful ceramic pieces.

The guests learned how the construction was coated with ceramic pieces to make it a sea world on the land. They applauded Thuys project and expressed appreciation for the efforts of Ha Nois authorities and artists in preserving public art constructions.

Talking pottery: Nguyen Thu Thuy hosts a talk introducing her work to coat the Mirror House with ceramic pieces.  VNS Photo Nguyen Ha

Thuy has finished the first part of the project and the new Mirror House began receiving guests early this month. She will finish 3D paintings inside the house in the near future.

The house was built in the shape of a huge snail shell, with a labyrinth of 50 mirrors reflecting distorted images of visitors.

The House was in a state of disrepair with oxidised mirrors, leaking roof and damp walls until Thuys project started in July 2017.

Ha Noi authorities assigned Thuy and designers from the Tan Ha Noi company to renovate the house and turn it into an artistic work engraved with ceramic designs.

Welcome: Artist Nguyen Thu Thuy presents flowers to Renata Greploud, spouse of the Czech Ambassador to Viet Nam.  VNS Photo Nguyen Ha

Thuy decided to take inspiration from the ocean. The floor was paved with the colour of ocean blue to depict an aquatic scene of coral, sea star, sea anemone and fishes. She used images of Ha Long Bay and Truong Sas [Spratly Archipelago] waves as guidance for the entire work.

Thuy is considered primarily an artist of ceramic paintings. It was her idea to transform the Red River Dyke Road wall into a work of art running along Au Co, Nghi Tam, Yen Phu, Tran Nhat Duat, Tran Quang Khai and Tran Khanh Du streets. At 3.85km long, this is the worlds largest ceramic mosaic and was awarded a Guinness World Records certificate.

She is also the mastermind of a great number of other public works of art such as the ceramic mosaic lotus steps in Thanh Hoa Province, the Ha Noi Amsterdam school mosaic sign, mosaic items along Tran Vu Street by Truc Bach Lake (Ha Noi) and the painted mural wall in the a Nang International Airport.  VNS
HA NOI  A documentary film about Asian openbill storks eating snails won the Green Viet Nam Award at the sixth National Environmental Festival Film, the organisers said on Tuesday morning in Ha Noi.

The film Openbill Storks Return, directed by Pham Hieu Thao from ong Thap Provincial Television, reflected the joy of local farmers when the storks return after the emigration. The storks eat snails which harm the wet rice.

However, due to uncontrolled and illegal hunting, the storks may vanish forever, said Thao.

Through the film, I want to plead for people to stop hunting and protect the endangered birds.

Thanks to the storks, farmers need less crop-protection chemicals, which are harmful to human health.

Thao said he wanted to raise awareness about protecting the ecological balance from negative impacts by people.

He said journalists should present urgent issues to society in a truthful and timely way.

Under threat: Asian openbill storks eating snails that damage rice crops.  From a video by Pham Hieu Thao.

Beside highest prize for the most outstanding work, the organising board also presented prizes to directors Hong Anh and Nguyen Ho Tri from VTV24 Information Centre (VTV), Nguyen Xuan Giang from An Giang Provincial Television, Bao Quang from the Viet Nam Animated Cartoon Film Studio, Huynh Nguyen from Binh Phuoc Provincial Television, and Nguyen Hong Quang from Science and Technology Section (VTV).

The film festival is organised every three years by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in collaboration with the Viet Nam Television and Viet Nam Cinema Association.

It is aimed at honouring film and television organisations and individuals who have positively contributed to the education of the community about protecting environment.

There are five categories: short feature, documentary, science, newsreel and cartoons - all with environmental themes. This season, the organising board received more than 100 entries from directors nationwide, according to Nguyen Van Phan, secretariat of the film festival.

Most of the films highlight problems that have affect society, such as forest protection, climate change, pollution, technology used in protecting the environment and biological diversity, he said.  VNS
General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong speaks at at a two-day conference held by the Ministry of Public Security in Ha Noi yesterday.  VNA/VNS Photo Tri Dung

HA NOI  General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, has urged the public security sector to improve forecast and analysis work for the prevention and early detection of threats to national interests and security - and any act of sabotage.

Speaking at a two-day conference held by the Ministry of Public Security in Ha Noi yesterday to review the performance of the sector and outline tasks for 2018, the Party leader said steps must be taken to protect information, cyber and economic security and effectively counter hostile and false information, especially on the Internet.

While praising the public security sectors efforts, Trong said that the domestic and international situation in 2018 posed heavy tasks for the sector.

He said this was why it was necessary to ensure the Partys absolute and comprehensive leadership of the public security forces.

He added that operations must be increased against trans-border, hi-tech and drug crimes and violations of laws in environment, food safety, and taxation; and enhance the effectiveness of operations against corruption, he stressed.

Last year, public security forces strictly promoted the rule of law, and innovative, active, responsible and effective actions. They succeeded in providing advice to the Party and State on strategic issues in the fields of politics, the economy and foreign affairs while ensuring the nations interests, national security and social order.

Trong said the forces had played an active role in ensuring security for Viet Nams important political events, particularly the APEC Economic Leaders Week, enhancing the countrys image in the international arena.

Also, thanks to drastic efforts, the forces also brought about a 3.02 per cent decline in the number of crimes in 2017 while 80.41 per cent of criminal cases were solved. The number of traffic accidents fell by 6.32 per cent with a 4.33 per cent decrease in fatalities, according to the sectors year-end report.

The sector has also improved the efficiency of state management of population, household registration, and foreigners as well as the use of weapons and explosives, and conditional business areas.  VNS
HCM City  HCM City should consider a range of policies to support people who are resettled when it acquires their land or house for public projects, a city leader has said.

The city has carried out social surveys on life after resettlement over many years, but most of relocated people are faced difficulties in finding work and earning a steady income, chairwoman of the Peoples Council, Nguyen Thi Quyet Tam, was quoted as saying in Nguoi Lao ong (Labourers) newspaper.

Authorities cannot have a single policy for all kinds of people who move to new places.

After visiting many resettlement apartments in various districts, Thi Thi Tuyet Nhung, head of the Peoples Councils Society and Culture Commission, said she found most of the people had to return to their former areas for sustaining their earnings because they could not earn a living in the new place.

However, due to long distances and the cost of travelling, many have sold or rent out their resettlement apartments, return to their old area and rent slum houses."

She also said that because they have no job some of them have taken to drinking and gambling the whole day.

If authorities dont come up with proper policies, social evils will plague resettlement areas.

In the past Mai Quoc Tuan and his family used to live in Binh Hung Hoa ward, Binh Tan district. He had a workshop with 10 workers that processed garments and earned around VN12 million (US$530) a month.

With this steady income, he could feed his five-member family.

After moving to Vinh Loc B residential area in Binh Chanh District on the outskirts, Tuan could not run his workshop because he lived too far away.

Now Tuan is planning to become a motorcycle-taxi driver while his wife has to work as a housemaid.

Le Thi Qui used to earn VN3 million ($130) a month after retirement by working in a workshop near her former house, also in Binh Hung Hoa. It was enough along with her pension to live quite well.

It used to be fun and joy because I could meet my friends, chat with them and buy essential things. But now, since I was moved, my only friend is a TV and there is no extra money on top my pension of VN3 million, she said bitterly.

Solutions

According to Lai Phu Cuong, head of the Binh Tan District Ground Clearance and Compensation Commission, there is plenty of support for resettled people in the form of loans for starting businesses, scholarships for vocation training, and creating jobs in the relocated areas.

If resettled areas ensure quality and complete their infrastructure, many will live there, creating business opportunities for local residents.

Layer Nguyen Van Hau said the citys point of view matches the World Banks, which has said the life of resettled people should be equal to or better than what it was before.

That is why local authorities provide much support for resettled people.

But he admitted that in other countries authorities often hired a professional consultancy to survey each family before relocation to preserve their earnings and living standards.

In Viet Nam, surveys are done only to decide how much compensation should be paid to owners and not how they can live after relocation."

Nhung said: The Peoples Council will have a special meeting to discuss the problem and seek solutions to help resettled people stabilise their lives in new places. -- VNS




HA NOI  Many road users have raised their voices about a Ha Noi ban prohibiting the use of taxis - including Grab and Uber - from using 13 inner-city streets. They claim it will do nothing to reduce the citys traffic congestion.

The Department of Transport issued the ban on paid passenger cars during peak times in a bid to solve severe traffic chaos in those streets.

The ban took effect nearly a week ago. Accordingly, hire cars are not allowed into Hoang Hoa Tham, Mai Xuan Thuong, Giang Vo, Lang Ha, Le Van Luong, Truong Chinh, Kham Thien, Hang Bai, Phu Doan, Cau Giay, Xuan Thuy, Giai Phong and Chuong Duong Bridge from 6am to 9am and from 4.30pm to 7.30pm.

Warning signs have already been installed in those streets.

However, many drivers say the ban will not only fail to reduce the gridlock, but it likely to cause more trouble for drivers.

A Grab taxi driver called Hung said that most Grab and Uber drivers only worked part-time and used their cars as their own means of transport. Thus, it would be difficult for police to discover just who was a violator.

When approached by police, drivers turn off their "apps", or ask customers to walk through the banned areas or pretend to be the drivers relatives. This would free them from paying fines.

Hung said the ban would force all vehicles to take alternative routes, making journeys unnecessarily longer and even turning these "safe" routes into new gridlock areas.

A Uber taxi driver said the ban caused a little inconvenience for drivers picking up passengers, but there were many ways of avoiding being caught by authorised agencies.

He said he ignored the ban and still picked up or dropped off passengers in recent days.

We only know the destination of passengers when we accept their trip. We cant keep cancelling all trips through banned streets, he said.

However, he added that he had not seen any violators being stopped and fined in the past several days.

Tran Van My, a Mai Linh taxi driver, said that he supported the ban if police could ensure all paid passenger cars were banned from those streets.

Uber and Grab are not different from us. They carry passengers and contribute to traffic congestion. But they can freely pick up and drop passengers in the taxi banned areas.

If the ban stops just taxis because we are easy targets, this is totally unfair, he said.

Bui Danh Lien, acting vice-chairman of the Ha Noi Transport Association, told the newspaper Lao ong (Labour) that the ban for cars with fewer than nine seats on certain routes was made by the city authoritys management.

The association said the ban was missing the root of the problem. The basis of gridlocked streets is all about the big increase in vehicles and inadequate and ill-quality infrastructure, he said.

Vu Van Vien, director of the citys Department of Transport, said that the move was intended to reduce traffic jams and environmental pollution - and had been approved by the citys Peoples Council.

Vien admitted that the ban could cause inconvenience for passengers who used transport services from Uber and Grab, but still said it would help reduce gridlock.

Police will stop and remind violating drivers until the ban take full effect.

Vien said the ban was not permanent, adding that it would be removed from routes where traffic jams were overcome and applied to streets where congestion was getting worse.

Vien also said it was important to be able to identify cars operating under transport contracts. The Ministry of Transport has worked on a draft decree, which stipulates that cars from Grab and Uber must display company logos on their front and back windows. This would help police tell the difference, he said.  VNS
HA NOI  Two Vietnamese fishermen were rescued from a sunken Malaysian fishing vessel and transferred to authorised Vietnamese agencies on Monday.

The fishermen, Huynh A Met from the southernmost Ca Mau Province, and Ly Chien, from Mekong Delta Soc Trang Province, were brought back to Viet Nam by a ship of the Maritime Search and Rescue Centre Zone 3.

They were rescued by the ship with the Bahamas flag, MG Neptune, en route to Vung Tau City in Viet Nams southern coastal province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau last Friday.

Met and Chien were among 13 Vietnamese sailors working onboard PAF 4583 of Malaysia, which sank in international waters near Singapore last Thursday.

Eight other Vietnamese sailors were rescued by the ship Asiatic Dawn en route to Malaysias Klang Port and one was rescued by the ship Nordlily on its way to Singapore. All the nine sailors are in a stable health condition, according to the Viet Nam Maritime Search and Rescue Coordination Centre (VIETNAMMRCC), which received notice from its Singaporean counterpart.

The VIETNAMMRCC has requested the Singaporean Centre to search for the two remaining fishermen who are still missing.

The centre said it had been able to contact a sailor named Toan, who was rescued by the Asiatic Dawn. According to Toan, the PAF 4583 vessel belongs to a Vietnamese named Nguyen Van Hau, who lives in Malaysia.  VNS
HA NOI  Individuals or organisations who are found to cause damage to trees will be fined up to VN30 million (US$1,300) from January 15, says a new Government decree.

Under Decree No 139/2017/N-CP, the fine will range from VN500,000 to VN1 million for activities such as nailing trees, picking flowers, cutting branches and peeling tree barks.

The same fine will be imposed for building illegal fences around trees along streets, in parks or other public areas; grazing animals and poultry in parks; and hanging lights or advertising boards on trees in public places without permission.

An administrative fine of VN10-15 million will be levied on violations such as dumping household, toxic or construction wastes on the foot of trees, damaging and hindering the development of trees in urban areas and growing banned trees without the permission of authorised agencies.

Those who are caught cutting, removing or burning tree roots or digging the foot of the trees will be fined between VN20-30 million.

Apart from the administrative fine, violators will also be required to recover the damaged trees or remove boards and lights.  VNS
BUCHAREST  Romanias left-wing Prime Minister Mihai Tudose resigned on Monday after losing the backing of his party due to internal power struggles, barely seven months after his predecessor suffered the same fate.

Tudose handed in his resignation on Monday evening after senior members of the ruling Social Democrats (PSD) voted to withdraw their support at a leadership meeting.

"I am leaving with my head held high. Im going to get my things at parliament," Tudose told journalists after the party gathering.

The move heralds fresh turmoil for Romania, one of the European Unions poorest countries plagued with corruption scandals, and comes on the eve of a historic visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Tudoses resignation will have to be signed off by centre-right President Klaus Iohannis. He also needs to approve the PSDs new prime ministerial nominee, to be chosen at a party meeting today.

It is the second time in a year that the PSD has torpedoed its own government.

In June 2017, the party filed a no-confidence motion in then-prime minister Sorin Grindeanu, after he fell out with powerful PSD boss Liviu Dragnea.

Dragnea, who is barred from running for office because of a fraud conviction, is widely acknowledged to pull the strings behind the scenes.

The party chief nominated former economy minister Tudose as Grindeanus successor, but their relationship also turned into an increasingly bitter sparring match in the past few months.

In a recent television interview, Tudose slammed Dragnea for taking key decisions without consulting other senior party members.

Things took a turn for the worst last week when Tudose demanded the resignation of Interior Minister Carmen Dan, a Dragnea ally, after a paedophilia scandal that involved Romanias police force.

Two bad choices

But Dan has ignored the call to step down, humiliating Tudose. "The conclusion of the (party) meeting has been that we cant continue anymore like that, because there is a conflicting situation between the party and the government as well as within the government itself," Dragnea said on Monday.

Back in October, Iohannis expressed doubt over the "PSDs ability to govern" given its shaky track record in government.

Analysts said the PSD scenario was repeating. The conflict is "between Liviu Dragnea, who wants to control the government and a prime minister (Grindeanu or Tudose) who refuses to obey all his orders," said Cristian Pantazi, editor of the HotNews.ro website.

When questioned by journalists, Dragnea claimed Monday he had "made two bad choices" for prime minister, adding that he would not make the same "mistake".

Tudoses departure is the third major crisis to hit the Social Democrats since they rode back into power in December 2016, barely a year after being forced from office over a deadly nightclub blaze blamed on corruption.

In February 2017, the Romanian government was forced to back down on altering anti-corruption laws in the politicians favour after the biggest protests since the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.

Despite ongoing opposition, the PSD approved a fresh set of controversial judicial reforms last month.

Critics say that the changes will reduce the independence of magistrates and curb the powers of the DNA, the respected anti-corruption investigative body.

Brussels worries that Romania is backtracking on tackling graft, and Washington has also expressed concerns.

Thousands of people including magistrates and law students took to the streets across Romania once again in recent weeks to protest the new laws.  AFP
VANCOUVER  Foreign ministers from 20 nations began crisis talks on Monday on North Koreas ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs, though Chinas absence cast doubt over the effectiveness of any deal.

The two-day Vancouver meeting hosted by Canada and the US comes amid signs of easing tensions on the Korean peninsula, after the North and South met for the first time in two years and Pyongyang agreed to send athletes to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

And tensions between Washington and Pyongyang, which claimed it had successfully tested ballistic missiles that could deliver atomic warheads to the US, appear to have calmed as well.

But the US, which will review with allies at the summit the effectiveness of current sanctions against the hermit kingdom and explore adding more, remains sceptical that Kim is ready to negotiate away North Koreas weapons programme.

Over the weekend, a false alarm in Hawaii warning of an incoming ballistic missile rattled nerves, while US President Donald Trump and North Koreas Kim Jong-Un have traded bluster over who has the bigger nuclear launch button at his desk.

The so-called Vancouver Group is formed by 20 countries that fought in the 1950-53 Korean War. They include Australia, Britain, France, India, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea. Military officials will also be present at the meeting.

Many have questioned the utility of a conference where China  Pyongyangs main ally  and Russia are absent.

But officials said both countries, which hold veto power at the United Nations Security Council, would be briefed afterward.

China and Russia "absolutely will play an important role in moving toward peace on the Korean peninsula," Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last week.

On Monday at his annual press conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeatedly attacked the US, accusing Washington of issuing ultimatums and failing to recognise "the reality of the emerging multipolar world."

"Unfortunately, our American colleagues and their allies still want to do business solely on the basis of issuing ultimatums and do not want to listen to the views of other centres of world politics," he said, adding that Washington was to blame for having "seriously aggravated" tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Pope Francis, meanwhile, admitted that he was frightened by the prospects of an accidental nuclear war.

"I think we are at the very edge," he told reporters aboard his plane en route to Chile for a weeklong visit there and in Peru.

"I am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things."

The Vancouver meeting kicked off late Monday with a dinner and several bilateral meetings, before a full gathering today to hammer out next steps in the standoff.

Among the proposals to be considered is sending warships to the Sea of Japan to stop and inspect suspect ships bound for North Korea in order to enforce sanctions.

South Korea already seized two ships carrying oil to the North in December.

Some countries, however, have warned that such methods could increase military tensions or be interpreted as an act of war by Kims isolated regime.

Push for diplomacy

The ultimate aim is to force Kim into a diplomatic negotiation to abandon the weapons his regime sees as crucial for its survival.

Trump recently said that, under the right circumstances, he would be willing to speak directly with the North Korean leader, whom he has described as mad and a "rocket man."

Japans Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, meanwhile, sought to drum up EU pressure on North Korea over the weekend during a six-country trip to the Baltics and the Balkans.

South Korean President Moon Jae-In, who advocates dialogue with the North but remains critical of Pyongyangs weapons drive, said last week he was willing to have a summit with Kim "under the right conditions", but added that "certain outcomes must be guaranteed."

In a setback for such hopes, Pyongyang slammed Moon as "ignorant and unreasonable" for demanding preconditions  possibly a step toward denuclearisation  for a summit.

"The South Korean chief executive should not be dreaming," the state-run KCNA news agency said in an editorial, accusing Moon of "brownnosing" the US.

North Korea boycotted the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul. Its agreement to send athletes, an orchestra and high-level officials to next months Winter Olympics is seen in part as a move to ease military tensions with the US.

Seoul touted the recent inter-Korean talks as a potential first step to bringing the North into negotiations over its nuclear arsenal.

Further bilateral talks between the North and South are scheduled for Wednesday, after the Vancouver meeting.  AFP
WATERLOO -- The Cedar Valley's longest-serving economic development director is moving on.

Steve Dust, who shepherded the Greater Cedar Valley Alliance & Chamber through its consolidation with the Cedar Falls and Waterloo chambers of commerce and the development of the Cedar Valley TechWorks campus, announced today his plans to resign from that organization by June 30 after 14 years at the helm.

Until then, he will remain with the organization in an interim capacity and help the group's executive committee find his successor.

"I'm not retiring," Dust said. "I think what made me successful here, to the extent that I was, was my experience and skills in helping organizations find that vision, refine it and create the organization and build the organization. That's what I've done. That's what I enjoy and that's what I'm successful with.

"Just as I arrived at a time when the community was trying to come together to create the Cedar Valley, now we have another generation of leadership that's emerging," Dust said. "There's a whole raft of new business owners and senior managers who are going to be making decisions about what this economy is going to be.

"My feeling has always been an organization should not be known by the individual who leads it. It should be known by its mission," he said.

Dust originally thought he might work up to another decade.

"Frankly I wanted to be intellectually honest with myself in terms of not being here too long. Frankly I've been here longer than I ever expected to be, given the nature of the work the community asked me to do," he said.

Alliance board chairman Bob Smith of Lockard Cos. said, "We need to not just raise money but have the person that's going to implement the use of those funds at the helm. So the timing of Steve's transition is good in a couple of ways. It's good for him. It's also good for GCVA as we identify that new leader.

"Thankfully Steve was a mature enough leader to put the organization ahead of personal aspirations or desires," Smith said. "He's chosen to step aside and allow us to continue and for him to pursue opportunities that take advantage of his abilities. He's got a lot of career left."

The Alliance, among other things, will be looking at additional revenues as part of its overall operations.

Former Waterloo Mayor Tim Hurley, who is board chairman for Cedar Valley TechWorks under the Alliance umbrella, said, "We definitely need to progress to a point where our government entities are supporting the Alliance" at a more extensive level. "In communities our size, or regions, we're woefully short," Hurley said.

"Alliance emphases have switched from just bringing in industry and jobs to the point where the No. 1 priority among all members is workforce development," Hurley said. "That needs to continue. We need to ignite a fire and find a way for entrepreneurs to flourish in the Cedar Valley. To me, we've got to foster and nuture and grow the (support) base that has happened during Steve's time."

Smith said the organization will be meeting over the next month to determine a process for picking Dust's successor, with his help. He also said the Alliance will be reaching out to longtime and potential supporters for focus and ideas for the organization's future direction.

Dust is believed to be the longest serving economic development director among the Alliance and its various predecessor organizations, dating back to the 1980s recession and farm crisis.

Dust took the reins shortly after the TechWorks campus concept was conceived -- a state-recognized ag-based product research, development, entrepreneurial and manufacturing center on two former John Deere buildings on what was part of the company's Westfield Avenue site.

The campus is now home to a recently opened Courtyard by Marriott hotel, John Deere Tractor & Engine Museum and the "Tech I" building that houses the Alliance office, the Cedar Valley Makers Space and elements of the University of Northern Iowa Metal Casting Center, as well as peripheral development around it.

"That is going to be a higher led emphasis in the organization now -- tech-led economic development," Dust said. "In a place like ours, new product development is as important as startups."

"We saw Steve bring business, higher education and community leaders, as well as educators and students, together," Smith said. "Steve has many talents including being a great builder, inclusive collaborator, and program and initiative developerand the Alliance board is most appreciative of his leadership. "

Dust, 63, and his wife, Donita, have a grown son living in Waterloo and a son and daughter-in-law in California. Dust previously worked for a Des Moines commercial real estate firm and for MidAmerican Energy. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Central Missouri State University and the University of Iowa and served two terms as mayor of Sedalia, Mo.
WATERLOO  The Apostolic Pentecostal Church Food Pantry has new hours.

It will be open from 4:30 to 6 p.m. today, the third Tuesday of the month. There will be no distribution Wednesday.

The pantry is located at 1645 Downing Ave., Waterloo. Emergency food assistance will still be available on an individual basis by contacting the church office at 234-2920 or emailing a.pentecostal@mchsi.com.

Legion post

plans events

WATERLOO  American Legion Post 138 at 728 Commercial St. has several events planned.

Today bingo is planned for at 6:15 and 7 p.m., with food from 6 to 8 p.m. Hawaiian ham patties, chicken and hot dogs are planned at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

Tenderloins, chicken strips and fish will be served starting at 11 a.m. Friday.

A pepper tournament will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday. Bingo is planned for 1:15 and 2 p.m. Sunday.

Don Bosco

breakfast set

RAYMOND  The St. Joseph Parish Don Bosco Benefit Breakfast will be held from 8:30 a.m. to noon Sunday at Reuter Hall, 313 E. Central St.

The menu will include scrambled eggs, sausage patties, homemade cinnamon rolls, hash browns, juice, coffee and milk. Cost is $7 for adults, $5 for youths ages 5 to 11, and children ages 4 and younger are free. Everyone is welcome.

VFW events

announced

WATERLOO  The VFW Sullivan Brothers Post 1623, 1406 Commercial St., will have karaoke with Caseys Music to Go from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Jan. 26.

Crockpot meals are set for 5 to 7 p.m. Jan. 23, and there will be bingo from 5 to 7 p.m. Jan. 25.

The VFW is open to the public.

AAUW to host

speakers Jan. 27

CEDAR FALLS  Victoria DeFrancesco and Karen Mitchell, professors of communications studies at the University of Northern Iowa, will be the speakers at the AAUW brunch Jan. 27 at the Cedar Falls Womans Club, Third and Clay streets.

They will present  Micro-Aggressions: Dealing with Racist and Other Unwanted Comments.

The event begins with a gathering at 10 a.m., followed by the speakers at 10:40 a.m.

The January brunch includes veggie quiche, fruit cup, muffin, juice, coffee or tea for $13.

AAUW Cedar Falls/Waterloo advances equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, philanthropy and research. Its monthly meetings and speakers are a continuing tradition of empowering women.

Reservations for brunch are due Friday at AAUW.CFW.RSVP@gmail.com or call Mary Ellen Beckman 269-1893.

Visitors are welcome and anyone may attend and listen to speaker. Reservations are not required for attendance only.
CEDAR FALLS  The spirit of service was evident Monday at the University of Northern Iowas Maucker Union.

Tables lined with volunteers in the unions ballroom assembled thousands of bags filled with canned and packaged food destined for the backpacks of needy students across 16 counties.

It was all part of the third annual Martin Luther King Day of Service, a partnership between UNIs service and leadership council, the food bank and the Volunteer Center of the Cedar Valley. The event drew UNI students and others from across the community.

Somber anniversary recalled this MLK Day WATERLOO  It was early 1968. A charismatic minister Anna Mae Weems had hosted on a visit to

We probably have 200 in this room and probably about 200 in Lang Hall, said Jessica Haring, volunteer services manager for the Northeast Iowa Food Bank. The others were hearing a presentation on Martin Luther King Jr., poverty and the food bank. Later, the groups would switch so they could work on filling the bags too.

Our goal is to pack 15,000 bags, she noted, supplying weekend breakfasts, lunches and a snack for identified students from 143 schools. That equates to about 100 pallets. Each pallet has 24 boxes containing the packed bags.

The packages with items such as soup, macaroni and cheese, cereal and juice will be distributed to students over the course of a month. Haring said it was nice to see people are willing to push through that cold and wind to attend the event.

Other King Day service events were held throughout the area. Among those were Columbus Catholic High School in Waterloo, Wartburg College in Waverly and the volunteer center through the Cedar Falls Public Library.

The Waterloo Center for the Arts held King Day of Service workshops for youths on leadership and personal responsibility. Most involved the arts as a learning tool.

I was a little bit scared because of the weather, said Cherie Kabba, one of the organizers. But she was happy to see more than 60 young people turn out for the seven workshops along with a number of unexpected volunteers.

Children were among the volunteers at UNI. Sophie Cooley, a fourth-grader at Cedar Heights Elementary School, didnt mind missing out on a day at home to participate in the volunteer activity.

My friends mom brought me, she said. Its kind of fun. She knows about Kings I have a dream speech and has done similar volunteer activities at the food bank.

Many other volunteers were UNI students.

Im a future educator myself, said sophomore Jessica Sholes. Volunteering for the kids appealed to the first-time participant. Theres no better way to give back.

For Sophomore Shannon Jones, the inspiration for participating came from King, a civil rights leader who was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., 50 years ago this April.

She wanted to use the day to give back because Martin Luther King was a wonderful leader and he made a huge impact on America.

Junior Josh Mostaert said Kings leadership is an important focus of the day that he was striving to emulate.

Dr. King was one of the ultimate leaders, said Moestaert. He organized a bunch of people that were disinfranchised from the system.

Our fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, were really big on community services. This is one way we can come together and do something good for the community  and really fun. Were having a great time here.

Abby Martin, an Americorp worker in South Tama County Community Schools who graduated from UNI in December, was back on campus for the event. It brings the community together, she said.

At the Center for the Arts, a showcase was staged allowing students to perform something they worked on during the day. People sang, performed spoken word poetry and recited what they learned in the workshops.

We wrote a poem about our dream, said Rebekah Luloff, a fifth-grader at Dr. Walter Cunningham School for Excellence. It was fun.

It was fun and learning about other people at the same time, said Sanai Scott, a fourth-grader at Kittrell Elementary School.
CEDAR FALLS  Traffic concerns at an increasingly busy intersection in a growing part of the city were discussed again at Monday nights City Council meeting.

Traffic at Greenhill Road and South Main Street  the proposed location of a new Fareway grocery store as well as a Kwik Star convenience store  came up again as the council approved a 2018-23 capital improvements plan that doesnt show improvements underway there until 2020-21. Thats not soon enough, according to neighbors. And several City Council members Rob Green, Dave Wieland and Mark Miller  all asked if some near-term improvements couldnt be made.

City staff members  Community Development Director Stephanie Houk Sheetz and City Engineer Jon Resler  said the city intends to send out a request for proposals for a study of most of the Greenhill corridor, including the possibility of short-term improvements to the Greenhill-South Main intersection. That was a main issue during recent Planning and Zoning Commision discussions of the Fareway and Kwik Star projects.

There is a need to look at Greenhill as a corridor, Resler told council members. Kind of a first item in this RFP would be to take a near-term look, what we could do this year, at Greenhill and Main ... . It will look at this upcoming year needs ... . It would be up to you all to decide if it would be worth doing or not, including some possible additional temporary lanes or signal modifications. Long-term could include a number of possibilities, including a roundabout at the intersection.

Responding to a question from Wieland, Resler said short-term improvements at South Main and Greenhill could potentially be coordinated with the private development anticipated there.

Im glad were going to look at the whole corridor, Miller said, referring to Greenhill. Weve got a beautiful stretch of road on University Avenue. And I know the roundabout discussion is dreaded. At the same time, were creating a University Avenue on Greenhill Road. With the pace of things that are happening out there, I hope we give that some thought at some point.

Miller said later he generally supports roundabouts as an efficient way to move traffic.

Penny Popp, a resident of the El Dorado Heights residential area near South Main and Greenhill, again urged traffic improvements at that intersection soon.
DES MOINES  Gov. Kim Reynolds said Tuesday she has been given assurance from her emergency management team that Iowas alert system has built-in safeguards designed to avoid a false alarm like one in Hawaii last weekend that had residents bracing for a potential nuclear attack.

Reynolds said she had her staff contact the states Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management to make sure Iowa could not have a similar situation to one that occurred Saturday when a Hawaii emergency management employee set off a statewide panic by sending out a false alarm about an incoming ballistic missile. The erroneous message went out when an employee sent the missile alert to cellphones across the state by picking the wrong option on his computer for a routine drill, and then confirming his choice. It took officials 38 minutes to send a corrective alert rescinding the warning as a false alarm.

I talked to them as soon as I saw that because I cant imagine the fear and the angst and the anxiety that they were feeling, Reynolds told her weekly news conference.

Mark Schouten, director of Iowas emergency response agency, assured the governor Iowa has a secure process in place operated by trained personnel that has multiple validation steps to ensure messages are accurate and appropriate, she said. There also are steps in place to be followed in the event a false report went out to walk back the alert immediately, she added.

I felt very good with the report that I got back from Director Schouten on the process that we have in place. Its for any type of an emergency like that. The fact that we have multiple validation steps I think it really important, the fact that we have ongoing training for the individuals responsible for doing that and making sure that the messages are accurate and appropriate, Reynolds told reporters.

He assured me that they had steps in place to make sure that that didnt happen but they also have steps in place that if something did go out that they needed to walk back they could do it immediately, she noted, so I felt very confident with the report.

On a separate topic Tuesday, the governor indicated new research on the states regulatory framework from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University on Tuesday suggests Iowas administrative code is overly burdensome to business and industry and impacts growing the economy.

State RegData is a research platform that allows users to quickly analyze state regulations and identify the specific industries most targeted by excessive regulation, said Laura Jones of the research agency.

An analysis of Iowa revealed more than 160,306 state restrictions that would take one person about 563 hours  or more than 14 weeks  to read, Jones said. Using the new State RegData platform, users will be able to run an analysis comparing regulations across various industries in under a minute. Jones said Iowa ranked fifth highest in regulations of 20 states Mercatus has studied.

As governor, Im committed to eliminating red tape throughout state government, said Reynolds, who noted that the Branstad-Reynolds administration set a goal of reducing onerous state rules and regulations in January 2011.

Efforts to achieve that goal included an executive order signed in 2011 requiring all new regulations be justified by job impact statements and passing a law one year later requiring all agencies to review their administrative regulations every five years. Reynolds said that review process is just being completed and the Mercatus research offers a good starting point for a balanced, moderating assessment of state governments regulatory burden.

Also Tuesday, Reynolds said she is not in a rush to implement new Trump administration guidelines that allow states to enact rules requiring that able-bodied Medicaid participants to work while receiving program benefits. However, she indicated the new federal restrictions could be considered by Iowa officials down the road similar to what has happened in Kentucky.

The Iowa governor told reporters her No. 1 priority is convincing state lawmakers to approve and fund her Future Ready program that seeks to improve the job prospect for about 127,000 Iowans by bolstering their educational achievement and their workplace skills over the coming years.
DES MOINES  Iowa 1st District U.S. House Democratic hopeful Thomas Heckroths campaign  asserting an opponent is playing by a different set of rules  has challenged her to pledge not to work for any group lobbying lawmakers during the 2018 Iowa legislative session.

We need to reduce the influence of money in the legislative process and make sure our representatives at the state and federal level are transparent, he said.

Heckroth cites a claim that state Rep. Abby Finkenauer, D-Dubuque, failed to report that she had been hired in September 2015 as state director for Make It Work and continued in that position during the 2016 legislative session. The national nonprofit advocates for economic policies such as equal pay, affordable day care, paid family leave and earned sick days.

I believe she owes Iowans a pledge not to be employed by these groups during this congressional race, said Heckroth, of Cedar Falls.

He said Finkenauer failed to report the change in employment as required by the Iowa House of Representatives ethics rules.

Finkenauers campaign manager, Joe Farrell, said it speaks for itself that Thomas is attempting to revive a false and discredited right-wing attack originally made by a group funded by Robert Mercer, the same guy who funded Breitbart and gave us Steve Bannon.

Its disappointing Finkenauer wont accept the challenge, Heckroth spokesman Sam Roecker said, because if were going to defeat Rod Blum and retake this district, we need a nominee focused on the needs of this district, not on whats best for PACs and lobbyists.

Finkenauer and Heckroth are two of four candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in the 20-county 1st District that includes Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Dubuque and Marshalltown. Courtney Rowe and George Ramsey, both of Cedar Rapids, also are running. The winner will face Blum, a Dubuque Republican.

In addition to failing to report her relationship with the advocacy group, Heckroth said, Finkenauer introduced legislation focused on Make It Works priorities.

Regardless of whether we agree with the objectives of outside groups like this or not, the fact is representatives and candidates shouldnt be influenced in this manner, he said.

Earlier in the campaign, Heckroth challenged Finkenauer not to accept contributions from political action committees and lobbyists while the Legislature is in session.

Iowa law prohibits lobbyists and political action committees from making contributions to candidates for statewide and legislative offices during legislative session. The 2018 session, which started Jan. 8, is set to run for 100 days or until mid-April.

Finkenauer rejected that challenge, arguing that foregoing lobbyists campaign contribution during the session would penalize her federal campaign during those months leading up to the June primary. Heckroth, on the other hand, could accept those contributions during that time.

Finkenauer has raised more than $600,000 through December 2017 and collected several endorsements from labor unions and groups that back female and abortion rights candidates.

According to Federal Election Commission reports, Heckroth raised $133,822 and had $105,296 cash on hand through October.
DES MOINES  Bringing the death penalty back to Iowa likely will get debated but probably not approved during the 2018 legislative session, key lawmakers say.

Sen. Brad Zaun, R-Urbandale, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he plans to assign a subcommittee to take up Senate File 335 with an eye on possibly expanding the provisions, but he is uncertain how far the issue may go in a session already loaded with more pressing priorities.

S.F. 335, introduced by a group of Senate Republicans last session, would restore capital punishment in Iowa for the first time since 1965 by establishing a two-pronged process.

A jury or judge could convict a perpetrator of committing multiple class A offenses, and separately make a decision whether to execute the offender by lethal injection. Any death penalty conviction automatically would be appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court, and juvenile offenders would be exempted.

Proponents say it would allow capital punishment in cases where an adult kidnaps, rapes and murders a minor. Zaun said there are some who would like to expand it to situations where police officers are killed in the line of duty or other heinous circumstances.

My promises at this point are that I will promise that I will assign a subcommittee and the subcommittee will hold a hearing so people could weigh in on whether theyre for or against that, he said. I think considering some of the tragedies that have happened here in the state of Iowa, and Ive heard from so many Iowans who would at least like to have the conversation started.

One of those is Sen. Jerry Behn, R-Boone, the bills lead sponsor who has raised the issue for nearly two decades in the Legislature without success in getting it passed.

Right now in Iowa, if you kidnap and rape someone, theres a perverted incentive to murder your victim because youre no worse off. I think thats not appropriate at any level and weve had a couple horrific crimes of similar nature in the past and I would just as soon not wait for another one of those horrific crimes before we try to do something about it, Behn said. That was the genesis of introducing the bill in the first place to fix that.

The Boone Republican said he believes the death penalty is a deterrent to crime worth considering and believes it would get public backing if it were a topic of discussion again in the Legislature, although he has not gauged support for it among legislators.

Sen. Rich Taylor, D-Mount Pleasant, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who worked for 27 years in the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison, said he is willing to listen to the arguments for reinstating capital punishment but he doubts there were be enough support for Senate passage.

For me, its a no. Somebodys going to have to show me some real good reason to change my mind on that, said Taylor.

Theres too many chances for error and weve seen that over the last few years with the new DNA sampling. There are a lot of people in prison who really shouldnt have been there in the first place. So, if we have the death penalty, theres no return from that, he said.

It rather surprises me that the Republicans on one hand say all life is precious and believe that life begins at conception and then are for the death penalty on the other end, added Taylor. Its pretty contradictory.

Taylor said the death penalty is such a divisive issue he questions whether lawmakers should take it up in a year already beset with some major issues as the GOP-run General Assembly works to erase a projected budget deficit and consider a major rewrite of the individual income tax code.

Top lawmakers from both parties had similar views in pre-session interviews.

I havent heard from folks in my community about that being a key priority this year, said House Majority Leader Chris Hagenow, R-Windsor Heights. I just havent seen it rise as a priority on our side yet, so Im not particularly concerned about.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Dix, R-Shell Rock, said he is aware there is interest within his caucus to have a debate on the issue and he is willing to let the process work and see where it goes.
WATERLOO  Waterloos police chief will donate a kidney to a friend of a friend.

Just one, Chief Daniel Trelka said Tuesday.

The procedure is scheduled today at Froedtert Hospital in the Milwaukee, Wis., area.

Im a little nervous, but my mindset is there, said Trelka, who in the past has donated plasma.

The organ donation plan started awhile ago when a retired police officer from Sturgeon Bay, Wis., where Trelka had been police chief before coming to Waterloo, fell ill and needed a replacement.

Trelka, 53, worked with the officer and applied to be a donor, which involves a battery of tests.

During the process, the retired Sturgeon Bay officer got better and no longer needed a kidney. But Trelka decided to go ahead with the donation anyway after learning a friend of a friend had the same need.

For a guy my age, Im in excellent health.  I figured what the heck, Trelka said.

The procedure originally was scheduled for around Christmas. Then it was pushed back to Jan. 9 and again postponed until today, Trelka said.

The operation and recovery are expected to take him out of action for about five weeks. Maj. Joe Leibold will be acting chief, and Trelka will keep up with developments through email.
A couple was arrested after police discovered that 13 people had been held captive in their California home in filthy conditions, some shackled to beds with chains and padlocks, officials said Monday.

The victims ranged in age from 2 to 29, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said in a statement.

A 17-year-old girl managed to escape from the residence in Perris, California on Sunday and called 911 from a cell phone she found in the house, police said.

The girl claimed her 12 brothers and sisters were being held captive inside the home by her parents, some of them bound with chains and padlocks, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said.

The 17-year-old "appeared to be only 10 years old and slightly emaciated," the Riverside Sheriff's Department said.

Sheriff's deputies responded to the home and found the 12 other victims, who "appeared malnourished and very dirty," authorities said. All of them looked like children, police said, and officers were surprised to learn that seven of them were adults. Several were shackled to their beds "in dark and foul-smelling surroundings," the Sheriff's Department said.

David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were charged Sunday with torture and child endangerment, the Sheriff's Department said. The couple was taken to the Robert Presley Detention Center in Riverside.

Bail was set at $9 million for each, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said.

It was not immediately clear if the suspects had an attorney or whether they had entered a plea.

The six children -- including the 17-year-old who escaped -- are being treated at Riverside University Health System Medical Center in Moreno Valley. The seven adults are being treated at Corona Regional Medical Center in Corona, authorities said.

State records: home listed as a school

David Turpin is listed as the principal of the Sandcastle Day School, according to a California Department of Education website. It was operated out of his home, the same nondescript, suburban residence where the 13 victims were found. The day school opened March 21, 2011, and was described as a private school serving grades 1-12. According to the website, the status of the school is "active."

Neighbors said they knew a large family lived there, CNN affiliate KABC reported, but they never saw any of the younger children.

One neighbor told the station that she saw the parents being arrested early Sunday. The children were taken from the home in their pajamas, she said.

"They were very, very pale-skinned, almost like they've never seen the sun," the neighbor said.

"And it was mostly girls ... kind of small-framed," the neighbor said.

Kimberly Milligan, a neighbor, told CNN affiliate KCAL/KCBS she thought the older children were much younger.

"I thought they were like 12 because they looked so malnourished, so pale," Milligan said.

"It's so sad, so horrible," another neighbor, Jennifer Luna, told the station, shaking her head. "I can't believe this. I can't believe this."

CNN's Braden Walker contributed to this report.
It is the speech they hope to one day deliver.

So several of the Democratic candidates for governor offered their perspectives on the condition of the state address given Tuesday by Gov. Kim Reynolds.

It was Reynolds first condition of the state address; she rose from lieutenant governor last spring when former Gov. Terry Branstad became U.S. ambassador to China.

Reynolds struck out on her own, not once mentioning Branstad. Before diving too deep into policy, she addressed sexual harassment in the workplace, a topic on the Legislatures radar after the state paid a settlement of $1.75 million to a former legislative staffer who accused co-workers of sexual harassment.

During her roughly 44-minute address, Reynolds said her hope is a water quality bill is the first thing she signs as governor; that she has charged her lieutenant governor, Adam Gregg, with leading an initiative exploring ways to revitalize rural Iowa; that her tax proposal will include lower individual rates, benefits middle-class families and does not include business tax reform; and she acknowledges mistakes were made in the roll out of Iowas private Medicaid management system, but she still believes it is the best approach.

Reynolds also discussed mental health care, public education funding and workforce training.

But the Democrats running for governor werent buying Reynolds message that the condition of the state is strong.

Nate Boulton and Cathy Glasson spoke at public events in the Capitol immediately after the governors address.

As a state senator, Boulton was in the Iowa House chamber for Reynolds speech. Minutes later, he responded outside the chamber. Boulton noted Reynolds highlighted Republicans changes to state collective bargaining and workers compensation laws in 2017, efforts Boulton was a leader in speaking out against.

You heard an emphasis on gutting workers compensation and taking away rights of public employees to bargain over their health insurance and better wages as points of pride for this administration, Boulton said later in a statement.

Boulton also criticized Reynolds over public school funding levels, the state budget shortfall, the lack of a water quality funding proposal and private Medicaid management.

We need a strong vision forward for this state, not just for the next 20 months, but for the next 20 years, Boulton said.

Glasson, a nurse and labor leader, spoke at a rally just outside the governors formal office in the Capitol. Organized by advocacy groups and attended by roughly a couple dozen people, the rally focused on a call for Iowas minimum wage to be raised to $15 per hour.

I believe the job of the governor is to raise wages and raise the standard of living for all Iowans, Glasson said, adding she thinks that can be accomplished with a $15 minimum wage and strong unions. We have to do it fast, because working people and working families cannot wait any longer.

Glasson also called for a repeal of the collective bargaining changes, saying that would be a start but not enough.

Fred Hubbell issued a statement focused on the state budget. Because state revenues grew at a pace slower than expected, lawmakers and the governor last year were forced to plug a budget hole of more than $100 million. This budget year, there is another shortfall of more than $30 million.

In the wake of budget shortfalls, Hubbell, a Des Moines businessman, called Reynolds desire for tax cuts misguided.

As someone who has balanced many budgets throughout my career, Gov. Reynolds fiscally irresponsible actions are alarming and risk turning our state into Kansas, Hubbell said in a statement, referring to tax cuts that helped create havoc with Kansas budget. The fact the governor is pushing tax cuts despite the massive debt she just created shows she puts politics and her re-election campaign before everyday Iowans. This state cant afford to lower taxes before fully paying off our debt.

Andy McGuire said Reynolds address was filled with lots of promises and political rhetoric, and also criticized Reynolds for touting the myriad conservative policies implemented during the 2017 session.

McGuire, a physician and former state party chairwoman, also criticized Reynolds for not reaching out to Iowas minorities in her speech.

It is also clear that this administration is clearly out-of-touch with Iowas minority communities, and (Reynolds) showed zero commitment to making Iowa a more inclusive state, McGuire said in a statement. Gov. Reynolds made no mention of efforts to curb the bullying of LGBTQ+ students in our classrooms or efforts to combat or curtail the recent, racially motivated incidents in our state.

In the governors defense and in a preview of how Reynolds will defend her record on the campaign trail this year, a spokesman for her campaign called the Democrats statements decades-old, worn-out criticisms and cited independent studies that have rated Iowa No. 1 in the country for middle-class families and as the third-best managed state.

While the governor is focused on doing even more to unleash opportunity across the state, Democrats are only belittling Iowas success and proposing nothing new of their own, Reynolds campaign spokesman Pat Garrett said.
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Jan 16, 2018 | By Julia

As we approach this years much anticipated Technishow, makers and businesses from around the world are starting to share their excitement with previews of what to expect this March in Utrecht. For those not in the know, the renowned Dutch trade show offers the largest manufacturing industry platform in the Benelux area, including demos, presentations, workshops and more to thousands of visitors, and this year will be no different. The Technishow 2018 is once again shaping up to be a comprehensive window into the current state of the manufacturing industry, with many 3D printing innovations positioned squarely at the centre of the action.

This week, Rosler Benelux BV added to all the buzz with a new peek at their RapidFinish solution. Announced as a new line of specially designed surface finishing machines, RapidFinish promises to remove those unsightly 3D printing lines by way of an advanced sanding and drumming process. Aimed specifically at companies who 3D print in plastic and metal, Roslers RapidFinish line is geared towards applications in the automotive, medical, dental and aviation industries, to name but a few.

a plastic part before (left) and after the RapidFinish treatment

Equipment designed for 3D printing high-quality components - when directly from the machine - can leave visible lines [between] the printed layers. These lines scare customers when end users use these parts in high-value industries, explain Rosler representatives. RapidFinish removes layer lines and produces a smooth finish for high-quality products.

A printed products geometry and material are the two main factors which determine what textures can be achieved, as well as the best finishing technique to use. Of the latter, plastic and glass bead blasting, as well as slide grinding or drumming, are the most popular methods, and can be applied to prototypes, show models, and parts for end users.

Although a number of companies are currently making a name for themselves in surface finishing, Rosler staff asserts that their RapidFinish solution sets them apart from the competition. A 3D printed part is fully automated with our installation, so that it gets a functional product surface, which significantly improves the quality of the end product. The result afterward, they promise, is exactly the same on all products because of our sustainable, environmentally friendly processing technique, which makes us very attractive as a supplier.



To check out the RapidFinish machines for yourself, head to Technishow 2018 in Utrecht from March 20-23. Located in Hall 8, Stand 088, Rosler will be present on all three days of the tradeshow, from 10:00 am onwards. Click here for more info.

Posted in 3D Printing Technology

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Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic:

In the decades after Hernan Cortes invaded Mexico, one of the worst epidemics in human history swept through the new Spanish colony. A mysterious disease called cocolitzli appeared first in 1545 and then again in 1576, each time killing millions of the native population. From morning to sunset, wrote a Franciscan friar who witness the epidemic, the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches.

In less than a century, the number of people living in Mexico fell from an estimated 20 million to 2 million. Its a massive population loss. Really, its impressive, says Rodolfo Acuna-Soto, an epidemiologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What can even kill so many people so quickly?

The Spanish, infamously, brought a litany of diseases unknown to the indigenous populationsmallpox, measles, typhusso some experts have suggested cocoliztli is simply one of those. Others, like Acuna-Soto, have argued it is an unknown viral hemorrhagic fever native to Mexico. The cause of cocoliztli has never been conclusively identified.

more here.
Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic:

The reviews of Fire and Fury are in, and they are pretty furious themselves. Michael Wolff, author of the best-selling expose of the Trump White House, has been accused of every kind of journalistic malfeasance: reconstructing scenes he couldnt have witnessed, retelling gossip as if it were gospel, letting his sources agendas drive his portrayals. President Trump himself has attacked the book as a work of fiction, and many of the journalists who have weighed in on it basically agree. At least, they complain, theres no way to tell if the stories Wolff retails are true. To anyone who pays attention to actual American fiction, such attacks have a familiar ring. For the last 15 yearsever since the publication of James Freys A Million Little Pieces, a book sold as a memoir that turned out to be heavily fictionalizedAmerican literature has been obsessed with the blurriness of the line separating fact and fiction. When it comes to genre, most book-buyers are literalists: If it says memoir or nonfiction on the dust jacket, everything inside is supposed to be 100 percent accurate. If it turns out not to be, they feel defrauded. Freys publisher had to offer refunds to disgruntled readers who thought they were getting a transcript, but had to make do with a story.

More here.
Stephen McCloskey in The Wire:

Western governments have been fuelling the Yemeni crisis through lucrative weapon sales to Riyadh used in Saudis three year bombing campaign. Amnesty International has argued that:

Countries such as the USA, UK and France, which continue to supply coalition members with arms, are allowing Saudi Arabia and its allies to flagrantly flout international law and risk being complicit in grave violations, including war crimes.

Amnesty urges these countries to: immediately halt the flow of arms and military assistance to members of the Saudi-led coalition for use in Yemen. This includes any equipment or logistical support being used to maintain this blockade.

The UK has licensed $4.6 billion worth of arms sales to the Saudi regime, a relationship described as shameful by Campaign Against Arms Trade, given Riyadhs record as one of the worlds most authoritarian regimes.

France, too, has sold 9 billion Euros of weaponry to Saudi Arabia from 2010-2016, amounting to 15-20% of Frances annual arms exports.

And the US has designed and negotiated a package totalling approximately $110 billion with Riyadh in 2017 following on from a total of $115 billion approved in arms sales by the Obama administration in 2009-2016.

More here.
Fouad Khan in Nautilus:

"I have a secret to tell you about my city, she says. It has to do with what Eve Ensler calls the feminine cell. It was the autumn of 2016. Id met her in Quito, Ecuador, at the United Nations Habitat III, the biggest global urban development conference in two decades. After a week spent pondering cities, we found ourselves talking to each other like strangers often do in the tired, busy evenings that follow a days hustle. Whats the feminine cell? I ask. Its empathy. Its respect for the human experience. Its being aware of the space you take up in the world and how that relates to the commons. Outside the colors of Quito were drenched in rain as the bars filled with eager conference attendees and locals alike. In the second year of a post-doc studying energy footprint reduction in cities, I was just about beginning to see the connections between social justice, the urban experience, and what makes a city tick. My city is always looking for solutions, she continued. There is no place in my city. There are only points and routes that connect those points.

America is having a bit of a moment right now. Powerful men long considered beyond retribution are being called out for their transgressions. Behavior long tolerated in a culture where female objectification is in the very air we breathe is being re-examined. It reminds me of the conversation I had in Quito two years ago.

As we look again at our culture, why stop with behavior? It is also time to re-examine the hardware of our societies. The very infrastructure that we have builtroads, buildings, public spaces, steel, dirt, and concreteencodes a set of values too. Are these the values we aspire to as a society and civilization? The cities weve built dont provide perfectly equal access to everyone. An obvious case in point: wheelchair ramps, or lack thereof. But even healthy, active residents of all genders may not consider all of a city accessible to them. Men, for instance, typically dont consider a dimly lit street lined by bars or clubs an unsafe or inaccessible part of town. For women, braving the same street past midnight has completely different connotations. Like video game players who have been leveled up, men can simply access a much larger part of a city or town at a wider variety of times. One Europe-wide survey found that 30 percent of all physical violence and 16 percent of sexual violence against women happens in bars, clubs, discos and other public places2something that women are very much aware of and which influences how they move around a city.

More here.
Louisiana Family Attorney Expects Busy Period with Start of New Year

Every new year not only brings new beginnings but sometimes it brings new health insurance questions and divorce. Pamela Breedlove, licensed Family Law Attorney, has seen many different cases come in over the past week and she is standing by to assist her clients in everyone possible way. Pamela specializes in three different forms of law: Civil Mediation, Healthcare Law, and Family Mediation.

Civil Mediation

Mediation is a way to settle a dispute between two or more opposing parties without using a third person, known as a mediator, to be involved. This is a great way for two people to be able to settle all of their issues without dragging in other people or causing an ordeal. What usually happens is that everyone will initially meet privately and then take a brief recess to discuss the meeting with their representatives. After the initial meeting has begun, negotiations then begin to come to a final agreement that is then written down and signed by both agreeing parties.

Healthcare Law

With the New Year brings many new questions for people about their healthcare options and rights. There are so many options and changing laws that it often confuses people. When a person goes to the doctor or hospital or uses their insurance, they are not always fully aware of their rights or if their health care provider acting in compliance with all of the healthcare laws.

There are often times that the roles can be reserved and a healthcare provider is seeking representation against a patients false claim. A healthcare provider takes their licensing and medical oath very seriously, and false accusations can harm their career forever.

Family Mediation

This is a special form of mediation very similar to civil mediation, but this specializes in helping to resolve family disputes. This is often the most recommended option for people who have to make negotiations that involve children. Divorce alone on a child can be life-altering, and when both parties can quickly, but calmly resolve their issues, it has a less harmful impact on the children. This form of mediation also involves the opinions and requests of the children, if old enough, and is used to help determine the final outcome of the dispute.

So whether you are curious about your patient rights or need some advice on that possible pending divorce, you can head over to sign up for a free consultation. The great team at Breedlove Law Firm will gladly assist you with all of your needs.

About Breedlove Law Firm

Pamela Breedlove has been an attorney for over 25 years and has the license to practice in the states of Louisiana and Georgia. She received her law degree from Georgia State University College of Law where she then proceeded to become a law clerk and eventually opened Breedlove Law Firm in 2012.

Media Contact

Company Name: BREEDLOVE LAW FIRM

Contact Person: Pamela Breedlove

Email: barryastenson@gmail.com

Phone: 318-423-0845

Address:216 Rolling Meadow Lane

City: Bossier City

State: Louisiana

Country: United States

Website: http://www.breedlovefirm.com/contact-us/


Reports 2017 Full Year and Q4 Production Results

Toronto, Jan 16, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - McEwen Mining Inc. ( NYSE:MUX ) ( TSE:MUX ) reports annual consolidated production in 2017 was 109,947 gold ounces and 3,178,742 silver ounces, or 152,329 gold equivalent ounces (see Footnote 1 below), at a gold to silver ratio of 75:1.

----------------------------------------------------------------------- 2017 Consolidated Production Summary ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Guidance 2017 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Gold ounces 109,500 109,947 20,096 22,191 19,051 48,609 Silver ounces 3,337,000 3,178,742 722,767 779,487 749,749 926,739 Gold Eq. ounces 154,000 152,329 29,733 32,584 29,047 60,965 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Q4 2017 Highlights



- El Gallo achieved production of 19,893 gold equivalent ounces in Q4, successfully recuperating lost production due to equipment failure in July.



- Black Fox had a good first quarter after the transition to MUX ownership, producing 14,279 gold equivalent ounces.



- Funding for a $10 million exploration program in the Timmins region, focusing on the Black Fox Complex.



El Gallo Mine, Mexico



Production in 2017 was 46,694 gold equivalent ounces, compared to 55,266 gold equivalent ounces in 2016. The mine overcame a production shortfall stemming from a serious mechanical crusher failure at the end of July to achieve 93% of our annual guidance.



In Q4, the mine produced 19,893 gold equivalent ounces, compared to 7,676 gold equivalent ounces during same period in 2016. Production in Q4 was higher as a result of increased crushing capacity, readily available stockpile of ore from previous quarters, and access to higher-grade portions of the orebody.



Black Fox Mine, Canada



MUX closed the purchase of the Black Fox Complex on October 6, 2017. During Q4, the mine produced 14,279 gold equivalent ounces from 79,046 tonnes processed at a grade of 6.47 gpt gold. These results are in-line with our production expectations set forth during the acquisition.



San Jose Mine, Argentina (49% (see Footnote 2 below))



Our attributable production from San Jose in 2017 was 49,233 gold ounces and 3,159,352 silver ounces, for a total of 91,356 gold equivalent ounces. Compared to 2016, gold production was up 6% and silver production was down 4%.



In Q4, attributable production was 14,528 gold ounces and 919,898 silver ounces, for a total of 26,793 gold equivalent ounces.



Return of Capital



The semi-annual return of capital of 1/2 cent per share will be paid on February 14th, 2018 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on February 2rd, 2018. It will be paid to common shareholders of McEwen Mining Inc. from additional paid-in capital. For shareholders in the US and Canada, return of capital is generally not taxed, however we recommend you to obtain advice from a tax professional familiar with your specific situation.



Financial Results



Operating costs for the quarter ended December 31, 2017 will be released with our 10-K Annual Financial Statements in late February 2018.



Footnotes:



1. 'Gold Equivalent Ounces' are calculated based on a 75:1 gold to silver ratio.



2. The San Jose Mine is 49% owned by McEwen Mining Inc. and 51% owned and operated by Hochschild Mining plc.



RELIABILITY OF INFORMATION REGARDING THE SAN JOSE MINE



Minera Santa Cruz S.A., the owner of the San Jose Mine, is responsible for and has supplied to the Company all reported results from the San Jose Mine. McEwen Mining's joint venture partner, a subsidiary of Hochschild Mining plc, and its affiliates other than MSC do not accept responsibility for the use of project data or the adequacy or accuracy of this release.



TECHNICAL INFORMATION



The technical contents of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Nathan M. Stubina, Ph.D., P.Eng., FCIM, Managing Director and a Qualified Person as defined by Canadian Securities Administrator National Instrument 43-101 "Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects".



CAUTION CONCERNING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS



This news release contains certain forward-looking statements and information, including "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements and information expressed, as at the date of this news release, McEwen Mining Inc.'s (the "Company") estimates, forecasts, projections, expectations or beliefs as to future events and results including, but not limited to, the closing of the Offering and the use of proceeds thereof. Forward-looking statements and information are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by management, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties, risks and contingencies, and there can be no assurance that such statements and information will prove to be accurate. Therefore, actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements and information. Risks and uncertainties that could cause results or future events to differ materially from current expectations expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements and information include, but are not limited to, factors associated with fluctuations in the market price of precious metals, mining industry risks, political, economic, social and security risks associated with foreign operations, the ability of the corporation to receive or receive in a timely manner permits or other approvals required in connection with operations, risks related to fluctuations in mine production rates, risks associated with the construction of mining operations and commencement of production and the projected costs thereof, risks related to litigation, the state of the capital markets, environmental risks and hazards, uncertainty as to calculation of mineral resources and reserves, and other risks. The Company's dividend policy will be reviewed periodically by the Board of Directors and is subject to change based on certain factors such as the capital needs of the Company and its future operating results. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information included herein, which speak only as of the date hereof. The Company undertakes no obligation to reissue or update forward-looking statements or information as a result of new information or events after the date hereof except as may be required by law. See McEwen Mining's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2016 and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, under the caption "Risk Factors", for additional information on risks, uncertainties and other factors relating to the forward-looking statements and information regarding the Company. All forward-looking statements and information made in this news release are qualified by this cautionary statement.



The NYSE and TSX have not reviewed and do not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the contents of this news release, which has been prepared by management of McEwen Mining Inc.





About McEwen Mining Inc





McEwen Mining (NYSE:MUX) (TSE:MUX) has the goal to qualify for inclusion in the S&P 500 Index by creating a profitable gold and silver producer focused in the Americas. McEwen's principal assets consist of: the San Jose mine in Santa Cruz, Argentina (49% interest); the Black Fox mine in Timmins, Canada; the Fenix Project in Mexico; the Gold Bar mine in Nevada, currently under construction; and the large Los Azules copper project in Argentina, advancing towards development.



McEwen has approximately 345 million shares outstanding. Rob McEwen, Chairman and Chief Owner, owns roughly 23% of the shares.


Gold Exploration Update

Perth, Jan 16, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Intermin Resources Limited ( ASX:IRC ) ("Intermin" or the "Company") provides the following exploration update from its 100% owned gold projects located near Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia (see Figure 1 in link below). In total, 26,254m of RC and diamond drilling was completed in 2017 across eight priority project areas on major gold bearing shear zones.



HIGHLIGHTS



- Highly successful exploration program completed in the Western Australian Goldfields



- Over 26,000m of reverse circulation ("RC") and diamond drilling completed across eight key project areas on major gold bearing shear zones



- At the Teal gold camp, high-grade intercepts included (see Note 1 below):



o 26m at 7.80g/t Au from 48m and 16m at 5.30g/t Au from 86m (Jacques Find)



o 27m at 4.16g/t Au from 53m (Jacques Find)



o 8m at 11.00g/t Au from 53m and 9m at 7.10g/t Au from 89m (Jacques Find)



o 15m at 5.40g/t Au from 28m and 13m at 5.40g/t Au from 55m (Peyes Farm)



o 9m at 5.20g/t Au from 82m and 6m at 5.00g/t Au from 55m (Peyes Farm)



o 31m at 3.20g/t Au from 64m and 16m at 4.10g/t Au from 73m (Teal)



o 11m at 7.80g/t Au from 51m and 15m at 4.20g/t Au from 130m (Teal)



- Focus for Teal in 2018 will be Resource extensions along two parallel strike zones and at depth and detailed metallurgical testwork to determine optimal processing pathways



- At the Anthill gold project, high-grade intercepts included (see Note 2 below):



o 41m at 2.63g/t Au from 69m and 30m at 2.98g/t Au from 73m



o 11m at 3.72g/t Au from 46m and 29m at 1.84g/t Au from 49m



o 17m at 5.30g/t Au from 137m and 6m at 11.15g/t Au from 110m



- Focus for Anthill in 2018 will be Resource extensions along strike and at depth and testing for repeat structures to the north at Fire Ant and to the east and west.



- Maiden JORC 2012 Mineral Resource for Anthill expected in the current March Quarter



- First pass drilling completed at Blister Dam with results expected in February



- Intermin awarded $60,000 EIS Government co-funding grant to drill recently defined induced polarisation targets at Blister Dam in 2018



- Follow up drilling at Olympia, Baden Powell, Chadwin and Goongarrie Lady will be completed in 2019 to enable focus on the core projects at Teal, Anthill and Blister Dam



- Preparations well advanced to commence a fully funded $4 million, 50 - 60,000m drilling program in the current March Quarter



- Cash and tradeable securities as at 16 January 2018 totals $8m



Commenting on the 2017 year, Intermin's Managing Director Mr Jon Price said:



"The past year has been one of significant growth for the Company on the back of a highly successful exploration program, the generation of cash flow from the first stages of the Teal mining operation and a number of value accretive acquisitions and joint ventures.



"Intermin is now in a strong and quite unique position to be able to self-fund a larger Resource growth drilling program in 2018 with the focus on our key projects at the Teal gold camp, Anthill and Blister Dam with planning at an advanced stage for 50-60,000m of drilling to commence this Quarter."



"Our shareholders are very supportive of our strategy to grow our resource base above the 1 million ounce mark with an aggressive drill program and that is our key objective for 2018. We have done it before and we'll be working very hard to do it again in what is a world class gold producing region."



Overview



The following sections provide a summary of work completed and the next steps for the Resource extension programs planned for the 2018 calendar year.



Blister Dam



Since September 2017, Intermin has been actively exploring the Blister Dam project located 54km northwest of Kalgoorlie-Boulder (see Figure 1 & 2 in link below). This region, northwest of the Kundana Goldfield, has a similar geological setting to the large open cut and underground deposits including Frog's Leg, Raleigh, Millennium and Bullant.



An Induced Polarisation ("IP") survey (see Figure 2 in link below), geological mapping, rock chip sampling and 46 RC holes for 4,180m have been completed to refine and test multiple priority targets.



Nine of the 21 individual prospects identified at Blister Dam were drilled up until the end of the field program in December 2017. The additional targets will be drilled in 2018 as part of the 5,250m follow up drilling provision as announced to the ASX on 11 July 2017.



The drilling confirmed the dominance of ultramafic and volcanic rocks and sediments with minor quartz and pyrite regularly intersected (see Figure 2 in link below). All 1m split samples have now been submitted to the laboratory and results are expected in February 2018.



In addition the Company has been awarded $60,000 in Exploration Incentive Scheme ("EIS") co-funding from the WA Government to RC drill test the recently defined IP targets (see Figure 2 in link below). The 2D dipole-dipole IP survey was completed in October and comprised approximately 98 line km. The IP results highlighted a number of small to moderate level conductor anomalies (10 - 20mV/V) and several potential (untested) fault zones.



The specific IP targets will be further refined with the addition of the outstanding drilling results and tested thoroughly with new RC drilling in the March Quarter 2018.



Teal Gold Camp



At the Teal gold project located 11km northwest of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, a total of 32 holes were completed for 3,024m at the Teal south, Jacques Find, Peyes Farm and Yolande prospects (see Figure 1 & 3 in link below). Excellent high-grade results were returned from the majority of holes intersecting both oxide and primary mineralisation (see Note 3 below) (see Figure 3 in link below).



The geology is dominated by Black Flag sediments (felsic volcanics and sediments) with lesser amounts of porphyry and intermediate volcanic rocks. Primary gold mineralisation is typically associated with quartz and sulphides and faulting has displaced or pinched out some of the mineralisation. The strong results at Jacques Find are especially encouraging and are interpreted to be the result of a cross structure intersecting a parallel structure with Teal mineralisation.



The mineralisation at Jacques Find has been intersected for at least 800m along strike and is open to the north, south and at depth.



A key outcome of the 2018 drilling program will be to define the strike and depth extents of this new discovery and determine the potential size of the deposit. The Company recognises there is potential to define a significantly larger Resource than is currently defined and will be prioritising this work to commence in the March Quarter.



Further work is planned to follow up priority targets at the Yolande, Peyes Farm and Teal NE prospects. In addition, the Company has been revising a number of potential underground targets as part of the Teal Deeps prospect. A number of deep RC/diamond holes have been allocated to "proof of concept" drilling.



Composite samples from oxide, transitional and primary material have been dispatched to Independent Metallurgical Operations Pty Ltd ("IMO") for detailed metallurgical testing. The testing will involve a staged work program comprising:



- Ore characterisation to prepare the composites for assay, provide head assay data and grind establishments for downstream testing



- Multi element analysis



- Bond Ball Work Index testing



- Determine the gravity recoverable gold content within the samples



- Determine the overall recovery of gold per composite under CIL processing conditions



- Flotation, ultra-fine grinding, roasting and pressure oxidation testwork as required



Anthill



At the Anthill gold project located 54km northwest of Kalgoorlie-Boulder (see Figure 1 & 4 in link below), a total of 46 holes were completed for 6,509m with excellent results returned (see Note 4 below) (see Figures 5 and 6 in link below). Compilation of a maiden JORC 2012 Mineral Resource is now underway and is planned for completion in the current March Quarter 2018.



The geology is dominated by a variolitic basalt with lesser amounts of porphyry and ultramafic rocks observed. At least two mineralised trends are evident and add to the geological complexity at Anthill. The gold mineralisation is pervasive and occurs in a number of settings, the most important being a quartz stockwork or thin veins with carbonate-sericite-silica-sulphide alteration. Some of the gold is very coarse and is easily visible in panned RC chips.



The Anthill project will also be prioritised in 2018 and the focus will be to extend known oxide mineralisation and to undertake deeper drilling to follow up the 2017 results.



Further, Intermin has completed the field assessment of the Fire Ant prospect and areas adjacent to Anthill. A common geological theme observed is that much of the historic drilling ended in the depletion zone with encouraging amounts of quartz veining regularly intersected in the old drill spoils at surface. These have since been re-sampled and submitted for multi-element testing. New target generation studies are now underway and is planned to drill test Fire Ant and other nearby prospects in the June and September Quarters.



Goongarrie Lady



At the 100% owned Goongarrie Lady gold project, located 90km north of Kalgoorlie-Boulder (see Figure 1 in link below), the Company completed an infill RC drill program (167 holes for 8,447m) to confirm the grade and the geological interpretation to support the completion of a Feasibility Study and Mine approvals. Results will be combined with drilling completed in the September Quarter 2017 to compile a Resource update with the aim to increase the proportion of mineralisation in the Measured Resource category.



Due the requirement to complete drilling in addition to what was originally planned, the Feasibility Study is now scheduled for completion in the June Quarter 2018. Key activities completed or commenced include:



- Final Resource Update - commenced



- Flora and Fauna surveys - complete



- Submission of a Clearing Permit - complete



- Estimate of infrastructure, mining, haulage, processing and technical services costs - commenced



- Metallurgical Testwork - complete



- Capital cost estimate - commenced



- Geotechnical, dewatering, surface and ground water studies - commenced



- Pit optimisation study and pit design - commenced



- Submission of Mining Proposal and Mine Closure Plan - commenced.



Binduli JV (Evolution Mining)



At the Binduli gold project located 5-20km northwest of Kalgoorlie-Boulder (see Figure 1 in link below), Joint Venture partner Evolution Mining Ltd ( ASX:EVN ) ("Evolution") has advised it has completed 39 RC holes for 3,922m. The holes tested high priority geochemical and structural targets at the Coot & Crake and Honey Eater prospects.



Results and follow up plans are anticipated to be available in the March Quarter 2018. Under the terms of the Binduli Joint Venture Agreement, Evolution can earn 70% interest in the project by spending $4.6M over five years.



Regional Projects



Throughout the year the Company has continued to review and explore greenfields gold projects in the region with the aim to secure new projects proximal to major geological structures with the potential to host a discovery or develop into a significant gold deposit. Intermin is working on developing a pipeline of early stage projects for target generation and drill testing.



Olympia (see Note 5 below)



At the Olympia prospect 27 holes for 2,174m were completed. The first pass aircore drilling was designed to test a 3,800m by 500m gold-in-soil auger anomaly (maximum assay 169ppb Au). Several holes returned anomalous levels of oxidised quartz-sulphide related gold and supergene mineralisation with grades up to 1.4g/t Au. Follow up work from the highly encouraging results and testing of two new areas at Olympia is planned.



Baden Powell (see Note 6 below)



At the Baden Powell prospect, eight holes for 1,364m were completed and aimed to test the depth extensions from the open pit and historical/recent drilling. A best hit of 17m @ 3.0 g/t Au (incl. 7m @ 5.95 g/t Au) was discovered in BPRC1703. The initial focus in 2018 will be on field mapping and sampling with a view to testing the Baden Powell strike and the potential for parallel structures.



New Mexico



At the New Mexico prospect, 12 shallow holes for 556m were completed with four holes testing each of the three tenements. The preliminary 4m composite results were encouraging with new low-grade mineralisation being discovered in two holes. The mineralisation appears to be open and untested. Individual 1m split samples are currently being collected and results are expected in the March Quarter.



The Yarmony, Area 54, Kanowna North and Windanya projects will be subject to early stage exploration techniques including auger soil sampling and aircore drilling if warranted in 2018. The strategy has proven to be successful, particularly with the advancement at the Olympia prospect.



Next steps



On the back of the successful 2017 exploration program, a targeted larger scale drilling program is in the final stages of development with approvals well advanced for commencement in the March Quarter 2018.



The key business objective for 2018 is Resource growth and 75% of the planned drilling will be focussed on Resource expansion at the Teal Gold Camp and Anthill gold project. Both RC and diamond drilling will be completed to continue lateral and depth extensions to known mineralisation and to test parallel structures along strike.



Planning and preparation is also well advanced for significant drilling in 2018 at the high priority Blister Dam project and will be finalised upon receipt of first pass results in the current quarter.



The 2018 program is estimated to comprise 50 - 60,000m of drilling within a $4 million budget. The program will be fully funded from existing cash reserves generated from the Teal gold mine and through the recently approved Exploration Incentive Scheme grant.



Notes



1 As announced to the ASX on 18 September, 15 and 29 November 2017



2 As announced to the ASX on 24 October 2017



3 As announced to the ASX on 18 September, 15 and 29 November 2017



4 As announced to the ASX on 24 October 2017



5 As announced to the ASX on 29 August 2017



6 As announced to the ASX on 29 August and 28 November 2017



To view figures, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/Y3GUB9S0





About Horizon Minerals Limited





Horizon Minerals Limited (ASX:HRZ) is a gold exploration and mining company focussed on the Kalgoorlie and Menzies areas of Western Australia which are host to some of Australia's richest gold deposits. The Company is developing a mining pipeline of projects to generate cash and self-fund aggressive exploration, mine developments and further acquisitions. The Teal gold mine has been recently completed.

Horizon is aiming to significantly grow its JORC-Compliant Mineral Resources, complete definitive feasibility studies on core high grade open cut and underground projects and build a sustainable development pipeline.

Horizon has a number of joint ventures in place across multiple commodities and regions of Australia providing exposure to Vanadium, Copper, PGE's, Gold and Nickel/Cobalt. Our quality joint venture partners are earning in to our project areas by spending over $20 million over 5 years enabling focus on the gold business while maintaining upside leverage.


Approvals and Drilling Program Progress

Adelaide, Jan 16, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Leigh Creek Energy Limited ( ASX:LCK ) ( MRTDF:OTCMKTS ) ("LCK" or "the Company") is pleased to provide its shareholders and the market with an update to the market on the approval process for the Pre-Commercial Demonstration stage (PCD), and significant progress with its additional Drilling Program for the Leigh Creek Energy Project (LCEP).



- Approval documents submitted to Regulator for assessment



- Public consultation of regulatory approval documents to conclude end of February 2018



- Additional Drill Program to be completed this week



- On target for operation of Demonstration plant



PCD Approval



The public consultation period for the demonstration phase of the Leigh Creek Energy Project (LCEP) has now commenced and will conclude at the end of February 2018.



As an outcome of the drilling program outlined below, LCK has secured sufficient additional geotechnical information to update the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and companion document, the Draft Statement of Environmental Objectives (SEO), together constituting the approval documents for the LCEP PCD.



LCK delivered the completed documents to the Energy and Resources Division - Department of Premier and Cabinet ("the Regulator") in December 2017. The Regulator has commenced its assessment process, which includes a statutory 30 business day public consultation period that concludes at the end of February 2018.



During this period, the public is invited to engage with LCK on matters pertaining to the approval documents, which are available through the Department of Premier and Cabinet, or at:



http://www.abnnewswire.net/lnk/I1Y031L5



In addition to the Company's extensive and continued stakeholder engagement efforts, LCK will continue to engage with stakeholders during the assessment period, and for the life of the project.



Drilling Program



LCK announced in its September 2017 Quarterly Report (30 October 2017) that it would be undertaking a program of additional drilling to secure geotechnical information required by the Regulator to augment existing information. This program commenced in early December 2017 and is expected to be completed this week.



The scope and objectives of this program are to:



- Drill three holes - two holes to provide further geological information requested by the Regulator and needed for the EIR, and a third hole to confirm design criteria for the PCD gasifier; and



- Reaffirm that no geological structures exist in proximity to the intended PCD gasifier location that could adversely affect the containment of ISG reactions.



LCK is pleased to report that the first two holes have been completed and the final hole will be completed this week. This has enabled the Company to provide the Regulator with additional geological data so it can fully assess the suitability of the proposed PCD site. Significantly, LCK has reaffirmed that there are no significant geological structures in proximity to the intended PCD Gasifier location.



SUMMARY



The Company believes that successful PCD approval and operations are significant milestones in its progress to commercialisation.



LCK's focus has been on continued work towards demonstration gas operations (PCD). Current and expected progress is represented in the graphic (see link below).



Commenting on the announcement, LCK Managing Director Phil Staveley commented: "We at LCK are excited to have passed another significant milestone, being the completion of approval documents for the LCEP PCD. Providing the Regulator with these documents in a timely manner has initiated the formal assessment process, a key step in the pathway to approval for PCD operations. Public consultation is an important component of the approval process. Notwithstanding our very extensive and comprehensive stakeholder engagement efforts to date, LCK is continuing to engage with stakeholders in regard to the approval documents and LCK's PCD operations at Leigh Creek."



To view figures, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/ZPX20U35





About Leigh Creek Energy Ltd





Leigh Creek Energy Limited (ASX:LCK) (OTCMKTS:MRTDF) is an emerging gas company focused on developing its Leigh Creek Energy Project (LCEP), located in South Australia. The LCEP will produce high value products such as electricity, methane and ammonium nitrate products (fertiliser and industrial explosives) from the remnant coal resources at Leigh Creek, utilising In Situ Gasification (ISG) technologies, and will provide long term stability and economic development opportunities to the communities of the Upper Spencer Gulf, northern Flinders Ranges and South Australia.

The Company is committed to developing the LCEP using a best practice approach to mitigate the technical, environmental and financial project risks.

Leigh Creek Energy acknowledges and respects the Adnyamathanha people, the Traditional Owners of the land on which its operations occur and pay our respects to their Elders past and present.


Acquisition of Mt Ida and Quinns Projects from LCD

Canberra, Jan 16, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Alt Resources ( ASX:ARS ) (Alt, or the Company) is pleased to announce the acquisition of a significant exploration package in the Mt Ida district, WA. The landholding encompasses the historical Quinns and Mt Ida South mining centres, and contains existing JORC resources of 1.24 Mt @ 2.5 g/t Au, for 97,300 oz Au.



Highlights



- Alt acquires 300 km2 exploration package adjacent to and surrounding the Bottle Creek Gold Mine, Mount Ida, WA



- New tenement packages include the Quinns and Mt Ida South projects



- 58 km long near-contiguous package along major mineralised structures



- Package contains existing JORC 2012 resources of 1.24Mt @ 2.5 g/t Au (97,300 oz Au)



- Numerous historical workings with multiple shallow walk-up drill targets



Alt has entered into a binding Heads of Agreement (HOA) with Latitude Consolidated Ltd ( ASX:LCD ) (LCD) to acquire the Quinns and Mt Ida South Projects (currently held 100% by LCD), as well as LCD's interest in the Mt Ida JV (currently held 80% by LCD). The exploration package fully encompasses the Bottle Creek mining leases, thus considerably expanding Alt's landholding in this area, and opening up significant exploration and development potential for the Company and shareholders.



Alt CEO James Anderson commented



"The addition of the Mt Ida South and Quinns assets is very significant for the Company. The expansion of Alt's portfolio through this acquisition as well as the recent Option to Purchase agreement by the Company for the Bottle Creek Gold Mine (see Note 1 below) is in-line with the Company's strategy to work towards becoming a gold producer. The Mt Ida South and Quinns Projects contain 97,000 JORC compliant gold ounces in satellite ore bodies. These are very accessible to the Bottle Creek Gold Mine site and when coupled with known mineralisation at Bottle Creek, the Company views the area to have the potential to support sufficient mining production for a processing plant on the existing Bottle Creek mining leases.



The project now has significant scale to warrant further development of known resources. Previous miners have been held back from development in this area of the Mt Ida gold belt because there is no processing plant in the immediate vicinity. Alt considers the Bottle Creek Mine site to be the ideal location to establish a CIP plant to process the Bottle Creek and the surrounding LCD ore bodies."



Terms of Agreement



Under a binding agreement executed between Alt and Latitude Consolidated Ltd, Alt will meet the following conditions in order to acquire LCD's interests in the Quinns, Ida South and Mt Ida JV Projects.



- make a cash payment of $400,000 to LCD within 7 days of signing the Heads of Agreement



- issue $750,000 in tradeable fully paid ordinary ARS shares, being 12,500,000 shares at a deemed price of $0.06 per share with a voluntary escrow period of 6 months from the date of completion. The issue of ARS shares pursuant to the acquisition of the LCD assets may be subject to shareholder approval



- grant $250,000 of options over fully paid ordinary ARS shares, being 3,125,000 options, with each option having an exercise price being 8 cents per share and exercisable for 3 years from date of issue



- make a cash payment of $600,000 to LCD on or before the 30th March, 2018



Project Geology



The Project area lies approximately 80 km north west of Menzies in the Mt Ida gold belt (see Figure 1 in link below), and is located on the northern extremity of the Mt Ida-Ularring greenstone belt extending from Davyhurst to Mt Alexander (figure 1 in link below). The Ularring greenstone belt forms the western part of the Norseman-Wiluna Province of the Yilgarn Craton.



The Mt Ida exploration package encompasses the Mt Ida and Ballard Faults (see Figure 2 in link below). The Mt Ida Fault and associated splays host mineralisation at the Bottle Creek Gold Mine, for which Alt Resources has signed a binding Option to Buy Agreement (see Note 1 below). The Mt Ida Deposit (Eastern Goldfields Ltd) is also directly adjacent the new project area, and boasts a resource of 128,000 oz Au (0.26 Mt @ 15.4 g/t Au). The average grade at Mount Ida Mine is 17 g/t Au.



The Ballard Fault and associated splays is host to a near-continuous mineralised sequence, including known JORC resources at the Quinns Project (including the Matisse and Quinn Hills deposits, and the Quinns Mining Centre) in the north, and the Mount Ida South Project (including the Spotted Dog and Tim's Find deposits) in the south (see Figure 2 in link below). These known resources comprise a total of 1.24 Mt @ 2.5 g/t Au for 97,300 oz Au (see Note 2 below) (see Table 1 in link below). In addition, numerous historical prospects and workings exist along the mineralised trend, and represent excellent shallow, walk-up drill targets.



Tim's Find is a shallow gold resource over 1,000m in strike length, and containing 31,000oz Au, within 0.36Mt @ 2.54 g/t Au (Indicated; see Table 1 in link below). The resource is interpreted to be open along strike and down dip, and has only been drilled to approximately 50m depth, with no previous mining.



Quinn's Mining Centre comprises the Boudie Rat and Forrest Belle shallow historical open pits (to no deeper than 25m) as well as Forrest Belle, Boudie West, Boudie Beach and Belvidere. These resources contain 36,200oz Au, within 0.43Mt @ 2.7 g/t Au (Measured, Indicated and Inferred; see Table 1 in link below). The resource is open along strike and between pits. At Quinn Hills a resource of 3,800oz @ 5.74 g/t Au (Indicated) was defined by previous explorers2. Very little drilling has been conducted at Quinn Hills, and the resource remains open at depth.



Notes to accompany Mineral Resource Statement for Quinns and Mt Ida South



- The Mineral Resource estimates by LCD are classified as Measured, Indicated and Inferred based on data density, data quality, confidence in the geological interpretation and confidence in the estimation.



- Drill hole data used by LCD in the Quinns and Mt Ida South Mineral Resource estimation is comprised predominantly of RC and diamond holes. o Drill hole spacing ranges from 200m X 20m to 10m X 5m.



- All RC drill hole collar locations were surveyed by DGPS with expected accuracy (XYZ) of +/- 0.1 metre.



- All recent drilll holes were routinely surveyed downhole using appropriate techniques. Drill core and chips was logged (lithology, alteration, structure, mineralization, veining) in detail then stored and validated in electronic databases.



- Gold analysis of the samples was undertaken by reputable laboratories using fire assay techniques. Only the assay results from RC, aircore or diamond drilling was used for the grade estimation. RAB holes were used to check and confirm the interpretation.



- Industry standard reference material and duplicates were utilised to check on laboratory assay quality control with no issues identified. Assays were composited to 1 metre lengths and grades were estimated with and without an appropriate upper cut (20g/t Au).



- A bulk density of 2.60g/cm3 was applied to all fresh material and a bulk density of 2.00g/cm3 was applied to any oxide mineralisation. These numbers were based on ISBD data from historic work and local knowledge of the mineralisation type. Oxidation profiles based on detailed geological logging has been used for the determination of the various oxide boundaries.



- Based on wire-framing to drill holes on a 0.50g/t Au cut-off with a nominal one metre skin of external dilution.



- The grade estimation method was Inverse Distance Cubed (ID3) of drill hole values lying within validated wireframes (solids) with only the numbers from the individual wireframes/solids used for the interpolation.



- Parent block sizes were set at 2m (x), 5m (y) and 2.5m (z), with the sub-cell size down to half of the parent cell size.



- The Mineral Resource estimate has been classified based on data density, data quality, confidence in the geological interpretation and confidence in the estimation. The Mineral Resources extends to a maximum of approximately 150 metres below natural surface with an average depth of approximately 100 metres.



Notes:



1. See ARS announcement, 8th November, 2017: http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/QCE95126



2. See LCD announcement, 14th September, 2016: http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/3J073GG0



To view tables and figures, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/X3T1G0H0





About Aurenne Alt Resources Pty Ltd





Aurenne Alt Resources Pty Ltd is an Australian based mineral exploration company that aims to become a gold producer by exploiting historical and new gold prospects across quality assets and to build value for shareholders.
Leonardo has been awarded the lead project related to the first European Defence Founds initiative, OCEAN2020, to boost Europe's defence capabilities, issued by the European Union under the Preparatory Action on Defence Research programme - with the competitive selection conducted by the European Defence Agency (EDA) - which is to be contracted in the coming weeks.





The OCEAN2020 team - which will be led by Leonardo - comprises 42 partners from 15 European countries. These include the Ministries of Defence of Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Lithuania, with additional support from the Ministries of Defence of Sweden, France, the United Kingdom and Estonia and the Netherlands. European industrial partners include Indra, Safran, Saab, MBDA, PGZ/CTM, Hensoldt, Intracom-IDE, Fincantieri and QinetiQ. A number of research centres include Fraunhofer, TNO, CMRE (NATO) and IAI.



We are extremely pleased with this result, the OCEAN2020 initiative has a high level of strategic and technological-operational value said Alessandro Profumo, CEO of Leonardo. It is the leading technological research project dedicated to the very topical issue of maritime surveillance, which is of interest across Europe and to the Mediterranean region in particular. This success has been made possible thanks to the strong collaboration between all 42 team partners which we have the honour to lead.



OCEAN2020 is the first example of a cross-European military research programme to-date. The Leonardo-led bid required a thorough analysis of operational requirements and a technologically-innovative yet operationally-realistic proposal. The research project also will see the integration of unmanned platforms in surveillance and interdiction missions.



The success in winning the tender both highlights, and will enhance, Leonardos strength in naval products and integrated systems. The companys expertise in the domain includes command and control systems, unmanned aircraft, sensors, helicopters for naval applications, communications and weapon systems, on the surface and underwater.



OCEAN2020 will see unmanned platforms of different type (fixed wing, rotary wing, surface and underwater) integrated with naval units command and control centres, allowing for data exchange via satellite, with command and control centres on land. The joint and cooperative use of both manned and unmanned vehicles will also be demonstrated as part of the project.



Leonardo would like to thank the Italian Navy which - as a key OCEAN2020 partner - has and will continue to make important contributions to the project. This includes the development of operational scenarios and making available naval assets and helicopters, which will take part in demonstrations.



In addition to complex simulation work, OCEAN2020 project will involve two live demonstrations of maritime surveillance and interdiction operations, conducted by European fleets using unmanned aircraft, surface vessels and underwater systems.



The first demo, scheduled to take place in the Mediterranean Sea in 2019, will be coordinated by the Italian Navy and will see Leonardos Hero and Solo unmanned helicopters operate from Italian naval units alongside other European partners.



The second demonstration, which will take place in 2020 in the Baltic Sea, will be coordinated by the Swedish Navy. The data collected by various systems during these two demos will be processed and sent to a prototype European command and control centre in Brussels.


The potential international health disaster posed by the emergence of the swine flu has got Africa intellectualising its capacity to handle an eventual pandemic. In a backdrop of standing orders from developed countries for vital drugs, developing countries like those in southern Africa may be out of luck when placing emergency orders for medicines in high demand with pharmaceutical companies. Here is how some southern African countries have responded so far...












More than 1,800 Pakistani Muslim clerics have issued an Islamic directive, or fatwa, forbidding suicide bombings, a book due to be unveiled by the government on Today says.

The South Asian nation has for years been plagued by violence by Islamist militants who often use suicide bombers and preach that their struggle is a holy war to impose Islamic rule.

Suicide attacks are frequently condemned as fanatical and immoral, especially when civilians are killed, but insurgents view the tactic as their most effective weapon.

Seeking to curb terrorism that has resulted in tens of thousands of casualties since the early 2000s, the clerics declared suicide bombings to be forbidden, or haraam.

This Fatwa provides a strong base for the stability of a moderate Islamic society, Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain wrote in the book.

We can seek guidance from this Fatwa for building a national narrative in order to curb extremism in keeping with the golden principles of Islam.

Foreign and domestic critics of Pakistans government and military accuse them of cozying up to radical groups for political and military purposes and say the state has for too long turned a blind eye to hate preachers in mosques.

Pakistani officials deny frequent U.S. allegations about collaborating with militant Islamist proxies in Afghanistan and India, and say vast gains have been made over the past decade against militant outfits such as the Pakistani Taliban.

But privately they also warn any moves against some popular hardline groups based in Pakistan would take a long time and need to be undertaken carefully.
One of the owners of Mojos Bistro Yug Tuli on Tuesday was arrested by the Mumbai Police in connection with Kamala Mills Fire.

The Mumbai Police informed that Tuli had come to Mumbai to meet someone which is when he was caught.

Mumbai Police had earlier said that Yug Tuli, who was allegedly absconding, was seen in Hyderabad, while his Jeep got seized from his grandfathers place.

Meanwhile, Juhu-based hotelier Vishal Karia, who was arrested for sheltering owners of the pub involved in the Kamala Mills mishap, was granted bail by Bhoiwada Court on Monday.

Earlier, Mumbai police had also arrested the owner of 1 Above resto bar, Abhijeet Mankar, in connection with the massive fire in Mumbais Kamala Mills that claimed the lives of 14 people last month.

On January 6, 1 Above was found to have flouted the fire safety measures issued by the Mumbai Fire Brigade, which led to the fire on December 29.

Yug Pathak, one of the owners of Mojos Bistro and the son of former Pune police commissioner K K Pathak, has also been arrested in the case.

Around 14 people were killed and 12 suffered critical injuries in the massive fire that broke out at the Kamala Mills compound in Lower Parel locality here in the wee hours of December 29.
Its difficult to decrypt what exactly went wrong with Pravin Togadia, the International Working President of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). Togadia was among those Sangh leaders who had vehemently opposed Modis elevation as PM pick. Given his long-standing rivalry with Modi, Togadia had conveyed to Bhagwat that the Sangh was making a big mistake in pushing for Modi as he would eventually turn against them. Togadias stand against Modi was seen as a reflection of the division in the VHP with one section led by Ashok Singhal backing Modi and the other opposed to him. Subsequently, the RSS decided to back Modi and made it clear to Togadia that he would have to abide by its decision. Nevertheless, no one actually bothered about the ranting from Togadia and Narendra Modi successfully became the Prime Minister of India.

The rift between Togadia and Modi continued with verbal attacks, but Modi gradually managed to shrivel Togadias size. Following Togadias sudden disappearance on Monday, the political circles were abuzz with talks of his strained relationship with PM Narendra Modi over the past 15 years. Not very long ago, Modi and Togadia were thick friends and used to travel together on scooter, visiting RSS cadres. They were the one who successfully executed rallies during Babri Mosque demolition. However, after Modi became the CM in 2002, their relationship soured. Some VHP leaders believe that the developments taking place against Togadia in the past one month were politically motivated and a conspiracy to put him in place.

Both RSS and BJP want VHP to be free of Togadia so that they can launch new programmes under Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). But Togadia has been putting up stiff resistance as a result of which old cases against him are being actively pursued. Togadias term as International Working President was to end on December 31, 2017 along with the term of President Raghava Reddy. Before any decision taken, Togadia went missing and rumours were making headlines. Day after he reappeared from his brief disappearance, Togadia expressed that he may be killed. As he was found unconscious in a hospital in Ahmedabad after being reported missing in the day earlier.

Earlier this year, Modi had turned down a VHP invitation to share stage with its leaders including Togadia during the Kumbh Mela. Aides close to Modi had then maintained that he did not want his development agenda to be hijacked by his participation in the gathering of hardliners. The rivalry between Togadia and Modi became more pronounced after the 2002 riots. As Modi sought to move away from the stigma of the 2002 riots, Togadia saw that the Gujarat chief minister is keen to save himself from the campaign, leaving the VHP leaders in trouble. In the state polls held in 2007, Modi showed that he could do well without VHP elements. In 2008, Modi got VHP members arrested in Gujarat because they were opposing the demolition of temples when roads in Gandhinagar were being widened.

The bad blood between BJPs PM pick Narendra Modi and VHP President Pravin Togadia is boiling over. Togadias reportedly anti-Muslim comments raised eyebrows in saffron circles, causing some leaders to wonder whether Hindutva hardliners were deliberately trying to throw a spanner in partys campaign and upset Modi, who was painstakingly trying to convey to voters that the party had moved onto a positive agenda. The BJP poll strategists were also worried that the row has reinforced the views of Modi critics that the ugly side of Hindutva will come back with a bang if he becomes PM. As Togadias remarks went viral, Modi was very upset. RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat and other Sangh bigwigs too were displeased as Togadia had been advised to avoid such controversies.

A section of VHP functionaries are at a loss to explain what prompted Togadia to make this claim. Senior Gujarat BJP leaders have already expressed disdain over this rhetoric, which has failed to arouse any passion even among Sangh Parivar believers and has instead only increased anxieties in the states Muslim community. More than anyone else, Togadia himself should be acutely aware that the VHPs cadre base has shrunk and Togadia is struggling hard to stay afloat in the state.

In the 2012 assembly elections, those who travelled across Gujarat noted that a substantial segment of the VHP had pitted itself against Narendra Modi and the BJP. Over three months, the outfits leaders and workers sweated it out to damage Modi and boost whatever negligible prospects Keshubhai Patel and Gordhan Zadafias Gujarat Parivartan Party (GPP) had against the BJP strongman. They knew that it was not possible for the Congress and the GPP to defeat Modi, so the purpose was to portray Modi as leading a divided Parivar in Gujarat and somehow reduce his victory margin in terms of seats won. The idea was to scuttle his national ambitions. To the VHPs dismay however, the outfits campaign against Modi ended up helping him correct his image outside Gujarat and even with some segments of the minorities.

In the elections, it won him support from a large number of people for whom good governance and the availability of basic amenities was far more important than the worn out rhetoric of the VHP. A number of VHP activists figured in around 200 pronounced convictions in post-Godhra riot cases. More importantly, former minister Maya Kodnanis conviction gave people a feeling that justice finally prevailed, even if it may not have brought complete closure to those directly affected.

Togadias conflict with Modi is both political and personal. In the 2007 assembly election, Togadia was forced to stay out of Gujarat. On the other hand, despite his image as a hardliner, Modi has never flaunted his Hindutva credentials  in fact, it is inbuilt in his persona. But after the 2002 elections, he has consciously cultivated the image of a strong development-oriented administrator. The rise of Togadia in the pre-2002 period was Modis loss. But after 2002, it has been the reverse. Modis stakes are much higher now. VHP supporters who used to flaunt their connections with the state government and used to offer their services to investors in Gujarat for a small fee, found them cut out of all government deals. This had Togadia railing against Modi but powerless to do anything about him. This disappearance can be new a tool to gain some publicity or further damage BJP and Modis image as Rajasthan is a BJP ruled state. Hatemonger Togadia this time also failed to act on his drama script, now big question is that what can be the political conspiracy? Who wants to eliminate Togadia and why he cries before media but possibly too scared to name anyone? This is when his own people are in power at the Centre, Gujarat and Rajasthan and he enjoys Z security.

Who wants to kill him? Who is he scared of?

What is this prank all about??

(Any suggestions, comments or dispute with regards to this article send us on feedback@afternoonvoice.com)
Vishva Hindu Parishads International Working President Dr Pravin Togadia has alleged that a political conspiracy is being hatched to kill him. The allegations have been made at time when the BJP government is in power and Togadias outfit VHP is closely associated with it. How can Togadia claim that there is a threat to his life when he is enjoying Z security? Who wants to get rid of him? Togadia had alleged that he was not permitted to speak on issues like Ram Temple, farmers and cow slaughter and some people were attempting to stifle his voice. The VHP leader added that he went into hiding as he was worried that police might kill him in an encounter. Hindu organisations have condemned the allegations made by Togadia against Gujarat, Rajasthan and central government. According to them, BJP has gained power with the support of Hindutva outfits and the party cant sideline them now. They added that there is a possibility of Togadia being victimised due to his strained relations with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Earlier Togadia had opposed the elevation of Modi for PMs post.

When AV spoke to Swami Dharmgyananand Saraswati (Gyan Swami), Official Spokesperson of Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, he said that the harassment of Pravin Togadia is an assault on Hinduism and its followers; he also indicated that secular forces are responsible for it. He said, I am not sure why the BJP would want to encounter Togadia. First we will have to ascertain whether he has any personal or political rivalry with BJP. An attempt is being made to tarnish Hindutva.

Since Togadia is a VHP activist which is associated with BJP so I dont know why he is making allegations against them. If I receive a call from VHP to protest against the harassment meted against Togadia then I would wholeheartedly join them. If BJP turns against Hindutva outfits then what ideology will they follow? Accepting Muslims in India after 1947 partition is our helplessness. Our country is Hindustan and we dont accept the secularism of India, he added.

Togadia claimed that since he had raised his voice in support of the Hindu community hence attempts were being made to silence him.

Vratadhar Ramanuj Jeeyar Swami Tridandiji, president of Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha said Togadia is feeling victimised as Modi disapproves of his activities. He said, Pravin Togadia is an active leader of BJP even before Modi. If BJP is behind this harassment then our organisation condemns it. There might be some political conspiracy behind this.

Togadia had warned Sangh that the outfit was committing a major blunder by promoting Modi as he will eventually turn against them. RSS nonetheless supported Modis elevation and also asked him to abide by their decision.

Vishwanath Kulkarni, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) activist said, If Togadia has accused BJP of encountering him then it is really unfortunate and unjustified. If the allegation made by Togadia against Rajasthan, Gujarat and central government is true then these governments must issue a clarification.

Togadia has served the Hindu outfits for a long period of time and we all support him even today. The government is now accountable to answer all the accusations made against them by Togadia. We are waiting for the truth to be unveiled, he added.
Note: Below is a rotten story of the unceremonious discharge of a 22 year old woman with Asperger's onto the freezing streets of Baltimore, Maryland. At age 22, unless her mother had guardianship, the hospital did not have to share information by law. However, human decency might have been an option. If you have a child with autism and even Asperger's, please consider the legal means available post age 18 so that you can continue or make or assist with legal, financial and medical decisions for your child. I'm reminded of a scene from my favorite movie, Parenthood, with Steve Martin. "Friends!?? Friends slow down. They even stop!" (See below.) This hospital was no friend. Expect more of this callous treatment as the medical community is PURPOSEFULLY unprepared to care of our loved ones. Note, the woman is 22, not 42, not 52. 22 years old. The epidemic has started to age out. Here we go...



###



From Fox News Baltimore



Baltimore hospital video fallout: Woman who identifies as patient's mom says she was mocked by security



A woman who says shes the mother of a patient dumped on the street outside a Baltimore hospital in frigid weather this week says she was laughed at and stonewalled by hospital staff while trying to find out about the status of her daughter.

The mother, who spoke to CBS News and identified herself only as Cheryl, said her daughter, Rebecca, is not deaf, not a prostitute, not a drug addict, but suffers from bipolar disorder and Aspergers syndrome. The woman was filmed moaning and pacing around outside the University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus on Tuesday after being discharged by workers, in a video that has gone viral.

"The hospital wasn't being helpful," Cheryl told CBS News. "I called the security department [and] they laughed at me. When I told them, 'That's my daughter in the video and I just need to find out if she's in the hospital,' they laughed at me. Every person that I talked to at the hospital either hung up on me or told me to email the hospital, and that everyone was going to tell me the same thing."








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In spite of its cruelty and evil actions, it is undeniable that Nazi Germany was way ahead of its time when speaking of technology. In fact, after the war, many German scientists fled to the United States, where they worked in different fields of science and boosted the military industry of this country.

However, there are many aspects of Nazi Germany technology that still remain very little known. One of these aspects is related to a secret space and military program that Hitlers regime developed in Antarctica with the help of extraterrestrials.

According to an article published by Australian researcher Michael Salla on Exopolitics.org, the Germans had successfully weaponised their flying saucer craft and other advanced aerial vehicles to the extent that nothing possessed by the US Navy could match these in performance, weapons and range.

Mr Salla made mention of US Navy Admiral Richard Byrd, who affirmed in 1947 that the United States could be attacked by hostile aircraft proceeding from the Polar Regions. A document quoted by the Australian researcher says the following:

Admiral Richard E Byrd warned today [05 March, 1947] of the necessity for the United States to adopt protective measures against the possibility of an invasion of the country by hostile aircraft proceeding from the polar regions. The admiral said: I do not want to scare anybody but the bitter reality is that in the event of a new war, the United States will be attacked by aircraft flying in from over one or both poles.

Many evidences suggest that these high-tech aircraft were developed in cooperation with extraterrestrial beings. In the opinion of Mr Salla, the Germans had been helped by extraterrestrials, who had supplied them with operational spacecraft for reverse engineering during World War II, and had helped the Germans establish their Antarctica bases.

The US national security establishment encouraged the debunking of contactees such as Adamski, Schmidt and many others, not because they feared the public learning about extraterrestrial visitation, but because they feared the public learning the truth about the German breakaway colony in Antarctica, Mr Salla explained. The most powerful nation states of the era, the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union did not want their citizens to learn that not only had a remnant of Nazi Germany survived World War II, but that its technological achievements in advanced aerospace technologies had become so dominant that the former Allied powers had nothing to match these with, he added.

Draw your own conclusions

For more information: http://exopolitics.org/pentagon-hid-german-secret-space-program-link-to-alien-contact-cases/
Versatility, range and payload lift demonstrated in varied missions

With 58 A400M multi-role military transporters delivered to date by Airbus  including last fridays handover of the German Air Forces 16th from 53 on order  the workhorse aircraft is receiving high marks for its payload carrying capability, operational versatility, flight range and the ability to operate from short airfields.

The A400M is living up to the Atlas nickname, having performed heavy-lift duties during missions ranging from supporting troops in counter-terrorism deployments to the delivery of humanitarian goods and airlifting relief supplies into disaster areas.

It has become favourite for pilots based on the airlifters crisp and precise handling thanks to Airbus proven fly-by-wire system, the excellent situational awareness with advanced head-up display, and powerful brakes for tight landing situations.

A large cargo hold, and kneeling capability for loading/unloading

Loadmasters  who are tasked with the safe loading, transportation and unloading of cargo  are united in their appreciation of the A400Ms large cargo hold with integral winch, the automatic load-locking system, and the aircrafts kneeling ability that eases loading/unloading and reduces the rear ramp angle.

The French Air Force, which became the initial A400M Atlas operator in 2013, has received 13 of its 50 airlifters on order  regularly dispatching the aircraft with troops and equipment for two major French counter-terrorism deployments: Operation Chammal in the Middle East and Operation Barkhane in Africa. "With the A400Ms four powerful turboprop engines, we can carry enormous loads at incredible speed, enabling us to rapidly respond to crisis situations all over the world, explained Captain Ronan, a pilot in the 1/61 Touraine squadron, a unit belonging to the French Air Forces 61st Transport Wing. French Air Force A400M also assisted in rescue efforts in the islands affected by Hurricane Irma.

A400M French Air Force at Hurricane Irma

For the UK Royal Air Force, its first A400M operational tasking was to deliver much needed food, water and essential aid to UK Dependencies and other Caribbean islands in Operation Ruman after the regions devastating hurricanes in 2017. Operation Ruman successfully utilised two aircraft for the Caribbean humanitarian flights in delivering tonnes of aid  providing significantly more payload per mission than smaller C-130 transporters that the A400M is replacing.

Remarkable A400M performance in Caribbean relief flights

The A400M was remarkable in what it could do, said Wing Commander Burdett of the RAFs No. 24 Squadron. It could take three times as much as a C-130 into a tight, small strip without taking any military risk in its performance. Whereas the C-130 was taking in five tonnes, the A400 would be taking in 15.

Having received 18 A400Ms from the total 22 on order, other RAF operations performed by the Atlas are regular transport flights to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus in support of Operation Shader (the UKs military intervention in Iraq and Syria), and the detachment of an aircraft to the Middle East in the backing of UK forces around the Arabian Gulf.

Additionally, Royal Air Force missions to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean have benefitted from the Atlas landing gear with 12 main wheels that distribute the A400Ms overall weight while on the ground. This makes the aircraft light on its feet  invaluable for hauling heavy payloads while not causing runway damage, after concerns were raised about the island airfields landing surface condition.
San Diego's city and county government has spent more than $1 million to guard eight prototypes of the proposed U.S./Mexico border wall, according to the Times of San Diego.

One of those prototypes was built by Caddell Construction of Montgomery.

In all, security cost the San Diego County Sheriff's Department more than $900,000, and San Diego police more than $125,000 to patrol the Otay Mesa area where the walls are.

Total cost, which was mostly in overtime pay for deputies and officers, was $1,175,840. Regular pay for law enforcement in those two jurisdictions added up to $1.26 million.

The security was due to the possibility of large-scale protests, but there were no demonstrations during construction, which took about a month. Officials said they believe the law enforcement presence in the area kept protests from happening.

The prototypes were built last year and are being tested as contractors seek to secure the contract on President Trump's proposed border wall.
Courtesy photo

For some reason, Samantha Brown, one of TVs best-known travelers, frequently forgets to pack a toothbrush.

Not that big of deal really. Its pretty easy for Brown to purchase a new toothbrush when she reaches her latest destination, and forgetting that basic provision may just free-up valuable memory space. One time I remembered to bring a toothbrush I forgot like 10 other things, Brown says with a laugh.

For the last 15 years, Brown has hosted an array of Travel Channel shows, including Great Hotels, Girl Meets Hawaii, Passport to Europe, Passport to Latin America, Green Getaways, Passport to China and Great Weekends.

Browns latest show, Places to Love, debuted earlier this month on PBS. The weekly, half-hour program airs 2 p.m. Sundays locally through March. For the Feb. 4 episode, Brown visits Alabama, with a trip to Huntsville. Places to Love season one's 13 episodes also spotlight Houston; Switzerlands Bern Region; Brooklyn, New York; Shanghai, China; Vancouver; Texas Hill Country; Big Sur and Monterey, Calif.; Xian, China; Donegal and Northwest Ireland; Orange County, Calif., Montreal and an Oregon RV trip."

On a recent afternoon, Brown called in for an interview from her Brooklyn office. Over the phone, she's as irrepressibly pleasant as she is onscreen - sort of like an inverse Anthony Bourdain.

By Matt Wake | mwake@al.com

Don't Edit

Courtesy photo

Samantha, why did you decide to highlight Huntsville on an episode of Places to Love?

What really sealed the deal was I spoke at the big TBEX conference (a 2017 event for travel content creators) there. I was like OK, whats there to do here? Because I was going to come from pretty far away, I live in Brooklyn, to come to Huntsville, Alabama, Id never been to the state of Alabama at all, amazingly, and so I just started doing a little research about what do you do while youre there, because Im going to try and have fun and meet people and it could be in the show. And so, it was as I started to get to know the town and what was going on there, it became what I thought just an up-and-coming destination that everyone wants to know about. So youre always as a traveler looking for the next, you know, Asheville, North Carolina, the next Austin, Texas and I thought Huntsville hit the mark.

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Lots of people who are interested in travel watch you on TV. But what shows do you watch when you watch TV?

I love comedies. I only watch comedies because I just want to laugh, so one of my favorite shows is Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I love Black-ish. I love Modern Family. Theyre all really good shows.

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Where all did you visit in Huntsville while shooting here for Places to Love last year? Or at least as much as you can tell us before the episode airs. Ive seen some stuff online about you visiting the U.S. Space & Rocket Center and Tangled String Studios at Lowe Mill.

Well I can tell you everyplace we went to. So we also did Gs Country Kitchen soul food. And we went to Burritt on the Mountain. What makes this very different from any other travel show that I do is we get to know the effort behind the experiences that travelers can have. At Miss Gs for instance we met Maurice and Greta who own Miss Gs and have owned it for 20 years, and we understand what they did to create a restaurant that totally resonates in a town that has more PhDs than almost any other place in the United States, as well as a community center and everyone can come into this one place and enjoy it the same way.

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When we went to Burritt on the Mountain, I wanted to concentrate on the amazing volunteer effort that this place is known for, over 800 volunteers. I dont just visit places and say, Hey this is your experience. We meet the people who make this experience happen, whether they own it, whether theyre creators, whether their volunteer effort makes it possible. So when we went to the Space & Rocket Center we meet Alex McCool who is part of the propulsion team that put the Saturn V on the moon and we also understand that hes a volunteer docent, that this man whos a national treasure is also someone who you can have access to when you travel.

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And we shot at Straight to Ale, this place they turned a junior high school into a bar, which is awesome. [Laughs] But we featured the Free the Hops movement at Huntsville, Alabama and the people who are trying to change the laws so people can have a good beer and the craft beer movement which had been slow-growing in the state of Alabama because of these laws. I always describe ("Places to Love") as a look at that local movement that everybody wants to be a part of when they travel. That authentic movement of meeting locals and going where they go.

Don't Edit

Whats a soul-food item or two you really enjoyed at Gs?

Oh gosh, fried chicken. Id never had fried chicken like that and I remember Maurice was very busy, he was going table to table and there was something going on in the back, and the fried chicken was sitting right in front of me and Gretas right across from me and Im waiting for Maurice to sit down. And Im just like, Please Maurice, please hurry because all I wanted to do was eat this chicken but we had to wait because I wanted the first bite to be on camera. I was born in Dallas, Texas but I grew up in New Hampshire so Alabama is so far what I know. Yet you can talk to people there and eat their food and feel like youve gone there your whole life, and thats why I love soul food restaurants in general and especially Miss Gs and this idea that no matter who you are when you walk through that door youre still greeted with that, Hi, honey. What can I get you, sweetheart? and it just makes you feel like you belong there.

Don't Edit

What factors led to the selection of other destinations besides Huntsville you visit for Places to Love season one?

Well the number one reason is budget. What do we have money to do? But I would say number two and ultimately the most important way we pick a destination is we want to show a cross-section of destinations around the globe and give the viewer an idea of whats possible and also highlight the fact that travel does not have to be bucket-list big to count. There are places that are going to be once in those lifetime trips like maybe Donegal, Ireland or Xian China, but then there are the places like Huntsville, Alabama, like Houston, like Brooklyn, like California that you can plan within a year if not a month and that is whats so important to me is that people just travel. That this doesnt just seem like travel is for other people, travel is for people with money, who are privileged with time and that this was something accessible to everybody.

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Did you bring any mementos from Alabama back home?

You know I got my kids something  I went to that wonderful general store downtown (Harrison Brothers Hardware), and what did I get them? I think I got rocks, I know that probably sounds terrible. [Laughs] But they collect rocks and so I try to pick up them things that from destinations. Oh, and I took home two stuffed animals, astronauts.

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Whats the biggest air travel faux-pas you see?

I think one of the worst things you can do no matter where you are in the world on a plane is take off your shoes and socks and have your bare feet. I cannot tell you how many times I have looked down at my armrest and I've seen two feet there because the person behind me is using my armrest as their footrest. [Laughs] And I actually have that picture someone, on my Twitter feed, my Instagram feed. And you'll see people take off their shoes. And I did see someone cut their toenails. There's no reason. I've seen people in their socks walk into the bathroom and come back out. That bathroom floor is so dirty with things you don't even want to know about and they've shuffled in just wearing their socks and then they're putting their feet up  So a lot of it's about how people treat their feet when they travel.

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The longest flight youve ever been on and howd you pass your time?

I think it is the longest one in the world, the flight from New York to Singapore. What is that, 18 hours?

Good gosh.

Well, luckily I was flying Singapore Air, which its like you enter a spa for 18 hours and you have your own loveseat and its wonderful. You actually dont want the plane flight to end. But sometimes when a network isnt paying for your $7,000 ticket I think the best way is to if you can wait to the very last moment to board so youre standing and walking, so whenever Im in airports and about to do a long-haul flight I just keep stranding and walking and so when I get to that seat Im so worn out. It doesnt matter that its not comfortable I enjoy sitting down and being there. And so its a combination of just wearing myself out physically and then every treating myself like I treated my once-toddler children where every 20 minutes Im going to do something that keeps me busy, whether its something on my Kindle or downloading shows on my iPad or maybe the in-flight television, just keep a roster of things that keep you busy.

Your Twitter bio describes you as the girl with the best job in the world. Whats the second best job in the world?

Oh, being a mom.

More: samantha-brown.com
Former Southeastern Bible College President John D. Talley died on Monday, Jan. 15. He was 77.

"John was a man of great character and energy, had a strong commitment to the scriptures, had a great commitment to Christian education, and had a great influence on the students," said Don Hawkins, who served as president of the college from 2001-2014.

Talley, born Feb. 2, 1940, graduated from Southeastern Bible College, served as an Army chaplain in Vietnam, served as a pastor, earned a seminary doctorate, then joined the Southeastern faculty in 1977. For his military service, Talley received the Silver Star, the Soldier's Medal and the Bronze Star.

Talley served as president of Southeastern Bible College from 1988-2000. In 2000, he left to become chairman of the pastoral department at Washington Bible College in Lanham, Maryland.

The college moved in 1988 to U.S. 280 when it bought the former Briarwood Presbyterian Church and school campus for $2.75 million. It had previously been in its Pawnee Avenue location since 1947. Talley presided over the move to the U.S. 280 campus, which was later sold to Mountain Brook Community Church.

The college moved again in 2004 to the former Valleydale Baptist Church campus on Valleydale Road. Southeastern Bible College suspended operations in 2017, then announced a merger with Piedmont International University, a Christian college based in Winston-Salem, N.C.

A memorial service for Talley has been set for 12:30 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 22, at the campus chapel, 2545 Valleydale Road, with visitation at 10 a.m. Interment will be at the Alabama National Cemetery in Montevallo.
Edna Register Boone was 10 years old and living in the small Houston County town of Madrid when an epidemic of influenza struck her town in 1918, killing many of her neighbors and playmates.

Her parents and siblings were among the few in the town who didn't contract the disease, she recalled in a 2007 interview with Ann Brantley of the Alabama Department of Public Health. Boone, who was 100 years old and living in Mobile at the time of the interview, said her family came to the aid of neighbors.

"My parents became automatic nurses; they nursed every family in town," Boone said. She recalled the disease took entire families.

"My father and Uncle Eli ... dug a common grave and buried three people in it: mother, father and a young daughter," said Boone, who died in 2011 at the age of 104. "People were buried in the clothes they died in and wrapped in sheets."

Houston County was not the only place to suffer the effects of flu that year. Less than a year after the United States entered World War I, an unprecedented outbreak of influenza swept the world, killing more people than the war. An estimated 16 million people were killed in WWI, but officials estimate 20 to 50 million died from the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918. It caused more deaths than any other illness in history, according to the National Archives.

And, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the outbreak is still affecting us: All strains of the Influenza A virus that make us sick today are descended from the flu of the 1918 pandemic.

No one knows how many died

In Alabama, authorities found it impossible to count the number of dead, as cases erupted too quickly for accurate record-keeping, according a health official speaking at a 2006 State Summit on the 1918 pandemic.

"It is impossible to know for sure exactly how many Alabamans were affected by the flu, since regular reports to the U.S. Public Health Service were never made. But it is known that during the last two weeks of October, more than 37,000 cases of the flu erupted in Alabama. People around the state died by the hundreds," said Michael Leavitt with the Department of Health and Human Services in his remarks at the Birmingham Summit.

A mass grave in a Sheffield cemetery's pauper's field illustrates the difficulty authorities had in keeping track of flu cases and deaths. The burial site in Oakwood Cemetery is believed to be the final resting place of as many as 100 flu victims, according to a 2015 article in The TimesDaily. Researchers are attempting to identify those buried there, many of whom are thought to have been workers constructing Air Nitrate Plant No. 2 on the TVA reservation in Muscle Shoals.

The beginning

Although some sources state the pandemic began in January 1918, the first officially reported cases of flu in the U.S. were at an Army camp in Kansas in March of that year. In Alabama, most sources agree the first cases were reported that September in Huntsville. The disease soon spread throughout the state, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health.

"Scientists, doctors, and health officials could not identify this disease which was striking so fast and so viciously, eluding treatment and defying control. Some victims died within hours of their first symptoms. Others succumbed after a few days; their lungs filled with fluid and they suffocated to death," the National Archives reports.

Even after determining the strain of the disease, referred to as the Spanish flu, health officials could not stop it. What made it so insidious is that it infected even healthy, young adults, who developed fluid in the lungs that led to pneumonia - the cause of death listed in many cases.

It struck in both rural communities and urban centers, leading to shortages of medical care and supplies. In many towns, people relied on neighbors to nurse the sick. Soldiers stationed around the world wrote letters home describing flu cases on their bases. Thousands of soldiers who survived the war were killed in the epidemic.

In some states, according to an article at Stanford.edu, people had to abide by strict ordinances meant to stop the spread of the disease. "Those who were lucky enough to avoid infection had to deal with the public health ordinances to restrain the spread of the disease. The public health departments distributed gauze masks to be worn in public. Stores could not hold sales, funerals were limited to 15 minutes. Some towns required a signed certificate to enter and railroads would not accept passengers without them. Those who ignored the flu ordinances had to pay steep fines enforced by extra officers. Bodies piled up as the massive deaths of the epidemic ensued."

In Alabama

The first Alabama counties struck were Madison, where Huntsville is located, and Conecuh, according to a history on the state Department of Public Health site.

On Oct. 5, 1918, the Birmingham News reported that more than 1,100 cases were counted in Huntsville by Dr. C. A. Grote, health officer of Madison County. Two days later, Gov. Charles Henderson began closing schools, churches and theatres in hope of curtailing the spread of the disease.

On Oct. 13, the Birmingham News reported: "A desperate situation exists in Huntsville growing out of the Spanish influenza epidemic. All druggists, physicians, and prescription clerks, except one, have been stricken with the disease, and a distressing appeal reached Montgomery last night in telegrams for immediate help for the stricken city."

That same day, 2,000 cases were reported at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery; the number of victims in the capital city would grow to 12,000 cases by the end of October. Cases were still being reported through late 1919, although some sources place the end of the epidemic in early 1920.

Leavitt, while speaking at the 2006 State Summit, said, "People around the state died by the hundreds. Health care professionals worked tirelessly, and with limited resources to stem the tide of the rising pandemic."

He quoted a report sent to the U.S. Public Health Service describing conditions in Florence, Ala.:

"...[Doctors were] overwhelmed with work [and] were handicapped by inadequate transportation and two days behind in making calls; many patients . . . had been sick in bunk houses and tents for several days without nourishment, or medical and nursing attention, the sanitary conditions of the bunk houses were deplorable; the mess halls were grossly unsanitary and their operation much hampered by the lack of help; the existing hospitals were greatly overcrowded with patients; and patients were waiting in line several hours for dispensary treatment, and were greatly delayed in obtaining prescriptions at the pharmacy. The epidemic was so far progressed that the immediate isolation of all cases was impossible."

He also quoted J.D. Washburn, who served in a medical unit in Alabama at the time: "We worked like dogs from about seven in the morning until the last patient of the day had been checked in or out - usually about 10 o'clock that night. The men died like flies, and several times we ran out of boxes to bury them in, and had to put their bodies in cold storage until more boxes were shipped in. It was horrible."

In Florence, Bellamy Planning Mill, later renamed Acme Lumber Co., was running "three full shifts a day to build enough coffins for the countless numbers of deceased workers since the lumberyard was located across the river from the camps of the workers building Wilson Dam," according to Auburn University. "The majority of the deceased were immigrant Cuban workers buried in common graves, and most had no known immediate relatives or survivors."

Impact today

The epidemic was so bad that people invented a nursery rhyme to remind children to keep windows closed. The rope-skipping verse was:

I had a little bird,

Its name was Enza.

I opened the window,

And in-flu-enza.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, we are still feeling the effects 100 years after the pandemic. "The impact of this pandemic was not limited to 1918-1919. All influenza A pandemics since that time, and indeed almost all cases of influenza A worldwide ... have been caused by descendants of the 1918 virus ..."

Leavitt reminded at the State Summit: "When it comes to pandemics, there is no rational basis to believe that the early years of the 21st century will be different than the past. If a pandemic strikes, it will come to Alabama."

Despite the fact that the flu impacted more than 25 percent of the nation's population - and that the average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 12 years during the outbreak - a relatively few number of people realize its reach, or the lessons learned about how to react to future epidemics.

"It is an oddity of history that the influenza epidemic of 1918 has been overlooked in the teaching of American history," the Alabama Department of Public Health writes, and encourages people to take advantage of the "ample documentation" of the disease on websites of the ADPH, the National Archives and other health sources.

"Exhibiting these documents helps the epidemic take its rightful place as a major disaster in world history."
A 26-year-old man is in custody in Georgia, charged in a road-rage shooting that left one man dead.

The Russell County Sheriff's Office on Tuesday announced the arrest of Justin Tyler Davidson of Seale. He is charged with murder in the Jan. 11 killing of 45-year-old Lorenzo Freeman outside of a Fort Mitchell Dollar General.

The shooting happened Thursday night at the intersection of Highway 165 and Sweetwater Branch Road. Authorities said the shooting stemmed from a road-rage incident between two cars that began on JR Allen Parkway in Columbus. The incident continued to Highway 165 in Fort Mitchell.

Shots were exchanged between both cars, leaving Freeman dead and two other men injured.

Davidson was one of the men injured. He was arrested at 12:05 p.m. Tuesday while still hospitalized at Columbus Regional. Sheriff's officials said he will be held in Georgia's Muscogee County Jail until he is extradited back to Alabama.

Authorities said he can't be extradited until he goes before a Muscogee County judge, which could happen Tuesday or Wednesday. His bond on the Alabama murder warrant is set at $50,000.
A former Anniston jailer is behind bars and accused of sexual misconduct with a city inmate.

Anniston police on Tuesday announced the arrest of Jonathan Common. He is 28, and was immediately fired.

Chief Shane Denham said investigators were notified Monday about the possible wrongdoing. They have not released details about the allegations against Common, but said the inmate was using a telephone under his supervision when the misconduct took place.

The female inmate, whose name has not been released, reported the incident to a female corrections officers, Denham said. A formal complaint was filed, investigation and all evidence presented to the Calhoun County District Attorney's Office.

A warrant was issued for custodial sexual misconduct, which is a Class C felony. According to Alabama law, it is unlawful for any employee to engage in sexual conduct with a person who is in the custody of the Department of Corrections, the Department of Youth Services, a sheriff, a county, or a municipality.

Commons admitted to the wrongdoing, the chief said. He is now being held without bond in the Calhoun County Jail. Denham said the officer was notified of his immediate termination and due process of that termination has begun.

"The Anniston Police Department prides itself on being able to maintain the trust of the community, with an open and honest relationship,'' the chief said in a statement issued Tuesday. "Any allegation against a city employee will be investigate thoroughly."

"I, as the chief of police, expect police department employees to do the right thing,'' he said, "and unfortunately that did not occur here."
Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin announced Monday that he plans to move forward with a proposal to provide city school graduates debit-free tuition to community colleges in Jefferson County.

The Fred Shuttlesworth Opportunity Scholarship was a promise Woodfin made during his campaign for mayor.

Read the full speech here.

During his State of the Committee address at Parker High School on Monday evening, the mayor didn't provide specifics on how to fund and launch the scholarship program. Woodfin said much of what he addressed during his speech would be accomplished through partnerships with other government entities, non-profits and the private sector.

Woodfin took office on Nov. 28.

"The state of our community is an open question that only you and I can answer together," Woodfin said.

"In significant ways, Birmingham is in a state of transformation," he said. "We are making progress. At the same time, we are being held back by our lack of progress in certain respects."

Too many Birmingham residents are living in poverty, Woodfin said.

He said the city's parks and recreation department needs to provide more services to youth including after school and summer programs in order to deter crime.

Woodfin said his office is going to launch a nationwide search for a new police chief.

A timeline for the search hasn't been announced.

Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper announced on Nov. 29 that he was stepping down after 10 years of service to the city. He is staying in his position during the search for a new chief.

Woodfin said he is supporting police strategies "that deter crime during peak hours in key locations." Police officers will also be charged with engaging directly with neighborhood residents and merchants.

He said the city will do a better job moving forward in keeping the city clean. There will be streamlined process for abating weeds and demolishing abandoned homes, he said.

"An effective public works department is a critical component of real community development - of promoting long-term sustainability of our neighborhoods by expanding housing options and providing incentives to attract neighborhood-based business and commercial growth."
Authorities have released the name of a man shot to death early Monday inside a Birmingham home.

Birmingham police identified the victim as Eric Cotton. He was 28.

North Precinct officers at 2:48 a.m. were dispatched to 3633 45th Avenue North after receiving one call of a person down, and another call that someone had been shot, said Sgt. Bryan Shelton. Officers entered the home and found Cotton dead. He had been shot in the back.

Shelton said officers had previously been alerted that the shooter may still be in the area. Moments later, they were told by dispatchers that an unknown black male - now known to be the suspect - had broken into a home in the 3500 block of 42nd Avenue North and was holding people against their will.

Earlier, Capt. Sean Edwards said Cotton, the suspect and a woman were inside the home hanging out and drinking when the 24-year-old suspect began acting erratic and bizarre. He pulled out two guns, Edwards said, and just started firing.

The female ran out of the house and hid in some bushes. Edwards said the suspect went looking for her and then broke into the other home, where there were two children and their grandparents. The suspect then fired shots in that home, but no one was injured.

Nearby police officers rushed to the scene when they heard the shots fired, Edwards said. As they were closing in on the suspect, he jumped out of a back window, got down on the ground and was taken into custody. The suspect was taken to UAB Hospital for treatment.

Shelton said investigators also believe narcotics were being consumed at the location during the time of the shooting. There is no clear motive as to what sparked the shooting.

Cotton and the shooter, police said, were best friends. "That makes this killing a little harder to cope with,'' he said. The suspect's name is being withheld pending formal charges.

"We are thankful this didn't turn out much worse. This suspect was a danger to the community, and we are grateful he didn't get the chance to cause more harm,'' Shelton said. "Patrol officers responded quickly, prompting the suspect to give up. Our prayers are with the victims and their families."

Anyone with additional information is asked to call Birmingham police at 205-254-1764 or Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777.
Warning: This article contains language some might find offensive

University of Alabama officials said they are investigating after a student recently posted videos on social media where she repeatedly used the n-word and other profanities.

Student Harley Barber, who said on the videos that she was a member of Alphi Phi sorority, posted the videos on Instagram, one of them shared on the Monday holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

In the first, she is at a sink where she turns off the water, explaining, "We do not waste water...because of the poor people in Syria. We don't waste water. I love how I act like I love black people because I (expletive) hate (n-word) so that's really interesting but I just saved the (expletive) (n-word) by shutting that water off."

In a second video, Barber addressed the growing backlash and apparent threats to turn her into her sorority officials. "(N-word) (n-word) (n-word). I don't care if it's Martin Luther King Day. I'm in the south now (expletive) so everybody can (expletive) off. I'm from New Jersey so I can say (n-word) as much as I want."

Barber on the video refers to her "Finsta" which is an alternate/fake Instagram account. Efforts to reach Barber for comment were unsuccessful.

Linda Kahangi, executive director of Alpha Phi International Fraternity, released this statement Tuesday evening: "Alpha Phi is a diverse, values-based organization and condemns the language and opinions in these videos. They are offensive and hateful to both our own members and to other members of the Greek and campus community. The Beta Mu chapter leadership and supporting alumnae moved quickly to address the offense, and Ms. Barber is no longer a member of Alpha Phi."

University of Alabama spokesman Chris Bryant on Tuesday released this statement to AL.com. "These remarks are ignorant and disturbing and in no way reflect the values of The University of Alabama. This unfortunate behavior has been reported to the Office of Student Conduct as it does not align with the community expectations of students at the Capstone."

This girl goes to the same university as me but they say, racism is dead. Unfortunately, this thread says the opposite. https://t.co/OaYeCVEGUQ  Damien Harris (@DHx34) January 16, 2018

Many have expressed their disgust with the remarks on Twitter, including Alabama running back Damien Harris. "This girl goes to the same university as me but they say, "racism is dead." Unfortunately, this thread says the opposite," Harris tweeted on Tuesday.

Auburn University's Kerryon Johnson replied to Harris' tweet: "Idk what's worse....her saying those things or her thinking she can come to the south which would make it okay to say???"

New York Giants' Landon Collins, a former UA player, posted this on Twitter Wednesday: "Alpha Phi, 'Be weary of the company you keep for they are a reflection of who you are or who you want to be.' Harley Barber didn't wake up this morning and decide to spew racist rhetoric for the first time in her life. Therefore, I believe I speak on behalf of my brothers and myself when I say the Bama football team does not need the support, cheers or high fives of anyone who condones this type of intolerant, hateful behavior. #BuiltByBama"

Updated at 7:52 p.m. to include a statement from Alpha Phi International Fraternity saying the organization condemns the language used by Barber and that she is no longer a member.
Massimo Di Ricco is a professor specialising in the Arab World and its relation with the West and Latin America.

God bless Guatemala. Last Christmas eve, Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Guatemalas President Jimmy Morales with these words for his decision to move his countrys embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Morales decision came as a surprise to many around the world. But Guatemala, the first country that showed interest in relocating its embassy following Donald Trumps Jerusalem move, was not the only country in Latin America that tried to please the US president at Palestines expense.

Only a few days before Guatemalas embassy announcement, several other Latin American and Caribbean countries had abstained in a UN General Assembly vote against the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital. Those abstaining included Mexico, Argentina and Colombia  the countries Netanyahu visited last September, during the first visit by an Israeli prime minister to the region since Israels foundation.

The shift in Latin Americas attitude towards Palestine is symbolic of a stronger Israeli influence in a region historically neglected by Tel Aviv. But it is also concomitant to the consolidation of right-wing governments in Latin America, and the US resurgence as the dominant power in a region it has always defined as its backyard.

Vying for US backing

Traditionally, the Palestinian struggle has enjoyed a lot of support in Latin America, at the grassroots level and otherwise.

In late 2010  early 2011, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador joined Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in officially recognising the Palestinian state. They also supported Palestinian membership in UNESCO later that year.

Back then, Latin America seemed to be a true Palestinian ally, under left-wing leaders such as Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

But much has changed since then. Chavez died, Lula and Rousseff have been removed from power, Correa took a break from power, and Kirchner and her former government faced accusations of treason. What remains of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), of which Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador and Cuba are the main representatives, still loudly criticises US politics in the Middle East, but with limited resonance within the region.

Latin America has gradually turned to the right, and this has affected the regions relations with the rest of the world. In the past, leftist governments managed to build new international relationships independent of the US, but the rise of the right in the region has allowed Washington to assume an active role in its backyard once again. The right-wing shift in the region brought to an end the era of independent foreign relations and transformed Latin America into a US playground once more.

Several Latin American countries that recognised Palestine as a state between 2008 and 2013, including the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Argentina, and Haiti, chose to abstain in the UN condemnation of the US decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Other countries that recognised Palestine during the same period, namely Guatemala and Honduras, voted against the UN resolution. Domestic considerations and a need for continued US support motivated these decisions.

Both countries are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the US to continue their fight against criminal gangs and drug trafficking, and they do not want to lose this money at any cost. And the political leadership in both countries recently went through severe political crises in which they badly needed US backing.

But Honduras and Guatemalas stance on the Jerusalem issue was not solely shaped by their need for US support. Both Morales and Hernandez visited Israel in the last year to improve their countries security and commercial relations with it. Both countries, which had cooperated with Israel in underground programmes of counterinsurgency in the 1970s, renewed several security agreements and boosted the exchange of military technology with Israel.

Israels charm offensive

Since Mauricio Macri assumed power in Argentina in 2015, former members of the Kirchner government have been under investigation for allegedly conspiring with Iran, to undermine the criminal investigation of the 1994 terrorist attack on the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and injured 300 others. The defendants have been accused of treason for signing a memorandum of understanding with Iran. Even Human Rights Watch considered the accusation of treason as strained and unreasonable.

But during his visit to the country as part of his Latin America tour in September 2017, Netanyahu lauded Macri for his efforts to solve the case, saying: We know without a doubt that Iran and Hezbollah initiated and backed up the attacks. This was the first sign of the new Argentinian governments rapprochement with Israel, and it was swiftly followed by a shift in Argentinas stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a result, it was no surprise that Argentina chose to abstain in the UN vote against US recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital.

Mexico, a country that historically has always supported Palestine, also changed its stance on the issue, and chose to abstain in the UN vote. The country, along with Paraguay, also abstained in a previous UN vote promoted by Ecuador on the issue of the permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.

According to the Israeli ambassador in Mexico, Jonathan Peled, Mexico voted with Israel against several pro-Palestine resolutions in the last year, as a result of specific requests the Israeli government made to Mexican authorities. During Netanyahus visit to Mexico, President Enrique Pena Nieto reaffirmed the friendship between Mexico and Israel and talked about strengthening relations.

With the rise of the right, the US is resuming the control of its backyard, and Israel is using the situation as an opportunity to have a more solid presence in a region it previously ignored. With no sign, for the moment, that the left is going to take back power, support for the Palestinian cause remains in the hands of the grassroots.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
In 2017, the US dispatched special operations to 149 countries. What were they doing there?

The Special Operations forces of the United States  currently 70,000-strong and thus larger than the regular militaries of many sizable countries  occupy a very special place in US national mythology.

According to TIME Magazine, Special Ops heroes are the planets most skillful soldiers and toughest warriors  operating in their very own secret world.

Newsweek hails them as dead accurate, lethal and all-but-silent. They are the militarys elite  highly trained badasses armed with bullets and brains in equal measure.

The obsequious glorification of badass warriors is of course hardly surprising, given that US society has been inculcated to view international relations as a sort of video game in which the US gets points for blowing things up.

More surprising, perhaps, are the dimensions of the oh-so-secretive world.

In a recent dispatch, investigative journalist and author Nick Turse reveals that Special Operations forces were active in no fewer than 149 countries in 2017  meaning that the secret world has managed to encompass 75 percent of the globe.

This record high is courtesy of US President Donald Trump, that self-appointed very stable genius who is now building on the special forces frenzy fuelled by his predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

Exempt from scrutiny

The US Special Operations Command was officially established in 1987, but the appeal of its services grew considerably among the US political establishment in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Now, Turse writes, the push to further expand Special Operations comes at a moment when [various US senators] continue to acknowledge how remarkably clueless they are about where those elite forces are deployed, and what exactly they are doing in far-flung corners of the globe.

He refers to the shock expressed by certain officials in Washington in 2017, following the news of the demise of four Special Operations commandos in the West African country of Niger.

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Other clues as to US activity in Africa  where the present significant expansion of Special Ops activity surely has nothing to do with copious resources found on that continent  can be found in headlines like: Strong Evidence that US Special Operations Forces Massacred Civilians in Somalia.

Anyway, a negative headline here and there is a small price to pay for a secret army largely exempt from public  and even governmental  scrutiny.

Speaking of prices, a September New York Times article quotes a former special forces commander who speculates that it probably costs closer to $1.5 million to train a special forces soldier these days.

Add to this the hefty subsequent costs of deployment and equipment  not to mention the financial demands of a conventional US military that is itself none too tiny  and its no wonder the US has no pennies to spare for trivial things like healthcare.

Combat boots every one of them

One of the major selling points of Special Operations forces is that their footprint is perceived to be light, a perception buoyed by the US habit of referring to deployed forces as advisers and trainers even when these forces are directly engaged in combat.

A November TIME Magazine article quotes an assessment of the arrangement by former Navy SEAL-turned-Republican-congressman Scott Taylor: Its easier to put trainers and advisers in a country and say we dont have boots on the ground  Well, thats bullshit. Theyre combat boots, every one of them.

As for what certain boots on the ground have been up to in places like Iraq and Syria, the US-led coalition against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) was lambasted last year for its use of white phosphorus munitions, prohibited in civilian areas under international humanitarian law. Amnesty International suggested that the coalitions reliance on white phosphorus on the outskirts of Raqqa  ISILs former self-declared capital in Syria  may amount to a war crime.

Indeed, one gets an idea of the effectiveness of phosphorus munitions from a passage in veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisks book Pity the Nation, which quotes a Beirut doctor on the incendiary aftermath of Israels use of phosphorus shells in Beirut in 1982:

I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames. When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours.

Perpetual war

White phosphorus aside, the US Special Operations forces have been implicated in other carnage, as well  including by assisting in the coordination of air attacks in various conflict zones.

In the battle for Mosul, Iraq  which ended in July 2017 and also involved plenty of US advisers doing more than advising  NPR reported that more civilians than [ISIL] fighters are believed killed.

The Independent also reported a civilian casualty rate in Mosul nearly 10 times higher than the official one: As coalition and Iraqi government forces increased their pace, civilians were dying in ever higher numbers at the hands of their liberators.

A precise casualty count has been thwarted by a number of factors, including that many bodies remain under the rubble and that, as the Independent notes, The Americans say they do not have the resources to send a team into Mosul.

Apparently, a country with an annual defence budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars  and unilateral entitlement to invade and bomb sovereign nations at will  cant be expected to count the dead.

Meanwhile, in response to a growing perception that US special forces are stretched to the limit, US Defence Secretary James Mattis has brought up the possibility of having conventional forces assume some of their tasks.

Such an adjustment would not, however, constitute a retreat from the Special Ops obsession, but rather a reinforcement of the culture of the badass warrior  who, work[ing] almost entirely in the shadows, as Newsweek puts it, has helped the US war-making apparatus permeate the globe.

And the shadows, it seems, have gotten even darker with the ascension of the aforementioned very stable genius to the role of military commander-in-chief, one who spends his time threatening North Korea with nuclear annihilation and otherwise scoffing at the idea of any sort of accountability to humanity.

In fact, as the US marches on towards perpetual war, its nearly impossible to detect a bright side.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
Here is what you need to know about the US-backed Syria force reportedly in the making in the countrys northeast.

A US plan to form a new border security force in the northeast of Syria has drawn condemnation from major powers in the region, including Turkey and Russia.

Under the plan, the US-led coalition fighting against ISIL in the war-torn area would recruit 30,000 fighters into the new force, according to US officials.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the US was working to form a terror army on his countrys southern border by training and supplying the force that would include Kurdish fighters.

Purpose of the force

The force would not be entirely new, drawing from existing recruitment and initial training programmes, said Ryan Dillon, spokesman for the US-led coalition, officially known as the Combined Joint Task Force  Operation Inherent Resolve.

The coalition is working jointly with the [Syrian Democratic Forces] to establish and train the new Syrian Border Security Force (BSF), Dillon told Turkeys state-run Anadolu news agency.

Currently, there are approximately 230 individuals training in the BSFs inaugural class, with the goal of a final force size of approximately 30,000, he said.

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Dillon said efforts were taken to ensure individuals served in areas close to their homes.

Therefore, the ethnic composition of the force will be relative to the areas in which they serve.

More Kurds will serve in the areas in northern Syria. More Arabs will serve in the areas along the Euphrates River Valley and along the border with Iraq to the south, Dillon said.

Kurdish fighters involvement

Around half of the new force will reportedly be recruited from the SDF, an umbrella group of fighters dominated by the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) in control of the northeast of Syria.

The US views the YPG as a highly effective fighting force against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) and President Donald Trump decided to arm YPG fighters earlier this year.

The US arms shipments began before the launch of a months-long offensive to remove ISIL from the Syrian city of Raqqa, its self-declared capital. The YPG played a prominent role in the eventual defeat of the group later in 2017.

Turkeys reaction: Threatens to intervene

The YPG is considered a terrorist group by Turkey over its ties to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long fight inside the country.

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The PKK is also blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by Turkey and its Western allies. More than 40,000 people in Turkey have been killed since the 1980s after the PKK launched its rebellion.

The PKKs initial aim was achieving an independent Kurdish state, but later changed it to a demand for equal rights and Kurdish autonomy in Turkey.

Ankara is furious over US plans to form the new force with Kurdish fighters and has responded by reinforcing the border with Syria with more of its troops.

A military operation in northern Syria against the city of Afrin  controlled by the Syrian Kurdish armed group YPG  will be launched in the days ahead, Erdogan said on the issue, accusing the US of forming a terror army.

Russias reaction: Syria cut into pieces

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov criticised the reported US move, accusing Washington of seeking to establish a Kurdish-controlled entity along Turkish and Iraqi border zones.





He claimed that the Trump administration did not want to keep Syria as a state in its current borders.

What it would mean is that vast swaths of territory along the border of Turkey and Iraq would be isolated, its to the east of the Euphrates River. There are difficult relations between Kurds and Arabs there, Lavrov said.

There is a fear that they are pursuing a policy to cut Syria into several pieces, he added.

Syrias reaction: Breach of sovereignty

The Syrian government denounced the new border force in northern Syria as a blatant assault on its sovereignty.

Syria strongly condemns the US announcement on the creation of militias in the countrys northeast, which represents a blatant attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity and unity of Syria, and a flagrant violation of international law, a government source, cited by state news agency SANA, said.

Syria considers any Syrian who participates in these militias sponsored by the Americans as a traitor to their people and nation, and will deal with them on this basis, the official was cited as saying.
Rights groups warn ailing political activist, who has been in detention since 2016, could spend more years in jail.

Human rights groups have roundly condemned a ruling by a Bahraini court to affirm a two-year jail sentence for activist Nabeel Rajab, saying the verdict illustrates the corruption of the kingdoms justice system.

Rajab had been found guilty in July of spreading rumours and untruthful information against the government in TV interviews.

The verdict was upheld in November, following a legal challenge by Rajab. On Monday, an appeals court affirmed the lower court verdict, in a decision that was final.

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) on Tuesday urged the Bahraini government to immediately release Rajab, saying he is a political prisoner who had done nothing.

Nabeel is not only a human rights defender but also a man of intellectual value. He should not be in jail, Dimitris Christopoulos, president of the Paris-based group, told Al Jazeera.





I expect the Bahraini authorities to understand that violating the fundamental human rights of rights defenders is not the way to proceed, he said, even as he warned that Rajab could face an even longer jail term for a separate case he faces.

Saeed al-Shehabi, leader of the opposition Bahrain Freedom Movement, called the ruling an implementation of a state policy and warned that the leadership in the capital, Manama, was determined to block any dissent.

Yesterdays decision was not just a gross violation of his human rights and the principles of fair trial, al-Shehabi told Al Jazeera on Tuesday.

This is a political decision. He did not get a fair trial. He was tried for peaceful expression of opinion, he said, adding that 95 percent of those in jail in Bahrain are there because of peaceful expression of opinion.

Routine misuse of courts

While already in jail, the government charged Rajab with more offences over his social media posts about torture in Bahrains Jau Prison  where he is held  and his criticism of the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which his countrys rulers support.

Rajab had also written a letter published in the New York Times, criticising Bahrains treatment of its people and handling of dissent.

For those charges, Rajab faces a separate 15-year jail term, a prospect that Christopoulos, of FIDH, described as outrageous and grotesque.





The Bahrain Center for Human Rights, the rights watchdog which Rajab leads, said the kingdom routinely misuses the courts to target activists and opposition members.

We are very worried about Nabeels safety and well-being, the organisation said in a statement on Monday.

Authorities should release him immediately, drop the charges against him and investigate thoroughly his possible ill-treatment in detention.

Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, director of the London-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD), said that Rajab was denied a fair trial at every stage.

This is a slap in the face of free expression and tragically illustrates the corruption of the justice system, Alwadaei said in a statement.

Bahrains rulers are fearful of the truth, he said, adding that they have been emboldened by the unconditional support of the US and UK, both of which have existing or pending military bases in the tiny Gulf state.

Rajab, who had been previously jailed in 2012 and 2014, was re-arrested in July 2016. It took another six months for the prosecutor to investigate and file charges against him, and he later received the two-year sentence.

Humiliating treatment in jail

According to BIRD, the upholding of the sentence on Monday means Rajab will stay in jail at least until the end of 2018. Since his 2016 detention, he would have spent two years and six months in prison  six months beyond his sentence.

For Rajabs second charge, which carries up to 15 years in prison, a decision is due in February.





At Jau Prison, BIRD said, Rajab had been subjected to humiliating treatment, including the forcible shaving of his hair, degrading search of his body and confiscation of his personal belongings.

He had been transferred to the facility in October 2017, after being hospitalised for six months because of the deterioration of his health.

Starting in 2011, Shia-led protests erupted across the country, forcing neighbouring Saudi Arabia to intervene on behalf of the Al Khalifa family, which has ruled the kingdom for 200 years.

Saudi Arabia has accused its regional rival, Iran, of encouraging its Shia-majority population to rise against Bahrains Sunni rulers, allegations that Tehran has denied.
Pope Francis arrives in Chile for first leg of Latin American tour, with more unrest expected in Santiago.

Pope Francis has arrived in Chile for the first leg of his Latin American papal tour, with protests over alleged sexual abuse within the Catholic Church marking his visit.

Demonstrations are expected to take place throughout the capital, Santiago, on Tuesday, where the pope is scheduled to conduct an open-air mass at 13:30 GMT.

More than 500,000 people are expected to attend the ceremony in Santiagos OHiggins Park, according to Chilean newspaper The Santiago Times.

Chilean parishioners criticised the Argentinean pontiff, the first Latin American leader of the Catholic Church, for his decision to appoint Juan Barros as Bishop of the Chilean city of Osorno in 2015.

They say Barros covered up the sexual abuse of dozens of minors by Catholic priest Fernando Miguel Karadima, who was found guilty by the Vatican in 2011.

Almost 80 Chilean priests, deacons and religious brothers who have been accused of molesting children were named in a database published by the Boston-based research group bishopaccountability.org on January 10.

Anger grows

Before the popes visit, his first to Chile since assuming the papacy in 2013, protesters vandalised four Catholic churches using firebombs in Santiago on January 12.

They left a note at one site warning the Pope Francis the next bomb will be in your robe, according to Latin American broadcaster Telesur.

Other messages called for autonomy and resistance from Chiles indigenous Mapuche people, according to the Catholic News Agency.

Roughly two-thirds of Chiles 1.5 million Mapuches live in urban squalor and the remainder in impoverished rural communities. They are the countrys poorest and most marginalised segment of society.

Outgoing Chilean President Michelle Bachelet described the attacks as very strange and said authorities had been unable to tie the incidents to a particular group, Telesur reported.

In a democracy, people can express themselves as long as its done in a pacifist way, she said and called for a climate of respect during the popes upcoming visit.

The pontiff will also visit Temuco, where he is expected to meet Mapuches, and Iquique, before travelling to Peru.
Beijing is North Koreas key trading partner and its only ally. It has called the summit meaningless. China wants gentle diplomacy to work first instead of tougher measures.

Foreign ministers from 20 countries are meeting in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss the North Korean nuclear threat.

They are looking for ways to increase diplomatic and financial pressure on North Korea to force it to give up its nuclear ambitions.

But China and Russia have not been invited.

Beijing is North Koreas key trading partner and its only ally. It has called the summit meaningless. China wants gentle diplomacy to work first instead of tougher measures.

Al Jazeeras Rob McBride reports from Beijing.
Trump administration holds back $65m of planned $125m package, a move that may prove catastrophic for millions in need.

The US government is cutting more than half of its planned funding to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, a move that could prove catastrophic for millions of people in need.

The Department of State announced on Tuesday that it was withholding $65m out of a $125m aid package earmarked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).

In a letter, the department said that additional US donations would be contingent on major changes by UNRWA.

Those funds are frozen for future consideration, Heather Nauert, State Department spokeswoman, told reporters.

For nearly 70 years, UNRWA has been the lifeline to the more than five million registered Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories and Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.





It offers support in food supply, access to education, healthcare, social services and employment.

This is going to be a big blow, Al Jazeeras James Bays, reporting from the UN headquarters in New York, said of the move by the US, which is UNRWAs largest donor supplying almost 30 percent of its budget.

UNRWA is the agency that deals with the needs of so many desperate people, he added.

Political dimension

The announcement came after US President Donald Trump had threatened on January 3 to cut aid to Palestinians.

In a series of tweets, Trump had said:  We pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect.

 With the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?

The posts came less than a month after his controversial decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israels capital, a move that prompted widespread international condemnation and led Palestinian leaders to say that they would no longer accept any peace plan put forward by the United States.

Following the US threats to cut aid, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for UNRWA to be scrapped and accused the agency of helping fictitious refugees.

Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, said on Tuesday he had not been informed of Washingtons decision.

First of all, UNRWA is not a Palestinian institution, UNRWA is a UN institution, Guterres said, expressing his deep concern about the move.

If the agency is not in a position to provide vital services and emergency support it will create a very very serious problem, he told reporters.

In my opinion, and an opinion that is shared by most international observers, including some Israeli ones, it [UNRWA] is an important factor of stability.





Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the US seemed to be following the Israeli governments instructions to gradually dismantle the one agency that was established by the international community to protect the rights of the Palestinian refugees and provide them with essential services.

She said in a statement that Trumps administration was targeting the most vulnerable segment of the Palestinian people and depriving the refugees of the right to education, health, shelter and a dignified life, warning that the US was creating conditions that will generate further instability throughout the region.

Al Jazeeras Bays said there was also a political dimension to the US move.

Trump has said he is going to try and come up with the deal of the century between Israelis and Palestinians  and yet he has now recognised Jerusalem as Israels capital and cut the funding to UNRWA, said Bays.

One of the sides feels very strongly now that he is not an honest broker.

There will be a revolution

Trumps threat had cast doubt on the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees, with many expressing fear about the impact of such a move.





If the wakala [UNRWA] goes away, there will be no education, no healthcare, no sanitation, Yazan Muhammad Sabri, an 18-year-old Palestinian refugee in Dheisheh camp told Al Jazeera last week.

There wont be anything  everything will disappear.

Salah Ajarmeh, a 44-year-old refugee living in Aida camp, had said that if the services stop, there will be a revolution.

Palestinian uprisings began in the refugee camps in Jordan and Syria, and this will happen again.

Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, also urged the US government to reverse its decision.

The move will have devastating consequences for vulnerable Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, including hundreds of thousands of refugee children in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria who depend on the agency for their education, he said in a statement.

It will also deny their parents a social safety net that helps them to survive, and undermine the UN agencys ability to respond in the event of another flare-up in the conflict.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis and his cabinet will resign on Wednesday, leaving the Czech Republic in political limbo.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis has lost a confidence vote in parliament, an expected result that marks the end of his short-lived minority government.

Only 78 members of parliament on Tuesday voted in favour of the government, while 117 were against.

Babis, the countrys second-richest man, and his cabinet will hand in their resignation on Wednesday, a spokeswoman said.

However, the prime minister is expected to remain in office as he negotiates with opposition parties to form a new government.

Babis ANO movement won Octobers parliamentary elections, with 78 seats in the 200-seat house. His government of ANO members and independent experts was appointed last month.

Czech President Milos Zeman, who is tasked with appointing prime ministers, has said he is willing to give Babis a second chance.

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However, Zeman is up for re-election himself in a runoff that will be held on January 26-27.

It is unclear if Babis will get that second chance if Zeman loses to his opponent, Jiri Drahos.

Opposition parties have said they are ready to talk about joining a coalition, with some of them only willing to come to the table if Babis was not prime minister.

The ANO chairman should wake up from his dream about a minority, one-party government and he should start working normally, work on building a government with majority support in parliament, Petr Fiala, head of the centre-right Civic Democrats said.

That demand mainly sprouted from fraud allegations against Babis.

He is alleged to have hidden ownership of one of his companies a decade ago to win a $2.45m subsidy, mostly from European Union funds, meant for small businesses.

Babis, the second richest man in the Czech Republic, has denied any wrongdoing, saying the investigation is a ploy to try to get him to leave politics.

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This is a ploy organised by the mafia that had been stealing billions here, for a long time, and I, of course, bother them, Babis said on Tuesday.

After winning the October elections, Babis regained previously revoked immunity from prosecution.

However, Czech police have requested Babis immunity to be lifted, a course of action a parliamentary committee also recommended earlier on Tuesday.

With parliament giving a vote of no-confidence and presidential elections happening next week, it could take weeks  if not months  before the Czech Republic has a government.
Analysts say UAE allegations are likely in retaliation of Dohas UN complaint over Emirati infringement of its airspace.

Analysts have expressed scepticism at a claim by the United Arab Emirates that Qatari fighter jets had intercepted Emirati passenger planes.

On Monday, Emirati state media said two civilian airliners bound for Bahrain were intercepted by Qatar, citing the countrys General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA).

Qatar strongly rejected the claims, describing them as a systematic attack by the UAE to draw attention away from its own violations of Qatari airspace.

Last week, Doha filed a complaint to the UN Security Council over two alleged instances of Emirati military aircraft entering Qatari airspace.





Aviation analyst Alex Macheras said that if Mondays incident had taken place as described, he would expect the airlines involved to come forward, a formal complaint to be made to international bodies and passengers on board the flights to have shared pictures.

The international community for aviation expects the UN to be notified with details of the interception, time, coordinates, location and a full run-down of what happened  exactly like what Qatar supplied the UN with when the UAE military flew over Dohas economic area, Macheras told Al Jazeera.

Until then, it seems these accusations are more in retaliation to being the subject of Qatars UN complaint rather than a genuine occurrence.

At the time of publication, no airline had come forward to say its aircraft were involved in the alleged incident.

Crews and passengers saw the incidents with their naked eyes, which proves that the interception posed a present and clear threat to lives of innocent civilians  #UAE CAA And yet:

 one UAE airline is denying

 another wont comment

 not a single report from a passenger  Alex Macheras (@AlexInAir) January 16, 2018

The claims by Emirati media outlets were made amid an ongoing diplomatic crisis between Qatar and three neighbouring Gulf states plus Egypt.

In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt broke off ties with Doha accusing it of supporting terrorist groups and aligning itself too closely to their regional rival, Iran.

The quartet imposed a land, sea, and air blockade on Qatar, and also prevented Qatari aircraft from entering their airspace.

Qatar vehemently rejected the accusations and had refrained from imposing reciprocal punitive measures on the four states.

The UAE reports said the planes were inside Qatars airspace at the time they were intercepted.

Emirati airliners are allowed in Qatars airspace because Doha did not impose restrictions after the blockade came into effect. Qatari planes are, however, blocked from Emirati airspace under a series of punishing measures.

Kings College London academic, Andreas Krieg, said he thought the allegation that Qatar intercepted Emirati airliners was fake news and that the country had no incentive to breach International Air Transport Association (IATA) rules.

Qatar is in full compliance with IATA regulations, Krieg told Al Jazeera. Qatar has built its entire narrative on being a reliable partner in multilateral organisations and institutions.

He explained that Doha would gain nothing from breaching the very rules that Qatar is suing the UAE for.

It would run counter to Qatari government policy to respect international obligations even when dealing with companies or private individuals from the blockading countries.





Krieg, a defence specialist who has worked as a security consultant to the Qatari armed forces, said the UAE was partaking in a massive media campaign against Qatar, which was aimed at undermining the countrys international reputation.

He accused the Emiratis of spreading alternative facts and said that since June 2017, the vast majority of claims made by the UAE were either exaggerated, manipulated or blatant lies.

In recent years, they have invested billions worldwide in what they see [as] a war over narratives, he said.

In July 2017, the Qatari government condemned the UAE for its alleged role in orchestrating the hack of Qatars state news agency and publishing false comments attributed to Qatars Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani.

The UAE has denied involvement in the hack.
A new report released by the international watchdog organisation Freedom House has raised concerns about Tunisias democratic backslide.

Data analysed by the NGO from 195 countries over the past year showed that Tunisia was still the only free country in the Arab world, but the North African state saw its political rights rating decreased from two to three, the report said on Tuesday.

Municipal elections were once again postponed, leaving unelected councils in place seven years after the revolution, and figures associated with the old regime increased their influence over the vulnerable political system, for example by securing passage of a new amnesty law despite strong public opposition, said the document titled, Freedom in the World 2018.

The extension of a two-year-old state of emergency also signalled the erosion of democratic order in Tunisia.

Tunisia managed to reach the status of a free country in just four years after the 2011 uprising, but Freedom House warned that 2017s sharp democratic declines threatened to downgrade the achievement.

The events of the past year indicate that while the international community was quick to praise the countrys achievements, it did not provide enough sustained support and attention, it said.

Without careful development and consolidation, the new democracy may prove easy prey for an old guard that was never fully dismantled.

Repressive region

The report warned that it was important to keep the foothold of democracy in a repressive and unstable region.

It said the rest of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa remained with a status of not free, except Morocco which it said is partially free.

However, Moroccos civil liberties score declined from four to five and it received a downward trend arrow due to harsh state responses to major demonstrations throughout the year, the document said.

According to Freedom House, democratic principles weakened globally for the twelfth consecutive year.

Only 88 out of 195 countries were rated free, 58 were partly free and 49  not free in its latest report.
Originally subsidies for Hajj helped poorer sections of the community go on the pilgrimage many could not afford.

New Delhi, India  The Indian government has announced the end of a decades-long policy of giving subsidy to thousands of Muslims heading to the holy city of Mecca to perform the annual Hajj pilgrimage.

Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Indias minister for minority affairs, said on Tuesday that the move was part of a policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement.

Hajj subsidy funds will be used for the educational empowerment of girls and women from minority communities, he told reporters in Delhi.

The decision followed a 2012 ruling by the countrys Supreme Court, which had directed the government to gradually reduce the subsidy and abolish it by 2022.

The move was welcomed by many Muslim groups in the country.

This has been a long-standing demand of the Muslim community in India, Navaid Hamid, president of the All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, an umbrella organisation of several Muslim groups, told Al Jazeera

This subsidy was used for a long time to denounce the Muslim community, to spread lies that Muslims were being appeased for vote-bank, added Hamid.

Air India was getting the subsidy

Starting in 1954, the Indian government has for decades offered subsidies amounting to billions of rupees to poor Muslims wanting to perform Hajj. In 2016, the sum was about $75m, down from about $100m in 2013, according to official data.

Muslim pilgrims were given the subsidy through concessionary airline fares.

Hajj subsidy was a major earner for the national airline, Air India, said Faizan Mustafa, a Muslim scholar and vice-chancellor of the Nalsar University of Law.

It is Air India that was getting the subsidy, he told Al Jazeera.

Some poor Muslims will not be able to afford the journey for Hajj now. But those who are determined to go will still go.

We want to manage our own Hajj affairs

Muslims worldwide are expected to go on Hajj at least once in their lifetime  if they are able to.

The original argument for the subsidies was that they would help poorer sections of the community perform the pilgrimage, something that they could otherwise not afford.

Yet, the contested policy faced criticism from many quarters, including Indias Hindu nationalist ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has long called it appeasement for minorities.

India, however, also spends significant state funds for other pilgrimages, including the Hindu religious festival of Kumbh.

The Hajj subsidy was used a political tool in the country for decades, said Kamal Faruqui, a member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.

We want to manage our own Hajj affairs, the government should help us. Hajj is compulsory only for those who can physically and financially afford it, he told Al Al Jazeera.

The government said on Tuesday that a record number of 175,000 Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage this year.
Israa Jaabis suffered burns and charged with attempted murder after her car exploded near Israeli checkpoint in 2015.

I feel scared when I look at my face in the mirror, so imagine what others must feel when they look at me.

Those are the words of Israa Jaabis, a 33-year-old Palestinian mother from Jerusalem who has been languishing in Hasharon, the only Israeli prison for Palestinian female prisoners.

She is accused by Israel of attempted murder after blowing her car up at a checkpoint, a charge she denies. Her burns, she claims, are the result of an explosion in the car following a technical fault.

Broken on the inside, physically burned, and in an immense amount of pain, Jaabis said last week, in a letter dictated to her lawyer, that she does not receive adequate medical treatment from the Israeli Prison System (IPS).

She suffers from first and third-degree burns on 60 percent of her body, and is dependent on a fellow prisoner to assist her with simple tasks, leaving her feeling humiliated.

Eight of her fingers were amputated as they had melted to stubs from the burns.

She cannot lift her hands up all the way because her underarm skin is stuck together.

Her right ear is almost nonexistent and in a constant state of inflammation.

And her nose has a gaping hole on one side; she breathes mostly through her mouth.

She also suffers from nervous breakdowns, shock, and severe psychological crises.

The Israeli version is that she tried to blow up her car at the checkpoint, but how could that be the case when the windows of the car were all intact? The exterior of the car did not even change colour. And if there was an explosion, Israa would have been blown up with it into many pieces. by Mona Jaabis, Israa Jaabis' sister

Two years ago, before the accident, Jaabis was working at a nursing home, volunteering her time at charities and schools, and dressing up as a clown to entertain the children at the Augusta Victoria hospital in occupied East Jerusalem.

Car explosion

On October 10, 2015, Jaabis was moving furniture in her car to her home in the Jabal Al-Mukaber neighbourhood in Jerusalem when, 500 metres from the al-Zayyim checkpoint in Jerusalem, she lost control of the vehicle.

It was two weeks after the start of the knife Intifada or the October uprising, which was characterised by individual attacks ranging from stabbings, car rammings and, to a lesser extent, shootings, carried out mostly by Palestinians in their teens and twenties unaffiliated with political factions.

Israeli soldiers shouted at Jaabis to stop the car, which veered into the adjacent lane. Suddenly, an explosion went off in the car.

The Israeli version is that she tried to blow up her car at the checkpoint, but how could that be the case when the windows of the car were all intact? said Mona Jaabis, Israas sister.

The exterior of the car did not even change colour. And if there was an explosion, Israa would have been blown up with it into many pieces.

What happened to the car was a technical fault, Mona said.

There was an electric contact that affected the airbag in the steering wheel, and the chemicals in the airbag caused the fire, she said.

The Palestinian prisoner rights group, Addameer, said the fault caused a gas cylinder to blow up.

An Israeli soldier approached her after she left her burning car, yelled and pointed his gun at her, and proceeded to arrest her on the spot, Addameer said.

The car was not inspected in the aftermath of the incident by Israeli authorities, who according to Mona have no interest in entering talks about compensation claims.

Imprisoned in the slaughterhouse

Jaabis spent three months at Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital, before being transferred to the Ramleh prison hospital, referred to by other inmates as the slaughterhouse.

In 2017, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison by the central court in Jerusalem on charges of attempted murder.

Israa, a 32-year-old Palestinian mother, suffers from severe burns after two years ago, Israeli soldiers fired at her car. Israel sentenced her to 11 years in prison. She needs urgent care but Israel denies her any treatment or surgery #FreeIsraa pic.twitter.com/FB8z2prJ4X  Palestine is not a slogan (@Stefaniafodd) January 2, 2018

She is incapable of performing daily activities like eating, using the bathroom, or even changing her clothes, Addameer reported.

While Jaabiss condition requires extensive medical and mental care, the Israeli authorities completely neglect her pressing needs.

Jaabis needs at least eight surgeries, including a skin graft around her right eye and facial reconstruction.

Prison guards provide her with an ointment for burns, which she uses up within three days, and painkillers, which, Mona said, she is apprehensive about taking because she fears they could addle her brain.

Neglect amid new interest

The social media hashtags #Save_Israa and #Help_Israa aim to raise awareness and pressure the IPS into granting her the required medical treatment.

But Mirvat Sadeq, a Ramallah-based journalist, said these efforts fell short, as she accused rights groups of neglecting Jaabis case.

There are currently eight female prisoners who suffer from injuries, some of them with very difficult cases, and there must be a quick intervention to release them, Sadeq told Al Jazeera, adding that the Palestinian Authority must use political pressure.

Is there a pain greater than this? I don't see any justification for why I am here in prison. by Israa Jaabis, Palestinian prisoner

The International Red Cross is also severely lacking in taking any action to help Israa. It is the duty of the ICRC to provide permanent visits and report on the health conditions of the prisoners and urge all parties to work for the treatment of the sick and injured cases, she explained.

Last week, Jaabis appeared at court to appeal against her sentence. The appeal was postponed until further notice.

Is there a pain greater than this? Jaabis told reporters at the hearing. The pain is visible, and I dont receive treatment.

She held up her hands. I have no fingers, she said. I have been here for two years. I dont see any justification for why I am here in prison.

Leah Tsemel, Jaabis lawyer, told Al Jazeera: She is not doing very well and is in deep pain and turmoil  She is getting some vitamins, but no proper treatment and nothing is being done to improve her appearance.

It might be too late

Jaabis nine-year-old son Motasem does not have a Jerusalem ID because his father is from the West Bank.

The child was permitted to see his mother after 18 months of her detention, but such visits have now been stopped, the IPS said, because he does not carry the required ID.

I have no desire to eat, and I need a psychiatrist as my mental condition is deteriorating, Jaabis said in her letter. A lot of times I want to cry, and I feel a huge volcano bubbling up inside of me. What does my son say when he sees me? Is he scared of me?

Mona said that her sister is aware of the heightened interest in her case.

This might be too late, Mona said. Israa has reached the point of desperation where sometimes I think it would have been better not to do anything at all.

Follow Linah Alsaafin on Twitter at @LinahAlsaafin
Reported to be the first raid of its kind in the country, Jordanian police seize several tonnes of drug substances.

Jordanian police have shut down a facility that was producing illegal drugs and masquerading as a factory for cleaning supplies in an industrial area in the capital, Amman.

The site was reportedly manufacturing Captagon, an amphetamine-based drug that is one of the most popular narcotics in the Middle East, including among fighters in Syrias long-running conflict.

The anti-narcotics department (AND) said on Tuesday that it had confiscated several tonnes of enough material to make more than 100 million pills.

According to the official news agency, Petra, it was the first raid of its kind in Jordan, and eight people in total were arrested.

The main suspect was arrested at the facility, after the AND had worked for months pursuing information based on a tip-off.

The AND had gathered information about the suspect who had imported chemicals used to manufacture detergents.

In a statement, the Department of Public Relations and Information (DPS) said that the suspect had sought the help from foreign nationals to process the chemicals and extract elements to produce pills of Captagon, a psychostimulant.

On the same day, another AND team raided an apartment in Amman that was used as storage for the drugs and found two million Captagon pills there. Another suspect present at the scene was also arrested.

Six other people who had planned to smuggle the drugs outside the country were arrested elsewhere, the DPS said, and the investigation is still ongoing.

War in Syria

Captagon has been the drug of choice for many fighters in the Syrian conflict.

In November 2015, 11 million pills were seized by Turkish officials at the Syria-Turkey border.

The drug can be bought cheaply at $2, and Syrians in refugee camps in Lebanon are increasingly turning to using it, Ramzi Haddad, a Lebanese psychiatrist and cofounder of an addiction centre called Skoun, had previously told Al Jazeera.

In the short term it makes people feel euphoric and fearless and makes them sleep less  perfect for wartime fighting, but in the long term it brings on psychosis, paranoia and cardiovascular side effects, added Haddad.
Top Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic died at a local hospital in Kosovos Mitrovica city on Tuesday morning after an unknown gunman shot him five times outside his office.

Ivanovic, who was the leader of the civic initiative, Freedom, Democracy and Justice (SDP), succumbed to the chest wounds, the chief prosecutor of the prosecutors office in Mitrovica told the local media.

Kosovos President Hashim Thaci strongly condemned the murder in a statement published on his social media account, urging Mitrovica residents to cooperate with police.

The director of Serbias government office for Kosovo, Marko Djuric, told the Serbian Tanjug news agency that Ivanovics killing was an act of terrorism.

This is an attack against the entire Serbian people, a criminal and terrorist act that must and will be punished, Djuric, who was in Brussels attending a talk, told Tanjug.

Al Jazeeras Stefan Goranovic, reporting from the Serbian capital Belgrade, said the incident was shocking news for the Serbian community in Kosovo, as well as the public in Serbia.

It is shown by the fact that the president of Serbia, Alexandar Vucic, called the immediate national security council here in Belgrade in the building of the Serbian presidency, he said, adding that the meeting should define what the official Serbian response should be in terms of the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue.

One of the Serbian delegation representatives in Brussels said that the dialogue, for now, will be terminated and the Serbian delegation is on its way back to Belgrade, Goranovic said.

Moderate voice

About 40,000-50,000 ethnic Serbs live in northern Kosovo, rejecting integration with the mainly Albanian state since it declared independence from Serbia in 2008.

Relations between Serbia and Kosovo have been tense since 2008, but in 2013 both parties agreed to participate in EU-sponsored negotiations on normalising relations, a condition for both to progress on their way towards membership in the bloc.

Ivanovic lived in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica.

Known as a moderate among Kosovo Serb politicians, Ivanovic had been one of the chief interlocutors for NATO, United Nations and European Union officials based in Kosovo after the war.

In 2016, he was found guilty of war crimes linked to the killings of four ethnic Albanians during the war and was jailed for nine years. But after a retrial was ordered he was released last year and allowed to defend himself while free.
Campaigners call on Nepali authorities to step up efforts to demystify menstruation after chauupadi claims another life.

Kathmandu, Nepal  In Nepals far western Achham, a remote arid region where farming villages dot the foothills of the Himalayas, government and aid workers have walked from door to door for nearly a decade to advocate against chauupadi, an ancient Hindu ritual where women are banished from their homes during menstruation.

Their ultimate goal is to end segregation, yet the dangers these women are exposed to have added urgency to their campaign.

In Achham alone, at least 12 women have died while following chauupadi since 2007. And just last week, the practice claimed another life.

Gauri Kumari Budha, a 22-year-old student, was found dead on January 8 after she spent the night in a chauu goth, a low, windowless mud hut where she confines herself during her period.

Officials said she died of smoke inhalation after she lit a fire to stave off the cold. Others have previously died due to snake bites and infections.

Hers is the first death reported since the Nepali parliament voted to criminalise chauupadi last year.

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The new law, due to come into effect in August, sets a three-month jail term and a 3,000 rupee ($30) fine for those who force women to follow the custom.

Birendra Budha, Gauris husband of 18 months, said he was aware chauupadi was illegal and had advised his wife against sleeping in the chauu goth.

I used to tell her time and again not to sleep in that hut since it was unsafe and unhygienic, he told Al Jazeera by phone. But people here are dogmatic in their beliefs, and many women practise chauupadi even if they are told not to.

The policeman who works in the capital, Kathmandu, said he was devastated by her death.

It was so sudden. We are all still in shock, he said.

They will hide and do it

Pema Lhaki, a womens health advocate, told Al Jazeera she was saddened and angered by Gauris death.

When the spouse of a Nepali policeman dies because of chauupadi, that gives you an indication of the kind of challenges we face in ending the practice, she said.

In 2005, the Nepali Supreme Court banned the practice. However, women still followed chauupadi, prompting the government to introduce the law criminalising it.

But campaigners like Lhaki said a lot more effort was needed to end chauupadi. Raising awareness about the science behind menstruation, as well as the buy-in of religious and political leaders, was key to that process, they said.

In the far west of Nepal, where the chauupadi tradition is prevalent, many believe that menstruating women are impure and can bring bad luck to a household. In addition to being forced from their homes, women on their periods are banned from social gatherings, denied access to some foods and can also be barred from toilets in their homes.

Describing the superstitions some Nepalis hold about menstruation, two local activists, in a recent article for the Republica website, wrote: They believe if a menstruating woman fetches water, the well will dry up. If she touches a tree, it will never again bear fruit or will die; if she consumes milk, the cow will stop giving milk; if she reads a book, Saraswati, the goddess of education, will become angry; if she touches a man, he will be ill.

The practice is enforced by religious leaders in most villages, but women do it themselves, too, because they believe they are protecting their families, said Lhaki, who works for the Nepal Fertility Care Centre.

If I am told that my actions could cause harm to my daughter, husband or family, of course I will do it.

Lhaki hailed the new law as a positive step but said women and girls would continue to die or suffer from health problems associated with chauupadi as long as people linked menstruation to impurity.

Without a change in such beliefs, the women themselves will hide and do it, and they will not report it being done either even when the law comes into effect, argued Lhaki.

Demystifying periods

Radha Paudel, founder of the charity Action Works Nepal, said the solution was to create a national dialogue about menstrual stigma. Its very simple. Menstruation is natural  and we need to deliver the scientific message, she told Al Jazeera.

In Jumla district in midwestern Nepal, that change was under way, Paudel said.

A key step towards that was educating the village shamans about menstruation, she said.

Megh Nath Yogi, a 38-year-old shaman from the village of Tila-3 in Jumla, said he stopped advocating for chauupadi when he understood that menstruation is a natural process.





Some people were sending women to chauu goths until recently, he told Al Jazeera. They were of the view that God would be angry if women stayed inside their homes during their periods.

So I told them, I will take care of God but dont send women to the chhau goth.

For Paudel, the campaign does not end with the destruction of the chauu goths.

To me, the underlying principle of chauupadi is segregation, she said. Menstrual restrictions are a human rights issue. It ends when gender discrimination ends.

Back in Achham, residents of Gauris village are still in mourning.

She was well-loved here, her husband, Budha, said.

Chhaupadi is blind faith. My wife would not have died if she had stayed inside our home that day. People should be told that menstruation has nothing to do with religion.

Roshan Sedhai reported from Kathmandu. Zaheena Rasheed reported and wrote from Doha.
Syrian Kurdish fighters previously armed by the United States are no longer part of the battle against ISIL and the US-led coalition doesnt support them, a US military official said on Tuesday.

The comments were the first indication by American officials that US-led forces may not intervene if Turkey follows through with a promised cross-border military operation to wipe out the group known as YPG, which controls the Afrin region along Turkeys southern border.

The comments  reported by Turkeys Anadolu news agency  came after senior Turkish officials threatened an imminent attack against the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG).

The US has viewed the YPG as the most effective fighting force against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS)  and has provided weapons, training, and air support.

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An estimated 8,000-10,000 YPG soldiers are operating in the Afrin region in Syrias Aleppo province, which borders Turkeys Hatay and Kilis areas.

YPG is considered a terrorist group by Turkey because of its ties to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long armed conflict in Turkey, killing an estimated 40,000 people.

Pentagon spokesman Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway told Anadolu the US-led coalition wasnt involved with the YPG in the Afrin area.





We dont consider them as part of our Defeat ISIS operations, which is what we are doing there and we do not support them. We are not involved with them at all, Rankine-Galloway told the news agency.

US-led coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon said its forces werent active in Syrias Afrin area.

We are not operating in Afrin. We are supporting our partners in defeating remaining ISIS pockets along the Middle Euphrates River Valley, Dillon was quoted as saying.

Al Jazeera asked the US-led coalition, formally known as Operation Inherent Resolve, if it would intervene on behalf of the YPG if Turkey targets Afrin.

It would be inappropriate and irresponsible to speculate on hypothetical situations, the Public Affairs Office responded in an email.

What we can tell you is that the international coalition is resolved to train, equip and support our SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) partners to attain the lasting defeat of ISIS.

Purge terrorism

Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on Sunday to purge terrorism from our southern borders, adding his military will attack the YPG in Afrin in the coming days.

Erdogans comments followed the US-led coalitions announcement that it would train 30,000 fighters from the YPG-dominated SDF to act as a border force in northern Syria.

Like other Turkish officials in previous days, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Tuesday sternly denounced the plan.

Is the duty of protecting NATO borders left to terror groups? We can protect our own borders, Yildirim was quoted as saying by Anadolu.





He asked countries to choose between NATO responsibilities or collaboration with marauders.

The US-led coalition said Turkey had nothing to fear from a border force in northern Syria.

Security forces are internally oriented and do not pose any threat to our coalition partner and NATO member, Turkey. Furthermore, they do not pose any threat to any other country in the region, the Public Affairs Office told Al Jazeera.

These internal forces are focused on preventing the flow of terrorists across borders, thus bringing more stability to the region.

Speaking at a high-level NATO meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, Turkeys armed forces chief, General Hulusi Akar, said his country will not allow YPG to receive assistance from any NATO nation.

We cannot and will not allow support and arming of the YPG terror group under the name of an operational partner. We hope this mistake will be corrected in the shortest time, Akar said.

When asked for a response to the situation on the Syria-Turkey border, a NATO official told Al Jazeera in an email: NATO is a member of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS and supports it with flights of AWACS surveillance aircraft and with training for Iraqi forces.

Nevertheless, NATO does not have a presence on the ground in Syria.
Facing sedition charge, the 93-year-old, known as father of Taliban in Swat, released on bail as trial continues.

Islamabad, Pakistan  Pakistani authorities have released on bail prominent militia commander and scholar, Sufi Muhammad, known as the father of the Taliban in the Swat Valley, on health grounds, his lawyer says.

Muhammad, 93, was imprisoned in the northwestern city of Peshawar in 2009 and charged with sedition and waging war against Pakistan, after he led demands for the imposition of a strict, conservative interpretation of Islamic law in the countrys northern Swat Valley.

He is the father-in-law of current Pakistan Taliban chief Mullah Fazlullah.

On January 8, a Pakistani court ordered that he be released on bail from the Peshawar central jail on humanitarian grounds, while the cases against him would continue to be heard.

Muhammad was released on Monday after bail bonds worth 700,000 Pakistani rupees (about $6,300) were submitted by his son to authorities in Mingora, the capital of Swat district, said Fida Gul, the clerics lawyer.

The court has also ordered that once in the month he will report to his local police station, as well as whenever he is planning on leaving his town, Gul told Al Jazeera.

The former militia commander, who suffers from diabetes and kidney ailments, has also promised authorities that he will not take part in any political activities, he said.

He has given this undertaking to the court [that he] will not involve himself in any type of activities that are against the writ of the government [or] that promote the [Taliban] movement.

Muhammad is expected to travel to his native town of Timergara, about 170km northwest of the capital Islamabad, in the coming days.

Father of Swat Taliban

Pakistan has long faced international criticism for not doing enough against armed groups fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan and against Indian security forces in the disputed region of Kashmir.

In November, a Pakistani court ordered the release of Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who carries a $10 million US bounty on his head, saying the government had not presented sufficient evidence to maintain his detention under anti-terrorism laws.

Earlier this month, the United States suspended about $1.1bn in security assistance to Pakistan, saying the country needed to take action against Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network commanders it believes enjoy safe haven in the country.

Sufi Muhammads fight, however, has been focused on the Pakistani state and security forces for the past 16 years.

The head of the Tehreek-e-Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM), Muhammad had long fought for the imposition of his strict interpretation of Islamic law in his native Swat and Dir districts.

He rose to prominence in 1994, when he led a mass public sit-in in the valley, opposing government plans to impose Pakistans judicial structures on the district.

A veteran of the US-backed Afghan war against Soviet forces, Muhammad led a brigade of thousands to fight US-led coalition forces in neighbouring Afghanistan in 2001. He was arrested on his return to Pakistan in 2002.

In 2008, he was released as part of a deal between the government and militias in the Swat Valley which saw Islamic law imposed by a faction of the Taliban, led by commander Mullah Fazlullah, in the valley.

A year later, as the peace agreement fell apart, Muhammad once again found himself in the governments crosshairs, with a full-scale military operation launched to retake Swat from the Taliban.

He was re-arrested from the northwestern city of Peshawar in July that year, and charged with waging war against Pakistan.

The cases, his lawyer says, will continue to be heard in court.

He was released only on the basis of his sickness and his old age, but the trials are ongoing, said Gul. He has not been acquitted.

Asad Hashim is Al Jazeeras Web Correspondent in Pakistan. He tweets @AsadHashim.
Palestine Liberation Organisation reconsiders its recognition of Israel until Israel recognises the State of Palestine.

The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) is considering the suspension of its recognition of Israel, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official said Tuesday.

There is no alternative for the Palestinians but to suspend their recognition of Israel, Saeb Erekat, a member of the PLOs influential Executive Committee, said in a statement.

The PA and the PLO  both of which recognize Israel  are both led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbass Fatah movement.

According to Erekat, Trumps decision last December to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital was intended to isolate Jerusalem but has instead isolated the U.S.

We can only implement the [PLO] Central Councils recommendation to suspend recognition of Israel until Israel recognizes the state of Palestine, Erekat said.

PLO recommendation

Earlier this year, the Palestine Liberation Organisations (PLO) Central Council, the second-highest Palestinian decision-making body, has recommended revoking recognition of Israel until the latter recognises the State of Palestine in its 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

During a meeting in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah late January 15, PLO, which is an umbrella of major Palestinian political parties, said it assigned its Executive Committee to suspend recognition of Israel until it recognizes the State of Palestine on the 1967 borders and revokes the decision to annex East Jerusalem and expand and build settlements, according to Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency.

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In a final statement read after the meeting, the PLO also said that the Oslo Accords, signed with Israel in the early 1990s, no longer stand.

It added that it would renew its decision to stop security coordination [with Israel] in all its forms and called on all Arab states to sever all ties with any state that recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and transfers its embassy to it.

But several Palestinian political parties expressed their reservations on the final statement, saying the language was vague.

Omar Shehadeh, a leader in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) party, said there was no clear decision to end the Oslo Accords, withdraw recognition of Israel and stop security coordination. He added that assigning the PLOs Executive Committee to take such actions could take some time.

The meeting comes following a decision in December by US President Donald Trump to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Breaking with decades of US policy that favoured a two-state solution, Trumps declaration dealt a blow to the Palestinian leadership, which for more than two decades has unsuccessfully attempted to establish a state on the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

The PLO meeting in Ramallah was organised to lay out the Palestinian strategy to confront the US in the wake of its Jerusalem decision.

At the start of the two-day meeting, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas slammed Trumps peace proposal, saying: Now we say No to Trump, we wont accept his plan  we say the deal of the century is the slap of the century, referring to the US presidents pledge to achieve the ultimate deal.

In the final statement, the PLO said it would find other international pathways under the auspices of the United Nations to sponsor solving the Palestinian cause.

After officially recognising Israels existence in 1988, the PLO and Israel signed the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995 meant to lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state through the establishment of an interim Palestinian government  the Palestinian Authority.

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The Oslo deals also gifted Israel complete control of the Palestinian economy, civil and security matters in over 60 percent of the West Bank, and introduced the controversial security coordination between Israel and the PA.

The PA says the only answer to more than 70-year-old conflict is the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

But since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has only intensified, making it difficult for Palestinians to envision such a solution.

Currently, between 600,000 to 750,000 Israeli citizens  or 11 percent of the Israeli population  live in the occupied Palestinian territories  encouraged by the right-wing Israeli government which offers them incentives to move there.

Guarded by heavily armed Israeli soldiers, they have taken up large swaths of Palestinian private land.
Rights committee in Qatar receives complaint by Sheikh Abdullah Al Thani about his arbitrary detention in Abu Dhabi.

The family of a Qatari royal family member who says he is being held as a prisoner in the United Arab Emirates has confirmed his arbitrary detention, according to a Doha-based human rights group.

The National Human Rights Committee in Qatar (NHRC) said in a statement on Tuesday that it received a complaint from Sheikh Abdullah bin Ali Al Thanis family about his restriction of movement by the Emirati authorities.

The National Human Rights Committee in the State of Qatar affirms the illegality of this measure and its violation of all international and regional human rights conventions, instruments and understandings, the statement said.

It holds the Emirati authorities responsible for the safety and security of this Qatari citizen and demands his immediate release.

The group also called on the international community and NGOs to intervene and ensure the safety and release of Sheikh Abdullah, as well as hold the Emirati authorities responsible for the violation.

The statement said that the NHRC had informed the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and several other international organisations about the incident.

Video appeal

A video released on Sunday showed Sheikh Abdullah saying that if anything happened to him, Sheikh Mohammed was responsible.

Though he did not explain who Sheikh Mohammed was, Sheikh Abdullah appeared to be referring to Abu Dhabis Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

I am currently in Abu Dhabi. I was a guest of Sheikh Mohammed. I am no longer a guest; I am a prisoner, he said.

They told me not to leave. I am afraid that anything could happen to me, and the people of Qatar would be blamed. So I just wanted to inform you that if anything happens to me, the people of Qatar are innocent, added Sheikh Abdullah.

I am a guest of Sheikh Mohammed, and if anything happens to me after this, he is fully responsible.
Coalition of human rights groups calls on Prime Minister May to withdraw the invitation to Saudi Arabias crown prince.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May should withdraw an invitation extended to Saudi Arabias Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to visit the UK, a coalition of human rights group has said.

The coalition, including the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR UK), sent a letter on Monday to the British leader saying the visit was not in the UKs interest, nor in the interest of the peoples suffering from the Crown Princes adventurism.

The Saudi regime  has one of the worst human rights records in the world. Torture, arbitrary detention, and other appalling abuses are widely documented, the letter said.

It shames us as a nation to support and associate with a brutal dictator who uses hunger as a weapon, and has allowed the largest cholera epidemic in history to develop in Yemen, it added.

Saudi Arabia has been at war in Yemen since March 2015, when a coalition led by the oil-rich kingdom launched a campaign of aerial bombardment, aimed at countering Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and reinstating the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The UK government has licensed more than 4.6 billion ($6.3bn) worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia since the bombing began, according to CAAT.

To date, an estimated 10,000 people have died in the war. Yemens cholera outbreak, a direct consequence of the conflict, has claimed about 2,000 lives and affected more than one million people since April 2017.

British-made jets and bombs have played a major role in destroying civilian targets and the poor nations [Yemens] infrastructure, the rights groups letter said.

UK personnel, from the armed forces and BAE Systems, are present in the Saudi operations centre, aiding this catastrophe.

A spokesperson for May said the prime minister looked forward to welcoming the Crown Prince to the UK in the New Year, on December 20, 2017.

Reprieve, a UK-based human rights organisation, said the following day that the invite had been given amid a wave of repression in Saudi Arabia.

Despite the Crown Princes rhetoric of reform, the reality is that on his watch, executions have sped up, dissent has been criminalised, and juvenile protesters are facing the swordsmans blade, Maya Foa, the organisations director, said.

According to Reprieve, at least 142 people were executed in Saudi Arabia last year.

Mondays letter  also signed by the Bahrain Institute for Human Rights, Sheba for Democracy and Human Rights, Human Rights for Yemen, Iraqi Democrats, and Stop the War Coalition  accuses Saudi officials of having supported repression in other states such as in Bahrain in 2011, during a military crackdown against anti-government protesters.

It also references the current blockade imposed on neighbouring Qatar by Saudi Arabia  alongside Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt  and Mohammed bin Salmans recent attempt to pressure Lebanons Prime Minister Saad Hariri into resigning from his position, as evidence of failed attempts to impose regime change on sovereign nations.

King Salman, Saudi Arabias current ruler, removed his nephew, Mohammed bin Nayef, as crown prince and replaced him with his son, Mohammed bin Salman, in June 2017.

The move marked a departure from Saudi Arabias line of succession, breaking with decades of custom maintained by the kingdoms royal family.
UN refugee agency says the repatriation deal must guarantee protection of Rohingya upon return to Myanmar.

The UN has raised concerns over the return of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees, who fled a military crackdown in Myanmars Rakhine State, within the next two years as agreed upon by Bangladesh and Myanmar.

As part of a repatriation deal signed by the two Asian neighbours in November last year, Bangladesh and Myanmar officials at a joint meeting in Naypyidaw on Tuesday agreed on plans to facilitate the return of those displaced since August.

Much work remains to be done in the context of the Rohingya refugee situation to ensure that any potential returns are voluntary, that they occur in conditions of safety and dignity, and that they are sustainable, said Caroline Gluck, senior public information officer for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency.

The protection of the Rohingya refugees must be guaranteed both in Bangladesh and upon their return to Myanmar, she told Al Jazeera in an emailed response.

Earlier, Bangladeshs foreign ministry said in a statement that the repatriation would be completed preferably within two years from its commencement.

There will be two working groups  one will work on verification process for Rohingya, and the other will facilitate the return of verified refugees to Myanmar, an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who preferred to remain unnamed, said.

When asked whether the verification process is different from the one outlined in 1992 when a similar crisis had led to another deal being agreed upon, the ministry official declined to clarify, saying the foreign secretary will clarify the issue later.

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Under the arrangement, Bangladesh would possibly establish five transit camps from where returnees would be received initially in two reception centres on the Myanmar side, the statement revealed.

Some 1,550 refugees will be sent back each week, which will add up to approximately 156,000 over a period of two years.

Myanmar has reiterated its commitment to stop the outflow of Myanmar residents to Bangladesh, the Bangladesh foreign ministry said.

The agreement does not specify when repatriation will commence but outlines providing temporary shelter to returning Rohingya and building houses for them later.

They will slaughter us

More than 650,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh since August 25, when Myanmars army launched a bloody crackdown in response to attacks on border posts by the armed group, Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army.

Refugees who crossed the border reported mass killings, gang rapes and arson, prompting the UN and rights groups to accuse Myanmars army of possible crimes against humanity.

The mainly Muslim minority, who live primarily in Rakhine State, is not recognised as an ethnic group in Myanmar, despite having lived there for generations. They have been denied citizenship and are rendered stateless.

Many refugees living in camps in Bangladesh have also raised fears about returning to Myanmar.

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Abd-us-Salam, who is more than 100 years old, has fled three military crackdowns in Myanmar. He and his wife are currently seeking refuge in Bangladeshs Kutupalong refugee camp.

Theres no point in sending us back to Myanmar because there is no security for us there, he told Al Jazeera.

They will not allow a single Rohingya to live there, he said.

They will slaughter us all. Please dont send us back as bait for the monster.

Taslima Begum, another Rohingya refugee, said she would rather die in Bangladesh than go back.

We have been persecuted and brutalised there, she said. They took all our possessions, crops and cattle.

Safe return

UNHCRs Gluck told Al Jazeera that Rohingya refugees said they would only consider returning if they saw positive developments in relation to their legal status and citizenship, the security situation in Rakhine State and their ability to enjoy basic rights back home.





She said that the causes of the crisis, such as the Rohingyas legal and citizenship status, need to be addressed to ensure peace and security in Rakhine State.

Since the signing of the deal, the UN and rights groups have criticised the repatriation plan, because they believe it does not guarantee the protection of the refugees on return.

Delwar Hossain, director of East Asian Study Centre of Dhaka University, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that it would be impossible to complete the repatriation process within two years.

I am sceptical whether they will be able to start the repatriation properly with the Physical Arrangement that was signed between the two countries, he said.

The UN has called the violence against civilians in Myanmar a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

The ongoing crisis has been described as the biggest forced exodus of 2017.

Faisal Mahmud contributed from Dhaka
Egyptian president says Cairo seeks good relations with both countries as tensions continue to rise in Read Sea region.

Egypts President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said his country was not meddling in the internal affairs of Sudan and Ethiopia, as he sought to defuse rising tensions in the Red Sea region.

Sisi, in a televised broadcast on Monday, said Cairo was not planning to go to war with the African countries.

We are not prepared to go to war against our brethren or anyone else for that matter. I am saying this as a clear message to our brothers in Sudan and Ethiopia, Sisi said.

Egypt neither conspires nor meddles in anyones internal affairs. We are determined to have good relations [with Sudan and Ethiopia]. Our region has seen enough the past few years, he said.

Egypt fears that the soon-to-be-completed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project, the largest hydroelectric dam project in Africa, will significantly reduce its share of the Nile River water. The river provides almost all of Egypts freshwater.

Addis Ababa says the $5bn dam will not have any effect on Egypts share of the Nile water, and claims the project is necessary for the East African countrys economic development.

Egypt, with a population roughly equal to that of Ethiopia, has traditionally received the lions share of the Niles water, under agreements reached in 1929 and 1959.

Other Nile basin nations view those agreements as unfair, arguing that they ignore the needs of their own large and growing populations.

Egypt has long accused Sudan of siding with Ethiopia, while Khartoum claims Cairo is supporting rebels in its territory.

Khartoum recalled its ambassador to Cairo for consultations on January 4, following media reports of Egypt sending troops to Eritrea, which has a border with Sudan.

Sudan also closed its borders with Eritrea and sent troops to its border region of Kassala.
Russian and Syrian government air strikes are said to have killed more than 300 people in Damascus provinces Eastern Ghouta region in just the past two months.

Activists and monitors say de-escalation agreements are doing nothing to stop the slaughter of civilians in opposition territory on the outskirts of Damascus, as well as other areas of the country.

Eastern Ghoutas proximity to the capital has made it an obvious target for Syrian government forces and their allies  who have had it under siege for years. The area is controlled by fighters loyal to the Free Syrian Army. Russian and Syrian government air strikes are said to have killed more than 300 people there in just the past two months.

That is despite the fact that Eastern Ghouta is in one of four de-escalation zones set up earlier last year by Russia, Iran, and Turkey.

Al Jazeeras Osama Bin Javaid.
Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the NATO military alliance for support, accusing the US of violating its border.

Kurdish civilians fear they will become targets if Turkey follows through with its threat to move against Kurdish fighters in Syria, which it calls terrorists. The Turkish military is preparing a strike against YPG fighters, who form part of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the NATO military alliance for support, accusing the US of violating its border.

He says his militarys operation is likely to centre on Afrin  and include Syrian rebels.

Al Jazeeras Sinem Koseoglu reports from the Turkey-Syria border.
Undocumented immigrants and their supporters say life has gotten much worse since Trump took office.

When a federal judge in California blocked US President Donald Trumps move to rescind an Obama-era policy meant to protect undocumented people brought by their parents as children, Paul Quinonez felt some relief.

It was a symbolic victory for us and it was great to see the courts realise that as young undocumented people we shouldnt live in limbo, Quinonez, an undocumented resident of Washington state who has been protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme since he was in his last year of high school, told Al Jazeera hours after the court decision on January 9.

The Trump administration announced in September that the programme, which protects 800,000 individuals, would be phased out by March, unless Democrats could agree with Republicans to an increase in immigration enforcement, including a US-Mexico border wall.

Judge William Alsup wrote in his January decision that DACA covers a class of immigrants whose presence, seemingly all agree, pose the least, if any, threat and allows them to sign up for honest labor on the condition of continued good behavior.

DACA-protected immigrants, sometimes called Dreamers because of never-passed legislation, are often considered a benefit to the US economy. They have an employment rate of nearly 90 percent in well-paying jobs and about 75 percent are enrolled in institutions of higher education.

This has become an important programme for DACA recipients and their families, for the employers who hire them, for our tax treasuries, and for our economy, Alsup added.

But the ruling shouldnt give us false hope, we need a permanent solution, said Quinonez, who came to the US from Mexico with his family when he was seven years old.

During Trumps first year, life in the US for undocumented immigrants, including those protected by DACA, has gotten much worse, Quinonez said.

November 8, 2016  None of us imagined

The road to a permanent solution for Dreamers has been long and convoluted. Former President Barack Obama announced DACA in 2012, after the Republican-controlled Congress voted against several immigration reform bills during his first term.

Obamas track record on immigration is also complex. He has received credit from many for DACA, and his 2014 attempt to expand the programme to include more undocumented individuals, which was later blocked by the Supreme Court after 26 states sued over its implementation.

But Obama was also popularly called the deporter-in-chief, a play on the US presidents title of commander-in-chief of the US armed forces, for widespread removals of undocumented migrants.

Quinonez said he and his family were at first distrustful of the programme.

I wasnt sure if I wanted to apply. I wasnt sure if I could trust the government, Quinonez recalled.

Furthermore, DACA didnt provide a permanent pathway to citizenship, making it a stopgap measure.

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Quinonez said his family discussed if it made sense to spend money on a college education, when any future president could end the programme.

But Quinonez did apply, was granted protection from deportation, graduated from university and now works in politics.

Like many, especially in left-leaning Washington state, everything he knew about politics suggested that Trump would never be elected.

None of us imagined that someone like Trump would run for president, win the Republican nomination and become president of the US, Quinonez said.

Trump ran on a platform that many said was xenophobic and racist, allegations the now US president denies. When he announced his candidacy in 2015, the Trump infamously said that immigrants from Mexico are bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists, before saying he assumed that some are good people.

An integral part of this platform was building a wall on the US-Mexico border and initiating a crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the US.

When Trump won on November 8, 2016, Quinonez said he was in shock for the next couple of days. I kept not realising what that meant.

The truth settled in when his younger brother, who is studying to be an engineer and doesnt follow politics, called Quinonez and asked about the future under the Trump administration.

The effects were felt in the Quinonez family and throughout the community. He said his parents started talking to their children about possibly moving back to Mexico.

It was the mirror image of what he went through at the age of seven, the children of undocumented children would have to learn and adapt to [Mexican] society; learn a language they dont speak.

January 20, 2017  Promises of serious enforcement

When Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 44th US president on January 20, 2017, he promised his presidency would favour America first.

His policies on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families, Trump said during his inaugural address. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs, he added.

The president was quick to deliver on a number of campaign promises. On January 25, Trump signed two executive orders, the first was the Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements, and the second Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.

The orders prioritised the construction of the US-Mexico border wall and granted expanded powers to immigration authorities to increase deportations and detentions.

By February, ICE had instituted a nationwide crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Cities in Texas, Arizona, California and elsewhere were swept up in detentions, some of which took place in historically protected areas like courthouses, spreading fear and uncertainty through communities.

Trumps crackdown prompted many cities to adopt so-called sanctuary city policies that limit local law enforcement cooperation with immigration authorities.

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Fearing potential death if returned to their countries of origin, some undocumented immigrants have taken refuge in houses of worship, hoping ICE wouldnt violate its own protocol to not carry out raids on religious establishments.

Juan Belman, an Austin-based dreamer and local activist that works to provide undocumented individuals with legal support, told Al Jazeera that Trumps first year has created an environment that inspires people to get involved.

Weve seen a lot more people become engaged in all these issues. Its crazy, right? We only see this increase in activism after something bad has happened, Belman said.

The 25-year-old dreamer, who was brought to the US at the age of 10, said the bad hes referring to is an increase in interior enforcement.

The number of deportations under Trump was lower than any from Obamas last years in office, but the decline comes because US Border Patrol are apprehending fewer people trying to cross the US-Mexico border, Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) told Al Jazeera.

CIS, which is supportive of Trumps immigration policy, was labelled a hate group last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for its ties to John Tanton, the father of the modern nativist movement which is anti-immigrant. The group describes itself a low-immigration, but pro-immigrant, nonprofit.

Vaughan said lower border detentions are a sign that fewer people are trying to cross illegally, most likely because they are deterred by Trumps promises of more serious enforcement.

Inside the US, Trump has increased detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants both with and without criminal records.

Although total deportations have decreased, detentions of undocumented immigrants increased to 143,470 in 2017, up from slightly over 110,000 in 2016.

Many of those detained are required to stand before a judge in an immigration court.

These courts decide the status of the undocumented and face a backlog of over 500,000 cases. This number began building under the Obama administration and steadily increased in Trumps first year.

Even though many in Belmans community have become more involved in the pro-immigrant fight, finding legal support is still difficult, he explained.

In Austin, we have developed a community hotline so we can help people with legal support, but trying to find legal representation for everyone is very difficult, Belman said.

Its not only lawyers, but also immigrant judges who preside over these courts that face a shortfall.

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There are currently about 300 immigration judges, and New York-based watchdog group Human Rights First says an additional 120 are needed to handle the current backlog.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the official who announced the rescinding of the DACA programme in September, is considering ending administrative closures. He launched a review of the practice this month.

Administrative closures allow undocumented individuals to stay in the country while their petitions are vetted by parties outside the immigration courts.

If Sessions ends the practice, an additional 350,000 cases will be re-opened in immigrant courts.

This would flood the courts, Belman said. I dont know what we would do handle an increase like that.

January 19, 2018  A deal with the devil

While the Trump administration has held the status of Dreamers hostage for Trumps border wall, Democrats are using the US federal budget to push immigration protections forward.

The deadline for a spending agreement to avert a government shutdown is January 19, the day before the first anniversary of Trumps presidency. Any US budget agreement will require Democratic support to pass the Senate, and the Democratic leaders  with newfound leverage from a Senate seat gained in the recent Alabama special election  have said that the budget and DACA protections are linked.

On January 11, a bipartisan group of legislators announced they reached a deal on DACA protections, the US president rejected it and his congressional liaison Marc Short said, Theres still a ways to go.

Trump is pushing for increased border security, an end to both chain migration  a process that allows immigrants to apply for their family to come to the US  and the diversity visa programme that allows for people from countries with a small presence in the US to apply for visas.

The Trump administration has also said it was ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

TPS grants individuals fleeing specific crises, like natural disasters or conflict, visas to live and work in the US. The move to end the status for the three countries affects hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom say they fear to return to their home countries.

Democrats, during negotiations with Trump and congressional Republicans on continued protections for Dreamers, reportedly offered an end to the diversity visa programme in exchange for continuing the TPS programme.

These negotiations prompted the now infamous comments from Trump, in which the US president reportedly questioned why the US should take immigrants from shithole countries like El Salvador, Haiti and some African countries.

The fallout, including renewed accusations of racism on the part of the president, have prompted Trump to say a DACA deal is unlikely.

Even if it does happen, Trump is asking undocumented young people to make a deal with the devil: Protect their futures in exchange for sacrificing their parents and other community members by supporting increased funding and resources for detention, deportation, and border militarisation, Alisa Wellek, the executive director of the Immigrants Defense Project, told Al Jazeera.

The idea of being leveraged to further militarise the US border and stop other immigrants from coming to the US doesnt sit well with many Dreamers, including Belman, who remembered his father being detained by immigration authorities.

But Belman said hes optimistic: It wont be a one-party solution. Both parties can be doing more and supporting these efforts. Im hopeful that something positive is going to come out of the talks.

Reflecting on a year of Trumps presidency, Quinonez explained that many felt a sense of complacency before the election, even though DACA was a temporary solution. We should have prepared more.

Quinonez said he hopes Trumps first year is a wake-up call for those who arent yet involved with the pro-immigrant movement. Its imperative for activists and citizens to keep pressuring the Democrats, who havent always supported their cause as strongly as they could, Quinonez said.

Were fully aware that 2018 is an election year, Quinonez said, referring to 2018 midterm elections that could see Democrats making gains over Republicans after a routing in the 2016 elections.

The Dreamer movement is mobilised and holds sway in progressive communities across the US, the activist warned.

Democrats will feel the consequences if they dont do more for immigrants, Quinonez concluded.

This article is part of a multipart series examining the State of America Under Trump. Also read:

One year under Trump: A shrinking space for protests

Trumps America: An attack on climate change fight

Trumps America: War of attrition on journalists

Trumps America: A war on police, or their detractors?
The fate of Oscar Perez, and opposition figure who is a former pilot and action film star, is unknown after a shoot-out during which several people died.

Oscar Perez is a former member of the forensic police and a helicopter pilot; he was accused by the Venezuelan government of trying to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro.

Hes been on the run for over six months, and the government has been trying to find him.

Recently, Venezuelan Special Forces attacked his hideout and a shoot-out ensued, during which a number of people died.

Perez posted videos online during the raid, telling his followers that he was ready to negotiate and was asking the Special Forces not to shoot.

His fate remains unknown.

Al Jazeeras Teresa Bo reports.
Interior Minister Nestor Reverol confirmed Oscar Perez was killed together with six of his accomplices.

Venezuelan police have killed a former police officer who had been on the run after stealing a helicopter and attacking government buildings six months ago, according to officials.

Interior Minister Nestor Reverol confirmed on Twitter on Tuesday that Oscar Perez was killed with six accomplices in a gun battle near the capital, Caracas, on Monday.

Six members of Perezs group, who Reverol called members of a terrorist cell, were arrested by police.

Two police officers were also killed in the operation.

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In June 2017, Perez and several unidentified accomplices used a stolen helicopter to launch four grenades at the Supreme Tribunal in Caracas, before shooting at the interior ministry with firearms.

On Monday, an elite Venezuelan police force located Perez and his allies in El Junquito, on the outskirts of Caracas.

During the raid, Perez posted several videos of himself online showing injuries from a clash between him and the authorities.

In some of the Instagram videos, shots can be heard.

They are firing at us with grenade launchers. We said we are going to surrender, but they do not want to let us surrender. They want to kill us, a bloodied Perez said.

However, Venezuelan authorities said the polices forces came under attack by Perezs group as they were negotiating a surrender, claiming the group tried to detonate a vehicle loaded with explosives.

People in El Junquito took to the streets to show their support of Perez, who became Venezuelas most wanted man after the helicopter attack.

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Shortly after that incident, Perez declared that he belonged to an uprising of members of the security forces who were fed up with President Nicolas Maduros administration.

The Venezuelan authorities later issued an arrest warrant in which he was accused of a terrorist attack.
Prominent critic of all parties in Yemens war freed after more than 150 days in captivity.

A prominent Yemeni activist who used social media to document the war that has ravaged his country has been released by Houthi rebels after more than five months in detention.

Hisham al-Omeisy, 38, was freed on Monday along with two other prisoners accused of being loyal to Yemens slain former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, sources told the Yemen monitor website.

The political analyst and father of two was reportedly captured without charge on August 14, in the capital Sanaa, by more than a dozen armed security officers from the National Security Bureau.

A number of international rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, had condemned the arrest and demanded al-Omeisys release.

Al-Omeisy, who has 35,600 followers on Twitter, has appeared several times as a commentator on Al Jazeera and used social media to document the war in Yemen.

Following his release, pictures of al-Omeisy hugging and greeting his two sons emerged on Twitter.

Those moments when a dear friend is released from prison are the best moments ever, ones you never forget, makes all the struggle worthwhile. Today we celebrate a #FreeHisham @omeisy pic.twitter.com/3iSZWxWNsY  Jamila Hanan (@JamilaHanan) January 15, 2018

Middle East journalists, rights activists and social media users welcomed the news on Twitter.

Al-Omeisy has been a vocal critic of all parties involved his countrys civil war, now its fourth year.

His last post on Twitter before detention criticised the military and corrupt officials.





Armed goons backed by corrupt officials are forcefully taking real estate properties in Sanaa, the tweet on August 12 read. They just showed up at my door.

Yemen has been torn apart by a civil war, which began in September 2014, when rebel Houthi fighters stormed into the capital and overthrew President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadis internationally recognised government.

In March 2015, the Saudi-led coalition began a campaign against Houthi forces allied with overthrown President Ali Abdullah Saleh in support of Hadis government.

Since then, the Houthis, who are believed to backed by Iran, have been dislodged from most of the south, but remain in control of Sanaa and much of the north.

With war still raging, at least 10,000 people killed and widespread famine, Yemen has been described as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world by the UN.
The Palestine Liberation Organization wants to suspend recognition of Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has called Donald Trumps peace efforts the slap of the century  and promised to slap back.

Now the Palestinian Liberation Organization has outlined its strategy to face the US presidents recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital.

The core demands are to suspend Palestinian recognition of Israel and to no longer regard the US as a partner for peace.

But do Palestinians have alternative options?

Presenter: Elizabeth Puranam

Guests:

Abdul Sattar Qassem  professor of political science, columnist for Middle East Monitor

Yosi Beilin  former Israeli cabinet minister

Rula Jebreal  professor of communication, University of Miami
An invasive species of monkey in Silver Springs State Park isnt just a nuisance. A study shows they also pose a public health risk.

Many of the invasive rhesus macaques monkeys in Silver Springs State Park, east of Ocala, carry the herpes B virus and can transmit it to humans, according to a study that will be published in February by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The park, which has about 175 macaques, is still considered safe for visitors, but park officials have urged visitors to avoid monkeys, wrote park manager Sally Lieb in an email. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission released a statement saying it supports the removal of the monkeys in order to eliminate the threat they pose to humans.

Transmission is most likely to occur when humans come into contact with a macaques bodily fluids, the report said. Although there have been no reports of human infection from the macaques at Silver Springs State Park, the CDC still considers there to be a risk.

Given the current information available, we must consider the presence of the population of invasive rhesus macaques in Florida to be a public health concern, the report said.

Catholic Gators Outdoors Ministry might move its hiking trip from the park to avoid the macaques, said Nick Lomas, a UF religion sophomore.

That, as a trip leader, would make me hesitate and probably go to another spring, the 19-year-old said.

Contact Jessica Giles at jgiles@alligator.org. Follow her on Twitter at @jessica_giles_.

A macaque monkey is pictured about. The species can carry the herpes B virus and transmit it to humans.
In a letter to the Alligator on Tuesday, UF Student Body Treasurer Revel Lubin announced his intention to switch from Impact Party to Inspire Party.

Lubin ran for the executive ticket last year with Impact, and in the letter, he said he thought it would be a move that could initiate positive change in Student Government. He said since then he has witnessed tokenism in the party  as expressed in the resignation speech of Janae Moodie a week ago.

He said minority individuals, including himself, are marginalized. He said Impact gives positions to fill quotas and uses diversity as a buzzword.

I put the students over the politics and over Impact, he said. But as time went on, I cant compromise my character to be a part of something that was contradicting everything I stood for.

The criminology and law and African-American studies sophomore said he saw things that were unjust from the beginning of his time in Impact. Lubin said although he agrees with some of the points Moodie made in her speech, it wasnt her resignation that prompted him to make this announcement.

This is something I was prompted, just me personally for a long time, he said. It has nothing to do with what Janae said. Im taking this uncomfortable position to stand up.

In the last paragraph of the letter, Lubin said he will switch to Inspire. He said his future plans with SG are still unclear.

I think Im taking time to pray about my next step and figure out what I want to do to serve within the party, he said. Im unsure as to which direction I will take next.

Lubin said he identifies with Inspire's vision.

I noticed a group of individuals who have like-minded ideas, he said. Its a fresh group with fresh visions.

Senator Benjamin Lima (Inspire, D) said this is an exciting development for the party. He led Inspires creation in Fall 2017 as its president.

Revel is someone who has a great sense of vision for the student body, he said. A lot of our senators have been collaborating with him on numerous initiatives. Our caucus is very excited to see the potential to have someone of his stature to be able to be affiliated with Inspire Party.

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Senate President Pro-Tempore Trevor Schaettle said he didnt understand the necessity for Lubin to disaffiliate.

I feel like the problem definitely couldve been addressed further on, and I feel like this is kind of a scapegoat kind of blaming, he said. A lot of us were shocked at that.

Senate President Ian Green (Impact, Business Administration) said Lubins statement has more to do with the political climate and upcoming elections than the true reality of Impact.

Specifically for me, Im the third black male Senate President here at the University of Florida, Green said. I have gotten to where I am because of the work I have put into this university. Theres a reason why I have gray hairs and a receding hairline.

Student Body President Smith Meyers, who ran with Lubin on his executive ticket, said he hadnt heard of Lubins concerns.

Revels letter to the editor is the first time in the nine months we have been in office that I have heard about his concerns with Student Government, he wrote in an email.

Read his full letter here.

Revel Lubin
The salsa instructor counted off beats as about 20 people stepped forward and backward Sunday afternoon to support hurricane recovery efforts in Puerto Rico.

About 150 people attended The Fiesta and Concierto para Puerto Rico hosted by Plenitud PR, a Puerto Rican-based nonprofit, at Heartwood Soundstage located on South Main Street. Sarah Ingley, an event organizer with Plenitud PR, said the primary motivator for the fundraising efforts was the devastation after Hurricane Maria.

The fundraiser here is to help Plenitud PR do what they do  to give to those in immediate need but also to set in place more long-term water and food means, the 39-year-old said.

The event raised about $2,000 from the $10 ticket and merchandise sales, said Naina Ramrakhani, a member of the board of directors at Plenitud PR. The money will go toward the organizations next workshop on rainwater harvesting and emergency water filtration at their sustainable farm in Puerto Rico.

Some of Plenitud PRs past work includes bringing about 1,200 water filters to northwest Puerto Rico to help provide safe drinking water after the hurricane, Ingley said.

Olga Rivera-Cruz, a Gainesville resident, smiled and watched as people filled the dancefloor as the band Latino Sound Machine, which headlined, covered songs like Oye Como Va by Tito Puente.

The 50-year-old said she was born and raised in Puerto Rico and had family affected by the hurricane. She had to make travel arrangements to get her parents out of the island but had to work urgently because of her father who is in a wheelchair.

She said post-hurricane fundraising efforts are important because Puerto Ricans dont have all the resources they need.

It was very traumatic, Cruz said. So this is my only way to say Im here  you all still matter.

On Sunday, people danced in support of hurricane recovery efforts in Puerto Rico.

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Since the election of President Trump, we have witnessed a series of rulings by Clinton- and Obama-appointed federal judges to block executive orders (E.O.) related to immigration. In each case, the current system has allowed a single unelected judge to block the actions of a duly elected president who has attempted to exercise the authority conferred upon him by the Constitution and the voters. Such judicial tyranny cannot be tolerated.

The only court created by the founders of the Constitution is the Supreme Court (SCOTUS), with all other federal courts established by Congress and administered by the Judicial Branch of government. District courts, appellate courts, and the various circuits are all congressional initiatives. Federal judges are nominated by the Executive Branch but confirmed by the congressional arm of government.

Throughout the history of the Republic, the appointment of judges by the party in power has been an ongoing effort to seat individuals of their own political philosophy. When the parties were each more centrist, the process was somewhat less contentious, but as the left drifted farther from the Constitution using the concept of it being a living document, the divides have widened. We now have a cadre of Obama appointed far-left judges who are prepared to exercise their political ideology over their sworn constitutional duties. Some of these individuals in fact might have been more suitable for ambassadorships than lifetime judicial appointees, for their primary qualifications appear to be their history of donating or bundling money for a sitting president plus their demonstrated talent in the writing of legal fiction.

Currently, judge-shopping, an action elevated to an art form by advocacy groups and lower government entities in liberal circuits, will most likely engender a ruling devoid of legal merit but coinciding with the philosophy of the plaintiff. The activist judge delivers a ruling, which then is arrogantly applied to the entire nation and interpreted as blocking the sitting president. These rulings are most often overturned, but the glacial pace of the courts allows the ruling to stand for an inordinate time, often running out the clock on the original E.O.

There is talk of resolving the situation by appointing strict constitutionalist judges, as Trump is now doing, and "packing" the court. "Dilution" would be a better term, for the sitting liberals will still enjoy their lifetime appointments, and it is axiomatic that impeachment is all but impossible, requiring two thirds of the Senate to agree. While appointments are helpful by improving the odds of finding a judge prepared to fulfill his duties honestly, they do nothing to alleviate the judge-shopping or the inordinate delays.

There is a relatively simple answer: Congress can deliver a fix already contained within the Constitution but requires the defining of a single word. This word is found in Article 3, Section 2, which deals with judicial power and jurisdiction:

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

The solution is for Congress to define "public Ministers" to include the president and vice president of the United States and all Senate-confirmed Cabinet ministers. This would allow the Executive Branch to ignore lower-court rulings for E.O.s and various acts of Congress signed by the president and avoid the interests of the nation being held up by a single unelected lawyer of either political persuasion. Some time limits for appeals should be built in to allow an issue to reach SCOTUS in a reasonable time less than the current two-year hiatus. If the lawyers have done their research, there is no reason why an initial appeal to the circuit appeals court cannot be done in thirty days and a ruling given in another seven.

If SCOTUS refuses a case, then the lower-court ruling will be moot, and the E.O. or legislation will proceed as promulgated. Alternatively, if the nine rule on the case, that decision will be considered constitutionally binding on the Executive and Legislative Branches. Again, a time limit for hearing and ruling should not exceed sixty days.

This will infuriate the left, even though it does not limit leftists' access to the courts or threaten their appointments, for they have used the legal system to achieve goals they could not attain legislatively or at the ballot box. It does, however, return the ability of the president to protect the nation and to address issues that Congress must ultimately decide on. It also removes the ability of the "Resistance" to wait out a sitting president by setting definite time limits for judicial review.

Conversely, if an administration signs an E.O. that is patently unconstitutional, as were many of Obama's declarations, particularly those relating to immigration, the EPA, and other federal agency regulations, a ruling will be rendered before major harm can be done, or the regulation can be overturned by Congress.

If Congress determines that a solution can be achieved by defining a single word, they might look at other areas where this would be a useful technique. For example, the definition of "natural born" in the Fourteenth Amendment has already been kicked back to Congress by SCOTUS to define. It should be defined as an individual born in the USA or territories of at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or of two parents who are both legal residents of the USA. This will end the concept of "anchor babies" as a means of invading the USA.

The Constitution is a document where definitions have been used to bend society on a political basis. Defining a single word, "ministers" in Article 3, as suggested here will end the ability of a politicized judiciary to resist the will of the people being exercised by their elected officials. This can be done without all the bitter and useless efforts to impeach individual judges or to "pack" that branch of government. Congress would thereby remove delay as a tactic while still giving all groups "their day in court"  and ending the current judicial tyranny.
The mainstream media's coverage of President Donald Trump is unprecedented in its lack of fairness and its constant negativity. It represents the ultimate weaponization of big reporting that's in sync with efforts by the shadow government to mobilize the national security apparatus and the other entrenched Deep State bureaucracies for the purpose of weakening and ultimately taking down the 45th president of the United States.

As bad and biased as the reporting is today, it really is nothing new  just more of the same, only much worse. It's become fake news on steroids.

The chart below, by Media Tenor and included in Harvard's Shorenstein Center's May 18, 2017 report "News Coverage of Donald Trump's First 100 Days," measured the "tone of coverage on President Trump by major mainstream media outlets between January 20 and April 29, 2017.

Notwithstanding the orders from on high that may be dictating how the media spin their political coverage, the vast majority of working journalists today are hardcore progressives and leftists who vote en masse for Democrats. One need look no farther than a study by the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity highlighted in an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, published on October 17, 2016, titled "Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash."

People identified in federal campaign finance filings as journalists, reporters, news editors or television anchors  as well as other donors known to be working in journalism  have combined to give more than $396,000 to the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Trump, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis. More than 96 percent of that cash has benefited Clinton: About 430 people who work in journalism have, through August, combined to give about $382,000 to the Democratic nominee, the Center for Public Integrity's analysis indicates. About 50 identifiable journalists have combined to give about $14,000 to Trump.

Ninety-six percent of journalists' contributions went to Clinton, four percent to Trump. These percentages parallel almost exactly the percentage of negative stories about President Trump that were published or broadcast during his first nine months in office. A study by the Pew Research Center for Journalism & Media, published October 2, 2017, found that news stories about President Trump and his administration through September 2017 were positive only 5% of the time. This contrasts with coverage of President Obama during his first year in office, which was only 20% negative. It is obvious that the MSM had a love affair with Barack Obama that lasted for most of his presidency.

The Swift Boat Thing

Leftist media bias goes back even farther than 2016, needless to say. On August 1, 2004, the New York Times published an article by John Tierney on the overwhelming bias of the media in favor of Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry. Tierney cited an:

... unscientific survey we conducted last weekend during a press party at the [Democratic National] convention. We got anonymous answers from 153 journalists, about a third of them based in Washington. When asked who would be a better president, the journalists from outside the Beltway picked Mr. Kerry 3 to 1, and the ones from Washington favored him 12 to 1. Those results jibe with previous surveys over the past two decades showing that journalists tend to be Democrats, especially the ones based in Washington. Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic.

So, almost 14 years ago, journalists based in the nation's capital supported the Democratic Party candidate by a margin of about twelve to one. Journalists from flyover country also favored Kerry but by four to one.

The easy transition of top journalists from their comfy and influential reporting jobs and into positions of spinning news on behalf of the federal government is an everyday occurrence, especially in Democrat administrations. On September 12, 2013, The Atlantic published an article noting:

Time managing editor Rick Stengel is leaving journalism to go work for the State Department, making him at least the 24th reporter to go to work for the Obama administration.

Appearing during the second hour of Sean Hannity's radio program on January 12, Ari Fleischer, a political commentator and the press secretary during the first term of President George W. Bush, noted that "it's even worse with President Trump in the White House because the press can't hide their bias anymore."

"Extremism in the defense of fake news is no vice"

Media bias favoring Democrats goes way back. An egregious example of fake news and toxic bias in the MSM occurred in 1964, and the perpetrator, CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr, went unpunished and emerged with his career unscathed. Brent Baker reminded us of this sad but still relevant old story in an article at NewsBusters on July 25, 2010 on the occasion of Schorr's death. Baker cited an article published nine years earlier in The Weekly Standard by Andrew Ferguson, who was reviewing a book by Schorr.

During the Republican Convention in San Francisco in 1964 that nominated conservative icon Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) for president, Schorr reported a fake news story that aired on the CBS television network during its wall-to-wall coverage of the convention. Speaking from Germany, where he was based as a prominent foreign correspondent, Schorr said:

It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, center of Germany's right wing. It is also known as Hitler's one-time stomping ground.

The only problem was that the story was completely made up and false. Goldwater never traveled to Germany after he received his party's nomination for president in 1964, and he never intended to do so. With no bills to pay for reporting fake news even back then, Schorr continued to report for CBS News for the next decade and a half and then spent the last 25 years of his life working in high-profile reporting, hosting, and commentating positions for National Public Radio with the title "senior news analyst." When he died on July 23, 2010 at age 93, NPR headlined its lead story "Journalism Legend Daniel Schorr Dies At 93."

These days, poll after poll is confirming, as Gallup headlined one of its reports on the subject published on September 14, 2016, that "Americans' Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low."

Now that "fake news" has entered the popular lexicon, The Hill reported on May 24, 2017  three months into the Trump administration:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the mainstream press is full of fake news, a sentiment that is held by a majority of voters across the ideological spectrum. According to data from the latest Harvard-Harris poll, which was provided exclusively to The Hill, 65 percent of voters believe there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media.

These recent reports appear to confirm the classic observation by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, first published in France in 1849, that "the more things change, the more they remain the same" ("plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose")  except that the situation regarding the news business is arguably worse now in light of the mainstream media having almost completely lost what was left of their minds, and all of their remaining credibility, in their totally biased coverage of President Donald J. Trump.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. In addition to his writing, Peter has appeared as a guest commentator on NBC; PBS; the CBC; and, on January 4, 2018, the BBC. For announcements and links to a wide selection of Peter's published work, follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.
The Democrats and their media allies did everything they could to defeat Trump's tax cuts and reforms. They continually lied to the public in a bid to make them believe that less than half of the taxpayers would actually get cuts and that the bill was meant to benefit only big, rich corporations. Therefore, we got all sorts of articles, obviously fed to journalists by left-wing think-tanks and Democratic politicos, claiming that the tax cuts aren't good or aren't performing as promised.

So, two weeks into a ten-year program, we are now hearing whining that all the promises of the broad-based reform haven't been fulfilled yet. (Eight years into Obamacare with nothing close to what was promised hasn't caught their attention  they're still telling us how good it is.)

It's a stupid thing for Democrats to keep holding onto this mythology, because they are about to be swamped by events.

But holding onto the narrative they are. Here's one example of a New York Times article whose purpose is to deride bonuses and tax cuts, claiming that the prime beneficiary is solely the greedy rich, particularly the corporations. It's a narrative that's pretty close to what House minority leader Nancy Pelosi has been saying, in her claims that corporations are only handing out crumbs and pretty much keeping all the tax gains for themselves. The article tries to portray corporations as evil and greedy and keeping too much for themselves, while the bonuses are just dog biscuits to the public. Naturally, the government is never greedy when Democrats want to take so much money and power for themselves  just corporations.

Somehow, Democrats don't seem to care that over half Americans in surveys don't have so much as a small savings nest egg to pay for emergencies, so my guess is that the millions of these same Americans who have gotten bonuses along with the many who have gotten raises (think of how many people Walmart alone employs) are happy that they have gotten these bonuses after eight years of Obama and essentially flat wages. A bonus of $1,000 is certainly better than zero, which is what they would have gotten had the Democrats gotten their way.

I am actually amazed at how fast the money from the tax cuts is trickling through. We're talking about millions in bonuses and raises in less than two weeks into a ten-year plan, and these are only the ones that have been announced.

Here's another article complaining about the tax cuts. From the Associated Press, we read: "Less than meets the eye, bonuses are not raises." (Isn't it great that they use the word "less" in the headline?)

The bonuses are one-time payouts, not the permanent pay raises that Trump and congressional Republicans have said will eventually result from the corporate tax cuts. Over time, bonuses are far less valuable to employees than wage increases. So far, most companies haven't said whether any permanent pay increases are in the works. Economists caution that the corporate income tax cut's effect on average pay, if any, might not become apparent for several years. "As a worker, it's great to get a one-off bonus, but that doesn't guarantee anything for the next year," said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont. "You'd rather have the raise, because next year you're working off the higher base." "The bulk of the corporate tax cuts should accrue to people who hold stock in companies," said Ethan Harris, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "Workers benefit much more from a cut in taxes on ordinary income. In other words, better to get a direct cut than a spillover from cuts to others." In some cases, the companies are sharing only a sliver of their tax-cut windfalls. Bank of America's bonuses will cost it roughly $145 million  only about 4 percent of the $3.5 billion that Goldman Sachs estimates Bank of America will receive from the tax cut.

I believe that it is great for the economy that close to 100% of Americans got a cut in their actual tax rates, but I believe that the even bigger benefit to the economy is in the large permanent tax cuts to corporations and other businesses. I am thinking of small businesses and their owners, who create the jobs. Under the previous tax law, corporations were parking trillions of dollars of profits overseas while politicians were pretending they would eventually get 35% of that money because of double-taxation. It didn't pan out as they had planned, because Democrats just don't get human nature, including how humans respond to incentives. Now, with the new tax regime, companies will bring a significant amount of that missing money back because of new rates up to 15.5%. As a result, the government will now get hundreds of billions of actual dollars instead of pretending it will eventually get the overseas cash in the end, which in reality has yielded zero.

With the lower rates and the money brought back, businesses will now spend, invest, raise dividends, buy back stock, or save the money. All of these uses are more efficient and effective in making the economy grow than the government taking a larger share and redistributing some. The multiplier effect will be astonishing and, as is always the case, much greater than economists are predicting. Minorities and the young will certainly have more opportunities to move up the economic ladder.

After that, we will see companies choosing to stay in the U.S., with many more coming to the U.S. because of the new 21% corporate rate, which is finally competitive by global standards, with the added benefit of no threat of double-taxation. In addition, there will be fewer regulations, which will cause expansion and more startups in the U.S. The business climate is now good compared to when government was seeking to step on the throat of businesses and its leaders continually badmouthed them.

It is a shame that the Democrats wouldn't go along with the cuts and reform, which is why the individual rates can't be permanent, but at least the corporate rates are permanent. Corporations need permanent rates to be competitive and make long-term decisions.

Something I wish everyone would learn is that when stock prices go up, they help 100% of us, whether we directly have investments or not. This is because all of us have a stake in how much government pension funds earn on their investments. This generation and future generations will not be taxed so much if the public pensions and entitlements such as Social Security earn more and the government has more to spend on human needs. Capitalism is what built this country, not government.

We will see the media continually, on behalf of Democrats, diminish the effects of tax reform and cuts on economic growth, because, after all, there is always an election coming up. People and businesses doing well do not help the Democrats win. That is the goal: power for the Democrats instead of the people.

I can't think of any other government program where the results of such a revolutionary reform have been challenged within two weeks of inception. Democrats are in for a surprise.

Jack Hellner is a certified public accountant who works on individual and corporate taxes.
An 11-year-old Toronto girl says she was attacked while walking to school with her brother by "a man dressed in black" who came up behind her and started to cut off her hijab.

The incident occurred in a Toronto suburb. The little girl also told police that the man attacker her again, trying to cut off her hijab, even though she and her brother were walking with other pedestrians.

The attack set off a wave of indignation across Canada.

The Guardian:

"I felt confused, scared, terrified," Khawlah Noman, who is in Grade 6, told reporters at her school on Friday. "I screamed. The man just ran away. We followed this crowd of people to be safe. He came again. He continued cutting my hijab again." The Toronto district school board said it was "shocked" to hear about the assault which Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne called a "cowardly act of hatred" that did not represent the province. Police did not have anyone in custody. The attack comes as Canada approaches the first anniversary of a deadly shooting in a Quebec City mosque that killed six people at prayer. A French-Canadian university student has been charged as the sole suspect. Last month, a Quebec judge suspended a law banning people from wearing niqabs and other face coverings while giving or receiving public services. Researchers have documented an increase in far-right extremist activity in Canada, much of it targeting Muslims.

This would be a terrible, horrific attack  if it actually happened. After investigating all weekend, the Toronto police said on Monday that no such attack occurred.

CP24:

"There was an extensive investigation Friday and over the weekend and quite simply, investigators came to the conclusion, considering all the evidence they had, that what was described did not happen," police spokesman Mark Pugash said. Pugash declined to call the incident a hoax, but said police now consider the investigation closed. "I think we did absolutely what people would expect, which is we don't jump to conclusions. We work on evidence and we invested a lot of time and a lot of effort over a fairly short period of time," Pugash said. "I think we owe it to everybody to examine particularly serious allegations in a detailed way and that's what we did." No one was arrested and there are no charges pending on connection with the investigation, he said. There was no indication from police or school officials as to why the girl would have made up the story if it did not happen.

So dozens of man-hours are spent investigating this incident by police, and when they discover it's a hoax, not only do they refuse to identify it as such, but they also refuse to arrest the perpetrator for filing a false police report.

The school district, who made a huge deal out of the incident when it occurred, holding a press conference with the kid and her family, maintained a stoic silence after releasing a statement:

The Toronto District School Board initially issued a short statement Monday saying they were thankful the assault never occurred and that they would not comment further. However facing mounting criticism over the fact that the girl and her family were made available to the media Friday in a news conference at the school, the school board released a lengthier statement Monday afternoon explaining that they dispatched a spokesperson to the school after police tweeted about the incident. "At no time did the TDSB call a press conference[;] however[,] spokespeople from the TDSB and Toronto Police made themselves available to answer any questions," TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird said in the statement. "This was done inside the school due to the bad weather outside. "After expressing concern that they were going to be approached by media outside while trying to leave, as well as a concern that no members of the community be subject to the alleged perpetrator, the family was asked if they would like to join the TDSB spokesperson as she spoke to media. The family members said they would speak to media and it was our understanding that this happened after, not before, they provided statements to police."

Got that? They never called a press conference last Friday, but they held one anyway. Any time the denial of what actually happened is as involved and convoluted as that one, you know they're lying.

Pam Geller, writing at Breitbart, lists some other hate crime hoaxes:

There are so very many of these instances, it's astonishing. Last August, also in Canada, a Muslim claimed he was verbally abused and punched in a restroom; police found he had "exaggerated the interaction." In London in July, a Muslima falsely claimed that her hijab was pulled off in what she called a racist attack. In March, the General Teaching Council for Scotland accused a Muslim teacher of forging a letter from a colleague saying: "Don't trust Muslim teachers." That same month, posters calling for the internment of Muslims at the University of California-San Diego were found to have been put up not by "Islamophobes," but by leftist students trying to smear opposition to jihad terror. And in Montreal, a Muslim was charged with a terror hoax for allegedly making a bomb threat targeting Muslim university students. Last February, an Ohio Muslim was charged with painting anti-Arab graffiti on the garage door of a Muslim family. And in a notorious incident last December, a Muslim teen claimed her hijab was ripped off and she was verbally abused in a crowded New York City car by two Trump[-]supporters; after the story garnered international headlines, several reports said that she had made up the whole thing  apparently to avoid punishment from her parents for missing her curfew and dating a Christian.

There have been genuine cases of violence, even murder, against Muslims, but jumping to conclusions as the press and school district did in this case is typical of how so-called "hate crimes" play out. The incident appears on the front page or tops the TV news, and if it is discovered that the crime never happened, it's buried or never even reported.

As long as a "hate crime" advances a politically correct agenda, it is covered. When it might damage the cause when it's shown to be a hoax, correction of the record is given short shrift.
Does anyone care that Maxine Waters (Calif.), John Lewis (Ga.), Frederica Wilson (Fla.), Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), and Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) are going to skip the State of the Union address? Of course not. They are, as usual, behaving like spoiled children who have been appeased and coddled for years into thinking their constituents or anyone else cares when they reveal their lowbrow immaturity. Their constituents probably are embarrassed.



President Trump's 2017 SOTU address enjoyed ratings almost 20% higher than Obama's 2016 address.

These members of the House claim that President Trump exudes "racism and hatred." What a crock! He does no such thing. But so desperate are these moonbats to malign this man that they will say and do anything, no matter how ridiculous, to further their anti-Trump agenda.

All the Democrats have is their anti-Trumpism. Trump, whatever word he used in that closed-door meeting, was talking about dysfunctional nations, not the people who live there and want to come here. But common sense dictates that we cannot take in every person from a failed state. America, like most of Europe, is being overrun by immigrants from third-world countries who do not speak English. Many are illiterate. They come from cultures that have nothing in common with the West. They will not find work and so will be a drain on the government of whatever state they end up in and the federal government as well.

California is toast thanks to its ongoing open invitation to illegals. That state now has the largest population of homeless people and the highest rate of poverty. That is what the left hath wrought. And now that California is an official sanctuary state, the situation will only get worse.

American voters in 2016 bucked the well organized, Democrat-controlled system and miraculously, perhaps divinely, elected Donald Trump rather than the so, so corrupt Hillary Clinton. Enough voters were sick to death of the Clintons, the failed economic policies of Obama, and the disastrous race relations promulgated by Obama. Over the eight years of his administration, he not so slyly promoted the notion that law enforcement as a group is racist, culpable for the deaths of black men and guilty of all manner of crimes. He not so subtly initiated open season on police across the country. Too many law enforcement persons were killed by demented people who thought Obama had given his tacit permission to take them out. The SOTU boycotters were all on board with Obama's anti-police rhetoric.

President Obama was bad for America; he encouraged black Americans and all other minorities to see themselves as, victims. By doing so, he invalidated the incredible grace and dignity of the black families who prevailed and succeeded after the Civil War, all those black families who voted Republican until the early 1960s. Those families did not teach their children to be victims. Read Clarence Thomas's books and Larry Elder's book about growing up with actual role models. They learned, to the benefit of us all, not to be victims. The same holds true for national treasures Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, and others. There are too many brilliant and wise black leaders and thinkers to list here. None of them supported Barack Obama or his policies for good reasons.

Today's young people, whether black, white, hispanic, Asian, Indian, or American Indian, or women, gay, or "transgender," are all being taught that they are victims, that they are somehow oppressed. They are being taught that they are victims of Western civilization, of the Judeo-Christian values on which our civilization is based. University education now nearly criminalizes religious belief unless it is Muslim; Islam must be protected, no matter how genocidal it becomes. Same sex-attracted people and people who think they're members of the opposite sex must be valued over and above the deplorable "normals." The progressive left long ago moved beyond equality of opportunity to government-mandated equality of outcome. It will never happen, but leftists are determined to punish those who revere the individual liberty on which our Constitution is based, on which America was founded.

The anti-Trump half of the country cannot accept their loss. They continue to mourn the fact that the most corrupt person to ever seek the office of president lost! That Mrs. Clinton's crimes over the past forty years are well documented matters not. The progressive left does not value honor, faith, or loyalty. Its members value only power, political power over the deplorables, those of us who revere the Constitution and the glorious ideals on which it is based. If and when the truth of the wholesale corruption of the FBI, the DOJ, the DNC, and the Clintons does come out, there will be a long awaited reckoning.

There are millions of Americans for whom it would be the honor of a lifetime to be at the State of the Union address. Since there will be at least five empty seats, perhaps the vainglorious five will put them up for a lottery. Those five and whoever else joins in their petty snit do not deserve to be there.
Western democracies, the most prosperous and peaceful societies in the history of the world, are gradually losing their commitment to civil order, the set of norms and beliefs that differentiate them from places where you can't walk down the street confident that you will not be robbed, coerced, or killed by random thugs or predatory government. The rise of victimology, and the conviction that a purported "victim" is justified in violently lashing out at "oppressors," is poisonous.

Once people with any sort of prestige or prominence start justifying the use of violence to fight people and ideas they disagree with, the slippery slope toward a violent society gets an even steeper angle.

Last night, Trevor Noah, the South African comedian who inherited Comedy Central's Daily Show franchise from Jon Stewart and managed to lose a large part of the audience, seemed to make light of mob violence directed against a global retailing chain because some people took racial offense at one of its ads.

The specifics of the offense that sparked mob violence:

Several stores belonging to Swedish clothing company H&M have been attacked and trashed by members of Economic Freedom Fighters. They were protesting an advertisement by the firm widely seen as racist.

Noah's response was to laugh at the supposed triviality of mob violence that wrecked several stores in South Africa.

NOAH: "But first, you guys remember how H&M got in trouble last week over an ad for what some said was a racist hoodie. Over the weekend, the news of what they did got to the capital of black people, and they are not having it. NEWS 8 [clip]: "Videos and photos are popping up all over social media of protesters ransacking some H&M stores in South Africa after the clothing company released a controversial ad the critics are calling racist. Earlier this week, the clothing company apologized for the widely criticized ad and removed the hoodie from its stores." NOAH: "They really trashed that H&M. Look at that place. That's got to be at least $26 worth of damage easily."

Actually, the damage to multiple stores was serious:

The experience of having stores trashed certainly would discourage future investment (and jobs) on the part of H&M and other global retailers (and other businesses) in the locations affected. And the absence of foreign investment will eventually be blamed for the persistence of poverty. Noah has himself chosen to leave his native South Africa  a nation where violence rules the streets in Johannesburg and elsewhere  and make his life in the United States, where people enjoy a higher level of civil order. But he is doing his best to encourage the sort of behavior among his viewers that will eventually bring about a similar level of violence and chaos to our streets.
In a bid to slant the news and convince us that President Trump is racist, CNN's Chris Cuomo decided to give viewers a demonstration of how it works, dismissing President Trump's Indian-American deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, as "Raj whatever-his-name-is."

Ordinarily, this is what some people do when confronted with a long or difficult to pronounce (to them) name and not enough industry to get it right.

In a newsman, who is paid to know the facts, it's not only incompetent; it's pretty disgusting.

On first pass, Cuomo's flip-off has a whiff of stereotyping, given that in some Indian languages, such as Telugu, spoken by 75 million people in south India, many names are indeed long.

However, the last name "Shah" is not one of them. It's a one-syllable four-letter word whose meaning Americans actually know: king, as in nearby Iran, and this last name likely has the same meaning. And if this quiz is correct, it's also the 78th most common name in India, a nation of one billion people.

So what we are seeing here is both an effort to stereotype someone's name as inconvenient and an effort to dismiss Shah as someone insignificant, on the grounds that he's Indian-American and he works for President Trump.

This is getting to be a pattern. President Trump's FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has been subject to horrific threats and racist attacks from the left based on his administrative decision to end net neutrality.

Joe Biden, one the Democratic Party's leading lights, has been continuous in his willingness to stereotype Indian immigrants by low-level jobs, identifying them as cab-drivers and convenience store clerks in separate incidents. It's another bid to dismiss Indian-Americans as insignificant, despite the very different picture in reality. Some immigrants may start from humble positions, but Indian-Americans actually have the highest education levels of any immigrant group, the highest marriage rate, and the lowest divorce rate. As you may imagine, not many show up on crime blotters.

They have just one problem: quite a few of them are conservative, and most supported President Trump in the 2016 election. Indian-Americans, see, shouldn't be conservatives, in the eyes of the left, any more than black Americans are "allowed" to be, according to the left. That's why they are subject to racism from these leftists, who are convinced they can get away with it. Their intolerance of political views is matched by their intolerance of Indian-Americans as people.

As the mainstream press and the left-wing political class try to make a collective howl about President Trump's supposed racism, the truth, from this CNN correspondent, comes out.
According to data compiled by the Center for Immigration Studies, one of the most horrific categories of crime, kidnapping, is vastly disproportionately committed by immigrants, legal and illegal. Daniel Greenfield of Front Page Magazine reports:

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 42.4 percent of federal kidnapping convictions are of non-citizens. Non-citizens also account for 31.5 percent of federal drug convictions. Even though theyre only 8.4% of the population. Obviously there arent enough Americans to commit these crimes.

President Trump was excoriated by self-righteous progressives for pointing out this disproportion, when he said of criminal alien gangs, They kidnap, they extort, they rape and they rob.

Much of the kidnapping spree is related to activities of MS-13, an ultra-violent gang from El Salvador, whose members were prevented from being deported by the TPS (Temporary Protected Status) program that President Trump just ended, to further cries of alarm and racism from the progs. They want us to look elsewhere. The New York Times:

With his protected status, Carlos Jiron, another Salvadoran, started a small contracting business and won bids for big jobs, including to paint federal buildings in the Washington area. We have built a life here, said Mr. Jiron, 41, who lives with his wife and two American-born children in a four-bedroom house they bought in Springfield, Va. He will have to decide whether to take his children to El Salvador, where he says they would not maximize their potential and would face safety threats; leave them with guardians in the United States; or remain in the country at the risk of arrest and deportation as one of the millions of undocumented immigrants.

No mention in the New York Times story just quoted of:

Over in New York, five MS-13 members and associates were caught trying to kidnap and randomly murder a16-year-old. Prestige in the El Salvador gang comes from murder. Bodies of MS-13 initiation murders keep popping up in public parks near prominent locales. In Texas, two MS-13 gang members kidnapped three teenage girls, raped them and killed a 15-year-old girl in a Satanic ritual. Maybe its a good thing that there are some crimes that Americans wont commit. And we should keep it that way. Ending Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador keeps Americans safer. (snip) Video of the murder was sent to MS-13 leaders to win a higher status for the killers. Last year, the media had portrayed her as a victim.

This is just collateral damage on the way to importing a voting majority for the Democrats. And besides, it adds another minority victim with which to characterize America as violent and unjust. A twofer, if you will. If MS-13 were kidnapping people off the streets of the Upper West Side, the New York Times might care more about the issue.
The sale of a substantial portion of US uranium reserves to a Russian company controlled by Vladimir Putin  who openly desires to control the world uranium market  never could have been approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-AG Eric Holder, if the dimensions of the scandal being investigated by the FBI and Justice Department had been known. That the scandal was hidden from the public is itself scandalous.

Last Friday, an 11-count indictment was unsealed, naming:

a former DoD intelligence analyst-turned uranium transportation executive who stands accused of a bribery and money laundering scheme involving a Russian nuclear official connected to the Uranium One deal. The indictment corroborates a November report by The Hill that an FBI mole deeply embedded in the Russian uranium industry had gathered extensive evidence of the scheme. Mark Lambert, 54, of Mount Airy, Maryland, was charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and to commit wire fraud, seven counts of violating the FCPA, two counts of wire fraud and one count of international promotion money laundering.

The details of the case against Lambert are much less important than the cast of characters that kept the scandal under wraps while our uranium reserves were sold to Russia. Zero Hedge explains in a long and complicated post. The gist:

Robert Mueller's FBI had been investigating the scheme since at least 2008 - with retiring Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe assigned to the ongoing investigation which was hidden from the Committee on Foreign Investments in the Untid States (CFIUS). Had they known, the committee never would have approved the Uranium One deal with TENEX's parent company, Rosatom. Four individuals were eventually prosecuted and given plea agreements after the Uranium One deal was approved. The prosecuting DOJ attorneys? Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and top Mueller investigator in the Trump-Russia probe, Andrew Weissman - who praised former acting Attorney General Sally Yates for defying Trump. Unsurprisingly, all four indicted individuals were handed extremely light sentences, none of which made headlines. The judge? Theodore Chuang - an Obama appointee who went to Harvard Law at the same time as Obama, advised Hillary Clinton as "Counselor on detail to the United States Department of State," and just so happened to strike down Trump's "Travel Ban" Executive Order. Chuang's wife, Jacinta Ma served as a senior policy advisor to Michelle Obama.

It is striking how the same cast of characters who minimized the scandal are now going after President Trump.

Update:

Imperator Rex (hat tip: Clarice Feldman) lays out clearly, step by step, what the players in the cabal did at each stage of the unfolding operation that kept the scandal under wraps and went after Trump. It is worth the time if you want to grasp who the players are and what they did.

.
Climate alarmism, like all leftist propaganda, has turned virulent among its many followers. It has been widely chronicled how the Gang Green  the radical environmental Nazis pushing climate change to establish an international order  has threatened nonbelievers or at least fantasized about horrible things being done to those who simply do not agree with their marginal and rather manipulated science. We've had professors calling for the death penalty for climate change "denial," and we've had calls for Nuremberg-style trials for "deniers." They have tried to call those who do not believe in global warming insane. Even NASA scientist James Hansen called for trials of "deniers," a blood libel term designed to evoke visions of neo-Nazis.

Well, here's another one for you. Over at Quadrant, Tony Thomas has unearthed a 2008 fantasy document from Forum for the Future, a hard-left Green infection posing as a non-profit group.

Their dream? A gulag archipelago for climate change-deniers.

The Kerguelen islands are horridly cold and windy specks near the Antarctic, populated by a few score of French scientists and several thousand sheep. But to a leading British green group, Forum for the Future, it has enormous potential as an internationally[] run penal colony for global warming s[k]eptics.



The [f]orum's founder-director is Jonathon Porritt, 67, Eton- and Oxford-bred [c]hancellor of Keele University, adviser to Prince Charles, and Green Party activist. The Forum's fancy for Kerguelen can be found in its 76-page report "Climate Futures  Responses to Climate Change in 2030," written in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard, a company [that] should know better. This scenario, one of five, involves the naughty world delaying the reduction of emissions, for which we must all suffer.

It isn't good enough for these green fascists to win the argument; they must punish those who disagree with them, and in as severe a fashion as Stalin did.



The report further states:

Expensive, state-funded information campaigns reinforce the need for changes to lifestyles and aim to keep the mandate for state intervention strong. Inevitably parallels are drawn between this and the authoritarian state propaganda of the twentieth century. "Climate crime" is a social faux pas everywhere, but in some countries it is a crime to publicly question the existence of anthropogenic climate change or to propose actions that could in some way contribute to climate change. It is very rare to come across dissenting voices with any real power, but resistance to overly strong state intervention is occasionally violent. The media in some countries [have] been permitted to discuss whether the single focus on resolving climate change means that other equally important or inter-linked issues are being ignored.

So it is fine for government to conduct propaganda to enforce the Official Truth. The Soviets had a word for that: "pravda."



The report continues:

[I]n some countries a licen[s]e is now required to have children and these are awarded according to a points system. Climate-friendly behavio[]r means points[.]

So we must have a breeding license, and to acquire one, we must be good little boys and girls, obedient to our masters.

This appears to be an astonishingly radical, revolutionary document, yet it is not outside the mainstream  some of the names of those who backed this are surprising.

The list includes Kimberly-Clark, Unilever, the Shell Foundation, Target, and a host of others.

The point here is to illustrate the totalitarian mindset of these people. They can't let reality speak for itself; they have to silence those who point out that they have been wrong on many occasions. Like Herod imprisoning and then murdering John the Baptist, these people will do anything to shut the mouths of those trying to stop their dreams  dreams that, experience suggests, will become nightmares to the majority if enacted.

Liberals  and that includes the environmentalists  are juveniles. They think like pre-adults, reason like pre-adults. And when confronted with the reality that their juvenile thinking does not comport with the way things work, their answer is as juvenile: to shut mouths and punish those who disagree with them.

To dream of the murder or exile of an opponent is the ultimate in childish thinking. These people do not belong anywhere near the mechanisms of power.

Hat tip: Paul Driessen

Read more from Tim and friends at The Aviary www.tbirdnow.mee.nu.
We are now in day four or five of the "s-hole" crisis. I can't wait for Day 220, like what we used to watch on Nightline during the Iran hostage crisis.

Thankfully, I am not stuck in any airport and forced to watch a certain network do the s-hole shuffle 24/7.

The media's reaction to the "s-hole" episode can be divided into two groups:

1. Some journalists immediately went to the race card  i.e., Donald Trump is a racist, as we've been saying all along.

2. He does not have the temperament, as we've been warning you all along.

It did not occur to any journalist to ask two simple questions:

1. Did he really say it? Two senators say he did not.

2. What were Senator Durbin's motives? Why would a U.S. senator come out of a private meeting and say something like that? Did he not take into account the damage such a statement would inflict on the country? Is it all about being anti-Trump?

And then Congressman John Lewis, who is supposed to be immune from any criticism because he was a civil rights activist, calls President Trump a racist. Why didn't someone challenge such an irresponsible assertion?

Well, all of this is having a rough impact on the media's credibility, as we see in this post:

About 2 in 3 American adults say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current affairs, according to a Pew Research Center report last month. The survey found that Republicans and Democrats are about equally likely to say that "fake news" leaves Americans deeply confused about current events. Despite the concern, more than 8 in 10 feel very or somewhat confident that they can recognize news that is fabricated, the survey found.

As we watch another day of more s-hole panels, it may be worthwhile to remind them to stop digging when you are in an s-hole.

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
A two-hour bumpy ride from Uyuni across Bolivias high plains will take you to the small town of San Vicente. At the entrance to this remote settlement is a sign that proclaims: Welcome to San Vicente. Here lie Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid.

The notorious outlaw duo, made famous by the 1969 movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, allegedly met their death in a gun fight at this old miners' settlement high in the southern Bolivian Andes, not far from Uyunis famous salt flats. On the towns only cemetery, an area has been cordoned-off to mark Butch's supposed grave. About a decade ago, a small one-room museum was opened to celebrate the towns strange legacy, and private tour operators from the nearby towns of Uyuni and Tupiza take tourists along the "death trail". Butch and Sundance hats, t-shirts and key chains are sold in the San Vicente town store.

The welcome sign at San Vicente, in southern Bolivia. Photo credit: bradshawsinbolivia.blogspot.in

The story of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a fascinating one.

Butch Cassidy was born as Robert Leroy Parker in 1866. During his teen years, while working from ranch to ranch, Parker met and forged a close relationship with a cowboy named Mike Cassidy, on whose honor he chose the nickname "Butch Cassidy". The Butch part is said to have come from his brief stint as a butcher in one of the ranches he worked.

Cassidy started his criminal career stealing horses, before he began associating with other criminals and going after bigger pursuits. One of his trusted associates was Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, who named himself The Sundance Kid, after a successful robbery in Sundance, Wyoming.

By the end of the 19th century, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and other members of the Wild Bunch gang became notorious for robbing banks and holding up trains. In 1901, with law enforcement agencies hot on their trails, the outlaws headed to South America, changed their names and found employment at the Concordia Tin Mine in Bolivia. Ironically, their job was to guard the company payroll.

The Wild Bunch gang. Harry A. Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid, is sitting on the far left. Robert Leroy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, is sitting on the far right.

Cassidy wanted to settle down as a respectable rancher, but old habits, as they say, die hard and the two returned to their old ways. Now this is where the story turns interesting. On November 3, 1908, a convoy of mules carrying the payroll of a mining company near San Vicente was attacked and robbed by two masked men. The bandits then proceeded to San Vicente, where they lodged in a small boarding house.

The houses owner became suspicious of the two foreign lodgers when he saw that a mule they had in their possession carried the mining companys brand on the mule's left flank. He alerted a nearby telegraph officer who in turn notified a small Bolivian Army cavalry unit stationed nearby.

On the evening of November 6, three soldiers from the regiment along with the police chief and other officials surrounded the lodge with the intention of arresting the robbers. But the bandits opened fire and a gun fight ensued. After several hours of exchanging fire, all went quiet inside the house. When the Bolivian soldiers entered the house the following morning, they saw two men lying in a pool of blood, riddled with bullets. Apparently, one of them had shot his fatally wounded partner to put him out of his misery before killing himself with the final bullet.

No positive identification of the dead bandits were ever made, but somehow it was assumed that the saga of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had come to an end. The bandits were buried at the small San Vicente cemetery and the towns name was forever engraved in history books.

Predictably, rumors persist till this day that the outlaws escaped the law and lived out their remaining lives anonymously in the United States or another country. Cassidy's sister, Lula Parker Betenson, who died in 1980, even claims that Cassidy returned to the family home in Circleville, Utah. Another theory, perpetuated by a doctor, states that Cassidy went to Paris and had his face altered by a surgeon.

Local historians believe that there is enough evidence to support that Butch and Sundance died in Bolivia, but in the end its all circumstantial.

Somewhere in this cemetery lies the supposed graves of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Photo credit: cliff hellis/Flickr

The town of San Vicente. Photo credit: cliff hellis/Flickr

San Vicentes main street. Photo credit: cliff hellis/Flickr

An information board at the San Vicente Museum. Photo credit: www.triphistoric.com
(ANSA) - Santiago, January 16 - Pope Francis apologised for child sex abuse by the clergy on the first full day of his visit to Chile on Tuesday.

"Here I feel bound to express my pain and shame at the irreparable damage caused to children by some ministers of the Church," he said as he addressed Chile's government authorities including President Michelle Bachelet, representatives of civil society, and the diplomatic corps at the La Moneda Palace in Santiago.

"I am one with my brother bishops, for it is right to ask for forgiveness and make every effort to support the victims, even as we commit ourselves to ensuring that such things do not happen again".

Chile's Catholic Church has been struggling to keep up with a changing and modernising, increasingly skeptical and secular society for years.

Then, in 2010, it was was plunged into crisis when evidence emerged that it covered up for a prominent and powerful priest, something of a father figure for the Chilean elite, who had sexually abused minors in his high-class Santiago parish over decades. In February 2011, after several years of a Catholic canonical investigation, the Vatican found tKaradima guilty of sexually abusing minors and psychological abuse in Chile.

It sent him to a "life of prayer and penitence" and to "lifelong prohibition from the public exercise of any ministerial act, particularly confession and the spiritual guidance of any category of persons." But the Chilean Church has yet to fully recover from the scandal. Many of the local faithful are still furious over a 2015 decision by Pope Francis to appoint a bishop who had been one of Karadima's proteges. Bishop Juan Barros, appointed to lead the faithful in the southern city of Osorno, has always denied he knew that Karadima was Chile's worst clerical sexual predator.

But many Chileans have shown they are skeptical of Barros's claims. Francis's visit has also been disrupted by attacks on churches by political groups protesting against the government and the Vatican and campaigning for Indios rights - nine attacks in all, with the three latest coming on Monday night.

Another three churches were firebombed in Chile last night in protest against Pope Francis's visit to the South American country, sources said Tuesday.

Two of the churches are in Cunco, 700km from Santiago, in the Araucania region, which Francis will visit tomorrow. According to fire services the two churches went up in flames at the same time. The other fire was at the parish of the Mother of Divine Providence at Puente Alto, on the outskirts of the Chilean capital. According to eye witnesses a group of five people threw firebombs against the door, and the flags of Chile and the Vatican were burned.

The Argentine pontiff arrived in Chile for a three-day trip Monday. He will go on to a three-day trip in Peru.


(ANSA) - Rome, January 15 - Italy's mission in Niger is to fight illicit traffic at the request of he Niger government, Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano said Monday.

"Niger is on the southern border of Libya and our task will be to help the Niger armed forces to control an area crossed by armed bands", he told the Senate foreign and defence affairs committees.

Also testifying, Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti said the Niger mission would reach a maxium number of 470 men while an ongoing mission to Libya would be slightly boosted to 400 units overall.

She said Italy was defending its "strategic interests" in these and other missions, against migrant trafficking and other issues.

"The heart of our interventions is the enlarged Mediterranean, from the Balkans to the Sahel, to the Horn of Africa," she said.

Pinotti said the Niger mission was a "non-combat mission".

She said "we will not guard borders".

The defence minister stressed that it was a training mission.


(ANSA) -Naples, January 16 - Interior Minister Marco Minniti said after chairing a meeting in Naples on a spate of attacks by youth gangs known as 'baby gangs' that they used "terror methods". He said that all the perpetrators of the latest attacks had been apprehended. Minniti vowed a crackdown on the gangs.

Carabinieri police said earlier they had nabbed seven members of a gang of youths that allegedly conducted 17 robberies near Naples in October and November last year, including four minors.

Most of the victims of the robberies were the same age as the youths who allegedly staged the heists at bars and railway stations in the province of Naples.

They allegedly used toys guns to threaten the victims and force them to hand over their cell phones. Two members of the gang were arrested late in November.

The four minors have been taken to a detention centre, while the other three are in Poggioreale prison, the sources said.

Interior Minister Minniti chaired the security meeting at the Naples prefect's office following the recent escalation of attacks by gangs of youths in the area.

A minor was insulted and punched in the face near to Naples' Policlinico metro station late on Sunday, in the latest in the string of attacks by so-called 'baby gangs' of teenagers.

The victim, a 16-year-old who said he did not know the attackers, suffered a broken nose.

On Saturday two pupils aged 14 and 15 suffered an unprovoked assault from a gang of around 10 youths armed with chains at the province of Naples town on Pomigliano d'Arco.

The teens' mobile telephones and money were stolen, but investigators suspect that thirst for violence, rather than theft, was the prime motive.

"We are going through difficult days that can only be successfully addressed if we are united," said Naples Mayor Luigi de Magistris.

"Naples will get through it and everyone must do their part.

"I'm sure we will win this challenge because naples is a city of life, not of death".

Another case was that of Arturo, a 17-year-old stabbed in the throat in the southern city a week before Christmas.

Around 800 students took to the streets of Naples, along with de Magistris and Justice Undersecretary Gennaro Migliore, to protest against crime and violence after that attack.

The boy returned to Naples Cuoco high school on Monday and was greeted by a big banner reading "Welcome back Arturo".

"I'm embarrassed because I didn't expect so many journalists at my return to school or this reception from my school mates," he said.

"Now it's my teachers who are waiting for me, more than my companions.

"I'm excited. This place was one of the things I missed.

"I want to hurry. I have a lesson".

There are also reports a gang of youths of North African origin mugged a group of four minors in Turin on the night between Saturday and Sunday.


(ANSA) -Naples, January 16 - Interior Minister Marco Minniti said after chairing a meeting in Naples on a spate of attacks by youth gangs known as 'baby gangs' that they used "terror methods". He said that all the perpetrators of the latest attacks had been apprehended. Minniti vowed a crackdown on the gangs.

The interior ministry will "immediately" send 100 police units to patrol the streets in the area, Minniti said.

"These are acts of unacceptable violence," he said.

Minniti said Camorra gang members would have their parents' rights rescinded in such cases.

He also said there would be a zero-tolerance policy on illegal motor scooters.

Minniti said the ministry had hatched the idea of having police offices in each single municipality in order to fight the crime wave.

Carabinieri police said earlier they had nabbed seven members of a gang of youths that allegedly conducted 17 robberies near Naples in October and November last year, including four minors.

Most of the victims of the robberies were the same age as the youths who allegedly staged the heists at bars and railway stations in the province of Naples.

They allegedly used toys guns to threaten the victims and force them to hand over their cell phones. Two members of the gang were arrested late in November.

The four minors have been taken to a detention centre, while the other three are in Poggioreale prison, the sources said.

Interior Minister Minniti chaired the security meeting at the Naples prefect's office following the recent escalation of attacks by gangs of youths in the area.

A minor was insulted and punched in the face near to Naples' Policlinico metro station late on Sunday, in the latest in the string of attacks by so-called 'baby gangs' of teenagers.

The victim, a 16-year-old who said he did not know the attackers, suffered a broken nose.

On Saturday two pupils aged 14 and 15 suffered an unprovoked assault from a gang of around 10 youths armed with chains at the province of Naples town on Pomigliano d'Arco.

The teens' mobile telephones and money were stolen, but investigators suspect that thirst for violence, rather than theft, was the prime motive.

"We are going through difficult days that can only be successfully addressed if we are united," said Naples Mayor Luigi de Magistris.

"Naples will get through it and everyone must do their part.

"I'm sure we will win this challenge because naples is a city of life, not of death".

Another case was that of Arturo, a 17-year-old stabbed in the throat in the southern city a week before Christmas.

Around 800 students took to the streets of Naples, along with de Magistris and Justice Undersecretary Gennaro Migliore, to protest against crime and violence after that attack.

The boy returned to Naples Cuoco high school on Monday and was greeted by a big banner reading "Welcome back Arturo".

"I'm embarrassed because I didn't expect so many journalists at my return to school or this reception from my school mates," he said.

"Now it's my teachers who are waiting for me, more than my companions.

"I'm excited. This place was one of the things I missed.

"I want to hurry. I have a lesson".

There are also reports a gang of youths of North African origin mugged a group of four minors in Turin on the night between Saturday and Sunday.


BEIRUT - The Lebanese government is to present an infrastructure modernisation plan worth 16 billion dollars at the upcoming international conference to discuss economic support to Lebanon, which is scheduled to take place in Paris in April. The infrastructure projects will lead to annual GDP growth of 6-7%, Premier Saad Hariri has said. They are part of government efforts to garantee "political, economic and social stability" and security, the premier is quoted by the daily L'Orient le Jour as saying. The plan will be funded through "loans from financial institutions, international funds and friendly countries", Hariri added.

Northern Lebanon is set to benefit most from the plan in view of its potential role in rebuilding Syria. Here, projects include expanding Tripoli port, reactivating the Rene-Moawad airport and building a railway between Tripoli and Syria.
ABU DHABI - Saudi Arabia is pushing ahead with its renewables and nuclear power projects to meet rapidly growing power demand, top government officials from the kingdom said in Abu Dhabi.



According to Gulf News, the country will build a nuclear plant comprising two reactors with a total capacity of 3.2 gigawatts, Abdul Malek Al M. Saberi, a senior official from King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KACARE) told reporters on the sidelines of World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi.



''We have received proposals from five countries including China, Russia, US, South Korea and France to build the nuclear power plant. We will announce the winner at the end of the year and will sign a joint venture in the early 2019 to build the plant,'' Al Saberi said.



The kingdom is aiming to commission the nuclear plant by 2027, he said adding that Saudi Arabia will be the second country in the region to have a nuclear power plant after the UAE.



The country is also building two small reactors, with a capacity of 120 megawatts each, which are expected to be commissioned by 2023. Nuclear energy will contribute about 5 per cent of the total energy mix once the nuclear reactors become operational.



''There is an annual electricity demand [growth] of more than 7 per cent in Saudi Arabia due to growing population and industries,'' Al Saberi added. ''With nuclear energy we are going to rely less on hydrocarbons for electricity generation and the nuclear energy programme will also give a boost to industrial sector growth and diversification of the economy.'' Saudi Arabia is also looking at wind, as well as solar plants, to contribute to the country's energy mix. It is targeting 9.5 gigawatts of wind and solar energy by 2023.



''We will not stop and will go beyond that. We are optimistic to achieve the target. The government is supporting the programme in a big way,'' said Asem Othman Alkadi from Renewable Energy Project Development Office in Saudi Arabia.



Geothermal and waste to energy are the other sources of energy which the Kingdom is targeting in future, he added.



Saudi Arabia, one of the largest exporters of oil in the world is planning to invest $30 to $50 billion in the coming years up to 2023 in renewable energy projects. (ANSAmed).


Yemen: Save the Children, 8 mn risk starving to death 17 NGOs launch appeal for humanitarian corridor

(ANSAmed) - ROME, JANUARY 16 - Eight million people in war-torn Yemen risk dying of starvation, Save the Children and 16 other humanitarian organizations active in the country said in a statement on Tuesday.



The NGOs asked for the urgent and unconditional reopening of the port of Hudaydah to enable the access of food and fuel.



Save the Children said in a statement that enabling the access of goods for a period of 30 days ''only briefly alleviated the effects of a prolonged blockade on Yemeni ports on the Red Sea''.



''The sides involved in the conflict in Yemen are therefore responsible in reducing the impact of the war on civilians and all factors causing the population's death and suffering with over eight million people already risking to lose their lives due to famine''.



''Thirty days represent an insufficient period to stop and reverse the damages caused to the food market in Yemen last November and December''. (ANSAmed).




Yemeni activist freed by Houthi rebels Al Omeisy was arrested without charge in August

(ANSAmed) - Rome, January 16 - Houthi rebels have released the prominent Yemeni activist Hisham Al Omeisy, five months after he was arrested without charge by Houthi-backed National Security Bureau (NSB) security forces in Sanaa.



Al Omeisy, 38, used social media to shed a critical light on the ongoing conflict in Yemen. He had 35,000 followers on Twitter alone.



Numerous human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, had criticised his arrest and called for his release. (ANSAmed)
Erdogan threatens anti-Kurd operation in Syria 'US back terrorists, we are not responsible for consequences'

(by Cristoforo Spinella) (ANSAmed) - Istanbul, January 16 - Turkey will crush a "terror army" being created by the United States on its southern border with Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday.



"A country we call an ally is insisting on forming a terror army on our borders," Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara after the US announced the creation of a Kurdish-led military force of 30,000 troops to protect Syria's borders with Turkey and Iraq. "What can that terror army target but Turkey? Our mission is to strangle it before it's even born," Erdogan continued.



The US has said it is working with the mainly Kurdish YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to establish the border force.



Turkey considers the YPG to be an extension of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the rebel group that has been waging an armed struggle with Turkey for decades. "This is what we have to say to all our allies: don't get in between us and terrorist organisations, or we will not be responsible for the unwanted consequences," Erdogan said. A military operation by Turkey could start "at any moment", he added.



The threat of new Turkish intervention in northern Syria has been hovering for months. Following the conclusion in March of the operation Euphrates Shield, which established an area of influence of 2,000 sqkm, overthrowing ISIS and slowing the Kurdish advance, in recent months a military advance guard encroached on the 'de-escalation zone' in Idlib to monitor the truce brokered in Astana with Russia and Iran.



In this way, Turkey also guaranteed itself a pincer movement around the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, the primary target of a possible future military campaign together with the area of Manbij, which it considers to be a 'red line' for Kurdish expansion in Syria. During the weekend the clashes between the PYD rebels and the Turkish army returned to warning level, even if so far no victims have been reported. However, Turkey is continuing to strengthen its contingent on the border, with the deployment of armoured vehicles and Hawk missile batteries with a 40 km range. The new border force announced by the US has also been strongly condemned by Syria, while according to Russia "the actions show that the United States do not want to maintain the territorial integrity of Syria". Erdogan could now take advantage of the situation to launch an operation that has always been at the centre of his strategic aims, carrying out the threat that he has repeated to the Kurds for months: "We will arrive unexpectedly one night". (ANSAmed)
Holy See-Turkey: media, Erdogan to visit pope 'On February 5, first Turkish president in 59 years'

(ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, JANUARY 16 - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet Pope Francis at the Vatican next month, according to Turkish press reports published on Tuesday.



The visit will reportedly take place on February 5 and will focus on the situation in Jerusalem following tension after it was recognized as Israel's capital by US President Donald Trump.



The Turkish presidency has not officially confirmed the report but Erdogan had previously stated that he wished to meet with the pontiff with whom he has recently spoken on the phone.



If confirmed, the visit would be the first visit to the Vatican by a Turkish president in 59 years.



According to the same sources, Erdogan will travel to Latin America after meeting the pope. (ANSAmed)
AMMAN - The senates has endorsed the controversial state budget for 2018, allowing the government to cut subsidies on bread and other major commodities, risking increased prices and growing public anger over fiscal policies.

The move, which took place late Monday, brings closer the implementation of the risky law, which could trigger wide nation protests and bring instability in a country that suffers from rising levels of poverty and unemployment. But the government insists the decision was necessary to trim expenditures in order to raise funds.

The senates is locally known as the upper house of parliament, a chamber of legislators who are handpicked by the king and are traditionally loyalist generals, tribe leaders and former government executives. King Abdullah is expected to sign a royal decree to approve the parliament decision ahead of its publication in the official gazette, the official seal of approval to the budget.

The government said he 2018 draft state budget includes, for the first time, a social safety network/cash subsidy with a value of JD171 million to make up for rising cost of living brought about by lifting subsidies. The cash support will be directed to each member of the army, security and civil service whose salary is below JD1,500, ($2110).
Tunis - Tunisia continues to focus on tourism, following a 23.2% increase in the number of foreign visitors last year. To this end the country has launched the website Tunisiatourism.info and the first digital television channel specialising in Tunisian tourism. The initiative is the work of the company MCM (Media, Comunicazione, Marketing) in partnership with Tunisian flag carrier Tunisair, the ministry for tourism and sector professionals. "The website aims to promote Tunisian tourism to local and foreign tourists. Designed in four languages, it provides a guide to Tunisia's regions and includes tourist information and a full list of all the hotels and lodgings in order to promote direct bookings without the need for an intermediary," said Guillemette Mansour of MCM. The dedicated television channel will broadcast various programmes of interest to a Tunisian and non-Tunisian audience. Tunisiatourism.info has grown out of the institutional website "Discover Tunisia" and has the slogan "Tunisia happens".



The project has an eye to the advantages of Tunisia's recent Open Sky agreement with the European Union, which should open up the airspace to low-cost flights to and from Europe. The new website and digital TV channel fall within the framework of the ministry's development plans for the sector, Tourism Minister Salma Elloumi Rekik said. "Today it is imperative to adapt to technological advances that allow tourism to be developed in terms of information and communication, particularly as bookings are made on the internet," she said." (ANSAmed)
DAE-AIS will:



Leverage DAEs full service, global platform to provide bespoke asset management solutions to investors in aviation assets,

Provide investors a single point of contact dedicated to championing their interests within the wider DAE platform, and

Ensure a best-in-class standard of care for investors assets.



Firoz Tarapore, Chief Executive Officer of DAE said: DAE-AIS will provide a unique offering blending our full platform capabilities with a dedicated service unit led by industry veteran Dan Stone. Dan will be responsible for growing the assets under management of approximately $850 million to $5 billion to address the growing needs of investors in this sector.
From February 2018, passengers passing through all terminals at Dubai International will have real-time access to the latest offers in food and retail outlets, plus experiences and leisure activities, via the brand-new Time Out DXB App and monthly Time Out DXB magazine. By downloading the App, using the airports free wi-fi, they will receive curated information based on their travel status  with users able to choose between transit passengers, tourists and residents. The 88-page Time Out DXB monthly English-language magazine will be circulated free-of-charge throughout the airports terminals.



The ultimate showcase for both Dubai International and the city of Dubai itself, the Time Out DXB brand will shed light on everything from the hottest concert in town, to the newest hotel suite, to the latest restaurant opening. It will also showcase Dubai International (DXB) as a city within a city and a destination in its own right.



We are transforming the airport customer experience, and the development of Time Out DXB is another step towards redefining the way people experience our airport and the city we call home. We have some exciting developments and new openings in the airport over the coming year and Time Out DXB will help passengers navigate their way through all we have on offer at DXB, now and in the future. The media brand Time Out is world-renowned for its ability to celebrate and promote the very best destinations around the globe, so adding DXB alongside the likes of New York, London and Sydney is quite something, said Eugene Barry, Executive Vice President, Dubai Airports Commercial Group.



Both the app and magazine will be filled with expert recommendations on airport dining and relaxation options, shopping bargains and information on the latest musicDXB concert or artDXB exhibition. From grab-and-go food outlets to luxury dining, swimming pools to spas, hotels to kids play zones, art displays and even live music stages, Dubai International has something for everyone, providing Time Out DXB a rich stream of content to engage its readers.



Ali Akawi, CEO of ITP Media Group, said: In laying out his UAE Vision 2021, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, challenges us to work harder, be more innovative. These have been our guiding principles as we sought to develop a media brand that truly showcases a great city and a great airport, using the latest technologies to enrich the user experience. Time Out DXB is the result, which we believe will also inspire millions of people not just to visit Dubai, but like us, one day call it home.

Dubai is a leading business and tourist destination and Dubai International is a window to the emirate, playing a critical role in creating that valuable first impression and attracting transiting travellers to Dubai. We are well-primed to be a compelling destination for connecting travellers and this partnership is sure to yield dividends in terms of helping us reach our goal of 20 million tourists by 2020, added Issam Kazim, CEO, Dubais Corporation for Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DCTCM).
The programme is designed and customized for Oman Air training in accordance with PACA rules and regulations pertaining to the approved Pilot Training. Oman Air has achieved an important milestone in 2016 when the state-of-the-art Oman Air Flight Training Centre (OAFTC) was inaugurated.

There are currently over 20 cadets enrolled in the MPL programme, distributed in various batches on a full scholarship abroad. The cadets were assessed in accordance with Oman Air selection criteria that included theoretical and practical competency-based assessment.

Captain Ali Sulaiman, EVP Operations, said: We are delighted that for the first time in Oman, Oman Air has managed to obtain PACA approvals for this unique programme. The Oman Air Flight Training Centre (OAFTC) is one of the tools that the cadets will utilised post MPL graduation. The OAFTC is equipped with high standard training facilities that are required to continue the training of our cadets after the program. This really puts us at the forefront of pilot and cabin crew training and demonstrates how our state-of-art facility and commitment to excellence is resulting in innovative and effective new programmes that will help shape the future of aviation.
The airline temporarily upgraded its current triple-daily service to Athens to an ultra-modern A350 on Monday, with the arrival of the flight greeted by a water canon salute at Athens International Airport.

Qatar Airways Group Chief Executive, Akbar Al Baker, said: We are extremely proud to be the first airline to fly the Airbus A350 to Greece. Athens is a key destination on our European network, and we are delighted to be able to provide our passengers travelling to Greece today with the ultimate comfort and services on board one of the most technologically advanced aircraft in the sky. We will have more good news for the Greek market later this year with the upcoming launch of direct services to Thessaloniki, offering our passengers even more opportunity to explore this majestic country.
The contract signing ceremony was held at Sharjah Civil Aviation . Sheikh Khalid Isam Al Qassimi, Chairman of the Department of Civil Aviation-Sharjah signed the contract with the Serco ME CEO, David Greer.

As part of a broader five-year programme, Serco and Sharjah DCA have consolidated and reorganised Aeronautical Information Services (AIS) and ATC assistant duties into one department, Aeronautical Information Management (AIM). As part of the collaboration, the entire AIS system was revamped, instituting extensive training programmes for the existing staff and cross-training each one into all three specialties. The result of these efforts is a centralised and more efficient service and increased competence and expertise of the staff. Serco simultaneously embarked on an aggressive Emiratisation programme to bring Emirati youth into the aviation industry and explore their opportunities for professional development and career advancement. This initiative has increased the number of Emirati staff employed by Serco by 20% and will continue to grow as the programme matures.

Sheikh Khalid Al Qassimi, Chairman of the Department of Civil Aviation-Sharjah commented: We are delighted to extend our partnership with Serco through this new contract. Serco has long track record of providing high quality air traffic services, which will help us to meet the exciting challenges of increasing traffic through Sharjah International Airport. The contract will also ensure an increasing emphasis on the training of Emiratis into key roles in the Air Traffic Services".

David J. Greer OBE, CEO, Serco Middle East commented, The continued partnership between the Sharjah DCA and Serco demonstrates the trust and confidence our customer has in Serco as their preferred ATS provider and we look forward to supporting DCA in building on the success story of Sharjah Aviation in the years to come on this important ATS contract.
Turkish Cargo will be connecting Miami to 120 countries through more than 300 destinations with its Istanbul-Madrid-Miami departing flights and Miami-Houston-Istanbul return flights.

Turkish Cargo, which has been transporting 110 tons of belly cargo weekly on Turkish Airlines passenger aircraft to Chicago, Atlanta and New-York; has now reached four destinations in the United States with Miami. The flag cargo carrier will then show a 100 ton capacity increase to the North American market with wide body freighters to reach 220 tons weekly.

Miami Airport being the largest in the United States and ranked 10th in the international cargo market, stands out for its capacity of handling perishable goods supply chain, which represents 47 percent of the international transit cargo, offering high-end infrastucture.
Setting aside PostClassical Ensemble, the guerilla DC chamber orchestra I co-founded fourteen years ago, the most exceptional American orchestra I know is the South Dakota Symphony.

South Dakotas Copland and Mexico festival, which concluded last Sunday afternoon, had many highlights. The performance of Silvestre Revueltass Sensemaya was lots better than the versions you can see on youtube conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. The crucial difference was a slightly slower tempo, maximizing the weight and momentum of this amazing Mexican juggernaut, and the expert punctuation of certain rhythmic details at the very end. The musicians, for whom Revueltas was a discovery, responded with an infectious gratitude and excitement I do not typically encounter elsewhere.

Another new work for the orchestra as Aaron Copands prize-winning 1934 Communist workers song, Into the Street May First! It was to have been sung by a local chorus. When that fell through, the musicians took it over with interest and alacrity, singing from their seats. (A few scurrilously threatened to take a knee.)

Only a veteran of American symphonic affairs could fully appreciate the South Dakota situation. Many orchestras are fractured by tensions between labor and management. Wariness and indifference are pervasive. When the Pittsburgh Symphony went on strike in 2016, the picketing players were quick to differentiate themselves from the institution. That would be unthinkable in Sioux Falls.

The crucial ingredient is the 57-year-old music director: Delta David Gier. A year into his tenure, he moved to Sioux Falls. He and his wife have raised their kids there. What he has achieved would have been unthinkable had he not decided to become a local resident. That many American music directors live off site is tolerated far more than it should be. Art museums arent run by outsiders. Neither are theater companies.

Giers South Dakota programing is sophisticated. He emphasizes new and American works. Next seasons Mahler 8 will complete a comprehensive South Dakota Mahler cycle. He does without guest conductors and brand-name soloists. His 14-year tenure shows what can happen, over time, when a music director with vision is manning the home front.

The orchestras signature initiative is the Lakota Music Project, which Gier initiated in 2009. It connects SDSO to six Indian reservations. The relationship is symbiotic; it builds trust and community. To date, SDSO has produced more than 30 side-by-side musical events juxtaposing two cultures and their practitioners.

Two seasons ago, SDSO travelled to the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation to perform Dvoraks America, exploring the influence of Longfellows The Song of Hiawatha on Dvoraks New World Symphony. I reported the outcome in this space. The mood on the bus was cheerful: business as usual. Many another orchestra would have resented that three-hour ride.

Last weeks Copland and Mexico was partly undertaken as an overture to Sioux Falls Hispanic community. The Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe was a center of attention. So were two middle school classes that spent two months studying aspects of Mexican culture and history. The students infographics were displayed in the lobbies of the Washington Pavilion performing arts center. Six middle schoolers took part in pre-concert discussions with Gier. More than 500 newcomers to SDSO attended the festival concerts for free. The hall was packed with families.

The contract SDSO has negotiated with its players promotes a degree of service flexibility that could be controversial elsewhere. It maximizes opportunities to send musicians to schools, hospitals, health centers  and Indian reservations. The musicians feel well utilized. They interact as a family.

Both Dvorak and America and Copland and Mexico came to Sioux Falls via the NEH-funded Music Unwound consortium that I am fortunate to direct. SDSO is the ideal recipient. Both prongs of Music Unwound  contextualized, cross-disciplinary programs, and linkage to institutions of education  are fully served.

Copland and Mexico tells the story of Aaron Coplands 1930s Mexican epiphany. The examples of Diego Rivera and Carlos Chavez turned him into a populist  even, for a time, a political artist on the far left. We heard Coplands El Salon Mexico. Mainly, however, the program introduced a lesser-known musical genius surpassing Copland: the mercurial, short-lived Revueltas. The main event was a film with live music: Redes (1935), in which Paul Strands hypnotic cinematography and Revueltass volatile score mark one of the highest and most dialectical achievements in marrying music with the moving image.

It was Giers inspiration to rupture the concert with a surprise. Not only did Into the Streets, May First! interrupt the scripted narration; it was instantly followed by a re-enactment of Coplands testimony when in 1953 he was subpoenaed by Joe McCarthy and asked if he had ever been a Communist. Bob Wendland, playing Copland, stood in a solitary spotlight; McCarthys voice of god was declaimed from on high. As with so many American artists and intellectuals, Coplands Depression-era politicization returned to haunt him during the Red Scare.

The SDSO concerts incorporated vigorous 45-minute post-concert discussions. On Saturday night, an audience member asked how the musicians felt about accompanying a film. Mario Chiarello, one of three members of the double bass section who teaches music in Sioux Falls public schools, had joined the post-concert audience  and volunteered a response. He explained that Redes was twice rehearsed without the film. With the addition of the film at the dress rehearsal, he said, a new dimension was attained. The musicians could not see the overhead screen, but an uncanny sensation swept the orchestra  a feeling of being empowered by something bigger.

That could stand as a metaphor for the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra.
With international prices falling due to excess production, domestic strategic brand initiative crucial.

Leading coffee growing countries like Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam and Indonesia has caused an oversupply with the prices of the commodity falling by about 30% in the global markets.

Bengaluru: The Coffee Capital, Banga-lore, will host a four-day international coffee festival, beginning today, amidst global uncertainty over the future of the commodity. Excess coffee production from leading coffee growing countries like Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam and Indonesia has caused an oversupply with the prices of the commodity falling by about 30% in the global markets.

Indian coffee industry is at the crossroads now and the only option available for the industry is to create its own coffee brand, for the domestic and international markets, suggested Anil Kumar Bhandari, president, India Coffee Trust.

The Ministry of Commerce should set up a special focus group for coffee, involving all stake holders in the industry, to create a profile, brand and a sophisticated communication for Indian coffee at home and outside. The government also has to sanction a fund to build a brand, he said.

Prediction for climate change impact on coffee producing countries, including India, is already causing a lot of concern for coffee growers. The entire industry is worried about the rumour of Coffee Board getting restructured. The board is the only entity that holds the industry together. Also the industry hears that an Export Promotion Board is on the anvil for coffee.

Bhandari said, ``India has been exporting all its surplus coffee for decades. We grow the best quality coffee, including several specialty varieties. In fact we are the only country that grows coffee under the shade of rain forests. No other country does that. Still, Indian coffee is not able to command a premium in the global markets, because we have not yet built a brand for it. So the need of the hour is to build a sophisticated campaign for our coffee and not creating another entity for exports.

Coffees from Central American countries, South American countries, Kenya, Ethiopia are getting premium in global markets, alth-ough none of these countries grow superior quality coffee. During last fiscal, India exported coffee worth Rs 5,600 crore, the basic price fetched at the New York Futures Exchange. We have the potential to double the value, with the same quantity of exports, if we are able to position our coffee under specialty and premium varieties and not as bulk commodity sold at the basic price, added Bhandari.

Vietnam has recently launched a five-year campaign to build its own premium coffee brand.

The country is spending some $7.5 million in this exercise.

Indonesia, with an average production of 691,000 tonnes a year, is witnessing a sudden spurt in coffee culture, followed by a mushrooming of cafes across the country. Brazil is the largest coffee producer, consumer and exporter of coffee followed by Vietnam, Indonesia and Columbia.

China is also quite bullish on coffee retailing, and its enthusiasm in the space is evident with every fortnight witnessing the opening of a Starbucks outlet in the country. Chinas domestic coffee consumption is in the 12 to 15% range against 5 to 7% that of India.
Salman Khan is having trouble these days because the actor has received death threats.

Mumbai: Salman Khan is having trouble these days because the actor has received death threats from the gangster Lawrence Bishnoi with regard to the black buck case.

Cops had unexpectedly dropped in on the sets of Salman Khan's Race 3 in Film City last Tuesday and told both him and producer Ramesh Taurani that the shoot would have to be stopped immediately. But Salman couldnt stay in hiding for long since the actor has other commitments to complete. So the shoot is reportedly on with tight security in presence.

A source close to the development told Pune Mirror that the actor had been rehearsing with his co-stars and director-choreographer Remo D'Souza in between scenes last week despite having little time to spare what with the Bigg Boss finale and other commitments.

"The song shoot is on schedule. Like the two previous title tracks, this one too will be mounted on a grand scale. A special set has been designed for the song. Next month the unit moves to Bangkok and then on to Dubai and Abu Dhabi. They are expected to finish by March with the last of the film being wrapped up in Mumbai," the source informed. Producer Ramesh Taurani confirmed the news to the daily.
Salman Khan and Ali Abbas Zafars collaboration has been loved in Sultan and Tiger Zinda Hai.

Mumbai: Salman Khan and Ali Abbas Zafars collaboration has been loved twice  in Sultan as well as the recently released Tiger Zinda Hai. The amazing duo is once again collaborating for Bharat which is Salmans brother-in-law Atul Agnihotris production.

In an interesting revelation, Ali mentioned that Salman will go 10 years younger and carry off his look from Maine Pyar Kiya.

Ali revealed to DNA, We have just locked the script. The idea is to make Salman look the way he appeared in Maine Pyar Kiya  from the time he began his career to now. But we will know how much we can achieve only after our complete research is done.

Hes such a good-looking man. He will work a little harder, as I keep pushing him to lose more weight and look younger. He can reduce weight and look 10 years younger within four weeks, smiles Ali.

As for the prosthetics, Ali said that he will keep it to a minimum and adjust with the VFX because he knows how much prosthetics affects Salman.
Health Minister Anil Vij said that Padmavati is the symbol of Indian women's pride and her character assassination will not be tolerated.

Chandigarh: The Manohar Lal Khattar government in Haryana has banned the release of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's controversial film 'Padmaavat' in the state, Health Minister Anil Vij said on Tuesday.

"Film Padmavati/Padmavat banned in Haryana," the senior minister tweeted.

The film had faced stiff opposition from various quarters in Haryana.

Vij had earlier said that he would not allow screening of the movie in the state. He alleged that Bhansali had wrongly presented historical facts in the movie to "defame" the image of 'Rani Padmavati' and this had hurt the sentiments of lakhs of people.

"Rani Padmavati is the symbol of Indian women's pride. The character assassination of Padmavati will not be tolerated at any level," he had said.

The film, mired in controversy over its plot line, was given a go-ahead by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which had asked the makers to change the title from 'Padmavati' to 'Padmaavat' and suggested some other modifications.

The film is set for release on January 25.
Gujarat VHP general secretary Ranchod Bharward said in Ahmedabad that Togadia was traced, but didn't disclose where he was found.

'Togadia was brought to the hospital by someone in the 108 ambulance service. He was in an unconscious state,' said Dr. Rupkumar Agrawal at the hospital. (Photo: Screengrab from NDTV)

Ahmedabad: Hours after being "untraceable" from Ahmedabad in the morning, VHP international working president Pravin Togadia was found in an unconscious state in Shahibaug area of the city tonight and was rushed to a hospital.

The VHP leader, a Z Plus category protectee, went "missing" after stepping out of the VHP headquarters in Paldi area of the city when a contingent of Rajasthan Police came to arrest him in an old case.

According to a statement issued by the VHP in Delhi, Togadia (62), who suffered from low blood sugar levels, was found in an unconscious state in Shahibaug and was taken to Chandramani Hospital located in the same area.

Gujarat VHP general secretary Ranchod Bharward said in Ahmedabad that Togadia was traced, but didn't disclose where he was found.

"Togadia was brought to the hospital by someone in the 108 ambulance service. He was in an unconscious state," said Dr. Rupkumar Agrawal at the hospital.

He said Togadia became unconscious as his sugar level had dipped, but was stable now.

"He is stable now. He was unconscious as his sugar level had dipped...he is stable now," Dr. Agrawal said.

Shahibaug is around 12 kms away from the Paldi office of the VHP.

The city police formed four teams to locate the Hindutva leader after he went "missing" from the VHP office on Monday morning.

VHP spokesperson Jay Shah said, "Togadia was brought to the hospital by somebody in an 108 ambulance."

As the word spread, hundreds of VHP workers rushed to the hospital.

The VHP had earlier claimed Togadia was detained by the Rajasthan Police in connection with the case, but the latter denied this.

The mystery over Togadia's disappearance had deepened, with a senior police officer maintaining that neither the local Sola police nor the Rajasthan Police arrested him.

Sola police station officials said a team of Rajasthan Police visited them on Monday to execute an arrest warrant against Togadia under section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the IPC, but could not find him at his residence.

According to a senior Crime Branch officer, Togadia, a resident of Thaltej area in the city, boarded an auto-rickshaw from the VHP headquarters in Paldi area this morning and has been untraceable since.

Addressing a press conference this evening, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) J K Bhatt said neither the Sola police nor the Gangapur police in Rajasthan have arrested Togadia.

"The Rajasthan Police went to Togadia's residence in Thaltej area with the Sola Police to execute an arrest warrant (at around 10:45 AM) on Monday morning. But, Togadia was not found there. However, VHP workers thought that he was arrested, which is not true," Bhatt told reporters.

The officer said Togadia was present at the VHP state headquarters in Paldi area of the city since Sunday night.

He left the office in an auto-rickshaw with a "bearded man" at around 10:45 AM on Monday, said Bhatt.

"An SRP (State Reserve Police) jawan, who was deployed outside the VHP office, told us that Togadia and a bearded man called an auto-rickshaw and left the office at around 10:45 AM. Before leaving, Togadia told the security staff the he will be back within 30 minutes. We have formed four teams to trace him," the JCP said.

Earlier in the day, VHP spokesperson Jay Shah claimed that Togadia was detained by the Rajasthan Police in an old case.

Rajasthan Police had denied having detained or arrested Togadia.

"Togadia was not at all arrested by our team. As per my information, the police team of Gangapur (in Rajasthan) is returning without executing the arrest warrant, as he (Togadia) was not found in Ahmedabad. It is a rumour that Togadia is in our custody which is not true at all," said Inspector General of Police, Bharatpur range, Alok Kumar Vashishtha had said.

Gangapur town is in Sawai Madhopur district of Rajasthan and falls under the jurisdiction of Bharatpur range of the state police.

At around 4 PM, a group of 40 workers of the VHP laid a siege to Sola police station and shouted slogans for the "release" of their working president.

Later, another group of VHP workers blocked the busy Sarkhej-Gandhinagar highway, but police broke up the protest.

Similar protests were held in Paldi area here and in Surat city during evening.

In Paldi, VHP workers had blocked roads and damaged some buses.

The situation was brought under control after police rushed to the spot.
He said the Army was working closely with other security forces to maintain pressure on terrorists.

New Delhi: In a blunt message to Pakistan on Monday, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat said the Army was ready to escalate its offensive against Pak-backed terror groups if forced to do so even as he asserted that no anti-India activities will be allowed to succeed in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Army Chief, in his address to Army personnel on the occasion of Army Day, said the Pakistani Army has been actively trying to aid terrorists sneak into India along Line of Control (LoC) in J&K. We will not let these anti-national elements to succeed at any cost. If we are forced, then we may escalate our military action and carry out (the) other action, he said adding that the Army is using its might to teach them a lesson.

Terrorists and their handlers are creating various challenges within the country by adopting new tactics, he said.

Targeting of Amarnath pilgrims, attacking policemen and Army personnel from Jammu and Kashmir, including murder of Lt Ummer Fayaz, were attempts to attack national unity and divide the society, Gen. Rawat added.

He said the Army was working closely with other security forces to maintain pressure on terrorists.

For more than a year, in a major shift in the counter insurgency tactics to toughen the rules of engagement in Kashmir, the Indian Army has operated in a seek and engage mode and brought back the Cordon and Search Operations (CASO) operations that were abandoned in 2002 after a public hue and cry over rights violations.

The change in tactics was necessitated because militants were believed to be hiding among the civilian populace and using them as human shields while many civilians have been found to be harbouring militants.

At the same time, the Army has been forcefully responding to all ceasefire violations by Pakistani troops along the Line of Control with a tit-for-tat approach.
Togadia's remark came a day after he had reportedly gone missing and was later found admitted in a hospital in Ahmedabad.

Addressing the media, Togadia moved to tears claiming that efforts have been made to silence his voice and not let him speak on issues like the Ram temple, farmers' welfare schemes and the law on cow slaughter. (Photo: ANI)

Ahmedabad: Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) international working president Pravin Togadia on Tuesday alleged that attempts are being made to frame him in fake cases.

Addressing the media, Togadia moved to tears claiming that efforts have been made to silence his voice and not let him speak on issues like the Ram temple, welfare schemes for farmers and the law on cow slaughter.

Togadia's remark came a day after he had reportedly gone missing and was later found admitted in a hospital in Ahmedabad.

"I am being targeted for a decade old case; there is an attempt to suppress my voice," he said while interacting with the media.

He said that someone might be trying to get him killed in a fake encounter.

"Rajasthan Police team came to arrest me. When I was offering Pooja on Monday morning, one person entered my office and said that I will be killed in the encounter," he added.

When asked who was planning to attack him, he refrained from blaming anyone and said that he will openly talk about the names with evidence.

Earlier on Monday, Togadia, who was traced to Chandramani Hospital in Shahibuag area of Ahmedabad, was detected with low blood sugar.

Lack of knowledge regarding Togadia's whereabouts created a ruckus in the state, as VHP workers laid a siege to the Sola police station, shouted slogans, and blocked traffic on main Sarkehj- Gandhinagar highway.

Meanwhile, Sola police station inspector J S Patel said, "Rajasthan police today (Tuesday) sought our help to execute the warrant against Pravin Togadia, as his residence falls in our area. The warrant, related to section 188 of the IPC, was issued by a sessions court in Gangapur. We took the Rajasthan Police to Togadia's residence but he was not found there".

Patel had also refuted allegations of Togadia being abducted by the police.

On a related note, the Ahmedabad Metropolitan court earlier in January had issued non-bailable warrants (NBWs) against Togadia and 38 others, including BJP MLA from Daskroi (Ahmedabad), Babu Jamnadas Patel, in a 1996 attempt to murder case.
Four SC senior judges on Jan 12 held a press meet to question the 'biased and unilateral' decision made by the CJI.

K K Venugopal's remarks come a day after he stated that everything was settled in the higher judiciary. (Photo: ANI/File)

New Delhi: Attorney General K K Venugopal on Tuesday said the crisis in the Supreme Court seems to be unresolved and hoped it will be "fully settled" in a couple of days. The remarks come a day after he stated that everything was settled in the higher judiciary.

A crisis erupted on January 12 after four senior judges - Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph openly castigated the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

"Yes, I think it has not been settled. Lets hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days," Venugopal said.

Asked about reports about the impasse continuing, Venugopal said he has to agree with the view.

On whether he had a meeting or spoke with any of the four judges or the CJI, Venugopal said, "Nothing of that sort has happened".

However, he hoped things will be sorted out in the next couple of days.

The four top Supreme Court judges had on Monday resumed work, belying the simmering tensions sparked by their accusations against the Chief Justice, while the Attorney General had described the unprecedented crisis as "a storm in a tea cup".

In the presser, the four judges had flagged certain problems, including the assigning of cases in the apex court, and said there were certain issues afflicting the country's highest court.

Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra had on Sunday met a seven-member delegation of the Bar Council of India and Supreme Court Bar Association President Vikas Singh and had assured them that the crisis would be sorted out soon and congeniality would prevail.
A-G says everything has been settled.

New Delhi: The revolt that was being seen as a major threat to the judiciarys image in the country came to a rather tame end on Monday with the four rebel judges meeting the Chief Justice of India for a brief discussion over a cup of tea and then proceeding to hear cases as usual at the Supreme Court.

Attorney-general K.K. Venugopal and Bar Council of India chairman Manan Kumar Misra, who held meetings with the apex court judges over the weekend, claimed that all was well. There was, however, no official word on how the roster is going to be prepared henceforth and whether cases will continue to be allocated only by the CJI, one of the grievances of the four judges.

The unprecedented crisis that had rocked the countrys judiciary for the last three days was alleged to have been resolved amicably after the rebel judges and the CJI sorted out their differences over tea. There were, however, dramatic scenes at the meeting. Sources said that a junior judge broke down after accusing the four rebel judges of tarnishing his image.

At 10 am, the four rebel judges  Justices J. Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan Lokur and Kurian Joseph  attempted to sort out their difference with CJI Dipak Misra at the daily tea meeting which, on Monday, took the shape of an informal full court. Apart from the CJI, there were 22 judges in the lounge. Source said CJI Misra and the four judges discussed the thorny issues after all the staff was ordered out of the lounge where judges chat before going to court every day.

Sources also said that the tea meeting saw some heated arguments over the manner in which the four judges discussed their issues with the media. After the meeting, the rebel judges held court amid signs of a calm, as of now at least, and the agreement that they will not precipitate the matter further, sources said. Attorney-general Venugopal said, Now everything has been settled. The courts are functioning. The storm was resolved over a cup of tea.

There was, however, no word from the four judges whether they were satisfied with the outcome of the meeting.

During the days proceedings, the CJI smiled but didnt answer when the issue of rebellion was raised in his courtroom by lawyer R.P. Luthra.

Mr Venugopal told the media that except for three judges, who were on leave, all other judges of the Supreme Court were present at the customary tea meet before the commencement of work. At the meeting, Justice Arun Mishra took exception to the four rebel judges taking his name at the press conference on January 12 and broke down while talking about how his image had been tarnished.

One of the rebel judges pacified Justice Mishra and expressed regret, saying he was not their target. Last Friday, the four judges had questioned the CJIs wisdom in assigning PILs related to CBI judge B.H. Loyas death to Justice Mishras court, instead of sending them to any of the top four senior judges.

Monday was the first working day after January 12 when the four addressed the media alleging that the administration of the Supreme Court is not in order.

The Constitution Bench, which is likely to take up eight important cases, including the Aadhaar matter, in the coming weeks still comprises CJI Misra, A.K. Sikri, A.M. Kanwilkar, D.Y. Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan. All the four top judges have been left out.

Bar Council chairman Misra said that the councils seven-member delegation met 16 judges and the CJI in the past two days and impressed upon them the need for putting an end to the whole issue which had dented the judiciarys image. We did not want any political party to take advantage of the situation. Everyone is discharging his duties and everything has been resolved amicably, he said. On January 12, the four rebels in an unprecedented move in the annals of judiciary questioned the unilateral and biased decisions of the CJI in allocation of important cases to junior judges. They felt that they were being sidelined and alleged that the situation in the Supreme Court was not in order.

They alleged that many less than desirable things have taken place in the last few months.

In an apparent warning, the judges had said that lack of impartiality in allocation of high-profile cases and constitution of benches with junior judges could imperil Indias democracy.

The four judges had written a seven-page letter to the CJI two months ago on allocation of work. But the allocation of two petitions last week, seeking a probe into the death of former Mumbai-based CBI special judge B.H. Loya, who had refused to discharge BJP president Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case, to a bench headed by Justice Mishra (number 10 in rank), triggered the controversy.
Cong leader Arjun Modhwadia demanded an independent inquiry into Togadia's allegation.

Hardik Patel, Cong leader Arjun Modhwadia met Togadia at a hospital in Ahmedabad where the VHP leader was admitted on Monday in an unconscious state. (Photo: ANI)

Ahmedabad: Terming Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Pravin Togadia's claim that he apprehended a plot to kill him in a police encounter as a "serious issue", opposition Congress in Gujarat on Tuesday sought an inquiry.

Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia met Togadia at a hospital in Ahmedabad where the VHP leader was admitted on Monday in an unconscious state.

Apart from Modhwadia, a vocal critic of the VHP's Hindutva ideology, Patidar quota agitation leader Hardik Patel also met Togadia separately.

Togadia, the VHP's International Working President, on Tuesday claimed that he went into hiding on Monday as he feared that police might kill him in an encounter after arresting him in an old case.

After meeting Togadia, Modhwadia demanded an independent inquiry into Togadia's allegation.

Also read: Attempts being made to kill, frame in fake cases, claims Pravin Togadia

"We all know the track record of Rajasthan police (about encounters). We also know what happens to those who raise voice against the BJP, be it (BJP leaders) Sanjay Joshi, Haren Pandya or (CBI) judge (B H) Loya. To stop recurrence of such incidents, an independent inquiry must be conducted in Togadia's case," Modhwadia told reporters.

Hardik Patel, who had joined hands with the Congress in the recent Assembly elections, pointed fingers at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah.

"Rights of common people are being snatched. I may not agree with Pravinbhai's ideology, but I am always with him.

We all know what kind of conspiracies are being hatched by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. I don't know about Hindus, but a leader of a Hindu organisation is definitely in danger now," he said.

Gujarat Congress chief Bharatsinh Solanki and the party's state in-charge Ashok Gehlot also demanded an inquiry into Togadia's claim that he could be killed in an encounter.

Gehlot was the chief minister of Rajasthan when Togadia was booked under section 188 of IPC for defying police orders in Gangapur town of that state in 2002.

"The law and order situation in Gujarat has completely deteriorated and it reflects in what Togadia claimed today (Tuesday). We demand an inquiry into Togadia's allegations to bring out the truth," Solanki said.

Gehlot said the issue is serious as both Gujarat and Rajasthan are ruled by the BJP.

"Togadia was arrested in the past too (in Rajasthan, when the Congress was in power). Togadia is known to have links with the ruling party. And if such things can happen with him, we can only imagine the situation of common people. This is a serious issue and the state government should order an inquiry," said Gehlot.

Togadia went untraceable on Monday after a team of Rajasthan police arrived in Ahmedabad to arrest him in the case registered against him at Gangapur in Sawai Madhopur district.

He was then found unconscious and hospitalised.

Addressing a press conference at the hospital on Tuesday, Togadia alleged that attempts were being made to silence him when he was raising the voice of the Hindu community.

He claimed that he went into hiding after learning that a Rajasthan police team had come to arrest him. He claimed he got messages from some people that he might be killed in a (fake) encounter.
Kovind emphasised that collaboration in newer areas such as space, cyber-security and innovation would add depth to the partnership.

Netanyahu's visit was the culmination of celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Israel, (Photo: @rashtrapatibhvn)

New Delhi: President Ram Nath Kovind on Monday called for greater cooperation between India and Israel in countering terrorism and said a strong global response would defeat the menace in all its manifestations.

Welcoming visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called on President Kovind on Monday, the president said India-Israel security cooperation was defined by their common fight against terrorism.

"This challenge is eating into the vitals of our society. Our counter terrorism cooperation is progressing well but we need to do more. We need to work together to develop a strong global response to defeat terrorism in all its manifestations," the president said.

President Netanyahu's visit was the culmination of celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Israel, he said.

"Our warm and friendly ties are growing stronger. In a little over two years, the two countries have exchanged presidential and prime ministerial visits," President Kovind was quoted in an official statement as saying.

The president said bilateral cooperation had expanded manifold.

"Political understanding, security cooperation and technology partnerships are the key pillars of strategic engagement between India and Israel," he said.

The president also emphasised that collaboration in newer areas such as space, cyber-security and innovation would add depth to the partnership.

He said there were ample opportunities before the two countries in the fields of investment, manufacturing, services, start-ups and technology.

President Kovind appreciated the presence of Israeli companies in India, especially in the water, defence, technology and pharma sectors, and urged them to collaborate in programmes such as Make in India, Clean India, Smart Cities and Digital India.

Appreciating Israel's cooperation in the field of agriculture, he said the country had taught India "to do more with less".

"Israel's support has served our farmers exceedingly well, especially in water deficient areas. As we work to make our farming choices more sustainable, we will seek more Israeli support," he said.
Naqvi said that despite the subsidy withdrawal, a record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage from India this year.

'Muslims didn't benefit from it; development with dignity is what we believe in, the subsidy will be used for educating girls,' minority affairs minister Naqvi further said. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Union Minister of Minority Affairs on Tuesday announced the scrapping of Haj subsidy from this year.

The subsidy is a means of financial support that the Centre grants to Indian Haj pilgrims in the form of discounted air fares on Indian Government owned carriers.

Naqvi said that despite the subsidy withdrawal, a record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage from India this year.

Naqvi also said that the Saudi Arabian government has in principle agreed to allow Haj journey from India by ships and officials of the two countries will sit together to finalise the modalities.

"This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi told reporters and cited a host of measures for the welfare of minorities.

"Muslims didn't benefit from it. Development with dignity is what we believe in. The subsidy will be used for educating girls," Naqvi further said.

Earlier this year, Naqvi had said that the Centre would abolish the subsidy for Haj pilgrims in accordance with a Supreme Court order.

"A constitutional bench of the Supreme Court had, during the Congress regime in 2012, directed that the Haj subsidy be done away with. Hence, in the new policy, as per the recommendations of a committee, we have decided to do away with the Haj subsidy gradually," he had said.
The bench was hearing 2 PILs seeking independent probe into the case and adjourned the hearing for a week later, without specifying dates.

At the time of Loya's death, he was presiding over the CBI court hearing the alleged Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the Maharashtra government to give all documents pertaining to the death of Justice B H Loya to petitioners seeking an independent probe into the circumstances of the death of the CBI special judge.

The Supreme Court observed that it "was a matter where the petitioners should know everything".

A bench of Justices Arun Mishra and M M Shantanagoudar passed the direction after the Maharashtra government submitted before the court documents, including Loya's postmortem report, in a sealed cover.

Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Maharashtra, told the bench that documents contained certain confidential material which cannot be shared in public and they cannot be given to petitioners.

The bench directed that all the documents be given to the petitioners within a week.

The counsel for the petitioners told the bench that they needed to look into these documents to argue the matter.

The petitioners in the case are Maharashtra-based journalist BR Lone and Congress leader Tehseen Poonawalla.

The petitioners' counsel assured the court that they would not make any of the documents public.

The bench adjourned the hearing for after a week without specifying any dates.

The matter which was listed for hearing on Monday was postponed to Tuesday as Justice Shantanagouder was on leave on Monday.

The Supreme Court on Friday termed as a "serious matter" the issue of alleged mysterious death of special CBI judge BH Loya and sought response from Maharashtra government on pleas seeking an independent probe into it.

The top court said, "This matter requires bi-parte hearing rather than exparte".

The apex court on Friday also asked the Maharasthra government to file the autopsy report into the death of former CBI judge BH Loya who died in mysterious circumstances in December 2014.

At the time of his death, Loya was presiding over the CBI court hearing the alleged Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case. He died of cardiac arrest on December 1, 2014, according to hospital records, a day after he attended the wedding ceremony and reception of the daughter of fellow Judge Sapna Josh.

In an unprecedented move in the annals of judiciary, four senior most judges of the Supreme Court on Friday questioned the unilateral and biased decisions of the Chief justice of India Dipak Misra in the allocation of important cases to junior judges.

They said though they wrote a seven-page letter to the CJI two months ago (on allocation of work), the allocation of two petitions on Friday seeking a probe into the death of former CBI sessions judge BH Loya who discharged BJP President Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case, to a bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra (number 10 in the rank) triggered the controversy.
The Israeli PM also praised Mr Modi for the rapid rise in Indias ranking in the ease of doing business over the past three years.

New Delhi: Speaking in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and a host of international delegates, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at radical Islam and its terrorist options from the podium of the Raisina Dialogue conference here on Tuesday evening, saying that the challenge can be overcome by strengthening India-Israeli ties. The Israeli PM also hailed the India-Israel alliance, saying that only the strong survive.

Our way of life is being challenged, most notably the quest for modernity, the quest for innovation is being challenged by radical Islam and its terrorist options from a variety of corners. This can upset the international system. I think one of the ways to overcome such a challenge is to strengthen the relationship between our two great democracies. The alliance of democracies, I think, is important to secure our common future, Mr Netanyahu said, as Mr Modi listened in the audience.

The weak dont survive. The strong survive. You make peace and alliances with the strong, he said, adding: We believe in India as you believe in Israel. May God bless the India-Israel alliance. He further said: We have discussed in the visit how we can strengthen our two nations in civilian areas, in security areas.

Israel has had a turbulent relationship with the Islamic world for decades due to the Palestinian issue, but the reference to radical Islam may be calculated to strike a resonance among many in India, which is battling the terrorism of Pakistan-based terror outfits like the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. Interestingly, however, while Israel considers Iran to be the epicentre of terrorism, India considers Pakistan as being so. Israel is also battling radical outfits and accuses Iran of backing these.

Mr Netanyahu said the secret of Israel was that its roots lay in ancient traditions, while its branches and leaves reached out to the sky like an enquiring mind. He said it was the same with India and that this characterises our two people. The Israeli PM also praised Mr Modi for the rapid rise in Indias ranking in the ease of doing business over the past three years.

Speaking about the public support in India for friendship with Israel, Mr Netanyahu mentioned his trip to Agra (to visit the Taj Mahal) earlier in the day. We are naturally sympathetic to India. When I walk on the streets of India like I just did in Agra, I saw the sympathy and friendship of people. Somebody said to me, We are so happy that you are friends with our Prime Minister... We are friends with you, we are friends with Israel. Its a natural friendship and a natural partnership.

The Israeli PM also spoke about various aspects of power such as military power, economic power and political power, and also the importance of the values of democracy. Defence costs a great deal of money, he said, pointing out that military power was dependent on economic power. He described political power as the ability to form strong alliances, pointing out how he had visited countries in all continents last year. Speaking after Mr Netanyahu, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said Israel was a reliable friend in not just the defence sector but also other sectors like water and agriculture.
The father of the victim had lodged a complaint against the two brothers (Sunil and Sonu) following which an FIR was registered.

'Prima facie, it appeared that she had committed suicide after the sexual assault. The accused  identified as Sonu and Sunil  allegedly assaulted the girl when she was alone at home.' said police. (Photo: PTI/Representational)

Hamirpur: A minor girl allegedly set herself on fire after two brothers gang-raped her in Uttar Pradeshs Hamirpur district.

Meanwhile, the father of the victim had lodged a complaint against the two brothers (Sunil and Sonu) following which an FIR was registered.

District Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Lal Sahab Yadav said FIR has been registered against two brothers on the complaint of victim's father. Victim's body has been sent for postmortem.

Prima facie, it appeared that she had committed suicide after the sexual assault. The accused  identified as Sonu and Sunil  allegedly assaulted the girl when she was alone at home. They also attacked her younger brother after he walked in on them, but he managed to escape, he added.
The ruling JD-U and BJP have already dubbed end of political life for RJD chief Yadav.

Patna: Trouble for RJD chief Lalu Yadav is far from over as another verdict in the fodder scam case is expected on January 24. Sources claim that verdict in all three pending fodder scam cases in which he figures as an accused is expected within six months.

The ruling JD-U and BJP have already dubbed end of political life for RJD chief Yadav, who is currently languishing in jail and seeking bail from Ranchi high court in the Deoghar treasury case.

However, party insiders claim that Lalus son Tejashwi Yadav is now planning to forge an alliance with anti-BJP forces in other states on the lines of grand secular alliance which had led to a massive defeat of the NDA during 2015 assembly elections in Bihar.

On Monday, after he met his father inside Birsa Munda Jail, Tejashwi Yadav gave hints that he is trying to rope in other opposition parties to join the Mahagathbandhan in Jharkhand.

This was Tejashwi Yadavs first meeting with Lalu Yadav after his conviction in the fodder scam case.

I was allowed to meet him for only for five minutes. All of us are worried about his health and wanted to know whether he is taking his medicines on time. He is a heart patient and has undergone a heart surgery, Tejashwi Yadav said.

He further added that after January 15, our party will hold public meetings across Bihar and spread the message of Lalu Yadav. He is a mass leader and no one can match his standards not just in Bihar but in other states as well. We are trying to expand the grand secular alliance and want all anti-BJP forces to unite against the BJP.
While it is assumed that rats and their fleas spread plague, there is little historical and archaeological support for such a claim.

Human "ectoparasites", such as body lice and human fleas, might be more likely to have caused the epidemic (Photo: AP)

London: Black Death, one of the worst pandemics in human that claimed millions of lives in Europe during the 12th Century, may have been spread by human fleas and body lice, rather than rats, a study suggests.

It has long been thought that the plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which lasted in Europe until the early 19th century, was spread by rats.

It devastated European populations from 1346 to 1353 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people.

However, according to scientists from the University of Oslo in Norway and the University of Ferrara in Italy human "ectoparasites", such as body lice and human fleas, might be more likely to have caused the epidemic.

The researchers created models of how a disease could be spread by rats, airborne transmission, and fleas and lice on humans and clothes, according to 'The Telegraph'.

They found that, in seven of the cases, there was a closer resemblance between the human model and the outbreak when compared with the other two alternatives.

"While it is commonly assumed that rats and their fleas spread plague during the Second Pandemic, there is little historical and archaeological support for such a claim," researchers wrote in the study published in the journal PNAS.

"Here, we show that human ectoparasites, like body lice and human fleas, might be more likely than rats to have caused the rapidly developing epidemics in pre-Industrial Europe," they said.
Democracy and rights activists have branded the internet law draconian and a threat to free speech.

Judges also ordered him to pay 10 million rupiah (US$700) in fines. (Photo: Pixabay)

An Indonesian teenager was sentenced Tuesday (Jan 16) to 18 months in prison for "insulting" President Joko Widodo on Facebook.

The 18-year-old high school student from Medan on the island of Sumatra, identified by the initials MFB, was found guilty of violating the country's internet law by making defamatory and slanderous comments online.

Judges also ordered him to pay 10 million rupiah (US$700) in fines.

"If the fines are not paid, the jail term is extended by one month," the presiding judge told the Medan court.

The teenager accepted the verdict and did not file an appeal.

MFB was arrested in August last year after he posted numerous inflammatory messages and memes against Widodo and police chief Tito Karnavian using fake accounts.



In July, he made a post challenging the police to arrest him. And they did, a month later.

The government of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim majority country, has received criticism following a string of arrests of people accused of insulting the president, making slanderous comments and posting fake information on social media.

Democracy and rights activists have branded the internet law draconian and a threat to free speech.

Last week a court in Jambi province, also on Sumatra, sentenced a local politician to one year in jail after he made a Facebook post considered to be insulting Islam. The judges found him guilty of violating the law and "inciting hatred".

In November last year, a man was charged for posting on Instagram images of Widodo's wife, Iriana, with texts considered offensive to the first lady.
Disability activist Virali Modi was in Kochi recently as part of her #mytraintoo campaign.

Virali Modis is an inspiring, miraculous tale. The beginning is tragic, but then comes the silver lining followed by rays of hope and determination, making a radiant woman out of a little girl had been comatose. A disability activist, motivational speaker, model, adventure junkie and a beauty pageant runner-up, the 26-year-old wheelchair-bound woman was featured among BBC 100 Women 2017. She had come to Kochi all the way from Mumbai recently as part of her #mytraintoo campaign, under which she collects petitions seeking disabled-friendly rail facilities.

Recalling how the spark for the campaign got ignited, she says, I was molested three times while trying to board a train in Mumbai. Since our railway stations lacked ramps or lifts or platforms making trains accessible for everyone, I had to be lifted from my wheelchair to the train by luggage porters. All the three times, I was groped, touched and manhandled, like a piece of luggage.

The incident made her start the campaign, which she took to former Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu. She is glad that the results are showing.

Excited about the permanent and portable ramps for disabled passengers, small wheelchairs to get inside the train, electronic buggy to transport them, disabled-friendly lounges and wheelchair-friendly washrooms at Ernakulam Junction Station, she expressed joy over finding that six stations in Kerala are disabled-friendly. I am glad that so much progress is happening here. My fight is for accessibility. Even Mumbai is yet to receive complete accessibility at railway stations. I have been actively meeting politicians for that, says Virali, whose life overturned ten years ago when she contracted malaria.

Virali Modi scuba diving.

Admitted to hospital in a critical condition, Virali suffered a respiratory and cardiac arrest that left her comatose. When the doctors gave up hope and were about the remove her life support system, she suddenly opened her eyes, bouncing back to life. But it wasnt all happy. She was paralysed down her waist and couldnt walk again. Her parents Pallavi and Jithesh  have been very supportive, but society always reminded of her inability. Depressed, she attempted suicide three times. But slowly, she grew out of it, to follow all her dreams  of becoming an actor, of serving people. Everywhere, she was judged for her disability.

A strong woman, Virali could no longer be beaten by bitterness. She fought, became a top writer on Quora, took part in the Miss Wheelchair India beauty pageant and became the runner-up and got over nervousness. Now a motivational speaker and model, she nurses acting dreams. Having attended theatre workshops and acting classes, I would like to become an actress, not just because of my passion, but to inspire others that you can make it there whatever comes your way, says Virali, who works for a portal that offers holiday initiatives for the disabled. An adventure buff, she did scuba diving four times last year and has travelled all over three continents. According to her, disability doesnt make a difference to anyones life because anything is possible if you have a vision and will power.

She also has a message for the disabled. Never give up; never settle for what life offers. You have every right a normal able-bodied person has. Never take no for an answer and never step down. Fight for what you think is right and fight for your rights. Keep smiling because life is beautiful.

Aiming at taking the #mytraintoo campaign across India and advocating accessibility for all, Virali wants all disabled people to get out of their homes and enjoy the world. She also strongly objects to labels like specially-abled and differently-abled. Those terms directly or indirectly mean abnormal. Disabled are rapists, murderers or psychopaths. If in not that sense, disabled is a term applicable to all as everyone is less able that another person. For me, this wheelchair is my throne and I am a queen!
The police solved the case with help from local informers and the description given by the female friend of the victim.

Soni was arrested from Govindpuri and led the police to his accomplices Sanjay alias Machchi (33), Pawan Kumar (23) and Ram Babu alias Vishambar (21). (Representational Image)

New Delhi: All four accused involved in the murder of a 22-year-old youth in a park in Govindpuri were arrested on Sunday night.

On Saturday evening, the four accused were sitting on a wall of Tughlaqabad fort when they saw the couple.

The gang followed and ambushed them, and fled after the victim, Naresh, fell on the ground.

Surinder (31), also going by the name Soni, said that he had committed the murder because he wanted to gift gold jewellery to his wife for her birthday.

Soni was arrested from Govindpuri and led the police to his accomplices Sanjay alias Machchi (33), Pawan Kumar (23) and Ram Babu alias Vishambar (21).

DCP (southeast) Chinmoy Biswal said that the weapons used for the murder and the robbed items have been retrieved from the accused.

Though no CCTV footage was found near the crime scene, the police solved the case with help from local informers and the description given by the female friend of the victim.

Sanjay, one of the accused told the cops that he was a resident of Lucknow and had come to Delhi for a court appearance on January 9.

He took part in the crime because he needed to pay his lawyer.

Surender and Sanjay had been arrested in the past for committing a similar robbery bid in the same park in 2014.
Police have sent both the bodies for postmortem and are further investigating the matter.

According to police officials, the accused Omprakash, reportedly killed his wife, Sobha and his son in front of his other two children and then ran away from the spot. (Photo: File | Representational)

New Delhi: A woman and her one-and-a-half-year old son were allegedly stabbed to death by her husband in Delhi's Jahangirpur area late on Monday night.

The accused Omprakash, reportedly killed his wife, Sobha and his son in front of his other two children and then ran away from the spot.

"Husband is under suspicion, as he is absconding. A case has been registered under section 302 of the Indian Penal code (IPC)," said DCP North, Aslam Khan.

Meanwhile, woman's brother also accused Omprakash of assaulting his sister.

Police have sent both the bodies for postmortem and are further investigating the matter.
He was speaking at the Delhi BJP executive committee meet held at the NDMC Convention Centre.

NEW DELHI: Union home minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday termed the Congress president Rahul Gandhi taking national issues to international for as an act of immaturity and claimed that is a major reason for deteriorating political graph of the Congress in the country.

Referring to Mr Gandhis recent visit to Bahrain when he highlighted how job creation in India was at an eight-year-low, Mr Singh said, Congress leaders taking domestic issues to international platforms was indeed sad. He was speaking at the Delhi BJP executive committee meet held at the NDMC Convention Centre.

He told party leaders in the national capital that a majority of people feel that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the best for the country and the BJP is the best political party. As per an international survey, 88 per cent of people feel Mr Modi is the best PM for India and 70 per cent have rated BJP best political party, Mr Singh added.

Blaming Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi for creating obstacles in development, Mr Singh said that the Centre was ready to extend full support to it, but the politics of confrontation by the AAP government is a major obstacle.

Mr Singh told the party activists that the Centre is trying its best to help Delhi in the wake of on-going sealing drive undertaken by the civic bodies on the direction of Supreme Court-appointed monitoring committee.

Mr Singh also called the Delhi BJP to ensure that people trust them at ground level. We will have to leave al-is-fine-in-politics attitude and work towards betterment of the society, Mr Singh said.

In his address, Delhi BJP president Manoj Tiwari said that Mr Singh addressed the party state unit executive meeting as a guardian and his suggestions and guidance will be followed dutifully.

The political resolution passed by the Delhi BJP executive committee slammed the Arvind Kejriwal government for its failure in fulfilling its promises and spreading misinformation regarding its achievements. We will start a district level campaign across Delhi soon to expose the government failures every front, including water, electricity, transportation, education, health and other issues, he added.

BJP national general secretary Anil Jain gave tips to party leaders asking them to concentrate on booth management for success in coming polls in the capital.
After the oppositions attack, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis announced the probe on August 29.

Mumbai: The committee helmed by retired additional chief secretary K.P. Bakshi which is probing industries minister and Shiv Sena leader Subhash Desais decision to de-notify MIDC land, is expected to submit its report by end of January this year.

The single-member committee is probing the MIDC land release decision taken in the past 15 years. Sources said that Mr Desai had not yet filed his reply before the committee.

It was alleged that Mr Desai de-notified lands in Igatpuri taluka in Nashik district. These lands were identified for industrial purposes and released later on. So, it was claimed that the decision was taken in favour of a few.

After the oppositions attack, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis announced the probe on August 29.

Mr Bakshi was assigned the job of probing the decision to de-notify industry lands.

In the past few months, Mr Bakshi has gone through MIDC documents and is now studying industry department documents. He has sought an explanation from all industries ministers and secretaries in the past 15 years regarding de-notification of industry land. Mr Desai is learned to have not filed his explanation yet. However, the committee will get it soon and finalise its report by the end of January 2018, said senior officials.

The chief minister is expected to carry out a cabinet expansion in February and there will be a budget session in March.

So, if the inquiry report comes before that, it will be convenient to take decisions accordingly and settle political scores as matters of the last 15 years are being investigated, said sources.
Nashik Court acquits one accused, to pronounce quantum of sentence on January 18.

Nashik : A Nashik court on Monday convicted six persons, while acquitted another, for the cold-blooded murder of three young dalit sanitary workers in Ahmednagars Sonai village in 2013, which is said to be an honour killing. The court will pronounce the quantum of sentence on January 18. The six accused were convicted on various counts, including murder and criminal conspiracy. The killings, according to the police were the outcome of an inter-caste love affair between one of the deceased, Sachin Sohanlal Gharu, and a Maratha girl, Seema Darandale.

Additional sessions judge Shri Vaishnav of Nashik, while convicting the six, acquitted the seventh accused, as the prosecution could not establish charge of conspiracy against him.

Sources said that one of the deceased, Gharu, was allegedly in love with a Maratha girl who was doing her Bachelors in Education from Ghatge-Patil College at Nevasa Phata in Nevasa tehsil. The Darandale family was allegedly incensed over the affair and probably planned the brutal killing.

A person had approached to Gharu and the other two victims, Sandeep Raju Thanvar and Tilak Raju Kandare, and offered them good compensation for cleaning a septic tank at Darandale Vasti in Nevasa tehsils Vithalvadi area on January 1, 2013. The man then took the trio to the spot, where the murderers were waiting. Thanvar was thrown into the septic tank and drowned while Kandare, who tried to flee, was cut down with choppers. The murder of Gharu, the main target, was the most heinous, as he was hacked to death. Thanvar and Kandares bodies were buried in a dry well that belongs to Seemas father, Raghunath alias Popat Darandale, while Gharus remains were crammed into a bore well. The prime accused included Popat, Seemass paternal uncle Prakash, her brother Ganesh alias Praveen, her maternal cousin Sandeep Kurhe, and relatives Ashok Navgire and Ashok Rohidas Phalke  the last of whom was acquitted. Advocate Ujjwal Nikam was the special prosecutor in the case.

Alleging that the Darandale family was well-connected, the deceaseds relatives had prayed to the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay high court to shift the hearing to another place, either Nashik or Jalgaon, instead of Ahmednagar, after which the case was conducted in Nashik.

Timeline of the case

January 1, 2013: Sandeep Thanvar and two others are killed

January 3, 2013: The FIR is registered

January 9, 2013: Two members of the Darandale family and an accomplice are arrested

February 5, 2013: The police arrests two more accused

2017: Trial gets underway in a sessions court in Ahmednagar against seven accused

Previous cases

On April 28, 2014, a dalit, Nitin Aage (17), was killed and hanged from a tree by three men of the Maratha community in a village in Ahmednagars Jamkhed taluka. Aage was allegedly killed by Sheshrao Yevle (42) and Sachin Golekar (21) as they had spotted him talking to the latters 14-year-old sister. After the trial court acquitted the accused for want of evidence, Aages parents approached the Bombay high court seeking a retrial, which was allowed.

A 21-year-old girl was hacked to death in Nimkheda in Buldhana district on April 3, 2017 by her father who was from the Dhangar community as she had married to a boy from the Maratha community. Though the superintendent of police had denied that it was a case of honour killing, the fathers statement said that he had killed her as she had married outside the

community.
The court also tagged together all the petitions filed by Rubabuddin and the CBI in the case so that they could be heard together.

Mumbai: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday told the Bombay high court that it would not challenge the recent discharge of any of the senior IPS officers in the case pertaining to the alleged extrajudicial killing of gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh in November 2005.

The central agency made this statement while the court was hearing a revision application filed by Sheikhs brother Rubabuddin challenging the CBI courts order discharging IPS officers D.G. Vanzara, Dinesh M.N. and constable Dalpat Singh Rathod from charges of killing Sheikh in a fake encounter.

When the petition came up for hearing before Justice Revati Mohite-Dere, the judge asked CBI counsel Sandhesh Patil and Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Anil Singh if the agency or the government was going to challenge the discharge of any IPS officer in the case.

Following this, they informed the court that the agency had already challenged the discharge of some junior officers and constables. However, it decided not to challenge the discharge of any top police officer.

The ASG did not cite any reason behind the CBIs decision.

Unhappy with this statement, the judge observed that while the CBI was opposing the discharge of sub-inspectors and constables, it had conveniently gone quiet on the discharge of most of the senior IPS officers.

The CBI court has discharge IPS officers like Vanzara, the former Gujarat DIG; Rajkumar Pandian, former Gujarat police chief P.C. Pande; and additional director general of police Geeta Johri. Though Rubabuddin had initially challenged the discharge of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president Amit Shah, who was the home minister of Gujarat at the time of the incident, also but later he withdrew his petition.

Apart from the Sohrabuddin case, these officers were facing trial for killing Sohrabuddins wife Kausar Bi and bumping off his aide Tulsiram Prajapati in a fake encounter too.

The court had discharged these officers, as the investigating agency had not taken prior sanction to prosecute them. Justice Mohite-Dere, on last date of hearing, had sought to know from the CBI if an accused could be discharged from a case on the ground of sanction alone. The CBI is yet to reply on this point.

The court also tagged together all the petitions filed by Rubabuddin and the CBI in the case so that they could be heard together. The court clubbed the matters when advocate Gautam Tiwari told the court that though CBI had challenged sub-inspectors Himanshu Singh and Shyam Singh Charans discharge in 2016, these petitions were yet to be heard.
The child, who was keen to exploring the surroundings of the five-storey building, peeped through glass windows in the neighbourhood.

Mumbai: Nine years after the 26/11 attacks rocked Mumbai, Moshe Holtzberg  better known as Baby Moshe  returned to the city on Tuesday and visited south Mumbais Chabad House where 10 Pakistani terrorists had killed his parents, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and Rivka Holtzberg. The Jewish couple ran a cultural and outreach centre for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement at the house.

Special arrangements were made for the 11-year-old at Chabad House, formerly known as Nariman House, where a memorial honouring the attack victims has been created. After Moshe arrival, the media tried to speak to him but, seemingly shy and confused at being the centre of attention, the boy only said, shalom (a Hebrew word meaning peace that is used as a salutation by Jews), and then uttered two Hindi words, Bahut khushi (Im very happy).

The boy was accompanied by his grandfather, Shimon Rosenberg and his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuel, who heroically picked up the then-two-year-old Moshe and ran from the building after had come under siege. The State of Israel granted Ms Samuel citizenship two years after the incident for her bravery.

Stating that he feels very good in this country, Mr Rosenberg said, I feel very happy to come to India, to Nariman House where I am going to pray. I will greet the people of India.

Moshe, who was first taken to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel at Colaba  another site of the terror attack  was seen in photos chatting and laughing with Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, who runs Chabad House. Special food and juices were prepared for the boy.

The child, who was keen to exploring the surroundings of the five-storey building, peeped through glass windows in the neighbourhood. He also visited a library and a prayer place.

Expressing joy, Rabbi Kozlovsky said, Finally, Baby Moshe is at home. This visit is very emotional for him. He will see the living memorial project.

The memorial will include the apartment where the Holtzbergs lived, as well as the sites where the killings occurred. A portion of the fifth floor, will be kept as it is.
Parties strongly opposed saying the President has not contributed for Mumbai.

Mumbai: As the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu is slated to visit Mumbai on Thursday, a major controversy was averted as no decision was taken in the BMC group leaders meeting over the proposal to name a square in Kala Ghoda after a former Israel President, Shimon Peres. Following stiff opposition from the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Congress, the proposal has been kept pending.

According to civic officials, the Federation of Indo-Israel Chamber of Commerce has demanded the BMC that a square between the VB Gandhi Road and Saibaba Marg at Kala Ghoda area should be named after Mr Peres. The administration had tabled the proposal before the BMC group leaders for approval on Tuesday.

The proposal said, Mr Peres had dedicated his life for the Jews and worked hard for the global peace. He followed the path of non-violence, which was initiated by Mahatma Gandhi and he was also awarded with Nobel peace award.

However, SP and Congress opposed the proposal vehemently. In his 70 years of political career, Mr Peres made no contribution to the social, financial, cultural, educational and political field in Maharashtra and Mumbai. The proposal to name the square at Kala Ghoda after Mr Peres is just to please the Israeli visitors, who are currently on Indias tour, said SP group leader Rais Shaikh.

By bringing up such proposal, the BMC is violating its own practice as several foreign names given during the British regime have been later changed. What is the need of naming city places with foreign names? questioned opposition leader Ravi Raja, Congress.
Samarpan Maity who won the recognition says the pageant is important towards creating awareness about the LGBTQ community.

Maiti who is working as a senior research fellow in the field of cancer drug discovery from a reputed institute in Kolkata, stumbled upon a modeling career after his friends pushed him towards getting into shape.

The award for Mr Gay World India 2018 has gone to Kolkata boy Samarpan Maiti.

Maiti who is working as a senior research fellow in the field of cancer drug discovery from a reputed institute in Kolkata, stumbled upon a modeling career after his friends pushed him towards getting into shape.

Speaking to this correspondent, Maiti says that the win makes him feel like he is on the top of the world. The winner goes on to thank Sushant Digvikar, the director and producer of MGWI along with Sanket Sveronic and Darshil, who continuously worked to groom them and cared for them like members of a family.

Being from a middle class rural background I had to face many challenges to be in the position that I am in today. The win made me feel that finally my struggles got acceptance, he says, adding, I will take this opportunity to inspire the thousands of struggling souls out there who are seeking acceptance too.

Mr Gay World is a part of celebration of the LGBT community globally so that people from different countries can know the real challenges and achievements of different region and can highlight it into the global platform.

It is very important to send a representative from such a country that has not yet acknowledged the right of the LGBT community to speak about the discrimination, fights and social issues we are facing here, says Maiti, adding it will also help the community in India experience firsthand what other countries are doing for the LGBT rights.

From being a regular kid trying to come to terms with his sexual identity to the proud winner of the Mr Gay World India 2018, it has been a long journey for Maiti and the young winner says that the path has been anything but easy.

Maiti recollects that after his father passed away when he was nineteen, one of his friends, who, incidentally is his sisters fiance, took over all his responsibilities.

He was very affectionate to me and that made everyone in our hostel think that we were both gay, Maiti says, adding that soon they were driven out.

The incident pushed Maiti to interact with other members from the community and later when his friend went abroad, Maiti came out to him.

Maiti would go on to come out to his other friends and colleagues, and received mixed reactions to his orientation. What shocked him most was that even the scientific community was judgmental towards him with many saying that interacting with the LGBTQ community had turned him gay.

I came out to my family in 2016, Maiti says. While his sister eventually accepted him for his happiness, his mum who at first tried to cajole him into believing that it was just a phase, is still coming to terms with his orientation.

Now that he has won, Maiti feels that it is a formal recognition to his initiative and work.

My focus is now on to represent my country at world stage in Mr. Gay world in South Africa this summer, the young winner adds.

He goes on to say that he wants to help the underprivileged members of the LGBT community who are lagging behind and the uneducated people who live in slums in urban places and dont know how to deal with society.

I want to help them uplift themselves in a dignified way, Maiti says, adding, They are mostly invisible and neglected. I want to assure them that we all are besides them. My other mission is to conduct gender education programs among school children and science researchers to make them sensitised so that our future generation can live in a society without any discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Maiti agrees that the win puts him in a position where he can represent and lead, not only members from the community, but the youth, at large. The winner recollects that as a youngster, alienation was always a turmoil and there were no role models to look up to. This made him realise that with the title he has the opportunity to represent all that is good and inspiring from the community.

I want to work in such a way that general perception could change about community and it can inspire not only LGBT youths but society at large, Maiti says.

Youngsters, in India and around the world are still finding it difficult towards accepting their sexual identity and coming out. On being asked for his advice to them, Mr Gay World India says that accepting that fact that we are living in a heteronormative society where growing up as a child one is expected to have a certain kind of preference and mannerism is of optimum importance.

They are so many stereotypes attached to a gender identity. Everyone wants to be loved and accepted the way they are and being different becomes a challenge. First one needs to accept themselves as they are. The coming out happens to oneself and then to rest of the world. It's a long process, having a friendly support group helps. Do not hesitate to reach out for help if you need it, he concludes.
In a letter to Apple, the council requested an explanation for the slow-down and about what is being done to rectify the problem.

the council requested an explanation for the slow-down and information about what Apple planned to do to rectify the problem.

A Chinese consumer group has asked Apple (AAPL.O) for information about the slowing of older iPhones after operating system updates, and has also demanded a reply before Friday, according to the reports of a state news agency.

The query from the Shanghai Consumer Council came in response to consumer feedback that old iPhones became sluggish after upgrading the software to iOS 10.2.1. In a letter to Apple on Monday, the council requested an explanation for the slow-down and information about what Apple planned to do to rectify the problem.

The California-based company had acknowledged in December that iPhone software could slow down some phones with battery problems and apologized for the issue. It also cut battery replacement costs and said it would change its software to show users whether their phone batteries were working well.

The Shanghai Consumer Council, a non-government organization approved by the Chinese authorities, said it had received 2,615 complaints about Apple products and services in 2017, compared with 964 complaints in 2015.
Riverside County Sheriff's Department said, 'The 13 victims who had been held captive at Perris, California home range in age from 2 to 29.'

The parents, 57-year-old David Allen Turpin and 49-year-old Louise Anna Turpin, were booked on torture and child endangerment charges. (Photo: @RSO | Twitter)

Los Angeles: A California couple has been arrested for torture after authorities said on Monday their 13 malnourished children were held captive in their home, with some shackled to beds in the dark.

Authorities set bail at USD 9 million for the parents after a 17-year-old girl escaped the house on Sunday and called 911 using a cellphone found inside.

She was so "emaciated" that officers said they originally thought she was only 10 years old.

The 13 victims who had been held captive at the Perris, California home range in age from two to 29, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said in a statement. They were not named.

"Further investigation revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, but the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner," the statement added.

"Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29. The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty."

The sheriff's office said "the victims were provided with food and beverages after they claimed to be starving."

The parents, 57-year-old David Allen Turpin and 49-year-old Louise Anna Turpin, were booked on torture and child endangerment charges.

'Mommy loves me'

David Turpin is registered in the California School Directory as head of the Sandcastle Day School, a private institution, but its address matches that of the Turpins' home in public records.

The school, which opened in March 2011, only has six students -- one each in fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, tenth and twelfth grade, meaning for children aged about 10-18 -- according to the latest state education department data.

The Turpins filed for bankruptcy the same year the school was opened, stating in court documents that they had accrued between USD 100,000 and USD 500,000 in debt, The New York Times reported.

It said David Turpin at the time worked as an engineer for defence contractor Northrop Grumman, earning USD 140,000 a year, while his wife was listed as a homemaker.

A Facebook page under the name of David-Louise Turpin includes pictures of the couple, whose mug shots were released by police, in various staging of a marriage ceremony or exchange of vows from 2011 to 2016.

In the latest set of photographs, uploaded in April-July 2016, Louise Turpin wears a long white wedding gown and her husband is dressed in a suit.

An Elvis Presley impersonator in a gold and silver suit holds a microphone and poses with the couple and children, in a kitsch scene reminiscent of Las Vegas weddings.

They exchange wedding bands and are surrounded by 13 smiling children and youths.

Nine girls, all with long dark hair, wear matching fuchsia plaid dresses with white tights and shoes. A baby girl is dressed in a bright pink flowery and sequined dress. Three boys, their dark hair in bowl cuts like David Turpin, are dressed in black suits with red ties.

An April 2016 photograph shows the same smiling children and the couple wearing jeans and red t-shirts that read "Thing 1," "Thing 2," "Thing 3" and so on, a take on the mischievous siblings featured in the popular Dr Seuss children's book "The Cat in the Hat."

In another photograph, from September 2015, Louise Turpin lies on her stomach in the grass and props up the baby, who wears a t-shirt reading "Mommy loves me."
It does not cover Rohingya refugees who were living in Bangladesh prior to that date who the UN estimates number at 200,000.

The agreement follows a pact between the countries in November paving the way for repatriations from January 23, a deadline that is likely to slip given the logistical challenges of the cross-border operation. (Photo: AP)

Yangon: Myanmar and Bangladesh have agreed to repatriate Rohingya displaced by an army crackdown "within two years", Dhaka said on Tuesday, outlining the first clear timeline for a return of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

The agreement says the process will be "completed preferably within 02 (two) years from the commencement of repatriation", according to a statement from the Bangladeshi government following talks in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw.

The deal applies to Rohingya who fled Myanmar in two major outbreaks of violence since October 2016, when militants from the stateless Muslim minority first attacked border-guard posts in northern Rakhine state.

It does not cover Rohingya refugees who were living in Bangladesh prior to that date who the UN estimates number at 200,000.

"During this two-day meeting, we agreed on the form that refugees will have to fill to be able to come back to Myanmar," Mohammad Sufiur Rahman, Bangladesh ambassador in Myanmar told AFP.

"We should be able to start the process in the coming days," he said, but added Myanmar's stated deadline of next week for starting Rohingya repatriation was "not possible".

The agreement follows a pact between the countries in November paving the way for repatriations from January 23, a deadline that is likely to slip given the logistical challenges of the cross-border operation.

Myanmar has faced intense diplomatic pressure to allow the safe return of Rohingya refugees driven out by its army.

But many Rohingya in crowded camps in Bangladesh say they are reluctant to return to Rakhine state having fled atrocities including murder, rape and arson attacks on their homes.

Despite that, Myanmar authorities have pressed ahead with the construction of a "temporary camp" in Rakhine's Maungdaw district.

Eventually the site "will accommodate about 30,000 people in its 625 buildings" before they can be resettled permanently, Myanmar's state media reported this week.

But only a fraction of the buildings have been finished.
He also said that it is time for a courteous yet 'ruthlessly candid dialogue' with the US 'with everything on the table.'

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US. (Photo: Twitter/ @PakMnstrDefence)

Islamabad: The US had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat to it and Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan said.

He also said that it is time for a courteous yet "ruthlessly candid dialogue" with the US "with everything on the table" to remove all misunderstandings between Islamabad and Washington.

Reading out a policy statement on the government's foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly on Monday, he regretted that the US downplayed India's aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported on Tuesday.

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US.

"It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," Khan said.

He said that Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," he alleged.

Pakistan accuses India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against it, a charge India has dismissed.

Khan alleged that "India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan" and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

"India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour," he claimed, adding that the unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace.

The minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan.

He said Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation 'Zarb-i-Azb' and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

He urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001.

He also criticised the US for not pursuing internal reconciliation in Afghanistan, which had now become a safe haven for terrorists.
Pakistan is a crucial gateway for US military supplies destined for US and other troops fighting a 16-year-old war in Afghanistan.

The United States has long blamed militant safe-havens in Pakistan for prolonging the war in neighboring Afghanistan, giving insurgents, including from the Haqqani network, a place to plot attacks and rebuild their forces. (Photo: Representational | PTI)

Brussels: The top US military officer, Marine General Joseph Dunford, said on Monday he was committed to the US-Pakistan relationship, which has been strained in recent weeks as Washington piles pressure on Islamabad to crack down on terrorists.

"Do we agree on everything right now? No we don't. But are we committed to a more effective relationship with Pakistan? We are. And I'm not giving up on that," Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a small group of reporters during a trip to Brussels.

The United States has long blamed militant safe-havens in Pakistan for prolonging the war in neighboring Afghanistan, giving insurgents, including from the Haqqani network, a place to plot attacks and rebuild their forces.

Still, Pakistan is a crucial gateway for US military supplies destined for US and other troops fighting a 16-year-old war in Afghanistan.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump's administration, frustrated over Pakistan's failure to do more to combat terrorists, announced a plan to suspend up to roughly USD 2 billion in US security assistance.

That triggered outcry in Islamabad. Pakistan's military said its army chief told US General Joseph Votel, head of the US military's Central Command, that Pakistan "felt betrayed" by US criticism.

In a possible sign of efforts to improve relations, Alice Wells, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, met with Pakistani Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua in Pakistan on Monday.

A statement from Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said Wells "acknowledged Pakistan's efforts in eradicating terrorism" and "underlined the need for strengthening intelligence cooperation" to fight terrorism.

Dunford was careful in his public remarks but made clear that Votel would continue to lead the military-to-military discussions. Dunford said he and US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis would also contribute to that dialogue.

"I'm not going to talk about the relationship in public because I'm committed to try to improve the relationship and I do believe that the military-to-military dialogue led by General Votel, with occasional reinforcement from Secretary Mattis, myself and others, is the right approach," Dunford said.
While withdrawing the PLO's recognition of Israel could spark international backlash, it was unclear whether the vote was binding.

Palestinian leaders voted on Monday to call for the suspension of recognition of Israel . (Photo: AFP)

Ramallah (Palestinian Territories): Palestinian leaders voted on Monday to call for the suspension of recognition of Israel in a move with potentially deep implications as they met in response to US President Donald Trump's declaration of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

While withdrawing the Palestine Liberation Organisation's recognition of Israel could spark international backlash, it was unclear whether the vote was binding.

A previous vote by the same Palestinian Central Council, a high-ranking arm of the PLO, in 2015 to suspend security coordination with Israel was never implemented. That vote was also reaffirmed on Monday.

However, even if the move goes no further, the vote was another expression of Palestinian fury over Trump's Jerusalem declaration and what they see as the White House's attack on their long bid for statehood.

On Sunday as he opened the meeting, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, who voted in favour of the suspension, called Trump's peace efforts the "slap of the century."

The vote ordered the Palestine Liberation Organisation to suspend its recognition of Israel until it "recognises the state of Palestine", cancels its annexation of east Jerusalem and stops settlement activity, a statement said.

The PLO is considered the official representative of the Palestinians internationally and formalised its recognition of Israel in 1993.

In a statement, the delegates also backed comments on Sunday by Abbas that the Oslo peace accords of the early 1990s, which form the basis of the Palestinians' relations with Israel, were "finished."

Abbas had said that Israel had ended the accords through its actions, referring to activities seen as eroding the possibility of a two-state solution such as persistent settlement building.

Removing The 'Mask'?

There was no immediate Israeli reaction to the vote, but earlier on Monday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Abbas's comments had "torn off" his "mask" as a supposed moderate.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip and does not recognise Israel, appeared to welcome the vote but said in a statement that the "real test" would be "to implement it effectively on the ground and put in place the necessary mechanisms."

The rare meeting of the PCC was called after Trump's controversial December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Palestinians want the annexed eastern sector of the city as the capital of their future state, and Abbas has said Trump's stance means the United States can no longer be the mediator in peace talks with Israel.

The US president has sought to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table, with talks stalled since 2014.

Speaking late on Sunday at the opening of the council, which brought together Palestinians from multiple political parties, Abbas told delegates: "We said 'no' to Trump, 'we will not accept your project'."

"The deal of the century is the slap of the century and we will not accept it," the 82-year-old leader added, referring to Trump's pledge to reach the "ultimate deal".

He instead called for an internationally mediated peace process.

Threat To Cut Aid

The Palestinians' relations with the US leadership have deteriorated rapidly since Trump's election.

He came to power promising to lead the most pro-Israel administration in history, but also to pursue a peace deal.

His envoys, including senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, had been shuttling between the two sides in search of common ground.

But Trump also infuriated the Palestinians by refusing to commit to the idea of an independent Palestinian state, and recently threatened to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid.

The Jerusalem announcement prompted the Palestinians to freeze ties with the administration, and Abbas is expected to shun Vice President Mike Pence when he visits the region next week.

On Sunday night, Abbas slammed the US ambassadors to Israel and the United Nations, David Friedman and Nikki Haley, calling them a "disgrace".

Both Trump appointees have been strong supporters of Israel, with Friedman having backed Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

An indignant Abbas also said that Trump had accused them of refusing to engage in peace negotiations.

"May God demolish your house. When did we refuse?" he said, using a common Arabic curse.

He also said the Oslo accords that led to the creation of his Palestinian Authority and envisioned a final resolution to the conflict were in effect finished.

"I am saying that Oslo, there is no Oslo. Israel ended Oslo," Abbas said.

In response to Abbas's comments, the European Union said its position on the conflict remains "based on the Oslo accords".

"A negotiated two-state solution which fulfils the aspirations of both sides, Israel and Palestine, is the only realistic way of bringing the lasting peace and security that both Israelis and Palestinians deserve," European Commission spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic told reporters in Brussels.

France, which organised an international conference in support of the two-state solution a year ago, issued a similar reaction, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow "understands" Abbas's anger.

"For years they made concessions without receiving anything in return," Lavrov said at an annual press conference in Moscow.

"We constantly hear that the US is about to unveil an important deal that would satisfy all sides. We have not seen this kind of document."
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.
City police are investigating a shooting and carjacking.

Shooting happened at Tampa apartment complex

Suspects followed victim, passenger to restaurant

Victim has non-life-threatening injury



It happened just after 7 p.m. Monday at Post Rocky Point apartments. Police said a shooting victim and a passenger fled to the parking lot of a Bahama Breeze restaurant located off the Courtney Campbell Causeway.

According to police, the suspects followed their car to the restaurant. The shooting victim, identifed as 23-year-old Justin A. Sierra, went inside the restaurant and was seeking help.

The culprits then carjacked the vehicle with the shooting victim and passenger, police said.

The person shot was taken to a local hospital with a non-life-threatening injury.

Police are looking for two people in connection with the shooting.



Anyone with information is asked to call Tampa Police.
N. Oregon Coast's Inn at Seaside a Gleaming Mix of Past, Present, Future

Published 01/15/2018 at 8:42 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff





(Seaside, Oregon)  In the north Oregon coast tourist magnet town of Seaside, there's a lot of past, present and future all around you.

The Inn at Seaside is at an interesting crossroads of all that. The building hasn't been around all that long, but it's already seen some action in terms of landmark historical moments, and it  unbeknownst to just about everyone  gazes out at a spot where an important decision in rock 'n roll history was made. In some ways, it's even a reminder of the wonders of the American dream.

Most of all, however, the Inn at Seaside is a stellar accommodation filled with enticing facets and features that go beyond the fact it sits directly in front of the Seaside Convention Center.

In fact, for many years it was named the Seaside Convention Center Inn, until the former owners changed it around 2007 or so. That year, the inn sustained some damage in the Great Gale of 2007, with its signage getting smashed by debris and high winds. It saw some history here.

Not long after that the Inn at Seaside changed hands, getting scooped up by a burgeoning storm of another kind: Masudur Khan and his Seaside Lodging, LLC company. In less than ten years, the Bangladesh native and his company have changed the face of Seaside, building the regal and award-winning River Inn at Seaside and transforming two other lodgings into something special. Khan had already risen to new heights after coming to the U.S., and as company spokesperson Kaarina Vera put it: he was working as a mechanical engineer, then thought out of the box to create this hospitality company.

Then there's the that pivotal moment the Inn at Seaside stares at unknowingly  but more on that in a bit.

The repose and pleasantries begin as you enter the lobby, where rather stunning marble-like tiles give way to a large, inviting fireplace and seating for simply lounging around in. The 24-hour lobby even features cookies and perhaps a bit of candy, with someone always around to assist you, whatever the hour.

Depending on the weather, there's an outdoor patio that may greet you first  perfect for those cool and pleasant coastal evenings of spring, summer and the Second Summer of fall.

Other notable features are the warm, indoor pool and bikes for rent should you want to wander the town at a quicker, more invigorating pace. There's complimentary breakfast in the morning, free wi-fi and an on-site fire pit for a real rustic experience.

The Inn at Seaside also boasts some noteworthy meeting space in the form of a 500-square-foot room that's perfect for all kinds of gatherings, be it business or celebratory.

Further inside, there are 48 rooms serving a wide variety of needs. Some are pet friendly, and some sleep up to seven or eight people.

Just about each room comes with an array of amenities, including coffee maker, in-room yoga mats, mini-fridge, microwave, and usually a work desk with an ergonomic chair. In the corridors and rooms you'll find some awesome art on the walls in the form of old historical photos and stunning scenics of Seaside.

There are larger units available too, including one- or two-bedroom units or suites that come with full kitchens, small kitchens, a dining area or a living area. The room types vary.

In some of the full kitchen units, you'll find modern - even futuristic whites - and lighter colors with wood highlights, while the kitchen is gracefully, snugly fitted into a bend in the architecture.

Other rooms are equally upscale at first glance, but with a shimmering glow in their color display, yet plenty of wood and modern furniture to give a homey feel. Still other rooms are accentuated by what could be termed dreamy whites.

- Where to eat - Map and Virtual Tour

By far the most interesting aspect of the Inn at Seaside is the one you can never see  not exactly, anyway. While a quarter of its windows look out over what appears to be an uninteresting parking lot, a building that was once there helped shape rock 'n roll history. The corner of the lot that faces the convention center and the Carousel Mall is where the Pypo Club once sat, an otherwise unassuming under 21 club on the Oregon coast that featured some big names in the world of rock music back in the '60s.

It was here, about 1960, that a group of young Portland dudes in a band were hanging out for days on end, and kept noticing the original 1957 version of Louie Louie was in heavy rotation on the jukebox. They decided then and there they would redo this song, later releasing it under the name The Kingsmen. This version became THE party song for decades.

While you have to use your imagination to envision that while gazing from your hotel window, your lodging surroundings are very real. Inn at Seaside is 441 Second Ave. Seaside, Oregon at 800-699-5070. 503-738-9581. More on the Inn and Seaside below:













Above: the Inn at Seaside had its sign wrecked in the Great Gale of 2007, but was soon replaced

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If you're looking to indulge that interest in theater, the Beaumont Community Players want to help. Learn the ins and outs of traditional stage management duties, from running rehearsals to calling shows, at this four-session class.

When: 7 p.m.-9 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 24, 31 and Feb. 7
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Local hospitals are rationing IV fluid bags in the midst of a national shortage caused by Hurricane Maria, leaving officials alarmed and scrambling for solutions.

"We've been in an IV solution crisis for months," said Aily Powell, director of pharmacy at Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas. "We've managed, but we're constantly hovering in a state of crisis. It's kind of been a way of life for us recently."

The shortage followed after Maria knocked out power to Baxter International, which operates three IV bag manufacturing plants in Puerto Rico.

The sterilized bags are typically pre-filled with saline or dextrose and are used to administer antibiotics, anti-nausea drugs and other medications.

> > IN HEALTH: The 1918 flu pandemic: Could it happen today?

"It's basically the equivalent of water for us," Powell said. "We use it as a base for everything. Not having it makes it difficult to administer medicine to patients."

The shortage has been exacerbated by a sharp increase in flu cases nationwide, with patients rushing to hospitals, where they often require IV drip medications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 46 states are reporting widespread flu activity.

Under normal circumstances, Powell said she has seen patients use as many as 10 bags in a day.

Baxter is the main supplier of medical products for Baptist Hospitals.

"Normally we'd go solely through Baxter, but we'll take whatever we can get right now," Powell said.

Left with insufficient supplies, Powell said nurses at Baptist have started cutting larger fluid bags into smaller ones.

Physicians at Baptist reassess patients treated for dehydration every hour to see if they still need the fluid bags. Others are treated by pill or manual infusions.

"You kind of have to pick and choose your battles," Powell said. "We're pretty much at that point."

At Christus St. Elizabeth, Director of Pharmacy Tommy Welch had placed a large order for saline fluid and bags the day before Maria hit Puerto Rico. It wasn't nearly enough.

> > FLU: Has this season reached its height?

Welch usually receives seven pallets of saline fluid every Monday from his main supplier, Devon Medical Products. This week, he got two.

"This is probably as bad as I've seen it before," Welch said.

In response to the shortage, local hospitals have kept a close eye on supply, begun mixing solutions on site, ordered premixed and frozen solutions at higher cost from alternative suppliers and assigned nurses to do manual injections.

Welch said other hospitals call him nearly every day asking if he has any supply.

"We haven't completely run out yet, but I know other hospitals I've talked to are getting close," Welch said.

Powell said she has tried collaborating with other hospitals to find alternatives to the shortage.

"The funny thing is, we all strategize together to find a way to manage through the shortage," Powell said. "The only problem with that is if we all have the same idea then we could create a shortage for something else."

In a statement, Baxter said all three of its manufacturing sites in Puerto Rico are now connected to the electric grid  the last site was hooked up in late December  with diesel generators in place for intermittent power disruptions.

Baxter received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to import IV bags from Baxter sites in six countries, including Mexico.

Last week FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the agency expects the shortage of IV saline fluids to improve in early 2018.

Welch isn't confident supplies will return to normal levels that soon.

"It's getting to a point where you don't see a light at the end of the tunnel and nobody can tell you that it's going to get better," Welch said. "These hospitals that are completely out will have to decide very soon if they can keep accepting patients."

MFaye@BeaumontEnterprise.com

Twitter.com/mattGfaye

John Murawski of the Raleigh News & Observer contributed to this report.
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More than a dozen people gathered Monday afternoon at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Orange, holding signs printed with quotes from the famous civil rights leader, calling on the Sons of Confederate Veterans to take down the monument that sits in the shadow of Interstate 10.

The "Confederate Memorial of the Wind" hasn't flown a flag for at least six months but was intended to display 32 battle flags for the Texas regiments of the Confederate Army.

"To me, it's a slap in the face, it's very disrespectful, especially on MLK Drive," said LaNita Brown. She joined other Orange residents, including members of Southeast Texas Progressives, in the second small protest at the site in the past month.

Bernita Bias, who arrived at the protest with Brown, said she was inspired after seeing videos of other protests across the U.S. this morning. It was her first time "standing on the street with a sign," but she plans to stay involved going forward, she said.

As the pair stood facing the street with their backs to the cracked cement pillars, several drivers waved, honked and gave the protesters thumbs up in apparent approval. While others scrutinized the signs silently, only one stopped to voice their disapproval in the first hour.

Houston resident Jeremy Parzen said the group has more than tripled their numbers since last month, when he and his wife, Tracie, who was born in Orange, protested at the monument.

"I'm trying to get the Sons of Confederate Veterans to dialogue," he said but so far has been unsuccessful.

The monument's construction on privately owned land, which began in 2013, drew controversy and opposition at the time, but has largely faded from the spotlight.

For years, "we've kind of let stuff like this go," said protester Gwendolyn Gray. "We have children growing up here seeing this, it's important to be out here," she said, calling it "part of Martin's dream."

Linda Dixon, who said monuments to the Confederacy celebrate things like lynching and segregation, suggested the pavilion could be turned into a public space for events, while Gray said she'd rather see it torn down.

Parzen said he hopes to make the event a monthly occurrence to keep attention on the memorial. He said the monument has given Orange a bad reputation in national media coverage, especially as monuments to the Confederacy have been removed across the U.S.

Following a deadly protest by white supremacists at the site of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, local authorities began questioning other Confederate sites across Southeast Texas, though the statue to "Our Confederate Soldiers" in Wiess Park and Port Arthur ISD's Robert E. Lee Elementary and Dick Dowling Elementary have remained unchanged.

Franklin Gans, a former president of the Orange chapter of the NAACP who fought against the monument's construction, said Monday that he was encouraged to see "a different set of participants" at this year's Martin Luther King, Jr. events, including a march at Solomon Johnson Park and presentation at Orange City Hall.

He said younger people were more involved in this year's activities than in past years, an encouraging sign for passing the torch on to next generation.

LTeitz@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/LizTeitz
Lava cascades down the slopes of the Mayon volcano, seen from Legazpi city, Albay province, 340 kilometers (210 miles) southeast of Manila, Jan. 16, 2018.

More than 3,000 families have been evacuated to safety as the Philippines' most active and picturesque volcano showed signs it was priming for an eruption, volcanologists said Tuesday.

Romina Marasigan, the spokeswoman of Manilas disaster risk reduction agency, said more than 12,000 individuals had already been evacuated from the towns of Guinobatan and Malilipot around Mayon Volcano, after the mountain continued to spew ash and lava oozed out of its crater.

Its very dangerous to stay within the seven-kilometer radius around the volcano, she said.

The 2,462-meter high volcano in the central province of Albay began spewing ash, rocks and mud on the weekend. Lava had also started to spill from the crater, and the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) had raised Alert Level 3.

Level 3 of a five-step alert system means that the volcano is exhibiting an increased tendency towards eruption, magma is close to the crater, and an eruption is likely within days or weeks.

In its latest advisory earlier Tuesday, Phivolcs said lava collapse events had characterized the volcanos activity the past 24 hours. It said nine tremor episodes had been recorded, of which four were accompanied by short-duration lava fountaining.

The mountain also spewed ash that rose to two kilometers and fell on the nearly villages, according to Phivolcs, which characterized Mayons activity as a relatively high level of unrest.

It warned residents to be vigilant against lava flows, lahars and sediment-laden streams along channels that flow from the crater.

Civil aviation authorities must also advise pilots to avoid flying close to the volcanos summit as ash from any sudden eruption can be hazardous to the aircraft, it said, noting that ash fall events could occur on the southwest side of the volcano.

In 2013, Mayon Volcano erupted, killing five hikers, including three Germans who strayed near its summit, ignoring warnings. Mayons most destructive eruption was in 1841, when a massive eruption buried an entire town and killed 1,200 people.
For Immediate Release, January 16, 2018 Contact: Andrea Santarsiere, (303) 854-7748, asantarsiere@biologicaldiversity.org Documents Reveal Idaho Wolverine Killed by Illegal Trap Group Asks State to Prosecute Trapper, Limit Trapping in Wolverine Habitat VICTOR, Idaho Documents the Center for Biological Diversity obtained through a public-records request prove the snare that killed an adult female wolverine in Idahos Beaverhead Mountains last month did not have a stop, a mechanism required under state law that could have prevented the wolverines death. Based on this information, the Center sent a letter today calling on the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to prosecute the trapper and limit trapping in crucial wolverine habitat in Idaho. The death of this female wolverine was entirely preventable, said Andrea Santarsiere, a senior attorney at the Center. Rather than inform the public of this trapping violation, the Department of Fish and Game tried to bury it. Our state wildlife officials have to enforce their own trapping regulations and stop the needless killings of rare animals. Wolverines have been proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act. Adapted to live in high-altitude ecosystems with deep snow, they once roamed through most of the northern United States, from Washington and California east to Maine, and in the West as far south as Arizona and New Mexico. Threatened by climate change, trapping and habitat loss and fragmentation, wolverines are now constrained to a small portion of their once-expansive range. They exist only in the northern Rocky Mountain regions of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, as well as the Cascade Mountains in Washington and a small portion of eastern Oregon. Scientists believe fewer than 300 individuals remain. The Fourth of July Creek drainage in the Beaverhead Mountains, where this wolverine was killed, is considered prime wolverine habitat. Idahos Department of Fish and Game has confirmed wolverine use of the area during the past eight years; the area is an important travel corridor for wolverines, and the agency has even documented a wolverine maternal den in the area. The death of even one wolverine is significant when dealing with such a small population, said Santarsiere. Idaho should not permit the use of deadly traps in known wolverine habitat. Were asking the agency to reconsider this practice. On Feb. 4, 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a proposed rule to list the wolverine in the contiguous United States as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. However, in an unexpected reversal, the Service suddenly withdrew the proposed rule in August 2014, determining that listing under the Endangered Species Act was not warranted. The Center and allies challenged the withdrawal in court, and on May 14, 2016, the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana vacated the withdrawal, sending the Fish and Wildlife Service back to the drawing board to reconsider the fate of this rare carnivore. We will do everything necessary to ensure federal and state agencies take actions necessary to protect the wolverine, added Santarsiere.
Influence of genetic variants of IDH1, IDH2, TET2 and DNMT3A on cytarabine cytotoxicity in different populations by Y. Wang & J. K. Lamba1

The above article from the Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics, published online on 21 November 2017 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted following discussions with the authors, the Journal Editors and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The Retraction has been agreed as this paper was submitted under the joint names of Yan Wang, Jatinder K. Lamba and a third coauthor. After acceptance of the paper, Dr Wang wrote to the EiC asking for the name of the third coauthor to be dropped because of insufficient contribution. The EiC asked that the request be signed by all three authors. When this arrived, the paper was published online with only Dr Wang and Dr Lamba. However, Dr Lamba wrote to the EiC after publication indicating that she had not previously seen the manuscript and that there were coauthors missing. As it is clear that Dr Lamba's signature was forged, we cannot rely on the integrity of the report. The retraction is with the agreement of Dr Lamba but not of Dr Wang.

REFERENCE

1. Wang Y, Lamba JK. Influence of genetic variants of IDH1, IDH2, TET2 and DNMT3A on cytarabine cytotoxicity in different populations. J Clin Pharm Ther. 2017;00:19. <!--TODO: clickthrough URL-->https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpt.12653
The Competition Commission's probe into the supply of school uniforms has so far established that various schools had made exclusive supply deals with stockists, a practice that is considered uncompetitive.

Inspirestock International via 123RF

In the past two years, the commission has been investigating allegations of collusion in the sector, a trend parents felt was driving costs higher. If confirmed, the finding by the commission would affirm parents' suspicions at a time when many are forking out thousands of rand in uniforms, pushing up the costs of education.

Commission spokesman Sipho Ngwema on Friday said he was confident that the commission was about to conclude and announce the outcome of its investigation into suspected price fixing in the school uniform sector.

The probe was initiated in April 2015 when school governing bodies noticed that stockists were emerging as direct and sole suppliers to schools for uniforms at the beginning of each academic year, allowing them to determine prices and lock other suppliers out. Parents' representatives and school governing bodies also raised concern saying schools should not make a business out of selling uniforms.

Tim Gordon, CEO of the Governing Body Foundation which represents school governing bodies, said parents needed as many uniform items as possible - such as shirts and socks - to remain generic so that they could be purchased from a supplier of their choice. "The challenge comes with unique items like blazers, ties, badges and sporting items. Those are the items where stockists come in. The other thing is uniform, stockists indicate that it is not a very profitable business."

He said they typically made profit twice a year at most and carry large stocks. "Other stockists say thanks but no thanks and many schools have only been able to find one stockist. Small towns cannot support multiple stockists and schools are often stuck with one.

"The commission says this should not be the case and other stockists should be able to get business," he said.

According to Gordon, the foundation is hoping that the commission would understand the complexities involved in uniform supply. "We haven't spoken to them in recent times. Our first meeting with the commission was in April 2015. But we believe it [the probe] is close to finalisation."

Brian Brink of the Textile Federation said because schools were increasingly purchasing uniforms from stockists and manufacturers, the commission's probe affects textile manufacturers less than it would have in the past.

Source: Business Day
Making honest and affordable wines, False Bay Vineyards, the sister brand of biodynamic Waterkloof Estate, has given its range of wines a facelift with each now telling their own unique story.

In 2015, starting with the Sauvignon Blanc, they decided to improve their grape sources for the range and concluding with the Chardonnay in 2017, that vineyard voyage is now complete.

Waterkloof Winemaker Nadia Barnard with estate owner Paul Boutinot (Image Supplied)

We felt that now was the perfect time to give those grapes the vessels they deserve. Striking new labels that tell their unique stories, shares cellarmaster for both brands Nadia Barnard.

If we do in fact use grapes from old coastal vineyards, ferment them spontaneously with wild yeast and then age the wine in large wooden casks, why werent we tying our flag to the mast and communicating those facts on the labels?

Grammy-nominated graphic artist and renowned illustrator Stanley Chow was commissioned to draw a descriptive icon for each of the six wines, to give each their own identity and striking new look.

Its all in the name. Each one is different but we harness the same natural ingredients: fantastic coastal fruit, old vines and wild yeast abound, with additions avoided, adds Nadia.

Image Supplied

Where did it all start for False Bay Vineyards?

Back in 1994 when, long before founding Waterkloof, Paul Boutinot came to the Western Cape to seek out and rescue grapes from old, under-appreciated vineyards. These treasures were otherwise destined to be lost in the large cooperative blends that were dominating South Africa's wine industry back then.

Unusual for that time, Boutinot transformed those Cape gems into wines of minimum intervention: wild yeast ferments, no acid additions...you know the drill. A familiar story to many pure wine' lovers now, but back then he was swimming against the tide.
Whitey Basson is back in the driving seat months after his exit from Shoprite, accepting an offer to become an independent nonexecutive director of JSE-listed dairy group Clover.

His return comes after he gave up all of his corporate roles in late 2017 stating that he was tired and that Shoprite was now so large that it took up too much of his time. Basson now says his return to corporate life is a "toe in the water".

"If I can give something back, help on operations, make milk cheaper - just not be too busy. Mentally, I can still handle a lot of problems," he said on Monday. "I will join companies and parastatals for free if I thought I could make a difference to SA."

Clover has also appointed Flemming Morgan as an independent nonexecutive director. He was until recently a member of global foods group Danone's executive committee and CEO of Nutricia, Danone's medical nutrition division. He earlier held senior posts at British American Tobacco and Coca-Cola.

Cratos Capital portfolio manager Ron Klipin said the new appointees should bring new thinking to the group.

Clover CEO Johann Vorster said the group had been expanding commercially into new value-added products. This came after it rationalised its lowmargin basic milk products business by handing over control of raw milk prices to its suppliers through special purpose vehicle Dairy Farmers SA.

Vorster said Basson liked the Clover brand and had known the dairy company's management for a long time.

"I really feel that Clover is at the right time to reposition - all the hard work has been done. I really feel [Basson and Morgan] can add a lot of value," he said.

French-based Danone and Clover were in a joint venture for decades, ending the relationship in 2016.

Clover was savaged on all fronts in the year to June 2017 as prolonged drought was followed by a wetter, cooler summer, which affected domestic beverage sales. At the same time, rand volatility was compounded by SA's volatile political environment, affecting profits.

Along with long-life milk and juice products, and dairy and fruit juice blends, the company had developed value-added offerings such as custards and yoghurts in no-fat, low-fat and full-fat varieties.

Clover chairman Werner Bchner said that Basson's 45 years of African retail experience, combined with Morgan's experience at some of the world's best-known, fast-moving consumer goods companies, would "significantly strengthen" Clover's board.

"I look forward to working with them closely as we drive Clover's strategy to develop and expand higher-margin value-added products in dairy and other related food categories we want to dominate."

Clover brands are sold in Shoprite stores across SA and in other parts of Africa.

Basson said it was one of the biggest accounts for Shoprite and other major food retailers, including Pick n Pay.

Source: Business Day
Australia is calling on the world's top scientific minds to help save the Great Barrier Reef, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund research into protecting the world's largest living structure.

The UNESCO World Heritage-listed reef is reeling from significant coral bleaching due to warming sea temperatures linked to climate change.

The 2,300km site is also under pressure from farming runoff, development and predatory crown-of-thorns starfish, with experts warning it could be suffering irreparable damage.

On Tuesday, the Australian government announced a AUS$2.0m ($1.6m) funding pot available to people with bright ideas on how to save the reef.

"The scale of the problem is big and big thinking is needed, but it's important to remember that solutions can come from anywhere," said Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg.

He said the money would be available to the world's "greatest scientific minds, industry and business leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs".

"Solutions could focus on anything from reducing the exposure of corals to physical stressors, to boosting coral regeneration rates by cultivating reef-building coral larvae that attract other important marine species," Frydenberg added.

Up to AUS$250,000 is available for an initial feasibility stage, where researchers can test the technical and commercial viability of their proposals for up to six months. More than one proposal is expected to be accepted at this stage, the government said. A further AUS$1m will then be made available to the best solutions at the proof of concept stage, where applicants develop and test their prototypes for up to 12 months. Those that are successful will retain intellectual property rights and will be able to try to commercialise their innovation.

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee last year decided not to place the Barrier Reef on its list of sites "in danger" despite concern over the mass coral bleaching. The 2017 bleaching marked the second-straight year that corals have been damaged by warming sea temperatures, an unprecedented occurrence that scientists said would give the invertebrate marine creatures insufficient time to fully recover.

Coral reefs make up less than one percent of Earth's marine environment, but are home to an estimated 25% of ocean life, acting as nurseries for many species of fish.

Source: AFP
When a woman rises to the top rung of the traditionally all-male corporate ladder in Africa, it's front-page news because women's progress in business leadership on the continent continues to be achingly slow.

A board meeting in progress in Nairobi, Kenya. Photo: AMO/ George Philipas

According to a ground-breaking 2015 study by the African Development Bank (AfDB) titled Where Are the Women? Inclusive Boardrooms in Africas Top-Listed Companies, in the 307 top African companies, women accounted for only 14% of total board membership. That translates to one woman out of every seven board members. And one-third of the boards have no women at all, adds the report.

Countries with the highest percentage of women board members are Kenya (19.8%), Ghana (17.7%), South Africa (17.4%), Botswana (16.9%) and Zambia (16.9%). Companies that have seated more than a small handful of women include the Kenya-based East African Breweries Limited (EABL) with a board thats 45.5% women, followed by South Africas Impala Platinum Holdings Limited at 38.5% and Woolworths Holdings Limited at 30.8%.

On the downside, the country with the lowest percentage of women on boards is Cote dIvoire (5.1%), followed by Morocco (5.9%), Tunisia (7.9%) and Egypt (8.2%). Uganda hangs around the continents average of 12.7%, according to the report.

The economic and developmental case

Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, AfDBs special envoy on gender, makes an economic and developmental case for more women on company boards. Women serving on company boards sharpen the continents competitive edge and make inclusive growth a reality.

Women Matter Africa, a report by McKinsey & Company, a US-based global management consulting firm, further highlights the financial benefits for companies having women on their boards. The earnings before interest and taxes margin of those with at least a quarter share of women on their boards was on average 20% higher than the industry average.

But women are under-represented on all rungs of the corporate ladder  in non-management as well as middle and senior management positions, notes the McKinsey & Company report, which states that only 5% of professional women make it to top management in companies in Africa.

And even those women who join management may not necessarily wield influence because they usually occupy staff roles rather than line roles from which promotion to CEOs usually come.

The AfDB report concurs with McKinsey & Companys finding that most women in corporate organisations are frozen at the periphery. The method used to appoint board members doesnt favour women, maintains Fraser-Moleketi. Board appointments are made through old-boy networks, locking women out, she says, and the process of choosing a nominee is not always transparent.

Limited by patriarchal beliefs

Expected to combine work with family duties, women are further limited by patriarchal beliefs that channel them into low-wage careers such as teaching and nursing. The belief among many Africans that a womans career should complement  not interfere with  her family responsibilities is a traditional notion of a womans role that fails to acknowledge the benefits of gender diversity to society.

Women are victims of ongoing socio-cultural prejudice, says Viviane Zunon-Kipre, chair of the board of Societe nouvelle dedition et de presse based in Cote dIvoire.

African women can take some small solace in the fact that the continent ranks first in female membership of boards among emerging regions. Africas 14.4% is far higher than Asia-Pacifics 9.8%, Latin Americas 5.6% and the Middle Easts 1%.

African women as board members

Also, more African women are becoming board members in blue chip companies, non-governmental organisations and financial institutions, and government enterprises are appointing women to their top management, says Wangethi Mwangi, a non-executive board member and former longtime editorial director of the Nation Media Group (NMG). The media company operates in Kenya, Rwanda Tanzania and Uganda.

Although the NMG has only two women among its 13 board members, Mwangi explains that women head the digital, procurement, human resources, operation and marketing departments, while in editorial we have a female managing editor. In departments such as procurement, advertising and marketing, women perform very well, he says.

EABL is the gold standard for womens board membership in Africa. But just a decade ago women constituted only 16% of its board, Eric Kiniti, the companys corporate relations director, points out.

The companys policy is to take gender into account during the hiring process. Before hiring at the senior management level, we ask that there must be a female candidate in all our short lists. And if there isnt, we ask why, he says.

Each member of EABL executive is individually responsible for tackling gender biases that might exist within the business. As signatories to the UN Global Compact and the UN Womens Empowerment Principles, we have a set of codes internally to secure diversity in our workplace, maintains Kiniti.

One of the UN Womens Empowerment Principles requests companies to establish high-level corporate leadership for gender equality. Companies promoting women to top management positions are therefore in sync with the 2030 global goals. Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced Inequalities, specifies that everyone will have equal opportunities and nobody will be left behind.

Making gender diversity a priority

To increase diversity in companies, including on boards, McKinsey & Company recommends four administrative goals: the first is that companies make gender diversity a top board and CEO priority.

The second is to anchor gender diversity strategies in a compelling case, which means communicating relevant policies to employees. The third is to confront limiting attitudes toward women in the workplace, which means focusing on changing perceptions of womens traditional responsibilities. The fourth is to implement a fact-based gender diversity strategy, which involves using metrics and data to understand womens contributions within a company.

The AfDB agrees with these recommendations, adding that companies should publish gender-aggregated data in their annual reports and that corporate governance codes should impose quotas for womens representation on boards.

To kick-start the process of increasing the numbers of women on boards, quotas have been shown to be very effective in many European countries, notably Norway, Finland and more recently France, says Fraser-Moleketi.

Norway adopted a gender quota policy in 2003, requiring firms operating in the country to increase the percentage of women on their boards to at least 40%, from an average at the time of 7%. The government warned it would deregister companies not complying with the regulation.

At 40.1% currently, Norway has the worlds highest percentage of women on company boards. The global average is 15%.

Lack of penalties for non-compliance

Unlike in Norway, African countries adopting policies that support womens leadership in companies are not necessarily enforcing those policies. The Kenyan constitution requires that of the elective or appointive bodies of a company, no more than two-thirds of the members be of the same gender. Unfortunately, the law is silent on penalties for non-compliance.

South African laws generally promote gender equity in state-owned institutions, but women constitute about 33% in those institutions.

Moroccos 2011 constitution guarantees gender equality in all appointments, yet only a negligible 0.1% of those in management positions in private companies are women. In 2016, the Global Gender Gap Report published by the World Economic Forum ranked Morocco 139 out of 145 countries in narrowing the gender gap. A 2015 study by the International Labour Organisation found no female CEO in any large company in Morocco.

Irina Bokova, director general of UNESCO, observes, A sustainable society and a thriving democracy depend on all of its citizens being included and involved in public debate and decision making at every level.

Many African companies claim to be equal-opportunity employers. They must now match their words with actions.

Source: Africa Renewal
Digital currency Bitcoin will "die a horrible death" in 2018, killed by its rival sister, Bitcoin Cash, says Lorien Gamaroff, CEO and founder of Centbee, a Bitcoin Cash wallet.

"Bitcoin is slow and expensive and its market share is being eroded by cryptocurrencies that are quicker and cheaper," said Gamaroff, who initially intended Centbee to be a Bitcoin wallet before a user activated fork led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash in July 2017.

Bitcoin Cash was closer to Bitcoin's original mission to be a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, said Roger Ver, an early investor in bitcoin-related startups.

High fees and slow transaction times would weaken Bitcoin's adoption and market value, Ver, CEO of Bitcoin.com, said at a recent blockchain summit in Hong Kong.

Gravity-defying Bitcoin surged 1,250% in 2017 to a market value of more than $200bn, as speculators poured into the digital currency. "How to buy Bitcoin" was Google's third-most searched "how to".

The widespread publicity that accompanied Bitcoin's rise has made it difficult for fund managers and regulators to ignore.

Cryptocurrencies would in 2018 emerge from "the nascent stage of being at the fringe", said Farzam Ehsani, blockchain lead at RMB.

"There isn't any central bank or financial institution that isn't thinking about this and what it means for our economy."

Ehsani expected greater regulation of cryptocurrency exchanges, where buying and selling took place, as wellas of the interface between cryptocurrencies and regular, fiat currencies.

Regulators will have their hands full. There are more than 1,000 alternative digital currencies to bitcoin, known as "alt-coins". The more prominent ones include Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, Cardano, Neo and Ripple.

With a market value on Friday of $78.9bn, global money transfer network Ripple's digital currency, XRP, surged nearly 35,000% in 2017.

Earlier in 2018, CNBC reported that when XRPhit a high of $3.84, its co-founder Chris Larsen became one of the five richest US people on paper.

Monero (XMR) describes itself as a "private digital currency" that uses "stealth addresses to obfuscate the origins, amounts and destinations of all transactions".

Monero increased by 2,300% in 2017 and is currently trading at about $379.

Dizzying as this may sound, Ehsani believes there is potential for a large increase in market value among cryptocurrencies.

At a total value of just more than $700bn, they remained a relatively small asset class, Ehsani said. At the same time, a lot of cryptocurrencies were "tremendously overvalued".

Cryptocurrencies were too speculative to be an asset class and should not form part of portfolios with a wealth preservation focus, said Deon Gouws, chief investment officer at Credo Wealth.

"Most cryptocurrencies we see launching today are likely to fail, but there's still a lot of money to be made if you can identify the long-term winners successfully and early," said Gouws, who has a personal interest in cryptocurrencies.

"I also believe the identity of such future winners is unknowable today."
The majority of employers in the steel and engineering sector have implemented self-determined wage increases for workers in the absence of an industry wage agreement.

Trade unions signed a three-year wage deal with only one employer body, the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of Southern Africa (Seifsa) in August 2017, after disagreements among employers on the amounts on offer. Employer bodies such as the South African Engineers and Founders Association, a former affiliate of Seifsa, the Light Engineering Industries Association of SA and the Kwazulu-Natal Engineering Industries Association are among the majority of employer bodies that were not party to the August agreement.

This meant that, despite the existence of an industry bargaining council, employers who had rejected the 7% wage hike had unilaterally set their own rates, watering down the functions of centralised collective bargaining.

The National Employers Association of SA (Neasa), which is opposed to the wage deal, accused Seifsa members of applying to be exempted from the agreement, citing its un-affordability. Neasa CEO Gerhard Papenfus said the applications made a mockery of the negotiations process.

"Instead of agreeing on a base wage affordable to the majority of employers in the market, Seifsa, for many years, agreed to outrageous wages, extended through unlawful means to non-parties and then advised their members - the signatories to their agreement and supporters of the extension request to non-parties - to apply for an exemption. It makes no sense at all," Papenfus said.

While the unions and Seifsa were likely to petition Labour Minister Mildred Oliphant for an extension order that would make the deal inclusive to non-parties, as had been done in the past, there were still a number of hurdles ahead.

What the unions and Seifsa have is a parties' agreement.

In order for Oliphant to intervene, the employers and labour leaders have to reach an agreement on the existing settlement in order to ratify it as a deal binding to the industry.

Even then, Neasa has vowed it would challenge applications for an extension.

"Should they attempt this, they will find that they do not have the prerequisite support for any extension. Should they attempt extension through unlawful means, we will do whatever we deem necessary to prevent them from doing so," said Papenfus.

Solidarity said the employers were not acting in the best interests of the industry, describing as worrying the impasse that had led to the agreement and continued to stalk parties months after its signing.

"We have to go through all the internal processes in council. What we had is a party agreement and we have to draw up an industry deal that has to go through the management committee and then we can start the process of going to the minister and extend it to parties," said Solidarity deputy general secretary Marius Croucamp.

Seifsa had failed to respond to questions at the time of going to press.

Source: Business Day
British Airways has conducted a research study which found that the average working South African has not taken a two-week break over the last year; either as a result of not being able to take time off or worrying about the workload on their return.

While 65% felt their employer provides an adequate number of holidays each year, 60% ended the year with leave-days owing to them because they were saving the days for a holiday they didnt take. Most breadwinners felt frustrated and unsettled after shoehorning a week off, with 61% saying they either felt they hadnt had a long enough break or that they hadnt fully switched off from work, and 73% saying that they thought about work or other commitments a lot while on holiday.

Those whod been overseas wished theyd spent more time at the destination (66%) or didnt get to see all theyd wanted to (35%), while 70% said theyd visited the same holiday destination up to five times.

Nick Hewer, former advisor to the UK production of The Apprentice said: A happy workforce is key to having an efficient working environment and most importantly, a successful business. Employees need time off to unwind and relax in order to perform to the best they can.

Managing the pressures of work

Going on holiday is always exciting and we all enjoy the countdown to the day it starts, but judging from the results of this survey, many people are reluctant to venture somewhere new.

The fact that many South African travellers repeatedly return to the same destination may partly be due to lack of time to plan holidays because of the pressures of work. But returning to the same destination is likely to make you feel as though your trips going by more quickly, whereas new holiday experiences will make you feel as though youve been away from your routine for longer, says Sue Petrie, British Airways commercial manager for Southern Africa.

Petrie adds that the growing awareness of the need for work-life balance ties into the rise of whats being termed experientialism  the realisation that you get more long-term happiness from the memories of an amazing journey or experience than from material goods. Buying a designer handbag may feel like it brings happiness  and of course theres nothing wrong with buying goods  but spending the same amount on, say, a holiday in your bucket-list destination will be more rewarding in the long-term.
Briefing and engagement sessions aimed at educating workers about the National Minimum Wage (NMW) policy, which takes effect from 1 May 2018, are set to resume this week.

The Department of Labour says the sessions are to inform workers on the implications of proposed amendments to the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA), the Labour Relations Act (LRA), the Accord on Collective Bargaining and Industrial Action and the Code of Good Practice on Collective Bargaining, Industrial Action and Picketing.

The objective of the worker briefing sessions is to ensure that the NMW, as a new labour policy intervention instrument, is communicated to all the intended beneficiaries - the workers, said the department.

The next worker briefing sessions will take place on Thursday, 18 January at Emnotweni Tsogo Sun Casino - 15 Government Boulevard Riverside Park Extension 1 in Nelspruit, and on Friday, 19 January at Protea Hotel Marriot Emalahleni - 167 Jellicoe Street in Witbank.

The worker engagement and briefing sessions started on 9 November 2017 and target all sectors of the economy. Since the start of the roadshows, briefing sessions have been held in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, George, Pietermaritzburg, Richards Bay, Durban, Tzaneen, and Polokwane.

The agreed NMW at National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) is pegged at R20 an hour for major sectors, with the exception of sectors such as farm and domestic workers.

The exceptions to the national minimum wage which include:

The minimum wage for farm workers will be 90% of R20 per hour (R18 per hour);



The minimum wage for domestic workers will be 75% of R20 per hour (R15 per hour);



The minimum wage for workers on an Expanded Public Works Programme is R11 per hour.

Nedlac social partners have agreed that the farm, forestry and domestic sectors will be brought up to 100% of the NMW within two years, pending research by the National Minimum Wage Commission.

More worker NMW and labour amendments briefing sessions are still to be held in:

Klerksdorp - 25 January



Rustenburg - 26 January



Bloemfontein - 01 February



Welkom - 02 February



Umtata - 07 February



East London - 08 February



Port Elizabeth - 09 February



Upington - 15 February



Kimberley -16 February

The briefing sessions on NMW and amendments to labour laws are held from 10am  1pm.
MONTREAL, Canada: An Ontario man made his first court appearance on Monday, 15 January 2018, to answer charges of running a website that collected personal and password data from some three billion accounts, and sold them for profit.

Jordan Evan Bloom, 27, of Thornhill earned some Can$247,000 ($198,800 US) by selling the data for a "small fee" via leakedsource.com, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement.

The information was stolen during massive hacks of websites including LinkedIn and the Ashley Madison online dating service.

Some of the data could also be used to access other popular websites if the hacked user used the same password and username combination, according to police.

Bloom was charged in December as part of a criminal probe dubbed "Project Adoration" focusing on trafficking in personal data, unauthorized use of computers, and possession of illicitly obtained property.

The probe lasted more than a year.

Authorities have shut down Bloom's website, but another with the same domain name hosted by servers in Russia is still operating.

"The RCMP will continue to work diligently with our domestic and international law enforcement partners to prosecute online criminality," inspector Rafael Alvarado said in a statement.

Police noted that help from the Dutch National Police and the FBI were "essential" to the investigation.

Source: AFP
The Maitland house crammed with 52 immigrants who shared one toilet is under renovation, following action taken by the City of Cape Town.

A room in the dilapidated property in Maitland. Photo: Tariro Washinyira

Some tenants were paying R880 a month for a bunk bed in a small room shared with three other people, with a leaking roof and an outside toilet.

Responding to GroundUp queries, city officials visited the property on 11 December and served the owner with a notice to comply with environmental health by-laws. A follow-up inspection was conducted on 11 January, Mayoral Committee Member for Area North Councillor Suzette Little said.

Inspection revealed that the owner had partially complied with the notice. The overcrowding issue has been resolved and there are currently five remaining tenants in the building. The owner however requested an extension until 31 January 2018 in order to fix the structural shortcomings, namely the missing ceiling boards and the inadequate ventilation. The extension was granted and will be followed-up after the due date. No further health nuisances were reported.

When GroundUp visited the property on Thursday, 11 January, most of the rooms were vacant. One of the occupiers who did not want to be named said the property owner had started renovations and would get new tenants, though the old tenants had indicated that they would like to return.

She said though she felt sorry that some of the tenants had lost their accommodation, she was relieved that the tenants high water and electricity bill had been lowered. She said some of the tenants were backpackers from Zimbabwe who came and went.
Members of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature (GPL) will embark on a school readiness drive from Wednesday until Friday (17 - 19 January 2018) to assess issues such as registration, teaching and the state of affairs in schools.

Presiding officers [of the GPL] will engage with the schools management to identify critical needs for speedy intervention. During this campaign, the presiding officers - together with the Portfolio Committee on Education - will each actively visit two identified schools, accompanied by the relevant stakeholders.

Officers will oversee the readiness of schools for the 2018 academic year, looking specifically at issues such as the registration intake process, monitoring teaching and learning and looking at the state of affairs in the respective schools, said the Provincial Legislature.

The GPL will pay a visit to 15 secondary schools in the Tshwane region education district as part of the institutions School Readiness Programme for the 2018 academic year.

The initiative forms part of the legislatures oversight mandate over the work of the executive authority in the province.

Towards the end of 2017, the Gauteng Department of Educations executive authority outlined the departments financial situation underpinning several constraints. The visits are thus aimed at assessing the schools state of readiness ahead of the new academic year.

Presiding officers will also use this initiative to donate valuable educational support materials to the schools based on their individual needs such as school shoes, uniform and groceries, among other things, said the legislature.

Parents and learners can also expect to hear about the mandate of the legislature, as well as the campaign for the promotion of the right to education for children and the role of parents in providing support and strengthening the education system.

To kick off the drive, the following schools will be visited on the first day of school, Wednesday, 17 January: Sitjhejiwe Secondary School in Ekangala; Strauss Secondary School, Nkangala; Lesedi Secondary School, Donkerhoek; Tshipatabani Secondary School, Donkerhoek; Wozanibone Secondary School, Sokhulumi; Sokhulumi Secondary School, Cultural High School, Bronkhorspruit; Dan Kutumelo Secondary, Bronkhorspruit; Mpumelelo Secondary School, Bronkhorspruit and Zithobeni Secondary School, Bronkhorspruit.

On Thursday, oversight visits will be conducted at these schools: Memezelo Secondary School, Soshanguve; Hlanganani Secondary School, Soshanguve; Elizabeth Matemela Secondary School, Soshanguve; Kgomotso Secondary School, Soshanguve; Soshanguwe Secondary School; Botsebotse Secondary School, Soshanguve; Senthibile Secondary School, Soshanguve; Amogleng Secondary School, Soshanguve; Makhosini Secondary School, Soshanguve and Lethabong Secondary School, Soshanguve.

To close off the first week of school, the GPL will on Friday pay a visit to these schools in Hammanskraal: Ntswane Secondary School; Tipfuxeni Secondary School; Adam Masebe Secondary School; New Estrus Secondary School; Modilate Secondary School; Bokamuso Secondary School; Hans Kekana Secondary School; Rakgotso Secondary School; Madisong Secondary School and Lehwelereng Secondary School.
The Association of Southern African Travel Agents (ASATA) lifts the veil on which destinations will emerge as the most popular in the new year and which will be the main trends and inspirations that will inspire South African travellers in 2018.

Marta Huk via 123RF

Visa-Free destinations rule

Visa-free destinations will be a popular choice for budget-conscious South African travellers who are likely to be deterred by exorbitant visa costs, according to Monica Horn, product manager, Harvey World Travel. Horn explains that the rate of exchange will continue to have an impact on spending, which is why well see more South Africans opting for destinations in Africa, the Indian Ocean Islands or even the Far East.

Karen Donkin, iGo Travel, agrees and says the weak rate of exchange will see travellers prompt South Africans to explore their own country or travel within Africa.

Trafalgar reports that Russia has seen a strong growth amongst South African travellers, partly due to the fact that South Africans no longer need visas to visit Russia. For 2018, TTC has even added a new trip to the destination and are introducing the eight-day Highlights of St Petersburg and Moscow, says Theresa Szejwallo, MD The Travel Corporation (TTC).

Shopping around for a good deal will be common

While head of Kulula Holidays Desmond OConnor says he doesnt see significant changes in travel for 2018, he foresees that the drive for value deals and cost-effective travel will be the key decision maker for most South African.

Says OConnor: We expect booking trends to shorten in terms of when people book compared to when they travel, and people will continue to shop around (online and offline) for the best deal. We have seen the booking trends shorten substantially in the last 24 months and people are booking a lot closer to the planned departure date than previously.

According to OConnor, travellers can expect a huge drive on activities, value adds and benefits in an attempt of travel sellers to differentiate value and try and upsell.

Wellness travel is the next big thing

Wellness travel will be the next big thing in travel, according to Club Travels Tatum Vermaak. She explains Club Travel has seen an uptick in demand for sporting and wellness travel.

Szejwallo agrees and says this niche is expanding 50% faster than the overall tourism industry. The definition of wellness travel is also broadening and is no longer restricted to spa treatments and pampering. Says Szejwallo: South African wellness travellers want the real thing when they travel and want to connect with locals and find their happy place.

The Maldives is expected to become a popular island getaway

With Maldivian Airlines announcing they will soon start offering direct flights to South Africa, Vermaak predicts the Maldives will become a popular island getaway for South African travellers. Direct flights from South Africa will make this destination a lot more affordable for South African travellers, says Vermaak, adding that depending on the airfares, the new flights could propel the Maldives as a value-for-money option.

OConnor also foresees that the Maldives will become an attractive destination. He says: The usual Indian Ocean islands remain strong, as does the far East and I think these areas will remain the key leisure markets for South Africans. However, we do see potential for the Maldives to grow from an international perspective.

South Africans will take to the seas in 2018

Cruising will also be a popular holiday option for South Africans in 2018, says Vermaak, who adds that the cruising industry is growing at a fast pace. She foresees that cruising will start to take off amongst the younger generations with products such as U by Uniworld, which caters for 21 to 45-year-olds. She says: The ship has DJs, rooftop lounges and adventurous excursions.

Horn agrees and says that 2018 will be all about "cruising cruising cruising! She explains that there are a great number of different cruise liners available, and the trick for travel agents will be to match the right cruise line to the right customer.

Groups will be popular for leisure and corporate travellers

Group travel is becoming more popular as people are attracted to the hassle-free element of this kind of travel, says Szejwallo. Travellers dont want to risk anything going wrong with their reservation or face having to pay more as a result of the volatility of the rand.

Guided holidays will also gain popularity as an option for staff incentives, as well as for corporates who are looking for a bleisure city break. Says Szejwallo: Often corporates have limited time before or after their business trips and by taking a City Explorer to London, Paris, Berlin or Madrid, they can enjoy these business hubs for between six to eight days without having to worry. The appeal is that they dont have to pack and unpack as their entire stay is in one city.
The Cape IT Initiative (CiTi) has launched CiTi Circles, a confidential, problem-solving forum for entrepreneurs that are "serious about growth".

CiTi Circles aims to help startups address issues within their businesses through structured, monthly two-hour sessions with a facilitator and eight other entrepreneurs in similar growth phases.

The sessions will help business owners solve problems, get input on current situations, and make better decisions. Sessions will be held at the Woodstock Bandwidth Barn, with pricing ranging from R500 to R1,000 per month depending on the business.

Having worked with entrepreneurs for the past 18 years, we know how lonely and challenging running a business is. While there are many incubation options available, such as CiTis own VeloCiTi programmes, what happens when entrepreneurs finish the programme? CiTi said.

Entrepreneurs facing the complexities of growth can hugely benefit from ongoing advice and contacts from those who understand the journey. Who better to support an entrepreneur than other entrepreneurs?

Hence CiTi Circles, with forums led and facilitated by Mignon Keyser, a peer facilitator with 15 years experience, who has worked with CiTi and entrepreneurs in its ecosystem for many years. Each session aims to provide a safe, contained space for entrepreneurs to ask questions and get advice without judgment.

This article was originally published on www.disrupt-africa.com
With a wave, Kinji Asamura summoned a riderless motorcycle to his side in the Yamaha booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

The concept electric motorcycle, called 'Motoroid,' then balanced in position, holding its place even when Asamura tried gently to push it over.

Nearby, a robot that might seem suited for a futuristic action film was astride a production model Yamaha super-bike that it had ridden at speeds topping 200 kilometres per hour on a test track.

"The motorbike is the recent past, and the Motoroid is the future," Yamaha spokesman John Boreland told AFP as he glanced from one two-wheeled creation to the other.

"The object is to see what lessons can be learned to connect machine to human more effectively."

The robot-ridden Yamaha motorcycle, called 'Motobot,' is fast but blind, relying on pre-programmed routes, according to Yamaha.

Lessons learned so far from the research model include that "human beings react a hell of a lot quicker," according to Boreland.

Flesh-and-blood riders have also proven better at grasping the counter-intuitive notion of counter-steering and leaning through turns, he added.

The Motoroid model boasted autonomous features such as balancing on its own, recognising riders, and being summoned with a wave.

Wings on the back of the seat were designed with the help of a psychologist to gently squeeze a rider's lower back in a sort of reassuring caress at potentially perilous high speeds, Boreland said.

"Somewhere along the line, this will all meld together so you'll be part of the bike and it will figure things out for you," Boreland said of insights and advances resulting from the concept motorcycles, which are not for sale.

Source: AFP
On Monday, Media Monitoring Africa announced a "legal defence fund" for journalist and author Jacques Pauw to fight legal challenges over his explosive 2017 book, The President's Keepers.

Photo: The Book List

The media advocacy organisation said on its website that this followed "kind offers from members of the public" to assist Pauw with the mammoth legal battles that lay ahead of him after the release of the book.

The bestseller contains damning claims about President Jacob Zuma, including that he extracted a salary from a private company while he was head of state, and that he subsequently failed to submit his tax returns after becoming president.

While the State Security Agency charged Pauw for the punishable offence of disclosing executive details, the South African Revenue Service has also threatened legal action against the journalist, citing violation of the Tax Administration Act.

Media Monitoring Africa said NB Publishers would respond to Sars's application to the High Court in Cape Town soon. Sources say that the state faces the quandary of having to validate Pauw's claims if the information disclosed is proven true in court.

"In what amounts to a relentless campaign of intimidation, there have also been threats of civil suits against Pauw and NB Publishers. Through attorney Willem de Klerk and with senior counsel, NB and Pauw have co-operated with the authorities but have also made it clear that they stand by the book and are prepared to defend it," the statement read.

Media Monitoring Africa said the legal defence fund was a crucial part of a campaign to protect the right to freedom of speech. The organisation's website included details for South Africans who wished to contribute money to the defence fund.

Source: BDpro
Imagine a shopper, Sarah, who is concerned about child labour and knows about groups like the Fair Wear Foundation that certify which brands sell ethically produced clothing. Hours after learning that fashion giant H&M reportedly sells clothing made by children in risky workplaces in Burma, she goes shopping. Completely forgetting about what she just heard, she buys an H&M dress.

sergeybogachuk via via 123RF

What happened? Sarah either forgot about that child labour allegation, or she mistakenly recalled that H&M was on Fair Wears list of ethical brands  which it isnt. Either way, how could she make such an error?

We are interested in how actual purchasing can be different from consumers own values. Our research shows that even though most consumers want to buy ethically sourced items, its hard for them to heed these sentiments, especially when adhering to their sentiments requires remembering something.

Selective memories

Its not easy to shop ethically in the U.S. Nearly all the clothing sold here is imported. Although not all imported clothing is made in exploitative workplaces, companies that demonstrably benefit from unfair and even dangerous labor practices abroad continue to flourish.

Prior consumer psychology research has shown that people dislike thinking about unethical issues associated with their purchases. When you buy a new sweater, you probably dont want to contemplate the harsh reality that it might have been made by exploited workers. And you may be tempted to come up with rationalizations to avoid thinking much about these issues.

In fact, consumers may do their best to remain ignorant about whether a product is ethical or not, simply to avoid the anguish they would experience if they were to find out.

Unethical amnesia

We wanted to learn what consumers would do if they had to face the truth.

Perhaps they might just forget that truth. After all, memory is not a particularly accurate recording device. For example, recent psychological research suggests that people experience unethical amnesia  a tendency to forget when they have behaved unethically in the past.

So would shoppers also prefer to forget when a company exploits workers or engages in other unethical actions? We predicted that they would.

In a series of studies described in an article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, we explored why consumers memories might fail them when it comes to recalling whether products are ethical. It turns out that there is a predictable pattern for what consumers are likely to remember (or forget) about the ethicality of products.

In general, we found that consumers are worse at remembering bad ethical information about a product, such as that it was produced with child labour or in a polluting manner, than they are at remembering good ethical information  such as that it was made with good labour practices and without much pollution. Our findings should trouble the many companies now vying for the ethical consumerism market and the people who buy those products.

Avoiding feeling torn

To test our hypothesis, we studied how well 236 undergraduates would remember manufacturing information about six wooden desks. We did not select any of the participants for these studies based on whether they did or did not see themselves as ethical consumers.

We told these students that half of the six brands of desks were made from wood sourced from endangered rainforests and that the rest came from wood sourced from sustainable tree farms.

After they had several opportunities to study and memorize the descriptions, the participants completed unrelated tasks for approximately 20 minutes. Then we displayed only the desks brand names and asked the students to recall their descriptions.

The participants were significantly less likely to correctly remember when a desk was made with rainforest wood compared to when it was made with sustainable wood. They either did not remember the wood source at all or wrongly recalled that the desk was made from sustainable wood.

Did that suggest shoppers just dont want to remember unpleasant information about brands?

To find out, we looked into how accurately the students would remember other attributes of the desks, such as their prices. We found that they didnt make the same kinds of errors.

People generally strive to act morally, which in this case would mean remembering whether products are ethically sourced or not and then presumably acting accordingly. However, people also do not want to feel bad or guilty.

And no one enjoys feeling torn. The easiest way for conscientious shoppers to avoid this inner conflict is to yield to their consumerist whims by forgetting details that might trigger ethical concerns.

Do these jeans make me look unethical?

In another study, we had 402 adults participate in an online experiment. As part of a shopping task, this group, which averaged 38 years old and included slightly more women than men, read about a pair of jeans. Half of them saw jeans made by adults. The others saw jeans made by children.

Consistent with our other findings, people who saw the child-labour jeans were significantly less likely to remember this detail compared with people who had seen the jeans made by adults.

Notably, participants who saw the child-labour jeans said they felt more uncomfortable. We determined that this desire to not feel uncomfortable again led participants to forget about the child labour detail.

I dont remember and I feel fine

In another online experiment, we presented 341 adults (with the same demographic profile) with one of two scenarios.

Half of them read about a consumer who, when trying to recall a description of jeans they were interested in purchasing, forgot whether the jeans were ethically made. The other half read about a consumer who instead remembered whether the jeans were made ethically, but chose to ignore this information.

It turns out that participants judged consumers less harshly for buying jeans they forgot were made by children rather than when they remembered but ignored this information.

So, maybe consumers forget when products are made unethically so they can buy what they want without feeling (as) guilty.

Reminding consumers

How can marketers help consumers make more ethical choices?

One possibility is to continually remind them, even at point of purchase, of their products ethical attributes. That is what companies such as Everlane, a clothing company that has built social responsibility into its business model, and the outdoor apparel giant Patagonia already do.

Also, companies can concentrate on the bright side, describing how happy their well-paid workers are and how their contractors are good environmental stewards instead of pointing out the bad things their competitors do. Based on what we learned, that approach would make ethical consumers less likely to subconsciously dodge this issue.

How can consumers make more ethical choices?

For starters, they can forget about relying on their memories when they shop. They can use guides like the one Project Just has created to assess their next purchase, and they can also make notes to themselves about brands to avoid. The key is to realise our memories are not perfect and that shopping without a plan may lead us away from our values.
Voice search has moved from novelty to a daily reality for many people. According to Google, voice search queries in 2016 were up 35x over 2008. According to statistics from MindMeld, 11% of people using voice search in 2016 started more than three years before, while 60% started in the twelve months preceding Q1 2016.

Jumping forward a couple of years and Amazons Echo Dot was the best-selling product across all of Amazon during the 2017 holiday season. The etailer was not specific about just how many of the devices were sold but did say in a statement that tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices were purchased worldwide.

Furthermore, research has shown that those who use voice technology are very satisfied with the experience, a positive sign for ongoing adoption. In fact, two-thirds (65%) of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home said they cant imagine life without such a device, and 42% said voice activated devices have quickly become essential in their day to day lives.

According to Google, 20% of searches on an Android device are already voice searches and, with voice-enabled assistants now installed by default on all smartphones, comScores forecast that 50% of all searches being voice by 2020 almost seems like a gross underestimate.

However, what the rise of voice search does mean is that marketers need to rethink their search strategies. If voice search is in the too hard basket, or you just havent even begun to consider its ramifications on SEO, here are just three things you need to be addressing right now to ensure your voice is being heard, even if at first its just a whisper.

Get Your Local Listings Sorted



Almost a quarter (22%) of people are using voice search to discover local content and information, such as where is the nearest cafe? or is there a gas station nearby?. Voice search can recognize phrases such as nearby or near me and, referring to the mobile devices physical location, present relevant results. As such, local businesses must ensure their Google My Business listing has been claimed and is up to date.

Think How People Speak



A query typed into Google Search will not be constructed in the same way as a spoken query. While a typed search query might contain core keywords such as induction oven Houston the oral query is more likely to be conversational such as where is the best place to buy an induction oven in Houston?. Its like long tail, but its less about variations of keywords and more about how people speak, but thats the way your keyword strategy must now head.
The Botswana Exporters and Manufacturers Association (BEMA) is a member based organisation which advocates for a conducive business environment for local producers and exporters. Established in 1995, the association has through consistent engagement and dialogue with policy makers managed to safeguard the interest of its members throughout the years.

In the last three years, the manufacturing sector has been going through a turbulent period characterised by massive job losses and shut-downs. Many investors have divested from the Botswana economy to seek alternative markets and set-up shop elsewhere. Investor confidence is low and the sector feels that the legislative environment has become somewhat unpredictable. Furthermore, excessive dumping and predatory behaviour from South Africa has placed many industries under existential threat.

With the size of the Botswana market, it is evident that growth opportunities for the sector can be realised through exports. It is difficult however, even with a good set of policies in place to support local producers, to capture even the local market, let alone secure export opportunities. BEMA believes that for manufacturer to master and reach the level of competitiveness required for long term sustainability in exports, they must have mastered the art of satisfying their own domestic market. A population of 2 million people is a good practice run for those with aspirations big enough to play in the global or even regional space.





The 2 million people however, must be serviced with good quality, competitive pricing and consistency. It is absolutely crucial that local producers are allowed sufficient access to the local market if they are to reach an export ready status.

Botswana is not necessarily an innovative economy, being a developing country, manufacturers compete primarily on cost as opposed to innovation or technology which is usually the case with more developed economies. It is therefore critical for the Government to support the growth of the sectors with knowledge of the fact that cost competitiveness is critical for the survival of manufacturing firms in Botswana. We encourage Government to focus its policy reform strategies on subsidising input costs and offering to incentivise manufacturers on that basis. Importers (of raw material) are already at a slight advantage due to the strength of the Pula against the Rand and the basket of currencies of some of its trading partners, but this is not enough.

Government must realise that the persistent lack of implementation which consistently appears on the agenda is a problem that will not go away. This is a major set-back for manufacturers as it renders excellent policies obsolete and therefore there is no benefit to those it was intended to support. Local procurement preference initiatives are not taken seriously and procuring entities continue to ignore and bypass these directives without consequence.

There has to be accountability and consequences for those who choose to circumvent these directives to the detriment of the private sector. More often than not, circumvention of directives intended to support local producers is a fire that is lit by the match of corruption.

Retailers play a big part in the growth and development of manufacturing in any emerging economy. The retail sector however, is often overlooked in conversations around economic diversification and growth in the manufacturing sector. Government must make an effort to encourage more support from the retail sector and attach conditions to their trading license requirements if necessary. BEMA believes that at least 30% of what is on retail shelves should be locally produced, with the exception of those products that are not available locally.

The sector is still recovering from the electricity and water crisis that was experienced in recent years. It is encouraging that this crisis seems to have been averted and those Government efforts to find solutions have borne fruit.

The sector recognises Governments efforts in reducing the cost of doing business, development of SEZs, creating a one stop shop platform and recent economic stimulus initiatives that have boosted some sub-sectors. We are encouraged by the number of excellent policies that have been put in place; we have seen some effective reforms that have indeed benefitted our members.

BEMA co-chairs the AGOA Reference Committee tasked with formulating a response strategy for the renewed AGOA initiative to 2025. We are pleased to see that the strategy document has been finalised and are happy with the level of engagement and consultation. Members are confident and encouraged by some of the lessons learned and are confident that the new proposals and approach taken will bear fruit.

We must admit that the manufacturing sector has a lot of work to do; we recognise our responsibility to create employment for the people of Botswana. We take this responsibility seriously and as such we are willing to continue with our open and honest engagements with Government. Manufacturers in Botswana are ready for business. We have recognised the need for us to focus on quality and consistency in production and will be signing an MOU with BOBS in the next few weeks. We have engaged and developed positive working relationships with those whom we call our enablers and these are critical stakeholders to the sector and include the likes of BITC, PPADB and EDD amongst others.

BEMA is confident that given the opportunity to fully service the local market, both Government and the private sector, local manufacturers will surpass the expectations of buyers and consumers with their service, production and delivery capabilities. With the right mind-set and willingness to buy local, the manufacturing sector in Botswana will see exponential growth within a very short space of time. Business confidence will be boosted unlocking further investments from both foreign and domestic investors either starting-up or expanding existing businesses. Manufacturing will become more advanced, more innovative and more competitive in exports. Our greatest achievement in this process will be employment creation and economic diversification.
Getbucks Botswana, a notable player in the micro-lending business will raise more cash in the capital market to power its operations going forward.

The disclosure is contained in the Companys financial report for the year ended June 2017, in which the unlisted lender posted a profit of P9, 8 million, against P404, 923 made the same period in 2016.

The Group expects to raise further funding for the business through the listing of additional tranches under the Programme Memorandum on the Botswana Stock Exchange by 31 January 2018, said a statement signed by Chairman Jeffery Sibisibi and Managing Director, Marthin De Kok.





The Gaborone-based company has previously raised capital in the domestic market. So far it has raised P71 million under its bond programme which was launched early last year. During the year under review, Getbucks which offers loans to formally employed people, stated that its revenue and loan book jumped by 6 percent to P85, 6 million and 73, 3 million respectively.

Despite the modest increase in profits, the company has not declared any dividends. Getbucks Botswana has been active in the domestic market since it was established some few years ago. Last year, the company agreed to acquire 50 percent of the share capital in Sure Choice Proprietary Limited , a micro finance business, for a total purchase consideration of P10 million.

The acquisition is subject to all customary regulatory approvals, and GetBucks regulatory approval requests have been filed with the Non-Bank Financial Institutions Regulatory Authority (NBFIRA), disclosed Sibisibi and de Kok. As part of the agreement, GetBucks has taken over the loan owing to the Seller by Sure Choice, as part of the purchase agreement.

Going forward, Getbucks is expected to improve its profitability and grow its asset base while leveraging cutting edge technologies in delivering above average customer service and competitive pricing and products.

Getbucks has also announced the appointment of Marshall Chimedza as Finance Director. He replaces Clever Hamadi who passed on last July.
Standard Chartered, the countrys oldest bank is bullish of the year ahead after experiencing a decline on profitability in recent years owing to variety of reasons.

This is the message coming clearly from the relatively new Chief Executive Officer, Mpho Masupe. He was speaking at the banks branch opening at Mowana Park, Phakalane on Wednesday morning.

As we kick-start 2018 with this branch opening, it signals the beginning of an exciting year ahead across our retail, commercial and global segments, stated Masupe who was appointed to head the 120-year old bank in October 2017.





We are poised to share new products and enhanced offerings, new services, and greater integration across segments, all of which are aligned to our global push to create efficiency and convenience to you our clients through innovation and digitization on our global award winning digital platforms.

Concerning new products and services, BG Business understands that it is just a matter of time before the bank signs a deal with one of the local mobile telecommunications companies to offer exclusive services to the unbanked community. Executives of the bank are tight-lipped who the prefer mobile telecommunications company is.

The listed lender, which is a unit of Standard Chartered plc, has also announced that more focus will also be placed on digital banking platforms.

Our branches of the future are smaller and champion digital integration and focus on fast friendly service offering to our clients, he stressed. The new branch at the leafy Phakalane is the 21st for the bank.

Masupe also told guests who included Bank of Botswana (BoB) Deputy Governor, Andrew Motsomi that, the new branch will offer services mainly to Priority Banking customers. However, this does not discount other customers.

Speaking at the same event, Head of Retail, Pedzani Tafa said Priority banking customers remain a key segment of the banks operations. In 2017, we witnessed a 70% year-on-year growth in our Priority segment which was strong affirmation that what we have to offer is what this segment is looking for, she stated.

Standard Chartered is currently among the top four banks in the country, but its position within the group has lately come under threat due to its decreasing profitability.

For the half year results to June 2017 the bank posted a loss of P57 million on its comprehensive income. Our H1 results are not our best and we will continue to have some real challenges in the short term.

We have booked a H1 loss for 2017, which is our first in many years. The outcome for our H1 result is not unexpected. A tough external environment which saw reduced margins, hurt our income, said Masupe at the time.

The bank is currently under a closed period ahead of the coming full year results announcement in few months time.
A Zimbabwean, Prince Moyo, 24, accused of stabbing Kago Keletse to death with a knife on the Eve of BOT 50+ celebrations, says he was framed by the police, who placed the murder weapon in his pocket.

Moyo is pinning his hopes on the forensic results that are expected to be produced before Francistown Magistrate Kaveri Kapeko on January 22.

He is accused of killing Kago at the same bar where his (Kago) late father was also shot to death by armed robbers during a robbery gone wrong on the 20th of December 2013.





State prosecutor, Mothusi Meshack pleaded with the court this week Monday that they be given time to check with the lab if the results were ready. After getting the results, we will be in a position to draft committal documents, Meshack said.

When he was asked if he had anything to say, Moyo told the court that he had nothing to do with the murder. He claimed that one investigating officer took a knife and placed it in his pocket and said it is the knife he used to kill the deceased.

Upon arrest, there was no weapon at the crime scene. I do not know what happened to the deceased, the knife was shown to me at the CID office, it has an owner, the accused said.

Kapeko said that those were issues of evidence which he will discuss with his attorney.
Francistown High Court Judge, Bashi Moesi last week granted bail with stringent conditions to three Malawian men who are accused of trafficking five of their fellow citizens.

This came after the trio; John Mayodi, Enock Nkatha and Gaston Kamanga filed an urgent application for bail with the court. In their previous mention they had applied for a no case to answer.

Ruling is expected in March.





The State alleges that on July 11, 2016 at Kazungula border, acting together with a common purpose and with intention to deceive and exploit, the trio unlawfully recruited and transported one Sakina Kaboda, Mary Mhone, Melise Biston, Graig Kabota and Tomasi Manda from Malawi with intention to traffic them to South Africa.

When granting bail, Moesi said that the three men had been in custody for a very long time awaiting trial with no hope that it will be finalised any time soon. He said their lives have been brought to a standstill and their remand in custody since July 2016 was enough punishment in itself which seriously compromised the constitutional presumption of innocence, which he said operated in their favour.

His bail conditions are that; pending the finalisation of the principal case the applicants must not contact the victims either directly or indirectly. This means no contact whatsoever, by whatever means, Moesi said adding that for the avoidance of doubt the trio should not go to any place in Kasane or wherever in Botswana where the victims are sheltered.

The accused persons were also ordered to surrender their travelling documents to Tati Police Station. The High Court Judge said that the trio should not go to Kazungula border gate or any other border or any official international transit departure points in Botswana.

Pending the finalisation of the principal case, applicants must each furnish security to the court by way of entering into a bond in the sum of P15, 000. If they fail to attend court on any appointed day then they shall pay the amount to the state and forfeit their bail, he said.

The accused were told to report to Tatitown Police Station on Wednesdays and Sundays between the hours of 07:30 and 17:00. Moesi said that it shall be open to the state if it is in its interests and within its capabilities to use electronic tagging and monitoring devices to monitor their movements.
South East District Council Chairman Phenyo Segokgo has promised that he will announce his next political home next week Monday.

Segokgo admitted to have kept people guessing for a very long time following his expulsion from the Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD) together with Ndaba Gaolathe, Wynter Mmolotsi, Joyce Mothudi, Pako Keogilwe and Harriet Snowy Rampa.

When Gaolathe and others formed the Alliance for Progressives (AP) following the bloody Bobonong congress, many had expected Segokgo to defect to the new party only for the youthful councillor to hold his cards close to his chest leaving people in suspense about his next political home.





Neither could a planned motion of no confidence by some Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) and Botswana National Front (BNF) councillors dampen his spirit nor force him to make his announcement prematurely.

At some point, Segokgo was said to be on his way to join BNF or BDP in order to save his political career.

Currently, I have made up my mind as to which party I am going to join and I will be meeting with all my councillors this Friday to inform them of my next political home.

Although I will not divulge to you where I am headed at this point, I will make an official announcement probably next week Monday, Segokgo explained.

The decision to announce his next home will end months of speculation since he was expelled from BMD.
Botswana Public Officers Pension Fund BPOPF has failed in its court bid to stop Capital Management Botswana (CMB) from implementing its decision to eject BPOPF from the partnership Fund known as Botswana Opportunity Fund.

At the centre of controversy is whether the CMB who are a General Partner and Fund Managers of BPOPFs P880 million have breached the Partnership Agreement (PA) as alleged by BPOPF which claims that since late 2017 it has been requesting information from CMB to which it is entitled under the PA, but nothing has come forth.

The information includes but not limited to audited financial statements of the Fund, in the form prescribed by the PA. BPOPF states that it later appeared that there is a series of breaches of the PA and the Advisory Management Services (AMS) agreements by CMB. Boitumelo Molefe, the Chief Executive Officer of BPOPF states in her affidavit that, those breaches were material, serious and mostly ongoing, and are incapable of being remedied. Thus CMB failed to act in the best interest of the Fund and its investor, BPOPF.





But CMB counter argues that they managed the Fund well and would like to continue managing the Fund. BPOPF brought the matter before Justice Godfrey Radijeng on an urgent basis on 27th Decenber 2017 where seasoned Attorneys were lined up. Attorney Gabriel Kanjabanga appeared for CMB, while BPOPF was represented by Advocate S.D Van Nierkerk of South Africa appearing with attorney TC Dumba of Minchin and Kelly

BPOPF argues that CMB has ejected it from the Fund of which it was a legitimate limited partner and this through the arbitrary and completely unjustified designation of the BPOPF as a defaulting limited partner. It has been sent off with only a fraction of what it invested in the Fund, with no accounting provided for an enormous discrepancy between its investment and the net proceeds paid out to it.

In his order issued on December 27, Justice Radijeng dismissed the application with costs for want of urgency. The application is not urgent and there will be no need for CMB to address the court on points in limine, he ruled.

Part of Justice Radijengs ex tempore ruling states that the two parties entered into a partnership agreement in November 2014 by which BPOPF invested in a private equity (B0P). BPOPF was the limited partner while CMB was appointed General partner. BPOPF submitted that during the period June 2015 to June 2016 there were five (5) drawdown notices issued by CMB by which BPOPF paid P447.50 million of the total P880m committed. BPOPF averred further that during the course of 2017 certain events and facts were uncovered regarding the manner in which CMB was operating the Fund which caused BPOPF grave concern. The BPOPF commissioned its own investigations into the actions of CMB regarding the Fund. The outcome of the investigations was that CMB had and continued to commit a series of material breaches to the PA and AMS placing the Fund and its assets in jeopardy.

On the determination whether the application meets the urgency test, CMB submitted that BPOPF is complaining of alleged breaches by CMB that it has known for a considerable time since the parties contracted.

I agree with CMB that BPOPF has sat on their rights and failed to move with expedition when the chronology of the event set out and complained about as forming the background to the application were within BPOPFs power to act on, said the Judge.The parties relationship started in 2014 when BPOPF decided to invest for the first time in private equity investments, specifically unlisted private companies in the country and elsewhere in Southern Africa. In her affidavit filed before the court Molefhe states that with no prior experience in investments of this nature, BPOPF sought a professional private equity investment manager to assist it in making such investments.

This is the stage where CMB presented itself to BPOPF as a private equity investment manager that was in the process of establishing a new equity fund and the final deal between the two was sealed in November 2014 through a Partnership Agreement.

Under the Agreement, CMB was amongst others appointed as the Fund Manager responsible for managing the assets of BPOPF. Since the formation of the Fund, BPOPF remains a limited partner having committed P880 million to the partnership. BPOPF argues that it is the sole investor of the partnership and accordingly it is the beneficial owner of the vast majority of at least 99 percent of the assets of the Fund. Its interest and that of the 166, 879 members are inextricably bound up with the Fund

Molefe argued in her affidavit that CMB has continuously avoided and ignored all requests for clarity in its failure to respond to BPOPFs letter of 18 December 2017. Further CMB is no longer acting in the best interest of the Fund, but rather in its own, self-serving interests, with significant harm and prejudice to the BPOPFand its members.

She protested that CMB although CMB has been removed as the general partner of the fund, it continues to act as if it is still the partner, and has purportedly taken radical and significantly prejudicial steps and actions in doing so.She said that whilst a payment of P50 million had been made to BPOPF by CMB on 24 November 2017 for the next proceeds of its interest following the alleged sale, the transfer was not accompanied with any letter notifying BPOPF of the payment.

She said it was only on 12 December 2017 when BPOPF did its accounting reconciliation that payment came to light. Molefe's affidavit says that the partnership with CMB was BPOPFs first foray in investments of this nature. With no prior experience in this field of investments BPOPF, and not being fully aware of all the risk associated with such investment structure, relied on CMB and legitimately placed its trust in CMB that it would abide by the terms of the agreement and discharge its fiduciary duties towards the Fund and BPOPF.
Over 15 full-time lecturers and other administrative staff at the ABM University in Gaborone have been terminated without warning, Botswana Guardian is reliably informed.

All the employees had contracts that had ended and were still awaiting review. Sources told this publication that the sackings happen at a time when most if not all of the lecturers had been working for over nine months after their contracts had elapsed.

A lecturer that preferred anonymity shared that their contracts had elapsed in February 2017, and that they received their terminal benefits in April 2017 respectively.





However; he said that the employer did not communicate as to whether their contracts would be reviewed or not. Even then, he said they still received monthly pay until December 22 when the announcement of lay-offs were made.

While it seems that contracts had automatically assumed the character of the previous ones, the aggrieved lecturers express anguish at their employers lack of regard in the matter at hand.

Our letters simply say, our contracts cannot be renewed but we have all been under the impression that they will be renewed as we have been working and getting our salaries as per the previous arrangement.

In fact they say, the letters that were handed over in December should have long been handed over before contracts ended, something they regard as crafty and unlawful.

Another aggrieved employee maintained that the process of laying off was also done without regard to due process. We were not warned or even made aware that this would happen. In fact, she says on that fateful day, a meeting was called only for them to be told that their contracts would be terminated and January would be their last month as employees as a result of the current financial situation.

"We demand that we be fairly dismissed. We demand that our benefits be calculated aptly with complete regard to the time we worked out of contract.Executive Director of ABM University Daisy Molefhi was not available at the time of going to print. Her secretary said her boss was repeatedly in and out of meetings. The publication was later referred to the Human Resource Manager who was unavailable at the time the call was made. While ABM university college continues to grow in leaps and bounds, it faces an extreme shortage of lecturers. Last year the institution launched its Entrepreneurship Development Centre which is located in Gaphatshwa.

The aim of the centre is to promote youth entrepreneurship activities by students and alumni by providing a network of like-minded resources who may help sustain both the passion and provide ideas on entrepreneurship. It is currently receiving admissions for 2018 batch of students.
A five-person Panel of Court of Appeal Judges was Wednesday itching to make a comment in their ruling in the controversial sedition case against veteran investigative journalist and editor of Sunday Standard, Outsa Mokone.

Despite repeated protestations by Mokones attorney, Dick Bayford of Bayford & Associates, that it would be improper to do so since the matter is before the trial court, the Judges nonetheless made tacit and suggestive comments, which may border on influence peddling.

Mokone has approached the Court of Appeal to challenge the decision of the High Court, which ruled that Sections 50 and 51 of the Penal Code are consistent with the Constitution and his warrant of arrest in 2014 was lawfully issued and executed.





Mokone was arrested after his publication carried a story in August 2014 headlined President hit in car accident while driving alone at night. The author of the story Edgar Tsimane has since fled the country allegedly fearing for his life after a tip-off. A warrant of arrest was applied for by government through Attorney General and was issued on the 2nd of September 2014 by Gaborone Magistrate Court for alleged violation of Section 51 of the Penal Code for committing the act of Sedition. On Wednesday the five Court of Appeal judges asked Mokones lawyer, Dick Bayford if it would be wrong for them to make a comment in their ruling regarding the conduct of his client. Bayford argued that it would not be procedural for the court to make such a comment since the case of sedition is still at the Magistrate court.

Proceedings of the trial court on the case have been suspended pending the finalisation of the current case in which Mokone is challenging the Sections of the Penal Code that deals with Sedition and the warrant of arrest. We want to comment on the matter of principle regarding the conduct of your client. Is it not the duty of the editor to have cross-checked the facts? He only checked with the journalist who wrote the story. People who were involved when the alleged accident happened were not followed up on because they denied what was said to have happened in the published article. We have to look at the matter of principle, said Justice Isaac Lesetedi. Bayford said procedurally it would be incorrect because the Appeals Court is not seized with the matter and it is only the trial court that can deal with it. Bayford indicated that the Court of Appeal should only confine itself with the matter before it and not go beyond its mandate. The judges seemed not convinced by Bayfords argument reiterating that they do not see what harm would be done to Mokones case if the panel could make a comment. If the police are not above the law, so is the press, said newly appointed Judge, Justice Fritz Brand.

Judge President of the Court of Appeal Ian Kirby raised concern that the article contained serious allegations about the President, which allegations the Commissioner of Police says were inaccurate. He said the article contained allegations that the president tried to bribe the witness not to report the matter. Bayford however stood his ground that it would be incorrect for the court to comment on the matter which is before the trial court. He further stated that the issue of cross-checking the facts with sources could not be done. He stated that the journalist who wrote the story has not deposed of an affidavit. The court is expected to deliver its judgement on the appeal next month. Mokone through his lawyer wants the appeals court to make a declaration for future directions on whether or not the warrant of arrest issued by the Chief Magistrate for Gaborone Administrative District for his arrest was applied for and issued lawfully; whether in the circumstances the same empowered the police to detain him; whether the provisions of Section 50 and 51 of the Penal Court are ultra vires Section 12 of the Constitution of Botswana; whether the 4 hour 40 minutes delay on the night of the 8th of September 2014 outside of visiting hours allow Mokone to consult with members of Bayford and & Associates (his attorneys) constituted an infringement of Mokones right to legal representation as enshrined under Section 10 of the Constitution?

According to Penal Code (Cap 08:01) Section 50 (1), a seditious intention is an intention to bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the person of the President or the Government of Botswana as established by law; to excite the inhabitants of Botswana to attempt to procure the alternation, otherwise than by lawful means, of any other matter in Botswana as established.

If found guilty a person is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years and such a publication shall be forfeited to the state. Section 51 (5) of the same Act states that when a proprietor, publisher, printer or editor of a newspaper is convicted of printing or publishing a seditious publication in a newspaper, the court may in addition to any other punishment it may impose, and whether or not it has made an order under subsection (4) make an order prohibiting any further publication of the newspaper for a period not exceeding one year.
The song A re chencheng by musical prodigy Ratsie Setlhako is one of the most known created in pre-colonial Botswana.

For many years, the song has played as prelude to the popular show Dipina le Maboko on government radio station, RB1. Ratsie Setlhako is a musical marvel, appreciated as one of the godfathers of folk music in Botswana.

He has also been celebrated posthumously on various platforms. There is now a book that traces his roots, celebrates his musical artistry and tries to unpack the enigma that he is believed to have been. The book titled Definitive biography of Ratsie Setlhako by Modirwa Kekwaletswe was launched in December 2017 to great acclaim.





In an interview with BG Style, Kekwaletswe, who is a writer, visual artist and graphic designer, says that his interest in the life of Ratsie Setlhako was ignited while he was still a writer in the newsroom after he realised that there was little information about Ratsie Setlhako. The project would take him 18 years to complete. His first point of enquiry was Batho Molema who recorded Setlhako and other folk artistes, before Setlhakos death. Molema affirmed that I needed to do the project. He conceded that he recorded all these artistes but there was little time to talk about their history, their life and inspiration, Kekwaletse points out.

He bore the onus of finding out more and went to Setlhakos home village Mokgware and also Palapye, Selebi Phikwe and Mahalapye, where the artiste spent a lot of time. When the initial book draft was complete, Kekwaletswe thought he had a solid project and was ready to publish but it was still lacking in substance and depth  he needed more information. However, my funds were running out so I sourced funding to complete the project, he recalls. Kekwaletswe received a P610, 000 grant from Companies and Intellectual Property Authority (CIPA) to complete the project, which includes a book and documentary.

Ratsie Setlhako was born in 1890 in Mokgware village, and was of the Mosokola regiment (also known as Mophato) at a time when the tsie (locust) was rife: hence he was fittingly named Ratsie. He grew up to be a herd boy and he taught himself how to play the segaba, widely considered an African zither. His music was appreciated in his later years as he was invited to play across the country. Throughout his research, Kekwaletse unravelled interesting bits of information about Ratsie Setlhako. For one, I established that he was a Mokaa from the Barolong, who were later, moved to the north by Kgosi Kgama III, he says. But it is his music that stands out. Kekwaletswe says: His music is complex, and boasts rich analysis. The use of words and synopsis is outstanding  he was exceptionally talented. He further points out that Ratsie Setlhako did not rely on imagination but sang about real incidents, scenarios and people. He used peoples names in the songs. These were not random names but of people related to his lifestyle, he says. He also notes that Ratsie Setlhako was one of the first Batswana to appreciate that music can be a career.

From Lobatse to Old Naledi to Phikwe and Nata, he traversed Botswana performing and was appreciated for it.

Ratsie Setlhakos made his spiritual transition after he died in a road accident in Palapye and was buried in the same village. Although little is shared about his private life, Ratsie Setlhako is believed to have had an intimate partner who bore him three children. The woman would later bundle up the children off to South Africa. The woman is said to have passed on, together with two of the children, at different stages. Ratsie Setlhako then found a partner in Garelekane Morakane, who received the Presidential Honour on his behalf in 1979/80. There is also a primary school in Palapye named after the artiste. Kekwaletswe says they are still working on getting the book around the country and would soon have it available in major bookstores.

Call 71 32 19 72 to order a copy of the book.
Hunters, the real, natural cider has partnered with AFSTEREO Botswana in releasing a compilation titled Hunters Airplay Classics that aims to appreciate and revive memories of artists that shaped the urban music scene in Botswana.

Hunters is a category leader in ciders, and offers a refreshing alternative to Premium Beer. Music plays a critical role as one of the brand pillars for Hunters, we saw it fit to not only do this compilation but to also acknowledge the artists that shaped urban music for Botswana youth, said Lekgotla Ntshole, Trade Marketing Manager at Distell Botswana.

AFSTEREO Botswana is the leading supplier of real-time radio and television insights to the media, marketing research, auditing, regulatory and music industry in Botswana.





According to David Moepeng, Managing Director at AFSTEREO Botswana, Hunters Airplay Classics is another initiative by the company, in partnership with Hunters cider that aims to promote local music.

Through buying music rights from the record labels of the respective songs featured in the compilation, AFSTEREO Botswana is the publisher of the compilation. Moepeng added that the partnership was a result of the rapid growing interest in local music by Batswana.

Hunters prides itself in supporting local music and has embarked on a journey to be a small step in the right direction to inspire local artists to continue producing music and refreshing Batswanas drinking occasions.

Last year, Hunters and AFSTEREO Botswana partnership saw the release of their first compilation titled; Hunters Airplay Hits Vol.1 that contained Botswanas most played songs in 2016 including music from artists such as Amantle Brown, Team Distant and Ban-T. The strategy is to be relevant, as well as build emotional resonance with the new generation of influential consumers in the midst of ever changing market trends, added Ntshole.

The compilation brings together unparalleled combination of raw lyrical talent and productions that dominated airwaves in the early 2000s. The Hunters Airplay Classics compilation includes classics from Vee Mampeezy, Stagga, Scar, Zeus, Orakle and Mapetla. Songs were selected based on popularity and are in no particular order. If all artists and their respective record labels allow us, we wish to release the Vol.2 of the classics next year because theres so much music from back in the day that never got the opportunity to reach Batswana the way it can now, added Moepeng. The compilation will be available for a 12-pack of any Hunters in selected Liquorama, Tops and Pick n Pay bottle stores nationwide.




PARIS (AFP): European aerospace giant Airbus overtook arch-rival Boeing in terms of aircraft orders last year, but warned that it could cease making its A380 jet if it does not receive any more orders for the supersize plane.



Airbus said it booked a total 1,109 aircraft orders and a record 718 deliveries in 2017.



By comparison, US rival Boeing booked 912 orders and 763 deliveries.



Chief operating officer Fabrice Bregier said that overall deliveries could rise to 800 this year, given the increased pace of production of its A320neo aircraft.



The medium-haul A320neo and A321neo jets feature new generation engines that use 15 percent less fuel compared to their peers.



"We are going to double the number of A320neos" delivered this year, Bregier told a news conference. "If we do that, we will be close to 800 deliveries in 2018."



He acknowledged that deliveries of the A320neo had been slowed last year by problems with the engines made by US firm Pratt & Withney and by CFM, the joint venture of General Electric and Safran.



Nevertheless, the problems were gradually being resolved and around 30 aircraft were waiting for their engines, down from 60 at the beginning of the year, he said.



Turning to the A380, sales director, John Leahy, warned that Airbus would have no choice but to halt the programme if Dubai's Emirates airline  the main customer for the superjumbo launched in 2007  did not place another order.



"We are still talking to Emirates, but honestly, they are probably the only one to have the ability right now on the market place to take a minimum of six per year on a period of eight to 10 years," Leahy said.



"Quite honestly, if we can't work out a deal with Emirates there is no choice but to shut down the programme," Leahy said.



"But I'm hopeful that we work out a deal with Emirates," he added.



There have been a total of 317 orders for the A380, the world's largest passenger airliner, since its launch.



Airbus had been hoping to secure another major order from Emirates, which took delivery of its 100th A380 in 2017, at the Dubai Air Show in November.



But the airline finally picked 40 Boeing 787-10 jets instead.



COO Bregier said the "trajectory will be to go lower" in production of the A380.



"We will deliver 12 aircraft as planned in 2018," and the number could fall to six per year in subsequent years, Bregier said.



"The challenge will be to maintain at least this level in the years to come" before customers start placing replacement orders for the A380s they currently have in service, and "potential new markets" start opening up, he said.



Turning to Airbus' overall performance last year, the plane-maker insisted that commercial aircraft deliveries in 2017 "were up for the 15th year in a row, reaching a new company record."



At the end of 2017, Airbus' overall backlog stood at 7,265 aircraft valued at USD 1.059 trillion at list prices, the company said.



"A new Airbus delivery record coupled with our fourth best order intake wraps up a remarkable year for us," Bregier insisted.






NEW DELHI (PTI): Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is likely to fly a sortie in a Sukhoi 30MKI fighter aircraft of the Indian Air Force (IAF) on Wednesday in Jodhpur.



IAF sources said Sitharaman would visit the Jodhpur airbase, during which she would fly the sortie in the frontline fighter jet.



The Sukhoi 30MKI is a twin-engine fighter aircraft and has a two-seat cockpit.




Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu during the Indo-Israel summit in New Delhi on Monday. A PIB photo

NEW DELHI (PTI): Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday invited Israeli defence companies to India for co-production, as he held comprehensive talks on strategic issues with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, who called him a "revolutionary leader".



The two countries also inked nine pacts to boost cooperation in key areas such as cyber security and gas and oil after extensive delegation-level talks between their prime ministers.



During the talks, the issue of India voting against Israel at the UN on the Jerusalem issue also figured with Indian officials maintaining that both sides put forth their views. However, the officials asserted that the two leaders agreed that the ties "are not determined by a single issue".



India had last month joined 127 other countries to vote in the UN in favour of a resolution opposing the recent decision of the US to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital.



Terming their talks as "wide-ranging and intensive", Modi, at a joint press event with Netanyahu, said they reviewed the progress in the bilateral relations and agreed that "the possibilities and the opportunities" that beckon the two countries need to be seized.



"We will strengthen the existing pillars of cooperation in areas that touch the lives of our peoples. These are agriculture, science and technology, and security...In defence, I have invited Israeli companies to take advantage of the liberalised FDI regime to make more in India with our companies," Modi said.



According to a joint statement, the leaders noted the "grave" threat that terrorism poses to peace and security including from non-state actors, and reiterated that there can be no justification for acts of terror on any grounds.



They advocated strong measures against terrorists, terror outfits, those who sponsor, encourage or finance terrorism or provide sanctuary to terrorists and terror groups, the statement said.



At the press event, Netanyahu said, "Indians and Israelis know too well the pain of terrorist attacks. We remember the horrific savagery in Mumbai. We grit our teeth, we fight back, we never give in."



The two leaders also noted that the next meeting of the Joint Working Groups on Homeland and Public Security will be held in February 2018, the statement said.



They reiterated the importance of building comprehensive cooperation in counter-terrorism, including cyber-space, the statement said.



On whether the multi-million Israeli missile Spike deal figured in the talks, Vijay Gokhale, Secretary (Economic Relations), did not give a direct answer and said defence and security cooperation was discussed. He did not get into specific details.



On defence cooperation, the statement said the two prime ministers consider it important to set the direction for developing more business models and partnerships for joint ventures and joint manufacturing, including transfer of technology as well as joint research and development in defence and security fields.



The two leaders asked their respective defence ministries to hold discussions this year with active involvement of the public and private sectors, in order to create the basis for viable, sustainable and long term cooperation in the defence industry, the statement said.



The bonhomie between the two leaders was on full display with Modi starting his press statement welcoming Netanyahu in Hebrew and the visiting leader describing the Indian prime minister as a "revolutionary leader".



"You are a revolutionary leader and you are revolutionising India. You are catapulting this magnificent state into the future. And you have revolutionised the relations between Israel and India," Netanyahu, popularly known as 'Bibi', said.



Dubbing Netanyahu's visit as a "long-anticipated moment in the journey of friendship" between India and Israel, Modi said the visit was also a fitting climax to the commemoration of 25 years of bilateral diplomatic relations and marked a special beginning to the new year calendar.



Asserting that their discussions were marked by the desire to do more, Modi said, "Prime Minister, I have a reputation of being impatient in getting results. If I may let out an open secret, I know that so are you."



Referring to his visit to Israel last year, Modi said they had promised each other and their people to build a strategic partnership as also progress of diverse and cutting-edge cooperation, and of joint endeavours and shared successes.



He said last year in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu had expressed the intent to cut down bureaucratic red tape with a machete and forge ahead with speed.



"I am happy to tell you that in India, we are well on our way to doing just that. We have imparted our shared impatience to the implementation of our earlier decisions," he said, asserting that the results were already visible on the ground.



The two leaders also exchanged views on scaling up the centres of excellence that have been a mainstay of agricultural cooperation by bringing in advanced Israeli practices and technology.



Modi said the two countries are also venturing into the less explored areas of cooperation, such as oil and gas, cyber security, films, and start-ups.



Asserting that they are committed to facilitating the flow of people and ideas between their geographies, Modi said, "We are working with Israel to make it easier for our people to work and visit each other's countries, including for longer work durations. To bring people closer on both sides, an Indian Cultural Centre will soon open in Israel."



He also said that they have decided to start an annual exchange of bilateral visits by 100 young people from science-related educational streams.



Modi said that he was looking forward to accompany Netanyahu to his home state, Gujarat.



"There, we will have another opportunity to see the fulfilment of the promise, which our mutual cooperation holds in diverse areas such as agriculture, technology, and innovation," he added.


Ryanair claimed it has set a new record with weekly bookings of three million, writes Eamon Quinn.

The news is in another sign that the airline is emerging from one of its most turbulent periods after its staff-roster fiasco frightened investors.

Its shares, which rose slightly to around 16 in the latest session, have dropped steeply since September when the airlines self-inflicted wounds over a shortage of pilots first emerged.

Touching 19.75 in August, Ryanair shares were trading at a record highboosted by the huge expansion of bookings as Europes economic recovery finally picked up pace after the debt crisis.

They then slumped to 13.33 before clawing back as investors totted up the costs of the airline conceding recognition for the first time of trade unions amid the threat of strikes at its busiest bases in Europe. However, the current share price of 16 still makes Ryanair the most valuable of Europes big three, with a market worth of 18.8bn.

Shares in IAG, which owns of Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, and Veuling, fell 1.75% in the latest session to trade in Madrid at 7.37, close to their all-time high of 7.68.

That values the airline as Europes second most valuable, at 15.17bn. Its shares trade in Madrid and London.

Lufthansa, whose shares had a spectacular climb last year and almost tripled to touch a record high of 31.26 in Frankfurt, were boosted by the collapse of rival Air Berlin.

Yesterday, they were trading at 29.14, down 4%, valuing the airline at 14.06bn.
Barry McElduff has been appointed as Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern under Westminsters arcane procedures for resigning MPs.

The move is part of the age-old formalities that give effect to the resignation of Members of Parliament.

When Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams quit Westminster in 2011 to run for the Irish parliament he was also granted a British aristocratic title - Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.

A statement from HM Treasury said: "The Chancellor of the Exchequer has this day appointed Barry McElduff to be Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern."

A by-election date has yet to be set for his West Tyrone constituency. The onus is on Sinn Fein to propose a date for the electoral authorities. The agreed date will then be announced by the Speaker.

Mr McElduff resigned on Monday - 10 days after he posed with a Kingsmill-branded loaf on his head on the anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre.

The abstentionst MP, who had already been suspended by his party for three months, said staying in the job would have impeded efforts to forge reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

Mr McElduff has insisted that he had not meant the video as a reference to the sectarian murders of 10 protestant workmen by republican paramilitaries near the south Armagh village of Kingsmill in 1976.

However, he acknowledged the post had caused "deep and unnecessary hurt" to the Kingsmill families.

West Tyrone is a very safe Sinn Fein seat and the party will likely hold on to it in a future by-election.

There has been speculation that rival unionist parties could agree on a unity candidate, potentially from the victims sector, but even that move would be unlikely to see the republican party lose a seat it secured with 51% of the vote last year.
By Louise Walsh

A Fine Gael Councillor is calling for answers after Meath Co. Council confirmed they were contacted by an off-shoot organisation of the Church of Scientology in relation to a controversial development in Ballivor.

The council had previously denied any contact by Narconon, but yesterday admitted it had given the company permission to change the use of a 56-bed nursing home in the village to a drug rehabilitation centre.

The admission comes on the back of months of speculation locally and just days before residents plan to stage a protest at the site tomorrow.

Local Fine Gael Cllr Noel French called the revelations "worrying" and said they have scuppered plans by residents to object through the planning process.

Narconon has failed to answer any previous press queries on any involvement they plan on having in the village of just 1,700 people.

Cllr French is now calling on the council for answers on why members were not notified of the decision when it happened over a year ago.

"Meath County Council confirmed yesterday that in August 2016 they were requested by the Narconon Trust c/o McGill Planning, 7 Fitzwilliam Street Upper, Dublin 2, to make a declaration in accordance with Part V of the Planning & Development Acts as to whether or not a change of use from a nursing home to a residential drug rehabilitation facility was an exempted development," he said.

"The Council issued a declaration on 2nd October 2016 that the change of use as outlined in their submission was exempted development (and therefore would not require planning permission).

"The council had previously said We had previously confirmed that there had been no recent requests for pre-planning meetings and no recent contacts relating to the development and that remains the position.

Cllr French said this communication had come as a result of his query last week to the planning section of Meath County Council.

He said: "A nursing home and a drug rehab centre are not the same thing.

"The interpretation of it being the same is convenient, to say the least, but others could argue it is not the same at all, plus the impact on the local community is completely different.

"Certainly the scale of a drug rehabilitation centre of 56 beds in a village of 1700 is worrying.

"Yet an official or officials can make such a determination without referring it to councillors or putting it into the public domain.

"I understood that all planning matters were displayed publically on the planning website but this now does not appear to be the case.

"It is worrying that decisions in which councillors or the public are not involved in can be done in secret."

It surprises me that Meath County Council did not provide this information when requested to do so in December, but it really amazes me that it was not up on the website. I have dealt with the planning section of Meath County Council previously and I have always found them efficient and helpful.

The Ballivor says No group had planned to challenge a change of use for the building but this revelation removes that opportunity.

They said: "We now know that Narconon is planning a drug rehabilitation centre in Ballivor but we should have known this from the start actually from October 2016 when the planning decision was made.

"Instead we had to find these things out ourselves and spend time and energy we could devote to other work.

"This was not on the planning file online as far as I could see and the planning file has now come down from the website. I will be asking Meath County Council to ensure that this does not happen again.

"All planning material relating to a site should be put online, not just some of it. I am really annoyed by this revelation."

Council's email

Dear Councillor,

I wish to update you in relation to the position with the Old National School at Ballivor, the existing planning permission and the ongoing local concerns about the future use of the site.

We had previously confirmed that there had been no recent requests for pre-planning meetings and no recent contacts relating to the development and that remains the position.

We have now carried further searches to establish if there had been any applications or contacts in previous years by The Church of Scientology or Narconon.

The Council can now confirm that in August 2016 we were requested by the Narconon Trust c/o McGill Planning, 7 Fitzwilliam Street Upper, Dublin 2, to make a declaration in accordance with Part V of the Planning & Development Acts as to whether or not a change of use from a nursing home to a residential drug rehabilitation facility was an exempted development.

The Council issued a declaration on 2nd October 2016 that the change of use as outlined in their submission was exempted development (and therefore would not require planning permission).

There is no record of any contacts by The Church of Scientology and there is no record of any further contact since then by the Narconon Trust.

As previously outlined I would emphasise that the final arbiters of whether or not planning permission is required are An Bord Planeala and it is open to any person to submit a further Part V application for determination at any time
A kind hearted Dublin man, who won 50,000 on a National Lottery scratch card, has surprised his best friend by splitting the windfall with him 50:50.

Both men, who are in their 20s and work together, claimed their prize won on an All Cash Platinum scratch card, at National Lottery HQ today.

The ticket was bought at the Supervalu store in Fairgreen, Naas, Co. Kildare.

They grew up on the same street in Dublin and the man who bought the ticket said they have always shared every bit of luck.

He said: "It was the first thing that came into my head when I realised I won. I called himself and said 'Youve just won 25,000'.

"He didnt believe me so I called around to his house and showed him. Im delighted to share my win with him - he's been my best pal since we were nippers."

His friend was stunned by the act of generosity.

He said: "Its funny as we were in the shop this morning getting breakfast and my card was declined. The win could not have come at a better time."

A Galway man also claimed a scratch card prize, this time 20,000 on a Money Multiplier 20X scratch card.

He bought it at the Express Store on Harbour Road in Ballinasloe.
Families of adults with disabilities are experiencing a real crisis every single day due to the lack of residential care places in Cork, writes David Linnane.

According to figures presented by the COPE Foundation, there are 168 people waiting for residential places in their centres, and 27 of those are priority one, meaning that both of their parents have passed away or their sole carer is incapacitated.

The HSEs Cork Kerry Community Health group said that it has highlighted the problem at a national level, seeking support for more places, but expects the waiting list challenge to continue this year.



The figures were supplied by the Cope Foundation to Fianna Fail TD Michael McGrath, who said there was a growing frustration at the lack of resources for services for people with disabilities.

The HSE is not even providing the funding for emergency cases to be dealt with. Behind closed doors, within the walls of certain family homes, there is a real crisis every single day of every week of the year, and they are not being looked after.

He said that respite for carers is also an issue, as there are not enough temporary beds to place people in.

Mr McGrath added: Its something, as a politician, Im contacted about quite a lot. Its frustrating to see families doing their very best to care for a loved one, and they need a rest too. Its not happening frequently enough, unfortunately.

Cork Kerry Community Healthcare said that that it is concerned with the scale of the problem and is doing everything it can to meet the need for places.

We, as part of the HSE, have highlighted the level of need in the disability sector in submissions for funding to both the Department of Health and the Department of Finance and Public Expenditure. While Cork Kerry Community Healthcare hasnt received its funding allocation for 2018 yet, we expect challenges to continue in 2018, said a spokesperson.

They said that there is a committee, which includes representation from COPE, tasked with prioritising individual cases, with an agreement to place priority one cases first.

Mr McGrath said that his party will focus on the issue, but will be presenting people with the choice for better public services at the next election.

The government has to deliver for people with special needs. It comes down to a lack of resources, undoubtedly. Its why we have to make a major decision as a country about where we want to go, he said.

This story first appeared in the Evening Echo.
Update 6.25pm: 250million has been paid to tracker mortgage holders who were done out of low-cost interest rates by banks, the finance minister said.

Redress and compensation was made by the end of last year to 12,900 customers who paid too much for their loans.

They were identified by a Central Bank review and Paschal Donohoe warned banks should make further progress by March or face action.

The minister said: "This examination has laid bare the fact that very poor cultural and governance issues still exist within lending institutions in Ireland post the banking crash, and that if banks are to regain the trust of customers then they must be prepared to change their attitudes significantly.

"Customers of these lenders have been treated appallingly and in some severe cases have even lost their homes, either directly or indirectly, due to the shameful behaviour of their lenders.

"This behaviour is simply unacceptable."

The minister added: "As at end December, approximately 250million in redress and compensation has now been paid to 12,900 impacted customers as identified from the industry-wide examination, and this includes payments to 3,700 impacted accounts identified since last September."

This is on top of 47million paid before the start of the Central Bank's industry-wide examination of 15 lenders two years ago.

The mistake affected major financial institutions including Ulster Bank, Bank of Ireland and KBC.

All the banks have offered apologies.

Mr Donohoe told a meeting of the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform and Taoiseach that he expected a further update from the Central Bank on the basis of data at the end of March.

"If further sufficient progress regarding the payment of redress and compensation to impacted customers has not been made at that point, the Government will be prepared to consider further possible actions."

Customers have been treated appallingly due to the shameful behaviour of lenders, Mr Donohoe added.

"The prompt payment of remaining redress and compensation payments to outstanding impacted borrowers is now a key requirement, and indeed it will be a practical demonstration of the regret that banks are now expressing for the harm they have inflicted upon their impacted tracker borrowers."

Sinn Fein TD Pearse Doherty said those affected wanted accountability.

"They want somebody to pay the price, somebody to be held responsible. They don't want this swept under the carpet."

He added: "It is pathetic, the type of compensation being offered by the financial institutions."

The minister said he had no interest in sweeping the matter under the table.

"What happened was wrong, the many people affected by this and suffering caused was unconscionable."

Update 4.16pm: Central Bank will punish banks over tracker mortgages if necessary

The Finance Minister says he believes the Central Bank will punish banks and individual staff over the tracker mortgage scandal if their review deems it necessary.

Paschal Donohoe is appearing before the Oireachtas Finance Committee to discuss the ongoing tracker scandal which has seen almost 34,000 customers affected.

Minister Donohoe says customers were treated appallingly by their lenders, and he says appropriate compensation must be paid out urgently.

He added that if banks were found to have done wrong, they would be brought to task.

They (the Central Bank) have the powers to sanction both an organization and individuals, said Mr Donohoe.

From engaging with the Central Bank extensively on the matter, I have no doubt at all that if they reach a finding they are confident they can stand over in relation to either individual or collective failure, they will sanction accordingly.

Original story (6.56am): The Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe will appear before an Oireachtas committee today to be questioned about the tracker mortgage scandal.

A proposed Irish Banking Standards Board will be discussed, as well as compensation plans for victims.

The total number of customers caught up stands at 33,700 with just under 300m in redress paid out as of mid-December.

Ahead of today's meeting, Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform Committee chairman John McGuinness says they are keen to ensure the Government plays its part in resolving the issue.

- Digital desk
The imprisonment of Gerry Adams more than 40 years ago was unlawful because of flaws in the detention process, the Court of Appeal in Belfast has heard.

Mr Adams, who is due to stand down as Sinn Fein president next month, has launched a legal bid to overturn two convictions received in 1975 while he was detained without trial at the Maze Prison during the early 1970s.

The challenge hinges on a complex technicality that Mr Adams internment was not lawful because the order to hold him had not been considered by the then Secretary of State.



The matter was explored at length before three of the Norths most senior judges led by Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan at Belfasts Royal Courts of Justice.

Mr Adams, who was not present for the hearing, was among hundreds of people held without trial during the height of the Troubles in the North.

The Louth TD was first detained in March 1972, but was released in June that year to take part in secret talks in London.

He was rearrested in July 1973 at a Belfast house and interned at the Maze Prison, also known as Long Kesh internment camp.

He is challenging convictions handed down by two separate Diplock Court trials - cases tried by a single judge sitting without a jury - relating to two attempts to escape from internment.

The Court of Appeal heard that on Christmas Eve, 1973, he was among four detainees caught attempting to break out of the Maze.

Barrister Sean Doran QC, who is representing the veteran politician, said: "A hole had been cut in the perimeter fence and all four were already through."

The second escape bid in July 1974 was described as an "elaborate scheme" which included the kidnap of a man, who bore a "striking resemblance" to Mr Adams, from a bus stop in West Belfast.

The man was taken to a house where his hair was dyed and he was given a false beard, the court heard.

The man was then taken to the Maze where he was to be substituted for Mr Adams in a visiting hut.

However, prison staff were alerted to the plan and Mr Adams was arrested in the car park of the jail, the court heard.

He was subsequently sentenced to 18 months in jail for attempting to escape.

"Each conviction is for attempting to escape from lawful custody," said Mr Doran.

However, Mr Adams legal team have argued that his imprisonment was not lawful because an interim custody order was signed by a junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office and not the Secretary of State.

They contest that the 1972 Detention of Terrorists Order required senior level authorisation, from the Northern Ireland Secretary of the day.

Mr Doran said: "There is a very clear distinction made in the wording of the legislation between, on the one hand, the power to make an order and, on the other hand, the power to sign an order.

"Its only the Secretary of State who can be responsible for the decision to make the order."

The lawyer added that documents presented to the court appeared to "copper fasten submissions that there was not personal consideration of the case".

Meanwhile, prosecution barrister Gerry Simpson QC said the Secretary of State could not be expected to be across every case.

Referring to a principle whereby an official within a government department can make a decision for the Secretary of State, he said: "This is a real Carltona case."

"The decision itself, under Carltona, can be taken by an official.

"The Minister signs it and so that it becomes a signed order for the governor of a prison to act on."

The move would also provide "political accountability".

Mr Simpson added: "It would be absurd to expect the Secretary of State to deal with every case."

Internment was introduced in 1971 by former Northern Prime Minister Brian Faulkner for those suspected of involvement in violence.

The policy lasted until December 1975. During that time, 1,981 people were interned - 1,874 were nationalist and 107 were loyalist.

However, the introduction of internment, the way the arrests were carried out and the abuse of those arrested led to mass protests and a sharp increase in violence.

It is understood Mr Adams instigated legal proceedings after the Pat Finucane Centre recovered a document from the British National Archives in London.

Reserving judgement in the complicated case, Sir Declan Morgan said the three Appeal Court judges would take time to "reflect" on the submissions.

The case has been adjourned.

PA
By Ann OLoughlin

The High Court has been asked to consider committing the CEO of Iarnrod Eireann and a senior manager at the company to prison for an alleged failure to comply with a court direction that a DART driver be restored to his position.

Last April Mr Justice Paul Gilligan said the driver Mr Paul Leblique should be restored to his position and disciplinary findings against him which arose following a safety incident at Tara Street Station in 2016 should be set aside.

Following the incident Mr Leblique was demoted to a non driving role with the company after he had refused to provide a urine sample.

The matter has returned before the High Court where the driver, represented by Conor Bowman SC, claims that despite the judges findings, and having passed all the various tests and assessments proposed by Irish rail, Mr Leblique has not been reinstated to his position as driver.

Arising out of the alleged failure to comply with the judges direction Mr Leblique has brought a motion seeking to attach and commit to prison the CEO of Iarnrod Eireann Mr David Franks, and Mr Chris Rafferty Dart District Manager of Pearse Station.

The company denies the claims. Stephen Dodd Bl for Irish Rail said said the company "entirely rejected" the application which he said was without merit.

The case was before Mr Justice Tony OConnor who, noting the seriousness of the claims, fixed the hearing of the application to next Friday

The application comes after Mr Leblique, of Griffith Road, Finglas East, Dublin, sued his employer seeking various orders and declarations including that Irish Rail restore him to his position after he was taken off train driving duties.

The company opposed the action and had denied his claims.

It arose out of an incident on the morning of January 25, 2016, when the Dart he was driving at stopped short at Tara Street with the last carriage not coming up to the platform.

He was spoken to by a superior who joined the train at Pearse Street and they both continued on to Bray Station where another superior asked him to provide samples of breath and urine.

His breath sample was clear but he refused to provide a urine sample on grounds that the 2005 Rail Safety Act required that only a medical practitioner could take such a sample.

The sample was to be taken by an employee of a Northern Ireland company which carries out such tests for the rail company.

Mr Leblique was later suspended and then demoted.

Following a two day hearing before the High Court last April, Mr Justice Gilligan said it appeared the company was no longer pursuing the central issue in the case - the refusal of the sample - and that would have to be set aside by the court.

That only left the matter of stopping short of the platform which, it appeared, should be addressed through the companys driver development and support scheme.

After saying that Mr Leblique should be restored to his position the Judge also awarded him the costs of his action against his employer.
A judge has discharged the jury in the second retrial of a Cavan child-minder accused of causing serious harm to a baby because of a legal issue.

Sandra Higgins (aged 36), of The Beeches, Drumgola Wood, Cavan town, Co Cavan denies a charge of intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to the baby at her home on March 28, 2012 .

On Monday morning, Judge Cormac Quinn empaneled a jury to hear the trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. It was scheduled to last two weeks.

On Monday afternoon a legal issue arose before the trial opened in evidence. Judge Quinn sent the jury home to deal with the issue.

This morning he told the jury that unfortunately the legal issue now means that the trial is not ready to proceed.

He discharged the jury and remanded Ms Higgins on continuing bail. He set a new trial for June 11 next.

Earlier Judge Quinn said that it is alleged that the defendant assaulted the 10-month-old baby. He said that it will be alleged that on March 28, 2012 the baby presented at hospital with non-accidental injuries.

He told the jurors that the case had gone to trial on two other occasions. He said these trials were accompanied by publicity and that in order to serve as a jury for this trial, it was crucial that jurors felt they would not be affected by anything they had seen or heard in the media.

The court heard that the trial is expected to hear evidence from a number of civilian and garda witnesses from Co Cavan. The defence may also call an paediatrician from Wales to give evidence.
Latest: Gardai have confirmed a DNA profile has conclusively stated Joanne Hayes is not Baby Johns mother.

In an apology to Ms Hayes, Superintendent Flor Murphy, who is leading the investigation, said: It is a matter of significant regret for An Garda Siochana that it has taken such a long time for it to be confirmed that Ms Hayes is not the mother of Baby John.

On behalf of An Garda Siochana, I would like to sincerely apologise to Ms Hayes for that, as well as the awful stress and pain she has been put through as a result of the original investigation into this matter, which fell well short of the required standards.

If you can't view the video, click here to view on Facebook.

The Tribunal headed by Mr Justice Kevin Lynch into that investigation rightly criticised many aspects of that investigation. For those failings, I apologise.

It is accepted that the original investigation fell short of what was required and expected of a professional police service, but I want to reassure the public that this will be a thorough and professional investigation. While this investigation team cannot change what happened in the past, we can help find the answers into what happened to Baby John and are determined to do so.

File photo of Joanne Hayes

Gardai say that over 30 years later Ireland is a different place, one which isnt so heavily influenced by religion.

They are appealing for anyone with information into Baby Johns case to come forward and say he deserves the truth.

Ireland was a different place in 1984. It was a different society with different societal pressures. We would hope that in the Ireland of 2018 that people will be more prepared to come forward.

Our strong belief at the current time is that the answers to this are in Caherciveen and the close surrounding areas.

We would ask anyone who was living in Caherciveen and surrounding areas around the time of April 1984 to speak to us. Even the smallest piece of information could be vital.

After all these years, Baby John deserves the truth.

An incident room has been established in Caherciveen Garda Station and the investigation will be supported by the Garda Serious Crime Review Team.

The public are asked to call Gardai in Caherciveen on 066 9473610 or the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 with any information.

Update: 2pm: Gardai formally apologise to Joanne Hayes

Gardai in Co. Kerry have announced that a DNA profile from the baby who was found in Cahersiveen in 1984 has confirmed that Joanne Hayes was not his mother.

The baby boy - known as Baby John - was found at White Strand beach in Cahersiveen on April 14, 1984.

The full DNA profile has been established from a blood sample taken from the murdered newborn baby and preserved by gardai.

Although blood group testing in the 1980s quickly established no link between the Cahersiveen baby and the woman at the centre of the investigation, Joanne Hayes, DNA testing had not been carried out until now.

Officers said that they have formally apologised to Ms Hayes.

They have apologised to her for the stress and pain she was put through as part of the original investigation into the murder of 'Baby John' in Kerry in 1984.

The Gardai also confirmed that they are re-opening the murder investigation into the baby boy who was found with multiple stab wounds in a plastic bag on the rocks at White Strand.

Update: 9.55am: Gardai likely to offer apology on Kerry Babies case

Gardai this afternoon are likely to offer an apology for their handling of the Kerry Babies casein which a single woman from Abbeydorney was accused of having two children by two different fathers at the same time in 1984, writes Anne Lucey.

A tribunal of inquiry was held into the handling of the investigation by gardai in the 1980s.

The apology is likely to be offered in Cahersiveen later this afternoon where a press conference has been called, according to a senior garda source.

The conference is to give details of a re-opening of the murder investigation into a baby boy found with multiple stab wounds in a plastic bag on the rocks at White Strand.

Although blood group testing in the 1980s quickly established no link between the Cahersiveen baby and the woman at the centre of the investigation, Joanne Hayes, DNA testing had not been carried out until now.

Ms Hayes' solicitor Pat Mann had several times called for DNA testing.

The full DNA profile has been established from a blood sample taken from the murdered newborn baby and preserved by gardai.

The baby boy - known as Baby John - was found at White Strand beach in Cahersiveen on April 14, 1984.

The child was buried in the cemetery in Cahersiveen in a poignant ceremony with a guard of honour by local school children. |The granite headstone over his grave reads:

I am the Kerry baby named John I forgive.

It has been vandalised a number of times, most recently in 2010. Mementos such as toys have also been left in the grave over the years.

Supt Flor Murphy, who is head of the garda division in the area, said every aspect will be explored later this afternoon.

He also stressed the review was totally focussed on the Cahersiveen baby.

The DNA information would be of assistance if gardai got new information about the possible identity of the mother and the father, the Supt added.

Gardai still do not know if the baby was washed up on the tide or left on the rock.

6.44am: Gardai to begin review into Kerry babies case

By Catherine Shanahan

A garda review of the death of a baby whose murder is bound forever to one of the most divisive sagas in modern Irish history gets under way today.

In the 33 years since the body of Baby John was found on White Strand, Caherciveen, Co Kerry, no light has ever been shed on who his parents are and how he ended up there  despite a murder investigation and lengthy tribunal that reflected poorly on garda behaviour, and even less favourably on the prevailing unpalatable attitudes towards female sexuality, and unmarried mothers in particular.

However, on last nights Claire Byrne Live show, it was revealed that a full DNA profile of the Caherciveeen baby had been generated, which may explain the re-opening of the case.

Two years ago, the Hayes family said it believes tissue samples retained from the dead infant could dispel doubts over their innocence in the childs death.

The Kerry Babies case divided society like no other. Joanna Hayes, from Abbeydorney, outside Tralee, was an unmarried mother who had been having an affair with a local married man, Jeremiah Locke, resulting in a pregnancy, with ultimately no baby to show for it.

This raised garda suspicions during their investigations into the mystery behind the baby washed up on the beach. Ms Hayes was arrested and confessed to the murder.

The 25-year-old initially told gardai she had miscarried after four months, but later said she had a baby boy, which she delivered while standing up in a field.

The baby appeared to be dead and she panicked and went home, and the following morning she returned to the spot and placed it in a drain, she told them.

Gardai then extracted confessions from other members of the family that Ms Hayes had beaten and stabbed the baby to death, and that her siblings had disposed of the body at Slea Head, suggesting that the baby found on Caherciveen Beach on April 14, 1984, was hers.

Charges were preferred against Ms Hayes and family members, but in a sensational twist the day after their court appearance, the body of a second baby was found in a hole of water on the Hayes farm, bearing out Ms Hayes story.

The garda presumption then was that twins were born to Ms Hayes, but results of blood tests on tissue from the Caherciveen baby, which became known about three weeks after the charges had been preferred, debunked this theory.

The charges were not dropped until October 1984 and there was an immediate outcry after details of the case became public knowledge. The Hayes family claimed they had been ill-treated by the gardai and forced to make statements, and that the charges had been fabricated.

The then justice minister, Michael Noonan, ordered a public tribunal of inquiry.

The Kerry Babies Tribunal lasted 82 days in 1985. It ended with High Court Judge Kevin Lynch clearing the garda investigating teams, in general, while finding that the investigation was slipshod.

He unequivocally found that Joanne Hayes did not have twins, but one baby  the Abbeydorney baby.

The news that the case of Baby John is being revisited may not be welcomed in all quarters. The review will be conducted by gardai in Caherciveen supported by the Serious Crime Review Team.

At a news briefing scheduled for Caherciveen garda station at 2pm today, investigating gardai will appeal for information from anyone living in Caherciveen and surrounding areas around April 1984 that could help finally unravel the mystery of where Baby John came from and who his parents are, while simultaneously bringing closure for Joanna Hayes and her family.

- Irish Examiner
A Meath resident who organised vehicles used in a 2010 tiger kidnapping has been jailed for ten years after being extradited back from Spain, writes Aoife Nic Ardghail.

Jeffrey Melvin (36) failed to show up for his trial in June 2012 and was eventually extradited back to Ireland in September 2016 on foot of a European Arrest Warrant.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that cash-in-transit employee Reginald Shannon was forced to hand over 134,000 to armed gunmen in January 2010 after his mother and young niece had been kidnapped.

Detective Inspector Barry Walsh said there was no evidence that Melvin had been present during the robbery, but the investigation had linked him to the vehicles used in the raid.

Melvin, a trained mechanic with an address at Somerville, Ratoath, Meath, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit a robbery between October 13, 2009 and January 4, 2010.

He is currently serving a four year sentence for possessing firearms.



Det Insp Walsh told Tara Burns SC, prosecuting, that Brinks Allied staff member Mr Shannon was met by two armed gunmen as he was walking his dogs about 5.30am on the January date.

These men accompanied him back to his home, where his mother and nine-year-old niece were still asleep in bed. The raiders bound the two females hands with cable ties, brought them outside and laid them under a duvet in the back of a Toyota Verso people carrier.

Mr Shannon was secured into a Renault Kangoo van with a ratchet and strap and forced to drive around Dublin, until the raiders in the vehicle directed him to the back of a Bank of Ireland.

The court heard there was a Brinks Allied van there to make a delivery. Mr Shannon approached his colleagues and explained it was a tiger kidnapping and his colleagues handed over two money bags of cash.

Det Insp Walsh told the court that Melvins phone number was tracked back to the Toyota Verso, the Renault Kangoo and a third van used in the tiger kidnapping.

Melvin was arrested and made admissions about purchasing the various vehicles before he ultimately failed to show for his trial in June 2012.

The court heard that two men were previously acquitted of the tiger kidnapping due to legal issues that arose in their trials. Another individual pleaded guilty to providing gardai with false information and received an 18 month prison sentence.

In a victim impact statement read out in court, Mr Shannon revealed that though the event didnt have a profound psychological affect on him, it did impact his sense of security.

He said he didnt return to work because his mother and niece had suffered greatly to date.

His mother, Angela Shannon, described in her victim impact statement how she suffered from anxiety and depression, couldnt leave the house on her own and had lost out on socialising because she was always on edge.

The now teenage niece said she had been hospitalised because of the psychological trauma and that she used to relive the kidnapping daily in her mind. She said the crime had destroyed her life.

Det Insp Walsh agreed with Seamus Clarke SC, defending, that his client was not the main organiser in the operation.

He further agreed that Melvin had not been known to him prior to the investigation.

Michael OHiggins SC, also defending, submitted to Judge Martin Nolan that his clients plea of guilty had significant value as it spared court time and the victims having to give evidence.

He submitted that Melvin had been chosen because he was in the car trade and could source vehicles.

He said Melvin came from a respectable family and had the support of his parents and siblings. Counsel handed up a number of testimonials, including a letter of apology from Melvin.

Judge Nolan accepted that Melvin was not the brains of the operation but said the father-of-one was a vital part as vehicles were needed to commit the crime.

He imposed a ten year sentence to run concurrently to the four year sentence he is already serving.
A man whose wife died during surgery for an ectopic pregnancy at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, has settled his High Court action, writes Ann OLoughlin.

Malak Thawley was 34 years of age, a teacher and a US citizen who was expecting her first baby with her husband Alan when she died at Holles Street on May 8, 2016.

When the case opened before the High Court last week, Alan Thawleys counsel said that what happened was a  cascade of negligence and it was one negligent act after another.

Exemplary damages were also being sought in the case. Senior Counsel Liam Reidy SC said the doctor who carried out the surgery was an inexperienced junior surgeon and was not supervised.

Counsel told the court how inept the entire process at the hospital was illustrated in the fact that when they decided to cool Mrs Thawleys brain with ice, two doctors were sent across the road to a pub to get ice as there was none in the hospital.

The fact the Minister for Health directed a statutory inquiry into the case gave no comfort to Mrs Thawleys widower, Counsel said, cant get over his wifes death and has severe hopelessness.

Counsel said the situation had caused a " catastrophic disturbance" of Mr Thawleys psychiatric wellbeing and he is not likely to recover.

When the case came before Mr Justice Anthony Barr today, he was told the case was settled and could be struck out.

Mr Reidy SC said the case had been settled for compensatory damages only and aggravated or exemplary damages were not involved.

No other details of the settlement which is confidential were given to the court.

Alan Thawley, a 31-year-old data scientist from Brusna Cottages, Blackrock, Dublin, had sued the National Maternity Hospital Dublin over the death of his wife Malak who was originally from Dallas on May 8, 2016.

It was claimed that Mrs Thawley suffered a laceration to the surface of her aorta and there was complete mismanagement of the major vascular injury and Mrs Thawleys deteriorating condition, culminating in the loss of opportunity to save her life and her eventual and avoidable demise.

It was also claimed there was a failure to have vascular clamps available on site at the hospital for emergencies and a failure to have a red phone installed in theatre for use in emergencies.

It was further claimed that Mrs Thawleys life was unacceptable endangered during the operative procedure and her death occurred as a result of the injury inflicted upon her and the complete mismanagement of the injury afterwards.

Mr Thawley had also sued for nervous shock and claims his whole life and happiness with his late wife together with his plans and dreams for their future have been annihilated.

Liability was not at issue in the case which was before the court for assessment of damages only.

The National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street apologised in court last week for the death of Malak Thawley.

Counsel for the hospital Eoin McCullough SC extended deepest condolences to the widower of Malak Thawley and apologised for the events which led to his wifes death.

The High Court also heard that when proceedings to sue were issued in January last year over the tragic death of Malak Thawley in May 2016, a letter admitting liability in the case was issued the next day.

In the letter, the hospital also apologised and extended deepest condolences.

Mr Mc Cullough told the court the hospital apologised on numerous occasions and an internal inquiry was also set up.

Opening the case last week Liam Reidy SC said the Thawleys had been profoundly happy and excited when she became pregnant.

As a surprise gift, her husband had arranged a scan at six weeks. At the scan they were told to go to Holles Street for advice about the ectopic pregnancy.

Counsel said it was a Sunday and an ultrasound at Holles Street confirmed the ectopic pregnancy.

Mr Thawley he said had researched ectopic pregnancy and had seen it could be treated with certain medicine, but Counsel said he was told that because the foetal sac had a heartbeat, the only option was a surgical intervention.

The couple felt they should follow the advice.

Counsel said to this day Mr Thawley regrets the decision made, but the couple were reassured it was a routine procedure which would take 30 minutes.

Mrs Thawley was taken to theatre at 4pm.

Alan never saw her again, Counsel said.

At 5.30pm a nurse told him a lot of blood was found in the abdomen and at 6.30 pm a doctor came to him and he was told his wife had lost ten units of blood but they were dealing with it.

Counsel said Mr Thawley felt he was not being told the full picture.

At 7.30pm The Master of the National Maternity Hospital Dr Rhona Mahony came to him and told him the situation was very serious and doctors were doing everything they could.

Dr Rhona Mahony.

She said there is a chance your wife could die. About 20 minutes later, she returned with a specialist surgeon and said Malak is dead.

Counsel said Mr Thawley was told a trocar had been inserted in the abdomen and it had torn the aorta.

Mr Reidy said Mr Thawley remembered saying are you telling me it was a mistake and the surgeon said yes it was medical misadventure.

Counsel said Mr Thawley was in a state of shock and disbelief.

When he returned to Holles Street the next day, Counsel said the Master Dr Mahony said all surgery has risks and what happened was an accident.

Mr Thawley spoke to a relative who was a surgeon abroad and Counsel said Mr Thawley came to the conclusion what happened was not an accident.

Counsel said Mr Thawley felt embittered that the Master of the hospital had not said the situation was mismanaged and said sorry but told him what happened was an accident.
The government has revealed where ministers are being sent for St Patricks Day.

More than 30 ministers will be sent to countries across the globe for the festivities.

As is tradition, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar will head to the US to meet Donald Trump in the White House.

That trip cost the taxpayer more than 35,000 last year.

For the second year in a row, Shane Ross will be left to mind the country as he stays in Ireland.

Tanaiste Simon Coveney heads to China and Hong Kong, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe will visit Argentina and its to Australia for Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan.

Here's where Government Ministers are heading for St. Patrick's Day.



Eoghan Murphy heading to Korea, not John Halligan who gets the UK pic.twitter.com/UNTS2G0CTW  Sean Defoe (@SeanDefoe) January 16, 2018

Five ministers and the Attorney General will visit the USA as well as the Taoiseach.

As part of the governments Global Footprint initiative, Ministers will also visit Vietnam, Brazil, Oman, Lebanon, Kenya and Singapore, among others.

A visit to Korea will be made, but its South Korea and Eoghan Murphy wholl be sent there, with John Halligan instead making a trip to the UK.
By Aoife Nic Ardghail

A Dublin mother-of-three who conned her way into an elderly dementia sufferers home by pretending she was an acquaintance has been jailed for three years for burglary.

Margaret Cawley (27) knocked at the house with a co-accused woman and a child and gained access by pretending she knew the 84-year-old female resident.

The court heard that the elderly womans sister, who was aged 75, had been visiting and opened the door to Cawley.

Cawley and her co-accused went into the sitting room, spoke to the home owner as if they knew her and then offered to make tea.

As Cawley went into the kitchen, she stole the 84-year-old womans handbag from her rollator walker and the co-accused took the sisters bag. The culprits and the child then ran out the door.

Cawley, of Daletree Place, Ballycullen, Dublin pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to trespass and theft at Newcastle Manor Rise, Newcastle, Dublin, on March 14, 2017.

She has 17 previous convictions for burglary and is currently serving a 22-month district court sentence. Her co-accused is still before the courts and cannot be named.

Garda Stephen Broderick told Fiona McGowan BL, prosecuting, that Cawley and her co-accused fled in a Nissan Almera car after they grabbed the two handbags.

Neighbours witnessed the car speeding off and the 75-year-old woman in distress outside the house.

Further witnesses saw two bags being thrown from this vehicle on the Nangar Road, near Baldonnel, Dublin.

Gda Broderick said he tracked down the Nissan, driven by Cawley, a short distance later and found a walking stick taken from the elderly womans home in the passenger footwell.

The bags and their contents, including disabled parking discs, prescriptions and bank, social welfare and medical cards, were all recovered. A cash amount of 100 had been taken.

Gda Broderick told the court that the incident has impacted both elderly victims and they were more anxious being alone.

The garda agreed with James Dwyer BL, defending, that no violence or threats had been used in the offence.

Mr Dwyer submitted to Judge Martin Nolan that his client had had an unhappy childhood with time spent in various womens refuge centres because of her violent father.

He said she had stayed in similar centres due to a violent relationship in her adult life.

Judge Nolan noted that Cawley must have known the home owners age and that a certain amount of cunning was used in the offence.

He acknowledged she had a sad background but said the crime was serious.

He imposed the three year jail term, saying full credit was to be given for any time Cawley in custody spent solely on this burglary charge.
A young Dublin woman who held over 24,000 of cocaine as a free favour to a third party has received a four year suspended sentence, writes Aoife Nic Ardghail.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that Yasmin Redmond (20) was leading an aimless existence at the time and had agreed to hold the drugs in a shed for no money as a favour to another person.

Redmond, of Thornton Heights, St Michaels Estate, Inchicore, pleaded guilty to possessing cocaine worth 24, 251 at her home on April 17, 2017. She has no previous convictions.

Garda Nicola Gormon told Lisa Dempsey BL, prosecuting, that she and colleagues with confidential information arrived at the premises with a search warrant.

Gardai forced entry as the home was empty at the time and were in the middle of the raid when Redmond entered.

She admitted there was something in the shed as officers uncovered a school bag containing the cocaine block behind an artificial Christmas tree at that location.

Redmond was arrested and told gardai that she had been minding them for a week for someone else.

Garda Gormon agreed with Ronan Munro SC, defending, that his client co-operated with gardai, had not come to adverse attention since and had steered clear of former peer groups.

Mr Munro submitted to Judge Martin Nolan that his client had been leading an aimless existence at the time but was now accessing counselling and attending Youthreach.

He asked the judge to depart from the mandatory minimum ten year sentence for drugs offences of this nature and consider imposing a suspended sentence. Counsel suggested this was an exceptional case.

Judge Nolan accepted that Redmond was very young, co-operated with gardai and was at the lowest level of the drug dealing operation.

He said Redmond did not deserve to go into custody and suspended the sentence for four years.
A woman who claims she was raped by two men on Jason Derulos tour bus has told their trial she left Ireland because of what happened.

The men, who cant be named for legal reasons, deny raping and falsely imprisoning the then 19-year-old on the bus in June 2014.



From the witness box yesterday, the woman claimed the first accused man raped her on a bunk bed upstairs on the tour bus.

She claims she was raped by a second man afterwards.

She said she was handpicked to get on the bus after a VIP aftershow party for Jason Derulo and his crew at the Savoy nightclub in Cork city.

The American musician is not facing any charges.

Under cross-examination by counsel for the second accused man, she accepted she told a counsellor she decided to move to the UK because of what happened and denied the decision was made several months before the alleged rapes.

She also said she remembered texting her boyfriend afterwards saying she had just been raped and said she was surprised this same man told Gardai he wouldnt describe her as his girlfriend, but rather a "good friend".

The trial will resume tomorrow.
Even as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Liam Neeson still gets nervous when meeting certain famous people.

One such person was President Michael D Higgins.
U2 has confirmed dates for the European leg of their eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE Tour.

Kicking off in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 2, the European tour will begin in Berlin on August 31 for a string of European dates, including Cologne, Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Milan, Manchester and London.

In addition, special home shows are being planned for Dublin and Belfast, details of which will be announced as soon as they are finalised.

The eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE Tour follows the recent release of the bands 14th studio album Songs of Experience.

Tickets will go on sale January 26 and there will be a public ticket limit of 4 tickets per person.

U2.com subscribers will have access to a presale from Thursday, January 18 at 10am to Saturday, January 20 at 5pm.

Fans who pre-ordered Songs of Experience with participating retailers prior to November 30, 2017 are also eligible for a pre-sale opportunity for shows in the UK, Germany, France Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Ireland and Holland.

Eligible fans will receive a unique code allowing access for a limited presale opportunity beginning Monday, January 22 at 9am to Wednesday, January 24 at 5pm. These are limited to 2 tickets per person.

U2s eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE Tour is produced by Live Nation Global Touring.
Danish inventor Peter Madsen has been charged with murdering Swedish journalist Kim Wall during a trip on his private submarine.

Prosecutors alleged Madsen either cut Ms Walls throat or strangled her, describing the case as "very unusual and extremely gross".
A four-year-old girl who was found in Spain after going missing with her schizophrenic mother has returned to England.



Elliana Shand had been at the centre of private family court litigation.

She had disappeared from her London home with her mother Jessica Richards, who is in her mid-20s, after social services staff at Barking and Dagenham Council raised concerns about her care.

A judge who has overseen the case at hearings in the Family Division of the High Court in London had said he was very concerned for Ellianas safety and made public appeals for help.

Mr Justice Hayden heard on Friday that Elliana had been found safe and well with her mother in Spain by Spanish police.

Lawyers representing the council on Tuesday told the judge that Elliana had returned to England.

The judge said she would stay with her paternal grandparents Sean and Eileen Doyle, who are both in their 50s and live in the Wembley area of London.

Mr Doyle, a Liverpool fan who campaigns for victims of the Hillsborough disaster, had mounted an internet campaign and begged people to help find Elliana.

- PA
Update 4.52pm: French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed not to allow the re-establishment of the "Jungle" camp of migrants in Calais.

His promise came as he visited the Channel port ahead of a UK-France summit at which reports suggest he will seek to renegotiate Britain's role in dealing with migrants gathered there.

A view of a migrant camp in Calais, France, as French President Emmanuel Macron visited the region.

Mr Macron said the current "Dublin rules", under which refugees are required to seek asylum in the first safe country they reach, were "unsatisfactory" and called for an "integrated" EU system to deal with the problem.

Hundreds of asylum seekers hoping to cross the Channel remain in the area, more than a year after authorities dismantled the town's sprawling Jungle camp.

The president met Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart and organisations working with migrants on Tuesday, just two days before talks with Prime Minister Theresa May.

Aid groups have labelled the visit a "political show", while organisation L'Auberge des Migrants declined to meet Mr Macron "to show our profound disagreement with the upcoming immigration law".

One refugee called on the president to show "pity" for the plight of migrants in his policy.

Mr Macron said that Calais had become "a dead end for thousands of women and men who have spent years on the road".

French President Emmanuel Macron with the Mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart as he arrives at Calais Town Hall in France during a visit to the region.

Update 1.41pm: French president Emmanuel Macron has said he wants to negotiate with the UK over better police cooperation to handle migrants in the French port of Calais - and is also seeking more money from Britain to help develop the city.

Mr Macron is visiting the northern city, where many migrants attempt to sneak across the Channel.

In a speech to security forces in the city, Mr Macron also said he wants the UK to take in more unaccompanied minors.

Mr Macron is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Theresa May in Sandhurst on Thursday.

He said France is doing "everything" to prevent migrants from illegally entering the UK, insisting: "Calais is not a back door to England."

The city is the closest point between France and Britain, with two cross-Channel transport systems, the Eurotunnel and ferries.

Earlier: French president Emmanuel Macron has visited a migrant centre in northern France as he prepares to press the UK to do more to help deal with people who converge on the Calais region in hopes of crossing the Channel.

Mr Macron talked briefly with Sudanese migrants at the centre in Croisilles, home to 63 people.

He also questioned officials about measures to speed up processing for migrants who agree to apply for asylum in France.

French President Emmanuel Macron shakes hands with migrant Salha Medhat, right, from Sudan, while migrant Attayet Ali, left, looks on during Macrons visit to a migrant center in Croisilles, northern France effectively place the British border in Calais.

The French president also asked about migrants who abandon such centres to try to sneak across the Channel instead.

Guillaume Alexandre, the head of the association managing three facilities in the Pas-de-Calais region, said nearly 70% of migrants there leave before filing any paperwork in France.

Mr Macron will travel to Calais later on Tuesday. On Thursday, he will meet Prime Minister Theresa May to discuss accords that effectively place the British border in Calais.

- PA
Thousands of people lined streets in Chile's capital as Pope Francis visited the Latin American country for the first time.

But crowds in Santiago were sparser than those seen during visits to neighbouring countries, with some protesting over sexual abuse by priests and others angry at a decision made to appoint a bishop close to another who abused minors.

Francis appointed Juan Barros, a reverend who was mentored by Rev Fernando Karadima, with the latter found guilty in 2011 of abusing dozens of minors over decades by the Vatican.

Rev Barros, bishop of the southern city of Osorno, has always denied he knew what Karadima was doing when he was the priest's protege.

"It's not just time for the Pope to ask for forgiveness for the abuses but also to take action," said Juan Carlos Cruz, a victim of Karadima.

Pope Francis was greeted by President Michelle Bachelet and a band played while the two walked on a red carpet as night began to fall.

The pope travelled in a black sedan to the centre of the city, flanked by several cars. He then transferred to a popemobile, waving to small crowds of well-wishers who lined up along avenues.

Crowds were notably thin, particularly compared to papal visits in other Latin American countries.

"Long live the pope!" yelled some as he passed by in the popemobile.

Others carried signs criticising the pope or extolling him to act.

"Stop the abuse, Francis!" read one sign. "You can so you must!"

Over the next three days, Pope Francis is scheduled to celebrate Mass in Santiago, the southern city of Temuco and the northern city of Iquique.

On Thursday, the pope will go to Peru for a three-day visit.

Pope Francis' trip was aimed at highlighting the plight of immigrants and indigenous peoples and underscoring the need to preserve the Amazon rainforest.

However, sexual abuse by priests has taken the limelight in the weeks before his arrival.

Hours before Pope Francis landed, activists on issues related to sex abuse by priests called for sanctions against both abusers and anyone who helped cover up their actions.

About 200 people attended the first of several activities aimed at making the sex abuse scandal a central topic of Pope Francis' time in the country.

The majority of Chileans continue to declare themselves Roman Catholics, but the church has lost the influence and moral authority it once enjoyed thanks to the scandals, secularisation and an out-of-touch clerical caste.

"I used to be a strong believer and churchgoer," said Blanca Carvucho, a 57-year-old secretary in Santiago. "All the contradictions have pushed me away."

Local church leaders had ignored the complaints against Karadima for years, but they were forced to open an official investigation after the victims went public and Chilean prosecutors started investigating.

The Vatican in 2011 sentenced Karadima to a lifetime of "penance and prayer" for his crimes, but the church leadership has not won back Chileans' trust for having covered up his crimes for so long.

"The Karadima case created a ferocious wound," said Chile's ambassador to the Holy See, Mariano Fernandez Amunategui.

He and others inside the Vatican speak openly of a Chilean church "in crisis" as a result, a remarkable admission of the scandal's toll on a church that wielded such political clout that it helped stave off laws legalising divorce and abortion until recently.

- PA and Digital desk
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called on Nato to take a stand against the United States over its plans to form a 30,000-strong Kurdish-led border security force in Syria.

Turkey has threatened to launch a military offensive against Syrian Kurdish militias, which Ankara considers to be terrorists.

On Monday, Mr Erdogan accused fellow Nato ally the US of creating an "army of terror" in Syria along the border with Turkey, and vowed to crush the force.

Addressing his ruling partys deputies on Tuesday, Mr Erdogan questioned Natos stance on the issue, saying: "Hey Nato! You are obliged to make a stance against those who harass and violate the borders of your members."

Mr Erdogan said Turkeys military chief would discuss the issue in Brussels.

Ties between Turkey and the US have deteriorated over American support for the Kurdish militia, known as the Peoples Defence Units, or YPG, which Turkey says is a major threat to its security. The US has relied on the YPG as the backbone of a Syrian force that drove Islamic State from much of northern and eastern Syria with the help of US-led airstrikes.

The coalition said the new force, expected to number as much as 30,000 in the next few years, is a key element of its strategy in Syria to prevent the resurgence of IS there.

Mr Erdogan reiterated that Turkey plans an imminent intervention in the Kurdish-controlled enclave of Afrin in northern Syria. Turkey has sent reinforcements to its border in recent weeks and Mr Erdogan said this week that Turkish troops were already firing artillery at Afrin from the border.

Speaking to reporters after his speech to party legislators, Mr Erdogan said Turkey would conduct the operation in Afrin with Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Asked whether he planned to discuss the Kurdish-led border force with US president Donald Trump, Mr Erdogan said he had no plans to call the US leader.

The Turkish leader was quoted as saying: "We discussed the issue before. He said he would get back to me. I wont call him as long as he does not get back to me."
What are they talking about in Middletown Township? The ADA-accessible playground at Cobalt Ridge Park, home-improvement projects, climate change or the towns female police officer? Actually, all those topics -- and more on the townships own podcast, Middletown Township Talks. It recently celebrated its first anniversary and is doing quite well, say show organizers. Middletown Township Talks provides residents the...
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...
The Gifted wraps up its first season with the two-hour finale, titled eXtraction and X-roads. The Mutant Underground and Hellfire Club join forces to protect other mutants from Dr. Campbell and Trask Industries. Loyalties and family ties are tested, as tensions run high and grave decisions are made. Just how will the mutants handle the threats they face and who will make it out alive?

Fox Renews The Gifted for Season 2>>>

Dr. Campbells End Game is Finally Revealed

After plenty of questions over what Dr. Campbell has tried to gain from his research, it is all finally revealed. A flashback to his past four years ago, where his brother is dying from cystic fibrosis, shows how he feared that the human race was going extinct due to the X-gene. Now he wants to get rid of it to protect the human race. However, some of Otto Struckers research into getting rid of the X-gene is missing.

Meanwhile, the mutants plan the first stage of their attack. The Frost sisters know that Dr. Campbell will be talking at the Humanity Today conference, and that will be the perfect time to kidnap him. Everyone powerful against mutants will be at Humanity Today.

Dr. Campbell turns to Senator Montez to organize a meeting for more funding and support for Trask Industries and the Hound Program. Senator Montez isnt too certain about going another step forward with the attack on mutants, but Dr. Campbell convinces him that they need this to prevent a war.

John and his small group of mutants manage to stop Mr. Bennett on the way to Humanity Today. The Frosts make Bennett call to change his security detail. The initial plan works out. With Bennett incapacitated, John, Marcos and Clarice get into the conference building. Lorna is able to disrupt all communication, giving the small group a chance to grab Dr. Campbell. However, a childs choir gets in the way and the small group is forced to abandon their mission while taking fire.

The Struckers Go on a Mission of Their Own

Not everyone is happy about the Struckers returning to the Mutant Headquarters, but theres little time to worry about that. Sage realizes that Dr. Campbell has been combing through Ottos research, just like Reed, and hes been talking to an insurance company that just happens to be where Reeds mom, Ellen, works. The Strucker family heads off to protect her. While trying to get his mom to come with him, Reed breaks the news that Otto was killed by Dr. Campbells men. Ellen never knew that Otto was a mutant or that hed made Reed sick.

During the trip, Andy and Lauren are no longer seeing eye-to-eye on the Von Strucker siblings. While Lauren views them as the terrorists that the human reports have painted them as, Andy views them as protectors of mutants  almost like George Washington, as a liberator for America and not the enemy the British viewed him as.

When Sentinel Services arrives, the Struckers convince Ellen to leave her work. Andy decides to use his abilities against the Sentinel Services men, but Lauren tries to stop him. They use their powers against each other, connecting into a mini-bomb that throws each other back.

Ellen finally realizes that there may have been a researcher that Otto talked to, a woman called Madeline. Despite Sentinel Services going after the Struckers, Ellen decides she cant go to the Mutant Underground. She will go to a friend instead.

Back at the Underground, Reed gives Sage Madelines name to research. Meanwhile, Kate wants to get to the bottom of the fight between Lauren and Andy. Lauren is worried about her brother and worries Kate too. All Andy sees is that the humans are becoming a threat to the mutants and they need to become like the Von Strucker family.

The Mutants Run Away

After the disaster of the attack on Dr. Campbell in the first half of The Gifteds season 1 finale, the mutants have no choice but to run away. The Frost siblings arent happy about running (or that John and Marcos refused to attack children), but she has no choice. When they get back to their safe house, the Frost sisters hurry to find out where Dr. Campbell will go next before its too late.

Back at the Humanity Today conference, Dr. Campbell tells the senator that they need to attack now. They head to a private plane to discuss the next steps.

Quiz: Which Special Agent TV Hunk Would You Date?>>>

Jace Uses the Hound Program

When Jace gets to where Sentinel Services was attacked, he uses two mutants from the Hound Program to find out where the Struckers went afterwards. When the hounds get two trails, Jace alerts local police about Ellen and takes Sentinel Services to the Underground.

The Struckers trail leads to a toxic contamination site. Jace realizes its not as toxic as previously made out to be, so he organizes for an assault team to move in. Despite Pedro pushing fear on everyone, Jace fights against it. The mutants have to evacuate the Underground.

As the Underground starts evacuating, Lauren turns to Andy. Its time to fight against Sentinel Services. Their parents spend time creating another exit from the Underground through the vault, after barricading themselves for protection. The mutants with combat training hold off Sentinel Services while the exit is made.

Jace decides its time to send the hounds in, and theyre not taking any prisoners. Luckily, the exit is created and all the mutants are able to escape. Andy and Lauren stay behind to use their joint powers against Sentinel Services. Sage later confirms that the whole of HQ is gone and only the Strucker siblings made it out alive.

Lorna Considers a Safer Future

During the episode, Lorna and Clarice have a chance to bond over their families and the fact that the Frost sisters have attempted to get into both of their heads. Clarice knows she has darkness in her family tree but believes that whats in the family tree doesnt matter. The family tree doesnt make a mutant evil.

A flashback into Lornas past reveals how she joined the Mutant Underground. While in a court-ordered mental health facility, she was visited by another mutant with news of the Underground. This links to how Lorna feels now, as she refuses to run away from the current problem.

Lorna decides to join with the Frost sisters and leaves with two of them. After learning of a flight plan, Lorna and two of the Frost sisters head to the plane to take it down. Marcos, John and Clarice find out, threaten the remaining Frost sister and go to stop Lorna. They get there in time, but Lorna chooses to take the plane down, killing all on board, including Dr. Campbell. After that, she takes off, leaving the others behind without a word.

In the end, Jace is the one who becomes the scapegoat for the bureaucrats. He chooses to quit Sentinel Services. Meanwhile, the Mutant Underground had to decide where to go from this point. With the Mutant Underground divided, Lorna and the Frosts return to gain their own recruits. Andy is among those who leave with the Hellfire Club, splitting the Strucker siblings.

Did you expect Lorna to take down the whole plane? What do you think Jace will do next? How will the Mutant Underground rebuild? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

The Gifted will return for season 2 on FOX. Want more news? Like our Gifted Facebook page.

(Image courtesy of FOX)
The market for licensed merchandise in India is exploding; according to a recent report by ESP, a Group M company, licensing and merchandising (L&M) is a staggering Rs 87,000 crore plus industry in the country. This constitutes between five and seven per cent of the global L&M market, small but significant enough for every superhero franchise to flood the market with a figurine or branded accessory. However, less than 10 per cent of the total Indian L&M pie comes from Indian brands. and American pop culture rules the niche, even as studios put their might behind popular domestic television icons and Bollywood and the Indian Premier League bring out their celebrity led merchandise.
The government has taken one more small step in coming to grips with one of the most difficult parts of giving a decent burial to the Indian public sector  privatising . It has allowed foreign airlines to own up to 49% of the national carrier. A year ago, it had announced its decision to strategically divest its stake in the carrier.
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Hindustan Oil Exploration Company (HOEC) is expecting its production to go up from 500 barrels of oil equivalent during 2015 to around 8,000 barrels during the current fiscal year, backed by the growing production in its Assam facility. The company, which has been facing crisis after shutting down one of its facility in 2011, is expecting its three ongoing projects to take up the production to 25,000 barrels in three to five years, said P Elango, MD of the company.
RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani on Tuesday announced Rs 50 billion investment in expanding telecom and petro-retail businesses in West Bengal and said his company is exploring the possibility of setting up a manufacturing facility for mobile phones and set-top boxes.

Speaking at the Bengal Global Business Summit, India's richest man paid lavish compliments to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee saying that under her leadership "West Bengal is becoming Best Bengal!"



Ambani said his company Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) had committed an investment of Rs 45 billion in the state but has ended up investing Rs 150 billion.

"Didi, we could make this large investment only because you have created a friendly climate and an enabling policy infrastructure," he said, adding that RIL has emerged as one of the largest investors in Bengal.

Most of the investment has been made in creating fourth-generation high-speed mobile and internet network for Reliance Jio, the telecom arm of RIL.

"We are committing to invest another Rs 50 billion in Jio and the entire digital eco-system, retail and retro-retail in the next few years," he said.

Also, Reliance will work with "multiple partners to explore setting up next-generation state-of-the-art electronics manufacturing facilities and make West Bengal the hub for innovation and hi-tech technologies for consumer devices such as mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other devices", he said.

Starting in 2015 through a public Wi-Fi Experience Zone in Park Street, Jio has enmassed over 12 million customers in the state, Ambani said.

He said the digital economy will bring prosperity at more than double the speed of the traditional economy.

While Jio will reach 100 per cent of state population before the end of 2018, it is "embarking on an ambitious project of connecting Bengal with Optic Fibre", he said.

Also, Reliance is setting up Digital Service Centres across India to bring Government to Citizen (G2C) services within easy reach of every citizen, particularly in the rural hinterland.

It will give birth to digital entrepreneurs in villages and small towns, kick-start e-commerce and support agriculture as well as small and medium enterprises.

Ambani said Bengal has said goodbye to the slow growth rate of the past and today is the fourth largest state economy in India, growing at 15.64 per cent, much higher than the national average.

"Investments in infrastructure have been unprecedented. A global think-tank ranked Kolkata second among the Indian metros on overall economic performance, even ahead of Mumbai," he said. "Today, the state is famous for the ease of doing business! A miracle has happened."



Stating that Bengal today means business, he said the state has adopted "a positive mindset that can make the impossible possible.
Singapore Air Transport Services can exercise its right of first refusal for taking over the 50 per cent stake of Air India in its most profitable unit that provides ground-handling services at major metro airports across the country.
Tata Sons counsel on Tuesday in his arguments said the conversion of Tata Sons from a Limited company to a Private Limited company cannot be considered as an act of oppression. Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Tatas counsel also refuted allegations that Ratan Tata interfered in the affairs of Tata Sons. On contrary, it was Cyrus Mistry who sought guidance from the chairman from time to time on range of issues, Singhvi told the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) in Mumbai, which concluded the hearing on Tuesday.
Almost a decade after he narrowly survived the November 26, 2008, Mumbai terror attacks, the orphaned Moshe Holtzberg arrived in Mumbai on a cool Tuesday morning on his first visit to India.

Then a toddler on the verge of turning two and now an 11-year-old, the bespectacled Moshe, sporting a T-shirt and shorts, landed at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) along with his grandparents, with whom he grew up in Israel.

Appearing a tad bewildered by the presence of a large media posse outside the CSIA, he kept close to his grandmother, with his grandfather following nearby.

Accompanying them was his savior and Indian nanny, Sandra Samuel, who has lived with and looked after him in Israel since the harrowing experiences of 26/11 in the Chabad House, which is inside Nariman House in Colaba, in the southern tip of Mumbai.

At the media's insistence, Moshe managed to say: "Shalom... Bahut khush" (Greetings, I feel very happy)", as they stepped out around 8 a.m.

He religiously sported a small brimless cloth cap, called 'kippah' - which he kept on all through the day in Mumbai.

"I want to pray in Nariman House, where Moshe's parents were killed... Moshe likes the people of India and loves the country. He wants to thank Prime Minister Narendra Modi," said the boy's grandfather, Shimon Rosenberg, sporting a snowwhite beard.

Later, in the afternoon, the entire family, including Samuel, visited the Chabad House, in Nariman House, Colaba, which was under siege by two Pakistani terrorists who gunned down seven persons there, including Moshe's young parents.

They were warmly received there by the present Rabbi, Israel Kozlovsky, who also heads the Chabad Trust in India, along with his toddler child and other officials.

Moshe and his grandparents offered a brief but solemn prayer at the small synagogue here, visited the library and various other rooms, including the one in which his parents were felled by the terrorists bullets during the November 26-29 strikes.

Samuel took them around the room where Moshe's parents were killed, and recounted the chilling events of that day to him and his grandparents, against the backdrop of the bullet-ridden walls, damaged plaster and floor, some tell-tale reddish-brown stains (probably blood) of the dance of death in the building exactly nine years and three months ago.

At one point, Rabbi Kozlovsky, his wife and Samuel posed before a large portrait of Moshe's parents which hangs in one of the corridors of Chabad House, most of which has undergone a renovation.

Along with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Moshe is likely to visit the Chabad House on Thursday, to declare it as a Living Memorial.

Arriving in Mumbai in 2003, (Moshe's parents) the Holtzbergs ran the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish outreach centre serving the tiny local Jewish community and visiting Israelis in the city, which was shut down after the terror strikes and reopened only in 2014.

When they were killed in the indiscriminate firing, the US-born Rabbi Gavriel was 29 and his Israel-born wife Rivka was 28.

Unknown to them, their toddler son Moshe, then barely two, was protected and saved by his Indian nanny, Samuel, and later they were taken to Israel.

As a gesture of goodwill for saving little Moshe's life, Samuel was later granted an honorary citizenship of Israel and continues to live and work there.
As many as six were arrested from the railway station here on Saturday night.

The six members, identified as Mohammad Jahangir Alam (17), Ibrahim Alam (17), Mohammad Ashan (15), Nur Fataman (16), Jhana Tara (14) and Dilwara Begum (27) were reportedly waiting to board a train to Hyderabad.

The six people were detained by the railway police here, who were moving "suspiciously" through the railway station. Upon interrogation, they confessed to being from Myanmar and had sneaked into India via Bangladesh.

Further, it was revealed that one stayed in Hyderabad while the other five who recently had taken refuge in Chittagong of Bangladesh illegally crossed the border through Sonamura into Tripura from where they boarded a bus to Dharmanagar.

"The police who saw the six minors detained them and began investigations, following which they confessed to being from Myanmar. Cases have been registered against all of them, and the investigation is underway. The six are in safe custody," Inspector of Dharmanagar Railway Police Swapan Kumar Singh told ANI.

This is the second such incident reported from the state Tripura in less than two months.

Earlier, eight Rohingyas belonging to two families, including two women and four children, were arrested at Khayerpur, 12 km north of Agartala.
Will it be third time lucky for Barmer? This is the question that is floating around as Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday kicked off the commencement of work for the Rs 431-billion petroleum refinery at this city in Rajasthan.
Indian Army chief Bipin Rawat on Monday sent out a warning to Pakistan that India will scale up action if Islamabad continues supporting terror and infiltration of militants, while also stressing on the need to secure the northern border along China.
Moshe Holtzberg, who lost his parents during the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008, arrived in Mumbai on Tuesday.

Moshe is all set to return to Nariman House- his home and one of the sites that terrorists chose for bloodbath.

Addressing the media here earlier, Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, Director of Chabad-run Jewish center at Nariman House had said that Moshe will be accompanying Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 18 for the inauguration of a memorial project dedicated to those killed in the 26/11 carnage.

Kozlovsky noted, "We are very excited about this upcoming visit of with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We are heartened to see him here again in the Nariman House, the very place where his life was miraculously saved by his nanny, Sandra Samuel. Prime Minister Netanyahu will be coming here on January 18 to unveil the memorial project which will be dedicated to remember and commemorate all the victims of 26/11 attack".

Moshe was only two when terrorists killed his parents at Mumbai's Jewish house. Then 'Baby Moshe' became a face of the innocent victims of ruthless terrorism.

His parents had moved to Mumbai seven years before the attack to work at the Chabad House. After the attack, Moshe's maternal grandparents took him to Afula, a city in Israel for his safety and comfort.

He added that a part of the memorial will have a special area designed to remember the parents of .

"We are very excited about this programme. This visit for Moshe is very emotional and sensitive as he lost his parents here. We will need the cooperation of the media and we will provide a press release at the end", he continued.

Earlier on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi received his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu at the airport in Delhi.

The Israeli premier, who is on a six-day visit to India, is accompanied by his wife Sara and a 130-member delegation from various sectors, including cyber, agriculture and defence.
The Centre has abolished the Haj subsidy, Minorities Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqi said on Tuesday. He said the Supreme Court had in 2012 asked the Centre to phase out the subsidy by 2022, but the Narendra Modi government has decided to implement the decision in 2018 itself as a symbol of its commitment towards empowerment without appeasement of the minority communities.

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said the Haj subsidy, contrary to the perception being constructed, didnt benefit the Hajis, but governments were pleasing flight operators, particularly Air India. He said a division Bench headed by Justice J Aftab Alam had in 2012 asked the Centre to abolish the subsidy by 2022, and use that money for welfare of minorities, particularly for their education, and that the Congress-led UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government had brought down the allocation for Haj subsidy.

Naqvi said the Centre would use the money for welfare of minority communities. He said a record number of 175,000 Muslims would undertake the pilgrimage this year from India. He said the Centre had spent over Rs 2.5 billion last year towards Haj subsidy.

It is part of the Modi governments efforts to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement, Naqvi said. Asked if the subsidy withdrawal would make the cost of the pilgrimage too high for many Muslims, Naqvi said the government was making efforts to bring it down.

The Saudi Arabian government has agreed to allow Indians to go on Haj via sea and officials of the two countries will work out the modalities, he said. The sea route is likely to be much cheaper. He said Haj pilgrims from certain regions would be free to choose their port of departure and this would bring down the cost by up to 70 per cent on some routes. The minister said, in a first, over 1,300 women would go on Haj without a mehram (male guardian), a practice done away with from this year. Woman Haj assistants would accompany them and the government has made arrangements for their stay in Saudi Arabia, he said.

Naqvi said his ministry was organising an event in Lucknow on January 18 in which Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath would speak on empowering minorities without appeasement. Minority affairs ministers of nine states will attend the event. He detailed a host of measures, such as providing jobs and job opportunities to 850,000 minority youth and scholarships to 18.3 million students, to claim that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA government has been working to empower minorities.

Congress leader Azad said his party didnt have any issues with the government abolishing Haj subsidy. It was the airlines which benefited, not the common pilgrim, he said. Azad said the normal fare from India to Jeddah charged by any airline was between Rs 30,000 and Rs 40,000, but the airlines and operators charged Rs 70,000 to Rs 75,000.

A former civil aviation minister and also a former member of the Central Haj Committee, Azad explained the genesis of the subsidy. He said until the early 1980s the pilgrims would travel to Jeddah by the sea route. When these ships became too old and certified unfit in 1982, the government instead of buying new ships decided that pilgrims should travel to Jeddah by air and since the sea route was much cheaper, the government would subsidise the air travel.

Azad said the UPA government had taken a Cabinet decision, subsequent to the Supreme Court order, to reduce the Haj subsidy, which in 2012 was around Rs 6.5 billion.
There will be no subsidy for Haj from this year, minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said on Tuesday.

Naqvi told reporters that despite the subsidy withdrawal, a record number of 175,000 Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage this year from India.

Naqvi also said that the Saudi Arabian government has in principle agreed to allow Haj journey from India by ships and officials of the two countries will sit together to finalise the modalities.

"This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi told reporters and cited a host of measures for the welfare of minorities.

Earlier this year, Naqvi had said that the Centre would abolish the subsidy for Haj pilgrims in accordance with a Supreme Court order.

"A constitutional bench of the Supreme Court had, during the Congress regime in 2012, directed that the be done away with. Hence, in the new policy, as per the recommendations of a committee, we have decided to do away with the gradually," he had said.
Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra today reached out to the four senior most judges of the in a bid to defuse the unprecedented row over allocation of cases and other issues amid fresh hopes of a resolution by the weekend.

As the crisis that rocked the apex court appeared to linger on, court sources said the CJI met the four dissenting judges - Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, M B Lokur and Kurian Joseph - for 15 minutes and discussed all issues raised by them at their press conference on January 12. The issues included the allocation of sensitive and important Public Interest Litigations(PILs).

The first face-to-face interaction between the two sides after the press conference took place in a lounge in the apex court premises where judges meet each other informally over tea or coffee before proceeding towards their respective courts at 10.30 am.

But no details were available on whether the differences have narrowed down or any solution worked out on the issues raised by the four judges. Justice Misra is likely to have another meeting with the four judges tomorrow.

However, one of the issues sought to be raised by the four judges appeared to have been addressed when a bench comprising Justices Arun Mishra and M M Shantanagoudar in its order during the hearing in the Loya case today said, "Put up before the appropriate bench." The death of special CBI judge B H Loya had drawn intense attention as the judge was earlier hearing the sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.

The case, whose assignment to the bench hearing the PILs, was a bone of contention at the joint press conference by the four judges.

While the CJI was meeting the four judges, other judges were also present, including the one who has been the target of some activist lawyers for dealing with some of the recent sensitive PILs.

Sources said that the judges also expressed concern over the media coverage in the aftermath of the January 12 presser.

There was a general feeling among the judges that when efforts are being made to resolve the crisis, there was a need for a careful reporting of the issue.

Sources said some of the judges who are presently junior in seniority have openly expressed their displeasure against the four judges for making public their grievances without deliberating the issues in house.

Four days after the crisis erupted, the corridors of the were abuzz with all types of speculation after Attorney General K K Venugopal earlier in the day said that the crisis has not been fully resolved.

"I think it (crisis) has not been settled. Lets hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days", Attorney General K K Venugopal told PTI.

He had asserted yesterday that "everything has been settled" and described the crisis as a "storm in a tea cup." The Bar Council of India had declared "kahani khatam (story is over)" in describing the crisis that erupted on Friday when four senior-most judges launched a virtual revolt against Chief Justice Dipak Misra.

At an unprecedented press conference, Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph openly castigated the functioning of the top court.

Bar Association (SCBA) President Vikas Singh today said there was a likelihood of the crisis being resolved by the end of this week.

"By the end of this week the crisis is likely to be resolved," he told PTI.

Singh said that when he had handed over the SCBA resolution to the CJI on Sunday, he had got the impression that the crisis would be resolved. Singh said the CJI was hopeful that within a week things will return to normalcy.

In its emergency meeting on Saturday, the SCBA had passed a resolution asking the chief justice to convene a full court meeting of the apex court judges and transfer all pending PILs for hearing before the five senior-most judges who are members of the collegium.

Venugopal, the attorney general, also hoped that things will be sorted out in the next few days.

Asked whether he had a meeting or if he spoke with any of the four judges or the CJI, Venugopal said, "Nothing of that sort has happened".

At the press conference, the four judges had flagged certain problems, including the assigning of cases by the CJI, and said there were certain issues afflicting the country's highest court.

On Sunday, CJI Misra met a seven-member delegation of the Bar Council of India and SCBA's Singh, and had reportedly assured them that the crisis would be sorted out soon and congeniality would prevail.

Today, the Bar Council of India Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra continued to maintain that there was "absolutely no crisis now.
A rocket landed inside the compound of the Indian embassy in Kabul city on Monday evening, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has confirmed.

All Indians and staff are safe, Swaraj informed on Twitter.

"A rocket has landed in our Chancery compound in Kabul. The rocket has clipped the top of the three-storied ITBP barracks. There are no casualties. All Indians and staff are safe," External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj posted on Twitter.

"A rocket landed in the premises of our Embassy in Kabul a while ago causing minor damage to a structure at rear side of the Embassy compound. No fire or casualties. Our Charge d' Affaires informs that all Embassy employees are safe," Raveesh Kumar, the spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs said on Twitter.

Earlier, Afghanistan's TOLOnews reported that the rocket had landed close to the Indian embassy in the 14th Street of Wazir Mohammad Akbar Khan, located in the heart of the city.

This incident took place hours after the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) delegation left the country after a two-day visit to Kabul.
Stressing upon the value of democracy in an increasingly multipolar world, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday said today's quest for modernity and innovation is being challenged by radical Islam and its terrorists.

"India is the world's most populous democracy. It is a place which shows that humanity can be governed with freedom, that we can secure the rights of people," Netanyahu said while delivering the inaugural address of this year's Raisina Dialogue, India's flagship conference on geopolitics and geo-economics.

"Those things that make life worthwhile. The ability to think as we want, speak as we want, believe what we want and a society that is pluralistic, diverse and free. This is what India is about, this is what Israel is about."

Stating that the world is moving from being unipolar to multipolar, Netanyahu said: "The reason I mentioned the importance of democracies is because even though we have relationships with most of the countries of the world, if we are to live in a world that protects international norms, something that you Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi talk about all the time, we must have of course the ability to protect those norms."

He described the India-Israel relationship as "a natural friendship and a natural partnership of democratic and free people" but said that "our way of life is being challenged".

"Most notably, the quest for modernity and the quest for innovation is being challenged by radical Islam and its terrorists, offshoots from a variety of corners and this can upset the international system," the Israel Prime Minister said.

"I think that one of the ways to overcome such challenges is to strengthen the relationship between our two great democracies. The alliance of democracies I think is important to secure our common future."

Speaking about the secret behind the success of a small country like Israel, Netanyahu referred to the fact that 75 years ago, the people of his country "were like wind-tossed leaves".

"The weak don't survive, the strong survive. You have to make tryst with the strong," he said.

He said that the source of strength lies in military power for which F-35s to submarines are needed.

"Defence costs a lot of money. Where does this money come from? It comes from the second power - economic power," he stated.

Netanyahu said that after establishing military power and economic, Israel built the third power, that is political power.

But he said that there is a fourth power which is the power of values and the most important of these is democracy.

Organised by the Ministry of External Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation, the three-day Raisina Dialogue this year is being held on the theme "Managing Disruptive Transitions: Ideas, Institutions and Idioms".

Over 500 leaders from 90 countries are attending this annual conference.

Netanyahu arrived here on Sunday on a six-day visit to India in what is the second Prime Ministerial visit from Israel to India in 15 years after that of Ariel Sharon in 2003.

On Monday, he held a bilateral summit with Prime Minister Modi following which nine agreements were signed between India and Israel across multiple sectors.

After having visited Taj Mahal in Agra earlier on Tuesday, Netanyahu will move to Ahmedabad on Wednesday and from there to Mumbai before departing from India on Friday.

--IANS

ab/dg
Attorney General K K Venugopal on Tuesday said the crisis in the seems to be unresolved and hoped it will be "fully settled" in a couple of days, remarks that come a day after he stated that everything was settled in the higher judiciary.

A crisis erupted on January 12 after four senior judges -- Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph -- openly castigated the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

"Yes, I think it has not been settled. Let's hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days," Venugopal told PTI.

Asked about reports about the impasse continuing, Venugopal said he has to agree with the view.

On whether he had a meeting or spoke with any of the four judges or the CJI, Venugopal said, "Nothing of that sort has happened".

However, he hoped things will be sorted out in the next couple of days.

The four top judges had yesterday resumed work, belying the simmering tensions sparked by their accusations against the Chief Justice, while the Attorney General had described the unprecedented crisis as "a storm in a tea cup".

In the presser, the four judges had flagged certain problems, including the assigning of cases in the apex court, and said there were certain issues afflicting the country's highest court.

Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra had on Sunday met a seven-member delegation of the Bar Council of India and Bar Association President Vikas Singh and had assured them that the crisis would be sorted out soon and congeniality would prevail.
A crisis erupted on January 12 after four senior judges - Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph - openly criticised the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. The dramatic press conference held by the judges to allege that sensitive and important cases were being assigned to "select benches" headed by junior SC judges in the last few months, created an unprecedented storm that is unlikely to die down too soon.

Here are top 10 developments



1. CJI meets 4 senior judges



Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra has met with the four dissenting judges  Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph  this afternoon, and is likely to meet them once again on Wednesday. The meeting was called by CJI Misra himself and it will continue on Wednesday as issues raised at todays meeting remained unresolved, sources said.
The largest consumer goods company in the country, Hindustan Unilever (HUL), was on Tuesday slapped with a notice by the governments anti-profiteering body, set up to monitor whether or not firms were passing on benefits of the goods and services tax (GST) to consumers.
How is the banking sector placed in Q3? Siddharth Purohit takes a look in this Business Standard Special



Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal. They do not reflect the view/s of Business Standard.
It had all the makings of a great investment summit: A galaxy of stars from India Inc and beyond, a venue spread across 4.5 million square feet with an auditorium to seat 3,200 people, and industrialists acknowledging a positive change in Bengal under Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.


The visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Taj Mahal in Agra on Tuesday and the formal welcome by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath come in the backdrop of the state gearing up to hold UP Investors Summit 2018 next month and to showcase defence manufacturing as a key investment sector.
Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu praised one another for revolutionising the bilateral relationship, the nine agreements signed  on subjects ranging from cyber security to homeopathic research  suggest the two countries are finding it hard to match the heady rhetoric with concrete outcomes in areas that matter.
To boost the employability of aircraft maintenance engineers, the country's aviation watchdog plans to take a slew of measures such as a shorter licence procedure, frequent eligibility tests and lower examination fees.

Speaking at an event today, Director General of Civil Aviation B S Bhullar said that following several representations, the aviation watchdog has proposed to the Ministry of Civil Aviation that examination fees for aircraft maintenance engineers (AMEs) be reduced.

In response, Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha said, "We are examining it. We will definitely ensure some relief."



Sinha was addressing an open house discussion on enhancing the employability of aircraft maintenance engineers.

The AME trainees passing out from the DGCA-approved AME training institute have to pass as many as 11 modules, and each of these carry an examination fee of Rs 2,500, according to a participant who sought to draw the attention of the authorities to the "exorbitant" fees being charged.

J S Rawat, Joint Director General of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), also said that these exams, which are currently held thrice a year, would be held more frequently, adding that the "ultimate plan" is to have on- demand exams for aircraft technicians as well as pilots.

He also said that measures have been taken to reduce work experience criterion from five years to two years to acquire type-A licence (for AMEs) and for more advanced licences from seven years to four years so that there are more licenced personnel in a shorter time.

According to management consulting firm IMaCS's Comprehensive Skill Gap Report, 72,900 technicians and AMEs will be required by the industry by 2035.

However, data indicates that a mere 3,644 Basic Licences and 159 type-rated AME licences were issued in the last five years.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inaugurated the third edition of the geo-political conference, 'Raisina Dialogue', here on Tuesday and laid stress on the need to develop economic, military and political power to emerge as a strong nation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj also attended the inaugural session.

Delivering his inaugural address, the Israeli premier appreciated the efforts being made by the Narendra Modi government to cut the bureaucratic red tape and improve ease of doing business.

Netanyahu, on a six-day visit to India, said a government can both facilitate and block economic growth. Growth is possible when there is a free market which facilitates innovation by business entities, he said.

Referring to economic growth, he said, "The weak don't survive, the strong survive...you make alliance with the strong."



He said that to defend a nation, one needs a strong military which in turn requires a lot of money. The money, he said, comes from a strong economy.

Netanyahu stressed that alliance between democracies was important.

The event, jointly organised by the Ministry of External Affairs and Observer Research Foundation (ORF), is a multilateral conference aimed at addressing challenging issues globally.

The theme of the dialogue this year is 'Managing Disruptive Transitions: Ideas, Institutions and Idioms'.
India and Israel on Monday pledged to fight terror as the two countries sought to broadbase their relationship on the silver jubilee of establishment of their diplomatic ties with Prime Minister Narendra Modi inviting Israeli companies to take advantage of the liberalised FDI regime in defence sector and to make more in India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the opening plenary at the WEF's summit next week, while the keynote address will be given by US President Donald Trump at the annual jamboree of the global elite to be attended by 70 state heads.

Besides, 38 heads of major international organisations such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, as also nearly 2,000 CEOs including over 100 from India will be present at the five-day World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2018, beginning on January 22 with a welcome reception to be hosted by India.

Announcing the official programme in Geneva today, the WEF said the summit will see the largest ever engagement of global leaders this year where the key talking points would include international security, environment and the global economy.

The theme of the meeting, spread over 400 sessions, would be 'Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World', while the meeting would also see the largest ever proportion of women leaders (21 per cent) including all co-chairs being women this time including social entrepreneur Chetna Sinha from India and IMF's Christine Lagarde, the WEF said.

Modi will be accompanied by six union ministers, including Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal, Suresh Prabhu, Dharmendra Pradhan, M J Akbar and Jitendra Singh.

Besides, two chief ministers (Devendra Fadnavis and Chandrababu Naidu) and over 100 CEOs would take India's total presence to 129 -- the fourth highest after the US (780), the UK (266) and Switzerland (233 people). China will have 118 participants.

Women participants would account for 12 per cent of total Indian presence, compared to 27 per cent from the US, 24 per cent from the UK, 22 per cent from Germany, 20 per cent from Switzerland, 19 per cent for China and 18 per cent for France.

The WEF said its 48th Annual Meeting will focus on finding ways to reaffirm international cooperation on crucial shared interests, such as international security, the environment and the global economy.

The meeting comes at a time when geostrategic competition among states is generally seen to be on the rise.

Alongside international cooperation, an additional priority of the meeting will be to overcome divisions within countries, said the WEF which describes itself as an international public-private organisation focussed on improving the state of the world.

The WEF said divisions have often been caused by breakdowns in the social contract as a result of failure to protect societies from the transformational impacts of a succession of shocks, from globalisation to the proliferation of social media and the birth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

"Collectively, these shocks have caused a loss of trust in institutions and damaged the relationship between business and society," it added.

"Our world has become fractured by increasing competition between nations and deep divides within societies. Yet the sheer scale of the challenges our world faces makes concerted, collaborative and integrated action more essential than ever," WEF's Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab said.

He further said the summit aims to overcome these fault lines by reasserting shared interests among nations and securing multistakeholder commitment to renewing social contracts through inclusive growth.

This year's opening plenary will be delivered by Modi on January 23, Prime Minister of India, while Trump will deliver a keynote address before the close of the meeting on January 26, the WEF said.

This year a record number of leaders from G7 economies will participate, including Paolo Gentiloni, Prime Minister of Italy; Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission; Emmanuel Macron, President of France; Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; and Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, in addition to President Trump.

Other leaders from the G20 countries would include Liu He, Member of Political Bureau and General Director of CPC Central Committee of the People's Republic of China; Argentina President Mauricio Macri, South Africa Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Brazil President Michel Temer.

From the host country, Alain Berset, President of the Swiss Confederation, will also participate.

Overall, the summit will have over 340 top political leaders with 10 heads of state/government from Africa, nine from Middle East and North Africa and six from Latin America.

These include Ethiopia Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn, Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Nigeria Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Lebanon President Saad Al Hariri, Jordan King Abdullah II Bin Al Hussein, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Columbia President Juan Manuel Santos.

The summit will also be attended by 40 arts and culture leaders, including Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, Cate Blanchett and Elton John.

One of the key issues to be discussed would be navigating a multipolar and multiconceptual world and the balance between global cooperation and local autonomy to prevent the disintegration of the world order.

Besides, the leaders will also discuss how to overcome divisions in society and if outrage cycles in media and political rhetoric are widening societal fault lines and undermining tolerance, then what solutions can be jointly developed to restore the social compact, the WEF said.
High level meeting & joint exercises between Indian and Japan Coast Guards

A High Level Meeting between Indian Coast Guard (ICG) and Japan Coast Guard (JCG) was held at Coast Guard Headquarters, New Delhi on January 15, 2018 under the provisions of the Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) signed between the two agencies in 2006.

The Indian delegation was led by ICG Director General Shri Rajendra Singh while KCG was led by its Commandant Admiral Satoshi Nakajima in the meeting. It focused on augmenting the operational level interaction and capacity building in areas of search and rescue, pollution response and maritime law enforcement.

Relations between the two Coast Guards go back a long way with ICG ships calling on ports in Japan for professional interactions since 2000.

This meeting and visit is in continuation of the efforts by the governments of the two countries to enhance cooperation between the two Coast Guards in the field of maritime safety and security at sea.
IWDRI-2018 concludes successfully; Shri Kiren Rijiju addresses participants

The two-day International Workshop on Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (IWDRI) successfully concluded here today, setting the stage for taking the dialogue on resilient infrastructure forward at the global level.

The Workshop identified Best Practices in the Infrastructure Sector, as well as key issues in existing practices and ways to address them. Priority areas for collaboration on Disaster Resilient Infrastructure were also identified.

The Workshop was organised by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) jointly with United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). MoS (Home) Shri Kiren Rijiju delivered the Valedictory Address.

Resilient infrastructure is important not only for the aggregate economic growth but also for ending poverty," said Shri Rijiju. He further added, Our actions today, through investment in infrastructure, can reduce or increase the future risk. We need to shape policies that seek to not only reduce risk but also stop the creation of new risks."

If we are able to build complete resilience in the country, there are studies which suggest that our GDP could go up by upto 2 per cent, he said, adding that the work on resilient infrastructure, however, needs to take into account the ongoing rapid urbanisation as unplanned urbanisation is closely linked to creation of new risks.

Delivering the valedictory address, Dr. Rajiv Kumar, Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog, invited both NDMA and UNISDR to work together with NITI Aayog to help spread disaster awareness in society rapidly and widely. He also called for the need of ranking States in terms of their progress in Disaster Management.

Dr. P. K. Mishra, Additional Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, reiterated Indias commitment to working towards Disaster Risk Resilience along with the global community.

He also praised the practical, outcome-based deliberations at the Workshop.
President of India addresses 45th Convocation of AIIMS; says it is for society to profit from Medical Science it is not for medical science to profiteer from society

The President of India, Shri Ram Nath Kovind, graced and addressed the 45th convocation of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi today (January 16, 2018).

Speaking on the occasion, the President said that AIIMS is a national centre of excellence. In medical research and healthcare, it is a model for the country. The name AIIMS" has become a byword for quality, commitment and rich experience. The faculty and doctors, as well as of course the students, are the pride of our medical fraternity and our nation.

The President advised the graduating doctors that as they go into the world a world that needs their services more than ever before they should remember that they need to give back to society. He stated that it is true that they need to be legitimately rewarded for their academic excellence, their medical skills and their expertise. Yet, as doctors, their services must be available both to those who can afford their fees and also to those who are less fortunate and cannot. Disease does not distinguish between rich and poor but unfortunately the poor suffer the most. It is for society to profit from medical science it is not for medical science to profiteer from society.

Pointing out the shortage of doctors in our country, the President said that doctors need help in the form of more colleagues.

And this is where we need a new regulatory system to enhance availability of doctors and medical professionals in our society. In the absence of this, the work-load on our doctors is very high.
Saksham-2018

Saksham 2018, a vigorous and high intensity one-month long people-centric mega campaign of Petroleum Conservation Research Association (PCRA), Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has been launched on 16th January in an inaugural function held in Delhi.

The PCRA Saksham National Essay and Painting competition-2017 has been a big hit amongst the school children with about 40 Lakh students from across schools of all education boards of the country participating in it. The prizes were given away in the function to the winners of PCRA Saksham National Essay and Painting competition-2017, which includes Singapore Study tour, Laptops, Tablets & cash prizes to encourage children in their efforts in the area of fuel conservation. The dignitaries were amazed to see the innovations, skill and thoughts depicted in the paintings of the children reaching finals displayed in the exhibition.

The National Quiz competition finals are going to be held during this Saksham-2018, wherein students from 31 states shall be vying for the National Title.

The awards were presented to the oil companies for their exemplary work towards the national cause of fuel conservation.

The publicity vans of PCRA, the messengers on wheels were flagged-off covering various cities to spread conservation awareness especially amongst the rural masses.

Under the able guidance of Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas, various interactive programs and activities are being run by public sector upstream/downstream Oil & Gas companies during the month long Saksham-2018 like organizing Cyclothons in various cities, workshops for drivers of commercial vehicles, seminars for housewives/cooks on adopting simple fuel saving measure, nationwide campaign through Radio, TV, Digital Cinemas, Outdoor etc.

The focus of Saksham is to reach out to various segments viz., School children, Youths, Housewives, Heavy vehicle drivers, Car owners, Mechanics, Fleet Operators, Industries, Farmers, Pump-attendants, LPG delivery boys, Residential Societies, Anganwadies, Gram Panchayats etc. for their involvement and adoption. An exhaustive campaign through social media has also started utilizing all the available option like various customized campaigns including interactive contests through Facebook, twitter, MyGov platform, campaign through Radio, TV, Digital Cinema, Print etc. across the country. One of the biggest achievements of programs under Saksham has been organizing Cyclothons in 76 cities and further plans to conduct the Cyclothons in another 600 cities across the country and thus making it as a movement towards fuel conservation and healthy life for the people. PCRA plans to observe Cycle Day on 21st January throughout the country & organizing Cyclothon event at Indore, Bhubaneswar, Mumbai etc. to spread the message of fuel conservation, reduction of vehicular emission by reducing congestion and improving traffic flow
Smart Cities Mission: 82 SPVS Formed So Far---A Step in the direction of Achieving Our Vision to Improve Ease of living-- New Benchmarks Being Set Up In Terms Of Project Implementation: Hardeep Puri Smart Cities Mission Has a Strong Focus on Innovative Digital Technologies & Dovetails with Digital India Vision Areas & Digital Empowerment of Citizens

Smart Cities Mission is a step in the direction of achieving our vision to improve the ease of living particularly for the poor, women, elderly and differently abled people. All Indians should be able to enjoy a clean and sustainable environment. As a major player in digital revolution and a technology superpower, India must also leverage cutting edge technology to power its infrastructure, offices and homes." Stating this at the Smart Cities Summit organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry here today, Shri Hardeep S. Puri, Minister of State(I/C) for Housing & Urban Affairs informed that the Smart Cities Mission is progressing at a brisk pace. 90 cities have been selected so far. The selection of ten more cities will be announced shortly. There are about 3000 projects worth Rs.1,40,000 crores at various stages of implementation. Tenders for projects worth Rs 16,000 crore have been called, and more than 1 lakh crore worth of projects are being readied for issuance of tenders. This remains one of the fastest ever project implementations at this scale and geographic spread in urban sector. This will have a Lighthouse effect. Other cities and regions around them will soon start undergoing transformation towards becoming centres of urban excellence.

Addressing the participants at the Summit, the Minister said that there is a new benchmark in terms of project implementation. In a short duration of 2.5 years (First round of 20 cities were selected in Jan 2016, and last 30 cities were selected as recently as June 2017) which is a small period in terms of urban development life-cycle where transitions take place over decades. He further informed Smart City Mission has a strong focus on innovative digital technologies and dovetails with Digital India 'vision areas'digital empowerment of citizens, making government services available digitally, and creating digital infrastructure as utility to every citizenvery closely. Digital Technology solutions, such as surveillance systems lead to greatly reduced crime and improved safety of residents particularly women. City wide wi-fi networks have improved communication among citizens as well that with various service providers. E-governance and citizen feedback management has led to improved social cohesion by increase in opportunities for citizen engagement, reduction in social inequities, and reduction in response time for services for business. Integrated traffic management will increase the traffic speeds and reduce traffic congestions and hence cleaner air for people to breathe", he further informed.

Deliberating on the approach followed by Smart Cities, the Minister informed that cities have co-created a vision and smart city proposal through an extensive citizen engagement. The quality of some of the smart city plans can be ascertained by the fact that Bhubaneswar smart city plan was adjudged as the best city plan by American Planners Association. This is also first time that cities have created an institutional mechanism (SPVS) at the city level. Till now 82 SPVs have been formed and considering the capacity gaps existing at cities, this is not a small achievement by any standards. For the first-time Cities are also thinking in terms of converging the objectives, resources and processes of different projects taken up by various agencies towards realization of a common vision. Today every project taken up at the cities are appraised by smart city SPVs in terms of public value it creates. This has led to an improved coordination and efficiency in delivery of services at cities. For the first time in the urban scenario in India there has been an emphasis to leverage the grant fund given by government through innovative financing mechanisms. The 90 smart cities have proposed to leverage the fund by 2.5 times through internal revenue mobilization, value capture financing, municipal bond issue etc. Cities need to work as start-up and leverage their financial resources. Smart city mission has been heralding this transformation.

RJ
The President of India delivers Convocation Address at the 45th Convocation of AIIMS; Appreciates Mission Indradhanush Innovation for low cost, effective and affordable healthcare is the need of the day: J P Nadda

The Honble President of India, Shri Ram Nath Kovind delivering the Convocation Address at the 45th Convocation of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), at New Delhi today said, the name "AIIMS" has become a byword for quality, commitment and rich experience. The faculty and doctors, as well as the students, are the pride of our medical fraternity and our nation." The Honble President further stated that patients and their families have great trust in the doctors. It is upon you to ensure that the trust is given due respect and that you treat them with care and compassion," the Honble President added. Shri J P Nadda, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, and President of AIIMS, New Delhi was also present at the occasion, and awarded degrees to 572 graduating students.

Appreciating the efforts of the Health Ministry, the Honble President said that by launching programmes like Mission Indradhanush, the Health Ministry is urgently trying to fill the immunisation gap and protecting all children from killer diseases. As a word of caution, the Honble President stated that in our country, both obesity and malnutrition are substantial public health issues. And in our country, we have a very large child population as well as one of the worlds largest populations of senior people. Both these groups pose very different but very real challenges to our healthcare system and our doctors and nurses", he stated.

The Union Health Minister Shri J P Nadda congratulated all the students and said innovation for low cost effective and affordable healthcare is the need of the day. To take up all these challenge AIIMS is strengthening and expanding its facilities and Government of India is fully supporting this. He further said that the brand of AIIMS is recognized and respected the world over and every student educated at AIIMS has the potential to become a leader in their chosen area. A considerable number of AIIMS alumni have already demonstrated leadership in making our world a better place, he stated.

Speaking at the function, Shri Nadda said that in order to protect each and every child in the country from vaccine preventable diseases, the government has launched Mission Indradhanush special immunization drives in 2014, to fully immunize all children and pregnant women across the country. So far, more than 3.2 crore beneficiaries have been immunized.

From 1% annual increase in full immunization, Mission Indradhanush has resulted in 6.7% of annual expansion. Recently released SRS data has indicated a steep decline in Under 5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) from 49 in 2013 to 39 in 2016," Shri Nadda added.
Im apparently the victim of sexual assault. And if youre a sexually active woman in the 21st century, chances are that you are, too.
The European Union's trade tsar has no idea what will tell his audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, but she is clear what the EU's message to the U.S. president will be.

America is shooting itself in the foot by withdrawing from global leadership on trade, Cecilia Malmstrom, the 49-year-old Swede who has served as Europe's trade commissioner for the past three years, told Reuters.

Under Malmstrom's direction, the EU has juggled a dizzying array of trade talks over the past year. In July it clinched a preliminary deal with Japan. And early this year it hopes to seal agreements with Mexico and the Latin American Mercosur bloc.

The retreat of the United States under Trump has played a big role in this push, Malmstrom says. Countries around the world are desperate for new trading partners, and the EU, confident again after years of economic crisis and Britain's vote in 2016 to leave the bloc, has eagerly filled the gap.

"We have shown that we have overcome that acute crisis, so many countries are turning to Europe for leadership and for partnership," said Malmstrom, who will also be in Davos.

"With other countries we are now setting the standards and that is also why it is bad for the U.S. to withdraw because there are standards set now and they will be global."

Since coming into office one year ago on a promise to put America first, Trump has pulled Washington out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), threatened to scrap the 90s-era North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and to introduce steel tariffs that could hit European allies as well as China.

But Malmstrom singled out Washington's confrontational stance towards the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as particularly worrying.

The Trump administration has blocked the appointment of judges to a WTO body that rules on trade disputes. If the United States does not shift its stance, that body could cease to function altogether, Malmstrom said.

She described a WTO ministerial meeting in December as a "disgrace". The meeting in Buenos Aires failed to reach any agreements, such as on ending fishing subsidies, and descended into acrimony, in the face of stinging criticism from the United States.

"We want American leadership in the world. They shouldn't disengage," Malmstrom said.

Trump will be the headliner in Davos one year after Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to the ski resort in the Swiss Alps and signalled a readiness to assume a leadership role in free trade created by an inward-looking Washington.

Malmstrom described the Xi speech as "brilliant" in terms of content and timing - just three days before Trump's inauguration.

But she said there had been no change in China's behaviour towards Europe since then. If anything, the hurdles to European investment in China have grown.

The EU seemed to have gained a free trade ally in the world's second largest economy, but Malmstrom said Beijing had not backed up Xi's speech with action.

"Maybe he really believes in these things, but we haven't seen it yet in China," she said.

"We want to work in China and we want China to invest here, but the level playing field is not there. We haven't seen anything concrete in our trade relationship."
Sugar prices have fallen below Rs 3,000 a quintal for the first time in this crushing season due to intensified competition among mills.

Mills in Maharashtra on Tuesday quoted Rs 2,990 a quintal for sale of the S30 variety of sugar to stockists and traders. The realisation for mills for the S30 variety of sugar has slumped by over 15 per cent since the beginning of this crushing season in October. The M30 variety of sugar continued to trade above Rs 3,100 a quintal at the mill gate.

The current prices are Rs 600-700 below the cost of production, which is estimated at Rs 3,600-3,700 a quintal due to an increase in cane cost in Vidarbha and Marathwada, where sugar mills agreed to pay Rs 200 a quintal premium to avoid a farmers protest.

Sugar sells for Rs 40-42 a kg in retail markets.

Sugar prices are consistently going down due to some production =numbers being circulated through social networking sites. A production figure for 2018-19 is being circulated that no one can possibly know today, said Abinash Verma, director-general of the Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA).

The ISMA has estimated the countrys sugar output at 25.1 million tonnes in the October 2017-September 2018 season. The National Federation of Cooperative Sugar Factories (NFCSF) has forecast Indias sugar output at 29-30 million tonnes in the 2018-19 season.

The working capital of mills may be wiped out if they continue to incur a Rs 6-7 loss on every kilogram of sugar produced. The government earlier this season removed the stock limits on sugar in order to bail out mills.

Despite knowing the sugar output this season is unlikely to be much higher than consumption, many large and medium sized mills have been selling sugar in distress to clear cane dues to farmers. Mills should not be allowed to start crushing if they do not have adequate working capital to pay cane dues to farmers, said an industry executive.

The ISMA has, in a separate development, written to the Union food ministry to initiate talks with the governments of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which import around 3.5 million tonnes of sugar annually. These two Asian countries, however, import their entire sugar requirement on preferential duty from Pakistan and Taiwan.

India is a signatory to the South Asian Free Trade Agreement, but sugar has been kept out of this treaty. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh impose import duties of $90-190 a tonne on sugar, which makes Indias exports uncompetitive.

Bilateral trade with duty relief from a deficient country does not violate World Trade Organisation norms, although we do not expect opening up of exports before April, another official said.

Pakistan provides sugar export incentives of Rs 1,100 a quintal for shipments up to 1.5 million tonnes. Indian exporters will remain uncompetitive for exports to any country with such an incentive from the Pakistan government to sugar mills in that country.
Gangster Abu Salem on Monday claimed that the prosecution did not have enough evidence against him in the 2002 Delhi Extortion case.

Through his lawyer, the gangster also claimed in Patiala House court that he was being tried in the case, in violation of an order by which he was extradited to India from Portugal in 2005.

After hearing the defence' s arguments, Additional Sessions Judge Tarun Sehrawat set January 31 as the next date of hearing, wherein the prosecution will submit its replies to the claims made by Salem.

Earlier on January 11, the apex court upheld the writ petition filed by the gangster to be 'infructuous'. In the petition, Salem had sought that direction be given to the Centre to send him back to Portugal as it had allegedly flouted rules while seeking his deportation.

Salem is facing trial for allegedly demanding Rs 5 crore as protection money from Delhi businessman Ashok Gupta in 2002.

He has already been granted bail regarding the case; however he continues to be in jail on various other cases, including the 1993 Mumbai blasts case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The police apprehended three persons on charges of running a Brothel house here in Prashanth Nagar area on Tuesday.

The three persons were identified as Shaik Fahad, N Suresh, and M Joseph.

Apart from the arrest, the police also rescued three sex workers from the house, who were natives of Kolkata and Mehboobnagar, as confirmed by the Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP), Banjara Hills.

The arrest was made following a raid conducted at a duplex house under the jurisdiction of the Jubilee Hills police station, following which whereabouts of the Brothel in operation were known.

The police also seized cash worth Rs. 12,420, three mobile phones and 20 unused condoms from the crime scene.

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Three people were killed after a police head constable of India Reserve Battalion (IRB) Group 7 fired at them in Daund area near Pune.

The Pune rural police spokesperson confirmed that the shooter belonged to the IRB.

The reason behind the firing is yet to be ascertained.

The probe is underway.

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After over 700 days of protesting against his brother's alleged custodial death, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan met Sreejith here on Monday.

Following the meeting, Sreejith told media that he would continue to protest.

Sreejith has been protesting outside the Secretariat for over 700 days, demanding CBI inquiry into his brother Sanjeev's death in police custody.

Sreejith claimed the protest was against the inaction of the police officials regarding his younger brother's death.

Meanwhile, Congress Member of Parliament (MP) from Thiruvananthapuram Shashi Tharoor, along with AICC General Secretary KC Venugopal, met Union Minister of State (MoS) Jitendra Singh in New Delhi to press for a CBI inquiry into Sreejeev's death.

Later, Tharoor and Singh also held a meeting with Home Minister Rajnath Singh in the capital.

Tharoor on twitter further revealed that he spoke to Sreejith on the phone to convey the government's assurance of a CBI inquiry into his brother's death, and urged him to call off the protest.

"Spoke to Sreejith by phone to convey the government's assurance of CBI inquiry into the custodial death of his brother Sreejeev. Admired his courage and persistence but urged him to call off his protest now. May truth and justice prevail," he tweeted.

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India is aiming at a two-fold hike in exports of food items in the next five years which will help in doubling the income of farmers and those associated with the food and agriculture industry, the Ministry of Commerce revealed.

To give a further boost to India's agro and food exports, the Department of Commerce in association with Trade Promotion Council of India (TPCI) is organizing 'Indus Food'- a mega international food and beverage trade show.

To be organized at India Expo Mart in Greater Noida from January 18, the two-day event will be inaugurated by Union Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu.

Indus Food will see the participation of over 400 exhibitors, including representations from over 12 states and departments.

Further, global buyers from 43 nations will visit the show.

The event is expected to provide a good platform to Indian exporters to access global market without having the trouble of going to overseas trade fairs.

India's food market stood at USD 193 billion in 2016, which is estimated to grow to USD 540 billion by 2020.

This is also likely to see doubling of Indian food exports in next five years from USD 31 billion in 2015. This industry is growing annually by 12 percent.

"Indus Food provides us with big opportunity to host the world F&B market in India and showcase to the world big strides that India is taking in the food and agro sector under Prime Minister Narendra Modi," said TPCI Chairman Mohit Singla.

Prabhu expressed hope and said, "Indus Food expo will not only benefit exporters but also help in improving the financial condition of our farmers and those engaged in agricultural ."

To promote food exports, TPCI is being supported by Department of Commerce in hosting one of the largest buyer-seller meets in the food segment in India.

Many top personalities, including Iran's Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Ali Akbar Mehrfard; Saif Sultan Al Sheibany, DG public authority for food reserves of Oman, Al Kafeel religious trust of Najaf and Karbala of Iraq will also take part in the international expo.

Today India stands at sixth place in the global food and grocery market, but India's share in food items exports is just 12 percent, which the government is trying to take up to 20 percent.

India has achieved impressive results in exports of some items like prawns which has seen a jump of 17 percent between 2012-17, while grapes and turmeric exports have grown by 12 percent.

To give a boost to food processing industry, Commerce and Industry Ministry is also formulating an aggressive agri export policy separately.

With such a powerful global trade show, India will surely be able to make the best utilization of its huge production and consumption power.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Social activist Anna Hazare on Tuesday asserted that the Kisan Pension Bill has been hanging in the Parliament for far too long.

"Kisan Pension Bill is still in the Parliament while they don't adhere to it. We are asking them to implement the bill. It is the responsibility of the government to take of farmers whose age is more than sixty," Anna Hazare said in a press conference here.

"Constitution says every person has the right to live, a farmer who has spent his whole life farming and is above the age of 60, has no serviceman in his home, and no person is employed, what will happen to his life?" asked Hazare, adding that the Constitution says every person has the right to live.

On a related note, Anna Hazare on Sunday announced that he would be starting a "peaceful protest" from March 23, 2018 for bringing an improvement in the conditions of farmers in the nation.

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Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) international working president Pravin Togadia on Tuesday alleged that attempts are being made to frame him in fake cases.

Addressing the media, Togadia moved to tears claiming that efforts have been made to silence his voice and not let him speak on issues like the Ram temple, welfare schemes for farmers and the law on cow slaughter.

Togadia's remark came a day after he had reportedly gone missing and was later found admitted to a hospital here.

"I am being targeted for a decade old case; there is an attempt to suppress my voice," he said while interacting with media.

He said that someone might be trying to get him killed in a fake encounter.

"Rajasthan Police team came to arrest me. When I was offering Pooja last morning, one person entered my office and said that I will be killed in the encounter," he added.

When asked who was planning to attack him, he refrained from blaming anyone and said that he will openly talk about the names with evidence.

Earlier on Monday, Togadia, who was traced to Chandramani Hospital in Shahibuag area here, was detected with low blood sugar.

Lack of knowledge regarding Togadia's whereabouts created a ruckus in the state, as VHP workers laid a siege to the Sola police station, shouted slogans, and blocked traffic on main Sarkehj- Gandhinagar highway.

Meanwhile, Sola police station inspector J S Patel said "Rajasthan police today sought our help to execute the warrant against Pravin Togadia, as his residence falls in our area. The warrant, related to section 188 of the IPC, was issued by a sessions court in Gangapur. We took the Rajasthan Police to Togadia's residence but he was not found there".

Patel had also refuted allegations of Togadia being abducted by the police.

On a related note, the Ahmedabad Metropolitan court earlier in January had issued non-bailable warrants (NBWs) against Togadia and 38 others, including Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Daskroi (Ahmedabad), Babu Jamnadas Patel, in a 1996 attempt to murder case.

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Bangladesh and Myanmar on Tuesday have finalised an agreement, which will facilitate the repatriation of the Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh.

The agreement title 'Physical Agreement' says that the repatriation would be completed within two years, the Dhaka Tribune reported.

The agreement was reached during the meeting of a Joint Working Group (JWG) between the two countries in Naypyidaw, Myanmar.

The Bangladeshi delegation was led by Foreign Secretary Md Shahidul Haque, while Permanent Secretary Myint Thu led the Myanmar side.

"The agreement is guided by the earlier understanding and principles signed "Arrangement on the return of the displaced persons from Rakhine State" and the Terms of Reference (TOR) of the JWG", said Haque in a statement.

Under the agreement, Bangladesh would establish five transit camps from which the Rohingyas would be received from the Myanmar side for repatriation.

On the other hand, Myanmar would shelter the Rohingyas in a temporary accommodation for now at Hla Pho Khung and re-build new houses in Rakhine State for them.

Besides, the two countries have also finalised the form for verification of all the Rohingyas.

Bangladesh Ambassador to Myanmar Sufiur Rahman said, "We have signed a very positive treaty. After several discussions, Myanmar has agreed to complete the repatriation process preferably within two years from the day it commences. Modalities for repatriation of orphans and children born out of unwarranted incidence have been incorporated in the arrangement."

During the meeting, Bangladesh had proposed to repatriate at least 15,000 Rohingyas every week but Myanmar rejected the proposal.

"They [Myanmar] have taken some preparations for the Rohingyas. They have agreed to take back 300 Rohingyas per day. Some 1,500 Rohingyas will be sent back in a week," said Rahman.

Bangladesh has also expressed their interest that Myanmar would ensure the Rohingyas do not enter the country again.

Also, Myanmar agreed to repatriate at least 7,000 Rohingyas who are stuck near the border areas.

Rohingyas are a Muslim minority ethnic group in Myanmar. They have been regarded by many majority Buddhists as illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

Also, they have been long persecuted by the Buddhists and the security forces.

As of December 2017, an estimated 6,55,000 Rohingya people fled to Bangladesh to avoid the persecution from the security forces that started in Myanmar's Rakhine state in August last year.

There are more than 3,00,000 Rohingyas living in Bangladesh, who fled in earlier waves of violence from the Myanmarese Government since the last three decades.

The United Nations has called the violence against civilians 'ethnic cleansing', but the Myanmarese Government rejected the claims.

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A Bharatiya Janata Party worker was allegedly killed in Tripura's Shimna on Monday night.

The BJP alleged that Communist Party of India (Marxist) was behind the murder.

The incident took place at Kathacherra village under Sidhai Police Station of Shimna constituency of West Tripura district.

BJP leader and former MLA Ratan Lal Nath said Chiranjit Das, party's Yuva Morcha worker was allegedly murdered by a CPI(M) supporter Kartik Das.

He added, "At least seven BJP supporters have been murdered by CPI(M) in last one year as the party in power is frustrated. They are trying to terrorise the voters against supporting or joining the BJP."

On the ongoing murders, Union Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment Vijay Sampla said, "There is nothing called law and order in the state of Tripura and the murders attest this fact."

Meanwhile, CPI(M) state secretary Bijan Dhar denied any hand of the party in the murder.

On January 3, a BJP supporter Amulya Malakar of Rajnagar under P.R. Bari police station area limits in South Tripura was hacked to death allegedly by a CPI(M) supporter.

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At least ten workers have died and five others injured after an under-construction bridge collapsed near Colombia's capital city Bogota, the local media reports.

The official authorities said that the workers were fixing drainage on the partially-built structure before it fell apart into the canyon below.

Some workers are feared to be missing.

The injured were rushed to a nearby hospital for medical assistance.

Nine died on the spot, while one worker succumbed to injuries in the hospital.

Transportation Minister German Cardona visited the site for the inspection of rescue work.

An investigation has been launched to find out the reason for the bridge collapse.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Union government on Tuesday scrapped the Haj subsidy for pilgrims as the fund will instead be used for the empowerment of minorities from this year.

Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said that the Haj subsidy funds will now be used for the education of girls and women of the minority community.

"When we say development with dignity, then we must also say Haj with Dignity. Around 1.75 lakh people will go to Haj this year. We are in support of strengthening the minority. Haj subsidy funds will be used for educational empowerment of girls and women of the minority community," he told the media.

However, there is an exception to the rules for the poor and people over 70 years of age.

Yesterday, Naqvi took to Twitter and expressed happiness saying Saudi Arabia has given a green signal for India's decision to revive the option of Haj pilgrimage through sea route.

He said that officials from both the countries will discuss on all the formalities and technicalities so that it can be re-started in the coming years.

Naqvi also stated that Muslim women in India have been allowed to travel for Haj without a 'Mehram', or a male guardian.

A bilateral agreement was signed in connection with Haj 2018 during the meeting between Naqvi and Saudi Arabia's Haj and Umrah Minister Muhammad Benten.

Naqvi met with Dr Benten at his office in Mecca on Sunday for signing the annual Haj agreement.

A total of 1,70,000 Indian pilgrims are expected to travel for Haj in 2018.

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In another turn of events, Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra has set up a five-judge constitution bench under him to hear several major cases, however, the bench doesn't comprise the four senior judges of the top court, who had held a press conference.

Earlier on January 15, the Bar Council of India (BCI) said that the rift between the CJI and four senior Supreme Court judges has been "laid to rest".

BCI Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra said that the matter was resolved after a judges meet in the CJI Misra's chamber on Monday.

The apparent crisis in the Supreme Court came when the four top court judges, justices Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph, on Friday held a press conference - a first by apex court judges - and alleged that the CJI had been violating the conventions in his role as the master of the roster.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said the Congress Party and drought are 'twin brothers' as wherever the party goes, there is drought.

Lashing out at the grand old party during the inaugural ceremony of an oil refinery here, the Prime Minister said, "Congress and drought are 'twin brothers', wherever the party will go there will be drought only. Some people mislead citizens often. Their misleading the nation on Barmer refinery is not the exception, but the norm. There are several such areas in which they have been misleading the nation for years".

He added that the previous government allotted Rs. 500 crores for One Rank, One Pension (OROP) even after knowing that this number is not the accurate figure.

"Is this the respect they had for the armed forces? For 40 years, nothing was done about OROP. Before the 2014 elections, a token sum was allocated towards OROP even when it was widely known this sum is unrealistic and too less. It was our commitment to make OROP a reality and we worked towards making that possible," the Prime Minister asserted.

He further said that when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed office, one of the first things it did was to see what work has been done on the promises in the Railway Budget.

"Just for a few claps in Parliament, some people made promises they could never keep. We were determined to end that culture of misleading. The manner in which Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje has managed the drought situation during both of her terms and helped the people is commendable. It is in contrast to the opposition in the state whose poor drought management in Rajasthan is widely known," Prime Minister Modi added.

He asserted that this is a time for 'Sankalp Se Siddhi', "We have to identify our targets and work towards achieving them by 2022, when we mark 75 years of freedom".

The state of the art refinery will be first of its kind in the country.

The refinery is expected to change the growth landscape of Rajasthan and western parts of the state in particular.

The project, which is a joint venture of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) and Rajasthan Government, is worth Rs. 43,000 crore.

The project will generate employment in the state as well.

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A Delhi Court on Tuesday began the trial of Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah and his close aide Muhammad Aslam Wani in connection with a money laundering case for alleged terror funding.

The court also sought the Enforcement Directorate's response to the bail plea filed by Shah by February 22.

Shah's wife also filed an application before the court and requested for proper security and medical facilities to her husband in Tihar jail.

She also raised questions about the security and medical issues.

The ED had, on September 23 last year, told the court that Shah admitted to receiving funds from Pakistan's terror outfits to spread terror in Jammu and Kashmir and others parts of the country.

His close aide Wani also admitted to his complicity in the crime, the ED said.

The chargesheet filed by the ED stated that the separatist had admitted to talking to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) founder Hafiz Saeed on phone on the issue of Kashmir and had last spoken to him in January 2017.

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According to the Delhi Police, the man named Deepak was found hanging from the ceiling inside the jail, where he was lodged.

"It is suspected to be a case of suicide", said the police.

The police rushed the victim to GTB Hospital but was declared brought dead by the hospital authorities.

The man was arrested yesterday for harassing a minor near his residence and was booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act 2012.

He also had four pending cases on harassing in 2017 and was on the run, before his arrest.

The family members of Deepak, however, have alleged that he was being dragged into this case as a victim of the plot and did not commit suicide. They have demanded a fair investigation into the matter.

An enquiry has been initiated by the Metropolitan Magistrate.

The police have suspended three assistant sub-inspector of police (ASI) and one sub-inspector for this incident.

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Both the US State Department and the Pakistan government were caught unawares when President Donald Trump tweeted on 1 January that Pakistan had provided only "lies and deceit" whilst giving safe haven to terrorists. Within three days, a scrambling State Department announced the USA was suspending military aid to Islamabad.

The said security assistance is estimated to be worth some USD1.9 billion annually. IHS Jane's quoted a StateDepartment official as saying, "The United States will not deliver grant-funded military equipment or transfer security-related funds to Pakistan unless required by law. Exceptions may be made on a case-by-case basis if they are determined to be vital to national security interests."

It is known that the financial suspension includes USD1 billion in funds under the Foreign Military Financingprogram and the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund. About USD900 million under the Coalition Support Funds is also affected.

It is important to note that this funding has not been cancelled, just suspended. The official informed IHS Jane's, "This suspension is not a permanent cut at this time. Security assistance funding and pending deliveries will be frozen but not cancelled as we work to ensure Pakistan takes decisive action against terrorist and militant groups. We do not intend to re-programme any funds at this time."

It is important to note that the USA is only the second-largest provider of military equipment to Pakistan. China tops that list already. Therefore, the freezing of American military aid does not alter the status quo order.

Is there a possibility of China stepping in to make up for this loss of funds and military hardware? To answer that question we must consider the type of equipment that each country supplies. For example, China supplies more strategic-type and combat assets.

Examples of assets sold by China from 2010-16 include MBT-2000-based main battle tanks, Type 041submarines, CH-3 and Wing Loong unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), JF-17 fighters, K-8 trainer jets, Z-10 and Z-9C helicopters, F-22P frigates, Azmat-class missile patrol boats,1,500-tonne and 600-tonne patrol boats, HJ-8 anti-tank missiles, QW-1 man-portable surface-to-air missiles (SAM), A-100 rocket launchers, C-802 and CM-400AKG anti-ship missiles, HQ-7 and LY-80 SAMs, PL-12 and PL-5E air-to-air missiles, various guided bombs, ZDK-03 airborne early warning aircraft, Type 90 antiaircraft guns, and Yu-3 and Yu-4 torpedoes.

In contrast, a lot of US equipment sold to Pakistan isassets useful for combating terrorists and insurgentsrather than warships or offensive armored vehicles. A lot is second-hand too. From 2010-16, the USA supplied M109A5 self-propelled howitzers, P-3C Orion patrol aircraft, various missiles and bombs, F-16C fighters, King Air 350, Cessna 208 and Cessna U206 aircraft, Cougar and MaxxPro protected vehicles, M113 armored personnel carriers and ScanEagle UAVs.

One deal likely to be frozen is the sale of twelve Bell AH-1Z attack helicopters. However, Pakistan has already expressed interest in the T129 Atak platform from Turkey, which could just as easily fill this gap.

IHS Jane's predicted, ".The move by the United States to halt defence supplies and military aid to Pakistan is likely to prompt Islamabad to move closer to China, which increasingly views itself as a provider of counterinsurgency equipment and would welcome the move as an opportunity to further strengthen its influence in South Asia."

So, yes, China will likely garner new sales in Pakistan for the type of counterinsurgency equipment that the USA previously provided. Regardless, this will simply come on top of the full-blown combat weaponry that Pakistan has already, and will continue, buying from Beijing. Thus, Pakistani dependence on Chinese equipment will deepen a trend already occurring.

It must be remembered that Islamabad was already wary of US-supplied equipment because it has previously endured a US-imposed embargo. That experience made Pakistan realize that it had to diversify its supplier base because, to reply solely on the USA, meant its military equipment would soon end up unserviceable. Indeed, this was one reason Pakistan has been courting China for many years. Additionally, China has been more willing to transfer technology and assist with local production, something American companies are loath to do in Pakistan.

Chinese officials and media have been remarkably silent on what impact the US sanctions against Pakistan will have, but the leadership must surely be rubbing their hands with glee. While this game of brinkmanship could prompt Islamabad to redouble its counterinsurgency efforts, there is consensus among many commentators that the South Asian country will be pushed even more firmly into China's embrace as its support base narrows.This will not all be positive, however, as Pakistan will be forced to accept Chinese terms that are unlikely to be more generous than the USA's.

The US-Pakistan relationship has always been rocky. Pakistan has always relied upon overseas funding, and the war in Afghanistan has been a boon for Pakistani coffers. While it might threaten to cozy up to China, thiswill not heal deep-seated difficulties within the country. Simply transferring to a different money tree will not solve internal-security problems, whilst overreliance on China will limit Islamabad's future foreign policy avenues.

Furthermore, terrorist attacks in China, any suspected links with insurgent organizations in Pakistan, or violent attacks against Chinese interests in the Muslim country will attract Chinese ire. While it is positive that Pakistan enjoyed a peaceful transition to a civil government in 2013, foreign support must sustain governance and strengthen the economy. Will China, an authoritarian regime that fears democratic institutions and human rights, do so? It seems unlikely.

China talks glibly of "win-win cooperation" as it pushesits One Belt, One Road initiative, but the fact is that China possesses hardnosed business ethics that produce only one winner. This hard-driving attitude is actuallyrebounding in some cases. A high-profile example is the USD14 billion Diamer-Bhasha Dam, where China was allegedly asking for ownership stakes, something unacceptable to Pakistan.

The dam was supposed to be part of the much-vaunted China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the latter being a business venture with strategic overtones. One thing it is not is aid. Projects are negotiated atcommercial rates and, since Beijing is bankrolling the scheme, it typically uses Chinese companies and technology.

A recent report in The Jamestown Foundation entitled "CPEC: Iron Brothers, Unequal Partners" and written by Sudha Ramachandran, noted that "serious differences have come to the fore between China and Pakistan over the $60-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor".

It continued, ".The Sino-Pakistani relationship in CPEC is an unequal one. Not only will CPEC benefit China more than Pakistan, Beijing also calls the shots. It is even cracking the whip to ensure Islamabad concedes its demands on contentious issues. Islamabad's vulnerability to Chinese pressure can be expected to increase, especially after the US decision to suspend security aid..."

Ramachandran warned, "CPEC's scope is breathtaking. In addition to opening up Pakistan's domestic economy to Chinese participation on an unprecedented level, itwill result in China's deep penetration of Pakistan's security, society and culture."

For instance, while the knows a lot about CPEC's highway, railway and energy projects, little has been made public about the agricultural arena where swathes of land will be leased to China for "demonstration projects". China could well be using Pakistan to strengthen its own food security. Furthermore, a fiber-optic cable for internet and television will be routed through China, which will doubtlessly bring Chinese culture directly into Pakistani living rooms.

Suspiciously, there has been little public release of details of projects such as terms, conditions and schedules. The benefits will obviously be far greater forChina than Pakistan, including special economic zones where companies will not have to pay taxes. Chinese will also gain visa-free access to Pakistan, but not vice versa. "It could turn Pakistan into a Chinese colony," the report suggested.

The Jamestown Foundation warned, "The most important is the looming debt trap. Economists have highlighted the estimated $90 billion in debt that Pakistan will have to repay China over 30 years. The consequences if Pakistan is unable to repay are unclear, though it is possible it would meet the fate of Tajikistan and Sri Lanka, which ended up ceding territory to China in lieu of unpaid debts."

The report predicted that Pakistan's defiance of China on the Diamer-Bhasha project will likely be short-livedsince its "economy and military are far too dependent on China for Islamabad to resist Beijing's pressure for long".

Indicative of Pakistan's snowballing vassal-like status, Ramachandran noted that "the Pakistani government reacted to the US announcement by allowing the renminbi to be used for bilateral trade and investment activities, reversing an earlier decision in November barring the use of renminbi on the grounds that it would undermine Pakistan's economic sovereignty. China's grip over Pakistan in CPEC has tightened."

Yes, there are differences between Beijing and Islamabad over CPEC and some of its projects. However, the initiative will not be derailed, especially as the latter increasingly comes under Chinese influence - for better or for worse.

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With the Union Budget 2018-19 inching closer, garment dealers here are hopeful of a reduction in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) rates levied on textiles, which, they believe, have drastically hampered sales.

"After the GST was introduced, the volume of sale has significantly reduced, and the number of customers has dropped. We hope that the government will reduce taxes, thereby helping sales pick up again," Bhisham, a garment dealer told ANI.

The GST was rolled out on July 1 last year and has seen retaliation from the textile sector ever since. While the tax rates were reduced to 12 percent, and then further to 5 percent, the general opinion is that traders have been severely affected by the new taxation scheme.

On a related note, the Budget will be presented on February 1.

The first Budget Session of the Parliament will be held from January 29 to February 9, while the second session will be held from March 5 to April 6.

This will be the last full-fledged budget that will be presented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Union Government.

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GSK Consumer Healthcare on Tuesday announced the appointment of Filippo Lanzi as regional head of Asia Pacific, a geography composed of 23 countries.

Filippo will report to Brian McNamara, CEO of GSK Consumer Healthcare, and become a member of the consumer healthcare strategic leadership team as well as the GSK Singapore country board.

"Filippo is an outstanding leader who brings a wealth of expertise to a dynamic and rapidly growing Asia Pacific Region at GSK Consumer Healthcare. He has a unique ability to translate strategy into world-class execution by bringing together teams and innovations that drive results," said Brian McNamara.

"His people-focused leadership style and proven track record growing categories and transforming businesses are exactly what we need to win," McNamara added.

Filippo joined GSK as part of a joint venture between GSK's Consumer Healthcare and Novartis OTC.

Filippo, who helped lead the JV integration in Europe, has more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry.

He led multiple markets across the continent, including southern Europe and most recently central and eastern Europe as area general manager.

He has helped enhance these areas' commercial channels, accelerate talent development and transformed these businesses over the last three years.

"I'm thrilled to be here in Asia Pacific. The region is sitting on a demographic sweet spot with a growing population that desires quality healthcare products. I am focused on accelerating the innovations that our consumers need from us, to do more and feel better," said Filippo.

"The opportunity that lies ahead for GSK is enormous, and the ability to lead a great team in this next chapter is deeply humbling and incredibly exhilarating," he added.

Prior to Novartis, Filippo spent five years at Johnson & Johnson managing the diabetes division in Italy and then as head of mediterranean cluster for the ethicon/endo franchise.

Before that he was with Nestle for 10 years, holding various roles of increasing responsibilities across the in marketing, sales and finance.

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The Telangana Prisons Department on Tuesday announced that "if you spot a beggar in the city and inform officials, you can pocket Rs. 500".

Till now eight people have claimed the cash after spotting beggars and handed them over to concerned department staff.

Telangana Prisons Department, Inspector General (I.G), A. Narsimha told ANI, "We started a home for the beggars on October 28, 2017. Two structures were made one to confine male beggars in Chanchalguda and the other Charlapalli for female beggars."

"Within a span of three months we have picked up two thousand beggars from various places. Out of them, 1500 are male and 500 female. Many have also been released to their homes after further intervention and investigation. Only after stern warning there are being sent home and if they come across the second time on the streets then would be put in jail and a case would be registered," he added.

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Police head constable of India Reserve Battalion (IRB) Group 7, who shot dead three people over a money dispute in Daund area near Pune, was arrested in Supah village on Tuesday.

Reportedly, one of the deceased was the relative of the accused.

The Pune rural police spokesperson had earlier confirmed that the shooter belonged to the IRB.

Further probe was underway.

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Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Tuesday chaired a meeting of the Unified High Command (UHQ) to discuss and review the security situations in the state.

Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh was also present at the meeting.

Mufti called on the UHQ, a body comprising topmost officers of various security and intelligence agencies, to discuss crucial matters like the upcoming panchayat polls, civilian killings and recruitment of local youth into militancy.

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The Maharashtra government on Tuesday handed over documents in a sealed cover in connection with Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) judge Justice B.H. Loya death case to the Supreme Court.

Senior Advocate Harish Salve appeared for the state government.

A division bench of the apex court, headed by Justice Arun Mishra, was hearing the plea filed by three petitioners, Aneeta Shenoy, Shehzad Poonawalla and a journalist.

All the three petitioners sought a Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe into the alleged mysterious death of the CBI judge Loya.

The petitioner claimed that Judge Loya died mysteriously when he was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in which Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Amit Shah then was an accused.

The top court had asked the Maharashtra government earlier in the month to submit the postmortem report of the CBI judge who had died under mysterious circumstances, asserting that the "matter was very serious."

According to reports, Maharashtra-based journalist B R Lone had filed an independent plea seeking a fair probe into the matter, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case, in which various police officers and the BJP president Amit Shah were named as parties.

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One of the owners of Mojo's Bistro, Yug Tuli, who was arrested by the Mumbai Police in connection with Kamala Mills Fire on Tuesday, said that he surrendered himself as his bail plea got rejected.

"I have come to surrender since my bail plea got rejected. I was waiting for the anticipatory bail in Amritsar," Yug Tuli told media here.

Mumbai Police had earlier said that Yug Tuli, who was allegedly absconding, was seen in Hyderabad, while his Jeep was seized from his grandfather's place.

Yug Pathak, one of the owners of Mojo's Bistro and the son of former Pune police commissioner K K Pathak, has also been arrested in the case.

Around 14 people were killed and 12 suffered critical injuries in the massive fire that broke out at the Kamala Mills compound in Lower Parel locality here in the wee hours of December 29.

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One of the owners of Mojo's Bistro Yug Tuli on Tuesday was arrested by the Mumbai Police in connection with Kamala Mills Fire.

The Mumbai Police informed that Tuli had come to Mumbai to meet someone which is when he was caught.

Mumbai Police had earlier said that Yug Tuli, who was allegedly absconding, was seen in Hyderabad, while his Jeep got seized from his grandfather's place.

Meanwhile, Juhu-based hotelier Vishal Karia, who was arrested for sheltering owners of the pub involved in the Kamala Mills mishap, was granted bail by Bhoiwada Court on Monday.

Earlier, Mumbai police had also arrested the owner of '1 Above' resto bar, Abhijeet Mankar, in connection with the massive fire in Mumbai's Kamala Mills that claimed the lives of 14 people last month.

On January 6, '1 Above' was found to have flouted the fire safety measures issued by the Mumbai Fire Brigade, which led to the fire on December 29.

Yug Pathak, one of the owners of Mojo's Bistro and the son of former Pune police commissioner K K Pathak, has also been arrested in the case.

Around 14 people were killed and 12 suffered critical injuries in the massive fire that broke out at the Kamala Mills compound in Lower Parel locality here in the wee hours of December 29.

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Pakistan's Supreme Court on Tuesday will commence hearing the suo motu case on the rape and murder case of the seven-year-old girl.

A three-member bench of the apex court will hear the case, reported Dunya News.

The minor, who was a resident of the Kasur district of Pakistan's Punjab province, was kidnapped on her way to a tuition centre on January 4 from Kasur's Kot Road area.

Five days after her disappearance, she was found raped, dead and buried in a garbage dump on Jan 9 near the Kashmir Chowk.

According to the initial post-mortem report, the minor was strangled to death after being raped multiple times.

As per the autopsy, the girl had marks of torture on nose, neck, and other parts of the body, the report said.

Hundreds of enraged protestors clashed with the police in Kasur last week over this incident.

The Punjab administration had then said that six personnel, including four policemen and two civil defence personnel, were arrested for allegedly opening fire at the mob.

The culprit remains at large over five days after the incident surfaced, the report said.

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The Ernakulam district court on Monday sentenced a man to death for murdering a four-year-old girl at Chottanikkara in 2013.

The convict, Renjit, killed the girl after conniving with minor's daughter and his friend Basil.

Renjit and minor's daughter Rani had been in relationship and the two wanted to remove the girl who was being a hurdle to their affair.

Basil and Rani have been awarded double life term.

Following his conviction, Renjith tried to commit suicide in the jail on January 10.

According to the chargesheet, the child was sexually assaulted too before being murdered.

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A team from Pakistan's National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has left for the United Kingdom (UK) to collect "more" evidence against ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to probe into his alleged ownership of Flagship Investments.

According to the Dawn, a three-member NAB team will meet the concerned authorities in London to reconfirm charges against Sharif and his family, over allegedly owning 15 off-shore companies in the UK.

The NAB team is expected to return to Pakistan on Wednesday.

A joint investigation team (JIT) - formed by Pakistan's Supreme Court - had hired services of a UK-based solicitor firm, Quist, along with an investigative company to assist in the collection and dispatch of all relevant documents of the said case.

Two weeks ago, another NAB team visited London and sought details of his and his family's properties, their bank accounts and tax returns.

Pakistan's Supreme Court disqualified Sharif as Prime Minister after an inquiry into the 2016 Panama Papers linked his family to offshore companies.

A five-member bench of the Supreme Court, on July 28, had directed National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to file references against Sharif and his three children.

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Israel's visiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday night stressed the need to strengthen the political alliances to take on "Islamic radicalisation which is a threat to the international systems".

Netanyahu was delivering the inaugural address at the Raisina Dialogue 2018, organised by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and Observer Research Foundation here today.

The Israeli Prime Minister said his country is trying to strengthen political alliances with like-minded countries across the world, from America, Latin America, Africa, Australia and Asia, especially with democracies.

He emphasised that Israel's relationship with India is very special and praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for taking it to a new level.

Netanyahu's address was listened to by Prime Minister Modi who sat along with EAM Sushma Swaraj in the special front row.

Saying the weak do not survive, but only the strong, and only the strong are respected, Netanyahu said strong territorial power is very important and for that, the country needs to develop a strong economy.

He said without a strong economy, it is difficult to have territorial strength.

Netanyahu noted that under Modi's leadership, the government has improved the ease of doing business index by 42 steps, which is important to strengthen the economy.

The Israeli Prime Minister said the government should "cut the bureaucracy" to make doing business easier and move up the free market.

Though Modi was present at the inaugural address as a rare gesture, he did not speak. And this was mentioned by Swaraj as a rare occasion when she delivered the vote of thanks.

She also mentioned that India's strengthening relations with Israel and improving cooperation especially in the field of agriculture and water.

Earlier, welcoming the Prime Ministers of two countries and Swaraj, ORF Chairman Sunjoy Joshi said it was two years ago under the initiative of Prime Minister Modi's government that this Dialogue was curated as a platform where the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, could discover their interdependence in forging a common, shared future for the .

He said the pace of change induced by technological innovation is unprecedented. It is even transforming the way humans interact, and the way businesses and communities are organised, affecting the responses of societies and nations in unpredictable ways.

Joshi said Prime Minister Netanyahu leads a nation that is no stranger to volatility. Yet has successfully managed to provide growth, prosperity and security to its people in a turbulent region.

From technological innovations that have ensured food and water security in a parched environment, to creating one of the most vibrant start-up eco-systems nurtured by a world-class defence and technology industry, the prowess of Israel has made light of the greatest challenges to the security and well-being of its people.

"We indeed find ourselves in a which promises exponential jumps in knowledge systems, possible through previously unimaginable collaborative networks across diverse cultures, societies and nations, intelligent collaborative networks that link man and machine. Sometimes, these can be a source of disruption, but managed well they can be a source of exponential growth," Joshi said.

"And at the Raisina Dialogue we celebrate this diversity," he added.

Ministerial delegations from many countries like Australia, Russia, Singapore, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, and Poland are attending this year's conference.

Former President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, former Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harder and former Prime Minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, were among more than 150 speakers and over 550 delegates from around 90 countries who are participating in the Dialogue.

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Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for India's rise on the Ease of Business rankings list.

"I was astounded to know that Prime Minister Modi has moved India in the scale of ease of doing business 42 places in three years," Netanyahu said while addressing the inaugural session of the third annual Raisina Dialogue in Delhi.

He also talked about education and the Israeli Defence Force where young people are taught and trained.

"The weak don't survive, the strong survive, you make alliances with the strong, and you are able to maintain peace by being strong. So, therefore the first requirement from our time of our first Prime Minister was to achieve minimal strength required to assure existence," he said.

"India is one of world's most populous democracies. Its place that shows humanity can be governed with freedom that we can secure rights of people, ability to think, speak and believe what we want; society is pluralistic and diverse, free like Israel. Democracy is most important value. Democracies bind and connect to each other in natural ways," he added.

Prime Minister Modi and his Israeli counterpart attended the Raisina Dialogue after the two returned to the capital after fulfilling their day's engagements.

Earlier in the day, Netanyahu and his wife Sara visited the Taj Mahal in Uttar Pradesh's Agra and thanked Prime Minister Modi for allowing him a visit to the 'temple of love'.

The Israeli premier, who is on a six-day visit to India, is accompanied by his wife Sara and a 130-member delegation from various sectors, including cyber, agriculture and defence.

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About 1,000 adults and adolescents in Denmark may face prosecution for redistributing child pornography after sex videos featuring 15-year-olds were shared on Facebook.

The move developed after the California-based social media giant alerted the US authorities that the videos, along with a sexually explicit photo, were being spread online.

While one video is 50 seconds long, the other is 9 seconds long.

The police explained that the consensual sex at the age of 15 is legal in Denmark, but anyone resorting to forwarding the video, violates the law against distributing child pornography, reported the New York Times.

According to the report, the police notified 1,004 people on Monday that they faced preliminary charges, which the police can issue on their own. However, it is upto the prosecutors whether to proceed with the charges and take the cases to trial.

"It may sound very dramatic that we're charging with child pornography," a police superintendent Flemming Kjaerside said.

"Many had no intention to distribute child pornography, but objectively speaking, that's what they've done," Kjaerside added.

The offenders, who range in age from 15 to their early 20s, shared the videos once or twice mostly but some of them did so hundreds of times.

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Ahead of the release of 'Padmaavat' on January 25, Rajput Karni Sena chief, on Tuesday, requested the government to understand their sentiments.

"I urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Chief Ministers to see our point of view. We want nothing less than a nation-wide ban on the film," Lokendra Singh Kalvi told ANI while protesting against Sanjay Leela Bhansali's magnum-opus in Dholpur.

The film has, time and again, run into trouble with members of the Karni Sena, who allege that the movie shows Rajput legacy in bad light, and that historical facts have been tampered with.

Despite the clearance from Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), 'Padmaavat' won't be released in Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat.

The flick, based on the legend of Rani Padmini, a 13th century Hindu Rajput queen, mentioned in Padmavat, an Avadhi poem written by Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi in 1540, has been facing protests from various groups, particularly the Shri Rajput Karni Sena, for allegedly tampering with historical facts.

The CBFC has suggested five modifications in 'Padmavati', which included changing the film's title to 'Padmavat', in December last year.

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Despite the clearance from Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), 'Padmaavat' won't be released in Haryana, Health minister Anil Vij said on Tuesday.

"In the meeting, I said it should be banned in Haryana keeping in view law & order situation in state. Cabinet supported this & we decided it will be banned in Haryana," Vij told ANI.

Haryana is the third Indian state after Rajasthan and Gujarat to have banned the screening of the controversial Sanjay Leela Bhansali directorial.

The flick, based on the legend of Rani Padmini, a 13th century Hindu Rajput queen, mentioned in Padmaavat, an Avadhi poem written by Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi in 1540, has been facing protests from various groups, particularly the Shri Rajput Karni Sena, for allegedly tampering with historical facts.

The CBFC has suggested five modifications in 'Padmavato', which included changing the film's title to 'Padmaavat', in December last year.

The flick is all set to hit theatres on January 25.

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Taking a dig at Pakistan, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) has dwelled upon that the country provides safe terror sanctuaries to Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD) chief and UN-designated global terrorist Hafiz Saeed and other terrorists.

"It's a shame that Pakistani forces have murdered a PhD Scholar, while Hafiz Saeed is provided with the official protection. Terror outfit like Taliban is provided with the safe terror havens and even al-Qaeda's founder Osama bin Laden was provided with the same," said Nadeem Nusrat, a Pakistani-American politician, who is also the incumbent convener of Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM).

While getting into a stew over Pakistan's atrocities, Nusrat added, "Anyone who dares raising his voice against the country is made disappeared. Pakistani security forces have arrested Balochs and disappeared them. Niether the Balochs are free, nor the Mahajans living in Pakistan."

The recent move unfolds as, on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day, 100 taxis in DC were launched having signages reading 'Free Karachi.' They were flagged off at a function at Anacostia Art Center, 1231 Good Hope Road.

"Dr Martin Luther day was chosen as he is the symbol of equality and freedom," said Nusrat.

Earlier on Monday, he tweeted, "This is Washington D.C., the capital of the USA. Taxis are lining up with #FreeKarachi banners to participate in Dr Martin Luther Kind [King] Day parade in the capital. #FreeKarachi."

The Free Karachi movement was developed after MQM leader Dr Hasan Zafar Arif was found dead in a car in Karachi's Ilyas Goth area on Sunday.

Dr Arif, who was also the MQM-London's deputy convener, used to teach Philosophy at the University of Karachi.

The United Kashmir People's National Party (UKPNP) Exiled Chairman Sardar Shaukat Ali Kashmiri strongly condemned the extrajudicial killing of MQM London's deputy convener Dr Hasan Zafar Arif.

The American Friends of Balochistan (AFB) also condemned the extrajudicial killing of Arif and drew attention to the recurring pattern of violence against activism for truth and justice in Pakistan.

The ADB said, in its statement, the present killing bears all the usual marks of an extrajudicial assassination by Pakistani state agencies.

The murdered professor was an alumnus of the University of Reading and Harvard University.

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For the first time in the history of Pakistan, threats from insurgents have brought newspaper distribution across Balochistan, including in capital Quetta, to a grinding halt.

According to an article published by the web site newslinemagazine .com, 22 press clubs have been shut down so far in Balochistan, most of them located in the central and southern parts of the province.

A reason for this is the ongoing tussle between the Balochistan government (which many say is administered from Islamabad) and the so-called Baloch insurgents over the implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP), which has put an end to the publication of statements issued by the latter.

This unsettled province of Pakistan has been undergoing a low-level insurgency since 2005, with several rebel groups fighting for control and acknowledgement as the rightful representatives of the people of the province, and them claiming responsibility for carrying out several attacks on security forces over the last decade.

The implementation of the NAP has resulted in newspapers stopping the carrying of statements of banned outfits for more than a year, and being countered by insurgent groups such as the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF) reportedly with threats to media houses to choose whether they would carry the statements, or face an indefinite forced suspension of newspaper distribution.

Since the end of October last year, there have been a string of attacks on media houses, press clubs, media distribution vans and individually on journalists. On October 25, a hand grenade was flung into the Hub Press Club, wounding six journalists.

Currently, according to the web site, all individuals with any connection to the media are at risk of being attacked by Baloch separatists, and this has necessitated in security being beefed up at these institutions and issuing of instruction to journalists, hawkers, and transporters to stay away from press clubs and newspaper offices, particularly at night.

Newsline has quoted Khalil Ahmed, the president of the Balochistan Union of Journalists (BUJ), as saying that the Balochistan government has not taken the threat of insurgent groups seriously, and, as a consequence, journalists are suffering.

"Working under a cloud of fear and uncertainty in Quetta has killed the creativity of journalists," Ahmed adds.

Letters have been forwarded to the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the All Pakistan Newspapers Society (APNS), and the Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors (CPNE), but to no avail.

Journalists are questioning the implementation of the NAP. Most believe that given the volatile security situation in Balochistan, the statements of insurgents should be published and accepted as a bitter pill to be swallowed.

Balochistan's Inspector General (IG) of Police has told media personnel that publishing the claims of insurgents in newspapers, makes it easier for the police to carry out investigations.

Newsline quotes Bahram Baloch, the President of the Gwadar Press Club, as saying that it is no longer possible for journalists to work post attacks by insurgents in Hub and Turbat.

The newspaper distribution business in Balochistan has also been hard hit economically, and some like Mullah Riaz's Al-Badar Bookstall in Gwadar have even suspended operations.

Media activity in Blaochistan's second largest city Khuzdar has come to a grinding halt. Freedom of the press in Balochistan is under threat and if the government does not remedy the situation, matters could get worse.

The provincial government has said that it is dealing with the current situation as per law and maintains that the insurgency does not have the support of the masses.

The current situation in Balochistan, therefore, runs contrary to the provincial government's claims that conditions are improving.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be joining Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara Netanyahu on a visit to Gujarat later today.

Netanyahu will receive a reception on the arrival, as they proceed to Sabarmati Ashram from Ahmedabad Airport.

They will pay homage to Mahatma Gandhi at Sabarmati Ashram.

Prime Minister Modi and Netanyahu will inaugurate the iCreate Center at Deo Dholera Village in Ahmedabad.

They will visit a Startup Exhibition and interact with innovators and Startup CEOs.

The two Prime Ministers will dedicate a mobile water desalination van to Suigam Taluka, of Sabarkantha district, through a video link. Both leaders will also address the gathering.

The two leaders will also visit the Centre of Excellence for Vegetables at Vadrad in Banaskantha district, where they will be briefed on work plan of the Centre.

They will inaugurate the Centre of Excellence for Date Palms at Kukama, Kutch District, through a video link. The two Prime Ministers will also interact with farmers.

Prime Minister Netanyahu will later depart for Mumbai.

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The United Arab Emirates on Monday claimed that Qatari fighter jets had twice intercepted civilian passenger planes en route to Bahrain in a "clear violation of international law."

"Qatari fighter jets intercepted an Emirati civilian aircraft during a routine flight to Manama in a flagrant threat to civil aviation safety and in a clear violation of international law," the General Civil Aviation Authority Director said in a statement published by the state news agency WAM.

The local media reports quoted the UAE GCAA Director-General Saif Al-Suwaidi, as saying, "Two commercial airliners that were intercepted by Qatari fighter jets were regular and scheduled flights with a well-known track, which meet the necessary approvals and internationally recognised permits."

He said incidents of sudden interception of a civil aircraft by a fighter jet could threaten the safety of the passengers and crew.

"The two planes arrived safely to Bahrain and returned to the UAE," Al-Suwaidi confirmed.

Earlier on Monday, Qatar denied its fighter jets intercepted the passenger planes of UAE.

Qatar's foreign ministry released a statement, saying the UAE's claim was false.

"The State of #Qatar announces that the claims of Qatari fighter-planes intercepting a UAE civil aircraft are completely false. A detailed statement will follow," Lolwah Rashid Alkhater, Spokesperson for Qatar's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote on Twitter.

The incident has come at a time when Qatar, since mid-2017, has been facing a diplomatic and economic blockade by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain, over accusations of supporting "terrorism".

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Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was subpoenaed last week to testify before a grand jury in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, The New York Times reported.

The former aide to United States President Donald Trump is to give evidence in the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the report said.

Bannon, who joined the Trump campaign in August of 2016 and left the White House almost exactly a year later, it is the first time special counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed someone from within the US leader's inner circle.

The revelation came as Bannon was appearing behind closed doors with the House Intelligence Committee to testify in that committee's probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The latest development comes after Bannon recently fell out with the U.S. President after he described Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump as "dumb as a brick" in an upcoming book, 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House'.

The Bannon's observation about Ivanka was reported by The Wall Street Journal, which as reviewed Michael Wolff's new book.

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A minor boy was stabbed by a student here in Rachakonda, following his feud with a student who teased his sister.

According to the station house officer (SHO) of Nacharam police station, a complaint was lodged by K. Krishna stating his daughter was teased by a student in the class. Following this, the girl's 16-year old brother Arvind, proceeded to school to confront the boy.

However, Arvind was stabbed with a knife by another student from behind while he was returning home. He was immediately shifted to a local hospital for treatment and is out of danger.

A case has been registered under Section 307 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Investigation in the matter is underway.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday vowed to destroy the United States trained border security force in Syria.

According to the Washington Post, during a speech in Ankara, Ergodan slammed the U.S. for its continued military support for Kurdish separatist groups in Syria tagged as terrorist organisations by Turkey.

"A country we call an ally is insisting on forming a terror army on our borders. What can that terror army target but Turkey?" Erdogan said, referring to the new Syrian security force and the NATO alliance shared between Ankara and Washington.

"Our mission is to strangle it before it's even born," the Turkish president added.

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There is a rising concern in Britain that its government is inexplicably keeping quiet about Pakistan's assault on free speech.

In an article written for the Guardian, Jon Boone, former writer for the paper on Pakistan and Afghanistan, has categorically said the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) should be protesting about the kidnap and torture of social media activists.

He says that their abduction and reported torture by agents of the state has resulted in them avoiding criticising the country's military establishment and militant religious groups backed by the army.

Over the past month or more, a peace activist has been abducted from Lahore, a Marxist professor has been murdered and a kidnapping attempt was made Taha Siddiqui, an outspoken journalist.

Boone says, "Britain has had nothing to say about this growing assault on free speech, even when it involved a journalist who contributes to British media outlets, including this one. But there were no public condemnations. Not even the meekest expression of concern."

While he acknowledges that terrorist-related violence in Pakistan has come down, he feels that at times the UK seems keener to challenge negative international perceptions of Pakistan than the Pakistani government itself.

"While terrorist violence is sharply down, it has been achieved in a way that is unlikely to be sustainable: a campaign of illegal abductions and killings rather than root and branch reform of an incapable police and broken judicial system. The business environment remains unreformed, and the country never far from its next economic crisis," Boone adds.

He questions as to why Britain prefers to believe the endless promises of successive Pakistan Army chiefs about the situation improving, when actually that is far from the truth and may never happen.

Pakistan, he opines is a "deep state" running amok, and therefore, it is imperative that "Britain should not be blind to the problems that remain, or (be) afraid to raise its concerns publicly."

He is also critical of the fact that British diplomats conduct diplomacy with Pakistan Army generals at in their headquarters in Rawalpindi, and believes that this is actually compromising the bilateral relationship, and further undermining the authority of elected civilians in Pakistan.

Pakistan is one of the few countries where the public displeasure of the British high commissioner might have a useful effect and impact, he concludes.

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United States President Donald Trump has told the Chinese President Xi Jinping that the growing U.S. trade deficit with Beijing "is not sustainable."

The White House on Tuesday in a statement said that President Trump spoke with Xi on Monday to discuss trade and talks between North and South Korea to de-escalate the nuclear crisis on the peninsula.

"President Trump expressed disappointment that the United States' trade deficit with China has continued to grow," the White House said. "President Trump made clear that the situation is not sustainable."

Trump has often cited the trade deficit as evidence the U.S. is "losing" to countries like China.

The U.S. had a $347 billion trade deficit in goods with China in 2016, and Trump has previously laid the blame for the figure with his predecessors.

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Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara were received by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in Agra on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, his wife Sara and Chief Minister Adityanath then visited Taj Mahal in Agra.

The Israeli premier, who is on a six-day visit to India, is accompanied by his wife Sara and a 130-member delegation from various sectors, including cyber, agriculture and defence.

On day two of his visit, Netanyahu held bilateral talks with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi in New Delhi.

Following the delegate-level talks, the two sides inked nine pacts in various sectors including oil and gas, amended protocol for airports, and cybersecurity, among others

Apart from Delhi and Agra, Netanyahu will be visiting Gujarat and Mumbai, and will be accompanied by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi on extensive portions of his visit.

Earlier yesterday, the two prime ministers attended a ceremony to mark the formal renaming of iconic Teen Murti Chowk as Teen Murti-Haifa Chowk.

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Sales decline 81.41% to Rs 4.47 crore

Net profit of Bharat Immunological & Biological Corporation declined 77.38% to Rs 0.50 crore in the quarter ended December 2017 as against Rs 2.21 crore during the previous quarter ended December 2016. Sales declined 81.41% to Rs 4.47 crore in the quarter ended December 2017 as against Rs 24.04 crore during the previous quarter ended December 2016.4.4724.044.479.900.451.590.381.570.502.21

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Adoption of Corporate wellness program can save India Inc. income up to US$ 20 billion by 2018 through a reduction in absenteeism rate by 1.00 percent and at the same time improve chronic and lifestyle diseases of corporates and employees, according to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) latest paper.

The chamber analysis further reveals that on an average for every rupee being spent on employee wellness programme, employers get Rs. 132.33 as a saving on absenteeism cost and Rs.6.62 back as reduced health care costs.

The paper also found that 83 per cent of respondents are willing to contribute a percentage of their salary in company sponsored wellness program; however 17 per cent are not at all willing to participate in it, adds the paper.

On impact of wellness program to corporate employees across sector, the paper disclosed that among IT/ITeS sector employees, 93 per cent feel that company sponsored wellness program act as a motivating factor for them. However 7 per cent feel depressed about the healthcare program.

About 60 per cent employees engaged in media sector consider wellness program as a motivating factor, whereas remaining 40 per cent feel that it acts as a depressing factor. However, in case of FMCG, 75 per cent of employees feel that it act as a motivating factor, however, 25 per cent consider it as a depressing factor. In financial sector, 84 per cent of employees favor the wellness program while 16 per cent of respondents not interested to participate in these kind of programs, noted the paper.

In rest of sectors 100 per cent of employees consider company sponsored wellness program act as a motivating factor for them.

The ASSOCHAM observed that out of top 500 Indian companies that are working towards CSR initiatives, offer healthcare programs and facilities in nearby areas where their factory outlets are located and many are serving in rural blocks/districts/village.

But ironically 42 per cent of them ignore employee health care as they do not offer any wellness program to them.

However, the chamber noticed that despite the availability of preventive health care benefits through medical plans, most of the respondents do not take advantage for getting routine health care examination. As some are not aware about benefits that exist and some hesitate to ask. Almost 76 per cent of employees deny accepting that "it"- heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or stroke can happen to them.

About 48 per cent of respondents informed that their organization offer corporate wellness program. Out of which 62 per cent of the employees feel that the present wellness program run by their organization needs improvement.

However, out of the 52 per cent of the employees revealed that their company do not run any wellness program, 51 per cent of the survey respondents say if in future their company initiates any employee wellness program they would surely participate in it.

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Fitch Ratings has affirmed India-based micro-irrigation company Jain Irrigation Systems Limited's (JISL) Long-Term Issuer Default Rating (IDR) at 'B+'. The Outlook remains Positive. The agency has also affirmed JISL's USD200 million 7.125% senior unsecured notes due in 2022 at 'B+' with Recovery Rating of 'RR4'. The notes are issued by JISL's wholly owned subsidiary Jain International Trading B. V. and guaranteed by JISL.

The affirmation with Positive Outlook reflects JISL's satisfactory deleveraging in the last 12 months, which is in line with our expectations. We expect JISL to be able to reduce leverage (defined as lease adjusted debt net of cash adjusted for seasonality/EBITDAR) further to around 3.5x by the financial year to 31 March 2019 (FY19) from 4.3x at FYE18 and 4.7x at FYE17, underpinned by robust growth in EBITDA. However, the bulk of the company's micro-irrigation business, which accounts for around 60% of its EBIT, is susceptible to unpredictable weather patterns and India's vulnerable agricultural sector, which may yet pose risks to the company's deleveraging.

JISL's ratings reflect its high, albeit improving leverage, and its strong business risk profile as a globally diversified producer of micro irrigation systems (MIS), a leading manufacturer and distributor of polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene pipes in India for industrial and residential uses, as well its leading position in supplying processed fruits and vegetables to leading multinational fast-moving consumer goods companies across several geographies.

KEY RATING DRIVERS

Deleveraging On-Track Despite Challenges: We expect JISL's leverage to reduce to 4.3x by FY18 supported by a boost in revenue and EBITDA from the acquisition of two US dealers of MIS products in April 2017, as well as strong growth in contracts won for projects in MIS and plastic pipes in India and overseas. We expect the rise in project revenue in total revenue to improve EBITDA margins. The demand for retail-MIS sales in India is likely to remain muted in 2HFY18 due to a gradual turnaround in domestic crop prices after a weak start to the fiscal year, as well as farmers possibly delaying spending until after the government processes their farm loan waivers.

Long-Term Structural Growth: India's low irrigation coverage and high dependence on erratic rainfall underpin the demand for JISL's micro-irrigation products. Policies such as the Indian government's Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana (PMKSY) Scheme, which aims to improve country-wide irrigation access, are likely to drive the long-term growth of JISL's cash flows. In FY17 the government spent around INR20 billion to bring an estimated 840,000 hectares (ha) under irrigation, up from INR16 billion and 570,000 ha in FY16. The government estimates the PMKSY scheme will invest INR500 billion over FY16-FY20 to irrigate 7.6 million ha.

Furthermore, JISL's pipes business stands to benefit from initiatives, such as India's Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation to develop urban infrastructure such as roads, water supply and sewage services, solid waste management and storm water drains. The government of India aims to spend a total of INR500 billion as part of this scheme from FY16 to FY20. In the last 12 months JISL won orders worth INR13.3 billion in its MIS and pipes divisions in India, and at end-1HFY18, had a global project order book of INR27 billion for these divisions. The orders are typically executed over one to two years.

Cash-Flow Seasonality: JISL's sales are slower during the first half of the fiscal year than the second half, which results in a higher cash balance at the fiscal year-end of around INR1 billion on average, compared with the preceding three fiscal quarters. This is primarily because sales of MIS in India depend on the performance of the monsoon rains, which usually occur between June and September.

Fitch therefore deducts INR1 billion from JISL's year-end cash balance when calculating the year-end leverage ratio to account for this seasonal variance.

Diversified Cash Flows: JISL's revenue is diversified across products and geographies, with sales outside India accounting for 45% of revenue in FY17. High-tech agricultural inputs (MIS and tissue culture), plastic pipes and food processing accounted for 62%, 15%, and 19% of operating profits, respectively.

DERIVATION SUMMARY

Fitch does not rate any of JISL's direct competitors. However JISL may be compared with companies in the diversified manufacturing segment, such as JSC HMS Group (HMS, B+/Stable) and Yingde Gases Group Company Limited (B+/Stable).

HMS is a major pump, compressor and equipment manufacturer to the oil and gas industry in Russia and CIS. Its ratings reflect the lack of diversification by customer and geography, and a low share of after-market services. The ratings factor in the group's leading market position and stable fundamentals of the oil industry. JISL has a stronger business risk profile than HMS, supported by its larger operating scale and more diversified cash flows across geographies and end-markets. As a result, JISL can support more leverage than HMS at the same rating.

Yingde provides industrial gases to customers in the Chinese steel and chemical manufacturing sectors, with a high 70% exposure to the steel sector. Risks to Yingde's credit profile from its industry concentration were evident during the industry's downturn in the last few years, although this situation has now improved. Therefore, despite Yingde's larger operating scale compared to JISL, we assess both companies as having a similar credit risk because JISL's cash flows are diversified by end-market and geography, which mitigate the risks stemming from a smaller scale. Unlike Yingde, JISL's rating is on Positive Outlook because we expect its leverage to improve in the next 12-18 months. Yingde's rating is on a Stable Outlook because there is more uncertainty around its ability to achieve the requirements for an upgrade at this point.

No country-ceiling, parent/subsidiary linkage or operating environment aspects impacts the rating.

KEY ASSUMPTIONS

Fitch's Key Assumptions within Our Rating Case for the Issuer

- Revenue of INR79 billion in FY18 and INR87 billion in FY19

- EBITDA of INR11 billion in FY18 and INR12 billion in FY19

- EBITDA margin to remain around 14% in the next two years

- Capex of INR3.5 billion and INR3 billion respectively in FY18 and FY19

Recovery Rating Assumptions

- The recovery analysis assumes that JISL would be considered a going-concern in bankruptcy and that the company would be reorganised rather than liquidated. We have assumed a 10% administrative claim.

- We have assumed that JISL's going-concern EBITDA is equal to JISL's EBITDA in the last 12 months to September 2017 with no further discount applied. This is conservative because it does not include most of the EBITDA from JISL's April 2017 acquisitions in the US, and it does not factor in the robust EBITDA growth we expect JISL to post over the medium term. It reflects Fitch's view of a sustainable, post-reorganisation EBITDA level, upon which we based the valuation of the company.

- An enterprise value (EV) / EBITDA multiple of 6x is used to calculate the post-reorganisation valuation and we believe this is closer to a distressed multiple, considering that as of 30 September 2017, JISL was trading at a EV/EBITDA multiple of 11.3x.

- We used secured and unsecured debt (including vendor financing reclassified from trade payables as unsecured debt) as of 31 March 2017.

- We have assumed that JISL's sanctioned but undrawn lines of INR12.8 billion will be fully drawn at the point of distress, and that these lenders would have a prior ranking claim on JISL's assets ahead of bond investors.

- The recovery waterfall results in a 100% recovery estimate corresponding to a 'RR1' Recovery Rating for the USD200 million unsecured notes. Nevertheless, Fitch has rated the senior notes at 'B+' with a Recovery Rating of 'RR4' because under Fitch's Country-Specific Treatment of Recovery Ratings criteria, India falls into 'Group D' of creditor friendliness. Instrument ratings of issuers with assets in this group are subject to a soft cap at the issuer's IDR.

RATING SENSITIVITIES

Developments That May, Individually or Collectively, Lead to Positive Rating Action

- Lease adjusted debt net of cash adjusted for seasonality /operating EBITDAR sustained below 3.5x

- Ability to generate sustained neutral free cash flow

Developments That May, Individually or Collectively, Lead to Negative Rating Action

- Not meeting the positive rating sensitivities for an extended period will result in the Outlook being revised to Stable

LIQUIDITY

Comfortable Liquidity: At FYE17, JISL had readily available cash (net of cash adjustment for seasonal variations) of INR1.4 billion and approved but undrawn credit facilities of INR12.8 billion available to fund debt maturing in FY18 of INR5.8 billion and vendor financing of INR2.4 billion, plus Fitch's estimate of free cash outflow (after capex and dividends) for FY18 of around INR700 million. The group had a further INR12.3 billion of working capital debt repayable on demand, which we expect lenders to roll over during the normal course of business given the group's satisfactory credit profile.

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Publicly rated structured finance (SF) in non-Japan Asia remained mostly stable in 4Q17, says Fitch Ratings. Three tranches from three Chinese ABS transactions were upgraded in the quarter, with 17 other tranches affirmed across China, India and Korea.

The three upgrades were to the class B notes of Fuyuan 2016-1 Retail Auto Mortgage Loan Securitization Trust, Fuyuan 2017-1 Retail Auto Mortgage Loan Securitization Trust and Fuyuan 2017-2 Retail Auto Mortgage Loan Securitization Trust. They are all Chinese auto loan ABS transactions originated by Ford Automotive Finance (China) Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ford Motor Credit Company LLC (BBB/Stable/F2), and the upgrades reflect the build-up of credit enhancement, strong asset performance and a stable sector outlook. The positive rating actions resolved the Rating Watch Positive (RWP) on the ratings of the three tranches, which had been in place since 20 September 2017 following the update of Fitch's Structured Finance and Covered Bonds Country Risk Rating Criteria.

The class A notes from the three Fuyuan transactions were affirmed as were three tranches from Shanghe 2016-1 Retail Auto Mortgage Loan Securitization Trust and Shanghe 2017-1 Retail Auto Mortgage Loan Securitization Trust.

Nine Indian auto loan ABS pass-through certificates from seven Platinum Trust transactions were affirmed at 'BBB-sf' in 4Q17.

Fitch also affirmed two tranches from Hyundai Capital Auto Funding XI Limited, a Korean auto loan ABS transaction originated by Hyundai Capital Services Inc. (BBB+/Stable/F2). The transaction was still in its revolving period at the time of review; it began amortising in December 2017. Strong underlying asset performance supported the affirmation of outstanding ratings at 'AAAsf'.

Most Fitch-rated SF transactions from China, India, Korea and Singapore have Stable Outlooks, based on the agency's expectations of asset performance and macroeconomic conditions. Two Chinese ABS tranches remain on RWP following the criteria change referred to above.

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Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers & Chemicals lost 8.15% to Rs 496.50 at 11:39 IST on BSE after the company said that it has indefinitely closed its TDI-II plant at Dahej following leakage.

The announcement was made during market hours today, 16 January 2018.

Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was up 28.58 points, or 0.08%, to 34,872.09. The BSE Mid-Cap index was down 151.43 points, or 0.84%, to 17,977.45.

On BSE, so far 7.36 lakh shares were traded in the counter, compared with an average daily volume of 2.11 lakh shares in the past two weeks. The stock hit a high of Rs 547 and a low of Rs 484.05 so far during the day. The stock hit a record high of Rs 548.50 on 24 October 2017. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 236.40 on 2 February 2017.

The mid-cap company has an equity capital of Rs 155.42 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.

Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers & Chemicals (GNFC) said that in the morning on 15 January 2018, there has been a sudden leakage at TDI-II Plant, Dahej, which called for plant shutdown at Dahej. Due to safety measures already put in place by the company over a period of time, neither there is any property damage nor any loss of life, GNFC said. However, as a matter of abundant precaution, management has decided to close the plant indefinitely till the root cause is thoroughly analysed, reviewed and necessary further safety measures to be taken are fully evaluated in addition to current safety precautions, the company said.

GNFC reported 0.4% rise in net profit to Rs 166.11 crore on 5.6% rise in total income to Rs 1530.28 crore in Q2 September 2017 over Q2 September 2016.

GNFC is one of the leading companies in the fertilizer industry in India.

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Real GDP growth in the OECD area slowed marginally to 0.7% in the third quarter of 2017, compared with 0.8% in the previous quarter, according to provisional estimates, as contributions from private consumption (0.3 percentage point, compared with 0.5 in the previous quarter) and investment (0.1, compared with 0.3) fell. Stock-building and net exports, however, with contributions of 0.2 and 0.1 percentage points respectively, mitigated the slowdown in overall GDP growth. The contribution from government consumption was negligible.

In the United States, GDP growth was stable at 0.8%, reflecting a lower contribution from private consumption (0.4 percentage point, from 0.6 in the previous quarter) that was counterbalanced by higher contributions of stock-building and government consumption (0.2 and 0.1 percentage point respectively, up from 0.0 in the previous quarter). Contributions from investment and net exports were stable (0.1 percentage point each).

In Germany, real GDP growth picked up to 0.8%, compared with 0.6% in the previous quarter. The strong rebound of net exports (contributing 0.4 percentage point, up from minus 0.4 in the previous quarter) and the stronger contribution of stock-building (0.4 percentage point from 0.2) were only partially offset by a negative contribution from private consumption (minus 0.1 percentage point, down from 0.5) and a lower contribution from investment (0.1, down from 0.3).

In Japan, real GDP growth slowed slightly to 0.6%, compared with 0.7% in the previous quarter.

Net exports and stock-building (contributing 0.5 and 0.4 percentage point, respectively, compared with minus 0.2 and 0.0 in the previous quarter), were the main drivers of overall GDP growth, but they were more than offset by a strong drop in the contribution of private consumption (minus 0.3 percentage point, down from 0.5).

In France, GDP growth was stable at 0.6%, reflecting a strong rebound in stock-building (0.5 percentage point, up from minus 0.4 in the previous quarter) and a higher contribution from private consumption (0.3, up from 0.1). These positive effects were completely offset by deterioration in the trade balance (minus 0.6 percentage point, compared with 0.6 percentage point in the previous quarter). Contributions of investment and government consumption were unchanged.

In the United Kingdom, GDP growth picked up marginally to 0.4% (up from 0.3%), as a result of stronger contributions from private consumption and stockbuilding (0.3 and 0.1 percentage point respectively, up from 0.1 and minus 0.4 in the previous quarter).

In Italy, GDP growth increased marginally to 0.4% (from 0.3%), mainly reflecting higher contributions from net exports (0.2 percentage point, up from minus 0.4) and investment (0.5 percentage point, up from 0.2). These effects were almost fully offset by destocking (minus 0.5 percentage point, down from 0.4 in the previous quarter).

In Canada, GDP growth slowed to 0.4% in the third quarter of 2017, from 1.0% in the previous quarter, as a result of a strong deterioration in the trade balance (minus 0.8 percentage point, from minus 0.1). This was only partially counterbalanced by stockbuilding (0.3 percentage point, up from 0.0).

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Vascon Engineers rose 1.25% to Rs 48.45 at 9:41 IST on BSE after the company said it sold 85% of the units in its new residential project in Pune on the day of its launch.

The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 15 January 2018.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 82.98 points, or 0.24% to 34,926.49.

On the BSE, 1.23 lakh shares were traded in the counter so far, compared with average daily volumes of 5.35 lakh shares in the past two weeks. The stock had hit a high of Rs 49 and a low of Rs 47.20 so far during the day. The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 58.80 on 15 May 2017. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 28.20 on 11 August 2017.

Vascon Engineers announced that it sold 68 units, or 85% of the units, in its new residential project 'Forest Edge' on the day of its launch. The project is located at Kharadi in Pune. Its first tower consists of 80 units. It was launched on the auspicious occasion of Makar Sankranti.

Forest Edge is a joint venture between Vascon, Clover Builders and Shree Madhur Realtors with Vascon having a 50% share in the project.

Net profit of Vascon Engineers rose 139.68% to Rs 1.51 crore on 14.97% decline in net sales to Rs 54.60 crore in Q2 September 2017 over Q2 September 2016.

Vascon Engineers is one of the foremost listed real estate companies headquartered in Pune with over 30 years of experience delivering 200+ projects spanning over 50 million square feet of landmark developments across residential, industrial, IT parks, malls and multiplexes, hospitality and community welfare centers in 30+ cities across India across EPC and its own real estate projects.

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At least two people died in an explosion that destroyed three apartment buildings in the Belgian city of Antwerp, police reported on Tuesday.

The blast, which rocked Paardenmarkt street late on Monday, injured 14 others, one of whom was in critical condition, Efe news agency reported.

"Police confirm: two victims found under the rubble, both deceased. Victims not yet identified. Investigation into the cause of the explosion ongoing," Antwerp Police tweeted.

No official confirmation has been yet given about the cause of the explosion, but police have ruled out terrorism.

Three apartment buildings collapsed onto a pizzeria and seven other neighbouring buildings were damaged.

The explosion occurred just 100 feet away from a 19th-century Neo-Gothic church.

Images by an epa photographer on the ground showed firefighters crowded around the shell of the buildings, which were hollowed out by the blast.

Antwerp's Mayor, Bart de Wever, said on Twitter that his thoughts were with the victims and their families. "Antwerp will support you," he said.

Paardenmarkt is a busy street located near several university buildings and has many apartments where students live.

--IANS

him/dg

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At least five security personnel were killed and six others injured in a gun attack in Pakistan's Balochistan province late on Monday.

According to the reports, some unknown gunmen opened fire at a vehicle carrying security personnel in Shapok area of Turbat, a district in Balochistan, Xinhua reported.

Following the ambush, the driver could not keep control over the vehicle and it overturned and skidded off the road.

The injured were rushed to the hospital in Turbat city. However, there are no reports about their condition yet.

Security forces have cordoned off the area and started a search operation to arrest the attackers.

Ethnic violence has claimed thousands of lives in the province. Militants belonging to nationalist groups have been killing and kidnapping government officials and pro-government elders in the province.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Actor Timothee Chalamet has pledged to donate his entire salary from his upcoming Woody Allen-helmed film to three organisations as the director faces the fallout from allegations of sexual abuse by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow.

The "Call Me By Your Name" star, 22, is set to star in Allen's upcoming film titled "A Rainy Day in New York", alongside Jude Law, Elle Fanning and Selena Gomez, reports people.com.

His fellow co-star in the film, Rebecca Hall, pledged to donate her salary to the Time's Up movement. Chalamet revealed the same pledge in an Instagram post on Monday.

"This year has changed the way I see and feel about so many things; it has been a thrilling and, at times, enlightening education," he wrote.

"I have, to this point, chosen projects from the perspective of a young actor trying to walk in the footsteps of more seasoned actors I admire. But I am learning that a good role isn't the only criteria for accepting a job -- that has become much clearer to me in the past few months, having witnessed the birth of a powerful movement intent on ending injustice, inequality and above all, silence.

"I have been asked in a few recent interviews about my decision to work on a film with Woody Allen last summer. I'm not able to answer the question directly because of contractual obligations. But what I can say is this: I don't want to profit from my work on the film, and to that end, I am going to donate my entire salary to three charities: TIME'S UP, The LGBT Center in New York, and RAINN."

The actor said that he wants to be "worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the brave artists who are fighting for all people to be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve".

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has broken a 16-year-old myth by spending a night at the Agra Circuit House -- a place not chosen by any state Chief Minister for the last 16 years, officials said on Tuesday.

The monk-turned-politician also broke a 29-year-old myth by visiting Noida last year.

The last Chief Minister to have stayed in the Agra Circuit Couse, a government accommodation, was Rajnath Singh who was here 16 years back.

Incidentally, he lost his chair after the visit and none of his successors have dared to stay there since.

Neither Mulayam Singh Yadav, nor Mayawati and not even Akhilesh Yadav mustered the courage to stay at the circuit house for fear of losing power.

They stayed at plush five-star properties whenever in the Taj city. Adityanath stayed at suite number 1 at the circuit house and when he was asked about the jinx, he reportedly smiled and scoffed at it.

He has in the past said that he did not believe in myths.

Prime minister Narendra Modi also lauded the chief minister last month for not believing in myths.

Adityanath is in Agra to receive the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sarah as they come to visit Taj Mahal on Tuesday.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Almost a decade after he narrowly survived the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, Moshe Holtzberg arrived in Mumbai on a cool Tuesday morning.

Then a toddler, now the 11-year-old bespectacled Moshe, sporting a T-shirt and shorts, landed at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) along with his grandparents, with whom he grew up in Israel.

Appearing a tad bewildered by presence of a large media posse outside the CSIA, he kept close to his grandmother, with grandfather following nearby.

At the media's insistence, Moshe managed to say: "Shalom... Bahut khush" (Greetings, very happy)", as they stepped out around 8 am today.

"I want to pray in Nariman House, where Moshe's parents were killed... Moshe likes the people of India and loves the country. He wants to thank Prime Minister Narendra Modi," said the boy's grandfather, Shimon Rosenberg, sporting a snowwhite beard.

Along with the visiting Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Moshe is likely to visit the Chabad House, located in Nariman House building in Colaba, one of the targets of 10 Pakistani extremists during the Mumbai terror strikes.

However, Moshe's parents -- Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg -- were not so fortunate and were shot down in the indiscriminate firing in Chabad House.

Arriving in Mumbai in 2003, the Holtzbergs ran the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish outreach centre serving the tiny local Jewish community and visiting Israelis in the city, which was shut down after the terror strikes and reopened only in 2014.

When they were felled by terror bullets, the US-born Rabbi Gavriel was 29 and his Israel-born wife Rivka was 28.

Unknown to them, their toddler son Moshe, then barely two, was protected and saved by his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuel, and later they were taken to Israel.

As a gesture of goodwill for saving little Moshe's life, Samuel was later granted an honorary citizenship of Israel and continues to live and work there.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Days after he called Kannadigas "harami" or illegitimate, Goa's Water Resources Minister Vinod Palienkar on Tuesday accused the Karnataka government of being "habitual liars" vis a vis the Mhadei water dispute issue.

In a Facebook post uploaded on Tuesday, Palienkar alleged that the Karnataka government was paying its expert witness to appear before the Tribunal, which he termed an unfair practice.

"Karnataka WRD Minister @reachmbp says that they have not violated anything. Karnataka Govt have been habitual liars with regards to #Mhadei issue. We will file contempt with photographic evidence," Palienkar said.

"Goa never paid for its witnesses. Our witnesses worked keeping in mind #GoemGoemkarGoemkarponn in #Mhadei matter. Unlike Karnataka witness A.K. Gosain who had confessed in tribunal that he was paid 50k per day by Karnataka for being the witness & 5 lakhs to prepare report," he further said in his post. 'Goem, Goemkar, Goemkarponn' or 'Goa, Goans and Goanness' is a slogan of the ruling alliance party Goa Forward to which the Minister belongs.

The Facebook post also contains a facsimile of a note signed by M. Satish Kumar, Officer on Special Duty of the Karnataka Water Resources Department, where the official spells out the fees paid to Prof. A.K. Gosain for putting together relevant reports and for making depositions before the Tribunal in person as an expert.

Palienkar had triggered controversy on Saturday by referring to Kannadigas as 'harami'. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and former BJP leader from Karnataka B.S. Yeddyurappa have both censured the Goa Minister subsequently, with the latter demanding an apology from the Minister for the abusive remark.

Goa, Karnataka and Maharashtra are currently involved in a dispute in the tribunal over controversial Kalsa-Bhandura dam project across Mhadei river, through which Karnataka aims to divert water from the Mhadei basin to nearby basin on the Malaprabha river.

Mhadei, also known as the Mandovi river, is considered as a lifeline in the northern parts of the coastal state. It originates in Karnataka and meets the Arabian Sea in Panaji in Goa, while briefly flowing through Maharashtra.

The river course is 28.8 km in Karnataka, and over 50 km in Goa.

Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar's letter to Yeddyurappa last month to discuss river water sharing for drinking purposes on humanitarian grounds had triggered popular protests in both Goa and Karnataka.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An army officer was injured on Tuesday in Pakistan firing on the line of control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, defence officials said.

"Captain Bangoria of Maratha Light Infantry was injured in Pakistan firing in Chakan Da Bagh area of the LoC. He was airlifted for treatment to Jammu city where attending doctors have described his condition as stable," defence sources said here.

The sources said after Pakistan violated the ceasefire with heavy firing on Indian positions, the Indian troops retaliated, resulting in firing exchanges those continued till 6 p.m.

Authorities had on Monday suspended the cross-LoC bus service between Chakan Da Bagh and Rawalakot following heightened tension on the LoC.

Seven Pakistan soldiers were killed on Monday across the LoC when Indian troops in Poonch fired mortars at their positions.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ayaz Khan, best known for starring in the show "Dill Mill Gayye", is a very underrated actor and hasn't got his due in the industry, says actor-director Samir Soni.

"Ayaz is a very underrated actor. For me, he is fantastic. He has not got his due and I feel bad," Samir said in a statement.

Ayaz will be soon seen in Samir's psychological thriller "My Birthday Song". The film has been written and directed by Samir.

"His character in the film is of a devil. He has an evilest charm. When he smiles, there is a devil's impression in it. We call him the 'lovable rascal'. Even in real life if he is after something, he is so endearing in that, you like it. That's what a devil does. Devil comes in different faces and for me, Ayaz personifies that," said Samir.

"My Birthday Song", which also features Sanjay Suri and Nora Fatehi, is slated to release on Friday.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bangladesh and Myanmar have agreed that the repatriation of Rohingya refugees on Bangladeshi territory will be completed within two years of the process beginning, the Bangladesh Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

The agreement, adopted in Dhaka by the Joint Working Group formed to start repatriating the over 650,000 Rohingyas who have arrived in Bangladesh since August, also establishes that the repatriation will be based on considering the family as a unit, Efe news agency reported.

"The Physical Arrangement stipulates that the repatriation would be completed preferably within two years from the commencement of repatriation," according to a statement by the Ministry.

The working group has been meeting over the last two days in Naypyidaw to discuss the return of the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority, to Myanmar -- an option rejected by several human rights organisations who believe that the necessary conditions to ensure the safety of this minority on Myanmar territory are still not in place.

"Myanmar would shelter the returnees in a temporary accommodation... and expeditiously rebuild the houses for the returnees to move in there," according to the agreement.

"Under the Physical Arrangement, Bangladesh would establish five transit camps from which returnees would be received initially in two reception centres on Myanmar side."

Myanmar will "consider resettling the people staying at the zero line on a priority basis", says the agreement, which explains that modalities for repatriation of orphans and children born out of "unwarranted incidence" have been incorporated in the agreement.

Myanmar and Bangladesh signed an agreement on November 23, 2017 to repatriate the Rohingyas, who have arrived in the latter country since August and whose number, according to the latest figure released by the United Nations on Monday, has risen to 655,500.

According to the agreement, the repatriation process had to start within two months of the signing of the agreement.

The crisis erupted on August 25 when the Myanmar Army launched an operation in western Myanmar's Rakhine state -- where around 1 million Rohingyas were living -- in retaliation for an attack by a Rohingya insurgent group on multiple government posts.

The UN and various human rights organisations have said there is clear evidence of rights abuses in Myanmar, with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights calling the Army's operations "ethnic cleansing" and saying there were indications of a "genocide".

Last week, the Myanmar Army acknowledged extrajudicial killings of Rohingyas, who were buried in a common grave in September.

In a study released in December, non-profit Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said at least 6,700 Rohingyas, including 730 children aged less than five years, had been killed in Myanmar during the first month of the crisis.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
West Bengal's opposition parties - the Congress, BJP and CPI-M - on Tuesday demanded "white paper" from the Mamata Banerjee government on the number of actual fructified proposals that the state had received in earlier business summits.

Meanwhile, inaugurating the fourth edition of Bengal Global Business Summit at the Biswa Bangla Convention Centre, Banerjee on Tuesday made a passionate appeal to investors to invest in the state.

However, the opposition described the Trinamool Congress government's effort of organising the business summit every year to woo investors in the state as "waste of public money".

State Congress President Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said: "The state government has never given a complete report on how many proposals have fructified from the previous business summit. The state government tries to fool everyone in the name of business summits."

Had the state managed to fructify even 50 per cent of the earlier proposals, there would not have been so much unemployment in the state, he said.

Leader of Opposition in the Assembly and Congress leader Abdul Mannan said these business summits are nothing but a "complete waste of public money".

Echoing Mannan, senior CPI-M leader and Left Front legislative party leader Sujan Chakraborty demanded that the state government should publish a "white paper" on the how the proposals have actually been fructified in the state.

West Bengal BJP President Dilip Ghosh said these business summits are "attempts to fool the masses" and only organised to derive political gains.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara arrived at Agra on Tuesday morning to see the Taj Mahal.

The Israeli Prime Minister and his wife were welcomed by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Soon after, the Netanyahu couple and the delegation accompanying them drove to the Amar Vilas hotel in the Taj city.

Netanyahu and his wife then drove to the Taj Mahal where they are to spend more than an hour, a district official informed IANS.

Tight security arrangements have been made for the VVIP visit and the Taj, the ivory white marble mausoleum on the south bank of the Yamuna will be closed for common visitors till the Israeli Prime Minister leaves.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and wife Sara in Agra, received by CM Yogi Adityanath. #NetanyahuInIndia pic.twitter.com/fjgBHpGno4  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 16, 2018

No car or person was allowed to be in a periphery of 500 metres around the Taj since morning.

Guides of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) are to take the Netanyahu couple around the Taj Mahal and apprise them about the architecture and the love story of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal.
In a fierce attack on the Congress party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said that drought and the Congress are "twins" and accused the party of "fooling people by making false promises".

"Congress and drought are twins. No matter where Congress goes, drought always follows," Modi said while addressing the public in Pachpadra in Barmer, during a function to lay the foundation stone of the much-awaited Rajasthan Refinery Project.

Modi's attack on the Congress comes in the wake of a letter written by former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot in which he had questioned why the Rajasthan Refinery's foundation-laying ceremony was being held for the second time when it was already done by then Congress president Sonia Gandhi four years back.

Modi said: "Congress party has misled people by simply laying foundation stones for projects and has done nothing for the poor. We cannot mislead people by installing stones. As in 2022 we complete 75 years of independence, we will ensure that our refinery starts functioning in the same year," Modi said.

He took a dig at the Congress, saying: "We don't want people to come and ask us that after installing the stone why you did not take action on implementing the same."

He appreciated the efforts of Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje who initiated the process to turn the project into reality.

Modi began his address saying 'Khamma ghani' - a greeting in Marwari language - and went into an aggressive mode where he attacked Congress and its working on several occasions.

He said that Congress has the tendency of fooling people by making false promises, and that the OROP scheme could have never been implemented successfully if the Congress' plans and projections were kept in mind.

"They misled us as well by allotting funds worth Rs 500 crore for OROP in the budget. However, after calculations, the entire costing for the OROP came to over Rs 12,000 crore. We took the help of Army officers in this context and ensured that Rs 10,004 crore is deposited into their account. The remaining shall also be deposited soon," he assured.

Continuing his attacking mode, Modi said "When we assumed office, one of the first things we did was to see what work has been done on promises made earlier in the Railway Budget. Just for applause in Parliament, some people made promises they could never keep. We were determined to end that culture of misleading," said Modi, adding that "we had to close the practice of calling the Railway Budget each year as it focussed on making false promises."

Modi said that 1,500 policies planned by the erstwhile government "were seen only on paper and there was no planning chalked out for their implementation".

Urging the country to work in unison, he said that this is a time for 'Sankalp se Siddhi'. "We must focus on our aims and work towards achieving them by 2022, when we mark 75 years of freedom," he added.

Recalling the times when getting an LPG connection was a challenge, he said people used to go to MPs for a letter recommending a gas cylinder. "Many MPs sold coupons in black. It was not acceptable to me that women of India should suffer due to lack of cooking gas facilities," he said.

Targetting Congress, he said "Garibi Hatao was an attractive slogan for them. They nationalized the banks but the doors of the banks were never allowed to be opened for the poor. Jan Dhan Yojana changed such parameters and the poor got access to banking facilities."

Over 32 crore people opened their accounts in the Jan Dhan bank accounts, he said.

He praised the efforts of Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje in tackling the drought crisis during both her terms. "It is in contrast to the opposition in the state, whose poor drought management in Rajasthan is widely known," Modi said, in a dig at the Congress.

Modi expressed his happiness to be in Rajasthan, "especially for a project that will bring happiness and prosperity to the lives of many". He thanked Dharmendra Pradhan and Vasundhara Raje for their "untiring efforts to make this project a success".

He said the project will change the face of Rajasthan in next five years as Barmer will emerge as an industrial hub which will create infinite job opportunities for people of the state.

Modi also praised former Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat who according to him was the face behind modern Rajasthan. "This man was a visionary who first envisioned the dream of setting up this refinery," he said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Following allegations of corruption and money laundering against him, Punjab's powerful cabinet minister Rana Gurjit Singh has submitted his resignation from the Congress government in the state. However, Chief Minister Amarinder Singh is yet to accept the resignation, government sources said on Tuesday.

Sources in the Punjab Congress told IANS that Amarinder Singh is likely to meet Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday to discuss the resignation issue and expansion of his cabinet.

Rana Gurjit Singh, who is the Irrigation and Power Minister, has courted controversies in the past few months in the multi-crore sand mining auctions done in the 10-month-old Amarinder Singh government.

People associated with Gurjit Singh and his companies had bagged multi-crore rupee sand mining contracts in May last year. One of these people was a cook with Rana Gurjit earlier.

It was alleged that these people were just fronts for the minister and his companies and the sand mining contracts were picked up through benami means.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) were seeking the resignation of Rana Gurjit following the serious allegations of corruption against him.

AAP leader and Punjab's Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Singh Khaira said on Tuesday that Rana Gurjit's resignation was long overdue.

The Minister and his son were recently issued summons by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) following allegations of money laundering abroad.

The billionaire minister, who has business interests in liquor and sugar manufacturing, is considered close to Amarinder Singh. The Chief Minister had been defending him despite the corruption controversies around him.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
French car manufacturer Peugeot will appeal against a 10-minute penalty handed to Dakar Rally leader Carlos Sainz for "potentially dangerous" driving.

Dakar's disciplinary committee on Monday ruled that the 55-year-old Spaniard was at fault after an apparent collision with Dutch quad rider Kees Koolen during the Stage 7 from La Paz to Uyuni, Bolivia on Saturday, reports Xinhua news agency.

"The truth is that Carlos did not hit the quad, because it was not damaged and also finished 10th in the two stages since," Peugeot team boss Bruno Famin said.

"In addition, if the organisers believe there was bad behaviour on Carlos' part, the penalty should be a monetary one. We are going to say that we are going to appeal the decision in the next hour."

Sainz, who won the race in 2010, still leads Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah by almost 57 minutes with six days remaining.

Monday's 242km stage from Tupiza in Bolivia to the northern Argentine city of Salta was cancelled due to bad weather.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Special Committee of the Delhi Assembly will look into a sealing drive currently on in the city and allegations of corruption by BJP-led municipal corporations in the process, Speaker Ram Niwas Goel said here on Tuesday.

Goel referred the matter to the existing nine-member committee headed by Aam Aadmi Party legislator Bhavna Gaur and asked it to submit a report in the next Assembly session.

The sealing drive was discussed in the Assembly for most of the past two days with the ruling AAP and the opposition BJP blaming each other for the drive.

The sealing drive is being carried out by a Supreme Court-appointed Monitoring Committee against business establishments using residential properties for commercial purposes, and it is being implemented by the three BJP-led municipal corporations in the national capital.

The AAP MLAs alleged that businessmen were being "harassed" by the corporations and that there was "huge corruption" involved in the process.

The Monitoring Committee was set up by the Supreme Court in 2006 for sealing the premises of erring businessmen. But in 2012, the apex court asked the committee to stop the drive.

In December 2017, the Supreme Court ordered resumption of the sealing drive and revived the Monitoring Committee.

The AAP had opposed the committee's revival in the Supreme Court and later accused the municipal corporations of corruption in the process.

"Action is being taken against business establishments using residential properties for commercial purposes without paying conversion charges," North Delhi Municipal Corporation spokesperson Yogendra Mann told IANS.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday described the Congress' act of taking the nation's issues to other countries as an act of "immaturity" and asserted that's why people are rejecting them.

"By taking national issues to international forums, Congress leadership has shown its immaturity and people are repeatedly rejecting Congress in polls," Rajnath Singh said while addressing the Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers at its national executive meeting here.

The Home Minister was referring to Congress President Rahul Gandhi's recent visit to Bharain when he highlighted how job creation in India is at an eight-year-low.

Addressing the Indian diaspora in Bahrain, Rahul Gandhi also 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.

Praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party President Amit Shah, the Home Minister said: "Both of them have exemplary organisational skills and it is showing results.

"Now, we have 19 state governments today," he said.

Targeting the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi over the confrontation politics, the Home Minister said: "Centre is ready to extend all support to Delhi government but it is sad that the of confrontation run by Delhi government is acting as an obstacle."

"We are trying best to help Delhi in sealing matter," he said.

The Home Minister also called upon party workers to ensure people trust and party workers at ground level.

"We will have to leave 'all is fine in politics' attitude," he said, adding that "we need to work for taking society towards betterment".

Hailing his government's work, he said: "The world and the people of the country today feel BJP is the best party to govern India. An international survey has shown 88 per cent feel Narendra Modi is best the Prime Minister for India... while 70 per cent people have rated BJP as best political party."

Rajnath Singh was referring to the survey conducted among 2,464 respondents in India carried out by the Pew Research Centre last year.

He also said that today India is are fastest growing economy with stabilised GDP (gross Domestic Product) and greater ease of doing business.

"Now, we have highest foreign reserves as ever," he said.

The Home Minister also said that under the BJP's leadership "we have made our borders better guarded and we are always ready to retaliate in defence".

"We have almost contained Naxalism and terrorism," he added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Manipur Chief Minister N. Biren Singh on Tuesday said severalof those eligible for old-age pension scheme have been left out of its ambit.

The Chief Minister on Tuesday ordered an examination of the process of selecting persons for the Below Poverty Line (BPL) tag.

"Instead, it is found government employees and other well-off persons who have comfortable income were issued the old age pension scheme cards. Officials will check it by going to the villages," Biren Singh said.

There have been media exposes of how extremely poor sections were denied any help from the government for treatment and day-to-day life.

The selection of persons for BPL cards seems to have been issued on political and personal considerations, officials said.

Media reports said that Shanerou Paomei of Senapati district of Manipur is over 100 years of age. Reports say that she and many others have not heard of the pension scheme even.

Biren said: "It is very unfortunate that BPL persons had been selected on other considerations. It will be rectified after proper verification."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Even as Goa and Karnataka slug it out over the disputed waters of the Mhadei/Mandovi river water, former Goa Chief Minister Ravi Naik has suggested a 'unique' idea to tap the excess river water flowing into the Arabian Sea.

Naik, a Congress legislator, told reporters here on Tuesday that river water in the state should be harvested by building dams and selling it off to water-deprived regions of the country and even exporting it to the Arabian region to generate revenue.

"So much of our water is wasted. Now, our government could build dams and privatise it. The water can then be exported by putting up dams and give us (the state) some revenue. Dams can be put up all over Goa.

The water can be stopped and sent to Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Haryana or even Arab countries," he said.

"They (Arab countries) export petrol, we can export water. We do not get enough water to drink, despite there being an abundance of water in Goa," Naik said, calling for better harvesting of excess water which spills into the sea.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The central government on Tuesday said it has decided to withdraw subsidy given to Muslims for the annual Haj pilgrimage.

Announcing the decision, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said it was in line with the government's agenda to empower minorities without appeasing them.

"This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi told reporters here.

He said the government would utilise the funds saved from withdrawing the subsidy for education of minorities, particularly girls.

Naqvi said the subsidy amount ranged from Rs 500-700 crore, which mainly went to the national carrier Air India that flew the pilgrims to Jeddah, along with Saudi Airlines, in a 50:50 ratio.

With the government already moving ahead with privatisation of Air India, the subsidy would not make sense, he felt.

Naqvi said the withdrawal of subsidy would not make much difference in the airfare from major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata, though it would make travel costlier from smaller cities.

"But to offset this cost hike, we have for the first time given the choice to pilgrims to select their point of embarkation. So, for example, a pilgrim from Srinagar may now embark from Delhi, or a pilgrim from Gaya may embark from Kolkata etc., to avoid extra expenses," Naqvi said.

However, the Minister said that the government would "fulfil all its responsibilities it has towards its citizens" and would make all the arrangements for the pilgrims in Saudi Arabia apart from ensuring their safety, security and comfort.

The government had drafted the policy to abolish the Haj subsidy in phased manner after the Supreme Court asked it in 2012 to withdraw it gradually by 2022.

Last year, the government had formed a committee comprising eminent Muslims headed by retired IAS Afzal Amanullah to revise India's Haj policy. The committee had recommended abolition of Haj subsidy and allowing women above 45 years of age to proceed on Haj without "mehram" (male guardian), among other things.

The government accepted most of the recommendations made by the committee.

This year, the highest number of Indian pilgrims are likely to go for the pilgrimage after Saudi Arabia increased India's quota by 5,000.

A total of 1.75 lakh Indian Muslims can go for Haj this year.

--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.)
Iran's Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani on Monday vowed "proportional reaction" to the new US sanctions on Iranian entities and individuals.

Larijani, who is also among the individuals sanctioned, said that the sanctions against the judiciary chief of a country is "crossing all international red lines," the Tasnim news agency reported.

Larijani said that Iran would not remain silent on such measures. But he did not disclose what Iran's response will be.

"The US should know that every hostile action will draw proportional reaction from Iran," he said, adding that he does not care about the US sanctions against him.

On Friday, while US President Donald Trump agreed to extend the waivers for sanctions on Iran, the US Department of Treasury imposed new sanctions on 14 Iranian individuals and entities over Iran's alleged human rights abuses and ballistic missile programme.

Larijani said that the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), could by no means be changed or linked to other issues.

Under the nuclear deal, signed by Iran with six major powers including Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the US, Iran agreed to halt its nuclear weapons development program in exchange for the lifting of the nuclear-related sanctions.

The US President has to decide whether to continue the waivers for the sanctions on Iran every 120 days.

Trump on Friday said he decided to extend sanctions waivers on Iran for the last time, threatening to withdraw from the pact unless US Congress and European allies can fix the alleged "disastrous flaws".

Calling it "a last chance," Trump said the US "will not again waive sanctions in order to stay in the Iran nuclear deal."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In another show of strength, the Shri Rajput Karni Sena on Tuesday took out a massive rally in Dholpur in Rajasthan to demand a countrywide ban on Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Padmaavat", which is scheduled for release on January 25. They have threatened mass immolation if the film is not banned.

The rally was led by Rajput Karni Sena patron, Lokendra Singh Kalvi. Thousands of women were seen walking in the protest rally.

The protesters met the district collector and requested him to convey their message to the central government for banning the film across India.

Dholpur was chosen as the location for the rally as it is situated on the Uttar Pradesh border. "We want the Yogi Adityanath government in UP to ban the film, as the Haryana government has already declared a ban in the state today," a senior member of Karni Sena told IANS.

"Earlier, we had met Haryana Chief Minister Manoharlal Khattar requesting him to ban the movie, and he had assured us the movie would be banned once they check its legal aspects."

"We want Prime Minister Narendra Modi to look into the issue and ban the movie across India. We met Home Minister Rajnath Singh on January 14 and apprised him of the challenges the country will face once the film is released," he said.

"Why the central government is keeping mum on this issue is beyond our understanding," he added.

According to the Karni Sena member, 1,700 women have registered their names, addresses and consent letters from their families with the Jauhar Samiti in Chittorgarh.

"If the film's screening is not stopped, they will perform jauhar (mass immolation). The men will go to cinema halls with swords to stop its screening," he added.

All highways surrounding Chittorgarh will also be blocked on Wednesday as a mark of protest.

He warned that in case the film is released on January 25, "Republic Day celebrations will turn into a dark day as there will be all chances of a war like situation in the country".

"We are also planning a big protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi from January 22 where thousands of Rajputs from across the country will be gathering to stage a massive protest," he said.

Asked if Karni Sena members are supporting Congress in the Ajmer and Alwar bypoll, he said that "looking at the silence of the central government and to protest against the injustice meted out to members of Shri Karni Sena who were demanding a CBI probe into the Anandpal issue, the Karni Sena members have vowed to ensure BJP loses the ensuing by-polls".

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Actor Kevin Spacey has been accused of racism and refusing to acknowledge black employees on the first season of "House of Cards".

Earl Blue, 51, the head of VIP Protective Services, was hired by Knight Takes King Productions to manage on-set security during season one filming of the Netflix series in 2012.

He claims Spacey, who played the lead character Frank Underwood in "House of Cards", refused to acknowledge the black team members and even made racial slurs, reports dailymail.co.uk.

Blue said a group of black security guards were watching the trailer for the show when he heard the actor tell his personal security manager: "I don't want n***ers watching my trailer."

When Blue raised concerns with set managers about Spacey, who was referred to as "The Powers That Be", he was told: 'That's just the way he is; we have got to keep him happy'."

Despite producers allegedly telling VIP Protective Services that they were pleased with their work, their $1.1 million contract was not renewed.

Breaking his four-year silence, father-of-three Blue, who plans to sue Spacey, claims the fallout resulted in his business, which employs 40 guards, losing millions of dollars in revenue.

One of his employees, supervisor Eric Lyles, 47, corroborated Blue's allegations and claimed Spacey also refused to shake his hand or acknowledge him.

The pair fear dozens more will have suffered discrimination at the hands of the Hollywood star, who has separately been accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen men.

Blue said: "I was a tremendous fan of the man but now I am disgusted by him. I lost faith that I am in the right job after the contract was terminated. I questioned myself for months. What could I have done differently?

"Then I came to the realisation that I did everything I was supposed to do, I was just dealing with a racist man.

"I sat on it for four years because I believe in confidentiality but when it comes to the point where people are being harmed, enough is enough. I realized he was getting worse and worse."

A former employee of Knight Takes King, who asked not to be named, said he has "no particular recollection" of Spacey behaving in a racist manner towards security staff.

However, he said Spacey was a "real a*****e" who was "temperamental" on set and would "get frustrated" if things didn't go his way.

He said the reason Blue's contract was severed was "never explained".

Producer Iain Paterson declined to discuss the allegations but said VIP Protective Services's work was found to be "unsatisfactory", reports dailymail.co.uk.

A source claimed: "VIP Protective Services had the set security contract for season one, when break-ins occurred in both the make-up trailer and Kevin Spacey's trailer.

"The contract for set security was then awarded to Master Security for Season 2-6, yet VIP has continued to bid each year."

Blue denied the claim and said: "There were no break-ins. I pride myself on our service and integrity so to hear these lies has struck a cord. No reason was given for terminating the contract."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Libya's state-owned Afriqiyah Airways on Monday suspended all flights after heavy clashes damaged a number of its airplanes.

"As a result of the clashes at M'etiga international airport, we regret to inform you that our aircraft fleet (five airplanes, including a cargo plane) has suffered great damage. This damage, unfortunately, prevents the fleet from flying again." Afriqiyah Airways said in a press release, Xinhua reported.

The company said that flights from Misurata and M'etiga airports are suspended until further notice, including regular scheduled flights.

Security services closed Tripoli's M'etiga international airport on Monday morning, following a heavy attack by an armed group that killed 16 people and injured 48 others, including civilians.

The UN-backed government issued a statement condemning the attack, saying it "threatened the lives of travellers, nearby residents and the safety of air traffic."

The airport witnessed frequent clashes and armed attacks, most recently in October 2017.

However, Monday's attack is the most violent one the airport has witnessed so far, as gunmen attacked the air hub and the prison inside it, where hundreds of terrorists have been detained over the past few years.

--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.)
In the first reported incidents of 2018, a tigress was killed in retaliation by poisoning and its paws harvested as loot by villagers in Madhya Pradesh's Seoni district, while another tigress died in an unusual battle with a male at Kanha National Park, in the state, officials said.

According to officials, a 5-6-year-old tigress was hunted down by four villagers in Sonkhar village under Bhargat division of Seoni district on January 13.

The culprits later chopped off all four paws using an axe and also harvested its canines and whiskers.

They were arrested on Sunday and the loot was recovered with help of a dog squad, officials told IANS.

The tigress among many other such free-ranging felines lived outside the national park in Kanha-Pench forest corridor, dotted by several villages.

"We have confiscated all the articles with the help of dog squad. Three people have been remanded to know the purpose of the hunt and two others sent to jail," J.S. Bhargava, Divisional Manager, Barghat Forest Division, told IANS.

Officials said the culprits poisoned a cattle carcass and used it as bait to kill the tigress. The bovine had been killed by the tigress earlier, which angered the villagers.

"Cattle death is compensated quite well. The region does not have much productive cattle and government compensated maximum Rs 25,000 on one kill. Yet they hunt the tigers and in this case harvested the body," Nitin Desai, Director Central India, Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) told IANS.

Desai said that animal parts are often used as amulets and considered to bring good fortune by some villagers, a possible theory behind the harvesting of its paws and teeth.

However, officials are still sceptic.

"It is unclear, and possibility of a nexus of wildlife trade can not be ruled out. Poaching in such a manner raises doubts. We are investigating the matter," Bhargava said.

The conservationists see the killing as a great loss, as a single tigress gives birth to about 15 cubs.

Meanwhile, another tigress (T-83) died battling a tiger (P-56) in Kanha Tiger Reserve on January 11.

According to the officials, the battle was fierce as it was unusual, since a tigress and a tiger do not fight over territory and all other reasons of fighting were ruled out.

"The tigress T-83 had no cubs, so fighting P-56 to protect them is ruled out. Also the entire region has no hunting incident, so fighting over a hunt share was also ruled out," Sanjay Kumar Shukla, Field Director of Kanha Tiger Reserve, told IANS.

Shukla added that a case of cannibalism was also noticed as deep canine wounds in the tigress' body were found with sign of tiger P-56 feeding on her.

"We are still trying to understand. Tigers do show cannibalism in case of territorial fights and killing of cubs to mate with the female, but not usually like this," Shukla pointed out.

According to National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), Madhya Pradesh lost 17 tigers in 2017 till October, later four others were electrocuted in December.

India overall lost 115 tigers in 2017 of which at least 36 were poached.

(Kushagra Dixit can be reached at kushagra.d@ians.in)

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Vishwa Hindu Parishad's international working president Pravin Togadia was found unconscious in a hospital in Shahibagh locality in Ahmedabad late on Monday after being reported "missing" earlier.

The police said he was brought by people to a private Chandra- Mani hospital in an unconscious state, which the doctors claimed was caused by low level of sugar.

He was admitted in the hospital around 9.20 p.m. and later his condition was stated to be stable, the police said.

The police, however, still have no idea how the VHP leader reached Sardarnagar which was about 15 kilometres away from the VHP office from where he reportedly left in an autorickshaw.

It was also not clear why he fell unconscious as he had no past history of sugar levels falling so alarmingly.

The details would emerge after the police could speak to Toghadia on Tuesday.

Earlier, the Ahmedabad Crime Branch said it had constituted a special team to look for the Vishwa Hindu Parishad Pravin who went missing amid allegations that the Rajasthan Police took him away.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the umbrella body of all saffron outfits, in a one-line statement also expressed concern over the "goings-on around Togadia" and hoped the state government and the police would initiate immediate action.

Notably, Togadia enjoys Z-Plus security.

Around 50 Vishwa Hindu Parishad workers created a ruckus at a police station in Ahmedabad, alleging that the police, in connivance with their Rajasthan counterparts, had taken Togadia into custody in connection with a 10-year-old murder case.

Alleging that the Sola police helped the Rajasthan Police arrest the VHP's International Acting President from Paldi area in Ahmedabad, the workers wanted to know his whereabouts.
A hearing of corruption references against former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law, is underway in an accountability court in Islamabad, media reports said.

This is the 13th time the ousted prime minister is appearing before an accountability court.

Nawaz flew in with daughter Maryam Nawaz and her husband retired Captain Safdar from Lahore on Tuesday morning and made his way to court after a brief stay at Punjab House, Dawn.com reported on Tuesday.

A heavy contingent of police was seen stationed outside the court on their arrival.

Three witnesses are expected to record their statements in front of Judge Mohammad Bashir, who will hear the references.

A five-member bench of the Pakistan's Supreme Court on July 28 had directed National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to file references against Nawaz and his children in six weeks in the accountability court and directed the trial court to decide the references within six months.

The Supreme Court also assigned Justice Ijazul Ahsan a supervisory role to monitor the progress of the accountability court proceedings.

The former premier and his sons, Hassan and Hussain, have been named in all three NAB references, while Maryam and husband Safdar have been named only in the Avenfield reference.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday said it had arrested two persons in connection with the murder of former state Minister and Janata Dal-United legislator Ramesh Singh Munda in 2008.

Residents of Jharkhand capital Ranchi, both suspects -- Prafull Kumar Mahto, 27, and Jaiganesh, 37 -- were arrested on Monday and have since been remanded in agency custody for five days by an NIA Special Court in Ranchi.

Munda was gunned down by Maoist guerrillas on July 9, 2008, while attending a programme at a school on Ranchi's outskirts.

Maoist commander Kundan Pahan's name figured in the killing. Pahan surrendered to police in May last year.

The probe was handed over to the NIA in September 2017.

An official of the counter-terror probe agency in Delhi said that the role of the two suspects had emerged vis-a-vis the murder conspiracy.

On October 9 last year, the agency had arrested former Jharkhand Minister Gopal Krishna Petre in the case, exposing the Maoist-politician nexus in Jharkhand.

Besides Petre, the NIA arrested Assistant Sub-Inspector Sheshnath Singh who was accused of providing advance information regarding Munda's movement to the Maoists. Singh, a bodyguard of Ramesh Singh Munda, is in NIA custody till October 15.

It is the first case in which a politician has been arrested in the killing of another politician.

Petre created history by defeating the then Jharkhand Chief Minister and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha chief Shibu Soren in January 2009 by-election to the Tamar seat, which fell vacant after Munda's murder.

After Shibu Soren lost the poll, President's Rule was imposed in Jharkhand.

Petre was again elected the legislator in the November 2009 assembly polls and he became a Minister.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Tokyo stocks closed higher on Tuesday, with the benchmark Nikkei stock index finishing at its highest level in more than 26 years as the yen's softer tone against the US dollar lifted exporters' issues and raised hopes for earnings results at the end of the month.

The 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average added 236.93 points, or 1.00 per cent, from Monday to close the day at 23,951.81, marking its highest closing level since November 15, 1991, Xinhua news agency reported.

The broader Topix index of all First Section issues on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, meanwhile, gained 10.35 points, or 0.55 per cent, to finish at 1,894.25.

Technical analysts here said that as the yen continued to ease against the US dollar during trading hours investors' risk appetite returned.

As a result, export issues, which are widely exposed to currency fluctuations, advanced as a weaker yen boosts export-oriented firms' profit outlooks when the yen is weak in comparison to other major currencies.

Exporters, including automobile and tech-related issues, also see yields boosted when repatriated on favourable exchange rates, all underpinned by increased competitiveness in overseas markets.

A rise in US stock futures during trading hours here also helped buoy the market, investment analysts said, with the market's upside supported by overseas investors speculating that Japanese firms will produce solid earnings results at the end of this month.

By the close of play, electric appliance, information and communication, and transportation equipment-linked issues led gainers, and falling issues outpaced rising ones by 980 to 972 on the First Section, with 111 ending the day unchanged.

On the main section on Tuesday, 1,318.17 million shares changed hands, dropping from Monday's volume of 1,421.70 million shares.

Market capitalization on the First Section totalled a record 701.72 trillion yen ($6.33 trillion) and the turnover on the second trading day of the week came to 2,430.7 billion yen ($21.94 billion).

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Padmaavat" was banned on Tuesday by Haryana's BJP government, even as massive protests against the movie's upcoming release continued in Rajasthan.

The decision to ban the film was taken on Tuesday at a meeting of the Haryana cabinet, chaired by Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar.

"Padmaavat" is already banned in Rajasthan and Gujarat, both ruled by the BJP.

Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij tweeted about the ban being imposed on the movie which is set to release nationwide on January 25.

"Film Padmavati/Padmavat banned in Haryana," Vij wrote on Twitter.

Vij took up the issue regarding the impending release of the film and said the Rajput community in the state was against the film. He said the entire cabinet supported him on the move to impose a ban on screening of the film in Haryana.

The film, cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification with U/A certificate, has been caught in a row over claims by Rajput groups backed by a section of the BJP that it distorts history.

Shree Rajput Karni Sena, at the forefront of the protests, has demanded a nationwide ban on the film.

On Tuesday, Karni Sena members took out a massive rally led by its chief Lokendra Singh Kalvi in Dholpur, Rajasthan to protest against the Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh and Shahid Kapoor starrer.

"Dholpur was chosen as the location for the show of strength as it is situated on the Uttar Pradesh border. We want the Yogi Adityanath government in UP to ban the film as Haryana government has already declared its ban in their state," a senior member of Karni Sena told IANS.

The spokesperson said a huge protest is also being planned at Jantar Mantar in Delhi from January 22.

On their part, "Padmaavat" producers have stated that the film is based on "Padmavat", a poem by Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, in an ode to the famed valour, legacy and courage of Rajputs, and portrays Rani Padmavati with utmost respect and does not tarnish her repute or misrepresent her character in any manner.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani on Tuesday said Palestine remains the most important issue for the Islamic world, media reports said.

After the collapse of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, the issue of Palestine has regained its importance for the Muslims, Xinhua quoted Rouhani as saying.

He made the statement during the opening ceremony of the 13th Session of the Parliamentary Union of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Tehran.

The current instability and insecurity gripping the region stem from continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, he said.

Rouhani urged the Islamic states to unite for the creation of a "calm region and peaceful foreign relations" and said Iran views no country as its "competitor" in the region.

"Some countries, however, are following the wrong path and seek to widen the rifts among Muslim nations under the US and Israel's influence," Rouhani said.

He criticised some Muslim states for what he called their dependence on foreign powers, saying "the experiences of modern history teach us that these powers solely think about their own interests".

Iran believes it could even engage in negotiations and cooperation with the countries with which it has differences of opinion based on mutual respect, he added.

The ongoing meeting of the Parliamentary Union of the OIC, which will last until Wednesday, is being attended by parliament speakers, deputy speakers, and parliamentary delegations from 44 countries.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pope Francis asked for forgiveness from victims of child abuse at the hands of the clergy in Chile, during a visit to the South American country on Tuesday.

The Pope had been widely expected to address the scandal ahead of his visit to Chile, Efe news agency reported.

"I cannot express enough the pain and shame I feel due to the irreparable damage caused to children by those in the church," Francis said during a ceremony at the presidential palace.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said that the petroleum refinery he inaugurated in Barmer district will not only change the future of Rajasthan, but also help generate energy for the entire country.

He said that when the country celebrates in 2022 the 75th anniversary of its independence, a new source will help produce energy which would be sent across India.

He was addressing the work commencement ceremony of the Rs 43,129 crore refinery project at Pachpadra in Barmer district on Tuesday in the presence of Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and Petroleum Minister Dharamendra Pradhan.

"Rajasthan is taking the lead to become the energy powerhouse of the country," Modi said while addressing the event.

The Prime Minister said lakhs of people would get employment and the economic scenario in the region would change.

The refinery, a joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited and Rajasthan government, will have the capacity to refine 90 lakh crude oil annually.

Due to be completed by 2022, the project is expected to bring Rs 34,000 crore to the state government coffers annually.

He appreciated the efforts of Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje who initiated the process to turn this project into reality.

"We cannot mislead people by installing stones. As in 2022 we complete 75 years of independence, we will ensure that our refinery starts functioning in the same year," Modi said.

He took a dig at the Congress, saying: "We don't want people to come and ask us that after installing the stone why you did not take action on implementing the same."

The foundation stone laying ceremony had been performed four years ago by then Congress President Sonia Gandhi.

Modu said the Congress had installed stone plaques across the country and misguided the public. He said he hoped that henceforth the public would ask for the date of commencement of public works.

Taking a dig at the Congress, the Prime Minister said he had heard people say that the Congress and drought were twins.

"When the Congress comes to power, drought comes along. On the other hand, whenever Raje becomes the Chief Minister, dry regions of the state receive good rains."

Due to Raje's untiring efforts, the refinery project, which was getting delayed, was finally realised and Rajasthan will benefit, he added.

Hitting out at the Congress on the issue of inauguration of the refinery project twice, Chief Minister Raje said: "We don't believe in installing stones, but we believe in working hard to build a building. We work to turn our efforts into reality."

Accusing the earlier Congress government of not doing anything after the stone-laying ceremony, she said: "There was no planning, no seriousness and no projection of implementing this scheme. We are doing this with a lot of planning."

The refinery work has been kicked off by our Prime Minister and I firmly believe that it will be inaugurated also by Modi, she said.

Raje said the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state had made farmers a partner in developmental process through the new Solar Energy Policy.

In the next one year, Bhadala Solar Park with 2,255 MW generation capacity will be set up and another with 1,000 MW capacity will come up in Nokh in Jaisalmer.

The programme was also addressed by Pradhan who said the refinery will bring in lot of growth and development in the state.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha, chief of the Rashtriya Lok Samta Party, an ally of the BJP, has been openly voicing sympathy for jailed RJD chief Lalu Prasad and his family, triggering speculation that he is likely to jump onto the RJD bandwagon.

Kushwaha, a soft spoken politician, has repeatedly expressed his sympathy for Lalu Prasad and his family in the last two weeks -- unlike the BJP and its other allies including JD-U and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and LJP chief and Union Minister Ramvilas Paswan.

On Monday too, he publicly expressed his sympathy for the Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo and his family. "I have sympathy for Lalu and his family. They are passing through a difficult phase," Kushwaha said while surrounded by his party leaders and workers.

He advised Lalu Prasad and his family to cooperate with the judicial process as the "court and law will do its own work".

Last week Kushwaha had said that he and his party have full sympathy for the family of Lalu Prasad, who was sentenced to three and a half years jail in a fodder scam case by a special CBI court in Ranchi.

"I and my party have full sympathy with the family of Lalu Prasad," Kushwaha said here.

He said there is no need to say anything on the verdict of the court against Lalu Prasad. "Court has been doing its work and no one should say anything on the issue."

Kushwaha, who belongs to the powerful OBC Koeri caste which is the largest social group after Lalu Prasad's Yadav caste in Bihar, is reportedly not comfortable with the BJP and Nitish Kumar.

Kushwaha in the past has raised the issue of making caste-based census public. "It should be made public because people from different castes are eagerly waiting to know their exact numbers."

Last year Lalu Prasad had repeatedly demanded that caste-based census be made public. He had made it an election issue in the 2015 Bihar Assembly polls to consolidate the backward castes.

RJD senior leaders say that Lalu Prasad has no problem in projecting Upendra Kushwaha as the chief ministerial candidate in the 2020 Bihar Assembly polls after the two parties join hands.

However, they insist the RLSP chief would have to walk out of the NDA to contest the next Lok Sabha polls with the RJD. "Both Lalu Prasad and Upendra Kushwaha have held discussion on it," an RJD leader said.

Last year, a senior RLSP leader Nagmani mooted the idea of projecting Kushwaha as the next Chief Minister of Bihar at a party rally organised here.

Earlier, much to the surprise of BJP, the RLSP had demanded that Kushwaha be declared NDA's chief ministerial candidate for the Bihar Assembly polls in 2015.

According to RLSP leaders, the party chief has been eyeing the Chief Minister's chair and could change sides for it.

In this backdrop, Kushwaha's sympathy for Lalu Prasad could be an alarm bell for the BJP and the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) of Nitish Kumar.

"Laluji will have no problem in promoting Upendra Kushwaha as the chief ministerial candidate in case he join hands with him...It's simple. Laluji's younger son and former Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav is young...He can wait for a few years," a senior RJD leader said.

Kushwaha was reportedly upset that despite the RLSP being an NDA constituent, Nitish Kumar had refused to induct ministers from the party in his cabinet in July last year after he formed a new government with the BJP.

What irked Kushwaha more was that Nitish Kumar informed BJP leaders that he would keep RLSP out of the government and the BJP is believed to have kept mum on the issue.

"BJP ally LJP's leader Pashupati Kumar Paras (younger brother of Union Minister and LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan) was inducted into the Cabinet of Nitish Kumar when Paras was not even a member of the legislative assembly. He was defeated in the 2015 assembly polls. But Paswan put pressure on the BJP to accommodate him in the cabinet," an RLSP leader said.

It is widely known that Nitish Kumar has strong reservations about Kushwaha, who has repeatedly attacked and targeted him in the last three years. Kushwaha is a friend-turned-foe of Nitish Kumar in Bihar .

Kushwaha is said to be unhappy with top BJP leaders and uncomfortable with Nitish Kumar's JD-U's entry into the NDA.

"He (Upendra Kushwaha) had refused to resign from the Union Cabinet after being asked by BJP President Amit Shah during the last reshuffle of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Cabinet... It was embarrassing for him," an RLSP leader said.

In all probability, if party leaders are to be believed, the RLSP chief is set to jump onto the RJD bandwagon.

In the caste-ridden of Bihar, Lalu Prasad is planning a new social engineering by wooing Kushwaha. In Bihar, Koeris comprise around seven-eight per cent votes.

Lalu Prasad is aware that his own castemen Yadavs and Muslims are with him and the support of Koeris could change the political arithmetic in the state.

Besides Kushwaha, the RJD is also trying to rope in former Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, President of Hindustan Awami Morcha. Manjhi, a Mahadalit, is reportedly unhappy with the BJP after he was left in the lurch despite repeated promises to place him either in the Union Cabinet or in a Raj Bhavan.

(Imran Khan can be contacted at imran.k@ians.in)

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The opposition National Conference (NC) and Independent MLA Engineer Rashid on Tuesday interrupted the proceedings of Jammu and Kashmir assembly over the arrest of a Kashmiri businessman by Delhi Police.

Bilal Ahmad Kawa, 37, a Kashmiri businessman was arrested by Delhi Police and the Gujarat anti-terrorism squad at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi on January 12 for alleged involvement in the Red Fort attack of 2000.

Delhi Police said Kawa's bank account had been used for Lashkar-e-Taiba terror funding.

Ali Muhammad Sagar, senior NC leader and MLA on Tuesday accused the state government of being "afraid of the Central government over the arrest of an innocent Kashmiri businessman".

Sagar, while speaking in the state assembly, demanded a statement from Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Abdul Rehman Veeri on the businessman's arrest.

"When he is innocent, why is the state government shying away from its responsibility to protect him", Sagar asked.

The National Conference leader also questioned the businessman's arrest being made after 17 years since the Red Fort attack had taken place in 2000.

Independent MLA, Engineer Rashid said "would the state government wait for Kawa being hanged like Afzal Guru (Parliament attack convict) and then come out with a statement on this sensitive issue".

The businessman's mother had on Monday appealed to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti to intervene in the matter to get him released.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the Maharashtra government to share all the documents relating to the death of Special CBI Judge B.H. Loya with the petitioners seeking independent probe and adjourned the matter for seven days.

"This is a matter, they must get everything. There should not be any confidentiality," said the bench of Justice Arun Mishra and Justice Mohan M. Shantanagoudar asking senior counsel Harish Salve to share the documents with the petitioners.

Social activists T. Poonawala and Mumbai journalist Bandhuraj Sambhaji Lone have moved the top court seeking independent probe into the death of Judge Loya.

As Salve appearing for Maharashtra government told the court to have a look at the documents that were in a sealed cover, Justice Mishra said "Exchange the copy with them (petitioners). And we adjourn the matter for seven days."

As Salve said that he had himself not seen the documents sent by Maharashtra government, the bench told him to go through the documents and if he finds some are sensitive, then he can hold them back.

Justice Mishra said, "Unless there is something, there should not be any confidentiality. Normally there should not be any objection in sharing the documents."

Salve said that he has a spare copy which he can share with senior counsel Pallav Sisodia - appearing for the petitioner - but he should keep it to himself.

The death of Judge Loya has raised a storm as presiding over the special CBI court he held the trial in the Sohrabuddin Shaikh fake encounter case in which BJP president Amit Shah is one of the accused. Shah was later discharged in the case.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Gymnast Simone Biles, a four-time Olympic champion from the United States, has said that she was also sexually abused by Larry Nassar, a former US Gymnastics team doctor who was sentenced to 60 years in prison on child pornography charges.

"I too am one of the many survivors that was sexually abused by Larry Nassar," Biles, a 20-year-old gymnast who won four gold medals and a bronze in the 2016 Rio Olympics, wrote on her Twitter account on Monday, reports Efe.

"Most of you know me as a happy, giggly and energetic girl, but lately I have felt broken and the more I try to put off the voice in my head, the louder it screams, I'm not afraid to tell my story anymore," Biles wrote.

"It is not normal to receive any type of treatment from a trusted team physician and refer to it horrifyingly as the 'special treatment'," Biles quoted.

Three other US Olympic gymnasts have accused Nassar of sexual abuses, including Gabby Douglas, who won gold with Biles in the 2016 Rio Olympics, McKayla Maroney and Aly Raisman, who was the first to reveal Nassar's behaviors.

"This behaviour is completely unacceptable, disgusting and abusive, especially coming from someone whom I was told to trust," Biles said.

"For too long I've asked myself, 'Was I too naive? Was it my fault?', " Biles continued but added that "I now know the answer to those questions: No. No, it was not my fault. No, I will not and should not carry the guilt that belongs to Larry Nassar, USAG and others.

"It is impossible to relive these experiences and it breaks my heart even more to think that as I work towards my dream of competing in Tokyo 2020, I will have to continually return to the same training facility where I was abused," she explained.

Federal Judge Janet T. Neff sentenced Larry Nassar on December 7, 2017 to the maximum penalty of 60 years in prison on three child pornography charges.

Judge Neff said that her sentence was based on the grave danger and threat that Nassar poses to children. The judge's verdict could automatically be a life imprisonment for Nassar, who is already 54 years old and currently has another 10 criminal charges pending against him, for which he already pleaded guilty last November.

Nassar also pleaded guilty in July 2017 to charges of obtaining and possessing child pornography and attempting to destroy evidence.

In November 2017, Nassar admitted before the court that the treatment he was performing on athletes was not a legitimate medical procedure.

--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 said that his South Asia strategy is "working far more rapidly than anybody would understand" and denying protection for terrorists in Afhganistan.

The policy he announced in August was "providing crucial support for our forces in Afghanistan and denying safe haven for terrorists," Trump told reporters on Tuesday at the White House in Washington where he was meeting Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

"Our troops fighting (the) IS and Taliban where we have made tremendous strides," he added.

Trump's South Asia policy gave New Delhi an enhanced role in the region. It focused on Afghanistan and covered India, Pakistan and the Central Asian nations and included a warning to Islamabad that it has much to lose by supporting terrorists.

Following up the August policy announcement and other pronouncements warning Islamabad about its support to terrorists operating in Afghanistan, the Trump administration froze security aid to Pakistan this month.

Nazarbayev said: "While the American troops (are) in Afghanistan, I think it's the mission of the whole world to make sure that Afghanistan is stabilized and it also a mission for us as a neighbouring country to to see that peace prevails in Afghanistan."

On Thursday, he is to preside over a high-level meeting of the United Nations Security Council on non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

At the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan was left with the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal, which it voluntarily gave up.

"I think Kazakhstan has the moral right to talk to the nations that are seeking nuclear weapons," Nazarbayev said. "And this is the way we are talking to Iran and this is the way we will be talking to North Korea."

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)

--IANS

al/ahm/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Sri Lankan Navy on Tuesday arrested 16 Indian fishermen for poaching illegally in the island's northern seas, its media unit said in a statement.

Four fishing trawlers belonging to the fishermen were also taken into custody, Xinhua news agency reported.

The fishermen were apprehended in the seas northwest of Delft Island and northeast of the Kachchativu Island, in Sri Lanka's north, by Fast Attack Craft attached to the Northern Naval Command of Sri Lanka.

Those apprehended have been handed over to the Assistant Director of Fisheries in Jaffna for further legal action.

The Sri Lankan government has repeatedly warned that Indian fishermen trespassing into Sri Lankan waters to fish illegally will be arrested and their boats will be seized.

Sri Lankan and Indian fishermen often face arrests when they enter each other's territorial waters illegally with both countries attempting to find a lasting solution to the fishing dispute.

--IANS

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The Telangana government has signed an agreement with Korea Mobile Internet Business Association for collaboration in the AI, VR, AR, IoT and electronics manufacturing sectors, an official statement said on Tuesday.

The agreements with MOIBA, an association of about 500 mobile internet companies and another with JCCIA were signed during the visit by a delegation from the state government to South Korea.

During the two-day visit, Information Technology Minister K. T. Rama Rao, who was heading the delegation, met Choi Dong Jin, Executive Director, and representatives from MOIBA.

According to a statement from the minister's office here, he explained 'Digital Telangana' initiative and how it is planning to connect every home with the FiberGrid project. The minister invited Korean AVCGI companies to invest in Game Tower being built in Hyderabad.

The delegation met heads of several renowned automotive, textile companies and business associations.

Calling on K.K. Yoon, Director, Global Rail Business, Hyundai Rotem, a leading manufacturer of rolling stock, defence products and plant equipment, Rama Rao told him about the newly flagged off Hyderabad Metro, and the state's plans to expand rail/metro network in the state.

Later, the Minister met Nam Geunho, EVP, Hyundai Corporation - which is a manufacturer of marine vessels, industrial plants and machinery, commercial automobiles land rolling stock, steel, chemical products.

He also met Kihuk Sung, Chairman, Youngone Corporation. This company recently announced $300 million investment in Kakatiya Textile Park in Warangal.

The Telangana delegation held a series of meetings in Daegue Metropolitan City which home to several textiles, fashion and high-tech industries.

The delegation called on automotive company representatives led by Choi Woon Back, Director General, Future Industrial Promotion Bureau, Daegu City, where the minister gave an overview of the automotive ecosystem in Telangana and requested the Korean company representatives to visit the state once and explore investment opportunities.

--IANS

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A leading Kosovo Serb politician was on Tuesday fatally shot outside his party offices in Mitrovica, a restive Serb-held city in Kosovo, media reports said.

Oliver Ivanovic, 64, was gunned down by unidentified assailants as he arrived at his SDP party headquarters just after 8 a.m. and was later pronounced dead by medical staff at Mitrovica Hospital.

He was shot five times in the chest, Efe news agency reported, quoting Serbian state TV.

The Serb politician, who previously served as head of the Serbian government's Ministry for Kosovan Affairs, had been sentenced to nine years in jail after being found guilty of war crimes by a specialised European Union court, although an appeals court in Kosovo's capital had overturned the ruling and ordered a fresh trial.

He allegedly ordered the killing of ethnic Albanians in 1999 during the Kosovo war.

Albanians comprise the majority of Kosovo's population.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, a move that was never fully recognised by Belgrade, which has maintained it is an autonomous region of the country.

Northern Mitrovica has a majority Serb population and has been administered independently from the rest of Kosovo as per the currently pending EU initiative to create the Community of Serb Municipalities in Kosovo.

--IANS

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Tensions between Turkey and US-backed Kurdish militias in control of northern areas of Syria approached boiling point on Tuesday after the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's threat of imminent military action to secure the border area was met with a defiant message from Kurdish groups that they would stand their ground.

Erdogan, Turkey's hardline leader, told lawmakers from his Justice and Development Party (AKP) that military action against the YPG (People's Protection Units) militias, which Ankara regards as a terrorist organisation, could begin within the next two days, Efe news agency reported.

"Neither those who appear to be our allies but stab us in the back, nor those who support terrorism can stop this," Erdogan said, insisting that he would not consult US President Donald Trump on this military initiative but rather Russia's leader Vladimir Putin, whose country is a co-signatory in a Syria peace deal that also involved Iran.

The escalation in military rhetoric from Turkey came after the US-led coalition in Syria announced military blueprints to establish a 30,000-strong border force composed primarily of YPG fighters, the largest group inside the ethnically-mixed Syrian Democratic Forces umbrella group that administers the de facto Kurdish territories of Manbij and Afrin in northern Syria.

Reacting to the warnings coming from Ankara, a YPG spokesman in Afrin province told Efe via telephone that military preparations were underway to protect the region from any Turkish-led attack.

Afrin province, tucked up in northwestern Syria, remained cut off from Kurdish-controlled regions further east as a result of a Turkish-led military invasion in 2016 that sought to push back fighters from the Islamic State terror group as well as prevent the creation of a Kurdish-controlled corridor along the border.

The row over the YPG's role in Syria, being the US' principal ally in the campaign against the IS, threatened to further damage already fragile relations between Washington and Ankara, the largest and second-largest NATO allies in terms of active personnel.

"How is it possible that the US can weaponise an army from so many thousands of kilometres away," Erdogan asked rhetorically, adding that NATO must make its stance clear on the matter.

Turkey considers the YPG to be indistinguishable from the PKK Kurdish guerrillas who for decades have waged a low-scale civil war in eastern Turkey.

Within the context of Syria's civil war, Turkey has offered its backing to moderate rebels from the Free Syrian Army, while Russia and Iran support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

--IANS

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Two labourers were injured in an explosion inside an army field ammunition depot in Jammu and Kashmir's Anantnag district on Tuesday, police said.

Police sources said two injured in the explosion at the Khundroo field ammunition depot were taken to hospital.

"The cause of explosion is being ascertained," a police source said.

Four people were killed and over three dozen injured in explosions triggered by fire inside this ammunition depot in August 2007.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A probationary Sub-Inspector of the Kerala Police attached to a station near here and a police constable, besides two others, have been arrested for rape of a 15-year-old girl, police said on Tuesday.

Addressing reporters here, Alappuzha Superintendent of Police S. Surendran identified the arrested policemen as Sub-Inspector Liju and police constable Nelson.

"Another two men also have been arrested. We have set up a special investigation team also to probe the case in detail and to look up if more people are involved," he said.

The involvement of the policemen surfaced after the arrest of a woman named Athira, who was a relative of the teenage victim, and after examining her mobile phone, police found interactions between her and Liju.

The crime came to light when local residents stopped Athira and the teenage girl when they were going out and informed police, who then began a probe.

Meanwhile, the police team is also probing if there are more police officials involved in having exploited the girl, who hails from a poor background.

--IANS

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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned "in the strongest terms" Monday's twin terrorist attacks in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, said his spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

Guterres expressed his deepest sympathies to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to those injured, said the spokesman, Xinhua reported.

"The secretary-general reiterates that the United Nations will continue to stand by the government and people of Iraq in their efforts to fight terrorism and rebuild their country."

Two suicide bombings within minutes rocked an open-air market in Baghdad, killing more than two dozen people early 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.)
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) vowed on Tuesday to continue its services despite the possibility that the US will stop its financial aid.

"Despite austerity, the Agency is committed to continue its vital services to the Palestinian refugees," UNRWA Spokesman Sami Masha'sa said in a press release, reported Xinhua.

This commitment will not be affected by any intention of the US to withhold assistance from the agency, he said.

The US is so far the biggest supporter of the UNRWA, contributing more than $300 million annually.

"Even if without this year's U.S. financial pledges, UNRWA will not leave Palestinian refugees alone and will continue to operate in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as its presence and services in East Jerusalem," Masha'sa noted.

UNRWA provides services to 5.3 million refugees in the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and operates 711 schools and 143 health clinics.

The US has threatened to freeze or delay its financial support payment to the UNRWA until the Palestinians return to the negotiating table with Israel.

UNRWA plays a significant role in supporting Palestinian refugees by providing access to education, healthcare, social services and employment in the occupied Palestinian territories and in neighboring states.

--IANS

him/vd

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The UN Children's Fund (Unicef) on Sunday said it had detected a total of 4,011 suspected cases of diphtheria in camps for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, where 31 people have died due to a serious outbreak of the infectious disease.

Unicef spokesperson Benjamin Steinlechner told Efe news that it was a very serious outbreak, to which Unicef and the World Health Organisation, along with the Bangladesh Health Ministry, have responded with a large-scale vaccination campaign to mitigate the risks of the disease spreading further.

"The latest number of suspected cases is 4,011. However these are not all confirmed diphtheria cases. Out of the 4,011 cases, so far 61 cases have been confirmed," he said.

Unicef said in a statement released on Sunday that they are beginning the second phase of the vaccination program on January 25 for 475,000 minors in refugee camps for Rohingyas, who arrived in Bangladesh to escape violence against them in Myanmar.

The vaccination has to be carried out in three phases to be effective, it said.

During the first phase, which began on December 12 and concluded on December 31, nearly 150,000 children aged six weeks to seven years, and 166,000 children between seven and 17 were vaccinated against diphtheria and other diseases.

The number of suspected cases of the highly infectious respiratory disease, which can even be contracted from coughing or a sneeze, increased by nearly 800 in less than 10 days, after the WHO recorded 3,155 cases on January 5.

Rohingyas in refugee camps at Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar live in conditions ripe for the propagation of infectious diseases such as cholera, measles, rubella and diphtheria.

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 when Myanmar security forces launched 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 Bangladesh and Myanmar have reached an agreement on the process of repatriation for Rohingya refugees who have reached Bangladesh which is expected to begin within two months.

--IANS

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Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is going to host a coordination meeting between the Centre and various states and union territories to review the implementation on the ground of various central schemes for minorities welfare.

Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said on Tuesday that the meeting will be held in Lucknow on Thursday (January 18) and would be hosted by Adityanath.

The meeting, to be presided over by Naqvi, will see participation from ministers and senior officials from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Chandigarh.

"The meeting would discuss the status of implementation of a plethora of central schemes for minorities' welfare and development and also the roadmap for further implementation and improvement," Naqvi said.

The central government will be holding coordination meetings with the states to review the implementation on the ground of these central schemes.

Naqvi said that the government is mulling to open Navodaya schools in minority concentration districts to provide better opportunities to the minorities.

However, he added that these schools would not serve exclusively to minority students only and students from other communities would also be given admission.

"The idea is to have around 30-35 per cent of students from minorities and rest from other community...There would not be any reservation for minority students," he said.

He said the government is also working on madrasa modernisation and over the last one-and-a-half years, around 1,400 madrasas across the country have been linked with the scheme.

"We are working on the concept of '3T's, that is, teacher, tiffin and toilet. We are providing teachers to the madrasas for subjects like English, Maths, Science, computer etc to link the madrasa students with mainstream education," Naqvi said.

More such meetings will soon be held in Mumbai and Kolkata, he said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The US on Tuesday called for a new bilateral relationship with Pakistan at the conclusion of a top US diplomat's two-day visit here.

Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia Alice Wells highlighted the need to step up measures against in order for the US-Pakistan relationship to develop, Efe news agency reported.

"Ambassador Wells underlined that the US seeks to move toward a new relationship with Pakistan, based on our mutual interest in realizing a stable and prosperous region," according to the US Embassy in Islamabad.

Wells, who did not address the press during her stay in Pakistan, headed the first high-level visit by the US to Pakistan, following the former's decision earlier this month to suspend security aid to the country.

During her visit, she urged the Pakistani government to act against the Haqqani network, a faction of the Afghan Taliban that Washington and Kabul claim have taken refuge in Pakistan along with other terror groups.

The US diplomat underlined that US's South Asia strategy represents "an opportunity to work together" in bringing peace to Afghanistan, defeating the Islamic State and eliminating terrorist groups that threaten both the US and Pakistan.

As part of this strategy, unveiled in August by US President Donald Trump, the US announced an increase of 3,000 troops in Afghanistan in September.

On January 4, Washington suspended its coalition support funds program towards Pakistan, amounting up to $900 million, until Islamabad took decisive steps in the fight against .

The announcement came after Trump posted a message on Twitter on January 1, in which he accused Islamabad of "lies and deceit" and "giving safe haven to the terrorists" after receiving $33 billion from the US over the last 15 years.

On Monday, Wells met Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua, who expressed to need for carrying forward the relations with the US in an environment of trust and mutual respect, according to a statement by the Pakistan Foreign Ministry.

The US and Afghanistan for years have accused Pakistan of providing refuge to the Taliban's Haqqani network, which stages attacks on US and Afghan troops, a claim that Islamabad denies.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Defence Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan has said that the US has been trying to convince Pakistan that India is not a threat and that Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards its neighbour.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," Dawn on Tuesday quoted Dastgir Khan as saying.

Regretting how the US "downplayed" India's "aggressive posturing" along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning in Afghanistan.

He called for "ruthlessly candid dialogue" with Washington to remove all types of misconceptions and misunderstandings.

"It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," Dastgir Khan said.

He alleged that "India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan".

Terming 2017 as the "deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians", he said that India today is a "highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour".

"The unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace," the Minister added.

Dastgir Khan also said the Indian government had "accelerated Pakistan bashing".

"The case of Kulbhushan Jhadav is a proof of his attempts to create unrest in other countries," nation.com.pk quoted the Minister as saying.

He said Pakistan was a responsible nuclear state and it would continue with its policy of "full spectrum deterrence".

"Pakistan will continue its policy in line with the policy of credible minimum deterrence and avoidance of armed race," the Defence Minister said.

--IANS

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According to Debt-laden Air India will be split into four entities ahead of sale, if the government is successful in privatising Air India this year, it would be creating history. This decision should have been taken before abolishing the Planning Commission. The privatisation of Air India was a direct attack on the entrepreneurial spirit which creates economic growth, and the worst decision taken by Indira Gandhi. The privatisation will be faced by the powerful labor union of Air India that receives support from various political parties. The Air India labor force has been pampered. For example, even after the employees retire, they and their families get a free travel anywhere in the world. Such benefits continue even when Air India is a heavily indebted state-owned enterprise.


News of Delhi's tryst with smog in recent years seems to have travelled far and wide. So much so that foreign visitors now plan their itinerary around the weather. On Tuesday, when the city got a rare respite from the high pollution levels, the premier of Australia's Victoria state, Daniel Andrews, who is on his first official visit to the country, did not hide his enthusiasm.
appear to be in the air. Governments at the Centre as also in the states are busy undertaking all kinds of . But there are crucial differences in the way the Centre and the states are approaching this idea.
The CPI-M on Monday, citing media reports, said it was "shocking" that Security Adviser Ajit Doval attended a meeting at Home Minister Rajnath Singh's house to discuss the election strategy in Tripura.
As many as six more states, including Gujarat, Haryana and Bihar, on Tuesday, joined the government's centralised e-way bill system for inter-state road transportation of goods in the GST regime, taking the total to ten.

Under the Goods and Services Tax rolled out from July last year, inter-state movement of goods beyond 10 km, with a value of Rs 50,000 and above, will mandatorily require e-way bill from February 1.

Four states - Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Kerala -- had already started using e-way Bill.

Today, six more states -- Haryana, Bihar, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Sikkim and Jharkhand -- have started the trial runs kickstarted by the GST Network (GSTN).

"Other states are also likely to join us soon in this initiative and it will implement it throughout the country from next month.

Transporters and other taxpayers will not be required to visit any tax office or check post under this system and the E-way Bill can be generated electronically," GSTN CEO Prakash Kumar said.

Transporters who want to generate e-way bill can visit the 'ewaybill.nic.in' portal and register themselves by giving the GSTIN. Transporters who are not registered under GST can enrol themselves under e-way bill system by providing their PAN or Aadhaar to generate the eWay Bill.

There is a provision for cancellation of e-way Bill within 24 hours of its generation.
Sixteen Tamil Nadu fishermen were today arrested by the Sri Lankan Navy for allegedly fishing in their waters near Katchatheevu islet.

More than 2,500 fishermen from Mandapam and Rameswaram had ventured into the sea yesterday and were fishing off Katchatheevu when the Lankan naval men came to the spot and snapped the fishing nets of 100 boats before chasing them away, Assistant Director of Fisheries Department, Mandapam, Gopinath said.

Sixteen fishermen were arrested and taken to Kangesanthurai in the island nation, he said adding four boats were impounded.

Condemning the frequent arrest of the fishermen, Rameswaram Fishermen Association President, P Sesuraja urged the Centre to intervene and help them fish in the traditional waters in Palk Strait.

Over 3,500 fishermen from the state were on January 9 chased away by the Lankan naval personnel who had damaged some boats by pelting stones and snapped the fishing nets of around 50 vessels, for allegedly fishing in their territorial waters off Katchatheevu islet.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Police in southern Germany say a school bus has rammed into a house without braking, injuring 21 children.

Mannheim police spokesman Christoph Kunkel said today three helicopters helped bring the children, including six with serious injuries, to the hospital for treatment.

He said the bus crashed into the side of a house in the town of Eberbach, about 50 km east of Mannheim, just after 7 am.

He says the cause of the accident isn't immediately clear but that police are interviewing the driver of the bus.

The bus was full at the time of the accident but police did not have specifics on how many children were on board.

Kunkel says a wide area around the accident scene has been shut down as the incident is investigated.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An Assistant Sub-Inspector of India Reserve Battalion (IRB), posted at the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) camp, allegedly shot dead three persons at Daund near here today.

The suspect Sanjay Baliram Shinde later locked himself in his house, police said.

One of the deceased was a close relative of the suspect, a police official said.

According to police, Shinde opened fire at two different places - Nagar Mori and Borawake Nagar --- in Daund, killing three persons.

Additional Superintendent of Police Sandip Pakhale said the reason behind the attack was still unknown.

"The accused is still at large. We are outside his house. Since he has a weapon, we are treading cautiously," the officer said.

Tension prevailed in Daund after the incident with curious citizens gathering outside the suspect's house, a police officer said.

"SRPF companies and additional force from Pune were summoned to control the law and order situation," he said.

According to a senior SRPF official, Shinde belongs to India Reserve Battalion, Kolhapur, which is a part of SRPF.

"Due to unavailability of space in Kolhapur, some IRB companies are kept at SRPF Group 5 and Group 7 in Daund. The accused Shinde is under the administrative control of Commandant, SRPF 16 Kolhapur," said the officer.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A moderate but shallow 4.4-magnitude quake jolted Athens today, the national observatory and experts said.

The quake had a depth of just five kilometres and an epicentre 24 kilometres northeast of the Greek capital. It was followed by weaker aftershocks, the observatory said.

"The 4.4-magnitude earthquake was felt across the capital and as far as Lamia and Corinth," Efthymios Lekkas, head of Greece's state earthquake planning and protection organisation told state television ERT.

"Residents should not worry, we are not expecting something bigger," he said.

The national observatory had initially given a 4.2 magnitude for the quake.

Lekkas said the area of the epicentre was characterised by "small faults that don't have the ability to cause something greater."



There was no immediate report of damage or injuries.

In July, a 6.7-magnitude quake killed two people and injured hundreds on the tourist island of Kos and across the Aegean Sea in the Turkish resort of Bodrum.

Greece and Turkey sit on significant fault lines and have been regularly hit by earthquakes in recent years.

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At least six security personnel have been killed in terror attacks in Pakistan's troubled Balochistan province.

This morning, a police constable was gunned down in Quetta following an attack yesterday in Turbat when militants shot dead five Frontier Corps (FC) personnel.

The policeman identified as Naseer Ahmed was on his way to work when two unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle fired at him and sped away.

Last evening, a convoy of paramilitary FC came under attack in the mountainous region of Shapok in Kech district, 50 kilometres from Turbat town.

Five FC personnel were killed while six others were injured, officials said.

Since the start of the year, militants and separatists have stepped up their attacks on security personnel and installations in Balochistan.

The attacks started on January 1 when militants carried out twin assaults on a security checkpost in Chaman injuring three security personnel.

The next day, six FC officials were injured in a bomb blast near the suburbs of Quetta.

Last week, five policemen were killed when a suicide bomber rammed his motorcycle into a police truck in Quetta while two civilians also died in the attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Returning to the place where he was orphaned nine years ago in a terror attack, 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg today appeared bewildered with the media frenzy as cameras popped to catch his glimpse.

Moshe, who was a toddler when Pakistan-based terrorists killed his parents at Nariman House, appeared visibly moved as he spent almost two hours going around the five-storeyed building in south Mumbai.

The Israeli resident had kosher food at Nariman House.

His grandparents and two uncles, who accompanied him from Israel, were with him during his Nariman House visit.

Moshe's Indian nanny Sandra Samuels, who had saved him during the terror attack, was also present.

His father Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and mother Rivka were killed in Nariman House, which was a terror target during the 26/11 Mumbai attack in 2008.

The Jewish couple ran a cultural and outreach centre for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement at the Nariman House in South Mumbai's Colaba area.

"The visit to Nariman House was an emotional experience for Moshe," his grandfather Shimon Rosenberg said.

During Moshe's visit to Nariman House, there was a large gathering of members of the Jewish community, police, security personnel and media around the building, whose entry was restricted.

Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, who runs the Chabad House, said, "Finally, Moshe is back home. The visit is very emotional for him. He is here to see the living memorial project".

Last year, Rosenberg had requested the Indian ambassador to Israel that the Nariman House building be registered with the land registry department as belonging to Moshe.

Moshe, who landed here this morning from Israel, went to the iconic Taj hotel in Colaba, and then proceeded to Nariman House.

"Shalom...bahut khushi (I'm very happy)," said a shy Moshe, speaking to media at the Mumbai airport.

"I feel very happy to come to India, to Nariman House where I am going to pray. I will say hi to the people of India. I feel very good in this country," Rosenberg said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met Moshe and his grandparents during a visit to Israel in July last and told him that he could visit India anytime.

While meeting Modi, Moshe had said, "I remember our connection to Nariman House. I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai and when I get older, live there".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Police today arrested activists of a right-wing organisation when they were heading for a college run by a Catholic organisation here to perform 'aarti' of Bharat Mata.

Defying the district magistrate's order, the Vishwa Sanatan Sangh leader Updesh Rana had announced that he will perform aarti of Bharat Mata ('Mother India') inside Saint Mary's College, Superintendent of Police Vineet Kapoor told PTI.

"We arrested Rana when he was entering the town. It was a preventive arrest. Besides, we have arrested 29 activists of the outfit in Bhopal and Vidisha on their way to the college," the SP said.

The college had moved the Madhya Pradesh High Court recently, seeking security.

On January 4, activists of right-wing organisations created ruckus after they were allegedly not allowed to perform aarti of a portrait of Bharat Mata (which they were carrying) on the college premises.

The HC had asked the Vidisha district administration about the security provided to the college. The district authorities told the court that they had provided security to the college on January 4 too, and were committed to protect the constitutional rights of the institute.

Today, around 300 policemen were deployed in and around the college, SP Kapoor said.

The VSS had announced on social media that it was going to organise a massive aarti in the college today. It hadn't taken the permission of the district magistrate for the event, another police officer said.

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The ADB today said it has invested USD 50 million in True North VI LLP (True North VI) to provide equity capital to middle-market companies in India embarking on their next phase of growth.

True North was established in 1999 (as India Value Fund) with a view to investing in mid-sized, India-centric businesses.

"Through its investment in True North VI, ADB will support market leading businesses in India that require sophisticated funding solutions to realise their growth plans," said Janette Hall, ADB's Director of the Private Sector Investment Funds and Special Initiatives Division.

True North VI is a closed-end private equity fund that aims to make up to 10 equity investments between USD 50-150 million each in financial services, healthcare, and consumer sectors.

True North may also target investments in technology products and services companies, Manila-headquartered Asian Development Bank (ADB) said in a statement.

Mumbai-based True North has launched five separate investment funds, with a combined corpus of approximately USD 2 billion.

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An Afghan official says a mortar attack in northern Faryab province has killed five people.

Karim Yuresh, the provincial police chief's spokesman, says the attack took place during the weekly bazaar in Khwaja Sabz Push district, which was hit by three mortar shells on today morning.

He says 45 people, including women and children, were also wounded in the attack.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks but Yuresh blamed the Taliban.

In Kabul, meanwhile, Nasart Rahimi deputy spokesman for the Interior Ministry, says security forces arrested three suspects following a rocket attack late Monday night on Wazir Akbar Khan, a key central neighborhood in the Afghan capital that houses many diplomatic missions, agencies and non- governmental groups.

Rahimi says no casualties were reported.

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The crisis in the Supreme Court seems to be far from over with Attorney General K K Venugopal today saying the matter seems to be unresolved and Supreme Court Bar Association President Vikas Singh hoping it would be settled by this weekend.

Venugopal, who yesterday asserted that everything was settled in the judiciary, today said, "I think it (crisis) has not been settled. Lets hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days".

A crisis erupted on January 12 after four senior judges -- Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph -- openly castigated the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

Asked about the crisis, senior advocate and Supreme Court Bar Association President (SCBA) Singh today said there was a likelihood of the crisis being resolved by the end of this week.

"By the end of this week the crisis is likely to be resolved," he told PTI, when asked about the present situation.

Singh said when he had handed over the resolution of the SCBA to the CJI on Sunday, he had got the impression that the crisis would be resolved.

Singh said the CJI was hopeful that within a week things will return to normalcy.

He also said as of now it appeared that everything is returning to normal.

The SCBA in its emergency meeting on Saturday had passed a resolution asking the chief justice to convene a full court meeting of the apex court judges and transfer all pending PILs for hearing before the five senior-most judges who are members of the collegium.

Asked whether he had a meeting or spoke with any of the four judges or the CJI, Venugopal said, "Nothing of that sort has happened".

However, he hoped things will be sorted out in the next couple of days.

The four top Supreme Court judges had yesterday resumed work, belying the simmering tensions sparked by their accusations against the Chief Justice, while the Attorney General had described the unprecedented crisis as "a storm in a tea cup".

In the presser, the four judges had flagged certain problems, including the assigning of cases in the apex court, and said there were certain issues afflicting the country's highest court.

Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra had on Sunday met a seven-member delegation of the Bar Council of India and Supreme Court Bar Association President Vikas Singh and had assured them that the crisis would be sorted out soon and congeniality would prevail.

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The Allahabad High Court today issued a contempt notice to censor board chairman Prasoon Joshi in connection with the release of the film "Padmaavat" on January 25.

The Lucknow bench of the court granted three weeks' time to Joshi for filing his response to the contempt notice.

It fixed next hearing of the matter in the week commencing February 12.

A bench of Justice Mahendra Dayal passed the order on the petition filed by Kamta Prasad Singhal, who had submitted that he had earlier filed a Public Interest Litigation seeking ban on the release of the movie because it promoted Sati, which is an offence.

After hearing the PIL, the court had on November 9, 2017 dismissed the petition but, simultaneously, it had permitted the petitioner to move his grievance through a representation to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).

Accordingly, he moved the representation before the chairman of the board on November 13, 2017 but Joshi is yet to decide on it and three weeks time given to him by the high court has expired.

At this, the high court issued contempt notice to Joshi.

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The mortal remains of Lance Naik Yogesh Bhadane, killed in firing during a ceasefire violation by Pakistan Army in Jammu and Kashmir, were consigned to flames at his native place in Maharashtra's Dhule district.

Bhadane, 22, who hailed from Khalane village in Dhule, was critically injured in the firing in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district on January 13 and later succumbed to his injuries.

The jawan's body was brought yesterday to his village, located around 330 kms from Mumbai, where the last rites were performed with full state honours, an official in the Dhule district administration said.

Bhadane is survived by his wife.

Pakistan Army troops initiated unprovoked firing on Indian posts from across the border in the Sunderbani sector on Saturday, prompting the Indian troops guarding the Line of Control (LoC) to retaliate strongly and effectively, an Army spokesman earlier said.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger said he is "proud" of Eliza Dushku for speaking out about her alleged molestation at hands of a stunt coordinator on the sets of the "True Lies".

In a Facebook post, Dushku, who played the daughter of Schwarzenegger's character, alleged that she was sexually harassed by Joel Kramer, who was in-charge of her safety on the film sets.

Replying to a tweet by co-star Tom Arnold, the former California governor wrote, "Tom, you bet your a** all of us would have done something. I'm shocked and saddened for Eliza but I am also proud of her - beyond being a great talent and an amazing woman, she is so courageous."



Schwarzenegger joins his "True Lies" co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, who had praised Eliza Dushku for opening up about incident, saying the actor "has awakened us to a new, horrific reality".

Curtis, played Eliza's mother in the James Cameron- directorial, penned a column in Huffington Post saying she had shared the story with her privately a few years ago.

"I was shocked and saddened then and still am today. We have all started to awaken to the fact that the terrible abuses now commonplace in daily reports have been going on for a very long time... Eliza's story has now awakened us from our denial slumber to a new, horrific reality. The abuse of children," Curtis wrote.

Cameron had also praised Duskhu for her bravery in speaking out and said had he had any inkling about such behaviour, "there would've been no mercy".

Meanwhile, Kramer has denied Dushku's claims calling them as "atrocious lies".

He has been fired by his agency, Worldwide Production Agency following molestation allegations.

"WPA has elected to part ways with Joel Kramer based on the allegations of misconduct now being reported. Such behaviour is unacceptable and entirely at odds with the the standards of conduct we demand of ourselves, and expect from our clients," the agency's president and general counsel Richard Caleel said in a statement to Deadline.

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ASK Property Investment Advisors (ASK PIA) today said it will invest Rs 150 crore in two middle-income group residential projects coming up in Pune.

The company, a part of the financial services firm ASK Group, plans to invest Rs 80 crore in a project developed by Kumar Properties and Rs 70 crore in 'Avon Vista' of Naiknavare Developers.

While the investment of Rs 80 crore will be made from ASK PIA's offshore fund, the Rs 70 crore investment is deployed from the firm's recently launched ASK Real Estate Special Situations Fund-I (ASK RESSF-I), the company said in a statement issued here.

"Pune continues to garner interest from several domestic and multinational companies to set up and expand operations here as it has an advantage of proximity to financial centres and a preferred destination for IT and manufacturing companies," ASK PIA Managing Director and CEO Amit Bhagat said.

Kumar Properties' project offers over 600 units of 2-3 BHK, while 'Avon Vista' of Naiknavare Developers offers 500 units. Both these projects are expected to generate revenues of around Rs 1,000 crore, the release stated.

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The Supreme Court today said the attacks on those opting for inter-caste marriage were "absolutely illegal" and no 'khap panchayats, individual or the society can question any adult woman and man marrying of their own choice.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud also pulled up the Centre for not taking the matter seriously and not filing its suggestions on the issue, saying such panchayats or bodies cannot threaten adult women and men for marrying each other.

Khaps are caste or community organisations, particularly in the rural areas of north India, which at times act as quasi-judicial bodies and pronounce harsh punishments based on regressive and age-old customs and traditions.

The bench told Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Pinky Anand, who represented the Centre, that if the government does not come out with its suggestions, then the court would pass order on the suggestions given by senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, who is assisting the court as an amicus curiae.

"You take it from us, whatever the amicus says about khap, we are not concerned with that. What we are concerned is that when an adult girl or boy gets into marriage, no khap, no individual or no society can question them," the bench said.

"Whenever there is any kind of collective attack on a boy or a girl, who are adults, it is absolutely illegal," it said.

The apex court also said such associations cannot collectively punish any men or women for marrying each other of their own choice.

When a man, who was appearing in person on behalf of the khap panchayats, told the court that khaps were not opposing such marriages and there was a social change now, the bench said they should not take it in a regressive manner.

"Even if panchayat is a collective body, they cannot threaten a girl or a boy from marrying each other. Whatever it is, it shall not be archaic. It should be alive," the court said.

During the hearing, the ASG sought some time to file a response to the suggestions given by Ramachandran, who opposed it saying the plea relates to the issue of honour killings and the government should not delay the matter.

The amicus said the Law Commission, in its report, had dealt with this aspect and suggested a legislation to deal with issue, but the Centre was "taking time" to get responses from the respective state governments as to whether such a law could be passed.

"If you (Centre) do not have suggestions, we will pass order on the suggestions of the amicus," the bench told the ASG, adding it might evolve a mechanism to deal with the issue.

The bench also reminded the ASG that the matter has been pending before the top court since 2010.

The ASG, however, said the government would respond to the suggestions and sought three weeks time for it.

The bench granted time to the Centre to file suggestions and posted the matter for hearing on February 5.

The apex court had earlier sought suggestions from the petitioner, an NGO 'Shakti Vahini', the amicus curiae and khap panchayats on the issue.

The NGO had moved the court in 2010 seeking directions to the central and state governments to prevent and control honour crimes by taking a number of measures.

Earlier, the court had invited khap panchayats to hear their views before issuing any order to stop them from harassing and killing couples and women in the name of honour.

The Centre had earlier pleaded with the apex court to put in place a mechanism to monitor crimes against women by khap panchayats, as the police was not able to protect women facing ordeal at their hands.

The top court had also said that as a pilot project, it would examine the situation in three districts of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh where khap panchayats were active.

It had summoned the Superintendents of Police of Rohtak and Jind districts of Haryana and that of Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh to apprise the court of the situation there.

Several cases of women and men falling victims to khap diktats have been reported over the years, particularly in states like Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

In 2007, a Haryana court had awarded capital punishment to five persons and life sentence to one for murdering a couple on the orders of a self-styled khap panchayat for marrying against societal norms.

Similarly, a woman from Rajasthan was ordered to live with a man whose wife had eloped with her husband by the Khap of Notara Bhopat village in April 2015.

In 2014, a community panchayat in Uttar Pradesh had banned girls from wearing jeans and keeping mobile phones, claiming that these were having a "bad" effect on them and were responsible for eve-teasing incidents.

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The Biodiesel Association of India (BDAI) has sought a revision in Goods and Services Tax (GST) of 18 per cent levied on biodiesel to 5 per cent saying higher taxation will have an adverse impact on the industry.

BDAI has written letters to the Union finance minister Arun Jaitley and finance ministers of West Bengal and Rajasthan seeking their support for reducing the GST from 18 per cent to 5 per cent.

The apex biodiesel industry body in its letter has mentioned that in the pre-GST regime, only six per cent excise duty was levied on biodiesel and no VAT was imposed on it mainly to promote the use of the clean fuel.

"States like West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Haryana and Chhattisgarh were levying only the excise duty. But with the implementation of GST, the statutory levy on biodiesel has gone up to 18 per cent which has made it costlier than high speed diesel," BDAI said in its letters.

Currently, biodiesel is used by oil marketing companies (IOCL, HPCL, BPCL), Indian Railways, state transport corporations, and port authorities, among others. The industry is also in discussions with the army, navy and air force for using the green fuel.

"Indian Railways was able to start blending across 15 zones, but stopped it due to increased burden of GST. The state road transport corporations of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana have created blending infrastructure but have not been able to absorb the increase in GST resulting in complete stoppage of the blending programme," BDAI said.

It further pointed out that several biodiesel retail outlets established in the states of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh have become non-functional due to increased biodiesel price.

This may cause a major setback by way of thousands of jobs losses, BDAI said.

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Police said an explosion has torn through three adjacent homes in Belgium's northern port town of Antwerp and injured up to 20 people.

Antwerp police said in a statement today that most of the injuries were slight. Authorities rescued seven people from under the rubble.

Antwerp police spokesman Wouter Bruyns told VRT network: "There are about 10, a maximum 20 casualties, fortunately including many slightly injured."



The explosion ripped through the homes late in the evening. Antwerp police quickly announced that the blast was not part of a terror attack.

At least one building totally collapsed. Rescue workers were still going through the debris around midnight.

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Bitcoin, the best known of hundreds of 'virtual' coins, slumped today to a six-week low below $12,000 as analysts blamed a rush by various jurisdictions to regulate the sector.

The final weeks of last year were marked by bitcoin mania as the unit topped $20,000, but it lost some 20 per cent in today trading which saw most of its fellow cryptocurrencies similarly wilt.

"Bitcoin has dropped below $12,000, a level not seen since early December. The cryptocurrency has fallen nearly 40 percent since its all-time high," noted David Madden, market analyst with CMC Markets.

According to crypto exchange coinmarketcap.com, other major virtual currencies ethereum, ripple and bitcoin cash, a clone which split from the original last year, posted double- digit losses by early afternoon.

"Explaining moves in bitcoin is always tricky but this plunge ... may well be a result of recent signs that regulatory pressures are building," said Neil Wilson, analyst for ETX Capital, as several countries, notably China and South Korea, target a crackdown.

Last week saw prices sag after the South Korean government said it was planning to ban cryptocurrency exchanges -- though it later backtracked -- while Justice Minister Park Sang-Ki said Seoul was preparing a bill to shut down the country's virtual coin exchanges to slam the brakes on a craze which "has started to resemble gambling and speculation."



South Korea is a hotbed for cryptocurrency trading, accounting for some 20 percent of global bitcoin transactions, while much of the "mining" -- computerised creation -- of the coin units is undertaken in China.

"South Korea holds some of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, so a ban is expected to disrupt Bitcoin trading," said a note from British consultancy Capital Economics, which also alluded to Chinese concerns of bitcoins's effect on financial stability.

Lukman Otunuga, research analyst at FXTM forex forecaster, also blamed the market jitters on the political regulatory backdrop surrounding the sector, which topped $600 billion in market capitalisation in mid-December.

"Bitcoin was the talk across financial markets for all the wrong reasons on Tuesday, after prices tumbled sharply to their weakest level since early December," said Otunuga, noting talk of tighter regulation "has effectively eroded investor appetite for bitcoin.

"With reports on a renewed crackdown on the cryptocurrency in China fueling anxiety over future restrictions, further losses could be on the cards in the near term," added Otunuga, noting the latest wild ride in value "should remind investors on how explosively volatile and unpredictable" cryptocurrencies can be.

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked BJP leader Ajay Agrawal to explain his locus in filing an appeal in the politically-sensitive Rs 640 million Bofors pay-offs case and asked how could the matter be entertained at the instance of a third party.

Agrawal, who had contested the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 from Rai Bareli against then Congress president Sonia Gandhi, has filed an appeal in the apex court against the 2005 verdict of the high court, quashing all charges against three Hinduja brothers and the Bofors company.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra today said when the CBI has not filed any appeal in the apex court challenging the May 31, 2005 Delhi High Court judgement, how could a private person file an appeal in the matter.

"When the prosecutor has remained silent, why should we go into it? The occurrence took place in 1986. 31 years have passed, nobody challenged it. You are a third party and you have to satisfy us on this issue," the bench observed.

The top court also asked questions to Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Maninder Singh, appearing for the CBI, and said, "you have not filed an appeal in the last 12-13 years. What do you propose to do now?"



The ASG replied though the CBI did not file the appeal, a special leave petition was filed by private parties, who were involved in the case, which was withdrawn later.

He said after the High Court quashed all charges in the case, there were deliberations whether to challenge the decision of the HC or not.

However, after Agrawal filed the appeal, CBI has been appearing in the matter as one of the respondents.

The apex court posted the matter for hearing on February 2 saying, "we expect the petitioner (Agrawal) to argue the matter on the next date of hearing and argue the parameters on grant of leave".

In law, locus standi means the right to bring an action, to be heard in court or to address it on a matter before it.

At the outset, senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who was present in the courtroom, objected to the plea and said this was a 31-year-old case. He also questioned the locus of the petitioner and said the appeal was filed by a third party who is not connected with the case.

Agrawal, strongly objected to his submission and asked "for whom he is appearing in the matter".

Sibal told the bench that earlier he had appeared for late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the case.

Justice R S Sodhi of Delhi High Court, since retired, had on May 31, 2005 quashed all charges against the three Hinduja brothers -- Srichand, Gopichand and Prakashchand -- and the Bofors company, castigating the CBI for its handling of the case, saying it had cost the exchequer about Rs 2.5 billion.

Before the 2005 verdict of Justice Sodhi, another judge of the Delhi High Court, retired Justice J D Kapoor, had on February 4, 2004, exonerated the late prime minister in the case and directed the framing of charge of forgery under section 465 of the IPC against Bofors company.

The Rs 14.37 billion deal between India and Swedish arms manufacturer AB Bofors for the supply of 400 155mm Howitzer guns for the Indian Army was entered into on March 24, 1986.

Swedish Radio on April 16, 1987, had claimed that the company had paid bribes to top Indian politicians and defence personnel.

The CBI on January 22, 1990 had registered the FIR for alleged offences of criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery under the Indian Penal Code and other sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act against Martin Ardbo, the then president of AB Bofors, alleged middleman Win Chadda and the Hinduja brothers.

It had alleged that certain public servants and private persons in India and abroad had entered into a criminal conspiracy between 1982 and 1987 in pursuance of which the offences of bribery, corruption, cheating and forgery were committed.

The first charge sheet in the case was filed on October 22, 1999, against Chadda, Ottavio Quattrocchi, the then defence secretary S K Bhatnagar, Ardbo and the Bofors company. A supplementary charge sheet was filed against the Hinduja brothers on October 9, 2000.

A special CBI court in Delhi on March 4, 2011, had discharged Quattrocchi from the case saying the country could not afford to spend hard-earned money on his extradition which had already cost Rs 2.5 billion.

Quattrocchi, who had fled from here on July 29-30, 1993, never appeared before any court in India to face prosecution. He passed away on July 13, 2013. The other accused persons who died are Bhatnagar, Chadda and Ardbo.
Boko Haram jihadists have killed nine people in two separate attacks in northeast Nigeria, militia members and local residents said today, underlining the persistent threat to civilians.

The first attack happened at about 11:00 am (1000 GMT) on Monday when six people collecting firewood were shot dead in Jinene village, near the border town of Ngala, in Borno state.

The second occurred in Pallam village, in the Madagali area of neighbouring Adamawa state, at about 11:30 pm, and saw the militants seize food, before burning several shops and homes.

Nigeria's military and government maintain the insurgents are a spent force, after nearly nine years of violence that has killed at least 20,000 people and forced more than 2.6 million others from their homes.

But hit-and-run raids and suicide bomb attacks, including in and around camps for the displaced, are a constant menace, exacerbating already precarious living conditions in the impoverished remote region.

Loggers, many of whom live in the camps and are forced to collect wood in the unprotected bush to to sell, have been particularly vulnerable. Scores have been killed in recent months.

Umar Kachalla, a civilian militia leader from the town of Gamboru, near Ngala, said the latest attack was carried out by jihadists who arrived on motorcycles.

"Six people were killed by the gunmen who also abducted five girls who joined the loggers to collect firewood from the Jinene woods," he told AFP.

The loggers were among 80,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) sheltering in a camp at Ngala, three kilometres away.

"Some of the loggers managed to escape and made it back to the camp and informed the soldiers," he added.

The attackers made off with some 500 goats after they shot and injured two shepherds in a field near the displaced camp. The goats belonged to some of the IDPs.

Ngala resident Abubakar Yusuf, who gave similar account, said residents were afraid to leave the town for fear of Boko Haram attacks.

"They are out in the bush, moving on motorcycles and killing anyone they come across," he said.

In August 2014, Boko Haram seized Ngala and Gamboru. Nigerian troops retook both towns in September 2015 with the help of Chadian forces after months of fighting.

But despite the recapture, Boko Haram fighters continue to launch sporadic raids, ambushing troops and vehicles, as well as attacking and abducting farmers.

At least 31 loggers have not been seen since January 2 and are believed to have been abducted near Gamboru.

They had left the town to fetch firewood in a Boko Haram hotspot 15 kilometres away, where 10 other loggers had been killed two weeks earlier.

In September last year Boko Haram killed seven people when they fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the IDP camp.

Monday's attack in Adamawa was the first in the state this year after a spate of raids and suicide bombings, including in November, when at least 50 people were killed at a mosque in the town of Mubi.

Maina Ularamu, a former Madagali local government chairman, said three people were killed and two others were critically injured.

Resident David Maigrai supported Ularamu's account and added: "They burnt several shops and many homes. They also stole food.

"On their way out of the village, they ran into a group of vigilantes on patrol in Kuda village, who engaged them in a shoot-out, killing two of the attackers."



There have been repeated attacks in and around Madagali, which borders Borno state and the militants' Sambisa Forest stronghold.

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BSE arm Marketplace Tech Infra Services (MTISPL) has inked a pact with Thomson Reuters to avail the latter's powered solutions -- proTRade, i3 Algos and Bracket Order -- a move which will help bourse's members trade more efficiently.

"We are extremely delighted to offer mobile trading application on BEST (BSE Electronic Smart Trader) platform. This will enable members to provide all different types of front end access (Exe, Browser and Mobile) available, so that investors can trade using any preferred mode," BSE managing director and CEO Ashishkumar Chauhan said in a statement.

"It shall be our endeavor to provide members world class technology to access domestic and international exchange," he added.

proTRade is Thomson Reuters exchange certified mobile app, which would help BSE members and their customers trade securely on BEST platform.

Besides, i3 Algos built on Thomson Reuters NEST platform will provide investors comprehensive tools with predefined set of highly sophisticated and comprehensive algorithms for customers to choose from, to execute their orders programmatically in a short span of time.

Meanwhile, Bracket Order, would enable BSE members and their customers to place orders by entering parameters for taking new positions, squaring off the positions and keeping a stop loss for those positions.

Thomson Reuters managing director (South Asia) Pradeep Lankapalli said: "Our solutions for the BEST platform will help promote agility and efficiency in trading and enable the broking industry achieve greater scalability, transparency and innovation".

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The Border Security Force has seized 23 kilogramme of ganja from near the Bangladesh border in North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, BSF said today.

The BSF troops of Amudia Border outpost (BOP) noticed some suspicious movement by miscreants yesterday night near the India Bangladesh Border Fence (IBBF). When the troops challenged the the miscreants, they fled leaving behind their head load, a BSF release said.

After thorough search of the area the BSF troops recovered six bundles from the spot in which 23 kilogramme of ganja was packed, the release said.

The seized ganja has been handed over to Customs Office Tentulia, it said.

Last year, BSF South Bengal Frontier has seized 866.72 kilogramme of ganja and apprehended four Indian and five Bangladeshi nationals involved in ganja smuggling, the release added.

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Japanese tech major Canon today said it expects to clock double-digit revenue growth this year on the back of strong performance across its imaging and printing businesses.

"Year 2017 was a good year for us. Compared to 2016 that saw single-digit growth, we saw a double-digit growth in 2017. We are confident of continuing the double-digit growth in 2018 as well," Canon India President and CEO Kazutada Kobayashi told PTI.

He declined to comment on revenue numbers as the company is finalising its financial numbers for the entire year.

In 2016, the company clocked revenues of about Rs 2,450 crore.

Kobayashi said the company had taken steps like bringing in products with a "local fit" and expanding coverage that had helped drive business expansion in the Indian market.

"Both our imaging and printing businesses are doing well in India," he added.

The company today launched a new range of ink tank printers, bringing in six new models, priced between Rs 8,195 and Rs 17,425.

"With its improved features, providing high productivity at an effective cost, the new G series is a perfect solution for the student, home and small office set ups to explore their creative selves," he said.

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The CBI today filed a charge sheet against former Madhya Pradesh minister Laxmikant Sharma, his OSD and 93 others for alleged irregularities in the recruitment of contractual teachers through Vyapam in 2011, officials said.

Besides Sharma and his the then OSD O P Shukla, the charge sheet, filed in a special court in Bhopal, also named Pankaj Trivedi, the then controller of examinations at Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board also known as Vyapam; the then principal system analyst in Vyapam Nitin Mohindra, two other officials, six middlemen and 83 candidates, they said.

The agency has charged them with criminal conspiracy, cheating, forgery, violation of IT Act, provisions of prevention of corruption act and others, CBI spokesperson Abhishek Dayal said here.

The CBI registered an FIR in the case in 2015 on the directions of the Supreme Court.

During the investigation, the agency examined the computers of Mohindra and also the OMR sheets which showed marks of 84 candidates were allegedly increased to ensure their selection through the contractual teachers recruitment examination, the officials said.

According to the CBI, one beneficiary candidate was absconding and was not named in the charge sheet as probe was pending against him.

Some of these candidates got favours at the instance of Sharma who had given their roll numbers to Trivedi for inflating numbers in their results, the agency has alleged.

The CBI alleged that Sharma, Shukla and Trivedi were directly involved in collecting details like roll numbers and form numbers which they had provided to Mohindra who then prepared a digital file on his computer carrying these information of candidates who were to be favoured by altering their qualifying marks.

After the results were prepared, Mohindra deleted the marks of these 84 candidates from the result file and inserted inflated scores for these candidates ensuring their qualification, the CBI alleged.

The CBI detected that he could not make changes in the OMR sheets filled by these candidates during the examination, they said.

The agency found these changes in the results while examining OMR sheets which revealed that numbers secured by the candidates in their examination sheets were less than the final results announced through the Vyapam, they said.

The CBI also alleged that Sharma ensured the appointment of Trivedi as controller of examination even though his name was not among the three short-listed candidates for the post.

Sharma, the then minister, allegedly "violated due process of appointment of controller of examinations, vyapam" and went out of the way to appoint Trivedi as controller, the agency alleged.

Trivedi, in return, facilitated illegal selection of certain candidates "sponsored" by Sharma, it alleged.

The CBI has registered 154 regular cases in connection with the scam and filed final reports in over 90 cases.

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China today dismissed as "untrue and irresponsible" the criticism that it made inadequate efforts to save 32 crew members who died after an Iranian oil tanker exploded and sank nearly a week after colliding with a cargo ship off the coast of China.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said at a daily press briefing that China mobilised nine vessels on the day the accident happened and there had been more than 13 rescue vessels at the scene from the second day.

Rescue forces from Shanghai and Jiangsu worked with Japan and South Korea in the rescue operations, Lu said.

The 274-meter-long Sanchi sunk on Sunday after burning for more than a week following a collision with a Hong Kong- registered tanker. All 32 members of its crew -- 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis -- are believed dead.

Operated by Irans National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC), the vessel was taking 136,000 tonnes of light crude oil condensate to South Korea.

Iranian Merchant Mariners Syndicate, an industry NGO, had written to Chinese authorities expressing frustration at the lack of progress in putting out the fire.

"It was clear that the Chinese are not cooperating enough, IMMS vice president Saman Rezaie had said.

Chinas state-run Xinhua agency, however, reported that an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that it is "not true" to say that China had not made adequate efforts when faced with such a complex accident and that China had provided the utmost cooperation to Iran during the process.

"The remarks from the Iranian side shows that the claims of an inadequate rescue are untrue and irresponsible," Lu said.

The entire ship sank on Sunday. No burning was seen on sea surface from a marine surveillance plane at about 1 pm Monday and the oil spill could be easily seen from the air, the Xinhua report said



Lu said China welcomes Iran to join in the investigation of the accident, and will facilitate visas for the families of the crew.

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China has launched a new guided- missile frigate called 'Wuhai', which has stronger anti- submarine capabilities, official media reported today.

Lu Baoqiang, political commissar of a military base under the Northern Theatre Command, conferred the navy ensign and naming certificate to the new frigate (hull number 540) at the ceremony yesterday after which Wuhai officially joined the naval battle sequence, state-run Global Times reported.

The Wuhai is the latest member of the Type 056 corvettes family, which is the Chinese PLA (People's Liberation Army) Navy's main fleet for offshore defense, Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told the daily.

As China's older generation corvettes, the Type 037 and Type 053, are retired, the Type 056 has gradually taken over their missions, Song said.

The main duties of the Wuhai, will include patrolling, guarding, escorting missions, and working with other naval forces to strike enemy ships. It is also capable of engaging in anti-submarine warfare and other comprehensive maritime warfare, the report said.

The new version of Type 056 ships, including the Wuhai, are more equipped with anti-submarine weapons, and while these ships do not have shipboard hangars, they can accommodate anti-submarine helicopters, Song noted.

The Wuhai also features stealth and electromagnetic compatibilities, the report said.

The Type 056 corvettes are 89 meters long and 12 meters wide, with a displacement of 1,300 tonnes.

The modified Type 056 corvettes have been widely deployed by the China Coast Guard as law-enforcement vessels, and are seen in the Huangyan Island in the disputed South China Sea as well as the waters off the disputer Islands in the East China Sea to safeguard China's maritime rights, the report said.

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China today disclosed the details of five typical cases uncovered during a crackdown on online pornography, in a move to deter similar criminal activity.

The National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications said that Internet enterprises and individuals who had produced or distributed child pornography were severely punished in 2017.

In one case, police in Zhengzhou City, central China's Henan Province, arrested four suspects for distributing photos and videos including child pornography, through a profit- making website.

From 2011 to August 2017, Wu Mousheng and three other associates were found to have lured more than 100 juveniles to film indecent videos in the name of filming videos on children's education, according to the office.

The suspects then distributed the videos online and raked in over 500,000 yuan (USD 78,000). The suspects have been transferred to prosecution authorities for investigation.

In another case in Shenyang City, northeast China's Liaoning Province, police arrested a suspect surnamed Wu in August 2017, confiscating five computers, six phones and over 100 child pornography videos. The suspect lured three girls to film such videos by sending them hongbao (red envelopes) containing money, it said.

In other cases, police arrested suspects and seized a number of pornographic photos and videos, state-run Xinhua agency reported.

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Actor Christian Bale has said he regrets working on "Terminator Salvation" and that he even turned down the role thrice before giving his nod to the sci- fi action film.

The 43-year-old actor, who played John Connor in 2009 film, said he eventually accepted the part in order to prove to others that it was a bad decision.

"I said no three times. I thought that the franchise... I went 'Nah, there's no story there.'



"There's a perverse side to me, where people were telling me that, there's no way on God's Earth that I should take that role, and I was thinking the same thing. But when people started verbalising that to me, I started to go, 'Oh really? All right, well watch this then.' So there was a little bit of that involved in the choice," Bale told MTV in an interview.

The actor said the film is a "great thorn" in his side and he wishes the makers could have revived the film franchise.

"It's a great thorn in my side, because I wish we could have reinvigorated (the franchise). And unfortunately, during production, you could tell that wasn't happening. It's a great shame," he said.

Bale added "Terminator..." was a "learning experience" for him referring to the on-set diatribe against cinematographer Shane Hurlbut leaked.

"That was a very unusual occasion. Great learning lesson for me. No matter how much you lose yourself in a scene, you do not allow yourself to behave that way. And yeah, of course, I've got enormous regrets about it."



The actor previously expressed unhappiness over his performance as Bruce Wayne/ Batman in the Dark Knight trilogy by Christopher Nolan.

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Four senior most judges of the Supreme Court, who had hurled accusations against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra on several issues, today met among themselves, amid hectic parleys between other judges to resolve the crisis.

Their meeting came hours after the CJI reached out to them at the apex court lounge and held parleys with them over tea, before starting the day's proceedings in the apex court.

It is learnt that Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph had a meeting but nothing concrete has emerged. The meeting in the evening took place at the residence of one of these judges.

However, the outcome of the deliberations is not known.

Sources said the judges are likely to meet the CJI tomorrow morning as usual and probably some more deliberations are on the cards as hectic parleys are on to restore normalcy in the top court's functioning.

"As of now, nothing concrete has emerged," sources close to the four judges said.

Some of the judges, lower in the apex court hierarchy, are in favour of some rapprochement at the earliest on the grounds that the reputation of the judiciary is at stake.

The four judges had in an unprecedented press conference on January 12 raised a litany of problems, including the assigning of cases in the apex court, and said there were certain issues afflicting the country's highest court.

A senior advocate said there was a need to resolve the crisis as several important PILs are likely to be heard from tomorrow before the constitution bench of the Supreme Court.

Others said even the matter relating to the death of special judge B H Loya should not have been heard in such a surcharged atmosphere.

Senior advocate and SCBA president Vikas Singh had wondered why some activist lawyers were making a fuss about assignment of sensitive cases in the apex court to judges who are ranked lower in seniority.

Speaking to PTI, Singh in his personal capacity, condemned the reported remarks of another senior advocate who supported the four judges on the allocation of PILs to the five senior most judges of the apex court.

"These activist lawyers are looking for judges who can always give them favourable orders," Singh said.

Amidst the ongoing crisis, a body comprising activists from various fields today said it has handed over a complaint against CJI to the five senior most Supreme Court judges over alleged misconduct in connection with the medical college bribery case.

Advocate Prashant Bhushan, the convenor of Campaign for Judical Accountability and Reforms (CJAR), held a press conference and repeated all the allegations it had raised in its PIL in the case that was dismissed by the Supreme Court with an exemplary cost of Rs 25 lakh.

The petition was dismissed on December 1 last year.

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Congress MP from Uttarakhand Mahendra Singh Mahra said today the party will strongly raise the issue of people who would be displaced by the proposed Pancheshwar dam in Rajya Sabha during the winter session.

"The public hearing of the proposed project was completed in a hurry giving no chance to the affected people to express their point of view on rehabilitation," he said at a press conference here.

The Rajya Sabha MP alleged that the Modi government seemed in a hurry to construct the project without taking into account the plight of those to be displaced.

The public hearing was carried out in a highly unmethodical manner in Pithoragarh, Almora and Champawat districts where the affected population resides, he said.

Emphasising that the Pancheshwar dam will change the geography and climatic conditions of three districts forever, he said any action plan on the project must take into account the point of view of people to be affected by it.

Meanwhile, Congress workers, led by PCC chief state spokesperson Mathura Dutt Joshi, today visited the Pancheshwar valley villages to know the views of the people in affected villages.

"Most people in Pancheshwar valley villages are averse to construction of the dam. However, in the same breath they say if it is essential to have the project, the size of the dam should be reduced so that the number of people to be affected by it is not that big," Joshi said.

The people are in favour of run of the river projects in the river Kali as such projects do not lead to a big rehabilitation problem, he said.

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West Bengal Congress president Adhir Chowdhury today ruled out the possibility of an alliance with the CPI(M) in the upcoming panchayat polls and held the Left party responsible for the growth of the BJP in the state.

The panchayat poll later this year in West Bengal will be crucial as it may be seen as an indicator of voting patterns in the next general election of 2019.

"We have clearly said it earlier that we will fight it out alone in the panchayat polls," the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) chief told reporters here.

When asked why the Congress had decided not to go with the CPI(M) in the state, Chowdhury said it was the Left party which had arbitrarily broken its alliance with the Congress after the 2016 Assembly polls.

Chowdhury shared voting figures in the last few by- elections to claim that the Congress had retained it vote share of 10-12 per cent in the state, whereas the CPI(M) had lost its constituency to the BJP.

"The rise of the BJP in the state is due to the CPI(M)'s inability to hold on to its own votes. Since the day it broke the alliance with the Congress, the BJP's vote share has been increasing," he said.

The CPI(M)'s West Bengal unit had forged an alliance with the Congress during the 2016 Assembly polls in a bid to defeat the ruling Trinamool Congress in the state.

Although the CPI(M) central committee in 2015 had ruled out having any understanding or electoral alliance with the Congress in the fight against the BJP, the party had allowed state units to review specific political situations before deciding on their own "tactical line".

As a result, the party's West Bengal unit had entered into an alliance with the Congress for the 2016 election, which ended up pushing the Left to the third position in the state that it had ruled from 1977 to 2011.

The two parties went separately in the by-poll for the Sabang Assembly seat and have fielded their own candidates for the Uluberia Lok Sabha Parliamentary by-poll fixed for January 29.

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The Congress and IUML in Kerala today came out against the Centre's decision to stop subsidy for Haj pilgrims from this year.

Kerala PCC President M M Hassan said the decision was the latest example of the Centre's "enmity" towards the minority community and asked it to retract its decision.

The decision to stop subsidy for Haj from this year was announced by Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi at New Delhi today.

The subsidy for Haj pilgrims was a practice in force in the country since the time of Jawaharalal Nehru, Hassan said, adding, "there is no justitication to stop it."



Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala alleged that the decision was announced with an ulterior motive.

As per a Supreme Court order, there was time till 2022 to stop Haj subsidy, he said and alleged that there was a separate agenda behind the decision.

Senior Congress leader and former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy termed the decision "most unfortunate".

"The decision to withdraw subsidy was to divide people and to destroy secularism," he said.

Leaders of IUML, a partner in the Congress-led UDF Opposition in the state, also flayed the Centre's decision to withdraw the subsidy.

IUML leader P K Kunhalikutty, MP, said his party would oppose it.

The Centre has taken the decision expecting that it could pay political dividends, Kunhalikutty alleged.

IUML state general secretary K P A Majeed said though there was time for the government to do away with Haj susbidy, the decision to stop it "hurriedly" was wrong, especially at a time when all arrangements were on for the Haj pilgrimage.

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A court here has directed the police to lodge an FIR against a Congress MLA and his four associates for allegedly grabbing land belonging to villagers and threatening them.

Special Judge under Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act Yogesh Pareek yesterday directed AJK (Anusuchit Janjati Kalyan) police station to lodge FIR against Jaisingh Agrawal, who represents Korba assembly constituency, and four others while hearing a plea by Dukhlal Singh.

A resident of Chuiya village, Dukhlal had alleged that the MLA and his associates had captured 45 decimal of his land in the village, the petitioner's lawyer Abdul Rahman said today.

According to the petition, Agrawal had purchased a piece of land in Chuiya village from Abdul Gaffar in 2010.

When the boundary wall construction was underway on that plot in 2012, Dukhlal had raised objection saying that his land adjacent to it was captured in the process.

Later, when the measurement of the plot was done by revenue inspector and patwari, it was found that besides 45 decimal belonging to Dukhlal, land of two other villagers - 90 decimal of Pratap and 1.20 decimal of Rambai, was also illegally captured by Agrawal.

Subsequently, Dukhal lodged a complaint with police but no action was taken, the petition said.

Last November, Dukhlal filed the application under Section 156(3) of the Criminal Procedure Codein the court seeking action against the MLA and his associates.

After hearing, the special court asked AJK police station to lodge FIR against Agrawal, Surendra Jaiswal, Bhola Soni, Vijay Singh and Darshan Manikpuri under various sections of SC and ST (prevention of atrocities) Act and IPC's sections506 (B) (criminal intimidation), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and 120 B (criminal conspiracy).

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A proposal worth Rs 3,547 crore to procure assault rifles and carbines was cleared today by the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), which also announced simplified norms to give a boost to 'Make in India' programme.

Under the proposal, which was cleared at the DAC meeting chaired by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, 72,000 assault rifles and 93,895 carbines will be procured on the "fast track basis", a defence ministry release said.

The procurement is to "enable the defence forces to meet their immediate requirement for the troops deployed on the borders" and is expected to address the shortage of small arms for the armed forces, the ministry said.

Tenders will soon be floated to set the ball rolling for the procurement process, sources said, adding the procurement could also be done at the government to government (G to G) level.

To encourage participation of private sector in defence design and production and to give a boost to 'Make in India' programme, the DAC introduced significant changes in the 'Make II' category of the Defence Procurement Procedure, it said.

The DAC also simplified the procedure to make it industry friendly, with minimal government control.

The revised procedure will now allow the defence ministry to accept proposals from the industry and also allow start-ups to develop equipment for the Indian Armed Forces.

The minimum qualification criteria to participate in 'Make II' projects has also been relaxed by removing conditions related to credit rating and reducing financial net worth criteria.

According to the earlier 'Make II' procedure, only two vendors were shortlisted to develop prototype equipment.

"Now, all vendors meeting the relaxed eligibility criteria will be allowed to participate in the prototype development process. The vendor will not be required to submit Detailed Project Report," the statement said.

After accord of approval of the 'Make II' project by the council, all clearances will be accorded at Service HQ (SHQ) level, it added.

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The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) today cleared the procurement of assault rifles and carbines worth Rs 3,547 crore on "fast track basis" to meet the immediate requirement of troops deployed on the borders, defence ministry sources said.

Under the proposal, cleared at the meeting chaired by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, 72,000 assault rifles and 93,895 carbines will be procured, the sources said.

The procurement is expected to address the shortage of weapons for the armed forces, they added.

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A day after a Dalit youth was allegedly beaten up by four Hindu Vahini activists, the Shahid Udham Singh Sena today threatened to launch an agitation here if the police failed to arrest the accused by January 17.

Vipin Kumar (22) was allegedly beaten up brutally by four activists of the Vahini in Kalanpur village here yesterday, Circle Officer Yogender Singh said, citing a complaint lodged by the victim, under sections 307 of IPC and the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

The case was registered against accused Rahul, Dhiraj, Jodha and Kaku, who were absconding, Singh said.

Meanwhile, Dalits, led by Shahid Udham Singh Sena president Vikas, have threatened to launch an agitation if their demands were not met.

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Dramatic scenes were witnessed on the second day of the Delhi Assembly today with suspended AAP leader Kapil Mishra marshalled out on the speakers' orders for lampooning Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

BJP MLA Manjinder Singh Sirsa was also marshalled out along with Mishra for "obstructing" the Assembly staff taking the suspended AAP leader out of the House and the issue was referred to the Privilege Committee of the House.

As the proceedings began, Mishra held up a poster bearing an image of AAP's Rajya Sabha MP-elect Sushil Gupta holding a snake with Kejriwal's face photo-shopped on it. Speaker Ram Niyas Goel objected to it and ordered him to be marshalled out.

Sirsa sprang to Mishra's defence even as the marshalls were taking the suspended AAP leader out. This drew Goyal's ire who ordered that the BJP legislator be taken out as well.

"I am forwarding the matter of Sirsa trying to obstruct the marshalls to the Privilege Committee of the House," Goyal said.

Sirsa told reporters outside the House that he was not blocking the marshalls but merely asking Mishra to go out.

Earlier, Mishra alleged that AAP had "sold" its Rajya Sabha seats and demanded a discussion on the matter in the House.

The three-day session had a stormy beginning yesterday as the AAP and BJP MLAs traded barbs and indulged in sloganeering over the sealing drive, leading to four adjournments in two hours and the marshalling out of two opposition legislators.

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Celebrating the 10th anniversary of a friendship agreement, the National Capital Territory of Delhi and Fukuoka Prefecture in Japan today signed a deal for cooperation in various fields including environment and air pollution.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Governor of Fukuoka Prefecture Hiroshi Ogawa signed the memorandum of understanding document.

"We hope to harness our further potentials in the spheres of environment and air pollution...," Kejriwal said on the occasion.

He said that Delhi would like to have more exchanges between school, college and university students.

"We have the example of a fruitful partnership in the inception of the Delhi Metro and we hope to expand this cooperation in other modes of transport and their multi-modal integration," he said.

Expressing happiness over the agreement, Ogawa said that Fukuoka Prefecture was the first local government of Japan to have a friendship agreement with the Delhi government in 2007.

"Pollution is the new area in which we will be conducting training. Also, culture and heritage related exchange will be done. Delhi has lots of historical sites and we have the experience and technology for preservation and repair," he said.

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Veteran French actor Catherine Deneuve has apologised to the victims of sex abuse after she signed a letter denouncing the MeToo movement and claiming that it unfairly punishes men for flirting "insistently or clumsily".

The actor had denounced the #MeToo movement and its French equivalent, #Balancetonporc (Call out your pig), in a letter, signed by over 100 French actors. The letter said the movements have created a totalitarian climate by publicly prosecuting private experiences.

In a personal statement, published in newspaper Liberation, Deneuve apologised to victims of "odious acts" but stood by the statement while distancing herself from a number of other female signatories.

"I am a free woman and I will remain so. I greet fraternally all the victims of odious acts that may have felt aggrieved by this forum published in the World, it is to them and to them alone that I apologise," Deneuve wrote in the new letter.

Deneuve said she signed the statement because she is opposed to the "media lynching" of men who are accused of inappropriate behaviour.

"Yes, I like freedom. I do not like this characteristic of our time where everyone feels the right to judge, to arbitrate, to condemn. A time when simple denunciations on social networks generate punishment, resignation, and sometimes and often media lynching.

"An actor can be digitally erased from a movie, the director of a large New York institution may have to resign for hands to the buttocks put there thirty years without any other form of trial. I do not excuse anything. I do not decide on the guilt of these men because I am not qualified for. And few are," she said.

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Police today arrested the chief medical officer of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited's hospital here for allegedly molesting a nurse.

"Dr Sunil Kumar, chief medical officer of BHEL's Kasturba Hospital, has been arrested under section 354 (molestation) of IPC," said sub-inspector Y F Majhi of Govindpura police station.

The complainant, who is 22 years old, had complained that the doctor called her to his cabin and touched her inappropriately. He also sent her obscene messages, she told police.

Kumar (58) was produced before a magistrate who released him on a bail of Rs 25,000.

BHEL's public relation officer Vinodanand Jha said he can not comment as the matter was sub-judice.

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The Enforcement Directorate has issued a fresh summons to Karti Chidambaram, the son of senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, in connection with its probe into the INX Media money laundering case.

Official sources said that in response to the agency's second summons issued for today, Karti Chidambaram's authorised representative appeared before the agency and replied to their queries.

As the agency needed further clarifications, the ED, in the fresh summons, has asked Karti Chidambaram to appear before it in person or through his authorised representative on January 18.

The first summons was for January 11 when Karti Chidambaram's legal representatives appeared before the agency.

Last week, the ED searched the premises of Karti Chidambaram and those associated with him in a separate money laundering case pertaining to the Aircel-Maxis deal.

The central probe agency had registered a case against him and others in May last year.

It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the ED's equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a CBI complaint, including Karti Chidambaram, INX Media and its directors, Peter and Indrani Mukerjea.

The ECIR was lodged under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

The sources said that the ED would probe the alleged "proceeds of crime" generated in this case.

It was the ED which had provided information about the alleged illegal payments made by INX Media, based on which the Central Bureau of Investigation had filed its FIR.

The CBI had also carried out searches at the homes and offices of Karti Chidambaram across four cities for allegedly receiving money from the media firm owned by the Mukerjeas to scuttle a tax probe.

The Chidambarams have denied all the charges made against them.

The CBI had filed the FIR against Karti Chidambaram and the Mukerjeas on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, receiving illegal gratification, influencing public servants and criminal misconduct.

The agency has alleged that Karti Chidambaram received money from INX Media for using his influence to manipulate a tax probe against it in a case of violation of Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) conditions to receive investment from Mauritius.

The CBI has said it has also recovered vouchers of Rs 10 lakh which were allegedly paid for the services.

These vouchers were issued in favour of Advantage Strategic Consulting (P) Limited, a firm "indirectly" owned by Karti Chidambaram, the CBI had alleged.

Former finance minister P Chidambaram, after the CBI searches on May 16, had issued a strong statement in response to the raids, saying the government was using the CBI and other agencies to target his son.

The FIPB approval was granted in "hundreds of cases", the senior Congress leader had said.

The CBI FIR was made out against Karti Chidambaram, his company Chess Management Services, the Mukerjeas (currently in jail on charges of murder of their daughter Sheena Bora), INX Media, Advantage Strategic Consulting Services and its director Padma Vishwanathan.

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Union Tourism Minister Alphons Kannanthanam today emphasised the need for ensuring the efficacy of existing technologies used for forecasting natural disasters like Cyclone Ockhi.

Citing the controversy which erupted over the warning of Cyclone Ockhi, which hit the Kerala coast on November 30, he said an introspection was required to understand what actually happened with the warning.

The Kerala government had claimed that a delayed warning had been issued, but the Centre had said that it was given on November 29 itself.

"Cyclone Ockhi has taken many lives in the coastal region. What is more disturbing is that we still do not know the accurate number of people who lost their lives owing to the disaster," Kannanthanam said.

"An introspection is required to understand what has actually happened with the cyclone warning",the minister said.

He was speaking at the second international symposium of the Societal Applications in Fisheries and Aquaculture using Remote Sensing Imagery (SAFARI), organised by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) here today.

The Minister said scientists and the authorities concerned must seriously look into these things.

"There is no point in engaging in a blame game between the Centre and the State. It is need of the hour to develop adequate technologies to mitigate such disasters", he said.

Stating that the communication system has to be improved, he said scientists working in the area should ensure the efficacy of existing technologies, reliability of the data and models to predict such disasters.

Satellite and remote sensing data could be used to improve the system, the minister said.

He opined that scientists should focus on community oriented research work. They should ensure that their research benefits the common people so that they could be saved from such disasters and their living standards improved, he said.

Kannanthanam said studies in the fisheries and marine sectors should help upgrade the socio-economic status of fisherfolk.

The minister also said that satellite and remote sensing data would be made use to develop eco-tourism in the country.

"There is a huge opportunity for eco-tourism in India.The Tourism Ministry is well receptive of using the technology of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in this regard," he said, adding that the remote sensing technology would be used to start adventure tourism in valleys of the Himalayas.

CMFRI Director A Gopalakrishnan presided over the meet.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is calling on NATO to take a stand against the United States, a fellow ally, over its plans to form a 30,000-strong Kurdish-led border security force in Syria.

Turkey has threatened to launch a military offensive against Syrian Kurdish militias, which Turkey considers to be terrorists.

Yesterday Erdogan accused the United States of creating an "army of terror" in Syria along the border with Turkey, and vowed to crush the border force.

Addressing his ruling party's deputies today, Erdogan questioned NATO's stance on the issue, saying: "Hey NATO! You are obliged to make a stance against those who harass and violate the borders of your members."



Erdogan said Turkey's military chief would discuss the issue in Brussels.

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A former CIA officer has been arrested and charged with illegally retaining classified records, including names and phone numbers of covert CIA assets.

Fifty-three-year-old Jerry Chun Shing Lee was arrested Monday night after arriving at JFK International Airport. He made an initial appearance yesterday in federal court in New York, but will face charges in northern Virginia, where the CIA is located.

According to court documents, Lee, a Hong Kong resident, served in the CIA from 1994 to 2007 as a case officer.

A court affidavit states that in 2012, when Lee traveled to northern Virginia with his family, the FBI searched Lee's possessions and found two small books with handwritten notes containing names and numbers of covert CIA employees and locations of covert facilities.

Court records don't yet list an attorney for Lee.

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Prestigious institutions like the IITs were producing brilliant professionals who virtually ended up becoming "salesmen" of multinational companies instead of contributing to nation building, former president Pranab Mukherjee today lamented.

Stressing on quality research, Mukherjee sought revision of the goals of higher seats of learning in South Asia, as he was conferred an honorary doctor of letters (D Litt) degree by Chittagong University, one of the leading varsities of Bangladesh.

"Few Indians like Amartya Sen, C V Raman and Har Gobind Khorana received the Nobel Prize for their outstanding academic research but they pursued their studies in foreign universities like Harvard, not in Indian ones," he said in his convocation address on the third day of his four-day private visit to Bangladesh.

He said prestigious higher seats of learning like the IITs were producing brilliant professionals who virtually "emerge as the salesmen of multinational companies" doing injustice to their merit and brilliance while people with lesser merit could perform their jobs.

Mukherjee said being a finance minster he had allocated funds for education but had little scope to review the performance of particularly the higher seats of learning, which he managed to do after becoming president as it required him to be the chancellor to over 100 universities.

He also urged the universities to develop themselves as centres of intellectual practices discarding all narrow outlooks as "there should be no wall to divide the intellect and creative thoughts".

"In the history of thousands of years, universities like Nalanda and Taxila acted like magnets to attract intellectuals from all over the world," he said.

Chittagong University Vice Chancellor Iftekhar Uddin Chowdhury conferred the degree on Mukherjee at the university campus.

Pro-Vice Chancellor Shirin Akhtar also attended the convocation conducted by acting registrar Kamrul Huda.

Mukherjee also asked researchers of sociology and politics in South Asian universities to explore reasons behind a common fact that saw assassinations of top independence leaders of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma and Sri Lanka soon after their independence exposing them to a leadership vacuum and instability.

"In Bangladesh, Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was brutally killed only three-and-a-half years after independence, while India saw Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, Pakistan saw the killings of Liaqat Ali Khan and Bhutto, Burma saw Aung San's murder and Sri Lanka witnessed the murder of Ranasinghe Premadasa," he said.

Mukherjee said all these assassinations affected the democratic advancement of the countries in the region, which once was under single British rule.

"People need to know what political or socioeconomic reasons caused these assassinations, which subsequently saw prolonged military rule disrupting the democratic process," he said.

Mukherjee, however, said like India, Bangladesh proved that democracy could advance the nation in terms of economic growth and social development.

"A recent World Bank report identified Bangladesh as a country of continued advancement. It's GDP growth rate reached the spectrum of 7 per cent while the global recession slowed down the growth rate of most developed nations. In social development indicators, Bangladesh is progressing fast as well," he said.

Chittagong University (CU) in the southeastern port city had said it had decided to confer a Doctor of Letters (D Litt) degree upon Mukherjee for his "outstanding contributions to society and for being a genuine friend of Bangladesh".

The Chittagong City Corporation will also present Mukherjee with a 'Key to the City' this evening. The city's Mayor A J M Nasir Uddin will hand over the key to the former president.

Bangladesh's premier Dhaka University earlier in 2013 had also conferred an honorary doctorate of law on Mukherjee.

Mukherjee, 82, served as the 13th president of India from 2012 until 2017.

He arrived here on Saturday.

Yesterday, he attended a Bengali literature conference and paid a courtesy call on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who hosted a lunch at her official residence in his honour.

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A signed wooden box, containing a set of 24 cigars from the personal collection of Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, has been sold for USD 26,950 at an auction in the US.

The Trinidad Fundadores cigar box retains its "Republica de Cuba" cigar warranty seal, which has been re-adhered to the cover.

The box contain 24 cigars, and is stamped on each end, "24 Fundadores," with a maker's mark on the bottom, "Habanos S A, Hecho en Cuba, Totalmente a mano."



The box is accompanied by an image of Castro signing it for noted philanthropist Eva Haller, according to the Boston- based RR Auctions.

"Castro handed to me the box of cigars. He gave them to me, because I jokingly asked him for it, when others lit a cigar," Haller wrote in a letter dated March 2002.

"I told him, that if he signs the box, I will sell it and make lots of money. He thought that was funny," she wrote.

Beginning in 1980, Trinidad Fundadores were exclusively produced for Fidel Castro, and until 1998 the only boxes that were allowed to leave Cuba had been gifts to foreign dignitaries.

The brand made its official launch as a Cuban export in February 1998, and this box - from Castro's personal stash - was signed and given away only four years later.

Cigars were an integral component of Castro's heroic revolutionary image, and as such this signed box is a truly remarkable historical artifact, according to the RR Auctions.

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The Delhi High Court today sought to know from aviation regulator DGCA the number of passengers who flew on IndiGo, Spicejet and GoAir to and from Delhi between April 1 to December 31, 2017 from Terminal 1 (T-1) of the IGI airport here.

A bench of Justices Hima Kohli and Rekha Palli asked the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to prepare an affidavit of the three private carriers who have been asked by DIAL to partially shift their operations from T-1 to T-2.

It also directed the civil aviation regulator to produce before it the relevant records on January 18.

The bench sought the information during the hearing of an appeal filed by IndiGo against a single judge's December 20, 2017 order upholding the decision of IGI airport operator DIAL to partially shift its operations from T-1 to T-2.

Senior advocate Mukul Rohtagi, appearing for IndiGo, also contended that the single judge passed the order on the basis of information given by the Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) that they flew 16.1 million passengers per annum (mppa) between April 2016 till March 2017.

"We have flown only 14.62 mppa for the year concerned. 16.1 mppa reflects the capacity of the airlines and not the passengers," Rohtagi argued. He also contended that 14.62 mppa was not beyond the capacity of the T-1.

He said the DIAL itself has disclosed that T-1's existing capacity was 20 mppa.

The IndiGo counsel contended that the decision would cause "complete confusion and inconvenience" to passengers and virtually have the effect of destroying its business.

In view of the operational capacity of T-2, both GoAir and Spicejet, keeping in view their traffic load and operations as per data provided by DIAL, could be accommodated there and Indigo could continue operating from T-1.

Senior advocate Rajiv Nayar, appearing for DIAL, rubbished IndiGo's claims and said there was no error in the single judge's order.

"IndiGo has already crossed 12.5 mppa by December 2017 and by end of the financial year on March 31, 2018, it would cross 18 mppa," Nayar submitted.

He said the decision was taken after due deliberations, keeping in mind the security of passengers and stakeholders. "Such administrative decision was not subject to judicial review," Nayar submitted.

To this, the bench said, "We need to get the details of the passengers who travelled till December 31, 2017 from the DGCA."



IndiGo has challenged the single judge's ruling that there was no illegality in DIAL's order to order partial shifting of its operations, along with that of SpiceJet and GoAir, from T-1 to T-2 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport here.

DIAL on October 21 last year had asked the three airlines to shift their flights to and from Delhi to Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru, to T-2 from January 4, 2018.

All other flights of the airlines shall continue to operate from T-1, the airport operator had said.

While upholding DIAL's decision, the single judge had given the airlines time till February 15 to partially shift their operations.

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Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit today described the late 'Gnani' Sankaran as an independent and fearless journalist who spoke his mind.

"I am shocked to know about the demise of Gnani Sankaran, veteran journalist, writer and political analyst," a Raj Bhavan release, quoting Purohit, said.

He was an independent, fearless journalist who spoke his mind and never compromised on his principles, the governor said.

Sankaran was a strong believer in democratic values and did his best to propagate the values of freedom, expression and principled journalism in society, Purohit said.

"His death is a great loss to the society, particularly to the journalist fraternity, Purohit said, extending his condolences to the bereaved family.

DMK Working President M K Stalin met Sankaran's family and offered his condolences, a DMK release said.

Sankaran died here yesterday following a brief illness.

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GSK Consumer Healthcare today said it has appointed Filippo Lanzi as Regional Head of Asia Pacific region.

He replaces Zubair Ahmed who takes over as the Non- Executive Chairman of India Board, the company said in a statement.

As Regional Head of Asia Pacific, a geography composed of 23 countries, Lanzi will report to the company's CEO Brian McNamara and has also become a member of the consumer healthcare strategic leadership team as well as the GSK Singapore Country Board.

Commenting on the appointment, McNamara said: "His (Lanzi) people-focused leadership style and proven track record of growing categories and transforming businesses are exactly what we need to win."



Lanzi, who joined GSK as part of a joint venture between GSK's Consumer Healthcare and Novartis OTC, helped lead the JV business integration in Europe and has more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry, the statement said.

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Terming VHP leader Pravin Togadia's claim that he apprehended a plot to kill him in a police encounter as a "serious issue", opposition Congress in Gujarat today sought an inquiry.

Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia met Togadia at a city hospital where the Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader was admitted yesterday in an unconscious state.

Apart from Modhwadia, a vocal critic of the VHP's Hindutva ideology, Patidar quota agitation leader Hardik Patel also met Togadia separately.

Togadia, the VHP's International Working President, today claimed that he went into hiding yesterday as he feared that police might kill him in an encounter after arresting him in an old case.

After meeting Togadia, Modhwadia demanded an independent inquiry into Togadia's allegation.

"We all know the track record of Rajasthan police (about encounters). We also know what happens to those who raise voice against the BJP, be it (BJP leaders) Sanjay Joshi, Haren Pandya or (CBI) judge (B H) Loya. To stop recurrence of such incidents, an independent inquiry must be conducted in Togadia's case," Modhwadia told reporters.

Hardik Patel, who had joined hands with the Congress in the recent Assembly elections, pointed fingers at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah.

"Rights of common people are being snatched. I may not agree with Pravinbhai's ideology, but I am always with him. We all know what kind of conspiracies are being hatched by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. I don't know about Hindus, but a leader of a Hindu organisation is definitely in danger now," he said.

Gujarat Congress chief Bharatsinh Solanki and the party's state in-charge Ashok Gehlot also demanded an inquiry into Togadia's claim that he could be killed in an encounter.

Gehlot was the chief minister of Rajasthan when Togadia was booked under section 188 of IPC for defying police orders in Gangapur town of that state in 2002.

"The law and order situation in Gujarat has completely deteriorated and it reflects in what Togadia claimed today. We demand an inquiry into Togadia's allegations to bring out the truth," Solanki said.

Gehlot said the issue is serious as both Gujarat and Rajasthan are ruled by the BJP.

"Togadia was arrested in the past too (in Rajasthan, when the Congress was in power). Togadia is known to have links with the ruling party. And if such things can happen with him, we can only imagine the situation of common people. This is a serious issue and the state government should order an inquiry," said Gehlot.

Togadia went untraceable yesterday after a team of Rajasthan police arrived here to arrest him in the case registered against him at Gangapur in Sawai Madhopur district.

He was then found unconscious and hospitalised.

Addressing a press conference at the hospital today, Togadia alleged that attempts were being made to silence him when he was raising the voice of the Hindu community.

He claimed that he went into hiding after learning that a Rajasthan police team had come to arrest him. He claimed he got messages from some people that he might be killed in a (fake) encounter.

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Hackers have stolen over USD 400,000 worth of cryptocurrency as they broke into the digital wallet of Stellar Lumen, one of the most popular virtual currencies in the world, according to media reports.

The hackers on Saturday hijacked the server that hosts BlackWallet, a web-based wallet application that stores lumens, and stole 669,920 from users' accounts, the BBC reported.

Although BlackWallet tried to warn users about the attack via forums, many continued to log in and lose money, the report quoted tech site Bleeping Computer as saying.

The stolen amount has been moved to Bittrex, a virtual currency exchange, where it was likely to be converted into another currency to hide their tracks, the site claimed.

BlackWallet's creator, in a Reddit post, said he had since disabled his hosting account and websites.

"I am sincerely sorry about this and hope that we will get the funds back. I am in talks with my hosting provider to get as much information about the hacker and will see what can be done with it," the developer, who goes by the alias of Orbit84, said.

"If you ever entered your key on BlackWallet, you may want to move your funds to a new wallet," Orbit84 added.

A crypto or virtual currency is a type of money that is completely digital, like Bitcoin, and can be used to buy products and services.

Stellar is an open-source payments network focused on reducing poverty in the developing world. It says its lumens - which work using blockchain technology - make monetary transactions cheaper, quicker and more reliable, the BBC reported.

According to CoinMarketCap, a site that ranks the value of different crypto-currencies, there is USD 11.6 billion worth of Stellar Lumen in circulation, it added.

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Attacking the BJP for calling Haj subsidy a form of Muslim appeasement and vote bank politics, AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi today claimed the party's government in Uttar Pradesh gave funds for pilgrimages, and wanted to know if that would be stopped.

Funds are also given for the Kumbh Mela, while the Congress government in Karnataka gives grants to those who undertake 'Chardham Yatra', Owaisi claimed, adding he himself had demanded withdrawal of the Haj subsidy long ago.

"Haj subsidy this year is (Rs) 200 crore & it would have been phased out by 2022 as per Supreme Court order, since 2006 I have been demanding that should be removed & used for Muslim girls education upliftment," Owaisi tweeted.

There will be no subsidy for Haj from this year, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said today, calling the step "part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement".

Owaisi, in another tweet, asked if the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh would stop the funds, which he said, are given for pilgrimage to Ayodhya, Kashi and other temple towns.

"#Haj Subsidy BJP /RSS had called It appeasement, vote Bank Pol my Qs to BJP will you bring a Bill in parliament remove Article 290A of Constitution, Will BJP Tell Yogi govt to stop 800 crore for pilgrimage to Ayodhya,Kashi,Mathura 1.5 lakh to each Manasarovar yatri?" he asked.

Article 290A relates to annual payment to certain Devaswom Funds.

"Haj Subsidy 3 Qs to BJP/RSS Why did Haryana government give 1 Crore to Dera Sacha Sauda was it for electoral appeasement? 4qs why did Modi govt gave grant of 100 crore to MP govt for Simhastha Maha Kumbh & MP govt had spend 3,400 crore was this not appeasement," Owaisi said in a series of tweets.

Claiming that the Congress government in Karnataka gave Rs 20,000 to each pilgrim who undertook 'Chardham Yatra', Owaisi asked whether it was not "appeasement of majority".

Would the NDA government "walk the talk" by allocating enough funds for the education of Muslims girls, he asked.

"I challenge the Modi Government to walk the talk by allocating 2,0000 crores for Muslim girls scholarships...will wait and see in next budget 18-19," he said.

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The Manohar Lal Khattar government in Haryana has banned the release of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's controversial film "Padmaavat", Health Minister Anil Vij said today.

Vij said a decision to this effect was taken at a meeting of the state Cabinet keeping in view the sentiments of a large number of people who felt that historical had been "distorted" in the period drama.

The minister said that in the previous Cabinet meeting too he had demanded a ban on the film.

"In the last cabinet meeting, I had raised the issue of banning the film because of distortion of historic facts by the filmmaker," Vij said.

In that meeting, the chief minister had assured that when the censor board clears the film, a decision will be taken by the government, he added.

"In today's Cabinet meeting, I again raised the issue and said the film should be banned in Haryana keeping in view the law and order situation of the state as the film was facing stiff opposition from various quarters," Vij told reporters here after the meeting.

He said the entire Cabinet, which met here today under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Khattar, supported him after which a decision was taken to ban the release of the film in Haryana.

"Film Padmavati/Padmavat banned in Haryana," the senior Cabinet Minister had tweeted earlier.

Significantly, the film, which stars Deepika Padukone, Shahid Kapoor and Ranveer Singh in lead roles, had faced opposition from various quarters including from the Rajput community.

Vij had earlier said that he would not allow the movie to be screened in the state.

He had alleged that Bhansali had wrongly presented historical facts in the movie to "defame" the image of 'Rani Padmavati' which had hurt the sentiments of lakhs of people.

"Rani Padmavati is the symbol of Indian women' pride. The character assassination of Padmavati will not be tolerated at any level," he had said earlier. Industry and Commerce Minister in the Khattar cabinet, Vipul Goel had also expressed concerns over the film.

The film, mired in controversy over its plot line, had been given the go-ahead by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which asked the makers to change the title from 'Padmavati' to 'Padmaavat' and suggested some other modifications.

The movie is set for release on January 25.

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The Haryana government has decided to form a non-banking financial company (NBFC) -- Haryana State Financial Services Limited -- to act as an in- house treasury manager for efficient management of surplus funds of state public enterprises and autonomous bodies.

The decision was taken here today at a meeting of the state cabinet.

"The NBFC will provide better deposit rates on overnight funds of state government entities. Besides, it would provide better deposit rates throughout the year to state government entities.

"It would also provide much better lending rates to state government entities than the banking industry," state Finance Minister Abhimanyu said after the cabinet meeting, chaired by Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar.

The NBFC would enable quick and hassle-free lending and create financial discipline among the state government entities. It would also result in centralised mechanism for prudent management of funds under the overall control and supervision of the General Administration Department, he said.

It will be established as a limited company under the Companies Act and registered with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as an NBFC.

The authorised capital of the company will be Rs 10 crore and the paid up capital will be Rs 2 crore in the first instance.

The entire equity of the company will be held by the state government while the General Administration Department will be its administrative department.

The company will lend money, accept deposits and provide financial assistance with or without security to the state government, a body corporate, government company, state or municipal body, local body, wholly or partly owned by the government.

The Chief Secretary will be the chairman of the company, whereas administrative secretaries of finance, cooperation, power, industries, agriculture, town and country planning and urban local bodies departments will be other ex-officio directors.

The minister added that to check the increasing number of wilful financial irregularities and frauds committed by chit fund companies and protect the interests of small investors, the Haryana government has decided to frame the Haryana Chit Fund Rules, 2018 to provide a mechanism for effective implementation of the Chit Fund Act, 1982.

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The Bombay High Court today asked the Pune police commissioner if a case pertaining to alleged fraud and misappropriation of funds of the Osho Rajneesh Trust can be transferred to the Economic Offences Wing.

A division bench headed by Justice B R Gavai was hearing a petition filed by Pune resident Yogesh Thakker, alleging that the spiritual guru's signature was forged in his will by the trustees of the Osho International Foundation.

While an FIR was lodged with the Pune police last year, Thakker claimed the police had not made any substantial progress in the probe and hence, sought a direction to the CBI to take over the investigation.

"Does the Pune police have an Economic Offences Wing? Why cannot the case be transferred to this wing so that there can be specialised investigation," Justice Gavai asked.

The court, while posting the matter for hearing on January 23, directed the Pune police commissioner to file his affidavit in the regard by then.

According to Thakker, the trustees allegedly transferred money from the trust to private companies owned by them.

In 2012, Thakker wrote a letter to the Pune police commissioner following which an FIR was lodged against the trustees in 2013, but so far there has been no further progress in the case.

Rajneesh passed away in 1990 and his will was prepared in 1989.

Thakker alleged that the will was forged and sought to support his claim with a report of a private handwriting expert.

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The Delhi High Court today said it was "appalled" by the historic Delhi Public Library's "lack of concern" towards its property and books at Karol Bagh here.

The view was expressed by a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar after the lawyer representing the library said he had no instructions on whether the books had been removed or not.

The lawyer for Delhi Public Library (DPL) said they had to inspect the books and ascertain their condition before any steps were taken.

"We are absolutely appalled by your lack of concern for your property and the books. You have no concern for what is actually public property. Your concern is obvious from your conduct," the bench said.

The court had on December 6 last asked the library to preserve its books, which are locked up in the premises in question since November, 2016.

It had directed the authorities to shift the books, CDs, computers, catalogues and other important material lying in the premises to Delhi Public Library's head office or any other safe location.

Meanwhile, the lawyer for the person who bought the building housing the library told the court that DPL officials had visited the premises and were packing up the books.

The owner's lawyer also said that his client was willing to pay around Rs 40 lakh to set up the library on some other vacant land.

The bench listed the matter for further hearing on March 20.

The first Delhi Public Library was started by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru across the Old Delhi Railway Station in 1951.

The court on December 4, 2016 had extended till March 20, 2017 its order restraining the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) from demolishing the building.

The court was hearing a petition filed by some scholars and journalists, who had moved against the corporations' notices to the library to vacate the premises, claiming that the building was structurally unfit and dangerous.

The court had directed the authorities to lock the library while ensuring that no life was put in danger.

The library was issued the first notice by the NDMC on September 15, 2016 and the next one on November 4, 2017, asking the library to vacate so that the building could be demolished.

Seeking quashing of the notices, the petitioners have alleged that the owner of the premises, Dimple Enterprises, "wants a commercial complex in place of the library in order to make money from the land".

Funded by the Ministry of Culture, the Delhi Public Library is an autonomous body which has around 45 branches and mobile libraries across Delhi.

Officers from both central and Delhi governments, intellectuals, members of legislative assembly and councillors are its members.

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Retired Supreme Court Judge N Santosh Hegde has expressed indignation over the delay in the appointment of the Lokpal even four years after the enactment of the law for setting up the anti-corruption institution.

The former Lokayukta of Karnataka also criticised political parties for keeping quiet on the issue.

"The party in power does not want the anti-corruption ombudsman as it is afraid that if the truth comes out from Lokpal's office it will be in trouble," he alleged.

"The present prime minister, when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, did not appoint a Lokayukta there. Ultimately, the High Court of Gujarat directed for the appointment. The attitude seems to be the same here (at the Centre)," Hegde told PTI.

He sought to know why the opposition was keeping quiet over the issue.

"Very unfortunate," he said, adding that when it comes to the Lokayukta or Lokpal, no party wants it because "everybody is sailing in the same boat."



"I can understand why the government is keeping quiet because it does not like it...the evidence is there in Gujarat. But why is the opposition keeping quiet? It's as much their responsibility to see to it that the law is enforced. They are party to the law," said the former solicitor general of India.

Hegde said he had seen the importance of the office of Lokayukta/Lokpal.

"You can do a lot of good things there; people-friendly decisions can be taken there; otherwise, for everything people should run to a court of law," he said.

Under the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act-2013, the ombudsmen are to be appointed at the Centre and in states for inquiring into the allegations of corruption against public functionaries.

But the appointment of the Lokpal is stuck in procedural wrangling.

Hegde said the absence of a recognised Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, who is a member of the selection committee to pick the Lokpal, being cited as the reason coming in the way of the appointment was nothing but an excuse.

The Lokpal proponents point out that the Supreme Court last year ruled that the government can go ahead with the appointment without an official Leader of Opposition.

On social activist Anna Hazare threatening to revive his struggle in March, Hegde, who was a key part of his anti- corruption movement in 2011, said he was unaware of the proposed move.

Hazare had recently said he would undertake a fast from March 23 in Delhi if his demand for passing "proper" bills for the Lokpal, Lokayukta and electoral reforms were not met.

Asked if he would be willing to be a part of Hazare's movement again, Hegde said, "It depends on what exactly is his object".

On whether Hazare would be able to attract public support this time also, Hegde said it depends on what move he makes, and recalled that the last time around it was the middle class which supported his movement.

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Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar said today that the history of the state's referendum held over 50 years back will be included in the school curriculum.

The coastal state is celebrating the "Asmitai Dis" (Identity Day) today to mark the anniversary of the referendum, held on January 16, 1967, on whether to merge with neighbouring Maharashtra.

"Goa's history does not end with the liberation of the state from the Portuguese rule, but it continues till the opinion poll and even till 1987 when the statehood was attained," Parrikar said at a function in Margao, about 40 km from here, to mark the occasion.

He said efforts should be made to teach this part of history to students.

"I assure that the opinion poll would be a part of the school curriculum during the academic year 2019," he said.

Parrikar said a committee of experts would be formed to finalise the curriculum and include the referendum episode.

At the function, organised by the Directorate of Official Language and the Ravindra Bhavan, the chief minister recited a poem by veteran poet late B B Borkar.

He said that the victory during the opinion poll was because of the "unified and combined" efforts of the Goans cutting across religion, caste, creed and regional lines.

The efforts of the people who contributed to keep Goa as a separate entity should be recognised in different forms, Parrikar said.

During the event, Parrikar inaugurated a lane dedicated to those who participated in the anti-merger movement.

Some of the living witnesses of the referendum earlier expressed happiness that the people of the then Union territory did not opt to merge with Maharashtra.

When the referendum was held, the then ruling party, Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), was in favour of merging with Maharashtra. But several leaders, led by Jack Sequeira of the United Goans party, were opposed to it.

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Popular TV host Ashleigh Banfield has criticised Aziz Ansari's unnamed accuser.

Banfield, who hosts "Crime & Justice" on HLN, said the woman, who identified herself with the pseudonym 'Grace', misused the #MeToo movement.

"By your own clear description, this wasn't a rape, nor was it a sexual assault. By your description, your sexual encounter was unpleasant," she said.

"I'm sorry you had a bad date ... but let's take a moment to reflect on what you claim was the 'worst night of your life.'"



The host then said that Grace had "chiseled away at a movement".

"The #MeToo movement has righted a lot of wrongs and it has made your career path much smoother ... what a gift. Yet, you looked that gift horse in the mouth and chiseled away at that powerful movement with your public accusation," Banfield said.

In a post on Babe.net, the woman claimed that she exchanged numbers with Ansari at the 2017 Emmy Awards after- party and went on a date with him on a bar on the banks of the Hudson river, which escalated quickly to a sexual encounter at his apartment.

The woman said she "used verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was". She added that her reticence to engage in the act was "ignored" by the actor.

Grace alleged Ansari called her a cab when she wanted to leave and he texted her the next day. When she told him that she had an unpleasant experience, he apologised that he "misread things".

Responding to the claim, Ansari said the two engaged in "sexual activity, which by all indications was completely consensual".

A New York Times opinion piece by Bari Weiss has also termed the article in Babe.net as "arguably the worst thing that has happened to the #MeToo movement since it began in October".

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Rani Mukerji went through the usual anxiety of a mother when she started "Hichki" after Adira's birth, but the actor is confident that her daughter will one day be proud of her working parents.

The actor said more than her, it was her filmmaker husband Aditya Chopra who wanted her to get back to the sets.

"I had this anxiety about leaving my daughter at home because it was going to be a new environment for her. She is not going to see me for a few hours, which she is used to. It is a dilemma that every working mother goes through where you face this anxiety," Rani told PTI in an interview.

"The child will soon get used to it. I am sure Adira will understand that both her parents leave home for work. It will be normal and it will be something that she will be proud of."



In India, many working women leave their jobs after they embrace motherhood but Rani believes things are changing now as fathers are getting more involved in the upbringing of their children.

"People are still not ready to accept it. It is a hesitation that they need to overcome. Obviously, a child is more attached to the mother. But now fathers are also getting involved."



The actor said society needs to do away with the stigma attached to men contributing in the house chores and child rearing.

"When we expect that men should go out and work, those men should also be encouraged to participate in the house work. What happens is that they are discouraged from doing it. It is a mental block that we need to overcome."



The actor said Aditya, who runs the Yash Raj Films, was instrumental in her return.

"As a director-producer, he understands that I also have a responsibility towards the people who have given me so much love and adoration. Now that I have a new family, I cannot leave my old family behind. I have to stay in touch with my fans. It is a part of me, which I cannot separate from," she said.

The year 2017 saw a major upheaval in terms of women's movement with a lot of debate surrounding feminism.

Asked about her opinion, Rani said, "It should start at home. The day every woman starts to make a difference in the house, a change will come in the country. You can't bring about a change by just talking about feminism. If one wife decides not to put up with the injustice that her husband does, things will start to change.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Congress today said that by abolishing the Haj subsidy, the Centre was only implementing the Supreme Court's decision, and hoped that the Modi government would utilise the funds for the education and development of the disempowered among the minorities.

Minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi today announced that there will be no subsidy for Haj pilgrimage from this year.

Congress's senior spokesperson Ghulam Nabi Azad said the government had ended the subsidy four years before it was supposed to end as per Supreme Court directives.

He also said that the subsidy was not meant to appease Muslims and claimed that it benefited the airlines which inflated flight charges by almost double during the pilgrimage.

"Since the government has wound up this subsidy almost four years before the date prescribed by the Supreme Court, I don't think we have any issue.

"We don't want to make this an issue at all. Let the government do whatever they want to do. I just wanted to make it clear, the Hajis were not the beneficiaries, it was the airlines who were the beneficiaries. If they had some favour on somebody, it was on the airlines, not on the Hajis," he told reporters.

Asked if the Congress welcomed the decision of abolishing the subsidy, he said, "We welcome the Supreme Court judgement, not the government."



The government is only implementing the Supreme Court decision, Azad said.

It was not the government's decision, but of the Supreme Court bench of Justice Aftab Alam, he said.

Azad, who is also the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, said just as the government has implemented the first part of the Supreme Court judgement, it should implement the second part too.

"The Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Aftab Alam had in 2012 decided that within 10 years, by 2022 the Haj subsidy should be abolished gradually. Whatever money is being saved by the government, the government should use that money for the welfare of the minorities and particularly for the education of the minorities' children," he said.

Reacting to the development, Congress Communications in- charge Randeep Surjewala said the Congress sincerely hopes that the Modi government will honour the Supreme Court direction and utilise the money saved for the disempowered, including modern education to children, especially young girls from minority community.

Surjewala also hoped that the government would provide special incentives for higher education, including in medical, engineering and other services, besides ensuring skill development of the children of the minority community.

He also urged the government to make provisions for helping the destitute women among the minorities, including those who have been widowed, abandoned or divorced, and make other provisions for the social development of the minority community.

Azad also said that the normal fare from any part of the country to Jeddah is far less than what the airlines were charging.

"The actual beneficiaries are the airlines...Let them not say that the government was pleasing anybody, the government was pleasing the airlines, not the Hajis," he said.

The senior Congress leader said the normal airfare from any part of the country to Jeddah is between Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000, whereas the airlines charged about Rs 70,000 to 75,000 during the Haj period.

He said the Haj subsidy was gradually reduced and that started during the Congress government. "It must be half of Rs 650 crore in 2012 than now," he said.

Azad said the impression being given was that the Haj pilgrims are being benefited and the government is doing something extraordinary. "It is not like that. There was no appeasement," he said.

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India for the first time took part in a meeting of the international military cooperation departments of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) since joining the bloc last year.

An Indian delegation led by Major General Ajay Seth participated in the meeting, which discussed issues of practical cooperation among SCO nations, an Indian Embassy press release here said today.

The two-day meeting concluded today.

This is the first meeting attended by India in the field of defence cooperation under the SCO framework.

India and Pakistan were admitted last year into the grouping in which China plays an influential role.

The SCO is comprised of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan.

Officials say both India and China look to SCO as a major platform for improving bilateral ties bogged down by a host of differences, including the 73-day military standoff at Dokalam last year.

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India earned an income of USD 27 billion from in the year 2017, Union Tourism Minister Alphons Kannanthanam said here today.

Stating that tourism sector was doing "extremely well", he said in 2017 alone, there was an increase of 15.2 per cent in the to the country.

"And the foreign exchange earnings went up by 20.2 per cent. So my income from tourism from foreign tourists' arrival alone last year has been 27 billion dollars and if we convert to rupee terms it would come to approximately Rs 1,75,000 crore," Kannanthanam told reporters here.

He said the tourism sector is contributing 6.88 per cent to the country's total GDP, besides 12.36 per cent of the total employment in terms of jobs.

"I think our sector is doing very well. But am I happy with the numbers? No. I want these numbers to increase dramatically because India is an incredible place and we have everything for everybody. So we are trying to bring in lot more people," he said.

Responding to a query on tourist arrivals from Israel, he referred to Israeli Prime Minister's India visit and said both the nations are now having a close relationship.

"So we are hoping that much large number of tourists will come to India in future," Kannanthanam said.

He also said Israel is one of the favourite tourist destinations for Indians and very large number of people were going there.

The Minister was here to chair a review meeting between officials of Railway Board and Kerala government on the development of railways in the state.
India and Egypt have discussed measures to enhance bilateral trade and supply of agricultural products.

India's Ambassador Sanjay Bhattacharyya met with Ali El- Sayed Moselhi, Egyptian Minister of Supply and Internal Trade, yesterday and discussed means of enhancing the bilateral trade and finding new opportunities for collaboration.

The meeting was also attended by P K Das, Director- Marketing (The State Trading Corporation of India Ltd) and SP Kar, Executive Director (Food Corporation of India).

During the meeting, Egyptian Minister for Civil Supply hailed India for sending the emergency rice consignment to Egypt in 2016.

"The Minister welcomed more Government-Government agreements for supply of agricultural products. This form of cooperation has huge potential to significantly buoy our bilateral trade as well as exchanges in the field of public distribution systems for the common people, Ambassador Bhattacharyya said.

"I am very excited about the prospects of G-G cooperation in this area from the overall context of our strong bilateral relations, the Ambassador added.

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A tractor carrying Indian pilgrims today met with an accident in Nepal's Nawalparasi district, killing at least one person and injuring 13 others.

The accident in Triveni Village Council took place when the tractor was heading towards Trivenidham on the occasion of Hindu festival Maghe Aunshi for taking holy dip.

The driver of the vehicle died on the spot and 13 others sustained injuries as the tractor overturned, according to the police.

The injured pilgrims have been taken to a local health centre for treatment.

All the people in the tractor were from Gorakhpur, India.

Thousands of pilgrims have come to Trivenighat today to worship at the temple.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Iran's former president Mohammad Khatami today called on authorities to listen to popular demands after a wave of deadly unrest over economic woes.

Authorities "should try to identify people's problems and hardships" instead of "humiliating" them, the reformist said in a statement published online.

He called for "an environment in which people could express their wishes and demands in all security without feeling intimidated" and without undermining the country's stability.

Khatami spoke after deadly protests across the country from December 28 to January 1 over the dire state of the economy during which some demonstrators called for regime change.

Twenty-five people were killed in the unrest, according to the authorities.

Iranian leaders of all political stripes have accused the country's "enemies" of fomenting the unrest.

"The enemy seizes any opportunity" to harm the country, Khatami said, but "all institutions must recognise their share of blame" for the "shortcomings" highlighted by the recent protests, Khatami said.

Despite being barred from public appearances over his role in 2009 protests, Khatami remains one of the most popular figures in Iranian .

His endorsement was seen as crucial to President Hassan Rouhani's election in 2013 and 2017.

Rouhani, a moderate who secured a key 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, has pushed for greater civil liberties in the wake of the unrest.

On Tuesday, Rouhani called for "reinforcing democracy and listening to people's opinions" to counter any Western belief that Islam and democracy are incompatible.

The recent protests have exacerbated tensions between Rouhani and ultra-conservatives, who criticise the government's policy of outreach and accuse the president of neglecting the poorest members of Iran's population.

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Israeli leaders have slammed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for a fiery, invective- filled speech against President Donald Trump, in which he proclaimed the US role as arbiter of the Mideast conflict over, attacked the administration's envoys and described Israel as a colonial conspiracy.

Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman yesterday said Abbas had "lost his senses" and had given up on the prospect of peace negotiations in favor of open confrontation with both Israel and the United States.

Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the pro-settler Jewish Home Party, said the speech represented Abbas' swan song.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during a trip to India, said Abbas "tore off the mask" and exposed what he called the truth. "The root of the conflict between us and the Palestinians is their continuous refusal to recognise the Jewish state in any borders," he said in a statement on Facebook.

In a rambling, two and half hour long speech Sunday night, the Palestinian leader sharply escalated his rhetoric, lashing out at the US, Israel, Britain and even other Arab leaders, whom he told to "go to hell" for criticizing him. He pronounced the peace process dead, and accused Israel of killing it.

The speech came at a time of great frustration for the 82-year-old Abbas, who after 13 years in power has made little progress in his goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state on lands captured by Israel in 1967.

The rival Hamas militant group now controls the Gaza Strip, his erstwhile Arab allies have quietly moved closer to Israel or turned their attention to other pressing matters such as Iran, and he has lost faith in the United States as a Mideast broker following Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital last month. Abbas also is deeply unpopular with his own public.

In the address, Abbas attacked Trump over the Jerusalem decision and rebuked Trump's recent Twitter comment threatening to cut American aid and alleging the Palestinians were no longer willing to negotiate a peace deal.

"Since when did we reject negotiations?" Abbas told members of the Palestinian Central Council, a key decision- making body. "Shame," Abbas said, addressing Trump.

To laughter from the crowd, Abbas then added the phrase "Yekhreb Beitak," literally translated as "may your house be demolished."



In colloquial Palestinian Arabic, the phrase can have different connotations, from a harsh to a casual insult, but its use in a widely watched speech seemed jarring, and could exacerbate his already fragile relationship with an American president who is particularly averse to criticism.

Despite the tough rhetoric, Abbas did not announce any major policy decisions. He said he remains committed to seeking a peace deal with Israel and promoting a culture of peace in Palestinian society. He denounced terrorism and noted that he has signed an anti-terrorism agreement with over 80 countries, including the US, while saying he maintains a team dedicated to outreach with the Israeli public.

He said he supports only nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation.

Even so, much of his language was especially harsh. Abbas has said that by siding with the Israelis on the sensitive issue of Jerusalem, Trump had destroyed his credibility and made it impossible for the Palestinians to accept his vision for a peace plan.

Abbas called Trump's moves a "slap in the face" and threatened that the Palestinians "will slap back," without elaborating. He took particular aim at the US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a strong supporter of Israel's West Bank settlements, for reportedly objecting to the use of the word occupation, and Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, for once quipping that she wore high heels to fend off Israel's opponents.

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The Jammu and Kashmir government stoday said efforts are being made to vacate over 140 hectares of horticulture land which is under the occupation of the defence establishment in the state.

"Efforts are being made to identify the alternate land for accommodating the security forces suitably in order to vacate the horticulture land from the occupation of defence establishment," Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti said in a written reply in the state Assembly here.

Replying to a question by Mohammad Yousuf Bhat, Mufti, who is minister-in-charge (Home), said a total of 2887.17 kanals (144.35 hectares) of horticulture land is under the occupation of defence establishment in the state.

She said over 12.38 crore is being paid as rent annually to the owners of the private land under the occupation of the defence establishment in the Kashmir division.

In pursuance to Jammu and Kashmir requisitioning and acquisition of the Immovable Property Act, the chief minister said the rentals are being revised after every five years in respect of the land under the occupation of defence forces, in consultation with the Ministry of Defence.

Mufti said while over 18,846 hectares of land are under the occupation of the security forces including 18,025 hectares under the Army in the Kashmir division, a total of 17,734 hectares of land are under the use of security forces, including 16,364 hectares in the Jammu division.

It includes state land, acquired land, requisitioned land, land on hiring basis, leased land and private land under unauthorised occupation of the Army and other forces in the state, the chief minister said.

She said over 678 hectares of land are under the occupation of the forces for which they are providing rent annually.

This includes 518 hectares in Kashmir and 160.4 in the Jammu division.

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Goa Water Resources Minister Vinod Palyekar today accused Karnataka of "paying" money to a witness to appear before a tribunal, which was looking into the dispute over the sharing of the Mahadayi river water between the two states.

Karnataka and Goa, the riparian states of the Mahadayi (known as Mandovi in Goa), have been locked in a bitter battle over the sharing of the water of the river, which originates in Belagavi in Karnataka.

The matter is pending before the Mahadayi Water Dispute Tribunal.

In a series of tweets, Palyekar, who has been engaged in a war of words with the Congress government in Karnataka, made fresh accusations against the neighbouring state.

"Goa never paid for its witnesses. Our witnesses worked keeping in mind #GoemGoenkarGoemkarponn (interest of the state) in #Mahadayi matter (sic)," one of his tweets read.

"Unlike Karnataka witness A K Gosain who had confessed in tribunal that he was paid 50k per day by Karnataka for being the witness and 5 lakhs to prepare report (sic)," the minister further said.

The Goa government has claimed that Karnataka has resumed work on a tributary canal of the river at Kankumbi village, in "violation" of a Supreme Court order.

Palyekar had said the state would file contempt petitions against Karnataka in the apex court and also in the tribunal.

Meanwhile, Karnataka Irrigation Minister M B Patil had visited Kankumbi yesterday and said that the claims made by Goa were "false". He had also said that no fresh work was going on at the proposed dam site.

Palyekar, in a late evening statement yesterday, had called Karnataka "habitual liars" on the Mahadayi issue.

The Goa government made a representation before the tribunal on the river-sharing issue yesterday.

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In a U-turn, the Sri Lankan Cabinet on Tuesday decided to reimpose the 39-year-old "sexist" law banning women from buying alcohol or working in places that sell or manufacture liquor.

It also decided to reduce the extended opening hours for bars and pubs announced last week.

A finance ministry official on January 12 had announced lifting of the 1979 law that prohibited the sale of any type of alcohol to women on the island of 21 million people in an effort to strike off retrograde laws from the statute books and reorganise them to meet the modern day needs.

The move had revoked sharp criticism from nationalists and Buddhist monks who termed it an attack on the Sinhala majority Buddhist culture.

"The Cabinet has decided to rescind the gazette notification (on lifting of ban)," Minister of Ports and Shipping Mahinda Samarasinghe told reporters.

Addressing a public rally on Saturday last, President Maithripala Sirisena had said that he was against the move and wanted the gazette notification to be cancelled.

He said he was against promoting alcoholism and demeaning the women by linking them to the alcohol business.

Critics have accused the president of not taking gender equality seriously.

"This is not just about this archaic sexist law but the archaic sexist system in which this law is just one more tool of control," the BBC quoted a Sri Lankan blogger as saying.

Sri Lanka's Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera, in his budget proposals for 2018, had unveiled steep tax rise on hard liquor, but greatly reduced tariffs on wine and beer, for which he also came under fire.

Under new measures, also passed by Samaraweera, bars and pubs can remain open an hour late, till 10 pm.

Announcing the measures, the finance minister had said that strict curbs on Sri Lanka's licenced liquor manufacturers only encouraged a black market for spirits, and deprive the state of much-needed revenue.
At least 16 Indian fishermen have been arrested and their four fishing trawlers seized for allegedly fishing in Sri Lanka's territorial waters near Katchatheevu islet, the Sri Lankan Navy said today in Colombo.

The fast gun boats and the fast attack craft, attached to the Northern Naval Command of the Sri Lanka Navy, arrested the fishermen in the seas, northwest of the Delft Island and northeast of the Katchatheevu Island.

The fishermen and trawlers were handed over to the Assistant Director of Fisheries in Jaffna for further legal action, the Navy added.

Meanwhile in Rameswaram, a fisheries department official said that more than 2,500 fishermen, from Mandapam and Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, had ventured into the sea yesterday.

They were fishing off Katchatheevu when the Lankan naval personnel came to the spot and snapped the fishing nets of 100 boats before chasing them away, Assistant Director of Fisheries Department, Mandapam, Gopinath said.

Condemning the frequent arrest of Indian fishermen, Rameswaram Fishermen Association President, P Sesuraja asked the Centre to intervene and help them fish in the traditional waters in Palk Strait.

The arrest of Indian fishermen by Sri Lankan Navy has become a flash point in India-Sri Lanka relations.

On January 4, at least 13 Tamil Nadu fishermen were arrested by the Sri Lankan Navy, prompting Chief Minister K Palaniswami to urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi to secure their release.

On January 7, over 4,000 Tamil Nadu fishermen were chased away by the Navy personnel who also snapped the fishing nets of 100 boats for allegedly fishing in the territorial waters off Katchatheevu islet.

Over 3,500 fishermen from Tamil Nadu were on January 9 chased away by the Lankan naval personnel who had damaged some boats by pelting stones and snapped the fishing nets of around 50 vessels.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Lt Governor Anil Baijal today approved a Delhi government scheme for quality healthcare service for people of the city, without any income criteria.

The scheme was passed by the AAP cabinet on December 12 and was subsequently sent to the LG for approval.

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal took to Twitter to announce the development.

"Hon'ble @LtGovDelhi approves 'Quality Health for all' scheme without income criteria. Thank u so much sir," he said.

An official from the Lt Governor's office said the nod for the scheme was given today. The approval was given post facto.

The 'Quality Health for all' scheme, applicable to permanent residents of Delhi, pertains to providing patients free-of-cost, specified, high-end diagnostic (radiological) tests and surgeries at private hospitals, in case of delay in government facilities.

Baijal had on December 29 concurred with the amendments to the Delhi Arogya Kosh (DAK) scheme. However, he had advised the government to retain some "income ceiling" so that the resources of the government were used to help the poor and the needy and the "poor are not crowded out by the well-to-do".

Kejriwal had responded that if the income criteria was introduced, it would practically "kill" the scheme.

Health Minister Satyendar Jain had last week said there were needy people and those who might fall above the ceiling limit too were tax-payers, so no one should be restricted from availing the service.

"We cannot differentiate between the poor and rich while providing medicines to them for their wellness," he had said.

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The Supreme Court today left it to the Maharashtra government to decide which documents, relating to the death of special CBI judge B H Loya, could be handed over to the petitioners who have sought an independent probe into it.

The state government, which filed documents in a sealed cover relating to Loya's death, had during the hearing opposed the petitioners' demand that the entire material should be handed over to them for perusal.

The apex court, in its order which was uploaded on its website late in the evening, said, "Let the documents be placed on record within seven days and if it is considered appropriate, copies be furnished to the petitioners. Put up before the appropriate bench".

After the order was uploaded, the standing counsel for Maharashtra said their team of lawyers, including senior advocate Harish Salve, would scan and verify all the documents in consultation with the concerned department and take a call on the issue of handing over the documents.

The case, whose assignment to the bench hearing the PILs was a bone of contention of the unprecedented press conference by the four senior-most judges of the apex court, came up for hearing before a bench comprising Justices Arun Mishra and M M Shantanagoudar.

Loya, who was hearing the sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, had allegedly died of cardiac arrest in Nagpur on December 1, 2014, when he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleague's daughter.

When the counsel for the petitioners today said they should be given copies of the documents the state government has submitted to the court, the bench had observed, "it is a matter where they should know everything".

The issue had come under the spotlight in November last year after media reports quoting Loya's sister had fuelled suspicion about the circumstances surrounding his death and its link to the Sohrabuddin case.

However, Loya's son had on January 14 said in Mumbai that his father died of natural causes and not under suspicious circumstances.

Earlier today, Salve, representing Maharashtra, placed before the bench the documents, including Loya's postmortem report, in a sealed cover. He told the court that these documents contained certain confidential materials which should not be made public.

When the petioners insisted that they should be given the copies, Salve said the confidentiality of these documents should be maintained and they should not be made public.

"If anything is confidential, we will put confidential mark on that," Salve said.

The petitioners' counsel had then assured the top court that they would not make any of the documents public.

The bench, without specifying any date, adjourned the case and said it would be listed for hearing after a week.

"We are not fixing any date," the bench said during the brief hearing in the jam-packed courtroom.

The apex court was hearing two separate PILs, filed by Maharashtra-based journalist B R Lone and Congress leader Tehseen Poonawalla, seeking independent probe into the alleged mysterious death of Loya.

The court had earlier termed as a "serious matter" the issue of Loya's death and had asked Maharashtra government to file certain documents, including the autopsy report.

Poonawalla's counsel had earlier told the court that this was a case of alleged mysterious death of a judge, who was hearing a sensitive case, and it was required to be probed independently.

In his plea, he has claimed that circumstances revolving around the death of the judge were "questionable, mysterious and contradicting".

The other plea filed by the journalist has submitted that a fair probe was needed into the mysterious death of Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin encounter case in which various police officers and BJP president Amit Shah were named as parties.

A PIL seeking probe into the judge's death was also filed before the Bombay High Court on January 8 by the Bombay Lawyers' Association.

The Indian judiciary was thrown into a turmoil on January 12 when four senior apex court judges, Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, M B Lokur and Kurian Joseph, had convened an unprecedented press conference raising some issues, including "selective" allocation of cases by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

In the encounter case, the BJP President along with Rajasthan Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria, Rajasthan-based businessman Vimal Patni, former Gujarat police chief P C Pande, Additional Director General of Police Geeta Johri and Gujarat police officers Abhay Chudasama and N K Amin, have already been discharged.

A total of 23 accused, including police personnel, are facing trial for their involvement in the alleged fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi and their associate Tulsidas Prajapati in Gujarat in November 2005.

The case was later transferred to CBI and the trial was shifted to Mumbai.

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Ludhiana police today ordered that no person would cover their face while driving or walking in the city limits.

In a press release, Ludhiana Police Commissioner R N Dhoke issued various prohibitory orders keeping in view the law and order situation.

Dhoke said that anti-social elements usually covered their faces while committing crimes to avoid being identified.

He, however, added that those having any kind of allergy or illness will be exempted from covering their faces.

The city police chief also banned unauthorised use of stickers or logos related to the 'police', 'Army', 'VIP', or those which said 'On Government Duty' etc.

He also issued orders for the shopkeepers to keep a record of buyers of Army print clothes and uniforms under Section 144 of the CrPC.

The city police chief said it has been found that shopkeepers do not keep a record of the sale of Army print clothes and uniforms.

Offenders can disturb law and order situation or commit a crime in the city by wearing Army, paramilitary uniforms, he added.

The police commissioner ordered the shopkeepers to ask for a photograph, identification proof and mobile numbers of the buyers. The shopkeepers will have to submit the record of sale to police stations concerned, he said.

He said these orders will last over the next two months.

Further, the Police Commissioner also prohibited the shopkeepers to encroach the area outside their shops.

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Psychedelic drugs like magic mushrooms can help relieve the symptoms of depression, without the 'dulling' of emotions linked with antidepressants, a study has found.

Working out if someone is happy, angry or afraid, from the look on their face, is a skill we may take for granted.

For some people, however, such as those with chronic depression, this innate ability to pick up on and respond to emotional prompts like a facial expression can be disrupted, with the brain becoming oversensitive to negative stimuli.

While antidepressants drugs can help to combat the symptoms of depression for patients, they can dampen how the brain processes strong emotions - effectively turning down the dial on the hypersensitivity to negative emotions but also 'blunting' intense positive mood.

Researchers at the Imperial College London in the UK suggest that psychedelics, like magic mushrooms, may hold the key to sidestepping some of these effects in treating depression, by reviving the brain's activity and effectively reconnecting patients with their emotions.

Previous research has shown that psilocybin - the active compound in magic mushrooms - may help to alleviate symptoms in patients with persistent depression by 'resetting' brain activity.

In the study published in the journal Neuropharmacology, researchers focused on the potential of the drug to change brain activity in key areas involved in emotional processing.

They found that after treatment with psilocybin, patients with depression who did not respond to conventional treatments, reported improvements in their mood and symptoms.

However, the researchers also observed a stronger response to emotional faces with increased brain activity in an area called the amygdala - the almond-shaped region of the brain involved in processing emotions and which is known to play a role in depression.

The findings suggest an alternative pathway to tackling the changes seen in the depressed brain, which could potentially avoid some of the side effects seen with "Prozac- like' selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the most commonly prescribed antidepressants.

"Our findings are important as they reveal biological changes after psilocybin therapy and, more specifically, they suggest that increased emotional processing is crucial for the treatment to work," said Leor Roseman, from Imperial College.

In the small, trial a total of 20 volunteers with depression were recruited and asked not to take any antidepressant medication in the two weeks leading up to the trial.

They were then given two oral doses of psilocybin alongside psychiatric support, receiving an initial low dose of the drug before taking a second, much stronger therapeutic dose a week later.

In order to capture changes in brain activity, 19 of the volunteers completed fMRI scans before and after treatment.

They were shown images of human faces that were either happy, scared or neutral, with the fMRI capturing their responses as changes in blood flow throughout different regions of the brain.

Following treatment, patients reported feeling emotionally re-connected and accepting, with one patient describing the experience as an 'emotional purging'.

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Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today termed the violence near Koregaon Bhima village earlier this month a result of "conspiracy".

Fadnavis was speaking at a meeting of state BJP office-bearers here. The party's state unit chief Raosaheb Danve was also present.

"There was a conspiracy behind the Koregaon Bhima violence. We (BJP workers) should remain alert. BJP workers should try to maintain communal harmony in the society. A constant dialogue with people is necessary," the chief minister said.

Dalits visiting a war memorial at Koregaon Bhima in Pune district came under attack on January 1, leading to massive protests and a shut-down across the state two days later.

The chief minister also asked the party workers to prepare for "forthcoming elections".

"We have decided to hold tri-colour rally ("Tiranga rally") at every district place on January 26 to counter Opposition leaders' 'Samvidhan Bachao' ('Save Constitution') rally in Mumbai," said Danve in his speech.

"Some people are conspiring to malign the BJP and the state government because of our development works. The Halla-bol rally of Opposition has failed, it has had no impact on people," the state BJP chief said.

BJP sources said the party leaders discussed how to strengthen workers' network and the preparations for coming local body elections.

The party is also assessing the communal impact of Koregaon Bhima incident and its aftermath, sources added.

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Ahead of final arguments before the Mahadayi Water Dispute Tribunal in February, the Goa government today constituted a committee to inspect possible violation of Supreme Court's directions by Karnataka.

Goa Water Resources Minister Vinod Palyekar set up the four-member committee to monitor, on weekly basis, possible violation of SC directives at Kankumbi village in Karnataka with resumption of the construction of a canal there.

Goa, Karnataka and Maharashtra are locked in a dispute over sharing of the waters of the Mahadayi.

The tribunal will hear final arguments in the first week of February.

Palyekar told reporters here that he has constituted a four-member committee to visit the disputed site on the Mahadayi at Kankumbi, and asked for weekly reports.

"The committee will bring to the government's notice if any activity is happening there," Palyekar said.

Goa and Karnataka are caught up in a fresh row after Goa claimed the latter has resumed the work on a canal at Kankumbi.

Goa Chief Secretary Dharmendra Sharma wrote to his Karnataka counterpart, asking to stop the work.

Meanwhile, the Goa Water Resource Department's chief engineer Sandip Nadkarni has been stripped of his powers.

"All the powers of chief engineer, Water Resource Department shall be immediately given to Additional Chief Engineer P J Kamat in view of recent Mahadayi dispute developments and (as) during the critical time chief engineer is not available and is out of the country on private holiday. It is now very difficult to rely upon him," read a note sent by Palyekar to the secretary of his department.

Goa government has already submitted a brief summary of the arguments before the tribunal, where it has claimed that Karnataka's demand for drinking water was false, and the neighbouring state, in reality, wanted the water for sugarcane irrigation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Supreme Court today pulled up the CBI's SIT, probing alleged extra-judicial killings and fake encounters by the army, Assam Rifles and police in Manipur, for not registering the required number of FIRs as directed by it earlier.

The apex court, while putting searching questions to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) over the issue, directed them to lodge 30 more FIRs on or before January 31 this year, after the team said it has lodged 12 FIRs till date.

The apex court is hearing a PIL seeking probe into as many as 1,528 cases of extra-judicial killings in Manipur.

"FIRs have to be registered in every single case. It is the investigation that has to be carried out by you (SIT). After the investigation, you decide whether you will file the charge sheets or closure reports," a bench comprising Justices Madan B Lokur and U U Lalit said.

The top court asked the SIT to complete its investigation in the 12 matters in which FIRs have already been registered, by February 28 this year.

"We make it clear that on or before January 31, 2018, all FIRs must be registered in respect of the remaining 30 cases as mentioned in the three tables that we have mentioned in the judgement dated July 14, 2017," the bench said.

The court had on July 14 last year constituted an SIT comprising five CBI officers and ordered registration of FIRs and probe the alleged extra-judicial killings in Manipur.

The bench, which perused the first status report filed by the SIT, had directed that all subsequent reports to be filed before it, should have the approval of the CBI director.

The bench also asked the CBI director to monitor the progress in the investigation and posted the matter for further hearing on March 12.

At the outset, Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Maninder Singh, appearing for the CBI, placed before the bench the status report of SIT.

Senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, representing the petitioners, raised the question that CBI has not yet lodged the FIRs as directed by the court earlier and statement of witnesses have not been recorded so far.

The ASG referred to the contents of the status report and said that out of 48 such incidents, the SIT has not received the documents related to six cases.

However, the bench asked the CBI's DIG, who is in-charge of the SIT probe and was present in the court, as to why all the FIRs were not registered yet despite ordering the team to do so by December 31 last year.

"You (SIT) do not need forensic reports to register an FIR. For registering an FIR, you do not need site visit. There are orders of the Gauhati High Court and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). You can register FIRs in respect of these cases and then carry out investigation," the bench said.

When the DIG said they have to examine the voluminous records of each case before lodging FIRs and see whether a case was made out or not, the bench shot back, "that is for the courts to see if cases are made out or not. The Gauhati High Court has said about unnatural deaths. You cannot say that judgement of high court is wrong".

Meanwhile, the ASG told the bench that SIT has received the documents related to these cases in tranches.

The bench told the DIG that the apex court has asked the SIT to first investigate the cases which have already been dealt with by the high court, NHRC and a commission headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice Santosh Hegde.

"Why did we picked up these cases? Because there are some foundational analysis by some judicial authorities in these matters," the court said, adding, "you were expected to carry out investigation from there onwards".

Regarding the arguments advanced by Gonsalves, the ASG said that process of recording statement of witnesses have already began.

The apex court had on January 8 said it appeared that the matter relating to probe into these cases was not being taken up seriously by the SIT.

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Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband's "America First" agenda and stay true to her roots, if there's a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.

In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.

The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometres from the Italian border.

Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got US citizenship in 2006.

From designs by Dolce & Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady's touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established, and expensive, design houses.

As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump's political base.

Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He's helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.

"In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?" Pierre told AP.

Mrs. Trump's old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.

Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.

Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.

It's a striking contrast with Michelle Obama, who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to US fashion brands.

Most of Mrs. Trump's clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house's knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.

This is highly unusual, and contrasts with Mrs. Obama's frequent collaborations with designers.

Perhaps it's not Mrs. Trump's choice, given her husband's unpopularity.

People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world's most photographed women. It's a deafening silence, especially given that it's an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown's wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.

Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she's not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.

The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children's interests.

When she departed the White House to visit hurricane- damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Punjab Power and Irrigation Minister Rana Gurjit Singh, accused by the opposition of illegally bagging sand mining contracts, has submitted his resignation to Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, who is yet to act on it.

The chief minister confirmed that he had received the resignation letter and said he would discuss the matter with his Congress party president Rahul Gandhi on January 18 in Delhi before taking a final call on it.

Besides the mining contract controversy of last year, the minister came under fire from the opposition after the Enforcement Directorate this month served a summon on his son, Rana Inder Partap Singh, for allegedly raising funds abroad for a family-owned company without the required permission from the Reserve Bank of India.

"I have given my resignation from the ministry to the Captain Sahib (the chief minister). I handed over my resignation personally to the chief minister a week ago," Rana Gurjit Singh said today.

The chief minister, however, said he had received the resignation letter on January 4. "It has been with me for 12 days," he said.

Rana Gurjit Singh, who is considered close to the chief minister, was inducted into the cabinet after the Congress returned to power in the state last year.

Asked why he tendered his resignation, the minister said he resigned on moral grounds as the opposition had been trying to corner the chief minister by making false allegations against him (Rana) and was demanding his resignation.

"I have set a standard by resigning on moral grounds," the MLA from Kapurthala said.

Asked whether the chief minister had asked him to resign, the minister said, "Never. I am here (in politics) because of him (Amarinder Singh)."



"I had earlier also offered to resign (during the sand mining controversy last year). Then the chief minister told me to continue," said Rana Gurjit Singh, whose family has business interests in sugar, power and distillery.

The opposition, particularly Leader of the Opposition and AAP MLA Sukhpal Singh Khaira, has been demanding Rana Gurjit Singh's resignation.

The opposition Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) has demanded the sacking of Rana Gurjit Singh for allegedly acquiring sand and gravel mining contracts through "benami transactions in the names of his cook and office staff".

The minister has vehemently denied this charge and claimed that there was no wrongdoing on his part.

Facing immense pressure, the Amarinder Singh-led government had in May last year formed the Justice J S Narang Commission to look into mining auctions.

The commission was mandated to probe all aspects of the allegations of impropriety against the irrigation and power minister in the multi-crore sand mining auctions.

This year, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) asked the minister's son to appear before it on January 17 for allegedly raising funds to tune of USD 18 millions abroad by floating global depository receipts for one of the family-owned companies without the mandatory permission of the Reserve Bank of India.

"The opposition again made a hue and cry that the ED has issued summons. They issued such notices several times and the reply will again be given this time also," the minister said, denying any violation of any norm.

Rana Gurjit Singh said that he had not been handling family businesses since 2000.

Rana Gurjit Singh also dared AAP MLA Sukhpal Singh Khaira to resign from his post as his name also allegedly figured in a drug case.

"Well, I have resigned. The person (Khaira) who has been making noise and seeking my resignation, will he now resign on moral grounds or not remains to be seen. He should also resign. I have set the standard and he should also follow me," Rana Gurjit Singh said, adding, "I have showed courage as I have not committed any sin.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Jammu and Kashmir Assembly today witnessed uproarious scenes after the opposition NC and MLA Sheikh Rashid raised the issue of Bilal Ahmad Kawa, who was arrested on charges of involvement in the 2000 Red Fort attack last week, and demanded a statement from the government.

The issue was raised by Independent MLA Rashid who also trooped into the well of the House, before returning to his seat later. He was supported by the legislators of the National Conference (NC) party.

"Kawa is innocent. Ensure his release," Rashid said as he referred to the protest by his family members, who, he said, are camping at Lal Chowk in Srinagar for his release.

Speaking on the issue in Assembly, NC MLA Ali Mohammad Sagar told House that both, the police and CID, have given Kawa clean chit on the issue and that he was not involved in militancy.

"About 20 years have passed since the attack on the Red Fort. At that time he (Kawa) was 17 years old," Sagar said.

Sagar also said that he enquired into the matter on his own, and didn't find Kawa involved in militancy.

Alluding to the External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj's quick response for Indians' facing trouble abroad, the NC general secretary said it is time for the state government to to intervene in the same manner for its innocent state subject.

"An innocent state subject is arrested and accused of an attack which had happened 17 years ago. There are five instances when innocent Kashmiris had to spent 20 years in jails before getting absolved of the charges and released.

"Their lives and families were ruined," he said while demanding government's immediate intervention into the case.

Accusing the state government of being afraid of New Delhi and the home ministry, Sagar said the state government should ask for Kawa's release at the earliest.

With MLA Rashid further pressing for a statement from the government on the issue, state's Parliamentary Affairs Minister A R Veeri said the house would be informed soon on the matter.

The 37-year-old Kawa, suspected to be linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba, was arrested from the Indira Gandhi International Airport on January 10.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart Benjaman Netanyahu will dedicate to the nation a centre for entrepreneurship and technology during their visit here tomorrow, the organisation said.

Called the International Centre for Entrepreneurship and Technology (iCreate), the body is a public private partnership (PPP) venture of the Gujarat government, set up to nurture entrepreneurs by providing them with funds, space, mentors and other facilities.

The two prime ministers will also recognise and award 38 entrepreneurial projects from the two countries -- 18 from India and 20 from Israel -- and will engage with some of the people behind the start-ups, iCreate officials said.

"In September 2012, Modi, the then Gujarat chief minister, conducted the ground breaking ceremony for a campus for iCreate on a 40-acre plot of land at Dev Dholera," a press release from iCreate said.

"Tomorrow, Modi and Netanyahu shall dedicate iCreate to the nation," it said.

iCreate shares close engagement with Israel as one of the organisations facilitating the Centre's India-Israel Innovation Bridge, the body's chief mentor, Parag Amin, said.

"This institution has been working since long with Israel," Amin said, adding that when Modi visited the West Asian nation as Gujarat's chief minister, he saw Israel's framework and policy on entrepreneurship and believed that it was way ahead of India in the field.

"Modi had then sought greater engagement with Israel in the field of entrepreneurship. Since then, we have done a lot of innovation tie-ups with Israel," he said.

Amin added that when their CEO Anupam Jalote went to Israel with Modi last year, it was decided that an "innovation bridge" will be created between the two countries.

The India Israel Innovation Bridge is managed by the Israel Innovation Authority and the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) of the Government of India, and is jointly managed by Invest India on behalf of the DIPP.

iCreate is one of the organisations facilitating this Bridge by hosting start-ups from both the countries, mainly those working in the field of innovating solutions to problems faced in the areas of water, agriculture and medical devices, Amin said.

"We had launched a start-up challenge with Invest India for start-ups in the areas of water, agriculture and medical devices. As many as 38 entities were selected and will be awarded. Winners will spend some time in Israel and India and will be funded by both the governments," he said.

At the event tomorrow, Modi and Netanyahu will also view some leading start-ups from Gujarat which will also set up stalls and showcase their products at the start-up fair which will carry on for three days, he said.

iCreate CEO Jalote said the two countries could help each other by leveraging on one another's strength, and the engagement between the two at the government level would help create successful entrepreneurial ventures.

"Israel has cutting edge technology. They create technology, but we are for mass production, cost reduction and understanding culture to make them adaptable. Therefore, when these two things come together, you have successful entrepreneurial ventures," he said.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned the names of Rajasthan's Rajput leaders, including former vice president Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh, during his speech at the commencement of the Barmer oil refinery project here today.

The prime minister's speech assumed significance as the Rajput community has expressed resentment against the BJP ahead of the January 29 bypolls to two Lok Sabha and one Assembly constituencies in the state. Rajasthan also goes to Assembly election later this year



Modi said that it was Shekhawat who had envisioned a modern Rajasthan and an oil refinery in the state.

As Modi mentioned the name of former external affairs minister Singh, the people was overwhelmed and raised slogans in support of the prime minister.

Singh, once a prominent leader of the BJP, has been in coma after he suffered head injury in 2014. His son Manvendra Singh is a BJP MLA.

The prime minister also remembered the First World War hero Major Dalpat Singh Shekhawat, who played a crucial role in the battle of Haifa in Israel.

Modi said that he and Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu visited Teen Murti Chowk in Delhi to pay homage to the war heroes and and mark its renaming as Teen Murti-Haifa Chowk. Netanyahu is on a six-day visit to India.

Modi was addressing a function organised to "commence" work on the Rs 43,129 crore Barmer oil refinery project here.

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Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh today announced the signing of an MoU for setting up a startup in STPI's incubation centre in Mohali, where the state government has proposed the country's biggest government- supported startup hub.

The MoU was signed between the Department of Industries, Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), Indian School of Business (ISB) and Punjab Technology University (PTU). ISB and PTU will act as knowledge partners of the startup, said an official release.

Addressing a conclave on 'Mohali as next big IT hub in the North', the chief minister also announced a Rs 100 crore fund in collaboration with PTU for the Mohali Startup Hub, to be spread over an area of 45,000 sq ft.

The startup hub would be part of the state government's new policy for startups and entrepreneurship.

The chief minister also launched the Punjab Bureau of Investment Promotion's new Startup Portal, which would connect all the stakeholders.

Interacting with the audience, Singh said he would soon be meeting the Air Force chief for permission to use their air fields for small aircraft (20-seaters) to promote air connectivity in Punjab.

He said he would also discuss installation of CAT III landing with the Army chief and the Union aviation minister.

Listing the initiatives of his government to boost the IT and ITES sector, the chief minister said it has been decided to set up an 'international desk' within the Punjab Startup Hub to facilitate the new investors and entrepreneurs from across the globe.

He further said a special campaign has been launched to woo the Punjabi and Indian diaspora for making huge investments in Punjab.

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The Delhi High Court today directed a group of visually impaired students, whose hostel was recently demolished, to immediately shift to the alternate facilities being provided to them by the DDA.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar said its order of January 3 asking them to move out of the area has to be complied with.

The court was displeased that the visually impaired students' had not moved out from the site and were living there in a tent, saying "our orders will not be frustrated like this".

The bench said it took up the issue of the students on its own after coming to know of their plight and was working to ensure proper facilities for them.

"This is not expected when we were giving them facilities. Our orders will not be frustrated like this. We do not approve of this. Please shift to the community centre. If they do not move, we will ensure physical removal," an angry bench said.

It said "we have not left any poor or disabled person out on a limb."



The remarks of the court came after the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) submitted that it was asking the students to shift to the community centre, but they were not moving out.

The court told the students' lawyers that by not shifting from the site, they were "encroaching on public land".

It gave them time till January 24, the next date of hearing, to move to the community centre.

The court on January 3 also had told them to move to an alternative accommodation, saying they were illegal occupants of government land and cannot claim legal right over it.

The court was hearing a PIL by nine visually impaired students, who have alleged that DDA acted illegally in forcibly evicting them from the hostel in south-west Delhi where they were residing since 2000.

The court has taken up the issue on its own also after it came across a report that 20 students were sleeping in the open after their hostel, Louis Welfare Progressive Association of the Blind in Janakpuri here, was demolished on December 15 last year.

The report had claimed that the occupants were neither given prior information about the demolition nor ample time to gather their belongings.

Around 20 people, mostly students of Delhi University or the nearby Sarvodaya school, used to stay there.

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The government's decision on revoking has no meaning as there was no such concession and Muslims were being cheated in its name, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) said on Tuesday.

"The subsidy was not given to those going on Haj but it was for Air India that is running in losses. It was an eyewash. Muslims were cheated in the name of the subsidy," AIMPLB General Secretary Maulana Wali Rahmani told PTI.

"In normal days, tickets for Saudi Arabia come for Rs 32,000 but during Haj, Air India used to charge Rs 65,000 to Rs 1 lakh from those going for Haj. The fare will be less without subsidy," he said.

"Haj-bound Muslims are bulk purchasers of Air India tickets and so their fare should be less. It's rule of International Air Transport Association that if anyone is going for pilgrimage, he will be given 40 per cent discount. If the fare is not less, it should at least the same as on normal days," he said.

All India Shia Personal Law Board Chairman Yasoob Abbas, on the other hand, said the board favoured subsidy on Haj.

"The government used to give subsidy to reduce loss of Air India. If the amount is now spent on education of Muslim children, it will be good but the poor who used to go to Haj will not do so now," he said.

Samajwadi Party spokesman Rajendra Chowdhury said that should not be revoked completely and facilities for those going for the annual pilgrimage should be increased.

Earlier in the day, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi announced in Delhi that there will be no subsidy for Haj from this year and said the move was part of the government's efforts to "empower minorities" without appeasement.

A record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage this year from India, he said, adding the government had spent over Rs 2500 million last year on subsidising the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Saudi Arabia.

The decision is in line with a 2012 Supreme Court order, asking the government to do away with the subsidy, which had long been sought by the BJP.

The BJP had cited the subsidy as an example of "Muslim appeasement" by parties such as the Congress.
Top NCP leaders from Maharashtra today took to the streets as part of the second phase of their agitation against the Devendra Fadnavis government.

The Sharad Pawar-led opposition party has started an agitation, 'halla bol' (attack), against the BJP-led government for its "anti-people and anti-farmer" policies.

State NCP president Sunil Tatkare and senior party leaders like Ajit Pawar, Supriya Sule and Dhananjay Munde were among those present at the inauguration of the second phase of the stir in the temple town of Tuljapur in Marathwada.

After offering prayers to Goddess Tulja Bhavani at a temple, they joined party workers and leaders from Marathwada to perform "Gondhal", a ritualistic dance form and folk art, to highlight the alleged failures of the Fadnavis government.

The NCP leaders and workers also took out a morcha and later handed over a memorandum against the government to the tehsildar of Tuljapur, about 400km from here.

The agitation will cover the entire Marathwada region and conclude at Aurangabad on February 3 when party chief Sharad Pawar will participate in a rally. The first phase of the stir was organised last month.

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The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) of Sharad Pawar, a coalition partner of the Congress in the Meghalaya government, today announced that it would contest the upcoming state Assembly polls on its own and field candidates on at least 42 seats.

NCP general secretary Praful Patel said the party could have an electoral understanding with regional parties on a few seats, adding that the scenario would be more clear as the election approached.

Patel, whose party had been supporting the Congress-led Meghalaya Progressive Alliance in the north-eastern state for the last five years, attacked Chief Minister Mukul Sangma for allegedly not giving the NCP its due in governance.

The NCP's electoral plans for Meghalaya and two other north-eastern states of Nagaland and Tripura, where polls are due in the first quarter of the year, were made public by Patel after chairing a party meeting.

"We are going to contest on 22 of the 24 seats in the Garo Hills region and at least on 20 seats in the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya," he told reporters.

The NCP had two MLAs in the 60-member Meghalaya Assembly after the 2013 state polls. After Sanbor Shullai's resignation from the House, it is now left with only one legislator, M A Sangma.

Yesterday, it had named Saleng A Sangma the new state party chief after he resigned from the House as an Independent MLA.

In Nagaland, Patel said the party was going to contest from fewer seats, but did not specify the number. "We have had four MLAs in Nagaland in the past," he said.

In Tripura, the NCP leader said the party was not going to contest, except for a few "token" seats.

The polls in these states are due in the first quarter of the year as the term of their current assemblies is scheduled to come to an end by March. The term of the Meghalaya Assembly ends on March 6.

Patel, who was here on a whirlwind two-day tour, is slated to address a rally in the Garo Hills tomorrow, before returning to Delhi.

The former Union minister also released the first list of six candidates (for the Khasi-Jaintia Hills region), featuring former minister ECB Bamon who would lock horns with NPP candidate and former Congress minister Sniawbhalang Dhar.

Attacking the Sangma government, Patel said, "Misgovernance is of the highest order. The people are disillusioned and they are looking for a change."



While acknowledging the growing popularity of the BJP in the state, he said the divisive policies of the saffron party and its allies, as regards food habits, cultural and religious ethos, would lead to fragmentation of the society.

"I am sure the people of Meghalaya will outrightly reject these infringements on their food habits, beliefs, religious ethos and that a befitting answer (to the BJP) will be given by the state in the coming election."



Asserting that the NCP was a credible alternative for the people of Meghalaya, the former Union minister said the party aimed at bringing good governance.

He was particularly harsh on the Sangma government for denying former Meghalaya NCP chief Sanbor Shullai a ministerial post, after he was asked to resign as the deputy speaker of the Assembly.

"The Congress did not do justice to the two MLAs from our party. They took our support, made Shullai the deputy speaker and then, asked him to resign," Patel said, adding that the NCP never got the respect it deserved in the ruling alliance.

Shullai is now with the BJP.

Asserting that the party would not extend support to the BJP after the election "for sure", the NCP leader said, "We will do what is in the best interest of the people of Meghalaya and have an alliance with the regional forces.

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Visiting Israeli Prime Minister will present his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi a special gift - the Gal-Mobile water desalinisation and purification jeep the two leaders rode on Israel's Olga beach last year.

The jeep has reached India, sources here confirmed.

"It has reached Delhi and is on its way to Bhuj," sources here said.

"There will be a live demonstration of desalination of sea water that the two Prime administers will witness through video conferencing from the iCreate centre on Janaury 17," they said.

Netanyahu and Modi waded into the Mediterranean Sea and rode the "buggy" jeep on the coast during the latter's visit to Israel in July last year.

The jeep is said to cost around 390,000 shekels (approximately USD 111,000).

Gal-Mobile is an independent, integrated water purification vehicle, designed to produce high-quality drinking water. It can be useful in natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, military use in difficult terrain and rural areas to provide drinkable water.

It can purify up to 20,000 litres per day of sea water and 80,000 litres per day of brackish/muddy or contaminated river water and bring it to WHO standards.

Modi and Netanyahu had witnessed the demonstration of sea water purification technology pioneered by Israel at a water desalination unit on the Olga Beach during the Indian Prime Minister's visit to Israel.

"When you and I walked shoeless along the Mediterranean shore, we drank sea water that was purified before our eyes using technology that will save untold lives. India and Israel are working together to provide clean water, to increase crop yields, to keep our people safe from terrorism and other challenges to the future we both seek," Netanyahu said yesterday in New Delhi.

Modi at the India-Israel Business Summit yesterday said Israel's technology for land, water or space has won appreciation.

"In fact, hailing from a water deficient state in India, I have particularly admired Israels water efficiency," he had said.

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School students from the Australian state of Victoria will get an opportunity to visit India under an ambitious strategy to strengthen economic and cultural ties with India for next ten years.

The announcement was made today on the first day of the visit of the state Premier Daniel Andrews to India.

Andrews visited Bluebells School International in Delhi and participated in a school lesson conducted via skype with Bluebells Victorian sister school, Rangebank Primary School in Cranbourne.

The visit, part of premier's official tour to India, follows the launch of the Government's new strategy 'Victoria's India Strategy: Our Shared Future' in Melbourne on Sunday.

The 10-year strategy is an ambitious blueprint aimed at doubling Victoria's goods exports to India, attracting more international students an boost tourism, Andrews said.

With as a key focus of the strategy, the premier announced three new initiatives to strengthen Victoria's relationship with India by engaging with the next generation of young people.

These include a new two-year Victorian Young Leaders to India pilot which will see up to 200 Victorian Year 7-9 students and 25 teachers travel to India and complete two to four-week immersion programmes.

A two-year Women in School Leadership Programme that helps female school leaders, including principals and senior teachers, from Victoria and India to share knowledge related to school leadership, change management and State priorities.

A two-year Victorian Schools and Indian Diaspora Partnerships Programme to deepen Victorian schools engagement with India by harnessing the knowledge of the Indian diaspora to develop and support partnerships between schools in India and Victoria.

Andrews also presented the new strategy to senior Indian government officials and business leaders in Delhi.

"Victoria is home to the largest number of people with Indian heritage in Australia. It is right our students understand the significance of Indian culture, and the economic contribution India makes to our state," Andrews was quoted as saying in a press release.

"This will give our young leaders the chance to showcase Victoria's strengths to other Indian young people, while at the same time immersing themselves in Indian culture and building their leadership skills," he said.

"Our relationship with India is already strong but there's always more we can do and our new strategy will get it done," he added.

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The new St Xavier's University will set up a research centre in the New Town campus of the city next year, Vice-Chancellor Rev Father John Felix Raj said today.

While 35 researchers were now at work at the St Xavier's College, the new university, which started functioning from July 2017, will have its research centre functioning from next year, Felix Raj told PTI on the sidelines of the 11th Convocation and Valedictory of St Xavier's College here.

"The research centre will be for PhD projects," he said.

West Bengal and Higher minister Partha Chatterjee yesterday called upon the university to become a centre of excellence and recommended the varsity set up a research centre by next year apart from running courses.

"The new St Xavier's University, which celebrated its first anniversary foundation day yesterday, was set up on 17 acres of land alloted by West Bengal government and will work towards imparting excellent quality as underscored by Education Minister Partha Chatterjee," Felix Raj, who had been previously the Principal of St Xavier's College, said.

Felix Raj was given the highest honour from St Xavier's College, 'Nihil Ultra Award' by present Principal Rev Dr Dominic Savio at the 11th Convocation.

Turning emotional he said, "It is a different kind of feeling as I had served St Xavier's College for 33 years and left this place to become the VC of St Xavier's and build it as a world class university."



At the St Xavier's College function today, Calcutta University Pro Vice-Chancellor Prof Dipak Kumar De conferred degrees to under graduate students of the St Xavier's College.

Twenty-three gold medals were also given to students in various disciplines.

The Principal said on February 21, the International Mother Language day, St Xavier's College (Kolkata) Alumni Association with the Bengali Literary Society of the premier institution will hold an international torch light peace tour aimed at promoting native mother tongues across the world.

The torch light tour will start from Sahid Bedi, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, travel to St Joseph's College, Bengaluru, Dubai (the Indian Association there), again Asansol St Xavier's College, Burdwan St Xavier's College, St Xavier's College, Raghabhpur, St Xavier's University, Rajarhat and finally culminate at St Xavier's College, Kolkata.

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There will be no subsidy for Haj from this year, minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi announced today and said the move was part of the government's efforts to "empower minorities" without appeasement.

A record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage this year from India, Naqvi told reporters here.

"There will be no subsidy on Haj now," he said.

The government had spent over Rs 250 crore last year on subsidising the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Saudi Arabia, he said.

The decision is in line with a 2012 Supreme Court order, asking the government to do away with the subsidy, which had long been sought by the BJP.

The BJP had cited the subsidy as an example of "Muslim appeasement" by parties such as the Congress.

Following the order, the subsidy was being gradually reduced every year.

"It is part of the Modi government's efforts to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi said.

Asked if the subsidy withdrawal will make the cost of the pilgrimage too high for many Muslims, Naqvi said the government was making efforts to bring it down.

The Saudi Arabian government has agreed to allow Indians to go on Haj by the sea route and officials of the two countries will work out the modalities, he said.

Haj pilgrims from certain regions will have an additional option to choose from where they want to fly to Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage, he said and claimed that this would bring down the cost by up to 70 per cent on some routes.

The minister said, in a first, over 1,300 women would go on Haj without a 'mehram' (male guardian), a practise done away with from this year.

Woman Haj assistants would accompany them and the government has made arrangements for their stay in Saudi Arabia, he said.

Naqvi said his ministry is organising an event in Lucknow on January 18 in which he and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will speak on "empowering minorities without appeasement". Minority affairs ministers of nine states will attend the event.

He also cited a host of measures, such as providing jobs and job opportunities to 8.5 lakh minority youth and scholarships to 1.83 crore students, to claim that the BJP-led NDA government has been working to empower minorities.

His ministry is entrusted with welfare measures for minorities that include Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Zoroastrians, Buddhists and Jains.

Naqvi, the lone Muslim cabinet minister in the government, also claimed that his ministry had succeeded in helping a lot of youths in getting employment by training them as GST facilitators.

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There will be no subsidy for Haj from this year and the funds saved will be used for providing education to minorities, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said today, while projecting the move as an effort by the government to "empower minorities" without appeasement.

The minister also said a record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage this year from India despite the subsidy withdrawal.

"There will be no subsidy on Haj now," he told reporters, adding that the government had spent over Rs 250 crore last year on subsidising the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Saudi Arabia.

The decision is in line with a 2012 Supreme Court order, asking the government to do away with the subsidy, a long standing demand of the BJP.

The BJP had cited the subsidy as an example of "Muslim appeasement" by parties such as the Congress.

Following the order, the subsidy was being gradually reduced every year.

"It is part of the Modi government's efforts to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi said.

The funds would be utilised for providing education to minorities, he said.

Asked if the subsidy withdrawal will make the cost of the pilgrimage too high for many Muslims, Naqvi said the government was making efforts to bring it down.

The Saudi Arabian government has agreed to allow Indians to go on Haj by the sea route and officials of the two countries will work out the modalities, he said.

Naqvi said his ministry is also organising an event in Lucknow on January 18 in which he and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will speak on "empowering minorities without appeasement" with the help of central schemes.

Minority affairs ministers of nine states will also attend the event, he added.

Reacting cautiously to the government's decision, the Congress said it hopes that the Modi government will honour the apex court's direction and utilise this money for the education and development of the disempowered among the minorities, including young girls.

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB)said the government's decision on revoking Haj subsidy has no meaning as there was no such concession and Muslims were being cheated in its name.

Welcoming the Centre's decision, the Vishva Hindu Parishad said the money saved from it should be utilised for the education of poor Hindu girls.

According to sources in the minority affairs ministry, till 2017, the notional savings following gradual abolition of subsidy since 2012 was to tune of Rs 636.56 crore. In case, the government had chosen to reduce the subsidy gradually till 2022, the total national savings would have have been around Rs 5970.6 crore, the sources said.

Haj pilgrims from certain regions will have an additional option to choose from where they want to fly to Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage, Naqvi said and claimed that this would bring down the cost by up to 70 per cent on some routes.

There are a total of 21 Haj embarkation points (EPs) in the country -- Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Cochin, Indore, Srinagar, Bhopal, Guwahati, Mangaluru, Aurangabad, Varanasi, Jaipur, Nagpur, Ranchi, Gaya, Ahmedabad and Goa.

Haj aspirants -- for whom the 10 airports of Srinagar, Guwahati, Ranchi, Gaya, Indore, Bhopal, Mangaluru, Goa, Aurangabad and Varanasi are the nearest EPs - will now get an additional economical option to fly from.

The pilgrims from Jammu and Kashmir, whose nearest EP is Srinagar, can opt to travel from Delhi now, helping them save on (per head) airfare. In 2017, the airfare for the pilgrimage from Srinagar was Rs 1,09,692 as against Rs 73,697 from Delhi.

The airfare for Haj 2018 may vary, ministry sources said.

Similarly, aspirants whose basic EPs are Guwahati, Ranchi and Gaya will have the alternative of undertaking the journey from Kolkata. Those having Indore, Bhopal, Goa and Aurangabad as the nearest airports, can opt for flying from Mumbai.

Those with Varanasi as the basic airport can choose Lucknow as their optional embarkation point while those with Mangaluru as their EP will have the option of Bengaluru.

Embarkation point once selected cannot be changed later on as tendering will be done accordingly, the sources said.

Naqvi also cited a host of measures, such as providing jobs and job opportunities to 8.5 lakh minority youth and scholarships to 1.83 crore students, to claim that the BJP-led NDA government has been working to empower minorities.

His ministry is entrusted with welfare measures for minorities that include Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Zoroastrians (Parsis), Buddhists and Jains.

Naqvi, the lone Muslim cabinet minister in the government, also claimed that his ministry had succeeded in helping a lot of youths in getting employment by training them as GST facilitators.

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In a joint raid with the National Investigation Agency (NIA), Uttar Pradesh Police is learnt to have unearthed old currency notes estimated to be worth Rs 80 crore in Kanpur.

"Kanpur police has unearthed huge amount of old currency notes from a locked house. Negotiators who promised to get it exchanged were also arrested. As per the estimate, the seized currency is expected to be in the range of Rs 80 crore," a police officer told PTI.

The officer said a team from the Reserve Bank of India and Income Tax department would shortly give the exact amount of the seized currency.

The police also refused to divulge the names of the arrested.

"We are looking if there was any involvement of government officers," police sources said.

Another officer said the raid was conducted in Seesamau pocket of Kanpur and some people were detained from a hotel in Swaroop Nagar pocket.

Inspector General (Kanpur Range) Alok Singh is monitoring the case.

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The Uttar Pradesh government today directed the district authorities to initiate action against illegal installation of loudspeakers at temples, mosques and other public places after expiry of the deadline to remove the amplifiers.

Acting on the Allahabad High Court order, the state government had on January 7 issued a 10-page-order directing a survey of permanently installed loudspeakers and issuance of show cause notice to those using them without requisite permission.

The order said 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 the noise pollution control laws.

"The deadline to remove the amplifiers expired yesterday," Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar told PTI.

Asked as to what action would be taken against those who neither apply for permission nor comply with terms and conditions of permission, Kumar said, "Action will be initiated at the district level."



The government has already issued a format for applying for permission.

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.

The court order implied that sound should not go beyond the periphery of the public or private place.

The order said that the district magistrates were required 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.

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 had directed the principal secretary (home) and the chairman of the Uttar Pradesh 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.

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Pakistan's law enforcement agencies have foiled an attack on a security check point in Lahore and arrested two Jamaat-ul-Ahrar terrorists, officials said today.

On a tip off provided by an intelligence agency, the Counter-Terrorism Department of Punjab Police raided a house in densely populated Harbanspura area and arrested Jamaat-ul- Ahrar's Lahore chapter activists - Amjad Khan and Daood Khan.

According to a spokesperson of CTD, both suspects had planned to target a security check post in Lahore.

Some hand grenades, small-scale arms and guns have been recovered from the suspects.

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar spokespersonAsad Mansoor yesterday surrendered along with two associates in Dera Ismail Khan.

The JuA, based in Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, has been involved in a series of terror attacks inside Pakistan.

Pakistan had banned the organisation in 2016.

The group has been involved in more than 100 terrorist attacks on Pakistani soil.

JuA chief Omar Khalid Khorasani was reportedly killed in a drone attack in Afghanistan in October last year.

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Pakistan is examining a proposal for a DGMO-level meeting with India, which last happened in December 2013, to reduce tension along the Line of Control and the Working Boundary through fresh confidence-building measures, according to a media report.

The report comes a day after Pakistan said four of its soldiers died and five others injured in cross-border firing by India across the LoC. The Indian Army, however, said seven Pakistani soldiers were killed in its retaliatory firing.

A Pakistan defence ministry official in a meeting yesterday told the Senate defence committee that a "fresh proposal of DGMOs' (Director Generals of Military Operations) meeting is being considered," the Dawn newspaper reported.

The official also briefed the senators about the latest trends in Indian ceasefire violations, it said.

According to the report, one of the confidence-building measures being considered for the planned meeting of DGMOs is "calibre reduction" of the arms being used at the LoC.

Pakistan-India DGMOs have a frequent hotline contact, but they last met face to face four years ago at Wagah, a village which serves as a transit terminal between Lahore and Amritsar.

The December 24, 2013 Wagah meeting had taken place after a break of 14 years. That meeting too was held to discuss ways to ensure peace along the LoC and the Working Boundary.

Meanwhile, a resolution adopted by the Senate committee through consensus condemned Indian Army chief Gen. Bipin Rawat's statement about "calling nuclear bluff of Pakistan" as "stupidity and provocative".

They termed it a "war-like" proclamation, the report said.

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Wracked by terrorism, extremism and sectarianism, Pakistan government today issued a fatwa signed by over 1,800 Islamic scholars from different schools of thought against the use of violence, including suicide bombings, for religious purposes.

Titled as 'Paigham-e-Pakistan' (the message of Pakistan), the fatwa issued at a grand ceremony here was prepared under the supervision of Islamabad-based International Islamic University.

The decree came at a time when US President Donald Trump has asked Pakistan to act against terror groups on its soil and warned against providing safe havens to terrorists.

Addressing the ceremony, President Mamnoon Hussain said the launch of national narrative on counter-terrorism manifested that the whole nation was extremely serious on the issue.

"I believe that this decree, prepared in the light of true teachings of Islam, will transform their hearts and pave the way for their salvation in the hereinafter," he said, referring to militants and Islamic radicals.

In a statement, the government said the fatwa was part of national narrative on extremism and terrorism. It was endorsed by religious scholars, parliamentarians, intellectuals and policy makers.

The fatwa also declares armed struggle against the country, its government or armed forces "illegal".

It acknowledges that it is responsibility of the government to fully implement Islamic provisions of the Constitution, but it rejects use of force for it and says that taking up arms to achieve this purpose amounts to 'Fasaad-fil- Arz' or spreading willful violence on earth.

Quoting verses from holy Quran and Hadith, the fatwa says suicide is unacceptable in Islam and a grave sin. Supporting such (suicide) attacks has also been described as tantamount to supporting a collection of sins.

President Hussain said the decree would not only promote positive image of the Islamic teachings and Pakistani society in the world but would also help in overcoming the menace of extremism.

He said the roots of extremism and militancy lied in intolerance and in not appreciating different points of views, which fostered sectarianism by eliminating moderation.

He mentioned that renunciation of research, dogmatism and intolerance resulted in dreadful forms of sectarianism.

Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal said Pakistan is fulfilling its commitments in the war on terror but it is also for the international community to fulfill its obligations by listening to the voices emanating from Myanmar, Kashmir and Palestine.

In his remarks, Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif expressed the confidence that the national narrative against militancy will prove to be a turning point for the country.

"We have rejected all forms of terrorism and extremism," he asserted.

"The land of Pakistan at no time shall be allowed to be used for the propagation of any kind of terrorism," Asif said, adding that this included training and recruitment of terrorists, along with execution of terror activities in other countries "and other such ulterior motives".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A fatwa signed by more than 1800 Islamic scholars from different schools of thought against the use of violence, including suicide bombings, for religious purposes was today issued by the Pakistan government.

Titled as 'Paigham-e-Pakistan', the fatwa issued at a grand ceremony here was prepared under the supervision of Islamabad-based International Islamic University.

Addressing the gathering, Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain said the launch of national narrative on counter- terrorism manifested that the whole nation was extremely serious on the issue.

"I believe that this decree, prepared in the light of true teachings of Islam, will transform their hearts and pave the way for their salvation in the hereinafter," he said, referring to militants and Islamic radicals.

In a statement, the government said the fatwa was part of national narrative on extremism and terrorism. It was endorsed by religious scholars, parliamentarians, intellectuals and policy makers.

The fatwa also declares armed struggle against the country, its government or armed forces "illegal".

It acknowledges that it is responsibility of the government to fully implement Islamic provisions of the Constitution, but it rejects use of force for it and says that taking up arms to achieve this purpose amounts to 'Fasaad-fil- Arz' or spreading willful violence on earth.

Quoting verses from holy Quran and Hadith, the fatwa says suicide is unacceptable in Islam and a grave sin. Supporting such (suicide) attacks has also been described as tantamount to supporting a collection of sins.

President Hussain said the decree would not only promote positive image of the Islamic teachings and Pakistani society in the world but would also help in overcoming the menace of extremism.

He said the roots of extremism and militancy lied in intolerance and in not appreciating different points of views, which fostered sectarianism by eliminating moderation.

He mentioned that renunciation of research, dogmatism and intolerance resulted in dreadful forms of sectarianism.

Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal said Pakistan is fulfilling its commitments in the war on terror but it is also for the international community to fulfill its obligations by listening to the voices emanating from Myanmar, Kashmir and Palestine.

In his remarks, Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif expressed the confidence that the national narrative against militancy will prove to be a turning point for the country.

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Pakistani troops opened fire at Indian posts along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district today, injuring an Army Captain, officials said.

"There was a ceasefire violation by the Pakistan Army. They resorted to firing along the LoC in Chakan Da Bagh area in Poonch this evening," a security force official said.

The injured Army Captain has been hospitalised, they said.

The Indian troops retaliated and the exchange of fire continued till late night, they said.

The latest violation of the ceasefire came a day after seven Pakistani Army men, including a Major, were killed and four others injured in retaliatory action by the Indian Army in Poonch.

Authorities had on Monday suspended the cross-LoC bus service between Chakan Da Bagh and Rawalakot, following heightened tension on the LoC.
Pakistan's Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa is in Sri Lanka on a three-day visit to boost military-to-military relations and meet the country's top leadership.

Bajwa arrived here yesterday at the invitation of his Sri Lankan counterpart, Lieutenant General Mahesh Senanayake.

He is expected to pay courtesy calls on President Maithripala Sirisena, the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, State Minister of Defence, Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, Chief of Defence Staff and Commanders of the Navy and Air Force, the Army said.

During his stay in Sri Lanka, General Bajwa will hold discussions on matters of professional interests with his counterpart Senanayake, the Pakistan High Commission in Colombo said.

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A so-called "diploma mill" operating out of a call centre in Pakistan sold thousands of fake degrees to British nationals, a new investigation revealed today.

Axact sold more than 3,000 qualifications in Britain between 2013 and 2014, including PhDs and doctorates, the BBC investigation found.

The company reportedly invented hundreds of universities online and used fake stories in an attempt to dupe employers who might check the references on applicants' CVs.

Axact, which claims to be the "world's largest IT company" and has invented names such as Brooklyn Park University and Nixon University, is run by agents from a call centre in Karachi.

'Degrees of Deception', to be aired as part of BBC Radio 4s 'File on Four' programme, claims that clinical staff employed by the UKs state-funded National Health Service (NHS) and nurses were among thousands who had acquired these fake degrees.

"While we have good processes in place to shut down such sites, the problem with fake universities is that they are often based outside the UK," said Jane Rowley, chief executive of Higher Education Degree Datacheck (HEDD), the UK's official body for candidate verification and university authentication.

"Pakistan, Malaysia, Romania and the Middle East are among some of the countries we have come across in investigations. As more and more employers demand degree qualifications, people are tempted by these offers. We encourage proper checks by employers so that such fake degrees are exposed because if no one buys them, these organisations would cease to exist, she said.

Pakistan had opened an investigation into Axact in May 2015 after'The New York Times'found that it had created at least 370 fake websites and employed 2,000 people.

Axacts chief executive was acquitted of money laundering in 2016 but its vice-president, Umair Hamid, was jailed in the US last year on fraud charges.

While Axact denies all wrongdoing, the Pakistani investigation ground to a halt amid claims of government corruption.

Action Fraud, the UK's national cybercrime reporting centre, said it did not have the power to close fake Axact websites but instead had to provide evidence to domain registries and registrars, a process that takes months.

"Degree fraud cheats both genuine learners and employers, so we have taken decisive action to crack down on those seeking to profit from it," a Department for Education spokesperson said.

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Palestinian leaders voted today to call for the suspension of recognition of Israel as they met in response to US President Donald Trump's declaration of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

The vote ordered the Palestine Liberation Organisation to suspend its recognition of Israel until it "recognises the state of Palestine", cancels its annexation of east Jerusalem and stops settlement activity, a statement said.

It was unclear if the vote by the Palestinian Central Council, a high-ranking arm of the PLO, was binding. A previous vote by the council in 2015 to suspend security coordination with Israel was never implemented.

Council members "mandate the Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee to suspend recognition of Israel until it recognises the state of Palestine, cancels the decision to annex east Jerusalem and stops settlement activity," the statement said.

The vote was 74 in favour, two against, with 12 abstentions, according to an AFP journalist present.

The move came after Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas yesterday called Trump's peace efforts the "slap of the century" as he opened the meeting.

While the Palestinians have been deeply angered by Trump's Jerusalem declaration, they also risk facing an international backlash if they follow through on the call to suspend recognition of Israel.

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The Bihar government today informed the Patna High Court that participation of school children above class 5 in the proposed statewide human chain on January 21 will be voluntary and not compulsory.

Advocate General Lalit Kishore submitted before a bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice Anil Kumar Upadhyay that the chief secretary has already issued a direction which says that children up to class 5 will not participate while it will be completely voluntary for children above class 5 to take part in the human chain.

The court was hearing a PIL filed against making presence of students above class 5 mandatory in the human chain against child marriage and dowry.

It is not at all compulsory for anyone and no coercive action will be taken for non participation, the AG submitted before the court.

He further said guardians will have options whether or not they want to send their wards to take part.

The PIL was filed by Shiv Prakash Rai, who sought direction to the government not to hold the human chain and involve school children and teachers in it.

The court posted the matter for next hearing after four weeks.

It may be noted that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had on Gandhi Jayanti last year announced that a human chain would be formed on January 21 to create awareness on abolishing social evils of child marriage and dowry on the lines of prohibition.

The Bihar government had claimed that the state had formed the world's largest human chain on January 21, 2017 in which over four crore people participated in support of the liquor ban with Kumar and leaders from various political parties and citizens holding each others' hands at the Gandhi Maidan here.

The petitioner's counsel submitted during the hearing that it was misuse of public money on human chain and children should not be involved in it at all as many kids were taken ill during last year's campaign against liquor.

Besides, citing the apex court ruling, the petitioner contended that teachers should not be engaged in non academic activities except duties of national importance such as election duty etc.

On this, the court said that it was not disposing of the petition and listed the matter for hearing after four weeks.

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The Supreme Court today directed Maharashtra government to hand over all documents filed by it on the death of special CBI judge B H Loya to the petitioners who have sought an independent probe into it, saying they "should know everything".

The case, whose assignment to the bench hearing the PILs was a bone of contention of the unprecedented press conference by the four senior-most judges of the apex court, came up for hearing before a bench comprising Justices Arun Mishra and M M Shantanagoudar.

Loya, who was hearing the sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, had allegedly died of cardiac arrest in Nagpur on December 1, 2014, when he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleague's daughter.

The issue had come under the spotlight in November last year after media reports quoting Loya's sister had fuelled suspicion about the circumstances surrounding his death and its link to the Sohrabuddin case.

However, Loya's son had on January 14 said in Mumbai that his father died of natural causes and not under suspicious circumstances.

Today, at the outset, senior advocate Harish Salve, representing Maharashtra government, placed before the bench the documents, including Loya's medical and postmortem report, in a sealed cover.

He told the court that these documents contained certain confidential materials which should not be made public.

However, the counsel appearing for the petitioners said they should be given copies of these documents.

To this, the bench observed, "it is a matter where they should know everything".

Salve told the court that these documents could be given to the petitioners but they should maintain its confidentiality and should not make them public.

"If anything is confidential, we will put confidential mark on that," Salve said.

The petitioners' counsel assured the top court that they would not make any of the documents public, after which the bench asked the state government to hand over the materials to the petitioners within seven days.

The bench, without specifying any date, adjourned the case and said it would be listed for hearing after a week.

"We are not fixing any date. We have said, list it after seven days," the bench said during the brief hearing in the jam-packed courtroom.

The apex court was hearing two separate PILs, filed by Maharashtra-based journalist B R Lone and Congress leader Tehseen Poonawalla, seeking independent probe into the alleged mysterious death of Loya.

The court had earlier termed as a "serious matter" the issue of Loya's death and had asked Maharashtra government to file certain documents, including the autopsy report.

Poonawalla's counsel had earlier told the court that this was a case of alleged mysterious death of a judge, who was hearing a sensitive case, and it was required to be probed independently.

In his plea, he has claimed that circumstances revolving around the death of the judge were "questionable, mysterious and contradicting".

The other plea filed by the journalist has submitted that a fair probe was needed into the mysterious death of Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin encounter case in which various police officers and BJP president Amit Shah were named as parties.

A PIL seeking probe into the judge's death was also filed before the Bombay High Court on January 8 by the Bombay Lawyers' Association.

The Indian judiciary was thrown into a turmoil on January 12 when four senior apex court judges, Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, M B Lokur and Kurian Joseph, had convened an unprecedented press conference raising some issues, including "selective" allocation of cases by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

In the encounter case, the BJP President along with Rajasthan Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria, Rajasthan-based businessman Vimal Patni, former Gujarat police chief P C Pande, Additional Director General of Police Geeta Johri and Gujarat police officers Abhay Chudasama and N K Amin, have already been discharged.

A total of 23 accused, including police personnel, are facing trial for their involvement in the alleged fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi and their associate Tulsidas Prajapati in Gujarat in November 2005.

The case was later transferred to CBI and the trial shifted to Mumbai.

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Pope Francis admitted today he was frightened by the prospect of an accidental nuclear apocalypse, as he began a weeklong visit to Chile and Peru to bolster a local Catholic Church riven by sex abuse scandals.

"I think we are at the very edge," the pope told reporters aboard his plane when asked about the threat of a nuclear war in the wake of a recent string of tests by North Korea and a false missile alert last week that sparked panic in the US state of Hawaii.

"I am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things," he said.

The pope landed in Santiago today on his first visit to Chile since becoming pope, and his sixth to Latin America.

The 81-year-old Argentine pontiff will find a very different Chile to the one he first encountered as a student priest in the 1960s.

Socialist President Michelle Bachelet has presided over major change in the once deeply conservative country, decriminalizing abortion, recognizing civil unions for same- sex couples and introducing a bill to legalize gay marriage.

Preparations for the visit have been overshadowed by a recent report that almost 80 members of the Chilean clergy have been accused of the sexual abuse of minors since 2000, more than half of them convicted by a Vatican court.

Protests are expected over Francis's appointment of a bishop in the southern city of Ororno who is accused of covering up for Fernando Karadima, an influential priest whom the Vatican convicted of abusing children in 2011.

In a sign of growing exasperation at Church inaction, activists from several countries meeting in Santiago today launched a new global organization, Ending Clerical Abuse (ECA).

The organization "seeks to stop child sexual abuse by the clergy," said one of its founders, Jose Andres Murillo.

The body aims to form a group of prosecutors "to bring to court these crimes against humanity," said Sara Oviedo, former vice president of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

During his three days in Chile, Francis will meet with victims of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, while there are no formal plans to meet victims of pedophile priests.

Bachelet, who will meet Francis tomorrow, has called on Chileans to welcome the pope, though a positive reception may not be universal.

On Friday, five Catholic Churches in the capital were attacked -- three with firebombs -- by what police said was an anarchist group. Demonstrations are planned by feminist and gay rights groups.

The highlight of the three-day visit will be an open-air mass in a Santiago park tomorrow.

At another mass at the airport in Temuco, the capital of the impoverished southern Araucania region, Francis is expected to draw attention on Wednesday to state persecution of the indigenous Mapuche people and also meet members of the community.

The Mapuche -- some seven percent of the Chilean population -- inhabited a vast territory before the arrival of Spanish colonists in 1541, and have long protested the loss of ancestral lands.

During his visit to Chile, the pope will also meet representatives of the poor and young people, as well as visit a women's prison.

Authorities expect nearly a million Argentines, Bolivians and Peruvians to visit Chile to see the pope.

Francis sent "warm greetings" to his native Argentina in a telegram to President Mauricio Macri as he flew over the country on his approach to Santiago, though he made no mention of a much-awaited visit.

The former Archbishop of Buenos Aires has now visited all of Argentina's neighbors except Uruguay on official tours -- Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Paraguay. Elsewhere in Latin America, he also traveled to Colombia and Ecuador.

The absence has raised questions in the Vatican and in Argentina.

Many consider that Francis's homilies would be interpreted as carrying more political weight at home than may be acceptable, and -- particularly given the pope's defense of the poor -- may be seen as pointed political attacks against Macri's market-friendly austerity.

On Thursday, the pope will travel to Iquique in northern Chile, where he will preside over another open-air mass, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, before traveling on to Peru's capital Lima.

Peru is in the throes of a political crisis sparked by a controversial pardon for ex-president Alberto Fujimori, who was serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses, as well as another abuse scandal involving the clergy.

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Leading Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was killed in a drive-by shooting today that is likely to reignite tensions between Pristina and Belgrade.

The assassination occurred on the very day that Serbia and Kosovo had resumed talks on normalising ties after a hiatus of more than a year.

The Serbian government official in charge of Kosovo, Marko Djuric, said the murder was "a criminal, terrorist act against the entire Serbian people".

Ivanovic was shot dead by gunmen firing from a car as he arrived at the headquarters of his party in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica at about 8:15 am local time, according to police.

"I am informed that he was shot dead on the spot and efforts to revive him at Mitrovica hospital were unsuccessful," his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic told AFP.

He said Ivanovic, who was set to face a retrial on charges of war crimes over the Kosovo conflict after an earlier conviction was thrown out, had been hit by five bullets.

Police said they have found a burnt-out car that was presumably used in the attack, local media in Kosovo reported.

Public prosecutor Shyqri Syla told AFP that investigators were at the scene, but that it was not yet known who was behind the attack.

Ivanovic, 64, of the Social Democratic Party, was considered a moderate politician in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica. Last year he was elected a deputy in the municipal council of northern Mitrovica.

A former Serbian state secretary for Kosovo, Ivanovic was a key interlocutor with NATO, the United Nations and later the European Union after the 1990s war and was seen as backing dialogue with Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic swiftly called an emergency meeting of the Council for national security after the shooting, national broadcaster RTS reported.

"Whoever is behind this attack... whether these are Albanian, Serb or any other criminals, they have to be punished, they have to be brought to justice," Djuric said in Brussels, where he was heading the delegation due to hold talks with Kosovo Albanians today.

However, after the assassination, the Belgrade delegation walked out of the talks that had resumed after more than a year's hiatus, according to local media in Belgrade.

Under the pressure from the international community and European Union auspices, Kosovo and Serbia have been trying to normalise ties almost 20 years since the start of a bloody war that claimed 13,000 lives, mostly ethnic Albanians.

The 1998-99 war between Serbian security forces and Kosovo Albanian guerrillas was ended by a NATO air campaign.

Predominantly ethnic Albanian Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. But Belgrade has rejected the move and still considers the breakaway territory as its southern province.

About 120,000 of Kosovo's 1.8 million inhabitants are ethnic Serbs.

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The government on Tuesday gave its nod for the procurement of assault rifles and carbines worth Rs 35.47 billion to meet the immediate requirement of troops deployed on the borders on a "fast track basis", the said.

The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), headed by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, cleared the procurement of 72,000 assault rifles and 93,895 carbines.

The procurement is expected to address the shortage of small arms for the armed forces.

Sources said that tenders will soon be floated to set the ball rolling for the procurement process. The procurement could also be done at the government to government (G to G) level.

To encourage participation of private sector in defence design and production and to give a boost to 'Make in India' programme, the DAC introduced significant changes in the 'Make II' category of the Defence Procurement Procedure, a statement said.

The DAC also simplified the procedure to make it industry-friendly, with minimal government control.

The revised procedure will now allow the to accept suo motu proposals from the industry and also allow start-ups to develop equipment for the Indian Armed Forces.

The minimum qualification criteria to participate in 'Make II' projects has also been relaxed by removing conditions related to credit rating and reducing financial net worth criteria.

According to the earlier 'Make II' procedure, only two vendors were shortlisted to develop prototype equipment.

"Now, all vendors meeting the relaxed eligibility criteria will be allowed to participate in the prototype development process. The vendor will not be required to submit Detailed Project Report," the statement said.

After accord the of approval of the 'Make II' project by the council, all clearances will be accorded at Service HQ (SHQ) level, it added.
The threat of radical Islam and its terrorist offshoots can "upset" the international system, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said today, batting for stronger ties between India and Israel to overcome the challenge.

Addressing the inaugural session of the 'Raisina Dialogue' here, Netanyahu hailed India as Israel's "natural friend and partner", drawing a wide smile from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was in the audience.

Netanyahu said closer ties between democracies was essential to secure the common future of humanity at a time "our way of life and the quest for modernity and innovation" are being challenged.

The Israeli PM will travel to Gujarat tomorrow with Modi, who is the only Indian Prime Minister till date to have visited Israel.

"Most notably the quest for modernity, the quest for innovation is being challenged by radical Islam and its terorist offshoots from a variety of corners and this can upset the international system.

"One of the ways to overcome such a challenge is to strengthen the relation between our two great denmocracies. The alliances of democracies is important to secure our common future," Netanyahu said, addressing the inaugural session of the three-day conference where a range of geopolitical issues will be discussed.

Considering India's large Muslim population, New Delhi has always walked a tightrope in striking a balance between deepening its ties with Israel while trying not to upset its equation with Palestine, which shares a fractious history with the Jewish state.

India had last month joined 127 other countries to vote in the UN in favour of a resolution opposing the recent decision of the US to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Netanyahu began his 16-minute speech by identifying military strength, economic prowess and political power as the prerequisites for the development of a nation, factors which he said were behind the Jewish nation's rise from the "ashes".

"The weak don't survive, the strong survive. You make peace, alliances with the strong. You are able to maintain peace by being strong," he said.

Netanyahu, who arrived in New Delhi on a six-day visit on January 14, said Modi's July, 2017 visit to Israel "broke ground". "You were the first leader of India to come to Israel in 3,000 years. It will not take long for your next visit, I know that."



Earlier in the day, Netanyahu, accompanied by his wife Sara, visited Taj Mahal in Agra. Netanyahu referred to this trip in his speech to make a point about the "common value" of democracy that the two countries share.

Netanyahu said the democratic values of India and Israel ensure that people have the ability to think as they want, speak as they want, believe in what they want.

"We have a special relationship. We are naturally sympathetic to India. When I was walking the streets of Agra, somebody said we are so happy that you are friends with our prime minister. He said we are friends," Netanyahu said.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj also attended the inaugural session, and while delivering the vote of thanks, said the Israeli premier's visit to India underlines the celebration of 25 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar, former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai, union ministers VK Singh, Jayant Sinha and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor were present at the event, organised jointly by the Observer Research Foundation and Ministry of External Affairs.

Netayahu said he found "astounding" the fact that under Modi, India has climbed nearly 42 spots in the ease of doing business rankings even as he stressed on the need to cut red tape to encourage businesses.

He said a government can both facilitate and block economic growth. Growth is possible when there is a free market, which facilitates innovation by business entities, he said.

He said to defend a nation, one needs a strong military, which in turn requires a lot of money. The money, he said, comes from a strong economy.

"Defence costs a great deal of money. The money comes from the second source of power, economic power...the third power is political power, which means the ability to make political alliances and relationships with many other countries," he said.

The theme of the dialogue this year is 'Managing Disruptive Transitions: Ideas, Institutions and Idioms'. The event has an impressive line up of more than 150 speakers and over 550 delegates.

Army chief General Bipin Rawat and Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba will address a session, along with Admiral Harry Harris, Commander, US Pacific Command, General Chris Deverell, Joint Forces Commander, UK, among others, tomorrow.

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Clashes between BJP supporters and Congress workers forced Rahul Gandhi to change his route in Amethi today on the last leg of his two-day visit to his Lok Sabha constituency.

The route scheduled to have been followed by the Congress president -- who is visiting his Parliamentary constituency in Uttar Pradesh for the first time after becoming party chief -- was changed in view of strong protests by BJP workers.

Members of the two parties clashed in the Gauriganj area, prompting the police to intervene and change the route of the cavalcade of Gandhi, whose security is handled by the SPG.

Gandhi was slated to have reached Gauriganj from Musafirkhana, but the route was changed as local BJP leaders Ashish Shukla and Sudhanshu Shukla, along with a large number of party workers, had assembled on the Gauriganj-Musafirkhana Road in protest against the visit of the 47-year-old Congress leader.

"We did not allow Rahul Gandhi to pass through the troubled Gauriganj-Musafirkhana route in view of the palpable tension there," Additional SP BC Dubey said.

Gandhi took the Jamo Road, where Congress workers stood on its two sides to greet him, and then walked a distance of about two kilometres to reach Gauriganj.

The protesters at Gauriganj-Musafirkhana Road were seen displaying placards which described Gandhi as their "missing MP" and accused him of grabbing farmers' land for a trust, ignoring the development of Amethi and not utilising MPLAD funds.

Some of the placards charged him with ignoring the problems of the local people and health and education needs, and laying foundation stones of "fake" projects.

BJP supporters staged protests against Gandhi yesterday, too, as the Congress leader began his visit to Rae Bareli and Amethi.

As the Congress chief's convoy was leaving Salon, which falls in the Amethi Lok Sabha constituency but is in Rae Bareli district, for his next stop, Parshderpur, some BJP workers raised slogans against him.

The police had to intervene to separate BJP and Congress supporters.

Gandhi faced angry protesters at the Rajiv Gandhi Chowk in Amethi, because of which he could not garland a statue of his father, former Prime Minister and Amethi MP Rajiv Gandhi, there.

Supporters of the BJP and the Congress fought a pitched battle, forcing the local police and PAC constables to intervene.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress president Rahul Gandhi today wrapped up his two-day visit to Uttar Pradesh, the first as party chief, amid strong protests from BJP supporters in his Lok Sabha constituency.

On the second day of his tour, the Congress MP was forced to change his route as party workers heckled and clashed with BJP supporters in the Gauriganj area, prompting the police to intervene.

Clashes between BJP supporters and Congress workers marred the last leg of his visit.

After the commotion in Gauriganj, the police changed the route of the cavalcade of Gandhi, whose security is handled by the SPG.

Gandhi was slated to have reached Gauriganj from Musafirkhana, but the course was changed as local BJP leaders Ashish Shukla and Sudhanshu Shukla, along with a large number of party workers, assembled on the Gauriganj-Musafirkhana Road in protest against the visit of the 47-year-old Congress MP.

"We did not allow Rahul Gandhi to pass through the troubled Gauriganj-Musafirkhana route in view of the palpable tension there," Additional SP BC Dubey said.

Gandhi took the Jamo Road, where Congress workers stood on its two sides to greet him, and then walked a distance of about two kilometres to reach Gauriganj.

The protesters at Gauriganj-Musafirkhana Road were seen holding placards which described Gandhi as their "missing MP" and accused him of grabbing farmers' land for a trust, ignoring the development of Amethi and not utilising MPLAD funds.

Some of the placards charged him with ignoring health and education needs and other problems of the local people and laying foundation stones of "fake" projects.

BJP supporters staged protests against Gandhi yesterday, too, as the Congress leader began his visit to Rae Bareli and Amethi.

As the Congress chief's convoy was leaving Salon, which falls in the Amethi Lok Sabha constituency but is in Rae Bareli district, for his next stop, Parshderpur, some BJP workers raised slogans against him.

Clashes followed between the BJP protesters and Congress workers and the police had to separate them.

Gandhi had faced angry protesters at the Rajiv Gandhi Chowk in Amethi, because of which he could not garland a statue of his father, former prime minister and Amethi MP Rajiv Gandhi.

Supporters of the BJP and the Congress fought a pitched battle, forcing the local police and PAC constables to intervene.

Meanwhile, a day after the BJP sought an apology from the Congress president for anti-Modi posters here, the police today registered a case against three people, including a local Congress leader.

The posters were seen near the Gauriganj railway station, and a case has been registered in this connection at the Gauriganj police station, Dubey said.

"Police have registered a case against Abhay Shukla alias Jeeju, nagar Congress adhyaksh (city party chief) Narendra Singh and Ram Kumar under various sections of the IPC. Police is investigating the case and action will be taken against the guilty," he said.

The BJP had yesterday demanded an apology from the Congress president for the posters that appeared in his Lok Sabha constituency which, it said, "denigrated" Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Senior BJP leader and UP cabinet minister Shrikant Sharma had asked Gandhi to apologise to the nation for the "insulting" posters and said the Congress MP suffered from an "attention seeking disorder".

He had also claimed that Gandhi's first visit to UP as party chief had proved to be a "flop show".

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Rae Bareli, the high profile Lok Sabha constituency of Gandhi's mother and former party resident Sonia Gandhi, the police have lodged two cases against Congress MLC Deepak Singh and others for allegedly misbehaving with security personnel on duty yesterday during Rahul Gandhi's visit.

"Two cases were registered against Deepak Singh and others at Salon police station here late last night. One case was registered on the complaint filed by a citizen, while the other was lodged by the police," Additional SP Rae Bareli Shashi Shekhar Singh said today.

"In his complaint, Ramsajeewan Nirmal said that on Monday when the people of Salon were trying to meet their MP Rahul Gandhi to narrate their problems, Congress MLC Deepak Singh, party leader Jamal Anwar and 15-20 others had attacked them," he said.

Ramsajeewan Nirmal said he was injured and those who tried to come to his aid were also beaten up, Singh added.

The second case was registered by Salon police station in-charge Gaudeen Shukla against the Congress MLC, Anwar and 40-50 others, the additional SP added.

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The Bombay High Court today asked the Maharashtra government what steps it has taken to bring down prices of sanitary napkins and spread awareness about their use.

A division bench of Justices N H Patil and N W Sambre said it was an important issue affecting half the population.

The court was hearing a public interest litigation filed by NGO Shetty Women Welfare Foundation, which raised the issue of non-availability of sanitary napkins for "over 80 per cent of women" because of lack of awareness or high prices.

The petition also challenged the 12 per cent Goods and Services Tax on sanitary napkins.

"This is an important issue... it affects half the population. What has the Maharashtra government done to increase and spread awareness about the use of sanitary napkins," Justice Patil asked.

The the state government should also consider lowering the costs of sanitary napkins, he said.

"The state government also needs to consider cutting down the cost of these napkins...make them available at concessional rates," he said.

The court said the government should promote Indian manufacturers which would bring down prices.

"First step is (creating) effective awareness and the second step is making the napkins available and at a subsidised rate," Justice Patil said.

The bench suggested that the government issue guidelines to Gram Panchayats which could ask their women members to spread awareness on the issue in rural areas.

The high court directed the state's principal secretary and secretaries of the departments concerned to hold discussions on the issue.

On the subject of GST, the judges said it would be better if the additional solicitor general (who represents the Centre) assisted the court during further hearings.

The bench posted the petition for hearing after two weeks.

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Embattled Reliance Communications is laying a 68,000-km undersea cable to carry data across Europe and Asia, to be built at a cost of USD 600 million.

The system, which will connect its base in India with Italy to the West and Hong Kong on the East, is expected to treble revenues in five years for its wholly-owned subsidiary Global Cloud Exchange, which is laying the cable, the company said here today.

It is expected to be operational by the third quarter of 2020 and will have a revenue potential of USD 1 billion per year, RCom's chief executive Bill Barney told reporters.

The new cable will increase its total capacity by ten times as against the current capacity, he added.

Saddled with a debt of Rs 45,000 crore, the Anil Ambani-led company exited the consumer-facing wireless business late last year, to focus on the enterprise segment.

The size of what is being billed as the "new RCom" is much smaller but it is expected to be much leaner. Late last month the company sold its spectrum to elder brother-run Reliance Jio for an estimated Rs 23,000 crore which helped it skirt a slew of insolvency petitions and eventual liquidation.

The cable will be financed by partners, whose numbers can go up till 30, he said, adding the company expects to get over USD 700 million through such pre-sales as against the cost of USD 600 million.

It has already tied up with six partners, including Alibaba, for the cable and raised USD 300 million in commitments, he said.

Barney said the company expects a spurt in IT and telecom activity in the country over the next five to ten years, due to which it is betting on the cable business.

The cable potentially reaches over 75 per cent of the youth in the globe, which is also very educated, he said.

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Romania's left-wing Prime Minister Mihai Tudose resigned today after losing the backing of his party due to internal power struggles, barely seven months after his predecessor suffered the same fate.

He handed in his resignation this evening after senior members of the ruling Social Democrats (PSD) voted to withdraw their support at a leadership meeting.

"I am leaving with my head held high. I'm going to get my things at parliament," Tudose told journalists after handing in his resignation at the party meeting.

The move heralds fresh turmoil for Romania, one of the European Union's poorest countries, and comes on the eve of a historic visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

It is the second time in a year that the PSD has torpedoed its own government.

In June, the party filed a no-confidence motion in then- prime minister Sorin Grindeanu, after he fell out with powerful PSD boss Liviu Dragnea, 55.

Dragnea, who is barred from running for office because of a fraud conviction, is widely acknowledged to pull the strings behind the scenes.

The party chief nominated former economy minister Tudose as Grindeanu's successor, but their relationship also turned into an increasingly bitter sparring match in recent months.

Tudose's resignation will have to be signed off by centre-right President Klaus Iohannis. He also needs to approve the PSD's new prime ministerial nominee, to be chosen at a party meeting tomorrow.

Back in October, Iohannis expressed doubt over the "PSD's ability to govern" given its shaky track record in government.

It is the third major crisis to hit the party since it rode back into power in December 2016, barely a year after being forced from office over a deadly nightclub blaze blamed on corruption.

In February, Romania's largest protests since the fall of communism forced the government to drop a bill aimed at watering down anti-corruption laws that critics said would have helped Dragnea himself.

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The Supreme Court today directed the Maharashtra government to give all documents pertaining to the death of CBI special judge B H Loya to the petitioners, who are seeking an independent probe into the circumstances behind it.

A bench of Justices Arun Mishra and M M Shantanagoudar passed the direction after the Maharashtra government submitted some documents, including Loya's post-mortem report, in a sealed cover to the court.

Judge Loya, who was presiding over the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, had allegedly died of cardiac arrest in Nagpur on December 1, 2014, when he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleague's daughter.

As the petitioners said they needed to look at the documents submitted, senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Maharashtra, told the bench that the documents contained certain confidential material which cannot be shared in public and cannot be given to the petitioners.

The counsel for the petitioners, a journalist and a Congress leader, told the bench that they needed to look into these documents to argue the matter.

"It is a matter where they (petitioners) should know everything," the bench observed.

The bench, which was hearing two PILs seeking independent probe into the death of Loya, adjourned the hearing for after a week without specifying any date.

Salve later told the court that the documents could be shown to the petitioners' counsel but they should not make it public and mark them as confidential documents.

The bench then directed that all the documents be given to the petitioners within a week.

The petitioners' counsel also assured the court that they would not make any of the documents public.

The apex court had earlier termed as a "serious matter" the issue of Loya's alleged mysterious death and had sought Maharashtra government's response.

Senior advocate Dushyant dave, representing Bombay Lawyers' Association, had said the high court was already seized of the matter and the top court should refrain from hearing the issue.

Advocate Varinder Kumar Sharma, appearing for petitioner Congress leader Tehseen Poonawalla, had said this was a case where a mysterious death of a judge, who was hearing a sensitive case, had taken place on December 1, 2014 and it needed to be investigated independently.

The apex court had agreed to hear two separate pleas filed by Poonawalla and Maharashtra-based journalist B R Lone, seeking an independent probe into Loya's death.

The issue had come under the spotlight in November last year after media reports quoting his sister fuelled suspicion about the circumstances surrounding his death and its link to the Sohrabuddin case.

Poonawala, in his plea, said the circumstances revolving around the death of the judge were "questionable, mysterious and contradicting".

The other plea filed by the journalist submitted that a fair probe was needed into the mysterious death of Loya, who was hearing the sensitive Sohrabuddin encounter case in which various police officers and BJP president Amit Shah were named as parties.

A PIL seeking probe into the judge's death was also filed before the Bombay High Court on January 8 by the Bombay Lawyers' Association.

In the encounter case, the BJP President along with Rajasthan Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria, Rajasthan-based businessman Vimal Patni, former Gujarat police chief P C Pande, Additional Director General of Police Geeta Johri and Gujarat police officers Abhay Chudasama and N K Amin, have already been discharged.

A total of 23 accused, including police personnel, are facing trial for their involvement in the alleged fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi and their associate Tulsidas Prajapati in Gujarat in November 2005.

The case was later transferred to CBI and the trial shifted to Mumbai.

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The Supreme Court today asked BJP leader Ajay Agrawal to explain his locus in filing an appeal in the politically-sensitive Rs 64 crore Bofors pay-offs case.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra noted that the CBI has not filed any appeal in the apex court challenging the May 31, 2005 Delhi High Court judgement and asked the petitioner to explain his locus in the case.

"We expect the petitioner to argue the matter on the next date of hearing and argue the parameters on grant of leaves," the bench also comprising justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said.

The matter will be now heard on February 2.

Justice R S Sodhi of Delhi High Court, since retired, had on May 31, 2005 quashed all charges against the three Hinduja brothers -- Srichand, Gopichand and Prakashchand -- and the Bofors company, castigating the CBI for its handling of the case, saying it had cost the exchequer about Rs 250 crore.

Agrawal, who had contested the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 from Rai Bareli against the then Congress president Sonia Gandhi, has filed an appeal in the apex court against the 2005 verdict of the high court.

Before the 2005 verdict of Justice Sodhi, another judge of the Delhi High Court, retired Justice J D Kapoor, had on February 4, 2004 exonerated late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in the case and directed the framing of charge of forgery under section 465 of the IPC against Bofors company.

The Rs 1,437-crore deal between India and Swedish arms manufacturer AB Bofors for the supply of 400 155mm Howitzer guns for the Indian Army was entered into on March 24, 1986.

Swedish Radio on April 16, 1987, had claimed that the company had paid bribes to top Indian politicians and defence personnel.

The CBI on January 22, 1990 had registered the FIR for alleged offences of criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery under the Indian Penal Code and other sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act against Martin Ardbo, the then president of AB Bofors, alleged middleman Win Chadda and the Hinduja brothers.

It had alleged that certain public servants and private persons in India and abroad had entered into a criminal conspiracy between 1982 and 1987 in pursuance of which the offences of bribery, corruption, cheating and forgery were committed.

The first charge sheet in the case was filed on October 22, 1999, against Chadda, Ottavio Quattrocchi, the then defence secretary S K Bhatnagar, Ardbo and the Bofors company. A supplementary charge sheet was filed against the Hinduja brothers on October 9, 2000.

A special CBI court in Delhi on March 4, 2011, had discharged Quattrocchi from the case saying the country could not afford to spend hard-earned money on his extradition which had already cost Rs 250 crore.

Quattrocchi, who fled from here on July 29-30, 1993, never appeared before any court in India to face prosecution. He passed away on July 13, 2013. The other accused persons who died are Bhatnagar, Chadda and Ardbo.

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A government school teacher died while 12 students were injured, three of them seriously, when their bus rammed into a stationary truck at Goraya, ten kms from here, on National Highway 1 this morning, police said.

Goraya SHO Parminder Singh identified the deceased as Gurcharan Singh, an Art and Craft teacher of Government Senior Secondary School, Tungan in Sangrur district.

Three critically injured students were admitted to Civil Hospital Phagwara, he said.

They included Sukhjinder Singh, Hasandeep Singh and Mandeep Singh, both aged around 16.

He said the other students, including 2-3 girls, sustained minor injuries and were provided first aid at nearby hospitals, including Bara Pind.

They sustained bruises and were discharged after first aid, said SHO.

Giving details of the accident, he said that a bus was carrying 47 students, including 28 boys and 19 girls, of Tungan school to Science City Kapurthala as part of an educational tour.

Three teachers, including two women teachers, were accompanying them, he said.

A case was registered against the truck driver for parking the truck in the area leading to the accident.

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In a show of solidarity, journalists today boycotted a press meet to be addressed by Gujarat MLA and Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani here after he refused to talk in the presence of an English channel.

After a close door interaction with students and academicians, Mevani had agreed to a short media meet.

As soon as the newsmen started getting ready for the event by arranging the microphones, Mevani asked the reporter of an English channel to remove his equipment.

The legislator made it clear that he will not talk in the presence of that TV channel since it was "his policy".

"We were arranging the microphone. As soon as he saw microphone that had our logo, he asked us to remove it. I told him we want a general byte and not an exclusive. But he refused", the reporter of that particular channel covering the event told PTI.

"We felt like he was dictating terms. We just sought a byte from him on issues relating to the State (Tamil Nadu)", he said.

The video released later by the TV channel showed Mevani saying he will not speak if there was a question from that particular channel.

"If a question comes (from that channel) I will stop speaking to anyone. Let the mic be removed", Mevani said.

Reacting to Mevani's rider, another TV channel reporter told him: "You cannot demand like that. If you do not want to talk then it is up to you. Thank You."



Following the incident, social media was flooded with comments supporting Chennai media for boycotting the event.

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A senior leader of a faction of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) has been found dead in mysterious circumstances in this Pakistani city, prompting police to launch an investigation.

Hasan Zafar Arif, 73, who took over the leadership of the Pakistan chapter of the MQM London last year in Pakistan at a time when the a was banned by the government, was found dead on Sunday on the back seat of his car near the Ibrahim Hyderi area.

His family said there were blood stains on Arif's face and shirt when his body was found.

Arif, took over the leadership in Karachi last year following the authorities decision to ban the party from activities in the wake of its chief Altaf Hussain's anti-state speech outside the Karachi Press Club.

Inspector General East Sultan Khawaja has been nominated to carry out the investigations into the mysterious death.

Senior Superintendent Police, Rao Anwar said chemical tests were still being conducted after an autopsy on Arifs body.

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The US military is conducting "very serious" training for a possible conflict with North Korea, a top Republican lawmaker said today, though he said he hoped such preparations would never be put to use.

Congressman Mac Thornberry, who chairs the powerful House Armed Services Committee that provides civilian oversight to the Pentagon, said the administration of President Donald Trump is closely studying its options.

"The administration is very seriously looking at what would be involved with military options when it comes to North Korea," Thornberry told a group of reporters.

Training efforts "are very serious," he added.

"The military has preparations under way, and hopefully they will not be needed."



Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has repeatedly insisted that efforts to resolve the North Korea crisis should be diplomatically led, though he has said the Pentagon always plans for any contingency.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula and between Pyongyang and Washington have been sky-high for months, after North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un repeatedly test-fired missiles potentially capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and hitting the United States.

He also authorized the detonation of North Korea's most powerful nuclear device to date.

Though the US military routinely trains on the Korean peninsula with South Korean counterparts, The New York Times reported Sunday that a series of drills in the United States suggest a new focus on readying the military for conflict with North Korea.

"If you are going to ask men and women to risk their lives on behalf of the nation, we owe them not only the best military equipment but also the best training and preparation that our country can provide them and I think that's part of what's going on," Thornberry said.

Last week, global tensions cooled somewhat with the resumption of talks between North and South Korea.

But the rhetoric picked back up again Tuesday, when North Korea denounced President Donald Trump's tweeted message that he has a bigger nuclear button than Kim as the "spasm of a lunatic" and the "bark of a rabid dog."



On January 2, Trump had written on Twitter: "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!"



Further adding to jitters, residents in Hawaii were subjected to an erroneous alert Saturday warning them that a missile was inbound.

Emergency management officials later admitted "the wrong button was pushed" during a shift change.

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Pakistan's ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif today compared the corruption cases against him to a 'flop' movie as he appeared before an accountability court trying him for graft in the Panama Papers scandal that forced him to resign.

The cases were launched on September 8 following the Supreme Court verdict of July 28 that disqualified Sharif as prime minister and ordered the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) for institution of cases against him.

Sharif, 68, arrived in the court - his 13th appearance



in Islamabad.

He was accompanied by daughter Maryam and son-in-law Mohammad Safdar, who are co-accused in one of three cases.

During the hearing, at least two more witnesses produced by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) recorded their statements.

Sharif's lawyer Khawaja Harris cross-examined the witnesses.

Later, the court postponed hearing till January 23 and summoned three more witnesses.

Sharif after the court hearing narrated a story about a famous big-budget film in the 1960s to dismiss corruption charges against him.

"After it was released, amid much fanfare, someone asked the producer and director how the movie was faring, to which they replied 'Pehlay haftay zabardast, doosray haftay zabardasti (The first week was great but the second was forced)," Sharif said as he linked the 'flop' movie to his own corruption cases.

"You (media representatives) are here covering the case. You better know these cases and how strong they are?", he said.

He also criticised his political opponents planning protests this week against his partys rule in Punjab province. He asked them to wait for another four months when general elections are due to be held.

The three cases against him pertain to the Al-Azizia Steel Mills, several companies including Flagship Investment Ltd, and London's Avenfield properties.

Sharif and some of his family members are facing charges relating to their overseas properties.

The political future of Sharif, who leads the country's most powerful political family and the ruling PML-N party, has been hanging in balance since then. If convicted, Sharif can be jailed.

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US President Donald Trump today said that his South Asia strategy announced in August is "working rapidly".

In a joint media appearance at the White House with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Trump said, "Our strategic partnership with Kazakhstan has advanced my South Asia strategy, which is working and working far more rapidly than anybody would understand.

He thanked the Kazakh president for providing crucial support to US forces in Afghanistan and denying safe havens to terrorists.

"Kazakhstan is a valued partner in our efforts to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons," he said.

"This cooperation has grown even stronger this month during Kazakhstan's presidency of the United Nations Security Council, he said.

Kazakhastan, a non-permanent member, holds the rotating presidency on the UN Security Council.

Trump thanked Nazarbayev for his full support for his South Asia strategy including his efforts in Afghanistan.

"I greatly appreciate the president's personal assurances that Kazakhstan will continue to provide critical logistical support and access for our troops fighting ISIS and the Taliban where we have made tremendous strides, he said.

"We also appreciate Kazakhstan's work to train and educate Afghan civilian specialists and I am grateful for the president's pledge of additional support to bolster Afghan security, Trump said.

Nazarbayev is the first Central Asian leader to visit the White House. The two had earlier met in Riyadh and have spoken over phone.

"While the American troops are in Afghanistan, I think it's the mission of the whole world to make sure that Afghanistan is stabilised and it also a mission for us as a neighbouring country to see that peace prevails in Afghanistan, said the Kazakh president.

So far Kazakhastan has provided humanitarian technical support to Afghanistan to the tune of USD 75 million.

It has also spent USD 50 million training Afghan to some civilian professions that they cannot get trained in Afghanistan.

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".

Trump had also sought a major role for India in bringing peace in Afghanistan and ruled out a hasty withdrawal of troops from the war-torn nation while announcing his new Afghanistan and South Asia policy in August.

The US has suspended about USD 2 billion in security aid to Pakistan over it failure to crack down on militants.

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A Delhi court has quashed the summons issued against ShopClues founder Sandeep Aggarwal in a criminal defamation case filed against him by his estranged wife and company's co-founder Radhika Ghai Aggarwal.

Additional Sessions Judge Sidharth Sharma passed the order on a petition filed by Sandeep seeking setting aside of a magisterial court's May 2017 order summoning him to face trial in a criminal defamation complaint, filed by his wife.

ShopClues, an online marketplace, was founded in 2011 and valued at over USD one billion in 2016.

In her defamation complaint before Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Radhika had sought Sandeep's prosecution alleging he had published certain "false, defamatory, derogatory and malicious imputations against her in print, social and electronic media, with sole motive to damage her reputation".

Advocate Vijay Kumar Aggarwal, appearing for Sandeep, had told the court that the accused was living at Gurgaon in Haryana, which was outside the jurisdiction of the magisterial court here and that it had not made an appropriate inquiry before summoning his client.

The petition was opposed by the advocate appearing for Radhika, saying that appropriate inquiry was conducted by the magisterial court before summoning the accused.

"In the order, Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) has not mentioned that he is conducting an inquiry under section 202 (postponement of issue and either inquire into the case himself or direct an investigation by police) CrPC which is required to be necessarily carried out in the complaint before him as the accused is residing in Gurugram, Haryana i.e. outside the jurisdiction of the CMM, New Delhi," it said.

The sessions court also noted that the magistrate had not summoned the representatives of newspapers or websites, which had allegedly published the defamatory contents, to ascertain the publication of the articles.

"In light of above discussion, I am of the considered opinion that the mandatory requirement under provision of 202 CrPC have not been complied with in the present matter. The impugned order dated May 30, 2017 is set aside," the sessions court said.

The sessions court has now directed both the parties to appear before the CMM.

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Suspected National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-K) militants today set ablaze nine oil tankers loaded with crude along Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border in Tinsukia district, a senior police officer said.

"The militants set afire the tyre and engine parts of the tankers. In the incident, no one was injured," Tinsukia Superintendent of Police Mugdhajyoti Dev Mahanta told PTI from the incident spot over phone.

"Luckily, the fire could not reach crude inside the tanks in any of the vehicle as police team and fire brigade reached the spot immediately. The fire were doused successfully," he said.

The incident took place this evening on Tinsukia side at the Namchik gate between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.

The police suspect the NSIN(K) militants were behind the incident, the SP said.

Police has launched an operation to nab the culprits, he added.

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The Congress in Maharashtra today demanded a CBI probe into the Kamala Mills Compound fire and suspension of BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta over the incident that resulted in the death of 14 people last month.

A delegation of state Congress leaders met Governor Vidyasagar Rao and put forward the twin demands.

The delegation comprised Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam and senior leader Arif Mohammed Naseem Khan, among others.

Nirupam later said there had been 48 per cent rise in fire incidents in 2017 compared to 2016 due to "faulty" policies of the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) under the present commissioner.

The "casual" attitude of BMC officials towards the Kamala Mills fire victims was "shameful", he said.

Vikhe-Patil said "corruption" in the BMC and illegalities were responsible for the December 29 blaze and also other fire incidents in the metropolis in the past.

"The commissioner deliberately neglected what was happening (illegally in the compound). Demolition of unauthorised structures after the Kamala Mill fire was just an eyewash," Vikhe-Patil said.

He said Mehta was the "culprit number 1" in the entire case and wondered why he has been entrusted with the task of heading the probe into the tragedy.

Nirupam said Shiv Sena-BJP leaders made Mehta make the statement about political pressure on him to go slow on the fire probe.

"This was done to change the course of the investigation," the former Lok Sabha MP alleged.

The Congress leaders demanded a CBI probe into the fire and also suspension of Mehta.

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All states should take cue from Tamil Nadu and support organ transplantation, Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu said today.

He said the state government, under the leadership of the late Jayalalithaa, had taken up the "noble" programme of extending government support to organ transplantation.

"I want every state to follow (it). A government hospital doing transplantation, that is praiseworthy," he said at a function here.

"One may ask, what is great in that. But nowadays doing your duty is also praiseworthy," Naidu said.

He recalled that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in one of his 'Mann ki Baat' programmes, had advised that everyone should do their duty.

Naidu made the remarks at the function to felicitate Dr Mohamed Rela on successfully completing 1,000 liver transplantations in Tamil Nadu.

Rela is Chairman and Director, Institute of Liver Disease and Transplant, Gleneagles Global Health City.

Naidu recalled that when he was a Union minister, he used to inform organisers of events not to offer a vote of thanks to him as he was only doing his duty.

Naidu said if all people do their duty, "it will add beauty to the country".

The Vice President also urged the people going abroad for better prospects to return and serve the country.

"I always advocate (that) those who go abroad for greener pastures to return. That is what has been done by these two doctors (Dr Rela and hospital chairman, Dr K Ravindranath). Even after you return, your returns will be good and you will also be happy," Naidu said.

On the economic front, he said the country was progressing due to reforms undertaken by the NDA government, despite a slowdown in the world economy.

"When the entire world economy is slowing down, India was able to march forward on account of reforms like GST (Goods and Services Tax), demonetisation (by the Centre)," he said.

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Tata Trusts today said it has set up an 'Impact Lab' at IIT Delhi in partnership with health innovation player PATH for healthcare solutions in areas such as maternal and child health, nutrition and diagnostics for chronic and infectious diseases, among others.

The collaboration between the two will mobilise about USD 10 million to run the entire ecosystem.

The 'Impact Lab' will source solutions in chosen areas to improve healthcare of poor and resource challenged communities.

"Together Tata Trusts and PATH are building a healthcare Impact Lab which will become a place in the country where innovators can come with their ideas and innovation, test them and build better products and solutions out of those," Tata Trusts Head Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Institutions Manoj Kumar told PTI.

He further said the ideas and innovations will be taken to the market, to public health professionals, government, NGOs and to everybody who has to do with India's public health problems.

"This lab is focussed on incubating innovations and taking them to community. Research ideas will be converted into actual healthcare solutions, he added.

To start with, the lab will focus on communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, among others as also the major healthcare issues in India.

PATH India Country Director Neeraj Jain said: "We are hoping that over the next couple of years, we will be able to mobilise USD 8-10 million to be able to run this whole ecosystem.

When asked about the need to come up with the idea, Jain said while there are lots of innovations across the country, they are not really able to reach scale specially for products or ideas which are targetted at people living in the low resource area.

"The idea is to really focus on healthcare solutions for India from innovations that are happening within India," he added.

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The Telangana government would soon introduce a system similar to the 'core banking network', used in banks, in the administration of land records.

The system aims at facilitating immediate changes in land records whenever any transactions take place, thus avoiding delays in the process.

"The core banking network system would be introduced. Entries and changes would be done immediately in the passbooks of (lands) buyer and seller. We are arranging high capacity computers and servers for this," said Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao in a meeting with district collectors.

The changes would be updated in a proposed website, named 'Dharani', according to a state government release.

Rao said "revolutionary changes" would be initiated in the administration of land records from March 12.

He said 'Pattadar' (land ownership) passbooks would be distributed to land owners from March 11.

"Chief Minister Chandrasekhar Rao said that from March 11, Pattadar passbooks should be distributed in all the villages," the release quoted the CM as saying at the meeting.

The Pattadar passbooks would be distributed in view of the land records updation and "purification" (rectification) exercise recently carried out in the state.

Rao said 93 per cent of land was found to be without any disputes (in the land records updation programme).

He also talked about the changes proposed to be brought in the Panchayati Raj system. A new Panchayat Raj Act is proposed to be enacted.

The number of village panchayats is likely to increase by another 4,000 from the present 8,684, the Chief Minister said.

The government is discussing various aspects of the Panchayati Raj system, including whether to conduct direct or indirect elections, the release quoted him as saying.

The budget session of the Legislative Assembly would be held from March 12, he added.

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Three persons were today killed when a head constable of the India Reserve Battalion (IRB), posted at the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) camp, allegedly opened fire on them at Daund town near here, a police official said.

Following the incident, the suspect locked himself inside a flat and the police was trying to bring him out, he said.

One of the deceased was a relative of the constable, the official said, adding that further details were awaited.

Daund is around 80 km from Pune.

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An Assistant Sub-Inspector of India Reserve Battalion (IRB), posted at the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) camp, allegedly shot dead three persons at Daund near Pune today.

Sanjay Baliram Shinde, the accused, was later arrested from Supa village near Shirur in the district.

Shinde opened fire at two places -- Nagar Mori and Borawake Nagar --- in Daund town this afternoon, killing three persons, police said.

"Initially police thought he was hiding in his house. When a police inspector spoke to Shinde over phone, he, to mislead the cops, said he was going towards Solapur," said Vishwas Nangare-Patil, Inspector-General of Police, Kolhapur Range.

"However, his phone location nailed his lie as it showed movement towards Shirur. He was arrested at Supa and a 9 mm pistol and two magazines were seized from his possession," Nangare-Patil added.

Nangare-Patil said Shinde told the police officer over phone that he had a monetary dispute with one of the persons he shot.

"After killing two people at one spot, he left the spot and killed another person with whom he had some previous enmity," said Nangare-Patil.

However, Shinde's account of the events needs to verified, Nangare-Patil added.

The victims were identified as Amol Jadhav, Gopal Shinde and Prashant Pawar.

Another police official said that Shinde had two non-cognizable offences registered against him in the past.

Today morning, Shinde demanded money from one of the deceased, he said.

"When Shinde started pressurising him for the money, the latter slapped him. An angry Shinde, who had a pistol, fired at him. When another man tried to catch hold of Shinde, he too was shot," the police official said.

Shinde then left the place and shot the third man with whom he had previous enmity.

However, the sequence in which the three victims were shot was not yet clear.

Tension prevailed in Daund after the incident with people gathering outside Shinde's house.

"SRPF companies and additional force from Pune were summoned to control the situation," said a police official.

A senior SRPF official said that Shinde belongs to the India Reserve Battalion, Kolhapur, which is part of the SRPF.

"Due to unavailability of space in Kolhapur, some IRB companies are kept at SRPF Group 5 and Group 7 camps in Daund. Shinde is under the administrative control of Commandant, SRPF 16 Kolhapur," said the officer.

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Actor Timothe Chalamet, who is generating Oscar buzz for his role in "Call Me by Your Name", has announced that he will be donating his salary from Woody Allen's film "A Rainy Day in New York" to Time's Up movement and other charities.

The 22-year-old actor also promised to donate funds from his work on the film to the LGBT Center in New York and RAINN, an anti-sexual violence organisation.

"I have been asked in a few recent interviews about my decision to work on a film with Woody Allen last summer ... What I can say is this: I don't want to profit from my work on the film, and to that end, I am going to donate my entire salary," Chalamet said in his statement, posted on Instagram.

"I am learning that a good role isn't the only criteria for accepting a job. That has become much clearer to me in the last few months, having witnessed the birth movement intent on ending injustice, inequality and above all, silence."



Rebecca Hall and Griffin Newman, Chalamet's co-stars in 'Rainy Day', have already announced that they will donate their salaries from "Rainy Day".

Chalamet's "Lady Bird" director Greta Gerwig recently stated that she regrets having worked with Allen in 2012's "To Rome With Love".

Dylan, Allen's adopted daughter, accused the director of sexually abusing her in the early 1990s while she was a child.

She reiterated her allegations in a 2014 New York Times op-ed and other articles. She has often criticised Hollywood actors for not taking her claims seriously.

Dylan's allegations have picked up steam in wake of the #MeToo movement following her brother Ronan Farrow's expose of Harvey Weinstein. Ronan is Allen and Mia Farrow's biological child.

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Actor Timothee Chalamet, who has received rave reviews for his performance in "Call Me By Your Name", has expressed his desire to work with filmmakers Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro.

The 22-year-old actor said if he ever gets a chance to work with the directors he will immediately accept the offer, Contactmusic reported.

"I'm getting people saying keep working on these kind of projects, keep working on things with integrity that are more independently oriented, and certainly if it was a Christopher Nolan opportunity or was a Guillermo.

"Hey give me a call if you want to work together! I'm totally serious about that," Chalamet said.

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VHP leader Pravin Togadia, who briefly went missing yesterday, today charged that "some people" were trying to stifle his voice and that he was not allowed to speak on issues like Ram Temple, farmers and cow slaughter.

A tearful Togadia, 62, made the allegations at a press conference, where he also said that he went into hiding as he feared police will kill him in an encounter.

"I am being targeted for a decade-old case, there is an attempt to suppress my voice. Rajasthan Police team came to arrest me. Someone told me plan was being made to kill me in an encounter," Togadia claimed.

Togadia, who went missing yesterday after Rajasthan Police came to arrest him in a ten-year old case and was later found admitted to a hospital in unconscious state, claimed that attempts were being made to silence him for raising the voice of the Hindu community.

The VHP leader said he will surrender before the court in Rajasthan after he is discharged from hospital.

"Yesterday morning, I was performing pooja, when messages came that a large contingent of Rajasthan Police, along with Gujarat Police, was coming to encounter me (kill me in an encounter)," Togadia claimed.

"After informing my security guards, I, along with a VHP worker, took an auto-rickshaw, and went to Theltej area of the city. I called up Rajasthan chief minister (Vasundhara Raje) and home minister (Gulabchand Kataria) but they denied their police had come to Gujarat to arrest me. This raised more suspicion and I switched off my mobile phones," he said.

"I contacted lawyers of Rajasthan and told them to get the arrest warrant cancelled. But they said that it was difficult as court issued it. So I decided to go to Jaipur by taking a flight and appear before the court (in Gangaput)," he said.

"However, when I was going in the auto-rickshaw to the airport, I felt dizzy and asked the driver to take me to some hospital. Then I fell unconscious. When I regained consciousness, I was at an unknown hospital," he said.

"I do not fear death, I do not fear encounter. But I had to protect myself while following the law of the land," he said.

"I have been raising my voice for Hindus. I am raising issues like Ram temple, national law to ban cow slaughter, re-settlement of Kashmiri Hindus in that state, giving farmers fair price for their crops. But an attempt is being made to silence my voice," he said.

"Old cases are being reopened, so that I can be arrested. An attempt is being made to stifle my voice by arresting me in different states," he said.

To a query, Togadia said he would reveal the names of those behind the plot to silence his voice, at the right time.

"Rajasthan Police had come to arrest me, but the chief minister and home minister of that state were not aware about it. Same way it happened in Gujarat. When Gujarat court issued a warrant against me, the chief minister (Vijay Rupani) here, or home minster (Pradeepsinh Jadeja) were not aware about it," he said.

"On whose orders are police is taking such action will be revealed by me at an appropriate time and with evidence," Togadia said.

An arrest warrant was issued by Ahmedabad court recently against Togadia and he had appeared in the court on January 6 to get it cancelled.

He also claimed that CBI was threatening doctors associated with VHP.

The mystery over Togadia's disappearance yesterday has deepened, with a senior police officer maintaining that neither the local Sola police nor Rajasthan Police had arrested him.

The VHP had yesterday claimed that Togadia was detained by Rajasthan Police in connection with the case, but the latter denied this.

Sola police station officials said a team of Rajasthan Police visited them yesterday to execute an arrest warrant against Togadia under Section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), but could not find him at his residence.

According to a statement issued yesterday by the VHP in Delhi after Togadia was found, Togadia, who suffered from low blood sugar levels, was found in an unconscious state in Shahibaug area and was taken to Chandramani Hospital located in the same area.

VHP workers had taken to the streets yesterday and halted traffic and held demonstrations after their leader was untraceable.

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Rabble-rouser VHP leader Pravin Togadia today created a storm with his claim that there was a plot to get him killed in an encounter by the police of Gujarat and Rajasthan, states ruled by the BJP, setting off calls by the Congress for an inquiry into his allegation.

Togadia, who is convalescing in a hospital here after having gone missing for some time yesterday and found unconscious, told journalists that some people were trying to stifle his voice and not allowed to speak on issues like Ram temple, farmers' issues and cow slaughter.

"Yesterday morning, I was performing pooja, when messages came that a large contingent of Rajasthan Police, along with Gujarat Police, was coming to encounter me (kill me in an encounter)," a teary eyed Togadia claimed.

"After informing my security guards, I, along with a VHP worker, took an auto-rickshaw, and went to Theltej area of the city. I called up Rajasthan chief minister (Vasundhara Raje) and home minister (Gulabchand Kataria) but they denied their police had come to Gujarat to arrest me. This raised more suspicion and I switched off my mobile phones," he said.

Togadia, a 'Z plus' category protectee, and one of the most vocal Muslim baiters in organisations linked to the RSS, said he then contacted his lawyers in Rajasthan to get the warrant against him issued in an old case cancelled.

On being told that it cannot be done, Togadia said he decided to take a flight to Jaipur and appear before the court in Gangapur. He claimed when he was on way to the airport on an auto-rickshaw, he felt dizzy, and asked the driver to take him to a hospital. Togadia claimed he then fell unsconscious, and on regaining consciousness, found himself in a hospital.

A team of Rajasthan Police had approached their Gujarat counterparts for help to execute an arrest warrant against Togadia under section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the IPC, but could not find him at his residence.

"I do not fear death, I do not fear encounter. But I had to protect myself while following the law of the land," he said.

"I have been raising my voice for Hindus. I am raising issues like Ram temple, national law to ban cow slaughter, resettlement of Kashmiri Hindus in that state, giving farmers fair price for their crops. But an attempt is being made to silence my voice," he said.

The Congress, a known ideological foe of the BJP-RSS, and its Gujarat ally Hardik Patel rushed to the Chandramani Hospital to inquire after Togadia's condition.

"The ruling dispensations in Rajasthan and Gujarat have engaged in fake encounters even earlier. Togadia's apprehension is not without a reason," senior Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia said.

"An internal wrestling is going on in the BJP where attempts are being made to finish off the opponents," Modhwadia said, and sought an "independent and court- monitored" probe into the allegations levelled by Togadia, who was marginalised in Gujarat's Hindutva politics after Narendra Modi became the chief minister in 2002.

Patidar quota agitation leader Hardik Patel also met Togadia separately. Patel, who backed the Congress in the recent Assembly elections in Gujarat, pointed fingers at Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah over claims made by Togadia.

"Rights of common people are being snatched away. We (he and Togadia) can have different 'mat' (ideology) but our 'mann' (heart) is one. We all know what kind of conspiracies are being hatched by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. I don't know about Hindus, but a leader of a Hindu organisation is definitely in danger now," he said.

Gujarat Congress chief Bharatsinh Solanki and the party's state in-charge Ashok Gehlot also demanded an inquiry into Togadia's claim that he could be killed in an encounter.

Gehlot was the chief minister of Rajasthan when Togadia was booked under section 188 of IPC for defying police orders in Gangapur town of that state in 2002.

"The law and order situation in Gujarat has deteriorated and it reflects in what Togadia claimed today. We demand an inquiry into Togadia's allegations to bring out the truth," Solanki said.

Gehlot said the issue is serious as both Gujarat and Rajasthan are ruled by the BJP.

"Togadia was arrested in the past too (in Rajasthan, when the Congress was in power). Togadia is known to have links with the ruling party. And if such things can happen with him, we can only imagine the situation of common people. This is a serious issue and the state government should order an inquiry," said Gehlot.

Though the did not react to Togadia's claims, veteran RSS leader M G Vaidya said only the VHP leader can reveal who was behind the alletged plot to eliminate him.

"Togadia has said he will provide evidence (to show who was behind the conspiracy). We should wait till then," Vaidya said in Nagpur.

"Only Togadia can reveal who was behind the conspiracy to kill him," Vaidya said, wondering how someone with Z-plus security can be eliminated in an encounter.

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An Indian-origin terror suspect, who allegedly agreed to help another man acquire a gun for an attack in London, went on trial along with three others today.

Nadeem Ilyas Patel, from east London, was charged with possession of a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence in May last year.

The 26-year-old was remanded in custody along with Umar Ahmed Haque, 25, Muhammed Abid, 27, and Abuthater Mamun, 19, who are all on trial at the Old Bailey court in London.

Patel denies conspiracy to possess a firearm but has pleaded guilty to possession of a prohibited weapon.

Haque, a schoolteacher, emerged as the mastermind of the group as the court was told that he was "fascinated" by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group.

The London landmark of Big Ben, Heathrow Airport, a shopping centre and police officers were among his planned targets for a terrorist attack.

"He was fascinated by the warped and extreme ideology of Islamic State. As he later told the police after his arrest, he was their loyal follower," said prosecutor Mark Heywood.

Haque was inspired by the attack on the UK Parliament in March 2017, which killed five people, and he was recorded outlining his violent plans to Mamun.

"Umar Haque had determined in 2016 and early 2017 to carry out a violent attack or attacks, with others if he could, in this country," Heywood said, adding that he also influenced students, aged between 11 and 14, whom he taught at the Lantern of Knowledge Islamic School in east London.

"His methods were to expose them to information and video recordings, of the kind that no one should expose to children, and even have them enact scenarios of violent action against police," he told the court.

Haque denies two counts of preparing to commit terrorist acts, one charge of conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence, and one count of dissemination of terrorist publications.

He has admitted possessing three copies of a terrorist publication and a second charge of dissemination of terror publications.

Mamun is accused of assisting him to raise funds for a terror plot and Abid is charged with failing to tell the authorities about the alleged plans.

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The Trump administration has no qualms admitting immigrants who are skilled, employed and can speak English, a top official has said, while giving insight into what its merit-based system would look like.

Such individuals could be from any part of the world given that they fulfil the requirements, the official said.

If such a policy is developed and implemented, it could benefit individuals from countries like India, the majority of whom meet the criterion.

The Trump administration wants to reform the immigration system to serve the US' national interest, the official said.

"..And so, our position, is that a system that prioritise individuals based on their individual skills and merit will certainly produce better results than the system we have now," said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"We want to bring in individuals, wherever they may be from, who love this country, who love its people, who have skills, who have talent, who have -- who speak English, who are committed to supporting our values and our very way of life," said the official.

The official said some of the existing programmes for immigrants ignored such requirements which are important for individuals to succeed in the US.

"So, what we have with the Diversity Lottery Program or through chain migration is that in these cases there are identified examples of individuals who were not selected to come to the US based on their love of this country, skills, merit, and individual attributes that will lead them to their success," the official said.

"We would like to admit individuals from all backgrounds or any place in the world, based on their own individual merit and their likelihood of success, into the US," the official said.

The admission of any foreign national who goes on to commit a terrorism-related offense or who conspires to support terrorists is simply an unacceptable outcome for the US, no matter what, the official said.

"Our goal is to eliminate terrorism in all of its forms, wherever it may emanate from," the official said.
US President Donald Trump's exclusive club in Florida has been cited by state inspectors for several code violations that pose a serious threat to public health and safety, a media report has said.

The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Trump's Winter White House where the president hosts world leaders, is checked annually by the state of Florida.

The club, located on a beachfront property, was cited in November for two violations deemed high priority: the lack of smoke detectors capable of alerting the hearing impaired through flashing bright lights; and slabs of concrete missing from a staircase, exposing steel rebar that could cause someone to fall, Miami Herald reported.

"High priority lodging violations are those which could pose a direct or significant threat to the public health, safety, or welfare," the inspection code reads.

The November inspections of the club's two main kitchens, meanwhile, yielded a total 15 violations, the report said.

Among the no-nos was the staff's failure to track the freshness of potentially hazardous foods, including curry sauce dated October 21 pulled from a freezer and improperly marked, milk stored at 49 degrees instead of the safe temperature of 41 degrees, and cases of hot dogs stored on the ground of the walk-in freezer, the report said.

Ten other noted violations were deemed less serious under Floridas stringent food safety regulations, yet still damaging to the reputation of the upmarket club that charges a USD 200,000 initiation fee, and USD 14,000 a year for membership.

Trump had hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe at the Mar-a-Lago resort last year.

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The police today detained two plus II students of a local private college in Odisha's Cuttack district for alleged sexual misconduct with a girl student of the same institution.

Police said the students are now being interrogated on the basis of a complaint filed by the college principal.

The two boys of the college near Athagarh finding the girl alone in a classroom allegedly made unwanted sexual advances towards her. While one student groped and grabbed the girl, the other student recorded the same in his mobile phone, police said quoting the complaint lodged with them.

Hearing the cries of the victim girl, some other girl students rushed to her rescue and snatched the mobile phone, the complaint said.

When the matter was brought to the notice of the college principal, he referred this to the local police with a written complaint.

The police said the officiating officer-in-charge of the Gurudijhatia police station P K Lenka is interrogating the accused students.

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The UAE will lodge a complaint with the International Civil Aviation Organisation after Qatari jets came within little more than three kms of Emirati passenger flights, its civil aviation chief said today.

"Today we will file our complaint to the International Civil Aviation Organisation about the two serious incidents, along with the evidence that we've gathered, and ask for the intervention of the council to stop Qatar from repeating the act," Saif al-Suwaidi, head of the general civil aviation authority, told AFP.

The United Arab Emirates said yesterday that Qatari fighter jets had "intercepted" two passenger flights headed for Bahrain, drawing a swift denial from Gulf rival Qatar.

Abu Dhabi is also looking at re-routing flights to Bahrain to avoid Qatari airspace, as a feud between Qatar and its Gulf neighbours escalates.

"We are now studying changing the route to another one which is very far from Qatar," Suwaidi said.

"However that will take some time as we have to reach an agreement with Bahrain".

Suwaidi declined to name the airlines operating the two flights, which he said had been forced to delay their descent into Bahrain International Airport as Qatari fighter jets came within little more than three kms.

But Bahrain's civil aviation authority identified the aircraft as Emirates flight EK837 and Etihad flight EY23B. Bahrain too plans to file a complaint to the ICAO, a Montreal-based specialised agency of the United Nations.

The allegations came after Qatar accused UAE fighter jets of violating its airspace in December and January, most recently on Sunday.

The Qatari foreign ministry charged that they were a baseless attempt to overshadow its own complaints against the UAE.

Bahrain and the UAE have no diplomatic ties with Qatar, which lies between the two Gulf allies and is banned from using their airspace.

In June, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt broke diplomatic relations and most trade links with Qatar, accusing it of ties to Islamist extremists and Saudi arch-rival Iran.

Qatar denies the allegations and and accuses the four states of aiming to incite the overthrow of its government.

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The Yogi Adityanath government today removed R P Singh from the post of Uttar Pradesh Haj Committee secretary following the controversy over the saffron paint on Haj office boundary wall.

The government had earlier issued a notice to Singh, seeking an explanation on who ordered its office boundary wall to be painted saffron and why it was subsequently repainted.

"RP Singh, who is joint director in the minority welfare directorate, has been removed from his additional post of secretary, UP Haj Committee, with immediate effect," an office order issued by Principal Secretary (Minority Affairs) Monika S Garg said.

Vineet Srivastav, an assistant director in the minority welfare directorate, will take charge as secretary, UP Haj Committee, the order added.

UP's minister of state for Muslim Waqf and Haj, Mohsin Raza had earlier directed his department's principal secretary to get a clarification from Singh on the circumstances of the painting and repainting of the wall, which he said were not clear.

Raza said the media has raised a number of queries about the incident. A seven-point notice was issued to the UP Haj Committee's secretary.

The notice sought clarifications on the rules under which the maintenance and painting work of Haj Committee office was done. It also sought to know on whose orders the boundary wall was painted for the first time.

"When a saffron coat was already given, then under which circumstances there was a need to change the colour, and on whose orders was the colour changed?" the notice said.

"Who is responsible for the second coat of paint, and who will bear the cost for the second coat of paint," it asked.

The notice also sought details of the tender floated for the painting and the companies involved.

The minister, in the notice, also sought to know why the UP Haj Committee secretary issued a press release, and on whose orders, regarding the paint job.

"Whether any written orders were issued to the contractor? According to the press release, action was to be initiated against the contractor. Hence, what action has been initiated against the contractor," Raza asked in the notice.

The minister also sought to know on which date the secretary of Haj Committee inspect the office wall.

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Allied world powers met today for crisis talks on the North Korean nuclear missile threat, but without key player China, there seemed little chance of a breakthrough.

Canada and the United States are hosting a two-day meeting in Vancouver to bolster solidarity in the face of Kim Jong-Un's regime.

But neither China -- the North's main ally and sole significant trade partner -- nor Russia were invited for the ministerial-level talks, limiting the scope for effective new initiatives.

"The most important relevant parties of the Korean peninsula issue haven't taken part in the meeting so I don't think the meeting is legal or representative," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular briefing.

Lu denounced the "Cold War mentality" of "relevant parties," without naming the United States, which is urging Beijing to cut off fuel oil supplies to Pyongyang to force it to negotiate its own nuclear disarmament.

With China absent from Vancouver, US President Donald Trump spoke with his counterpart Xi Jinping.

According to the White House, the pair expressed hope that a recent resumption in face-to-face talks between North and South Korea "might prompt a change in North Korea's destructive behavior."



But Trump also "committed to sustain the United States- led global campaign of maximum pressure to compel North Korea to commit to denuclearization."



Trans-Pacific tensions have been running high for months, despite the recent return to direct talks between Kim's regime and Moon Jae-In's South Korea.

Over the weekend, a false alarm in Hawaii warning of an incoming ballistic missile rattled nerves, and earlier this month, Trump and Kim traded saber-rattling bluster.

As the talks got underway, Pyongyang issued its first response to Trump's argument that his nuclear arsenal dwarfs the North's fledgling missile batteries.

Official party newspaper Rodong Sinmun dismissed Trump's "swaggering" as the "spasm of a lunatic" frightened by North Korea's power and the "bark of a rabid dog."



The so-called Vancouver Group represents 20 countries that sent troops or support to the UN-backed side in the 1950 -53 Korean War.

They include Australia, Britain, France, India, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea. Military officials will also be present at the meeting.

Many have questioned the utility of a conference where China -- which supported the North during the conflict -- is absent.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last week that China and Russia "absolutely will play an important role in moving toward peace on the Korean peninsula."



On Monday at his annual press conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeatedly attacked the US, accusing Washington of failing to recognize "the reality of the emerging multipolar world."



Pope Francis, meanwhile, admitted that he was frightened by the prospects of an accidental nuclear war.

"I think we are at the very edge," he told reporters aboard his plane en route to Chile for a week-long visit there and in Peru.

"I am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things."



The Vancouver meeting kicked off late Monday with a dinner and several bilateral meetings, before a full gathering Tuesday to hammer out next steps in the standoff.

Among the proposals to be considered is sending warships to the Sea of Japan to stop and inspect suspect ships bound for North Korea in order to enforce sanctions.

South Korea already seized two ships carrying oil to the North in December but some have warned that such methods could increase military tensions or be interpreted as an act of war by Kim's isolated regime.

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called today for nations to step up the US-led "maximum pressure" campaign against North Korea by thwarting sanctions evasion and interdicting ships conducting illicit trade with the pariah nation.

The uncompromising message delivered to a gathering of 20 nations that were on America's side during the Korean War came despite the recent diplomatic opening between the rival Koreas after a year of escalating tension.

"We must increase the costs of the regime's behavior to the point that North Korea must come to the table for credible negotiations," Tillerson said in his opening remarks at the meeting on Canada's western coast.

The meeting convened days after a mistaken missile alert caused panic on Hawaii, a stark reminder of the fears of conflict with the North.

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said its talks with North Korea, leading to its participation in next month's Olympics being hosted by the South, are a "significant first step toward restoring inter-Korean relations."



But she conceded that despite the overtures, North Korea has yet to show any intention to fulfill its obligations on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono was blunter. He said the North "wants to buy some time to continue their nuclear and missile programs."



British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told reporters that in spite of the inter-Korean talks, "the North Korean regime is still going down the path of the acquisition of an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) tipped with a nuclear device that could have incalculable geostrategic consequences."



The meeting is being attended by foreign ministers and senior diplomats of nations that sent troops or humanitarian aid to the UN Command that supported South Korea in the fight against the communist North and its allies during the 1950-53 Korean War. It's a diverse gathering of mostly European and Asian nations, as well as Australia, New Zealand and Columbia. Officials are discussing sanctions, preventing the spread of weapons by North Korea, and diplomacy.

The gathering, co-hosted by Canada and the US, is strongly opposed by China and Russia, which fought on the communist side in the war. It appears primarily symbolic and unlikely to break much new ground.

Although Tillerson said the meeting sends North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a unified message that a nuclear-armed North is unacceptable, it risks alienating Beijing and Moscow.

They are Pyongyang's main trading and diplomatic partners, but have nevertheless supported UN Security Council resolutions to restrict revenue for North Korean nuclear and missile development.

Tillerson called for China and Russia to fully implement the sanctions. He reiterated US opposition to their idea of a "freeze-for-freeze," whereby the US-South Korea military exercises would halt in exchange for suspension of the North's nuclear programs.

According to the agency Tass, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday called the Vancouver meeting "unacceptable" and "destructive." Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told reporters a meeting that "doesn't include important parties to the Korean peninsula nuclear issue" cannot help resolve it.

Tillerson said all nations must work together to improve maritime interdiction operations and stop illicit ship-to-ship transfers that violate UN sanctions. The US has previously highlighted efforts by North Korea to circumvent restrictions on supplies of oil and petroleum products, most of which are supplied by China.

The latest UN Security Council resolution, adopted in December in response to an intercontinental ballistic missile test, calls on member states to impound vessels in their ports if there are reasonable grounds to suspect illicit trade with North Korea. It authorizes interdictions in a member state's territorial waters.

Tillerson also highlighted how North Korean missile tests pose a threat to civilian air traffic in the busy skies above East Asia.

"North Korea's willingness to launch missiles at any time presents a threat to people of all nationalities in the region's airspace each day," he said.

Despite Washington's tough stance and determination to keep up the pressure on North Korea, President Donald Trump has signaled openness to talks with North under the right circumstances.

After months of insults and blood-curdling threats he's traded with Kim, Trump suggested in an interview last week that the two leaders could have a positive relationship.

The White House said Trump spoke Monday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and they were hopeful that the inter-Korean talks "might prompt a change in North Korea's destructive behavior."



But Kim, widely viewed as seeking to drive a wedge between the US and South Korea, shows no sign of making concessions toward Washington as his totalitarian government comes close to perfecting a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the United States.

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The US has been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat to it and Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan has said.

He also said that it is time for a courteous yet "ruthlessly candid dialogue" with the US "with everything on the table" to remove all misunderstandings between Islamabad and Washington.

Reading out a policy statement on the government's foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly yesterday, he regretted that the US downplayed India's aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported today.

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US.

"It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," the defence minister said.

Khan said that Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," he alleged.

Pakistan accuses India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against it, a charge India has dismissed.

Khan alleged that "India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan" and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

"India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour," he claimed, adding that the unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace.

The minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan.

He said Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation 'Zarb-i-Azb' and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

He urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001.

He also criticised the US for not pursuing internal reconciliation in Afghanistan, which had now become a safe haven for terrorists.

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The Trump administration has cut tens of millions of dollars in money for Palestinian refugees, demanding that the UN agency responsible for the programs undertake a "fundamental re-examination," the State Department said.

In a letter yesterday, the State Department notified the UN Relief and Works Agency that the US is withholding USD 65 million of a planned USD 125 million funding installment to the body. The letter also makes clear that additional US donations will be contingent on major changes by UNRWA, which has been heavily criticized by Israel.

"We would like to see some reforms be made," said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, adding that changes are needed both to the way the agency operates and is funded.

"This is not aimed at punishing anyone."



The State Department said it was releasing the rest of the installment -- USD 60 million -- to prevent the agency from running out of cash by the end of the month and closing down.

The US is UNWRA's largest donor, supplying nearly 30 percent of its budget. The agency focuses on providing health care, education and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes during the war that led to Israel's establishment in 1948. Today, there are an estimated 5 million refugees and their descendants, mostly scattered across the region.

The US donated USD 355 million to UNWRA in 2016 and was set to make a similar contribution in this year; the first installment was to have sent this month. But after a highly critical January 2 tweet from Trump on aid to the Palestinians, the State Department opted to wait for a formal policy decision before sending its first installment.

Trump's tweet expressed frustration over the lack of progress in his attempts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and he pointed the finger at the Palestinians.

"We pay the Palestinians HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect," he said. "But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?"



Israelis accuse the UN agency of contributing to Palestinian militancy and allowing its facilities to be used by militants. They also complain that some of UNRWA's staff are biased against Israel.

Nauert said the United States believes there need to be more "burden-sharing," a regular Trump complaint about multilateral organizations dependent on significant contributions of US cash.

"We don't believe that taking care of other nations and other people have to be solely the United States' responsibility," she said.

The US plan to withhold some, but not all, of the money was backed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis, who offered it as a compromise to demands for more drastic measures by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, officials said.

Haley wanted a complete cutoff in US money until the Palestinians resumed peace talks with Israel that have been frozen for years. But Tillerson, Mattis and others argued that ending all assistance would exacerbate instability in the Mideast, notably in Jordan, a host to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and a crucial US strategic partner.

Eliminating or sharply reducing the US contribution could hamstring the agency and severely curtail its work, putting great pressure on Jordan and Lebanon as well as the Palestinian Authority. Gaza would be particularly hard hit.

Some officials, including Israelis, warn that it might push people closer to the militant Hamas movement, which controls Gaza.

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Assam Governor Prof Jagdish Mukhi today urged consumers to take a pledge to use energy judiciously as the country has huge deficit in crude oil production level compared to its consumption pattern.

"The countrys source of energy basket which grossly constitutes petroleum products, is also diminishing at fast rate but its demand is still growing and India has huge deficit in crude oil production level," he said.

The nation is striving for double digit economic growth and the energy demand is bound to grow at similar pace, the governor said while inaugurating Saksham-2018, a month-long awareness campaign for conservation of petroleum products organised by Indian Oil Corporation limited here.

"We are recognising and adopting measures to increase our dependency on renewable energy sources but the demand for petroleum products as source of energy is still growing", he added.

The countrys import bill is high and always dependent on global crude oil prices, rupee depreciation as well as rise in domestic consumption, he pointed out.

Sufficient refining output has reduced import dependency on petroleum products and the country has been able to export finished products to contain the foreign exchange deficit to a little extent, Mukhi informed.

As a part of Saksham, Petroleum Conservation Research Association (PCRA) under the aegis of Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has been organising campaign to sensitise consumers about energy conservation efforts in the country since 1978.

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To firm up bilateral ties with India, Australia's Victoria state plans to double its exports to AUD 1 billion by 2027, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said today.

Andrews, who is on his maiden visit to India, announced that Victoria is taking all measures to double the value of its annual goods exports to India to almost 1 billion Australian Dollar (AUD) over the next decade.

He made the announcement while launching 'Victoria's India Strategy: Strengthening Trade and Cultural Ties With India' here.

The strategy also includes plans to "grow expenditure by Indian visitors to Victoria from AUD 367 million in 2017 to AUD 885 million besides doubling the number of businesses engaged in India from 150 in 2017 to 300 per year", he said.

He further said Victoria aims at increasing the number of Indian postgraduate research students in Victoria by 25 per cent.

India's economy is the third-largest and fastest growing on earth. The Victorian government believes that a close bond with India will be beneficial for both economies, he said.

Victoria's world-renowned expertise in fields such as health, sports, tourism and education combined with Indias appetite to innovate and grow presents enormous opportunities for both economies.

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A war with North Korea is avoidable, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said today, urging direct talks between key powers on dismantling Pyongyang's nuclear program.

Guterres said recent moves by South and North Korea to ease tensions were important, but he added: "let's not forget that the essential problem is yet to be solved."



"I believe war is avoidable," Guterres told reporters, but he added: "I am not yet sure that peace is guaranteed."



The UN chief said his goal was to ensure that "those who are more relevant in this process are able to seriously talk to each other and seriously find a way to denuclearization."



The former Portuguese prime minister begins his second year as UN chief this month with North Korea looming large as the most pressing global security threat.

The United States and North Korea have shown little interest in holding direct talks to address the crisis.

Presenting his priorities for 2018 to the General Assembly, Guterres said there were "small signs of hope" after North Korea agreed to take part in the Winter Olympics in the South and the re-opening of a military hotline between Pyongyang and Seoul.

Guterres will attend the opening ceremony of the Pyeongchang Games next month.

North Korea's race to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States with a nuclear warhead has raised fears of a devastating conflict.

At the United Nations in September, President Donald Trump vowed to "totally destroy" North Korea if it launches an attack on the United States.

Trump's administration has been adamant that North Korea must first freeze its military programs before talks can take place.

The United States has led the drive at the Security Council to ratchet up economic sanctions on North Korea such as restrictions on oil supplies that were adopted in December.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the opening plenary at the WEF's Davos summit next week, while the keynote address will be given by US President Donald Trump at the annual jamboree of the global elite to be attended by 70 state heads.

Besides, 38 heads of major international organisations such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, as also nearly 2,000 CEOs including over 100 from India will be present at the five-day World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2018, beginning on January 22 with a welcome reception to be hosted by India.

Announcing the official programme in Geneva today, the WEF said the summit will see the largest ever engagement of global leaders this year where the key talking points would include international security, environment and the global economy.

The theme of the meeting, spread over 400 sessions, would be 'Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World', while the meeting would also see the largest ever proportion of women leaders (21 per cent) including all co-chairs being women this time including social entrepreneur Chetna Sinha from India and IMF's Christine Lagarde, the WEF said.

Modi will be accompanied by six union ministers, including Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal, Suresh Prabhu, Dharmendra Pradhan, M J Akbar and Jitendra Singh.

Besides, two chief ministers (Devendra Fadnavis and Chandrababu Naidu) and over 100 CEOs would take India's total presence to 129 -- the fourth highest after the US (780), the UK (266) and Switzerland (233 people). China will have 118 participants.

Women participants would account for 12 per cent of total Indian presence, compared to 27 per cent from the US, 24 per cent from the UK, 22 per cent from Germany, 20 per cent from Switzerland, 19 per cent for China and 18 per cent for France.

The WEF said its 48th Annual Meeting will focus on finding ways to reaffirm international cooperation on crucial shared interests, such as international security, the environment and the global economy.

The meeting comes at a time when geostrategic competition among states is generally seen to be on the rise.

Alongside international cooperation, an additional priority of the meeting will be to overcome divisions within countries, said the WEF which describes itself as an international public-private organisation focussed on improving the state of the world.

The WEF said divisions have often been caused by breakdowns in the social contract as a result of failure to protect societies from the transformational impacts of a succession of shocks, from globalisation to the proliferation of social media and the birth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

"Collectively, these shocks have caused a loss of trust in institutions and damaged the relationship between business and society," it added.

"Our world has become fractured by increasing competition between nations and deep divides within societies. Yet the sheer scale of the challenges our world faces makes concerted, collaborative and integrated action more essential than ever," WEF's Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab said.

He further said the summit aims to overcome these fault lines by reasserting shared interests among nations and securing multistakeholder commitment to renewing social contracts through inclusive growth.

This year's opening plenary will be delivered by Modi on January 23, Prime Minister of India, while Trump will deliver a keynote address before the close of the meeting on January 26, the WEF said.

This year a record number of leaders from G7 economies will participate, including Paolo Gentiloni, Prime Minister of Italy; Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission; Emmanuel Macron, President of France; Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; and Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, in addition to President Trump.

Other leaders from the G20 countries would include Liu He, Member of Political Bureau and General Director of CPC Central Committee of the People's Republic of China; Argentina President Mauricio Macri, South Africa Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Brazil President Michel Temer.

From the host country, Alain Berset, President of the Swiss Confederation, will also participate.

Overall, the summit will have over 340 top political leaders with 10 heads of state/government from Africa, nine from Middle East and North Africa and six from Latin America.

These include Ethiopia Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn, Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Nigeria Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Lebanon President Saad Al Hariri, Jordan King Abdullah II Bin Al Hussein, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Columbia President Juan Manuel Santos.

The summit will also be attended by 40 arts and culture leaders, including Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, Cate Blanchett and Elton John.

One of the key issues to be discussed would be navigating a multipolar and multiconceptual world and the balance between global cooperation and local autonomy to prevent the disintegration of the world order.

Besides, the leaders will also discuss how to overcome divisions in society and if outrage cycles in media and political rhetoric are widening societal fault lines and undermining tolerance, then what solutions can be jointly developed to restore the social compact, the WEF said.

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The Yogi Adityanath government has decided to seek a clarification from the Uttar Pradesh Haj Committee over the re-painting of its office boundary wall which had been given a saffron coat, a state minister said.

UP's minister of state for Muslim Waqf and Haj, Mohsin Raza, has directed his department's principal secretary to get a clarification from the secretary of UP Haj Committee.

"The boundary wall of the Haj Committee of UP was given a saffron coat as per the directives of the secretary of Haj Committee of UP. A day later, the colour of the boundary wall was changed. Under which circumstances this was done is not clear.

"A number of queries came from the media following the change of colour from saffron to another shade. Hence a seven -point notice seeking clarification from the secretary Haj Committee of UP has been issued," Raza said today.

According to the minister, a clarification has been sought as to what are the rules under which the maintenance and painting work of Haj Committee office is done.

Another point on which clarity has been sought is on whose orders was the boundary wall was painted for the first time.

"When a saffron coat was already given, then under which circumstances there was a need to change the colour, and on whose orders was the colour changed?" Mohsin has asked in his notice.

Another query raised by the minister is "who is responsible for the second coat of paint, and who will bear the cost for the second coat of paint," according to the notice.

The minister also sought details of the tender floated in this regard and the companies involved.

He also sought to know that why did the secretary Haj Committee of UP issue a press release (and on whose orders).

"Whether any written orders were issued to the contractor? According to the press release, action was to be initiated against the contractor. Hence, what action has been initiated against the contractor," Raza asked in the notice.

The UP minister also sought to know that on which date did the secretary of Haj Committee of UP inspect the spot (Haj Committee office).

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Social activist Anna Hazare today hit out at one-time protege and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, and said he would ask volunteers to his new movement to sign an affidavit stating they would not join .

Hazare said here that if he had made Kejriwal sign an affidavit, he would not have been able to become a minister.

"Those who possess clean character, unblemished reputation, and the ability to sacrifice and willing to join the movement ... if they sign an affidavit saying that he/she will not join any party, nor contest polls and serve the country and the society (then) only those can take part in the movement," Hazare said.

He told reporters that he would undertake a rally here on March 23 to highlight the growing agrarian crisis in the country. Over 12 lakh farmers have committed suicide in the last 22 years and the government failed to address the issue, he claimed.

Hazare said he visited Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Karnataka in the last few months to understand the plight of the farmers.

Hazare led an anti-graft movement with a demand that the government come up with a law to enable appointment of a Lokpal to probe corruption cases against government official and functionaries. The movement had shook the UPA government.

Kejriwal played a key role in the movement and later went on to form the Aam Aadmi Party.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A 19-year-old tribal woman, looking for a job, allegedly committed suicide by consuming poison, after being duped of Rs 15,000, police said.

"Manisha Adivasi, a class 12 student consumed pesticide last night at Bichhua-Jagir village, after an unidentified person duped her of Rs 15,000," Sultanganj police station assistant sub inspector (ASI) BB Tiwari said.

"The accused promised her a job for which she gave him the money," Tiwari said, adding Adivasdi did not get the job.

She was rushed to a hospital in Begamganj tehsil of the district from where she was referred to government-run hospital in Bhopal, where she succumbed to her injuries today, the officer added.

In her dying declaration, she had mentioned that one day an unidentified man called on her cell phone and promised her a permanent job in a state government department if she shells out Rs 15,000.

Thereafter, the unidentified person called her frequently from three different numbers. She borrowed money from her acquaintance and transferred the money in a bank account, her declaration stated.

After a few days when Adivasi tried to contact the unidentified person on his different numbers, she could not get in touch with him, according to her declaration.

In the meantime, her acquaintance started bothering her for recovering the money, Tiwari said.

Disturbed after being cheated, and pestered by the person who had lent her money for recovery, she took the extreme step, the ASI said citing her declaration.

"We have registered a case and investigations are on to nab the unidentified accused," the officer added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The commerce ministry today said it is working on a comprehensive action plan, including development of a sectoral portal to reduce cost of exports, imports and domestic logistics in the country.

The 'National Integrated Logistics Action Plan' would focus on making logistics more efficient through easing of processes, induction of information technology and co- ordinated enhancement of logistics infrastructure in the country.

Through this, "we will look at speed and cost of doing business", Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu told reporters here.

He added that the speed of import and export depends on efficiency of logistics.

Prabhu said the ministry is looking at the logistics policy structure of other countries including Singapore and Dubai.

The UAE has stated it would "work with us" in the initiative, he added.

As part of the plan, the ministry is working on a detailed portal to link logistics services.

Special Secretary (Logistics) Binoy Kumar said the idea is to bring interface among all logistics to bring down compliance burden for industry and traders.

In a statement, the ministry said it has resolved to reduce the logistics cost from the present 14 per cent of GDP to less than 10 per cent by 2022.

A concerted effort in collaboration with central line ministries as well as state governments has been initiated for simplifying the regulatory processes in both domestic and EXIM (export-import) logistics, it added.

It added that work has also been started on an integrated logistics portal that will be a transactional e-market place connecting buyers as well as logistics service providers with all government agencies such as customs, port community systems, sea, air port terminal, shipping lines and railways.

Further, with a view to establish linkages with the government agencies, industry and academia for developing a detailed action plan, the ministry has inked an MoU with industry chamber CII today.

The objective of the pact includes establishing a working group to examine issues related to logistics and recommend solutions; to undertake studies on logistics and to promote government policies.

Anant Swarup, joint secretary in the department of commerce, stated that as per estimates, 10 per cent cut in logistics cost could help increase 5-8 per cent increase in exports.

The main challenges of the sector, he said, include multiple regulators or policy making bodies, procedural complexities and lack of single window system.

The action plan also aims to improve logistics, skilling and increase jobs in the sector to 40 million by 2022, he added.

Keshav Chandra, Joint Secretary in the department, said these initiatives would help cut transaction costs and compliance burden of industry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Chinese President Xi Jinping today held telephone talks with his US counterpart Donald Trump to resume a suspended dialogue programme aimed at improving bilateral economic ties, amid tensions over their huge trade imbalance.

The phone call between the two leaders came as the Trump administration threatened tough action against China including punitive tariffs, sanctions and even a trade war.

Tensions have escalated between Beijing and Washington in recent months, with China last Friday reporting a record USD 275.8 billion trade surplus with the US, contrary to Trumps goal to narrow the US trade deficit with China, Hong Kong- based South China Morning Post reported.

The two leaders discussed bilateral trade and the situation on the Korean Peninsula, especially the talks between the South and North Koreas to bring down the tensions, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told media here.

They believe that this relationship is quite important, Lu said.

The two sides need to maintain high-level contacts, bring the four high-level dialogue mechanisms between them into full play, and hold the second round of dialogues at a proper time, Xi told Trump, state-run Xinhua agency reported.

The phone call came amid strengthening of efforts to keep China-US trade relations right on track and at a time when tensions on the Korean Peninsula have shown signs of easing as senior officials from Pyongyang and Seoul met face-to-face on the borders earlier this month in what was their first direct talks in more than two years.

The economies of China and US are large and the differences between the two countries inevitable and natural, Lu quoted President Xi as saying.

The two countries should in a constructive way enlarge the pie of cooperation and properly settle the difference in economic relations and trade, he said.

As economic and trade cooperation brings tangible benefits to both peoples, the two countries should adopt constructive measures to properly settle economic and trade issues of mutual concern by opening up the market to each other and "making the cake of cooperation bigger," Xi added.

Xi also called for advancing cooperation between the two militaries, and in law-enforcement, drug control, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and cooperation at local levels, as well as close communication and coordination on major international and regional issues.

He said China welcomes the "positive signs" in the Korean Peninsula as the South and North Koreas began talks to ease tensions.

Trump said he attaches great importance to China which plays important role in Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, the Xinhua report said.

Trump said the US side attaches great importance to its relations with China as well as to the US-China cooperation.

The US is willing to work with the Chinese side to enhance bilateral exchanges at all levels, expand pragmatic cooperation, and properly handle problems in bilateral trade so as to achieve even greater results in bilateral relations, Xinhua quoted Trump as saying.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Yemeni rebels have freed a journalist they had been holding in the capital Sanaa since August but others remain in arbitrary detention, Amnesty International said today.

Hisham Omeisy had spoken out against restrictions in rebel-held areas but had also criticised the actions of a Saudi-led coalition that has been fighting the rebels since 2015.

"The release of Hisham al-Omeisy today is a welcome step -- however, Huthi authorities must also immediately and unconditionally free all prisoners of conscience languishing in detention," Amnesty's Samah Hadid said.

Pictures circulating on social media showed Omeisy hugging his two young sons, thin but apparently unharmed.

Amnesty said there had been a surge in arbitrary arrests in Yemen since 2016, with journalists, human rights defenders and members of the Baha'i religious minority most at risk.

The rebels sentenced Yemeni Baha'i Hamid Haydar to death earlier this month on charges of collaborating with Israel and forging official papers, Amnesty said.

The Baha'is believe that Bahaullah, who was born in Iran in 1817, was the most recent prophet sent by God. They are widely persecuted in the Islamic world.

Human Rights Watch has said it has documented 66 cases of arbitrary arrest by the rebels, who control Sanaa and much of the north of Yemen.

Two of those held died in custody while 11 more suffered ill-treatment including torture, HRW said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Paul Sandle and Alex Fraser

LONDON/CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) - Britain ordered a fast-track inquiry into the role played by Carillion's directors in the failure of the construction and services group, as some of its thousands of small suppliers started to lay off workers on Tuesday.

The 200-year-old company, swamped by debt and pension liabilities and burning through cash, went into liquidation on Monday, threatening suppliers, merchants and big banks.

The government, which relies on big outsourcing companies such as Carillion to provide services from school dinners to road building, stepped in to guarantee that key contracts would be unaffected.

But it said other work would only be paid for 48 hours after the collapse, and thousands of small suppliers face unpaid bills totalling millions of pounds.

Business Secretary Greg Clark said a full picture of the events which caused Carillion to enter liquidation needed to be established by the Insolvency Service.

"I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors," he said.

"Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously."

Carillion's auditors, KPMG, would also be examined, he added.

Carillion was responsible for providing millions of pounds of public services as well as major infrastructure projects in Britain, Canada and the Middle East. It was winning state contracts as recently as November.

HUNDREDS OF PROJECTS

Rudi Klein, head of Britain's Specialist Engineering Contractors' Group, estimated that Carillion had left a trail of 1.2 billion pounds in unpaid bills to thousands of small subcontractors.

Examples of private companies that could be hit included a small Northern Irish engineering contractor owed 150,000 pounds and a concrete frame manufacturer in northwest England owed 2 million pounds, Klein said.

Flora-tec, a corporate horticulture company based in Cambridgeshire, eastern England, said it is owed almost 1 million pounds for its work on Carillion contracts at local prisons, schools and hospitals, and had to lay off 10 of its 90 staff.

"People were in tears, colleagues we worked with for a long time. But as soon as we knew what happened we had to cut our cost base," Managing Director Andy Bradley said.

He told he felt he had been misled.

"Government, even despite several profit warnings, continued to give Carillion large public sector contracts (...) and the message that sends to businesses like mine, the small guys in the supply chain, is that central government must have confidence in Carillion," he said.

"I want the government to think long and hard about the SME sector, because we are the people that will bear the brunt of this, not the shareholders and not the big multinational conglomerates."

OUTSOURCING BRITAIN

Britain began outsourcing public services in the late 1980s under Margaret Thatcher and the model expanded under successive governments. It is now the world's second-largest outsourcing market behind the United States.

Spun out of Tarmac nearly 20 years ago and incorporating construction names such as Wimpey and Alfred McAlpine, Carillion operated in Britain and Ireland, Canada, the Middle East and North Africa.

It was working on 450 British government projects, including the building and maintenance of hospitals, schools, defence sites and a high-speed rail line.

The government has faced questions as to why it continued to award Carillion contracts after it first signalled it was in financial difficulty in July last year.

Just a week after that first warning, Carillion was named as one of the contractors on Britain's new High Speed 2 rail line, a flagship project that will better connect London with the north of England. In November, it won a further two contracts with state-owned Network Rail.

Mike Cherry, chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, said it was vital that Carillion's small business suppliers were paid, or some of those firms could themselves be put in jeopardy, putting even more jobs at risk.

"When the dust settles on this sorry saga, there is also a wider lesson to learn about the concentration of public contracts in the hands of a small number of very big businesses," he said.

Carillion former chief executive Richard Howson, who stepped down after the group warned on profit in July, was paid more than 1.51 million pounds ($2.08 million) in salary and bonuses in 2016, according to the company's annual report.

He will continue to be paid a 660,000-pound salary until Oct. 2018 under the terms of his notice when he left the group in November, after handing over to interim CEO Keith Cochrane, according to a statement on the company's website.

($1 = 0.7261 pounds)

(Additional reporting by Elisabeth O'Leary, Editing by Keith Weir and Andrew Heavens)

(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.)
I don't know how many young women come to this blog or how many are parents of teenage or young adult women, but here are some safety tips from Kelsey's Army:

T

I

P

S

1. Trust your instincts - If something feels wrong then something probably is wrong.2. Know your surroundings - know who and what is around you.3. Always have a plan for where you would go and what you would do if a situation arises.4. Be willing to make a scene in order to be noticed.5. Let someone know where you are going and when you will be back.Remember the acronym TIPS:ake Chargenform others of your whereaboutsrepare for any situationurvival Mentality (role play situations so you will respond should they happen)For more information, go to Kelsey's Army
By David Shepardson

DETROIT (Reuters) - California and the Trump administration will hold a series of new talks over fuel efficiency rules as the auto industry still hopes for a deal to retain nationwide requirements.

Officials from the California Air Resources Board are set to meet in Washington this month for another round of discussions on the 2022-2025 fuel-efficiency rules, automakers and government officials said on Tuesday. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt told last week that more talks are also planned in California in the coming weeks.

California, which touts its environmental agenda and efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, has been increasingly at odds with the Trump administration's efforts to roll back environmental regulations.

Automakers want the White House and California to reach agreement on revisions because a legal battle over the rules could result in lengthy uncertainly for the industry. They also want changes to address lower gasoline prices and a shift in U.S. consumer preferences to larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles.

A group representing General Motors Co, Volkswagen AG , Toyota Motor Corp and other automakers has encouraged more talks between California and federal regulators in hopes an agreement is reached.

In 2011, California's air emissions regulator and the Obama administration reached an agreement with major automakers to nearly double average fleetwide fuel efficiency to more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025, but included a "midterm review" to determine by April 2018 whether the final requirements were feasible.

California, joined by nearly a dozen other states, could seek to enforce existing emissions rules, even if the Trump administration softens the federal 2022-2025 requirements.

Pruitt told last week that no decisions on the requirements have been made but he hoped national rules would remain. "California doesn't have the authority to set the standards for the rest of the country," Pruitt said.

Asked if EPA would consider withdrawing California's waiver under the Clean Air Act to set its own emission rules, Pruitt said: "There's no reason to speculate on that right now. I think that what's important is that we continue to reach out to work with California."

first reported earlier this month that the Trump administration met with California officials on Dec. 15 to discuss the programme.

The meeting included EPA air office chief Bill Wehrum, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) deputy chief Heidi King, and White House aide Mike Catanzaro.

NHTSA plans to issue its proposed changes, if any, for the 2022-25 model years by March 30. The agency is "on track" to meet that deadline, King told Reuters on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show on Tuesday. She expects it to propose "a broad range of options."

In a move widely seen as a preamble to loosening fuel standards, U.S. President Donald Trump announced in March he was revisiting the 2025 requirements.

In June, New York state's attorney general and 12 other top state law officials said they would mount a court challenge to any effort to roll back vehicle fuel rules.

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Detroit; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

(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 Michelle Martin and Georgina Prodhan

BERLIN/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of German industrial workers downed tools on Tuesday in support of trade union IG Metall's demands for a 6 percent pay rise and a right to the first new cut in weekly working hours since the 1980s.

Workers have been staging such warning strikes since last week, a common tactic in sectoral wage negotiations in Germany. About 33,000 workers took part on Tuesday, including 10,000 at Mercedes maker Daimler AG, taking the total to 425,000 since last week.

With Europe's largest economy steaming ahead and unemployment at a record low, Germany's biggest trade union is confident of winning a significantly better deal for around 3.9 million workers in the metal and engineering sectors.

IG Metall said it would decide next Friday, after the current round of wage talks, whether to escalate the dispute into 24-hour strikes.

"The proposal that the employers have made is far from fair," IG Metall chief Joerg Hofmann told a conference in Frankfurt. "An offer of a 2 percent wage rise is more like a provocation."

IG Metall is demanding that workers should be able to cut their weekly hours to 28 from 35 if they need to care for children, elderly or sick relatives and get the right to return to work full-time after two years.

The union said it had beefed up its strike war chest by 84 million euros last year thanks to membership dues that rose 2 percent to 561 million euros.

"We have plenty of staying power," said treasurer Juergen Kerner. "Our strike coffers are well filled."

Flash strikes also took place on Tuesday at Schaeffler, Bosch Rexroth, ZF Friedrichshafen, Siemens, BMW and Osram.

In the northern state of Lower Saxony, employers' association NiedersachsenMetall said a third round of negotiations had ended on Tuesday without a result.

"We've offered the trade union alternative solutions but unfortunately we're not seeing much movement from the other side yet," said NiedersachsenMetall head Volker Schmidt.

Roman Zitzelsberger, head of IG Metall in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, told striking workers at the gates of Daimler's factory in the town of Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart: "The economy is booming because the employees like those here at Daimler do good work every day."

"So 6 percent is appropriate and we won't be fobbed off with 2 percent."

Employers reject the demands to cut hours unless working time for others could be increased temporarily as well. They argue that workers in Germany's industrial sector already have shorter weeks than their peers in other countries and worry that reducing their hours further would hurt German competitiveness.

($1 = 0.8191 euros)

(Reporting by Michelle Martin in Berlin and Georgina Prodhan in Frankfurt; Writing by Michelle Martin; Editing by Peter Graff)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Martinne Geller and Francesca Landini

LONDON/MILAN (Reuters) - Swiss food group Nestle has agreed to sell its U.S. confectionery business to Italy's Ferrero for $2.8 billion, it said on Tuesday, marking CEO Mark Schneider's first big sale and a small step on its path towards healthier products.

Nestle, the world's biggest packaged-food company, has cited the unit's weak position in the United States, where it trails Hershey, Mars Inc and Lindt, as the rationale for a sale.

For family-owned Ferrero, the cash deal offers a chance for the Italian company to build scale quickly in that key market, where it has done two other deals in the past year.

The maker of Nutella spread and Ferrero Rocher pralines will become the third-largest chocolate company in the U.S. and globally, according to Euromonitor International.

For Nestle, which first sold milk chocolate in the 1880s, a consumer shift away from junk and sugary foods has led the Swiss company to focus on "nutrition, health and wellness", although it says it is committed to its non-U.S. confectionery business.

However, bankers and analysts have speculated that it could dispose of other weak brands, or even step away from candy altogether by forming a joint venture as it recently did in ice cream. Hershey, which owns Nestle's KitKat brand in the United States, would be the obvious partner, one banker said.

Tuesday's deal only accounts for about 1 percent of Nestle's sales, but is part of a larger shake-up by chief executive Schneider, a healthcare industry veteran one year into the job.

Schneider has been tasked with accelerating Nestle's growth strategy in an increasingly tough environment for multinational food companies due to slowing growth and greater competition from niche, upstart brands.

Nestle's mass-market chocolate bars, such as BabyRuth, Butterfinger and Crunch, have underperformed rivals for years as consumers have turned towards healthier snacks such as fruit bars and premium chocolate brands such as Lindt.

Nestle said last week it was selling Australian chocolate bar Violet Crumble. The company is expanding into consumer health, bidding for the vitamin and supplements business being sold by Germany's Merck after agreeing last month to buy vitamin maker Atrium Innovations.

"The switch of assets makes a lot of sense," Vontobel analyst Jean-Philippe Bertschy said of the moves out of U.S. chocolate and into vitamins. "You're going out of a weak business in terms of financials and ... entering a market with strong growth and higher margins.

Nestle paid $2.3 billion for Atrium, which has about $700 million in annual sales. The chocolate business, which it is selling for $2.8 billion, has about $900 million in sales.

Liberum analyst Robert Waldschmidt estimates the deal represents a multiple of roughly 20.7 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, which he said "feels like quite a top multiple".

Waldschmidt pointed to the recent sale of Reckitt Benckiser's food business, which is higher margin, at 20.3 times EBITDA.

Third Point, the U.S.-based hedge fund that has pushed Nestle to boost returns, was not immediately available to comment.

CHOCOLATE WOES

The United States accounts for nearly 19 percent of a global chocolate market worth $102.3 billion at retail, according to Euromonitor. The value of the market has been buoyed by people increasingly choosing more expensive treats, but volume has been weighed down by the popularity of other alternatives.

Nestle has lost market share in recent years, as start-up brands like Kind have grown quickly.

Even Lindt, whose Lindor chocolate balls command premium prices, has felt the pain, reporting on Tuesday that 2017 organic sales rose only 3.7 percent, below its long-term target of 6 to 8 percent. Sales in North America fell 1.6 percent.

Ferrero was advised by Credit Suisse and Lazard while Davis Polk and Wardwell acted as its legal adviser.

TV - Ferrero to buy Nestle's confectionery business (http://reut.tv/2B7IL6p)

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(Additional reporting by Silke Koltrowitz and John Miller in Zurich and Svea Herbst-Bayliss in Boston; Reporting by Martinne Geller in London; Editing by David Goodman and Alexander Smith)

(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 Nidhi Verma

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's Reliance Industries has declared a 30 percent increase in the installed capacity of its export-focused oil refinery, a government report showed, increasing the size of the world's largest refinery complex.

India's Petroleum Planning & Analysis Cell (PPAC) in its October report showed 35.2 million tonnes a year as the installed capacity of Reliance's refinery in the special economic zone (SEZ) at Jamnagar, in northwest India. That is up from 27 million tonnes, or 540,000 barrels per day (bpd), as of April 1 that PPAC reported in an August 2017 report.

The new capacity is the equivalent of 704,000 bpd of crude processing.

Reliance built its first refinery at Jamnagar with an installed capacity of 660,000 bpd in 1999. This refinery sells most of its fuels in the local market. The SEZ plant was added in 2008 and turned the entire Jamnagar complex into the world's largest oil processing site.

Two sources familiar with the matter confirmed that Reliance has declared the increased SEZ capacity, which they said the company attributed to debottlenecking, or a by streamlining the processes at the plant.

"They have declared enhanced capacity," said one of the sources by telephone, without providing details on how the company raised the capacity.

Reliance has been consistently operating its export-oriented refinery at a rate higher than the nameplate capacity

Reliance had no immediate comment on the increase when contacted by .

Although most of the products from the SEZ plant are meant for overseas market, some like cooking gas are sold in local markets.

Reliance's refineries are among the most complex in the world and have facilities that can maximize the production of diesel and gasoline from so-called heavy, or higher density, crude oil that typically sells for less than other crude grades.

Reliance, in a presentation to India's Center for High Technology (CHT), said it wanted to raise the capacity of its Jamnagar complex to 100 million tonnes a year by 2030, sources last year told .

CHT is a unit of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas that evaluates projects and assesses their technological requirements.

(Reporting by Nidhi Verma; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Jessica Kuruthukulangara

- Indian shares were nearly unchanged on Tuesday as gains in IT stocks were offset by losses in oil refiners such as Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd, with sentiment dampened after data showed the country's trade deficit widened in December.

India's December trade deficit touched its highest in over three years, as higher import bills for gold and crude oil weighed.

The wider deficit is a bit of a concern, said Anupam Singhi, Chief Executive at MarketSmith India, part of William O'Neil India. With markets hovering near record highs, volatility is set to increase ahead of the federal budget next month, he said.

The broader NSE Nifty was down 0.10 percent at 10,730.95 as of 0605 GMT, while the benchmark BSE Sensex was 0.01 percent lower at 34,839.36.

Oil refiners fell as global oil prices rose to near three-year highs due to production curbs in OPEC nations and Russia and robust demand from healthy global economic growth.

Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd and Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd slipped more than 2 percent, while Indian Oil Corp Ltd was down 1.7 percent. The Nifty energy index slid as much as 1.6 percent.

"Higher crude prices impact the profitability of oil refiners, hence they are a bit under pressure," Singhi said.

Shares of IT services firms such as Infosys Ltd, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Wipro Ltd rose after Morgan Stanley said it expected a turnaround for these stocks in 2018.

The Nifty IT index jumped over 3 percent, gaining after two consecutive sessions of losses.

Federal Bank Ltd slid as much as 6.9 percent after posting a lower-than-expected third-quarter net profit and as bad loans rose.

(Reporting by Jessica Kuruthukulangara in Bengaluru; Editing by Biju Dwarakanath)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - UK-based quality assurance firm Intertek said on Tuesday that one of its employees had been arrested by Singapore police in connection with an investigation into oil theft at Shell's biggest refinery.

Muhammad Ali bin Muhammad Nor faces two charges of conspiring with Shell employees as part of a scheme to steal oil from Shell's Palau Bukom industrial site, court documents show.

"We understand Muhammad Ali who worked for Intertek in Singapore is one of the suspects who has been arrested by the Singapore police as part of the criminal investigation," a spokesman for the company said.

"As the investigation is ongoing, we will not be able to provide further comments."

The company, which is listed on Britain's main stock exchange, specialises in offering quality and quantity assurances, including for fuel products.

(Reporting by John Geddie; Editing by Neil Fullick)

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The best way to predict your future is to create it. When Abraham Lincoln was saying these words, he used them to instil motivation, enthusiasm and new vigour in the American people. Today, many decades after and continents away, these lines seem apt for a year ahead in India.
The battle for acquiring Braj Binani's debt-loaded cement business intensifies after doyens of Indian industry tossed their hat into the ring on the final day of the bid submission on Monday. When JSW Cement, headed by Sajjan Jindal's son Parth, submitted its bid jointly with a private equity player, D-Mart promoter, Radhakishan Damani, joined hands with stock investor, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, to try their luck. Dalmias of Dalmia Bharat bid jointly with Ajay Piramal. Others reported to be in race are Aditya Birla Group's UltraTech, German cement giant Heidelberg and Ramco Cements (jointly with PE firm True North).

The 11.25 million tonne (MT) Binani Cement, which is facing insolvency proceedings in the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), had an outstanding debt of Rs 3,608 crore at the end of the last financial year. During the last fiscal year, the company's cement production stood at 3.55 MT compared to 4.33 MT in the year before. It reported a net loss of Rs 347.60 crore on revenues of Rs 1534.62 crore. The company --- which manufactures and markets 'Ordinary Portland Cement' (OPC) and 'Pozzolana Portland Cement' (PPC) under the 'Binani' brand--- is Braj Binani group's flagship subsidiary with operations in Rajasthan, Dubai and China. It has a capacity of 6.25 MT in its plants in Rajasthan and its markets spread across northern and western India. While moving slow in India, Binani aggressively pursued his global expansion plan. He created grinding capacity of 2 MT in Dubai and in China, he built 3MT clinkerisation capacity.

The lenders filed claim for Rs 3,884 crore from the company during the insolvency process. It includes the loans taken over by Edelweiss Asset Reconstruction Company from the banks and dues to State Bank of India, Canara Bank and Bank of Baroda. The cement maker also faces a claim of Rs 2,429 crore-worth corporate guarantees from IDBI Bank and SBI, which is currently in dispute between the resolution professional and the lenders.

The buyers and price

There was expectation that lenders would take a haircut of 50-60 per cent in their loan claims and it led to the rush of buyers for Binani Cement. An executive with one of the bidders says that the assets are value for money. "They have markets and a strong brand. The production facilities are relatively new," he says. "For building capacities of this size in the middle of a strong market will be tough in today's time. The asset will turn to be lucrative when demand picks up," he adds.

Industry experts point out that the cost of the assets would be a little less than Rs 4,000 crore. For comparison, Nirma bought Lafarge's 11MT assets for Rs 9,400 crore.

In one of the recent bankruptcy court driven sales, Dalmia Bharat emerged as the highest bidder for Murli Industries, a Nagpur-based cement manufacturer, in a deal that will involve huge write down of equity and Dalmia infusing close to Rs 400 crore to revive the company.

Parth Jindal, managing director of JSW Cement recently said Binani Cement was a big asset with 11mt capacity and Rs 3,800 crore debt, which could go up to Rs 4,500 crore with contingent liabilities. JSW Cement, which has a cement making capacity of 11.6 MT in India, has access to Rs 6,000-7,000 crore worth of funds for the deal, he added.

Fall of Binani

In 1997, the company commenced operations in Rajasthan after setting up a 1.65 MT integrated cement facility and a 25 mega watt (MW) captive power plant. As soon as they commissioned the plant, the economy went bust. The investment of Rs 400 crore and the high interest payments put the company in trouble. After eight years, the company raised capacity to 2.25 MT with the rise in demand. In 2007, the capacity was doubled to meet escalating demand. In 2008, a split grinding unit at Neem-Ka-Thana, Rajasthan, was commissioned.

The aggressive expansion of Binani got halted after the economy slowed down post-2012, especially in India. The restructuring of the term loans was necessitated on account of lackluster demand, decline in realizations and increase in costs. In addition, the company had failed in paying the tax dues to Rajasthan and the production grounded to a halt in Rajasthan. In the meantime, lenders also failed to take a joint decision for a Corrective Action Plan (CAP) for the recovery of the company.

Bank of Baroda, in July last year, had filed a petition against Binani Cement with the NCLT's Kolkata bench, seeking to recover Rs 97 crore in an outstanding loan. According to the holding firm's auditor, MZSK & Associates, Binani Cement had assets worth Rs 5,074.83 crore at the end of March 2017.
Bitcoin faced the biggest one-day fall in three years with 18 per cent drop in selloffs across the market amid reports of the South Korean government launching a series of measures to regulate the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin's competitor cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Ripple also tumbled 23 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively. The Bitcoin took the dip after South Korea's Finance Minister Kim Dong-yong on Monday said his government was planning to clamp down on the "irrational" virtual currency, reported Reuters.



Bitcoin traded at $11,191.59 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange experiencing 18 per cent dip in price. Interestingly, Bitcoin has faced a downfall of around 40 per cent since it touched the $20,000 mark in December, leaving industry analysts perplexed. Though Bitcoin grew by over 2,000 per cent in 2017, but, at the same time, it has also shown signs of volatility. Due to various reports emerging around its regulation, Bitcoin's market cap worth $130 billion was wiped off in 2017 alone.

Many countries, including India, are planning to regulate the currency amid mad rush for investment in it and challenges Bitcoin poses for the conventional currency system. The Indian government has already set up a committee to formally suggest ways to regulate trade of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Bloomberg reported on Monday that the Chinese government was also planning to shut down online marketplaces that allow the trading of domestic Chinese as well as foreign cryptocurrencies. India's central bank has already warned people, highlighting uncertainty associated with its trade. Finance minister Arun Jaitley in December said the most famous cryptocurrency "Bitcoin is not considered a legal tender in India".

The government also made it clear that the government or any other regulator in India has not given license to any agency for working as exchange. "Consumers need to be alert and extremely cautious as to avoid getting trapped in such Ponzi schemes," said the finance ministry, adding that virtual currencies were stored in digital/electronic format, making them vulnerable to hacking, loss of password, malware attack which might result in permanent loss of money.
Today the official handle of Acharya Balkrishna, managing director of Patanjali Ayurved Ltd, tweeted in Hindi "Haridwar se har dwar tak" (From Haridwar to every doorstep). This promise follows the announcement of yoga guru Baba Ramdev's company signing agreements with eight leading e-tailers and aggregators - Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm Mall, 1MG, Bigbasket, Grofers, Shopclues and Snapdeal-in the capital this morning.

The nation's fascination for the indigenous brand and the disruption it caused in the FMCG space is old news now. While a 2017 Nirmal Bang report revealed that the brand already reaches nearly 53% households in personal care and 26% in food products - up nearly 100% from a year ago - online shoppers have often been left disappointed with various products being "out of stock". All this will change with the new online partners coming on board.

According to Ramdev, the online mechanism aims to provide convenient and efficient option along with the extension of the traditional retail market. "Utmost care has been taken to ensure (the) Swadeshi movement and that Patanjali products reach into every household without compromising on policies and business ethics," he added.

Of course, some of Patanjali's products are already available on its own portal, patanjaliayurved.net, along with several online platforms through various other sellers but the new tie-ups will allow the Haridwar-based firm to not only systematically place its range of products but also extend reach significantly, including globally. Ramdev made one more announcement this morning: It will soon establish a production unit in Noida. Patanjali has reportedly created an ecosystem that helps to settle at least a million orders every day and it posted a sales growth of 10 crore last month.

Patanjali Ayurved decided to tweak its sales strategy last year when it departed from the branded franchise it relied on since inception to make its fledgling presence felt in the market and adopted the channel distribution route usually preferred by FMCG companies. The move was seen to be crucial to meet Ramdev's ambitious target of annual sales of Rs 1 lakh crore by 2020.

With the new online gambit, Ramdev comes a step closer to seeing his dream come true. At the very least, the move is sure to help Patanjali carve out a bigger market share - the company is currently ranked number 7 in the FMCG space - and meet its turnover target of Rs 20,000 crore for this fiscal year, a twofold growth year-on-year.

With agency inputs
A rocket landed in the Indian Embassy premises in Kabul, Afghanistan, causing minor damage to a structure, but all the mission staff were safe, the Times of India reported citing the external affairs ministry.

January 16, 2018, 11:42 Rocket lands inside Indian Embassy in Afghanistan's Kabul

STEPANAKERT, JANUARY 16, ARTSAKHPRESS:According to external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, the rocket clipped the top of the ITBP barracks located inside the premises of the embassy.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said no fire and casualties were reported in the incident.

He also said that India's Charge d' Affaires there informed that all the Embassy employees were safe.

It was not clear whether the target of the attack was the Indian Embassy, which is located in the high-security diplomatic zone of the Afghan capital.
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India-Israel venture into less explored areas of cooperation

On Day 2 of his maiden visit to India, second by any Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu held delegation-level talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. PM Modi invited Israeli defence companies to take advantage of the liberalized FDI regime to make more in India with Indian companies. The two countries also inked 9 MoUs in areas like oil and gas, air transport, space, etc. In the joint statement, the two leaders also expressed desire to scale up the existing Centers of Excellence in India which have been a mainstay of agricultural cooperation between the two countries. They are venturing into less explored areas of cooperation, such as oil and gas, cyber security, films, and start-ups.



UIDAI to discuss Aadhaar deadline with banking and telecom regulators

According to a report by the Economic Times, top officials at the Unique Identification Authority of India will meet the country's banking and telecom regulators to discuss whether there is a need for fresh deadlines to link the Aadhaar number with essential services. These discussions are taking place in the wake of new security protocols which are being introduced to improve privacy



Infosys announces 95% variable pay, highest in past nine quarters

The Indian IT sector has been synonymous with pink slips and spiralling attrition, but is seeing a new trend of late. There is an increasing reliance on variable pay to reward the workforce. Two days ago, news reports claimed that Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest IT services company, had declared 100% of the target variable pay to all its India employees for the third quarter of this financial year. And now rival Infosys has followed suit. According to The Economic Times, India's second-largest IT player has given 95% of variable pay in the December quarter-the highest level of payout in the past nine quarters.



Telecom sector loses 40,000 jobs since 2017, may cull 50,000 more: Report

Faced with uncertainty, the once-sunshine telecom sector will continue to witness decline in headcounts for the next six-nine months, taking the total number of job losses to 80,000-90,000, says a report. The sector, which has been witnessing rough weather in terms of profitability due to rising competition and lower margins, has witnessed large scale lay-offs making job scenario uncertain, said a CIEL HR Services report. The report is based on a survey among around 100 senior and mid-level employees of 65 telecom and software and hardware service providers to telecom companies.



Expectations mount from the 2018 Auto expo

India's Auto Expo, the second largest auto show in the world by the numbers, will be held in February. The theme this time is "automotive technologies that drive the world." The two-part event will host a components show and a motor show. The components show will take place February 8-11 at the Pragati Maidan convention center in New Delhi, while the motor show will go on from February 9-14 at the India Exposition Mart building in Greater Noida. With booths from more than 2000 automotive industry professionals, auto enthusiasts are in for a treat. There will be more than 100 product unveilings and around 24 launches.

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Four days ago four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court held a press conference and openly criticized the Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra, over the allocation of cases. Now, a five-judge Constitution Bench has been announced by the CJI that does not include any of the 'rebel' judges - Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, MB Lokur and Kurian Joseph. Instead the bench includes judges of lower seniority - Justices AK Sikri, AM Khanwilkar, DY Chandrachud, Ashok Bhushan and is headed by CJI Misra.

On January 17, the newly-formed bench will commence hearing on eight crucial cases that include validity of the Aadhaar Act, Section 377, and entry of women in Kerala's Sabarimala temple.

On January 12, the four judges called a press conference and claimed that cases were assigned on the basis of preference. "Four of us are convinced, the democracy will not survive. We met CJI this morning, with specific request but we could not convince him. We had no choice but to communicate to the nation to take care of the institution. We place it before people of country," Justice Gogoi said during the conference.

"All our efforts have failed and we are all convinced that unless this institution is not preserved, democracy can't be protected in the country," Justice Chelameswar said.

Former Attorney-General of India Soli Sorabjee reacted to the press conference and said that he was not in favour of this and said that he wished the four judges had not done this.

The Indian National Congress also released a statement at the wake of this unprecedented event, and said, "The Congress Party earnestly appeals that the Full Court of the Supreme Court should take up the issues raised by the four Honourable Judges and find solutions that are consistent with the traditions and conventions of the Judiciary pointed out by the four Honourable Judges and that will preserve the independence of the judiciary."

The Attorney General and the Bar Council of India have claimed that the issue has been sorted out between the five justices but the CJI is yet to meet the four judges, according to PTI.
Monday blues had taken on a whole new meaning yesterday, when news broke that petrol and diesel prices had breached the Rs 70 and Rs 60 marks respectively. This morning brings more bad news-oil prices have now set a new record since August 2014, reflecting the sharp increase in international crude oil rates.

Mumbai is India's most expensive city for motorists with non-branded petrol selling at Rs 79.15 per litre while diesel is priced at Rs 65.90 per litre. In Chennai, petrol is going for close to Rs 74 per litre and diesel at Rs 65.23 per litre. The corresponding figures for Bengaluru are Rs 72.39/62.92 for a litre of petrol and diesel respectively, while Kolkata posted Rs 74/Rs 64.5 respectively. Delhiites are having an easier time comparatively with petrol priced at Rs 71.27 and diesel at Rs 61.88 a litre. That's a hike of 9 paise per litre of petrol in just one day in the metros, while diesel is up by 14-16 paise per litre.

You can blame the price of Brent crude, which serves as the Asian benchmark, for this state of affairs. Last week, it shot past the $70 per barrel mark, the highest since December 2014, which is alarming since India imports most of its crude oil. Prices may have eased some in the past couple of days but they reportedly remain on track to post a fourth straight week of gains. This explains the renewed calls to the government to cut excise duty and cushion the burden on the common man.

The BJP-led government has cut excise duty only once during its tenure-but raised it nine times between November 2014 and January 2016. In October 2017, when petrol price had reached Rs 70.88 per litre in Delhi and diesel was priced at Rs 59.14, the government had lowered excise duty by Rs 2 per litre. But the central levy on fuels, according to a Bloomberg report, was still twice of what was charged three years ago. In any case, the party did not last long-a cursory look at the price data shared on Indian Oil's website shows how fuel prices have been going up by a few paise every single day.

The daily price hike would have been far more marked had oil marketing companies not chosen to lower margins instead of increasing prices. After all, while Brent crude posted a 45% price hike in the past six months, petrol and diesel prices rose just 9-11% during the period.

But if you are waiting for the government to step in and make your wallet happier, don't hold your breath. Last week, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan responded to media queries on whether the Centre would cut excise duty on the two fuels by asking states to first cut VAT. He added that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has already written to the states seeking reduction in VAT.



With PTI inputs
Aiming to strengthen partnership in the farm sector, India and Israel today said they are working on a five-year plan for cooperation in agriculture and water.

A three-year joint programme (2018-20) has already commenced, under which the Centres of Excellence (COEs) are being set up across the country to train farmers about Israeli farm and water technologies.

As many as 28 such centres are being set up under the programme. One new centre at Bhuj, Gujarat, will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu during his ongoing visit.

They will also visit a centre in Vadrad in Gujarat.

"We will strengthen the existing pillars of cooperation in areas that touch the lives of our peoples. These are agriculture, science and technology, and security," Modi said after holding extensive discussions with Netanyahu to strengthen bilateral relations.

The two countries exchanged views on scaling up the COEs which have been a main-stay of agricultural cooperation by bringing in advanced Israeli practices and technology, Modi added.

Netanyahu shared idea of revolutionising Indian farm sector with use of Israeli water efficiency improving technology.

"Some plants need more water, some less. We can see it today with big data, with drones, with other instruments of technology to make farmers produce much more crops. More crops with less," he added.

In a joint statement issued after the meeting, India and Israel announced that "both sides are working together on a Five Year Joint Work Plan for strategic cooperation in agriculture and water".

Both the Prime Ministers expressed satisfaction over the roll out of the three-year work programme (2018-20) in the field of agriculture aimed at increasing crop yield and optimisation of water use efficiency.

According to the statement, the PMs were apprised of the progress made in jointly establishing 28 COEs across the country.

They also underscored the importance of sharing the development experiences with other countries.

India and Israel have agreed on ways to develop joint programmes of assistance for third countries in the areas of training, capacity building, and the development of small projects in the agriculture, water, health-care and education sectors, the statement added.
In yet another bizarre incident involving IndiGo Airlines, 14 passengers flying from Goa to Hyderabad were left at the airport. According to a report in TOI, passengers claimed that the airline did not make any announcement regarding the change in departure time.

However, an IndiGo spokesperson said the airline made several announcements calling the passengers to report at the gate, the report said. The passengers who were left behind had their boarding passes with them.

Flight 6E 259 was supposed to depart at 10.50 pm on Monday, but the passengers alleged that the aircraft left 25 minutes before the scheduled time.

The flight's scheduled time of arrival in Hyderabad was 12.05am, but it landed at 11.40pm, the report said.

"The boarding gate closed at 10:25 pm and they reached the gate at 10:33 pm. IndiGo staff looked for them at the airport while making frantic announcements over hand-held loudspeaker," the report said quoting an airline spokesperson.

"Despite no fault on our part, we shifted them to the next morning flight free of charge," it added.

The budget carrier reportedly called them on the phone number provided by the passengers but it turned out to be that of their travel agent.

The incident at Goa airport has raised the question whether 'passenger baggage reconciliation' was carried out by the airline as the check-in baggage of the passengers who were left behind was not offloaded from the aircraft.

According to IATA, the procedure known as 'baggage reconciliation' attempts to ensure that the only baggage loaded onto an aircraft is that belonging to passengers of that flight who have actually boarded the aircraft.

This story has been updated.
India's second largest drug company Lupin Ltd has also entered the growing Over the Counter (OTC) market in the country.

The Rs 17,119 crore revenue Lupin forayed into the OTC segment by launching a new division - Lupin Life Consumer Healthcare. It has launched Softovac, a 34 year old legacy brand in the treatment of constipation and irregular bowel habits, as an OTC product. The product's shift from prescription to OTC was piloted in West Bengal where the brand witnessed an over 25 percent growth in sales and a pan-India roll-out was initiated with actor Anil Kapoor as the brand ambassador.

Anil Kaushal, Head, Consumer Healthcare Business, said the company was planning to create a large product basket of legacy brands and high selling OTC products. "We are looking at a turnover of around Rs 300 crore in a couple of years and the growth will include acquisitions", he said.

Pegged at over Rs 18,862 crore by a Nicholas Hall 2017 report, the Indian OTC market is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9 percent to cross Rs 44,115 crore.

While effects of GST and demonetisation were hampering the growth of domestic drug sales, OTC drugs still remains an attractive segment for leading Indian drug companies like Sun Pharma, Cipla, Piramal Healthcare, etc. Ahmedabad based Torrent was the latest entrant into this field with the Rs 3600 crore acquisition of Mumbai based Unichem Labs' India business, which included Unienzyme, a major OTC brand.

A month ago, Nandini Piramal-led Consumer Products Division of the Piramal Enterprises, had acquired a gastro-intestinal product Digeplex and associated brands from Shreya Lifesciences to strengthen its OTC basket. Piramal's Consumer business, which acquired four OTC brands from Pfizer last year, now has revenues in excess of Rs 375 crore.

Earlier the OTC market was dominated by FMCG companies like Dabur, Unilever, Henkel, Reckitt Benckiser and the like. In the last few years, drug companies like Cipla, Dr Reddys, Lupin, Sun Pharma have created separate divisions for OTC drug sales. Zydus Cadila has a separate company in Zydus Wellness to tap this opportunity. Mankind sells near ten per cent of its Rs 4000 crore business as OTC products like contraceptive brand Manforce. In 2010, consumer and healthcare company Reckitt Benckiser had paid $742 million to acquire Paras Pharma, a company with a large portfolio of OTC healthcare brands.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced the new First Presidency on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. President: Russell M. Nelson (center), First Counselor: Dallin H. Oaks (left), and Second Counselor: Henry B. Eyring (right).

The Mormon Church announced Tuesday morning that Russell M. Nelson has become its new president. The selection of the 93-year-old former heart surgeon was done by high-ranking Mormon D. Todd Christofferson, during a broadcast from the Salt Lake Temple, to members of the church around the world.

We are pleased to announce to you this morning that President Russell M. Nelson was set apart as the 17th president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, January 14, 2018, said Christofferson. With President Dallin H. Oaks as First Counselor and President Henry B. Eyring as Seconcd Counselor in the First Presidency. President M. Russell Ballard was set apart as acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

Nelson is the religions 17th president. He is the second-oldest man to assume the position that succeeds Thomas S. Monson, who died Jan. 2 at the age of 90.

Nelson later spoke to reporters during a press conference from the churchs administration building. He said, he wakes up each morning eager for the adventures of the day.

Though our world is filled with serious challenges, I am optimistic about the future and feel confident about the fundamental goodness of human kind, expressed Nelson. I marvel at the compassionate outreach we see constantly from leaders and members of other faiths, and from people of good will everywhere, who seek to reduce human suffering wherever it is found.

He said the church will continue to provide resources and manpower, to provide aid in times of turmoil.

Oaks said he felt privileged to be called as a counselor. He described working with President Nelson in the Quorum of the Twelve for almost 34 years.

I know his love of the Lord Jesus Christ and his commitment to our Heavenly Fathers plan of salvation, of which he has spoken, described Oaks. I know his love of the people and I know of his wisdom.

He said he was thrilled to participate in the leadership of the church.

Eyring later said he hopes the world will see the church for what it is, and what it wants to become and why.

This is important to us as it surly is to you, but it is never easy, Eyring said. Even those of us within the church have to work hard to see the church as it really is. It is even harder for those who are looking from outside. It is also easier for us to describe what we are trying to become than it is for you to believe that we really hold such lofty aims.

Prior to his service as head of the church, President Nelson served as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles since April 1984. He was president of that quorum from July 15, 2015, until his call as the Churchs leader.

In April, the church is expected to fill the two vacancies, left from Monsons and previously Robert D. Hales death in October.

<hr /><p style=text-align: center;>will@cvradio.com
Over this past weekend in Hawaii, an alert message went out to residents to prepare for a ballistic missile attack and to seek shelter. An officer in the emergency operations center had apparently accidentally selected a template which sent what was meant to be part of an internal drill out to the public. To make matters worse, it took over a half-hour for a second message to go out informing the public that there was no emergency.

On KVNUs For the People program on Monday, Utah Department of Public Safety  Public Information Officer Joe Dougherty said such a scary, errant message would probably not go out here.

That is extremely unlikely to happen in our state, he said. The way our alert system is set up is not one that stores a bunch of template messages so that we wouldnt have a possibility of logging in and accidentally pushing or clicking a button on a website that immediately sends an alert out to our residents.

He said they do have pre-scripted messages that would be used in an emergency but they are not in a format where someone can accidentally send one out to the public. He noted that each message is accounted for and theres an audit to trace who sent it.

Dougherty said the most common alert message in Utah that has been sent out with resulting success is the Amber Alert. He said if people want to be able to get real alerts all they need is a fairly modern cell phone or smartphone.

Currently, Cache County has the Code Red system which is a subscription system. (Local residents can just) go to the Cache County Sheriffs Office, look for emergency alerts or emergency management. There are going to be instructions there about how to make sure youre part of the Code Red system. But, in a fairly short amount of time, Cache County will have the ability to send alerts without causing or making people sign-up.

Dougherty said they are really excited about that because these alert messages will be able to be disseminated quickly.
Major international scientific conference will be held in Yerevan on February 23 dedicated to the 30 th anniversary of the Artsakh movement.

January 16, 2018, 13:52 Famous international specialists, media figures to attend conference dedicated to 30th anniversary of Artsakh movement

STEPANAKERT, JANUARY 16, ARTSAKHPRESS-ARMENPRESS: Ashot Melkonyan, director of the History Institute at the National Academy of Sciences, told a press conference in Armenpress that a lot of renowned international specialists from different countries, scientific institutions will attend the conference. In addition, the conference will also be attended by famous media figures.

We emphasize that the Artsakh movement was not only a movement for the right to self-determination, it was also a national liberation struggle that logically led to Armenias independence. We most importantly would like to hear the words of our international partners, foreign specialists about the Artsakh movement, Ashot Melkonyan said.
CAMEROUN :: Is it Cameroon's turn to be suspended from US trade pact with Africa?

Cameroon has been a member of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) initiative since it was launched in 2000. AGOA is a preferential trade programme which allows a set of eligible products from designated African countries into the US market.

Its main objective is to promote economic development through increased trade and investment between the US and sub-Saharan Africa. Cameroon has benefited a great deal. In 2015, it made USD$133 million in overall export trade. Cameroons main exports to the US include petroleum, cocoa, rubber, timber, and coffee, while its main imports from the US include machinery, vehicles and chemicals.

But AGOA is not just a trade pact. Its also a way of promoting democracy. It comes with strict eligibility criteria which require that countries maintain the rule of law. Countries must also commit to political pluralism, the right to due process, fair trial, and equal protection under the law. They must also cooperate in international efforts to eliminate human rights violations.

The AGOA legislation empowers the American president annually to determine which countries are still eligible for its benefits. If he determines that a country is not making progress towards meeting the criteria he can decide to suspend it from the agreement.

The history of AGOA is replete with cases of ejections and re-admissions. These have often been based on human rights and democracy related issues. For instance, in 2016 former US President Barack Obama ejected Burundi from the AGOA family.

He did this on grounds that the country had failed to establish the rule of law. His reasons included the continuing crackdown on opposition members, assassinations, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrests and torture.

South Sudan and The Gambia have also had their memberships terminated. The Democratic Republic of Congo and Swaziland too. Mali, Guinea Bissau and Cote dIvoire were ejected and re-admitted after making efforts to strengthen the rule of law.

So far Cameroon has had a stellar record. But given recent developments questions are being asked about whether or not it should still benefit from the scheme.

Troubles in Cameroon

Over the past year Cameroon has been engulfed in a crisis that has pitted the Anglophone part of the country against the central government whose policies are decried to favour its Francophone regions. The Anglophone regions to the west are former British mandated territories, while the Francophone regions in the east are former French mandated territories.

The unrest began in October 2016 with a protest against the overwhelming use of French in a country where French and English have equal status under the constitution.

What began as a disagreement over the use of language in courts and in the design of school curricula has slowly became a political battle for Anglophone secession. The calls for secession have been met with brutal repression by state security forces. Whenever the state and the secessionists have clashed state agents have used excessive force.

Multiple human rights abuses have been committed against unarmed civilian populations including killings, mass arrests and detention. Some pro-Anglophone Cameroonians have sought refuge in neighbouring Nigeria while others have been arrested and detained pending prosecution.

In January, the government shut down the internet in some Anglophone regions. The shutdown, which lasted for more than three months, was condemned as a violation of international human rights.

Because of this crisis one could rightly question whether Cameroon is still eligible for the AGOA trade benefits. Cameroon is not alone. Mauritania also faces ejection from the trade agreement for human rights abuses. The issue of modern-day slavery in Mauritania, which was once expelled before being re-admitted, has raised questionsabout its continued AGOA membership.

Eligibility in question

In October US Trade Representatives Joseph Lighthizer announced new efforts to ensure that all countries receiving US trade benefits met the eligibility criteria.

By creating a more proactive process to assess eligibility the US will ensure that nonperforming countries are excluded from trade preferences. Although Lighthizer was referring to Americas Generalised System of Preferences  which is a different US preferential trade arrangement  it is likely that the review will also be applied to AGOA countries.

When it comes to Cameroon, the international community has called for dialogue before any action is taken. Opposition leaders are demanding the inclusion of all political and civil society stakeholders regardless of their religious beliefs or political opinions, including those who aspire for a return to federalism. Federalism was abolished in 1972 and replaced by a unitary state.

The Cameroonian government has shown its readiness to engage in talks with every stakeholder except the separatists who have been implicated in the November killings of four soldiers in the North-West region, and another four in the South-West region.

Current events have given the Cameroon government an opportunity to address issues of decentralisation which have remained dormant since the promulgation of the 1996 constitution. The constitution was supposed to grant a certain level of autonomy to local governments. Twenty years down the road decentralisation has remained a dead letter. This is why the latest separatist calls have taken root.

The ConversationDialogue is needed not only to end the brutal repression of the secessionist movement, but also to address the latent causes of the crisis. If the dialogue doesnt take place Cameroons AGOA membership may be just another casualty of the ongoing Anglophone crisis.
| BY Ricki Green |

ALDI knows back to school shopping can be a bit of a chore  with endless items and multiple stops  especially when you could still be enjoying summer holidays. And thats why ALDI is putting the fun into going back to school through a new campaign via BMF Sydney which features the adventures of AL & DI.

This year sees AL & DI go back in time, escaping dinosaurs and mummies, as they collect all the goodies for the school year ahead. The animated characters reveal an incredible Special Buys Back to School sale, with everything from notebooks and shoes to backpacks and lunch boxes, selling for less than $20. Not forgetting a wide variety of tasty lunchbox favourites to keep the little ones active all day and with no artifical colours storewide there is even more reasons to stock up at ALDI.

The integrated campaign lives on TV, Radio, POS, Catalogue, Social and Digital. And parents can keep up to date with the Back to School range at https://www.aldi.com.au/en/special-buys/back-to-school-special-buys/.

Agency: BMF Sydney

Executive Creative Director: Cam Blackley

Creative Director: Alex Derwin

Creative Lead: Sophia Coghlan

Art Director: Dan Pritchard

Copywriters: Lisa Down and Gooch Richards

Head of Planning: Hugh Munro

Group Account Director: Toby Hussey

Senior Account Director: Barbara Stewart

Account Manager: James Arnold

Account Executive: Sammy Hall

Agency Producer: Esta Lau

Director: Greg Sharp

Production Company: Mighty Nice

Producer: Tina Braham

Art Buyer: Basir Salleh
| BY Ricki Green |

Campaign Brief will be the exclusive host of upcoming events for Australias top creative directors in Sydney and Melbourne featuring Tony Gulisano (far left), global chief growth officer at The One Club for Creativity (TOCC).

TOCC is the worlds foremost non-profit organization celebrating creative excellence in advertising and design and home to The One Show, ADC Annual Awards and a wide range of other awards, recognition and development programs.

The Sydney event will be held this Tuesday January 30, generously sponsored by Photoplay and the event in Melbourne will held on Thursday February 1, sponsored by The Otto Empire.

Gulisano, who has decades of experience in the advertising awards and recognition industry, will visit Australia from the organizations headquarters in New York to meet with the local creative community, speak about The One Clubs mission and plans for 2018 and explain the process and criteria for being selected to serve on the jury for The One Show.

As global chief growth officer, Gulisano is a driving force behind all TOCC global initiatives, working closely with the senior leadership team to create, implement and expand professional and educational development programs worldwide including Executive Creative Summits, Creative Leaders Retreats, Portfolio Night and others. He also also plays a key role in recruiting top global creative talent to serve on juries for The One Show and ADC Annual Awards.

Says Kevin Swanepoel (above right), CEO, The One Club for Creativity: Australia is a very important market for the ad industry overall, and The One Club in particular. Were very excited to work with Campaign Brief, as it gives Tony the opportunity to hear first-hand from creatives about how the industry is evolving in Sydney and Melbourne, and for him to explain how The One Club can work with everyone there to recognize and elevate the local creative community.

Says Gulisano: Ive known CB publisher Michael Lynch for many years, and am honored to work with his team to meet many of the countrys creative leaders of today and tomorrow. Australia is home to some of the worlds best work that is often recognized with One Show Pencils for creativity of ideas and quality of execution and ADC Cubes for excellence in craft, design and innovation. I look forward to lively and informative conversations.

The One Club produces a number of the industrys leading global awards shows and recognition programs, including The One Show, ADC Annual Awards, Creative Week, Young Guns honoring creatives age 30 and under, Young Ones student awards, One Screen Short Film Festival, Creative Hall of Fame and others.
And of course, the role that the outstation police contingents played in supporting all field staff was beyond praise. There are more than a few of us who owe their careers and perhaps their lives to the unstinting assistance and support of the outstation constabulary with whom they worked.

I also acknowledge that during the late 1970s when tribal fighting became widespread in the Highlands, the cooperative bond between kiaps and police was strong, forged under the stresses of dealing with a major crisis.

In my experience the relationship between the regular RPNGC officialdom and our field staff took the form of a rather wary collaboration at best. In many instances, personal relationships were warm and both organisations benefited.

EX-KIAP WEBSITE - Some might see it as ironic that the form of award adopted for recognition of kiaps Papua New Guinea service should take the form of a Police Service Medal.

However the attitude of those at RPNGC headquarters was often a cause of concern and gave rise to the view that perhaps the police hierarchy were reluctant to accept that kiaps were competent to carry out police duties.

There are a few incidents that I can dredge up from my memory that could give rise to this view.

The decision in the 1960s by the Police Commissioner to ban all police involvement in the supervising of road construction activities. This came as a cruel blow to the energetic road construction program being implemented in the Highlands at this time.

Counter arguments that police involvement in civil projects was a long standing tradition in Papua New Guinea, were dismissed and prosecutions threatened if this edict was ignored.

About the same time when the time came for re-issue of warrant cards, we found that the replacement cards being issued by police headquarters allowed kiaps to exercise police powers only in the rural areas with township areas being excluded.

In this instance I believe it was our director who took this matter up, pointing out in a letter to the commissioner of police that the RPNGC Ordinance allowed no such restriction to be placed on warrant cards. This innovation was subsequently dropped.

This was followed up by an instruction that all indictable offences, including those committed in rural areas, were to be investigated by regular police officers. Kiaps, and the years of expertise they had accumulated in this law enforcement area were to be sidelined. This too was quickly abandoned as the sheer volume of work its implementation would have meant was beyond the regular police resources.

There were also several instances where expatriate police inspectors had taken what we considered to be a vindictive delight in prosecuting patrol officers caught out in relatively minor breaches of the law. That the supreme court generally exonerated patrol officer being so charged was encouraging.

Then in the early 1970s the police commissioner issued an edict that all handcuffs held on outstations were to be sent immediately to the provincial police headquarters, with no explanation as to why this direction was necessary. Who actually owned these items was a matter of contention and their removal would create difficulties in detaining offenders in remote areas, and bringing them safely to court.

There may be other instances of attempts by the regular constabulary to seemingly set out to erode the status of the kiaps role in policing, but these spring immediately to mind.

No doubt many field staff will disagree with this evaluation of the situation as I saw it, but I do believe these points deserve to be recorded for the benefit of posterity.

Chips Mackellar

Chips Mackellar adds:

Ray Whitrod was commissioner of the RPNGC and later commissioner of Queensland Police. When he eventually retired he wrote a book, Before I Sleep: Memoirs of a modern police commissioner (UQ Press, 2001).

In that book he stated that, in the PNG context, the kiaps were far better police officers than the regulars, simply because they could talk to the public direct and also to their own other ranks. He mentioned that very few of his regular officers could speak Pidgin or Motu and they had to use interpreters to even speak to their own subordinates.

Whitrod said that Canberra made the mistake of superimposing the regular constabulary officers upon a kiap policing system which had begun during the era of Sir William Macgregor and obtained ever since. He said that that two separate officer corps imposed upon a singular other ranks system only caused confusion.

He said that what Canberra should have done was to create two separate police forces, each with its own officer corps and other ranks system, with the kiaps and their police operating outside town boundaries and the regular constabulary and their police operating inside town boundaries.

Whitrod said this dual policing system operated well elsewhere in the world, for example in France with the police and the gendarmerie, in USA with police and sheriffs and so on, each with its own areas of jurisdiction. Pity no one thought of this during our time in PNG.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018 at 9:48AM

Moneris Solutions Corporation ("Moneris"), Canada's largest processor of debit and credit payments, today announced their partnership with Kount, an online fraud protection platform that assesses customer transactions in real time. The Moneris Kount partnership will allow large businesses using the Moneris Gateway to reduce fraud exposure and chargeback risks from online and in-app transactions.

Card-not-present (CNP) transactions are the highest risk for fraudulent payments that affect businesses today  specifically those that do mail order, telephone order or ecommerce transactions. Since Canada's shift to chip and PIN card transactions in 2011, CNP fraud has increased by 130 per cent.

"We are pleased to partner with Kount to bring more payment protection to our merchants," said Jeff Guthrie, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Moneris. "Online spend is growing and it's important for businesses to keep on top of fraud threats. Solutions that take advantage of machine learning, and other customizable data points to reduce ecommerce, in-browser and in-app payment fraud are part of the suite of services we're committed to providing our merchants."

Moneris Kount allows businesses to set a risk tolerance profile that best meets their business needs. The system analyzes transaction data in real time, helping businesses make informed decisions to block problematic transactions before they are processed. Large merchants can use the solution seamlessly with the Moneris Gateway and receive assistance throughout the set-up and integration process via the Moneris Kount support team.

"Currently, Moneris Kount tracks merchant identified transactions that flow through Moneris' online merchant portfolio and helps to keep clients safeguarded from potential fraud," said Don Bush, VP of Marketing at Kount. "Our mission is to help businesses accept more legitimate orders, and reduce chargebacks and lost revenue. We are happy to partner with Moneris to bring more merchants the tools that they need to run their business better."

The Moneris Kount partnership provides businesses with layered fraud management tools. These tools take advantage of predictive modeling to analyze hundreds of variables and generate a numeric risk score for each customer that can be applied to the transaction in real-time. This helps businesses to determine valid orders from fraudulent ones, minimizing manual reviews, reducing decision time and margin of potential error.

Moneris is focused on driving business success for new and existing customers by keeping them informed and providing the tools needed to keep them secure. As part of this commitment, Moneris Kount will also be available to small businesses across Canada later in 2018.

For more information please visit www.moneris.com/kount.
"The most common nesting sites are in wall cavities, a hole in the ground, roof voids and can also be found in conifer trees. Wasps can gain access through cracks, crevices and holes around widows and door frames. Residents will often see a steady stream of wasps leaving and returning to the area," Mr Bariesheff said.
"We actually get a very mixed response, some people who are very passionate with their frustration and anger that this is happening because they feel they are managing their pain in the best way," Ms Sadkowsky said.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who also serves as chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, received donations from an unlikely source: former Erie County Executive Joel Giambra, a Republican gubernatorial candidate.

State campaign finance records show Friends of Joel Giambra, Giambra's campaign committee, contributed $5,000 to support Brown's re-election. Brown won a fourth term as Buffalo mayor in November.

Giambra donated $2,500 to Brown's campaign in August and another $2,500 in November, according to the filing. The donations were made before Giambra launched his campaign for governor.

Giambra's campaign finance filing, which covers a six-month period from mid-July to mid-January, shows his committee contributed to other Democrats and some Republicans. The donations include $1,500 to Republican state Sen. Patrick Gallivan's campaign and $1,000 to Democratic state Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples Stokes. His campaign also gave $500 to Juanita Perez Williams, a Democrat who was the runner-up in the Syracuse mayoral race last fall.

Supporting Democratic candidates is nothing new for Giambra, a one-time Democrat who switched parties when he ran for Erie County executive in 1999.

Before the 2014 election, he donated $3,000 to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Four years later, he is seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Cuomo, a Democrat seeking his third term as governor.

Other Democrats receiving financial support from Giambra include New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli and state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

Giambra's recent campaign contributions and his past support for Democrats, including Cuomo, could complicate his attempt to secure the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

Mike Long, chairman of the state Conservative Party, said last week that Giambra is a "nonstarter" for his party's endorsement. That could influence how Republican leaders view Giambra. The Conservative Party typically supports the GOP nominee by utilizing New York's fusion voting system, which allows candidates to appear on multiple ballot lines.

When Long discussed the reasons why he doesn't support Giambra, he cited his past support for Democrats. He also questioned whether his policies would differ from Cuomo.

"He would, I think, continue to go down the same path that the governor has traveled," Long said in a phone interview.

But in the first two weeks of his gubernatorial campaign, Giambra has been critical of Cuomo. He panned the governor's economic development strategies, including $750 million in state funding for the construction of the SolarCity plant in Buffalo and $90 million for a factory in the Syracuse area.

Giambra considers those investments and others as "corporate welfare."

In making his pitch to GOP leaders, he is stressing the importance of "electability." Republicans haven't won a statewide election since 2002 when Gov. George Pataki won a third term. He thinks he can appeal to more New Yorkers and defeat Cuomo.

"My job is to win over the hearts, the minds and the voters of middle New York state," he said earlier this month. "That's who I am. That's where I think this state is. That's where I think this country is right now."

While Giambra may face an uphill battle for the Republican nomination, he is one of only two announced candidates in the GOP field. The other is Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb, a Canandaigua Republican.

State Sen. John DeFrancisco, the state Senate's deputy majority leader, is considering a run for governor. The Syracuse Republican expects to make his final decision soon, possibly by the end of the month.
With the general election less than 10 months away, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in a strong position to win a third term as New York's top executive.

A new Siena College poll released Tuesday found 55 percent of voters would support Cuomo, a Democrat, for a third term as governor. It's the highest percentage of voters to say they would re-elect Cuomo since the college began asking the question during the 2018 election cycle.

Cuomo is viewed favorably by 62 percent of voters  his best favorable rating since June 2014. And his job performance rating  half of voters said he's doing an excellent or good job as governor  is at its highest level in eight months.

Siena pollster Steve Greenberg acknowledged that Cuomo faces many challenges this year. He will play a major role in negotiating a new state budget that erases a $4.4 billion deficit. He also must determine how to best address the impact of federal legislation, most notably the new tax law signed by President Donald Trump.

There are outside factors to consider. Public corruption trials linked to Cuomo's former top aide, Joe Percoco, begin this year. Cuomo hasn't been charged and has denied knowing anything about Percoco's alleged conduct.

While it's still early in an election year, there are reasons for Cuomo to feel confident about his chances for a third term.

"Cuomo's favorability rating is up net 23 points since November's poll of likely 2017 voters, and up net 10 points since the October Siena College poll of registered voters," Greenberg said. "He is viewed favorably in every region, including upstate, for the first time since last May, by a 10-point bulge."

It's possible Cuomo may face a primary challenge. Former state Sen. Terry Gipson is planning to seek the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Others are considering a run, including actress Cynthia Nixon and former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner.

But, as Greenberg noted, Cuomo has an 80 percent favorable rating among liberal voters. And 41 percent of voters describe him as a liberal.

Another good indicator for Cuomo: Half of New York voters believe the state is on the right track.

Siena surveyed 824 registered voters Jan. 7-11. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent.
With the latest crop of trucks joining the rest of the industry in offering advanced active safety systems as well as connectivity features, you have to try to not to find a pickup thats to your liking.



If youre more of a RAM type of guy/gal rather than a fan of the Chevy Silverado or the Ford F-150, know that you can spec your truck in lots of different ways, from the rugged Rebel all the way to something more sporty like this Patriot Blue Big Horn.

The latter comes with Mopars 20 aluminum wheels, splash guards, aluminum running boards and side graphics, which are available in Grey Metallic or black.

You get a little something extra even for the interior, with all-weather floor mats, more rigid sidewalls and stainless steel embossed sill guards. Aside from that, the Big Horns 5.7-liter HEMI engine can sound off through Mopars 5-inch custom exhaust tips, available in either gloss black or chrome.

The Rebel on the other hand is what you might want to take if youre driving over really rough terrain. It has 33 tires, a lifted suspension with Bilstein shocks and a locking rear differential.

Whichever truck you choose, as long as it says RAM on the front and 1500 on the sides, you can benefit from features such as the 12 touchscreen display with split-screen capability, the fourth-generation Uconnect system, a Harman Kardon premium audio system, 360-degree Surround View Camera, optional wireless charging, plus Android Auto and Apple CarPlay compatibility  with either of the two available touchscreens (8.4 or the 12-inch).

Safety tech includes Adaptive Cruise Control with Stop, Go and Hold, Forward Collision Warning, Ready Alert Braking, Lane Departure Warning and more. In total, the 2019 RAM 1500 has more than 100 safety and security features.

PHOTO GALLERY
Chinese automakers arent popular in the United States, but thats something Guangzhou Automotive Company (GAC Motors) is looking to change. GAC brought a good-looking two-door SUV called the Enverge to the Detroit Auto Show to get its name out in the open before its official launch in 2019.



As far as electric vehicles go, the Enverge is wearing a futuristic design, something that a lot of EVs miss out on at the moment. The grille-less front end allows GAC to tack on a massive badge onto the front of the vehicle, while the headlights wrap around the entire front end of the vehicle. Another nifty feature of the headlights is that they slide out and can be used as flood lights, similar to some of the LEDs found on the Toyota FT-AC Concept.

The front end looks like an angry snake, which is pretty aggressive for an EV and a crossover.The Enverge concept has a pinched rear end that mimics the Toyota Prius with a rear taillight design that wraps around the rear end. The SUVs design is striking, especially when you take the gullwing doors  something thats usually found on supercars  into account.

The design, as the Chinese automaker claims, is supposed to appeal to young consumers in the U.S. If the exterior doesnt draw buyers in, the interior certainly will. Theres a Formula 1-inspired steering wheel with a few steering-wheel-mounted buttons within reach of the drivers thumbs. Instead of a traditional dashboard, theres an enormous flatscreen that provides necessary information  the cars speed, navigation, etc.

While the majority of enthusiasts enjoy sitting in the drivers seat, the passengers in the back of the SUV are treated to something even more high-tech  panoramic augmented reality goggles that take information on things outside of the Enverge and lays them onto the opaque windows.

Power wise, the SUV features a 71 kWh battery pack that gives the vehicle a range of 370 miles, which is 120 miles more than the Byton Crossover Concept from CES. GAC also claims that a 10-minute charge allows the Enverge concept to go up to 240 miles. A wireless charger will be available for the production-ready version of the vehicle.

The SUV has a claimed output of 240 horsepower, which is put down to all four wheels and can get to 60 mph in less than 4.5 seconds. The vehicle tops out at 99 mph. The zero to 60 mph figure is right on par with what the Tesla Model 3 recently did.

A production version of the Enverge concept would certainly be an interesting vehicle for GAC to enter the North American market.

Photo Gallery
Chinas Guangzhou Automotive Company (GAC Motors) is planning a multi-pronged approach to enter the U.S. market in 2019. Two vehicles that will go on sale is a production version of the striking Enverge SUV and the GA4, is a sedan that was unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show this week.



Besides powertrain options for the GA4, there isnt a lot of available information for the sedan. The sedan will be available in two different powertrains: a 1.3-liter or a 1.5-liter engine. Specs for the engines arent available.

As far as tech features are concerned, we know that the sedan will offer consumers with remote engine control via a smartphone, and Android-based software for the infotainment system.

Besides those tidbits of information, everythings pretty much up in the air for the GA4. And GAC didnt release a lot of pictures for the car, making it even more difficult to see what its fitted with.

The four-door model isnt anything special on the outside, which is a shame as the midsize sedan segment is ripe for change at the moment. The front end mimics that of the previous generation of the Mazda6 sedan, but has a lot more chrome. The grille, for example, is comprised of three horizontal chrome bars. The air intake on the lower part of the front fascia also has a chrome trim piece, while a trim element on the hood is made from chrome, as well.

The rear end doesnt have nearly as many shiny materials, as theres just one trim piece on the bottom of the bumper. Overall, the GA4 features a chunky design thats uninspiring. Unfortunately, its the same situation on the inside of the car.

A quick glance at the interior and were having deja vu of being inside a Kia. And its not one of Kias more modern, better designs, but one from a time when the automaker was just starting to get its act together. Theres a decently-sized screen thats integrated into the dash, but other than that, its pretty standard stuff on the inside.

After seeing some of GACs more radically-designed vehicles at last years Detroit Auto Show, we were hoping for something with a little more character. But the majority of American consumers probably wont be going with one of the Chinese automakers vehicles for their style. Instead, the GA4s greatest asset will probably be its price tag, which will be announced closer to the sedans actual release date.

Starting off in a new country is proving to be a difficult task for CGA, which has zero dealers in the U.S. at the moment, despite planning its entrance into the market since 2014. According to a report by Autonews, the Chinese automaker is looking to recruit dealers at the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) convention in March. GCA isnt settling on one avenue just yet, though, as the automaker claimed it would also look into partnering with other groups. Building its own dealership network is a possibility, as well.

Another major problem we see holding GAC back is brand awareness, as the Chinese automaker isnt exactly a household name.

Photo Gallery
The Mitsubishi L200 pickup truck is now capable of towing up to 3.5 tonnes thanks to the companys latest revisions.



Mitsubishi has added extra strengthening to key areas of the chassis of the L200, making it capable of offering a 3.5-tonne towing capacity on the tarmac when a three-axle braked trailer is attached and with four-wheel drive engaged.

That towing capacity figure falls to 3.1 tonnes with one- or two-axle braked trailers and to 0.75 tonnes regardless the number of axles or whether the trailer has brakes or not. Thats because the more tires you have in contact with the road, especially with brakes fitted, the bigger the straight line stability is.

The updated Mitsubishi L200 also comes with the Trailer Stability Assist system fitted as standard while it also offers a payload of up to 590kg at its maximum towing height.

Last but not least, Mitsubishi now offers its Smartphone Link Display Audio infotainment system with the L200, featuring smartphone integration as the name suggests and voice control among other things.

Prices in the UK kick off at 19,000, with the new Mitsubishi L200 offered in single, club and double cab body styles and offering up to 1,060kg of payload capacity.

PHOTO GALLERY
Meet the 2018 Jeep Grand Commander, a China-only 7-seater SUV thats rumored to make its public debut at the Beijing Auto Show in April.



Once its wheels touch showroom floors, it will compete against the likes of the Volkswagen Teramont and the Toyota Highlander, with prices said to start at around 250,000 yuan ($39,000). Responsible for manufacturing the Grand Commander is the Guangzhou-Fiat joint venture.

These images, courtesy of CarNewsChina and Autohome, show two different specs, Longitude and Limited, together with front and all-wheel drive models.

The difference between the two specs, at least as far as the exterior is concerned, is that one features chrome inserts along the window frames, front bumper and side sills, while the other does not.

Powering the Grand Commander is a new 2.0-liter turbocharged petrol unit borrowed from the Jeep Wrangler  where it makes 268 HP and 295 lb-ft (400 Nm) of torque.

Unlike the Yuntu Concept on which it is based, the Grand Commander comes with a 7-seat layout, whereas the study only had six seats. As for size, Jeeps new Teramont/Highlander rival measures 4,873 mm (15.9 ft) in length, 1,892 mm (6.2 ft) in width and 1,738 mm (5.7 ft) in height, with a wheelbase of 2,800 mm (9.2 ft).

H/T to Karim!

PHOTO GALLERY
Photo: Instagram

A new winery set to open in the middle of downtown Kelowna will break the traditional mould with more than just its urban location.

Jason Alton says hes trying to do something different with Ricco Bambino, by creating a more vibrant and social atmosphere inside the winery.

I wanted to steer heavily away from the traditional approach that many wineries have  which is that artisan, hand-in-the-grapes, wood, rusty metal, brick, dark orange motif  and play on ... what the feeling is when you drink wine: which is bright, cheerful, happy, somewhat sophisticated, somewhat opulent, those kinds of elements, he explains.

To learn how Alton plans to accomplish that at his Pandosy Street winery, as well which notable winemaker will join him on the journey, check out the full story on Castanet's sister business news website, Okanagan Edge.
Madison Erhardt

Although it's mid-January, temperatures will feel more like October this week.

Environment Canada is forecasting mild temperatures and rain for the majority of the week in the Okanagan.

Monday hovered around the freezing mark, but Tuesday should see a high of 3 C and a 70 per cent chance of rain or snow showers.

On Wednesday through Friday, temperatures should be a balmy 5 C with some showers.

Saturday is forecast to drop slightly to 3 C with a possible chance of flurries. And Sunday will be back to 1 C with a chance of snow.

Blue Monday took a new meaning in parts of B.C. this morning. A dense fog blanketed the South Coast.

Environment Canada put out an advisory for Metro Vancouver, the Sunshine Coast, eastern Vancouver Island and the Southern Gulf Islands that was rescinded later in the morning. The Okanagan saw some fog this morning as well.
Whether it's codifying Roe v. Wade into state law or implementing early voting in New York, a new poll found voters like major elements of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's 2018 State of the State address.

Cuomo outlined his legislative agenda earlier this month in Albany. Siena College found the proposal that received the most support is his plan to pass the Child Victims Act, which would eliminate the statute of limitations for sex crimes committed against minors and increase the statute of limitations for civil cases. More than three-quarters of New Yorkers, 76 percent, endorsed the governor's push.

Two-thirds of New Yorkers supported Cuomo's plan to prevent taxpayer funds from being used to settle sexual harassment claims involving state officials. Sixty-five percent said they favor early voting, which has been included in Cuomo's agenda before but hasn't been adopted.

New York is one of 13 states that lacks some form of early voting.

The Dream Act, which would allow undocumented immigrants to receive state tuition aid for college, was supported by 60 percent of voters. That's the highest level of support for the Dream Act in the Siena poll, according to pollster Steve Greenberg.

Codifying Roe v. Wade into law to ensure a woman's right to an abortion was backed by 59 percent of respondents. Most voters  58 percent  also approve of Cuomo's call to file a lawsuit challenging the new federal tax law, which he believes will harm New York state's finances.

A solid majority (57 percent) support eliminating cash bail for individuals charged with misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies. And 55 percent said they want to increase terms for state legislators from two to four years and impose term limits on lawmakers and statewide officials.

Voter backing for Cuomo's proposals is one sign of the governor's strength as he kicks off what will be a challenging year. The state is facing a $4.4 billion deficit and officials are scrambling to determine how to address certain federal issues, including the impact of the new tax law that was signed last month. Corruption trials will bring attention to the need for ethics reform  an issue that received little attention in the governor's agenda.

But half of voters surveyed believe New York is on the right track and Cuomo has a 62 percent favorable rating. Half of respondents said he is doing an excellent or good job as governor. And 55 percent say they would re-elect him to a third term.

"Election Day is 42 weeks away. Many political lifetimes," Greenberg said. "Budgets, trials, legislation, ribbon cuttings, natural or other disasters (hopefully not), federal issues and unforeseen events likely to impact the political landscape.

"That said, Andrew Cuomo enters a re-election year with his best favorability rating since the last re-election campaign, his best job performance rating in eight months, his best re-elect rating in this cycle and a potpourri of State of the State proposals that are popular with New York voters."

Siena College surveyed 824 registered voters. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.
Josh Winquist

How do you spell marijuana?

For most people, it isn't a debate. However, the Government of Canada sometimes spells the word with an "h" Marihuana.

One website, Canada.com, reported Health Canada provided this official explanation:

"The common way to spell marijuana is with a j  however, the legal name and the way it is used under the program is with an h. As a result, you will often see marijuana spelled two ways from Health Canada:

1)When referring to it in general terms j

2)When referring to the Program (Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulation).
Photo: Chris Ausman

Friends of Christopher Ausman, a 32-year-old man found dead in 2014, filled a Kelowna courtroom, Monday.

Details heard in court left many distraught. Friends and family of Ausman were in tears.

Ausmans death was originally described as suspicious, but was upgraded to homicide several days later.

Steven Pirko was charged with second-degree murder on Nov. 18, 2016, almost three years after the death.

Ausman was found in a pool of blood on the 100 block of Highway 33 on the morning of Jan. 25.

Friends said Ausman, a young father, was playing a poker game at a friends house in Rutland that night.

Monday was the start of an expected three-day preliminary inquiry to determine if the Crown's case is strong enough to proceed to trial.

Evidence heard at a preliminary inquiry is protected under a publication ban.

Pirkos mother was also in court and left in tears.

The victim's father, Eric Ausman, has been a civilian member of the RCMP in Cranbrook for more than 20 years.
Contributed KGH Foundation

Travelling for healthcare can be expensive and that's why Kelowna General Hospital plans to raise millions to build JoeAnna's House, a home-away-from-home initiative.

The KGH Foundation has committed to raising $8 million towards JoeAnna's House, for families throughout the Interior who need a place to stay for an extended period of time.



Often extended visits to KGH are unplanned and lengthy, costing more than anticipated.

KGH is the Interiors tertiary referral centre and provides the majority of care previously provided by Lower Mainland hospitals.

One in four beds at KGH is occupied by a patient from elsewhere in the Interior. That amounts to 100 people cared for every day at the hospital from communities like Vernon, Coldstream and Armstrong, according to the KGH Foundation.

From Jan. 17 to 19, they will visit communities throughout the Northern Interior to share more information about the impact of JoeAnna's House.

The next free event will take place Wednesday at the Prestige Hotel in Vernon, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

KGH asks anyone with interest in supporting the initiative to attend the event for more information.
Photo: RCMP

RCMP are investigating after materials and tools were stolen during a break and enter from a downtown Kelowna construction site on Sunday.

A suspect cut through a fenced perimeter on the 1400 block of Ellis Street and entered the building through a window.

Copper piping and construction tools were loaded into a vehicle that fled the scene.

Forensic investigators have examined the scene, and the investigation remains ongoing, said Cpl. Jesse ODonaghey.

RCMP were notified of the break and enter at 7 a.m. on Sunday.

Anyone with information is asked to contact RCMP at 250-762-3300 and cite file number 2018-2311.
Alanna Kelly

Investigators are working to determine the cause of a mobile home fire that left one man dead.

Firefighters responded to the blaze at Lake City Homes Estates just after 5 a.m. on Sunday to find the mobile home engulfed in flames.

A deceased man was found inside the home while firefighters battled the blaze.

RCMP continue to maintain security of the fire scene as serious crimes, forensics and fire investigators with the RCMP examine the scene alongside the coroner and fire investigators with the Kelowna Fire Department, said Cpl. Jesse ODonaghey.

Neighbour Kevin Cutting said he first saw the fire in a glass reflection across the street.

He ran a few metres down the road, called 911 and alerted surrounding neighbours of the fire.

The firefighters kicked the front door in, and it folded and it was like the whole door, just poof  and it was gone, he said. I couldnt believe ... the place just lit up.

Cutting said it was shortly after that the roof collapsed on firefighters, injuring three.

The cause of death is still unknown and being investigated.

Residents living at Lake City Homes Estates said they didn't know much about the man living at the residence.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Kelowna RCMP at 250-762-3300.
Photo: Colin Dacre

The City of Pentictons bylaw department is asking the public to provide contact information when filing complaints.

The city says it received a letter dated Dec. 18 on Jan. 12, including 32 photographs of violations of the citys good neighbour bylaw along the Penticton Creek walking path.

The city wishes to thank the individual who took the time to document the referenced concerns. Bylaw officers rely on reportings to identify and resolve concerns quickly and efficiently, bylaw manager Tina Siebert said in a news release.

We hope the individual who submitted this information comes forwards so that we can personally thank you.

The city says because they received the letter almost a month later, many of the concerns were already fixed. Contact information is also appreciated, to help officers get more information to process each file quickly.
Photo: Meiklejohn Architects Inc.

Kelowna city council gave its blessing to a four-story, 55 unit strata development within the Central Green site.

The development is the final for-purchase building to go up on the former KSS site at the corner of Richter Street and Harvey Avenue.

The building approved Monday is the furthest south of the proposed developments, situated along Richter Street, surrounded on two sides by the future Rowcliffe Park.

City planner Terry Barton says the multi-family development is similar to other for-purchase buildings currently going up on the site.

"The finishes and materials are utilizing the red brick masonry, which is inspired from the Central school across the road, exposed concrete, with cast reveals and hardi-plank siding," said Barton.

Unlike the rental building council panned a week ago as not being what council had hoped to see, Barton says this particular building is exactly what it was meant to be.

"In total, all the ones that have been completed or are under construction form approximately 531 units on site.

"This meets the zoning's anticipated density for the site. I can say with certain comfort that the density proposed on this specific development is consistent with the original intent of the zone."

Coun. Luke Stack called it a beautiful building which will look very nice once the park is complete, while Mayor Colin Basran said it's easy to support the development.

However, he said he's really waiting to finally see some park construction happen on the site.

"I think once people can start to use the park, this is going to start to feel like the complete community we wanted to accomplish on this site," said Basran.

"The park obviously is the big missing link."
Photo: Colombian Gov't

Colombian officials say 10 workers died after a bridge they were building outside the nation's capital collapsed.

Civil Defence authorities say the labourers were working on drainage along the bridge when the structure fell Monday about 95 kilometres from Bogota.

Nine people were killed at the scene and the 10th died after being taken to a nearby hospital with severe injuries.

Authorities are still working to determine how many people were working on the bridge at the time of the collapse and if anyone is missing.
Photo: The Canadian Press

A wayward wallaby disrupted downtown traffic by bounding across the Sydney Harbor Bridge on Tuesday with police in pursuit.

The adult male was captured without any apparent serious injury and is expected to be released back into the wild within days.

Swamp wallabies, which are smaller marsupials than their kangaroo cousins, are common across eastern Australia, but are rarely seen in cities.

The startled wallaby hopped across the bridge's eight lanes of traffic an hour before sunrise then turned onto an expressway on the harbour's southern shore toward the Sydney Opera House. A pursuing police car with flashing lights videoed the animal's steady bounding before a police officer captured him near the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and wrangled him into a horse float, police said.

Veterinarian Larry Vogelnest said the wallaby was "quite distressed," but he gave it a tranquilizer before taking it to the wildlife hospital at nearby Taronga Zoo.

"It had some minor grazes on its face and its hind legs," Vogelnest told reporters. "There don't seem to be any major injuries."

Vogelnest said he did not know where the wallaby had come from or how it found its way to the bridge.
Photo: City of Kelowna Potential buildout of Capri-Landmark area with newly realigned Sutherland Avenue in the centre.

Call Kelowna Mayor Colin Basran a dreamer.

When it comes to a preferred redevelopment plan for the Capri-Landmark town centre, the mayor is dreaming big.

While councillors generally liked the plan as presented, they had some reservations about the proposed $100 million price tag, the logistics of realigning Sutherland Avenue and creation of a large park space just south of the newly realigned street.

"Call me a dreamer, I love this plan for a number of different reasons," said Basran.

"One, because it brings the density and the mixed-use that we want to see. It increases the connectivity of our neighbourhoods that we all appreciate. It promotes alternate modes of transportation and people moving, parks and communal space."

He says it brings all the ideals and everything council is trying to champion, together.

And, while Coun. Luke Stack also loved the plan, he was the lone voice against it.

He likened it to constructing John Hindle Drive. Stack said it was a priority when he first ran for council 10 years ago to get the road built to UBCO.

That was an $11 or $12 million project and the province had to come to the table to assist.

"This is a $100 million challenge in 22 years. When I put it in perspective to building one road of John Hindle to building $100 million of assets in 20 years, I just don't have the confidence we can pull it off," said Stack.

"I love the plan, but back to Coun. Sieben's comment, the size of the park in the middle is very, very expensive. And, I also know we have a deficit of about 30 other parks we are waiting to build."

Stack says he likes the look, the layout and the principles of the plan, but doesn't think is achievable.

The linchpin of the plan is the realignment of Sutherland Avenue so it connects with Spall Road near Kent Road.

Cost of land acquisition for transportation, much of that to do with Sutherland, is estimated at $18 million.

Coun. Gail Given had some concerns surrounding Sutherland, but said overall, she supports the plan. She says it gives the development community a clear indication of what the city is looking for in that particular town centre area.

But, she said it is not a signal to the community that this is the new top priority for the city.

"I wouldn't want people to be misled that this is a priority ahead of everything else the city is doing, it isn't," she said.

"It's a plan. It's signalling what our expectations are."

A final version of the Capri-Landmark plan will come to council later this spring.
Mother Teresa said: Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

It is clear that there is a growing epidemic of loneliness in the industrialized countries of the world.

In Japan, it is estimated that each week over 4,000 elderly people die alone in the many huge apartment complexes in and around Tokyo. This reality recently drew international attention when the remains of a man, whose rent and utilities were being automatically withdrawn from his account, were discovered after his account ran out. He had been dead for over three years.

It would be inaccurate to say that this epidemic strikes only the elderly. For instance, while a disturbing 75 percent of the elderly in Britain describe themselves as lonely, about half of the overall population also suffers from loneliness.

The research is clear. A recent examination of over 70 studies on the effects of loneliness on health concludes that loneliness is not only a painful experience but a threat to health. There are specific mechanisms that underlie this threat.

Loneliness causes disrupted sleep patterns, reduced immune response, increased inflammation, disruption in metabolism and hormonal balance. These reactions lead to an increase in all types of infections, increased risk of type II diabetes, arthritis, heart attacks, strokes, dementia and depression.

In the United States, there are well-funded public health campaigns to combat the health risks of obesity and smoking. But the evidence is mounting that severe loneliness may be a greater risk to health than either of these two. Yet no action has yet been taken here to systematically address the problem.

Two questions come to mind. First, why should the human body react so violently to loneliness and social isolation? And second, what elements in contemporary life are bringing on this epidemic?

For the young of all species, there is a period of vulnerability and dependence. But it is usually brief. Human offspring, however, are utterly helpless for an extended period of time and continue to be vulnerable for many years. This fosters a powerful internal craving for intimacy and care. On a collective level, our ancestors would never have survived if they had not banded together in tribes and other social units. As a result, the desire to be embedded in ongoing togetherness is ingrained in us. The absence of the experience of belonging creates an inner deprivation as powerful as hunger or thirst. The evidence is clear that our bodies experience this deprivation on a cellular level.

On the surface, it seems as though our culture provides ample opportunity for social interaction and connection. Our homes are a treasure trove of multimedia opportunities. And most of us carry in our pockets a cellphone that provides instant access to the rest of the world. So why should so many of us feel isolated and alone?

The short answer is that there is a fatal mismatch between these kinds of social possibilities and what we crave on the deepest level. For well over 99 percent of human history, we lived in small social groupings. There were no strangers in our daily lives. And everything was done together. We ate together, slept together, worked together and played together, and any remaining available time was filled with celebrations and rituals that further enhanced and cemented social bonds. Togetherness was not something an individual had to seek. Togetherness was woven into the very fabric of ones everyday life from birth until death.

It would seem that during the past half-dozen or so generations there has been a relentless eroding of the remnants of this togetherness. About 100 years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead lamented the emergence of the nuclear family over the extended family of more traditional life. She described it as guaranteed to promote loneliness and isolation. And now, even the nuclear family has become fragmented and diluted as a supportive entity. With each wonderful technological advancement we seem to be cast farther away from the Eden of our ancestors.

We might be discouraged from attempting to address this epidemic that is so deeply rooted in modern life. But there is evidence that even modest interventions can make a difference.

Recently, a public health initiative called campaign to end loneliness began in England. One component employs volunteer telephone befrienders. Follow-up research has revealed multiple benefits to recipients. These changes have manifested as significantly improved mental and physical health, and reduced mortality rates.

Following this example, we each might make a difference by reaching out to one person we suspect is living in loneliness.
Photo: Thursday Night Jazz Band

Pentictons Thursday Night Jazz Band is hosting its sixth annual benefit concert this week for Grandmothers for Africa.

The charity fundraises for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which supports grandmothers in sub-Saharan countries of Africa who are left to raise their AIDS orphaned grandchildren.

Volunteer Norma Lippa says the benefit concert is close to a sell out every year, because they are such an amazing group.

Lippa says the Penticton wing of Grandmothers for Africa have about 25 full members, with other branches throughout the Okanagan.

The benefit concert takes place Jan. 18 at the Barking Parrot. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at the Lakeside Hotel front desk or any member of the band.
Photo: Google Maps

Kelowna city council has paved the way for a new housing development on McIntosh Road in Rutland aimed at students.

Council Monday gave initial approval to rezone three properties, two on Dougall Road, and one on McIntosh, to facilitate the project.

The four-and-a-half-storey development would include 94 units of student housing. It would include 89 micro-suites, three one-bedroom and two four-bedroom suites.

Planner Terry Barton says the applicant is asking for a 20 per cent reduction in the parking requirement, which would require a variance.

However, Barton says, they are also proposing to mitigate that reduction by starting up a car share program in Rutland.

"Currently, there are no car share spots in the town centre, so they are proposing to establish four cars in total, that would be in varying locations across the Rutland urban centre to act as not only a benefit to this development, but as a community amenity," said Barton.

He says there are discussions between the developer and the OgoShare program, and they are supportive of establishing a fleet of four vehicles.

The proposal will go before a public hearing before it can be approved.
Photo: Google Maps

Careful on your commute.

Rock debris was reported overnight on Highway 97 at Drought Hill in Peachland.

A Castanet reader reported rocks in the southbound lane as of late Monday.

"It looks like a small portion of rock broke off from the hillside and tumbled down. It's in a corner and is hard to see in the dark," the tipster said.

It's not known if the debris has been cleaned up as of early this morning.
Photo: The Canadian Press

A progressive group says it's baffled that the Canadian government has worked at the NAFTA negotiating table to protect a dispute resolution system that allows companies to sue governments, estimating it has cost Canadian taxpayers $314 million.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says in a report to be published Tuesday that Chapter 11 provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement have cost Canada $95 million in unrecoverable legal fees, calculated based on data it obtained through an access to information request.

The report comes ahead of the latest round of NAFTA renegotiations, slated to kick off in Montreal on Jan. 23. The U.S. wants to water down the enforcement mechanism for Chapter 11 by making dispute resolution panels non-binding or voluntary.

The CCPA says Canadian losses through that system amount to $314 million when the legal fees are added to $219 million in awards and settlements under Chapter 11, also known as the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, since the trade treaty was enacted in 1994.

"The current renegotiation opens the door to get rid of, or at least neutralize, the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism in NAFTA and I certainly think Canada should grasp the opportunity," said Scott Sinclair, a senior research fellow with the CCPA.

"I do think negotiators and the government are weighing their options ... because the U.S. administration wants to make ISDS optional. While a lot of the Trump administration's proposals in the NAFTA talks are harmful to Canadian interests, this one is beneficial."

Chapter 11 was designed to give investors confidence when they do business in another country by providing an impartial tribunal to settle disputes with the government over discriminatory treatment. The Trump administration says this chapter encourages job outsourcing to Mexico and wants to make participation voluntary.

It's one of three chapters that act as NAFTA's enforcement system, all of which the Trump administration is seeking to water down or eliminate.

Chapter 20, rarely used, lets governments sue governments. Trump's administration wants to make it strictly advisory.

Chapter 19 was Canada's big demand in the original NAFTA and remains a priority. It allows companies to dispute punitive duties, like those imposed on Canadian softwood lumber and on aerospace company Bombardier Inc. The Trump administration wants Chapter 19 scrapped entirely.

The CCPA says Canada has been the target of more claims under Chapter 11 than its Mexican and American partners and the trend is getting worse as Canada has been sued over twice as many times as Mexico and the U.S. combined since 2010.

Canada is also far more likely to lose challenges  the CCPA says Canada has won nine and lost eight concluded cases so far while Mexico has won seven and lost five and the U.S. has won all 11 of its concluded cases.
Photo: The Canadian Press

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is launching a revamped youth service program, pledging $105 million over the next three years to help young people volunteer in their communities.

In an Instagram live video today, Trudeau and Peter Schiefke, the parliamentary secretary to the prime minister for youth, speak to several young people across Canada about the initiative, which fulfills a campaign promise.

Canada Service Corps is in its design phase still and will fully launch in 2019.

In the meantime, the program will provide funding to 10 national organizations to help them engage more young people.

As well, small grants of $250, $750 or $1,500 will be available for individual Canadians between 15 and 30 years old who come up with innovative projects to engage their peers at the local level.

The government has also produced a new online tool to match young people with volunteer opportunities.
Photo: The Canadian Press

UPDATE: 2:30 p.m.

Toronto police say they've found the mother of a newborn baby boy who was allegedly abandoned this morning outside a commercial building.

Police say the mother is receiving medical care, but would not provide further details.

Police said they received a call just before 11 a.m. from someone claiming to be a passerby who found the infant in a plaza in the city's west end.

They say the baby was in a safe indoor area when officers arrived and was conscious and breathing.

Paramedics say the baby was rushed to a hospital where he remains in critical condition.

Const. David Hopkinson says the police investigation into the matter is ongoing.

ORIGINAL: 10:20 a.m.

Toronto paramedics say a newborn baby is in critical condition after being found abandoned outside a building in the city's west end.

The baby was rushed to hospital after being found just before 11 a.m.

A spokeswoman for the city's paramedics says the baby's health is in jeopardy but the situation is not currently life-threatening.

Police say they don't know how long the baby had been outside.

The temperature was around -6 C at the time.

Police have not said who found the baby and say their investigation is ongoing.
Photo: The Canadian Press

A member of a team of explorers has reached a record depth in a cave near Fernie, B.C., that is believed to be the deepest in Canada.

The cave has so far been measured at 5.3 kilometres in length and 670 metres deep  more than 200 storeys below the ground.

Project leader Jeremy Bruns puts that in perspective by pointing out that the CN Tower in Toronto is just over 550 metres tall.

The Calgary-led group began exploring the Mount Bisaro plateau in 2012 and has done roughly 10 expeditions.

Team leader Katie Graham recently made it down to the 670-metre mark, but had to scuba dive through a channel to do it.

Bruns says it's fascinating that there is a lot of the plateau left to explore and the cave could go down as far as one kilometre.

During expeditions, explorers are taken to the plateau by helicopter as it would be too gruelling to hike all their equipment up. They have endured harsh conditions: camping underground, enduring temperatures just above freezing and relying on headlamps in the complete darkness.

"To get to this milestone is really exciting," said Graham. "We know there's a lot more cave there. This isn't the end of it."
Photo: The Canadian Press Train engineer Thomas Harding leaves the courtroom on sixth day of deliberations.

The jurors at the Lac-Megantic trial told the judge Tuesday they are at an impasse in their deliberations.

Quebec Superior Court Justice Gaetan Dumas read a letter from the jurors in which they asked him what would happen if they couldn't reach unanimity.

"We are at an impasse," Dumas said, referring to the letter. "What happens if we can't arrive at a unanimous decision."

Dumas was expected to address the jurors later in the day.

Tom Harding, Richard Labrie and Jean Demaitre were charged with criminal negligence causing the 2013 tragedy that killed 47 people when a runaway train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded.

Before the jurors began deliberating last Thursday, Dumas told them the verdict for each had to be unanimous.

All three accused can be found guilty of criminal negligence causing the death of 47 people, while jurors have the option of convicting Harding on one of two other charges: dangerous operation of railway equipment or dangerous operation of railway equipment causing death.

Harding was the train's engineer, Labrie the traffic controller and Demaitre the manager of train operations.

The three men each pleaded not guilty to one count of criminal negligence causing the death of 47 people.

None of them presented a defence at the trial, but lawyers for each told the jury in turn the Crown had failed to meet its burden of proof.

The prosecution mounted a case that the three were each criminally negligent in their own way for failing to ensure the train was safe before the wee hours of July 6, 2013.

That's when the locomotive and its cargo of crude oil from the United States rolled away and derailed in Lac-Megantic, exploding and then killing 47 people as well as destroying part of the downtown core.
Photo: osoyoos.ca

No changes will be made to the size of Mayor and Council in the Town of Osoyoos, after the idea to expand from five councillors to seven was floated last month.

In a report to council, the town's director of corporate services Janette Van Vianen said the proposed change would allow "more diverse representation on council and more representation during councillor absences," costing between $42,000 and $50,000 to add the two new positions.

Council members voted to instead keep the size of table the same. Only Coun. Mike Campol was opposed, who deeply criticized the decision during the meeting.

"All it takes is one vacation or an illness to have representation of three people. For significant changes of bylaws and significant spending decisions, that concerns me," he said.

As for the additional taxpayer dollars of up to $50,000 for two councillors, Campol said "I dont see it as an extraordinary amount of money, for more representation and diversity on a council."

The idea to add two councillors was offered because decisions were made last year with the legal quorum of three out of five members at times, Mayor Sue McKortoff said in December.

She added the most notable absence was of one member, Coun. Carol Youngberg, who was away more than any other council member to help her sister deal with medical issues.

On Monday, McKortoff said "I think we are extremely well represented by the five people that we do have on council right now... I think in this town ($50,000) could be spent probably in a better way."

Following the decision, council members voted unanimously to also have town staff look into the cost of potentially moving council meetings to the evening  a motion that was put forward by Campol.
AUBURN  Katherine (Testa) Verillo, 99, of Restmour Home, Auburn, passed away peacefully Friday, Jan. 12, 2018, in Auburn Community Hospital with her loving family by her side.

She was born in Auburn, the daughter of the late Michael and Felicia Riccillo Testa and would have celebrated her 100th birthday this April 11. Katherine was a life resident of Auburn, having attended Seymour Street School and was a longtime communicant of St. Francis of Assisi Church.

In her earlier years, Katherine worked at the Seneca Army Depot during World War II as a bomb specialist, having helped rivet numerous missiles and bombs. She also had been employed by the former Button Factory. She married Joseph Verillo in 1944 on Thanksgiving Day. Katherine would then become a homemaker, raising three beautiful children, and cherishing every special time with them. Whether it was cooking a delicious Italian meal for her family or reading one of her favorite books, Katherine was most happy being at her home. She will be sadly missed.

She is survived by two daughters, Elaine (James Sr.) Bona, and Diana Verillo; a son, David (Ann) Verillo, all of Auburn; five grandchildren, James (Christine) Bona Jr., Michael Bona, Deanna Bona and her fiance, Jacob Taro, Eric Verillo and his fiancee, Nicole McGowen, and Christina (Luigi) Caruana; three great-grandchildren, Madelynn and Carson Bona, Giovanni Caruana; a sister, Ann Vedora; as well as several nieces and nephews.

In addition to her parents, Katherine was predeceased by her husband of 43 years, Joseph, who passed in 1988. She also was predeceased by a grandson, Joseph M. Bona; great-granddaughter, Marley Rose Taro; sister, Louise Mazzeo, and two brothers, Dominick and Daniel Testa Sr.

The family will receive friends from noon to 1 p.m. this Wednesday in St. Francis of Assisi Church, Clark Street, Auburn, with her Mass of Christian burial to immediately follow at 1 p.m. in the church. Burial will be in St. Josephs Cemetery.

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in Katherines memory to either Hospice of the Finger Lakes, 1130 Corporate Drive, Auburn, NY 13021 or Matthew House, 43 Metcalf Drive, Auburn, NY 13021.

Arrangements are by Pettigrass Funeral Home.
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A nanostructured gate dielectric may have addressed the most significant obstacle to expanding the use of organic semiconductors for thin-film transistors. The structure, composed of a fluoropolymer layer followed by a nanolaminate made from two metal oxide materials, serves as gate dielectric and simultaneously protects the organic semiconductor - which had previously been vulnerable to damage from the ambient environment - and enables the transistors to operate with unprecedented stability.

The new structure gives thin-film transistors stability comparable to those made with inorganic materials, allowing them to operate in ambient conditions - even underwater. Organic thin-film transistors can be made inexpensively at low temperature on a variety of flexible substrates using techniques such as inkjet printing, potentially opening new applications that take advantage of simple, additive fabrication processes.

"We have now proven a geometry that yields lifetime performance that for the first time establish that organic circuits can be as stable as devices produced with conventional inorganic technologies," said Bernard Kippelen, the Joseph M. Pettit professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and director of Georgia Tech's Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics (COPE). "This could be the tipping point for organic thin-film transistors, addressing long-standing concerns about the stability of organic-based printable devices."

The research is the culmination of 15 years of development within COPE and was supported by sponsors including the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Transistors comprise three electrodes. The source and drain electrodes pass current to create the "on" state, but only when a voltage is applied to the gate electrode, which is separated from the organic semiconductor material by a thin dielectric layer. A unique aspect of the architecture developed at Georgia Tech is that this dielectric layer uses two components, a fluoropolymer and a metal-oxide layer.

"When we first developed this architecture, this metal oxide layer was aluminum oxide, which is susceptible to damage from humidity," said Canek Fuentes-Hernandez, a senior research scientist and coauthor of the paper. "Working in collaboration with Georgia Tech Professor Samuel Graham, we developed complex nanolaminate barriers which could be produced at temperatures below 110 degrees Celsius and that when used as gate dielectric, enabled transistors to sustain being immersed in water near its boiling point."

The new Georgia Tech architecture uses alternating layers of aluminum oxide and hafnium oxide - five layers of one, then five layers of the other, repeated 30 times atop the fluoropolymer - to make the dielectric. The oxide layers are produced with atomic layer deposition (ALD). The nanolaminate, which ends up being about 50 nanometers thick, is virtually immune to the effects of humidity.

"While we knew this architecture yielded good barrier properties, we were blown away by how stably transistors operated with the new architecture," said Fuentes-Hernandez. "The performance of these transistors remained virtually unchanged even when we operated them for hundreds of hours and at elevated temperatures of 75 degrees Celsius. This was by far the most stable organic-based transistor we had ever fabricated."

For the laboratory demonstration, the researchers used a glass substrate, but many other flexible materials - including polymers and even paper - could also be used.

In the lab, the researchers used standard ALD growth techniques to produce the nanolaminate. But newer processes referred to as spatial ALD - utilizing multiple heads with nozzles delivering the precursors - could accelerate production and allow the devices to be scaled up in size. "ALD has now reached a level of maturity at which it has become a scalable industrial process, and we think this will allow a new phase in the development of organic thin-film transistors," Kippelen said.

An obvious application is for the transistors that control pixels in organic light-emitting displays (OLEDs) used in such devices as the iPhone X and Samsung phones. These pixels are now controlled by transistors fabricated with conventional inorganic semiconductors, but with the additional stability provided by the new nanolaminate, they could perhaps be made with printable organic thin-film transistors instead.

Internet of things (IoT) devices could also benefit from fabrication enabled by the new technology, allowing production with inkjet printers and other low-cost printing and coating processes. The nanolaminate technique could also allow development of inexpensive paper-based devices, such as smart tickets, that would use antennas, displays and memory fabricated on paper through low-cost processes.

But the most dramatic applications could be in very large flexible displays that could be rolled up when not in use.

"We will get better image quality, larger size and better resolution," Kippelen said. "As these screens become larger, the rigid form factor of conventional displays will be a limitation. Low processing temperature carbon-based technology will allow the screen to be rolled up, making it easy to carry around and less susceptible to damage.

For their demonstration, Kippelen's team - which also includes Xiaojia Jia, Cheng-Yin Wang and Youngrak Park - used a model organic semiconductor. The material has well-known properties, but with carrier mobility values of 1.6 cm2/Vs isn't the fastest available. As a next step, they researchers would like to test their process on newer organic semiconductors that provide higher charge mobility. They also plan to continue testing the nanolaminate under different bending conditions, across longer time periods, and in other device platforms such as photodetectors.

Though the carbon-based electronics are expanding their device capabilities, traditional materials like silicon have nothing to fear.

"When it comes to high speeds, crystalline materials like silicon or gallium nitride will certainly have a bright and very long future," said Kippelen. "But for many future printed applications, a combination of the latest organic semiconductor with higher charge mobility and the nanostructured gate dielectric will provide a very powerful device technology."
Q: We have a next-door neighbor who has a very large, tall cypress tree on her property. The tree overhangs three adjacent properties and homes, including ours.

Over the years, we, along with the other property owners, have all trimmed branches and limbs that overhang our properties. These were all done with city permits, taking into account the health and structure of the tree. The tree owner has done nothing in the last 15 years to care for her tree. There is a fair amount of dead wood in this tree.

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Last October, a windstorm twisted off a very large live limb, which fell into the property directly behind the tree owners property, just missing the house, but smashing the fence between the houses. The tree owner said she had no money to pay for anything (we think she owns her house free and clear and does not have homeowners insurance). She began to ignore phone calls and letters about cleaning up and repairing the damage and fence. The neighbor behind her house eventually, months later, paid to remove the limb and debris and to build a new fence.

The storm also left a number of partially broken limbs hanging up in the tree. We consulted two local arborists about the tree, concerned there was real danger of the tree throwing more limbs. They said it could cost up to $10,000 to deal with all the issues they could see from the ground, but there could well be more, once they got up into the tree to investigate. I consulted our homeowners insurance agent, who requested we send a certified letter to the tree owner, stating our concerns about the tree and asking her to get the tree work done. We and another neighbor even offered to help offset the cost. She accepted the letter, but will not speak with us.

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We have contacted the city arborist and code compliance officer, sending them the tree reports from the local arborist and a copy of the letter we sent to our neighbor. I have called and emailed the city, including the city council, a number of times. They have said they were on it, but it might take some time. To date, nothing has been done. The tree limbs have turned brown up in the tree.

We will again hire the tree company to come trim overhanging branches, but there is so much wrong with this tree that could affect our home. We also believe the tree owner may not be mentally stable.

We think hiring an attorney would do no good, as it would only inflame her, and she apparently has no money, as her house is falling into disrepair, with holes and broken windows. We do not have the financial resources to address this on our own. Any ideas?

A: First, talk with your local television station and see if theyre interested in a story about the lack of response from your local government. Years ago, when I was in college, I worked for a local paper in Cicero, Ill. Believe it or not, a cow that was being transported by rail fell off the train and was lying in the middle of a city street. The city did nothing about it; our paper published a picture of the dead cow on the front page, and by 8 a.m. that day, the cow was removed. Your elected officials want to be re-elected; try this approach.

Next, contact the city health department. If the tree owners house is in such a bad condition, the city may decide to condemn.

Finally, consult an attorney. I once represented a couple who had a similar problem with their next-door neighbor. My clients were concerned that if they merely trimmed the overhanging branches and chopped off the encroaching roots, the tree would fall, hurt someone and damage property. Accordingly, I filed a nuisance suit against the neighbor and the judge issued an order requiring the tree to either be removed or properly cabled so it would not fall.

If you get such a court order, the neighbor would have to comply or be in contempt of court. In such a case, the court could require the house to be sold to satisfy the court order.

Keep in mind that I cannot provide legal advice. Discuss your options with a local attorney.

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Benny Kass is a practicing attorney in Washington, D.C., and in Maryland. He does not provide specific legal or financial advice to any reader. Readers may email him, but he cannot guarantee a personal response.

mailbag@kmklawyers.com

[ Related: Wondering why your condo assessments keep going up? Here's how to find out. ]

[ How should associations handle conflicting versions of condo documents? ]

[ Buyers' money is locked up in unbuildable land. What's their next move? ]
Tierney Darden, second from left, is joined by her parents Trudy Darden, far left and father David Darden, at the Alise hotel Thursday Aug. 24, 2017, attending a news conference with attorney Patrick Salvi, seated at center. (Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune)

A young dancer left partially paralyzed when a shelter at OHare International Airport collapsed on her has received a record $115 million settlement from Chicago and its insurer, her attorney announced Tuesday.

The settlement comes after a Cook County jury in August deliberated just four hours before awarding Tierney Darden, now 26, a record $148 million in damages. The city had admitted it was liable five months before trial. Jurors lined up to hug Darden, who lives with her father in Vernon Hills, before leaving the Daley Center courtroom.

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After the city argued in court the verdict was excessive Dardens lawyers ultimately settled this week for $115 million  still a state record in an individual personal injury case, her lawyers said. Such post-verdict settlements are not uncommon in civil cases with large damage awards against municipalities and other deep-pocketed defendants.

Although we believed the verdict would have been upheld on appeal, when weighing the risks and benefits, we felt this was a fair compromise, Patrick Salvi, one of Dardens lawyers, said in a statement. Tierney has a long, difficult life ahead of her; these funds will help her obtain all the necessary medical care for the remaining decades of her life.

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AIG Aviation, one of the citys insurance companies paid out the entire settlement, which was structured in a $15 million annuity to cover Dardens living expenses and $100 million in cash, Salvi said in a phone interview. A spokesman for the New-York-based insurance giant declined to comment.

The city itself already pays out hundreds of millions of dollars a year in settlements, judgments and workers compensation claims, according to a 2016 inspector generals report. In 2013 and 2014 those figures totaled nearly $460 million including $200 million for workers comp and $146 million for police misconduct and public safety claims, the report stated.

Dardens settlement matches what has been paid out  at least $115 million  by the city so far in claims related to disgraced former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge.

In his clients case, Salvi said the funds will not only pay for round-the-clock care for Darden, who had been studying modern dance when her spinal cord was severed, but also underwrite her quest to end chronic daily pain she described as torture during the 7-day trial. Darden is paralyzed from the waist down.

Shell have a team of caregivers so her parents dont have to be her caregivers any longer, Salvi said. She's going to do everything possible under medical science to reduce her pain to a level where she can function better  function at least like many paraplegics do.

On the afternoon of Aug. 2, 2015, Darden, then a dance student, was standing with her mother and 19-year-old sister outside the airport on a lower-level street that accesses Terminal 2, according to the law firm.

The women had just returned to Chicago from Minneapolis, where they were shopping for bridesmaid dresses for an upcoming wedding, Darden's lawyers said. A storm rolled through the area as the women were waiting to be picked up, and a 750-pound pedestrian shelter came loose and fell onto Darden.

Before the incident, Darden had lived independently in Chicago and was attending Truman College.

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It was determined the shelter that injured Tierney had missing bolts, Darden's lawyers said. An investigation later found other shelters at O'Hare were poorly maintained, with missing bolts, corroded parts or broken brackets, her lawyers said.The city has since removed all the shelters at OHare, Salvi said.

Darden wasnt available for comment Tuesday, but told reporters at a news conference after the jury verdict last year: It didn't have to happen to me. I was more upset than anything and kind of heartbroken because my legs were taken away and those were the two things I needed to do the one thing that I love, which is dance.

The city of Chicago, which was insured up to $500 million, had offered $30 million to settle during the trial.

Attorneys for the city did not immediately comment.

sschmadeke@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @SteveSchmadeke

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[ Jury awards her $148M, but woman says O'Hare bus shelter collapse took away 'my life' ]

[ Jury awards $148 million to woman paralyzed after O'Hare bus shelter collapse ]
About six months after Jim Walters stepped down as Skokie fire chief, the village has announced his successor.

Jason W. Brandt of Louisville, Kentucky, a battalion chief with the rank of major for the Louisville Fire Department, has been tapped for the job, said Skokie Village Manager John Lockerby.

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He is scheduled to start his new post Jan. 19.

Village officials said he will make $160,589 in his first year.

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"Jason's proven leadership in the fire service has protected lives and property during both fire and medical emergencies and provides a perspective that made him the ideal individual to lead the men and women of the Skokie Fire Department who dedicate their lives to protecting our community each and every day," Lockerby said.

According to Skokie officials, Brandt, 46, began as a firefighter in 1998. He progressed through the ranks as a fire apparatus operator, company commander and intelligence liaison officer with the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security.

Since 2012, officials said, he has held the rank of major and has overseen emergency operations for seven suppression companies located in five fire stations.

Skokie officials said he is a trained paramedic, an instructor and subject expert in hazardous materials at the Center for Domestic Preparedness and has received numerous awards from the Louisville Division of Fire, including a Medal of Valor for a house fire with rescues.

Lockerby said Brandt's broad emergency response skills will benefit the Skokie Fire Department and the community.

Brandt also has certification from the Fire Department Safety Officers Association, Homeland Security Office for Bombing Prevention, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and more, according to the village manager.

"Since 1981, the Skokie Fire Department has had a history of quality customer service," Brandt said in a prepared statement. "As fire chief, I look forward to carrying on those traditions and making Skokie home for my family."

Brandt holds bachelor of arts degrees in both biology and environmental studies from Cornell College, and a Master of Science degree in emergency services management from Columbia Southern University, according to village officials.

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He joins a department that has held a Class I rating from the Insurance Services Office since 1995 and, in 2001, the Skokie department earned accreditation from the Commission on Fire Accreditation International.

According to Lockerby, the Louisville Fire Department is one of the few departments in the country that is also CFAI accredited and holds an ISO Class I rating.

misaacs@pioneerlocal.com
Citizens of Chicago, food-TV obsessives, our long nightmare is over:

Meet Catherine De Orio.

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She's Italian. She's in her mid-30s. She lives in the West Loop. She's married to a lawyer. She has no food allergies. She has a throaty, confiding voice. Her favorite color is green, and if she were a tree, she would be a fig tree ("beautiful leaves, and edible "). She once owned a goldfish that committed suicide by leaping out of its bowl and into a garbage disposal.

Also, she just signed a one-year contract with WTTW-Ch. 11. Yes, after five months of speculation and lobbying, an audition process that drew more than 900 applicants, more than 10,000 online votes from viewers and a fair amount of gut-level consideration from producers 

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Catherine De Orio is the new host of "Check, Please!"

De Orio  whose selection has been known and closely guarded for weeks, so much so that producers and station executives would only refer to her as "the chosen one" internally  now becomes the face, moderator and "brand ambassador" of the wildly successful, long-running restaurant-review round table, the highest-rated show on Chicago public television. Indeed, De Orio appears genetically engineered for "Check, Please!" duties, possessing every quality that David Manilow, the show's creator, has been publicly espousing since Alpana Singh, the previous host, announced last winter she was leaving the show after 10 seasons.

A self-described noncritical food writer (for the online magazine Eater and the glossy print publication Vegas), De Orio's up on food trends and local restaurants, but doesn't have a history of panning or praising Chicago establishments. A self-employed media personality and "culinary consultant"  "I do a lot of corporate recipe development and spokesperson work for brands, on TV and at events," she said  she's comfortable in front of a camera (unlike Singh, whose mild on-screen presence was never entirely satisfying, even to Singh).

Plus, well, De Orio is so nice  a quality that Manilow has also been stressing for months.

Last week, an hour or so after being told she was the new host, she hugged this reporter.

I'm sorry, she said. I have no sense of personal space, and I'm a hugger, and this is killing me. I have been told I can't tell anyone about this until the official announcement, and I have watched this show since Amanda Puck (the host for the first two seasons) was on, and I remember watching with a friend and saying, I want that job.' So when I got home and the only person there was my dog, this curmudgeonly pug, I hugged her, and she was like: Feed me. I don't care. What does this mean for me?' Which is a typical dog.

The official announcement was to be made Wednesday on WTTW's website.

Manilow, who created the series in 2001 and since franchised "Check, Please!" spinoffs in five cities (including San Francisco and Miami), said that De Orio "reinforces what we've been doing all along. She is smart, knowledgeable about food and wine, and sure, there is somewhat of a gut feeling here: As we went through this process, we would see certain people and think, 'There's the new host.' But then those people would fall to the wayside, yet Catherine was one of the few people who I liked her audition tape then I met her and liked her even more. Then she auditioned for us, and I liked her even more. And her story appealed."

Unlike Singh (who grew up in California) and Puck (Staten Island), De Orio is the show's first host from the Chicago area. She grew up in Elmwood Park, studied art and political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, became a litigation lawyer, then became disillusioned and went to Kendall College culinary school  not to be a chef but "to celebrate food," she said. (Her audition video resembled a courtroom parody and featured De Orio swearing on Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking.")

That said, despite the months of hype leading to this announcement, De Orio's duties mostly amount to moderating 13 episodes a year and a handful of specials, as well as appearing at show-related events around Chicago. On the other hand, don't mistake the relative lightness of the job with a lack of consequence: Her appointment is not minor to Manilow, who owns the rights to the show and would like its success to continue  or to WTTW, which in recent years has reduced the number of ongoing series it produces. "When you think of this in terms of our branding, how iconically local the show is for us now, a change like this is a gigantic deal for this station," said Dan Soles, WTTW's chief television content officer.

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One more caveat:

Though producers and executives close to the show play up her everyday relatability and use words like "authentic" to describe De Orio  despite a candidate pool that variously included the wife of chef Charlie Trotter, Ina's Kitchen owner Ina Pinkney and well-known food consultant Sarah Levy  De Orio has had a lot of previous screen time. She's appeared often on the "Today" show, "The Rachael Ray Show" and Martha Stewart's satellite radio channel. And her spokeswoman duties have not been for minor brands, but rather, among many others, Ball Park hot dogs and Hillshire Farms meats  duties that V.J. McAleer, WTTW's senior vice president of production, said will have to be reviewed on a rolling basis to avoid any conflicts of interest.

"At the same time, we are PBS," he added, "and aren't paying anyone a lot of money, and people have to make a living  we just want to be sure nothing conflicts with her as the face of a show about restaurants and food." (De Orio, for her part, said many of her contracts are up for negotiation, and she doesn't expect a problem.)

Asked if online viewer voting for a new host  supposedly part of the decision process  factored into his decision, Manilow said: "It did in the sense (that) I don't remember which place she came in, but it was not the bottom three finalists, in which case it would have mattered. (The voting) mattered enough. And look, Catherine's never read a teleprompter! Just meet her, then you'll understand the decision right away."

Yes, you do.

We met near a park outside her home; coffeehouses, being full of snoops, were ruled out. She played it nice and clandestine: She wore a tweed Dolce & Gabbana suit and heels, huge black sunglasses and the expensive-looking blond highlights of a movie star. Every passing dog-walker and jogger in Lululemon cast a glance. Her smile is gigantic, her laugh is even bigger and she talks a mile a minute  Annie Hall meets Nigella Lawson.

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Asked why she left law for food, she answered for a solid five minutes.

Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. >

A few highlights:

"My background started in the arts. I worked at the National Gallery of Art straight out of college, where I worked for the Italian Renaissance painting curator. I was his researcher. Then I went to Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship, where you meet visiting scholars and give talks and do papers, and though I didn't really care for the modern art, because I'm an old-masters person, it was great to learn about the Venetian School.  Then I became worried about living in big cities and making no money, so people suggested I try law school  but when I got out of law school, I ended up working for a not-for-profit and basically dealing with licensing agreements, which is awful! The only person who cared is my dad, because now I'm a lawyer  and you do learn to negotiate and speak in front of people in law school, which are translatable skills  but I'm ready to slit my wrists. So I went to culinary school and didn't tell my parents for a long time, but it was my time! My money! But, of course, to parents, being a lawyer is more legit than slaving over a stove. "

She talks a lot.

"I know!" she said. "I have damaged vocal cords!"

She added that, because other finalists were at the WTTW offices the day that she was anointed as the host, Manilow asked her not to skip on her way out of the building. "It was so hard!" she said. "I nodded to people on the way out and had to look serious. It was awful! Then I got in my car and had a stupid grin all the way home."

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Taping for the 13th season of "Check, Please!" begins next month, and new episodes air in the fall. De Orio has already downloaded a teleprompter-reading app for her iPad. Chicago, everything's going to be all right.

cborrelli@tribune.com | Twitter @borrelli
Winners of 2018 Jean Banchet Awards (presented by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation) gather onstage, posing with 9-year-old Evie Murphy, front center, who has cystic fibrosis and handed out the awards. (Christy Clow Photography)

Sarah Grueneberg's Monteverde, the perpetually packed pasta spot in the West Loop, won restaurant of the year at the 2018 Jean Banchet Awards. The Chicago-based awards ceremony took place Sunday night at Venue Six10, with Michael Muser returning as the host.

Muser is the former partner and general manager of Grace, which recently saw an exit of all of its kitchen talent, including chef Curtis Duffy. But the ceremony still managed to celebrate current culinary talent in the Chicagoland region.

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Another big winner was Smyth, the ambitious spot from John Shields and Karen Urie Shields, which won for best new restaurant. Though that's not entirely surprising, considering Phil Vettel recently ranked the West Loop spot as fourth best restaurant in Chicago.

It was also a huge night for Sixteen in the Trump International Hotel and Tower. Executive chef Nick Dostal picked up an award for rising chef of the year, while Parag Lalit won for best sommelier.

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The Banchet Culinary Achievement Award went to Katsu and Haruko Imamura of Katsu. That much-loved sushi restaurant closed Nov. 26 after nearly 30 years.

The Chicago-based award ceremony is named after Jean Banchet, the legendary chef of Le Francais, which operated in suburban Wheeling. Touting itself as the only Chicago-based awards ceremony, the event was presented by the Greater Illinois Chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Check out the full list of winners below:

Restaurant of the year: Monteverde

Chef of the year: Andrew Zimmerman (Sepia, Proxi)

Rising chef of the year: Nick Dostal (Sixteen)

Best chef de cuisine: Bill Montagne (Nico Osteria)

Pastry chef of the year: Anna Posey (Elske)

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Rising pastry chef of the year: Kyleen Atonson (Honey's)

Best neighborhood restaurant: Daisies Restaurant

Best ethnic restaurant: Ras Dashen Ethiopian Restaurant

Best new restaurant: Smyth

Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. >

Best sommelier: Parag Lalit (Sixteen)

Best mixologist: Amit Gilad (GreenRiver)

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Best restaurant design: Proxi

Best service: Oriole

Best bar: Income Tax

Banchet Culinary Achievement Award: Katsu and Haruko Imamura (Katsu)

nkindelsperger@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @nickdk

[ Monteverde, where handmade pasta is king, er, queen ]

[ Grace closes after exits of Curtis Duffy, Michael Muser ]

[ Phils 50: 10 newcomers ]
Nearly 35 years after discovering buried treasure in Grant Park, Rob Wrobel and Eric Gasiorowski return to the park with Expedition Unknown host Josh Gates to describe how they solved one piece of a puzzle that has confounded people for decades.

Publisher Byron Preiss buried 12 ceramic casques  each containing a key that could be redeemed for a jewel  in parks around the country and put location clues in his 1982 book The Secret. Gates visits the places where casques have been found and tries to pinpoint the remaining treasures on an episode of Expedition Unknown that is scheduled to air at 8 p.m. Wednesday on the Travel Channel.

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One of the things about the The Secret that you learn when you delve into it is that its really difficult, Gates said in a phone interview. None of the puzzles are particularly easy to solve, so I think for three teenagers to have cracked the very first one, its incredible stuff.

Gates met with Gasiorowski and Wrobel in April 2017, and they showed him the casque they unearthed with their friend David James as suburban teenagers in 1983. Gasiorowski told the Tribune that for years he held on to the casque  which was valued at more than $500 when it was dug up  but Wrobel now possesses it. He said the emerald they received from Preiss  worth about $1,000 at the time  was stolen sometime in the early 2000s.

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Now a 51-year-old welder who lives in Plainfield, Gasiorowski said he helped a treasure hunt group research possible casque locations about a decade ago.

A second casque was found in Cleveland in 2004. That leaves 10 casques up for grabs. Cameras follow Gates as he visits Milwaukee, New York and St. Augustine, Fla., to search for treasure. Adding to the mystery is that Preiss died in a 2005 car crash.

I think if theres one fatal flaw to The Secret its that Byron maybe imagined it in an age when people werent as mindful about the protection of local parks. I think, unfortunately, in order to solve The Secret, unless youre really technical and you know exactly where the box is buried, you do run the risk of damaging these parks, Gates said. We worked with the permission of the local park in Milwaukee as well as in St. Augustine. And to be honest, I think a lot of their motivation for letting us film was their hope that we could find one of the boxes and kind of stop people from coming to the parks and trying to dig it up.

tswartz@tribpub.com

Twitter @tracyswartz

[ RELATED: Treasure hunt brought 'Expedition Unknown' host Josh Gates to Chicago ]

[ A look at the Chicago TV and film projects set to premiere in 2018 ]

[ New 'Man v. Food' host talks tackling Timothy O'Toole's burger challenge ]
Givins Irish Castle is at the corner of 103rd Street and Longwood Drive in the Beverly neighborhood on the Far South Side of Chicago. (Raul Torres photo)

On the top of a hill on the Far South Side there sits an ancient castle.

Understandably, because it is the citys only castle, it has long held a special place in the hearts and memories of those who have called the Beverly neighborhood home.

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For us, its more than a mere iconic symbol of the neighborhood, says Mike Flannery, the astute political reporter and editor (now with Fox 32 News) and a longtime neighbor of the building. My children went to preschool at the castle. We bought many a Christmas tree at the annual sale on the parking lot. Spotting it as we travel west on 103rd Street is always eagerly anticipated. It means were almost home.

The castle was built in 1887 as the home for the family of Robert Givins, who had arrived in Chicago as a teenager in 1863 with 10 cents in his pocket and a distinguished lineage in his native Canada. He got into the real estate game and did very well here.

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Not only did he build the castle and live in it with his family on and off for about a decade, but also he owned much of the property in the surrounding area and elsewhere across the city. He was touted as a potential candidate for mayor. He traveled extensively. He wrote novels. He died in 1915 and is buried at Rosehill Cemetery on the Far North Side.

His colorful life and the equally lively story of the castle are captured in great detail in two compelling ways that share one title, Chicagos Only Castle: The History of Givins Irish Castle and Its Keepers: a 90-minute 2011 documentary and a recently published, lavishly illustrated and deeply researched book (www.chicagosonlycastle.org), both by Errol Magidson.

Givins was perhaps inspired to build his castle after being impressed by a similar structure while on a trip to Ireland. He was almost surely influenced by a previous castle-builder named Potter Palmer who had a few years before built a massive castle at what is now 1350 N. Lake Shore Drive as a home but also as a means to help promote and sell the vast tracts of land he owned in the surrounding area, soon to be known as the Gold Coast.

Palmers castle came down in 1950, but Givins remains.

It was rented from Givins from 1895 to 1897 by the Chicago Female College, and sold in 1909 to a manufacturer and inventor named John Burdett and his wife, Jessie. They lived there until 1921, at which time they sold it to Miroslaw and Bonnie Siemens, he a doctor and founder of the Ukrainian National Museum.

In 1942, the castle was purchased by the Beverly Unitarian Fellowship, in whose hands it has remained, offering all the familiar things that a church offers, as well as that annual Christmas tree sale referred to by Flannery and preschool classes (beverlycastleacademy.org).

Magidson came upon the building the way many people do: It caught him by surprise.

In 1977, he and his wife, the late Jan, were driving around looking to relocate from their North Side apartment when they pulled to a stop at the traffic light at 103rd Streetand Longwood Drive. As he writes, I could not believe my eyes. Visions of kings and queens and knights in shining armor entered my mind. It was then I knew this was the right neighborhood for us.

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He would live in the neighborhood for the next 35 years as he fashioned a successful career as a professor in academia at area colleges and universities  and developed a deep devotion to the castle and its history that is manifest in the documentary and book.

He is giving the proceeds from the book to efforts to make some needed structural repairs in the building. That will certainly please all of those for whom the castle is a special place.

It will always be a special place for me, says Debbie Doody Furlong, who grew up in the neighborhood and attended preschool in the building. Even though it was a little spooky for me as a kid, I love the place. Every time I see it, like when I drive down to drop off one of my kids at a cousins house nearby, it does me good to see that old castle.

The castle is not open for regular tours except on special occasions (www.beverlyunitarian.org). But there is nothing to stop you from ogling it from the street or sidewalk, or attending a service within. And, if you happen to be in this charming and significant neighborhood, try to make a visit to the Ridge Historical Society at 10621 S. Seeley Ave.

It was there, nearly 20 years ago, that I met Linda Lamberty, a society board member and passionate researcher. She explained that "ridge" refers to the Blue Island Ridge, the 30- to 60-foot-high part of a moraine created more than 12,000 years ago, when the glaciers retreated. It runs majestically, dotted with large homes, through the Beverly and Morgan Park neighborhoods. The castle is one of many buildings that sit atop it.

Lamberty also told me that she had lived in Beverly since her birth in 1951 and that her family's presence in the area dates back to the 1840s. She said, My thing is people. They are the ultimate source of information, people who have lived here and can tell us what life was like." Now the official historian for the society, she served as an associate producer of the documentary and as the editor of the book.

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No one ever spent more time looking at the castle than did Jack Simmerling, the late local artist who grew up in the neighborhood. He was interviewed for this book and said, I have painted the castle in every conceivable mood (and season). I studied the castle because I love the intricacy of the stonework, the battlements.  It played a very significant role in the development of the Longwood Drive residential section.

Just east of the castle is the Heritage Gallery, 1907 W. 103rd St., where the artist worked for nearly 30 years alongside his daughter Vicki. He painted while she worked as a master custom framing expert. You will find there many examples of Simmerlings work, including many versions of the castle that he first saw as a little boy and that so powerfully grabbed his eye for keeps.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @rickkogan

[ An escape from the 'Christmas madness' at Glessner House ]

[ Jack Simmerling's vibrant work lives on ]

[ Read all of Rick Kogan's Sidewalks columns in the Tribune ]
Lee Ann Womack will play City Winery on Jan. 20 and 21 in support of her latest release, "The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone." (Ebru Yildiz photo)

In some ways, every heartache is like an old Hank Williams song, Lee Ann Womack sings on the title track of The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone, her latest album, bone-chilling in its ability to tap straight into the grief and longing that accompanies someones world falling apart with a gesture as mundane as a Camry pulling out of a crowded apartment parking lot.

Released in October, the albums mix of 14 mournful and feisty originals and cover songs doesnt try to romanticize love or its inevitable fleeing the way country legends like the Hillbilly Shakespeare did. This is music that mimics the way lying on the kitchen floor with your cheek pressed up against the cold linoleum in a puddle of tears feels.

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My music, its not a hopeful type of music, Womack says via phone from her home base in Nashville. Its country music. Its Deep South-kind of soul music for the working man.

Fair-weather fans who remain familiar with Womack through her early aughts crossover hit I Hope You Dance may be surprised to find themselves crying into their cabernet when she performs Saturday and Sunday at City Winery, but Womack says even that joyful Grammy winner contained the blueprints of this stirring material.

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When I think of I Hope You Dance, I dont think about all the success and all the things that came along with it. I think about the lyric and how real that lyric was, she says. I would say theres a lot on this record thats like that.

Twenty years, nine studio albums in and heaps of CMA, ACM and Grammy wins and nominations to her name, Womack, 51, is making the most visceral music of her career while many of her peers merely coast. She credits the Lone Star state with being her secret weapon for resurrecting the youthful hunger that drives artists just starting out. Thats why she decided to take a break from the factory she says Nashville has become for Houston, three hours from her birthplace in Jacksonville, to hunker down in SugarHill Studios.

Every time I go back to Texas I am reminded of why I got in the business in the first place. (I) was full of hopes and dreams and had everything ahead of me, and every time I go back there I feel like that again. I wanted to feel like that while I was making this record, she admits.

With her little clique of husband and producer Frank Liddell (Miranda Lambert), co-writers and musicians Waylon Payne and Adam Wright, even daughter Annalise Liddell on guitar in tow, Womack easily reclaimed that childlike wonder. It happens automatically, she says of setting foot in Texas. Like its just sort of a Pavlovian response.

Womack co-wrote more songs on The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone than any of her other albums. Without a record label pushing deadlines (the album eventually found a home on Dave Matthews ATO Records), she credits the surge in creativity to the one thing theres never enough of. I had the luxury of having the time to take my time, she says.

Womack also found the lack of executives concerned about the bottom line, budgetary constraints and the almighty radio single freeing. There were all kinds of things that I didnt have to think about, she says. Thats the way music should be made. Thats the way art should be made. Real music is not a product.

The results are a master class in furious hellfire (All the Trouble, in which she transforms the word find into five syllables of defiance), gauzy resignation (Hollywood) and subterfuge (Talking Behind Your Back).

Influenced by flipping through old family photos, Mama Lost Her Smile drips with mystery while also providing commentary on the notion that all pictures are a lie. You dont take pictures of the bad times. No one whips out their camera when somebodys bawling, Womack explains.

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The reason for the matriarchs missing grin is never resolved.

I think its much better to leave it open, she says before laughing. Cause everybodys smile might just have a different story. Its not really about why she quit smiling, its just that she did.

A gifted interpreter, Womacks vocals veer from pristine to gritty without losing the ache absent from what passes as country music currently on radio stations devoted to the genre. Finding songs to lend her voice to is almost an art itself. You probably heard a song before and thought, Gosh, did they write that about me? I love discovery as well as writing myself, she admits, but claims she doesnt have a preference. I lean more toward Willie Nelson in that I write some of the things I do and some I dont.

Choosing the right songs to cover comes down to a gut thing. I either feel it or I dont, she says. The bouncing closing track, Take the Devil Out of Me stemmed from just fooling around in the studio, the same room where George Jones recorded the original version 60 years ago.

I wouldnt say I felt his presence, Womack deadpans when asked if Jones ghost paid her band a visit while putting his immortal words to tape. I mean, I feel his presence all the time because Im obsessed with his singing, but it wasnt anything otherworldly.

Hes surely smiling from the great beyond.

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jschaults@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @jschau2

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Jennifer Higdon can pinpoint exactly when the idea of writing a concerto for the renowned low brass section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra most likely lodged in her subconscious.

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Growing up in Atlanta, the daughter of hippies before the hippie movement, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer describes her parents, she was only 9 when her father, a freelance artist, bought her a portable cassette player and some tapes to play on it. Her favorite recordings, which she and her brother played over and over, were Fritz Reiners classic CSO recordings of the Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition and Respighis The Pines of Rome.

Both of those are pretty brass-heavy pieces, Higdon observes, speaking from her home in Philadelphia, and I wonder today how much that incredible Chicago brass sound seeped into my mind.

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Local audiences will be free to draw associations of their own Feb. 1-3 when the CSO under Riccardo Muti is scheduled to present the world premiere of Higdons Low Brass Concerto as part of subscription concerts at Symphony Center.

A co-commission by the Chicago Symphony and the Philadelphia and Baltimore symphony orchestras, the unusually scored work also will figure prominently in four of the eight concerts the orchestra and Muti are to give as part of a five-city East Coast tour, Feb. 7-17. A performance of the Higdon concerto on Feb. 9 in New Yorks Carnegie Hall will mark the works East Coast premiere. Subsequent performances are scheduled in Naples and West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Chapel Hill, N.C.

The only piece of advice Muti gave the 55-year-old composer at their brief meeting here in October was Write these guys a good concerto. I said, Yes, sir, Higdon recalls, with a laugh.

Once she had accepted the commission extended by the CSO  another in a 30-year-long series of new works for CSO principal players funded by the Edward F. Schmidt family of Evanston  she wasted no time soliciting advice from these guys: CSO principal trombone Jay Friedman, trombonist Michael Mulcahy, bass trombonist Charlie Vernon and principal tuba Gene Pokorny.

I gave her a whole list of wishes when we met a few months ago, says Friedman, who joined the CSO trombone section in 1962 and was appointed principal two years later. One, it had to be a serious piece of music that could stand on its own  not a showpiece for dancing elephants. Two, it had to have no gimmicks  no cadenzas, no mutes, no glissandos, no funny stuff. Three, I wanted her to write lyrically and bring out the fact that the low brass can play very softly and delicately, the kind of playing the public doesnt usually associate with us. Ive been a specialist in soft playing my entire time in the CSO.

Mulcahy and his low brass colleagues gave Higdon a DVD of a concert they had performed on tour in Japan to give her an idea of their individual and collective abilities in chamber repertory of various periods and styles.

Higdons group concerto is a nice opportunity for the four of us to showcase our teamwork, says Mulcahy, who joined the CSO in 1989. We spend 99 percent of our lives figuring out how to better fit in with each other in this great orchestra, he adds, chuckling. Except for brief solo passages in the orchestral literature, the audience isnt really (made) aware of the interplay and colors produced by the trombone choir, because we usually play a supporting role. So its good to have our voices, our instrumental dialogues, exposed in this way.

The Low Brass Concerto is one of five new Higdon concertos that are to receive their premieres within the next four months. These include a tuba concerto for Craig Knox, a fellow professor at Philadelphias Curtis Institute of Music; and a harp concerto for Yolanda Kondonassis. Her extensive catalogue includes 10 other concertos, one of which, the violin concerto she wrote for Hilary Hahn, won the 2010 Pulitzer for music.

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The CSO co-commission also happens to be her third concertante piece, after a bluegrass blowout, Concerto 4-3, composed for the string trio Time for Three (the CSO played the Chicago premiere at Ravinia in 2009), and On a Wire, a concerto for the new-music sextet Eighth Blackbird, which was premiered in 2011.

Higdons creative fecundity  not a day passes when shes not applying pen to score paper, she says  has swelled her catalogue of well over 150 works, making her one of todays most acclaimed and sought-after composers. Composing is a very serious need for her. I have to express things, she told The New York Times in an interview published in 2010.

Her compositional plate is jam-packed, she says, through 2020, forcing her to be choosy about which commissions she is able to fulfill on deadline and which requests for new scores she must relegate to a waiting list. She appears particularly excited about writing an opera for Opera Philadelphia, set to an original text by librettist Jerre Dye, about an art theft. The company has scheduled the premiere for 2020.

Were trying to figure out how to make it a mystery, Higdon says. There arent many mystery operas, if any.

She self-publishes her music through Lawdon Press, the publishing company she operates with her partner, Cheryl Lawson, out of their split-level home. (The title is an amalgamation of the couples surnames.) They average five or six orders for rental or purchase per day, she reports. Lawson tends to the business end of things full time while Higdon holes up seven days a week in her first-floor studio, which is stocked with a Steinway baby grand piano, a Yamaha keyboard and a computer.

Higdon admits it felt scary when she picked up a message the CSO artistic administration left on her answering machine requesting a piece for the orchestras low brass section, since she had never composed a concertante-style work for this particular combination of instruments before.

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The more she thought about it, however, the greater the challenge of writing for one of the legendary orchestral brass sections appealed to her. I knew this was something I absolutely had to do, she says, with the Southern lilt of her upbringing on a 40-acre farm in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Tennessee.

A meeting with Friedman, Mulcahy, Vernon and Pokorny here last fall allowed her to familiarize herself with her soloists and to get a better bead on their musical personalities. What the Chicago and Philadelphia brass players have in common, she came to realize, is that these people really play with joy.

Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony, one of the co-commissioners of the Higdon concerto, has characterized the composers music as very immediate, authentic, sincere and without pretense. Much the same could be said about Higdon herself.

She taught herself to play the flute at 15 and three years later entered Bowling Green State University as a flute major. She started composing at 21, refining her craft through music theory studies at Curtis, where she received an artist diploma, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned masters and doctoral degrees under the tutelage of composer George Crumb.

All the same, Higdons music betrays little of Crumbs experimental sensibility. It is grounded in traditional tonal harmony, rhythmically driven, colorfully scored, accessible and often strikingly beautiful. And Chicago audiences have heard quite a bit of it, including her Percussion Concerto, which CSO percussion principal Cynthia Yeh performed with the Chicago Sinfonietta; and her song cycle Civil Words, which baritone Thomas Hampson introduced locally at Ravinia.

Higdon already had so many commissions on her plate that when she was notified of winning the 2010 music Pulitzer she already felt overwhelmed with requests.

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Winning so prestigious a prize can, she says, mess with your head in a major way. Still, about the only difference that the Pulitzer has made in her life so far, she adds, is that when I leave a voice message with someone, they will call me back immediately.

When asked about her working methods, Higdon confesses that although she has never experienced writers block, she tends to vacillate between fretting over a new composition and scribbling down notes in a manic rush of activity.

Its usually agonizing at the beginning, when its extremely difficult to find the sound world for (a given) commission, she explains. Im in such a bad mood that the cats avoid me for a week. Sometimes the music flows quickly; sometimes its staggeringly slow. Ill spend four to six hours a day to get 10 to 15 seconds of music.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will present the world premiere of Jennifer Higdons Low Brass Concerto (2017) under Riccardo Mutis direction Feb. 1-3 at Symphony Center. The soloists are trombonists Jay Friedman, Michael Mulcahy and Charlie Vernon, and tubist Gene Pokorny. The program also holds works of Stravinsky and Britten, and Chaussons Poems of Love and the Sea, sung by mezzo-soprano Clementine Margaine; $34-$220; 312-294-3000, www.cso.org.

John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.

jvonrhein@chicagotribune.com

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Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg in "All The Money in the World." Wahlberg has agreed to donate the $1.5 million he earned for reshoots on the movie to the anti-sexual misconduct initiative Time's Up, in Williams' name. (Fabio Lovino/Sony-TriStar Pictures)

Controversy over the pay gap between Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams for the film All the Money in the World offered a defining moment in the fight for gender pay equality.

It highlighted that lack of transparency is a key component of inequity and that men seem to have a special fraternity when it comes to accessing and navigating the unwritten rules of compensation.

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Call it getting Wahlberged. Its that moment when a woman learns how much more her male coworker got paid because the rules for negotiating werent clear, and he negotiated and she didnt because she didnt even know that something was negotiable.

Its a great example that there are little moments for negotiation, and when theyre lost, they can lead to meaningful disparities, said Hannah Riley Bowles, senior lecturer at Harvard Universitys Kennedy School and a leading expert on how gender influences pay negotiations. Its the lack of transparency about what the norms or standards are that allow for secret or private deal-making. Its a big wake-up call to women of being aware whether there might be opportunities to negotiate.

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This is where men have a distinct advantage. The difference between men and women is that women are hesitant to negotiate when theyre not clear that theyre able to negotiate, she said. Her research confirms that men are more willing to bargain and better understand the social conventions for it. While both men and women are perceived to be more demanding and less nice when haggling, women get penalized for it much more than men.

The social cost is too high, said Bowles. The primary reason women dont assert themselves is that theyre more likely to receive backlash for negotiating than men. In male-dominant fields, men are likely to have better information and access to opportunities.

Until a cultural revolution or legislation can dislodge the built-in male advantage  hello salary histories  the onus still falls on women themselves to level the disparity. Bowles encourages women to ask around about what is negotiable and what the norms, standards and opportunities are before engaging the employer.

If youre clear on the norms and you go in, youll have a better outcome, she said. Its also important to get advice from people across genders. If women are asking women and men are asking men, they may come up with different answers as to whats negotiable, she said.

There are more places than ever to find compensation information. Industry associations and magazines, as well as job sites like LinkedIn, Glassdoor and PayScale, publish a trove of insights about salaries, benefits and negotiation trends.

According to a PayScale survey, 57 percent of 31,000 people polled had not asked for a raise in their current field. Among workers who were paid in the $10,000 to $20,000 range, 31 percent asked for a raise and 25 percent of those who asked got one. Of negotiators who earn more than $150,000, 51 percent asked for a raise and 70 percent of those who asked received one. If you make less money, youre less likely to have asked for a raise in first place, but youre also less likely to get one, said Lydia Frank, vice president of content strategy at PayScale.

The survey also found a difference between men and women with MBA degrees. Among all the different college-degree levels for women, those with MBAs were slightly more successful than women with other degrees in receiving a raise if they asked for one, with 48 percent compared with an average 43 percent, respectively. But male MBAs far outpaced other male degree holders in getting raises  63 percent compared with an average 45 percent  and were successful far more often than their female MBA peers at 48 percent.

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Barbara Yong, a partner at business law firm Golan Christie Taglia in Chicago, learned the ins and outs of negotiation the hard way. When she was a younger partner at another law firm, she didnt stand up for herself when the partners were divvying up the profit.

I was naive enough to give some money back, so the men would be satisfied, and none of the men did that, she said. At that time, it didnt occur to me that I should be fighting for what Im worth. I just lived with it and said, Never again. The next time, I certainly didnt offer, she said.

Yong also is the lead organizer of Equal Pay Day Chicago and a member of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), which advocates for equity for women and girls and holds Work Smart workshops across the country on pay and negotiation. Now when she gives talks about salary negotiations, I remind people that everything is negotiable, including benefits, said Yong.

Among the things she said that can be bargained for are vacation days, paid time off, insurance coverage and additional coverage for your family. Other things that people dont think about are severance packages and the duration and scope of non-competes.

For part-time workers who dont get benefits and cant choose their schedule, she suggested asking to get the schedule a week or two in advance, so you can make arrangements for child care, etc. For lower level jobs, she said, people could negotiate the ability to work from home and use of company computers and cellular phone service.

Another factor is how employees fit into the company culture. Some CEOs identify employees as patriots or mercenaries, with the former motivated by the mission and the good of the company, and the latter more driven by their own personal gain. But even patriots can learn to negotiate.

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Dorri McWhorter, CEO of the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, admits to being one of those team-player types who feared backlash from negotiating her salary. She said she tried to make up for it by demonstrating her worth.

The fact is that you never do, she said. It took her 10 years into her career to learn to meaningfully negotiate after being put in a role that gave her access to her colleagues salaries. When she saw that her salary fell short, she went to her boss feeling angry but outwardly calm.

She didnt get the raise and eventually took another job. When she negotiated at her next job, her pay was 25 percent more. When you shortchange yourself, you become an advocate for others, she said. The YWCA holds negotiation workshops with the AAUW curriculum. Now as an employer, she does research to identify the best offer she can give for a job and actively seeks out new benefit options. Last week, McWhorter sent a memo to her employees offering six weeks of paid Family and Medical Leave Act time off. For a not-for-profit with 90 percent women employees, it is a significant move, she said.

Kate MacArthur is a freelancer.

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It seems reasonable to discourage travel to Myanmar because of human rights abuses there. Or the Galapagos Islands because of their ecological fragility.



But why would one of the most respected travel promotion and guidebook companies tell people to stay away from the state of Missouri?



That's what Fodor's is doing with its No List 2018, which lists Missouri as one of the top 10 places in the world for travelers to avoid.



"The Show-Me State is full of wonders that belong on anyone's travel bucket list," Fodor's says in explaining why Missouri came in at No. 7.



"It's home to breathtaking limestone caverns, the Budweiser Clydesdales, Kansas City-style BBQ, great jazz, the Silver Dollar City Amusement Park, and even a museum that purports to house the holy finger of John the Baptist.



"Unfortunately," the guide continues, "Missouri is also the place where SB 43 was passed making it more difficult to sue employers for discrimination, a state representative argued that homosexuals weren't 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. And that's just in 2017."



That last one was a reference to the fatal shooting of one Indian man and the wounding of another at Austins Bar & Grill in Olathe, which we know is in Kansas, not Missouri.



Fodor's list of reasons to avoid Missouri echoes concerns of the NAACP, which last summer also discouraged travel to the state. Missouri chapter head Nimrod Chapel Jr. told Fodor's that Missouri has "a separate standard of laws that are only applicable to some people," including people of color, women, the disabled, senior citizens, foreigners and people of faith.



Chapel said the way laws are enforced in Missouri is discriminatory.



"Not everyone dies after an encounter with law enforcement, and we wouldn't suggest that," Chapel said in a reference to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. "But there (are) so many negative outcomes that would indicate that there's some bias in the way that their laws are enforced that we think that people have to be aware of the danger and, you know, decide for themselves."



No. 10 on Fodor's list is Cuba because all the bureaucratic restrictions make it difficult to embrace the island's true character. And then there's that mysterious audio weapon phenomenon.



No. 9 is the Great Wall of China for its fragility and the city of Beijing for its densely polluted air.



The nation of Honduras is No. 8 because of its high murder rate, particularly victimizing the LGBT community.



Mount Everest made the list at No. 6 because it is dangerous and is littered with trash and bodies.



No. 5 of the places to shun is Myanmar, the Asian country convulsed by human rights violations aimed at Rohingya, members of a local ethnic Muslim minority.



Coming in at No. 4 is Ao Phang Nga National Park in Thailand, the beauty of which is threatened by pollution and litter.



Third in the places to avoid this year is the Taj Mahal in India, for purely practical reasons. It is scheduled to undergo a mudpack treatment this spring to remove discolorations. It just won't be so romantic covered in mud.



No. 2 is a catch-all category. Basically, Fodor says, you should avoid places that don't want you, such as Venice and Amsterdam, where the local populations are dwarfed by tourists.



And topping the stay-away list is the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador because of their ecological fragility. A tourist was caught trying to smuggle four iguanas out in his luggage.
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Fattoum Bakir and her husband, Khaled Haj Khalaf, in their home in Skokie on Jan. 7, 2018. The Haj Khalaf family fled their native Syria, lived in a Turkish refugee camp and came to the United States, where they are adjusting to new lives. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

The smile has returned to Fattoum Bakirs face, a symbol not only of happiness, but also of the resilience the Syrian refugee and her family have shown in their turbulent journey from their war-torn homeland to two one-bedroom apartments in Skokie.

Nearly a year after being reunited in Chicago, everyone in the family has applied for a green card. They wait eagerly for their status as legal permanents, which would allow them to shed the refugee label that has dogged them for years as they fled violence at home, endured a Turkish refugee camp and settled in America  a country thats offered them both a fresh start and a stark ending to life as they once knew it.

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I know its really hard to forget whats happened, old things, Bakir said through her daughter Aya Haj Khalaf, 19, who translated for her parents. But you have to.

Last February, the 45-year-old mother thought her joy would never end as she clasped and kissed her daughters face in the arrivals terminal of OHare International Airport. Bakir, her husband, Khaled Haj Khalaf, and their three youngest children were reunited with her elder daughter, son-in-law and only grandchild after fearing that an executive order banning Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. would keep them apart indefinitely.

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But by last summer, the reality of their dramatic relocation had sunk in. Bakir and her husband wept day and night about the war they had witnessed, family members they had left behind and the difficulties of their new life in the U.S.: a new language, their college-educated children taking jobs on an assembly line, a radically different culture and climate.

Yet the Haj Khalaf family moved forward again. The younger boy, Uday, 15, is now thriving at Niles West High School, his mother said. Aya got a promotion at her job at a frozen food packaging company and is sailing through English classes in hopes of enrolling in college courses soon. The elder son, Mohamad, and their son-in-law, Abdulmajeed Haj Khalaf, are driving for Lyft and Uber, learning their way around the Chicago area. The elder daughter, Baraa, is pregnant with her second child.

The Haj Khalaf family, whose story the Tribune has chronicled over the past year, is one of an estimated 180 Syrian refugee families who have relocated to the Chicago area since 2015, according to the Syrian Community Network, a Chicago-based nonprofit group founded the same year. The U.S. State Department in 2013 announced plans to absorb tens of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the countrys violent and ongoing civil war, but the number has dwindled in the last year both nationwide and in Chicago, according to Suzanne Akhras, the networks executive director.

The slowdown comes after three attempts by President Donald Trump to restrict travel into the U.S. from several Muslim-majority countries. The latest ban, upheld by the Supreme Court in early December, still faces legal challenges in lower courts. But it has already decreased the number of Syrian immigrants coming to Chicago, as the vetting process has become slower and more difficult, and applicants without bona fide connections to the U.S. have been removed from consideration.

Trump also reduced the annual cap on refugees admitted into the country, from 110,000 in fiscal 2016 to 50,000 in 2017 and 45,000 this year, said Jims Porter, communications and policy coordinator for RefugeeOne, a resettlement agency based in Chicago that sponsored the Haj Khalafs.

RefugeeOne has not assisted with any Syrian refugee locations into Chicago since September, Porter noted.

Khaled Haj Khalaf expresses his relief after his 23-year-old daughter, her husband and their now-18-month-old daughter were finally allowed to join the rest of the family in the U.S. after being stuck in limbo by an executive order banning immigrants from war-torn Syria. (Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune)

Bakir and Haj Khalaf and their three youngest children came to U.S. in September 2016 after being granted expedited refugee status because Khaled Haj Khalaf has serious heart problems. His elder daughter had to be approved for resettlement in the U.S. separately because by then she was married and had a child. That approval came five months later.

Through the internet, Bakir and Haj Khalaf connect regularly with his brothers and father, still in Syria or in exile in nearly Turkey, making sure they have not been hurt  or worse, killed  in the ongoing war.

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My heart is very tired, said Khaled Haj Khalaf, 47, adding that its hard for him to endure news of the war back home. We have to watch, though, because my family is still there.

His family members in Syria desperately want to join them in the U.S., and Khaled Haj Khalaf said he understands the desire. Seven years ago, he too wanted nothing more than a safe new start for his family, who fled their Aleppo home in the middle of the night after a bomb destroyed a neighbors house.

But today, Haj Khalaf knows that starting over can be traumatic too.

In July, his son Mohamad, 23, quit his job packing frozen food. After growing up in desert heat, he could no longer tolerate the low temperatures working second shift  and overtime  in a freezer. He now splits his days into two shifts while driving for Lyft, which has helped him learn about Chicago, its suburbs and their residents. But the erratic schedule has put his English-language classes on hold, which he fears will keep him from returning to his dream of going to college and becoming a journalist.

Aya continues to work at the frozen food company, where she was promoted to a team leader and made several friends. Because she made it through level four of English classes at Truman College, her parents lean on her heavily to translate immigration documents, utility bills and even casual conversations. Earlier this month she applied to be a cashier at Walgreens because she hopes to eventually return to the pre-pharmacy college classes she began in Syria. She is determined to complete level seven of her English classes, the final step.

Yet despite the progress, she still feels lost and confused by the intricacies of living in a foreign country, she said.

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Because of his heart condition, her father can work only two days a week making pastries at a popular takeout restaurant in Chicagos Ravenswood neighborhood. He applied for federal retirement benefits, but the paperwork was denied. Aya has tried to dispute the denial on her father's behalf on the phone, online and at the Social Security office.

They have to be so tired, Khaled Haj Khalaf said of his children taking on many of the caregiving and breadwinning responsibilities in the U.S. Hard workers.

Recognizing the difficulties that families like the Haj Khalafs endure, the Syrian Community Network has implemented a variety of relocation assistance programs since it opened three years ago. The nonprofit, which operates almost completely through community donations, provides new Syrian refugee families with rent assistance for up to six months, a mentoring program, after-school homework assistance for children, and winter coats.

This month, the network began holding English as a second language classes. Advocates work to get refugees into better-paying jobs and educational certificate programs, said Akhras, the executive director.

Even with these efforts, many refugees say it can take five to six years to adjust.

We understand why it can be so overwhelming, Akhras said. Many people are going from day to day and paycheck to paycheck. But we want them to move beyond that.

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Porter, of RefugeeOne, said the strength that refugee families demonstrate in their relocation process is inspiring. They have the courage to persevere in spite of the challenge theyve encountered, he said. And theyre resilient.

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A year into their journey, the Haj Khalafs remind themselves every day of how fortunate they are to be given this opportunity in America.

Mohamad said he enjoyed seeing Christmas lights twinkling across the Chicago area this winter, even though the Muslim family doesnt celebrate Christmas. Aya said she found the Secret Santa exchange at her workplace fun, even though she didnt understand the concept at first.

And they are anticipating the arrival of their green cards, which will be a milestone for the entire family.

Im not refugee anymore. I hate this word, Aya Haj Khalef said. Im American.

vortiz@chicagotribune.com

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Chicago police respond to a shooting in the 4200 block of South Michigan Avenue late on Jan. 15, 2018. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

Eight people were wounded in shootings in Chicago between Monday afternoon and early Tuesday, authorities said.

In the most recent attack, a man and a woman were shot in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the Southwest Side just before 2 a.m. Tuesday, police said.

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The man, 22, and the woman, 24, were stopped at a light in the 5900 block of South Sacramento Avenue when someone in another vehicle fired shots, police said. They drove to Mount Sinai Hospital, where both were stabilized. The woman suffered gunshot wounds to the left elbow and a graze wound to the back of the head. The man was shot in the left leg and back.

Just before 1 a.m. on the Near Southwest Side, a 23-year-old man was shot in the chest in the University Village/Little Italy neighborhood, police said. He was walking on the sidewalk in the 1500 block of South Morgan Street when he heard gunfire and realized he was hit. A family member drove him to Rush University Medical Center, where his condition was stabilized, police said.

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On the South Side around 7:45 p.m. Monday, two men and a teenage boy were shot in the 4200 block of South Michigan Avenue in the Bronzeville neighborhood, police said.

They were standing in a courtyard when a man came up to them and started shooting, police said. A 24-year-old man shot in the leg was taken by ambulance to Stroger Hospital, where his condition was stabilized.

The other two, a 17-year-old boy and a 26-year-old man, took a private vehicle to Mercy Hospital and Medical Center, where both of their conditions had stabilized, police said.

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The boy was shot in the arm and leg, and the 26-year-old was shot in the right hand.

About 5:20 p.m. on the Far South Side, a 28-year-old man was shot in the 9900 block of South Carpenter Street in the Washington Heights neighborhood.

The man suffered a gunshot wound to the back and his condition had stabilized at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, police said. He was sitting in a parked vehicle when he heard shots and felt pain, police said.

About 12:20 p.m. on the West Side, a man was shot at a Green Line station in the 4700 block of West Lake Street.

The victim, 26, was standing next to an escalator near the Cicero stop when someone he was arguing with shot him in the leg, according to police and the CTA.

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The station closed for about 45 minutes as emergency crews dealt with the shooting, said CTA spokesperson Irene Ferradaz.

Video of the incident was being turned over to police, she said.
A 72-year-old man was rescued from a burning home Tuesday afternoon in the South Sides Englewood neighborhood.

Firefighters were called to the 7300 block of South May Street to help a man whod become trapped in the attic, said Chicago Fire Dept. spokesman Larry Langford.

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Firefighters from Engine 54 and Truck 20 found the lifeless 72-year-old and performed CPR, bringing him back to consciousness, Langford said.

He was taken in serious to critical condition to Stroger Hospital and there were no other injuries.

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The blaze was brought under control at the house, which had no working smoke detectors, said Langford.

The cause and origin of the fire were under investigation.
The FBI issued a wanted flyer for a man accused of robbing a TCF Bank at 3531 N. Broadway Street in Lakeview East on Sunday. (FBI)

A GPS tracking device slipped into a wad of cash helped authorities arrest a man for a Lakeview East bank robbery over the weekend.

Sidney Hassell, 64, of Mississippi, was charged with the robbery of a TCF Bank inside a Jewel-Osco at 3531 N. Broadway Street in the Lakeview East neighborhood just after 10 a.m. Sunday, according to an FBI spokesman.

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U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Mason ordered Hassell to remain detained at a court hearing Monday afternoon, said FBI spokesman Garrett Croon.

Hassell is accused of stealing $560 from the TCF Bank, according to an unsealed criminal complaint. He allegedly went up to the teller and handed over a deposit slip and said, This is a robbery, according to the complaint. Dont make any sudden movements, just give me all the money in the drawer.

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The teller gave the robber four $20 bills with recorded serial numbers as bait bills, slipping the tracking device between the notes. The teller also handed over ten, five and one dollar bills, the complaint said.

The robber rolled up the bills and put them in his pocket.

The teller described the man as about 50, 6 feet, and weighing 220 pounds with a gray scruffy beard. He was wearing a dark-colored hat, brown puffy jacket and black leather gloves. Responding Chicago police officers received radio broadcasts of the robbers description and real-time location updates from the GPS device.

Officers tracked the signals to a vehicle and pulled it over. Hassell, who matched the description, was inside, the complaint said.

Chicago police found a hat and brown jacket in the car, the affidavit said. The teller identified Hassell as the robber, the affidavit said.

An FBI search turned up $560 in the pocket of the jacket, Special Agent Ward Yoder wrote in the complaint. The cash included the four $20 bills with matching serial numbers from the robbery and the GPS device.
Ruby Grant, 9, from left; Wendy Lawler and son Duncan Karnov, 6; and Laurel Tiknis make buttons on Jan. 15, 2018, for the upcoming Chicago Women's March at Busy Beaver Button Co. in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

Tanya Vega didnt go to Chicagos womens march last year. Held on Jan. 21, the day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the event attracted a massive crowd, flooding the Loop with an estimated 250,000 people from the region.

But Vega, a prep cook, worked that day and was not one of them.

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Her daughter Alexis was, though, and after hearing the 15-year-old describe her feeling of empowerment after last years event, her mother knew she wouldnt  couldnt  miss the second womens march in Chicago, scheduled for Saturday morning.

For me its personal, my parents lived through the civil rights movement, said Vega, a Humboldt Park resident. Im feeling what they felt, that fight for two generations at the same time, my daughters and mine.

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At a button-making event Monday at Busy Beaver Button Co. in Logan Square, Vega and others expressed the same sentiments: an eagerness to be part of what could be another historic event, and a thirst to share that enthusiasm with the mothers, sons, sisters, daughters, husbands, wives and friends they brought with them to make the vibrant, sassy pins. Listen to Oprah, one 10-year-olds custom button read, alluding to the entrepreneurs Golden Globes speech this month on sexual harassment and assault. A woman's place is in the House, the Senate, and the White House, read another, in a bold blue print. Like this one, most of the custom-made pins illustrated the theme of this years march, dubbed the March to the Polls, and focused on getting voters more politically engaged.

Organizers said that in the year since the last womens march, the number of women candidates running for political office in the country has skyrocketed. Last month EMILYs List, a national womens group, said that more than 25,000 women have contacted the organization about running for office since the 2016 election. Most are new to politics. In the months before the 2016 election, the group has said, roughly 1,000 women expressed similar interest.

Though sign- and button-making events are important, the marchs organizers said, attendees also need to be prepared for the event logistically. Organizers were hesitant to estimate turnout but said at least 25,000 people, including at least 3,000 from surrounding states, have confirmed they will attend.

For protest veterans and the uninitiated, planning for large crowds, limited cellphone reception, congested transportation and adverse weather conditions is key, among other things, said Claire Shingler, a lead organizer for Womens March Chicago.

Be aware, and be ready for anything, said Shingler, a mother of three from Chicagos Bowmanville neighborhood. But be open to everything as well.

During the many protests since the last womens march, Shingler has refined the art of protest prep. She advises attendees to come up with plans in advance of the event. Designate meeting points in the Loop, as cell signals can often be unreliable in large groups. Staying hydrated is important, too, and bringing snacks is also smart, she said, particularly for parents. No food will be sold at the event, organizers said at a Tuesday news conference.

And as it is mid-January in Chicago, Shingler said, dressing for the weather is paramount. Were Chicagoans, after all, we have the gear, she said.

Fortunately, its expected to be far warmer in the city Saturday than earlier in the week, and the National Weather Service predicts the day will be mostly cloudy, with a high near 45 degrees. But it could rain in the afternoon.

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Organizers have arranged for a number of warming stations and a family area along the route, which begins at Grant Park and ends at Federal Plaza. The rally space at the park will open at 9 a.m., and the quarter-mile march begins at 12:30 p.m. The Chicago Temple is also slated to be open to the public to warm up, and there will be an area for disabled attendees and families at Monroe Street and Columbus Drive.

The event will have sign language interpreters for the speakers  which include Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx, and U.S. Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Bill Foster  and monitors with closed captioning. The cast of Hamilton and comics from Second Citys She the People are expected to perform as well.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 55 People walk north on LaSalle Street during the Women's March on Chicago on Jan. 21, 2017. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

Organizers said they have been working in lockstep with city agencies to prepare for the event. The CTA will be providing additional service Saturday, operating longer trains on the Blue, Brown, Purple, Green and Orange lines from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. Extra service will be provided on the No. 147 Outer Drive Express bus from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., and multiple bus routes are available to Grant Park.

From 10 p.m. Friday through 6 p.m. Saturday, select streets will be closed within the city. Columbus Drive from Monroe Street to Balbo Drive will be closed, as will Jackson Street from Lake Shore Drive to Michigan Avenue. The westbound lane of Congress Parkway between Columbus and Michigan will also be closed.

Buses passing through the area will be rerouted, and congestion should be expected, CTA officials said. Additionally, estimated bus arrival times may not be accurately reflected by the CTA Bus Tracker, a spokesperson cautioned.

Daywatch Weekdays Start each day with Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox. >

We recommend that customers allow extra travel time and encourage them to purchase their unlimited ride passes and fares in advance, the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

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Metra will also be adding trains Saturday on the BNSF, UP North, UP Northwest and UP West lines.

Others who attended the march last year had tips for energized newcomers like Vega: Signs can be fun but cumbersome, especially with young children. Its helpful to add string or yarn to them so they can be worn around the neck or to make signs on a pillowcase, which can be folded and put in a bag. Those can also be reused. Others said bringing plastic bags for trash pickup is helpful in cutting down on litter, and wipes and hand sanitizer can be useful tools if running water is not available in the portable restrooms. Most important, many advised, come for the cause, and bring others who care.

People made eye contact with each other in a different way (last year), Shingler said. People acknowledged each others humanity. It was powerful.

eolumhense@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @essayolumhense

RELATED

[ Women's March organizers plan another Chicago rally for 2018 ]

[ 'Moment of change'  activists prepare for second Women's March ]

[ Thousands fill Loop after Women's March rally in Chicago draws estimated 250,000 ]
Voters mark their ballots in Huntley on Nov. 8, 2016. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)

Welcome to Clout Street: Morning Spin, our weekday feature to catch you up with what's going on in government and politics from Chicago to Springfield. Subscribe here.

Topspin

Illinois election officials have told state lawmakers that voter data won't be sent as scheduled to a controversial system aimed at flagging duplicate voter registrations across state lines.

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The State Board of Elections' decision is the latest action prompted by concerns over Illinois' participation in the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program.

The program is run through the Kansas secretary of state's office headed by Kris Kobach. Kobach was head of the recently disbanded voter integrity task force formed by President Donald Trump.

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In November, the eight-member state elections board split along partisan lines in rejecting a call to end Illinois' role in the program over questions about the security of voters' personal information.

Some Democratic lawmakers have proposed legislation to end the state's participation in the program, and more than a dozen of them asked the state board if recent talks delivered promised answers about tighter security procedures.

But in a letter sent last week to lawmakers by Steven Sandvoss, the board's executive director, no answers were forthcoming.

"In the December conference call, Crosscheck officials said they would provide us with proposed security enhancements for our review and would not receive data from any state until security enhancements were in place," Sandvoss wrote.

"As of this date, we have received no description of security enhancements from Crosscheck," he wrote. "We plan to review and discuss those proposed enhancements upon receipt and will transmit no data to Crosscheck until security issues are addressed to our satisfaction."

Illinois had been scheduled to transmit voter data Monday. (Rick Pearson)

What's on tap

*Mayor Rahm Emanuel will have a police academy event in the morning and appear with union officials in the afternoon to talk about the Coalition of Unionized Public Employees agreements.

*Gov. Bruce Rauner will sign a bill in Lincoln and meet with business owners in Edwardsville.

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*Three City Council committees will meet.

*Democratic candidate for governor Daniel Biss will have two housing events in Chicago.

*The week ahead: On Wednesday, the City Council meets, as does the Cook County Board. On Thursday, the City Club of Chicago will host a panel about sanctuary cities that includes Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia and former U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh.

From the notebook

*More #MeToo fallout: Government agencies would be required to publicly disclose whether they've entered into a severance agreement with an employee accused of sexual harassment under legislation introduced by a Republican lawmaker.

The proposal from Rep. David McSweeney, R-Barrington Hills, comes as elected officials and prominent figures nationwide face heightened scrutiny amid a flood of sexual misconduct allegations.

In Illinois, state Sen. Ira Silverstein, D-Chicago, has been accused of sexually harassing a victims rights advocate while working with the woman to pass legislation. Silverstein denied the allegations, which brought to light flaws in the way ethics complaints are handled at the Capitol as the office charged with investigating allegations sat empty for three years.

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The measure pushed by McSweeney would require local government agencies, including schools and community colleges, to disclose within three days details of severance agreements whenever any workers are fired over alleged sexual harassment or discrimination

A related proposal he also introduced late last week would prevent taxpayer dollars from being used to pay off legal settlements resulting from a state lawmaker's sexual misconduct. (Bill Lukitsch)

*Endorsements: Democratic governor candidate Daniel Biss, a state senator from Evanston, has won the endorsement of the New Trier Township Democratic organization. ... Republican governor candidate Jeanne Ives won the Wheeling Township GOP endorsement.

*On the "Sunday Spin": On this week's show, Chicago Tribune political reporter Rick Pearson's guests were Democratic state Reps. Mike Zalewski and Jaime Andrade on bitcoin; and Democratic attorney general candidates Jesse Ruiz andAaron Goldstein appeared separately. The "Sunday Spin" airs from 7 to 9 a.m. on WGN-AM 720. Listen to the full show here.

What we're writing (Long holiday weekend edition)



*Trump says his words on immigration were misrepresented by "Senator Dicky Durbin."

*Democrat Kennedy calls Republican Ives' gun crime solution ignorant and stupid.

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*Ives challenges Rauner on abortion rights at Chicago March for Life.

*Durbin slams Trump "shithole" denial as furor grows over immigration remarks.

*Pritzker says Rauner guilty of "fatal mismanagement" at veterans home.

*Rauner's education agency rebukes him for funding bill veto.

*Aldermen approve $5.6M subsidy for Presence Health despite flap over abortion services, birth control.

*Emanuel appoints marketing executive to Chicago Board of Education.

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*State school officials rebuke Rauner over education veto, citing "disruption" and "confusion."

*Chicago aldermen advance $9.3 million wrongful conviction settlement tied to Burge detectives.

*CPS announces new special ed hires just before aldermen publicly blast them for cuts.

*Cook County assessor not cooperating with investigation, IG complains.

*Attorney general candidate relieved no one hurt after he, his campaign team robbed at gunpoint.

*Illinois' higher education leaders at odds over proposed budget.

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*Two Chicago cops recommended for firing in fatal shooting of teen in 2016.

*As Uptown 'cage hotel' prepares to close for renovations, residents pack up to leave  and face an uncertain future.

What we're reading

*Murder on the margins: Chicago women strangled, killers at large.

*Cranberries singer Dolores O'Riordan dies.

*Revolution Brewing releases 17 percent beer aged for two years in bourbon and whiskey barrels.

*Why Hamilton likely will close in Chicago in a year. (Whew, good thing we got tickets for next month.)

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Follow the money

*Candidates' quarterly reports are due. Watch them roll in there.

*The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform has the latest cash tallies in the race for governor.

*Track Illinois campaign contributions in real time here and here.

Beyond Chicago

*Trump says he is "not a racist."

*DACA deal appears unlikely.

*Is the Republican tax overhaul working?

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*Missile alert error shows people don't know how to react.
Former President Barack Obama waves at a group of pedestrians gathered in front of his Kenwood neighborhood residence before heading to jury duty at the Daley Center on Nov. 8, 2017. (Alyssa Pointer / Chicago Tribune)

WASHINGTON  A year after leaving the White House, former president Barack Obama has been on the go, writing a memoir, giving paid speeches, passing the plate for his future presidential center in Chicago and even making a stop in the city for jury duty.

Some of his closest allies predict hell ratchet up his activities during his second year off the job, even if specific plans remain under wraps.

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Hell continue to be politically active in 2018, with more endorsements and more campaigning, his spokeswoman Katie Hill said. Still, he wont maintain such a high profile, lest he risk taking political oxygen away from Democrats in a critical election year, associates said.

Obama likely wont ever take a day job, they said, and will keep carefully picking his spots when he disagrees with President Donald Trump, who has moved quickly to undo an array of Obama measures.

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A year after handing over the keys to the White House, the countrys 44th president is, in the words of former top strategist David Axelrod, liberated.

He must feel 100 pounds lighter, said Axelrod, who leads the University of Chicagos Institute of Politics. He is still deeply concerned about the world, and the things that always concerned him, but theres something to be said about not having those red phones around him, metaphorically speaking.

Where hell put down roots, though, remains an open question. If the schedule holds, hes likely to be back in Chicago in 2018 to break ground for his presidential center, but has made his home in Washington for the last year.

The Obamas stayed in the capital so daughter Sasha can finish high school there in 2019. Their $8.1 million residence in Washington keeps them anchored on the East Coast, as does older daughter Malia, a Harvard freshman.

Hillary Clintons latest book said the Obamas as far back as 2013 mused about moving to New York, and Axelrod said hes heard a lot of speculation about where the family will settle.

I expect well see a lot of him in Chicago, but where his mail shows up, I dont know, he said.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 8 Former President Barack Obama leaves the jury area at the Daley Center in Chicago after arrving for jury duty Nov. 8, 2017. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

Obama, 56, was not the first to leave the Oval Office in his prime. Bill Clinton, now 71, and Jimmy Carter, 93, likewise left the office in their mid-50s and have had long post-presidential careers. In visits last year to more than a dozen foreign countries, Obama met with foreign dignitaries but routinely carved out time to engage with youth.

Im really obsessed now with training the next generation of leaders to make their mark on the world, he told the U.K.s Prince Harry in September.

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Last April, Obama met privately on Chicagos South Side with at-risk young men in a job-training program created by his friend and former Education secretary, Arne Duncan.

The former CEO of Chicago Public Schools said the meeting in the Roseland neighborhood with about 25 men was an emotional one. Many of the men had been shot, some had served prison terms and none had fathers in their lives. Obamas passion for mentoring young people and bolstering tomorrows leaders arises because he identifies with them, according to Duncan.

He talked about the absence of his father in his life and how that shaped him and he talked about some of that anger, some of that resentment, what that did, Duncan said. He talked about some of the mistakes he made, but how Hawaii was a much more forgiving environment than the South Side of Chicago.

Duncan said Obama has shared with him a prophecy  one he at first thought was a little crazy. Obama said he thought what he could do to help young people over the next 25 or 30 years could actually be more impactful than the eight he was president.

If he can really help train a generation of not hundreds, but thousands of leaders, not just domestically but internationally, Duncan said, you think about the ripple effect not just over the next 25 years, but over the next 50 years.

Altogether, Obama traveled to Chicago at least seven times since the 2017 inauguration, not counting trips he may have made under the radar. Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama are still obviously deeply committed to Chicago, said Hill, his spokeswoman. Its near and dear to his heart and its where the foundation is headquartered, and the work there  is going to scale up dramatically in the coming months and years.

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Plans call for his presidential center to open in Jackson Park in 2021.

Its his intent to create a global platform for civic engagement, so as his travels take him around the world, its important for him to engage with young people before the bricks and mortar of the Obama Center are completed, said Valerie Jarrett, a former top Obama White House adviser, now an unpaid adviser to the Obama Foundation.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 9 An artist's aerial view of the planned Obama Presidential Center in Chicago's Jackson Park. (DBOX for the Obama Foundation)

When the former president was in Chicago last month for Mayor Rahm Emanuels summit meeting on climate, Obama said it is hard to address climate change in an unusual time but never mentioned Trump by name.

On major issues important to him, Obama has challenged Trump publicly. Hes defended the Affordable Care Act, spoken in favor of protections for so-called Dreamers and criticized the new administration for abandoning the Paris climate agreement.

Obama respected the latitude shown by former Republican Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, Axelrod said, So he has resisted commenting on Trump except around specific policy concerns and then only very rarely. I dont think you have to be Sherlock Holmes to decide hes got big differences (with Trump), but  hes going to be measured about how he publicly expresses himself.

Jarrett, like others, is reluctant to address how Obama regards Trump, whose administration has targeted many of the ex-presidents policies and priorities, such as trade pacts, net neutrality, an expansion of national monuments and improved relations with Cuba.

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Former Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said the former president also has largely stayed out of the fray to leave space for the next generation of Democratic leaders to emerge. Observed Axelrod: To the extent he (Obama) is the point man on some sort of resistance, he is retarding the ability of other leaders to step forward as they should.

Talking about his new life, Obama told Prince Harry that he sleeps later and has become reacquainted with traffic and after experiencing the presidencys accelerated pace and constantly full inbox, everything still feels to some degree like it is moving in slow motion.

Meantime, he has enjoyed ample island time in places from the British Virgin Islands to Bali.

Hes an Illinoisan by choice and a Hawaiian by birth, Axelrod said. Thats the environment in which he grew up. He loves the warm weather, he loves the beach and he loves the water.

There were limits to what you could do as president, because you had a lot to do.

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Axelrod, like others, rules out a day job for Obama. Eight years in the White House isnt like any other job, he said. Those are dog years. Its pretty tough to adapt to another job once youve been president. Only past presidents know completely what the demands of the job are.

kskiba@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @KatherineSkiba

[ After months of secrecy, a glimpse of Obama Center's evolving design ]

[ 2 months out of office, Barack Obama is having a post-presidency like no other ]

[ Obama lifts lid on post-presidency career with civic engagement forum at U. of C. ]
WASHINGTON  Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin on Tuesday grilled a Cabinet secretary who took part in last weeks White House immigration meeting during which the president reportedly called African nations shithole countries, but she said she did not recall the president using those specific words.

At a Senate hearing, Durbin asked Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen how President Donald Trump characterized countries in Africa at Thursdays meeting.

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I dont  I dont specifically remember a categorization of countries in Africa, she replied. Nielsen on Fox News Sunday also said she didnt recall Trump saying the exact phrase but that he undoubtedly will continue to use strong language on immigration.

Durbin pressed Nielsen on Tuesday about what the strong language was.

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Replied Nielsen: Lets see. Strong language. There was, uh  apologies, I dont remember (a) specific word. What I was struck with frankly as Im sure you were as well was the just general profanity that was used in the room by almost everyone.

On Tuesday, Durbin asked Neilsen if she heard him use profanity.

No sir, Nielsen said of Durbin. Neither did I.

The exchange was the latest in the spat between Durbin and Trump over the senators contention that the president referred to African nations as shitholes and asked why America would want to accept more immigrants from Haiti. Trump on Monday lashed out at Durbin via Twitter, calling him Dicky Durbin and saying Illinois senior senator totally misrepresented what was said at the immigration meeting in question.

Three White House officials said two other GOP senators in the meeting told the White House they heard Trump say shithouse not shithole, letting the pair deny the presidents comments, The Washington Post reported.

To another question from Durbin, Nielsen said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had used strong and tough language in Thursdays meeting. Durbin asked if Graham was repeating exactly what the president had said.

I remember specific cuss words being used by a variety of members, Nielsen said, without citing any profanities.

Durbin defended Graham by saying his strong words repeated exactly the words used by the president, which you cannot remember.

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Durbin also asked Nielsen if she remembered the president saying he wants more European immigrants and asking why we cant have more immigrants from Norway.

She answered: I heard him repeating what he had learned in a meeting before: That they are industrious, that they are a hardworking county, they dont have much crime there, they dont have much debt.

Just before Durbin questioned Nielsen, he introduced two so-called Dreamers who were brought into the U.S. illegally as children. One is a woman studying medicine at Loyola University Chicago whose ambition to be an obstetrician-gynecologist in underserved communities. The other is a man whom the Illinois senator described as a chemical engineer who aspires to serve in the military.

Durbin has been working with Graham and other senators on an immigration deal, but the ongoing meeting spat possibly has dimmed the outlook for an agreement.

kskiba@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @KatherineSkiba

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RELATED:

[ Trump says his words on immigration were misrepresented by 'Senator Dicky Durbin' ]

[ Trump acknowledges 'tough' language but appears to deny 'shithole' remark ]

[ A look inside the tense, vulgar White House meeting on immigration ]
Troy LaRaviere, a former CPS principal and president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, attends a town hall gathering on fair elections legislation on Nov. 15, 2017, at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Chicago. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

Mayoral challenger Troy LaRaviere launched his campaign website Tuesday morning, and in the process called Mayor Rahm Emanuels office "incompetent" and "corrupt."

The website, www.troyforchicago.com, features the headline "For the People" and declares, "It's time we elect a mayor who will make City Hall serve all our families and neighborhoods." Two central themes of the site and LaRaviere's budding campaign are allegations that Emanuel serves the interest of wealthy donors instead of ordinary Chicagoans and has no plans to solve the city's biggest challenges.

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"Our mayor's office is incompetent," LaRaviere said in a statement. "A simple look at our city's mounting debt, the mayor's amateurish leadership of our school system or his complete inadequacy in both supporting police and holding them accountable is just the beginning of the mounting evidence of his incompetence."

LaRaviere, who is president of the Chicago principals association, also charged that Emanuel's office is "corrupt" because "wealthy investors, bankers and corporations have seized control of city government to make it work for the few at the expense of the masses." LaRaviere pointed to a pair of Chicago Tribune reports from 2015 and 2017 that found that up to 70 percent of the mayor's top donors have benefited from actions at City Hall, from contracts and zoning approvals to appointments and personal endorsements from the mayor.

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Chicagoans want solutions, not platitudes and insults, Emanuel campaign spokesman Pete Giangreco said in response to LaRavieres comments and website. If a candidate for mayor doesnt have a set of real ideas and a real record of getting things done, then they really arent up to the job.

In April 2016, the Emanuel-controlled Chicago Public Schools removed LaRaviere as principal of Lakeviews Blaine Elementary amid allegations of insubordination for opposing a standardized test and ignoring warnings about engaging in on-the-job "political activity." LaRaviere insisted his firing was "politically motivated," and the move drew a rebuke from then-U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who slammed Emanuel for having an "unhealthy obsession with taking revenge." The mayor said he had nothing to do with the decision.

The move came as LaRaviere was running for president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association labor group, a post he would win and still holds.

On his website, LaRaviere promises a fundamentally progressive agenda and describes himself as a strong supporter of the platform of Senator Bernie Sanders above a video of one of the two ads he appeared in for Sanders presidential campaign.

LaRaviere also takes aim at Emanuels financial management of the city, pointing to a Tribune report from March 2017 that found that the mayors short-term budget solutions would cost the city $1 billion in interest, much of it coming due after the 2019 election. On his website, LaRaviere predicts Chicagoans will pay for the debt with increased property taxes, dubbing it Rahms Debt-Tax.

As mayor, I will be upfront about the cost of good government, end the practice of indebting taxpayers to big banks and raise enough revenue to adequately fund city services, LaRaviere says on his website. He did not specify, however, what taxes he would raise or institute to come up with enough money to wipe out such debt.

LaRaviere (pronounced Luh-Raah-vee-AY) also advocates for an elected school board to replace the mayoral-appointed panel, a move long pushed by progressives and the Chicago Teachers Union that would require a change in state law. LaRaviere also supports campaign finance reform and the creation of a small donor match ordinance in which small contributions would be matched with public funds in an effort to take big money out of the citys politics.

Other planks of his campaign platform include racial and ethnic equality, safer neighborhoods, improved education, protections for immigrants and refocusing city resources on economic development in neighborhoods with higher needs.

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In November, LaRaviere became the first candidate to declare he would challenge Emanuel, telling the Tribune in an interview he intended to run. Last week, LaRaviere filed the paperwork to create a campaign fund.

Former Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy has worked with an exploratory committee eyeing a run on his behalf and has scheduled a campaign fundraiser for next month, saying he intends to make a decision on a bid soon. Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer and businessman Willie Wilson, who ran in 2015, have not ruled out a bid.

bruthhart@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @BillRuthhart

[ Troy LaRaviere blasts CPS, details reasons he was ousted as Blaine principal ]

[ Emanuel tries to dig out, look ahead to third term bid ]

[ Emanuel's 2019 mayoral foes: LaRaviere in, 'Chuy' close, McCarthy warmer ]
The Danish inventor at the center of the mysterious death of Swedish freelance journalist Kim Wall, whose dismembered body was found off the coast of Copenhagen in August, was formally charged with killing her Tuesday.

Prosecutors say that during a trip on his private submarine, Peter Madsen, 47, either strangled or cut Wall's throat before severing her body and tossing it into the sea. Madsen is charged with homicide, dismemberment and the indecent handling of a corpse.

"This is a very unusual and extremely brutal case which has had tragic consequences for Kim Wall and her relatives," prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen said in a statement from the Danish prosecution authority.

Wall's disappearance and gruesome death has drawn international attention, demonstrating the risks female freelance journalists can face. Friends and family say Wall, 30, was a brave reporter who during her brief career reported from Sri Lanka, the Marshall Islands and North Korea.

Madsen in October denied killing Wall, and said she died of carbon monoxide poisoning inside his submarine while he was on deck. Wall boarded the submarine on Aug. 10 to report a story about Madsen, according to her family. Madsen is known in Denmark for raising money through crowdfunding to build rockets and submarines.

She was reported missing the next day. Madsen was rescued from Koge Bay that day after, according to police, purposely sinking his vessel, a 60-foot UC3 Nautilus.

Prosecutors are seeking a sentence of life in prison for Madsen or, based on the results of a psychiatric evaluation, that he be sent to a mental institution. Prosecutors said the killing was premeditated but did not provide a motive.

"The interest in the case has been enormous," Buch-Jepsen said. "However, we hope the media will respect that further evidence in the case must be presented in court and not in the press."

Madsen was taken into custody Aug. 12, and has since repeatedly altered his account of the circumstances that led to Wall's death. Before claiming in October that she died of carbon monoxide poisoning, Madsen in August said he dropped Wall off shore in Copenhagen before his submarine sank. He then told a Danish court in September that while giving Wall a tour of his boat, he lost his grip on a 150-pound hatch, which collided with Wall's skull. He told prosecutors at the time he panicked and gave Wall a "burial at sea."

"In the shock I was in, it was the right thing to do," Madsen told the court, according to Agence France-Presse.

In early October, divers found Wall's dismembered remains. Wall's legs were found in plastic bags weighed with metal, according to the Associated Press, and her recovered head showed no signs of fracture - which suggested she had not been struck by a hatch. Another bag contained a knife and Wall's clothing. Weeks earlier, a naked torso that had been stabbed 15 times was recovered nearby.

Madsen, who had previously been charged with manslaughter, was being held in Vestre Prison in Copenhagen.

The Washington Post's Rachel Siegel contributed.
This photo taken on Jan. 9, 2018, shows the gaming room inside the new Four Winds Casino Resort in South Bend, Ind. (Robert Franklin / AP)

SOUTH BEND, Ind.  A Native American tribe is ready to open a northern Indiana casino to join three it already operates in southwestern Michigan.

The Four Winds South Bend casino owned by the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians will be Indiana's first tribal casino. An opening ceremony is being held at noon Tuesday, with the casino scheduled to open to the public at 4 p.m. Tuesday.

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The tribe says the casino will have about 1,800 electronic gambling machines, four restaurants, three bars and employ about 1,200 people. It is on South Bend's southwest side, near the U.S. 31/20 bypass.

The new tribal casino won't pay state taxes, giving it a business advantage over Indiana's 13 existing casinos.

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The Pokagon Band says it has some 5,000 members in the South Bend area.
A sitting U.S. senator plans to give a speech this week comparing the president of his own party to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. That in itself is remarkable.

"It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies," Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., plans to say in a speech about President Donald Trump classifying the news media as "the enemy of the people."

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But Flake's warnings about Trump are even more significant than comparing the president to a Soviet dictator. When Flake criticizes the president, he is criticizing his entire party for standing by such a leader.

"This alone should be a source of great shame for us in this body, especially for those of us in the president's party. For they are shameful, repulsive statements," Flake plans to say in the speech. The Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe obtained the remarks, which Flake plans to give as the president hands out "fake news" awards this week.

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On Jan. 7 Trump tweeted:

"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!"

Flake is free to speak his mind because he is retiring this year, rather than risking losing a primary because he has criticized Trump. And his retirement speech read like a dual indictment of Trump and Republican leaders who continue to work with and normalize him.

As I wrote when Flake announced his retirement in October by saying he would "not be complicit" in Trumpism: "The entire premise of it is that Trump is bad for the country and people shouldn't stand by and let him ruin it. So the next logical question is: What does he think of people who aren't speaking out against Trump?"

In other words: To let Trump be Trump for the sake of getting reelected is just as bad for democracy as Trump is, Flake argued, then and now.

Flake has tried different avenues to try to get his party to ditch Trump. He has argued that Trump and Trumpism are making Republicans unelectable. "We are in trouble as a party if we continue to follow both Roy Moore and Donald Trump," he said in November, doubling down on something similar he said on a hot mic a day earlier.

To Flake, the rise of controversial candidates, the decline of the power of the establishment to stop them and polls showing that swing voters are souring on Trump are all neon-flashing warning signs that the United States is leaving the Republican Party in the era of Trump. So to save the GOP, it should ditch Trump the way Flake has.

Trump has his critics among Senate Republicans, but Flake is the only high-profile one pointing a finger at party leaders and voters for enabling it. Sen. Bob Corker, Tenn., called Trump's White House "an adult day-care center" and said Trump might start World War III, but he never broadened his barbs to his own party.

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Sen. John McCain, Ariz., has urged the GOP to "fight" against Trumpism, frequently reminding his party that "we are not the president's subordinates. We are his equals." But that's not the same thing as indicting the GOP for putting up with Trump.

Flake, by contrast, is using increasingly clear language to say Republicans are nearly as guilty as he thinks the president is for a demise of democracy and political norms.

"I dare say that anyone who has the privilege and awesome responsibility to serve in this chamber knows that these reflexive slurs of 'fake news' are dubious, at best," Flake will say in his speech this week.

It doesn't seem as though congressional Republicans are heeding Flake's warnings that Trumpism is bad for Republicanism. Or at least, that embracing it is worse for Republicans than ditching Trump altogether.

Since Flake announced his retirement, Republicans have passed a tax plan and given Trump a sizable chunk of credit, GOP leaders have defended Trump's apparent misunderstandings about a foreign surveillance law and immigration, and several GOP senators have sided with the president over whether he called Haiti and African and Latin American nations "shithole countries."

And really, what choice do Republicans have? Trump is president. He's the only one who can sign bills into law. To ditch Trump wholesale would be the equivalent of ditching their hope of accomplishing anything else while Republicans control Washington.

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To Flake, Republicans are damned if they stick with Trump. GOP leaders feel as though they would be worse off if they ditched Trump. Categorize this as one more example of the no-win situation Trump is putting the Republican Party in.
President Donald Trump decried Thursday that the U.S. was not taking in enough immigrants from Norway, and accepting too many arrivals from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, combined with some flowery language I would prefer not to reproduce. There has been a vociferous emotional reaction, but Id like to take a more sober tack and consider what the data actually tell us, focusing on Africa and Norway.

One of the most striking facts, unbeknownst even to many immigration advocates, is the superior education of Africans coming to this country. Of adults 25 years or older born in Africa and living in the U.S., 41.7 percent have a bachelors degree or more, according to 2009 data. For contrast, only 28.1 percent of the native-born American population has a bachelors degree or more, and 26.8 percent of foreign-born adults as a whole have a college degree, both well below the African rate.

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How about high school diplomas? About one-third of immigrants overall lack this credential but only 11.7 percent of African-born migrants dont have a high school degree  close to the estimated rate for native-born Americans, 11.4 percent.

Or consider Nigerian-Americans, Nigeria being Africas most populous nation: Their education levels are among the very highest in the U.S., above those of Asians, with 17 percent having a masters degree.

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About three-quarters of African migrants speak English, and they have above-average rates of labor force participation. They are also much less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans.

That implies we could accept more African immigrants with mutual benefit. Subjectively, I would also note that sub-Saharan Africa is the region where I encounter the least anti-American sentiment. Thats broadly consistent with these poll results.

As a resident of the Washington, D.C., area, I live alongside an especially high number and proportion of African immigrants. It is well known in this region that African immigration outcomes in terms of education, starting new businesses, safety and assimilation are quite positive.

Theyre not sending us their best people is a claim I hear from Trump in his speeches and news conferences. Yet thats the opposite of the truth when it comes to Africa.

How about Norwegians? During Americas earlier age of mass migration starting in the late 19th century, the U.S. received many Norwegians. They were especially likely to come from low-skilled backgrounds; they had problems assimilating; and about 70 percent returned to their home country. If we compare the 16 immigrant groups from that time for which we have data, the Norwegians and the Portuguese did the worst in terms of wage gaps.

To be clear, I think this experiment with Norwegian migration has more than worked out all right, as Norwegian-Americans now have above-average levels of income and have assimilated extremely well. But this is a cautionary tale, indicating that the groups one might think would succeed right away often face big struggles. Ole Edvart Rolvaags Giants in the Earth, the famous 1920s novel of Norwegian migration to the Dakotas in the 1870s, shows the enterprise was highly fraught and assimilation was a major issue. It is noteworthy that the novel was originally published in Norwegian, whereas the major Nigerian and Nigerian-American novels of today are typically written and first published in English.

It would be a mistake to look at these comparisons and conclude that somehow Africans are intrinsically superior to Norwegians. In fact, there is some pretty simple economic theory at work. The harder it is to get from one country to another, the more the immigration process selects for individuals who are especially ambitious and resourceful.

Economist Edward Lazear suggests a simple experiment: Consider immigrants to the U.S. from Algeria, Israel and Japan, and rank them in order of most to least educated. The correct answer? Algeria, Israel, then Japan. That may be counterintuitive at first glance, but its easy to see how it works. If you are Algerian and educated, or aspire to be educated, your prospects in Algeria are relatively poor. A talented, educated person in Japan or Israel can do just fine by staying at home. These kinds of considerations explain about 73 percent of the variation in the educational outcomes of migrants.

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In other words, Trump is not only being offensive, he is also quite wrong.

Bloomberg

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.
Walmart joined other companies in announcing an employee wage hike and bonus program. Citing "the opportunities tax reform creates for us," the retailer said Thursday that the measures "will benefit the company's more than 1 million U.S. hourly associates."

Interest in this announcement extends well beyond the company itself. The move raises relevant questions for those seeking to predict the future economy: Does this event mark the attainment of a critical mass that makes it inevitable the corporate sector as a whole will pass on part of the relief from the recent tax-cut package in the form of higher wages? Will it translate into greater short-term consumption and growth, as well as greater corporate investment and higher growth potential? And will it assuage those who are concerned about higher government debt?

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Starting in February, the starting wages of Walmart associates will increase to $11 an hour. Eligible full- and part-time employees will also receive a one-time bonus to be determined by their length of service (including $1,000 for those with at least 20 years). Combined, these two measures will add $700 million of expenses to the amount the retail giant had already budgeted for in its fiscal-year planning.

Yet the announcement was also met with criticism.

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Some have noted that, for most employees, the one-off bonus will be less beneficial than a generalized increase in wages, and that the new starting hourly wage would only catch up to the mandated minimum that is already in effect in some states. And the change is occurring in the context of a tightening labor market that opens greater alternative employment opportunities for the company's associates. In addition, the announcement came just a few hours before Walmart said it would close 63 Sam's Club warehouse locations.

Nonetheless, there are three reasons why the news is systemically consequential and, therefore, should be of interest to a broad range of economists:

 First, Walmart has joined the growing list of companies passing on some of the benefit from the tax cuts to employees in a public way. This will make it increasingly difficult for other financially viable companies to resist internal and external pressures to do the same. Indeed, we could be witnessing the initial phases of a generalized phenomenon that will help address, at least for 2018, a recurrent problem for the economy: stagnant wage growth.

 Second, given a high marginal propensity to consume among many beneficiaries, such corporate decisions will likely lead to higher consumption overall. The durability of the resulting positive growth impetus would increase significantly if the higher aggregate demand were also to induce companies, many of them already both profitable and cash-rich, to expand their investment plans.

 Third, a sustainable pickup in growth would help alleviate concerns about the higher government debt associated with the tax reduction for companies.

For years, Walmart's business plans and decisions were closely followed for insights about what lies ahead for the retail sector. Should this change provide another example, the U.S. would take a further step forward in seeking to reverse too many years of growth that has been too low and insufficiently inclusive.

Bloomberg

Mohamed A. El-Erian is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is the chief economic adviser at Allianz SE, the parent company of Pimco, where he served as CEO and co-CIO. His books include "The Only Game in Town" and "When Markets Collide."
President Donald Trump listens as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson speaks during an event to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Friday, Jan. 12, 2018, in Washington. (Evan Vucci / AP)

President Donald Trump, having clearly spent the morning absorbed in the careful study of immigration issues, just unleashed this thoughtful and considered policy prescription.

Trump tweeted "We must have Security at our VERY DANGEROUS SOUTHERN BORDER, and we must have a great WALL to help protect us, and to help stop the massive inflow of drugs pouring into our country!"

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The notion that a wall will stop the influx of drugs is a fantasy, but the real point here is that Trump is doubling down on his rejection of a deal reached by a bipartisan group of senators that would protect the "dreamers," because it didn't give him enough concessions, including on the wall. That rejection makes a government shutdown more likely.

But now, thanks to an important new report in The Post, we have learned much more about how and why he rejected this compromise. And it's grounds for serious pessimism about what comes next.

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The Post report confirms that despite Trump's denial of the "shithole countries" comment, Trump did, in fact, privately conclude that the deal would result in more people coming to the United States "from countries he deemed undesirable." This shows that Trump rejected the deal (as I argued) because it does not do enough to reverse the current racial and ethnic mix in the U.S.

But it gets worse: The Post also reports that Trump was originally favorable toward the deal, but the anti-immigration hardliners around him intervened, on the grounds that it would supposedly be "damaging" to Trump and "would hurt him with his political base." This included (unsurprisingly) Stephen Miller and even (disturbingly) Chief of Staff John F. Kelly. After that, The Post reports, Trump began telling friends that the agreement was "a terrible deal for me."

This is dispiriting to learn, because in reality, the deal actually makes substantial concessions to Trump. The deal would offer legal protections to the dreamers  people who were brought here illegally as children  in exchange for more money poured into border security, an end to some types of family-based immigration (dreamers will not be able to petition for their parents to get legalization, though they would get temporary protected status) and a cut of half the amount of visas the lottery system awards to people from historically lower-immigration countries.

These are both meaningful concessions. For the vast majority of lawmakers, the argument here is not over whether to protect the dreamers  Trump himself supports doing this  it's over what Trump should be given in exchange for agreeing to it. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that as many as 500,000 parents of dreamers who might otherwise have tried to gain legalization probably would not be able to under this deal, according to the group's senior policy analyst Julia Gelatt.

In humanitarian terms, this would be a bitter pill for the dreamers. "The tension that dreamers face is that they often feel their parents have already made a lot of sacrifices for them," Gelatt tells me. "A bill that would further limit their parents' opportunities may be hard for many dreamers to swallow."

The deal would also result in 25,000 fewer visas to new immigrants by lottery per year, Gelatt says. Instead, those protections would now be awarded to people with temporary protected status  people who would have stayed anyway if Trump were not also rolling back that program. And the deal completely sidelines the question of what to do about the 11 million undocumented people already here  which of course allows their deportations to continue apace.

Trump is easily manipulated

Yet Trump was easily manipulated into believing this deal would sell out his base. This suggests Trump is both totally lost on the policy details and is captive to the idea  pushed heavily by a few loud voices on the far right  that his base is not just ardently restrictionist but also will break out into open rebellion if that sentiment is not honored to the hilt, rendering all compromise and problem-solving impossible. Indeed, The Post reports that Trump originally thought his "shithole" comment would also help with the base (how this squares with his subsequent denial of the comment is anyone's guess).

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Yet many in his base might not actually reject a deal protecting the dreamers: A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that large majorities of non-college whites, older voters, and even white men support such protections. And Trump is rejecting the compromise even though it was negotiated by a bipartisan group of senators  a genuine good faith effort that was easily poisoned in Trump's mind by a cadre of advisers operating with seemingly bottomless bad faith.

One of the biggest lies at the core of Trumpism is the idea that great swaths of Real America are rooting for the hardest of hard-line immigration crackdowns to succeed and that only liberal elites in their bubble don't get this. But this idea has itself created a bubble around Trump, and his most cynical advisers are very skilled at keeping it in place.

Washington Post

Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog, a reported opinion blog with a liberal slant.
Gov. Bruce Rauner signs education funding reform bill SB 1947 at Ebinger Elementary School in Chicago on Aug. 31, 2017. Earlier this month Rauner issued an amendatory veto on SB 444, a trailer bill to this legislation. (Ashlee Rezin / AP)

Illiinois new program to help thousands of students snare tuition scholarships for private schools is off to a terrific start. Individual and corporate donors already have pledged about $40 million to help low- and moderate-income students gain a better education.

We strongly supported this program as part of a sweeping Illinois school funding overhaul designed to send more money to poor and needy schools.

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But some needy schools and students may be left out.

Heres the snag: The law says that schools must be recognized by the Illinois State Board of Education to participate in the scholarship program. That means a school's educational program has been approved by ISBE and meets minimum state academic requirements.

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But many private schools havent sought ISBE recognition because it isnt mandatory. Now, though, they need it so they can raise donations and make scholarships available to their students. But the process can take at least a year. Result: Dozens of Catholic and independent schools were blindsided by the requirement and now complain that theyll be shut out under the current law.

Heres where it gets complicated. Earlier this month, Gov. Bruce Rauner tried to accommodate those schools by tacking an amendatory veto onto another bill. The bill makes technical changes that would allow the state to go forward with the new public school funding formula. Without those changes, 178 school districts would not receive $37.8 million in promised funding, ISBE says. Chicago Public Schools may lose about $44 million.

This is about delay, delay, delay on something that took 30 years to pass, Democratic state Sen. Andy Manar, one of the sponsors of the legislation that created the new formula, tells us. I dont care about the politics. I want the schools to realize the promise they were given when the governor signed (the overhaul bill) into law.  Because of this veto, that is now going to take much longer than it otherwise would have.

Heres the outlook: Lawmakers must deal with Rauners changes to the trailer bill before the new formula can be fully implemented. They can accept the governors changes or override them, or pass a new bill; if they choose not to consider the current bill, the legislation will die. And, presumably, those 178 public districts will not receive all the promised funding.

All of this will be on the agenda when the Hatfields and McCoys begin a new legislative session later this month. So what to do? Focus on priorities: This should be about lower-income students getting the best education possible. Not political brinkmanship in an election season.

We have no problem with expanding the eligibility rules or extending the deadline so schools that were caught short can get up to speed. It would be unconscionable, however, if this relatively small issue ties up millions of dollars to be divvied under the new funding formula.

Gov. Rauner, lawmakers, make sure the scholarship program works for all students. Democratic state Rep. La Shawn Ford of Chicago largely agrees with Rauner and is working to make the changes Rauner seeks. A number of African-American schools have been shut out unfairly, he tells us. The tax credit was built on helping poor people, and we should make sure no one is left out. We second that.

In a state with leaders focused on whats best for children, this would be an easy fix. In Illinois  ?
As the Chicago Tribunes resident expert on hip trends in the American youthscape, I want to discuss the latest craze: eating brightly colored laundry detergent pods.

If youre a lame adult  which I am definitely NOT  you might have missed out on the Tide pod challenge, a deeply intellectual coming-of-age endeavor in which a teen bites into one of those clear, squishy detergent packets. The attempted consumption of said packet results in epic levels of mouth foaming and possible gagging and/or death, creating a chaotic and outrageous scene that can be recorded and posted on YouTube so others can enjoy the teens ability to make terrible life decisions.

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The Washington Post, citing data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers, reported that more than 50 teens were intentionally exposed to detergent capsules last year, and ABC News recently noted that already this year there have been about 20 cases of intentional detergent pod consumption.

The Minnesota Poison Control Center this month tweeted: While the Tide Pod Challenge may have started as a joke, it is extremely dangerous! Even if the entire pod is not swallowed, ingesting just a small amount of the concentrated detergent can cause effects such as burns inside or around the mouth, nausea or breathing problems.

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It would be easy to simply lecture teenagers by saying lame adults things like: Are you kidding me with this nonsense?; Have you lost your damn mind?; or Maybe dont do that, OK?

But the last thing a teen wants to hear from an adult is a long lecture on why eating rubbery gel packs filled with poisonous chemicals meant for cleaning dirty clothes is a bad idea. Its like saying, You probably shouldnt stick your face in that fan, to which a teen would reply, What do you know, old man! before epically having his nose lopped off by a fan blade.

No, the better approach is to first blame adults for the very existence of the dangerous detergent pods. Explain that the squeezable pods were invented because adult humans found the act of hoisting a box or plastic bottle of detergent and pouring some into a washing machine too taxing and demanded something marginally simpler, unconcerned about any potential risks this convenience might pose to small children or extremely dumb teenagers. (You might leave off the extremely dumb part if your teenager happens to be extremely dumb.)

By taking responsibility for the pods, you will turn them into an uncool adult thing that no self-respecting teenager will want to be caught dead biting into on a YouTube video.

The next step is to redirect that teen desire to do something incredibly dumb in front of a camera. I have a few suggestions, though you must keep these ideas out of the hands of teenagers, which shouldnt be hard since the last time a teenager read a newspaper was 1973.

For each of these activities, youll need to hire some teen actors (be sure to have them sign non-disclosure agreements); film them doing the activity; and then make sure the video goes viral and is frowned upon by adults.

Random Lawn Mowing: Have your rad teens sneak up to a neighbors house and then (insert electric guitar riff) MOW THE LAWN! When the surprised homeowner comes out to find teens doing his or her yard work, capture the #EXTREME reaction, then have the kids finish the work, return home and neatly put the lawnmower in the garage. Show your kids the video and say something like, Can you believe these idiot teens?! Before you know it, everyone will be getting their lawn mowed for free.

Vandalizing Apples: Take your teen actors to any grocery store and film them cackling and shouting Anarchy Rules! as they remove those annoying stickers from every apple in the produce section. #ApplePrankin! Before long, we adults will no longer have to deal with peeling those stickers off our apples, which is a convenience even greater than not having to pour detergent into the washing machine.

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Hack Your Parents Enemies: Huddle the teen actors around a laptop and shoot shaky video  from a variety of strange angles  as they hack into the bank accounts of all the people who have ever wronged you. Have the teens chant, Steal that cash! Steal that cash! as they transfer money into an offshore bank account you set up in the Cayman Islands. #HackYoRentsHaters! Post that video to YouTube, hit the go viral button or whatever it is the kids use and then sit your children down that night to tell them how disgraceful you think it is that teens are doing this. Wait a few weeks and then retire to the Caymans.

OK, that last one might be slightly illegal, but its still a substantial step up from having your teens eating Tide pods.

Speaking of which, make sure you line up a laundry service down in the Caymans. Last thing you want is to injure your tropical-drink-holding hand while lifting a detergent bottle.

rhuppke@chicagotribune.com

RELATED

[ Teens are daring each other to eat Tide pods. We don't need to tell you that's a bad idea. ]
To the editor: As a departed Illinois resident and business owner knowledgeable in insurance, I must wonder why, in the rush to bring in Google, Amazon and others, the biggest issue for a large employer is often overlooked.

Illinois is consistently ranked toward the bottom of all 50 states for the cost of workers compensation  and particularly for the outrageous litigation surrounding it. Any employer checking with their insurance advisers would never move to Illinois.

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 Michael Mead, Crivitz, Wis.

Eerie parallels

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To the editor: I got a kick out of the latest commercial from DirecTV. The ad shows people who still have cable TV also enjoying having their airline seats kicked by an unruly child, being bumped from behind by a grocery cart, and sitting in gum then laughing about it.

This commercial reminded me of the voters in Illinois who like to have their taxes go up, the cost of their medical coverage go up, the corruption in government continue, and their neighbors leave the state in droves.

Voters of Illinois, this DirecTV commercial applies to you. You keep electing the same people  and they are laughing at you.

 Harold Plucienik, Chicago Heights

The Goldilocks problem

To the editor: I grew up in a small town in southern Illinois. During a recent trip back there I met a retired couple who moved back from Wheaton at her request. He had always lived and worked in the suburbs, so small town life is a new experience. They now have a newly rehabbed house on six acres with pocket change for real estate tax. He loves it, and she wants to move back to Wheaton for its shopping and activities. Few people realize how much they will miss suburban life.

We discussed why people would leave the state when it has such a wide diversity in taxes, terrain, politics, religious fervor and pace of life.

My wife and I have been looking for a new area in which to retire for decades. Just like my new friends, a move needs to please both people, because it will be our last move! I love the mountains and the roads; she wont drive in mountains. We dont want to live in the big city or suburbs. We like green, so desert areas are out, as are hot summers. Hurricane- and flood-prone areas are out, as is Tornado Alley. Super cold and heavy snow are out, too. Our picks before we retired have already been overrun by retirees and vacationers driving up prices.

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Many people decide on a place without taking into consideration all the circumstances. One couple I know moved to Florida to be near their daughters family, leaving their son 1,200 miles away. Now they are moving back half way to Tennessee. Their politics and the place they picked in Florida didnt agree. She likes shopping and museums. Their new area has neither.

Leaving family and friends to move to another area can be traumatic. Sometimes one low tax is offset by another tax retirees hadnt thought about. Many of those I know that moved out of state have moved back to their previous area in Illinois. Climate change will cause more to move here as droughts and storms increase.

When I was a construction engineer, I was told there are only two good jobs: the one I left and the one I am going to. I think moving is the same thing. No matter where we live, problems exist to irritate us.

 Chuck Johnson, Morris
We believe that the Jan. 12 story Aldermen approve $5.6M subsidy for Presence Health despite flap over abortion services, birth control accurately reported how exchanges between City Council Finance Committee members and Dr. Laura Concannon, Presence Healths regional chief medical officer, proceeded. However, the exchanges ignored key aspects of the tax increment financing subsidy and how it benefits underserved populations of Chicago communities.

We are plagued by inequity in health care; the request for TIF money pending before the City Council is a chance to chip away at this historic wrong. The proposal uses TIF money in the Loop to free up funds for community clinics for low-income residents on the South and West sides.

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When Presence Health, one of the largest health systems in Illinois, was formed six years ago, we partnered with the city of Chicago to move 200 jobs downtown through TIF and made a commitment that we would recognize that public investment by building a cancer center and three medical homes in underserved neighborhoods. This was an innovative model that would tie $5.6 million of downtown TIF money  which must be spent downtown  to $14 million in much-needed health-care investments in disadvantaged neighborhoods around the city.

When all four of our care sites are open, they will serve over 15,000 patients. Our three medical homes are located in minority neighborhoods high in Medicaid enrollment that otherwise lack primary care options. The new Presence Center for Cancer and Specialty Care is a leading provider of cancer care to the West Side of Chicago. It serves as a shining example of what we all want: a top-tier, all-inclusive cancer center that primarily serves distressed communities.

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These medical homes and cancer center came to fruition through community input and a city willing to work with its health care providers to reduce health disparities. As a Sister of Mercy I am proud to be part of a strong history of providing health care to the poor and vulnerable populations of Chicago. Throughout these years faith-based organizations like Presence Health have partnered with the government to extend access to the poor and underserved. Today, the highest need is for quality primary care in distressed communities. Our investments are meeting that need because of the citys help through TIF funding. We urge the City Council to recognize the benefits of this partnership to Chicagos poor and vulnerable by approving the TIF agreement that made it possible.

 Sister Terry Maltby, RSM, vice chair, Presence Health Ministries
President Donald Trump speaks during a joint press statement with President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan on Tuesday, January 16, 2018 in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery / TNS)

Donald Trump saying something racist isnt exactly news anymore, observed Michael Che, of Saturday Night Live. Yet Trumps former wife, Ivana Trump, offers these kind words of support for her ex: Hes not a racist, she says, he just says racist things.

I dont think Donald is racist at all, the presidents first wife told Good Morning Britain on Monday. Sometimes he says these things which are silly, or he doesnt really mean them ... but hes definitely not racist, Im sure of that.

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Instead, she suggested, the president has so many people telling him left and right what to say and what not to say that sometimes maybe it gets confusing, she said.

Confusing? Thats a good description of the presidents latest flip-flop during negotiations on a proposed bipartisan immigration deal, during which he reportedly claimed with very vulgar language that America needs more immigrants from places like Norway and fewer from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa.

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Throwing in Norway turned his vulgar plea for a higher-skilled immigration pool into a stark call for white supremacy, straight from a white nationalist playbook.

By the way, immigrants from sub-Sahara Africa actually are better educated that most others, including most Americans. Of the 1.4 million immigrants from sub-Sahara Africa who are 25 and older, according to the Los Angeles Times, citing research from the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, 41 percent have a bachelor's degree, compared with 30 percent of all immigrants and 32 percent of the U.S.-born population  and 38 percent of the 19,000 U.S. immigrants from Norway.

But a lot of people find it is easier to stir up fears and rage against immigrants from certain countries without regard for such details as facts.

Since President Trump campaigned heavily on immigration fears, he has to dance a delicate foxtrot between the demands of his hyper-conservative political base and the need to win enough Democratic votes to pass a bipartisan immigration deal.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., , thought they had a deal before the White House meeting, according to news reports. But at the meeting Trumps reputation for following the advice of the last person to whom he has spoken showed itself. A fired-up Trump had swung over to the positions of hard-line conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton, of Arkansas.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders found themselves growing mute or amnesiac amid the blowback from Trumps reportedly racist statements.

The president denied making those remarks and most of the Republican lawmakers in the room said they didnt hear the reported words or didnt remember them. Cotton and Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., denied on Thursday, the day of the meeting, that Trump made the slur, but the next day they shifted to saying they did not recall exactly what the president said. By Sunday, Perdue and Cotton were flatly denying Trump used the vulgarities.

But Durbin, the only Democrat in the room, confirmed the report word-for-word, and Graham, who had confirmed the reported words to South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott, told a South Carolina newspaper on Monday that My memory hasnt evolved.

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Still, if Trump was upset by the reports of his language, he took his time in responding to it  enough time to call around to friends see how well the reports of his slurs against immigrants were playing with his base.

"Its weird that people in the room dont remember Trump using that word when Trump himself was calling friends to brag about it afterward," conservative columnist Erick Erickson, who has in the past been critical of Trump, said in a tweet. "I spoke to one of those friends. The president thought it would play well with the base."

If so, Trump probably was right about that. He has devoted his presidency, so far, to pandering to his most conservative minority of supporters, while paying a more reasonable-sounding lip service to the rest of us.

This drama would be more entertaining were it not for the 800,000 immigrants whose fate under the protections of President Barack Obamas Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program hangs in the balance. Thats the serious side of politics. It affects real peoples lives, regardless of their political persuasion or ethnic backgrounds. The president, of all people, must never be confused about that.

Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.

cpage@chicagotribune.com

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Veteran rappers and an artsy rock-composer come to Chicago this week.

Thursday, Jan. 18

White Mystery, Paul Cherry, Son of a Gun 'In The Round'

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Thalia Hall

1807 S. Allport St. 312-526-3851

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White Mystery is a pair of redheaded siblings  Alexandra and Francis Scott Key White  from Chicago who play rock n roll thats as smoldering as their hair color. The two have released seven albums and toured the country with their snarling, old-school rock approach. Mystery was formed nearly a decade ago after the two made a 10-year pact to be in a band, so this could be one of the bands final shows in this iteration of the group. $10. 8:30 p.m., 17+. Tickets: thaliahallchicago.com

Friday, Jan. 19

Camron

Portage Theater

4050 N. Milwaukee Ave. 773-283-7244

Although Camron has only trickled out bits of new music in recent years, Killa Cam has the back-catalogue to create a set list that still bangs, full of hits and rhymes that you know well. The veteran MC has honed his stagecraft and is an engaging host: funny and candid. Plus, he always has plenty of love for Chicago: Left Chicago with good money for five drops/ Westside, did the South Side like the White Sox. $24.99 - $350. 8 p.m., 17+. Tickets: theportagetheater.com

Saturday, Jan. 20

Destroyer

Metro

3730 N. Clark St. 773-549-4140

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Twenty-two years and 12 albums after its formation, Dan Bejars Destroyer remains an ambitious group, and last falls ken LP was one of its most adventurous releases yet. Its a sprawling collection of cinematic tracks, recorded with a live band and string section. Bejar and Destroyer have always been chock-full of lush, exciting sound, so a live performance of these latest works promises to be a rousing one. $21-$23. 9 p.m., 18+. Tickets: metrochicago.com

Pharoahe Monch

Subterranean

2011 W. North Ave. 773-278-6600

Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. >

When Pharoahe Monch grabs the mic, its impossible not to pay attention. Monchs whip-tight, unrelenting delivery is not only commanding, his content is deep and multifaceted, challenging both mind and ears. While he hasnt released a project in three years, his messages are consistently poignant enough that his messages hold up over time, and, given todays political climate, hell surely have plenty to say, even between songs. $20-$25. 9 p.m., 21+. Tickets: subt.net

Sunday, Jan. 21

Hinds

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Lincoln Hall

2424 N. Lincoln Ave. 773-525-2501

A Spanish, all-women four-piece crew, Hinds makes music that will make you more than ready for summer: shimmering, pliable lo-fi garage pop that practically emits its own warmth. Their twang isnt one-dimensional either: Hinds can make you swing on the dance floor as well as they can swoon with sentiment. $15-$17. 9 p.m., 18+. Tickets: lh-st.com

@lucheezy | adlukach@redeyechicago.com

[ Looking for more to do in Chicago? ]
Jason Contreras, holding his new badge just presented to him by the Aurora Police Department, gets an emotional hug from his mother, Sandi Saltijeral, soon after her son was sworn in by the department Monday morning. Contreras brother, Nico, was murdered in November 1996 at age 6. (Denise Crosby/The Beacon-News )

Early Monday morning, the Aurora City Council chamber was filled with proud family and supportive friends as 10 young men, standing ramrod straight in their dark suits and ties, were sworn in as Aurora's newest police officers.

Cellphones clicked. Cameras rolled. Parents beamed. And only hugs outnumbered the handshakes going around the room.

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But most of the attention, certainly from the media, was focused on the second young man who took this oath on a snowy Martin Luther King Jr. Day  for no one knew more personally than he did the impact a police badge can have on a family and a community.

Jason Contreras was only 3 years old when in November 1996 his older brother Nico was shot and killed while asleep in his bed at their grandmother's house.

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Mayor Richard Irvin speaks with the 10 new Aurora police officers, who were sworn in on Monday. (Denise Crosby/The Beacon-News )

If you know even the basic outline of Aurora's ugly history with gang violence, you probably recognize the name of little Nico. And you likely are familiar with his sweet face, as well, for this 6-year-old child's senseless murder became a rallying cry that set off a wave of anti-gang activism in the community.

While Jason was barely old enough to remember the night his brother was slain or the immediate aftermath, he spent the next two decades as a member of a close-knit family as determined to seek justice for Nico as the police department and prosecutors who eventually got convictions for the two men responsible.

Elias Diaz  who authorities say planned the shooting and drove the getaway car  was found guilty in 2008 and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Mark Downs, who fired the gun into the bedroom  reportedly Nico's uncle was the target, whom they believed was a rival gang member  was convicted in 2009 and received a 70-year sentence.

The murder not only became an integral part of Aurora's dark history and road to redemption, it also came to define much of this family's story  as they became involved with law enforcement, clergy and other activists trying to stem the tide of gang violence that had ripped apart the community. So it's no wonder there were so many family members gathered in the council chamber to watch this young man being sworn in as an Aurora police officer.

Jason Contreras hugs his grandmother Mary Saltijeral soon after he was sworn in as an Aurora police officer Monday morning (Denise Crosby/The Beacon-News )

And there is little surprise why this celebration  including those hugs, smiles and tears  was also for a little boy who, only in death, had a chance to make his mark in the world.

Jason's mother, Sandi Saltijeral, admitted she was "scared out of my mind," when Jason announced his senior year of high school he wanted to become a police officer. But trying to change his mind was futile, she said, because when "Jason makes up his mind to do something," there is no talking him out of it.

"And I know how much he wants to make a difference,how much he wants to help people," said Saltijeral, who moved to Chicago several years ago but remains tightly connected to the Aurora community.

There is "no doubt" Jason gravitated to law enforcement because of Nico, said his father, Javier Contreras. Jason was a Plano High School student when the men accused of his brother's murder came to trial. After graduating with a degree in law enforcement from Western Illinois University, he joined the Plano Police Department in the fall of 2016. But his goal, the family told me, was always to be part of Aurora's force, which had played such a vital role in his life.

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"Becoming an Aurora cop means a lot to him and to all of us," Contreras said. "It is coming full circle for the family."

In addition to loved ones, there were plenty of city and county officials on hand who played an active role in the Nico case, including two Kane County assistant state's attorneys who have been working on it since the killers were arrested and who continue to deal with the ongoing appeals process.

Sandi Saltijeral, whose 6-year-old son Nico Contreras was murdered in Aurora in 1996, gets a hug from Kane County police liaison Linda Hagemann after Saltijerals surviving son, Jason, is sworn in Monday as a new Aurora police officer. ( Denise Crosby/The Beacon-News )

"Something good came out of something really bad," noted Sal LoPiccolo, a 29-year veteran prosecutor who got to know Jason and the family as they faithfully attended all court proceedings through the years, and have had to endure so many emotions as appeals have snaked through the system.

His colleague agreed. "This was a horrible crime," said Mark Stajdohar, who has been a prosecutor for 17 years and admits he's grown particularly close to the family. "And seeing this (ceremony) helps."

As police liaison for the county's state's attorney's office, Linda Hagemann has also become personally involved. And as the longtime victims advocate gave Jason's mother a congratulatory hug, she reminded Saltijeral of the powerful impact her slain son has had on so many people in this community.

"Nico," she said, "will always have a special place in our hearts."

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Now that his little brother is a member of the Aurora police force, the family could not be more proud.

"Jason knows who he is," said his beaming grandmother, Mary Saltijeral. "And I do not worry, for God will watch over him."

DCrosby@tribpub.com
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- According to data released by the China Passenger Car Association, Lavida was the best seller among all models from German brands in December. It reached a sales volume of 45,554 units last month, increasing 21.32% year on year, while slightly falling 4.21% month on month. The second best-selling model was Sagitar that reached a December sales volume of 29,946 units with a year-on-year growth of 19.09% and a month-on-month increase of 2.78%.



Bora and Magotan ranked third and fourth among German models in December 2017 with sales volumes of 22,458 units and 20,343 units respectively. Both of them witnessed a year-on-year sales growth and a month-on-month sales increase.

Among the top 10 German models, New Santana (ranking 5th), Jetta (ranking 7th) and Passat (ranking 9th) all suffered year-on-year and month-on-month sales drops in December. Especially New Santana, its December sales were 16,932 units, slumping 42.11% from a year earlier and dropping 37.21% compared with November.

Although just ranking 8th in sales, Benz C Class saw an impressive sales growth of 46.43% from the previous year to 12,489 units. This is the first time for Benz C Class to enter top 10 list of German models.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- On January 15, 2018, China Harmony New Energy Auto Holding Limited (Harmony Auto) and China Continent Property and Casualty Insurance Co., Ltd. (CCIC) signed a strategic cooperation agreement in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. Both parties will collaborate in many areas, such as auto insurance, investment, financing and innovation, etc.



In auto insurance aspect, CCIC will provide 8 types of insurances for Harmony Auto, such as vehicle extended warranty insurance, vehicle replacement compensation insurance and performance guarantee insurance, etc. The insurance company will also proffer Harmony Auto various services like self-owned property insurance, employee's vehicle insurance, etc. Besides, risk management and risk analysis of data are also included in CCICs services.

In investment and financing field, the partnership will be processed in forms of equity investment, debt financing and investment integrating equities with debts.

Liu Fenglei, CEO of Harmony Auto, stated that in 2017, the company implemented the development strategy that besides its sales businesses of 4S shops, it simultaneously expanded its businesses in new energy vehicle area and after-sales services. Based on this strategy, Harmony Auto achieved an outstanding performance last year. In the first half of 2017, its operation revenues increased 3.2% year on year to around RMB 5.09 billion and the shareholders' net profits reached around RMB 560 million, soaring 84.5% from a year earlier.

What's more, Harmony Auto is the biggest shareholder of BYTON who just showcased its first production model BYTON Concept at CES 2018 last week.

In addition, Harmony Auto has set a benchmark in Chinas auto aftermarket with its aftersales services independent of 4S shops. Along with the development of its new energy vehicle businesses and aftersales services, the automaker is expected to realize sustainable profits in investment.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- According to data released by the China Passenger Car Association, Haval H6 was the best seller among all SUV models of Chinese brands. In December 2017, Haval H6's sales were 55,126 units, falling 31.52% year on year and slightly up 1.9% month on month. The second best-selling model was Baojun 510. Last month, 54,050 units of Baojun 510 were sold with a month-on-month growth rate of 8.39% which was closely behind Haval H6 in sales volume. Boyue ranked third with a sales volume of 31,205 units, surging 53.14% from a year earlier and slightly up 1.04% compared with the previous month. However, its December sales were over 20,000 units less than the second winner Baojun 510.

Trumpchi GS4 and Changan CS75 ranked fourth and fifth whose December sales were 22,221 units and 21,604 units, with year-on-year growth of 2.74% and 7.18% respectively. Each of the top 5 SUV models reached December sales of over 20,000 units last year.

Among the top 10 SUV models of Chineses brands, Haval H2 (ranking 7th), Roewe RX5 (ranking 9th) and Fengguang 580 (ranking 10th) all suffered year-on-year and month-on-month sales drops in December, 2017.
Adam Frisch conceding CD3 race to Lauren Boebert

Frisch conceded after most county clerks reported results, showing that he's still trailing Boebert by more than 500 votes in Colorado's 3rd District.
Foreign travelers transiting through China have several options for transit visa exemptions. These transit visa exemptions allow eligible foreign travelers a visa-free visit for 24, 72, or 144 hours.

Although requirements for each transit visa exemption are different, each transit visa exemption stipulates that foreign travelers are only eligible when traveling through China between two different countries. Further, onward travel must occur within 24, 72, or 144 hours of arrival.

To obtain a transit visa exemption, travelers should review eligibility requirements, and confirm their eligibility with their local Chinese embassy.

After confirmation, travelers must communicate their intention to obtain a transit visa exemption to their airline prior to travel. The airline will liaise with border control officials, who grant transit visa exemptions to travelers that meet requirements after verification.

In most cases, the transit visa exemption only allows the traveler to visit the province of their arrival. However, travelers entering China via Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing can travel within Shanghai, Zhejiang province, and Jiangsu province, and travelers entering via Beijing, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, and Qinhuangdao can travel within the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

Starting from January 1, 2019, the 144-hour visa-free transit policy was implemented in Xiamen, Qingdao, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Kunming. On May 1, 2019, the 144-hour visa-free policy in Guangdong province was further expanded.

From December 1, 2019, the 144-hour visa-free transit policy will expand the stay area in Sichuan province; Zhejiang province will allow it to be accessed from more ports of entry; and Chongqing and Shaanxi provinces will get upgraded from the 72-hour visa-free transit policy. In Sichuan, the 144-hour visa-free transit will expand the stay area to 11 cities besides Chengdu. Similarly, in Zhejiang, Ningbo will also be an applicable point of entry to access this visa-free transit; previously, it was applicable only from Hangzhou Xiaoshan Airport.

The 24-hour Transit Visa Exemption

Foreign travelers transiting through China within 24 hours to reach another country of destination may be eligible for a 24-hour Transit Visa Exemption. This visa exemption is available to all foreigners, and most ports of entry in China.

The 72-hour Transit Visa Exemption

Foreign travelers transiting through China within 72 hours to reach another country of destination may be eligible for the 72-hour Transit Visa Exemption. This visa exemption is only available to citizens of participating countries traveling through participating ports of entry in China.

To obtain this visa exemption, the foreign national must have a valid passport from one of the 53 countries, which includes:

24 Schengen countries in Europe (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland);

15 other European countries (Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Macedonia, Monaco, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, UK, and Ukraine);

Six countries in North and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and US);

Two Oceanic countries (Australia and New Zealand); and

Six Asian countries (Brunei, Japan, Qatar, Singapore, South Korea, and UAE).

Further, eligible travelers must be transiting through one of the following cities  Changsha, Guilin, or Harbin.

Xian and Chongqing currently enjoy the 72-hour policy but will upgrade to 144-hour one starting from December 1.

Authorities will continue to expand the list of cities where 72-hour Transit Visa Exemptions are applicable.

(Beijing, Chengdu, Dalian, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Kunming, Nanjing, Qingdao, Shanghai, Shenyang, Tianjin, Wuhan, and Xiamen have already upgraded to the 144-hour visa-free transit policy.)

The 144-hour Transit Visa Exemption

Foreign travelers transiting through China within 144 hours to reach another country of destination may be eligible for the 144-hour Transit Visa Exemption. This visa exemption is available to citizens of countries that are eligible for the 72-hour Transit Visa Exemption; however, the number of participating cities is more limited.

To obtain this visa exemption, the foreign national must have a valid passport from one of the 53 countries that are eligible for the 72-hour Transit Visa Exemption.

The 144-hour Transit Visa Exemption was first introduced to three cities in East Chinas Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang area: Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Nanjing. The exemption was then expanded to North Chinas Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, namely: Beijing, Shijiazhuang, Tianjin, and Qinhuangdao.

On January 1, 2019, the 144 hour visa-free policy was implemented in the cities of Xiamen, Qingdao, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Kunming.

As of May 1, 2019, Guangdong province expanded the 144-hour visa exemption policy to cover every international airport in the province  Guangzhou Baiyun, Shenzhen Bao-an, and Jieyang Chaoshan  as well as four railways, eight land entries, and 15 ports. Travelers who obtain a transit visa exemption in Guangdong can travel freely throughout the province for the duration of the exemption.

Starting December 1, 2019, travel to the following regions will benefit from the 144-hour visa-free transit policy:

Xian and Chongqing, which currently enjoy the 72-hour visa-free transit policy, will allow the 144-hour visa-free transit policy from Xian Airport and Chongqing Airport, respectively.

Ningbo will be added to the 144-hour visa-free transit zone of Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang and passengers can enter or leave China from Ningbo Airport and travel within the transit zone.

Chengdu, which currently enjoys the 144-hour visa-free transit only in Chengdu city, will get its stay area expanded to 11 cities, including Leshan, Deyang, Suining, Meishan, Yaan, Ziyang, Neijiang, Zigong, Luzhou, and Yibin.

After this expansion, the 144-hour visa-free transit policy will be implemented in 27 ports across 20 cities.

The 20 cities are  Beijing, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, Qinhuangdao, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Shenyang, Dalian, Qingdao, Chengdu, Xiamen, Kunming, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Jieyang, Chongqing, Xian, and Ningbo.

Hainan Visa Exemption

Since May 1, 2018, visitors from 59 eligible countries can travel to South Chinas Hainan province visa-free for up to 30 days.

Unlike other visa exemptions in China, visitors to Hainan enjoying visa-free access do not need to be traveling to a third country. However, they must book their visits via travel agencies registered in Hainan and approved by Chinas National Tourism Administration.

To be eligible for visa-free travel to Hainan, visitors must hold a valid passport from one of the following countries:

25 Schengen countries in Europe (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland);

15 other European countries (Albania, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Macedonia [FYROM], Monaco, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, the United Kingdom, Ukraine;

Six countries in North and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, the United States);

Two Oceanic countries (Australia and New Zealand); and

11 countries in Asia and the Middle East (Brunei, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and UAE).

Confirm eligibility before departure

Travelers planning on visiting China with a visa exemption are advised to confirm their eligibility with the relevant port of entry in China or their local Chinese embassy/consulate before departure. The nature of the travelers itinerary and other factors may influence eligibility to qualify for a visa exemption.

Prospective travelers may also use a tool released by Chinas State Council to determine their eligibility for a visa exemption based on their nationality and port of entry. The tool can be accessed here.

Travel China Cheapers China Visa-Free Transit Guide is also an excellent resource for travelers.

(This article was originally published on September 6, 2017. It was updated on May 7, 2019 and November 14, 2019.)
Here is a selection of stories curated by AP editors to keep you informed as you start your weekend.
Canada Post on Monday released its annual two-stamp issue to mark the Lunar New Year -- the Year of the Dog.





The Year of the Dog stamps incorporate Chinese lanterns as a central design element. The customary red and gold dominate the design.

A permanent domestic-rate stamp features an endearing small dog that looks ready to rush headlong into the year ahead, while the international-rate stamp shows a larger, dignified canine, one foot raised in anticipation.

"Canada Post is proud to once again mark the vibrant and festive occasion that is the Lunar New Year, celebrated by Canadians of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and other East Asian heritage," said Canada Post President and CEO Deepak Chopra in a release. "The annual unveiling of this stamp issue has become a much-anticipated event."

The stamps are designed by Vancouver's Subplot Design Inc with illustration by Meimei Mao and photography by Raeff Miles.





The Year of the Dog stamp issue includes a traditional gummed pane of 25 domestic-rate stamps, which includes four Chinese blessings, presented in calligraphy by Albert Ng, member of the Order of Ontario, plus both Permanent domestic- and international-rate stamp booklets and a broad selection of philatelic collectibles.

It also has the international-rate official first day cover (OFDC), which also features a traditional Chinese blessing, is unsealed to facilitate the Chinese New Year tradition of giving money in a red envelope.

The Year of the Dog begins on Feb. 16, 2018, and runs to Feb. 4, 2019. Loyal, trustworthy and courageous, the easy-going individuals born under the sign of the Dog are believed to willingly put others' well-being above their own.
A computer mouse with speech recognition and transcription capability, a smart watch with step tracker and sleep monitor, and a portable Chinese-English translation machine are some of the exhibits at the exhibition hall of China Speech Valley, the country's first nation-level industrial base setting its eye on speech and artificial intelligence (AI).





Since its inception in 2012, China Speech Valley has been on the cutting-edge of developing AI ecosystems to support technological breakthroughs and economic growth.





Qi Dongfeng, president of Anhui Information Investment Company said, "In 2016, its output value reached 32.7 billion yuan, up by 44.1 percent. So far, 200 companies including IFLYTEK, AMAZFIT, QuantumCTek and Sunwin have settled in."





IFLYTEK, one of the leading companies in the Speech Valley engaged in speech technology development and services, has been investing 25 percent of its sales revenue in research and development for five consecutive years. In 2017, the company set eight new records in international AI competitions.





Meanwhile, communications technology company QuantumCTek supported the successful launch of the Mozi quantum satellite. The Speech Valley also contributed to the world's first long-distance quantum communication line between Beijing and Shanghai, among other internationally advanced innovation efforts.





Now, the Speech Valley has developed a speech and AI industrial chain covering basic research, technology research and development, platform support, and industrial development and application, and built up an AI innovation ecosystem with companies of all sizes.





AMAZFIT is also one of the leading companies in the Speech Valley. Its Xiaomi Watch managed to claim the largest market share in the smart wearable industry globally in about four years. The smart wearable industry fund, launched by the company, reached 100 billion yuan (US$15.55 billion) in its first phase, and the company invested in a dozen start-ups engaging in fitness apps, health and elderly care, chip design, new materials and precise manufacturing in the U.S.'s Silicon Valley and Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province, where the Speech Valley is located. It is estimated that by 2021, the output value of AMAZFIT, its suppliers and retailers will reach 10 billion yuan.





Jointly built by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Anhui Provincial Government, the Speech Valley offers considerate supporting services to the AI industrial chain under favorable policies and market-oriented management. "The platform provides services like market promotion and financial support, and thus, entrepreneurs here can focus on technical research and product development," Yu Yanxing, founder of Anhui Speech Information Technology co., LTD., said.





The high-tech industry represented by intelligent speech contributed to 65 percent of Anhui's industrial growth in the first half of 2017. In September 2017, Anhui Province launched special policies and measures to support the construction of the Speech Valley, and set up a special fund for intelligent speech and AI industry development. The Speech Valley established a think tank last November, comprising 30 AI experts.





Qi said the Speech Valley has the support of national strategies and provincial policies, and it will accelerate the development of AI in the next five to 10 years and strive for an operating revenue of 100 billion yuan by 2020.




China's anti-graft chief has called on fellow members of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to resolutely defend the core status of General Secretary Xi Jinping in the CPC Central Committee and the whole Party.

To achieve that, CCDI should tighten up the accountability for overseeing discipline compliance, said Zhao Leji, secretary of the CCDI, while addressing a seminar which concluded on Monday.

The three-day seminar, 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 held for CCDI members after the second plenary session of the 19th CCDI.

Zhao, also member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, said that priority should be given on political building to identify and expel those who are disloyal and dishonest to the Party, who comply in public but oppose in private.

Work was needed to address corruption that occurs on people's doorsteps, said Zhao.

In addition, Zhao highlighted the prospect of an ongoing reform of supervisory systems.

His fellow members were also reminded that serving on the CCDI means responsibilities and they must lead by example in observing the Party disciplines and improving work style.

Yang Xiaodu, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and deputy secretary of the CCDI, attended the seminar.
You are here: China

Cyber security is a major concern for China, with booming money loss figures being reported.

The country has the worlds biggest online market by Internet population, but industry regulators and top dot-com firms say a third of crime cases in China are related to Internet crimes, a figure thats rising 30 percent a year, according to Tencent, the countrys leading dot-com company.

Last month, Chinese Internet regulators received 4.39 million cases nationally, up 22 percent from a year ago, the Cyberspace Administration of Shanghai said on Monday.

Internet crime has become a top social problem  covering fraudulent phone calls and short messages, phishing websites, ransomware viruses and privacy invasion, industry experts said.

New technologies and a new ecosystem with both industry and regulator powers should be adopted to fight online crime, said Pony Ma, chairman of Tencent, which has more than 1 billion users signed up to messaging app WeChat and its popular games.

Tencent cooperated with government regulators, including the public security officials, last year to crack down on 160 top Internet crime cases, involving money losses of 3.2 billion yuan (US$485 million).

Reports to the regulators have been transferred and processed with top dot-com firms including Tencent, Sina, Baidu and Alibaba, said the Shanghai cyberspace administration.

Chip-level security flaws also need investigating to improve online security, industry experts said.

Two chip-level flaws, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, have been discovered recently, which may affect billions of smart devices produced in the past decade. This means both Windows and Mac computers could be affected, as well as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and cloud service providers.
At the end of December, a series of protests against economic policies erupted in Iran. As they spread, their scope expanded to include political opposition. But when President Trump tweeted his support for the protesters and criticism of the government, pro-government marchers filled the streets.

Yet, on January 3, the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, announced the defeat of the "sedition" in the country.

Next, the Trump administration placed sanctions on five subsidiaries of the Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group - a defense group that is a key producer of Iran's ballistic missiles and that is already under US sanctions.

What is going on in Iran?

US struggle for new sanctions and regime change

In 2015 the nuclear accord (JCPOA) offered Iran relief from US, UN and multilateral sanctions on energy, financial, shipping, automotive and other sectors. The primary sanctions were lifted after the International Atomic Energy Agency's certification that Iran had complied with the agreement. Yet, secondary sanctions on firms remained in place, along with sanctions applying to US companies, including banks.

Then Washington opted for a U-turn. Following the House of Representatives, the Senate unanimously extended the Iran Sanctions Act for a decade in late 2016. Despite the Obama sanctions relief, most Democrats reversed their positions.

When President Trump arrived in the White House, he began developing a far more muscular policy against Iran to benefit from Saudi economic and geopolitical support. Last May, he signed a $350 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, which has been followed by a push to counter Iran's regional and strategic weapons programs.

In October, two months before the Iranian protests, the Trump administration designated for sanctions additional missile and IRGC-related entities, while threatening to cease implementing the JCPOA.

Along with economic pressures, Trump has seized covert operations. After he made the conservative Iran hawk Mike Pompeo the head of the CIA, the abrasive uber-hawk Michael D'Andrea became the head of CIA's Iran operations. After the 9/11 attacks, he was involved in the capture of Osama bin Laden, the interrogation program that was condemned as inhumane and ineffective in the 2014 Senate report, political assassinations and ramped up drone programs which have unleashed waves of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and Yemen.

Iran's recent events bear D'Andrea's covert signature.

Iran's quest for economic stabilization

Between 2010 and 2013, the sanctions hurt Iran's economy contributing to the fall of crude oil exports from 2.5 million barrels per day to 1.1 million by mid-2013. That was compounded by the plunge in oil prices since early 2014.

Sanctions relief has enabled Iran's oil exports to return to nearly pre-sanctions levels, boosting economic growth to 7% in 2016. Iran has regained access to some $115 billion in hard currency held abroad. Foreign energy firms have begun making new investments in Iran's energy sector and major aircraft manufacturers have sold Iran's commercial airlines new passenger aircraft. The relief also contributed to the political victory of Iran's President Hassan Rouhani in the May 2017 presidential election.

Growth has also begun to broaden to the non-oil sector. Real GDP growth is projected to reach 4.2% in 2017/18 and is expected to be sustained over the medium-term if financial sector reform takes hold.

In Iran, the 2009 protests were led by urban middle class. In contrast, recent demonstrations have been fueled by discontent in rural areas and small cities; the core constituencies of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who seeks a political comeback and was arrested for inciting unrest against the government.

It is this economic unease, coupled with budget leaks, that is being further stirred by new US sanctions and alleged destabilization efforts - which aim to undermine Iran's ongoing policy recalibration in the Middle East.

Shifting toward East

Only two weeks before the protests, Iran's media reported that the country would join the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in early 2018, which would increase the Union's population to 260 million and make its economy as large as that of India.

Even more important is Iran's proposed role in the evolving One Road One Belt initiative (OBOR). Through the worst days of the 2010-16 sanctions, major Asian countries remained engaged in Iran's economy. In the coming years, the same countries are likely to support Iran to diversify its economy away from oil and gas and to become a major regional trading hub.

Recently, China and South Korea's oil imports have reached or surpassed pre-sanction levels, while purchases by Japan and other Asian countries have been slower to rebound. At the same time, China's share of Iran's global trade has climbed from 20% in 2010 to 31% in 2016. Moreover, foreign direct investment in Iran has soared, growing five-fold to $12.2 billion in 2016.

Soon Trump must decide whether to recertify Iran's compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, to waive US nuclear-related sanctions that were suspended under the JPOA, or to withdraw from the JPOA - all of which would penalize Iran's economy, again.

Since it penalizes rightful compliance, US credibility is crumbling across the Middle East. Washington can slow Iran's participation in OBOR initiatives and its reintegration in the world economy but it cannot stop Iran from taking its rightful place in the family of nations.

Dr Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served as research director at the India, China and America Institute (USA) and visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore).





Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.





This is an abbreviated version of the original commentary which was released by China-US Focus on January 15, 2018.
On November 17, 2017, President Xi Jinping holds talks at the Great Hall of the People with President Juan Carlos Varela of Panama, who is in China for a state visit. [Xinhua]





The second ministerial meeting between China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) will take place soon in Chile. It will be the first major event in the relations between China and Latin America after the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China ended late last year.





In February 2010, the 21st Summit of the Rio Group and the second Latin American and Caribbean Summit on Integration and Development were jointly held in Mexico. It was decided that these two organizations will be replaced by a new one called CELAC. In December 2011 it was officially inaugurated.





Excluding the United States and Canada in its membership, CELAC seeks to represent the interests of all the 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. As the largest regional bloc in the region, CELAC wishes to advance social welfare, the quality of life, economic growth, and to promote independent and sustainable development by ways of promoting political, economic, social and cultural integration.





The first China-CELAC ministerial meeting was convened in early 2015 in Beijing. Several important documents were approved and an ambitious road-map of cooperation between the two sides was drawn.





The second China-CELAC ministerial meeting will review what has been achieved over the past two years. Undoubtedly, it will contribute to the further development of China's relations with Latin America and the Caribbean.





Since the first China-CELAC ministerial meeting in 2015, bilateral ties between the two sides have witnessed great progress.





For instance, China published its second policy paper towards Latin America and the Caribbean in November 2016. Compared with the first one, released in 2008, it listed more areas of cooperation between the two sides, including the so-called collective cooperation. By collective cooperation, it means that China would not only work with individual countries, but also promote cooperation with CELAC and other regional organizations. In particular, the policy paper stated that efforts will be made to give full play to the role of such mechanisms as the China-CELAC ministerial meeting, the dialogue of foreign ministers of China and the "Quartet" of CELAC, and the meeting of national coordinators.





With Latin America becoming a partner in China's Belt and Road Initiative, Chilean President Bachelet and Argentine President Macri attended the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May 2017. They expressed great interest in participating in this initiative, and their Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, extended his warm welcome by announcing that Latin America and the Caribbean would be designated as the natural extension of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, one of the two components of the Belt and Road Initiative.





For 250 years starting from the second half of the 16th century, Chinese silk and other products were sold to Acapulco, Mexico via the Manila Galleon. Therefore, as many people believe, Latin America's involvement in China's Belt and Road Initiative is just the revival of the ancient trading route.





It can be expected that relations between the two sides will be further promoted by the initiative's Five Links (or Wu Tong ), i.e., policy coordination, infrastructure connectivity, trade facilitation, financial cooperation and people-to-people exchanges.





Over the past two years, areas of cooperation have been expanding. The most notable is the cooperation in productive capacity. In his speech to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), based in Santiago, Chile, in May 2015, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang called on China and Latin America to enhance cooperation in productive capacity, mainly bringing in industrial facilities, production lines, technology and management experience from China to Latin America.





Latin America seems to have a keen interest in engaging itself with China's new idea of cooperation in productive capacity. It is believed that Latin America's not-so-well-developed manufacturing and infrastructure would benefit from its cooperation with China in this field.





Needless to say, in order for Latin America to make good use of China's comparative advantage in productive capacity, both sides need to take tangible actions. Particularly, efforts must be made to figure out which projects are most urgently needed.





In the first China-CELAC ministerial meeting two years ago, China set out a target for bilateral trade: By 2025, two-way trade between the two sides would reach US$500 billion. However, it suffered a decline in 2015 and 2016. But there will be moderate growth in 2017. In order to realize the US$500 billion target, the remaining seven years must witness stronger growth every year. This is not a small challenge.





Due to differences in language, culture and political-economic systems as well as long geographical distance, mutual understanding is always insufficient. Therefore, people-to-people exchanges are greatly needed.





In March 2016, the Year of the China-Latin America Cultural Exchanges was kicked off in Beijing. In the biggest-ever all-year-round program between the two sides under the framework of China-CELAC Forum, hundreds of activities, such as art performances, exhibitions, movie screenings, tourism promotions and literary events, were organized to enhance the mutual understanding and friendship.





In the diplomatic arena, the most eye-catching event was the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Panama. Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela highlighted this diplomatic action as one of the major accomplishments of his past year in office. In November 2017, the leader of the Central American nation paid a week-long visit to China. "I have experienced your national spirit and resilience represented by the Great Wall. I solemnly reaffirm Panama's adherence to the one-China principle and support for the peaceful reunification of China," President Varela said in Beijing.





As China's second policy paper towards Latin America put it, China's development cannot de-link its ties with Latin America and other developing areas. The second China-CELAC ministerial meeting will further strengthen this linkage in the new era of globalization.





The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/jiangshixue.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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A site in Bangladesh bearing unique architectural features has been jointly unearthed by a team of archaeologists from Bangladesh and China, unlocking both cultural and tourism potential.





The site contains the remains of the Buddhist town and temple of Nateshwar, the present-day location of the Bikrampur area in Bangladesh's Munshiganj district, 30 kilometers south of the capital Dhaka. The site is home to the remains of the temple and city thought to be 1,000 years old.





The ruins, which are still being excavated by the team of Bangladeshi and Chinese archaeologists, are among several major recent archaeological discoveries in Bangladesh.





The historical site was discovered about seven meters beneath the ground, at the place where venerated Buddhist scholar and philosopher Atish Dipankar was thought to have spent his life.





Deputy chief of mission at the Chinese embassy in Dhaka, Chen Wei, and Bangladeshi and Chinese archaeologists recently visited the site.





The excavation has already unearthed several valuable artifacts from the site, including a prayer hall, mortar floor, octagonal stupas, broken pottery, baked clay materials and burned bricks.





Sufi Mostafizur Rahman, who is leading the excavation team of researchers, says carbon-14 tests on 26 unearthed relics at a laboratory in the United States have proved that the site is more than 1,100 years old. Rahman has sought further Chinese support to continue the excavation activities.





He says he hopes the site, with proper conservation, will emerge as a tourist attraction since the 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 unique.





She says 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 says, adding that this is going to be the heart of Buddhist heritage tourism in this part of the world.





Archaeological research at the site began in 2010 and a series of significant results have been achieved since.





It is believed that this discovery will offer an interesting glimpse into the early life of Atish Dipankar. During the 10th and 11th centuries, he was known in Bangladesh, India, China and other Asian countries as a saint-philosopher by virtue of his scholarly attributes and spiritual eminence. He was called Atish Dipankar Srigyan, which means "glorious wisdom source of light".





He wrote more than 200 Buddhist texts, popularized medical science and built reservoirs. He was also known as a translator.





But the great philosopher was forgotten for centuries in the land of his birth, Bangladesh, as well as on the Indian subcontinent until the end of the 19th century. Atish Dipankar was "rediscovered" in his motherland long after he left Bangladesh for the Tibet autonomous region in Southwest China to introduce Buddhist teachings and died there.





A mausoleum has already been built in the village of his birth with the support of China.





Chen says the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Hunan province is involved in the excavation.





"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 "commonwealth" of Bangladesh and China, he adds.




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China on Monday expressed condolences to the families of the crew of sunken oil tanker Sanchi, saying it will help Iran deal with the aftermath of the accident.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said Chinese rescuers approached the tanker many times at the risk of their lives to search and fight the fire at close range. China also coordinated rescue teams from Japan and the Republic of Korea.

The Panama-registered oil tanker Sanchi, carrying 136,000 tonnes of light crude oil from Iran, collided with the CF Crystal, a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter, about 300 kilometers east of the Yangtze River estuary on Jan. 6. Thirty-two crew members of the tanker, 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis, were lost.

The entire ship sunk Sunday afternoon, leaving a large amount of spilled oil burning on the surface.

Lu said according to Iranian media reports, it is believed that all crew members were dead within an hour of the collision.

"I would like to express my respect and appreciation to all rescuers for the bravery and professionalism they showed during the process," Lu said.
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At least 10 people were killed on Monday when a bridge under construction in central Colombia collapsed.

Another two people were missing and four others were injured when the structure fell along a tract of a highway that links the capital Bogota with the nearby city of Villavicencio, officials said.

Jorge Diaz, director of Civil Defense for the department of Meta, said the victims were construction workers who fell from a height of approximately 280 meters. Some 20 workers were on the bridge at the time of the accident.

"Ten people are dead. Nine died at the site of the accident and one was taken to a hospital, where he died," Diaz told local media.

Video footage posted to the Caracol News website showed what appeared to be half of the bridge still standing, while the other half had plummeted into the gully below.

The bridge was just 20 meters away from completion, a Caracol News anchor said.
Hundreds of students and Flagstaff residents marched in solidarity in honor of the life and civil rights work of Martin Luther King Jr. Monday on the Northern Arizona University campus.

Many marchers from the Du Bois Center to the University Union said they were motivated by reports that President Trump referred to African nations as shitholes.

I think the divisive political climate motivated a lot more people to march and show we believe in what Dr. King stood for, Tracye Moore said. Specifically I am talking about the divisiveness created by our 45th by calling majority black African nations shitholes.

Flagstaff resident Kosmos Ververelli expressed the same sentiment, stating that the nation needed to come together against the presidents comments

The poor comments made at the executive level have created more divisiveness in this country and they dont reflect the world that Martin Luther King stood for, Ververelli said.

However, most preferred to focus on support of King instead of defiance of Trump.

Marchers carried signs depicting his most inspirational quotes such as I have a dream and Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Many marchers took the time to inform the public about todays social justice issues, such as migrants being sold as slaves in Libya.

There is still injustice all over the world so I feel an obligation to march, NAU student Shyanne Carter-Wade said as she carried some of the posters she handed out to marchers. We have to keep fighting against injustice just as Dr. King did.

Moore said she would have marched even without the presidents provocative comments because she believed in Kings message of greater service.

Flagstaff resident Resley Grose did not mention the president when he shared why he marched.

I march to keep the dream alive, Grose said. We have to keep the dream alive by encouraging people, having a discussion about our problems and not getting involved with all of these distractions.

Ververelli said he marched because he believed in King.

I believe in what MLK stood for and I want to honor him, Ververelli said. If I am being honest I am a follower of Jesus and Dr. Kings faith drove him just like it drives me.

Carter-Wade said she was encouraged by the number of people who came out to march and others who joined when they realized the significance of this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which comes 50 years after his assassination.

I think this year we are seeing a lot more doers, people who are unhappy with the injustice they are seeing and wanting to do something about it, Carter-Wade said. There are more people who joined the march after they realized what we were doing. The next step is to get more people involved with their community and more people willing to help by voting and running for office.

Ververelli said the memory of King was an easy way to bring people together, despite what he said was a divided country.

Martin Luther King was a hero and that is an easy thing to march for.
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Russia and China are working closely together on a string of important international and regional issues, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday.





"We can try to enumerate for a long time the joint initiatives that Russia and China are promoting in the international arena," Lavrov said at his annual press conference.

The two countries are working actively on their joint initiative on the transition from military confrontation to a political settlement on the Korean Peninsula, one of the most serious topics on the international agenda, he said.

"If we talk about the nuclear issue, it is primarily Pyongyang and Washington, but we will also be ready to contribute to this bilateral dialogue within the framework of the so-called six-party process involving Russia, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea," he added.

The six-party talks to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, which involved South Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), China, the United States, Russia and Japan, have been suspended since late 2008.

With regard to the Syrian settlement, Russia and China share the same stance in appealing for "an exclusively political settlement based on the decisions of the United Nations Security Council that presupposes a political dialogue," Lavrov said.

The minister also highlighted cooperation in the field of international security, specifying that the two countries jointly drafted important documents concerning the non-deployment of weapons in outer space and the prevention of acts of chemical and biological terrorism.

A close process of consolidation of efforts on integration of the Eurasian space was also observed, Lavrov said, adding that the two countries have agreed to promote the integration of their Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and Belt and Road initiatives.

"Members of the EAEU are preparing an agreement on trade and economic cooperation with China. In parallel, there are contacts between the EAEU and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization...In general, this is what President Putin called the Greater Eurasian Project," he said.

Putin announced the idea of a greater Eurasian partnership in December 2015.
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Turkish military will soon start a new operation in a besieged border area of Syria, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday.





"We have finished our preparations and an operation could start at any moment," Erdogan said in Ankara.

The Turkish Armed Forces will resolve the Afrin and Manbij issue as soon as possible, he said.

The Turkish president also strongly slammed the United States over its plans to form a 30,000-strong border forces based on the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), dominated by the People's Protection Units (YPG).

"It is our duty to kill this terrorist army before it is born," he vowed.

The U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State (IS) had issued a written statement to some media outlets earlier on Sunday, confirming it will set up a 30,000-strong new border security forces with the YPG-led SDF.

The coalition named the new army the Syrian Border Security Force. About 15,000 of the fighters will be SDF veterans as the fight against IS comes to a close. The remaining 15,000 will be recruited and trained in the near future.

Currently, 230 individuals are training in the inaugural class, according to the coalition statement.

Turkey sees YPG as the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a group Ankara considers as terrorist. However, the United States has supported the YPG as its ally on the ground in combating IS in Syria.
You are here: World

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At least 77 people were injured after the floor of Jakarta's Indonesia Stock Exchange collapsed on Monday, Bloomberg reported, citing local police.

The collapse started in an internal balcony overlooking the main lobby where a group of students were visiting.

Police have cordoned off the two-tower, multi-story building and evacuated people after the collapse.

Indonesian police have ruled out a bomb as a cause of the collapse. "We can confirm that this was not because of a bomb," said national police spokesman Setyo Wasisto.

In 2000, the stock exchange was targeted in a car bomb which left 15 people dead and dozens injured.
You are here: World

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At least 10 people were injured after an explosion caused a building to collapse in the Belgian northern town of Antwerp on Monday evening.

The explosion occurred in a downtown neighborhood in Antwerp, completely destroying one building and severely damaging two others.

According to local police, 10 to 20 people were wounded in the incident. Most of the injuries were slight.

Authorities said that seven were rescued from under the rubble.

Local media reported that the blast was caused by a gas cylinder, while police ruled out terrorism in the case.




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Qatari military jets on Monday intercepted a civil passenger aircraft from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which was on the way to land at Al Bahrain International Airport in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, the official Emirati news agency WAM reported.

The UAE's civil aviation authority GCCA has informed its Qatari counterpart entity that a second Emirati commercial airliner was intercepted by Qatari fighter jets while the aircraft was on a "regular scheduled and well-known journey."

The UAE authority added that it regards this incident "as a serious and renewed breach of international conventions and the safety of civil aircraft traffic."

Earlier in day, a first Emirates passenger flight was intercepted by Qatari military jets, said the UAE, which called the action a "flagrant and serious threat to the safety of civil aviation," according to WAM.

The flight operated by Emirates was a regular scheduled service which took off Monday morning from its home airport Dubai to Manama, the capital of Bahrain, according to Sky News Arabia in Abu Dhabi.

GCCA stressed that "the UAE rejects this threat to the safety of air traffic and will take all necessary legal measures to ensure the safety and security of civil aviation."

Emirates is the Dubai government controlled, international carrier of the UAE.

The incident happened days after Qatar filed complaint to the United Nations about a UAE military jet's alleged violation of its airspace last December.

The complaint is refused by the UAE as "incorrect and confusing," and it added that UAE authorities were working to respond to it officially with evidence.

The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt have cut diplomatic ties with Qatar in June 2017, accusing Doha of supporting "extremism and terrorism."

They also blamed Qatar, a major natural gas supplier, of aligning with non-Arab Gulf state Iran against Arab interests.

The Arab quartet also imposed transport and trade sanctions by air, land and sea. Qatar has denied the charges and upgraded trade with Iran and Turkey since then to mitigate the impact of the sanctions.

As a result of these events, Gulf Arab stocks markets plummeted on Monday, while the price of oil (Brent) remained stable below 70 dollars per barrel.




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Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, on Tuesday discussed bilateral trade and the situation on the Korean Peninsula by phone.





The phone call came amid strengthening of efforts to keep China-U.S. trade relations right on track and at a time when tensions on the Korean Peninsula have shown signs of easing.





CHINA-U.S. TRADE





China-U.S. relations maintained overall stability and achieved significant progress in 2017, said Xi in the phone call.





Keeping bilateral ties on a track of healthy and stable development is in the interests of both countries and both peoples, and conforms to the common aspiration of the international community, the Chinese president said.





The two sides need to maintain high-level and various levels of interactions, bring the four high-level dialogue mechanisms between them into full play, and hold the second round of dialogues at a proper time, Xi said.





As economic and trade cooperation brings tangible benefits to both peoples, the two countries should adopt constructive measures to properly settle economic and trade issues of mutual concern by opening up the market to each other and "making the cake of cooperation bigger," Xi added.





The Chinese president also called for advancing cooperation between the two militaries, and in law-enforcement, drug control, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and cooperation at local levels, as well as close communication and coordination on major international and regional issues.





The two sides need to meet each other halfway, respect each other, focus on cooperation, deal with sensitive issues in a constructive way, respect each other's core interests and major concerns, and maintain the momentum of sound and steady development of China-U.S. relations, he said.





Trump said that the U.S. side attaches great importance to its relations with China as well as to the U.S.-China cooperation, and that it is willing to work with the Chinese side to enhance bilateral exchanges at all levels, expand pragmatic cooperation, and properly handle problems in bilateral trade so as to achieve even greater results in bilateral relations.





KOREAN PENINSULA ISSUE





In response to Trump's request for comments on the development of the situation on the Korean Peninsula, Xi told him that China was "ready to join the U.S. for proper settlement of the nuclear issue."





Xi said that there are some positive changes and related parties should work jointly to keep up the hard-won momentum for the easing of the situation on the Korean Peninsula and create conditions for the resumption of talks.





Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and safeguarding peace and stability in the region accord with the common interests of all sides, said Xi, adding that it is vital for the international community to stay united over the issue.





China is ready to continue its joint efforts with the United States and other members of the international community to achieve progress that would finally lead to a proper resolution of the issue, said Xi.





In response, Trump said the U.S. side values China's significant role in resolving the Korean Peninsula issue and is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China over the issue.





Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have shown signs of easing as senior officials from Pyongyang and Seoul met face-to-face on the borders earlier this month in what was their first direct talks in more than two years.





During the dialogue held at the South Korean side of the Panmunjom demilitarized zone, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) said it will send athletes to the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, in February.





The two Koreas held a working-level meeting Monday and discussed details concerning the arrangement for Pyongyang's state art troupe that will be dispatched to perform at the Olympics. The DPRK also proposed further talks at Panmunjom on Wednesday on logistics for its participating athletes, according to media reports.





The international community welcomed the diplomatic thaw between the pair shown in their frequent consultations and is eager to see if the rapprochement will last beyond the sporting event. Pyongyang and Seoul are technically still at war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended with a truce instead of a peace treaty.




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The Embassy of Tajikistan in China held an annual press conference, highlighting the achievements of Tajikistan and China relationship in the year 2017 and broad perspectives for the developments of the bilateral relationship in the period of 2018.





Tajikistan accords high priority to the further broadening and deepening of its friendly and good-neighborly relations with China.





Today, as equal partners, both countries for the sake of their peoples and country's interests, as well as for the safeguarding and promotion of the region's peace and stability, has realized a multi-faceted cooperation.





"Under the close and intensive work of both Parties, the mutual relations between both countries in 2017, as always, remained friendly and mutually beneficial," said Ambassador of Tajikistan to China Parviz Davlatzoda. In 2017, from January to September the trade turnover between Tajikistan and China amounted to about $980.538 million dollars, however by the end of 2017, it amounted over one billion dollars, which is a worthwhile result.





Tajikistan and China support an intensive dialogue at the highest levels. As an example, during the year 2017, which it marks the "25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations" between Tajikistan and China, the leaders of both countries held three productive meetings in Astana, Beijing and Xiamen.





Beside, Emomali Rahmon, the President of Tajikistan, during his state visit to China last year, also participated in the BRICS Summit Dialogue between Emerging Market Economics and Developing Countries, said Davlatzoda during the press conference.





The recent visit, undoubtedly, contributed to strengthening of political mutual trust and mutually advantageous cooperation in the fields of security, economy, humanitarian activities, as well as deepening the strategic coordination and interaction between the two countries.





Meanwhile, following mentioned state visit, the bilateral relations have been elevated to a higher level of comprehensive strategic partnership. The two countries have adopted a decision to advance in-depth coherence of the constructions of Belt and Road initiative and "National Development Strategy of Tajikistan for the period up to 2030". In that respect, a series of cooperation programs, particularly in the fields of science and technology, agriculture, energy, infrastructure projects, human resources, media, as well as other cooperation project at the local level have been signed.





During the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Heads of Government in early December 2017, in the Russian Federation's Sochi, the Prime Minister of Tajikistan Khokhir Rasulzoda held a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.





Over the course of the past year, dedicating to the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Tajikistan and China, the Embassy with the assistance of its Chinese partners, successfully organized and conducted a number of various activities, such as scientific, trade, economic, cultural, and humanitarian, youth and relative events. In addition, various exhibitions were carried out. More than 40 various high-level delegations from both countries were exchanged views during the courses of the past year.





The pace of constructive relations between the two countries will maintain, and in the course of the year 2018, this relationship will be filled up with many political and economic events, said Tajikistan ambassador to China. As so, the President of Tajikistan plans to pay a working visit to China to attend the Meeting of SCO Council of Heads of State, in Qingdao in the coming June of 2018, while the participation of the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the 17th Meeting of the Council of Heads of Government (Prime Ministers) of the member States of SCO, will take place in Dushanbe in this fall of 2018.





Tajikistan is also interested in having wider cooperation on tourism with China.





Thanks to its favorable climate, beautiful nature, extremely high mountains, healing waters and unique historical and cultural heritage, Tajikistan has a great tourism opportunity. Chinese entrepreneurs and investors can proactively contribute to the development of tourism infrastructure and its promising subsectors within Tajikistan's public programs based on the interests of both parties.





The ambassador underlined that "we are firmly committed to developing and strengthening our ties within the formation of the 'comprehensive strategic partnership' for the benefit of the peoples of the two countries and the peace and stability in the region at large. Hence, enhancing the political interaction between both sides on a wide range of issues of mutual interest, undoubtedly will contribute to the development of bilateral relations".




PHOENIX -- Saying biology matters, an Arizona woman is making a last-ditch effort to keep from being forced to share custody of her child with her former wife.

Keith Berkshire, attorney for Kimberly McLaughlin, is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn last year's ruling by the state's high court, which concluded that Suzan McLaughlin had the same right to claim parentage as if she had been Kimberly's husband.

In legal pleadings, Berkshire acknowledged the historic 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that concluded that states must extend the right to marry to same-sex couples. The justices expanded on that two years later, spelling out that same-sex couples must have access to the "constellation of benefits that the state has linked to marriage.''

But Berkshire contends nothing in either ruling requires states to ignore the biological fact that men and women are different -- and that, by definition, two women cannot both be the biological parent of a child born to one of them. That, he said, undermines the decision of the Arizona Supreme Court to effectively rewrite a statute that says that only men are entitled to the presumption of "paternity'' of a child born during a marriage.

In the legal filings, the attorney also takes a slap of sorts at the Arizona Supreme Court, saying the justices effectively adopted a statute dealing with how paternity cases are handled in cases of artificial insemination, a statute that, while approved in other states had never been enacted by lawmakers here.

What the U.S. Supreme Court decides could have implications not only beyond this case and beyond other situations involving child custody and support: A ruling against Berkshire would undermine arguments by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and the Center for Arizona Policy that just because same-sex marriages are legal does not void all state laws that differentiate between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples.

That's not just an academic argument.

In writing last year's ruling, Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Scott Bales said he reads the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage to "require a reassessment of various state statutes, rules, and regulations to the extent they deny same-sex spouses all of the benefits afforded opposite-sex spouses.''' That includes taxation, property rights, hospital access, adoption rights and more.

Court records show Kimberly and Suzan, legally married in California in 2008, agreed to have a child through artificial insemination using an anonymous sperm donor.

Kimberly became pregnant in 2010. The couple moved to Tucson, entered into a joint parenting agreement and executed mirror wills, declaring they were equal parents to the child.

After the boy's 2011 birth, Suzan stayed home and cared for him while Kimberly worked as a physician.

When he was nearly 2, Kimberly moved out, taking the boy with her and cutting off his contact with Suzan.

In filing for divorce, Suzan sought parenting time, citing an Arizona law, which says that the husband is the presumed parent of a child born within 10 months of a marriage. When a trial judge agreed to let the case proceed, Kimberly appealed, saying the paternity presumption law, by its plain wording, applies only when the other spouse is a man.
PHOENIX  They are mostly young boys, orphaned by war and conflict in their home countries who arrive in Arizona with little more than family photographs or maybe spices for their favorite foods.

Most refugee children are from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Somalia and are in need of a foster family to help them. Phoenix is one of 12 U.S. cities that accept refugee children under the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors Program.

Though Arizona accepted thousands of refugees last year, only 21 foster families are licensed to help them. Even before in Arizona, most child refugees often have spent months in refugee camps overseas while being screened for permission to come to America.

And though Catholic Charities of Arizona is tasked with finding foster families, few are willing or able to accept refugee children.

There is not sufficient capacity to help all the kids who need it, said Katie Kuennen, associate director of childrens services for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Clairette Clinger, director of the Catholic Charities Unaccompanied Refugee Minor program, said President Donald Trumps administration has stigmatized refugee minors and hampered efforts to recruit foster parents.

She said she has heard a lot of reasons why potential foster parents dont want to take in refugees, like they are bad children or they are already broken.

You have this type of sentiment that foster children are always going to be in trouble, Clinger said. But theyre not. Its a child in need of a home.

On Oct. 24, Trump announced a change to the refugee ban. But refugees could still be denied entry to the United States in the future.

The change comes with a caveat that refugees will be subjected to stricter screenings. Administration officials have said that 11 countries, which remain unidentified, will still be reviewed. Officials added that refugees from those countries could be admitted on a case-by-case basis if they are not a threat to the United States.

Weve seen, especially now with travel ban in place, that this is impacting refugee children, Kuennen said.

While a backlog of cases and finding foster families have been problems in the past, travel restrictions are delaying or may delay already-placed childrens arrival in the United States. Children and teens go through the same security screenings as adults and families.

If they are accepted as refugees, the United Nations gives the U.S. State Department a list of approved refugee minors. The State Departments Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration distributes that list to USCCB and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

In the time it takes to approve refugee minors for travel, organizations like Catholic Charities work to find the foster homes. Clinger said the right home is a combination of space and cultural sensitivity.

They come from out of the country and we dont know anything except for whatevers on their paper, Clinger said of the refugees. Within a month or six months, we can determine if the child needs a higher level of care.

For foster families to be eligible for refugee child placement, they must undergo extensive training from social service workers, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Licensed families have to complete 33 hours of training classes, which can take up to eight months, Clinger said.

However, the Arizona Office of Licensing and Regulation is implementing online classes for all potential foster families in January 2018, which Clinger said she hopes will increase the number of eligible homes for refugees.

Its very difficult for (the refugee children) during the first year for their adjustment, Clinger said. We have to make sure the parents have the tools and have the cultural ability to have the children.

Catholic Charities provides extra training so that families understand the politics and customs of the refugee childs home country, while giving them better ways to deal with the trauma of death and war.

We know most of their weaknesses and their strengths, and we also know their competency as far as diversity is concerned, Clinger said. This is a thing youre not born with, the acceptance of diverse cultures.

Even if the refugees have a family willing to foster them in the United States, they enter a country that has been opposed to accepting refugees in the past. In October 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that 54 percent of Americans said the U.S. has no obligation to take in refugees.
If you build it, the city of Flagstaff might not come -- for business purposes, that is.

On Tuesday, the city council will vote on a resolution against the proposed wall along the border with Mexico. The resolution also contains a clause that the mayor and city council will do their best not to procure services from any companies that are involved with the creation or maintenance of the wall.

In response to the drafted resolution, the president of the Arizona Chapter of the Associated General Contractors wrote a letter to the mayor and city council, alleging the language illegally blacklists contractors.

The maintenance provision alone is so broad that it will include cement producers, concrete suppliers, sand and gravel operations, fuel suppliers, steel suppliers, cleaning supply companies, tool suppliers, etc., David Martin, the chapter president wrote. These companies are critical to building the citys infrastructure and will be excluded from procuring work with the city.

Martin said the chapter does not take a position on the wall or on the citys resolution, but said that provision is unconstitutional and limits competition, which could increase costs for taxpayer-funded projects in cities.

The council discussed a possible resolution at its January 2 meeting, and two members of the public spoke in favor of the council voicing its opposition to the border wall.

Robert Neustadt, a member of Keep Flagstaff Together, an immigrant rights organization, said the wall would have a very, very extreme environmental impact, noting that 33 threatened and endangered species live in the area where the wall would be built, and their migration paths would be destroyed by the barrier.

More than 7,000 human remains have been discovered in the desert near the border since 1994, Neustadt said, and around 150 bodies are found in Arizona annually.

As citizens of this country we all already have blood on our hands for the existing wall, Neustadt said in a letter to the Daily Sun, adding that many people are not aware there are nearly 700 miles of walls and vehicle barriers

Northern Arizona University Humanities professor Gioia Woods also spoke against the wall, and said the university cannot fulfill its mission when there is an idealistic and physical barrier. The NAU Faculty Senate has passed similar resolutions in support of undocumented immigrants, she said.

At the councils January 2 meeting, councilmen Charlie Odegaard and Scott Overton said they opposed moving the resolution forward. Overton said he did not think the action was in the best interest of the city, and Odegaard said he did not think the resolution had imminent impact to Flagstaff.

If the council votes to adopt the resolution, it will join several other cities, including Tucson and San Diego. The Tempe City Council is considering a similar resolution on a new wall, but it does not include avoiding doing business with companies involved in the walls construction or maintenance.
Detroit Free Press

The president of the United States is a racist.

Not racially insensitive, you understand. Not a populist demagogue cozying up to his white, working-class base.

Were talking straight-up, go-back-to-where-you-came-from bigotry, the kind that emboldened Southern segregationists to barricade college classrooms and train firehoses on civil rights demonstrators more than half a century ago.

Except that this is 2018, and the guy making like your drunk uncle in high dudgeon is the leader of the free world.

No one who has paid even casual attention to Donald Trump could claim real surprise when he reportedly told a bipartisan congressional delegation that he was tired of immigrants from shithole countries such as Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations and yearned for more from countries like Norway.

So much for any doubt about what this president means when he talks about merit-based immigration.

Trump could not have been clearer about who is welcome in his America and who is not.

In a tweet Friday morning, Trump offered a shallow denial, saying he used tough language. But theres no denying that the words multiple news organizations reported Trump said are consistent with comments he has made about race during his campaign and his presidency.

Its noteworthy that these comments came one day before the eighth anniversary of the devastating Haiti earthquake that led the U.S. to offer protected status to nearly 60,000 Haitians, and the week before the observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day Trump will surely go through the motions to honor.

But no matter what he says on Monday, well know how he really feels. Weve seen him speak from the heart before:

In June 2015 when he called Mexican immigrants rapists.

In December of that year, when he called for a travel ban barring all Muslim travelers from the U.S.

And in August 2017, when he recognized very fine people, among the white supremacists who incited chaos and violence in Charlottesville.

Republicans of conscience will call Trumps most recent comments appalling and ignorant. Repugnant and vile. Hateful and disturbing.

But what comes next? Experience suggests the partys censure will be fleeting, and its reconciliation with its racist leader swift.

But the immigrants whose lives and childrens lives hang in the balance will not forget. And neither should voters, who will soon have the opportunity to hold apologists accountable for the presidents unvarnished bigotry.

Dreamers shouldnt be bait for getting a border wall

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Striking a deal in Washington often requires horse trading. We understand that. But when one of the bargaining chips is the lives of some 800,000 immigrants brought here as children  120,000 in Texas  the negotiating takes on a sickening smell.

This week members of Congress and President Donald Trump are trading demands for what it will take to continue the DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, program.

The program, started by President Obama, has provided work permits and a reprieve from deportation for some immigrants who were brought here by their parents and have never really known their birth countries.

The DACA recipients, called Dreamers, have graduated from high schools and attended colleges here. They hold respectable jobs. They serve in our military.

You can argue that their parents should be held accountable for illegally entering the United States. But it seems wrong to blame and punish young people, many who were barely out of diapers when adults decided they should grow up in the United States.

President Trump has given Congress a March 15 deadline to come up with a legal fix for the Dreamers or theyll face deportation.

Most congressional Democrats and a fair number of Republicans want to find a solution that will allow the Dreamers to stay. The President told a bipartisan congressional delegation Tuesday if Congress can pass a plan that does that hell sign it. The hitch seems to be the Presidents demand that border security and funding for a wall with Mexico be part of a deal.

Most everyone agrees we need a secure border. But defining what constitutes security and then paying for it has alluded Congress and previous administrations unable to adopt meaningful immigration reform. Texas has spent millions in state tax dollars on border surveillance arguing the federal government cant seem to get the job done.

Linking these young people to a plan for border security is ridiculous. How is the border any more secure if they are deported?

38 minutes of fear in Hawaii

Chicago Tribune

In 1938, Orson Welles panicked the nation with a false alarm about a Martian invasion in the radio broadcast The War of the Worlds. That was far-fetched, of course. But what happened on Saturday, sadly, was not so hard to imagine  or believe.

Authorities sent an emergency alert to cellphones in Hawaii: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

The possibility that a missile or missiles would land hung in the air for 38 minutes. Thats 38 long minutes while people sought shelter and reached out to relatives. We imagine some wondered if theyd ever hear the voices of their loved ones again.

Thankfully, it was a false alarm.

In calmer times, such an alert might have been shrugged off by many people as a relic of the Cold War. Someone pushed the wrong button. No biggie.

Many Americans may believe this nation is 50 years past such dire alerts. When a cellphone blares with an alert, people brace for bad weather. A tornado. A thunderstorm. Not a nuclear attack.

But a new nuclear threat looms. This time, from a North Korean dictator trading threats and insults with President Donald Trump. Whats real? Whats political theater? Whats empty bluster for domestic audiences? We dont know.

We do know that Hawaiians arent the only ones in range of a potential North Korea strike. Washington, D.C., is also likely in range, or soon will be. New York, too. And of course, Chicago.

In December, for the first time in more than three decades, a warning siren sounded across Hawaii as officials tested a system that could alert residents that a nuclear missile launched by North Korea was headed their way. Hawaiians now watch TV ads to prepare them for the worst, warning them to get inside, stay inside if an attack seems imminent. Shades of the 1950s-60s duck-and-cover drills in American classrooms.

Saturdays false alarm may be quickly forgotten. But a terrible thought lingers: The next warning could be real.

Fight Sessions pot policy, but dont ignore other issues

The Seattle Times

Threatening moves by Attorney General Jeff Sessions against states that legalized marijuana are ill-informed, destructive and a distraction from far more important issues.

Sessions last week rescinded two Obama-era U.S. Department of Justice memos that had established a fairly hands-off approach to legalized medical and recreational marijuana.

The memos provided clarity for federal officials by prioritizing enforcement of serious offenses such as interstate trafficking, cartel involvement and distribution to minors.

They also helped reduce conflict between archaic elements of federal drug law and state laws that increasingly legalize and regulate marijuana.

President Donald Trump should explain how this apparent move toward heavy-handed federal regulation and attack on state rights squares with his governing philosophy.

Trumps administration must also provide its rationale to the public and guidance to law enforcement and a marijuana industry thats approaching $20 billion a year in regulated sales.

Uncertainty and the risk of regressing to prohibition  a failed policy that sapped law-enforcement resources, disproportionately targeted people of color and failed to rein in consumption  should prompt Congress to advance proposals to regulate, rather than prohibit, marijuana.

Recreational use is now legal in eight states including Washington, Oregon and California, and medical use is legal in 29 states. Additional states have decriminalized possession of small quantities or authorized use for particular illnesses.

State and local officials are right to defend enlightened marijuana laws that reflect the will of the people.

This is precisely the sort of policy challenge that made former U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan a wise choice for Seattle mayor.

Seattle and Washington will no doubt play a large role in any legal response by Western states to the Sessions move, but this cant distract from more pressing issues.

Dreadful shortcomings in Washingtons mental-health system, for instance, cry out for the impassioned response and spotlight that Gov. Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson gave to Trumps latest offense.

Regional officials must resist being accomplices in Trump administration misdirection efforts. It appeared to use this hot-button issue to divert attention from new allegations of Trump misbehavior and investigations into Russian meddling.

Sessions is wrong to pull the nation backward on marijuana policy.

Regardless of the motive and the timing, its terrible governance to sow uncertainty and confusion for states, a nascent industry, law enforcement and tens of millions of consumers.

Trump shows his ugly side. Again

Chicago Tribune

For a brief moment Thursday, President Donald Trump gave the world a glimpse of his capacity for reasoned calm.

The Wall Street Journal had posted an interview in which Trump came across as insightful and philosophical. Other news outlets were reporting progress on an immigration bill the president had promised to sign.

Then something hit the fan.

In a meeting with lawmakers about the proposed immigration legislation, Trump stunned visitors with a nasty, vulgar comment about immigrants from Haiti and African countries, The Washington Post reported. Trump wanted to know why the United States should accept immigrants from sh countries.

Trumps comment  made in the Oval Office, leaked to the Post and not denied by the White House  is offensive and insulting to all Americans. Its insulting to all immigrants to this country, to all people of all nations. Most Americans, after all, arrived on these shores as wretched refuse, as a Statue of Liberty plaque proclaims.

What Trump said is beneath the dignity of the highest office of the land. But it isnt surprising. His Twitter feed is a cesspool of negative thoughts uploaded directly from the presidents raging id.

Trump has a boorish streak, a lack of respect for others and limited self-control. He should have recognized what he said was inappropriate and would be leaked. The president owes the country an apology.
The CBC says the collapse of the huge British construction and services firm Carillion PLC has big implications for Canada where it has an estimated 6,000 employees. Carilion went into liquidation Monday putting thousands of jobs and millions of dollars of government contracts at risk. Among contracts held in Canada is one with CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. Other Canadian contracts are for the maintenance and support of military housing at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Petawawa, contracts for hospitals in North Battleford, Sault Ste. Marie, the Stanton Territorial Hospital in the NWT, the Royal Ottawa Healthcare Group in Ottawa and more. There is also a major facility maintenance contract with Shell at one of its oilsands operations, along with at an office building in Calgary.








Senior officials and experts have dismissed voices demonizing China's helping hands extended to African countries, saying that China is the country that offers real solutions to the growing pains of the developing continent.

The officials made the observation after some recent media comments accused China of adding to African countries' debt burdens by offering financing and of having political motives behind the financing.

The accusations were raised as Foreign Minister Wang Yi was making his first trip abroad for 2018 to Rwanda, Angola, Gabon and Sao Tome and Principe from Friday to Tuesday.
Bay Area - the key to region's growth, prosperity Updated: 2018-01-17 06:58 By Cornelia Zou in Hong Kong(HK Edition)

Experts see HK playing crucial part in push to drive capital, talent for area's advancement

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area is already one of the most significant epicenters of economic output in the world, with enormous manufacturing capacity, rapidly growing financial centers and a huge talent pool.

Leveraging the different strengths of the cluster of 11 cities in the bay area is key to achieving the region's overall prosperity, panelists told a China Daily Asia Leadership Roundtable on "Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area: Prospects for Hong Kong", which was held as part of the 11th Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong on Tuesday.

The bay area covers more than 56,000 square kilometers - larger than both the Greater Tokyo Area and the San Francisco Bay Area. It has a population of 67 million people spread across nine cities and two special administrative regions. With 1 percent of China's land area, it recorded a GDP of $1.3 trillion last year - 13 percent of the country's total.

"The bay area is a national level strategy but different from other strategies, such as the Belt and Road Initiative," said Zhang Yuge, director at the Center for Hong Kong and Macao Studies of Shenzhen-based think tank China Development Institute.

"It still has room for growth in terms of GDP per capita, tertiary industry ratio, the number of top global enterprises, as well as the cultivation of innovation in comparison with other developed bay areas worldwide."

"The biggest, most important and most urgent problem to solve is the free flow of key elements in the bay area," he said.

Solving these issues will be key to Hong Kong reaping the most benefits from the area's growth. And, the key elements at play - the ones that need to move most freely - are talent and capital.

Attracting more capital to the area is an important challenge that must be addressed quickly, said Zhang.

"SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) in China have a lot of challenges when it comes to borrowing money from external sources," said Susie Cheung, founder member and co-convenor of the Asia-Pacific Structured Finance Association. "Securitization is not the only means, but it's an effective means to bring in capital."

"For the enterprises in the bay area, the infrastructure projects need to attract revenue from institutional investors. We need to build up a pipeline of well-prepared bankable projects," she said.

In this push to attract more capital and talent, Hong Kong could play a critical role in being the undisputed financial leader in the region.

"Hong Kong is a world-class financial center. Among the 11 cities involved in this initiative, Hong Kong stands out in terms of its capabilities in the financing arena, in equity financing and debt financing," said Jing Ulrich, managing director and vice-chairman of Asia Pacific at JPMorgan Chase.

"Hong Kong can really become a leading financier for southern Chinese companies."

Ulrich noted that more than half of the companies listed on the Hong Kong stock market at present are of mainland background. The mainland's exposure to debt financing has also been increasing, accounting for over 30 percent of the total assets of Hong Kong-based banks.

A super-connected city

On top of being a leader in finance, Hong Kong is super-connected, has advanced and reliable technology with good ICT (information and communications technology) infrastructure, and also is home to many world-class accounting and legal professionals.

"Hong Kong can become an important knowledge hub, not just a financing center in the bay area," said Ulrich.

Besides Hong Kong, Shenzhen's rapid development has impressed the world. The city's GDP has surpassed that of Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

"There's some healthy competition as well among the bay area cities," Ulrich added. "Hong Kong needs to work harder to avoid being marginalized.

Ginger Cheng, managing director and head of large and mid-cap corporates, institutional banking group, at DBS Bank (China) Ltd, told the forum: "This is an area where we've already seen rapid development in the past 20 years leveraging China's open-door policy. This is the most market-driven area in all of China."

"It's evidenced by how the privately-owned enterprises in the region developed in the past year and have become global players," she said.

Cheng thinks that a market-oriented culture is an asset for the bay area, and Hong Kong could tap into that.

"Hong Kong is already a leader in providing products and services to large companies via an equity capital market and offshore bond offering," she added.

This year alone, the total bond issuance of mainland corporates reached a historical high of $168 billion - almost doubled that of $88 billion in 2016.

"Hong Kong probably needs to think of more innovative financing products and solutions for SMEs in China, as well as startups," said Cheng.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing - the city's stock market operator - has already made some progress by moving toward allowing biotech and healthcare companies without profit track records to be listed in the local stock market.

"Hong Kong took up half of the imports of the bay area in the past three years, and the bay area took up about 60 to 70 percent of the total imports of China. This is a huge asset," said HNA Innovation Finance Group's Chief Innovation Officer, Ding Lei. "The ratios for export are relatively lower but increasing."

"With such a huge imports and exports size, there's still a lot of space for development based on commodities, warehousing and logistics that are related to the real economy," said Ding.

A challenge, however, will be fostering innovation, particularly in Hong Kong.

"I see a lot of new talents and capital flowing into Shenzhen or Zhuhai very quickly. It's easy to find human resources in these cities, but the policy is a bit tighter in Hong Kong for the financial industry," said Ding. "Although the Hong Kong government is trying to push innovation in the city, there's not much support."

Strengths and weaknesses

Hong Kong does have a lot of strength that places it in a good position to attract talents and innovation. But, it also has weaknesses.

"Hong Kong's No 1 weakness is its high cost," said Ulrich. "Doing business in Hong Kong is very expensive. To attract the necessary talents into Hong Kong, the government can do more by offering attractive prices for entrepreneurs and startups."

Ulrich further pointed out that improving education in Hong Kong is another way to enlarge the local talent pool.

"There needs to be a more effective coordination mechanism for the 11 cities," she said. "We have three different currencies, three different customs, different immigration policies and different divisions of government. The central government can help coordinate the efforts in the bay area to make the movement of professionals much more expedient."

"The integration of employment can be achieved by improving the commuter system of the metropolitan area and the custom clearance policy," said Zhang.

Ding also said mainland conglomerate HNA will expand its operations in the bay area as it offers great opportunities for bulk commodities trading, warehousing and logistics.

The financial arm of HNA, which has diversified interests in aviation, tourism and real estate, was launched in Hong Kong in March this year, principally engaged in commodity trade, financial investment and consumer finance which, Ding believes, has huge potential and can play a key part in promoting internationalization of the yuan.

In less than one year since its launch, HNA Innovation Finance Group has sealed two deals. In March, it entered into an agreement to acquire a 51-per cent equity interest in Swiss commodities trader Glencore's oil products storage and logistics business for $775 million. It also agreed to acquire Singaporean logistics firm CWT in a $1-billion takeover late last year.

The group is still looking for other merger-and-acquisition opportunities in areas linked to its core business, Ding said.

Such acquisition plans are in line with the nation's strategy, he said, and the group wants to use its strengths to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative, the bay area development and renminbi internationalization.

Sharing their insights and wisdom on Hong Kongs role in the bay areas development, the distinguished panelists at the China Daily Asia Leadership Roundtable, themed Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area: Prospects for Hong Kong and held in conjunction with the 11th Asian Financial Forum at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on Tuesday, are all on the same page that Hong Kong stands out with its unique advantages in playing a critical part in the regions future economic progress.Photos By Parker Zheng / China Daily

(HK Edition 01/17/2018 page7)
I had the privilege or reading a pre-release version of "God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church." Here are 20 quotes from the book, which you should pick up.
North Koreas recent decision to participate in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics comes at a time when the country has arguably never been more isolated from the West. Recent actions and counteractions between the United States and North Korea have led to unprecedented tensions in a long-strained relationship. The State Department issued a travel ban that forced about 200 Americans working there to leave before it went into effect, and more recently, the United Nations initiated new sanctions against the country.

Despite the risks and restrictionssome of which have been ongoing for decadesAmerican Christians have found ways to minister to North Koreans in need. For some, it means teaching young people at the evangelical-founded Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. For Heidi Linton, who serves as the director of Christian Friends of Korea (CFK), it means serving gravely sick North Koreans.

CFK describes its mission as sharing Gods heart of love and grace to the North Korean people primarily within the context of tuberculosis and hepatitis. These are both very serious diseases in North Korea that affect hundreds of thousandsprobably millions, said Linton, who has been working in the country since the mid-1990s.

Linton, along with her American team members, must now secure special validation passports to continue working in North Korea. She spoke recently with CT about her familys long connection to North Korea, her personal relationships with citizens of the closed country, and the role Billy Graham played in catalyzing CFKs work.

To what extent has fear factored into your work?

How can you avoid fear when it comes to North Korea? That said, I cling to the verse in 1 John 4:18 that says, There is no fear in love. Perfect love casts out fear. None of us in our own strength can ever love perfectly, but the Holy Spirit working through us can show Gods perfect love to the North Korean people.

This last August [after North Korea ran new ballistic and nuclear tests] was a very intense time for CFK. We sat ourselves down and said, Are we supposed to be going back in August? We called our board of directors together for prayer and discussion over two days, and team members also talked with their families. We laid out several criteriathis needs to happen by this date, and that needs to happen by that date. If these things come together, then we will go. They did all come together, we had a productive trip, and God gave us peace while we were there. We ended up going back in October, as well.

This has been a walk of faith from the very beginning, and thats hard to define sometimes. You read Hebrews 11 [where it says faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see], and there are many, many examples of how confusing and difficult that can be in the moment. Yet God is faithful.

What is your organizations connection to Billy Graham?

Billy Graham wanted to go to North Korea in the early 90s. My brother-in-law had made a visit to North Korea and maintained relationships with the North Koreans at the UN Mission in New York, so he made some introductions, and then he and others were involved in negotiating and helping to organize Dr. Grahams early visits.

My husbands unclehe was a lifelong missionary to Korea who later served on the board of CFK for many yearsinterpreted for Dr. Graham when he spoke at churches and at Kim Il-sung University and other places. Graham and his team met then-president Kim Il Sung, who declared that they were friends of Korea. After we realized there was a real need in North Korea for ongoing humanitarian assistance, my husband and his brother joined with three other board members and founded what became Christian Friends of Korea. We now have different partners and volunteers across the US and globally.

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What initially catalyzed your work in North Korea?

We initially began working in 1995 during the famine yearsfrom 1994 to 1998and we started by sending food. Not long after, we got a request to send an ambulance, so we put one together. Part of the funding for this project came from an honor (including a monetary prize) my mother-in-law had been given for her work with tuberculosis in South Korea. When they found out about that, [our contacts in North Korea] said, Oh, we have a tuberculosis problem. Could you help us with that? It really was just sort of a door that God opened to us, and we walked through it.

Obviously, treating these types of diseases in North Korea is extremely challenging. How has the risk and complexity changed in recent years?

The past year has been particularly difficult. The travel ban, which took effect on September 1, has been part of that, although weve been able to navigate it. But there have been issues with new sanctions, which impact lots of different aspects of our work. Whenever you raise sanctions on a country, third parties that we have to do business with in order to deliver humanitarian aid in North Korea start to get very nervous. This work has always been difficult, but now were at an unprecedented level of complexity. Humanitarian activities are being seriously jeopardized, and Christian organizations like ours face additional challenges.

What is your own familys relationship to Korea?

I married into my husbands family, and his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all missionaries in Korea. His great-grandfather, Eugene Bell, went to Korea as a Presbyterian missionary in 1895, and the family has had a presence in Korea ever since then. So were going on 123 years, now. Most of them speak the language very fluently, and they certainly have a deep understanding and appreciation for the culture and the people, the context and the history.

Are there other missionary connections for CFK?

In the Black Mountain/Montreat area of North Carolina, where CFK is headquartered, there were many retired missionaries to Korea who returned from the mission field and settled here. We ended up establishing our organization here in part because of all these wonderful people who really understood Korea and knew its language and culture. We used to bring the North Korean officials down here from New York to visit them. It was sort of their home away from home because they would have dinner in these peoples homes and speak their own language and begin to understand how much these people really loved their country. Many of these retired Korea missionaries had known their country before it was a North and a South, before it was divided. That resonated on another level, as well.

When did you first sense Gods call to North Korea?

I would have never dreamed of working in North Korea in my 20s. Although I had known many Koreans in college and high school, it wasnt really on my radar screen. But when I married, I began to learn a lot more about Korea. When I went to North Korea for the first time, it grabbed my heart. The needs were overwhelming. I had already been involved in the work for three years as a volunteer, helping with newsletters and communications with donors and that kind of thing. But it was transformative to actually visit the country, meet ordinary North Koreans, and follow Gods lead in understanding how we could potentially help.

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What has changed over the years that youve been in North Korea?

My early visits were during the famine years, and that was a time of incredible hardship and overwhelming need. Its hard to explain what we saw and experienced. Certainly, the countrys come a long way since that time, at least in some respects. There is more food available now, although its not enough. But there are small segments of the population that are doing significantly better than during those hard, hard years. I remember when bicycles came in. People were walking everywhere in the earliest years, and then all of a sudden bicycles came on the scene, and that was a huge transformation.

Many people have cell phones, too. Theres color everywhere nowthe buildings always used to be grayand so to have things painted colors brightens everything. Theres grass planted everywhere now; that was all barren when we first came. There are parks, and there are new buildings, especially in Pyongyang. So I have seen a lot of changes over the years. Certainly, theres been a lot of work done, and yet theres still a long, long way to go.

Is there a personal relationship with anyone in North Korea that is of particular importance to you?

One meaningful relationship was with a director of a tuberculosis sanitarium that we visited off and on for years. Ill never forget just how excruciating the difficulties were; he was trying to take care of TB patients and was sick himself.

When we visited one time, I went to shake his hand, and it was so hot because he had a fever. As we were leaving, he gave me a box of pheasant eggs. I said, How did you get these eggs? He said, I knew you were coming. I wanted to welcome you. So I hiked around the hills for the last three days to collect these eggs out of the nests for you. I was amazed by this huge act of sacrifice and generosity. We went on to help this man rebuild his care center from the ground up. We helped him build a ward to care for multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB patients. We had a new well drilled for him, and then our team worked with his staff to put in a solar/gravity water system. We worked with him on a greenhouse. By the time we finished, his whole facility had been completely transformed.

He died about a year and a half ago from MDR-TB. He had been sick with TB five times. He was 59 years old, just a few years older than I am. But his life gives you an idea of the kind of people who are thereself-sacrificing, hardworking, and special people.

Im sorry about his death.

Sadly, there are a lot of people who have died. Weve worked in about 30 care centers, and so we get to know many different people. Its really a privilege to visit them. Theyre hospitable and welcoming and share ideas about how to improve the facility and help the patients.

On this last visit, one man that we talked with told us hes been in TB work for more than 20 years. He built the road to his own facility when he first got started, and then he built the buildings and planted fruit trees. His vision and determination are remarkable. He was planting fruit trees during some of the hardest years, and now they are starting to bear fruit. He and his stafflocal doctors and nursesare now rebuilding a main patient building by hand. The care center has improved so significantly, but he went through some really hard years to get there. These are very selfless people, and the people that they care for are generally very, very sick.

How do you see the church in South Korea interacting with North Korea?

Its been very difficult because of the legal constraints that the South Koreans are under. Theres been almost no interaction between the South and the North in recent years. In many cases, their South Korean passports prevent them from being able to go to North Korea. I hope that can change, but for now, they dont have the opportunity.

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What I will say for the South Korean church is that its a praying church. Im always amazed at the Koreans early morning prayers and their calling out to God. We can learn from that.

What about the American church? How can it better love and support North Koreans?

First of all, we need to be aware that there are 25 million people there that need our prayers, love, and supportpeople who need us to understand their context. I hope we can be a praying church. What we get in the news is often a very scary picture, but underneath that, there are real people who need to know that God loves them and has not abandoned them.

So I would encourage the American church to find tangible ways to help. There are several very good organizations involved in North Korea, and they need a lot of help. They need volunteers. They need prayer support. They need financial support. People should get involved. We have an amazing opportunity to love people in the name of Jesus and to let them know that Christians will be at the forefront of caring for them.

What do you want our readers to know about North Korea?

North Koreans are real human beings who are trying to love their families well. Theyre trying to raise their kids. Theyre trying to be healthy. They suffer just like we do. They long for better relationships with the outside world, with us as the enemy. They want to know who we are and why we think the way we do. Theyre limited in the amount of information they have, and thats important for us to understand, and its also important for us to understand that they have very little say in what their government does.

Its a very complex situation, but I think the Bible is very clear: We are called to actively love our enemies. When we do, God enters into that space and brings healing, understanding, righteousness, and justice. So were called to engage. Were called to reach out. Were called to remember that these are our brothers and sisters.
home World Christ statue in Peru catches fire days before papal visit

A large statue of Christ caught fire in Peru on Saturday, just days ahead of Pope Francis' scheduled visit to the South American nation.

According to the Associated Press, the statue, called "Christ of the Pacific," was donated by Brazilian company Odebrecht, which is at the center of a corruption scandal involving many of Peru's high-profile politicians.

Two dozen firefighters responded to fight the blaze that charred nearly the entire back of the 69-foot (21-meter) statue. It was initially thought that the fire was caused by an act of arson, but the police stated that it was sparked by electrical cables that had short-circuited due to humidity.

Many Peruvians saw the statue as a reminder of Odebrecht's illegal activities, including its bribe offers to high-ranking officials in exchange for lucrative public works contracts. In January 2017, the statue was vandalized with messages like "Out of the country Odebrecht."

Two former presidents have been accused of accepting money from the Odebrecht while current president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was nearly impeached in December over his alleged links to the company.

Documents uncovered by opposition lawmakers have reportedly shown that Kuczynski's private consulting firm received $782,000 from the company over a decade ago when he was serving as a government minister. The president denied knowing about the payments, saying he had recused himself from all consulting business when he took office.

The burning of the statue came five days before the pope's arrival in Peru. Francis is hoping to call attention to the need to protect the Amazon rainforest, but Peruvians are waiting to see whether he addresses corruption.

On Monday, Francis landed in Chile, where three Catholic churches where firebombed in the capital city of Santiago.

In one church, the perpetrators reportedly left a direct threat to the pope, saying the next bombs will be "in your cassock."

The message was written in Spanish but all letters that signify grammatical gender were reportedly replaced with "x"s, a common practice among activists on the radical left.

"We will never submit to the dominion you want to exercise over our bodies, our ideas and actions, because we were born free to chose the path we want to take. Against every monk and nun and against every preacher. Bodies free, impure and wild," it read.

The perpetrators further threatened to attack the pope's "disgusting morals" with the "fire of combat."

"Freedom to all the political prisoners of the world! Free Wallmapu [indigenous territory]! Autonomy and resistance! Pope Francis the next bombs will be in your cassock!" the message concluded.
home World US pledges $55 million to help Christians rebuild their homes in Iraq

The U.S. government has pledged to donate $55 million to the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) to help Christians and other religious minorities rebuild their homes following the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq.

In October, Vice President Mike Pence announced that will no longer rely on the U.N. to provide aid to Christians in Iraq and vowed to work instead with faith-based groups and private organizations to help persecuted minorities.

According to The Christian Post, President Donald Trump's administration recently announced that it has renegotiated a deal with the U.N. to ensure that vulnerable Christians, Yazidis and other minorities will receive the U.N. assistance that they were previously denied.

Iraqi Christian leaders and human rights advocates have lamented that thousands of persecuted minorities have not been receiving their fair share of U.N. assistance for rebuilding their communities.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) stated in a press release that it has ensured that $55 million out of $75 million pledged to the UNDP Funding Facility for Stabilization in Iraq "will address the needs of vulnerable religious and ethnic minority communities" in the Nineveh Province."

"The modified agreement ensures that the U.S. contribution will help the populations of liberated areas in Ninewa Province resume normal lives by restoring services such as water, electricity, sewage, health, and education," the release stated.

USAID officials said that another $75 million has been pledged but it will be dependent on the UNDP improving its "accountability and transparency record."

The Trump administration also announced that it is accepting proposals from private organizations on the ground in Iraq to receive direct aid from the U.S. government to help religious minorities rebuild their ancestral homelands.

Human rights expert Nina Shea, who previously served as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), had voiced her skepticism about the renegotiated deal between the Trump administration and the U.N.

"I have no confidence in the UNDP," Shea said in an email to The Christian Post on Friday. "As USAID is now willing to admit, UNDP has been grossly mismanaged, is not transparent, and has deliberately marginalized the genocide that targeted Christian and Yazidi minorities for over the past two years," she continued.

Shea further stated that the success of the agreement "will depend on the vigilance of USAID overseers." She asserted that the overseers need to monitor the funds, not just on paper, but also through field checks and regular communications with church leaders on the ground.

The new agreement between the U.S. government and the UNDP were negotiated largely by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and her office, according to Fox News.
Windows on to a world of water

For his exhibition 50 Seas at Christies in Paris, the acclaimed French designer Mathieu Lehanneur has created 50 ceramic discs, each replicating the surface of the sea and painted in colours taken from images of the oceans across the globe

At the end of the day, each of us is unique, and wants to be considered unique, says 43-year-old French designer Mathieu Lehanneur, whose multidisciplinary approach spans architecture, interiors, product design, craft, science and art. In my work, be it as a designer, artist or architect, and regardless of whether I am producing something unique or for mass production, I want every piece to speak personally. Lehanneurs oeuvre, which ranges from air-cleansing sculptures and boutique interiors to outdoor computers and emergency telephones, has won critical acclaim for its blend of sleek minimalism, practicality and beauty. He has collaborated with brands including Nike, Air France, Sony and Pullman Hotels, and his works feature in the collections of MoMA New York, MoMA San Francisco, the Victoria & Albert Museum and The Pompidou. Growing up, my family was more of a community, explains Lehanneur, who was the youngest of seven children. In such a large unit, you have to function as a group. I now apply that same ethos to our world, whether the context is family, business, country or the entire planet. The latter, in particular, is in evidence in his new body of work, 50 Seas, which goes on display at Christies in Paris as part of Maison et Objet, a biannual fair for home decor. Fusing science with design, the work charts the chromatic topography of our planets liquid environments.

Open a larger version of this image Mathieu Lehanneur, 50 Seas. Each work is sold separately for 4,800, as an edition of one with two artists proofs

Open a larger version of this image

Can you describe the project in your own words? Mathieu Lehanneur: I have worked with the liquid state of materials for many years. In a previous project I made liquid forms from marble, and this series grew from that. It draws on the experience of being in front of the sea or ocean, where you can stand in silence and enjoy the rhythm of the waves and the infinite colours of the water. Each disc represents a pinpoint-specific place on earth, and faithfully replicates the colour of the water there. How did you make the wave shapes? ML: It was a long process to accurately reproduce the movement of the oceans texture in ceramic. In order to realistically reproduce the seas currents in a physical form, my studio adapted 3-D computer software used by the cinema industry for rendering CGI waves.

Open a larger version of this image Rather than working from a desk and computer, explains Lehanneur, the majority of my time was spent moulding shapes and mixing colours in front of a furnace Open a larger version of this image

Once we were happy with a waves texture, we printed it as a mould. From this we cast 50 identical circular discs, each with the same surface pattern, and every one made by hand. It took a long time to get right. They were made in a studio in Switzerland  a landlocked country  but rather than working from a desk and computer, the majority of my time was spent moulding shapes and mixing colours in front of a furnace. How did you select the 50 colour points in the oceans and seas? ML: I didnt want them to be random  I wanted the work to show the entire range of water colours, from Mexico to the Arctic. It was difficult to select the 50  I could have easily chosen thousands. But in the end I felt 50 was the right number to give a good interpretation of the entire colour spectrum, with no two colours being too similar. Was it difficult to recreate the colours faithfully? ML: I partnered with the French satellite photography company Planet Observateur. It provided me with high-resolution images of each of the 50 points, from which we colour-matched the enamel paint by eye. We probably made close to 2,000 paint samples before I was happy that each was accurate enough. It takes a lot of learning and mixing because the colours change enormously during the firing process, so they look wildly different between start and finish.





These works are physical representations of the seas, but they are also snapshots

At Christies in Paris, they will be mounted on the walls in one long row, at eye level. This is so that the audience can easily compare one to the next, and feel as if theyre in front of the water. Below each piece will be the GPS coordinates and name of each location. That way, you can know where youre looking, whether it is the Yucatan Peninsula or the Caspian Sea. Each ceramic will operate like a window on to a world of water, allowing people to travel the planet. Do you have a favourite? ML: I do, but I cant tell you which it is. As the pieces are currently unlabelled, I dont know where the colour I love most comes from!

Open a larger version of this image Each ceramic will operate like a window on to a world of water and allow people to travel the planet, says Lehanneur Open a larger version of this image
Kinder Morgan

The U.S. could become a net exporter of natural gas in 2018 for the first time since 1957, thanks to increased natural gas exports to Mexico, LNG exports to at least 20 countries and less gas flowing into the country from Canada, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Exports of LNG continue to grow, as terminals on the Gulf Coast reach full capacity, and with planned terminal additions in Maryland, Georgia, Texas and Louisiana, the Energy Department expects that by 2019 the U.S. LNG capacity will be the third largest in the world. U.S. pipeline capacity to Mexico is also expected to double by 2019.
A man running back and forth through traffic was struck and killed Monday night on Hempstead Road in northwest Houston, police said.

Witnesses have told authorities the victim may have been a homeless man who was familiar to people in the area.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was a great relief, if only for some time.

It allowed 800,000 people like myself to live and work without fear of deportation.

DACA was an executive order issued by former President Barack Obama in 2012 that gave undocumented young people a two-year renewable work permit, provided they met certain criteria. On Sept. 5, 2017, President Donald Trump rescinded the program. While the program is set to expire on March 5, there is now a legal battle playing out in the courts to keep it intact.

As Congress and the White House debate how to move forward, they should be aware of one little-known consequence of DACA. It forced many recipients to change their names, throwing many aspects of their lives into disarray.

I am an anthropologist who has been studying immigrant youth since 2010. In my most recent research, I interviewed DACA graduate students about the impacts of DACAs forced name alteration.

Heres what they told me.

Forced name change

DACA forced immigrants who grew up in the United States using only one last name  usually their fathers  to add another last name, usually their mothers maiden name. This was done because the new forms of identification that were issued through DACA, such as work permits, had to match the information on the applicants birth certificate.

The majority of DACA recipients, about 75 percent, are from Mexico, where it is customary to use both paternal and maternal last names. Therefore, many applicants have two last names on their birth certificates.

While the birth certificate name requirement applies to all immigrants, it has a unique impact on DACA recipients. DACA recipients were brought to the U.S. at a young age without legal status. In the U.S., it is customary to use only one last name. Many immigrants from Mexico dropped their mothers last name during their primary education and grew up using just one last name because their families were instructed to do so by institutions like schools and the DMV. All of their U.S. records prior to DACA are often under that shortened name.

For example, I interviewed Rosa V. Martinez (a pseudonym), who says she was forced to add her mothers last name, Flores, to her name when she applied for DACA. Rosa pleaded with the immigration officials to let her keep just one last name, but she was not allowed. The consequences of this were significant.

Her new legal name did not match a lifetime of records, such as the name on her bachelors and masters degrees, published works and transcripts. When Rosa applied to Ph.D. programs, the schools were unsure if Rosa V. Martinez and Rosa V. Martinez Flores were the same person and were reluctant to accept her transcripts. The already stressful application process became even more complicated.

Another graduate student, Vicente Hernandez (a pseudonym), attempted to get a student loan, but his new legal name, which also had a second last name, did not match his credit score. Because of this, the bank was unwilling to give him the loan. Vicente was finally approved only after many stressful weeks and extra paperwork.

Vicente said, There was no need for that huge inconvenience and hassle. This would have never happened had they [U.S. immigration] allowed me to keep my name as it was.

Using surnames for control

Beyond the negative impacts discussed by the research participants in this study, the renaming of individuals has historically been used as a way to control people. It facilitates a countrys ability to reject and discard individuals deemed unfit for society, as well as criminalize and persecute them. This is not something most DACA recipients are aware of.

A well documented, extreme example of this comes from Europe. By the 19th century, the use of last names was widespread in Europe. But one group, the Ashkenazi Jews, had managed to resist. A Prussian law in 1833 forced all Jews to choose from a fixed list of surnames. Through this decree, the state effectively secured via last names the recognizability of Jews as Jews. The closed list of Jewish surnames made it easier for Nazi Germany to carry out the task of genocide. The efficient expulsion of Jews to their deaths during WWII would have been, logistically, much more difficult prior to the 19th century.

Last names make populations traceable. They aid the government in tracking criminals and other persons of interest and knowing accurate population size for the purposes of taxation and waging war.

Another example of how governments use forced name change to hurt people comes from U.S. history. In 1887, the use of surnames was enforced on Native Americans with the Dawes Act, which created unambiguous personal identities for the purpose of ending communal holdings of property, and opened Indian lands to settlement by non-Indians and to development of railroads.

As the future of those previously protected by DACA is mired in uncertainty, it is important to learn from the past and be cautious of the potentially harmful consequences of forced name changes on peoples lives. It is likely that the negative impacts due to forced name change will worsen if no law is passed to aid former DACA recipients.

The question remains: Will the surname system enable the government to track and criminalize vulnerable immigrants?

***

Linda E. Sanchez is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

For comments, tips or pitches for this blog, write to Olivia P. Tallet.
Jakarta | Wed, January 10, 2018 | 03:58 pm

With the Jakarta-Bandung railway project now stagnant, Maritime Affairs Coordinating Minister Luhut Pinsar Pandjaitan has said the government needs to review the project, including whether the two cities need to be connected with a high-speed railway.

However, Luhut stressed on Tuesday that the stagnation had not been caused by financing problems, claiming that China, as the major investor in the project, was still committed to the agreement, which had already been signed by the governments of both countries.

So it is not a financing problem. The problem is with ourselves. We need to know, for example, whether a high speed rail link between Bandung and Jakarta, which are only 140 kilometers apart, is a necessary project, said Luhut in his office in Jakarta on Tuesday as reported by tempo.co.

Therefore, the government would evaluate the project as requested by President Joko Jokowi Widodo, said Luhut, adding that the evaluation would be completed within one month.

The President has ordered me, State-owned Enterprises Minister Rini Soemarno and Investment Coordination Agency head Thomas Lembong to evaluate the Jakarta-Bandung high speed project. Next week, we will start coordinating, he added.

Luhut said there was no change to the financing scheme as the funding would still come from China as previously agreed. We have to respect the agreement, the minister added.

President Jokowi led the ground-breaking ceremony of the project in January 2016. The government has given the Indonesian-Chinese joint venture, Kereta Cepat Indonesia China (KCIC), a fixed concession period of 50 years starting on May 31, 2019, the deadline for the project's completion. (bbn)
A new lawsuit from a University of St. Thomas administrator accused the campus of botching the investigation into a sexual misconduct allegation, encouraging her silence and retaliating against her after she reported receiving a nude photo from a colleague.

Siobhan Fleming, the university's associate vice president for academic affairs, said in the lawsuit that she received the nude photo via email in 2015. She has now filed multiple complaints regarding the photo and how the university responded to her complaint, including Monday's filing and an August lawsuit in county court that she later withdrew.

In August, she sued two colleagues who she said sent and received the email, Adam Martinez and Dominic Aquila. Martinez, a director of the college's faith and culture program, sent the photo, Fleming said in the August filing. Aquila, then provost at St. Thomas, also received the email and told Fleming to delete it, Fleming says in Monday's lawsuit.

Days after that August lawsuit was filed Aquila announced he would leave his position as provost but remain a St. Thomas employee, a decision he said at the time was "long in the making."

Fleming has also filed complaints with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, the Texas Workforce Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging retaliation and sex discrimination, according to Monday's federal lawsuit.

Monday's suit offers new allegations regarding the contents of the email she said she received and what occurred after she said she reported it. In it, she accuses St. Thomas and its employees of silencing her accusations, improperly investigating her report and paring back her job responsibilities after she complained.

The email, the lawsuit said, was an "obscene sexual photograph" accompanied by text that "she interpreted to suggest that (the sender) was masturbating at home and planned to come in later 'to do as much of this as I can.'"

"The email and the image itself were highly disturbing for her," said Alexander Zalkin, a California-based attorney representing Fleming. "What was more disturbing and cause for more distress was St. Thomas' response."

Richard Ludwick, St. Thomas' president, said in a statement Tuesday through a spokesperson that the university was "surprised and disappointed to learn of the lawsuit."

"University of St. Thomas' internal investigation was conducted appropriately, and we had a third party, independent investigator," his statement read. "We have confidence in that process. The university's actions were appropriate in the investigation and the handling of the complaint. We did not retaliate."

A University of St. Thomas spokesman declined to comment on a detailed list of questions about the lawsuit. Aquila and Martinez did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

The university, like others across the city, was closed Tuesday due to Houston's weather.

The investigation

Fleming, a St. Thomas alumna who joined the university as an administrator in 2013, said in Monday's federal suit that the university's investigation into her report was a "sham."

First, she said in the suit, Aquila encouraged her to "delete (the email) immediately and not tell anyone about it" when she talked to him about the photograph.

After she said she urged the university to investigate the email as a violation of the school's sexual misconduct policy, she said Aquila told her that the email did not violate St. Thomas' policies "because the sender did not intend to harass Dr. Fleming," according to the lawsuit.

St. Thomas' sexual misconduct policy names "distribution of pornographic material" as a form of sexual misconduct.

Under federal law, St. Thomas' policy reads, most university officials who receive a report of sexual assault have to share that information for investigation.

"The University believes that no person should bear the effects of sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or related violence alone," the policy reads. "When sexual misconduct, sexual assault or some form of related violence occurs, the university's paramount concern is for the safety, health and well-being of those impacted."

She said in the suit that shortly after receiving the email, she told her brother, then a board member, about the complaint. He alerted the board chair, who told then-President Robert Ivany about the complaint, she said in the lawsuit.

"Aquila confronted Dr. Fleming in her office and berated her for informing members of the board about the obscene image she received," the lawsuit says. "Aquila told Dr. Fleming that he was trying to keep this from the Board, but now that they knew, St. Thomas would be forced to conduct an investigation."

The university's Title IX coordinator  an administrator named Randy Graham who is responsible for compliance with the federal nondiscrimination law  did not interview Fleming during the investigation, according to the lawsuit.

Graham told her that St. Thomas investigated the email as a potential violation of the university's technology resources policy and "did not find any pornography" on the sender's computer, according to the lawsuit.

"It became apparent that while all the men involved in the incident had been interviewed, she, the complainant and the only woman, had not," the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit says that when Fleming asked why St. Thomas did not investigate the allegation as sexual misconduct, Graham said Fleming did not report it as such. Fleming, however, said in the suit she asked the university to investigate the email as a violation of the sexual misconduct policy.

'Completely isolated'

Fleming said in the lawsuit she was removed from her position on multiple committees, including the staff affairs policy committee and the president's cabinet meeting group. St. Thomas leaders, she said in the lawsuit, directed colleagues and board members not to interact with her.

Her "job responsibilities have been reduced to virtually nothing," the suit reads, and she has been "completely isolated." The suit alleges that "Aquila's and St. Thomas' actions have been, and are, clearly intended to make Dr. Fleming's work environment so unbearable that she resign."

When she complained of retaliation in June, St. Thomas hired an outside firm to investigate but "did not offer any final report or relay the outcome of any investigation" after the investigation was completed in August, according to the lawsuit.

Lindsay Ellis writes about higher education for the Chronicle. You can follow her on Twitter and send her tips at lindsay.ellis@chron.com.
Two members of an alleged doomsday group are accused of marrying each other's daughters and kidnapping them.

News station KUTV reports Utah man Samuel Shaffer told police that he was betrothed to John Coltharp's daughter and that Coltharp was betrothed to his daughter. Both of the girls are between the ages of 7 and 8.

DEAD: Man running through traffic killed

Sanpete County Deputy Attorney Kevin Daniels told the news station that the men also allegedly married their own 4-year old daughters. Daniels added that police did not have any evidence that the four-year-old girls were abused but were investigating the possibility.

Both men are charged with kidnapping. Coltharp is also charged with sodomy of a child for a sexual assault that reportedly occurred on Aug. 1, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The Iron County Sheriff's Office said in a release that Shaffer faces two counts of kidnapping and four counts of child abuse.

Now Playing: Two Utah men believed to be involved in a doomsday religious cult allegedly married each others underage daughters Video: People

According to the sheriff's office release, deputies found Shaffer walking around in an area of southwest Utah where they believed some of the abducted children were being kept. Shaffer was arrested and told police where two of the missing girls could be found.

Deputies say they found two girls inside two blue plastic 55-gallon water barrels, in which the children had allegedly spent about 24 hours in subfreezing temperatures. Once they were found, the girls were transported to area hospitals. Shaffer told police a few hours later where two other girls were hidden. Police said say they recovered the girls from an abandoned mobile home. The girls were reportedly in poor health with signs of dehydration.

BUSTED: Police use PIT maneuver to stop erratic, dancing driver

The sheriff's office said Shaffer and Coltharp are believed to be members of the Knights of the Crystal Blade, a religious group. The group released a statement on its website stating, "This group and website in no way, shape, or form, condone or tolerate child coupling, child marriages, arranged marriages, neglect, abduction or abuse."

Will Axford is a digital reporter for Chron.com. Read more of his stories here and follow him on Twitter.
The days may be numbered for the world's largest passenger aircraft.

Airbus, the European aerospace group that makes the A380 superjumbo, said Monday that it would have to end production of the plane if its only major customer, Emirates, did not order more.

The admission by John Leahy, the company's chief operating officer, was the latest indication that Airbus miscalculated more than two decades ago when it bet that clogged runways would create demand for larger planes that could deliver more people with fewer landing slots. Instead, airlines bypassed the major hubs and ordered midsize planes that could fly directly between regional airports.

"The A380 was better suited to 1995, before air routes fragmented," said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis at Teal Group Corp., a consulting firm in Fairfax, Va.

Airbus said Monday that it has not given up on the plane, but acknowledged that it is endangered.

"If we can't work out a deal with Emirates, I think there is no choice but to shut down the program," Leahy said during a webcast. "But," he added, "I'm hopeful that we'll work out a deal."

Emirates, based in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, did not respond to a request for comment.

While it would be premature to write the A380's obituary, there is little doubt that the double-decker plane - once touted as the future of aviation - has been an enormous disappointment and a financial disaster for Airbus, the most formidable competitor to Boeing in the passenger airplane market.

When Airbus started delivering the A380 a decade ago, after spending $25 billion to develop it, the company, based near Toulouse, France, saw the plane as the solution to airport congestion and to increased demand for air travel. Only so many planes can land at an airport in any given day, so Airbus reasoned that planes carrying more people would allow airports to absorb more passengers.

The A380 can carry more than 500 passengers while also offering amenities like showers, first-class suites and a bar.

But the airline industry responded by increasing traffic to smaller airports, a change that favored Boeing and its 787 Dreamliner, a midsize, wide-bodied plane that can carry a maximum of 330 passengers. The Dreamliner has two engines, making it much less expensive to maintain than the four-engine A380.

Aboulafia of Teal Group noted that it is now possible to fly directly to Spain from Washington, D.C., without passing through a large hub like London or Frankfurt.

Airbus did not book any orders for the A380 last year, the company said Monday.

The superjumbo's poor performance overshadowed an otherwise decent year for Airbus, which said Monday that it delivered 718 aircraft in 2017, a 4 percent increase from the previous year. The company said it had a backlog of orders worth $1.1 trillion. Airbus's best-seller by far in 2017 was the A320 line, versions of which can carry up to 240 passengers, or about half as many as the A380.

Leahy, the Airbus chief operating officer, said Monday that the A380's best days were ahead. Passenger traffic is doubling every 15 years, he said, meaning that the original rationale for the model still holds.

But he acknowledged that, until that day arrives, Airbus needs a minimum of six to eight orders a year to keep production alive at the A380's final assembly plant near Toulouse. For the moment, he said, the only likely customer for those planes is Emirates.
WASHINGTON - The nation's banks are finding a lot to love about the Trump administration's tax cuts.

The $1.5 trillion tax overhaul signed into law late last year provided deep and lasting tax cuts to all types of businesses, but financial institutions are among the biggest winners so far, reaping benefits from a lower corporate rate and more preferable tax treatment for so-called pass-through companies, which includes many small banks.

While some of the biggest banks are reporting fourth-quarter earnings hits stemming from the new tax law, they see rich benefits over the long term, including effective tax rates that are even lower than the new 21 percent corporate rate.

Citigroup said Tuesday that it would take a one-time $22 billion hit from the tax law, largely related to the bank's tax-deferred assets, which now must be recalibrated to reflect the lower corporate rate. In a news release, Citigroup chief executive Michael Corbat said the law nevertheless "not only leads to higher net income and increased returns, but also serves to strengthen our capital generation capabilities going forward."

$7 billion boost

JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest bank, and Wells Fargo both said Friday that they expect the new law to reduce their effective tax rates next year to 19 percent, a cut of nearly one-third from what they paid in 2016. The reduction will give the banks a combined boost of more than $7 billion in 2018 alone. PNC Financial said Friday that it expected its effective tax rate to fall even further next year, to 17 percent.

"The good news is that tax reform has produced both current and future benefits for our shareholders," PNC's president and chief executive Bill Demchak told analysts Friday. He said the bank's preference would be to divert the tax savings "toward dividend" - which is to say, to return a higher dividend to shareholders.

More than 70 financial institutions have announced they will raise wages or offer bonuses to employees in the wake of the tax law's passage, including big firms such as Bank of America and community banks such as Bank of the Ozarks. All told, those institutions account for about half of the companies that have promised raises or bonuses since President Donald Trump signed the bill into law, according to a running list tallied by Americans for Tax Reform, a low-tax advocacy group.

Rolling back regulations

The payouts to workers reflect a small slice of the windfall that banks large and small are in line to receive. The law includes a reduction in the corporate rate to 21 percent from a high of 35 percent last year, as well as a 20 percent deduction for income from pass-through companies. One-third of all community banks are organized as pass-throughs, according to the Independent Community Bankers of America, which represents those firms and was among the groups pushing for a lower pass-through rate.

Analysts projected the financial industry would reap some of the largest benefits from that reduction given that banks typically paid much higher effective tax rates in the past than many other industries, like manufacturing.

The boon for banks comes as the industry begins to regain some of its swagger in the wake of the financial crisis and as it seeks to roll back some of the post-crisis regulations put in place by the Obama administration under the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.
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Halo House, a unique community of 33 low-cost, temporary apartments for patients with blood cancers and their families, will break ground near the Texas Medical Center later this month, officials said on Monday.

The 42,520-square-foot complex of one- and two-bedroom furnished apartments is expected to open for patients in early 2019.

The units will rent for roughly $20 per day and be available for leases that run from two weeks to three months, said Monique Hart Capers, director of development and marketing for the Halo House Foundation. She said an option for a longer lease period is still under consideration.

The$12 million complex will offer discounted, home-like settings for those undergoing treatment for blood cancers such as lymphoma, leukemia, or myeloma.

Each year roughly 30,000 patients seek treatment at the medical center for their specific cancer diseases which can last anywhere from a few weeks to several months. Since it is crucial they remain close to their treatment, finding nearby lodging can become financially crippling, Capers said.

RELATED: Halo House provides a home away from home for young cancer patients

Halo House first opened in 2011 with just two apartments. More recently it has expanded to 11, with as many as 100 per day on the waiting list. The new expansion will triple the number of apartments.

In addition to the 28 one-bedroom units, there will also be four two-bedroom apartments. A small fitness center, a multi-purpose activity facility and a chapel will also be part of the expansion.

The project is being funded by donations and grants. A ground-breaking ceremony is scheduled for Jan. 30.
The River of Life Women's Life Skills Training Center of Cleveland is now ready to offer its first set of GED and ESL classes to the local public.

The River of Life is an organization dedicated to changing the lives of women with support and learning opportunities for teaching skills to help improve upon their lives.

Now the Cleveland branch is adding onto the program by giving GED and ESL, or English Second Language courses. The courses are separate from the main River of Life program.

"They can do it while doing the program at the River or they can do it separate," said River of Life Director Zann LaFrance of the Cleveland branch.

While the River of Life is geared more towards women, the GED and ESL classes are designed for either men or women.

LaFrance says the River of Life is offering these courses to address a need in Cleveland.

"We have a lot of Spanish speaking people in the community," said LaFrance.

LaFrance says River of Life is hoping the Spanish speaking members of the Cleveland community will take advantage of the classes not only to learn a new language but also to improve their ability to help their children with their own education.

River of Life is also providing the GED classes to help many of the students in the main classes.

"A lot of our students were lacking a high school diploma," said LaFrance.

LaFrance says the GED classes will provide parents a chance to not only further themselves but also to take classes while their children are also in school.

Both daytime and nighttime classes are available. Registration for the first GED day class is scheduled for Jan. 23 at 8:30 a.m. The class runs from Jan. 30 to March 29 on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.

The first nighttime GED class has registration scheduled for Jan. 17 at 5:30 p.m. The classes are running from Jan. 29 to April 4 on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Both classes will be held at the River of Life located at 206 S. Fenner Ave Cleveland, Texas.

The first ESL day class has registration on Jan. 18 at 8:30 a.m. Classes are scheduled from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from Jan. 23 to April 5. Nighttime classes have registration on Jan. 10 and start on Jan. 17 and run to April 4. The schedule is for Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:30 to 9 p.m. Classes are held at Covenant with Christ located at 301 S. Fenner Ave.

For more information on the classes call the River of Life at 281-593-1735.
With extreme weather in the forecast for Southeast Texas, school district leaders have already decided to close campuses on Tuesday, Jan. 16. Local districts that have announced closures for Tuesday are Cleveland, Hardin, Tarkington, Dayton, Liberty, Coldspring-Oakhurst, Splendora, Hull-Daisetta and Shepherd. No information is available for Devers ISD at this time.

Additionally, all school activities at the campuses listed above have been canceled for Tuesday. Splendora ISD rescheduled its board meeting to Thursday, Jan. 18.
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David Byrne has set an April 28 date in Houston. Byrne will perform on the lawn at White Oak Music Hall.

Byrne last played Houston in 2012 with St. Vincent. His last solo show here was 2009 at Jones Hall. He seemed to enjoy the venue, but as a bicyclist found the city a little unforgiving.
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Get ready to eat some cookies.

The Girl Scouts of San Jacinto Council enters the next century of Girl Scouts learning how to be future CEOs. The Girl Scout Cookie Program teaches girls essential entrepreneurial skills but also powers amazing experiences for girls across the United States, including outdoor and travel opportunities, exposure to STEM and ways to improve their communities through service projects.

This year, GSSJC is rallying the community to donate more than 10,000 cases, or 120,000 packages, of Girl Scout Cookies to first responders who provided relief during Hurricane Harvey across the 26-county jurisdiction as part of Cookies4Heroes.

"Following their extraordinary efforts during Hurricane Harvey, we want to tell first responders across southeast Texas, thank you," said Mary Vitek, GSSJC's CEO. "First responders have always been very supportive of Girl Scouts by opening their doors to teach girls about their profession and the positive work they are doing in our communities."

Cookies4Heroes is a program where cookie customers can support Girl Scouts by purchasing cookies and donating their purchase. These cookies are given by the council to first responders and groups that support the military.

To participate, customers need to let the Girl Scout who is taking their order know that they would like their cookies to be donated to Cookies4Heroes.

Cookies will arrive in Houston and surrounding areas Feb. 10-17, and customers can begin purchasing cookies at booths Feb. 23. The last day to purchase Girl Scout Cookies is March 25.

Almost 1 million Girl Scouts participate in the Cookie Program in the United States each year, generating nearly $800 million in sales during the average season. And all 100 percent of net revenue raised locally stays within the Council area. Councils use cookie earnings to power amazing experiences for girls through their programming, while girls and their troops decide how to invest in impactful community projects.
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A grand jury will review a fatal stabbing Sunday night at a Westchase apartment complex.

Houston police say a man's girlfriend stabbed him multiple times after he forced his way inside an apartment she refused to let him enter.

Police responded to a call just before midnight at the Hudson at Westchase apartments at 3131 Hayes Road, where they found a man dead with multiple stab wounds outside an upstairs apartment.

Police say the man had forced his way into an apartment after his girlfriend refused to let him in. Once inside, he got into a physical altercation with someone who was visiting. In the middle of that altercation, police say, the man's girlfriend stabbed him several times.

He left the apartment and fell near the top of the stairs.
Memorial Villages Police Department

The Memorial Villages Police Department that while roads are mostly wet throughout its coverage area, icy conditions may persist in some areas.

"Icy locations include bridges and overpasses and portions of the roadways where there is paint, such as crosswalks and Stop lines," a department news release reported. "Additionally, there are several road closures occurring throughout the Metro area."
Have you wondered how your area hospitals stack up in terms of the quality of care they provide?

Emergencies obviously call for rushing to the nearest hospital. But when you have time to plan, it is worth doing some research and finding out which hospitals do the best job of caring for their patients.

Medicare's Hospital Compare website  at medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html  has made it easier for you to check that. The site has overall star ratings to help you better understand which hospitals are top performers, which are average and which need improvement. The ratings range from one to five stars, with five being the best.

The Hospital Compare site already enjoys a solid reputation with the public, showing how thousands of hospitals scored on various indicators of quality care. You can compare hospitals on the basis of such factors as clinical outcomes, customer satisfaction and patient safety.

The just-updated overall star ratings offer a snapshot of particular hospitals' quality of care, by summing up individual measures of hospital performance already posted on the website. The ratings reflect such factors as how often patients get infections after surgery, how long patients must wait in the emergency department before seeing a doctor or nurse, and how likely patients are to get readmitted to the hospital after a heart attack.

The stars take into account the mix of patients at a hospital, so that those facilities with a high percentage of sicker patients aren't rated lower than those that handle more run-of-the-mill cases.

Medicare assigned stars to 3,692 Medicare-certified hospitals nationwide. Another 887 couldn't be included, mostly because they didn't have enough data to properly evaluate them. They may have been too new or too small and, therefore, had too few cases on which to base ratings. The ratings will be updated regularly on the website, as the government continues to collect the most recent data.

Nationally, 260 hospitals received five stars, 753 rated four stars, 1,187 scored three stars, 1,155 received two stars, and 337 had just one star.

The 274 rated Texas hospitals scored an average of 3.3 stars for overall quality of care. Thirty-three hospitals received five stars, 84 rated four stars, 105 scored three stars, 43 received two stars, and nine had just one star.

Here are the scores for area hospitals:

Houston

Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center - 5

Texas Orthopedic Hospital - 5

Harris Health System - 2

Tops Surgical Specialty Hospital  5

Memorial Hermann Hospital System - 4

Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center - 2

Methodist Hospital - 5

Methodist West Hospital - 4

Methodist Willowbrook Hospital - 5

St. Luke's Health Baylor College of Medicine  2

Park Plaza Hospital - 4

Woman's Hospital of Texas - 3

Cypress Fairbanks Medical Center - 2

Houston Northwest Medical Center - 2

St. Joseph Medical Center - 2

St. Luke's Hospital at the Vintage - 3

West Houston Medical Center - 3

Katy

Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital - 4

Richmond

OakBend Medical Center - 3

Sugar Land

Memorial Hermann Sugar Land Hospital - 3

Methodist Sugar Land Hospital - 3

St. Luke's Sugar Land Hospital - 3

Sugar Land Surgical Hospital  5

Other Texas hospitals' star ratings can be found at medicare.gov/hospitalcompare/search.html.

By using star ratings on its Compare websites, Medicare is trying to help you make more informed decisions about your health care. The public reporting also gives low-performing providers a compelling incentive to improve their practices and procedures and, hence, their scores.

Nursing Home Compare, Home Health Compare and the Medicare Plan Finder also use star ratings to help you check out health care providers and choose one with quality in mind.

Of course, as informative as these websites can be, they can't tell the whole story about where to go for care. They're simply a screening tool that lets you focus on a few providers that interest you.

Visit with your doctor about the best hospital for you. Research shows that some hospitals do better than others at treating certain conditions. And talk to family members and friends about what they liked or disliked about their recent hospital stays and which facilities they'd recommend.

Medicare also recently updated its "Guide to Choosing a Hospital," which includes a checklist of questions to ask your doctor and explains how to find the hospital that's the right fit for you. A free copy can be downloaded at medicare.gov or requested by calling Medicare at 1-800-633-4227.

Once you've done your homework, you'll have peace of mind knowing you've made an informed choice about your care. Then you can concentrate on the rest of your preparations for your hospital stay.

Bob Moos is the southwest regional public affairs officer for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The inmates in these photos have been in the Montgomery County Jail for longer than a year, according to jail records.

Many of them are suspects in some of the county's most high-profile murder, robbery and assault investigations.
Boys & Girls Clubs announces new board chair

Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Houston has announced that William W. (Bill) Goetz, who has served as a member of the Board of Directors since 2012 and has been on the Executive Committee since 2015, has been elected Chair of the Board for a two-year term.

Goetz is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Sysco Corporation, a position he has held since April 2016. He joined Sysco as senior vice president-marketing in early 2012. Before Sysco, Goetz held leadership roles in marketing at both Cintas Corporation and ECOLAB Corporation.

"It is my privilege to serve the organization in this capacity," said Goetz. "Since my election to the Board of Directors six years ago, I have enjoyed helping to advance the mission of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Houston - and in turn witnessing thousands of youths' lives changed by our programs, staff and volunteers. Over the course of my two years as Board Chair, I hope the organization continues to maximize the impact made on Houston's youth who need us most."

Goetz succeeds Christopher P. Papouras, president of Nabors Drilling Solutions, who served as Chair of the Board of Directors from 2016-2017 and has been a Board member since 2012.
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Geophagy means to consume earthly substances, and is usually practiced as a cultural tradition or to remedy mineral deficiency, according to Merriam-Webster.com.

A word many have never heard of, 73-year-old former Lubbock resident David Nelson - a resident of Meyerland for the last 30 years - recites the spelling and definition effortlessly. In 1959, Nelson competed in the National Spelling Bee as an eighth-grader and placed 12th out of 70 after misspelling geophagy.

"It's actually spelled g-e-o-p-h-a-g-y, and I put an 'f' in it," Nelson chuckles.

Even though he didn't win, Nelson's experience at the National Spelling Bee was significant for other reasons, namely the moment he received a signed memento from then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson.

Nelson recalled his interaction with Johnson, and said what struck him most was Johnson's large size and powerful nature. At 5 feet 8 inches tall, Nelson remembered looking straight up just to make eye contact with Johnson, whose height surpassed 6 feet.

"I could see that if he talked to you and shook your hand, it would be difficult, I think, to turn down a request from him," Nelson said.

It was in that moment that Johnson gifted Nelson a souvenir: an autographed mechanical pencil, displaying a tiny photograph of the senator. To Nelson's disappointment, Johnson's signature has faded a bit since 1959, but Nelson's memory of the encounter seemed crystal clear.

"He was congratulating us, of course not for winning the bee, but just for winning from our area in Lubbock," Nelson said. "He was very gracious."

Nelson was one of nine Texas participants in the national bee that year. Placing 12th overall, he was the second-highest scoring participant from the state. The other participants from Texas that year included Kevin North, John Nelson, Jamie Lou Fuller, Elaine Hassell, John Kennedy, Charles Murphy, Gerardo Aguirre and Sam Hergert.

Nelson didn't know if the other spellers received pens as well, but said they all took a group photograph with Johnson hours after Nelson was eliminated from the competition.

As a prize for qualifying for the National Spelling Bee, Nelson and the others spent a week in Washington, D.C., touring historic locations. Nelson recalled eating the famous Senate Bean Soup in the Capitol.

Before qualifying for the national competition, Nelson said he spent an hour per day practicing words from a booklet. Nelson's mom, a former spelling bee champion, helped him study for over a year, according to Nelson.

"It didn't come naturally," Nelson said. "I actually was in it for three years. I had started entering in the sixth grade and I was third in the city that year."

In his third and final year to enter, Nelson won his middle school's bee, the Lubbock city spelling bee, the Lubbock County bee and the regional bee before finally qualifying to go to the national bee.

In 1959, Johnson wasn't yet a president, but Nelson said many Texans thought of him as powerful and influential.

"Actually the next year, in 1960, when he ran for vice president, I think a lot of us from Texas were a little surprised that he would give up his very powerful position as senate majority leader to run for vice president," Nelson said.

When Johnson initially ran for president against John F. Kennedy, Nelson said his family favored Johnson. Nelson laughed when he explained: Kennedy was from Massachusetts.

"Oh yeah, we were big supporters of Lyndon Johnson back then," Nelson said. "He was from Texas, you know?"

Nelson said, as a kid, he was excited while meeting Johnson and was equally thrilled to receive the signed mechanical pencil. To Nelson, the pencil grew in significance over time, especially after Johnson became president in 1963.

"It is, far and away, my best keepsake or memento that I have from the National Spelling Bee," Nelson said.

What puzzles Nelson to this day, however, is why Johnson chose a mechanical pencil instead of the common fountain pen. Nelson assumed Johnson never signed documents with the pencil, and Nelson's own theory is the mechanical pencil was chosen as a superior receptacle for the encased picture.

Research on Johnson's use of mechanical pencils turns up little information, but political pencils were reportedly popular in the '50s and '60s, according to an article on Knoji.com.

"I joked to someone that maybe it would be better if some of the legislation was signed in pencil," Nelson said. "Then if it turned out to be bad legislation you could erase it."
Houston police continued Tuesday searching the area around east downtown for an escaped prisoner, an undocumented immigrant on probation for illegally re-entering the country after being deported.

Jorge Armando Santana-Trujillo, 30, escaped Monday morning after slipping out of his handcuffs and then going out the window of a police transport van, HPD spokeswoman Jodi Silva said. He was in custody accused of violating federal probation, and was being transported from a police substation to the county jail.
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A Pasadena man faces felony charges after he was allegedly caught with methamphetamine and pot brownies in a La Porte drug-free zone.

The city has established 1,000-foot drug-free zones across the city around schools, day cares and parks, allowing for enhanced charges against suspects caught with narcotics.

The Jan. 10 arrest took place in the 4100 block of Farrington Blvd., in the Farrington Park drug-free zone.

DRIVE-BY SHOOTING: 3 injured on Martin Luther King Blvd.

Driver Dustin James Clay, 35, of Coldspring, Texas, was stopped by an officer who then searched the vehicle, in which Juan Manuel Limones, Jr., 37, was a passenger.

A K-9 officer seized 3.5 ounces of marijuana, five marijuana brownies, 2.9 grams of crystal meth, a shotgun, stolen checks and a debit card. Officers allege that all of these items can be linked to Limones.

Limones was charged with fraudulent possession of identifying information, unlawful carrying of a firearm by a felon and possession of a controlled substance in a drug-free zone. James was also arrested and charged with driving while license invalid, a Class C misdemeanor.

Both were processed at the La Porte Jail. Limones was transferred to the Harris County Jail, where he is being held with no bond.

Dana Burke is a digital reporter at Chron.com. You can read more of her stories here and follow her on Twitter at @danapburke.
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Harris County officials are urging people to stay home due to icy weather as more ice forms on roadways.

Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman said that motorists on the Hardy Toll Road are currently going slow to avoid accidents on the slick road.

"Everyone is practically crawling," he said.

While no ice yet formed on Hardy and other major roads, Herman said it is only a matter of time.

"We know they're going to ice over. We know it's eventually going to ice," Herman said.

The Sam Houston Tollway westbound toward Texas 249 has been shut down with deputies blocking the roadway.

An accident at approximately 10 a.m. of a car crashing against a wall in that area was due to the icy, slick road, Herman said.

As of 11 a.m., the constable's office is reporting the following northwest Harris County roads have ice and should be avoided by drivers:

-Tomball Parkway at Grand Parkway westbound

- Sam Houston Parkway road and ramp at Texas 249

- Grand Parkway at Champion Forest Drive

- Grand Parkway at Boudreaux Road east and westbound

- U.S. 290 connector ramps

- U.S. 290 at Fairfield Creek

- FM 2978 and Bogs Road in Tomball

- North Sam Houston Parkway at Ella Blvd. westbound

- Cypresswood Road at Hardy Toll Road

"We're encouraging people to stay at home if at all possible," Herman said.

The Harris County Sheriff's Office reported on social media that the bridges in the Towne Lake subdivision in Cypress have iced.

Residents are encouraged to report icy roads by calling 713-CALL-MAP or 713-225-5627.

Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle said service trucks previously used during Hurricane Harvey to perform water rescues are depositing crushed limestone on iced roadways.

"If you don't need to be out on the icy road, don't go," Cagle said.

Cagle said that elevated areas, such as bridges, are the first to ice as cold air freezes the water.

Precinct 4 will be de-icing roads on bridges and streets as ice accumulates on roadways, he said.

Warming centers will be open after being coordinated with the Office of Emergency Management as needed. If any power lines are affected, the precinct will clear debris, but CenterPoint Energy would be responsible for restoring power and fixing power lines.

To report power outages, call CenterPoint at 713-207-2222 or 800-332-7143.

As of 11:25 a.m., CenterPoint reported 99.79 percent of customers in the greater Houston area had power.

Cagle said that residents should call the precinct's community assistance department at 281-353-8424 for non-emergencies. For any medical or emergency assistance, residents should call 911.

"If there's ice, stay home where it's nice," he said.

In Tomball, the non-essential city functions closed at 10 a.m. and are expected to re-open at 10 a.m. on Wednesda as announced on the city website.

Tomball residents can call 281-351-5451 for non-emergencies.

Classes are cancelled in northwest Harris County today due to icy weather and hazardous driving conditions.

Weather-related hotlines:

Residents are encouraged to report icy roads by dialing 713-CALL-MAP.

To report a loss of power, call CenterPoint at 713-207-222 or 800-332-7143.

Precinct 4 residents can call the non-emergency line at 281-353-8424.

Tomball residents can call the non-emergency line at 281-351-5451.
Classes are cancelled in northwest Harris County after officials forecast hazardous wintry conditions expected to set in on Tuesday.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning on Monday for the Houston area to begin at 3 a.m.

Cy-Fair ISD, Klein ISD, Spring ISD, Tomball ISD and Lone Star College will close their campuses on Tuesday.

The forecasted accumulation of ice from freezing rain and sleet are expected to create hazardous driving conditions.

"Rain will gradually change over a wintry mix from north to south late tonight through tomorrow evening," the weather service stated on its website.

Lone Star College announced on Monday that classes will be cancelled and campuses will be closed on Tuesday.

Cy-Fair ISD stated on its website that it was following county officials' warning to cancel classes.

"Although morning conditions may be safe, worsening conditions throughout the day could cause transportation hazards after school," Cy-Fair ISD stated on its website.

Spring ISD announced all schools and offices would be closed due to weather conditions.

"In addition, there will no after school classes or activities," said spokesperson Karen Garrison in a statement. "At this time, the school district has not made a decision regarding Wednesday, Jan. 17."

Tomball ISD also announced classes and school activities would be cancelled.

Klein ISD stated that it would follow other school districts in closing schools on Tuesday as a safety precaution.

"Harris County officials have advised school districts that potentially dangerous icing conditions are expected for our area beginning Tuesday, mid-morning and possibly continuing overnight," Klein ISD stated on its website.

Klein ISD, Spring ISD and Tomball ISD had board meetings scheduled on Tuesday.

Garrison said Spring ISD would reschedule their board of trustees meeting, but did not elaborate when.

Klein ISD stated on its website that the board of trustees meeting would be cancelled.
A federal appeals court has thrown out a more-than $24 million jury verdict in a patent infringement case that favored a Beatrice manufacturer.

Exmark Manufacturing, which makes lawnmowers, had alleged in a 2010 lawsuit that that Briggs & Stratton Power Products Group and Schiller Grounds Care Inc. were manufacturing mowers that infringed on a patent for multiblade mowers equipped with baffles between blades that allow the mower to be converted from a mulching to a side-discharge mower.

After a 2015 trial in U.S. District Court, a jury decided that Briggs & Stratton had willfully infringed on Exmark's patent and awarded the Beatrice company nearly $24.3 million, an amount the court doubled because of the willful infringement involved.

A three-judge appeals court panel, however, ruled last week that the District Court judge in the case erred when he dismissed a Briggs & Stratton claim that the Exmark patent in question was not valid.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel also threw out the damages award because it said an expert employed by Exmark did not provide an adequate explanation as to how she came up with a 5 percent royalty rate figure on which the jury relied in calculating damages.

Both issues were remanded back to the District Court for reconsideration, including a potential new trial.

A spokesman for Briggs & Stratton declined to comment on the ruling. Officials from Exmark could not be reached for comment.
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A Houston federal judge on Tuesday denied an injunction requested by Central Care clinics to block the loss of grant money critical to the continued operation of its six locations across the city.

Patients "should not be alarmed" but should expect some changes, Central Care's lawyer Reginald McKamie said after the hearing.

"The patients should not be concerned that it is going to shut down immediately," he said. "Some tightening will have to occur, but Central Care has been here for 25 years."

READ MORE: Congresswoman protests loss of funding to local clinics

The city's oldest federally qualified health center sued in December to retain grant money from the Health Resources and Services Administration, a U.S. Health and Human Services agency known as HRSA.

In court testimony on Friday, Central Care CEO La Toya Darden said the health center spent triple to hire physicians because of delays by HRSA that prevented access to National Health Service Corps providers.

She said the HRSA delays also caused Central Care to receive a lower score in the most recent service area competition for health center grant money. In 2017, Central Care received nearly $5.4 million from HRSA through that program.

Houston Area Community Services, which has local clinics under the name Avenue 360, outscored Central Care and won the service area competition for the 2018 funding.

McKamie said the loss of funding is a "significant blow" to the organization, but stopped short of saying the clinics would shut down as had been alleged in court documents and voiced by supporters in recent weeks.

Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal previously extended funding into this year under a temporary restraining order, but released the government from that obligation in Tuesday's ruling.

The government entered the 550-page administrative record into the court file related to the 2018 service area competition which showed submissions and scores for both applicants. Central Care received an 89; Avenue 360 got 94.

In a 20-minute explanation, Rosenthal said she believed Central Care "will suffer an injury if it does not get this grant" and denied the injunction request "with reluctance." However, she found that the clinics had not sufficiently shown a substantial likelihood of success in proving the legal standard to proceed: that the funding process was "arbitrary" or "capricious."

The jurist also encouraged the clinic to "seek alternative funding" to continue operations and provide continuity of care for clients. Darden said the network serves about 10,000 patients clinics in Sunnyside, Third Ward, Acres Homes, southwest Houston, north Houston and in the Humble-North Forest area.

"I urge them not to give up their commitment to improving the health and, therefore, the lives of the people they have so far dedicated themselves to serve," Rosenthal said in concluding her remarks. "The community needs you. The system needs you."
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A Houston-area death row prisoner convicted of killing two men in a drug deal gone bad lost out Monday in a federal appeals court, a ruling that could move him one step closer to an execution date.

Attorneys for Paul Wayne Slater, a brain-damaged junior high dropout with a low IQ, argued it was bad lawyering earlier in the case that helped earn him a death sentence more than two decades ago for a shooting in the bay of a Houston car wash.

"This case today, they would never seek the death penalty," said defense attorney Randy Schaffer. "I think the death penalty was probably sought in this case because it was a time when they were seeking the death penalty just for sport."

Now Playing: Here are 5 facts to know about the Texas death penalty. Video: Houston Chronicle

In July 1995, Slater was scheduled to meet up with three men to sell them some crack, according to court filings. Would-be buyers Eric Washington, Roddrick Martin and Glenn Andrews showed up with $3,000 on hand for the exchange.

Then, two men pulled up in a Cadillac and there's some dispute as to what happened next, but ultimately Slater fatally shot Martin and Andrews while Washington fled the scene.

A month later, police tracked down the blood-soaked Cadillac. A few weeks after that, Slater confessed - though he said the slayings were in self-defense, according to court records.

"There are very few cases in which the state has sought the death penalty in a drug transaction, where the victims were drug dealers," Schaffer said Monday.

Even so, Slater was sentenced to death in 1996, after his trial lawyer failed to request a jury instruction on murder as a lesser-included offense - a move that would have allowed for a self-defense claim.

In the years since his conviction, Slater has also lodged appeals blaming his trial attorney for failing to bring up claims of brain damage and learning disabilities. A 1991 evaluation placed his IQ at 77, though some tests have scored him as low at 63, according to court filings.

"The law is a little schizophrenic on whether you can bring in new evidence at this point in a case," Schaffer said. "It's really complicated stuff but long story short 5th Circuit said, 'No, you can't and even if you could we don't think it would have made a difference.'"

Now, Slater's defense team can file for a rehearing in the 5th Circuit, try their luck in the Supreme or go back to state court, Schaffer said.

"And truly this is a case for a commutation for a life sentence," he added, "so at the appropriate time we'll be asking to meet with District Attorney Kim Ogg."
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The 53-floor Heritage Plaza building at 1111 Bagby is one of the most-recognizable in downtown Houston.

Started in 1984 and completed three years later, it is renowned in architecture circles for its broad shoulders topped by a unique formation that looks like a crumbling Mayan ruin.

RELATED: What is at the top of the imposing Williams Tower?

It is currently the fifth-tallest building in Houston, right behind the nearby Bank of America Center. It's the eighth-tallest in the state of Texas, eligible for bragging right.

The chief engineer of Brookfield Properties' Heritage Plaza is Michael Rodriguez, who has one of the coolest office views in Houston. He has been king of the castle of sorts here for nearly seven years. He's been with the company for four decades now.

Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle

His messy desk looks over Buffalo Bayou Park points west from atop the 52nd floor the building. He can have his morning snack and watch the rest of Houston fight their way to work from nearly 762 feet up.

Now Playing: This father and his kid went to Discovery Green Park in Houston, Texas to fly his drone. As the drone ascended into the air, it captured aerial shots of the city rooftops and of the park. Video: Jukin

"I'm glad I took this position," he says. "I've experienced some great things."

The only thing above Rodriguez's floor are the cooling towers that keep the entire skyscraper air-conditioned.

RELATED: See Houston's favorite skyscrapers as they looked while under construction

Even simple tasks at the building are epic ordeal, he says.

"With plaza level ceilings as high as a three-story building, the lobby makes a powerful first impression," says Rodriguez. "Engineering a building of this magnitude takes a lot of skill. Particularly when changing a light bulb, you may find yourself needing a few engineers safely tied to a scaffold."

Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle

Formerly known as Texaco Heritage Plaza, its name changed after Chevron absorbed Texaco and pulled out of it and some other downtown properties. A large Texaco icon out front, once a favorite of skateboarders, has since been removed.

The odd stepped formation at the top of the 762-foot skyscraper was actually inspired by architect Mohammed Nasr's trip to the jungles of Mexico. Some say it also looks like a bald eagle with its head and wings outstretched.

RELATED: How Houston dealt with the oil bust in the '80s

The portion of the structure used to be lit up with neon but Rodriguez says sometime in the past decade building managers decided to not light it anymore.

At the time of its construction the glass, granite, and steel building was the only privately-funded building in downtown Houston which at the time was being ravaged by a hellacious oil and real estate industry downturn.

It was the newest skyscraper in downtown for nearly 15 years until 1500 Louisiana (formerly Enron Center South) was constructed.

James Nielsen/Houston Chronicle

Most Houstonians are likely unaware of the circa-1929 Federal Land Bank Building that sits on the northeastern edge of Heritage Plaza's footprint. The limestone low-rise is connected to the skyscraper next door and houses among other things the Houston Bar Association.

Heritage Plaza was in fact built around the bank building, which served the Tenth Farm Credit District. It later became the Farm Credit Bank of Texas. It still retains its "Farm Credit Banks" title out front which faces the downtown library.

Owing to that agricultural history of offering up loans to needy farmers and ranchers, when ground was broken for Heritage Plaza in 1984 a plow drawn mule did the honors and linking Houston's past with its present.

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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A Texas teacher has been arrested and charged with having an improper relationship with a student after the 16-year-old teenager reportedly told his mother about the sexual relationship.

Marisela Mendoza Winn, 39, taught at IDEA McAllen Public Schools and is accused of having sexual relations with a student who was in her English class.
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11:30 p.m. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas is bracing for a possible "high load" of electricity usage Wednesday morning as Houstonians and other Texans wake up to bitter temperatures.

The council is expecting a peak between 7 and 8 a.m. High loads of electricity usage typically occur during the morning time after overnight low temperatures, just like much of Texas is experiencing from a winter storm, according to a press release.

9:00 p.m. The National Weather Service has now issued a winter weather advisory instead of a winter storm warning until 5 a.m. Wednesday for all of southeast Texas.

A hard freeze warning has also been issued until 10 a.m. for the region. Wind chill temperatures are expected to drop to the single digits and the low teens overnight throughout the area.

The frozen precipitation has stopped, but forecasters still urge residents to take precaution on icy roads and bridges.

The Houston Health Department announced that all health centers and multi-service centers will be closed Wednesday.

Additionally, all Kelsey-Seybold clinics will not open until 1 p.m. on Wednesday. The Kelsey-Seybold Main Campus Ambulatory Surgery Center and Spring Medical & Diagnostic Ambulatory Surgery Center will stay closed on Wednesday.

Jury duty has also been canceled for Wednesday, according to the Harris County District Clerk's Office.

7:35 p.m. The Harris County Sheriff's Office 911 center took in more than 400 crash reports between 5 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Tuesday.

Houston municipal courts will also remain closed on Wednesday and are scheduled to reopen on Thursday.

METRO Bus service is expected to remain suspended through Wednesday morning due to the overnight freezing temperatures and dangerous driving conditions.

There have now been more than 100 reports of ice on various roadways across the area including on Katy Freeway, I-45 and 610.

6:25 p.m: More than 40 school districts announced closures for Wednesday including Houston, Spring Branch and Katy due to the inclement weather.

University of Houston and its campuses in Katy, Downtown and Sugar Land will also not open.

At Hobby Airport, Southwest Airlines has cancelled its remaining flights for Tuesday evening. The airport has seen more than 120 flight cancellations throughout the day.

At Bush Airport, more than 160 flights were cancelled and some of the runway ramps closed due to severe icing conditions.

5:50 p.m. Mayor Sylvester Turner urged residents to stay inside their homes as temperatures hovered below freezing and were expected to remain that way until Wednesday afternoon.

"Stay off the roads this evening," Turner said during a Tuesday evening briefing at the Office of Emergency Management. "It's critical. It's important."

A homeless person was also found dead Tuesday from hypothermia off of Telephone Road, according to Turner and Chief Samuel Pena with the Houston Fire Department.

City officials told residents to seek shelter at the several warming centers across town. The two American Red Cross warming centers at South Main Baptist Church and Pleasant Missionary Grove Baptist Church were quickly filling up with about 400 people at the two shelters, according to the agency.

Centerpoint Energy has restored power to more than 90,000 customers over the last 24 hours.

Nearly 300 motor vehicle accidents had also occurred on Tuesday, according to Pena.

4:25 p.m. As temperatures continued to fall, reports of icy roadways spiked for roadways across the Houston area. More than 70 reports of ice on roadways had been received by Tuesday afternoon, according to Houston TranStar.

The main lanes of U.S. Highway 59 at U.S. Highway 90A were also shut down in both directions because of ice in Sugar Land.

The U.S. Highway 59 southbound main lanes at the Brazos Rivers were also closed Tuesday.

Public Works also treated 19 bridges in Missouri City for ice.

Missouri City cancelled its scheduled city council meeting for Tuesday evening and moved it to Feb. 5 because of the weather. All non-emergency offices were also closed Tuesday.

4 p.m.: The Houston region could see temperatures drop to 20-year lows, according to the most recent forecast from the National Weather Service in Houston.

"Low temperatures overnight tonight are forecast in the teens and low 20s with wind chill values in the single digits to low teens," NWS said. "A Hard Freeze Warning and Wind Chill Advisory have been issued for the entire area through 10 AM Wednesday. Temperatures should climb through the day Wednesday, reaching above freezing by around 12-2 PM. High temperatures are forecast in the mid to upper 30s."

"A mix of mainly sleet and snow is continuing to fall across much of the area," the NWS said. "This wintry mix will come to an end from north to south this afternoon and evening, with much of the Brazos Valley and Piney Woods region already seeing an end to the precipitation."

"Even as the precipitation ends, temperatures continue to be well below freezing area-wide, and ice on the roadways will continue to be a concern," NWS said. "A Winter Storm Warning remains in effect for areas along and south of a line extending from Colorado County to Polk County. The Winter Storm Warning has been downgraded to a Winter Weather Advisory for much of the Brazos Valley and Piney Woods region, as the precipitation in those areas has ended but dangerous icy conditions remain."

----

3:48 p.m.: Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzales said Tuesday afternoon that deputies had received reports of more than 200 accidents across the county, including 27 major accidents that likely involved injuries.

Gonzales made the comments as officials braced for temperatures forecast to drop even further, meaning more roads and bridges iced over endangering Tuesday evening and Monday morning commutes.

"It makes no sense to put your employees in harm's way unless its absolutely necessary that they be at work," said Harris County Judge Ed Emmett.

TxDOT officials said they had 40 crews working around the clock to de-ice roadways, prioritizing closed freeways first. Thoroughfares like state highway 225 and the Fred Hartman Bridge over the Houston Ship Channel were particularly icy, TxDOT officials said.

----

3:33 p.m.: Metro is halting bus service at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, citing "dangerous road conditions." People should make arrangements to catch buses prior to 5:30 p.m., Metropolitan Transit Authority spokesman Jerome Gray said, adding that the agency will respond to situations where people are stranded. "The key is to get to those services as we are phasing them down," Gray said.

----

3:24 p.m.: A hard freeze warning has been issued by the Houston area from 9 p.m. Tuesday until 10 a.m. Wednesday, the National Weather Service has announced. A wind chill advisory is also in effect for the same time period. That will mean very little melting of snow and ice on roads. Houston residents should also prepare for very cold temperatures overnight.

----

3:19 p.m.: Harris County jury calls for Wednesday morning and afternoon have been canceled. The Waller County Commissioners Court meeting, usually held at 9 a.m. on Wednesdays, has also been rescheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday.

---

Officials are warning residents to stay off the roads today if they can, as a mix of freezing rain, sleet and light snow has fallen across the region and more is still in the forecast.

The entire southeastern region remains under a winter storm warning all the way out to the coastline until midnight, and temperatures are only expected to continue falling, the National Weather Service warns.

Houston and Harris County officials have been warning all morning and afternoon that, as the day wears on, driving is only expected to get more and more dangerous while ice, sleet and snow accumulate, resulting in a dangerous mess.

READ ALSO: Tips for driving on icy roads from people who know

The wintry weather already has impacted roadways throughout the region and led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights from Houston's main airports. And CenterPoint has reported 11,000 customers with power outages ostensibly due to the weather.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said there have been about six major and nine minor collisions in Houston this morning, but none appear weather-related.

Two weather-related crashes were reported in Fort Bend County, one at Westpark Tollway and Peek Road and the other at the Grand Parkway and Cinco Ranch Boulevard, Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office Major Chad Norvell said. Neither involved major injuries.

"As you well know, we have a cold front moving through Fort Bend County," said Fort Bend County Judge Bob Hebert. "We've had rain. We're now seeing freezing temperatures over most of the county. Ice is beginning to form. ... It's going to get worse all day."

County offices, courts and school districts were all closed.

Overpasses closed

Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office deputies, meanwhile, were in the process of closing the overpasses on Grand Parkway between the Westpark Tollway and Interstate 10.

In Houston, as of mid-morning, the city's public works department had received two reports of icing on bridges in northeast Houston and was investigating them, deputy department director Jeff Weatherford said.

Acevedo and Mayor Sylvester Turner also cautioned against getting on the roads, as did Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez earlier this morning.

"Conditions are only going to get worse," Gonzalez said at a news conference. "It's very deceiving, because some parts are OK right now and will get you to your destination. But the larger problem is the commute home. The worst is yet to come."

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said to use caution not only on freeways but also on neighborhood streets, and also urged anyone planning to travel on the tollways to check for closures later in the day.

All Metro-operated HOV/HOT lanes are closed due to the conditions. Bus shuttles are available for the purple line, the red line is operating on a single track and delays are expected. Metro CEO Tom Lambert encouraged those who absolutely must travel today to take advantage of public transportation.

Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Danny Perez said TxDOT will continue to lay salt, sand and brine mixes along hazardous roadways until the conditions fully subside.

Only getting colder

A small accumulation of ice is possible as the day wears on, NWS warns -- and in areas under the winter storm warning, there may be a chance for snow tonight. Areas along and north of Interstate 10 will see the greatest possibility of ice and snow, NWS said.

It's only going to get colder the later it gets as the arctic cold front keeps pushing south. The high this afternoon is forecast for 36 with a low tonight of 24, with some northern areas even dipping into the teens, making it one of the coldest nights in years, meteorologists said. It's currently 27 degrees in Houston, and from 1 p.m. until midnight, the windchill is forecast between 11 and 17 degrees.

A warming center for those without shelter is located at Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church. Another at South Main Baptist was scheduled to open at noon, the American Red Cross said.

Fire Chief Samuel Pena urged residents to be careful using open flames or space heaters to heat their homes, adding that four fires overnight appeared to have been caused by heating devices.

"You want to maintain at least a 3-foot area clearance around those space heaters," Pena said. "They need to be plugged in, directly into the outlet. Don't (plug) them into the extension cords, because that causes a fire risk."

NWS says a hard freeze warning and windchill warning are likely later in the afternoon or evening.

As of 1 p.m., Houston TranStar is reporting 42 hazardous icy locations along area roadways, a full list of which can be found here.

Houston Public Works officials warned that ice on overpasses were hazardous at Homestead at Tidwell and Kelley at Lockwood in northeast Houston.

Closures abound in anticipation of the wintry conditions. The majority of school districts in the area are closed and a full list can be found here. Many universities have also canceled classes, including the University of Houston, Rice University, the South Texas College of Law, HCC and Lone Star College.

Flights canceled

Hundreds of incoming and outgoing flights have been canceled this morning out of Houston's major airports, with 549 cancellations and 68 delays out of Bush and 60 cancellations and 40 delays out of Hobby. A full list of cancellations and delays at Bush can be found here, while flight status information for Hobby can be found here.

Jury duty is canceled at all Harris County and Houston courts. Three county courts and 22 district courts are also closed, and municipal courts are closed outright. The city is asking those who need to reset a court date to do that in person at the municipal courthouse from Wednesday to next Tuesday, until 5 p.m. All non-emergency city services are also suspended.

City Council is slated to begin an hour later Wednesday, at 10 a.m., and Turner said he will decide Tuesday evening whether to suspend or modify city services on Wednesday.

Both the Harris County and Houston offices of emergency management have been activated and remain on high alert, and the Texas Department of Transportation is continuing to treat roadways for ice.

"We're experiencing ice in Montgomery County, Waller County -- we'll have crews working around the clock until this weather event subsides," one TxDOT official said at the morning news conference.

The Harris County Sheriff's Office encouraged drivers to report icy conditions on major roadways by calling the motorist assistance line at 713-225-5627, while the city of Houston encourages drivers to call 311.

"Please stay home and off roads - if possible! Freezing temps + icy roadways = dangerous driving conditions," the sheriff's office wrote on social media around 6 a.m.

Jay R. Jordan contributed to this report.
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A 31-year-old man was arrested Sunday after a 15-year-old girl accused him of raping her for about a year, sometimes after he picked her up from school.

The suspect, David Allen Sanders of San Antonio, now faces a charge of continuous sexual abuse of a child. He was booked into the Bexar County Jail.

RELATED: After second home invasion in as many months, San Antonio man catches intruder on camera

According to his arrest report, the victim's mom suspected the two of having a sexual relationship. On Sept. 16, the victim's mom searched through her phone for evidence, upsetting the victim and causing a physical fight between the two of them.

The mom eventually found Facebook messages between the victim and Sanders that indicated the two were involved in an inappropriate relationship. The woman turned over the phone to police as evidence.

In late December, police interviewed the victim. She told them that Sanders "had been sexually abusing her for well over a year," between the summer of 2016 to summer 2017, the affidavit says.

"Due to the victim being traumatized by the events, she said her brain has suppressed much of the events after she began to describe [Sanders] taking her clothes off during the different times he would 'rape' her," the affidavit says.

RELATED: Driver killed in single-vehicle crash after losing control

She told police that Sanders forced her to perform sexual acts on him after he picked her up from school, and that he had sexually assaulted her on several occasions at her great grandmother's house.

Police interviewed Sanders on Jan. 11. He allegedly told police that he had a sexual relationship with the victim for about 6 months, and went on to describe their sexual acts and texting behavior.

Officers then secured a warrant for his arrest and booked him into jail on Sunday.

Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com

Caleb Downs is a crime reporter for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here.| cdowns@mysa.com | Twitter: @calebjdowns
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CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuelan special forces on Monday captured five members of a band led by a rebellious police officer who has been on the run since stealing a helicopter and launching grenades at government buildings in the capital last year, officials said.

It wasn't clear if the renegade officer, Oscar Perez, himself had been killed or captured in a deadly gunbattle after more than six months on the lam.

Two officers were killed and five seriously wounded during a shootout with Perez and his comrades, the Ministry of Interior Relations said in a statement.

"The members of this terrorist cell who conducted armed resistance were taken down and five criminals captured and detained," the statement said.

Earlier Monday, Perez, 36, posted video clips showing blood dripping across his face as gunshots rang in the background. Perez said officers were firing at the group and wanted to kill him instead of permitting his surrender.

"We're going to turn ourselves in!" Perez shouted.

He holed up with at least two other men in what appeared to be a home in mountains outside Caracas. He urged Venezuelans in the video clips to fight against the socialist government.

"I want to ask Venezuela not to lose heart - fight, take to the streets," he said. "It is time for us to be free, and only you have the power now."

Perez leaped into the spotlight in June when he staged a dramatic helicopter attack in Caracas, lobbing grenades at the Supreme Court and Interior Ministry buildings in broad daylight. No one was injured in the incidents, and Perez managed to flee.

In numerous videos posted on Instagram, Perez has claimed that he is fighting for Venezuela's freedom from a tyrannical government that is starving its people.
AUSTIN  Former Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson raised nearly $89,500 in his bid to unseat Republican incumbent George P. Bush, according to campaign finance records filed Tuesday.

But Bush, who is seeking his second term in office, has reportedly raised 10 times more, racking in $1 million in contributions. As of Tuesday evening, Bush's financial records were not yet available on the Texas Ethics Commission website

"As expected, the George P. Bush Campaign raised over $1 million and reported $3.3 million cash on hand, the highest amount of cash on hand our Campaign has ever reported," said Ash Wright, Bush's campaign manager. "Our report reflects the overwhelming support we are receiving for our reelection."

Patterson, a Republican from Austin, has nearly $100,000 in hand, including a $20,000 personal loan to his campaign for the period ending Dec. 31. The largest single contribution came from Dick Saulsbury, founder of Saulsbury Industries, an Odessa-based engineering and construction company, who gave Patterson $25,000.

Patterson, who was first elected as the state's land commissioner in 2003, wants to head the agency that manages state-owned lands and the Alamo. He gave up the job to run for lieutenant governor in 2014. Bush then won the seat.

Patterson has long been critical of Bush, including the office's response to Hurricane Harvey. Since 2011 the office has also overseen housing recovery efforts after natural disasters.

"I'm pleased we were able to raise what we did in a very short time during the Christmas holidays, Patterson said in a statement. "Texans are angry about the Alamo, and Hurricane Harvey, and they're responding.

Davey Edwards, another Republican challenging Bush in the March 6 primary, raised $5,000. He is confident that name recognition and campaign funding will not determine the GOP candidate.

"Texans are going to the polls educated and prepared to make the vote based, not on how much money the candidate raised, but how much love that candidate has for this position," he said in a statement on his Facebook page. "Regardless of campaign viability through donations, Texans want me, Dr. Davey Edwards, to be the next Texas Land Commissioner and that message is spreading like wildfire!"

Alejandra Matos covers politics, education and immigration policy. Follow her on Twitter. Email tips to alejandra.matos@chron.com.
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AUSTIN -- Attorney General Ken Paxton reported $5.7 million in his political war chest Tuesday as he prepares to run for reelection in November against a Democrat hoping to exploit the general's personal legal troubles.

Paxton raised $774,178 from July to December of 2017, according to a campaign finance report filed by his reelection team. In that time, Paxton's campaign spent more than $420,000, much of it on campaign and legal consulting, but also car magnets and campaign tote bags, a campaign video and a harpist for a reception.
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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Fundatia de Binefacere Caritas Moldova solicita oferte de pret de la companii cu privire la dezvoltarea designului pentru Sala Events & Sufragerie
CLIFTON PARK, N.Y.  A local resident has been appointed U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Regional Administrator for Region II, an area that encompasses New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The announcement from the SBA that Steve Bulger, a longtime Clifton Park resident and Troy native, had been appointed to the post was made Jan. 12. It noted his extensive experience in economic development, sales and marketing, and government relation.

Bulger, 57, who is already handling the duties of the job, will be responsible for managing and overseeing the agencys lending, economic development and procurement programs for five district and six branch offices.

The SBA was created in 1953 and since Jan. 13, 2012 has served as a cabinet-level agency of the federal government to aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns. It has 10 regions that cover the U.S. and its territories. The Region II office assists nearly three million small businesses that employ more than six million workers.

I am very pleased that Steve is in place to help support me and the President in serving as a voice and go-to resource for our nations 30 million small businesses, said SBA Administrator Linda McMahon in a statement. In his new position as the Regional Administrator for Region II, I will rely on him heavily as we move forward in 2018 and beyond and look forward to working closely with him on the issues and concerns that are most important to the small businesses in his region.

Bulger is known locally for serving as Chairman of the Clifton Park Planning Board for a number of years before joining former Rep. Chris Gibsons staff as district director for six years. Upon Gibsons decision not run for reelection, Bulger was elected chairman of the Saratoga County Republican Committee in 2016.

Upon his expected appointment to the SBA position, Bulger resigned the latter position two weeks ago.

Bulger said he first got wind of the possibility of the SBA appointment when he received a call from former Rep. John Sweeney in late August. Sweeney told Bulger his name had been submitted to the White House for a position at the SBA in New York.

This was a surprise for me, Bulger said. I wasnt looking for it. I didnt have my eye on it. It came out of the blue. But I couldnt be more honored and happy to be serving again.

As he looked into what he had been recommended for, Bulger said he was surprised to see it was a regional administrators job and would require White House and SBA vetting.

Prior to joining Gibsons staff Bulger was a manager with a national company overseeing orthopedic implant and equipment sales and marketing efforts in the Upstate New York and Western New England. He spent a total of twenty years in the medical device sector.

Though that experience was noteworthy for the SBA, Bulger said equally noteworthy were all his years working for or with small businesses including his father printing company in Albany, his time as town Planning Board Chairman, and his work with Clifton Park Supervisor Philip Barrett in 2000 to bring the Boscovs Store to Clifton Park Center.

And just as important were my six years with Rep. Gibson, Bulger said. We met with hundreds, literally hundreds of small business owners and employees because Rep. Gibson sat on the House Small Business Committee and I was the guy he appointed here in the district to be the liaison to all these small and medium sized businesses and companies in the Congressional District.

Bulger said that duty in the district allowed him to hear their concerns as to what government was doing to help as well as hear about their business challenges.

I really learned a lot in that role, he said last week. I feel that helped prepare me very well for at least being aware of the issues here that small businesses are facing or have faced.

Bulger thinks his work helping with disaster recovery relief for Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee may also have stood out with the SBA.

In my six years with Rep. Gibson I probably spent more time in the district dealing with disaster recovery issues from constituents in the Catskills and the Adirondacks than any other issue over the six years, he said. I worked with FEMA and SBA just helping people recover from the disasters. I have a knowledge of it and know how devastating it is.

He expects that experience will be put to good use as he looks into helping small businesses in Puerto Rico apply for loans and grants.

I spoke to SBA Administrator Linda McMahon about Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, he said. As the recovery goes on, after the disaster recovery with FEMA, SBA will be playing a big role there and thats going to be a big focus for me.

Bulger preferred not to name a figure for his salary saying only, its commensurate with a leadership role in the federal government.

Bulger is a graduate of Troy High School and Lafayette College where he earned an undergraduate degree in Government and Law. Though his office is in Manhattan he expects to be doing a lot of traveling throughout Region II.

He intends to remain in Clifton Park with his wife Mary Beth. The couple has three children. Two have graduated from high school and their youngest is a sophomore at Shenendehowa High School.

I like that SBA is one of the few federal agencies that actually helps businesses rather than hinders them and that there is wide bi-partisan support, Republican and Democrat alike, Bulger said. Everybody likes the Small Business Administration. Theres a lot of support there and Im really looking forward to helping.
TE Subcom has been awarded a contract by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to build a subsea cable from California to Chile. A ready-for-service date is expected in 2019.



The Curie Submarine Cable will be a four fiber-pair subsea system spanning over 10,000 km from Los Angeles to Valparaiso. It will include a branching unit for future connectivity to Panama.



The project is believed to be the first subsea cable to land in Chile in 20 years.



Were proud to provide comprehensive services to Google on this project. Leveraging existing TE SubCom infrastructure through our SubCom Global Services (SGS) options put us in position to be a true partner to them. Our role in the continued growth of global connectivity and information sharing is a point of substantial pride for the TE SubCom team, said Sanjay Chowbey, president of TE SubCom.
The Man wants us to believe any number of ridiculous things, from trickle-down economics to tinfoil hats being "crazy." Right, like "Tubthumping" just gets stuck in your head out of nowhere -- we know what cellphone towers really do, whitey. We accept such absurd concepts as the obvious lies they are; untruths perpetuated solely to further powerful interests. But some of the most seemingly innocent facts we never even think to question were in fact originally churned out by the propaganda machine. For example ...

6 Tobacco Companies Invented Type A/B Personalities To Avoid Blame For Heart Attacks

Type A personalities are stressed workaholics prone to angry outbursts, while Type Bs are more relaxed and agreeable. Those are all of the types. Clearly, there are no people who fall outside of those definitions.

But why did such a reductive categorization take hold in American culture? Oddly enough, it's because of cigarettes. It turns out that for years, the tobacco industry was involved in both financially influencing studies about and propagating the idea of this binary personality system. Yep, Type A / Type B personalities are "to a large extent a construct of the tobacco industry."

Lucky Strike But it's not like they could bribe thousands of medical professionals to go along with them, right?

See, Big Tobacco needed to come up with a reason people who smoked were more prone to heart attacks, but for some reason didn't want to say "our bad." They eventually settled on the idea that some people are just naturally on the verge of blowing an artery all the time, and if those same people also tended to de-stress with nicotine, then the connection between smokers and people who have heart attacks would be nothing more than a coincidence. They proceeded to fund every psychological study that pushed the two personality types, then did everything they could to make sure the American public accepted it. So the next time you hear someone describe themselves as a real "Type A" personality, tell them the truth about where that comes from. Then, for fun, tell them to calm down. Listen close and you might even hear the artery pop!
Storage News

Veeam Acquires N2WS In Play For AWS Cloud-Native Data Protection

Joseph F. Kovar

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Veeam Tuesday unveiled the acquisition of N2WS, a small developer of data protection and disaster recovery offerings with native AWS cloud capabilities.

N2WS, based in West Palm Beach, Fla., with its primary development done in Haifa, Israel, said it is the largest provider of data protection AWS environments. Its technology provides an enterprise-class offering purpose-built for the AWS cloud with full support for EC2/EBS, RDS, RedShift and Aurora.

[Related: Veeam Extends Data Protection To Microsoft's Azure Stack]

Veeam, which last year made an equity investment in N2WS, paid $42.5 million for the company.

The initial investment Veeam made in N2WS gave the company an opportunity to closely watch how the AWS data protection market evolved, said Peter McKay, co-founder and CEO of Baar, Switzerland-based Veeam.

"What was clear over the last couple of months is they just continued to exceed our expectations," McKay told CRN. "We saw that as very complementary to our business. So we looked at that, and with our equity position found it easier to buy."

N2WS will continue operations as a separate company under the name "N2WS, A Veeam Company."

Prior to the acquisition of N2WS, Veeam's cloud business was focused mainly on Microsoft Azure, the IBM Cloud, and VMware on Azure, McKay said. The company also worked with AWS, but did not have an AWS-native offering, he said.

"N2WS is natively developed for AWS," he said. "It's No. 1 or No. 2 in the marketplace. And it's enjoyed incredible success, really becoming a critical part of the AWS ecosystem from day one.  It's natively developed, meaning it's focused on nothing but AWS. It's a tighter solution that is incredibly leverageable within the AWS environment."

Unlike Veeam, which runs a channel-only sales model, about half of N2WS's sales come directly via the Amazon Marketplace and half via indirect channels, McKay said. "Ultimately, it will be the Veeam channel that'll distribute N2WS," he said. "That's an opportunity for the Veeam channel to add AWS to their portfolio."

However, McKay said that Veeam will continue to offer N2WS via the Amazon Marketplace.

"People go to AWS for a workload," he said. "Yeah, we will keep that. But more complex, comprehensive workloads will typically go through a channel rep. That's what [N2WS has] seen. People want to try it, will maybe go to the [Amazon] Marketplace. But ultimately, their model is more indirect, traditional channel mode. And that's the way we want it."

McKay said that while N2WS will be run as a separate company, its technology will be integrated into the Veeam platform.

"People who buy Veeam can get a license of N2WS as well for 60 days," he said. "And when the fully integrated version becomes available, then they can upgrade to that version. So right off the bat we're going to allow the customers to leverage that technology as we're merging the technologies together."

Veeam channel partners liked how Veeam is expanding into the AWS cloud environment and opening new potential opportunities for them.

It is a natural progression for Veeam, said Ron Venzin, partner at Focal Point Solution Solutions Group, an Ellenton, Fla.-based solution provider and Veeam channel partner.

"Actually, AWS is a requirement," Venzin told CRN. "There are so many organizations finding the cloud to be increasingly important. It's growing. People are looking to put more on clouds, not less. This means more opportunity for Veeam, and more opportunity for us."

The acquisition is important for customers already on the Veeam platform, Venzin said. "Customers are looking for alternatives," he said. "And if they want AWS, having it with Veeam is a good option because Veeam is already their product choice. Knowing Veeam, they will make AWS easier."

Chris Pace, founder and CEO of Centre Technologies, a Houston-based solution provider and Veeam channel partner, told CRN that while Azure is his company's primary public cloud focus, Veeam's acquisition of N2WS provides the tools to make it easier to expand with customers to the AWS cloud.

"Veeam making acquisitions like this gives organizations like us more tools in the tool chest to leverage more cloud providers," Pace said. "Partners are all looking for the tools to manage cloud environments like they do on-premises environments. We've had a lot of tools for on-premises, but when we move to the cloud, things like visibility, monitoring and protection can get taken away."
Connecticut on Tuesday joined a multi-state effort to appeal the Federal Communications Commissions recent rejection of so-called net-neutrality rules.

Attorney General George Jepsen said that the failure of Congress to assure consumer access to the Internet exacerbates the need for he and other attorneys general to act. Twenty states and the District of Columbia filed a petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Districts of Columbia Circuit, calling the FCCs recent action "arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion" in violation of federal laws and regulations.

"The Internet should always remain open and free," Jepsen said in a statement. "In the face of the FCC's action, and the inaction of Congressional leadership to right this obvious wrong, state attorneys general are today taking this first step in asking the court to overturn the FCC's order.

Last month, the five-member FCC board repealed its 2015 Open Internet Order, which had prohibited the blocking of content, as well as so-called throttling practices of internet service providers, to retain open access for consumers. Jepsen said the FCC's new regulation would let providers discriminate against content, or charge higher rates to content providers and consumers.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT
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WASHINGTON  Jonathan Gonzalez Cruz, a senior at Southern Connecticut State University, stood up at an impromptu sit-in at a Senate office Tuesday and told fellow Dreamers crowding the room about watching his father get taken into ICE custody for deportation.

When I came home that night and knew I wasnt going to see him at the dinner table, that broke my heart, said Gonzalez Cruz, 21, an economics and math major. Each day when I was in school, I had to pretend like nothing happened, because no one knew I was undocumented.

That was when Gonzalez Cruz was a high school sophomore. Although they keep in touch through phone calls and social media, he has not seen his father in about six years. Without legal status himself, Gonzalez Cruz could not get back into the U.S. if he went to Mexico for a visit.

Because of the preponderance of immigration-friendly Democrats in the state, people in Connecticut dont think deportations can happen, said Gonzalez Cruz, whose story had been recounted last week on the Senate floor by Sen. Richard Blumenthal. But its happening right now.

Gonzalez Cruz was among 50 or so youthful Connecticut immigrants, brought illegally to the U.S. as children, who boarded buses in Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford before dawn for the long trip to Washington.

They spent the day traipsing the halls of Senate office buildings, hoping to sway key senators to support the DREAM Act, which would give them permanent legal status and a possible path to citizenship.

Their visit unfolded as the clock continued to click down to a possible government shutdown Friday night if congressional Democrats cannot reach agreement with Republican counterparts and President Trump on a deal that may -- or may not  include relief for Dreamers.

Democrats insist that any deal to avoid a shutdown must include a plan for continuing Dreamers legal status.

Trump and Republican lawmakers have conditioned Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals extension on funding billions in construction of a wall, although not one that runs the entire 2,000-mile length of the U.S.-Mexico border.

For now, Dreamers enjoy legal status under President Obamas DACA legislation. President Trump canceled the order last September, but a federal judge has put a stay on it so that a lawsuit can proceed.

A potential bipartisan deal got sidetracked last week after Trump refused to back it and then threw gas on the fire by using the word shithole to describe impoverished nations that account for a portion of U.S. immigration flow.

Connecticut Dreamers joined counterparts from other states in staging sit-ins at Senate offices, testing the restraint of Capitol police officers who stood by as long as the demonstrations were brief and not overly disruptive. Neither of Connecticuts senators got a visit, although the offices of Sens. Blumenthal and Chris Murphy had been destinations of previous Washington trips.

While lawmakers and the White House continue to posture in public and negotiate in private, leaders of the 800,000 Dreamers -- 8,000 or so in Connecticut -- are keeping their sights on a clean DREAM Act, one that goes beyond simple extension of President Obamas 2012 DACA order.

Both Blumenthal and Murphy support such a measure but any deal that helps the Dreamers is likely to fall well short of that.

Although the situation appears dire at times, Dreamers have grown somewhat philosophical about doomsday scenarios.

Every week feels like the final week, but were going to run out of deadlines at some point, said Camila Bortoletto of Danbury, campaign manager of Connecticut Students for a Dream, referring to the ultimate expiration of DACA on March 5.

We do not want a DACA fix; we want the DREAM Act, Bortoletto said, arguing that with its 2007 cut-off date, DACA reinstatement would do nothing to help more-recent youthful immigrants who may be of high school age.

Obama promulgated DACA after Congress failed to approve the DREAM Act, an acronym for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act that was first introduced in 2001.

And the DREAM Act should not be a vehicle for (Trump to) get the wall, she said.
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BRIDGEPORT  President Donald Trump is giving civil rights advocates plenty of material to talk about  with the keynote speech at Mondays Martin Luther King Jr. celebration a case in point.

Comparing the president to that big Biblical bully Goliath, the Rev. Jerome Jackson, speaking at Mount Aery Baptist Church at the 38th annual celebration of the life and work of King, said that sometimes Trump makes us think that we are tiny people in our society.

The remembrance was sponsored by Mount Aery and Bridgeports Black Pride.

Im going on 67 now and when I was younger, we thought that we would end racism, or at least move the cause forward a little, he said. But as we look back on things, it feels like for every five steps we took forward, we took 20 steps back.

He said the statements and Tweets that Trump is making are enough to make you want to quit the struggle.

But dont you dare quit, said Jackson, who is the lead pastor at the Mount Olive Baptist Church in Hackensack, N.J., noting that 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of Kings assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis.

He said that some of the blame for our nations leadership must be placed at the doorstep of evangelical congregations.

I am not happy with my colleagues in the evangelical churches, he said. Im telling the world that they call themselves Christian, and yet they support Trump every single time. I mean, how many churches can even mention the language that our president is using?

Jackson said that American society is organized to keep African Americans at the bottom, the reasons include everything from gerrymandered voting districts to the millions of disenfranchised voters to the vast numbers of young people who are incarcerated.

Turning to the media, he said that its incomprehensible that Fox News is the number one television news outlet. It really is Trumps station, Jackson said. Another mystery, he said, is why poor white folks vote Republican.

We arrived in separate ships, but were in the same boat now! he said.

He also had little regard for politicians who claim to be Christian but who vote like the Devil. They dont see us and they dont see our pain.

Included in that list, he said, is the South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is black and who has a voting record more in line with his white Republican colleagues.

I refuse to invite him into my church any more, Jackson said. You can come to my church, but if you do, sit down, be quiet and listen to me.

About 300 people turned out to the event. VIPs in the pews included U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th; Republican gubernatorial hopefuls former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker and Shelton Mayor Mark Lauretti; state Sen. Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport, Trumbull; state Sen. Ed Gomes, Bridgeport, Stratford; state Sen. Antonietta "Toni" Boucher, R-Wilton, Ridgefield; state Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield; Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and Greater Bridgeport NAACP President George Mintz.

Moore also addressed the gathering.

This is not a day off, its a day on, she said. Today we are seeing grave threats to our rights and our liberties  acts very similar to what Dr. King witnessed.

The annual MLK Day celebration has taken place in Mount Aery Baptist for more than 30 years. It began as a breakfast gathering in the late 1970s.

jburgeson@ctpost.com
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GUILFORD  Two New Haven men are among a group of alleged sexual predators who were arrested in a sting operation.

Concluding a sting operation conducted by multiple law enforcement agencies, police arrested five men who allegedly had arranged sexual liaisons with individuals they believed to be children, according to police.

Operation Not In My Town was a joint effort involving the Guilford Police Department, Veterans 4 Child Rescue Foundation and the New Haven office of the states attorney and a number of other local departments. It was conducted between Jan. 12 and Jan. 14 when police were set up in a remote house to catch the potential offenders.

Policeidentified and charged five men with criminal attempt to commit second-degree sexual assault and criminal attempt to commit risk of injury, Guilford police Lt. Timothy Bernier said in a news release.

Gregario Rafael Diaz of Putnam; Robert Prece of New Haven; Sergio Bordonaro of Boston; Marvin Gay Dunkley of New Haven; and Kevin Millen of Ellington were all arrested, with bail for each set at $500,000, according to a release from police.

You cant hide, said John Jacobs, a manager for V4CR. The Internet has given predators the idea that by changing their screen name we dont know who they are. We can find you if youre stupid enough to come online. The Internet is not anonymous anymore. We can find who these folks are. If you think youre safe preying on a child, then youre in for a surprise.

The regional and multi-jurisdictional effort focused on identifying potential sex offenders who had arranged sexual liaisons with children, police said.

The operation had been ongoing for several weeks as police and the foundations investigative team created decoy profiles on social media sites, dating sites, Craigslist and Backpage, then engaged users who responded to ads for sexual experiences with children, said Bernier, who helped draft the operational plan and acted as the arresting commander on scene.

Once ads are posted, they can get hundreds of responses from perpetrators trying to make contact and thousands of hits within a 24 hours, he said.

Getting the targets is unfortunately very easy, he said. Finding the people is not hard. Anyone can stumble upon these sites. The logistics of conducting the operation and follow through to prosecution is difficult.

Guilford police, working with several other local police departments, operated 12 to 15 hours a day in the house with around 10 officers in the house at all times. Guilford police have conducted similar operations before, but nothing of this scale, Bernier said. Throughout the operation, police had close contact with the conversations between the perpetrators and decoy profiles.

Right up until the time they see us, they think theyre out there to make contact with a child, Bernier said.

The Veterans 4 Children Rescue Foundation works with teams of veterans who are licensed investigators around country to help investigate pedophilia and trafficking scenarios. Without the cooperation of local law enforcement and district attorneys, their teams would not be able to deploy their investigators.

The sting operation was part of a documentary the foundation is filming, called Contraland, to show how vulnerable children are to online sex predators in this country, Jacobs said.

Child trafficking isnt a problem happening only in other countries, he said. Its happening here and we need to make parents aware about how vulnerable children here. The exposure is far greater than children understand.

The access to our children is very easy and when you give a kid a cell or computer, you give them access to the world and world access to your child, Bernier said. Be diligent in protecting them even if it seems like encroaching on their privacy. Making sure our children are safe outranks that.

Following up this operation, Guilford police will be holding and participating in educational seminars for both parents and children, police said. The dates will be announced shortly. Parents and educators are encouraged to contact the departments crime and prevention unit for more information on Internet safety.
From 1545 to 1548, a mysterious disease killed about 80 percent of the population of Mexico. It was one of the worst epidemics in human history, felling an estimated 5 million to 15 million people, and was known by natives as cocoliztli - a word meaningpestilence.

About three decades later, cocoliztli struck again, wiping out half of the remaining native population between 1576 and 1578.

"The place we know as New Spain was left almost empty," wrote a Franciscan friar who witnessed the horrors. "In the cities and large towns, big ditches were dug, and from morning to sunset the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches . . ."

For more than a hundred years, scientists have sought clues to what may have caused this disease of epic proportions. Some have suspected illnesses such as measles, smallpox or a type of hemorrhagic fever - potentially brought over to Mexico by the Spanish.

Now, using ancient DNA, a team of researchers has for the first time identified a possible cause of the colonial-era epidemic: Salmonella enterica, a pathogen that causes enteric or typhoid fever.

The study, published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution, was led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Harvard University and the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Up until now, scientists studying ancient epidemics have been forced to mostly rely on historical descriptions of symptoms, which were subject to cultural biases and inaccuracies. Most infectious diseases are incredibly tough to track on the DNA of skeletal remains.

But using a new computer program, this team of researchers was able to analyze ancient DNA from the teeth of 29 skeletons. Most of the remains were excavated from the only known cemetery linked to the cocoliztli epidemic of 1545 to 1550 AD, a burial site located in the Mixtec town of Teposcolula-Yucundaa, in Oaxaca, Mexico. After the epidemic, this city was relocated to a neighboring valley, leaving the epidemic cemetery essentially untouched, according to the study.

A new computer algorithm called MALT allowed scientists to screen broadly for all bacterial DNA in the extracted samples, without specifying a target organism beforehand.

"We could look at anything and everything," Ashild Vagene, one of the authors of the study, said in an interview with The Washington Post. The program allowed researchers to filter out all environmental DNA, such as fragments from plants or fungi, she said.

Matching up the DNA fragments with a large database containing all known environmental and pathogenic bacterial genomes, the scientists were able to find traces of Salmonella enterica Paratyphi C in 10 of the skeletons.

The study does not identify the precise source of the bacteria. At this point, scientists cannot be certain if it was a pathogen brought over by the Spaniards, or one that originated locally and flourished with the social changes brought by the Europeans.

However, "we believe it is likely that it was brought over by Europeans," Vagene said, because research indicates this strain type already existed in Norway long before it broke out in Mexico. Moreover, the Nahuatl word and concept cocoliztli only appeared in the native language after the arrival of the Spaniards.

Francisco Hernandez, a lead physician in the Spanish colony, described cocoliztli based on autopsies he performed on the dead:

"The fevers were contagious, burning, and continuous, all of them pestilential, in most part lethal. The tongue was dry and black. Enormous thirst. Urine of the colors sea-green, vegetal-green, and black, sometimes passing from the greenish color to the pale. Pulse was frequent, fast, small, and weak - sometimes even null. The eyes and the whole body were yellow. This stage was followed by delirium and seizures. Then, hard and painful nodules appeared behind one or both ears along with heartache, chest pain, abdominal pain, tremor, great anxiety, and dysentery [diarrhea]. The blood that flowed when cutting a vein had a green color or was very pale [and] dry . . ."

Vagene said the team of scientists only extracted DNA from one particular burial site, containing victims of one particular wave of the disease. Therefore, further work must be done to find out if DNA at other sites can be traced to Salmonella enterica.

This specific pathogen may be one of several causes for the disease, Vagene said.

"We can only look for pathogens that we know exist today," she said. "We can't look for things that we don't know existed."

Still, the study marks a first step toward understanding the disease exchange in colonial Mexico. And the MALT program could be used to find causes to other ancient and modern diseases in other periods and parts of the world, Vagene said.

"It's the first piece of the puzzle to perhaps finding out what caused this epidemic mystery," she said.
Words that inspire or inflame was the theme of your Sunday editorial and it seemed to want to juxtapose the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.  inspire  with the latest words of President Donald J. Trump  inflame  regarding the latters alleged remarks about certain countries sending us their immigrants.

As an aside, Im wondering where the speech Gestapo was when Obama called Libya by a similar description a couple of years ago but well return to that some other time.

I was in the Army when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and I vividly remember his words of inspiration to all Americans at the time. He was eloquent, poised, factual and articulate, a man all Americans could believe in. He never ran for office because he didnt need to as his podium was above the political realm. He transcended politics. So did Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, not my first choice for president, read America like few politicians have before him.

He saw that Obama had lied to the American people often and eloquently and that there wasnt the slightest movement on the Left or the main-stream media to counter what he was saying.

So Donald Trump decided to tell the truth crudely and America ate it up. We were tired of being lied to by politicians who primarily looked out for themselves and their own enrichment.

We were not interested in global warming and net neutrality but instead we were interested in America, American jobs, a good American future for our kids and we were interested in our American borders. Trump read that and said it. Crudely, but it was the truth and the truth is what matters to Americans.

Would we rather be lied to eloquently by Obama or talked to honestly but crudely by Trump? I wholeheartedly opt for the latter.

Kim Raseman

Milford
Disgraced actor Kevin Spacey now accused of racism and refusing to acknowledge black employees on first season of House of Cards, DailyMailTV has exclusively learned from a former security boss.

Aziz Ansari is denying a woman's claims over the weekend that the Master of None star left her feeling 'violated' after a date. In a statement to Variety, the star said he thought their evening was 'completely consensual.'

Sarah Palin's son, Track, was accused of assault twice last year. In this DailyMailTV exclusive, his ex speaks out about the alleged physical abuse that led her to file for sole custody of their son and what she thinks fuels Track's rage.

It's the ninth anniversary of the 'Miracle on the Hudson' when famed Capt. Sully Sullenberger crash landed a plane to safety in the water. DailyMailTV is speaking exclusively with one of the 155 survivors, Adir Freilich, with a chilling account of the crash and how it's changed his life. For more from Adir Freilich, check his podcast StartUpCamel.com.

The sons of some of Hollywood's finest took over the runway this weekend at the Dolce & Gabbana fashion show in Milan. Daniel Day Lewis, Piers Brosnan and Jude Law's sons represented Millennials at the splashy event.

And, there will soon be a new generation of celebrity babies. DailyMailTV takes a look at who's expecting this year. Kim Kardashian's surrogate could be the first to give birth, followed by a few stars set to join the five-timers parenting club, including Alec Baldwin.
Relative of the 13 siblings held captive, with some chained to beds, speaks exclusively with DailyMailTV about family's failed attempts to reach kids. They were rescued after their 17-year-old sister escaped and called police to their California home. Parents David Allen Turpin and Louise Anna Turpin gave authorities no real explanation and are being held on $9 million bail. Contributor Nancy Grace joins DailyMailTV's team coverage on this story, including an exclusive with Louise's sister.

Kim and Kanye announce 'She's here! We're so in love' and welcome 7lb 6oz baby girl, thanking surrogate in sweet note on Kim's website. They added, 'North and Saint are especially thrilled to welcome their baby sister.'

Yesterday DailyMailTV brought you an exclusive with Track Palin's ex-girlfriend, Jordan Loewe, with graphic descriptions of his alleged abuse. In part two of this exclusive interview, Jordan claims the Palins tried to cover up their son's shocking abuse for the sake of their name.

A teen mom's heartbreaking message to her newborn son as she is about to give him up for adoption is racking up millions of views online. DailyMailTV speaks exclusively to the young woman behind this powerful video filled with love.

And, DailyMailTV has exclusive new details about Johnny Depp's $2 million-a-month spending habits with an exorbitant wine tab that could be leaving the star in debt.
The justification for having a census every ten years is that it furnishes the Government with valuable information to improve public services and plan for future demand.

That's the theory, anyway. The last one was held in 2011 and was the most extensive, intrusive ever. The census form ran to 32 pages, delving into the most intimate areas of our lives.

They even had the impertinence to ask about sexual preference, as if that's any of their damn business.

Next time they are determined to find out how many transsexuals there are. Failure to comply could land you with a fine of up to 1,000. But, we're told, it's for our own good.

The last census in 2011 was the most extensive ever with a form that ran to 32 pages and delving into the most intimate areas of our lives

The Government insists it must know everything about us in order to provide the 'world-class' public services which politicians are always boasting about.

So how's that working out, then? They've had seven years to sift through all the data from the 2011 census and react accordingly. But can anyone, hand on heart, honestly say that things have got better?

Are the roads and trains less crowded, as a result of ministers learning that more people would be travelling?

Is it easier to see your doctor? Have hospital waiting lists been slashed as more beds have been provided to cope with our growing, ageing population?

Can you get your children into the local school of your choice? Are there more coppers on the beat? Are your dustbins emptied more frequently?

Has the third runway at Heathrow been built yet? Have we opened a few more nuclear power stations to meet our insatiable demand for electricity, to power all the fancy gizmos we rely upon today?

Er, not exactly. Road space has actually been reduced, thanks to the faddish obsession with building cycle lanes. The NHS appears to be in permanent crisis, and it can take weeks to see a GP, that's if you can find one still registering new patients.

School places are under more pressure than ever, largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration. The police have withdrawn from the streets to concentrate on scouring the internet for 'hate crime'.

In some areas, you're lucky if you see the dustmen once every three weeks. No wonder fly-tipping is endemic. We'll put a man on Mars before the third runway at Heathrow opens. And it's only a matter of time until the iPhones will be going out all over Britain, as coal-fired power stations shut arbitrarily, to meet made-up 'climate change' targets, and we are forced to rely on useless windmills.

The 2021 census, will for the first time since the Domesday Book, pictured, ask for details about all our income, investments and other assets

One area where we do now lead the world is in snooping on and gathering irrelevant information about the population.

We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files.

Plans for the 2021 census have just been released and, next time, it won't be just the now-predictable demands for ethnicity, sexual predilection and gender identity.

For the first time since William the Conqueror's Domesday Book, in 1086, the Government is planning to gather details of all our income, investments and other assets. That early census was so thorough that it was said 'there was no single hide nor yard of land, nor indeed one ox or cow nor one pig which was left out'.

In 2021, hiding a pig in your shed will be easier than concealing the contents of your piggy bank from the authorities. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) plans to use new legal powers, slipped through Parliament last year, to trawl income tax and social security records and compile profiles of everyone's worth.

The ONS claims it needs to build up a database of prosperous postcodes, so that services can be concentrated on 'vulnerable' areas. Cobblers. This is the first step towards introducing a wealth tax and a local income tax, so that the 'rich' pay more.

The census is not about serving the common good. It's about divide and rule, carving up the country into different and competing victim and special interest groups. They are also planning to tap into mobile phone records to track our movements, in an outrageous expansion of state surveillance. Already, Britain has more CCTV cameras than any other country on earth.

None of this is about providing better public services, it's about control. Knowledge is power, knowledge is valuable and can be sold to the highest bidder.

The tech giants already harvest our online habits, which they can then parlay into commercial gain by bombarding us with advertising. Naturally, the Government wants a piece of the action.

Of course, they pay lip service to security. But would you trust any Government official with a shred of evidence which isn't essential?

Never mind individual civil servants and rogue coppers using sensitive information to spy on and discredit others.

Look at the way local councils misuse anti-terrorism legislation to monitor parents attempting to circumvent school catchment areas to get their kids a decent education.

How many times have we heard of Government staff downloading 'secure' records and then leaving them on a train somewhere?

We know that the DVLA sells our vehicle information to private parking companies. Only yesterday, it was revealed that the Department of Health is handing over the medical records of British cancer patients to American lawyers acting for Big Tobacco.

Always work on the basis that no information you supply to the Government  or anyone else for that matter  is confidential or secure, and you won't go far wrong.

The next census, as usual, will be produced in dozens of different languages, many of them scribble. But we still won't know how many people are living here, legal or otherwise.

MPs admitted last week that they haven't got a clue about the number of foreign nationals living under the radar in Britain, because no such information exists and there's no reliable method of measuring it.

Richard Littlejohn argues that the census is not about serving the common good or providing better public services but about control

Best guess is somewhere between two and three million. But don't expect the census to clarify that.

Illegal immigrants aren't going to fill in a census form. Nor are transients, or many of those living in overcrowded inner-cities, where English is rarely spoken.

So, once again, the law will only apply to those who agree to abide by it and the 2021 census will be just another excuse by the Government to invade our privacy, fine and tax us more.

As for all this information leading to better provision of public services, well, last time out more than 400,000 people identified their religion as 'Jedi', but I haven't noticed state-funded Jedi community centres springing up everywhere. Have you?

At least not all the information they gather is wasted, which is why they're so keen on asking about gender identity.

The good news is that, while the rest of our public services are falling apart, we now also lead the world in transgender toilet provision, and the NHS is offering free cervical smear tests to men who define as women, even though they haven't got a cervix.

Makes you proud to be British.

Here's another one of those stories I don't know whether to file under Mind How You Go or You Couldn't Make It Up.

A policewoman has been awarded 15,000 compensation because she couldn't carry an Alsatian up a hill. No, I can't believe I've just written that sentence, either.

PC Kim-Louise Carter applied to join the Gloucestershire canine unit. One of the tests involves carrying a dog up a 70-yard gradient. When she failed to carry a 5st Alsatian called Hulk up the hill, she was given another chance with a lighter dog called Fizz.

But she dropped Fizz, too, complaining that her legs had 'turned to jelly'. It didn't help that during the exam her dog got into a fight with another one and bit a police officer.

Maybe she's just not cut out to be a dog handler. Yet despite the fact that three other women candidates did pass the test, Kim-Louise cried 'sex discrimination'.

And, with depressing predictability, a tribunal agreed with her, ruling that the test must be made easier and ordering instructors to undergo 'equality training'.

Perhaps the police should get rid of all their Alsatians and in future use something smaller like a dachshund, chihuahua, or some other miniature breed that PC Carter can keep in her handbag.

Had to laugh at the man who blew himself up trying to rob a Glasgow ATM. Police are still looking for his accomplice. Last night they issued a photo of the two men they believe were responsible, possibly under the influence of bevvy

Nick Clegg, rejected by his former constituents in Sheffield, is claiming 115,000 a year in allowances previously only given to ex-Prime Ministers. Why should taxpayers have to subsidise Calamity Clegg, when he devotes all his time attempting to overturn the democratic decision of the 17.4 million who voted for Brexit?
A mother sparked an online debate when she questioned whether an eight-year-old boy should be allowed to use a women's changing room.

The British Mumsnet user wrote about how she had taken her 10-year-old daughter to the local swimming baths but that the little girl had felt too uncomfortable to use the communal changing room - because other mothers were using it with their sons.

The mother explained that her daughter was 'developing' and becoming more aware of her body, and felt especially self-conscious as one of the boys attended the same after-school activity club as she does.

The post sparked a flurry of responses from parents on both sides of the debate, with some arguing the little girl had 'more of a right' to use the facility than the boys while others insisted the mother was overreacting.

A Mumsnet user asked if it is right for boys to use female changing rooms. Stock image

The woman explained the situation on the online forum and asked others for their opinion

Taking to the online forum, the concerned mother explained: 'DDs [darling daughters] go swimming at our local leisure centre. Fabulous set up. Regular ladies/gents communal changing areas.

'Plus large family cubicles, plus accessible cubicles, plus an individual changing village... Over the past few weeks I have noticed that there are about three boys aged about 7/8 being taken into the ladies' changing room.

'They are well behaved kids and there are no major problems with them. Except that [my daughter] (10 and beginning to develop) is getting a bit uncomfortable - she knows at least one o them from an after-school activity.'

She asked other parents whether there was 'something she was missing' as they chose to use the women's changing room despite there being so many other options available.

Some fiercely defended the girl's right to be able to get changed in her own changing room

Several parents thought it was reasonable for the mother and daughter to expect to use the facilities without young boys being there.

One posted: 'Personally, I think if family changing rooms are available there is no need for children of the opposite sex to be in male or female changing rooms at any age. Cant see what there is to miss!'

Another wrote: 'Yes this is not fair on girls. But girls needs are almost always ignored.'

However others questioned whether the little girl would be more comfortable using one of the other changing rooms available given her feelings about her body.

Others agreed that the boys' mothers should use other options. But one mother said she wouldn't feel comfortable letting her son change alone

'No idea but if your dd is starting to get self conscious given the set up you describe wouldnt the individual changing rooms be a more comfy option?,' one asked.

Others argued that mothers of sons had every right to bring the boys into the changing room and pointed out they were not 'sexually aware'.

'If you have an issue with me taking me 7, SEVEN, year old boy in with me to change, instead of sending him off into a room of fully grown men alone, that issue is yours,' one mother wrote.

Another agreed: 'It makes more sense for a woman to take her male child into the women's changing rooms, than for an adult woman to shower and change in the men's changing rooms. How about a bit of support for mothers who have male children?'
A woman with a hankering for her late nonna's pasta sauce is offering $500 to anyone willing share their secret sauce recipe with her.

Alexandra Tully, 30, of Alexandria, Sydney, recently posted an ad on Airtasker looking for someone who might be able to help her recreate an important link from her past.

Ms Tully's listing explained how her grandmother - her nonna - died a few years ago, and that one of the many things she missed about her 'is the delicious, heart-warming pasta she used to make me.'

Alexandra Tully (pictured) is out to source someone who can teach her how to make a perfect pasta sauce

She continued: 'There's something about home cooked, authentic Italian pasta sauces.

'I can't articulate the sensation I had with nonna's pasta sauces, but there's a warmth and cosiness to it that I can't recreate myself, nor has been fully achieved at the epic pasta restaurants I've visited around inner Sydney.'

'So, I'm on the search for the best of the best and am offering $500 for your most secret of recipes.

Ms Tully said one of the things she most missed about her beloved nonna (pictured left) was her heart-warming cooking

The 30-year-old Sydneysider is hoping to learn how to recreate her grandmother's classic pasta sauce (stock image)

'The task will be to come to my home in Alexandria, spend an afternoon teaching and cooking your recipe with me, so I can share it with my family.'

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Ms Tully revealed that her recent wedding may have triggered feelings of nostalgia for her much-loved nonna's home cooking.

'I would always go to Nonna's place after school and the smell of the sauce as I walked through the door is something I want to recreate for my family,' she said.

Ms Tully has outsourced the job through the online site Airtasker and the ad has had over 200 responses

So far the ad has had more than 200 responses, with many sharing their own stories of how cooking connects them to their family history.

One commenter wrote: 'My mum would make spagetti (sic) sauce so the whole street could smell it its not some thing i pass on willingly but my parents past away and i no how much i miss some things mum use to cook that i never learned but one thing i did learn and mastered was the pasta sauce.

'I hope that the recipe I show you (and any others in particular that you miss from your Nonna) are able to fill you with the magical warmth that these pasta sauces fill me with,' another said.

While a third was so willing to help out, they even offered to bypass Ms Tully's $500 fee: 'I'm sorry I know this isn't the nature of airtasker - but I'd love to do this for free if this task dosesn't (sic) work out.'

People everywhere have come forward with their own stories about how cooking connects them to their family history

Ms Tully said she'd been overwhelmed by the many responses to her ad, which appears to have resonated with many.

'I was expecting four or five replies because it seems like such a niche thing to ask people and I didnt think so many would relate to my story.'

The 30-year-old explained that her nonna came from the region of Lu in Italy so the sauce she was hoping to recreate would be an amatriciana - a basic tomato sauce which is flavoured with bacon or prosciutto.

Though Ms Tully is hoping to learn how to make an amatriciana she has said she is open to learning how to make sauces from other Italian regions

However, she has said she is open to looking at other regional recipes.

Ms Tully also noted in her ad those chosen to create the pasta sauce must feel comfortable appearing on camera as well as she is hoping to film the session.

The ad closes this Friday, and those interested can apply via airtasker.com/pasta.
It's that time of the year again when parents begin rushing around for back to school supplies. But perhaps the most important item of all is the shoes they will be wearing for the year.

There are plenty of labels to choose from and they range in prices too but which are the best for providing a firm and supportive shoe?

Australian consumer watchdog CHOICE pitted five pairs of black lace-up school shoes against each other to see what the differences were.

It's almost back to school time and consumer watchdog CHOICE has pitted five pairs of black lace-up school shoes against each other to see which ones are better for your child (stock image)

The shoes, from brands including Target, ROC and Clarks, varied in price from $35 to $139.95.

One shoe from each pair was cut from toe to heel to see the internal elements that make up each shoe.

They were then assessed by podiatry experts Kate McArthur, director of City Feet Clinic and Charlotte Bodell, spokesperson for the Australian Podiatry Association.

So how did they perform?

CHOICE experts Kate McArthur and Charlotte Bodell looked at a range of areas of each of the shoes

Clarks  Daytona Senior $139.95

Clarks were referred to as a 'gold standard' shoe by both of the experts.

'While certainly not cheap, the shoes were assessed as being very good quality as well as coming in a range of widths and lengths,' CHOICE said.

The experts said the shoe was padded and contoured to ensure a good fit, but was expensive  particularly if you have a child with fast-growing feet whose shoes will need to be replaced after six months.

ROC  Larrikin $119

The CHOICE experts found that the shoe has a sturdy last and good heel height but the sock liner is made out of a synthetic fabric, so it won't breathe as well.

Ms Bodell described the sole as 'blown out', meaning there are air pockets inside the sole. While these can provide cushioning and create a lighter shoe, they also make the soles wear out and sink down more easily.

Although the most expensive, Clarks Daytona Senior shoes performed the best, according to CHOICE (stock image)

How to find the best fit  Always have both feet measured for length.  Toes shouldn't touch the end of the shoe. The ideal gap is approximately half a thumb width from the end of the longest toe to the end of the shoe.  Check the shoes are both wide and deep enough  if you can see the outline of the foot squashed up against the shoe then it's not right.  Shoes should feel comfortable immediately and there shouldn't be any pressure points or pain at all.  Shop for shoes in the afternoon as feet tend to swell throughout the day. Source: CHOICE Advertisement

Lynx  Arrow $79.95 (we paid $59.95 on sale)

Although the experts thought the firm and sturdy heel cup was among this shoe's good points, it also had a few negative aspects.

'The last is made of cardboard which will degrade quicker than other materials  especially if the shoe gets wet,' the experts told CHOICE.

They also noted that the soles are 'blown out' (have air pockets), which means the shoes may wear out more quickly.

Grosby  leather lace-up boys shoes $35

The bad points far outweighed the good points for these Grobsy school shoes.

The experts said there was no steel shank for support and called the heel cup ''flimsy''.

They also said that 'despite a chunky appearance, the soles are too spongey and soft' and that ''the top of the shoe is quite wide and won't fit a child with a narrow foot'.

CHOICE recommends parents to get both of their child's feet measured and to shop for shoes in the afternoon as feet tend to swell throughout the day (stock image)

Target  Eton Grad lace-up school shoes $35

At an affordable $35, this pair of shoes is lighter than other brands and has a good heel height, according to the experts.

However, the CHOICE experts said it is 'too flexible and soft all over' and there is 'no steel shank'.

While the experts agreed that the Clarks shoes were the best out of those assessed, both commented on the high price.

Ms Bodell thought the Lynx shoes were a good product for a good price, and rated both the Target and Grosby shoes as poor.

Ms McArthur also rated the Grosby shoes as poor, but said the Target shoes could be an option if your child's feet are going through a growth spurt, meaning wear and tear is unlikely to be an issue.

'They aren't great, but they'd be OK if your child is only wearing them for a few months as a budget option,' she said.
A heartbroken mom who posed for a photo shoot with her baby after she died believes every grieving parent should do the same.

Laura Winner lost her first daughter, Adaline, to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in December 2015 after putting the seven-week-old down for an afternoon nap.

The 30-year-old, from Rapid City, South Dakota, posed for photos with her baby girl five days after she died to memorialize their last moments together.

In memory: Laura Winter posed for photos with her baby girl Adaline after she died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

Tragedy: Adaline (pictured) was seven weeks old when she died of SIDS during an afternoon nap

Laura, who now has another daughter, said some friends and family criticized the photo shoot, calling it 'inappropriate,' but she believes it is something all grieving parents should do.

'At the time I didn't think there was anything unusual about getting photographs with my daughter after she had passed,' the former nursing assistant said.

'We had just brought Adaline a gorgeous pink dress the day before she died because we had arranged to get some professional baby photos taken. But we had no idea that she would wear this dress in a post-mortem photo shoot instead.'

'The photo shoot just seemed like the normal thing to do and it was so comforting to be able to hold and be with her again,' she added.

Mother's nightmare: Adaline, who is pictured as a newborn, tot was 'inconsolable' and wouldn't stop crying the day before her death

Happy memories: Laura's husband Sean is pictured with Adaline after she was born

'I just sat and held her for hours that day, stroking her hair and talking to her. I didn't want to say goodbye to my baby. She just looked like she was sleeping; none of it felt real. I kept thinking, "Okay, you can wake up now."'

Laura said the photo shoot upset a lot of people, but she told them it was a way to keep her baby's memory alive.

'Even now, I can look at those photographs and find peace,' she said. 'Negative feedback about the photos always comes from people who haven't been through that kind of loss. You could never understand how it feels until you've been through it.

'Although some might think it is strange, it actually really helps with the grieving process and getting some closure, especially when your child dies so unexpectedly,' she added. 'I really encourage everyone who has lost a child to have post-mortem photos done.'

Tribute: Laura said she chose to have a post-mortem photo shoot with her daughter as a way to keep her memory alive

Grieving: 'The photo shoot just seemed like the normal thing to do and it was so comforting to be able to hold and be with her again,' she said

Laura noted that she has never heard anyone say they they regretted doing it, but there are a lot of parents who said they wished they had and now it's too late.

'There is such a taboo surrounding death but it's a fact of life and is not something that should be considered shameful or be hidden,' she said.

'I am so glad I have these photos because those are the last moments I have with my daughter and I will be able to look back at them forever.

'We all need to grieve in the way that feels natural to us and we shouldn't be judged for it.'

Laura said she felt a 'lingering sense of doom' early on in her pregnancy with Adaline, and couldn't shake the feeling 'something terrible was going to happen.'

Helpful: Laura, who is pictured with Adaline, said she can look to those photos and 'find peace'

The day before her daughter's death, Laura said the tot was 'inconsolable' and wouldn't stop crying, but she didn't think too much of this because she wasn't sick and had always been a colicky baby.

On the day of her daughter's death, Laura placed Adaline on the other side of the bed before taking a nap.

Three and a half hours later she woke from her nap 'with a start' and instantly knew something was wrong because Adaline hadn't yet woken up to be fed. Adaline was still next to her on the bed but wasn't breathing.

'When I woke up and saw the time on my alarm clock, I just knew she was gone,' Laura said. 'I didn't even have to look at her before that sick feeling of dreadful realization dawned on me. I looked over at Adaline and she was just as I had left her.

'Her skin had started to take on a purple blotchiness which I knew was an example of blood pooling that occurs after a heart stops beating.

In her honor: Each year on the anniversary of her death, they donate a package of gifts to the neonatal intensive care unit at their local hospital

Memorial: The couple also releases a pink balloon on her birthday and the anniversary of her death

'I was really calm at first, almost eerily so. I held her and said her name a few times,' she recalled. 'I thought I could wake her up, but no amount of touching or talking did a thing.

'I set her down and called 911 and just told them, "My baby won't wake up  I think my baby is dead."'

Adaline was rushed to hospital but could not be revived.

'I couldn't believe this nightmare that was unfolding before my eyes,' Laura said. 'At the hospital I was put into a room by myself and the doctor told me, "Your baby is dead."'

'I was numb. When I had to identify her body as soon as I saw this tiny body underneath a white sheet with a little tuft of her black hair poking out from underneath, I just lost it,' she recalled.

Blessing: Nearly a year after losing their daughter, the couple discovered Laura was pregnant again. Laura is pictured pregnant with Adaline

Little sister: Laura and Sean welcomed their second daughter, Hailey, in May 2017

'I couldn't believe my baby was dead. I didn't want to be in a world where Adaline wasn't alive.'

Due to the unexplained nature of Adaline's death, Laura couldn't see her body for five days while the police investigated.

An autopsy later confirmed Adaline had died from SIDS, also known as cot death.

Laura said after Adaline's death she was tortured by painful thoughts she could accidentally have rolled onto her daughter in her sleep  leaving her in a very dark place.

She and her husband Sean, who is a member of the Air Force, now release pink balloons each year for Adaline's birthday and on the anniversary of her death. They also donate a package of gifts to the neonatal intensive care unit at their local hospital.

A mother's pain: Laura admitted she always thinks what it would be like if Adaline were still here playing with Hailey

Angel: 'I feel like Adaline's spirit is watching over her little sister all the time. Hailey has her very own guardian angel for life,' Laura said

Laura is determined to raise awareness of self-sleep practices, which advise SIDS could be more likely if babies sleep in the same bed as their parents.

Nearly a year after losing their daughter, the couple discovered Laura was pregnant again  with their second daughter, Hailey  who was born in May 2017.

'We were overjoyed when we found out we were having another baby and I cried when I found out we were having another girl. We couldn't be happier,' she said.

'I always sit and imagine what it would be like if Adaline were still here playing with Hailey.

'The pain is still there but we've learned to live with it and we feel blessed to have had Adaline in our lives, even if for a short time,' she added.

'I feel like Adaline's spirit is watching over her little sister all the time. Hailey has her very own guardian angel for life.'
A mother-of-three with a penchant for organisation has shared a glimpse into her perfectly arranged kitchen pantry.

Danielle Holloway, from Adelaide, said she spent a week giving her cupboard a makeover by decluttering her space for just $300.

From coordinated containers filled with sugar, flour, cereal and pasta to colour-coded snacks and tiny labelled spices - every little ingredient has been neatly tucked away on shelves.

Scroll down for video

Mother Danielle Holloway has shared a glimpse into her perfectly arranged kitchen pantry

The thrifty mother praised Kmart for the cheap items she purchased for her creation, including plastic containers, Lazy Susans and baskets.

'Kmart to the rescue! Now my sauces and tinned food are neat,' she said in the caption of the video she shared on Facebook.

She even used tier shelves to stack her condiments and cake decorating items.

'See-through containers make it easier to see what you have and how much is left, and also to keep unwanted pests away,' she told Mamamia.

'Tiered shelves are great for cans, as a lot of the time cans are stacked behind each other resulting in wasting time looking for certain ones [and accidental double-ups].'

The thrifty mother praised Kmart for the cheap items she purchased for her creation, including plastic containers, Lazy Susans and baskets

She even used tier shelves to stack her condiments and cake decorating items

The containers - a mix of Costco's Polder brand and Aldi's Crofton - are all labelled with black and white permanent marker on clear stickers.

After sharing her video to a Facebook group over the weekend, the mother was praised for her super organised pantry, with some parents even joking to pay her to come out to their homes for a makeover.

The mother said she was stunned to see other parents gushing over her finished pantry.

'I'm glad other people share the same happiness as me looking at a clean pantry,' she told Mamamia.
When Prince Harry announced his engagement to Meghan Markle, some monarchists worried the glamorous American actress would overshadow more senior members of the Royal Family.

Well, it hasnt taken long for their fears to be realised, owing to cackhanded scheduling by courtiers.

This Thursday, Harry and Meghan make their first joint visit to Wales, but it will take place on the same day as Prince William is due to carry out engagements elsewhere.

This Thursday, Harry and Meghan make their first joint visit to Wales, but it will take place on the same day as Prince William is due to carry out engagements elsewhere

Mark my words, William will be furious, a source tells me.

He is carrying out these visits because he really believes in the projects.

Inevitably, Meghan will attract all the media attention. William understands that, so he will be very frustrated that the engagements were arranged for the same day.

The clash seems unnecessary, as Harry has no other official engagements this week.

William is due to visit Evelina London Childrens Hospital to draw attention to a scheme helping Forces veterans to find work in the NHS.

Although the Duchess of Cambridge is not scheduled to be there, she might decide to join her husband, as shes a supporter of Evelina.

Kate has been known to turn up unannounced at Williams engagements, such as at Paddington station last October when she met a group of children helped by royal charities.

Kate has been known to turn up unannounced at Williams engagements and steal the show

She guaranteed positive headlines by dancing with a person dressed as Paddington Bear.

Meghans trip to Cardiff will be only her third public visit with Harry since they announced their engagement last November.

On her previous two visits, to Brixton and Nottingham, she attracted crowds of hundreds and media coverage around the world.

William is usually met just by a few polite onlookers.

A Kensington Palace spokesman is keen to play down the scheduling blunder.

I am not sure what you mean by clash, he says, loftily. They will regularly be attending events on the same days.
When Lucy Good's marriage broke down five years ago, the solution wasn't to abandon the relationship entirely and attempt to parent alone.

Instead, Ms Good, 42, and her ex-husband decided co-parenting could work as an option as both still wanted to be involved in their daughters' lives.

Speaking to FEMAIL, Ms Good revealed the Noosa-based couple split amicably after years of trying to make their 10-year marriage work.

'It wasn't dramatic in any way, she said. 'We just grew steadily apart. We did lots of things to try and make it work, including emigrating to Australia,' said the United Kingdom-born Ms Good.

Lucy Good (pictured) has revealed her and her ex-husband parted on amicable terms which made the decision to co-parent a much easier one

Following the couple's decision to part, the two sat down to negotiate ways they could raise their children, Amber, who was nine at the time, and her younger sister Ruby, who was then aged seven.

Ms Good said co-parenting was a natural decision for the pair who wanted the split to be as easy on their kids as possible.

'There wasn't ever any consideration that we wouldn't co-parent and that I would take the kids, which can happen quite a lot of the time.

Ms Good with her two daughters: Amber (pictured left) and Ruby (pictured right): She believes everyone benefits from the arrangment

'For us, it was always going to be 50/50. The discussion wasn't even needed,' she continued. 'It was a given.'

Commenting on the rising trend of part-time parenting, expert Sharon Witt said the arrangement is one that can work really well, as long as both parents are committed to putting the well-being of their children first.

'The children that I have seen that do the best and thrive in a situation where parents are no longer residing together are those where the needs of the children are considered above all else.'

Parenting expert Sharon Witt (pictured) believes the arrangement can work really well

For the arrangement to function well, Ms Witt outlined that both parties need to be clear from the outset what their expectations of the situation are.

'Co-parenting doesn't work so well where children go to one household and have one set of rules and they come back to another and have to navigate a different set of rules and expectations. That's where the most stress for children occurs,' the author said.

'Co-parenting means good communication between both parents,' she stressed.

The five C's of co-parenting Leading parenting expert, Dr Justin Coulson offers five recommendations for making a co-parenting arrangement work: 1. Closeness - The closer parents live to each other, the easier it is on the children. Routines such as schooling, activities and friends aren't disrupted by moving between homes 2. Care-giving - Dr Coulson said most research showed that the more involved parents are in care-giving the better it is for both. An uneven care-giving situation can lead to conflict and resentment 3. Conflict - Irrespective of your feelings toward the other person, always maintain courteous and respectful interactions, Dr Coulson said 4. Change - Change associated with divorce or separation can be hard on children. It's important to communicate change ahead of time and to be as patient and understanding as possible after change occurs 5. Cash - The more consistent cash-flow is in the two homes the better it is for kids. Mum and Dad should both be able to provide children with similar circumstances: food, facilities, and resources Source: Dr Justin Coulson Advertisement

Now five years into their arrangement, Ms Good said the situation has worked really well for everyone, mostly because both have stayed living in close proximity to the other.

She explained her and her ex-husband live about a 10-minute drive from each other, which has helped stabilise the lives of their children.

'We made the decision that when we split up we had to stay here until the kids had flown the nest,' she said.

'The kids always know that whatever happens mum and dad are near to one another.

The family all live close to each other which Ms Good believes has made things much easier for everyone

'That was something that was really important to us, and probably key to making it work.'

While Ms Good admitted Amber and Ruby did go through a period of adjusting to the new parenting situation, this was eased she said 'by keeping the message consistent.'

She continued: 'There were times when they were upset and confused, but it was a matter of giving them the same message which was this is the way it is, it's not going to go back to the way it was.'

Telling the truth about the couple's situation and 'keeping the message consistent' helped the children adjust to the new parenting situation

'It was really important to not give them false hope.'

She believes her children also enjoy the arrangement because both now get to have a much more active relationship with each parent.

'It's great to see them both benefiting from good relationships with both mum and dad.

'Less quantity and more quality time with your children forges happy, positive relationships.'

Ms Good said co-parenting has opened up opportunities and given her the time to concentrate on building her own life

Ms Good, who now writes a blog that supports other single mothers, doesn't believe she would have struck out on her own if she had continued in her marriage.

'I am a much happier and freer person and I have had the opportunity to concentrate more on me.

'Now with a little bit of breathing space that I get from not having the children, I feel I can move forward with my own life and better it, and in turn better their lives too.

'Co-parenting has given me the space to move forward, which was a really important thing to be able to do.'


A disgruntled male shopper has demanded Harvey Nichols take down a 'sexist' sign on its shop front.

Rob McGibbon, a writer from Chelsea, London, tweeted a photo of the sign outside the department store directing customers towards the men's department in the basement, which reads: 'Great men go down.'

McGibbon, who blasted the double entendre as 'lewd and offensive', called on the retailer to remove the sign, which he suggested would spark an outcry if women were the subject of the joke.

He said on Twitter the 'anti-sexism debate should go both ways', and accused the London department store of 'casual hypocrisy'.

His argument proved divisive, with many agreeing that the sign would prompt 'uproar' had it been about women, while others pointed out that it was clearly intended as a joke.

Harvey Nichols advertised their men's department - which is in the basement - with the slogan 'great men go down'

Writer Rob McGibbon called the sign 'lewd and offensive' and urged the store to take it down

McGibbon insisted he wasn't taking issue with the joke, rather the 'double standard and casual hypocrisy', and suggested that the store wouldn't advertise the women's department in the same way.

He argued that the same joked wouldn't be made about women and the anti-sexism debate must 'work both ways'

He tweeted: 'I have asked Harvey Nichols to take down its lewd & offensive poster. The anti-sexism debate must work both ways.

'It's not the double entendre that irks me, it's the double standard and casual hypocrisy. Eggshells for all.'

The tweet has had over 350 likes and retweets, and sparked a debate amongst users.

One woman said it shouldn't be taken so seriously and called it 'tongue-in-cheek fun'.

But McGibbon suggested that the same joke - if made about women - would be considered offensive.

A female Twitter user said she thought it was 'tongue in cheek fun', but Rob said her response wouldn't be the same if it was about women

He responded: '''Great Women Get On Their Knees'' is certainly tongue in cheek and true, too. Would that be seen as fun as well?'

Many men agreed with his points, and said there would be 'uproar' if the sign was aimed at women.

One tweeted: 'Maybe it's about time men started complaining about sexism.'

'The double standards is laughable! The outrage this would have cause if it had of been the other way about,' another posted.

Other men found the sign offensive, with one saying there would be 'uproar' if it was about women

The risque sign has come under fire at a time when sexism is at the top of the global agenda.

The Harvey Weinstein scandal that engulfed Hollywood, and the #MeToo and Time's Up campaigns that followed in the wake of those and subsequent allegations, have sparked widespread conversation and debate around gender equality.

A spokesperson for Harvey Nichols said: 'The signage was designed to direct customers down to our menswear department which occupies the lower two floors of our Knightsbridge store.

'The copy used makes light of the location of the department. On the whole, we have received positive reactions from customers, with many people viewing it in the light-hearted manner it was intended. However, we recognise that our signature tongue-in-cheek humour may not be to everyone's tastes.'
For many of us, visiting the Disney parks is a magical experience made even more so by the staff that work there.

But as one former employee has revealed, a lot of effort goes into making the theme park the happiest place on earth.

A former cast member who worked at Walt Disney World Florida has revealed the secret goings on of the parks.

A former Disney World Florida cast member has revealed the secrets of working in the park

Writing anonymously for PopSugar she admitted that there were plenty of tricks employed by staff members in order to keep guests happy.

First and foremost employees are encouraged to use customers names wherever possible.

She writes: 'Have you ever been surprised by a cast member who uses your name? It's either because you have a pin on with your name on it, or when you paid with your room key or credit card, we took a quick glance at it to get your name.'

However, there is an exception to the rule as she revealed that it is unacceptable for employees to acknowledge celebrities, revealing that asking for an autograph is grounds for dismissal.

As anyone working in retail will be aware, the job requires you to answer customer queries wherever possible, but in Disney World that means EVERY question.

Revealed that employees are encouraged to learn customer names but should avoid approaching celebrities

The cast member revealed that it is never acceptable to answer a customer question with 'I don't know' and you must come up with an answer without exception.

If you can't come up with an answer you are required to find out, and if asked a 'silly' question, produce a 'silly' answer.

She explains: 'If a child asks you what Tinker Bell eats before her flight across the Magic Kingdom during the fireworks, you better come up with an answer quickly.'

Aside from strict verbal dos and don'ts, Disney also operates strict policies on staff's gestures - most noticeably the 'Disney point'.

'All cast members have to point with two fingers so it's not interpreted as being rude' explains the writer.

And it isn't pointing alone that must be performed in a certain style.

The woman revealing that those cleaning litter must do so without stopping - although cleaners will never deal with chewing gum removal as it is banned from employees and not sold on site.

MailOnline has contacted Disney for a comment.
It has already garnered a legion of fans since it launched on Channel 4 at the beginning of the month.

And now Derry Girls, which is based on a group of 16-year-old school pupils living in Northern Ireland's Londonderry during the 1994 conflicts, is causing a stir for reasons that have nothing to do with performances or plot.

Viewers were flabbergasted to learn that Nicola Coughlan, who plays central character teenager Clare Devlin, is almost twice her screen age at 31 years old.

Back to school! Nicola Coughlan, (right) who plays 16-year-old school girl Clare Devlin in hit drama Derry Girls, is almost twice her screen age at 31 years old

When one fan made the discovery after researching the actress, she shared the baby-face blonde's age on social media, sparking a flurry of tweets expressing surprise that a thirtysomething could still be cast as a schoolgirl.

Taking to Twitter, Amanda wrote: 'Nicola Coughlan, who plays Clare in Derry Girls, is 31 years old. THIRTY ONE YEARS OLD!'

And her tweet quickly garnered hundreds of likes and comments from surprised viewers.

'Blimey! She must have an attic in her house!', one wrote, referencing Oscar Wilde's book, Dorian Gray, where the central character never ages.

Nicola Coughlan, pictured left, from Galway, takes a lead role in the comedy based around schoolgirls' lives in Northern Ireland during The Troubles

One viewer claimed it was all about the clothes, saying: 'It's the school uniform that makes her look a lot younger,' while a Northern Irish viewer joked: 'Its all the rain that keeps us all so young out here'.

Another shocked viewer wrote: 'HOLY S***!! what ages are the others?', while one complimented the actress on her youthful looks.

'Wow! She's looks so young! Obviously got great genes. Good shout out for Derry Girls, funniest series to come along for a long time', they wrote.

'Nicola Coughlan, who plays Clare in Derry Girls, is 31 years old. THIRTY ONE YEARS OLD!' A surprised fan wrote

Others had quite different concerns and pointed out she must have trouble buying alcohol.

'Must be a pain trying to get a bottle of wine from a supermarket', they tweeted.

The six-part series, inspired by writer Lisa McGee, who created the show, follows the Derry Girls as they juggle the pressures of high school along with the complex political situation in Northern Ireland.

It also stars Erin, played by Saoirse Monica Jackson- thought to be 24 in real life, her cousin Orla, portrayed by Louisa Harland, 24, pal Michelle (Jamie-Lee O'Donnell), 26, and Michelle's English cousin, James played by Dylan Llewellyn, 25- all portraying 16-year-old characters on screen.

'Must be a pain trying to get a bottle of wine from a supermarket', another fan tweeted

Set in mid-1990s Northern Ireland during 'the Troubles', it shows the teenagers living through the period of conflict that didn't end until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, as the battle over whether Northern Ireland should leave or remain in the United Kingdom came to an end.

Juxtaposed with the group of pupil's comical teenage problems, the series has been praised by critics and fans.

After airing just one episode at the beginning of January, Channel 4 announced last week that they would be commissioning a second series.
He's captured dozens of special royal moments over the years - from Kate and William's wedding day to Harry and Meghan's more recent engagement announcement.

But now, Getty's royal photographer Chris Jackson has revealed why members of the royal family don't always make his job easy - in particular, Her Majesty the Queen.

The 38-year-old, who is married to the Duchess of Cambridge's stylist Natasha Archer, explained how the 91-year-old monarch 'can go a whole event where she's not smiling', making it hard to get that money shot.

Meanwhile, 'touchy feely' Prince Harry's love of hugging is not always a good thing from Chris's point of view, as it makes it trickier for the photographer to capture people's faces.

Royal photographer Chris Jackson has revealed how the Queen (photographed by Chris during a visit to Hyde Park Barracks in October) can make his job difficult as she 'can go a whole event where she's not smiling'

Speaking in an interview with the Huffington Post, the photographer explained how getting a good picture can often be down to luck, although members of the royal family can sometimes make his life more difficult.

Discussing photographing the Queen at official engagements, Chris said: 'She's not always smiling. In fact, you can go a whole event where she's not smiling. She doesn't always make it easy for you. But I like that.'

He said that recently engaged Harry, 33, meanwhile can also be tricky to photograph due to how 'touchy feely' he is.

'Hes a big hugger, wherever he goes...You have to be quick off the draw to capture those,' Chris explained.

The photographer said that Prince Harry's love of hugging can also make his job tricky because it makes it more difficult to capture faces. Harry is photographed here by Chris at an Invictus Games launch in Sydney in June

Chris, 38, who took snaps of Prince Harry and Meghan after they announced their engagement in November (above) said he hopes to capture them leaving St George's Chapel as husband and wife in May

'Theyre all wonderful and lovely but you do have to be able to see peoples faces a bit.'

Chris also added that he is looking forward to photographing Harry and Meghan on their wedding day in May, explaining how he hopes to capture the moment they leave St George's Chapel as husband and wife.

The photographer, who has been capturing members of the royal family for nearly 14 years, previously got the money shot of Kate and William leaving Westminster Abbey back in 2011.

Over the years, Chris has captured dozens of special royal moments including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their wedding day in 2011 (above)

Earlier this year, the photographer revealed that one of his favourite pictures from last year was that of Prince George standing next to his proud father on his first day of school

Earlier this year, Chris revealed his favourite royal photographs from last year, which included Prince George's first day at school in September.

Speaking about capturing the special moment, he told FEMAIL: '[It was] One of my favourite photos Ive taken this year, and very special to have been asked to take it.

'The first day of school is a big moment for both parents and children alike and it was great to see little Prince George with such a big smile on his face as he stood next to his father, the Duke of Cambridge ahead of their first school run together.'

He added: 'My favourite story of recent weeks was that Prince George had played the sheep in the school nativity play, I bet he enjoyed it!'
The unique sartorial choices on University Challenge have been as entertaining as the academic battles in recent years, with contestants getting ever braver about what they wear to the BBC 2 studio.

And the latest episode of the high-brow quiz was no exception after a Cambridge University brainbox donned a polka-dot bow in his hair - and a very colourful shirt.

Theo Howe, who's reading Japanese Studies at the esteemed Fitzwilliam College, was widely praised by viewers for the pretty adornment.

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Take a bow, Howe: Cambridge Fitzwilliam student Theo Howe donned a colourful hair clip - and a colourful shirt - on last night's episode of the academic quiz

Twitter went into overdrive at the sight of the Japanese Studies' student's hair adornment, with many saying it was 'refreshing' to see someone dressing daringly

Among those heaping compliments on Howe was Reverend Richard Coles, formerly of 80s band The Housemartins and most recently seen on Strictly Come Dancing, who was sailing across the Atlantic as the episode was being aired.

It appears the student is the vicar's godson.

@RevRichardColes tweeted: 'News reaches me mid Atlantic that my godson Theo is on #UniversityChallenge wearing a ravishing bow in his hair. We list to port as everyone rushes to the screening room.'

Lots of viewers took to social media to say they admired the wearing of the bow.

@EllieMidona wrote: 'Tell your godson that he looked utterly amazing. It's so refreshing to see a someone that isn't afraid to dress a little outrageously. The bow was adorable and I love it.'

Quiz show host Jeremy Paxman remained tight-lipped on the bow...but Twitter didn't, with thousands of people commenting on the hair clip

Famous godfather: Reverend Richard Coles, of The Housemartins and Strictly Come Dancing fame, tweeted that he'd heard the news that godson Theo was appearing on the show wearing a bow

Howe and his teammates impressed with their sharp intellect - and cruised through to the next round

@murphyspeak wrote: 'Below Theo's colour coordinated bow sits a breathtaking brain - hence tonight's victory. Looking forward to seeing him in next round of #university challenge. Go Theo.'

@adrianhealth penned: 'He is driving his own style and good for him. If I see one more Vyella shirt and a sensible sweater - and that is just Paxman!'

@RachelHaines73 wrote: 'He rocked that bow!'

And inevitably there was some criticism of the polka-dot clip too, with many saying the clip was putting them off the actual business of quiz questions.

@calico_gifts admitted the sight of a man in a bow was too much. 'The bow in Howe's hair is really distracting me... I'm not sure why as it wouldn't if he were female... but still... #distracted #UniversityChallenge'

@PamelaSBall agreed: 'I am particularly stupid tonight or the questions seem unusually difficult\specialist. But it could be cause I am distracted by Howe's bow.'

Elsewhere, many people were curious as to why Howe had chosen to wear the bow but the clever student, from Oxfordshire, focused solely on helping his team win through to the next round instead.
Scientists aren't always considered to be the most romantic of types, with their jobs primarily involving fact and reason.

But one academic has proven the stereotype to be wrong - by proposing to his long-term girlfriend in the acknowledgements section of his thesis.

Rui Long, a PhD student at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, asked Panpan Mao to marry him at the back of his paper published in the scientific journal Physica A.

And it seems that his unorthodox proposal method paid off, as he later confirmed that Panpan had indeed said yes, according to Times Higher Education.

PhD student Rui Long, from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, proposed to his long-term girlfriend in the acknowledgements section of his thesis

In the paper, the academic thanked his partner Panpan Mao before popping the question

The researcher's sweet marriage proposal was shared online by fellow academic Dr Jess Wade.

The acknowledgement in the paper reads: 'Rui Long wants to thank, in particular, the patience, care and support from Panpan Mao over the passed years. Will you marry me?'

Posting a screenshot of the relevant section on Twitter, Dr Wade commented: 'Romance is not dead, its just behind a paywall.'

Other social media users were quick to react, describing the proposal as 'lovely' and 'cute'

The unusual marriage proposal was shared on Twitter by fellow academic Dr Jess Wade

Rui asked his partner to marry him in a paper published in the scientific journal Physica A

One wrote 'Haha I love this!' while another commented: 'Scientists are just the best'.

Another Twitter user quipped: '[O]ne way to find out if your partner read your paper. I certainly wouldn't have had a reply if I proposed like that!'

Meanwhile, one Twitter user revealed that this is not the first time an academic has popped the question in their thesis.

In a paper published in 2015, scientist Caleb M. Brown wrote in the acknowledgements section: 'C.M.B. would specifically like to highlight the ongoing and unwavering support of Lorna OBrien. Lorna, will you marry me?

Other social media users were quick to react, with many describing the proposal as 'cute'

One person joked that it was a way to test if your partner actually read your paper or not
A woman who hid her body in shame after enduring years of sexual abuse is now reclaiming her body by posting photos of herself on social media celebrating the skin she's in.

When Suzie Larson, from Georgia, was just 13 years old, a family member tried to touch her, talked 'graphically' about her body and later tried to rape her.

Over the next six years, Suzie, who is now 25, was raped by three different men. The abuse crushed her self-esteem and caused her to develop an eating disorder as well as suicidal thoughts from the age of 15.

Self-love: Suzie Larson, from Georgia, hid her body in shame after enduring years of sexual abuse but is now reclaiming her body by posting photos of herself on social media

Past: When Suzie, now 25, was just 13 years old, a family member tried to touch her, talked 'graphically' about her body and later tried to rape her

At her lowest point, she weighed just 106 pounds.

'My family member tried to touch me and talked openly and graphically about my body, from a young age,' Suzie said.

'He later threatened to rape me, at which point I feared for my safety. I kept quiet to protect our family because I didn't want to be responsible for tearing my family apart.

'I was terrified I had done something wrong. That I was at fault.

'A year later, another man assaulted me, where he said he wanted to have a conversation with me in the parking lot.

'When he lured me into his truck, I was confused. He forced me to perform oral sex on him. It was extremely traumatic, and I ended up quitting my job later in the year.

'I was then pursued by one of his male friends who groomed me. He intoxicated me, coerced me into non-consensual sex, and told me it didn't matter what I wanted.

Ordeal: Over the next six years, Suzie, who is now 25, was raped by three different men. She is pictured in 2014, when she was struggling with mental health issues

Struggles: The abuse crushed her self-esteem and caused her to develop an eating disorder as well as suicidal thoughts from the age of 15

Process: It wasn't until 2015, when her hair began falling out due to her eating disorder, that Suzie began her path towards recovery

Recovery: Suzie (pictured in 2008, less than a year after the first assault) has since embraced her healthy 130-pound body, partly thanks to her husband, Samuel, whom she married in 2014

'I would go on to say, yell, and scream "no" at him, but it never mattered. He used me.

'When my parents told me to break it off, he wouldn't let me. So, I was stuck. I was afraid, and I learned to hate myself.

'I suffered with (and still struggle with) severe depression and so I often wouldn't take my make-up off for days.'

Due to her eating disorder, Suzie's body temperature was below normal, meaning she had to wear long sleeves and sweaters in order to avoid hypothermia.

'For years I was completely self-destructive. I had an absolutely horrible relationship with my body. I saw it as the enemy,' she added.

'I wanted to die because of what they did to me, the things they made me feel about myself; that I was cheap, dirty, worthless.

'The emotional effects of the abuse have outlasted the physical effects. It has taken me until this past year to be able to smile at my body, actually smile, and say kind things to my skin.'

It wasn't until 2015, when her hair began falling out due to her eating disorder, that Suzie began her path towards recovery. She has since embraced her healthy 130-pound body, partly thanks to her husband, Samuel, whom she married in 2014.

Now, Suzie shares photos of her body on social media along with inspirational messages for those who might be struggling too.

Spreading the word: Now, Suzie shares photos of her body on social media along with inspirational messages for those who might be struggling too

Coping: Throughout recovery, Suzie found solace in writing a journal, and while she found it scary to buy new clothes after going up in sizes, she carried on

Speaking out: 'I began therapy and started learning words for my abuse. It hurt because I'd kept it in my whole life, then suddenly everything was inside out,' she said

'My husband has been my number one supporter in my recovery. He helped rescue me from my abuse and has always told me to do what I feel is best for me,' Suzie said.

'He was very patient and gentle with me, even though I had a lot of sensory issues (afraid of being touched, etc.). We were able to form a bond and he was the first person I ever truly trusted outside of my brothers.

'Recovery started from just getting help from my eating disorder. I wasn't eating; I needed to take care of my body because I was developing a lot of issues from my eating disorder.

'My hair was coming out; my joints have lost their cartilage. My teeth were breaking. I was having massive migraines and huge amounts of nerve pain.

'So, I quit work and told my doctors about everything. They helped me start to re-feed. I had a lot of swelling at first. My stomach shrunk so I couldn't eat a lot at once.'

Struggles: Due to her eating disorder, Suzie's body temperature was below normal, so she oftn wore long sleeves. She is pictured in 2010, when she started 'putting on a face' for others

Changes: In 2015 (pictured), Suzie's hair had begun falling out, so she decided to cut it off. That was the year she began thinking of herself in a more positive light

Couple: In 2013 (pictured), Suzie started to date the man who is now her husband. He treated her with 'respect' and the relationship gave her 'reprieve' from her 'constant fear and paranoia'

Throughout recovery, Suzie found solace in writing a journal, and while she found it scary to buy new clothes after going up in sizes, she carried on.

'I began therapy and started learning words for my abuse. It hurt because I'd kept it in my whole life, then suddenly everything was inside out,' she added.

'I began feeling stronger, I decided to come out to family and friends about my abuse. It was a very hard decision because I didn't know how everyone would react, but I wanted them to know the real me.

'From there I think I began to have the confidence to reclaim my body. Showing my body, whether nude or clothed, is a way of releasing it from the pain and shame.

'I believe women deserve to be able to feel worthy, beautiful, strong, and loved. No matter what size you are, you deserve to love your body exactly how it is. Embracing the little imperfections as parts of yourself is something that makes you uniquely you.

'I also believe women are more powerful than we think. We must feed ourselves healthy thoughts; reminding ourselves that we are queens, we can accomplish anything, and we do deserve love.

'I want to remind women that 'I began therapy and started learning words for my abuse. It hurt because I'd kept it in my whole life, then suddenly everything was inside out,' she addedrather than feeling alone and turning suicidal like I was for so long, they can look outward and find an entire community of survivors who are ready to listen.'
As a former Queen of the Netherlands, Princess Beatrix has lived a life that is extraordinary in so many ways.

But the Dutch royal, 79, has shown that she's also just like any other doting grandmother - after she was spotted with a tote printed with the faces of three of her granddaughters.

Beatrix looked stylish as she attended a reception at the Royal Palace of Amsterdam on Tuesday, accompanied by an aide carrying the bag featuring a picture of King Wilhem-Alexander and Queen Maxima's daughters: Princesses Catharina-Amalia, Alexia and Ariane.

The proud grandmother opted for a chic ensemble for the event, wrapping up warm in a black tasseled shawl.

Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands was spotted with a tote printed with the faces of three of her granddaughters as she arrived at a reception at the Royal Palace of Amsterdam

Princess Beatrix with her granddaughters Catharina-Amalia, Alexia and Ariane

Beatrix finished off her look with a black jacket underneath featuring sequin embellishment and a pair of black pumps, accessorising with elegant turquoise earrings.

The royal looked in high spirits as she waved at well-wishers outside the palace as she arrived for the annual reception for the country's diplomatic corps.

Her aide was seen carrying the bag, which features a picture of King Wilhem-Alexander's daughters: Princesses Catharina-Amalia, Alexia and Ariane

The former Dutch Queen opted for a chic ensemble for the event, wrapping up warm in a black tasseled shawl

The former Dutch Queen stepped down as monarch in 2013 following a 33-year reign, making way for her son Wilhem-Alexander.

She has eight grandchildren in all, including Wilhem-Alexander and Maxima's three children Catharina-Amalia, 14, Alexia, 12, and Ariane, 10.

After giving up the throne, the glamorous royal, whose husband Prince Claus died in 2002, took up the title Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Princess Beatrix's son, King Willem Alexander, with his wife Queen Maxima and their daughters Princess Catharina Amalia, Princess Ariane and Princess Alexia in 2013

Beatrix now lives in the Drakensteyn Castle near the village of Lage Vuursche, occasionally undertaking official engagements.

The former monarch is not the only royal to be pictured with a personalised handbag while out and about.

In the past, Prince Andrew's ex-wife Sarah Ferguson has been spotted carrying a carrying a 225 Anya Hindmarch number emblazoned with the faces of daughters Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.
From the outside it looks like any sleepy suburb, but the so-called 'Miracle Village' contains a much darker secret.

Indeed, half of the population in the Florida community are registered sex offenders, who are forced to live away from the rest of society.

The so-called village, located outside of Pahokee, features in a new BBC documentary presented by Stacey Dooley looking at laws in the state that punish paedophiles and other sex offenders for life.

Half of the population in the Miracle Village in Florida (pictured) are registered sex offenders. The community features in a new BBC documentary hosted by Stacey Dooley

In the BBC Three documentary, Stacey (pictured) looks at laws in the state that punish paedophiles and other sex offenders for life

One Miracle Village resident, Chris Dawson, tells the host how he was convicted for having sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend when he was 18 - after she allegedly lied about her age.

According to the Mirror, Chris, who once played drums in a band, says of his offence: 'She lied to me about her age and had fake ID.

'I had no idea. All her friends believed her so I believed she was 18 too.'

He believes that he deserves another chance to live a full life - something which the community is helping him to achieve.

Since moving to Miracle Village, Chris has found himself a new girlfriend - Lexi, 25 - who he met in the local church, and who knew he was a sex offender when they began their relationship.

But, she says, although it 'made her think twice' before they started dating, she was won over after getting to know him better and being able to 'see past the label'.

The Mirror reported that the community is now getting so popular that it is running out of room, meaning some residents have to be housed in the nearby town of Pahokee, with the help of a local ministry.

Lewis, 33, who was arrested for trying to have sex with a nine-year-old at age 18, is one of these residents; he wanted to move to Miracle Village in order to get a 'second chance' in life.

However this is not something that is readily offered to sex offenders in the state of Florida because of its incredibly strict laws relating to sex crimes.

In particular, state law prevents child sex offenders from living within 1,000ft of a school, park, day care center or a playground.

Sex offenders who live in the village include Chris Dawson (left), who was convicted of having sex with a minor, and Pat Powers, a registered offender who founded the village ministry

Housing in the village (pictured) was made available to sex offenders in 2009 by Christian pastor Dick Witherow

State law prevents child sex offenders from living within 1,000ft of a school, park, day care centre or playground

In some cities, including Miami, and other suburban areas that distance is increased to 2,500ft, meaning that it is near impossible for a convicted offender to reside in a normal community, which are more often than not full of schools and public play areas.

Sex offender laws in Florida In Florida, child sex offenders cannot live within 1,000ft of schools, childcare facilities, or their victim. In some cities and counties - including Miami - this restriction goes up to 2,500ft. Registered sex offenders also cannot loiter within 500ft of community safety zones. The sex offender laws in Florida are among the most restrictive in the US. Advertisement

That's why in 2009 pastor Dick Witherow began making housing available to sex offenders at Miracle Village, which covers an area of 175,000 sq ft and was built in the 1960s to house sugar cane workers.

Located away from densely populated areas, it gives sex offenders a place where they are able to have a life away from state restrictions.

There are roughly 200 people residents in the village, with around 100 of these having been convicted of sexually abusing minors, viewing child pornography or even molesting their own children.

The Christian ministry that offers the housing to offenders is now run by Pat Powers, who is himself a former sex offender, and served 12 years after being convicted of getting involved in relationships with students when he was 'one of the top racquet ball coaches in the world'.

In his biography on the Miracle Village Ministries website, he describes himself as a 'born-again Christian and advocate for registered sex offenders who have paid their debt to society and would like to become productive citizens again'.

He added in a 2015 interview with GQ that it took him time to come to terms with what he had done - and to forgive himself for causing such 'hurt' to others.

On the programme, Stacey also spends time with convicted sex offenders living in a homeless camp in Miami, where they are forced to live in tents

'I thought I should have been killed at the time, okay? But then, after a while, you say, "Wait a second, hold it. People have done things as bad if not worse and they're not being punished anymore. Okay. Why?"

'I did twelve years. Weve paid our debt to society, so now let us live our life. You know? Let me tell you, if I screw up again, hang me.'

Indeed, despite the taboo surrounding sex crimes, many of those who have visited Miracle Village admit that it has changed their views on registered offenders as a whole.

For example, back in December 2014, photographer Sofia Valiente spent six weeks living in Miracle Village in order to document its residents and learn more about their day-to-day lives.

Speaking to Vice about the project, she admitted that she had, at first, 'feared the worst', but that 'after speaking with some of the residents, I saw that they weren't monsters' - indeed, she went on to add that most were 'no different' than people living in an ordinary community.

But Miracle Village is not the only Florida community where registered sex offenders seek respite from the strict laws that govern their lives after they are released from jail.

On the show, host Stacey also spends time with convicted sex offenders living in a homeless camp in Miami, where they are forced to live in tents.

She also meets with Senator Lauren Book, along with her father, lawyer and lobbyist Ron Book, who have campaigned to push through more than 20 pieces of sex offender-focused legislation - including the 2,500ft residency restrictions in Miami.

During the programme, she discovers that Lauren herself was abused for six years as a child by the familys live-in nanny.

Stacey Dooley Investigates: Second Chance Sex Offenders airs on BBC Three on January 24.
Ivanka Trump put a trendy twist on a classic black suit as she stepped out in a ribbon-tied blouse and flared cropped pants for a panel about women in the workplace.

The 36-year-old first daughter and Small Business Administration administrator Linda McMahon joined women from various backgrounds on Tuesday to discuss what has been accomplished to advance women at home and in the workplace.

For the meeting held at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex, Ivanka donned a white blouse featuring a black ribbon tied around the collar and a black velvet blazer.

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Waling with purpose: Ivanka Trump donned a funky pair of cropped pants as part of a black-and-white ensemble for her busy day at the office on Tuesday

Classic with a twist: Ivanka, who paired the pants with a ribbon-tied blouse and a velvet blazer, attended a panel discussion about women in the workplace on Tuesday

All smiles: The first daughter happily posed for pictures at the event, which was held at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex

Ivanka's outfit included matching cropped black pants that flared out at her calves, leaving her ladylike shoes in full view.

Keeping with the black and white theme of her outfit, her black kitten heels featured elegant pearl straps across her feet.

The mother-of-three's blonde hair was blown out with the ends curled under, and she wore natural-looking make-up to accentuate her features.

She topped off the look with large pearl earrings, and certain movements exposed the red string she was wearing on her left wrist.

Company: Ivanka was joined by Small Business Administration administrator Linda McMahon (left) on the panel

Her mission: The 36-year-old spoke animatedly during the panel discussion, which touched upon what has been accomplished to advance women at home and in the workplace

Enjoying herself: At one point, she was photographed laughing while she pulled back a piece of her hair that was falling in her face

Though she hasn't spoken about the purpose of the string, which she has been wearing for months, it does bear a resemblance to the type of red string that Kabbalah practitioners wear to ward off the 'evil eye'.

Ivanka was seen leaving the side gate of her Washington, D.C. home earlier in the day, and she looked straight ahead as she quickly made her way to the black SUV waiting for her at the curb.

The first daughter may have looked a bit solemn this morning, but she was all smiles when she spoke at the panel discussion.

At one point, she was photographed laughing while she pulled back a piece of her hair that was falling in her face.

Stylish touch: Earlier on Tuesday, the first daughter was seen leaving her Washington, D.C. home, showing off a pair of black beaded kitten heels

Ride: The first daughter was seen heading out in the Secret Service vehicle around on Friday morning, making a morning call as she departed her house

Ready: Ivanka's husband and fellow White House adviser, Jared Kushner, 37, was also seen heading out this morning, wearing a raincoat on top of his usual suit and tie

While working as a White House senior adviser, Ivanka has weighed in on tax reform and issue surrounding working women.

Last Friday, Ivanka avoided the rainy D.C. weather and left for work in a Secret Service vehicle, making a morning call as she departed her house in the upscale neighborhood of Kalorama.

The day before, Ivanka cut a much different figure when she took advantage of the warmer weather and stepped out without a coat and in a long-sleeved, light blue dress.

She paired the pastel number with a pair of opaque black tights, as well as quirky open-back shoes with black pompoms on them.

Duo: Ivanka took her six-year-old daughter, Arabella, to school on Thursday

Celebration: Ivanka posted Snapchat videos of her children, Arabella, Joseph, and Theodore, singing 'Happy Birthday' to their dad last Wednesday

The first daughter previously wore the dress in New York City back in December 2016, when her father was the president-elect.

Ivanka was seen leaving her home with her husband, Jared Kushner, and their six-year-old daughter, Arabella, the morning after they celebrated his 37th birthday with cake in their dining room.

The night of Jared's birthday, Ivanka posted Snapchat videos of her three children, Arabella, Joseph, and Theodore, singing 'Happy Birthday' to their father before helping him blow out the candles on his cake.

Arabella stole the show with her impressive singing voice, and Jared made sure to give all of his kids a hug and a kiss to thank them.
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A couple of proud cat owners staged an incredibly realistic birth photo shoot with their kitten to celebrate the tiny feline's arrival into their home.

Lucy Schultz, 24, a photographer and committed cat lover, welcomed her first cat with her partner Steve after years of yearning for a kitten of her own.

The pair, based in Denver, Colorado, waited until their were financially stable to adopt their cat, a five-month-old, white and orange male rescue kitten who hasn't been named yet.

Congratulations! A couple of proud cat owners staged an incredibly realistic birth photo shoot with their kitten to celebrate the tiny feline's arrival into their home

That's an idea: Lucy Schultz, 24, a photographer and committed cat lover, welcomed her first cat with her partner Steve after years of yearning for a kitten of her own, and staged a special photo shoot to mark the occasion

Quirky: The pictures mimic traditional birth photo shoots and include shots of Lucy as though she is going through labor

Process: Elizabeth Woods-Darby, who took the images, made sure to include a shot of Steven (left) as if he's welcoming his newborn into the world, as well as pictures of the feline wrapped in a towel

Emotional: With the photos, Elizabeth made sure to get all the moving shots typically expected for new parents

Uncanny: The images perfectly mirror the emotion-filled photos some couples take during the birth of a child

Lucy had previously thought she would want to do a baby-style announcement once she got her own cat, announcing the arrival of the feline like new parents would do with that of a newborn.

But after brainstorming with her friend and videographer Elizabeth Woods-Darby, Lucy decided to take things to the 'next level', as she told Yahoo.

The result was a photo shoot that has all the hallmarks of a traditional birth photo session, complete with photos of Lucy as though she is going through the stages of labor.

Elizabeth, who was behind the camera, also took emotional snaps of Lucy and Steven holding their furry baby, carefully wrapped in a towel for the occasion.

Responsible: Stevend and Lucy, based in Denver, Colorado, waited until their were financially stable to adopt their cat, a five-month-old, white and orange male rescue kitten who hasn't been named yet

Thought process: Lucy had previously thought she would want to do a baby-style announcement once she got her own cat, announcing the arrival of the feline like new parents would do with that of a newborn

Escalating: But after brainstorming with Elizabeth, Lucy decided to take things to the 'next level' with the photo session

Art imitating life: The result of the trio's work was a series of images with all the hallmarks of a traditional birth photo session

New to the world: Elizabeth's images include many close-up shoots of Lucy and Steven's furry baby

Keeping a straight face: While the trio laughed throughout the photo session, they regained their composure for the snaps

Acting: Lucy pretended to be experiencing the pains of labor with the kitten placed between her legs

Peaceful: Lucy and Steven's pet appeared to rest blissfully during certain moments of the photo session

Details: 'We wanted the images to feel as real life as possible,' Elizabeth said. 'The unmade bed, the messy sweaty face and hair, the natural light and the sweetness of the new five -month-old kitten with his new parents'

Pairing: Lucy said she's 'a lucky woman' for having found a partner who embraces all her quirks, including her cat obsession

Lucy, naturally, shared the photos on Facebook as though announcing the birth if a child, writing 'On 1/10/18 we welcome our first baby kitten, a neutered male DLH. He is 22" long and weighed 6 pounds 7 oz. He is already eating solid food. Name to be announced. We are so in love.'

'We wanted the images to feel as real life as possible,' Elizabeth told Yahoo. 'The unmade bed, the messy sweaty face and hair, the natural light and the sweetness of the new five -month-old kitten with his new parents.

'The hilarity did not escape us. But we charged on through our laughter. And yes, we laughed the whole shoot. But Lucy and her partner were troopers and we managed to capture some incredibly heartfelt images as well. It was one of the funnest shoots I've done in a while.'

The images have now been shared 72,000 times from Lucy's Facebook page, and have left viewers either laughing or scratching their heads.

As for Lucy, she said she's 'a lucky woman' for having found a partner who loves her exactly as she is.

'He's the best man I've ever met, and he completely embraces my weirdness and my obsession with cats,' she said.

The kitten, meanwhile, has started learning the rules of his new home, and has become 'very curious' about his owners' two fish tanks.

Giggles: 'The hilarity did not escape us. But we charged on through our laughter,' Elizabeth said of the session

Proud mom: Lucy, naturally, shared the photos on Facebook as though announcing the birth if a child, writing 'On 1/10/18 we welcome our first baby kitten, a neutered male DLH. He is 22" long and weighed 6 pounds 7 oz'

Reactions: The images have now been shared 72,000 times from Lucy's Facebook page, and have left viewers either laughing or scratching their heads

Now for the tough work: The kitten, meanwhile, has started learning the rules of his new home, and has become 'very curious' about his owners' two fish tanks

Real: Elizabeth's photos include this close-up of Steven and Lucy's intertwined hands, which gives the set an emotional feel
Sophie Gadd shared copy of menu that 'avoided writing prices' on Twitter

Trendy new restaurants often like to push the boundaries - despite not always being to everyone's taste.

And now, one eaterie has been slated online for the way it has presented its prices - using times of day instead of pounds and pence.

Customer Sophie Gadd shared a copy of the offending menu on Twitter, which featured nibbles such as a sourdough roll for '02:50' and green olives for '03:00'.

Although she did not name the restaurant online, a version of the same menu can be found on the website of the Rail House Cafe in London.

Other social media users were quick to comment - with some suggesting the strategy was being used to 'distract' customers from how much the food really costs.

A restaurant understood to be London's Rail House Cafe (pictured) has been mocked online for its method of writing prices in the form of times on a 24 hour clock

The menu features a 'sourdough roll' priced as '02:50' and green olives priced at 'O3:00'

Customer Sophie Gadd said she was 'amazed' at the ways trendy restaurants try to avoid writing prices

Posting a snippet of the menu online, Sophie wrote:'[C]onsistently amazed with the many ways trendy restaurants avoid writing prices. WE KNOW IT IS MONEY WE ARE NOT FOOLS.'

Other social media users were quick to react, with many describing the menu as 'ridiculous'.

One commented: '[I]t's to distract you from the fact they are charging 12 quid for some pasta and cheese'.

Meanwhile, some suggested the menu looked like a timetable or a 'festival line-up'.

Others were quick to mock the restaurant for the way it presented its prices. One suggested it was used to 'distract' customers from how much the food really cost

One Twitter user wrote: 'I'm actually surprised that's not an indication of the time you have to order it if you want them'.

Another quipped: '[C]ancel my plans I have sourdough roll at 02:50'.

The Rail House Cafe launched in Victoria, London, in February last year and is the latest opening from the Village London group.

On its website, the restaurant describes its menu as having 'healthy choices for every day and twists on naughty comforts'.

The group also has house cafes in Fitzrovia and Bermondsey.

A spokesperson for Rail House Cafe said: 'The prices are presented that way to resemble train timetables, being 'Rail House Cafe'.

'Its just a bit of fun and we certainly dont think it has tricked anyone.'
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When one creative New Yorker left the fashion industry to open her own bakery, it was only natural that it would be one of the chicest sweet shops in the city.

Flour Shop, which opened in Manhattan's trendy Soho neighborhood in November, is the rainbow dream-come-to-life of Amirah Kassem, who left the fashion world at age 25 to break into the baking business.

After building up a roster of celebrity and big-brand clients, Amirah's technicolor flagship debuted to much excitement from both kids and social-media-obsessed grown-ups alike.

Scroll down for video

Squee! Flour Shop opened in Manhattan's trendy Soho neighborhood in November

Wonderland: The store's rainbow decor has found fans in kids and adults alike

Focus on fun! A giant rainbow painted on a white wall and floor is a favorite spot for pictures  especially for founder Amirah (pictured)

Every day is a party! The window display is packed with colorful balloons

Sugar rush: Each of the confections on offer is bright and colorful

Explosion! Flour Shop is particularly known for its 'exploding cakes,' a twist on its six-layer rainbow cake

Customers are met with the rainbow aesthetic before even stepping inside the 'cakery,' located on Lafayette. ROY-G-BIV stripes paint the glass doors, and the window display is packed with colorful balloons.

The lounge area inside is white from floor to ceiling  that is, except for a giant rainbow that starts on one wall and bleeds across the floor. Above the rainbow is a sign reading 'Sprinkles and Smiles,' as the shop said it wanted there to be 'Instagram around every corner.'

That rainbow and chirpy message are, of course, a favorite backdrop for Instagrammers, who've snapped photos of themselves and their food in front of it.

Naturally, that food is rainbow too. Flour Shop is known for its six-layer rainbow cakes, which come in a variety of sizes. Each layer is a different color, and they're covered in pretty frosting and sprinkles.

Special twist: The cakes are filled with colorful sprinkles, which pour out when someone takes a slice

Star fave: Though Amirah has celebrity clients including Beyonce and Katy Perry, she really loves seeing the way kids react to what she makes

Too pretty to eat? The cakes are also customizable when special-ordered, and she makes a black-and-white cookies 'n creme version (right)

Push it! She also sells cake pop versions of her six-layer rainbow cake

Could live here: The Sprinkles and Smiles sign on the wall is an Instagram favorite

There are also colorful cakeballs, unicorn cakes, six-layer cake pops, and  the piece de resistance  the exploding layered rainbow cakes, which spill out glitter, confetti, and sprinkles when someone slices into them.

'Similar to Walt Disney, my inspiration comes from imagination. I am not a classically trained baker so I often bake "outside the box",' she told Vogue.

'The most popular cake we have now is our sprinkle explosion cake, and we have had multiple requests from the fashion industry to fill them with jewelry, sequins and beads pertaining to specific collections and even hidden gifts.'

She added that she always knew that social media had to play a major role in her business, saying: 'It was key when I started as I didnt have the resources to build a website and the social media world we live in allowed me to show my work at no cost!'

Always on theme: Around the holidays, the windows were decorated with  what else  rainbow trees

All about making magic! The shop also makes colorful unicorn cakes

Everything's a must! This dark unicorn cake can be special-ordered from the shop

The colorful confections have made the shop both a real-life hit and an Instagram one

Background: Amirah has no official culinary training but grew up baking with her mom in Mexico

Perfect picture: She knew from the beginning to harness the power of Instagram

Amirah, who grew up making cakes with her mother in Mexico, started Flour Shop out of her Brooklyn apartment five years ago, selling her creations as special orders.

Her clients have included famous ladies like Katy Perry, Beyonce, and Sarah Jessica Parker, as well as brands likes Vans, Don Julio Tequila, and Alice + Olivia (designer Stacey Bendet is a friend). Fashion elites like Jenna Lyons (formerly of J.Crew) and Rebecca Minkoff are fans, and Busy Philipps recently stopped by for an event.

But while she's a favorite of stars and those in the fashion scene, Amirah said she gets the most joy out of making treats for children.

'To be honest kids are my favorite  they look at my cakes like I look at glitter and pizza [laughs],' she told Nasty Gal. Her favorite thing to make, meanwhile, are edible installations: 'There is something Willy Wonka about getting to eat off the walls.'

Star-studded: Actress Busy Philipps recently stopped by the shop to host an event with Micahels

On the scene: Katy Perry (left) is one of several celebrity clients, and a cake she made for Alice + Olivia's Stacey Bendet (right) went viral
Shocking footage has emerged of a nurse playing with another medic's hair  while a critically ill fathers desperate calls for help went unanswered.

Alan Ford, who spent 15 days in intensive care fighting for his life, recorded the clip from his bed as he begged for extra fluids because he was dehydrated.

The father-of-two described the ordeal, which showed one nurse sitting behind the reception area appear to massage anothers head, as out of order.

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, he explained how he thought he was going to die  and that on another occasion bungling doctors nearly cost him his life.

'I wanted liquids, Mr Ford, 54, said of the moment recorded in his video. 'I was dehydrated. I was fighting for my life.'

He was whisked into intensive care at Blackpool Victoria Hospital, where he stayed for 15 days as doctors fought to keep him alive.

Doctors diagnosed him with a life-threatening embolism  a blocked artery caused by a foreign body, such as a blood clot - in his stomach.

The footage was handed to MailOnline following yesterday's story about a nurse spotted 'booking her holiday at a sunny beach resort' while a patient waited five hours to be seen.

Alan Ford, who spent 15 days in intensive care fighting for his life, recorded the horrific clip as he begged for extra fluids because he was dehydrated

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Mr Ford explained how he thought he was going to die

Health chiefs at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex, have since stated that the unnamed nurse was being 'managed accordingly'.

A spokesman for Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: 'This video was not taken in any of our critical care areas.

'We will fully investigate the footage and, if appropriate, we will follow hospital policy.'

It comes amid claims of the NHS' worst winter ever, with A&E waiting times, ambulance delays and bed occupancies shooting through the roof.

Furious doctors are up in arms over the 'chronic under-funding' of the health service, as the battle for more money is placed at the forefront of a political row.

Prime Minister Theresa May was forced to apologise after bosses controversially decided to cancel 55,000 operations to cope with the crisis two weeks ago.

A&E staff have also spoken of their grave concerns of the 'battlefield' conditions they have faced this winter, revealing they are 'ashamed' over the 'substandard care'.

In the clip filmed by Mr Ford, the unnamed member of staff seems to be unaware of the life-threatening situation he could have been in.

Mr Ford, whose children are 31 and 30, was rushed to hospital on New Year's Eve - a day after he was sent home by medics who thought there was nothing wrong.

'I wanted liquids, Mr Ford, 54, explained of the moment recorded in his video. 'I was dehydrated. I was fighting for my life'

He was whisked into intensive care at Blackpool Victoria Hospital, where he stayed for 15 days as doctors fought to keep him alive

'BEEN IN A&E FOR FIVE HOURS... MEANWHILE THE NURSE IS BOOKING HER HOLIDAYS' A nurse at England's worst performing A&E department was caught looking at beach holidays on her work computer by a furious patient, who claims she was waiting more than five hours to be seen. NHS bosses have confirmed the incident took place and have said the unnamed nurse was being 'managed accordingly'. The woman was snapped scrolling through pictures of sunny beach resorts while on the phone. The image was taken at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex, was shared on a community Facebook page. The nurse was slated online in the anonymous post shared by Spotted in Harlow. The post read said: 'Been in A&E for five hours... Meanwhile the nurse is booking her holidays.' Advertisement

He told MailOnline: The next thing I know, Im in intensive care and have got four doctors around me, injecting me with God knows what else to keep me alive.

The kitchen designer, from Manchester, was also struck down with flu in hospital, which doctors confirmed was the H3N2 strain  commonly known as Aussie flu.

It left Mr Ford suffering from hallucinations - a symptom reported by dozens of other victims struck down by 'Aussie flu' this winter.

During his treatment, medics gave him antibiotics to fight an infection - but he was allergic. He was also given enough steroids to 'kill a donkey'.

The asthma sufferer told MailOnline: At the end of the day, a couple of things went wrong. Im allergic to antibiotics and I was nearly killed.

'Another stage was when the top guy came in with his underling and b******* him for overloading me with steroids.'

NHS England announced two weeks ago all non-urgent operations would be cancelled until February.

New data from NHS England shows the health service is operating at a poorer level than at the same point in 2016, which was branded a 'humanitarian crisis'

PM WARNED PATIENTS ARE 'DYING PREMATURELY' IN CORRIDORS, LEAKED LETTER REVEALS Furious A&E chiefs have warned Prime Minister Theresa May that patients are 'dying prematurely' in hospital corridors. A leaked letter, written by the bosses of 60 casualty units, reveals there are 'serious concerns' about patient safety amid the NHS' worst winter on record. Chiefs warned just 45 per cent of patients had been seen within four hours in some A&E units during last week - well below recommended levels. The strongly-worded letter also revealed how levels were 'never higher than 75 per cent'. The Government time-target is 95 per cent. Furious A&E chiefs have warned Prime Minister Theresa May that patients are 'dying prematurely' in hospital corridors Their revelation, seen by HSJ, mirrors figures released by NHS England today which showed waiting times have reached their worst on record. Fears have been raised that the problems will only worsen, amid the rapid spread of flu which some expect to be the worst outbreak in 50 years. Names on the scathing letter, dated yesterday, included some of the bosses of the biggest and busiest casualty units across the country. They included: Cambridge University Hospitals, Guys and St Thomas Hospital, Kings College Hospital and Central Manchester University Hospitals. They warned the NHS is 'chronically underfunded' and not prepared for the winter onslaught, now considered to be the worst recorded in recent history. Advertisement

The controversial move was slammed by experts, but was considered as the only way to cope with the mounting pressure placed on the health service.

Damning figures released on Thursday highlighted how poor the NHS is performing this winter, with A&E waiting times hitting their highest on record.

Just 85.1 per cent of patients were seen within the four-hour time target set by Government - equaling last January's record low - which was branded a 'humanitarian crisis' by the Red Cross.

And more than 300,000 patients were forced to wait for at least four hours in all A&E units - the highest amount since figures began in 2010.

Ambulance delays have also risen to record proportions, with more than 5,000 patients left stuck in the back of the vehicles waiting to be transferred to A&E.

While bed occupancy levels have hit their worst point yet this winter, with 24 trusts declaring they had no free beds at some point last week, the figures showed.

The 'disappointing' figures have been escalating rapidly in the past few week, and are only expected to get worse by the end of the month.

Furious A&E chiefs wrote to Prime Minister Theresa May earlier this week to inform her that patients are 'dying prematurely' in hospital corridors.

A leaked letter, written by the bosses of 60 casualty units, revealed there are 'serious concerns' about patient safety amid the ongoing crisis.

Chiefs warned just 45 per cent of patients had been seen within four hours in some A&E units during last week - well below recommended levels.

Names on the scathing letter included some of the bosses of the biggest and busiest casualty units across the country.

And thousands of patients are being urged to get on ferries and the Eurostar to visit a hospital in Calais as the worst winter ever tightens its grip on the NHS.

Calais Hospital, ran in partnership with health chiefs in south Kent, has launched a campaign encouraging patients to make the trip across the Channel for 'fast care'

The data shows that over 5,000 extra beds were brought into service to cope with demand
The annual flu epidemic has suddenly become serious. Few could have missed the alarming headlines last week about the dramatic rise in cases  GP consultations for flu up by 78 per cent, hospital admissions up by 50 per cent and intensive care admissions up by 65 per cent compared with the week before.

Nearly 2,000 people have now been hospitalised because of complications owing to this years flu outbreak, according to Public Health England  and 85 have died as a result.

Worryingly, the danger is far from over, with the flu season set to last at least to the end of February, and possibly as late as May, according to the Department of Healths Communicable Disease Centre.

Its not the flu virus itself that claims lives, but almost always flu-related pneumonia, the most common cause of death from flu, explains Dr Ben Marshall, a consultant respiratory physician at Southampton General Hospital.

Official figures show the NHS is in the midst of its worst flu outbreak in seven years, with the number of patients visiting their GP with symptoms doubling in a single week

Its been reported that the tragic death this month of Bethany Walker, 18, from Applecross in Wester Ross, Scotland, was due to flu-related pneumonia.

What many people may not realise is that there is a pneumonia vaccine that can help protect against the bacteria most commonly responsible for the disease, Streptococcus pneumoniae (also known as pneumococcus). This one-off vaccine can last for up to 20 years.

But while its been available for 17 years and is offered for free on the NHS to at-risk groups, uptake remains low  this includes the over-65s, with around a third (four million people) declining the free jab.

Uptake is even lower among people with conditions that raise the risk of pneumonia, including long- term kidney, liver and heart problems such as congenital heart disease, anyone with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), diabetes and those having chemotherapy for cancer or on long-term steroids for severe asthma or arthritis  with just four in ten having the jab.

This is deeply worrying, says Dr Marshall. We know the vaccine protects around 45 per cent of people over 65 and those with chronic illness, compared to around 70-75 per cent of those with healthy immune systems.

But this is still very worthwhile. For people of any age, I would recommend consideration of vaccination for pneumonia if theres an underlying medical condition that might increase the risk of serious complications.

Experts suspect that one reason people dont have the jab is simply because most dont know about it. The rate of vaccination among the general population  who have to pay a 70 fee to a pharmacy to have the jab privately  is perhaps, not surprisingly, even lower than among at-risk groups.

And if they do know about the jab, many people think pneumonia is a serious concern only for people at the end of their lives.

SHOULD YOU PAY 70 FOR PNEUMONIA JAB? What can you do to protect yourself against pneumonia? First and foremost, says Dr Richard Russell, a consultant chest physician and medical director of the British Lung Foundation, its important to have the flu vaccine, as this helps to protect the immune system (as well as reducing the risk of getting flu). But what about the pneumonia jab? This is not free to everyone. So, should you pay to have it (at a High Street chemist such as Boots)? The risk of young and middle-aged adults dying of pneumonia is tiny, says Dr Tim Peto, a professor of medicine at the University of Oxford. The only real risk is in babies and older people. Yet ironically, the jab is most effective in healthy people. It reduces the risk of pneumonia in people with a healthy immune system by around 75 per cent, while for frailer people over 65 and those with chronic conditions, protection is around 45 per cent, says Dr Russell. But, he adds, its still worth having, as theres a huge bonus for frail people or those with chronic illness. It effectively provides protection against sepsis, a high-risk type of blood poisoning that is most commonly caused by pneumonia. For those who dont get it on the NHS, at 70, the vaccine may sound a lot of money, but it could certainly be a worthwhile investment, says Dr Russell. Yet another preventive measure for those with degenerative diseases could be regular visits to the dentist. Research published in the journal Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment reported that problems with swallowing and saliva control may be the principal reason pneumonia is a leading cause of death in people with Parkinsons. Patients who had improved their oral health were less likely to be admitted to hospital with pneumonia. Advertisement

Yet figures from the British Lung Foundation show that, even in healthy people, the risk of contracting pneumonia increases year on year  with those in their 50s, for instance, having a 40 per cent increased risk of contracting bacterial pneumonia compared with those in their 40s.

There are clear benefits for people of all ages having a pneumonia vaccination, says Dr Richard Russell, a consultant chest physician at Lymington New Forest Hospital and a senior lecturer at the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford.

Should a fit 30-year-old man have the pneumonia vaccine? As their doctor, I would support their decision to have the jab if thats what they choose to do.

Although people are only offered a free vaccination for pneumonia over the age of 65, the fact remains that the risk of getting pneumonia increases significantly over the age of 50.

And with fears that the flu jab is not as effective this year, there are concerns there could be more cases of pneumonia as a result.

People think of pneumonia as a relatively minor chest infection that is only dangerous to older people, but thats not the case, says Dr Marshall.

The infection is a killer, adds Dr Russell.

WHY IS PNEUMONIA SO DEADLY?

Pneumonia is a rapidly progressing acute infection that affects around a quarter of a million people in the UK every year, killing on average 29,000 of them, making it the leading cause of death from an infectious disease and the sixth biggest cause of death overall in Britain.

IS IT 'JUST' A COUGH - OR SOMETHING MORE SERIOUS? Pneumonia affects the alveoli inside the lungs. A chesty cold or bronchitis is an infection of the bronchial tubes or airways. Pneumonia is much more serious and lasts longer than bronchitis, which people usually get over in two to three weeks. Its usually caused by bacteria. Bronchitis is almost always a viral illness. Pneumonia frequently causes a high fever with shaking chills. Bronchitis normally doesnt. Pneumonia causes a cough that brings up thick green or blood-tinged mucus from the lungs. Bronchitis starts with a dry, hacking cough and, after a few days, a cough that brings up clear or yellow mucus from the lungs. However, with both disorders, the cough may last for several weeks. Both bronchitis and pneumonia can cause moderate to severe chest pain when coughing or drawing breath. With pneumonia, an X-ray can reveal fluid on the lung. Bronchitis normally doesnt show. Breathlessness and lethargy are an important sign of pneumonia, too  even in young people  and if someones lethargy is getting worse, rather than better, then pnuemonia is more likely, says consultant chest physician Dr Richard Russell. Other strong indicators are the production of green discoloured sputum or, on occasion, coughing up blood. If in doubt, see your doctor. Dont wait. Pneumonia is a killer. Advertisement

The infection causes the clusters of tiny, balloon-like air sacs (known as alveoli) that lie at the end of the bronchial tubes in the lungs to become inflamed and fill up with mucus.

Its the same gungy fluid that we all cough up when we are beginning to recover from a heavy cold, explains Dr Russell.

But, trapped in the lungs, mucus becomes highly toxic.

The alveoli, he points out, play a vital role in getting oxygen-rich air into the lungs, filtering out carbon dioxide and sending oxygen into the bloodstream to nourish the bodys tissues and organs.

When this process stops working efficiently, you start to develop all the symptoms of pneumonia, including shortness of breath, chest pain, a high temperature and a bad cough, says Dr Russell.

If left untreated, oxygen levels in the body start to fall and you begin to suffer severe confusion, heart failure and, eventually, coma and death may result.

Most at risk of dying of the disease are those who are older and frail, or who are already seriously ill.

Pneumonia can often be diagnosed by a GP by listening to noises in the chest and lungs through a stethoscope.

As with any fast-developing disorder, speed in diagnosing it is of the essence and symptoms can be confused with other respiratory conditions including the much less serious bronchitis or flare-ups of asthma, or smoking-related conditions such as emphysema. For patients and their families, the experience of pneumonia can be terrifying: one minute, theyre managing normal cold or flu symptoms  and the next, they find themselves requiring an urgent referral to A&E.

GPs sometimes have to make what can be a life-and-death decision on whether the patient can remain at home with the infection managed by oral antibiotics, or whether an admission to a hospital that at the moment is already chock-a-block is required, says Dr Russell.

WHY DOES FLU TURN INTO PNEUMONIA?

occasionally, pneumonia can be caused by viruses, for instance occurring as a complication of the viruses that cause colds and flu. But its most frequently caused by the pneumococcus bacteria.

The bacteria can either be inhaled as airborne droplets delivered from someones uncovered cough, or reach the lungs via the bloodstream from a bacterial infection elsewhere in the body, such as the middle ear (a common cause of pneumonia in children) or the urinary tract (most commonly in older women).

This transmission is so simple because were all awash with Streptococcus pneumoniae, the bacteria being one of several that colonise the respiratory tract, the sinuses and the naval cavity, explains Dr Marshall.

But in someone with a healthy immune system, theres little danger  youre only at risk of pneumonia when theres a chink in your immune system armour.

That can occur for a whole range of reasons  because you have a chronic lung condition such as COPD or heart failure or kidney disease, or you are taking chemotherapy drugs for cancer.

One of the major causes of poor immunity, though, is having flu. Having flu can paralyse your immune system and can increase your risk of pneumonia by up to 100 times  and this can impact on the immune system for a few weeks after the infection has cleared up, adds Dr Marshall.

People can get clear of flu, then they suddenly become really ill from pneumonia that develops on the back of the flu, says Dr Rod Daniels, deputy director of the Worldwide Influenza Centre in London. Thats because the flu virus can really mess up your immune system.

This year, however, theres concern that the flu vaccine may be only of moderate effectiveness, which means only 30 to 40 per cent of flu cases will be avoided among people who have the vaccine

And so, while pneumonia can take hold at any time of the year, it tends to peak during the flu season, says Dr Marshall.

Interestingly, he adds, the flu vaccine, has resulted in a long-term downward trend in cases of fatal pneumonia  with just 17,460 excess deaths in 2013/14.

This year, however, theres concern that the flu vaccine may be only of moderate effectiveness, which means only 30 to 40 per cent of flu cases will be avoided among people who have the vaccine, Dr John McCauley, director of the Worldwide Influenza Centre, said last week.

If certain conditions make you more at risk, another factor can be what doctors call a poor cough  one thats simply insufficiently powerful to clear the build-up of mucus in the lungs. Short-term, this build-up of mucus in the lungs is a normal, healthy immune response to a viral or bacterial infection.

But if the cough doesnt easily clear the phlegm, bacteria-laden mucus creates the perfect environment for an infection to take hold.

Another potential problem is having a degenerative disease, such as Parkinsons, where a common symptom is difficulty swallowing, which inevitably interferes with robust coughing.

Chris Failes, a 72-year-old retired estate agent and mother of two with two grandchildren, from Lymington in Hampshire, was diagnosed with Parkinsons two years ago.

Last May, her GP told her that the cough shed suffered from over a few weeks was a mild form of pneumonia and she was prescribed antibiotics and told to rest. Through the summer and early autumn, Chriss cough seemed to improve  though, looking back, she says, the cough didnt ever really go away and, in the run-up to Christmas, it became worse.

I think it was the cold weather that made me so ill, she says. It was horrible. My chest felt very uncomfortable and tight, as though I couldnt breathe. I couldnt get rid of the phlegm in my lungs. I had no energy.

But if the cough doesnt easily clear the phlegm, bacteria-laden mucus creates the perfect environment for an infection to take hold

She spent Christmas in bed and was then put on a third course of antibiotics by her GP. But by January 5, her doctor referred her to a chest consultant at the local hospital  where scans confirmed she had pneumonia.

I remember sitting in the hospital waiting for the results, my body lolling over to one side, my head drooped down onto my chest. I felt so lifeless.

Yet, once diagnosed in a timely way, pneumonia is relatively easy to treat  as is clear from Chriss recovery.

A week ago, she told Good Health last week, I was so ill that I couldnt move my head.

But after just three days in intensive care, receiving intravenous antibiotics and liquids, as well as oxygen to ensure that her bloodstream remained oxygenated, Chris was well enough at the weekend to be discharged and sent home.

My doctor has told me I wont be back to normal for six to eight weeks. And I am under strict instructions not to overdo it, says Chris.

But it means that I am missing out on looking after my grandchildren aged 18 months and five years  they are so gorgeous. I usually look after them once or twice a week and its awful not be able to  though I hope Ill be better soon and be spending time with them again.
A powder sprinkled on food every day may banish severe peanut allergies.

The powder has tiny traces of the proteins in peanuts that can trigger potentially fatal reactions.

By gradually increasing the amount of these proteins consumed over several months, doctors believe they can help patients immune systems become tolerant to them, eventually eradicating the risk of life-threatening reactions.

A powder sprinkled on food every day may banish severe peanut allergies. The powder has tiny traces of the proteins in peanuts that can trigger potentially fatal reactions

A trial is under way in the U.S. and Europe to find out whether consuming the powder every day for 20 weeks will increase tolerance to the point where it is safe to eat small amounts of nuts.

This type of treatment is already used by a handful of specialist allergy clinics in the UK. But it usually involves patients ingesting tiny quantities of nuts themselves to gradually build up tolerance.

How spiders could help type 1 diabetes patients Spider webs have inspired a new transplant treatment for type 1 diabetes  where the immune system destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Patients can have a transplant of these cells, but need immune-suppressing drugs for life, with a higher infection risk. Now, inspired by how water beads on to a spiders web, scientists at Cornell University in the U.S. have made a thread to which the insulin-producing cells can be attached. This is covered by a gel to stop the body rejecting them. It means patients dont need immune-suppressing drugs, says the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Advertisement

While this can be effective, it involves a lot of trial and error, as nuts protein content can vary greatly, making it hard to precisely monitor intake and increasing the risk of an abnormal reaction.

The scientists behind the powder say it can be made to contain precise doses of nut protein, from less than 0.5 mg up to 300 mg. This gives doctors greater control over how much protein patients ingest.

Around one in 100 people in the UK has a peanut allergy. When their immune system comes into contact with any of the three types of peanut protein (Ara h1, Ara h2 and Ara h3), it mistakenly treats them as a threat, releasing chemicals to destroy what it perceives as a dangerous invader.

One of the main chemicals is immunoglobulin E, an antibody pumped out in large volumes to repel the suspected attack.

This rush of chemicals triggers symptoms of an allergic reaction, often within seconds. These range from an itchy mouth to anaphylactic shock, where the airways narrow, blood pressure plummets and organs start to shut down.

Sufferers who have had severe reactions usually carry an EpiPen device to give themselves a shot of adrenaline if another reaction occurs. This opens up the airways and dilates blood vessels to force blood pressure back up.

Sufferers who have had severe reactions usually carry an EpiPen device to give themselves a shot of adrenaline if another reaction occurs

The new medicine  codenamed AR101  is a drug and not a food supplement. It comes in capsules containing pre-determined doses of nut protein in powder form. Once the capsule is cracked open, the flavourless powder is sprinkled on foods in which it can be easily dispersed, such as mashed potato. In a 2016 U.S. trial, 40 patients with severe allergies were put on the daily powder for 12 weeks.

Once a fortnight, doctors gave them slightly more; they were told to stop at the first sign of symptoms, such as hives or tingling in the mouth. Once this resolved, the dose would be increased again.

New clues to improve treatments for arthritis Patients with osteoarthritis tend to have one of two types of the disease  and working out which they have will improve treatments, say researchers. Until now, this form of arthritis was thought of as a single disease, but when University of Manchester scientists examined samples of the synovial fluid that surrounds joints and tissue from 60 patients with knee arthritis, they identified two distinct types. The differences lie in the nature of the synovial fluid and the way the genes in the diseased tissue behave. The findings, published in the journal Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, could provide a basis for developing treatments targeted at those with either type. Advertisement

The results, which are awaiting publication, but were released at a conference in 2016, showed some patients who previously suffered reactions when they ate the equivalent of less than one peanut could tolerate seven or eight nuts.

In the new trial, more than 500 patients will receive similar treatment, but over a 20-week period, to see if longer treatment will lead to even greater tolerance.

The U.S. regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, recently granted the drug Fast Track designation to speed its progression through the approval process. It could be available for UK patients within the next two years.

Anthony Frew, a professor of allergy and respiratory medicine at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, said while the powder could benefit sufferers, the effects may be temporary  as with similar existing treatments.

He adds: If you stop having the peanut protein daily, tolerance wears off, so you may have to keep consuming this powder for ever.

Meanwhile, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York have identified six genes that set off peanut allergies. They monitored 40 nut allergy patients immune reactions before, during and after consuming peanuts or a placebo, an oat powder.

They took blood samples to monitor the action of genes and different processes within cells.

The hope is that this will lead to ways to prevent and treat reactions, reported the journal Nature Communications.
For more than half a century, hearing aids have been the only effective treatment for the millions of Britons struggling with deafness.

But they can be unsightly, uncomfortable and, in the eyes of some, label users as old before their time.

Now, scientists are testing new drugs that could banish hearing aids for good for the estimated 900,000 people in Britain with moderate to severe deafness.

Two major clinical trials have started in recent months, which, it is hoped, will produce ground-breaking medicines capable of helping millions who cannot hear properly.

For more than half a century, hearing aids have been the only effective treatment for the millions of Britons struggling with deafness

Both studies involve injecting experimental medicines into the ear with the intention of repairing the damage that caused the hearing loss in the first place.

Scientists at University College Londons Ear Institute are taking part in an international trial injecting a drug called a gamma-secretase inhibitor into the ears of 24 patients who have had partial deafness for up to ten years and use a hearing aid.

They believe the drug will restore hearing by stimulating the growth of healthy new hair cells deep inside the ear.

In a healthy ear, sound enters the cochlea (a snail-shaped compartment inside the ear) and is picked up by sensory cells that resemble tiny hairs.

These hairs convert sounds into an electrical impulse that can travel along the auditory nerve to the brain.

These hairs can be damaged or destroyed by ageing, loud noise or infection and, until recently, it was thought it was impossible to regenerate them.

But laboratory tests at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston in 2013 found that injecting gamma-secretase inhibitors into a type of cell called a progenitor cell led to the growth of healthy new hair cells. Progenitor cells are a form of stem cell that, unlike most stem cells, cannot develop into almost any form of body tissue.

Instead, they are more likely to develop into local cells, according to where they are in the body.

But they can be unsightly, uncomfortable and, in the eyes of some, label users as old before their time

So progenitor cells in the inner ear are most likely to develop into cells typically found in the ear  such as the tiny hair cells that transmit sound. However, a protein, called a notch protein, stops that from happening. The new drug works by blocking the effects of the notch protein, allowing the progenitor cells to turn into hair cells.

Tests to make sure the drug is safe were completed on 24 patients in the UK at the end of 2017. Each volunteer had three, weekly injections into the eardrum, using a local anaesthetic first to numb the eardrum.

Trials to measure how effective it is could now begin within the next few months.

Meanwhile, U.S. firm Frequency Therapeutics, is working on a similar treatment that also stimulates progenitor cells to grow into healthy hair cells.

It is using a treatment codenamed FX-322, made up of an undisclosed combination of different drugs.

In December, at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, the first nine patients were injected with FX-322 to check its safety.

None of them suffered significant side-effects and more in-depth studies will be carried out over the next two years.

FX-322 involves a one-off injection into the ear of a slow-release gel, which allows the active medicine to gradually seep into the inner ear over the space of a few days, to increase the time that progenitor cells are exposed to the drug  and potentially improving the chances of success. The landmark treatments could not only reduce the need for hearing aids, but also for cochlear implants  the high-tech devices that restore hearing to the profoundly deaf.

These bypass the damaged inner ear and stimulate the auditory nerve, which carries sound to the brain. Around 14,000 people in the UK currently have a cochlear implant, which cost around 40,000 each.

Now, scientists are testing new drugs that could banish hearing aids for good for the estimated 900,000 people in Britain with moderate to severe deafness

Already, 11 million people in the UK have some degree of deafness and the charity Action on Hearing Loss calculates that, by 2035, more than 15 million will be affected.

Much of this rise is due to the ageing population, but noise-induced hearing loss, cancer drugs and antibiotics also play a part.

Even mild hearing loss doubles the risk of developing dementia. Reduced hearing can also treble the risk of falls and double the risk of depression.

Dr Adam Frosh, a consultant ear, nose and throat specialist at the Lister Hospital in Hertfordshire, describes the new trials as exciting.

Restoring hair cells in the cochlea is the holy grail of hearing loss treatment, he says.

But one of the big questions is the bioavailability of the drug when you inject it into the inner ear  i.e. how long does it stay there, or does it just get flushed away by fluids in the inner ear within moments?

This is crucial, because it needs to be present long enough to have an effect on any progenitor cells that are present.
Six-year-old Flora is already a multi-award winner at Crufts  but for her owner, Robert Stuhldreer, 57, shes also a lifesaver

Six-year-old Flora is already a multi-award winner at Crufts  but for her owner, Robert Stuhldreer, 57, shes also, quite simply, a lifesaver.

For 12 years Robert had suffered from blackouts that his doctors couldnt explain even though they put his life at risk.

But within weeks of Robert acquiring Flora  an Akita, a large breed native to Japan  as a puppy, that all changed.

Roberts problems began in 2000 when he was driving to a dog show with his dog Max, also an Akita, and suddenly everything went black. When I woke I was in hospital, not in my car where Id last remembered being, recalls Robert, who regularly shows at Crufts and trains specialist dogs for film, television and theatre.

Doctors said hed blacked out at the wheel  the police had called an ambulance and taken Max to the police station.

Robert was discharged the next day with no explanation as to what had happened.

A few months later he passed out, again without warning. Then again. Sometimes months would go by with nothing happening, then Id suddenly black out  it could take place anywhere: walking the dogs, crossing a road. I was terrified.

Robert, who lives in Islington, North London, hasnt driven since, and now relies on public transport.

Over the next few months, the episodes became more frequent and Robert began to worry that something sinister was going on.

He was referred to hospital for tests, including cardiac monitoring, CT scans and MRI scans, but the cause of his blackouts remained a mystery.

It had doctors flummoxed, recalls Robert. I was worried Id come to harm.

For 12 years Robert had suffered from blackouts that his doctors couldnt explain even though they put his life at risk. But within weeks of Robert acquiring Flora  an Akita, a large breed native to Japan  as a puppy, that all changed

Robert suffered regular episodes over the next few years  sometimes every few weeks, other times just once in six months. But always without warning.

And then Robert met Flora.

When Flora was five months old, she and Robert were at a training ground when he fainted.

When I came to, I was lying on the ground and Flora hadnt left my side, he recalls.

I remember stroking her and thanking her for not leaving me.

A few weeks later, they were walking down a road when Flora suddenly stood in front of Robert and stopped, blocking his path.

I admit, I was annoyed, Robert says. Id always been strict about her walking at my side. But she didnt listen. Despite all her training, she blocked my path again. Then, seconds later, Robert blacked out.

Over the following weeks, a pattern formed. Flora would be normally so well-behaved, but then she would stop suddenly and block Roberts path. If he ignored her, she would gently take his hand in her mouth and pull downwards, as if indicating he should lie down. Moments later he would always pass out.

It was as if Flora was warning me of impending blackouts, says Robert. My other dogs  I have four  dont do this. Only Flora.

Last year, after 16 years with his condition, Robert was referred to a cardiologist, who, based on his symptoms (tests again showed nothing), finally diagnosed the problem: cardiac syncope.

The word syncope means temporary loss of consciousness  Roberts is caused by his heart stopping or not beating properly for blood to flow.

It can be linked to coronary heart disease  it may occur in people who have had heart attacks, for instance, or structural problems with heart muscles.

But despite extensive tests, consultants could find no abnormality with Roberts heart to cause the syncope. As Robert says: I was relieved to have a diagnosis but also nervous about what it meant for my life.

He can lose consciousness at any time  for example while crossing a busy road  making almost any situation dangerous.

A few weeks later, they were walking down a road when Flora suddenly stood in front of Robert and stopped, blocking his path. I admit, I was annoyed, Robert says. But she didnt listen. Despite all her training, she blocked my path again. Then, seconds later, Robert blacked out

For this reason, Robert takes particular care on train and Underground platforms  ensuring he stands well away from the edge  and when walking over bridges or near water.

There is no cure for Roberts condition, but in 2016 he was fitted with a small heart monitor, called a Cardiac Reveal, which sits below the skin near his collarbone. My consultants are hopeful that it might glean whats causing my syncope, he says.

Meanwhile Robert, who is single, relies on Flora to protect him. Her warnings give me a few moments to get to safety, whether Im at the edge of a road, in a park or walking by a river bank, he says.

So how can Flora predict blackouts before they happen?

Incredibly, it seems the dog can smell changes in Robert. As Claire Guest, CEO of Medical Detection Dogs, a UK-based charity, explains: Humans can smell a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of tea but a dog can smell a teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic swimming pools. Thats how amazing their sense of smell is.

We all have our own unique smell, she adds. But when we become unwell, it causes biochemical changes in our bodies, and dogs can detect these changes naturally.

As Good Health has previously reported, the charity is now harnessing this extraordinarily acute sense of smell to train dogs to detect conditions such as cancer (known as bio detection)  and to act as medical assistance dogs, warning their owners of dangerously low blood sugar levels (in people with diabetes), or the presence of nuts in food (for those with severe allergies).

Training a medical assistance dog is done by collecting odour  in urine, faecal, skin swabs or breath samples  and rewarding the dog when they detect a change in the smell (essentially a change in volatiles, organic compounds released by the human body). Recognising a change in a persons odour that the dog perceives as threatening, they alert the owner, explains Claire Guest.

When not training, the dogs live as pets with a family of volunteer dog fosterers before they are assigned to their for ever owner.

Claire says it generally takes six to eight months to train a dog. When it comes to bio detection, hunting dogs, gun dogs and any reward-driven dogs, for example Labradors and working spaniels, are great, she says.

So how can Flora predict blackouts before they happen? Incredibly, it seems the dog can smell changes in Robert

For assistance dogs for people with long-term conditions, she explains the breed doesnt matter as much but the relationship with the owner is of huge importance.

The dog must be in tune with the owner  but the owner must also be in tune with the dog and listen and respond to them.

For instance, if a dog is trying to alert an owner, that owner might perceive the dogs unusual behaviour such as pawing or barking as being naughty when actually theyre trying to tell them something.

Although Flora did not have any formal training, she is now a registered assistance dog for Robert with an organisation called Canine Generated Independence after being assessed by qualified trainers.

I love all my dogs  Kin, Rose, Roxy and Grace, but Flora and I seem to have an almost symbiotic relationship, says Robert.

Shes also been very successful at Crufts, having won the Kennel Club Good Citizen Dog Scheme Class in 2015, 2016 and 2017. She received a commendation for devotion to duty from the veterinary charity the Peoples Dispensary For Sick Animals. Flora was also a Crufts class winner in the past three years.

But Robert is proudest of how Flora has given him his life back. She gives me confidence to still do what I love  train dogs  and to venture outside despite my condition. Flora saves my life on countless occasions. Shes incredible.
A measles outbreak has spread to five regions in England, infecting 122 confirmed cases.

West Yorkshire has the most sufferers with 34 people being struck down with the life-threatening infection, followed by 32 in the West Midlands, 29 in Liverpool and Cheshire, 20 in Surrey and Sussex, and seven in Greater Manchester.

Dr Mary Ramsey, head of immunisation at Public Health England, believes the measles outbreak in England has come from Europe as people travel to regions experiencing epidemics, such as Italy, Germany and Romania.

She adds that in order to avoid an epidemic in the UK, parents should vaccinate their children against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).

To prevent a measles outbreak, it is recommended that 95 per cent of the population is immunised against the infection.

Only 91.9 per cent of children were vaccinated against measles between 2015 and 2016 compared to 94.2 per cent in 2014 to 2015 and 94.3 per cent in 2013 to 2014, according to NHS immunisation statistics.

The World Health Organization (WHO) claims people's fear of vaccines, along with complacency, means many, particularly young children, are unprotected.

The decision by parents not to vaccinate their children could be attributed to disgraced gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield's theory in 1995 that the MMR vaccine is linked to bowel disease and autism. His controversial views have since been widely discredited.

A measles outbreak has spread to five regions, infecting 122 confirmed cases (stock)

West Yorkshire has the most sufferers with 34 people being struck down with the life-threatening infection, followed by 32 in the West Midlands, 29 in Liverpool and Cheshire, 20 in Surrey and Sussex, and seven in Greater Manchester

MEASLES DECLARED 'ELIMINATED' FROM THE UK JUST FOUR MONTHS AGO The 'elimination' of measles has been achieved in the UK, global health leaders said in September. The elimination of measles or rubella can be verified once a country has sustained 'interruption of endemic transmission' for at least 36 months, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The European Regional Verification Commission said the UK achieved elimination status for measles as of 2016. Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at Public Health England, said: 'We are delighted that the WHO has confirmed that the UK achieved measles elimination in 2016 and that rubella elimination continues to be sustained. 'In addition, national vaccine coverage of the first MMR dose in five year olds has hit the WHO's 95 per cent target. 'This is a huge achievement and a testament to all the hard work by our health professionals in the NHS to ensure that all children and adults are fully protected with two doses of the MMR vaccine. 'We need to ensure that this is sustained going forward by maintaining and improving coverage of the MMR vaccine in children and by catching up older children and young adults who missed out.' Advertisement

WHAT WERE THE MEASLES, MUMPS AND RUBELLA VACCINATION RATES IN TWO-YEAR-OLDS ACROSS ENGLAND IN 2015 TO 2016? Region of England % vaccinated North East

North West

Yorkshire & Humber

East Midlands

West Midlands

East of England

London

South East

South West

Source: NHS immunisation statistics 95

92.9

94

94.1

93.1

93.5

86.4

91.9

92.9



Low vaccination rates

Dr Will Welfare, a consultant in health protection at Public Health England, told Manchester Evening News: 'Measles is a very infectious virus and can spread rapidly among communities, such as schools, if people have not been fully immunised.

'I would appeal to any parents who have not yet had their children vaccinated to get them protected as soon as possible through their GP.'

Dr David Elliman, paediatrician at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, added: 'Although the uptake of the both doses of MMR vaccine is high in UK, because measles is so infectious, it is not yet high enough to stop [the] outbreaks we are seeing'.

Epidemics in Europe

Earlier this year, the WHO warned measles was spreading across Europe in regions where vaccination rates are low, namely France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Switzerland and Ukraine.

Data published in November last year by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in the Communicable Disease Threat Report show that from January 2016 to November 2017, more than 19,000 measles cases were reported in the European Union, including 46 deaths.

The highest number of cases in 2017 were reported in Romania, where 7,759 people suffered, followed by Italy with 4,775 cases and Germany with 898 sufferers. Greece also experienced a measles outbreak, with at least 368 cases, and one death, since May 2017.

These outbreaks occurred due to insufficient vaccination levels.

Dr Ramsay said: 'Due to ongoing measles outbreaks within Europe, we will continue to see imported measles cases in the UK in unimmunised individuals.

'This serves as an important reminder for parents to take up the offer of MMR vaccination for their children when offered at one year of age and as a pre-school booster at three years, four months of age.'

The World Health Organization claims people's fear of vaccines, along with complacency, means many, particularly young children, are unprotected against measles

WHAT IS MEASLES? Measles is a highly contagious viral infection that spreads easily from an injected person by coughing, sneezing or even just breathing. Symptoms develop between six and 19 days after infection, and include a runny nose, cough, sore eyes, a fever and a rash. The rash appears as red and blotchy marks on the hairline that travel down over several days, turning brown and eventually fading. Some children complain of disliking bright lights or develop white spots with red backgrounds on their tongue. In one in 15 cases, measles can cause life-threatening complications including pneumonia, convulsions and encephalitis. Dr Ava Easton, chief executive of the Encephalitis Society told MailOnline: 'Measles can be very serious. '[It] can cause encephalitis which is inflammation of the brain. 'Encephalitis can result in death or disability.' Treatment focuses on staying hydrated, resting and taking painkillers, if necessary. Measles can be prevented by receiving two vaccinations, the first at 13 months old and the second at three years and four months to five years old. Source: Great Ormond Street Hospital Advertisement

Is Andrew Wakefield's discredited research to blame for low vaccination rates?

In 1995 the gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet showing children who had been vaccinated against MMR were more likely to have bowel disease and autism.

He speculated that being injected with a 'dead' form of the measles virus via vaccination causes disruption to intestinal tissue, leading to both of the disorders.

After a 1998 paper further confirmed this finding, Wakefield said: 'The risk of this particular syndrome [what Wakefield termed 'autistic enterocolitis'] developing is related to the combined vaccine, the MMR, rather than the single vaccines.'

At the time, Wakefield had a patent for single measles, mumps and rubella vaccines, and was therefore accused of having a conflict of interest.

Nonetheless, MMR vaccination rates in the US and the UK plummeted, until, in 2004 the then-editor of The Lancet Dr Richard Horton described Wakefield's research as 'fundamentally flawed', adding he was paid by attorneys seeking lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.

The Lancet formally retracted Wakefield's research paper in 2010.

Three months later, the General Medical Council banned Wakefield from practicing medicine in Britain, stating his research had shown a 'callous disregard' for children's health.

On January 6 2011, The British Medical Journal published a report showing that of the 12 children included in Wakefield's 1995 study, at most two had autistic symptoms post vaccination, rather than the eight he claimed.

At least two of the children also had developmental delays before they were vaccinated, yet Wakefield's paper claimed they were all 'previously normal'.

Further findings revealed none of the children had autism, non-specific colitis or symptoms within days of receiving the MMR vaccine, yet the study claimed six of the participants suffered all three.
Ugandan health chiefs have denied there is an outbreak of 'eye-bleeding fever' - even though tests have confirmed the virus is in the country.

Officials in the African nation have been accused of 'concealing' cases of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, which is fatal 40 per cent of the time.

But the nation's health minister addressed the widespread fears in a rant on Twitter this morning, blaming the Ugandan Medical Association for sparking fears.

Sarah Opendi's claim comes after she yesterday confirmed tests came back positive for CCHF in a nine-year-old boy in hospital - which the union branded an emergency.

She wrote on social media today: 'There is no Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever in Uganda as earlier reported by @TheUMAofficial.

'The Ministry of Health always informs the public when there is an outbreak in the country. It is not true, as alleged, that the Ministry is concealing an outbreak.'

Sarah Opendi's claim comes after she yesterday confirmed tests came back positive for CCHF in a nine-year-old boy in hospital - which medics branded an emergency

Anyone who displays symptoms, including fever, headache, bleeding and muscle pains, should immediately visit their local hospital, Ms Opendi added.

Doctors have been told to don protective gear when handling any patients, amid concerns CCHF could spread rapidly across Uganda.

Up to 60 people were feared to be infected and were asked to undergo tests to confirm whether or not they had been struck down, it has been reported.

The Ugandan Medical Association has today asked the Government to come out clearly on the status of the deadly disease, according to local reports.

Its president Dr Ekwaro Obuku said: 'There was a confirmed case on December 26, 2017 and we have learnt that this case was discharged.

'We state one confirmed case of Congo-Crimean is an epidemic already. It should activate emergency levels, it should activate epidemic levels.'

A nine-year-old girl died in the Nakaseke District of central Uganda with the symptoms of an eye-bleeding disease which it is thought could kill up to 40 per cent of those infected by it

A health team is reported to have rushed to disinfect the girl's house and put her in a body bag after she died in the Nakaseke District of central Uganda (file photo of nurses)

The feared outbreak comes only months after hundreds of people were killed by the plague in Madagascar in what was described as the worst bout for 50 years.

Nearly 200 people died from the medieval disease, which was considered to be at crisis point before it died down towards the end of November.

WHAT IS CCHF? The Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) virus causes severe viral haemorrhagic fever outbreaks. CCHF outbreaks have a case fatality rate of up to 40 per cent, according to statistics. The virus is primarily transmitted to people from ticks and livestock animals. Human-to-human transmission can occur resulting from close contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected persons. CCHF is endemic in Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and Asia, in countries south of the 50th parallel north. There is no vaccine available for either people or animals. Source: World Health Organization Advertisement

CCHF was blamed for killing three people in neighbouring South Sudan, but health chiefs have also denied they are suffering from an outbreak.

World Health Organization chiefs issued a report last week which revealed all tests taken on the three deaths had came back negative for the virus.

Fresh fears were raised on Sunday when a nine-year-old girl died in central Uganda of what also was originally suspected to be CCHF.

Emergency workers reportedly rushed to disinfect the girl's house and put her in a body bag after she died in the Nakaseke District.

Blood tests taken at the Uganda Virus Research Institute came back as negative for the bug, transmitted by ticks. Officials are yet to determine her cause of death.

Humans can also spread the disease, which can cause large areas of bruising and uncontrolled bleeding, between each other through bodily fluids.

However, a nine-year-old boy under isolation in Kiwoko Hospital, Nakaseke, tested positive for the fever, it has since emerged.

Ms Opendi reportedly said yesterday: 'Results from Uganda Virus Research Institute tested positive for the CCHF.'

Tests on both the dead girl and boy in hospital came back negative for Marburg, after the virus was found in Uganda in November.

World Health Organization officials confirmed it contained the outbreak of the bug - considered one of the deadliest in existence - in a matter of weeks.
A Kentucky plastic surgeon was arrested after he allegedly showed up drunk to perform an operation on Monday.

The hospital staff at Baptist Health Lexington were suspicious that Dr Theodore Gerstle might be intoxicated when he arrived for the only surgery he had scheduled that day, according to the Lexington Herald Leader.

The chief medical officer on duty reportedly confronted Dr Gerstle about his apparent state before the surgeon got into the operating room.

Dr Gerstle left the hospital on foot and was arrested blocks away after the hospital staff reported the incident to the police.

Scroll down for video

Plastic surgeon Dr Theodore Gerstle was escorted to jail by police officers in Lexington, Kentucky after he allegedly showed up for a surgery drunk on Monday

According to his practice's website, Dr Gerstle is board-certified and is 'the only Harvard-trained' plastic surgeon in Lexington, though he completed medical school at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Daily Mail Online called his office for comment, but the staff was unwilling to speak about his arrest.

Still in full surgical scrubs and lab coat, but no outerwear, the surgeon walked out of Baptist Health hospital and onto the snowy sidewalk in Lexington, where temperatures hovered in the upper 20s on Monday.

Dr Gerstle only made it a couple blocks before police arrested him on Shady Lane.

The officers took him to the Fayette County jail, where he is now being held on public intoxication charges.

It is unclear if Dr Gerstle had a track record of drunkenness on the job.

However, at least one Lexington resident, Alexander Sterling, had complained about the surgeon on Facebook.

'Transmen do not go to Dr Theodore Gerstle MD of Lexington KY for top surgery. He royally f***** up Bryson Thompson's chest and is not taking responsibility,' Sterling wrote last March.

The warning accompanied a graphic picture of a bare chest - presumably Thompson's - with jagged scarring around the nipples, one of which has signs of infection.

Dr Gerstle was charged with public intoxication at the Fayette County jail (right) after the private plastic surgeon (left) left Baptist Health Lexington, where he had scheduled a surgery

The scars look nothing like the straight straight-lined scars below the area where breast tissue would have been that typically remain after top surgery.

Unfortunately, drinking problems are surprisingly common among surgeons.

A study of more than 25,000 American surgeons conducted in 2012 revealed that more than 15 percent of them probably struggled with some form of alcohol dependence or abuse.

According to the Herald Leader, Baptist Health has suspended Dr Gerstle's permissions to work at the hospital.

His license status remains active in the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure's database, but substance abuse is considered a violation of the state's Medical Malpractice Act, warranting 'discipline,' the site says.
President Donald Trump received a perfect score on the world's standard cognitive assessment test, his doctor revealed in a White House briefing today.

The 10-minute test, known as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (or, MoCA), was created in 1996 for medical professionals to determine mild cognitive dysfunction.

It assesses concentration, attention, memory, language, calculations, orientation, executive functions and visual skills.

Trump scored 30 out of 30. A score above 26 is deemed 'normal', while anything lower than that is caused for concern.

Those who do well on the test do not need to perform any other tests.

The average score is 27.4. People with mild cognitive impairment score an average of 22.1, while Alzheimer's patients tend to score around 16.

First used in Montreal, Canada, the test is now one of the most respected methods of assessing cognitive health worldwide, available in 55 languages and dialects, and formats for testing illiterate patients and in other cultural settings (by changing certain references).

President Trump is the first president to ever undergo the test as part of his presidential physical.

Here are some examples of the test doctors use, and how the patient is graded:

ALTERNATING TRAIL MAKING

TEST: The patient is told to pair up five numbers and letters (1-5, A-E) in ascending order (pairing 1 with A, 2 with B, etc).

RESULT: The patient gets a point for every successful pair: 1-A; 2-B; 3-C; 4-D; 5-E. No lines can be crossed. The patient earns 0 if they make a mistake that is not immediately corrected.

NAMING

TEST: Name each animal.

RESULT: One point for each

Lion

Rhinoceros (or rhino)

Camel (or dromedary)

MEMORY

TEST:

Step one: The doctor tells the patient that they are going to read a list of words that the patient must remember. At the end the patient has to tell them as many as they remember, it doesn't matter what order.

The doctor then reads five words, one per second:

FACE, VELVET, CHURCH, DAISY, RED

As the patient recites the words, the doctor marks a check in the box for each word said aloud.

The patient indicates when they have recalled all they can.

Step two: The doctor reads list a second time. At the end the patient has to recall all 10 words.

The doctor then reads words again, one per second.

As the patient recites the words, the doctor marks a check in the box for each word said aloud - including the first five again.

The patient indicates when they have recalled all they can.

SCORING: No plus points, only minus if they get it wrong.

SENTENCE REPETITION

TEST:

Step one: The examiner reads this sentence, and the patient has to repeat it exactly: 'I only know that John is the one to help today'.

Step two: The examiner then reads another sentence, with the same instruction: 'The cat always hid under the couch when dogs were in the room'.

SCORING: One point for each correct sentence.

DELAYED RECALL



TEST: The patient has to recall all the words they heard earlier (FACE, VELVET, CHURCH, DAISY, RED).

SCORING: One point for each word recalled (with no cues from the examiner).

TOTAL SCORE:

Add up all the points accumulating, adding a point if the patient has fewer than 12 years of formal educations.
An energy supplier broke into a family home and changed the locks without the owners knowledge, because a former tenant had failed to pay a 227 bill.

James Mant, 44, and Victoria Parsons, 41, have filed a claim against Scottish Power after a year-long struggle to resolve the issue.

Having moved into the five-bedroom property 12 months ago, the couple received several letters from the energy firm chasing payments for electricity bills.

Crisis: James Mant and Victoria Parsons were traumatised by a dispute with Scottish Power

Despite explaining to Scottish Power on numerous occasions that the 227.34 bill was owed by a previous tenant, a debt recovery firm went to the couples home.

Then, on December 6, a debt recovery firm acting on behalf of Scottish Power broke into the property in Whiteley, Hampshire, while restraining the couples eight-year-old Springer Spaniel, Oscar.

The door was damaged, so new locks were fitted.

The company installed a prepaid gas meter during the break-in  even though it hadnt supplied gas to the home since 2015 and the unpaid bill related to electricity usage. Scottish Power has apologised for the distress and says it made a genuine error.

James, an insurance broker, says: It was a horrific situation. You think your home is safe and that your dog is safe and secure.

'It felt like a burglary had taken place. Victoria was left feeling sick and faint, and I was very angry and frustrated as no one seemed to be taking the situation seriously.

The couple have launched a 7,000 claim against Scottish Power after compiling an itemised list detailing the financial impact of the dispute  including hours of work lost dealing with the issue, locksmith costs and damage to the front door.

GOT A TIP OR AN ENERGY QUESTION? Do you have an energy question you would like to have answered? Contact:experts@thisismoney.co.uk with the subject line 'energy expert'

When they bought the house in December 2016, they elected to use the existing utility services  electricity from Scottish Power and gas from Bulb, who had been supplying the property since 2015.

At the time, they were not aware the previous tenant had left an outstanding electricity balance of 227.34. After receiving a bill addressed to Lettings Northwood, James opened it to find out who the suppliers were and called the company to change the name on the account.

He said he also tried to give them a meter reading. The couple contacted Scottish Power a further nine times to resolve the issue  four times in January last year, once in April, once in May, twice in June and once in September  but the dispute was passed to a debt recovery firm called Richburns on August 25.

According to the company, an agent visited the property on September 22 and reported the home was vacant, even though Victoria, a financial planner, works from home. A letter was then sent to the couple providing details of a court case on November 24, in which Richburns would request a warrant to enter the house.

Home invasion: Despite explaining to Scottish Power on numerous occasions that the 227.34 bill was owed by a previous tenant, a debt recovery firm broke in to the couples home.

This is usually an energy suppliers last resort if you fall behind on your bills. A court will grant access so the firm can switch off your energy supply or install a pre-payment meter.

The new meter puts you on a more expensive tariff, so the debt is cleared more quickly.

Before it can apply to the court, the energy supplier must write and call you many times. If it still receives no response, it must send someone to visit the property. James and Victoria say they never saw the letters Scottish Power claims to have sent.

This is because those that did arrive were not addressed to them  so they returned them to sender and told Scottish Power what they had done. On December 6, the familys dog walker called to say he couldnt get into the house and that there was a notice from Scottish Power on the door. It gave them the locksmiths number as he had the keys to the replacement lock.

The dog, inside the house, was getting distressed and the couple had to wait three hours for the locksmith to return as he had been called to another job.

James says he is worried for his dog, Oscar, who is now very nervous. I hate to think of what they had to do to get him on a lead, he says. When they saw the dog, it should have been quite obvious the home was occupied and a mistake had been made.

Victoria says she was unable to sleep because she was uneasy about someone having been in her home without consent.

Its unnerving to think that we know nothing about the locksmith that was used, James says. We thought theres no way of knowing if someone could come back, stick the key in the lock and rob us. We changed the locks again for peace of mind.

Scottish Power has admitted to Money Mail that it failed to act correctly and should not have entered James and Victorias home. Under the Human Rights Act, a notice should have been sent via recorded delivery to Mr Lettings Northwood or Current Owner/Occupier.

The letter sent by Richburns was addressed only to Mr Lettings Northwood. So the couple were right to return it unopened.

A spokeswoman for Scottish Power says: This was a genuine error for which we apologise to James unreservedly. Enforcement action to recover debt is only done as a last resort, but we completely accept that the outstanding account on our system has nothing to do with James whatsoever.

We are investigating this as a matter of urgency to understand what went wrong and why this was allowed to progress to the stage where we entered his property. We will also provide James with compensation for the distress this has caused to him and his partner.

The company has now agreed to pay James and Victoria 5,666. Richburns did not return requests for comment.

In April 2016, Scottish Power was fined 18 million for unfair treatment of customers after an investigation by energy regulator Ofgem. Customers told Money Mail of receiving astronomical bills, complaints being ignored and threatening letters sent to the wrong homes.

money.mail@dailymail.co.uk
In the last few months, the number of Britons getting involved in speculative cryptocurrency 'investing' has rocketed with bitcoin being the star attraction.

At the start of 2017, bitcoin sat at under $1,000 a coin. By December, it hit nearly $20,000. Tempted by these outlandish returns, many have blindly piled in hoping to make a quick buck (or bit).

This is despite warnings of a bubble and many not truly understanding how the digital currency works.

Crypto boom: It has been hard to ignore the rise of cryptocurrencies and most would have at least heard of bitcoin

The price is now roughly $11,800 a coin after a dive this morning. It had been relatively stable so far in 2018  well stable by bitcoin standards.

The second main cryptocurrency, ethereum, is new compared to bitcoin. Bitcoin launched in 2009 while ethererum only arrived in 2015.

Ethereum has too seen its price surge from $8 a coin in January 2017 to a high in recent days of $1,345. Today it sits at $1,085.

Cryptocurrencies have been a hot topic and many may feel like they've missed the bitcoin and ethereum bandwagon.

As such, they may be asking: what's the next crypto bandwagon they can jump on?

There is little doubt that some of these alt-coins, such as ripple and litecoin, have probably popped up in recent conversation about digital currencies. But what are the alternatives and are they stable and credible?

We asked cryptocurrency exchange London Block Exchange to give us the key points on some of the main alternatives.

This is Money would also like to add that this is not an endorsement of any of the digital currencies and because of the volatile nature, we urge you to read the fact box below.

For example, this morning (16 January 2018) prices of most of the digital currencies have fallen by a quarter.

Furthermore, it is imperative to do more research if you're thinking of parting with your cash. Below is a taster of each digital alternative - but each one is complex in its own right.

When stalwart US investor Warren Buffett says the bitcoin craze is going to end in tears, it's worth doing as much research as possible if you are tempted in.

If you do buy into bitcoin Find out how bitcoin and the blockchain works, so that you have some understanding of the system, the ledger, the major players and the public and private key elements. Remember bitcoin yields nothing and its main source of value is scarcity. Most bitcoin activity is trading not investing. Research coin wallets, the digital vaults where cryptocurrency is held, and consider security carefully. Bitcoins have been stolen before, understand how this happened. Be prepared for extreme volatility. The price can move by 20 per cent in one day and you could easily lose half of your cash in a far quicker time that investing in the stock market. Consider how you would cash in any gains. There are reports that this has proved hard for some people. A time of market stress could lead to people being locked in and unable to trade. Read our guide to How to be a successful investor, which looks at the far less high octane world of long-term investing and how to make it a success.

BITCOIN (BTC)

Firstly, let's start with the bitcoin basics. The digital currency that most will be familiar with is free from government interference and can be shared instantly online. It doesn't rely on trusting one central monetary authority.

The underlying technology is blockchain, a financial ledger maintained by a network of computers that can track the movement of any asset without the need for a central regulator.

The price exploded in the second half of last year and as such, saw it race towards the $20,000 mark before Christmas.

Since then, it has nearly halved in value and it may mean that many who invested in December could have been badly burnt.

SEVEN ALTERNATIVES

RIPPLE (XRP)

Ripple works as a decentralised payments network. However, unlike other cryptocurrencies, it works largely to enhance traditional financial systems.

Its unit of cryptocurrency is called XRP - and its purpose is to bring speed, transparency and security to conventional financial processes.

The value of an XRP is much lower than a bitcoin, however there are more XRP available than Bitcoin (100billion vs 21million).

Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Ripple doesn't need to be mined - it can only be bought from exchanges.

Price? At present, the coin sits at $1.35. It reached a high of $3.40 in mid-January, so has more than halved in value since.

However, at the start of December, it stood at $0.25 a coin, meaning some may have already vastly profited from XRP.

LITECOIN (LTC)

Many people are unaware that litecoin originally served as a modification of the core bitcoin protocol - it's a cryptocurrency that can generate more blocks in less time, and handle a higher volume of transactions than bitcoin.

It allows quicker transaction confirmation - if bitcoin takes ten minutes to generate a block, litecoin can do it in two-and-a-half minutes.

Rewards for mining bitcoin are halved every time a further 210,000 blocks are mined. This is to slow down the mining of bitcoin, which has a finite supply. Litecoin rewards are also halved periodically, but only after every 840,000 blocks.

While bitcoin is capped at 21million, litecoin is capped at 84million - significantly higher than bitcoin, however not as much as ether at 98million and growing.

Its software protocol is called 'SegWit'

Price? At present, the coin sits at $208. It reached a high of $360 in mid-December.

At the start of December, it was $99 a coin, meaning it surged in that two week period and highlights the volatile nature of these currencies.

DASH (DASH)

Like litecoin, dash was originally developed to improve upon the weakness of the bitcoin network.

Created as XCoin, the project then changed its name to darkcoin before finding its current identity of dash, representing 'digital cash.'

The developers of dash created the world's first self-funding and self-governed blockchain protocol, a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that uses a two-tier developer network, rather than a single-tier one where all tasks are completed by miners.

This has been achieved through an incentive-based system.

Currently, 10 per cent of each block portion is allocated back to dash developers, who receive payments for their contributions, unlike bitcoin (where contributions are voluntary).

As a result, a number of high-tech features have been added to dash by their developers.

One key feature of dash is masternodes  an incentive-based system that encourages users with payments to secure the network and add additional features to it.

Masternode operators get 45 per cent of the reward for every dash block that is mined.

Additional features include something called 'InstantSend' that can send and confirm transactions globally in seconds and 'PrivateSend,' which allows dash users to remain completely anonymous.

Price? Currently, the price of dash sits at $790 a coin. It reached a peak of $1,550 in late December. At the start of November, it sat at $260 a coin.

BITCOIN CASH (BCH)

Bitcoin cash was created by 'forking' the original bitcoin protocol in 2017, which enabled more transactions to be processed and to increase the size of the blocks available.

The developers were concerned about using 'SegWit'  the software model that litecoin is based on, because they felt it did not address the core issue of scalability and felt it wasn't transparent enough.

Litecoin's SegWit change used a 'soft fork', but developers of bitcoin cash developed a 'hard fork.' This means old applications will not function with the new blockchain, which has an increased block size - meaning the verification and block confirmation process is sped up.

Miners are encouraged to join the bitcoin cash network by a more dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) than the bitcoin network.

This means that the chances of finding a new block are updated once per day. Bitcoin's difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks, or approximately every fortnight.

Price? Currently, bitcoin cash sits at $1,950 a coin, which is huge considering it only forked from original bitcoin in the summer. It peaked at $3,830 in late December.

MONERO (XMR)

Like bitcoin, monero enables a direct digital exchange of value between two parties, however, unlike bitcoin, monero transactions are completely private.

It uses the CyptoNight algorithm, which implements 'ring signatures' and 'stealth addresses' to muddle up each transaction's value, origin and destination and obscure the the sender and recipient's identities.

HAVE YOUR SAY Are cryptocurrencies a bubble waiting to happen or the future? Have you invested in any digital currencies - and if so, let us know your stories below.

Because each unit of value is 'fungible' or interchangeable, monero overcomes the concern that tracked or 'coloured' coins might restrict the usability of a blockchain currency.

The supply of monero will be infinite, with block rewards smoothly decreasing until 2022 when a minimum coin creation rate of 18 XMR per hour will be maintained.

Last week, it was claimed that North Korea is taking an interest in monero. Allegedly, evidence was found of malware that took over a person's computer and mined it. This was then sent back to Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang.

Price? Monero currently sits at $350 a coin, after peaking a few days ago at $495. In August, it was just $1 a coin.

IOTA (IOTA)

Iota is a cryptocurrency designed for the 'Internet of Things', hence the acronym.

Rather than using a blockchain ledger like bitcoin, iota uses a system called 'The Tangle' which aims to solve the transaction fees and scalability concerns presented by bitcoin.

This will be achieved by asking the sender to create and verify a transaction at once, which removes dependency on miners and ensures the system is completely decentralised.

In addition, while bitcoin speed decreases as the number of users increase, Iota's speed increases as the number of users increase.

Price? Iota currently sits at $3 a coin. It peaked at $5.25 towards the end of December and sat at $0.35 at the start of November.

NEM (XEM)

New Economy Movement (Nem) powers what is known as the Smart Asset System - this aims to power the blockchain economy by offering a range of secure and tested features.

It is intended to be an open, customisable blockchain solution that gives easy access to Nameserver and API tools, with transactions processed by a global network of nodes.

Ultimately, this means building blockchain software is simpler for developers who use the Nem network, because of its structured tools for app development and flexibility.

Nem introduced the concept algorithm called 'Proof of Importance' for coin issuance, which works in a similar way to 'Proof of Stake', saving energy and being more scalable than the traditional 'Proof of Work' algorithm.

Rather than mining, Nem users can create coins on the network by acting as a public node and 'harvesting' rewards from block creation and collecting fees from the processed transactions.

In order to reduce the impact of 'bad actor' masternodes on the network, Nem uses the Eigentrust++ algorithm, which allows nodes to 'judge' each other and optimise the load balance.

By using a custom time synchronisation protocol, Nem avoids the risk of the network losing consensus because of external effects from incorrect NTP servers.

Price? Currently, Nem sits at $1.14 a coin - roughly 20 per cent of its peak registered at the start of January. At the beginning of December, it sat at $0.25 a coin.
Shares in GKN hit a high last night as investors bet a bidding war will break out for the embattled engineer.

The company, which dates back to the 18th century and makes parts for fighter jets, Black Hawk helicopters and Audi and BMW cars, rejected a 7billion approach from predator Melrose last week.

Both companies yesterday embarked on charm offensives in a bid to convince shareholders that their plans were best for the future of GKN.

US fund manager Vulcan Value Partners, one of GKNs biggest investors, urged the company to enter talks with Melrose, but added that the current offer was too low.

Target: GKN, which dates back to the 18th century and makes parts for fighter jets, Black Hawk helicopters (pictured) and cars, rejected a 7bn approach from predator Melrose last week

Analysts said Melrose will need to raise its offer for GKN from the 405p a share proposed last week  and could face a string of rival bids from private equity. American buyout giant Carlyle is said to be weighing up a bid and others such as Blackstone and KKR could also join the fray.

Jonathan Hurn at Deutsche Bank said: We believe Melrose could return with an improved proposal. Also with GKN now in play, other potential acquirers may enter the process.

While GKN has not disclosed what it sees as an acceptable offer level per share, we are of the view that 450p would be more acceptable to management.

Shares in GKN, which jumped 26 per cent to 420p on Friday after the Melrose proposal was made public, rose another 4.1 per cent, or 17.4p, to 437.4p yesterday.

The latest share price rise came as GKNs new chief executive Anne Stevens, a former high-flyer at Ford who officially took over just days before the company rebuffed Melroses approach, met investors to persuade them that the management team is best placed to turn the business around.

GKN, which employs 53,000 around the world including 6,000 in the UK, is planning to split its aerospace arm from its cars division as it seeks to bolster its defences against Melrose and other suitors. The company could even sell its aerospace business.

GKN IN TURMOIL Sep 14 Kevin Cummings, aerospace boss, will succeed Nigel Stein as GKN chief, it is announced

Oct 13 GKN warns profits will be lower following crisis at aerospace arm

Nov 16 Cummings out as company says it needs alternative leadership

Jan 1 Anne Stevens takes over as interim chief

Jan 12 GKN rejects 7billion takeover offer from Melrose and makes Stevens permanent boss Shares rise 26 per cent

Jan 15 Shares rise 4.1 per cent as bidding war expected to break out

A spokesman said: Melroses opportunistic offer to shareholders fundamentally undervalues our company and its prospects and would deprive our shareholders of the full benefits of the value that GKN intends to deliver.

But Melrose bosses launched their own charm offensive, appealing directly to the City to back their 7billion takeover plan in a series of meetings of GKN shareholders.

In a presentation to investors, Melrose described GKN as an overly complex and under-managed organisation without focus which needs a fundamental change of culture and leadership.

Warning against GKNs own plans, the company added: Melrose intends to significantly improve GKNs businesses as opposed to a hasty break up.

Andrew Gollan, an analyst at Berenberg, said: We expect Melrose to return with a higher offer for GKN and for it to be accepted.

'The rejected 405p bid undervalues GKN, in our view, but we believe Melrose has scope to significantly increase its offer by the February 9 deadline.
Softbank is pondering a listing of its mobile arm on the London Stock Exchange

Softban is pondering a listing of its mobile arm on the London Stock Exchange in a bid to raise 13.1billion.

The float would happen at the same time as the Japanese tech giant makes its public debut in Tokyo.

Softbank is planning to sell 30 per cent of shares to investors, keeping a 70 per cent stake.

The firm is said to be aiming for an autumn listing in Tokyo.

If it does pursue a London listing, it would mean the return of British tech star ARM Holdings to the citys trading floor.

Cambridge-based ARM, which designs microchips used in most smartphones, was bought by Softbank in 2016 for 24.3billion.

Softbanks telecoms arm, known as Softbank Corp, is one of Japans three main mobile companies.
Plastics maker Carclo saw 31.7million knocked of its value after issuing a double profit warning and announcing its chairman and finance boss would be stepping down.

Shares in the company took a hammering after it was hit by a string of contract delays in its two key businesses.

It plunged as much as 50 per cent in early trading before finishing down 34.7 per cent, or 43.3p, to 81.6p.

Carclo said it had experienced an unexpected delay in the awarding of two large tooling and automation contracts in its plastics division.

It said the arm was further hit after a key customer  which showed an interest in its moulded plastics business  failed to increase its orders.

Plastics maker Carclo saw 31.7m knocked of its value after issuing a double profit warning and announcing its chairman and finance boss would be stepping down

Its LED car lighting business didn't fare better either. Carclo said delays in the award of three new contracts would also reduce the division's profit for the current year.

As a result, the firm said profits for the year ending March 2018 would be 'significantly below expectations' and reduced its profit expectations for the 2018-19 financial year.

Following the shock update, Carclo also said its group finance director, Robert Brooksbank, would be leaving the firm after 14 years to pursue other career and business opportunities.

Investors were also dealt another blow after it revealed its chairman Michael Derbyshire will also retire from the board after nearly six years at the helm.

The FTSE 100 fell 0.12 per cent, or 9.50 points, to 7769.14 while the FTSE 250 finished down 0.13 per cent, or 26.58 points, at 20,832.77.

STOCK WATCH - E-THERAPEUTICS Biotech company E-Therapeutics jumped higher after announcing a partnership with artificial intelligent firms. Tie-ups with Intellegens, a spin-out from the University of Cambridge, and Manchester-based Biorelate, were unveiled. Biorelate uses artificial intelligence to scan through vast amounts of medical research and identify areas to look out for whilst Intellegens uses artificial intelligence to bridge gaps in data. Shares rose 3.7 per cent, or 0.35p, to 9.75p following the news.

The discovery of a 910-carat colourless diamond sent shares in Gem Diamonds rocketing 15.6 per cent, or 12.6p, to 93.2p.

The miner said the diamond was the largest found at the Letseng mine in the southern African kingdom of Lesotho.

Heat treatment supplier Bodycote soared after lifting its full year guidance and announcing it expects to benefit from President Trump's tax reform.

Bodycote said trading in the final quarter of 2017 was better than anticipated and it now expects its full year profits for 2017 to fall in the upper range of its 117million  126m estimates.

The FTSE 250 company added that while it is still examining the full effects of recent US tax legislation on future results, it expects a significant non-cash tax credit for 2017. Shares leapt 3.4 per cent, or 32p, to 983.5p as a result.

News that its boss of 15 years would be exiting the business sent shares in construction company Watkin Jones plunging.

The firm dropped 10.2 per cent, or 23p, to 203p after chief executive Mark Watkin Jones said he would be stepping down due to personal reasons.

The company is on the hunt for a successor and Watkin Jones will step down once a replacement is appointed.

His departure will mark the first time a non-family member will run the company, which has been run by Watkin Jones' family for more than 227 years.

Watkin Jones and his family have a combined 30 per cent shareholding in the firm, worth around 168million.

His departure comes after the student-housing builder more than tripled its profits for the year to September 30 to 43.3million from 13.3million.

Sales jumped 13.1 per cent to 301.9million.

The company also announced it would be proposing a final dividend of 4p per share, compared to 2.67p last year  with its total dividend for the year up 10 per cent to 6.6p.

Payment tech firm Safecharge rose 0.8 per cent, or 2.5p, to 311p after its subsidiary Safecharge Financial Services was granted a license by the Financial Conduct Authority as a payment institution.
New demand: Apple's tax bill has climbed by 81m

Apples tax bill has climbed by 81million after investigators probed another of its companies  bringing the total demanded by HM Revenue and Customs to almost 220million.

The hike in payments means one of its sales and marketing arms, Apple UK Ltd, has seen its total bill soar by 260 per cent.

Tax officials at HMRC combed through the companys accounts for 2011 to 2015.

Investigators are understood to have disputed how much commission Apple UK gets for providing business services to other firms owned by the iPhone maker.

For the five years to September 2015, it reported total sales of 500.5million and profits of 289.5million  but it paid just 22.6million in tax.

Apple said the hike in its bill by 81.4million was due to an extensive audit by HMRC.

The fresh tax hit takes the total amount of back-dated payments made by Apple to 218m. Tax officials also swooped on another of its UK arms, Apple Europe Ltd.

It was forced to hand over an extra 137million, accounts revealed last week.

The company was criticised last year after its UK retail arm, Apple Retail UK, posted 1billion of sales at its British stores but paid just 8million in tax.

Apple has defended its tax affairs and insists it pays everything it owes in the countries it operates in.

A spokesman said: As a multinational business and the largest taxpayer in the world, Apple is regularly audited by tax authorities.

An HMRC spokesman said yesterday it did not comment on specific companies but stressed that large businesses were subjected to an exceptional level of scrutiny.

Multinational companies must pay all taxes due and we dont settle for less, he said.

For the 18 months to April 2017, the new accounts showed Apple UK paid a further 35.7million in tax.

The business reported sales of 313.1million and profit of 291.7million over the period.
Mr Kipling and Bisto owner Premier Foods could be on the verge of selling its Super Noodles and Cup a Soup brand Batchelors, worth an estimated 200million.

The group has been in talks with its biggest shareholder, Japanese noodle maker Nissin Foods, amid mounting pressures for the group to reduce its debt burden.

Premier has racked up 500million of debt and was forced to issue a profit warning last year.

Premier Foods has been in talks with its biggest shareholder, Japanese noodle maker Nissin Foods, about a possible dale of its Super Noodles brand

It served up losses of 1.2million for the six months to the end of September, a marked improvement on the 8.7million loss recorded for the same period last year.

Premier rejected a 537million takeover bid from US food manufacturer McCormick in 2016, opting instead for a tie up with Nissin, which owns 20 per cent of the group.

But Premier, which also owns the Ambrosia and Oxo brands, played down reports of the Batchelors sale.

A spokesman said: There is no current situation where discussions have gone beyond an exploratory stage.

Shares were up after the statement, rising 3.4 per cent, or 1.4p, 42.75p.
BREXIT BREAK Medium-sized firms are upbeat about Brexit and want a clean break with the European Union, according to accountant RSM.

A survey of 315 firms found that 41 per cent believe leaving the bloc will be good for the economy over the next five years, versus 40 per cent who think it will be damaging.

Only 22 per cent of the companies said they wanted to remain in Brussels single market, with the rest favouring looser ties.

BACKING BRITAIN French lender BNP Paribas has launched a hiring spree in London to try to break into the top rank of City banks.

It follows Deutsche Bank boss John Cryan saying that reports his firm could move 4,000 jobs out of the UK after Brexit are wrong because the figure is much too high.

POACHING BOSSES Japans Mitsubishi UFG Financial Group is plotting to poach senior City bankers from rivals in a loud and clear commitment to London, according to senior executive Holly Villiers.

BIO BUDDIES AIM-listed biotech firms Avacta Group and Glythera Limited have agreed to work together to make specialised drugs that use anti-bodies to fight disease.

The tie-up could led to treatments that allow drugs to work longer in the blood and penetrate tumours more deeply.

FRAUD SHOCK Major frauds cost British business 2.1billion in 2017, a study by accountant BDO shows  the highest level for 15 years.

ON BOARD Advertising agency M&C Saatchi has appointed Lorna Tilbian, 60, one of the founders of broker Numis, to its board from January 30.

LATE PAYERS British businesses have been hit by a surge in late payments from Continental companies, research by payments company Marketinvoice shows.

The study showed European Union firms coughed up 73 per cent of bills after deadline last year, up from 40 per cent in 2016.

SLOW SALES Primark owner Associated British Foods is expected to report sluggish Christmas sales this week.

Analysts at Credit Suisse have forecast a 1 per cent dip in like-for-like sales, with business propped up by its UK arm.

FLYING HIGH Aircraft manufacturer Airbus enjoyed a record year for deliveries in 2017, with 718 aircraft delivered to 85 companies, up 4 per cent a year earlier.
The Bank of England has said UK lenders do not face any direct threat of major difficulties as a result of Carillion's dramatic collapse amid government demands for a 'fast-track' investigation into the failed construction firm.

Banks and insurers' exposure to Carillion, which went into liquidation on Monday, are 'entirely manageable' according to the central bank's deputy governor for prudential regulation and head of the Prudential Regulation Authority, Sam Woods.

Carillion's lenders, Barclays, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and Santander UK, were reportedly facing heavy losses on their 2billion exposure to the firm.

Speaking in front of a Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday, Woods said: 'There's then the question of will there be a wider, indirect issue with suppliers and that's more difficult for us to get a handle on,' but added: 'I'm not massively worried about it.'

Banks do not face a direct threat after the collapse, the Bank of England told a committee



Business secretary Greg Clarke demanded that an investigation looking to uncover company misconduct be fast-tracked in order to establish 'the full picture of the events' which led to the company folding.

He said: 'In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors. Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously.'

After issuing several profit warnings last year, Carillion sank under the weight of 1.5 billion of debts this week.

While the Bank of England believes the big banks face few major issues linked to the collapse, around 30,000 private firms are said to be owed money by the global construction giant with only public sector contracts guaranteed government backing.

Businesses working on purely private-sector contracts could receive only two days of government support, cabinet office minister David Lidington warned, leaving thousands of workers unsure of their futures as contracts dry up.

Carillion's collapse threatens the futures of 28,000 members of its pension scheme, 48,500 workers around the world and about 5,000 suppliers.

It has also left a hole across a number of services with the failed firm having been responsible for managing a number of buildings and company facilities, including areas such as security.

Nearly 50,000 workers have been left with uncertain futures in the wake of the collapse

Larger companies which worked with Carillion also face substantial losses.

Engineering firm Van Elle for example faces a 1.6 million hit if Carillion doesn't pay what it owes and said in a note to shareholders that it was bracing for an 'adverse financial impact' if the money wasn't recovered.

It also said it was 'too early to say' what the impact will be on a further 2.5 million worth of revenue linked to Carillion contracts due in the second half of the financial year.

Jon Fenton, chief executive of Van Elle, said: 'While it is disappointing to note the Carillion announcement we continue to develop further our strong relationship with Network Rail and its principal contractors, and remain committed to developing high-quality solutions in the rail division both for upgrade and maintenance work.'

In a separate stock market announcement, John Laing Infrastructure Fund said it had launched company contingency plans, rolling nine Carillion projects onto new providers.

However, it said the firm should not suffer any 'material impact'.

Engineering firm Van Elle faces a 1.6 million hit if Carillion doesn't it pay what it owes

On Monday Balfour Beatty revealed it would take on a loss of between 35 million and 45 million as Carillion's collapse hit and Galliford Try said the firm's demise had left a 60 million to 80 million hole in the funding of the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route road project in Scotland.

Kier group also implemented contingency plans for its joint ventures with Carillion, adding that it does not expect to take a financial hit.

Six companies  Carillion Plc, Carillion Construction, Carillion Services, Planned Maintenance Engineering, Carillion Integrated Services and Carillion Services 2006  were all placed in liquidation, with PwC appointed to support the official receiver.

PwC said there is no prospect of any return to shareholders, meaning heavy losses for those who had not cashed out in hopes the stock could recover.
Cars could be banned from driving past Parliament to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks, under plans being considered by MPs and peers.

The authorities at the Houses have signed off funding for tests of how traffic could be managed if Parliament Square was partly or even fully closed off, MailOnline has learned.

The proposals could mean that only vehicles belonging to politicians, their staff and delivery firms are allowed access to the road running past the historic building.

Plans for a secure 'air lock' are being pushed after a review in the wake of the attack last March, when Khalid Masood used a car to mow down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before roaming on to the estate and stabbing a policeman to death.

Plans for a security 'air lock' outside parliament are being pushed after a review in the wake of the deadly attack last March

One option attracting support is for the road directly outside the gates to be closed to all non-parliamentary traffic

A 'war game' that simulated gun-wielding terrorists ramming a car through the gates is also said to have exposed glaring weaknesses - concluding that four extremists armed with automatic weapons could get into the Commons chamber and massacre MPs.

Barring non-parliamentary traffic from the area would make it easier to protect the vulnerable main entrance.

Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, who chairs the parliamentary security group, gave a presentation to MPs and peers on the plans before Christmas.

The 'Parliament Square Streetscape' project', which is being put together with Westminster Council, is also understood to have support in principle from London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

Mr Khan pledged to part-pedestrianise the square, a prime tourist spot, during his election campaign.

The idea was originally raised a decade ago, and reached the stage of having plans drawn up by renowned architect Norman Foster. But it was dropped by Boris Johnson when he became London Mayor in 2008.

In an answer to a written question in November, Mr Khan said a 'multi-agency steering group' was considering options ranging from 'minimal changes to more significant changes to the square'.

A source close the Mayor said: 'Sadiq remains committed to part-pedestrianise Parliament Square to improve its safety, security and environment for Londoners and visitors to the capital.'

A Parliamentary spokeswoman said: 'The Streetscape projects are in their early stages.

Last March Khalid Masood used a car to mow down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before roaming on to the estate and stabbing a policeman to death (pictured)

The 'Parliament Square Streetscape' project', which is being put together with Westminster Council, is understood to have support in principle from London Mayor Sadiq Khan (pictured)

The House of Commons budget will soar by 50 per cent this year as MPs pour money into beefing up security and renovating crumbling buildings, including restoring the Elizabeth Tower (pictured)

'The Commissions of both Houses have agreed to fund further work to ascertain the implications of the project and their potential benefits.

'More details will be made available in due course, subject to appropriate security considerations.'

Tory MP Chris Philp told MailOnline changes were needed to protect the main entrance to parliament, and closing off the road would 'make sense'.

He suggested it would also improve the appearance of the space outside the Houses.

'From a security point of view I can see why that would make sense,' he said.

'Making sure the security works properly is a vital concern.

'We need to make sure it doesn't mess up the traffic flow.'

It emerged recently that the House of Commons budget will soar by 50 per cent this year as MPs pour money into beefing up security and renovating crumbling buildings.

Costs are set to hit an eye watering 600million, with spending on capital projects nearly doubled from 154million to 304million in the 2018-19 financial year.

Expenditure on day-to-day running of the estate will go up 56million to 317million.

The massive hike will see the overall spend at parliament top 800million, as the House of Lords is expecting its budget to go up 10 per cent.
Buoyed by a string of Republican retirements and President Donald Trump's persistently low approval rating, Democrats are increasingly hopeful about their chances for a midterm election wave that would give them control of the House and deliver a blow to the president.

The number of Republicans bowing out rather than bearing down for tough races is the latest worrisome sign for the GOP. Combine that with Trump's ability to unite Democrats in opposition and historical headwinds, and some Democrats are optimistic.

'We don't have an Obama figure energizing us; we have Trump energizing us,' said Democratic Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia, as he described standing-room-only gatherings at local Democratic events. 'Who is the D? Show me who the D is, so I can vote for them,' he said of voter sentiments. 'I think it's shaping up into that kind of election.'

In this Dec. 22, 2017, file photo. the U.S. Capitol in the early morning in Washington. Buoyed by a string of Republican retirements and President Donald Trump's persistently low approval rating, Democrats are increasingly hopeful about their chances for a midterm election wave

Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, who is leading Democrats' House campaign effort, said there is a 'clear path to a majority,' something he said he never saw in 2016.

Indeed, Trump's job approval rating - a key indicator in midterm elections - lags below 40 percent in most polls, and marks for Congress are half that. Since Trump's inauguration, Democrats have won state legislative elections across the country, reclaimed the Virginia governor's seat by a surprising 9-percentage-point margin and managed an upset Senate victory in GOP-dominated Alabama, albeit with the help of a Republican nominee accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls.

The next test is in Pennsylvania, where a March special election to replace Republican Rep. Tim Murphy, who resigned amid allegations he asked a woman he was having an affair with to get an abortion, will become another test of momentum. Trump is expected to campaign for the Republican candidate, state Rep. Rick Saccone.

President Trump could be a drag on the hopes of House Republicans of keeping power

Even House Speaker Paul Ryan concedes that his party may have to 'buck history' for him to keep his job, though he maintains that voters will reward Republicans after their sweeping tax cuts. 'The reason I feel confident and comfortable is because we ran on a set of ideas and policies, we're now executing those ideas and policies, and the results are proving themselves,' Ryan said Friday in Wisconsin.

Nonetheless, the environment has contributed to a steady stream of Republican retirements. This week, Ed Royce and Darrell Issa of California, two of the more vulnerable GOP members, announced they would not run again. Altogether, 31 House Republicans have announced their retirements so far, ahead of a typical election-year pace and giving rise to comparisons with 1994, 2006 and 2010, the last three times that voters flipped control of the chamber.

Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia warned Democrats against 'overconfidence'

Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers, who heads the GOP's House campaign operation, says he believes the retirement run is near its end, but he and other Republicans concede that the later the retirements, the harder it is for candidates to step in and build the campaigns necessary to win.

National Democrats, meanwhile, are targeting 91 House districts - a list that covers nearly all the GOP vacancies - and they say they have 'viable' candidates in 87 of those districts.

Since World War II, the president's party has never gained seats when the president's job approval rating is below 50 percent, a threshold Trump has yet to reach. Gallup polling of the presidents' approval rating in the week before midterm elections offers some guidance.

Foreign Relations Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., announced his retirement

STEP AWAY: Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from California announced he won't seek reelection in his California district

Barack Obama watched Democrats lose 63 seats in 2010 with a 45 percent rating; Bill Clinton lost 53 seats at 46 percent in 1994; and Ronald Reagan lost 28 seats at 42 percent in 1982. Jimmy Carter managed the narrowest losses in 1978, losing 11 seats with a 49 percent approval rating.

'The real question is how many seats the president's party loses,' Ayres said, and whether Ryan can 'limit the damage.'

Republicans find comfort in district lines that GOP-run legislatures drew after 2010. The boundaries dilute Democratic voting strength by concentrating the party's most reliable voters in fewer districts. Those advantages explain part of the GOP's current 24-seat margin in the 435-representative chamber.

'Our districts got drawn in a way where, yeah, there's 20 or 30 competitive seats out there, always will be, but most of them are pretty hard to flip,' said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., who oversaw GOP efforts in House races in the previous two election cycles.

But even partisan boundaries might not withstand a genuine wave election. Democrats are leading by double digits in many 'generic ballot' polls, which ask voters whether they prefer a Democratic or a Republican congressional candidate. Pollsters say such a national generic ballot lead is likely enough to overcome GOP advantages from gerrymandering.

Democratic momentum showed up throughout 2017, even in four House special elections to replace Trump executive branch appointees in GOP strongholds. Republicans swept the four, but Democrats managed double-digit swings from the November 2016 results in each instance.

'For years, you've seen independents in red states and swing states acting more like Republicans,' said Democratic pollster Zac McCrary. 'That trend is reversing.'

Democrats' richest targets are the 23 GOP-held districts where Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton outpaced Trump. Most of those are in suburban areas, including several in states where Democrats believe they can capitalize on new tax provisions that cap filers' deductions for state and local property taxes at $10,000.

Issa and Royce represent such districts, as do many incumbent Republicans in California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Several of those districts are among the ones that Ryan's outside political operation is working to defend. The Congressional Leadership Fund, an independent political action committee, has opened field offices in 27 GOP-held districts so far. The group has set a fundraising goal of at least $100 million for the cycle, more than either the Democrats' or Republicans' official House campaign committees raised during the first 11 months of 2017.

Rep. Leonard Lance, R-N.J., represents one such district where the group has set up shop. Lance has seven Democrats vying to challenge him. Clinton carried the district by about 3,800 votes. Lance won his fifth term in 2016 by 38,000. 'I like that extra zero,' he said.

Democrats are 'running against President Trump,' Lance said while emphasizing his votes against the GOP's final effort to repeal 'Obamacare' - though he's voted for repeal before - and his opposition to the new tax law. 'I vote my conscience here,' Lance said, 'and I will be judged based upon my vote.'
Toronto police are disputing an 11-year-old girl's claim that her hijab was cut by a scissors-wielding man as she walked to school last week.

On Monday, Mark Pugash, Toronto Police spokesman, said an extensive investigation was conducted and police concluded the incident did not in fact happen.

Sixth-grader Khawlah Noman, her mother and her younger brother held a news conference at her school on Friday where she said she 'felt really scared and confused,' after the man approached her.

Toronto police are disputing 11-year-old Khawlah Noman's claim that her hijab was cut by a scissors-wielding man as she walked to school last week

She said she was walking to school with her younger brother when a man came up behind her, pulled off her jacket hood and started cutting the bottom of her hijab.

She said she turned around, screamed and the man ran away. She claims he returned a short time later and continued to cut her hijab from behind before he smiled and ran away again.

Her mother called on police to treat it as a hate crime.

Sixth-grader Khawlah Noman, her mother and her younger brother held a news conference at her school on Friday (all pictured here)

She said she was walking to school with her younger brother when a man came up behind her, pulled off her jacket hood and started cutting the bottom of her hijab

After investigating the incident authorities came to the conclusion that there wasn't evidence to support the girl's account.

'It's very rare for an allegation to be investigated and we later find out that it does not happen,' Pugash said on Monday.

He also said: 'It's something that received, quite understandably, a lot of media and social media attention and I know it caused significant concern, as it should.'

After investigating the incident authorities came to the conclusion that there wasn't evidence to support the girl's account (pictured in the center)

He declined to say whether the girl acknowledged it didn't happen. He said police wouldn't take a step like this unless they were absolutely confident.

Ryan Bird, a spokesman for the Toronto District School Board, said he is 'very thankful' that the alleged assault didn't occur.

'We are very thankful that this assault did not in fact happen. We won't be commenting further,' he stated.

The story made international headlines and even drew public condemnation from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

She claims she started screaming and the man ran away. She said he returned a short time later and continued to cut her hijab from behind before he smiled and ran away again

Ryan Bird, a spokesman for the Toronto District School Board, said he is 'very thankful' that the alleged assault didn't occur

'My heart goes out to Khawlah Noman following this morning's cowardly attack on her in Toronto,' the Canadian Prime Minister tweeted on Friday.

'Canada is an open and welcoming country, and incidents like this cannot be tolerated.'

Trudeau has not commented following the police's conclusion.
A 3.5-metre great white shark ripped a 28-year-old freediver's fin off his foot in a close call on Australia's east coast on Saturday morning.

Callum Stewart was making his way to the surface of the water near Martin Island, south of Sydney, around 9am when he said he felt a sudden blow from behind, pushing him upward.

Believing it was one of the seals that had been swimming alongside him, Mr Stewart told the Illawarra Mercury he turned to take a look at the playful creature but instead came eye-to-eye with a massive great white shark.

A 3.5-metre great white shark ripped a 28-year-old freediver's fin off his foot in a close call on Australia's east coast on Saturday morning (pictured)

'It did a full 180-degree turn and came back to look at me. That's probably the point I realised I might be in trouble,' he said.

'The most amazing memory I have is looking this thing dead in the eye, and wondering if that was the last thing I'm going to see.'

Callum Stewart (pictured) was making his way to the surface of the water near Martin Island, south of Sydney, around 9am when he said he felt a sudden blow from behind, pushing him upward

Mr Stewart, an engineer, told the publication he was so shocked he didn't immediately realise the shark had yanked his one-metre-long fin off his left foot and was still holding it in its mouth.

Coralie Fleming, Mr Stewart's diving partner, told the Illawarra Mercury she watched on in horror as the shark bit onto the 28-year-old's left foot and initially thought her friend had been ripped in half.

'There was one metre [missing] off Callum's body. I was horrified, then I realised it was just the fin.'

Mr Stewart, Ms Fleming, and her boyfriend Mitchell Scanlan-Bloor, who captured the incident on video, scrambled to a nearby rock for safety before making their way to their boat, anchored 30 metres away.

The presence of large sharks is common around groups of seals, Dr Vic Peddemors, the Department of Primary Industries' head shark researcher, told the publication.

Dr Peddemors said the great white appeared to have taken a 'test bite' to see if Mr Stewart was a food source.
Kami Gilstrap, 24, from Arizona has died after being shot in the chest by a stray bullet while visiting a popular target shooting range in Buckeye, police reported

An Arizona woman has died after being shot in the chest by a stray bullet while visiting a popular target shooting range in Buckeye.

Authorities announced the death of 24-year-old Kami Gilstrap of Glendale Monday who was shot around 2pm on Sunday.

Buckeye police spokeswoman Detective Tamela Skaggs says Gilstrap was with family members at the shooting area Sunday when she was struck.

She was flown by helicopter to a hospital in critical condition but later died of severe injuries.

Gilstrap, who leaves behind husband Blake Gilstrap, was in the desert about 30 miles west of Phoenix when she was shot.

Gilstrap leaves behind her husband Blake Gilstrap (pictured here) and friends revealed the married couple were expecting their first baby

Skaggs says neither the type of bullet that struck her nor the person who fired the shot has been identified and that 'hundreds of people' were shooting at the time of the incident.

Buckeye Police Chief Larry Hall said 'the biggest challenge we're facing in this investigation, right now is that there are hundreds of shooters out here and there were hundreds of shooters just south of where the incident occurred.'

'In trying to determine trajectory, and actually the round that hit her, it's gonna be a very challenging investigation at this point,' Hall said.

Neither the type of bullet that struck Gilstrap nor the person who fired the shot has been identified police have said

It is legal to shoot on large swaths of US owned land in Arizona.

Gilstrap's Facebook profile says she worked as a nanny in Litchfield Park.

Apparently her husband Blake was an airman stationed at Luke Air Force Base and the pair had just learned they were expecting their first child, azfamily.com reported.

Police have confirmed the incident is currently under investigation.
The internet prankster who made headlines for plunging into Bondi's iconic Icebergs pool from a balcony has been arrested for performing a similar stunt in Brisbane.

Luke Erwin was filmed climbing over the fence of the Goodwill Bridge in South Bank and leaping in to the water, acting like a 'silly salmon'.

Footage shows Mr Erwin wriggle with his arms flailing as he plunges nearly 13 metres into the Brisbane River, after being egged on by friend Jackson O'Doherty.

A 23-year-old man was arrested after jumping off the Goodwill Bridge in South Bank, Brisbane, on a dare

The bridge is nearly 13 metres above the level of the Brisbane River, which runs below

Shortly after, the pair were approached by police, who did not find their prank entertaining in the slightest.

Officers were filmed speaking to the pair after confiscating their camera and SD card, and the men were issued a court date for February.

A spokesperson for Queensland Police told Daily Mail Australia a 23-year-old man from Elderslie, NSW was charged with one count of unregulated high-risk activity.

Officers will allege in court that around 12.30pm on January 9, the man jumped off the Goodwill Bridge into the Brisbane River.

Police confiscated the camera used to film the jump as well as the SD card inside

Mr Erwin (right) and his friend Jackson O'Doherty (left) say officers did not return the SD card

The pair said in a separate video their camera had been returned late in the afternoon, but upon finding more footage of allegedly illegal activity, officers kept the SD card.

Police told the men they could have it back after next month's court date. Mr Erwin will appear in Brisbane Magistrates Court on February 19.

Last month, Mr Erwin was filmed jumping into Bondi's Icebergs swimming pool in Sydney, as bathers looked on in shock.

He appeared hesitant about the distance from the balcony to the pool below, which was only two metres deep, but eventually climbed over the balcony.

After discarding his phone, he jumped from the balcony still wearing his shoes, t-shirt, and shorts and landing only a few metres from other swimmers.

Families watching on from elsewhere in the popular venue appeared shocked to see Erwin suddenly plummet into the pool.
Action film star Steven Seagal is denying he sexually assaulted actress and Bond girl Rachel Grant on the set of one of his films in 2002.

Allegations of harassment and assault from multiple actresses including Jenny McCarthy and Eva LaRue have hit Seagal or have been resurfaced against him since October.

Grant, speaking to the BBC, said Seagal, 65, assaulted her during the filming of Out For A Kill, which debuted straight-to-video in 2003.

Steven Seagal has denied an allegation of sexual assault by Rachel Grant, who says he forcibly pulled down her strapless top, forced her on to a bed and began to unzip his pants before stopping

Grant appeared as Peaceful in the 2002 Pierce Brosnan-starring James Bond film Die Another Day

At the time Grant, 40, was 26 and Seagal would have been in his early 50s.

She says she was at a line reading with Seagal and the film's director at a hotel in Sofia, Bulgaria.

At some point, she says, the film director left and she was alone with the actor.

She claims he asked her to take off her strapless top multiple times, and she said 'no,' each time.

The actress says she later stood up, at which point Seagal forcibly pulled her top down and exposed her breasts.

'I was forced to cover myself,' she told the BBC. 'He pushed me on to the bed with force.'

Grant (pictured in 2002, the year she says she was assaulted) says she began to cry as Seagal began unzipping his pants. She says he then stopped the assault and apologized

The alleged incident took place during a line reading in Sofia, Bulgaria for Seagal's film Out For A Kill

She says Seagal then said, 'I suppose you want to see my [euphemism for penis],' and proceeded to unzip his pants.

She claims she then began to cry and that Seagal stopped what he was doing and apologized.

Later, she says she lost her job on the film.

Grant said: 'What actress should be brought to someone's bedroom on the first meeting and then be told to take their top off?'

Seagal, speaking through his legal team, told the BBC in a statement: 'Our client denies having such contact with Ms Grant and further vehemently denies any alleged assault at all, in particular, the alleged assault occurring in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2002.'

Grant, who appeared as Peaceful in the Pierce Brosnan-starring James Bond film Die Another Day in 2002, said she came forward after being encouraged by the #MeToo movement.

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating at least one claim of sexual assault against Seagal, Variety reported last week.

The alleged incident occurred in 2005; further details have not been forthcoming.

The action star has been accused of misconduct by four of his own assistants and actresses including Katherine Heigl, Jenny McCarthy, Portia de Rossi and Julianna Margulies.

Eva LaRue (left) and Jenny McCarthy (right) have both accused Seagal of misconduct

One actress, Regina Simons, told The Wrap that Seagal raped her at his California home in 1983.

Seagal has starred in dozens of action films since the 1980s, perhaps most notably 'Under Siege' which debuted in 1992 and made $80million in North America.

He is quite outspoken politically and befriended Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who gave him Russian citizenship in 2016.



For this action and for remarks he has made about Russian militancy, the action star has been banned in Ukraine.
Sir Nicholas Soames has said his grandfather, Winston Churchill, would have been a leader in the fight against climate change.

In an attack on Donald Trump, Sir Nicholas - a Tory MP since 1983 - said the evidence is 'entirely against' the US president's stance on the environment.

He also praised Prime Minister Theresa May's speech last week, in which she set out a 25-year plan to prioritise the natural world, and contrasted her to Trump.

'My grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill, knew a thing or two about courage,' Sir Nicholas wrote in his attack on Trump's climate change stance. Right: Theresa May

'My grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill, knew a thing or two about courage,' Sir Nicholas wrote on CNN, adding that the war leader would agree with Mrs May on climate change.

'President Trump is, I gather, a fan, having a bust of him in the Oval Office. Without Churchill's determination, the Nazis would have won the war in Europe.

'But this is equally true of his respect for evidence. You cannot defeat an enemy of markedly superior forces unless you have better information and make better decisions.'

His intervention comes after President Trump - who has previously branded climate change a 'hoax' - wrote on Twitter recently that the world could 'use a little bit of that good old global warming' in response to cold winter weather in northeastern US.

President Trump has also pledged to remove the US from the Paris Agreement, which is designed to fight against climate change.

In his article, Sir Nicholas compares President Trump unfavourably with previous Republican leaders like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

In an attack on Donald Trump, Sir Nicholas (left) - an MP since 1983 - said the evidence is 'entirely against' the US president's stance on the environment

Their efforts to protect the environment, Sir Nicholas explained, were 'perfectly in tune' with conservative views.

But President Trump - a 'right-wing leader like not other - is not 'an inhabitant of the great tradition that gave us presidents such as Reagan and the two Bushes', he goes on.

Sir Nicholas also said Britain, which has reduced its emissions while also growing economically, has proved that countries do not need to sacrifice wealth to battle climate change.

He namedrops another British prime minister popular on the American right - Margaret Thatcher - as a way of attacking Trump, explaining that she was a 'key figure [in the fight against climate change] for whom I hope the president would have some regard'.
The co-hosts of A&E's Scientology and the Aftermath have come out in support of Oscar-winning screenwriter and producer Paul Haggis, after sexual misconduct and assault claims were lodged against him by four women, three of whom chose to remain anonymous.

Co-hosts Leah Remini and Mike Rinder shared an open letter on Monday, claiming they believe the Church of Scientology is behind the allegations Haggis now faces.

'Those who accuse without going to law enforcement, those who seek hush money to keep their stories secret, those who make accusations to the media anonymously  they are suspect,' the letter reads.

'And when the target of these tactics is someone who is a prominent critic of scientology, it is very suspect.'

Haggis has denied the claims, and all four women have denied being involved with the Church of Scientology.

Leah Remini and Mike Rinder have come out in support of Paul Haggis (pictured), who has been accused of rape and sexual assault by four women; Haggis is seen here in New York City on Monday

Haggis currently faces sexual assault and misconduct claims from multiple women, who have not been identified themselves.

One of those women is Haleigh Brest, a publicist who filed a civil lawsuit against Haggis in Manhattan on December 15, alleging rape, according to the Associated Press.

Her suit has since been amended to include allegations brought forward by three anonymous women, one of which is also publicist who has also claimed being raped by Haggis.

Remini and Rinder believe this lawsuit has been funded by the Church of Scientology.

'We expect the next "revelations" about Paul Haggis in this campaign to destroy him to be based on information culled from his scientology files in the form of more "anonymous" accusers, hiding behind a lawyer who will never have to disclose who is paying their bill,' the two wrote.

Haggis responded to Breest's initial complaint with his own civil lawsuit against Breest, alleging she attempted to extort him for $9 million in exchange for not taking legal action against him.

Leah Remini (left) and Mike Rinder (right) say the Church of Scientology is behind the claims lodged against Haggis; The two are seen here in Beverly Hills on August 5

The Church of Scientology Building is shown here at 4810 Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles

Breest's attorney responded to Haggis' counter-complaint in a statement on January 4.

'We view Mr Haggiss claims against Haleigh Breest as ludicrous, and a further act of aggression. In our system of justice, those who have been wronged have the clear right to seek redress and hold those responsible accountable for their misconduct, said Jonathan Abady of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP.

'In an act of remarkable hubris, Mr. Haggis has the temerity to claim that he, not her, was the victim. It is a preposterous and transparent PR stunt that will not succeed. Ms. Breest will not be intimidated or deterred from seeking justice.'

Haggis has denied all rape claims.

Haggis (pictured), Remini and Rinder are all prominent defectors from the Church of Scientology. Haggis is seen here at 55th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall on October 5

The Church of Scientology International Building is shown here on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on September 10

Remino (left) extricated from the Church of Scientology in 2013; Rinder (right) removed himself in 2007; Haggis ended his relationship with the group in 2009 after 35 years

Remini, Rinder and Haggis are all prominent defectors from the Church of Scientology, who have gone on to speak their minds about the practices of the group.

Haggis left the group in 2009, after being a members for 35 years, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Remini left in 2013, and Rinder left in 2007.

His departure was perhaps the most surprising of all, as he was Senior Executive of the Church of Scientology and a spokesperson for the organization at the time.

Remini is also known for her role as Carrie Heffernan on King of Queens.

The two wrote that they realized they were placing themselves at risk of public condemnation for coming out in support of Haggis during a time when Hollywood and the rest of the country are reckoning with pervasive sexual assault and abuse of power, but that they felt couldn't remain silent.

'In this time of heightened awareness of sexual predators, it is easy to remain quiet when an injustice is being perpetrated for fear of being tarred as politically incorrect,' Remini and Rinder wrote.

'But more important to us than being politically correct is standing up for what we believe is right.'

Remini and Rinder cite Scientology's well-documented practice of keeping extensive records of confessions by their members as evidence that the religious group facilitated accusations against Haggis.

This process is known as auditing.

'Like those of us who were scientologists, we trusted and confided in our church to seek resolution for our shortcomings. What is different about scientology is the detailed records they maintain of everything you tell them,' the letter read.

'And beyond that, they conduct intense interrogations based on the idea that only when all specifics and details are disclosed can one find relief. The names, dates, and minute details of any indiscretions, and even thoughts, are all recorded.'

Haggis is seen here smoking a cigarette in Manhattan with an unidentified woman on Monday

Remini is co-host of a show that focuses on leaving the Church of Scientology on A&E

Haggis is seen here at a press conference during the Mallorca International Film Festival 2017 on October 27 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain

The two go on to say that members of the Church of Scientology feel an 'intense pressure' to divulge even the slightest detail that may be considered a transgression to the group.

'This information is used against anyone who departs scientology and dares speak their mind. This is not imaginary. There is a documented history of such things,' the two wrote.

'With the name of everyone one might have thought of, flirted with or taken on a date, it takes little imagination to conjure a string of accusers being contacted and suddenly appearing out of the woodwork.'

Remini and Rinder maintain Haggis is a 'good man' who has consistently supported women's rights and been an ally to the LGBTQ+ community.

'Like all of us, Paul Haggis is not perfect,' Remini and Rinder wrote.

'Unlike a lot of us, he is truly a gentleman. A gentle man, with impeccable manners and a generous heart.'

Remini and Rinder's show, Scientology and the Aftermath, won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Reality Programming at the 33rd Annual Television Critics Association Awards on August 5.

Haggis is perhaps best known for his Best Picture Oscar winners, Million Dollar Baby (2004), which he wrote and produced, and Crash (2005), which he wrote, produced and directed.

(Left to right) Executive Producer Eli Holzman, Former Senior Executive of the Church of Scientology International and the Sea Organization, Mike Rinder, actor/producer Leah Remini, SVP, Development & Programming, A&E, Amy Savitsky, VP, Non Fiction & Alternative Programming, A&E, Devon Graham Hammonds, Executive Producer Aaron Saidman accept the award for Outstanding Achievement in Reality Programming for Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath'onstage at the 33rd Annual Television Critics Association Awards during the 2017 Summer TCA Tour at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on August 5

Remini and Rinder's full letter is below:

'There is plenty of reason to worry about defending anyone accused of sexual assault in todays climate. But the fear of consequences for speaking our truth has not held us back in the past and isnt about to start now.

'We have supported victims of sexual abuse who have reached out to us and have worked with them and law enforcement to ensure justice is done for both victims and the accused. We have avoided trial by media.

'In this time of heightened awareness of sexual predators, it is easy to remain quiet when an injustice is being perpetrated for fear of being tarred as politically incorrect. But more important to us than being politically correct is standing up for what we believe is right.

'Paul Haggis is a good man who has been a friend to us and so many others. He has championed the rights of women, the LGBT community and has fought for and devoted himself to the underprivileged in the world. These are not PR stunts  he has devoted his time, skill and money to worthy causes without fanfare for decades.

'Like all of us, Paul Haggis is not perfect. Unlike a lot of us, he is truly a gentleman. A gentle man, with impeccable manners and a generous heart.

'Like those of us who were scientologists, we trusted and confided in our church to seek resolution for our shortcomings. What is different about scientology is the detailed records they maintain of everything you tell them. And beyond that, they conduct intense interrogations based on the idea that only when all specifics and details are disclosed can one find relief. The names, dates, and minute details of any indiscretions, and even thoughts, are all recorded.

'It is not a crime to be attracted to women (or men). Its not a crime to flirt. Or to have sexual relations with someone. It might not be acceptable to your significant other (if you have one), but it certainly isnt criminal nor worthy of newspaper headlines.

'Only a scientologist can understand the pressure one feels to offer up even the slightest thing that the scientology organization might consider a transgression of THEIR mores. This information is used against anyone who departs scientology and dares speak their mind. This is not imaginary. There is a documented history of such things. When someone is a declared an enemy by scientology, they are fair game.

'With the name of everyone one might have thought of, flirted with or taken on a date, it takes little imagination to conjure a string of accusers being contacted and suddenly appearing out of the woodwork.

'We expect the next revelations about Paul Haggis in this campaign to destroy him to be based on information culled from his scientology files in the form of more anonymous accusers, hiding behind a lawyer who will never have to disclose who is paying their bill.

'Those who accuse without going to law enforcement, those who seek hush money to keep their stories secret, those who make accusations to the media anonymously  they are suspect. And when the target of these tactics is someone who is a prominent critic of scientology, it is very suspect.

'Paul Haggis deserves, based on his record as a gentleman and humanitarian, to be judged when all the evidence has been taken under penalty of perjury in a court of law. Because claims of anonymous accusers who have NOT gone to law enforcement are not credible.

'Leah Remini

'Mike Rinder'
Grace Read has had her nine-week-old Puppy named Rosko snatched out of her arms

A young Auckland woman has been left stunned and traumatised after two thugs tore her young puppy from her arms outside her home and took him away.

Grace Read was standing in her Castor Bay driveway on Monday when two men shoved her to the ground at 11.40am and stole nine-week old Rosco.

'Today has been torture,' a heartbroken Grace posted to Facebook this morning. 'I didn't want to write this post because I didn't believe it.'

She told Daily Mail Australia that she is heartbroken and appreciates all the help and support she's been given.

Grace was standing in her Castor Bay driveway when two thugs snatched 9-week-old Rosko

One of them men threw Grace to the ground while the other snatched up her puppy and ran

'I was just outside letting him [Rosko] walk around and two guys came down the driveway. First, I thought maybe it was the neighbour's visitors,' Read explained.

But the pair approached her, tried to gain entrance to her house and knocked on her front door and called out to her.

'They tried to get inside. I said, "I'm not letting you just waltz into my house!",' she told Stuff.co.nz on Tuesday morning.

But when asked them to leave, one of the thugs became 'aggressive' and flung the young woman into the ground while the other tried to snatch up her puppy.

'One of them threw me to the ground and out of the corner of my eyes I saw the other one look at Rosko, I scrambled to grab him but they got on top of me and ripped him out of my arms.'

Rosko is a rottweiler puppy, black with a brown chest and brown eyebrows.

'It's been absolute hell. I've only had him a week-and-a-half. I was so in love with him,' she said. 'I just want him to be safe.'

Grace took to Facebook to describe the thugs that took her puppy in a bid to track them down

Rosko is a tiny black rottweiler with a brown chest and may be in the Castor Bay (pictured) area

In a bid to track them down, she shared on her post that she'd heard one of the men mention that they were from the Hibiscus Coast and one of them has a girlfriend named Harriet Rea.

'[Harriet] has been arrested but we still don't have our dog home safe and sound,' Grace shared. 'I beg anyone who knows anything at all you can call the police anonymously. I just want him to be OK.'

She describes one of the men as a white male of average height and slim build, really short blonde hair, possibly with little stubble and wearing a snap back.

The other man was Maori, bigger with a round, clean-shaven face dressed in a black tee-shirt and jeans. '

Detective Senior Sergeant Marcia Murray said police attended the incident yesterday and are now investigating the matter.
Muslim convert Sonny Bill Williams has travelled to a historic Islamic mosque in Saudi Arabia as he prepares for his pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

The 32-year-old rugby union star, who converted to Islam in 2009, was led by a Sheikh through Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, also known as the Mosque of the Prophet.

The place of worship, in the city Medina, is one of the holiest sites in Islam and the place of burial for Prophet Muhammad.

Footage posted to social media shows Williams being led into an Islamic prayer by Sheikh Kamal Abu Mariam as they stand beside the grave.

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Sonny Bill Williams has travelled to Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, also known as the Mosque of the Prophet, in Saudi Arabia s he prepares for his pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca

Footage shows Williams being led into an Islamic prayer by Sheikh Kamal Abu Mariam as they stand beside the grave of Prophet Muhammad

'What an amazing feeling visiting the prophets(as) holy masjid [mosque] in Madinah,' he later wrote on Instagram.

'Thanks to the Shiek's for their insightful knowledge today,' he said in another post.

According to the video's caption, Williams will soon perform umrah - a pilgrimage to Mecca which can be undertaken at any time of the year, unlike the Hajj.

'Dr. Sheikh Kamal Abu Mariam with one of our favourite NRL players Sonny Bill Williams at Masjid Al-Nabawi and soon to perform umrah,' the caption reads.

'May Allah accept from them both... Williams recently reverted to Islam... by the will of Allah.'

The cross-code superstar recently spoke to MailOnline about his faith.

'Thanks to the Shiek's for their insightful knowledge today,' Williams captioned this picture

Williams is understood to be preparing for a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. Pilgrims are seen gathering around the holiest shrine in Muslim religion, call Kaaba, in Mecca

'I'm a proud Muslim. It's given me a feeling of happiness and contentment I've always looked for. I see it as a responsibility,' he said.

'Before I became a Muslim, I lived up in a flash house in Toulon and would worry about where the pair of boots I'd ordered were or some rubbish like that.

'Then I met a Tunisian family living in a one-bedroom apartment in the projects. They didn't have much but they always had me round for breakfast and never asked for anything back.

'They always asked Allah for guidance and it really struck a chord.'

The 32-year-old rugby union star (pictured playing for the All Blacks last year) converted to Islam in 2009
The EU will ignore Theresa May's wish to take back control of Britains borders and say that the UK should remain open for two years

EU migrants would be handed the right to travel to the UK until the end of 2020 and then stay on indefinitely, under Brussels demands for a Brexit transition period.

The bloc will ignore the Prime Ministers wish to take back control of Britains borders and instead say that the UK should remain open for two years after the split.

Brussels will seek to block the UK from creating its own post-Brexit immigration system and delay a previously agreed cut-off point for new arrivals.

The revelation will threaten to inflame impending talks over the transition period amid warnings to the Prime Minister not to cave in to any power grab from Brussels.

Theresa May has previously acknowledged that a two-year transition period is necessary to avoid a cliff edge Brexit and to provide certainty to the business community.

But EU attempts to gain a say over UK borders and citizenship rules as part of the arrangement are likely to infuriate Downing Street.

It will also raise concerns among Brexiteers that the EU is determined to try to issue diktats to the UK even after the divorce has taken place.

As part of the demands, drawn up by the Michel Barniers team alongside the 27 remaining member states, the UK will also be curtailed from shaping its trade and fisheries regime.

Under the landmark first-phase deal agreed between the UK and the EU last year, Britain set out plans to start implementing a citizens rights regime on Brexit day in March 2019.

This will involve many of the 3.2million EU citizens living in the UK being able to apply for settled status, while tough border laws would also be applied to new arrivals.

But in draft negotiating directives setting out the EUs demands for the transition period, seen by the Financial Times, Brussels will instead seek to delay the landmark change in UK immigration.

EU migrants would be handed the right to travel to the UK until the end of 2020 and then stay on indefinitely, under Brussels demands for a Brexit transition period lead by European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michael Barnier (pictured)

The EU will insist that the previously agreed cut off  the point when new EU arrivals to the UK are guaranteed citizenship rights - does not take effect until the end of the transition.

The demand is understood to have been led by Eastern European countries, including Poland, which boast some of the highest EU migration rates to the UK.

In particular, the provisions of the citizens rights part of the withdrawal agreement should apply as from the end of the transition period, the paper is reported to say.

The plan was first discussed by diplomats last week after they decided that full residency rights should be extended as the UK will effectively be subject to the EUs legal framework throughout the period.

But it is likely to kick-start a wave of protest from hard-line Brexiteers, who are adamant that the UK should not be curtailed even if the transition period keeps the status quo relationship.

Prominent Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg said last week: Free movement must end when we leave on 29th March, 2019.

Chancellor Philip Hammond (left) last week called on EU leaders to ensure that there is rapid progress on the UK's exit deal. Environment Secretary Michael Gove is expected to tell the Prime Minister he cannot accept EU wishes to curb the UKs ability to shape EU fishing quotas during the transition

Otherwise we will not have taken back control in the way demanded by the referendum result.

A number of other EU demands outlined in the draft proposal are also likely to anger the UK, including wishes to curb the UKs ability to shape EU fishing quotas during the transition.

This flies in the face of promises by environment secretary Michael Gove, who was expected to tell the Prime Ministers Brexit war cabinet this week that he would not accept such a move.

The senor minister said at the weekend that the UK should be seen as an independent coastal state in law when we leave and the arrangements for fisheries need to reflect that.

The paper sets out how Brussels should maintain direct effect over the UK, therefore trumping British laws.

The UK will also be told to seek authorisation from Brussels to roll over existing EU trade deals that it is currently part of, in a move that will be seen as unnecessarily burdensome.

The revelations come as the UK negotiators prepare for talks on the transition deal, which Mrs May had hoped to have largely tied up before a meeting of EU leaders in March.

While many have acknowledged that a status quo transition is likely, whereby the existing relationship is largely maintained, many UK ministers will be uneasy at the prospect in light of the EU approach.

Chancellor Philip Hammond last week called on EU leaders to ensure that there is rapid progress on finalising the deal in coming months, before trade talks begin.

The demands are expected to be signed off by EU ministers later this month and could be refined before then.
Pictured: German WWI pilot Manfred von Richthofen - the 'Red Baron'. He took down more British and other Allied planes than any other pilot in the war

Legendary German pilot the Red Baron was shot down by an Australian soldier over France during World War I, new evidence suggests.

Manfred von Richthofen took down more Allied planes than any other pilot in the Great War, with 80 confirmed kills to his name.

His exploits became an iconic war story, but the mystery of who exactly took the Baron out has never been solved.

A fuel tank believed to have been salvaged from his bullet-riddled plane and brought back to Australia by troops has surfaced in a Melbourne museum.

The find adds credibility to the argument it might have been an Australian solider who took out the Red Baron.

Experts at the Australian National Aviation Museum in Moorabbin, Victoria, discovered the brass fuel tank in their storage facility, where it had been sitting and gathering dust for some 30 years.

The Red Baron was shot down in 1918 above Australian trenches at France's River Somme (pictured)

His fuel tank was recovered from the wreckage and brought home by Australian soldiers

The tank was donated to the museum, situated in suburban Melbourne, in the early 1980s by a family who had long kept it in storage

It was donated to the museum in the early 1980s by a family who had long kept it in storage but its significance was only recently realised.

Experts believe the find could prove it was not a Canadian pilot who shot down the baron  as has previously been suggested  but an Australian soldier.

Chairman of the museum, Ashley Briggs, said the fuel tank had only recently been taken out of storage, which is when researchers discovered it came from a Fokker Dr.I - the type of plane the Red Baron flew.

'It also showed signs of a low impact crash,' Mr Briggs said. 'There was fuel dripping out of the plane when it went down, and the tank has a hairline crack in the bottom.'

'The tank has all those signs, so we believe it could very well be from the Red Baron's plane.

'Our research ultimately begged the question: why did that tank survive?'

The tank is from a Fokker Dr.I - the type of plane the Red Baron (pictured) flew. The damage shown on the tank suggests it came from a plane which crashed in the same circumstances as the Baron's

Damage done to the tank (pictured) shows it was hastily removed from its plane and likely involved in a crash similar to the one that befall the Red Baron

Chairman of the Australian National Aviation Museum Ashley Briggs (pictured) said troops would have not brought back a souvenir so large unless it had special significance

Mr Briggs said during WWI it was a tradition among Australian troops to bring back souvenirs from the frontline.

But he said there was no explanation for why the soldiers would cart such a bulky spoil as this particular tank back Down Under - unless it had special significance because of a famous owner.

'When you consider the amount of booty which would have been available, why would the Australian soldiers bring something this large?' Mr Briggs asked.

'It would have needed to be something pretty significant.'

Canadian pilot Roy Brown intercepted Richthofen and shot at him on the day he was gunned down and as such has been being widely credited with taking out the war's top-scoring airman.

It wasn't until the tank saw the light of day again that researchers discovered it was from the same type of plane flown by 'the Red Baron'

But in recent years, stories have circulated it was in fact an Australian, either gunner Robert Buie, from the Central Coast, or Sergeant Cedric Popkin, from the New South Wales Tweed Valley.

The re-discovery of the fuel tank is another chapter in a story which has captivated the imagination of war historians for decades.

'Most people have heard of the Red Baron,' Mr Briggs said. 'It's a very iconic story.'

'The human element is far more interesting than the piece of metal itself.

'It's a story that has survived for generations. The knowledge [of younger generations] may be limited but they have heard of him for whatever reason.

'The various facts line up to substantiate the story. But we will never be able to prove it beyond reasonable doubt.'
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The sister of a teenager who was trapped in his car for 30 hours with a bone sticking out of his leg and multiple fractured limbs has told of her family's extraordinary bid to find him, including hiring a helicopter.

Megan Lethbridge, 19, from Belmont, NSW, became concerned when she could not locate her 17-year-old brother Sam on Sunday evening and went to police about 8pm.

'I asked if there had been any accidents,' Ms Lethbridge told Daily Mail Australia. 'I asked "is there anything you can do?".

'They told me Sam had probably just run away. I said "that's not him. Something is really wrong".'

Sam Lethbridge, 17, is taken by paramedics and NSW Fire and Rescue officers from the crash site south of Newcastle

Sam Lethbridge's vehicle after he was cut free from the wreckage near Murrays Beach, south of Newcastle, on Monday

Sam Lethbridge, 17, survived the night with a bone sticking out of his leg after his car left the Pacific Highway and slammed into an embankment at Murrays Beach

Sam Lethbridge, 17, was trapped for about 30 hours in his crashed car near Newcastle; he was found on Monday morning

Ms Lethbridge had last been in contact with her brother about 12.30am on Sunday after she finished her bar job and had been unable to find him after contacting his friends that afternoon.

Ms Lethbridge's parents Tony and Lee were on a weekend away in Canberra, so she took on the responsibility of finding her brother.

Her parents arrived home about 1am Monday and also went to Belmont police station but were not satisfied with what was being done searching for their son.

'Dad said as soon as he walked out "we're gong to hire a helicopter and find him",' Ms Lethbridge said.

'He said "I'm not going to just sit here and lose him".'

Mr Lethbridge remembered there had been an accident about five years ago near where Sam's car was eventually found and wanted to search there.

Sam was believed to have been driving from Gosford, on the Central Coast, to the Lethbridge family home at Blacksmiths, on Lake Macquarie, when he left the road after 6am on Sunday.

Paramedics and NSW Fire and Rescue officers work to free Sam Lethbridge from his car after its discovery on Monday

NSW Fire and Rescue officers at Sam Lethbridge's vehicle after the 17-year-old was cut free late on Monday morning

Sam Lethbridge's car had travelled at least 20 metres off the Pacific Highway on Sunday morning; it was found on Monday

On Monday, Mr Lethbridge hired a helicopter which went up with pilot Lee Mitchell and Mr Lethbridge's brother Michael about 9.45am.

Mr Mitchell, of Skyline Aviation Group, swung into action when the Lethbridges came to see him at Lake Macquarie Airport and hired his Robinson R44 helicopter.

'My job as far as being a pilot and looking for a car is the easy job,' Mr Mitchell said.

'The father had the insight to hire the helicopter in the first place and go looking for his son.

'It was fortunate he had an idea where to start looking. He was fairly adamant it was somewhere between the Doyalson turnoff on the M1 and Swansea.'

He was right. Mr Mitchell and Michael Lethbridge spotted Sam's vehicle after about 10 minutes in the air.

'It was fairly obvious from the air and invisible from the road,' Mr Mitchell said.

Skyline Aviation Group pilot Lee Mitchell with the Robinson R44 he flew to locate where Sam Lethbridge had crashed

Helicopter pilot Lee Mitchell said he was in the air for only about 10 minutes before he and Michael Lethbridge found the car

Map showing where Sam Lethbridge's vehicle was found near Murrays Bearch in relation to Newcastle and Lake Macquarie

The pilot called 000 and the helicopter hovered over the crash site.

'It was a bit of a mission accomplished for me to be able to find the vehicle and at that point its important to remain composed in all the excitement,' Mr Mitchell said.

At 10.01am Michael Lethbridge sent a text message to his brother to say he had spotted Sam's crashed car off the Pacific Highway near Murrays Beach, south of Newcastle.

When Michael Lethbridge was able to reach the crashed vehicle he could see that Sam had survived the night. He had a bone sticking out of his leg.

Emergency services including ambulance and fire crews were called to the scene.

Sam was trapped in the driver's seat with a compound fracture to his right femur and fractures to his ankle and arm. He was freed about midday, Ms Lethbridge said.

Ms Lethbridge wanted to thank Mr Mitchell and motorist Billy Creanor who stopped to render first aid.

Sam (left) was discovered at 10.45am on Monday when his uncle spotted the wreckage on the side of the road. His sister and father are pictured right

The rescue operation took a painstaking 45 minutes, during which time Sam was given pain medication and stabilised by paramedics

Tyre marks from Sam Lethbridge's car can be seen leaving the Pacific Highway and leading into bushland south of Newcastle

Sam was given pain medication during the rescue operation and was stabilised by paramedics.

NSW Ambulance superintendent Jeff Atkins said: 'When we got to him he was pretty dehydrated. But his clinical observations were quite good which was amazing.'

'He then had to be carried back to the highway.'

Sam was taken by ambulance to the John Hunter Hospital where he remains. He had suffered an ankle injury, a fractured forearm and a compound fracture to his femur.

Superintendent Atkins said the teenager would need to undergo a 'world of physio' to regain full use of his injured leg.

A NSW police spokesperson said Sam Lethbridge was formally reported missing about 11pm on Sunday and an investigation began.

'As part of that investigation a missing person report was tabled at the police Monday morning crime review and provided to senior management and supervisors with the contents then disseminated to all staff,' the spokesperson said.

'Police had also broadcast a "Keep a lookout for" message regarding the missing individual and vehicle which was issued statewide. This is in line with normal procedures for incidents such as this.'

The teenager needed to be cut from the wreckage (pictured) when he was discovered badly injured on the side of the Pacific Highway south of Newcastle
A married father posed as a Good Samaritan, offering housing to a mother and daughter before grooming the teenage girl with drugs and using her as a sex object.

The 35-year-old was sentenced to seven years in jail at the District Court of Western Australia on Friday after being convicted of child sex offences in September.

The man offered to house the victim and her mother, but then gave the girl cannabis and alcohol and manipulated her into having a sexual relationship with him.

A married father posed as a Good Samaritan, offering housing to a mother and daughter before grooming the teenage girl with drugs and using her as a sex object (stock image)

Between August 2014 and December 2015 he sent her photos of sex toys, suggested a threesome with a transsexual and the two had penetrative sex.

District Court Judge Ronald Birmingham found the man treated his victim, aged 14 and 15, as a 'sex object', Perth Now reported.

'You made them feel part of your family and it was just part of manipulating [the victim],' Judge Birmingham said.

The 35-year-old was sentenced to seven years in jail at the District Court of Western Australia (pictured) on Friday after being convicted of child sex offences in September

'You persuaded her that you loved her. You gave her alcohol, cannabis and treated her as an adult.'

The girl, who was the man's daughter's best friend said in a victim impact statement the experience had made it impossible to trust adults.

'He stole my innocence and saw I was a vulnerable target. I was a naive girl who, even though I consented to the sexual abuse, I was not old enough to do so and he knew that,' she said.

Judge Birmingham said although the girl had been the instigator of some of the sexual acts, she had been manipulated by a man she viewed as a father figure.

She suffered panic attacks and depression after the abuse, and her mother has been left feeling like a parental failure.

The man will be eligible for parole after five years behind bars.
It may look like these red squirrels are being subjected to a form of medieval torture, but these tight tubular cages are for their own good.

The wire restrainers keep them safe  and spare their human handlers a nasty bite  as they are given a health check before being transported to new homes.

The medical is part of a project to reintroduce the red squirrel, one of our best-loved and fastest declining mammals, to its former glory in the countryside, in this case isolated forests in the Highlands.

A project to reintroduce red squirrels to their old forest homes in the Scottish Highlands is being carried out by the Trees For Life charity

Reds were once a common sight but the introduction of disease-carrying American grey squirrels in the 1870s has driven them out of many areas.

Since then, the red population has plummeted from 3.5million to around 120,000.

Today, they exist in small pockets of England and Wales, although they are more common in Scotland, which is regarded by experts as the creatures best stronghold.

The project to reintroduce red squirrels to their old forest homes is being carried out by the Trees For Life charity.

The wire restrainers keep them safe  and spare their human handlers a nasty bite  as they are given a health check before being transported

Because reds travel from tree to tree, they wont cross large open spaces, so are unable to return to areas of isolated forest where they once lived without a helping hand.

Becky Priestly of the charity said: The new populations are not only flourishing and breeding in their new homes, they are also starting to spread into new areas, with squirrels sighted as far as nine miles away.

In the past two years 33 reds have been transported to Shieldaig in Wester Ross, 22 to the Coulin Estate near Kinlochewe, and 30 to Plockton.

The population of red squirrels has plummeted from 3.5million to around 120,000

Before they are transported they are squeezed into the cages to be checked for disease, particularly the lethal squirrelpox virus spread mostly by greys.

Although the reds clearly dont enjoy these encounters, they are unharmed.

Only relatively few are taken from each site to ensure local populations are not affected.

The animals are carried to their new homes, specially designed nest boxes fixed to trees at the reintroduction sites and lined with hay.

Food is provided for months while the squirrels get used to their new lives.
Calm: David Lidington told MPs that the collapse of Carilion was 'regrettable' and 'disappointing'. This was quite an understatement

David Lidington's ears went traffic-light red as he defended the Government  Governments since the New Labour era  over the Carillion affair. One of Whitehall's favourite private-sector contactors had just gone bust. Spectacularly bust. Wonderbra Eva Herzigova hello-boys bust.

Our elite, from Mandelsonians to May-ites and all those Blairite/Osbornish Centrists with their networky non-executive directorships, was in an awkward spot.

It fell to Mr Lidington, Theresa May's new Damian Green in at least some respects, to spread calm and reassurance. 'Regrettable,' he called it. 'Disappointing.' To appreciate the understatement here, imagine the owner of a space rocket seeing the thing do a loop-the-loop seconds after lift-off before it nosedives into the ocean with a terminal 'splosh', and responding with an 'oh, I say, that's a bit of a bore'.

Or shades of the poor Earl of Uxbridge at the Battle of Waterloo, observing that he had just had his leg shot orf, only for the Duke of Wellington to look down at the smouldering stump and murmur 'so you have  what bad luck'. There are times for nonchalance and there are times for declamatory fury. Mr Lidington went for the Wellington option. He claimed that legal propriety prevented him condemning top executives' bonuses at Carillion. Such matters might be the subject of an inquiry by the Official Receiver. It would therefore be improper of him to comment beyond saying he could 'understand' if many people thought such bonuses appalling.

On a day when the post-Thatcher settlement  the use of private contractors to deliver state-paid services  looked in dreadful disarray, one might have expected the Corbynites to be on more of a roll. Oddly, this did not happen. Labour's spokesman, Jon Trickett, worked a few anti-Tory digs into his short speech but it was not the Corbo-Leninist, anti-capitalist eruption some of us had anticipated, even though Comrade Jeremy himself was in the Chamber to hear it.

Labour's spokesman, Jon Trickett, who is pictured leaning forward holding a piece of paper on the opposition front bench, worked a few anti-Tory digs into his short speech but it was not the Corbo-Leninist, anti-capitalist eruption some of us had anticipated

Mr Trickett said the Government had been 'recklessly complacent' about Carillion's financial affairs and should have run a mile once it heard the company declare profit warnings in the summer. Well, maybe. But that might have triggered Carillion's collapse a lot earlier, argued Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood in a select committee an hour earlier. Mr Trickett's best moment came when he noted that the chairman of Carillion had been the Government's 'corporate responsibility tsar'. Ha! That says everything you need to know about Whitehall tsars. His wider complaint against private finance initiatives (PFIs) was easily defused by Mr Lidington, who noted that Mr Trickett had been an enthusiastic member of Gordon Brown's team at 10 Downing Street, and he seemed perfectly happy about PFIs then.

Despite such an unpromising wicket, Mr Lidington made some headway with his argument that the private sector would have to clear up the mess. He rejected a claim by Stephen Kinnock (Lab, Aberavon  trying to work himself into the Corbynites' good books) that we had seen 'the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of risk'. To the contrary, said Mr Lidington, private enterprise was going to pick up most of the risk. In the select committee earlier, the head of the civil service, John Manzoni (formerly of BP), said the shareholders of and lenders to Carillion had been 'wiped out to the tune of billions of pounds'.

Mr Lidington rejected comments by Labour's Stephen Kinnock while Carillion's HQ's local MP Eleanor Smith made a ham-fisted contribution

Carillion's HQ's local MP was Eleanor Smith (Lab, Wolverhampton SW). I'm afraid she was hamfisted  to the extent that Speaker Bercow smirked. What a pity for those Carillion workers that the Wolverhampton SW seat is no longer occupied by Labour's sharp and eloquent Rob Marris, who quit at the last election.

Andrew Bridgen (Con, NW Leics) said that 'capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell  there is nothing to keep us on the straight and narrow'. Mr Bridgen added: 'Carillion's finished but demand for its services continues and those jobs will be recreated and in future the management will have to be better.'

Mr Lidington paid tribute to Mr Bridgen's theological expertise.
Prominent Hollywood stunt coordinator Joel Kramer is facing two more sexual misconduct allegations, three days after actress Eliza Dushku says he molested her when she was a child.

Actress and stuntwoman Laura Albert claims one of the incidents involved Kramer and her younger sister, who was 15-years-old at the time, and her sister's 16-year-old friend, in Kramer's hotel room after filming for 1997 mystery drama, 'Virus,' she told Deadline.

Without mentioning the girls' names, Albert said she had invited her sister on the set of the film in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she lived, in February or March of that year.

'I invited my younger sister to the set as she resided there... I wanted her to come to the set in an effort to mentor her, to show her the motion picture industry from the inside,' Albert said in writing to Deadline.

'She had desired to become a makeup artist. One day after we finished work, I had my sister and her friend, who were 15 and 16 and in the 10th grade, come out to hang with all the stunt personnel as we were going to go go-karting.'

Following filming, they went back to the hotel, where a Kramer allegedly made moves on the teen girls.

Actress and stunt woman Laura Albert (pictured left) has accused Hollywood stunt coordinator Joel Kramer (pictured right) of sexual misconduct

The alleged incidents took place following the set of 1997 mystery drama, 'Virus,' Kramer told Deadline

Jamie Lee Curtis, who came forward this week saying Eliza Dushku told her on the set of 'True Lies' she was molested by Kramer, also starred in the movie 'Virus'. Curtis said she was 'shocked and saddened then' and still is today over the alleged assault

Kramer allegedly invited the two down to the hotel pool, where he exposed his penis and told them, 'you cannot handle this'. Then, he attempted to persuade both girls to join him back in his room, Albert claims.

Albert said her sister ended up leaving, but her 16-year-old friend followed the Emmy-nominated stunt coordinator, who was 39-years-old at the time, back to the room, where they allegedly had sex.

In North Carolina, the age of consent is 16, according to ASPE.

Despite Albert's story, Kramer told Deadline he and the teen 'fooled around' at the time, but did not have intercourse - but Albert replied he was 'full of sh*t'.

Meanwhile, Kramer said he was unaware of the girl's age, during what he described to be a 'consensual' incident.

He said he remembered her as a pretty girl with tattoos, and was 'devastated' and 'bothered for years' after he found out her age.

Furthermore, another woman told Deadline in the late 70s to early 80s that Kramer allegedly forced her to perform oral sex on him somewhere in the San Fernando Valley.

The unnamed stuntwoman said the alleged assault happened after a group of friends went out for drinks.

She says she got into his car afterward, when he drove 'up into the hills on the south of side of Ventura Boulevard' and pulled his penis out.

She said he 'grabbed' her by the back of her head, and 'forced' her down onto him, and ejaculated in her mouth. Then, he released her head and 'cleaned himself up', she says.

The woman revealed she never spoke about the said incident before, but after hearing of Dushku's recount, she felt obligated to.

Kramer said the woman's accusation was 'fabricated' and that he is 'depressed and shocked' over the claims.

On Saturday, Dushku accused Kramer of sexually molesting her 25 years ago.

Eliza Dushku (above) accused one of Hollywood's leading stunt coordinators, Joel Kramer, of sexually molesting her 25 years ago

The 37-year-old actress wrote a lengthy, detailed Facebook post in which she alleged that Kramer took her to a hotel room in Miami when she was just 12 years old and 'rubbed all over' her body until he was 'finished'.

At the time, Dushku was starring in one of her first breakout roles alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1994 action flick, 'True Lies'.

Kramer has also denied her allegations.

Dushku wrote that she told her parents, one of her brothers, and two adult friends about what happened, but 'no one seemed ready to confront this taboo subject then, nor was I.'

The actress wrote that before the alleged incident Kramer 'made me feel special' and 'methodically built my and my parents' trust' by 'grooming me' for months.

'[H]e lured me to his Miami hotel room with a promise to my parent that he would take me for a swim at the stunt crew's hotel pool and for my first sushi meal thereafter,' she wrote.

Kramer then 'disappeared in the bathroom and emerged, naked, bearing nothing but a small hand towel held flimsy at his mid-section,' according to Dushku.

'I remember how he laid me down on the bed, wrapped me with his gigantic writhing body, and rubbed all over me,' she wrote.

'He spoke these words: 'You're not going to sleep on me now sweetie, stop pretending you're sleeping,' as he rubbed harder and faster against my catatonic body.

The 37-year-old actress (left) wrote a lengthy, detailed Facebook post on Saturday in which she alleges that Kramer (right) took her to a hotel room in Miami when she was just 12 years old and 'rubbed all over' her body until he was 'finished'

'When he was 'finished', he suggested, 'I think we should be careful,' [about telling anyone] he meant. I was 12, he was 36.'

Dushku also said that after the alleged incident in the hotel Kramer 'put me on his lap' and 'clutched me' while they were both in the backseat of a taxicab.

She wrote that the cab driver 'stared at me in the rear view mirror' and that 'my eyes never left the driver's eyes during that long ride' in Miami.

Dushku also said that after the alleged assault Kramer 'grew cold with me in the ensuing weeks.'

She wrote that after an adult female friend of hers in whom she confided confronted Kramer about his behavior, Dushku was injured in a 'stunt-gone-wrong'.

Dushku wrote that it was 'no small coincidence' that she suffered broken ribs as a result of the accident given that it was Kramer who was 'responsible for my safety on a film that broke new ground for action films.'

'My life was literally in his hands: he hung me in the open air, from a tower crane, atop an office tower, 25+ stories high,' Dushku writes.

'Whereas he was supposed to be my protector, he was my abuser.'

She said Kramer had given her 'over-the-top special attention' by nicknaming her 'Jailbait'  doing so in a 'sick flirty way in front of others'.

Nobody on the set of the movie thought it was necessary to speak up, Dushku wrote.

The actress penned that she decided to come forward after learning recently that Kramer 'still works at the top of the industry.'

'And a few weeks ago, I found an internet photo of Joel Kramer hugging a young girl,' she writes.

'That image has haunted me near nonstop since. I can no longer hide what happened.'

At the time, Dushku was starring in one of her first breakout roles alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1994 action flick True Lies

Kramer has worked either as a stunt double for Schwarzenegger or a stunt coordinator on a number of his films, including Commando, Predator, Raw Deal, Total Recall, Last Action Hero, and the Terminator movies, according to IMBD.

Kramer told Variety on Saturday that Dushku's allegations were 'absolutely not true.'

He claimed Dushku swam in the hotel pool with him and other members of the stunt crew, including Dushku's stunt double.

Afterwards, he took her to her first ever sushi meal, and then took her home.

Kramer told Variety he was 'taken aback' and 'floored' by the allegations.

He claims he 'never molested her' and was 'never nude in front of her.'

'This whole talk of luring her to my room, on top of her, getting off, holding her in the car and calling her jailbait is just outright hyperbole and lies,' he said.

Kramer told Variety that another person on the set told him that Dushku was 'always asking questions' about him.

He said that led him to believe he needed to 'handle her with kid gloves.'

'I did kiss her on the cheek once to say goodnight to her, gave her a hug,' he said.

'We treated her like family, she was part of our crew.'

Kramer insisted the allegations were 'absurd' and said that it would not have made any sense for him to do the things he is accused of.

One Facebook user wrote: 'I'm so sorry but as a parent it was your parent's responsibility to do something...They allowed you to go back to work knowing your life was in his hands'

Judith Dushku, Eliza's mother, agreed with the criticism

'Who in their right mind would do something like that, when you're a high-profile coordinator on a shoot like that with months left of shooting?' he said.

On Facebook, Dushku's mother writes that she accepts criticism from people who say that she should have done more to either protect her daughter or confront Kramer.

One Facebook user wrote: 'I'm so sorry but as a parent it was your parent's responsibility to do something...They allowed you to go back to work knowing your life was in his hands.

'And even after the incident they said nothing.'

Judith Dushku, Eliza's mother, agreed with the criticism.

'I accept your condemnation as Eliza's mother,' she wrote. 'I was afraid of Joel Kramer, too. And it was years later that I finally understood fully what really happened.'

'At the time, Eliza was too scared to tell the whole story and in a way I think she protected me from knowing because she knew how frightened I was of the powerful men on the set.'
A former indigenous politician who received a prestigious award from Barack Obama has described Aboriginal 'welcome to country' ceremonies as 'bulls***'.

Bess Price said such ceremonies would only ever be indigenous symbolism while Aboriginal women in remote communities continued to suffer higher rates of domestic violence.

She argued that gestures to improve the self-esteem of first Australians did nothing to address the dire living standards of women in remote Aboriginal communities, where alcohol abuse and poverty were rife.

'No wonder we Aboriginal people can't get ahead. No wonder Aboriginal women experience the highest level of violence against us,' the former Northern Territory government minister told her Facebook followers from Alice Springs this week.

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Former indigenous minister Bess Price slammed indigenous symbolism as 'a lie'

Bess Price said 'Welcome to Country' events were a 'shame' as indigenous women bashed (Aboriginal tent Embassy in Canberra pictured)

'All the "Welcome to Country", all the "Smoking Ceremonies" and all the made up bulls*** rituals about "pay our respects to elders past and present" is just one big lie.

'Shame shame shame.'

The Warlpiri woman received a prestigious U.S. International Women's Courage Award from former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2012 for her work tackling domestic violence.

She re-entered the public spotlight as her daughter Jacinta Price was attacked this week for campaigning to keep Australia Day on January 26.

Price's daughter Jacinta was attacked for supporting keeping Australia Day where it is

In the Facebook post, written on Sunday night, Bess Price also took aim at a former indigenous Northern Territory Labor politician, Marion Scrymgour, for publicly criticising her daughter.

Ms Scrymgour, a former deputy chief minister of the Northern Territory, previously described Jacinta Price as a 'dud' on Facebook who 'our mob can see through'.

'The hate that has been directed at my daughter for having a different opinion to those who want to remain in their victimhood mentality is disgusting and I'm appalled,' Bess Price said.

'There is a dark side that has come to surface and Australia is now witnessing this up close.'

Former Labor politician Marion Scrymgour (pictured in 2007) has described Jacinta Price as a 'dud' who 'our mob can see through'

Jacinta Price, an Alice Springs town councillor, had this month joined former federal Labor leader Mark Latham as part of a 'Save the Date' campaign to maintain the national day where it is.

Her involvement in TV and radio ads came as the Greens described the upcoming 230nd anniversary of the First Fleet landing in Sydney Harbour as a day of 'genocide'.

Some indigenous people regard the idea of commemorating Australia Day on January 26, when the British arrived in 1788, as 'Invasion Day'.

Jacinta Price had been targeted by online trolls, who had wished her a 'painful death', and left-wing indigenous activists who accused her of selling out indigenous people.

Indigenous former Northern Territory minister Bess Price blasted 'welcome to country' events
A man has died while travelling in remote central Australia.

The 32-year-old left the community of Ampilatwatja in the North Territory to travel by car to Murray Downs Station last Wednesday, Senior Sergeant Michael Potts says.

He failed to arrive at his destination.

Police have launched a search for the man's car, described as a silver 2000 Holden VX Commodore sedan like this one, with the NT registration CC79JJ

His body was found about 20km from Ampilatwatja near the highway on Saturday.

'A cause of death has not been determined and investigations are ongoing,' said Sen Sgt Potts.

'Police are still trying to locate the man's vehicle, a silver 2000 Holden VX Commodore sedan.'

Police have launched a search for the man's car.

It's described as a silver, 2000 Holden VX Commodore sedan with the NT registration CC79JJ.
Downing Street criticised Carillion's decision to continue paying the 660,000 salary of former chief executive Richard Howson until October, even though he quit in September

Fat cat bosses at failed construction giant Carillion could face severe penalties if they have ripped off staff and taxpayers, ministers warned yesterday.

An inquiry into the firm's collapse may also lead to sanctions against executives if it is found they mishandled the company's pension fund.

Ministers were left scrambling to shore up public services yesterday after the firm, which has 20,000 staff and 450 government contracts, went into liquidation.

Firefighters in one county were even put on standby to deliver school dinners that had been provided by the firm.

Amid a furious blame game, ministers came under fire after it emerged they had handed Carillion more than 1.5billion in new contracts since it issued the first of three profit warnings last July.

They were also accused of taking their eye off the ball, after MPs were told the key official in charge of managing the Government's relationship with the firm was put on other duties between August and November last year  just as the company was collapsing.

Amid fears for vital public services, Cabinet Office minister David Lidington pleaded with Carillion's public sector staff to turn up for work, saying they would be paid directly by the Government.

Cabinet Office minister David Lidington pleaded with Carillion's public sector staff to turn up for work amid fears for vital public services. Pictured is the company HQ in Wolverhampton

But last night he tried to put the focus back on the firm's management, which has been accused of paying itself huge bonuses and making massive share dividend payments even while the firm was in trouble.

Mr Lidington said receivers would be conducting an inquiry into the firm's collapse. MPs were told it could lead to 'severe penalties' for current and former directors if they were found to have caused 'detriment' to staff, taxpayers or the company's pension fund, which has a 580million black hole.

Downing Street also criticised Carillion's decision to continue paying the 660,000 salary of former chief executive Richard Howson until October, even though he quit in September.

Mr Lidington said receivers would be conducting an inquiry into the firm's collapse and that it could lead to 'severe penalties' for current and former directors

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: 'We wouldn't expect to see people benefiting from this failure.' As fears grew of a substantial multi-million pound bill for the taxpayer:

Some 20,000 Carillion staff and apprentices were warned they could face redundancy as soon as tomorrow, as ministers said they would only extend support to those providing public services.

Analysts said up to 30,000 small suppliers could be left nursing losses totalling 1billion, with banks potentially losing another 2billion.

Unions warned that schools, hospitals and prisons could all face disruption.

Civil service chief John Manzoni claimed EU procurement rules had made it impossible to blacklist Carillion even when it started to run into difficulty.

Carillion said it had 'no choice but to take steps to enter into compulsory liquidation with immediate effect' after talks to restructure its debts collapsed yesterday. Ministers turned down a last-minute request for a 20million lifeline to keep the firm afloat for longer.

Mr Lidington said it was right that 'shareholders and lenders bear the brunt' of the pain, rather than taxpayers.

Lord Adonis, former chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, said taxpayers were likely to face a bill running into 'tens of millions' to fund the managed liquidation.

Shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett, left, accused the Government of being 'recklessly complacent, while Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable accused ministers of 'feeding contracts' to the company

Downing Street yesterday insisted services were holding up well. But fears remain overcritical sectors such as cleaning operating theatres, school meals and prison maintenance. Oxfordshire county council put firefighters on standby to deliver school meals, saying 'no child will go hungry at school'.

Labour council offered building giant a 120m deal days ago A LABOUR-RUN local authority offered Carillion a new contract worth up to 120million days before the firm collapsed. Leeds City Council named the company as its preferred bidder to build a stretch of dual carriageway in the city despite prominent media reports that it was on the brink of going bust. The contract was worth an initial 14million, with options to extend it as high as 120million. Town hall chiefs last night said they were looking at the impact of Carillions collapse on the project, but insisted the deal had not been signed off. In the Commons, shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett said the collapse of Carillion was a failure of the Governments whole ideological system of contracting out public services. But Cabinet Office minister David Lidington said a third of Carillions contracts were awarded by the Coalition Government, with another third agreed by Labour before 2010. He said it was wrong to resort to party politics over an issue involving all the main parties. Advertisement

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable accused ministers of 'feeding contracts' to the giant to contain fears that a possible collapse may have on key public services. Controversy focused on the Government's decision to continue handing out contracts to the firm after it began issuing profit warnings last summer, including a 1.4billion HS2 rail line deal. Shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett accused the Government of being 'recklessly complacent in seeking to avoid responsibility and placing the whole responsibility on the company'.

But Government sources stressed that most of the new contracts were so-called 'joint ventures' in which Carillion's business partners are now obliged to pick up the work.

Mr Lidington insisted that ministers had been 'closely monitoring' the firm after it became clear it was running into trouble. But he struggled to explain why the official in charge of the Government's dealings with the firm was 'rotated off' to other duties for three months last year.

Between 2011 and 2016, Carillion paid out 458million in dividends to shareholders, despite a growing black hole in its pension funds. Last September, the firm's board changed its rules to make it harder to claw back bonuses paid to executives.

Mr Howson pocketed 1.5million in salary, bonuses and pension payments during 2016. As part of his departure deal, Carillion agreed to keep paying him a 660,000 salary and 28,000 in benefits until October. Former finance chief Zafar Khan, who left Carillion in September, will receive 425,000 in base salary for 12 months.

Bosses who raked in fortunes as company crumbled

Chief with ski chalet and historic hall

Richard Howson, 49, lives in a 2million historic hall in north Yorkshire, with his wife Geri and their two sons.

The handsome stone property boasts commanding views across the Dales. The couple also have a six-bedroom ski chalet in Rhone-Alpes, France, complete with a hot tub.

Richard Howson, 49, lives in a 2million historic hall in north Yorkshire, with his wife Geri and their two sons

The handsome stone property boasts commanding views across the Dales. The couple also have a six-bedroom ski chalet in Rhone-Alpes, France,

Two years ago Mr Howson was criticised for an estimated 50,000 home renovation while his firm was accused of failing to fix 45,000 squalid Army houses. The Leeds Polytechnic graduate worked as an engineer, before joining Carillion in 1999 and becoming chief executive in January 2012.

He left in September having received more than 6million in pay and bonuses in the role. Under his contract he is due to receive a 660,000 basic salary and 28,000 benefits till his notice period expires at the end of October.

Mr Howson, like Philip Green and Richard Adam declined to comment.

The self-styled Christian capitalist

Philip Green, a 215,000-a-year self-styled Christian capitalist, likes to trumpet his noble deeds, once telling a newspaper: 'The more money you've got the more you should give away.'

Philip Green,a 215,000-a-year self-styled Christian capitalist, joined Carillion's board in 2011 and has been chairman since 2014.

The 66-year-old father of two has k a four-bedroom house outside Cape Town and owns a 2.2million home in Berkshire, pictured, which he shares with wife Judy

The 66-year-old father of two declined to tell his interviewer how much he gives, but has kept enough to buy a four-bedroom house outside Cape Town and owns a 2.2million home in Berkshire which he shares with wife Judy.

The Wales University and London Business School graduate was rapped by the Pensions Ombudsman in 1994 after he let pension scheme money be used to buy a luxury flat at an inflated price, when he was an executive at Coloroll.

He joined Carillion's board in 2011 and has been chairman since 2014.

Received 2.6m in 'extras'

Finance director Richard Adam, a married father of three, lives in a sprawling 3.5million six-bedroom house on a private road in Hertfordshire

Finance director Richard Adam, a married father of three, lives in a sprawling 3.5million six-bedroom house on a private road in Hertfordshire.

After graduating in maths at Reading University, he trained as an accountant and worked in a public and private companies before joining Carillion in 2007.

Mr Adam, 60, has had up to 2.6million in extra cash and shares since starting in 2006, according to Daily Mail calculations.

In 2016 he was handed a bonus of 140,000 and long-term incentive awards worth 278,000.

After leaving Carillion in December 2016, he faced a revolt from shareholders at First Group when he joined the transport company's board. More than a fifth opposed his appointment.

His Carillion successor Zafar Khan launched the review that found the financial black hole which led to last year's profit warning.

Chief' bonuses protected by late tweak to pay policy

Chief executive Richard Howson, 49, quit in September after taking home 582,000 in bonuses and long-term incentive awards last year on top of his 660,000 basic salary

Bust outsourcing firm Carillion introduced new rules protecting bosses' bonuses in the run up to its collapse.

The firm changed the wording of its pay policy to apparently make it harder for investors to claw back the money even if the company went under.

The changes in the pay deal, revealed by the Daily Mail in September, could preserve any bonuses Carillion chiefs pocketed as the firm teetered on the brink.

Chief executive Richard Howson, 49, quit in September after taking home 582,000 in bonuses and long-term incentive awards last year on top of his 660,000 basic salary. Finance chief Richard Adam, 59, retired at the end of December 2016, taking home 418,000 on top of his 460,000 basic salary.

Before 2016, bosses could be forced to hand back their annual bonuses and share awards in 'circumstances of corporate failure'. But in the group's 2016 annual report this wording was clarified.

It stated deferred bonuses may be reduced in circumstances of corporate failure. But it went on to say the so-called 'clawback' provisions could be applied in only two circumstances: if results had been misstated or if someone was guilty of gross misconduct.

Mr Howson has made 1.9million in cash and share bonuses during his tenure, and Mr Adam has had up to 2.6million in extra cash and shares since starting in 2006, according to Mail calculations. But crucially, although they have been condemned for their role in the collapse of Carillion, the pair have not been found guilty of misconduct.

Hedge fund 'nets 200m from firm's demise'

Hedge funds were estimated to have made as much as 200million betting on the demise of Carillion.

While banks and rival firms were nursing huge losses, traders have been heavily shorting the stock  meaning they make money when the shares fall in value or the firm collapses  since well before last year.

Carillion has been one of the most bet-against stocks on the market, with around a quarter of its shares held by short-sellers. Between July and last Friday, its share price fell more than 90 per cent, sending its stock market value from just over 1billion to around 61million before the firm collapsed.

Between July and last Friday, Carillion's share price fell more than 90 per cent, sending its stock market value from just over 1billion to around 61million

Hedge fund Marshall Wace was one of the biggest winners immediately after the firm's disastrous trading update in July, pocketing a paper profit of 19.1million in just three days.

The fund was co-founded in 1977 by Brexit-backer Sir Paul Marshall, 58  whose son Winston is a member of folk rock group Mumford and Sons  and Ian Wace, 54. The pair have an estimated wealth of 505million.

Thunderbird Partners, founded by trader David Fear, 49, are estimated to have made 14.5million during the period of Carillion's fall. And Naya Capital, founded by former Goldman Sachs banker Masroor Siddiqui, 46, in July 2012, made 7.6million as the share price plunged more than 70 per cent within a few weeks.

While many hedge funds cashed out and pocketed profits between July and yesterday, 12 hedge funds were still shorting the stock as of Friday, allowing them to clean up when the firm went into administration yesterday.

BlackRock, the world's largest fund manager which manages more than 4.1trillion, had a short position as of last Friday. Mayfair-based Rye Bay Capital, founded by former HSBC banker Daniel Martin, 54, also had a short position yesterday.

Under short-selling, the trader borrows shares from a broker and sells them on at current market price. They then wait for the price to fall as predicted, before buying the shares back and handing them back to the broker.

The trader therefore pockets the amount by which the price has fallen, minus any borrowing costs. If a firm has gone into administration, the shares become worthless. The hedge fund does not have to return them to the lender, but still has the cash from when it sold them on.
The Dambusters Raid on the night of May 17, 1943, carried out by 19 Lancasters from Gibsons squadron, has gone down in history as one of the most audacious exploits of World War II.

Not only was the colossal Mohne dam breached, but a second, the Eder, was also smashed, while a third, the Sorpe, was damaged, though not broken. Although the attack cost the lives of 53 RAF airmen, it caused devastation to the German economy and gave a tremendous boost to public morale. The tale of the assault on the vast structures almost seemed a national metaphor for Britains increasingly confident fight against the once-impregnable Nazi empire.

Gibson won the Victoria Cross and 33 other airmen were awarded medals for gallantry in the raid. A CBE was also awarded to Roy Chadwick, Avros chief designer who had conceived the Lancaster bomber.

The honour was fully deserved, since the Dambusters could never have succeeded without the Lancaster, whose unique qualities of robustness and responsiveness made it the ideal plane for such a precision task.
The former California detective who arrested Jodi Arias 10 years ago says he hopes people will instead focus on her victim.

Former Siskiyou County detective Nathan Mendes was featured in the three-part Investigation Discovery series Jodi Arias: An American Murder Mystery which aired Sunday.

He shared with Fox News that he hopes the series - which explores the death of Travis Alexander in 2008 and all the media chaos surrounding the trial - sheds light on the man who lost his life.

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Former Siskiyou County detective Nathan Mendes (right) was featured in the three-part Investigation Discovery series Jodi Arias: An American Murder Mystery

'I think people should realize the whole thing is a travesty,' he said. 'As sad as it is, everybody focused on Jodi.

'Books are named Jodi Arias, shows have the name Jodi Arias. Taglines are Jodi Arias. It's almost like we forgot Travis even existed in all of this. It became such a circus about Jodi.

'And she shouldn't be the headliner here. And hopefully, some people will get to see that other side and realize Travis was the victim here.

'Jodi made that decision, but we shouldn't have ever highlighted her. Books and shows should be based on Travis Alexander, not Jodi Arias I think Travis and his family deserve that.'

He shared with Fox News that he hopes the series sheds light on the man who lost his life, Travis Alexander. Arias is pictured in 2013

'It's almost like we forgot Travis (pictured) even existed in all of this. It became such a circus about Jodi,' he said

Alexander's body was found on June 9, 2008, in his Meza, Arizona home. He was found with a gunshot wound to the head, a slit throat and a plethora of stab wounds to his body.

For Mendes, Arias's strange behavior was unsettling from the moment the two met after Alexander's body was found.

'The crime scene was such a mess,' he said. ' But when I first came across Jodi and we arrested her at her grandparents' house, my initial impression of her was she didn't seem concerned at all The whole case was bizarre. Especially her demeanor Even when we booked her, she wanted to make sure her hair looked OK Things like that were not sitting well with a lot of us.

'She was almost more concerned about her image She didn't have a concern for consequence or outcome Like for me, I wouldn't care what my hair looked like if I was being arrested or what my picture is going to look like. To me, that was just weird.'

Mendes noted that Arias would change drastically once prosecutors left the room. She notably could be seen laughing and talking with herself.

He added: 'At the time, we were watching it from the next room. She was trying to burn off stress. That was an indicator of stress.

'When people are put under a lot of stress that energy has to go somewhere, so you do see a lot of bizarre things in the interrogation room. She was just kind of rambling. But the whole yoga scene was a little strange to me. I've seen some strange things, but that's up on the top.'

And when all of the woman's sexual fantasies and escapades were brought forth during the trial, the detective shares he was a little shocked.

He said: 'I was a little surprised by the relationship that they had and the relationship she had with other men. Sexually. I know everybody has their private lives that they don't share with other people. But that was the thing with Jodi. The world got to see it.

'For a lot of folks that was the first time they had seen someone's sexual exploitations plastered all over the media. And that was shocking for a lot of people. You read about it and you certainly hear about it, but in her case, it was just put out there.'

The detective shared that Arias' family was stunned to discover that she could commit such an act.

'She has a great family. They were devastated. Absolutely devastated I know initially they were dumbfounded and it was kind of surreal to them as far as her grandparents and parents were concerned,' he shared.

'I think she just wasn't willing to share him with anybody else, that's my personal opinion. Just seeing the evidence and seeing what was transpired before Travis was killed,' Mendes explained. Arias pictured in 2013

'It was like, "You guys must have made a mistake." That was their initial reaction. "You have the wrong person." And that's normal behavior from parents, family members. No one wants to think that their child, [or] grandchild, can do something that brutal to anybody.'

But he asserts she was motivated to kill Alexander.

'I think she just wasn't willing to share him with anybody else, that's my personal opinion. Just seeing the evidence and seeing what was transpired before Travis was killed,' he explained.

'I think she had come to the realization that Travis wasn't going to settle down with her and that she wasn't willing to share him with anyone else or have him date or marry anybody else. It had to be Jodi. I think that's what prompted a lot of this. She wasn't willing to let him go. It's the old, "If I can't have you, nobody can."'

The second part of the series airs on Monday at 8pm.

Footage from Jodi Arias: An American Murder Mystery - first aired Sunday - shows the moment police told her they knew she killed Travis Alexander

Arias was 30 when she met Alexander and the two embarked on a whirlwind romance that only lasted a few months but continued after with numerous sexual encounters in 2006.

Even when Alexander began dating other women, the two regularly saw each other and Arias grew more and more jealous.

'I just want to offer any assistance I might have. I was a really good friend of Travis',' Arias said during an early call with Mesa, Ariz. Detective Steve Flores.

She was already being identified as a suspect by friends of Alexander.

'I just want to offer any assistance I might have. I was a really good friend of Travis',' Arias said during an early call with Mesa, Ariz. Detective Steve Flores

Arias was 30 when she met Alexander and the two embarked on a whirlwind romance

The romance only lasted a few months but continued after with numerous sexual encounters in 2006

Even when Alexander began dating other women, the two regularly saw each other and Arias grew more and more jealous

'I heard that he passed away and I heard there was a lot of blood,' she added.

'I heard that his roommate found him or his friend found him or people were I'm sorry, it's odd. I'm just upset.'

And in an in-person meeting with Arias following additional phone calls, Detective Flores told the woman that her alibi trip from Yreka, California, to Salt Lake City, Utah, was questionable.

Flores had problems with the route Arias said she took during a trip and it was then that he told her that she had been at the house

'So, this trip took you a little over 48 hours. I have a problem with this trip,' Flores said.

'If you slept for 10 hours, it would still leave 18 some odd hours. That's when Travis was killed.'

And while Arias tries to assert that she wasn't near Meza, Arizona, the detective calls her out.

'You were at Travis' house, you guys had a sexual encounter, which there's pictures. And I know you know there's pictures, because I have them,' he said.

A camera had been found in Alexander's washing machine that revealed the two had had a sexual encounter the day of his murder and featured Arias naked in bed.

And the revelation was all that Flores needed.

'There's no doubt in my mind that you did this. None,' he said.

'So you can go until you are blue in the face and tell me you weren't there and you had nothing to do with it. I won't believe you.'

Arias would deny that she committed the crime even at that moment.

'There's no reason for it,' she stated. 'There's no reason why. There's no reason I would ever want to hurt him.'

Flores then showed her photos that were believed to be gone but were found in the washing machine

'There's no reason why. There's no reason I would ever want to hurt him,' she stated

The clip ends with Flores reading Arias her Miranda Rights.

Arias was eventually found guilty of murder in a highly publicized trial detailing all the kinks and fetishes the two had been involved in.

She was sentenced to life in prison.

The three-day special started on Sunday and will be shown exclusively on Investigation Discovery at 10pm Eastern.
Authorities say a 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student whose body was found buried in a shallow grave in a California park had been stabbed more than 20 times.

The Orange County Register reports that police are investigating whether the killing was an act of rage.

Samuel Lincoln Woodward, 20, was arrested and taken into custody Friday on suspicion of homicide after DNA evidence linked him to the death of college sophomore Blaze Bernstein.

Pictured here is Blaze Bernstein the 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student whose body was found this week at a Southern California park

Bernstein was home visiting his family in Lake Forest during winter break when Woodward picked him up on January 2 and drove with him to several places before winding up at a park.

Barnes says the two knew each other from high school and detectives apparently used Snapchat to find the suspected killer.

Samuel Lincoln Woodward, 20, has been arrested in connection with the death of Blaze Bernstein. Police say DNA links Woodward to the case

Woodward was the last person to see Blaze Bernstein alive.

Woodward told officers he had picked Bernstein up the night before he was reported missing on January 3, but that the University of Pennsylvania pre-grad had walked off in Borrego Park, Anaheim, according to the LA Times.

There is no obvious motive behind the incident and no weapon has been found.

Woodward and Bernstein had attended the Orange County School of the Arts together.

The victim was at home on a break from his studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the weekend it emerged Woodward defended the Confederate flag and wrote disturbing posts on social media, according to The New York Post.

He wrote in one post that the rebel flag 'represents Southern pride, not racism.'

On another social media platform called askfm, Woodward said if he could have two items while being stranded on a deserted island, it would be 'The Bible and a Colt .45'.

On his profile, Woodward picks the torture method 'waterboarding' as a new skill he wants to learn and in another message, someone states to Woodward: 'You are violence. It scares me.'

Authorities say Woodward previously told them he had left Bernstein at the park to go see his girlfriend, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

Woodward couldn't remember the name nor the address of his 'girlfriend', police said.

Samuel Lincoln Woodward, 20 wrote in one post that the infamous rebel flag 'represents Southern pride, not racism' (Pictured: Woodward's image placed in front of Confederate Flag)

Woodward also had scratches on his hands, which police say he told them he had sustained while participating in a fight club.

Woodward also had dirt under his fingernails, which he told authorities was due to falling into a 'dirty puddle' while sparring.

Bernstein's mother Jeanne said 'Nothing will bring back my son so we ask the world to please honor Blaze's memory by doing an act of kindness today - don't wait - do it now. Celebrate the goodness that still exists in this world in-spite of these acts of senseless evil. People are good and Blaze knew that,' according to the Los Angeles Times.

Pictured is the park in which Bernstein was found. The Ivy League student was planning to major in psychology and later study medicine, his father said

Bernstein, a sophomore, was planning to major in psychology and later study medicine, the Orange County Register reported his father, Gideon Bernstein, saying last week.

His dad said that he had a passion for cooking and was a creative writer. He had recently been named to the staff of Penn Appetit magazine at school.

A friend at school told WPVI that she had been communicating with Bernstein over break over ideas for the magazine for the next semester.

Pictured is another view of the park. His father had said his son had a passion for cooking and was a creative writer

In another message, someone states to Woodward that 'You are violence. It scares me,' to which he replies 'I wouldn't fight anybody unless they attacked me'

A private funeral service was held on Monday to honor Bernstein, who has been described as a talented writer, a passionate chef and a selfless volunteer by his family and friends.

People were given spatulas with the last recipe he devised in the kitchen to celebrate his culinary skills, according to ABC7.

The family of Bernstein is asking the public to do good deeds out of respect for Blaze.

Gideon and Jeanne Bernstein, parents of missing teen Blaze Bernstein, pictured here, are joined by Orange County Sheriff's Lt. Brad Valentine, right, during a news conference in Lake Forest, California

'We want people to do acts of kindness,' said David Thalberg, a spokesman for the Bernstein family.

'We want them to post them, we want them to do whatever they can in Blaze's honor. Because it's the kind of kid he was.'

The family have created a website to honor Blaze's life, titled the Blaze Bernstein Memorial Fund at the Jewish Community Foundation of Orange County.
The wife of the heroic police officer who was knifed to death during the Westminster terror attack claims he was wearing an 'inadequate' stab vest.

Michelle Palmer, whose husband Keith was one of four killed by Khalid Masood in March, has yet to see a report into his body armour 10 months on from his death.

She is also demanding to know how Masood was able to enter the grounds of parliament 'so easily', as an inquest is held into the attack at the Old Bailey.

Masood, 52, was shot dead by police after he drove a rental car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before fatally stabbing PC Palmer, 48.

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Michelle Palmer (right on her wedding day), whose husband Keith (left) was one of four killed by Khalid Masood in March, has yet to see a report into his body armour 10 months on

Gareth Patterson QC , acting on behalf of Mrs Palmer, told the court: 'We welcome the indication that you will be investigating further what happened at the Houses of Parliament.

'[Also] how it was this attacker was able to get thorough those gates and how PC Palmer was apparently stationed and unarmed with, it seems, inadequate body protection.'

The pre-inquest hearing earlier heard how Masood, who was born in Kent, may have taken performance enhancing drugs hours before he launched the rampage.

Evidence of rage-inducing substances were found in a urine sample taken from Masoods dead body after he killed five people at 2.40pm on March 22.

The victims' families called for internet giants to police terrorist material online and questioned why apps like WhatsApp and Telegram require end-to-end encryption.

They also asked that upcoming inquests into the terror attack to investigate whether Masood, 52, was radicalised online or in prison.

Gareth Patterson, QC, representing the victims, said: Why it is that radicalisation material continues to be freely available on the internet we dont understand.

Michelle Palmer, whose husband Keith (left) was one of four killed by Khalid Masood (right) in March, has yet to see a report into his body armour 10 months on from his death

Evidence of rage-inducing substances were found in a urine sample taken from Masoods dead body (pictured) after he killed PC Palmer and four pedestrians at 2.40pm on March 22

This particular attacker used WhatsApp to send a jihadi document without any difficulty.

We just dont understand why it is necessary for WhatsApp and Telegram and these sort of media applications to have end-to-end encryption.

Lawyers representing the Home Office said the issue of end-to-end encryption is too broad for an inquest and is a matter of legislation and social policy.

Masood was shot dead after ramming a hired Hyundai 4x4 into at least 35 people on the bridge and leaving the vehicle to stab PC Palmer to death by the Palace of Westminster.

Spanish teacher and mother-of-two Aysha Frade, 43 from London, US tourist Kurt Cochran, 54, window cleaner Leslie Rhodes, 75, and Romanian tourist Andreea Cristea, 31, died of their injuries after Masood crashed into them.

Judge Mark Lucraft, QC, will preside over inquests into all the deaths, which are due to start at the Old Bailey on 10 September.

The lives of many were torn apart by less than two minutes of high and terrible drama. Can I start by expressing my condolences to the families, he said.

The scene by Westminster Bridge after Khalid Masood's murderous rampage on March 22

A submission by Jonathan Hough, QC, assisting the coroner, read: A urine sample from Khalid Masood provided evidence of anabolic steroids having been taken in the hours or days prior to his death.

The sample analysis is attested to by a forensic toxicologist.

A more specialist pharmaceutical toxicologist has been instructed to prepare a report addressing how steroid use may have affected Khalid Masood.

The whole incident was witnessed by the Mets Acting Commissioner Craig Mackey, who was waiting to leave the House of Commons in a car with his driver and personal assistant.

Detective Superintendent John Crossley of the Counter Terrorism Command outlined the incident to Westminster Coroners Court as the inquest into the deaths of the victims was formally opened.

DSI Crossley told the inquest the incident lasted 82 seconds and was recorded on CCTV footage.
An America sailor has been freed from house arrest overseas thanks to a memorandum issued by the Defense Secretary on January 2.

Navy Lieutenant Craig Becker, 36, was turned over to American authorities last week, and Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) will take over the lead in an investigation into the 2015 death of his wife, Johanna Hanna Elizabeth Hove-Becker, 32.

Belgian authorities charged Becker with homicide, after Hove-Becker's death in Mons, Belgium on October 8, 2015, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

Becker is accused of drugging his 32-year-old wife and tossing her from a window in Mons, Belgium, from which she fell and bounced off several balconies before plummeting to her death.

Navy Lieutenant Craig Becker (right), now 36, was turned over to American authorities last week, and Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) will take over the lead in an investigation into the 2015 death of his wife, Johanna Hanna Elizabeth Hove-Becker (left)

Defense Secretary James Mattis issued a memo in January that overruled a 2015 decision by US Naval Forces Europe and Africa that granted jurisdiction to Belgium authorities over the case.

'This memorandum should not be read as expressing any opinions as to what actions, if any, should be taken within the US military justice system,' Mattis wrote.

This follows a lawsuit filed by Becker's American attorneys against Mattis, Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer and the Navys top attorney, Vice Adm. James Crawford on November 6.

The suit, filed in Washington, DC District Court, sought that American military forces assert jurisdiction over charges lodged against him by Belgian investigators under Article VII of the NATO Status of Forces Treaty.

The view from the window Hove-Becker either fell or was pushed from is seen at left. The window is highlighted in the photo at right

Belgian authorities charged Becker (right) with homicide, after the death of Hove-Becker (left) in Mons, Belgium on October 8, 2015

The treaty allows concurrent jurisdiction to Brussels and the US because Becker's wife died in Belgium, but Becker's attorneys, San Diego-based Jeremiah J. Sullivan, III and David Patrick Sheldon in Washington, DC, argued that they couldn't find a case where the US ceded jurisdiction, when the victim was a United States citizen.

'Were still not sure what freed Lt. Becker but justice prevailed,' Sullivan told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

'Lt. Becker shouldnt be forced to litigate against his own country to exercise the constitutional rights that are afforded to him.'

Hove-Becker was born in Sweden and raised in Florida, before moving to Belgium in 2013

Hove-Becker worked as a psychologist before her death at age 32 in 2015 in Belgium

Military officials previously explained their decision to grant jurisdiction to Belgium by citing concerns that evidence obtained in Belgium would not be admissible in an American military court martial proceeding, according to military records reportedly obtained by the Union-Tribune.

The sailor is stationed on Mons with the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

The explosive ordinance disposal expert also reports to Naval Support Activity Naples, the Italian base that also houses US Naval Forces Europe and the US Sixth Fleet, with ties to Coronado-based Naval Special Warfare.

Becker's attorneys argued his security clearance and knowledge related to US nuclear capabilities would pose a threat to US national security, were he to be tried in Belgium.

No charges have currently been filed in the US against Becker.

John and Yvonne Hove of Jacksonville, Florida, parents of the deceased woman, have custody of the couple's child pending the completion of the investigation

NCIS has declined to comment while the investigation is ongoing.

John and Yvonne Hove of Jacksonville, Florida, parents of the deceased woman, have also declined to comment.

The Hoves have custody of Hove-Becker's and Becker's three-year-old daughter while the investigation continues.

Hove-Becker moved to Mons in 2013 with Becker. She was a psychologist, born in Sweden and raised in Florida. She moved with her husband to Mons in 2013.
Shoppers in a central Japanese city have been put on alert after packs of fugu were accidentally sold with highly toxic parts still inside.

A supermarket in Gamagori in central Japan sold five packages of the specially prepared pufferfish without removing the livers, which contains a deadly poison.

Three of the potentially lethal specimens have been located, but the other two remain at large, local official Koji Takayanagi said.

Shoppers in the Japanese city of Gamagori are being warned not to eat packs of fugu after five were accidentally sold with toxic parts still included

'We are calling for residents to avoid eating fugu, using Gamagori city's emergency wireless system,' which broadcasts over loudspeakers located around the city.

'Three packages will be retrieved today, but we still don't know where the remaining two are.'

Fugu is one of Japan's most expensive winter delicacies, and is often served in thin slices of sashimi or hot pot.

But the fish's skins, intestines, ovaries and livers contain a poison called tetrodotoxin that can be fatal.

The poison works by blocking signals sent by the nerves, causing muscle paralysis.

Three packs containing fish livers (pictured top right) were sold, and while three have been tacked down, another two are still unaccounted for

The part of the fish that contains the deadly poison differs from one kind of fugu to another.

Japanese chefs are required to train for at least two years to prepare the fish, before taking a test which a third of applicants fail.

Despite the rigorous training, dozens of people are thought to suffer from fugu poisoning every year, with several deaths among that number.

Eating the fish is banned in most countries, but in Japan it is considered a delicacy.
The family of a 17-year-old who was trapped in his crashed car in bushland south of Newcastle for 30 hours says police suggested he had probably just run away.

Sam Lethbridge's mother called her youngest child Megan, 19, about 6.30pm on Sunday asking if she had been in recent contact with her brother.

'Mum called me and said "have you heard from Sam?"' Megan told Daily Mail Australia. 'I knew something wasn't right.'

Sam was in fact trapped inside his car after it ran off the Pacific Highway at Crangan Bay; it was spotted from a helicopter hired by his father the next morning.

Sam Lethbridge, 17, is taken by paramedics and NSW Fire and Rescue officers from the crash

Sam Lethbridge's vehicle after he was cut free from the wreckage near Newcastle on Monday

Sam Lethbridge, 17, survived the night with a bone sticking out of his leg after his car left the Pacific Highway and slammed into an embankment at Crangan Bay

Sam Lethbridge, 17, was trapped for about 30 hours in his crashed car near Newcastle

Tony Lethbridge said his son had barely been conscious since he was freed from the vehicle.

'The only time I really spoke to him was when I first saw him in the car,' Mr Lethbridge told Daily Mail Australia. 'First thing he said to me was "I'd love a drink".'

Megan had last spoken with her brother about 12.30am on Sunday when Sam told her he had been out driving with friends.

'When I hung up I had this really weird gut feeling that something wasn't right,' she said.

Sam and Megan live with their parents Tony and Lee and older brother Luke, 21, at Blacksmiths, on Lake Macquarie.

Having contacted the friends Sam had been with on Saturday night, Megan learnt her brother had dropped a mate off at Gosford on the Central Coast shortly before 6am on Sunday.

About 14 hours after Sam was last seen Megan went to Belmont police station to report him missing.

'I asked if there had been any accidents,' Ms Lethbridge said. 'I asked "is there anything you can do?".

Paramedics and NSW Fire and Rescue officers work to free Sam Lethbridge from his car

Megan Lethbridge, 19, reported her brother Sam, 17, missing to police on Sunday night

NSW Fire and Rescue officers at Sam Lethbridge's vehicle after the 17-year-old was cut free

'They told me Sam had probably just run away. I said "that's not him. Something is really wrong".

'They just told us to go home and he'll show up.'

' I knew he didn't just run away. I knew something was terribly wrong.'

Ms Lethbridge's parents were on a weekend away in Canberra and got back home about 1am on Monday. They joined Megan at Belmont police station.

Again, according to Megan, police told the family there was little they could do about Sam's missing status.

'Dad said as soon as he walked out "we're gong to hire a helicopter and find him",' Ms Lethbridge said.

'He said "I'm not going to just sit here and lose him".'

Mr Lethbridge remembered there had been an accident about five years ago near where Sam's car was eventually found and wanted to search there.

'Everybody was saying he's probably run away and all that kind of stuff,' Mr Lethbridge told Sunrise. 'That's just not Samuel.'

Sam was believed to have been driving from Gosford, on the Central Coast, back to Blacksmiths when he left the road sometime after 6am on Sunday.

Sam Lethbridge's car had travelled about 20 metres off the highway on Sunday morning

Megan Lethbridge knew something was wrong when she could not contact her brother Sam

On Monday, Mr Lethbridge hired a helicopter which went up with pilot Lee Mitchell and Mr Lethbridge's brother Michael about 9.45am.

At 10.01am Michael Lethbridge sent a text message to his brother to say he had spotted Sam's crashed car off the Pacific Highway at Crangan Bay.

When Michael Lethbridge was able to reach the crashed vehicle he could see that Sam had survived the night. He had a bone sticking out of his leg.

Emergency services including ambulance and fire crews were called to the scene.

Sam was trapped in the driver's seat with a compound fracture to his right femur and fractures to his ankle and arm. He was freed about midday, Ms Lethbridge said.

Ms Lethbridge wanted to thank the helicopter pilot and motorist Billy Creanor who stopped to render first aid.

Sam (left) was discovered at 10.45am on Monday when his uncle spotted the wreckage on the side of the road. His sister and father are pictured right

The rescue operation took a painstaking 45 minutes, during which time Sam was given pain medication and stabilised by paramedics

Tyre marks from Sam Lethbridge's car can be seen leaving the road and leading into bushland

Sam was given pain medication during the rescue operation and was stabilised by paramedics.

NSW Ambulance superintendent Jeff Atkins said: 'When we got to him he was pretty dehydrated. But his clinical observations were quite good which was amazing.'

'He then had to be carried back to the highway.'

Sam was taken by ambulance to the John Hunter Hospital where he remains. He had suffered an ankle injury, a fractured forearm and a compound fracture to his femur.

Superintendent Atkins said the teenager would need to undergo a 'world of physio' to regain full use of his injured leg.

On Tuesday afternoon Tony Lethbridge told Daily Mail Australia his son had been unconscious for most of the time since he had been pulled from the car.

'He going good,' Mr Lethbridge said. 'He's stable. All we can do is just wait.'

Megan Lethbridge said she never believed her brother had run away.

'I don't think they took it as seriously as they could but I guess they hear [of missing teenagers] every day,' she said. 'I suppose they did all they could at the time.'

The NSW Police Force has been contacted for comment.
Advice please, Nigel, on how to boil an egg?

One things for sure. You dont want to cook it like they do in Italy, or in Poland, or in Slovakia. What they consider perfectly normal over there would certainly never be acceptable over here!

So whats the best way to boil an egg?

Let me ask you this. How many eggs are there in the European Union? Well, Ill tell you. Literally millions, possibly billions. Or even trillions. And thats a fact.

Lets face it, were never going to be told the true figures. So when you ask me Whats the best way to boil an egg?, Id ask you in return, Exactly which egg are you talking about?

Nigel Farage has offered his advice on the perfect boiled egg to Craig Brown now he has said there is 'no chance' he will return to the Ukip leadership

Would you advise bringing the water to the boil before placing the egg in the saucepan?

Hang on a second. Lets not jump the gun. What we have to do first is wrest back control of the saucepan. We might think its ours, but, let me tell you, its not! Frankly, there could be a Greek using it to make a moussaka, or a Pole to brew up cheap vodka, or heaven knows who else.

Look, you talk about bringing the water to the boil, but, frankly, we havent a cat in hells chance of bringing any water to the boil if someones just gone and drilled a hole in the bottom of the saucepan.

Actually, my saucepan is in tip-top condition.

Thats what you think. But what about your frying pan? What about my frying pan? And Ill just add this. I was talking to a bloke recently, nice bloke down the pub, and he told me his saucepan had just lost its handle. Can you believe it  someone had stolen the handle off his saucepan! Now, I dont know if this person was necessarily from Hungary or from Turkey, or from Ashby-de-la-Zouch . . .

Ashby-de-la-Zouch is in England.

Well, thats what they want you to believe. Is Ashby-de-la-Zouch in England? Its a vexed question. If it is really in England, then why dont they give it an English name? Thats all Im saying. Frankly, it looks to me  and to a great many other people, too  that this is a town with something to hide. But Ill go no further than that. Have you ever been offered a boiled egg in Ashby-de-la-Zouch? No. And nor have I. And, frankly, I dont know anyone who has.

Im not saying that the place is definitely riddled with sex offenders, terrorists and bank robbers. Personally, I find such mindless accusations offensive. But if, as you claim, Ashby-de-la-Zouch really is in England, well, that raises all sorts of questions about how it got here.

So, Nigel, any advice on the best way to boil an egg?

What is certain is that the Delias and the Nigellas and the Mary Berrys and all the other so-called cookery experts will never give up.

Theyll go on whingeing and whining about how to boil an egg until the cows come home. And, youve got to ask yourself, whats in it for them? The Delias and Nigellas and Mary Berrys of this world are always rabbiting on about grabbing a saucepan and fetching an egg and boiling up water, but do they ever tell us how much they have invested in water companies, or why they find saucepans so indispensable or how many of their known associates are hens in high places? Thats the question weve got to ask ourselves.

Once the egg is in the boiling water, how long should you let it sit there, Nigel?

Fifteen minutes for a hard egg-sit, bare minimum. But, as I say, we cant let Smith, Berry and Lawson make all the running. Frankly, they dont know the first thing about boiling eggs. Weve got to close down this whole boil-in-a-saucepan argument once and for all.

Fifteen minutes?

Thats not what I said.

But you just said, Fifteen minutes. You said thats how long you should let an egg sit.

Once again, youre quoting me completely out of context.

The clock is ticking and the time for prevarication is over. Or frankly  is it? Let me get back to you on that!
One of the most important strategic sites in Europe for the US military has come under threat from a rather unexpected enemy: a flock of sheep.

It is their random meanderings near the Deveselu base in southern Romania that has triggered an unusual power struggle between US commanders and a stubborn local sheep farmer.

Dumitru Bleja's 250 or so sheep 'grazed without problem' in the area for years before the Americans arrived at the end of 2013, says Alexandru Damian, mayor of Stoenesti, a community on the vast Danubian plain 25 miles north of the border with Bulgaria.

One of the most important strategic sites in Europe for the US military has come under threat from a rather unexpected enemy: a flock of sheep (pictured)

It is their random meanderings near the Deveselu base in southern Romania that has triggered a power struggle between US commanders and a stubborn local sheep farmer. A sheep shelter (pictured) sits next to the fence surrounding the US Deveselu military base

'Sheep are not like people. They don't respect the rules, they go into areas where security sensors are active, touching the fence and setting off alarm systems,' he says.

But this is unthinkable for the US military, which chose the site as one of its two anti-missile defense systems to help defend NATO members against the threat of short and medium-range ballistic missiles, particularly from the Middle East.

In 2014, the top US official at Deveselu informed Romania's defense ministry that having a shelter for sheep some 10 yards from the fence 'undermines the minimum security requirements and is incompatible' with the running of the base.

The complaint has spiraled into a more than three-year legal saga between the Romanian defense ministry and the farmer that has now reached the country's highest court, which on Wednesday will rule on one of the aspects of the case.

According to the mayor, Bleja had in 2007 bought nearly 2.5 acres of land adjacent to the area later taken over by the base, and a year later, he built a shelter for his sheep -- well before work began on the military site. But, the farmer never applied for planning permission to build, he says.

With the ministry pursuing him for building without a permit, the shepherd has responded with his own claims -- for damages of up to $22,000 in the event of the demolition of his 1,420-square-foot sheep pen.

For the mayor, the situation is 'embarrassing'. 'We have signed a treaty with the Americans and we should respect it,' he says.

Contacted by AFP, the US military declined to comment 'on a dispute between the Romanian government and a private citizen'.

The base at Deveselu is part of the NATO missile shield and was built at an estimated cost of $800 million

The mayor said Bleja bought nearly 2.5 acres of land ikn 2007 adjacent to the area later taken over by the base, and a year later, he built a shelter for his sheep before work began on the military site. But, the farmer reportedly never applied for planning permission to build

'We sincerely appreciate the strong and continued partnership between the United States and our Romanian allies that allows for continued operations at Naval Support Facility Deveselu,' said Lieutenant Tim Pietrack, spokesman for the US Navy's Europe, Africa and Southwest Asia region.

The base at Deveselu, which is part of the NATO missile shield and was built at an estimated cost of $800 million, was inaugurated in May 2016, infuriating Russia which views it as a security threat right on its doorstep.

In Stoenesti, residents are largely reluctant to talk 'to avoid getting into trouble' with Bleja, but some believe that he is the one at fault.

'Even if we're talking about building a road, people should just accept the conditions laid out' by the authorities responsible for expropriations, said one bar owner.

'You can't just dig in your heels and do things of your own accord. The landowner must reach an agreement with the military and with the local authorities,' said a 69-year-old retiree, Nicoleta Nacu.

With the ministry pursuing him for building without a permit, the shepherd has responded with his own claims -- for damages of up to $22,000 in the event of the demolition of his 1,420-square-foot sheep pen

Ahead of Wednesday's verdict, the farmer -- who declined to be interviewed -- has gone with his sheep to his hometown of Caracal, which lies about 9 miles west of Stoenesti. Pictured is the sheep shelter

'And the damages he is asking for are exaggerated because after all, the sheep pen is not all that big.'

One local councilor even accused the farmer of buying the land and building the shelter there 'on purpose, to be able to demand significant compensation from the Americans'.

But the idea is dismissed out of hand by Bleja's lawyer Serban Dinu.

'Out of the question,' he says.

'Back in 2007, nobody knew that Deveselu would be chosen' as the site for a US base, he told AFP.

Ahead of Wednesday's verdict, the farmer -- who declined to be interviewed -- has gone with his sheep to his hometown of Caracal, which lies about 9 miles west of Stoenesti.
Retired USAF Colonel Charles Halt is shown on video admitting that two men involved in the Rendlesham Forest incident in Suffolk, England were 'unaccounted for hours'

A U.S. Air Force colonel was recorded saying he believes two men involved in the Rendlesham Forest incident - considered the 'British Roswell' - where perhaps abducted by aliens.

Video recently released shows Charles Halt saying he believes one of the two men, John Burroughs, 'may have been abducted' and admitting that both Burroughs and Jim Penniston were 'unaccounted for hours'.

Halt, who is now retired, was discussing the December 26, 1980 incident in which Staff Sergeant Penniston and Airman Burroughs reportedly interacted with a small aircraft that landed in Rendlesham Forest, near the NATO airbases of RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk, England.

Halt was working as a deputy commander in the U.S. army at the time.

Halt, in his original memo to the UK's Ministry of Defence, did not mention his thoughts that have now been revealed by former police detective Gary Heseltine, who along with his wife, Lynn, is making a documentary about the incident.

The video was shot by Lynn in 2010 and shows her husband walking and talking with Halt about the incident.

The admission comes courtesy of a 2010 video showing Halt (left) discussing the December 1980 incident with Gary Heseltine (right), who along with his wife Lynn is making a documentary about it

Staff Sergeant Jim Penniston (right) and Airman John Burroughs (left) allegedly interacted with a UFO that landed in Rendlesham Forest on December 26, 1980

Pictured is the east gate at RAF Woodbridge, near where the incident is alleged to have occurred. In the video, Halt says: '[John Burroughs] may have been abducted, who knows

The notion that Burroughs and Penniston were abducted by the unidentified flying object has been widespread.

Halt became involved on December 28, 1980, when he returned to the area of Rendlesham Forest where Burroughs and Penniston claimed to have seen the aircraft.

He allegedly saw a light-beam from the aircraft.

One witness told The Sun in December 2016: 'I could see these lights over the treetops, and I was thinking, what's going on? Then they started sending people out there and at first it was hard to believe, all these bright lights. It was hard to take in.'

The UK's Ministry of Defence dismissed the incident.

The incident is called the 'British Roswell' after the famous alleged UFO citing in Roswell, New Mexico.

'[John Burroughs] may have been abducted, who knows,' the footage shows Halt saying. 'I don't play that up.'

He adds: 'You know there is lost time, we know that. They were not on the radio.'

Pictured is another view of the gate. One witness to a December 28 sighting told The Sun: 'I could see these lights over the treetops, and I was thinking, what's going on? Then they started sending people out there and at first it was hard to believe, all these bright lights. It was hard to take in'

Heseltine told The Sun he believes Halt's admission is in the 'public interest'

Halt sent a memo to the UK's Ministry of Defence about the incident. The Ministry dismissed its potential significance

Heseltine told The Sun that he decided to release the video now because the admission that Penniston and Burroughs had lost communication with the base 'had never been made public'.

'I think it is in the public interest,' he added to The Sun.

Halt, meanwhile, told The Sun: 'I never said anyone was abducted.'

The revelation comes after this past summer's reveal of 'Britain's X-Files', some of which shed further light on the Rendlesham Forest incident.

'What's readily apparent from a detailed study of all this is that the MoD was telling Parliament, the media and the public that the UFO phenomenon was of "no defense significance" and of limited interest to the MoD', Nick Pope who was part of the Ministry of Defence's UFO project from 1991 to 1994 told MailOnline last summer.

'However, the files show that behind the scenes, the subject was obviously taken more seriously than we let on, with many of the cases self-evidently being of great defence significance  e.g. when UFOs were seen in close proximity to military bases, were encountered by RAF pilots, or were tracked on radar by fighter controllers or air traffic controllers.'

Halt (pictured in a portrait from his army days) told The Sun: 'I never said anyone was abducted'

The incident was deemed the 'British Roswell' in reference to an alleged UFO sighting in Roswell, New Mexico
A Sydney mother who saved for a year to take her two children to Perth was left sitting drenched and bag-less after her plane landed with no luggage on board.

Louisa Roberto was on board Qantas flight 565 on Monday morning and says she and her two children, who both have special needs, had been waiting at the baggage carousel for half an hour before an announcement was made.

'Not one bag came off that belt, not one,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

For most, a missing bag is an inconvenience. For Ms Roberto, whose luggage contained her son's medication, it was a nightmare.

Louisa Roberto, a single mother of two, was left without her son's medication after their flight from Sydney landed in Perth without a single passenger's suitcase on board

Her 10-year-old son Ollie has Autism and ADHD. The family landed at 8.15am, and Iggy was due for his next dose of medication at lunch time.

When her bags did not arrive, panic began to set in for the mother-of-two.

The trio waited around for as long as possible, but as her son became more and more restless, Ms Roberto knew she had to get him to the hotel.

'They said we could wait for next flight [which would have our bags on it], but with a child like mine, I can't wait around,' she said.

Ms Roberto and her sons (from left: Iggy, eight, and Ollie, 10,) were not informed their baggage was missing until they had waited at the baggage carousel for about half an hour

The family sat drenched from the rain, without their bags for as long as they could after being promised their belongings - and Ollie's medication - were on the next flight over

When she told airline staff her dilemma, she said they were abrupt and told her she should not have packed it in check-in luggage.

'In a sense, they're correct and I should have packed it on with me, but I thought stupidly and wrongly my bags would arrive,' she said.

'Not one person got anything off the [baggage] carousel,' she said.

Ms Roberto's bags did eventually arrive - late on Monday afternoon.

Had they not, the holiday she had spent a year saving for would have been canned.

'The medication [that Iggy is on], you can't get from a GP - you need a specialist and you need an authorisation code from the government to receive it,' she said.

The bags arrived late on Monday afternoon, but had they not, the young family would have needed to fly home, ruining the holiday Ms Roberta saved for a year to afford

An issue with cargo hold of QF565 from Sydney to Perth and also from QF772 from Perth to Melbourne meant no luggage could be loaded on to the flights.

In both instances, the airline loaded stranded baggage on to the next available flight, and customers in destinations other than their home state were compensated if their luggage was not returned within 24 hours.

A spokeswoman for Qantas told Daily Mail Australia: 'We appreciate the frustration caused by flight delays and the inconvenience caused when customers bags dont arrive when they should.

'We sincerely apologise to our customers who were impacted by our baggage delays yesterday.'

Journalist Peter van Onselen, who was also on the plane, was left outraged when his bag also did not appear on the conveyor belt, which Ms Roberto claims didn't even turn on

Journalist Peter Van Onselen was also on the flight, and had taken to Twitter to report no bags had been on the plane.

On Monday, a fault in the baggage belt at Sydney Airport also affected passengers luggage, with about 100 bags across a number of flights headed around the country left behind in Sydney.

Ms Roberto also slammed the airline for their poor handling of the situation.

'At the airport, I didn't get as much as one apology. It was just "oh well",' she said.

'They should be offering something in compensation. I would have been happy with a coffee.

'I'm still waiting for even an apology.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Qantas for further comment.
A Queensland mother has claimed her 16-year-old daughter was 'sexually harassed and racially vilified' in a bizarre job interview at McDonald's.

Rita Pryce, from North Queensland, took toFacebook on Monday to share her disgust and frustration after her daughter was reduced to tears in her first ever job interview.

Ms Pryce claims her daughter was asked irrelevant questions including: 'Do you think you're beautiful?'

Rita Pryce (pictured) claims her daughter was sexually harassed and racially vilified by a McDonald's manager

She said her daughter was 'harassed and vilified' in a McDonald's job interview

'This was one of the many ridiculous questions an award-winning senior staff member of the McDonald's asked my 16yr old daughter at her FIRST ever job interview recently,' she posted to Facebook.

'Just when I was furious to hear that in the car minutes later from my daughter while she was crying, scared after feeling intimated through the entire interview, she told me about the rest of it.'

Ms Pryce posted a transcript of how she claims the interview went.

She said her daughter was asked questions including 'what is two plus two?' and told people with bubbly personalities (such as her daughter's) 'make a lot of mistakes.'

'Those inappropriate questions left my daughter feeling sexually harassed and racially vilified,' Ms Pryce said.

The mother said she phoned McDonald's to make a formal complaint, but was disgusted to later find out the employee who interviewed her daughter was still working at the store.

In response to the claims, McDonald's told Daily Mail Australia the manager has been stood down.

'McDonalds takes any matter of this nature incredibly seriously. The allegations described are unacceptable and when McDonalds head office was informed of this matter today we started an immediate review,' a McDonald's spokesperson said.

'We are making efforts to contact the mother to seek further details, in addition, the manager has been placed on leave to allow us to conduct a full and fair investigation.'
A four-year-old boy was horrifically savaged by a dog that jumped at his face as he played on the beach with his mother.

The little boy was rushed from Conway Beach in the Whitsundays to Proserpine Hospital about 5.50pm on Sunday.

Witness Sandra-Lee Kelly said the boy needed 50 stitches to large slices, gashes and puncture marks on his face and under his chin.

A four-year-old boy was horrifically savaged by a dog that jumped at his face as he played on a beach in the Whitsundays until his mother fought it off

His injuries were so severe that he was taken to Lady Cilento Children's Hospital in Brisbane for treatment, and was discharged on Tuesday.

Ms Kelly said the toddler mother had to fight off the aggressive red dog that could be a dingo, a wild or feral dog, or one that escaped its owners.

'The dog pounced and mauled his face and his mother kicked at the dog and it was very fortunate the dog ran away,' she said.

The local council was trying to determine what type of dog it was and whether it was wild, a common pest in the area, or a domesticated one.


She is currently a student at Georgetown Law - but Tiffany Trump took time away from her studies over the weekend to moonlight as a flower girl at the Las Vegas wedding of two of her close friends.

Tiffany, 24, strutted her stuff down the aisle at the ceremony ahead of the bride and groom - socialite Quentin Esme Brown and NYC Prep reality star Peter Carey Peterson, also known as 'PC'.

The raucous weekend actually began as a 25th birthday celebration for socialite Andrew Warren, who is also Tiffany's best friend, and the bride and groom revealed that they only planned the big ceremony on the day it took place - Sunday - during a 'sober breakfast'.

Tiffany Trump, 24, moonlighted over the weekend in Las Vegas as a flower girl at the wedding of two of her close friends

Pretty pose! Trump looked poised as she walked down the aisle with perfect posture - as her Secret Service agents looked on

Trump was all smiles in sky-high heels, to celebrate the marriage of 'best friends'

The president's daughter wore a form-fitting black dress and she sauntered down the aisle to celebrate the wedding of her celebrity friends

Nevertheless, they had certainly taken the time to think out certain key details - even Tiffany's fitting flower girl accessory.

No doubt a play on her own name, the youngest daughter of President Donald Trump tossed flowers from a Tiffany & Co bag at A Little White Wedding Chapel in Vegas as her secret service detail looked on.

Lucky groom Peter is the grandson of billionaire former US Secretary of Commerce Pete Peterson, while the bride is the daughter of late Hamptons real estate developer Harry Joe Brown Jr.

And as expected from a Vegas ceremony, the wedding was far from traditional.

Instead of a classic bridesmaids gown, the president's daughter wore a form-fitting black mini dress that allowed her to show off ample lengths of leg as she sauntered down the aisle to celebrate the wedding of her celebrity friends.

Looking delighted to have been given a starring role at the event, Tiffany beamed with happiness as she walked confidently down the short aisle at the Vegas chapel, pausing now and then to reach into her Tiffany's bag and pull out more pink rose petals to throw into the air.

Once she reached the end of the walkway, she struck a pose with arm in the air and let more pink rose petals fly

Tiffany tossed flowers from a Tiffany & Co bag at A Little White Wedding Chapel in Vegas

Tiffany took a seat and watched with joy, as other friends followed in her footsteps to stand at the alter for the ceremony

'Unconventional, yet unconditional,' Brown wrote on Saturday with an Instagram post, describing her wedding to her 'best friend'

The newlyweds, Peter Carey Peterson, also known as 'PC,' and Esme Brown, are 'best friends' who have 'never had sex' but wanted to marry, nonetheless

Having turned the aisle into her own personal runway, she then struck a pose at the end with her arm held high in the air, letting more of the flowers fly in the process.

Tiffany then stepped away from the spotlight, taking a seat at the front of the chapel to watch as her two friends took their place in front of the altar.

Adding another unique element to the proceedings was the relationship between the bride and groom - who revealed on their Instagram accounts that they do not actually have a romantic relationship, but are instead 'best friends' and 'soulmates' who wanted to celebrate their 'pure friendship' with an official union.

They also both confirmed that they have 'never had sex' and suggested that they never expect to have a romantic or sexual relationship in the future.

'Unconventional, yet unconditional,' newlywed Brown wrote on Saturday, alongside a picture of herself and her new husband at the ceremony.

She continued: 'Married to my best friend. My soulmate. The person who never turned his back on me and vice versa. We have one life. Free yourself! P.S. We have never had sex. Its pure friendship.'

They star-studded ensemble partied the night away Omnia nightclub, leading up to the wedding; Tiffany was joined by her close friends Peter Mark Brant (right) and Andrew Warren

Strike a pose: Tiffany confidently posed for plenty of pictures during her Vegas stay, and is seen pouting alongside birthday boy Andrew, and Magic Johnson's son EJ (left)

Tiffany danced up a storm in a white dress in Las Vegas, with EJ Johnson behind her

EJ Johnson can be seen behind Tiffany as she showed off her moves in white mini dress

Celebration! Tiffany also found time to celebrate the birthday of her friend Andrew - who seemed delighted with his raucous weekend of fun

Warren appeared to enjoy numerous celebrations over the weekend, including a dinner at Lavo

In a later post, shared on Sunday by both the bride and groom, they admitted that they had been 'deluged with questions, concerns and comments'.

'I wanted to clear the air about my marriage,' she wrote on the post - which was also shared by Peter. 'Yes, it was in Vegas and planned that day... but it was also planned sober over breakfast and had been a plan developing between Peter Cary and I for over a decade.

'He has always been my soulmate in every sense of the word and we mutually felt that Vegas was the place to finalize our commitment to partnership: a) because we were amongst close friends and b) because we love to have a little bit of a laugh.

'No, this was not a drunken act on a whim, and no we will not be getting an anulment.

'Peter and I - as well as many of you - have seen the pain and destruction of failed marriage... something that happens frequently and often times due to a sexual component - whether extramarital affairs or losing interest.

'There are often marriages that are without sex and are more of "an arrangement" - but many times the former part of that statement is hidden from society.

Trump looked pretty in pink as she prepared to set off for Andrew's birthday brunch with Brant - after posing in front of a velvety, icy blue couch

Blonde bombshells: Tiffany can be seen posing with her friend Sarah Shatz, who works for private member's club Velocity Black

What turned into a wedding started as a birthday celebration for socialite Andrew Warren, who is also Tiffany's best friend

The group, which happened to be in Vegas anyway, included the likes of Abigail Breslin, Reya Benitez and EJ Johnson as they partied the night away

Warren's entourage had a blast at Omnia nightclub, before Peterson and Brown got married

Trump (right) wore a sequin-covered outfit in gold and black as she partied with Warren (left) and another woman in Las Vegas

Peace: Actress Abigail Breslin (center), another friend of Andrew's can be seen cosying up to the birthday boy, as well as Peter, and a blonde latex-clad friend

'Within this observation an idea began to unfold that marriage is perhaps much more of a commitment to one's counterpart who is the best possible partner for you.'

She later added that she hopes her kids will grow up 'differently' to her, explaining that she wants society to be fully accepting of homosexual parents in the future - something that was not the case when she was a child.

Brown then explained: 'Peter and I are not romantically involved - in fact we are still dating others and will continue to seek love in all forms - we are just each other's hearts and wish to begin our journey towards evolution, because the more we face reality, the more we can see that there is no right or wrong.'

As well as Tiffany, the wedding party included the likes of actress Abigail Breslin, socialite Reya Benitez, and EJ Johnson, of Rich Kids of Beverly Hills fame, and the son of former basketball star Magic Johnson - all of whom appear to have been in Vegas already in order to celebrate the birthday of their mutual friend Andrew Warren.

They star-studded ensemble partied the night away Omnia nightclub, leading up to the wedding.

Happy as can be: The first daughter had a huge smile plastered on her face as she partied the weekend away

Fashion show: At one point, Tiffany donned a black and gold sequined ensemble for the first night out in Sin City, showing off her decolletage in the low-cut number

Shake it! The weekend originally began as a birthday celebration for Tiffany's friend Andrew - before the wedding was arrange on Sunday

Tiffany and Peter celebrated the weekend away in Las Vegas, both before and after their friends' wedding, even finding time to ride in a gondola at The Venetian

The first daughter, seen posing with close friend Peter, found time to change into numerous form-fitting ensembles through the weekend of fun

Pout patrol: Tiffany looked confident and happy in front of the cameras throughout the weekend - happily showing off her new bangs, which are the work of A-list style Jose Eber

Smiling: Peter shared a close-up video of Tiffany as they took a ride on the gondola with two other friends

But while some clearly expressed their disapproval over the union, Brown's mother expressed support for the marriage, with the bride posting a screen grab of a text message sent to her and her new husband by her mom on Monday.

'I just want to say I'm very proud of you both for taking this bold, progressive step,' she wrote in the text.

'It took a few hours to recover from the surprise (!), but now that I have (for the most part), I applaud your decision to just go for it. Bravo!'

Brown shared the text along with the caption: 'I have a hero for a mother and I couldn't be more grateful.'

And the wedding party certainly didn't let any naysayers get in the way of their fun-filled weekend, which seems to have come to a close on Monday lunchtime, with several of the guests revealing that they were on their way home - many returning to New York.

Tiffany, meanwhile, is due to return to her studies at Georgetown Law in Washington, D.C. in time for the start of her Spring Semester on Tuesday 16 January.

A-list guests: Actress Abigail, who also attended the weekend of fun, shared just a few snaps from the getaway of herself posing on her hotel balcony

Chic: The 21-year-old was also pictured smoking a she posed for a photo

The morning after: Newlywed Brown appeared to be suffering slightly after her wedding celebrations (right) which were hailed as 'bold and progressive' by her mother (left)

However if the thought of her impending classes was worrying her over the winter break, she certainly didn't let it show, enjoying a fun-filled West Coast getaway throughout the holiday season.

As well as her break in Las Vegas, the daughter of President Trump also enjoyed a getaway in Los Angeles, where she treated herself to a new hairdo, courtesy of celebrity stylist Jose Eber, and was also seen ringing in 2018 at Playboy's New Year's Eve party, hosted by the late Hugh Hefner's son Cooper and his girlfriend Scarlett Byrne.

DailyMail.com also revealed that Tiffany went on a shopping spree at the newly branded Kitson Kitross store, where she admitted she found the items pertaining to her famous father 'hilarious!'

She browsed each aisle and asked, 'Where on earth do you guys find this stuff?' and ended up purchasing three of the Donald Trump 'Over Re-action' figures where the 45th Commander In Chief can be posed with his middle finger up.

'My Dad couldn't have this in the Oval Office,' she mused, 'But he could have it in his New York one.'
Commuter chaos is expected for the first day back at work after Australia Day as Sydney train staff declare a 24-hour strike.

The Rail, Tram and Bus Union called the stoppage from 12.01am for both Sydney and NSW networks on January 29 as the latest salvo in an escalating pay dispute.

Train workers are demanding a six per cent yearly pay rise in each of the next four years, claiming to be the lowest paid in the nation.

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Mass delays are expected across Sydney's train and bus networks, as transport workers refuse to work overtime

Only RTBU members are allowed to strike with legal protection from repercussions with Sydney Trains, so some workers will keep working.

'We're disappointed it has come to this, but management and the NSW Government haven't left us with any other options,' RTBU NSW Secretary Alex Claassens said.

'Workers have been trying to negotiate a fair and reasonable enterprise agreement for well over six months now, but the NSW Government and Sydney and NSW Trains management have refused to bargain fairly.

'Not just around pay, but around basic conditions that impact their safety and the safety of commuters.

'The terrible way management and the NSW Government are willing to treat its hard-working employees has been laid bare for everyone to see lately.

'Workers are being stretched to capacity trying to deliver the shambolic new timetable, and now on top of this they're all being told they can't be guaranteed fair conditions and pay.'

The Monday strike is in addition to an indefinite ban on overtime beginning on January 25 that will cause delays and cancellations for day or weeks.

Sydney Trains relies on huge numbers of staff to do overtime to run its schedule, especially since the new timetable came into effect.

The strike was called as many of the union's members didn't think the overtime ban by itself went far enough.

With Sydney Trains relying on its drivers to do overtime to run its schedule, the move is expected to cause chaos for commuters

Mr Claassens said on Monday, about the overtime ban, that the government could stop the industrial action from going ahead if it met their demands.

'From Thursday the 25th of January, there will be an indefinite ban on overtime work. We've seen in the past few days that excessive overtime is leaving workers across the network fatigued and exhausted,' he said.

'The ban on overtime is important in order to protect our workmates and commuters.'

Mr Claasens said the union was 'incredibly disappointed we've had to get to this point'.

'No one wants to take industrial action, but we haven't been left with any other options at this stage,' he said.

'We're still hopeful that management and the government will come to the table and deliver an enterprise agreement that provides workers with the wages and conditions they deserve, so we don't have to take any more action. Our door is always open.'

Sydney Trains Chief Executive Howard Collins (pictured) as he speaks to the media

Mr Claasens said the NSW Government expected transport workers 'to do more with far less'.

He ensured commuters they would be kept updated with as much information as possible in lead up to next week's action.

'The last thing any railway worker wants to do is inconvenience commuters... but i'm sure everyone will understand, we've been forced to this point.'

Sydney Trains boss Howard Collins responded to the announcement on Tuesday saying it would create havoc for commuters.

'That will have an impact on the network... we are working on those contingency plans now,' he told reporters.

'It would be an important challenge for us and we would have to reschedule (trains).'
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Four of the children living in the California house of horrors were seen less than two months ago looking 'very thin and very albino', a neighbor has said.

Housewife Wendy Martinez, 41, who lives in a home behind the single-story ranch-style property, told DailyMail.com she saw four of the children kneeling in the front yard late at night at the end of October.

She said the quartet looked emaciated and pale, and appeared to have been instructed not to respond when she tried to say hello to them.

'It was about 9pm at night and we came around right here and at the gate, we saw four children inside,' Martinez said.

'They were on their knees, four little kids, and they were just rolling on the grass. It was odd at that time of night.

'Their mother was in the archway, I just remember the mother in the archway, and I said, "hi". There was like no movement, not even to look over to see who's saying hi.

'No movement, like if they were told not to speak to anybody. The mom, no movement at all.'

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'Things 1 to 13': The family are seen in Dr Seuss-style shirts, and all in blue jeans, in a family photo taken in April 2016

Wendy Martinez (left) thought the Turpins were the perfect family, but Dennis Cooke (right) did not the think their 'beautiful' home was big enough to house 13 children

Two parents have been arrested after 13 of their children were found shackled to beds inside their home in California

Asked whether she thought the children needed help, she told DailyMail.com: 'Honestly, I didn't see like they needed help.

'They were in their yard. It was awkward that it was at 9pm at night but they were in their yard.'

David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested Sunday after 13 adults and children aged between two and 29 were found inside their four-bedroom Perris home.

Some of the children had been shackled to their beds and, cops said, were being held in 'a foul-smelling room'.

The Turpins purchased the house, which sits on a quiet well-to-do street, for $351,000 in August 2014  later registering it as a school.

Sitting within a new development, the house had been a model home and was, said Dennis Cooke, 61, 'already tricked out with custom fittings' when they moved in.

Parents David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested and charged with torture and child endangerment

Police originally thought all of the victims were children but soon discovered seven were adults. The family are pictured above

Cooke, who works at Home Depot in Perris, said he had been shown around the property before the Turpins moved in, adding: 'This one was very beautiful, it was already tricked out with custom fittings, the backyard done, the landscaping done.'

But he said the spacious four-bedroom home is nowhere near large enough for 15 occupants, telling DailyMail.com: 'Oh no, no. Absolutely not. I would say a normal family, if they had six children, it could be adequate but 13, no. absolutely not.'

Although the Turpins were understood to be running a school from the house, neighbors said they saw no sign of parents arriving to drop off their children  and most said they had no idea that a young family lived in the property.

'You know what, I drive past this way every day but I've never seen the family or anything,' said nurse Janeece Calhoun, 21. 'Never anybody coming in or out.'

Neighbor Michelle Walls, 47, added: 'You would think you would have heard them. In our neighborhood, kids are usually out playing, shooting hoops. Going to the park.

'I'm surprised I never saw them because most kids need to go outside and play.'

The Turpin family, as well as extended relatives, are seen enjoying a holiday at Disneyland in California in 2011

Martinez says she last saw a member of the family a month ago, when she spotted one of the couple's teenage daughters drive past in a red Volkswagen Jetta, which was seen parked outside the home today.

She said: 'One of the girls was coming in in the red Jetta. They were in and out. I think it was one of the girls, I don't know which one it was, but as I was going out, she was coming in. She'd been out.'

Martinez added: 'It's weird  you never know what's going on. They've got three cars and that [mini]van. They move it, there's no cobwebs.

'They're mobile. I don't understand why they would wait so long to say something. Looking at their pictures, they seemed like the perfect family.'

Other shocked neighbors on Muir Woods Road said they did not even know children lived in the property, and were horrified to learn what was really going on inside.

House of horrors: The victims, all siblings aged between two and 29 years old, were being held captive in a home in Perris, California, police said. Media are seen outside the house

Loved-up: Pictures on Facebook show the Turpins getting married, with their children next to them at the altar

Playing happy families: The Turpins are pictured smiling at their wedding, which was conducted by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas

Neighbors told the Press-Enterprise they were horrified to learn of the allegations.

Andrew Santillan, who lives nearby said: 'I didn't know there were kids in the house. I had no idea this was going on.'

Zinzi and Ricardo Ross live on the same road as the Turpins.

'It's very shocking. Very devastating,' Mr Ross said.

'It's crazy, I can't believe this is going on,' Mrs Ross added.

But Andria Valdez said she had seen the children before, joking that they were like the vampire family in the Twilight books and films because they were 'really, really pale' and 'only came out at night'.

Another local said the children were seen building a Nativity scene in the front yard of their home a few years ago, but were 'weird about it' when complimented on their work.

State records appear to suggest David Turpin home-schools his six children at their address, calling it Sandcastle Day School.

David Turpin's parents, James and Betty Turpin, told ABC News they were 'surprised and shocked' at the news.

The couple, who live in West Virginia, said they had not visited the family for four or five years but had spoken to them on the phone, although not with their grandchildren.

Andrew Santillan, who lives nearby to the home (pictured) said: 'I didn't know there were kids in the house. I had no idea this was going on'

Mr and Mrs Turpin were arrested and charged with nine counts of torture and 10 of child endangerment. Neither of them have a serious criminal record. Camera crews are seen outside the home

Neighbors stand outside a home where a couple was arrested after police discovered that 13 people had been held captive in filthy conditions

The siblings - of which six are adults and seven are children - were only found after their 17-year-old sister broke out of the home and called the police.

Riverside County Sheriff's Department began investigating after the 17-year-old girl freed herself, escaped the home and called the police on a cell phone she stole from inside the property on Sunday morning, cops said.

The girl's 12 siblings were then discovered by officers, who charged their parents with torture and child endangerment.

Officers arrived at the home early on Sunday morning and found several children and adults chained and padlocked to beds in a foul-smelling room.

They were malnourished, dirty and all of them have been hospitalized, police said.

The victims were given food and drinks and Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services will care for them once they are well enough to be released from hospital.

Shocked neighbors gathered on the street as police investigate the home where 12 siblings were found shackled

Some neighbors said they were unaware children even lived in the home in Perris, California. Neighbors are seen on the street

Police initially thought all of the victims were children but soon discovered seven were adults.

Mr and Mrs Turpin were arrested and charged with nine counts of torture and 10 of child endangerment. Neither of them have a serious criminal record.

The couple are being held at Robert Presley Detention Center east of Los Angeles and their bail has been set at $9million. They will appear in court on Thursday.

Pictures on Facebook show the Turpins renewing their vows at a wedding ceremony in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator, with 13 children posing for photos in matching outfits for the boys and the girls.

The 10 girls are all dressed in pink dresses with white tights and white shoes, while the boys are seen in suits with purple ties - and bowl haircuts like their father.

Other pictures show the family smiling on a trip to Disneyland, while another shows them wearing Dr Seuss-style shirts, with each child's top emblazoned with 'Thing 1' to 'Thing 13'.
The next morning, the cannabis plants were missing despite being guarded

A police guard was left to protect the seized plants the property overnight

Two people were arrested and taken into police custody on Monday night

Almost a hundred cannabis plants were stolen while under guard in Perth

A group of West Australian police officers were embarrassed on Tuesday morning after light-fingered thieves stole almost 100 cannabis plants overnight.

Police were called to a home at Anketell on Monday to investigate an alleged 'cannabis cultivation project' tip-off on the Perth property.

'They recovered a large number of plants being hydroponically grown inside the home, and arrested a 61-year-old man and a 41-year-old woman.

A light-fingered thief stole almost a hundred cannabis plants out from under police guard

A crime scene was established with officers delegated to guard the property overnight. They returned the next morning to execute a search warrant.

But WA Today reported that when officers arrived the next day, the scene had been 'breached' and nearly 100 plants had been removed.

An investigation has been launched by internal affairs as officers work to determine how the thieves gained access to the home and left without being detected.

Meanwhile, the Organised Crime Squad are investigation 'a range of serious drug offences' that may have occurred at the property.

The man and woman were charged over illegally growing cannabis and will front the Perth Magistrate's Court on Tuesday.
More than one fifth of Donald Trump's US condominiums have been purchased by unidentified organizations in secret and in cash since the 1980s, an investigation has found.

These transactions mean buyers can hide their finances and identities and avoid legal scrutiny, according to a report by BuzzFeed.

More than 1,300 Trump condos were bought by shell companies instead of people and the deals were completed without a mortgage, records of Trump's property deals show.

The Treasury Department says these characteristics could mean the buyer is laundering money.

The amount of money possibly being laundered, which has been calculated by BuzzFeed, totals at around $1.5 billion.

This accounts for 21 per cent of the 6,400 Trump condos sold in the US.

More than one fifth of Donald Trump's US condominiums have been purchased by unidentified organizations in secret and in cash since the 1980s, an investigation has found. From left to right Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are pictured at Trump Soho press conference on September 19, 2007 in New York City

Shell companies buying the properties and all-cash deals are not considered illegal, and the Trump Organization has no obligation to reveal their funding sources.

But anti-corruption officials say that these practices used throughout the luxury real estate market, and in Trump's company, could point to money laundering.

More than 1,300 Trump condos were bought by shell companies and were completed without a mortgage. Pictured is the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago

Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the Treasury Department's former financial-crimes chief, told BuzzFeed that federal investigations 'continue to reveal corrupt politicians, drug traffickers and other criminals using shell companies to purchase luxury real estate with cash'.

The Treasury Department also said that all-cash real-estate purchases by shell companies are 'an attractive avenue for criminals to launder illegal proceeds while masking their identities.'

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network say hundreds of the secretive Trump condo sales may indicate money laundering.

Over $205 million in sales were to business based in foreign countries who are notorious for keeping records and banking information confidential.

These include the British Virgin Islands, Panama and the Cayman Islands.

Other jurisdictions include Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Jersey, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands Antilles, Switzerland, and St. Vincent and Grenadines.

The State Department says the British Virgin Islands has 'significant money laundering risks,' Panama is 'an attractive target for money laundering,' and in Cayman Islands, money laundering mostly involves 'fraud, tax evasion and drug trafficking.'

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network say hundreds of the secretive Trump condo sales may indicate money laundering. Pictured is the Trump SoHo in February 2017

According to the report, at least 28 shell companies resold their Trump properties within six months of buying them in cash. Cars are seen going past Trump Tower in Manhattan last week

Trump is seen speaking to reporters at the Trump International Golf Club at West Palm Beach. Neither the White House or his company has responded to requests for comment

According to the report, at least 28 shell companies resold their Trump properties within six months of buying them in cash.

The National Association of Realtors says this could indicate money laundering 'especially if the resale price is significantly higher or lower than the original purchase price.'

Stefan Cassella, a former deputy chief of the Justice Department's Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section, said it's difficult to distinguish between secretive sales that are done for legal reasons from those that hide criminal activity.

'If a money launderer is doing his job well, he's making the transaction look legitimate,' Cassella said.
Logan Paul feels even he deserves a second chance following the scandal surrounding a tasteless video he posted of a dead body in Japan's Suicide Forest.

Walking through Los Angeles International Airport on Monday, the 22-year-old did not seem to thrilled to be answering questions as he made his way through security.

'Everyone deserves a second chance bro,' the annoyed Paul said as he made his way through the terminal.

Walking through Los Angeles International Airport on Monday, Logan Paul said that his next venture will most likely have to do with clothing brand Maverick

'Everyone deserves a second chance bro,' the annoyed Paul said as he made his way through the terminal

The embattled Paul added he was being treated 'fairly' by YouTube after the company severed connections with the star after backlash from the video.

Paul continued by telling the paparazzo that he had learned 'so many things' from the incident and when asked about future plan he said 'its coming.'

At one point, the 22-year-old pointed to his neon-pink and charcoal grey pull over, insinuating that he was going to be focusing on a clothing brand - Maverick - for his next venture.

YouTube cut ties with Logan Paul in the wake of the scandal surrounding the disturbing suicide video he posted that showed a corpse hanging from a tree.

The 22-year-old's multimillion subscriber channels are being removed as a preferred ad partner and all original projects with Logan are now being put on hold, YouTube revealed on Wednesday.

YouTube star Logan Paul's multimillion subscriber channels are axed in the wake of the scandal surrounding the disturbing suicide video he posted (above)

Logan also has been cut from the original YouTube comedy series Foursome, which stars other similar social media entertainers.

'In light of recent events, we have decided to remove Logan Paul's channels from Google Preferred,' a YouTube spokesperson said.

Google Preferred collects YouTube's main content into packages for advertisers.

'Additionally, we will not feature Logan in Season 4 of Foursome and his new originals are on hold,' YouTube added.

It comes after the video sharing company faced backlash for not quickly responding to the video Logan posted on December 31.

YouTube issued a statement 11 days later condemning Logan and the footage.

The social media star sparked a furious backlash from celebrities, fans and the press, leading the YouTube megastar to post not one, but two apologies, and an announcement he was taking time off 'to reflect.'

Since then, the prankster, who typically posts on social media multiple times a day and shares several videos a week, has stepped back from YouTube and Twitter, and has barely been seen out.

It comes after YouTube faced backlash for not quickly responding to the video Logan posted on December 31. YouTube issued the above statement on Twitter on Tuesday

The social media star created furor when he posted a 15-minute video of him coming upon the corpse of a man hanging from a tree in a Japanese forest known for its high rate of suicides.

'Did we just find a dead person in the suicide forest hanging?', Logan asked a man, who appeared to be guiding them through the forest, at the start of the 15-minute shocking video.

The video, titled 'We found a dead body', then cut to the man's body dangling from a tree as Logan zoomed in with his camera. DailyMail.com has decided not to include this part of the video.

'Yo, are you alive? Are you f**king with us?' Logan is heard yelling at the motionless man.

'A lot of things going through my mind. This is a first for me,' Logan said, before asking someone to call the police.

Logan then films closer to the man's body, noting that his 'hands are purple' and speculating that the man probably killed himself that same day.

The YouTube star, who is worth a reported $14 million, claimed that he and his crew visited the forest with an intent to focus on the 'haunted aspect' of the forest.

Toward the end of the clip, one of Logan's friends is heard saying, 'I don't feel good.'

Logan then replied: 'What you've never stood next to a dead guy?' He then started laughing before saying that the whole vlog was supposed to be a joke.

He later appeared to realize how his reactions could be perceived, saying: 'Me smiling and laughing is not a portrayal of how I feel about the circumstances. Everyone deals with s**t differently.'

The clip received so much backlash online that he eventually deleted the post.

YouTube issued a statement on Twitter on Tuesday in relation to Logan's video.

The social media star created furor when he posted a 15-minute video of him coming upon the corpse of a man hanging from a tree in a Japanese forest known for its high rate of suicides

'Many of you have been frustrated with our lack of communication recently. You're right to be. You deserve to know what's going on,' the statement read.

'Like many others, we were upset by the video that was shared last week.

'Suicide is not a joke, nor should it ever be a driving force for views. As Anna Akana put it perfectly: 'That body was a person someone loved. You do not walk into a suicide forest with a camera and claim mental health awareness.

'We expect more of the creators who build their community on YouTube, as were sure you do too... the channel violated our community guidelines, we acted accordingly, and we are looking at further consequences.

'Its taken us a long time to respond, but weve been listening to everything youve been saying.'

'We know that the actions of one creator can affect the entire community, so well have more to share soon on steps were taking to ensure a video like this is never circulated again.'

The vlogger took the video down a day after posting it following widespread outrage and issued a grovelling apology (above) saying he intended to raise awareness of suicide

The YouTube star, 22, tweeted: 'Taking time to reflect. No vlog for now. See you soon'

The 22-year-old's multimillion subscriber channels are being axed and all original projects with Logan are now being put on hold, YouTube revealed on Wednesday

The vlogger took the video down a day after posting it following widespread outrage and issued a grovelling apology.

'I'm so sorry about this... suicide is not a joke. Depression and mental illnesses are not a joke,' he said.

He claimed he had intended to raise awareness about suicide by filming the video.

'If this video saves just ONE life, it'll be worth it,' he said.

'I was misguided by shock and awe, as portrayed in the video. I still am.'

It's been a tough time for the Paul family as Logan's younger brother Jake, 20, was captured on video repeatedly dropping the n-word during a freestyle rap.

Jake was heard rapping in the newly released footage about 'little a** n***as', saying later that: 'I whip it like my n***a Richie Vetter, he make the p***y so wet it gets wetter.'

A source toldBuzzfeed that Jake wasn't racist and had matured a lot since the footage was filmed just nine months ago during Coachella festival at a location in Palm Springs.
An attempt to oust President Donald Trump's hotel business from managing a luxury hotel in Panama has turned bitter with accusations of financial misconduct.

Trump Hotels is contesting its firing, and its staff ran off a team of Marriott executives invited last month to visit the property during a search for a new hotel operator, according to two people familiar with the matter.

After the owners' association accused Trump Hotels of mismanagement and financial misconduct in a $15 million arbitration claim, the company owned by the president fired back with a $200 million counterclaim and refused to turn over the property's financial records.

The Trump International Hotel and Tower Panama is a mix use property with hotel accommodations and luxury condos

Trump Hotels is currently in a legal battle with the majority owners of the Panama property who say they want new property management after several breaches of contract

When a team from Marriott International Inc. came to the property at the invitation of the hotel's majority owner, Trump staff asked them to leave, according to the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss publicly what happened behind the scenes.

The head of Trump Hotels, Eric Danziger, also called Marriott chief executive Arne Sorenson to complain about the visit, the two people said.

Marriott generally steers clear of properties facing ownership and management disputes. But the call from a senior Trump executive to the CEO of Marriott, which manages more than 6,000 hotels, raised the awkward matter of how American companies interact with a business owned by the president.

Marriott, like most major international companies, has significant business and public policy interests before the Trump administration.

Brand tarnished: The majority owners of the property said in a letter to fellow owners that their investment has no future so long as the hotel is managed by Trump Hotels

Refusing to leave peacefully: The letter to fellow owners says that Trump Hotels aren't budging

The property, built in 2011, has struggled to sell off units since it opened. Some owners see no income

While some owners are not seeing any income from their units, they have to pay the maintenance out of their own pockets

Federal employees who travel and hold government conferences pay to use its properties, and Marriott has been lobbying the administration and Congress over U.S. tourism, trade and legal restrictions against property ownership in Cuba, disclosures to consumers about resort fees, and other issues.

Trump Organization general counsel Alan Garten said the call was not intended to pressure Marriott.

'We have a great relationship with Marriott,' Garten said. 'They were appreciative that we let them know that we have a valid contract.'

A spokeswoman for Marriott declined to comment.

The matter highlights potential ethics concerns raised by Trump's decision not to divest himself from his businesses, said Larry Noble, head of the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based public interest group that studies issues of democracy.

'I don't know if they've got a valid contract or not,' Noble said. 'But if you're a big company, you'd really have to think twice before getting into a fight with one of the president's companies.'

Since Trump took office, Trump hotels in New York and Toronto have quietly reached deals to separate themselves from Trump's brand.

But the Panama dispute is shaping up as a brawl.

In a letter to fellow owners, the investor leading the hotel owners' board of directors accused Trump Hotels of 'gross mismanagement, breaches of contract, conversion and breaches of fiduciary duties.' Conversion is a legal term for the misuse of someone else's property for one's own gain.

When the majority owners invited Marriott executives to the property for potential new management- the suit claims Trump Hotel staffers ran them off

The majority owners, Ithaca Capital Partners, did agree to not act in a manner adverse to Trump Hotels- however they say- the president's company breached the contract leaving the wording voidable

'Our investment has no future so long as the hotel is managed by an incompetent operator whose brand has been tarnished beyond repair,' Orestes Fintiklis, the managing partner of Miami-based Ithaca Capital Partners, wrote in the letter. Trump Hotels, he wrote, 'is refusing to maintain its last shreds of dignity and peacefully vacate our property.'

Fintiklis did not respond to emails from the AP seeking comment.

Trump Hotels accused Ithaca of deceiving its fellow hotel owners and illegally terminating the Trump contract.

'Unfortunately, it is YOU, the unit owners, who will ultimately be the ones to bear responsibility for the bad acts of Mr. Fintiklis and his cohorts,' said Trump Hotels executive vice president Jeff Wagoner in an earlier letter to the owners last week.

Rising 70 stories in the shape of a wind-filled sail, the Trump hotel promised investors a chance to become the part owner of one of Central America's finest hotels. It has struggled to sell units after its completion in 2011.

Occupancy rates are low enough that some owners receive no income from their properties and must reach into their own pockets to pay maintenance costs.

The effort to remove Trump hotels from managing the hybrid condo-hotel units on the property began last year, after Ithaca Capital Group purchased 202 unsold hotel units from the building's struggling developer.

After buying the units in August, Ithaca and the other owners voted in November to fire Trump's directors, clearing the way for terminating Trump's contract and the $15 million arbitration claim against Trump Hotels.

Not all the hotel unit owners were represented at the meeting, but those contacted by The Associated Press support the effort to fire Trump.

'They wanted to remove him quietly,' said Al Monstavicius, a retired Nevada doctor who owns a penthouse hotel unit in the building, of Ithaca's efforts. 'That didn't work.'

Monstavicius said Trump's statements regarding Mexicans and his determination to strip hundreds of thousands of Central Americans of their protection from deportation have made Trump's brand toxic in Panama.

Occupancy in recent days - considered peak high season - has ranged from 26 to 28 percent, according to Trump Hotels figures.

Overbuilding and general weakness in the Panama hotel market have contributed to problems. Trump's team said it was proud of the hotel's financial performance. It told owners Trump's hotel has outperformed its peers for 81 of the last 84 months, but Fintiklis dismissed the claim as 'simply delusional.'

The hostilities extended to Ithaca's invitation of Marriott executives to the property.

'We were obviously concerned about their presence there,' Garten said, adding that he believed Marriott did not know of the circumstances.

The heart of Trump Hotels' claim against the hotel owners is a February 2017 agreement. When it bought 202 units, Ithaca agreed not to act 'in any manner adverse to the interests of Trump Hotels.' In his letter, Fintiklis acknowledged the language in the agreement but said mismanagement and misconduct by Trump Hotels rendered it invalid.

If the owners in Panama succeed, it won't be the first time that Trump has been ousted there. In 2015, amid the early months of Trump's presidential campaign, the owners of apartments in the same building voted to fire Trump's management company over budget issues and allegations of misspent funds.

Since then, the property's overall finances have improved. Its annual deficits, which exceeded $1 million, have since turned into a surplus, according to financial documents provided to the AP by an owner.
A police car has been rammed and a man has been dramatically arrested near the Australian Open.

A witness told 3AW he saw 10 police cars chasing another vehicle on the wrong side of Wellington Parade near Jolimont station in Melbourne just before 4.30pm on Tuesday.

'The police all jumped out guns drawn,' the witness named Andrew said.

A police car has been rammed and a man has been dramatically arrested near the Australian Open

A witness told 3AW he saw 10 police cars chasing another vehicle on the wrong side of Wellington Parade near Jolimont station in Melbourne just before 4.30pm on Tuesday

'He rammed the police car, a divvy van pulled in front of him, he tried to get around and rammed it.'

Another witness named John said a man was pulled from the car.

'All I could see was a black sedan and police pulling stuff out of the boot,' he said.

'It looked very dramatic.'
A dozen activists could be charged with misdemeanor crimes - for feeding the homeless in a public California park.

The city of El Cajon, near San Diego, banned 'food sharing' in public spaces back in October in an effort to curtail the spread of Hepatitis A .

But a group called Break the Ban, some of whose members face charges for their violation of the city's code due to their alleged 'crime' on Sunday, sees the ban differently.

'It was really a disguise,' attorney Scott Dreher told NBC San Diego. 'People were complaining homeless people will come to the park if you give them free stuff.'

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A group called Break the Ban fed the homeless at Wells Park in El Cajon, California on Sunday. Twelve people were cited and could be charged with misdemeanor crimes in connection with the act

The city banned 'food sharing' in public spaces back on October in an effort to curtail the spread of Hepatitis A

But the volunteer group sees the ban as a means to keep the homeless out of public spaces.

The volunteer group was handing out food to homeless people at Wells Park in El Cajon.

One of the twelve volunteers, all of whom were issued citations, was only 14 years old.

The citizens could face up to a $1,000 fine and even jail for the act of feeding the homeless.

The volunteers were also handing out clothing and toiletries.

The city says that the measure is meant to curtail its Hepatitis A outbreak and cites the existence of more than a dozen locations throughout the 100,000-person city that offer food to the homeless.

'What we're saying is feeding them at city parks is a bad idea given the situation,' a councilmember told NBC San Diego.

Sunday's 'feed the homeless' event was the fourth such even Break the Ban has put on since October, Fox5SanDiego reports.

'The only people not allowed to be served in this park and all of El Cajon are the homeless,' event co-organizer Leslie Gollub told Fox5SanDiego.

'It was really a disguise,' attorney Scott Dreher told NBC San Diego . 'People were complaining homeless people will come to the park if you give them free stuff'

Sunday's event was the fourth the group has held since the Sunday ban. Pictured is a Facebook page for an event this past November. 'It was absolutely necessary to break this law until they were willing to enforce it, and, now that they have, we will continue this fight in court,' co-organizer Shane Parmely told the San Diego Union-Tribune

'It was absolutely necessary to break this law until they were willing to enforce it, and, now that they have, we will continue this fight in court,' co-organizer Shane Parmely told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Hepatitis A is a liver virus generally caused by the spread of touched objects, food or sexual intercourse.

There is a vaccine for the disease.

The group has announced that it will take the City of El Cajon to court over the ban, which it says is unconstitutional and discriminatory, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
A warrant has been issued for the arrest of missing boy William Tyrrell's biological father after he failed to show in court for carrying around stolen credit cards.

Police found Brendan William Collins, 35, 'unsteady on his feet' - walking side to side down a footpath and kicking a wall for no apparent reason - on a street in Sydney's west about 5.30pm on November 17 last year.

Officers asked Collins why he was carrying a clear plastic bag containing two $100 notes and three $50 notes, a police statement of facts said. He claimed he had just withdrawn the money from an ATM.

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An arrest warrant has been issued for the biological father of William Tyrrell (pictured) who did not appear in court on Tuesday. William went missing in 2014 sparking an enormous manhunt

Collins (pictured) failed to show in court on Tuesday on charges of carrying stolen credit cards. At the time of his arrest in November last year he was unsteady on his feet', walking side to side down a footpath and kicking a wall for no apparent reason, a police statement of facts said

The police then searched him and found he was carrying two cards in his wallet that belonged to men named 'Steve' and 'Ejub'.

He also had a NSW police force civilian warrant card with another man's photo on it, the court facts said.

Collins - who is the biological father of William and the half-brother of Five Seconds of Summer rocker Michael Clifford - claimed he found the cards on a road in Westmead but couldn't say exactly where.

He claimed he had been planning to hand the cards in to police. He also claimed he had a receipt for the money but never produced it for police.

Police later contacted the men who owned the cards and charged Collins for having unlawfully obtained goods in his personal custody.

Collins was meant to appear in front of Magistrate Jennifer Giles on Tuesday.

But he failed to turn up to Parramatta Local Court and was convicted of the crime.

Collins (pictured) had only recently been released from jail on drugs charges last year when he was revealed to be the missing toddler's biological father. William's biological mother Karlie (left and right) was also named for the first time last year as the toddler's parents

A landmark court ruling last year allowed the fact William (pictured) was a foster child to be published

WHO'S IN WILLIAM TYRRELL'S FAMILY? William's biological parents were named last week as Karlie Tyrrell and her partner, Brendan. Brendan's mother, Natalie Collins, is the boy's outspoken grandmother. Brendan's father is Daryl Clifford. Daryl and his second partner Karen later had 5SOS guitarist Michael, who would be Brendan's half-brother and William's half-uncle. William was taken into foster care when he was about nine months old. His foster parents are from Sydney's north shore. They have asked to remain anonymous. William vanished from his foster grandmother's home on September 12, 2014. Advertisement

Magistrate Giles issued a bench warrant to have Collins 'forcibly brought before the court for sentence' and ordered the stolen property be returned to its owners.

Collins had only recently been released from jail on drugs charges last year when he was revealed to be the missing toddler's biological father.

His former partner, Karlie Tyrrell, is the boy's biological mother.

A landmark court ruling last year allowed the fact William was a foster child to be published.

Both William's biological parents and foster parents have been ruled out as suspects in the investigation into his disappearance.

William's disappearance from his grandmother's home in Kendall in the state's north on September 12, 2014, sparked one of the biggest manhunts in Australian history.

There is a $1 million reward for information leading to William's discovery.
A caravan engulfed in flames on the side of a highway took firefighters half an hour to extinguish after rushing to contain the blaze.

Footage captured by onlookers shows the vehicle consumed by the harsh fire at Marmion Ave near the Eglinton turn off approximately 30 kilometres outside of Perth.

Dark grey smoke is seen billowing from the gutted caravan wreck as the flames devastate the mobile home around 5pm on Monday.

A caravan (pictured) engulfed in flames took firefighters half an hour to extinguish

Footage captured by onlookers shows the vehicle consumed by the harsh fire

The explosion caused around $65,000 of damage despite the firefighters efforts to minimsise the destruction.

In a second video, the caravan is engulfed in flames before a small explosion occurs sending a rush of fire into the air.

The cause of the fire remains unknown.
A three-year-old girl has tragically died after she was mauled by a dog in Oklahoma.

Rylee Marie was at home, being watched by her grandmother, when the dog attacked her on Sunday, her father Jason Dodge told ABC 7 News.

She later died from her injuries.

Dodge had bought the pit bull, named Remington, from a friend just five days before the attack.

Police shot and killed the dog, which they described as mixed breed, when they arrived on the scene.

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Rylee Marie, 3, was at home with her grandmother when the family dog attacked her on Sunday in Duncan, Oklahoma; She later died from her injuries

Dodge said his mother was watching his little girl at his home, while he went to visit his brother.

Dodge said he got a phone call, and all he heard were the words 'daughter' and 'dog' before he raced home to see Rylee Marie had been attacked.

'I picked her up and carried her, I ran out the front door, and I threw her in the passenger seat [of my truck],' he said.

'I went to go to the hospital and then the ambulance came. They took her out of my truck.'

But it was too late for Rylee Marie.

Jason Dodge said he got a phone call, and all he heard were the words 'daughter' and 'dog' before he raced home to see Rylee Marie had been attacked

This is the dog, named Remington, that attacked, and ultimately killed, Rylee Marie, age 3

Dodge said his mother was watching his little girl at his home, while he went to visit his brother

Rylee Marie was a fun-loving little girl, who loved cats and dogs, her father said

'There was nothing they could do, absolutely nothing,' Dodge said, of the Emergency Medical Services team and the doctors who tried to save her at the hospital.

Police got the call about the attack at around 3 pm Central.

When police arrived on the scene, the dog charged an officer, who then shot and killed the dog, according to OK News.

Dodge said he told officers to kill the pet.

'I was like, "Kill this dog. Just shoot it down or I will,"' Dodge said.

'And he did, he shot it in the back yard.'

Dodge got the dog from a friend last week, he said, and had had it in the house for five days.

'I was very cautious about it because I don't just bring random dogs into my home,' he said.

'I took my son over there and the dog did'nt attack him. It loved him, gave him a hug, licked him on the face. [Then I] brought him here, my son came outside all day and played with him, [and the dog] did'nt do nothing to him.'

Two days later, though, his daughter was killed by the dog.

'There was nothing they could do, absolutely nothing,' Dodge said, of the Emergency Medical Services team and the doctors who tried to save her at the hospital

'Really missing you Rylee Marie Dodge!' Dodge wrote in a Facebook post on Monday

With tears in his eyes, Dodge told a reporter for ABC 7 News, 'I'm just too depressed right now to talk much more. I just miss her so much'

With tears in his eyes, Dodge said, 'I'm just too depressed right now to talk much more. I just miss her so much.'

Dodge shared more of his feelings on social media on Monday.

'Really missing you Rylee Marie dodge!' he wrote.

'I'm so sorry this happened to you baby girl. I know I promised you I'd never let anything happen to you and I failed at it. I will always love you, that's a promise. I'll never let up! Miss you baby girl you're my everything baby girl. Daddy really wishes you was here!! I don't know what I'm going to do without that beautiful smile and my kisses an hugs. Love you, R.IP. Rylee Marie.'

Rylee Marie was a fun-loving little girl, who loved cats and dogs, her father said.

ABC 7 said an investigation is underway.
Pauline Hanson has weighed into the debate about moving Australia Day, likening the idea of changing the public holiday to renaming a stadium.

The One Nation leader said the idea of shifting the national day from January 26 to another day to appease left-wing activists was 'rewriting history' and urged a stand be taken against 'vocal minorities'.

She likened the symbolic gesture, proposed by the Greens, to the renaming of Brisbane's old Lang Park Stadium and Queensland's Bruce Highway.

Pauline Hanson (pictured) has weighed into the debate about moving Australia Day

'... Australia Day will always be Australia Day,' she wrote in a post on her Facebook page

'The Bruce Highway will always be the Bruce Highway to me, not this new Pacific Coast Way they've changed the signage to,' she told her 219,000 Facebook followers on Tuesday.

'Lang Park will always be Lang Park, not Suncorp Stadium.

'And Australia Day will always be Australia Day.'

Senator Hanson's intervention in the Australia Day debate comes a day after Greens leader Richard Di Natale likened the arrival of British First Fleet in Sydney Harbour, in January 1788, to 'genocide'.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott on Monday tweeted there were '364 other days' for the Greens to be 'politically correct' while his successor Malcolm Turnbull has described the call to shift the national day as 'divisive'.

The debate about moving Australia Day has also coincided with former Labor leader Mark Latham making a campaign video with indigenous Alice Springs town councillor Jacinta Price to 'Save the Date'.

The One Nation leader likened the idea of changing the public holiday to renaming a stadium
A man traveling from Iceland to England has been arrested for trying to board plane while wearing an excessive amount of clothes.

Ryan Carney Williams, who identifies as Ryan Hawaii, reportedly wanted to avoid the excess luggage fee and therefore wore eight pairs of pants and ten shirts.

He claimed was denied a boarding pass at the British Airways desk for his flight home after he put on all the clothes that wouldn't fit in his checked luggage.

A man traveling from Iceland to England was arrested at the Iceland Keflavik International Airport for wearing an excessive amount of clothes on Wednesday

Ryan Carney Williams, who identifies as Ryan Hawaii, reportedly wanted to avoid the excess luggage fee and therefore wore eight pairs of pants and ten shirts (pictured left)

The airline said Hawaii was acting rude so they turned him away, however he refused to leave the desk so they called a security guard over, Icelandic news site, Mbl said.

Hawaii posted a video to his Twitter profile slamming the airline for 'racial profiling.'

He tweeted: '@British_Airways hi being held at Iceland Keflavik airport because I had no baggage put all the clothes on and they still won't let me on. Racial profiling? Or.....'

He posted two videos asking the employees why he wasn't allowed to board to which on of the airline staff said 'do we need to call the police?'

We explained our policy to our customer, and arranged an alternative flight to London. 

In a later tweet he says how he was arrested, sprayed with mace and held on the ground after refusing to leave.

After he gave his statement to police he returned to the airport to get an EasyJet flight he had booked for the next day.

He posted two videos asking the employees why he wasn't allowed to board to which on of the airline staff said 'do we need to call the police?' (stills from the video pictured above)

Initially EasyJet refused to refund him as they said it is not under their terms and conditions

However, they responded later saying they had refunded him the money for the flight

However, once he had checked in and gone through security Hawaii says he got through check-in and security, but once he arrived at the flight gate, a man told him he wasn't allowed to board because of the incident the day before.

'And AGAIN! Refused from 2 flights in 2 days for no valid reason,' he tweeted.

Hawaii claims he was stuck at the Iceland airport with no money and without his belongings as his luggage successfully flown to England without him.

Hawaii arrived back in England after boarding a Norwegian airline flight.

EasyJet and British Airways both reportedly refunded him after he complained to them.

British Airways released a statement saying: 'We give our customers a wide range of fares to choose from to meet their needs. Our hand baggage only fares from Iceland are as low as 47 ($64) each way, and are designed for customers who are travelling without any hold baggage.

'We do understand that our customers' plans can change so they can choose to pay a fee at the airport if they need an extra bag. We explained our policy to our customer, and arranged an alternative flight to London.'
A man has been charged over a hoax phone call that triggered a major emergency response.

Fire crews and paramedics rushed to Port Willunga at Maslin Beach in South Australia on Tuesday after a man phoned to say someone had fallen off a cliff.

When emergency crews arrived at the scene about 1pm, no one was found injured, Nine News reported.

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A man (pictured) has been charged over a hoax phone call that triggered a major emergency response

A 29-year-old man, located at the scene, was arrested and taken into custody charged with creating a false belief.

The police service said it would make a claim to recover costs from Tuesday's response.

South Australia Police said it would take action against anyone who made false telephone calls.

The police service said it would make a claim to recover costs from Tuesday's response - which saw paramedics, fire crews and police turn up to the scene
The family of an Aboriginal teenage boy found dead on train tracks in NSW 30 years ago hope a $500,000 reward will bring them some closure.

Mark Anthony Haines' body was discovered near Tamworth after a night out with his friends and girlfriend on January 16, 1988.

NSW Police on Tuesday relaunched an appeal for information over the suspected murder, offering a substantial reward if it leads to a conviction.

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Mark Anthony Haines' (pictured) body was discovered near Tamworth after a night out

Family and friends stood outside Tamworth Police Station (pictured) calling on anyone with information to come forward

'Someone knows something and we need those people to come forward,' acting superintendent Jeffrey Budd told reporters.

The 17-year-old's uncle, Craig Craigie, says it has been a long and arduous journey for the family.

'We hope that this reward will encourage anyone living in guilt over the last 30 years to finally come forward,' he said.

'Hopefully it will bring some closure and some natural justice.'

Acting Superintendent Jeffrey Budd told reporters outside Tamworth Police Station today that the reward hopes new details will help the family find closure

A traditional smoking ceremony and service held for the Tamworth teen on Tuesday

Two separate post-mortems concluded the teenager's death was caused by massive head injuries consistent with being struck by a train.

But a coronial inquest later returned an open finding, and it's believed a stolen car found less than 2km from his body may be linked to the case.

'It has always been the family's belief that there were other people involved with Mark at the time of his death and evidence shows that,' Mr Craigie said.

He noted that the case could have been handled a lot better, labelling their attitudes at actions at the time 'mediocre' and at times damaging.

Mark's final remains will also be returned to the Gomeroi country, with a cremation being held by his family later in the day.
A glamorous make-up artist with a shocking driving record tried to excuse her unsafe behaviour behind the wheel to police with the flimsy excuse: 'We've had a s**t morning'.

Sydney mother-of-two Layal Alzinati, 28, was scolded by a magistrate as 'completely irresponsible' after Parramatta Local Court heard details of her bad driving on Tuesday morning.

Ms Alzinati's driver's licence was already suspended when she jumped in the front seat of a white Audi Q5 in Granville, in Sydney's west, about 9.40am on August 29 last year.

Sydney mother-of-two Layal Alzinati, 28, pictured leaving Parramatta Local Court on Tuesday

Officers saw her conduct an illegal U-turn and then accelerate harshly, 'well in excess of the speed limit', a police statement of facts shown to the court said.

When police asked Ms Alzinati why she did it, she said: 'We have had a s**t morning. I didn't want to sit in the traffic, my husband was running late for work.'

And when officers looked up her licence, they found it had been suspended months earlier after she was pinged doing more than 30km/h over the speed limit.

Ms Alzinati's lawyer told the court '2017 was a bad year' for the Condell Park woman and said she had suffered 'serious' injuries at one point in the year.

Magistrate Tim Keady fined Ms Alzinati $700 and disqualified her from driving for three months.
The former presidential candidate used the holiday to chastise the president's alleged comment regarding immigrants who come from 's***hole countries'

Mitt Romney has taken another swipe at Donald Trump following the president's alleged 's***hole countries' comments.

Tweeting on Martin Luther King Jr Day, the former presidential candidate said: 'The poverty of an aspiring immigrant's nation of origin is as irrelevant as their race. The sentiment attributed to POTUS is inconsistent w/ America's history and antithetical to American values. May our memory of Dr. King buoy our hope for unity, greatness, & 'charity for all."

He used the holiday to chastise the president's alleged comment regarding immigrants who come from Haiti, African countries and El Salvador.

Romney's latest war of words with Trump comes just days after he was reported to have text a businessman saying he would run for a Utah senate seat.

The New York Times reported that Gardner called Utah Governor Gary Herbert last Saturday to read him he text.

Herbert felt that both Trump and Romney could reconcile their issues with each other.

'I think there is a willingness on both sides to say, 'Look, we may disagree on stuff, we may have problems from our past, but what we ought to be looking toward is our future,'' Herbert added.

'The poverty of an aspiring immigrant's nation of origin is as irrelevant as their race. The sentiment attributed to POTUS is inconsistent w/ America's history and antithetical to American values. May our memory of Dr. King buoy our hope for unity, greatness, & 'charity for all,'' the former Massachusetts governor said on Twitter

The tweet comes after reports that Romney texted Utah businessman, Kem Gardner, 'I'm running' for the Utah Senate seat that is up for grabs

But the governor was frank and stated: 'If he's going to run, let's go. If not, we need to find somebody else to run, and there's people that have been trying to queue up for the opportunity.'

On Thursday, Trump was said to have asked why the U.S. would accept more immigrants from Haiti and 'sh**hole countries' in Africa rather than places like Norway, as he rejected a bipartisan immigration deal.

On Friday, he denied those remarks, adding while he had made some tough ones, he did not make those particular comments.

On Thursday, Trump (pictured) was said to have asked why the U.S. would accept more immigrants from Haiti and 'sh**hole countries' in Africa rather than places like Norway, as he rejected a bipartisan immigration deal

'The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used,' Trump wrote, using unusually passive language in an effort to walk back the comment.

'What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made - a big setback for DACA!' Trump tweeted Friday.

He also added: 'Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said 'take them out.' Made up by Dems. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings - unfortunately, no trust!'

'The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used,' Trump wrote, using unusually passive language in an effort to walk back the comment

He also added: 'Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said 'take them out.' Made up by Dems. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings - unfortunately, no trust!'

Romney, on the other hand, is expected to declare his intention to replace Utah Senator Orrin Hatch as the Republican nominee.

He's been extremely vocal of his criticism of Trump, blasting him as both a 'phony' and 'fraud' while out on the 2016 campaign.

More recently, Romney voiced his opposition for alleged abuser Roy Moore for the Alabama Senate race that he historically loss.

Nevertheless, Trump once contemplated for the title of Secretary of State.

And in December, Kellyanne Conway told CNN that the two had a 'great relationship.'
It was noted by one of Churchill's secretaries as a 'magnificent oration', while one MP at the time said it was 'worth 1,000 guns and the speeches of 1,000 years'.

And the historic 'we shall fight on the beaches' by Sir Winston Churchill to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940 has clearly lost none of its strength.

For cinema audiences watching the conclusion of the new biopic Darkest Hour are said to be breaking into spontaneous standing ovations at the end of the film.

Gary Oldman has been praised for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in the film Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour ends with the speech from Churchill, which responded to the Dunkirk evacuation

Producer Eric Fellner, co-chairman of Working Title Films, told the Daily Telegraph that there had been various 'surprising' reports of audiences applauding the film.

He said: 'It has been reported back to us, not only here but in America, and across the whole of the country not just in the big metropolitan areas.

'We've been hearing it a lot. It's very surprising. It very rarely happens other than at the premiere or special screenings of the films, so it's quite extraordinary.'

He added that a decision was made two years ago to make the film because it is a 'fascinating piece of history', 'engaging', 'exciting' and 'entertaining'.

Cinema-goers in Britain have told of audiences applauding at the end of the new movie

But he said the Brexit vote and election of US President Donald Trump were among the 'volcanic political and social eruptions' the world has seen since then.

Speaking to arts correspondent Hannah Furness, he added: 'I think we've just hit a zeitgeist where people are fascinated by and feeling a need for leadership.'

The film is leaving audiences across Britain - and even the US - feeling patriotic, with some fans speculating that it is bringing back the 'Dunkirk spirit' in 2018.

Darkest Hour ends with the rousing speech from Churchill, played by Gary Oldman, which responded to the Dunkirk evacuation.

One cinema-goer from Wiltshire tweeted: 'First time I have seen a film that has the audience clapping at the end. Darkest Hour is amazing and Oldman is outstanding.'

Another from Lincolnshire said: 'Watched the Darkest Hour at Kinema in the Woods last night and at the end everyone clapped.'

And a third from Hampshire tweeted: 'Go and see The Darkest Hour. All the old people were clapping at the end.'

The film, which was released in Britain last Friday after first being shown in the US last September, received four stars in a review by Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner.

Oldham (pictured left in Los Angeles last Wednesday; and, right, in the movie) has won a Golden Globe award for the film and has also been nominated for a Bafta

Viner described the movie as a 'thriller, skilfully woven out of events to which we all know the ending', adding: 'It bowls along with terrific energy.'

UK Cinema Association chief executive Phil Clapp told the Telegraph of the applause that 'such audience reaction to a particular film is not that common these days'.

Oldham, 59, who grew up in New Cross, South East London, has won a Golden Globe award for the film and has also been nominated for a Bafta.

The actor spent four hours in make-up every day, starting as early as 1.45am, to be transformed into the spitting image of the wartime prime minister.
Police are attempting to explain the mysterious circumstances surrounding a young tourist who was found in a car park in only her underwear.

Officers were called after a 20-year-old woman was found near the Urunga Esplanade in Mooloolaba early on Sunday morning.

It is believed she left a nearby nightclub through a back fence, where her clothes were later found.

Officers were called after a 20-year-old woman was found near the Urunga Esplanade in Moolooaba early on Sunday morning

A man and woman found the tourist and gave her clothes to cover up while they called police.

'She became disorientated and alerted a man in a van,' Detective Senior Sergeant Daren Edwards said.

'He saw the female and he did see a male who appeared to be near her run off.'

They are appealing for the man and woman who assisted them to come forward, and also for another man driving a white Audi who told the couple he also attempted to help the 20-year-old.

'Certainly we don't believe these people are involved in anything unlawful with this female, but we really would like themselves be made known to us,' Det. Snr. Sgt. Edwards said.

The tourist was suffering no bruises and there was no evidence she had been sexually assaulted, but they are still seeking assistance to 'cover all bases'.

Anyone with any information is being urged to contact Police Link on 131 444.
The parents of a terminally ill 11-year-old girl have vowed to fight doctors who want to withdraw her pain relief despite the threat of her being placed in foster care.

Melody Driscoll suffers from Rett Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that affects brain development and results in severe mental and physical disability.

Her parents, Karina and Nigel Driscoll, appeared on Good Morning Britain today to speak about their battle with medics at King's College Hospital in London, where Melody is being cared for.

The parents of a terminally ill 11-year-old girl have vowed to fight doctors who want to withdraw her pain relief despite the threat of her being placed in foster care

Doctors are weaning her off morphine and steroids over fears that the drugs could result in potentially fatal liver damage.

But her parents say they believe Melody will die 'from shock and pain' if morphine is withdrawn and are suing the hospital in a bid to get the drugs for their daughter.

They have enlisted help from Charles Da Silva, the lawyer who worked on the Charlie Gard case. The family are trying to raise 50,000 to cover the legal costs.

After contacting the council to see if they could provide a social worker for Melody, the couple were given a letter from social services which read that their ill daughter could be taken into care.

Parents Karina and Nigel Driscoll appeared on Good Morning Britain today to speak about their battle with medics at King's College Hospital in London, where Melody is being cared for

In the letter, doctors say the parents are 'difficult' and say Melody could be at risk from 'significant harm'.

Mr Driscoll said today: 'We are struggling, quite a lot. The worst thing is with social services we actually asked for a social worker to be involved to help us with the situation in the hospital.

This picture shows the agony endured by terminally ill 11-year-old Melody Driscoll as she was weaned off morphine and steroids

We have sent her videos of Melody in pain at the hospital and she just says there's nothing they can do as they have to listen to the medical practitioners.

Mrs Driscoll added: They say that she doesnt need the pain relief, that they can manage it with easier drugs, they say that the morphine is affecting her liver.'

She said: But we say her liver is being damaged anyway because of the TPN - she is fed intravenously so we have to bypass her digestive tract and that causes liver failure in the long term.

We think we will lose her through shock and pain [if morphine is stopped].

She has always struggled since she was three years old with chronic pain. She was always very sick because of it, internally bleeding from it.

When Great Ormond St stated her on the morphine and ketamine four years ago it gave her a quality of life.

We knew they couldn't cure her, or fix her, so we opted for quality of life over quantity because we didnt want her to suffer any more.

Melody's anguished father Nigel said: 'It's so hard to watch her suffer when we know there is something which could take the pain away in minutes'

Melody's parents (left, she is pictured with her mum) are terrified that their beloved daughter could go into cardiac arrest from withdrawal

Last week Mrs Driscoll spoke about the letter which threatened to take her child into care.

She said: 'I saw the words 'foster care' and collapsed. I couldn't read on. We love our children more than anything and we'd never harm a hair on their heads.

'I asked for a social worker because I thought they'd help us do the best for Melody. Now I realise how naive we were. Parents are powerless.

'How do we begin to explain to the other children that Melody might be taken from them?'

After contacting the council to see if they could provide a social worker, the couple were given a letter which said Melody could be taken away from them

According to the parents, medics have said Melody is naughty rather than in a huge amount of pain

The couple, who live in Croydon, are distraught at seeing their little girl in so much pain.

Melody was not predicted to live beyond the age of five, but is now 11 years old. She is unable to walk or talk.

The child was put on morphine and steroids in 2013, and her family say they saw a massive improvement in her well being.

Mrs Driscoll, who has four other children with her husband, said: 'I know these drugs might make Melody die sooner but she's already terminally ill so we are going to lose her  we know that.

Melody's mum captured the heartwarming moment Ed paid a surprise visit to Melody at Epsom Hospital in Surrey

'We want as much time with her as we can, but understand that should be about quality, not quantity.

'I'd rather have one more year with Melody where she was not in pain, than five years of watching her like this.

'How can we be called unfit parents for fighting for that?'

According to the parents, medics have said Melody is naughty rather than in a huge amount of pain.

Pop star Ed Sheeran delighted Melody with hugs and kisses and serenaded her with two songs

Mr Driscoll, a panel beater, said: 'It's so hard to watch her suffer when we know there is something which could take the pain away in minutes.

'We've been told she already has liver damage because she's been tube-fed for so long but we feel none of the doctors can see the bigger picture.'

A spokesperson for King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said: 'All decisions taken by our expert clinical team are in our patients' best interests. We are unable to comment further on this case.'

In a statement, Croydon Borough Council said: 'It is always very difficult for all concerned to ensure the right decisions are made for children who have complex health and care needs when there are differing medical options.

'We always seek to work with parents and hear the views of the child and the family.'

To donate to the family's JustGiving page, click here.
A man reported missing from Sydney last week has been found safe and well.

Kevin Brooks, 52, from New Zealand, was reported missing after he had not been seen or heard from since December.

On Tuesday he was located safe and well in Wollongong.

Kevin Brooks (pictured) was reported missing after not being heard from since December

The 52-year-old was reported missing from Sydney last week has been found safe and well

Police thanked the media and the public for their assistance.

Almost one week ago officers appealed for information to help locate Mr Brooks who hadn't been seen or heard from since last month.

He has been living in Sydney and Brisbane for almost 20 years.

He was most recently living in Ashfield but was in the process of moving to Brisbane, and bought a train ticket at Central Railway Station just before 11am on Thursday 21 December 2017.

On Tuesday he was located safe and well in Wollongong, NSW police said

He missed the train that afternoon and had not been seen since.

Mr Brooks was due to catch a rebooked train three days later on Sunday 24 December 2017 but did not check in and had not accessed his bank account since that day.

Serious concerns for Mr Brooks welfare were raised with police urging anyone with information about his whereabouts to contact them.
A national product safety agency is needed in the wake of the Whirlpool tumble dryer scandal, say MPs.

The white goods were linked to 750 fires dating back to 2006  but MPs fear as many as 1million are still sitting in homes. The American-owned manufacturer has been accused of delays in making the items safe.

The call for action on product recalls comes in a report by MPs of the business select committee. It follows an inquiry into how Whirlpool handled the problem with its dryers.

This fire in Shepherd's Bush in West London in August 2016 is believed to have been caused by a faulty Whirlpool tumble dryer. Some 50 families had to be evacuated from their homes

Mother-of-two Melissa Dooley, pictured, was sorting her washing when black smoke started pouring from her Hotpoint tumble dryer in October 2016

Labour MP Rachel Reeves, pictured, believes a national body responsible for policing product recalls is necessary because local councils have been slashing their budgets for trading standards by up to 71 per cent

Committee chairman, Rachel Reeves MP, said: 'Whirlpool's response has highlighted flaws in the UK's product safety regime which is fragmented and poorly resourced. There is a strong case for a single national product safety agency.'

Whirlpool first admitted there was a problem with its dryers in 2015 by which time 750 fires  dating back to 2006  had been linked to machines sold under the Indesit, Hotpoint and Creda brands.

Rather than issuing a full recall, Whirlpool said people could continue to use the dryers under supervision until engineers were sent out to repair them. One of the machines caused a fire in a tower block in Shepherds Bush in August 2016, driving 50 families out of their homes.

Ministers asked consumer champion Lynn Faulds Woods to review the product recalls system two years ago but she says her recommendations, including a Government-backed agency and a website to list all recalls, were ignored.

Number of fires in London since 2009 attributed to white goods by company Brand Total Whirlpool, including Hotpoint, Indesit, Proline, Creda and Swan 895 Bosch, including Neff and Siemens 276 Hoover, including Candy 209 Beko 191 AEG, including Electrolux and Zanussi 157 TOTAL 1728 Source: London Fire Brigade

Number of fires in London since 2009 attributed to Whirlpool White Goods Whirlpool Hotpoint Indesit Proline Creda Swan TOTAL 69 502 257 12 51 4 895 Source: London Fire Brigade

Currently, responsibility for overseeing product safety and recalls is left to individual council trading standards departments. These departments say they do not have the resources to do the job.

And it called on manufacturers to use safer materials in plastic-backed fridge-freezers, which were linked to 214 fires with 27 serious injuries or fatalities in England in 2015/16 alone.

This Whirlpool tumble dryer was blamed for the deaths of Bernard Hender and Doug McTavish in Llanrwst, north Wales in October 10, 2014

The committee's inquiry into risks from faulty electrical goods was triggered by last year's Grenfell Tower tragedy, when 71 people died in a fire thought to have been started by a faulty Hotpoint fridge-freezer.

It found that the number of fires involving faulty electrical appliances in England has remained constant at between 4,300 and 5,000 a year.

In 2015/16 alone, 676 fires in England were caused by tumble dryers, leading to a total of 46 injuries and fatalities.

Whirlpool alerted authorities in 2015 that fires could be caused by fluff catching on a heating element in dryers marketed under its Hotpoint, Indesit, Creda and Proline brands.

The company began a programme of modifying machines in customers' homes, initially advising them that they could continue using the tumble dryers while awaiting action.

This advice was withdrawn following a fire in a west London flat caused by an Indesit dryer in 2016.

And a second defect in the door mechanism of some Whirlpool products was blamed for a fire in Llanwrst, north Wales, which killed two men in 2014.

The Commons committee branded Whirlpool's response to the defect 'inadequate', after hearing that only around 50 per cent of an estimated 5.3 million affected dryers have received the necessary modification.

But the company insisted that its ongoing campaign had achieved a resolution rate more than three times the industry average for a product recall, with 1.7 million machines modified and 99.9 per cent of registered customers' issues resolved.

'After two years of extensive measures to raise awareness to this campaign  including directly contacting four million owners of these appliances  the number of consumers coming forward has fallen sharply,' said the company in a statement.

'We continue to urge consumers to contact us immediately if they believe they still own an affected appliance. We can assure consumers that they if they contact us now, they can receive a resolution within one week.'

Hotpoint tumble dryer 'bursts into flames' In October 2016 Melissa Dooley, 35 of Sherwood, Nottingham, was sorting out her washing and putting it into her tumble dryer. The mother-of-two suddenly noticed black smoke coming out of the Hotpoint machine. She quickly pulled the device from the wall when it burst into flames. She quickly evacuated her three-year-old son and nine-year-old adopted sister to safety and rang the fire brigade. Advertisement

Ms Reeves said there was a 'strong case' to replace the 'fragmented and poorly resourced' product safety regime with a single national agency of the kind recommended by Ms Faulds Wood.

'The Government must now implement the recommendations of (her) independent review on product safety, which they have been sitting on for nearly two years,' she said.

Reductions in funding for local and national trading standards were impacting on effectiveness and 'making it difficult for consumers to have confidence' in the system, said the committee.

The 'vast majority' of councils have cut spending on trading standards, with 20 slashing it by more than 60 per cent and one by 73 per cent between 2010/11 and 2015/16.

The overall trading standards workforce has been reduced by 56 per cent between 2009 and 2016.

In 2016, a coroner in Birmingham ruled that 49-year-old Mishell Moloney, died from carbon monoxide inhalation after a fire in her Beko tumble dryer

Alex Neill, of consumer campaign group Which? said: 'Despite hundreds of reported fires and numerous reviews, the UK's product safety system is still broken and potentially threatening the lives of millions of consumers.

'We have already seen the tragic consequences of companies behaving badly and delays to improving the system. The Government must no longer allow these dangerous products to remain in people's homes and must bring in immediate reforms.'

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: 'The Government's top priority is to keep people safe and Britain's product safety requirements are among the highest in the world, which is why we established the Working Group on Product Safety and Recalls to examine the evidence of Lynn Faulds Wood's independent review.

'We are considering their recommendations, including the creation of a new national oversight body, and will respond shortly.

'We have already taken a number of steps to improve our product safety regime, including upgrading the Government's recalls website to make it clear to the public which white goods are safe to use.'

Hotpoint tumble dryer 'probably caused' fire which killed two men A faulty Hotpoint tumble dryer was the probable cause of a fire that killed two people as they slept following an inquest in September. Restaurant manager Doug McTavish, 39, and chef Bernard Hender, 19, both died in their flat in Llanrwst, North Wales in October 2014. The pair were drying towels from the restaurant where they worked when the blaze broke out. Doug McTavish, 39, left, and Bernard Hender, 19, right, both died in their sleep after a faulty tumble dryer caught fire at their flat in Llanrwst, North Wales in October 2014 Landlord Garry Lloyd Jones, 50, survived the blaze. Firefighters said they encountered 18-inch high flames when they arrived at the scene. An independent expert appointed by insurers pinpointed 'untoward electrical activity' in the door switch as the probable cause. Whirlpool had flown in experts from America to contest the claims at Ruthin County Hall, Denbighshire, and said the fire could have been started in the flat's light switch or in an iron. But assistant coroner David Lewis ruled yesterday after a five-day inquest that 'on the balance of probabilities', the door switch of the dryer was the cause. Mr Lewis also rejected the firm's theory that the fire could have started by spontaneous combustion in the towels after the drying cycle had finished. Giving a narrative verdict, he said he found Whirlpool's experts 'to be less than compelling'. Mr Lewis said he was considering whether to make a 'prevention of further deaths' warning and gave Whirlpool two weeks to make submissions to him. Advertisement
The White House's communications director is set to face questions from the House Intelligence Committee as part of its investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

Hope Hicks could face the panel as early as this week, CNN first reported, as lawmakers talk to the inner circle of President Trump's presidential campaign.

She is a long-term aide of the President and officially is the third person to take the top communications role in his administration after the disastrous 11-day appointment of Anthony Scaramucci, who held the role after low-key Communications Director Mike Dubke resigned.

Hope Hicks could face the panel as early as this week as the focus turns to pinpoint who was part of the inner circle of Donald Trump's presidential campaign

The White House's Communications Director Hope Hicks, left, is set to face questions from the House Intelligence Committee as part of its investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election

The family and friends of Hope Hicks are concerned for her mental health due to her White House job

Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held the role of acting communications director after Dubke resigned and before Trump put Scaramucci in the role, prompting Spicer's exit from the administration.

According to CNN's report, Hicks will be interviewed about any contacts Trump's associates had with Russians.

Also among those still to face this particular panel of lawmakers: Trump first Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

Bannon is expected on Capitol Hill today.

The latter left his post at the White House in August and resigned from Breitbart News last week as he featured heavily in the book, 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House' by author Michael Wolff.

Wolff's book also featured Hicks.

According to Fire and Fury, which details the inner workings of Trump's White House, Hicks' family and friends are concerned for her mental health.

She will need therapy after she leaves her job working for Donald Trump, her friends and family have said.

'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.

Hicks was the first person that Trump hired for his campaign back in 2015.

She formerly worked for Ivanka Trump's fashion brand, and was brought on to the campaign team at the now first daughter's recommendation.

Hicks took over the role of communications director from Scaramucci in August.

Hope Hicks (background, center) became White House Communications Direction in August of 2017

Wolff's new book 'Fire and Fury' looks inside the Trump administration

The book also gives insight into how Hicks' role evolved throughout the campaign and during President Trump's first year in office.

'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 wrote.

Wolff reported 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,"' Wolff wrote.

The book also claimed that Hicks had an on-again, off-again relationship with Lewandowski, who is married.

Wolff said Hicks was upset about the 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.

Hicks has never commented on the allegations found in 'Fire and Fury,' though the White House has aggressively pushed back against the book.

Wolff's sloppy reporting has been highlighted by media outlets as well.

Among the things the author got wrong: Hicks' age. She is 29.
Emmanuel Macron is claiming victory in his bid to force Britain to take in more migrants and hand over extra money for Calais border controls.

The French President has been pushing for concessions as part of an overhaul of the so-called Le Touquet agreement.

Mr Macron is due in the UK tomorrow for a summit withTheresa May, and the Elysee says it has secured commitments for the creation of a joint 'operational task force' to handle asylum requests.

Whitehall sources have also indicated they are willing to listen to requests for additional funding - even though senior Tories insist Britain should not hand over another penny.

French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing for concessions as part of an overhaul of the so-called Le Touquet agreement (file picture). He will meet Theresa May (pictured right in her constituency on Sunday) later this week

The Le Touquet deal was signed by Tony Blair and French counterpart President Jacques Chirac in 2003, signed the historic document that revolutionised border controls in Channel ports.

It meant moving the French frontier to the south coast of England, and the UK frontier to northern France.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said yesterday that reform would include Britain sharing more costs and taking in greater numbers of migrants.

'I want to reach an additional protocol to these agreements and to take concrete measures to look after a certain number of costs by the British,' Mr Collomb said in an interview with Paris newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

LE TOUQUET DEAL STRUCK BY BLAIR AND CHIRAC IN 2003 The Le Touquet deal was signed by Tony Blair and French counterpart President Jacques Chirac in 2003. The treaty revolutionised border controls in Channel ports, meaning that all checks are carried out on the French side. It was part of efforts to close the growing migrant camps at Sangatte, which became known as the 'jungle'. The UK contributes tens of millions of pounds every year to the cost of the controls. Advertisement

Mr Collomb also said the British should 'take concrete measures' to take on 'a larger number of people, as regards to the reception of refugees and unaccompanied minors.'

France will do everything it can to help refugees 'but cannot take in economic migrants,' Mr Collomb added.

The Elysee Palace today said the treaty would 'complete' the Le Touquet agreement, but was 'still in the process of being finalised'.

It will focus principally on the handling of unaccompanied minors, asylum requests and family reunions.

The deal will reportedly include 'precise commitments' from the UK to process asylum claims more quickly, accept more young people travelling alone and to deliver 'significant' extra sums for frontier protection.

Mr Macron visited Calais yesterday as he prepared for the 35th UK-France summit tomorrow.

It will be held at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Berkshire, with Brexit and related issues such as immigration high on the agenda.

Mr Macron visited Calais yesterday as he prepared for the 35th UK-France summit tomorrow.

It will be held at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Berkshire, with Brexit and related issues such as immigration high on the agenda.

With Brexit approaching, and the number of Britain-bound asylum seekers in ports such as Calais growing, the French want Le Touquet to be updated. Pictured: Riots in the Calais Jungle

The Elysee Palace said 'ways to improve the handling of migrants on the common border in Calais' will be discussed.

Before his election as head of state last May, Mr Macron described Britain's decision to leave the EU as 'a crime' but he has since softened his stance.

He once suggested that Le Touquet would have to be renegotiated completely, but he is now pointing to the new clauses suggested by Mr Collomb.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb (right) said today that reform would include Britain sharing more costs and taking in greater numbers of migrants. Pictured centre: French president Emmanuel Macron

It was in 2003 that Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Jacques Chirac signed the historic document that provided juxtaposed border controls in Channel ports. Pictured: Blair and Chirac in 2002

Mr Macron is, however, increasingly concerned by security in Calais, where hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers have crossed into the UK over the past 20 years.

More than 8,000 were kicked out of the port town in 2016 following the razing of the so-called Calais 'Jungle' refugee camp, but illegal settlements are reappearing.

Those creating them hope to get across to England using ferries or the Channel Tunnel, and often pay people smugglers.

Both Mr Macron and Mr Collomb will visit representatives of the security services and humanitarian groups in Calais.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said: 'We have provided help already in the form of additional security and we have put in place structures in order to find minors in Calais homes here.'

Macron suggests Calais charity workers are persuading migrants to head for Britain Macron suggested that charity workers were deliberately trying to dissuade migrants from seeking asylum in France. Speaking to police officers and soldiers at the port yesterday, he said:'When associations encourage these men and these women to stay [in Calais], to install themselves in an illegal situation, even to pass to the other side of the border, they are assuming an immense responsibility. Never, ever will they have the state at their side.' He added: 'Each time that [migrants] are told they will be taken to the police, they are being lied to. Each time they are told that in shelters, the police are waiting for them, they are being lied to. And it is this lie, spread by too many commentators which is now damaging our collective efficiency and the humanity we owe these people.' France will this week urge Britain to take in more migrants and pay a larger cost towards policing them as part of a revision of the so-called Le Touquet agreement. Pictured: The Calais Jungle before it was dismantled Macron has been accused by the left-wing of ordering a clampdown on migrants sleeping in woods near to the port. French charities, Utopia 56 and L'Auberge des Migrants, have apparently refused to meet the French president in protest. It has led to accusations that charities are deliberately misleading migrants into thinking that they will reach the UK, The Times reported. Advertisement

Bayeux Tapestry is to be displayed in BRITAIN: Macron agrees to let Norman Conquest artwork leave France for the first time in 950 years in historic loan

Preparations under way to move the fabric across the Channel for first ever time

Macron is expected to make announcement of the momentous loan on Thursday

But director of Bayeux Museum in Normandy said tests must first be conducted

The Bayeux Tapestry is set to come to Britain after Emmanuel Macron agreed to allow the artwork to leave France for the first time in 950 years.

The tapestry, which dates from around 1077, depicts the story of William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and is displayed in Bayeux, in Normandy.

Preparations are under way to move the fabric across the Channel in a bid to show the strength of the British-French relationship in the wake of the Brexit vote.

President Macron is expected to make the announcement of the momentous loan on Thursday when he meets with Theresa May at Sandhurst.

Scroll down for video

Preparations are under way to move the fabric (pictured) - which shows the conquest of England by Norman invaders - across the Channel in a bid to show the strength of the British-French relationship in the wake of the Brexit vote

The tapestry depicts not only the battle of Hastings but a series of events in the two years leading up to the battle which formed the basis for William the Conqueror's claim to the English crown.

The director of the museum where the tapestry has been throughout most of its history confirmed the move,The Times reports.

But Antoine Verney said the agreement will be subject to tests necessary to determine whether the precious object can be moved without being damaged.

May and Macron are also expected to announce increased defence co-operation, with British helicopters set to be deployed in Africa to help on French-led missions.

The length of the loan - and the location of its display - has not been decided.

This close up of the Bayeux tapestry shows Harold (left) being struck by an arrow to the eye

But the big move is likely to be at least five years away.

One British government official - rejecting the suggestion the violent tapestry simply reaffirms ancient Anglo-French hostility - told The Times: '[It] underlines both governments' recognition of the depth of a relationship rooted in our shared history.'

The length of the loan - and the location of its display - has not been decided. Pictured: A section of the tapestry showing the Escort of Count Guy of Ponthieu (who captured Duke Harold)

President Macron is expected to make the announcement of the momentous loan on Thursday when he meets with Theresa May at Sandhurst. Pictured: The tapestry in Bayeux

Previous attempts to see the tapestry brought to the UK - during the Queen's coronation in 1953 and to mark the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 1966 - ended in failure.

Ironically, it is considered most likely the historic cloth was created in England after being commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux.

Odo was the half-brother of William the Conqueror - leader of the Norman imperialists - and is thought to have requested the work in the 1070s.

Royston's big brother: Epic history of the Bayeux Tapestry, which inspired the three-decade long effort Nazi connections: Heinrich Himmler (pictured) coveted the Bayeux Tapestry because it is a part of Germanic history 1066: Between seven and twelve thousand Norman soldiers defeat an English army of a similar size at what is now Battle, East Sussex 1476: The embroidered cloth depicting the battle is referred to for the first time in an inventory of Bayeux Cathedral 1732-3: Antiquarian Smart Lethieullier writes the first detailed English account of the tapestry while living in Paris - but it is not published till 1767 1792: During the French Revolution, the precious artwork was declared public property and confiscated to be used as a covering for wagons - but it was saved by a lawyer who hid it in his home 1804: In a move dripping in symbolism, Napoleon - under the impression France was about to invade and conquer Britain - had the tapestry temporarily moved to Paris for display 1870: The tapestry is removed from Bayeux once again during the Franco-Prussian War - but it is moved back two years later 1944: The Gestapo removed the tapestry to the Louvre in Paris - just days before the German withdrawal. A message from Heinrich Himmler - who coveted the cloth because it is a part of Germanic history - is believed to imply the Nazis planned to take it to Berlin 1945: It was returned to Bayeux, where it has been ever since Advertisement

The huge tapestry - it is 230ft long and 20in high - is a masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon art.

It depicts Edward the Confessor, a weak king of England, dispatching one of his kingdom's magnates, Harold Godwinson, to Normandy.

While there Harold is taken prisoner until William the Bastard - later Conqueror - rescues him.

Harold pledges an unexplained oath (though it is presumed to be regarding Harold's support for William's claim on the English throne) to William before returning to England.

May and Macron are also expected to announce heightened defence co-operation, with British helicopters set to be deployed in Africa to help on French-led missions

The director of the Bayeux Museum (pictured) in Normandy - where the tapestry has been through most of its history, barring two displays in Paris - confirmed the move

After showing Halley's Comet - a bad Medieval omen - William is shown receiving the news and ordering the construction of a fleet to invade England. Pictured: The fleet en route to England

The final segments of the tapestry are missing, but they are thought to have depicted the invaders' celebratory feast and William's coronation. Pictured: A cart carrying wine and other supplies for William's England-bound ships

Following the death of Edward, Harold is made king.

After showing Halley's Comet - a bad Medieval omen - William is shown receiving the news and ordering the construction of a fleet to invade England.

The invading army is then shown arriving in England before engaging in the Battle of Hastings, in which Odo is given a starring role.

King Harold then perishes on the battlefield after taking an arrow in the eye - the sole source claiming that he died in this manner - before the Normans seize victory.

The final segments of the tapestry are missing, but they are thought to have depicted the invaders' celebratory feast and William's coronation.
Australia's first newspaper for children, Crinkling News, is shutting down after two years of publication.

The newspaper released a statement on Tuesday, announcing funding had run out eight months after crowd-funding raised $200,000.

The national weekly newspaper for children says it's being forced to close despite making the money from last May's campaign 'stretch as far as it possibly could'.

Australia's first newspaper for children, Crinkling News, is shutting down after two years of publication (pictured: the final front page for 2017)

The newspaper released a statement on Tuesday, announcing funding had run out eight months after crowd-funding raised $200,000

'We are very sorry to say we cannot keep publishing the newspaper with the resources we have,' the statement said.

'It will need a much bigger business, government or philanthropy to take all the amazing things we have done together and keep the momentum going.'

Co-founders and couple, Saffron Howden and Remi Bianchi, set up the newspaper two years ago, using their redundancy payments as Fairfax journalists.

'We left our careers in journalism for grown-ups and put all our personal savings into launching Australia's only national newspaper for kids,' they said.

Co-founders and editors, Saffron Howden (pictured) and Remi Bianchi, set up the newspaper two years ago, using their redundancy payments as Fairfax journalists

'When our personal savings weren't enough to keep publishing, you put your hands in your pockets and helped us raise money as part of a crowdfunding campaign so we could find new ways to keep Crinkling News doing ground-breaking work.'

The money from the crowd-funding campaign helped the news site launch Australia's 'inaugural media literacy conference for young people', as well as commission research into how children receive news in Australia.

Ms Howden and Mr Bianchi ran the weekly publication from a room of their home in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.
BBC presenter Steph McGovern had a hilarious response for viewers congratulating her on her 'pregnancy', before describing the confusion as 'just life on camera.'

The Breakfast presenter, who was discussing the collapse of British firm Carillion, received tweets from viewers who mistakenly thought she was expecting a child.

But Miss McGovern, a Breakfast show regulars and leading financial journalist, quipped: 'I am not with child, I am with pot belly.'

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BBC presenter Steph McGovern hilariously responded to viewers this morning, who mistakenly congratulated her on being pregnant

Speaking to MailOnline, she added: 'I'd definitely be in the wrong job if I got offended by comments like that. Even my own auntie asked me once if I was pregnant after seeing me on the telly - that's just life on camera.

'I just decided to tweet a reply about it today because I'd had a run of a few celebratory tweets and I wanted to clarify I wasn't and get in there before my boss started arranging my maternity cover!'

The presenter added, making a more serious point: 'What's been interesting though is all the messages I've had, showing you how many women it happens to on a daily basis.

'It's a pot belly, not a baby. Although, I'm thinking about naming mine now after all the attention it's getting.'

The Breakfast presenter, who was discussing the collapse of British firm Carillion, received tweets from viewers who thought she was expecting a child

But Miss McGovern, one of the BBC's most popular TV figures and a leading financial journalists, quipped: 'I am not with child, I am with pot belly'

One person had tweeted her directly, simply writing: 'Congratulations!'

Another, Peter Felton, said: 'I thought you were with child too. Then I thought maybe it's beer belly.'

While another joked at the well known Middlesbrough F.C. fan: 'Too many pies at the footie', which Miss McGovern then 'favourited' - seeming to suggest she approved of the post.

One person had tweeted her directly, simply writing: 'Congratulations!'

While another quipped at the well known Middlesbrough F.C. fan: 'Too many pies at the footie.'

Following her hilarious Tweet, social media users flocked to Twitter to congratulate her on her cheeky response.

Rob said: 'Congratulations on enjoying food and being thoroughly nice and normal.'

Defending her, Saeed Khan said: 'Gosh, people can be so brutal, especially in the public eye.'

Adding: Let's face it, we all are carrying a few extra pounds after crimbo.'

Defending her, Saeed Khan said: 'Gosh, people can be so brutal, especially in the public eye'

Peter Felton said: 'I thought you were with child too. Then I thought maybe it's beer belly'

Miss McGovern has become an audience favourite in recent years thanks to her insightful financial reporting and jovial personality. The financial journalist studied Science Communication and Policy at UCL before working on the BBC's Tomorrows World programme

Miss McGovern has become an audience favourite in recent years thanks to her insightful financial reporting and jovial personality.

The financial journalist studied Science Communication and Policy at UCL before working on the BBC's Tomorrows World programme.

She went on to produce daily financial news packages on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 and in 2012 made her debut presenting BBC Breakfast.
A speeding knifeman, who hit 50mph driving the wrong way down a one-way street before ploughing into a tipper lorry and van, has been jailed for two years.

Kareem Thomas, 28, from east London, fled the scene on foot to escape police.

Officers had frantically tried to flag down Thomas to tell him he was driving the wrong way in busy Paragon Road in Hackney, at rush hour on September 1 last year.

A speeding knifeman, who hit 50mph driving the wrong way down a one-way street before ploughing into a tipper lorry and van, has been jailed for two years

But the reckless driver refused to stop and hit 50mph in his blue Peugeot hatchback, as he charged into Retreat Place.

Thomas rammed into a white van which was shunted into a Hackney Council dustbin lorry, inflicting 'catastrophic' damage to the refuse truck.

Firefighters dashed to the scene to free a trapped man from the battered van and two men were rushed to hospital with serious back injuries.

Thomas jumped out of his motor and ran away as he was chased by police officers on to Morningside Estate.

Police ran a check on his car and found the demon driver at home, 'breathing heavily after the pursuit'.

Thomas had also quickly changed into different clothes in a desperate bid to escape arrest.

Thomas was jailed up for 23 months at London's Wood Green Crown Court yesterday

Officers searched the offender's abandoned car and found a deadly 12ins kitchen knife in the driver's side door compartment.

Thomas was jailed up for 23 months at London's Wood Green Crown Court yesterday.

He has a previous conviction for possession of a knife in 2011.

After the case, Detective Inspector, Paul Ridley, of Hackney CID, said: 'Driving at those speeds in a heavily built-up area at that time of the morning is pure stupidity.

'It's only through sheer luck that he didn't kill anyone.

'The sentence in this case reflects the seriousness of this offence and the reckless manner of the defendant's manner.'

He added: 'The fact that he had a large knife, together with a previous conviction for carrying a weapon, also adds weight to the length of time he has been jailed.

'We have witnessed the devastating and tragic effects of knife crime on the community and we will use any tactics at our disposal to prevent people being hurt.'

Pictured is the aftermath at the scene of the crash which shows the front of the lorry badly damaged
Jailed tax fraudster Mohammed Suleman Khan (pictured) hid his wealth in the UK while building an estate in Pakistan modelled on Buckingham Palace

The brother and entourage of a notorious fraudster dubbed 'the General' have been ordered to pay back 13million gained from a mortgage scam or face more jail time.

Jailed Mohammed Suleman Khan hid his wealth in the UK while building an estate in Pakistan modelled on Buckingham Palace.

The businessman avoided paying tax and national insurance for a decade.

Two of his brothers, a sister-in-law and two other associates were jailed after using forged financial documents to obtain mortgages for properties they then rented, allowing them to earn huge amounts of money.

Now following an investigation by the Royal Asset Recovery Team, a court has ordered one of his brothers, Shokut Zuman, and two of his entourage, Arshid Khan and Mohammed Mughal, to pay back 13m.

Khan built himself a vast estate in Pakistan, left, inspired by Buckingham Palace, right

Birmingham Crown Court heard the gang - which also included Khan's brother Shahalam Khan and Zuman's wife Samiah Hanna - built up a valuable property portfolio by 'taking advantage of a buoyant property market' between 2003 and 2010.

They made false declarations to obtain mortgages that they otherwise would have been refused.

Khan's brother Shokut Zuman has been ordered to pay back money gained from a mortgage scam or face more time behind bars

Cheat spent tax on home the size of Buckingham Palace Mohammed Suleman Khan was originally sentenced to four years in April 2013 after defrauding the taxman of 450,000 in an unrelated case. His nine-year scam was exposed after police raided his Moseley home and discovered plans for his own 'Buckingham Palace' in Pakistan, complete with a library, cinema and servant quarters. Khan, 45, later faced a proceeds of crime hearing but was hit with an extra ten-year sentence after failing to pay 2,209,090. Advertisement

Shahalam Khan, 47, received a five-year term after also being convicted of benefit fraud while Zuman, 43, received a four-and-half-year sentence and Hanna, 46, received a two-year suspended sentence.

Arshid Khan, 47, was jailed for five years while Mughal, 67, was jailed for four and a half years.

The gang used forged financial documents to obtain mortgages on 21 properties in the Bournville, Selly Oak and Moseley areas.

The houses were renovated then rented, mainly to students, allowing the gang to earn huge amounts in rent.

At a Proceeds of Crime Act hearing at Birmingham Crown Court on January 4, Arshid Khan was ordered to repay 8,010,881 within three months or face a further 10 years in jail.

Mohammed Mughal, 67, (left) was ordered to hand over 1,385,775 within three months or face an extra seven years in prison. Shahalam Khan, 47, (right) received a five-year term after also being convicted of benefit fraud

Mohammed Suleman Khan's brother Zuman was told to repay 4,058,852 within three months or face another nine years behind bars while Mughal, 67, was ordered to hand over 1,385,775 within three months or face an extra seven years in prison.

Detective Inspector Jonathan Jones, head of the Regional Asset Recovery Team, said: 'The trio were ordered to pay back more than 13million.

'This represents one of the team's best ever confiscation results and the conclusion of almost seven years hard work.

'Whilst a significant element of this represents hidden assets, we still expect to enforce the sale of a large number of properties restrained in the UK and raise around 4.5 million.

'Additionally, lengthy sentences were imposed on Khan, Zuman and Mughal, which will further persuade them to pay up any hidden assets.

'This has been a hard-fought Operation which has ended with a spectacular result.'
Shocking footage emerged capturing the moment when electric sparks from welding works setting an six-storey building on fire in southwest China.

The sparks had ignited the fireworks in a local supermarket and the explosion led to a huge blaze on January 15.

The fire was put out and no injuries were found from the incident.

Fireworks in a supermarket are set off as it catches sparks from nearby welding works in southwest China (left). The explosion soon set ablaze a six-storey building (right)

Mobile phone footage shows black fumes covering an six-storey building in Debao county of Guangxi Province.

It's believed that fireworks that were to be sold in a supermarket was lit up when sparks from nearby welding works ignited it by accident.

The fireworks shot out from the supermarket and the explosions has set ablaze a building nearby, according to The Paper.

It's unclear how many fireworks were set off.

Black fumes have covered the 59ft-tall building as fireworks being set off (left). 21 firefighters are sent to put out the fire and no casualties were found in the incident (right)

Black fumes can be seen engulfing the 18-metre-high (59 ft) building from metres away.

Debao Fire Brigade sent out four fire engines with 21 firefighters to the scene. The fire was put out around 5:21pm and no casualties were reported from the incident.

Debao Police are investigating the mattter for further details.
A leading Serb politician has been shot dead in a drive-by shooting in Kosovo this morning, it has emerged.

Gunmen opened fire at Oliver Ivanovic from a car shooting him five times in front of the offices of his Citizens' Initiative Party at 8.15am in the northern town of Mitrovica.

Doctors battled to save the 64-year-old, one of the key politicians in the Serb-dominated region, but he was declared dead at 9.30am.

A Kosovo court convicted Ivanovic of war crimes during the 1998-99 war. That verdict was overturned and he is awaiting a retrial.

The attack, on the very day that Serbia and Kosovo had resumed talks on normalising ties after a hiatus of more than a year, prompted the Belgrade delegation to walk out the discussions.

It is likely to heighten ethnic tensions in Kosovo, a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008.

Leading Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic (pictured) has been shot dead in a drive-by shooting in Kosovo, it has emerged

Gunmen opened fire at Oliver Ivanovic from a car shooting him five times in front of the offices of his Citizens' Initiative Party at 8.15am in the northern town of Mitrovica. Police are pictured at the scene this morning

Medics say Ivanovic received at least five gunshot wounds to his upper torso when shot by unknown assailants. A burnt-out car believed to have been used in the attack has been found by police in Mitrovica

Medics say Ivanovic received at least five gunshot wounds to his upper torso when shot by unknown assailants. A burnt-out car believed to have been used in the attack has been found by police.

Marko Djuric, the Serbian government's official dealing with Kosovo, described the incident as a 'a criminal, terrorist act against the entire Serbian people'.

He added that 'whoever is behind this attack ... whether they are Serb, Albanian or any other criminals, they must be punished.'

It was 'an attempt to push the Serbian people into chaos, to push Serbia into chaos', he added.

Kosovo remains tense, a decade after declaring independence from Serbia in 2008. Serbia does not recognize the split and EU-mediated talks have been under way in a bid to normalize ties.

About 10,000 people died in the 1998-99 war between Serb forces and Kosovo ethnic Albanian rebels.

Doctors battled to save the 64-year-old, one of the key politicians in the Serb-dominated region, but he was declared dead at 9.30am

A Kosovo court convicted Ivanovic (centre) of war crimes during the 1998-99 war. That verdict was overturned and a retrial had been under way

In a protest against the killing, Serbia said it would quit the ongoing round of a European Union-sponsored dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina on the normalisation of relations that was due to take place in Brussels.

'I can confirm that Oliver Ivanovic has died from gun shots. Investigators are on the scene,' Shyqyri Syla, a state prosecutor in Mitrovica, told Reuters.

Ivanovic, of the Social Democratic Party, was considered a moderate politician in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica. Last year he was elected a deputy in the municipal council of northern Mitrovica.

A former Serbian state secretary for Kosovo, Ivanovic was a key interlocutor with NATO, the United Nations and later the European Union after the 1990s war and was seen as backing dialogue with Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.

In 2016 he was found guilty of war crimes linked to the killings of four ethnic Albanians during the war and was jailed for nine years. But after a retrial was ordered he was released last year and he is now awaiting a new trial.

In 2016 Ivanovic was found guilty of war crimes linked to the killings of four ethnic Albanians during the war and was jailed for nine years. But after a retrial was ordered he was released last year and he is now awaiting a new trial

Ivanovic lived in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic swiftly called an emergency meeting of the Council for national security after the shooting, national broadcaster RTS reported.

A delegation was due to hold talks with Kosovo Albanians today.

However, after the assassination, the Belgrade delegation walked out of the talks that had resumed after more than a year's hiatus, according to local media in Belgrade.

Under the pressure from the international community and European Union auspices, Kosovo and Serbia have been trying to normalise ties almost 20 years since the start of a bloody war that claimed 13,000 lives, mostly ethnic Albanians.

The 1998-99 war between Serbian security forces and Kosovo Albanian guerrillas was ended by a NATO air campaign.

Predominantly ethnic Albanian Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. But Belgrade has rejected the move and still considers the breakaway territory as its southern province.

About 120,000 of Kosovo's 1.8 million inhabitants are ethnic Serbs.
A transgender Mississippi woman sentenced to life for murder in 2014 for providing illicit silicone buttocks injections had died in jail after serving less than three-and-a-half years of her sentence.

Tracy Lynn Garner, 58, was found guilty in 2014 of depraved-heart murder and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the 2012 death of 37-year-old Karima Gordon.

Depraved heart murder is a killing caused by reckless disregard for human life.

Prosecutors in 2014 said Karina Gordon's death was caused by the injections that Tracy Lynn Garner (above) administered

Karina Gordon (above) died eight days after receiving the buttock enhancing injections

Garner, an Atlanta-area resident, was born male but received sex reassignment surgery and posed as a nurse

The circumstances surrounding Tracy Lynn Garner's death are still unclear

Garner, an Atlanta-area resident, was born male but received sex reassignment surgery and posed as a nurse.

Gordon died eight days after receiving the 'bargain-basement butt enhancement' injections.

Prosecutors in 2014 said Gordon's death was caused by the injections that Garner administered.

The Mississippi Department of Corrections said in a statement Monday that an autopsy will be done on Garner, who died Sunday morning.

She was taken from Central Mississippi Correctional Facility to a hospital in Jackson, where she was pronounced dead.

The Department of Corrections did not elaborate on the circumstances surrounding the inmate's death, CBS News reported.

Prosecutors said Gordon was referred to Garner by Natasha Stewart, an adult entertainer - also known as Pebbelz Da Model - who was herself convicted of manslaughter in February 2014 and is serving a seven-year prison sentence.

The prosecution said Stewart told Gordon that Garner was a nurse even though she had no medical training and was not licensed to perform buttock injections.

At her trial Garner's defense attorney argued that Gordon had received other injections that could have caused her death.

He said that the silicone found in Gordon's body did not match silicone seized from Garner's Jackson home.

'We don't know how much she'd gotten before she ever came to Mississippi,' John M. Collette said.

Authorities initially identified Garner as a man, Morris Garner, after the arrest.

Gordon began feeling ill several hours into the car ride back to Atlanta from Jackson and when she called Garner for advice, he told her to take some cough syrup.

Deaths from illegal cosmetic procedures happen sporadically around the country. A New Jersey woman was recently currently charged with giving a fatal dose of silicone during a penile enhancement.
The owner of a Queensland bridal store has been fined $14,000 and ordered to pay back a number of customers, after a barrage of complaints were made against her.

The Office of Fair Trading launched legal action against Serenity Bridal owner Sharon Lucille Bennett after four different brides made formal complaints.

Queensland woman Lauren Copelin ordered a dress from Serenity Bridal, in Beenleigh, in March last year but after months of failed communication with Bennett, realised she would never see the dress she fell in love with.

'Honestly, I never expected what happened to happen to me,' Mrs Copelin told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday.

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Queensland woman Lauren Copelin ordered a dress from Serenity Bridal, in Beenleigh, in March last year but after months of failed communication with Bennett, realised she would never see the dress she fell in love with

Mrs Copelin gave Bennett a $1000 deposit for the dress, money she never saw again.

'For months I dug myself into a hole of anger and hurt, knowing I lost that money and my dress,' she said.

'The amount of hurt she put me and my husband through was ridiculous.'

Mrs Copelin said the business owner, Sharon Bennett, was brilliant to deal with when she first ordered the dress, but soon realised there was no substance to her promises.

The Office of Fair Trading launched legal action against Serenity Bridal (pictured) owner Sharon Lucille Bennett after four different brides made formal complaints

'The amount of hurt she put me and my husband through was ridiculous,' Mrs Copelin (pictured with husband Jacob) said

'Sharon's communication at the start was great but it slowly started to become poor and I'd get auto replies after each message I'd send,' she said.

'After the first couple of dates she gave me, I put my faith in her to come through, but  when she started making excuses as to why my gown wasn't coming, I had a feeling.'

The Queensland bride was forced to find another dress just weeks before her wedding.

Mrs Copelin was joined by three other brides who made complaints with Fair Trading to take the dress dealer to court.

Bennett did not turn up to court for proceedings, but defended herself with a written affidavit submitted to the court.

In the affidavit, Bennett said her health problems prevented her from running the business properly, and responding to customer complaints.

Mrs Copelin was joined by three other brides who made complaints with Fair Trading to take the dress dealer to court

'After the first couple of dates she gave me, I put my faith in her to come through, but  when she started making excuses as to why my gown wasn't coming, I had a feeling.'

Speaking in court, Magistrate Ron Kilner said Bennett's actions were 'deliberately misleading'.

'Quite frankly, the affidavit is fanciful and totally unbelievable,' Magistrate Kilner said, according to Nine News.

'Her excuses are a further attempt by her to not comply.'

Bennett was ordered to pay a $14,000 fine and pay back the brides who never received their dresses or deposits back.

Much to the distress of her victims, Bennett has now created another business, swapping bridal gowns for baby clothes, according to Nine News.

She is now the owner of baby clothes store, Sylvie and Lu, which has already amassed hundreds of followers on its Instagram page.

Daily Mail Australia contacted Bennett for comment but she did not reply before publishing.

'For months I dug myself into a hole of anger and hurt, knowing I lost that money and my dress,' she said
The Belgian Jewish community has filed a lawsuit against legislation banning the production of kosher meat from 2019.

They argue that banning the sale of such meat, which requires animals to be killed without being stunned first, violates their right to freedom of religion.

The European Jewish Congress previously described the law as 'the greatest assault on Jewish religious rights since Nazi occupation'.

Belgian Jewish groups have launched a legal challenge to new laws in two states which ban the production of kosher meat from next year, saying it discriminates against their religion

The Coordinating Council of Islamic Institutions has also filed a lawsuit because the same legislation also bans the production of halal meat.

Politicians in the Walloon region were the first to pass the law in May last year, followed by Flanders in July.

Flanders is home to half of Belgium's Jewish population and contains most of the slaughterhouses that produce kosher meat.

Islamic groups have also launched a challenge because the same law bans the sale of halal meat

Three organisations filed the suit Tuesday, including the Belgian Federation of Jewish Organizations, the European Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress.

The lawsuit argues that the legislation violates EU law, including the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Belgian Constitution, all of which guarantee freedom of religion.

The European Court of Human Rights has previously described kosher slaughter as 'an essential aspect of practice of the Jewish religion', the suit notes.

Brooke Goldstein, the Executive Director of The Lawfare Project, which is supporting the lawsuit said: 'Belgian Jews cannot remain silent while their religious freedoms are trampled and nor should anyone else.

'Laws preventing Belgian citizens from peacefully practicing their faith will do nothing to heal the divisions in Belgian society and are an embarrassment.'

The laws state that the slaughter of animals without being stunned first, which is required for meat to be certified kosher or halal, causes unnecessary suffering. Pictured is undercover footage, taken in a halal slaughterhouse in 2015, which shows conscious sheep being killed

Yohan Benizri, the President of the Belgian Federation of Jewish Organizations, added: 'Legislators have given Belgian Jews a worrisome political signal, by trumping their right to practice their faith, in violation of the crucial principle of separation of Church and State.

'Thats very sad, but it is also unlawful. It is a violation of European legal norms, including the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and we are hopeful it will be overturned as such.

'If this legislation ever comes into force it would be a dark day for freedom in Belgium.'
A Japanese broadcaster has issued a false North Korea ballistic missile alarm just days after a phone alert warning of a possible strike caused panic across Hawaii.

The NHK network sent out the warning urging people to take shelter on its internet and mobile news sites as well as on Twitter today but apologised and corrected the error within minutes.

It was not immediately clear what caused the false alarm which comes amid heightened tensions between Tokyo and Pyongyang.

Last year, Kim Jong-un's regime fired a test missile over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, where thousands were awoken by air-raid sirens.

Today's false television alert comes just three days after a blunder caused more than a million people in Hawaii to fear that they were about to be struck by a nuclear missile.

A Japanese broadcaster has issued a false North Korea ballistic missile alarm just days after a phone alert warning of a possible strike caused panic across Hawaii. Pictured: A Japanese defence system on the outskirts of Tokyo

NHK deleted its tweet after several minutes, issued a correction and apologised several times on air. It said a mistake in handling the alert system had caused the error.

Confirming today's false alarm, NHK wrote: 'Around 6.55pm earlier we reported on the NHK's news site and NHK's news disaster prevention application "Pattern of North Korean missile launch" but this was incorrectly issued. J alert has not appeared. I must sincerely apologise.'

Residents and tourists alike were left terrified after the mistaken alert was blasted out to cellphones across Hawaii on Saturday with a warning to seek immediate shelter and the ominous statement 'This is not a drill.'

The erroneous warning was sent during a shift change at the state's Emergency Management Agency when someone doing a routine test hit the live alert button, state officials said.

They tried to assure residents there would be no repeat false alarms. The agency changed protocols to require that two people send an alert and made it easier to cancel a false alarm - a process that took nearly 40 minutes.

The error sparked a doomsday panic across the islands known as a laid-back paradise.

An alert in Hawaii was sent to mobile phones and broadcast on television and radio by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HEMA) shortly after 8am on Saturday

Police dispatchers in Hawaii found out in minutes than an alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile was a false alarm but struggled to inform panicked islanders that there was no threat

Parents clutched their children, huddled in bathtubs and said prayers. Students bolted across the University of Hawaii campus to take cover in buildings.

Drivers abandoned cars on a highway and took shelter in a tunnel. Others resigned themselves to a fate they could not control and simply waited for the attack.

The 911 system for the island of Oahu was overwhelmed with more than 5,000 calls. There were no major emergencies during the false alarm, Mayor Kirk Caldwell said.

An investigation into what went wrong is underway at the Federal Communications Commission, which sets rules for wireless emergency alerts sent by local, state or federal officials to warn of the threat of hurricanes, wildfires, flash flooding and to announce searches for missing children.
A Melbourne mother who complained about her eyebrows after having them tattooed is being sued by the company and technician who completed the work.

Amanda Coats, 43, took to Facebook in July to allege an eyebrow appointment turned into a medical nightmare after she contracted a severe infection.

The cosmetic tattooist, Batulzii Cleveland, along with the store, have now filed a writ in the County Court seeking more than $150,000 in compensation from Ms Coats.

Amanda Coats, 43, took to Facebook in July claiming an eyebrow appointment turned into a medical nightmare after she contracted a severe infection

She is now being sued by the company and technician who completed the work

The business at the centre of the scandal, Point Cook's Skincare Laser Clinic, claims to have lost 11 clients as a result of the post - at a cost of $5,600.

Ms Cleveland claims she has been subject to ridicule following Ms Coats' viral complaints which she alleges implied she was rude, unprofessional and unhygienic.

The single mother-of-three said she persisted, and continued to send her beautician photos of the developing infection.

When contacted by Daily Mail Australia at the time, the owner of the clinic denied Ms Coats' version of events, saying she was 'delighted' after leaving the clinic.

He claimed Ms Coats rang the clinic once when she was concerned about the colour in her eyebrows fading, which he added is 'quite normal'.

The owner said the clinic didn't hear from her again until two and a half weeks after the appointment,when she forwarded a photo of her infected eyebrow.

The store and cosmetic tattooist Batulzii Cleveland have filed a writ in the County Court seeking more than $150,000 in compensation from Coats

Ms Cleveland claims she has been subject to ridicule following Coats viral complaints which she alleges implied she was rude, unprofessional and unhygienic

'There's no way we could be possibly responsible for the infection at that stage, two and a half weeks after the procedure,' he said.

'My wife has done over 2,000 of these procedures, and we've never had any issues of infection.'

'We've been unable to defend ourselves and we are taking action against Ms Coats for defamation and that's in the process of being issued.'

Ms Coats said she also gained legal representation.
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North Korea, Afghanistan and Somalia are the most dangerous countries in the world to be a Christian, according to a new report.

The list was put together by Christian organisation Open Doors which ranked world countries by violence against the religion's followers and pressure put on their daily lives.

Researchers found that 1 in 12 Christians worldwide experience high levels of persecution, with repression by radical Islamic regimes being the main driver.

Other causes include weak governments using religious nationalism to prop up their power in places like India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and the resurgence of Islam in central Asian countries such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

These are the 50 countries in the world where it is most dangerous to be a Christian, according to a study by organisation Open Doors which measured levels of violence against followers and pressures put on their daily lives

North Korea topped the list for the 16th year running thanks to the Kim regime's brutal repression of all religion. Christians form part of the third and lowest caste of North Korean society, and are actively discriminated against

North Korea has topped Open Doors' list since 2002 thanks to the brutal repression of all religions, but especially Christians, by the Kim regime.

Not only are the Kim family leaders of the state, they are also the state religion, and worshipping any deity over them is considered treasonous. Neighbours and family members are encouraged to watch out for suspicious behaviour and report it.

Christians, along with Buddhists, form part of the lowest caste of North Korean society, meaning they are subject to constant observation and actively discriminated against when it comes to receiving jobs, getting into college, and being given supplies by the regime.

Afghanistan is Islamic by constitution, meaning that government officials, ethnic group leaders, religious officials and citizens are hostile toward adherents of any other religion, the report says.

As a result Christians are deprived of property and businesses while being subjected to beatings and are often killed for practicing their religion.

In Somalia, Islam is also the state religion and all Somalis are expected to follow the faith. Imams and madrasas have stated publicly that there is no room for Christianity in the country, the report says, while militant group al-Shabaab also threatens Christians with death.

During the time the report was being put together, researchers recorded 3,066 instances of Christians being killed 1,252 abductions; 1,020 cases of rape or sexual harassment; and 793 church attacks.

Somalia, which expects all citizens to be Muslim and is also home to the extremist al-Shabaab group, came in third
Sweden says it will issue an updated version of a Cold War era civil emergency advice booklet, amid its concerns about the threat of conflict with Russia.

The Swedish civil contingencies agency says that the 2018 edition bears the working title 'If Crisis or War Comes' and will be delivered to some 4.7 million Swedish households by June.

The agency gives practical advice on crises such as cyber and terror attacks, along with conventional warfare.

The leaflet dates from the Cold War and advises people what to do in the event of war

The issuing of the updated version of the booklet comes amid fears of war with Russia

The first edition of the 'If War Comes' booklet was published during World War II, during which Sweden was neutral.

Christina Andersson, from the civil contingencies agency, said the decision was a result of 'the current security situation' in the region, as Russia intensifies military manoeuvres.

Last year the Russian military conducted drills experts believe 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.

Attacks on Sweden and Finland were rehearsed because Russia 'would not expect them to remain neutral' in the event of a real war, Western intelligence experts suggested.

The massive programme of war games featuring tens of thousands of troops and code named Zapad took place near the Belarus capital Minsk in September.

The war games also involved anti-submarine warfare and air defence drills throughout the Baltic Sea.

Western experts believe the Zapad manoeuvers (pictured) were a rehearsal for an attack on nations in the Baltic

Russia's 'Zapad' war games simulated the occupation of adjacent nations, analysts say. This graphic shows where the rehearsals were carried out and what military forces took part

Analysts from two Western intelligence agencies claimed that the exercises, which included artillery, tanks, rocket launches and simulated air and navy raids, were a dry-run for a 'shock campaign' against Western European NATO members.

There have also been reports of airspace violations by Russia's military aircraft in the Baltics and a military buildup in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which sits across the Baltic Sea from Sweden.

Moscow has repeatedly said the 'Zapad' exercises were purely defensive in nature and were not aimed at targeting a third country or group of countries.

In 2016, the Swedish civil contingencies agency sent out a letter to all local authorities telling them they must be better equipped to respond to the threat of war.
The man who bashed, raped and murdered a four-year-old girl has been denied parole 28 years after he committed the atrocities.

Lauren Hickson was four years old when she was tortured and raped before being drowned in the Nepean river in south-west Sydney, just 300 metres from her home.

The horrific 1989 murder was committed by Neville Raymond Towner, then aged 23.

Towner appeared in Sydney West Trial Courts via video link on Tuesday, where he was denied an application for early release. He will spend the remainder of his life behind bars.

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Neville Towner, the man who bashed, raped and murdered a four-year-old girl, has been denied parole 28 years after he committed the atrocities.

Lauren's mother Jurina told reporters outside court before the ruling the most painful part was waiting for an outcome. 'He gets a second chance and what did Lauren get, nothing,' she said

Lauren Hickson (pictured) was four-years-old when she was tortured and raped before she was drowned in the Nepean river in south-west Sydney, just 300 metres from her home

On May 18, 1989 Towner confessed to abducting Lauren, sexually assaulting and murdering her.

A year later he was sentenced to life in prison.

In 2002, a judge changed his life sentence to a life with parole, for which he was eligible in 2009, Nine News reported.

In 2017 the State Parole Authority announced it intended to release Towner.

Lauren's mother Jurina told reporters outside court before the ruling the most painful part was waiting for an outcome.

'He gets a second chance and what did Lauren get, nothing,' she said.

'At least he wasn't in the room. It brings back memories. This is with you for the rest of your life.'

On May 18, 1989 Towner confessed to abducting Lauren (pictured), sexually assaulting her and her ultimate murder

The horrific murder, which happened on May 17 in 1989, was committed by Neville Raymond Towner (pictured), then 23

Jurina pleaded with the parole board on Monday, to keep him behind bars. 'God forbid what he'll do (if he's released),' she told Nine News .

She pleaded with the parole board on Monday, to keep him behind bars.

'God forbid what he'll do (if he's released),' she told Nine News.

Ms Hickson struggled to hold back tears as she remembered the life taken away from her.

'It's very very hard. She'd be 33 this year,' she said.

'She's not here. She's not here for Christmas, not here for family gatherings.'

Ms Hickson claimed Towner showed no remorse for the crime since his conviction in 1989.

'He won't talk about the murder. He just won't talk about it He's shown no remorse, he's never said once he's sorry,' she said.

Ms Hickson (right) struggled to withhold tears as she remembered the life taken away from her
A former boyfriend of under fire Ukip boss Henry Bolton's former mistress has told how he revealed her sickening messages to him to show the world what she was like.

Patrick Gilmour leaked explosive emails from topless model Jo Marney, 25, where she joked about raping babies.

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Mr Gilmour, cousin of Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour, said: 'I sent the messages because I wanted them to know what kind of a person Jo is. She can be manipulative and unpredictable.'

Left, Ukip leader Henry Bolton with ex-girlfriend Jo Marney and right, Ms Marney, with former partner Patrick Gilmour, cousin of Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour

Left, Ms Marney with Pink Floyd star Dave Gilmour, before she began dating Ukip boss Bolton

He added: 'I didn't expect those messages to be published and for Bolton to know where they had come from.

'I feel like I have been used as a pawn in a political game by the party to get Bolton sacked.

'But I apologise to him because my words and texts have been twisted out of context and put into the public domain by them. Now I just want to be left out of it.'

Ms Marney, from Kent, who boasts of being a glamour model, journalist and critic, has since been suspended by Ukip and dumped by Bolton over her racist texts about Prince Harry's fiancee, Meghan Markle.

Left, Ms Marney with Bolton at Christmas and right, outside her home in Kent after the racist text scandal broke

Bolton (pictured, on Good Morning Britain) dumped his girlfriend after her racist remarks emerged

Ms Marney sent these racist texts calling Prince Harry's fiance Meghan Markle a 'dumb little commoner'

Mr Gilmour says he willingly sent Ukip party members dirt on Ms Marney when leader Bolton announced he had left the mother of his two young children, 42-year-old Tatiana Smurova, for her shortly before Christmas.

As background, he sent them damning messages from his former girlfriend.

Mr Gilmour, who lives in Australia, alleged that he was then contacted out of the blue by an angry Bolton who used menacing threats to cover up his shamed mistress's sickening messages.

Mr Bolton allegedly told Mr Gilmour that Ms Marney would harm herself should the message be made public - and that he would have 'blood on his hands.'

Once Bolton was made aware that the messages were in the public domain, he encouraged Mr Gilmour to suggest that they had been doctored, it is claimed.

Father-of-three Bolton warned him: 'You are so far out of your depth here. You are playing with Fire'.

The married Ukip boss added: 'It's a shame you were talked into releasing the other messages you received from Jo. Why did you do that?'

Mr Gilmour, pictured, with his famous cousin, said he leaked the messages because he wanted the public to know how'manipulative and unpredictable' Ms Marney could be

Left, Ms Marney poses for a photo with Tom Jones at a party and right, with Patrick Gilmour when they were dating

Gilmour replied: 'If I tell you why will you promise not to basically make my life agony? Not going to lie, you scare me.'

Mr Bolton then told him: 'If you tell me yes, but more so if you promise not to do this again. Then I will leave you alone'.

Mr Gilmour, who dated Marney for 18 months until last year, said today when contacted by MailOnline that the messages from his former girlfriend were disgusting.

He added: 'I was shocked when Henry emailed me. I wasn't expecting that because I didn't know that the people I was talking to would reveal me as the source of the messages.

'I regret sending them now and feel like I've been dragged into a political tug of war.'

Ms Marney (right) apologised at the weekend after messages emerged where she said Prince Harry's 'black American' fiancee will 'taint' the Royal Family

He went on: 'But Jo is not a nice person. She is powerful and has threatened and intimated me. She has a very bad temper and her mood can switch in an instant. She could fly into a rage over something simple like me not wanting to watch a film.

'The messages she sent me about raping babies are disgusting. I was appalled even though they were a joke.'

A Ukip source told MailOnline that Mr Gilmour had approached the party keen for the messages to be made public.

They said: 'Patrick contacted me asking to get messages into the public domain and I put him in touch with a couple of journalists with whom he spoke directly.

'I was made aware that Henry Bolton had told Patrick to say these messages were doctored once he found out that they had not been deleted and were in the public domain. I advised Mr Gilmour it was better to say nothing than to lie.

'Patrick sent me messages saying Henry Bolton had 'begged' to see the messages written by Jo Marney and later threatened him with Jo's 'blood on his hands' if he did not either delete them or say they were doctored.

'I had to stop all communication with him after it became obvious he was still in contact with Henry and Jo and I could not be sure if he would deny something he had previously requested me to do - out of fear or another reason I do not know.'

Ms Marney apologised at the weekend after messages emerged where she said Prince Harry's 'black American' fiancee will 'taint' the Royal Family with 'her seed' and pave the way for a 'black king'.

She also said that she would never have sex with 'a negro' because they are 'ugly'.

It came as Bolton is due to face a crunch meeting over his own future with Ukip following outrage over the relationship.

In Ms Marney's messages, which she sent to a male friend just three weeks before starting her relationship with Mr Bolton, she sneered at Harry's engagement to Los Angeles-born Markle  who will marry Harry on May 19  on the grounds that she is a 'black American'

Ms Marney (left, with Bolton and right), from Kent, boasts of being a glamour model, journalist and critic, has since been suspended by Ukip

She also described Ms Markle, whose mother is black and whose father is white, as 'a scrubber' and a 'gender equality t***' who is 'obsessed with race' and a 'dumb little commoner'.

After being confronted with her texts, Ms Marney apologised for her comments which she claimed had been 'taken out of context'.

In a statement, she said: 'I apologise unreservedly for the shocking language I used. The opinions I expressed were deliberately exaggerated in order to make a point and have, to an extent, been taken out of context. Yet I fully recognise the offence they have caused.

'No offence was intended and, again, I apologise unreservedly for any such offence or hurt that my messages have caused to members of the public, members of Ukip my friends, family and loved ones.

'I have disappointed them all and let myself down. I cannot sufficiently express my regret and sadness at having done so.'
Dramatic video footage has emerged showing a hero firefighter catching a baby who was dropped by parents from the third floor of a burning apartment building.

The fire took place in Decatur, Georgia at the Avondale Forest Apartments on January 3.

Captain Jackie Peckrul, a super mom of triplets, was one of the DeKalb County firefighters who responded to the fire, which left 80 people homeless, according to WAGA-TV.

Dramatic video footage has emerged Saturday showing a hero firefighter catching a baby who was dropped by parents from the third floor of a burning apartment building

The fire took place in Decatur, Georgia at the Avondale Forest Apartments on January 3. The image above shows Fire Captain Scott Stroup catching one of the children thrown off the third-floor balcony of a burning apartment in Decatur, Georgia

Stroup is seen in the undated file photo above. He is the firefighter on the ground who caught the baby

Lance Ragland, the hero father of eight children, saved his entire family and was the last to be rescued from the third floor balcony. He suffered second-degree burns to his back

Ragland's newborn twins were among the children who were rescued early morning on January 3

Captain Jackie Peckrul, a super mom of triplets, was one of the DeKalb County firefighters who responded to the fire

Miraculously, just one person suffered second-degree burns as a result of the blaze.

Peckrul, a 14-year veteran at the department, said the situation was particularly dire when she and her fellow firefighters arrived to the burning complex.

You immediately saw flames and you could hear their screams, she recalled.

Peckrul got to work. She took the ladder from the fire truck and climbed up halfway toward the third-floor balcony.

Ragland said the fire got closer and time was running out to save his family. 'I felt warm, then one time it got really hot, that pushed me to go faster,' he said

Peckrul said that when she climbed the ladder she was not expecting a child to be thrown off the balcony. One of Ragland's children is seen above. It is not known if this was the child caught by Peckrul

The Ragland family of 12 people, including eight children, lived in the apartment that was trapped by the raging fire.

As Peckrul climbed halfway up the ladder, she said: I see blue coming.

It was a blue blanket all wrapped up and my hands came off the ladder and I had got him, she said.

Peckrul said she received no warning that the family was going to drop a baby out of the balcony.

I think they thought I was expecting it, she said.

Ragland and his family of 12 face the next hurdle - recovering economically after everything they had was destroyed

Peckrul then helped the rest of the family climb out of their apartment.

A helmet camera worn by one of the firefighters at the scene shows Captain Scott Stroup catching an older sibling of the baby.

Peckrul, Stroup, and the rest of their comrades are being hailed as heroes after rescuing a number of people, including one in a wheelchair.

The only thing running through my mind was, Lord, let me catch this baby, Peckrul told WAGA-TV.

I cant imagine the fear that the mom was facing. I was thinking about her child first.

Peckrul, a 14-year veteran at the department, said the situation was particularly dire when she and her fellow firefighters arrived to the burning complex.

You immediately saw flames and you could hear their screams, she recalled.

Peckrul got to work. She took the ladder from the fire truck and climbed up halfway toward the third-floor balcony.

Peckrul, Stroup, and the rest of their comrades are being hailed as heroes after rescuing a number of people, including one in a wheelchair

The only thing running through my mind was, Lord, let me catch this baby, Peckrul told WAGA-TV. She is seen above with one of her daughters

The Ragland family of 12 people, including eight children, lived in the apartment that was trapped by the raging fire.

As Peckrul climbed halfway up the ladder, she said: I see blue coming.

It was a blue blanket all wrapped up and my hands came off the ladder and I had got him, she said.

Peckrul said she received no warning that the family was going to drop a baby out of the balcony.

I think they thought I was expecting it, she said.

Peckrul then helped the rest of the family climb out of their apartment.

There's no better feeling in the world [than saving the lives of people and their children], Peckrul said.

Never want to see any parent lose a child, she said.

Lance Ragland, the father who tossed his two children out of the apartment and was the last to be rescued, suffered second-degree burns.

He was released from the hospital after an overnight stay.

Now he and his family of 12 face the next hurdle - recovering economically after everything they had was destroyed.

'Failure is not an option, failure is never an option when it comes to protecting family,' he told WAGA-TV when asked what was going through his mind on that fateful night.

Ragland said the fire got closer and time was running out to save his family.

'I felt warm, then one time it got really hot, that pushed me to go faster,' he said.

'We're just trying to figure out how we're going to rebuild but we're together and we will figure it out,' said Ragland

One by one, Ragland helped his family climb out of the balcony and onto the ladder.

Ragland also threw his newborn twins out the window hoping that the firefighters below would catch them.

'From my end, I'm looking at a checklist, I couldn't see what everybody else was doing,' said Ragland.

'At the bottom, [its a] whole other world going on because they're catching the rush that Im sending down and I'm not giving no space.'

After he had gotten everyone out, Ragland was the last to leave. He suffered burns to his back, but he didn't mind.

'Anything happens to me, I'm okay, but to yall no,' said Ragland.

The family is now staying with relatives until they could get back on their feet.

A GoFundMe page was started by a relative to help cover the costs of rent and other expenses, including diapers and baby formula.

'We're just trying to figure out how we're going to rebuild but we're together and we will figure it out,' said Ragland.
An Elizabethan stone bridge which features in the classic Thomas Hardy novel Tess Of The D'Urbervilles has partially collapsed.

Wool Bridge in Dorset features in a dramatic scene in Hardy's 1891 book, but part of the wall slumped into the River Frome yesterday.

The bridge is where a sleepwalking Angel Clare picks up Tess Durbeyfield and, moaning that his wife is dead, carries her over the bridge into the churchyard, where he lays her in a coffin.

The Grade II listed overpass is also connected to Woolbridge Manor which was the real-life setting for Tess and Angel's ill-fated honeymoon.

A large crack had appeared in the structure over Christmas, but the curved bridge's six arches remain intact.

The Grade II listed Wool Bridge in Dorset features in a dramatic scene in Hardy's 1891 book, but part of the wall slumped into the River Frome yesterday

A large crack had appeared in the structure over Christmas, but the curved bridge's six arches remain intact

The 16th century bridge has been sealed off so architects can examine what caused its collapse, since traffic was banned from it several years ago and it is only used by pedestrians.

To protect the bridge from further erosion, large bags of aggregate will be lifted by crane into the river. It is unclear what caused it to collapse although a crack had developed over Christmas.

Longer term repair works will not be able to take place until the summer when weather conditions are better.

The Thomas Hardy Society has expressed its sadness at the demise of the 'iconic' bridge.

Secretary Mike Nixon said: 'In the novel Angel carries Tess over this bridge and lays her in the coffin.

The 16th century bridge has been sealed off so architects can examine what caused its collapse, since traffic was banned from it several years ago and it is only used by pedestrians

'It is a massively iconic bridge in Thomas Hardy literature and it is a very sad loss.

'It really is very, very important and we hope it can be repaired and restored to its former glory.'

Peter Wharf, a local councillor, said: 'It's a very sad sight because it is a particularly beautiful bridge. It's very important.

'There are some very visible cracks in the bridge.

'It hasn't been open to traffic for a while, so it is reasonably safe. We don't understand what's caused it, because there has been no traffic going over it for a few years.

'We'll be taking every step to make sure it is safe, and that it is fixed.

'We are very hopeful the bridge is repairable. The fact it has managed to survive 500 years indicates we can do something to make to stay for 500 more.'

The bridge, pictured intact in 2004, is where a sleepwalking Angel picks up Tess and carries her over the bridge into the churchyard where he lays her in a coffin

The Thomas Hardy Society has expressed its sadness but longer term repair works will not be able to take place until the summer when weather conditions are better

Woolbridge Manor was once owned by descendants of Sir Payne de Turberville, who arrived in England during the Norman conquest of 1066.

Wellbridge House, as Hardy called the manor, is where Tess confesses to Angel she is not a virgin having once been raped, which he is unable to handle.

Wool Bridge is currently owned by the Weld family whose Lulworth Estate extends over 20 square miles of the south Dorset countryside.

There is a stone inset halfway along it that states anyone who defaces or damages the bridge will be transported for the rest of their lives to Australia.

During the Second World War, the end arches of the bridge were widened and the parapets removed so tanks could get through.
The parents of a baby who died at a scandal-hit hospital have told an inquest of the 'chaos' when their daughter was born 'purple and limp' before being placed like a 'dead weight' on her mother's chest.

Poppy Rushton was 'grey, purple and unresponsive' when she was born at Furness General Hospital, Cumbria, on March 3 2016. She died five days later.

The coroner will consider the monitoring of Poppy's heartbeat half an hour before her death, as well as the care she received afterwards.

The inquest heard how the senior midwife, Lindsey Biggs, was struck off after her failings contributed to the death of another baby years earlier.

Poppy Rushton's parents Michael and Kayleigh (pictured together) arrive at the inquest into their daughter's death at Cockermouth Coroner's Court

Devastated mother Kayleigh Rushton, 29, is a paediatric nurse at the hospital where Poppy was born.

She told the hearing at Cockermouth Coroner's Court: 'We feel the care given to Poppy fell woefully short of what should have been expected.

'Her chances of survival may have been increased if better care had been given, especially the resuscitation and the chaos that surrounded it.

'We are very upset and devastated by our beautiful daughter passing away and we are very angry to learn about the failures and that Lindsey Biggs was allowed to continue in her role while being investigated for her part in another baby's death several years earlier.'

Ms Biggs was one of a band of midwives accused of colluding to cover up blunders which contributed to the deaths of at least 11 babies and one mother.

The group  who dubbed themselves 'the musketeers' - continued working at the NHS trust despite public outrage over the deaths, which occurred between 2004 and 2013.

An inquiry found there was a 'dysfunctional culture' on the maternity unit at Furness General Hospital and there had been a 'lethal mix' of failures.

Ms Biggs was one of the midwives involved in the care of baby Joshua Titcombe in November 2008, who died from a serious infection just nine days after he was born.

Following an investigation into Joshua's death, she was struck off and banned from practising for at least five years in October 2016.

Lindsey Biggs (pictured) was allowed to continue in her role despite being investigated for her part in another baby, Joshua Titcombe's, death several years earlier

Speaking at the inquest into her daughter's death Mrs Rushton said: 'I was admitted to hospital to be induced on March 2 and I was shown around and had my observations taken. They attached a CT monitor and a midwife explained I had a high heart rate.

'At 3am I started actively pushing. Ms Biggs didn't say much to me all night but she told me to save my energy and not shout out as much.

'I can't remember her speaking to me or even introducing herself. She wasn't friendly or encouraging.'

Mrs Rushton told area coroner Kally Cheema about the moments after Poppy's birth at 3.32am.

She said: 'Poppy was born and placed on my chest. I didn't know there was anything to be concerned about. I didn't worry at all or panic. She was purple and limp and I knew then something was wrong. She felt like a dead weight placed on me.

'The other midwife in the room, Cassandra Calderbank, asked if the dad wanted to cut the cord but she was quickly told to cut it herself then Ms Biggs took Poppy from me. I couldn't see what she was doing but I assumed she was giving her oxygen.

'She left the room with her and I told Mike to follow them.'

Husband Michael Rushton also gave evidence on the opening day of the inquest, which is expected to last five days.

He said: 'I gathered from the discussions between everyone that there was something wrong but no one explained anything to us. We were just reassured.

'Poppy was grey and purple and unresponsive. The cord was around her neck, not tightly but not loosely either.

'I followed Poppy and Ms Biggs into the other room and sat and watched them work on her. All I can remember is people asking for a scalpel. That seemed to go on for a long time.

'She was resuscitated for about half-an-hour before taken to the Special Care Baby Unit then onto Burnley General Hospital.'

Poppy died there five days later on March 8 2016.

Sunday Ajayi, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at FGH, said: 'When I started my shift Ms Biggs told me in her summary that I needed to monitor Mrs Rushton's CTG.

'After I left the labour ward I had to go and see to other patients on other wards, and I was with another patient when I was asked to go and check it again later.

'I was called about 1.50am and I tried to find out if it was urgent. I was under the impression it wasn't and I returned at 2.18am. I would have rushed straight over if I had more information to say it was urgent.

'I checked her CTG again when I got there and the decision was made to take a foetal blood sample, which came back normal.'

Mr Ajayi returned to the ward after being told Poppy was being resuscitated.

He said: 'I rushed down to where they were treating her.

'Through everything I was trying to explain things to Mrs Rushton, even though she's a nurse herself. Maybe they didn't grasp what I said but I would have explained to them what was going on.

'I want to express my genuine and sincere condolences to Mr and Mrs Rushton.

'This was very traumatic and I just wanted to say that.'

Giving evidence via video link from India, Dr Victor Morris, locum consultant paediatrician on the night in question, told the inquest how he tried to resuscitate Poppy immediately after her birth.

He said: 'I was called to the labour ward and when I got there I saw Ms Biggs rushing out with Poppy in her arms.

'I followed and she was placed on the resuscitation table, where I noticed she was pale and unresponsive. She was motionless and wasn't making any effort to breath on her own.

'While we were resuscitating her she had a couple gasps but that was the only respiratory movement she ever made.'

The inquest continues.
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Union bosses have warned that the 'clock is ticking' for thousands of workers caught up in the collapse of construction giant Carillion amid fears of redundancies in the coming days.

Firms working for Carillion on private sector contracts will only have Government support until tomorrow, Cabinet Office minister David Lidington has said.

The Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) warned ministers not to 'duck and dive' over the pay and jobs of workers in private firms as well as in the public sector.

Just a handful of Carillion staff were left at the 75million Angel Gardens development in Manchester, pictured today

Leaders of the TUC, Unite and GMB met Business Secretary Greg Clark this evening and warned him that workers should not be left to 'carry the can'.

GMB general secretary Tim Roache said: 'The clock is ticking for Carillion's 8,500 private sector workers, and the Government must now offer them reassurance and financial guarantees.

'No worker should go hungry, default on a bill or miss a rent or mortgage payment because of a crisis they did not cause.'

Mr Clark has written to the Insolvency Service and the Official Receiver asking that the statutory investigation into the conduct of Carillion's directors is fast-tracked and extended.

This means the Official Receiver's investigation will consider whether those who are, or were previously directors of the company may have caused detriment to those owed money, including workers and businesses affected.

The minister has also written to the chairman of the Financial Reporting Council, Sir Win Bischoff, and asked it to investigate the preparation of Carillion's accounts past and present, as well as the company's auditors.

A foreman at the Angel Gardens development in Manchester(pictured today) said that all the sub-contractors employed at the site had packed up their tools yesterday and left

Mr Clark said: 'It is important we quickly get the full picture of the events which caused Carillion to enter liquidation, which is why I have asked the Insolvency Service to fast-track and broaden the scope of the Official Receiver's investigation.

'In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors. Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously.'

TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady called for a national taskforce involving unions to safeguard jobs, services and pensions.

'Workers can't be left at the back of the queue. Each and every worker at Carillion needs to know where they stand. They have bills and mortgages to pay, and deserve certainty on their future.

Carillion has public sector or public-private partnership contracts worth 1.7 billion, including providing school dinners, cleaning and catering at NHS hospitals, construction work on rail projects such as HS2 and maintaining 50,000 Army base homes for the Ministry of Defence.

But its shares price has plunged more than 70% in the past six months after a string of profit warnings, and breached its financial rules.

Two people in high-visibility jackets next to the S2 building, a Carillion construction project in King's Cross, London

The group, which employs around 20,000 British workers, has been struggling under 900 million of debt and a 587 million pension deficit.

Anger is growing over bumper payouts received by Carillion's former chief executive Richard Howson.

He pocketed 1.5 million in salary, bonuses and pension payments during 2016 and, as part of his departure deal, Carillion agreed to keep paying him a 660,000 salary and 28,000 benefits until October.

The sites of major multi-million pound developments in Manchester, Birmingham, London and Sunderland were deserted when visited by MailOnline today, with expensive building equipment left turned off.

At the 700m Paradise - One Chamberlain Square development in Birmingham, which will see an eight-storey office block built on the site of the Old Central Library, padlocks were fastened on the gates and there was no sign of any workers.

Small businesses who supplied Carillion could fold unless they are paid what they are owed - potentially plunging more jobs into doubt, the Federation of Small Businesses said.

At the Paradise development a single security guard at the site told MailOnline: 'There's unlikely to be any sign of life here for at least another week or so, we're told.'

Work has also ground to a halt at two Carillion sites in north London - the S2 Handyside and Gas Holders sites, behind King's Cross.

Construction workers from the failed firm had been sent elsewhere on Tuesday morning, with those subcontracted by Carillion given work at other sites.

Workers at many sites were reluctant to be named, after being told not to speak to the media by Carillion bosses.

At the site of the former Vaux Brewery in Sunderland, where development began in 2016 after Corillian forged a partnership with Sunderland Council, a lone security officer said: 'The managers won't speak to anyone.

'They [Carillion] have taken so much on that the people don't matter.'

Just a handful of Carillion staff were left at the 75million Angel Gardens development in Manchester, where a foreman said that all the sub-contractors employed at the site had packed up their tools yesterday and left.

'I'll be out of a job then but I'm pretty confident I'll get taken back on here by whichever company takes over,' he said. 'It's the middle management that will suffer the most because they all have companies cars and medical care.

'I feel sorry for those who have spent a lot over Christmas on their credit cards and now find out they are out of a job. They will be the ones who will be worrying about if they are going to be paid and be able pay their bills.'

The Midland Metropolitan Hospital in Smethwick, West Midlands, was also pictured devoid of staff today.

Development stops at the Midland Metropolitan Hospital in Smethwick, West Midlands, pictured today

The collapse of construction giant Carillion has thrown the future of the Midland Metropolitan Hospital(pictured today) into doubt

The scene at the deserted Carillion construction site at the former Vaux brewery in Sunderland today. MailOnline visited this morning to find no one working there

Ministers have today ordered a fast-track investigation into directors at the failed firm Carillion after they paid themselves bumper bonuses while the firm slid into insolvency.

Business Secretary Greg Clark has asked for an official probe by the Receiver to be 'broadened' to look into the conduct of the bosses - present and past.

The crisis topped the agenda in Cabinet discussions as Theresa May and her senior ministers talked about how to try to stop job losses and keep vital services going.

The PM told her ministers: 'Public services have continued to be provided but there would be no complacency.'

In a statement announcing the investigation, Mr Clark said: 'It is important we quickly get the full picture of the events which caused Carillion to enter liquidation, which is why I have asked the Insolvency Service to fast-track and broaden the scope of the Official Receiver's investigation.

'In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors.

'Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously.'

The failed company's bosses have faced fierce criticism after it emerged they changed the rules to allow them to keep their bumper bonuses - even if the firm failed.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd,left) and Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson pictured walking into No10 today, where Theresa May will speak with her ministers about the outsourcing giant's collapse and the government's response

Minister of State Claire Perry arriving at 10 Downing Street(left) alongside State for Work and Pensions Esther McVey(right)

The company's ex chief executive Richard Howson is still getting his 660,000 salary until October - even though he quit in September as the firm's shares tumbled and it issued profit warnings.

Former financial officer Zafar Khan stepped down in September but will continue receiving a 425,000 base salary a year after leaving.

And Keith Cochrane, who became interim CEO in July will receive a 750,000 salary until July.

Last September, the firm's board changed its rules to make it harder to claw back bonuses paid to executives.

Small businesses could go bust if Carillion's debts are not paid Small businesses that supplied Carillion could go bust costing yet more jobs if the firm's debts are not paid, a business chief today warned. Mike Cherry, chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, said the unpaid bills have been piling up over the past few months. The warning comes as engineering firm Van Elle told investors its faces a potential 1.6m hit if it fails to claws back the cash Carillion owes to it. Mr Cherry said: 'It is vital that Carillion's small business suppliers are paid what they are owed, or some of those firms could themselves be put in jeopardy, putting even more jobs at risk besides those of Carillion's own employees. 'These unpaid bills may well go back several months.' He said he wrote to Carillion in July last year to express concern after hearing the company was making small suppliers wait 120 days to be paid. He added: 'When the dust settles on this sorry saga, there is also a wider lesson to learn about the concentration of public contracts in the hands of a small number of very big businesses.' Advertisement

Downing Street insisted that no additional taxpayers' money would be spent dealing with the crisis at Carillion.

Meanwhile, thousands of private sector Carillion workers will find out today if they are being sacked after the construction giant went into liquidation.

The Government has promised to pay Carillion workers on private sector contracts for 48 hours after the infrastructure firm's collapse - but will not offer them the same protection as those in the public sector.

And the signs were looking gloomy as work ground to a halt on two Carillion building sites in north London - including Google's new building in King's Cross.

A site source told MailOnline: '(It), was completely empty of workers and there was no one on site - the contract has been given to someone else by the sounds of it.'

While there were also no workers to be seen today at Sunderland's Carillion site, after it went into liquidation yesterday.

Hundreds of staff were sent home indefinitely after the company collapsed - leaving the vast Vaux site completely desolate.

Mounds of rubble and dirt have been abandoned and an uncompleted office building stands surrounded by scaffolding.

A lone security officer, who did not wish to be named, told MailOnline: 'This is my second day on this site, just here to make sure that no one comes in.

'Some have tried to come and pick up their equipment but can't.

'The managers won't speak to anyone. 'They [Carillion] have taken so much on that the people don't matter.

'We had lads here yesterday that came all the way up from Birmingham to start work and they were just told to go.

'They stay in digs through the week and go home at weekends - so to get here on a Monday and be told that is awful.'

Cabinet Office minister David Lidington yesterday said that those private companies employing Carillion would have only two days of government support.

'The position of private sector employees is that they will not be getting the same protection that we're offering to public sector employees, beyond a 48-hour period of grace,' Mr Lidington told the Commons.

The Government will pay Carillion workers on private sector contracts for 48 hours after the infrastructure firm's collapse but for no longer. Pictured: a contractor at Carillion's Royal Liverpool Hospital site today

He said the move would 'give time for the private sector counterparties to Carillion to decide whether they want to accept termination of those contracts, or themselves to pay for the ongoing costs.'

'I think that is a reasonable gesture towards private sector employees,' he added.

Mrs May's Cabinet met as the fallout from the crisis continued to reverberate through the Government.

Ministers warned yesterday that fat cat bosses at the failed construction giant they could face severe penalties if they have ripped off staff and taxpayers.

Row as former CEO Richard Howson draws a 660,000 salary despite stepping down Richard Howson(seen in an undated social media photo) will continue receiving a pay packet that includes 28,000 in benefits until October Carillion was accused of offering 'rewards for failure' as it emerged the former CEO still draws a 660,000 salary despite stepping down last summer after presiding over the company's slide to collapse. Richard Howson, who ran the company from 2012 to July following a shock profit warning, will continue receiving a pay packet that includes 28,000 in benefits until October. Former financial officer Zafar Khan stepped down in September, yet will continue receiving a 425,000 base salary a year after leaving. And Keith Cochrane, who became interim CEO in July will receive a 750,000 salary until July despite leaving the firm next month, The Times reported. Unite said: 'This is a classic case of rewards for failure. 'The people at the top of Carillion were apparently lining their pockets while much of their workforce weren't receiving meaningful pay increases. 'Taxpayers' money appears to be siphoned off into private boardrooms.' Advertisement

An inquiry into the firm's collapse may also lead to sanctions against executives if it is found they mishandled the company's pension fund.

Ministers were left scrambling to shore up public services yesterday after the firm, which has 20,000 staff and 450 government contracts, went into liquidation.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell accused the Government of being 'too close' to Carillion.

He told MPs in the Commons today that Tory ministers are 'too wedded' to privatisation.

He said: 'When there were loud and clear worrying signs about Carillion, why, instead of intervening, did the Treasury Minister collude in the strategy of drip-feeding more contracts to Carillion to buoy up an obviously failing company?'

Firefighters in one county were even put on standby to deliver school dinners that had been provided by the firm.

Amid a furious blame game, ministers came under fire after it emerged they had handed Carillion around 2billion in new contracts since it issued the first of three profit warnings last July.

They were also accused of taking their eye off the ball, after MPs were told the key official in charge of managing the Government's relationship with the firm was put on other duties between August and November last year  just as the company was collapsing.

Amid fears for vital public services, Mr Lidington pleaded with Carillion's public sector staff to turn up for work, saying they would be paid directly by the Government.

But last night he tried to put the focus back on the firm's management, which has been accused of paying itself huge bonuses and making massive share dividend payments even while the firm was in trouble.

Mr Lidington said receivers would be conducting an inquiry into the firm's collapse.

MPs were told it could lead to 'severe penalties' for current and former directors if they were found to have caused 'detriment' to staff, taxpayers or the company's pension fund, which has a 580million black hole.

Downing Street also criticised Carillion's decision to continue paying the 660,000 salary of former chief executive Richard Howson until October, even though he quit in September.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman warned yesterday 'We wouldn't expect to see people benefiting from this failure.' As fears grew of a substantial multi-million pound bill for the taxpayer:

Some 20,000 Carillion staff and apprentices were warned they could face redundancy as soon as tomorrow, as ministers said they would only extend support to those providing public services.

Analysts said up to 30,000 small suppliers could be left nursing losses totalling 1billion, with banks potentially losing another 2billion.

Unions warned that schools, hospitals and prisons could all face disruption.

Civil service chief John Manzoni claimed EU procurement rules had made it impossible to blacklist Carillion even when it started to run into difficulty.

The taxpayer-backed Pension Protection Fund was poised to take over responsibility for Carillion's pension schemes.

Carillion said it had 'no choice but to take steps to enter into compulsory liquidation with immediate effect' after talks to restructure its debts collapsed yesterday.

Ministers turned down a last-minute request for a 20million lifeline to keep the firm afloat for longer.

Mr Lidington said it was right that 'shareholders and lenders bear the brunt' of the pain, rather than taxpayers.

Lord Adonis, former chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, said taxpayers were likely to face a bill running into 'tens of millions' to fund the managed liquidation.

Cabinet Office minister David Lidington pleaded with Carillion's public sector staff to turn up for work amid fears for vital public services. Pictured is the company HQ in Wolverhampton

Shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett, left, accused the Government of being 'recklessly complacent, while Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable accused ministers of 'feeding contracts' to the company

Downing Street yesterday insisted services were holding up well. But fears remain overcritical sectors such as cleaning operating theatres, school meals and prison maintenance. Oxfordshire county council put firefighters on standby to deliver school meals, saying 'no child will go hungry at school'.

Labour council offered building giant a 120m deal days ago A Labour-run local authority offered Carillion a new contract worth up to 120million days before the firm collapsed. Leeds City Council named the company as its preferred bidder to build a stretch of dual carriageway in the city despite prominent media reports that it was on the brink of going bust. The contract was worth an initial 14million, with options to extend it as high as 120million. Town hall chiefs last night said they were 'looking at the impact' of Carillion's collapse on the project, but insisted the deal had not been signed off. In the Commons, shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett said the collapse of Carillion was a failure of the Government's 'whole ideological system of contracting out public services'. But Cabinet Office minister David Lidington said a third of Carillion's contracts were awarded by the Coalition Government, with another third agreed by Labour before 2010. He said it was wrong to 'resort to party politics' over an issue involving all the main parties. Advertisement

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable accused ministers of 'feeding contracts' to the giant to contain fears that a possible collapse may have on key public services.

Controversy focused on the Government's decision to continue handing out contracts to the firm after it began issuing profit warnings last summer, including a 1.4billion HS2 rail line deal.

Shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett accused the Government of being 'recklessly complacent in seeking to avoid responsibility and placing the whole responsibility on the company'.

But Government sources stressed that most of the new contracts were so-called 'joint ventures' in which Carillion's business partners are now obliged to pick up the work.

Mr Lidington insisted that ministers had been 'closely monitoring' the firm after it became clear it was running into trouble.

But he struggled to explain why the official in charge of the Government's dealings with the firm was 'rotated off' to other duties for three months last year.

Between 2011 and 2016, Carillion paid out 458million in dividends to shareholders, despite a growing black hole in its pension funds.

Last September, the firm's board changed its rules to make it harder to claw back bonuses paid to executives.

Mr Howson pocketed 1.5million in salary, bonuses and pension payments during 2016.

As part of his departure deal, Carillion agreed to keep paying him a 660,000 salary and 28,000 in benefits until October. Former finance chief Zafar Khan, who left Carillion in September, will receive 425,000 in base salary for 12 months.

Bosses who raked in fortunes as company crumbled

Chief with ski chalet and historic hall

Richard Howson, 49, lives in a 2million historic hall in north Yorkshire, with his wife Geri and their two sons.

The handsome stone property boasts commanding views across the Dales. The couple also have a six-bedroom ski chalet in Rhone-Alpes, France, complete with a hot tub.

Richard Howson, 49, lives in a 2million historic hall in north Yorkshire, with his wife Geri and their two sons

The handsome stone property boasts commanding views across the Dales. The couple also have a six-bedroom ski chalet in Rhone-Alpes, France,

Two years ago Mr Howson was criticised for an estimated 50,000 home renovation while his firm was accused of failing to fix 45,000 squalid Army houses. The Leeds Polytechnic graduate worked as an engineer, before joining Carillion in 1999 and becoming chief executive in January 2012.

He left in September having received more than 6million in pay and bonuses in the role. Under his contract he is due to receive a 660,000 basic salary and 28,000 benefits till his notice period expires at the end of October.

Mr Howson, like Philip Green and Richard Adam declined to comment.

The self-styled Christian capitalist

Philip Green, a 215,000-a-year self-styled Christian capitalist, likes to trumpet his noble deeds, once telling a newspaper: 'The more money you've got the more you should give away.'

The 66-year-old father of two has k a four-bedroom house outside Cape Town and owns a 2.2million home in Berkshire, pictured, which he shares with wife Judy

The 66-year-old father of two declined to tell his interviewer how much he gives, but has kept enough to buy a four-bedroom house outside Cape Town and owns a 2.2million home in Berkshire which he shares with wife Judy.

The Wales University and London Business School graduate was rapped by the Pensions Ombudsman in 1994 after he let pension scheme money be used to buy a luxury flat at an inflated price, when he was an executive at Coloroll.

He joined Carillion's board in 2011 and has been chairman since 2014.

Received 2.6m in 'extras'

Finance director Richard Adam, a married father of three, lives in a sprawling 3.5million six-bedroom house on a private road in Hertfordshire.

After graduating in maths at Reading University, he trained as an accountant and worked in a public and private companies before joining Carillion in 2007.

Philip Green, a 215,000-a-year self-styled Christian capitalist, joined Carillion's board in 2011 and has been chairman since 2014. Finance director Richard Adam,(right) a married father of three, lives in a sprawling 3.5million six-bedroom house on a private road in Hertfordshire

Mr Adam, 60, has had up to 2.6million in extra cash and shares since starting in 2006, according to Daily Mail calculations.

In 2016 he was handed a bonus of 140,000 and long-term incentive awards worth 278,000.

After leaving Carillion in December 2016, he faced a revolt from shareholders at First Group when he joined the transport company's board.

More than a fifth opposed his appointment.

His Carillion successor Zafar Khan launched the review that found the financial black hole which led to last year's profit warning.

Chief' bonuses protected by late tweak to pay policy

Chief executive Richard Howson, 49, quit in September after taking home 582,000 in bonuses and long-term incentive awards last year on top of his 660,000 basic salary

Bust outsourcing firm Carillion introduced new rules protecting bosses' bonuses in the run up to its collapse.

The firm changed the wording of its pay policy to apparently make it harder for investors to claw back the money even if the company went under.

The changes in the pay deal, revealed by the Daily Mail in September, could preserve any bonuses Carillion chiefs pocketed as the firm teetered on the brink.

Chief executive Richard Howson, 49, quit in September after taking home 582,000 in bonuses and long-term incentive awards last year on top of his 660,000 basic salary. Finance chief Richard Adam, 59, retired at the end of December 2016, taking home 418,000 on top of his 460,000 basic salary.

Before 2016, bosses could be forced to hand back their annual bonuses and share awards in 'circumstances of corporate failure'. But in the group's 2016 annual report this wording was clarified.

It stated deferred bonuses may be reduced in circumstances of corporate failure. But it went on to say the so-called 'clawback' provisions could be applied in only two circumstances: if results had been misstated or if someone was guilty of gross misconduct.

Mr Howson has made 1.9million in cash and share bonuses during his tenure, and Mr Adam has had up to 2.6million in extra cash and shares since starting in 2006, according to Mail calculations. But crucially, although they have been condemned for their role in the collapse of Carillion, the pair have not been found guilty of misconduct.

Hedge fund 'nets 200m from firm's demise'

Hedge funds were estimated to have made as much as 200million betting on the demise of Carillion.

While banks and rival firms were nursing huge losses, traders have been heavily shorting the stock  meaning they make money when the shares fall in value or the firm collapses  since well before last year.

Carillion has been one of the most bet-against stocks on the market, with around a quarter of its shares held by short-sellers. Between July and last Friday, its share price fell more than 90 per cent, sending its stock market value from just over 1billion to around 61million before the firm collapsed.

Between July and last Friday, Carillion's share price fell more than 90 per cent, sending its stock market value from just over 1billion to around 61million

Hedge fund Marshall Wace was one of the biggest winners immediately after the firm's disastrous trading update in July, pocketing a paper profit of 19.1million in just three days.

The fund was co-founded in 1977 by Brexit-backer Sir Paul Marshall, 58  whose son Winston is a member of folk rock group Mumford and Sons  and Ian Wace, 54. The pair have an estimated wealth of 505million.

Thunderbird Partners, founded by trader David Fear, 49, are estimated to have made 14.5million during the period of Carillion's fall. And Naya Capital, founded by former Goldman Sachs banker Masroor Siddiqui, 46, in July 2012, made 7.6million as the share price plunged more than 70 per cent within a few weeks.

While many hedge funds cashed out and pocketed profits between July and yesterday, 12 hedge funds were still shorting the stock as of Friday, allowing them to clean up when the firm went into administration yesterday.

BlackRock, the world's largest fund manager which manages more than 4.1trillion, had a short position as of last Friday. Mayfair-based Rye Bay Capital, founded by former HSBC banker Daniel Martin, 54, also had a short position yesterday.

Under short-selling, the trader borrows shares from a broker and sells them on at current market price. They then wait for the price to fall as predicted, before buying the shares back and handing them back to the broker.

The trader therefore pockets the amount by which the price has fallen, minus any borrowing costs. If a firm has gone into administration, the shares become worthless. The hedge fund does not have to return them to the lender, but still has the cash from when it sold them on.

Carillion collapse fallout: Banks 'safe' but small businesses set to suffer amid demands for 'fast-track' probe

By Louise Hill for This Is Money

The Bank of England has said UK lenders do not face any direct threat of major difficulties as a result of Carillion's dramatic collapse amid government demands for a 'fast-track' investigation into the failed construction firm.

Banks and insurers' exposure to Carillion, which went into liquidation on Monday, are 'entirely manageable' according to the central bank's deputy governor for prudential regulation and head of the Prudential Regulation Authority, Sam Woods.

Carillion's lenders, Barclays, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and Santander UK, were reportedly facing heavy losses on their 2billion exposure to the firm.

Speaking in front of a Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday, Woods said: 'There's then the question of will there be a wider, indirect issue with suppliers and that's more difficult for us to get a handle on,' but added: 'I'm not massively worried about it.'

Engineering firm Van Elle faces a 1.6 million hit if Carillion doesn't it pay what it owes

Business secretary Greg Clarke demanded that an investigation looking to uncover company misconduct be fast-tracked in order to establish 'the full picture of the events' which led to the company folding.

He said: 'In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors. Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously.'

After issuing several profit warnings last year, Carillion sank under the weight of 1.5 billion of debts this week.

While the Bank of England believes the big banks face few major issues linked to the collapse, around 30,000 private firms are said to be owed money by the global construction giant with only public sector contracts guaranteed government backing.

Businesses working on purely private-sector contracts could receive only two days of government support, cabinet office minister David Lidington warned, leaving thousands of workers unsure of their futures as contracts dry up.

Carillion's collapse threatens the futures of 28,000 members of its pension scheme, 48,500 workers around the world and about 5,000 suppliers.

It has also left a hole across a number of services with the failed firm having been responsible for managing a number of buildings and company facilities, including areas such as security.

Larger companies which worked with Carillion also face substantial losses.

Engineering firm Van Elle for example faces a 1.6 million hit if Carillion doesn't pay what it owes and said in a note to shareholders that it was bracing for an 'adverse financial impact' if the money wasn't recovered.

It also said it was 'too early to say' what the impact will be on a further 2.5 million worth of revenue linked to Carillion contracts due in the second half of the financial year.

Jon Fenton, chief executive of Van Elle, said: 'While it is disappointing to note the Carillion announcement we continue to develop further our strong relationship with Network Rail and its principal contractors, and remain committed to developing high-quality solutions in the rail division both for upgrade and maintenance work.'

In a separate stock market announcement, John Laing Infrastructure Fund said it had launched company contingency plans, rolling nine Carillion projects onto new providers.

However, it said the firm should not suffer any 'material impact'.

On Monday Balfour Beatty revealed it would take on a loss of between 35 million and 45 million as Carillion's collapse hit and Galliford Try said the firm's demise had left a 60 million to 80 million hole in the funding of the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route road project in Scotland.

Kier group also implemented contingency plans for its joint ventures with Carillion, adding that it does not expect to take a financial hit.

Six companies  Carillion Plc, Carillion Construction, Carillion Services, Planned Maintenance Engineering, Carillion Integrated Services and Carillion Services 2006  were all placed in liquidation, with PwC appointed to support the official receiver.

PwC said there is no prospect of any return to shareholders, meaning heavy losses for those who had not cashed out in hopes the stock could recover.
A man is facing a string of charges following the seizure of five snakes and a number of guns at a property in eastern Victoria.

The snakes, some of which were believed to be pythons, were seized from the Morwell property, in Victoria's south-east, about 9.45am on Tuesday.

Five firearms, a large amount of ammunition and cannabis plants were also seized.

A man (pictured getting into police vehicle) is facing a string of charges following the seizure of five snakes and a number of guns at a property in eastern Victoria

Five firearms, a large amount of ammunition and cannabis plants (pictured) were also seized

The cannabis plants were allegedly found growing in the backyard of the Morwell property.

Wildlife officers from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, were called to the property to safely remove the snakes from the home.

A 20-year-old Morwell man is facing charges relating to animal cruelty, firearms and drugs.

The man, who is yet to be charged, is due to appear in an out-of-sessions hearing at Traralgon on Tuesday night.

The cannabis plants were allegedly found growing in the backyard of the Morwell property

A 20-year-old Morwell man is facing charges relating to animal cruelty, firearms and drugs (police seize items from the home)

The man, who is yet to be charged, is due to appear in an out-of-sessions hearing at Traralgon on Tuesday night (wildlife officers were called in to safely remove the snakes)




A child genius who got an Amazon Echo for Christmas has exposed a flaw - after asking it a historical question which it got wrong.

Curtis Elton, 14, quizzed the digital assistant which answers to the name 'Alexa' about the date Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor, only to be told it was in 1934.

The teenager from London, who became the youngest ever person to receive a degree-level diploma in music at the age of 11, knows the correct answer is 1933.

Child genius Curtis Elton exposed a flaw in his Amazon Echo, when it got two historical dates wrong

Curtis, who was dubbed the mini Mozart, filmed the gadget answering more than one key historical question wrongly.

He asks: 'Alexa, when was Hitler Chancellor of Germany?'

Alexa says: '1934.'

Curtis then says: 'But, wasn't it in 1933?'

Alexa replies: 'Sorry, I don't know that. In 1933, there was The Great Depression...'

Curtis responded: 'Wasn't the Great Depression in 1929?'

Curtis, a competitive ice skater who skates internationally, bought the 89 Amazon Echo earlier this month with a gift voucher he was given for Christmas.

15-year-old piano player Curtis, dubbed the mini Mozart, found the mix-up incredibly funny, and filmed the gadget getting it wrong

The child genius, whose IQ was recorded at 152 in 2015, caught Alexa out on the date Hitler became Chancellor and the date of the Great Depression

The device connects to a cloud-based voice service to play music, make calls, set alarms and timers, manage to-do and shopping lists, control compatible smart home devices, and more.

But it didn't take long for Curtis, whose IQ was recorded as 152 in 2015, to realise he knew more than the smart-machine.

Mother Hayley Elton, 45, said: 'It's funny really, you wouldn't expect a child to know more than a computer, and he's proving Alexa wrong here.

'Curtis is a child prodigy, he takes things to the next level and never lets them just remain mediocre - but we never expected this.

Curtis became the youngest ever person to receive a degree-level diploma in music at the age of 11

'I don't really know what he was doing, but he suddenly found something very funny, I went and saw that he found out Alexa answered one of his questions wrong.'

Hayley and Curtis released an album together named Mozart, Mummy and Me.

Hayley, who is a music teacher, said that her graphic designer husband Jonathon, 50, also finds the whole ordeal amusing.

She said: 'He thinks it's terrific, he knows that Curtis is very bright anyway.

'I'm looking forward to finding out what else Curtis gets right over Alexa.'

Curtis and his younger sister Sophia, 12, are an ice skating duo who compete internationally

Curtis, who has shot to stardom for his piano playing and ice-skating skills, also made it to the finals of the Channel 4 Child Genius show.

Hayley added: 'He really wanted a voucher for Christmas, he didn't care what or how much, just a voucher- he likes browsing online to see the things he could buy.

'So his sister was generous and got him an Amazon voucher, and he got Alexa at the beginning of January.

'He'd only had it for about a week and he was just asking it random questions, like History GCSE questions.'

Curtis and his mother Hayley released and album together called Mozart, Mummy and Me

In 2013, Curtis changed school because he was not being exempted from rugby practice, where once someone stood on his hand - stopping him from being able to play piano for weeks.

Equally high-achieving sister Sophia, 13, and Curtis, are an ice-skating duo who compete internationally, representing Great Britain across the globe.

Curtis lives with sister Sophia and his mum and dad in London and Curtis is set to appear in a thriller film called The Red Sparrow, featuring Jennifer Lawrence in March this year.

A spokesperson for Amazon said: 'This was a glitch and has been fixed.'
Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis has revealed how being stalked for more than 20 years by a former university friend affected her marriage.

Ms Maitlis said she had been let down by the criminal justice system and Edward Vines's unwanted attention was upsetting her husband Mark Gwynne and scaring her children.

Vines, 47, was jailed by a judge at Oxford Crown Court for 45 months after admitting two breaches of an indefinite restraining order banning him from contacting the BBC journalist.

Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis has revealed how being stalked for more than 20 years by Edward Vines (right) affected her marriage with husband Mark Gwynne (left)

The BBC Newsnight presenter said she felt 'let down' that Edward Vines could send her letters from prison

The court heard that Vines - who had briefly become friends with Ms Maitlis while they were both students at Cambridge University in 1989 - had written letters to her while serving a previous prison sentence for earlier breaches of the restraining order.

He had then written again while out on licence and under the supervision of probation services.

Ms Maitlis said: 'It has affected my relationship with my husband who is frustrated we cannot get to the bottom of the problem even though we have been tackling it through the courts and CPS for over twenty years and it has scared my children who thought the threat had gone way - albeit temporarily while he was behind bars.'

Oxford Crown Court heard a letter ended with Vines saying 'I will not relent until you talk to me.'

Ms Mailtis, 47, did not receive the letters, which were sent to the BBC and intercepted by security guards.

Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis said she had been let down by the criminal justice system

When he was released, Vines ramped up his campaign and bombarded her with more creepy messages.

In a victim statement heard by the court Ms Maitlis said: 'When I heard Edward Vines had breached his restraining order I felt scared and let down.

'Scared because it meant that even from within the prison system the perpetrator was able to reach me - let down because the system had been unable to stop him getting in touch even though the crime he is serving time for is harassment through unwanted and ongoing contact.'

Vines was jailed in 2016 for three years at Oxford Crown Court for breaching an order initially imposed after he was convicted in 2002 (pictured during that year) of harassing Ms Maitlis where he was jailed for four months

The journalist said it had made her 'jumpy' around strangers for no reason.

In a previous interview with Times Magazine she said: 'There is a weariness to it. It feels never-ending. His life is ruined; I try to blank it. It's a heaviness that sits on you, and when he comes back it's dreadful. I get calls at all times of the day and night. It feels desperately sad. I can't see how it will end.'

VINES' 27 YEAR STALKING CAMPAIGN 1989 - Edward Vines first met Emily Maitlis when they were both students at Cambridge University. 1990 - Vines believed Ms Maitlis had acted 'scornfully' towards him after he had told her he was in love with her and had a 'sexual attraction' to her while they were studying. 2002 - He was convicted of harassment after Ms Maitlis contacted police about his erratic behaviour following the murder of her fellow broadcaster Jill Dando. 2009 - After Vines continued trying to contact Maitlis, he was given the restraining order. 2015 - He breached the order by sending two letters to the journalist and emails and letters to her mother, Marion Maitlis. 2016 - He was jailed for three years for breaching a restraining order preventing him from contacting her. However he sent her a letter from his prison cell, as well as a second letter while out on licence and under the supervision of probation services. Advertisement

Judge Peter Ross said the fact Vines was able to send letters to Ms Maitlis from inside Bullingdon Prison and from approved probation premises was 'something of a scandal' and demanded answers from the governor and probation service within 10 days.

The judge told him: 'Ms Maitlis wants absolutely nothing to do with you and that has been made clear repeatedly.'

Vines's sentencing was delayed after his application to alter his plea was refused by the court.

At the time, his lawyer, Michael Gould, told the court he could no longer represent his client as he had been 'professionally embarrassed'.

Vines told the court: 'As a defendant I never had full access to previous evidence given and I was not aware of the impact it was having on her life, this is news to me.

'Through solicitors I have had and the police handling of things, I have never been able to solve this problem 'I think the whole issue comes back to if she would talk to me just once, that hasn't happened once since university. There were one or two calls but that's it.

'I am very sorry about it, I had no idea how she was feeling. Two of us are unhappy in this situation, I don't know what to do about it. I think I have been through enough. All this distress has been caused by not being able to talk to her once since all those years ago at Cambridge.'

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: 'We apologise unreservedly for this error and for the distress caused to the victim.

'We have significantly strengthened our monitoring procedures to prevent incidents like this from happening again.

'We would like to reassure the victim that any future correspondence involving this offender will be carefully checked, with staff reminded of the sensitivities of this particular case.'

Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis has spoken out over how a 20-year campaign of harassment at the hands of a former university friend is destroying her life as he was jailed for nearly four years

Vines first met Ms Maitlis in their first year at Queen's College, Cambridge, in 1989.

He believed Ms Maitlis had acted 'scornfully' towards him after he had told her he was in love with her and had a 'sexual attraction' to her while they were studying in 1990.

In 2002, he was convicted of harassment after Ms Maitlis contacted police about his erratic behaviour following the murder of her fellow broadcaster Jill Dando.

In 2009, after Vines continued trying to contact Maitlis, he was issued with the restraining order.

He breached the order by sending two letters to the journalist and emails and letters to her mother, Marion Maitlis, between May 10 and June 26 in 2015.

He was then jailed for three years in 2016 for breaching the order preventing him from contacting her.

The stalking got so bad Ms Maitlis revealed her two children had security to get on a bus to school and she required an escort to go shopping at a supermarket.
A Danish inventor has been charged with murdering Swedish journalist Kim Wall after she was last seen on board his submarine.

Peter Madsen claimed Miss Wall, 30, was killed by accident during the maiden voyage of his home-made craft UC3 Nautilus in Copenhagen in August last year.

But prosecutors have now charged him with her murder after her dismembered corpse was fished out of the city's harbour over several months.

Madsen, 46, is accused of either slitting her throat or strangling her before cutting up her body, placing it in bags, and dropping it into the harbour attached to weights.

Kim Wall, 30, died while on board a submarine built by 46-year-old inventor Peter Madsen in August last year before her dismembered body was found in Copenhagen harbour

Madsen claims Miss Wall was killed by accident while on board, and said he disposed of the body. But prosecutors now say he killed her, either by slitting her throat or strangling her

His trial will begin on March 8, when he will be charged with premeditated murder as well as dismemberment and 'sexual relations other than intercourse of a particularly dangerous nature.' Lawyers will be seeking a life term.

Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen said the case is 'very unusual and extremely brutal.'

Wall was last seen on August 10 boarding Madsen's submarine for a trip around Copenhagen harbour for a story she was writing.

In the early hours of the following morning Madsen called the coastguard to report the craft was sinking, after which it became apparent Miss Wall was missing.

Madsen initially denied any knowledge of her fate, saying he dropped her off on shore before the submarine ran into trouble.

But he later changed his account, saying she was killed by accident after a heavy hatch fell on her head.

He also admitted dismembering and disposing of the body, but has always denied deliberately killing her.

Divers were quickly able to recover the wreck of the Nautilus from the bottom of the harbour, but found no trace of Miss Wall on board except for her underwear.

Her torso was discovered almost two weeks after she was last seen, before her head and legs were discovered in October.

Crucially, examiners said the skull bore no evidence of a fracture which would corroborate Madsen's account.

Two arms were then discovered in the same area in November. All the body parts had been weighted down with metal.

Police technicians board Peter Madsen's submarine UC3 Nautilus on a pier in Copenhagen harbour, Denmark, in August (file photo)

Madsen had initially denied any knowledge of Miss Wall's fate, saying he dropped her off on shore before his submarine sank, but later changed his story (pictured, the pair on board)

Police also found some of Miss Wall's clothes and a knife in one of the bags.

Earlier, prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen told a court custody hearing that a hard disk found in Madsen's workshop contained fetish films in which real women were tortured, decapitated and burned.

Madsen, who is married, denied the hard drive belonged to him and has denied any sexual relationship between himself and Miss Wall.

Prosecutors have previously said they believe Madsen killed Wall as part of a sexual fantasy, and found multiple mutilation wounds to her genitals.

Madsen is a self-taught engineer has successfully launched rockets with the aim of developing private space travel.

He is known for his occasionally foul temper and fallouts with former colleagues.

His homemade submarine Nautilus, launched in 2008, was the biggest private sub ever made when he built it with help from a group of volunteers.

But they became engaged in a long-running dispute over the Nautilus, before members of the board decided to transfer the vessel's ownership to Madsen, according to the sub's website.

In 2015, Madsen sent a text message to two members of the board claiming: 'There is a curse on Nautilus'.

'That curse is me. There will never be peace on Nautilus as long as I exist,' Madsen wrote, according to the volunteers.

Madsen's character is expected to be central to the murder case against him. A verdict is expected on April 25.
Christopher Lewis tried to assassinate the Queen in 1981

A troubled teenager who attempted to kill the Queen boasted to police that he came within 'finger twitch of seeing her head splatter', a former detective told MailOnline.

Christopher Lewis had the monarch lined up in his sights and was about to pull the trigger when two police officers walked into his line of sight.

He failed to take the shot, but would later fire at the Queen with the bullet whizzing harmlessly past her head.

Former detective Tom Lewis who interviewed self-named terrorist Lewis said the 17-year-old enjoyed describing how he almost assassinated the Queen during a walkabout on a tour of New Zealand in 1981.

The troubled teen, a career criminal with a hatred for the Royal family, later died in mysterious circumstances while awaiting trial for murder.

He was found electrocuted in his prison cell despite being under constant supervision - and died protesting his innocence for the murder of a mother-of-three who was battered to death.

Mr Lewis, a detective sergeant, was put in charge of the investigation into the shot fired at the Queen while she visited the town of Dunedin during a Royal tour of New Zealand.

The Queen and Prince Philip pictured visiting New Zealand in 1981 as Lewis prepared to assassinate Her Majesty

A police mugshot of troubled teenager Chris Lewis, who fired a shot that narrowly missed the Queen while she was in Dunedin in 1981

Childhood photos of Chris Lewis, who would grow up to be a career criminal in and out of jail who died aged 33 after killing himself in jail while on remand facing trial for murder

He later claimed the incident was hushed up on the orders of the New Zealand government and those police officers who wanted Lewis charged with attempted treason moved off the case to other work.

Lewis was only ever charged with illegal possession of a firearm and discharging a weapon but never for trying to kill her during a visit to Dunedin.

The retired detective told MailOnline: 'When I interviewed the teen he was very clear of what would have happened.

'He said he had taken up position in a place called the Octagon with his .22 rifle. He was less than 50m from where the Queen would walk past and was a crack shot.

Lewis (pictured) grew up with his single mother and then his strict stepfather

'He told me that he had a direct shot and had her hat in his sights and was waiting for her head to splatter. He said he was just a finger twitch away from killing the Queen.

'Fortunately two police officers walked into his line of sight and he did not take the shot. Had he done so he would have changed the course of history.'

Lewis, who later plotted to kill Prince Charles and Princess Diana in a 1984 visit to New Zealand, retreated to a second firing position. This time he did pull the trigger of his .22 rifle but the bullet did not strike anything.

The attempted assassination only came to light when Lewis was arrested for an earlier robbery of post office.

Former detective Lewis said one of his accomplices suddenly blurted out that the teen was angry because he had 'missed the Queen'.

Now retired and living on Australia's Gold Coast 72-year-told Mr Lewis vividly recalls sitting down with Lewis as the teen talked about his attempt on the Queen's life.

He said the initial charging sheet contained the words ''attempted treason' which carried the death penalty. Lewis said when senior officers realised the enormity of what this would mean he was sent on leave.

When he returned he had been taken off the investigation and there was no mention of an attempt to kill the Queen.

Bespectacled Lewis was found electrocuted in his prison cell - and died protesting his innocence for the murder of a mother-of-three who was battered to death

Lewis lived at this Albany St flat in the heart of Dunedin's student quarter when he was 17, studying by correspondence when he was arrested over the attempted murder of the Queen

The shooter was later jailed for three years for a post office raid and firing a gun near the Queen. He spent the final year of his sentence in a psychiatric hospital but escaped to try and kill Charles and Di who were on a royal visit.

'There is no doubt in my mind that had he got hold of a gun he would have carried out the attempt on Prince Charles and Diana. The man was a psychopath with a hatred of the royal family.'

Lewis would die 16 years later while being held on remand for the murder of Tania Furlan.

He was able to kill himself in the most gruesome fashion by wrapping a wet towel around his head and using bare wires from a TV which he pushed into an electric junction box in his cell.

Tom Lewis (right) is the detective who investigated Lewis's case

Lewis said his namesake had shown a liking of violence from an early age and not been afraid to inflict pain on those who crossed him. Aged 11 he almost killed a neighbour by strangling her with a belt and later would stab a boy in the head with a pair of scissors. Before taking his own life in 1997 Lewis left behind an autobiography that detailed the childhood abuse and neglect that shaped him.

In his own words, the bespectacled drifter told how he his life had become a 'living hell' after his mother re-married and he was abused by his stepfather. He said he was left in a state of constant terror and would be beaten with a leather belt for minor indiscretions, such as not washing his hands or forgetting to feed his pet guinea pig.

When he was just four years old he was thrown out of nursery school after pushing a boy off a slide. His later school years were marred by expulsions for showing classmates porn images, playing with matches and tipping over a teacher's desk. He idolised the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly and cult leader Charles Manson and friends described Lewis as a 'true psychopath' who once ripped the head of a bird 'just for the fun of it'.

Former classmate Paul Taane said Lewis was 'messed up beyond belief' - adding: 'He always wanted to know what it would be like to take someone's life.'

Lewis claimed he never intended to hurt the Queen and only wanted to scare her. When later talking to his partner about the shooting he confessed to an assassination attempt. 'Damm, I missed her,' he said according to Stuff NZ magazine.

On his release from prison Lewis attempted to go straight, but veered back into a life of petty crime. He remained on the intelligence services' watch list and in 1995 when the Queen returned to New Zealand he was exiled to Great Barrier Island in the Hauraki Gulf because of police fears for the Queen's safety during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Auckland.

The Queen was targeted by the Royal fanatic during a walkabout on a New Zealand tour in 1981

Queen Elizabeth ll smiles during an inspection as she tours New Zealand on October 1, 1981

A year later he was arrested for the murder of Mrs Furlan in Auckland. She was beaten to death with a hammer with forensic evidence linking Lewis the crime in July 1996.

Police said a footprint found at the murder scene matched those of a pair of Reebok trainers worn by Lewis. They also said a notebook found at his home had indentations from where he had written the ransom note.

While Lewis admitted almost all his crimes he protested his innocence the to the murder and insisted he had been framed. He never stood trial as he killed himself in his cell.

A re-investigation of the Furlan murder failed to clear Lewis. His mother, speaking after an inquest into her son's death, said he had suffered from an 'untreatable' mental disorder and said he was 'psychologically disturbed'.

But she added she still loved her son, saying: 'He's my son, I still love him and I always will.'
A judge made public the conclusion that Paul Worthington (pictured) sexually abused 13-month-old Poppi hours before her death

Poppi Worthington's father is still getting 50,000-a-year police protection despite a coroner ruling he sexually abused his daughter before she died, it was revealed today.

Cumbria Police confirmed that 'security arrangements have been put in place due to threats having been made' to Paul Worthington, from Barrow-in-Furness.

But John Woodcock, the local MP for Poppi's family, has condemned the 'absurd and expensive' protection for the father of the tragic 13-month-old girl.

The Labour MP for Barrow spoke out as it was revealed that former supermarket worker Worthington, 49, may have to live the rest of his life with a new identity.

He has been living in hiding after a judge made public the conclusion that he abused Poppi hours before her death.

Today, Mr Woodcock told MailOnline: 'Our community will resent this daily reminder of the abject failure of the police to do their job in the first place.

'We have to try every avenue and hope that the coroner's verdict gives us a chance at getting a trial that would end this absurd and expensive situation - but the chances are slim, which is why I am calling for a public inquiry.'

The father appeared to make every effort to avoid saying anything that could help reveal how and why Poppi (pictured) died

A Cumbria Police spokesman told MailOnline today of the protection for Poppi's father: 'We will not comment on the specific details, but security arrangements have been put in place due to threats having been made to Mr Worthington.'

Yesterday, the senior coroner for Cumbria concluded that Poppi suffered a serious sexual assault in her father's double bed at the family home in the early hours of December 12 2012.

Poppi Worthington woke up screaming at about 5.30am in 2012 at the family home

The ruling on the balance of probabilities effectively mirrored two earlier fact-finding judgments by a High Court family judge in 2014 and 2016 that Worthington abused his daughter shortly before her death.

Mr Woodcock said yesterday that Poppi will never get justice, as he called for a public inquiry into the 'grotesque failing' by police.

He said: 'This is the verdict we all feared - Poppi was probably assaulted by her father before she died. That little girl will probably never get justice because of grotesque failings into the police investigation into her death.

'But we owe it to her to campaign for a public inquiry that can expose all that is rotten in the system that has led us to this terrible day.'

Worthington appears to have escaped prosecution over the sexual abuse of his daughter, but his protection could cost the taxpayer as much as 50,000 a year.

He appeared before the fresh inquest into Poppi's death at Kendal Coroner's Court last November  but had to be accompanied by two police officers armed with Tasers.

Worthington was also allowed to give evidence while shielded from the public.

The father appeared to make every effort to avoid saying anything that could help reveal how and why Poppi died.

Paul Worthington arrives at Kendal County Hall in Cumbria for the inquest last November

During the hearing, he declined to answer questions 252 times, routinely responding: 'I rely on the right not to answer under Rule 22.'

John Woodcock, the local MP for Poppi's family, has condemned the 'absurd and expensive' police protection for the father

This allows witnesses at inquests to avoid saying anything that could incriminate them. But coroner David Roberts still found flaws in the father's evidence.

For example, Worthington  who denies any wrongdoing  had misled medical workers at Furness General Hospital into thinking that constipation may have contributed to Poppi's death.

Mr Roberts said the accounts Worthington had given since the tragedy 'differ and raise concerning questions'.

Among these were elements of Worthington's account of Poppi's final hours which he said were 'not credible'.

He found of Worthington: 'Whilst parts of his previous accounts may be true, I cannot rely upon any one of them as providing a complete and truthful history of what took place between his taking Poppi from her cot and her death.'

Worthington may once have believed he would escape unscathed from Poppi's death.

It was not until eight months after the day she died that Worthington was arrested and questioned by police.

Forensic faults, no reconstruction and not analysing phones: 12 basic errors in the initial police probe A dozen police findings outlined by High Court judge Mr Justice Jackson: 1) Items at the hospital Poppi was taken to were not preserved for forensic analysis 2) Items at the family home were not preserved for forensic analysis 3) The scene at the family home was not secured, with Poppi's last nappy being lost despite the presence of police officers 4) The detective inspector and another officer not visiting the home. According to national protocol, a senior officer should immediately attend the home to take charge of the investigation and ensure that evidence is intelligently preserved 5) No reconstruction with the parents at home so that their accounts could be understood and investigations focused 6) No forensic medical examination at the time of death. Swabs were not taken until post-mortem despite delays meaning forensic analysis can be prejudiced 7) No engagement of a paediatrician with specialist knowledge of investigating sexual abuse for there to be a physical examination of the child, a viewing of the home and a report for the pathologist 8) Dr Armour's initial views were not clearly passed on to the local authority for safeguarding purposes 9) The parents were not formally interviewed until August 2013 10) Neither parent's mobile telephone or Facebook accounts were analysed 11) Samples were not sent for analysis until after receipt of Dr Armour's full report 12) No statements taken from any witnesses (paramedics, nurses, doctors, family members) until September 2013. Advertisement

And, after errors in the police investigation, there was not enough evidence to charge him.

In autumn 2014, Cumbria council was still trying to keep everything about the death  including Poppi's name, the town she lived in and all public agencies involved  secret.

Only in January 2016 was a damning fact-finding ruling by High Court judge Mr Justice Jackson made public. It concluded that Worthington had perpetrated a brutal assault on Poppi before she died.

The only clue to Worthington's life was given by his barrister Paul Clark, who said: 'He has been in a long-term position of great vulnerability and risk and as a result has been in a long-term position of witness protection whereby his current appearance and location are not known.'

Witness protection is usually provided for those giving evidence against criminals at great risk to themselves, rather than those needing protection from vigilante attacks.

Worthington's lawyers, Farley Solicitors, said: 'Mr Worthington is considering his options following the coroner's conclusion today and we are advising him not to say anything further at this point.'

Cumbria Police's chief constable, Jeremy Graham, has again apologised to Poppi's family for the force's failings, but said police would now look at 'possible courses of action' with lawyers following the coroner's findings.

Lead detective on the police inquiry, Detective Inspector Amanda Sadler, a former Miss Great Britain, was subjected to a disciplinary hearing last year where gross incompetency was proven and she was demoted in rank.

She has since retired along with her boss, former Detective Chief Inspector Mike Forrester. No further action was taken against either of the former officers.

In 2015, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) concluded that both Mrs Sadler and Mr Forrester had cases to answer for gross misconduct.

Mr Woodcock said: 'It is hard to overstate our community's anger at seeing an officer found responsible for gross incompetence able to keep a job in the force before retiring. This is not accountability.'

Paul Worthington is helped into Kendal County Hall for the second inquest last November

He said a public inquiry should look at preventing negligent officers from retiring to escape scrutiny and the decision by Cumbria Police to offer an officer found guilty of gross incompetence an alternative senior role in the force rather than dismissal.

He added: 'Police officers work so hard to keep our community safe but they need leaders now who are prepared to recognise the damage that has been done by this tragedy and campaign for real change to restore public confidence.'

Mr Graham said the inquest detailing the catalogue of failures by officers had been 'uncomfortable listening'.

He added: 'I will consider the detail of the coroner's conclusion and his comments today and we will be having an early discussion with the Crown Prosecution Service in order to determine possible courses of action.'

Cumbria's police and crime commissioner Peter McCall declined to comment to MailOnline today on the protection for Worthington.
A young British fashion designer who was arrested for trying to board plane while wearing an excessive amount of clothes claims 'racial profiling' played a role in his detention.

Ryan Carney Williams, 22, who makes music and designs clothes under the moniker Ryan Hawaii, was blocked from flying home from Iceland after he put on all of the spare clothes that had exceeded BA's baggage limit.

But after the confrontation led to Mr Williams' arrest, alleged macing by Icelandic police and being denied flights two days in a row, the Brit blamed racial profiling for the escalation.

Scroll down for video

Ryan Carney Williams, 22, who makes music and designs clothes under the moniker Ryan Hawaii and was arrested for trying to board plane while wearing an excessive amount of clothes, claims 'racial profiling' played a role in his detention

Speaking to MailOnline, Mr Williams said: 'If I was a young white male or a young white female I would have been treated slightly differently.'

Describing the days events, the designer admitted to refusing to move away from the BA check in desk while putting on eight pairs of pans and ten shirts to avoid excess fees. Annoyed at British Airways staff refusing to allow him to board with an extra IKEA bag filled with clothes, Mr Williams wore the excess clothing as he couldn't afford the 90 surcharge.

But despite acknowledging his role in the confrontation, Mr Williams took to Instagram to record the events and accuse the airline of racial profiling.

Speaking to MailOnline, Mr Williams said: 'If I was a young white male or a young white female I would have been treated slightly differently.'

Mr Williams, from Catford, London, whose parents originate from Cuba, Jamaica, Ireland and England said: 'The reason I say it's racial profiling - and I hate pulling the race card - is because my whole experience of life shows me that the older generations are very nationalist.'

Explaining why he felt he had been treated unfairly, he said: 'Im not saying theyre racist but they see me - Im 6ft, dreadlocks hair, military boots - if it was America they would have assumed I was a rapper but in Iceland theyre not used to black people.'

A spokesperson for British Airways strongly refuted Mr Williams' claims and added he was not denied boarding because of the luggage but rather his behaviour towards staff.

They said: 'The decision to deny boarding was absolutely not based on race. We do not tolerate threatening or abusive behaviour from any customer, and will always take the appropriate action.'

After being led away by police, Mr Williams claims he was pepper sprayed in the eyes, nose and mouth, which has left him unable to work and struggling to talk.

During the incident, Mr Williams posted a video to his Twitter profile slamming the airline for 'racial profiling.'

A man traveling from Iceland to England was arrested at the Iceland Keflavik International Airport for wearing an excessive amount of clothes on Wednesday

Ryan Carney Williams, who identifies as Ryan Hawaii, reportedly wanted to avoid the excess luggage fee and therefore wore eight pairs of pants and ten shirts (pictured left)

He tweeted: '@British_Airways hi being held at Iceland Keflavik airport because I had no baggage put all the clothes on and they still won't let me on. Racial profiling? Or.....'

He posted two videos asking the employees why he wasn't allowed to board, to which one of the airline staff responded: 'Do we need to call the police?'

In a later tweet he explained he had been arrested, pepper sprayed and held on the ground after refusing to leave.

After he gave his statement to police he returned to the airport to get an EasyJet flight he had booked for the next day.

He posted two videos asking the employees why he wasn't allowed to board to which on of the airline staff said 'do we need to call the police?' (stills from the video pictured above)

Initially EasyJet refused to refund him as they said it is not under their terms and conditions

Mr Willaims says he got through check-in and security, but once he arrived at the flight gate, a man told him he wasn't allowed to board because of the incident the day before.

'And AGAIN! Refused from 2 flights in 2 days for no valid reason,' he tweeted.

Mr Williams claims he was stuck at the Iceland airport with no money and without his belongings as his luggage successfully flown to England without him.

Mr Williams arrived back in England after boarding a Norwegian airline flight.

According to him, EasyJet and British Airways both refunded him after he complained to them.
German police and intelligence agents have launched raids nationwide on the homes of Iranians suspected of plotting attacks on Israelis.

Media reports said at least ten wanted suspects are members of Iran's notorious Quds Brigades responsible for assassinations both inside and outside their homeland against government critics.

Focus Magazine (in German) reported that hit teams from the Iranian secret intelligence service Vevak were also targeted in the raids in Berlin, Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg and North Rhone-Westphalia.

Police are eager to catch 10 wanted suspects of Iran's notorious Quds Brigades (file picture)

'We believe the suspects spied on institutions and persons in Germany at the behest of an intelligence unit associated with Iran,' spokesman Stefan Biehl told The Associated Press.

The government said 'elaborate observations' by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic German intelligence agency, led to Tuesday's swoops.

In September 1992 Iranian hitmen murdered four Iranian exile politicians in the Berlin restaurant Mykonos. In the ensuing investigation it was proved that Iran's Secret Service had issued the assassination order.

This time Israeli and Jewish interests are understood to have been the target.

But Mr Biehl declined to comment on a report by weekly magazine Focus that the suspects were spying on Israelis in Germany.

He that no arrests had yet been made.

Germany's Interior Ministry referred questions about the raids to federal prosecutors.

Last month, the German government protested to the Iranian ambassador following the conviction of an Iranian agent for spying.

The Pakistani man was convicted in Berlin last year of espionage and sentenced to more than four years in prison. His targets included Reinhold Robbe, who headed the German-Israeli Association.

Last April, federal prosecutors filed charges against two men suspected of spying on the opposition People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) on behalf of Iranian intelligence, Deutsche Welle reported.

The Paris-based MEK is an Islamist-Marxist-feminist militant group seeking to overthrow Iran's theocratic government.

Iran has blamed the group for stirring up protests earlier this month in Iran.

Thousands of Iranians attend state-organised anti-Israel demonstrations (file pic)

In those protests thousands took to the streets to demand cheaper food prices and less unemployment. At least 21 people were killed.

The MEK has also been accused of carrying out covert operations on behalf of Israel and the United States.

Iran and its Lebanese Shia ally Hezbollah have been accused of assassinating numerous Kurd and MEK members throughout Europe.

They are alleged to have carried out multiple deadly attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets abroad.

In 1992, four Iranian-Kurdish opposition leaders were assassinated in a Berlin restaurant by Iranian agents.

One of the most serious terror-related incidents on German soil in recent years took place during the 1972 summer Olympics, when 11 Israelis were killed after being taken hostage by members of a Palestinian militant group, Black September, on 5 September.

Two died in the athletes' Olympic village in Munich. The others were killed during a gun battle with West German police at a nearby airfield - as the militants tried to take them out of the country.
The new US embassy in London has officially opened days after hitting back at Donald Trump for suggesting its move to a new location was a 'bad deal'.

Trump said he had cancelled his trip to London over concerns about the agreement for the new embassy building he was to officially open there  blaming it on his predecessor Barack Obama.

The decision to relocate to a new embassy was inked in 2008 during the administration of George W. Bush. Officials cited security concerns.

But Trump said the new headquarters in Nine Elms, south of the River Thames, was both 'expensive' and 'off-location'.

The new US embassy in London has officially opened days after hitting back at Donald Trump for suggesting its move to a new location was a 'bad deal'

Trump said the new headquarters in Nine Elms, south of the River Thames, was both 'expensive' and 'off-location'

Trump said he had cancelled his trip to London out of concerns about the agreement for the new embassy building he was to officially open there and blaming it on his predecessor Barack Obama

The new United States embassy based in Nine Elms officially opensNew US Embassy Opening, London. The new building was designed by Kieran Timberlake at a cost of a billion dollars, complete with this foot with a ring in its sole

The president condemned Obama on Twitter for selling the old site on Grosvenor Square in London's exclusive Mayfair district 'for peanuts'.

'Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for 'peanuts,' only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars,' Trump wrote on Twitter.

'Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!'

Trump took to Twitter Thursday saying the 'real' reason why he canceled was because the Obama administration 'sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London'

Trump tweeted shortly before midnight to criticize the move to an 'off location' at Nine Elms, south of the River Thames, as a 'bad deal'.

With the President vowing not to make the trip across the Atlantic, a waxwork from Madame Tussauds was carted across the capital to be there in his absence.

Trump had vowed to open the building himself.

At the time the government decided to relocate its historic embassy, officials said it wasn't possibly to retrofit the existing facility.

The government undertook global efforts to upgrade security at its embassies following embassy bombings and an increase in worldwide threats after Sep. 11.

Trump's tweet, which followed the Daily Mail exclusively revealing last night that the trip to London would be called off, sparked an overwhelming backlash on social media in Britain.

'We looked at all our options, including renovation of our current building on Grosvenor Square,' then-Ambassador Robert Tuttle said, CNN reported.

'In the end, we realized that the goal of a modern, secure and environmentally sustainable embassy could best be met by constructing a new facility,' he added

Workers look at the Madame Tussauds wax figure of US President Donald Trump outside the new US Embassy in Nine Elms, London, after the President confirmed he will not travel to the UK to open the new building

With the President vowing not to make the trip across the Atlantic, a waxwork from Madame Tussauds was carted across the capital to be there in his absence. Trump had vowed to open the building himself

Last week a US embassy spokesman insisted it was completed within its one billion dollar budget and said the plan to finance it was developed in 2007, when George W Bush was in the White House, suggesting Trump was wrong to blame predecessor Barack Obama.

Reports have suggested the president may have called off his trip because he felt he had 'not been shown enough love' by the British Government.

But Boris Johnson said he expects Mr Trump would still visit the UK 'in due course' and called for a 'grown-up conversation' with the American administration.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has called for a 'grown-up conversation' with US president Donald Trumps administration. Trump's waxwork is inspected by a local with the Embassy in the background

The Foreign Secretary also criticised Labour's attempts to stop the president visiting Britain as 'extremely odd', given the UK's 'crucial' relationship with the US.

Trump's cancellation of his visit left the Government and City Hall at loggerheads last week as Johnson accused London Mayor Sadiq Khan of endangering the so-called 'special relationship'.

And the Foreign Secretary, who is attending a two day summit on North Korea in Vancouver, told the Guardian on Monday: 'For Jeremy Corbyn to say that this relationship doesn't matter, is I think insanity, and irresponsible.

'And to try to banish the president of the United States from visiting the UK when he's had trips to France, to Germany, to Japan, to China, is, I think, for the Labour Party extremely odd.

'It's a crucial relationship, and it's a very positive relationship.'

On the prospect of a visit from Mr Trump, Mr Johnson said: 'I think that we will have a visit in due course.'

And he told protesters to 'understand that America, for better or worse, in our lifetimes, has incarnated values of liberty and fairness and freedom around the world, and it still does'.

Asked whether Mr Trump represents those values, he said: 'Let us have a grown-up conversation with our American friends about the things we want to do together.'

Mrs May controversially extended the offer of a state visit, officially on behalf of the Queen, when she became the first world leader to meet Mr Trump in the White House following his inauguration last year.

Since then, however, the president has indicated he does not want to take up the invitation if he is going to face mass demonstrations, and it had been expected he could make a low-key working visit rather than a trip which involved all the trappings of a state occasion.

The decision to relocate to a new embassy was inked in 2008 during the administration of George W. Bush. Officials cited security concerns

Trump was previously expected to make his first trip to the UK since entering office, but British officials were newly informed he went cold on the idea.

A new date has not been offered, raising the prospect of a major diplomatic snub. One senior source told the Mail that Trump  who was expected to officially open the new US embassy in London  had cancelled because he was unhappy about the arrangements and the scale of the visit.

The reversal comes despite Trump telling Theresa May last month that he would come to Britain in the New Year.

Preparations were advanced for a 'working' visit to officially open the embassy, but the Mail understands this role will now be performed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Trump was also scheduled to hold talks with the Prime Minister in No 10, with February 26 and 27 marked in the diary.

Downing Street had hoped to confirm the dates this week.
An Australian woman who was mysteriously shot dead near her home in Kenya had previously accused her husband of stalking, threatening, harassment and psychological torture.

Gabrielle Maina, a teacher at an international school in Nairobi, was murdered on the side of the road on October 19 last year.

Her Kenyan husband, Cyrus Bernard Maina Njuguna, and his cousin, John Njuguna Waithira, were arrested over her death but have since been released without charge.

Gabrielle Maina, a teacher at an international school in Nairobi, was murdered on the side of the road on October 19 last year

Her Kenyan husband, Cyrus Bernard Maina Njuguna, and his cousin, John Njuguna Waithira, were arrested in relation to her death but have since been released without charges being laid

Mrs Maina moved to the African nation with her husband and their two sons in 2016, where she took a job at Hillcrest Preparatory School as principal.

However, in April last year she was granted an apprehended violence order (AVO) against her Mr Maina after their marriage soured.

In court documents obtained by the ABC, the 40-year-old mother accused him of becoming 'extremely violent' and having 'uncontrollable anger' in the AVO application.

'He totally withdrew his companionship and as a resort (sic) I have suffered mentally and psychologically  to escape the abusive relationship and to feel more secure I sought an alternative accommodation away from the Respondent,' the affidavit lodged with the Chief Magistrate's Court in Nairobi in April, 2016 says.

'The Respondent has continued contacting, calling, sending messages, stalking threatening, harassing and disturbing my peace  these actions by the Respondent have subjected me to humiliation and a credible threat of ruining my life and as such, I am afraid for my safety  the Respondent's actions have caused me and my family, untold anguish, psychological torture and trauma.'

She was successfully granted the AVO, despite Mr Maina categorically denying her allegations of 'domestic violence'.

Mrs Maina moved to the African nation with her husband and their two sons in 2016, where she took a job at Hillcrest Preparatory School as principal

In court documents obtained by the ABC , the 40-year-old mother accused her husband of becoming 'extremely violent' and having 'uncontrollable anger' in the AVO application

He instead claimed she ended their relationship because she admitted to cheating on him.

'Her reason for her request for separation were solely the result of her having an affair with an ex-colleague at her work place,' Mr Maina said in court in August, 20.

'It has always been my desire to keep the family together and the breakdown of the marriage and by extension the family has caused me untold grief, turmoil and pain and I am surprised and saddened that the Petitioner [Mrs Maina] has chosen to attribute the breakdown of the marriage to me.'

He said he loved both his wife and his sons deeply and would never place any 'anguish, psychological torture and drama' on their lives.

Mr Maina and his cousin maintain their innocence in relation to the Australian's death, with their lawyer stating as many as 10 people can place her husband in his office at the time of her murder.

Police are investigating the both possibilities that the incident was a random attack or a planned act.
An Alaska Airlines plane carrying 166 passengers collided with a de-icing truck at a Massachusetts airport.

The Massachusetts Port Authority said the plane, that was heading to Portland, Oregon, struck the parked truck on the taxiway at Boston's Logan International Airport.

No one was inside the de-icing truck at the time of the incident around 4.40pm on Monday.

An Alaska Airlines plane (pictured) carrying 166 passengers collided with a de-icing truck at Boston's Logan International Airport. No one was inside the de-icing truck at the time of the incident on Monday

Alaska Airlines said the 166 passengers aboard the airplane were returned to the boarding gate.

Officials said no one was injured in the incident. Passengers said it felt like the plane ran over a speed bump.

'Not a big deal, a little bump,' Rick Gencarelli from Portland told WCVB. 'But a little bump turned into a big inconvenience.'

According to Gencarelli, passengers spent two hours waiting inside the terminal at the gate before learning Alaska Airlines had cancelled the flight.

The airline re-booked the passenger's flights and gave each of them a $300 food and lodging credit.

Officials said the Boeing 737-900 jet sustained minor damage to its left wing and was taken out of service for inspection.

'We apologize to our guests who have been inconvenienced this afternoon on AS Flight 33. The safety of our guests and our employees is our number one priority,' the airline said in a statement.

Alaska Airlines also said it is investigating the cause.
Angela Merkel's political fate has been put back in the balance just days after her party announced a 'breakthrough' in talks to form a coalition.

Merkel's CDU party on Friday agreed a blueprint for government with their former partners the SPD, and are waiting for the SPD to vote on Sunday on whether to push ahead with formal talks.

But Martin Schulz, SPD leader, is now facing down a grassroots rebellion that has already seen two regions vow to defy him when it comes to the ballot.

Party members are wary of reentering government with Merkel, which saw them bleed support at the last election, and accuse Schulz of failing to agree a signature policy such as major healthcare reform or tax hikes for the rich.

Angela Merkel is facing the prospect of her grand coalition falling apart before formal negotiations even begin thanks to a grassroots revolt in the SPD party

Martin Schulz, leader of the SPD, is trying to persuade his party's 600 delegates to back entering formal talks with Merkel's CDU party, but two regions have already vowed to defy him

Schulz is now canvassing the SPD's 600 delegates ahead of Sunday in the hopes of persuading them to back him.

If he fails to do so it will almost certainly spell the end of his political career, analysts believe, and raise serious questions about Merkel's own future.

The 12-year Chancellor has already been humbled after three-way coalition talks with smaller parties broke down without a result.

The Berlin and Saxony-Anhalt factions of the SPD, two of the smallest, have already held non-binding votes which demanded Schulz rejected the deal.

'A renewed grand coalition cannot be the result of talks. We reject the start of coalition negotiations with the conservatives,' said the motion by Berlin's SPD chief Michael Mueller which was passed.

It singled out unsatisfactory proposals on home building, rents and migration and integration and expressed great disappointment over the absence of plans for a shakeup of the health system.

The SPD's youth wing, Jusos, opposes the deal and its head, Kevin Kuehnert, is undertaking his own 'NoGroKo Tour', referring to the faction's opposition to a grand coalition.

Six of the party's 45 presidium members have also promised to reject the deal.

Schulz is focusing his efforts on the party's western heartland, particularly the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, to shore up his support.

Many in Schulz' party are wary of reentering government with Merkel after they bled support to the far-right at the last election and returned their worst ever post-war result

Even if Schulz can convince his party delegates to back talks, he still needs to get the final deal past a ballot of 400,000 party members before a coalition can be formed

Trade unions, some other localities and the state of Brandenburg, have said they back the deal.

'We have a duty to look at how to make life better for people,' Schulz said in a live Facebook broadcast on Tuesday.

'We are living in the world of Trump, Putin, Erdogan. We live in a world of dictators who make the world's breath pause with their crazed ideas.

'We have the chance to make Europe a bit more social, peaceful and just.'

If the SPD rejects entering talks, the prospect of a new election or a minority government under Merkel loom - both unwelcome options.

It has been almost four months after the general election which saw the SPD and conservatives slump to their lowest post-war support.

Most of their losses were picked up by the far-right AfD party, which ran an anti-immigration campaign.

The SPD had vowed to go into opposition after its dismal election result but was forced to reconsider in the interest of national stability.

It is difficult to predict the outcome of Sunday's vote as the regional results are not binding. At the Bonn congress 600 delegates are free to vote how they wish.

Some leading SPD members argue Sunday's vote is only on the blueprint for a final deal and details can still be negotiated. After any final coalition deal, the SPD's 443,000 members will be balloted.

Some conservatives have expressed confidence that the SPD will back the blueprint. 'I can only recommend moving at top speed,' said Bavarian conservative Alexander Dobrindt.

'I look forward to starting coalition negotiations on Monday,' he said, adding his only concern was the 'masochistic way' the SPD had of talking down its successes.
In stark contrast to the agreeable President Trump presented to the public during the open-door immigration meeting last Tuesday, the Thursday meeting  now best known for the president's 's***hole' comment  featured shouting, swearing and no deal.

The Washington Post reported new details about the meeting Monday night, as lawmakers and the president still squabble over what was said, while the newspaper's reporters talked to more than a dozen White House officials, lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides about what happened.

Over the long holiday weekend, President Trump has denied he talked about 's***hole countries,' going after Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin  the lawmaker in the meeting who made the most pronounced allegation that the president said the phrase  last night in a tweet.

Thursday's immigration meeting, in which President Trump made the controversial 's***hole countries' remark, featured swearing, shouting and didn't get lawmakers and the White House any closer to a deal, the Washington Post reported

Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, came forward and said President Trump made the 's***hole' remark, telling CNN Tuesday that it was a 'horrible moment in the history of our country' and Republican senators in the room should be able to recall what the president said

'Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting,' the president claimed.

'Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military,' Trump said.

Durbin has stood by his story, including during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper that aired Tuesday.

'It really tells a story. This was a horrible moment in the history of our country and in the history of the Oval Office and the White House,' Durbin said. 'And they should, I think, honor that responsibility that they have as public officials to tell the truth.'

He was aiming his comments at two of the Republicans in the room  Sens. David Perdue, of Georgia, and Tom Cotton, of Arkansas  who now say the president didn't use the slur.

'Im telling you he did not use that word, George, and Im telling you its a gross misrepresentation,' Perdue said Sunday to ABC News' George Stephanopoulos.

'I certainly didn't hear what Sen. Durbin has said repeatedly,' Cotton said the same morning on Face the Nation.

Three White House officials told the Post the Perdue and Cotton were able to make their denials because they heard Trump use the term 's***house,' rather than 's***hole.'

The two Republican senators originally told the press that they did not recall what Trump said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, another Republican in the meeting, said his 'memory hasn't evolved' on the meeting.

'I know what was said and I know what I said,' Graham told the Post and Courier, suggesting strongly that Durbin's account was accurate.

Beyond the controversial comment, directed at immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and the whole of Africa, the president was 'fired up' when the senators arrived at the meeting.

When he had spoken to Durbin on the phone at 10:15 a.m. that day, he had expressed pleasure at the senators' bipartisan immigration plan.

But by the time the group arrived at the White House for the noon meeting, Trump was testy at best.

He was seated by Cotton, a hard-liner on immigration, the Post said, and was in no mood to sign off on the agreement  a departure from what he had said the day before, urging lawmakers to color in the details and saying he would sign whatever they figured out.

The president complained that there was not enough money etched out in the deal to finance his long-promised border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

Trump, the paper reported, objected to the Democrats' proposed changes to the visa lottery and to how people from countries get 'temporary protected status,' with the president worrying it would attract people from 's***hole countries' instead of immigrants from more desirable, in the president's eyes, places like Norway and Asia.

Racially-charged comments continued when lawmakers brought up the Congressional Black Caucus, with Durbin suggesting the voting bloc would be more likely to come to the table if protections for certain countries were included.

Trump dismissed this, telling those in the room he didn't care about currying favor with the group of black lawmakers, the Post reported.

At one point Graham, as he's acknowledged publicly, demanded that Trump shift his tone on immigration.

Meanwhile, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, encouraged the group to support his more conservative House bill, which was a no-go for the liberal Democrat Durbin.

After the meeting, Graham told his Senate colleagues that he was disturbed by what he had heard, as he and Durbin both acknowledged that they were shocked by Trump's shift in tone, the Post said.

At the Tuesday meeting, which was attended by the president's press pool and broadcast on TV, Trump had gushed about signing a 'bill of love' that would help 'Dreamers,' undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, become legal, turning the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program into law.

Trump even briefly expressed interest in signing a 'clean' DACA bill, that would do only that with no other strings  the most important for the administration being a border wall  attached.

However, White House officials including Chief of Staff John Kelly, who formerly served at the Department of Homeland Security secretary, and Stephen Miller, the president's senior adviser on policy, were against what Durbin and Graham were touting.

On Tuesday, with no new deal in sight, Trump continued hammering the Democrats and calling for his border wall.

'We must have Security at our VERY DANGEROUS SOUTHERN BORDER, and we must have a great WALL to help protect us, and to help stop the massive inflow of drugs pouring into our country!' the president tweeted.

With government funding running out Friday he added, 'The Democrats want to shut down the Government over Amnesty for all and Border Security.'

'The biggest loser will be our rapidly rebuilding Military, at a time we need it more than ever,' he wrote. 'We need a merit based system of immigration, and we need it now! No more dangerous Lottery.'
An 11-year-old boy has been injured after part of a school playground wall fell off.

Police were called to a report of an injured child at St Joseph's Primary School on Queen's Road in Aberdeen at 9am on Tuesday.

Aberdeen City Council said the incident was caused by 'a section of rendering material which became detached from a wall' at the school.

A schoolboy has been seriously injured by a falling wall at this primary school in Aberdeen

Police say they will contact the city council and the Health and Safety Executive

The boy has been taken to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary with non life threatening injuries.

A Police Scotland spokeswoman said: 'The child's family are aware and are with the child.

'Officers will be liaising with Aberdeen City Council and the Health and Safety Executive regarding the incident.'

A council spokesman said: 'Our immediate priority is the wellbeing of the injured pupil and we are liaising with their family.

'The safety and wellbeing of all pupils, staff and visitors at Aberdeen's schools is a priority for the council and a comprehensive response to this incident is ongoing.

'Whilst it would not be appropriate to comment further on the specifics of the incident at this early stage, we would seek to reassure the public that Aberdeen City Council is responding in line with established procedures.'
A Pittsburgh pizza shop manager has been caught on film slamming a black woman's head repeatedly into the ground after she showed up at his restaurant asking to use the bathroom.

Mahmut Yilmaz, 41, was filmed struggling with Jade Smith, 34, at Pizza Mario in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Friday night at around 7.30pm.

Smith had been drinking with a friend in a bar next door and went to Pizza Mario after missing her bus to get home.

She asked if she could use the restroom but ignored Yilmaz when he told her no and attempted to push past him.

Mahmut Yilmaz, 41, was filmed throttling Jade Smith, 34, in Pizza Mario in Pittsburgh on Friday after she refused to leave despite him telling her she could not use the bathroom

Smith had just missed her bus home when she went into the pizza restaurant at 7.30pm to ask to use the bathroom. Yilmaz later told police he was trying to stop her from disturbing other customers when he put his hands on her. She is seen above before being thrown to the ground, staring into the camera as a customer filmed her

Mahmut Yilmaz, 41, was arrested on charges of aggravated assault and assault

The fight began by him restraining her as other customers, including one who had begun recording on their cell phone, watched.

As they stood in a standoff, Smith said repeatedly: 'Push me again, push me again.'

He shouted back: 'I said please!'

Yilmaz was then filmed slamming her back into the wall. The pair then fell to the floor, crashing into a table and chairs on their way.

He then appeared to repeatedly hit the woman's head off the ground, yelling: 'Why you not listen to me!' as he held her in a tight grip.

After a few seconds, several other pizza shop employees rushed over to break the pair up and escort Smith outside.

Yilmaz then tossed the woman to the ground and hit her head repeatedly off the hard floor as other customers watched in shock

Police were called and interviewed them both at the scene but neither told them about the fight, according to The Post Gazette.

Officers said Smith appeared 'disheveled' but had no obvious injuries.

However, they were called to hospital later that night to interview her. She said that in the hours since the incident, she had developed a strong headache.

Smith told them she had been diagnosed with a concussion and that she did not mention the fight because she could not remember it clearly.

Footage of the incident swept social media, gaining more than 900,000 views by Tuesday morning on one Facebook account where it was posted.

After it spread, Yilmaz turned himself into police and was arrested on aggravated assault and assault charges. His bail was set at $5,000.

During police interviews, he told officers he did not mean to hit Smith's head against the floor and that he was trying to get her to pay attention to him when he began shaking her.

Smith will be arrested via summons for defiant trespass and disorderly conduct, according to police records.

The incident sparked protests in Pittsburgh. On Monday, scores of angry local people descended on the pizza shop to demand that it be shut down.

They claimed the attack was racially charged and that Smith was discriminated against for being a woman.


A millionaires son savagely attacked a Saudi Prince and kicked out two of this teeth following a row at an upmarket nightclub.

Saad Alfoudari, 31, was part of a gang who chased down Abdulaziz Al Saud following a night at Cirque Le Soir, in Soho, central London.

Mr Alfoudari and eight of his friends had been asked to leave the club, popular with A-listers including Cara Delevigne and Rihanna, due to rowdy behaviour.

It was outside the venue that they clashed with Prince Al Saud, nephew of King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Southwark Crown Court heard.

Saad Alfoudari, 31, was part of a gang who chased down Abdulaziz Al Saud following a night at Cirque Le Soir, in Soho, central London (pictured, Mr Alfoudari wearing a white shirt, being held back by the group)

Their aggression centred mainly upon Prince Al Saud with another attacker, Souan Alenezi, booting him from behind causing him to drop to the floor.

Further kicks to the princes face by the pair displaced two or three of his teeth while he also suffered severe bruising to both lips, bruising to one of his eyes and pain around his nose.

Prosecuting, Alex Agbamu said: 'The defendant was firstly involved in a confrontation with Prince Al Saud outside the doors of the Le Cirque Soir.

He was Prince Al Sauds lead pursuer as he hastened to his car and he was involved in the attack on Prince Al Saud when the latter lay upon the ground.

Police were called and officers soon spotted Alfoudari and Alenezi jogging away from the scene before trying and swap clothes with three other men close to a waiting taxi.

Alfoudari, whose shirt was adorned with bloodspots, told police they had been the victims of an attack but he was arrested after CCTV footage was reviewed.

He initially claimed to have no recollection of the night, in July 2013, when questioned the following day but admitted affray.

Mr Agbamu told the court the case had taken so long to come to court after the suspects fled the jurisdiction in breach of police bail, this defendant included.

The 'ringmaster' host of Cirque le Soir, Tom Eulenberg, 35, is pictured with Cara Delevingne and Rihanna

But he was arrested at Heathrow Airport last September on his way into the country.

Alfoudari had previously been picked out by the Prince as the one who attacked me during an identity parade held in March 2014.

William Clegg, QC, defending, said Alfoudari was a family man, married with two children and boasting a 50,000 per year tax-free job working for the Prime Minister of Kuwait.

He said the CCTV footage at no time showed his client striking the Prince at all while the blood on Alfoudaris shirt was his own, stemming from a cut sustained earlier inside the club.

After privately showing the judge a statement to avoid causing any degree of embarrassment to the family of the victim, he said: There is slightly more to this than meets the eye.

The court heard Alfoudari languished for six months on police bail before heading back to Kuwait to see his family.

Despite trips in and out of the UK since, he had never been stopped before last September.

Mr Alfoudari and eight of his friends had been asked to leave the club, popular with A-listers,.due to rowdy behaviour

Mr Clegg said suggestions he fled the jurisdiction were a slight exaggeration.

This was an ugly incident indeed, said Judge Jeffery Pegden QC.

You gave pursuit to the prince, if I may call him such, down the road and were a party to - and I use my words carefully - a party to the violence that was then inflicted upon him.

It is right and I accept Mr Cleggs submission that there is no coverage of you actually striking the Prince and it seems to me that it must follow that there had been some sort of incident in the club before the violence outside.

You had your own blood upon you and there is no account for that at all in any part of the incident outside of the club.

So, despite your intoxication there must have been some sort of incident in the club before the pursuit and consequent violence outside.

Referring to the time Alfoudari spent tagged and in custody before his father, who owns two UK properties worth 3million, stumped up 1million to secure him bail, the judge said there was absolutely no point imposing a short suspended custodial sentence as he had effectively already served it.

Alfoudari, from Marylebone, central London, admitted affray and was fined 750 and ordered to pay 750 costs.
The Duchess of Cornwall's aristocratic cousin allegedly claimed housing benefit under Brad Pitt's Fight Club character's name, Tyler Durden.

Dru Edmonstone, whose family still own the 6,000-acre Stirling estate they were given by Scottish King Robert III in 1435, is accused of fraudulently obtaining more than 81,000 from the state - Stirling Council, and the Royal Burgh of Kensington and Chelsea.

The 46-year-old, whose great-grandmother is Edward Alice Keppel is also the great-grandmother of Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, is also accused of pocketing money taken from walkers at a pop-up cafe in a caravan on the West Highland Way while posing as a doctor, a ranger, and a mountain rescuer, and claiming to be selling refreshments for charity.

The Duchess of Cornwall's aristocratic cousin allegedly claimed housing benefit. Pictured: Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall

It is alleged that Edmonstone made false claims for handouts including income support, tax credit, carers' allowance, and disability living allowance.

He posed as he did so as his sister, his wife, and his own carer, and pretending that he was looking after a 12-year-old disabled child, who was neither living with him nor, in fact, was disabled.

The Stirlingshire aristocrat, whose family own the historic Duntreath Castle Estate, near Blanefield, is also said to have falsely claimed housing benefit for renting a mews cottage in Kensingston as part of the 81,367 alleged fraud.

As part of the same fraud, which is said to have been committed between January 2014 and April the following year, it is also said that he falsely claimed 'access to work' grants alleging that he needed the assistance of a carer to help him operate a business he claimed to be running - a cafe in a caravan on the West Highland Way.

A second charge alleges that he pretended to be Tyler Durden and living alone at Ardoch House, in Blanefield, and that on various occasions between July 20, 2016 and October 25 the same year he completed an application form for housing benefit in Tyler Duden's name, produced documentation, a driving licence, and a bank card in the name of Tyler Durden, and attempted to induce employees of Stirling Council to authorise the payment of housing benefit by fraud.

Tyler Durden is the alter-ego of The Narrator in the 1999 Fight Club film. Played by Pitt, Durden was named in 2008 as the greatest movie character of all time.

A third charge alleges that between January 2016 and April 2017, Edmonstone formed a fraudulent scheme and obtained an unknown amount of money by fraud from the public by obtaining a caravan and setting it up as a cafe on the West Highland Way near Ardoch House and variously pretending to walkers that he was a doctor, a member of the mountain rescue service, a 'West Highland Way Ranger', or member of an organisation responsible for the upkeep of the long distance path, that he was authorised to collect money for such organisations for refreshments, or that payment was required to walk the West Highland Way.

At a preliminary hearing at Stirling Sheriff Court today, Edmonstone, of Ardoch House, Blanefield, denied all the charges, which are on indictment - the more serious type of prosecution in the sheriff courts.

The 46-year-old's great-aunt is Edward Alice Keppel is also the great-grandmother of Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall

Defence agent Ken Dalling said Edmonstone's own solicitor, John Mulholland, was stuck by snow in Cumbernauld.

Mr Dalling asked for the preliminary hearing to be adjourned for a week 'in anticipation of resolution'.

Prosecutor Alex Piper said: 'There have been discussions with Mr Mulholland regarding resolution - we are nearly there.'

Sheriff Wyllie Robertson adjourned the hearing until January 24th, and continued Edmonstone's bail.

Duntreath Castle, a famous shooting estate, is the ancestral home, in unbroken succession, of the Edmonstone family, who were granted the lands by Robert III as a wedding gift for his grand-daughter.

Sir Archibald's grandmother Alice Keppel was Edward VII's mistress and great-grandmother of Prince Charles's second wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall

Edmonstone's father, Sir Archibald Edmonstone, 83, the 7th baronet of Duntreath, inherited the castle at the age of 22 and it has become a popular setting for weddings, seminars, private parties and corporate events.

Sir Archibald's grandmother Alice Keppel was Edward VII's mistress and great-grandmother of Prince Charles's second wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.

The Edmonstone Baronetcy was a title created on May 20, 1774 for Archibald Edmonstone, who had been a Tory MP for Dunbartonshire and Ayr Burghs.

The estate of Duntreath lies on both sides of the Blane Valley some 12 miles north of the Glasgow.
A mother of two 12-year-old twins was killed when a casino shuttle boat caught fire off the coast of Florida on Sunday.

Carrie Dempsey, 42, died and 14 others were injured when the blaze erupted aboard the Sun Cruz Casino boat, as it sailed along the Port Richey Canal towards the Tropical Breeze Casino cruise boat.

All 50 passengers were forced to jump ship into the chilly waters and swim to shore where they were treated by emergency crews.

Carrie Dempsey, 42, died and 14 others were injured when the blaze erupted aboard the Sun Cruz Casino boat

Dempsey was a widow, and mother to two 12-year-old twins, a sister and brother (pictured with them left and right)

Dempsey, of Lutz, Florida, who had been complaining of pain in her feet when she got to shore, had gone home after the fire, but suddenly began feeling ill.

She rushed to the Bayonet Point Regional Medical Center but died shortly after arriving, at 10pm, officials said.

An autopsy has been scheduled for Tuesday determine the cause of death

Dempsey's death will be devastating for two 12-year-old twins, a brother and sister, who lost their father Joe previously.

Her family declined to speak about the loss, except to say that the mother was a 'wonderful' person.

Dempsey, 42, died and 14 others were injured when the blaze erupted aboard the Sun Cruz Casino boat, as it sailed along the Port Richey Canal towards the Tropical Breeze Casino cruise boat

The boat was ferrying patrons to a casino ship off the Florida Gulf Coast when it caught fire near shore Sunday afternoon

In this photo provided by Pasco County flames engulfed the boat Sunday, in the Tampa Bay area

Christine Hashim, who was among the volunteers who rushed to help the gamblers swimming to shore, said she and her fellow neighbors had separated the survivors needing medical treatment but Dempsy was not a part of that group.

'She was complaining that her feet hurt. I checked her feet to make sure she did not have any open wounds or anything on her feet and after that, I didn't see her again,' she told WTSP.

Hashim added that she and the other volunteers had been focused on getting everyone warm after the freezing water.

'We just kept wrapping everyone in blankets and giving them coffee until the investigation could be completed enough that they could leave,' Hashim said.

She also praised the boat's quick-thinking captain who was able to turn the vessel round immediately after learning a fire had broken out in the engine room, and took it to shore.

Fifty people were on board the Sun Cruz Casino boat shuttle when the fire erupted as it sailed along Port Richey Canal

The captain drove the boat towards the shore so that the passengers could jump out safely and swim to shore

'It's amazing he was able to get so much closer to shore and that made a huge difference because if they had been just a little further out. We would be having a totally different conversation,' Hashim said.

Sun Cruz spokeswoman Beth Fifer says the company doesn't know what caused the fire that also injured 14 other passengers. Eight passengers remain in hospital after the fire.

Helicopter video taken by WTSP-TV early Monday shows the boat was burned down to its hull, with only an American flag on its bow uncharred.

Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Michael De Nyse said investigators will determine the cause of the fire and examine the history of the boat and Tropical Breeze Casino.

The Coast Guard and Pasco County Sheriff's office will decide if the case will become a criminal one now that someone has died.

Tropical Breeze Casinos, claims the the 12-year-old shuttle in question had no known issues before this fire.

Some of the rescued passengers were given blankets and coffee to try and warm up after being forced to jump in the water

They were loaded onto a bus to ferry passengers home or to medical treatment if needed

Dempsey, pictured with her son, had gone home after the fire, but suddenly became ill and went to the emergency room where she died

Fifer said Monday that the company 'was deeply saddened' by the death but that there had never been any issues with the boat, which was destroyed by the fast-moving fire.

'We are deeply saddened for the loss of our passenger, the 14 injured and anyone else who was affected by this tragedy,' Fifer said.

The shuttle boat regularly carried people back and forth from the Tropical Breeze's offshore casino, about a 45-minute ride into international waters. There, passengers would play games such as black jack, which is illegal at non-Indian casinos in Florida, and roulette, which is illegal statewide.

The shuttle boat caught fire about 4pm. Sunday, quickly engulfing the boat close to shore near residential neighborhoods. Officials said the boat was headed out to the casino ship at the time.

Port Richey Police Chief Gerard DeCanio said the shuttle boat experienced engine problems after leaving the dock at Port Richey, a suburban community about 35 miles northwest of Tampa. But as the vessel turned back, flames kicked up and people began jumping overboard into shallow water, according to witness accounts.

Larry Santangelo, 57, said he had just driven into his neighborhood when he saw smoke and fire and thought a house - possibly his own - was ablaze. But then he realized it was the boat just about 100 yards offshore.

SunCruz Casinos is a privately owned company that operates boats that sail at least three miles off shore in order to allow gamblers to legally play while avoiding federal and state laws against gaming

He told the Tampa Bay Times that he then saw people wandering about confused, wet and cold, after they reached land. One woman collapsed upon reaching shore and vomited, he said.

Santangelo said he took about 30 of the passengers into his garage to warm up and recover.

'It was so windy and they were soaking wet,' said Santangelo. He worried that some might suffer from hypothermia.

It wasn't immediately clear what caused the fire, which sent a huge plume of dark black smoke wafting over sunny skies on an unusually chilly winter day in the Tampa Bay region.

'It looked pretty dramatic because the shuttle boat burned really fast,' DeCanio told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Another witness told the Tampa Bay Times the shuttle boat passes regularly by his family's home, carrying patrons to and from a casino ship offshore. But he knew something was wrong when he saw smoke and heard shouts and screams.

Temperatures in the afternoon fell to as low as 43 degrees. The temperature of the water at the time was about 59 degrees - which is cold enough to cause hypothermia if a human being stayed in the water long enough

The shuttle boat takes gamblers three miles offshore, where a casino boat floats in international waters

In this photo provided by Pasco County flames engulf a boat Sunday, Jan. 14, 2018, in the Tampa Bay area

'They didn't have much time to decide whether or not to jump,' said Bakr Jandali, 19, who was with his home nearby. 'The fire was moving fast. It was a hard jump.'

Jandali said passengers had to jump about 12 feet from the boat and wade through waist-deep water to shore. There, residents gave them aid.

'All of us, my family and the neighbors, brought them towels and water,' Jandali said. 'They were so cold.'

News footage at the site showed bedraggled survivors cloaked in blankets trying to warm themselves afterward.

The boat was identified in newspaper reports as the Island Lady, a 72-foot wooden-hulled vessel which Fifer said had been inspected by the Coast Guard.

'If we had any type of idea that there was a problem, we wouldn't have left the dock,' the cruise spokeswoman told the Tampa Bay Times. 'There was no inkling that there were any problems with that vessel whatsoever.'
The secretary of homeland security got grilled at a Senate hearing about whether President Trump used the word 's***hole' in an Oval Office meeting  but acknowledged only hearing 'rough talk.'

Homeland Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen was interrogated by Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin  mocked as 'Dicky Durbin' in a tweet by the president on Monday  who also attended the meeting, and says Trump used the word to refer to nations in Africa.

Nielsen, under tense questioning under oath at the Senate Judiciary Committee, said she did not hear that specific word.

'There was a lot of rough talk by a lot of people in the room. But what I understood him to be saying is lets move away from the countries and lets look at the individual,' she said of President Trump.

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Kirstjen Nielsen, Homeland Security Department, was grilled about an Oval Office meeting where President Trump reportedly referenced 's***hole countries.' Trump denies it

'I dont specifically remember a categorization of countries in Africa,' she told Durbin.

Durbin asked her point blank what was the 'strong language' she said was used.

'Let's see, strong language. There was, ah  apologies I dont remember a specific word. What I was struck with frankly  is just the general profanity that was used in the room by almost everyone,' she answered.

'Did you hear me use profanity?' asked Durbin. 'No sir, neither did I.'

'I did hear tough language from Senator [Lindsey] Graham,' she allowed. 'I remember specific cusswords being used by a variety of members.' Durbin then observed that Graham only used the same words President Trump did in pushing back against him.

'I dont specifically remember a categorization of countries in Africa,' Nielsen told Sen. Richard Durbin

Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois interrogated Nielsen about a meeting both of them attended with President Trump

Durbin said Graham 'repeated exactly the words used by the president which you cannot remember.'

Earlier in her testimony, she got asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy whether Trump used the word or similar language  after reports that some recall Trump saying 's***house.'

'I did not hear that word used, no sir,' she said.

She also got asked repeatedly about Norway.

'Do you remember explicitly the president saying expressly I want more Europeans why cant we have more immigrants from Norway?' Durbin asked her  picking up on another detail from an explosive Washington Post report.

'I do remember him asking about the concept of under-represented countries as a fix,' she said.

She answered: 'I heard him repeating what he had learned in a meeting before [with the country's prime minister] that they are industrious, that they are a hardworking country they dont have much crime there they dont have much debt,' she said.

'In general I just heard him giving compliments to Norway,' Nielsen added.

IN THE HOT SEAT: 'In general I just heard him giving compliments to Norway,' Nielsen added, although she said she didn't know whether Norway was a predominantly white country

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and former Deputy Chief of Staff Kirstjen Nielsen speak together as they walk across the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2017

Earlier, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont asked Nielsen if Norway was predominantly white.

'I actually do not know that sir,' Nielsen responded.

Deporting immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children will not be a top federal law enforcement priority even if lawmakers do not pass a program to protect them, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security chief said in an interview aired on Tuesday.

Kirstjen Nielsen, speaking ahead of a congressional hearing, told CBS News that as long as so-called Dreamers have registered with federal authorities they will not be a top target even after U.S. President Donald Trump moved to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

"It's not going to be a priority of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement," she said. "If you are a DACA that's compliant with your registration - meaning you haven't committed a crime and you in fact are registered - you are not a priority of enforcement for ICE should the program end."

Although federal officials have said they will not target Dreamers, Trump has significantly expanded the categories of people who can be prioritized for deportation and immigrant advocates say DACA recipients who lose their status are at risk.

Nielsen's comments come as Trump and lawmakers battle over an immigration deal that has blown up amid Trump's controversial remarks at a recent White House meeting. The talks also overshadow larger spending negotiations ahead of a possible federal government shutdown this week.

President Donald Trump (L) listens with US Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen during a meeting with Republican members of the Senate about immigration at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 4, 2018

Nielsen is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee at 10 a.m. (1500 GMT) to discuss oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.

Nielsen, referring to a forthcoming DHS study on immigration and terrorism, said she would ask lawmakers for help "to close the loopholes that prevent us from removing known suspected terrorists and other criminals from the United States."

The report also shows officials must "continue to enhance our screening and vetting" as well as "continually vet those who are here," including legal permanent residents and others who were naturalized, she said.

Sen. Dick Durbin (pictured) said President Trump made the 's***hole countries' comment

Trump went after Durbin, who last week backed up the report of what he said in the Oval Office

SEAT OF HONOR: Durbin was seated next to Trump during a negotiating sessions that turned into a televised display earlier this month

Asked if that meant such individuals would be under permanent surveillance, Nielsen give no details but said: "Up until the point that you are a citizen, we want to continue to make sure we understand who you are and why you're here."

Nielsen is likely to be asked about Trump's remarks at last week's meeting where Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin said the president made disparaging remarks about immigrants from Haiti and African countries. Nielsen told CBS she did not remember or hear the controversial words used.

Trump has said that Durbin, who will be at Tuesday's hearing, misrepresented his comments.
Thomas Traficante (pictured), 23, was arrested last month for allegedly terrorizing his ex-girlfriend and about a dozen of her Sigma Kappa sisters in November

A Long Island man has been arrested for allegedly terrorizing his ex-girlfriend and nearly a dozen of her sorority sisters after they broke up.

Authorities allege that Thomas Traficante, 23, sent the first threatening text message to his ex-girlfriend and her Sigma Kappa sorority sisters on November 10.

'its [sic] not safe out there tonight kappas [sic],' the message read.

According to the Democrat and Chronicle, about a dozen Sigma Kappa sisters at the State University College at Geneseo told authorities they received the message.

The sisters said they ended up changing their plans on November 10 and postponed their event after they received the text.

Authorities allege that Traficante then sent another text about 24 hours later.

'glad [sic] you all mostly took my advice last night, but moving it forward one night doesn't make kappas [sic] or their dates any safer. I mean no harm, im [sic] not the threat, but harm is coming,' the message read.

Traficante and his girlfriend had broken up shortly before the alleged harassment started.

Officials said Traficante, who did not attend SUNY Geneseo, did most of the harassment from downstate.

University police checked on the telephone number that had a 585 Rochester-region area code, but found that it was generated by an online service and not linked to a mobile phone.

Traficante (pictured) was charged with cyberstalking and threats, and is scheduled to appear in federal court Tuesday for a bail hearing

Authorities allege that Traficante (right) sent the first threatening text message to his ex-girlfriend and her Sigma Kappa sorority sisters on November 10. 'its [sic] not safe out there tonight kappas [sic],' the message read

He was arrested in December and charged with cyberstalking and threats, and is scheduled to appear in federal court Tuesday for a bail hearing.

According to the Chronicle, federal prosecutors want him to stay jailed as he awaits trial.

Traficante also allegedly sent his ex-girlfriend cocaine, then alerted campus police to the shipment in hopes she would be arrested.

An affidavit from FBI Special Agent Barry Couch said that 'local police searched the sorority members' house and reported the sorority sisters were extremely concerned and scared for their safety after receiving a text that read: 'I'm in the house.'

Within a week after calls and texts, Traficante's former girlfriend discovered that someone had posted her contact information on a prostitution website.

His ex-girlfriend said she received dozens of calls from men soliciting sex, according to the Chronicle.

Within a week after calls and texts, Traficante's former girlfriend discovered that someone had posted her contact information on a prostitution website. The Sigma Kappa sisters (file image) said they were rattled by the numerous texts

Officials said Traficante, who did not attend SUNY Geneseo (file image), did most of the harassment from downstate. On Tuesday, federal prosecutors will try to make the case in court that Traficante is both dangerous and likely to flee if released on bail

Nassau County police approached Traficante, who denied the threats and the shooting, but said 'he was seeing a therapist due to the breakup with victim,' court papers said.

But Traficante's former girlfriend was convinced that he was somehow involved with the harassment.

In early December, university police subpoenaed information about the telephone number that was the source of the texts and were led to Traficante's Long Island home address.

The FBI found a semiautomatic AR-15, one that he legally owned, during a search of his home, according to media reports.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors will try to make the case in court that Traficante is both dangerous and likely to flee if released on bail.
A Queensland man has allegedly been caught on CCTV pinching his neighbour's horse before riding around his yard.

Footage shows the moment Quarter Horse Sally was taken out the front gate of her Wulguru home in Townsville without permission.

A man, thought to be a neighbour, was filmed by onlookers in broad day light riding the horse on her owner's property before his own front yard in the street over.

A Queensland man has been caught on CCTV (pictured) pinching his neighbour's horse

'He was upfront lying, (saying) I took the horse  I've got the horse  I'm going to buy it and I'm going to take it to the stables next door,' family member Jennifer Webster, who was looking after the horse, told 9 News.

She said there was no apology offered and upon Sally's return, Ms Webster had to spend 20 minutes hosing her off as she was drenched in sweat.

The six-year-old mare was reunited on Tuesday with its owners who returned home early from their trip.

It is understood they are in disbelief at the horrifying treatment of their beloved animal.

Sally (pictured) is recovering from an open leg wound while the man was seen riding her from the home in Townsville

Young owner Jarrod Coleman (pictured) was mad that his horse was treated cruelly

Young owner Jarrod Coleman said he was angered by the incident and said it was a shame his 'nice' horse was treated cruelly while healing from an open leg wound.

'I feel terrible about it  it's going to take me longer now to get that horse right. She's not going to be the same horse again,' another owner, Paul Webb, added.

Police are investigating the incident, however no charges have yet been laid.
A bullied teenager has been stabbed to death at a Dunkin' Donuts after standing up to her tormentors by pepper spraying them.

Valaree Megan Schwab, 16, died in hospital after being attacked which occurred at 12.30pm in New Rochelle, New York, on January 10.

Z'Inah Brown, 16, has been arrested for her death. She allegedly used a steak knife to stab Valaree twice in the upper torso.

Students at the pair's high school told ABC News Schwab was being bullied by Brown and others at the Dunkin' Donuts.

There were five or six teenagers in the group that ganged up on Valaree which included both boys and girls, police said.

Schwab tried to fight them off with pepper spray after being harassed by them on the 10-minute walk down which ended at the Dunkin' Donuts.

Valaree Megan Schwab, 16, died in hospital after being stabbed twice in the torso last Wednesday

None of the other teenagers present have been identified. It is not clear how long they had allegedly been bullying Valaree.

After the attack, Z'Inah fled the scene, leaving Valaree behind.

Police have arrested 16-year-old Z'Inah Brown for her death

She was taken to hospital in the Bronx but was later pronounced dead.

Classmates have since described Valaree as a 'unique' student who 'spoke her mind'.

In her obituary, she was described as a keen musician with a passion for the guitar.

She filmed YouTube videos about causes she believed in, including one in which she slammed Donald Trump and called his presidency 'tyranny'.

Brown was charged with second degree murder after turning herself in a day after the attack last week.

Her mother was in court for her arraignment last week but gave no comment as she left.

School staff say they are 'saddened' by the teenager's death.

In a statement last week, they said Valaree was not in classes on the day of the attack.

It is not clear if Brown was in school on the day of the attack or not.

The two girls were arguing outside this Dunkin' Donuts near their high school in New Rochelle, New York, when Valaree pepper sprayed Brown, allegedly prompting her to pull out a steak knife and stab her twice

Valaree was described as a 'unique' girl who loved playing the guitar and who 'spoke her mind'

Police appealed for Brown after the attack last week. She handed herself in and was arrested on suspicion of second degree murder

'The City School District of New Rochelle is saddened by the incident on North Avenue today in which a New Rochelle High School student was stabbed.

'The student was not in school today and the incident did not happen on school grounds.

'New Rochelle High School and School District officials are cooperating fully with the New Rochelle Police Department in this matter.

'The High School and District will make counselors, social workers and other professionals available for students and staff who require assistance for as long as is necessary.

'All other information about the incident should come from the New Rochelle Police Department,' they said.

A representative for the school district did not respond to questions about Valaree's death on Tuesday.

It is not known if the bullying was ever reported to staff. Valaree's grieving family has not commented on her death.

Valaree was not in school on the day of the attack, according to officials
Hundreds of flights have been canceled in Texas, where frigid temperatures have left runways - and roads - dangerously icy.

Ice and snow also shut down interstates in Louisiana and caused highway crashes in Kentucky as the National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for the Houston area and for parts of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Snow began falling during the pre-dawn hours on Tuesday in Louisiana, where freeways were closed in and around Baton Rouge as the winter weather system took aim at other states, forecasters said.

Dangerous wind chills also prompted school systems to close on Tuesday across Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Kansas and Missouri.

Some colleges also canceled classes, including Wichita State University in Kansas, where wind chill values were expected to drop as low as minus-13F, The National Weather Service said.

At the University of Texas in Tyler, southeast of Dallas, classes were canceled and Baylor University, in Waco, also had a snow day.

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A winter storm warning was issued for Houston and parts of Louisiana and Mississippi causing hundreds of Texas flights to be canceled (Pictured, snow falls in Tyler on Tuesday)

Mallory Hart holds the hand of her one-year-old son Hart Alvorado as he experiences snow for the first time in Tyler, Texas, after the overnight storm

Snow began falling during the pre-dawn hours Tuesday in Louisiana, where freeways were closed in and around Baton Rouge (Pictured, Savannah Stucker, left, and Loretta Compton throw snow balls at Betty Virginia Park in Shreveport, Louisiana)

Dangerous wind chills prompted school systems to close Tuesday across Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Kansas and Missouri (Pictured, traffic makes its way north on Highway 7 in Oxford, Mississippi)

Berean Matthews, 11, rides on the back of her father, Steven Matthews, as they sled down a snowy hill on the campus of the University of Texas in Tyler on Tuesday

The winter storm belt is traveling north, making its way from San Antonio, Texas, all the way to Albany, New York

'Winter Storm Warnings' were in place in San Antonio and Houston while the rest of the corridor received a 'Winter Storm Watch'

At least 38 flights scheduled to depart or arrive at the San Antonio International Airport on Tuesday have been canceled.

Meanwhile, in Houston, George Bush Intercontinental Airport announced 528 cancellations and 59 cancellations were made at William P Hobby Airport.

Winter Storm Inga has sent freezing temperatures into Texas with Houston 21F and San Antonio standing at 30F.

Police in Austin say highways in the capital are iced over and several counties opened emergency operation centers to coordinate the emergency response.

Public safety authorities, including Austin Police Chief Brian Manley, are asking residents to avoid driving unless it's an emergency.

More than 600 flights have been canceled in Texas due to snow and icy conditions, including 38 flights at San Antonio International Airport on Tuesday (pictured)

In Houston, George Bush Intercontinental Airport has announced 528 cancellations (pictured) and 59 cancellations were made at William P Hobby Airport

'We are seeing more road closures and crashes every hour,' Manley said via Twitter. 'Stay off the roads, unless it's an absolute emergency. The ice patches will sneak up on you.'

The cold front also brought snow to parts of North Texas, where the wind chill pushed temperatures into the single digits.

At 8am, there was a 50 degree temperature between Brownsville in the south at 53F and Amarillo far north at 3F, reported KVUE.

Winter Storm Inga has sent freezing temperatures into Texas with Houston 21F and San Antonio standing at 30F (Pictured, snow covers the ground at a park in Tyler, Texas, on Tuesday)

At 8am, there was a 50 degree temperature between Brownsville in the south at 53F and Amarillo far north at 3F (Pictured, snow blankets a park in Tyler early Tuesday morning)

Public safety authorities, including Austin Police Chief Brian Manley, are asking residents to avoid driving unless it's an emergency (Pictured, snow and sleet falls in Downtown Dallas on Monday evening)

A truck is stuck sideways on Front Street in Tyler as unusually cold temperatures affect much of the south, forcing schools to close

In Kentucky, multiple crashes closed a 10-mile section of Interstate 24 on the west side of the state and blocked southbound lanes of Interstate 65 in the south-central area, including a five-vehicle pileup that involved a Greyhound bus, authorities said.

In Tennessee, forecasters called for up to six inches of snow in the central part of the state, which includes the Nashville area.

Snow was falling Tuesday morning in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and was expected to move into Alabama and Georgia later in the day.

In Louisiana, state officials said both lanes of Interstate 49 in the Shreveport area were closed early Tuesday. Parts of Interstate 20 and Interstate 220 were also closed.

Stacy Shoaf walks her dog Rambo as snow falls in Oxford, Mississippi on Tuesday

Wayne Finley, with the Owensboro Convention Center, clears snow from a section of the steps at the entrance to the facility on Tuesday in Owensboro, Kentucky

Snow accumulates on vehicles on I-55 in Jackson, Mississippi on Tuesday as a band of sleet and snow is expected to carpet a sizable portion of the state

Below-freezing temperatures will continue to affect the majority of the the south through to Thursday

Most cities in the south are not expected to be pelted by more than five inches save for the central Tennessee where forecasters called for up to six inches of snow

Ice had coated roads and bridges in 36 of Mississippi's 82 counties, mostly in the northern and central parts of the state, the Mississippi Department of Transportation said in a statement Tuesday morning.

Some of the heaviest snow in Mississippi was expected in the state's Delta region, where up to three inches was possible.

In Alabama, Governor Kay Ivey declared a state of emergency. Numerous businesses and government offices closed because of the threat.

Alabama officials were trying to avoid a repeat of four years ago, when a winter storm blanketed central Alabama and left motorists stranded on roads in metro Birmingham for hours. Teachers and students camped out in schools.

Forecasters aren't predicting a large amount of snow for Alabama, about two inches or less. But they say temperatures steadily falling into the teens could freeze anything that comes down.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy found a sweet way to stay on President Donald Trump's good side, presenting him with a special jar of only his two favorite Starburst flavors.

McCarthy noticed the president's candy preference as the two men bonded aboard Air Force One in October, according to a Washington Post account.

Rifling through a handful of chewy Starbursts, Trump picked out only the cherry and strawberry flavored ones.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (left) found a unique way to ingratiate himself with U.S. President Donald Trump  and the way to his heart is through his sweet tooth

McCarthy saw Trump picking out only the cherry and strawberry Starbursts from a package aboard Air Force One, and decided to send him a jar of only the ones he liked

'We're there, having a little dessert, and he offers me some,' McCarthy told the paper. 'Just the red and the pink.'

'A bit later, a couple of his aides saw me with those colors and told me, "Those are the president's favorites".'

McCarthy, the second-ranking House Republican  he sets the floor schedule and is next in line behind Speaker Paul Ryan  later got a supply of the chewy sweets and tasked an aide with sorting through them to cull Trump's lesser favorites.

The California Republican had the candies placed in a jar and presented to the president. He 'made sure his name was on the side of the gift,' according to the account, and had it delivered to a 'grinning' president, a White House official said.

In the Air Force One meeting last October, McCarthy learned that Trump has favorite candy flavors, and he used that bit of information to his own advantage

Orange and lemon Starbursts? Not in Trump's Oval Office. It's just cherry and strawberry for him

McCarthy may not have known that Wrigley already makes a red-only Starburst variety pack.

'FaveReds' include cherry, strawberry, fruit punch and watermelon.

The candy gesture illustrates how McCarthy has gone out of his way to cultivate his bond with the president.

During an unusual immigration meeting where Trump allowed cameras in for nearly an hour, it was McCarthy who jumped in after Trump appeared to be agreeing with Democrats' goal of promoting a bill that would restore the controversial 'DACA' program with no strings attached.

'Mr. President, you need to be clear, though,' he said. 'You have to have security.'

That quick save nudged the president back to talk of building his proposed wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

McCarthy hasn't always been behind the president, and had to do some face-saving repairs to their relationship once Trump was elected.

McCarthy once suggested that Trump was on Vladimir Putin's payroll, but saved his bacon last week during an immigration meeting at the White House

Quick fix: Wrigley makes a red-only 'FaveReds' package including only cherry, strawberry, fruit punch and watermelon Starbursts.

During the 2016 campaign he participated in a conversation with Ryan and other top GOP leaders about the Ukrainian prime minister's belief that Russia's government had put its long tentacles to work disrupting foreign elections in Europe and elsewhere.

Reacting to news that hackers had infiltrated the Democratic National Committee's computer network, McCarthy said on June 15, 2016 that he thought Moscow was trying to harvest opposition research on Trump so it could provide it all to his team.

'There's two people I think Putin pays: [Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump,' McCarthy said. 'Swear to God.'

Ryan swore his lieutenants to secrecy. McCarthy later told reporters that 'it was a bad attempt at a joke. That's all there is to it. Nobody believes it to be true.'
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A desperate father who hired a helicopter to look for his missing son after refusing to accept the police dismissing him as a runaway has revealed he had a gut feeling the 17-year-old had been involved in a crash.

It had been 30 hours by the time Sam Lethbridge's family got to him - after spotting him in their own aerial search of the area between Gosford and his home on Lake Macquarie.

He was alive but had a bone sticking out of his right leg after he crashed his car and became stuck just 20 metres from the Pacific Highway.

His father Tony Lethbridge had an inkling something was wrong - and so acting on intuition decided to speed up the search process by hiring his own helicopter.

Sam Lethbridge, 17, is taken by paramedics and NSW Fire and Rescue officers from the crash site south of Newcastle

Sam Lethbridge's vehicle after he was cut free from the wreckage at Crangan Bay, south of Newcastle, on Monday

'I just couldn't get it out of my head that he'd crashed somewhere,' he told The Age.

The memories of another crash on the same stretch of road also helped the father make up his mind.

That driver wasn't found for five days, and didn't survive.

'With the way the bush is there, if a car goes in you're not going to see it. The only way you'll see it is from the air. And that's what we did.

The young man's sister, Megan, was the first person to contact police fearing him missing - that was at 8pm on Sunday.

'I asked if there had been any accidents,' Ms Lethbridge told Daily Mail Australia. 'I asked 'is there anything you can do?'.

'They told me Sam had probably just run away. I said 'that's not him. Something is really wrong'.'

Sam Lethbridge, 17, survived the night with a bone sticking out of his leg after his car left the Pacific Highway and slammed into an embankment at Crangan Bay

Sam Lethbridge, 17, was trapped for about 30 hours in his crashed car near Newcastle; he was found on Monday morning

Ms Lethbridge had last been in contact with her brother about 12.30am on Sunday after she finished her bar job and had been unable to find him after contacting his friends that afternoon.

Ms Lethbridge's parents Tony and Lee were on a weekend away in Canberra, so she took on the responsibility of finding her brother.

Her parents arrived home about 1am Monday and also went to Belmont police station but were not satisfied with what was being done searching for their son.

'Dad said as soon as he walked out 'we're gong to hire a helicopter and find him',' Ms Lethbridge said.

'He said 'I'm not going to just sit here and lose him'.'

Mr Lethbridge remembered there had been an accident about five years ago near where Sam's car was eventually found and wanted to search there.

Sam was believed to have been driving from Gosford, on the Central Coast, to the Lethbridge family home at Blacksmiths, on Lake Macquarie, when he left the road after 6am on Sunday.

Paramedics and NSW Fire and Rescue officers work to free Sam Lethbridge from his car after its discovery on Monday

NSW Fire and Rescue officers at Sam Lethbridge's vehicle after the 17-year-old was cut free late on Monday morning

Sam Lethbridge's car had travelled at least 20 metres off the Pacific Highway on Sunday morning; it was found on Monday

On Monday, Mr Lethbridge hired a helicopter which went up with pilot Lee Mitchell and Mr Lethbridge's brother Michael about 9.45am.

Mr Mitchell, of Skyline Aviation Group, swung into action when the Lethbridges came to see him at Lake Macquarie Airport and hired his Robinson R44 helicopter.

'My job as far as being a pilot and looking for a car is the easy job,' Mr Mitchell said.

'The father had the insight to hire the helicopter in the first place and go looking for his son.

'It was fortunate he had an idea where to start looking. He was fairly adamant it was somewhere between the Doyalson turnoff on the M1 and Swansea.'

He was right. Mr Mitchell and Michael Lethbridge spotted Sam's vehicle after about 10 minutes in the air.

'It was fairly obvious from the air and invisible from the road,' Mr Mitchell said.

Skyline Aviation Group pilot Lee Mitchell with the Robinson R44 he flew to locate where Sam Lethbridge had crashed

Helicopter pilot Lee Mitchell said he was in the air for only about 10 minutes before he and Michael Lethbridge found the car

Map showing where Sam Lethbridge's vehicle was found at Crangan Bay on Lake Macquarie and where he was heading

The pilot called 000 and the helicopter hovered over the crash site.

'It was a bit of a mission accomplished for me to be able to find the vehicle and at that point it's important to remain composed in all the excitement,' Mr Mitchell said.

At 10.01am Michael Lethbridge sent a text message to his brother to say he had spotted Sam's crashed car off the Pacific Highway at Crangan Bay, south of Newcastle.

When Michael Lethbridge was able to reach the crashed vehicle he could see that Sam had survived the night. He had a bone sticking out of his leg.

Emergency services including ambulance and fire crews were called to the scene.

Sam was trapped in the driver's seat with a compound fracture to his right femur and fractures to his ankle and arm. He was freed about midday, Ms Lethbridge said.

Ms Lethbridge wanted to thank Mr Mitchell and motorist Billy Creanor who stopped to render first aid.

Sam (left) was discovered at 10.45am on Monday when his uncle spotted the wreckage on the side of the road. His sister and father are pictured right

The rescue operation took a painstaking 45 minutes, during which time Sam was given pain medication and stabilised by paramedics

Tyre marks from Sam Lethbridge's car can be seen leaving the Pacific Highway and leading into bushland south of Newcastle

Sam was given pain medication during the rescue operation and was stabilised by paramedics.

NSW Ambulance superintendent Jeff Atkins said: 'When we got to him he was pretty dehydrated. But his clinical observations were quite good which was amazing.'

'He then had to be carried back to the highway.'

Sam was taken by ambulance to the John Hunter Hospital where he remains. He had suffered an ankle injury, a fractured forearm and a compound fracture to his femur.

Superintendent Atkins said the teenager would need to undergo a 'world of physio' to regain full use of his injured leg.

A NSW police spokesperson said Sam Lethbridge was formally reported missing about 11pm on Sunday and an investigation began.

'As part of that investigation a missing person report was tabled at the police Monday morning crime review and provided to senior management and supervisors with the contents then disseminated to all staff,' the spokesperson said.

'Police had also broadcast a 'Keep a lookout for' message regarding the missing individual and vehicle which was issued statewide. This is in line with normal procedures for incidents such as this.'

The teenager needed to be cut from the wreckage (pictured) when he was discovered badly injured on the side of the Pacific Highway south of Newcastle
Authorities in Pennsylvania are investigating an apparent murder-suicide in which a 63-year-old man killed a 16-year-old girl believed to be his niece before turning the gun on himself last week.

The bodies of Freddie Simmons and the teenager were found at around 8.30pm on Friday when Pocono Mountain Regional police went to his home in the 100 block of Poplar Place in Coolbaugh Township, just outside Tobyhanna.

Investigators say Simmons and the girl lived in the residence with other family members, who were present during the murder-suicide. Some of them later ran next door to summon help.

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Murder-suicide: Police say 63-year-old Freddie Simmons (left and right) on Friday shot and killed his 16-year-old niece before turning the gun on himself

Crime scene: Police responded to Simmons' home outside Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania (pictured) and found the man and the teen dead in the same room

Police who responded to the scene found a note allegedly written by Simmons, saying he was going to kill himself and take the girl with him, reported Pocono Record. Their bodies were found in the same room.

The 16-year-old had been shot multiple times while Simmons had a single gunshot wound to the head that was self-inflicted.

The girls name has not been released. As of Tuesday morning, there was no word on a possible motive.

Neighbor Harold Dover told WNEP that Simmons was married, but his wife was out of town.

Final letter: Police found a note allegedly written by Simmons (pictured), saying he was going to kill himself and take the girl with him

Simmons lived in this house with his niece and other family members, some of whom were present during the murder-suicide

Social media posts suggest Simmons' widow is a pastor and the couple have two grown children, a son and daughter.

The Pocono Mountain School District has revealed in a press release that Simmons' slain niece was a student at Agora Cyber Charter School.

Those who knew the family told the station WFMZ they were peaceful and good people.
Umar Ahmed Haque, 25,(seen in a sketch from the Old Bailey today) allegedly planned atrocities across London when he was working at the Lantern of Knowledge Islamic boys secondary school in Leyton, east London, where he taught

An ISIS-inspired mosque teacher prepared his students for acts of terror with physical training and role playing classes as he plotted strikes on targets including Big Ben and the Queen's Guard, the Old Bailey heard.

Umar Ahmed Haque, 25, allegedly planned atrocities across London when he was working at the Lantern of Knowledge Islamic boys secondary school in Leyton, east London, where he taught.

He denies showing videos of beheadings to pupils at the school or plotting terrorist acts, but admits training children at the Ripple Road Mosque in Barking, east London, where he also taught.

Haque, who allegedly planned attacks on Big Ben and the Queen's Guard, has confessed to having copies of the ISIS magazine Rumiyah.

Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC said Haque decided in 2016 and early 2017 to carry out one or more violent attacks in this country.

Haque became obsessed by the Westminster attacks of March 22 2017 in which which five people die and more than 50 people injured.

'It proved to be for him a subject of fascination and contemplation, as you will hear him say in due course,' Mr Heywood said.

In covert recordings with fellow accused terrorist Abuthaher Mamun, 19, Haque said, 'We are here to cause terrorism, we are a death squad sent by Allah.

'Someone recorded the Prime Minister being bundled into a car and driving away and they were in confusion saying 'don't get out that way'.

'I like to see this, I wanna see these people scared and working for their money.'

Haque expressed fears of a 'snitch' and discussed the justification for killing civilians, jurors were told.

He allegedly discussed using a car, leaving bombs in a lift, and going for 'a quick spin' around Westminster.

Abuthaher Mamun, 19,(left) denies preparation of terrorist acts and Nadeem Patel denies conspiracy to possess firearm with intent to cause fear of violence. They are both depicted in sketches from the Old Bailey today

Mr Heywood said of Haque: 'There is justification of killing civillians, there is reference to the need to deter what Mr Haque calls 'the enemy'.'

Haque praised Osama Bin Laden and IS fighters in Africa as well as Khalid Masood, and had told the police he was a 'loyal soldier' of Islamic State, the court heard.

On 11 April 2016 he attempted to fly from London Heathrow to Istanbul and was stopped by security officers.

He claimed he was going on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia after a few days holiday in Istanbul.

Haque was in possession of two mobile phones which he had used to visit news sites about the terror attacks in France and Belgium and Syrian beheadings.

Haque is on trial with Nadeem Ilyas Patel, 26, who allegedly plotted with him together to obtain a firearm.

Patel denied that charge but admitted to having a Walther P99 handgun adapted to discharge a noxious liquid or gas.

Muhammad Abid, 27, denies failing to disclose information about Haque's terror planning.

Mamun, 19, denies trading in financial options in order to finance the attack allegedly plotted by Haque.

All four men were detained in a string of raids on May 17 after an investigation by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command.

All four men were detained in a string of raids on May 17 after an investigation by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command and are on trial at the Old Bailey(file pic)

Haque, of Forest Gate, east London, denies two counts of preparing to commit acts of terrorism, one count of dissemination of terrorist publications and one count of conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.

He admits to dissemination of terrorist publications, and four counts of collection of information likely to be useful to a terrorist.

Abid, of Manor Park, denies failing to disclose information about Haque.

Mamun, of Barking, denies preparation of terrorist acts.

Patel, of Forest Gate, denies conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence. He admits possession of a prohibited weapon.

The trial continues.
Tesco customers have reacted with fury after the supermarket downgraded the value of rewards they can claim with Clubcard points.

The scheme used to allow customers to 'boost' the value to their Clubcard points to two or four times the value with partner firms including Prezzo, Cafe Rouge and London Zoo.

But, from today, the supermarket has suddenly said all Reward tokens will be three times the value, meaning those hoping to get four times the value have missed out.

The supermarket insisted the move was to make things more 'straightforward' for customers, but many of those who use the scheme have branded the move cynical.

Tesco have been slammed by customers after changing the increase in value they can receive by using their Clubcard points at other shops and restaurants

One customer wrote on Twitter: 'We had 89 saved up in vouchers - worth 356. Now they are worth 267.

'No advance warning, really really poor from Tesco - been loyal customers for well over 10 years - because of clubcard. And what a load of BS about 'making it easier'.'

Another wrote: 'All clubcard boosts going to 3x. Everything we chose was 4x so this is a big reduction. But highlight was the inane corporate-speak lathered over the announcement...'this is not a reduction in boosts, oh no, this is to make it easier to understand' How dumb are we?'

Another added: 'I've decided to make things easier. From today, I am no longer shopping at Tesco. You'll miss me more than I'll miss you! #tesco #clubcard'

Tesco has around 16 million active Clubcard customers, according to figures released at its half-year results announcement.

Scores of customers took to Twitter today to express their anger at the supermarket

A spokesman for the supermarket said: 'We've listened to our customers and simplified our Clubcard Reward Partners so that they're more straightforward for everyone.

'This means that from January 15, we will offer customers three times the value of their vouchers with over 100 Clubcard Reward Partners including days out, weekend breaks, holidays and more.

'This builds on the work we did last year to further help customers, when we introduced the new contactless Clubcard and made significant improvements to the Tesco Clubcard app.'

Martin Lewis, founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, says: 'Tesco has done a little, but it certainly doesn't help.

'Under the guise of simplification, its changes to its reward scheme is a slap in the face to 100,000s of loyal customers.'

Tesco says the move will make the system simpler, but critics say they bungled the change

Mr Lewis added: 'The issue is that these changes have been made immediately without any notification. Many people save their reward points month after month after month, waiting to redeem on a big item.

'These changes leave many of those people missing out on 50 or 100  not good when so many are struggling.

'This is a terrible policy implementation by Tesco. I call on it to urgently review its policy to give a window of opportunity to those who've already saved substantial points, and will lose out by these changes, to still redeem at the prior value.'
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Elizabeth Jane Flores, 41, a Christian motivational speaker, says her sister Louise Anna Turpin did not allow her to visit her home or speak with her 13 children

The sister of the mother who kept her 13 children shackled and malnourished in a California house of horrors has said she was never allowed to visit her sibling and knew something was 'not right' about her parenting.

Elizabeth Jane Flores, 41, from Cleveland, Tennessee, told DailyMailTV she had not seen Louise Anna Turpin in 19 years, and while she still kept in touch with her sister by telephone, Turpin refused to invite her over to her home and never let her speak to her nieces and nephews.

'Something didn't seem right about her parenting but never would I have expected it to be like this,' Flores told DailyMailTV.

'We have been so worried about them because it's been so strange but there was nothing we could do. They wouldn't let anyone visit and we didn't know their address. I haven't seen her in 19 years. We would talk on the phone from time to time, but every time I would ask to talk to her kids, she wouldn't let me.

Flores, a mother of seven, says their parents had even flown out to visit the family but Turpin would not give them an address.

'She never let us talk to her kids. She wouldn't even accept my Facebook request. We all wondered what was going on. My parents booked several flights to go see them but when they got there they wouldn't tell them where to go and my parents left crying every time. They died before they got to see them again. It's just heartbreaking and I'm so embarrassed about all of this.'

Turpin and her husband David Allen Turpin, 57, were arrested and charged with torture and child endangerment on Sunday after their 17-year-old daughter fled their Perris, California home and called the police.

Their 13 kids, aged from two to 29 years old, were immediately taken to hospital after they were saved from the 'foul-smelling' room on Sunday morning.

Louise Anna Turpin and David Allen Turpin, 57, were arrested and charged with torture and child endangerment on Sunday after their 17-year-old daughter fled their Perris, California home and called the police

The mother of 13 allegedly never allowed her family to come visit, refused to give them an address, and did not allow her sister to speak with her children

'Things 1 to 13': The family are seen in Dr Seuss-style shirts, and all in blue jeans, in a family photo taken in April 2016. The family as very religious and said the parents had so many children because they believed 'God called on them' to do so

Flores, an author and Christian motivational speaker, has revealed on her website that she was a victim of child abuse, but revealed nothing about her sister. She has co-authored three books with her cousin Tricia Andreassen, who is also a motivational speaker.

In one book, Resilience In The Storm, published in 2016, Flores revealed she was molested as a child by a 'family member that she 'loved so much.' She also disclosed that her mother was in an abusive relationship.

'I think I was around nine years old when a family member that I loved so much and I was supposed to be able to trust, molested me. It continued all through my childhood and teen years.'

Police said the siblings were all desperately malnourished and pleaded with officers for food and water after they were freed. It is not known how long they were chained, padlocked and shackled before they were discovered.

A neighbor who saw four of the children less than two months ago described them as 'very thin and very albino.'

Housewife Wendy Martinez, 41, who lives in a home behind the single-story ranch-style property, told DailyMail.com she saw four of the children kneeling in the front yard late at night at the end of October.

She said the quartet looked emaciated and pale, and appeared to have been instructed not to respond when she tried to say hello to them.

'It was about 9pm at night and we came around right here and at the gate, we saw four children inside,' Martinez said.

'They were on their knees, four little kids, and they were just rolling on the grass. It was odd at that time of night.

Elizabeth, pictured with her husband and seven children, says they were worried for the family because of Louise's odd behavior and they did not 'know what was going on'

Above is the four-bedroom home in Perris, California where the 13 children were found dirty and malnourished. The Turpins purchased the home in 2014 and later registered it as a school. Elizabeth alleges Louise refused to give them an address to their home

Parents David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested and charged with torture and child endangerment

'Their mother was in the archway, I just remember the mother in the archway, and I said, "hi". There was like no movement, not even to look over to see who's saying hi.

'No movement, like if they were told not to speak to anybody. The mom, no movement at all.'

When asked whether she thought the children needed help, she told DailyMail.com: 'Honestly, I didn't see like they needed help.

'They were in their yard. It was awkward that it was at 9pm at night but they were in their yard.'

Police found that some of the children had been shackled to their beds and were being held in 'a foul-smelling room'.

The Turpins purchased the house, which sits on a quiet well-to-do street, for $351,000 in August 2014  later registering it as a school.

Sitting within a new development, the house had been a model home and was, said Dennis Cooke, 61, 'already tricked out with custom fittings' when they moved in.

Cooke, who works at Home Depot in Perris, said he had been shown around the property before the Turpins moved in, adding: 'This one was very beautiful, it was already tricked out with custom fittings, the backyard done, the landscaping done.'

But he said the spacious four-bedroom home is nowhere near large enough for 15 occupants, telling DailyMail.com: 'Oh no, no. Absolutely not. I would say a normal family, if they had six children, it could be adequate but 13, no. absolutely not.'

Although the Turpins were understood to be running a school from the house, neighbors said they saw no sign of parents arriving to drop off their children  and most said they had no idea that a young family lived in the property.

'You know what, I drive past this way every day but I've never seen the family or anything,' said nurse Janeece Calhoun, 21. 'Never anybody coming in or out.'

Neighbor Michelle Walls, 47, added: 'You would think you would have heard them. In our neighborhood, kids are usually out playing, shooting hoops. Going to the park.

'I'm surprised I never saw them because most kids need to go outside and play.'

Police originally thought all of the victims were children but soon discovered seven were adults. The family are pictured above

Martinez says she last saw a member of the family a month ago, when she spotted one of the couple's teenage daughters drive past in a red Volkswagen Jetta, which was seen parked outside the home today.

She said: 'One of the girls was coming in in the red Jetta. They were in and out. I think it was one of the girls, I don't know which one it was, but as I was going out, she was coming in. She'd been out.'

Martinez added: 'It's weird  you never know what's going on. They've got three cars and that [mini]van. They move it, there's no cobwebs.

'They're mobile. I don't understand why they would wait so long to say something. Looking at their pictures, they seemed like the perfect family.'

Other shocked neighbors on Muir Woods Road said they did not even know children lived in the property, and were horrified to learn what was really going on inside.

Neighbors told the Press-Enterprise they were horrified to learn of the allegations.

Andrew Santillan, who lives nearby said: 'I didn't know there were kids in the house. I had no idea this was going on.'

Zinzi and Ricardo Ross live on the same road as the Turpins.

'It's very shocking. Very devastating,' Mr Ross said.

'It's crazy, I can't believe this is going on,' Mrs Ross added.

Although the Turpins were understood to be running a school from the house, neighbors said they saw no sign of parents arriving to drop off their children  and most said they had no idea that a young family lived in the property

They appear to have had marriage-renewal ceremonies in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator at least three times in 2011, 2013 and 2015

David and Louise Turpin, seen renewing their vows at an Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas in 2016. The 10 girls are all dressed in pink dresses with white tights and white shoes, while the boys are seen in suits with purple ties - and bowl haircuts like their father

But Andria Valdez said she had seen the children before, joking that they were like the vampire family in the Twilight books and films because they were 'really, really pale' and 'only came out at night'.

Another local said the children were seen building a Nativity scene in the front yard of their home a few years ago, but were 'weird about it' when complimented on their work.

State records appear to suggest David Turpin home-schools his six children at their address, calling it Sandcastle Day School.

David Turpin's parents, James and Betty Turpin, told ABC News they were 'surprised and shocked' at the news.

The couple, who live in West Virginia, said they had not visited the family for four or five years but had spoken to them on the phone, although not with their grandchildren.

Wendy Martinez (left) thought the Turpins were the perfect family, but Dennis Cooke (right) did not the think their 'beautiful' home was big enough to house 13 children

The siblings - of which six are adults and seven are children - were only found after their 17-year-old sister broke out of the home and called the police.

Riverside County Sheriff's Department began investigating after the 17-year-old girl freed herself, escaped the home and called the police on a cell phone she stole from inside the property on Sunday morning, cops said.

The girl's 12 siblings were then discovered by officers, who charged their parents with torture and child endangerment.

Officers arrived at the home early on Sunday morning and found several children and adults chained and padlocked to beds in a foul-smelling room.

They were malnourished, dirty and all of them have been hospitalized, police said.

The victims were given food and drinks and Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services will care for them once they are well enough to be released from hospital.

Police initially thought all of the victims were children but soon discovered seven were adults.

Mr and Mrs Turpin were arrested and charged with nine counts of torture and 10 of child endangerment. Neither of them have a serious criminal record.

The couple are being held at Robert Presley Detention Center east of Los Angeles and their bail has been set at $9million. They will appear in court on Thursday.

Pictures on Facebook show the Turpins renewing their vows at a wedding ceremony in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator, with 13 children posing for photos in matching outfits for the boys and the girls.

The 10 girls are all dressed in pink dresses with white tights and white shoes, while the boys are seen in suits with purple ties - and bowl haircuts like their father.

Other pictures show the family smiling on a trip to Disneyland, while another shows them wearing Dr Seuss-style shirts, with each child's top emblazoned with 'Thing 1' to 'Thing 13'.
A mother who lost her newborn baby after complications during labour told an inquest she feared her desire for an 'ideal birth' had delayed the emergency operation to save him.

Jo Meeke and Matt Gurney's son Puck died on March 16 last year after the couple had planned for a home birth but went to the hospital as they feared something was wrong.

The couple, of Bosham, West Sussex, said Ms Meeke had enjoyed an 'uncomplicated, dream pregnancy' until their son needed to be resuscitated.

Puck died in their arms at Southampton University Hospital's neo-natal unit the morning after his birth, with his parents given just 30 minutes to say goodbye.

Baby Puck, pictured while still alive, died in the arms of his parents, Jo Meeke and Matt Gurney, hours after an emergency caesarean operation in Chichester, an inquest heard

Puck's family told the inquest they would have elected to have a Caesarian operation earlier if it had been offered to them.

Giving evidence at West Sussex Coroner's Court in Crawley on Tuesday, Ms Meeke said: 'I was in constant pain.'

She said the pair were left waiting at the desk when they arrived at St Richard's Hospital in Chichester, despite ringing ahead, and then waited nearly two hours before they were seen by a midwife at 12pm.

Ms Meeke told the court no-one had made her aware of concerns raised in the findings of a cardiotocography (CTG) - a test used to check a foetal heartbeat.

A specialist registrar admitted he was late for a review of Ms Meeke's condition as he was seeing to another high-risk woman in labour.

The couple, who named their son after the character in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, are trying to raise 65,000 to buy part of a woodland in his memory

Just after 6.15pm, doctors decided to deliver the baby by emergency caesarean section, more than 24 hours after going into labour, but he died the next day.

Ms Meeke, 39, said: 'I just remember the feeling of panic that nothing was happening. I just remember the panic, that things weren't happening quickly and people weren't arriving. I just remember being really scared.

'It's something that I have to live with for the rest of my life, wondering if it was my fault the way I wanted my ideal birth to be that action wasn't taken when it should have been.'

The couple, who named their son after the character in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, are trying to raise 65,000 to buy part of a woodland. So far, more than 20,000 has been donated.

They said they wanted something good to come out of the 'utterly devastating event' that changed their lives forever and hope the woodland would help them come to terms with their loss.

Ms Meeke (right) told the court she feared her desire for an 'ideal birth' had delayed the emergency operation to save Puck

They also said they hoped it would provide somewhere for grieving families and the 'amazing' nurses at the Southampton neo-natal unit to seek solace.

The inquest, which is expected to last two days, heard concerns were raised of a potential abruption, where the placenta partially or completely separates from the uterus which could deprive the baby of oxygen and cause severe bleeding.

This was being monitored before a decision on how to proceed with the delivery was made, the court heard, but the parents said they were not told the significance of a potential bleed on the placenta.

Giving evidence via video link and then telephone from Egypt, Dr Ibrahim Elshazly said he told the parents he did not think it was safe to continue with a home birth and that they should have a hospital delivery.

He said the plan was to continue monitoring the baby's heartbeat and have a caesarean section at 6pm, but if there were signs of improvement then to progress with a natural birth.

Midwives Helen Fecher and Holly Cook were also questioned by coroner Bridget Dolan over the time it took for concerns to be raised with an obstetrician.

Ms Fecher said it would have been difficult for Ms Meeke to have the procedure any earlier but 'limitations' on the ward at the time had not affected the decision.

The inquest continues.
Former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon has received a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators, following revelations of his explosive remarks about a Trump campaign meeting with Russians.

Bannon is the first member of President Trump's inner circle to be ordered to appear, the New York Times reported.

The former top advisor to the president added to his growing collection of subpoenas during hours-long testimony before the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday.

Bannon was appearing there to answer questions for the panel's Russia investigation. But his lawyer told lawmakers the White House told him not to answer questions about his time at the White House or during the presidential transition  both key timeframes in the Mueller probe.

STORY TO TELL?: Bannon's appearance comes after his public break with President Trump, and published comments where he called a Trump Tower meeting with Russians 'treasonous'

He then got served immediate subpoenas in connection with things the panel wanted answered, Fox News reported.

He did not invoke a formal executive privilege, according to the report.

'I certainly think that when the committee expects an executive privilege, when does that attach is the question that is sort of dominating the day. You know, at what time does it attach? During the transition or during the actual swearing in?' asked Rep. Tom Rooney, a Florida Republican, the Hill reported.

Republican panel chair Rep. Devin Nunes of California authorized the subpoenas, as he has the power to do. 'Thats how the rules work,' he said.

It is possible Bannon's lawyers would be able remove the Mueller subpoena and have him appear voluntarily in exchange for cooperation.

Word of the subpoena, which was delivered last week according to the paper, comes after revelations that Bannon called a Trump Tower meeting with Russians 'treasonous' in interviews in a new book, 'Fire and Fury.'

Such sentiments, and any foundation for them, are the kind of information Mueller's investigators will want to probe in their examination of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Following the book's publication, Trump said Bannon had 'lost his mind' as they went through an extraordinary public break. Bannon also was pushed out of the Brietbart News conservative web site.

The split with Trump is also an opportunity for Mueller to try to exploit.

Bannon arrived in the Capitol complex Tuesday to face investigators in a House Intelligence Committee probe. His appearance at a closed door committee meeting comes just days after he suffered an extraordinary public break with President Trump.

Bannon was cast out of the president's circle after he gave slashing interviews in the new book, 'Fire and Fury,' including a comment where he called a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians 'treasonous.'

That meeting, which included Donald Trump Jr., Trump son in law Jared Kushner, and former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort is of prime interest to special counsel Robert Mueller as well as to Democrats on the Intelligence panel.

Bannon was spotted entering a congressional office building for the meeting. White House Communications Director Hope Hicks is expected to testify later this week.

Former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon is scheduled to appear before the House Intelligence Committee this week

Bannon said afterward he did not mean to be referring to Donald Trump Jr., but was speaking of Manafort, a seasoned political player who has since been charged with money laundering and conspiracy.

Bannon and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski are each scheduled to testify the committee, which is probing Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

Amid partisan clashes on the panel, the GOP majority is also probing the conduct of FBI agents involved in probes of Hillary Clinton's emails as well as of Donald Trump and his associates during the campaign.

That meeting has proven central to special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of any collusion or obstruction of justice.

Steve Bannon, former advisor to President Trump, arrives at a House Intelligence Committee closed door meeting, on January 16, 2018 in Washington, DC

Last week, Bannon has hired Bill Burck of the law firm Quinn Emanuel to represent him.

The panel has fallen into partisan camps, as Republicans, led by chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, dig for information to muddy the FBI and the golden showers dossier, while Democrats push to call back witnesses to grill them on Russian election interference and ties between Trump associates and Russia.

Bannon's lawyer, who participated in the Martha Stewart prosecution and is a former Special Counsel and Deputy Counsel to President George W. Bush, also represents ex-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and current White House counsel Don McGahn.

President Donald Trump (L) congratulates Senior Counselor to the President Stephen Bannon during the swearing-in of senior staff in the East Room of the White House on January 22, 2017 in Washington, DC

In this Nov. 9, 2017, file photo, Steve Bannon, speaks during an event in Manchester, N.H. Breitbart News Network announced Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018, that Bannon is stepping down as chairman of the conservative news site

Corey Lewandowski, original campaign manager for Donald Trump for President, also is expected to appear

Former Virginia first lady Maureen McDonnell arrives at Federal Court with her attorney William Burck in Richmond, Va., Monday, Aug. 25, 2014. Bannon reportedly hired Burck as he prepared for the House Intelligence Committee

Bannon reportedly will appear next week before investigators for the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes of California

Following the release of 'Fire and Fury,' the president tweeted that Bannon had 'lost his mind,' which included numerous disparaging quotes from Bannon about the Trump family, the president tweeted that Bannon had 'lost his mind.'

White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller in an appearance on CNN on Sunday, calling him an 'angry, vindictive person' whose 'grotesque comments are so out of touch with reality.'

Bannon apologized for his comments and was pushed out of his job running Breitbart News within days of publication.

Although he was pushed out from his post atop the Trump campaign, Lewandowski has maintained contact with Trump and his network.
A mother, 36, remains in a medically-induced coma following a devastating blaze that claimed the lives of her four young children. Michelle Pearson is unaware that her children have died

A mother remains in a medically-induced coma following a devastating blaze that claimed the lives of her four young children.

Michelle Pearson, 36, is unaware that four of her children have died as a result of the fire, as she has now been in the medically-induced coma since December 11.

Demi Pearson, 14, Brandon, eight, Lacie, seven, and Lia, three, all died following the house fire in Walkden, Greater Manchester, and it is understood Michelle remains in the same condition since being placed in the coma.

Two 16-year-old boys - one understood to be her son - who cannot be identified for legal reasons, escaped the blaze by jumping out of a window.

A GoFundMe page set up by their uncle, Matt Pearson, to raise money for the children's funerals has raised 23,445 so far.

Michelle's mother, Sandra Lever, wrote on Facebook to thank supporters for their kind donations.

The mother-of-six is unaware that four of her children have died as a result of the fire, as she has now been in the medically-induced coma since December 11. Demi Pearson, 14, Brandon, eight, Lacie, seven, and Lia, three, all died following the house fire in Greater Manchester

Matt said: 'I want to give these kids the best funeral they deserve with customised coffins for them and a horse and carriage to take them to the cemetery.

'They will all be buried together side by side.'

Mrs Lever wrote: 'Thanks everyone for all donations, my grandkids will have best send off ever.

'I am so overwhelmed [and] lost for words. The whole community came together.

'Thank you all once again. Us Pearson's are greatful [sic] to you all.'

Two weeks earlier, on Christmas Day, Mrs Lever paid tribute to her grandchildren.

She wrote: 'Want to wish my 4 beautiful grandchildren Lacie, Demi, Brandon, Lia, a happy Christmas.

'Wish you was here. It was not your time to go. Miss you so much, everyday hurts without you. Until we meet again, love you loads xx.'

Yesterday, Greater Manchester Police confirmed Michelle Pearson was still in the same condition in hospital.

A GoFundMe page set up by their uncle, Matt Pearson, to raise money for the children's funerals has raised 23,445 so far. Michelle's mother, Sandra Lever, wrote on Facebook to thank supporters for their kind donations

Michelle had her 36th birthday came two days after Christmas, on December 27, 2017. Greater Manchester Police confirmed Michelle Pearson was still in the same condition in hospital

Michelle had her 36th birthday came two days after Christmas, on December 27, 2017.

Members of the community also came together to arrange charity walks, raffles and one man has even penned a tribute rap in memory of the four little ones.

Fundraising days organised to raise money for the family recently raised in excess of 5,000 and 29-year-old Sean O'Toole from nearby Swinton has penned a rap called 'Four Little Angels' and is selling copies of the track with all proceeds going to the Pearson Family Fund.

David Worrall, 25, Courtney Brierley, 20, and Zac Bolland, 23, were charged with four counts of murder and have been remanded until their pre-trial preparation hearing on March 9.
Sinead Wooding, 26, was bludgeoned with a claw hammer and stabbed in Leeds

A Muslim man who killed his convert wife by bludgeoning her with a claw hammer and then stabbing her was today found guilty of her murder.

Akshar Ali, 27, murdered 26-year-old Sinead Wooding with friend Yasmin Ahmed, 27, before dumping her body in woodland and setting it on fire, Leeds Crown Court was told.

A jury today unanimously found the pair guilty of murder after five days of deliberations.

The court had previously heard mother-of-four Miss Wooding had been attacked at her home in Leeds with a hammer and had been stabbed six times.

Her body was kept in a cellar for two days before being transported to woodland north of the city, the court heard.

The body had then been wrapped in a duvet and trussed up with wire before being doused with petrol.

The smouldering remains were discovered at about 9am on Sunday, May 14 by a group of students who were out for a run in the area.

Akshar Ali (pictured left), 27, murdered 26-year-old Sinead Wooding with friend Yasmin Ahmed (right), 27, before dumping her body in woodland and setting it on fire

The court had previously heard Miss Wooding had been attacked at her home in Leeds with a hammer and had been stabbed six times. Pictured: Investigators in the city last year

Crime scene investigators enter the house in Leeds following the murder in May last year

The jury also unanimously found Vicky Briggs, 25, of Leeds, guilty of assisting an offender by helping clean up and burn material after the murder.

But the jury reached a not guilty verdict on two remaining defendants accused of involvement in Miss Wooding's murder.

Ali's mother Aktahr Bi, 45, of Leeds, was found not guilty of assisting an offender by making arrangements to dispose of Miss Wooding's corpse.

And Ali's brother, Asin Ali, 21, was cleared of assisting an offender by procuring a vehicle and assisting in the disposal and burning of her body.

Mr Justice Langstaff had earlier asked the jury to continue to try and reach majority verdicts on the two remaining defendants, but later said he would accept verdicts on which at least ten of the jury agreed.

Her body was kept in a cellar for two days before being transported to woodland (pictured) north of Leeds, the court was told

A police cordon around the crime scene at Allwoodley Car Park, north of Leeds, last year

The court previously heard Miss Wooding's badly disfigured body was found with six stab wounds to the chest and there was evidence of 12 blows to her head.

In addition, the jury was told how Miss Wooding had converted to the Muslim faith before meeting Ali, whom she married in an Islamic ceremony in February 2015.

And the court also heard that Miss Wooding called police the night before she was killed but officers did not visit until three days later.
A fox was spotted prowling through Downing Street this morning - just days after Theresa May confirmed she had dropped plans to hold a vote on overturning the hunting ban.

The bushy-tailed intruder limped past No10 as the Prime Minister and her ministers discussed their response to Carillion's collapse during the weekly Cabinet meeting.

The furry urban animal slunk was first seen scurrying past Mrs May's London headquarters at around 11.30pm - just after ministers had headed in.

And it darted back across the private road just as Home Secretary Amber Rudd emerged out of the front door following the weekly meeting shortly after 1pm.

Photographer Paul Davey, who spotted the sad-looking creature, said: 'He hobbled past once, and then came back the other way.

'He was limping, his back right leg was injured - he wasn't a well fox.

The furry urban animal slunk was first seen scurrying past Mrs May's London headquarters at around 11.30pm - just after ministers had headed in

'He had a nice face but he looked quite cute and sad.'

Mrs May had promised to give MPs a free vote on overturning the fox hunting ban during the General Election campaign last year.

But she quietly dropped the pledge after the Tory election disaster - which saw the Conservatives lose their majority and have to strike a 1billion deal to be popped up in No10 by the DUP.

The Prime Minister confirmed at the weekend that she had ditched the pledge after voters sent a 'clear message' they did not want it.

She told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: 'As Prime Minister, my job isn't just about what I think about something, it's actually about looking at what the view of the country is.

The bushy-tailed intruder darted across the street just days after Theresa May confirmed she had ditched her pledge to give MPs a free vote on overturning the fox hunting ban

The fox was seen limping around Westminster as Cabinet ministers were inside No10 discussing their plans to try to limit the damage caused by the collapse of the outsourcing and construction giant Carillion

'I think there was a clear message about that and that's why I say there won't be a vote on fox hunting during this Parliament.'

The law, introduced by Labour in 2004, bans the use of dogs to hunt foxes and other wild mammals in England and Wales.

Rather than pushing through a fresh controversial vote on hunting the Tories have instead scrambled to rebrand their party as being pro animal welfare and protecting environmentally friendly.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove has announced plans to create a new forest in the north as part of the Government's new eco agenda.

While the PM has announced a war on single-use plastic, unveiling plans to extend the 5p plastic bag charge to all shops.

While ministers are consulting on proposals to hit all single use plastics - including straws and plastic cutlery - with a similar charge.
A British couple from Essex have been stabbed and robbed while on a hiking holiday in South Africa.

Don and Yvonne Cormack, from Harlow, were knifed near Table Mountain, in the south-western city of Cape Town.

Mr Cormack , 71, was hospitalised after being stabbed nine times by the robbers on the Silvermine hiking trail near the picturesque Kalk Bay on Saturday.

Stabbed hiker Don Cormack with wife Yvonne and daughter Don Cormack at Victoria Hospital in the Cape Town suburb of Wynberg

Yvonne Cormack (left) tried to defend her husband Don (right) from the knifemen

Yvonne Cormack was stabbed in the arm and in the back of her head

His wife, 67, tried to protect him from the two knifemen but was also stabbed.

She told how the couple had been with a group of seven other hikers when they were attacked.

'We were walking and the guys came running at us with knives.

'They first attacked one of the women, who was standing on a rock taking photos. Then they told us to throw our phones and bags to the ground.

'Next they started attacking my husband Don, who they stabbed nine times all over his body.

'I took a stick and started hitting at the robber then he started stabbing me too.

'He stabbed me in my arm and back of my head.'

The robbers attacked five of the group using rocks and knives to inflict terrible injuries.

I won't forget that knife coming at me and cutting into my skin.'

Don and Yvonne got off lightly compared to another member of their party who tried to raise the alarm.

Yvonne said: 'I screamed at Don to give him his bag which Don did and I also gave them mine. Then they attacked Don again.

'The other robber followed one of the other hikers, who ran to get a phone signal to call for help.

'His face was brutally damaged after he was hit with a rock. He is in a critical condition in hospital.

The couple were hiking on the Silvermine hiking trail that goes from Silvermine to Kalk Bay in Cape Town

The pair were hiking on the picturesque Silvermine trail with five other people on Saturday

'They operated on him for four hours. Another hiker's face was also smashed with a rock.'

Yvonne explained how she had been hiking on Table Mountain for two years but had never experienced anything like this before.

After the frenzied attack, the robbers fled the scene carrying bags and phones.

The remaining members of the group ran for help and a rescue helicopter was dispatched.

Yvonne said: 'The others luckily found a group not far from us who had a doctor and rescue officer with them.

'Because Don and the other guy could not walk I waited with them till the rescue helicopter came.

'We are lucky to be alive. I won't forget that knife coming at me and cutting into my skin.'

Don was then taken to Victoria Hospital by helicopter where he is awake and able to talk.

Mr and Mrs Cormack (pictured in an older photo) were not as badly injured as others in their party

He says he is traumatised by the attack and that his memory of events is a bit vague.

Police recently arrested two men but it is not clear if they are being held in connection with the latest robbery. Security on Table Mountain has been increased.

The body responsible for tackling crime on Table Mountain, SANParks, moved to reassure visitors to the national park.

A spokeswoman for SANParks said: 'Table Mountain National Park has appointed a visitor safety team whose role it is to keep crime to a minimum in the national park.

'In addition, the park also boasts a ranger corps which has as one of their roles law enforcement in the park.

'These teams are supported by a dog unit consisting of 12 security-trained canines.

'Resources will be deployed to the mountain side above Kalk Bay where a criminal incident took place over the weekend.

'Given the extent and remoteness of the park, it is a challenge to have a presence everywhere at all times.

'Our team is deeply concerned about any incidents and we request that hikers please save our emergency number.'
The Marriott International group has pulled down decorative copies of a book that is related to the banned Falun Gong spiritual group over after the recent political scandal on territorial integrity.

The book, titled 'Bloody Harvest: the Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs', appeared on the shelf in the lounges of Element Chongli, a hotel under the Marriott group, in northwest China, according to Bloomberg News.

Hotel representatives refused to give out any comment and said the matters are being look after by the Public Security Bureau.

The Marriott saga has sparked series of criticisms for firms with geographical inaccuracies

Marriott hotel group is said to have taken down banned books related to Falun Gong

With over 5,800 properties across the globe, Marriott International Inc. crowned as the world's largest hotel group since they bought Starwood group in 2016.

But a recent Mandarin-language customer survey in its rewards programme had sparked mass outcry in China as it listed Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Tibet as countries.

China National Tourism Administration believed the survey had caused offence with its geographical inaccuracies.

The Chinese government demanded the hotel group to shut down their Chinese website for a week and ordered immediate and thorough checks of websites and apps to ensure they comply with the law.

Foreign ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, said: 'We welcome foreign enterprises to do business in China,

'Meanwhile, they should respect Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity, abide by Chinese law, and respect the Chinese peoples feelings, which are the foundation for any corporation to do business in any country.'

The gaffe deteriorated as one of their employees had liked a tweet published by Friends of Tibet on January 9.

The post was to congratulate the hotel group for listing Tibet as a country along with Taiwan and Hong Kong, stated South China Morning Post.

It's said the banned book is put up on Element Chongli hotel's bookshelves in the lounge area

Marriott Reward gives a 'like' over Friends of Tibet's twitter post of listing Tibet as a country

Arne Sorenson, chief executive of the hotel group, issued an apology letter on January 11, stressing that the company 'respects and supports the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China. Unfortunately, twice this week, we had incidents that suggested the opposite'.

The incident has drawn intense criticism online and web users 'volunteered' to look on other foreign companies.

Delta Air Lines, Spanish clothing giant Zara and medical device company Medtronic were also called out for listing Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate countries.

The firms were urged to "immediately alter their illegal content and publish apologies".

They have since apologised and changed their websites.

The Chinese government stated Tibet is an "autonomous region" firmly under Chinese control since the 1950s.

Hong Kong and Macau are former British and Portuguese colonies, respectively, that are now "special administrative regions" of China.

Taiwan has been self-ruled since splitting from the mainland after a 1949 civil war, but Beijing continues to claim sovereignty over the island.
Kailee Marie Perez, 25 (pictured), of Muskegon County, Michigan, was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on January 11

A young mother was sentenced to 20 years in prison last week for molesting a four-year-old relative.

Kailee Marie Perez, 25, admitted to fondling a young male relative's genitals in a video that she sent to her alleged drug dealer in November 2016, who then circulated the video online, according to court records.

While the victim is not named in court papers, the father of the victim wrote on Facebook that the boy is a relative.

In September, Perez took a plea deal, agreeing to plead guilty to sexual exploitation of a child if prosecutors dropped an additional charge of distribution of child pornography.

A federal court judge sentenced the Muskegon County, Michigan woman to two decades in prison on January 11.

Perez's dealer, 32-year-old Nathan Osborne, was sentenced in October to 37 years in prison for distributing Perez's video and for persuading another woman, 20-year-old Jazmine Pacyga, to film herself sexually assaulting her infant son.

Pacyga is currently awaiting trial after undergoing a mental evaluation to see if she was legally insane. Doctors determined she was fit to stand trial in December.

The mother admitted in September to molesting a four-year-old male relative. The victim is not being named to protect his identity. Perez is pictured above with her son in a Facebook photo

Perez (left and right) has struggled with addictions to heroin, crack cocaine and prescription medications

In a May 2015 article about her then-boyfriend, recovering drug addict Dan Nelson, Perez revealed that she had been addicted to heroin just after their first son was born in September 2012.

At the time, Perez said she was pregnant with their second child, but it's unclear if she was able to carry the child to term since there are only pictures of the older child on her Facebook.

The couple appear to have split shortly after that article came out. Perez's ex now appears to have custody of their five-year-old son.

In the lead up to Perez's sentencing, a social worker conducted an assessment of her risk to repeat the crime.

The report says that he doesn't believe Perez is sexually attracted to children, and that she made the video after being 'coerced by [Osborne] upon whom she had developed an unhealthy dependency' for drugs and sex.

The social worker said that Perez had a history of abusing heroin, marijuana, crack cocaine, and prescription stimulants and pain killers. She had tried to get off drugs before by going through inpatient and outpatient rehab programs.

He believes that Perez's risk of repeating the crime are low if she can remain clean.
President Donald Trump's first end-of-year report card is in, and the country is as split as ever about the quality of his schoolwork.

More than one-third of voters in a new Morning Consult poll conducted for Politico give the president a failing 'F' grade for his job performance since last year's Inauguration Day.

But the same number, 35 per cent, say he deserves either an 'A' or a 'B.'

President Donald Trump is still a politically polarizing figure, with similar numbers of American voters calling him a great success and a rank failure

A poll released Tuesday shows that 35 per cent believe Trump deserves an 'A' or a 'B' for Year One on the job, the same proportion that gives him an 'F'

Pollsters found America's body politic in the same schizophrenic state it's been in since Trump first entered the White House sweepstakes in 2015.

More men than women line up to support the president. More than half of females give him a 'D' or 'F,' while more than half of males put him in the 'A,' 'B' or 'C' categories.

And African-American voters are the most likely group to flunk him.

Self-described Trump voters are still in his corner, with his A-B-C total reaching 92 per cent of that group. But 85 per cent of voters who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 give Trupm a 'D' or an 'F.'

Pollsters also asked voters to grade the president on his handling of specific issues ranging from national security to the environment.

Combining the 'A' and 'B' grades and subtracting the 'F's provides a window into the public's overall level of support.

On job creation, for instance, 42 per cent gave Trump and 'A' or a 'B,' while just 24 per cent said he's failing. That's a difference of +18 points.

Trump enemies include feminists like these protesters on Monday who compared him to a 'Handmaid's Tale' villain

The president's base of support is still wildly skeptical of Hollywood and the media

Voters also gave the president a +17 rating on handling the overall ecomony, +11 on fighting terrorism and +4 on managing international trade.

But they're less impressed with his approach to immigration (-3), the national debt (-7) and foreign relations (-9).

Voters appear most upset about Trump's views on global warming (-17), his performance on health care (-11) and his approach to 'draining the swamp' (-12).

Not surprisingly, few Democrats are willing to give the president anything above a 'gentleman's "C",' but Republicans appear unswayed by a series of partisan scandals gripping the White House.

More than 7 in 10 Republicans, 72 per cent, give Trump an 'A' or 'B.'

In fact, GOP voters are happier with his job performance today than they were after his first 100 days in office.

'Despite a tumultuous first year in office, our polling shows an uptick in Republican voters who think Trump is doing an excellent job as president,' Morning Consult co-founder Kyle Dropp said Tuesday.

The president's base doesn't seem to be eroding: GOP voters are happier with his job performance today than they were after his first 100 days in office

'In mid-April, 33 percent of Republicans said they would grade Trump's presidency an "A," compared to 43 percent of Republicans who said they would give him the same grade today.'

Few Democrats, naturally, have good thingfs to say about the commander-in-chief.

Seventy-nine percent of them give Trump a 'D' or 'F.'

A possibly worry for the administration is the outcome among self-described 'independent' voters, those who identify as neither Republican nor Democrat.

Just 27 per cent were impressed enough to give Trump 'A' or 'B' marks. Far more, 45 per cent, hand down a 'D' or 'F.'

The poll was conducted Jan. 4-5 and sampled 1,988 registered voters. Its margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Fears are today growing for the welfare of a giant Humpback whale which has become entangled with a lobster pot buoy off the south coast of England.

Marine wildlife experts are concerned the 20 tonne behemoth could die if it is not freed from the buoy since it could restrict its movement and make it unable to dive for food.

The whale was spotted by local photographer Peter Moore one mile off the Isle of Portland in Dorset.

This Humpback whale is believed to have been caught on a lobster pot off the south coast

Photographer Peter Moore spotted the mammal about a mile off Chesil Cove in Dorset

Marine mammal experts are waiting for weather conditions to improve before going out to the Humpback whale and attempt to free it from the line

The British Divers Marine Life Rescue, a voluntary organisation which rescues sea animals in difficulty, will launch an operation to free the whale once weather conditions improve.

They have advised boats to stay clear of the 50ft mammal which is normally harmless since it could be 'unpredictable' due to the distress of being entangled.

Mr Moore, 49, spotted the whale while visiting Chesil Cove.

He said: 'Just as I arrived at the cove there were people leaving who said they thought they saw a whale or dolphin.

'I kept a watch and couldn't see anything until in the distance I picked something out.

'I saw water shoot up which could only be a whale then its dorsal fin break the surface.

'It did this two or three times. It was then I noticed it was dragging what appeared to be an orange lobster pot buoy and was heading south.

'It was amazing to see the whale but quite concerning it was attached to the buoy. I just hope it can break free from it.'

Mr Moore, head of environmental services at Dorset County Council, spotted the whale swimming southwards at 2.30pm on Sunday.

However, there have been no further sightings of the whale since then.

Experts believe this could by the same whale which was sighted close to the shore off Slapton Sands in Devon last February and twice had to be freed from floating objects.

Stephen Marsh, of the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, said: 'We don't know yet if it is the same one because we've not had the chance to do a comparison of the photos.

'Unfortunately we've had reports that this whale has become entangled with a lobster pot.

'Humpback whales are not dangerous but I would advise boats not to approach it because it is such a large creature and as it is entangled it could be unpredictable.

'Since the whale appears to have been swimming quite quickly hopefully it is not badly entangled.

'Perhaps it may even have been able to free itself.

'We hope to get out to it once the weather lets us.'

Humpbacks have a cavernous mouth that is big enough to swallow a car, but they are totally harmless - they love to hoover up a 'soup' of millions of micropscopic plankton with every gulp.

They cover vast distances - often spending part of the year in Antarctica then deserting the South Pole to swim up towards the seas around the North Pole, sometimes pitching up in British waters.

Sightings in British waters have become more frequent in the last five years, with 40 reported in 2016 compared to just five in 2012.

This surge has been attributed to a crackdown on whaling, although whales which swim into waters used for fishing are getting themselves entangled in equipment like the orange lobster pot buoy used by fishermen to reel in their catches.

Marine wildlife expert Steve Trewhella said an entangled whale has restricted movement and is not able to dive for food which is also the way it gets hydration.

He said: 'The bay is no place for a magnificent animal like that because there are too many hazards for them to get caught in from lobster pot buoys to fishing quills.

'If a whale is entangled and its movement is restricted it can't dive for food which is also its source of hydration.

'There is only so long a whale would be able to survive without water and I fear if it is not released from the buoy it may end up stranded on the beach.'
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Moscow experienced its darkest December on record in 2017, with just six minutes of sunshine.

The Russian capital usually gets an average of about an hour a day during the final month of the year but that fell dramatically at the end of 2017.

The meteorological station of the Moscow State University reported that for the whole of December the sun in the Moscow sky appeared only for six minutes or seven minutes, according to the TASS news agency.

Scroll down for video:

A woman crossing the road in Moscow in December 2017, when the Russian capital experienced just six minutes of sunshine

A couple walking in snowfall in central Moscow in December. The head of the Russian Meteorological Centre said slightly higher than average temperatures resulted in the lack of sunshine

Moscow's Red Square pictured in December. The city usually gets about an hour of sunshine a day in December and until now the darkest month in the city was in 2000 when three hours of sunshine were recorded.

Until now, the darkest month in Moscow was December 2000, when only three hours of sunshine were recorded.

According to Roman Vilfand, head of the Russian Meteorological Centre, Moscow's exceptionally overcast weather in December was in fact due to higher than average temperatures, the Moscow Times reported.

The news of Moscow's record dark December, comes as temperatures in Russia plummet back down to near record lows, in a country that has some of the coldest inhabited places on earth.

Temperatures in the remote, diamond-rich Russian region of Yakutia on Tuesday plunged to -67C in some areas.

In Yakutia - about 3,300 miles east of Moscow - where students routinely go to school in -40C, school was canceled throughout the region.

Local police also ordered parents to keep their children at home.

Over the weekend, two men froze to death when they tried to walk to a nearby farm after their car broke down. Three other men who were with them survived because they were wearing warmer clothes, local investigators reported on Monday.

In the village of Oymyakon, state-owned television showed mercury falling to the bottom of a thermometer that was only set up to measure down to -50C.

Temperatures in Russia, including Moscow (pictured on January 8) are now plummeting again, with the mercury falling down to near record lows

The temperature in the remote Siberian village of Oymyakon averages -50C in January

In Oymyakon - the coldest village on earth - inhabitant's eye lashes freeze solid mere moments after stepping outside.

It was so icy this week that a new electronic thermometer conked out after recording a bone-cracking -62C.

The official weather station at the 'pole of cold' registered -59C, but locals said their readings were as low as -67C - less than 1C off the lowest accepted temperature for a permanent settlement anywhere in the world.

And that record breaking recording was taken in the town back in 1933.

One villager in Oymyakon recorded a temperature of -67C, while others agreed that the official reading of minus 59C did not tell the full story.

The digital thermometer was installed last year to help Oymyakon market itself to tourists, but it gave up the ghost at 62C.

'It broke because it was too cold,' reported The Siberian Times.

The remote village is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement in the world

Temperatures dropped so low in the Russian village that a new electronic thermometer broke at a bone-cracking minus 62C

The town's name translates as 'the water that doesn't freeze' and comes from the fact it sits above a thermal spring

The village is home to around 500 hardy people and in the 1920s and 1930s was a stopover for reindeer herders who would water their flocks from the thermal spring.

This is how the town got its name which translates as 'the water that doesn't freeze'.

The Soviet government later made the site a permanent settlement during a drive to force its nomadic population into putting down roots.

In 1933, a temperature of -67.7C was recorded in Oymyakon, accepted as the lowest ever in the northern hemisphere.

Lower temperatures are recorded in Antarctica, but here there are no permanently inhabited settlements.

Lower temperatures are recorded in Antarctica but only in areas where there are no permanent settlements

Daily problems that come with living in Oymyakon include pen ink freezing, glasses freezing to people's faces and batteries losing power.

Locals are said to leave their cars running all day for fear of not being able to restart them.

Rock solid earth makes burying the dead a difficult task. The earth must first have thawed sufficiently in order to dig, so a bonfire is lit for a few hours.

Hot coals are then pushed to the side and a hole just a few inches deep is dug. The process is repeated for several days until the hole is deep enough to bury the coffin.

Locals are said to leave their cars running all day for fear of not being able to restart them
Three men have been jailed for nearly 40 years after a new police forensics team linked them to multiple offences - involving the same gun.

Richard Ojo, 25, Myron Hyllam, 27, and Mamud Mansaray, 26, were locked up for a combined total of 39 years for their role in four shootings in London in 2016.

Operation Esyia looked into four firearms offences which took place in Lambeth and Wandsworth between August 14 and September 3, 2016.

Richard Ojo (middle), 25, Myron Hyllam (left), 27, and Mamud Mansaray (right), 26, were locked to a combined total of 39 years for their role in four shootings in London in 2016

Ojo (left), of Lambeth, was jailed for 16 years for his role in the four shootings between August and September 2016. While Mansaray (right), of Tower Hamlets, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to rob and was sentenced the same day to five years and ten months in prison

The Trident Active Series Linked Team used forensic analysis to identify when the same weapon was used in a shooting and remained in circulation.

The new police team, which is part of Metropolitan Police Trident and Area Crime Command, was set up on January 2017.

The firearm, believed to be a self-loading pistol, has never been recovered but examination of ammunition found at the scene helped the police link the four offences.

Forensics found the offences were linked by the same gun and the year long investigation lead to the conviction of the three men.

The first offence took place Wandsworth shortly after 11pm on August 14, 2016 when a victim was robbed at gunpoint while sitting in his car.

He tried to run away but was shot in the leg and the thieves stole a Rolex watch and two gold chains.

Detectives found the Rolex watch during a search of Ojo's home address in March 2017 and the two gold chains were recovered from Mansaray's vehicle when it was searched after his arrest.

Hyllam, Mansaray and Ojo were stopped by police in a silver Mitsubishi Outlander a few days before the shooting.

Analysis of their mobile phone records also linked the three men to the first offence.

The same handgun was then discharged in Robertson Street in Wandsworth on August 17, 2016, just before 3am.

Hyllam, of Brixton, was jailed for 18 years. He and Ojo were both found guilty of conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to endanger life and conspiracy to rob after an eight-week trial at Woolwich Crown Court in October

CCTV footage showed three cars in convoy at the scene and two people getting out, run out of shot - before leaving in the same car.

Another shooting linked to the same weapon took place in the Springhill estate in Lambeth shortly after 9pm on August 22, 2016.

Police said two people were driving and about to turn into the estate when they saw a man fire three shots.

Forensics found the same firearm had been used but the investigation was not able to determine whether or not the shots had been directed towards a person. No evidence was found to link Ojo, Mansaray or Hyllam to this offence.

The final shooting took place on September 3, 2016, in Lambeth where CCTV evidence showed shots may have been fired towards someone who was seen to run away, but no victim was ever found.

Last year Ojo and Hyllam were both found guilty of conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to endanger life and conspiracy to rob in after an eight-week trial at Woolwich Crown Court in October.

Ojo, of Lambeth, was jailed for 16 years, while Hyllam, of Brixton, was jailed to 18 years.

On Monday this week Mansaray, of Tower Hamlets, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to rob and was sentenced the same day to five years' and ten months imprisonment.

He was found not guilty of conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to endanger life.

Detective Inspector Edward Facer, of the Met's Trident team said: 'The arrests and convictions of these men are the result of a year-long investigation that involved in-depth analysis of the four incidents, phone records, CCTV and forensic examination of ammunition found at the four scenes of crime.

'This investigation demonstrates how we are able to prosecute those responsible for firearms offences, even if there are no witnesses to a shooting.

'The lengthy sentences handed to these defendants should send out a message that gun crime will not be tolerated and we will relentlessly pursue anyone involved in firearms offences.'

Detective Superintendent Mike Balcombe, also from Trident Command, said: 'The Active Series Linked Team was set up with the intention of prosecuting those responsible for multiple firearms offences.

'Through outstanding police work and expert forensic analysis, three men responsible for a series of firearms offences have been taken off the streets of London.'
A multi-million pound 'diploma mill' in Pakistan is selling fake degrees to thousands of British students.

More than 3,000 phoney qualifications were bought by UK-based customers from IT company, Axact, between 2013 and 2014.

Among those buying the degrees were NHS consultants, nurses and psychologists, a probe has revealed.

Axact operates a network of phoney colleges, using names including Brooklyn Park University and Nixon University

One Brit even spent an incredible 500,000 on fake documents, the investigation by BBC Radio 4's File on Four found.

Axact operates a network of phoney colleges, using names including Brooklyn Park University and Nixon University, with biographies gushing about the establishments' bogus illustrious histories.

In one example, a consultant at a London teaching hospital bought a degree in internal medicine from the fake Belford University in 2007.

The doctor who had previously been disciplined by the General Medical Council (GMC) for failing to report a criminal conviction  told the BBC he had not used the certificate because it 'had not been authenticated'.

While it is illegal to use a fake diploma in the UK, it is not against the law to purchase one.

Higher Education Degree Datacheck (HEDD) chief executive Jayne Rowley told the BBC that only 20 per cent of UK employers ran proper checks on applicants' qualifications.

Axact gushes to students about its bogus universities on their websites

British engineer Cecil Horner, who bought fake documents for nearly 500,000, has been sent a barrage of threatening calls by Axact.

Mr Horner, who was based in Saudi Arabia, died in 2015, and his son Malcolm believes he bought the qualification over concerns he would lose he job.

He told the BBC: 'It makes me so angry.

'It's unfathomable these websites still exist and they can't be shut down.'

The Department of Education said HEDD would take action to tackle the fraudsters.

A spokesman said: 'Degree fraud cheats both genuine learners and employers, so we've taken decisive action to crack down on those seeking to profit from it.'
A couple in Chicago got a shock wedding gift - a letter of congratulations from the President of the US and the First Lady.

Brianna and Timothy Dargert of Orland Park decided to invite Donald and Melania Trump to their big day which took place in May last year.

Unsurprisingly, the President and First Lady were not able to attend, and as the weeks ticked by the newlyweds thought their invite had fallen on deaf ears.

But months later, they got a surprise in the post from the White House.

Brianna and Timothy Dargert of Orland Park decided to invite Donald and Melania Trump to their big day which took place in May last year - and months later received this message

The letter read: 'We join your family and friends in celebrating this joyous occasion and your love and commitment to one another. May your hearts grow fonder and your love deeper each day, and may God continue to bless your life together'

The President of the US and the First Lady (pictured with their son Barron)

The letter read: 'We join your family and friends in celebrating this joyous occasion and your love and commitment to one another.

'May your hearts grow fonder and your love deeper each day, and may God continue to bless your life together.'

The couple spoke to Fox 32 News about their delight at receiving the unexpected correspondence.

'We both admire the President greatly,' they said.

'And to receive something from him personally completely touched our hearts.

'It is wonderful to see that he truly cares about the American people.'
Sickening footage has emerged of a teacher allegedly flogging an entire class of children for missing the start of term at a Nigerian school.

A total of 15 students - who appeared to be in their early or pre-teens - were seen being repeatedly whipped across the back, legs, face and torso during a harrowing three-minute clip.

The man appeared to revel in his role as punisher, delivering blows with venom as the children were forced to submit to a public schoolyard lashing in front of their classmates.

Merciless: The teacher can be seen reveling in administering his punishment by flagellation

It is not known when exactly the teacher carried out his inhumane beatings

A group of more than a dozen adults watched the barbaric spectacle and appeared to do nothing as the students cried out in pain and begged for mercy.

It is claimed school prefects received six lashes each - three more than their classmates - for not ensuring their attendance for the resumption of lectures.

The distressing video - reportedly filmed in Eggon, Nasarawa State - was posted on Facebook on Monday and has been shared more than 22,000 times. It is not clear exactly when it was shot.

It shows a large man towering over a small girl on the ground holding a whip above his head.

She shrieks as he brings it crashing down on her three times - the third blow is so hard it knocks her off the step she was lying next to.

The man says 'next' and another girl lies down in front of him.

She tries to position her arm to shield her leg but he moves it away, saying: 'Move your hand.'

He then viciously whips her across the back and chest six times as she writhes in pain and her body contorts.

The chilling procession continues as the children meekly approach the step to be flogged one-by-one.

The punishment floggings have created outrage on social media

A girl appears to take several blows full in the face from close range, another is hit before she even has a chance to lie down and brace herself.

An older boy cries and begs the man not to hurt him as he squats down on the ground, before taking three savage blows to the back.

Throughout, the adults calmly stand and watch.

The heartbreaking scenes sparked outrage on Facebook and prompted calls for the school to be shut down.

Chinwe Iwueke commented: 'My God, what did they do? Why would they receive this kind of beating? Children that went to school to learn. Unbelievable.'

Princess Adeoti wrote: 'So sad this still goes on in Nigeria. I went to an expensive private school and yes I WAS caned the same way. I also remember teachers being slapped multiple times by parents who pay thousands on fees.'

Angelina Katumbella added: 'In what world are we living? This is happening in the 21st Century? People need to just say enough is enough.'
Nadine Loveman killed her three-and-a-half month old Steven with an insulin shot before taking her own life by the same method

A tragic mother and her baby boy found lying dead together on a sofa had both overdosed on insulin, an inquest heard today.

Nadine Loveman, 36, and her three-and-a-half month old baby, Steven, were discovered at their terraced house in Brentwood, Essex.

Police and paramedics were called to the shocking scene but both Ms Loveman and her baby were already dead.

Essex Coroner's Court heard how a postmortem into baby Steven revealed two small red puncture marks on his leg.

Further investigations showed the tot had been injected with insulin, which triggered fatal brain damage.

A postmortem on horse riding enthusiast Ms Loveman carried out in the days after her death showed the she had also injected herself with insulin.

Detective Inspector Stuart Truss of Essex Police, told the inquest that if Ms Loveman had survived she would have been prosecuted for killing her little boy.

He said: 'On the information known to me, there is a strong likelihood that Nadine would have been facing charges for the murder of Steven.'

DI Truss confirmed investigations had ruled out anyone else being involved in the deaths on March 12 last year.

'In my 18 years as a police officer it is one of the most emotional cases I have been involved with and probably ever will be.

Police said they would have prosecuted Ms Loveman for the murder of her son, Steven, pictured, had she not taken her own life

'There is no evidence to support anybody else being involved in the deaths of Nadine and Steven Loveman and as such it is concluded that Nadine took the lives of both herself and herself through the use of intravenous insulin overdose.'

Ms Loveman's parents Steven and Linda attended the hearing in Chelmsford, along with her sister, Frankie.

The devastated family told the inquest there was nothing to show the mum was planning her shocking actions.

Senior Essex Coroner Caroline Beasley-Murray asked the family directly, 'Did she ever say she would do anything like this?'

They replied 'no, no'.

Frankie added: 'We had no idea' whilst Ms Loveman's mother said: 'We had no clue'.

No live evidence was put before the hearing about Ms Loveman's state of mind in the days leading up to the tragic double death but Mrs Beasley-Murray referred to written statements about how she was seeming 'very low' and how she felt 'everything was on top of her'.

Ms Loveman's postmortem showed she had been drinking alcohol and there was also evidence of previous cocaine use.

Dr Andreas Marnerides , a paediatric pathologist, told the inquest how he'd spotted the puncture wounds on baby Steven.

'There were two marks on the left thigh which, to the naked eye, would look like injection sites.

'When I looked, these were recent. They happened close to the child's death.'

Police investigating the tragedy said no one else was involved in the incident

Mrs Beasley Murray asked: 'Were the two very small red marks consistent with being puncture marks?'

He replied 'yes'.

Dr Marnerides, of St Thomas' Hospital, London, explained how everyone's body produces insulin and a chemical known as c-pedtide in equal measure.

Both Ms Loveman and Steven's bodies showed signs of extra insulin, but no additional c-peptides.

Ms Loveman's parents Steven and Linda attended today's inquest along with her sister Frankie

Essex Coroner's Officer Nader Beeson confirmed both mother and son died from exogenous insulin overdoses.

The levels of insulin in their systems was not revealed today.

Despite the police evidence Mrs Beasley-Murray recorded an open verdict on both deaths.

She said: 'I am going to record an open conclusion.

'We will never ever know quite what was going through her mind, what state of mind she was in when she was sitting on that sofa.

'I am going to record an open verdict.'

The post mortem found Ms Loveman had been drinking alcohol and had used cocaine before taking her own life in her home in Brentwood, Essex, pictured

And coming to the same open verdict on Steven's death, she said about his mother: 'We will never quite know through her mind on that occasion, there are too many bits of the jigsaw missing.

The inquest heard how Ms Loveman's family are now bringing up her other children.

Tonight Ms Loveman's devastated sister, Frankie, said the whole family is still reeling from the tragedy.

She said: 'Nadine was my sister and was a great person who was full of life and cared for everyone, especially her children.

'They show us everyday what an exceptional mum she really was.

'She had a good heart and would always help anyone if they were in need.

'She is missed beyond belief.

'The pain is unbearable and we are all heartbroken.'
The parents accused of starving and keeping their 13 children chained up inside their home had an obsession with Disneyland, according to the multiple family trips they took to the theme park and their 'DSLAND' car license plates.

David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were both arrested at their home in Perris, California on Sunday after their 17-year-old daughter managed to escape and call 911.

Police went to the home after interviewing the girl and found three of her brothers and sisters shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks while the others sat nearby in dark, foul-smelling surroundings.

The children, aged 2 to 29, were 'malnourished and very dirty', according to police.

David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, took their children to Disneyland on at least two occasions between 2010-12. This picture was posted on Facebook in 2011 with 12 of their children and extended relatives

But the shocking allegations made against David and Louise are in stark contrast to the life they publicly portrayed on their joint Facebook page.

Photos posted on Facebook between 2010 and 2012 show that the couple took their children to Disneyland on at least two separate occasions.

David and Louise are pictured smiling with their children in front of the theme park's iconic castle and posing with Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse, Princess Jasmine and Winnie the Pooh's Eeyore.

Just like all of their family photos, the children are pictured wearing matching outfits.

Some of the younger children wore the same Disney-themed outfits on both family trips to the theme park. The trips occurred prior to the birth of their youngest daughter, who is now aged two.

David and Louise are pictured in front of Disneyland's iconic castle appearing to hold Tinker Bell. The photo appeared on Facebook in October 2010

One of the personalized plates on a Volkswagen Beetle reads 'DSLAND'

One of the plates on a Volkswagen parked outsdie their home reads: 'DL4EVER'. There has been speculation that the second plate could also mean David and Louise forever

Photos posted on Facebook between 2010 and 2012 show that the couple took their children to Disneyland on at least two separate occasions

Meanwhile, two of the four cars parked outside the family's home in Perris when they were arrested also appear to have license plates linked to Disneyland.

One of the plates on a Volkswagen Beetle reads 'DSLAND'.

The other, which is also on Volkswagen, says 'DL4EVER'. There has been speculation that the second plate could also mean David and Louise forever.

In addition to the family's Disneyland trips, the Turpins also took their children to Las Vegas three times in 2011, 2013 and 2015 so they could renew their wedding vows at an Elvis-themed chapel.

Their children were present at the ceremonies. In 2015, the 10 girls wore matching pink dresses with white tights and white shoes, while the three boys were seen in suits with purple ties.

The bizarre ceremonies show the couple staring lovingly at each other while their 13 children mull awkwardly nearby.

Police have confirmed the children are all the couple's biological offspring.

David and Louise are pictured above smiling with their children and Disney Princess Jasmine. The photo was posted in 2012

Just like all of their family photos, the children are pictured wearing matching outfits

Some of the younger children wore the same Disney-themed outfits on both family trips to the theme park

Disney-themed statues were spotted in the yard of the family home in Perris on Tuesday

Police arrested David and Louise on Sunday and charged them with torture and child endangerment. They are being held on $9 million bail.

They were alerted to the conditions after the Turpins' 17-year-old daughter fled and called 911 with a cell phone she found in their home.

The girl, who was so small officers initially believed she was only 10, was met by police who interviewed her and then went to the family home where they found the children.

'The victims were provided with food and beverages after they claimed to be starving,' officers said.

It was not known how long some of them were chained, padlocked and shackled before they were discovered.

Just like all of their family photos, the children (above in a photo posted in 2011) are pictured wearing matching outfits on the various trips to Disneyland

The couple's joint Facebook page features several photos of the youngest child when she was a baby in late 2015. They are both dressed above as Disney Princess Snow White
Gerry Adams (pictured) has launched a legal bid to overturn two historical convictions for attempting to escape from prison

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has launched a legal bid to overturn two historical convictions for attempting to escape from prison.

Appeal proceedings began before three senior judges at Belfast's Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday.

Mr Adams is seeking to quash convictions received in 1975 while he was interned without trial at Northern Ireland's Maze Prison during the early 1970s.

One escape bid, in 1974, included the kidnap of a man, who bore a 'striking resemblance' to Mr Adams, from a bus stop in west Belfast.

The man was taken to a house where his hair was dyed and he was given a false beard, the court heard.

He was then taken to the Maze Prison where he was to be substituted for Mr Adams in a visiting hut.

However, prison staff were alerted to the plan and Mr Adams was arrested in the car park of the jail, the court heard.

The second failed jail break occurred on Christmas Eve 1973, when Mr Adams was among four detainees caught cutting a hole into the jail's perimeter fence.

Barrister Sean Dorian QC, who is representing the veteran politician, said: 'Each conviction is for attempting to escape from lawful custody.'

The case centres on a technicality that Mr Adams' internment was not lawful because the order to detain him had not been considered by the Secretary of State.

Mr Adams is seeking to quash convictions received in 1975 while he was interned without trial at Northern Ireland 's Maze Prison (pictured) during the early 1970s

Mr Doran said documents presented to the Appeal Court judges appeared to 'copper fasten submissions that there was not personal consideration of the case'.

The court heard how an interim custody order had been signed by a junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office and not the Secretary of State.

'There is a very clear distinction in the power to make an order and the power to sign an order,' added Mr Doran.

Earlier the court was told how Mr Adams, who was not in court for the hearing, was twice convicted of attempting to escape from the Maze.

Mr Adams was among hundreds of republicans to be held without trial during the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Internment was introduced in 1971 by the former Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner for those suspected of involvement in violence.

The entrance to H-Block 4 at the former Maze Prison in Northern Ireland (pictured in 2006)

Mr Adams was interned in March 1972, but was released in June that year to take part in secret talks in London.

He was rearrested in July 1973 at a Belfast house and interned at the Maze Prison, also known as Long Kesh internment camp.

Both of his convictions were handed down by two separate Diplock Court trials - cases tried by a single judge sitting without a jury.

In the first wave of raids across Northern Ireland, 342 people were arrested.

The policy of internment lasted until December 1975. During that time, 1,981 people were interned - 1,874 were nationalist and 107 were loyalist.

The introduction of internment, the way the arrests were carried out and the abuse of those arrested led to mass protests and a sharp increase in violence.
A novelist whose death is at the centre of a village murder probe was previously found to have died of 'acute alcohol intoxication', it emerged today.

Peter Farquhar, 69, is one of two neighbours in the Buckinghamshire village of Maids Moreton who were allegedly murdered and their savings plundered.

Cambridge-educated former public school teacher Mr Farquhar was thought to have died in his sleep in October 2015. His death was recorded as accidental at an inquest and his death certificate states he died as a result of 'alcohol intoxication'.

But, after his 83-year-old friend Ann Moore-Martin also died suddenly 18 months later, neighbours told police of their concerns and an investigation was launched.

Three men, two of whom are said to have been planning a documentary film about Mr Farquhar in the final months of his life, have been arrested as part of the double murder probe.

Peter Farquhar, 69, (pictured) was a retired part-time English lecturer at the University of Buckingham and had previously taught at Manchester Grammar School

Retired headteacher Ann Moore-Martin, pictured answering the door when Nigel Farage was campaigning in her village, died in May last year. Police are now investigating the circumstances of her death

A neighbour said Mrs Moore-Martin was rushed to hospital after she inexplicably started bleeding from her mouth just weeks before her death.

Investigators discovered substantial sums of money appeared to have vanished from the accounts of both pensioners.

On Tuesday, two men were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, fraud and burglary. A third was held on suspicion of fraud.

The murder suspects are both former students of Mr Farquhar at the University of Buckingham, where he lectured in English literature.

The pair lodged with the frail academic and novelist for many months and at least one of them also moved in with Mrs Moore-Martin after his death.

Public records show they established a company three months before Mr Farquhar died devoted to selling his unpublished novels, as well as poetry and essays.

Former church warden Ben Field (left) and professional magician Martyn Smith (right) are among the three men arrested by police investigating

One of the men, Baptist minister's son Ben Field, 27, was arrested at his family home less than 20 miles away in Olney.

He was a deputy warden and leading member of the parish church where Mr Farquhar was a long-standing worshipper and preacher. He gave his landlord a dog, Kipling, and read at his funeral.

Cambridge graduate Thomas Field, Ben Field's brother, was also detained on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud

Ben Field was arrested on suspicion of two counts of murder, two counts of conspiracy to murder, two counts of suspicion of fraud by false representation, one count of conspiracy to defraud and two counts of burglary.

A second suspect, Martyn Smith, 31, was arrested at his parents' home in Redruth, Cornwall.

He was arrested on suspicion of two counts of murder, two counts of conspiracy to murder, two counts of suspicion of fraud by false representation, one count of conspiracy to defraud and one count of burglary.

The professional magician briefly studied English literature at the University of Buckingham before dropping out.

Mr Farquhar's third novel, A Wide Wide Sea is dedicated to the pair. The author says the book 'would not exist' without them.

A third man, understood to be Field's Cambridge graduate brother Thomas, was arrested in Milton Keynes.

He is not being linked with any murder, but was arrested on suspicion of one count of conspiracy to defraud, one count conspiring to commit fraud by false representation and one count of suspicion of fraud by false representation.

He has since been released under investigation.

Detectives today arrested three men and launched a major murder investigation after the neighbours died in similar circumstances. Pictured: Mr Farquhar at a book signing

The father of two of the man arrested Rev Ian Field, said he was 'deeply distressed' by the police investigation.

He said today: 'We are cooperating fully with the authorities and ask for privacy at this difficult time.'

The Rev Field, who is lead minister at the Olney Baptist Church in Buckinghamshire, refused to answer any further questions.

A post mortem examination was carried out following Ms Moore-Martin's death but details have not yet been released by the police.

News of the murder inquiry sent shockwaves through the village where Mr Farquhar and Mrs Moore-Martin had lived for more than two decades.

Aerial view of Manor Park in Maids Moreton, near Buckingham, of the former homes of Peter Farquhar (left) and Ann Moore-Martin (right)

Mr Farquhar's death certificate gives his cause of death as 'acute alcohol intoxication'

Neighbours said they lived yards from each other and were 'good friends'. Mr Farquhar spent 34 years teaching at the private Manchester Grammar School before moving to 35,000-a-year Stowe School in Buckinghamshire.

After his 'retirement' he took up a part-time role as English lecturer in romantic and modern poetry at the University of Buckingham, where colleagues described him as 'charming, erudite and deeply thoughtful'.

An evangelical Christian, he was described by students as 'an inspiration' and a character based on his life was played by Toby Stephens in the 2013 football movie Believe.

He was praised by former pupil Michael Crick  now a Channel 4 News political correspondent  as 'one of the most extraordinary teachers of my life'.

'He was somewhat of a father figure to many of us,' he said. 'He kept in touch with successive generations of pupils and guided them through their early careers.'

Other pupils recounted how their former teacher once punched a man at a bus stop for being rude to an elderly lady.

Both victims were neighbours and lived on the same street in the affluent village near Buckingham (pictured, Mr Farquhar's home)

Mrs Moore-Martin was headmistress at St Mary's Catholic Primary School in Bicester, Oxfordshire.

She had lived in her detached Maids Moreton home for more than 20 years. She was photographed meeting then-Ukip leader Nigel Farage as he campaigned in the constituency in 2010.

It is understood that as she lay critically ill in hospital, police were alerted to suspicions that she had been the victim of fraud.

She died on May 12 last year. The inquiry deepened when officers realised her neighbour had also died in similar circumstances.

They found he too may have lost money. Post mortem examinations have yet to identify exactly what led to their deaths.

After months of low-key investigations, police finally revealed they had arrested three men.

Police are treating the incidents in Maids Moreton (pictured) as a potential double murder

Neighbour Betty Cook, 87, said: 'Peter was always going on about his student Ben. He was living in the house with him. I think he was from Stowe School too.

She said Field moved in with Mrs Moore-Martin soon after Mr Farquhar's death.

Mrs Cook added: 'Peter was the nicest man you could meet. He took a man in as a lodger and I didn't see much of Peter after that.'

Another neighbour said Mr Farquhar became a recluse shortly before his death.

'He used to tend to his garden but it became overgrown and he stopped walking his dog. Next thing we heard he was dead.'

A spokesman for Thames Valley Police declined to comment on details of the investigation.
A chef rebutted a lukewarm Tripadvisor review after it accused her of not making authentic Thai food - even though she's from Thailand.

Thitapha Martin spotted a comment which described the meal as 'disappointing', the prawns 'tasteless' and the noodles 'wrong'.

Reviewer Yolanda X added: 'There is a new tendency in small UK cities where Thai restaurants jump to the top of the reviews.

Thitapha Martin, owner and chef at So Thai in Gloucester, hit back at a lukewarm review of the restaurant

'Not bad but pretty disappointing': The review said that the prawns were 'tasteless' and the noodles were 'wrong'

'I believe it's because people are too bored to eat fish and chips and [have] never tried good Thai.'

Fuming Ms Martin, boss at SoThai in Gloucester, then launched a defense on the review site.

She wrote: 'You underestimate and insult diners from "small UK cities" and our own customers taste and knowledge of Thai food - let me assure you that you do not need to have lived in Sydney to recognise and appreciate authentic Thai cuisine.

Furious Ms Martin rebutted the review and said: 'You underestimate and insult diners from "small UK cities"'

'The noodles are imported from Thailand and I confirm they are the 'correct' noodles for the dish I presented.

'I was born & bred in Thailand and all my dishes are cooked as I would cook them at home, with tastes specific to my home region.

'I am sorry they did taste as good as the prawns you had in Thailand, fresh from the pacific ocean and no doubt eaten in beautiful sunshine.'

Yolanda X did finish by rating the food three star, describing it as 'not bad'.

'I was born & bred in Thailand and all my dishes are cooked as I would cook them at home': Ms Martin said that her Thai food was authentic

Yolanda X's full review said: 'Food was not bad but pretty disappointing, had tasteless tempura prawns and a Pad Kee Mao, my favourite when living in Thai and Sydney where Thai restaurant are great.

'The ingredients were pretty right apart from using wrong noodles, but just it missed the deep flavour, the smokiness of the real Thai....there is a new tendency in small UK cities where Thai restaurant jump to the top of the reviews, I believe cause people is both bored to eat fish&chips and never tried good Thai.

'Having said that the food was not bad - three stars not more.'
A poster boy for Romanian immigration into the UK, who was welcomed at Luton Airport by Keith Vaz before setting up his own construction business, has died in a car crash.

Victor Spirescu, 33, became famous after he was greeted by the Labour MP outside a Costa coffee branch at the airport in 2014 following the lifting of rules preventing migrants from new EU members moving to the UK.

Mr Spirescu, originally from Sibiu County in central Romania, died in a collision just one mile from his home in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, at 4am yesterday morning.

His heartbroken fiancee, Suzana Mates, 23, today told MailOnline he was the 'happiest person on earth' and said she was 'so lost' and 'cannot believe he isn't coming back'.

Victor Spirescu, originally from Sibiu County in central Romania, became famous after he was greeted by the Labour MP outside a Costa coffee branch at the airport in 2014 (pictured)

Upon his arrival to the UK Mr Spirescu (pictured with Suzana) told reporters that he was not here 'to rob your country', adding that he wanted to get a job, earn money, and then go back to Romania

Keith Vaz tonight told MailOnline he is 'deeply saddened' to hear about Mr Spirescu's death.

He said: 'I am deeply shocked and saddened with this news coming almost exactly four years since Victor arrived in the UK.

'He was so excited about starting a new life in Britain. My thoughts and prayers are with his friends and family.'

Victor proposed to Miss Mates on May 16 2016 in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, while they were paragliding and popped the question as they were coming in to land on her birthday.

The pair were due to get married and would have been together for three years in March.

They lived together in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, and he ran an air conditioning company - but also worked for Glenn Armstrong.

Restrictions lifted on January 1, 2014 Bulgarian and Romanian people were allowed to freely work in the UK from January 1, 2014. Both of the countries joined the EU in 2007 and there had been rules on what particular jobs they could take in Britain. Victor Spirescu became the first Romanian to arrive in Britain after the border laws were relaxed and became a minor celebrity after he was pictured meeting Labour MP Keith Vaz in the UK. The restrictions were put in place over fears of a repeat of the large influx of immigrants who arrived in the UK after eastern European countries joined the EU without any rules or laws in place regarding entry. Advertisement

His body will be flown back to Romania where will be buried in Bucharest.

Speaking to MailOnline, Miss Mates said: 'My future husband was in the car with a friend and there was a car accident on a straight road which is bizarre because Victor was the most confident and reliable driver and I don't think he would make this mistake, a beginner's mistake.

'We still don't know what happened, so many people are contacting me. I can't cope, it is overwhelming.

'I will book a chapel in London where everyone can come and celebrate his life. He was in the UK for four years.

'There are a lot of people who know him and love him. The police investigation is expected to last a week.

'He told everyone that we were going to get married, he was so excited. We were planning the wedding, he proposed to me, we were so happy.

'There was no ring because rings are meaningless and the love we had was so inexplicable, so unexplained, we were crazy about each other.

'I am just so lost, I'm so confused, I don't believe this is happening and that he isn't coming back. Oh my god, I loved him so much.

Mr Spirescu's death was widely reported in Romanian media and confirmed to MailOnline by Suzana, who said she felt 'exhausted and devastated'. He is pictured behind the wheel of a car in an undated image, left. The suspected crash scene is pictured right

Mr Spirescu lived in Milton Keynes and had a fiancee, who he is pictured with in this social media photo

'I need to be patient and wait for the results of the investigation, he was the most wonderful man on this planet and I loved him so very much.

'He was so smart, so intelligent, he was the happiest person on earth, a wonderful human being and he also said carpe diem - live life to the full.

'We are suffering, we can't believe it. We will never forget him, I feel his energy with me even now.'

On the meeting with Keith Vaz, she said 'he made the UK his home, he worked hard'.

She said he actually met Mr Vaz several years later when he was working near the MI6 building and walking to Westminster tube.

Mr Spirescu (pictured on holiday in an undated photo) ran an air conditioning company - but also worked for Glenn Armstrong

She added: 'Keith said "Victor, Victor, it's so nice to see you" and he invited him to the houses of parliament for tea one day.'

They had no date set for the wedding, they were planning one wedding in Romania and one in Cyprus as she is half-Cypriot.

Miss Mates, who spent New Year's Eve in Scotland with his parents, added: 'He told everyone we were getting married because he was so excited.'

Victor Spirescu became an overnight celebrity and went on to earn 60k a year Victor Spirescu became a minor celebrity after he was the first Romanian to come to work in the UK following the new immigration rules which were introduced on January 1, 2014. He started his new life in the UK washing and later set up an air conditioning company, Air Vent Systems Ltd. Mr Spirescu was the unrivalled poster boy for EU migration and claimed to earn 60,000 a year through his hard work. He claimed to have earned 62,000 in 2015, and 58,000 in 2016. Mr Spirescu was also able to purchase a fleet of cars and enjoyed plenty of exotic holidays because of his hard work and dedication. Advertisement

Friends wrote tributes to Mr Spirescu on social media, with one adding, 'God takes friends, you were the best'.

Adrian Claudiu posted on Facebook: 'Today I lost a dear friend to me and my family... left way too fast between us.'

Mr Spirescu's meeting with Mr Vaz, the then chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, was widely covered by the media.

The Romanian first set up as a car washer, before setting up Air Vent Systems LTD.

His death was widely reported in Romanian media and confirmed to MailOnline by Suzana, who said she felt 'exhausted and devastated'.

No more details were available on Tuesday evening about the circumstances of Mr Spirescu's death.

Upon his arrival to the UK Mr Spirescu told reporters that he was not here 'to rob your country', adding that he wanted to get a job, earn money, and then go back to Romania with his wife.

He has been linked to several women. He met Zoe Russell, 22, shortly after his arrival in the UK, and moved into her three-bedroom home before Mr Spirescu returned to Ms Suzana, his then ex.
A fugitive ex-police helicopter pilot has been killed alongside six other members of a 'terrorist cell' in Venezuela, the government has said.

Oscar Perez, a photogenic former cop who once starred in an action film, last year used a stolen helicopter to attack government buildings and stole weapons from a military base in what he called a rebellion against President Nicolas Maduro.

He appeared with a bloody face in nearly a dozen Instagram videos early on Monday, saying he was surrounded by authorities shooting at him with grenade launchers even though he was promising to surrender.

Fugitive cop Oscar Perez (pictured) who carried out a grenade attack in a stolen helicopter in protest at Venezuela's government has posted a defiant video claiming he was surrounded

Interior Minister Nestor Reverol in a press conference said seven 'terrorists' including Perez were killed in the operation outside Caracas along with two police officers involved in the raid.

He said Perez's group had attacked first and that officials had acted in self-defense.

Maduro's socialist government has described Perez as a 'fanatic, extremist terrorist' and had been carrying out a manhunt for him since last June.

Government critics initially questioned whether Perez' attacks were staged in cahoots with the government to justify a further crackdown on the opposition.

Oscar Perez appeared with a bloody face in a series of Instagram clips, claiming that he was being shot at in a poor neighborhood outside the capital Caracas

Perez, a 36-year-old former police pilot, is wanted for using a stolen helicopter to lob grenades and shoot at government buildings in June (pictured)

But his death prompted an outcry over what critics called an extrajudicial killing and turned him into a martyr for hard-line foes of Maduro.

'Honor and glory to those brave citizens who gave their life for their ideals,' tweeted former Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma, now in exile in Spain after himself being jailed on charges of leading a coup against Maduro.

Perez, a 36-year-old former police pilot, was wanted for using a stolen helicopter to lob grenades and shoot at government buildings in June as well as for breaking into a National Guard unit in December to steal weapons.

Police appeared to finally track him down yesterday in the poor hillside neighborhood of El Junquito and in a dozen dramatic videos posted on Instagram, Perez said authorities were firing at him with grenade launchers and that snipers were outside.

State television read out an official statement last night that said two police officers and several militants were killed in the clashes and that five 'terrorists' were arrested, but did not specify Perez' fate.

'They are firing at us with grenade launchers. We said we are going to surrender but they do not want to let us surrender.

'They want to kill us,' said Perez, seemingly wearing a bulletproof vest, as he crouched down in what appeared to be a small house and gunshots were heard in the background.

'His face becomes increasingly covered with blood with each video.

'Venezuela, don't lose hope... Now only you have power so that we can all be free,' he said in an earlier video, staring into the camera and telling his children he loves them and hopes to see them again.

President Nicolas Maduro's leftist government has described him as a 'fanatic, extremist terrorist' and a manhunt has been under way for months.

Police appeared to finally track him down in the poor hillside neighborhood of El Junquito and in a dozen dramatic videos posted on Instagram, Perez said authorities were firing at him with grenade launchers and that snipers were outside

Pictures appeared to show his hide-out as he spoke to the camera. Perez claimed that the building was surrounded

Oscar Perez rose to fame in June after allegedly hijacking a police helicopter, flying over Caracas' centre and firing shots at and lobbing grenades on the Interior Ministry and the Supreme Cour

'What a coward now that he's caught like a rat!' tweeted Prisons Minister Iris Varela.

'Where is the courage he had to attack military units, kill and injure officials and steal weapons?'

An action film star who portrays himself as a James Bond or Rambo-like figure on social media, Perez has added surreal twists to Venezuela's long-running political drama.

President Nicolas Maduro described Perez's actions in June as a 'coup' and a 'terrorist' attack and launched a manhunt for him and his co-conspirators

A nationwide manhunt was launched for Oscar Perez after he targeted a government building in Caracas in protest at dictator Nicolas Maduro's government. He is pictured during an event of the Body of Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigation in Caracas in 2015

In many of his posts, Perez shows off his skills on the firing range - including this footage where he hits a target behind him using a makeup compact mirror

Perez does have an acting past - having produced and starred in a 2015 film called Suspended Death in which he plays a cop rescuing a wealthy hostage from a vicious gang

He rose to fame in June after allegedly hijacking a police helicopter, flying over Caracas' centre and firing shots at and lobbing grenades down on the Interior Ministry and the Supreme Court.

Perez claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was to fight what he said was a tyrannical government.

He went into hiding afterward, only to pop up two weeks later at an opposition vigil for anti-government protesters killed during demonstrations that rocked the country last year.

Then in December, a video posted on Perez's YouTube account shows armed, masked men taking control of military barracks under cover of night.

They smash photos of Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, handcuff around a dozen soldiers and berate them for supporting 'dictatorship' in Venezuela. Perez says his team stole around 26 AK-103's and over 3,000 munitions for the rifles, as well as pistols.
A cheeky elephant has been caught trying to steal food at a campsite.

The footage, taken by Willem Bakhuys Roozeboom, 45, shows the elephant using his trunk to try and access a food van.

But the vehicle, parked at Mana Pools campsite, Zimbabwe, was too secure for the hopeful thief.

The footage, taken by Willem Bakhuys Roozeboom, 45, shows the elephant using his trunk to try and access a food van

The safari camp manager has said that elephants are attracted to the smell of fruit and will stop at nothing to reach their goal.

Thankfully this elephant soon got bored and can be later seen munching on a leafy branch.

Mr Roozeboom said: 'Almost every day this particular elephant will visit the campsite gently walking around, sniffing cars, tents, chairs and our laundry on the line.

But the vehicle, parked at Mana Pools campsite, Zimbabwe, was too secure for the hopeful thief

The safari camp manager has said that elephants are attracted to the smell of fruit and will stop at nothing to reach their goal

'As long as you give him his space, don't make sudden movements or chase him away he will be as relaxed as he is in the video.

'The elephant knew I was there the whole time. He looks, but doesn't pay any attention to me while I calmly walk around staying out of his personal space. He just want his fruits and vegetables.

'My girlfriend Iris Breeman, can be seen closing the back of our truck not to make it too easy for the elephant to get in and investigate what else we carried with us.

Sneaky! The elephant attempts to use its trunk to poach food from the front seats of the van

The elephant soon got bored and wandered off to munch on a leafy branch

'You can hear in the video that I make one attempt to 'shoo' him off. That clearly made no impression at all, so I left it.

'It's his space much more than it is ours and the last thing I wanted was to upset him.

'We just had to face the consequences, whatever that would be, rather than to chase him of which might have given him the wrong associations for the future.'
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that immigrants from 'everywhere' are welcome in the United States and not just countries like Norway, rebutting a charge once again that he referred to Haiti and African nations as 's***hole countries.'

Responding to a question about his reported remarks in the Oval Office, Trump said: 'I want them to come in from everywhere. Everywhere.'

The controversy followed Trump into a meeting with the president of Kazakhstan. Trump's press secretary was also questioned in front of the White House about a related charge that Trump 'is a racist.'

Trump meanwhile argued, from his Twitter account, that it would be Democrats' fault if the fight over immigration leads to a Friday shutdown.

Summing up the debacle in a Capitol Hill hearing on Tuesday afternoon, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was in the room when Trump reportedly denigrated certain countries, said: 'This has turned into an s-show, and we need to get back to being a great country.'

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that immigrants from 'everywhere' are welcome in the United States and not just countries like Norway, rebutting a charge once again that he referred to Haiti and African nations as 's***hole countries'

Trump and his White House dug their heels in on immigration on Tuesday as Washington approached a fiscal cliff that Democrats demanding a DACA fix have said they may not rescue the federal government from.

'The Democrats want to shut down the Government over Amnesty for all and Border Security,' Trump tweeted. 'The biggest loser will be our rapidly rebuilding Military, at a time we need it more than ever.'

Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters who chased her down outside that Democrats were using the s***hole countries remarks as an 'excuse' to avoid doing their jobs.

'They to get on board and start doing what they were actually elected to do,' she charged.

President Trump said Sunday that an immigration deal is 'probably dead' at this stage because Democrats 'don't really want' one.

In a tweet, Trump blamed the opposing party for a stall in talks that came after the widely-publicized claim that he said he doesn't want people from 's***hole' countries relocating to the United States.

'DACA is probably dead because the Democrats dont really want it, they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our Military,' he said.

Later that evening, as he went to dinner with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who he has been leaning on to help negotiate a deal, Trump repeated the claim, telling reporters, 'Honestly, I dont think the Democrats want to make a deal. I think they talk about DACA, but they dont want to help the DACA people.'

Trump could not say there will be a shutdown but said it was his belief that 'there shouldnt be, because if there is, our military gets hurt very badly.'

President Donald Trump said Sunday that an immigration deal is 'probably dead' at this stage because Democrats 'don't really want' one

Trump, pictured Friday, is blaming Democrats for the collapse of a deal to protect Dreamers and fix flaws in the immigration system

Trump and his White House dug their heels in on immigration on Tuesday as Washington approached a fiscal cliff that Democrats demanding a DACA fix have said they may not rescue the federal government from

At a hearing on Tuesday morning in Washington, Graham, a former foe who had become a golfing buddy of Trump's, said of a shutdown, 'We should all be kicked out if that happens.

Democrats and the White House need to each realize that negotiations are not zero-sum. If the administration wants billions its border wall and a total overhaul of the visa system, he said, it will have to go further on DACA protections than it has been.

Graham tore into Trump's staff at the White House afterward, saying that the president had not been 'well served' by senior officials, including chief of staff John Kelly.

Somewhere in between a conversation with lawmakers last Tuesday, in which Trump said he's sign anything they sent them, and the completion of a bipartisan agreement on Thursday in the Senate, Graham pointed out that something happened at the White House and the president changed his mind.

The Republican optimistically told reporters, 'I think there's a chance to reconstruct this.'

For that the happen, though, he said Trump needs to stop listening to people at the White House with 'dramatic views,' a shot that appeared to be aimed in the direction of senior policy advisor Stephen Miller, a conservative hardliner on immigration.

Graham and a bipartisan group of senators said they had reached an agreement on Thursday only to hear from the president by way of his spokeswoman at a news a conference that the proposal was unsatisfactory to the White House.

Summing up the debacle in a Capitol Hill hearing on Tuesday afternoon, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was in the room when Trump reportedly denigrated certain countries, said: 'This has turned into an s-show, and we need to get back to being a great country'

Later, the president said returned to claims in tweets that Democrats seem 'intent on having people and drugs pour into our country' and the agreement they offered was a 'big step backwards.'

'Wall was not properly funded, Chain & Lottery were made worse and USA would be forced to take large numbers of people from high crime...countries which are doing badly,' he said. 'I want a merit based system of immigration and people who will help take our country to the next level. I want safety and security for our people. I want to stop the massive inflow of drugs.'

Trump is also demanding that the Democratic Party give him the boost in military spending he's been requesting as part of the negotiations to protect Dreamers and keep the government funded beyond Friday.

Accusing Democrats of 'not being interested in life and safety,' Trump said last Friday, 'Sadly, Democrats want to stop paying our troops and government workers in order to give a sweetheart deal, not a fair deal, for DACA. Take care of our Military, and our Country, FIRST!'

Democrats are saying that an immigration compromise must include a route to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children and are currently living and working in the country under the Deferred Action for Childhood arrivals program.

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett, one of the Democratic senators involved in the negotiations said Sunday on Meet the Press that his group was willing to offer Trump $1.6 billion for his border wall and another $1.1 billion for other border security enhancements.

'And at the same time, we're saying that we should put the DREAMERS on a pathway to citizenship,' Bennett said. 'There are other compromises as well. This was a hard-fought negotiation over four months. I think that it's a middle-of-the-road approach that I hope other colleagues will support.'

The money would only get Trump through the first year of construction, though. His administration prefers a bill that would allocate $30 billion to border security and the wall.

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake said Sunday on ABC News' 'This Week' that the deal that had been worked out and Trump is rejecting is truly bipartisan.

'There are three Democrats, three Republicans and were working now to add more Republicans to that list and we will have more this coming week,' he said. 'I think that when we get back into town, people will realize theres only deal in town, theres only one bipartisan bill and we need 60 votes and that bill will be presented with even more Republicans and Democrats than we have right now.'

A bipartisan group of senators said they had reached an agreement on Thursday only to hear from the president by way of his spokeswoman at a news a conference that the proposal was unsatisfactory to the White House. Trump had the above to say on Friday am

Shortly after the White House rejected the senators' immigration compromise, a claim that Trump had referred to Haiti and other African nations as s***hole' countries emerged.

The comments were supposedly uttered by Trump at a Thursday session in the Oval Office that Republican senators and one Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, had attended.

'He said these hate-filled things and he said them repeatedly,' Durbin said on Friday.

Republicans in the room have said they 'do not recall' the president making the comments Durbin says he did.

'Im saying that this is a gross misrepresentation,' Sen.David Perdue clarified to ABC News on Sunday.

Graham has suggested that Trump did make derogatory comments, though, and he confronted him.

Alluding to the dispute, Graham said in a Friday afternoon statement, ' I said my piece directly to him' in the meeting. 'The President and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel.'

Appearing on 'This Week,' though, Sen. Flake, a Republican, cast doubt on Perdue's version of events.

'All I can say is I was in a meeting directly afterwards where those who had presented the president our proposal spoke about the meeting. And they -- they said those words were used before those words went public. So thats all I can tell you is I -- I heard that account before the account even went public,' Flake revealed.

The reported remarks created chaos for Trump at home and abroad.

Hatian-American Republican Rep. Mia Love of Utah, said the comments were 'unkind, divisive [and] elitist' and demanded that Trump apologize. She went a step further and said Sunday that they were racist.

House Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights legend, said that he would skip Trump's State of the Union address, because 'he is a racist.' The Democrat said he could not 'in good conscience' attend Trump's speech to a joint session of Congress.

House Democrats said roundly they would move to censure Trump for the reported comment on Tuesday.

Asked point blank if he's 'a racist' on Friday by veteran reporter April Ryan after he signed a Martin Luther King Jr. Day proclamation, Trump exited the room swiftly without commenting.

He told reporters on Sunday in Palm Beach that he's the 'least racist' person they have ever interviewed. 'No, no, Im not a racist,' he insisted.

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday that there was no deal yet to help the 'Dreamers,' immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children, despite a handful of senators boasting that a deal had been made

Trump on Friday pushed back aggressively on the original claim, which had appeared in the Washington Post, that he asked in the meeting, 'Why are we having all these people from s***hole countries come here?'

He said in a lengthy set of tweets that 'the language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used.'

'What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made - a big setback for DACA!' he said, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program his administration is ending.

Trump said, among other things, that the deal he was presented did not include enough funding for his border wall and did not make radical enough changes to the visa system.

Complaining about the proposal on Saturday he said it was a 'missed opportunity,' which is, 'Too bad!'

'The Democrats are all talk and no action,' he said. 'They are doing nothing to fix DACA.'

Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, was one of six senators who signed on to a statement saying that a deal had been etched out between the two parties in the upper chamber

Even after Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the deal was a no-go, the senators involved were touting it on social media

Six senators had boasted on Thursday that they had a deal in place that would solve the issue of what to do with the roughly 800,00 people brought to the U.S. illegally as children and whose legal status granted under the Obama administration is about to expire.

Yet, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, 'There has not been a deal reached yet.'

Minutes after the briefing, Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, and Cory Gardner, a Republican from Colorado, tweeted a statement saying there was indeed a deal.

'Several of my colleagues and I have reached an agreement that reflects the discussion we had this week with @realDonaldTrump on a solution for Dreamers and border security,' Gardner wrote, sharing a statement that was co-signed by five of his colleagues.

The group of senators working together included Gardner and Durbin, along with Republicans Jeff Flake and Graham, as well as Bennett and Bob Menendez.

'We have been working for four months and have reached an agreement in principle that addresses border security, the diversity visa lottery, chain migration/family reunification, and the Dream Act  the areas outlined by the President. We are now working to build support for that deal in Congress,' the statement said.

CNN reported that Durbin and Graham had met with Trump at the White House, along with a handful of other senators on Thursday, and Trump told the lawmakers to keep working.

More shockingly, when those in the meeting breached restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of the deal, the president mocked those parts of the world.

The White House meeting was also attended by Republicans including Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue, along with Reps. Bob Goodlatte and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican's chief vote counter, Sen. John Cornyn, said.

Cornyn indicated to CNN that the gang of six's proposal wouldn't be enough to get an immigration bill over the finish line.

'I think the message has now been delivered that we need to get everybody at the table and we'll take the best of their ideas,' Cornyn said.

Goodlatte, who serves as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, unveiled an immigration bill Wednesday afternoon that would give Trump most of what he wants and give the Dreamers three-year documents that could be renewed indefinitely.

The White House has indicated its support for Goodlatte's bill, but Democrats have said that the Dreamers must be awarded permanent residency status, an action conservatives are rallying against as amnesty for the illegal immigrants.
Shahida Shahid (pictured) died after collapsing following a visit to Almost Famous Burgers in Manchester city centre

A student with a dairy allergy who ate a chicken burger marinated in buttermilk died because of 'misadventure', an inquest has ruled.

Shahida Shahid, 18, died in hospital in January 2015, three days after collapsing following a visit to Almost Famous Burgers in Manchester city centre.

A friend administered her epi-pen to combat the allergic reaction and she was rushed to hospital.

But the university of Manchester mathematics student died after suffering severe brain damage 'not compatible with life', a jury at the inquest was told.

Her death was an 'unintended consequence of a deliberate act', according to a finding reached by the jury.

The inquest at Manchester Crown Court previously heard that Shahida had informed barman Reiss Balfour that she had allergies to dairy, nuts and fish.

The court heard Shahida studied at Walkden High School and Winstanley College in Wigan and was in her first year studying mathematics.

She went out for a meal with friends in Manchester over the Christmas holidays to celebrate their first term at university.

While at the restaurant, in the city's Great Northern Warehouse shopping centre, Shahida ordered and ate a chicken burger which had been marinaded in buttermilk, the jury was told.

The university of Manchester mathematics student (pictured left and right) died after suffering severe brain damage 'not compatible with life', a jury at the inquest was told

Paramedics were only called when she reached The Printworks, another shopping centre half a mile away.

Although a friend administered her epi-pen that she carried with her, she did not recover after suffering severe brain injuries and died three days later.

On two previous occasions she had been hospitalised with allergic reactions after inadvertently eating dairy produce.

On her 16th birthday, with her father battling terminal cancer, she ate pancakes with whole milk instead of soya milk and had an allergic reaction. She was treated in hospital and prescribed an epi-pen.

Then in November 2013, while at a restaurant in Birmingham, she had another reaction and her GP sister administered the epi-pen.
The son of a Texas couple who were found bound and shot to death execution-style in a gated community on Saturday believes his parents may have been followed by someone who knew they had cash to deposit from their Subway sandwich franchises.

Richard Lam said his parents, Bao and Jenny Lam, were in the process of handing over the day-to-day operations of their fast-food chain to him, including putting him in charge of depositing the proceeds from the six sandwich shops at the bank.

Last week, however, Richard was away on a cruise, so his parents were back in charge of running their eateries and taking care of the cash deposits.

Their son came back from his vacation on Saturday morning and tried calling his parents several times, but no one picked up.

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Son speaks out: Richard Lam (left) suspects someone targeted his slain parents, Bao and Jenny Lam (right) because they knew the pair had cash from their Subway eateries

Police say the couple were found bound and shot on the first floor of their home (pictured) in a gated community late Saturday night

That evening, he drove to their home in the 16500 block of Glorietta Turn in Spring and called 911 at 8pm, asking to perform a welfare check.

Police broke into the two-story home around 9pm and found the couple bound and shot dead on the first floor.

The home - located in the gated Northgate Country Club community - was ransacked, with firearms and other items missing.

'Everything was disturbed,' said Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told KTRK. 'Furniture was overturned, drawers were opened. It will take some time to process the scene.'

It appears that the couple, both aged 61, were attacked as they parked their car in the garage, and that they could have been dead for up to three days before their bodies were found.

The grieving son now suspects that someone followed his parents, knew that they were in possession of a 'cash bag' from their businesses, followed them home from work and ambushed them.

Richard shared these pictures of him and his parents after their bodies were found this weekend

They did not deserve any of that, the younger Mr Lam told the station KPRC2. They would have given anything to them [the robbers].

Richard said his parents, both of whom came to the US as teenagers on student visas, worked hard for years to build their business and treated their employees like family.

The Lams were also active in the local Buddhist community and supported the temple where they worshipped by donating their time and money.

'They wanted to pay it forward, doing good things, bringing good karma so it comes back down on future generations, on us - my sister and myself, Richard said.

'It's very scary. That's why I am worried right now,' one neighbor said. 'You don't know what is going on next door.'

Police are hopeful that surveillance cameras in the neighborhood will help them nab the person or persons responsible.

Anyone with information on the double murder is being asked to call the Harris County Sheriff's Office at 713-274-9100 or CrimeStoppers at 713-222-TIPS.
A HLN host has attacked Aziz Ansari's anonymous accuser for making 'career-ending' claims about nothing more than a 'bad date', while warning that such 'reckless and hollow' allegations threaten to undermine the entire #MeToo movement.

A 23-year-old Brooklyn photographer, using the pseudonym 'Grace', claimed over the weekend that she'd gone on a date with the Master of None star which turned out to be 'the worst night of my life'.

She told Babe.net that the comedian, 34, had ignored a number of verbal and non-verbal 'cues' that she wasn't interested in having sex, such as 'pulling away and mumbling.' Grace engaged in oral sex with Ansari but texted him the next day to tell him he'd made her feel 'uncomfortable.'

Ansari responded to allegations saying he was 'surprised and concerned' but that 'by all indications was completely consensual.'

Now HLN host Ashleigh Banfield has hit out at 'Grace' for her 'appalling' decision to go to the press about a bad date, which she said could have career-ending consequences for Ansari.

HLN host Ashleigh Banfield has attacked Aziz Ansari's anonymous accuser for making 'career-ending' claims about nothing more than a 'bad date'

She also warned that claims like Grace's undermined the work of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements to tackle actual sexual assault and sexual harassment in the workplace.

'You had a bad date. I've had a few myself. They stink,' Banfield, 50, said in her Monday segment.

'Your date got overly amorous. After protesting his moves, you did not get up and leave right away, you continued to engage in the sexual encounter. By your own clear description, this was not a rape, nor was it a sexual assault. It did not send you to the police. It did not affect your workplace or your ability to get a job.

A 23-year-old Brooklyn photographer, using the pseudonym 'Grace', claimed over the weekend that she'd gone on a date with the Master of None star (pictured) which turned out to be 'the worst night of my life'

The woman texted Ansari the day after the encounter to tell him he'd made her feel 'uncomfortable' and had ignored her nonverbal cues

'So I have to ask you: What exactly was your beef? That you had a bad date with Aziz Ansari? Is that what victimized you to the point of seeking a public conviction and a career-ending sentence against him?'

'What you have done in my opinion is appalling. You went to the press with the story of a bad date, and you have potentially destroyed this mans career over it right after he received an award for which he was worthy.'

Banfield, who has worked in the media for three decades, said that there was a good chance the 23-year-old anonymous accuser would never have to face the sort of 'toxic work environment that the rest of us have endured' because of the work of brave women and the #MeToo campaign is getting rid of 'the Harvey Weinsteins and the Kevin Spaceys of the world.'

But the HLN host warned that frivolous accusations undermined that important work.

'You looked at that gift horse in the mouth and chiseled away at that powerful movement with your public accusation,' Banfield told Grace in the letter.

Banfield said that Grace threatened the 'remarkable progress being made against the Harvey Weinsteins and the Kevin Spaceys of the world'. Here she is pictured with Spacey who took her as his date to the 66th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards in LA in 2014

'You have chiseled away at a movement that I, along with all my sisters in the workplace, have been dreaming of for decades, a movement that has finally changed an oversexed professional environment that I, too, have struggled through at times over the last 30 years.

'All of the gains that have been achieved on your behalf and mine are now being compromised with the allegations you threw out there, and I'm going to call them 'reckless and hollow.'

She ended her furious segment saying that she hopes Grace has learned from her experience, and that next time she goes on a bad date she will 'stand up sooner, you smooth out your dress, and you bloody well leave, because the only sentence a guy like that deserves is a case of blue balls, not a Hollywood blackball.'

Banfield's take has received a mixed response online, with some praising her for her no-nonsense approach, and others saying she missed the point.

Her rant came days after Ansari spoke out with his side of the story on Sunday.

'In September of last year, I met a woman at a party. We exchanged numbers. We texted back and forth and eventually went on a date,' Ansari acknowledged in a statement to Variety.

'We went out to dinner, and afterwards we ended up engaging in sexual activity, which by all indications was completely consensual,' Ansari said.

'The next day, I got a text from her saying that although "it may have seemed okay," upon further reflection, she felt uncomfortable. It was true that everything did seem okay to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned,' he said. 'I took her words to heart and responded privately after taking the time to process what she had said.'

'I continue to support the movement that is happening in our culture,' he said. 'It is necessary and long overdue.'

The anonymous woman had described their date in detail in the Babe.net story on Saturday, claiming the actor had pressured her for sex at his apartment over the course of the night while they were on a date.

The woman's claims did not involve force or violence.

The woman said she met Ansari at an after-party for the Emmys in Los Angeles on September 17 when she noticed they had both brought the same kind of film cameras.

Ansari is pictured above with Master of None co-creator Alan Yang (left) and co-stars Eric Wareheim and Alessandra Mastronardi after the Emmys

She said she exchanged phone numbers with Ansari at the party and later made plans for a date when they had both returned to New York.

On Monday, September 25, she said she went to Ansari's swanky TriBeCa apartment, where they drank white wine and talked.

After dinner at an oyster bar a few blocks away, she said they returned to his apartment.

She claims he performed oral sex on her and then asked her to reciprocate, which she did.

The woman claims he stuck his fingers down her throat and allegedly kept moving her hand towards his penis.

She said she couldn't say whether Ansari was just clueless or actively ignoring her signals.

AZIZ ANSARI'S FULL STATEMENT ON SEXUAL MISCONDUCT CLAIMS Aziz Ansari's publicist released the following statement on Sunday: 'In September of last year, I met a woman at a party. We exchanged numbers. We texted back and forth and eventually went on a date. 'We went out to dinner, and afterwards we ended up engaging in sexual activity, which by all indications was completely consensual. 'The next day, I got a text from her saying that although "it may have seemed okay," upon further reflection, she felt uncomfortable. It was true that everything did seem okay to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned. 'I took her words to heart and responded privately after taking the time to process what she had said. 'I continue to support the movement that is happening in our culture. It is necessary and long overdue.' Advertisement

'I know I was physically giving off cues that I wasn't interested. I don't think that was noticed at all, or if it was, it was ignored,' she said.

She alleges that Ansari repeatedly asked her 'Where do you want me to f**k you?'

When the woman stood up to leave, Ansari insisted on calling a car for her, she claims.

'I cried the whole ride home. At that point I felt violated. That last hour was so out of my hand,' she said

'This was not what I expected. I'd seen some of his shows and read excerpts from his book and I was not expecting a bad night at all, much less a violating night and a painful one,' she said.

The next day, before the woman could figure out what to say to Ansari about the date, he allegedly sent her a text message.

'It was fun meeting you last night,' the message read.

The woman responded: 'Last night might've been fun for you, but it wasn't for me. You ignored clear non-verbal clues; you kept going with advances.

'I want to make sure you're aware so maybe the next girl doesn't have to cry on the ride home.'

Ansari allegedly replied: 'I'm so sad to hear this. Clearly, I misread things in the moment and I'm truly sorry.'
A man has been arrested after his girlfriend's body was found wrapped in plastic in a home southwest of Detroit, Michigan.

Prosecutors said Jeffrey Thomas, 50, was charged Tuesday with concealing the death of an individual. The victim was identified as 32-year-old Jennifer Butkowski.

Butkowski and Thomas were in a relationship and lived together in a home in Rockwood, Michigan.

Jeffrey Thomas, 50, was charged Tuesday with concealing the death of an individual after police found his girlfriend's body wrapped in plastic in the bedroom of a home they shared

Police were called to the house early Sunday morning. Upon arrival, they found a disoriented Thomas, who had blood on his hands, arms and legs, according to The Detroit News.

Police said Thomas jumped from an upper-floor window at the Rockwood home shortly after midnight and told officers a gunman was inside, holding children as hostages.

No gunman or children were found inside, however.

When authorities entered the house, they smelled a foul odor. Going deeper into the house, they discovered Butkowski's body, which had been wrapped in plastic. The windows in the bedroom were also open despite sub-freezing temperatures.

Police said that Butkowski had been dead for up to a month, but that there were no obvious signs of trauma on her body, WXYZ reported.

Rockwood Police Chief Randy Krause said an autopsy will determine the cause of death. The case is being treated as a homicide.

Authorities said that Thomas jumped from a window of the upper story of this home, which he shared with his girlfriend on Sunday night, claiming a gunman was in the house

When police entered the house, they found Jennifer Butkowski's body, wrapped in plastic, in the bedroom. It's estimated that she had been dead for up to a month

Police said that it was unclear why the scantily-clad Thomas had jumped out the window. He was arrested at the scene and taken to a nearby hospital, the News-Herald said.

'He tried to conceal the death by wrapping her in plastic. We don't know what his intentions were to do with the body, but that is a crime and we are holding him on that,' Krause said, according to WXYZ.

Thomas and Butkowski were said to have moved to Rockwood from another state less than two months ago.

If convicted of concealing Butkowski's death, Thomas could face up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
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The 17-year-old girl who escaped her California home through a window so she could call police and show them photo evidence of the 'horrific' conditions she and her 12 siblings were allegedly forced to endure by their parents told cops she was afraid they would kill her if she was caught.

The courageous teen, who was so malnourished officers initially believed she was only 10, is being hailed a hero one day after police were able to rescue her starved brothers and sisters from their home in Perris, California on Sunday.

Authorities found at least three of the Turpin children - aged 2 to 29 - shackled to their beds and furniture with chains and padlocks in a dark, foul-smelling room inside the family home.

The victims, including six children and seven adults, were 'malnourished and very dirty'. It is not clear how long some of them were chained, padlocked and shackled before they were discovered.

'We do need to acknowledge the courage of that young girl who escaped,' Riverside County sheriff's Capt. Greg Fellows said on Tuesday.

He said the 17-year-old girl managed to escape through a window and call 911 with a deactivated cell phone she had found in the home. When officers interviewed the girl, she provided photos of the conditions and abuse suffered by her and the rest of her siblings.

And according to The Mirror, the 17-year-old who finally broke free thought her parents would kill her if they caught her trying to escape.

'In her mind, she was risking her life,' a source told the paper, describing the teen as 'so intelligent' despite alleged limited access to the outside world during her childhood.

Police have confirmed that all 13 victims are the biological children of David Allen Turpin, 57, and his 49-year-old wife Louise Anna Turpin. They were both arrested and charged with nine counts of torture and 10 of child endangerment. They are being held on $9million bail pending a court appearance.

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David and Louise Turpin, seen renewing their vows at an Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas in 2015, have been arrested after 13 of their children were found shackled to beds inside their home in Perris, California on Sunday

Parents David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested and charged with torture and child endangerment

Police said the 17-year-old girl bravely managed to escape through a window of the home and notify authorities. She told police she was scared her parents would kill her if they caught her escaping, according to the Mirror

The malnourished siblings, who were taken to hospital still dressed in their pajamas, continue to undergo treatment. Child's services will now seek a court order to have oversight over the 13 children, including those over the age of 18.

Police confirmed that both David and Louise Turpin were religious but were unable to say if that played a role in holding their children captive.

While still early in the investigation, police said there were no signs that any of the siblings were sexually abused or that the parents were suffering from mental illness.

The sheriff's captain said the conditions were horrific and amounted to torture. It wasn't yet clear how long they had been held in such conditions in the filthy home but it appeared to have been a 'prolonged' period.

'If you can imagine being a 10-year-old and being chained to a bed ... I would call that torture,' he said.

He added that Louise seemed 'perplexed' about why police came to their home, but it was unclear how the children's father reacted.

Deputies had never been called to the home and neither had social service workers.

Corona Regional Medical Center CEO Mark Uffer said his facility is treating seven of the adult children.

'It's hard to think of them as adults, they are so small,' Uffer said, adding that they clearly malnourished but stable and very friendly.

'I believe they are hopeful life will get better for them after this event.'

Police originally thought all of the victims were children but soon discovered seven of them were adults. The family are pictured above in a photo taken around 2015

'Things 1 to 13': The family are seen in Dr Seuss-style shirts, and all in blue jeans, in a family photo posted in April 2016

Police found the siblings inside their family home (above) after the 17-year-old girl managed to escape through a window and call 911 with a cell phone she had found in the house

Riverside County sheriff's Capt. Greg Fellows praised the 17-year-old girl on Tuesday after she managed to escape through a window and call 911 with a cell phone she had found in the home

Video courtesy of the Vegas Chapel

The Turpins were believed to be dogged by debt and filed for bankruptcy twice - once in Texas and again in 2011 after moving to California.

They were between $100,000 and $500,000 in debt when they filed for bankruptcy in August 2011 . At the time of the filing, David Turpin was earning a $140,000 salary as an engineer at defense firm Northrop Grumman where he had been working for eight months. His wife was listed as a stay-at-home mom.

Records show the large family's expenses exceed Turpin's pay by just over $1,000 a month. He previously worked for Lockheed Martin but left the job in 2010.

Court documents show that David had tried to keep his 2010 Ford Mustang in the bankruptcy proceedings but a judge eventually ordered for him to give it up.

Their bankruptcy lawyer, Ivan Trahan, told the New York Times that the couple often spoke fondly of their children but he never saw them.

'They spoke about them highly,' Trahan said. 'We remember them as very nice couple. This is shocking.'

They are believed to have moved to California from Texas around 2010. The Turpins lived in Murrieta first before purchasing their current four-bedroom home in Perris in August 2014 for $351,000.

Their house in Perris is also the address of Sandcastle Day School - a private school registered in 2014-15 so David Turpin could home-school six of his children. In the 2016-17 school year, it had an enrollment of six students - one each in the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, 10th and 12th grades. As a private school, there are no laws that require it to be inspected.

David Turpin's parents, James and Betty Turpin, told ABC News they were 'surprised and shocked' at the allegations.

The couple, who live in West Virginia, said they had not visited the family for four or five years but had spoken to them on the phone, although not with their grandchildren.

The grandparents described the family as very religious and said they were Pentecostal Christian.

They said the parents had so many children because they believed 'God called on them' to do so. They added that the 'very strict homeschooling' would involve the children memorizing long Bible passages and even attempting to memorize the entire book.

The children also all appear to have been given names beginning with a J, perhaps a tribute to Jesus or maybe even to the Old Testaments Joseph, who is believed to have had 12 siblings.

The Turpin family, as well as extended relatives, are seen enjoying a holiday at Disneyland in California in 2011

They have had marriage-renewal ceremonies in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator at least three times in 2011 (pictured above), 2013 and 2015

The shocking allegations provide a stark contrast to the life shown on David and Louise's joint Facebook page. They appear to have had marriage-renewal ceremonies in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator at least three times in 2011, 2013 and 2015.

Their children were present at the ceremonies and are seeing posing for photos in 2015 in matching outfits for the boys and the girls. The 10 girls are all dressed in pink dresses with white tights and white shoes, while the boys are seen in suits with purple ties - and bowl haircuts like their father.

HOW DID THE TURPIN FAMILY GO UNNOTICED? Police said on Tuesday they wished they had an answer as to how the Turpin children ended up in the situation they did. The family had lived in Perris, California since 2014 but deputies had never been called to the residence previously for any reason. Social workers had also never visited the home. State Department of Education records show the family home has the same address as Sandcastle Day School, where David Turpin is listed as principal. Six of the children were homeschooled. In the 2016-17 school year, it had an enrollment of six with one student each in the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, 10th and 12th grades. As a private school, there are no laws that require it to be inspected. Family have said they were never invited over to their home, but thought they were living the dream life based on Facebook photos of their trips to Disneyland and Las Vegas. Neighbors have described the family as intensely private, with some saying they did not even know children lived in the home. Advertisement

Footage of the ceremony posted online showed the smiling children awkwardly dancing and clicking their fingers behind their parents.

Another ceremony with the same Elvis impersonator in 2013 - prior to their youngest child being born - shows the children wearing the same outfits. Photographs from 2011 show the couple by themselves, but impersonator Kent Ripley said the children were in attendance that time as well.

'I'm still disturbed. This is a sad day for everybody, especially the children, I mean they were sitting right around here three different times,' Ripley told Fox5Vegas. He added on Today: 'Nothing seemed to be unusual apart from the fact there was a lot of them. They were well behaved and smiled a lot'.

Other pictures show the family smiling on several trips to Disneyland, while another shows them wearing Dr Seuss-style shirts, with each child's top emblazoned with 'Thing 1' to 'Thing 13'.

It also features several photos of the youngest child when she was a baby in late 2015. She was often pictured posing with her mother, including in a Snow White costume, inside a Krispy Kreme store and at a lake.

The last public images that appeared on the Facebook page were posted in July 2016.

Speaking to CNN, grandmother Betty Turpin said the parents made the children dress alike for safety reasons. She describes how the children would line up according to age and the mother and father would walk in front and back of the line.

'They were very protective of the kids. This is a highly respectable family.'

Louise's sister Elizabeth Jane Flores, 41, told DailyMailTV that he was never allowed to visit her sibling in California and knew something was 'not right' about her parenting.

She said she had not seen Louise in 19 years, and while she still kept in touch with her sister by telephone, Turpin refused to invite her over to her home and never let her speak to her nieces and nephews.

'She never let us talk to her kids. She wouldn't even accept my Facebook request. We all wondered what was going on. My parents booked several flights to go see them but when they got there they wouldn't tell them where to go and my parents left crying every time. They died before they got to see them again. It's just heartbreaking and I'm so embarrassed about all of this,' she said.

Meanwhile her other sister Teresa Robinette told NBC: 'We always thought she was living the perfect life. She would tell us they went to Disneyland all the time, they would go to Vegas.'

The couple are pictured above on a neighbor's surveillance cameras being arrested on Sunday morning

House of horrors: The victims, all siblings aged between two and 29 years old, were being held captive in a home in Perris, California, police said. Media are seen outside the house

Loved-up: Pictures on Facebook show the Turpins renewing their vows in 2015, with their children next to them at the altar

Playing happy families: The Turpins are pictured smiling at the most recent of their vow renewals, which was conducted by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas

Tradition: The couple are seen in a picture from 2011, renewing their vows in front of the same Elvis impersonator

More than once: The family are gathered for yet another vow-renewal ceremony in 2013, with the children dressed in the outfits which were then re-used three years later

DISNEY-OBSESSED PARENTS ARRESTED FOR IMPRISONING 13 CHILDREN The parents accused of starving and keeping their 13 children chained up inside their home had an obsession with Disneyland, according to the multiple family trips they took to the theme park and their 'DSLAND' car license plates. David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were both arrested at their home in Perris, California on Sunday after their 17-year-old daughter managed to escape and call 911. But the shocking allegations made against David and Louise are in stark contrast to the life they publicly portrayed on their joint Facebook page. David and Louise are pictured above smiling with their children and Disney Princess Jasmine. The photo was posted in 2012 Photos posted on Facebook between 2010 and 2012 show that the couple took their children to Disneyland on at least two separate occasions. David and Louise are pictured smiling with their children in front of the theme park's iconic castle and posing with Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse, Princess Jasmine and Winnie the Pooh's Eeyore. Just like all of their family photos, the children are pictured wearing matching outfits. Photos posted on Facebook between 2010 and 2012 show that the couple took their children to Disneyland on at least two separate occasions Just like all of their family photos, the children are pictured wearing matching outfits Some of the younger children wore the same Disney-themed outfits on both family trips to the theme park. The trips occurred prior to the birth of their youngest daughter, who is now aged two. Meanwhile, two of the four cars parked outside the family's home in Perris when they were arrested also appear to have licence plates linked to Disneyland. One of the plates on a Volkswagen Beetle reads 'DSLAND'. The other, which is also on Volkswagen, says 'DL4EVER'. There has been speculation that the second plate could also mean David and Louise forever. One of the plates on a Volkswagen parked outsdie their home reads: 'DL4EVER'. There has been speculation that the second plate could also mean David and Louise forever One of the personalized plates on a Volkswagen Beetle reads 'DSLAND' Disney-themed statues were spotted in the yard of the family home in Perris on Tuesday Advertisement

Neighbors said the family were unusual and reclusive, with some saying they did not even know children lived in the home.

Housewife Wendy Martinez, 41, who lives in a home behind the single-story ranch-style property, told DailyMail.com she saw four of the children kneeling in the front yard late at night at the end of October, looking emaciated and pale.

'They were on their knees, four little kids, and they were just rolling on the grass. It was odd at that time of night.

'Their mother was in the archway, I just remember the mother in the archway, and I said, hi. There was like no movement, not even to look over to see who's saying hi, like if they were told not to speak to anybody. '

Asked whether she thought the children needed help, she told DailyMail.com: 'Honestly, I didn't see they needed help.'

Another neighbor said Louise Turpin was defiant when cops arrived at the home on Sunday. They said she 'smirked' and 'spat twice down at the floor'.

Andrew Santillan, who lives nearby, told Press-Enterprise: 'I didn't know there were kids in the house. I had no idea this was going on.'

Others said they had seen the children digging for food in the garbage bins, but had not taken notice as it did not look sinister.

'Nonchalant, looked like they were having fun like a regular family,' neighbor Nicole Gooding told CBS2.

'The older kids, I thought they were, like, 12, because they looked so malnourished, so pale,' Kimberly Milligan added.

Another neighbor, Andria Valdez, said she had seen the children before, joking that they were like the vampire family in the Twilight books and films because they were 'really, really pale' and 'only came out at night'.

Another local said the children were seen building a Nativity scene in the front yard of their home a few years ago, but were 'weird about it' when complimented on their work.

The couple's joint Facebook page features several photos of the youngest child when she was a baby in late 2015. She was often pictured posing with her mother outside the house, including dressed as Disney Princess Snow White (left)

David and Louise are pictured in front of Disneyland's iconic castle appearing to hold Tinker Bell. The photo appeared on Facebook in October 2010 and was one of multiple trips to the theme park

The Turpins were arrested and charged with nine counts of torture and 10 of child endangerment. Neither of them have a serious criminal record. Camera crews are seen outside the home on Monday

'THEY SEEMED LIKE THE PERFECT FAMILY': NEIGHBORS

HORRIFIED TO DISCOVER PARENTS' HORRIFIC SECRET Wendy Martinez thought the Turpins were the perfect family Four of the children living in the California house of horrors were seen less than two months ago looking very thin and very albino, a neighbor has said. Housewife Wendy Martinez, 41, who lives in a home behind the single-story ranch-style property, told DailyMail.com she saw four of the children kneeling in the front yard late at night at the end of October. She said the quartet looked emaciated and pale, and appeared to have been instructed not to respond when she tried to say hello to them. It was about 9pm at night and we came around right here and at the gate, we saw four children inside, Martinez said. They were on their knees, four little kids, and they were just rolling on the grass. It was odd at that time of night. Their mother was in the archway, I just remember the mother in the archway, and I said, hi. There was like no movement, not even to look over to see whos saying hi. No movement, like if they were told not to speak to anybody. The mom, no movement at all. Asked whether she thought the children needed help, she told DailyMail.com: Honestly, I didnt see like they needed help. They were in their yard. It was awkward that it was at 9pm at night but they were in their yard. David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested Sunday after 13 adults and children aged between two and 29 were found inside their four-bedroom Perris home. Some of the children had been shackled to their beds and, cops said, were being held in a foul-smelling room. The Turpins purchased the house, which sits on a quiet well-to-do street, for $351,000 in August 2014  later registering it as a school. Sitting within a new development, the house had been a model home and was, said Dennis Cooke, 61, already tricked out with custom fittings when they moved in. Cooke, who works at Home Depot in Perris, said he had been shown around the property before the Turpins moved in, adding: This one was very beautiful, it was already tricked out with custom fittings, the backyard done, the landscaping done. But he said the spacious four-bedroom home is nowhere near large enough for 15 occupants, telling DailyMail.com: Oh no, no. Absolutely not. I would say a normal family, if they had six children, it could be adequate but 13, no. absolutely not. Neighbor Dennis Cooke did not the think the Turpins' 'beautiful' home was big enough to house 13 children Although the Turpins were understood to be running a school from the house, neighbors said they saw no sign of parents arriving to drop off their children  and most said they had no idea that a young family lived in the property. You know what, I drive past this way every day but Ive never seen the family or anything, said nurse Janeece Calhoun, 21. Never anybody coming in or out. Neighbor Michelle Walls, 47, added: You would think you would have heard them. In our neighborhood, kids are usually out playing, shooting hoops. Going to the park. Im surprised I never saw them because most kids need to go outside and play. Martinez says she last saw a member of the family a month ago, when she spotted one of the couples teenage daughters drive past in a red Volkswagen Jetta, which was seen parked outside the home today. She said: One of the girls was coming in in the red Jetta. They were in and out. I think it was one of the girls, I dont know which one it was, but as I was going out, she was coming in. Shed been out. Martinez added: Its weird  you never know whats going on. Theyve got three cars and that [mini]van. They move it, theres no cobwebs. Theyre mobile. I dont understand why they would wait so long to say something. Looking at their pictures, they seemed like the perfect family.
A federal judge has released Rick Gates, one of the campaign aides charged in Robert Mueller's Russia probe, from house arrest.

Gates, 45, is a long-time business associate and protege of Paul Manafort, the man who ran Trump's presidential campaign for several months in 2016 and is also charged by Mueller.

The pair are accused of laundering money and conspiracy against the US, among other charges, in the wake of the Mueller investigation.

Manafort, 68, was fired shortly after the Republican National Convention amid questions about his business dealings in Ukraine but Gates stayed on and was more recently working to help close the financial books of Trump's inaugural committee. Gates was in turn removed following questions about his involvement with Manafort.

In October, the two men pleaded not guilty to a 12-count indictment by a federal grand jury, telling a judge that they planned to fight the Justice Department in court.

A federal judge has released Rick Gates, (center) one of the campaign aides charged in Robert Mueller's Russia probe, from house arrest

Gates was accused of laundering money and conspiracy against the US, among other charges, in the wake of the Mueller investigation

Gates, 45, is a long-time business associate and protege of Paul Manafort (pictured), the man who ran Trump's presidential campaign for several months in 2016 and is also charged by Mueller.

The business partners, who have been in home confinement since then, face charges including conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy against the United States and failing to register as foreign agents of Ukraine's former pro-Russian government for behavior occurring as far back as 2012.

The court documents make no mention of contact with Russians during the presidential campaign.

A U.S. District Court judge scrapped the confinement condition of Gates' bail order on Thursday, NBC News reports.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the U.S. election

He is still likley to have some restrictions, such as a curfew and travel restrictions.

His attorneys have petitioned the court on several occasions for his temporary release from home confinement, including in November when Gates asked to be allowed to be able to leave his home to pick up and drop off his children at school.

A judge denied a request by Gates to attend a New Year's Eve party.

Manafort will remain imprisoned.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, a federal judge delayed setting a trial date for Manafort and Gates.

Defense lawyers said the government still needed to produce all the evidence against their clients - and give them enough time to sort through it all.

The trial was originally scheduled for May but Judge Amy Berman Jackson announced today that it might not start until the fall of 2018.

'We have limited resources,' Manafort's attorney Kevin Downing told the Business Insider Tuesday. 'We're not big law firms.'

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, a federal judge delayed setting a trial date for Manafort (seen leaving at court Tuesday) and Gates

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his wife Kathleen leave the Prettyman Federal Courthouse January 16

If held in September, the trial could run up to the 2018 midterm elections, which could create some difficult press for Trump and his administration.

The indictment against Manafort, 68, and Gates, 45, includes 12 separate criminal counts: conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said during a press briefing that 'today's announcement has nothing to do with the president, nothing to do with the president's campaign or campaign activity.'

Sanders told DailyMail.com that Trump and Manafort 'haven't spoken in several months. The last known conversation was back all the way to February.'

She said that 'there was some initial contact' with Gates 'after the president was sworn in, with him at meetings here at the White House  but nothing directly with the president.'

The government alleges that at least $75 million was moved by Manafort to offshore accounts without declaring the income to the government. From there Manafort allegedly withdrew $18 million to fund a lavish lifestyle, and Gates is accused of pulling out another $3 million.

The defendants' surrender to the FBI in the morning was followed by a dramatic announcement that one of Trump's campaign foreign policy advisers, George Papadopoulos, had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with Russians who promised 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton and access to 'thousands' of her emails.

Papadopoulos secretly agreed to a plea bargain earlier this month, suggesting he may be cooperating with Mueller.








The United States will give a UN agency $60 million in aid for Palestinians refugees but withhold a further $65 million for now, the State Department said on Tuesday, as the Trump administration carried out a threat it made two weeks ago to cut funding.

While saying the decision would sustain schools and health services, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert echoed President Donald Trump in calling on other nations to provide more funds because he believes the United States pays more than its share.

The decision to keep back some money is likely to compound the difficulty of reviving Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and to further undermine Arabs' faith that the United States can act as an impartial arbitrator, particularly following Trump's Dec. 6 announcement reversing decades of US policy and recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

A Palestinian official quickly criticized Washington's decision to withhold some of the money and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was unaware of any cut in aid but he was 'very concerned' about the possibility.

The State Department notified the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) of the decision in a letter, Nauert said at a daily briefing.

The United States will give a UN agency $60 million in aid for Palestinians refugees but withhold a further $65 million for now, the State Department said on Tuesday. A Palestinian woman has her child checked at a UN-run facility in Gaza City

A Palestinian refugee woman gestures as she waits to receive aid at a United Nations food distribution center in Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City on Monday

She said the Trump administration was conditioning the release of the additional funds on whether the organization makes unspecified reforms.

She insisted, however, the US decision was 'not aimed at punishing' anyone.

A US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said UNRWA must be fundamentally reevaluated 'in the way it operates and the way it is funded.'

'Without the funds we are providing today, UNRWA operations were at risk of running out of funds and closing down. The funds provided by the United States will prevent that from happening for the immediate future,' the official said, saying the additional '$65 million will be held for future consideration.'

While saying the decision would sustain schools and health services, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert echoed President Donald Trump in calling on other nations to provide more funds because he believes the United States pays more than its share

In a Twitter post on Jan. 2, Trump said that Washington gives the Palestinians 'HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect.

'They don't even want to negotiate a long overdue peace treaty with Israel ... with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?' Trump added in his tweet.

While US officials did not link the US decision to Trump's tweet, they made a point often advanced by the president by saying the United States had been UNRWAs single largest donor for decades and demanded other nations do more.

'The United States government and the Trump administration believes there should be more burden sharing going around,' spokeswoman Nauert said.

Trumps aides initially debated whether to cut off all UNRWA aid after the tweet, a second US official said.

But those opposed to the idea argued that it could further destabilize the region, the official said.

'UNRWA has proven time and again to be an agency that misuses the humanitarian aid of the international community and instead supports anti-Israel propaganda, perpetuates the plight of Palestinian refugees and encourages hate,' Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (center) speaks during a meeting with the Palestinian Central Council in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Sunday. Abbas blasted the Trump administration's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital last month

Palestine Liberation Organization official Wasel Abu Youssef told Reuters: 'This decision confirms the US administration is continuing in wiping out the rights of the Palestinian people. First was declaring Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and today the refugee issue.'

Historically, US administrations had said the status of Jerusalem must be decided in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The city is holy to three major monotheistic faiths.

At the United Nations, Guterres told reporters that the services provided by UNRWA were 'of extreme importance, not only for the well-being of these populations ... but also in my opinion and an opinion that is shared by most international observers, including some Israeli ones, it is an important factor of stability.'

'So if UNRWA will not be in a position to provide the vital services and the emergency forms of support that UNRWA has been providing this will create a very, very serious problem and we will do everything we can to avoid this situation,' he said.
Fox News Channel will unveil a new documentary on Sunday about events leading up to the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton almost 30 years ago.

The hour-long episode of Scandalous, which will be narrated by actor Bruce McGill, will air January 21 at 8pm.

Scandalous will feature interviews with more than 40 people, among them principals in that saga, including special prosecutor Ken Starr, former Senator Joe Lieberman, current Senator Lindsey Graham, and Linda Tripp.

The documentary will focus on the sequence of events that led to the impeachment, including the Whitewater controversy.

Whitewater was a failed Arkansas real estate venture which involved Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Fox News Channel will unveil a new seven-part documentary series on Sunday about events leading up to the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton almost 30 years ago

The series will begin by tackling the Whitewater controversy. Whitewater was a failed Arkansas real estate venture which involved Bill and Hillary Clinton (left). It was investigated by then-special prosecutor, Ken Starr (seen right when he was president of Baylor in 2014)

In 1992, when then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was running for the Democratic nomination, it was learned that he and his wife lost money in a land deal from the 1970s and 80s.

Despite a series of investigations, authorities failed to find enough evidence to criminally prosecute the Clintons for their role in the Whitewater affair.

One of the Clintons associates, Susan McDougal, ended up going to prison for refusing to answer questions related to Whitewater.

McDougal, who received a pardon from President Clinton before he left office, is one of the people interviewed in the upcoming Fox News documentary.

Clinton's impeachment was preceded by a chain of events, most notably the revelation that he engaged in an extramarital affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton's impeachment was preceded by a chain of events, most notably the revelation that he engaged in an extramarital affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky

In 1998, it was learned that the then-22-year-old intern and the president had a number of liaisons on the White House grounds, including in the Oval Office.

Lewinsky testified that she and the president had nine sexual encounters in the Oval Office between November 1995 and March 1997.

When the presidents aides noticed that their boss was spending too much time with Lewinsky in the White House, she was transferred to the Pentagon.

It was there that she met a co-worker, Linda Tripp.

The affair became public after Tripp secretly recorded conversations with her and passed them on to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel investigating Clinton for his role in the Whitewater deal.

Both Clinton and Lewinsky denied having a sexual relationship under oath when testifying in the Paul Jones lawsuit accusing the then-president of sexual harassment.

The affair became public after Linda Tripp (above) secretly recorded conversations with Lewinsky and passed them on to Starr

Clinton first forcefully denied the allegations, saying in January that year in a public statement: 'I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me... I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.'

He eventually admitted in August 1998 to having an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky.

'I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife,' he said at the time. 'I deeply regret that.

'Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate.

'In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.'

Clinton became only the second president in US history to be impeached by Congress.

He was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.

After Clintons impeachment, a trial was held in the Senate, where Republicans fell short of the necessary amount of votes to remove him from office.

In the two decades since the scandal, Lewinsky has largely stayed out of the public eye  only to re-emerge in recent years as an advocate for preventing cyber-bullying.
Ministers today ordered a fast-tracked investigation into the bosses at failed firm Carillion after it emerged they awarded themselves bumper bonuses as the companies slid into insolvency.

The Government said the probe will look at bosses 'past and present' who received fat cat salaries while the firms shares tumbled and it racked up billions in debt.

And the crisis topped the agenda at Cabinet this morning as Theresa May told her minsters No 10 is offering support and will not be 'complacent'.

Meanwhile state-backed bank RBS was among the list of financial lenders who said they could face losses from the firm's collapse.

The announcement by Business Secretary Greg Clark comes amid widespread anger that Carillion is still dishing out huge pay packets to senior staff who left the firm just before it went bust.

Business Secretary Greg Clark (pictured outside No10 last week) announced the probe amid widespread anger that Carillion is still dishing out huge pay packets to senior staff who left the firm just before it went bust

Minister of State Claire Perry arriving at 10 Downing Street(left) alongside State for Work and Pensions Esther McVey(right)

Home Secretary Amber Rudd,left) and Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson pictured walking into No10 today, where Theresa May will speak with her ministers about the outsourcing giant's collapse and the government's response

Richard Howson, the company's former chief executive, will continue to draw from his 660,000 salary until Octobver despite quitting last summer.

Former financial officer Zafar Khan stepped down in September but will continue receiving a 425,000 base salary a year after leaving.

And Keith Cochrane, who became interim CEO in July, will receive a 750,000 salary until July despite the firm's collapse.

Announcing the investigation today, Mr Clark said: 'It is important we quickly get the full picture of the events which caused Carillion to enter liquidation, which is why I have asked the Insolvency Service to fast-track and broaden the scope of the Official Receiver's investigation.

'In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors.

'Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously.'

Politicians and union leaders have queued up to condemn the company for dishing out the hefty salaries and bonuses while the company failed.

And fury has deepened as it emerged the bosses changed the rules last September to make it harder for bonuses to claw back.

Two people in high-visibility jackets next to the S2 building, a Carillion construction project in King's Cross, London

A foreman at the Angel Gardens development in Manchester(pictured today) said that all the sub-contractors employed at the site had packed up their tools yesterday and left

Downing Street has warned the company it would not be right for company bosses to be seen to be benefiting from failure.

While Unite, the country's biggest trade union, said: 'This is a classic case of rewards for failure.'

And as the former bosses of the failed firm are still enjoying their very generous pay packets, workers and small firms who supplied the outsourcing and construction giant are facing an uncertain future.

Thousands of private sector workers whose jobs relied on the Carillion could hear if they will be out of work following its collapse soon.

The Federation of Small Businesses has warned that small firms could go bust, causing more job losses, unless its debts are paid.

While building sites around Britain have been left 'ghost towns' as workers were told to go home and stay away as construction ground to a halt following the collapse.

And Carillion's lenders, including Barclays, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Lloyds and Santander UK, are facing heavy losses on their 2 billion exposure to the collapsed outsourcer.

The Prime Ministers official spokesman said: Cabinet began with a discussion of the decision to place Carillion into compulsory liquidation. The Prime Minster led the discussion and said that despite a lot of work to find suitable financing options, this had not proved possible for the company.

She added the taxpayer could not be expected to bail out a private company.

He added: The PM said public services had continued to be provided but there would no complacency and the Government would be vigilant in monitoring for any emerging issues in public services and in providing support for employees of companies with private sector Carillion contracts.
The Justice Department launched a frontal assault Tuesday on a judge's ruling that protected beneficiaries of the DACA program from the threat of its termination in March.

The Department of Justice said it would go directly to the Supreme Court to establish that the White House can legally shutter Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era executive order that offered deportation protection and work permits to hundreds of thousands of people who entered the U.S. illegally as children.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted a request a week ago to block the administration from ending DACA while lawsuits play out. He also ordered the administration to resume accepting renewal applications from people already enrolled in the program.

'It defies both law and common sense for DACA ... to somehow be mandated nationwide by a single district court in San Francisco,' Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.

Fighting mad: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday that he will go directly to the Supreme Court to push back against a federal judge who blocked the administration from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program

President Donald Trump is using the threat of DACA's demise in March as leverage to get Democrats to agree to fund his proposed border wall, but the judge's ruling took that piece of the puzzle out of his hands

The DACA program has pitted immigrants' rights groups against conservatives who voted for Trump because of his promise to get tough on immigration

Sessions noted that DACA was 'an entirely discretionary non-enforcement policy that was implemented unilaterally by the last administration,' and that Congress had previously 'rejected similar legislative proposals.'

The central legal question surrounding the latest DACA episode is whether the President of the United States can issue an executive memo to cancel what a previous president established in the same fashion.

Republicans want to use the threat of DACA's cancelation as leverage to bring Democrats to the table as they seek billions in funding for border control measures including a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

The DOJ said Tuesday that it intends to appeal Alsup's order to the Ninth Circuit, a traditionally liberal judicial panel.

At the same time, it's planning this week to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a final appeal before the California-based appeals court acts.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke, who issued the memorandum last fall spelling out how DACA would wind down, 'acted within her discretion to rescind this policy,' Sessions said Tuesday.

He called the direct appeal to the Supreme Court 'rare' but said it was being done 'so that this issue may be resolved quickly and fairly for all the parties involved.'

Protesters calling for an immigration bill supporting DACA demonstrated in the office of Senator Chuck Grassley on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday

A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that a massive majority of Americans want DACA beneficiaries to be able to stay in the U.S. and apply for citizenship

President Donald Trump objected last week to the fact that attorneys looking to stop him from ending the DACA program chose the nation's most liberal venue to do it.

'It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts,' Trump wrote on Twitter.

Earlier, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders had said in a statement that '[w]e find this decision to be outrageous.'

Trump has drawn criticism in recent years for his attacks on judges who issue rulings that displease him. He branded one a 'so-called judge' after the first version of his nation-specific travel ban was ruled unconstitutional.

In another case during the presidential campaign, he claimed a Mexican-American judge's ethnicity rendered him unable to rule fairly in the Trump University case.

The federal court system is 'broken and unfair,' Trump said last week, pointing to the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco as fertile hunting ground for liberal partisans seeking friendly rulings

DACA has protected about 800,000 people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children or came with families who overstayed visas. It includes many college-age residents.

The Trump administration announced in September that it would cancel DACA, citing a threat from a coalition of 10 states, led by Texas, to challenge the program's constitutionality.

Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez lashed out at Trump last week, saying his move to rescind DACA 'was never about the rule of law. It was about deporting Dreamers and using them as bargaining chips in future political negotiations while holding their futures hostage.'

Trump has insisted repeatedly that any congressional deal to save DACA must be tied to funding for his border wall.
Pastor jailed: Gerardo Custodio Jr, 30, a youth pastor from California, has been charged with multiple counts of engaging in lewd acts with minors

A California youth pastor has been charged with repeatedly molesting two teenage girls, including at the Ontario church led by his father.

Gerardo Custodio Jr, 30, was arrested on Sunday on multiple charges of engaging in lewd acts with a minor stemming from alleged incidents that occurred between 2012 and 2015.

According to a press release from the Ontario Police Department, Custodio has served for many years as a youth pastor at the Iglesia La Familia De Dios, a church on North Euclid Avenue in Ontario, where his father, Gerardo Custodio Sr, is the senior pastor.

Police say Custodio Jr had spent time away from the church while attending college but resumed his duties there in 2011.

On Saturday, police interviewed two young female parishioners from La Famila De Dios who had come forward to report that they had been asexually abused by their youth pastor.

House of worship: Custodio is a long-time youth pastor at Iglesia La Familia De Dios in Ontario, California, where police say some of the sexual encounters had taken place

The suspect's father, Gerardo Custodio Sr (pictured right with son), 61, is the senior pastor at the church

One of the victims was 14 years old in 2012 when she said Custodio Jr, then aged 24, allegedly began abusing her. According to the woman, some of the sexual encounters took place at the house of worship between 2012 and 2014.

The second victim said she was 15 years old when her encounters with the then-26-year-old pastor took place between 2014 and 2015.

Police said Custodio Jr, of Upland, also faces additional unspecified charges involving both victims.

Following his arrest, Custodio Jr was taken to the West Valley Detention Center, where his bail was set at $3million.

Investigators believe there may be more victims out there and they are encouraging them to come forward.

Custodio Jr (pictured left with his mother and twin sisters) is accused of molesting two girls, aged 14 and 15, between 2012-2015

According to the churchs website, Gerardo Custodio Sr immigrated to the US with his family from their native El Salvador in 1995, just a few months after La Familia De Dios opened its doors.

The 61-year-old senior pastor is married and has three children, including his son and 24-year-old twin daughters. The father is not facing any criminal charges.

DailyMail.com on Tuesday reached out to the church for comment on the allegations against the youth pastor and was awaiting a response.

Anyone with information about this case is being asked to call the Ontario police at (909) 986-6711.
The Australian Federal Police have issued arrest warrants for 20 jihadis who are fighting for radical Islamic terror groups worldwide.

They include notorious ISIS fighter Neil Prakash, who is detained in Turkey, and Adelaide terrorist medic Tareq Kamleh.

As Australian fighters attempt to return home after the collapse of ISIS, federal police are working with Turkish authorities to stop them as they cross the border.

Meanwhile, counter-terrorism police in Australia are investigating 215 suspects on Australian soil, some who are already before the courts on terror charges.

The Australian Federal Police has issued arrest warrants for 20 jihadis who are fighting for radical Islamic terror groups worldwide (pictured is Neil Prakash)

They include notorious ISIS fighter Neil Prakash, who is detained in Turkey, and Adelaide terrorist medic Tareq Kamleh (pictured)

AFP Deputy Commissioner Ian McCartney said strong law enforcement strategies are in place to combat threat of returning terrorists.

'A real concern is a hardened Islamic State fighter returning from the conflict zone,' he told The Daily Telegraph.

'If they do return to Australia we want to be able to mitigate the risk with a priority of prosecuting.'

Meanwhile counter-terrorism police in Australia are investigating 215 suspects on Australian soil, some of whom are already before the courts on terror charges (pictured is ISIS fighter Mohammad Ali Baryalei)

About 220 Australians have travelled to Iraq or Syria to fight for terror groups since 2012 (pictured is ISIS fighter Mohamed Elomar)

About 220 Australians have travelled to Iraq or Syria to fight for terror groups since 2012.

Of those, 110 are dead or unaccounted for - including Sydney man Mohammad Ali Baryalei - and 40 have returned to Australia.

Prakash, 26, is the highest-profile terrorist with an AFP warrant out for his arrest, but he remains behind bars in Turkey after being captured at the border in 2016.

Prakash (pictured), 26, is the highest-profile terrorist with an AFP warrant out for his arrest, but he remains behind bars in Turkey after being captured at the border in 2016

Many Australian jihadists who travelled to the Middle East to fight are dead or unaccounted for (pictured is Tareq Kamleh)

Australia has sought to extradite Prakash to face terror related charges, and he is also wanted for questioning in the US, UK and Israel.

Born to a Fijian father and a Cambodian mother, he converted to Islam in 2012 and joined ISIS in the Middle East, becoming known as Abu Khaled al-Cambodi.

He has admitted making propaganda videos and being responsible for ISIS in Australia, but says he was not '100 per cent responsible' as he was forced to do it.
A Michigan family was devastated when their shepherd-husky mix came home seriously injured after he had been shot twice in the head with a crossbow.

The seven-year-old dog named Marty had been missing from his home in Croswell, Michigan for almost three weeks.

Police believe the dog was being held, as it had been subzero temperatures for several weeks.

They also believe he may have been chained when he was shot with the bolts.

A seven-year-old shepherd-husky mix named Marty had been missing from his home in Michigan for three weeks when he was found shot twice in the head with a crossbow

'He was shot twice in the head,' Tammy Lortt said to The Times Herald. 'He was missing nearly three weeks until he came back.'

The pup belongs to Lortt's brother Jason Lumley.

Marty is now under veterinary care and is improving every day.

Sanilac County Sheriff Garry Biniecki said that deputies have a suspect and plan to charge them with animal cruelty. Deputies acquired both evidence and a written confession from the person.

The sheriff's office conducted an investigation and identified a suspect, who is expected to be charged with animal cruelty

The family set up a GoFundMe to help with Marty's medical bills. It raised over $10,000 in just three days

'Animals are pretty special and people need to realize you need to take care of them,' Biniecki said.

The family set up a GoFundMe to help with Marty's medical bills. It raised over $10,000 in just three days.

'Marty is doing great! They were waiting for him to be stronger to do surgery to close up the hole but now they may not even have to do that it looks like its healing,' the page reads.

Any leftover money will be used to pay the bills, putting up a kennel to keep the dog from escaping, and the rest will be donated to an animal shelter and the veterinarian's office.
Matt Damon apologized for weighing in on the #MeToo movement in an appearance on the Today show on Tuesday, a little less than a month after he was forced to skip his new movie premiere due to backlash over his statements.

The Downsizing star, 47, spoke with Kathie Lee Gifford to promote his foundation, Water.org, and a partnership they have planned with Stella Artois for the Super Bowl.

At the end of the interview, Gifford questioned Damon about some recent comments he had made about the sexual harassment scandals sweeping Hollywood.

'You know, just recently in the news you were caught up in something that's very much in the vernacular of our conversations these days. What have you learned from that whole experience?' Gifford asked.

Damon, clearly uncomfortable, looked down as he formulated his answer.

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Matt Damon apologized for weighing into the #MeToo movement during an appearance on the Today show on Tuesday

'I really wish that I'd listened a lot more before I weighed in on this,' Damon said Tuesday

'Boy, that...well, I really wish that I'd listened a lot more before I weighed in on this,' Damon said.

'You're a good listener though Matt,' Gifford interjected.

'Well not in this case, You know, I think ultimately what it is for me is that I don't want to further anybody's pain with anything that I do or say and so for that I'm really sorry.

'And you know this whole like "Times Up" [movement]...I mean a lot of those women are my dear friends and I love them and respect them and support what they're doing and want to be a part of that change and want to go along for the ride, but I should get in the back seat and close my mouth for a while,' he added.

'Well a lot of us like it when you open your mouth, especially about things like this - Water.org,' Gifford said as she closed the interview.

Damon (right) had a long working relationship with Harvey Weinstien (center) before the producer was hit with dozens of allegations of sexual misconduct. The two pictured above with Ben Afflect in October 2016

Damon found himself in hot water last month, when he spoke about the #MeToo movement in a series of interview promoting his latest film Downsizing.

In one interview with Business Insider, Damon bemoaned that men like him who aren't predators in Hollywood.

'We're in this watershed moment, and it's great, but I think one thing that's not being talked about is there are a whole s**tload of guys - the preponderance of men I've worked with - who don't do this kind of thing...I don't do that, and most of the people I know don't do that,' he said.

In another interview with ABC's Peter Travers, Damon said it was important to recognize that there is a spectrum of offenses.

'I do believe that there's a spectrum of behavior, right? And we're going to have to figure - you know, there's a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation.

'Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn't be conflated, right?' he said.

Damon's remarks were not well received online, and he was later a no show at the December 18 premiere of Downsizing.

Even his ex-girlfriend Minnie Driver knocked him for the comments.

'Good God, seriously?' Driver tweeted in response to his claim.

The mother-of-one said: 'You don't get to be hierarchical with abuse. And you don't get to tell women that because some guy only showed them their penis their pain isn't as great as a woman who was raped.'

Driver's career took off following the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, written by Damon and Ben Affleck and produced by Harvey Weinstein, whose accusers launched the current wave of scandals sweeping Hollywood.

Actress Alyssa Milano also criticized Damon on Twitter, writing: 'Dear Matt Damon, It's the micro that makes the macro.'

'We are in a 'culture of outrage' because the magnitude of rage is, in fact, overtly outrageous. And it is righteous.'

'We are not outraged because someone grabbed our asses in a picture. We are outraged because we were made to feel this was normal. We are outraged because we have been gaslighted. We are outraged because we were silenced for so long.'

Alyssa went on to compare the 'spectrum' to stages of cancer, in that some are more treatable than others but it's still the same disease.

Because of his close working relationship with Weinstein, Damon has been a part of the conversation in the #MeToo movement from the very beginning.

Shortly after the two exposes that brought down Weinstien were published, Damon was accused by The Wrap's Sharon Waxman of trying to get a story about Weinstein's sexual misconduct killed several years ago.

Damon denied the claim in a statement Deadline Hollywood, in which he claimed to never have known about Weinstein's behavior.

'I did five or six movies with Harvey. I never saw this. I think a lot of actors have come out and said, everybodys saying we all knew. Thats not true. This type of predation happens behind closed doors, and out of public view.

'If there was ever an event that I was at and Harvey was doing this kind of thing and I didnt see it, then I am so deeply sorry, because I would have stopped it. And I will peel my eyes back now, father than I ever have, to look for this type of behavior,' he said.

One of Weinstein's accusers, Rose McGowan, questioned how ignorant Damon could have been considering his long working relationship with Weinstein.

Later, Damon backtracked and admitted that he had heard of at least one accusation.

He said he knew that there was history between Weinstein and his The Talented Mr Ripley co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, who dated his lifelong friend Ben Affleck.

'I knew the story about Gwyneth from Ben [Affleck] because he was with her after Brad [Pitt] and so I knew that story,' Damon said in a GMA interview in October.

'But I was working with Gwyneth and with Harvey on [the 1999 film "The Talented Mr.] Ripley."

He then added: ' I never talked to Gwyneth about it but Ben told me that whatever or agreement they had come to there was an understanding ... and he treated her incredibly respectfully. Always.'
Ricky Whipple (pictured), 29, was arrested on Monday for allegedly starting 11 fires in a California park

A man was arrested on Monday for allegedly starting 11 fires in California.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said deputies arrested, Ricky Whipple, 29, after they received reports of multiple fires.

Deputies responded to the reported fires around 7.45am on Monday at the Glen Helen Regional Park.

A total of 11 fires were started along a three-mile stretch near the regional park and the 15/215 Freeway interchange, according to the department's press release.

'After each fire was started, Whipple ran through a series a storm drain tunnels underneath the freeways to elude capture from the deputies,' the press release said.

Authorities were able to locate Whipple with the assistance of a helicopter as he walked through the dense brush near Cajon Boulevard and Kenwood Avenue, which was in close proximity of the last fire.

Whipple was detained at the scene without incident.

At the different fire sites, several items of evidence were located that connected Whipple to the fires.

He was charged with aggravated arson and booked into the Central Detention Center.

The fires burned dry vegetation and caused a multi-jurisdictional response from fire crews with the San Bernardino County Fire Department, Cal Fire, and the US Forest Service.

All the fires were contained and extinguished.

However, fire crews spent several hours cooling down hot spots to prevent additional fire damage.

Whipple is being held on $250,000 bail and he's scheduled for court on January 17.

The fires burned dry vegetation and caused a multi-jurisdictional response from fire crews with the San Bernardino County Fire Department, Cal Fire (pictured), and the US Forest Service. All the fires were contained and extinguished
Selma Blair has claimed that disgraced filmmaker James Toback once threatened to murder her and gauge my eyes out.

The actress is among hundreds of women who have accused Toback of sexually assaulting or harassing them since the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in October.

Blair, 45, originally only agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, saying she feared for her life after Toback warned he'd kill her if she told anyone he'd assaulted her.

But when Toback claimed his accusers were lying, the actress decided to take the incredibly brave step to speak out.

'I had literally been afraid for 17 years of James Toback who threatened to murder me,' she told the hosts of The Talk on Monday.

Selma Blair (left) has claimed that disgraced filmmaker James Toback (right) once threatened to murder her and gauge my eyes out

She said that the 73-year-old screenwriter had threatened to 'put cement shoes on [me] and gouge my eyes out with a Bic pen if I ever told anybody' about the alleged assault.

Blair told Vanity Fair in October how her representatives arranged for her to meet Toback in 1999 to discuss an upcoming project he'd written called Harvard Man.

The Cruel Intentions star said that she had declined to meet the director in his hotel room, and arranged to meet him in the hotel restaurant. But when she sat down at the table to wait for him, the hostess approached her saying Toback couldn't come down and wanted to meet her in his room.

'I had literally been afraid for 17 years of James Toback who threatened to murder me,' she told the hosts of The Talk on Monday

She told Sharon Osborne that the 73-year-old screenwriter had threatened to 'put cement shoes on [me] and gouge my eyes out with a Bic pen if I ever told anybody' about the alleged assault

Feeling 'ratted' she went to Toback's room, where he started grilling her about her family, before boasting he could have her father killed, she told the magazine.

After about 40 minutes, she said the Two Guys and a Girl director ordered her to take her clothes off.

'I need you to do this monologue naked,' she says he told her.

'I said, Why would my character need to be naked? She is a lawyer in a courtroom.

'He said, Because I need to see how your body moves. How comfortable you are with your body. This is where I start training you.

Blair said she agreed to take off her sweater but felt 'ashamed'. Meanwhile Toback commented that she needed 'a lot of work.'

She claims she was making to leave when he sat down on the bed and told her she had to talk to him, before asking: '"Would you f**k me?"'

Blair said she told him 'no' but he blocked the door and told her she couldn't leave 'until I have release.'

She refused to have sex but she says Toback said he would 'rub up against your leg. You have to pinch my nipples. And you have to look into my eyes."'

In October, the LA Times published an investigation that saw 38 women accusing Toback of sexual misconduct, with 31 going on the record. Since then, both Selma Blair (left) and Rachel McAdams (right), who have both now detailed times they were harassed at the hands of the 72-year-old after being invited to an audition at his hotel room

The actress says when it was over, he threatened her.

'He told me, There is a girl who went against me. She was going to talk about something I did. I am going to tell you, and this is a promise, if she ever tells anybody, no matter how much time she thinks went by, I have people who will pull up in a car, kidnap her, and throw her in the Hudson River with cement blocks on her feet. You understand what Im talking about, right?

Blair said she only ever told two people about what happened, her boyfriend who she made promise not to tell anyone else, and she also told her manager, after he said Toback wanted to see her again, that the director was 'vile' and not to send any more women to him.

On Monday, Blair said that when women began accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment, she felt the alleged Toback incident 'weighing on me.'

But it wasn't until she saw Toback's name trending on Twitter, after he called his accusers 'lying c***suckers' that she finally decided to speak out under her own name.

'I said if I could be a bigger voice, then I will,' she added.

Toback is now under investigation by the LAPD and the Los Angeles district attorney.

Blair's story has been echoed by countless other women including actress Rachel McAdams.

Julianne Moore (left) revealed on Twitter that she ran into Toback early in her career while walking home in New York City, claiming he tried to pick her up twice. Natalie Morales (right) added her voice to the chorus in response to a tweet from journalist Glenn Whipp, who broke the story, writing: 'Glenn add one more. Exact same playbook by James Toback when I encountered him near Central Park'

Both actresses have said the assaults took place when they were at the beginning of their careers and were offered a role in the upcoming movie Harvard Man - which came out in 2001 and ended up starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Joey Lauren Adams.

And despite the difficulties involved in bringing historic allegations against someone accused of sexual assault or harassment, Blair hopes that her alleged attacker will end up behind bars.

'I do think James Toback belongs in jail I would hope that he would be found guilty,' said Blair, who has one child, Arthur Saint Bleick, with fashion designer Jason Bleick. The couple split in 2012. She is divorced Ahmet Zappa, son of musician Frank Zappa in 2006 after two years.

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that the number of women accusing Toback of sexual harassment or assault has jumped to 395.

In October, the LA Times published an investigation that saw 38 women, including Blair, accusing Toback of sexual misconduct, with 31 going on the record.

Since that initial story ran in late October, 357 women contacted Times reporter Glenn Whipp, sharing stories of the writer-director approaching them on the streets of Manhattan and Los Angeles, on trains and airplanes.

According to the Los Angeles Times, 395 women have made accusations of sexual misconduct against Toback (pictured, May 2017)

Most of the accounts involved Toback telling them he wanted to cast them in a movie, which often led to a range of unwanted sexual advances and actions.

Toback has also denied all of the subsequent allegations on multiple occasions.

Toback, who received an Oscar nomination for writing 'Bugsy,' has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women. Many of the women said Toback had promised them stardom and their meetings would end with sexual questions and Toback masturbating in front of them or simulating sexual intercourse with them.

Julianne Moore revealed on Twitter that she ran into Toback early in her career while walking home in New York City, claiming he tried to pick her up twice.

Natalie Morales added her voice to the chorus in response to a tweet from journalist Glenn Whipp, who broke the story, writing: 'Glenn add one more. Exact same playbook by James Toback when I encountered him near Central Park.'
They say that a dog is man's best friend - but, in this case, he's baby's best friend too.

Kernel, a one-year-old Great Dane, was seen making friends with another one-year-old - but on two legs - at a pet store in Brighton, Massachusetts, on January 9.

Held on a leash by his owner, Alyssa, the 150lb pooch is seen nuzzling a blonde toddler and licking the top of his head, as the baby put his hands up and smiles.

Kernel, a one-year-old Great Dane, was seen making friends with a one-year-old toddler at a pet store in Brighton, Massachusetts, on January 9

The toddler holds up his hands and smiles after the dog nuzzles him and licks the top of his head

Alyssa, the owner of Kernel, asks the toddler if he would like to pet the 150lb pooch

'You like that?' Alyssa asks the toddler as she records the video.

'Yeah,' the toddler replies.

She then asks: 'Yeah? You want to pet him?'

The blonde little boy smiles and walks a few steps forward as he goes to pet the black-and-white canine.

'Remember, nice and gentle with the dogs,' a man, presumably the boy's father, encourages off-camera.

Alyssa then tugs on the leash encourages her pet: 'Say hi, Kernel.'

The toddler lets out a laugh as he pets Kernel for the first time.

'Remember, nice and gentle with the dogs,' a man, presumably the boy's father, encourages off-camera

The blonde-haired baby laughs and gently strokes Kernel's stomach before giving the camera a puzzled look

@KernelTheGreatDane has more than 56,000 followers. Owner Alyssa (pictured), who is a professional photographer, she chronicles day-to-day-life with the canine

Off-screen, a woman, presumably the toddler's mother says: 'I know, it's different when the kisses come from above! They come from a different angle.'

The baby then gently strokes Kernel's stomach before giving the camera a puzzled look.

Alyssa shared the video to her Instagram, where it has been viewed more than 155,000 times.

She captioned the video: 'LOVE IS OUR ACTIONS, LOVE IS GIVING ALL WE CAN, EVEN IF IT'S JUST THE BIGGER SLICE OF CAKE. LOVE IS UNDERSTANDING WE HAVE THE POWER TO HURT ONE ANOTHER, BUT WE ARE GOING TO DO EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO MAKE SURE WE DON'T. #LoveThyNeighbor #OhMyHeart #ThatBabyLaughTho.'

@KernelTheGreatDane has more than 56,000 followers. The account is full of videos and pictures snapped of the dog by owner Alyssa, who is a professional photographer, as she chronicles day-to-day-life with the pooch.
A British ISIS hacker and husband of infamous terrorist Sally Jones taught fanatics how to build bombs as they plotted to bring down the Statue of Liberty.

New Yorkers Munther Omar Saleh, 21, and Fareed Mumuni, 22, are due to be sentenced after admitting to planning a terror attack in February last year.

Court documents reveal the would-be murderers were in communication with Junaid Hussain, a notorious Islamist geek who was jailed for hacking Tony Blair's accounts in 2012.

Court documents reveal the would-be murderers were in communication with Junaid Hussain (left), a notorious Islamist geek who was jailed for hacking Tony Blair's accounts in 2012. He was married to Sally Jones (right)

Saleh believed the Statue of Liberty to have a 'very weak point' which could be targeted with bombs, forcing the symbol of hope to collapse on 'mushrikeen' [non-Muslims] below

Hussain, from Birmingham, was killed by a US drone strike in Syria in 2015 aged 21.

His wife, Jones, was 45 when he died. Known as the 'White Widow', she was killed two years later in another American strike.

But court documents show that in 2015 - months before his death - Saleh and Mumuni were receiving instructions from Hussain, Newsweek reports.

Saleh believed the Statue of Liberty to have a 'very weak point' which could be targeted with bombs, forcing the symbol of hope to collapse on 'mushrikeen' [non-Muslims] below.

Hussain's wife, Jones (pictured), was 45 when he died. She was killed two years later in another American strike

The duo also considered hitting Times Square, an 'easier' target, as well as 'simultaneous attacks all around NYC' if they could find the manpower.

Hussain provided him with instructions on how to build a pressure cooker bomb to facilitate the attack.

Saleh and Mumuni were arrested in June 2015 and their murderous plans foiled.

When they were arrested, they ran towards FBI vehicles bearing knives.
A couple who returned to their home after renting it to a female tenant were left horrified to find the property lying in ruin.

Elaine and Andy Maiden returned earlier this month to their home in Armadale, in Perth's south-east, to find it left in an unlivable state, 7 News reported.

The pair had been working interstate for two years, during which time their home's kitchen had been damaged, lighting fixtures removed and carpet soiled.

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Elaine and Andy Maiden (pictured) have been left heartbroken after finding their five-bedroom home in Armadale, in Perth's south-east, left in an unlivable state by their female tenant

The pair had been working interstate for two years, during which time their beloved home's (pictured) kitchen had been damaged, lighting fixtures removed and carpet soiled

Copper piping was also ripped from the wall, and a massive junk-pile left in a tin shed in the backyard.

The destruction has left the married couple counting their costs as they attempt to return the home to a liveable condition.

'The whole lot, I've got to pay for this. I've got to pay for a skip [bins], I don't know how many skips it will take,' Mr Maiden said on Tuesday.

He added: 'To come back to this is heartbreaking.'

His wife Elaine broke down in tears after seeing the horrific state of their once-family home.

The destruction has left the married couple counting their costs as they attempt to return the home (pictured before the tenancy) to a liveable condition

The five-bedroom home (pictured before the tenancy) once boasted a clean and tidy interior

'It still upsets me, this is our home. It's just horrible.' Mrs Maiden said.

Mr and Mrs Maiden last received a condition report in April, saying the tenant was taking reasonably good care of the property, 7 News reported.

The tenant moved out just months later in July, leaving the Maidens with a massive repair bill they are struggling to afford.

Now the Maidens have been forced to rent, as they don't have the money to demolish or rebuild the home, and are still paying off their mortgage.

Mr and Mrs Maiden last received a condition report in April, saying the tenant was taking reasonably good care of the property (pictured)
Police in Minnesota are losing hope for a woman who has been missing for eleven days, after her boyfriend was arrested with burn wounds to his face nearly 700 miles away in Arkansas.

Cristina Prodan, 27, was reported missing from the town of Edina on January 5. Five days later, her troubled boyfriend, Joseph Porter, was arrested in Jacksonville, Arkansas for theft.

Police spokesman Kaylin Eidsness told the Star Tribune on Monday that additional charges against Porter, in connection to his girlfriend's disappearance, could come as early as Tuesday.

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Cristina Prodan, 27 (left), was reported missing from Edina, Minnesota on January 5, a few days after taking her abusive boyfriend, Joseph Porter (right), back. Porter was arrested in Arkansas five days after she went missing, with burns on his face

Prodan's mother Livia says her daughter invited Porter to move in with her in October after the two met online.

Soon after they started living together, Porter allegedly became abusive, and Prodan eventually took out a restraining order against them.

On December 28, Porter pleaded guilty to violating the order, and he was esntenced to time served.

Prodan's mother says police have told her they believe her daughter is dead

Prodan invited Porter to move in with her in her apartment (above) in Edina, Minnesota in October, after neeting him online

Soon after, he got back together with Prodan and she went missing just a few days later.

Last week, Livia Prodan told WCCO that local police had told her they believed her daughter was dead.

Porter (pictured in a mugshot last month) allegedly became abusive and Porter took out a restraining order against him

'The deputies told me that they are looking for the body, but I don't know if they find it or not,' the mother told Fox 9 on Monday.

Livia says she warned her daughter away from Porter.

'She felt in love with him - she wanted to get married,' the mother said. 'I told her, "He doesn't love you, he just came to you to steal from you - he's homeless, he doesn't work."'

Porter has a lengthy criminal record with arrests for battery, burglary, and property damage in Arkansas, where he also lived.

He was also the subject of another no-contact order with another woman in Hennepin County,Minnesota in 2014.

In one case, discovered by WCCO, a girlfriend wrote that Porter 'beat her unconscious...and killed her dog violently.'
The girlfriend of a man accused of killing a Chinese graduate student wore a wire for two weeks to help police catch him, it has been revealed.

Brendt Christensen, 28, is accused of kidnapping and killing scholar Yingying Zhang after allegedly kidnapping her on June 9 last year.

She vanished after telling friends she was going to sign an apartment lease near the University of Illinois where she was studying.

For weeks, police suspected Christensen but had no evidence to arrest him.

Brendt Christensen's girlfriend, who has not been named, was wearing a wire in this photograph. It was taken at a vigil for missing student Yingying Zhang, three weeks after she went missing. He is now charged with killing her

In court on Tuesday, his lawyers however revealed that his girlfriend, who he was filmed attending a vigil to help find Zhang after she went missing, wore a wire to record hours of their conversations in the weeks which followed her disappearance.

Among the conversations was one in which Christensen allegedly confessed to the killing and described how Zhang, 26, fought back when he attacked her.

He is also said to have described his 'perfect victim' by pointing them out in the crowd at the vigil where he was filmed walking hand in hand with the woman.

Christensen's lawyers did not reveal how the FBI contacted his girlfriend.

They pleaded with a judge to not allow the taped conversations into evidence at his trial, claiming the girlfriend was pressured into wearing the wire because she feared charges herself.

Yingying Zhang, 26, was last seen on June 9 last year. Her body has never been found

On one occasion, she was apparently so nervous about wearing it in front of him that she fainted, his lawyers claimed.

Christensen also allegedly tried to lure another student into his car on the day Zhang went missing.

That student told investigators that he pretended he was a cop to try to get her into his vehicle. She identified him through photographs shown to her by police.

Zhang's body has never been found. Her death shocked her relatives in China who believed she would be safe in the small campus town where she spent most of her time.

Christensen is also married. It is not clear if he and his wife, who has not been identified, are estranged.

His lawyers are asking for his trial to be moved to Chicago, claiming the case was so high profile that he has no chance of a fair trial.

According to the audio obtained by Christensen's girlfriend, he talked about his 'ideal victim' and described how Zhang (right on the last day she was seen alive) fought back when he killed her

Christensen is awaiting trial on charges of kidnapping causing death. He could face the death penalty if convicted

Zhang's family traveled to the US from her native China after she disappeared.

Zhang's distraught family in China are demanding answers and say they cannot move on until they know what happened to her

Her grieving father was still in the country in November last year after authorities said she was presumed dead.

He walked the route to her apartment from campus every day, he said, because it gave him comfort.

At the time, her mother said: 'We don't know where she is, and I don't know how to spend the rest of my life without my daughter.

'I can't really sleep well at night. I often dream of my daughter, and she's right there with me.

'I want to ask the mother of the suspect, please talk to her son and ask him what he did to my daughter. Where is she now? I want to know the answer.'

The FBI previously said they had obtained 'audio surveillance' from the vigil which Christensen attended.

They did not disclose that it was recorded by his girlfriend.

He is charged with kidnapping resulting in death, which carries the potential of the death penalty on conviction.


Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden is likely to step down just before the release of a report examining the collisions involving the USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain last summer

The top Navy commander of America's surface warfare forces in the Pacific is expected to resign under pressure this week over two accidents last year that cost the lives of 17 sailors at sea, it was reported on Tuesday.

Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden is likely to step down just before the release of a report examining the circumstances of the collisions involving Naval destroyers Fitzgerald and McCain last summer, Defense News reported.

The report is expected to be a damning one which will include recommendations for a series of corrective steps, including Rowden's removal from his position.

Ten sailors aboard the guided missile destroyer USS John McCain died when it collided with a tanker east of the Straits of Malacca and Singapore on August 21.

Its sister ship, the USS Fitzgerald, almost sank off the Japanese coast on June 17 after colliding with a container ship. Seven crew members died.

Admiral James Caldwell, who is the director of the navy's nuclear reactors, has been tasked by the military with investigating the incidents and determining which disciplinary actions are necessary.

Ten sailors aboard the guided missile destroyer USS John McCain died when it collided with a tanker east of the Straits of Malacca and Singapore on August 21

As head of surface forces since August 2014, Rowden is responsible for setting policy and overseeing the manning, training, and equipping of surface ships.

Rowden is expected to be replaced by Rear Admiral Richard Brown, the current commander of Naval Personnel Command in Millington, Tennessee.

Last week, Rowden announced he would step down from his post.

By resigning this week, he essentially moved up his resignation by a few weeks.

Rowden is not the only senior officer who is likely to pay the price for the collisions in the Pacific.

In September, Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Scott Swift announced his retirement after he was passed over to lead the US Pacific Command.

Its sister ship, the USS Fitzgerald, almost sank off the Japanese coast on June 17 after colliding with a container ship. Seven crew members died

The commanding officers of the Fitzgerald and McCain  Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William Moran and Commander Alfredo J. Sanchez, respectively  were fired from their posts last year.

The Fitzgerald and the McCain are part of the US Navy's 7th Fleet, which patrols the waters around the Korean Peninsula, Russia, and China.

The three-star officer who commanded the 7th Fleet, Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, was dismissed.

Senior officers in the chain of commands of both ships were also dismissed from their jobs.

In November, naval investigators said the two crashes in the Asia Pacific region were caused by preventable errors by the sailors on board the ships.

The accidents raised questions about Navy training and the pace of operations, prompted a Congressional hearing and the removal of a number of officers.

'Both of these accidents were preventable and the respective investigations found multiple failures by watch standers that contributed to the incidents,' Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson said.

The report found that no single person could be blamed for the accidents, but broadly the crews were underprepared, there was ineffective command and control, and a lack of training.

Navy officials say some changes have been made since the crashes. Now, Navy vessels are required to turn on their identification system in busy sea lanes, something that was not mandatory previously.
Council bosses have paved the way for what is thought to be Britain's first ever buffer zone banning protesters from gathering outside an abortion clinic.

Pro-life campaigners have been accused of 'intimidating and harassing' women as they make their way in and out of the Marie Stopes clinic in Ealing, west London.

A group called the Good Counsel Network holds daily vigils outside the centre in which it displays anti-abortion banners.

Tonight, Ealing Council's cabinet unanimously voted to begin a public consultation on whether to introduce a public space protection order (PSPO) outside the clinic.

nti-abortion protesters continue a vigil outside the Marie Stopes Abortion Clinic in October

Councillor Binda Rai told the meeting that the protests were forcing vulnerable women seeking a legal treatment to face 'emotional hijacking at the point of access'.

Ms Rai said: 'The PSPO outside a Marie Stopes clinic is unprecedented nationally. We know that other councils are watching what we do.'

The council were forced to act after 3,593 residents signed a petition calling for a buffer zone banning protesters from congregating outside the clinic.

It comes after hundreds wrote to the council complaining that the pro-life campaigners were 'intimidating and harassing' women.

More than 300 people wrote to the authority describing the pro-life protesters as 'intimidating and harassing'.

The earliest that the eight-week public consultation could begin is January 29.

A council spokesman said a decision on whether or not to implement a PSPO will only be made once the consultation process has been completed.

Marie Stopes UK managing director Richard Bentley noted that 'a number of local authorities' are keeping a close eye on what is happening in Ealing while others including Birmingham and Portsmouth are 'actively exploring' how to increase protection for women in their areas.

Placards and banners in support of a Public Space Protection Order are placed outside the Marie Stopes Abortion Clinic by a pro-choice group

Describing the situation outside clinics as 'harassment', he said: 'The majority of women who arrive at our clinics have already had a consultation with a trained healthcare professional in which they have talked through their options and have come to a decision that's right for them.

'Strangers harassing them as they enter and leave the clinic does nothing to change that. All it does is upset women on what can already be a difficult day.'

Katherine O'Brien, of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, suggested that trying to negotiate or compromise with anti-abortion protesters has not worked.

She said: 'Tonight's decision will have implications outside of this one London borough. A number of councils are currently considering how to tackle anti-abortion activity, and this vote makes it clear that a public space protection order, creating a protest-free zone around clinics, is the best way to proceed on a local level.

'However, while Ealing Council's action is clearly significant, anti-abortion clinic harassment is a national problem in need of a national solution.'
A 46-year-old man has been bitten by a police dog after he allegedly threatened officers with an axe in Melbourne's north-west overnight.

Police were called to Rye Court in Delahey just after midnight following reports of a neighbourhood dispute between two men, Nine News reported.

The man was arrested with the help of the dog squad after he allegedly made threats towards his neighbour while armed with the weapon.

A man remains in police custody after allegedly threatening officers with an axe in Melbourne

One of the men allegedly lunged towards officers with the dangerous object and was subsequently attacked by a police dog.

He was immediately taken to hospital for an injury sustained during the arrest.

The man remained in police custody Wednesday morning with charges yet to be laid.
A car has become wedged between two trucks on a busy Melbourne road after a horror crash which has thrown peak-hour traffic into chaos.

A man in his 40s was rushed to hospital with head and leg injuries following the smash in Truganina on Wednesday morning.

Emergency crews rushed to the intersection of Robinsons Road and Calarco Drive to find the utility stuck between the trucks at about 6.30am.

A car has become wedged between two trucks on a busy Melbourne road after a horror crash which has thrown peak-hour traffic into chaos

The man was taken to The Alfred hospital in a serious condition, as was a woman who sustained leg injuries, The Age reported.

The crash has caused major delays and commuters have been urged to avoid the area.

'All lanes closed southbound on Robinsons Rd near the Deer Park Bypass and the right lane is also closed northbound, due to a collision,' VicTraffic tweeted.

'Emergency services are on site. Heavy delays in the area. Please avoid it and seek an alternative route.'
Libby Purves (pictured) said that the BBC 'clings on' to stars such as Gary Lineker and Graham Norton

Broadcaster Libby Purves has branded male BBC presenters 'vain and greedy' as she blasted the corporation's 'craven fear of losing talent' for driving pay to 'insane' levels.

The former Radio 4 presenter said that the corporation 'clings on' to stars including Graham Norton and Gary Lineker 'like frightened toddlers to their teddies' and fail to 'hunt widely' for alternative presenters.

She accused BBC bosses of shying away from telling the highest-paid stars that their salaries will shrink because they are concerned about them quitting.

Having said that she would like to see director-general Lord Hall making it clear that top stars are replaceable, she told Radio Times: 'That this never happens is because of two things.

'One is that managers like to talk of 'handling multi-million-pound budgets', because that makes their own inflated pay seem good value.

'The other is a craven fear of losing 'talent', and a failure to hunt widely for more. They get fixed on the idea that there can only ever be one Norton or Winkleman or Feltz or Lineker.

'They cling on, like frightened toddlers to their teddies. In fluffy showbiz it's a bit understandable. But news and good documentaries aren't showbiz.'

Miss Purves, who hosted her final episode of Midweek on Radio 4 last March after more than 30 years, also spoke of Carrie Gracie's high-profile resignation as the BBC's China Editor in protest of unequal pay.

Referring to a series of tweets written by Newsnight presenter Evan Davies last week in light of Miss Gracie's resignation, Miss Purves said: 'Evan Davis tweeted over Gracie, 'I don't think the idea that there should be equal pay for the same work makes sense in showbiz. No junior actor working alongside Tom Cruise should expect to get the same pay.'

BBC 'Today' program presenter John Timpson with the two women in his life, wife Pat Timpson (left) and his co-presenter Libby Purves (right) in 1959

The former Radio 4 presenter mentioned BBC stars such as Claudia Winkleman and Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker (pictured)

'Mate, you're not in showbiz! It may be harsh to say, but nobody wants you on a red carpet! You're an economist who did a bit of Today!'

Branding the BBC's wounds from the pay gap 'self-harm', she said she believes there are many highly-paid employees, including Today presenter John Humphrys, who would do their job for lower pay.

Describing the situation as 'awful', Miss Purves said: 'None of it had to happen. Some complain that the pay gap exists because women don't negotiate.

'I would say that it's more about men being vain and greedy. With few exceptions (mainly in the shiny-floor-and-spangles world, inhabited by, for example, Claudia Winkleman) it's men who drive pay to insane levels.

'It's men, not women, who flick their carefully tended hair and purr, like a L'Oreal ad, 'Because I'm worth it!'

'I told one 400k colleague that he was overpaid. He said, 'It's because I came from newspapers when they paid a lot, so the BBC had to match it.' 'Why?' I asked, and he sidled away to talk to someone richer.

'But really, why? He can't act, sing or dance, isn't pretty and  until briefed  knows no more than hundreds of other journalists.'

Carrie Gracie (pictured) resigned as the BBC's China Editor in protest of unequal pay
Wendy Martinez thought the Turpins were the perfect family

Four of the children living in the California house of horrors were seen less than two months ago looking very thin and very albino, a neighbor has said.

Housewife Wendy Martinez, 41, who lives in a home behind the single-story ranch-style property, told DailyMail.com she saw four of the children kneeling in the front yard late at night at the end of October.

She said the quartet looked emaciated and pale, and appeared to have been instructed not to respond when she tried to say hello to them.

It was about 9pm at night and we came around right here and at the gate, we saw four children inside, Martinez said.

They were on their knees, four little kids, and they were just rolling on the grass. It was odd at that time of night.

Their mother was in the archway, I just remember the mother in the archway, and I said, hi. There was like no movement, not even to look over to see whos saying hi.

No movement, like if they were told not to speak to anybody. The mom, no movement at all.

Asked whether she thought the children needed help, she told DailyMail.com: Honestly, I didnt see like they needed help.

They were in their yard. It was awkward that it was at 9pm at night but they were in their yard.

David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested Sunday after 13 adults and children aged between two and 29 were found inside their four-bedroom Perris home.

Some of the children had been shackled to their beds and, cops said, were being held in a foul-smelling room.

The Turpins purchased the house, which sits on a quiet well-to-do street, for $351,000 in August 2014  later registering it as a school.

Sitting within a new development, the house had been a model home and was, said Dennis Cooke, 61, already tricked out with custom fittings when they moved in.

Cooke, who works at Home Depot in Perris, said he had been shown around the property before the Turpins moved in, adding: This one was very beautiful, it was already tricked out with custom fittings, the backyard done, the landscaping done.

But he said the spacious four-bedroom home is nowhere near large enough for 15 occupants, telling DailyMail.com: Oh no, no. Absolutely not. I would say a normal family, if they had six children, it could be adequate but 13, no. absolutely not.

Neighbor Dennis Cooke did not the think the Turpins' 'beautiful' home was big enough to house 13 children

Although the Turpins were understood to be running a school from the house, neighbors said they saw no sign of parents arriving to drop off their children  and most said they had no idea that a young family lived in the property.

You know what, I drive past this way every day but Ive never seen the family or anything, said nurse Janeece Calhoun, 21. Never anybody coming in or out.

Neighbor Michelle Walls, 47, added: You would think you would have heard them. In our neighborhood, kids are usually out playing, shooting hoops. Going to the park.

Im surprised I never saw them because most kids need to go outside and play.

Martinez says she last saw a member of the family a month ago, when she spotted one of the couples teenage daughters drive past in a red Volkswagen Jetta, which was seen parked outside the home today.

She said: One of the girls was coming in in the red Jetta. They were in and out. I think it was one of the girls, I dont know which one it was, but as I was going out, she was coming in. Shed been out.

Martinez added: Its weird  you never know whats going on. Theyve got three cars and that [mini]van. They move it, theres no cobwebs.

Theyre mobile. I dont understand why they would wait so long to say something. Looking at their pictures, they seemed like the perfect family.
Researchers in Iceland have reconstructed the partial genome of a remarkable man who died in 1827, after escaping slavery and becoming the first person of African heritage to live in the Nordic country.

The whereabouts of Hans Jonatans remains are unknown  but, using DNA samples from 182 of his descendants, geneticists with deCODE have traced his family back to distinct areas of West Africa.

The study reconstructs Jonatans maternal genome, revealing where his mother or family before her were likely abducted from to be sold into the slave trade.

The whereabouts of Hans Jonatans remains are unknown  but, using DNA samples from 182 of his descendants, geneticists with deCODE have traced his family back to distinct areas of West Africa. Some of his descendants are pictured above

'Using these data, we reconstructed 38% of HJs maternal genome and inferred that his mother was from the region spanned by Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon, the team wrote in the journal Nature Genetics.

Jonatans story rose to international fame after the publication of the biography, The Man Who Stole Himself.

He was born into slavery on the island of St Croix in 1784.

While there are some uncertainties about his father, its thought he was born to a white Dane named Hans Gram, who was a plantation secretary.

His mother was a house slave named Emilia Regina.

WHO WAS HANS JONATAN? THE INCREDIBLE LIFE OF ESCAPED SLAVE REVEALED Hans Jonatan was born into slavery in 1784 on a sugar plantation in St. Croix, a Danish colony in the Caribbean. His story rose to international fame after the publication of the biography, The Man Who Stole Himself. There are no pictures of Hans Jonatan, and the wherabouts of his remains are unknown. His grandson is pictured While there are some uncertainties about his father, its thought he was a white Dane named Hans Gram, who was a secretary on one of the islands plantations. His mother was a house slave named Emilia Regina. Eventually, the plantation owner returned to Denmark and took the two with him  but, slavery was illegal in the country. Jonatan fought for the Danish navy and later declared himself a free man, according to New Scientist. After a court battle, however, a judge ruled in 1802 that he should be sent back to the Danish West Indies to return to slavery. To avoid this fate, Jonatan escaped to Iceland, where he was greeted with open arms, Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, told New Scientist. The whereabouts of Hans Jonatans remains are unknown  but, using DNA samples from 182 of his descendants, geneticists with deCODE have traced his family back West Africa, from a region that covers Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Advertisement

Eventually, the plantation owner returned to Denmark and took the two with him  but, slavery was illegal in the country.

Jonatan fought for the Danish navy and later declared himself a free man.

After a court battle, however, a judge ruled in 1802 that he should be sent back to the Danish West Indies to return to slavery.

To avoid this fate, Jonatan escaped to Iceland, where he was greeted with open arms, Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, told New Scientist.

He was the first black man to set foot on Icelandic soil and was received with open arms, showing that racism was not innate in this insular 19th-century community of Icelanders, Stefansson told New Scientist.

According to the study published in Nature Genetics, Hans Jonatan marks the first  and only  presence of African gene migration to Iceland before the 20th century.

'The reconstruction of HJs maternal genome was unusually tractable because chromosome fragments from recent African ancestors are very rare in the Icelandic gene pool,' they wrote.

During his life in Iceland, Jonatan had two children with an Icelandic woman, according to GenomeWeb.

He died in 1827.

The researchers were able to pinpoint 674 African chromosome fragments from the decedents studied. They eventually narrowed this down even further after screening for a number of required criteria. Seven of his decedents are shown above

The researchers used DNA from 182 of his decedents to reconstruct his genome despite not having access to his remains.

Iceland offers a unique opportunity for reconstructing Jonatans genome, as it has a massive database that accounts for nearly half of its population  and, he was the only inhabitant of African heritage for at least 100 years

'The Icelandic population was founded by settlers from Scandinavia and the British Isles around 1,100 years ago, and remained relatively isolated until recently,' the researchers wrote.'

As a result, his DNA was quite distinct.

The researchers were able to pinpoint 674 African chromosome fragments from the decedents studied.

They eventually narrowed this down even further after screening for a number of required criteria.

Using this information, the deCODE team reconstructed 38 percent of Hans Jonatans maternal genome.

The work could be a major breakthrough for genealogists.

'To our knowledge, this study demonstrates the first use of genotype data from contemporary individuals, along with information about their genealogical relationships, to reconstruct a sizeable portion of the genome from a single ancestor born more than 200 years ago,' the team wrote.

'Ancestor genome reconstruction of this kind can be viewed as a virtual ancient DNA study, whereby genotype information is retrieved from a long-dead individual without the need for DNA samples from physical remains.'
Nasa is using X-rays from distant stars to navigate the Milky Way.

Mapping a path in space has long been a challenge for space agencies because there are very few obvious landmarks.

Nasa's new experiment aboard the International Space Station has come up with a solution in the form of a 'cosmic GPS'.

This new type of GPS using X-rays sent out by pulsars, which are spinning stars that emit electromagnetic radiation.

These X-rays guides spacecraft in the same way GPS satellites are used to triangulate a position here on Earth.



The breakthrough could lead to robotic vehicles being sent out into the depths of the galaxy, sending back never before seen images and data.

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Exploring the mind-boggling distances between the stars just took a step closer to becoming a reality, thanks to a 'space GPS' system developed at Nasa. Experts at the space agency have successfully tested the world's first fully autonomous x-ray navigation apparatus

HOW NASA'S SEXTANT NAVIGATION SYSTEM WAS DEMONSTRATED During the demonstration, the Sextant team selected four millisecond pulsar targets and directed Nicer to orient itself so it could detect X-rays within their sweeping beams of light. The millisecond pulsars used by Sextant are so stable that their pulse arrival times can be predicted to microsecond accuracy for years into the future. During the two-day experiment, the payload generated 78 measurements to get timing data. Sextant fed this into specially developed onboard algorithms to autonomously stitch together a navigational solution that revealed the location of Nicer in its orbit around Earth as a space station payload. The team compared that solution against location data gathered by Nicer's onboard GPS receiver. The goal was to demonstrate that the system could locate Nicer within a 10-mile radius as the space station sped around Earth at slightly more than 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h). Within eight hours of starting the experiment on November 9, the system converged on a location within the targeted range of 10 miles and remained well below that threshold for the rest of the experiment In fact, a 'good portion' of the data showed positions that were accurate to within three miles, according to the Nasa team. Advertisement

Pulsar emit X-rays from their poles.

Whenever their poles point toward us, we see a pulse of X-ray light, like a 'cosmic lighthouse'.

The new GPS, dubbed SEXTANT is designed to detect these X-ray signals from relatively close pulsars.

SEXTANT Is attached to the ISS, and the timings of the pulsar signals changes, depending on the position of the space station.

This mirrors how the Global Positioning System (GPS), provides positioning, navigation, and timing services to users on Earth with its constellation of 24 operating satellites.

GPS is able to locate a receiver's position by measuring distance, using the travel time of radio signals between three satellites to 'triangulate' where it is coming from.

The technology was developed at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

It uses the 52 X-ray telescopes and detectors that make up the Neutron-star Interior Composition Explorer (Nicer).

Nasa first demonstrated the technology in November, but has only just made the results public.

Project Manager Jason Mitchell, an aerospace technologist at Nasa, said: 'This demonstration is a breakthrough for future deep space exploration.

'As the first to demonstrate X-ray navigation fully autonomously and in real-time in space, we are now leading the way.'

During the demonstration, the Sextant team selected four millisecond pulsar targets and directed Nicer to orient itself so it could detect X-rays within their sweeping beams of light.

The millisecond pulsars used by Sextant are so stable that their pulse arrival times can be predicted to microsecond accuracy for years into the future.

During the two-day experiment, the payload generated 78 measurements to get timing data.

Sextant fed this into specially developed onboard algorithms to autonomously stitch together a navigational solution that revealed the location of Nicer in its orbit around Earth as a space station payload.

The team compared that solution against location data gathered by Nicer's onboard GPS receiver.



The experimental new system, called Sextant, uses the Nicer mirror assemblies on the International space station to gather data on pulsars

Pulsars (artist's impression) are spinning stars that emit electromagnetic radiation, including the X-rays used by the apparatus

The Nicer observatory, about the size of a washing machine, is currently studying neutron stars and their rapidly pulsating relatives, called pulsars

The goal was to demonstrate that the system could locate Nicer within a 10-mile radius as the space station sped around Earth at slightly more than 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h).

Within eight hours of starting the experiment on November 9, the system converged on a location within the targeted range of 10 miles and remained well below that threshold for the rest of the experiment

In fact, a 'good portion' of the data showed positions that were accurate to within three miles, according to the Nasa team.

WHAT ARE PULSARS? Pulsars are essentially rotating, highly magnatised neutron stars. These stars are made of matter much more densely packed than normal and which give the entire star a density comparable to an atomic nucleus. The diameter of our sun would shrink to less than 18 miles if it was that dense. These neutron stars also have extremely strong magnetic fields which accelerate charged particles. These give off radiation in a cone shaped beam which sweep across the sky like the light from a lighthouse as the star rotates. When the beam sweeps over earth, it becomes visible as a pulsar, producing light that cycles every few seconds to just a few milliseconds. Their rotational period is so stable that some astronomers use it to calibrate instruments and have proposed using it to synchronise clocks. British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar. Since then other types of pulsars that emit x-rays and gamma rays have also been spotted. Advertisement

Nasa will now focus on updating and fine-tuning both flight and ground software in preparation for a second experiment later in 2018.

The ultimate goal, which may take years to realise, is to develop detectors and other hardware to make pulsar-based navigation readily available on future spacecraft.

Teams will focus on reducing the size, weight, and power requirements and improving the sensitivity of the instruments.

A version to support human spaceflight may also be developed.
A simple brain scan can now determine whether or not you have a creative mind.

Scientists have found a pattern of neural activity that marks out people who are good at generating original ideas, such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

Experts could one day target the brain regions responsible using a 'creativity pill' to make people more imaginative, according to one researcher.

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A simple brain scan can now determine whether or not you have a creative mind. Scientists have found a pattern of neural activity that marks out people who are good at generating original ideas, such as skilled artists and musicians (stock image)

WHAT THEY FOUND The study found distinct brain patterns in both the most and least creative thinkers they studied. In highly original thinkers, activity between three brain regions was particularly strong. These included the default mode network, which is linked to spontaneous thinking, and the executive control network, which lights up when we focus our thoughts. Dr Beaty told MailOnline: 'Interestingly, these brain regions do not usually work together. This suggests that the creative brain might be "wired" differently.' The third, known as the salience network, helps us to prioritise what best deserves our attention in a given moment. 'Our findings suggest that creativity involves an optimal balance between spontaneous and controlled aspects of thinking,' Dr Beaty said. 'Spontaneous brainstorming is important, and it may lead to creative insights on its own. 'But many initial ideas are not the best, so we often need to evaluate and modify them to ensure they fit the creative goal at hand.' Advertisement

The international team of scientists, led by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, found three areas of the brain linked to creative thought.

They discovered that innovative thinkers had stronger connections between these three regions than those who were less imaginative.

Lead researcher Dr Roger Beaty, a psychologist at Harvard, told MailOnline: 'Creativity is often defined as the ability to come up with new and useful ideas.

'Previous studies largely measured activation of specific brain regions - which brain areas "light up" when people think creatively.

'In this study, we were interested in understanding how these different regions communicate with one another during creative thought.'

Dr Beaty teamed up with colleagues in China and Austria to take brain scans of 163 people - including musicians, artists and scientists - while they performed creative tasks.

While laying in an MRI machine, participants were given 12 seconds to come up with an original use for an object that flashed up on screen, such as a knife or sock.

'Just thinking about new and unusual ways to use these [objects] has been shown to be a valid way of [measuring] creative thinking,' Dr Beaty told Live Science.

For example, while an unimaginative participant might see a sock and give 'covering feet' as a potential use, a creative one may answer 'a water filtration system'.

Three independent scorers rated each answer, and these marks were then compared to the MRI scans.

The study found distinct brain patterns in both the most and least creative thinkers they studied.

Late Apple founder Steve Jobs was described as a 'visionary and creative genius' for his work in revolutionising consumer technology

The scientists found three areas of the brain linked to creative thought. In future, scientists could target these regions to promote original thinking using drugs or magnetic brain stimulation (stock image)

A CREATIVITY PILL? Researchers found that activity between three brain regions is particularly strong in creative thinkers. In future, scientists could target these areas to promote original thought using drugs or magnetic brain stimulation. Dr Beaty told MailOnline: 'Traditional training in different domains like creative writing may function in part to enhance connectivity within this network. 'Other cognitive training and non-invasive brain stimulation methods might also be useful for facilitating creative thought. 'But I think we're a long way off from a creativity pill.' Advertisement

In highly original thinkers, activity between three brain regions was particularly strong.

These included the default mode network, which is linked to spontaneous thinking, and the executive control network, which lights up when we focus our thoughts.

Dr Beaty told MailOnline: 'Interestingly, these brain regions do not usually work together. This suggests that the creative brain might be "wired" differently.'

The third, known as the salience network, helps us to prioritise what best deserves our attention in a given moment.

'Our findings suggest that creativity involves an optimal balance between spontaneous and controlled aspects of thinking,' Dr Beaty said.

'Spontaneous brainstorming is important, and it may lead to creative insights on its own. But many initial ideas are not the best, so we often need to evaluate and modify them to ensure they fit the creative goal at hand.'

In future, scientists could target these areas of the brain to promote original thought using drugs or magnetic brain stimulation.

Dr Beaty told MailOnline: 'Traditional training in different domains like creative writing may function in part to enhance connectivity within this network.

'Other cognitive training and non-invasive brain stimulation methods might also be useful for facilitating creative thought. But I think we're a long way off from a creativity pill.'
Mount Etna is known as one of the most powerful volcanoes on the planet, but now one researcher thinks it may not be a 'real' volcano after all.

Despite the tonnes of molten rock it spews across the island of Sicily, Etna also produces around 7 million tonnes of steam, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide every year.

As a result, one scientist claims the mountain is more like a giant hot spring than a 'true volcano'.

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Mount Etna is the highest volcano in Europe and measures 3,330 metres (10,926 feet). It spewed around 70 million tonnes of lava onto the island of Sicily in 2011 and also produces around 7 million tonnes of steam, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide every year

MOUNT ETNA Etna, at 3,330 metres (10,926 feet), is the highest volcano in mainland Europe. The volcano is one of the most active in the world. It produces around 7 million tonnes of CO2, water and sulphur dioxide every year. In 2011, it spewed nearly 70 million tonnes of lava. The last time Etna posed a serious threat to villages on its slopes was in 1992, when lava streams headed towards Zafferana, a town of 7,000 people. In a spectacular operation, Italian and US soldiers used controlled explosions to divert the flow. Advertisement

Professor Carmelo Ferlito, from the University of Catania in Sicily, studied the volcano and how it is fuelled, according to a report in the New Scientist.

It is commonly believed that the water, CO2 and sulphur dioxide produced from Etna's eruptions are released from magma as it rises to the surface.

Professor Ferlito says that for this to be true, Etna would need to erupt ten times more lava than it currently does.

Another theory that tries to account for the large amounts of gas produced states that the gas escapes before the lava reaches the surface and then the lava retreats back into the Earth.

This constant flux caused by the magma produces a 'breathing' affect, as the crust rises and falls with the movement of the lava.

To maintain the output of gases though, this would require an injection of more than 10,000 kg of magma every second.

This would 'inflate the volcano like a children's balloon', Professor Ferlito says.

This constant flux of the mountain produces a 'breathing' affect, as the crust rises and falls with the movement of the magma beneath. This animation was captured by NASA and shows the movement of the Earth around the volcano

Professor Ferlito's research focuses around the idea that the amount of different materials found is not explained by current theories.

The study suggests that the chamber that feeds the volcano doesn't just hold magma, instead it has lots of carbon dioxide, water and sulphur dioxide

'Only 30 per cent is molten rock,' says professor Ferlito.

Such a system is closer to a hot spring than to a volcano.

The source of the water to feed the eruptions could come from the water-rich pockets inside the Earth, according to professor Ferlito.

In his research paper, he also points to the growing evidence of a huge amount of water in the Earth's mantle - the section of the Earth below the crust.

Research published last year says that there is as much water here as in all of the Earth's oceans combined.

Dr Kayla Iacovino, a volcanologist from Arizona State University told New Scientist the idea is 'inventive'.

Dr Iacovino proposed an alternative theory in 2015 that suggests the gas comes from deep within the Earth as magma churns around producing gas.

This paper was published in Earth-Science Reviews.
An out-of-control space station put in orbit by China will come crashing back to the planet in the next few weeks, revised estimates say.

The Tiangong-1 space station, which is hurtling towards Earth carrying a 'highly toxic chemical, will likely hit sometime between March and April.

Agencies around the world have been monitoring the doomed craft's descent, with three separate predictions issued in recent days.

While most of it will burn up during re-entry, around 10 to 40 per cent of the satellite is expected to survive as debris, and some parts may contain dangerous hydrazine.

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An out-of-control space station put in orbit by China will come crashing back to the planet in the next three months, revised estimates say. The Tiangong-1 space station, which is hurtling towards Earth, will likely hit sometime between March and April.

CHINA'S PREDICTIONS FOR THE FATE OF TIANGONG-1 Recent speculation from industry experts has claimed that the space station is out of control. It was originally expected to re-enter in late 2017. Chinese officials said on January 8 that it should break down in the atmosphere some time between January 2018 and March 2018. They also responded to previous claims that the space shuttle will embark on an uncontrolled re-entry and could land in highly populated areas. They say that the remaining wreckage will land in a 'satellite graveyard' - an area of the South Pacific ocean commonly used by Russian and US space agencies to dump debris. Advertisement

Experts from the European Space Agency (ESA), based in Paris, are among those tracking Tiangong-1, which means 'heavenly palace'.

Tiangong-1's average orbit has dipped from 289.1 kilometres (179 miles) to 281.3 km (174 miles) since December 2017, according to China's space agency.

ESA issued an updated prediction of its re-entry date on January 12, giving a current estimated window between March 17 and April 21.

These are the most precise predictions currently available, although the agency admits this is 'highly variable'.

Website Satflare, which provides online 3D tracking of more than 15,000 satellites, has calculated what it thinks are the chances of the space station entering the atmosphere during the next three months.

According to its analysis of orbital elements gathered during the last months, the re-enter may occur in March (20 per cent), in April (60 per cent) or in May 2018 (20 per cent).

These predictions may also change as new orbital measurements will be available.

Aerospace Corp, a non-profit corporation based in El Segundo, California, which provides technical guidance and advice on all aspects of space missions, has also issued its own forecast.

It says Tiangong-1 will re-enter the planet's atmosphere in mid to late March, with wiggle room of two weeks either side of this timeframe.

It added that people should not be worried about being hit by debris.

In a written statement, a company spokesman said: 'When considering the worst-case locations, the probability that a specific person will be struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.

While a precise landing location remains unclear, ESA has provided the latitudes between which Tiangong-1 is likely to land  and countries at risk include Spain, Italy, Turkey, India and parts of the US. ESA says no fragments will fall higher than 43N or further south than 43S

Agencies around the world have been monitoring the doomed craft's descent, with three separate predictions issued in recent days. Experts from the European Space Agency give a current estimated re-entry window of between March 17 and April 21

Website Satflare has calculated odds of re-entry in March (20 per cent), in April (60 per cent) and in May 2018 (20 per cent)

Aerospace Corp, a US non-profit corporation which provides technical guidance and advice on all aspects of space missions, says Tiangong-1 will re-enter the planet's atmosphere in mid to late March, with wiggle room of two weeks either side of this timeframe

'In the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris.

'Only one person has ever been recorded as being hit by a piece of space debris and, fortunately, she was not injured.'

On September 14, 2016, China made an official statement predicting Tiangong-1 would reenter the atmosphere in the latter half of 2017.

Experts from Aerospace's Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (Cords) have been studying the space station and in November updated their predictions for its uncontrolled re-entry.

WARNING OVER 'HIGHLY TOXIC' CHEMICAL ONBOARD CHINA'S TIANGONG-1 SPACE STATION A 'highly-toxic' corrosive chemical could land on Earth when parts of an out-of-control Chinese space station crash into our planet. The chemical, called hydrazine, is used in rocket fuel and long-term exposure is believed to cause cancer in humans. It is being carried aboard the Tiangong-1 space station which is hurtling towards Earth. The warning over exposure to the chemical came from Aerospace Corp, a non-profit corporation based in El Segundo, California, which provides technical guidance and advice on all aspects of space missions. Hydrazine is a colourless, oily liquid or sometimes white crystalline compound with a very highly reactive base. A 'highly-toxic' corrosive chemical could be spread over the planet when a Chinese space station crashes to Earth, experts have warned. The substance, called hydrazine, is used in rocket fuel and is believed to cause cancer in humans (stock image) It has a number of industrial, agricultural and military uses, including in rocket fuel. Symptoms of short-term exposure to high levels of hydrazine include irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, dizziness, headache, nausea, pulmonary edema, seizures, and coma, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Long-term exposure can also damage the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system in humans. The liquid is corrosive and may produce dermatitis from skin contact in humans and animals. Increased incidences of lung, nasal cavity, and liver tumours have been observed in rodents exposed to hydrazine. The EPA has classified hydrazine as a Group B2, a probable human carcinogen. Advertisement

This placed the date sometime in March 2018, but more recent estimates have narrowed this window further.

While a precise landing location remains unclear, ESA calculated the latitudes between which Tiangong-1 is likely to land.

Countries at risk include Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, India and parts of the US.

While most of the space station will break up, parts of flaming debris could land on Earth, experts claim.

ESA announced that it was hosting an international campaign to monitor the re-entry of Tiangong-1 early last year.

The Tiangong-1 spacecraft launched in 2011, with the aim of using the craft to set up a larger space station.

China's first space station, Tiangong-1, has been out of control since September 2016, and now experts have predicted when and where it will come crashing back down to Earth

The craft is now at an altitude of less than 300 kilometres (186 miles) in an orbit that is decaying, forcing it to make an uncontrolled re-entry.

Holger Krag, head of ESA's Space Debris Office, said: 'Owing to the geometry of the station's orbit, we can already exclude the possibility that any fragments will fall over any spot further north than 43N or further south than 43S.

'This means that re-entry may take place over any spot on Earth between these latitudes, which includes several European countries, for example.

'The date, time and geographic footprint of the re-entry can only be predicted with large uncertainties.

WHAT IS THE TIANGONG-1 SPACE STATION? The vehicle is 10.4 metres long and has a main diameter of 3.35 metres. It has a liftoff mass of 8,506 kilograms and provides 15 cubic metres of pressurised volume Tiangong-1 is China's first Space Station Module. The vehicle was the nation's first step towards its ultimate goal of developing, building, and operating a large Space Station as a permanent human presence in Low Earth Orbit. The module was launched on September 29, 2012. Tiangong-1 features flight-proven components of Chinese Shenzhou Spacecraft as well as new technology. The module consists of three sections: the aft service module, a transition section and the habitable orbital module. The vehicle is 10.4 metres long and has a main diameter of 3.35 metres. It has a liftoff mass of 8,506 kilograms and provides 15 cubic metres of pressurized volume. Advertisement

'Even shortly before re-entry, only a very large time and geographical window can be estimated.'

Much of the spacecraft is expected to burn up in the atmosphere upon re-entry.

But owing to the station's mass and construction materials, there is a possibility that some portions of it will survive and reach the surface.

In the history of spaceflight, no casualties due to falling space debris have ever been confirmed.

The Chinese space agency has been tracking the space station (pictured before it was launched in 2011), and vowed to issue warnings if there are any potential collisions imminent. But not everyone is convinced by this
Federal ocean managers say it might be time to move the East Coast population of the world's largest turtle from the United States' list of endangered animals.

An arm of the NOAA has received a petition from a fishing group asking that the Northwest Atlantic Ocean's leatherback sea turtles be listed as 'threatened,' but not endangered, under the Endangered Species Act.

The giant reptiles, which can weigh 2,000 pounds, would remain protected under federal law, but their status would be moved down a notch.

Federal ocean managers say it might be time to move the East Coast population of the world's largest turtle from the United States' list of endangered animals. Leatherbacks live all over the world's oceans and have been listed as endangered by the U.S. since 1970

DEBATE OVER LEATHER BACK SEA TURTLES Leatherbacks live all over the world's oceans and have been listed as endangered by the U.S. since 1970. An arm of the NOAA has now received a petition from a fishing group asking that the Northwest Atlantic Ocean's leatherback sea turtles be listed as 'threatened,' but not endangered, under the Endangered Species Act. Deciding whether the listing should be changed will require determining the stability of the population, said Jennifer Schultz, a fisheries biologist with NOAA Fisheries. The fishing group that requested the change wants the Northwestern Atlantic's leatherback population to be considered a distinct segment of the population. That segment would include all of the leatherbacks that nest on beaches in the eastern U.S. states. But NOAA Fisheries is going to look at the status of the turtles worldwide, said Angela Somma, chief of endangered species division with NOAA Fisheries. -Associated Press

NOAA officials have said the agency has reviewed the petition from New Jersey-based Blue Water Fishermen's Association and found 'substantial scientific and commercial information' that the move might be warranted.

The agency now has about eight months to make a decision about the status of the turtles.

Leatherbacks live all over the world's oceans and have been listed as endangered by the U.S. since 1970.

Deciding whether the listing should be changed will require determining the stability of the population, said Jennifer Schultz, a fisheries biologist with NOAA Fisheries.

'We'll look at scientific papers, we look at the best available scientific and commercial data,' she said.

'And then we'll say, 'What does the status look like? How are they doing?''

The fishing group that requested the change wants the Northwestern Atlantic's leatherback population to be considered a distinct segment of the population.

That segment would include all of the leatherbacks that nest on beaches in the eastern U.S. states.

But NOAA Fisheries is going to look at the status of the turtles worldwide, said Angela Somma, chief of endangered species division with NOAA Fisheries.

Blue Water Fishermen's Association requested the change of listing in part to spur new research into the status of the leatherback population, said Ernie Panacek, a past president of the organization.

Data about species such as sea turtles and marine mammals play a role in crafting fishing regulations, and fishermen fear the government is using outdated data about leatherbacks, he said.

'I get a little frustrated in the fact that they are making regulations without scientific data in front of them,' he said.

'The more turtles there are, the more interactions you are bound to have with them.'

The giant reptiles, which can weigh 2,000 pounds, would remain protected under federal law, but their status would be moved down a notch

The leatherback sea turtle has been the subject of intense interest from conservation groups over the years.

It's listing as endangered by the U.S. predates the modern Endangered Species Act that was enacted in 1973.

The Costa Rica-based Leatherback Trust, an international nonprofit group, describes them as 'ancient creatures celebrated in creation myths belonging to diverse cultures around the world.'

International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the leatherback sea turtle as 'vulnerable,' which is one notch above 'endangered' on the IUCN's scale.

It's one of the largest reptiles on Earth, feeding mostly on jellyfish, which has left them at risk to plastic in the ocean, which can kill them if they ingest it.

They are also notable for being the deepest diving and most migratory of all sea turtles, and for their lack of a bony shell.

NOAA is collecting information and comments on the subject until Feb. 5.
Alphabet Incs Google said on Tuesday it would add five regions and build three new submarine cables as it expands its infrastructure for cloud customers.

The company, which has invested $30 billion in infrastructure over the past three years, said its Netherlands and Montreal regions will open in the first quarter of 2018, followed by Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong.

Google plans to commission the three subsea cables in 2019, the internet giant said in a blog post.

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The subsea cables include: Curie, a private cable connecting Chile to Los Angeles; Havfrue, a consortium cable connecting the United States to Denmark and Ireland; and Hong Kong-Guam Cable system, a consortium cable interconnecting major subsea communication hubs in Asia

PLCN SUBSEA CABLE In October 2016, Google announced it would be building an 8,000-mile undersea cable across the Pacific Ocean by 2018. The timeline later shifted into 2019. The PLCN will stretch from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. It is an ultra high-capacity system, capable of 120-terabits-per-second. This is twice the capabilities of the Faster cable, which connects the US to Japan. The team says it would be able to support 80 million simultaneous HD video conference calls between Asia and North America. Advertisement

The subsea cables include: Curie, a private cable connecting Chile to Los Angeles; Havfrue, a consortium cable connecting the United States to Denmark and Ireland; and Hong Kong-Guam Cable system, a consortium cable interconnecting major subsea communication hubs in Asia.

Subsea cables form the backbone of the internet by carrying more than 90 percent of the worlds data traffic.

The companies setting up the cables include TE SubCom, a unit of NYSE-listed TE Connectivity Ltd, and Tokyo-listed NEC Corp, Google said.

The company said it has direct investment in 11 cables, including those planned or under construction.

The announcement comes two years after the internet giant revealed its 8,000 undersea cable connecting Los Angeles to Hong Kong would be built across the Pacific Ocean by 2018.

Google says it would add five regions and build three new submarine cables as it expands its infrastructure for cloud customers. Its Netherlands and Montreal regions will open in the first quarter of 2018, followed by Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong.

For the project, Google teamed up with Facebook, Pacific Light Data Communication, and TE SubCom to construct a system thats twice as powerful as the record-holding Faster cable that went live in June, which was said to be 10 million times quicker than a modem.

According to the researchers, the new ultra high-capacity system would be able to support 80 million simultaneous HD video conference calls between Asia and North America, and will bring faster speeds and increased security.

The announcement comes two years after the internet giant revealed its 8,000 undersea cable connecting Los Angeles to Hong Kong would be built across the Pacific Ocean by 2018

Plans for the Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN) were first announced on the Google Cloud Platform Blog.

The cable would be the highest capacity trans-Pacific system, with a capacity of 120 terabits-per-second, and is the sixth undersea cable the Google has taken part in.

From the get-go, PLCN is designed to accommodate evolving infrastructure technology, allowing us to independently choose network equipment and refresh optical technology as it advances, the Google team wrote.

Most importantly, PLCN will bring lower latency, more security, and greater bandwidth to Google users in the APAC region.

The new system will be twice as powerful as the record-holding Faster cable that went live in June, pictured, which was said to be 10 million times quicker than a modem

Another subsea cable system can deliver 60 terabits per second of bandwidth 5,600 miles across the ocean, bringing high speed connection to users in the US and Japan. It has landing points in Oregon, in the US, and Chiba and Mie, in Japan

Along with this, the firm says it will expand Googles reach in Asia for Google Cloud and G Suite users.

Just months prior, Google revealed the completion of its subsea cable system that stretches from the United States to Japan.

The $300 million Faster cable system is backed by six companies, including Google, and runs through the Pacific Ocean from Oregon to Chiba and Mie.

The system currently has a greater total capacity than any other undersea cable, Google SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs Holzle revealed in a blog post.
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Saturns largest moon Titan is a world enshrouded in hazy mystery.

Its said to be Earths toxic twin, with systems of liquid methane that give way to rivers and seas  and, data from the Cassini mission suggests its atmosphere could even be home to molecules that underlie the building blocks of life.

In a stunning throwback image, NASA has revealed another look at Titan, showing the incredible layers of the moons hazy atmosphere.

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The image released today by NASA reveals just how striking the smoggy moons haze truly is, appearing like brushstrokes high above the moon. At the time, Cassini was roughly 20, 556 miles (33,083 kilometers) from Titan

COULD PRIMITIVE LIFE EXIST ON TITAN? Using data collected as Cassini flew through Titan's upper atmosphere, at about 9501300 km (590-807 miles) above the surface, researchers have identified what are known as carbon chain anions. These are thought to be the building blocks of more the more complex compounds that make life possible. Researchers say the data from Cassinis plasma spectrometer (CAPS), suggest the carbon chains seeded larger molecules at Titan, as they were found to dwindle closer to the moon, while precursors to larger aerosols underwent rapid growth. Not only does the discovery suggest Titan may contain molecules that drive prebiotic chemistry, but it could also help to explain how life sprung up on Earth, according to ESA. Advertisement

The breathtaking image was captured in visible light by the Cassini spacecraft back in March 2005, using its wide-angle camera.

At the time, Cassini was roughly 20, 556 miles (33,083 kilometers) from Titan.

Scientists long suspected the presence of Titans atmosphere.

And, in the decades since Voyager made its first detailed observations, insight on the incredible world has only continued to grow.

The image released today by NASA reveals just how striking the smoggy moons haze truly is, appearing like brushstrokes high above the moon.

In this view, individual layers of haze can be distinguished in the upper atmosphere of Titan, Saturns largest moon, NASA explains.

Titans atmosphere features a rich and complex chemistry originating from methane and nitrogen and evolving into complex molecules, eventually forming the smog that surrounds the moon.

In a study released this past summer, scientists investigating Titans atmosphere revealed theyd discovered large quantities of a chemical that could be an important step on the pathway of life.

On Earth, the chemical known as vinyl cyanide is used in the process of creating plastics  but, in the harsh environment of Titan, it could form flexible membrane-like structures similar to those surrounding animal and plant cells.

Its said to be Earths toxic twin, with systems of liquid methane that give way to rivers and seas  and, data from the Cassini mission suggests its atmosphere could even be home to molecules that underlie the building blocks of life. A view of Titan is pictured

The researchers say they have definitively detected the material, and they suspect a large amount of it may even reach the surface.

A separate study revealed the presence of molecules thought to be building-blocks of the complex organic compounds that make life possible.

The surprise find from the NASA/ESA Cassini mission means the massive moon is now a key target in the search for primitive alien lifeforms  and, it could help to explain the reactions that allowed first life to emerge on Earth.

These molecules are thought to be a vital stepping-stone on the way to more complex molecules, and scientists say their presence at Titan suggests the process previously only known to exist in the interstellar medium may actually be universal.

Scientists long suspected the presence of Titans atmosphere. And, in the decades since Voyager made its first detailed observations, insight on the incredible world has only continued to grow

The Cassini mission came to a dramatic conclusion in September 2017, when it plunged directly into Saturns atmosphere.

After 20 years in space, including a seven-year mission extension, Cassinis dramatic finale was no surprise.

The team carefully planned every aspect of its termination, to expend every last bit of its propellant and crash the spacecraft into Saturn itself  where it would burn up in the atmosphere, and ensure it didnt accidentally contaminate the pristine moons Enceladus and Titan, which have shown potential to support microbial life.

Now, scientists are poring through the data to learn more than ever about the ringed planet and its satellites.
If you went been to Venice, Barcelona or Paris last summer and you thought it felt very busy, you were not alone.

Venice and Barcelona were so overcrowded that locals took to the streets to protest at the growing tourist onslaught. And one of the main reasons for the crowds was... China.

The Chinese are joining the queues to enter our favourite tourist places in ever greater numbers. China is finally engaging with the world and, in tourism at least, the effects are phenomenal.

A tourist explores a footbridge in the Thai rainforest. The Chinese are joining the queues to enter our favourite tourist places in ever greater numbers

In just a few years, it has leapt up the league table of tourist-generating nations to first place, with more than 135 million international departures in 2016. Chinas tourists have been increasing in double digits since 2010, and most experts agree that 200 million Chinese will be travelling abroad every year by 2021.

The Chinese are not only travelling abroad in ever greater numbers, theyre spending far more money than other countries (five times as much as the British).

The British and the Americans used to set the pace in international travel: their entrepreneurs led the way in investing in new properties and establishing standards and patterns of growth for international holiday resorts.

But Western domination is history. Now, when major tourist destinations devise their development plans for the future, China is top of the list of the nations they want to attract. Cruise lines are falling over themselves to find a product the Chinese like (its more difficult to find something to their taste than you might think).

Cities such as Venice reach maximum capacity, pressure will grow for measures  almost certainly financial  to limit entry

The growth of tourism from China is also certain to impact on our own foreign travel plans. As cities such as Venice reach maximum capacity, pressure will grow for measures  almost certainly financial  to limit entry.

Faced with this prospect, 2018 is a good time to re-examine your bucket list ambitions. Here are some suggestions

1. If you want to go, go now

If youve long-harboured a desire to visit Venice, Rome and Paris, prioritise plans to go this year. If you thought the queue to get up the Eiffel Tower or Venices Campanile was bad a couple of years ago, imagine what it will be like in two years time.

Already, a visit to any of the most popular cities needs to be planned with military precision to avoid infuriatingly long queues.

Use the internet to get timed entries into mega-popular sights such as the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

The ancient ruins in the city of Pula, one of the smaller cities in the country of Croatia

And we will all have to work harder to find alternatives to the most crowded attractions.

In some cases  such as ascending the Campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore, a short ferry ride across the lagoon from St Marks Square, instead of climbing St Marks Campanile  it is cheaper, better and much less crowded.

If youre visiting the Louvre in Paris, concentrate on seeing a handful of its treasures (probably not the Mona Lisa, unless you have very sharp elbows). Better still, head for another of Pariss lesser-known but equally satisfying museums such as the Rodin Museum on the Boulevard des Invalides.

Specialists offering a range of European city breaks include: Thomas Cook (thomascook.com/holidays/city-breaks/); Kirker Holidays (kirkerholidays.co.uk), which has packages to a range of luxury hotels; and Superbreak (superbreak.com), which offers a range of city breaks from airports around the UK.

2. Follow the fashion of taking special trips

Just going on a foreign holiday used to be sufficiently unusual.

Where you went to or why you went were hardly considered. A beach was a beach: as long as the sun shone, everything was just fine. But as the package holiday business gets close to celebrating its 70th birthday, more and more travellers  especially younger ones  draw up their travel plans with an end in sight.

The joys of beach Thailand have been eclipsed by a desire to discover real Thailand  to take a tour that leads you off the beaten track and shows you the life of ordinary Thais.

This purposeful travel is also luring more senior adventurers who are keen to sign up for voluntourism projects that help developing countries. People are hoping for some sort of life-changing experience.

Buddhist monks are followed by an elephant in Thailand. The joys of beach Thailand have been eclipsed by a desire to discover real Thailand

Now, more than ever, it makes sense to plan a holiday that is likely to take you far from the madding crowd and let you do something to aid disadvantaged people.

InsideAsia Tours (insideasiatours.com) is a specialist company offering tailor-made itineraries to Japan, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Expert Africa (expertafrica.com) is an Africa specialist, offering high-quality, tailor-made trips to Southern and East Africa.

TravelLocal (travellocal.com) is the buy local expert in tailor-made holidays, putting independent travellers in direct contact with tried-and-trusted travel companies in more than 40 destinations worldwide.

For volunteering expeditions, visit eu.earthwatch.org/expeditions.

Village Ways (villageways.com) works with remote communities in Thailand, India, Nepal, Georgia, Ethiopia and Spain.

3. Choose a cruise

One of the most promising ways of avoiding tourist gridlock is the cruise. The current model of Western Mediterranean cruises, which plough a nautical furrow around Barcelona, Pisa and Rome, will have to be revised.

Cruise lines have the potential to open up lesser-known ports: this is already happening on the Adriatic, where Dubrovnik is being challenged by ports such as Pula.

Expect cruises to become more of a learning experience where you split your time between soaking up some sun and learning how to cook or paint.

River cruises are also rapidly gaining more popularity. While they inevitably focus on the likes of Vienna, Budapest and Nuremberg, they can also go to equally charming towns and villages on the Rhine, Danube, Rhone and Douro. There are also cruises that dont involve sailing. Railway journeys led by guides have become more affordable.

Escorted rail holidays are available through Arena Rail Holidays, which offers holidays in Italy, France, Germany, Corsica, Switzerland, Sardinia and Holland. Pictured is a steam train in Germany

Again, while they can include major cities, their particular delight is that they will take you to places off the beaten track  to the Harz mountains of Germany, for example, where steam railways are still alive and well.

Ocean cruise operators include Jules Verne (vjv.com), which offers a range of cruises such as Destination North Pole, island-hopping in the Maldives and In The Wake Of The Vikings, a trip from Britain to Iceland and onwards to the Faroe Islands.

For river cruises, visit Avalon Waterways (avaloncruises.co.uk), APT (aptouring.co.uk), Tauck (tauck.co.uk/river-cruises), Cosmos (cosmos.co.uk) and River Cruise Line (rivercruiseline.co.uk).

Escorted rail holidays are available through Arena Rail Holidays (arena travel.com), which offers holidays in Italy, France, Germany, Corsica, Switzerland, Sardinia and Holland.

McKinlay Kidd (mckinlaykidd.com) offers train trips in England, Scotland and Ireland.

4. Discover Britain

If foreign destinations are becoming more expensive and crowded, stay in Britain and head to places you may have never visited, such as Alnwick Castle, pictured

If foreign destinations are becoming more expensive and crowded, stay in Britain and head to places you may have never visited.

Wales, Scotland and Ireland have attractions to rival the best in the world, and there are wonderful areas of England  the Lake District, Northumbria, North Somerset and the Cotswolds, for example  just a few hours from your front door.

The UK has some of the best hotels and self-catering accommodation in Europe. The weather may not be great  but who really wants a suntan these days?

For self-catering stays, visit cottages.com which has 20,000 properties in the UK. The Eden Hotel Collection (www.edenhotelcollection.com) and Pride Of Britain (prideofbritainhotels.com) offers a range of luxury country house hotels. Laterooms.com offers the largest range of UK hotels.
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Most tourists wanting to bring a souvenir home from the travels opt for fridge magnets, key rings or maybe even a cuddly toy.

But for visitors to the Bolivian captial La Paz, they could pick up llama fetuses, owl feathers, hand-made potions or even dried frogs from the city's famous Witches' Market.

The market, called Mercado de las Brujas, which is perched 11,975 feet above sea level, sees vendors line the streets in a lively area of the city to sell strange and fascinating products.

One of the stalls at the Witches' Market in La Paz, which sells all kinds of products for diverse indigenous rituals

An Aymara woman wearing traditional dress of a bowler hat and wide skirt watches over her stall at the market in Bolivia

One of the most popular items on sale at the market is llama fetus, which is traditionally buried underneath new buildings in Bolivia to ward off evil spirits

Tourists mingle with local women wearing the traditional indigenous dress of bowler hats and wide skirts while men spread cloths out on the ground to read peoples fortunes with coca leaves.

Pre-Christian culture remains strong in Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority, and vendors say there has been a resurgence of interest in traditional beliefs in recent years.

The more exotic offerings, such as dried corpses of wild cats and the feet of vicunas, are no longer sold due to a crackdown by authorities to conserve protected species. But the vendors say they keep them on show to attract tourists.

Some of the souvenirs on offer at the market in La Paz, which is said to be popular with both locals and tourists alike

Dried frogs are especially popular with customers, especially if they have a cigarette hanging out of their mouths

However, llama fetuses are one of the most common purchases because they are believed to ward off bad spirits. Many workmen, for instance, make sure there is one on site to ward off accidents.

Meanwhile, miners make frequent offerings of sweets, alcohol and coca they buy at the market to the gods, to make up for the riches they take from the earth and to keep them safe from the dangers of working in the pit.

Other popular items that sell fast include anything with a frog symbol, and actual dried-up frogs, especially if they have cigarettes hanging out of their mouths.

A street vendor selling traditional Bolivian handcrafts helps a customer who is interested at items at her stall

The market in La Paz is the highest in the world with an elevation of roughly 11,975 feet above sea level

Tourists mingle with local women wearing the traditional indigenous dress of bowler hats and wide skirts while men spread cloths out on the ground to read peoples fortunes with coca leaves

Meanwhile, students wanting help to pass exams snap up traditionally carved stone charms representing owls for wisdom or suns for energy.

Items depicting an entwined couple represent love, tortoises health and condors make for safe journeys.

The Mercado de las Brujas is open everyday from 9.30am to 7pm.
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The 29 best small cities in America for visitors have been revealed in a new influential study.

National Geographic Traveler carried out a detailed survey and consulted with experts to draw up the list, which includes cities such as Columbia in South Carolina being named the best groomed, Kansas City as the most artsy and Santa Cruz the most musically grooviest.

To compile the list, the respected publication worked with destination branding advisor Resonance Consultancy in developing a 'Small Cities Index', a survey that drew from statistics and social media mentions to determine which cities rank highest.

The city of Columbia in South Carolina, which was named one of America's best small cities after being declared the 'best groomed'

Darkness descends over Kansas City in Missouri. The small city was praised for having a big artsy scene that often trends on social media

Louisville, Kentucky, also made the list compiled by National Geographic Traveler after being named one of the 'meatiest cities' with an abundance of butchers, delis and steakhouses

They then split them into fun categories they excelled in, which included the number of green spaces and even Instagrammable moments.

Other categories included most hipster (harboring lots of coffee shops, tattoo parlors, record shops, vintage stores), musically grooviest (music venues, live music, instrument stores), most artsy (art galleries, art supply stores, art schools), best groomed (barber shops, hair salons, hair removal services, cosmetic dentists), meatiest (butchers, delis, steakhouses), most dog friendly (pet sitting, pet stores, pet groomers, dog friendly restaurants) and the sudsiest (breweries).

Other cities to make the ranking were Asheville, named as the most artsy, Charleston, one of the most Instagrammable, Reno, named as dog friendly and Olympia, which was praised for its number of coffee shops.

Louisville was named as one of the 'meatiest' cities, having an array of butchers, delis and steakhouses while Pittsburgh was the 'sudsiest' with an abundance of breweries.

Children enjoy a fairground ride in Santa Cruz, California. The city was named as one of the most 'musically grooviest'

The waterfront in Lakeland, Florida. The city was found to be one of the most dog-friendly in the best 29 small US cities table

Hickory in North Carolina, pictured, was named as being hipster friendly thanks to its coffee shops, tattoo parlors, record shops and vintage stores

George Stone, National Geographic Traveler editor in chief, said: 'At Traveler were passionate about tales of urban renewal, about communities that have collaborated to improve their main streets, about smart cities that have pursued development policies that produce happiness.

'In this article, we report on authentic small cities that each embody a surprising superlative.

'Happy places for locals are also rewarding places for travelers. Our index of small cities on the rise is based on unconventional metrics that we think produce happiness: green spaces, coffee shops, breweries, music venues, Instagrammable moments and puppies!'

The small city of Omaha in Nebraska, pictured, won praise for also being 'musically groovy' thanks to its live music scene

One of the greenest cities on the list was Madison (pictured), Wisconsin. It was praised for its environmental credentials and parks

While Resonance Consultancy President Chris Fair added: 'Every city is unique.

'Our approach to analyzing millions of consumer-generated ratings and reviews to create indexes such as these is an innovative new approach to revealing the characteristics that differentiate one place from another.

'Were excited to be working with National Geographic to share this data and its insights with travelers around the world.'

The results are in the February/March 2018 issue of Traveler magazine, available now on newsstands and online at www.natgeo.com/bestsmallcities.
They say if you want to know a man, walk a mile in his shoes. If you want to know an Amsterdam man, youre probably better off riding a mile on his bike. Bikes are a major part of the citys transportation system. Youll find them chained to bridges, propped up outside shops, and stacked up in multi-story racks outside Central Station. Each one has its own personality, too. Youll see everything from candy-coloured ones with bunting on the handlebars to cycles that look like antiques with battered baskets on the front. Riding a bike in the city will give you a taste of local life. Its easy to hire one or join a bike tour, but before you get on the saddle there are a few things you should know.
In December, he hit the headlines after he was pictured in a furious row with his tearful girlfriend Camilla Thurlow outside a fundraiser they were attending.

Reflecting on the bust-up, Jamie Jewitt, 27, has confessed he blames himself for the tension-filled situation which caused him and his Love Island other half to have a public tete-a-tete.

Speaking to MailOnline ahead of his LDN Talk: Social Media and Me on Wednesday, the Calvin Klein model revealed that his 'high emotions' were influenced by aggressive harassment they face as a couple online but insisted it wasn't solely to blame.

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Reflection: Jamie Jewitt, 27, has confessed he blames himself for the tension-filled situation which caused him and his Love Island other half to have a public tete-a-tete

'Anything can cause an argument,' he began. 'I do really think it was the really subject that I was reading that caused my high emotions, some people write horrible things and I'm not saying that's why or what caused the argument.

'It was our reaction to it that night and how I was feeling that night and the time and the place that more that caused the situation to turn into a row.

Adding: 'Anyone and anything can cause that. It's social media, it's just one of those things.'

Condemning social media harassment, the mental health advocate explained that trolls want to get under their target's skin and get a reaction.

Tempers: Speaking to MailOnline ahead of his LDN Talk: Social Media and Me on Wednesday, the Calvin Klein model revealed that his 'high emotions' were influenced by aggressive harassment they face as a couple online but insisted it wasn't solely to blame

Honest: He added: 'It was our reaction to it that night and how I was feeling that night and the time and the place that more that caused the situation to turn into a row' (Pictured in December at the fundraising event)

He shared: 'I think if you sit down and take everything to heart that was said on there Trolls say the worst possible things you could hear to try and get a reaction. When they get a reaction they say even worse things.

'When you're involved in a subject like that you're emotions are going to run high.

Continuing, he said: 'The things they say are purposely formulated to get a reaction and they're the worst things you could imagine.'

When he hit headlines at the time, he spoke to Metro about how trolls on Twitter and Instagram 'frustrate the hell out of him', and led to their tense clash.

Hitting back: Condemning social media harassment, the mental health advocate explained that trolls want to get under their target's skin and get a reaction

He said: 'The argument started because Camilla gets harassed and I get harassed by people saying all kinds of horrible f****** things on Instagram, and she gets a lot of it, comments and such, and it gets too much.'

Holding Camilla's phone in his hand at the time, the model admitted he caught wind of what his beauty was being called on social media - causing him to erupt into rage, and leading to an argument.

He said: 'I dont want to say what I was calling these people but they frustrate the hell out of me. And I got way too angry,' before adding: 'It was over in seconds and were absolutely fine.'

Now a month on from the argument, Jamie has insisted that the pair have never been stronger as ever after he spent New Year's in Scotland with her family and friends.

Moving on: Now a month on from the argument, Jamie has insisted that the pair have never been stronger as ever after he spent New Year's in Scotland with her family and friends

'Fantastic': He cheerfully shared: 'Oh we're fantastic. We're absolutely fine, we're fantastic. That was all over in a second, it really was'

He cheerfully shared: 'Oh we're fantastic. We're absolutely fine, we're fantastic. That was all over in a second, it really was.'

Camilla and Jamie met in this summer's series of Love Island, when he entered the villa as a late entrant and found happiness with the unlucky-in-love bomb disposal expert.

Five months after the end of the show, on which they finished in second place -missing out on 50,000 prize to Kem Cetinay and Amber Davies, they remain a couple.

He was deemed the perfect gentleman in the house after lavishing her with affection, including shaping her name into avocado on toast on her birthday and staging a La La Land style dance towards the final.

Hitting it off! Camilla and Jamie met in this summer's series of Love Island, when he entered the villa as a late entrant and found happiness with the unlucky-in-love bomb disposal expert

Pipped to the post: Five months after the end of the show, on which they finished in second place -missing out on 50,000 prize to Kem Cetinay and Amber Davies, they remain a couple

Now looking to the future, Jamie is concentrating on his public speaking and philanthropic work with a particular passion on mental health and social media.

The fashion star is set to next tackle the stage at LDN Talks for his Love Island, Social Media, and Me talk which he's set to discuss his own experiences with online platforms and his career.

He added: 'It's my story, how I got into modelling, what it's taught me, my views on the industry and my kind of look inside the industry.

'I find nowadays it's got to a place where it makes people feel inadequate.... It's something I really believe in'.

Jamie will be holding an exclusive in-depth talk at the International Students House on 17th January at 19:30 discussing how social media has affected his life.
He's on the promotional trail for his new film The BBQ.

And Shane Jacobson looked like he might have been spending too much time in front of a barbecue on Monday night.

The Australian actor looked very flushed and red as he attended The BBQ premiere in Perth with My Kitchen Rules' Manu Feildel.

Hes roasting! Shane Jacobson looks very flushed and red at The BBQ event in Perth with My Kitchen Rules' Manu Feildel

The humid summer conditions appeared to have gotten to Shane as he walked the red carpet with his co-star Manu.

The Kenny star was dressed in jeans and a button down shirt, with Manu in a similar ensemble and adding a blazer.

Both men appeared in high spirits as they signed autographs and posed with a barbecue.

Feeling flushed? The humid conditions appeared to have gotten to Shane as he walked the red carpet with his co-star Manu

Happy to be there: Both men appeared in high spirits as they posed with a barbecue

Shane and Manu star together in The BBQ, a Australian comedy about an international barbecuing competition.

Shane and Manu's characters go head to head in the movie, which also stars Magda Szubanski.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Manu said he was over the moon at scoring his first acting role.

Sign here please: Shane autographed a poster of his popular comedy film Kenny

Getting onboard: Meanwhile celebrity chef Manu signed a wooden bread board

Co-stars: Shane and Manu star together in The BBQ, a new Australian comedy about an international barbecuing competition

'For me, I'm pinching myself. It's my first one, so I'm enjoying the ride,' the celebrity chef said.

'It's not a job I thought I would ever get into.

'If someone said to me 10 years ago ''you're going to be in a movie,'' I would have said, ''Yeah right''.'

Rivals: Shane and Manu's characters go head to head in the movie, which also stars Magda Szubanski
She first burst onto screens as Sally Fletcher on Home And Away in 1988.

And Kate Ritchie is getting ready to pop bottles to celebrate the 30 years since she joined the Channel Seven soap.

On Tuesday, the 39-year-old took to Instagram to share the unique story behind the old and tattered bottle of champagne sitting on her book shelf.

'This is the first bottle of bubbly I was ever given!' Kate Ritchie has marked 30 years since joining Channel Seven soap Home And Away by showing off an old and tattered bottle of Carrington champagne sitting on her book shelf

'This is the first bottle of bubbly I was ever given,' the former actress-turned-radio presenter began her post.

'I was nine years old and our neighbours in Campbelltown, George and Michelle Slade, gave it to me as a congratulations for the premiere pilot episode of a little show called Home and Away.'

'It has leaked a little, it still wears the original curling ribbon and I will have had it 30 years this coming Wednesday. It was January 17, 1988,' she added about the affordable, yet sentimental bottle of bubbly.

A bottle of sparkling champagne can last for more than three to four years and should be stored upright and in a cool, dark place, according to Eat By Date.

Sentimental: The former actress-turned-radio presenter, 39, explained to her followers that she was given the bottle by her neighbours to congratulate her on her first episode for the soap back in 1988

Child star: Fans of the actress loved her heartfelt post and reminisced about their first time watching her in the drama, including one who said: 'And as a 38-year-old I still remember sitting down with my mum, dad and sis to watch this episode memories!!'

Fans of the actress loved her heartfelt post and reminisced about the old days, including one who wrote: 'And as a 38-year-old I still remember sitting down with my mum, dad and sis to watch this episode memories!!'

'I remember watching that episode! Congratulations on a long and successful career so far,' another follower added.

Meanwhile friend and co-star Debra Lawrence, who played Pippa Fletcher, wrote: 'I was not to meet you for another 3 years, but when I did, what a jolly good time we all had!!!

'Happy anniversary to the show that changed my life and gave me you as a friend,' the veteran actress added.

Moving on: Kate left Home And Away in 2008 to start a career as a radio presenter with Nova in Adelaide, but returned to the soap five years later to reprise her iconic role as a guest to celebrate for the show's 25th anniversary

Kate left Home And Away in 2008 to start a career as a radio presenter with Nova in Adelaide, but returned to the soap five years later to reprise her iconic role as a guest to celebrate for the show's 25th anniversary.

In 2014, she began hosting the Nova 96.9's drive time program with Tim Blackwell and Marty Sheargold, which she is still at the helm of.

Aside from her professional career, Kate's personal has evolved and blossomed after marrying former NRL star Stuart Webb in 2010, and giving birth to their daughter Mae four years later.

Loved up! Aside from her professional career, Kate's personal has evolved and blossomed after marrying former NRL star Stuart Webb in 2010
She has already been engaged twice before and never been married. Now Jersey Shore star Angelina Pivarnick is giving it another try.

The 31-year-old beauty accepted a proposal from Chris Larangeira on Friday, her rep confirmed to UsWeekly.

He popped the question at his home, presenting her with a large diamond ring. They have known each other for 14 years but their friendship only turned to romance in the past year-and-a-half.

Third time a charm? Jersey Shore star Angelina Pivarnick is engaged. The beauty accepted a proposal from Chris Larangeira on Friday, her rep confirmed to UsWeekly

Nice ice: He presented her with a beautiful diamond ring after an Italian dinner

There is a photo of him down on one knee holding a red box as she looks as if she is about to cry.

The TV star has on a V-neck black top and jeans. His face cannot be seen.

Her best friend Adam Barta took photos of the proposal.

'Ive never seen her so happy,' Barta told the site. 'Shes grown so much, and when I saw Chris get down on one knee, it made me tear up. There was a lot of cheering and clapping.'

Her past: Here she is seen far left with Ronnie Magro, Jenni Farley, Pauly Delvecchio, Nicole Polizzi, Sammi Sweatheart Giancola, Mike Sorrentino and Vinnie Guadagnino on Jersey Shore in 2009

Pretty in pink: With Pauly D and Mike S in another promo photo

The star said she was surprised by the proposal. First they enjoyed their romantic meal then headed back to his home. There she found 'a heart of rose petals with their initials A and C in the middle.'

The pinup told the site: 'The A was first, which I thought was really cute. He proposed and then we laid in the roses.'

She posted a photo of the roses on Instagram. 'Sooo happy @chris_piss_e,' she wrote.

Ring it in: Pivarnick was was previously engaged to David Kovacs in 2011 and Louie Gero in 2016; here she is seen with Gero in NYC in 2016

They were friends for a long time before getting romantic. 'We always liked each other, but I believe God brought us together at the right time,' she said.

This is not her first engagement. Pivarnick was was previously engaged to David Kovacs in 2011 and Louie Gero in 2016.

Pivarnick appeared on the first two seasons of Jersey Shore and now works as an EMT in New York.
He sat alongside Angelina Jolie at last week's Golden Globe Awards.

And Chris Hemsworth certainly bore a striking resemblance to the actress's most famous ex as he stepped out in New York on Monday.

The 33-year-old Australian actor could easily have been mistaken for Brad Pitt with his cropped blonde hair and chiseled jawline as he arrived at ABC studios for an early morning appearance on Good Morning America.

Brad, is that you? Chris Hemsworth sported similarities to Brad Pitt whilst cutting a dapper figure in New York early on Monday morning

Despite it still being dark outside, Chris sported a pair of square sunglasses, the kind often sported by trendy Brad himself.

Looking casual and cool, the Melbourne-born star wore a grey cardigan, dark jeans and a pair of scuffed combat boots which he left decidedly unlaced.

The hunk rugged up against the winter weather by adding a black scarf and stylish camel coat.

Seeing double! Chris bore a striking resemblance to fellow Hollywood heartthrob Brad Pitt (pictured in 1991)

All smiles! Appearing in high spirits, the Hollywood heartthrob flashed a peace sign and even stopped to snap a selfie with a fan

Appearing in high spirits, the Hollywood heartthrob flashed a peace sign and even stopped to snap a selfie with a fan.

Chris appeared on Good Morning America to spruik his latest film, 12 Strong, which also features an appearance from his wife, Elsa Pataky.

The Spanish-born stunner did not join Chris for the morning show interview, staying back in Australia while her husband flew to America for work.

Uncanny! In his latest film 12 Strong (left) Chris bears a striking resemblance to Brad in his film, Fury (right)

Love scene: With life imitating art, Elsa plays Chris' on-screen with, with the two sharing a steamy scene together

Produced by Jerry Bruickheimer, the blockbuster follows a group of special forces agents sent to Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks.

With life imitating art, Elsa and Chris play an on-screen married couple and even share a steamy love scene together.

The film is written by Oscar winner Ted Tally and opens in the US on January 19.

Side by side: Chris sat next to Angelina at the Golden Globes last week
It's a situation most of us dread ever having to be in: running into an ex.

And it's one former Bachelorette-lovebirds-turned-bitter-exes Sam Frost and Sasha Mielczarek very nearly had to endure when the pair attended the same Sam Smith concert at the Sydney Opera House on Monday night.

Sasha took to his Instagram account to share a photo of himself and his date for the night, his mum.

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Ouch! Sasha captioned the photo of him with his mother: 'Wouldn't want anyone else by my side #datenight

In the caption Sasha wrote: 'Judging on how good Mum looks and having a Captain Cook at my melon in this photo, Im starting to think Im adopted!''

Sam meanwhile attended the event with her fellow Home and Away cast mate Ada Nicodemou.

The blonde bombshell went for minimal makeup and wore a flirty white floral gown with gold statement flats, while Ada stole the limelight in a strappy sequined number.

Awkward! Sam attended the event with her fellow Home and Away cast mate Ada Nicodemou, while Sasha showed up with his mum.

Sam also later popped up on fellow Bachelorette Georgia Love's Instagram Stories, with Georgia captioning the cheeky picture: 'The people they seat you next to at these things!'

The blonde bombshell, who has been keeping herself busy filming scenes ahead of her acting debut on Home and Away, can be seen leaning into the TV reporter and beaming at the camera.

All smiles! Sam meanwhile popped up on fellow Bachelorette Georgia Love's Instagram Stories, with Georgia caption the cheeky picture: 'The people they seat you next to at these things!'.

Beach bum: Sam has been keeping herself busy filming scenes ahead of her acting debut on Home and Away

It's not known how far apart Sam and Sasha were sitting, but given the exclusive invite to the Nova Red Room event, it's safe to say there's a good chance the former lovebirds would have known the other was at the venue.

The couple have stayed well away from each other since acrimonious split back in 2016.

Happier times: They dated for 18 months after falling in love on the 2015 season of The Bachelorette.

They dated for 18 months after falling in love on the 2015 season of The Bachelorette.



Not long after calling it quits, Sasha opened up about the toll the couple's breakup took on him, revealing he has been secretly battling mental health issues.

'I suffered in silence,' the 31-year-old told News Corp.

Sasha revealed he had gone through a 'dark period' over the past six months after splitting from Sam.

Struggle street: Both Sam and Sasha revealed they struggled following their break-up

Sam also opened up about having mental health struggles.

The reality TV sweetheart told the Herald Sun that the break up with Sasha combined with the criticism her short-lived radio career received led her to see a psychologist once a week for several months.

'I reached breaking point last year. I was like oh my goodness I am really, really struggling with my mental health,' Sam said.

While Sasha remains single, 28-year-old Sam has since hooked up with an old friend of hers, Dave Bashford.
They both starred in the hit series The Secret Life of Us during the early 2000s.

And Joel Edgerton and Claudia Karvan had a mini reunion of sorts last Saturday, meeting up for a swim.

The two actors and longtime friends met at Sydney's Bondi Beach and were quick to cool off from the scorching temperatures with a swim.

The Sea-cret Life Of Us! Former co-stars Joel Edgerton and Claudia Karvan reunite for a swim at Bondi Beach

Claudia, 45, sizzled as she wore a green bikini which showcased her trim legs and toned stomach.

Going makeup free, the actress flaunted her glowing natural complexion as she cooled off in the water.

Her former Secret Life Of Us co-star Joel, 43,showed off his buff physique while wearing a pair of red boardshorts.

Making onlookers green with envy! Claudia, 45, sizzled as she wore a bikini which showcased her trim legs and toned stomach

Ageless beauty: Claudia looked stunning in the two piece swimsuit

Natural beauty: Going makeup free, the actress flaunted her glowing natural complexion as after cooling off in the water

Sporting a shark tooth necklace, the actor looked happy and relaxed as he emerged from the waves after sampling the water temperature.

Joel and Claudia met up at Bondi Beach last week with a group of friends in a bid to escape the heat.

Both previously starred together in The Secret Life Of Us on Network Ten, which aired from 2001 to 2005.

Cooling off: Joel showed off his buff physique while wearing a pair of red boardshorts

Accessorising: Sporting a shark tooth necklace, the actor looked happy and relaxed as he emerged from the waves after sampling the water temperature

Catching up: Joel was at Bondi Beach with Claudia and a group of friends

New movie: Joel stars alongside Will Smith in new Netflix movie Bright, which has been savaged by critics

The popular series also starred Deborah Mailman, Samuel Johnson and David Tredinnick.

Since appearing on the series Joel has gone on to find success as an actor in Hollywood with roles in The Great Gatsby, Loving and Warrior.

He also stars alongside Will Smith in new Netflix movie Bright, which has been savaged by critics.

Hollywood favourite: After getting his start on Australian TV and theatre Joel has starred in a slew of movies

Star turn: He made a name for himself playing the villain in The Great Gatsby

Down to earth: Despite his success Joel doesn't appear to be interested in being as famous as his A-list co-stars

'Im kind of lucky that it happened slowly. Because Im well off, its fine; I can do what I want': The actor said he is grateful he became famous at an older age

But despite his success Joel doesn't appear to be interested in being as famous as his A-list co-stars.

'Im kind of lucky that it happened slowly. Because Im well off, its fine; I can do what I want,' he told The Monthly in 2013.

'I complain every now and again, but like my brother says, its all high-class problems.'

'I complain every now and again, but like my brother says, its all high-class problems': Joel said he was most

Specs appeal! Joel shaded his eyes behind a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses
He arrived in Australia late last week to promote his new Netflix film, Bright.

And Will Smith is certainly enjoying his time in the country.

After climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge and raving about brunch in Bondi, the 49-year-old took to Instagram late Monday, revealing he had also been 'blessed' to receive a traditional Welcome To Country.

All smiles: Will Smith continued to immerse himself in Australia's culture and traditions, sharing a photo on Monday with an Aboriginal elder who 'blessed' the star with a traditional Welcome To Country

The happy snap showed Will inside Sydney's Allianz stadium, posing alongside Aunty Marg, an Aboriginal elder who performed the protocol which respectfully acknowledges the Indigenous owners of the land.

'Spent the afternoon with Aunty Marg (Aboriginal Elder). We were blessed with a Traditional Welcome To Country Ceremony!' He captioned the photo.

The picture received praise from many of the Men In Black star's 4.9 million followers.

One admirer wrote: 'RESPECT WILL SMITH. Thank you for acknowledging Australia's first Nation People. What a wonderful human being you are.'

Animal encounter: Will's posting came just hours after received a guided tour of Sydney 's Featherdale Wildlife Park

Furry friends! The Oscar-nominee even got to cuddle up to a koala

Another added: 'I bet it was a great thing to experience'.

Will's posting came just hours after received a guided tour of Sydney's Featherdale Wildlife Park, where he got up close with the country's venomous snakes and crocodiles.

The Oscar-nominee even got to cuddle up to a less deadly Australian animal - the famous koala bear.

Business with pleasure: The actor is in the country in order to promote his new Netflix film, Bright

It was the latest excursion for the star, who has been immersing himself in all the country has to offer over the past several days.

On Saturday, Will partook in the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb before enjoying a boat ride around the harbour on Sunday.

He also indulged in another of Australia's greatest cultural traditions- brunch.

The hilarious star revealed that a green pea pancake at Bondi hotspot Porch and Parlour was so delicious that it 'broke him'.
She's a critically acclaimed actress who has taken Hollywood by storm.

And Marion Cotillard turned heads on Monday night as she rubbed shoulders with Diane Kruger and Monica Belluci at the star-studded Cesar - Revelations 2018 party in Paris.

The Academy Award winner looked decades younger than her 42-years as she slipped her incredible physique into a pair of shiny holographic trousers.

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Wow factor: Marion Cotillard (left) turned heads on Monday night as she rubbed shoulders with Diane Kruger and Monica Belluci at the star-studded Cesar - Revelations 2018 party in Pari

Nailing Parisian chic, the French beauty paired the bold high-waisted trousers with a simple black knit.

The screen siren added a boost to her height with pointed black boots and accessorised the edgy look with large diamond earrings.

Marion accentuated her striking looks with a bold rouge lip and braided two small plaits into her wavy blonde tresses.

Ageless beauty: The Academy Award winner looked decades younger than her 42-years as she slipped her incredible physique into a pair of shiny holographic trousers

Daring: Marion's appearance comes after she was seen displaying her incredible physique in the French movie Les Fantomes d'Ismael, which translates to Ismael's Ghosts

The star mingled with Diane Kruger at the event which celebrates film in France.

Diane, 41, looked effortlessly chic in a ruffled white dress which showcased her tiny waist with a neat black bow.

The German-American model turned actress showed off her age-defying beauty with deftly touches of make-up.

Meanwhile Monica Bellucci stunned in a dazzling black suit which highlighted her hourglass frame.

The 53-year-old paired the all-black ensemble with Louboutin heels and a quilted shoulder bag.

Stylish: Nailing Parisian chic, the French beauty paired the bold high-waisted trousers with a simple black knit as she posed with the James Bond actress (left)

Ruffles: Diane, 41, looked effortlessly chic in a ruffled white dress (left) which showcased her tiny waist with a neat black bow while Monica stunned in a dazzling black suit (right)

All things fashion: The actresses posed for a photo with Chanel's president of fashion, Bruno Pavlovsky

Smiles: (L-R) Bruno Pavlovsky, Marion Cotillard, Diane Kruger, Monica Bellucci and Alain Terzian posed for a shot inside the venue

Marion's appearance comes after she was seen displaying her incredible physique in the French movie Les Fantomes d'Ismael, which translates to Ismael's Ghosts.

The actress looked sensational as she stripped off for co-star Mathieu Amalric, who famously starred in 2008's Quantum Of Solace, in the sizzling scene which follows a filmmaker whose life is overturned by the reemergence of an ex.

Marion no doubt sent shockwaves in the movie as she left nothing to the imagination by boldly stripping down and leaving the entirety of her frame on show.

The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May before the theatre release in Russia, in which it was met with mixed reviews.

Marion plays Carlotta Bloom, the ex-wife of Mathieu's character Ismael Vuillard, who vanished mysteriously 20 years previously - leading to a decade of searching for her before he was forced to declare his beloved wife dead.

Stepping out: Diane cut a casual figure when she stepped out in Paris on Tuesday

Wrapping up warm: The star covered up in a khaki coat and skinny jeans
Ant McPartlin and his estranged wife Lisa Armstrong are reportedly battling over the custody of their dog, Hurley.

The TV presenter, 42 - who announced he would be parting ways from the make-up artist to MailOnline on Saturday - will be forced to share ownership of the five-year-old chocolate Labrador in a bid to for an amicable divorce, as alleged by The Sun.

Speaking to the online publication, a source detailed the devastating blow for both parties involved: 'Ant adores Hurley - hes like his child - but obviously so does Lisa who calls him my boy.

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'They always thought they would raise him together': Ant McPartlin, 42, and his estranged wife Lisa Armstrong, 41, are reportedly battling over the custody of their dog, Hurley

Split: The TV presenter announced he would be parting ways from the make-up artist to MailOnline on Saturday

It was continued: 'Its a very sensitive situation because they always thought they would raise him together, but they are currently sharing custody and there will be a formal agreement made in the coming weeks.

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Ant for further comment.

It has also been claimed that Ant is also preparing to give Lisa their West London pad - which is worth 6million and is situated next to best friend, Dec Donnelly.

Speaking of the situation: 'No final decision has been made about the house but Ant moved out last year to allow Lisa to stay there and accepts that it is her choice if she wants to stay' before admitting that it was 'awkward' that Dec lived so nearby.

'Sensitive situation': The TV presenter will be forced to share ownership of the five-year-old chocolate Labrador in a bid to for an amicable divorce, as alleged by The Sun

Speaking of the custody battle, it was continued: 'Its a very sensitive situation because they always thought they would raise him together, but they are currently sharing custody and there will be a formal agreement made in the coming weeks'

'Hurley is like his child': A source detailed the devastating blow for both Ant and his estranged wife involved

And and Lisa's divorce could reportedly cost the ITV star, whose net worth is estimated at 62million, a grand total of 31million.

If it goes ahead, it will be among the largest divorce settlements paid by a UK celebrity in history.

It has also been reported than Declan Donnelly is 'torn' between best friend Ant and Lisa.

A source told The Mirror: 'Dec will always stand by Ant, but over the years he has, naturally, become very good friends with Lisa, and his wife, Ali, is also very close to her.

'Difficult for all concerned': It has also been reported than Declan Donnelly is 'torn' between best friend Ant and Lisa

'He feels very much torn and its a tremendously difficult situation for all concerned.'

Meanwhile, Lisa has expressed her gratitude to fans for showing their support after her split from the TV presenter was confirmed on Saturday.

Breaking her social media silence in the wake of the announcement, the make-up artist 'liked' a number of encouraging tweets from her followers, one of which praised her for being 'classy to the end'.

The 41-year-old has so far remained silent on the split, though she seemed to have found a suitable way to vent her outlook through the messages of her fans.

Staying strong: Meanwhile, Lisa has expressed her gratitude to fans for showing their support after her split from the TV presenter was confirmed on Saturday

High cost: And and Lisa's divorce could reportedly cost the ITV star, whose net worth is estimated at 62million, a grand total of 31million

'Going through difficult times we must always be reminded that better times are ahead,' read one tweet Lisa had 'liked'. 'For a beautiful person like yourself it will be tough but keep your chin up and you will bloom again.'

Another enthused: 'Well I think @lisaAmakeup has stayed classy to the end. She hasn't deserved any of this.i really feel for her. (sic)

'Just no need @antandedec keep stuff private.chin up Lisa.'

'My wife and I would like to wish you well and hope you have your family and friends around you take care you are a lovely lady,' comforted a further fan.

Ant's spokesman confirmed to MailOnline that the spouses had parted ways on Saturday.

'Better times are ahead': The 41-year-old has so far remained silent on the split, though she seemed to have found a suitable way to vent her outlook through the messages of her fans

A statement read: 'In response to the recent speculation in the media, Ant is very sad to announce that, after 11 years, he is ending his marriage to Lisa McPartlin.

'Ant asks for privacy at this difficult time, for both himself, Lisa and their immediate families. No further statement will be made.'

A source close to Ant added to The Sun on Sunday: 'This was a tough decision for Ant but he has to do the right thing for his health. The marriage has effectively been struggling for eight months. He's given it a good go.

They added: 'Ant's big concern in the whole thing is Lisa and making it as easy as possible for her.'

Happier times: Ant and Strictly Come Dancing make-up artist Lisa have known each other for 23 years and tied the knot in 2006

Ant and Strictly Come Dancing make-up artist Lisa have known each other for 23 years and tied the knot in 2006.

Ant has been living apart from partner Lisa, having moved out of the 6million property they share last year following his stint in rehab for an addiction to painkillers.

He had spent the last two months filming in Australia for ITV reality show I'm A Celebrity, but Lisa was unable to join him overseas, due to her commitments to BBC One's Strictly Come Dancing.

At the time, Lisa dismissed claims that this made her 'estranged' from husband Ant, explaining that she had not been out to Australia with him for 10 years.
Actress Helen George has revealed she opted to have an elective caesarean after hearing horror stories about childbirth through her role on Call the Midwife.

Suggesting she felt the need to defend her choice, the 33-year-old insisted she was not too posh to push but rather a caesarean was right for her at the time.

Miss George, who gave birth to her first child four months ago, said that what she had learnt on the BBC drama  which has shown a number of difficult birth scenes  affected her decision.

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Giving birth: Actress Helen George has revealed she opted to have an elective caesarean after hearing horror stories about childbirth through her role on Call the Midwife (second from L)

She added that a caesarean is not the easy way out, as it affects a mothers ability to lift their baby and exercise is restricted.

I havent spoken about this before but I chose to have a C-section [caesarean], she said when asked about her daughter Wrens birth, which was earlier than expected due to complications.

It coincided with the fact that I had to deliver her early, but even without that, I would have gone for an elective caesarean because of what Id learnt on Call the Midwife, she told The Radio Times.

Working on Call the Midwife means that lots of people tell you their horror stories about birth.

Im not against natural birth, Im pro whatever you feel is right for you. Some people may not understand why I elected to have a C-section, but it was right for me at the time.

Candid: Suggesting she felt the need to defend her choice, the 33-year-old insisted she was not too posh to push but rather a caesarean was right for her at the time

Miss George, who gave birth to her first child four months ago, said that what she had learnt on the BBC drama  which has shown a number of difficult birth scenes  affected her decision

Its not because Im too posh to push, its about what I think my body is capable of. Im not good with pain... I faint when I stub my toe.

Not that a C-section is the easy way out. Its a major operation. I have a large scar on my stomach. You cant exercise for a long time and you need help to pick up the baby.

Miss George suffered complications late in her pregnancy, which meant she itched all over her body.

Having been diagnosed with a liver condition called ICP (intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy), which can cause babies to be stillborn because of a build-up of bile in the mothers blood, she had Wren earlier than expected.

Miss George, who plays Nurse Trixie Franklin in Call the Midwife, also hit out at being stereotyped as a dumb blonde during her acting career.

'Some people may not understand': She added that a caesarean is not the easy way out, as it affects a mothers ability to lift their baby and exercise is restricted

Helen continued: Not that a C-section is the easy way out. Its a major operation. I have a large scar on my stomach. You cant exercise for a long time and you need help to pick up the baby

Discussing the parts she is offered, she said: I do get stereotyped as the dumb blonde. A lot of the parts I get offered are accessories to a male character: the blonde girlfriend, the doctors wife, or simply having a romantic scene I mean really, just kill me. But the great thing about Call the Midwife is that the women are the protagonists.

Speaking at a screening for series seven of Call the Midwife, which starts this Sunday [21 Jan], Miss George said it had been 'weird being pregnant while filming a drama about childbirth.

Meanwhile, her partner, Jack Ashton, who is also in the drama  playing Rev Tom Hereward since 2014 - said that having their own baby had enlightened him about the issues tackled in the show.

However, the couple were given no special treatment during Wrens birth, which took place on the NHS at a London hospital.

They said the midwives did not recognise them as being from Call the Midwife until Wren had been delivered.

Ashton said: They didnt [know] until afterwards. They had no idea at the time, and that was just great really. They just treated us like everybody else.
She's the Neighbours starlet who is hoping conquer Hollywood like fellow alumna Margot Robbie.

And Olympia Valance, 25, has teased her departure from the long running Network Ten soap after four years of playing Paige Smith.

Speaking to TV Week, she hinted at that character's departure from the soap likely ties in with the murder of villain Hamish Roche at the end of the 2017 season.

'It will ripple through the entire Erinsborough community': Olympia Valance teases her departure from long-running soap Neighbours as she prepares to try her luck in Hollywood

'I think the fallout from Hamish's death will ripple through the entire Erinsborough community for the first part of the year,' she teased.

Last year saw Paige caught up in a controversial love triangle between Mark Brennan (played by Scott McGregor) and former priest Jack Callahan (played by Andrew Morely).

As a result of the character's relationship with Jack, she became pregnant with his son, Gabe.

'I don't think Paige saw herself as being maternal until she was pushed into this unexpected situation,' she said about her character's change.

In character: Speaking to TV Week, she hinted at that character's departure from the soap likely ties in with the murder of villain Hamish Roche at the end of the 2017 season (pictured as Paige Smith)

'I don't think Paige saw herself as being maternal': Last year saw Paige caught up in a controversial love triangle between Mark Brennan and former priest Jack Callahan. As a result of the character's relationship with Jack, she became pregnant with his son, Gabe

With her final scenes set to be aired in coming episodes, Olympia also gushed over working with and learning from her co-stars, Jackie Woodburne and Kate Kendall, calling them 'incredible people'.

Aside from trying her luck in Los Angeles during pilot season in late January, Olympia recently completed filming British series Ghetto Heaven.

Last year, it was revealed she had signed with US management agency Roar, the same team who represent Chris, Liam and Luke Hemsworth.

'I feel very lucky and very blessed to have been given this chance,' she told The Herald Sun.

Her stepfather, musician Ross Wilson told to the publication that he and the actress' mother Tania will fly out to Los Angeles with her for pilot season in late January.

He also revealed that her final week of filming was very emotional for her: 'I know there will be a few speeches and a lot of tears.'

It was also reported that she 'begged' the producers to not kill off her character, allowing her to allow her to return in the future.

'I never want to be killed off. I honestly love Melbourne, and I love working on Neighbours,' she said in a previously told the Herald Sun.
He arrived in Sydney on Friday ahead of promotional duties for Netflix film Bright.

And Will Smith has made the most of his downtime, taking in the sights of Eastern Suburbs hotspot, Bondi Beach.

After raving about the brunch dish that 'broke' him, the 49-year-old joked that he was 'suing' Australian coffee company, Will & Co, over the use of his name.

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'I'm suing!' Will Smith's extraordinary response after he discovers Australian coffee company Will & Co in a Sydney restaurant

Having visited Bondi eatery Porch and Parlour, Will shared a hilarious photo, while seated at a table.

The Men in Black actor dressed casually in a navy T-shirt gestured to a ceramic coffee cup with Will & Co's signature branding emblazoned on the front.

Beaming for the camera, Will captioned the image playfully: 'I found this coffee company in Australia. Two words: I'm suing.'

Lighthearted: Having visited a Bondi eatery, Will shared a hilarious photo, while seated at a table. Gesturing to a coffee cup with Will & Co's branding on the front, the actor hilariously captioned the image: 'I found this coffee company in Australia. Two words: I'm suing'

Seal of approval: The hilarious post comes after the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star raved about the $19 gourmet brunch dish that 'broke' him. 'Okay...I ABSOLUTELY HATE when people post pictures of food! BUT...this damn Green Pea Pancake at Porch & Parlour in Bondi Beach, Australia...It Broke Me, Y'all,' Will shared with his five million Instagram followers on Saturday

Taking in the sights: Will arrived in Sydney on Friday to promote Netflix film Bright, and has been making the most of his downtime

The hilarious post comes after the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star raved about the $19 gourmet brunch dish that 'broke' him.

'Okay...I ABSOLUTELY HATE when people post pictures of food! BUT...this damn Green Pea Pancake at Porch & Parlour in Bondi Beach, Australia...It Broke Me, Y'all,' Will shared with his five million Instagram followers.

The photo saw the husband of actress Jada Pinkett Smith dining on a generously-sized green pea pancake, served with avocado, snow peas, a poached egg, feta, zucchini and a mint salad.

Plot: Starring alongside Australia's Joel Edgerton, 43, the thriller-fantasy film sees Will star as police officer Daryl Ward, who teams up with rookie Nick Jakoby, played by Joel, and comes face-to-face with a world filled with human and mythical creatures

Will arrived in Sydney on Friday to promote Netflix film Bright, in which he stars alongside Australia's Joel Edgerton, 43.

The thriller-fantasy film sees Will star as police officer Daryl Ward, who teams up with rookie Nick Jakoby, played by Joel, and comes face-to-face with a world filled with human and mythical creatures.

During an appearance on Monday's Sunrise to promote the film, Will admitted that he loves being recognised, as it makes him feel 'safe'.

'When I go somewhere it feels like everyone is my friend,' the sometime rapper told co-hosts David Koch and Samantha Armytage.

Surprising confession: During an appearance on Monday's Sunrise to promote the film, Will admitted that he loves being recognised, as it makes him feel 'safe'

Questioned by the breakfast stars as whether the Hollywood lifestyle ever gets to him, Will shared on-air: 'I love being able to go out in public and getting recognised.'

'It's so funny because we talked about this on set one time (of Netflix film Bright), some people feel imposed upon by being recognised [but] when I go somewhere it feels like everyone is my friend,' Will explained.

'I always will be able to get an ambulance. You know, people will always be willing to help,' the Philadelphia born entertainer added.
He made history last week when he became the first man to have four ribs removed.

And the 'Human Ken Doll' aka Rodrigo Alves paraded the results of his 28,000 procedure as he headed out to lunch in Beverly Hills on Monday.

Clad in a skin-tight pale blue shirt, the 34-year-old appeared over the moon with the results of his latest surgery as he kissed glamorous pal, Sofia Vegas on the cheek.

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Proud: 'Human Ken Doll' aka Rodrigo Alves paraded the results of his 28,000 procedure as he headed out to lunch in Beverly Hills on Monday

Slipping a cream jacket over his surgically-sculpted physique, under which he wore a corset to help make his body smaller, the star ensured all eyes were on him for the outing.

He paired the look with ripped denim jeans and shiny black loafers and accentuated his incredibly smooth complexion with contoured cheeks and ample amounts of highlighter.

Rodrigo had reverted back to his grey locks after recently dying his hair black in a stand against the sexual abuse scandal in Hollywood.

Smooch: Clad in a skin-tight pale blue shirt, the 34-year-old appeared over the moon with the results of his latest surgery as he kissed a glamorous female pal, Sofia Vegas on the cheek

Commanding attention: Slipping a cream jacket over his surgically-sculpted physique, the star ensured all eyes were on him for the outing

The lunch comes after Rodrigo underwent his rib removal operation at the hands of Doctor Michael K. Obeng in Los Angeles, with the surgeon sharing a glimpse of the procedure on his Instagram account.

The star originally wanted to have six ribs removed, but was left frustrated when surgeons refused to perform the full procedure out of fear it may compromise his lungs.

Stylish: He paired the look with ripped denim jeans and shiny black loafers and accentuated his incredibly smooth complexion with contoured cheeks and ample amounts of highlighter

Tiny waist: Posing for the camera, he showed off the results of his surgery

Having fun: Rodrigo cuddled a yorkshire terrier before heading for a spot of lunch

Slimline: Rodrigo, who has spent a whopping 480,000 so far on cosmetic procedures, settled on removing four floating ribs in a 28,000 procedure aimed at achieving a more 'elegant and classic figure'

Curvy: The Human Ken Doll was joined by a busty blonde who showed off her ample assets in a pink minidress

Rodrigo, who has spent a whopping 480,000 so far on cosmetic procedures, settled on removing four floating ribs in a 28,000 procedure aimed at achieving a more 'elegant and classic figure'.

He previously said of the surgery, which was filmed for his new reality show Rodrigo's World: 'My life shall be changed forever as from January 2018 and by summer 2018 I will be looking like a fitness model.'

The Brazilian star can be seen undergoing the procedure on the cosmetic surgeon's Instagram page, unearthed by MailOnline.

Eye-catching: The trio put on quite the show as they paraded their surgically-enhanced figures for their lunch date

Going under the knife again: Last week Rodrigo had four ribs removed, with his surgeon Doctor Michael K. Obeng sharing a glimpse of the procedure on his Instagram account

He previously said of the surgery: 'My life shall be changed forever as from January 2018 and by summer 2018 I will be looking like a fitness model'

Brave: The Brazilian star can be seen undergoing the procedure on the cosmetic surgeon's Instagram page, unearthed by MailOnline

One post was captioned: '0ur first male #RibRemoval @rodrigoalvesuk the verdict is out if Rodrigo is the first gentleman to have his #ribs removed! Watch our #Live #Feed to #Witness #History!!'

A particularly graphic post showed Rodrigo's ribs laid out on the table in front of him as the star delightedly snapped a picture of them.

Rodrigo decided to dye his hair black last Monday in honour of the Time's Up movement - which takes a stand against the recent sexual harassment and abuse scandal in Hollywood.

Dangerous procedure: The 34-year-old star originally wanted to have six ribs removed, but was left frustrated when surgeons refused to perform the full procedure out of fear it may compromise his lungs

Extreme measures: Rodrigo, who has spent a whopping 480,000 so far on cosmetic procedures, settled to remove four floating ribs in a 28,000 procedure for a more 'elegant and classic figure'

Guests attending the Golden Globes last Sunday all wore black to tribute the movement, but Rodrigo missed the memo and turned up in a bright white suit.

Speaking to MailOnline after the show, the TV personality confessed he felt 'awful' about his outfit, and wanted to dye his hair to make up for the blunder.

He said: 'At the Golden Globes, I really turned heads, I mingled with Justin Timberlake and Zach Efron who gave me compliments on my looks and outfit.

'However, 90% of the guests were wearing black. I genuinely didnt have the chance to read the memos and my agents never told me that I had to be wearing black.'

Rodrigo went on to say that he was mortified to overhear TV networks ridiculing his outfit choice, and even his hair, as he stood out so much on the carpet.

He continued: 'I got very embarrassed and upset, I didnt meant to not support or disrespect the cause against sexual harassment.'
She's one of the most sought after models in the world.

And it wasn't hard to see why when Doutzen Kroes attended the Piaget event during the #SIHH2018 in Geneva, Switzerland on Monday night, looking effortlessly glamorous.

The beauty, 32, stunned in silk camisole with sheer lace detailing at the bodice, before changing into a striking teal dress with a thigh-high split.

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Glamorous: Doutzen Kroes attended the Piaget event during the #SIHH2018 in Geneva, Switzerland on Monday night, looking effortlessly glamorous

Doutzen dressed up her slinky top with a smart blazer and black trousers, accessorising with a pendant necklace.

The blonde bombshell wore her hair pinned back from her face in a loose bun and set off her striking features with minimal make-up.

She later emerged in a more glamorous ensemble, rocking a chic long-sleeved dress with a cheeky side-split.

Outfit change: She later emerged in a more glamorous ensemble, rocking a chic long-sleeved dress with a cheeky side-split

Elegant: Doutzen dressed up her slinky top with a smart blazer and black trousers, accessorising with a pendant necklace

The Victoria's Secret star let her hair down loose and upped the glamour with heavier make-up.

Also in attendance at the jewellery bash were the likes of Hollywood star Ryan Gosling and Australian model Shanina Shaik.

Doutzen is fresh from holidaying in Bahia with Sunnery and their children - son Phyllon, 6, and daughter Myllena, three.

Switching things up: The Victoria's Secret star let her hair down loose and upped the glamour with heavier make-up

Smart: Doutzen set off her elegant ensemble with a simple pair of stilettos

However, the family have also been relaxing with Doutzen's best pal Candice Swanepoel and her fiance Hermann Nicoli while away.

Doutzen was even spotted sweetly cradling Candice's blossoming baby bump on the beach last week, as she prepares to welcome her second child.

The duo previously walked in Victoria's Secret shows together, but Doutzen quit in 2015 to focus on her family.

'We built amazing relationships,' she said. 'Whats so great is that there is always someone in the world that I know.

'Every fashion country I go to, there is someone there that I can spend time with.'

Dapper chap: Also in attendance at the jewellery bash were the likes of Ryan Gosling
She's the talented TV journalist best known for hosting Sunday Night.

But it was Monday that saw Melissa Doyle sport a winning look, standing out among celebrity arrivals at Sam Smith's Nova Red Room concert.

The 47-year-old beauty turned heads in a leather dress as she joined a bevvy of stars including Sam Frost, Georgia Love and Richard Wilkins at the Sydney Opera House.

Going hell for leather! Melissa Doyle stood out among celebrity arrivals at Sam Smith's Nova Red Room concert, held at the Sydney Opera House on Monday

Melissa complemented the sleeveless garment with a pair of frilly black heels, leaving her trademark blonde locks flowing freely.

Stunning actress Jessica Marais similarly made for an eye-catching figure as she arrived at the concert.

The Love Child starlet, 32, wore a stylish pair of high-waist flared plants teamed with a demure white button up.

Stylish: Jessica Marais made for an eye-catching figure as she arrived at the concert

A number of other small-screen stars were also seen lining the red carpet, ready to soak up the sound of British singing sensation Sam.

Channel Ten journalist Natarsha Belling stunned in a chic black outfit, while social media star Georgia Love also turned out for the event.

The Today Show's Richard 'Dickie' Wilson looked dapper, bringing his ladylove Virginia Burmeister along for the show.

(Channel) Ten out of ten! Natarsha and Georgia both cut stylish figures at the show

VIP attendees: The Today Show's Richard 'Dickie' Wilson looked dapper, bringing his ladylove Virginia Burmeister along for the show

Meanwhile, a host of Home and Away stars were also invited along to hear Sam serenade the crowds, with the soap's newest arrival Sam Frost holding court.

The newbie cuddled up to her veteran co-star Ada Nicodemou, while stunning Sarah Roberts posed with Caleb Alloway.

Sam seemed so enamoured with her new workmates, that the presence of her ex, Sasha Meilczarek was hardly noticed.

The newbie and the veteran! Home and Away's Sam and Ada already look like they're BFFs

Soap stars: Stunning Sarah Roberts posed with Caleb Alloway ahead of Sam Smith's show

The Bachelorette winner was spotted with his mother Kym at the event.

Also making for a delightful duo were husband and wife Kate Waterhouse and Luke Ricketson.

The stylish journalist and the rugby league legend made a rare public appearance together.

Mum's the word! Sasha brought along a stunning blonde- his own mother Kym

Hot couple alerts! Kate Waterhouse and Luke Ricketson made a rare public appearance, whilst Nova's own Michael Wipfli brought along wife Lisa

Nova's own Michael 'Wippa' Wipfli brought along his stunning wife Lisa, who made for dazzling couple, each sporting stylish outfits.

And, of course, there was no shortage of genetically-blessed models on the red carpet.

Male model twins Jordan and Zac Stenmark were joined by former pageant queen Erin Holland who looked ravenous in red, while blogger Tash Sefton sported double denim.

Genetically blessed: Male model twins Jordan and Zac Stenmark wore stylish looks

Ravenous in red: Former pageant queen Erin Holland looked lovely in a dress that matched the colour of the carpet
They have starred in their first film together after tying the knot seven years ago.

And on Monday, Chris Hemsworth appeared on Good Morning America to promote his new film 12 Strong, which features his wife Elsa Pataky playing his on-screen love interest.

The 34-year-old couldn't help but gush over the mother of his three children.

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'It was like a little holiday away from the kids!' Chris Hemsworth gushed about working with wife Elsa Pataky on their first film together 12 Strong during an appearance on Good Morning America on Monday

The Thor star said that shooting the film in early 2016 had felt like a vacation to him and Elsa.

'It was great, it was like a little holiday away from the kids,' Chris said.

'We left the kids with their grandparents and went off for a few weeks and shot together.

'We've been rehearsing that relationship and that on-screen chemistry for seven years so if we didn't have chemistry, we would've been in trouble.'

Pure bliss! 'It was great, it was like a little holiday,' Chris said when asked how they went working with his wife on the film

On and off-screen romance: 'We've been rehearsing that relationship and that on-screen chemistry for seven years. So if we didn't have chemistry, we would've been in trouble'

And it seems as though Chris' wife Elsa also felt the same way.

Taking to Instagram on Monday, the mother-of-three shared a clip from the film that showcased their on-screen romance.

'7 years of rehearsals to play this part on @12strongmovie,' she captioned.

Synopsis: In the film, Chris plays the role of Captain Mitch Nelson, who has the task of leading his team of 12 soldiers to take down the Taliban

'Hope you will feel the chemistry!'

12 Strong tells the story of the first Special Forces team that's deployed to Afghanistan following the events of 9/11.

In the film, Chris plays the role of Captain Mitch Nelson, who has the task of leading his team of 12 soldiers to take down the Taliban.

Family: Chris and Elsa married in 2010, later welcoming three children, daughter India Rose, five, and twin sons Tristan and Sasha, three

Elsa plays the part of the captain's dutiful wife, who looks after their daughter while he is at war.

Chris and Elsa married in 2010, later welcoming three children, daughter India Rose, five, and twin sons Tristan and Sasha, three.

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,' Chris added.
The pair have fronted Good Morning Britain since 2015 and have been involved with fierce on-screen arguments.

But Susanna Reid confirmed that she is 'genuine friends' with co-host and journalist Piers Morgan, despite their frequent wind-ups.

The 47-year-old presenter made known of her 'combative relationship' with the Sussex native, but insisted that it was all on friendly terms.

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Friendly hosts: Susanna Reid, 47, confirmed that she is 'genuine friends' with co-host and journalist Piers Morgan, 52, despite their frequent wind-ups

Speaking to Radio Times, the former BBC Breakfast host confessed: 'People might say, 'Why cant you two stop spatting?', and I know we have a combative relationship on air, but we are genuine friends'

She continued: 'We understand what winds the other person up. Sometimes he ignores that and continues to wind me up, but hell know when Im upset about something'.

Last week, Piers fell victim of a joke during an episode of Coronation Street.

Candid: The 47-year-old presenter made known of her 'combative relationship' with the Sussex native, but insisted that it was all on friendly terms

The 52-year-old joked that he wasn't best pleased as he confronted the ITV soap over its 'unprovoked attack' during Monday's instalment of Good Morning Britain.

The TV host hit back after last Wednesday's edition saw Eileen Grimshaw, played by actress Sue Cleaver, moan that she 'gets enough of a headache with Piers Morgan'.

Addressing the jibe, Piers accused GMB's showbiz correspondent Richard Arnold of being responsible.

'Where did this attack come from?' Piers Morgan joked that he wasn't best pleased as he confronted about being mocked by Sue Cleaver during an episode of Coronation Street last week

He ranted: 'I couldn't understand where this impromptu and unprovoked attacked came from...

'Then a little part of my brain took me back to Sue Cleaver - who is your best friend! Have you given me zingers in Corrie, Arnold?'

Denying he played any part in the insult, Richard joked that he had only befriended Sue all of these years because he was hoping to get a mention in the soap.

Ouch! The 52-year-old TV host hit back after last Wednesday's instalment saw Eileen Grimshaw moan that she 'gets enough of a headache with Piers Morgan'

He quipped: Twenty-three years I've been carrying that woman and you get the mention!'

But despite his supposed outrage, the journalist eventually admitted that he was in fact flattered to have been cited in the long-running show.

'My grandmother loved Corrie, she would have loved me being mentioned...' he praised.

'Have you given me zingers in Corrie, Arnold?': Piers accused GMB's showbiz correspondent Richard Arnold of being responsible, as the host is long-time friends with actress Sue Cleaver

Piers' mention came as a light-hearted moment in what had been a dark double instalment of Coronation Street, after the villainous Pat Phelan admitted to murdering Luke Britton and threatening Seb Franklin.

Having been oblivious to her partner's evil ways, a terrified Seb soon tells Eileen everything about her wicked husband, prompting her to make an appointment to visit Anna Windass in prison.

A terrified Seb then told Eileen everything about her evil husband and she made an appointment to visit Anna Windass in prison the next day.
Halle Berry knows how to make an entrance.

The Oscar-winning actress, 51, turned heads in a very daring gown that barely protected her modesty at the 49th annual NAACP Image Awards in Pasadena, California, on Monday.

The strapless number had a dark red embellished bustier bodice and black sheer material from the waist down that allowed Berry to flaunt all of her legs and a little cheeky posterior.

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Wow factor: Halle Berry, 51, turned heads in a very daring gown that barely protected her modesty at the 49th annual NAACP Image Awards in Pasadena, California, on Monday

Daring: The strapless number had a dark red embellished bustier bodice and black sheer material from the waist down that allowed Berry to flaunt her legs and a little cheeky posterior

The sexy star struck some saucy poses as she walked the red carpet in a pair of towering black stiletto heels.

Her incredible gown had a long train that pooled behind her as she showed off her very toned figure.

Berry wore her hair in a stylish bun and accessorized with black stud earrings.

She added a touch of black eye liner and mascara and some soft pink glossy lip color to complete her look.

Brought her A game: Berry wore her hair in a stylish bun. She added a touch of black eye liner and mascara and some soft pink glossy lip color to complete her look

Cheeky: The sexy star struck some saucy poses for photographers

Putting on a show: Berry's incredible gown had a long train that pooled behind her as she as she walked the red carpet in a pair of towering black stiletto heels

The NAACP Image Awards show, taking place on Martin Luther King Day, celebrates the 'achievements of people of color in motion pictures, television, music and literature'.

Joining Berry in leading the stars on the red carpet was Kerry Washington who looked gorgeous in a black satin gown.

Scandal star Washington flashed a little cleavage in the low cut number that had spaghetti straps and a voluminous skirt.

The actress, 40, wore her long hair tied back from her face and falling down her back and she accessorized with stunning diamond chandelier earrings.

Washington kept her make-up muted with just a touch of eye liner and some pink lip color.

Luminous: Kerry Washington looked gorgeous in a black satin gown as she led the stars on the red carpet at the 49th annual NAACP Image Awards in Pasadena, California, Monday

Red carpet ready: Scandal star Washington, 40, flashed a little cleavage in the low cut number that had spaghetti straps and a voluminous skirt

Blinged: The actress wore her long hair tied back from her face and falling down her back. She accessorized with stunning diamond chandelier earrings

Laverne Cox took a leaf out of Berry's fashion playbook, also opting for a black gown that had a sheer skirt.

The Orange Is The New Black star flaunted her figure in the low-cut number comprised of a skimpy bodysuit and sparkly semi sheer panels from the waist to the floor.

Cox, 45, added diamond earrings, bright red lip color and black polish on her toe nails.

Dared to bare: Laverne Cox, 45, flaunted her figure in a low-cut black number comprised of a skimpy bodysuit and sparkly semi sheer panels from the waist to the floor

Trans star: Cox, 45, added diamond earrings, bright red lip color and black polish on her toe nails

Rising star Storm Reid showed off her red carpet poise in a strapless black mini dress with sheer overlay that featured white piping and embellishments.

The actress, 14, paired the stylish number with black heels and braided hair.

The teen, who had a part in 12 Years a Slave, stars in the upcoming movie A Wrinkle in Time for director Ava DuVernay.

Fasionista: Teen actress Storm Reid, who's starring in upcoming movie A Wrinkle In Time, wore a strapless black mini dress with sheer overlay that featured white piping and embellishments

Rising star: Storm, 14, showed her red carpet poise in the number that she paired with black heels and braided hair

On trend: A Wrinkle In Time director Ava DuVernay, 45, arrived for the awards show wearing a dark red jumpsuit with long sleeves, wide pants and a flounce at the neck one one side

Mandy Moore opted for a classically elegant look with a full-length powder blue dress.

The stylish number had short sleeves, a round neckline and was cinched at the waist.

The This Is Us star carried a red clutch purse and wore her brunette shoulder-length hair loose and added more bright color with hot pink satin pumps

She was made-up with a touch of pale blue eye shadow along with black liner and mascara and her lips were colored a soft pink.

Lovely: Mandy Moore, 33, opted for a classically elegant look with a full-length powder blue dress. The stylish number had short sleeves, a round neckline and was cinched at the waist

Simply gorgeous: The This Is Us star carried a red clutch purse and wore her brunette shoulder-length hair loose. She added more bright color with hot pink satin pumps

The Walking Dead stars Danai Gurira and Sonequa Martin-Green were both on hand for the televised awards show.

Gurira, 39, chose a dramatic white off-the-shoulder dress with big ruffles on the bodice.

The skirt had an asymmetrical tiered hem and she added gold sandal heels.

Sonequa Martin-Green, 32, opted for a sleeveless textured dress with bold horse motifs.

She added a stunning statement silver choker and matching drop earrings.

Pretty look: Danai Gurira, 39, chose a dramatic white off-the-shoulder dress with big ruffles on the bodice. The skirt had an asymmetrical tiered hem ad she added gold sandal heels

Fashion forward: Sonequa Martin-Green, 32, opted for a sleeveless textured dress with bold horse motifs. She added a stunning statement silver choker and matching drop earrings

Stood out from crowd: Andra Day, 33, also chose a bold multi-colored textured outfit along with satin red sandals, multiple decorative clips in her hair and pearl white drop earrings

Dapper: Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya and Get Out director Jordan Peele wore tuxedos and shiny shoes

Black-ish star Tracee Ellis Ross walked the red carpet in a shiny gold sleeveless frock.

The actress, 45, flashed some cleavage in the low-cut dress that fell to just below the knee with a flounce hem.

She added nude sparkly heels and wore her hair back from her face.

Upbeat: Black-ish star Tracee Ellis Ross walked the red carpet in a shiny gold sleeveless frock

Shiny star: The actress, 45, flashed some cleavage in the dress that fell to just below the knee with a flounce hem. She added nude sparkly heels and wore her hair back from her face

Looking good: Ross' sitcom co-star ara Shahidi, 17, looked lovely in a black gown with a sheer panel at the bodice and a solid black collar and a tiered skirt

Chadwick Boseman opted for a light blue tuxedo suit that he paired with a white shirt and dark blue now tie.

The dapper 41-year-old actor stars in the highly anticipated marvel superhero movie Black Panther out next month.

He was joined on the red carpet by his movie co-star Michael B. Jordan who chose an all-black outfit pairing a black shirt and bow tie with a tuxedo suit.

Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman opted for a light blue tuxedo suit that he paired with a white shirt and dark blue now tie

Also on the red carpet was Boseman's movie co-star Michael B. Jordan who chose an all-black outfit pairing a black shirt and bow tie with a tuxedo suit

Rapper Common, left, also wore a tux while Keegan-Michael Key, right, who was accompanied by his wife Elisa Pugliese, decided on a dark two-piece suit

Comedienne Toni Love, left, wore a full-length silver and black dress cinched at the waist while actress Loretta Devine, right, wore a red long-sleeved gown with crossover bodice

Adrienne Bailon Houghton, left, flaunted her ample cleavage in a black gown while model Jasmine Sanders matched the carpet in her Ester Abner strapless red dress slit to the thigh

Yvette Nicole Brown wore a very eye-catching gown of turquoise and orange

Niecy Nash flashed some leg in a shimmery gold embellished dress with a wide waistband and low-cut crossover bodice

Former Basketball Wives castmember Draya Michele, 32, also showed off her legs in a black one-shoulder dress with side slit

Once the televised awards show got underway, several actresses joined together to deliver a powerful statement on stage.

Kerry Washington, Tracee Ellis Ross, Lena Waithe, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Angela Robinson and Laverne Cox encouraged the audience to 'stand by us, stand for us, stand with us' against harassment.

It came as momentum continues to build around the #MeToo Movement.

On stage message: Kerry Washington, Tracee Ellis Ross, Lena Waithe, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Angela Robinson and Laverne Cox encouraged the audience to 'stand by us, stand for us, stand with us' against harassment

In another moving moment, Mary J. Blige, who is garnering awards attention for her performance in the Netflix movie Mudbound, presented Entertainer Of The Year to Selma director Ava DuVernay.

ABC's sitcom Black-ish won for best comedy series with outstanding actress and actor awards for Ross and for Anthony Anderson who also hosted the Image Awards.

Honored: Mary J. Blige, who is garnering awards attention for her performance in the Netflix movie Mudbound, presented Entertainer Of The Year to Selma director Ava DuVernay

Celebration: ABC's sitcom Black-ish won for best comedy series with outstanding actress and actor awards for Ross and for Anthony Anderson

Emcee: Anderson also hosted the Image Awards

Cute couple: Terrence Jenkins and Jasmine Sanders looked loved-up as they posed together at the after-party, with Jasmine looking sensational in a glamorous scarlet Ester Abner gown

Loving life: (L-R) Susan Kelechi Watson, Chadwick Boseman, Danai Gurira, Kenric Green, Sonequa Martin-Green, Amirah Vann seemed to be enjoying themselves at the party

All-smiles: Dondre Whitfield, Kofi Siriboe, Timon Kyle Durrett, Bianca Lawson, and Deric Augustine looked chirpy at the bash

Two's company: Omari Hardwick and Mack Wilds looked dapper in their fitted suits

Terrific trio: (L-R) Issa Rae, Jay Ellis, and Yvonne Orji posed together on the night

Sassy in sequins: Issa Rae looked incredible in her eye-catching emerald and gold gown
She headed down the catwalk in Shanghai for the Victoria's Secret Fashion show a couple of months back.

But for a Victoria's Secret Angel like Romee Strijd, even an outdoor walk in New York City can look like a saunter down the runway.

The 22-year-old Dutchwoman offered a glimpse of her enviably flat midriff when she was photographed in Manhattan sidewalk beside her beau Laurens Van Leeuwen.

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Side by side: Romee Strijd offered a glimpse of her enviably flat midriff when she was photographed in Manhattan sidewalk with her beau Laurens Van Leeuwen

Her pine green crop top hoodie featured swirling white cursive text that read: 'Billionaire Girls Club,' next to a spray of floral patterning.

Romee, who was born in Zoetermeer, let her charcoal jacket slide off her shoulders as she walked, revealing her wrap's bright orange lining.

Swinging along a black leather bag, she emphasized her pencil thin legs in a pair of black and white Adidas trousers and slipped on pristine white sneakers.

Simply stylish: Her pine green crop top hoodie featured swirling white cursive text that read: 'Billionaire Girls Club,' next to a spray of floral patterning

Meanwhile, Laurens - clad in a black hoodie, black jacket, black trousers and striped sneakers - carried a glinting black bag along as well.

The dashing brunette, whose father Bert is the famous Dutch television presenter of reality series Het Familiediner, draped an arm about his girlfriend.

Romee walked as a newcomer at the 2014 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in London, and took her current role as a Victoria's Secret Angel the following year.

Layering up: Romee, who was born in Zoetermeer, let her charcoal jacket slide off her shoulders as she walked, revealing her wrap's bright orange lining

Coordinated: Swinging along a black leather bag, she emphasized her pencil thin legs in a pair of black and white Adidas trousers and slipped on pristine white sneakers

E! News interviewed Romee alongside fellow Angel Jasmine Tookes last April, and the pair, who've long said they're workout buddies, dished culinary indulgences.

'My guilty pleasure food, 24/7, is pizza,' said Jasmine, whereas Romee confessed to leaning toward 'sweets a lot. I like chocolate and, like, candies, ice cream.'

Being workout buddies, said Jasmine 'makes it more fun, to do it with your friends, and, like, we do a nice lunch or a brunch before, so, yeah.'

Coiffed: Meanwhile, Laurens - clad in a black hoodie, black jacket, black trousers and striped sneakers - carried a glinting black bag along as well

Romee had touched on exercising with Jasmine in a 2016 interview with Glamour as well, saying it 'Definitely!' helps to have a friend motivate her to work out.

'Sometimes, when I don't feel like working out, she'll push me to go, and the same can be said the other way around!' she confided.

Their meal dates had also come up, as Romee told the magazine: 'It also helps to plan a fun breakfast or lunch after a workout as something to look forward to.'
She will make her highly-anticipated debut on The Project later this month.

And after celebrating Christmas with her family in Australia, Lisa Wilkinson has squeezed in a visit to New York ahead of her move to Network Ten.

On Monday, the former Today host was seen bundled up in a winter coat and beanie as she braced the cold for a stroll down the street.

Baby, it's cold outside! Makeup free Lisa Wilkinson bundles up in a coat and beanie as she steps out in New York ahead of debut on The Project

Makeup free, the 58-year-old looked stylish in a pair of knee high tan boots and a matching handbag.

Lisa kept warm in the icy temperatures by wearing a feather down coat and thick white scarf.

Wearing a pair of oversized aviators, Lisa sported a maroon beanie with a faux fur bobble.

Brr! Lisa kept warm in the icy temperatures by wearing a feather down coat and thick white scarf

Keeping warm: Wearing a pair of oversized aviators, Lisa sported a maroon beanie with a faux fur bobble.

Lisa is in New York for a holiday with husband Peter FitzSimons prior to her starting her new role with The Project on Sunday, January 28.

Lisa will join The Project panel later this month after quitting her role with rival network Nine in October.

The veteran magazine editor and journalist abruptly left the network after failing to achieve pay parity with co-host Karl Stefanovic.

Shock departure: The veteran magazine editor and journalist abruptly left the network after failing to achieve pay parity with co-host Karl Stefanovic

New role: Lisa will join The Project panel later this month after quitting her role with rival network Nine in October

Earlier this week, Lisa once again denied rumours of any feud with her new colleague, Carrie Bickmore.

'Carrie and I have been mates for years. I'm a huge admirer of her wonderful work and passion for the causes she believes in,' she gushed to TV Week.

'To be working with Carrie was one of the big reasons I decided to go to Ten. And we couldn't be more excited to be working together.'
Work never stops for Roxy Jacenko.

Before strolling into Sweaty Betty PR on Tuesday morning, the 37-year-old managed to hit the gym, catch-up with a friend for breakfast and phone in to a meeting.

Spotted just after her personal training session with Ryan Cairns in Paddington, the beauty put on a leggy display and showed off her pert derriere in tight activewear.

Phoning it in! Roxy Jacenko put on a leggy display in figure-hugging tights on Monday, as she was spotted out for breakfast with a male friend (R)

The socialite was looking her best in her cropped grey tights, her blonde locks looking stylish despite the fact she'd just been sweating it out inside.

Roxy was then joined at popular local breakfast spot Jackie's Cafe by a male friend.

The pair chose a table outside for their catch-up and were seen chatting across the table to other friends in attendance.

She looked to be enjoying herself, offering animated expressions in between sips of her coffee.

Looking good! Spotted just after her personal training session with Ryan Cairns in Paddington, the beauty put on a leggy display and showed off her pert derriere in tight activewear

Nice day for it! The pair chose a table outside for their catch-up and were seen chatting across the table to other friends in attendance

Thanks a latte! She looked to be enjoying herself, offering animated expressions in between sips of her coffee

After racing through her meal, the perennially busy mother-of-two was off again, her male friend managing valiantly to keep up with her accelerated pace.

Completing her post-gym look with a sleeveless puffer jacket, black top and sunglasses, Roxy and her mate enjoyed a laugh and a smile as they walked.

She looked to be giving him directions before they parted.

Off again! After racing through her meal, the perennially busy mother-of-two was off again, her male friend managing valiantly to keep up with her accelerated pace

Always the way! Just as it seemed the beauty was on track to breeze into work on time, she was stopped by an important business call

Hands full! She juggled the call with her hands-full, seen stopping out the front of her car and chatting away for several minutes

Just as it seemed the beauty was on track to breeze into work on time, she was stopped by an important business call.

She juggled the call with her hands-full, seen stopping out the front of her car and chatting away for several minutes.

Eventually she arrived at her Sweaty Betty PR office with her wallet in one hand and her Balenciaga bag draped over the other.

Everything here? Roxy quickly made sure her outfit was all in order
Dan Single and Bambi Northwood-Blyth have split after almost four years of marriage.

Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Australia Jane Magnus - the wife of the celebrant who married him and Bambi - confirmed their separation.

Jane, who is a Byron Bay-based event planner, confirmed months of speculation with a few simple words: 'They have,' she said.

EXCLUSIVE: 'They have split': Dan Single's friend confirms he and Bambi Northwood-Blyth have ended their relationship

Bambi and Dan have not been seen together since April 2017 when the Ksubi jeans founder launched a controversial crowdfunding campaign.

The Go Fund Me page he set up asked for $250,000 to be raised to cover his two-month recovery and 'incidentals' following an accident in which he fell three floors from his Paris hotel window.

Jane's husband Adam performed Bambi and Dan's marriage ceremony in 2014.

In an interview Jane said that the couple had parted ways: 'They have [split], Dan's in town,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Australia Jane Magnus - a close friend of Dan's and also the wife of the celebrant who married him and Bambi - confirmed their separation

Daily Mail Australia has contacted both Dan and Bambi's representatives for comment.

Dan, 37, and Bambi married in Byron Bay at Coorabella, the same lush estate Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley tied the knot at in 2016.

Bambi, 27, became stepmother to Dan's 10-year-old son Justice who he shares with former partner Pip Edwards.

Spot the celebrant: Jane's husband Adam performed Bambi and Dan's marriage ceremony in Byron Bay in 2014

After marrying the pair continued their jet-setting party lifestyle, which was well-documented on both their Instagram accounts.

In 2016 the couple took trips to London, Miami, California, Colorado, Marrakech, St Tropez, Marseille, Byron Bay, and the Gold Coast.

However, all that ended in April 2017 when Dan fell from the window of the $478-a-night Grand Hotel Armour in Paris.

Celebrity venue: Dan, 37, and Bambi married in Byron Bay at Coorabella, the same lush estate Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley tied the knot at in 2016

According to Dan's Go Fund Me page (which he set up shortly after the accident) the 35-metre fall shattered 'every bone from my feet to my hips and pelvis.'

Dan, who was once estimated to be worth $21 million, set up the page to crowd source $250,000 to 'help fund the hospital bill, rehab bill, early flights home, being unable to make bread and work over the next months and all the incedentals [sic] the family is covering at the moment'.

Bambi went to ground following Dan's controversial crowd-sourcing campaign and briefly deleted her Instagram account

The page was met with backlash from the public, who labelled it 'disgusting' and 'pathetic' before it was deleted.

Bambi went to ground following Dan's controversial crowd-sourcing campaign and briefly deleted her Instagram account.

In the months that followed the brunette beauty was not seen wearing her wedding ring or pictured with Dan.

In June, she flew to Ibiza to celebrate her 27th birthday with model and friend Megan Blake Irwin.

In 2016 the couple took trips to London, Miami, California, Colorado, Marrakech, St Tropez, Marseille, Byron Bay, and the Gold Coast

That same month a source told The Daily Telegraph that Bambi and Dan were 'on the rocks'.

'Things haven't been great between them,' a close friend revealed. 'The party lifestyle looks to have finally caught up.'

In early January she hinted she was single again as she joked that she needed a 'wingman'.

Meanwhile, Dan quietly returned to Australia in mid-2017 and has largely kept a low profile.

The fashion designer only returned to the social scene last month when he was photographed attending Jessica Hart's cosmetics brand LUMA in Sydney.
She makes her official debut on Channel Seven soap Home And Away, later this month.

And at Sam Smith's Nova Red Room Sydney concert on Monday, Sam Frost proved that she's getting on swimmingly with her co-stars.

Joined by actor Caleb Alloway, the 28-year-old was pictured laughing as she flaunted her slender figure in a very low-cut white patterned frock.

Summer Bay babes! Sam Frost, 28, flaunted her slender figure in a VERY low-cut white patterned frock, as she let her hair down with Home And Away co-star Caleb Alloway, 32, at Sam Smith's Nova Red Room concert, in Sydney on Monday

Sam cut a casually chic figure in a white frock with a red rose print, that featured a plunging neckline.

While drawing attention to her delicate decolletage, the short hemline also revealed her trim pins.

Accessorising with metallic slip-on shoes, a tan shoulder bag and a layering of jewels, the budding actress styled her locks into a deep side part.

Antics: Caleb, sporting an abstract dress shirt with several buttons left undone and cropped lightwash jeans, used his hands in a dramatic fashion, when conversing with Sam

Pals: Sam looked to well and truly be getting on swimmingly with Caleb, pictured laughing as the pair made their way to the Sydney Opera House's Concert Hall

Finishing off the look was a makeup palette consisting of a matte complexion, bold brows, lashings of mascara and a soft pink lip.

Joined by co-star Caleb, the actor cut a cool and casual figure in a neutral-hued abstract shirt, with several buttons left undone, teamed with a pair of cropped lightwash jeans and brown leather lace-up shoes.

Using his hands in a dramatic fashion to get his point across, Sam erupted in laughter, as the pair made their way to Sydney Opera House's Concert Hall.

Casually chic: The former reality star-turned budding actress drew attention to her slim figure in the rose print frock, which she accessorised with metallic slip-on shoes and a layering of delicate jewels

Another familiar face: The blonde beauty, who starred on both The Bachelor and Bachelorette, later posed for a red carpet snap with another Home And Away co-star Ada Nicodemou, 40

The blonde beauty, who starred on both The Bachelor and Bachelorette, later posed for a red carpet snap with another Home And Away co-star Ada Nicodemou, 40.

With Sam's casting in the long-running soap having been met with a backlash from diehard Summer Bay fans, Ada told Daily Mail Australia last Wednesday that viewers need to give her 'a break'.

'I just think everyone should give the girl a break and enjoy watching her,' the veteran actress said, at the Priceline Pharmacy Kooyong Classic.

Support: With Sam's casting in the long-running soap having been met with a backlash from diehard Summer Bay fans, Ada told Daily Mail Australia last Wednesday that viewers need to give her 'a break': 'I just think everyone should give the girl a break and enjoy watching her'

Ada has been working closely with Sam on-set since she began filming the drama series in August, and has formed a strong bond.

'I've been working a lot with Sam so I think everyone is going to enjoy her character and really love her.

'She's such a beautiful person, we are having a great time on set, I know the fans will love her,' the brunette went on to say.
She has broken new ground as the first transgender actress of color to star as the lead in a scripted series.

But Laverne Cox still couldn't help having a major fangirl moment when she finally got to meet the star she describes as her 'inspiration' - Halle Berry.

The two connected backstage at the 49th annual NAACP Image Awards held in Pasadena, California, on Monday night.

Dream come true: Laverne Cox had a major fangirl moment when she finally got to meet her 'inspiration' - Halle Berry - backstage at the 49th annual NAACP Image Awards Monday night

And in a coincidence of simpatico proportions, both Cox and Berry had taken a leaf out of a similar fashion playbook, looking stunning in revealing outfits that showed off their fabulous figures.

The Orange Is The New Black star shared a photo of the two of them together to her social media Monday evening along with a sweet message.

'I finally met @halleberry tonight. I got teary. She has been such a huge inspiration for me for so much of my life,' she wrote on Instagram.

'Thank you Ms. Berry for your incredible career and all the inspiration and being so sweet as I totally fanned out.'

Big night: 'I finally met @halleberry tonight. I got teary. She has been such a huge inspiration for me for so much of my life,' Cox, 45, later wrote on social media

Red carpet ready: The Orange Is the New Black star put her figure on show in a dramatic black number with a plunging neckline and sheer skirt

Earlier, Cox had walked the red carpet in a plunging black number comprised of a skimpy bodysuit and sparkly semi sheer panels from the waist to the floor.

She wore sparkly embellished sandal heels and sported black polish on her toe nails.

The actress added chandelier diamond earrings and carried a silver clutch purse.

She capped off her look with black eye liner and mascara and bright red lip color.

Trans star: Cox, 45, added diamond earrings, bright red lip color and black polish on her toe nails
She kicked off her week meeting acting superstar Will Smith on Sunrise following the summer break.

But Samantha Armytage was back at the beach on Tuesday.

The 41-year-old posted a selfie in a swimsuit as she soaked up the sun's rays.

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'Resting beach face': Swimsuit-clad Sunrise star Samantha Armytage takes a selfie after a refreshing dip in the sea

Clearly fresh from a dip in the sea, she glistened with droplets of water across her youthful visage.

'Resting beach face,' the breakfast presenter captioned her picture, adding a smiley face emoji.

This week Sam had the honour of interviewing Will Smith, who is in the country to promote his latest film Bright alongside his Australian co-stars Joel Edgerton and Lucy Fry.

Popular host: Sam is the host of Sunrise alongside David Koch

The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air star admitted to her and co-host David 'Kochie' Koch that he enjoys being recognised by fans.

'When I go somewhere it feels like everyone is my friend,' he said.

'I love being able to go out in public and getting recognised.'

'It's so funny because we talked about this on set one time (of Netflix film Bright), some people feel imposed upon by being recognised [but] when I go somewhere it feels like everyone is my friend,' the Men in Black actor went on to explain.

'I always will be able to get an ambulance. You know, people will always be willing to help.

Down under: This week Sam had the honour of interviewing Will Smith, who is in the country to promote his latest film Bright alongside his Australian co-stars Joel Edgerton and Lucy Fry
Mandy Moore opted for a classically elegant look for her appearance at the 49th annual NAACP Image Awards in Pasadena, California, on Monday night.

The This Is Us star, 33, looked simply lovely in a powder blue gown as she posed for photos on the red carpet.

Her stylish number had short sleeves, a round neckline and was cinched at the waist.

Star power: Mandy Moore opted for a classically elegant look for her appearance at the 49th annual NAACP Image Awards in Pasadena, California, on Monday night

Moore contrasted the pale color of her dress with a pair of hot pink satin heels and a red clutch purse.

The actress wore her brunette shoulder-length hair loose and accessorized with simple diamond earrings.

She was made-up with a touch of pale blue eye shadow along with black liner and mascara and her lips were colored a soft pink.

Just perfect: Moore, 33, contrasted the pale color of her powder blue dress with a pair of hot pink satin heels and a red clutch purse

Picture perfect: The actress wore her brunette shoulder-length hair loose. She was made-up with pale blue eye shadow along with black liner and mascara and soft pink lip color

Moore is one of the most feted women in television right now thanks to her starring turn in the NBC hit drama.

That means she's in demand for awards shows and red carpet events.

The former tweener explained recently to Coveteur that having to spend hours in high heels used to cause her severe pain and that forced her to find a way to mitigate her agony.

She told the magazine that her stylist recommended she try CBD oil, which is made with cannabidiol, a compound found in cannabis.

Cannabidiol is used for medical purposes, and while it doesn't have the intoxicating properties of THC - the active ingredient in marijuana - it does offer a myriad of benefits including reducing pain and anxiety.

In demand: Moore is one of the most feted women in television right now thanks to her starring turn in the NBC hit drama This Is Us
It was just the day before that she wished her fans 'good morning' with a very busty snap.

And by Monday night Kim Kardashian had upped the stakes as she posted a topless snap of herself to Instagram.

The 37-year-old was clearly in a state of undress as she protected her modesty with some bed sheets while wishing her millions of followers 'good night'.

'Good night': Kim Kardashian shared a topless bedroom snap to Instagram on Monday evening

The day before, the reality star flashed her impressive cleavage in a photo she captioned 'Morning' along with a sunshine emoji.

Pulling a sneer for the camera, Kim, clad in a denim shirt, also revealed a jeweled grill in her teeth.

The reality TV icon had strung on three necklaces, two of which were medallions and one of which had metallic lettering reading: 'PABLO.'

Kim's husband, Kanye West, released a record in 2016 entitled The Life Of Pablo - his seventh and most recent studio album.

Kanye is Kim's third husband - preceded by Damon Thomas and Kris Humphries - and the pair of them are currently expecting a baby via surrogate.

The couple, who are known affectionately to fans as Kimye, already share four-year-old daughter North and two-year-old son Saint.

Good morning indeed! The day before, the reality star flashed her impressive cleavage in a photo she captioned 'Morning' along with a sunshine emoji

Dropping references: Kim's 'PABLO' necklace in the snap appeared to be a nod to her husband Kanye West's seventh and latest studio album The Life Of Pablo

As it turns out, Kim's family is expanding on multiple fronts, with her younger sister Khloe, 33, expecting a baby by her Cleveland Cavalier beau Tristan Thompson.

Last year, Tristan and his ex-girlfriend Jordan Craig welcomed their own son Prince.

There is also a swirl of rumors that Kim and Khloe's half-sister Kylie Jenner is pregnant at 20 by her 25-year-old rapper boyfriend Travis Scott.

Expanding the family: Kim is currently, by way of a surrogate, expecting her third child by Kanye, who is her third husband after Damon Young and Kris Humphries

Meanwhile, the eldest sibling in the Kardashian-Jenner lineup, Kourtney Kardashian, 38, has got three children by her on-and-off paramour Scott Disick.

Mason, their eldest, is eight, while Penelope is five and Reign is three.

The Kardashian girls' rotund younger brother Rob Kardashian, 30, has a one-year-old daughter named Dream by his ex-fiancee Blac Chyna.
Brittany Cartwright forgave boyfriend Jax Taylor for cheating on her during Monday's episode of Vanderpump Rules, despite hearing a recording of his unfaithful tryst.

The Kentucky native threw her boyfriend out of their shared apartment after listening to a recording of him making unflattering comments about her to one night stand Faith.

'You're a piece of f***ing s*** and you deserve to rot in hell,' Brittany screamed as she threatened to play the recording to all their friends at their booze-fueled housewarming party.

Caught cheating: Jax Taylor tried to patch up his relationship with Brittany Cartwright after cheating on her during Monday's episode of Vanderpump Rules

'I've heard the recordings. You deserve to rot in hell. Get the f*** out of here you piece of s***,' she screamed at him.

But despite pals Stassi Schroeder and Katie Maloney-Schwartz encouraging her to call time on her relationship with Jax, Brittany admitted she was reluctant to give up.

'I was raised to be a good Christian woman and that's all about forgiveness,' she said. 'I believe everybody deserves it, even Jax.'

Brittany broke down in uncontrollable tears when Ariana Madix and Lala Kent played her a recording of Jax talking to Faith after their hook up.

Standing by: Brittany decided to stand by Jax after he cheated on her

Describing the call, Brittany said: 'Jax is talking to this girl, telling her he doesn't want kids, he doesn't want marriage, he hasn't had sex with me in months and it just makes me sick.'

Addressing the room in a rage, she screamed: 'Everyone, I'm sorry, I'm going to play this voice recording from Faith over the entire speaker just so everyone can hear.'

While Jax stormed out. James Kennedy asked the girls why they were crowding around Brittany.

Tough crowd: James Kennedy was shut down by the women

A furious Lala told him: 'F*** you. We're not going to deal with your bulls*** and I'm done with these men thinking they can do whatever the f*** they want.'

Jax, meanwhile, told Tom Sandoval: 'I cheated. I did everything wrong, I understand that. I'm going through it. I sat Brittany down the other day and said ''I want to go through this, you and me'' and she said ''yes''.'

Throwing his phone against the wall, he added: 'The relationship's done. It's over.'

Kicked out: Jax was booted out of his apartment by Brittany

The voice recording chaos also sparked a huge row between Ariana and Tom Sandoval, who was angry with his girlfriend for playing the audio after everyone had been drinking all night.

'Playing this recording after hours of drinking is such a horrible idea,' he said. 'Is Ariana out of her f***ing mind? I'm honestly disgusted by it.'

He told Ariana: 'You should have had the f***ing wherewithal to know that maybe it's not the right time to f***ing tell her all this.'

Bad fight: Tom Sandoval argued with Ariana Madix over her role in the Jax situation

'You're being so obtuse right now,' she screamed.

Tom retaliated: 'I'm really mad at you for this. For not using your judgment.'

Storming out, Ariana shouted: 'You're a f***ing d*** dude. Keep having Jax's back you f***ing d***.'

So obtuse: Ariana stormed out of her fight with Tom

The following morning, a defensive Jax told Brittany he had 'no words' to describe her actions the previous night.

'I know I shouldn't have played the recording in front of everybody, but I had no idea I was going to hear that last night,' she said.

Jax told her: 'You gave me your word as a woman. You said it was going to be you and me.'

Tape recording: Brittany played the incriminating recording in front of everyone

Speaking to the camera, Brittany complained: 'Jax got embarrassed. He got embarrassed that he got caught and now he instantly turns around and says ''you did this to me. You hurt me''. That's a crock of bulls***.'

She told Jax: 'I was drunk and I was p***ed off and I had the right to be.'

'You have a right to do it between you and I. I am not dating the rest of this f***ing group,' he shouted.

Angry woman: The Kentucky native admitted that she was angry when she played it

Brittany snapped: 'You're gross. Go to try and ruin another girl's life. You will, I know it. You're dirty.'

The mood at Tom and Ariana's wasn't much better as Ariana suggested they should end their relationship.

'The one person whose opinion means the most to me is telling me they're disappointed in me,' she said.

Making up: Ariana and Tom made up after their fight

Tom explained: 'All I'm saying is take responsibility for your f***ing actions and you don't do that ever in our f***ing relationship.'

'I think we should just break the f*** up,' Ariana said.

While Ariana and Tom resolved their issues that night and apologized to one another, Katie and Stassi attempted to give Brittany a pep talk.

'Seeing Brittany so upset because Jax cheated on her is like deja-vu,' Stassi said. 'I remember this exact feeling six years ago. I was in this position. When are women going to realize that Jax is not worthy of dating?'

Been there: Stassi Schroeder empathized with Britttany over Jax

She told Brittany: 'I feel like you might have to just face the music and say ''it's done''. You didn't do anything. He did this.'

Katie added: 'This is no way to live.'

Brittany, however, told the camera: 'I always thought if he cheated on me I would be gone, but life is not black and white.'

Fed up: Brittany screamed at Jax after hearing the recording

Speaking to her mother on the phone, she added: 'I just love him so much I feel like I should at least try to work things out.

'Maybe it still won't work out in the end, but I'm just going to make sure that if he ever starts going back on his old ways we're not going to be together.'

While the Vanderpump Rules couples were under severe stress, things were working out better for James as he launched his club night See You Next Tuesday at Sur.

He's back: James was back deejaying at Sur

Open-mouthed at the name, Lisa Vanderpump laughed: 'Of course James Kennedy's going to call his party night See You Next Tuesday. I think I've called him that myself.'

After the night was a rousing success, he told Lisa: 'You've saved me in ways that I couldn't explain how you've saved me.'

'I had to give you tough love,' Lisa explained. 'I had to be cruel to be kind.'
The Balinese princess welcomed the arrival of her fourth child, Goldie, with fiance Adam Ellis last month.

And proud mother Lindy Klim returned to Bali with her five-week old newborn this week.

The 39-year-old shared a snap cuddled up to her bub, writing: 'After 3 long months we finally made it home to Bali.'

'We finally made it home': Lindy Klim returns to Bali with adorable newborn daughter Goldie and fiance Adam Ellis this week

Lindy looked radiant and in high spirits as she took a relaxed selfie with the smiling baby in a white onesie.

Goldie had a yellow frangipani resting behind her tiny ear, as her mother labelled her: 'Bali baby.'

In another photo, the tot appeared to let out a giggle as she laid on a patterned quilt.

'Bali baby': Lindy and fiance Adam's cute bub smiled as she wore a yellow frangipani behind her tiny ears

Home: Lindy and Adam split their time between Australia and Bali, where Lindy's ex-husband Michael Klim also resides

Lindy's followers reacted to the cute display in the comment section with words of well wishes and praise.

'Welcome home. She is so gorgeous. You look so happy. X', 'she is just perfection', and 'Island princess little Goldie.'

The trip to Bali appears to have been Goldie's first overseas venture with her mother and father.

Lindy and Adam split their time between Australia and Bali, where Lindy's ex-husband Michael Klim also resides.

Loved-up! Lindy shares the adorable bub with fiance Adam Ellis, who she became engaged to last October after a whirlwind romance

Goldie has joined a growing brood of siblings, including Stella, 11, Rocco, nine, and Frankie, six, who Lindy shares with her ex-husband Michael Klim.

Lindy became engaged to Adam last October after a whirlwind romance.

The couple first started dating in March last year, just a month after Lindy and then-husband Michael announced they were separating after 10 years of marriage.
He embarked on romance with the beauty therapist earlier this month, after ex Charlotte Crosby rebuffed his public proposal.

But Stephen Bear has already hinted he has split from Jessica Garthwaite on social media - awkwardly during their romantic holiday in Bali.

According to the Mirror, the 28-year-old posted a cryptic Tweet on Monday which claimed girls try to 'cling on to his fame' - before he took to Snapchat to inform his admirers they must 'pass a test' to be his girlfriend.

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Calling it quits? Stephen Bear has already hinted he has split from Jessica Garthwaite on social media - awkwardly during their romantic holiday in Bali

The pair are currently in Bali celebrating Stephen's birthday, and have shared a number of loved-up snaps from the trip so far.

However, the reality star hinted he had split from Jessica in a string of cryptic social media posts, despite still being away with the beauty on the island.

First taking to Twitter, he wrote in a now-deleted message: 'Girls would love to be with me for ever,but once you get rejected Im the worse guy in the world and Im a user...

In the past: Stephen embarked on romance with the beauty therapist earlier this month, after ex Charlotte Crosby rebuffed his public proposal on Instagram (pictured in May 2017)

Lashing out: The reality star hinted he had split from Jessica in a string of cryptic social media posts - with one Tweet claiming girls only dated him for fame (above)

He then went on to accuse women of being with him for his position in the public eye, adding fiercely: 'How about.. you need to stop being tight and fame hungary..

'Try to cling onto my fame but your just not good enough,so up your game girls and stop hating' (sic)

Not stopping there, the Ex On The Beach star then shared an equally bitter video on Snapchat - which saw him claim girls must pass a 'test' to date him, in order to prove they meet his numerous good qualities.

Confident: Not stopping there, the Ex On The Beach star then shared an equally bitter video on Snapchat - which saw him claim girls must pass a 'test' to date him

'I'm good looking, I'm funny, I'm smooth': In the video he listed his redeeming features, which girls will only see if they don't 'take the p**s' in their romance

According to the Mirror, he said curtly: 'Right, the thing is I don't need to prove myself, but as a guy yeah, you want the best and unfortunately if you don't pass a guy's test, go away.'

He went on to list his redeeming features, which girls will only see if they don't 'take the p**s' in their romance.

He continued: 'Just give you a quick outlook on where I'm at. I'm good looking, I'm funny, I'm smooth, I'm cool, I'm doing alright in the bank, good sense of humour, very loving.

'But if you take the p**s or you're horrible or mean to me, I will not be with you, so you need to pass the test with me.'

Confusing: Despite the posts, Stephen has not deleted the photos of him and Jessica from his Instagram page

He finished his bizarre tirade by adding: 'When I'm single, I'm single. When you're with me, I'm a f**king legend. And the same with most guys, if you want to be with me, if you want the best, stop hating.'

Despite the posts, Stephen has not deleted the photos of him and Jessica from his Instagram page. MailOnline has contacted his representatives for comment.

Stephen has been putting his love woes behind him and cosying up to a number of beauties in Bali, since his appeal for a reconciliation with ex Charlotte Crosby was rejected.

Last month, the Celebrity Big Brother alumni admitted he had 'really messed up' and declared he wanted to 'spend the rest of my life' with Charlotte, in a heartfelt Instagram appeal.

Moving on: Stephen's appeal for a reconciliation with Charlotte was rejected last month - when he declared he wanted to 'spend the rest of my life' with her on Instagram

Sharing a number of loved-up snaps of the pair, he wrote: 'Dear Charlotte, I really messed up, if I can rewind the clock back maybe I wouldnt of done the things I did and say. Lifes about making mistakes.

Ive just been really sad recently and I need to get it off my chest. I no being with me isnt easy and I will probably send you insane in the end and I really do care and still love you (sic).'

Charlotte and Bear enjoyed an 11-month romance before they were plagued by a number of splits - resulting in their acrimonious breakup in December.

The couple first hit a crisis after the former scaffold worker was pictured heading home from a Halloween party, with a mystery brunette in tow.

Their roller-coaster romance then appeared to come to a screeching halt in October, with the couple being plagued by 'cheating' claims and Charlotte feuding with Bear's family on Twitter.
Apprentice star Jessica Cunningham was been left devastated when her ex-boyfriend Alistair Eccles took his own life last August, when he was aged 35.

And the 30-year-old has revealed how devastated she was to tell her three daughter, aged six, four and three, whom she shared with Alistair, the tragic news.

Talking to Lorraine on Tuesday morning, she said: 'I've never been through it, so I didnt know how to tell them, it was one of the hardest things we've had to do.

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'It was the hardest thing I've had to do': Pregnant Jessica Cunningham told Lorraine on Tuesday how hard it was to tell her children that their father had taken his own life

Family: Pictured with her three daughters, who are aged six, four and three - Jessica said the girls have taken the news as well as can be expected

'Never do you imagine youd have to go through it, but luckily they are amazing children and they're so happy, they have really good support around them.'

Jessica is happily in a relationship with Alex Daw and they are expecting their first child together after suffering a miscarriage in October.

She said: 'My partner and myself were very open with what questions they do ask us because we want them to want to talk to us and trust us.

She told Lorraine: 'Never do you imagine youd have to go through it, but luckily they are amazing children and they're so happy, they have really good support around them'

Devastating loss: The girls' father Alistair Eccles (pictured) took his own life in August at his home when he was aged just 35

She also said: 'When you are going through a bad part of your life, you're comforted by knowing other people have gone through it'

Expectant: Jessica proudly caressed her bump as she posed for shots in the green room

'They are coping really well. I think it's really important, when the news broke about my ex-partner, the amount of women who got in touch in a similar situation, a lot of people get forgotten about.

'When you are going through a bad part of your life, you're comforted by knowing other people have gone through it.

'I write a blog, I love it, it's very cathartic and hopefully it helps me to inspire other people.'

My queens: Jessica has found love with new boyfriend Alex Daw (centre, here with her girls), they are expecting a baby together

Happy times: Jessica showed off her changing shape in a form-fitting pink dress which she teamed with matching shoes

Good news: Jessica also revealed that she is expecting her baby on June 28, which is also the date of her partner, Alex's birthday

Cosy: Jessica kept out the cold with a grey leather jacket which had a fur lining

Keeping her spirits up: Jessica looked beautiful as she was pictured leaving the studio after her interview

Talking about looking forward to the future and her excitement over adding to her brood, Jessica, who also starred in Celebrity Big Brother in 2016, said:

'I'm a big believer in the power of the universe. When we got pregnant the first time round, I thought this is incredible.

'I started to get excited and then we had the miscarriage. It was really sad, but you just get on with it. We had to.

And gushing over Alex, she said: 'He's such a lovely person and I feel very lucky to have him this pregnancy has come at the right time.

Jessica said of her pregnancy: 'I'm a big believer in the power of the universe. When we got pregnant the first time round, I thought this is incredible'

'You can't enjoy it the same after a miscarriage, because you worry about it constantly... but touch wood everything seems to be going OK.

'Everybody goes through stuff in life; ups and downs. You just have to find the positives out of every negative.

'You can wallow in self-pity but that drags you under, or be positive and look to the future. Thats got me through last year... that, and the children.'

Jessica also revealed that she is expecting her baby on June 28, which is also the date of her partner, Alex's birthday.

Entrepreneur: She already has a successful fashion business, The Prodigal Fox, which earned her a spot on The Apprentice in 2016 (pictured in green, with Lord Sugar - centre - and the other contestants)
She has been on cloud nine ever since her rapper beau proposed to her on stage back in October.

And proving she is still as smitten as ever, Cardi B couldn't tear herself away from fiance Offset as they paid a recent visit to a grocery store in Hollywood.

The Bodak Yellow hit-maker, 25, looked sensational for the couple's low-key outing, as she slipped her famous curves into a fuchsia pink frock and nude stiletto heels.

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Smitten: Cardi B couldn't tear herself away from fiance Offset, while drawing attention to her famous derriere, as they paid a recent visit to a grocery store in Hollywood

Ensuring all eyes were on her, Cardi favoured an eye-catching number that made sure to draw attention to her ample derriere, as it sheathed her curvaceous frame.

It made for an uncharacteristically demure display for the performer, thanks to its high neckline and pencil-style skirt that sat just above the knee.

Wearing her glossy brunette locks down in a swept over style, Cardi then added a slick of hot pick lipstick to her lips to match her outfit choice. She was joined by her beau who cut a casual figure in distressed jeans, an over-sized sweatshirt and red beanie hat.

The duo were caught stealing a moment to themselves during their shop, as Cardi threw her arms around her husband-to-be's neck, before the pair indulged in a smooch in full view of onlookers.

Loved-up: The duo were caught stealing a moment to themselves during their shop, as Cardi threw her arms around her husband-to-be's neck, before the pair indulged in a smooch in full view of onlookers

Stylish: Ensuring all eyes were on her, Cardi favoured an eye-catching number that sheathed her curvaceous frame and made for an uncharacteristically demure display

With only eyes for each other, Cardi and Offset put on a very close display, as they stole a series of intimate moments throughout their shop.

Their loved-up display comes after both stars have been championing their romance. Hitting back at fans who have questioned her relationship with Offset, Cardi has insisted he is the guy for her.

She tweeted in response: 'I got options but i want who i want,' before adding in another tweet: 'I dont date him or Im not with him for the public .We not together for yaaaa we together cause we want to be.' (sic)

Offset, meanwhile, declared his love for girlfriend Cardi by having her name tattooed onto his neck.

Only eyes for each other: Cardi and Offset put on a very close display, as they stole a series of intimate moments throughout their shop

Defiant: Their loved-up display comes after both stars have been championing their romance, with Cardi hitting back at fans who questioned her relationship with Offset, as she insisted he is the guy for her

The fresh new ink was done in the style of her logo and was etched onto his skin just underneath another tattoo of the character Buttercup from the popular '90s cartoon The Powerpuff Girls.

Offset took to social media to show off his inking, sharing a video of Cardi sweeping his braids away from his neck to reveal the fresh inking underneath.

The rapper, 26, is a member of platinum-selling, Atlanta-based hip hop trio Migos, and famously proposed to Cardi onstage at Power 99's Powerhouse concert in Philadelphia last October with a huge 8-carat diamond ring.

Cardi was seen proudly showcasing her new Instagram on social media shortly after, penning alongside a photo of her engagement ring: 'Jesus Christ Im so emotional, @offsetyrn I loveee you so much. Thank you for seeing the potential in me since you met me .For giving me advice molding me and loving me .

Symbol of love: Offset, meanwhile, has declared his love for girlfriend Cardi by having her name tattooed onto his neck

Showing it off! Offset took to social media to show off his inking, sharing a video of Cardi sweeping his braids away from his neck to reveal the fresh inking underneath

Adding to the collection: The fresh new ink was done in the style of her logo and was etched onto his skin just underneath another tattoo of the character Buttercup from the popular '90s cartoon The Powerpuff Girls

'Your such a amazing man to me your family ,friends ,kids and you are extremely talented.I cant wait to spend FOREVAAAA with you .Lets make a lot shmoney and love together  .' (sic)

The new engagement bling has been recently been hot topic of conversation, as it bares a striking resemblance to the one given to Paris Hilton from Chris Zylka.

When asked by TMZ what he thought of the $2million ring the 32-year-old actor bought for his heiress bride-to-be, Offset replied it was 'same thing'.

The site claims Paris's ring is 20 carat compared to Cardi's 11; Offset previously revealed he nabbed his for $500,000.

Big moment: The Finesse (Remix) hitmaker famously proposed to Cardi onstage at Power 99's Powerhouse concert in Philadelphia last October

Delighted: Cardi was seen proudly showcasing her new Instagram on social media shortly after, penning alongside a photo of her engagement ring: 'Jesus Christ Im so emotional, @offsetyrn I loveee you so much'

A fan tweeted at Paris and Cardi B, mentioning that both their diamond rings looked very similar to each other. Paris kindly replied: 'Our future hubby's obviously both have amazing & similar taste! Congrats @iamcardib & @OffsetYRN! #LuckyGirls #RingGoals'

Meanwhile, Cardi recently revealed she and her rapper beau are planning to splash out $1million on their wedding, with the starlet hoping to spend a whopping $50k on her dress alone.

She made the confession during an interview on BBC Radio One with Charlie Sloth and insisted she doesn't think it's fair for her love to cover all of the costs himself. Asked about her big day, Cardi flippantly responded: 'We're going to spend over a million.'

Twinning: Recently a fan tweeted Paris Hilton and Cardi B, mentioning that both their diamond rings look very similar to each other, with Offset later appearing to confirm they are the 'same thing'

Quizzed on who would be footing the bill, she claimed that while Offset has 'more money' than she does, she doesn't want to pressure her beau into paying for everything, especially when she is certain her 'expenses' for the nuptials are going to be much more than his.

She said: 'I don't think that will be fair [to let Offset pay]. I don't like putting all that responsibility on my man. No, it's a partnership.

'And I feel like my expenses is going to be more expensive than his. I feel like my wedding dress itself is going to be at least $50,000... it's got to be extravagant.'

Defending her decision to splash the cash on her bridal gown, Cardi insisted: 'You only get married once!'

Expensive taste: Cardi recently revealed she and her rapper beau are planning to splash out $1million on their wedding, with the starlet hoping to spend a whopping $50k on her dress alone

She also expressed her desire to start a family with her love and claimed she definitely does 'want kids', but not until at least 'two years from now'.

By marrying Offset Cardi is set to become a step-mother to his three children, with the star only recently revealing he is dad to three children from three previous romances.

A source told Hollywood Life: 'Cardi's right by Offset's side, she's ride or die. He wants to get shared custody of his oldest son and she supports him 100 percent.

'Cardi has a huge heart and she's ready to give love to Offset's kids and be a stepmom... she is all about family and now that she and Offset are family, his kids are her family too.'

Loved up: She also expressed her desire to start a family with her love and claimed she definitely does 'want kids', but not until at least 'two years from now'

It has also been claimed Cardi and her beau will film their big day in a wedding TV special worth $1million. According to TMZ, shortly after their engagement BET, VH1 and WE expressed their interest in the couple, with Cardi and Offset set to be 'mulling over' offers.

Speaking of her husband-to-be in an interview with Rolling Stone, Cardi dished that on her birthday, that fell in the same month she got engaged, Offset was away on tour. She said: 'I was sad, because it's like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm not getting no d**k on my birthday." But I wasn't going to get d**k on my birthday anyway, because I got my period.'

Professionally, she and Offset 'polish' each other, she claims. Cardi added: 'I could always ask him, "Do you think this is OK to do? Do you think I'm getting tricked?"'
He's Lorraine Kelly's go-to man when it comes to reporting on the world of fashion.

But expert Mark Heyes suffered his own sartorial faux-pas on Tuesday morning's edition of the chat show when his trousers burst open live on air.

The unfortunate moment occured midway through his appearance, meaning he had to cover himself up as he attempted to press on with the segment.

Wear And Tear! Lorraine Kelly's resident fashion expert Mark Heyes suffered an embarrassing wardrobe mishap as his trousers SPLIT OPEN live on air on Tuesday

What's more, the front of his slacks split, opening up at the crotch - shocking those early morning viewers who had tuned in for a dose of light-hearted fashion advice.

The split seemed to have been caused by his entrance on the show, which saw him being carried in on the back of SAS: Who Dares Wins star Ant Middleton.

As he joined Lorraine for the segment - which was about a sweater that Meghan Markle had worn recently - he admitted that the split had occured.

'The was a huge [ripping] sound and my trousers split!' he told a giggling Lorraine, in order to address the matter head on.

Mark the ripper: The front of his slacks split, opening up at the crotch - shocking those early morning viewers who had tuned in for a dose of light-hearted fashion advice

Oops: He was unable to change outfits as he appeared again later on the show, this time sitting with Lorraine to discuss the serious topic of overly-skinny models

'I'll have to cover up with these,' he added, indicating his cue cards.

At the end of the segment, Lorraine told him to go away and get his trousers 'stitched up'.

'I'm too far gone. I'm going to have to walk around like this for the rest of the day,' the fashion expert jested.

Cover up: He had to hold a cushion over his crotch this time, saying 'They've not just ripped - I can't remove this cushion - it's quite horrific'

And indeed he was unable to change outfits as he appeared again later on the show, this time sitting with Lorraine to discuss the serious topic of overly-skinny models.

He had to hold a cushion over his crotch this time, saying: 'They've not just ripped - I can't remove this cushion - it's quite horrific.'

Lorraine airs Moday - Friday from 8:30AM on ITV.
Chantel Jeffries took gymwear to daywear as she headed to lunch in Beverly Hills wearing a stunning grey two-piece on Monday.

The 24-year-old DJ made the look her own as she sashayed down the street, flaunting her abs in the lycra athleisure wear.

She added some colour and sass to her ensemble with a black jacket which had embroidered sleeves.

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Chantel Jeffries flashed her toned abs in a grey lycra crop top and low-rise matching leggings as she headed to lunch in Beverly Hills on Monday

The beauty also wore a pair of Gucci sliders which had colourful flowers hand-painted throughout.

She carried a red leather bowling bag by Alexander Wang in one hand as she did her thing, while pouting to perfection.

Chantel wore a pair of designer shades, which had reflective lenses and wore her hair up and neatly secured in a pony.

Putting her best foot forwards: The beauty also wore a pair of Gucci sliders which had colourful flowers hand-painted throughout

Double trouble: Chantel sported a hoodie depicting her own name and face on a mugshot - seven years after posing for her police portrait last Wednesday, from her clothing range

Then and now: She was arrested in 2011 after allegedly trying to plunge a knife into a teenage rival at least five times after an argument on Facebook although charges were dropped

The stunner is currently advertising her own range of clothing which is soon to drop and her fans have been showing their love for it on her Twitter page.

Among the range is thought to be a hoodie which includes Chantel's mugshot emblazoned across the front.

She was arrested in 2011 after allegedly trying to plunge a knife into a teenage rival at least five times after an argument on Facebook although charges were dropped.

Wow thing: The 24-year-old DJ made her look her own as she sashayed down the street, flaunting her abs in the lycra athleisure wear

She wore the item of clothing last Wednesday, as she headed out in Los Angeles, seven years after posing for her police portrait.

Chantel, from Jacksonville, N.C., was arrested for misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon after she was said to have stabbed the woman in the left forearm although the charges against the then-17-year-old were later dropped.

She has since gone on to forge a successful career in modelling and social media, maintaining a strong presence on YouTube, where she keeps fans up-to-date on her home and body makeovers.
She's known for her elegant sartorial displays on the red carpet and at star-studded soirees.

And Katie Holmes swapped her usually cutting edge haute couture ensembles for a vintage-inspired look as she wrapped up while arrived to New York City art museum The Met alongside a male pal on Monday.

The 39-year-old screen star paid tribute to yesteryear as she combated the freezing January temperatures in a wool khaki jacket with eye-catching shearling lined collar.

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Stepping out: Katie Holmes swapped her usually cutting edge haute couture looks for a vintage-inspired ensemble as she wrapped up while arrived to New York City art museum The Met alongside a male pal on Monday

Her statement jacket featured large pocket detailing and complementing buttons while she draped her camera over the piece and around her neck.

She teamed her heat-inducing piece with a pair of cropped wide-leg lightwash denims which drew attention to her burgundy leather boots with buckle detail across the foot.

Making sure to stay warm in the Big Apple, she donned a 1940s cloche-style hat in a grey wool over her brunette pixie crop and sported a pair of matching mittens as she arrived to see the Michelangelo; Divine Draftsman and Designer exhibition at the Met.

Showing off her natural beauty, the Batman Begins star - who is in a relationship with Jamie Foxx following her 2012 divorce from Tom Cruise - kept her make-up minimal.

Wrapped up: The 39-year-old screen star paid tribute to yesteryear as she combated the freezing January temperatures in a wool khaki jacket with eye-catching shearling lined collar

Complementing her look, Katie's pal donned green parka with fur-trimmed hood, black jeans and a powder blue peaked cap.

The Dawson's Creek star has been happily dating fellow actor Jamie Foxx of late.

The couple kept their love tightly under wraps since they were first romantically linked in August 2013.

For years they had insisted they were 'just friends' until recently when they were pictured holding hands in public for the first time while they strolled on the beach.

Romance: The Dawson's Creek star has been happily dating fellow actor Jamie Foxx of late (Pictured in September 2017)

Under wraps: The couple kept their love tightly under wraps since they were first romantically linked in August 2013 (Pictured in June 2017)

It has been claimed Katie's ex-husband Tom included a clause in her 2012 divorce settlement banning her from publicly dating for five years.

Her romance with Jamie is the first relationship she has embarked on since she split from the Top Gun star in 2012.

The former flames, who share daughter Suri, made headlines when they got engaged in 2005 following just seven weeks of dating and they were together for six years before they parted ways for good.

They tied the knot in a lavish Scientology ceremony at the Odescalchi Castle in Italy.
He has been pushed to his limit in recent weeks, being left wheelchair bound after falling off a cliff, with his agonising set to cause even more woes as a drug addiction storyline looms.

But at least Coronation Street's Billy Mayhew is about to reunite with his foster daughter Summer Spellman in the coming days, although not his boyfriend Todd Grimshaw.

Teaser images for next week show Billy and Todd's mum Eileen collecting Summer from a playground after she was sent on the run with Todd, a hastily written exit for axed actor Bruno Langley.

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Returning: Coronation Street's Summer Spellman is set to return to the soap next week after being on the run with Todd Grimshaw, reuniting with Billy Mayhew

Billy is reunited with Summer after the schoolgirl gets in touch saying she and Todd can finally be reunited with the vicar, with plans for them all to go away together.

However, when Billy and Eileen go to meet Summer, she is alone, and later admits that Todd isn't coming.

Admitting that Todd was finally caught by police after being on the run since Christmas, Billy then decides to bring Summer home.

Off: Actor Bruno Langley was axed from Corrie in September after being convicted of sexual assault

Grandmother Geraldine later also reunites with Summer, though the schoolgirl also reveals that she and Todd only went on the run to get away from her, and will be returning to the Grimshaw house.

Todd was hastily written out of the soap in September after actor Bruno Langley was convicted of sexual assault.

What followed was a hasty exit scene which saw Todd drive off with Summer with Eileen and Billy clueless as to where they were, though the character's face was never shown on screen.

On the run: Summer was last seen on screen just before Christmas, went she and Todd went on the run in a hastily-written exit

Speeding off: Todd was heard off-screen telling Summer to get in the car, and upon her return the schoolgirl reveals he was finally caught by police

Despite being reunited with Summer, Billy is devastated to hear Todd won't be coming home, coming at a horrific time as the vicar struggles to deal with agonising pain after his cliff fall.

Billy had been relying on Adam Barlow to provide with stronger painkillers, unaware that the lawyer had actually been giving him weaker pills as part of a revenge plot for killing his mum Susan.

Fans will have to wait and see whether Billy's pain pushes him to the edge, but it is looking likely as actor Daniel Brocklebank was recently spotted filming scenes with his drug addict brother Lee.
She is well-known in the film world - having starred in the Underworld franchise, and most recently winning critical acclaim for her role in Love & Friendship.

But Kate Beckinsale kicked her television career back into gear on Tuesday, as she touched down in South Africa to film new ITV drama The Widow.

The 44-year-old was spotted puffing on a cigarette as she made a glamorous arrival in Cape Town for the project - clad in a sleek satin blazer and hot pink heels.

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Smoking hot: Kate Beckinsale was seen puffing on a cigarette as she made a glamorous arrival in South Africa to film new ITV drama The Widow

Here she is: The actress, 44, was casually chic in a sleek blazer and hot pink heels as she touched down in Cape Town, with a suitcase in hand

The Total Recall star was effortlessly glamorous in the double-breasted suit jacket and tailored trousers, which skimmed her long and slender legs to the floor.

Proving her chic sense of style, the brunette then slung a matching leather handbag over one shoulder, before injecting colour into the look with hot pink stilettos.

Styling her hair into big, bouncy waves and accessorising with dark sunglasses, the beauty drew attention to her clear and glowing complexion - accentuated by minimal make-up and a pale pink lip.

Suits you! The Total Recall star was effortlessly glamorous in the double-breasted suit jacket and tailored trousers, which skimmed her long and slender legs to the floor

Think pink:Proving her chic sense of style, the brunette then injected colour into the look with hot pink stilettos as she arrived with her mother Judy (R)

Puffing on a cigarette outside the terminal, Kate cut a completely relaxed figure as she waited for her taxi in the sunshine.

The British beauty is believed to be filming her new ITV drama The Widow in Cape Town.

The 8-part series, set to hit screens next year, is the newest project from screenwriting brothers Harry and Jack Williams - responsible for hits Liar and The Missing.

Kate plays Georgia Wells in the drama, who attempts to uncover the truth behind her husband's disappearance, after he is reported dead following a plane crash in the Congo.

Stunning: Styling her hair into big, bouncy waves and accessorising with dark sunglasses, the beauty drew attention to her clear and glowing complexion

Chilling out: Puffing on a cigarette outside the terminal, Kate cut a completely relaxed figure as she waited for her taxi in the sunshine

Coming up: The British beauty is believed to be filming her new ITV drama The Widow in Cape Town - from the creators of big hitters Liar and The Missing

Meanwhile the actress was seen jetting to the sun-soaked location with her mother Judy - clearly spending time away from rumoured comedian beau Matt Rife, 22.

The pair were last pictured sharing an embrace at the Westfield Century City mall in Santa Monica in November - three months after Us Weekly reported their romance had 'fizzled out'.

An insider said at the time: 'They went on a couple of fun dates. It fizzled out weeks ago. She's happily single and has a lot going on.'

The stunning SAG Award nominee began dating the TRL host sometime around March after reportedly meeting through a mutual friend.

The Total Recall actress is reportedly two years older than his mother and Matt is only four years older than her NYU-attending daughter Lily, who she shares with ex-partner Michael Sheen.
The Today show lost veteran host of 10 years, Lisa Wilkinson, last year, after she made a shock resignation following an alleged pay dispute.

And on Tuesday, Nine shared a promotional clip praising the new 2018 hosts Georgia Gardner and Karl Stefanovic as 'two of the best, together.'

The advertisement spoke highly of the TV duo, announcing: 'A new team, a new era; Georgia and Karl.'

'A new team, a new era... two of the best, together': Georgie Gardner and Karl Stefanovic star in promo clip for Today... after veteran host Lisa Wilkinson's shock resignation

Introducing Lisa's replacement to audiences, footage was shown of Georgie presenting on numerous Channel Nine programs.

The voice-over said: 'For 17 years she's been one of Australia's most trusted faces, to 60 Minutes to Nightly News, Georgia Gardner has done it all.'

Karl, who needed no introduction, was also shown behind the desk of Today and reporting from abroad at major events.

Welcome to the team! Journalist Georgie Gardner was announced as Lisa's replacement on the Today show in November, five weeks after Lisa resigned

Journalist Georgie Gardner was announced as Lisa's replacement on the Today show in November, five weeks after Lisa resigned.

Earlier this month, fans were treated to a sneak peek promo of the new breakfast duo in action.

In the short advertisement, Georgie and Karl looked comfortable behind the desk as they read the news, shared banter and introduced high-profile guests.

'Make a fresh start to your day': Georgie and Karl debut as Today show hosts in SNEAK PEEK promo for Nine

Georgie opens the clip by announcing, 'It is a brand-new day! Morning, Karl', to which Karl responds: 'Morning, Georgie.'

However, the duo soon break the fourth wall and begin conversing with their devoted viewers, with Karl saying good morning to a mother Karen in her kitchen.

Karl also plays the hero, by warning Karen's son Jack, who is watching them on TV, that his toast was burning.

He's so helpful! Karl also plays the hero, by warning Karen's son Jack, who is watching them on TV, that his toast was burning

'Here's your stop Tom': She also advises a distracted commuter watching her present the news on the bus to get off, before he misses his stop

Georgie then delivers the news, and gives a personal shout out to Alex watching from his laptop.

She also advises a distracted commuter watching her present the news on the bus to get off, before he misses his stop.

The promo ends with a promo shot of the pair in their broadcast outfits, with the voiceover announcing: 'Make a fresh start to your day. Wake up with Georgie and Karl on Today.'

The hosts will return to screens officially from January 22.

'Wake up with Georgie and Karl on Today': The hosts will return to screens officially from January 22

Meanwhile, Lisa Wilkinson has also starred in her own promos for The Project this week.

She reportedly departed Channel Nine in October after network bosses refused to pay her the same salary as her Today co-host Karl Stefanovic.

This week, the network revealed a first-look trailer of Lisa's debut, which pokes fun at the media hype surrounding her arrival.

In addition to her role on The Project, Lisa will also become editor-in-chief of the new online platform, Ten Daily.

Lisa is due to debut on The Project after Australia Day, despite the show returning on January 9.
She informs fans of the upcoming dramas in the soap world, as a television expert on This Morning.

But Sharon Marshall revealed she has found her very own happy ending on Tuesday, as she confirmed she was pregnant live on air.

The 46-year-old broke down in tears with hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield as she revealed she was 14 weeks along - gushing that she and partner Paul Fletcher were 'so happy and thrilled' at the news.

Bun in the oven! Soap correspondent Sharon Marshall revealed she was expecting a baby live on Tuesday's This Morning

'We're so thrilled': The 46-year-old broke down in tears with hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield as she revealed she was 14 weeks along

Sharon had been delivering her daily dose of soap gossip on the ITV sofa, when she announced her happy news to fans.

Struggling to hold back her tears, she told a delighted Holly and Phil: 'I'm pregnant! I'm probably going to say everything wrong but I'm happy, this is happy tears!'

At which an overjoyed Holly simply replied: 'It is just the most wonderful news!'

Emotional: Struggling to hold back her tears, she told a delighted Holly and Phil: 'I'm pregnant! I'm probably going to say everything wrong but I'm happy, this is happy tears!'

Supportive: At which an overjoyed Holly (L) simply replied: 'It is just the most wonderful news!'

She went on to admit that Dr Chris, who has been the resident medical expert on This Morning since 1988, was one of the first people she had told.

'I told Dr Chris very early, so he's been keeping the secret,' she explained. 'We're 14 weeks along, and he is the King of the corridor consultations so we had to let him know!'

Unable to hold back her tears, she then added with a laugh: 'Why am I so hormonal?', leading Holly to joke: 'Get used to this, it doesnt stop!'

'He is the King of corridor consultations': She went on to admit that Dr Chris, who has been the resident medical expert on This Morning since 1988, was one of the first people she had told

Can't wait: She also revealed that she and Paul are expecting the tot, who will be their first child, in July

So excited: Gushing of her partner, she said: 'Paul is really really happy, we're so thrilled, we just can't wait'

Blossoming: Sharon proudly showed off her growing bump on the show in a stylish floral maxi dress, styled like a shirt

She also revealed that she and Paul are expecting the tot, who will be their first child, in July.

Gushing of her partner, she said: 'Paul is really really happy, we're so thrilled, we just can't wait.'

Before joking of her soap segment on the episode: 'I deliberately took out anything related to babies because you'll cry and then I cry!'

After the show, the Lancashire native took to her Twitter page to share a photo of their baby scan, and thank fans for their support and well-wishes so far.

'Beyond happy': After the show, the Lancashire native took to her Twitter page to share a photo of their baby scan, and thank fans for their support and well-wishes

Delighted: Sharon and Paul, who is a music marketing executive, have been together for a number of years, and currently live in West London (pictured in February 2016)

She wrote in the caption: 'Thank you so much for your lovely messages, Paul and I are beyond happy.'

Sharon and Paul, who is a music marketing executive, have been together for a number of years, and currently live in West London.

The journalist is a popular member of the This Morning team, having been their resident soap expert since 2003.

In January last year, Sharon even paid tribute to the show's late agony aunt Denise Robertson at the National Television Awards, by wearing her earrings on the red carpet.

Denise died from pancreatic cancer in March 2016 at the age of 83, but Sharon wanted the broadcaster to be 'on stage with them' while they collected their award, having worked on the show for 27 years.
She's been dating girlfriend Lara Creber since late last year.

And now loved-up Fiona Falkiner has opened up about why she believes there is still work to be done to make accepting people for their many different sexual, physical and emotional variances the norm.

'It doesn't matter if you love a man, or love a woman, if you are fat, skinny, tall, short, we are all unique, beautiful individuals who deserve the same rights and respect,' the 35-year-old former Biggest Loser host told The Daily Telegraph.

This comes after she recently celebrated her 35th birthday with a special surprise birthday organised by her girlfriend Lara Creber (left)

Fiona will be participating in the annual Rainbow Run Sydney on February 25, which was originally set up to fund the marriage equality campaign, but will now honour equality in general.

'There is a long way before everything is completely equal,' personal trainer Lara, who was also interviewed, told the newspaper.

'We've just got to keep supporting each other and showing that everyone is the same.'

Lara recently organised a surprise birthday for Fiona, who turned 35 at the start of the year.

Biggest shock: On Sunday, an unsuspecting Fiona was overcome with emotion when she walked into her surprise birthday bash. The TV personality can clearly be seen in a state of shock, glassy-eyed with her hand over her mouth

They're quite the pair! The couple got together in late 2017 - making it official via Instagram

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 muc to all the beauty people in my life.'

The reality star also thanked her girlfriend, writing: 'especially you, @larzicrebs.'

She's been enjoying the great outdoors this summer, recently looking radiant relaxing at Wylies Baths in Coogee.

The Former Biggest Loser star took to Instagram to share the beaming snap with her 70,000 followers.

'First day back at work,' she captioned.

'But with a face by Kelly Tapp and hair by Brad Mullins life feels pretty good!' she added, thanking her hair and makeup team.

The look of love? Fiona Falkiner showed off her radiant glow as she beamed in a stunning selfie shared to Instagram this week

That tan is proof! She's been enjoying the great outdoors this summer, recently looking radiant relaxing at Wylies Baths in Coogee

For her makeup, she showcased a glamorous summer look with peach blush on her cheeks, lashings of mascara, kohl rimmed eyes and bold brows.

Fans of the reality star complimented her gorgeous glow, including one who simply wrote: 'Breathtaking.'

'This photo is absolutely stunning, it has such warmth to it! Beautiful,' another added.

Meanwhile fellow model and 2017 Block winner Elyse Knowles said: 'shining.'

Fiona also took to her Instagram story to share a short clip of her office for the day, which was a view looking out to Wylies Baths.
It's usually the hot tub that's the scene of risque displays inside the Celebrity Big Brother house.

But this season has seen the inclusion of a sauna - in which there's been some intimate chats between the men of the house.

And in newly released scenes, four of them have taken to the hot box to practice their bust enhancing exercises - after each having a go at dancing with their pecs.

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They must improve their busts: Jonny Mitchell, Shane J, Andrew Brady and Dapper Laughs strip to just their swimming shorts and hit the sauna... to perform BUST enhancing exercises

Sat in a row on the bench, Jonny Mitchell, Shane J, Andrew Brady and Dapper Laughs sit in their shorts [or, in the case of Jonny, just a towel] and wax lyrical about whether or not cameramen are watching them from behind the big mirror in front of them.

They decide it would surely be too hot for them, before Jonny instigates an impressive display of dancing with his pecs.

The others follow suit, with Shane unable to keep up properly.

Before long, the quartet are reciting 'I must improve my bust' and flexing their chests to 'enhance' themselves.

Dapper then takes it one step further by insinuating the exercises can be applied to his manhood.

Here he goes again: Dapper then takes it one step further by insinuating the exercises can be applied to his manhood

One man absent from this line-up is Ginuwine - who was taregted by fellow housemate Ashley James' father on Tuesday morning.

Ashley's father has admitted he finds it 'difficult' to watch her relationship with the US star play out onscreen.

Speaking in an interview with Heat magazine, the Made In Chelsea star's dad Geoff, 60, sent a stark warning to Ginuwine, insisting that if he doesn't treat his daughter right, he'll have his head 'knocked off'.

Hard to watch: While CBB star Ashley James appears to be getting her 'flirty friendship' with Ginuwine back on track, her father has admitted he finds it 'difficult' to watch her relationship with the US star play out onscreen

Ginuwine had entered the house along with seven other male housemates, three days after Celebrity Big Brother's female stars made their debut on the series.

The show had launched with an all-women lineup to mark this series' Year of the Women theme in honour of 100 years passing since women gained the right to vote, and since then, viewers have seen sparks fly between Ashley and Ginuwine.

Commenting on their 'unexpected' blossoming romance, Geoff said: 'As a father, it's quite difficult watching. As a long as a guy treats Ashley well, I'll be fine... if he doesn't, I'll knock his head off.'

When asked whether he is hoping to meet his daughter's new love interest, Ashley's dad admitted he would like the opportunity to 'suss out' the vocal talent and 'give him the evil eye', but played down any chances of a meeting, as it is still 'early days' between the pair.

Stark warning: Speaking in an interview with Heat magazine, the Made In Chelsea star's dad insisted that if the Pony singer doesn't treat his daughter right, he'll have his head 'knocked off'

Having his say: Commenting on their 'unexpected' blossoming romance, Geoff said: 'As a father, it's quite difficult watching'

Geoff joked: 'We have our other daughter's wedding coming up, we don't need another!'

He also laughed off claims he would become grandfather to Ginuwine's nine children if the star's romance with Ashley did progress, adding: 'I'm not sure they'd be interested in having me as a grandad... my life is a bit boring!'

Ginuwine shares two daughters with his ex-wife Tonya M. Johnston (known as Sole) and confirmed in February 2009 that he has parented seven other children; nine in total.

Ashley's father Geoff insisted she 'loves kids' and the reality beauty appeared to prove just that, after winning over a group of children to win immunity from CBB's upcoming eviction.

Protective: When asked whether he is hoping to meet his daughter's new love interest, Ashley's dad admitted he would like the opportunity to 'suss out' the vocal talent and 'give him the evil eye'

Free pass: Ashley's father Geoff insisted she 'loves kids' and the reality beauty appeared to prove just that, after winning over a group of children to win immunity from CBB's upcoming eviction

The housemates were given a challenge which tested their 'mental strength, resilience and determination' and had to keep a group of children in the playroom on their spots for the longest.

The children then voted for their favourite housemate in the diary room and chose Ashley, securing her place in the house and giving her immunity.

Meanwhile, viewers saw the social media influencer address her relationship with Giunwine, after the duo clashed following his attempts to seduce her with a sexually suggestive song.

Emotional: Viewers saw the social media influencer break down over her relationship with Giunwine, after the duo clashed following his attempts to seduce her with a sexually suggestive song

Hurt: Ashley confessed she was left 'terrified' by his advances and had been 'hurt' by his behaviour, claiming she had wanted their blossoming romance to stay 'positive and innocent'

Ashley confessed she was left 'terrified' by his advances and had been 'hurt' by his behaviour, claiming she had wanted their blossoming romance to stay 'positive and innocent'.

Keen to make amends with the rapper following their fallout, Ashley claimed he had been 'acting funny' with her and had been annoyed that Giunwine hadn't asked her 'what was wrong' after upsetting her.

She explained that the whole incident had left her feeling 'insecure', prompting Ginuwine to reply: 'I want to help if its something like that, come on. You gotta tell me your backstories cause obviously you've been hurt. That's weak.'

'What's weak is you knew I was upset and you didn't say anything,' she hit back, before adding: 'I just want our flirty friendship back.'

Fallout: Keen to make amends with the rapper following their fallout, Ashley claimed he had been 'acting funny' with her and had been annoyed that Giunwine hadn't asked her 'what was wrong' after upsetting her

Disbelief: She explained that the whole incident had left her feeling 'insecure', prompting Ginuwine to reply: 'I want to help if its something like that, come on. You gotta tell me your backstories cause obviously you've been hurt. That's weak'

Putting the incident behind them, the duo were later seen getting into bed together.

Ashley had been left wary over Ginuwine, after he was seen singing: 'Tonight is the night,' suggestively and pointing to her.

Speaking to her housemates, she said: 'He's said he's a womanizer. This isn't flirting fun, I need to protect myself. I know it's in my insecurities.

'I have put all my past into it and I'm like run, run, run. The moment I sense anything, I'm gone. Now I'm being that pathetic person reading into everything.

'He's not getting any! I don't take s*** from no one. It was fun and flirting and innocent. Now I'm like - I don't want to do that.'
He appeared to be turning his back on love, after posting a cryptic tweet accusing girls of clinging to his fame.

But just a day later and shortly after splitting from his holiday flame Jessica Garthwaite, Stephen Bear has appeared to move on with his FOURTH girl in three weeks since jetting into Bali.

The reality star, 28, was seen putting on an amorous display with his new bikini-clad love interest as he kicked back at a beach bar overseas, after cheekily hinting at his new romance on Instagram.

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Moving on already? Stephen Bear has appeared to move on with his FOURTH girl in three weeks since jetting into Bali, as he was seen putting on an amorous display with tattooed model Laura Hamilton-Clunes

Following the breakdown of his relationship with former Geordie Shore star Charlotte Crosby, Bear had jetted into the Indonesian island and appears to be enjoying an extended holiday.

Since touching down, he hasn't been without female company and has been linked to a bevy of beauties, with his latest flame reportedly unveiled to be Laura Hamilton-Clunes - a tattooed Australian model.

The duo were seen getting up close and personal while relaxing in the desirable temperatures overseas, as they cuddled up together on a sun-lounger. Laura was seen nestling in next to Bear's chest, while he wrapped an arm around the beauty.

She donned a plunging bikini top that struggled to contain her assets and made sure to expose the many inkings she has etched over her body. She paired her swimwear with distressed denim shorts and cool round-framed shades.

Revealing: Laura made sure to flaunt her assets and inkings in a plunging bikini top, while Bear teased a look at his muscular physique in an open floral shirt and aviator shades

New flame? The reality star, 28, was seen putting on an amorous display with his new bikini-clad love interest as he kicked back at a beach bar overseas, after cheekily hinting at his new romance on Instagram

Bear, meanwhile, teased a look at his muscular physique, as he posed in an open floral printed shirt and dark swimming shorts. He sported a pair of aviator shades on his face and couldn't tear his hands away from his new squeeze, as she affectionately placed a hand on his leg.

His appearance with Laura comes after he was seen hinting at another new romance on his Instagram page. Bear shared a shot of Laura sporting a mismatched bikini and Baker's hat, cheekily penning alongside it: 'Happy birthday to me.'

The former Celebrity Big Brother winner had been linked to another brunette, Jessica Garthwaite, but appeared to confirm his split from his holiday flame in a series of cryptic tweets.

No longer single? Bear shared a shot of Laura sporting a mismatched bikini and Baker's hat, cheekily penning alongside it: 'Happy birthday to me.'

All over: The former Celebrity Big Brother winner had been linked to another brunette, Jessica Garthwaite, but appeared to confirm his split from his holiday flame in a series of cryptic tweets just one day earlier

Bear had embarked on a romance with the beauty therapist earlier this month, after his ex Charlotte rebuffed his public proposal to win her back. He was warned away from his former Just Tattoo Of Us co-host Charlotte by her BFF Holly Hagan and later revealed to fans that Charlotte had rejected his advances.

He has also been linked to two other girls in recent weeks; a girl believed to be Dutch who he was seen cosying up to in Bali and Essex native Elizabeth Randall - making Laura his fourth love interest in just three weeks.

18-year-old Elizabeth and Bear were first linked just before Christmas, but the star split from the blonde just before heading away to Bali. According to The Sun, a source claimed the Argos worker had a 'lucky escape' from the lothario.

They claimed: 'He was always telling her he liked her and that he wanted to make her relationship work... now she can see him for what he really is - a user and a deadbeat.

Holiday romance: Bear had embarked on a romance with the beauty therapist earlier this month, after his ex Charlotte rebuffed his public proposal to win her back

Embracing his single status: Bear was seen cosying up to a girl, believed to be Dutch, during his break in Bali

Failed romance: 18-year-old Essex-native Elizabeth Randall and Bear were first linked just before Christmas, but the star split from the blonde just before heading away to Bali

'He was always being really intense and serious and telling her he was into her, but then he'd beg for Charlotte back and ignore her.'

Jessica, meanwhile, has reportedly now headed home from Bali and seeming to suggest he is single again, Bear had claimed girls try to 'cling onto his fame', before taking to Snapchat to inform his admirers they must 'pass a test' to be his girlfriend.

First taking to Twitter, he wrote in a now-deleted message: 'Girls would love to be with me for ever,but once you get rejected Im the worse guy in the world and Im a user...'

He then went on to accuse women of being with him for his position in the public eye, adding fiercely: 'How about.. you need to stop being tight and fame hungary..

In the past: Stephen was rejected by his former love Charlotte Crosby, after reaching out to her to try and win her back following the breakdown of their relationship

'Try to cling onto my fame but your just not good enough,so up your game girls and stop hating' (sic)

Not stopping there, the Ex On The Beach star then shared an equally bitter video on Snapchat - which saw him claim girls must pass a 'test' to date him, in order to prove they meet his numerous good qualities.

He finished his bizarre tirade by adding: 'When I'm single, I'm single. When you're with me, I'm a f**king legend. And the same with most guys, if you want to be with me, if you want the best, stop hating.'

Despite the posts, Stephen has not deleted the photos of him and Jessica from his Instagram page. MailOnline has contacted his representatives for comment.

Hitting out: Seeming to suggest he is single again, Bear had claimed girls try to 'cling onto his fame', before taking to Snapchat to inform his admirers they must 'pass a test' to be his girlfriend

Stephen has been putting his love woes behind him and cosying up to a number of beauties in Bali, since his appeal for a reconciliation with ex Charlotte Crosby was rejected.

Last month, the Celebrity Big Brother alumni admitted he had 'really messed up' and declared he wanted to 'spend the rest of my life' with Charlotte, in a heartfelt Instagram appeal.

Sharing a number of loved-up snaps of the pair, he wrote: 'Dear Charlotte, I really messed up, if I can rewind the clock back maybe I wouldnt of done the things I did and say. Lifes about making mistakes.

'Ive just been really sad recently and I need to get it off my chest.

Confident: Not stopping there, the Ex On The Beach star then shared an equally bitter video on Snapchat - which saw him claim girls must pass a 'test' to date him

'I'm good looking, I'm funny, I'm smooth': In the video he listed his redeeming features, which girls will only see if they don't 'take the p**s' in their romance

'I no being with me isnt easy and I will probably send you insane in the end and I really do care and still love you (sic).'

Charlotte and Bear enjoyed an 11-month romance before they were plagued by a number of splits - resulting in their acrimonious breakup in December.

The couple first hit a crisis after the former scaffold worker was pictured heading home from a Halloween party, with a mystery brunette in tow.

Their roller-coaster romance then appeared to come to a screeching halt in October, with the couple being plagued by 'cheating' claims and Charlotte feuding with Bear's family on Twitter.
They met while working together on a film set in 2016.

And Heather Matarazzo announced her secret engagement to writer Heather Turman with an adorable Instagram post shared on Monday afternoon.

The 35-year-old actress was perched alongside her leading lady on a sandy beach in the sweet photos of her proposal, with the caption, 'We kept it to ourselves for a few days, but it's official!'

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She said yes! Heather Matarazzo announced her secret engagement to writer Heather Turman with an adorable Instagram post shared on Monday afternoon

Peering off into the distance, the women cuddled up to each other to gaze at the sunset while sitting along the shore.

'There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only,' Matarazzo wrote. 'It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, ones dreams would have no meaning.' - The Alchemist.'

After the loving quote, she wrote, 'We kept this to ourselves for a few days, but on 1-11, I asked.....and she said yes. To death and back, I love you, Turman. #twinflame #engaged #thealchemist.'

Love: The 35-year-old actress was perched alongside her leading lady in the sweet photos of her proposal, with the caption, 'We kept it to ourselves for a few days, but it's official!'

Romantic:Peering off into the distance, the women cuddled up to each other to gaze at the sunset while sitting along the shore

'I'm engaged to the absolute, unequivocal love of my life,' Turman wrote in an Instagram post. 'I never knew I could find someone that matches me the way she does, in all ways... always.

'If Hollywood is my pyramids, then she is my Fatima. This is it. #whenyouknowyouknow #secondtimesacharm.'

Both women had their backs to the camera, with Turman's blonde hair peeking from underneath a black leather jacket with a light grey hood.

Matarazzo donned a long black sweater worn off one shoulder, showing off one thick black strap.

Happy: The ladies live together with their two dogs and a cat; seen in a cheery holiday photo on Instagram

Sweet: Matarazzo and Turman worked together on the comedy Stuck in 2016; seen with Jillian Armenante at a film festival in 2016

Matarazzo and Turman worked together on the comedy Stuck in 2016.

Matarazzo starred in the film while Turman served as writer and producer, in addition to receiving acting credits.

The loving duo live together with a host of furry friends and regularly gush about their love on social media.

The Princess Diaries starlet was previously engaged to Caroline Murphy before calling off their engagement in 2012.
In November he was rumoured to be 'having fun' with 29-year-old male model Matt Law.

But Bruno Tonioli, 61, was sure to bat away such suggestions on Tuesday during an appearance on Loose Women - dismissing any talk of a romance with the blonde hunk.

Tonioli also sent shock waves after he said 'p**s take' as part of a challenge - leaving host Andrea McLean to apologise to the studio audience and viewers at home.

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'Me naughty? I'm practically a saint!' Bruno Tonioli cryptically avoided questions about his love life on Loose Women... and insisted he loves being naked and 'letting it all hang out'

'What romance?' Bruno asked coyly as Nadia Sawalha pressed him on the subject of a relationship with Matt. 'Our secret romance?' he joked, pointing to Nadia.

He went on to elaborate on his love life: 'I have a night out with friends and it all becomes... we go to a restaurant and have a nice time with friends that's all there is to it.'

Seeming to discredit the rumours, he then changed tact again and said suggestively: 'Me naughty? Never. I'm practically a saint.'

The long-standing judge on Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing With The Stars was also asked about his body confidence.

Sugar daddy? In November Bruno was rumoured to be 'having fun' with 29-year-old male model Matt Law

Not happening: Bruno was sure to bat away such suggestions on Tuesday during an appearance on Loose Women - dismissing any talk of a romance with the blonde hunk

'I never have [been shy]! I'm always naked,' he exclaimed. 'It's very important for people to be relaxed with themselves. We all have stereotypes we try to comply with, we're all made certain ways, it's absolutely fine, let it all hang out.'

He went on: 'If you look at magazines, they all look like superheros, they are bodies that are impossible to attain unless you go to the gym 25 hours a day!'

Bruno appeared in a campaign in which the Loose Women presenters stripped down to show off their god-given physiques - which inspired some celebrity men to do the same.

Bruno happily got involved. He said: 'You just have to say "this is who I am, take it or leave it". Sometimes you have to take a bit of a risk, you have to say you're in it together, let's have a good time!'

Bruno's confidence will surely have been boosted by the attention from model Matt - especially if the rumours of their dalliance were indeed accurate.

Denied: 'What romance?' he asked coyly as Nadia Sawalha pressed him on the subject. 'Our secret romance?' he joked, pointing to Nadia

Having fun? Despite Matt insisting that they are 'just friends', a source has revealed that he has 'put a smile back on Bruno's face'

The pair were seen enjoyiong a dinner date at West Hollywood restaurant Catch in November, with Bruno getting rather tactile with the stunning blonde.

A source told MailOnline at the time: 'Its not love, but it's going well. They are seeing how things are going and they get on well and laugh a lot. Its early days.'

The judge was seen enjoying another night on the town with the handsome male model at Hollywood's Sunset Marquis - with an onlooker claiming that there was 'chemistry' between the pair.

An onlooker said: 'Bruno kept giving Matt hugs. There was definitely chemistry between them but obviously an age gap. Bruno was very touchy-feely! They sat close and everyone were looking over as the table was all laughing.'

Blunder: Tonioli also sent shock waves after he said 'p**s take' as part of a challenge - leaving host Andrea McLean to apologise to the studio audience and viewers at home

Departure: Italian choreographer, dancer, and TV personality Bruno was seen wrapped up warm as he left the ITV sudios

Sources later told The Sun: 'Bruno has really been getting on well with Matt, they enjoy each others company. They have spent the last few days together in the States and he has been introduced to a few of his friends.

'Bruno is growing increasingly fond of Matt and it isnt hard to see why. Hes noticed everywhere they go. They were very touchy-feely over dinner and laughing so loudly that everyone took notice.'

Despite Matt insisting that they are 'just friends', a source has revealed that he has 'put a smile back on Bruno's face'.

It was also claimed that the pair are 'having fun' and not taking things too seriously due to their age difference.

Bruno was on Loose Women to promote the upcoming Strictly tour, revealing: 'We're going to have the four finalists and all the favourites. We do two rounds of dancing and our scores are only for guidance, the people in the arena choose their winner every night.

'It still touches me, we are welcomed like rockstars, the response of the crowd, they laugh at all the comments.'

Promo trail: Bruno was on Loose Women to promote the upcoming Strictly tour, revealing: 'We're going to have the four finalists and all the favourites. We do two rounds of dancing and our scores are only for guidance, the people in the arena choose their winner every night

Confident: The long-standing judge on Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing With The Stars was also asked about his body confidence

The judge flies back and forth from the UK and the US to juggle both versions of the dancing shows. But he doesn't complain.

He said: 'I really appreciate every second of it. I fly in every Thursday and leave every Sunday of the show.

'How do I do it? I have no idea. I'm in the zone, I know that from September to December, I have a job to do.'

However, Toniolo caused an epic blunder live on-air when he accidentally swore during a game where he had to guess dance moves Shirley Ballas was performing.

He revealed that Shirley and her son Mark Ballas once did the dance as part of a 'p**s take' video, before he quickly asked: 'Can I say 'p**s take?'

Immediately he was informed that he wasn't able to and Andrea apologised for the use of his language.
The Jonas Brothers broke up at the peak of their popularity in 2013, but there's a chance that the fraternal trio is ready to make a comeback.

On Monday, the band's official Instagram account was secretly reactivated and fans were quick to notice this as they questioned whether a reunion was in the works.

The trio's social media page did not include any new photos or announcements that marked the occasion for the account's activation.

They're back! The Jonas Brothers Instagram account went live again on Monday without warning or announcement

The band's last Instagram post was dated July 22, 2013, the same year that the Jonas Brothers broke up.

The account's most recent post was suddenly swamped with comments after fans realized what had happened.

Excited followers spammed the post by demonstrating their shock and enthusiasm.

Many commentators also directly demanded answers by asking whether this move signaled an upcoming reunion.

Last post: The account's most recent post is dated 2013, the same year the band broke up

The boys are back in town: Fans repeatedly expressed the phrase 'OMG' and couldn't believe that the band's Instagram account was back

Reunion? The band got called out by multiple fans who asked if a reunion was coming

It was only a week ago that Nick Jonas, 25, was spotted having a serious conversation with his brother Joe Jonas, 28, in Studio City over breakfast.

The photos of the get together show the brothers focused and engaged as they have an intense discussion with one another.

It's possible that their recent meeting could be related to the re-launch of their Instagram account, and a potential reunion.

The talk: Joe Jonas, left, and Nick Jonas, right, appeared to be having a serious conversation last Monday; they may have been talking about a possible musical reunion

The three Jonas Brothers were seen together in 2017, four years after calling it quits in 2013.

In 2016, Joe Jonas was candid in a Reddit AMA where he took and answered questions from fans. The Camp Rock actor chose to be frank when asked why the Jonas Brothers broke up.

'I was seeing a therapist and I wasnt on speaking terms with my brothers,' he shared.

Together again? In late 2017, the three Jonas Brothers took a group photo at the AT&T Stadium in Texas that Joe Jonas posted on his Instagram account

Group shot: The three Jonas Brothers were photographed sitting together on a couch back in 2013

'When it happened, we were focusing on going on another tour and we had plans to hit the road and do what we had been doing for a while. Nick brought it to the table that he wanted to focus on different things, like acting and doing music on his own.'

'At first, it was really shocking to me because it was kind of all I had known was the Jonas Brothers, forever,' he continued.

'So, I was pretty mad and confused because, I was like, Ive been putting so much time and effort into this for so long and now I just have to stop and figure out what's next,' he wrote.
Her footwear looked more appropriate for a bedroom rather than the chilly streets of Manhattan, New York City.

Model Hailey Baldwin was spotted wearing Gucci's pink, fluffy slippers that cost an eye-watering $1,150 on Tuesday when the temperature hit a high of just 35F.

The 21-year-old teamed the pricey footwear, made from Merino lambs' wool, with an over-sized, caramel-colored wool coat that she wore over a grey hoodie and pale blue skinny jeans.

Toasty toes: Model Hailey Baldwin wore a pair of pink, fluffy Gucci slippers that cost an eye-watering $1,150 on Tuesday when she was spotted out in Manhattan, NYC, on a chilly Tuesday

Hailey, recently voted Maxim's World's Sexiest Woman of 2017, smoothed her long blonde tresses into a topknot that she perched high on her head.

And she was glued to her phone as she walked along the sidewalk with her other hand thrust deep into her pocket.

The daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin and niece of 30 Rock star Alec Baldwin recently jetted into New York after spending the holiday season in Los Angeles.

In the pink: The 21-year-old teamed her outrageously expensive footwear with an over-sized, caramel-colored wool coat, a grey hoodie and pale blue skinny jeans

On Thursday she celebrated her first cover of 2018 - the February edition of Marie Claire Italia - which hits newsstands today.

The high-fashion magazine spread was shot by David Bellemere and styled by Elisabetta Massari.

Hailey, who boasts 12.6 million social media followers, gushed on Instagram: 'Great way to start off the new year!'

'Great way to start off the new year!': On Thursday, Hailey celebrated her first cover of 2018 - the February edition of Marie Claire Italia - which hits newsstands today

She also co-hosts celebrity rap battle competition Drop The Mic, which airs Tuesdays on TBS. The show was recently renewed for a second season.

Meanwhile, Hailey has a role in the hotly anticipated Ocean's 8, a spin-off of George Clooney's Ocean's 11 franchise, co-starring a slew of female A-listers who are planning a heist on New York's Met Ball.

The movie, with Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, Helen Bonham-Carter, Anne Hathaway, Katie Holmes, Mindy Kaling, Rihanna and Awkwafina, is due out on June 8.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West welcomed their third child earlier this week.

And some fans are convinced that Kylie Jenner was her sister's surrogate in a bizarre conspiracy theory.

It comes after Kim announced the arrival of a 'healthy' baby girl, who was born at 12:47am on January 15 weighing 7lb 6oz via a surrogate.

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Surrogate sister? Fans are convinced that Kylie Jenner was her sister Kim Kardashian's surrogate in a bizarre conspiracy theory

The theory comes after Twitter was set alight on Friday with a wild rumour Kylie was 'in labor' and rushed to hospital.

While Kylie has yet to respond to reports that she is expecting her first child with boyfriend Travis Scott, fans were quick to jump to the conclusion that she was in fact acting as Kim's surrogate.

The speculation she was in labor began on a Facebook fan page called The Morning Breathers in which a member posted a screenshot of an alleged conversation with a friend who apparently works at the hospital according to Clevver.

Newborn daughter: It comes after Kim announced the arrival of a 'healthy' baby girl, who was born at 12:47am on January 15 weighing 7lb 6oz

In the image posted in the community, the alleged insider claimed that the 20-year-old star checked into the medical facility and was in labor.

However TMZ later confirmed the reports were a false alarm.

Wild: Fans took to Twitter to discuss the conspiracy theory

But fans took to Twitter to discuss the conspiracy theory, picking up on the false rumours the make-up guru was in hospital.

One wrote: 'Weird that @KylieJenner was apparently in hospital this weekend and Kim's baby was born yesterday. Is Kylie the surrogate? Yes or No??'

Another added: ' I'm convinced that @KylieJenner was Kim and Kanye's surrogate.. But either way Congratulations @KimKardashian and Kanye West to your latest addition. Heres to a beautiful and healthy baby girl! I'm so happy for you guys!!'

While another fan tweeted: 'Are we still theorizing that Kylie Jenner may secretly be Kim and Kanyes surrogate? Jw since there were rumors she was in labor and, coincidentally, Kimyes baby was just born.'

MailOnline has contacted Kylie Jenner's representatives for comment.

Baby number three: Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, pictured here over the weekend, have welcomed a girl

Meanwhile, Kim, 37, announced the news in a message on her website titled, 'She's here! We're so in love.'

She wrote: 'Kanye and I are happy to announce the arrival of our healthy, beautiful baby girl.

'We are incredibly grateful to our surrogate who made our dreams come true with the greatest gift one could give and to our wonderful doctors and nurses for their special care. North and Saint are especially thrilled to welcome their baby sister. Love, Kim Kardashian West.'

Kim and Kanye were both in the delivery room with the surrogate, although the rapper was behind a curtain until after the baby was born, according to TMZ .

Kim was the first person to hold the baby girl for skin-to-skin bonding, but the surrogate was allowed some contact with the child after the birth.

Her sisters Kourtney, Khloe and mother Kris were also at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A., where the family's doctor Dr. Paul Crane oversaw the delivery.

Message to fans: Kim shared the news on her website

Their decision to go through a surrogate for their third child came after Kim suffered complications with her two pregnancies, experiencing early-onset preeclampsia with North, four, and further troubles during labor with Saint, two.

Kim previously admitted that she's found the surrogacy experience to be very stressful.

She shared: 'Anyone that says or thinks it is just the easy way out is just completely wrong. I think it is so much harder to go through it this way, because you are not really in control.

'And, you know, obviously you pick someone that you completely trust and that you have a good bond and relationship with, but ... knowing that I was able to carry my first two babies and not my baby now, it's hard for me.

'So, it's definitely a harder experience than I anticipated just in the control area.'

She also admitted she had trouble explaining the process to her children.

She chose not to invite the surrogate to her lavish baby shower in November to avoid confusing her little ones.

Kim said at the time: 'I, um, I did not [invite the surrogate]. I did introduce her to my family. I introduced her to my family earlier that day. And, you know, I just thought, I don't know, it was like a weird decision to have to make.

'Of course, I would've wanted her to be there and be a part of it, but I hadn't really gone that far in explaining it to my kids yet.

Emoji love: Kim's sister Khloe reacted to the news on Twitter with a series of hearts

'Thrilled': Kim said her children Saint and North are delighted to have a little sister

'So I have to figure that out first before they really see and then if we're celebrating, you know, her, I just want to celebrate the baby. I think I have to explain it to my kids first and figure out how I'm going to explain it to them.'

Kim and Kanye started dating in 2012 shortly after the end of her 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries. They wed in 2014 in a lavish ceremony in Italy.

Their relationship hit a rough patch after they both endured a traumatic end to 2016, with Kim being robbed at gunpoint in Paris, France, in October, and the Famous rapper being hospitalized after suffering a breakdown just one month later.
She's the A-list actress that's known for her formidable style.

And Cate Blanchett did not disappoint on Tuesday, as she made a glamorous arrival at a party celebrating 150 years of Swiss luxury watch brand, IWC, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Joined by her son Roman, who she shares with husband Andrew Upton, the 48-year-old stunned in a shimmering blue long-sleeved frock.

Shimmering beauty! Cate Blanchett, 48, cut a glamorous figure in a sequinned blue frock, as she attended a red carpet event, in Geneva, Switzerland on Tuesday

Cate made a showstopping arrival in a blue sequinned frock, with a hemline of varying lengths.

Long sleeves gave an elegant feel, while the slim-fitting design cinched in at her slender waist.

Elongating her frame with black pointy-toe heeled boots, the Carol star accessorised further with a statement watch and a delicate silver bracelet on her left wrist.

Stunning: The event that celebrated 150 years of Swiss luxury watch brand IWC, saw the Carol actress highlighted her slim figure in the glitzy frock, accessorised with black pointy-toe heeled boots

Trim and terrific: Long sleeves provided an elegant feel, while the slim-fitting design cinched in at her slender waist

In profile: Beaming for the cameras, Cate drew attention to her beauty look consisting of wavy blonde locks, and a bold red lip

Styling her cropped blonde locks in a deep side part and structured waves, Cate enhanced her striking facial features with a matte complexion, defined brows, lashings of mascara and a bold red lip.

Accompanying Cate was her son Roman Upton, 13, who wore a brown tailored suit jacket and trousers.

The youngster teamed the look with a crisp shirt, striped burgundy tie and black dress shoes.

Very much a doting mother, Cate placed her left hand on her son's shoulder as they walked the red carpet.

Front and centre: The statement frock also featured a black design emblazoned on the front

Tressed to perfection: Cate's signature blonde cropped locks fell around her face and shoulders

Her date: Joined by her son Roman, 13, who she shares with husband Andrew Upton, the youngster sported a tailored brown suit jacket and trousers, a crisp black shirt, a striped burgundy tie and black dress shoes

The sighting follows Cate's appointment as the Cannes Film Festival Jury President for 2018.

In a statement released earlier this month, the Melbourne-born entertainer said she was 'humbled' by the 'privilege and responsibility' of presiding over the prestigious film festival.

'I have been to Cannes in my guises over the years; as an actress, producer, in the marketplace, the Gala-sphere and in competition,' Cate said.

Social: The mother-of-four happily posed for a photo with IWC CEO Christoph Grainger-Herr

Prestige: The sighting follows Cate's appointment as the Cannes Film Festival Jury President for 2018

Honoured: In a statement released earlier this month, the Melbourne-born entertainer said she was 'humbled' by the 'privilege and responsibility' of presiding over the prestigious film festival:

'But never solely for the sheer pleasure of watching the cornucopia of films this great festival harbours.'

The mother-of-four added: 'I am humbled by the privilege and responsibility of presiding over this year's jury.'

The Wrap reports that Cate is the only 12th female president in the film festival's 71-year history.

Cate is the first female president since Jane Campion presided over the jury in 2014.
She presents Just Tattoo Of Us - a show that sees pairs of loved-ones select highly regrettable inkings for one another, to hilarious and often shocking results.

And Charlotte Crosby seemed to see the less amusing side of life under the needle as she was spotted out in South Shields while covered in bandages, in images obtained by The Sun, following the latest in her string of laser removal sessions.

The 26-year-old former Geordie Shore star has been undergoing the lengthy procedure of ridding herself of vestiges of her ex-boyfriends Stephen Bear and Mitch Jenkins after paying tribute to both with ill-advised inkings.

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Ouch! Charlotte Crosby seemed to see the less amusing side of life under the needle as she was spotted out in South Shields while covered in bandages, in images obtained by The Sun , following the latest in her string of laser removal sessions

Charlotte's body is littered with various inkings, including a huge rose emblem on her hip as well as a peace sign on her wrist, which was her first ever tattoo - done with her Geordie Shore co-stars in 2013.

Since then, having got a taste for ink, the reality veteran decided to dedicate a marking to her ex-boyfriend Mitch, who she split from in 2016.

Charlotte had first got the inking, which saw an 'M' in the middle of two crossed arrows, when she was last dating Mitch in 2015. She announced the news on Instagram with the caption: 'Happy valentines... #YoungStupidAndVeryCrazyInlove'.

After breaking up, Charlotte was quick to reveal her desires to remove the tattoo in August of that year. She said in her Star magazine column: 'I need to get my 'M' tattoo removed, though. I can't walk around with that now we're not together, can I?'

Ouch! Charlotte is having her various inkings removed

Way back when: The 26-year-old former Geordie Shore star has been undergoing the lengthy procedure of ridding herself of vestiges of her ex-boyfriends Stephen Bear and Mitch Jenkins after paying tribute to both with ill-advised inkings

Oops! Following on from her M inking was her tattoo collection in association with Bear, which saw the TV twosome get matching cartoon line drawings of fish, with Charlotte's on her wrist and Bear's on his finger

Following on from her M inking was her tattoo collection in association with Bear, which saw the TV twosome get matching cartoon line drawings of fish, with Charlotte's on her wrist and Bear's on his finger.

Alongside this was the tattoo he chose for her when it was their turn to play contestants on Just Tattoo Of Us, as he gave her a huge half bear-half cheetah face on the side of her back, leading to a furious reaction from the bewildered star.

As she emerged on Tuesday, fresh-faced Charlotte seemed tender as she was wrapped up with bandages on her wrist and the back of her arm.

Oh no... As she emerged on Tuesday, fresh-faced Charlotte seemed tender as she was wrapped up with bandages on her wrist and the back of her arm (pictured with Bear)

That was then: Charlotte and Mitch first called it quits in late summer of 2014, following a year and a half together, but reconciled months later - after Charlotte revealed to MailOnline he had dumped her by text message

Charlotte and Mitch first called it quits in late summer of 2014, following a year and a half together, but reconciled months later - after Charlotte revealed to MailOnline he had dumped her by text message.

The pair became largely inseparable again following a trip to New York in January 2015 - confirming their reconciliation - before he accompanied her on her mammoth tour of Australia later that year.

Yet, it seemed the course of true love was not meant to be for the couple, as they broke up once again later that year, just before they were due to move in together.

Her romance with Bear meanwhile saw the duo enjoy an 11-month romance before they were plagued by a number of splits - resulting in their acrimonious breakup in December 2016.

Not great: Alongside this was the tattoo he chose for her when it was their turn to play contestants on Just Tattoo Of Us, as he gave her a huge half bear-half cheetah face on the side of her back, leading to a furious reaction from the bewildered star

Ouch! After breaking up, Charlotte was quick to reveal her desires to remove the tattoo in August of that year. She said in her Star magazine column: 'I need to get my 'M' tattoo removed, though. I can't walk around with that now we're not together, can I?'

The couple first hit a crisis after the former scaffold worker was pictured heading home from a Halloween party, with a mystery brunette in tow.

Their roller-coaster romance then appeared to come to a screeching halt in October last year, with the couple being plagued by 'cheating' claims and Charlotte feuding with Bear's family on Twitter.

Stephen has been putting his love woes behind him and cosying up to a number of beauties in Bali, since his appeal for a reconciliation with Charlotte was rejected.

Last month, the Celebrity Big Brother alumni admitted he had 'really messed up' and declared he wanted to 'spend the rest of my life' with Charlotte, in a heartfelt Instagram appeal.
Kanye West looked like one proud papa as he headed to his office in Calabasas on Tuesday.

That's the same day that he announced along with wife Kim Kardashian that they had welcomed their third child, a daughter, via surrogate.

The rapper is 'so excited' to be a father again, a source told People, adding 'he said that being a dad is what he does best.'

And the insider noted that a third child is a blessing after a tough 2016 that included Kim's robbery and his mental breakdown: 'Kanye says that his children have saved his life. This one in particular came along after a very dark time. Hes so in love with his kids.'

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Proud daddy: Kanye West was spotted out in Calabasas on Tuesday following the arrival of his third child

The source also said, 'He does everything that a dad does, even diaper duty. Kanye knows how to change a diaper 100 percent! Thats very important to him.'

West looked to be happy as he wore a brown track suit with fresh white Yeezy sneakers and carried a laptop with cell phone making it look as if he was going to a meeting.

Kim, 37, was not seen as she was likely with the newborn.

The Gold Digger hitmaker has been working on new music so he may have been taking a meeting for the album. The Georgia native was alone and drove himself in a silver sedan car without a bodyguard.

His look: The Paranoid rapper held onto a laptop and his cell phone as he wore a dark brown sweat outfit

Getting a push present for Kim? He was seen getting out of a silver sedan as he was seen in a parking lot as well

He was involved: According to a Tuesday afternoon report from TMZ, the singer was at the hospital with Kim when the baby arrived, but he was not in the delivery room

Not there: His wife Kim was not seen while he stepped out as she is likely with her newborn; here she is seen on Monday's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians

Their surrogate gave birth to a 'healthy' baby girl at 12:47am on January 15 weighing 7lb 6oz.

They have not yet revealed the name of their daughter.

The 37-year-old announced the news in a message on her website titled, 'She's here! We're so in love.'

On the move: Kanye was later seen driving off in his Mercedes

Nice car: He was all smiles

Baby number three: Kim and Kanye pictured here over the weekend getting dinner at Craig's in West Hollywood

She wrote: 'Kanye and I are happy to announce the arrival of our healthy, beautiful baby girl.

'We are incredibly grateful to our surrogate who made our dreams come true with the greatest gift one could give and to our wonderful doctors and nurses for their special care.

'North and Saint are especially thrilled to welcome their baby sister. Love, Kim Kardashian West.'

Message to fans: The Selfish author shared the news on her website

Kim and Kanye were both in the delivery room with the surrogate, although the rapper was behind a curtain until after the baby was born, according to TMZ.

Kim was the first person to hold the baby girl for skin-to-skin bonding, but the surrogate was allowed some contact with the child after the birth.

Her sisters Kourtney, Khloe and mother Kris were also at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A., where the family's doctor Dr. Paul Crane oversaw the delivery.

Their decision to go through a surrogate for their third child came after Kim suffered complications with her two pregnancies, experiencing early-onset preeclampsia with North, two, and further troubles during labor with Saint, two.

'Incredibly grateful': The couple thanked their surrogate - pictured here in San Diego in October - for making their 'dreams come true'

Kim previously admitted that she's found the surrogacy experience to be very stressful.

She shared: 'Anyone that says or thinks it is just the easy way out is just completely wrong. I think it is so much harder to go through it this way, because you are not really in control.

'And, you know, obviously you pick someone that you completely trust and that you have a good bond and relationship with, but ... knowing that I was able to carry my first two babies and not my baby now, it's hard for me.

'So, it's definitely a harder experience than I anticipated just in the control area.'

She also admitted she had trouble explaining the process to her children.

She chose not to invite the surrogate to her lavish baby shower in November to avoid confusing her little ones.

Kim said at the time: 'I, um, I did not [invite the surrogate]. I did introduce her to my family. I introduced her to my family earlier that day. And, you know, I just thought, I don't know, it was like a weird decision to have to make.

'Of course, I would've wanted her to be there and be a part of it, but I hadn't really gone that far in explaining it to my kids yet.

Emoji love: Kim's sister Khloe reacted to the news on Twitter with a series of hearts

'Thrilled': Kim said her children Saint and North are delighted to have a little sister

'So I have to figure that out first before they really see and then if we're celebrating, you know, her, I just want to celebrate the baby. I think I have to explain it to my kids first and figure out how I'm going to explain it to them.'

Kim and Kanye started dating in 2012 shortly after the end of her 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries. They wed in 2014 in a lavish ceremony in Italy.

Their relationship hit a rough patch after they both endured a traumatic end to 2016, with Kim being robbed at gunpoint in Paris, France, in October, and the Famous rapper being hospitalized after suffering a breakdown just one month later.
He sparked backlash after comparing the Hollywood sexual harassment scandal to a 'bit of a witch hunt'.

But Liam Neeson seemed determined to cast the controversy aside on Tuesday, as he attended the Paris premiere of his new thriller The Commuter.

The Taken actor, 65, looked dapper in a poloneck and sharp navy suit as he pulled a mock-stern expression while posing with the film's director Jaume Collet-Serra.

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Ever the professional: Liam Neeson attended the Paris premiere of his new thriller The Commuter on Tuesday after sparking backlash for claiming the Hollywood sexual harassment scandal had caused a 'witch hunt'

The action star plays insurance salesman Michael, who is contacted by a mysterious stranger on his train home in The Commuter.

He is forced to find the identity of a hidden passenger on the train before the last stop - in what he later realises is a deadly criminal conspiracy.

The Irish actor stars alongside Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson and Elizabeth McGovern in the gripping drama.

His outing in Paris comes after he claimed the Hollywood sexual assault claims have sparked 'a bit of a witch hunt' and said he was 'on the fence' about allegations facing Dustin Hoffman.

His comments followed screen legend Catherine Deneuve saying men are being unfairly targeted by sexual misconduct allegations and should be free to make advances toward women.

Casting controversy aside: The Taken actor, 65, looked dapper in a poloneck and sharp navy suit as he pulled a mock-stern expression while posing with the film's director Jaume Collet-Serra

Undecided: His outing comes after he said he was 'on the fence' about allegations facing Dustin Hoffman and warned of a 'witch hunt' in Hollywood

Dapper: Liam posed up a storm on the red carpet, looking dapper in his suit

Asked about the issue, the he told Irish television's The Late Late Show on RTE 'there is a bit of a witch hunt happening'.

'There's some people, famous people, being suddenly accused of touching some girl's knee or something and suddenly they're being dropped from their programme,' he added.

When his interviewer mentioned allegations facing Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, the actor appeared to take the scandals seriously, nodding his head with a serious expression.

Neeson also addressed actress Anna Graham Hunter's allegations that Hoffman groped her and made inappropriate comments when she was a 17-year-old intern on the set of the 1985 TV movie Death Of A Salesman.

New project: The action star plays insurance salesman Michael, who is contacted by a mysterious stranger on his train home in The Commuter

Plot: He is forced to find the identity of a hidden passenger on the train before the last stop - in what he later realises is a deadly criminal conspiracy

All-star cast: The Irish actor stars alongside Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson and Elizabeth McGovern in the gripping drama

'[When it comes] to the Dustin Hoffman thing, I'm on the fence about that,' he said.

When he was pressed further about the controversy, he said performers and support staff 'do silly things' while preparing for a show.

'When you're doing a play and you're with your family, other actors and technicians, you do silly things,' he said.

'You do silly things and it becomes superstitious. If you don't do it every night you think it's going to jinx the show.

'I think Dustin Hoffman... I'm not saying I've done similar things like what he did. Apparently he touched a girl's breast and stuff, but it's childhood stuff.'

Hand-in-hand: Director Jaume Collet-Serra and his wife Diba Adami attended the premiere

Strike a pose: Liam was in his element on the red carpet on Tuesday night

Playwright Cori Thomas accused Hoffman of exposing himself to her in a New York hotel room in 1980, when she was 16.

In response to Hunter's allegations, Hoffman issued a statement saying the incident 'is not reflective of who I am'.

On the Irish chat show, Neeson also defended US radio presenter and writer Garrison Keillor, who was dropped by Minnesota Public Radio last year over an allegation of 'inappropriate behaviour'.

I was reading recently about him, and he was listening to a sad story of a female friend of his, and the end of this, he put his hand to her back. 'She had a blouse on and it was her bare back.

Outspoken: Liam told The Late Late Show that 'there is a bit of a witch hunt happening' and said alleged groping by Dustin Hoffman, right, was 'childhood stuff'

'He immediately took his hand away and apologised. She said don't worry about it, forget about it. He emailed her because he was concerned. She said forget about it, don't worry about it.

Months later, he gets a call from a lawyer, saying he inappropriately touched this lady, and he was dropped from his programme.

Hollywood has been hit by a wave of sexual harassment and assault allegations following the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which alleged victims of sex abuse responded to by sharing experiences on Twitter using the hashtag #MeToo.

He closed the interview by praising the #MeToo campaign, saying: 'There is a movement happening and it's healthy and it's across every industry.The focus seems to be on Hollywood at the minute, but it's across every industry.'

The Irish actor's comments sparked criticism on Twitter, with @DrMMcMahonEP saying she was 'disappointed by Liam Neeson's comments'.

'Reinforcing the idea that inappropriately touching women was the norm and therefore OK,' she added. 'The reference to a "witch hunt" also irked me.'

Candid: Neeson spoke out in support of the #MeToo campaign in which women responded to the sexual harassment and rape scandal engulfing Weinstein by sharing their personal traumas online

Another user - @infinityonhi - speculated that the Star Wars actor's reputation lay in ruins, writing: 'I can't believe this Liam Neeson was a national treasure and now....he's over.'

But @RealSarahFlynn wrote: 'You mightn't like it but at least he's authentic and I don't think calling elements of it a witch hunt is that terribly untrue.'

And @ToastHawk1 added: 'Everybody is so quick to condemn Liam Neeson. It's a radical way of thinking, but what if he's right.

'Think of the Salem Witch Trials and the Red Scare. People were falsely accused for others' personal gain. We can't instantly shun someone when they've only been accused.'

Neeson's comments came after stars wore black at the Golden Globes to protest against sexual misconduct in Hollywood.
She recently confirmed she was expecting her first child.

And pregnancy certainly suited Angela Scanlon when she left the BBC studios in central London on Tuesday night, concealing her blossoming baby bump with a vibrant red coat.

The One show host was looking lovely in a floral tea dress and a vibrant red coat, exuding confidence in her eye-catching ensemble.

Scroll down for video

Looking good: Angela Scanlon when she left the BBC studios in style on Tuesday night, concealing her blossoming baby bump with a vibrant red coat

Angela completed her chic look with a pair of white heeled ankle boots an carried a large designer bag.

She wore her auburn locks pulled back in a low ponytail, with loose tendrils framing her face.

The beauty looked happy and healthy as she strolled along, joined by co-host Matt Baker.

Stylish: The One show host was looking lovely in a floral tea dress and a vibrant red coat, exuding confidence in her eye-catching ensemble

Beaming: Angela completed her chic look with a pair of white heeled ankle boots an carried a large designer bag

Calling it a night: Angela was also joined by co-host Matt Baker as she left the studios

In November, the Irish presenter, 33, announced that she was six months pregnant.

Revealing that she is due in the spring, Angela admitted she and her husband of three years are thrilled.

The sweet picture sees the TV star posing in a pink silk blazer, her bump barely visible as she points in excitement at her blossoming belly.

In conversation: Suggs stopped by The One Show for a chat on Tuesday evening

Delighted: In November, the Irish presenter, 33, announced that she was six months pregnant

Revealing her big news, the caption reads: 'SO. I've been baking for 6 months now... and I've made a bun! It's currently in the oven & will be ready by Springtime.

'We are so, SO thrilled (since I've taken my head out of the toilet bowl) and can't wait to welcome a mad, wonderful little human into our world.

'*Really hoping he/she is ginger*', the Oi Ginger! documentary presenter added.

'Can't wait to welcome a mad, wonderful little human into our world!' Angela revealed her baby news with this sweet post

'We are so, SO thrilled': The Irish presenter, 33, revealed that she is due in the spring, and Angela admitted she and her husband of three years are thrilled

A source close to the couple told The Sun: 'Angela and her husband Roy are over the moon.

'They can't wait to welcome their new addition next year  and are so excited to become a family of three.'

The Irish presenter began the year standing in for Alex Jones on The One Show during her maternity leave.

Big gig: The Irish presenter began the year standing in for Alex Jones on The One Show during her maternity leave

Angela recently opened up to Vice about jumping to Robot Wars and The Voice UK, from working as a journalist and stylist.

Speaking to Vice, she said: 'There are all these wonderfully eccentric, borderline bonkers people who come together in what is basically a massive creative celebration.

'It's a brilliant thing to be involved in, and I remind myself of that all of the time. I feel very lucky to be part of something that people speak so fondly about.

'The appeal of Robot Wars for me was to get my hands dirty, to be in the moment and to be with people while they were getting prepared, so I could really get a sense of their personalities as well as the work and the passion that goes into building the robots.
Violent car thieves masquerading as buyers have punched a Brisbane man in the head and stolen his luxury car during a test drive.

The two bandits, who had a gun, then had the audacity to double back in the stolen Audi A4 and pick up two mates they'd left at the owner's Runcorn home.

Police say four men arrived at the property about 9.30pm on Monday, but only two went on the test drive with the owner and his friend.

During the drive, the bandits produced the gun, punched one of the victims in the mouth, and forced the innocent pair out of the vehicle.

They quickly returned to the owner's home, picked up their mates, and fled in the beige Audi, with Queensland registration 264 LBC. Police are still searching for them.
More than a year a half after a man was shot in the back in Sydney's southwest, police have charged another man with attempted murder over the shooting.

The 24-year-old victim was approached from behind and shot in Prairiewood in July 2016. He suffered serious spinal injuries and spent a considerable period of time in hospital, police said.

A 26-year-old was arrested in Wolli Creek last Friday and has been accused of shooting with the intent to murder. He has been refused bail and is due to face Campbelltown Local Court on Wednesday.
A violent gang has ambushed a Brisbane commuter moments after he got off a bus, bashing him and stealing everything he was carrying.

The 35-year-old victim was chased down, attacked and robbed by a gang of three males just after leaving the bus at a Durack bus stop about 8pm on Monday.

The man was bashed in the head and body and had his mobile phone, wallet, house keys, sunglasses, portable phone charger and a sum of cash stolen.

The victim was taken to the Princess Alexandra hospital for treatment. His attackers were last seen running off and are yet to be found.
A $500,000 reward is being offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction over the suspected murder of a teenage boy found dead on train tracks in NSW 30 years ago.

The body of 17-year-old Mark Anthony Haines was found near Tamworth on January 16, 1988, and his family will make a public appeal for information alongside police in the town on Tuesday.

Mark's final remains will also be returned to the Gomeroi country, with a cremation being held by his family later in the day.

Two separate post-mortems concluded the teenager's death was caused by massive head injuries consistent with being struck by a train.

But a coronial inquest later returned an open finding, and it's believed a stolen car found less than 2km from his body may be linked to the case.
A Victoria Police officer is on reckless conduct charges for allegedly shooting at a vehicle during an incident at a booze bus.

No one was injured when the Leading Senior Constable allegedly fired his gun at Grantville on May 20, 2017, and the officer has been transferred to other duties, Victoria Police said in a statement.

Detectives from Professional Standards Command have charged him with reckless conduct endangering serious injury and reckless conduct endangering life to appear in Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court on January 25.
A man has died while travelling in remote central Australia.

The 32-year-old left the community of Ampilatwatja in the North Territory to travel by car to Murray Downs Station last Wednesday, Senior Sergeant Michael Potts says.

He failed to arrive at his destination and his body was found about 20km from Ampilatwatja near the highway on Saturday.

"A cause of death has not been determined and investigations are ongoing. Police are still trying to locate the man's vehicle, a silver 2000 Holden VX Commodore sedan," said Sen Sgt Potts.
Queensland Police Minister Mark Ryan has attacked Deputy Opposition Leader Tim Mander after a video surfaced of the then LNP police spokesman saying he was "open" to weaker gun laws.

Mr Ryan on Tuesday took a swipe at Mr Mander over the March 2017 video, which shows Mr Mander discussing weaker gun laws with the Shooters Union of Australia.

In the video Mr Mander says he wants "less regulation" as long as there is no risk to safety, prompting Mr Ryan to call on the opposition to clarify its policies on gun ownership.
Former Northern Territory politician Bess Price has hit out at anti-Australia Day activists for fuelling cyber hate towards her daughter after she pushed to keep the national holiday on January 26.

Indigenous Alice Springs councillor Jacinta Price has been targeted on social media since she helped former federal Labor leader Mark Latham launch a "Save Australia Day" ad campaign against those arguing it should be moved to a less contentious date.

In a Facebook post, Bess Price said the online vitriol directed at her daughter for "having a different opinion to those who want to remain in their victimhood mentality" was "disgusting".

"I'm appalled," she wrote. "All the 'Welcome to Country', all the 'smoking ceremonies' and all the made up bullshit rituals about 'pay our respects to elders past and present' is just one big lie! Shame shame shame!"

She criticised indigenous Australians for bringing their fellow countrymen down, taking aim at former deputy NT chief minister Marion Scrymgour.

Ms Scrymgour has suggested Jacinta Price is preparing to enter federal parliament to replace Nigel Scullion as an NT senator, and stressed that opposing voices "shouldn't be quiet".

"The voices in the communities that she continually bad mouths should have a voice too. She is a dud and our mob can see through that," Ms Scrymgour said in a Facebook post.

The Greens are actively throwing their support behind changing the commemoration, which leader Richard Di Natale says has been divisive and painful for many.

But Jacinta Price and fellow indigenous leader Warren Mundine argue Aboriginal people in remote communities have bigger issues to worry about.

"It is education, jobs, it is to get business activity happening, and to get better healthcare," Mr Mundine said.

"If the Greens were fair dinkum they would concentrate on these issues rather than something that is not going to make a difference to anyone."

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull expressed his disappointment about the latest push to change Australia Day, noting a free country debates its history and does not deny it.

"We recognise that the history of European settlement here in Australia has been complex and tragic for indigenous Australians," he said.

"Australia Day is a day to come together."
More than two-thirds of Australians polled in a new survey think youth gang crime has increased over the last few years.

The Essential poll, released on Tuesday, shows 70 per cent of the 1000 people quizzed think youth gang crime and drug-related crime (76 per cent) have increased.

Nearly 50 per cent think youth gang crime has increased a lot, with nearly three-quarters of Liberal-National voters perceiving a rise and 86 per cent of supporters of independent parties.

The results follow weeks of political furore over youth crime, especially in Victoria.

Multicultural Minister Alan Tudge - who holds a seat in Melbourne - echoed the comments of Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton on Tuesday, who said some people in the Victorian capital were afraid to go out at night.

"I certainly know there are great many people who are scared about these African gangs," Mr Tudge told Sky News.

"I have many, many people who say to me that they are concerned about going out at night."

Those polled in the Essential survey nominated drug-related crime and domestic violence as the two most important types of crime the government should address.

More than 50 per cent also agreed youth gang crime should be addressed.

A majority believed all crimes have increased over the past few years.
The pilots of an Air Asia flight to Perth that flew too low inappropriately handled the failure of the captain's flight management guidance computer, an Australian Transport Safety Bureau report has found.

The ATSB investigation of the flight from Denpasar to Perth in February 2016 found the pilots had a limited understanding of how the computer failure affected the aircraft's automation during the instrument landing system approach.

The failure resulted in an unexpected increase in engine thrust, which prompted a go-around.

"The flight crew commenced their descent for the second runway 06 instrument approach later than normal, initially necessitating an increased rate of descent and at 300 feet the engine thrust reduced briefly to idle," the ATSB said on Tuesday.
A number of people are trapped following a serious multi-vehicle crash involving a truck north of Dubbo in NSW's central west.

Eight ambulance crews and three choppers have been sent to the accident site on the Newell Highway following a call to triple-zero about 12.30pm on Tuesday.

Early reports suggest four cars and a truck were involved.

One car is believed to be completely crushed under a truck, a NSW Ambulance spokesman told AAP.

Two people are believed to be in a critical condition, including one who was thrown from their vehicle.
A YouTube prankster who made headlines in December when he jumped from a balcony into the Bondi Icebergs pool is due to face court after making a risky leap from Brisbane's Goodwill Bridge.

Luke Erwin, who has around 60,000 YouTube subscribers, was arrested after security guards told police the 23-year-old had jumped from the bridge at around 12.30pm on January 9.

Friend Jackson O'Doherty posted footage of the jump and subsequent arrest on his YouTube channel and Erwin will face the Brisbane Magistrates Court on February 19 charged with one count of unregulated high-risk behaviour.
Perth has been saturated with up to 10 years worth of January rain in the past 24 hours as records tumbled across the city.

The remnants of ex-Tropical Cyclone Joyce dumped more than 100mm of rain on parts of the city, with the Bureau of Meteorology predicting another 10 to 15mm of rain before conditions ease later on Tuesday.

The leafy suburb of Swanbourne has received 138.6mm since Monday, while Rottnest Island broke all January records after 143mm drenched the popular tourist spot in a little less than 24 hours.

Downed power lines have left about 400 homes without power.

Flights were delayed while hundreds of passengers circled above Perth Airport overnight, with pilots forced to abort landing attempts as winds of up to 72km/h lashed the runways.

Airservices Australia is warning passengers due to land in Perth to expect turbulence.

The State Emergency Service say they have responded to more than 329 calls for help since 9am on Monday, the majority coming from residents along the Perth coast. They include several car crashes and drivers stranded on waterlogged roads, but so far no severe damage has been reported.

Main Roads has advised motorists to check road closure updates and take extra care on the slippery roads.

A severe weather warning has been issued for residents in the Lower West, South West and Great Southern regions, stretching from the city of Bunbury to Albany, and extending from the Margaret River coast inland to Mount Barker, Katanning and Narrogin.

Widespread rainfall between 50 to 80mm is expected, with isolated falls of 120mm possible. A flood warning is in place for the Lower West.
Melbourne and Sydney are expected to cop more extreme heat over coming days, with temperatures across Australia's southeast predicted to reach into the low 40s.

The Bureau of Meteorology says temperatures in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide are forecast to range from the high 30s and into the low 40s from Wednesday, after a relatively cool start to the week.

"Tomorrow we'll start to see the heat build over South Australia and western Victoria. On Thursday, we'll see that heat move into other parts of Victoria and western NSW and Tasmania as well," senior meteorologist Jonathon How said on Tuesday.

"On Friday, we'll see that heat move into the rest of NSW and the ACT as well, and thankfully there will be a little bit of relief over southern parts of the country with a cold front.

"However, unfortunately the heat will linger over central and eastern parts of NSW well into the weekend."

A cold front is expected to bring relief to coastal SA, Victoria and parts of Tasmania from Friday night but conditions will remain fairly dry.
Melbourne Park favourite Jordan Thompson has fallen short of re-enacting his herculean first-round heroics of a year ago, going down in a tense five-set thriller at the Australian Open.

The 23-year-old Australian didn't land a single blow in the first two sets against Argentine Nicolas Kicker, ranked six spots ahead of him.

But he battled back before losing 6-3 6-1 4-6 3-6 6-3 in three hours and 42 minutes.

Almost 12 months to the day previously, Thompson sprung his first home-slam upset, coming up trumps after going the distance with Portugal's Joao Sousa.

But, in front of a stirring home crowd on court 8, the two-set down barrier proved too big a task this year.

After failing to convert a single break-point chance in the first two sets, Thompson pounced at 5-4 to steal the third.

A pressure-releasing racquet throw after losing his opening service game in the fourth lit a fire under the third-ranked Aussie as he rattled off two breaks of serve to take it to a fifth.

The Australian Davis Cup team staple seized an early 2-0 lead in the decider, but his momentum stalled after a controversial line call in the third game.

Not happy with Russian chair umpire Anastasia Kosheleva's call to replay the point after Hawk-Eye ruled his ball in, Thompson didn't mince his words.

"You guys never do your jobs, never," Thompson told Kosheleva in the fifth.

"Tell me he was going to make the ball, tell me that.

"I'm going to get reviewed for turning up late, you should get reviewed for that."

The critical game came not long after with Thompson letting six break points slip in eight-game deuce.

He never recovered, dropping serve after calling for the trainer at 3-2.
NSW's roads minister is "concerned and disturbed" by the number of heavy vehicle crashes on state roads, with six trucks involved in deadly crashes within 24 hours.

Two people were killed on Tuesday when a B-Double truck ploughed into cars stopped at roadworks, injuring at least 10 others near Dubbo.

The crash came less than a day after two separate fatal crashes involving trucks on NSW roads.

Roads Minister Melinda Pavey described the latest truck crash as "an absolute horror".

"I am just so concerned and disturbed about the level of accidents involving heavy vehicles in NSW at the moment," Ms Pavey told ABC News.

"We've had six heavy vehicles involved in accidents in the past 24 hours which are going to destroy lives, destroy families."

Meanwhile, one truck driver was killed and one other injured in a fiery crash south of Newcastle involving three heavy vehicles on Monday.

Two other truck drivers were killed near Grafton when their trucks collided on the same day.

Ms Pavey said she was worried about the 45 per cent increase in heavy vehicle accidents on the state's roads between 2016 and 2017, adding that increased activity on NSW roads was not enough to explain the jump.

She said speed was still the leading contributor in fatal crashes on NSW roads, while fatigue, drugs and alcohol also played significant roles.

NSW Police Superintendent Peter McKenna urged drivers to rest when they needed to and not use drugs or drink alcohol when driving.

"We need people to adhere to the messages police are putting forward about road safety," he told reporters near Dubbo.
Under the Trump Administration, regulation has become a dirty word. Trump and EPA head Scott Pruitt are throwing out regulations as fast as they can get away with it. Limits on fracking, wetland protections, limits on mercury emissions, auto fuel efficiency standards, anti-dumping rules for coal companies, limits on offshore drilling, bans on lead ammunition, power plant emission standards, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge protection, the Paris Climate Agreement. At least 60 environmental rules are on the way out.

In 1962 Rachel Carsons book Silent Spring showed the world the dangers of unregulated application of pesticides. DDT and other insecticides sprayed on crops to control insects were killing birds and sickening people. DDT was eventually banned after it was proven to be a cause of major declines in predatory birds such as eagles and peregrine falcons. Birds have made dramatic recoveries, partly due to the banning of DDT. Carsons work helped lead to the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In 1989 the Montreal Protocol phased out the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals which were destroying the Earths ozone layer. Ozone shields life on Earth from the suns deadly ultraviolet radiation. Use of CFCs for refrigeration and propellants caused the breakdown of the ozone layer, resulting in high levels of skin cancer among people and animals. Phasing out CFCs and replacing them with less dangerous compounds has mostly closed the ozone hole which is expected to fully close in a decade or two.

We need federal regulations to protect us from poisons such as asbestos, lead, DDT and CFCs, from disasters like the Exxon Valdez and the Deepwater Horizon oil spills, from mercury in our air and food, from clear cutting stream banks and dredging wetlands. Present and future generations will pay the price of Trumps regulatory rollbacks with their health and with the destruction of the natural world.

Vote out Republicans whenever you get the chance.

Phil Knight

Bozeman
Perth's new 60,000-seat stadium could be restricted to host a maximum crowd of 40,000 at a potential Big Bash League semi-final because the state government is worried public transport and pedestrian access isn't ready.

It all depends on whether the city's public transport system can cope with this weekend's community day, expected to attract 110,000 people to the stadium.

The McGowan government has announced the 40,000 cap if the Perth Scorchers host the midweek BBL semi due to construction delays on the Matagraup Bridge designed to bring thousands of pedestrians to the venue from East Perth.

Transport Minister Rita Saffioti says the advice she has received is that a cap is recommended given the constraints on the public transport system during the semi-final.

It is set to take place at 4pm mid-week in order for east coast viewers to watch the match live.

"During these hours the buses and trains are being used in the wider network, hence the system simply does not have the capacity without the bridge," Ms Saffioti said in a statement on Tuesday.

She said the government would evaluate how the transport system operates on the Community Open Day and One Day International before deciding on an appropriate cap.

The minister says she will discuss other possible solutions when she meets with WACA chief executive Christina Matthews and the Department of Transport and Perth Transport Authority within the next few days.

Opposition Leader Mike Nahan has said it was always going to be a challenge to encourage West Australians to use public transport and walk rather than drive.

He has also warned that action may be taken against the government for failing to finish the footbridge, as the ticket cap could deny revenue to the stadium's owners.

The government has also copped criticism for not providing a pick-up and drop-off zone at the venue and prohibiting ride-sharing services, such as Uber, from accessing the stadium.

Attendance has been staggered for this weekend's public opening with additional train and bus services on all lines running from 7.30am to 10pm.

About 15,000 ticket holders will tour the stadium in one-hour time slots from 8am to 9pm, with a further 95,000 people to access the general admission area.

Meanwhile, the stadium announced on Tuesday that fans will pay the same price of $8.50 for a cup of beer as was sold at the WACA and Domain Stadium.
The Turnbull government has rejected a call to direct NBN Co to complete as much as possible of the remaining direct line network using fibre to the curb or premises.

The call came from a parliamentary committee which spent a year examining the rollout of the national broadband network.

The government's formal response, tabled in federal parliament on Tuesday, said it remained committed to the "multi-technology mix" approach to the NBN, which would deliver fast broadband as soon as possible, at affordable prices and least cost to taxpayers.

However NBN Co would use fibre to the curb and premises where it was the "most appropriate and viable technology option".

"The cost to taxpayers of changing direction would be substantial both in terms of delay and in the estimated requirement of approximately an additional $30 billion to roll out a full FTTP network across the vast Australian continent," the government said.

It also rejected the committee's idea of a new "regional and remote reference group" to support the rollout of the network.

The parliamentary committee said such a body could analyse business decisions by NBN Co which impacted on user experiences and consider cases where the company was not meeting its responsibilities.

However, the government said NBN had a "comprehensive program of stakeholder engagements" with rural and regional groups.

One example of how such feedback had been taken on board was the decision in June 2017 to double data limits for the Sky Muster service covering remote areas.
A Northern Territory teenager has allegedly bashed a police officer in Alice Springs, leaving him hospitalised with a head injury.

Police say the officer was attempting to arrest the 15-year-old boy in Alice Springs around 5am on Tuesday morning when the youth attacked him.

The officer received hospital treatment for a head injury and the boy was charged with aggravated assault and breaching his suspended sentence.

The NT police union has expressed its disgust at the incident, adding that last financial year, there were 241 assaults on police across the Territory.

"This is an appalling statistic," NT Police Association Acting President Col Goodsell said.

"It's no secret policing is a dangerous profession, but being assaulted almost daily is not part of the job description."

Mr Goodsell called on NT Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw, and Chief Minister Michael Gunner, who is also the Police Minister, to publicly condemn any attack on police.

"We need the community to support the people who keep us safe," he said.

"It's not acceptable to attack an officer, or any emergency worker, when they're just trying to do their job."

It comes as 32 experienced officers, half of whom have relocated to Alice Springs from New Zealand, begin an 11-week intensive training program to relieve staffing levels.

Labor announced the fast-tracked recruitment plan in October, and opposition leader Gary Higgins says it'll be six months before they're trained and on the ground.

Mr Higgins said the central desert region is short 40 officers and the reinforcements have come too slowly to allay community safety concerns.
Former treasurer and Labor campaign veteran Wayne Swan could announce his retirement when nominations open later this year for the federal election due by May 2019.

Malcolm Turnbull could go to the polls as early as August 4 this year and Labor is well advanced in preselecting candidates in a bid to renew the party's ranks.

There has been speculation Mr Swan could step aside, having been first elected to parliament in 1993.

"I see myself as having a continuing significant input to make at both the local and national level in particular in the area of tackling economic inequality," Mr Swan told AAP on Tuesday.

"When nominations open for the next federal election later this year I will make a decision about my future then."

One of the Queensland MP's caucus colleagues Brendan O'Connor said it was entirely up to Mr Swan when he retired.

"Wayne has been a remarkable politician and has provided the parliament and indeed federal Labor a great legacy to date," Mr O'Connor told reporters in Melbourne.

"If he chooses to continue in his role ... then he is most welcome."

Mr Swan entered parliament representing the Brisbane seat of Lilley in 1993, but lost the seat in 1996.

However, he took it back in 1998 and has held it ever since.

He was treasurer from December 2007 to June 2013 and deputy prime minister for three years from June 2010.

It's been speculated Mr Swan could be replaced by Brisbane-based social justice lawyer Anika Wells.
A bushfire that shrouded Perth in an ominous ash cloud has killed native wildlife and caused about $1.6 million in damage to a logging company.

The suspected work of arson was lit on Sunday morning at two ignition points about 10km into the bush off Great Eastern Highway in Sawyer's Valley.

Fanned by strong easterly winds, it burnt through 4000 hectares, damaging a logging company's machinery and threatening homes and lives near Mundaring Weir.

Arson Squad detectives have called on people in the area, including the driver of a grey Ford Falcon, to contact police with any information.
Two men who were test driving a car near Brisbane have been charged after they allegedly threatened another man with a firearm before stealing the car.

Four men arrived at a house in Runcorn on Monday night with two members of the group, aged 18, getting in to test drive the Audi along with the 33-year-old resident of the house and his 21-year-old friend, Queensland Police say.

During the test drive, one of the males allegedly got out a firearm and told the 21-year-old male to get out of the car before he was punched in the head.

The 21-year-old and his 33-year-old friend exited the car.

An 18-year-old man was charged with unlawful use of a motor vehicle and is due to appear at Richlands Magistrates Court on January 31.

Another 18-year-old man was charged with two counts of robbery in company and attempted robbery in company, and one count of assault occasioning bodily harm. He's due to appear at the same court on January 17.
Today's Birthday, January 17: Australian politician Chris Bowen (1973- ).

Former Rudd government treasurer Chris Bowen voted against his electorate's wishes when Australia's highly-publicised same-sex marriage laws passed the lower house late last year.

Bowen's western Sydney electorate of McMahon, a hotbed for conservative Christian immigrants, returned the third-highest percentage of "No" responses, 64.9 per cent, for the gay marriage postal survey.

Bill Shorten's right-hand man had previously steered clear of backing the push, concerned of upsetting his constituents, before having a change of heart in 2015.

Born to parents Ross and Christine in Sydney in 1973, Bowen grew up in the city's outer-western suburb of Smithfield and developed a fascination with politics at an early age.

In primary school, the schoolboy was part of a campaign to save a local library, lobbied his council to provide larger bins and read a 416-page book on the rise of Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

At 15, the St Johns Park High School student attended his first ALP meeting and signed up as a party member in 1988.

After completing a University of Sydney economics degree, the budding politician was elected to Fairfield council in 1995 and later served as mayor.

Bowen took on responsibilities as regional council president between 2000 and 2002, then became chief of staff to Labor MP Carl Scully for three years before elected to parliament in 2004.

Upon entering parliament, the Prospect MP backed Kevin Rudd against incumbent leader Kim Beasley and rode the 'Kevin 07' wave to Labor's election win.

During Rudd's first spell as Prime Minister, Bowen served in a range of portfolios including assistant treasurer and consumer affairs minister.

His political career hit a snag as a central figure in the Rudd team's ill-fated leadership coup in March 2013, but after Rudd toppled party nemesis Julia Gillard in the June spill, Bowen became treasurer.

Bowen's 83-day stint in the job was the shortest in history - aside from PMs who briefly appointed themselves - before the 2013 election.

In opposition, the 45-year-old briefly served as federal ALP leader until Shorten's appointment and spruiked negative gearing reform at the 2016 election as shadow treasurer.

He still lives in Smithfield with his wife Rebecca Mifsud, a human resources manager, and their children Grace and Max.
Almost 120,000 electronic signatures have been recorded in an online petition calling for an app with potential for online bullying to be banned.

The petition was started by a Queensland mother Katrina, who does not disclose her last name, and gained huge traction following the suicide of Northern Territory teen Amy "Dolly" Everett whose funeral was held last week.

The Rockhampton mother says she doesn't want any child "to become the next Dolly" in the description for the petition, which aims to ban anonymous feedback app Sarahah.

But journalist Ginger Gorman, who is writing a book on cyber-hate and has been a victim herself, believes banning apps and social media for children is not the answer.

She says public attitudes needed to change and more can be done, like strengthening laws, increasing education for law enforcement agencies and ensuring platforms take responsibility.

Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467 or Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800 (for young people aged 5 to 25).
The father of a north Queensland man who has been missing for a month is hoping helicopter searches will help turn something up but fears his son may have died.

Reece Kearney hasn't been seen since December 15 when he smashed his phone, took off from his dad's Julatten home on a motorbike with only the clothes on his back, and withdrew $3000 at Atherton.

His father Ron believes he may have been riding to Normanton to visit his brother but he never arrived.

After searching roads between Georgetown to Croydon by car Mr Kearney on Saturday hired helicopters and spent five hours in the air trying to find his son, he said on Tuesday.

"We couldn't find any bike wreckage or any sign of life," he said.

"We feel that he didn't make it, that he might have had a road accident."

Despite fearing the worst, Mr Kearney said he hoped his son would contact family and let them know he is alright.

Police searches are expected to continue on Wednesday.
Hopeful young Australians are opening university offers this week but institutions may find themselves wishing they hadn't sent out so many invitations in the wake of a federal funding freeze.

Universities Australia anticipates the $2 billion freeze will mean almost 10,000 student places effectively go unfunded this year.

It says that's a conservative estimate, that assumes no overall growth in student numbers.

The decision to keep funding at 2017 levels for two years was announced in the Turnbull government's December budget update, just a fortnight before it came into effect.

"Many universities had already made detailed plans by that time on how many places they would offer in 2018," Universities Australia chief executive Belinda Robinson said.

The freeze means universities will not get extra money if they enrol more students than last year and they also won't see any indexation to help with rising costs.

The peak body says to break even, universities will have to cut commonwealth-funded places by 1.5 per cent - about 9500 spots.

But Ms Robinson said universities were determined to honour their commitments to prospective students.

"Some will be forced to offer fewer places in some courses to avoid a budget black hole. Others will have to dig into critical maintenance funds or will lose the funding they need to run outreach into regional and remote Australia."

Regional institutions say it will hit health courses heavily, highlighting the example of Central Queensland University where nursing student fees would no longer cover the cost of their hospital training placements.

Southern Cross University's new $12 million allied health sciences faculty could be left empty if it can't afford to enrol students in any of the courses it planned to offer there.

Regional Universities Network chairman Greg Hill says such initiatives had been under development for years, often with co-investment from the government, but now risk being left high and dry.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham has highlighted record levels of per-student funding and suggested universities look to marketing budgets to find savings.

"Are universities really saying that they can't find a meagre 1.5 per cent of efficiencies across their $17 billion budgets?" he said.

"If so, then they should be embarrassed for putting administrative and marketing budgets before their students."

Experts say the funding freeze - made without needing parliamentary approval after the Senate stymied earlier plans to cut university budgets - amounts to ending the demand-driven policy.

Last week, ratings agency Moody's warned the government's action would force universities to rethink their growth plans.
Although all the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest lies in Idaho, Montanans use it so much that the forests planning staff decided to include Missoula in its series of forest plan revision workshops.

The Montana session takes place this Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the University of Montana University Center Ballroom. Participants can learn more about how the Nez-Clear Forest intends to manage recreation, wilderness, Wild and Scenic River, motorized and commercial activity on the landscape.

The forest asks that participants RSVP for this workshop no later than Tuesday, Jan. 16; please contact Jennifer Becar, Public Affairs Specialist, at (208) 935-4273 or jbecar@fs.fed.us.

About four-fifths of the more than 14,000 public comments already received concern how the forest would handle 34 roadless areas, including the Great Burn/Hoodoo Pass and Mallard/Larkin recommended wilderness areas along the Montana-Idaho border. Many of the most popular entry points to those areas are on the Montana side.

About one-third of the Nez-Clear is already federally designated wilderness, Gospel Hump and parts of the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return wildernesses. The 2008 Idaho Roadless Rule analysis identified another 1 million acres that appeared to meet wilderness standards for primitive condition, opportunities for solitude and sufficient parcel size.

For more information on the Nez Perce-Clearwater planning process, please visit the Forest Plan Revision webpage (http://bit.ly/NPClw-FPR) or contact Zach Peterson, Forest Planner: 208-935-4239 or zacharyapeterson@fs.fed.us.
Beachgoers in NSW have been warned to be aware of hazardous surf conditions across the state's coastline.

While there won't be a repeat of the damaging surf conditions which closed most of the patrolled beaches on Tuesday, the surf will still be large and powerful on Wednesday, the Bureau of Meteorology says.

"Hazardous surf is large and powerful and dangerous for typical coastal activities especially rock fishing," duty forecaster Andrew Haigh told AAP.

Temperatures across NSW are also forecast to start heating up with parts of the state expected to reach 40C on Thursday.

Wentworth in the state's far south west is forecast to reach 42C and Broken Hill in the far west of NSW is expected to reach 40C on Thursday.

The high temperatures will continue into the weekend as Penrith is forecast to reach 42C on Friday and Saturday and the mercury is set to reach 44C in Ivanhoe in central NSW on Saturday.

The NSW Rural Fire Service has warned residents to prepare for the high temperatures and increased fire danger.

"Temperatures will reach the mid-40s in a number of areas and the Bureau of Meteorology forecast indicates there is little relief in sight, with little to no rain forecast during the coming hot spell," NSW RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said in a statement.

"The forecast heatwave will elevate the risk of fire and total fire bans are likely to be declared for some areas, so I urge landholders, homeowners, businesses and holidaymakers to consider how they will be impacted and begin making their preparations today."
Victoria is set to swelter through temperatures into the 40s amid severe fire danger in northwest parts of the state.

Melbourne is forecast to hit 31C on Wednesday, before climbing to 38C and 39C on Thursday and Friday, respectively, the Bureau of Meteorology says.

In the north and west of the state, temperatures are set to reach into the 40s.

The heat and gusty winds are forecast to produce severe fire danger in the Mallee and Wimmera on Thursday and Friday, with overnight conditions not expected to fall below 20C.

"From Thursday onwards, we're going to see a heatwave develop across Victoria and indeed the southeast of the continent," senior meteorologist with the Victorian bureau, Rod Dickson, said on Tuesday.

"It'll be the first time since early January 2015 that we've had two days in a row above 38 degrees.

"In the north of the state ... March 2015 is the (previously) most significant period we've seen temperatures this high with an extended period of temperatures above 40 degrees."

Mildura is forecast to hit 42C on Thursday, 44C on Friday and 43C on Saturday.

A weak cool change is forecast to bring relief to southern Victoria on the weekend.

Temperatures in Melbourne are expected to reach the mid-20s on Saturday, and remain in the mid-to-high 20s on Sunday.
A crash that claimed the lives of two people and involved seven vehicles has been described by authorities as "absolute carnage" as the NSW road toll rises to more than 20.

Police say a truck slammed into traffic held up by roadworks on the Newell Highway near Dubbo in NSW's central west about 12.30pm on Tuesday.

Two people were killed and two men were trapped for more than four hours, while eight others were taken to hospital for treatment.

A 50-year-old truck driver was the last to be freed and taken to Liverpool Hospital with a broken leg and spinal injuries, a NSW Ambulance spokesman said.

An 18-year-old who also had to be cut free from his car was taken to Westmead Hospital for observation with no obvious injuries.

NSW Ambulance superintendent Kathy Golledge earlier described it as "absolute carnage", with one car completely crushed under a truck.

The double fatality has taken the NSW road toll for 2018 to 21 people with the NSW Road Minister Melinda Pavey urging drivers to slow down, always wear a seatbelt and stay away from mobile phones.

"I have been both saddened and horrified for families across this state who have lost loved ones or been involved in these incidents," Mrs Pavey said in a statement.
Progressive Iranians are preparing to gather in Canberra to protest against the brutal response to anti-government demonstrations in their home country.

The demonstrations, which began in response to economic hardship in late December, have resulted in 25 deaths and thousands of arrests after spreading to more than 80 cities across Iran.

Iranians from across Australia plan to gather outside the Islamic Republic's embassy on Wednesday morning to voice their opposition to the spread of an "atmosphere of repression" in the Middle Eastern country.

Organisers believe the crackdown is creating a new wave of refugees, and are urging the Iranian diaspora and their allies to join the demonstration.
A forecast 38-degree day doesn't scare Ashleigh Barty, who wants her second-round match to be scheduled during the afternoon as she looks to blaze a path through the Australian Open field.

Barty can look forward to a second-round date with red-hot Italian Camila Giorgi on Thursday after overcoming Aryna Sabalenka in three sets.

The Belarusian took the fight to Australia's women's No.1, hitting 43 winners but losing 6-7 (7-2) 6-4 6-4 on Rod Laver Arena.

Barty credits her second-round appearance to her determination to weather the storm.

"I knew she had a big game, is very much a first-strike player," she said.

"It took me a while to sort of get used to her patterns, understand where she wanted to hit the ball.

"I felt like I had my plans in place. I knew if I hung around long enough, I'd be able to get into the match, work it into my favour."

Giorgi has a similar game style to Sabalenka, with an eye for a winner that can see her fortunes both surge and slump.

There's been more of the former this season, with a run from qualifying to the semi-finals in Sydney, where Barty made the final.

The 21-year-old hopes that, having beaten one heavy-hitter, another won't be so tough.

"It's very pleasing to come through that in such a tricky match," she said.

"It could have easily gone the other way.

"I felt like the experiences and the matches I went through last year really held me in good stead tonight.

"(Against Giorgi) it's going to be important for me to move well, switch on right from the first ball, be ready to dig out some tough balls early."

And that's where the weather can help.

The Queensland-based Barty will embrace the opportunity to put her fitness to the test.

Put to her that no one likes those conditions, Barty smiled and said "Aussies do".

"Absolutely. I love it. I'm from Brisbane (and it's) nice and hot up there. 38 would be perfect," she said.
Slain Australian woman Gabrielle Maina reportedly feared her husband before she was shot dead in Kenya.

Ms Maina, a 40-year-old school teacher, was shot dead by armed men riding a motorbike while walking near her Nairobi home in the suburb of Karen on October 19.

On Wednesday the ABC reported, citing court documents, that Ms Mania accused her estranged husband Cyrus Bernard Maina Njuguna of psychological torture and had been granted a restraining order against him six months before her murder.

In an affidavit to a Nairobi court in April 2017, Ms Maina said her husband "became extremely violent and was of uncontrollable anger" following a move to Kenya from Australia with their two sons in 2016.

Mr Njuguna, in an August affidavit, said he was not violent and his wife had been the one to grown distant and end the relationship after she had an affair.

Mr Njuguna and his cousin John Njuguna Waithira, were arrested in relation to her murder, but released without charge on November 1.

Police continue to investigate her murder.
Almost three weeks after a seaplane crashed into a river north of Sydney killing all six people on board, Sydney Seaplanes will take to the skies again.

The company stopped all flights immediately after the New Year's Eve crash that claimed the lives of Canadian pilot Gareth Morgan, high-profile UK businessman Richard Cousins, his two adult sons Edward and William, his fiancee Emma Bowden and her 11-year-old daughter Heather.

Flights were due to resume on Monday from Rose Bay on the city's harbour but were cancelled due to strong winds, as the company's operations resumed.

With Wednesday's clear skies, aircraft are set for take-off from 10am, a Sydney Seaplanes spokeswoman told AAP.
South Australia is set to swelter through three days of high temperatures that will put pressure on the state's energy reserves.

The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast temperatures in the high 30s to low 40s for Adelaide until the weekend, with some regional centres to rise even higher.

The Australian Energy Market Operator has issued a lack of reserve notice for Thursday when the expected electricity reserve, the amount above forecast demand, will be 575 megawatts, below the 600 megawatts the operator requires.
Britain's Johanna Konta overpowered Madison Brengle of the US 6-3, 6-1 on the back of eight aces and 37 winners in just 66 minutes in their first round match at the Australian Open

British hope Johanna Konta showed no signs of her recent injury troubles Tuesday as she dismantled Madison Brengle to continue the dismal US start to the year's first Grand Slam.

An incredible 12 of the 15 American players on court on day one were dumped out of the event -- including women's title fancies Venus Williams, Sloane Stephens and CoCo Vandeweghe plus Jack Sock and John Isner on the men's side.

And Brengle became the unlucky 13th American to head for the exit door after impressive ninth seeded Konta overpowered her 6-3, 6-1 on the back of eight aces and 37 winners in just 66 minutes on Hisense Arena.

The world number 90, who could find just four winners of her own, was always on the back foot against Konta who came into the tournament under a slight injury cloud.

The British number one withdrew from a warm-up event in Brisbane with hip trouble and then lost her Sydney title in the first round.

The Sydney-born Konta, who has made the semi-final and quarter-final in her previous two Australian Open appearances, is a crowd favourite in Melbourne.

"I'm very happy with that match," she said. "She really makes her opponents work for it."

Konta will face either Russian Anna Blinkova or another American Bernada Pera on Thursday, when temperatures are expected to be close to 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).

"I look forward to the heat, I love it," she added.
Melania Trump -- shown here at Children's National Medical Center in Washington in December -- is still an enigma, one year into her time as first lady

Groomed to perfection yet rarely heard in public, Melania Trump is an enigma -- a first lady whose opinions, marriage and goals remain a mystery to millions of Americans.

She is without question a unique first lady: a former model who once posed nude in her husband's private jet; the first foreign-born wife of a US president in nearly 200 years; and the first for whom English is a second language.

A year after channelling Jacqueline Kennedy in powder blue Ralph Lauren at her husband's inauguration, Trump has yet to embrace a cause, as did Michelle Obama with her anti-obesity campaign or Laura Bush and her literacy program.

For months, she stayed in New York, refusing to move to the White House until her young son Barron -- of whom she is said to be fiercely protective -- finished the school year.

She is infrequently seen in Washington and costing law enforcement tens of thousands of dollars a day in protection.

"She is still an enigma after a year," says Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University who has researched US first ladies.

"I don't think the American people feel that they know the real woman yet."

Her campaign-era pledge to fight against cyber-bullying has never come to light and saw her mercilessly criticized given her husband Donald's own reputation as something of a Twitter bully.

As the 47-year-old wife of a 71-year-old man known for past lewd remarks about women, and who divorced his two previous wives in a blaze of tabloid publicity, she is dogged by speculation that they lead largely separate lives.

- 'Air of mystery' -

An explosive account about life in the White House alleged that she cried on election night and that even in Trump Tower, the couple spent "days at a time without contact."

"People are still trying to figure out the relationship between the president and the first lady, and I think those kind of questions feed into the air of mystery," said Jellison.

Unlike the Harvard-educated Obama, Trump makes few public speeches -- perhaps not surprising after her address at the Republican National Convention in 2016 exploded into a plagiarism row, and given that she has been lampooned for her strong Slovenian accent.

The first lady's carefully edited social media accounts often show her interacting with children, as she did in December at a Marine Corps Reserve event in Washington

A devoted mother, her most direct communication is a carefully curated social media profile: photographs of herself impeccably groomed, often interacting with young children, or messages of comfort in times of national tragedy.

That could not be more different from the articulate, ever-present Obama, the Afghanistan-visiting Bush or the politically engaged, if unpopular, Hillary Clinton.

"To find a first lady as enigmatic as Melania Trump, we have to go back to the late '40s and early '50s," said Jellison. In particular, she cites Bess Truman, wife of Harry and first lady from 1945 to 1953.

But last week, Trump added three new people to her East Wing staff, including a director of policy who worked formerly in the National Security Council's Middle East Directorate and at Facebook.

"I am confident they will enhance my work on behalf of children everywhere, while helping me further expand my role," she said.

Her office says she intends to announce a signature initiative "in the coming months," with a focus on "the overall well-being of children."

"Mrs Trump continues to be focused on her roles as mother, wife and first lady... while remaining an independent woman who stays true to herself," said a spokeswoman.

- 'Like Diana' -

She has accompanied her husband on tours to the Middle East and Asia, where she was photographed in dazzling clothes, many of them European, after several US designers refused to dress her in opposition to her husband's politics.

Trump has accompanied her husband on trips to the Middle East and Asia, including to China, where she is seen here in November attending a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing

Her style may not be considered accessible but it has won admiration, despite back-biting over her decision to wear stilettos when heading to storm-ravaged Texas. She changed into sneakers before disembarking.

A Gallup poll in December said she was viewed favorably by 54 percent of Americans, up 17 points from January -- she is significantly more popular than her husband.

"She is doing an amazing job," enthuses Paolo Zampolli, a long-time friend who says he celebrated the New Year with the Trumps in Florida.

"The world did not make it easy for her," he said, insisting she is happy. "She wants to do a great job and she will."

Trump grew up in then communist-run Yugoslavia and is said to be fiercely private. Even in New York, she eschewed much of the high-profile charity endeavors and socializing beloved of other billionaire wives.

No other first lady has not first been through the training of being an elected politician's wife at a lower level.

"The fact that she has not made huge mistakes in this arena is a huge accomplishment," says Jeanne Zaino, a political science professor at Iona College.

"Like Princess Diana, she may find her voice... she may surprise people."
Native plant knowledge from the past and present will be the topic of a presentation by Rebecca West, curator of Plains Indian Cultures and the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

West will be addressing the Pahaska Corral of Westerners on Jan. 22 at the Governors Room in the Irma Hotel in Cody, Wyoming. The talk will be preceded by a no-host dinner starting at 6 p.m. and followed by the presentation around 7 p.m.

The dinner and the presentation are open to the public. Due to limited seating, nonmembers must RSVP by calling Jeremy Johnston at 307-578-4032 or emailing him at jeremyj@centerofthewest.org.

Wests lecture will delve into the existence of Plains Indian cultures as seasonally nomadic hunter gatherers, and specifically their intimate knowledge of plants in this region. The historical and archaeological record, along with oral histories and contemporary uses, reveal much about the relationships of Plains Indian cultures to the natural plant resources available for subsistence, medicinal and ceremonial uses.
US President Donald Trump arriving at a rally in Alabama

Donald Trump's political future may well hinge on 2018, when he risks losing control of Congress in crucial elections that kick off the next White House battle -- likely to pit the president against both Democrats and rogue Republican challengers.

Congressional mid-terms often swing against the party in power, and tradition suggests Trump's Republicans, who control the White House, the Senate and House of Representatives, are set to suffer on November 6 when Americans head to the polls.

The president is coming off a late-2017 high, when he managed to ram his massive tax cut plan through Congress.

But nearly one year into his presidency -- he marks the anniversary of his inauguration January 20 -- Trump is entangled in an alarming face-off with North Korea, has antagonized US allies over Iran, and faces accusations of racism and hatemongering.

"Historically, this is bound to be a Democratic year," Larry Sabato, who heads the Center for Politics at University of Virginia, told AFP.

"The question is, will it be a moderately Democratic year, a substantially Democratic year, or an overwhelming Democratic year?"

Polling suggests Democrats have a strong shot at flipping the House, whose 435 members serve two-year terms, in November. The prospects are slimmer in the Senate, where Democrats have to defend 26 seats compared to just eight for Republicans.

"Partisan gerrymandering is probably the only thing now that's giving Republicans some hope of hanging on to the House in 2018," said political historian Allan Lichtman of American University.

Trump and his Republicans will no doubt tout their tax cut success and the generally healthy economy.

US President Donald Trump speaks during a retreat with Republican lawmakers at Camp David

But the president's poor approval ratings and questions about his suitability for office will also fuel the campaigns -- not to mention the Russian election meddling inquiry that hangs like a sword of Damocles over the White House.

Republican Senator John Thune predicted that "hand-to-hand combat" lay ahead in the political contests.

Collectively they will serve as opening tests for Democrats, who have been emboldened by recent successes at the polls.

"It's going to be a tough environment," Republican Senator Jeff Flake, a Trump critic, told reporters.

- Forced into primaries -

After the mid-terms, Democrats would have two years to prepare their all-out effort to block the brash billionaire Trump, who will be 74 by Election Day 2020.

"If the House goes Democratic, then Trump will be able to get exactly zero passed," Sabato predicted.

A 2018 Democratic wave would not automatically signal Trump's demise. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama suffered scathing defeats in mid-term elections in 1994 and 2010; both were re-elected two years later.

But a more potentially embarrassing hurdle for Trump could emerge in the form of the primaries that determine presidential nominees.

US President Donald Trump's political future could hinge on the 2018 midterm elections

Even with Trump in office, the Republican Party must choose its White House nominee, and with Trump's popularity below 40 percent, analysts predict a challenger will emerge.

There are precedents for such turmoil. Ronald Reagan defied Republican president Gerald Ford in 1976, winning enough primary votes to carry the suspense into that year's nominating convention.

Senator Edward Kennedy bitterly challenged Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980, and far-right candidate Pat Buchanan opposed fellow Republican George Bush in 1988.

The lesson? Insurgents almost always fail.

"But if a president has a really serious challenge that ends up winning a quarter or a third of the delegate votes, he's probably going to lose" re-election, as Ford, Carter and Bush did, noted Sabato.

Conversely, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama consolidated power, won their party primaries without serious challenges, and served two presidential terms.

- Who will challenge Trump? -

Ohio Governor John Kasich speaks to reporters after meeting with Donald Trump

No Republican has yet to commit the political sin of declaring him or herself a 2020 White House rival to Trump -- but analysts expect challengers to start emerging after the mid-terms.

One likely contender is John Kasich, Ohio's moderate Republican governor who was Trump's last rival for the 2016 nomination, and has emerged as a bridge-builder in a divisive era.

Others more hostile to Trump, including Flake or Senator Ben Sasse, could embody a return to traditional conservatism, far from the fevered populism fueled by the president. But they have nothing close to his stature or notoriety.

There is also the possibility that Trump, whose campaign committee is already raising funds for 2020, could decline to seek a second term.

It would be a first since 1968, when Democrat Lyndon Johnson quit his re-election bid after poor primary showings.

Should Trump bow out, it could clear the way for a conservative ally of the president such as Senator Tom Cotton or Vice President Mike Pence.

The next White House battle will likely to pit Trump against both Democrats and rogue Republican challengers

Many Democrats are pushing to oust Trump even before 2020, citing the suspicion he colluded with Russia to sway the last election.

But absent considerably more damning evidence, even an impeachment procedure by a Democrat-led House likely would have zero chance of success in the Senate, and could backfire politically, Sabato said.

"It might restore Trump just like it did Clinton," Sabato said, referring to Republican failed attempts to oust the Democratic president in 1998.
Bailed Hong Kong democracy activists Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow could be jailed again today as they appeal their sentencing

Hong Kong's leading democracy activists appealed Tuesday against their jail terms in a case seen as a litmus test for the independence of the city's judiciary, which some fear is under pressure from Beijing.

Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow were jailed in August last year for their role in the 2014 Umbrella Movement mass pro-democracy protests, after Hong Kong's government pushed for harsher sentences.

A lower court had given Wong and Law community service orders and Chow a suspended sentence. But after the government's intervention they were jailed for between six and eight months by the Court of Appeal.

All three activists were later bailed pending their appeal.

The government's move was seen as further evidence of Beijing's growing influence over the semi-autonomous city, with Chinese authorities particularly riled by the emergence of activists calling for independence for Hong Kong.

Wong and Law's political party Demosisto wants self-determination for the city.

"Now is the chance for us to be aware how the courts of Hong Kong will recognise, will position, the motivation of civil disobedience," Wong, 21, told reporters ahead of the hearing at the city's court of final appeal.

- Chilling effect -

The unlawful assembly charges for which the three were jailed related to their involvement in the storming of a fenced-off government forecourt known as Civic Square in September 2014.

Their arrests sparked wider rallies which exploded two days later when police fired tear gas at the crowds, triggering the Umbrella Movement protests which brought parts of the city to a standstill.

Defence lawyer Robert Pang warned that harsher sentences had a "chilling effect" on young people expressing their views.

"We must guard against discouraging young, idealistic persons who are doing this not for their personal benefit...from expressing their point of view," Pang told the court.

Prosecution counsel David Leung argued the role of the court of appeal had been to judge whether the original magistrate had given "proper weight" when assessing the culpability of the trio for the clashes.

Court of final appeal judge, chief justice Geoffrey Ma, warned protesters should not "overstep the mark", whatever their motivation.

But he questioned whether the original magistrate had "erred in principle" as non-custodial sentences were common for unlawful assembly offences.

The case was adjourned for judgement with a date not set.

The Umbrella Movement called for fully free leadership elections to replace a system where the city's chief executive is selected by a pro-Beijing committee, but failed to win any concessions.

Since then there have been growing signs that China is increasing its control over Hong Kong.

Hong Kong has been governed under a "one country, two systems" deal since 1997, when Britain handed the territory back to China.

The deal allows citizens rights unseen on the mainland, including freedom of speech and a partially directly elected parliament, as well as an independent judiciary.

A number of leading campaigners have been charged in relation to the 2014 protests, while six rebel legislators including Law were disqualified from parliament.

Wong also faces a possible jail sentence Wednesday for obstructing the clearance of a major protest encampment in 2014, a charge to which he pleaded guilty.
An Iraqi Shabak girl stands next to her house which was destroyed by the Islamic State group in Baz Gerkan village

A Christmas tree stands on a roundabout in Bartalla in northern Iraq, its base adorned by posters of Shabak martyrs killed in the fight against the Islamic State group.

Now that victory has been declared against the jihadists, Iraq's ethnic and religious minorities are taking the future into their own hands.

In Baz Gerkan village, where fighting damaged or destroyed most of the houses, Shabak residents have rebuilt their school themselves.

A few kilometres (miles) away, they have restored the shrine of Imam Rida, the eighth of Shiite Islam's 12 imams, which was blown up by the Sunni Muslim jihadists who consider Shiites to be heretics.

Shabaks, who number around 60,000 in Iraq, have their own language and say they first settled in the Arab country several centuries ago from northern Iran.

Their places of worship, such as those of Christians, Yazidis and other minorities, were targeted by IS, and many fled their homes during the three years of jihadist occupation.

An Iraqi Shabak man at the door of a mosque destroyed by the Islamic State group in the village of Baz Gerkan

There are now only 400,000 Christians in Iraq against more than one million before the US-led invasion of 2003, making up three percent of the country's population along with Yazidis, Sabeans and Shabaks.

Today, several months after the entire northern province of Nineveh was retaken from the jihadists, churches and monasteries have been restored.

And for the first time in four years last December, Christmas carols were heard.

- Yazidis rebuild their temples -

The Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority has also managed to rebuild 20 of 23 temples destroyed by the jihadists in the Bashiqa area, east of Iraq's second city Mosul.

"All this was done thanks to donations from Yazidis and other inhabitants of the region," said Hilal Ali, who is in charge of the Yazidi sites of worship.

Mutassem Abed, 47, is a Shiite who joined the Hashed al-Shaabi coalition of paramilitary units following a call to arms in 2004 by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric.

The Hashed was formed specifically to counter the rise of IS in the country, and played a key role in the jihadists' defeat in 2017.

Now that the fighting has ended, Abed is looking to his future.

Hashed al-Shaabi fighters man a checkpoint in Bartalla east of Mosul on January 10, 2018

"We must rebuild a sanctuary that is even more beautiful and even bigger, to say to IS that it did not win," the Shabak fighter told AFP, wearing a parka over his uniform.

Life may slowly be returning to normal, but many checkpoints have been set up, usually manned by members of Hashed units from the Shabak, Turkmen, Christian or Yazidi minorities.

Iraq is relying on local forces to maintain security on the ground, after declaring in December that the war against IS had been won.

Such fighters know the local people, speak their languages and can easily spot any intruders, commanders say.

- Fighters with local knowledge -

"Even before IS, other terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda tried to chase out minorities," said Zein al-Abidine Jamil, a Shabak commander with the Hashed.

Another Bartalla Shabak, a policeman manning a checkpoint in the old part of Mosul, recalled the days when he could only enter the city under escort.

"Mosul? I went there on patrol. But never in a personal capacity. A lone Shiite? That would have been madness!" he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Sunni Muslims are a minority in Iraq, but in Mosul they form the majority and also have a presence in villages around the city.

The Shabak minority has a small Sunni community within it. But, residents say, many of them joined IS and were killed. Others fled with their families, joining the ranks of the displaced.

Shabak boys clear rubble around their house in the village of Baz Gerkan east of Mosul on January 10, 2018

Today, several months after Nineveh province was rid of IS, "we are directly responsible for the security of citizens", said Jamil.

Because of their local knowledge, such fighters were a major asset to the armed forces in their fightback against IS.

But human rights groups have charged that some minorities targeted by the jihadists were themselves guilty of abuses.

In December, the New York-based Human Rights Watch accused Yazidi fighters of executing 52 civilians in apparent revenge killings after capturing territory from the jihadists.

HRW said those killed included women and children, and came from eight families of the Sunni tribe Al-Bu Metewut who were fleeing clashes between IS and pro-government militias north of Mosul.
A record number of North Korean "ghost ships" washed ashore in Japan last year

Eight bodies have been recovered from a wrecked boat that washed ashore in central Japan, authorities said Tuesday, suspecting the vessel is the latest in a series of North Korean "ghost ships."

Coastguard rescuers found the corpses of seven men inside the wreckage of the boat that washed up in Kanazawa, central Japan, last week, senior police official Hiroshi Abe told AFP.

The badly decomposed remains of another man were discovered around 15 metres (50 feet) from the boat, added Abe.

"It is difficult to identify the bodies as they had begun to decompose," he said, noting that rough seas had prevented officials from investigating the boat thoroughly.

"We spotted a tobacco box which carries some Korean letters, but we can't confirm the boat came from North Korea," he said.

However, coastguard officials believe it is the latest North Korean fishing vessel to wash up on the coast, following a record number of such cases last year.

Television footage showed the wreckage of the flat-bottomed vessel capsized on the beach.

According to TV Asahi, a badge depicting former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il was found in the wreckage.

The number of North Korean fishing vessels washing up on Japan's coast hit a record 104 cases last year, following 66 in 2016, according to the Japanese coastguard.

Sometimes the crew members have already died at sea, a phenomenon local media refer to as "ghost ships".

Experts say some North Korean fishermen are travelling further out to sea in order to satisfy government mandates for bigger catches.

But their old and poorly equipped vessels are prone to mechanical and other problems, including running out of fuel, and there are few ways for them to call for rescue.

A severe shortage of food and foreign currency -- as international sanctions over Pyongyang's nuclear and missile ambitions bite -- are contributing to a wave of poorly-equipped North Korean fishing boats washing up in Japanese waters, pundits say.

Japan and North Korea have a tense relationship, with Pyongyang routinely issuing verbal threats as well as firing missiles near or above Japan.

But the Japanese coastguard occasionally rescues North Korean fishermen in maritime accidents in regional waters.
Dust clouded the lobby after a mezzanine floor collapsed at Indonesia's stock exchange in Jakarta

Indonesian investigators were sifting through the rubble at Jakarta's stock exchange complex Tuesday as they looked for clues to what caused a walkway collapse that left scores injured, including dozens of visiting university students.

A mezzanine floor at the tower in the city's business district crashed to the ground shortly before lunchtime Monday, injuring 73 people, police said. There were no deaths.

Dramatic CCTV footage showed a group of about 40 students on a balcony section plunge as the floor gave way with a cascade of glass, metal and other material showering the ground floor where several other people were walking.

National police spokesman Setyo Wasisto said the investigation team was hoping to gather crucial evidence by the end of Tuesday, though the results of their probe will not be known for several weeks.

Investigators will look at building material quality and the site's structural integrity, said Mushanif Mukti, a top official at the Association of Construction Safety and Health Experts.

"It needs to be examined to see whether it is structural fatigue or it's a weight issue," he said.

Indonesia stock exchange

Jakarta's governor Anies Baswedan has ordered an inspection of the complex, which was last checked in May last year.

Officials have described the collapse as an accident and not the result of an explosion -- the tower was bombed by Islamist militants in 2000, killing 10 people.

"If they (investigators) are done today, everything can be cleaned up and the ... scene can be re-opened," Wasisto said.

"Some tenants are a bit cautious even though building management said it's safe. They are also going to check the other mezzanine floor today."

- Broken bones -

Most of the injuries were broken bones, Wasisto said, adding that none was life-threatening.

"We have questioned a few witnesses ... (including) security officers, students, friends of those injured and employees who work there. It's ongoing," he said.

About a dozen people have been released from hospital.

The injured university students were from Palembang on Indonesia's Sumatra island. Many of their parents are demanding compensation for the accident.

"I want my daughter to be sent here to Palembang to get treatment," mother Irma Yanti said as she burst into tears.

"I was informed that her leg was broken."

Enforcement of Indonesian safety standards can be spotty.

In October, a deadly blaze ripped through a fireworks factory on the outskirts of Jakarta, killing 48 workers in one of the country's worst industrial accidents in recent memory.

Police said the fire was caused by sparks from welding equipment.

At the exchange, the damaged area remained closed off Tuesday but trading carried on as usual.

The bourse held a moment of silence to honour those injured.

After the accident, which happened in one of the two 1990s-built towers in the stock exchange complex, the lobby was filled with debris and toppled-over plants near a Starbucks outlet.

Hundreds of panicked employees were evacuated from the building, which also houses the local office of the World Bank.

Television images showed chaotic scenes as victims were taken to hospital or lay on the ground outside the tower complex.
Trump has pushed Xi to increase pressure on North Korea, in the hopes of convincing it to abanon its nuclear ambitions

China on Tuesday dismissed an international meeting on the North Korean nuclear crisis hosted by Canada and the United States as illegitimate, as major players like Beijing were not present.

The absence of Russia and China from the two days of talks in Vancouver, which began on Monday, shows the holes in Washington's bid to form a unified global front against North Korea's nuclear threat.

"The most important relevant parties of the Korean peninsula issue haven't taken part in the meeting so I don't think the meeting is legal or representative," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular briefing.

Lu denounced the "Cold War mentality" of "relevant parties" -- without naming nations.

China, which is North Korea's main economic and diplomatic ally, has criticised the Vancouver talks and called for sanctions discussions to remain within the United Nations framework.

While Russia and China have backed UN sanctions against North Korea, they have pushed for the United States to halt military drills in the region in return for Pyongyang suspending weapons tests.

Steve Goldstein, a senior US State Department official, told reporters last week that China and Russia were not invited to the meeting but would be briefed about it "right when it is over".

The US, which at the summit will review with its allies the effectiveness of current sanctions against the hermit kingdom and explore adding more, remains sceptical that leader Kim Jong-Un is ready to negotiate away his weapons programme.

The so-called Vancouver Group is formed by 20 countries that fought in the 1950-53 Korean War. They include Australia, Britain, France, India, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea. Military officials will also be present at the meeting.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov slammed the US on Monday, saying: "Unfortunately, our American colleagues and their allies still want to do business solely on the basis of issuing ultimatums and do not want to listen to the views of other centres of world politics."

- Xi, Trump talk -

Tensions have been high after the North staged a flurry of nuclear and missile tests.

Over the weekend, a false alarm in Hawaii warning of an incoming ballistic missile rattled nerves, while US President Donald Trump has traded bluster with Kim over who has the bigger nuclear launch button at his desk.

Trump has pushed Chinese leader Xi Jinping to increase economic and political pressure on North Korea in the hopes of convincing it to stop the development of its nuclear weapons programme.

But in recent weeks there has been an apparent rapprochement, with the two Koreas meeting for the first time in two years and Pyongyang agreeing to send athletes to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea.

In a phone call with Trump, Xi "pointed out that the situation on the Korean peninsula has shown some positive changes," the official Xinhua news service said Tuesday.

"All sides concerned should make joint efforts to keep up the hard-won momentum for the easing of the situation on the Korean peninsula and create conditions to restart talks," he was quoted as saying.

He also urged Trump, who has taken a hard line against the trade imbalance between China and the US, to come to the table on economic issues.

"The two countries should adopt constructive means to properly settle economic and trade issue of mutual concern through opening up markets to each other and making the cake of cooperation bigger," Xinhua quoted Xi as saying.
About 655,000 Rohingya have escaped to Bangladesh since August 2017 after the Myanmar army began a campaign of persecution

Myanmar and Bangladesh have agreed to repatriate Rohingya displaced by an army crackdown "within two years", Dhaka said Tuesday, outlining the first clear timeline for a return of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

The agreement says the process will be "completed preferably within 02 (two) years from the commencement of repatriation", according to a statement from the Bangladeshi government following talks in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw.

The deal applies to Rohingya who fled Myanmar in two major outbreaks of violence since October 2016, when militants from the stateless Muslim minority first attacked border-guard posts in northern Rakhine state.

It does not cover Rohingya refugees who were living in Bangladesh prior to that date who the UN estimates number at 200,000.

"During this two-day meeting, we agreed on the form that refugees will have to fill to be able to come back to Myanmar," Mohammad Sufiur Rahman, Bangladesh ambassador in Myanmar told AFP.

"We should be able to start the process in the coming days," he said, but added Myanmar's stated deadline of next week for starting Rohingya repatriation was "not possible".

The agreement follows a pact between the countries in November paving the way for repatriations from January 23, a deadline that is likely to slip given the logistical challenges of the cross-border operation.

Myanmar has faced intense diplomatic pressure to allow the safe return of Rohingya refugees driven out by its army.

But many Rohingya in crowded camps in Bangladesh say they are reluctant to return to Rakhine state having fled atrocities including murder, rape and arson attacks on their homes.

Despite that, Myanmar authorities have pressed ahead with the construction of a "temporary camp" in Rakhine's Maungdaw district.

Eventually the site "will accommodate about 30,000 people in its 625 buildings" before they can be resettled permanently, Myanmar's state media reported this week.

But only a fraction of the buildings have been finished.

burs-joe/apj/jah
Chinese authorities have publicly scolded several international firms for listing Hong Kong, Macau and Tawian as separate countries

Australia's Qantas has changed its website classification of Taiwan and Hong Kong from separate countries to Chinese territories after Chinese regulators scolded several foreign firms over similar listings.

The airline said Tuesday it was amending an "oversight", following in the footsteps of several other international corporations who were in the past week called out by Chinese authorities.

"Due to an oversight, some Chinese territories were incorrectly listed as 'countries' on parts of our website," a Qantas spokesperson told AFP. "We are correcting this error."

Shanghai's cyberspace authority last week sent a stern message to international firms when it ordered Marriott to shut down its Chinese website for a week and amend what it termed the "illegal" categorisation of regions Beijing claims under its authority.

Spanish clothing giant Zara, Delta Air Lines and Medtronic -- a medical device company -- were also called out for listing Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate countries.

The firms were urged to "immediately alter their illegal content and publish apologies".

They have since apologised and changed their websites.

In a separate rebuke, the Civil Aviation Administration of China noted in an online statement that Tibet and Taiwan were listed as countries on Delta's official website.

The airline issued a public apology and amended its classification of the regions.

The backlash was triggered on Chinese social media after Marriott established a customer questionnaire in Mandarin asking members of the hotel chain's rewards programme to list their country of residence, offering Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as possible options.

This drew the ire of authorities as Tibet is an "autonomous region" firmly under Chinese control since the 1950s.

Hong Kong and Macau are former British and Portuguese colonies, respectively, that are now "special administrative regions" of China.

Taiwan has been self-ruled since splitting from the mainland after a 1949 civil war, but Beijing continues to claim sovereignty over the island.
At least 59 toddlers have died from a combination of measles and malnutrition in the remote Asmat region of Indonesia's easternmost Papua province over the past few months

Dozens of toddlers in Indonesia's easternmost Papua province have died from malnutrition and measles over the past few months, a military spokesman said Tuesday, underscoring a lack of accessible medical care in the remote region.

The high number of deaths comes after President Joko Widodo vowed in 2014 to beef up infrastructure on the island that is shared with Papua New Guinea.

At least 59 toddlers have died from a combination of measles and malnutrition in the remote Asmat region, which has a severe shortage of doctors, said Papua military spokesman Muhammad Aidi.

"We received reports from the local health officials about" these deaths, he told AFP.

"We don't know for sure yet whether the malnutrition was caused by lack of food or by the parent's lack of knowledge regarding healthy food."

In response, the military has deployed medical teams and support staff to supply villagers with medicine, vaccines, medical equipment and nutritious food, Aidi added.

About 129,000 people live in Asmat, a swampy region cris-crossed by rivers that can only be accessed by a flight from Papua's capital Jayapura followed by a helicopter and boat ride.

"The region is disconnected from other parts of Papua because of a lack of infrastructure," Aidi said.

Indonesia annexed resource-rich Papua in the 1960s, but it remains poor with a low-level separatist insurgency carrying on for decades.
Some 8.4 million Yemenis are at risk of famine as the war between rebels and the Saudi-backed government nears its fourth year, the United Nations says

More than three-quarters of Yemenis are now in need of humanitarian aid as the war between rebels and the Saudi-backed government nears its fourth year, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Some 8.4 million people are at risk of famine, up from 6.8 million in 2017, the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA) said.

A total of 22.2 million people, or 76 percent of Yemen's population of 29 million, are dependent on some form of assistance, an increase of 1.5 million people over the past six months.

The United Nations' efforts to address what it has described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis have been hampered by a crippling blockade of rebel-held ports by the Saudi-led coalition that intervened in support of the beleaguered government in March 2015.

Following a rebel missile attack on Riyadh airport in November, the coalition halted even UN aid deliveries but it has since eased that measure.

On Monday, a ship carrying four US-purchased mobile cranes that had been blocked by the coalition for months docked in the main rebel-held port of Hodeida.

A man and child ride on a motorcycle loaded with sacks of wheat and cooking oil containers distributed as food aid by a local charity at a camp for the displaced, in the northern Yemeni province of Hajjah on December 23, 2017

Around 70 percent of Yemen's imports pass through Hodeida and UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the cranes will "significantly boost the discharge of humanitarian cargo".

"This will allow for faster delivery of relief items for Yemeni families in the grips of the world's biggest hunger crisis," he said.

But UN aid officials warn that access for humanitarian deliveries remains a concern even if the blockade is lifted.

A total of 9,245 people have been killed in Yemen since the coalition intervened in 2015, according to World Health Organization figures.

More than 50,000 have been wounded and millions displaced from their homes.

As Yemen's health care system has been brought to the brink of collapse, more than one million people have been infected with cholera, of whom more than 2,000 died, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Authorities have released the name of the man killed last week in a shooting in Sheridan, Wyoming.

Eric Kaylor, 47, was shot Wednesday night, said Kevin Sessions of the Sheridan County Coroners Office. Kaylor had gotten into a fight with his roommate, Christopher Macloughlin Labuy, 33, and died of a single gunshot wound to the head, Sessions said.

Sheridan police received a call around 11:15 p.m. that a homicide had occurred at an apartment building at 1410 N. Main St.

A man at the apartment told officers his friend, Labuy, had knocked on his door and told him hed shot another man in the building.

Kaylor was dead when law enforcement arrived.

Labuy was scheduled to make his initial court appearance in Sheridan County Circuit Court at 2 p.m. on Tuesday.
The YPG played a key role in the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance that last year ousted Islamic State jihadists from their stronghold of Raqa in northern Syria

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday vowed Turkey would soon begin an operation against towns in Syria controlled by Kurdish militia, calling the areas "nests" of terror.

The Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia controls key Syrian northern towns including Manbij and Afrin and is an ally of the US but Ankara accuses the group of being a terror organisation.

"Tomorrow, (or) the day after, (or) within a short period, we will get rid of terror nests one-by-one in Syria starting with Afrin and Manbij" in northern Syria, Erdogan promised in his weekly televised speech to his faction in parliament.

Turkey, which from August 2016 to March 2017 waged its Euphrates Shield cross-border operation in Syria, has repeatedly threatened a new operation against the YPG.

But Erdogan has stepped up the warnings in recent days as Turkish media said dozens of military vehicles were being deployed to the border area.

Erdogan told reporters after that the Afrin operation would be undertaken "together" with Syrian opposition fighters, like the Euphrates Shield action against the YPG and the Islamic State extremist group.

Turkey says the YPG is a branch of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged an insurgency inside Turkey since 1984.

But the issue has caused tension with the United States, which has handed weaponry to the YPG as a key player on the ground in the fight against IS.

- 'Hey NATO!' -

The US-led coalition fighting IS said at the weekend that it was working to create a 30,000-strong border security force in northern Syria.

Ankara immediately objected to such a move fearing the new force would be comprised of the YPG. Erdogan on Monday said Turkey had to "nip this terror army in the bud".

The Turkish president called on NATO, of which Turkey has been a member since 1952, to take a stand against attacks on Turkey.

"Hey NATO! You are obliged to take a stand with your partners in the event of any border aggression," Erdogan thundered. "Until now, what position have you taken?"

Turkish Chief of Staff General General Hulusi Akar is in Brussels until Wednesday for meetings with his NATO counterparts including US military's top figure General Joseph Dunford.

Akar was quoted as saying by state-run Anadolu news agency that Turkey "would not and will not allow an extension of the PKK to be given support and armed under the guise of 'operational partner'."

Despite friction between the NATO allies, Erdogan said he was "not considering making a call" to US President Donald Trump, according to Turkish media.
Moshe Holtzberg (C), now aged 11, was just two years old when Pakistani militants stormed a Jewish centre in Mumbai and killed his parents

An 11-year-old Israeli boy who survived the Mumbai terror attacks almost a decade ago returned for the first time Tuesday to the house where his parents were killed.

Moshe Holtzberg was two years old when Pakistani militants stormed Chabad House on 26 November 2008, killing six people, including Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who ran the Jewish centre.

The assault was part of a series of co-ordinated attacks across the Indian city, including on its main train station, that lasted three days and left 166 people dead.

Moshe was saved by his Indian nanny, Sandra Samuel, who managed to escape.

He now lives in Israel with his grandparents.

On Tuesday, Moshe made his first visit to Mumbai since the tragedy.

Samuel held his hand as the pair, along with Moshe's grandfather, battled their way through reporters at Mumbai's airport after touching down around 8:30 am.

"I'm very happy," a rather startled looking Moshe told reporters in Hindi.

He was later taken to Chabad House in south Mumbai where on Thursday he will join Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the unveiling of a memorial to the victims of the 26/11 attacks.

Ahead of Moshe's visit, Israel Kozlovsky, the centre's rabbi, told AFP that it would be a very emotional occasion.

"This is the place where he got his last hug from his father and mother," he said.

Samuel has said she found Moshe standing crying over the bodies of his parents and grabbed him before fleeing the house to safety. She also lives in Israel now.
Bread prices in Sudan have more than doubled after a jump in the cost of flour due to dwindling wheat supplies

Anti-riot police fired tear gas and beat protesters with batons Tuesday as hundreds of Sudanese demonstrated against soaring bread prices near a presidential palace in Khartoum, an AFP correspondent said.

Bread prices have more than doubled after a jump in the cost of flour due to dwindling wheat supplies, after the government decided to stop importing grain and allow private companies to do so.

The protest was the biggest in Khartoum since demonstrations erupted in some parts of the country earlier this month following the price increase.

On Tuesday, hundreds of protesters poured into the streets near a presidential palace in central Khartoum after the opposition Communist Party of Sudan called for an anti-government rally.

"No, no to hunger! No, no to high prices!" protesters shouted near the palace.

Police fired tear gas and hit protesters with batons as they tried to break up the protest.

A senior leader from the Communist Party, Siddig Yousif, was detained along with several protesters, the correspondent reported.

The Communist Party had sought permission from the authorities last week to hold Tuesday's rally but it had been denied.

"Today is an important day for Sudan as it is the start of widespread protests," a demonstrator told AFP on condition of anonymity.

"We were demonstrating peacefully but still the police beat us. This shows that the regime will not tolerate even peaceful protests."

Pictures and videos of Tuesday's protests were widely uploaded on social media networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Later on Tuesday police dispersed the rally near the palace but protesters staged small demonstrations in nearby streets as they were chased away.

"Lot of people watched us as we protested. I'm sure they will join us next time," the protester said.

The Communist Party said its members will continue to mobilise people and hold night-time demonstrations, while the country's main opposition Umma Party called for an anti-government demonstration on Wednesday.

On Monday last week, students also rallied against the rising prices near Khartoum University but police swiftly broke up the protest.

The day before, in the town of Geneina in the war-torn region of Darfur, a student was killed during a similar protest. It was unclear how he was killed.

Anti-government protests erupted after the cost of a 50-kilo (110-pound) sack of flour jumped from 167 ($9) to 450 Sudanese pounds ($25).

Similar protests were held in late 2016 after the government cut fuel subsidies.

The authorities cracked down on those protests to prevent a repeat of the 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.
Under the proposed draft being debated, President Rodrigo Duterte, whose single six-year term ends in mid-2022, would again be eligible to run for two more five-year terms

Philippine lawmakers on Tuesday began formal proceedings on changing the government into a federal system that could allow President Rodrigo Duterte to stay in office for more than a decade.

The proposed shift from a unitary system would give the next president two five-year terms and strong federal powers over a nation that would be divided into five federal states, congressional leader Roger Mercado said.

Although the proposed charter calls for a federal, parliamentary system with the prime minister as head of government, the president would still have vast powers, Mercado, a member of Duterte's ruling coalition, said.

"The president will have oversight power over all branches of government," including parliament and the courts, Mercado, the House of Representatives constitutional amendments committee chairman, said in a public hearing.

Under the proposed draft being debated by Mercado's commission, Duterte, whose single six-year term ends in mid-2022, would again be eligible to run for two more five-year terms.

Ramon Casiple, head of a think-tank involved in the charter change process, said that Duterte and all elected officials would no longer be bound by the term limits under the current 1987 constitution.

"That is always the case: if you have a (new) constitution, everybody starts with a clean slate," he told AFP.

He said Duterte, who has been pressing the charter-change effort, wants the new constitution ratified in a vote by May 2019. Mercado is pushing his committee's version to be adopted.

Casiple said Congress, which is controlled by Duterte allies, could form itself into a "constituent assembly" to rewrite the constitution as early as May and could finish the draft new charter by December.

Duterte and congressional allies want to effect the changes by having the House and the Senate sit as one in a constituent assembly to change the constitution.

The president says giving more power to the regions will answer the demand by the country's rebellious Muslim minority for more self-rule by creating a federal autonomous state for them.

But critics charge that the switch is unnecessary and fear that it will weaken the current constitution's safeguards against dictatorship.

It was written and ratified after the overthrow of the 20-year regime of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos who looted state coffers and oversaw massive human rights abuses after declaring martial law in 1972.

Marcos died in exile in Hawaii in 1989. Duterte has described him as the best president ever and in 2016 controversially allowed the former president's remains to be interred in Manila's "Heroes' Cemetery" despite popular protests.
Indonesia's government has received criticism following a string of arrests of people accused of insulting President Joko Widodo, making slanderous comments and posting fake information on social media

An Indonesian teenager was sentenced Tuesday to 18 months in prison for "insulting" President Joko Widodo on Facebook.

The 18-year-old high school student from Medan on the island of Sumatra, identified by the initials MFB, was found guilty of violating the country's internet law by making defamatory and slanderous comments online.

Judges also ordered him to pay 10 million rupiah ($700) in fines.

"If the fines are not paid, the jail term is extended by one month," the presiding judge told the Medan court.

The teenager accepted the verdict and did not file an appeal.

MFB was arrested in August last year after he posted numerous inflammatory messages and memes against Widodo and police chief Tito Karnavian using fake accounts.

In July, he made a post challenging the police to arrest him. And they did, a month later.

The government of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim majority country, has received criticism following a string of arrests of people accused of insulting the president, making slanderous comments and posting fake information on social media.

Democracy and rights activisits have branded the internet law draconian and a threat to free speech.

Last week a court in Jambi province, also on Sumatra, sentenced a local politician to one year in jail after he made a Facebook post considered to be insulting Islam. The judges found him guilty of violating the law and "inciting hatred".

In November last year, a man was charged for posting on Instagram images of Widodo's wife, Iriana, with texts considered offensive to the first lady.
Actress Gal Gadot arrives at the premiere Of "Wonder Woman" on May 25, 2017 in Hollywood

A cinema in northern Israel is to be named after Israeli-born Hollywood celeb Gal Gadot, star of the blockbuster hit "Wonder Woman", the town of Upper Nazareth said Tuesday.

"We are going to name the new cinema after Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress who brings honour to this country," municipal spokeswoman Orna Yosef told AFP.

"This is a message for our young people because Gal Gadot is an example of success, who has shown that dreams can be attained."

Gadot, 32, won the Miss Israel beauty pageant in 2004 aged 18.

After her two-year compulsory military service she went into modelling and then films, breaking into Hollywood with a role in 2009's "Fast and Furious."

She now lives in Los Angeles.

Last year, Lebanon and Tunisia banned "Wonder Woman" because of Gadot's Israeli army service.

The Gal Cinema, which will have two screens, will open officially on Wednesday with a showing of Israeli director Eran Riklis's thriller "Shelter".

Upper Nazareth was founded in 1956 adjacent to biblical Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel.

Upper Nazareth's population of 50,000 is 80 percent Jewish, with the remainder made up of Muslim and Christian Arabs.

Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot said that cinema closures in the area meant that until now residents were obliged to make a round-trip of around 80 kilometres (50 miles) to see a film in the coastal city of Haifa.
A recommendation by Palestinian leaders to suspend recognition of Israel could have major implications but analysts question whether the move announced by senior official Salim Zaanoun on January 16, 2018 will be implemented soon

A call by Palestinian leaders to suspend recognition of Israel in response to US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital could have major implications but is unlikely to be implemented for now, analysts said.

The vote late on Monday could be another devastating blow to the so-called peace process -- long on life support -- although the Palestinians argue US President Donald Trump and Israel have already effectively ended it.

Still, the risk of international criticism and practical concerns means the Palestinians are unlikely to follow through on the call to suspend recognition soon, analysts said.

"If we stop recognising them, we should stop dealing with them in all aspects, security and civilian," Ghassan Khatib, an analyst and former Palestinian minister, told AFP.

"That is not practically possible given the extensive interaction and dependency, so I don't think there is going to be an implementation to this."

The vote was by the Palestinian Central Council, one of the key institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in a meeting on Sunday and Monday called to discuss Trump's declaration of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

The vote ordered the PLO Executive Committee to suspend recognition of Israel until it recognises the state of Palestine and reverses its building of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

The PLO is considered the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people by the international community and formalised its recognition of Israel in 1993.

- Oslo 'finished'? -

The council meeting was the latest attempt by the Palestinian leadership to formulate a response to Trump's policies following his December 6 Jerusalem declaration.

The council also backed president Mahmud Abbas's comments that the Oslo agreements of the 1990s, the basis of Palestinian relations with Israel, were "finished".

Abbas said on Sunday that Israel had ended the accords through its actions, referring to activities seen as eroding the possibility of a two-state solution such as persistent settlement expansion.

He also called Trump's peace efforts the "slap of the century."

Eighty-seven of the council's 109 members attended for the vote, with the vast majority, including Abbas, voting in favour of suspending recognition.

But previous decisions by the PCC have not been implemented, notably a 2015 vote calling for suspending security coordination with Israel.

There is no date set for a meeting of the PLO Executive Committee, at which the suspension could be confirmed.

Israel did not immediately respond to the vote, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Abbas had "torn off" his "mask" as a supposed moderate in his speech on Sunday.

Following Monday's vote, Abbas set off on a trip to Jordan, Egypt and the European Union's headquarters in Brussels in which he is expected to seek support for a change of strategy.

- 'Not talks and words' -

The council meeting was part of Abbas's attempt to seek an alternative strategy to achieve an independent Palestinian state following the collapse in relations with the United States.

The longtime leader, now 82, has been through a series of failed US-brokered peace negotiations, but Trump's December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital deeply angered the Palestinians.

The Palestinians see the eastern part of the city as the capital of their future state, and Abbas froze ties with Trump's administration following the announcement.

Abbas has said the United States can no longer be the mediator in peace talks with Israel, calling instead for internationally-led negotiations. The PCC backed him in his call.

Trump has also threatened to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid to the Palestinians, including through the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.

Jihad Harb, a West Bank-based political analyst, said that while most Palestinians would support the central council's recommendation "it will take a long time to implement it."

"The people are waiting for implementation, not talks and words."

Abbas's term of office expired in 2009 but elections have not been held since due to Palestinian political infighting.

Polls indicate around 70 percent of Palestinians want Abbas to resign, with criticism of his policy of negotiations with Israel rife.

Israeli analysts, too, were sceptical whether the announcement would lead to much.

Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador and negotiator, said the Palestinians needed coordination with Israel for survival.

Israel occupies the West Bank and controls the borders with Jordan, making travel outside their headquarters in Ramallah near impossible for Abbas and other officials without Israeli cooperation.

"Israel or others are going to say: 'If you no longer recognise us, it's a mutual thing -- you are no longer recognised as the leadership for the Palestinians.'"

Diana Buttu, a former aide to Abbas and now prominent critic, said few new ideas had been floated, pointing to the advanced age of the delegates as evidence of the lack of new thinking.

"You can't lead a revolutionary movement with people at retirement age," she said.
'Jallikattu,' or the taming of the bulls, is a hugely popular annual event in Tamil Nadu state but has been criticised by animal rights activists

Two spectators at a controversial bull-wrestling festival in southern India were gored to death on Tuesday, police said, the third such fatal attack in two days.

"Jallikattu," or the taming of the bulls, is a hugely popular annual event in Tamil Nadu state but has been criticised by animal rights activists.

Police in Sivaganga district, where the event took place, said two people were killed and another 40 sustained injuries when bulls ran into the crowd.

"The bulls ran amok into the crowd after some unidentified people let them loose outside the arena," T. Jayachandran, the police superintendent of Sivaganga, told AFP by telephone.

"A case will be registered and we will take appropriate action against the culprits."

A raging bull sprinted into the viewer's gallery, killing a teen spectator and wounding 11 others on Monday in Madurai district of Tamil Nadu.

One more was gored to death in Tiruchirappalli city the same day, according to the NDTV news network.

In Jallikattu, bulls, often festooned with marigolds, are released from pens and young men try to grab them by their sharpened horns or humps to win prizes for the best bull taming.

The prizes range from cars, motorcycles, fridges to television sets, gold coins and furniture.

India's top court banned the controversial and sometimes deadly sport in 2016 citing animal cruelty, leading to statewide protests from residents who say the traditional contest is a crucial part of their culture.

The public outcry forced state authorities to overturn the ruling last year.

Critics say organisers lace the bulls' feed with liquor to make them less steady on their feet and throw chilli powder in their faces to send them into a frenzy as they are released.

Organisers of the centuries-old festival, however, insist the bulls suffer no harm.
Last year, price hikes on a string of goods and services in Jordan sparked protests

Jordan is to increase the price of fuel and bread as it seeks tax revenues to redress a debt-riddled economy rattled by the war in neighbouring Syria, press reports said on Tuesday.

The latest tax hikes come as resource-poor Jordan faces a public debt of some $35 billion, equivalent to 90 percent of its gross domestic product.

Tax on fuel is to increase from 24 to 30 percent, Jordanian newspapers reported the government as deciding on Monday.

And the price of bread is to double from next month, they also reported.

The tax on fizzy drinks is to jump from 10 to 20 percent and cigarettes are to cost 0.20 Jordanian dinar ($0.28) more per pack than previously.

A value-added tax of five percent will also be imposed on jewellery.

The government, which hopes to increase tax revenues by $761 million, also pledged "financial aid" to struggling families affected by the price hikes.

Last year, price hikes on am array of goods and services sparked protests in which demonstrators called for the cabinet to resign.

They came after new sales taxes on internet and mobile use, bread, domestic fuel and petrol, cigarettes and fizzy drinks.

In 2016, Jordan secured a $723 million three-year credit line from the International Monetary Fund to support economic and financial reforms.

Jordan's economy has been rattled by the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and the country has taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees from its neighbours, stretching its meagre resources.

Some 680,000 Syrians have fled to Jordan since the start of the conflict in their home country in 2011, the UN refugee agency says. Jordan says it hosts 1.3 million Syrians.

Jordan says the Syrian crisis has cost it more than $10 billion over the past five years.
US President Donald Trump will be this year's main attraction at Davos

US President Donald Trump's planned visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos next week will likely eclipse the long list of other movers and shakers set to attend.

The WEF on Tuesday unveiled its lineup for the annual meeting at the luxury Swiss ski resort town, where this year's focus is on how to create "a shared future in a fractured world."

"We need collaborative efforts," WEF founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab told reporters in Geneva, warning: "There is today a real danger of a collapse of our global systems... It is in our hands to change the state of the world."

Trump will be the first sitting US president to attend the Davos meet since Bill Clinton in 2000

But ironically this year's main attraction will be Trump, who is widely blamed for deepening a number of diplomatic rifts and creating new ones with polarising policy and rhetoric.

Since taking office a year ago, he has doubled down on his "America First" agenda, which stands in stark contrast to the globalisation and regulatory integration popular among the Davos crowd.

The five-day event kicks off Monday and is expected to draw some 3,000 political and business elites, including 70 heads of state and government.

- Trump participation 'essential' -

But attention is expected to be focused squarely on Trump, who will be the first sitting US president to attend the meeting since Bill Clinton in 2000.

A string of US presidents have avoided attending the upscale event, fearing a sojourn to a European ski resort would make them look out of touch.

But Trump is expected to use the opportunity to thumb his nose at the elites who flock to Davos -- a festival of globalism drawing many of his most virulent critics.

Trump has sparked alarm over his decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, as well as his barrage of criticism against the World Trade Organization and various UN agencies.

He has also pushed tensions to the boiling point with nuclear-armed North Korea and more recently reportedly branded Haiti, El Salvador and countries across Africa as "shitholes".

Schwab said he was thrilled that the US president would attend, pointing out that a major topic of discussion at Davos would be "the future of global cooperation" on issues like trade, the environment and the fight against terrorism.

"It is absolutely essential to have President Trump with us," he said.

The White House has said he will be accompanied by a large delegation, including his son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

US former foreign secretary John Kerry will attend the Davos summit, as will former vice president Al Gore

As something of a counterweight, former US vice president Al Gore and the country's former top diplomat John Kerry, both Democrats, will also be present.

Trump is slated to deliver a speech before the end of the meeting on Friday, WEF said.

This year's line-up will also be headlined by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will give the keynote address on Tuesday, and French President Emmanuel Macron, who is scheduled to address the forum on Wednesday.

British Prime Minister Theresa May and her Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau will attend, as will Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

The presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Zimbabwe, Switzerland and the European Commission will also be there, along with the kings of Jordan and Spain.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres will attend, flanked by the heads of the UN agencies for trade, health, labour and human rights, as well as the heads of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

UN chief Antonio Guterres will also attend

The business world will also be well represented, with the leaders of some 1,900 companies expected to be on hand.

- Women in focus? -

A number of Hollywood stars will also be present this year, including movie legend Cate Blanchette.

They may be among those addressing the hot-button issues of gender equality and sexual harassment, after accusations against Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein erupted into a global reckoning that has shaken artistic, media and political circles worldwide.

Trying to keep in step with the global zeitgeist, WEF organisers boast that the share of women participants this year will be the highest ever at 21 percent.

Among them are high-profile co-chairs including IMF chief Christine Lagarde, head of IBM Ginni Rometty and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg.
India is mired in conflict in the Himalayan region of Kashmir where roughly 500,000 soldiers are deployed

India will buy more than 160,000 guns worth $553 million for troops on its disputed, high-altitude borders, the defence ministry said Tuesday.

The defence acquisition council cleared the purchase of 72,400 assault rifles and 93,895 carbines for 35 billion rupees ($553 million) in a meeting chaired by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

The weapons will be bought to "enable the defence forces to meet their immediate requirement for the troops deployed on the borders," the ministry said in a statement.

New Delhi has signed several big-ticket defence deals since Prime Minister Narendra Modi stormed to power in 2014.

India -- the world's largest defence importer -- has been investing tens of billions in updating its Soviet-era military hardware to counter long-standing territorial disputes with its nuclear-armed neighbours China and Pakistan.

India and China fought a brief war in 1962 over their border and last year were involved in a months-long showdown over a disputed Himalayan plateau.

India is also mired in conflict in the Himalayan region of Kashmir where roughly 500,000 soldiers are deployed.

New Delhi accuses Islamabad of sending "terrorists" across the border -- one of the most heavily militarised in the world -- to fight security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947, with both claiming the territory in its entirety.

India has fought three wars against Pakistan, two of them over the control of Kashmir.
The YPG played a key role in the Syrian Democratic Forces alliance that last year ousted the Islamic State group from its stronghold of Raqa in northern Syria

Iran on Tuesday denounced a plan by the US-led coalition to create a 30,000-strong border force in northeastern Syria, saying it would complicate efforts to end the country's war.

"It is a clear intervention by the United States in the internal affairs of other countries, makes the Syrian crisis more complicated, creates more instability, and fans the flames in this country," state news agency IRNA quoted foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi as saying.

On Sunday, the US-led alliance fighting the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq said it was working with Arab and Kurdish fighters to establish a 30,000-strong Border Security Force (BSF) in Syria.

The BSF, expected to be set up over the next several years, would be responsible for preventing a "resurgence" of IS in areas where the jihadists had been cleared by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), it said.

Iran, a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, has sent thousands of fighters to Iraq and Syria to battle IS as well as other Sunni jihadists and Syrian rebels.

Iranian "military advisers" have also played a major role supporting the Syrian regime.

Ghasami said the timing of the announcement was "significant" as it came "at a time when Syrian forces and their allies have achieved great victories in the fight against Daesh and Al-Nusra Front terrorist", referring to IS and the former Al-Qaeda affiliate.

IS has lost much of its strongholds in Syria, where the regime, backed by its Russian ally, has been pounding jihadists and rebels in the northwestern Idlib province.

Syria has condemned the coalition's "border security force" plan, and said any Syrian taking part would be considered as a "traitor".

Turkey has also reacted sharply, saying the border force would "legitimise a terror organisation".

Ankara is fiercely apposed to the SDF, which is dominated by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), considered by the Turkish government to be a "terrorist" group.
Steve Bannon, former advisor to President Trump, arrives in Congress Tuesday to testify to a closed-door meeting of the House Intelligence Committee

Steve Bannon faced a marathon grilling Tuesday by a congressional committee probing Donald Trump's campaign links to Russia, as it emerged the former top aide has also been subpoenaed by the special prosecutor investigating the issue.

Bannon was quizzed behind closed doors by the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, the first time he has testified in the probe investigating whether Trump's campaign colluded with Russia in its bid to influence the 2016 US elections.

It was unlikely to be Bannon's last such testimony: the New York Times reported Tuesday that Bannon has been subpoenaed by Robert Mueller, the Justice Department special counsel investigating the same issue.

That made Bannon the first person from Trump's inner circle to receive a grand jury subpoena from Mueller in the probe, which is also looking at whether Trump has tried to obstruct the investigation.

When appearing before the Intelligence Committee, Bannon refused to answer a number of questions, citing "executive privilege" allowing the president to keep information from the public.

"Steve Bannon and his attorney asserted a remarkably broad definition of executive privilege," Representative Jim Himes, a Democratic member of the committee, said on CNN.

"Now remember, it's the president who has the executive privilege and so they went back, conferred with the White House, and the White House said that anything that happened, any communications that happened while Steve Bannon was in the White House or during the transition, any communications were off limits," Himes said.

- 'Gag order' -

"There were an awful lot of questions we weren't able to answer based on this novel theory of executive privilege," he said.

"I'm glad to say that members of both parties pushed back hard against this unprecedented claim -- what looks a lot like a gag order," said Himes.

The unrestricted testimony of Trump's estranged political strategist could be explosive: he had a front-row seat as chief executive of the 2016 election campaign in its final months, and as a top policy advisor in the first seven months of the administration.

An incendiary book released last week, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," by Michael Wolff, quoted Bannon as saying that a pre-election meeting involving Trump's eldest son Donald Jr. and a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer was "treasonous."

Wolff, who painted a picture of an erratic and poorly informed president, was given substantial access to the White House during Trump's first year by Bannon.

A hard-line nationalist who sought to shake up US domestic and foreign policy, Bannon, 64, was forced out as Trump's chief strategist in August.

His actions since then -- most notably supporting the failed Senate campaign of Alabama Republican Roy Moore, but also his comments in the Wolff book -- have left him increasingly isolated in conservative circles.

Last week he stepped down from Breitbart News, which he had helped make a powerful conservative force, and he lost the support of the Mercer family, wealthy conservative power brokers.

Underscoring the break, Trump said Bannon had "lost his mind" and branded him "Sloppy Steve" via Twitter.
Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille last week visited a drilling site at an aquifer at Mitchells Plain, about 25km from the city. April 21 is the feared 'Day Zero' for enforced water rationing

As Cape Town suffers its worst drought in a century, residents were warned by the mayor on Tuesday that they face losing piped water to their homes by April 21.

If rains do not materialise and drastic consumption reductions are not achieved by "Day Zero", the city's people face the prospect of queueing at standpipes for daily rations of 25 litres (9.2 US gallons) of water.

The city, which attracts millions of tourists every year, has enforced strict waste controls including splash bans at municipal pools and hauling homeowners using more than a 87-litre daily limit before the courts.

In the past week, just 39 percent of Capetonians used less than that amount.

"Cape Town's average daily collective consumption is still too high. It has increased to 618 million litres per day` up from 578 million litres per day (since the first week of January)`" said mayor Patricia de Lille.

Every day that consumption exceeds 500 million litres, so-called "Day Zero" -- the last day of normal water supply -- draws closer.

"Dam levels have dipped to 28.7 percent this past week," she told local media as she announced that "Day Zero" would happen one day earlier than previously forecast. It was previously predicted for April 22.

"The city has ramped-up pressure management to drive down consumption -- aiming to stretch our water supply past the winter rainy season."

Earlier this year, the city published a name-and-shame list of the worst water offenders in Cape Town, and it says it is issuing fines for the heaviest water users.

But officials themselves have faced criticism for failing to implement usage restrictions sooner, and have been accused of ignoring warnings by experts in the years before the drought.

City workers are now seeking to use groundwater from three local aquifers, recycle waste water and step up production at three desalination plants.

Some Capetonians have taken to collecting their own water at a natural spring outside a brewery in the city.

Many are convinced that with dam levels so low, the quality of tap water has declined -- a rumour that the city has been battling for months.

Strong summer rains saw much of southern Africa recover from a drought induced by the El Nino weather phenomenon.

But Mediterranean-like Cape Town receives most of its rain in the southern hemisphere's winter -- and scientists warn there is no guarantee of a good rainy season.
Women and children take part in a protest organised by Yemen's Huthi rebels in the capital Sanaa, in this file picture taken on December 21, 2017

The war in Yemen has killed or injured more than 5,000 children and left another 400,000 severely malnourished and fighting for their lives, the UN children's agency said on Tuesday.

In a report unveiled in Sanaa, UNICEF said nearly two million Yemeni children were out of school, a quarter of them since the conflict escalated when a Saudi-led coalition intervened in March 2015.

More than three million children were born into the war, it said, adding they had been "scarred by years of violence, displacement, disease, poverty, undernutrition and a lack of access to basic services".

UNICEF said the more than 5,000 children killed or injured in the violence amounted to "an average of five children every day since March 2015".

"An entire generation of children in Yemen is growing up knowing nothing but violence," said Meritxell Relano, UNICEF representative in Yemen.

"Children in Yemen are suffering the devastating consequences of a war that is not of their making," he said in a statement.

"Malnutrition and disease are rampant as basic services collapse," he said, adding: "Those who survive are likely to carry the physical and psychological scars of conflict for the rest of their lives."

The UN agency said more than 11 million children -- or "nearly every child in Yemen" -- was now in need of humanitarian assistance.

It called for an end to the bloodshed and the protection of children, as well as sustainable and unconditional access to deliver assistance to every child in need.

Yemen's internationally recognised government said on Tuesday that it faces economic difficulties and called on its allies, including Saudi Arabia, to help overcome them.

In a post on Facebook, Prime Minister Ahmed bin Dagher shared a letter to allies that called on them to help the country financially in order to "save Yemenis from famine".

Dagher urged the allies to transfer cash to the central bank in Aden, his government's de facto capital after Iran-backed Huthi rebels ousted it from Sanaa.

The war has killed 9,245 people since Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies joined the government's fight against the Huthis, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

It triggered what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

More than 2,200 people have died as a result of a cholera epidemic that has hit the country since April, according to the WHO.
An Iraqi Yazidi woman holds a placard during a protest outside the United Nations office in the Iraqi city of Arbil

Armenia's parliament on Tuesday passed a resolution recognising the 2014 genocide of Yazidis by the Islamic State group in Iraq and called for an international probe into the crimes.

Jihadists murdered thousands in massacres four years ago. Thousands of other women and girls were abducted and used as sex slaves.

"With this resolution we not only recognise and condemn the genocide, we also call on the international community to lead an international investigation," said Rustam Makhmudyan, the Yazidi deputy of a parliamentary human rights commission.

"As a nation that has lived through genocide, the Armenian people understand the significance of this recognition," said Armen Ashotyan, a ruling party lawmaker.

There are around 35,000 Yazidis in Armenia, making them the largest minority group in the ex-Soviet state. The world's biggest Yazidi temple is currently being built in a small Armenian village.

During the massacres, several dozen Yazidi families fled from northern Iraq to Armenia.

Of the world's 1.5 million Yazidis, the largest community was in Iraq where it comprised some 550,000 people before being scattered by an IS offensive.

Kurdish Iraqi officials in December said around half of the Yazidis kidnapped by IS are still missing and that 47 mass graves containing the remains of Yazidis have been found since 2014.

The UN has called the massacres of Yazidis a genocide, arguing that IS had planned them and then intentionally separated men from women to prevent Yazidi children from being born.

The Yazidis are Kurdish-speaking but follow their own non-Muslim faith that earned them the hatred of the Sunni Muslim extremists of IS.
Moroccan police and authorities inspect the scene of the shooting of Abdellatif Merdas, a Moroccan lawmaker who was gunned down and killed late on March 7, 2017 near his home in Casablanca

A Moroccan court sentenced to death a man over the murder of a member of parliament and jailed his widow, in a case involving sex and money, the government said Tuesday.

Abdellatif Merdas, who was a member of the liberal Constitutional Union party, was gunned down near his house in Casablanca in March last year.

A local councillor, Hicham Mouchtari, was sentenced to death on Monday after he was convicted of "premeditated murder", the justice ministry said.

Merdas's widow, Ouafae Bensamadi, was given a life sentence, and a female acquaintance of hers described as a "fortune-teller" was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

According to media reports of the investigation, Bensamadi had been having an affair with Mouchtari, who killed Merdas with the help of a nephew -- who was sentenced Monday to 30 years in jail.

The motives were "sex, money and vengeance," the state prosecutor said during the investigation, dismissing any political reason for the killing of Merdas.

Bensamadi, who consulted the fortune-teller, had allegedly been abused by her husband and was seeking revenge, according to media reports citing the investigation.

Morocco has not abolished the death penalty but has not carried out any executions since 1993.
The In Amenas gas facility in a picture from 17 January, 2013

Workers at Algeria's In Amenas gas plant gathered Tuesday around a black marble memorial to mark five years since a deadly raid by Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists left 40 hostages dead.

All trace of the four-day siege -- which saw workers from Japan, the Philipines, Britain, Norway and the United States killed -- has long been cleared away at the sprawling desert facility 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) southeast of Algiers.

"They are 40 martyrs. I am full of emotion, I knew a lot of these people," said Abdelmoumen Ould Kaddour, the CEO of Algeria's Sonatrach, that runs the site with Norway's Statoil and Britain's BP.

The assault -- which left 29 attackers dead -- was claimed by one-eyed Algerian jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a former head of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

At a ceremony the name of the victims were read out and a wreath laid after the recital of the Fatiha, the opening passage of the Koran.

Among the roughly 100 workers gathers were some who had survived the siege.

"We are going to mark five years since the attack and then go back to work," one worker who was held hostage for three days told AFP.

"It is hard for us and our families are anxious. Some people cannot escape the memories and are still disturbed by them. But life continues."

Since the attack the number of expats working on site has been reduced dramatically and the firms running the remote facility insist security has been ramped up.

To access the plant -- just 80 kilometres from the border with chaos-riven Libya -- you have to pass through several checkpoints and series of barriers.

There have been several international probes into the attack, which was claimed as revenge for French operations in Mali.

Four men are facing trial in Algiers over the raid.

The suspected masterminds, including Belmokhtar, have not been caught.
The US state of New Jersey outlaws flying drones after one to many drinks, in a state law that tightens regulations on the remote-controlled flying machines

Drunk driving has been a social taboo for decades, but New Jersey has now added drunk droning to the statute books: outlawing the flying of unmanned aircraft after one too many drinks.

The law makes it an offense to operate a drone under the influence of intoxicating liquor, narcotic, hallucinogenic or habit-producing drug or with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent or more.

Infractions can be punishable by up to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine.

The legislation, sponsored by Democrats in the state legislature, was signed into law by outgoing Republican Governor Chris Christie late Monday.

It also outlaws drones being flown in a manner that could endanger life or property, on or close to prisons, in pursuit of wildlife or interfering with a first responder.

"Drones have become increasingly disruptive, causing near-misses with airplanes, interfering with firefighter operations and being used to smuggle drugs and other contraband into prisons," said New Jersey assembly member Annette Quijano.

Small remote-controlled drones range from being a toy to a sophisticated machine capable of performing acrobatic flights or shooting aerial footage.

It was one of more than 100 pieces of legislation signed by Christie on his last day in office before newly elected Democrat Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive and US ambassador to Germany, takes office on Tuesday.

All drone activities within the United States must already follow Federal Aviation Administration rules and guidelines.

So far 40 states have enacted some kind of laws addressing drones, and threes have adopted resolutions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The Consumer Technology Association says total drone sales are expected to increase 20 percent to a record 3.7 million units in 2018, bringing in revenue of $1.2 billion.
The tussle with Noor, which many fear could turn violent, comes at a bad time for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani

A powerful former Afghan governor at the centre of a growing political crisis over his refusal to stand down permitted his appointed successor on Tuesday to set foot in his province for a funeral, sources have told AFP.

It is the first time Mohammad Daud has publicly visited Balkh since President Ashraf Ghani's office announced on December 18 that he would replace Atta Mohammad Noor as governor of the northern province.

Noor, nicknamed "King of the North", has refused to leave the post he has held since 2004, rejecting a claim by Ghani's office that he had resigned and throwing up a challenge to the president's authority.

The tussle with Noor -- which many fear could turn violent -- comes at a bad time for Ghani, whose government faces a deteriorating security situation with the Taliban and the Islamic State group stepping up attacks in recent months.

The crisis in Balkh has caused concern in Washington as well, and was on the agenda during a phone call between Vice President Mike Pence and President Ghani on Tuesday.

"The Vice President emphasized his support for the Afghan government to engage with Balkh Governor Atta and conduct a peacefully negotiated transition of leadership," said a readout of the call released by the White House.

Afghan and Western sources told AFP that Daud flew from Kabul, where he has been working during the dispute, to the provincial capital Mazar-i-Sharif to attend his father's funeral after Ghani's office struck a deal with Noor.

Under the agreement, Daud will return to the Afghan capital after the ceremony, highlighting the enormous power Noor still wields despite being officially stripped of his position.

Daud exited the airport near Mazar-i-Sharif surrounded by heavy security before and was whisked away in an armoured SUV on Tuesday, an AFP reporter said.

- Power struggle -

For the past month, Noor has made almost daily speeches to hundreds of supporters that have been broadcast live on television, highlighting the intense interest in the stand-off between the strongman and the president.

His Jamiat-e-Islami party -- dominated by ethnic Tajiks -- has been locked in negotiations with the presidential palace as the government tries to end the dispute peacefully and avoid an outbreak of violence.

"I am the governor and will remain so unless there is an agreement reached in the ongoing talks between Jamiat and the Arg (presidential palace). I will agree to the decision by Jamiat," Noor said defiantly on Tuesday.

One of his close aides told AFP that Daud was allowed to have three bodyguards during his visit to Mazar-i-Sharif and could remain in the city as a private citizen. If the appointed governor engaged in any political activity, he would have to leave.

Noor has hinted that he may run for the presidency in Afghanistan's next election, expected in 2019.

While President Ghani, an ethnic Pashtun, has not yet confirmed if he will run again, Western diplomats say he is trying to weaken or remove potential rivals ahead of the poll.

"Ghani believes the days of the warlords are over... (and) is trying to make an example of him (Noor)," a Western diplomat told AFP recently.

Noor has long been a thorn in the side of Ghani.

He recently called for the return of Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum, a powerful ethnic Uzbek warlord who fled to Turkey in May after he was accused of arranging the rape and torture of a political rival in 2016. Dostum has denied the allegations.

Tensions between Afghanistan's ethnic groups can often dominate the country's politics.

Last year, Noor met the country's deputy chief executive Mohammad Mohaqiq, a senior figure in the mainly Shiite Hazara ethnic community, as well as Dostum in Turkey to form the "Coalition for the Salvation of Afghanistan".
BISMARCK, N.D.  Kathleen Bennett will not see legal penalties for the alleged exploitation of her senile mother.

With one case already dismissed in Morton County, Burleigh County Assistant States Attorney Marina Spahr motioned Wednesday to dismiss felony exploitation of a vulnerable adult against Bennett, which South Central District Judge John Grinsteiner granted Friday.

Why? Mary Trujillo is dead.

The victim is deceased and the case became difficult to prove once the Morton County companion case was dismissed, Spahr wrote as the reason for her motion to dismiss.

Bennett, 59, was accused a year ago of using about $1,200 of her mothers money to rent hotel rooms, purchase meals and pay legal fees in Bismarck while her mother was hospitalized.

In November, Judge Allan Schmalenberger dismissed felony endangering of a vulnerable adult against Bennett, from allegations she tied her mother to a chair and left her on one occasion without pants, in her own excrement. At the time, the women were staying at the Oceti Sakowin camp in southern Morton County.

Its unclear when Trujillo died. Spahr said defense attorney William Kirschner told her about the womans death, but Kirschner said he didnt know exactly when she died.

Its been a few months, he said Friday.

An online search did not locate an obituary for Trujillo, who was about 83.

She had resided in Nevada with family after she was discharged from a Bismarck hospital last year, according to court letters.

Spahr said Trujillos death does not void the crime.

"It is one of the many factors analyzed when determining whether to proceed to a jury trial or not," she said. "It may not be the heaviest weighted factor either, depending on the case."

Bennetts previous case was dismissed after she was absent for her pretrial conference and when attorneys noted that key witnesses were out of state and resistant to testifying.

Kirschner said Bennett was in Nevada at the time with limited funds.
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, pictured on January 9, 2018, said US President Donald Trump's alleged slur against some poor countries proved Washington's claims it defends human rights are false

Iran's supreme leader on Tuesday said US President Donald Trump's alleged slur against some poor countries proved Washington's claims it defends human rights are false.

"The person who is today in office in America announces the stance of this country very clearly and blatantly," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech published on his official website.

"His predecessors too had the same stance but would not announce it this clearly and a clear example of this stance is his recent remarks on Africa, Latin America and other races which is an instance of acting against human rights."

Trump's reported description of Haiti and African nations as "shithole countries" has sparked international condemnation.

Trump has denied making "derogatory" comments about Haitians -- despite the insistence of at least one senator that the president used the words repeatedly on Thursday during a White House meeting on immigration.

The Iranian authorities describe the US as the "Great Satan" and the two countries have been sworn foes since Tehran's Islamic revolution in 1979.

The US has infuriated Iran by slapping sanctions on a top judge for alleged rights violations during a recent wave of anti-regime unrest in which 21 people were killed and hundreds arrested.

Tehran has also rejected demands from Trump for additional tough measures to keep alive a 2015 deal it signed with world powers to curb its nuclear programme.
Displaced Syrians who fled fighting in Idlib province's southeastern town of Sinjar drive on a road in a rebel-held area near the city of Saraqib in this file photo from January 7, 2018

Escalating violence in northwest Syria has caused more than 200,000 displacements since mid-December, the United Nations said on Tuesday, warning that medical facilities in the area were struggling to cope.

Russian-backed Syrian troops launched an offensive in late 2017 against jihadists and allied groups in Idlib, the last province in the country still fully outside the government's control.

The assault has seen tens of thousands flee, with many displaced multiple times.

In a new situation report published Tuesday, the UN's humanitarian coordination branch (OCHA) said it had recorded 212,140 instances of displacement between December 15 and January 16.

The largest displacement -- 58,338 people -- was to the village of Dana in Idlib province, but other waves of civilians fled to areas in the adjacent provinces of Aleppo and Hama.

In a first, OCHA said, around 6,700 families fled rebel-held areas of Hama province to nearby government-controlled territory.

Idlib and slivers of the neighbouring provinces are now hosting more than 1.1 million internally displaced Syrians, according to the UN.

As hostilities between Syrian troops and anti-regime forces escalate, OCHA said it had received reports of several health clinics in the area being rendered out of service in bombardment.

Other facilities, it warned, were "running low" on medical supplies.

"Facilities are strained due to the increasing caseload because of the recent displacement," the situation report said.

"The low winter temperatures and the lack of shelter is exacerbating the health situation of the IDPs (internally displaced people) causing winter-related illnesses."

More than 340,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the Syrian war, which began in 2011 as the regime brutally crushed anti-government protests.
The European Union has staunchly defended the nuclear deal as the best way to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions

The EU said Tuesday it is "carefully assessing" Donald Trump's statement on the Iran nuclear deal after the US leader set a 120-day deadline for fixing "disastrous flaws" in the landmark 2015 accord.

The European Union has staunchly defended the deal as the best way to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions, but Trump has said Washington will abandon the deal and reimpose sanctions unless Tehran is subjected to tougher controls.

Washington is concerned the deal, thrashed out over 12 years of talks, does nothing to punish Iran's continuing ballistic missile programme, interference in conflicts around Middle East or its human rights abuses at home.

The EU's Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn said the bloc was consulting with Britain, France and Germany -- signatories to the deal known as the E3 -- on how to respond.

"You will have seen that last Friday the United States extended the sanctions waivers," Hahn told the European Parliament.

"We are now, together with the E3 and the other EU member states, carefully assessing the statement and its implications."

Trump on Friday agreed to waive US nuclear-related sanctions but warned it was the "last chance" to fix the Iran deal, demanding that US lawmakers and European allies draw up a new deal to curb Iran's ballistic programme, among other issues.

The EU has insisted the nuclear deal must remain separate from discussion of other matters, but officials have been keen to stress that they challenged Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during talks in Brussels last week.

"These issues include the tensions in the Middle East, Irans ballistic missiles program, as well as the protests that took place in Iran in recent weeks," Hahn said.

"Let us be clear: all these issues must be addressed, and must be addressed outside the scope of the nuclear deal," he said.

"None of them would be easier to address if the JCPOA was not in place -- on the contrary," Hahn stressed, using the deal's technical name.

Iran has ruled out any change to the deal, which was signed with the US, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday warned Europe against compromising on the deal, saying it would be a "slippery slope in a very dangerous direction".
Gay rights activists have emerged from the shadows in Tunisia since the revolution in 2011, but their position remains precarious in the North African country's conservative Muslim society

The first ever film festival celebrating the LGBT community is underway in Tunisia, a Muslim country where homosexuals can face up to three years in prison.

Twelve short and medium-length films produced in Tunisia and across the Middle East and North Africa are being shown at the "Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival" that opened Monday.

The four-day event is organised by Mawjoudin, Arabic for "We Exist", a Tunisian non-governmental association which defends the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

It is the first event of its kind in Tunisia and the organisers say the "festival conceives of itself as audacious".

The films "speak of sexuality, identity and gender affiliation," said Senda Ben Jebara, a member of Mawjoudin, a group founded in 2014.

"Through this festival we would like to give a space to queer people in general in order to escape a bit from social pressure, and also to identify with something, find a means to express ourselves," she said.

"We are trying to fight not only in the courts but through art."

Ben Jebara said the messages which the festival would like to get across are that "we are different but we exist and differences are welcome".

Mourad, a 21-year-old festival-goer, said the film fest "helps to strengthen the LGBT community and brings together people who are considered different".

Gay rights activists have emerged from the shadows in Tunisia since the revolution in 2011, but their position remains precarious in the North African country's conservative Muslim society.

Article 230 of the penal code includes a punishment of up to three years in prison for homosexuality and young men are regularly detained and prosecuted.

An online radio station catering for the LGBT community, believed to be the first of its kind in the Arab world, started broadcasting in Tunisia on December 18.

But Shams Rad, which was set up by LGBT rights group Shams and promotes "dignity, equality", is now facing legal procedures aimed at shutting it down.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said North Korea must face "new consequences" for its provocative actions

The United States urged an escalation in pressure on North Korea over its nuclear missile program Tuesday, despite a more cautious tone from key US ally South Korea.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, co-hosting the Vancouver event with Canada's foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, called for North Korean ships to be intercepted and for new punitive measures to be implemented every time Pyongyang tests new weapons.

He received tough backing from his Japanese counterpart Taro Kono in public opening remarks, but South Korea's Kang Kyung-Wha sounded a more cautious note and told the 20 senior envoys sanctions pressure is already making progress.

"First, we all must insist a full enforcement of UN Security Council sanctions as this is the letter of the law. We especially urge Russia and China in this matter," Tillerson said.

"Second, we all must work together to improve maritime interdiction operations. We must put an end to illicit ship-to-ship transfers that undermine UN sanctions.

"And, third, there must be new consequences for the regime whenever new aggression occurs."

The tough US stance comes as some have welcomed North Korea's decision to meet with Seoul's representatives and to send a delegation to the South's upcoming Winter Olympics as a sign that tensions may be lowered.

But Kono urged the allies not to let their guard down as they seek to force Pyongyang to agree to negotiate its own nuclear disarmament.

Without mentioning South Korea by name, Kono warned that Kim Jong-Un's regime "must be intending to drive a wedge between those tough countries and those that are not so tough."

"I am aware that some people argue that because North Korea is engaging in inter-Korean dialogue we should reward them by lifting up sanctions or by providing some sort of assistance," he said.

"Frankly, I think this view is just too naive. I believe that North Korea wants to buy some time to continue their nuclear missile programs," he said.

For her part, Kang welcomed the international solidarity behind the sanctions regime, but her opening remarks in Tuesday's session carried a more optimistic message than that of her Japanese neighbor.

"I believe that the two tools, tough sanctions and pressure on the one hand and the offer of a different brighter future on the other, have worked hand in hand," she said.

"Indeed the concerted efforts of the international community has begun to bear fruit," she explained.

"We should take note that the North has come back to inter-Korean dialogue for its participation in the Winter Games, as evidence and observations accumulate to show that sanctions and pressure are beginning to take effect."
A Palestinian youth carries food donations outside the United Nations food distribution centre in Gaza City on January 15, 2018

The United States sent $60 million to keep the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees operating Tuesday but withheld a further $65 million, urging others to pay more.

A State Department official said the US had held back more than half of the voluntary payment Washington had been due to make to the UN Relief and Works Agency.

"There is a need to undertake a fundamental re-examination of UNRWA, both in the way it operates and the way it is funded," the official said on condition of anonymity.

UNRWA has provided health care, emergency aid and schooling to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as well as Gaza and neighboring Arab countries, since 1950.

The United States has long been its biggest donor, with large voluntary payments topping up the budget that UN member states provide for the frontline agency.

But, those days may be coming to an end, just as President Donald Trump's administration increases pressure on the Palestinian leadership to agree to talks with Israel.

The official told AFP the decision to withhold some funds was meant to encourage more "burden-sharing" by other members.

"The United States has been UNRWA's single largest donor for decades. In years past, we contributed some 30 percent of UNRWA's total income," he said.

"Without the funds we are providing today, UNRWA operations were at risk of running out of funds and closing down.

"The funds provided by the United States will prevent that from happening for the immediate future."

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he had not been informed of Washington's decision, but was "very concerned" by reports that it was in the works.

"I strongly hope that in the end, it will be possible for the United States to maintain the funding of UNRWA," he said.

"UNRWA is not a Palestinian institution but a UN institution," he said, dubbing the agency "an important factor of stability" in the Middle East.
Nestle said Tuesday it has agreed to sell its US candy business to Italy's Ferrero for a whopping $2.8 billion in cash as the Swiss food giant shakes up its product portfolio.

Ferrero, known for its Tic Tac, Nutella and Ferrero Rocher brands but which has traditionally preferred organic growth to acquisitions, will now be picking up Crunch, Butterfinger and Baby Ruth from Nestle.

The sale will make Ferrero the third-largest confectionary company in the US market.

Swiss food and drink giant Nestle is selling its U.S. candy business to Italy's Ferrero for about $2.9 billion in cash

According to media reports, Ferrero competed with major chocolate manufacturer Hershey and private funds, including Rhone Capital, to secure the deal.

Executive chairman Giovanni Ferrero said that after the acquisition the Ferrero Group 'will have substantially greater scale, a broader offering of high-quality products to customers...' in the United States, the world's largest confectionary market.

Nestle's chief executive Mark Schneider said the deal 'allows Nestle to invest and innovate across a range of categories where we see strong future growth and hold leadership positions, such as pet care, bottled water, coffee, frozen meals and infant nutrition.

Nestle has begun to reposition itself since Schneider, who previously headed up German healthcare group Fresenius, took over the reins of the Swiss firm at the start of last year.

It has snapped up companies that make vegetarian meals, vitamins and luxury coffee.

Its US candy business registered sales of some 900 million Swiss francs in 2016, in a market worth an overall $8 billion, according to Ibis World.

The figure only represented around three percent of its overall US sales, Nestle said.

Italy's Ferrero is picking up the US candy business of Nestle to become the third largest confectionary maker in the United States.

The company added it remains fully committed to growing its leading international confectionery activities around the world, particularly its global brand KitKat.

The family-run Ferrero businesses has 22 production sites and 30,000 employees.

In 10 years the company has more than doubled its turnover, to more than 10 billion euros.

Since 2014 it has acquired the Turkish group Oltan, specialising in hazelnuts, and the British chocolatier Thorntons before starting its offensive in the US.

The deal is expected to be finalised by the end of March, Nestle added.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, left, and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres shake hands at United Nations headquarters on December 15, 2017

A war with North Korea is avoidable, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday, urging direct talks between key powers on dismantling Pyongyang's nuclear program.

Guterres said recent moves by South and North Korea to ease tensions were important, but he added: "let's not forget that the essential problem is yet to be solved."

"I believe war is avoidable," Guterres told reporters, but he added: "I am not yet sure that peace is guaranteed."

The UN chief said his goal was to ensure that "those who are more relevant in this process are able to seriously talk to each other and seriously find a way to denuclearization."

The former Portuguese prime minister begins his second year as UN chief this month with North Korea looming large as the most pressing global security threat.

The United States and North Korea have shown little interest in holding direct talks to address the crisis.

Presenting his priorities for 2018 to the General Assembly, Guterres said there were "small signs of hope" after North Korea agreed to take part in the Winter Olympics in the South and the re-opening of a military hotline between Pyongyang and Seoul.

Guterres will attend the opening ceremony of the Pyeongchang Games next month.

North Korea's race to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States with a nuclear warhead has raised fears of a devastating conflict.

At the United Nations in September, President Donald Trump vowed to "totally destroy" North Korea if it launches an attack on the United States.

Trump's administration has been adamant that North Korea must first freeze its military programs before talks can take place.

The United States has led the drive at the Security Council to ratchet up economic sanctions on North Korea such as restrictions on oil supplies that were adopted in December.
Faustin Munene, pictured on the far right in 1998, was arrested in Gabon for attempting to stage a coup against the Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila

Democratic Republic of Congo's former military chief, who has been accused by Kinshasa of an attempted coup against President Joseph Kabila in 2011, has been arrested in Gabon, sources told AFP.

"General Faustin Munene has been arrested since Wednesday, January 10... in Gabon," said a statement from a party created by Munene, the Convention of the People for Progress and Democracy party (CPPD), on Tuesday.

The information was confirmed to AFP by a judicial official in the eastern province of Haut-Ogooue.

"Faustin Munene was arrested in Moanda and is in the hands of the DGDI in Libreville," the Gabonese capital, the official said, referring to the General Directorate for Documentation and Immigration, as the Gabonese intelligence agency is officially called.

The source said further details about the arrest were unclear, and it was unknown whether General Munene would be extradited to the DRC.

The Gabonese foreign and interior ministries did not confirm the arrest.

Munene was deputy interior minister and chief of the DRC's armed forces under Kabila's father, Laurent-Desire Kabila.

He is accused of being behind an attack on February 27, 2011, on Kabila's home and on a military camp. Eleven assailants and eight soldiers died.

He also allegedly carried out an attempted coup in the western province of Bandundu in 2010 for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia.

Kabila, 46, has been in power since 2001, succeeding his assassinated father at the age of 29.

He is at the helm of a regime widely criticised for corruption, repression and incompetence.

His constitutional term in office expired in December 2016, but he stayed on -- a move that stoked a bloody spiral of violence.

Under an agreement brokered by the Roman Catholic church, he was allowed to stay in office provided new elections were held in 2017. The date has since been postponed, to December 23 this year.

The DRC authorities have previously fallen out with the Republic of Congo over Munene.

In March 2011, the DRC recalled its ambassador to Congo, accusing Brazzaville of providing Munene with a safe haven and of failing to extradite him after he was arrested in Pointe-Noire.

AFP was not immediately able to confirm when Munene arrived in Gabon. The province of Haut-Ogooue abuts the Republic of Congo -- the two countries have a joint border than runs nearly 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles).
Chrystia Freeland, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson are co-hosting the North Korea talks in Vancouver

The United States and its allies on Tuesday vowed tougher measures to halt North Korean sanctions busting, including naval security operations to prevent maritime smuggling.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Canada's foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, hosts of talks in Vancouver, urged world powers to support "maritime interdiction" measures.

And, along with Japan, South Korea and the other powers gathered for the high-level meeting, they re-committed to "the complete, verifiable and irreversible de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula."

The warning of robust new tactics to intercept illicit shipments of nuclear materials or sanctions-busting imports was the most concrete measure to come out of a two-day meeting to which China and Russia were not invited.

Many observers, including Beijing and Moscow themselves, had questioned the value of holding a meeting of former Korea War allies to discuss an issue when China's support remains the key to diplomatic success.

Others had noted a stark difference in tone between the hawkish Japanese envoy, Foreign Minister Taro Ono, and South Korea's more cautious Kang Kyung-Wha, who said recent inter-Korea talks were a sign sanctions are already working.

But after the meeting was done, Tillerson insisted the allies will remain united and continue to work with China and Russia to enforce UN-backed sanctions and force Kim Jong-Un to negotiate his own nuclear disarmament.

"Our unity and our common cause with others in the region, most particuarly China and Russia, will remain intact despite North Korea's frequent attempts to divide us and sow dissension," he said.

"We discussed the importance of working together to counter sanctions evasion and smuggling and we also issued a call to action to strengthen global maritime interdiction operations to foil illicit ship-to-ship transfers."

North Korea has been accused of seeking to evade the draconian sanctions imposed on its isolated regime by transferring supplies from foreign vessels to its own on the high seas.

Some experts have argued that naval action to intercept merchantmen would be interpreted as an act of war and trigger a potentially devastating North Korean response.

And reports in Washington suggest that US forces are at least planning for a potential strike of their own, a limited so-called "bloody nose" strike to convince Kim that his safest option is a negotiated settlement.

Tillerson refused to address military planning issues, and would not say whether US President Donald Trump has been in contact with Pyongyang, but he did warn that the crisis is coming to a head.

"With respect to whether Americans need to be concerned about a war with North Korea, I think we all need to be very sober and clear eyed about the current situation," he warned, just days after a false warning of a missile strike jolted the US island state of Hawaii.

Tillerson said that North Korea's recent tests of a thermonuclear warhead and of an intercontinental missile show their "continued progress" in developing an arsenal that is already a global threat.

"I think our approach is in terms of having North Korea choose the correct step is to present to them that talks are the best option, that when they look at the military situation, that's not a good outcome for them," he said.

- Is North Korea 'buying time'? -

The delegates broadly welcomed North Korea's decision to meet with Seoul's representatives and to send a delegation to the South's upcoming Winter Olympics, which many see as a potential breakthrough in the standoff.

But Tillerson warned that more measures may be needed if North Korea continues its provocations, and Japan's Kono urged the allies not to let their guard down.

Without naming South Korea, Kono warned that Kim Jong-Un's regime "must be intending to drive a wedge between those tough countries and those that are not so tough."

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono had tough words for Pyongyang -- a tone that was not matched by his South Korean counterpart

For her part, Kang welcomed international support for sanctions, but her opening remarks carried a more optimistic message than those of her Japanese neighbor.

"I believe that the two tools, tough sanctions and pressure on the one hand and the offer of a different brighter future on the other, have worked hand in hand," she said.

"Indeed the concerted effort of the international community has begun to bear fruit," she explained.

Tillerson insisted after the talks that there is "no daylight" between Seoul and Washington on how to handle the crisis, and that the US-Japan-South Korea tripartite alliance remains "ironclad."

- 'Bark of a rabid dog' -

Moscow and Beijing were not represented in Vancouver and angrily dismissed the meeting.

"The most important relevant parties of the Korean peninsula issue haven't taken part in the meeting so I don't think the meeting is legal or representative," said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang.

Lu denounced the "Cold War mentality" of the United States, which is urging Beijing to cut off fuel oil supplies to Pyongyang -- a step too far for Beijing, which fears the collapse of Kim's regime more than its surrender.

Location of Hawaii and the estimated range of missiles tested by North Korea in 2017

Trans-Pacific tensions have been running high for months, despite the recent return to direct talks between Kim's regime and Moon Jae-In's South Korea.

As the talks got under way, Pyongyang responded to Trump's recent twitter warning that his nuclear arsenal dwarfs the North's fledgling missile batteries.

Official party newspaper Rodong Sinmun dismissed Trump's "swaggering" as the "spasm of a lunatic" frightened by North Korea's power and the "bark of a rabid dog."
Three candidates nominated by Republicans to fill and empty south Billings seat in the state Legislature will get interviews before the Yellowstone County Commission on Tuesday.

Frank Fleming, Jake Hanson and Rodney Garcia have been nominated by the GOP to fill a seat vacated by Republican Adam Rosendale. Rosendale moved to Great Falls and is no longer eligible to represent the South Billings House District 51.

State law allows the party of the vacating seat holder to submit three names to county commissioners, who then make the selection. Montanas Legislature convenes the first four months of odd-numbered years, which means barring a special session, Rosendales replacement would have a limited role. All 100 state House seats are up for the election this November.

Fleming has filed as a 2018 candidate. Hanson hasnt filed, nor has Rodney Garcia, who in 2016 and 2014 ran as a Republican for different Billings Senate seats.

County commissioners will interview the nominees publicly at 10:30 a.m. in 403a of the Yellowstone County Courthouse, 217 N. 27th St. They will select a replacement Jan. 23.

HD 51 includes south Billings north of the Yellowstone River and portions of the South Side and West End to Shiloh Road.
Louise Anna Turpin, 49, and David Allen Turpin, 57, have been arrested after authorities said their 13 children had been held captive in their home, with some shackled to beds

Thirteen malnourished siblings confined by their parents in a suburban California home -- three of them chained to the furniture -- face a difficult road to recovery, police said Tuesday, as investigators struggled to piece together what fueled the shocking abuse.

David Allen Turpin, 57, and his wife Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested on suspicion of torture after investigators on Sunday discovered the grim conditions in which they had been keeping their children, ages two to 29.

Their home was registered as a school, but instead of teaching materials, investigators found signs of torture inside.

Sheriff's deputies in Perris, a small city southeast of Los Angeles, found three children shackled with chains and padlocks in their filthy, foul-smelling home after receiving a 911 call for help from their 17-year-old sister who managed to escape.

She was so emaciated that officers first thought she was a young child.

"If you can imagine being 17 years old and appearing to be a 10-year-old, being chained to a bed, being malnourished and injuries associated with that, I would call that torture," Perris police chief Greg Fellows told reporters.

Officers also initially assumed all the other siblings to be children, but were "shocked" to discover seven were actually adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29.

All 13 were currently being treated for malnutrition and undergoing other diagnostic tests.

"The long-term needs of these kids are going to be the psychological and psychiatric needs due to the prolonged periods of starvation and maltreatment," said Sophia Grant, medical director of the child abuse unit at Riverside University Health System.

Mark Uffer (C), the CEO of Corona Regional Medical Center, said the adult children being treated at his facility were in a "very safe and secure environment"

Mark Uffer, chief executive officer at the Corona regional medical center where the adults were being treated, described their condition as "stable."

"I believe that they're hopeful that life will get better for them after this event," he said, adding they were now in a "very safe and secure environment."

- Middle class neighborhood -

Booked on suspicion of torture and child endangerment, the parents' bail was set at $9 million each.

Neither was able to immediately explain why their children were restrained, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

Police said there was no initial indication of sexual abuse, but cautioned that the investigation was still ongoing.

There was also no indication that either suspect suffered from mental illness, Fellows said, or that the children's ordeal was linked to the family's religious beliefs.

Reporters and residents gather outside the house where the children were allegedly held

Initial investigations have confirmed that the couple were the biological parents of all 13 siblings, Fellows said.

According to police, the family moved in 2014 from Texas to a middle class neighborhood of Perris, some 70 miles (110 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, homeschooling their children in their Spanish-style stucco house.

A gray van with tinted windows and three cars were parked outside the house, now surrounded by satellite transmission trucks and hundreds of cameras and journalists.

Their personalized license plates related to Disney Land -- DL4EVER, DSLAND and 4EVERDL.

"They looked vampire pale and very skinny," one neighbor, Kimberly Milligan, said of the few children she had seen. "They never had friends or family over."

"A lot of things were strange, but not enough to call the police... There's a special place in hell for people like that," she told AFP.

- Nine matching dresses -

A Facebook page under the name of David-Louise Turpin -- still visible Tuesday -- includes pictures of the couple renewing their wedding vows, from 2011 to 2016, with the children present.

California

In the latest set, uploaded in April-July 2016, an Elvis Presley impersonator holds a microphone and poses with the family in a Las Vegas wedding scene.

Nine girls, all with long dark hair, wear matching fuchsia plaid dresses with white tights, while a baby girl is dressed in bright pink.

Three boys, their dark hair in bowl cuts like David Turpin, are dressed in suits with red ties.

The Elvis impersonator, who renewed the couple's vows three times at his Elvis Chapel in downtown Las Vegas, said he got physically ill when he learned of the abuse.

"I really got sick to my stomach and couldn't believe it," Kent Ripley told the New York Daily News. "I was shocked and stunned and very saddened."

He recalled the children as being "very soft-spoken and well-mannered," and "very close" to one another.

"I think something recent maybe changed their circumstances, whether medical or related to work," Ripley added, saying the family seemed more "unique" than "odd."

"I wouldn't want to think of the kids suffering that long."

The Los Angeles Times reported that the couple had gone bankrupt twice, the first time in 2011 when David Turpin was working as an engineer for defense contractor Northrop Grumman, earning $140,000 a year.

An April 2016 photograph shows the family's smiling children and the couple wearing jeans and red t-shirts that read "Thing 1," "Thing 2," "Thing 3" and so on -- a reference to the mischievous twins in the popular Dr Seuss book "The Cat in the Hat."

In another September 2015 photograph, Louise Turpin holds a baby wearing a t-shirt reading "Mommy loves me."
The Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) is considered a terrorist threat by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who recently threatened an operation against towns in Syria held by YPG

The head of a powerful Kurdish militia hit back on Tuesday at Turkish threats to attack its forces in northern Syria, pledging to "cleanse" the area of Ankara's "scourges".

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday vowed to soon launch an operation against towns in Syria held by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara considers "terrorists".

The YPG, a key US ally in the fight against jihadists, controls key urban hubs in northern Syria including the towns of Afrin and Manbij.

In an interview published Tuesday with Kurdish news agency ANF, YPG chief Sipan Hemo said his forces stood "ready" to defend those towns against a Turkish assault.

"Our forces will be able to cleanse the area from Erdogan's scourges, just as we were able to cleanse it from Daesh," Hemo said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

"This is what the war in Afrin will be like," he said.

With US backing, the YPG has cleared swathes of territory in northern and eastern Syria from IS and has established semi-autonomous rule in those areas.

And at the weekend, the US-led coalition fighting IS said it was working to create a 30,000-strong border security force in northern Syria that would deploy along the Turkish frontier.

Ankara immediately objected to such a move out of fear the new force would be comprised of the YPG, which it accuses of being a branch of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has waged an insurgency in Turkey since 1984.

Erdogan has long threatened an operation against the YPG's enclave in Afrin but has stepped up his threats in recent days.

On Tuesday, he warned an assault on Afrin could take place "tomorrow, (or) the day after, (or) within a short period".

"We will foil Erdogan's filthy plans. We will turn those plans to major victories for the people of the region, the Kurdish, Syrian, and Turkish people," Hemo pledged on Tuesday.

Erdogan has said the Afrin operation would be undertaken "together" with Syrian rebels, whom Ankara has backed in other operations against the YPG and IS.
A member of Syrian government forces stands near Jabal al-Hass looking at smoke rising on the horizon in Aleppo province as they advance towards the Abu Duhur military airport in the ongoing offensive against opposition fighters on January 14, 2018

The head of Syria's leading jihadist alliance called on rebels Tuesday to "close ranks" to fend off a Russian-backed government offensive in the country's northwest.

It was Abu Mohamed al-Jolani's first audio recording since Russia claimed in October to have carried out an air strike that left the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) commander in a coma.

Moscow is now backing a weeks-long assault by Syrian troops on HTS's stronghold in the northwest province of Idlib, and Jolani on Tuesday appealed to the fragmented rebel movement to unite against it.

"For 100 days, we have been fighting one of the fiercest battles on all levels," Jolani said in an audio statement released by HTS media.

Some opposition factions have long refrained from fighting alongside HTS, most recently because of a "de-escalation" agreement in areas including Idlib that was brokered by world powers in Astana last year.

Jolani blasted the Astana deal as paving the way for the current offensive, but said Syria's rebels could "overcome these crises, if we unite our efforts and close ranks."

"We are ready to reconcile with everyone and turn a new page through a comprehensive reconciliation... Let us preoccupy ourselves with our enemies more than with ourselves and our disagreements," Jolani said.

The jihadist leader said Syria's uprising was facing a "critical phase" as it nears its seven-year anniversary in March.

Rebels and hardline Islamists overran Idlib province in 2015, and it remains the only province in the war-ravaged country outside of regime control.

For the past two years, the jihadist forces behind HTS have steadily expanded their control in the province, with the influence of mainstream fighters shrinking drastically.

Syria's army launched its push for Idlib late last year and has since recaptured dozens of towns and villages in the province.

The United Nations said Tuesday it had recorded 200,000 cases of displacement since mid-December as a result of the intensifying assault.

Since it erupted in 2011, Syria's conflict has forced millions out of their homes, with many being displaced multiple times over, and more than 340,000 people have been killed.
CAIRO (AP) - Egypt's president has sworn in four new cabinet ministers in a limited government reshuffle.

President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi swore in the new ministers of culture, tourism, local development and business just hours after parliament approved their appointment on Sunday.

Einas Abdel-Dayem, a career flute player who received her education in France and is currently in charge of the Cairo Opera House, was named Culture Minister. Another woman, U.S.-educated economist Rania al-Mashat, takes over the tourism portfolio, a key job at a time when Egypt is struggling to revive the lucrative sector decimated by years of turmoil following a popular uprising in 2011.

Khaled Badawi was named Business Minister. Abu Bakr el-Gindy took the local development portfolio.
CAIRO (AP) - A former Egyptian lawmaker said Monday he will not run in the March presidential election, saying the political "climate" wasn't conducive to campaigning.

Mohammed Anwar Sadat, nephew of Egypt's late leader Anwar Sadat, told reporters his decision was partially taken to protect his campaign workers from intimidation or arrest by authorities.

"We don't want people in the campaign to be hurt," he said.

Mohammed Anwar Sadat, nephew of Egypt's late leader Anwar Sadat and the leader of Reform and Development Party speaks during a press conference at the party headquarters, in Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Jan. 15, 2018. Sadat says he has decided not to run in the presidential election in March, saying the political "climate" isn't conducive to campaigning. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

He said he has no intention to contest a "lost battle" and cited emergency laws in force since last April and a 2013 ban on unauthorized demonstrations as further reasons for his decision.

"My decision not to run primarily has to do with the climate in which you don't feel there will be a genuine competition or equal opportunities," he said.

Sadat, an outspoken critic of the government, was thrown out of parliament last year amid allegations he had leaked official documents to foreign diplomats.

He is the second presidential hopeful to pull out of the election, which is virtually certain to be won by incumbent Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who has yet to formally announce his candidacy.

Last week, former prime minister and career air force officer Ahmed Shafiq also pulled out of the race, saying he was not the "ideal" person to lead the country at this stage. He was harshly criticized by pro-government media after declaring his intention to run.

Shafiq finished a close second behind the Islamist Mohammed Morsi in the 2012 elections. The following year, el-Sissi led the military's ouster of Morsi and was elected in 2014 after a landslide win.

Under the constitution, any would-be candidate must have formal "recommendations" from at least 20 lawmakers or 25,000 support signatures from voters, with a minimum of 1,000 each from 15 of Egypt's 29 provinces.

Most lawmakers have already endorsed el-Sissi, who has led a heavy crackdown since 2013 that has jailed thousands of opponents, mainly Islamists but also secular activists, including many of those involved in the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Under el-Sissi's rule, street protests have been effectively banned, human rights groups have been placed under severe restrictions and many critics in the media have been silenced.

But the general-turned-president has also spent much of the past four years trying to revive the economy while fighting an increasingly emboldened insurgency by Islamic militants.

Sadat claimed his supporters were harassed and threatened by security agents as they processed paperwork to nominate him.

"We dream of ... an election where the winner is not known until the last moment," he said.

Another hopeful, rights lawyer Khaled Ali, has also claimed the climate is biased in favor of el-Sissi. Ali became known when he won a court case that annulled Egypt's transfer of two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. The government went ahead with the transfer after the agreement was hurriedly ratified by parliament.

Ali was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison in September for allegedly making an obscene gesture while celebrating the court's ruling last January. He is appealing the verdict, but if his conviction is upheld he will not be eligible to run.
WALLINGFORD, Conn. (AP) - Police in Connecticut say two dogs mauled another dog to death in front of its home.

Wallingford Police Lt. Cheryl Bradley tells The Record-Journal that a woman was walking her Shih Tzu-poodle mix Monday morning when two dogs from down the street came running at her dog and attacked it. The owner told police that she and a neighbor jumped in to separate them, and then the owner of the attacking dogs came and took them back to his property.

The woman told police that she and her husband took their dog to a veterinarian, but it died in the car.

Bradley says the woman received minor injuries.

Police are investigating.
LONDON (AP) - Tempted to stifle a loud or untimely sneeze? Let it out instead, doctors in England warned Monday based on the very unusual case of a man who ruptured the back of his throat when he tried to suppress a sneeze.

In a case study published in the journal BMJ Case Reports, doctors described their initial confusion when the previously healthy man turned up in the emergency room of a Leicester hospital, complaining of swallowing difficulties and "a popping sensation" in his swollen neck.

The 34-year-old patient told them his problems started after he tried to stop a forceful sneeze by pinching his nose and closing his mouth. He eventually lost his voice and spent a week in the hospital.

FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2005 file photo, a man sneezes holding a tissue in Berlin, Germany. According to a case study published Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, in the journal BMJ Case Reports, doctors in England say stifling a big sneeze can be hazardous for your health in rare cases, based on the very unusual experience of a man who ruptured the back of his throat when he tried to stop a sneeze. (AP Photo/Roberto Pfeil, File)

"When you sneeze, air comes out of you at about 150 miles per hour," said Dr. Anthony Aymat, director for ear, nose and throat services at London's University Hospital Lewisham, who was not involved in the case. "If you retain all that pressure, it could do a lot of damage and you could end up like the Michelin Man with air trapped in your body."

While examining the sneeze-averse patient, doctors in Leicester heard "crackling in the neck" down to his ribcage, a sign that air bubbles had seeped into his chest. Worried about infection and other possible complications, they admitted him to the hospital, gave him a feeding tube and administered antibiotics, according to details published in BMJ Case Reports.

Dr. Zi Yang Jiang, a head and neck surgeon at University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, said he sees one or two cases arising from repressed sneezes each year, making them an "exceedingly rare" occurrence.

Jiang said it was bizarre that a single sneeze could generate enough force to cause the kind of physical damage that usually results from trauma, such as a gunshot wound to the neck. A collapsed lung is among the problems that retaining the air from an imminent sneeze can cause, he said.

"The whole point of sneezing is to get something out of your body, like viruses and bacteria, so if you stop that, those may end up in the wrong part of the body," he said. Jiang said in most cases, the excess air is later absorbed by the body.

The English patient made a full recovery and was advised to avoid plugging his nose while sneezing in the future. Doctors recommend letting sneezes rip into a tissue instead.

"The safest thing to do - although it's not socially acceptable - is just to sneeze loud," Aymat said.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - A high-level U.N. Security Council meeting this week will focus on "confidence building" measures to deal with weapons of mass destruction, and North Korea is expected to be in the spotlight. Another meeting will highlight Afghanistan's partnership with Central Asia "as a model to link security and development."

Deputy Russian Ambassador Petr Iliichev said Monday that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will attend both meetings. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is also likely to attend, along with ministers from council nations and Central Asia.

Kazakhstan, the first Central Asian nation to preside over the council, holds the presidency this month and its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, will preside at Thursday's meeting on "confidence building measures." Its foreign minister will preside at Friday's Afghanistan-Central Asia meeting.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will brief members at both meetings.
HONG KONG (AP) - Three Hong Kong activists will have to wait to learn the outcome of their final appeal Tuesday to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city.

Judges at Hong Kong's top court said they would issue their decision at a later, unspecified date following the appeal hearing for Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow against the sentences of up to eight months. Bail for the three was extended.

The three were initially let off with suspended or community service sentences after they were convicted of taking part in or inciting an unlawful assembly by storming a courtyard at government headquarters to kick-off the protests.

Pro-democracy activists, from left, Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, shout slogans in front of the Court of Final Appeal Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three young Hong Kong activists are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

But the case sparked controversy when the justice secretary requested a sentencing review that resulted in stiffer sentences, raising concerns about rule of law and fears that the city's Beijing-backed government is tightening up on dissent.

The trio's lawyers said the lower court overstepped its boundaries and put too much emphasis on the need for deterrence in handing down the revised harsher sentence.

"Laying down a heavy sentence will have a deterrent effect, but a balance has to be held between a deterrent and stifling young idealistic people," Law's lawyer, Robert Pang, told the judges.

Wong's lawyer also argued that under Hong Kong law, the 21-year-old shouldn't have been sent to prison because he was a minor at the time.

Speaking on the courthouse steps before the hearing, Wong estimated he had a 50-50 chance of going back to prison. "However I still believe that when people are united we will not be defeated."

Wong made world headlines and starred in a Netflix documentary after leading the "Umbrella Movement" protests while still a teenager. The protests, which brought parts of the busy Asian financial hub to a halt over Beijing's plan to restrict elections for top leader, ended without resolution after 11 weeks.

The three were given revised sentences ranging from six to eight months of prison time in last year's ruling but were bailed partway through when they won permission to appeal.

Wong could end up back in prison as soon as Wednesday, when he is due to be sentenced in a separate court case also related to the 2014 protests.

Pro-democracy young activist Alex Chow talks to reporters in front of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three young Hong Kong activists, Chow, Joshua Wong and Nathan Law, are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Pro-democracy young activist Nathan Law talks to reporters in front of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three young Hong Kong activists, Law, Joshua Wong and Alex Chow, are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Pro-democracy young activist Joshua Wong talks to reporters in front of the Court of Final Appeal Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three young Hong Kong activists, Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Pro-democracy young activists, from left, Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, shout slogans in front of the Court of Final Appeal Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three young Hong Kong activists are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Pro-democracy young activist Joshua Wong talks to reporters in front of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three young Hong Kong activists, Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

A yellow umbrella is displayed by a pro-democracy activist outside the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three young Hong Kong activists are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Pro-democracy activists, from left, Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, speak to reporters outside the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three young Hong Kong activists are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Pro-democracy activists, from left, Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, walk out of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The three young Hong Kong activists are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Pro-democracy activists Joshua Wong, left, and Nathan Law listen to reporter's questions outside the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three young Hong Kong activists, Wong, Law and Alex Chow, are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Pro-democracy young activists, from left, Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, speak to the media outside the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The three young Hong Kong activists are making a last-ditch attempt to overturn prison sentences for their roles in sparking 2014's massive pro-democracy protests in the semiautonomous Chinese city. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - Pope Francis met on Tuesday with survivors of priests who sexually abused them, wept with them and apologized for the "irreparable damage" they suffered, his spokesman said.

The pontiff also acknowledged the "pain" of priests who have been held collectively responsible for the crimes of a few, Vatican spokesman Greg Burke told reporters at the end of the day.

Francis dove head-first into Chile's sex abuse scandal on his first full day in Santiago that came amid unprecedented opposition to his visit: Three more churches were torched overnight, including one burned to the ground in the southern Araucania region where Francis celebrates Mass on Wednesday. Police used tear gas and water cannons to break up an anti-pope protest outside Francis' big open-air Mass in the capital, Santiago.

Pope Francis meets with Bishops at the Sacristy of the Cathedral of Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. (Luca Zennaro/Pool via AP)

Despite the incidents, huge numbers of Chileans turned out to see the pope, including an estimated 400,000 for his Mass, and he brought some inmates to tears with an emotional visit to a women's prison.

But his meeting with abuse survivors and comments in his first speech of the day were what many Chileans, incensed by years of abuse scandal and cover-up, were waiting for.

Burke said Francis met with a small group of abuse victims after lunch, listening to their stories and praying with them. The spokesman gave no details, other than to say the pope "listened to them, prayed with them and wept with them."

Earlier in the day, Francis told Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, lawmakers, judges and other authorities that he felt "bound to express my pain and shame" that some of Chile's clergy had sexually abused children in their care.

"I am one with my brother bishops, for it is right to ask forgiveness and make every effort to support the victims, even as we commit ourselves to ensuring that such things do not happen again," the pope said.

Francis did not refer by name to Chile's most notorious pedophile priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, who in 2011 was barred from all pastoral duties and sanctioned by the Vatican to a lifetime of "penance and prayer" for sexually molesting minors. Nor did he refer to the fact that the emeritus archbishop of Santiago, a top papal adviser, has acknowledged he knew of complaints against Karadima but didn't remove him from ministry.

Karadima had been a politically connected, charismatic and powerful priest who ministered to a wealthy Santiago community and produced dozens of priestly vocations and five bishops. Victims went public with their accusations in 2010 after complaining for years to church authorities that Karadima had kissed and fondled them when they were teenagers.

While the cover-up continued to roil the church, many Chileans are still furious over Francis' subsequent decision in 2015 to appoint a Karadima protege as bishop of the southern city of Osorno. Bishop Juan Barros has denied knowing about Karadima's abuse but many Chileans don't believe him, and his appointment has badly split the diocese.

Francis referred again to the scandal later in the day, but this time his words were directed at the hundreds of priests gathered in Santiago's cathedral who have seen their influence and moral authority plummet as a result of the Karadima case and cover-up.

Francis told them that the scandal had not only caused pain in the victims, but in the broader church community and among anyone who wears a clerical collar.

He said he knew the pain of priests and nuns "who after working so hard, have seen the harm that has led to suspicion and questioning; in some or many of you this has been a source of doubt, fear or lack of confidence." He said some priests had even been insulted in the subway or walking on the street, and that by wearing clerical attire they had "paid a heavy price." But he urged them to press on.

It was similar to the message that Francis delivered to American bishops in 2015 - one that infuriated sex abuse survivors who accused the pope of drawing a moral equivalency between the lifelong trauma endured by people who were raped as children, and the pain of clergymen who were now looked upon with suspicion.

"Sex abuse is Pope Francis' weakest spot in terms of his credibility," said Massimo Faggioli, a Vatican expert and theology professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia. "It is surprising that the pope and his entourage don't understand that they need to be more forthcoming on this issue."

Anne Barrett Doyle of the online abuse database, BishopAccountability.org, praised Francis for opening his visit with the apology, but said Chileans expect him to take action against complicit church leaders.

"This is a crucial opportunity for Francis. With luck, he will not make the mistake of his brother bishops in underestimating the savviness and moral outrage of the Chilean people," said Barrett Doyle, who last week released research showing nearly 80 Chilean priests have been credibly accused or convicted of abuse.

The Karadima scandal and long cover-up has caused a crisis for the church in Chile, with a recent Latinbarometro survey saying the case was responsible for a significant drop in the number of Chileans who call themselves Catholic, as well as a fall in confidence in the church as an institution.

That distrust extends to Francis, who is making his first visit as pope to the country of 17 million people. The Argentine pope is nearly a native son, having studied in Chile during his Jesuit novitiate and he knows the country well. But Chileans gave him the lowest approval rating among the 18 Latin American nations in the survey.

"People are leaving the church because they don't find a protective space there," said Juan Carlos Claret, spokesman for a group of church members in Osorno that has opposed Barros' appointment as bishop. "The pastors are eating the flock."

For his part, Barros, who concelebrated Tuesday's open-air Mass with Francis and other bishops, repeated his assertion that he knew nothing of Karadima's crimes.

"Many lies have been made about me," he said.

At a protest near the site of the Santiago Mass, police fired tear gas and water cannons before detaining several dozen demonstrators, according to an Associated Press photographer at the scene. Protesters carried signs with messages reading "Burn, pope!" and "We don't care about the pope!"

Other groups also called for demonstrations against the pontiff.

Victor Hugo Robles, an activist in Chile's lesbian and gay community, said the Vatican tries to paint an image of the pope as being close to the people, particularly those with the most needs.

"We are the ones who need help," said Robles. "Gay people, people living with AIDS. When it comes to those things, the church has an attitude of intolerance, of disgust."

Still, many were excited to see the pope and expressed appreciation for his apology for sex abuse.

"When people make a mistake it's necessary that they ask for forgiveness," said Monica Reyes, a nursing assistant who attended the pope's speech at the presidential palace.

The pope will try to inject new energy into the church during his visit, which includes sessions with migrants, members of Chile's Mapuche indigenous group and victims of the 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

___

Associated Press writers Eva Vergara and Patricia Luna and AP video journalist Paul Byrne contributed to this report.

Pope Francis arrives on his pope-mobile to celebrate Mass at O'Higgins Park in Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Francis begged for forgiveness Tuesday for the "irreparable damage" done to children who were raped and molested by priests, opening his visit to Chile by diving head-first into a scandal that has greatly hurt the Catholic Church's credibility here and cast a cloud over his visit. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

A woman is arrested during a protest against Pope Francis in Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The pontiff is visiting Chile Jan. 15-18, where the Vatican's handling of sex abuse cases has fueled bitter criticism. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

A man is arrested during a protest against Pope Francis in Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The pontiff is visiting Chile Jan. 15-18, where the Vatican's handling of sex abuse cases has fueled bitter criticism. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

People search through the charred remains of the Santa Juana Catholic chapel in the Alta Can Can community in Cunco, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Three churches including Santa Juana have been firebombed in Chile on the first full day of Pope Francis' visit to the Andean nation. (AP Photo/Dragomir Yankovic/Aton Chile)

People in traditional dress arrive for a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis at O'Higgins Park in Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

A pilgrim waits for Pope Francis to celebrate Mass at O'Higgins Park in Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The pope will try to inject new energy into the church during his visit, which includes sessions with migrants, members of Chile's Mapuche indigenous group and victims of the 1973-1990 military dictatorship. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Nuns express their happiness as Pope Francis walks past upon his arrival to the Cathedral, in Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Francis is telling Chile's priests that sexual abuse of children not only has caused pain to the victims but also to the priests who have been held collectively responsible for the crimes of a few. Francis urged priests and nuns at the meeting to have the strength to ask for forgiveness for abuse and the "clear-sightedness to call reality by its name." (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

A nun takes a picture as she waits for Pope Francis to celebrate Mass at O'Higgins Park in Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Pope Francis arrives to celebrate Mass at O'Higgins Park in Santiago, Chile, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Francis begged for forgiveness Tuesday for the "irreparable damage" done to children who were raped and molested by priests, opening his visit to Chile by diving head-first into a scandal that has greatly hurt the Catholic Church's credibility here and cast a cloud over his visit. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Demonstrators protest against the Catholic church and the visit of Pope Francis as Pope Francis drives by, in Santiago, Chile, Monday, Jan. 15, 2018. Francis' visit to Chile is expected to be fraught with a high level of opposition. Firebombings of Catholic churches in recent days have added to the tensions, as have planned protests of sex abuse and cover-ups.(AP Photo/Aliosha Marquez)
Two state-of-the-art Japanese power plants will receive Montana coal under an agreement announced Tuesday by Cloud Peak Energy.

The coal company said that up to a million tons of Spring Creek Mine coal would be shipped to Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, over 30 to 40 months beginning at the end 2019.

Spring Creek mine is located near Decker. The purchaser under the term export sales agreement is JERA Trading of Singapore.

The power plants, created by Mitsubishi, are designed to convert coal to synthetic natural gas. The process is intended to cut down significantly on the amount of coal carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

The first of the two 540-megawatt power plants is expected to begin operation in September 2020, according to the announcement.

After a 2011 tsunami destroyed the TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, Japan began developing coal-fired facilities. The agreement announced Tuesday is a step toward bringing coal power online.

Cloud Peak President and CEO Colin Marshall said in the announcement that he's hopeful the same technology will lead to new coal-fired power plants in the United States.

Cloud Peak Energy is pleased to be part of the Fukushima IGCC project and to help support Japans investment in next generation coal technology, said Marshall. If similar plants were to be built in the U.S. it would go a long way to addressing concerns about CO2 emissions while providing low-cost reliable electricity. Todays announcement also demonstrates the strategic importance of American energy resources to key Asian allies.

Commercial-scale, gasified coal power plant development in the United States has struggled mightily. The largest coal-gasified power project, Kemper County Power Plant in Mississippi, converted to natural gas last year after several cost overruns and construction delays.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) - Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Tuesday that if North Korea does not choose to negotiate on giving up its nuclear weapons that pose a growing threat to the United States it could trigger a military response.

After a meeting of U.S. allies on how to beef up the sanctions pressure, Tillerson stressed that the Trump administration seeks a diplomatic resolution in the nuclear standoff, but he said the North has yet to show itself to be a "credible negotiating partner." He said U.S.-North Korea talks would require a "sustained cessation" of threatening behavior.

Tillerson declined to comment on whether the White House is considering limited military action against Pyongyang, in response to reports that some in the Trump administration advocate military action to give the North a "bloody nose."

United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks with South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha during a meeting on North Korea in Vancouver, British Columbia, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Officials are discussing sanctions, preventing the spread of weapons and diplomatic options. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP)

"We all need to be very sober and clear-eyed about the current situation," Tillerson said when he was asked whether Americans should be concerned about the possibility of a war. He said North Korea has continued to make significant advances in its nuclear weapons through the thermonuclear test and progress in its intercontinental missile systems.

"We have to recognize that the threat is growing and that if North Korea does not choose the pathway of engagement, discussion, negotiation then they themselves will trigger an option," he said.

His uncompromising message came after a gathering in Vancouver of 20 nations that were on America's side during the Korean War, where there was skepticism among the allies over North Korea's sincerity in its recent diplomatic opening with the U.S.-allied South. The meeting convened days after a mistaken missile alert caused panic on Hawaii, a stark reminder of the fears of conflict with the North.

Despite Washington's tough stance and determination to keep up the pressure on North Korea, President Donald Trump has signaled openness to talks with the North under the right circumstances. After months of insults and blood-curdling threats traded with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump suggested in an interview last week that the two leaders could have a positive relationship.

Tillerson declined to say Tuesday whether Trump has spoken directly to Kim.

"I don't think it's useful to comment" he said. "We are at a very tenuous stage in terms of how far North Korea has taken their program and what we can do to convince them to take an alternative path. And so when we get into who's talking to who and what was said, if we want that to be made know or made public we will announce it."

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said its talks with North Korea, leading to the North's participation in next month's Olympics being hosted by the South, are a "significant first step toward restoring inter-Korean relations."

But she conceded that despite the overtures, North Korea has yet to show any intention to fulfill its obligations on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono was blunter. He said the North "wants to buy some time to continue their nuclear and missile programs."

The meeting was attended by foreign ministers and senior diplomats of nations that sent troops or humanitarian aid to the U.N. Command that supported South Korea in the fight against the communist North and its allies during the 1950-53 Korean War. It's a diverse gathering of mostly European and Asian nations, as well as Australia, New Zealand and Colombia.

The delegates were briefed Monday night by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. A senior State Department official described that as a chance to demonstrate that the U.S. has an integrated strategy and to raise confidence that it definitely prefers a diplomatic solution over resorting to military action. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the briefing and requested anonymity.

The gathering, co-hosted by Canada and the U.S., had few concrete outcomes and was principally intended as a show of solidarity. But it alienated China and Russia, which fought on the communist side in the war and were not invited. U.S. officials say those two nations, which are the North's main economic and diplomatic partners, will be briefed afterward.

Beijing and Moscow have supported U.N. Security Council resolutions to restrict export revenue for North Korean nuclear and missile development. They are more forward-leaning than Washington in their calls for negotiations with Kim's government. The sanctions also limit imports by North Korea of oil and petroleum products, most of which are supplied by China.

Tillerson said all nations must work together to improve maritime interdiction operations and stop illicit ship-to-ship transfers that violate U.N. sanctions. He said the allies did not seek to interfere with "legitimate maritime activities." He said most interdictions to date have taken place in ports and have not required military action.

The latest U.N. Security Council resolution, adopted in December in response to an ICBM test, calls on member states to impound vessels in their ports if there are reasonable grounds to suspect illicit trade with North Korea. It authorizes interdictions in a member state's territorial waters.

Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland, right, and South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, left, listen as Secretary of State for the United States Rex Tillerson speaks during a meeting on North Korea in Vancouver, British Columbia, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Officials are discussing sanctions, preventing the spread of weapons and diplomatic options. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP)

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, right, and South Korea's Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha meet in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, Jan. 15, 2018. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP)
MITROVICA, Kosovo (AP) - A leading Serb politician in northern Kosovo was gunned down Tuesday morning, an attack that raised ethnic tensions in the Balkans and prompted the suspension of EU-mediated talks between Kosovo and Serbia.

Assailants opened fire on Oliver Ivanovic, 64, close to the offices of his political party in the Serb-controlled northern city of Mitrovica. He was taken to a hospital but doctors were unable to save him.

The doctors said Ivanovic had received at least five gunshot wounds to his upper torso. The assailants escaped in a car that was later found burned out. Kosovo police sealed off the area of the shooting and began a manhunt for the attackers.

FILE - In this Oct. 23, 2004 file photo, Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic casts his ballot during general elections in the Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo. 64-year old Ivanovic has died from wounds after being shot by unknown assailants Tuesday Jan. 16, 2018, according to a statement from his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic, File)

Ivanovic was one of the key politicians in Serb-dominated northern Kosovo, a former Serbian province where tensions still remain high a decade after it declared independence in 2008. Serbia does not recognize that independence.

Ivanovic was considered a moderate who maintained relations with NATO and EU officials even after Serbia lost the control of its former province following NATO's 1999 bombing to stop a deadly Serb crackdown against ethnic Albanian separatists.

A Kosovo court convicted Ivanovic of war crimes during the 1998-99 war. That verdict was overturned and a retrial was underway.

In Pristina, the Kosovo government strongly denounced the slaying, saying it considers the attack a challenge to "the rule of law and efforts to establish the rule of law in the whole of Kosovo territory."

In Belgrade, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic held a top security meeting to discuss the shooting. Afterward, he called the killing "a terrorist act" and said Serbia is demanding that international missions in Kosovo include Serbia in their investigation into the slaying.

"Serbia will take all necessary steps so the killer or killers are found," he said.

At the news of Ivanovic's slaying, the Serb delegation at the EU talks in Brussels immediately left to return to Belgrade.

Delegation leader Marko Djuric said "whoever is behind this attack ... whether they are Serb, Albanian or any other criminals, they must be punished."

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called the presidents of Serbia and Kosovo to express the EU's condemnation of the killing. She appealed for both sides "to show calm and restraint."

The head of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, Ambassador Jan Braathu, said he was "shocked and deeply saddened" and considered Ivanovic "among the most prominent Kosovo Serb representatives for almost two decades. "

He also urged "all sides to avoid dangerous rhetoric and remain calm at this sensitive time, and recommit themselves to continue the work toward the normalization of relations and improvement of the lives of the citizens of Kosovo and Serbia."

___

Dusan Stojanovic and Jovana Gec in Belgrade; Llazar Semini in Tirana, Albania; and Raf Casert in Brussels contributed to this report.

Police officers secure the scene where unknown assailants opened fire and killed Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic in front of his office in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The Kosovo government has strongly denounced the slaying of a leading Serb politician in northern Mitrovica and says it considers it to be a challenge to "the rule of law". (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic)

FILE - In this Feb. 22, 2017 file photo, Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic, center, leaves the prison in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo. 64-year old Ivanovic has died from wounds after being shot by unknown assailants Tuesday Jan. 16, 2018, according to his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic. (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic, FILE)

Police officers secure the scene where unknown assailants opened fire on Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic in front of his office in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The Kosovo government has strongly denounced the slaying of a leading Serb politician in northern Mitrovica and says it considers it to be a challenge to "the rule of law". (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic)

Police officers guard a scene where unknown assailants opened fire on Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic in front of his office in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The Kosovo government has strongly denounced the slaying of a leading Serb politician in northern Mitrovica and says it considers it to be a challenge to "the rule of law". (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic)
MITROVICA, Kosovo (AP) - The Latest on the shooting of a Serb politician in Kosovo (all times local):

8:15 p.m.

NATO has condemned the assassination of a leading Serb politician in Kosovo and called on Serbia and Kosovo to return to EU-mediated negotiations in Brussels.

Kosovo police officers put a yellow police tape at the location where Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was assassinated, at the entrance of his office in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Ivanovic was shot and killed Tuesday morning, raising ethnic tensions in the region and halting EU-mediated talks between Kosovo and Serbia on the day they were due to resume. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said a NATO-led peacekeeping force established in 1999 "continues to guarantee a safe and secure environment and freedom of movement throughout Kosovo" following Tuesday's slaying.

Lungescu says NATO "fully supports the EU-facilitated dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, and calls for this dialogue to continue as soon as possible. This is critical for regional peace and security."

The Serbian delegation to the EU talks left a previously scheduled session after Serb political leader Oliver Ivanovic was shot to death by unknown attackers in northern Kosovo.

Lungescu urged "all parties to exercise restraint to defuse tensions, and allow the judicial authorities to carry out a full investigation."

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This entry has been corrected to show that the NATO spokeswoman's last name is Lungescu, not Lunge.

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7:50 p.m.

The prime minister of Kosovo has suggested that the slaying of a leading politician in the country's Serb-dominated north resulted from the "illegal involvement in the north of other institutions beyond Kosovo."

Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj spoke Tuesday at a news conference following a meeting of Kosovo's National Security Council. The council convened after Serb political leader Oliver Ivanovic was shot to death in Serb-controlled Mitrovica.

Haradinaj didn't elaborate on what outside forces he was accusing of being involved in Ivanovic's slaying.

He said he was open to inviting foreign law enforcement agencies such as the FBI to help with the investigation, but he turned down Serbia's call to be involved.

The prime minister also said he was surprised that the Serb delegation left a previously scheduled EU-mediated dialogue with Kosovo leaders after Ivanovic was killed.

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7 p.m.

Avni Arifi, who heads the Kosovo delegation at the EU talks in Brussels with Serbia, called on Belgrade to return to the negotiations.

At the news of Kosovo Serb political leader Oliver Ivanovic's slaying on Tuesday, the Serb delegation at the EU talks in Brussels immediately left to return to Belgrade.

But Arifi told the Klan Kosova TV station that "there is no alternative to the dialogue." He says the stance of Kosovo "is that we invite the Serb side to implement all the deals, to talk on any challenge in this process and to work on permanently normalizing ties between us."

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called the presidents of Serbia and Kosovo to express the EU's condemnation of the killing and appealed for both sides "to show calm and restraint."

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6:35 p.m.

A European Union mission that monitors Kosovo's justice system has strongly condemned "the act of criminal terror" that left moderate Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic dead.

Ivanovic was gunned down Tuesday morning in the northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica.

A statement Tuesday called "for a swift and efficient action by the authorities that leads to the arrest of the perpetrators of this horrendous act."

It said the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, or EULEX, "stands ready to offer its assistance."

The EULEX mission has supported Kosovo on its path to European integration in the areas of rule of law and fighting corruption since 2008, when Pristina declared independence from Serbia. EULEX's mandate expires in June.

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3:30 p.m.

Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj has called for a meeting of the country's National Security Council later Tuesday following the killing of Oliver Ivanovic, leader of an ethnic Serb political party, as he entered his party offices in the northern city of Mitrovica.

The government statement said the council "will discuss the general security situation in the country."

Kosovo police have offered a 10,000-euro ($12,250) reward for information on the attackers.

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3:20 p.m.

People from Kosovo's Serb minority say they are in shock over the killing of a moderate politician who was gunned down in an attack in a northern town.

Zivorad Lazic, from the central town of Gracanica, says the attack on Oliver Ivanovic earlier on Tuesday comes "as we hope to live as normal people."

Lazic adds the killing will "affect the Kosovo people."

Slobodan Petrovic, another Kosovo Serb lawmaker, says Ivanovic's death will be a huge loss for the Serb community in Kosovo, where tensions have simmered since the 1998-99 war.

Petrovic warns that "we may have a lot of consequences" if authorities fail to find the killers.

Ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but Belgrade does not recognize the split.

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3.10 p.m.

Serbia's foreign minister says the killing in Kosovo of a leading Serb politician is threatening the stability of both Kosovo and the Balkan region.

Ivica Dacic told reporters during a visit to Montenegro Tuesday that the attack earlier in the day on Oliver Ivanovic presented a "senseless terrorist act."

Dacic adds "the most important thing is to preserve stability in the north of Kosovo," a Serb-dominated part of predominantly ethnic Albanian nation.

He insists that "when the stability of northern Kosovo is jeopardized, the stability of the entire Kosovo and the whole region is under threat." Dacic adds "this is a big blow and shot into the interests of the Serbian people in Kosovo."

Ivanovic was considered a moderate politician in the former Serbian province deeply divided along ethnic lines.

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2:30 p.m.

The United Nations' senior official in Kosovo has strongly condemned the slaying of a Serb political leader in Kosovo.

The Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the U.N. Mission in Kosovo, Zahir Tanin, said Tuesday he was shocked and strongly condemned the killing of Oliver Ivanovic.

He urged investigative authorities to "work swiftly and effectively" and assured them that "all the international agencies on the ground are ready to support the authorities in any manner which may assist the swift apprehension of those responsible."

The U.N. mission governed Kosovo following Serbia's bloody crackdown against Kosovo Albanian separatists in 1999 and the NATO bombing that stopped it. After 2008, when Kosovo declared independence, it is playing a more minor role.

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2:10 p.m.

Serbia's president says the country is demanding that international missions in Kosovo include his country in their investigation into the killing of a leading Serb politician in the tense region.

President Aleksandar Vucic said Tuesday that Serbia views the fatal attack on Oliver Ivanovic in Kosovo earlier in the day as a "terrorist act." He says "Serbia will take all necessary measures so the killer or killers are found."

Vucic says "there are interesting details that point who might be the killers." He did not elaborate.

Serbia lost authority over Kosovo after the 1998-99 war and the former Serbian province declared independence in 2008. Serbia has refused to recognize the split.

Vucic says the Serbian delegation has left EU-mediated talks in Brussels on normalizing ties with Kosovo because "it makes no sense to talk in such circumstances."

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1:10 p.m.

The European Union's foreign policy chief has called the presidents of Serbia and Kosovo to express the EU's condemnation of the killing of Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic and make an appeal for calm.

The morning shooting came as both sides were about to start EU-mediated technical talks in Brussels on improving relations. It was unclear if there was any link between the two.

The EU said in a statement that Federica Mogherini said in her phone calls that the authorities in Kosovo should "spare no effort to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice without delay."

She also called on both sides "to show calm and restraint."

Mogherini last hosted the two presidents for talks last in September, the third such encounter last year. Talks between the two sides at a working group level should have resumed on Tuesday for the first time since the end of 2016.

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1:05 p.m.

The international community has strongly denounced the slaying of a Serb leader in Kosovo.

The head of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, Ambassador Jan Braathu, on Tuesday said he was "shocked and deeply saddened" and considered Oliver Ivanovic as "among the most prominent Kosovo Serb representatives for almost two decades ... (with) relentless engagement for the benefit of his community and has been a valued interlocutor in Kosovo."

"This will be a major test for rule of law in Kosovo," Braathu said.

The U.S. Ambassador to Pristina Greg Delawie called on judicial bodies "to investigate this incident swiftly and professionally, and bring the perpetrators to justice."

He also urged "all sides to avoid dangerous rhetoric and remain calm at this sensitive time, and recommit themselves to continue the work toward the normalization of relations and improvement of the lives of the citizens of Kosovo and Serbia."

Last weekend the State Department warned its citizens to "exercise increased caution in Kosovo due to terrorism."

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12 noon

Kosovo prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj says he considers the slaying of Serb minority political leader Oliver Ivanovic as "a punishable criminal act."

Reacting on his Facebook page to Ivanovic's death earlier Tuesday, Haradinaj said that "exploiting this tragic act for daily political goals, even to block processes aiming at normalizing ties between two countries, is against the logic and spirit of cooperation."

The talks between Serbia and Kosovo at the European Union have been suspended after the killing.

"Kosovo remains committed to create a safe environment for all its citizens and is powerfully set in its Euro-Atlantic path," Haradinaj said.

He also insisted that Kosovo authorities will do their utmost to clarify the killing adding that they will "in no situation accept the logic of calculating criminal acts for political purposes by anyone."

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11:30 a.m.

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci has strongly denounced the killing of a Serb political leader in the northern city of Mitrovica.

Oliver Ivanovic, leader of the Citizens' Initiative Freedom, Democracy, Justice party was shot dead Tuesday morning by still-unknown assailants.

In a reaction on his Facebook page Thaci called on law enforcement authorities "to throw light as soon as possible on the circumstances of the death so that the perpetrators are brought to justice."

He also urged citizens in the north to cooperate with police.

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11:25 a.m.

The talks between Serbia and Kosovo at the European Union have been suspended after the killing of Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic.

The 28-nation EU said it "strongly condemns the murder" and it expects authorities "to spare no effort to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice."

EU spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic said the EU calls on all sides "to show calm and restraint."

Talks between the two should have resumed on a technical level on Tuesday after they stopped in March last year when Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, then leader of the opposition Kosovo Future Alliance party, was detained in France pending a court decision whether he would be extradited to Serbia. He was released the following month.

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11:20 a.m.

Kosovo police have officially confirmed the shooting death of Serb political leader Oliver Ivanovic.

A statement Tuesday described how Ivanovic was shot at 8:10 a.m. near his office in Sutjeska Street in the northern city of Mitrovica.

Ivanovic was taken to the hospital where doctors confirmed his death.

The statement adds that about an hour later an Opel Astra car was found burned out in another Mitrovica street, and police believe that it was used by the perpetrators.

The investigation is continuing.

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11:15 a.m.

Serbian state television says that the country's delegation has walked out of an EU-mediated dialogue with Kosovo leaders after the killing of a leading Serb politician in Kosovo.

The report said Tuesday that the Serbian team is on its way back to Belgrade from Brussels after unknown assailants shot and killed Oliver Ivanovic in Serb-held Mitrovica early Tuesday.

The killing is likely to heighten tensions in Kosovo amid attempts to normalize ties between the former foes. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but Belgrade has refused to recognize the split.

Some 10,000 people died during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo which ended after NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999.

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11:05 a.m.

Doctors say that Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic received at least five gunshot wounds to his upper torso when shot by unknown assailants.

Milan Ivanovic, the head of Mitrovica hospital and who is not related to the politician, said Tuesday that doctors attempted to save Ivanovic but could do nothing.

Unknown assailants opened fire on Ivanovic outside the offices of his political party in an action that is likely to stir tensions in Kosovo almost exactly 10 years after it declared independence from Serbia.

The region has remained tense despite efforts by EU officials to mediate talks between Serbia and Kosovo leaders on normalizing ties. Serbia does not recognize Kosovo's independence.

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11 a.m.

A Serbian official says that the killing in Kosovo of a leading Serb politician is a "criminal act of terror" aimed at pushing the volatile region into chaos.

Marko Djuric, the Serbian government's official dealing with Kosovo, said Tuesday that "whoever is behind this attack ... whether they are Serb, Albanian or any other criminals, they must be punished."

Djuric adds that the attack earlier Tuesday on Oliver Ivanovic in Mitrovica "is an attempt to push the Serbian people into chaos, to push Serbia into chaos."

Kosovo remains tense, a decade after declaring independence from Serbia in 2008. Serbia does not recognize the split and EU-mediated talks have been underway in a bid to normalize ties.

About 10,000 people died in the 1998-99 war between Serb forces and Kosovo ethnic Albanian rebels.

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10:55 a.m.

The Kosovo government has strongly denounced the slaying of a leading Serb politician in northern Mitrovica and says it consicers it to be a challenge to "the rule of law and efforts to establish the rule of law in the whole of Kosovo territory."

The government issued a statement Tuesday following the death of Oliver Ivanovic, who was shot in the morning outside the offices of his Citizens' Initiative party in the northern city of Mitrovica.

"Violence is unacceptable, without taking into consideration where it comes from and toward whom it is directed," said the statement.

The government also invited all citizens to cooperate and urged law-enforcement institutions to seize the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

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10:40 a.m.

Serbian state television says that President Aleksandar Vucic has called a top security meeting after the shooting death in Kosovo of a leading Serb politician.

Vucic also will address the public at 1200 GMT on Tuesday about the death of Oliver Ivanovic, who was shot Tuesday morning in Serb-held northern Mitrovica.

Media reports say that unknown assailants opened fire at Ivanovic outside the offices of his Citizens' Initiative party in Mitrovica. Ivanovic's lawyer, Nebojsa Vlajic, confirmed Ivanovic died of wounds sustained in the attack.

The attack is likely to heighten ethnic tensions in Kosovo, a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008.

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10:20 a.m.

The lawyer for leading Serb politician in northern Kosovo Oliver Ivanovic says he has been shot dead.

"Unfortunately, I wish it weren't true, but doctors declared Oliver dead at 9:30 this morning," Nebojsa Vlajic, Ivanovic's lawyer confimed to The Associated Press by phone.

Serbian media reported that unknown assailants opened fire on Ivanovic in front of the offices of his Citizens' Initiative Party.

The 64-year-old was one of the key politicians in Serb-dominated northern Kosovo, a former Serbian province where tensions remain high a decade after it declared independence.

A Kosovo court convicted Ivanovic of war crimes during the 1998-99 war. That verdict was overturned and a retrial had been underway.

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9:55 a.m.

Serbian media are reporting that a leading Serb politician in northern Kosovo, Oliver Ivanovic, has been shot.

There was no immediate confirmation by the police in Kosovo of the reported incident on Tuesday morning. Reports say unknown assailants opened fire on Ivanovic in front of the offices of his Citizens' Initiative Party.

Serbia's state television says that doctors are struggling to save Ivanovic's life, while Vecernje Novosti daily reported that Ivanovic has died.

The 64-year-old is one of the key politicians in Serb-dominated northern Kosovo, a former Serbian province where tensions remain high a decade after it declared independence.

A Kosovo court convicted Ivanovic of war crimes during the 1998-99 war. That verdict was overturned and a retrial is underway.

A Serbian flag and a picture of assassined Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic are seen on his office in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Ivanovic was shot and killed Tuesday morning, raising ethnic tensions in the region and halting EU-mediated talks between Kosovo and Serbia on the day they were due to resume. (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic)

Police officers inspect a scene where unknown assailants opened fire on Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic in front of his office in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The Kosovo government has strongly denounced the slaying of a leading Serb politician in northern Mitrovica and says it considers it to be a challenge to "the rule of law". (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic)

FILE - In this Feb. 22, 2017 file photo, Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic, center, leaves the prison in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo. 64-year old Ivanovic has died from wounds after being shot by unknown assailants Tuesday Jan. 16, 2018, according to his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic. (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic, FILE)

FILE - In this Oct. 23, 2004 file photo, Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic casts his ballot during general elections in the Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo. 64-year old Ivanovic has died from wounds after being shot by unknown assailants Tuesday Jan. 16, 2018, according to a statement from his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic, File)

Flowers, candles and a picture of Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic, who was shot dead Tuesday morning by still-unknown assailants, at the scene of the shooting in front of his office in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. People from Kosovo's Serb minority say they are in shock over the killing of a moderate politician who was gunned down in an attack in a northern town. (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic)

People light candles at the scene of Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic's office in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Unknown assailants opened fire on Ivanovic outside the offices of his political party in an action that is likely to stir tensions in Kosovo almost exactly 10 years after it declared independence from Serbia. (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic)

Ripped election posters depicting Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic are seen in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Ivanovic was shot and killed Tuesday morning, raising ethnic tensions in the region and halting EU-mediated talks between Kosovo and Serbia on the day they were due to resume. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) - Novak Djokovic has rejected reports that leading men could potentially boycott future Grand Slams over prize money, though he did confirm that players held an hour-long private meeting on the eve of the Australian Open to discuss issues pertinent to the ATP Tour.

Djokovic, who is president of the ATP Player Council, didn't specify what issues were raised at the meeting, but said media reports stating that he proposed forming a tennis players' union to push for a greater share of revenue generated by tournaments were exaggerated or largely incorrect.

"I saw that you've portrayed me as someone who is very greedy, asks for more money and wants to boycott," Djokovic told a news conference following his first-round win over Donald Young on Tuesday. "What happened is that we, players, just wanted to have us players talk about certain topics. I don't think there is anything unhealthy about that."

Serbia's Novak Djokovic celebrates after defeating United States' Donald Young during their first round match at the Australian Open tennis championships in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

Most other players have declined to talk about what was discussed at the meeting, though Kevin Anderson, the player council vice president, told British media on Monday that the topic of prize money was raised.

No. 4-ranked Alexander Zverev said Djokovic did most of the talking at the meeting, which was attended by all of the top male players at the season's first major.

"I don't really have a position (on the subject) because that was the first time it was mentioned," he said. "Everybody listened to it. That's about it."

According to the Daily Mail newspaper, which first reported the meeting on Monday, Djokovic was said to have asked all non-players to leave the room and then gave a lengthy speech from the stage about forming a players' union, accompanied by an Australian lawyer.

On Tuesday, however, Djokovic denied that any lawyer was present or that he raised other issues related to equal prize money for men and women or the prospect of boycotting future Grand Slams if player demands weren't met.

"I know that you guys are trying to take this forward several steps," said Djokovic, who was returning from six months on the sidelines with a right elbow injury. "Obviously you're talking about union, you're talking about boycott, you're talking about radical decisions to make ... so we can get financial compensations the way we deserve it. But there was no talks about that."

Total prize money for the Australian Open reached 55 million Australian dollars ($42 million) this year, a 10 percent increase over 2017. The men's and women's singles champions will both take home AU$4 million ($3 million), while first-round losers will make AU$60,000 ($45,700).

While players at the top of the sport are making more at the Grand Slams, those ranked below 100 who play primarily on the lower-tier Challenger Tour and don't automatically qualify for the majors still struggle to get by.

Six years ago, when Federer was president of the ATP Player Council, the top male players put pressure on the Grand Slams to dramatically increase prize money - and the tournaments responded. The total purse at the 2013 Australian Open rose significantly, with the biggest jumps going to early-round losers. First-round losers that year earned AU$27,600, a 32 percent increase from the year before.

While players at this year's Australian Open were staying quiet on talk of starting a players' union, others connected with the sport weighed in on social media. Former No. 1-ranked Andy Roddick tweeted that "it's been a good idea for a long time," while Andy Murray's mother, Judy, said she "totally agreed."

"What about an umbrella union that represents men and women? That would give the players a much stronger voice to challenge the Slams and the joint ATP/WTA events. Better together," she wrote.

Djokovic acknowledged the sport is moving in the right direction on issues related to prize money, though work remains to be done.

"I'm part of the council, but I don't sit on these negotiation tables," he said. "I'm just glad that I'm part of it, that I can contribute to a better sport today, and the future."
THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) - Police in northern Greece have arrested two Pakistani suspected migrant traffickers accused of holding more than a dozen migrants captive and demanding ransoms from their relatives back home.

Ten men - six Pakistanis, three Bangladeshis and an Afghan - were freed during a police raid Monday on a shed in the countryside west of Thessaloniki where a gang was holding them captive.

Earlier, three other Pakistanis had managed to escape from the shed and contact police.

Two men from Pakistan, aged 62 and 17, were charged with blackmailing and illegally detaining the migrants, who had paid smugglers to get them into Greece from Turkey.

Police said Tuesday that the gang claimed the men in captivity owed smugglers between 1,000 and 2,500 euros, and would be held until their families paid up.
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on NATO to take a stance against the United States, a fellow ally, over its plans to form a 30,000-strong Kurdish-led border security force in Syria.

Turkey has been threatening to launch a new military offensive in Syria against Syrian Kurdish militias, which Turkey considers to be terrorists because of their affiliation with outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey.

On Monday Erdogan accused the United States of creating an "army of terror" in Syria, along the border with Turkey, and vowed to crush the U.S.-backed border force.

Turkey's President and leader of ruling Justice and Development Party Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses his lawmakers at the parliament in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Erdogan on Tuesday called on NATO to take a stance against the United States, a fellow ally, over its plans to form a 30,000-strong Kurdish-led border security force in Syria. Turkey has been threatening to launch a new military offensive in Syria against Syrian Kurdish militias, which Turkey considers to be terrorists because of their affiliation with outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Addressing his ruling party's deputies on Tuesday, Erdogan questioned NATO's stance on the issue, saying: "Hey NATO! You are obliged to make a stance against those who harass and violate the borders of your members."

NATO's headquarters described Turkey as "a highly valued ally" and said the alliance was committed to Turkey's defense. It said however that the alliance did not have a presence on the ground in Syria and that the matter was an issue for the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition, which includes dozens of countries.

Ties between Turkey and the United States have deteriorated over U.S. support of the Kurdish militia, known as the People's Defense Units, or YPG, which Turkey says is a major threat to its security. The United States however has relied on the YPG - the backbone of a Syrian force that drove the Islamic State group from much of northern and eastern Syria with the help of U.S.-led airstrikes.

The coalition has said the new force, expected to reach 30,000 in the next several years, is a key element of its strategy in Syria to prevent the resurgence of the IS group in Syria.

Erdogan on Tuesday reiterated that Turkey planned an imminent intervention in the Kurdish-controlled enclave of Afrin in northern Syria. Turkey has sent reinforcements to its border in recent weeks and Erdogan said this week that Turkish troops were already firing artillery at Afrin from the border.

Speaking to reporters after his speech to party legislators, Erdogan said Turkey would conduct the operation in Afrin with Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Asked whether he planned to discuss the Kurdish-led border force with U.S. President Donald Trump, Erdogan said he had no plans to call the U.S. leader.

"We discussed the issue before. He said he would get back to me. I won't call him as long as he does not get back to me," Anadolu quoted Erdogan as saying.

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Lorne Cooke in Brussels contributed to this report.

Turkey's President and leader of ruling Justice and Development Party Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses his lawmakers at the parliament in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Erdogan on Tuesday called on NATO to take a stance against the United States, a fellow ally, over its plans to form a 30,000-strong Kurdish-led border security force in Syria. Turkey has been threatening to launch a new military offensive in Syria against Syrian Kurdish militias, which Turkey considers to be terrorists because of their affiliation with outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Turkey's President and leader of ruling Justice and Development Party Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, salutes before he addresses his lawmakers at the parliament in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Erdogan on Tuesday called on NATO to take a stance against the United States, a fellow ally, over its plans to form a 30,000-strong Kurdish-led border security force in Syria. Turkey has been threatening to launch a new military offensive in Syria against Syrian Kurdish militias, which Turkey considers to be terrorists because of their affiliation with outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim follows him.(AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An Afghan official says a mortar attack in northern Faryab province has killed five people.

Karim Yuresh, the provincial police chief's spokesman, says the attack took place during the weekly bazaar in Khwaja Sabz Push district, which was hit by three mortar shells on Tuesday morning.

He says 45 people, including women and children, were also wounded in the attack.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks but Yuresh blamed the Taliban.

In Kabul, meanwhile, Nasart Rahimi deputy spokesman for the Interior Ministry, says security forces arrested three suspects following a rocket attack late Monday night on Wazir Akbar Khan, a key central neighborhood in the Afghan capital that houses many diplomatic missions, news agencies and non-governmental groups.

Rahimi says no casualties were reported.
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) - Romania's president on Tuesday appointed the defense minister as interim prime minister after Premier Mihai Tudose unexpectedly resigned.

President Klaus Iohannis named Mihai Fifor to temporarily take the post of prime minister, saying the current "political uncertainty should not degenerate into political instability" and cause negative economic effects.

Tudose, who took office in June 2017, quit late Monday after the left-wing Social Democratic Party withdrew its support for him amid a power struggle with powerful party chairman Liviu Dragnea. Dragnea himself can't be prime minister due to a 2016 conviction for vote-rigging.

FILE - In this Thursday, June 29, 2017, file photo Romanian Premier Mihai Tudose removes his glasses before a parliament vote on the new Romanian government in Bucharest, Romania. Romania's prime minister has resigned, Monday, Jan. 15, 2018, after his party withdrew its support amid a power struggle with party chairman after Romania's ruling left-wing Social Democratic Party withdrew its support for Mihai Tudose after a meeting lasting more than five hours.(AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda, File)

The resignation plunged Romania's currency, the leu, close to record-low levels and a two-week low against the euro Tuesday.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is visiting Romania at the end a six-country European tour, arrived Tuesday, but lunch and talks with the Romanian prime minister were canceled due to the political crisis.

Abe will meet Iohannis later Tuesday for talks.

The Social Democrats later named Viorica Dancila, a European MEP since 2009 and ally of Dragnea, as their choice for prime minister. Dragnea said her connections with EU officials would benefit the government.

Iohannis will consult with political parties Wednesday before formally proposing a candidate for prime minister who needs to get parliamentary approval.

The Social Democrats won elections in Dec. 2016 and ousted the previous Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu in a no-confidence vote after he fell out with Dragnea.
BERLIN (AP) - German authorities searched premises linked to 10 suspected Iranian spies following extensive investigations by the country's domestic intelligence agency, prosecutors said Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Federal Prosecutors Office said the raids took place early Tuesday at private homes and offices across Germany.

"We believe the suspects spied on institutions and persons in Germany at the behest of an intelligence unit associated with Iran," spokesman Stefan Biehl told The Associated Press.

He declined to comment on a report by weekly magazine Focus that the suspects were spying on Israelis in Germany.

The investigation was prompted by a tip from Germany's domestic intelligence service, said Biehl, adding that no arrests had been made yet.

Germany's Interior Ministry referred questions about the raids to federal prosecutors.

Last month, the German government protested to the Iranian ambassador following the conviction of an Iranian agent for spying. The Pakistani man was convicted in Berlin last year of espionage and sentenced to more than four years in prison. His targets included Reinhold Robbe, who headed the German-Israeli Association.

Germany's Foreign Ministry said Iranian ambassador Ali Majedi was summoned just before Christmas and told that "spying on people and institutions with a particular relationship to the state of Israel on German soil is a blatant violation of German law."
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump performed "exceedingly well" on a surprise cognitive screening test administered last week, his doctor said Tuesday, as the White House continued to bat back questions about the president's mental fitness for office.

Navy doctor Ronny Jackson, who administered Trump's first presidential physical last week, said Trump received a perfect score on a test designed to detect early signs of memory loss and other mild cognitive impairment. He also reported the 6-foot-3 president weighed in at 239 pounds - three pounds heavier than he was in September 2016, the last time Trump revealed his weight to the public. That number puts Trump on the cusp of - but just under - the obesity mark.

"The president's overall health is excellent," said Jackson, who predicted Trump would remain healthy for the duration of his presidency despite a diet heavy on fast food and an exercise regime limited to weekend golf outings.

White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson speaks to reporters during the daily press briefing in the Brady press briefing room at the White House, in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

"It's called genetics," Jackson said. "I don't know. ... He has incredibly good genes and that's just the way God made him."

Presidents don't typically sit for cognitive assessments during their periodic physical exams. But Jackson said Trump personally requested the test as he continues to face questions about his mental acuity for office. Such questions have escalated in the wake of an unflattering new book that paints Trump as a man-child who has trouble processing information and recognizing old friends.

But the 71-year-old president performed "exceedingly well" on the test, Jackson said, receiving a perfect score.

"He's very sharp. He's very articulate when he speaks to me," said Jackson, who works in close proximity to the president. Jackson accused doctors who have tried to diagnose Trump from afar of performing "tabloid psychiatry."

Still, Jackson said Trump acknowledged he'd be healthier if he lost a few pounds by exercising more and eating better. Jackson said he'd be arranging to have a dietitian consult with the White House chef to cut calories and would be recommending a low-impact, aerobic exercise program for Trump, with the aim of shedding 10 to 15 pounds this year.

"I would say right now on a day-to-day basis, he doesn't have a dedicated, defined exercise program," said Jackson. "The good part is that, you know, we can build on that pretty easily."

Trump's body mass index, or BMI, of 29.9 puts him in the category of being overweight for his height. A BMI of 30 and over is considered obese. A copy of Trump's New York driver's license obtained by Politico listed Trump's height as 6-foot-2, instead of 6-foot-3; the lower height would put Trump over the obesity threshold.

Trump's blood pressure was 122 over 74, and his total cholesterol was 223, which is higher than recommended, even though he takes a low dose of the statin drug Crestor. Jackson said he would increase that dose in an effort to get Trump's so-called "bad" cholesterol, or LDL level, below 120; it currently is 143.

Despite the diet and cholesterol concerns, Jackson stressed that Trump's "cardiac health is excellent." He passed a battery of heart exams, including a stress test that Jackson said showed an above-average exercise capacity for a man of his age, despite some calcium buildup in his arteries. He also takes a low-dose aspirin for heart health.

With such a bad dietary history, how can that be? Jackson said Trump has avoided some big heart risks - he's never smoked and isn't diabetic - and has no family history of heart problems.

Trump has experienced several recent episodes in which he appeared to slur his words, adding to concerns about his health. Jackson said he'd ruled out a list of possible causes, and that dry mouth caused by the over-the-counter decongestant Sudafed was likely to blame.

Trump last revealed details about his health two months before the November 2016 election, when he appeared on the "Dr. Oz" show to give details of a physical performed by his longtime physician, the eccentric Dr. Harold Bornstein. A year earlier, Bornstein had released a letter that predicted Trump would be "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency" if he won.

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment that Trump took includes remembering a list of spoken words; listening to a list of random numbers and repeating them backward; naming as many words that begin with, say, the letter F as possible within a minute; accurately drawing a cube; and describing concrete ways that two objects - like a train and a bicycle - are alike.

Cognitive assessments aren't routine in standard physicals, though they recently became covered in Medicare's annual wellness visits for seniors.

"It's not a diagnostic test, but it's pretty sensitive in picking up subtle changes in cognition," things involving memory, attention and language but not mental health issues, said Dr. Ranit Mishori, professor of family medicine at Georgetown University, who performs these types of routine physicals.

Mishori said Trump's vital signs, blood tests and physical examinations suggest "he seems to be on track, what you would want to see in a 71-year-old overweight male."

But Mishori cautioned that despite good results on his cardiac exams, Trump is at increased risk of cardiovascular disease because of his age, weight, sedentary lifestyle and cholesterol level.

___

AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard and Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson speaks to reporters during the daily press briefing in the Brady press briefing room at the White House, in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
MIAMI (AP) - Testimony has ended in an auto fraud trial of a pilot who once flew loads of drugs for Colombian cartels during Miami's "cocaine cowboys" era.

A federal jury is scheduled Wednesday to begin deliberating the fate of 72-year-old Mickey Munday, who has become well known through his open bragging about his past in interviews, social media posts and starring role in the 2006 documentary film "Cocaine Cowboys."

Prosecutors say the ring stole cars through use of false paperwork. Munday's defense is that he wasn't aware of the fraud.

Munday's alleged role in the auto fraud ring was transporting and hiding the stolen vehicles, similar to his work in the 1980s for Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel and later the Cali cartel.

He served about nine years in prison during the 1990s.
YORK, S.C. (AP) - The Latest on the wounding of four officers in South Carolina (all times local):

12:05 p.m.

Authorities say one officer is in critical condition and three others were less seriously wounded after they were shot by a fleeing suspect in South Carolina.

York County Sheriff's spokesman Trent Faris said Tuesday three of the four wounded officers were members of a county-wide SWAT team.

Faris says 47-year-old Christian Thomas McCall ran from his York home around 10:20 p.m. Tuesday after officers arrived to investigate him attacking a woman. Faris didn't know the woman's condition.

Faris says McCall shot a pursuing officer who was accompanied by a police dog, then about four hours later shot three SWAT officers in the woods. He didn't say which officer was critically injured.

Faris said at a news conference that McCall was also shot and was hospitalized, but did not give his condition.

___

11:15 a.m.

Authorities say a man suspected of shooting four law enforcement officers in South Carolina also fired at a police helicopter and damaged it. No one on board was injured.

State Law Enforcement Division spokesman Thom Berry says gunfire from 47-year-old Christian Thomas McCall damaged the rear stabilizer of one of the agency's helicopters early Tuesday.

Berry says the officers on board landed safely and were not injured.

State criminal records show only one arrest for McCall. In February 1994, he was charged with assaulting a law officer, resisting arrest, and simple assault in Florence. The records did not show what happened to the case in court.

___

9:30 a.m.

State police have released the name of a suspect in the wounding of four law enforcement officers in South Carolina.

State Law Enforcement Division spokesman Thom Berry said 47-year-old Christian Thomas McCall is the man officers think shot and wounded three York County sheriff's deputies and a York police officer early Tuesday. McCall was also wounded in the shootout. There's no word on their conditions.

A neighbor of McCall's says he was stunned to find out who might have been involved.

Roger Gilfillan says McCall lived with his wife and three children in a rural area outside York. Gilfillan said McCall frequently walked around the neighborhood but only spoke when someone spoke to him. Gilfillan said McCall never appeared to cause any trouble.

No one answered the door at McCall's home Tuesday morning.

___

6:25 a.m.

At least three sheriff's deputies have been wounded in a shooting in South Carolina.

Media outlets reported that the shooting happened about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday near York when officers responded to a domestic dispute.

York County sheriff's spokesman Trent Faris said the wounded officers have been taken to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. He did not have word on the officers' conditions. Fairs did not immediately respond Tuesday to messages seeking more information.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police are assisting in the investigation.

News outlets reported a suspect was in custody.

York is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southwest of Charlotte.
YORK, S.C. (AP) - A man who was wanted for beating his wife ambushed and shot three SWAT officers searching for him in woods in South Carolina, leaving one deputy "hanging on to life,' a sheriff said Tuesday.

Christian Thomas McCall earlier had shot and wounded a fourth officer who was chasing him with a police dog, York County Sheriff Kevin Tolson said.

McCall was also shot and is at the same Charlotte, North Carolina, hospital where the four officers were taken.

Cars are parked at a home in York, S.C. on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018, where multiple deputies responding to a domestic violence call were shot and wounded. State Law Enforcement Division spokesman Thom Berry said Christian Thomas McCall is the man officers think shot and wounded the officers early Tuesday. (AP Photo/Jeffrey S. Collins)

York County Detective Mike Doty was the most seriously injured

He is "hanging on to life. We've had a lot of support, texts, emails," Tolson said, "We need your continued prayers."

Officers were called to McCall's home outside of York around 10:20 p.m. Monday after he attacked his wife, authorities said.

McCall ran into the woods and deputies searched for him about three hours, York County Sgt. Randy Tolson said at a news conference.

The manhunt intensified and about two hours later McCall ambushed three SWAT team members in the woods. Tolson identified the wounded officers as Doty, York County Sgt. Buddy Brown and York City Police Sgt. Kyle Cummings.

Tolson didn't release details about the attack, saying it was under investigation by the State Law Enforcement Division. Agency chief Mark Keel said he does not comment on pending investigations.

Deputies had been called to McCall's house before because he said he was the victim in a domestic disturbance in 2015. The sheriff did not have details about the case.

McCall's wife was not seriously injured in the Monday night attack, Tolson said.

McCall, 47, is charged with three counts of attempted murder for the three officers who were less seriously wounded, Solicitor Kevin Brackett said. The prosecutor is waiting to see what happens with Doty's medical condition before deciding what to charge McCall with in that shooting.

The suspect had several "long guns," State Law Enforcement Division spokesman Thom Berry said. He did not know the specific type of weapons.

No one answered the door at McCall's two-story brick home later Tuesday morning. The yard was well-maintained and was lined with lights. Several cars were in the driveway.

A neighbor, Roger Gilfillan, said he was stunned to find out who might be involved.

"This is baffling," Gilfillan said several times, noting McCall lived in the home with his wife and two children.

"They were real nice people. He just kept to himself," said Gilfillan. McCall frequently walked around the neighborhood, but would only speak when someone spoke to him. McCall never appeared to cause any trouble, Gilfillan said.

Berry said a state police helicopter was shot and its rear stabilizer damaged during the search for McCall, but no one on board was injured and the chopper was able to land safely.

State criminal records show only one arrest for McCall. In February 1994, he was charged with assaulting a law officer, resisting arrest and simple assault in Florence. The records did not show what happened to the case in court.

Berry said all of the officers are white men, as is McCall.

York is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southwest of Charlotte.

___

Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter and see his work on apnews.com .
ATLANTA (AP) - The Latest on wintry weather in the U.S. (all times local):

2:35 p.m.

Forecasters are expanding the portion of Georgia that could get snow.

The National Weather Service says as much as 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) of snow could fall through Wednesday morning in a patch that extends into southeastern Georgia.

That's more snow over a larger region than originally forecast, and isolated areas could get even more accumulation. Metro Atlanta is within the area that could get both snow and freezing temperatures, creating the potential for travel problems.

Snow forecasts also are increasing in parts of Alabama, where Gov. Kay Ivey is shutting down government offices Wednesday as a precaution.

Some school systems are canceling classes because the wind chill will make already low temperatures feel near or below 0 degrees (-18 Celsius) as far south as the Gulf Coast.

___

12:35 p.m.

Police say multiple people have been injured in a five-vehicle pileup that included a Greyhound bus on a snow-slicked interstate in south-central Kentucky.

The crash, which also involved two commercial vehicles and two passenger vehicles, occurred Tuesday morning on I-65 near the 71 mile marker at the Bonnieville exit. A statement from Kentucky State Police said multiple people have been taken to hospitals. The extent of their injuries wasn't clear.

All southbound lanes have been closed due to blockage from the collision. Traffic is being detoured onto U.S. 31.

Police urge motorists to travel slowly and use extreme caution due to slick roads and heavy congestion in the area.

___

12 p.m.

Another round of snow fell Tuesday across much of Kentucky and Tennessee leading to multiple school closures and slick roads that caused multiple crashes.

The Kentucky Transportation Department reports that multiple crashes closed a 10-mile section of Interstate 24 in western Kentucky and blocked southbound lanes of Interstate 65 in the south-central part of the state.

The forecast in Kentucky called for up to 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) of snow for sections of central and eastern Kentucky.

In Tennessee, forecasters all calling for up to 6 inches (15 centimeters) of snow in the central part of the state and 1-3 inches 1 inch (2.5-7.6 centimeters) in the western and eastern regions.

Overnight, temperatures are expected to turn bitterly cold, with subzero wind chills.

___

10:45 a.m.

In Mississippi, ice had coated roads and bridges in 36 of the state's 82 counties, the Mississippi Department of Transported said in a statement Tuesday morning.

Road crews were working to put salt and other materials on roadways, mainly in the northern and central parts of the state.

Mississippi authorities were advising people to limit travel only to emergencies.

Some of the heaviest snow in Mississippi was expected in the state's Delta region, where up to 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) was possible.

___

10:35 a.m.

Hundreds of flights have been canceled in Texas, where frigid temperatures have left runways - and roads - dangerously icy.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for the Houston area Tuesday and is warning mariners of gale-force winds along the Texas coast. Sleet and freezing rain are forecast for parts of the state.

Flights into Houston, San Antonio and elsewhere have been canceled. Houston is enduring 21 degrees (-6 Celsius) and San Antonio stands at 30 degrees (-1 Celsius).

Police in Austin say highways in the capital are iced over and several counties opened emergency operation centers to coordinate emergency response.

The cold front also brought snow to parts of North Texas, where the wind chill pushed temperatures into the single digits.

___

10:35 a.m.

Low temperatures and dangerous wind chills are closing schools across Kansas.

The school systems canceling classes Tuesday include Wichita, Lawrence, El Dorado, Salina, Wamego and McPherson. Several Johnson County schools, including Shawnee Mission, Olathe and Blue Valley, had previously scheduled a professional development day for teachers Tuesday.

Some colleges also canceled classes, including Wichita State University and Emporia State University.

___

8:30 a.m.

Much of Alabama is shut down because forecasters say a snow storm with bitterly cold temperatures could cause travel problems.

More than 70 school systems in Alabama were closed Tuesday and others were dismissing students early. Numerous businesses and government offices closed because of the threat. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has declared a state of emergency.

Officials are trying to avoid a repeat of four years ago, when a winter storm blanketed central Alabama and left motorists stranded on roads in metro Birmingham for hours. Teachers and students camped out in schools.

Forecasters aren't predicting a large amount of snow, just 2 inches (5 centimeters) or less with more in spots. But they say temperatures steadily falling into the teens could freeze anything that comes down, making travel difficult.

___

6:45 a.m.

Forecasters say parts of the Deep South were in the path of a weather system that's expected to bring more snow, followed by bitterly cold temperatures.

The National Weather Service on Tuesday had issued winter storm warnings in northern Louisiana and the northwest portion of Mississippi.

Winter weather advisories covered most of Alabama and much of Georgia as well, and several school districts across the region canceled classes for Tuesday.

Snow was falling before dawn Tuesday in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. It was expected to move into Alabama and Georgia later Tuesday.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) - Ethiopian Airlines says it has finalized an agreement with Zambia to re-launch the southern African country's national carrier.

The partnership with Zambia comes as Ethiopian Airlines is opening new routes and hubs and is acquiring new aircraft.

In a statement Tuesday, the airline said it will have a 45 percent stake in the Zambian carrier and it aims to make the Zambian capital, Lusaka, its newest aviation hub. The remaining 55 percent will be acquired by the Zambian government which is aiming to revive the country's aviation sector after Zambia Airways ceased operations on January 2009.

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam told The Associated Press earlier this month his company is also exploring opportunities in other African countries including Mozambique, Djibouti and Congo.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Red lanterns sway in the wind. Streetlamps from the 1930s cast a yellow-green glare onto century-old buildings. Neon glows from a pair of dive bars. Figures are silhouetted waiting outside a restaurant, and a lone woman makes dragon beard candy in a tiny storefront window. All are nighttime scenes along Grant Avenue in San Francisco's Chinatown.

The avenue, which runs north and south, is one of the oldest streets in the city. In the late 1800s, it became home to Chinese immigrants who were fleeing unrest at home, seeking opportunity here or following the Gold Rush. Many of the neighborhood's buildings today can be traced to reconstruction efforts after the 1906 earthquake.

Grant Avenue is a bustling street during the day, often filled with tourists in search of souvenirs or locals shopping for food. But at night the street is quiet, allowing for leisurely strolling and new discoveries. Many stores close early with only a few bars, restaurants and bakeries open late. It's an interesting place to stroll this time of year and reflect on the area's culture and history as Lunar New Year approaches, Feb. 16, launching the year of the dog.

In this photo taken Thursday, Dec. 21, 2017, a man walks past the Li-Po bar along Chinatown's Grant Avenue in San Francisco. The bar is known for their Chinese Mai-Tai and dates from the 1930s. Inside red lacquered doors sits a golden Buddha statue behind a wrap around bar. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

At the intersection of Grant Avenue and Washington Street are a pair of dive bars located 10 steps away from each other. One is the Li Po Lounge, named for a poet in China's Tang Dynasty, dating to the 1930s. Inside its red lacquered doors sits a golden Buddha statue behind a wraparound bar. The Li Po is known for its $9 Chinese Mai Tai made with three rums, pineapple juice and a "Chinese Liqueur" served in a plastic hurricane glass and packing a wallop to the unsuspecting. Nearby is the Buddha Lounge, a dinky, quirky dive known for betting on your drink in a game of Liar's Dice between you and the bartender.

Where Grant Avenue meets Broadway Street near the North Beach district is China Live, which opened last year and serves as an anchor point for the revitalization effort within the greater Chinatown neighborhood. The four-story building is a culinary and cultural landmark. It includes multiple restaurants, bars, a retail market and event space. China Live was founded by George Chen and his wife Cindy Wong-Chen. George Chen is known as the creator of two well-known restaurants elsewhere in the city, Betelnut and Shanghai 1930.

The heart of China Live's ground floor is the Market Restaurant and Bar Central, a 120-seat restaurant with eight stations serving delectable cuisine ranging from dumplings and dim sum to Chinese charcuterie and barbeque. Upstairs is Eight Tables, a fine dining restaurant that has an eight-course, constantly evolving Chinese tasting menu. The restaurant is accessible via a secluded back alley entrance with a rickshaw available on request to take you from the main street.

With Old Shanghai as an inspiration, Cold Drinks at China Live was recently named as one of the city's best new bars. The 40-seat lush and mysterious bar features Scotch-centric cocktails and overlooks parts of the skyline and edge of Chinatown. For the lunar new year, Cold Drinks will be releasing 12 drinks in February inspired by the Chinese Zodiac animals, including this year's beverage, named, what else, The Lucky Dog.

In this photo taken Thursday, Dec. 21, 2017, red lanterns hang above Chinatown's Grant Avenue in San Francisco. The avenue, which runs north and south, is one of the oldest streets in the city. In the late 1800s the street became home to Chinese immigrants who were escaping persecution or following the Gold Rush. Many of the current buildings in the neighborhood can be traced to the reconstruction efforts after the 1906 earthquake. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Thursday, Dec. 21, 2017, a mural covers a wall in Chinatown as people make their way out of a restaurant after dinner in San Francisco. In the late 1800s the area became home to Chinese immigrants who were escaping persecution or following the Gold Rush. Many of the current buildings in the neighborhood can be traced to the reconstruction efforts after the 1906 earthquake. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Thursday, Dec. 21, 2017, a neon sign shines above the Buddha Lounge bar on Chinatown's Grant Avenue in San Francisco. The bar, a dinky, quirky dive is known for betting on your drink in a game of Liar's Dice between you and the bartender. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Thursday, Dec. 21, 2017, a video screen flashes images in the Cold Drinks bar at China Live in San Francisco. With Old Shanghai as an inspiration, Cold Drinks at China Live was recently named as one of the city's best new bars. The 40-seat lush and mysterious bar features Scotch-centric cocktails and overlooks parts of the skyline and edge of Chinatown. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Thursday, Dec. 21, 2017, a woman in a dessert shop window makes a dragon beard candy at night on Chinatown's Grant Avenue in San Francisco. In the late 1800s the street became home to Chinese immigrants who were escaping persecution or following the Gold Rush. Many of the current buildings in the neighborhood can be traced to the reconstruction efforts after the 1906 earthquake. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Thursday, Dec. 21, 2017, people dine in the Oolong Cafe at China Live in San Francisco. As Grant Avenue meets Broadway Street near the North Beach district is China Live, an anchor point for the revitalization effort within the greater Chinatown neighborhood. Opening last spring, the 30,000 foot, four-story building is a culinary and cultural landmark. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) - There seems to be no going back for Mahmoud Abbas after the Palestinian leader cursed and ridiculed President Donald Trump and his aides in a pugnacious speech - a very public break with the 82-year-old's long-standing efforts to cultivate Washington's goodwill as the sole pathway to Palestinian statehood.

Abbas' pivot from quiet diplomacy to loudly challenging the U.S. and Israel brings him in line with his aggrieved public and quashes any last expectations of a U.S.-brokered peace deal, but could also unleash forces that might eventually bring down his self-rule government.

Some questions and answers about the conflict:

FILE - In this Sunday, Jan. 14, 2018 file photo, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, center, speaks during a meeting with the Palestinian Central Council, at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. There seems to be no going back for Mahmoud Abbas after the Palestinian leader cursed and ridiculed President Donald Trump and his aides in his pugnacious speech Sunday - a very public break with the 82-year-old's long-standing efforts to cultivate Washington's goodwill as the sole pathway to Palestinian statehood. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed, File)

WHY THE OUTBURST?

The mostly unscripted barnburner - out of character for the typically buttoned-down Abbas - marked the culmination of his frustration with the U.S. administration. In the span of a few weeks, Trump smashed what Palestinians see as the ground rules of U.S. mediation in their conflict with Israel.

Trump recognized contested Jerusalem as Israel's capital, then portrayed Abbas' subsequent rejection of Washington as an unfit broker as a blanket refusal to negotiate, followed by threats to cut U.S. aid to the Palestinians.

"Yekhreb beitak!" (literally "May your house be demolished") Abbas exclaimed to laughter from a hall packed with Palestine Liberation Organization officials, cursing Trump as he recounted the recent U.S. measures. Burning more bridges, Abbas also lashed out at Trump's ambassadors to the U.N. and to Israel, Nikki Haley and David Friedman.

His core message was to reject pre-emptively what he fears to be an upcoming U.S. plan for a Palestinian mini-state on only some of the lands captured by Israel in 1967 and without a foothold in Jerusalem. "We will not accept a deal America dictates," Abbas said defiantly.

On Tuesday, a U.S. official said the Trump administration was withholding $65 million of the planned $125 million installment for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which focuses on giving health care, education and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

WHAT NOW?

A day after Abbas' "exit speech" from two decades of intermittent, U.S.-led talks with Israel, a PLO decision-making body outlined a confrontational approach - at least on paper.

The Palestinian Central Council called for suspending the PLO's 1993 recognition of Israel, halting security coordination with Israel and ending Palestinian compliance with interim peace deals from the mid-1990s. These so-called Oslo Accords had created the Palestinian autonomy government, headed by Abbas since 2005, and defined Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The final decision lies with Abbas. Aides and Palestinian analysts suggested he will move cautiously.

Implementing the council decisions could quickly escalate tensions with the hard-line government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and possibly bring about the collapse of Abbas' financially fragile self-rule government which administers parts of the West Bank.

Ending compliance with the Oslo Accords could also remove any justification for the continued existence of the Palestinian Authority.

On the other hand, Netanyahu and Abbas have overlapping interests that helped maintain the status quo for years, despite many crises and an adversarial relationship.

Both benefit from continued security coordination against a shared enemy, the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which dominates Gaza. The foreign aid-dependent Palestinian Authority shoulders the responsibility for the welfare of millions of Palestinians that would otherwise fall on Israel as the occupier. The Oslo Accords have also created a Palestinian political class eager to protect its perks, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians depend on autonomy government salaries.

WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?

Abbas says he remains committed to a two-state solution, or setting up a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But he hasn't explained how he can now get there, in the absence of the old framework of the ultimately unsuccessful "peace process" that called for a negotiated border deal.

Palestinians face years of uncertainty, as they try to strengthen alliances with Europe and the Arab world to make up for frayed ties with the U.S.

Abbas hopes to generate more pressure on Israel, including international sanctions, to force an end to its half-century-old occupation, said PLO official Hanan Ashrawi. "Without accountability, without Israel understanding that there is a price to be paid for its intransigence, it is not going to budge," she said.

But there are no firm commitments of support, despite sweeping condemnation of Trump's Jerusalem move in recent U.N. Security Council and General Assembly votes.

Europe, for years relegated by Washington to the role of Middle East paymaster, hasn't signaled a new assertiveness in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Sunni Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt are bent on curbing the influence of regional rival Iran, even at the expense of the once-central Palestinian cause, including the fate of Jerusalem, sacred to Muslims, along with Christians and Jews.

Netanyahu has strengthened Israel's trade and security ties with countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This week, for instance, he is in India, signing trade deals with the one of the world's largest and fastest-growing economies.

IS IT A WIN FOR NETANYAHU?

Abbas' rambling remarks seemed to provide fodder for Israeli hard-liners, who claim that he has not truly accepted Israel and lacks the credentials of a partner for peace.

Abbas at one point described the settling of Jews in the Holy Land as a colonial conspiracy, seemingly denying their historic ties to the land, and also claimed that Israel is "sending us lots of (illegal) drugs" that might tempt Palestinian children.

Dan Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said he understands Abbas' frustration with Trump and the Israeli government, but that this "doesn't justify returning to the most outrageous canards about Israel's very legitimacy."

"If he has chosen to go that route, he has chosen to end his role as a partner in the two-state solution," Shapiro, a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said of Abbas.

Netanyahu has demanded that Abbas accept Israel as a Jewish state, as proof of peaceful intent.

Abbas, a staunch proponent of nonviolence, has said it's not his role to define Israel's character, and that Netanyahu is simply trying to deflect attention from Israeli actions such as settlement building.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER ABBAS?

Israel might be able to score a short-term public relations win by portraying Abbas as rejectionist, but this won't lessen the existential threat posed by the unresolved conflict. Arabs and Jews will soon reach demographic parity in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, with Palestinians poised to become a majority.

Without a partition deal - even less likely after the latest crisis - Israel will either continue to rule over Palestinians with lesser rights in an apartheid-like situation or will have to give them citizenship in a single, binational state, an option most Israelis reject.

Abbas has dismissed the idea of an interim state in parts of the West Bank and Gaza, fearing the temporary will become permanent.

After 13 years in office, Abbas shows no willingness to step aside and has refused to groom an heir. His fiery speech reflected a broad Palestinian consensus and might help restore some of his tattered domestic legitimacy.

And even when he is eventually replaced, his successor is unlikely to accept what Abbas is now resoundingly rejecting.

___

Associated Press writer Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed.

___

Karin Laub has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1987.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - The judges who struck down North Carolina's congressional map for excessive partisanship that favored Republicans refused Tuesday to delay their order telling GOP state lawmakers to draw new lines by next week.

The denial by the three-judge federal panel was expected, given that the judges wrote 200-plus pages last week explaining why the boundaries approved two years ago were marked by "invidious partisanship" and are illegal political gerrymanders, violating several parts of the U.S. Constitution.

Barring a delay by the U.S. Supreme Court - which Republican legislators also have sought and their request is pending - the legislature will be required to redraw its map for North Carolina's 13 congressional districts by Jan. 24.

Attorneys for the lawmakers cited partisan gerrymandering cases already before the Supreme Court from Wisconsin and Maryland for necessitating the order's delay, because the justices may rule differently on whether partisan gerrymandering can be adjudicated.

But the lower court's judges - U.S. Circuit Judge Jim Wynn and District Judges William Osteen and Earl Britt - said the cases in the other states are different enough legally that their decision could stand no matter how the justices rule. For example, the Wisconsin matter involves legislative districts.

"Any decision the Supreme Court renders in those cases is highly unlikely to undermine all of the factual and legal bases upon which this court found the 2016 plan violated the Constitution and enjoined further use of that plan," the judges wrote.

When a previous court found the state's 2011 congressional map relied too heavily on race in drawing two districts, North Carolina Republican lawmakers approved new lines based on redistricting criteria designed to retain the party's 10-3 majority in the state delegation.

Requiring yet another map to be drawn so close to the start of candidate filing next month would confuse voters and make it difficult for potential candidates, according to lawyers for the Republicans.

But the judges wrote the May primary and November general elections are still months away and they have the power to delay candidate filing if necessary to ensure a lawful map is in place. The judges plan to hire a special expert to draw an alternative map in case lawmakers refuse to draw one or approve unacceptable boundaries.

If their order was delayed until the Supreme Court ruled this summer in another partisan gerrymandering case that still led to North Carolina's map being struck down, the judges said, it could be too late to draw a new plan in time for the fall election.

"As a result, North Carolinians would cast votes in congressional elections conducted under unconstitutional maps in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 - virtually the entire decade," the judges wrote Tuesday.

The denial came while the North Carolina legislature awaits a decision by another federal judicial panel - comprised of Wynn and two other judges - whether to accept a special master's plan to redraw roughly two dozen state House and Senate districts. This judicial panel appointed the expert after it raised constitutional concerns about a legislative redistricting the General Assembly approved last summer.
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) - The parents of a 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student killed and buried in a California park said Tuesday that the killing may have been a hate crime against their gay son.

The family statement came after a search warrant affidavit obtained by a newspaper revealed that Samuel Lincoln Woodward, 20, the high school friend arrested on suspicion of killing Blaze Bernstein, told investigators that Bernstein had kissed him and he had pushed him away before they went to the park.

As he described the kiss, Woodward clenched his jaw and his fists, saying "he wanted to tell Blaze to get off of him," investigators wrote in the affidavit obtained by the Orange County Register.

FILE--This undated file photo provided by the Orange County Sheriff's Department shows Blaze Bernstein. A suspect has been arrested in the death of 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student Bernstein,whose body was found this week at a Southern California park. (Orange County Sheriff's Department via AP, file)

"Our son was a beautiful gentle soul who we loved more than anything," Gideon Bernstein and Jeanne Pepper Bernstein. "We were proud of everything he did and who he was. He had nothing to hide. We are in solidarity with our son and the LGBTQ community."

The couple added, "If it is determined that this was a hate crime, we will cry not only for our son, but for LGBTQ people everywhere that live in fear or who have been victims of hate crime."

Bernstein was then stabbed more than 20 times and buried in a shallow grave at the park, the Register and the Los Angeles Times reported.

"We are saddened to hear, on the day we laid our son to rest, that gruesome details of the cause of his death were published," Bernstein's parents said in their statement.

Carrie Braun, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff's Department, would not confirm to The Associated Press if Bernstein was stabbed but said "the condition of the body at the time it was discovered turned it from a missing person to a homicide immediately."

Woodward was interviewed by authorities after Bernstein was reported missing by his parents on Jan. 3.

Woodward was arrested Friday on suspicion of homicide after DNA evidence linked him to the death of Bernstein, Orange County Undersheriff Don Barnes said. The two knew each other from high school, he said.

Bernstein may have been planning to sexually pursue Woodward, according to the 16-page affidavit.

Bernstein texted two female friends about a June interaction where he felt Woodward was romantically interested in him, according to the document. Bernstein wrote that Woodward was about to "hit on me" and "he made me promise not to tell anyone."

Bernstein was visiting his family in Lake Forest, 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, during winter break. Woodward picked him up on Jan. 2 and drove with him to several places before they wound up at a park, authorities said.

A sheriff's investigator wrote in court filings that Woodward appeared nervous, had scratched hands and dirt under his fingernails, and avoided touching doors with his hands while leaving the sheriff's office building.

It was not immediately possible to reach Woodward in custody, where he listed his occupation as "Nerf games," according to the jail's website.

Authorities searched for Bernstein for nearly a week with assistance from drone pilots and found his body Jan. 9 after recent rains partially exposed it.

___

This story has been corrected to show that while The Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times reported Bernstein was stabbed, the manner of death has not been confirmed by officials.
ST. LOUIS (AP) - The Latest on Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens' admission that he had an extramarital affair (all times local):

2:30 p.m.

Some Republican lawmakers are asking Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens to resign in response to an extramarital affair he had and more lurid allegations against him.

FILE - In this Jan. 10, 2018, file photo, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens delivers the annual State of the State address to a joint session of the House and Senate in Jefferson City, Mo. Greitens is delaying a planned tour to talk about his tax change proposals after admitting to having an extramarital affair. The Republican's spokesman, Parker Briden, said Monday, Jan. 15, that the governor will still unveil his policy goals this week, but that he's delaying a promotional tour. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

Reps. Marsha Haefner and Steve Cookson on Tuesday said the governor should step down.

Greitens acknowledged being "unfaithful" in his marriage following a report last week by St. Louis television station KMOV about his affair with a woman in 2015.

Greitens has denied other allegations against him, including claims that he threatened to release photos of her if she spoke about the affair. The woman's attorneys say she wants the media and public to leave her alone.

Haefner said in a statement that many lawmakers now do not trust or support Greitens. She says he's no longer fit for office.

____

2:05 p.m.

An attorney who works in the office of Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens reached out to a suburban St. Louis attorney on a fact-finding mission hours before news of the governor's extramarital affair broke.

Attorney Al Watkins on Tuesday provided The Associated Press with audio of the call from Lucinda Luetkemeyer, general counsel in the governor's office, that occurred Jan. 10. Hours later, KMOV-TV reported details of Greitens' affair with a St. Louis woman in 2015, when the Republican was preparing to run for governor.

Watkins says it is concerning Luetkemeyer was doing "damage control" while on the state payroll, even as the governor himself has called the affair a private matter.

Luetkemeyer says in an email she didn't know then if the allegations involved Greitens' personal life or "official duties."
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The Trump administration on Tuesday appealed a judge's ruling temporarily blocking its decision to end protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants and announced plans to seek a U.S. Supreme Court review even before an appeals court issues a decision.

Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice said in a court filing that they were appealing the Jan. 9 ruling by a federal judge preventing President Donald Trump from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The appeal was filed with the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a separate news release, the agency said it planned to file documents seeking a review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement that it defied "law and common sense" for a single federal judge to decide the DACA issue.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in his Jan. 9 ruling said lawyers in favor of DACA clearly demonstrated that the young immigrants "were likely to suffer serious, irreparable harm" without court action. The judge also said the lawyers have a strong chance of succeeding at trial.

He granted a request by California and other plaintiffs for a preliminary injunction against the administration while lawsuits challenging its DACA decision play out in court. Alsup also rejected the administration's request to dismiss the lawsuits.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement Tuesday that he was "confident the appellate courts will see the logic and justice behind the district court's issuance of the preliminary injunction."

DACA has protected about 800,000 people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children or came with families who overstayed visas. The program includes hundreds of thousands of college-age students.

Sessions announced in September that DACA would be phased out, saying President Barack Obama had exceeded his authority when he implemented it in 2012.

Efforts in Congress to reach a deal to protect DACA recipients appear to have gotten more complicated in the wake of Trump's use of a vulgarity during a meeting with lawmakers last week to discuss an immigration proposal.
DETROIT (AP) - Japanese vehicle brands are exploring new design ideas - and figuring out what sets them apart from their U.S. and European rivals - with new prototype vehicles.

Nissan, Infiniti and Lexus are all unveiling new concept cars at the Detroit auto show, which opens to the public Saturday.

Concepts are used to test ideas and see how show visitors react. Some elements are glamorous but impractical, with sharply angled headlights or pencil-thin side mirrors that will never actually end up on a production vehicle. But other elements from concept cars do make it onto the road. Lexus's gaping spindle grilles, now a feature on the automaker's vehicles, were introduced in 2011 on the LF-Gh concept car.

FILE- In a Jan. 5, 2018, file photo, the Lexus LF-1 Limitless concept vehicle is presented at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Japanese vehicle brands are exploring new design ideas, and figuring out what sets them apart from their U.S. and European rivals, with new prototype vehicles. Nissan, Infiniti and Lexus are all unveiling new concept cars at the Detroit auto show, which opens to the public, Saturday, Jan. 20. (AP Photo/Tony Ding, File)

"Maybe they don't develop that concept per se, but it makes a statement about where the brand is going," says Michelle Krebs, an executive analyst with the car buying site Autotrader.com.

This year's auto show concepts differ in many ways, but they're striving for one thing: simplicity. They all have serene interiors with real wood and minimal distractions. Karim Habib, Infiniti's executive design director, says designers are reacting to all the visual stimulation in the world.

"It is our intention to be an antidote to that," he said.

Here are some details on the concept cars at the show:

INFINITI Q INSPIRATION: The sleek sedan from Nissan Motor Co.'s luxury Infiniti brand explores how design will change as it moves to compact but powerful variable compression ratio engines. Karim Habib, Infiniti's executive design director, said the smaller engine allows for a shorter hood and a bigger passenger cabin than Infiniti's previous models. The exterior is bold and deceptively simple; there are few lines, but they're deeply etched into the surface so the curves shift as the viewer moves around the vehicle. At first glance, it's hard to see the grille, which is made of twisted metal painted the same color as the car. Inside, there are subtle details, like the traditional Japanese fabric made with gold rice paper that's tucked under the door handles. Each passenger has a touchscreen that offers guided meditation to reduce stress. Habib says the interior is meant to reflect Japan's tradition of polite, generous hospitality. Habib says elements from the Q Inspiration will eventually make it into production vehicles.

LEXUS LF-1 LIMITLESS: Vehicle brands have always had so-called flagship sedans, the big cars in the lineup that set the tone for all the others. Lexus, which invented the luxury crossover 20 years ago with the RX 300, is now playing with the idea of a flagship crossover SUV. The LF-1 is built so it can be powered by a fuel cell, a hybrid system, gasoline or a battery. By 2025, Lexus says, all of its models will have one of those options available. The LF-1 was designed in California but took its inspiration from a traditional Japanese sword, imagining smooth molten metal flowing into a solid, chiseled form. Inside, knobs and buttons are replaced by motion-activated controls and a wide, unobstructed dashboard. Lexus General Manager Jeff Bracken says Toyota Motor Corp.'s luxury Lexus brand will decide whether to build a flagship crossover based on customer and dealer response to the concept.

NISSAN XMOTION: Nissan Motor Co.'s XMotion - pronounced "cross motion" - differs from the Infiniti and Lexus concepts in exterior styling; instead of spare, undulating designs, the Xmotion is solid, square and blocky. It's ready for rugged use, with all-terrain tires and a retractable rooftop cargo box. But Alfonso Albaisa, Nissan's global design director, said the tough exterior protects the soft, cocoon-like interior. The long center console, which runs from the front to the rear seats, is made of cedar and uses a traditional Japanese architectural wood joinery technique. Cedar is also used for slats below the dashboard, which are meant to convey the sturdy "bones" of the vehicle. Nissan says the XMotion will serve as a blueprint for the company's SUVs and eventual autonomous shared vehicles.

FILE - In a Jan. 15, 2018, file photo, the Nissan Xmotion concept vehicle is unveiled during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Japanese vehicle brands are exploring new design ideas, and figuring out what sets them apart from their U.S. and European rivals, with new prototype vehicles. Nissan, Infiniti and Lexus are all unveiling new concept cars at the Detroit auto show, which opens to the public, Saturday, Jan. 20. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Arkansas lawmakers recommended regulators move forward Tuesday with efforts to ban an herbicide that farmers in several states say has drifted onto their crops and caused damage, advancing the prohibition despite a lawsuit by a maker of the weed killer.

A legislative subcommittee supported the state Plant Board's proposal to ban the use of dicamba from April 16 through Oct. 31. The proposed ban is scheduled to go before the Legislative Council, the Legislature's main governing body when lawmakers aren't in session, for a final vote on Friday.

The Plant Board earlier this month stood by the proposed ban after lawmakers urged the panel to consider revising the proposal.

Dicamba has been around for decades, but problems arose over the past couple of years as farmers began to use it to kill invasive weeds in soybean and cotton fields where specially engineered seeds had been planted to resist the herbicide. Because it can easily evaporate after being applied, the chemical sometimes settles on neighboring fields planted with seeds that are not resistant to dicamba.

Lawmakers endorsed the ban after hearing from farmers who have been sharply divided over the restriction. The Plant Board last year approved a temporary ban on the herbicide's sale and use, and has received nearly 1,000 complaints about dicamba. Farmers have also complained about dicamba causing damage to their crops in other states, including Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Tennessee.

"We are only asking for a pause in this until we get our hands around this and figure out what we can do," David Wildy, a farmer from east Arkansas, told the panel. "We can't allow this to happen again."

Opponents of the ban said it would put Arkansas at a competitive disadvantage with other states that haven't gone as far in restricting the weed killer.

"Give the farmers in this state an opportunity to compete with the rest of the U.S.," said Joe Mencer, a soybean farmer from southeast Arkansas.

Sen. Bill Sample, the Legislative Council's co-chairman, said he backed the ban even though he had initially asked the board to reconsider its proposal.

"I was satisfied that the science was proven," the Republican lawmaker said.

Monsanto, which makes dicamba, has filed a lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court challenging the ban and claiming the Plant Board exceeded its authority in prohibiting the weed killer. A hearing is scheduled next month in the Missouri-based company's lawsuit, which seeks to block the state from enforcing the ban.

"This vote would put Arkansas farmers at a serious disadvantage and we ask the executive committee to set this right for growers. We will continue to pursue our legal challenge. We will continue to stand with Arkansas growers who need new tools for weed control," Scott Partridge, Monsanto's vice president of global strategy, said in a statement.

___

Follow Andrew DeMillo on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ademillo
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A former CIA officer has been arrested and charged with illegally retaining classified records, including names and phone numbers of covert CIA assets.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, was arrested Monday night after arriving at JFK International Airport. He made an initial appearance Tuesday in federal court in New York, but will face charges in northern Virginia, where the CIA is located.

According to court documents, Lee, a Hong Kong resident, served in the CIA from 1994 to 2007 as a case officer. He worked in a variety of overseas offices and was trained in surveillance detection, recruiting and handlings assets and handling classified material, among other things.

A court affidavit states that in 2012, after Lee had left the CIA, he traveled from Hong Kong with his family to northern Virginia, where he lived from 2012 to 2013. When he flew to Virginia, for reasons that are not explained, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Lee's luggage and hotel room. Agents found two small books with handwritten notes containing names and numbers of covert CIA employees and locations of covert facilities, according to the affidavit.

A CIA review of the information in the books found information at Secret and Top Secret levels of classification, according to the affidavit.

The eight-page FBI affidavit makes no allegations of espionage against Lee, only alleging illegal retention of documents. Any conviction on that offense carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

The affidavit indicates Lee was interviewed five times by FBI agents in 2013, but never disclosed that he possessed the books.

Court records do not list an attorney for Lee.

Dean Boyd, a CIA spokesman, declined comment on the case Tuesday, citing Lee's ongoing prosecution.

Court records indicate Lee is a naturalized U.S. citizen and an Army veteran.
Police are investigating charges against others in connection with the Las Vegas massacre despite gunman Stephen Paddock (pictured) who killed 58 people being dead

Police are investigating charges against others in connection with the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, even though the gunman responsible for killing 58 people is dead, a lawyer for Las Vegas police told a judge Tuesday.

Attorney Nicholas Crosby did not identify new evidence or suspects but said charges might be possible depending on the results of an ongoing investigation.

Sheriff Joe Lombardo and the FBI have said they believe Stephen Paddock acted alone to carry out the October 1 shooting that also injured hundreds before killing himself.

'Without naming names, there are potential charges against others as a result of the ongoing investigation?' Clark County District Court Judge Elissa Cadish asked Crosby as he argued to keep police search-warrant records sealed.

'Yes,' said Crosby, who represents the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, which Lombardo leads. 'There are charges being investigated.'

Crosby told the judge he had no information that the charges pertained to the 'actual murders'.

The attorney declined outside court to say whom he referred to.

Officer Laura Meltzer, a Las Vegas police spokeswoman, said the department is 'investigating possible criminal charges related to items discovered during the service of search warrants.'

She did not name a suspect and said she could not specify the type of charges or what was found without compromising the investigation.

Sheriff Joe Lombardo and the FBI have said they believe Stephen Paddock acted alone to carry out the October 1 shooting that also injured hundreds before killing himself

Attorney Nicholas Crosby did not identify new evidence or suspects but said charges might be possible depending on the results of an ongoing investigation. Paddock opened fire from the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas

FBI spokeswoman Sandra Breault in Las Vegas declined to comment.

Federal court documents made public Friday showed that as of October 6, the FBI considered Paddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, 'the most likely person who aided or abetted Stephen Paddock'.

Danley, who was in the Philippines during the shooting, was questioned by the FBI after returning to the US Lombardo and Aaron Rouse, FBI agent in charge in Las Vegas, said in October that Danley was not a suspect.

Federal court documents made public Friday showed that as of October 6, the FBI considered Paddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, 'the most likely person who aided or abetted Stephen Paddock'

An FBI spokeswoman said last week that she could not comment about Danley.

Danley's lawyer, Matthew Lombard in Los Angeles, did not immediately respond to telephone and email messages Tuesday.

On Tuesday, the judge did not order the Vegas police records released as requested by a lawyer for media organizations, including The Associated Press.

Cadish said she might review the documents privately before making them public.

'It only makes sense that a party who is arguing that something has to be kept secret can't fully explain in public why it has to be kept secret,' she said.

Media companies want the judge to release affidavits showing what police told state judges to obtain search warrants immediately after identifying Paddock as the man who opened fire from a 32nd-floor suite of a casino-hotel into a country music festival crowd below.

Officials have not said and records released so far don't show what motivated the 64-year-old high-stakes gambler to kill.

'Paddock planned the attack meticulously and took many methodical steps to avoid detection of his plot and to thwart the eventual law enforcement investigation that would follow' the shooting, one federal document said.

A US judge on Friday unsealed more than 300 pages of FBI warrant records justifying searches of Paddock's properties in Reno and Mesquite, Nevada, along with vehicles and multiple email, Facebook and other internet accounts belonging to Paddock and Danley.

Danley told investigators that they would find her fingerprints on bullets used during the attack because she would sometimes help Paddock load high-volume ammunition magazines, according to the FBI records.

Other records showed that Danley received a wire transfer of money from Paddock while she was in the Philippines and that Danley deleted her Facebook account in the hours immediately after the shooting.

Concertgoers run for their lives on the night of the horrific shooting during the Route 91 Harvest country music festival
A heroic US Army dog who met wartime prime minister Winston Churchill during his military duties in the Second World War has been posthumously awarded the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross.

Chips, a Husky, German Shepherd-cross, was recognised with a PDSA Dickin Medal for protecting the lives of his platoon during beach landings when the British and Americans invaded Sicily in July 1943.

During the US-led mission, called Operation Husky, as Chips and his platoon landed on the shore at dawn they immediately came under fire from a machine gun nest.

But, as the soldiers headed for cover, Chips escaped from his lead and ran towards the line of fire which appeared to be coming out of a hut.

Chips will be posthumously awarded the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross

His handler, Private John Rowell, and the rest of the platoon watched as Chips entered the shack and the firing stopped.

One of the enemy soldiers then appeared with the dog at his throat, and Chips also grabbed the machine gun by the barrel and pulled it off its mount  enabling them to push forward. Chips suffered scalp wounds and powder burns as a result.

PDSA director general Jan McLoughlin said Chips is a very deserving, heroic dog who was recruited from family life in 1942, trained up and then deployed during the Second World War and undoubtedly saved military lives.

It has taken over seven decades but Chips can now finally take his place in the history books as one of the most heroic dogs to serve with the US Army, she said.

US military working dog Ayron, who received the award on behalf of Chips, with Chips' former owner John Wren

As well as his efforts on the battlefield, Chips served as sentry at the Casablanca Conference in Morocco in January 1943 when the Allies were still fighting to clear the Germans from North Africa.

This is where Mr Churchill and US president Franklin D Roosevelt mapped out the Allies strategy for the next phase of the war, and is where Chips met both leaders as he undertook his protection duties.

Lieutenant Colonel Alan Throop, of the US Army, said Chips, soon after his heroic actions, was recommended for a distinguished service cross, and a silver star and purple heart were also later approved.

But because at the time it wasnt US military policy to allow animals to get awards, it was rescinded, he told the Press Association.

It is important that Chips is recognised for his actions now, so many decades later, for his gallantry.

Chips protected his platoon during beach landings in July 1943

Lt Col Throop, who is based in the UK at Northwood Headquarters, said it was a privilege to represent Chips and the US Army at the ceremony, and that military dogs continue to play a vital role today.

The medal was first introduced in 1943 by Maria Dickin, the founder of the UKs leading veterinary charity the PDSA, and is a large bronze medallion bearing the words for gallantry and we also serve.

It was awarded at the Churchill War Rooms in London on Monday, during the 75th anniversary of the Casablanca Conference, and was worn on behalf of Chips by US Air Force dog Ayron, who is based at RAF Lakenheath.

John Wren, whose father donated Chips to the war effort, was aged just four when the family dog returned home, a day he said he can remember vividly.

The 76-year-old, who made the trip from his home in Long Island, New York, especially for the medal presentation, said Chips was a big dog, and that he remembers once being pulled on a sledge by him.

A veteran of the Vietnam War, Mr Wren said the Dickin Medal means a lot to him and his family, and added: He is finally getting good recognition of his efforts.

If you look at what he did, it was pretty unbelievable.

The Dickin Medal is the highest award any animal in the world can achieve while serving in military conflict, with Chips becoming the 70th recipient.
Construction giant Carillion asked the Government to provide funds of 20 million to help it secure more money from the banks and avoid going into liquidation, it has been claimed.

Talks were held throughout the weekend between Government ministers and company officials in a bid to keep Carillion in business, but they broke up on Sunday evening without a deal.

Sources told the Press Association that Carillion wanted 20 million to help it secure more funds from banks, a far lower figure than had been previously speculated, but ministers were unwilling to offer financial support.

The Cabinet Office decline to comment.

Carillions fall into compulsory liquidation has put thousands of jobs at risk, but the Government said staff should go to work and would continue to be paid.

Many small firms are also waiting for Carillion to pay bills going back several months.

Prime Minister Theresa Mays official spokesman said that, initially, the Government will be paying staff through the Official Receiver to ensure that public services continue to run as normal.

He said these payments will be the same as would have been provided to Carillion had they been able to continue, adding that there would be some additional burden on the taxpayer from the cost of the receiver.

How Carillions share price fell. Infographic from PA Graphics.

Carillion is understood to have public sector or public/private partnership contracts worth 1.7 billion, including providing school dinners, cleaning and catering at NHS hospitals, construction work on rail projects such as HS2 and maintaining 50,000 Army base homes for the Ministry of Defence.

It has seen its shares price plunge more than 70% in the past six months after making a string of profit warnings and breaching its financial covenants.

Shares in Britains second biggest construction firm were suspended after it was announced that the Official Receiver and accountancy giant PwC would oversee a liquidation process.

The group, which employs around 20,000 British workers, has been struggling under 900 million of debt and a 587 million pension deficit.

Lenders including HSBC, Barclays, Santander and Royal Bank of Scotland are reportedly set to lose an estimated 2 billion as a result of the collapse.

Carillion chairman Philip Green said: This is a very sad day for Carillion, for our colleagues, suppliers and customers that we have been proud to serve over many years.

The groups demise has posed questions as to why Carillion continued to receive Government contracts despite issuing a number of profit warnings.

2016 Carillion annual report says dividend has increased in each of 16 years since formation of company; Is this really acceptable alongside a pension fund deficit over half a billion pounds?  Steve Webb (@stevewebb1) January 15, 2018

Asked whether it had been a mistake to continue awarding contracts to Carillion, the PMs spokesman said: Since July, we have kept a very close eye on this, but of course if there are lessons which can be learned, they will be.

The receiver will carry out a full investigation and we will look at the findings.

Concerns have also centred on former Carillion chief executive Richard Howson, who pocketed 1.5 million in salary, bonuses and pension payments during 2016.

As part of his departure deal, Carillion agreed to keep paying him a 660,000 salary and 28,000 in benefits until October.

History of Carillion (PA Graphics)

Steve Webb, the former pensions minister, also questioned why the company had increased its dividend payments when it was grappling with a hefty pension deficit.

In a tweet, he wrote: 2016 Carillion annual report says dividend has increased in each of 16 years since formation of company; Is this really acceptable alongside a pension fund deficit over half a billion pounds?

Carillion retirees already receiving their pensions will continue to receive payments, the Government has assured.

However, there are around 27,000 staff involved in its defined benefit schemes which are likely to be transferred to the Pension Protection Fund.

A spokesman from the PPF said: We want to reassure members of Carillions defined benefit pension schemes that their benefits continue to be protected by the PPF and will continue to be protected if or when their scheme enters the PPF assessment period.

HMG has big questions to answer. Why were they awarding contracts to Carillion after the exposure of its problems in July? What contingency planning did they do for the collapse? 20,000 jobs & huge projects at stake! More Brexit-induced Whitehall paralysis & incompetence. https://t.co/dYZ4XUUWgn  Andrew Adonis (@Andrew_Adonis) January 15, 2018

Unions have called for urgent reassurances over the jobs, pay and pensions of thousands of workers following the disastrous news.

Rail, Maritime and Transport union general secretary Mick Cash said: The blame for this lies squarely with the Government who are obsessed with outsourcing key works to these high-risk private enterprises.

Jim Kennedy, the Unite unions national officer for local government, said a public inquiry was needed to answer questions about Carillions conduct and the Governments decision to award it contracts.

#Carillion: Tens of thousands of jobs at risk, along with public services and major infrastructure projects. Govt must step in.



TUC statement: https://t.co/y84m4fD1GR  TUC Press Office (@TUCnews) January 14, 2018

Cabinet Office Minister David Lidington said it was regrettable that Carillion could not find suitable financing options, but taxpayers could not be expected to bail out a private sector company.

It comes after the Financial Conduct Authority announced earlier this month that it had launched an investigation into the timeliness and content of announcements made by Carillion between December 7 2016 and July 10 2017.

Shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey said there were extreme concerns about the Governments handling of the situation and said Whitehall should take Carillion contracts back in-house.
Keeping the UK within the single market is the only option that makes sense if Brexit is to go ahead, Nicola Sturgeon said, as she published a new report which claimed leaving the European Union (EU) without a deal could wipe 12.7 billion a year from Scotlands economy.

If the UK were forced to revert to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules to govern relationships with Europe, Scotlands GDP would be 8.5% lower by 2030  the equivalent of about 2,300 for every person living north of the border, according to the research.

Over the same period, real disposable income would fall by 9.6% while investment in business could be 10.2% lower.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon launches the research paper at the University of Edinburgh

The figures, in a new report from the Scottish Government on the impact of different Brexit outcomes, present new evidence of the importance of single market membership, Ms Sturgeon said.

The First Minister claimed the research was more detailed and extensive than anything so far provided by the UK Government, adding it showed keeping Britain in the single market after leaving the EU to be the least damaging option by far.

Under this scenario, GDP would fall 2.7% by 2030  the equivalent to 4 billion or just under 700 per head of population  according to the research.

Meanwhile, disposable income would go down by 1.4%, with business investment expected to be just under 3% lower.

Ms Sturgeon said: It is clear from these figures that staying in the single market does not insulate us from the costs of leaving the EU but it will minimise those costs.

Indeed, compared to a hard Brexit, staying in the single market will benefit us to the tune of 1,600 per head.

Speaking in Edinburgh, the First Minister insisted: If Brexit is to proceed, staying in the single market is the only option that makes sense.

The paper was published as the SNP and other opposition parties ramped up their campaign against a so-called hard Brexit, with Labour facing pressure to join.

Ms Sturgeon insisted it is time now to make that case for continued membership of the single market even more loudly than before as she criticised Jeremy Corbyn for his stance.

The UK Labour leader said on Sunday that being in the single market is dependent on membership of the European Union.

The SNP leader said: Either Jeremy Corbyn is still misunderstanding the position of the single market, which given how often it has been pointed out to him cant possibly be the case, or he is now trying to deliberately mislead people with this line that you cannot be in the single market if youre not in the EU. Norway stands as the living proof that that is just not the case.

Some Tories support a softer Brexit with the UK staying in the single market, Ms Sturgeon said, adding there could be majority support for this across the UK.

Prime Minister Theresa Mays official spokesman said: The Prime Minister has made clear her commitment to getting a good deal which serves the interests of all parts of the United Kingdom, and that we are confident of doing so.

We have been clear that we are carrying out extensive preparations in relation to delivering Brexit and the will of the British people.
As a professor at a Catholic university in Bismarck, Peter Huff said it's important for students to understand how Martin Luther King Jr. operated.

Huff, a professor of theology at the University of Mary, spent the latter part of his Abrahamic religious traditions class on Monday to talk with his students about King and what they know about the iconic man.

But beyond teaching about King on MLK Day, Huff devotes several days of the year to educate students on the Baptist minister: his life, his words and, more importantly, how he applied the basics of Christian ethics to an unjust society.

"(Students) have fragments of a story of a major chapter in American history, just fragments of it, and I think it's a disservice to the people who work so hard to create a more just society, to let that story go simply in fragments," he said.

Huff's interest in King dates back to growing up as a young boy in Atlanta. Huff, now Catholic, was raised in a Baptist church, so he developed what he called a "kinship over racial lines" with the young pastor.

Huff was 10 years old when King was assassinated, and he recalls the next day in school when a classmate made a racist remark about King and something "clicked."

"I think my conscious awakened, maybe for the first time," he said. "I still remember that moment as kind of the beginning of my vocation."

Huff owns a collection of King's complete works, including his speeches, sermons, even his school papers. A whole row of his extensive book collection in his office is devoted to King.

Huff will tell his students about how King received a C grade in a public speaking class in college, letting them know that even if you cannot do well in something, you can improve.

"I take particular interest in him as a thinker; we think of him as an activist, which he certainly was, but he was a really sophisticated theologian," he said. "I tell my students this is what you can do with a theology degree: Change the world."

It's critical for students to also understand how King, particularly, was a Christian thinker, he said.

"(King isn't) just taking secular principles and applying them to society, but he's saying, 'Let's take the actual teachings of Jesus and apply them to society in a way that everyone can benefit," Huff said.

Huff's class was not the only space where University of Mary students learned about King's teaching on Monday. Izabella Fredericksen, a junior, said, in one of her classes, she and classmates opened with a prayer stemming from King's famous, "I Have a Dream" speech.

"I remember this one particular sentence like, it does not matter white, black, yellow, green, we all have life and its important, and we have integrity and dignity," she said. "That was just inspiring because so many years have passed since that moment, and to be reminded of it and how far weve come as a country and the relationships that weve built, its nice to be reminded of it and to thank Dr. King for his influence."

Huff also was selected to lead a MLK Day service Monday night at Trinity Lutheran Church in Bismarck. The event was sponsored by the North Dakota Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission, and it was supposed to feature the acclaimed religious historian Albert Raboteau, of Princeton University, but the speaker canceled due to being sick.

Huff on Monday night shared his experience growing up with King, his own transformation and why we need King.

King shines a light on disparities, even today, he said.

"Certainly theres been good change  all sorts of things are possible now that we're not in 1968 when he was assassinated  but still theres ugly racism. Sometimes its under a sugar coating of  if youre in the Midwest, we call it 'nice'  but theres still inequality, still injustice and still many institutions that need to be changed," Huff said.
When Sinn Feins chairman said Barry McElduffs behaviour was indefensible, it was clear the West Tyrone MP was under serious pressure.

He faced a mounting chorus of criticism from relatives of the 10 Kingsmill dead, other victims groups, unionists and nationalists.

Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney attacked his really, really stupid and insensitive actions.

Sinn Fein MP Barry McElduff has resigned after posting a picture on Twitter of him with a Kingsmill loaf (Barry McElduff/Twitter/PA)

Last week, John ODowd, a former Sinn Fein minister at Stormont, said the mass killing by republicans in 1976 was shameful and purely sectarian.

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

The party may have hoped that suspending Mr McElduff for three months would defuse the row.

But the pressure mounted as he faced official complaints to Parliament.

He clung on for a few more days before announcing his resignation on Monday.

The married father-of-three, 51, fell foul of what his own party said was inexcusable behaviour after tweeting a video posing with a Kingsmill loaf on the 42nd anniversary of the massacre of the same name.

Ten innocent Protestant workmen were killed in the sectarian shooting by republicans on a rural road in South Armagh.

Mr McElduff apologised and said he did not realise there could be a

possible link between the bread brand and the anniversary.

The condemnation of Barry McElduff`s deeply offensive actions has come from across the community. If a candidate emerges that allows cross-community support to coalesce around, it would send a strong message that this type of behaviour will not be tolerated. pic.twitter.com/nzDqjnHKrB  Ulster Unionist (@uuponline) January 15, 2018

He once said there should be no hierarchy of victims of the Northern Ireland conflict.

As a schoolboy he took days off to attend the 1981 funerals of IRA hunger strikers.

Sinn Feins West Tyrone MP has defended the right of republicans to remember their own victims of violence or patriot dead, including two IRA men killed by their own bomb in his native Co Tyrone.

He added previously: We all should have the opportunity to remember our dead.

Mr McElduff, who lives in the village of Carrickmore in Co Tyrone, has been steeped in republicanism from a young age and told of his pride at taking the day off school to attend the funeral of IRA hunger striker Raymond McCreesh.

He said: The level of his commitment and sacrifice is difficult to comprehend.

After a local council controversially named a play park after McCreesh, Mr McElduff said he was a hero.

He said: There are Irish people in possession of Nobel Prizes for their various contributions.

As far as I am concerned, Raymond McCreesh would be more deserving of international recognition than many of the past recipients.
Typhoon jets from RAF Lossiemouth have intercepted two Russian long-range bombers which were approaching the UK.

The quick reaction alert (QRA) aircraft took off in response to the two Tupolev TU-160 Blackjack bombers as they approached to within less than 50 miles of the UK.

The fighters escorted the Russian aircraft north away from the UK and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said that at no point did the Blackjacks enter British sovereign airspace.

RAF Typhoons were scrambled (Danny Lawson/PA)

At their closest the Russian aircraft were within 30 nautical miles (34.5 miles) of the UKs sovereign airspace, the MoD said  around 40 nautical miles (46 miles) from British soil.

A Royal Air Force spokesman said: QRA Typhoon from RAF Lossiemouth scrambled to monitor and subsequently intercept two Blackjack bombers approaching the UK area of interest. At no point did the Russian aircraft enter sovereign UK airspace   Tin Man (@DDCRAFPO) January 15, 2018

Officials would not confirm how many Typhoons were involved in the operation.

The fighters were supported by a Voyager air-to-air tanker.

A RAF spokesman said: We can confirm that Quick Reaction Alert (QRA)Typhoon aircraft from RAF Lossiemouth scrambled to monitor two Blackjack bombers approaching the UK area of interest.

The Russian aircraft were initially monitored by a variety of friendly nation fighters and subsequently intercepted by the RAF in the North Sea.

At no point did the Russian aircraft enter sovereign UK airspace.

Russian military activity near the UK in recent months has seen a series of planes scrambled and warships diverted to monitor naval vessels.

On January 8 it was reported HMS Westminster, a Portsmouth-based Type 23 frigate, was tasked to intercept two of Vladimir Putins warships and two supporting vessels as they passed close to UK waters.
At least 38 people have died after two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a busy street market in central Baghdad.

The back-to-back explosions, which left another 105 people injured, mark the deadliest attack since last months declaration of victory over the Islamic State group, Iraqi health and police officials said.

The bombings came just two days after a suicide bomber struck a police checkpoint in northern Baghdad, killing eight people there.

No group has so far claimed responsibility for either attack but they bore all the hallmarks of IS, which has claimed many such attacks in the past.

Around 105 people were injured (AP)

The bombers struck during Monday rush hour in the citys Tayran Square, which is usually crowded by labourers seeking work.

Ambulances rushed to the scene as security forces sealed off the area with yellow tape amid scenes of carnage.

The twin explosions shocked residents in the Iraqi capital because large-scale attacks had decreased significantly in Baghdad and other parts of country since security forces retook nearly all territory once held by IS militants.

Iraqi parliament speaker Salim al-Jabouri denounced the attack as a cowardly act against innocent people and called on the government to take all necessary security measures.

Iraqi and US officials have warned that IS would continue with insurgent-style attacks even after the Iraqi military and US-led coalition succeeded in uprooting IS across the country.

The cost of victory has been nearly incalculable as the three years of war against IS devastated much of northern and western Iraq  roughly a third of the country  where Islamic State militants had held most of the territory.
Plans to repatriate around 100,000 Rohingya Muslims to Burma after they fled horrific violence in the state are a matter of grave concern, a Commons committee has said.

MPs raised fears for the safety of the refugees as they warned rape and sexual violence remain weapons of war used by the Burmese military.

The crisis also fuels the prospect of the area becoming a powder-keg of radicalisation, according to the International Development Committee.

Fatema, 35, a Rohingya refugee who fled to a refugee camp after escaping when the military started firing at people in her village in Burma (DFID/PA)

More than 650,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh following a textbook example of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Burmese security forces in 2017, MPs said.

Repatriation of around 100,000 people is expected to begin later this month but the committee said it remains unclear whether the Rohingya involved will be volunteers, what their legal status will be and what arrangements will be put in place to protect their safety.

As it stands, this is a matter of grave concern to us, the report states.

MPs warned that a vicious cycle of resentment and revenge is likely after Burmese perpetrators of murder, rape, assault, arson in the conflict appear to have got away with it.

The Burmese Army continues to use rape as a weapon but the UK government has appeared reluctant to commit its full specialist team on sexual violence to help, it found.

Committee chairman Stephen Twigg said: The UK has 70 experts ready to deploy to Bangladesh to assist with this situation and yet we havent sent them.

It is unacceptable that it is taking the UK so long to send any specialist resources on sexual violence to advise on the experiences of the Rohingya in Rakhine State. 

Since 1982, the minority group has been stateless and are considered non-citizens by the Burmese authorities, following a law which denied they were native to the south east Asian country.

But the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation, a representative group based in the UK, claims the Rohingya have lived in Arakan (Rakhine State), western Burma, from time immemorial or roughly the 8th century.

Mr Twigg added: We are going to have to work much harder to protect populations from threats and humanitarian crises.

For decades, the people in Rakhine State endured discrimination, marginalisation and abuse.

The Rohingya have paid a heavy price for the lack of consensus amongst the international community on how and when to decide to act effectively. We cannot fail them again.

Kate Allen, Amnestys UK Director, who is visiting the Rohingya camps in Coxs Bazar, Bangladesh, said: MPs are right to express concern about the proposed returns of Rohingya to Myanmar (Burma), we share their alarm.

Amnesty has declared whats happening in Myanmar to be apartheid  both the civilian and military authorities in Myanmar need to dismantle that, before any of its victims can be expected to decide whether to return.

If Rohingya people do choose to go back to Rakhine State where they faced such appalling discrimination and violence, then Amnesty and other monitors must be allowed access.

A Government spokeswoman said Britain has led the international response, providing lifesaving aid to victims, calling on the Burmese military to halt violence and pushing other countries for support.

She added: As the International Development Secretary has said today and when she visited Bangladesh in November, the conditions for a safe, voluntary and dignified return of Rohingya people to Burma are a long way from being met. We continue to push for returns to be in line with UN principles and for international oversight on both sides of the border.
Jose Mourinho admits Manchester United have a chance of signing Alexis Sanchez after Manchester City pulled out of the race for the Arsenal forward.

Sanchez seemed certain to join the Premier League leaders this month but City decided to end their interest in the Chile international on Monday because of the costs involved.

It is understood that two other clubs, thought to be Manchester United and Chelsea, are prepared to pay more than City  in terms of transfer fee, wages and other costs.



Jose Mourinho is unsure if Alexis Sanchez will join Manchester United (Martin Rickett/PA)

United boss Mourinho refused to be drawn too much on the subject of the 29-year-old after his sides 3-0 win over Stoke but says he is relaxed about the transfer saga.

When asked how confident he was of being able to bring Sanchez in this month, Mourinho said: Not confident, but also not unconfident.

Just relaxed, and with the feeling that he is an Arsenal player, with the feeling that he can stay there, but also with the feeling that he can move, and if he moves, I think we have a chance.

I think most probably a player like him has other big clubs interested. Who knows? I think him, (Arsenal manager Arsene) Wenger, (Arsenal chief executive Ivan) Gazidis  I think they are the ones that know really what is going to happen.



Henrikh Mkhitaryan did not feature in the squad for Manchester United (Martin Rickett/PA)

Mourinho went on to reveal that Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who was left out of the United squad against the Potters, could be used as a makeweight in a potential agreement for Sanchez.

The Portuguese said: I didnt select him today because I wanted players fully focused. I understand that with so much talk and so much speculation, it is not easy for Mkhitaryan to play, to play at home, with this feeling that (it) can happen, maybe it doesnt happen.

So I prefer to protect him and protect the situation, and in the end of the transfer market, if he stays here, he is a very good player. Lets see what is going to happen.

City went close to signing the Chile forward in August after having a bid of 55million plus 5million in add-ons accepted but a deal could not be completed as Arsenal did not find a replacement.

City were not prepared to get into a bidding war with other clubs for Sanchez. Sanchez did want to join City, they believe, but his priority is simply to leave Arsenal. Man Utd & Chelsea thought to be other clubs interested #MCFC  Andy Hampson (@andyhampson) January 15, 2018

An injury to Gabriel Jesus reignited the potential of a deal but City were not prepared to pay a transfer fee of more than 20million, while Arsenal were thought to want 35million.

That opened the way for other clubs to enter the race to sign the wantaway player, with Chelsea the latest club reported to be in contention.

City were convinced that Sanchez did want to join them but it appears his desire to leave Arsenal this month now outweighs that.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said after his sides loss to Bournemouth on Sunday that a deal for Sanchez could be concluded within 48 hours.
Having breast reconstruction immediately following a mastectomy does not delay chemotherapy, a new study has found.

Concerns have been raised that immediate reconstructive surgery could delay chemo or radiotherapy.

But a new study  to be presented to the UK Interdisciplinary Breast Cancer Symposium, hosted by the charity Breast Cancer Now  found that further treatment for breast cancer was not delayed among a group of women studied.

Data was examined on more than 2,500 women from the UK and Europe who needed a mastectomy. (Rui Vieira/PA)

However, researchers found that women who had immediate breast reconstruction surgery were more likely to suffer complications requiring readmission to hospital in the first six weeks after treatment.

Did you know 1 in 8 women in the UK will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime? Find out more stats: http://t.co/QuRJ6DAq  Breast Cancer Now (@BCCare) November 15, 2012

The study, led by Dr Shelley Potter from the University of Bristol and Professor Chris Holcombe from the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, examined data on more than 2,500 women from the UK and Europe who needed a mastectomy, of which, 1,000 had immediate breast reconstruction.

Overall, further chemotherapy or radiotherapy was needed by almost half of patients and researchers did not find a significant delay in the time to start additional treatment between those who had reconstruction or not.

But patients who had an immediate reconstruction were found to be significantly more likely to require readmission to hospital or re-operation in the first six weeks following their surgery.

Breast Cancer Now estimates that of the 17,200 women who undergo a mastectomy following a breast cancer diagnosis each year in the UK  over 3,500 of these patients opt to have immediate reconstruction,
Up to one million defective tumble dryers are potential fire hazards in British homes due to manufacturer Whirlpools inadequate response to the discovery of a defect, a parliamentary report has found.

The House of Commons Business Committee demanded urgent action from the company to resolve a problem that has led to at least 750 fires since 2004.

And the cross-party committee called on the Government to consider establishing a single National Product Safety Agency, amid fears that cuts have undermined the effectiveness of local trading standards agencies.

Handout photo taken with permission from the Twitter feed of Liam Twomey of a blaze at Bush Court, Shepherds Bush Green, London, believed to have been caused by a faulty tumble dryer. (Liam Twomey/PA)

It accused ministers of watering down recommendations for an overhaul of the product recall system put forward in 2016 by an independent review led by Lynn Faulds Wood.

And it called on manufacturers to use safer materials in plastic-backed fridge-freezers, which were linked to 214 fires with 27 serious injuries or fatalities in England in 2015/16 alone.

The committees inquiry into risks from faulty electrical goods was triggered by last years Grenfell Tower tragedy, when 71 people died in a fire thought to have been started by a faulty Hotpoint fridge-freezer.

It found that the number of fires involving faulty electrical appliances in England has remained constant at between 4,300 and 5,000 a year.

In 2015/16 alone, 676 fires in England were caused by tumble dryers, leading to a total of 46 injuries and fatalities.

Whirlpool alerted authorities in 2015 that fires could be caused by fluff catching on a heating element in dryers marketed under its Hotpoint, Indesit, Creda and Proline brands.

The company began a programme of modifying machines in customers homes, initially advising them that they could continue using the tumble dryers while awaiting action.

This advice was withdrawn following a fire in a west London flat caused by an Indesit dryer in 2016.

And a second defect in the door mechanism of some Whirlpool products was blamed for a fire in Llanwrst, north Wales, which killed two men in 2014.

The Commons committee branded Whirlpools response to the defect inadequate, after hearing that only around 50% of an estimated 5.3 million affected dryers have received the necessary modification.

Committee chair Rachel Reeves said: Whirlpools woeful response to the defect in its tumble dryers has caused huge worry to people with these appliances in their homes.

Their delayed and dismissive response to correcting these defects has been inadequate and we call on Whirlpool to resolve issues urgently.

But the company insisted that its ongoing campaign had achieved a resolution rate more than three times the industry average for a product recall, with 1.7 million machines modified and 99.9% of registered customers issues resolved.

After two years of extensive measures to raise awareness to this campaign  including directly contacting four million owners of these appliances  the number of consumers coming forward has fallen sharply, said the company in a statement.

We continue to urge consumers to contact us immediately if they believe they still own an affected appliance. We can assure consumers that they if they contact us now, they can receive a resolution within one week.

Ms Reeves said there was a strong case to replace the fragmented and poorly resourced product safety regime with a single national agency of the kind recommended by Ms Faulds Wood.

The Government must now implement the recommendations of (her) independent review on product safety, which they have been sitting on for nearly two years, she said.

Reductions in funding for local and national trading standards were impacting on effectiveness and making it difficult for consumers to have confidence in the system, said the committee.

The vast majority of councils have cut spending on trading standards, with 20 slashing it by more than 60% and one by 73% between 2010/11 and 2015/16.

The overall trading standards workforce has been reduced by 56% between 2009 and 2016.

Alex Neill, of consumer campaign group Which? said: Despite hundreds of reported fires and numerous reviews, the UKs product safety system is still broken and potentially threatening the lives of millions of consumers.

We have already seen the tragic consequences of companies behaving badly and delays to improving the system. The Government must no longer allow these dangerous products to remain in peoples homes and must bring in immediate reforms.

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: The Governments top priority is to keep people safe and Britains product safety requirements are among the highest in the world, which is why we established the Working Group on Product Safety and Recalls to examine the evidence of Lynn Faulds Woods independent review.

We are considering their recommendations, including the creation of a new national oversight body, and will respond shortly.

We have already taken a number of steps to improve our product safety regime, including upgrading the Governments recalls website to make it clear to the public which white goods are safe to use.
A fundraising page set up to help a British man who was injured as he tried help victims during a deadly knife attack is going viral.

Hassan Zubier, 46, was hailed a hero after he was wounded while trying to save a womans life during the rampage in Finland that left two women dead and six people injured.

The attack in the city of Turku last August resulted in Mr Zubier having to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

A screengrab of Mr Zubiers GoFundMe page (GoFundMe/PA Images)

A GoFundMe page called Hassan Zubiers Medical Fund has raised more than 16,500 euro with donations accelerating over the weekend.

Mr Zubier was born in Dartford, Kent and now lives in Sweden. The page said Mr Zubiers family situation changed radically over one night.

A statement on the page read: Hassan Zubier from Marsta in Sweden was himself attacked when he stood up against the man who attacked innocent victims in Turku, Finland with a knife. He became dependent on a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

The family situation changed radically over one night. With a newborn baby in the family and the stress that Hassans disability implies, much help is needed both practical and financially.

By supporting him and his family, we can show our high regard for his courage and the compassion that he showed when trying to help a dying woman at risk for his own life.

More than 420 people have contributed to the 100,000 euro target in 19 days, most of them in the past 24 hours.

The campaign is trending on the crowdfunding website with around 1,000 shares on Facebook.
A camp to house Rohingya Muslim and Hindu refugees who return from Bangladesh to Burma will be ready by its promised deadline next week.

More than 650,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims fled to Bangladesh since Burmas military launched a brutal crackdown in August following attacks on police posts by a militant group.

Though Burmas army claimed it was a clearance operation against the terrorists, the United Nations, United States and others have said the operations were ethnic cleansing to remove the Rohingya from the country, also known as Myanmar.

A Rohingya boy holds his sibling as they sit on the side of a dirt road at Balukhali refugee camp in Bangladesh (Manish Swarup/AP)

Burma and Bangladesh signed an agreement in November to repatriate Rohingya and set up a working group last month to oversee the repatriation of people who had fled violence in the northern part of Rakhine state in the west of Burma.

Win Myat Aye, the minister of social welfare, relief and resettlement, said Burma was hosting a one-day meeting on Monday with Bangladesh officials in the capital Naypyitaw to discuss the logistics of how many Rohingya will be allowed into Burma and how they will be scrutinised to be placed in the camps.

Officials plan to start the repatriation process from January 23.

Rohingya Muslim women with their children stand in a queue outside a food distribution centre at the camp (Manish Swarup/AP)

We are planning ahead to be able accept the returnees from next week and we are sure that this will be done on time, Win Myat Aye said.

The UN refugee agency said it is not involved in the process but is willing to play a constructive role in the process if allowed, specifically in registering the refugees and helping determining whether they are returning to Burma voluntarily.

Our involvement in the process and our full access to areas of return in Myanmar can help to build confidence for all concerned, including the refugees, said Vivian Tan, UNHCRs senior regional communication officer.



A Rohingya Muslim family carry firewood on their head as they walk towards their tent at Balukhali camp (Manish Swarup/AP)

In the November agreement, Burmas civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, pledged to take measures to halt the outflow of Rohingya to Bangladesh and restore normalcy in the region.

The UN and rights groups have urged the Burmese government to ensure the safe and voluntary return of the Rohingya refugees.

Many have questioned whether Rohingya would return to Burma under the current circumstances.

Japans foreign minister on a visit to the country last week urged Suu Kyis government to guarantee the safe and voluntary return of the refugees.

State-run media in Burma reported on Monday the 124-acre Hla Po Khaung camp will accommodate about 30,000 people in 625 buildings and that at least 100 buildings are to be completed by the end of the month.

It would be the first camp built in the repatriation process.
Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho says he is relaxed about the transfer saga surrounding Alexis Sanchez as Chelsea reportedly emerged as rivals for his signature.

Arsenal forward Sanchez seemed certain to join Manchester City this month but the Premier League leaders decided to end their interest on Monday because of the costs involved.

It is understood that two other clubs, thought to be Manchester United and Chelsea, are prepared to pay more than City  in terms of transfer fee, wages and other costs.

City were not prepared to get into a bidding war with other clubs for Sanchez. Sanchez did want to join City, they believe, but his priority is simply to leave Arsenal. Man Utd & Chelsea thought to be other clubs interested #MCFC  Andy Hampson (@andyhampson) January 15, 2018

Mourinho refused to be drawn too much on the subject of the 29-year-old after his sides 3-0 win over Stoke but says there is a chance he could end up at Old Trafford.

When asked how confident he was of being able to bring Sanchez in this month, Mourinho said: Not confident, but also not unconfident.

Just relaxed, and with the feeling that he is an Arsenal player, with the feeling that he can stay there, but also with the feeling that he can move, and if he moves, I think we have a chance.

I think most probably a player like him has other big clubs interested. Who knows?

I think him, (Arsenal manager Arsene) Wenger, (Arsenal chief executive Ivan) Gazidis  I think they are the ones that know really what is going to happen.

Jose Mourinho gives his post-match verdict to #MUTV following #MUFC's win over Stoke. pic.twitter.com/yRQQLX2j8v  Manchester United (@ManUtd) January 15, 2018

Mourinho went on to reveal that Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who was left out of the United squad against the Potters, could be used as a makeweight in a potential agreement for Sanchez.

The Portuguese said: I didnt select him today because I wanted players fully focused.

I understand that with so much talk and so much speculation, it is not easy for Mkhitaryan to play, to play at home, with this feeling that (it) can happen, maybe it doesnt happen.

So I prefer to protect him and protect the situation, and in the end of the transfer market, if he stays here, he is a very good player. Lets see what is going to happen.

City went close to signing the Chile forward in August after having a bid of 55million plus 5million in add-ons accepted but a deal could not be completed as Arsenal did not find a replacement.

Gabriel Jesus injury could have forced Citys hand (Steven Paston/PA)

An injury to Gabriel Jesus reignited the potential of a deal but City were not prepared to pay a transfer fee of more than 20million, while Arsenal were thought to want 35million.

That opened the way for other clubs to enter the race to sign the wantaway player, with Chelsea the latest club reported to be in contention.

City were convinced that Sanchez did want to join them but it appears his desire to leave Arsenal this month now outweighs that.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said after his sides loss to Bournemouth on Sunday that a deal for Sanchez could be concluded within 48 hours.
Red Fawn Fallis is set to be tried in two weeks as the first federal defendant in connection to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

She is accused of firing a handgun at officers as they arrested her for disorderly behavior, but her case isnt the only one in federal court. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Delorme confirmed six other defendants are indicted in connection to the monthslong pipeline protests.

Like Fallis, they were indicted for alleged crimes on Oct. 27, 2016, when law enforcement moving south swept a protest camp erected on a pipeline easement.

Michael Little Feather Giron, 45, was indicted for civil disorder and use of fire to commit a federal felony offense. He is held at the Heart of America Correctional and Treatment Center in Rugby, set for trial to begin April 10 in Bismarck before District of North Dakota Chief Judge Daniel Hovland.

Five other federal defendants were indicted together a year ago for civil disorder and use of fire to commit a federal felony offense, stemming from a barricade fire set on the Morton County Road 134 bridge as law enforcement advanced. They are Michael Markus, Brandon Miller-Castillo, Brennon Nastacio, Dion Ortiz and James White.

The Water Protector Legal Collective is supporting legal defense for Fallis, Giron, Markus, Nastacio, Ortiz and White, according to spokeswoman Sarah Hogarth.

Markus is set for trial to begin March 6 in Bismarck before Hovland. Per Hovlands order, Markus trial was severed from the others' for prosecutors to call him as a witness regarding Nastacio's involvement in the fire.

A joint trial has apparently not yet been set for Miller-Castillo, Nastacio, Ortiz and White.

Miller-Castillo has not yet been arraigned or made an initial appearance, according to his court docket. He also has no legal representation.

Markus, Nastacio and White have been granted pretrial release.

Court records indicate Ortiz had pretrial release to a residence in New Mexico but was arrested in September on a violation notice. As recent as December, he was held at the Sandoval County Detention Center in Bernalillo, New Mexico, awaiting release to a halfway house, pending available space, according to the WPLC.

Fallis resides at a Fargo halfway house. Her trial is set to begin Jan. 29 in Fargo before Hovland. She was indicted a year ago for civil disorder, discharge of a firearm in relation to a felony crime of violence and possession of a firearm and ammunition by a convicted felon.
A humpback whale spotted near the Hawaiian island of Maui has been freed from braided line caught in its mouth.

A joint statement from US state and federal agencies said the entangled whale was first spotted on Thursday by the captain of a fishing vessel.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called on Nato to take a stand against the United States over its plans to form a 30,000-strong Kurdish-led border security force in Syria.

Turkey has threatened to launch a military offensive against Syrian Kurdish militias, which Ankara considers to be terrorists.

On Monday, Mr Erdogan accused fellow Nato ally the US of creating an army of terror in Syria along the border with Turkey, and vowed to crush the force.

Mr Erdogan has lashed out at the US over the border force move (AP)

Addressing his ruling partys deputies on Tuesday, Mr Erdogan questioned Natos stance on the issue, saying: Hey Nato! You are obliged to make a stance against those who harass and violate the borders of your members.

Mr Erdogan said Turkeys military chief would discuss the issue in Brussels.

Ties between Turkey and the US have deteriorated over American support for the Kurdish militia, known as the Peoples Defence Units, or YPG, which Turkey says is a major threat to its security. The US has relied on the YPG as the backbone of a Syrian force that drove Islamic State from much of northern and eastern Syria with the help of US-led airstrikes.

The coalition said the new force, expected to number as much as 30,000 in the next few years, is a key element of its strategy in Syria to prevent the resurgence of IS there.

Mr Erdogan reiterated that Turkey plans an imminent intervention in the Kurdish-controlled enclave of Afrin in northern Syria. Turkey has sent reinforcements to its border in recent weeks and Mr Erdogan said this week that Turkish troops were already firing artillery at Afrin from the border.

Speaking to reporters after his speech to party legislators, Mr Erdogan said Turkey would conduct the operation in Afrin with Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Asked whether he planned to discuss the Kurdish-led border force with US president Donald Trump, Mr Erdogan said he had no plans to call the US leader.

The Turkish leader was quoted as saying: We discussed the issue before. He said he would get back to me. I wont call him as long as he does not get back to me.
An 82-year-old man who was attacked by three thieves for his designer wristwatch last year has now died, police have said.

Ahmet Dobran, from East Ham, was assaulted last summer in Newham, east London.

The assailants punched him in the neck and arms and stole his gold bracelet and Longines wristwatch, police said.

Police have previously released CCTV images of the three men they want to trace (Nick Ansell/PA)

He died in hospital in the early hours of Monday.

Mr Dobran had been induced into a coma for several weeks following the August attack, before being moved to a nursing home.

82-year-old man dies after being robbed in Newham https://t.co/o07sdSZoB6 pic.twitter.com/ze5HSqSDzl  Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) January 16, 2018

The attack aggravated his Parkinsons condition, police said, and left him with three fractures to his vertebrae.

One man, aged 33, was arrested and charged with robbery in December, but the other two men are yet to be identified.

Police said they do not yet know whether Mr Dobran died as a result of the attack. A post-mortem examination is yet to take place.

Police have previously released CCTV images of the three men they want to trace.

Iain Wallace, Detective Inspector of Newham CID, said Mr Dobrans family were utterly devastated by the news.

He said: Whilst we are unable to ascertain at this time that he died as a result of the attack, we do know that are the very least it may have aggravated other existing conditions. We await the results of the post-mortem to determine this.

Whilst one of the men has now been identified and charged we are still keen to trace two other men who are still outstanding.

Someone knows who these men are and I would urge them to come forward to stop them from using the same level of violence on another vulnerable person.
French president Emmanuel Macron has visited a migrant centre in northern France as he prepares to press the UK to do more to help deal with people who converge on the Calais region in hopes of crossing the Channel.

Mr Macron talked briefly with Sudanese migrants at the centre in Croisilles, home to 63 people.

He also questioned officials about measures to speed up processing for migrants who agree to apply for asylum in France.

Mr Macron is making a foray into the symbolic heart of Frances migrant problem with a visit to the port city of Calais (AP)

The French president also asked about migrants who abandon such centres to try to sneak across the Channel instead.

Guillaume Alexandre, the head of the association managing three facilities in the Pas-de-Calais region, said nearly 70% of migrants there leave before filing any paperwork in France.

Mr Macron will travel to Calais later on Tuesday. On Thursday, he will meet Prime Minister Theresa May to discuss accords that effectively place the British border in Calais.
Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis has spoken out over how a 20-year campaign of harassment at the hands of a former university friend is destroying her life as he was jailed for nearly four years.

Ms Maitlis said she had been let down by the criminal justice system and Edward Viness unwanted attention was upsetting her husband and scaring her children.

Vines, 47, was jailed by a judge at Oxford Crown Court for 45 months after admitting two breaches of an indefinite restraining order banning him from contacting the BBC journalist.

Emily Maitlis stalker is jailed for nearly four years by a judge at Oxford Crown Court (Joel Ryan/PA)

The court heard that Vines  who had briefly become friends with Ms Maitlis while they were both students at Cambridge University  had written letters to her while serving a previous prison sentence for earlier breaches of the restraining order.

He had also written again after his release from prison while living in a bail hostel and subject of licence conditions.

Judge Peter Ross described this as wholly unsatisfactory and gave the probation service and the governor at HMP Bullingdon 10 days for a written explanation.

In a victim impact statement read to the court, Ms Maitlis, who was not present, said: When I heard that Edward Vines had breached his restraining order I felt scared and let down.

Scared because it meant that even from within the prison system the perpetrator was able to reach me  let down because the system had been unable to stop him getting in touch even though the crime he is serving time for is harassment through unwanted and ongoing contact.

It has affected my relationship with my husband who is frustrated that we cannot get to the bottom of this problem even though we have been tackling it through the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts for over 20 years and it has scared my children who thought the threat had gone away  albeit temporarily whilst he was behind bars.

It has affected my ability to do my work  I am constantly thinking of where I am being sent and whether he will be attempting to track me down.

And it affects every day decisions like how I leave the house and how I get to work, what time I feel able to come home at night, I work late nights often.

It also makes me jumpy around strangers for no reason as I fear any advance might be him.

Altogether the breach has been a reminder for me that this man remains a constant threat in my life and my familys life and that my ability to do my work, hang out with my children and lead a normal family life without constant sense of suspicion and fear has been badly damaged.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are in Coventry for a visit celebrating the citys history, people and heritage.

William and Kate will visit the ruins of Coventry cathedral and open a 59 million training facility for nurses, midwives and paramedics at Coventry University.

Police officers high-five children as they await the arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in Coventry (Aaron Chown/PA)

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrive to tour the ruins of Coventry Cathedral (Aaron Chown/PA)

The Duke of Cambridge meets the public (Aaron Chown/PA)

The Duchess of Cambridge is all smiles (Aaron Chown/PA)

Kate was handed flowers on her arrival (Aaron Chown/PA)

The Duchess looked fantastic, as always, in a striking pink coat (Aaron Chown/PA)

The royal pair touring the ruins (Aaron Chown/PA)

The Duchess meeting with staff and volunteers at the Rising Cafe (Heathcliff OMalley/Daily Telegraph/PA)

The Duke and Duchess speak to staff as they tour the Science and Health Building at Coventry University (Eamonn M McCormack/PA)

They watch on closely (Eamonn M McCormack/PA)

Kate speaks to a patient (Eamonn M. McCormack/PA)

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge `wiggle (Phil Barnett/PA)

Staff join in with the dance (Phil Barnett/PA)
Manchester Uniteds bid to bring Arsenals Alexis Sanchez to Old Trafford hinges on Henrikh Mkhitaryan moving in the opposite direction, according to the Armenians agent.

United boss Jose Mourinho admitted on Monday night that his side have a chance to sign Sanchez in this window, with previous suitors Manchester City understood to have now exited the race for the 29-year-old due to the cost involved.

There has been speculation Mkhitaryan will be offered as a makeweight from United to land Sanchez, and Mourinho left the playmaker out of the squad to face Stoke on Monday due to doubts about his future.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan could leave Manchester United this month (Martin Rickett/PA Wire)

Mkhitaryans agent Mino Raiola has now claimed that Sanchezs transfer to United is reliant on his client joining Arsenal as part of the deal.

City were not prepared to get into a bidding war with other clubs for Sanchez. Sanchez did want to join City, they believe, but his priority is simply to leave Arsenal. Man Utd & Chelsea thought to be other clubs interested #MCFC  Andy Hampson (@andyhampson) January 15, 2018

Manchester United are not going to sign Sanchez unless Mkhi agrees to join Arsenal, Raiola told The Times.

Mkhi is going to do what is best for him. He has two-and-a-half years left on his contract so its his decision.

Sanchez is part of the Mkhi deal, not the other way around.

Mkhitaryan was one of Mourinhos first signings in the summer of 2016 but has struggled for consistency.

He scored 11 goals last term having started just one Premier League game in the first four months of the campaign. After beginning this season brightly, providing five assists in the first three top-flight games, Mkhitaryans form has once again dipped and he has not scored for Mourinhos side since September.

Is he going to be involved in one deal and leave us? Its possible but its also possible that he stays, Mourinho told Sky Sports after the 3-0 win over Stoke.

The Portuguese added in his press conference: I didnt select him because I wanted players fully focused.

Read Jose Mourinho's latest comments on the current transfer speculation: https://t.co/KwfOMyZ7LU pic.twitter.com/Y77PJl0Kcv  Manchester United (@ManUtd) January 16, 2018

I understand that with so much talk and so much speculation, it is not easy for Mkhitaryan to play, to play at home, with this feeling that (it) can happen, maybe it doesnt happen.

So I prefer to protect him and protect the situation, and in the end of the transfer market, if he stays here, he is a very good player. Lets see what is going to happen.

United appear to be the last club standing in the race to acquire Sanchez, whose deal in north London runs out at the end of the season.

Press Association Sport understands City, who tried to sign Sanchez for a package worth 60million in the summer, withdrew their interest having hoped to agree a fee of around 20million.

It is thought Arsenal quoted 35million and City were unwilling to match the figures being offered by other clubs, with the fee, wages and potential player exchange costing more than they originally offered the Gunners in the summer.

And suggestions Chelsea had thrown their hat into the ring were then downplayed by Blues boss Antonio Conte on Tuesday when the Italian said he did not think they were attempting to sign Sanchez. As for United, on Monday night Mourinho was relaxed about whether Sanchez would move there this month.

Asked how confident he was the transfer would be completed, Mourinho replied: Not confident, but also not unconfident.

Just relaxed, and with the feeling that he is an Arsenal player, with the feeling that he can stay there, but also with the feeling that he can move, and if he moves, I think we have a chance.
French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed not to allow the re-establishment of the Jungle camp of migrants in Calais.

His promise came as he visited the Channel port ahead of a UK-France summit at which reports suggest he will seek to renegotiate Britains role in dealing with migrants gathered there.

Mr Macron said the current Dublin rules, under which refugees are required to seek asylum in the first safe country they reach, were unsatisfactory and called for an integrated EU system to deal with the problem.

Hundreds of asylum seekers hoping to cross the Channel remain in the area, more than a year after authorities dismantled the towns sprawling Jungle camp.

The president met Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart and organisations working with migrants on Tuesday, just two days before talks with Prime Minister Theresa May.

French President Emmanuel Macron meets Ahmed Adam, from Sudan (Michel Spingler/AP)

Aid groups have labelled the visit a political show, while organisation LAuberge des Migrants declined to meet Mr Macron to show our profound disagreement with the upcoming immigration law.

One refugee called on the president to show pity for the plight of migrants in his policy.

Mr Macron said that Calais had become a dead end for thousands of women and men who have spent years on the road.

He said that all those arriving in France deserved dignified and humane treatment, and promised to provide more accommodation and speed up processing of asylum claims.

But he added: For those who are not admitted, we must guarantee a rapid return to their country of origin. For years, we have been doing everything the wrong way round.

Mr Macron said: Everyone must know  everything is being done to prevent illegal passage to Great Britain In no case will we let a new Jungle be set up in Calais.

En aucun cas nous ne laisserons s'installer une nouvelle jungle a Calais. pic.twitter.com/zU3MhQjnMg  Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) January 16, 2018

It has been reported that France wants to secure an increase in Britains financial contribution to the costs associated with the Calais migrant camps, where an estimated 700 people are living.

Senior French politicians are also said to be pressing the UK to receive more refugees from the region and lone children in particular.

Downing Street declined to say whether Mrs May would discuss the pressures at Calais when she meets Mr Macron on Thursday at the UK-France summit, which a spokesman said would highlight cross-Channel co-operation on issues such as climate change, air pollution, cyber threats and the human genome.

We have taken a significant number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from the area in and around Calais already, Mrs Mays spokesman told reporters.

Solenne Lecomte, from aid organisation La Cabine Juridique, called on Mr Macron to work with such groups to understand the reality of the situation and branded his visit a political show.

Solenne Lecomte, of aid organisation La Cabine Juridique (Gareth Fuller/PA)

Speaking at a press conference in Calais on Tuesday, she said: If you are talking about migrants you need to have at least migrant organisations working with you.

You cant just talk alone and decide alone.

She described conditions in the camp as dreadful, with a lack of resources to support migrants.

People are not stopping just because someone tells them they have to stop, she said.

Unless someone moves the border it will be the same situation for a long time.

Mr Macron shakes hands with residents in Croisilles, northern France (Michel Spingler/AP)

A 32-year-old refugee from Ethiopia, who has been living in the camp for six weeks, said the camps were a disaster.

The man, who did not wish to be identified, said: We are all here to pass the border to get into England.

Daily life is just running after lorries, and its not that easy. The borders are closed and theres too much control.

He added: We are also confronting death and at the same time the violence of the police, which is really getting harder and harder.

They beat you and they have no pity.

The man, who is hoping to reach Canada where he has family, said migrants were just people looking for a future.

Im not expecting a lot but I just want to send a message to Mr Macron that we are humans and he is also human and he should have a little pity for us.

He added: Mr Macron is never going to have time for us because we are just nobody for him.

They call us illegal. I dont understand what that means.

Ive got a name, Ive got an identity. So Im not calling myself illegal.
Anthony Joshua believes it will take a superhuman effort for Joseph Parker to stop him from becoming undisputed world heayweight champion.

Joshua will put his WBA and IBF belts on the line as he looks to add the New Zealanders WBO strap to his collection in the second ever bout between two undefeated champions at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff on March 31.

Parkers promoter David Higgins brought up Joshuas weak chin during Tuesdays London press conference, something he admitted as a ploy to land the mouth-watering clash, but the Briton does not believe it will be a factor in the bout.

Anthony Joshua, pictured, takes on Joseph Parker in March (Victoria Jones/PA)

Joshua said: It will take more than a human to stop me from where I am destined to be.

Thats why I learned to not walk with sight, I walk with faith in this journey so in terms of you, using it as a PR stunt and the rumours you have heard, they are fake news.

Three times Ive been hurt or stopped. What I have learned from those adversities and storms, it will take more than any human to stop me from this journey.

Joshua signs off with There will be fireworks pic.twitter.com/OPYxgQDaAG  Duncan Bech (@DuncanBech) January 16, 2018

The 28-year-old Briton has won all 20 of his professional bouts inside the distance and showed respect to his next opponent, who is unbeaten in his 24-fight career.

Joshua added: It is an honour to be up here with another world champion. I dont know how to take his camp in terms of whats been said and whats been going on but I take everything with a pinch of salt and I roll with the punches.

Ill be in peak physical condition but Im making sure my mind is in the right place as well, at all times.

So Im looking forward to embracing the challenge, not just from a physical stand point but the mental challenge that will come from this fight as well.

Parker was in no doubt that the upcoming clash would be the most difficult of his career, but he anticipates that he will be taking three major world titles back to New Zealand.

The New Zealander said: Its an exciting time to be a heavyweight.

Sweat up before the presser  pic.twitter.com/37sGhIVu8t  Joseph Parker (@joeboxerparker) January 16, 2018

This is going to be the hardest camp and most work as I have a big challenge in front of me in Joshua.

Ive watched him for a long time. I know his strengths, he know mine. I know his weaknesses and he thinks he knows my weaknesses.

I cant wait to have this fight happen on March 31. I cant wait to put on a great performance, hopefully I will catch him on the chin and knock him out.
Pleading guilty Tuesday to charges he set a fire out of a desire to return to the state penitentiary, Darren Webers wish to return to treatment has been granted.

South Central District Judge Sonna Anderson sentenced him to four years for felony endangering by fire and four felony counts of violating a court order. Weber said he pleaded guilty to expedite his return to treatment for mental health.

I understand the charges, everything, he said. I just wish it would be resolved today so, whether at the penitentiary or at the (state) hospital, I can continue on with my treatment."

Weber, 42, was charged following a Dec. 5 fire at his apartment at 501 Memorial Highway, reportedly in an attempt to kill his roommate who he blamed for a probationary search that discovered marijuana, pornography and other items in violation of a court order. Court documents alleged Weber also wanted to kill the roommate so as to return to state prison.

Defender Robert Quick said Weber has been held on 23-hour lockdown at the Burleigh-Morton County Detention Center where his roommate, Jeffrey Wolff, is also held. They are both registered sex offenders.

Wolff, 41, is also charged with violating a court order. Weber was accused of barricading Wolff in his room as he started the fire in their apartment.

What happened? Anderson asked Weber, who then described his hospitalization history, including a 14-year commitment to the state hospital.

A big part: I didnt want to get out, said Weber, adding he didnt intend to hurt Wolff, but it was a means to an end.

I just want to get back to the penitentiary where I know Im safe, he told Anderson, also saying that his pattern of behavior is manifested by starting fires and hearing voices.

Burleigh County Senior Assistant State's Attorney Julie Lawyer noted Weber's criminal history, including another endangering by fire in 1994, as well as terrorizing, bail jumping and gross sexual imposition.

She said Weber wasn't charged for attempted murder for the fire last month as he did abandon his attempt to kill his roommate by waking him up and getting him out of the home.

Lawyer recommended a one-year sentence for one of the court order violations, but consecutive to the fire crime.

"Even though they're related, they're two separate matters," she said. Anderson opted for concurrent sentences of four years and one year.

Her sentence also included three years probation following Weber's commitment, waiving his mandatory court fees and allowing restitution to remain open for 60 days.

"Good luck to you, sir," the judge said.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has launched a legal bid to overturn two historical convictions for attempting to escape from prison.

Appeal proceedings began before three senior judges at Belfasts Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday.

Mr Adams, now a Louth TD, is seeking to quash convictions received in 1975 while he was interned without trial at the Maze Prison during the early 1970s.

Inside the Maze before it closed (Paul Faith/PA)

Barrister Sean Dorian QC, who is representing the veteran politician, said: Each conviction is for attempting to escape from lawful custody.

The case centres on a technicality that Mr Adams internment was not lawful because the order to detain him had not been considered by the then Secretary of State.

Mr Doran said documents presented to the Appeal Court judges appeared to copper fasten submissions that there was not personal consideration of the case.

The court heard how an interim custody order had been signed by a junior minister at the Northern Ireland Office and not the Secretary of State.

There is a very clear distinction in the power to make an order and the power to sign an order, added Mr Doran.

Earlier the court was told how Mr Adams, who was not in court for the hearing, was twice convicted of attempting to escape from the Maze.

On Christmas Eve, 1973, he was among four detainees caught attempting to break out.

A hole had been cut in the perimeter fence and all four were already through, said Mr Doran.

The second escape bid in July 1974 was described as an elaborate scheme which included the kidnap of a man, who bore a striking resemblance to Mr Adams, from a bus stop in west Belfast.

The man was taken to a house where his hair was dyed and he was given a false beard, the court heard.

He was then taken to the Maze Prison where he was to be substituted for Mr Adams in a visiting hut. However, prison staff were alerted to the plan and Mr Adams was arrested in the car park of the jail, the court heard.

Mr Adams was among hundreds of republicans to be held without trial during the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles.

Gerry Adams (centre) in Belfast acting as a member of the IRA guard of honour (PA)

Internment was introduced in 1971 by the former Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner for those suspected of involvement in violence.

Mr Adams was interned in March 1972, but was released in June that year to take part in secret talks in London.

He was rearrested in July 1973 at a Belfast house and interned at the Maze Prison, also known as Long Kesh internment camp.

Both of his convictions were handed down by two separate Diplock Court trials  cases tried by a single judge sitting without a jury.

In the first wave of raids across Northern Ireland, 342 people were arrested.

The policy of internment lasted until December 1975. During that time, 1,981 people were interned  1,874 were nationalist and 107 were loyalist.

The introduction of internment, the way the arrests were carried out and the abuse of those arrested led to mass protests and a sharp increase in violence.
The Irish premier has warned the UK Government there can be no back-sliding over the Brexit agreement on Northern Ireland.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the Irish Government will continue to advance and defend Irelands interests and seek to mitigate the negative effects of Brexit for the country.

Referring to the last-minute deal UK Prime Minister Theresa May struck with the EU in December Mr Varadkar said: There can be no back-sliding.

During Brexit negotiations in December the UK Government agreed that any future deal must protect North-South co-operation in Ireland and hold to the UKs guarantee of avoiding a hard border on the island.

The agreement also said that no new regulatory barriers would be allowed between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and Northern Irelands businesses would continue to have unfettered access to the UK internal market.

Speaking in the Dail on Tuesday Mr Varadkar said: It will be important to remain vigilant to ensure that commitments entered into in December are delivered in full.

However, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin warned that the agreement does not mean the absence of a border on the island of Ireland.

I am very concerned about the basic contradiction within the agreement about the introduction of no economic divisions on this island, he said.

Micheal Martin said it took 18 months for the UK Government to realise it could no longer intimidate the EU

Mr Martin added: The final text repeats the assertion of the UK Government from very early about its intentions to avoid new barriers.

This is contradicted by its new statement that all parts of the UK will be treated exactly the same. What is being discussed is a differently managed border. Not the absence of a border.

The opposition leader hit out at Mrs Mays administration saying it was ridiculous it took 18 months for the UK Government to recognise the reality that it no longer had the ability to intimidate the European Union by threatening a barrage of tabloid headlines and a possible veto.

Earlier the Taoiseach said contingency planning is continuing for all possible scenarios during the Brexit transition period.

Mr Varadkar said: The House can be assured that, as we have done up to now, in the negotiations, the Government will continue to advance and defend Irelands interests and to seek to mitigate the negative effects of Brexit for the country and exploit any opportunities.
A man has pleaded guilty to causing serious injury by dangerous driving after two police officers ended up in hospital when they were hit by a Maserati.

Christopher Appleton and Samantha Clark were critically injured when Mohammed Shaikh hit them with the white supercar in the early hours of Sunday December 17 last year.

The officers were on a footpath returning to a marked police vehicle parked on the A406 near Brent Park in Neasden, north-west London, when Shaikh came round a bend and lost control of the car at around 3.40am.

Mohammed Shaikh hit them with the white supercar (Metropolitan Police/PA)

The Maserati mounted the path, colliding with another vehicle and the officers, who were helping colleagues with an unrelated incident at the time, Scotland Yard said.

Man pleads guilty following Brent road traffic collision that left two officers seriously injured https://t.co/3VMkodOKGq pic.twitter.com/K6Pjik7PBh  Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) January 16, 2018

Mr Appleton was knocked over and is still receiving treatment in hospital, while Ms Clark, who was trapped beneath the car, continues to recover at home.

Shaikh, of Amberden Avenue, Finchley, north London, appeared via video link from Wormwood Scrubs prison to Harrow Crown Court on Tuesday when he made the plea.

The 48-year-old, who wore a white jumper and grey jogging bottoms when he appeared before the court, pleaded guilty to two counts of causing serious injury by dangerous driving.

He also admitted failing to provide a specimen of breath over the incident.

Commander David Musker said: This horrific incident is a reminder of the dangers that police officers face. We are really grateful to everyone from the London Fire Brigade, London Ambulance Service and medical staff who rushed to our officers aid.

Having to deal with the horrific injuries caused by road traffic collisions is something our officers do on a relatively often basis; but to do so knowing that the people you are rushing to help are members of your own team is really difficult.

We wish them the very best in their continued recovery.

At the time of the incident, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said: It is incidents such as this that act as a stark reminder of the uncertainties of police work and the dangers that officers face every day when they put on their uniforms or start their shifts to go and help the public.

Shaikh will be sentenced at a later date.
Pressure on North Korea must be kept up despite the tentative truce with Seoul, Boris Johnson has insisted.

Harsh economic sanctions agreed in a United Nations resolution in December must be strictly enforced by the international community, the Foreign Secretary said.

Tensions between North and South Korea appeared to thaw a little after Pyongyang agreed to take part in talks in the demilitarised zone of the peninsula.

Pressure on North Korea must be kept up despite the tentative truce with Seoul, Boris Johnson has insisted. Pictured: Boris Johnson, United Kingdom Secretary addresses the Vancouver Foreign Ministers Meeting on Security and Stability on the Korean Peninsula, in Vancouver

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un visiting the newly-renovated Pyongyang Teachers' University in Pyongyang on Wednesday

Kim Jong-un has agreed to send a delegation to the Winter Olympic Games being staged in South Korea in February.

But international leaders fear the move is a strategy to drive a wedge between Seoul and the rest of the UN.

At a two-day summit in Vancouver, Canada, Mr Johnson said that while it was 'great' there is an Olympic truce, there should be no doubt the missile-testing crisis is intensifying.

He said: 'There can be no doubt that the crisis is intensifying, we had 20 tests within the last year, 20 missiles, two of which flew over Japan, and one testing of a nuclear device.

Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland, right, greets UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson

Ballistic rocket launching drill of Hwasong artillery units of the Strategic Force of the Korean People's Army

'It's very important and encouraging that the world is not being intimidated or divided by the threat from North Korea, and actually we have come together, and in Resolution 2397 there was an unprecedented measure of global consensus about what to do and to intensify the political and economic pressure on the regime.

'It's great that conversations are taking place between North Korea and South Korea and great there is an Olympic truce, but I hope people will recognise that the programme is continuing in North Korea and that Kim Jong-un continues with his illegal programme.

'He can continue on the path of provocation and equipping his country with nuclear weapons that will lead to further escalation, further economic pain and hardship of his people or else he has an opportunity to go down a path that will lead to greater well-being for his people and a chance to emulate the astonishing achievements of the Republic of Korea (South Korea).'
One of the suspects involved in the Kollupitiya police station suicide bomb case in 2004, was sentenced to two years imprisonment suspended for 15 years, by High Court Judge Vikum Kaluarachchi today.

The suspect, Selvakumari Sathyaleela, was in remand custody for 14 years prior to the sentence which was delivered today.

On July 07, 2004, five policemen were killed when a suspected LTTE woman suicide bomber blew herself up inside the Kollupitiya police station. (T. Farook Thajudeen)

Video by Courts Parasanna
Mrs. Surekha Alles, Managing Director, Allianz Insurance Lanka(second from left) and Mr. Nihal Hadunge GM- Sales & Distribution  Allianz Life Insurance Lanka Ltd (extreme right) with Theshani Hiranya (third from left) and her family members

Allianz Lanka awarded scholarships to students who had excelled in the Grade 5 scholarship examination under the Allianz Sisu Diriya Scholarship program for the 3rdconsecutive year. The programme was originally initiated to commemorate Allianz SEs 125th anniversary.

Mrs. Surekha Alles, Managing Director, Allianz Insurance Lanka, handed over the scholarships to Jaffna district topper Ananthieka Udayakumar and Theshani Hiranya who was ranked 2ndin the Badulla district recently.

The insurer will be providing them with a monthly stipend from now until they sit for their A/L examinations under this scholarship which is awarded to children of Allianz Life policyholders who have done well in this exam.

At Allianz, we strive to give our policyholders and their loved ones the courage to move forward in their business and personal endeavors, irrespective of what their goal might be.We understand the value of education in helping them succeed and hence, created the Allianz Sisu Diriya Scholarship in Sri Lanka in 2015, said Mrs. Surekha Alles, Managing Director, Allianz Insurance Lanka. Commending Ananthieka and Theshani for their outstanding performance, we are delighted to stand by them throughout their school lives through this scholarship program.

Allianz Insurance Lanka Ltd. and Allianz Life Insurance Lanka Ltd., known together as Allianz Lanka, are fully-owned subsidiaries of Allianz SE, Germany, a world leader in integrated financial services. Having started out as a Greenfield operation in 2005, it has emerged as one of the fastest growing insurance service providers in Sri Lanka. The company prides on supporting its clients business strategy by understanding their risk profile and needs, and providing individual solutions from its world class portfolio of products and services. Around the world, over 140,000 Allianz employees serve some 86.3 million retail and corporate customers in 70 countries, who place their trust on the knowledge, global presence, financial strength and solidity of Allianz to support them in their moment of truth.
15th JANUARY, 2018- Amnesty International on Monday demanded the release of a 16-year-old Palestinian girl who was detained by Israeli authorities after a video of her slapping and hitting Israeli soldiers went viral on social media.



The Ofer military court will decide later on Monday whether to release Tamimi on bail or keep her in jail for the remainder of her trial. The teen faces 12 criminal charges including assault and incitement.

Nothing that Ahed Tamimi has done can justify the continuing detention of a 16-year-old girl, Magdalena Mughrabi of Amnesty International said in a statement.



The trial exposes the Israeli authorities discriminatory treatment of Palestinian children who dare to stand up to ongoing, often brutal, repression by occupying forces, Mugrabi added. Over 300 Palestinian minors are being held in Israeli prisons. Tamimi has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.
In an interview with Daily Mirror, Health Minister Dr. Rajitha Senaratne expressed his views on the bond scam, the Presidents term and the way forward for the government. Excerpts:

We came to root out corruption in all its manifestations

I asked right at the beginning not to appoint Arjun Mahendran as CB Governor

I know his negative track records

PM agreed to remove if there were any wrongdoing

By the time of his removal, Govt. was bogged down in a quagmire

There are no financial experts in Sri Lanka to evaluate the economic loss of this transaction

Q President Maithripala Sirisena sought to stay in power for six years. What is the way forward for the government in the wake of the Supreme Courts opinion that the President can serve only up to five years?

Some lawyers told the President that the 19th Amendment did not have retrospective effect. We formulated this piece of legislation in 2015 taking into consideration all these aspects. I do not know why the lawyers could not see it. It was made clear that the 19th Amendment had retrospective effect. Therefore, the term is confined to five years.

Nevertheless, the President had ambiguity. If he were to relinquish office after five years, he will have to accomplish the planned tasks by next year. If it were a six-year term, he will have one more year to attend to these. He wanted to have clarity in advance rather than to wait for the eleventh hour so that he could pre-plan his work. He followed the proper constitutional procedure in making a reference to the Supreme Court in this regard.

Q The UNP, which is the main ally of the government, raised concerns over the Presidents move. How will it affect the future of the government?

It is absolutely unwarranted for anyone to panic over such a move. If the President sought to increase his term from five years to six, it would have been serious. He only asked how long his term spanned. It is only the Supreme Court that can give its opinion. Why should one get alarmed when the law of the country is followed by another?

Q It is clear that the relationship between the President and UNP has been strained over the appointment of the Presidential Commission to probe the Central Bank bond scam. What is the way forward for the government now?

I am not aware of any such relationship being strained with the UNP. Be that as it may, I know for a fact that the understanding between President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is still intact.

Whenever there is any difference in opinion, the Prime Minister asks me to contact the President to secure his consent and vise versa. Other than that, the two leaders always sit together and discuss matters. Before every Cabinet meeting, they meet for a while. The other MPs are not aware of this understanding because both leaders are non-committal.

Q The President took steps to revoke the Gazette notification that sought to remove the ban on liquor sales for women and to extend the time for liquor sales. How does it happen if there were a proper understanding between the two leaders in common decision-making?

If the President did not revoke the Gazette, then it would be the problem. I too stood for revoking it. I asked him to annul it. The President contacted me immediately after the Gazette notification was released. One should bear in mind that this is Sri Lanka. This is not the United States or England. We do not want to make Sri Lanka such a country. We do not want to live in such a country. That is the reason why we live here. We have our civilized culture that is unique from those countries.

None knew liquor sales for women were banned in Sri Lanka before this Gazette note. We knew it only after it was announced. This is inviting unnecessary problems. We came to power with the promise of creating an alcohol-free country. As the Health Minister, I have the greatest role to play. In the world, 70 per cent of deaths are caused by non-communicable diseases. It is the same in Sri Lanka. In 2017, some 138,000 people died of such diseases. We have achieved a lot in curbing the spread of communicable diseases.

Smoking and consuming alcohol are the main reasons for non-communicable diseases. Lack of physical exercise is yet another matter. The World Health Organisation (WHO) invited me to its main session after recognising the initiatives taken by me to eradicate such diseases in 2017. Today, smoking has dropped by 16 per cent due to high taxation.

Our approach is used as a model for the entire world today. The world credits the President and me for it. When taxation on tobacco products was increased, some ministers argued against it in the Cabinet. They said the industry would collapse.

Q Anyway, wont the Presidents cancellation of a Gazette issued by another minister lead to resentment within the government?

The President has the power. He contacted Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera who is abroad.

Q You said the President and Prime Minister are in great understanding with each other. Yet, the UNP backbenchers are harsh on the President. How does it happen then?

Even the members of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) do the same to the other side. Actually, the SLFP started it. This is retaliation for what they initiated. Some SLFP members are having double standards. They remain with the government, but are critical of it. They do not mind whether this government survives or not. People are scornful of these MPs who spurn the government while enjoying its benefits. If they are critical of the government, they should leave it.

Q If the President and Prime Minister are in good terms, they can simply ask their members to keep their mouths shut. Why doesnt it happen?

There was a time like that. The Prime Minister asked UNP MPs not to be provoked by criticism from the other side. Yet, they questioned the Prime Minister at the parliamentary group meetings. He asked the Prime Minister to engage the President in this regard. They said they were not ready to remain quiet in the face of mounting verbal attacks from the other side.

If it is countered, things will take a turn for the worse. Both sides should stop it. This is a national government. Two forces that harboured enmity and bitterness have been brought under one umbrella. What is impossible has been achieved. Total reconciliation is impossible overnight.

It is a dream for some that this government has been elected. Some electoral organisers became MPs and MPs became ministers overnight. We made a huge compromise in defecting from the previous government. We risked it. What we aspire is not what these MPs want. Those who sacrificed a lot for the formation of this government conduct themselves properly. They know how arduous it was for them.

The UNP and SLFP alone did not form this government. There were a lot of apolitical forces that were at work. In fact, they wrote the manifesto. It is not the UNPers or SLFPers who did it. There were university academics, youth, women representatives, Bhikkhus and others involved in it.

Q Along with the President, you were the first to defect from the previous government. The main allegation against the former regime is fraud and corruption. You came to power with the promise of rooting out corruption. What did you feel when you learnt about the Central Bank bond scam?

This is the only allegation to be made against our government. We have taken action against that as well. We are not confronted with hundreds of allegations, unlike the former rule.

At that time, even a person who murdered one man and raped his girlfriend was at large. The Prime Minister referred the COPE report to the Attorney General. He took steps to appoint someone from the JVP to the COPE. On the other hand, the President appointed a commission to evaluate the loss to the national economic. There are no financial experts in Sri Lanka who can do it.

What is important is not who paid whose rental and who phone called whom. It is important to estimate the economic loss of this transaction and to work out modalities to recover it. I asked for it.

The commission should have brought foreign financial experts. The commission says there has been a loss of Rs.11 billion. Yet, we have frozen financial assets worth Rs.12 billion of Perpetual Treasuries Ltd. It means the amount frozen is one billion higher than the amount lost.

This commission says Rs.4,000 billion was lost in the past. Another commission has to be appointed to look into it.

Q There are reports that you have been assigned to whitewash the UNP. Is it true?

No. I studied this in my own. Nobody has given me any assignment to clear the name of the UNP.

Q How did you feel when you heard about this financial crime?

It is a major problem for us. It is a shock because we came to power on the plank of eliminating all forms of fraud and corruption. I objected the appointment of Arjun Mahendran as the Governor at the very beginning.

I pointed out his negative track records when he was in the Board of Investment. He was with me in Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya at that time. I asked what would happen if a person like this were appointed as the Central Bank Governor. The Prime Minister said, This is my ministry. Let me handle it!

Besides, the Prime Minister said he would sack Mahendran if found guilty of any offence. When he was removed, it was too late and the entire government was bogged down in a quagmire.

Q There is a huge gap between the first fraud and the second. Why didnt you take action when the first fraud took place?

That is why the Prime Minister said Mahendran misled him. The premier made inquiries about this. There is one thing. Mahendran is a qualified person. The Prime Minister would have trusted an internationally qualified person. That is where the fault is.

Q There are media reports that a new Prime Minister will be appointed after the election on February 10. What is your view?

It is fiction.

Q Do you think the incumbent Prime Minister should serve in office further?

What matters is not what I believe. He is the one chosen by the people of this country. We have parliamentary democracy. We cannot make ad hoc decisions. The Prime Minister made a huge sacrifice to form the government. I know it as the person who was involved in preliminary talks.

Initially, he wanted to contest the Presidential election. In fact, he asked me to become the common candidate. I insisted that someone who could get a chunk of Sinhala-Buddhist votes should be fielded. I proposed Speaker Karu Jayasuriya for it. The Prime Minister asked me not to propose anyone from his party.

Then, I asked for 24 hours to find another candidate. I informed President Sirisena at that time. Then, the President sought some more time to consult his family members to decide on the offer.
Deen Brothers Imports (Pvt.) Ltd, a company which provides the best machines and electrical appliances at fair prices nourishing the Sri Lankan industrial sector, was able to win the Gold award for the Southern Province and the Bronze award in the National Level at Entrepreneur of the Year 2017 organised by the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industries of Sri Lanka (FCCISL).

Deen Brothers Imports (Pvt.) Ltd has been able to grow as a leading company with a massive network of distribution across Sri Lanka and Maldives. Deen Brothers Imports (Pvt.) Ltd imports an assortment of products coming in world-renowned brands such as Oregon, Dongcheng, Shimge, Briggs and Stratton, Toptul, Golden Bridge and Norton.



Small to medium scale machines, power tools, water pumps, generators, spare parts, tools and accessories, general hardware equipments and home electrical appliances needed for the fields of agriculture, carpentry, construction and power are imported and distributed under the DBL brand name.



It should be noticed that we are blessed by the customers for bringing right and good products with a warranty to them. Therefore, we have been able to win these kind of awards. I would like to bestow the honour of these awards on the staff who gives us the strength to progress on an annual basis. We are prepared to contribute to the development of the country through successful trading even further. It is a pleasure to have been recognised with a series of awards in the local and international level in this year, said Deen Brothers Imports (Pvt.) Ltd CEO/Managing Director Deshamanya Dr. Najeeb Deen.
(c) 2018, The Washington Post  Mike Debonis  WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump said Sunday that he is not a racist and denied that he had spoiled chances for an immigration overhaul in Congress by using a vulgarity to describe poor countries as relations between key Republican and Democratic lawmakers turned poisonous. With the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants in the balance, Trump blamed Democrats for fouling chances for a deal addressing young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.



And in an extaordinary statement, he called himself the least racist person. Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga., who attended the Oval Office meeting last week at which Trump reportedly referred to shithole countries, had previously said they could not recall whether Trump used the term, but on Sunday they denied outright that the

president had.



They suggested that a Democrat who publicly confirmed the remarks, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, could not be trusted.



The accusations prompted Democrats to blast the GOP senators for impugning a colleagues integrity, while also slamming Trump and his remarks as unabashedly racist.
Insurance accounting has never been easier for accountants due to the complicated nature of insurance contracts when assessing the liability arising from insurance contracts.



This is where actuarial skills and expertise required in order calculating the policy liabilities both in life and non-life insurance.



International Financial Reporting Standards 17 (IFRS 17) is creating a new financial language for insurance contracts. International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) issued the new accounting standard on the 18th May 2017 after long years of making it.



The implementation of this will transform how insurers account for their income and liabilities in the balance sheet arising from insurance contracts. Adopting IFRS 17 by all insurers around the world will create consistency in the financial reporting among insurance companies introducing transparency at a higher degree. Also this new standard will bring good and most needed dialogue between accounting and actuarial professionals who are working in the insurance industry.



Completing second year

Sri Lankan insurance industry is just completing second year after implementing the risk based capital framework as the solvency assessment starting from 1st Jan 2016. Most of the companies just familiarizing this new solvency regime and its impact to individual company and without even a small break industry needs to get ready for another major transformation in the accounting standards.



Besides, with an entirely new profit recognition model, the new standard will require new models, systems, and processes. Also this may influence the development of future products and investment strategies. Insurers are expected to begin to be reported on this new basis by Jan 2021.



Currently, Sri Lankan insurers use the SLFRS 4 standard which is the adoption of IFRS 4 to the local insurance industry. The main requirement under SLFRS 4 on the liability front is to perform the liability adequacy test (LAT).LAT required companies to calculate their liabilities using the discounted cash flow method with the best estimate assumptions and check whether the liability booked (using any methodology) is not lower than the liability calculated using the discounted cash flow method.



Important change

The most important change in IFRS 17 is that it does not allow a gain at inception of the contract. IFRS 17 introduces uniformity of profit reporting through a more prescriptive method introducing the Contractual Service Margin (CSM) to the reserving methodology. CSM is the unearned profits in the insurance contract which will be released over the future term of the contract. IFRS 17 uses the retrospective roll forward methodology for the emergence of profit from CSM instead. The profit will also include the release of risk adjustment along with the CSM.



IFRS 17 requires to create groups of contracts to manage the profit reporting emergence separately. For each of these groups, the CSM, risk adjustment and profit emergence needs to be managed separately. Risk adjustment is based on the risk appetite of the entity to showcase the companys perception for the effect of the uncertainty about the timing and amount of cash flows that arise from the portfolio



Grouping is based on the profitability at the point of commencement of the contract. Company needs to club profitable, non-profitable and contracts with no significant risk of becoming non profitable together. Each group cannot contain more than twelve months of new contracts sold of similar characteristic. The determinations of which policies are to be sold by the company will be driven by the above factors, whether the company writes non-profitable contract, whether it might become non-profitable in future or whether it is never expected to be non-profitable. This will drive companies to do product development and pricing more cautiously, which will not be ending up creating non-profitable products and limiting the cross subsidy between contracts.



Building Block Approach

The key measurement model for longer term contracts under IFRS 17 is called the Building Block Approach (BBA). For shorter duration contracts which is less than 12 months, the approach is called Premium Allocation Approach (PAA). When the contract has a participation features (Eg: Unit Linked / Universal Life contract/ With Profit) the Variable Fee Approach applies and the deferred profit/ CSM is revalued in line with the variables of the underlying assets that contracts are backed with.



The most challenging requirement under IFRS 17 is that the CSM needs to be calculated for each group from the inception of the contract as if IFRS 17 had always been there. Finding the retrospective information related to these contracts would be very challenging. To eliminate this difficulty, there are two other approaches suggested to be used based.



Most of the countries have already accepted this new change and have already started the implementation process. It is very important to understand the new standard before we come to an early conclusion whether this is suitable or not suitable to our industry. Especially how this would affect the profit reporting and any changes required in the business itself. This might be a good starting point for some insurers to review their Key Performance Indicators and align with the company growth factors.



Deep dive workshop

STAR Actuarial Academy is bringing expert panels of global Actuaries to Sri Lanka in conjunction with the Deloitte Consultancy to conduct a deep dive workshop of the IFRS 17. The workshop will be held from the 24th Jan to 26th Jan 2018 at JAIC Hilton Residencies.



This three-day workshop will provide in depth knowledge on the standard and its implementation hurdles to our market, by analyzing important products sold in our market. The participants of this workshop will take away the hands on modelling experience of applying IFRS 17. All participants will learn the reporting, disclosures, implementation and IT system requirement aspects. Further, the workshop will discuss the impact to the current insurance regulatory framework with the implementation of the new standard. This workshop will be a rare opportunity for CEOs, CFOs, Actuaries and Finance professionals who work in the insurance industry to acquire knowledge on this international accounting standard.



(Thanuja Krishnaratna, is the Founder and the Managing Director of STAR Actuarial Academy. She is an Associate member of Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, UK (IFOA) and holds bachelors degree in Mathematics from University of Colombo. Further she holds MSc in Actuarial Science and Post Graduate Diploma in Actuarial Management from Heriot Watt University, UK. She currently works as an independent actuarial consultant in the life insurance sector.

She is the current president of Actuarial Association of

Sri Lanka)
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

~Oscar Wilde

Potent arguments are being exchanged between friends regarding the Bond-scam that has taken the Colombo social circuit by storm; lethal points for both sides are being hurled at each other; yet the evidence shows that the bond between the two protagonists, President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe, of the current coalition government is ostensibly intact. How tight and taut this bond could be is another matter altogether.

In politics the line that divides what seems and what is, is thin, faint and blurred. A clever politician knows how to tread that line without offending those who occupy on either side of the line. But that is intellectually dishonest and morally deplorable. But that again is politics, the one profession that has destroyed our culture and degraded our values.

Yet every five or six years, after each election cycle, expectations are high, hopes are higher and eventual disappointment is insufferable. That has been the sorry story about the declining features of our democracy. Maithripala Sirisenas mandate was clear. It was uncompromising. Its weight was overwhelming. The anti-Rajapaksa sentiments overpowered an electorate that the Rajapaksa family treated as an absurdly, cowardly and subservient commune.

Every five or six years, after each election cycle, expectations are high, hopes are higher and eventual disappointment is insufferable. That has been the sorry story about the declining features of our democracy

The collective sigh of relief that the majority of Sri Lanka exhaled was not only weighty and un-foggy, it was a real and living organism. At the time it seemed that the mandate embraced history; it called for a radical transformation of measures and values that were associated with a strain of truth not travesty, of dignity not degradation, of humility not hype. Nevertheless, in three short years, all significance of that mandate seems derelict and forgotten. The socio-political dynamics that drove the Rajapaksa regime and its henchmen and women to ecstatic pleasures and filthy riches has not died. On the contrary, it has gained momentum and is driving the current regime and the country at large, along the same blurry path towards the same empty goals.

Such tragic realities would open anybodys mind to these unfriendly vagaries of socio-politics. They, these realities, would prompt any reasonable man, in the current context, to downright disappointment and a feeling of being thoroughly let down. Disappointments in politics, exclusively for those who have chosen politics as a livelihood, are a common occurrence.

Yet for those who stay outside the fray as mere spectators and chosen only to partake of the voting process, these disappointments may mean abject poverty; they may lead the electors to unspeakable conditions in their close neighbourhoods. The electors lot may have deteriorated. Their numerous requests for common good may have gone unheeded. Theirs is a fate that has succumbed to the wants and needs of thuggish henchmen of politicians who have deliberately opted to exploit the poor and enrich themselves. The voters willy-nilly have empowered the elected and impoverished the electors.

Against such a wretched backdrop, against such an unfriendly social milieu, the voter is becoming increasingly disillusioned about the choices before him. This is the precise state of affairs any politician who runs for office strives to avoid but it is the precise situation he has created for his electors. A culture, which has nurtured the citizenry for the past few decades, has now totally enraptured the social theatrics of a nation. And there does not seem to be a way to discard that culture and create conditions and circumstances that would in turn engender a new culture founded on more morally-acceptable norms.

Blaming politicians and their practice of corrupt politics in general would not suffice. A general upheaval on the part of the citizenry is sensible and leadership for that kind of upheaval has to be generated from the societal ranks of today. Such expectations might be too rare and difficult to realize. Yet dreaming for a better state of affairs is no sin. In fact, it is an onerous duty of each and every elector to dream for a better tomorrow. But one cannot dream for a better tomorrow if one is entrenched in a comfort zone of the present.

Confidence and competence conspiring to reveal brilliant minds may be scarce and infrequent, but as Plato penned mankind will never see an end of trouble untillovers of wisdom come to hold political power or the holders of powerbecome lovers of wisdom. We might take eons to achieve a stage in which our power-holders would become lovers of wisdom. Accumulated subversion of norms, wilful and callous disregard for the rule of law, lack of decent and reasonable constraints on public conduct and appalling ignorance of history have created a monstrous galaxy of politicians whose beginnings are more obscure than their ends.

But they are a product of the democratic will of the electorate. The electorate has to come to terms with them until its time to replace them with an equally unqualified set of politicians. The founder-leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), Rohana Wijeweera articulated this process of continuous revolving-system of government (thattu-maaru kramaya) most eloquently in his speeches in the late sixties and early seventies. However, we cannot go where Wijeweera wished to take the youth in Sri Lanka. That ideology is dead and proven absolutely worse than the present democratic way of life to which Sri Lankans have got accustomed.

That is the preface to my central contention of todays column: Maithri/Ranil bond. Soon in the wake of the election of Maithripala Sirisena as President of Sri Lanka in January, 2015, the bond that was built between President Sirisena and PM Wickremasinghe looked immensely solid and firm. Almost each time President appeared in public, albeit his profound loyalty to SLFP, his original political party, he never failed to mention that he was greatly helped by the UNP and its leader Ranil Wickremasinghe for being elected as President. The bond between Ranil, leader of the UNP, seemed to grow with each passing day. His respect and admiration for the UNP leader was palpable and intense.

On the part of Ranil, the complement was returned with even greater strength. Nevertheless, the Bond-scam apparently had a profound effect on this bond. The mutual trust was shattered and the growing crevices became visible and tangible. In the meantime, Sirisenas fight within his own party, which he in fact left when he contested the Presidential Elections against its leader Mahinda Rajapaksa, became even more intense and at times comical.

Almost each time President appeared in public, albeit his profound loyalty to SLFP, his original political party, he never failed to mention that he was greatly helped by the UNP and its leader Ranil Wickremasinghe for being elected as President. The bond between Ranil, leader of the UNP, seemed to grow with each passing day. His respect and admiration for the UNP leader was palpable and intense

Sirisenas failure to take full control of the SLFP did play an integral part in the Maithri/Ranil bond to be fissured. The formation of the infamous Joint Opposition (JO), which in all realistic terms, a group of former Ministers and other parliamentarians whose loyalty to their defeated leader was surpassed only by their collective questionable financial integrity, increased the greying of Maithripalas shock of hair.

In order to buttress his position in the Cabinet, which was dominated by some UNP stalwarts, Sirisena resorted to one of the acts which enticed unconditional criticism. He brought back some defeated SLFPers back to parliament through the backdoor known as the national list. While the UNP members of the Cabinet, both in private and in public, spoke in one voice, these SLFPers began indulging in a cascade of crude and rude criticisms of their own government.

The JO, having failed to come to terms with the Presidency of Maithripala Sirisena, a typical product of the countrys dry zone citizenry, a loyal disciple of the Bandaranaike family and an emblematic follower of the so-called Bandaranaike policies, began a campaign of vituperative politics. They left no stone unturned in order to gain temporary political advantage. Despite allegations of amassing vast amounts of wealth at the expense of the countrys coffers, MR and his immediate family managed to throw mud, first at PM Wickremasinghe and then at President Sirisena.

Into this the arena of dastardly political theatre entered Arjuna Mahendran, unseated Governor of the Central Bank and deposed Minister of Finance, Ravi Karunanayake and their Bond-scam. The PM failed to see the depth of damage this Bond-scam could cause. He should have insisted that Arjuna Mahendran resign immediately upon the surfacing of accusations regarding the Bond-scam. The damage would have been much less; there would have been no Presidential Inquiry; no JO cry, for their past practice of corruption was hardly outdone.

The evil effects of the Bond-scam are now manifesting themselves as ghosts of mistakes that could have been easily averted. And their effects are affecting the bond between the President and the PM. The un-bonding of the bond between the two leaders of the country is now visible. Its apparent consequences would be shown in the local government elections scheduled for February 10, 2018.

What could have been nipped in the bud has grown into a massive tree, taking firm roots in a soil that is already spoiled and rotten. Hopes are still alive for the bond to re-bond. Its entirely on the shoulders of both men: Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremasinghe.

The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com
The polity of India always seek accountability and repeatedly remind those in power to perform and continue to deliver if they are to retain their trust

- Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad

The Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Lecture 2017 was held at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute of International Relations and Strategic Studies, Colombo on January 15. The lecture was delivered by Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister for Law and Justice and Electronics and IT, Government of India on the theme The Evolution of Indias Constitutional and Democratic Polity.

Late Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar was remembered by Tilak Marapana, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Chairman of the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute as a true gentleman whose intellect and qualities made him a respected and recognized individual across the world. His efforts as a diplomat and minister which elevated the image of Sri Lanka in the international sphere were admired.

Ms. Sugandi Kadirgamar explained to the gathering how Minister Kadirgamar was a firm believer of democracy and resolving differences by way of constitutional reform, and referred to India as the greatest democracy in the world. As much as the theme of the lecture was in remembrance of his opinions and beliefs, there was much from it that the polity of Sri Lanka can learn.

Minister Prasad recognizes the judiciary as an important institution which has contributed to the evolution of the Indian Constitutional and political journey. Judiciary plays a pivotal role in upholding the fundamental rights of the common citizens

Basic Philosophy

Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad stated that the basic philosophy of India is contained in the comment in the Rig Veda which says that the truth is one, the wise interpret it differently. Its essence is that the final destination is one which is where the truth lies, but it may be reached using different paths. Being a country with many religions, languages, dialects and castes, embracing this ideology has propelled India to achieve unity through diversity.

Secularism

According to Minister Prasad, India respects secularism not only because the constitution says so, but because respecting each others views is ingrained in their ethos. India has allowed many different religions to flourish. Numerous sects, faiths and beliefs have peacefully co-existed in India.

In the beginning of independence, India was partitioned on religious lines and nearly one million people were killed and ten million displaced. India had every justification and provocation to convert itself into a religious state, but the abiding principle of Indias constitution is secularism and also that no one shall be discriminated on the basis of religion.

Gender Justice

Minister Prasad assured that gender justice is something that is valued by the Constitution of India. Right to franchise to women came much earlier in India and today the speaker of the Lok Sabha. Six Cabinet Ministers and two Ministers of States are also women leaders. Minister Prasad drew on the example of women flying planes in India as testimony of the extent to which gender justice has developed. Mandatory representation has been given to women in municipalities and village councils through Constitutional amendments in 1992. A similar amendment in relation to the Parliament is in progress.

Trusting the ordinary citizen

In the quest for empowerment of the deprived and marginalized, India trusts the ordinary citizen. Minister Prasad endorses the view that political democracy cannot last unless it is built on social democracy. Liberty, equality and fraternity must be recognized as principles governing every citizens way of life. The freedom movement of India led by Mahatma Gandhi and other great leaders trusted the innate goodness of ordinary Indians and believed that they must be given a say in the democratic and Constitutional evolution of India. According to Minister Prasad, after having guaranteed the right to vote to all adult citizens by Indias Constitution, India became the worlds first large democracy to adopt universal adult suffrage from its very beginning.

Role of Elections Commission

According to Minister Prasad, the Elections Commission of India has played a key role in the consolidation of Indian democracy. The right of every adult citizen to vote is guaranteed by an effective and impartial body which has separate statutory existence. The commission has done commendable work in preventing violence and electoral malpractices.

Strong judicial arm

Minister Prasad recognizes the judiciary as an important institution which has contributed to the evolution of the Indian Constitutional and political journey. Judiciary plays a pivotal role in upholding the fundamental rights of the common citizens. Many complicated issues of race, religion, ethnicity and empowerment were brought before the courts during the course of the last 70 years, and the decisions given by the courts have been progressive and thoughtful in their judgments. Public interest litigation is also an important innovation in Indias judicial system to uphold the rights of the poor and the deprived by seeking genuine accountability.

Media and Civil Society activism

The independence of media and their critical approach to government policies are recognized in India as vital to its polity. Similarly, Minister Prasad claims that the democratic framework of India requires civil society activism. Some of them such as giving citizens the Right to Information and the Right to Free Basic Education have been fuelled through civil society activism.

Use and innovation of technology

Minister Prasad reinforced Prime Minister Narendra Modis view that IT (Indias Talent) + IT (Information Technology) = IT (Indias Tomorrow). He cited a few examples of how Digital India has strengthen the democratic network and governance of the country: 250,000 village councils are linked with optical fibre network; 1.19 billion people have been given a verifiable digital identity kept in safe conditions backed by Parliamentary law; technology is employed to improve access to healthcare and education by way of eScholarships and eHospitals. The combined result of these and many other initiatives shows that Indias economy has been driven by technology. The Minister also expressed his willingness to cooperate with Sri Lanka for a safe and secure cyberspace.

Fulfilment of expectations by leaders

Minister Prasad made reference to a statement made by the first President of India Dr. Rajendra Prasad who urged for honest men who will have the interest of the country before themselves and who will rise over all prejudices if the Constitution is to acquire life. Minister Prasad proudly stated that over the last seventy years India has had leaders who have lived up to the expectations of the people and the constitution.

250,000 village councils are linked with optical fibre network; 1.19 billion people have been given a verifiable digital identity kept in safe conditions backed by Parliamentary law; technology is employed to improve access to healthcare and education by way of eScholarships and eHospitals

Holding those in power accountable to the public

Minister Prasad stated that the people of India give support to political formations at the national and regional levels. However, they also expect those trusted by them to show maturity and foresight in their conduct and appreciate the basic ideology of India. Those who have failed to do so have never had a lasting political life. This has made India a functional, effective and accountable democracy.

Minister Prasad firmly stated that the power of India is the people of India. The entire population of India knows that they can unseat any political party howsoever powerful or popular they might be. Minister Prasad quoted an eminent thinker Lord Meghnand Desai  What makes India survive and thrive is the willingness of the people to talk to each other, to take advantage of the ballot box and to tell their rulers frequently where the limits of their tolerance and patient non-violent conduct are located.

From the time of being subjects of the colonial regimes, India and Sri Lanka have both pursued the quest for liberty, sovereignty and the need to have a better future which propelled both the freedom movements. The path India has taken since its independence overcoming multiple differences, strengthening democratic institutions and securing the independence of apolitical institutions is a great and exemplary lesson for Sri Lanka.

Recognizing the rights of the common people with a sense of empowerment and always seeking accountability of those who are in power are characteristics that must be drawn from the Indian Constitutional and democratic polity and internalized in our polity. It is a timely requirement that these aspects of governance and citizenship are paid due consideration as we are very much in the process of nation-building.
In a combative, two-hour speech brimming with colourful insults, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denounced President Trump on Sunday, calling his forthcoming peace proposal the slap of the century.



He said Palestinians were being offered the Jerusalem suburb of Abu Dis as the capital of their future state, rather than East Jerusalem, which most of the international community considers illegally occupied by Israel. The area sits outside Israels security barrier and has been floated but rejected as a capital for a Palestinian state in previous negotiations. We said no to Trump, Abbas said. We wont accept his project; his deal of the century is the slap of the century, and we will respond. Abbas was addressing members of the Palestinian Central Council as they began to discuss their response to the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital. Proposals include rescinding Palestinian recognition of Israel, pursuing Israel for war crimes at the International Criminal Court and advancing efforts for a Palestinian state to be recognized internationally.



He questioned where Trump had offered negotiations. On the phone? On television? I see a tweet, he said. We will not give Palestinians money because they refuse to negotiate. Abbas has said that the United States can no longer be a fair arbiter for negotiations, but that the Palestinians are open to talks in line with the Arab Peace Initiative, a framework endorsed by the Arab League in 2002.



By  Loveday Morris (c) 2018, The Washington Post Jan 15, 2018 - JERUSALEM -
One of the gala events associated with the Fairway Galle Literary Festival is the presentation ceremony of the prestigious Fairway National Literary Awards, the most valuable literary prizes awarded in Sri Lanka. The Fairway National Literary Awards competition is the only one of its kind that accommodates all three main languages used in Sri Lanka. It was recently announced that the Fairway National Literary Awards 2017 ceremony will be held on the 26th of January 2018 at 5.30 pm at the Fairway Pavilion in Galle.

Gracing the awards ceremony with his presence as chief guest will be the Honourable Minister of Finance and Media, Mr. Mangala Samaraweera. Several other Cabinet Ministers will also be present.

The panels of judges have already selected a total of 13 novels for the shortlists  five from the Sinhala language category and four each from the English and Tamil language categories. Each shortlisted novelist in each language category will receive a cash prize of Rs. 100,000 while the eventual winner in each language category will receive a cash prize of Rs.500,000.

The judges for the English language category comprises of Ranjani Obeyesekere  academic, literary critic and translator in the fields of literature, and theatre and performance, Jolly Somasundaram  retired civil servant, writer, playwright, and film and literary critic, and Arun WelandawePrematilleke  actor, playwright, director and specialist in immersive theatre.

The shortlisted novels for 2017 in the English language category are,

Dutugemunu: Prince of Destiny by Rukmani Samaranayake,

Song of the Sun God by Shankari Chandran,

Wrath of Kali: The dark side of God by Mario Perera and

The Other One by Amanda Jay.

The panel of judges for the Sinhala language category comprises of Gamini Viyangoda  writer, translator, social activist and political columnist, Buddhadasa Galappaththi  poet, writer, award winning columnist and stage drama make-up artist, and Prabha Manuratne  academic and literary critic championing feminist theory, Marxism and psychoanalysis.

The novels that have been shortlisted for 2017 are,

Handha Paluwa Thani Tharuwa by Nishshanka Wijemanna,

Yakada Silpara by Wimal Udaya Hapugodaarachchi,

Garunda Muhurthaya by Keerthi Welisarage,

PandakaPuthraWasthuwa by AnurasiriHettige and

NikiniKaluwara by Deepthi Mangala Rajapaksha.

The Tamil language categorys judging panel comprises of V. Maheswaran  academic and award-winning writer, Sumathy Sivamohan  academic, award winning film-maker, writer, performer, playwright and poet, and M. S. M. Anes  academic, writer and translator in the areas of philosophy, culture, music and folklore.

The four shortlisted novels for 2017 are,

Thazhumbu by M. Balasingham,

Kulaimurisal by J. Wahabdeen,

Ethanam by Theniyaan and

Neenthik Kadantha Nerupparu by N. Yohendranathan.

The Fairway National Literary Awards are presented by Fairway Holdings with the objective of recognising, encouraging and rewarding excellent creative writing in Sri Lanka. The competition has become increasingly popular and the announcement of the winners for 2017 is eagerly awaited.
(rt.com), 15 Jan, 2018 - Ankara has slammed the plan to create a 30,000-strong force from the Kurdish-dominated SDF militias on its border with Syria, accusing its NATO ally of presenting its unilateral move as a joint decision of the US-led coalition.



The Turkish government perceives the so-called Syrian Border Force, that may be stationed along the Kurdish-controlled parts of the Syrian border with Iraq and Turkey, as well as in the Euphrates River Valley, as a threat to its national security, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in the statement on Sunday. The US-led coalitions plan to set up such a force on the basis of the Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) veterans, who are set to make up half of the recruits, was unveiled by US Army spokesman for the US-led coalition, on Saturday. However, Turkey, which is also a part of the coalition to defeat Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), was not consulted prior to the announcement, according to the ministry.
Rep. Kevin Cramer named a new campaign manager Monday as he begins his re-election bid for the U.S. House.

Cramer, a Republican first elected in 2012, announced Jared Hendrix of Minot will lead his quest for a fourth term this year. Hendrix managed Republican state Rep. Rick Beckers failed run for governor in 2016.

The announcement came a week after state Democrats seized on a Politico report that examined Cramers practice of paying family members through campaign funds. Cramer said there was nothing illegal or unethical about the payments and said his wife, Kris, had been his campaign manager for a bargain.

Hendrix said his hire wasnt a response to the criticism, adding that he and Cramer had discussed him coming on board since November. Kris Cramer will still have a role in the campaign, Hendrix said.

In seeking re-election to the House, Cramer declined to run against Democratic incumbent Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.

Before he made the decision about the Senate race, they had planned to staff up this time anyway, Hendrix said. They just wanted to really step it up a notch and get out there and run an aggressive campaign.

Cramer has easily won re-election twice, most recently in 2016 with 69 percent of the vote. He faces a challenge this year from Democrat Ben Hanson, a former state legislator.

Cramer didnt return a message seeking comment Monday. In a statement, he called Hendrix a strong conservative who has a record or reaching out and motivating new voters, especially young people in North Dakota.
FORT YATES  Members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe called Monday for a greater sense of urgency and more law enforcement resources to solve cases of missing and murdered Native American people.

U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., organized a meeting with tribal leaders, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Marshals, the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation and others to hear directly from tribal members who are overrepresented in violent crime statistics.

Scott Davis, North Dakota Indian Affairs Commissioner, emphasized the need to develop tribal procedures for responding to missing person cases.

When does the clock begin when one of our relatives goes missing? said Davis, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

Carmen OLeary, executive director of the Native Women's Society of the Great Plains, said missing person reports should be given a higher priority by law enforcement.

Often, there isnt a report taken, there isnt a complaint, there isnt a search, OLeary said. Given the rates of violence against Native women, I think our response should be more like an Amber Alert for a missing person when we hear that a Native woman is missing."

Heitkamp said the response after Olivia Lone Bear was reported missing last fall at Fort Berthold was not immediate enough.

That whole situation reminds us that we need better protocols when someone goes missing, Heitkamp said.

OLeary, who works with programs that serve sexual assault and domestic violence victims, is working to train victim advocates in tribal communities to also support families of people who are reported missing. She added that missing person cases also involve Native men.

Theres a lot of shame around these things, and a lot of victim blaming when women go missing. That does silence people and isolate people, OLeary said.

Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Mike Faith said the reservation needs more law enforcement officers, and hes worried the current officers are in danger of burning out.

Tribal leaders also said they need more housing for law enforcement so officers can live in the districts they serve.

Heitkamp said she plans to continue pushing for more law enforcement officers, as well as more training.

We need police officers here, as much as any other part of the country," she said. "The job of the federal government is to provide it, and we are failing.

Heitkamp introduced Savanna's Act in October to bring justice for murdered and missing Native women and girls. The legislation is named after Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, who was killed in Fargo in August.

Heitkamp said she expects to hold similar meetings with other tribal nations, as well as work with Minnesota and Montana, to find solutions.

This is not a situation where we have a meeting and it gets forgotten, Heitkamp said. This is part of a process that will continue to develop, continue to grow and continue to raise national attention to this issue.

Staff representing Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., also attended the meeting.
The head of the North Dakota education and public employee union apologized Monday after calling President Donald Trump a liar and racist on Twitter over the weekend.

Nick Archuleta, president of North Dakota United, posted the message on the social media site Saturday morning before deleting it.

You are a liar, a racist, and an embarrassment to our Nation, sir, the tweet to Trump said.

A spokesman for North Dakota United said Archuleta wasnt doing interviews on the subject but shared a statement in which he apologized for his inconsiderate remarks.

I know that name-calling is wrong, and I regret that on occasion, I allowed my emotions to override the standards I set for myself, Archuleta said in the statement. Going forward, I will redouble my efforts to maintain civility in all my communications.

The tweet came amid reports that Trump used an expletive to deride Haiti, El Salvador and African countries during a meeting on immigration with lawmakers in the Oval Office last week, sparking fierce backlash. The president on Sunday said hes not racist and denied that he made the comments.

Archuleta has been critical of Trump and other officials before on Twitter, which happens to be the Republican presidents preferred medium for launching insults of his own. Last year, Archuleta said Trump is a fool and appeared to suggest Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is incompetent, among other tweets.

State Republican Party Chairman Kelly Armstrong, a state senator from Dickinson, said he likes Archuleta personally and was glad he apologized, but said its pretty clear that the leadership at North Dakota United is very partisan, and I guess its up to their members to decide if theyre OK with that.

North Dakota United has 11,000 members that include K-12 teachers and higher education faculty and staff, along with state, county and municipal employees, according to its website.
North Dakota oil production is back in growth mode, up about 1 percent in November to 1.19 million barrels per day, the Department of Mineral Resources reported Tuesday.

Director Lynn Helms said he expects the state will set a new oil production record in the first half of 2018, exceeding the high of 1.23 million barrels per day set in December 2014.

Helms cautioned, however, that extreme cold temperatures have recently caused some electrical problems in northwest North Dakota that could decrease Januarys production levels.

Any given month, we could take a step backward, but we are definitely back in growth mode at these oil prices, Helms said.

The price of North Dakota sweet crude was $54.75 a barrel on Tuesday, compared with $49.56 a barrel in December, according to figures Helms cited from Flint Hills Resources.

When prices were low, operators primarily focused on the core area of the Bakken where wells are most profitable.

Now areas that had been considered to be on the fringe of the Bakken are expected to be more attractive to drillers, thanks to recent increases in oil prices and advancements in technology, said Justin Kringstad, director of the North Dakota Pipeline Authority.

Helms said he expects areas in Divide, Burke and northern Williams counties will start to see additional drilling rigs this year. Divide County has had zero rigs operating and Burke County has one.

Overall, the state had 57 rigs operating on Tuesday, and Helms said he expects that to grow by five or 10 later this year.

Natural gas production increased 1.4 percent in November to nearly 2.1 billion cubic feet per day, according to preliminary figures.

The industry flared less natural gas in November, with 14 percent flared statewide compared with 17 percent flared in October. The volume of gas flared in November was 282 million cubic feet per day, Helms said.

The state had a total of 14,324 producing oil and gas wells in November, another record for the state.

One figure Helms said hes frustrated by is the number of inactive wells, which increased by 21 in November to 1,492. Even as oil prices have improved, companies havent brought those wells back online, instead spending money on new wells, Helms said.

Regulators are discussing new policies that could be adopted to decrease that number, he said.

The state also had 883 wells that were drilled but waiting on hydraulic fracturing crews at the end of November.

About 75 percent of oil was transported by pipeline in November and 11 percent was transported by rail, Kringstad said.
MINOT -- It is quite rare for a defendant to plead not guilty due to temporary insanity, but that defense has been successfully used during the past few years in several cases in North Dakota

One of the most recent to use the defense is Kyle Edward Coffman, 35, of Minot, who is asserting he lacked criminal responsibility for his actions when he allegedly assaulted a family member's accused rapist and terrorized the man's son and grandchildren on Oct. 2, 2016.

A pretrial conference for Coffman is scheduled Wednesday before Judge Todd Cresap in Minot.

Nick Thornton, president of the North Dakota Association for Defense Lawyers in Fargo, said defense lawyers weigh different factors when deciding to present a mental health defense.

"It depends on the seriousness of the offense," said Thornton.

State law allows different types of mental health defenses. A lawyer might call the competency of a defendant into question if he doubts that his client is capable of assisting in his own defense. In those cases, the case might go to trial at a later date if the defendant is later found competent.

A diminished capacity defense might be used to argue that the defendant is guilty of the crime but should be allowed to plead guilty to a lesser offense because of his mental state at the time of the crime.

The insanity or temporary insanity defense  lack of criminal responsibility  is used when the defendant argues he is not guilty because of his mental state at the time of the crime.

In less serious cases, Thornton said he might choose against using a mental health defense even when he feels his client qualifies. In some cases his client could end up being subject to court supervision for an even longer period with a mental health defense than he would with a guilty plea. A district court is permitted to retain jurisdiction over the defendant found not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility for the length of the maximum sentence allowed for a crime. In some cases, that might mean the defendant is confined to the state hospital until he is deemed no longer a danger to himself or the community; in other cases it might mean a defendant is allowed to live and work in the community while attending regular counseling through the North Dakota Department of Human Services.

For a Class C felony, the length of court jurisdiction could stretch to five years when a guilty plea and a plea bargain might have resulted in a lesser sentence. For a Class B felony, the maximum length of court supervision could be 10 years. For a Class A felony, the maximum period of supervision would be 20 years; for a Class AA felony, life. Thornton said he has probably raised a mental health defense more than other defense attorneys in North Dakota but he estimates that he has used one in less than 1 percent of his cases.

In the Minot area, the cases have been raised primarily in high stakes murder and assault cases.

Coffman, is charged with Class B felony burglary and Class C felony terrorizing, Class C felony aggravated assault and Class C felony reckless endangerment. If convicted of all the charges, the maximum prison sentence could be up to 25 years.

According to court documents and statements made at court hearings, Coffman's teenage son had just died days before. He was further stressed when he received a phone call from a family member telling him she had been raped and the police had declined to arrest her assailant because it was a "he said, she said" case. At that point, Coffman allegedly went over to the other man's house to confront him. He allegedly terrorized the man's son and grandchildren and struck the other man in the head with a gun before the man's son got the gun away from Coffman and pointed it at him. Coffman then fled the apartment.

Coffman is asserting he is not legally responsible for his actions because of his mental state at the time.

In another case, a former oil company worker was found not guilty of stabbing a coworker to death at a Minot hotel in 2011. The man was found to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. He was committed to the state hospital in Jamestown and was granted conditional release a year later. He was allowed to live and work in the community while under the supervision of Human Services. He asked to be released from supervision and presented expert testimony that he is at low risk to reoffend. Judge Stacy Louser denied his appeal because she said the risk to the man and society is too great if he stops taking his medications.

In 2015, a Minot woman was found not guilty due to lack of criminal responsibility for choking her baby daughter to death. The woman had suffered a psychotic break. She was evaluated by the state hospital and deemed no longer dangerous to the community. A judge ordered her to be released into the community, subject to supervision by the North Dakota Department of Human Services.

A Bismarck man tried to raise the defense after he was charged with sexually abusing a young female relative. He claimed he was not responsible for his actions because he did it while he was asleep. A medical expert diagnosed him with the sleep disorder sexsomnia. A plea deal was worked out that allowed him to enter an Alford plea to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the deprivation of a minor. The man was sentenced to a year in jail, all suspended, 18 months unsupervised probation and ordered to continue counseling and have no contact with the victim.

The lack of criminal responsibility defense has also been raised in the case of Angela Lee, a 44-year-old Minot woman accused of stabbing her mother in 2016 when the mother tried to stop her from strangling the family cat. That woman reportedly has a history of mental health issues. A dispositional hearing in that case is scheduled for next week.
For too long, the Wests policy toward Africa could be summed up in two words: foreign aid. Somehow, temporary funds transfers  many of which never reach their recipient country and end up in the pockets of well-connected Western professionals  would solve structural development issues. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu once derided some foreign aid plans as get-rich-quick schemes.

Those developmental policies, like Ponzi schemes, hurt the would-be beneficiary.

Even as the level of foreign aid into Africa soared through the 1980s and 1990s, African economies were doing worse than ever, as  a paper by economist Bill Easterly of New York University, shows, the World Economic Forum summarized. The countries that receive less aid  tend to have higher growth  while those that receive more aid  have lower growth.

If such policies harm Africans, albeit unintentionally, what would be a better alternative?

Nobel Prize winning economist Angus Deaton argues that we should focus on doing less harm in the developing world, like  ensuring that developing countries get a fair deal in trade agreements.

In todays Religion & Liberty Transatlantic essay, Ibrahim B. Anoba writes that two specific trends can help Africa flourish.

Anoba  who hails from Lagos, Nigeria  argues that his continent will benefit from free trade and Brexit. The fortuitous confluence of the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) and Brexit could fundamentally transform the African economy and improve the regions well-being. When it is signed this March, the CFTA would create a free trade zone (and customs union) encompassing 1.2 billion people in 54 nations, with a GDP of $2.2 trillion. It would include a greater number of countries than any free trade agreement in history. It is estimated to increase intra-African trade by as much as half-again.

Meanwhile, Brexit could help Africa get the best out of this historically one-sided [trade] partnership with Europe, Anoba writes:

The UK is already one of Africas largest European partners, and leading Brexiteers have raised the possibility of importing more goods from Africa once the UK no longer has to abide by the EUs Common Agriculture Policy, which imposes 18 percent tariffs on African agricultural goods. Of course, the post-Brexit EU would equally want to replace trade lost by Brexit. What this means is a new scramble for trade in Africa between Britain and post-Brexit EU that perfectly plays in the continents favor.

This new reality  combined with heightened interest in Africas economy by China, India, and others  could usher in a new era of prosperity to the worlds fastest-growing continent, he adds:

However, the beauty of this historic agreement is the simple-yet-vital change it promises to inaugurate in the continent. If this deal survives for at least a decade, it will have allowed African entrepreneurs to share their talents in a fast-evolving global market. Technological innovations that have helped some countries improve will be transferred to others through trade. The higher volume of trade will increase Africans personal, material well-being, especially those of the millions ravaged by poverty on the continent. And the possibility of increased trade  within Africa, with the EU, the UK, China, and other regional economic powers  is the most important path to open Africas doors to boundless prosperity.

Free trade and an improved geopolitical playing field must be joined with a respect for the rule-of-law, impartial administration of justice, and respect for human rights. Then Africa will take its place as a global economic power that enables its growing population to flourish  without Ponzi schemes or stilted trade agreements dictated by Brussels.

You can read Ibrahim B. Anobas full article here.

(Photo credit: Embassy of Equitorial Guinea. CC BY-ND 2.0.)
As per the data released by the commerce ministry, the trade deficit or difference between imports and exports was USD 14.88 billion, up about 41 per cent year-on-year.

New Delhi: Propelled by engineering good sand petroleum sectors, India's exports rose 12.36 per cent to USD 27.03 billion in December even as the trade deficit touched a 3-year high. Imports too surged significantly to USD 41.91 billion, up 21.12 per cent, on increased inbound shipments of crude oil and gold.

Exporters body FIEO said India is on course to reaching the USD 300 billion milestone for overseas shipments. As per the data released by the commerce ministry, the trade deficit or difference between imports and exports was USD 14.88 billion, up about 41 per cent year-on-year.

"Exports have been on a positive trajectory since August 2016 to December 2017 with a dip of 1.1 per cent in the month of October 2017," the ministry said in a statement.

FIEO said that positive growth for the second month in a row, after a fall in October, shows resilience of the Indian exporters.

"Since we have already achieved exports worth USD 224 billion in first 9 months of the fiscal and global trade growth remains robust in 2018, we are on our course to achieve the milestone of USD 300 billion in 2017-18," said FIEO President Ganesh Kumar Gupta.

The exports had totalled USD 274.64 billion in 2016-17, up from USD 262.29 billion in the preceding industry. As per the commerce ministry data, exports of engineering goods as well as petroleum products showed an increase of over 25 per cent in December.

However, shipments of ready-made garments declined by 8 per cent to USD 1.33 billion last month. Gold imports surged by 71.5 per cent to USD 3.39 billion last month as against USD 1.97 billion in December 2016.

The imports of petroleum products and crude oil increased by a significant 35 per cent to USD 10.34 billion in December, from USD 7.66 billion a year ago. The ministry said the global Brent prices increased by 18.75 per cent last month, compared to December 2016 as per World Bank commodity price data.

Cumulative value of exports for April-December, 2017-18, was USD 223.512 billion as against USD 199.467 billion in the year-ago period, a growth of 12.05 per cent. Imports during the first nine months of the current fiscal amounted to USD 338.369 billion as against USD 277.89 billion, a growth of of 21.76 per cent.

The trade deficit during the period widened to USD 114.85 billion. On the trade balance, FIEO said the rising deficit "is alarming" and the import profile needs to be analysed carefully to see whether imports would augment domestic production or pose a challenge.

The rising import of gold and precious and semi-precious stones can help exports from the gems and jewellery sector in next few months, Gupta added.

Exports of only 21 (as against 24 in November, 2017) out of 30 major product groups were in the positive territory in December, 2017 including engineering goods, petroleum, organic and inorganic chemicals, gems and jewellery, and drugs and pharmaceuticals.

Gupta further said exporters are having "huge problem" in getting refund of input tax credit (ITC) both due to "ignorance and recalcitrant approach" of the tax authorities.

He said exporters should be given reasons for the delay and there should be close monitoring of GST refund for exports on day to day basis. Aditi Nayar, Principal Economist with

ICRA said that a sharper than expected rise in imports of gold, and pearls, precious and semi-precious stones, amid a considerable decline in the pace of growth of non-oil merchandise exports, bloated the merchandise trade deficit to a three-year high of USD 14.9 billion in December 2017.

Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank data showed that the exports in services in November 2017 were valued at USD 15.392 billion.

The imports were valued at USD 9.64 billion. It said in a press release that the trade balance in services (net export of services) for the month was estimated at USD 5.74 billion.

Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu said in a series of tweets that growth in exports across major commodity groups reflects the positive trend in the economy.

"Our continuous efforts are focussed towards facilitating exports and achieving our full potential," he added.
Government had removed customs duty on pure nickel in the last budget.

New Delhi: Ahead of the budget, the stainless steel industry has asked the government to remove import duty on ferro-nickel and stainless steel scrap.

In its pre-budget wish list, the Indian Stainless Steel Development Association (ISSDA) has sought removal of customs duty on key raw materials used in producing stainless steel.

"The government had removed customs duty on pure nickel in the last budget, it didn't help the industry much since most of nickel used by stainless steel makers is in the form ferro-nickel," the ISSDA said.

The same relief should now be extended to ferro-nickel, it demanded. The import duty on ferro-nickel is 2.5 per cent.

The raw material has to be necessarily imported because India hardly has any nickel resources, the association said.

The industry body also said that since all the stainless steel is produced through electric furnaces, stainless steel scrap is the main raw material which also provides cost effective source of alloying elements like chrome and nickel.

The scrap is also not available in the country and has to be imported, the body said asking the government to bring the customs duty for stainless steel scrap to zero from 2.5 per cent at present.

ISSDA President K K Pahuja said, "It is absolutely necessary to preserve competitiveness of Indian stainless steel industry at a time when government is building new trade relations with other countries and we appeal to the Finance Ministry to remove basic custom duty on both ferro-nickel and stainless steel scrap."

The Union Budget for 2018-19 will be presented on February 1.

Steel Secretary Aruna Sharma had earlier told PTI that along with ferro-nickel, the steel ministry had pitched for bringing down import duty on stainless steel scrap to zero.

The steel ministry had already made a request to the finance ministry in this regard, she had said.
Mumbai: Akshay Kumar has turned Padman for his next, but did you know that the superstar himself was unaware about menstruation and pads for a long time?

I learnt about menstruation only when I was 19-20. I never held a pad in my hand. Nobody in my family asked me to buy sanitary napkin and its only in the last two years that I came to know about it in great detail. I have now learnt that menstruating women are considered ritually impure and polluted, and they are often isolated as untouchables. That they cant touch pickles, enter kitchen, or go to temples, wash their hair. Then, too many girls end up dropping out of school because they dont have supplies to manage their periods, Akshay told Firstpost.com.

When asked about his son, Aaravs impression on the films subject, Akshay said that he and his wife practice what they preach. His mother has explained everything to him. Nothing is hidden in our family. Aarav knows. I am not living a double standard life that I am talking to people about it but I have hidden it from my own son, he said.

Prior to this, Akshay worked in another film on social issue, which was Toilet: Ek Prem Katha that released last year. I can say from my experience that when I did Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, it was like entering a dangerous zone but the film brought a lot of changes in society. I am already victorious with millions and millions of people talking about Padman on social media, men discussing with other men and asking each other whether they watched the Padman trailer and that it talks about sanitary pads. I am glad they are talking, they should know. When we started making Toilet..., there was 62 per cent open defecation and post release, it is 33 per cent. So I presume change happened in that time span. So, from 82 per cent (percentage of women not using sanitary napkins) if that number goes down by even four to five percent, it will bring a big change, he added.

Directed by R. Balki, also starring Sonam Kapoor and Radhika Apte, Padman is slated to release on Republic Day with Deepika Padukone-Shahid Kapoor-Ranveer Singh starrer Padmaavat.
Pune: Akshay Kumar, who is all set to come up with his next film 'Padman' in the Republic Day weekend, feels that sanitary pads should not be tax-free, rather free for women.

While promoting the movie in Pune, the 50-year-old-actor said, "Women are going for tax-free sanitary pads, but I say it should be completely free. Cut the five percent money from defence, make one bomb less and give it to women to get sanitary napkins."

'Pad Man' is a biopic based on the life of Arunachalam Muruganantham, who makes cheap and affordable sanitary pads for the women of his village and fights for menstrual hygiene.

Quirky posters, interesting trailer and some soulful songs have already made fans really curious.

Helmed by R. Balki, 'Pad Man' also stars Sonam Kapoor and Radhika Apte.

The flick is all set to release on January 25, and will clash with Sanjay Leela Bhansali's magnum opus 'Padmaavat', which stars Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh and Shahid Kapoor in pivotal roles.
Doctors have been able to save a lot of lives thanks to the progress medical science has been achieving in the past several years. But can they actually bring people back to life.

What has been featured in science fiction for years may just come true in just a decade if experts are to be believed. Dennis Kowalski of the Cryonics institute in Michigan claims that the first human body frozen by cryogenics will be brought back to life within the next 10 years.

This comes at a time when 350 people across the globe have had their corpses frozen hoping that they can be reanimated in the future. Around 2000 people have signed up with Kowalskis institute to be frozen after their death.

They already have 160 people frozen in specialised liquid nitrogen tanks at their headquarters. Kowalski said that the revival of the first corpse depends on how quickly technology like stem-cells advances.
Researchers discover technique that help you use stress to your advantage. (Photo: Pixabay)

You don't need to hear how stressful life can be.

These days Monday blues are turning into week long blues.

Your days could be filled with a whole host of things that will make you want to run in another direction and not deal.

But researchers at the University of Mannheim in Germany have found that changing your stress "mindset" could help you in a positive way, the Daily Mail reported.

For the study, researchers examined how 171 workers felt during a normal work week.

Participants had to fill a diary thrice a day. At the beginning of the day, they had to write about their workload for the day. After work, researchers listed whether or not the participants took any constructive steps to manage with the work. At the end of the day employees had to explain how they thought they fared during the day.

The results showed those with a positive stress mindset were able to tackle their projects at work in a more energized manner.Your problems won't vanish over night, but what you can do is change the way you think to a postive mindset when you find a task stressful.

Researchers feel this approach can help provide an opportunity to learn and achieve something.
Judges also ordered him to pay 10 million rupiah (US$700) in fines. (Photo: Pixabay)

An Indonesian teenager was sentenced Tuesday (Jan 16) to 18 months in prison for "insulting" President Joko Widodo on Facebook.

The 18-year-old high school student from Medan on the island of Sumatra, identified by the initials MFB, was found guilty of violating the country's internet law by making defamatory and slanderous comments online.

Judges also ordered him to pay 10 million rupiah (US$700) in fines.

"If the fines are not paid, the jail term is extended by one month," the presiding judge told the Medan court.

The teenager accepted the verdict and did not file an appeal.

MFB was arrested in August last year after he posted numerous inflammatory messages and memes against Widodo and police chief Tito Karnavian using fake accounts.



In July, he made a post challenging the police to arrest him. And they did, a month later.

The government of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim majority country, has received criticism following a string of arrests of people accused of insulting the president, making slanderous comments and posting fake information on social media.

Democracy and rights activists have branded the internet law draconian and a threat to free speech.

Last week a court in Jambi province, also on Sumatra, sentenced a local politician to one year in jail after he made a Facebook post considered to be insulting Islam. The judges found him guilty of violating the law and "inciting hatred".

In November last year, a man was charged for posting on Instagram images of Widodo's wife, Iriana, with texts considered offensive to the first lady.
Two chain-snatchers on a bike attacked the wife of a police inspector and took away a gold chain weighing 70 gm from near her residence at HMT Layout on Monday morning.

BENGALURU: Two chain-snatchers on a bike attacked the wife of a police inspector and took away a gold chain weighing 70 gm from near her residence at HMT Layout on Monday morning. The inspector, who was inside the house, heard her screams, ran out of the house and chased them for a distance, but could not catch them. The victim, Gangamma, is the wife of Kenche Gowda, who is attached to the police headquarters.

The incident was captured on a CCTV camera installed at the inspectors residence. In the footage, the bike with two men is seen coming near the inspectors house. The pillion rider gets down from the bike and approaches the victim. He pulls the chain and when the victim raises an alarm and resists his attempts, he drags her for a distance from her house, snatches the chain and escapes. The police said that Gangamma had gone out to dump garbage outside her house around 7.30 am. As she was returning home, she was targeted.

The inspector, who was inside the house, heard Gangammas screams and rushed out. He chased the bike for a distance, but the two criminals managed to get away. He immediately filed a complaint at the Peenya police station. The Peenya police have taken the CCTV footage and are investigating. In another incident, two bike-borne men, suspected to be the same gang, snatched a 55-gram gold chain in Bagalagunte police station limits on Monday morning.

The victim, Sydhamani, is a homemaker and a resident of Bridavana Layout in Bagalagunte. Around 7 am, she was drawing a rangoli in front of her house when the two men snatched her chain and sped away. The police suspect that it could be the infamous Irani gang behind both incidents.
The fishermen said that the buyers might be upset that the fishes caught might contain the human remains. (Representational image)

Thiruvananthapuram: Putrefied body parts of the cyclone victims are getting entangled in fishing nets traumatising the fishermen.

Rajan of Kolachal, who works in the boat 'Manu Mon' owned by Simpson, had the terrifying experience of netting a putrefied human body when he went for fishing in the first week of January. Since he had to stay on in the boat for another four days and had no refrigeration facilities on board, he dropped the body into the sea.

"That day the boat anchored at the spot without fishing. It is upsetting that the bodies were being spotted like this," said Abdul Rahman, a boat owner from North Paravur.

As per estimates, over 300 fishermen have not returned home after cyclone Ockhi hit the seas.

Fishermen told Deccan Chronicle that they were unaware about extracting DNA evidence from human bodies and were not apprised about such a possibility.

"Rather than banking on the chances of extracting body parts, the government should quickly compensate the families of the missing fishermen," said Gilbert Xavier of Poonthura.

The fishermen said that buyers might be upset that the fish caught might contain human remains.

"Fish do eat anything edible in the sea but the proof that more bodies were still being spotted shows that pelagic fish do not prefer to feast on human remains. In any case, it shouldn't be a cause of concern for buyers because there are billions of fish in the sea," said a fisherman.
The president emphasised that collaboration in newer areas such as space, cyber-security and innovation would add depth to the partnership. (Photo: President of India/Twitter)

New Delhi: President Ram Nath Kovind on Monday called for greater cooperation between India and Israel in countering terrorism and said a strong global response would defeat the menace in all its manifestations.

Welcoming visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called on President Kovind on Monday, the president said India-Israel security cooperation was defined by their common fight against terrorism.

"This challenge is eating into the vitals of our society. Our counter terrorism cooperation is progressing well but we need to do more. We need to work together to develop a strong global response to defeat terrorism in all its manifestations," the president said.

President Netanyahu's visit was the culmination of celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Israel, he said.

"Our warm and friendly ties are growing stronger. In a little over two years, the two countries have exchanged presidential and prime ministerial visits," President Kovind was quoted in an official statement as saying.

The president said bilateral cooperation had expanded manifold.

"Political understanding, security cooperation and technology partnerships are the key pillars of strategic engagement between India and Israel," he said.

The president also emphasised that collaboration in newer areas such as space, cyber-security and innovation would add depth to the partnership.

He said there were ample opportunities before the two countries in the fields of investment, manufacturing, services, start-ups and technology.

President Kovind appreciated the presence of Israeli companies in India, especially in the water, defence, technology and pharma sectors, and urged them to collaborate in programmes such as Make in India, Clean India, Smart Cities and Digital India.

Appreciating Israel's cooperation in the field of agriculture, he said the country had taught India "to do more with less".

"Israel's support has served our farmers exceedingly well, especially in water deficient areas. As we work to make our farming choices more sustainable, we will seek more Israeli support," he said.
Thiruvananthapuram: A day after netizens thronged secretariat demanding justice for Sreejith who is fighting a lonely battle since past 766 days demanding CBI probe into the alleged custodial death of his brother Sreejeev, the Centre assured probe by the premier investigation agency and chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan extended all help to the family in their pursuit for justice.

The Centre has promised to get the allegations probed by CBI, said Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor on Monday. Mr Tharoor and AICC General Secretary K.C. Venugopal, met Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North Eastern Region in New Delhi demanding a CBI inquiry. Mr Singh assured that the probe will be ordered immediately.

Later in the evening, Sreejith along with his mother Ramani and friends met Pinarayi Vijayan and demanded CBI probe. After the meeting Sreejith said he would continue his fast till the CBI probe is ordered.

He demanded that the state government should initiate steps to vacate High Court stay on punitive action against police officers who are accused of custodial torture. The Chief Minister appealed us to end the hunger strike. But I will continue the strike as my demand is yet to be accepted, said a fatigued Mr Sreejith. The chief minister reportedly spoke to AG and directed him to take immediate steps for getting the stay vacated. Later in a Facebook post, Pinarayi Vijayan said his heart was with Sreejith's agitation demanding CBI probe into the death of his brother.

The chief minister said the demand raised by the family was just. We will do whatever is possible to meet these demands. The government will extend all help to Sreejith. I have assured this during my meeting with him. When this issue came to our notice, we sent a letter to CBI demanding a probe into the matter. I respect the issues being raised by Sreejith, his mother, family members and their friends. I respect their feelings. I will work with that conviction, he said.

Governor P Sathasivam also called up Ramani Sreedharan, mother of Sreejith to express anguish over his condition.

After learning about my sons hunger strike through media, Governor called up and appealed to ensure that Sreejith ended his strike. He asked us to hand over all document related to the case by Wednesday, Ms Ramani said. The protest by Sreejith gained momentum as it entered 767 th day. The strike had received unprecedented support from people especially youth here on Sunday.

Sreejev died in mysterious circumstances in police custody after being taken in for alleged mobile phone theft. While officials said that he had consumed poison in custody, the family members allege custodial torture. The Police Complaints Authority had also found the policemen guilty in the case.

Sreejeev was taken into custody by the Parassala police on May 19, 2014 on the charges of theft of a cell phone and alleged torture. Two days later the youth succumbed to his injuries at the Medical College hospital.

Since then Sreejith, his mother Ramani and brother Sreeju have been running from pillars to post seeking justice.

State Police Complaints Authority (SPCA) in its inquiry had found that the death was caused due to custodial torture. However, despite the clear indictment of police, the authorities had failed to take action against the guilty.

The family was paid a compensation of Rs 10 lakh. But more than money, they want the culprits behind Sreejeevs custodial murder to be brought to justice.
The owner of the Mojo's Bistro pub Yug Tulli, who had been evading arrest in the Kamala Mills compound fire case, surrenders before the Mumbai Police. (Photo: File)

Mumbai: The owner of the Mojo's Bistro pub Yug Tulli, who had been evading arrest in the Kamala Mills compound fire case, on Tuesday surrendered before the Mumbai Police, officials said.

"We have arrested Yug Tulli, after he surrendered himself before police today morning at N M Joshi Marg Police Station," S Jaykumar, Additional Commissioner of Police (Central) said.

He will be produced before a court on Tuesday, said Jaykumar.

After the arrest of Tulli -- who had been evading arrest since last two weeks -- all the owners of the Mojo's Bistro and '1 Above' have been arrested, another official said.

On Sunday, Tulli was spotted at the Hyderabad Airport with his wife but disappeared before the police could arrest him, he said.

The deadly fire, which had engulfed Mojo's Bistro and the adjacent 1 Above pub, at the Kamala Mills compound on December 29 last year had claimed 14 lives.

Tulli, a Nagpur based businessman, and his partner Yug Pathak, the son of former Pune Police Commissioner K K Pathak, were booked under sections of culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

The action was taken on the basis of the Mumbai Fire Brigade's report which had said the fire possibly started at Mojo's Bistro due to the flying embers of a hookah and spread to 1 Above, he said.

Initially this offence was registered against the three owners of the '1 Above' pub, managers, and staff, he said
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Kerala Tourism has begun the second leg of its international campaign with trade fairs and B2B meets. The first phase of the campaign had ended on November 30. The second phase has started with Kerala Tourism putting up a stall at Vakantiebeurs, the tourism fair of the Netherlands, on January 9.

The next will be the five-day FITUR, the international tourism trade fair of Spain, which will begin on January 17. Spain is important as it is one European country that has still not discovered our shores, a top tourism department official said. Spain contributes less than two percent of our foreign tourists. From Spain, Kerala Tourism will travel to Germany. On January 23 and 25, the first roadshows of the second phase will be conducted in the German cities of Dusseldorf, a hotspot of fashion and art, and Hamburg, Germanys second-largest city known as a major European science, research and education hub, with several universities and institutes.

On January 26, Kerala Tourism will take part in the three-day New York Times show. This will also mark the start of our promotions in the United States, the tourism potential of which we had never really attempted to tap, the official said. Less than 8 percent of the foreign tourist arrivals to the state are from the USA. The venues of the roadshows in the U.S are Los Angeles (January 30) and San Francisco (February 1).

Kerala Tourism will mark its presence in the BIT 2018 Milan International Travel Fair in Italy from February 11. It will also participate in the five-day ITB Berlin from March 7 and the roadshow at Marseille in France on March 13. The second phase of the campaign will conclude with the roadshows in Milan, Italy, on March 15. As many as 12 trade fairs and 24 roadshows have been planned as part of the campaign.
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: BJP State president Kummanam Rajasekharan had a guarded reaction to Rajya Sabha MP Suresh Gopis tax evasion case in which the latter was arrested and released on bail by the Crime Branch special team. Kummanam told DC, Anyone can file a case against anyone. The actor turned politician is only an accused as he has not been charge sheeted.

Kummanam maintained that since Suresh Gopi had been let out on bail and the investigation was on, the party need not comment on the issue further.

Let the case take its own course. Not all cases can be made accountable as people can file a case against anyone. Since the investigation is on, it is not fair for me to comment on it, said Kummanam.

However, a party insider told DC that Suresh Gopi had bought two luxury cars even before he had become a Rajya Sabha MP and also prior to his enrollment in the party. Suresh Gopis tax evasion case is his personal issue and the BJP has got nothing to do with it. In fact the actor turned politician tried to get the luxury car at the earliest from Pondicherry which has not been for tax evasion alone, said a party insider.
Despite subsidy withdrawal, a total of 1.75 L Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage from India this year, Naqvi said. (Photo: AP)

New Delhi: The Union Minister of Minority Affairs on Tuesday announced the scrapping of Haj subsidy from this year.

The subsidy is a means of financial support that the Centre grants to Indian Haj pilgrims in the form of discounted air fares on Indian Government owned carriers.

Naqvi said that despite the subsidy withdrawal, a record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage from India this year.

Naqvi also said that the Saudi Arabian government has in principle agreed to allow Haj journey from India by ships and officials of the two countries will sit together to finalise the modalities.

"This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi told reporters and cited a host of measures for the welfare of minorities.

"Muslims didn't benefit from it. Development with dignity is what we believe in. The subsidy will be used for educating girls," Naqvi further said.

Earlier this year, Naqvi had said that the Centre would abolish the subsidy for Haj pilgrims in accordance with a Supreme Court order.

"A constitutional bench of the Supreme Court had, during the Congress regime in 2012, directed that the Haj subsidy be done away with. Hence, in the new policy, as per the recommendations of a committee, we have decided to do away with the Haj subsidy gradually," he had said.
The civic body made it clear in February last year that it expected Bengalureans to segregate garbage at source and even threatened to slap fines on those who did not fall in line.

Noxious smoke from piles of burning garbage is a common sight in Bengaluru, which still struggles to dipose of its waste. Garbage (even the segregated variety) is collected and dumped indiscriminately in landfills, while the BBMP's promises about waste-to-energy plants remain up in the air. The seven processing plants, installed at a whopping Rs 450 crore, process only 800 metric tonnes, about one-third of their capacity. The BBMP is now planning to float tenders for contractors to manage these plants and assign marshals to monitor segregation, but these measures may fall flat in the absence of a regimented, decentralised process of collection and disposal, reports Aknisree Karthik.

Most would agree that traffic, roads and garbage are the citys bane, robbing it of its peace and quiet and clean surroundings. While the BBMP seems to be attempting to give the city better and sturdier roads in the run- up to the state elections, it has not met with much success in dealing with the rising traffic and miserably failed where garbage is concerned. You still find heaps of it on roadside corners, attracting flies, cows and stray dogs.

In some areas while the locals simply set fire to the garbage in violation of norms and at great risk to peoples health, the garbage that is collected finds its way to quarry pits and dumping yards , much to the dismay of ordinary citizens, environmentalists and solid waste management activists.

Although the BBMP had assured that waste to energy plants would solve the garbage crisis, unfortunately the city does not have even one such plant in operation. And despite the state government spending a whopping Rs. 450 crore on seven integrated scientific waste processing plants to process the garbage and convert it into compost, only 800 metric tonnes of it is being processed, much below the plants capacity to handle 2,500 metric tonnes (MT), regrets Ms Sandhya Narayanan, a member of the voluntary organization, Solid Waste Management Round Table (SWMRT).

All seven plants became operational in 2015. But even after two years, the BBMP has failed to bring in measures to improve their capacity and make it mandatory for the ward contractors to send the garbage to the processing centres. Instead, the contractors are allowed to dump garbage according to their convenience, putting peoples health at risk. In many places, farmers are up in arms against the indiscriminate dumping of garbage on the outskirts of the city and on their grazing lands, she notes, adding emphatically, It is high time that the BBMP brings in reforms like taking farmers into confidence when dumping garbage near their lands and uses technology to check whether mixed or segregated garbage is being dispatched.

The activist makes sense as the BBMP is seeing protests at Ramangar against a plant being set up there to generate power from garbage. It needs to convince the community living in the area to accept the plant by holding talks with it and make sure they are not deprived of any civic amenity. Offering jobs at the plants would quell the protests, agree BBMP sources

Currently, the processing plants, are functioning only at Lingadheeranahalli, Seegehalli, Kannahalli and Doddabidarakally while those at Chikkanagamangala and Subbarayanapalya have been shut down over a dispute with the contractor concerned, Ms Narayanan recalls.

The BBMP has planned to float tenders to get new contractors to run these plants. We must get these plants running in the next six months to ensure that the city is not caught in the garbage rut yet again, she stresses.

In her view, the BBMP and government have allowed local politicians and villagers to sabotage the waste processing units and hold the city to ransom on the grounds that they give off an unbearable stench. Also, acceptance of mixed waste at the processing units is another issue. It is imperative to have marshals and security at the waste processing plants for their smooth functioning, she adds.

Similar incidents

The BBMP has made it mandatory for all people to segregate garbage at source since February 2017.

It now claims segregation has gone up from 35 per cent in 2016 to 50-55 per cent today.

While the east zone and areas on the outskirts of the city are doing well with over 60 per cent of the garbage segregated in these parts, the core areas with slums are lagging behind.

Mayor Sampath Raj says with the appointment of marshals in all 28 constituencies, segregation is likely to improve in future.

Decentralise garbage management: Experts

Segregation of garbage at source seems to be floundering in the city. Although BBMP claims 50 per cent of the waste is currently segregated, the figure seems far too optimistic given the situation on the ground.

The civic body made it clear in February last year that it expected Bengalureans to segregate garbage at source and even threatened to slap fines on those who did not fall in line. Showing it meant business it gave wide publicity to the move through advertisements in leading dailies and roped in Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) and NGOs to take the initiative forward.

But while there is no denying there was initially an impetus for segregation at source, it seems to have gradually died down in the absence of a proper follow- up mechanism in place.

BBMP south and west division with many slums, which were the hardest to deal with, saw around 15 to 20 per cent of their garbage being segregated to begin with. But this too did not improve in the months that followed.

Says Ms Shanthi, a resident of Chamrajpet, For a few weeks last year we segregated garbage and even bought an extra dustbin to do this. The pourakarmikas too insisted on taking only segregated garbage. But after a few days they stopped demanding segregation and although we continued to do it, the rubbish used to end up in one pile on the pushcarts. So we stopped bothering to segregate as its very purpose was being defeated by the civic workers themselves.

Mr Syed Javeed Ahmed, resident, Anepalya, says pourakarmikas do not ask for segregated garbage. Every day a mini auto comes to our area and people just dump their garbage into it," he recounts.

Coordinator of Citizens for Bengaluru, Srinivas Alavilli says that while garbage is being segregated in many homes today thanks to increased levels of awareness, it's not clear what exactly happens next. The pourakarmikas seem to do a good job of segregation, but once it reaches the auto and then the truck its another story, " he laments, adding, "If each ward has its own garbage management centre and transport is eliminated or minimised there could be more success on this front."

Marshal assigned in each constituency to monitor segregation: Bengaluru Mayor, Sampath Raj

The BBMP has been stressing on segregation of garbage at source and even threatened to slap fines on defaulters since February last year. Are you seeing any results ?

The percentage of segregation has improved in the city . Earlier it was 40 to 45 per cent and now it is 50-55 per cent.

The segregation was between 30 to 35 per cent in 2016. Has it improved only by 20 per cent since ?

Yes. After I took over as Mayor I directed officials to submit a three month report on segregation of garbage. Once I get it we will know where we are lacking and work on improving in these areas.

What zone are doing well in garbage segregation?

Areas on the outskirts of Bengaluru and the east zone are doing well. The segregation here has crossed 60 per cent and in some places it is over 70 per cent. But the problem is in zones, which have a lot of slums.

People in many parts of the city complain that the civic workers themselves seem unaware about the need for garbage segregation. What are you doing about this?

We have been sensitising the pourakarmikas to segregation through several workshops. Our officers also brief them at the mustering centres.

What are your other plans on this front ?

We have assigned one marshal for each constituency to monitor segregation at source on a pilot basis. Based on the feedback we get we may assign one marshal for each ward in future.
A large number of devotees, spiritual leaders and leaders of Hindu outfits staged a massive protest at Chepauk in the city on Monday, demanding lyricist Vairamuthu apologise for his controversial remark on Goddess Andal. Spiritual leaders, including Sriperumbudur Sri Appan Jeeyar and Hindu Munnani founder convenor Ramagopalan were also present (Photo: DC)

Chennai: Devotees, spiritual leaders and leaders of Hindu outfits came out in huge number to protest here on Monday against lyricist Vairamuthu and demand apology for his controversial remarks against Goddess Andal.

Spiritual leaders, including Sriperumbudur Sri Appan Jeeyar, said Vairamuthu had insulted Andal and offended them by making his terrible remarks against the goddess.

The well attended stir, held at Chepauk, saw thousands of devotees, spiritual leaders and those belonging to Hindu outfits raising protest slogans demanding that Vairamuthu apologise in front of the famous Sri Andal shrine at Srivilliputhur. Hindu Munnani leader Rama Gopalan, Right wing ideologue RBVS Manian were among those who participated.

Devotees have been staging protest demonstrations and lodging police complaints against Vairamuthu in several places, including Chennai. The lyricist however had claimed in a statement that he used the reference to Andal only in a positive connotation as that of the original authors of a research work in the US, from which he had quoted. Thamizhai Aandaal (Andal ruled over Tamil) was my tribute to Poet Aandal, celebrating her contribution to Tamil, he said.

Andal, the only woman among the 12 revered Vaishnavite saints hailed as Alwars in Tamil, is also venerated as a Goddess and a gifted poet in view of her classic Tamil work Thiruppavai, in praise of Lord Krishna.According to the spiritual texts, she lived in the eighth century AD in Srivilliputhur.
Chennai: To replenish the resources of Jaffna Public Library in Sri Lanka which had lost its rare collections of books and manuscripts to a fire in 1981, the directorate of public libraries has so far collected nearly 40,000 Tamil books from general public and educational institutions.

Tamil Nadu government has launched a drive to collect one lakh Tamil books for the Jaffna public library in October.

We received books through our readers, general public and educational institutions. The collection of books varies from ancient Tolkappiam to biographies of famous film personalities, said S.Kannappan, previous director (incharge) of public libraries who helmed the project till last week.

As the 41st Chennai Book Fair is currently being held in the city, the officials have also requested the publishers to donate new titles for the iconic library in Sri Lanka.

The Jaffna public library which had over 90,000 rare books and palm-leaf manuscripts was burnt by a Sinhalese mob in 1981. Subsequently, the library was rebuilt and opened in 2003. Now it has close to 100,000 books. This move is expected to boost the resources of Jaffna library.

The officials were confident they could collect all the one lakh books within a months time. At present, the universities and educational institutions are collecting books. We expect at least few thousand books from publishers who have participated in the book fair. We are confident of collecting one lakh books before January, officials said.

Since the books are collected for the library, the directorate of public libraries is accepting only new books. "Whatever the books collected so far was categorised and packed neatly," sources added

First, it was planned to send it in two shipments. Now they want to send all the books in one shipment. "The Jaffna library will get the books in February," they said.

The University of Malaya in Malaysia also will get some books as part of the announcement, but a majority of books will be sent to Sri Lanka.
Medical examination of the victim and the accused could not be conducted even after two days due to non-availability of doctors at the government hospital. (Representational image/File)

Ghaziabad: A 13-year-old girl, gangraped two days ago, was still awaiting a medical examination as were the two minor accused detained in connection with the case, police said on Monday.

The minor victim was playing with two boys from her neighbourhood on Saturday evening when they took her to a secluded place and took turns raping her while the other gagged her, her father said in an FIR lodged under section 376 of the IPC and the POCSO Act.

The accused threatened her against disclosing the incident, the complainant said, adding that the victim narrated the ordeal to her parents after reaching home.

Medical examination of the victim and the accused could not be conducted even after two days due to non-availability of doctors at the government hospital, Senior Sub Inspector of Sahibabad Jitender Singh said.
New Delhi: Speaking in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and a host of international delegates, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at radical Islam and its terrorist options from the podium of the Raisina Dialogue conference here on Tuesday evening, saying that the challenge can be overcome by strengthening India-Israeli ties. The Israeli PM also hailed the India-Israel alliance, saying that only the strong survive.

Our way of life is being challenged, most notably the quest for modernity, the quest for innovation is being challenged by radical Islam and its terrorist options from a variety of corners. This can upset the international system. I think one of the ways to overcome such a challenge is to strengthen the relationship between our two great democracies. The alliance of democracies, I think, is important to secure our common future, Mr Netanyahu said, as Mr Modi listened in the audience.

The weak dont survive. The strong survive. You make peace and alliances with the strong, he said, adding: We believe in India as you believe in Israel. May God bless the India-Israel alliance. He further said: We have discussed in the visit how we can strengthen our two nations in civilian areas, in security areas.

Israel has had a turbulent relationship with the Islamic world for decades due to the Palestinian issue, but the reference to radical Islam may be calculated to strike a resonance among many in India, which is battling the terrorism of Pakistan-based terror outfits like the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.

Interestingly, however, while Israel considers Iran to be the epicentre of terrorism, India considers Pakistan as being so. Israel is also battling radical outfits and accuses Iran of backing these.
New Delhi: The Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms (CJAR) through lawyer Prashant Bhushan has sought an in-house-probe against the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra in the Lucknow medical college scam.

Bhushan sent copies of his complaint to the four senior judges  J. Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur, Kurian Joseph as well as to Justice A.K. Sikri. Signed by Bhushan in his capacity as the convener of the CJAR, the complaint calls for an inquiry against the Chief Justice for what Bhushan calls various allegations of misconduct.

The complaint says, The Central Bureau of Investigations FIR makes allegations that the entire conspiracy and planning was to bribe and influence apex court judges who are dealing with the Prasad medical trust case. The bench was clearly headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra. In these circumstances, he was an interested party and could not have dealt with this case either on the judicial side or the administrative side by way of assigning a particular bench to hear this case.

The complaint stated that though there was no conclusive evidence of Justice Misras involvement in the conspiracy, a thorough investigation was necessary. These matters have tarnished the reputation of the court and have brought the judiciary into disrepute, Bhushan said and added that the issue needed to be dealt with swiftly. Mr Bhushan said the judge should examine the complaint next in seniority to the CJ, or by a Collegium of senior judges.

The scam involves a medical college run by the Prasad Education Trust. The Medical Council of India had denied the trust permission to operate the college, but a middleman allegedly assured the trust that the judiciary would allow it to run the institute. The trust then allegedly paid the middleman to facilitate this.
Bengaluru: Owners of rooftop bars and restaurants who are under the impression that by installing fire safety equipment and following procedures prescribed by the Karnataka State Fire and Emergency Services they could open their establishments, they could be wrong.

After the Kamala Mills tragedy in Mumbai, local fire department officials woke up and issued notices to 70 rooftop bars and restaurants across the city, asking them to adhere to the fire safety norms or else face action. Even the BBMP health department started hunting down illegal rooftop bars and pubs without permanent structures. They identified over 125 such outlets and issued closure notices to them with a week's deadline from January first week.

BBMP chief health officer M.N. Lokesah told Deccan Chronicle, "Units cannot start functioning just by installing fire safety norms. According to the Karnataka State Municipal Corporation Act, there is no provision for rooftop bars to function just by erecting temporary structures. Of the 125 units we have slapped notice against, more than half have already closed."

He said that the notices served by the fire department related to installation of fire safety equipment, providing emergency exits and making the place safe, while notices served by the BBMP were based on the KMC Act which bans rooftop outlets with temporary structures.

BBMP health officials said that over 90 percent of rooftop bars and restaurants were operating under temporary structures that are made out of wood, bamboo, plastic sheets, steel and metal. They said all these are illegal and were erected by violating building bylaws.

The officials said that an owner might have taken the permission to run a restaurant or bar on the second floor of a building, but would have extended the operation to the rooftop by erecting temporary structures. They have to restrict to the floor for which they have been granted permission, officials said.

Mr Lokesh warned that units that do not adhere to BBMP closure notices will be dealt with severely and reminded the owners that the BBMP is empowered to slap hefty fines and register FIRs.On rooftop bars and restaurant owners planning to meet the BBMP, he said, "We have not received any such request."
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday made it clear that if an adult man and woman marry, no khap panchayat, individual or society can question them and slammed the Centre for not enacting a law to prevent khap panchayats from taking law into their hands.

A three-judge bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud orally observed that the attack by khap panchayats opposing such marriages and resorting to honour killings was illegal.

The bench made it clear that if the Centre failed to stop the khap panchayats through legislation, then the court would intervene to put an end to this practice.

The court asked the Centre to give its response on suggestions earlier given by amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran on ways to prevent harassment and killing of young couples in the name of family honour for marrying inter-caste or intra-clan (gotra).

The CJI said, What we are concerned is that if an adult girl or boy gets into marriage, no khap, no individual or no society can question them. Whenever there is any kind of collective attack on a boy or girl who are adult, it is absolutely illegal.

In an affidavit the Sarv Khap Panchayats of Rohtak said, The main culprits for honour killings are not the representatives of khaps but the family of the affected couples. Any effort to regulate the khaps role would not have any impact on the incidents of honour killings.
Hyderabad: Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states are not going to oppose the Central government's recent proposal of the Godavari-Cauvery river link scheme. However, they would like to put some conditions on its implementation.

Union water resources minister Nitin Gadkari has convened a meeting of irrigation ministers of states in Delhi on Wednesday. It will be attended by irrigation ministers T. Harish Rao (Telangana) and Devineni Uma Maheswara Rao (Andhra Pradesh) along with officials of the respective irrigation departments.

Hitherto both states have been against interlinking of rivers in the southern region on the plea that there will be hardly any surplus water in the Godavari once all the existing and proposed irrigation projects on the Godavari are completed.

This was the stand taken by both the states when Uma Bharati was the Union minister. However, Mr Gadkari has convinced both governments that the Centre will not harm their interests or their rights over the Godavari and Krishna river waters, but he wants to take up the inter-linking scheme with 90 per cent of the expense being borne by the Centre and only 10 per cent borne by the concerned state government.

We will convey to the Centre that we are not against the proposed scheme, but we will insist that surplus water in the Godavari at the Akinep-alli site is to be established by the Centre only after taking into account all the water requirements of Telangana state, said TS engineer-in-chief C. Muralidhar.

We have to look into the technical details of the proposed inter-linking system and then only will the AP government give its consent. Per se we are not against inter-linking of rivers as we have been implementing it already, said AP irrigation minister Devineni Uma Maheswara Rao.

Sources say that Mr Gadkari wants the scheme to be launched soon with an eye on the ensuing Assembly elections in Karnataka and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections both in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

The agenda note for Wednesdays meeting states that the National Water Development Agency (NWDA) had originally drafted a plan for the nine-link system  Mahanadi-Godavari link, Inchampalli-Nagarjuna Sagar link, Inchampalli-Pulichintala link, Pola-varam-Vijayawada link, Almatti-Penna link, Srisa-ilam-Penna link, Nagar-juna Sagar-Somasila Dam link, Somasila Dam-Grand Anicut link, 9. Cauvery-Vaigai-Gundar link.

However, this proposal got nowhere because the surplus waters in the Mahanadi basin could not be finalised and also because the Inchampalli dam was not ready.

NWDA now proposes to implement the nine link system in two phases.

In Phase-1 unutilised waters from the Indravati (a tributary of the Goda-vari) will be transfer-red to the Cauvery basin through three links  the Indravati-Godavari (Aknepalli site in Kottag-udem-Bhadrachalam district of Telangana State); Krishna (Nagarjuna Sagar) link; Krishna (NS Dam); Pennar (Somasila Dam) link; and Pennar (Somasila)-Cauvery (Grand Anicut).

Surplus waters will be lifted from the Akinepalli barrage downstream of Inchampalli on the river Godavari and transferred to the existing Nagarjuna sagar Dam in the Krishna basin and from there the water will be further transferred to Somasila Dam in Pennar basin and to the Grand Anicut in the Cauvery basin.

About 700 TMC ft of water can be thus transferred. After arriving at a consensus, a detailed project report of Phase-1 will be drawn up. In Phase-2, the water from Polavaram Dam will be transferred to Pennar Basin (as proposed by AP) and further to the Cauvery basin.
Hyderabad: Despite all the smart talk about Digital India, rural districts in Telangana lag behind in computer and internet knowledge.

Nearly 70 per cent of teenagers in the 14-18 age group in Nizamabad district have never accessed a computer in their lives.

Students were also found wanting when it comes to subtraction and division of numbers and 46 per cent were unable to name the national capital.

This information was revealed in the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for 2017, which was released in New Delhi on Tuesday.

According to Nazmal Shaikh, ASER associate for Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, this 12th survey of ASER was confined only to Nizamabad, unlike previous surveys that were done in all districts leaving out Hyderabad.

He said that 1035 teenagers in the age group of 14-18 years from 945 households in 60 villages were assessed on activity (enrolment and work), reading (basic), arithmetic and English as well as awareness (mobile, computer, internet, banking, digital transactions), financial calculations, daily tasks, maps and general knowledge.

Nearly 68 per cent of teenagers were unable to do a subtraction of three by one number.

Mr Nazmal said many of them could not give the answer for 347 divided by 9. Sixty per cent failed miserably in subtraction.

Enrolment in studies was found to dip in the 17 to 18 age group; 29 per cent of teenagers, male and female, were found to have not enrolled for any study.

70 per cent teenagers could read an English

And understandably 35 per cent in this age group were working for 15 days or more in a month. When it comes to financial calculations, only 33 per cent were able to calculate discounts and only eight per cent could calculate repayment when tasks were given.

There were some achievements too. Seventy per cent of teenagers could read an English sentence properly, and 96 per cent could recognise the map of India though they failed to name the country's capital.

A good 69 per cent have their own bank accounts.Teenagers were found to lag behind in computer usage, but nearly 80 per cent nodded their assent when asked whether they used or accessed mobile phones.

The ASER survey was carried out in 26 districts spread over 24 states across the country. Information was collected on four domains - activity, ability, awareness and aspirations
Tehreek Muslim Shabban president Mohammed Mustaq Malik said that if the Haj subsidy is scrapped, it may not have much impact.

Hyderabad: Withdrawal of the Haj subsidy by the Union government will not affect pilgrims in the state all that much, according to the State Haj Committee officials.

The previous year, no subsidy was granted to pilgrims embarking from Hyderabad. Pilgrims whose airfare crossed Rs 65,000 were given subsidy last year, said professor S.A. Shukhoor, special officer, Telangana State Haj Committee.

In 2016, pilgrims from TS received a subsidy of Rs 16,000 each. Since 2012, following the Supreme Court ruling, the government has been reducing the subsidy component, but it has not largely affected pilgrims, said professor Shukhoor.

This year, about 4,000 pilgrims are going on Haj pilgrimage from Telangana. A total of 7,000 will leave from the Haj embarkation point at the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport as pilgrims from Andhra Pradesh and five districts of Karnataka also depart from the Hyderabad embarkation point every year.

All India Sunni Ulema Board chairman and president, Maulana Syed Shah Hameed Hussain Shuttari, said that Muslims who are economically strong and can afford the pilgrimage have been asked to perform it.

So it will not affect people to a large extent. But at the same time, subsidy for other communities should also be withdrawn, he said.

The TS Haj Committee wants the Union government to stop making Air India the official carrier for Haj pilgrims from this country because it charges much more.

The Jamaat-e-Islami wants the government to call for global tenders. About three lakh people go on Haj pilgrimage every year. While private tour operators charge Rs 48,000 for the to and fro journey, the government nominated Air India charges about Rs 62,000, said Hamed Mohammed Khan, president of Jamaat-e-Islami, Telangana and Odisha.

Tehreek Muslim Shabban president Mohammed Mustaq Malik said that if the Haj subsidy is scrapped, it may not have much impact.

But at the same time, sincere efforts should be made to bring down the airfare by changing the travel policy. The government is trying to bail out Air India at the cost of Muslim pilgrims.
Hyderabad: Amrutha Sarathy, who claims to be the biological daughter of the late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa, has got in touch with a city-based DNA expert through her lawyer in order to have her DNA testing done at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, once the court allows this.

Ms Sarathy filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court asking for the body of Jayalalithaa to be exhumed in order to collect a DNA sample to prove that Ms Sarathy is the biological daughter of Jayalalithaa. The Supreme Court directed that the plea be filed in the Madras High Court.

The Madras High Court heard the petition on December 22, 2017, and served notice to the government of Tamil Nadu and the Chennai Municipal Corporation to file their counter reply on why the DNA testing of the late chief minister should not be ordered. On January 5, 2018, the nephew and niece of Jayalalitha, Deepak and Deepa, filed an impleading petition that they should be heard in the case.

The court then ordered them to submit their counter-affidavit on maintainability of the case (whether the request can be entertained or not) before January 25, 2018 and any reply should be filed before February 2, 2018, when the next hearing of the case will take place.

In view of these developments, Ms Sarathy approached a city-based DNA expert and the CCMB-Hyderabad, whose DNA human genetics wing has the facility to conduct Y-STR (Y-chromosome DNA) and mitochondrial test. The CCMB does such tests frequently and it takes around two months for the result.

The samples will only be collected and tested if the court so orders. This newspaper has learnt that during the arguments in court, the petitioner was asked, why there was no plea to establish the paternal link.

To which her counsel replied that the petitioner only wants to establish the maternal connection.

In her petition, Amrutha Sarathy says she was brought up as the daughter of Jayalalithaas late sister Shylaja and that it was only after the Jayalaithaas demise that she came to know through her aunts L.S. Lalitha and Ranjani Ravindranath, that she is Jayalalithaas biological daughter. Lalitha and Ranjani are related to Jayalalithaa, according to Amrutha.

Amrutha states that when she was born on August 14, 1980, at Jayalalithaas Mylapore residence in Chennai, an understanding was arrived at between Jayalalithaa and her family members that the birth would not be disclosed, to uphold the dignity of the family as they belong to a very religious, orthodox and cultured Brahmin family and her birth would come as a shock to everyone.
Hyderabad: Congress leader Mr Mohammed Ali Shabbir, criticised the decision to scrap the Haj subsidy as a hasty and blatant anti-Muslim act by the NDA government.

It has been done to please the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who is presently touring the country, he said.

Reacting to the cancellation of the Haj subsidy for 2018 Hajis, Mr Shabbir Ali said that the minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvis announcement had come as a shock for nearly 1.75 lakh Hajis from India whose applications have been processed and are ready for their journey in a few months.

He said that the ministers statement that the Haj subsidy was scrapped for the sake of empowering Muslim women indicated that the NDA was not interested in spending on the Muslim minority community and pleading lack of funds.
JACKSON, Mississippi -- A bill which would keep BP settlement money on the Mississippi coast cleared the Senate Tuesday and now heads to the House, where a similar bill died last year.

Senate Bill 2176, authored by Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Pascagoula Republican, would create a special fund for the BP money -- the Gulf Coast Restoration Fund -- separate from the state's general fund.

The bill was co-authored by other coast senators, including Tommy Gollott, R-Biloxi; Mike Seymour, R-Vancleave; Philip Moran, R-Kiln; and Joel Carter Jr., R-Biloxi. The bill cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday before passing the full Senate on Tuesday.

"I continue to believe the vast majority of the BP settlement should be spent on the three coastal counties where the disaster occurred," said Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves. "Through town hall meetings and other events on the Gulf Coast, I have heard from residents and community leaders about the impact the disaster had on south Mississippi.

"It is important to separate these dollars so they can be spent on projects that create jobs to spur the local economy on the Coast, which will ultimately benefit the entire state of Mississippi."

BP's settlement with Mississippi calls for the company to pay the state $750 million over 17 years for economic damages suffered as a result of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Coast legislators have argued from the outset that all of the BP money should be spent on the coast, but legislators from other parts of the state have attempted to get a share of it.

In 2016, Rep. Jeff Smith of Columbus -- some 250 miles north of the coast -- pushed a bill that would have spent $50 million of the BP money on roads and bridges throughout the state. That bill passed the House, but was held on a motion to reconsider and ultimately died.

During last year's legislative session, Wiggins introduced a bill similar to SB2176 and it also passed the Senate, but did not clear the House after some House leaders claimed it did not offer enough detail as to how the BP money would be spent.

Wiggins, however, told The Mississippi Press following Tuesday's Senate vote he is more optimistic that the bill will clear the House this year.

"I think we've had a year of reflection and I think there's been more discussion, so, yes, I'm optimistic," Wiggins said.

Wiggins said there are no real differences between the bill he introduced last year (Senate Bill 2634) and SB 2176.

"In fact, when I presented it to the Senate, I told them this is the bill they all voted for last year," he said. "I mentioned the same thing in the appropriations committee (hearing). There are no fundamental differences."
Last year, Chinese regulators banned initial coin offerings, shut down local cryptocurrency trading exchanges and limited bitcoin mining.

Chinese authorities plan to block domestic access to Chinese and offshore cryptocurrency platforms that allow centralised trading, Bloomberg reported Monday citing sources.

Chinese authorities will also target individuals and companies that provide market-making, settlement and clearing services for centralized trading, Bloomberg reported.

Last year, Chinese regulators banned initial coin offerings, shut down local cryptocurrency trading exchanges and limited bitcoin mining - but activity in the cryptocurrency and bitcoin space has continued through alternative channels in China despite the crackdown.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
Whatsapp has an end-to-end encryption to every chat conversation for its 1.3 billion users. Though it sounds safe, there is a flaw in group messaging which can be attacked by hackers. A bunch of researchers from the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany say that anyone who controls WhatsApp's servers could efficiently insert new people into a private group, even without the permission of the administrator of the respective group.

"The confidentiality of the group is broken as soon as the uninvited member can obtain all the new messages and read them," says Paul Rosler, one of the Ruhr University researchers who co-authored a paper on the group messaging vulnerabilities. "If I hear there's end-to-end encryption for both groups and two-party communications, that means adding of new members should be protected against. And if not, the value of encryption is very little."

The researchers say that administrator of a WhatsApp group can invite new members, but WhatsApp doesn't use any authentication mechanism for that invitation. Hence the server can simply add a new member to a group with no interaction on the part of the administrator. After that, every participants in the group then automatically shares secret keys with that new member, giving him or her full access to any future messages.

Once an attacker gains control of the WhatsApp server he then has access to the conversation and could also use the server to selectively block any messages in the group. "He can cache all the messages and then decide which get sent to whom and which not," says Rosler.

According to WIRED, a WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed the researchers' findings, but emphasised that no one can secretly add a new member to a groupa notification does go through that a new, unknown member has joined the group. The staffer added that if an administrator spots a fishy new addition to a group, they can always tell other users via another group, or in one-to-one messages. And the WhatsApp spokesperson also noted that preventing the Ruhr University researchers' attack would likely break a popular WhatsApp feature known as a "group invite link" that allows anyone to join a group simply by clicking on a URL.

A WhatsApp spokesperson has clarified through an email that, Existing members are notified when new people are added to a WhatsApp group. We built WhatsApp so group messages cannot be sent to a hidden user. The privacy and security of our users are incredibly important to WhatsApp. It's why we collect very little information and all messages sent on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted.

The researchers write that the company could fix this group chat flaw by adding an authentication mechanism for new group invitations. Using a secret key that the administrator only possesses to sign those invitations could let the admin prove his or her identity and prevent the spoofed invites, locking out uninvited guests. WhatsApp is yet to take their advice.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Trump's Winter WH where the president hosts world leaders, is checked annually by the state of Florida. (Photo: AP)

Washington: US President Donald Trump's exclusive club in Florida has been cited by state inspectors for several code violations that pose a serious threat to public health and safety, a media report has said.

The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Trump's Winter White House where the president hosts world leaders, is checked annually by the state of Florida.

The club, located on a beachfront property, was cited in November for two violations deemed high priority: the lack of smoke detectors capable of alerting the hearing impaired through flashing bright lights; and slabs of concrete missing from a staircase, exposing steel rebar that could cause someone to fall, Miami Herald reported.

"High priority lodging violations are those which could pose a direct or significant threat to the public health, safety, or welfare," the inspection code reads.

The November inspections of the club's two main kitchens, meanwhile, yielded a total 15 violations, the report said.

Among the no-no was the staff's failure to track the freshness of potentially hazardous foods, including curry sauce dated October 21 pulled from a freezer and improperly marked, milk stored at 49 degrees instead of the safe temperature of 41 degrees, and cases of hot dogs stored on the ground of the walk-in freezer, the report said.

Ten other noted violations were deemed less serious under Floridas stringent food safety regulations, yet still damaging to the reputation of the upmarket club that charges a USD 200,000 initiation fee, and USD 14,000 a year for membership.

Trump had hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe at the Mar-a-Lago resort in 2017.
India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan, Khan alleged. (Photo: Twitter/@pid_gov)

Islamabad: The US had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat to it and Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan said.

He also said that it is time for a courteous yet "ruthlessly candid dialogue" with the US "with everything on the table" to remove all misunderstandings between Islamabad and Washington.

Reading out a policy statement on the government's foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly on Monday, he regretted that the US downplayed India's aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported on Tuesday.

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US.

"It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," Khan said.

He said that Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," he alleged.

Pakistan accuses India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against it, a charge India has dismissed.

Khan alleged that "India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan" and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

"India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour," he claimed, adding that the unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace.

The minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan.

He said Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation 'Zarb-i-Azb' and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

He urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001.

He also criticised the US for not pursuing internal reconciliation in Afghanistan, which had now become a safe haven for terrorists.
Do you think pre-K literacy starts with mastering letter names, sounds, and the conventions of print? A research brief published this week from the International Literacy Association says those elements are only part of what helps young children master reading skills.

In What Effective Pre-K Literacy Looks Like , written by former assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education Susan B. Neuman, the association outlines a number of steps it considers important for creating strong readers.

They include reading to young children, which reinforces print conventions and concepts in the context of a meaningful experience;" setting up discovery areas for children to play and to practice what they have learned about print with their peers and on their own;" and offering regular opportunities for children to express themselves on paper, even with teachers acting as scribes early on. Such activities send the important message that writing is not just handwriting practicechildren are using their own words to compose a message to communicate with others.

The brief was released Monday, the same day that the International Literacy Association released its 2018 Whats Hot in Literacy  report. That report, which catalogued the responses of more than 2,000 literacy professionals around the world, found that early literacy was listed as among the top most important issues in the field.

William Teale, a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and the immediate past president of the ILA, said in an interview that theres general agreement about the importance of the early years in setting a childs academic trajectory. But, he said, there is still some disagreement about how to make high-quality early-childhood education widely available. Educators are also still debating which are the best curricula or methods to imparting that high-quality instruction, Teale said. He said the research brief is meant to inform the conversations of educators and of policy makers.

The ongoing question is, how do we foster those early literacy skills? To what degree to we engage in all kinds of direct instruction and to what degree do we embed instruction in play, Teale said. And how do you do this at scale is also a big thing.

Education Week File Photo: In 2016, Head Start teacher Yolanda Gladney reads to 3-year-olds LaTruth Alexander, Rome Williams, and Emily Valdez-Rojo.Shane Bevel for Education Week
A 16-year-old girl committed suicide by setting herself on fire after she was allegedly raped by two men in her home in Majhgawa area.



The incident took place on Sunday in Katha village, where the girl was allegedly raped by two men, who are brothers, belonging to the same village, Superintendent of Police Dinesh Kumar P said.

The girl's father, an employee of a private company, was at work while her mother had gone to a relative's house to celebrate 'Makar Sankranti' when the incident occurred, he said.

"Agonised by the trauma of the incident, the girl sprinkled kerosene on herself and set herself afire, after which she died," the SP said.

One of the accused brothers was arrested, while the other one was absconding, he added.

Meanwhile, the father of the deceased girl in his police complaint has alleged that when her daughter was setting herself on fire, his son tried to intervene and save her, but the accused injured him as well, the SP said.

The parents reported the case to the police yesterday and an FIR was subsequently registered, the police said.

A case has been registered against the accused under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) Act, for committing rape, and prompting to commit suicide, they said.
Two porters were injured in an accidental explosion at one of the biggest ammunition depot of army in south Kashmir's Anantnag district on Tuesday.



Reports said two labourers were injured in the explosion at army's 21 Field Ammunition Depot (FAD) at Khundroo, Anantnag, 70 kms from here. The cause of the explosion was not immediately known.

Pertinently, several people were killed while over 50 were injured when the same ammunition depot, one of the biggest in Kashmir, caught fire in August 2007. Thousands of civilian had to be evacuated then and it took army several weeks to clear the area of unexploded shells.

The economy of the area took a serious hit since the ammunition depot went ablaze as people are reluctant to visit fields and orchards, fearing unexploded shells might blast. The residents says some of the shells which had landed deep into the soil in 2007 incident get up with soil erosion. They are scattered in paddy fields and orchards, they complain.

In 2016, army had declared that all its ammunition depots across the state were safe, after J&K Legislative Assembly Speaker asked the Jammu and Kashmir government to conduct safety audit of all ordnance depots.

The direction was passed after two army officers and 15 Defence Security Corps jawans were killed in a fire incident at the central ammunition depot in Pulgaon, near Nagpur in Maharashtra on 31 May 2016.
The US has been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat to it and Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan has said.



He also said that it is time for a courteous yet "ruthlessly candid dialogue" with the US "with everything on the table" to remove all misunderstandings between Islamabad and Washington.

Reading out a policy statement on the government's foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly yesterday, he regretted that the US downplayed India's aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported today.

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US.

"It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," the defence minister said.

Khan said that Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," he alleged.

Pakistan accuses India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against it, a charge India has dismissed.

Khan alleged that "India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan" and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

"India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour," he claimed, adding that the unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace.

The minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan.

He said Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation 'Zarb-i-Azb' and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

He urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001.

He also criticised the US for not pursuing internal reconciliation in Afghanistan, which had now become a safe haven for terrorists.
Punjab's power minister Rana Gurjit Singh resigned from his cabinet post following a controversy over sand mining contracts where, among others, his former cook bagged a whopping Rs 26 crore contract in an auction.



Rana has submitted his resignation to Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh.

The opposition Aad Aadmi Party (AAP) has been gunning for the minister ever since the controversy broke out.

The Enforcement Directorate(ED) had issued summons to the minister's son in connection with the raising of funds overseas.

"I had offered to resign even earlier on moral grounds when my name cropped up. On the same grounds, I have submitted my resignation to the CM," Rana said.

The firm of the cook even gave a loan of Rs 50 lakh to the minister.

Four former employees of the minister had bagged sand minning contracts.

The minister's cook Amit Bahadur got a mining site in Nawanshahr for over Rs 26 crore while Kulwinder Pal Singh, a former official with him, got a contract for Rs 9.21.

The minister has claimed innocence saying they were all his former employees. Capt said he is yet to take a call on the ministers resignation.

A one-member judicial commission under Justice JS Narang (retd) was set up to look into the matter.

The commission gave a clean chit to the minister. The AAP had questioned the impartiality of Justice Narang as his son reportedly represented the minister's family as a counsel in a case.
Khadga Prasad Oli will return to power as the 11th Prime Minister of the 'Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal' since the abolishment of the Shah-monarchy in 2008. The veteran leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) or CPN UML, was earlier Prime Minister of Nepal from Oct 2015 to August 2016, besides having been previously Nepal's foreign minister (2006-07) and home minister (1994-95).



In the elections in November-December 2017, the 'Left Alliance' of the two principal Communist parties, Oli's CPN-UML and Pushpa Kamal Dahal's CPN (Maoist-Centre), won a joint victory in the bicameral legislature (House of Representatives and National Assembly) and in the state assemblies. These elections were closely watched by both Delhi and Beijing as, for once, a stable leadership was expected in Kathmandu given the restraining clauses that have come into play after the adoption of the new constitution in 2015.

The landlocked Himalayan country, flanked by competing geopolitical rivals China and India, will inevitably witness hectic pitching for influence and strategic sweepstakes. The centrist Nepali Congress was perceived to be pro-India, whereas the nationalistic, rejectionist and assertive tenor of the 'Left alliance' was believed to be the preferred dispensation of the Chinese. Therefore, for India, the challenge of handling and managing Oli in his second coming as prime minister.

'Dhruba', as Oli was known in his younger days, was a precocious chess player and given to writing fiery nationalistic poems - both early indicators of his proclivity and dexterity in the rumble-tumble of Nepalese politics, which has evolved from the absolutism of the monarchy era, the anarchical spirit accompanying the Communist/Maoist resistance to, finally, reconciliation and adapting to the democratic framework and the geopolitical opportunities of today.

Oli's baptism into the violent communist resistance in 1966 saw him rise quickly within the ranks and play a leadership role in the infamous Jhapa rebellion that saw the beheadings of feudal landlords, which ultimately put Oli behind bars for 14 years. The providential timing of his release coincided with the greenshoots of the democratic movement in Nepal, and Oli was poised to take the centre stage in Nepalese politics, first as the central committee member of CPM-ML and then as the founding chairman of Prajatantrik Rashtriya Yuwa Sangh.

The roller-coaster ride of Nepalese politics soon saw Oli become prime minister in Oct 2015, supported - incredibly - by the royalist and pro-monarchy Rashtryia Prajatantra Party and the Madhesi Rights Forum-Democratic, besides the Maoists and 13 other smaller parties.

Ironically, it was the Maoists who pulled the rug from under Oli's feet in less than 10 months, only for the two to soon join hands and form the 'Left Alliance'. The intra-Left intrigues notwithstanding, Oli has firmly established his personal credentials as the leading voice against the centrist Nepali Congress, taking an ultra-nationalist and unsubtly anti-India stand (and by default, pro-China), aided by popular perceptions of Delhi's hand in the debilitating and humiliating economic blockade of 2015.

Oli, the Machiavellian politician, had been quick to nail his political stance to the powerful and restive emotions of 'national pride' to establish the damaging perception that the Nepali Congress was hand-in-glove with Delhi, and posited his own proximity and preference with the ever-willing Beijing as a credible alternative. The unsavoury term 'foreign hand' in Kathmandu, has acquired an unmistakable Indian context and the inherent message in the optics of the prime minister-in-waiting making a surprise visit to the Chinese trade and transit point in Rasuwagahdi, makes Delhi wary of Oli's second coming.

Traditionally, the first international visit by every Nepalese prime minister has been to India. Oli's move to visit Rasuwagahdi-Kerung on the Nepal-China border, which is symbolically seen as an alternative to Birgunj on the Nepal-India border, holds vivid portents of Oli's 'balanced' foreign policy!

Beyond the political tactics of pitchforking China into the Indo-Nepalese realm, the reality is that over two-thirds of Nepal's trade is still with India. With life-sustaining imports a staggering nine-times that of exports, the Chinese are still far from offering a viable and sustainable option to that of India. Oli, the quintessential politician would know the limits and consequences of pandering to the Chinese beyond a point (for example, the fate of neighbouring Tibet and, more recently, Bhutan). Similarly, Delhi, too, must understand the sensitivities of 'big-brother' perceptions and those of interference in the internal affairs of Nepal. Unlike the expansionist agenda of China, there is much in common and comfort in dealing with India - the civilisational, cultural and fraternal connect that has overridden many challenges in Indo- Nepal relations since Independence.

Beyond economics and diplomacy, the emotive umbilical cord of the irrepressible Nepali Gorkhas in the Indian armed forces is the best example of Indo-Nepal trust and faith in each other. Befittingly, the serving and the previous chief of the Indian Army have been proud Gorkha officers - with the incumbent General Bipin Rawat hailing from 5/11 Gorkha Rifles, which is primarily composed of Rais, Limbus and Sunuwars from Nepal. General Rawat is a second generation Gorkha officer. His father Lt Gen L S Rawat was also from the Gorkhas. This, besides the reciprocal dignity of freely allowing citizens to travel between the two nations, is unparalleled among Asian countries.

Oli does have a certain ideological and political agenda that needs to be recognised and accommodated with care, dignity and requisite investments. The wounds of his first innings are still fresh and Delhi must tread carefully to address the same, whilst explaining in no uncertain terms the futility of overplaying the Chinese card, given its track record in the neighbourhood and globally. Nepal is truly a 'natural' ally of India from all possible angles, and Oli, a thoroughbred politician, should know that and benefit from it.

(The writer is a former Lt Gen in the Indian Army and former Lt-Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)
A 22-year-old student who set out to become a male escort was cheated of Rs 1.18 lakh.



Pradeep Chowdary (name changed), a resident of Hampinagar in Attiguppe, told the police he had been keen to fund his girlfriend's education.

A student of Java programming, he decided to work as an escort after he came across an ad on a free classifieds site.

The ad said, 'Start Working As A Male Escort for High Class Business Women. Earn High.' It promised easy money: Rs 20,000 a day.

Confident about his physique and good looks, he called up the mobile number provided in the ad.

Registration fee

The woman who answered his call identified herself as Alina Velho. She told him she represented a reputed agency and asked him to pay Rs 6,300 to register. Chowdary transferred the amount online to a bank account.

Alina's escort services agency created a profile for Chowdary, and sent him the details by email. She then asked him to be on standby.

A few days later, she called him to say a woman from Dubai, staying at a five-star hotel, wanted to hire him. Alina instructed him to be ready to head for the hotel.

She then asked him to pay a security deposit of Rs. 8,500 to have the client directly call him. He did as told.

Alina then told Chowdary he could collect his fees from the client and pay the company 20% by way of commission.

By then, Chowdary had transferred Rs 1.18 lakh to the bank account. He proceeded to the hotel lobby on Alina's instructions.

Wait in lobby

Chowdary spent hours waiting. Every now and then, Alina called him up to say the client was busy and would get in touch with him shortly. Later that night, the 'client' called him to say she was busy.

During the call, Chowdary heard a baby crying in the background. That was when he realised he was being conned. When he asked the caller about the baby, she hung up.

A furious Chowdary called up Alina and demanded his money back. She told him to pay Rs 8,500 as refund charge.

It was then that Chowdary lodged a complaint with the cyber crime police. They are investigating.
Policemen went after a speeding car in HSR Layout and caught a man who tried to escape with a chain he snatched from a woman.



Somashekhar, an employee of a private firm, snatched the chain of a woman at 21st Cross when she was going on her morning walk. The woman began to scream, following which Somashekhar sped off in a van.

Passersby alerted the control room which flashed a message to policemen patrolling HSR Layout. Constable Mahesh Nayak and Basavaraj, patrolling the streets, spotted the van and went after it on their bike.

Somashekhar abandoned his car after entering a dead end and began climbing a building in a desperate attempt to escape the pursuing policemen. As he stepped onto the building's asbestos roof, it gave in and Somashekhar crashed to the floor below.

The policemen caught him after a brief scuffle. Mahesh had a fracture to his left hand and Basavaraj was injured in the back, but the police managed to capture Somashekhar and hauled him to the police station.

Initial investigations revealed that Somashekhar joined a private firm as a housekeeper only to quit later. He stole a van from HSR Layout and used it to mug women to make a quick buck, a senior police officer said.
Encinitas thriller writer Christopher Reichs new novel, The Take, features a mobster-turned-fixer who finds himself chasing after a stolen letter so sensitive it could upend the worlds balance of power.

Reich (Numbered Account, Rules of Deception) will be at the Gordon Biersch Brewery in Mission Valley on Thursday, Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. for a ticketed event through Adventures By the Book.

Q: What got you thinking about the new book?

A: Several things. Ive spent my career writing what some people would call these globe-trotting, loyalty-blurring, fast-paced conspiracy thrillers that were deeply rooted in the days headlines and always took as a flash-point some political or moral crisis.

As time passed, I noticed there were so many of these stories in the news that I was just overwhelmed. I thought real life was getting ahead of fiction.

I wanted to go in a totally different direction. I wanted to do something thats lighter, thats more fun, thats more like how I really am. So I started trolling about for ideas.

I was drawn to several past characters and one was John Robie, the cat burglar in To Catch a Thief, the Alfred Hitchcock movie. I thought that was such a great character but he was way too nice. I wanted to have that kind of character but with a real edge to him.

The other area that interested me is private spying. The easy and mass availability of the most sophisticated surveillance tools, which used to be limited to the top intelligence agencies of the richest countries in the world, are now available to private citizens. Boy, does that empower the everyman to do what a superman can. From that came the character of Simon Riske.

Q: Tell me a little more about character development. How does your imagination work?

A: I never think about how they look. I always think about their character strengths and why I would look up to someone like that. With Simon Riske, I wanted someone who was classy, intelligent, presentable  and someone who came to be that way after suffering through a lot of hard knocks. A guy with real gravitas at his center.

Q: We get introduced to him at an auction where he is getting ready to pick someones pocket.

A: When I start to write a story, I draw on places Ive been and experiences Ive had. Ive been on tour to London and Ive been there at a time when they were having a big Sothebys auction. Its always so eye-popping and glittery and I thought that would be a great place to set something.

I didnt quite envision it would be a watch theft, but it kind of just came to me and with it I then endowed Simon Riske with this ability to pick peoples pockets.

Q: Do you worry about making him too skillful and therefore unbelievable?

A: When I decided I wanted him to be able to lift watches, I read an article in the New Yorker about a thief who was working in Las Vegas who then went over to the good side and was helping police. He was incredibly gifted at taking watches and picking pockets. There was a video on the New Yorker website and you literally could not see him do it. So I decided it was a skill people can have.

I never, ever want my characters to be super-human. If anything, I am dialing back their skill-sets as I become a more mature writer. Im trying to keep it as believable as possible.

Q: Not every writer is able to avoid the temptation.

A: For me, that kills the real suspense. Weve read too many of those books where the hero keeps dodging the bullets or theres 10 against one and somehow he overcomes the stratospheric odds. Im just done with that. I want it to be that when Simon gets cut, it hurts; when he gets punched in the face, you see the mark. I want it to be real.

Q: The new book is set mostly in France. Why there?

A: The original idea for the story came when I read in the Herald-Tribune, now the International New York Times, about the real-life robbery of a Saudi prince in his convoy. So that first scene really happened, and I wanted to use it for my own purposes.

Of course there wasnt a briefcase with a letter in it, but there was a 16-car convoy that was expertly robbed at gunpoint in 60 seconds with no shots fired. I saw that and I thought, This actually happened? Wow. As an investment banker, I had stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel George V (where the prince was before getting into his convoy). I lived in Paris, I know the city well, so I decided this is where I wanted to set my book.

Q: Youve written nearly a dozen books now. What do you like about writing thrillers, and has that changed over time?

A: The first thing, sadly, is that it doesnt get any easier. Thats kind of a bummer. But thats also the challenge. Im trying to write better. Im trying to write clearer, more succinct prose. And Im always trying to tell a better story with engaging characters, in interesting locales, and put them in situations the average reader will find exciting and way outside what they are used to seeing.

Q: What changes over the years have you noticed in the thriller genre?

A: When John le Carre wrote Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, spying was a very mysterious, nebulous world. We didnt know what spying was. We didnt know what they did. Now we know too much of who they are and what they do. So I think the interest in that area has kind of disappeared.

Of course, theres been a big rise in the unreliable narrator epitomized by Gone Girl and Girl on the Train. Thats a whole area that has sprouted up like mushrooms and is very fertile ground for authors, which I think has left the landscape open for a character like Simon Riske  a little bit old school, a little bit cinematic, trying to do the right thing.

Q: Youre hoping this will be a new series?

A: Im well into the second book, which opens up with Riske at a casino in Monte Carlo. Thats the area Im looking at: aspirational thrillers set in ritzy locales, but with very shady characters.

--John WIlkens is a writer for The San Diego Union-Tribune
As if moving to a new country wasnt a big enough undertaking, Tomoko Sakurai took over ownership of a unique Solana Beach business just a month after.

The Japan native, who moved to Solana Beach last June, purchased the Handcrafted store in the South Cedros Avenue Design District in July from Michael Gamble and Danny Burris.

Most of the items at the three-year-old shop are  you guessed it  handcrafted mostly by American artists. A few items were also created by creative minds in Canada and Japan.

Sakurai said she would often visit her parents in California and would always stop in Solana Beach on her trips. When she decided she wanted to move here, she found that Handcrafted was being put up for sale by its original owners.

Sakurai, a photographer, found the business to be a perfect way to support other creative folk and ease her into her new home.

The business is not commission-based. The shop  at 415 South Cedros Avenue  purchases the works outright from the artists to maximize support for them, Sakurai said. She said the shop finds artists at events such as craft shows, including the upcoming American Craft Retailers Expo next month in Philadelphia.

Ive always wanted to support the artists, she said. I love when people can make their livings with what they do as an artist.

The boutique sells unique items such as jewelry, accessories, home goods, pottery, scarves, cookware, handbags, glasswork and mirrors.

As they peruse the store, visitors can learn about the hundreds of artists.

Sakurai said she enjoys selling American handcrafted items in particular.

I love American handcrafted work because theyre not just beautiful, she said. Theyre so affordable and made so people can enjoy them in their daily lives.

For more information about Handcrafted, visit www.handcraftedsolanabeach.com or call 858-847-2385.

 Business spotlights are developed through this newspapers advertising department in support of our advertisers.
An illegitimate, orphaned immigrant born in the Caribbean rises to become one of the most brilliant of our Founding Fathers.

We all know by now the basic biography of Alexander Hamilton, thanks to the genius of Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda whose lyrics and musical production have captured the hearts, minds and imagination of thousands of devoted followers of the Broadway sensation.

But a lesser-known story is how the musical has engaged and excited students.

The inspirational rise of Alexander Hamilton to become a Founding Father, Revolutionary War hero, George Washingtons right-hand man, our new nations first treasury secretary and the face on our $10 bills, is not one you would think would stir young people who traditionally learn about figures in American history through dry textbook narratives.

But through Mirandas gifted adaptation of rap, R&B, blues, hip-hop, jazz, pop and other musical genres to tell Hamiltons story, young students are connecting to American history in ways not seen before, by means of this unique vernacular.

For the increasing population of low-income, underserved students in our communities, the musical play is particularly relevant, with its message of hope and the promise that America affords to all its people  especially the young, scrappy and hungry.

As for the line in the play that draws boisterous cheers (Immigrants  we get the job done!), the words touch the hearts of children who have come to America from other countries to escape tyranny or abject poverty  or both. It says, You can do this  whatever this is.

Diversity, in both its cast and its message, is the dominant power of the musical. We all come from somewhere else, and we all have a shot at making a difference.

Coden Day in San Diego

The educational potential of Hamilton is not lost on Carmel Valley resident Liz Nederlander Coden, who has deep connections to New York theater.

She spoke about the tremendous influence Hamilton has had on young people.

That is its greatest accomplishment, she said. My personal feeling is that Lin-Manuel Miranda and the show are changing the world. He has made the story of the birth of this nation relatable to people who could not have cared less.

Most people just looked at our founding fathers as men with wigs from ancient times, and now they can relate to them as people who might be living and struggling today.

The educational value of the show is profound beyond measure. I feel that he [Miranda] is educating the world.

Coden has more than a passing interest in the musical. When she heard that Hamilton was coming to San Diego, she began to consider how to use the opportunity to fundraise for local philanthropic organizations.

Your Shot In January was the result.

Liz Coden, a realtor with Pacific Sothebys International Realty  together with her husband, ophthalmologist and eye surgeon Daniel Coden  negotiated with Hamilton producers to purchase 500 orchestra section tickets for the Jan. 13 performance.

The idea of Your Shot In January was to sell the tickets at premium prices, with all profits to benefit Jewish Family Service and the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, two groups that serve the entire San Diego community regardless of religious affiliation.

At the Jan. 13 event, the Codens announced that an astounding $630,000 had been raised, to be split between the two organizations.

In their letter to donors, the Codens wrote, We took our shot and are grateful to you all for your tremendous generosity in making this fundraiser an outstanding success in every way.

San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer honored the Codens with a proclamation declaring January 13, 2018 Liz Nederlander Coden and Daniel Coden Day in the City of San Diego  for their countless volunteer hours to organizations that serve the community.

Excitement for civics

Pat Launer, Del Mar resident and renowned San Diego theater critic and arts writer, said Hamilton appeals to young people through its songs which she called infectious, catchy and memorable  part of Lin-Manuel Mirandas genius.

Because of that, students remember them, and they learn from them, she said. The show is an exciting, ebullient piece of American history, doing what the best history does: humanizing the facts, making it all very personal, not just an accumulation of dates and events and battles.

The score is terrific, but when you see it in the context of the stunning, ingenious production, history is really brought to palpable life. The specific facts may not all stay with you, but the songs that illustrate them will, and that (as we know from research on the effects of music) facilitates memory and learning.

I dont think any textbook can do that, no matter how well written. Hamilton shows how compromise and government work  and how the seminal events of history always involve personal interaction.

This is a bona fide phenomenon and its phenomenal. Its a game-changer for musicals  and for presenting history to people young and old.

The best part about the musical, Launer agreed, is that you dont even have to see the play to reap the benefits. The lyrics, the poetry, the dance, the beat  the phenomenon if you will  engage kids through the universal connective power of music.

Thats an undeniably compelling academic tool for educators seeking new, innovative ways to reach their students.

The play brings audiences into the room where it happens. That may be the best path to civics education anyone could ever imagine.

Hamilton for students

To bring history to life and make what happened over 200 years ago meaningful today is the goal of the Hamilton Education Program known as EduHam.

EduHam is a partnership of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Rockefeller Foundation and Hamilton.

The program uses the immense popularity of the musical to teach American history to high school students, particularly those in lower socio-economic demographics who attend Title I schools.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is the leading American history nonprofit organization dedicated to K-12 education. The Hamilton Education Program is part of the Institutes broader mission to improve the teaching and learning of American history.

The Institute offers resources on Alexander Hamilton and the founding era in the History Now section of its website, including essays, videos, online exhibitions, timelines and lesson plans. [https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/hamilton-education-program]

EduHam came to San Diego as part of the local Hamilton tour, to the delight of 2,800 students from 46 San Diego public schools.

The students, who studied this formerly obscure founding father for weeks before the production arrived in town, created and performed original adaptations of historical events as part of their history lessons, and were able to see a special performance of the play Jan. 11.

The response from students and teachers was overwhelming. Many teachers report that students rush to American history classes now, thanks to EduHam.

James G. Basker is president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and devised the education program with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, producer Jeffrey Seller, The Rockefeller Foundation and the New York City Department of Education.

According to a San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) press release, Basker said, This project is transformative. Hamilton has struck a chord with our nations students because it embodies what great history education is all about: bringing the past to life and fostering connections with the exceptional individuals and moments that have made us who we are. This program empowers students to reclaim their own narrative and empowers teachers to bridge classroom learning with the stage.

Basker, in a Variety Oct. 2017 story, described how the program energized Los Angeles students, saying, Ive never seen anything like it in 40 years as an educator. These kids are finding it the sexiest, most compelling period in American history because they get to enter into it personally, take ownership of events and then give voice to their version. Theyre really reclaiming the founding era for themselves.

Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller, who was instrumental in developing the education program, said in the SDCOE release, Our goal is to ensure that students have a shot to see Hamilton and use its words, music and staging to further their understanding and enjoyment of American history, music and drama.

Rajiv Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation, said in the release, After the initial success of the partnership in New York City, we could not throw away our shot to ensure students across the United States had the opportunity to witness living breathing history.

Said Paul Gothold, San Diego County Superintendent, The arts matter, and thanks to the Hamilton Education Program, San Diego County students will see, hear and feel history come to life through this blockbuster show.

The local EduHam program was funded in large part by Qualcomm, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Toys R Us Childrens Fund.

Opinion columnist and Sr. Education Writer Marsha Sutton can be reached at: suttonmarsha@gmail.com.
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Roxane Gay Responds To Trump's "Shithole Countries" Comment With A Powerful Essay On Racism

Last week, The Washington Post reported that, during a discussion about an immigration deal, Donald Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations as shithole countries. The comment was horrifying, but not surprising, considering Trump's previous statements on immigration. During his 2106 presidential campaign, he referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, and in an interview with Yahoo News, he said that Syrian refugees could be Isis-affiliated. The day before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Trump told reporters that he is the least racist person you have ever interviewed. Oh, Donald, I would say you cant be serious but this is actually the second time those words were uttered from your mouth.

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One response that was prompted by the shithole comment came in the form of tweets. People have been tweeting their accomplishments and how they are from #shithole countries.

via Twitter/@AF_ROdisiac

Other responses came from the countries Trump had insulted, writes the Hill. Botswana, a country in southern Africa, issued a statement calling Trump's comments reprehensible and racist. The African Union, which consists of all 55 countries in Africa, said, Given the historical reality of how many Africans arrived in the United States as slaves, this statement flies in the face of all accepted behavior and practice." The African National Congress of South Africa called Trump's comments extremely offensive.

Author Roxane Gay, who is the daughter of Haitian immigrants, responded to the shithole comment in a passionate essay for The New York Times, titled "No One Is Coming To Save Us From Trump's Racism." In the essay, Gay writes that Trump is not an outlier who only represents a few racist old men, but is actually a representation of the values of many Americans. He didnt reveal any new racism. He, once again, revealed racism that has been there all along, she writes. It is grotesque and we must endure it for another three or seven years, given that the Republicans have a stranglehold on power right now and are more invested in holding onto that power than working for the greater good of all Americans.

Gay writes that she could remind the American people of Haitis value and encourage people to have hope in a better future, as if rebellious enthusiasm is enough to overcome federally, electorally sanctioned white supremacy. But she won't, she writes:

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But I am not going to do any of that. I am tired of comfortable lies. I have lost patience with the shock supposedly well-meaning people express every time Mr. Trump says or does something terrible but well in character. I dont have any hope to offer. I am not going to turn this into a teaching moment to justify the existence of millions of Haitian or African or El Salvadoran people because of the gleeful, unchecked racism of a world leader. I am not going to make people feel better about the gilded idea of America that becomes more and more compromised and impoverished with each passing day of the Trump presidency.

This is a painful, uncomfortable moment. Instead of trying to get past this moment, we should sit with it, wrap ourselves in the sorrow, distress and humiliation of it. We need to sit with the discomfort of the president of the United States referring to several countries as shitholes during a meeting, a meeting that continued after his comments. No one is coming to save us. Before we can figure out how to save ourselves from this travesty, we need to sit with that, too.

photo via RoxaneGay.com

More From BUST

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Gianna Folz is a BUST intern, writer, reluctant runner, and occasional tweeter when angry about something. Follow and connect @gianna_folz
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PENDLETON, Ore. (AP)  The Oregon Military Department plans to spend $25 million on improvements at the former Umatilla Chemical Depot near Hermiston.

The Oregon National Guard said last week that a new training center will be used for weekend and annual training requirements for the Guard and other military branches. It will also house the 249th Regional Training Institute, which trains infantry leaders.





. . .
The First Official Encounter of the Apostolic Visit to Chile.

Author: Hannah Brockhaus | Source: CNA

In the first official encounter of his apostolic visit to Chile, Pope Francis expressed his shame and sorrow for the child sexual abuse crisis that occurred at the hands of clergy of the Catholic Church.

I feel bound to express my pain and shame at the irreparable damage caused to children by some ministers of the Church, the Pope said Jan. 16.

Speaking to the country's civil leaders, he said I am one with my brother bishops, for it is right to ask for forgiveness and make every effort to support the victims, even as we commit ourselves to ensuring that such things do not happen again.

The Church in both Chile and Peru has faced strong fallout from sexual abuse scandals, which have damaged the Churchs image and created a strong distrust of the hierarchy.

The major case in Chile is that of Fr. Fernando Karadima, who once led a lay movement from his parish in El Bosque. He was found guilty of sexually abusing minors in 2011.

The Popes meeting with the Chilean authorities, civil society, and diplomatic corps, was his first official encounter during his apostolic trip to Chile and Peru Jan. 15-22.

He will be in Chile through Jan. 18, visiting Santiago, Temuco, and Iquique. During the visit he will have lunch with the Mapuche residents of the Araucania region, and visit the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

From Chile he will go to Peru, visiting Lima, Puerto Maldonado, and Trujillo. He will meet with indigenous Amazonians and pray before the relics of Peruvian saints before returning to Rome Jan. 22.

In his speech the Pope said that the future of Chile depends on the ability of both its people and leaders to listen to one another, preserving the countrys ethnic, cultural and historical diversity from all partisan spirit or attempts at domination, which threaten the common good.

He enumerated the different groups of people he believes most need to be listened to: children, the unemployed, native peoples, migrants, youth, and the elderly.

It is necessary to listen, he said. To listen to the native peoples, often forgotten, whose rights and culture need to be protected lest that part of this nations identity and richness be lost. As well as migrants, who come to this country in search of a better life.

We should also listen to young people and their desire for greater opportunities, he continued, especially in education, so that they can take active part in building the Chile they dream of.

Quoting the Te Deum homily of deceased Chilean Cardinal Silva Henriquez, the Pope said that We  all of us  are builders of the most beautiful work: our homeland. The earthly homeland that prefigures and prepares the (heavenly) homeland that has no borders.

The Pope encouraged people to strive to make Chile a place that welcomes everyone, and where everyone feels called to join in helping to build up the nation.

Yours is a great and exciting challenge: to continue working to make this democracy, as your forebears dreamed, beyond its formal aspects, a true place of encounter for all, Francis said.

He quoted the words of St. Alberto Hurtado, a Chilean Jesuit who died in 1952 and was canonized in 2005, who said: A nation, more than its borders, more than its land, its mountain ranges, its seas, more than its language or its traditions, is a mission to be fulfilled.

A visit to the saints shrine is part of the Popes schedule at the end of the day, during a private meeting hell have with local Jesuits.

Each new generation must take up the struggles and attainments of past generations, while setting its own sights even higher, he said. Goodness, together with love, justice and solidarity, are not achieved once and for all; they have to be realized each day.

"It is not possible to settle for what was achieved in the past and complacently enjoy it, as if we could somehow ignore the fact that many of our brothers and sisters still endure situations of injustice that none of us can ignore.
Startups that apply to pitch at the forthcoming Salesforce PitchComp in Sydney are in with a chance to win USD$100,000 in funding from the cloud CRM providers investment arm.

The competition will be held at the Salesforce World Tour Sydney 2018 event on Tuesday, 6 March and will be judged by a panel of respected investors and entrepreneurs; namely, Niki Scevak (co-founder, Blackbird Ventures), Steve Baxter (Founder, River City Labs & Shark Tank star) and Naomi Simson (Co-founder, RedBaloon & Shark Tank star).

Salesforce will select three finalists to pitch to the judging panel. Each will receive two full passes to the event (together with travel and accommodation) plus an opportunity to win an USD$100,000 investment from Salesforce Ventures.

Startups will be eligible to enter the competition on the following conditions:

their technology stack was built on or integrates with the Salesforce Platform;

their total cash funding to date does not exceed AUD$5,000,000;

their current gross revenue is over AUD $50,000 annual run rate;

they are based in and authorised to work in Australia; and

they comply with the Official Rules.

Last year, financial services platform PractiFI prevailed over two other cloud-driven start-ups to win the inaugural Salesforce PitchComp in Sydney. Afterwards, co-founders Glenn Elliott (CEO) and Adrian Johnstone (CCO) spoke to Dynamic Business about the experience, which they said helped them hone their message.

Robert Wickham, Regional Vice President, Innovation & Digital Transformation, Salesforce APAC said: PitchComp provides startups with the opportunity to add velocity to their business, thats why were upping our commitment to the competition this year to help some of Australias most promising startups grow.

More information on how to enter, entry criteria, and key dates can be found on the PitchComp site. Applications close at 8:00pm AEST on Sunday 11 February, 2018.
Proactively From the Sea; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
Lee University will host Desegregation at Lee College with guest speaker Bishop Quan Miller, one of the first African-American students to attend Lee. The event will take place on Wednesday at 6 p.m. in the Walker Lecture Hall, located in Lees Science & Math Complex.

Lee doesnt have a written history, so its easy to gloss over the more difficult parts of our history, said Dr. Carolyn Dirksen, director of faculty development, who has been at Lee since 1968, just two years after Lee desegregated. Its important to look back over the first 100 years and examine what were important crossroads of Lee. We want to tell the true story, the highs and the lows, and desegregation is an important part of that story.

Mr. Miller, who attended Lee in the early 1970s, was among some of the first African-American students to attend Lee. He strived to help Lee integrate faster by founding The Evangelist Crusade Team, being the first African-American student to join Pioneers for Christ, and successfully lobbying for the college to celebrate and recognize Black History Month.

Mr. Millers presentation will be a first-hand account of what it was like to be an African-American student at Lee College and examine what he personally did to help set the groundwork for the modern-day Lee University.

He was in the vanguard of that group, said Dr. Dirksen. He brought about needed and significant changes to the college by being an extremely energetic social-changer.

Prior to Mr. Millers presentation, Lee history professor Dr. John Coats will talk briefly about Lees history with segregation and the journey to becoming a desegregated school, a journey which began in 1966 when the first three African-American students were admitted.

"There are people in the Cleveland community who remember Lee when it was segregated and lived through this time with us, said Dr. Dirksen.

Wednesdays event is sponsored by the Centennial Committee, which will organize events for the duration of 2018 to commemorate the 100th year of Lee University.

For more information about the event, contact Dr. Dirksen at cdirksen@leeuniveristy.edu.




Young Economist Prize

Finalists are invited to the annual ECB Forum on Central Banking, and the overall winner is awarded 10,000 .

Young economists can play an important role in shaping the future of Europe. Every year we recognise this through the Young Economist Prize, a research competition that offers talented students the chance to share their fresh perspectives on todays challenges.

What were the topics for 2022 paper submissions?

The theme of the 2022 ECB Forum on Central Banking is Challenges for monetary policy in a rapidly changing world. Accordingly, PhD students were invited to submit papers on this theme, including the following topics:

the short and long-term consequences of the pandemic on the labour market and modes of work, including on human capital accumulation and productivity;

energy markets in the post-pandemic economy, especially the effects of energy price volatility on inflation and inflation expectations;

globalisation, value chains, production networks and international trade in the post-pandemic economy, in particular the impact of supply bottlenecks on structural and stabilisation policies;

commercial and residential real estate markets in the post-pandemic economy, in particular boom-bust cycles and the implications of cross-country heterogeneity in real estate markets for prudential and macroeconomic stabilisation policies;

the role of inflation expectations in monetary policy decisions;

central bank digital currencies and crypto-assets, and their implications for the conduct of monetary policy.

Papers on other topics relevant to euro area central banking (including monetary policy, new means of payment and payments infrastructures, the deepening of Economic and Monetary Union, the functioning of the euro area economy and financial system, financial stability, and banking regulation and supervision) will also be considered.

How did we select the finalists?

The papers were assessed using three selection criteria: (i) innovative thinking and scientific merit, (ii) relevance for euro area policy, and (iii) pertinence to the Forum theme and aforementioned topics, also taking into account the information provided in the CV and recommendation letter.

What did they do at the Forum?

The ten selected finalists had the unique opportunity to attend the ECB Forum on Central Banking, which took place from 27 to 29 June 2022. The work of the selected finalists, as well as research posters summarising the main findings of their papers, is available on the ECBs website and has been shared with all Forum participants, including policymakers, top academics and market economists from around the world.

During the Forum, finalists had the opportunity to attend a varied programme of panel discussions and expert talks.

The finalists papers and research posters were assessed by a jury of top academics and senior ECB staff, taking into account votes cast by Forum participants. Please see the prize rules for further details.
In partnership with Lee University and the Hunter Museum of American Art, String Theory will welcome the prizewinning Houston-based wind quintet WindSync for the next concert of its season on Tuesday, Jan. 23, at 6:30 p.m.

WindSyncs visit is part of the annual String Theory Residency Program which will feature other performances including a concert in Lee Universitys Pangle Hall for Cleveland schoolchildren on Monday, as well as various Chattanooga schools, a master class at Lee on Friday, and a concert at Alexian Brothers on Sunday, in addition to the Family Concert on Saturday.

This event, sponsored by Chambliss, Bahner, & Stophel, P.C., is funded in part by grants from South Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission in partnership with the National Endowment of the Arts.

Founded in 2009 by pianist and Artistic Director Gloria Chien, String Theory brings acclaimed chamber musicians from around the world to perform in the intimate setting of the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga. Dr. Chien is a Steinway artist and an artist in residence at Lee.

The Tuesday String Theory concert will feature works by Offenbach, Buxtehude, Del Aguila, Stravinsky, and WindSync.

Prior to the concert, Art Connections will take place at 5:30 p.m. inside the Hunter Gallery. Former Hunter Museum Chief Curator Ellen Simak and Maestro Robert Bernhardt, conductor emeritus of the Chattanooga Symphony and artist-in-residence at Lee University, will explore works from the Hunter Museum collection that relate to the music featured in the evenings performance.

Review for WindSync:

Hailed by the Houston Chronicle as revolutionary chamber musicians, WindSync is internationally recognized for dramatic and engaging interpretations of classical music. The group builds highly thematic programs that feature landmark quintets, new works by American composers, and premiere arrangements of standard repertoire with the goal of increasing accessibility and cultural significance of wind chamber music.

Advocates of 21st century musicianship models and community-oriented programming, the members of WindSync have led master classes at New World Symphony, Texas Music Festival, and the University of Maryland Renegade Series, among others.

WindSync tours nationally and internationally, appearing at venues including the Schubert Club (in Minnesota), Met Museum, Shanghai Oriental Arts Center, and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Its most recent large-scale project is The Cosmos, a concerto for wind quintet and orchestra by Michael Gilbertson that received two performances in 2016. Other premieres include works by Paul English, Garrett Schumann, and Mark Buller.

WindSyncs master class at Lee University will take place in Pangle Hall on Friday, Jan. 19, at 3 p.m.

On Saturday, Jan. 20, at 1 p.m., WindSync will be featured in the Hunter Museums String Theory Annual Family Concert. The groups performance, complete with costumes and choreography, is an interactive retelling of Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev using the five wind instruments of WindSync.

Tickets for the Jan. 23 concert are $35 for Hunter members, $45 for non-members, $10 for students with a valid student ID, and $25 for groups of 20 or more people.

For more information on the master class at Lee University, call 614-8240.

For more information on String Theory at the Hunter, the Residency Program, or to purchase tickets, call 414-2525 or visit http://stringtheorymusic.org/.
Countdown starts to destroy US supported terrorists

After Erdogans statements, Turkish armed forces are getting ready for a military intervention to Afrin, Syria. YPG terrorists stated that they will resist.

YPG terrorists, tried to establish a new line in northern Syria with the help of US support, has fizzled out by dint of Operation Euphrates Shield.

Turkey has sent military reinforcements along its border with Syria. Two dozen armoured vehicles has entered Reyhanli district of southeastern Hatay province.

The forces were sent to assist the military units already deployed along the Syrian border.

The deployments came a day after President Erdogan said that a military operation in northern Syria against YPG would be launched "in the days ahead".

A senior YPG ringleader, Salih Muslim stated that Afrin will resist Turkish forces.
Israel plans for railway connecting it with Arab countries

It is reported that Israel is planning to build a railway connection between itself and Arab countries.

Reported by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, 15 million shekels ($4.5 million) cost of the plans for this project was included in the 2019 budget, which was approved three days earlier.

The initial plan for the project is to build a railway station in the city of Bisan with a railway network which travels through Jordan to Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The paper also reported that, Israel is transporting goods arriving in Haifa Port and heading to Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States through Jordan, noting that the war in Syria led these countries to use Israeli ports instead of those in Syria.

ISRAELS FLIRT WITH ARABS

Following Trumps Saudi Arabia visit, a dialogue process had began between Israel and Saudi Arabia. As a result of the dialog, sperad Middle East-wide, a dirty political alliance has showed up.
Kourtney Kardashian is making sure that her relationship with boyfriend Younes Bendjima remains at the top of her priority list.

Years after her relationship with Scott Disick, the father of her three children, came crashing down, Kardashian opened up on Keeping Up With the Kardashians about how she has learned from her mistakes and how she is applying her life lessons to her new romance.

"I've definitely learned from my past relationship, where I really wouldn't travel without the kids. And I think it is important to take time, especially because my relationship is important to me," Kardashian explained during the latest episode, according to a report by Just Jared on Jan. 14.

At the time that the episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians Season 14 was filmed, Kardashian had not yet introduced her boyfriend to her three children, 8-year-old Mason, 5-year-old Penelope, and 3-year-old Reign. Now, however, Bendjima has met and been seen out and about with the family.

"Just because those worlds aren't colliding right now, just making sure that I make time for both. And I think going on a trip once in a while reminds me the importance of being present and in the moment when I'm home," she added.

Earlier this month, Kardashian and Bendjima, who first met one another in late 2016 in Paris, France, began facing rumors of a possible wedding. However, as an insider explained, Kardashian and Bendjima are not considering anything over-the-top. As a Radar Online insider revealed, Kardashian would love to say "I do" with Bendjima but does not want any cameras around. Instead, she reportedly prefers it to be just the two of them.

The source went on to say that Kardashian and Bendjima both like the idea of tying the knot at one of her friend's homes in Punta Mita, Mexico. After all, Bendjima reportedly hasn't gotten used to the Kardashian circus and may not want the entire family around if he and Kardashian end up getting married.

To see more of Kourtney Kardashian and her family, including her sisters Kim and Khloe Kardashian and Kendall and Kylie Jenner, don't miss the new episodes of the 14th season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on the E! Network.

Younes Bendjima has not yet been seen on the show and is not expected to appear in the series at all during the currently airing season.
The 49th National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Image Awards kicked off with the attendees paying homage to Martin Luther King Jr. and reflecting on his legacy by using the #RepresentTheDream hashtag. This was the first time that the award show was held on Martin Luther King Day.

Three-time Image Award winner Anthony Anderson hosted the awards show for the fifth year in a row. The Black-ish star called the awards show the "Oprah for President" Headquarters. The actor followed by calling Winfrey a stable genius and joked about her running for president. Anderson stated why she would want to run for president and move into a smaller house.

Anderson also reflected on 2017 by shedding some light on Tyrese's most memorable moments in 2017, Meghan Markle making her way into the royal palace, and Omarosa Manigault's "$10 million" book deal.

Time's Up

Tracee Ellis Ross, Keri Washington, Laverne Cox, Lena Withe, Jurnee Smollet-Bell, and Angela Robinson presented the first award of the night and expressed their support of the Time's Up campaign. The women empathized on the importance of voting and urged people to go out and vote during the mid-term elections.

And The Winners Are...

Insecure star Issa Rae and Grown-ish star Yara Shahidi presented the award for Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series.

This is Anthony Anderson's fourth time receiving the award for his role in the hit ABC show, Black-ish.

Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman presented the award for Outstanding Actress in Drama Series. Taraji P. Henson took home the award for her role as Cookie Lyon in Empire.

Terry Crews and Jay Pharaoh presented Tracee Ellis Ross with the award for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as the matriarch in Black-ish. Ross and Anderson and Ross are four-time winners and led the comedy acting category.

The Walking Dead's Sonequa Martin-Green and Danai Gurira presented Omari Hardwick with the award for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series for his role as Ghost in Power. This is Hardwick's first time winning an NAACP Image Award. During his acceptance speech, Hardwick thanked Power's cast, crew, and creators. He also thanked rapper Common by calling him his "damn look alike."

The cast of Power received their first NAACP award for Outstanding Drama Series. The show's creator, Courtney Kemp, looked to Black-ish creator Kenya Barris for acceptance speech tips.

Get Out's, Daniel Kaluuya takes home the award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture. Kaluuya is a first-time nominee. The actor was surprised to win the award as he was also up against Denzel Washington for his role in Roman J. Israel Esq.

"I don't think you're allowed to beat Denzel Washington in an acting competition," Kaluuya said.

The hit summer comedy of 2017, Girls Trip, received the award for Outstanding Motion Picture. The film's producer, Will Packer, accepted the award on behalf of Haiti and Africa.
Actor Timothee Chalamet is the latest actor to cut ties with controversial director Woody Allen. Chalamet worked with Allen on an upcoming film.

Chalamet took to Instagram early Tuesday morning to reveal that he made a crucial decision regarding a past business decision that he made last year. The actor told his followers that he filmed A Rainy Day in New York last year with the Blue Jasmine director.

While the Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name actor could not describe working with Allen due to contract issues, his statement spoke volumes.

"I don't want to profit from my work on the film, and to that end, I am going to donate my entire salary to three charities: Time's Up, The LGBT Center in New York, and RAINN," wrote Chalamet.

Chalamet ended his post by adding that he wanted to be worthy of joining his fellow actors and performers who are fighting for equality and respect for everyone.

A Rallying Fan Base

Chalamet's Instagram post received over 147,000 likes and received numerous messages of support from his fans.

"I really appreciate that you're doing that. I think you made the appropriate decision possible in this situation," said one Instagram follower.

"You have all my respect, Timothee. Such a big heart for someone so young, and yet with talent and kindness to the moon and back. I'm proud to call you my idol, and I know you'll go very very far," wrote another Instagram follower.

Other Instagram followers left simple messages that contained numerous emoji symbols and expressed satisfaction with Chalamet's response.

Rebecca Hall Follow Suit

Apparently, Chalamet is not the only actor to donate his salary on this particular film. Rebecca Hall, who worked with Chalamet in the upcoming movie, stated that she would give her entire A Rainy Day in New York paycheck to the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund.

Like Chalamet, Hall has not publicly revealed that if she would work with Allen again. They could potentially join other actors such as actress Mina Sorvino who stated that she would not work with Allen after overcoming a blacklist that discredited movie mogul Harvey Weinstein put over her.

Another actor that recently joined Sorvino in the "not working with Woody Allen" club is Lady Bird actress-director Greta Gerwig. Gerwig previously worked with Allen in the 2012 film To Rome with Love and publicly admitted that she regretted the experience.

Woody Allen Allegedly Molested Stepdaughter

The sudden backlash against the four-time Oscar-winning actor slash director stems from an opinion piece written by Allen's estranged stepdaughter Dylan Farrow on Dec. 7, 2017. The article published in the Los Angeles Times called out several high-profile actresses for condemning Weinstein, but not Allen.

Farrow maintained that her stepfather had molested her when she was younger. While Allen has continuously denied these charges, Gerwig and Sorvino have apologized to Farrow for their actions, and Farrow accepted their apologies.
Anyone whos ever sold a home knows it can be a very complex process. Your home will likely need to be updated or renovated before it can go on the market, and you probably dont have an unlimited budget with which to work. These tips will help prepare your home to sell quickly and for the best price.

Update the Exterior

The first thing a potential buyer will judge is the exterior of your home.

At the very least, a fresh coat of paint should be applied before putting the house on the market. Youll also want to inspect the roof, siding, and other exterior elements that may need repair or cleaning. You dont want any superficial stucco cracks or wood rot keeping buyers away.

Check the Air Conditioning

If you have a central air conditioning unit in your home, make sure its working properly. It should start easily and produce an even amount of cool air throughout the house.

Ideally, youve had it inspected annually by an HVAC specialist. Even if you havent, inspecting the system and making repairs prior to selling your home should be considered mandatory. It may also be a good idea to check the furnace and clean the ducts before you start showing the home to buyers. That way, if they ask, you can assure them in good conscience that everything is in tip-top shape.

Make Sure the Floors Are Adequate



Whether your home has wood floors or carpet, make sure they are in good condition. Remove any visible indentations and put down new carpet in areas where its frayed or dirty. If you decide to replace your carpet, make sure its the same style and color throughout a given space.

Neutral colors are usually best when it comes to showing and selling a house, so think about choosing a light tan, even if its not your favorite. Woods floors are a huge perk for many home buyers, so consider removing carpet and refinishing your wood floors, if your home has them.

Check the Plumbing and Electrical Systems

Smart buyers arent going to put an offer on a home that has poor water pressure or dangerous electrical wiring. If the fixes to either system are minor, you can try and handle them yourself. However, these things can often be more complicated than they look, so it might be a good idea to call in a professional to make sure that the job is done safely.

Beautify Your Bathroom

Small updates to your bathroom can have a huge impact on how a buyer sees the whole house, and theyve been proven to have a great return on investment. Take an hour or two to redo the caulk around the sink and tub so theres a clean, unbroken line free of grime.

Replace any chipped tiles and give the whole floor a good steam clean. Switch out the toilet seat for a brand new one, and buy a neutral shower curtain and liner to make sure everything looks as clean and fresh as possible. Youll be surprised how much better your bathroom looks after these little tweaks.

Selling your home can be a great way to help you downsize or move up to your dream home. But if the process isnt done right, it could reduce your homes sale price or result in a long market stay. If you take the time to follow these tips, youll be well on your way to putting your home in a great position to sell.
Following a yearlong break, European leaders are once again colliding over migration and refugees. The European Union has postponed revamping its problematic system for dealing with the influx of people from the Middle East and Africa but the bloc has now set itself a June deadline to find the common ground. How Brussels addresses the problem will decide the fate of many  thousands of asylum seekers stuck in Greek and Italian refugee camps.

Member states are still divided and the gap is growing, which has the potential to further complicate their talks. The divisions emerged in 2015 after one million migrants had arrived in Europe, most of them fleeing conflicts in Syria and Iraq. While richer EU countries called for their redistribution across the bloc, the four Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech and Slovak Republics) have said no to accepting Muslims in their societies. The result of this dynamic has been stalemate.

The solution to this situation was overshadowed by the Brexit talks but European Council President Donald Tusk has set a new deadline now, which put the issue back on the top agenda. A 2016 deal with Turkey to prevent large flows of migrants from reaching Europe has helped tame the influx but how to share the migrants throughout the bloc remains a major stumbling block. Apart from finding a solution to this issue, EU leaders are also grappling with the problem of how to improve conditions in the refugee camps and provide education for migrant children while sending back those who do not quality for asylum.

In the meantime, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, is concerned that Brussels has not yet come up with policies that would address the root causes of mass migration outside its borders or to help members cope with arrivals. We are concerned that Europe has not yet learned the lessons of 2015 and 2016, said Sophie Magennish, the agencys head of policy and legal support.
Thankyou for the reply i have not held my savigs for six months as of yet but was wondering if i would have to show proof of where my savings came from once i have held them for six months will i be asked where they came from iv gatherd them over four years i strtd with a 1500 pound gift for my wedding and the rest i saved myself but because i withdrew it n re deposited it twice as i lent my money twice and got it bk would i hv to show all of that is my question
Dear All,

Needs some assistance regarding the immigration for Canada,

My details are as under,

Qualification:

B.com 02-year program

MBA Finance 02-year program

Experience:

I have more than 04 years of experience as an oracle erp functional consultant.

Please give suggestions regarding the following points.

 Which NOC Code is required according to my qualification and experience

 And whether my master program is equivalent to the Canadian degree program or should I select bachelor for Canadian immigration points calculator.

I shall be highly obliged if anyone can guide. Thanks.
can anyone tell me what is in article 127, law number 280 for the year 1980 in uae?
Whilst I am getting rather worn out at dealing with Filipinos and trying to fathom the sense of what they are doing, I have to tell you this one, it is a doosie!



We wanted to reconnect the well that services 3 of the units here. It was disconnected several years ago by previous occupants over the usual thing, fighting over who used how much water!!!



So far we have visited the Council Chambers 4 times and Lueco the provider 2 times. Now all we want to do is reconnect to the existing meter cavity that was originally provided, ie. putting in a new meter. The previous one was in the Corporate name of the village constructors and we wanted to change to private use, using my wife's name on the a/c as we are already a user for the household. I would have thought very simple - but silly me!!!



Firstly to the council who have to 'inspect' the site, can understand that, but before that happens, we had to provide a 'letter' from the Title owner of our property (has not been finalised yet, but we have a contract of sale} So I typed up a letter and had the seller sign it giving her consent! Oh no, we meant, affidavit, so to the lawyer, draw up consent affidavit and relieve us of 500p. Take it back to the Council, have to inspection by Council. Out they come the two 'brain surgeons' where is the circuit breaker - there were 5 on the board!!!! Have to Pick up next day, down we go. No you have to have a certificate from a Licensed Electrician (now remember Lueco the Electricity Company is reinstalling the meter)???? So off to a Licensed Electrician and 2500p later signs the document after an 'inspection' (Let me say these people were very helpful and continue to be), they are a Construction Company. The one 'recommended' by the Council Inspector wanted 5000p to do the job!!! Smell a rort there!



So today with the necessary document signed and feeling rather lighter in the pocket (we only are paying 50%0, the 3rd property is owned/occupied by Filipinos but they don't want to be involved - no surprise there either.



Why the Council even had to be involved in a major query as far as I am concerned. Surely, it is between the Supplier and us? I would have thought so.



This is the best example of bureaucracy gone off the rails and all in the interests of their back pocket, which we did not fill up IMO??? Hopefully today will be the day but who knows? Sometimes it just gets tiresome.
Lee ODonnell knocked the monster truck world for a literal and figurative loop last March when, during the 2017 Monster Jam World Finals in Las Vegas, he completed the first-ever four-wheel front flip in the events freestyle competition.

Thats right, while riding 10-feet off the ground in his five-ton VP Racing Fuels Mad Scientist truck, ODonnell launched into a complete, 360-degree forward flip, successfully landing wheels-down much to the delight of the 35,000-plus fans in the stands. The feat is commemorated in many a YouTube video.

(His triumph was undercut somewhat when, moments after sticking the flippety-flop, he hit another bump and the truck staggered backward, this time landing like an armadillo on the side of the road.)

Still, the move helped catapult ODonnell to his first-ever Freestyle Title at a Monster Jam World Finals.

ODonnell and his fellow drivers will roar into San Antonio Jan. 20 and 21 for a pair of shows at the Alamodome. (For ticket information, visit monsterjam.com/tickets.) New this year will be the Pit Party Early Access Pass, available with a ticket to the Saturday event. Pass holders will enjoy early entry into the Saturday Pit Party (1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.), which precedes the regular Pit Party (2:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m).

We recently spoke with ODonnell about that record-setting front flip, how he got involved in monster truck driving and what surprises he has in store for his San Antonio fans.

Q. Walk us through how that crazy front flip happened.

A. Wed been talking about the idea for two or three weeks, and Id previously tried something similar in Detroit, but I crashed. The thing is, this isnt something you can practice. We have a Monster Jam University in Illinois where you can go to rehearse and polish your moves. But the only time you can try something like it is during a competition. You cant rehearse because if you miss, at best, you wind up with a busted truck and, at worst, you can hurt yourself.

So in Vegas, I had only about 30 or 40 seconds left in my freestyle time. I jumped the same ramp I later did the front flip on and landed well, then I did a back flip. At that point my crew radioed that I had only about 10 seconds left. So I lined up with the ramp, popped a wheelie at full throttle and held it there. Usually when you do that, the back bumper drags and slows you down. But this time it didnt happen so I continued to gain speed. When I hit the ramp and started to flip forward, I knew it was going to be good, but I didnt know how good.

I guess I may have known what I had in mind because before the show I told my wife, Dont blink at the end of my performance.

Q. What was going through your mind after you did the flip?

A. First, when I was inverted, all the mud and water on the floorboards came and hit me in the face. So I was worried I wouldnt be able to see after Id landed. And then after I landed I had this adrenaline rush because I knew Id done something special, so I tried another back flip and thats when I landed upside down.

But the reaction of the fans was spectacular, so I ran into the stands and was high-fiving everyone, looking for my daughters and I gave them a big hug.

Another driver told me the video was already on YouTube. And this was only about five minutes after Id done the flip.

Q. How did you become a Monster Truck driver?

A. I grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, and we were always a racing family. My father and mother raced off road as a hobby, but they took it seriously. I remember being pulled out of school early lots of Fridays so we could go to races in Ohio, Virginia, everywhere.

When I was 5 or 6, I started BMX (off-road bike) racing and then motocross (motorcycle racing). But that was short-lived because my mother wanted a cage around me for safety. So I began racing short-course off-road.

One day I was at a race where they also had a Grave Digger monster truck, and I said to the woman there that Id drag that truck through a field. And she said, Ill make that happen. Turns out she was Peggy Wales and she and her husband, Mike, worked for Monster Jam (which puts on the monster truck shows). Mike eventually hired me to join the team.

Q. Anything special planned for San Antonio? Will you be doing another forward flip?

A. San Antonio is one of my favorite stops on our tour. The Alamodomes enclosed, so the crowd is really loud. My sponsor, VP Racing Fuels, is also based there, so Im coming in a day early to visit everyone at the plant. Plus, every employee gets a free ticket, so I have a huge following in the arena.

As for trying another forward flip, thats (to be determined). Everything has to be perfect to do that, so you never know. But that doesnt mean we dont have any other tricks in the bag. I cant tell you what that is because then the other drivers will try to do it first. But if Im going to try something new, San Antonio is the place to do it.

Richard A. Marini is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | rmarini@express-news.net | @RichardMarini
As the weather takes an arctic turn, it's time to consider the coffee shop's sweeter side: hot chocolate. Click through the slideshow above for 15 San Antonio coffee shops that make a good cup of cocoa. Call it coffee with benefits.

RELATED: 25 coffee shops to keep San Antonio buzzing
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A nonprofit board overseeing the Alamos day-to-day operations will open its meetings to the public this year.

But one state senator says state officials and philanthropists in charge of the historic mission and battle site and a far-reaching plan to improve it should do more to provide a level of openness befitting the Texas shrine.

The public just has an inherent right to know how their tax dollars are being spent. And were now talking about the Alamo, which is a big deal, said Sen. Kirk Watson, one of several Senate Finance Committee members who directed Land Commissioner George P. Bush at a Dec. 5 hearing to simplify the management structure and access to records regarding the Alamo and long-term master plan.

Board members of the nonprofit Alamo Endowment and subsidiary Alamo Trust which manages daily operations, approved a resolution Dec. 20 amending the trusts bylaws to declare that trust board meetings shall be open to the public. The board still can consult lawyers or discuss personnel matters in a closed session.

Notices of board meetings will be posted at least two days in advance, according to the resolution. It also states that all books and records of the trust shall be subject to the Texas Public Information Act.

Doug McDonald, Alamo CEO, said the trust agreed that it must adhere to the information act because it uses state funds, including Alamo gift shop revenues, to run the site in coordination with the Texas General Land Office. The Texas attorney generals office had issued a ruling in May that the trusts board minutes were subject to disclosure under the act, as it pertained to information maintained by the Land Office.

The decision to open board meetings to the public was made voluntarily to assure everyone that there is nothing to hide.

We didnt believe were required by law to do it, McDonald said. We want to open the meetings up.

Watson, D-Austin, said the changes help but do not go far enough. The Texas Open Meetings Act requires meeting notices be posted 72 hours in advance.

If youre going to open the meetings, why not follow the letter of the law? asked Watson, who served as mayor of Austin from 1997 to 2001.

The changes follow concerns from the public and the media about clarity and transparency of the endowment, chaired by Bush, and its two subsidiaries, including the trust, which is chaired by Houston businessman Welcome Wilson. The other subsidiary, the Remember the Alamo Foundation, the endowments fundraising arm, is chaired by local developer Gene Powell.

Meeting notices and agendas will be posted at thealamo.org and will include a citizen-input portion, McDonald said. The meetings have typically been held every three to four months in San Antonio.

Also this year, Texans can participate in a statewide outreach and design development phase of the Alamo master plan led by PGAV Destinations of St. Louis, the Land Office said. Land Office officials have mentioned the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site near Houston and National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg among sites overseen by state agencies, with nonprofits giving fundraising and management support.

But the Senate finance panel told Bush that the $450 million master plan project, a public-private endeavor to preserve the Alamos historic structures, expand pedestrian access and add a major museum, requires proactive openness. Along with $25 million committed to the project by the Legislature in 2015 and $75 million last year, the city of San Antonio has allocated $38 million, with the endowment expected to privately raise at least $200 million.

The Land Office inherited a public-private management structure at the Alamo when the Legislature assigned oversight to the state agency, replacing the Daughters of the Republic of Texas as custodians in 2011. Now, with the master plan putting the Alamo under scrutiny, some are suggesting that the Alamos roughly 100 employees be added to the state payroll, to avoid confusion about public accountability.

Jerry Patterson, a former land commissioner running against Bush in the March 6 GOP primary, believes that Alamo employees now reporting to the Alamo Trust should become Land Office staff. There has not been a formal study of the costs, including salary and benefits adjustments, to transition Alamo staff to state employee status. But because Alamo employees largely are paid from funds generated by the gift shop, Patterson believes that there could be a simple payroll swap at little additional cost.

Some have said Alamo employees are underpaid, compared with state or contract park or museum workers. The problem, Watson said, is that the Alamos nonprofit management of staff makes it hard to do a cost analysis.

He believes that consolidation of the three nonprofits and full access to records and meetings would mitigate perceptions of a shadow government running the Alamo and master plan process. Watson and other senators at the Dec. 5 hearing were further perplexed by a master plan review process involving inter-agency panels with appointees from the Land Office, the city and the Alamo Endowment holding closed meetings.

To a great degree, a hole has been dug, Watson said. The way its been set up has caused a loss of trust.

Scott Huddleston is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | shuddleston@express-news.net | @shuddlestonSA
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When President Donald Trump announced the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program last year, Jonathan Jimenez said he was devastated.

Jimenez, 22, was in the process of requesting travel papers under the Obama-era program that gave work permits to some young people in the country illegally. Because his parents are undocumented, Jimenez was the only one who could visit an ailing aunt in Mexico with an assurance he could come back to the U.S.

With Trumps September announcement that the program would be ending, not only could he no longer travel to Mexico, when his DACA permit expired this summer, he could lose his job and face deportation.

Over the weekend, Jimenez learned he might have a temporary reprieve after U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it would start renewing DACA work permits.

DACA recipients can renew their permits 180 days before they expire, said immigration attorney Gerardo Menchaca, and Jimenezs expires Aug. 16. If the ruling by a federal judge requiring USCIS to accept the renewal applications stays in place for a few more days, he might be safe from deportation to Mexico for the next two years.

It effects everyone, so were hoping for the best right now, to hear the good news, said Jimenez, who works at a bank. We want to keep going forward.

However, USCIS has said its not granting travel papers to DACA recipients, so the trip to Mexico remains off the table.

The Trump administration said Tuesday it will appeal the decision by U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who found the government improperly ended DACA, and its not clear how long the programs temporary reinstatement will last. Trump in the fall announced the program would be ending, and those whose permits expired before March 5 would have a chance to renew them for two more years.

I expect from what Ive been reading that the Trump administration, if they appeal that they are likely to win, Menchaca said. More than likely, anyone who has filed before that news comes out will be OK and anyone who hasnt wont. This could last a week, it could last a month. Who knows?

In its announcement, USCIS said its not accepting new applicants, but its accepting renewal requests from those whose work permits already have expired or will expire in the next 180 days.

If you wanted to renew, this is your chance, Menchaca said.

But young immigrants who came here as children, so-called Dreamers, long have asked for a legislative solution that would give them a path to citizenship.

For Jimenez, that would give him a chance to visit family in Mexico, which he left when he was 3 years old. When Trump ended DACA, he called on Congress to send him a bill that would provide a permanent path to legal status for Dreamers.

Since the new year started, a number of such proposals has been floated. But the efforts might be in jeopardy over a lack of consensus on several items: $18 billion in funding Trump has asked for to fund a border wall; Republican proposals that include greatly reducing the number of visas available to family members of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents; and a spat with Democrats over reports the president used offensive language to describe African and Latin American countries.

Andrea Fernandez, a DACA recipient and San Antonio activist, said shes been traveling to Washington over the last two months to lobby for a path to citizenship for Dreamers.

Her movements been given some momentum, Fernandez said, thanks to the introduction of two bills in the House, one by a group of Republicans including Congressman Michael McCaul, R-Austin, that she called horrible because of its border security provisions and restrictions on legal immigration, and another by a bipartisan group including Congressman Will Hurd, R-San Antonio.

But Alsups ruling also has reduced the sense of urgency in Congress, said Fernandez, a 21-year-old student at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

What it did is, it created this atmosphere in Congress that DACA is no longer a priority, because to them we have DACA back, and because we have DACA back they dont have to act right now, she said. What we were told was, You guys got what you wanted, you have DACA back. But thats not what we wanted. We wanted a permanent solution.

jbuch@express-news.net
WASHINGTON  An aggressive push to overhaul the decades-old system for sponsoring family members for citizenship is complicating the drive to protect Dreamers from deportation at a critical point in negotiations.

When two dozen influential members of Congress left a White House meeting last week, it looked as though they would take up immigration in two phases: first, by increasing border security and tinkering with the entry system while fixing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Later, they would take up long-debated and vexing issues on immigration reform.

But things changed quickly, with hard-liners insisting that a DACA fix be tied to significant changes in chain migration  and President Donald Trump seemingly undermining trust among negotiators with vulgar remarks he is said to have made about Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations.

We walked out of that meeting with people saying, Hey, we can work this out, said Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo. Then I started talking to Republicans, and theyre telling me, We want this and this and this.

What Cuellar heard repeatedly was the demand to end chain migration  an unflattering term embraced by critics, including Trump, for family migration.

Family-based immigrant visas have been a pillar of the U.S. system since 1965, the instruments by which citizens and legal permanent residents bring family members to the United States. The visas are regulated by a quota system both for countries of origin and categories of relatives, ranging from children and spouses of citizens to their parents and siblings.

They are widely used, and as of Nov. 1, 3.9 million people were waiting in line.

Air Force veteran John Del Toro of San Antonio relied on the visas to gain legal status in the U.S. for his wife and four stepchildren. His 18-year-old stepdaughter became a lawful permanent resident last week.

Del Toro, 59, met his wife, a British citizen, in the United Arab Emirates, where he was stationed and later worked as a defense contractor. The process was difficult, he said, but he succeeded thanks to good legal counsel, assistance from Homeland Security officials in San Antonio and a family migration system that he believes should not be significantly altered.

Im sure our system can be better, but its definitely better than Ive seen outside of the United States, he said.

Nonetheless, organizations pressing to restrict immigration have long targeted family migration. A report last fall by the Center for Immigration Studies asserted that over the past 35 years, 20 million of 33 million immigrants admitted to the U.S., or 61 percent, entered on family-based immigrant visas.

The report said citizens of Mexican heritage use the visas most liberally, each sponsoring more than six additional legal immigrants.

The ability to reside and work permanently in the United States is probably the most valuable commodity, or status, in the world and is one that the United States should be very selective in granting, said Andrew Arthur, a Center for Immigration Studies lawyer.

Arthurs organization and others believe that a change in the family system must be coupled with a new system in which applicants are judged by their capacity to contribute to the U.S., financially or with special skills.

The demand to overhaul the system picked up steam last month when a Bangladeshi immigrant in New York, who had entered on a family visa, strapped on a homemade pipe bomb, reportedly hoping to kill morning commuters at a Times Square subway station. He injured himself and three others.

Trump seized on the incident to demand immigration reform, and he has stepped up his rhetoric since last week, tweeting Monday: Honestly, I dont think Democrats want to make a deal.

Immigrant advocates contend that the words chain migration offend and distort.

It is misused to make it sound as though one person, like rabbits, can reproduce hundreds of family members and lead to exponential growth of immigration. In fact, the system has lengthy backlogs and quotas that prevent this, said Greg Chen, government relations director at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he brought up family visas at the meeting in which Trump is said to have made his crude remarks.

When it came to the issue of, quote, chain migration, I said to the president, Do you realize how painful that term is to so many people? African-Americans believe they migrated to America in chains, and when you talk about chain migration, it hurts them personally. He said, Oh, thats a good line.

On Monday, Trump referred in a tweet to Senator Dicky Durbin, adding that Durbin blew DACA.

A State Department report this month illustrated the challenges in gaining entry via family visas. It said that for most countries, family visas are just being issued for brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens who applied in 2004.

According to the State Department, for unmarried Mexican sons and daughters of U.S. citizens, green cards are being made available for those who applied with sponsorship in 1996  22 years ago.

Despite the restrictions, the family system is under attack on Capitol Hill and in the White House. Legislation introduced in the House this week by leading GOP conservatives would end categories for family visas except for spouses and minor children.

At the White House meeting Thursday  when Trump is said to have made his vulgar remarks  a bipartisan proposal from a half-dozen senators to restore DACA protections was rejected in part because it didnt go far enough to rein in family migration, said Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Republican in the Oval Office meeting.

The agreement in principle offered to prohibit family visas for parents of DACA recipients.

But despite the presidents assurance two days earlier that he would sign any DACA-related legislation Congress sent to him, the White House signaled Thursday that any bill would need to restrict categories of family-based visas for all future immigrants, not just Dreamers.

That demand makes it increasingly likely that Democrats wont support proposals being aired and may withhold votes this week on legislation to keep the government funded.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-San Antonio, said bipartisan efforts are needed to resolve thorny issues beyond a DACA fix, among them reauthorizing the Childrens Health Insurance Program.

Despite Trumps racist outburst, efforts are still underway to secure a more certain future for our Dreamers, he said.

Cuellar, a moderate in his party, said he believes that Democrats will need to make concessions on family migration to achieve a DACA fix. But, he noted, emotions and passions on both sides of the issue are making it difficult to get a deal.

Some of us in the middle believe we need to have border security and a few immigration changes in order to have DACA, he said. I support having families united. But does somebody bring in just their immediate family? Their father and mother? The question is, how do we address this issue?

blambrecht@express-news.net
The niece of a Mexican cartel leader who is wanted in the U.S. for allegedly ordering a string of assassinations in South Texas has been arrested in connection to the murder of a Mexican prosecutor.

Mexican marines arrested Sofia del Carmen Monsivais Trevino on Jan. 6 in Nuevo Laredo, according to officials in the state of Tamaulipas, which borders Texas from Laredo to the Gulf of Mexico. She was initially arrested on federal organized crime charges, but now faces state charges related to the January 2017 killing of the chief state prosecutor in Nuevo Laredo and four other officials.

In a news release that identified Monsivais Trevino only by her first name, the state said shes the leader of the Cartel de Noreste, the Nuevo Laredo-based splinter of the once-powerful Zetas drug cartel. Shes accused of being behind the killing of Ricardo Martinez Chavez a year ago. Tamaulipas officials said more than 200 rounds were fired when he and four other employees of the state prosecutors office were gunned down on a Nuevo Laredo street.

In a 2016 hearing in Waco, a federal agent testified that the Cartel de Noreste is run by the family members of Miguel Trevino Morales, the Zetas former leader who is accused of being behind mass killings in Mexico and homicides in Texas.

Known as Z-40 and Cuarenta, Trevino Morales is wanted in Texas on charges that he ordered five killings in Laredo during 2005 and 2006. During a 2016 trial in San Antonio of the Zetas leader in the border city of Piedras Negras, witnesses described a 2011 massacre that they said Trevino Morales ordered and took part in.

One former trafficker said he watched as Trevino Morales presided over the execution of dozens of people, many of whom had no connection to organized crime.

Gilberto Limon Jr., who at the time was a deputy special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in Laredo, testified in the Waco proceedings that the Zetas, which had started as a group of former Mexican special forces soldiers working for the Gulf Cartel, had split into a faction controlled by some of the gangs original members and and a rival group loyal to Trevino Morales, who was arrested in 2013.

He was succeeded by his brother, Omar, who was arrested in 2015. Both are in Mexico facing extradition to the U.S.

And once the cartel split  the Northern Cartel, Cartel de Noreste, was originally from Nuevo Laredo, he said. Since Mr. Trevino, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales  his home base you would say is Nuevo Laredo  he put in charge people for the Zetas cartel that are from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.

Limons testimony came during a detention hearing for Juan Francisco Trevino Chavez, a nephew of Trevino Morales who was arrested in 2016 near Houston on drug conspiracy charges. Trevino Chavez at the time was the leader of the Cartel de Noreste, Limon testified. Trevino Chavez, a U.S. citizen, has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Monsivais Trevino is the niece of Trevino Morales, said former FBI agent Arturo Fontes.

She was someone that lived in Nuevo Laredo, and after Cuarenta and after his other brother got arrested, she actually took the reins for a while, Fontes said. And then for the last few months shes been keeping a low profile.

Along with Nuevo Laredo, the Cartel de Noreste controls parts of the border states of Nuevo Leon and Coahuila, he said.

jbuch@express-news.net | Twitter: @jlbuch
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AUSTIN  The top Texas Democrats running for governor on Monday reported raising less than $300,000 combined in their first three weeks of campaigning, significantly less than most statewide political competitors have usually posted just over eight weeks before their primary.

Houston entrepreneur Andrew White disclosed in new state campaign-finance reports that he has raised $219,277 from more than 200 contributors  including $40,000 from himself  in the fundraising period that ended Dec. 31, 2017.

Former Dallas Sheriff Lupe Valdez, who announced her campaign a day before White, reported raising less than a quarter of Whites amount: $46,498.

White, son of the late Gov. Mark White, reported he has about $104,000 in the bank as fundraising continues, compared to Valdez $40,346.

Those amounts pale in comparison to the $43.3 million war chest of incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who has reported raising more than $9 million during the second half of 2017.

They are also far less than other Democrats have raised for other statewide races, though most of them have been candidates longer than White or Valdez.

San Antonio hospice firm owner Tom Wakely reported he has raised $3,281 during the last six months of 2017, and has spent $16,877  including $8,813 in loans from his wife.

The other Democrat who is considered a more prominent candidate in the race, Dallas businessman Jeffrey Payne, plans to file his report by a Tuesday deadline, campaign spokesman Hardy Haberman said.

These are fairly paltry amounts for a governors race this close to the primary, and if its a harbinger of things to come for the candidates it means they will have difficulty getting their message out  especially White, who does not have the potential voter base that Valdez has, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston who follows campaign fundraising in Texas.

Theres a lot of money thats flowing into other statewide races already. The gubernatorial candidates have some catching up to do.

In comments to reporters during the past week, both White and Valdez have said they are just getting started with both their campaigns and their fundraising. White earlier said he hoped to raise more than $3 million for the March 6 primary.

While Im happy to raise a substantial sum in such a short amount of time, Im even more thrilled and humbled by the support from Texas teachers, medical professionals, business leaders, homemakers, veterans and community leaders, White said in a statement. These supporters believe, like I do, that Texas can do better.

He said no single contribution was for more than $15,000. Valdez largest contribution was $5,000, her campaign finance reports showed.

With just over eight weeks until the Democratic primary, nine candidates who are mostly unknown statewide are scrambling to gain enough voter recognition and raise enough campaign cash to be selected to go up against Abbott in the November general election.

In past years in Texas, that has meant spending millions of dollars on campaigns that usually start well in advance of this years Democratic gubernatorial race and usually, by this point, have clear leaders.

This time, mostly unknown candidates announced last year with little fanfare and the bigger names waited until much later to enter the race, for a party that has fielded a record number of candidates for statewide, legislative and local races.

Democrats have not won a statewide office in two decades.

Among the other Democrats running for governor, retired Flint educator Grady Yarbrough reported he has not raised or spent any money on his campaign.

Reports for Plano financial consultant Adrian Ocegueda, former Balch Springs Mayor Cedric Davis, Austin businessman James Jolly Clark and Houston businessman Joe Mumbach were not listed on the Texas Ethics Commission website as having been filed.
Days after criticizing Police Chief William McManus for releasing undocumented immigrants without first conducting criminal background checks, Councilman Greg Brockhouse conceded on Monday that the police chief might have done nothing wrong.

Thats a reversal from Jan. 5, when Brockhouse fired off a news release decrying a lapse in judgment by senior City leadership. And its a departure from last week, when the councilman sent a letter to U.S. Attorney John Bash requesting an investigation into the Dec. 23 incident in which McManus opted to charge under state law the driver of a tractor-trailer allegedly smuggling 12 undocumented immigrants and release the passengers to Catholic Charities.

In his letter to Bash, Brockhouse wrote that the passengers should have been held until their identities were discovered and the federal immigration laws upheld to protect the citizens of San Antonio.

On Monday, Brockhouse told me, It may very well be a Homeland Security issue, which is where I tend to lean toward. I support the chief of police until proven otherwise.

A single Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agent who arrived late to the scene did not request to take the passengers into custody, according to McManus.

Detaining undocumented immigrants is not in the Police Departments purview, Brockhouse added, and I dont expect the chief of police to tell a federal agency to do their job.  I think in this case, HSI may very well be the breakdown. Its not the chief of polices job to be the immigration officer for San Antonio.

Brockhouse also softened his position on the suspected undocumented immigrants.

Last week, he seemed to paint them as criminals, telling San Antonio Express-News Staff Writer Jason Buch, These people paid large sums of money to evade immigration laws. I dont consider them to be victims if they paid large sums of money.

In his letter to Bash, in an apparent attempt to set off alarms about the released immigrants, Brockhouse claimed that passengers found dead last July in a tractor-trailer at a South Side Walmart in a separate incident were later identified as known MS-13 gang members. (Only one of the deceased immigrants was an MS-13 member, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)

On Monday, Brockhouse said he now understood that you can be both a victim and breaking the law.  The way that the chief described these folks to me, I would not describe them as criminals.

I tend to err on the side of theyre here fighting for a better life.

Brockhouse might simply have been in a more tolerant mood on Monday; we spoke soon after he marched in the citys 50th annual Martin Luther King Jr. March. In any case, the councilmans initial reaction only heightened a political feeding frenzy that will do nothing to address the immigration crisis in America.

Cheered on by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating whether San Antonio violated the states ban on sanctuary cities, and Mike Helle, president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association, has asked for McManus to be put on leave. On Monday, former Councilman Carlton Soules, who is running as a Republican for the state House seat being vacated by Speaker Joe Straus, joined the alarmist fray.

It is now crystal clear that Chief McManuss intervention last December into a routine smuggling case and his unilateral decision to release the illegal immigrants was not a decision he made on his own, Soules wrote in a lengthy news release. He was following a new unwritten policy that was  created in the shadows by Mayor (Ron) Nirenberg, City Manager (Sheryl) Sculley, and Councilman (Rey) Saldana, who worked with activist groups outside of the normal process and outside of the public view.

Soules added that the HSI agent walked into a new and hostile situation, with a host of immigrant activists and lawyers ready to create a scene and exploit the situation for publicity.

As Brockhouse finally acknowledged, the opposite is true: The federal agent deviated from typical procedure, and the only ones exploiting the situation for publicity are politicians.

Brian Chasnoff is a San Antonio Express-News columnist. Read more of his stories here. | bchasnoff@express-news.net | @bchasnoff
From left, Dr. Gautam Sammader, Dr. Seema Arora, Dr. Mrs Goyal, Dr. Goyal, Dr. B.R. Shetty, Dr. Sampat Shivangi, Dr. Mrs Shivangi, Unknown physician, Dr. Hetal and Dr. Sudhakar Jonnalagadda From left, Dr. Hamda Kamalboor, Dr. Anuj Chandra, H.E., Dr. Hussain Abdulrahman Al Rand, From left, Dr. Gautam Sammader, H.E., Dr. Hussain Abdulrahman Al Rand, Dr. B.R. Shetty, and Dr. Sampat Shivangi Previous Next

The American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin held a healthcare education seminar in Dubai on Dec. 26. The Dubai event was a pre-conference tour to kickoff the annual AAPI Global Healthcare Summita major event which took place in Kolkata, India Dec. 2831 and drew over 500 participants from all over the world. Under the direction of Chattanoogas own Dr. Anuj Chandra, the pre-conference drew approximately 75 visiting and local experts and healthcare leaders. Dr. Chandra is past president of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin-Sleep, and he is founder and medical director of the Advanced Center for Sleep Disorders in Tennessee.

AAPI enables healthcare leaders to freely exchange views, ideas, and cutting edge scientific findings to improve medical care in the U.S. and abroad. The Dubai Healthcare Education Seminar was an apropos opening to the Global Health Summit, in accordance with the vision of AAPI President, Dr. GautamSamadder, to educate and develop the next generation of health care leaders.

I see healthcare leaders coming together to solve problems and implementing those changes throughout the world, said Dr. Samadder. The Dubai Conference was an endeavor to collaborate with United Arab Emirates physicians, with the mutual sharing of expertise towards the improvement of healthcare on a global scale.

The Dubai Health Authority has a mission to transform Dubai into a leading healthcare destination. High ranking officials who attended the seminar expressed a reciprocated interest to collaborate with the physicians of Indian origin in the Gulf Region. The United Arab Emirates is the top destination for Indian migrants, and the AAPI welcomes a long-term alliance with physicians of the UAE.

One of the leaders who organized the event was Dr. Sampat Shivangi, chair of AAPI Legislative Committee. He was able to involve many UAE healthcare leaders and visiting delegates for a mutually beneficial symposium. The Chief Guest was Assistant Undersecretary of Health Centers and Clinic, H.E. Dr. Hussain Abdulrahman Al Rand.

Guest of Honor, Dr. B.R. Shetty, gave an account of the development of the Dubai health care system. Dr. Shetty completed his pharmaceutical education in India and moved to the UAE in 1973. He shared the story of how he founded, with humble beginnings, the New Medical Centrenow the UAEs largest private healthcare provider.

Dr. Chandra was chairman of the Dubai HES. Dr. Chandra has a mission to raise awareness about sleep health across the world and this endeavor was no exception. He ensured that the symposium included vital lectures about sleep medicine. Tennessee physician, Dr. Raghu Upender of Vanderbilt, gave a lecture on hypoglossal nerve stimulation in the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea.

UAE physician, Dr. Hamda Kamalboor, delivered a state of art impactful presentation on the diagnosis of sleep disorders. The approaching Kolkata GHS theme focused on Womens Healthcare, so Dr. Kamalboors participation exemplified the symposium in Dubai as the perfect way to launch. She delivered a very informative lecture. Dr. Kamalboor is one of two female neurologists in her region. She follows in the footsteps of her mentor, Dr. Sharifa Abdool, as an additional pioneer in her field. These women are examples of the expanding role of Emirati women in higher education, the workforce, and healthcare. Interestingly, the first practicing female physician in the UAE was an Indian national, Dr. Zulekha Daud.

The Global Healthcare Summit included a womens leadership forum, an initiative for aspiring female leaders to see and hear from their role models," said Dr. Chandra. "I believe the Dubai symposium was the perfect prologue. It was a privilege to be part of this event, and I too learned very useful information from other experts at the seminar.

The event was a success largely because of the dedicated delegates who traveled from around the world to attend, said officials. One of the collaborating professional organizations was the Association of Kerala Medical Graduates Emirates. Led by President Dr. Hanish Babu, AKMG Emirates physicians took time out of their busy medical practices and drove for hours to attend.

The Dubai symposium and Kolkata GHS were notable accomplishments which illustrate the AAPI efforts to improve healthcare on a global scale. While the AAPI was initiated to provide a forum for physicians of Indian origin, it continues to welcome physicians of any origin to participate. As the second largest medical association after the American Medical Association, the AAPI strives to form borderless partnerships of strengths across the globe.
As industry tries to digest the implications of the decision, Pulse Australias short-term priority is to ensure product currently en route to India is not subject to the tariff and is working with Federal government to get clarity from India on whether consignments on the water on the way to India will be exempt from the impost.
These include the Co-Innovation Strategies Program that has seen a significant increase in the level of private investment and accelerated adoption of innovation; the Young Food Innovators program which is building a generation of new talent in both farming and food production for our industry and the Producer Innovation Fast-Track program which reflects her passion for mentoring and supporting innovative producers as they seek to improve their businesses and explore new opportunities for growth.
But as far as Australian broadacre farmers are concerned, all eyes will be on the Fendt 1100 MT tracked tractor, which distributors AGCO say will be released in Australia under the Challenger livery.
Most people in the West share the belief that we all have a right to our own opinions, and a right to act on those opinions. We call it pluralism. But is Western-style pluralism always best?

Singaporeans dont think so.

The big secret which may be unpalatable to the West is this: sometimes, consensus works, Singapore lawyer and writer Adrian Tan told the FCPA Blog.

Sometimes, having a one-party system, whether in a nation, a state, or a city, works better than a system that is based on two parties fighting each other, he said.

Singapores per capita GDP is now $87,900. In the United States, its $57,400.

Some attribute Singapores success to low tax rates. Companies pay just 17 percent. But Bulgarias corporate tax rate is just 10 percent. No one talks about a Bulgarian economic miracle.

Individuals in Singapore are taxed at a top rate of 20 percent. Ukraine, Angola, and Romania have even lower individual rates. Western companies arent flocking to those countries.

How did Singapore do it?

Lee Kuan Yew, the countrys founder and prime minister from 1965 until 1990, steered people away from pluralism. He promoted Asian values  respect for the family and deference to institutional authority. He created a partnership among the government, industry, and trade unions.

And despite criticism from the West that his policies were illiberal and repressive, Lee also called for an acceptance of races and religions.

His vision of voluntary social discipline worked.

Certainly, for Singapore to develop itself from a disparate group of immigrants on a resource-poor island to a wealthy nation state, people had to learn cooperation, Adrian said.

A cooperative approach has some drawbacks. Most Singaporeans will admit that only pluralistic America could have produced Microsoft, Intel, and Apple.

But Singapores 5.6 million people enjoy their own collective innovation  an ultra-modern city that actually works.

There are jobs for everyone who wants one. Street crime is practically non-existent, and there are no dangerous neighborhoods. Medical care is affordable. The schools at all levels produce world-class students. The public transportation system makes cars strictly optional.

Sometimes its better to work together on a few average ideas, rather than to debate endlessly to find the best idea, Adrian said.

Singapores population is diverse. Ethnic Chinese make up about three quarters, Malays around 15 percent, and Indians about 8 percent.

And theres no common religion to unite the people. Just the opposite. Singapore is the worlds most religiously diverse nation, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

About a quarter of the people are Buddhist, 30 percent are Taoist, 15 percent are Muslim, 10 percent are Christian, and 4 percent are Hindu.

But peace and prosperity prevail. How?

In the West, people agree to disagree. Here, people learned to agree to agree, Adrian said.

____

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog.
Erlanger Health Systems is nearing a deal to acquire a hospital in Murphy, N.C.

Both the boards of Murphy Medical Center and Erlanger are slated to vote to approve this agreement next week.

The Murphy Medical Center board votes next Tuesday and Erlangers trustees vote on the agreement at next Thursdays board meeting, Jan. 25.


Will Packer paid tribute to the 'Girls Trip' stars, including Jada Pinkett Smith, all the "melanin-infused sisters" around the world as the movie won big at the NAACP Image Awards.

Jada Pinkett Smith

The movie's co-producer took to the stage at Pasadena's Civic Auditorium on Monday night (15.01.18) alongside the film's director Malcolm D. Lee to pick up the Outstanding Motion Picture accolade and praised the movie's stars Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Tiffany Haddish and Jada.

He said: "We stand up here before you as brothers, for our sisters.

"This is for you, Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Tiffany Haddish and all the other melanin-infused sisters, especially the ones from Haiti and Africa - we love you, and your brothers, we need you, you support us. Thank you, thank you, thank you."

The 43-year-old film producer also thanked his wife Heather Packer for "changing" his life and revealed the Essence Music Festival, where he met her, inspired his idea for the film.

He added: "Eight years ago I met this amazing woman at this festival down in New Orleans. At this festival black women were empowered to be whoever they wanted to be, celebrate the way they want to celebrate without worrying about men or society or confirming for anybody else.

"I left that festival and two things happened. Number one: I married that woman, her name is Heather Packer, I love you. She changed my life.

"Number two: I told Malcolm Lee, I said, 'I got that movie that we've been talking about making for so long.' "

The movie tells the story of four female friends who reunite to go on a jaunt to the Essence Music Festival, where Ryan Pierce - played by Regina - is booked to be a keynote speaker.
Penelope Cruz felt a "responsibility" playing Donatella Versace in 'The Assassination of Gianni Versace'.

Penelope Cruz

The Academy Award-winning actress stars as the Italian fashion designer in the Ryan Murphy TV series, and she's admitted to harbouring nerves about playing the icon.

Penelope said: "You feel much more responsibility [playing a real person].

"When Ryan called me ... I said 'I need to make [a] phone call and talk to Donatella about this' before taking the job."

And Penelope admitted she only felt comfortable accepting the role on the show - which explores the murder of designer Gianni Versace, Donatella's brother - after she'd spoken to her.

During an appearance on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show', Penelope shared: "She told me if somebody was going to do it, she was really happy that it was me, because she I think she knows what I feel for her and Gianni."

The Spanish beauty was also keen to stress how significant the role is to her.

She explained: "They're the most kind people. It's important to me that when she sees what I've done she can feel the love and respect that I have put there [and] how I feel for her."

However, Donatella - who serves as the artistic director and vice-president of the world-famous fashion house - previously described the show as a "work of fiction".

She revealed, too, that it "still hurts" to see Gianni - who was murdered in Florida in 1997 - depicted in an inaccurate way.

Donatella said earlier this month: "I haven't seen (the series) nor will I see it, because after all this time it still hurts to see Gianni represented untruthfully."
Known for some of the most family-friendly cars in the business, SKODA has taken things a step further with the creation of a special one-off Karoq made entirely from cardboard. The handmade Kid Karoq has been designed as the perfect play area for those who arent quite old enough to enjoy the many grown-up toys available in the brands all-new compact SUV.

Skoda Karoq

The life-size cardboard creation took 10 weeks and more than 600 hours to construct by British design studio, Lazerian, and has been built to the exact scale of the real Karoq: 4.4 metres long and 1.6 metres tall.

Commissioned by SKODA UK to celebrate the launch of the new compact SUV, which goes on sale in the UK on 11 January 2018, the brand drew inspiration for the cardboard version from 1,000 kids aged 6 to 11 - who told SKODA what features theyd pack into their perfect car.

Among the highest polling responses from the kids survey were the ability to play music of their choice (42.5%), a tablet to play and stream programmes on (67.6%), and an integrated movie projector (35.4%)  ideal to watch family favourites.

The research further highlighted that kids imaginations are as active as ever - almost three-quarters (73.5%) of children surveyed said that they have built their own cardboard creations.

Inside, the Kid Karoq has everything the children asked for  plus some additional goodies. Mini-motorists can climb into a hand-crafted drivers seat and play with a portable games console installed in the dash display.

The cardboard centre console also houses a digital tablet that controls a set of wireless Canton speakers, and mirrors many of the features found in the real Karoqs 9.2-inch Columbus infotainment system. This means they can choose the music without pesky grown-ups changing the track. In the absence of the LED ambient lighting found in the real Karoq, children can dance the day away under a multi-coloured disco ball.

A slide and ball pool takes pride of place in the Kid Karoq; containing over 1,500 balls  the precise number of balls that fit into the real Karoqs cavernous 1,810 litre boot space. Other features include WiFi hotspot, a film projector, play-time bean bags and a toy box. The design team even managed to create a secret den underneath the bonnet where children can keep an eye on the outside world through cleverly disguised spy holes.

Although the one-off Kid Karoq is not for sale, the real Karoq is starting from 20,875 OTR and sets new standards for connectivity, practicality and comfort in what is one of the most competitive sectors of the new car market

As with its larger sibling  the seven-seater Kodiaq  the Karoq delivers the perfect balance of practicality, comfort and value. Striking looks and a raft of new driver assistance systems and in-car technology are the hallmarks of SKODAs growing family of SUVs.

Further information about the all-new Karoq can be found at www.skoda.co.uk/suv

by Matt Shine for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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A passenger jet was left teetering on a cliff edge after skidding off the runway at an airport in northern Turkey.

Dramatic images show the white aircraft dangling precariously on the steep, muddy cliff face against the backdrop of the clear waters of the Black Sea.

We tilted to the side, the front was down while the planes rear was up. There was panic; people shouting, screaming, one of the passengers, Fatma Gordu, told state-run news agency Anadolu.

All 162 passengers and crew, who were on board the aircraft when it overshot the runway on Sunday, were evacuated safely by emergency services. No one was hurt.

The Pegasus Airlines Boeing 737 was flying from the Turkish capital Ankara to Trabzon Airport.

It is not yet known what caused the plane to skid off on to the cliff face.

The local governor, Yucel Yavuz, said an investigation had been launched into the incident  which Pegasus Airlines described in a statement as a runway excursion.

The airport, situated in the Turkish province of the same name, was closed for several hours afterwards but has since reopened.

Social media users reacted to the footage of the crash, with some saying it was incredible it stopped where it did.

How lucky are those passengers! wrote one person on Twitter.

Source: Sky News
Myanmar exported $1.86 billion worth of products from garment units operating under the cut-make-pack (CMP) system as of the first week of January in fiscal year 2017-2018, according to the commerce ministry. The figure is $568 million higher than exports for the same period in the last fiscal. The industry has been based on the CMP system for over 20 years.Efforts to shift more toward the higher value-added free-on-board (FOB) approach have not met with much success. The country has over 400 garment factories and in 2016 employed 3500,000 workers. Japan, South Korea and the European Union import garments from Myanmar.

Myanmar exported $1.86 billion worth of products from garment units operating under the cut-make-pack (CMP) system as of the first week of January in fiscal year 2017-2018, according to the commerce ministry. The figure is $568 million higher than exports for the same period in the last fiscal. The industry has been based on the CMP system for over 20 years.#

With garment exports as its top priority, the ministry is working with the Myanmar Garment Entrepreneurs Association to set a 10-year strategy to promote the sector and increase exports, a Myanmrese newspaper quoted deputy minister for commerce Aung Htoo as saying.Exports trebled between 2010 and 2014, reaching nearly $1 billion. Garment exports totalled $1.46 billion in 2015, accounting for about 10 per cent of all exports. Garment exports to the EU market had increased by 80 per cent. (DS)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Baba Ramdevs Patanjali Ayurved Ltd is all set to venture into e-commerce and partner with leading e-retailers and aggregators. To expand its network across the world, the company has taken the initiative to go online. Last year, Patanjali had announced its plan to launch an indigenous line of apparel, including denims, for men, women and children.

The initial sales target from apparel business alone is Rs 5,000 crore. The apparel line will be available across 250 exclusive retail outlets by April 2018. In 2016-17, Patanjali had crossed a turnover of Rs 10,500 crore and aims a two-fold growth this fiscal.

Patanjali Ayurveda has also decided to enter the diaper and sanitary napkin market by launching both kids and adult diapers and affordable sanitary napkins. The company plans to formally announce its foray into this sector by the end of the third quarter of 2018. The target is to take on international companies who dominate this market in India. (RR)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
I think it was probably Hollywood that created the myth of 'Sunny California'. At least that is the concept I grew up with. California - and all the 'Old West' - was famous for blue skies and those natural formations out in the desert that looked so near and yet were deceptively so far away. California's 'golden sunsets' were the subject of many a painting, post-card, and song, that either showed us or teased us with the thought of 'skies that were not cloudy all day'.

World War 2 came and went, and soon we started hearing the truth - about the 'liquid sunshine' of southern California which increasingly diminished our earlier mental images of sunny skies.

A new word came into the English Language at about that time, called 'smog': a mixture of smoke and fog, which seems to have originated there on the west coast and to have been tailor-made to describe the true scene there in Los Angeles. Comedians on national radio shows from that city were now making funny jokes about the 'liquid sunshine' and 'smog' phenomena there, thus popularizing those expressions as they crept into the rest of the nation's vocabulary and became part of American culture. 'Smog' was an especially cool new word, and soon other cities joined LA, not wishing to feel left out. Cities of our industrial north, especially - such as Detroit - became affected by the phenomenon.

And I plainly remember when the new smog was first identified here in Chattanooga. That was, of course, back when the many smoke-stack industries were still in place, with toxic smoke billowing out from tall chimneys 24 hours a day. I can remember travelling from Brainerd into town through the newly opened 'ridge cut' on I-24 (about 1966) when the smog was so thick it seemed like you could drive your car across it to Lookout Mountain! No downtown building could be clearly identified in that thick smoggy mess, although the skies might be crystal-clear directly overhead.

This was at the same time that littering the streets had become a pesky little problem as well. People would be leisurely driving along in their cars with a small bag of garbage poised on the floorboard just waiting for the right moment to be dumped. A window would suddenly open and that garbage would quickly and indiscriminately be thrown out - often right in the middle of traffic! I've seen that done many times, and it was a nation-wide thing! "Litterbug" campaigns began to spring up as a result - an idea that swept the nation - and DID lead to both a vast improvement in the country's cleanliness factor- and more importantly made people aware of the problem.

Environmentalists who had studied the relatively new field of "Ecology" at their universities soon got into the act, of course, seeing a new way to make a buck. (And I am not putting them or their work down, as they certainly helped us to see where all those new nationwide problems were.) The environmentalists/ecologists also made us equally aware of the polluted seas, and oceanographers such as Dr. Thor Heyerdahl (of Kon-Tiki fame) scared us with stories of vast masses of debris floating about in mid-ocean. Later workers in that field asserted that some of these debris masses were "as big as the state of Texas." Such pollution of the oceans I cannot attest to personally, as I have neither been to sea, nor yet seen a video or news report on that specific subject. But I can say that it seems reasonable to believe that such floating islands of refuse can exist, especially following the immense "tsunami" caused by a powerful earthquake that devastated parts of Japan in March, 2011. It took ages for all the Japanese wreckage to reach the shores of Oregon and Washington, but it DID arrive! Human beings were only capable of standing by and watching this massive freak of Nature.

In very recent times it has been the heavily industrialized cities of China and Japan where the entire population appears to be wearing face-masks to screen out the heavy pollution in those places. Such masks may be an on-going way of life for those populations until they find ways to scrub industrial smoke out of their lives, just as we have done in the U.S. Those masks have been completely eliminated in our own cities, and we never see them anymore save for rare accidental chemical spills, natural dust-storms, and the like.

Internet friends have recently been sending me the new and unbelievably fine crop of travel videos, knowing that I enjoy world travel. These videos are the very latest - all shot in HD, and many done in time-lapse photography - some with even the super-modern 'hyper time-lapse' technology using drones that can take cameras into heretofore totally inaccessible places. I have been astonished by the clarity of these videos - and the almost complete lack of visible pollution anywhere in the world! It makes me wonder where it all went - and so fast. Yesterday we were told that the planet was dying from it, while today there is sufficient visual evidence to prove that theory wrong. I know there may still be badly polluted areas of our earth - and Mexico City has been suggested as one candidate for such a reputation. Also Madrid, Spain, might qualify as another candidate for such. Dunno, because when I was last there, about 30 years ago, the smog was so thick you couldn't see the sun until almost noon daily. In the intervening 30 years I like to imagine that Madrid has both tackled and dealt with that problem. Judging from what I can now see the future looks promising. (Our young former house-guest friend, Sisi Z., now works in the Green industries of that city, and I believe the Madrilenos have enjoyed a massive air cleanup since that time.)

Your own world overview might deserve an up-date, because if you are still of the mind that Eurasia and the "Stans" are out-dated, dusty, sand-swept, throwbacks to Medieval times then you are in for a big surprise! Let me suggest that you watch a brief time-lapse tour of Astana, capital city of distant Kazakhstan - by Kirill Neiezhmakov - on YouTube. It will astound you! And it is the atmospheric clarity I want you to notice. Watch that same photographer's videos of Florence, Prague and Rome, and you will see what I mean. Cleanliness appears to be coming into vogue everywhere! Nobody is holding a handkerchief to their nose anymore, and clean air is once again catching on world-wide. There is even a (to me) brand new video of Chattanooga I have not yet watched in full, made using drones to capture views of the city as you have never seen it before...and Chattanooga surely has the same sort of pristine look as seen from the air!

Now I'll turn briefly to the oceans, which have been so widely criticized for decades. If the oceans are badly polluted I believe the worst of it follows the very heavily travelled sea-lanes, but that there are broad expanses of open water that remain absolutely clear and clean, and are home to all manner of exotic sea life. Once again we can thank the videographer's cameras for showing us that the battle to 'save the oceans' has not been totally lost.

To please both Ecologist and Layman alike, there was even a story on a national network news program recently which showed a dramatic reversal of the ozone problem over Antarctica and the entire South Polar region. This story could only have originated with environmental scientists who have equipment that is sophisticated enough to make such observations and produce such an array of facts. Let's thank those brave videographers who risk it all to produce wonderfully new images of Mother Earth and change peoples' opinions in the process!

Now if we can only get our scientist friends to agree that Florida will not soon sink into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean (at least in our life-times), and that the beaches of North Carolina will still retain the same high-water line as decreed by King George, III, in Colonial times, we can relax a bit. Let our grandkids worry about their own future, just as we have worried about ours. I am betting that in their lifetimes long-term investments on Florida beach-front property are still going to be offered to the highest bidder - and that the famous stone clock-tower (now almost 90 years old) at Daytona Beach will not have sunk into the sand!. When I was five years old that clock-tower was a new and sensational addition to the beach just as Daytona was starting on its quest for world-wide popularity as a vacation resort. At that time it stood by itself directly on the beach and has survived all the natural disasters that only a 90-year time period can bring. It has also been dwarfed by the construction of a large high -rise beach hotel and seems to have suffered no ill effects. One would think that if Florida WERE thinking of settling into the sea - following the classic example set by Atlantis - then it would have started the process by now. How can such tonnage pressing down constantly on the beach sand keep from being swallowed up?

Nope...it hasn't happened...at least YET! And I am of the mind that it WON'T happen for a long, long time (like thousands of years???!!!) All of earth's shorelines have been nibbled on along the edges, I am sure: look at England's fragile chalk cliffs of Dover - where the remnants of a Roman lighthouse still remain intact after more than 1500 years, high above the water. And consider the coast of our own Outer Banks of North Carolina, where ocean currents - and storms - are constantly changing, destroying bridges and beach-houses in the process. But mainland North Carolina remains pretty much the same as in Colonial times. Mother Nature and Father Time continue to do their evil work, and CHANGE will surely come about. (Those two evil people have even ganged up on ME, folks!) Let's hope that Man may have solved the pollution problem, but we are still at Nature's mercy when it comes to sinking into the Atlantic Ocean and other stuff like that!

I suspect that only Mother Nature and Father Time will live to tell!

* * *



Chester Martin is a native Chattanoogan who is a talented painter, sculptor and artisan as well as local historian. He and his wife, Pat, live in Brainerd. Mr. Martin can be reached at cymppm@comcast.net.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - January 15, 2018) - FALCON GOLD CORP. (TSXV: FG) ("Falcon" or the "Company") announces results of its Annual General ("AGM") held Monday January 15, 2018. Shareholders voted in favour of all management resolutions proposed in the Company's Information Circular.

Resolutions proposed and approved include:

i. The number of Directors for the Company was set at four. ii. The four members elected to the Board of Directors include: Stephen J. Wilkinson, David G. Tafel, James D. Farley, and Brian L. Crawford. iii. BDO Canada LLP, Chartered Accountants, was appointed as auditor of the Company for the ensuing year. iv. The Company's Stock Option Plan was ratified.

Subsequent to the AGM, the Board of Directors re-appointed the following officers:

Mr. Stephen Wilkinson- CEO,

Mr. David Tafel - Chairman, Audit Committee

Mr. Brian Crawford- CFO,

Mr. Kenneth Cawkell- Secretary

About Falcon Gold Corp.

Falcon is a Canadian mineral exploration company focused on generating, acquiring, and exploring opportunities in the Americas. For information on the Company, please visit our website: www.falcongold.ca.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Falcon Gold Corp.

David Tafel

Chairman

Stephen Wilkinson

CEO & Director

Telephone: 604-683-1991

Email: info@falcongold.ca

Cautionary Language and Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may contain forward looking statements including but not limited to comments regarding the timing and content of upcoming work programs, geological interpretations, receipt of property titles, etc. Forward looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore, involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.

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.
SYDNEY, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Zak Exhibitions & Conferences to host Zak World of Facades.Australia's construction industry is poised to be a highly lucrative market with a host of opportunities and an apt amount of industrial and the government support through an array of infrastructure investment strategies. The government's new infrastructure development has about $70 Billion investment plan while $5.3 Billion has been committed for National Housing Infrastructure in the region. Increased digitization in the construction segment has also witnessed investments amounting to $98 million further cementing the technological innovations as anintegral part of the construction economy.

Cloud, 3D and digital technology for design, modular and pre-fabrication construction, green buildings, dynamic facades, etc. are further enabling the innovation in construction trends in Australia. A consistent set of standards around technology adoption and use will help Australia's construction industry deliver world class commercial projects and also make housing more affordable.

Owing to the construction industry growth in the region, Zak is launching the world's leading conference series on facade design and engineering, Zak World of Facades in Australia. This conference with take place at the state-of-the-art International Convention Center in Sydney on 8th February 2018 . It will provide a dedicated platform to the construction industry to celebrate their strength, identify and mitigate the probable challenges, ascertain the way forward with a sole motive of raising the bar of facade construction in the region.

High-octane discussions on topics, including future trends for facades, energy-efficient facades, digital impact on facades, fire safety features with insights on new AS5113 code, new-age cladding materials, design consideration for high-rise facades and glass procurement challenges amongst others will happen during the course of one day proceedings. Industry influencers from firms such as Arup, Grimshaw, Hassell, Inhabit, Architectus, Fender Katsalidis, Aurecon, FJMT Studio, 3XN, Cundall, Arcadis, PTW, Plus Architecture, AECOM, etc. shall be partaking in the discussions while sharing their expertise on these subjects.

Dekton by Cosentino is the presenting partner of the event. Dekton is a new age facade cladding material made by sophisticated raw materials used in the production of glass, porcelanic and quartz surfaces. It is a material with unique characteristics and infinite application possibilities as ventilated facades, bonded facades and curtain wall spandrel panels.

Visit http://www.facades.sydney for the complete event agenda.

Further information about the event contact Shveta Sethi at info@zakgroup.com
Yokogawa Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6841) announces that its subsidiary, KBC Advanced Technologies, has signed a consultancy agreement with China Energy Engineering North Co., Ltd. for the integration of operations at six oil refineries in China's Shandong Province. These refineries are being acquired and will be operated by China State Energy Engineering Corp. Ltd. (SINOMEC), a state-owned company, and China Energy Engineering North Co., Ltd., a SINOMEC group company.

There are many small-scale oil refineries in Shandong Province. To improve efficiency and better meet market needs, SINOMEC has decided to upgrade facilities and integrate operations at these six oil refineries, which are located in Guangrao County. KBC will provide consulting services to assist SINOMEC in meeting these objectives.

The consulting services offered by KBC are as follows:

1. Conduct an integration study that will identify synergies for maximizing yield and profit.

2. Verify a plan to expand and diversify production.

KBC provides software and consultancy services that help to improve efficiency and profitability in the oil and gas upstream (exploration and production) and downstream (refining) sectors. The company's services are held in high regard by customers around the world.

The decision to award KBC this contract took into consideration the company's detailed knowledge of the oil industry and Yokogawa's solid track record in China. Through its introduction of highly reliable control systems, products, and other advanced solutions, Yokogawa will help this customer achieve profitability, ensure safety, and protect the environment.

About Yokogawa

Yokogawa's global network of 113 companies spans 60 countries. Founded in 1915, the US$3.5 billion company engages in cutting-edge research and innovation. Yokogawa is active in the industrial automation and control (IA), test and measurement, and aviation and other businesses segments. The IA segment plays a vital role in a wide range of industries including oil, chemicals, natural gas, power, iron and steel, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, and food. Targeting this segment, Yokogawa helps companies maximize their profits by offering a wide range of highly reliable products and working with the subsidiary KBC Advanced Technologies to provide premium solutions and services. For more information about Yokogawa, please visit www.yokogawa.com

About KBC

KBC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yokogawa Electric Corporation. KBC is the leading technology-based consulting company to the process industries which creates and sustains value for clients by effectively converting their strategies into results through technical and commercial excellence under-pinned by engineering simulation and analytics. Thereafter KBC sustains performance through the implementation of winning operating models and best practices that are powered by cloud, manufacturing execution system (MES) and automation technologies. For more information, visit www.kbcat.com

The names of companies, products, and brands in this text are registered trademarks or trademarks of the respective holders.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180115005246/en/

Contacts:

Yokogawa Electric Corporation

Public Relations, Integrated Communications Center

Yokogawa-pr@cs.jp.yokogawa.com
Fujitsu Limited Public and Investor Relations Tel: +81-3-6252-2176 URL: www.fujitsu.com/global/news/contacts/

TOKYO, Jan 16, 2018 - (JCN Newswire) - Fujitsu Limited and The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun, a regional newspaper in Japan, today announced that they have created an artificial intelligence-based automated article summarization system. In a field trial to summarize articles utilizing Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai, Fujitsu's approach to AI, the system was capable of being used on a variety of media distribution formats.The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun will deploy this system in its news distribution service for cable TV, with full-scale operations beginning in April 2018. This will accelerate news delivery for cable TV.This system uses automated summarization technology developed by Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., combining natural language processing technology with machine learning technology. In the trial, it was shown that the system could not only summarize an article instantaneously, a task that previously would have taken up to five minutes per article to do by hand, but also that it could summarize articles with greater accuracy-closer to what would be done by hand-than the existing lead method(1).Fujitsu is making this system available through a web API(2) that can be easily used by The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun without change to its existing workflow.BackgroundIn recent years, newspaper companies have been moving beyond delivery of the news via paper and have diversified to web news, SNS and other media formats. Because different media have different limits on the number of words or characters, newspaper companies have had to summarize articles to suit those requirements. As this task previously had to be done manually, it was difficult to increase work efficiency and reduce costs.In light of this situation, The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun worked with Fujitsu to conduct a field trial of an automated article summarization system using AI in order to improve work efficiency for its cable TV news report service. Because the results of this trial showed that the system could instantaneously summarize an article with the same high accuracy as when done by hand, The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun has now decided to deploy this system for actual operations.Automated Article Summarization System OverviewFujitsu created a model by applying machine learning and natural language processing to a total of about 2,500 sets of past articles from The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun and the summaries of those articles that had been made by hand, and built an automated article summarization system that automatically creates summarized articles optimized for the cable TV news delivery service. By using this system to automatically summarize articles, it has become possible to summarize in an instant what had previously taken up to five minutes per article to summarize manually. In addition, compared with the lead method, a previous article summarization method that summarized articles by mechanically extracting sentences starting from the top of the article up to the word or character limit, this system extracts important sentences from parts of the article beyond the lead, enabling it to create summarized articles with the same accuracy as the manual process. After this system was completed, it was used to summarize previously delivered "News Packs"(3) from Kyodo News, and it was able to produce similar results.In addition, because this system was created with a web API, it can easily be implemented without impacting the existing the workflow of the cable TV news service.Expected Benefits of ImplementationThe Shinano Mainichi Shimbun's news distribution service for cable TV had previously involved a five-step process, from deciding which articles to deliver, to sending them to a media editing system, summarizing the article, creating a headline, and proofreading. The step that took the most time was summarizing the articles, which could take between 3 and 5 minutes per article. By utilizing the automated article summarization system, this step can be eliminated, which is expected to reduce the time required for the entire process by about half, accelerating the operations of the service.Future PlansGoing forward, Fujitsu will build summarization models optimized for a variety of different media with restrictions on word or character count, including news distribution for cable TV, news tickers on electronic billboards and social media, creating an automated article summary system that supports a variety of media. In addition, in order to make this technology easy to utilize in a variety of industries outside media, Fujitsu aims to make this technology available as a general-purpose AI function in the form of an API offered on the Fujitsu Cloud Service K5 Zinrai Platform Service.(1) Lead methodA method that extracts sentences starting from the top of the article, or the lead, and continuing in order until it reaches the word or character count limit.(2) Web APIApplication programming interface. Technology used to efficiently develop websites and other online tools.(3) News PacksA digital wire report service offered by Kyodo News to participating companies and other customers.About Fujitsu LtdFujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. Approximately 155,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (TSE: 6702) reported consolidated revenues of 4.5 trillion yen (US$40 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017. For more information, please see http://www.fujitsu.com.* Please see this press release, with images, at:http://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-releases/Source: Fujitsu LtdContact:Copyright 2018 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
MOUNTAIN VIEW (dpa-AFX) - Chinese internet users have found in recent days that they have much easier access to Google Maps, to which access had been tightly limited for the past eight years, The Nikkei Asian Review reported. And while Google flagship search function is still inaccessible in the country, the renewed availability of its map service could signal a thawing of relations between the tech behemoth and the Chinese government. Until recently, internet users in China could not Google Maps through their mobile phones. But in recent days, users have found that when they attempt to access Google Maps on their phones, they are redirected to an affiliate of app Alibaba Group Holding, AutoNavi, which offers a Chinese map application. While the two apps differ in their design, some users report that they appear to be drawing on similar data. This suggests that Google has partnered with AutoNavi to obtain map data for its return to China, Nikkei said. Google reportedly said that it has 'not released anything new' in China, and has no plans to make an announcement. It added that Google Maps does has no official presence on Android or iOS app stores in the country. 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.
Mitsubishi Motors Public Relations Department http://www.mitsubishi-motors.com +81-3-6852-4275

TOKYO, Jan 16, 2018 - (JCN Newswire) - Mitsubishi Motors Corporation has today signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the government of Vietnam under which they plan to explore how best to promote the use of electric vehicles (EVs) in the country.Mitsubishi Motors will work with Vietnam Industry Agency (VIA) under the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) to conduct a joint study of efficient EV usage and the public policy programs and incentives that could support the accelerated adoption of sustainable automotive technology.An Outlander PHEV, a Mitsubishi Motors' market-leading plug-in hybrid EV, and one unit of quick battery charger have been delivered to VIA - MOIT as part of the agreement. The announcement took place during a ceremony at the MOIT headquarters in Hanoi today, attended by the MOIT Minister, VIA General Director and the government officials.Commenting on the MOU, Mr. Tran Tuan Anh, the Minister of Industry and Trade:"We are delighted to conclude the MOU with Mitsubishi Motors as our important partner. This joint study is very important milestone to promote the transition of a low carbon ecnomy."Kozo Shiraji, Mitsubishi Motors' executive vice president, said:"We are very pleased to be able to work with the Vietnamese government to embrace cleaner automotive fuels. We look forward to sharing Mitsubishi Motors' pioneering expertise in electric vehicles and exploring how government policy can support the adoption of this transformative technology."This important initiative demonstrates Mitsubishi Motors' strong commitment to accelerating the adoption of sustainable automotive technologies across rapidly developing markets such asVietnam. We hope to make a great contribution towards the environmental conservation of Vietnam."Vietnam is seeking ways to reduce CO2 emissions and to produce cleaner air and greener cities. Mitsubishi Motors is considering another joint EV study in other cities in Vietnam as a test bed for environmentally conscious policies. Since Mitsubishi Motors first entered Vietnam in 1994, the company has been committed to the development of the domestic auto market, and this Memorandum of Understanding represents the latest important milestone.Mitsubishi Motors, a global leader in plug-in hybrid EVs, continues to work to expand the use of EVs across the ASEAN region and support its transition to a low carbon economy.About Mitsubishi MotorsMitsubishi Motors Corporation is the sixth largest automaker in Japan and the sixteenth largest in the world. It is part of the Mitsubishi keiretsu, formerly the biggest industrial group in Japan, and was formed in 1970 from the automotive division of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. From October 2016, Mitsubishi is one-third owned by Nissan, and a part of the Renault - Nissan - Mitsubishi Alliance. For more information, please visit www.mitsubishi-motors.com/en/index.html.Source: Mitsubishi MotorsContact:Copyright 2018 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Regulatory News:

Kiadis Pharma N.V. ("Kiadis Pharma" or the "Company") (Euronext Amsterdam and Brussels: KDS), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing innovative T-cell therapy products to make bone marrow transplantations safer and more effective for patients, today announces that at its next General Meeting of Shareholders, the Kiadis Pharma Supervisory Board will nominate Subhanu Saxena to be appointed as a new member of the Supervisory Board.

Subhanu Saxena is currently a Regional Director with The Bill Melinda Gates Foundation as well as partner New Rhein Healthcare and Senior Advisor to Bain Capital. He was, until recently, the Managing Director and Global Chief Executive Officer of Cipla, a publicly listed, leading Indian pharmaceutical and biotech company with global operations and around 25,000 employees. During Mr. Saxena's leadership Cipla was transformed into a more international and agile company. Prior to joining Cipla, Mr. Saxena was Head of Global Product Strategy and Commercialization and member of the Executive Committee at Novartis. Before that, Mr. Saxena was CEO of Novartis UK and held various leadership roles in business development. Prior to joining the pharma industry Mr. Saxena worked with leading global companies including Citicorp, the Boston Consulting Group and PepsiCo across markets in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. Mr. Saxena holds a Graduate degree in Engineering from Oxford University and an MBA from INSEAD, France.

Arthur Lahr, CEO of Kiadis Pharma, commented: "I am delighted Subhanu has decided to join our Supervisory Board. As we continue to professionalize our company and prepare for the potential European commercial launch of ATIR101 in H2 2019, Subhanu's vast leadership experience in building and transforming a wide variety of organizations will be of immense value for Kiadis Pharma and help us tremendously to make ATIR101 widely available to patients.''

Subhanu Saxena added: "I am very pleased to join the Kiadis Pharma Supervisory Board and am impressed by the Company's investigational product and technology platform, which I am convinced can serve patients with a safer and more effective bone marrow transplantation. I look forward to support the further maturing of Kiadis Pharma.''

Mark Wegter, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Kiadis Pharma, commented: "We are very happy to welcome Subhanu to our Supervisory Board. His wealth of global strategic and commercial experience will be invaluable to Kiadis Pharma in the next stages of its growth and continued transformation into a successful commercial stage company."

About Kiadis Pharma

Kiadis Pharma's allodepleted T-cell immunotherapy product can make haploidentical hematopoietic stem cell transplantations (HSCT) safer and more effective. Single dose Phase 2 data with lead product ATIR101 given after a HSCT in patients with blood cancer shows a strong and clinically very relevant improvement over literature for the Baltimore protocol, without the risk of severe chronic Graft versus Host Disease (GVHD). Based on the positive results from the Phase 2 trial, the Company submitted a Marketing Authorization Application (MAA) to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in April 2017, for approval of ATIR101 across the EU as an adjunctive treatment in HSCT for malignant disease. Kiadis Pharma received Day 120 questions in September 2017 and is on track for potential (conditional) approval in Q4 2018 and launch in H2 2019. Kiadis Pharma is conducting a Phase 3 trial with ATIR101 across Europe and North America (head to head against the Baltimore protocol). The first patient was enrolled in December 2017.

In September 2017 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted ATIR101 the Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation. ATIR101 has been granted Orphan Drug Designations both in the US and Europe.

The Company's shares are listed on Euronext Amsterdam and Brussels under the ticker KDS.

Website: www.kiadis.com

Company presentation: http://www.kiadis.com/company-presentation/

Forward Looking Statements

Certain statements, beliefs and opinions in this press release are forward-looking, which reflect Kiadis Pharma's or, as appropriate, Kiadis Pharma's directors' current expectations and projections about future events. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and assumptions could adversely affect the outcome and financial effects of the plans and events described herein. A multitude of factors including, but not limited to, changes in demand, competition and technology, can cause actual events, performance or results to differ significantly from any anticipated development. Forward looking statements contained in this press release regarding past trends or activities should not be taken as a representation that such trends or activities will continue in the future. As a result, Kiadis Pharma expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release any update or revisions to any forward-looking statements in this press release as a result of any change in expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions or circumstances on which these forward-looking statements are based. Neither Kiadis Pharma nor its advisers or representatives nor any of its subsidiary undertakings or any such person's officers or employees guarantees that the assumptions underlying such forward-looking statements are free from errors nor does either accept any responsibility for the future accuracy of the forward-looking statements contained in this press release or the actual occurrence of the forecasted developments. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180115005675/en/

Contacts:

For more information, please contact:

Kiadis Pharma:

Karl Hard, +31 611 096 298

Head of IR Communications

k.hard@kiadis.com

or

Consilium Strategic Communications:

Mary-Jane Elliott, Philippa Gardner, Lindsey Neville, Hendrik Thys, +44 203 709 5708

kiadis@consilium-comms.com
GOTHENBURG, Sweden, Jan. 16,2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The SKF Group will publish its full year results on 1 February 2018 and welcomes investors, analysts and members of the media to take part in a conference call, which will be held in English, at 14:00 (Swedish Time), 13:00 (UK Time).

To join the conference call, please dial-in using the following details at least 10 minutes before the start of the call:

SE: +46-8-5033-6574

UK: +44-330-336-9105

US: +1-323-994-2083

Please inform the operator that you wish to take part in the SKF conference call.

The SKF Group's results for the full year 2017 will be published around 13:00 (CET). All information regarding the results will be made available on the Group's website: http://investors.skf.com/quarterlyreporting

MEDIA: To pre-book interviews with Alrik Danielson and Christian Johansson after the conference call, please contact Theo Kjellberg on theo.kjellberg@skf.com / +46-725-77-65-76.

Aktiebolaget SKF (publ)

For further information, please contact:

PRESS:

Theo Kjellberg

Director

Press Relations

tel: +46-31-337-6576

mobile: +46-725-776576

e-mail: theo.kjellberg@skf.com

INVESTOR RELATIONS:

Patrik Stenberg

Head of Investor Relations

+46-31-337-2104

+46-705-472-104

patrik.stenberg@skf.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/skf/r/skf-s-year-end-results-to-be-published-on-1-february-2018,c2431479

The following files are available for download:


LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Premier Foods plc (PFD.L) reported Tuesday that its third-quarter Group sales increased 4% from last year to 261.4 million pounds. Looking ahead, the company said its expectations for progress in FY17/18 remain unchanged.



In its trading statement for 13 weeks ended December 30, 2017, the company said branded sales were up 0.7% in the quarter, and Non-branded sales grew strongly, up 17%. These results reflect the robust performance of the UK food market and the benefits of the Group's strategic partnerships.



International sales growth was 26%, reflecting continued strong progress in Australia, the launch of Mr Kipling and Cadbury cake in New Zealand and a number of new customer listings for Sharwood's in Europe and the USA.



The company said total sales in the Grocery business were 4.8% higher in the period, with growth in both the Branded and Non-branded parts of the portfolio. Branded sales were ahead +3.4% and Non-branded sales increased by +13.9%, the latter mainly due to continued growth from existing contracts and new business wins notably in Stuffing.



Cadbury cake sales continued to grow strongly in International markets, but were lower in the UK during Q3, following some short term capacity constraints.



In the first three quarters of the financial year, sales grew 2.6% and over this period, six of the Group's largest eight brands grew market share in their respective categories.



Gavin Darby, Chief Executive Officer, said, 'We delivered another good quarter of growth, with sales up +4.0% in Q3 and +2.6% in the first three quarters of the year. Our International business produced another excellent quarter and our partnerships with Nissin and Mondelez International continue to deliver strong performances, demonstrating their strategic benefits to us. With our leading category positions and commitment to product innovation, our expectations for progress this year remain unchanged.'



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

"Innovation and rapid digitalization are creating a pressing need to address ICT skills gaps globally," says Sajwani

The Founder and Chairman of DAMAC Properties, Hussain Sajwani, will be speaking about the increasing demand for advanced digital skills on day one of the World Economic Forum (WEF), taking place on 23 - 26 January, in Davos, Switzerland.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160714/389603LOGO )



(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/629176/Hussain_Sajwani_Chairman_of_DAMAC.jpg )



Sajwani's session participation brings into focus the Middle East's efforts in developing ICT skills among its young population, where Sajwani was the main supporter of the recently launched 'One Million Arab Coders' Initiative in October 2017. The initiative was conceived from the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, for the creation of an empowered, happier society through learning and skills development.

The 'Digital Skills Imperative' session will bring top decision makers and thinkers together to discuss the need for advancing digital skills as a priority, in response to rapid global digitalization and mass automation. The session aims to identify whether existing skill-building efforts can scale up to address the changing nature of the digital workforce.

"As the world moves towards the adoption of a digital economy, it is becoming increasingly dependent on the availability of a skilled workforce, where each nation's economic success and failure is dependent on its efforts in developing a talent pool of highly skilled workers to cope with this disruption," said Sajwani.

'One Million Coders' is a first-of-its-kind pan-Arab education initiative supported by the Hussain Sajwani - DAMAC Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the DAMAC Group and its Chairman. Launched in collaboration with Dubai Future Foundation, the initiative aims to create a pool of one million software coders to lead the Arab world into a digital era.

The 'Digital Skills Imperative' session at WEF aims to highlight some of the key industry trends driving demand for advanced skills, and raises a number of discussions around the topic including shifting mindsets on lifelong learning and inclusive opportunities, designing incentives for collective action and investment, and understanding the role of emerging technologies.

"The digital skills gap is a global dilemma, not just one for the emerging markets, as millions of jobs in software development already need to be filled right now. What happens when these jobs increase by 20, 30 or 40 percent in the near future? Where will the global community find a sustainable stream of talent to tap into? The global community needs more initiatives like 'One Million Coders' to empower their societies with the skills and technical expertise required for jobs of the future. This is a strategic imperative for the economic success of any nation, as the world enters the Fourth Industrial Revolution," Sajwani added.

Get more information at www.damacproperties.com

DAMAC Properties has been at the forefront of the Middle East's luxury real estate market since 2002 - bringing luxury living experiences to residents from all over the world. Making its mark at the highest end of stylish living, DAMAC Properties has cemented its place as the leading luxury developer in the region, offering iconic design and the utmost quality. The company's footprint now extends across the Middle East with projects in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Lebanon and the United Kingdom.

As of 30th September 2017, DAMAC Properties has delivered over 19,900 homes. The company has a development portfolio of over 44,000 units at various stages of progress and planning, comprising more than 13,000 hotel rooms, serviced apartments and hotel villas, which will be managed by its hospitality arm, DAMAC Hotels & Resorts. With vision and momentum, DAMAC Properties is building the next generation of Middle East luxury living.

Visit us at www.damacproperties.com .

Follow DAMAC Properties on Facebook, Twitter (@DAMACofficial) and YouTube.
Michael Purcell, of Chattanooga, has been awarded the Certified Residential Specialist Designation by the Residential Real Estate Council, the largest not-for-profit affiliate of the National Association of Realtors.

Realtors who receive the CRS designation have completed advanced professional training and demonstrated outstanding professional achievement in residential real estate. Only 32,000 realtors nationwide have earned the credential. Out of more than one million realtors, less than three percent, are certified residential specialists.

Home buyers and sellers can be assured that CRS designees subscribe to the strict realtors' code of ethics, have been trained to use the latest tactics and technologies, and are specialists in helping clients maximize profits and minimize costs when buying or selling a home, said officials.

Mr. Purcell is an affiliate broker with ReMax Renaissance Reators. He is a member of the Greater Chattanooga Association of Realtors. Mr. Purcell received a BS degree from Tennessee Technological University, a Masters of Business Administration from UTC, and is a past UTC Alumni Board President and a former member of the UTNAA Board of Governors. He has served on the board of Mustard Tree Ministries and two Homeowners Associations. Mr. Purcell is an active member at Burks United Methodist Church in Hixson.

"It has been a goal of mine to obtain the coveted CRS designation since I entered the real estate profession two years ago," said Mr. Purcell. "As realtors, we better serve our clients and the

community by pursuing life-long learning and continuing education."
LINKOPING, Sweden and SHELTON,Connecticut, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

International medical imaging IT and cybersecurity company Sectra (STO: SECT B) announces that Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), one of the most renowned orthopaedic hospitals in the US, has ordered Sectra's 3D pre-operative planning solution. The software will provide HSS orthopaedic surgeons with advanced tools to enhance visualization of complex cases with the goal of improving patient outcomes.

"Sectra's innovative 3D solutions will enable us to make full use of the acquired images, resulting in cutting edge delivery of care to our orthopaedic patients," says William M. Ricci, MD, Chief of Orthopaedic Trauma Service at HSS. "This 3D platform will improve the quality of pre-operative planning with potential for improved surgical outcomes."

The 3D pre-operative planning solution includes tools that allow the surgeon to render standard CT images into a three-dimensional interactive image that can be segmented, manipulated, mirrored, templated and 3D printed. The software will integrate with the existing Sectra radiology PACS at HSS to enable surgeons immediate access from anywhere in the hospital.

"This agreement adds software tools for advanced 3D virtual fracture reduction and trauma planning as well as efficient tools for 3D spine planning into the hands of all surgeons at HSS," says Gustaf Schwang, General Manager Business Unit Orthopaedics at Sectra. "It also includes collaborative development of software, intended to deepen both companies' leadership position in our respective markets."

Video: Sectra's 3D Trauma Pelvic

Sectra at AAOS

Visit Sectra at booth #3967 where the orthopaedic solution will be showcased.

Read more and secure your meeting with Sectra at AAOS.

About Sectra Enterprise Imaging

With more than 25 years of innovation and 1,700 installations, Sectra is a leading global provider of imaging IT solutions that support healthcare in achieving patient-centric care.

The orthopaedic solution is part of Sectra's complete enterprise imaging offering which is comprised of PACS for imaging-intense departments-radiology, orthopaedics, pathology and cardiology, VNA and Cross Enterprise Workflow solutions. Using the same technical platform, customers can easily extend a departmental solution to create a comprehensive VNA and enterprise image management solution without major investments or the replacement of existing components.

Read more about Sectra and why Sectra PACS is "Best in KLAS" at http://www.sectra.com/medical/.

For further information, please contact:

Dr. Torbjorn Kronander

CEO and President SectraAB

+46 (0) 705-23-52-27

Gustaf Schwang

General Manager of Business Unit Orthopeadics at Sectra

+46 (0) 734-16-08-10

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/sectra/r/hospital-for-special-surgery-invests-in-sectra-orthopaedic-3d-planning-software-for-improved-surgica,c2430898

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CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - Reversing direction, the euro weakened against its major counterparts in pre-European deals on Tuesday. The euro dropped to 1.2216 against the greenback, 1.1792 against the franc and 135.34 against the yen, from its early highs of 1.2283 and 1.1828 and an 8-day high of 136.10, respectively. The euro slipped to a 4-day low of 0.8864 against the pound, after having advanced to 0.8901 at 1:30 am ET. The euro pared gains to 1.5195 against the loonie, 1.6776 against the kiwi and 1.5356 against the aussie, from its previous highs of 1.5257, 1.6855 and 1.5417, respectively. If the euro weakens further, it may find support around 1.19 against the greenback, 1.16 against the franc, 134.00 against the yen, 0.87 against the pound, 1.52 against the aussie, 1.66 against the kiwi and 1.50 against the loonie. 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.
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Following the recently enacted US Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Transport company National Express Group PLC (NEX.L) Tuesday said it now expects its effective tax rate to be cut to the low 20s from the anticipated high 20s, in percentage points. The group also expects the measures outlined in the Act to lead to a small tax credit in 2017. This is due to the revaluation of deferred tax balances and will be included in the Group's 2017 full year results. The Group said it will provide more detail on both the impact of the Act in its 2017 Preliminary Results announcement on 1st March 2018. 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.
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - NCC Group plc (NCC.L), a global cyber security and risk mitigation expert, reported Tuesday that its first-half attributable profit declined to 3.8 million pounds from 5.5 million pounds last year. Basic earnings per share were 1.4 pence, down from 2 pence a year ago. Adjusted earnings were 9.7 million pounds, compared to prior year's 11.9 million pounds. Adjusted basic earnings per share were 3.7 pence, compared to 4.7 pence a year ago. Adjusted operating profit from continuing operations fell to 14.1 million pounds from 16.2 million pounds last year, due largely to planned overhead increases committed in the prior year and adverse FX charges which more than offset GM gains Gross margin improved by 2.6% points to 39.4%: Group revenue from continuing operations grew by 7.2%. Revenues were 118.2 million pounds, compared to 110.3 million pounds last year. Chris Stone, Chairman, said, 'Strong organic revenue growth in our core assurance businesses continues to drive positive momentum in the business. The combination with gross margin gains flowing from improved realisation has delivered a significant recovery from the low point of the second half of the prior year.' Further, the company said the the Board is recommending an unchanged interim dividend of 1.5p per ordinary share. Looking ahead, the company said demand in core markets around cyber security and business continuity risk remains healthy with NCC Group first half growth rates continuing into the traditionally quiet third quarter. In the second half, the combination of further gross margin gains and continuing organic revenue growth will offset remaining committed cost increases to deliver full year Adjusted operating profit in line with the Board's current expectations. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
NEW YORK and LONDON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --Situs, the premier global provider of strategic business solutions for the finance and real estate industries, announced today that Lisa Williams will be Head of Europe, effective immediately.

Based in London, Ms. Williams will lead the European business, working with the senior team in Europe to set strategy and drive growth. She will also join the Executive Management Team of Situs, helping to drive the overall franchise, globally. In her new role, Williams will report to Situs President Nick Rudenstine.

"Our European business has been growing in scale and scope, and Lisa has played a key part in that over the past several years. Her experience in the industry, her connectivity to our clients, and her strategic vision make her well positioned for this role and we are excited about the prospects for the business as she takes the helm," said Mr. Rudenstine.

Ms. Williams has been a Situs employee for over eight years and has more than 15 years of commercial real estate servicing experience in the banking and financial industry. Prior to joining Situs, Ms. Williams spent six years at Capmark Finance Inc. (now known as Capita), overseeing the portfolio management of a Pan-European commercial portfolio in excess of 52 billion. She is an active member of the Counselors of Real Estate's (CRE) finance council, having served on its board of directors.

ABOUT SITUS

Situs is the preeminent advisor to clients to evaluate, optimize, and manage commercial and residential real estate assets and securities. Since 1985, Situs has set the standard for service, quality and execution. Situs has offices across the US and Europe and has been involved in more than $1 trillion of real estate debt and equity deals. A rated servicer with Moody's, Fitch and Morningstar, Situs has more than $165 billion of assets under management and is ranked a top 20 servicer in multiple categories by the Mortgage Bankers Association. In 2016, Situs received a second consecutive "Advisor of the Year" award by Real Estate Finance & Investment magazine, and the "Capital Advisor Firm of the Year" award by Property Investor Europe. In 2017, the firm won the "Industry Contributor of the Year" award from Real Estate Finance & Investment magazine.

SITUS MEDIA CONTACT

Cecilia Panozzo

cecilia.panozzo@situs.com

+ 1 212 294 1304
Regulatory News:

Not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States or any jurisdiction in which such distribution would be unlawful.

Kingdom of Belgium

Pre-Stabilisation Notice

The Royal Bank of Scotland plc (trading as NatWest Markets), (contact: Rom Balax, TEL: 020 7085 6268) hereby gives notice that the Stabilising Manager(s) named below may stabilise the offer of the following securities in accordance with Commission Delegated Regulation EU/2016/1052 under the Market Abuse Directive (EU/596/2014).

The securities: Issuer: Kingdom of Belgium Guarantor (if any): n/a Aggregate nominal amount: EUR Description: OLO #85 10y Fixed Rate Offer price: tbc Other offer terms: tbc Stabilisation: Stabilising Manager(s): BNP Paribas (co-ordinating stabilisation manager) Citigroup Global Markets Limited

Societe Generale

The Royal Bank of Scotland plc (trading as NatWest Markets) Stabilisation venue: Brussels Stabilisation period expected to start on: 16th January 2018 Stabilisation period expected to end no later than: For a maximum of 30 days after the proposed issue date of the securities Existence, maximum size and conditions of use of over-allotment facility: The Stabilisation Manager(s) may over allot the securities in an amount not exceeding 5% of the aggregate nominal amount stated above.

In connection with the offer of the above securities, the Stabilising Manager(s) may over-allot the securities or effect transactions with a view to supporting the market price of the securities at a level higher than that which might otherwise prevail. However, there is no assurance that the Stabilising Manager(s) will take any stabilisation action and any stabilisation action, if begun, may cease at any time. Any stabilisation action or over-allotment shall be conducted in accordance with all applicable laws and rules.

This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an invitation or offer to underwrite, subscribe for or otherwise acquire or dispose of any securities of the Issuer in any jurisdiction.

This announcement is only directed at, and the offer of securities to which it relates are only available to, persons outside the United Kingdom and persons in the United Kingdom having professional experience in matters related to investments or who are high net worth persons within article 12(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 and must not be acted on or relied upon by other persons in the United Kingdom.

In addition, if and to the extent that this announcement is communicated in, or the offer of the securities is made in any EEA Member State that has implemented Directive 2003/71/EC, as amended (together with any applicable implementing measures in any Member State, the "Prospectus Directive") before the date of publication of a prospectus in relation to the securities which has been approved by the competent authority in that Member State in accordance with the Prospectus Directive (or, where appropriate, has been approved by a competent authority in another Member State and notified to the competent authority in that Member State in accordance with the Prospectus Directive), this announcement and the offer are only addressed to and directed at qualified investors in that Member State within the meaning of the Prospectus Directive (or who are other persons to whom the offer may lawfully be addressed) and must not be acted on or relied on by other persons in that Member State.

This announcement is not an offer of securities for sale into the United States. The securities have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933 and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration. There will be no public offer of securities in the United States.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005834/en/

Contacts:

The Royal Bank of Scotland plc

Rom Balax

TEL: 020 7085 6268
Largest Unrestricted Prize for Young Scientists Confers 350,000 in Awards to Nine Researchers

LONDON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciencestoday announced the Laureates and Finalists of the 2018 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom. One Laureate in each of the three Blavatnik Awards categories-Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry-will each receive an unrestricted prize of US$100,000; additionally, two Finalists in each category will each receive unrestricted prizes of US$30,000. The Blavatnik Awards in the UK are the largest unrestricted cash prizes available exclusively to young scientists in the UK.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/629196/NYAS_LOGO.jpg

The Blavatnik Awards, established by the Blavatnik Family Foundation in the United States in 2007 and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, honour and support exceptional early-career scientists and engineers aged 42 years or younger. In 2018, the Awards recognise the first cohort of international honourees in the United Kingdom and in Israel. To date, the Blavatnik Awards have conferred prizes totalling US$5 million, honouring 220 outstanding young scientists and engineers.

In this inaugural year of the Blavatnik Awards in the UK, 124 nominations were received from 67 academic and research institutions across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. A distinguished jury of leading senior scientists and engineers from throughout the UK selected the Laureates and Finalists.

The inaugural Blavatnik Awards Laureates and Finalists in the UK will be honoured at a gala dinner and ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 7th March, 2018.

To follow the progress of the Blavatnik Awards, please visit the Awards' website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@BlavatnikAwards). For media requests, please contact Kamala Murthy [kmurthy@nyas.org; +1-212-298-3740] or Alex Pack [apack@brunswickgroup.com; +44 (0) 7469 083505].

The 2018 Blavatnik Awards UK Laureates are:

Life Sciences

Dr. M. Madan Babu , Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Dr. Babu's work has employed techniques from structural biology, genomics, and bioinformatics to reveal how G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs)-which are among the most highly variable drug targets in the human population-selectively couple to specific G-proteins. His discovery of a unique pattern, or 'barcode', on these proteins will aid in developing more specific, targeted pharmaceuticals in this age of personalised medicine.

Chemistry

Prof. Andrew L. Goodwin , University of Oxford . Prof. Goodwin is a world leader in the study of the chemistry and physics of functional materials, which have unique magnetic, optical, and electrical properties. His work has revealed the role of structural disorder in these materials, and how this phenomenon can explain unique material properties such asnegative thermal expansion, negative compressibility, and exotic magnetic states.

Physical Sciences & Engineering

Prof. Henry Snaith , University of Oxford . Prof. Snaith's pioneering work in developing new, low-cost and high-efficiency solar cells based on metal halide perovskite materials has not only initiated a new research field now studied by scientists around the world, but also has the potential to deliver solar energy to the market at a fraction of the cost of currently used materials.

"In the spirit of the United Kingdom's tradition of scientific excellence and pursuit of knowledge, we are pleased to recognise and support these inaugural Blavatnik Awards Laureates and Finalists as they pursue their careers in advancing their respected fields," said Sir Leonard Blavatnik, Founder and Chairman of Access Industries and head of the Blavatnik Family Foundation. "Through the promise that they have already demonstrated, we are confident they will continue pushing the boundaries of discovery and innovation."

"The community of previous Blavatnik Awards honourees is an incredible group of the smartest scientific minds. We are extremely proud to bring the Blavatnik Awards programme to the United Kingdom, recognising outstanding young scientists leading their respective fields," said Ellis Rubinstein, President and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences and Chair of the Awards' Scientific Advisory Council. "In its first year, we witnessed terrific enthusiasm from the UK's scientific community and hope to see even more institutions nominate their top Faculty-level scientists in the coming years."

2018 Blavatnik Awards UK Finalists

The following scientists have been named Finalists:

Life Sciences

Prof. Timothy Behrens , University of Oxford; honorary Principal Investigator, University College London (UCL). Prof. Behrens investigates the biology of the brain that underlies human behaviour. By combining mathematical models with behavioural experiments and neural recordings, he has uncovered at a cellular level how the brain stores abstract information about relationships between things in the world, and how we use this mental map in decision-making. His discoveries have applications in neural network computing and artificial intelligence, but also on our understanding of cognition and mental health.

Prof. Behrens investigates the biology of the brain that underlies human behaviour. By combining mathematical models with behavioural experiments and neural recordings, he has uncovered at a cellular level how the brain stores abstract information about relationships between things in the world, and how we use this mental map in decision-making. His discoveries have applications in neural network computing and artificial intelligence, but also on our understanding of cognition and mental health. Dr. John Briggs , Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Prof. Briggs uses cryo-electron tomography combined with fluorescence imaging and other techniques to visualise the molecular assembly processes of viral particles such as HIV at unprecedented resolution. His work provides detailed insight into the mechanisms of action of viruses, which stands to have a broad impact on drug development and our understanding of disease.

Chemistry

Dr. Robert Hilton , Durham University . Dr. Hilton's research has provided new insights into Earth's long-term carbon cycle and the natural processes that transfer carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and rocks. His research has uncovered how erosion of land in the form of earthquakes and resulting landslides, weathering of organic carbon in rocks, and the export of carbon by rivers can have an impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

Dr. Hilton's research has provided new insights into Earth's long-term carbon cycle and the natural processes that transfer carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and rocks. His research has uncovered how erosion of land in the form of earthquakes and resulting landslides, weathering of organic carbon in rocks, and the export of carbon by rivers can have an impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Prof. Philipp Kukura , University of Oxford . Prof. Kukura is a physical chemist recognised for pioneering efforts in single-molecule scale microscopy and spectroscopy that enable the study of native, unlabelled molecules in real time. His particular focus is on biological macromolecules such as proteins as they interact with drugs or self-assemble with each other.

Physical Sciences & Engineering

Dr. Claudia de Rham , Imperial College London . Dr. de Rham's work has revolutionised our understanding of the nature of gravity, founding a new field of study that connects cosmology with particle physics and the nature of spacetime itself. The implications of her work are extremely wide-ranging, from our understanding of the fundamental evolution of the universe to the quantum nature of gravity.

Dr. de Rham's work has revolutionised our understanding of the nature of gravity, founding a new field of study that connects cosmology with particle physics and the nature of spacetime itself. The implications of her work are extremely wide-ranging, from our understanding of the fundamental evolution of the universe to the quantum nature of gravity. Prof. Andrew Levan , University of Warwick . Prof. Levan is a leader in the field of extragalactic research, primarily aimed at understanding extreme transient events such as gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and their roles as cosmological probes. He studies events such as the most-distant gamma-ray bursts, which unveil details of the earliest galaxies, and was the first to identify the signature of a star destroyed through a close encounter with a supermassive black hole.

About the 2018 Blavatnik Awards UK Laureates

Dr. M. Madan Babu

2018 Blavatnik Awards in the UK Laureate in Life Sciences

Programme Leader, Computational Biology & Bioinformatics

MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Postdoctoral Scientist, National Institutes of Health, USA

Ph.D., University of Cambridge, UK

B. Tech., Anna University, India

Prof. Babu's multi-disciplinary work brings together techniques from structural biology, genomics, and bioinformatics to analyse biological systems at many levels. In one achievement using this approach, Prof. Babu has uncovered mechanistic details of a class of proteins called G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). These proteins are implicated in over a hundred human disorders, and drugs targeting GPCRs represent nearly 30% of all drug sales. Prof. Babu and his team identified key aspects of GPCR biology that will aid in developing more specific, targeted pharmaceuticals. Additionally, Prof. Babu has shown that many GPCRs targeted by common drugs are highly variable in the human population, such that patients with different variants are likely to have different responses to the same drug. This work represents a significant contribution to the relatively new field of personalised medicine.

In a parallel body of work, Prof. Babu has also made fundamental discoveries regarding protein structure. About 40% of human proteins have a region that is unstructured compared to normal proteins-these so-called intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) have puzzled structural biologists for decades. Through a combination of computational approaches, big-data analysis, machine learning, and experimental validation, Prof. Babu and his team helped to establish the roles of IDRs in health and disease. Together, these studies shed light on key classes of proteins that are integral to human health.

Prof. Andrew Goodwin

2018 Blavatnik Awards in the UK Laureate in Chemistry

Professor of Materials Chemistry, Inorganic & Solid-State Chemistry University of Oxford

Junior Research Fellow, University of Cambridge, UK

Ph.D., Mineral Physics, University of Cambridge, UK

Ph.D., Inorganic Chemistry, University of Sydney, Australia

B.Sc., Chemistry & Pure Mathematics, University of Sydney, Australia

Prof. Goodwin is considered a world leader in probing, investigating, and quantifying the effects of disorder and flexibility in materials that are traditionally thought of as highly ordered and uniform at an atomic scale. His laboratory utilizes advanced diffraction and modelling techniques to probe disordered materials and subsequently produce new, tailored materials that display unique properties.

As an example of his approach, most materials will expand upon heating and shrink when compressed; however, Prof. Goodwin has discovered that by careful control of the disorder within the structure of a substance, the opposite can occur-a material can be made that will shrink upon heating (negative thermal expansion) and expand when compressed (negative linear compressibility). These counterintuitive processes can be exploited in the design of heat-resistant materials, advanced pressure sensors, artificial muscles, and even body armour. Additionally, Prof. Goodwin has played a key role in the structural analysis of amorphous materials, which, in the case of amorphous calcium carbonate, the key structural component in bones and shell, led to a complete understanding of the ability of organisms to nucleate different crystalline structures from the same biomineral precursor.

Prof. Henry Snaith

2018 Blavatnik Awards in the UK Laureate in Physical Sciences & Engineering

Professor of Physics; Group Leader, Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics Device Group, Department of Physics

University of Oxford

Postdoctoral Scientist, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

Postdoctoral Scientist, University of Cambridge, UK

Ph.D., Physics, University of Cambridge, UK

M.Sci., Physics, University of Bristol, UK

Junior Research Fellow, University of Cambridge, UK

Prof. Snaith's research has striven to develop new, low-cost photovoltaic technologies based on easily processed materials, which promise to deliver solar energy at a fraction of the cost of current solar technologies. Since 2012, his research has transformed research in the photovoltaics community. He found that metal halide perovskite materials, which had been overlooked for decades because of their very low solar energy conversion efficiency, can be employed in a previously overlooked configuration to create highly efficient solar cells. He has since raised the energy conversion efficiency of the perovskite materials to over 22% when used alone in solar cells, and more recently to 25% by combining perovskites with crystalline silicon cells. Potentially, the perovskite-on-silicon combined cells may deliver a photovoltaic technology capable of surpassing the 30% efficiency mark, making them very promising for industrial applications.

Another huge benefit of these perovskite solar cells is their low cost, thanks to the fact they can be processed from solution and that the solar cells are simple layered devices. In addition, Prof. Snaith has significantly improved the long-term stability of perovskite solar cells and significantly advanced our fundamental understanding of the physics of these perovskite semiconductors, which has helped broaden the application range of these materials to include light emission as well as radiation detection, memory, and sensing. Prof. Snaith's work has led in a short period to a very promising new sustainable energy generation option that could quickly surpass our existing solar-cell technologies.

About the Blavatnik Family Foundation

The Blavatnik Family Foundation is an active supporter of many leading educational, scientific, cultural, and charitable institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and throughout the world. Recipients of Foundation support include Oxford University, Harvard University, Yale University, Tel Aviv University, Stanford University, New York University, the New York Academy of Sciences, Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, Carnegie Hall, the Royal Opera House, the Hermitage Museum, Lincoln Center, Jewish charitable organizations, and countless other philanthropic institutions. The Foundation is headed by Sir Leonard Blavatnik, a major American and British entrepreneur and philanthropist. Sir Leonard is the Founder and Chairman of Access Industries, a privately-held U.S. industrial group with global strategic interests in natural resources and chemicals, media and telecommunications, venture capital, and real estate. For more detailed information, please visit: www.accessindustries.com.
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.
BEIJING, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Uoolu.com will launch the first Global Real Estate Internet Summit (GREIS) and a brand and platform upgrade on January 29, 2018. The event is expected to bring together leading developers, media outlets and 500 investment experts.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/629186/Uoolu_Global_Summit_Biejing.jpg

Organized by Uoolu.com, a leading Chinese platform for property investment globally, and attended by top developers and media outlets, GREIS is set to be a major event of the sector in 2018. Mr. Huang Xiaodan, founder and CEO of Uoolu.com will launch the company's brand and platform upgrade at the summit. Heavyweights in real estate, private equity and hedge funds will share their insights in global asset allocation of China's new affluent class.

Breaking New Grounds

1. First meetup of 100 top developers from 22 countries

100 prestigious developers from 22 countries, including EMAAR, the largest developer in UAE, CONCORD, the largest community developer in Canada , Mitsubishi Estate, a leading Japanese developer, and Berkeley, one of the largest developers in the UK, are invited.

2. In the spotlight of over 100 media outlets

Influential international media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Bangkok Post, and Reuters will be invited, according to plan. The summit will be covered and live-streamed by top Chinese strategic media partners Hexun.com, ifeng.com, and Jiemian.com.

3. Shedding light on the formula of real estate + finance + AI

Industry insiders will share their perspectives on the purchasing power of Chinese consumers, global real estate trends, and blockchain's application in the sector. A big-data based investigation into global property investments by Chinese consumers and a forecast for trends in 2018is to be released in Chinese and English versions for the first time.

4. Launching of the Uoolu Global Real Estate Awards

Uoolu Global Real Estate Awards will be unveiled for the first time:

The Most Popular Global Real Estate Brands

The Most Popular Global Real Estate Projects

The Most Popular Innovative Global Real Estate Funds

The Driving Force of Global Assets Allocation

The rankings will assist investors in their search for the best properties worldwide.

The ground-breaking GREIS reflects Uoolu's market insights and ability to assemble the best properties. GREIS is meant to be a gathering of industry insiders and a bridge between quality assets and China's massive purchasing power.
BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - French stocks held steady on Tuesday as the euro paused after recent rally and investors eyed fresh corporate earnings for direction. The benchmark CAC 40 was marginally higher at 5,512 in opening deals after closing 0.1 percent lower on Monday. Airbus rose 0.2 percent. The Brexit developments as well as U.S. President Donald Trump's pro-America policies amount to a 'double whammy' of protectionist hazards, Chief Executive Officer Tom Enders said in London at the annual dinner of the ADS trade association. Utility Engie gained over 1 percent after its chief executive said 2018 would see an acceleration of growth. Media group Mediawan jumped nearly 3 percent on news that it is acquiring three major French TV production companies. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency is asking the public to review and submit comments on its draft of the Strategic Elk Management Plan, which serves as a guide for the agencys decisions regarding the elk program.

The plan is available for review on the TWRA website at https://www.tn.gov/twra/strate gic-elk-plan.html



In May, TWRA held two public workshops that were very successful in generating public input about the plan. Now that a draft of the plan is complete, TWRA would like the public to review the plan and submit comments.



The plan will provide guidance for the TWRA Elk Program for the next ten years with an emphasis on healthy populations, habitat, and public involvement, says TWRA Elk Program Leader Brad Miller.



Broad program goals are provided as the basic framework of the plan, and specific objectives and strategies have been created to meet these goals.



Comments will be accepted from Jan. 16, to Feb. 16, and can be submitted via email to TWRAElkComments@tn.govwith "Elk Plan Comments" in the subject line. TWRA is also accepting written comments by mail at:

Attn. Elk Plan Comments

Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency

3030 Wildlife WayMorristown, TN 37814
- Tech.co is a leading US technology news site

- Acquired by UK based international publishing tech company MVF

- Follows acquisition of Startups.co.uk in 2017

LONDON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MVF, one of the UK's fastest growing customer generation businesses, has announced the acquisition of US technology news brand, Tech.co.

It was reported this week that a record number of UK businesses were the target of international buyout in 2017, MVF bucks this trend with continued growth and another substantial acquisition.

Founded in the US in 2006, Tech.co has transformed from a community-building 'Tech Cocktail' event to an influential media brand with millions of readers around the world. MVF presently operates a suite of global publishing sites, using expert articles and informative reviews to connect active customers with businesses all over the world.

The purchase follows MVF's acquisition of UK business site startups.co.uk in February 2017, and is part of the company's ambitious growth plans as it aims to expand its global reach by acquiring high authority digital brands.

MVF CEO Michael Teixeira: "Tech.co is the perfect addition to our portfolio - it is a respected publishing site with an established reputation for providing tech news to an engaged community.

"We believe we can grow the brand's audience by further investing in great content and useful resources for global readers while applying our unique lead generation platform and cross-channel digital marketing expertise."

Tech.co cofounder Frank Gruber commented: "We are incredibly proud of the brand we have created over the last decade, growing it from a community event series to one of the world's leading tech publishers."

Cofounder Jen Consalvo added: "The leadership team behind MVF impressed us with their excitement for the brand and their ability to scale businesses. We feel confident Tech.co is in the right hands and look forward to watching it grow and evolve."

Notes to editors:

Founded in 2009 by 5 friends, MVF topped the Sunday Times Tech Track as the fastest growing tech company in the UK in 2013 after achieving compound annual growth of 278% over its first four years of trading

Tech.co founders Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo will focus on their work advising, investing, and consulting while they continue to grow Startup of the Year and Innovate Celebrate

and will focus on their work advising, investing, and consulting while they continue to grow Startup of the Year and Innovate Celebrate Tech.co cofounder Frank Gruber shares more details: https://Tech.co/techco-acquired-by-mvf-2018-01

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/628637/MVF_Acquires_Tech_Co.jpg
Four months after Hurricane Irma caused American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine (AUC) to evacuate students and faculty from Sint Maarten, AUC has resumed classes on its Sint Maarten campus. The medical school has begun a phased return to Sint Maarten after holding its September 2017 semester on the campus of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in Preston, United Kingdom.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005599/en/

(Photo: Business Wire)

"The last four months have required a tremendous amount of teamwork, support, and resilience from our students, faculty, and colleagues as well as from UCLan, which welcomed AUC and provided immense support," said Heidi Chumley, MD, Executive Dean of AUC. "Now we are excited to be back in our campus home, engaging with our community partners in Sint Maarten, and looking forward to playing our part in advancing the country's continued recovery."

The category 5 hurricane, which swept over Sint Maarten on September 6, 2017, had a major impact on the island, where AUC's students complete their first two years of medical school. After evacuating more than 700 students, faculty, family members, and staff to the U.S., AUC and its parent organization, Adtalem Global Education, commenced planning to find a temporary site in which to continue classes. Faculty and students mobilized to the UK quickly in September and completed the semester in the first week of January.

Now, as Sint Maarten continues to recover and rebuild, AUC is pleased to return for the January 2018 semester. While first, second, and third semester students will be based in Sint Maarten, fourth and fifth semester students will continue their studies in the UK, taught by AUC faculty. These students will benefit from clinical learning opportunities at our affiliated hospital sites in the UK.

Throughout the semester, AUC students and colleagues will mobilize to help the country rebuild. In February, the medical school will host Community Action Day, a day dedicated to volunteer work throughout the island. Students will also continue their work on public health, health education, and other programs to benefit the people of Sint Maarten.

About American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine

American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine (AUC) is a member of Adtalem Global Education (NYSE:ATGE), a global education provider headquartered in the United States. The organization's purpose is to empower students to achieve their goals, find success and make inspiring contributions to our global community. Founded in 1978, AUC has more 6,500 graduates and is one of the oldest medical schools in the Caribbean. Dedicated to developing physicians with a lifelong commitment to patient-centered care, AUC embraces collaboration, inclusion and community service. With a campus in St. Maarten, affiliated teaching hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom, and internationally recognized faculty, AUC has a diverse medical education program for today's globally minded physician. For more information visit aucmed.edu or follow AUC on Twitter (@aucmed).

About Adtalem Global Education

The purpose of Adtalem Global Education is to empower students to achieve their goals, find success and make inspiring contributions to our global community. Adtalem Global Education Inc. (NYSE:ATGE; member S&P MidCap 400 Index) is a leading global education provider, and the parent organization of Adtalem Educacional do Brasil, American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists, Becker Professional Education, Carrington College, Chamberlain University, DeVry University and its Keller Graduate School of Management, Ross University School of Medicine and Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine. For more information, please visit adtalem.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005599/en/

Contacts:

AUC

Chris Railey, 732-509-2258

crailey@aucmed.edu
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 01/16/18 -- Torex Gold Resources Inc. (the "Company" or "Torex") (TSX: TXG) announces an updated mineral resource estimate and mineral reserves estimate for its ELG Mine Complex ("ELG"), located in southwest Mexico. The announcement includes a maiden high grade, mineral reserve and mine plan for the Sub-Sill. The estimates were prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") and CIM Definition Standards.

Sub-Sill Mine Plan From The Maiden Mineral Reserve:

-- The mineral resource remains open in three directions. -- The In-fill drill program had a 100% success rate in upgrading Inferred mineral resource tonnes to Indicated mineral resource tonnes. -- The mineral reserve includes 71% of the Indicated mineral resource ounces at a 4.6 g/t cut-off-grade. Inferred ounces are not included. -- Estimated $86 million of before tax, free cash flow. -- Estimated 29 months of production, delivers 480,000 tonnes at 11.65 g/t, containing 180,000 Au ounces: -- 8 months to get to the steady state production rate of 850 tonnes per day. 76,000 tonnes at 15.30 g/t Au while main ventilation and electrical infrastructure are being established. -- 11 months at 850 tpd producing 283,000 tonnes at 11.40 g/t Au. -- For the remaining 10 months, the current mineral reserve supports the mining of 120,000 tonnes, at 9.93 g/t Au. -- Additional drilling is planned with the objective of upgrading inferred mineral resources, identifying additional mineral resources, and extending the mine life. -- Recoveries average 84.4% over the mine plan, 88.30% when Cu grade is less than 0.1%. 85.8% when Cu grade is between 0.1%, and 1% and 80.1% when Cu grade is greater than 1%. The average expected Ag recovery is 26.2% for the mine plan. -- Total Cash Cost(1) of $479/Au Oz and All In Sustaining Cost (AISC)(1) of $512/Au Oz. -- Mining costs average $110/tonne over the mine plan. Processing and G&A are the same as for the ELG open pits -- Total capital required is $23M, of which, $22M will be spent in the first year. -- There are 6 mining areas in the Sub-Sill mine plan, that range in size from 40 - 100m length on strike, 40 - 200m on plunge, and 3.5 to 25m thick dipping at an average of 24 degrees. -- The mining method is post pillar, cut and fill.

Fred Stanford, President and CEO of Torex stated: "This End-Of-Year (EOY) 2017, update of mineral reserves and resources for the ELG Mine Complex is really all about the underground discoveries at the Sub-Sill. (The mineral reserves and resources for the open pits remain largely unchanged except for depletion.) As anticipated, the Sub-Sill provides excellent near-term cash flow, and is open in at least three directions, which provides for the potential to extend that cash flow into the medium/long term." He added: "The engineers have done an excellent job in designing a projected low CAPEX operation to manage the complexities of the ore-body geometry. We look forward to continuing the drill program as soon as possible, with the objective of adding and upgrading mineral resources, and ultimately, to profitably extend the mine life."

(1) This is a non-GAAP measure with no standard meaning under IFRS. Refer to "Non-IFRS Performance Measures" section in the MD&A for 3rd Quarter 2017.

ELG Open Pits (ELG OP)

The mineral reserves and resources for the open pits remain largely unchanged except for depletion.

Mineral Resource Statement, End of Year 2017, El Limon and Guajes ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contained Contained Tonnes Au Grade Ag Grade Au Ag (Mt) (g/t) (g/t) (Moz) (Moz) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- El Limon (including El Limon Sur) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Measured 7.99 2.86 5.02 0.73 1.29 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indicated 20.77 2.87 5.07 1.92 3.38 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subtotal Measured and Indicated 28.76 2.87 5.05 2.65 4.67 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inferred 3.27 1.71 4.05 0.18 0.43 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contained Contained Tonnes Au Grade Ag Grade Au Ag (Mt) (g/t) (g/t) (Moz) (Moz) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Guajes ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Measured 2.19 2.53 2.28 0.18 0.16 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indicated 9.10 2.82 2.79 0.82 0.82 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subtotal Measured and Indicated 11.29 2.76 2.69 1.00 0.98 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inferred 0.45 1.49 2.60 0.02 0.04 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contained Contained Tonnes Au Grade Ag Grade Au Ag (Mt) (g/t) (g/t) (Moz) (Moz) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- El Limon and Guajes ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Measured 10.18 2.78 4.43 0.91 1.45 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indicated 29.87 2.86 4.37 2.74 4.20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Measured and Indicated 40.05 2.84 4.39 3.65 5.65 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inferred 3.72 1.68 3.87 0.20 0.46 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes to accompany El Limon and Guajes Mineral Resource Table: The qualified person for the Guajes estimate is Mark Hertel, RM SME, 1. an MPH employee. The estimate has an effective date of December 31, 2017. The qualified person for the El Limon estimate is Mark Hertel, RM SME, an MPH employee. The estimate has an effective date of December 31, 2. 2017. El Limon B Pit, where additional diamond drill information was available, was estimated and has an effective date of December 31, 2017. The qualified person for the El Limon Sur area within El Limon 3. estimate is Mark Hertel, RM SME, an MPH employee. The El Limon Sur area has an effective date of December 31, 2017. 4. Mineral Resources are reported above a 0.7 g/t Au cut-off grade. Mineral Resources are reported as undiluted; grades are contained 5. grades. 6. Mineral Resources are reported within a conceptual open pit shell. Mineral Resources are reported using a long-term gold price of 7. US$1380/oz, silver price of US$21.00/oz. The metal prices used for the Mineral Resources estimates are based on long-term consensus prices. The assumed mining method is open pit, 8. mining costs used are US$2.18/tonne, processing costs US$19.09/tonne, general and administrative US$8.80/tonne processed. 9. Recoveries gold 87% and silver 32%. 10. Assumed pit slopes range from 33 to 49 degrees. Rounding as required by reporting guidelines may result in apparent 11. summation differences between tonnes, grade, and contained metal content. Mineral Resources are reported using topography with mining progress as of December 31, 2017. Mining progress applies to both El Limon and 12. Guajes Mineral Resources. Stockpiled material is not included within the resource table above. El Limon Sub Sill Underground Mineral Resource has been excluded from 13. the Open Pit Mineral Resource. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have 14. demonstrated economic viability. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ELG Open Pit - End of Year Reserves 2017 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contained Contained Reserve Category Tonnes Au Grade Ag Grade Au Ag (Mt) (g/t) (g/t) (Moz) (Moz) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- El Limon (including El Limon Sur) Proven 7.42 2.66 4.28 0.64 1.02 Probable 16.97 2.72 4.12 1.48 2.25 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sub-total Proven and Probable 24.40 2.70 4.17 2.12 3.27 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Guajes Proven 2.24 2.24 1.82 0.16 0.13 Probable 9.25 2.54 2.43 0.76 0.72 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sub-total Proven and Probable 11.49 2.48 2.31 0.92 0.85 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mined stockpiles Proven 0.76 2.04 7.61 0.05 0.19 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total El Limon Guajes Proven 10.42 2.53 3.99 0.85 1.34 Probable 26.22 2.65 3.53 2.24 2.97 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Proven and Probable 36.64 2.62 3.66 3.08 4.31 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes to accompany Mineral Reserve table: 1. Mineral reserves are reported based on open pit mining within designed pits above in situ cut-off grades that are 0.80 g/t Au for all ore types. Mineral reserves incorporate and estimate for dilution and mining losses. The cut-off grades and pit designs are considered for the metal price of US$1,200/Oz and US$17/oz silver. 2. Mineral reserves are founded on, and include within, El Limon and Guajes Mineral resource. Effective dates of mineral reserves is December 31, 2017 for the Guajes and El Limon deposits. For the El Limon Sur deposit the effective date is December 31, 2017. Stockpiles were as of December 31, 2017. 3. The depletion that occurred during 2017 comes from mining carried out in Guajes and El Limon. 4. Mineral Reserves were developed in accordance with CIM (2014) guidelines. 5. Rounding may result in apparent summation differences between tonnes, grade, and contained metal content. 6. The qualified person for the mineral reserve estimate is Victor A. Barua, AusIMM member and a Torex employee.

ELG UG - Sub-Sill

High Grade Reserves Add to High Margin Production in the Short Term

Mineral Resource Statement, Sub-Sill Underground ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contained Contained Tonnes Au Grade Ag Grade Cu Grade Au Ag (Mt) (g/t) (g/t) (%) (oz) (oz) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sub Sill ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indicated 1.29 8.09 10.22 0.50 336,085 424,492 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inferred 0.65 9.09 10.79 0.60 191,087 226,919 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes to accompany Sub Sill Underground Mineral Resource table: The estimate was prepared by Mark. P. Hertel, RM SME, an employee of 1. MPH Consulting, who is a "Qualified Person" under NI 43-101. 2. The estimate has an effective date of December 31, 2017. Mineral Resources are classified in accordance with the 2014 CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves and 3. the 2003 CIM Estimation of Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves Best Practice Guidelines. 4. Mineral Resources are reported above a 2.5 g/t Au cut-off grade. Mineral Resources are reported as undiluted; grades are contained 5. grades. Sub Sill Resources contained within the conceptual pit shell have been 6. removed from the El Limon Open Pit Resources. Mineral Resources are reported using a long-term gold price of 7. US$1380/oz, and silver price of US$21.00/oz. 8. The assumed mining method is from underground. 9. Recoveries gold 87% and silver 32%. Rounding as required by reporting guidelines may result in apparent 10. summation differences between tonnes, grade, and contained metal content. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have 11. demonstrated economic viability.

Set out below is the table indicating the sensitivity to cut-off grade that was used for the Sub-Sill Indicated Mineral Resource, with the base case highlighted.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contained Contained Cutoff Au Tonnes Au Grade Ag Grade Cu Grade Au Ag (g/t) (Mt) (g/t) (g/t) (%) (oz) (oz) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.00 1.58 7.03 9.34 0.45 356,746 473,405 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.50 1.29 8.09 10.22 0.50 336,085 424,492 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.00 0.47 16.16 15.21 0.75 245,590 231,144 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10.00 0.31 21.07 18.66 0.92 211,867 187,628 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes to accompany the table: 1. The mineral resource estimates set out above have been prepared by Mr. Mark P. Hertel, who is a "Qualified Person" under NI 43-101. Mineral Reserve Statement, Sub-Sill Underground ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contained Contained Tonnes Au Grade Ag Grade Cu Grade Au Ag (Mt) (g/t) (g/t) (%) (oz) (oz) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sub Sill ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Proven - - - - - - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Probable 0.48 11.65 11.65 0.60 180,000 180,000 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes to accompany Sub Sill Underground Mineral Reserve table: 1. Mineral reserves are based on mechanized cut and fill mining within designed cut shapes above in-situ cut-off grades that vary from 4.37g/t Au to 4.84g/t Au accounting for the affect of copper content on process plant recoveries. 2. Mineral reserves incorporate estimates for dilution and mining losses. 3. Process plant recoveries for the Sub-Sill range from 80.1% to 88.3% for Au and 14.1% to 67.3% for Ag. 4. The Mine plan was developed using metal prices of US$1,200/oz. Au and US$17/oz. Ag. 5. Mineral reserves are founded on and include within, Sub-Sill measured and indicated resource. Effective date of resources is October 13, 2017. 6. Mineral reserves have an effective date of December 31, 2017. 7. Mineral reserves were developed in accordance with CIM (2014) guidelines. 8. Rounding may result in apparent summation differences between tonnes, grades and contained metal content. 9. The qualified person for the mineral reserves estimate is Clifford Lafleur, Professional Engineer of Ontario, Canada and a Torex employee.

ELG U/G Sub-Sill Mine Plan

A post pillar mechanized cut and fill mine plan has been designed using the updated Mineral Resource Estimation and geological model resulting in a high grade, Probable Mineral Reserve, of 0.48 million tonnes at 11.65 g/t Au for 180,000 gold ounces at an average in situ cut-off grade 4.60 g/t Au cut-off grade.

Three Cut-Off Grades were calculated to account for the affect of Cu grades on recoveries and used to guide the design of cut and fill production shapes. There are 6 mining zones in the mine plan which range in size from 40 - 100m length on strike, 40 - 200m on plunge and 3.5 to 25m thick dipping at an average 24 degrees. The mine plan converts 71% of Indicated Mineral Resource Au ounces to Probable Mineral Reserve Au ounces.

Development and infrastructure construction were designed to provide access to the production areas, main ventilation via a second portal and to service the mining operations. The production, development and infrastructure construction were costed and scheduled in a financial model.

The mine plan is expected to deliver 480,000 tonnes of high grade (11.65 gpt Au) ore containing 180,000 Au ounces to the ELG Processing Plant over a 29-month period. The Mine is expected to ramp up over an 8-month period with estimated production of 76,000 tonnes at 15.30 g/t Au while main ventilation and electrical infrastructure are being established. Steady state production is expected to continue for 11 months with estimated production of 283,000 tonnes (850 tpd) at 11.40 g/t Au, the main constraint being backfilling rate. For the remaining 10 months, the mine plan is expected to deliver 120,000 tonnes (400 tpd) at 9.93 g/t Au.

Sub-Sill ore is expected to perform well in the existing Plant with expected Au recoveries ranging from 88.30% when Cu grade is less than 0.1%, 85.8% when Cu grade is between 0.1% and 1% and 80.1% when Cu grade is greater than 1%. The average expected recovery is 84.4% for the mine plan. The expected recoveries for Ag range from 67.3% when Cu grade is less than 0.1%, 37.1% when Cu grade is between 0.1% and 1% and 14.1% when Cu grades are greater than 1%. The average expected Ag recovery is 26.2% for the mine plan.

During steady state production (approximately 850 tpd), expected operating costs average $108.35/tonne, including $79.97/tonne mining cost, $19.33/tonne processing and $9.05/tonne in general administration (G&A). Over the 29-month mine plan, operating costs are expected to average $140.86 /tonne.

Total capital required to execute the mine plan is estimated to be $23M, of which, $22M will be spent in the first year. Of the total capital spend, $9.5M is needed for lateral development.

Assuming the production, costs and plant recoveries listed above, the mine plan is expected to generate $86M in free cash flow (before tax) with a Cash Cost of $479/Au Oz and All In Sustaining Cost (AISC) of $512/Au Oz.

Sub-Sill Geology

The Sub-Sill deposit occurs at the south end of the El Limon deposit in the Mesozoic carbonate-rich Morelos Platform, which has been intruded by Paleocene granodiorite stocks, sills and dikes. Skarn-hosted gold mineralization is developed along the contacts of the intrusive rocks and the enclosing carbonate-rich sedimentary rocks of the Cuautla and Morelos formations. Gold mineralization at El Limon open pit is hosted in skarn developed immediately above a large granodiorite sill. At the Sub-Sill area, multiple skarn zones have been recognized underneath the El Limon Sill, developed along the contacts between marbles of the Morelos formation and multiple granodiorite sills that are interpreted as late stage porphyritic intrusions that emanate from the main body of granodiorite. The best developed skarn zones at the Sub-Sill area, strike NE-SW and dip between 35 degrees and 45 degrees to the northwest. They host multiple horizons with high grade gold mineralization that vary in strike length from approximately 50 meters up to 200 meters, with apparent widths varying from 2 meters to 36 meters. The trend of the overall skarn body in the Sub-Sill area is N-S to NE-SW and appears to connect to previously recognized skarn and gold mineralization at the Limon Sur deposit 200 meters to the SW.

Mineralization at the Sub-Sill deposit is primarily gold, strongly associated with bismuth and variable contents of silver and copper. Gold occurs in variably sulfidized pyrrhotite enriched skarn, while silver and copper mineralization is primarily determined by the degree of sulfidation of the host skarn. Mineralization is associated with retrograde alteration characterized by amphibole, calcite and quartz, with lessor amounts of chlorite +/- epidote, affecting pyroxene-garnet exoskarn and granodiorite-related endoskarn. Locally mineralization occurs in narrow lenses of massive sulfides.

Mineral Resource Estimate Methodology

Within the Sub-Sill project 85 drill holes (16,826 meters) support the mineral resource estimate. Assays were composited into 2.5 meter lengths for estimation into 2.5 meter cubic blocks. MineSight a commercially-available geologic modeling and mine planning software package, was used to produce a three-dimensional block model. Specific gravity (SG) was assigned by rock type from 107 wax immersion density determinations. Gold, silver and copper grades, within the Sub-Sill resource model, were estimated using grade domains, defined from Probability Assigned Constrained Kriging (PACK) and lithologic codes. Ordinary kriging was used to interpolate grade. Mineral Resources take into account geologic, mining, and processing constraints. Mineral Resources are classified in accordance with the 2014 CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves and the 2003 CIM Estimation of Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves Best Practice Guidelines.

Mineral Reserve Estimate Methodology

The estimated underground Sub-Sill Mineral Reserves have been based on a mine design including the development and infrastructure construction required to extract the Indicated portion of the Mineral Resource Estimate using the Mechanized Cut and Fill (MCAF) mining method. The three-dimensional block model created for the Mineral Resource Estimate was taken into Deswik software suite, a commercially-available mine planning software package, and used as the base of an MCAF mine plan. A cost model was built to determine 3 Break Even Cut-Off Grades (BECOG) for varying mill recoveries dependent on Cu content. The BECOG averages 4.60 g/t Au. The mine plan physicals such as SG, Gold, Silver and copper grades were estimated by applying the mine design shapes against the block model, unplanned dilution and mine recovery were also applied. Mineral Reserves take into account geologic, mining and processing constraints. Mineral Reserves are classified in accordance with the 2014 CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves and the 2003 CIM Estimation of Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves Best Practice Guidelines.

2017 In-Fill and Step-Out Drill Program Update

The in-fill and step out drill program started in Q2/17 is complete. This program has succeeded in upgrading inferred resources, testing the extents and prospect areas to the north, south, west, east and at depth of the known resources.

The in-fill program has completed 45 of 47 holes (96%) of the diamond drill holes that were planned with the objective of upgrading 1 million Inferred tonnes to the Indicated confidence category. The 45 holes upgraded 950,000 Inferred tonnes to the Indicated category, or 95% of the target, with 96% of the planned holes. This represents a 100% conversion ratio for Inferred tonnes to the Indicated confidence category, and delivered a 269% increase in the number of Indicated tonnes.

The step-out program has completed 39 of 47 holes achieving 11,896 meters of 13,105m planned on a 70m x 70m drill spacing. The purpose of this program is to test the prospective areas to the north, south, west and east of the known resource.

QA/QC and Qualified Persons

At the Morelos Gold Project, all of the El Limon Sub-Sill target analytical work is performed by SGS de Mexico S.A. de C.V. ("SGS") in Durango, Mexico and at SGS Mineral Services in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and ALS Chemex de Mexico S.A. de C.V.

Sample preparation is done at SGS sample preparation laboratory in Durango, Mexico. The gold analyses (fire assay with an atomic absorption or gravimetric finish) are completed at SGS analytical laboratory in Durango, Mexico and multi-element geochemical analyses are Copper Sequential Leaching are completed at their analytical facilities in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Check assays samples are analyzed at ALS Chemex Vancouver, BC, Canada. SGS and ALS Chemex are independent of the Company.

The Company has a Quality Assurance/Quality Control ("QA/QC") program in place that includes 5% of each of the certified reference materials, blanks and field duplicates. 10% of pulp samples are analyzed at a second laboratory as part of the QA/QC program to ensure the batch to batch relative bias remains constant and that absolute accuracy at anomalous to near cut-off grades is measured and acceptable. The QA/QC program as designed has been approved by Bureau Veritas and is currently overseen by Carlo Nasi, Chief Mine Geologist for the Morelos Gold Project.

The scientific and technical data contained in this news release pertaining to the Morelos Project has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Mark P. Hertel, RM SME, who is a Qualified Person under NI 43-101. Mr. Hertel is a Registered Member of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, has experience relevant to the style of mineralization under consideration and is an independent consultant, employed by MPH Consulting. Mr. Hertel has verified the data disclosed, including sampling, analytical, and test data underlying the drill results and he consents to the inclusion in this release of said data in the form and context in which it appears.

The scientific and technical data contained in this news release pertaining to the Sub-Sill Deposit Mineral Reserves has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Clifford Lafleur, P.Eng who is a Qualified Person under NI 43-101. Mr. Lafleur is a Registered Member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario, has worked the majority of his career in underground hard rock mining in Canada and Mexico in progressively senior engineering roles with relevant experience in mine design and planning, mining economic viability assessment and mining studies.

The scientific and technical data contained in this news release pertaining to the ELG OP Mineral Reserves has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Dawson Proudfoot, P.Eng who is the Vice President of Engineering at the Company and who is a Qualified Person under NI 43-101.

Naming Convention:

-- ELG Open Pits (ELG OP) refers to: -- El Limon Pit, -- Guajes Pit, and -- El Limon Sur Pit. -- ELG Underground (ELG UG) refers to the underground mining zones in proximity to ELG OP, including: -- Sub-Sill, -- El Limon Deep (ELD). -- ELG Mine Complex (ELG) refers to all of ELG OP, ELG UG, and the associated processing facilities & infrastructure. -- Media Luna Project (Not considered as part of the ELG Mine Complex). -- Morelos Property refers to all of the above.

About Torex

Torex is an emerging intermediate gold producer based in Canada, engaged in the exploration, development and operation of its 100% owned Morelos Gold Property, an area of 29,000 hectares in the highly prospective Guerrero Gold Belt located 180 kilometers southwest of Mexico City. Within this property, Torex has the El Limon Guajes Mine, which announced commercial production in March of 2016; the Sub-Sill Underground Project currently under development; and the Media Luna Project, which is in an early stage of development and for which the Company issued a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) in 2015. The property remains 75% unexplored.

Additional information on the El Limon deposit and analytical labs is available in the Company's most recent annual information form filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and the Company's website at www.torexgold.com.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Notwithstanding the Company's efforts, there can be no guarantee that the Company will not face delays or disruptions, including delays and disruptions connected to blockaders illegally blocking access to the ELG Mine Complex. Forward-looking information includes, without limitation, information with respect to mineral resource and mineral reserve estimates, mine design, the estimated increase in the mineral resource of the Sub-Sill deposit, the ability to realize the estimated mineral resources and mineral reserves, the parameters and assumptions underlying the mineral resource and mineral reserve estimates and the financial analysis, expected ramp up and steady state production, the expectation of continuing the drill program, with the objectives of adding and upgrading resource and profitably extending the mine life. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of terminology such as "plans", "expects", "estimates", "intends", "anticipates", "believes" or variations of such words, or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including, without limitation, risks related to the inability to realize resource and reserve estimates at anticipated recovery levels or at all, assumptions underlying resource estimates being incorrect, and those risk factors identified in the Company's annual information form and management's discussion and analysis. Forward-looking information is based on the reasonable assumptions, estimates, analysis and opinions of management made in light of its experience and perception of trends, current conditions and expected developments, and other factors that management believes are relevant and reasonable in the circumstances at the date such statements are made. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

Contacts:

Torex Gold Resources Inc.

Fred Stanford

President and CEO

(647) 260-1502

fred.stanford@torexgold.com



Torex Gold Resources Inc.

Gabriela Sanchez

Vice President Investor Relations

(647) 260-1503

gabriela.sanchez@torexgold.com




ALBANY, New York, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The report provides detailed analysis of the current and emerging trends of global catheters market. The market size has been provided for product type and end users segment. Based on product type, the market is segmented into cardiovascular catheters, urology catheters, intravenous catheters, neurovascular catheters, and specialty catheters. By end users the global catheters market is segmented into hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, dialysis centers and other. The global catheter market is anticipated to see moderate growth during the forecast period, owing to the increasing demand of minimally invasive procedures and rise in number of surgeries. In addition, geriatric population is expected to increase the patient pool worldwide and rise in demand for sterile & disposable catheters supplement the market growth. The report provides forecasts for revenue (US$ Mn) of the products from 2017-2025.

According to the report, the cardiovascular catheters market is projected to reach US$ 55.98 Bn in 2025 at a CAGR of 7.4% from 2017 to 2025.

View Report Preview athttps://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/catheters-market.html

The cardiovascular segment is further segmented into electrophysiology catheters, PTCA balloon catheters, IVUS catheters, PTA balloon catheters and others. The others segment of the cardiovascular catheters includes angiography catheters, guiding catheters and pulmonary artery catheters. The cardiovascular catheters segment is the highest contributing segment in terms of revenue for the growth of global catheters market. PTCA balloon catheters are also growing significantly due to the rising incidences of coronary heart diseases globally. According to WHO, an estimated 7.4 million people died due to coronary heart disease and 6.7 million were due to stroke in 2015 globally.

Urology catheters is the second largest segment contributing highly for the growth of global catheters market. The urology catheter segment is further segmented into hemodialysis catheters, peritoneal catheters, foley catheters, intermittent catheters and external catheters. The foley catheters dominates the urology catheters segment in terms of revenue, followed by the intermittent catheters and then hemodialysis catheters. The rise in the number of geriatric population which suffers from a wide range of urinary disorders, especially urinary incontinence and urinary retention is increasing globally. Moreover, catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) have become a major cause of concern for health care providers and professionals across the world, which is also increasing demand of technologically advanced urinary catheters globally, especially in developed economies such as the U.S. and Europe.

Request to View Sample of Report -https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=109

The intravenous catheters segment is segmented into peripheral catheters, midline peripheral catheters and central venous catheters. Intravenous catheters are used to administer parenteral nutrition, drugs, blood products, and intravenous fluids during illness and also in routine elective procedures. There has been a noticeable rise in the number of cancer patients, patients with renal impairment, diabetes and obesity. Target pool of patients undergoing hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, and chemotherapy has been on a consistent rise. Hence, this segment is expected to grow at a constant CAGR.

Neurovascular catheters are used to diagnose and treat neurovascular complications with minimally invasive micro catheters and access catheters. Cerebrovascular disease or stroke are treated with neurovascular catheters. Neurovascular diseases have an effect on network of blood vessels in the brain which give rise to potentially fatal conditions such as aneurysms and strokes. Here comes the role of neurovascular catheters, by using minimally invasive approaches neurovascular catheters are used for diagnosis and treatment of such conditions. Around 6 million Americans are affected by cerebral aneurysms alone annually. Specialty catheter are used for inflammations and categorized as oximetry catheters, wound drainage catheters, suction catheters, and thermo dilution catheters. Wound drainage catheters are designed for goal of drain liquids and semisolids from an otherwise closed wound.

Download PDF Brochure of Report:https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=109

Based on end users, the global catheters market is segmented into hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, dialysis centers and others. The hospital segment is the major contributing segment for the growth of the global catheters market. Increasing number of hospital facility across globe with the aim to provide high quality services at affordable cost is driving the growth the hospital segment. The ambulatory surgical segment is the second largest segment contributing for the growth of the global catheters market. Ambulatory surgical centers are well established in developed countries of North America and Europe. The dialysis centers are highly concentrated in the countries of Asia Pacific.

Major players operating in the global catheters market are Abbott Laboratories, Becton, Dickinson and Company, B. Braun Melsungen AG, C. R. Bard, Inc., Medtronic plc. Boston Scientific Corporation, Teleflex Incorporated, JOHNSON & JOHNSON, Cook Group Incorporated, Cardinal Health, Inc.(Cordis Corporation) and others.

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About TMR

Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The company's exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.

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For Latest News and Updates on Health Care Industry do visit our Blog https://theglobalhealthnews.com/
ZURICH, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

ETH Zurich - the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland brings some of its top researchers in the fields of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to Davos during the World Economic Forum. Robotics demos, interactive games, and inspiring speakers challenge visitors to rethink intelligence in a public exhibition and series of events that take place in the:

ETH Zurich Pavilion

Talstrasse 41

7270 Davos Platz

Switzerland

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/629234/ETH_Zurich.jpg )



International Press Exclusive

Monday, 22 January 2018 - 17:00

An international press exclusive launches the week featuring an open discussion on intelligence - one of the last mysteries of humankind. "How do we code to ensure self-preservation?" Moderator John Fraher, Bloomberg and experts from IBM Research, Google Switzerland, ETH Zurich, Disney Research, Starmind, Swiss AI Lab, and Silicon Valley Robotics discuss how, as creators, to address the risks and potential as the world builds artificial intelligence systems.

RoboRat

ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich researchers debut RoboRat - a prototype of an autonomous robotic lab rat that uses built-in artificial neural networks to demonstrate intelligent animal behavior.

Networking with Google

Tuesday, 23 January 2018, 20:00

Google Switzerland and ETH Zurich exchange views on the future of intelligence with some of Europe's most exclusive execs and members of the media.

RETHINKING Intelligence - Public Exhibition

Tuesday, 23 January - Thursday, 25 January 2018, 11:00 - 16:00

ETH Zurich researchers will be on hand to present exciting projects demonstrating their latest research in artificial intelligence, neural networks, and robotics in a public exhibition that takes place in the ETH Zurich Pavilion, Davos.

3D Printed Brain

Reprinting Intelligence imagines a future that 3D prints artificial organs.

Dextra

Attempt to defeat Dextra - a robotic hand that uses a brain-inspired neural network and a camera to anticipate an opponent's every move in a game of "rock-paper-scissors."

BrainRunners

Using a brain-computer interface the Cybathlon BrainRunners video game allows players to control an avatar using only thoughts.

ANYmal

Watch as ANYmal - a quadrupedal robotic search and rescue dog - perceive and map its environment autonomously.

TasteLab Cafe

ETH spinoff, TasteLab tantalizes the tastebuds showing the close relationship between science and food.

Further information

ETH Zurich Pavilion Press Page: http://bit.ly/ETHatWEF2018_Press

About ETH Zurich: https://www.ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich.html

Boilerplate: https://www.ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/portrait.html

Request event invitation: Juerg Brunnschweiler, Director ETH Global juerg.brunnschweiler@sl.ethz.ch


OTTAWA (dpa-AFX) - Automotive supplier Magna International Inc. (MG.TO, MGA) provided its financial outlook for fiscal 2018 and 2020. The company noted that its outlook reflects the new reporting segments that it recently announced as part of a realignment of its management structure along product lines.



Magna said that as noted in its third quarter 2017 report, it will adopt the new revenue recognition standard and change the accounting for tooling and pre-production engineering beginning in 2018.



The change will primarily result in a decrease in sales, substantially offset by a similar decrease in cost of goods sold. In addition, the company's outlook reflects this change in accounting.



For comparative purposes, the company expects the decrease in both sales and cost of goods sold for 2017 to be approximately $2.4 billion.



For fiscal 2018, Magna forecast total sales of $39.3 billion to $41.5 billion, EBIT margin of 7.9 percent to 8.2 percent, and net income attributable to the company of $2.3 billion to $2.5 billion.



Further ahead, for fiscal 2020, Magna projects total sales of $42.7 billion to $45.7 billion, and EBIT margin of 8.5 percent to 8.9 percent.



The company also said it expects to generate over $6 billion in free cash flow between 2018 and 2020, which is more than 25 percent of its current market capitalization.



Magna will be making a presentation at the Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry Conference on Tuesday, January 16, 2018, during which it will review the details of its outlook.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
NEW YORK CITY (dpa-AFX) - Foundation Medicine, Inc. (FMI) Tuesday said it has entered into a broad partnership with Pfizer Inc. (PFE) for development, regulatory support and commercialization of companion diagnostics that will be included in updates to FoundationOne CDx. The companion diagnostics will be used for Pfizer's oncology portfolio. FoundationOne CDx is a FDA-approved comprehensive genomic profiling assay for all solid tumors that incorporates multiple companion diagnostics. The unique combination of FoundationInsights and FoundationOne CDx will potentially enable Pfizer to leverage Foundation Medicine's platform technology to accelerate discovery and development of precision oncology therapeutics. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - RXi Pharmaceuticals Corp. (RXII) outlined its 2018 business strategy during a webcast presentation at the Biotech Showcase conference. RXi will focus development initiatives on novel immuno-oncology therapeutics using its proprietary sd-rxRNA platform. Focusing the development portfolio on Immuno-oncology, with a near term focus on Adoptive Cell Transfer (ACT), will streamline and reduce our quarterly burn-rate for 2018. The Company is aiming to enter the clinic with at least one of our compounds in the next 18 months, targeting a large multi-billion dollar market. RXi intends to partner/out-license both its Dermatology and Ophthalmology Franchises. Successfully completing these transactions should provide non-dilutive funding for the Company's focused development path in Immuno-oncology. Each of these Franchises is comprised of preclinical and clinical-stage assets broadly covered by a robust intellectual property estate 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.
Equities in the Asia Pacific region raced ahead on Wednesday, led by gains in Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng index, which topped its pre-crisis highs. In a boost to sentiment, overnight Japanese finance minister Taro Aso warned traders that "big moves" in exchange rates could be problematic, although the yen's then current level against the US dollar was not. While a seeming statement of the obvious, traders interpreted the former as a verbal intervention or an attempt by Aso to at least dampen ...

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.
BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - Bitcoin was on a free fall Tuesday, reaching below $12,000 for the first time since December 5, amid reports that China is stepping up crackdown on cryptocurrency 'Exchange-Like Services.'. Smaller rivals ethereum and ripple were also losing their value as investors around the world are getting more and more concerned over the future of digital currencies after a last week report that South Korea, one of the major markets for cryptocurrency, is preparing a bill to ban all crypto trading, over 'great concerns.' As of 4.13 am ET, bitcoin was trading at $11,951.61 a coin, but since gained back and was at $12,222.15 as of 7.00 am ET, down 10 percent. Ethereum, the second biggest digital currency, was down 12.1 percent at $1,134.67, while the third place holder ripple, which had once traded around $3.84, was trading at $1.44, down 14.3 percent. Chinese authorities reportedly plans to block online platforms and mobile apps that offer exchange-like services as part of stepping up the crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges. The Chinese government now plans to block domestic access to homegrown and offshore platforms that enable centralized trading, Bloomberg reported, quoting people familiar with the matter. The Central Bank of China in September had banned betting on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Last week, South Korea's justice minister Park Sang-ki had said the country was readying a bill to ban all crypto trading. South Korea has been emerging as a focus for the bitcoin world, influencing global demand for digital currencies. Regulators around the world are closely watching cryptocurrencies amid concerns over excessive speculation, money laundering and tax evasion, which led to increased volatility in global markets for bitcoin and other digital tokens since November. 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.
LONDON, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Reveals economic stake of 4.8% in Bezeq

Highlights need to simplify multi-layered pyramid structure

Calls for immediate removal of directors under investigation

Elliott Advisors (UK) Limited ("Elliott"), which advises funds which collectively hold an economic interest in Bezeq The Israeli Telecommunication Corporation Ltd. ("Bezeq" or the "Company") of approximately 4.8%, today released a letter to Bezeq's Interim Board Chairman Mr. David Granot.

Elliott describes the current problems that undermine Bezeq's potential, including the Company being part of a three layer leveraged holding pyramid with multiple conflicts and misaligned incentives. Elliott calls for the removal of at least one layer of the leveraged pyramid to more closely align the governance of Bezeq with its economic ownership.

Elliott furthermore outlines the urgent need to address the Company's serious corporate governance issues, and calls for changes at the Board level, including the immediate resignation of all the directors who were implicated in Israel Securities Authority investigations, and/or affiliated with Eurocom. Elliott believes Bezeq would benefit considerably from the election of new independent and professional directors to the Board, equipping it with "the right mixture of expertise, independence and integrity for the future."

As articulated in its letter to Interim Chairman Granot, Elliott "believe there is significant value to be unlocked if the right steps are taken to improve its corporate governance." Elliott goes on to state, "Bezeq has strong business fundamentals, an exemplary workforce, and great potential, which is why we're proudly one of the Company's largest independent investors. We are eager to work with you to ensure this Company has the board composition-and commitment to proper governance-that it deserves."

The text of the letter can be read in full below.

About Elliott

Founded in 1977, Elliott Management Corporation is one of the oldest private investment firms of its kind under continuous management. The firm's investors include pension funds, private endowments, charitable foundations, family offices, and employees of the firm. Elliott Advisors (UK)Limited is an affiliate of Elliott Management Corporation.

January 16, 2018

Via Email

David Granot

Interim Chairman

Bezeq The Israel Telecommunication Corporation Ltd.

The Triangular Tower

3 Azrieli Center

Tel Aviv 61620, Israel

Attention: David Granot, Interim Chairman of the Board of Directors

Dear Mr Granot,

Elliott Advisors (UK) Limited (together with funds advised by it, "Elliott" or "we") has been a shareholder of Bezeq The Israel Telecommunication Corporation Ltd. ("Bezeq" or the "Company") since mid-2017 and currently has an economic interest of 4.8% in the Company.

We have invested considerable time and effort to researching and analysing Bezeq, and believe there is significant value to be unlocked if the right steps are taken to improve the Company's corporate governance. Bezeq has strong business fundamentals, an exemplary workforce, and great potential, which is why we're proudly one of the Company's largest independent investors. We are eager to work with you to ensure this Company has the board composition-and commitment to proper governance-that it deserves.

Over the past few weeks we have closely monitored the highly public discussions regarding legal actions taken by creditors against Eurocom Communications ("Eurocom") and the potential recapitalisation and change of control of that entity. Eurocom sits at the top of a three layer leveraged holding pyramid that at present enables it to effectively control Bezeq despite being in default. We believe that this ownership structure needs to be simplified, with at least one layer being removed, to more closely align the governance of Bezeq with its economic ownership. We also believe that this should be achieved in a professional and transparent manner, making sure that a new control permit, if any, will be issued only to a well-capitalised professional investor or consortium with relevant expertise in telecom investments and committed to the highest standards of corporate governance.

Moreover we believe that the Board of Bezeq, as currently composed, is no longer fit for purpose. A number of the Directors are subject both to investigations of serious financial misconduct at Bezeq and / or are affiliated with Eurocom, which is subject to legal actions by its creditors. In these circumstances stakeholders of Bezeq may doubt both the independence of these Directors and their ability to focus properly on their obligations as Board members. We believe that it is in the best interests of Bezeq and all its stakeholders, including independent shareholders who own 73.7% of the shares, for decisive and immediate action to be taken to strengthen the Company's corporate governance.

In our view, the key steps in this direction include the following:

All of Bezeq's Directors implicated by the Israel Securities Authority investigation and/or affiliated with Eurocom should announce their resignations, effective immediately, from Bezeq and all its subsidiaries;

Such Directors should be replaced with independent and professional Directors elected from of a slate of candidates proposed by an independent special committee of the Board, following consultation with Bezeq's key shareholders, and confirmed by shareholder vote at the earliest opportunity; and

In the event of any change in the ultimate controlling shareholder of Bezeq, the Directors nominated by the new controlling shareholder should be chosen according to their relevant experience in businesses at this scale, and their clean, established record. Prior to their nomination the identity of such new Directors should be consulted upon with other key shareholders of Bezeq and confirmed by the relevant shareholder meeting.

As you well know, Bezeq faces compelling business opportunities and significant challenges. The time that passes without stable, impartial ownership and governance is to the detriment of all stakeholders. As such, we urge you to support the type of corporate governance which Bezeq and its stakeholders deserve - a Board with the right mixture of expertise, independence and integrity for the future.

We sincerely hope that our concerns will be promptly addressed over the coming weeks. In the meantime, we stand ready to take any and all steps open to Bezeq shareholders to ensure our interests are protected and welcome any questions you or any members of the Board may have.

We would like to discuss the letter in person with you at your earliest convenience.

Yours sincerely,

Elliott Advisors (UK) Limited
NEW YORK, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Canada leads the global trend to legalize and regulate medical and recreational cannabis, and some of the biggest players in the space are listed on Canadian stock exchanges. One of the public companies attracting attention in the sector is DOJA Cannabis Company Ltd. (CSE: DOJA) (OTC: DJACF) (DOJA Profile), which grows high-quality, hand-crafted cannabis, operates one retail store in Kelowna, British Columbia and is focused building the premier cannabis lifestyle brand in the industry. To bolster its retail ambitions and brand focus, DOJA recently announced a merger with fellow leading lifestyle cannabis brand company Tokyo Smoke and also announced a concurrent strategic investment of $10 million from Aphria, Inc. (http://nnw.fm/jML2w). The combined company resulting from the merger will use the name "Hiku Brands Company Ltd." to refer to the brand house containing premium cannabis brands DOJA, Tokyo Smoke, and Van der Pop. The Merger will create a uniquely positioned cannabis company combining a best-in-class craft cannabis producer with an award-winning lifestyle brand and retail-focused cannabis company. Other companies vying for increased retail recognition in the marijuana marketplace include Canopy Growth Corp. (TSX: WEED) (OTC: TWMJF), Emblem Corp. (TSX-V: EMC) (OTC: EMMBF), Golden Leaf Holdings Ltd. (CSE: GLH) (OTC: GLDFF) and The Supreme Cannabis Company, Inc. (formerly Supreme Pharmaceuticals) (TSX-V: FIRE) (OTC: SPRWF).



The Canadian cannabis market reaching new highs



While the United States wallows in legal disunity, Canada is now the largest regulated cannabis producer in the world. Medical cannabis is already a multi-million-dollar industry in Canada and, with the legalization of recreational use slated to begin July 1, 2018, licensed producers are ramping up production and positioning for retail recognition in advance of the adult use market opening up.



Total market value of recreational marijuana in Canada worth up to $22.6 billion



The retail market value of recreational marijuana in Canada is expected to reach $8.7 billion annually. Add in ancillary services such as testing labs, lighting and security systems, and Deloitte projects total market size could reach $22.6 billion (http://nnw.fm/6Rj9w). Market size could far exceed expectations when taxes, licensing fees, and marijuana-related tourism are factored in. Deloitte also estimates that fulfilling the demand for recreational marijuana will mean producing over 600,000 kilograms of marijuana annually, far more than existing licensed producers grow for medicinal purposes.



Branding, marketing and quality will be the differentiators



The Canadian marijuana market remains fragmented as licensed producers prepare for the expected tsunami of recreational demand. Retail distribution is almost an afterthought for the majority of cannabis companies that have a "grow it and they will come" attitude. DOJA Cannabis Company Ltd. (CSE: DOJA) (OTC: DJACF) has distinguished itself from its peers by combining a ''best-in-class ''craft ''cannabis ''producer with ''a retail-focused cannabis company that has a substantial national retail footprint and offers a portfolio of premium cannabis lifestyle brands.



Experience and expertise matter



DOJA is led by branding wizard, founder and CEO Trent Kitsch. A successful and experienced entrepreneur, Kitsch founded SAXX Underwear Co. in 2007 and built the company into a fast-growing globally recognized brand. He sold the company in 2016. Known for his hustle, audacity and branding prowess, Kitsch founded DOJA in 2014 with the vision of creating a premium cannabis lifestyle brand for Canada's legal marijuana market. An MBA graduate of the Richard Ivey School of Business with a major in entrepreneurship, Kitsch was recently selected as one of 10 Ivey Ambassadors for Entrepreneurship.



Partnerships and positioning set the stage



Retail positioning is imperative to capture an out-sized share of the nascent multi-billion-dollar marijuana market. DOJA's recently announced binding Letter of Intent to merge with Tokyo Smoke creates a rapidly expanding nationwide retail footprint featuring a portfolio of visionary cannabis brands. The merger, scheduled for completion by March 2018, will create Canada's first nationwide retail and brand-focused cannabis producer. With award-winning cannabis accessory stores and locations across the country, Tokyo Smoke owns two well-recognized premium cannabis brands and is the recipient of the 2017 Canadian Cannabis Brand of the Year Award. The transaction also brings together industry leading management teams with decades of experience from Google, Samsung, Bain & Company, Barneys New York, Lululemon, Cronos Group, and Marley's Natural among others.



In a testament to the viability of the merger, Aphria Inc., one of Canada's premier established producers, announced plans to invest more than $10 million in the merged company to gain leverage in the recreational marijuana market (http://nnw.fm/J2hV6).



Strategic Capital Partners are Essential



On Jan. 9, DOJA, in conjunction with Aphria, announced the closing of the $12.5 million strategic equity investment by Aphria (http://nnw.fm/PfyF0). Aphria recently raised $100 million for use in financing cannabis production facilities at home and abroad, and $12.5 million of it was ear-marked as a strategic investment in DOJA through the purchase of convertible subscription receipts. With a market capitalization of nearly $2.5 billion, Aphria is also the exclusive supplier to Shoppers Drug Mart, Canada's largest retail pharmacy chain.



Upon completion of the merger, it's expected the newly formed company will use the name Hiku Brands Company Ltd. With the capital infusion by Aphria, Hiku will have a cash balance over $31 million and be well positioned to increase its cannabis production capacity, enlarge its retail footprint and add select brands to its portfolio through accretive and synergistic acquisitions.



Commenting on the deal, Aphria CEO Vic Neufeld stated, "This transaction has the twofold benefit of providing us access to strong brands, through Tokyo Smoke and DOJA, and craft-cultivated British Columbia bud, through DOJA. Quality product and recognizable consumer brands will be key differentiators for patients and consumers, and we're looking forward to continuing our work with Hiku to create premium cannabis brands in Canada."



Location, location, location



As Deloitte noted in its report, marijuana-related tourism is expected to be no small factor in the $22 billion-plus Canadian cannabis market. DOJA's wholly owned subsidiary, is situated in the heart of British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, known as the picturesque "Napa of the North."



The Kelowna area attracted nearly 2 million visitors in 2016 and that number is expected to grow with the advent of marijuana tourism. Located on Kelowna's busiest street, DOJA operates the Culture Cafe, which serves as a cannabis information center generating brand awareness right in the middle of the tourist district.



Commenting on production at the facility, DOJA CEO Trent Kitsch stated, "I'm extremely proud of our cultivation team, they have delivered on all levels, the quality of our flower is impressive, and the yields exceeded our expectations. Post-harvest, our flowers were expertly hand-trimmed, hang-dried and artisanally cured. Our handcrafted approach is aimed at producing the finest cannabis with exceptional aroma, flavor and effects."



DOJA expects to deliver more than 5,000 kg of artisanal bud annually with its planned new facility (http://nnw.fm/JNn8l). Initial cannabis harvests have already been completed and DOJA awaits Health Canada pre-sales inspection for retail to commence.



Others positioning for greater retail recognition in the coming cannabis bonanza



The grandfather of Canadian cannabis production, Canopy Growth (TSX: WEED) (OTC: TWMJF) was the first federally regulated, publicly traded cannabis producer in North America. Canopy, through its wholly owned subsidiaries, operates numerous production facilities with over 700,000 square feet of licensed production, over 500,000 square feet of which is GMP-certified. With a focus on educating healthcare practitioners, conducting clinical research, and furthering the public cannabis education, Canopy and its affiliates have plans to develop a production platform that would represent 3.2 million square feet of indoor and greenhouse production capacity. The company has established partnerships in Canada and abroad, with interests and operations spanning four continents.



The Supreme Cannabis Company (formerly Supreme Pharmaceuticals) (TSX-V: FIRE) (OTC: SPRWF) aims to become a leading cultivator and distributor of affordable sun-grown cannabis by applying commercial agriculture practices to cannabis production. Its wholly owned 7ACRES subsidiary is a Canadian federally licensed producer of cannabis operating inside a 342,000-square-foot Hybrid Greenhouse facility. The Hybrid Greenhouse combines the technology of indoor production with the efficiencies and sustainability of a greenhouse in a single large-format production footprint. Supreme currently has a retail footing in oils via a partnership with Aurora Cannabis.



Emblem (TSX-V: EMC) (OTC: EMMBF) is an integrated licensed producer and distributor of medical cannabis and cannabis derivatives in Canada under the ACMPR (Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations). Emblem has a strategy across three verticals: cannabis production, patient education centers and pharmaceutical dosage form development. Like others, Emblem is vying for position within Canada's large and growing medical and recreational marijuana industry. The company currently has over 8,500 square feet of flowering capacity at its closed box facility in Paris, Ontario. A recent land acquisition for expansion of its greenhouse facilities would increase Emblem's total production capacity to upwards of 17,000 kgs. of dried flower per annum.



Canada-based Golden Leaf Holdings (CSE: GLH) (OTCQB: GLDFF), with operations in Portland, Ore., is one of the largest cannabis oil and solution providers in North America and has several recognized brands. Golden Leaf cultivates, extracts, manufactures and distributes its products through its branded Chalice Farm retail dispensaries, as well as through third party dispensaries. Golden Leaf believes its advanced research techniques enhance the extraction, refining, marketing and selling of high quality cannabis oils.



Be selective and focus on brand differentiation



There's little doubt the advent of legalized recreational marijuana in Canada will present immense opportunities as well as some logistical challenges. Companies that establish a dynamic retail presence with recognized national consumer brands could out-pace the competition and potentially deliver exceptional relative returns - savvy investors should take notice of the cannabis companies focused on brand differentiation.



For more information on DOJA Cannabis Company, visit DOJA Cannabis Company Ltd. (CSE: DOJA) (OTC: DJACF).

For a more in-depth look into DOJA Cannabis (CSE: DOJA) (OTC: DJACF), view the full report on Microsmallcap.com.



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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The volume of online searches conducted for prominent keywords pertaining to bitcoin has produced dramatic growth in 2017, the latest data from Google and Wikipedia shows. Main keyword groupings attached to bitcoin, such as 'bitcoin price,' 'bitcoin chart,' and 'bitcoin USD' received between one million and ten million searches each month on average during the last year, Google data indicates. This is a ten-fold increase compared to 2016. The keyword grouping 'bitcoin market' increased in search volume by 900 percent. Bitcoin was the second most searched global news on Google in 2017. In Google searches beginning with the words 'How to,' 'How to buy Bitcoin' was in third rank. Wikipedia published in its annual report the 50 most read articles of last year. The article on Bitcoin was ranked ninth, and the page was visited 15,026,561 times during 2017. Traffic for Wikipedia's bitcoin page peaked on December 8, when the price of the digital currency crashed by around 20 percent to $14,000 from the then all-time high of $17,171. The report describes bitcoin as 'the much-hyped future of money, which has turned into the most speculative intangible asset of all time, while proving totally unsuitable as a means of payment'. Still, over 2017 at least, bitcoin would have been a better investment than Tesla stock, Wikipedia says. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 01/16/18 -- Quantum Numbers Corp. (the "Corporation" or "QNC") (TSX VENTURE: QNC) is pleased to announce it has filed a new patent request for worldwide protection under the Paris Convention Treaty ("PCT") titled "Method and System for Generating a Random Bit Sample" (the "New Patent").

This New Patent coupled with QNC's quantum random number generator ("QRNG") will monitor numbers generated to ensure that only random numbers are selected from our QRNG, which, to the knowledge of QNC, would be a first in the industry.

Moreover, within the next two week, QNC intends to file a Prioritized Examination under the TRAC ONE program in the USA and an Accelerated prosecution under the PACE program in the European Union. The PCT will provide the New Patent a twelve-month worldwide protection, during which period we expect the original patent, covering the QRNG, will be examined pursuant to the urge off approval undertaken last year.

Dr. Reulet CTO of QNC said: "To be able to guarantee the quantum randomness of the numbers provided by our QRNG is the most important claims and advantage of our invention."

Mr. Phaneuf President and CEO of QNC added: "Our QRNG technology can be tiny, affordable and easily integrated, which in itself give us an undeniable competitive advantage. However, when combined with the principal attribute our new patent request, the actual uniqueness of our technology will provide us with an undeniable competitive advantage."

About Quantum Numbers Corp.

QNC is an innovative developer of cryptographic solutions based on Quantum Random Number Generator. The Corporation's mission is to address the growing demand for affordable hardware security for connected devices. Visit our website at www.quantumnumberscorp.com.

This news release includes statements containing certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law ("forward-looking statements"), including, but not limited to, statements with respect to the successful completion of the patenting of the Corporation's technologies. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "continue", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "may", "will", "potential", "proposed" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. Various assumptions were used in drawing the conclusions or making the projections contained in the forward-looking statements throughout this news release. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. The Corporation is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To receive QNC press releases by email, send a message to info@quantumnumberscorp.com and specify "QNC press releases" on the subject line. To unsubscribe QNC press releases, please send a message to info@quantumnumberscorp.com.

Contacts:

Pierre Miron

Chief Financial Officer

438.858.8873

info@quantumnumberscorp.com




BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - Private messaging app Telegram is planning a $1.2-billion Initial Coin Offering or ICO. The messaging app, with more than one hundred and seventy million monthly users, aims to find a prime place in the thriving cyrptocurrency arena. The company is reportedly planning to develop a blockchain to combat bitcoin and ethereum. Telegram mulls a private token sale in February and a public sale in March. The token sale is expected to raise around $600 million, which could beat the largest ever token sale of $257 million by Filecoin in September. Reports said, those qualified investors, who participate in pre-sale might get a discount of 68 percent in the public sale. According to a businessinsider report, Telegram's ICO will be to support Telegram Open Network or TON blockchain platform which will host a new generation cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications. The investors participating in the ICO will receive TON tokens, known as Grams. The tokens might not be listed till 2019. Telegram is said to be planning to invest 80 percent of the funds to develop the TON ecosystem, bandwidth, co-location and user verification system, businessinsider said quoting a white paper. TON is projected to become an alternative for Visa or Mastercard and 'can be regarded as a decentralised supercomputer and value transfer system.' Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 01/16/18 -- Pediapharm Inc. (the "Company" or "Pediapharm") (TSX VENTURE: PDP) (OTCQB: PDDPF) is pleased to announce that the Company's common shares begin trading today on the OTCQB Venture Market in the United States under the symbol "PDDPF". The Company's common shares will continue to trade under the symbol "PDP" on the TSX Venture Exchange.

"Getting listed on the OTCQB is part of our strategy to introduce Pediapharm to a wider audience," stated Sylvain Chretien, President and Chief Executive Officer of Pediapharm. "These are very exciting times at Pediapharm with the successful commercial launches of Rupall and Otixal in the last 12 months as well as the recently approved Cuvposa to be launched within the next few months. We look forward to share our tremendous growth story with US investors."

About Pediapharm Inc.

Pediapharm is the only Canadian specialty pharmaceutical company dedicated to serving the needs of the pediatric community. Its mission is to bring to the Canadian market the latest innovative pediatric products with the objective to improve the health and the well-being of children in Canada. Since its debut in 2008, Pediapharm has entered into numerous commercial agreements with partners from Canada and other countries around the world. The Company's innovative product portfolio includes NYDA, a breakthrough treatment for head lice; Relaxa, an osmotic laxative used to treat constipation; EpiCeram, a non-steroid emulsion for eczema; naproxen suspension, indicated to treat pain and inflammation due to various conditions, including Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis; Rupall, an innovative new allergy medication with a unique mode of action; Otixal, the first and only antibiotic and steroid combination ear drop available in single, sterile, preservative-free and unit-dose packaging; and Cuvposa, for chronic severe drooling, a condition affecting a significant proportion of cerebral palsy patients.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains forward-looking statements and other statements that are not historical, including statements pertaining to the management's expectations of the use of proceeds and the expected timing of the required regulatory approvals. Such forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to vary materially from the results or events predicted in these forward-looking statements. As a result, investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this release. Except as required by applicable law, the Corporation disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Forward-looking information reflects the current expectations or belief of the Corporation based on information currently available and such information is subject to a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties including those described under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Information Form (for the year ended March 31, 2016) available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and other risks associated with being a specialty pharmaceutical company.

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.

Contacts:

Pediapharm Inc.

Sylvain Chretien

President and Chief Executive Officer

514-762-2626 ext. 201

sylvain.chretien@pedia-pharm.com



Pediapharm Inc.

Roland Boivin

Chief Financial Officer

514-762-2626 ext. 202

roland.boivin@pedia-pharm.com



Frank Candido

Direct Financial Strategies and Communication Inc.

514-969-5530

directmtl@gmail.com




The Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS) the largest Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and financial crime prevention organization for financial crime prevention professionals has reached a record 60,000 members worldwide.

"Reaching the 60,000 membership milestone is a testament to the dedication and commitment of our members in striving for continuous learning and career advancement," said Tim McClinton, president and managing director at ACAMS. "Our priority for the coming year is to continue the momentum by expanding our product suite in an effort to provide current, impactful and relevant training in the field of AML and financial crime prevention."

Based in Miami, Fla., and with offices throughout the world, ACAMS offers the CAMS certification training and exam in 11 languages and hosts localized chapter events in 29 countries. ACAMS has gained significant traction with its CAMS certification in fast-growing regions like Asia and the Middle East. Hue Dang, head of ACAMS Asia, added, "I am very proud of the contribution of the Asia-based membership to ACAMS' achievement of this breakthrough of 60,000 members globally. The Asia-based membership itself achieved a major milestone having grown from 8,000 members at the end of 2016 to more than 22,000 members twelve months later, most notably due to the growth in membership from Taiwan, which grew by more than 10,000 members in the last six months of 2017."

Angela Salter, head of ACAMS Europe and CIS, stated, "The value of a strong professional network, access to industry information, and the quality of local and international engagement that our members experience cannot be underestimated in the ongoing fight against financial crime." She added, "The enthusiasm, expertise and passion our members bring to our community are the soul of ACAMS."

"The challenges faced by the industry such as cybercrime, cryptocurrency, fintech, regtech, human trafficking, risk assessment and sanctions show that there is a need for financial crime prevention professionals with advanced training," stated Kieran Beer, director of editorial content and editor-in-chief of ACAMS' moneylaundering.com. "The growth of ACAMS' membership demonstrates that the financial crime prevention community is adapting to the challenges and staying one step ahead of the criminals."

Founded in 2001, ACAMS provides resources like the acams.org members' website that features discussion forums, live chats, ACAMS' moneylaundering.com, ACAMS Today magazine and training opportunities, as well as access to webinars. ACAMS also sponsors seminars, conferences, chapter events and other opportunities for AML specialists to meet both online and face-to-face in order to engage with other like-minded professionals from all over the world.

"This is an exciting time for the AML community, as the industry continues to see sustained expansion and growth," said Geoffrey Fone, ACAMS vice president of sales. "Our diverse membership consists of members from casinos, money services businesses, law firms, bankers, real estate, securities firms, pre-paid card companies and government bodies. These organizations recognize the importance of having certified members as part of their teams and the value of the CAMS certification."

About the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists(ACAMS

ACAMS is a member of Adtalem Global Education (NYSE: ATGE), a global education provider headquartered in the United States. ACAMS is the largest international membership organization dedicated to enhancing the knowledge and skills of anti-money laundering (AML) and financial crime prevention professionals from a wide range of industries, with extensive resources designed to develop and sharpen the skills required for superior job performance and career advancement. Its CAMS certification is the most widely recognized AML certification among compliance professionals worldwide. Visit acams.org for more information.

About Adtalem Global Education

The purpose of Adtalem Global Education is to empower students to achieve their goals, find success and make inspiring contributions to our global community. Adtalem Global Education Inc. (NYSE: ATGE; member S&P MidCap 400 Index) is a leading global education provider, and the parent organization of Adtalem Educacional do Brasil, American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists, Becker Professional Education, Carrington College, Chamberlain University, DeVry University and its Keller Graduate School of Management, Ross University School of Medicine and Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine. For more information, please visit adtalem.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005224/en/

Contacts:

Adtalem Global Education

Media Contact:

Ernie Gibble

ernie.gibble@adtalem.com

630-353-9920

or

Investor Contact:

Joan Walter

joan.walter@adtalem.com

630-353-3800


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The ire over President Donald Trump's reported use of foul language while referring to immigrants last week is fomenting in the United States and abroad with hundreds converging on Times Square to protest racism, and Nicaragua joining the international chorus of criticism against Trump.



'Why are we having all these people from sh*thole countries come here,?' Trump was quoted as saying in a meeting with senators and House members last Thursday about immigration reform.



The office of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said in a statement that Trump's apparent reference to impoverished African, Central American and Caribbean countries was 'racist, disrespectful and humiliating.'



Nicaragua joins the ranks of Botswana, El Salvador, Ghana, Haiti, Nigeria, the 15-nation Caribbean Community, the African Union and the African Group of UN ambassadors who have slammed the derogatory term.



Hundreds of protesters carrying Haitian flags and signs held a demonstration in Times Square Monday in protest against Trump's racist remarks.



New York City's Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio was among politicians who joined the rally against racism marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day.



'We are a country built by immigrants and we will not stand by as Donald Trump denigrates the people who come to this country,' he said on Twitter before attending the rally.



Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, who was in the Oval Office when Trump addressed 23 members of Congress, insisted that the President made the remark, and said other offensive things.



Trump replied that he was 'totally misrepresented' by Durbin, and said the allegation was hurting efforts to strike a deal to protect so-called Dreamer immigrants.



Mitt Romney, A vocal critic of Trump, criticized his controversial comment. An immigrant's 'nation of origin is as irrelevant as their race,' he wrote on Twitter.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
A trading update from Burberry could provide an early highlight on Wednesday before the Bank of Canada grabs the spotlight on what is expected to be a quieter day for financial news. The first of the 'soft luxury' companies to report on the last quarter of 2017, Burberry is due to provide retail sales data for what is its third quarter. The consensus forecast is for 3% like-for-like sales growth, with the analysts predictions ranging from 2% to 4% after the 5% reported in the second quarter. ...

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.
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Chinese insurance regulators are warning against the purchase of so-called "love insurance" for public figures, reports thepaper.cn.

"Love insurance" is being sold through online platforms.

A still of Lu Han(Right) and Guan Xiaotong(Left). [File Photo: IC]

Online platforms began offering the "insurance" premiums in October, 2017, after young Chinese actor Lu Han revealed his relationship with actress Guan Xiaotong.

Certain sites have been offering a ten-fold return if the couple stay together for a year.

A screenshot details the "insurance" for the future relationship status of Chinese actor Wang Junkai being offered on a link through Taobao. [Screenshot: taobao.com]

A link on Taobao has also been offering "insurance" connected to any future relationship for Chinese actor Wang Junkai.

The China Insurance Regulatory Commission is warning that promotions of this nature, labelled as "insurance," are actually a form of gambling, which is illegal on the Chinese mainland.
The "Global Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Market Insights, Opportunity, Analysis, Market Shares And Forecast 2017 2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Global Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) market is expected to have a CAGR of 27% during the forecast period 2016-2023.

The key factors driving the market growth are increased adoption of BYOD, increasing demand of workplace flexibility and increasing adoptability of cloud technology in several end-user segments. However, the lack of training and education about the virtual desktop infrastructure is restraining the market growth.

Geographically, North America is the largest market region for global virtual desktop infrastructure market in terms of market revenue share. The US and Canada are some of the major countries which helps to drive the market in North America. This is because the majority of companies in North America require computing solutions on a large scale with more reliable and faster reliable computing solutions. As a result, there has been surging demand for desktop virtualization in the region thereby driving the market growth in North America.

However, Asia pacific is expected to emerge as the fastest growing market region during the forecast period 2016-2023. India, China and Japan are some of the major countries which are driving the virtual desktop infrastructure market in Asia pacific. The increasing adoptability of cloud technology trend in Asia pacific countries helps to fuel the market of virtual desktop infrastructure. According to International Trade Administration, cloud computing market in China has generated the revenue of $1.5 billion in 2013. However, the figure is expected to reach $20 billion in 2020 with a CAGR of approximately 40%.

The global virtual desktop infrastructure market is influenced by the presence of leading companies such as Citrix Systems, Huawei Technologies, Microsoft, VMware, Hewlett Packard etc. Product launch, joint ventures, merger and acquisition are some of the crucial strategies adopted by key market players to gain competitive advantage.

Market Dynamics

Market Drivers

Increased Adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Increasing Demand of Workplace Flexibility

Increasing Adoptability of Cloud Technology in End-User Segment

Market Restraints

Lack of Training And Education

System Complexity And Compatibility Issues

Market Opportunities

Rising Adoption of Cloud Based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Increasing Adoption of Desktop as a Service

Cost Reduction of I.T. Infrastructure

Market Challenges

Rising Demand of Bandwidth

Data Security Concern

Companies Mentioned

Atlantis Computing (U.S.)

Cisco Systems (U.S.)

Citrix Systems (U.S.)

Dincloud (U.S.)

Fujian Centerm Information (China)

Hewlett Packard (U.S.)

Huawei Technologies (China)

Igel Technology (Germany)

Listeq (Netherlands)

Microsoft (U.S.)

NComputing (U.S.)

Netapp (U.S.)

Pano Logic (U.S.)

Parallels (U.S.)

VMware Inc.(U.S.)

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/dv8kd8/global_virtual?w=4.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116006203/en/

Contacts:

ResearchAndMarkets.com

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: Computing
16 January 2018

Baring Emerging Europe PLC (the "Company")

Result of AGM

At the Annual General Meeting of the Company held on 16 January 2018 all the resolutions that were proposed were duly approved. The resolutions approved included resolutions to authorise the Company to issue shares, including shares held in treasury, and to purchase its own shares.

A copy of the resolutions passed at the Annual General Meeting, other than the resolutions relating to the ordinary business of the Annual General Meeting, have been submitted to the National Storage Mechanism located at http://www.hemscott.com/nsm.do.

A summary of the proxy votes received will shortly be available on the Company's website, www.bee-plc.com

Contact:

Baring Emerging Europe PLC



Martin Salmon / Graham Venables

Northern Trust

Tel: 020 7982 2000
The Board of Baring Emerging Europe PLC announces that Mr Bates has retired from the Board following the Company's Annual General Meeting that was held on 16 January 2018. The Board wishes to thank Mr Bates for his significant contribution to the Company during his tenure. The Board further announces that Ms Daley has been appointed as the new Chairman by the Board in place of Mr Bates and Mr Thomson has been appointed as the Chairman of the Audit Committee in place of Ms Daley. Both appointments have been made with immediate effect.

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.
LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / January 16, 2018 / Smartmatic, a London headquartered electronic voting company, has worked alongside election management bodies across the globe for more than a decade. With its team of election experts on hand to monitor and supervise the process, Smartmatic can guarantee free and fair elections. The election processes made possible by Smartmatic are transparent thanks to its proven system of checks and balances in place.





In this day and age, it is imperative to modernize elections and reap the benefits technology has to offer. Whether it is using direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, optical scanners for vote counting, online voting, or simply using data processing tools to manage voter rolls, technology can enable authorities to be much more efficient than ever before. But, of course, to run truly accurate elections, it is crucial to have a trustworthy poll body.

Thanks to companies like Smartmatic, whose mission is to create and offer electronic voting technology and services designed to make elections more auditable and transparent, the path towards fair voting is clearly defined.

Since its inception, "Smartmatic has helped hundreds of millions of voters cast over 3.7 billion votes in thousands of elections around the world." In many countries, the access to the right to vote is hard-fought and often unattainable. The technology works to ease this difficulty. According to Smartmatic, "Better use of technology in voting systems increases not only the transparency, efficiency, and integrity of an election, but also makes voting more accessible, allowing societies to reverse declining trends in turnout and citizen participation."





Electronic voting machines, or EVMs, are used in many elections in many countries. E-voting, though still physically supervised by election authorities, is a modern way for citizens to cast their votes for governmental office.

But sometimes, the jump from purely manual elections to electronic voting machines can seem daunting. Optical scanners can work as an intermediate. Optical scanners can be used to digitize the manual ballots marked by the voters and then facilitate counting and transmission of results. Optical scanners are currently widely used in the United States, Canada, and the Philippines.

It is easy to understand why many election and polling bodies choose to integrate electronic voting into their election processes. E-voting is speedier, less costly (individual workers do not have to be paid to sift through and count thousands of ballots), and more user friendly than traditional paper ballots.

Even so, electronic voting is not the absolute standard. Even in countries as developed as America, paper ballots are still heavily prevalent.

So, why is technology better? When votes are cast and counted electronically, as in the case of electronic voting, the results are available almost right away. Also, by automating crucial processes such as results transmission and canvassing the incidence of human error is minimized.

Moreover, electronic voting can be made more disability-friendly than traditional paper ballots. If a person with a disability requires assistance, an electronic voting option provides them with exponentially more privacy than a paper ballot casting system ever could. With the electronic option, a disabled person may cast an anonymous ballot with the help of the assistive technology. Otherwise, they would need the explicit assistance of an election official, who would inevitably invade their privacy in the effort to assist their voting process.





The advantages of modernizing elections are clear. Speed, accessibility and accuracy are important factors to consider. Next time you head out to vote, expect to use an electronic voting system to cast your ballot.

About Smartmatic:

Founded in the USA in 2000, Smartmatic is the leading provider of voting technologies and solutions worldwide. Today, out of the eight countries pioneering election automation Smartmatic provides technology and services to six of them: Belgium, Brazil, Estonia, the Philippines, USA and Venezuela. The company has managed elections across five continents, processing over 3.7 billion votes. It serves customers through an organization comprising over 600 employees across 12 offices around the world.

For more information, visit www.smartmatic.com.

Twitter - https://twitter.com/smartmatic

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/SmartmaticTechnology/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/Smartmaticgroup

Linkedin- https://www.linkedin.com/company/smartmatic

SOURCE: European News Daily
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / January 16, 2018 / Gainey Capital Corp. (TSX-V: GNC) (OTC PINK: GNYPF) ("Gainey" or the "Company") is pleased to provide David Coburn's year-end summary of company milestones achieved in 2017 and a look at plans for 2018.

Dear Valued Shareholders,

For Gainey Capital, 2017 has proven to be a pivotal year as we advanced existing assets, negotiated the acquisition of an additional exploration project and secured further funding. The last several years have been trying times in the junior exploration sector but I believe the work we have completed to date positions us to add significant value to the company in the coming years. In addition, our success should be complemented by a gradual improvement in the natural resources sector over the longer term.

During 2017, we continued to advance the El Colomo project. Early in the year, our geological team finalized the Phase I drilling program which had successfully encountered near surface mineralization at the La Nueva Victoria zone, including 70.85 m of 0.65 g/t Au and 35.31 g/t Ag. The drilling confirmed the district hosts significant gold and silver mineralization in line with results of surface sampling performed by the company. In the latter half of 2017, a second phase of exploration work was initiated on the property to follow up on results of the Phase I program and further define a number of the remaining untested mineralized zones. A number of drill ready targets have been defined and will be prioritized in line with other opportunities being considered by the company.

In an effort to diversify its exploration portfolio, the company has been actively reviewing projects located in western Mexico. As part of this program, the La Minita property was identified as a likely candidate for acquisition based on significant copper, gold and silver grades at surface and substantial exploration potential across the large land package (approximately 9,200 hectares). Additionally, the La Minita property, located in southern Sinaloa state, presents great infrastructure and location as it lies less than 5 kilometers from Mexican Highway 15 and less than 10 kilometers from a rail line. In late 2017 we successfully negotiated terms to acquire 100% of the property and signed a letter of intent with the company controlling the property. We look forward to finalizing the formal purchase agreement in early 2018 and beginning work on this exciting project.

During the second half of 2017, the company successfully closed a private placement that consisted of several tranches and raised nearly $2,000,000 CAD. We are now financially positioned to carry out the next phases of exploration at El Colomo and La Minita. In 2017 we were also able to strengthen our technical team with the addition of Mark Bailey as Technical Advisor and Brian Metzenheim as VP of Exploration, both with significant prior experience operating in Mexico with Minfinders Corporation.

In 2018, we are looking forward to leveraging our exploration assets, financial position and expertise to unlock additional value for our shareholders. With formal acquisition of the La Minita property slated to take place in early 2018, we will quickly advance to a first phase exploration program on the property. Work will focus on defining drill targets along known mineralized trends as well as identifying additional zones. Barring unforeseen circumstances, we should be drilling on the property by the second quarter of 2018. At El Colomo, we will continue to evaluate the potential of the numerous untested mineralized zones on the property and weigh their potential against success at La Minita to prioritize exploration efforts and funds. Furthermore, we continue to evaluate outside exploration opportunities with several intriguing possibilities currently being considered. Additionally, the company is carrying on its evaluation and review of sources of feed material for our processing mill located near Huajicori in Nayarit, Mexico. Toll milling contracts are currently being discussed with a number of major companies within Mexico and I look forward to updating shareholders on this in the near future.

With a number of significant opportunities facing the company, 2018 promises to be a busy and transformative year for Gainey Capital. I would like to thank all of our shareholders for their loyal support over the last several years and extend best my best wishes for the coming year. We look forward to a successful year as we continue to explore our properties and implement strategies to increase shareholders value.

Thank you,

David Coburn

CEO

Gainey Capital Corp.

Brian Metzenheim, Vice President Exploration, Gainey Capital Corp. is the Company's Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical information in this news release.

For information, please contact the Company:

Phone: 480-347-8904

E-mail: info@gaineycapital.com

Website: www.gaineycapital.com

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS:

This press release may contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "projects," "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will," "would," "may," "could," or "should" occur. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates, and opinions of the Company's management on the date such statements were made. The Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) has reviewed or accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this Release.

SOURCE: Gainey Capital Corp.
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - The UK government on Tuesday ordered a fast-track investigation into directors at the failed construction company Carillion. Carillion on Monday collapsed into liquidation after struggling with huge debt and heavy losses on contracts. The company's liquidation, which managed hundreds of public sector projects worth 1.7 billion pounds, has put 20,000 UK jobs at risk. Business Secretary Greg Clark has asked Insolvency Service to fast-track investigation into Carillion's directors and broaden scope to include those directors previously employed. 'It is important we quickly get the full picture of the events which caused Carillion to enter liquidation, which is why I have asked the Insolvency Service to fast- rack and broaden the scope of the Official Receiver's investigation,' Greg Clark said. 'In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors. Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously,' he added. The probe has been ordered because Carillion's former director Richard Howson is still receiving a hefty 600,000 pound payout despite the firm's weak financial health. According to reports, Howson received 1.5 million in salary, bonuses and pension payments during 2016 and, as part of his departure deal, Carillion kept paying him a 660,000 pound salary and 28,000 pound in benefits until October. Several other executives, including former finance chief Zafar Khan and interim CEO Keith Cochrane, also received similar benefits. 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.
Ascom secures an agreement with the Integrated Delivery Network (IDN) Munson Healthcare to upgrade its flagship medical center. The agreement amounts to CHF 1.1 million and includes the full Ascom Healthcare Platform. BAAR, Switzerland, 2018-01-16 17:30 CET (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Munson Healthcare, a nine hospital non-profit Integrated Delivery Network (IDN) serving the state of Michigan, selected Ascom (SWX:ASCN.SW), the leading global healthcare Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provider, for a comprehensive technology retrofit of its flagship Munson Medical Center. The CHF 1.1 million agreement signed in the second half of 2017 is notable for encompassing the full Ascom Healthcare Platform, including Telligence nurse call, Unite software, EMR and RTLS integrations, Ascom mobility handsets and clinical consulting and training. Challenged with inefficient legacy systems unable to upgrade to current technology, Munson valued partnering with Ascom versus using multiple vendors for an end-to-end replacement solution. Centralized management also proved key to the middleware sale, as Munson's flagship will serve as the central hub to manage all messaging and reporting for the rest of the network. Telligence nurse call deployments were completed in October, and the Unite and Mobility installations are underway this December into early 2018. "This is a significant IDN win for us because it continues to demonstrate the value of the holistic Ascom platform as a solution across an entire health system," says Francis Schmeer, Head of Marketing and Business Development. "Our engagement with the clinical and executive leadership of Munson, coupled with the longstanding relationship of our local partner Ascomnorth, proved invaluable during system design and selection. The clinical consulting and training included in this agreement will deliver customized, consistent workflows that are streamlined, efficient and patient-centric." About Ascom Ascom is a global solutions provider focused on healthcare Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and mobile workflow solutions. The vision of Ascom is to close digital information gaps allowing for the best possible decisions - anytime and anywhere. Ascom's mission is to provide mission-critical, real-time solutions for highly mobile, ad hoc, and time-sensitive environments. Ascom uses its unique product and solutions portfolio and software architecture capabilities to devise integration and mobilization solutions that provide truly smooth, complete and efficient workflows for healthcare as well as for industry, security and retail sectors. Headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, Ascom has subsidiaries in 15 countries and employs approximately 1,300 people worldwide. Ascom registered shares (ASCN) are listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange in Zurich. For more information, visit www.ascom.com/north-america and follow @AscomNA and LinkedIn. BAAR, Switzerland, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Munson Healthcare, a nine hospital non-profit Integrated Delivery Network (IDN) serving the state of Michigan, selected Ascom (SWX:ASCN.SW), the leading global healthcare Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provider, for a comprehensive technology retrofit of its flagship Munson Medical Center. The CHF 1.1 million agreement signed in the second half of 2017 is notable for encompassing the full Ascom Healthcare Platform, including Telligence nurse call, Unite software, EMR and RTLS integrations, Ascom mobility handsets and clinical consulting and training. Challenged with inefficient legacy systems unable to upgrade to current technology, Munson valued partnering with Ascom versus using multiple vendors for an end-to-end replacement solution. Centralized management also proved key to the middleware sale, as Munson's flagship will serve as the central hub to manage all messaging and reporting for the rest of the network. Telligence nurse call deployments were completed in October, and the Unite and Mobility installations are underway this December into early 2018. "This is a significant IDN win for us because it continues to demonstrate the value of the holistic Ascom platform as a solution across an entire health system," says Francis Schmeer, Head of Marketing and Business Development. "Our engagement with the clinical and executive leadership of Munson, coupled with the longstanding relationship of our local partner Ascomnorth, proved invaluable during system design and selection. The clinical consulting and training included in this agreement will deliver customized, consistent workflows that are streamlined, efficient and patient-centric." About Ascom Ascom is a global solutions provider focused on healthcare Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and mobile workflow solutions. The vision of Ascom is to close digital information gaps allowing for the best possible decisions - anytime and anywhere. Ascom's mission is to provide mission-critical, real-time solutions for highly mobile, ad hoc, and time-sensitive environments. Ascom uses its unique product and solutions portfolio and software architecture capabilities to devise integration and mobilization solutions that provide truly smooth, complete and efficient workflows for healthcare as well as for industry, security and retail sectors. Headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, Ascom has subsidiaries in 15 countries and employs approximately 1,300 people worldwide. Ascom registered shares (ASCN) are listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange in Zurich. For more information, visit www.ascom.com/north-america and follow @AscomNA and LinkedIn. Ascom Group Media Office, Daniel Lack, Company Secretary & Legal & Communications/IR +41 41 544 78 10, daniel.lack@ascom.com
SANTA MONICA, California, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

World Religion News has published an article by Claude Moniquet, Co-Founder of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, contemplating the difficult position Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew finds himself in, while trying to navigate between the goals and interests of his Turkish hosts and those of the USA, hosts of the Greek American Archdiocese which is the Ecumenical Patriarchate's biggest "donor".

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/629379/World_Religion_News_Ecumenical_Patriarch.jpg )

To read the full article, published January 3, click here: http://www.worldreligionnews.com/featured-contributors/ecumenical-patriarch-ignore-problem-jerusalem

This untenable position becomes especially clear in the aftermath of the controversial recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel by President Trump and, consequently, the extraordinary summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation held in Istanbul, which has decreed that the Islamic world regards East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.

In the wake of these events Patriarch Bartholomew keeps his silence, notes the author, despite being in the thick of things at the time (on the day of the historic recognition he was in Israel at the Hebrew University, being honored "in recognition of the merits in the interdenominational dialogue") and despite enjoying the unique position of having actual means of forging said interdenominational dialogue in this difficult time. The author then ponders over possible reasons of Ecumenical Patriarchate's lack of statements on the Jerusalem situation and what it might indicate about Patriarch Bartholomew's influence in the Christian world.
Finding new workers has been a persistent problem in the Chippewa Valley, and is one that the Chippewa Falls Area Chamber of Commerce is tackling.

I used to get 50 resumes for a job opening. Im lucky to get five now, Rolly Enderes of ChemCeed, LLC said Monday at the chambers 107th annual meeting held at the Avalon Hotel and Conference Center.

Enderes, the immediate past chair of the chambers executive committee, said the chamber is focusing on boosting the workforce, working with the Chippewa Falls School District and the McDonell Area Catholic School district. This past year 150 students took tours of area businesses. A youth apprenticeship program allowed students to enroll in an academic class and work under the supervision of mentors.

The program takes time but is worth it, Enderes said. Our partnership between schools and businesses is exemplary, he said.

Hard work by the city of Chippewa Falls and businesses on this problem of retaining and attracting workers will benefit all of us, said Neil Mathwig, incoming chair of the chambers executive committee and a partner in a new company, Earth Blinds, LLC. We need to bring people in from outside of the area, Mathwig told a crowd that jammed a ballroom of the conference center.

Plus, he said if local students stay in this area, businesses can provide them the training that meets the needs of those businesses.

Mathwig said the downtown Chippewa Falls Riverfront Park offers an influx of potential economic opportunities, including attracting potential workers to the area.

He also cited as part of the citys success is the grand opening planned soon for Toycen Ford, and the planned expansion of Allied Dies.

He said the chamber is also looking to find industrial property locations in the city, along with satisfying the housing needs of potential employees.

Enderes said there were 28 ribbon cutting ceremonies by Chippewa Falls businesses in 2017, while Mathwig pointed out that chamber membership has grown to more than 670.

We dont live on an island in Chippewa Falls, he said, crediting the city of Chippewa Falls, Main Street, Chippewa County and the Chippewa County Economic Development Corporation along with the village of Lake Hallie for working to promote growth in the area.

The chamber members also heard from Scott Kauphusman, owners of Machine Tool Camp, a Chippewa Falls company that remanufactures computer controlled machinery and CNC routers. Kauphusman, who grew up in Chippewa Falls, moved his company from Texas to Chippewa Falls in 2008. The company now sells its products throughout the United States.

The chambers executive committee members for the year include chair elect Ben Lane, first vice-chair Amy Forcier Pabst and treasurer Jamie Leibrandt. Board members include Mark Broses, Angela Eckman, Lindsey Everson, Tom Hubbard, Sue Kern, Erin Lorberter, John Lynn, Mike Olson and Brandon Thorsness.
ST. LOUIS, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --National Hug Day is just around the corner, and this yearBuild-A-Bear Workshop, Inc. (NYSE: BBW),an interactive destination where guests can create personalised furry friends, is celeBEARating with bear hugs for an important cause! Join in the fun and embrace the power of hugs with Bearemy, the Build-A-Bear mascot, in Build-A-Bear Workshop stores across the country.

WHAT: In support of Barnardo's, Build-A-Bear Workshop is inviting Guests to visit local stores at 1 p.m. (all time zones) on National Hug Day and give a bear hug to Bearemy, the ambassador of hugs. For every hug from Bearemy, Build-A-Bear Foundation will donate 1 to Barnardo's (up to 5,000).





Additionally, now through 15 Feb. 2018, U.K. Guests of Build-A-Bear Workshop can share the love and support Barnardo's by donating in stores or online at buildabear.co.uk.





All donations will go directly to the nonprofit organisation to help transform the lives of the U.K.'s most vulnerable children.



WHEN: 1 p.m. (all time zones) on 21 Jan. 2018



WHERE: Build-A-Bear Workshop stores

For store locations, please visit:

https://www.buildabear.co.uk/storefinder



VISUALS



Guests giving hugs to Bearemy

Build-A-Bear Workshop make-your-own furry friend experience

About Build-A-Bear

Founded in St. Louis in 1997, Build-A-Bear, a global brand kids love and parents trust, seeks to add a little more heart to life. Build-A-Bear Workshop has approximately 400 stores worldwide where Guests can create customizable furry friends, including company-owned stores in the United States, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and China, and franchise stores in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Mexico and the Middle East. The company was named to the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work Forlist for the ninth year in a row in 2017. Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc. (NYSE: BBW) posted a total revenue of $364.2 million in fiscal 2016. For more information, visitbuildabear.com.

About Barnardo's

The charity has helped transform the lives of millions of disadvantaged children in the UK, and continues to help families to build a better future. In 2016/17 more than 272,000 children, young people, parents and carers were supported by Barnardo's through more than 1,000 services across the UK, such as young carers, care leavers, foster carers and adoptive parents, training and skills or parenting classes. Visit www.barnardos.org.uk to find out more. Registered charity No. 216250 and SC037605.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/629398/Bearemy_Build_A_Bear.jpg
The European Commission carried out an unannounced inspection at the premises of an unnamed kraft paper and industrial paper sack firm on Monday as part of an ongoing investigation into a potential cartel, while Euromoney said it's RISI subsidiary had been inspected. The Commission announced on Tuesday that the inspection had taken place in a member nation the day before, choosing not to disclose the specific country, and noted that it was a follow on from two earlier raids in 2016 and 2017. ...

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
The European Magazine Business Awards 2017 Recipients

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BCI - Banco Comercial e de Investimentos, SA Best Mobile Banking Platform - Mozambique

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First Global Academy Best Islamic Finance Education Provider - Sri Lanka

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Gbenga Alade, Guaranty Trust Bank Banking CEO of the Year - Sierra Leone

Gerardo Garcia, Barents Re Reinsurance Company Inc. CEO of the Year - LATAM

Guaranty Trust Bank (SL) Ltd. Best Digital Bank - Sierra Leone

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Jammal Trust Bank SAL Best Lending Bank of the Year - Lebanon

KBL European Private Bankers Private Bank of the Year - Luxembourg

Laila Mamou, Wafasalaf Best Female CEO - North Africa

LGT Capital Partners Best Sustainable Investment Management Firm

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Never Nyemudzo, CBZ Holdings Group Banking CEO of the Year - Zimbabwe

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SIX Group Most Innovative Financial Technology Company - Switzerland

SURA Asset Management Investment Management Company of the Year - Mexico

Sylvain Vieujot,Equitativa Group Business Personality and CEO of the Year - UAE

Threestones Capital Management S.A. Investment Management Firm of the Year - Luxembourg

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Melia Hotels International Leading Company in Sustainability - Spain

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ROUYN-NORANDA, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 01/16/18 -- Explor Resources Inc. (TSX VENTURE: EXS)(OTCQB: EXSFF)(FRANKFURT: E1H1)(BERLIN: E1H1) ("Explor" or the "Corporation") is pleased to announce that at the Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders held on January 16, 2018, the following directors were elected: Christian Dupont of New Brunswick, Geoffrey Carter of Ontario, Mario Colantonio of Ontario and Gerhard Merkel of Germany.

The accounting firm Dallaire & Lapointe Inc. was re-appointed as independent auditors. The shareholders have also approved the continuation of the Corporation's Stock Option Plan and of the Shareholder Rights Plan.

Subsequently to the Annual and Special Meeting, the Board of Directors of the Corporation held a meeting and appointed the following officers: Christian Dupont, as President and Chief Executive Officer, Rodrigue Tremblay, as Chief Financial Officer and Julie Godard, as Corporate Secretary. Finally, the following directors have been appointed to the Audit Committee: Christian Dupont, Mario Colantonio and Geoffrey Carter. Two members of this committee are considered independent directors.

Explor Resources Inc. is a publicly listed company trading on the TSX Venture (EXS), on the OTCQB Exchange (EXSFF) and on the Frankfurt and Berlin Stock Exchanges (E1H1).

This press release was prepared by Explor Resources Inc. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange Inc. nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the Policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) has reviewed or accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

About Explor Resources Inc.

Explor Resources Inc. is a Canadian-based natural resources company with mineral holdings in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. Explor is currently focused on exploration in the Abitibi Greenstone Belt. The belt is found in both provinces of Ontario and Quebec with approximately 33% in Ontario and 67% in Quebec. The Belt has produced in excess of 180,000,000 ounces of gold and 450,000,000 tonnes of cu-zn ore over the last 100 years. The Corporation was continued under the laws of Alberta in 1986 and has had its main office in Quebec since 2006.

Explor Resources Flagship project is the Timmins Porcupine West (TPW) Project located in the Porcupine mining camp, in the Province of Ontario. The TPW mineral resource (Press Release dated August 27, 2013) includes the following:

Open Pit Mineral Resources at a 0.30 g/t Au cut-off grade are as follows: Indicated: 213,000 oz (4,283,000 tonnes at 1.55 g/t Au) Inferred: 77,000 oz (1,140,000 tonnes at 2.09 g/t Au) Underground Mineral Resources at a 1.70 g/t Au cut-off grade are as follows: Indicated: 396,000 oz (4,420,000 tonnes at 2.79 g/t Au) Inferred: 393,000 oz (5,185,000 tonnes at 2.36 g/t Au)

This document may contain forward-looking statements relating to Explor's operations or to the environment in which it operates. Such statements are based on operations, estimates, forecasts and projections. They are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and may be beyond Explor's control. A number of important factors could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements, including those set forth in other public filling. In addition, such statements relate to the date on which they are made. Consequently, undue reliance should not be placed on such forward-looking statements. Explor disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, save and except as may be required by applicable securities laws.

Contacts:

Explor Resources Inc.

Christian Dupont

President

888-997-4630 or 819-797-4630

819-797-1870 (FAX)

info@explorresources.com

www.explorresources.com




NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / January 16, 2018 / Pawar Law Group announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of shareholders who purchased shares of Credit Suisse Group AG (NYSE: CS) from March 20, 2015 through February 3, 2016, inclusive (the "Class Period"). The lawsuit seeks to recover damages for Credit Suisse investors under the federal securities laws.

To join the Credit Suisse class action, go to http://pawarlawgroup.com/cases/credit-suisse-group-ag/ or call Vik Pawar, Esq. toll-free at 888-589-9804 or email vik@pawarlawgroup.com for information on the class action.

No class has yet been certified in the above action. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. You may retain counsel of your choice.

According to the lawsuit, defendants during the Class Period made materially false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Credit Suisse's risk protocols and control systems were routinely disregarded; (2) Credit Suisse was amassing billions of dollars of risky, highly illiquid securities, in violation of those risk protocols; and (3) as a result, defendants' statements about Credit Suisse's business, operations, and risk controls were false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than February 20, 2018. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. If you wish to join the litigation, go to http://pawarlawgroup.com/cases/credit-suisse-group-ag/ or to discuss your rights or interests regarding this class action, please contact Vik Pawar, Esq. of Pawar Law Group toll-free at 888-589-9804 or via e-mail at vik@pawarlawgroup.com.

Pawar Law Group represents investors from around the world.

Contact:

Vik Pawar, Esq.

Pawar Law Group

20 Vesey Street, Suite 1210

New York, NY 10007

Tel: (917) 261-2277

Fax: (212) 571-0938

info@pawarlawgroup.com

SOURCE: Pawar Law Group
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - January 16, 2018) - Ely Gold Royalties Inc. (TSXV: ELY) (OTC: ELYGF) ("Ely Gold" or the "Company") through its wholly owned subsidiary, Nevada Select Royalty, Inc ("Nevada Select") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a definitive option agreement with Intermont Exploration LLC., ("Intermont") a Nevada limited liability company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Fremont Gold Ltd, a British Columbia Corporation ("Fremont") whereby Fremont has the option to acquire a 100% interest in the Gold Canyon Project, located in Eureka County, Nevada (the "Option" or "Option Agreement"). The total Option consideration (if exercised by Fremont) is US$802,500 and Nevada Select will retain a net smelter returns royalty ("NSR"). The Option Agreement was executed December 29, 2017 (the "Effective Date").

The Gold Canyon Claims consists of twenty-six (26) unpatented mining claims (460 acres) and is part of the original Gold Bar mining complex operated by Atlas Gold Mining Corp from 1986 to 1994 ("Atlas"). The claims are located only 900 meters northwest of McEwen Mining Inc's Gold Ridge ore body and are surrounded by the Gold Bar mine development. Gold Bar is scheduled to produce 65,000 ounces of gold for eight years starting in the first quarter of 2019. Nevada Select acquired the Gold Canyon claims through staking.

Jerry Baughman, President of Nevada Select commented on the Option, "This is exactly the kind of high-quality project and exploration partner we need to confirm the historic ounces at Gold Canyon and explore the high-quality targets identified by Atlas"

The Option

Under the terms of the Option Agreement, Fremont can acquire a 100% interest in the Property by making an initial payment of US$15,000 (paid), followed by:

$37,500 six months after the Effective Date

$150,000 one year after the Effective Date

$112,500 two years after the Effective Date

$112,500 three years after the Effective Date

$112,500 four years after the Effective Date

$300,000 five years after the Effective Date (the "Final Option Payment")

Fremont may terminate the Option Agreement at any time without further liability for future Option payments.

In addition to the payments, Fremont must pay advance royalty payments as follows:

$25,000.00 on the first, second and third anniversary of the Final Option Payment; and

$35,000.00 on the fourth anniversary of the Final Option Payment and on each anniversary thereafter.

There are no work commitments or additional expenditures required other than Fremont's obligation to maintain the claim maintenance fees. If the Option is exercised by Fremont, Nevada Select will retain a 2% NSR on the Gold Canyon Claims and a 1% NSR on any acquired or staked additional claims located within a one-mile area of interest. Fremont will have the right to buy-down 1% of the underlying royalties on all the claims for an aggregate purchase price of $3,000,000.

Trey Wasser, President and CEO of Ely Gold stated, "This transaction provides another excellent example of our royalty model. Finalizing this Option Agreement adds another important development royalty to our Nevada asset portfolio."

Stephen Kenwood, P. Geo, is director of the Company and a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101. Mr. Kenwood has reviewed and approved the technical information in this press release.

About Ely Gold Royalties Inc.

Ely Gold Royalties is an emerging royalty company with development assets focused in Nevada and the Western US. The Company is actively purchasing existing third-party royalties for its portfolio and all the Company's Option Properties will produce royalties if exercised. Its current portfolio includes 20 Deeded Royalties and 17 Optioned Properties. A majority of the royalties and option properties have active exploration programs and are being developed by partners comprised of majors, mid-tier gold producing companies and well-funded junior explorers. In 2018, Ely Gold estimates it will generate positive cash flow from its current portfolio. Ely Gold maintains a strong cash position and a gold stock equity portfolio. Ely Gold is well positioned with its current portfolio of available properties to generate additional operating revenue through option and sale transactions. The Company has a proven track record of maximizing the value of its properties through claim consolidation and advancement using its extensive, proprietary data base.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

Signed "Trey Wasser"

Trey Wasser, President & CEO

For further information, please contact:



Trey Wasser, President & CEO

trey@elygoldinc.com

972-803-3087



Joanne Jobin, Investor Relations Officer

jjobin@elygoldinc.com

604-488-1104

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release may contain forward-looking statements including but not limited to comments regarding the timing and content of upcoming work programs, geological interpretations, receipt of property titles, potential mineral recovery processes, etc. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore, involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.
Sequans Communications S.A. (NYSE: SQNS) ("Sequans" or the "Company"), a leading provider of single-mode 4G LTE semiconductor solutions for Internet of Things and a wide range of broadband data devices, today announced that it intends to offer newly issued American Depositary Shares (ADSs), representing ordinary shares, in an underwritten public offering under an effective shelf registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). The final terms of the offering will depend on market and other conditions at the time of pricing. Sequans intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes.

Needham Company is acting as the sole book-running manager of the offering.

The ADSs described above are being offered by Sequans pursuant to a shelf registration statement on Form F-3, including a base prospectus, previously filed with and subsequently declared effective by the SEC. The securities may be offered only by means of a prospectus. A preliminary prospectus supplement and accompanying base prospectus relating to the Offering will be filed with the SEC and will be available on the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov. Copies of the preliminary prospectus supplement and accompanying base prospectus relating to this offering may also be obtained, when available, from Needham Company, LLC, Attention: Syndicate Prospectus Department, 250 Park Avenue, 10th Floor, New York, New York 10177, by telephone at 1-800-903-4696, or by email at prospectus@needhamco.com. Before you invest, you should read the preliminary prospectus supplement and the accompanying base prospectus and other documents Sequans has filed or will file with the SEC for more complete information about Sequans and the Offering.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described herein, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

About Sequans Communications

Sequans Communications S.A. (NYSE: SQNS) is a leading provider of single-mode 4G LTE semiconductor solutions for the Internet of Things ("IoT") and a wide range of broadband data devices. Founded in 2003, Sequans has developed and delivered seven generations of 4G technology and its chips are certified and shipping in 4G networks around the world. Today, Sequans offers two LTE product lines: StreamrichLTE, optimized for broadband devices, including CPE, mobile and portable routers, and high-performance IoT devices, and StreamliteLTE, optimized for lower data rate and narrowband IoT devices. The Company is based in Paris, France with additional offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, South Korea, and China. Visit Sequans online at www.sequans.com; www.facebook.com/sequans; www.twitter.com/sequans

Safe Harbor

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding the proposed public offering and the intended use of proceeds from the offering. The offering is subject to market and other conditions and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the offering may be completed or as to the actual size or terms of the offering. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including market conditions, risks associated with the cash requirements of our business and other risks detailed from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and represent our views only as of the date they are made and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Disclaimer

The announcement is for information purposes only and does not, and shall not, in any circumstances, constitute a public offering by Sequans, nor a solicitation of an offer to subscribe for securities in any jurisdiction outside the United States, including France. No prospectus (including any amendment, supplement or replacement thereto) or any other offering material has been prepared in connection with the offering of the ADSs that has been approved by the Autorite des marches financiers or by the competent authority of another State that is a contracting party to the Agreement on the European Economic Area and notified to the Autorite des marches financiers; no ADSs have been offered or sold nor will be offered or sold, directly or indirectly, to the public in France; the prospectus or any other offering material relating to the ADSs have not been distributed or caused to be distributed and will not be distributed or caused to be distributed to the public in France; such offers, sales and distributions have been and shall only be made in France to persons licensed to provide the investment service of portfolio management for the account of third parties, qualified investors (investisseurs qualifies) and/or restricted circle of investors (cercle restreint d'investisseurs), in each case investing for their own account, all as defined in Articles L. 411-2, D. 411-1, D. 411-4, D.744-1, D.754-1 and D. 764-1 of the French Code monetaire et financier. The direct or indirect distribution to the public in France of any so acquired ADSs may be made only as provided by Articles L. 411-1, L. 411-2, L. 412-1 and L. 621-8 to L. 621-8-3 of the French Code monetaire et financier and applicable regulations thereunder. This communication does not constitute an offer or invitation to subscribe for or to purchase any of the ADSs and neither this communication nor anything herein shall form the basis of any contract or commitment whatsoever. Any contact with potential qualified investors in France does not and will not constitute financial and banking solicitation (demarchage bancaire et financier) as set forth in Articles L. 341-1 and seq. of the French Code monetaire et financier

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116006654/en/

Contacts:

Sequans Communications S.A.

Media Relations:

Kimberly Tassin, +1-425-736-0569

Kimberly@sequans.com

or

Investor Relations:

Claudia Gatlin, +1-212-830-9080

Claudia@sequans.com
MINNEAPOLIS, MN / ACCESSWIRE / January 16, 2018 / Spiritual healing is the ability to align with the all-powerful cosmic forces of Creation, Pure Source Energy, and God in order to co-create specific shifts in a person's consciousness and physical body for their greatest and highest good. Each individual has an unchanging and perfect light body, also known as the etheric body or etheric field, which is connected to the vitalizing energy of universal consciousness. Bill Torvund, founder of the healing ministry The Sanctuary of The On, explains how to tap and use this force to animate and nurture the self or Being.

The healing process is always one of co-creation, said Bill Torvund, with heartfelt prayers being extended to the cosmic forces of Infinite Love, Divine Light, and Life Energy, allowing the spiritual guide to often mentally see the shifts taking place within a person's energetic and physical anatomy. Often thought of as facilitators, these individuals are only needed to temporarily step in and help another rebalance and return to an etheric state of spiritual equilibrium. By joining forces with the "Light of God" in order to direct divine creative intelligence through the power of prayer to where it is most needed, God gives the spiritual ability to Create. As the healer joins in harmony with the Divine mind, miracle healing results can regularly occur.

While medical doctors are trained strictly to work with the conditions of the physical body and to diagnose and treat presenting conditions using established standards, the healer regards the body as the physical manifestation of the divine soul, which is God in individuated form. The art of the healer is to use the template of the soul, within which there is a perfect, incorruptible and eternal image of God, to align the etheric body with the physical one. In other words, the body is moved back into divine perfection so that it is once again in resonance with its soul, and remembers structurally, genetically and energetically how to function. The spiritual power to help others to heal therefore happens when we tap into a force of power that is much greater than any individual strength, and it is through this remarkable process that beneficial improvements or instant miracles can happen. It is written in Scripture that God's children are to "ask and it will be given." This is the key to cosmic healing, as we must ask for spiritual assistance in order to connect with and direct the forces of Creation. When given, countless in need can be helped.

Bill Torvund has been leading healing ministries since becoming aware of his healing gifts when he was four years old. In 1980, Bill was directed by the Holy Spirit to found The Sanctuary of On, a religious non-profit organization that first opened its doors in February 1980 in Portland, Oregon, to increase the outreach of his healing and teaching ministry.

Bill Torvund - Founder of The Sanctuary of the On: http://billtorvundnews.com

Bill Torvund - Spiritual Healer at The Sanctuary of the On: http://billtorvund.com

Bill Torvund (@BillTorvund) - Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillTorvund

Contact Information:

BillTorvund.com

http://billtorvund.com

contact@billtorvund.com

SOURCE: Bill Torvund
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 01/16/18 -- Tanzanian Royalty Exploration Corporation (TSX: TNX)(NYSE American: TRX)(NYSE MKT: TRX) (the "Company') is pleased to announce Michael E. Martin has accepted the position of head of Investor Relations for the Company. Mr. Martin has a distinguished career in the Financial Services Industry, which spans more than thirty-seven (37) years. He has extensive experience and knowledge in the precious metals and mining industries. In addition to these specializations, he has a broad base of general experience as a licensed Financial Advisor.

Mike has had a successful and distinguished career from a young age. Early in Mike's career, he was a Registered Representative, Series 7, financial principal of a boutique brokerage firm specializing in mining and resource investment and achieved a management position. The firm was a formidable trader of Over-The-Counter (OTC) gold mining companies, and served many European Banks, mutual funds, financial institutions, broker-dealers and high net-worth individuals, worldwide. Thereafter, Mike's career opportunities expanded and changed when he moved to Toronto, which was rapidly becoming a global mining industry center. Mike ran a sizeable and successful trading operation as part of the international trading desk for a large integrated Canadian brokerage firm. Mike returned to New York to work for another boutique firm where he remained for over twenty (20) years. There, he continued to evolve a metal and mining focused business providing mining analysis and commentary for the firm and his clients. During this period, Mike was often quoted in the press by Bloomberg News, The New York Times and other publications. Most recently, Mike has worked as a Financial Advisor for Oppenheimer & Co. and Westport Capital Markets.

Mike is a highly regarded and respected financial advisor and analyst, and the Company is pleased to welcome him to our corporate team.

For more information and updates, please see the Company website at: www.tanzanianroyalty.com

Respectfully Submitted,

James E. Sinclair, Executive Chairman

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements

Certain of the statements made herein may contain forward-looking statements or information within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements and forward-looking information can be identified using words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes" or the negatives thereof or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements or information herein include, but are not limited to the Positive Feasibility Study on Buckreef.

Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information by their nature are based on assumptions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. We have made certain assumptions about the forward-looking statements and information and even though our management believes that the assumptions made and the expectations represented by such statements or information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that the forward-looking statement or information will prove to be accurate. Furthermore, should one or more of the risks, uncertainties or other factors materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements or information. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, among others, the following: gold price volatility; discrepancies between actual and estimated production, mineral reserves and resources and metallurgical recoveries; mining operational and development risk; litigation risks; regulatory restrictions, including environmental regulatory restrictions and liability; risks of sovereign investment; currency fluctuations; speculative nature of gold exploration; global economic climate; dilution; share price volatility; competition; loss of key employees; additional funding requirements; and defective title to mineral claims or property, as well as those factors discussed in the sections entitled "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" in the Company's Form 20-F Annual Report dated November 25, 2016.

There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements or information contained herein. Except as required by law, we do not expect to update forward-looking statements and information continually as conditions change and you are referred to the full discussion of the Company's business contained in the Company's reports filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada and the U.S.

Cautionary Note Regarding Mineral Reserves and Mineral Resources

The terms "Mineral Reserve", "Proven Mineral Reserve" and "Probable Mineral Reserve" used in this release are Canadian mining terms as defined in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects under the guidelines set out in the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (the "CIM") Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, adopted by the CIM Council on August 20, 2000 as may be amended from time to time by the CIM. These definitions differ from the definitions in the United States Securities Exchange Commission ("SEC") Guide 7. In the United States, a mineral reserve is defined as a part of a mineral deposit which could be economically and legally extracted or produced at the time the mineral reserve determination is made.

The terms "Mineral Resource", "Measured Mineral Resource", "Indicated Mineral Resource", "Inferred Mineral Resource" used in this release are Canadian mining terms as defined in accordance with National Instruction 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects under the guidelines set out in the CIM Standards. Mineral Resources which are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability.

For a detailed discussion of Buckreef resource and reserve estimates and related matters see the Company's reports, including the Form 20-F Annual Report dated November 25, 2016 and technical reports filed under the Company's name at our website at: www.TanzanianRoyalty.com.

Cautionary Note to US Investors Concerning Estimates of Measured, Indicated and Inferred Resources

Note to U.S. Investors. While the terms "mineral resource", "measured mineral resource," "indicated mineral resource", and "inferred mineral resource" are recognized and required by Canadian regulations, they are not defined terms under standards in the United States and normally are not permitted to be used in reports and registration statements filed with the SEC. As such, information contained in this report concerning descriptions of mineralization and resources under Canadian standards may not be comparable to similar information made public by U.S companies in SEC filings. With respect to "indicated mineral resource" and "inferred mineral resource" there is a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and a great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an "indicated mineral resource" or "inferred mineral resource" will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all mineral deposits in these categories will ever be converted into reserves.

There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements or information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements or information contained herein. Except as required by law, we do not expect to update forward-looking statements and information continually as conditions change and you are referred to the full discussion of the Company's business contained in the Company's reports filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada and the U.S.

Contacts:

Investor Relations:

investors@tranzanianroyalty.com

1-844-364-1830




NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / January 16, 2018 / Juan Monteverde, founder and managing partner at Monteverde & Associates PC, a boutique securities firm headquartered at the Empire State Building in New York City, is investigating General Cable Corporation ("General Cable" or the "Company") (NYSE: BGC) relating to the sale of the Company to Prysmain Group. As a result of the merger, General Cable shareholders are only anticipated to receive $30.00 in cash in exchange for each share of General Cable.

Click here for more information: http://monteverdelaw.com/investigations/m-a/. It is free and there is no cost or obligation to you.

The investigation focuses on whether General Cable and its Board of Directors violated securities laws and/or breached their fiduciary duties to the Company's stockholders by 1) failing to conduct a fair process, 2) whether and by how much this proposed transaction undervalues the Company and 3) failing to disclose all material financial information in connection with the upcoming shareholder meeting on February 16th, 2018.

Monteverde & Associates PC is a boutique class action securities and consumer litigation law firm that has recovered millions of dollars and is committed to protecting shareholders and consumers from corporate wrongdoing. Monteverde & Associates lawyers have significant experience litigating Mergers & Acquisitions and Securities Class Actions, whereby they protect investors by recovering money and remedying corporate misconduct. Mr. Monteverde, who leads the legal team at the firm, has been recognized by Super Lawyers as a Rising Star in Securities Litigation in 2013 and 2017, an award given to less than 2.5% of attorneys in a particular field. He has also been selected by Martindale-Hubbell as a 2017 Top Rated Lawyer.

If you own common stock in General Cable and wish to obtain additional information and protect your investments free of charge, please visit our website or contact Juan E. Monteverde, Esq. either via e-mail at jmonteverde@monteverdelaw.com or by telephone at (212) 971-1341.

Contact:

Juan E. Monteverde, Esq.

MONTEVERDE & ASSOCIATES PC

The Empire State Building

350 Fifth Ave. Suite 4405

New York, NY 10118

United States of America

jmonteverde@monteverdelaw.com

Tel: (212) 971-1341

Attorney Advertising. (C) 2018 Monteverde & Associates PC. The law firm responsible for this advertisement is Monteverde & Associates PC (www.monteverdelaw.com). Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome with respect to any future matter.

SOURCE: Monteverde & Associates PC
After mid-May 2017 tornado ripped through Chetek and Cameron, Wis., leaving one person dead and dozens injured, staff from Lakeview Medical Center in Rice Lake were returning to the devastation to utilize their medical training and emergency response training in any way they could.

Full-time paramedic with the center and Bloomer Community Ambulance Service Chief Mark Schwartz was one those medical professionals assisting on scene.

He noticed the staff only had a tent set up to do their work, and there was nothing to block people from the elements in the aftermath of a tornado.

Thus was the start of the Bloomer Community Ambulance Services rehab trailer.

Utilizing the trailer twice within the last two weeks on the scenes of fires, the ambulance service has had a rehab trailer  also called the rehab/medical unit  available for emergency crews to use since November 2017. The unit, Schwartz said, has heat, air conditioning, storage for emergency and medical supplies, a generator, lights, food and even a pizza oven.

After that May tornado assistance, Schwartz, who also serves on the Bloomer Fire Department, starting chatting with others about the possibility of obtaining an enclosed space to serve emergency crews and those they are assisting on calls for service.

The ambulance service began fundraising around the community, reaching out to local businesses and organizations for any support available, and less than three months later, the trailer was completely funded, Schwartz said.

Its $14,000 cost was fully-funded through community donations and support, including $3,000 from the ambulance services annual pancake breakfast, the donation of a generator from Catalytic Combustion and a substantial portion from the Bloomer Firefighters Association, Schwartz said, taking money from its own fundraising efforts to donate to the unit.

The fire department is the emergency crew that will utilize the unit the most, Schwartz said, as was the case of two recent winter fires.

The first use of the unit came when crews battled a Dec. 30, 2017 fire in rural Colfax, and as subzero temperatures reached near-arctic double digits, crews were thankful for the few moments of heat and relaxation the trailer provided.

It was really appreciated because it was like 20 below that night, Schwartz said.

The Bloomer Community Ambulance Service posted photo of emergency crews using the trailer at the Colfax fire on Facebook, and the post was viewed 10,000 times, Schwartz said.

The unit has since been used again at a nighttime Sunday, Jan. 7 Chetek, Wis. fire.

But scenes of fires are not the only places the trailer could be utilized, Schwartz said.

Law enforcement could use the unit during any major situations where they may need to rotate equipment or officers, or it could be used on the scene of a natural disaster, not only providing safe medical aid in an enclosed space but also a check-point.

The idea and use of a unit like the ambulance services isnt uncommon, Schwartz said, but its been welcome addition to areas emergency service line-up.

We like having it, Schwartz said. Its definitely drawn a lot of attention.

For future maintenance, Schwartz said he will have the cost of fuel for the generator, propane for the heater and eventually, when needed, new tires, factored into the yearly budget.

Schwartz encouraged anyone interested in learning more about the unit to contact the Bloomer Community Ambulance Service by calling 715-568-5554.
Fatboy Products, LLC, a Williamsburg, Brooklyn-based beauty/hair brand, raised a second round of funding of undisclosed amount.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its domestic and international growth, from expanded distribution to product development, sampling and digital marketing.

Founded in 2016 by Tyson Kennedy and Tim Youngson and led by newly named CEO Kenny Kahn, a notable beauty industry veteran, Fatboy Products is a beauty brand currently providing daily care essentials and an assortment of award-winning styling products.

Its seven SKU collection include Fatboy Collection Perfect Putty, Tough Guy Water Wax, Boss Dog Styling Cream, Daily Hydrating Shampoo, Daily Hydrating Conditioner, Sea Salt Pomade and Fatboy Soap.

The products are currently distributed in 4 countries outside the U.S.  Norway, Japan, Australia and New Zealand  and is looking to expand the brands global presence into other markets.

Beyond omni channel distribution plans, Fatboys growth trajectory includes the launch of 3 new styling and treatment products in 2018, comprehensive sampling and marketing partnerships with Ispy and Fit Fab Fun, as well as an integrated digital marketing strategy.

FinSMEs

15/01/2018
New Delhi: If the government indeed breaks up Air India into four distinct parts before beginning a sale, it would be one of the most sensible decisions in any disinvestment process so far. Minister of State for Civil Aviation (MoS) Jayant Sinha said in this piece in LiveMint that the government will break the airline into four units and offer to sell at least 51 percent in each of them besides transferring most of the non-core debt to its own balance sheet. The core airline business comprising Air India and Air India Expressthe low-cost overseas armwill be offered as one company. Its regional arm (Alliance Air), ground handling business (AIATSL and JV company AISATS ) and engineering operations (AIESL) will be sold separately in the same process.

This is an eminently sensible move for several reasons. First, it allows the government to offer the core business of flying  the domestic and international operations  as a single and separate entity, shorn of the encumbrances of the other businesses. So any bidder interested only in Air Indias experienced cabin crew, international flying rights and other aircraft related operations need not be forced into buying its ground handling arm or that which offers engineering services too.

Second, it allows bidders to understand the financials of the deal better. The purely airline business is expected to have a debt of about Rs 19000-20,000 crore on its books, backed by aircraft which are of higher value. This enables any potential buyer to assess the merits of buying the airline operations vis-a-vis the enterprise value of the airline and any amount it would be expected to pay upfront to the government for buying this business out. Similarly, the financials of the other parts of Air India would become clearer by the breakup.

Third, it allows non-flying part of the business to also get distinct valuation and possibly a good set of buyers. The engineering business of Air India houses some industry-leading talent and has one of the most robust facilities for aircraft maintenance and repair in India. It could probably attract the right buyers with better valuation alone than when it was being bundled with the main airline business.

As for the ground handling part of the airline, it is split into a wholly owned arm (AIATSL) and a 50:50 jv AISATS. SATS has the first right of refusal in this venture and it is possible that the Singaporean company buys out the governments stake. It has made such an offer to the government earlier too.

Fourth, by breaking up the airline into different parts, it is possible that the government retains some of these parts  does not offer all the four for sale. There is a persistent view that Alliance Air, for example, which offers unmatched regional connectivity  should not be sold off since the government is anyway emphasising enhanced connectivity of the hinterland through special schemes like UDAN. Again, for AISATS and Air India Express there have been similar views  why offload these profitable ventures if the intention is to only let go of the loss making parts?

Air India has accumulated losses of almost Rs 40,000 crore and debt totaling around Rs 49,000 crore  of which working capital debt is around Rs 30,000 crore. This latter part of the debt is expected to be housed in a special purpose vehicle and only the remaining about Rs 19000-20,000 crore will need to be factored in for the sale of the airline.

Having decided to break up Air India, though, is no guarantee for the stake sale process to go on without a hitch. The success of this ambitious disinvestment case would also lie in whether the government continues to hold any stake at all in the disinvested entities. Indications are that the government may be reluctant to exit completely.

This would be a bad idea, even if government nominees on the board of the new entities pledge not to interfere in their functioning. At least two potential airline investors have already made it clear that if the government continues to hold even a minority stake in the airline entity, they would hesitate to come forward. This means a dwindling of interest in the sale process itself.

In this piece in MoneyControl, minister Sinha has indicated the governments intention to offer at least 51 percent stake in the airline but not completely exit.

Why the government doesnt want to let go of Air India is explained in an incoherent way by officials who have pointed out that this will ensure better valuation for its (governments) remaining stake in the airline. After a private acquirer takes over, it is presumed the airline entity will improve the running of a business which the government has systematically ruined through bureaucratic apathy and reckless misuse by politicians. At best, this is warped logic, at worst an invitation for the sale process itself to be derailed.

Already, the disastrous decision to merge the two erstwhile airlines - Air India (international) and Indian Airlines (domestic) - in 2007 pushed the resultant entity into sustained losses. Never, after this merger, has the resultant entity managed to register net profit of a single rupee. Only, a meagre operational profit has been registered for two fiscal years (FY 16 and FY17) and that too, largely on the back of benign fuel prices. Any move by the government to retain control even after disinvestment may similarly backfire. Even if the government waives a significant part of the debt from the books, its looming presence would be enough to deter sound investors.

Then, another thread in the disinvestment saga is about allowing foreign entities to own up to 49 percent stake in the disinvested parts of Air India. This is a welcome decision though the government may find it tough to ensure that the substantial ownership and management control caveat is followed.
Soon after Independence in 1947, then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said everything else can wait, but not agriculture. Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces the same situation today. Five years of sustained rural distress have highlighted both the urgency and the need for the appropriate policy actions. The upcoming Union Budget due on 1 February, 2018 will be the place to start, as finance minister Arun Jaitley has promised at a speech marking the launch of commodity option by the NCDEX a few days ago.

Agriculture in India is a mass of contradictions; nowhere is that more evident than in the rate of agricultural growth, which has been fairly volatile over the last 10 years, ranging from 5.8 percent in 2005-06 (FY06) to 0.4 percent in FY10, and -0.2 percent in FY15.

In 2013, India accounted for 25 percent the worlds pulses production, the highest for any one country, 22 percent of global rice production, 13 of wheat production. It also accounted for about 25 percent of all the quantity of cotton produced. India is among the top three agricultural producers in a number of crops.

But productivity  measured as yield or the quantity of produce per hectare  at a shade over 2 tonnes per hectare in FY15, is much lower than in other comparable countries such as Brazil (4.9 tonnes) or China (6.7 tonnes). One explanation has been the size of agricultural land holdings: the FY11 Agricultural Census (the latest year for which figures were available) reported that marginal holdings (less than one hectare) went up from 36 million in 1971 to 91 million in 2011.

Any set of solutions  and they will have to be a set  will have to address this volatility in growth and by extension, agricultural incomes. Four areas come to mind: a) land, water and agricultural inputs; b) credit and crop insurance; c) remunerative pricing, and d) storage and marketing infrastructure.

The 70th round of the National Sample Survey says 70 percent of farming households have less than one hectare of agricultural land; 3.7 percent have between 4 to 10 hectares, and less than half of one percent have more than 10 acres. This has profound implications for the economics of farming, from a mechanisation and irrigation point of view.

Some states have permitted land leasing; about 10 percent of all agricultural land in the country is leased, according to land records from different states, but this varies between states: 34 percent in Andhra Pradesh, about 25 percent in Punjab, and 21 percent in Bihar. Other states ban it: Kerala, Manipur and Jammu & Kashmir, for example. Agriculture being a state subject, this poses challenges.

Roughly 51 percent of the land under crops is irrigated; the rest is dependent on rainfall. Over the past few decades, ground water sources in many states have been overused. In Haryana and Rajasthan, 40-75 percent of the ground water has been over-exploited; the situation is worse in Punjab, where it is 75-90 percent. The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices recommended quantitative ceilings on the per hectare use of water, but nobody seems to be listening.

Access to the formal credit system has been an enduring, intractable problems for agriculture. According to some estimates, 40 percent of farmers  there are nearly 240 million people engaged in farming activity  still rely on informal credit from money lenders. Given the rising rural distress, debt forgiveness through loan waiver programmes by states have been an easy solution.

Farm loan waivers have long been a convenient instrument that governments have used to extract maximum political benefits, or confer them on the ruling partys political base (like when are elections are around the corner; we have five big ones in 2018). This time round, it began with Uttar Pradesh, followed by Punjab and then Maharashtra. In 2008, the loan waiver programme was Rs 60,000 crore. So far, the current wave is already almost twice that number; experts say that more are coming.

Media reports on an analysis by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its annual Trends in Money and Banking for 2017 suggest that farmers have not been repaying their loans knowing that the waivers will cover them. In June 2017, they quoted bankers saying that farmers were emptying bank accounts before loan instalments could be debited from them.

Agricultural non-performing assets have been rising for the last five years at least. Research by the Indian Council for Research and International Economic Relations (ICRIER) shows that NPAs fell for just a year when the last big loan waiver programme was announced in 2008, before rising sharply again; they have been rising ever since.

Consider crop insurance too. The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna (PMFBY) is a muddle of fineprint. The PMFBY was designed so that the central government shares part of the premium, subject to conditions. States have to walk a line, no matter what: whether the region is rain-fed or irrigated, irrespective of cropping density, which could range from less than 100 or more than 200 percent. Shouldnt states be allowed to design their own?

Food waste is endemic, and at all levels, and the quantity wasted, both during the harvest and the post-harvest process has only risen in the past five years. The highest losses have been in fruits and vegetables (somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of production in 2015), pulses (between 6.5 to 8.5 percent) and oilseeds (between 5 and 10 percent).

Suggested solutions have ranged from building cold chain infrastructure to mega food parks, but progress on this  which the Ministry of Food Processing launched in 2008  has been far short both in scale and speed. All of which has implications for pricing, remuneration to farmers, and rural household incomes.

Minimum support pricing (MSP) is a hot potato in political debated around the country, and often the agricultural community isnt even a participant in the public discourse. In a report that sought to assess the efficacy of MSPs, NITI Aayog found that just 10 percent of farmers were even aware about the MSP before the sowing season; 62 percent of farmers came to know about the MSP after sowing the crop.

Niti Aayog has recommended a price deficiency system, wherein farmers are compensated for certain commodities if their prices fall under a specified threshold. This could incentivise farmers to not hold on to stocks till prices become more favourable. Given the huge investment the government has made in the Aadhar system, addresses would reduce stock-holding by farmers who store commodities until prices increase, and also incentivise farmers are paid using direct benefit transfers.

If some of these solutions are implementable, what has been missing? In the first four years of this governments tenure, much attention has been paid to industry and manufacturing. We have a host of missions: Make in India, Swacchh Bharat, Digital India, Startup India, and a host of others.

Its not enough to address the challenges in Indian agriculture on the basis of a mission: It has to be dovetailed with the other missions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and with the same fervour and commitment. After all, he did promise to double farmers incomes by 2022. From all accounts, he is likely to be Prime Minister in 2019 again. For his government, which claims to take the long view, agriculture has become mission-critical. The Union Budget better reflect that.

For full coverage of Union Budget 2018, click here.
New Delhi: The finance ministry may tweak the provisions on Minimum Alternate Tax (MAT) in the forthcoming Union Budget to help the industry over come the impact of tax reforms in the US, say experts.

The purpose behind the introduction of MAT in the Income Tax Act was to bring all zero tax companies and to neutralise the impact of certain benefits/incentives.

Both the leading industry chambers, Ficci and CII, have suggested to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to reduce the incidence of MAT which has "impacted significantly" the cash flow of companies who otherwise have low taxable income or have incurred tax losses.

Tax expert Amit Singhania, Partner at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, said that considering the recent slashing of corporate tax rate in the US, there is a need to revisit the corporate tax rate in Union Budget 2018-19, to be presented to Parliament on 1 February.

"In order to encourage flow of funds (in form of dividend) from overseas subsidiaries, the reduction of MAT on such dividends is warranted," he said.

In a memorandum to the finance ministry, Ficci said that with the phasing out of exemptions and deductions available under the Act, "the burden of MAT should also be gradually reduced from the current levels of 18.5 percent to a rate which will be commensurate with the phasing out of tax exemptions and incentives.

"It is recommended that dividend received from foreign company should be exempt from MAT just like domestic dividend is exempt from MAT".

CII, in its memorandum, suggested that MAT be abolished in view of removal of all incentives or, alternatively, the rate be brought down to 10 percent. "It is submitted that levy of MAT should be restricted to those incomes that are taxable under regular provisions and incomes that are exempt under normal provisions such as LTCG (Long Term Capital Gains) on sale of listed equity shares or incomes that are not taxable such as Capital Receipts, should be kept out of the ambit of MAT," CII said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had last week brainstormed with economists and experts on the state of the economy as the government looks to revive growth which is estimated to be at a 4-year low of 6.5 percent in 2017-18, against the backdrop of introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is scheduled to present the Union Budget 2018-19 on 1 February. It will be the last full budget of the current NDA government.

For full coverage of Union Budget 2018, click here.
Mumbai: Public sector accounts for only 30 percent of the total healthcare expenditure in the country and investment in building and maintaining public health infrastructure needs priority in the forthcoming budget for FY 2018-19, a report says.

Public sector investment on healthcare accounts for less than 1.5 percent of GDP, which is one of the lowest globally, and the government intends to increase the expenditure to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2025.

The outlay on healthcare increased by a healthy 28 percent in the last budget and the allocation is likely to see a similar increase in the forthcoming budget as well, according to a report by rating agency Icra.

In line with National Health Policy (NHP) 2017, the expenditure is expected to be directed towards setting up of new hospitals to increase the number of beds in the country, and for transformation of existing district and town level health centres to provide better healthcare facilities across geographies while using the existing infrastructure.

Public sector accounts for only 30 percent of the total healthcare expenditure in the country, as compared to 42-58 percent in Brazil, 58 percent in China, 52 percent in Russia, 50 percent in South Africa, 48 percent in USA and 83 percent in UK as per the WHO reports.

ICRA believes that investing in building and maintaining public health infrastructure should be given

priority in the budget as these facilities are lagging and vast majority of the population has to bear their own healthcare costs due to low penetration of health insurance.

Besides, along with the setting up of new hospitals, the report recommends setting up of medical colleges and nursing academies to address the shortage of beds and skilled medical professionals in the country, it said.

The budget is also likely to increase the allocation for addressing the increasing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension and to increase the outlay for providing free drugs, diagnostics and emergency services across all public hospitals, in line with NHP 2017.

Icra suggested that new infrastructure developed through incentives can also be utilised for catering to the growing medical tourism in the country, which is expected to continue to grow by 20 percent over the next five years generating export revenues and employment.

For full coverage of Union Budget 2018, click here.
New Delhi: India and Israel will begin work on a free trade pact that Israel has been pushing for, officials said on Monday, as Benjamin Netanyahu began a first visit by an Israeli prime minister in 15 years.

India and Israel have built close ties over the years, largely centered on arms purchases, away from the public eye. But under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose nationalist party has long admired Israel for its tough approach to terrorism, ties have flowered across the economy.

We have had diplomatic relations for 25 years, but something different is happening now, Netanyahu said soon after the two sides signed nine agreements covering cooperation in cyber security, space and oil and gas exploration.

Israel has given initial approval for Indian energy companies to explore oil and gas in the eastern Mediterranean, in the first such move by Indian firms in that region.

Netanyahu, who said he saw a kindred spirit in Modi in terms of getting things done, pushed for a free trade pact with Asias third largest economy during the talks on Monday.

Modi agreed to open trade discussions, Indian foreign ministry secretary in charge of economic relations Vijay Gokhale told reporters. A delegation from the commerce ministry will actually go next month for discussions on trade, he said.

Bilateral trade has jumped from $200 million in 1992, when the two countries opened diplomatic relations, to $4.16 billion in 2016, largely in favour of Israel.

Netanyahu, accompanied by a 130-member delegation, wants to increase exports to India by 25 percent over the three years.

Israel has emerged as one of Indias biggest suppliers of weapons alongside the United States and long-term partner Russia.

But the two sides were tightlipped over the fate of a $500 million deal to buy anti-tank missiles from Israels state-owned defence contractor Rafael that India called off just weeks before Netanyahus first.

The Indian government wanted to support a local programme to build the missile but Israel has since pushed hard to revive the order. It has offered to transfer technology and eventually build the missile with a local partner in a boost for Modis signature Make-in-India drive for a domestic defence base.

Without referring to the anti-tank missile deal, Modi said he had invited Israeli companies to take advantage of Indias liberalised rules in the defence sector to make more in India with our companies.

Last year, Modi made a first trip to Israel by an Indian prime minister ever.
Ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and the brain behind D-Mart store chain Radhakishan Damani have come together to bid for the debt-laden Binani Cement that is up for sale after it underwent an insolvency proceeding. Two senior executives familiar with the development said with the inclusion of these two prominent names, the race will only get further intensified.

According to this Economic Times report, many big cement companies such as UltraTech, Heidelberg, JSW Group, Dalmia Bharat and Ramco Cements are eyeing the assets of the company either in partnership with another company or alone.

The partnership between Jhunjhunwala and Damani has evoked surprise, a senior executive said to the ET. "If you look at the list of bidders, it appears that competition will only intensify and lenders may not have to take any haircut," the executive said.

A slew of other billionaires and companies are also bidding together for Binani Cements. Prominent among them are billionaire Ajay Piramal and Dalmia Bharat, JSW Group along with a private equity firm (it has submitted its proposal) and the Ramco Cement with PE fund True North.

Banks had claimed Rs 3,884 crore unpaid loans due on Binani Cement that included borrowings from the State Bank of India, Canara Bank and Bank of Baroda. The cement maker also has Rs 2,429 as corporate guarantee due to the SBI and the IDBI Bank.

It may be noted that last year in July the Bank of Baroda (B0B) had approached the National Company Law Tribunal against Binani Cement for starting insolvency and bankruptcy proceeding. BoB decided to go to NCLT after the unlisted subsidiary of Binani Industries failed to repay a Rs 97-crore loan to the lender, the ET report said.
Mumbai: Equities took a breather on Tuesday after a three-session record setting run as investors dialled down fresh bets amid grim macroeconomic data and firm crude prices.

The Sensex shed 72 points to end at 34,771.05, while the broader Nifty finished at 10,700.45 points, down 41.10 points.

However, IT stocks surged on widespread buying after a Morgan Stanley report said Indian IT services shares are set for a turnaround in 2018 as recovery in spending is "imminent".

Overall sentiment turned weak after data released after market hours on Monday showed that the country's trade deficit, or difference between imports and exports, reached USD 14.88 billion in December, up about 41 percent year-on- year, as crude oil and gold import bill inflated.

The BSE 30-share barometer, after a higher start at 34,877.71, advanced to 34,936.03 in morning trade on continued buying by investors driven by encouraging quarterly earnings.

However, across-the-board profit booking at record levels pulled it down to a low of 34,735.55. It finally settled 72.46 points, or 0.21 percent lower at 34,771.05.

The gauge had gained 410.44 points in the previous three sessions and closed at an all-time high of 34,843.51 on Monday.

The wider NSE Nifty too slipped from record but managed to close above the crucial 10,700 mark at 10,700.45 points, down 41.10 points or 0.38 percent.

It shuttled between 10,762.35 and 10,687.85 during the session.

On Monday, it had closed at a new life-time high of 10,741.55.

Widened fiscal deficit and increasing fuel price on account of volatility in crude prices dampened the market sentiment.

"Mid and small caps underperformed but silver lining was seen in IT index on expectation of turnaround in spending," said Vinod Nair, Head of Research, Geojit Financial Services.

Meanwhile, domestic institutional investors (DIIs) sold shares worth Rs 173.28 crore on net basis, while FIIs bought equities to the tune of Rs 32.92 crore yesterday, provisional data showed.

Coal India was the biggest loser among Sensex components, falling by 4.57 percent, followed by Reliance Industries at 2.54 percent.

Other laggards included Tata Motors, Tata Steel, ITC Ltd, SBI, Power Grid, Bharti Airtel, M&M, Asian Paints, HDFC Ltd, Hero MotoCorp, Kotak Bank, IndusInd Bank, Yes Bank, Axis Bank, Maruti Suzuki and Bajaj Auto, losing up to 2.30 percent.

In contrast, IT counters like Wipro, Infosys and TCS were the top three performers in the Sensex pack, rising up to 4.88 percent.

Stocks of state-run oil marketing companies faced the selling heat on higher global crude prices, which continued to quote at near three-year high of USD 70 a barrel due to production curbs in OPEC nations and Russia.

HPCL, BPCL and IOC slipped by up to 3.35 percent.

Sectorally, the BSE realty index emerged as the worst performer by falling 3.51 percent, followed by metal 2.83 percent, PSU (2.26 percent), oil and gas (1.84 percent), power (1.78 percent), infrastructure (1.54 percent), consumer durables (1.29 percent), FMCG (1.12 percent) and auto (1.12 percent).

IT and teck rallied by 3.32 percent and 2.45 percent, respectively.

The small-cap index fell 2.21 percent, while mid-caps declined 1.74 percent.

In the Asian region, Japan's Nikkei rose 1 percent, Hong Kong's Hang Seng clocked its highest ever close by gaining 1.81 percent, while China's Shanghai Composite Index inched up 0.77 percent.

In the Eurozone, Frankfurt's DAX was higher by 0.41 percent, while Paris CAC 40 rose 0.21 percent in their early deals. London's FTSE was up 0.16 percent.
New Delhi: With the Centre announcing the abolition of the Haj subsidy, the Congress said on Tuesday that it hopes the Narendra Modi government will utilise the money for the upliftment of the disempowered among the minorities.

Minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Tuesday announced that there will be no subsidy for Haj from 2018.

Reacting to the development, Congress Communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said the Supreme Court bench headed by Justice A Aftab Alam had in 2012 directed the abolition of the Haj subsidy.

"Supreme Court bench headed by J Aftab Alam had directed abolition of Haj subsidy within 10 years in May 2012 besides asking for utilisation of money for education and upliftment of minorities.

"We sincerely hope that Modi government will honour the Supreme Court direction and utilise this money for the disempowered including modern education to children, especially young girls from the minority community...," he tweeted.

Surjewala also hoped that the government would provide special incentives for higher education, including in medical, engineering and other services, besides ensuring skill development of the children of the minority community.

He also urged the government to make provisions for helping the destitute women among the minorities, including those who have been widowed, abandoned or divorced, and make other provisions for the upliftment and social development of the minority community.
Tensions have escalated along the de facto border in Jammu and Kashmir, with authorities suspending the bus service between Poonch and Rawalkote. The move comes after the Indian Army foiled a fidayeen attack by killing five suspected Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) militants in Uri and after seven Pakistani Army men were killed, allegedly in firing between the two armies in Poonch.

The escalation has prompted fears of retaliation from the Pakistani Army, which has often proved deadly for the civilian population living along the LoC. While winters used to be a time of respite and calm in areas along the LoC, a prolonged dry spell this season has provided the militants with an opportunity to sneak into this side of Kashmir, to carry out attacks on security forces.

During one such attempt on Monday, Brigadier YS Alawat (Brigade headquarter, Uri) said a group of militants riding a boat on river Jhelum at Dulanja Uri were seen by security forces and challenged but they opened fire, sparking a gun-battle which raged on for nearly two hours.

"All the militants were eliminated. The bodies of four have been retrieved while the search for the fifth one is on. It was a major infiltration bid in which heavily-armed fidayeen had sneaked into this side and were planning to target army installations," he said. SSP Baramulla Imtiyaz Hussain said war-like stores, including arms and ammunition, were recovered and added that the suspects belonged to JeM.

Hours later, the army killed seven Pakistani soldiers and injured four others in areas along the LoC, apparently in retaliation for the killing of an Indian soldier in Pakistani firing on Saturday. Army sources said that it was a 'tactical strike' carried out on "enemy posts" in areas along Poonch district, which is one of the transit routes for militants infiltrating into Kashmir.

However, the Pakistan Army admitted to the killing of only four soldiers. A report in Dawn, quoting a statement of Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), said that four soldiers were killed in mortar shelling from the other side: "The soldiers were busy with maintenance of a communication line when they were fired upon and hit by a heavy mortar round."

In October last year, an army jawan was among two people killed, while six others including a defence porter were injured in unprovoked mortar shelling by Pakistani troops in Krishna Ghati and Karmara areas of Poonch district. Authorities admit that the fresh bout of violence has anguished people in dozens of villages in Poonch, Rajouri and other districts along the LoC, which may trigger migration.

"We have turned into nomads," Anikait Sharma, 28, a resident of Jangher village along the LoC in Rajouri district said. "We have no permanent address, no home and no life. We live in between relief camps and at the mercy of the government," he said.

Rajouri district was the scene of bloody pounding by Pakistani mortars in May and June last year, whose victims included a minor girl among many others. The unprovoked mortar shelling had shut schools and forced thousands of people to migrate out of the range of blazing guns and tanks across the LoC.

The army, meanwhile, insists that "attack is the best defence". "The days of strategic restraint are over. We have taught them a lesson in past and we will do it again. For each sacrifice offered by our men, we will snuff out lives of their ten soldiers. They (Pakistani army) can't keep testing our patience. We have to send out a clear message about our intent and capabilities," a senior army officer, who isn't authorised to speak to the media, told Firstpost.

According to data provided by the Union home ministry, Pakistan violated ceasefire 724 times along the IB and the LoC till October last year, as compared to 449 in 2016, during which at least 12 civilians and 17 security personnel were killed, while nearly 79 civilians and 67 security personnel were injured.

While schools are already closed in LoC areas, the freezing cold has complicated the situation for the civilian administration. Due to the killings in Poonch, authorities have suspended cross-LoC travel between the two sides of Kashmir in Chenab region, which had resumed recently after remaining shut for nearly four months. "Due to fresh tensions, trade and travel have been suspended," Muhammad Tanveer, in charge of LoC trade and travel, Poonch, told Firstpost.

As the two sides let their guns do the talking, thousands of people spend restless days and night in their homes, hoping for normalcy to return soon.

They are the worst sufferers of the animosity between the two countries. Bunty Kumar, a resident of Keri sector in Rajouri district, said he had recently shifted to his home after living in a relief camp in Nowshera since last six months due to continuous firing, the worst escalation in last decade.

"There will be a retaliation now. Just when we were trying to settle down, the situation has gone bad," Kumar told Firstpost over the phone. "Now, we are waiting how things pan out in coming days. We somehow managed to survive during summers but it will be difficult to live in shelter camps in this winter cold."
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday termed as "absolutely illegal" any attack by khap panchayats or associations against an adult man and woman opting for inter-caste marriage.

The apex court said if an adult man and woman marry, no khap, panchayat, individual or society can question them.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud asked the Centre to give its response on suggestions earlier given by amicus curiae (friend of the court) Raju Ramachandran on ways to prevent harassment and killing of young couples in the name of family honour for marrying inter-caste or intra-clan (gotra).

"Whatever the amicus curiae says about khap, we are not concerned with that. What we are concerned is that if an adult girl or boy gets into marriage, no khap, no individual or no society can question them," the bench said.

The bench told the Centre that it will not give its suggestion on the suggestion given by amicus curiae, assisting the court in the matter, and the court would contemplate passing an order based on the amicus' suggestion.

"Whenever there is any kind of collective attack on a boy or girl who are adult, it is absolutely illegal," the bench said and listed the matter for 5 February for further hearing.

The apex court had earlier sought suggestions from an NGO 'Shakti Vahini', amicus curiae and 'khap panchayats' on the issue.

Khaps are caste or community organisations in villages which at times act as quasi-judicial bodies and pronounce harsh punishments based on regressive and age-old customs and traditions.

The NGO had moved the top court in 2010 seeking directions to the central and state governments to prevent and control honour crimes by taking a number of measures.

Earlier, the apex court had invited 'khap panchayats' to hear their views before issuing any order to stop them from harassing and killing couples and women in the name of honour.

The Centre had pleaded with the apex court to put in place a mechanism to monitor crimes against women by khap panchayats, as the police was not able to protect women facing ordeal at their hands.

The top court had also said that as a pilot project, it would examine the situation in three districts of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh where khap panchayats were active.

It had summoned the Superintendents of Police of Rohtak and Jind districts of Haryana and that of Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh to apprise the court of the situation there.
New Delhi: The Bar Council of India on Tuesday said there was "absolutely no crisis now" in the Supreme Court and normalcy will be restored soon in the higher judiciary that saw four top judges coming out in the open against the Chief Justice of India.

BCI Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra told PTI that a seven-member delegation on Monday met Justice Ranjan Gogoi, one of the four judges who held the 12 January presser, and he assured him that there was no crisis at all.

"Justice Gogoi said the crisis is over. He said there is no dispute at all," Manan said when asked about reports which projected a contrary situation.

A crisis erupted on 12 January after four senior judges  Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph  openly castigated the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

The BCI chairman said he did not know the basis on which a section of media has been coming out with reports that the crisis was far from being resolved but stressed that there was a need not to further escalate the situation.

He said they had also met Justice MB Lokur and he had also said that there was no crisis as there was nothing personal about the issues raised by them.

When his attention was drawn to Tuesday's statement of Attorney General KK Venugopal, he said, "I don't know how and why the Attorney General is saying like this (sic). All judges are holding their courts and the work is going on normally in the Supreme Court."

"Hence, nothing more will come out in public and very soon all issues will be settled. Absolutely there is no crisis now," he said.

The four top Supreme Court judges had on Monday resumed work, belying the simmering tensions sparked by their accusations against the Chief Justice, while the Attorney General had described the unprecedented crisis as "a storm in a tea cup".

In the presser, the four judges had flagged certain problems, including the assigning of cases in the apex court, and said there were certain issues afflicting the country's highest court.

Chief Justice of India Misra had on Sunday met a seven-member delegation of the Bar Council of India and Supreme Court Bar Association President Vikas Singh and had assured them that the crisis would be sorted out soon and congeniality would prevail.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit the Taj Mahal in Agra with his wife Sara on Tuesday. Netanyahu will then return to New Delhi and participate in the Raisina Dialogue, where he will deliver an inaugural speech, according to PTI.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be accompanying Netanyahu to Gujarat on Wednesday where he will be welcomed in the same fashion as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was with a road show in Ahmedabad.

The road show is said to be an 8-kilometre drive from the airport to the Sabarmati Ashram. The two leaders will also be witnessing several innovative technologies in the field of water, agriculture and health at iCreate and visit a Centre of Excellence.

Netanyahu would arrive in Mumbai on Wednesday in the evening where he will meet the Indian Jewish community.

A packed schedule on Thursday for the Israeli premier in Mumbai would include a "power breakfast" with Indian business leaders, a business seminar, attending two memorial services for the victims of the 26/11 attack at the Taj hotel and Nariman House and finally a gala event with Bollywood actors.

On Monday, Modi and Netanyahu held "wide-ranging and intensive" talks to bolster cooperation in key areas such as defence and counter-terrorism. The two leaders noted the "grave" threat that terrorism poses to peace and security, including from non-state actors, and reiterated that there can be no justification for acts of terror on any ground, a joint statement, issued after the Modi-Netanyahu meeting, said.

They also advocated strong measures against terrorists, terror organisations, those who sponsor, encourage or finance terrorism or provide sanctuary to terrorists and terror groups, it said.

Modi and Netanyahu also noted with that the next meeting of the Joint Working Groups on Homeland and Public Security will be held in February 2018.

They reiterated the importance of building comprehensive cooperation in counter-terrorism, including cyber-space.

On his part, Netanyahu said Indians and Israelis know the "true pain" of a terror attacks. "We are talking about cooperation in (the field of) defence so that our people are always safe and secure. We remember the horrific savagery in Mumbai (a reference to 26/11 terror attack), we grate our teeth, we fight back, (and) we never give in," the Israeli premier said.

With inputs from PTI
The Centre has withdrawn the subsidy for Haj pilgrimage, Minority Affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi has announced on Tuesday. The Haj subsidy was provided by the Indian government to Indian Muslim pilgrims in the form of discounted flight prices.

Naqvi said that 1.75 lakh Muslims will be going on the pilgrimage this year, which is the highest number of people going on Haj pilgrimage from India. Naqvi also said that the Saudi Arabian government has in principle agreed to allow Haj journey from India by ships and officials of the two countries will sit together to finalise the modalities.

"This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi told reporters and cited a host of measures for the welfare of minorities.

Haj subsidy funds will be used for educational empowerment of girls and women of minority community: Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi pic.twitter.com/p1GmpyyRyg  ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

Naqvi was quoted by The Tribune as saying that the subsidy given on Haj when the BJP government came to power was Rs 700 crore . He said that the main beneficiary of the subsidy was the Air India.

The government had spent over Rs 250 crore in 2017 on subsidising the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Saudi Arabia, he said.

Asked if the subsidy withdrawal will make the cost of the pilgrimage too high for many Muslims, Naqvi said the government was making efforts to bring it down.

Haj pilgrims from certain regions will have an additional option to choose from where they want to fly to Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage, he said and claimed that this would bring down the cost by up to 70 percent on some routes.

The Union minister said, in a first, over 1,300 women would go on Haj without a 'mehram' (male guardian), a practise done away with from 2018.

Woman Haj assistants would accompany them and the government has made arrangements for their stay in Saudi Arabia, he said.

Naqvi said his ministry is organising an event in Lucknow on 18 January in which he and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath will speak on "empowering minorities without appeasement". Minority affairs ministers of nine states will attend the event.

He also cited a host of measures, such as providing jobs and job opportunities to 8.5 lakh minority youth and scholarships to 1.83 crore students, to claim that the BJP-led NDA government has been working to empower minorities.

His ministry is entrusted with welfare measures for minorities that include Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Zoroastrians, Buddhists and Jains.

Naqvi, the lone Muslim Cabinet minister in the government, also claimed that his ministry had succeeded in helping a lot of youths in getting employment by training them as GST facilitators.

In 2012, the Supreme Court had struck down the policy of giving subsidies to Haj pilgrims and directed that it be progressively "eliminated" within ten years.

"We hold that this policy is best done away with," a bench of justices Altamas Kabir and Ranjana Prakash Desai had held.

Following the order, the subsidy was being gradually reduced every year.

In October 2017, Naqvi had said the next Haj pilgrimage would be in line with the new policy, which he described as "better, transparent and one ensuring the safety of pilgrims".

According to The Hindu, the review committee on the Haj services had decided to end the subsidy in early 2018 during a meeting in November 2017. The panel comprised seniors officials of the Ministry for Minority Affairs, Civil Aviation Ministry and Ministry of External Affairs and the Haj Committee of India.

The decision is in consonance with the Supreme Court order... Subsidy is only one aspect of the governments responsibility with regard to Haj, we are committed to a more transparent and open system for sending pilgrims and their safety and security while they perform the pilgrimage, Naqvi was then quoted as saying by The Hindu.

With inputs from PTI
The Supreme Court took initial steps towards normalcy after the Chief Justice initiated talks with the four dissenting judges. In a meeting which lasted 15 minutes, the judges discusses the issues which were brought up in the extraordinary press conference on Friday.

The tone of the meeting has been cordial and everyone agreed that the issues were more important than the personalities.

However, the matter has not been resolved yet and the judges are expected to meet on Wednesday as well.

Earlier on Tuesday, the highly-anticipated hearing around the circumstances surrounding the death of CBI special Judge BH Loya ended in five minutes, with the apex court saying that the petitioners "must know everything". The court did not fix any specific date but listed the matter for hearing after a week.

The Maharashtra government placed the documents related to death of Judge Loya in a sealed cover before the court. It told the court that barring certain confidential reports placed by it, the petitioners can access other documents.

The hearings were being conducted on two petitions, one filed by BR Lone, a Maharashtra-based journalist and the other by activist Tehseen Poonawala.

Loya case one of the reasons for judges' rebellion

The Judge Loya death case was one of the reasons which prompted four senior to take their grievance about case allotment to the public on 12 January. A crisis had erupted after four senior judges  Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph  openly castigated the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

On Tuesday, the Bar Council of India said there was "absolutely no crisis now" in the Supreme Court and normalcy will be restored soon in the higher judiciary. BCI Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra told PTI that a seven-member delegation on Monday met Justice Ranjan Gogoi, one of the four judges who held the 12 January presser, and he assured him that there was no crisis at all. "Justice Gogoi said the crisis is over. He said there is no dispute at all," Manan said when asked about reports which projected a contrary situation.

This was in contradiction to the statement made by Attorney-General KK Venugopal who said the crisis seems to be unresolved and hoped it will be "fully settled" in a couple of days. On Tuesday, Venugopal told PTI, "Yes, I think it has not been settled. Lets hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days."

With inputs from agencies
Mumbai: Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday termed the violence near Koregaon Bhima village earlier in January a result of "conspiracy".

Fadnavis was speaking at a meeting of state BJP office-bearers. The party's state unit chief Raosaheb Danve was also present.

"There was a conspiracy behind the Bhima-Koregaon violence. We (BJP workers) should remain alert. BJP workers should try to maintain communal harmony in the society. A constant dialogue with people is necessary," the chief minister said.

Dalits visiting a war memorial at Koregaon Bhima in Pune district came under attack on 1 January, leading to massive protests and a shut-down across the state two days later.

The chief minister also asked the party workers to prepare for "forthcoming elections".

"We have decided to hold 'Tiranga rally' (tricolour rally) at every district place on 26 January to counter Opposition leaders' 'Samvidhan Bachao' (`Save Constitution') rally in Mumbai," said Danve in his speech.

"Some people are conspiring to malign the BJP and the state government because of our development works. The 'Halla bol' rally of Opposition has failed, it has had no impact on people," the state BJP chief said.

BJP sources said the party leaders discussed how to strengthen workers' network and the preparations for coming local body elections.

The party is also assessing the communal impact of Bhima-Koregaon incident and its aftermath, sources added.
On Tuesday, advocate Harish Salve, appearing on behalf of Maharashtra government in the case of judge BH Loya's death, handed over sealed documents to the Supreme Court. Judge Loya passed away in 2014 while hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, in which BJP president Amit Shah was an accused. Sohrabuddin, a gangster, was killed by Gujarat police along with his wife Kausar Bi in 2005. Shah was later discharged in the case.

After today's hearing in front of Justice Arun Mishra, the petitioner, 48-year-old Bandhuraj Sambhaji Lone, a Mumbai-based journalist who works in the Marathi media, spoke with Firstpost.

Edited excerpts follow:

The Supreme Court asked Maharashtra government to share the documents with the petitioner/petitioners

Yes, the Supreme Court told the Maharashtra government that the petitioner should know all the facts and must be able to examine all the documents, including the medical report. But, due to its confidentiality, it can't be shared.

Have you filed the PIL alone?

I have filed it alone, as an independent person. I filed the petition on 10 January. The first hearing was on 12 January. During the first hearing, the Supreme Court asked Maharashtra government to submit documents related to the case. Today, I was here for the second hearing and Salve handed over the documents to the Supreme Court. The next hearing is on 23 January. Tehseen Poonawalla filed another PIL petition independently.

Why file a petition in Supreme Court?

Others have filed petitions in the Bombay High Court, Nagpur Bench of Bombay High Court and the Punjab and Haryana High Court. I filed my petition in the Supreme Court as I felt it was the right forum to make my plea.

Which is?

The death of a judge  hearing an important case such as the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case  is a serious matter. I feel no proper investigation into the mysterious death of judge Loya has taken place. I pleaded for an independent probe monitored by the Supreme Court. Judge Loya died in Nagpur, where he'd gone to attend a wedding on 1 December, 2014. After his death, there was a hue and cry, but no real investigation took place.

But Loya's son recently said the family has no suspicions...

As a petitioner, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on any issue beyond the court's ambit.

Are you seeking support from any political party?

Neither I have sought support of any political party, nor has any party approached me. I want to make it clear that in the past, I have raised and fought for several issues on my own. In this case too, I'm not going to take any political support. I'll do it independently. However, politicisation of this issue cant be ruled out and I can't stop any individual or party from moving court as a petitioner.

So, you're fighting all by yourself...

Although the PIL is in my name as an independent petitioner, friends and like-minded people from the Mahatma Phule-Ambedkar group are supporting me. We want justice.

Why Loya case was in the news

"Our family is pained by the chain of events in past few days. Please don't harass us," Judge BH Loya's son, Anuj Loya said to the media during a press conference on Sunday. The press conference was held in Mumbai two days after top Supreme Court judges took on Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra alleging 'selective' allocation of cases to benches.

Warning that democracy is at stake, four senior judges of the Supreme Court had on Friday mounted a virtual revolt against the country's chief justice, raising questions on "selective" case allocation and certain judicial orders, sending shockwaves across the judiciary and polity. The judges had mentioned the allocation of a petition on judge Loya's death as an issue they had raised.

"There is no controversy, no need of politicising the issue. This is a tragic event. We do not want to be victims of politicisation of the issue. Let it remain the way it is, non-controversial," lawyer Ameet Naik said at the conference on Sunday.

"This is a matter of great grief for the family... Anuj is very disturbed about the issue. Anuj has held this press conference to clear the air about this," he added, reiterating his plea to the media to avoid politicising the death of BH Loya. Anuj's cousin and a family friend were also present during the press conference.

Anuj said he did not have any doubts about the way his father died three years ago. "I had an emotional turmoil, hence I had suspicions about his death. But now we don't have any doubts about the way he died," he said to reporters. "Earlier my grandfather and aunt had some doubts about his death, which they shared. But now neither of them has any doubts," he added.

When Anuj was asked if he wanted an investigation into his father's death, the 21-year-old said, "I am no one to decide if there should be an investigation. I don't think there was anything suspicious about this."

Anuj, who is a second-year student of law in a Pune-based college, also urged NGOs and politicians to stop "harassing" his family. "We faced some pressure from politicians and NGOs. We dont want to name anyone, but please excuse my family from continuously asking about my father's death," he said at the press conference.

Special CBI judge Loya, who was presiding over the Soharabuddin "fake encounter" case at the time, died in Nagpur on 30 November 2014, where he was visiting to attend a colleague's daughter's wedding. He was said to have suffered a heart attack.

Regarding the Supreme Court's probe into Loya's death, the apex court said the "mysterious death" of BH Loya was a "serious matter" and sought a response from the Maharashtra government on pleas seeking an independent probe into it. A bench of justices Arun Mishra and MM Shantanagoudar asked Maharashtra government counsel Nishant R Katneshwarkar to file a reply by 15 January.

With inputs from PTI
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has reportedly asked students to use separate plates to eat non-vegetarian food at the mess of the residential hostel, according to several media reports.

The administration of hostel 11 of the institute reportedly sent an email dated 12 January, requesting non-vegetarians to use plates specially meant for non-vegetarian dishes, and not to use the main plates during dinner, Hindustan Times reported.

The mail was sent after the administration received several complaints from the vegetarian students, the report added.

Although vegetarians and non-vegetarians sit at different tables in the mess, this is the first time they have been asked to use separate plates, Scroll reported.

The administration had said that the email was only sent to reiterate a rule which was already in place.

Speaking to Mid-day, Ritika Verma, general secretary of hostel eleven's student council, said that, "This is not a new rule. It is just a reiteration of a regulation that has existed for many years at all the hostels on IIT-B campus. There have always been separate plates for non-vegetarian food. Yet, a few students were seen eating non-vegetarian food in regular plates."

The move has not gone down well with the students, who argue that citing long-accepted practices cannot be a way to normalise such discrimination, according to Mumbai Mirror.
Jammu: Jammu and Kashmir Finance minister Haseeb Drabu on Tuesday said the estimated size of the Prime Minister's Development Package (PMDP) has gone up to Rs 82,453 crore and the projects instituted under this package are at different stages of execution.

The minister was replying to a question by BJP MLA Rajiv Jasrotia in the state Legislative Assembly.

He said that the package aims at overall development of the state and cannot be segregated at regional, sub-regional or district levels.

Drabu further informed that there was no timeline prescribed for spending, but it depends on their capacity to spend.

He added that a number of steps have been taken to implement the projects under the package in a time-bound manner which include inter-alia, finalisation of location and scoping of individual projects, formulation of Preliminary Project Reports (PPRs) and Detailed Project Reports (DPRs).

Drabu said that nearly all the projects have been taken up and are at different stages of contracting or execution.

Mian Altaf Ahmad, Shakti Raj Parihar and Er Rashid raised supplementary questions to the main question.
Chennai: In a show of solidarity, journalists on Tuesday boycotted a press meet to be addressed by Gujarat MLA and Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani in Chennai after he refused to talk in the presence of an English news channel.

After a closed-door interaction with students and academicians, Mevani had agreed to a short media meet.

As soon as the newsmen started getting ready for the event by arranging the microphones, Mevani asked the reporter of an English news channel to remove his equipment.

The legislator made it clear that he will not talk in the presence of that TV channel since it was "his policy".

"We were arranging the microphone. As soon as he saw microphone that had our logo, he asked us to remove it. I told him we want a general byte and not an exclusive. But he refused", the reporter of that particular channel covering the event told PTI.

"We felt like he was dictating terms. We just sought a byte from him on issues relating to the State (Tamil Nadu)", he said.

The video released later by the TV channel showed Mevani saying he will not speak if there was a question from that particular channel.

"If a question comes (from that channel) I will stop speaking to anyone. Let the mic be removed", Mevani said.

Reacting to Mevani's rider, another TV channel reporter told him: "You cannot demand like that. If you do not want to talk then it is up to you. Thank You."

Following the incident, social media was flooded with comments supporting Chennai media for boycotting the event.
On Friday, four senior Supreme Court judges chose to break norms and go public with their grievances against the Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra. Since then, some have said that their tipping point was the decision by the CJI to assign the case regarding judge BH Loya's death to a bench headed by a relatively junior judge.

Though the Loya case was not mentioned in the letter which the four senior (Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph) wrote to the CJI, during the press conference, when one of the media persons asked the judges whether their grievance about allotment of cases also related to the judge Loya case, the judges nodded in the affirmative. Since then, a great deal of air time, digital space, and newsprint has been devoted to the Loya case.

To hear the Congress, CPI, a section of the media, and certain legal luminaries supporting the four dissenting judges say it, the survival of our democracy and higher judiciary depended on which bench heard the judge Loya case. Except for an article in Caravan, no case has been made of foul play in the death of judge Loya.

So now we have the bizarre situation of judge Loya's 21-year-old son Anuj holding a press conference to announce that there was no foul play in his father's death (judge Loya died of cardiac arrest on 1 December, 2014), even as a section of influential people don't want to believe him and want the Bombay High Court and Supreme Court to institute an inquiry.

Anuj, at the Sunday press conference said: Since the past few days, due to media reports, our family is facing a lot of pain. We have no allegation against anyone. We are really pained, we are already trying to get out of this thing Please I request you people, please do not harass us or trouble us. He told PTI, My father died of natural causes, our family is convinced it was a natural death I have made myself clear that we do not have a suspicion It was a natural death.

That should have ended the controversy, but it didnt. While arguments are being made that Anuj made this statement under pressure, statements made by Anujs aunt over her suspicions about judge Loyas death and other charges relating to that are still being taken at face value. Judge Loya's death evokes a great deal of curiosity even three years later because when he passed away he was handling the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case, in which BJP president Amit Shah was one of the accused. Any suggestion of foul play in Sheikh's death thus has serious implications, both political and legal.

The Caravan story entitled: A Family Breaks its silence: Shocking Details Emerge in Death of Judge Presiding over Sohrabuddins trial was rebutted point by point and almost conclusively rubbished by two investigative reports by The Quint (Judge Loyas Death: Caravan Questions Shoddy Records, Testimonials) and by The Indian Express (CBI judge BH Loyas death in 2014: Nothing suspicious, say two Bombay HC Judges who were at hospital). However, PILs seeking inquiry into judge Loya's death were filed in Bombay High Court and Supreme Court by Bombay Lawyers Association and Tehseen Poonawalla, brother-in-law of Robert Vadra.

By going public, the four senior judges wittingly or unwittingly allowed themselves to be dragged into political domain, onto debates in TV studious, corridors of court rooms, government offices, offices of political parties, residences of political leaders, and tea shops. This is not a healthy development.

The issue emerging from the public debate is about which judge or bench is competent to hear the Loya case. What the argument that only one of the five top judges  either the CJI or one of the senior judges who virtually revolted against him should hear the case  means is open to public interpretation. Incidentally, Rahul Gandhi is demanding much the same. As of now, the case is being heard by Justice Arun Mishra, who is 10th in the pecking order of 25 Supreme Court judges.

The argument was that Justice Mishra did not have the requisite seniority and experience to hear such a case and the CJIs decision as master of the roster was a case of selective court or bench fixing. It should be noted here that the public places its trust and faith in the institution of the Supreme Court and not individual judges (irrespective of their seniority). By questioning the competence of judges on the basis of seniority, public faith in the institution of the Supreme Court has been dented.

A report published in The Times of India entitled: Super Sensitive cases being given to junior SC Judges for last 20 years noted 15 such cases (Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, Bofors, LK Advanis trial in Babri Mosque demolition, Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, Best Bakery case, BCCI case, disqualification of MPs and MLAs upon conviction and sentencing of two years or more, Coal Scam, Black Money case) were assigned not to the four senior most judges but to select benches headed by junior judges. The report said such instances did not attract any comment from activist lawyers about possible breach of bench fixing.

Let us compare Justice Mishras seniority with the fourth senior most judge Kurian Joseph. While Justice Joseph assumed his post on 3 March, 2013, and is set to retire on 29 November, 2018, Justice Mishra (former Chief Justice of Rajasthan High Court and Calcutta High Court) assumed office on 7 July, 2017, and will retire on 2 September, 2020.

In fact, by the end of the year, Justice Mishra will move up four spots (two senior judges are retiring this year) to sixth position. Next year, two more judges would retire thus bringing him into the list of the four senior most judges. The question: What difference would a year or two make as to his competence to hear the case?
The highly-anticipated hearing at the Supreme Court around the circumstances surrounding the death of CBI special Judge BH Loya ended in five minutes, with the apex court saying that the petitioners "must know everything". The court did not fix any specific date but listed the matter for hearing after a week.

The Maharashtra government placed the documents related to death of Judge Loya in a sealed cover before the court. It told the court that barring certain confidential reports placed by it, the petitioners can access other documents.

The petitions were filed last Thursday and allocated to Justice Arun Mishra and Justice Mohan M Shantanagoudar the next day according to The Indian Express. The hearing was deferred to Tuesday as Justice Shantanagoudar was not available

The hearings were being conducted on two petitions, one filed by BR Lone, a Maharashtra-based journalist and the other by activist Tehseen Poonawala.

The counsel for the petitioners told the bench that they needed to look into these documents to argue the matter. "It is a matter where they (petitioners) should know everything," the bench observed. Salve later told the court that the documents could be shown to the petitioners' counsel but they should not make it public and they would mark the confidential documents.

The petitioners' counsel also assured the court that they would not make any of the documents public.

Case was one of the reasons for judges' rebellion

It is worth noting that Judge Loya death case was one of the reasons which prompted four senior to take their grievance about case allotment to the public on 12 January. A crisis had erupted after four senior judges  Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph  openly castigated the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

On Tuesday, the Bar Council of India said there was "absolutely no crisis now" in the Supreme Court and normalcy will be restored soon in the higher judiciary. BCI Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra told PTI that a seven-member delegation on Monday met Justice Ranjan Gogoi, one of the four judges who held the 12 January presser, and he assured him that there was no crisis at all. "Justice Gogoi said the crisis is over. He said there is no dispute at all," Manan said when asked about reports which projected a contrary situation.

This was in contradiction to the statement made by Attorney-General KK Venugopal who said the crisis seems to be unresolved and hoped it will be "fully settled" in a couple of days. On Tuesday, Venugopal told PTI, "Yes, I think it has not been settled. Lets hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days."
A day after Attorney General KK Venugopal and Bar Council of India chairman Manan Misra said that the 'rebellion' in the Supreme Court family is over and that it was a "storm in a tea cup", Justice Arun Mishra will likely hear a petition on Tuesday that calls for an independent investigation into the death of special judge BH Loya.

Loya, who was hearing the CBI's case of murder against BJP chief Amit Shah, died of a cardiac arrest in Nagpur in December 2014. Court later cleared Shah and several top police officers.

On Monday, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and the other judges of the Supreme Court had an informal meeting inside the CJI chambers and Justice Arun Mishra is said to have broken down for being "unfairly" targetted by the four judges raising questions about his "competence" and "integrity".

He said that though his name was not mentioned by the four judges, inferences have been drawn from the cases referred to by the four judges including that of late Judge Loya. Justice Mishra said that he has been working hard and was overburdened. He said that even earlier the former CJIs Justice TS Thakur and Justice JS Khehar had assigned him tough cases.

At this point, the Chief Justice took Justice Mishra to his chamber while Justice J Chelameswar put his arm around his shoulder and told him that they were trying to raise issues and were not against him. According to reports, Justice Mishra was assigned the petition concerning Loya on Friday, the day when the four judges took on the CJI.

The benches in Courts Number two, three, four and five headed by the rebel judges  Justice J Chelameswar, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Kurian Joseph, respectively  attended to their business as usual, reports said.

Later, a lawyer RP Luthra in a mentioning before Court Number One headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra said that there is "a conspiracy to destroy the institution" and urged the Chief Justice to take action against the four judges. However, the Chief Justice smiled and remained silent.

Normalcy returns to Supreme Court

A semblance of normalcy marked the functioning of the Supreme Court on Monday after CJI Misra and all other judges, including those who revolted against him on Friday, had an informal meeting and discussed issues raised by the four judges who held the press conference on 12 January.

No details of what was discussed at the closed-door meeting were available as all judges, including the four, attended to their work after that. There was no word on whether an agreement was reached on the issues raised by the judges led by Justice Chelameswar on allocation of work before various benches of the court and more.

Venugopal and the BCI chief, however, claimed that the crisis in the country's top court "has been settled". "The full court met. It seems that everything is settled. Everything is hunky-dory," the Attorney General told the media.

Manan Mishra said the issues raised by four dissenting top judges of the Supreme Court had been resolved and that the judiciary did not want any political party to take advantage of the situation.

"As you can see, the matter has been laid to rest and all court rooms in the Supreme Court are functioning normally," Mishra said.

An unprecedented crisis engulfed the Supreme Court after the four top Supreme Court judges on Friday took on the Chief Justice over allocation of cases, saying the administration of the court was not in order.

Every day before the commencement of court work at 10.30 am, all the judges have tea together. On Monday, when judges came for the customary tea, the top court staff attending to judges in the lounge were asked to leave. Thereafter, in an informal chat, the issues raised by the four judges at a press conference were talked over and "resolved", a source said.

Congress demands independent probe

Meanwhile, the Congress demanded an independent investigation into the death of Loya, and argued that the consent of his kin was not necessary as the matter "impinges" on democracy. Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi's remarks came a day after Loya's son said that his father died of natural causes and not in suspicious circumstances and urged NGOs and parties not to "politicise" the matter.

Singhvi said that in a matter of public or national interest, anyone can seek a probe and it is not necessary that it will be ordered only on the plea of a family member of the deceased. "As a responsible stakeholder of democracy of this country, we want a fair and comprehensive inquiry regarding the mysterious death of judge Loya," he told reporters here.

Steering clear of any link with the current crisis in the Supreme Court, he said the Congress was not politicising the issue but was only seeking an impartial probe into the death of the judge.

"All my comments today have nothing whatsoever to do with the so-called Supreme Court imbroglio, nothing whatsoever. I think every citizen in this country and every political party is independently entitled to ask for a fair, comprehensive inquiry into his death," he said.

Singhvi said the inquiry should be conducted under the supervision of the Supreme Court or the High Court.

The Congress leader also read out statements of the judge's son Anuj Loya made two years ago at the time of his death and the statements of the judge's father and two sisters raising suspicion over his death.

"This whole argument that there is a politicisation is false. We are simply, as a responsible stakeholder of Indian democracy, asking for inquiry and putting before you the absolute patent paradoxes and contradictions in the diverse statements," he said.

With inputs from agencies
Mumbai: The Congress in Maharashtra on Tuesday demanded a CBI probe into the Kamala Mills Compound fire and suspension of BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta over the incident that resulted in the death of 14 people in December, 2017.

A delegation of state Congress leaders met Governor Vidyasagar Rao and put forward the twin demands.

The delegation comprised Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam and senior leader Arif Mohammed Naseem Khan, among others.

Nirupam later said there had been 48 percent rise in fire incidents in 2017 compared to 2016 due to "faulty" policies of the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) under the present commissioner.

The "casual" attitude of BMC officials towards the Kamala Mills fire victims was "shameful", he said.

Vikhe-Patil said "corruption" in the BMC and illegalities were responsible for the 29 December blaze and also other fire incidents in the metropolis in the past.

"The commissioner deliberately neglected what was happening (illegally in the compound). Demolition of unauthorised structures after the Kamala Mill fire was just an eyewash," Vikhe-Patil said.

He said Mehta was the "culprit number 1" in the entire case and wondered why he has been entrusted with the task of heading the probe into the tragedy.

Nirupam said Shiv Sena-BJP leaders made Mehta make the statement about political pressure on him to go slow on the fire probe.

"This was done to change the course of the investigation," the former Lok Sabha MP alleged.

The Congress leaders demanded a CBI probe into the fire and also suspension of Mehta.
Mojo's Bistro co-owner Yug Tulli on Tuesday surrendered before the Mumbai Police in connection with the Kamala Mills compound fire case.

A sessions court on Friday had rejected Tulli's anticipatory bail application. His lawyer had contended that the devastating fire at the Kamala Mills compound on 29 December, which claimed 14 lives, had started from the adjoining 1Above pub.

However, the prosecution had said that a report of the Mumbai Fire Brigade as well as eyewitnesses said the fire had started at Mojo's Bistro.

In its preliminary probe report, the fire brigade had said the blaze possibly started due to the flying charcoal embers of a hookah at Mojo's Bistro.

The husband of Parul Lakdawala, one of the fire victims, had filed an intervention application, opposing Tulli's anticipatory bail plea, saying that the latter was responsible for the death of his wife and others.

The police have already arrested Yug Pathak, a co-owner of Mojo's Bistro.

Pathak, the son of a retired IPS officer, and Tulli, a Nagpur-based businessman, were booked under sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 338 (causing grievous hurt by act endangering life and personal safety of others) and other relevant provisions of the Indian Penal Code.

The names of Pathak and Tulli were added to the FIR lodged on 29 December against the owners of 1Above: Kripesh Sanghvi, Jigar Sanghvi and Abhijeet Mankar. The three have been arrested and remanded to police custody.

With inputs from PTI
Pune: An assistant sub-inspector of India Reserve Battalion (IRB), posted at the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) camp, allegedly shot dead three persons at Daund near Pune on Tuesday.

The suspect Sanjay Baliram Shinde later locked himself in his house, police said.

One of the deceased was a close relative of the suspect, a police official said.

According to police, Shinde opened fire at two different places  Nagar Mori and Borawake  in Daund, killing three persons.

Additional Superintendent of Police Sandip Pakhale said the reason behind the attack was still unknown.

"The suspect is still at large. We are outside his house. Since he has a weapon, we are treading cautiously," the officer said.

Tension prevailed in Daund after the incident with curious citizens gathering outside the suspect's house, a police officer said.

"SRPF companies and additional force from Pune were summoned to control the law and order situation," he said.

According to a senior SRPF official, Shinde belongs to India Reserve Battalion, Kolhapur, which is a part of SRPF.

"Due to unavailability of space in Kolhapur, some IRB companies are kept at SRPF Group 5 and Group 7 in Daund. The accused Shinde is under the administrative control of Commandant, SRPF 16 Kolhapur," said the officer.
Mumbai: A special NIA court is likely to frame charges against Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit and six other accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts case on 7 February.

The matter was listed on Monday. As the judge was unavailable, the case was adjourned to 7 February.

The court had on 27 December rejected the pleas of the accused for discharge from the case. However, it dropped some sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) against the accused, provisions of which attract punishment up to life in prison.

The court had also dismissed the NIA's contention that there was no evidence against Sadhvi Pragya Thakur, saying it was difficult to accept the claim given that her motorcycle was used in the blast.

The accused will now face trial under sections 16 and 18 of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (conspiring for and committing/organising a terror act) and under the Indian Penal Code for criminal conspiracy, murder, attempt to murder and causing hurt besides charges under the Explosive substances Act and Arms Act.

The charges are punishable by varying prison terms up to life, and death for murder.

The NIA, while filing a chargesheet in the case in 2017, gave a clean chit to Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and three others  Shyam Sahu, Praveen Takalki, Shivnarayan Kalsangra  saying it found no evidence against them and they should be discharged from the case.

The court absolved only Sahu, Kalsangra and Takalki from all the charges, leaving Thakur to face trial.

Two others, Jagdish Mhatre and Rakesh Dhawde, will face trial only under the Arms Act "before concerned courts", the NIA court had said.

The NIA had claimed in its chargesheet that there was no evidence of Thakur ever being part of conspiracy meetings, and though the motorcycle used in the blast once belonged to her, she had sold it much before the blast and had no knowledge of the conspiracy.

Six persons were killed when an improvised explosive device strapped to a motorcycle went off at Malegaon, a town with sizable Muslim population in north Maharashtra's Nashik district, on 29 September, 2008, while 101 people were injured.

The Anti-Terrorism Squad of the Maharashtra police, which probed the case initially, charged Thakur, Purohit, Sudhakar Dwivedi, Ramesh Upadhyay, Sudhakar Chaturvedi, Jagdish Mhatre, Rakesh Dhawade, Ajay Rahirkar, Samir Kulkarni, Shyam Sahu, Shivnarayan Kalsangra, Pravin Mutalik and Ramchandra Kalsangra.

According to the ATS, it was Ramchandra Kalsangra who planted the bomb, and who is still absconding.

Thakur gave her motorbike to Kalsangra to plant the bomb, the ATS had said.

Thakur filed a discharge plea after the Bombay High Court granted her bail in April. The NIA didn't oppose her bail application. Purohit is also out on bail.

The court also had dropped the UAPA sections 17, 20 and 23 against all accused. These sections relate to raising funds for a terrorist organisation, being part of a terrorist organisation and aiding someone who is part of a terrorist organisation.
Kolkata: In an effort to shed West Bengal's investor wary image and woo much-needed capital, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said the people of the state will dedicate their heart to Indian and foreign industrialists if they infused capital in the state.

She also assured industrialists that there is "no pressure, discrimination, and intimidation" in the state and Bengal has only "love and affection" for them.

"If you invest in Bengal, the state will give you everything. We cannot invest, but we can dedicate our heart and ourselves to you.

"We love India and unity of India. We love tolerance. You must invest in Bengal. The state is attracting businesses from all over the world like never before. There is no pressure, discrimination, intimidation... only love, affection and attraction is here," she said.

The business summit was attended by a host of prominent industrialists, including LN Mittal of Arcelor Mittal, Sajjan Jindal of JSW Steel, Kishor Biyani of Future group, Uday Kotak, the head of Kotak group, and Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of RP-Sanjiv Goenka group.

Czech Republic, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Japan, China, South Korea, the UK and the UAE are among the overseas nations represented at the mega business gathering.

The chief minister also said the state holds potential in power, port, agro-based industries, IT and ITes, urban development, health and education and many other sectors.

Reminding investors that West Bengal was the gateway to the northeastern states and neighbouring countries of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, Banerjee made a passionate appeal to them to come to the state.

"Please consider Bengal as your home and the Bengal will work with transparency, accountability, credibility, sincerity and punctuality. We consider all of you as our family members. It is a collective family and without you, we account think and organise the event," she said.

Banerjee also said the state emerged as the number one in many parameters, including e-governance and digital applications in delivering public services despite the "long legacy" of the Left Front government of "doing nothing".

"No man-days were lost. Six years ago, man-days lost was 78 lakh due to agitations during the regime of the Left Front (that ruled Bengal between 1977 and 2011). We do not allow any strike and blockade. If there is a problem, we sort it out," she said.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday came down heavily on the CBI's SIT, probing alleged extra-judicial killings and fake encounters by the Army, Assam Rifles and police in insurgency-hit Manipur, for not registering the required number of FIRs as directed by it earlier.

The apex court directed the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to lodge 30 more FIRs on or before 31 January this year, after the SIT informed it that it has registered 12 FIRs to date.

A bench comprising justices Madan B Lokur and UU Lalit directed the probe team to complete by 28 February this year, its investigation into 12 cases lodged by them and file the final reports before the concerned court.

The bench, which perused the first status report filed by the SIT, posed searching questions to it.

The bench asked why all the FIRs have not been registered yet despite its 14 July order last year.

It directed that all the subsequent status reports, to be filed before it by the SIT, should have the approval of the CBI director.

The bench also asked the CBI director to monitor the progress in the investigation and posted the matter for further hearing on 12 March.

The apex court had earlier said it appeared that matters related to the probe into alleged fake encounters in Manipur were not being taken up seriously by the SIT.

The top court had on 14 July last year set up an SIT comprising five CBI officers and ordered registration of FIRs and probe into the alleged extra-judicial killings in Manipur.

It had asked the CBI director to nominate a team of five officers for the SIT to lodge the necessary FIRs and complete the investigation into alleged fake encounters by 31 December last year.

The apex court, which is hearing a PIL seeking probe into 1,528 alleged extra-judicial killings, had in July last year ordered registration of an FIR in 81 cases.

These cases include 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 National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and six cases probed by a commission headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice Santosh Hegde.
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New Delhi: Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan on Tuesday said he had filed a complaint against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra in the medical college scam case and requested five senior most apex court judges, including the four rebel judges, to hold an in-house inquiry into the matter.

As a convenor of Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms, Bhushan demanded in-house inquiry against Justice Misra saying that "the CJI has apparently committed several acts of serious misconduct that should be inquired into by a committee of three/five Judges of this court".

Bhushan levelled four charges against the chief justice in his complaint addressed to Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph  who held a presser last week complaining against the CJI  and Justice A K Sikri.

"The facts and circumstances relating to the Prasad Education Trust case show prima facie evidence suggesting that CJI Misra may have been involved in the conspiracy of paying illegal gratification in the case, which at least warrants a thorough investigation," Bhushan said.

M Quddusi, a retired Judge of the Orissa High Court was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation and later granted bail, Biswanath Agarwala, a middleman, and BP Yadav of the Prasad Education Trust, the institution which was barred by the Medical Council of India from admitting medical students and subsequently appealed before the Allahabad High Court and Supreme Court.

The complaint also questioned Justice Misra's denial of permission to the CBI to register a case against Justice Narayan Shukla of the Allahabad High Court in the Prasad Education Trust matter.

Bhushan's second charge against Justice Misra dealt with the "alleged misuse of his administrative powers by ignoring the clear principle of conflict of interest and proceeding with hearing of a petition for an independent inquiry by a former CJI into the irregularities in the Prasad Education Trust matter".

After hearing the petition himself, Justice Misra nullified the order of another bench of Justice Chelameswar who had ordered the matter to be listed before five senior Judges of the Supreme Court. The CJI constituted a three-Judge bench to hear the petition which later dismissed the plea filed by the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms.

Bhushan alleged that Justice Misra "conducted a serious act of forgery by ante-dating an administrative order dated 6 November, 2017".

The Supreme Court advocate also alleged that "Justice Misra as lawyer acquired land for a fodder farm in Odisha by furnishing a false affidavit". Later, the land deal was cancelled by a local Magistrate in 1985 but Justice Misra surrendered the land in 2012 after he was elevated to the Supreme Court.

The 24-page complaint read: "The abovementioned matters have tarnished the reputation of the court and have brought the judiciary into disrepute. It is a matter which needs to be swiftly dealt with."

"The inquiry must be swiftly done so that the reputation of the judiciary is not damaged further and its integrity and independence remains intact."
Mumbai: Moshe Holtzberg, who lost his parents in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, arrived in Mumbai for the first time since the tragedy struck the family over nine years ago, and said he was happy to visit the city.

"Shalom... bahut khushi (I'm very happy)," said a shy Moshe, who arrived at the Mumbai airport shortly after 8 am.

The boy, who is now 11 years old, was accompanied by his grandfather Shimon Rosenberg. Rosenberg said they will visit the

Nariman House, where Moshe's parents were killed in the terror attack in November 2008, and pray there.

"I feel very happy to come to India, to Nariman House where I am going to pray. I will say hi to the people of India. I feel very good in this country," Rosenberg said.

Moshe was two years old when his parents  Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and Rivka  were killed during the siege at the Nariman House by 10 Pakistani terrorists in November 2008.

The Jewish couple ran a cultural and outreach centre for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement at the Nariman House in South Mumbai's Colaba area. Moshe's Indian nanny Sandra Samuels had saved the child during the terror attack.

The terrorists carried out the attacks over three days in the city and killed 166 people. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met Moshe and his grandparents during a visit to Israel in July last year andtold him that he could visit India anytime.

While meeting Modi, Moshe had said, "I remember our connection to Nariman House. I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai and when I get older, live there."

"Dear Mr Modi, I love you and the people in India," the boy had said.
Mumbai: Mumbai police on Monday said that it had denied permission to some Muslim groups to hold a protest gathering at Azad Maidan against visiting Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Police today denied permission to some Muslim groups to hold a protest meet against the PM of Israel at Azad Maidan," a senior police official said.

Netanyahu, who is one a six-day tour to the country, will be in Mumbai on Thursday and is scheduled to visit Nariman House, a Jewish center that was one of the targets of the 26 November, 2008 terror strikes in the city.

Netanyahu will be accompanied by 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg who lost his parents in the attack.
Mumbai's air quality on Monday was the worst the city has seen in the new year, with the air quality index (AQI) at 253, according to the government's System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research (SAFAR).

At 253, air quality is said to be "poor" and "very unhealthy", according to the US Consulate Mumbai. "Health warnings of emergency conditions. The entire population is more likely to be affected" is how the US Consulate Mumbai describes "poor" air quality level.

Hindustan Times reported that prior to Monday, Mumbai had recorded a moderate air quality level of 190 on Sunday. During the first week of January, AQI in the city ranged between 216 and 240.

In fact, the air quality on Monday was close to the worst AQI for the entire winter season in Mumbai, which was 258, recorded on 25 December.

The Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) was the most polluted area in Mumbai, its air quality at a staggering 313.

The silver lining, however, is that SAFAR predicted an AQI of 172 for Tuesday.

"Wind speeds are normal and temperatures are higher than the past few days. Pollution levels are increasing due to an external source which could be due burning of wood during festivals over the weekend," The Times of India quoted Gufran Beig, project director at SAFAR, as saying.

On 18 December, PTI had reported that the government formulated a national clear air programme to tackle increasing air pollution across the country in a comprehensive manner.

Environment minister Harsh Vardhan in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha had said that the Centre has formulated the National Clear Air Programme (NCAP). "The government has formulated the NCAP as a long term time-bound national level strategy to tackle the increasing air pollution problem across the country in a comprehensive manner," he had said.

The minister had said that the objective is to augment and evolve an effective ambient air quality monitoring network across the country, besides ensuring a comprehensive management plan for prevention, control and abatement of air pollution.

"The NCAP focuses on a collaborative and participatory approach comprising all sources of pollution and coordination between relevant central ministries, state governments, local bodies and other stakeholders," he had said.

With inputs from PTI
Mumbai: Top NCP leaders from Maharashtra on Tuesday, took to the streets as part of the second phase of their agitation against the Devendra Fadnavis government.

The Sharad Pawar-led opposition party has started an agitation, `halla bol' (attack), against the BJP-led government for its "anti-people and anti-farmer" policies.

State NCP president Sunil Tatkare and senior party leaders like Ajit Pawar, Supriya Sule and Dhananjay Munde were among those present at the inauguration of the second phase of the stir in the temple town of Tuljapur in Marathwada.

After offering prayers to Goddess Tulja Bhavani at a temple, they joined party workers and leaders from Marathwada to perform "Gondhal", a ritualistic dance form and folk art, to highlight the alleged failures of the Fadnavis government.

The NCP leaders and workers also took out a morcha and later handed over a memorandum against the government to the tehsildar of Tuljapur, about 400 kilometres from Mumbai.

The agitation will cover the entire Marathwada region and conclude at Aurangabad on 3 February when party chief Sharad Pawar will participate in a rally. The first phase of the stir was organised last month.
Shillong: The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) of Sharad Pawar, a coalition partner of the Congress in the Meghalaya government, on Tuesday announced that it would contest the upcoming state Assembly polls on its own and field candidates on at least 42 seats.

NCP general secretary Praful Patel said the party could have an electoral understanding with regional parties on a few seats, adding that the scenario would be more clear as the election approached.

Patel, whose party had been supporting the Congress-led Meghalaya Progressive Alliance in the north-eastern state for the last five years, attacked Chief Minister Mukul Sangma for allegedly not giving the NCP its due in governance. The NCP's electoral plans for Meghalaya and two other north-eastern states of Nagaland and Tripura, where polls are due in the first quarter of the year, were made public by Patel after chairing a party meeting.

"We are going to contest on 22 of the 24 seats in the Garo Hills region and at least on 20 seats in the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya," he told reporters.

The NCP had two MLAs in the 60-member Meghalaya Assembly after the 2013 state polls. After Sanbor Shullai's resignation from the House, it is now left with only one legislator, MA Sangma.

On Monday, it had named Saleng A Sangma the new state party chief after he resigned from the House as an Independent MLA.

In Nagaland, Patel said the party was going to contest from fewer seats, but did not specify the number. "We have had four MLAs in Nagaland in the past," he said.

In Tripura, the NCP leader said the party was not going to contest, except for a few "token" seats. The polls in these states are due in the first quarter of

the year as the term of their current assemblies is scheduled to come to an end by March. The term of the Meghalaya Assembly ends on 6 March.

Patel, who was here on a whirlwind two-day tour, is slated to address a rally in the Garo Hills tomorrow, before returning to Delhi.

The former Union minister also released the first list of six candidates (for the Khasi-Jaintia Hills region), featuring former minister ECB Bamon who would lock horns with NPP candidate and former Congress minister Sniawbhalang Dhar.

Attacking the Sangma government, Patel said, "Misgovernance is of the highest order. The people are disillusioned and they are looking for a change." While acknowledging the growing popularity of the BJP in the state, he said the divisive policies of the saffron party and its allies, as regards food habits, cultural and religious ethos, would lead to fragmentation of the society.

"I am sure the people of Meghalaya will outrightly reject these infringements on their food habits, beliefs, religious ethos and that a befitting answer (to the BJP) will be given by the state in the coming election."

Asserting that the NCP was a credible alternative for the people of Meghalaya, the former Union minister said the party aimed at bringing good governance.

He was particularly harsh on the Sangma government for denying former Meghalaya NCP chief Sanbor Shullai a ministerial post, after he was asked to resign as the deputy speaker of the Assembly.

"The Congress did not do justice to the two MLAs from our party. They took our support, made Shullai the deputy speaker and then, asked him to resign," Patel said, adding that the NCP never got the respect it deserved in the ruling alliance.

Shullai is now with the BJP.

Asserting that the party would not extend support to the BJP after the election "for sure", the NCP leader said, "We will do what is in the best interest of the people of Meghalaya and have an alliance with the regional forces."
Islamabad: Pakistan is examining a proposal for a DGMO-level meeting with India, which last happened in December 2013, to reduce tension along the Line of Control and the Working Boundary through fresh confidence-building measures, according to a media report.

The report comes a day after Pakistan said four of its soldiers died and five others injured in cross-border firing by India across the LoC. The Indian Army, however, said seven Pakistani soldiers were killed in its retaliatory firing.

A Pakistan defence ministry official in a meeting on Monday told the Senate defence committee that a "fresh proposal of DGMOs' (Director Generals of Military Operations) meeting is being considered," Dawn newspaper reported. The official also briefed the senators about the latest trends in Indian ceasefire violations, it said.

According to the report, one of the confidence-building measures being considered for the planned meeting of DGMOs is "calibre reduction" of the arms being used at the LoC.

Pakistan-India DGMOs have a frequent hotline contact, but they last met face to face four years ago at Wagah, a village which serves as a transit terminal between Lahore and Amritsar.

The 24 December, 2013 Wagah meeting had taken place after a break of 14 years. That meeting too was held to discuss ways to ensure peace along the LoC and the Working Boundary. Meanwhile, a resolution adopted by the Senate committee through consensus condemned Indian Army chief Gen. Bipin Rawat's statement about "calling nuclear bluff of Pakistan" as "stupidity and provocative".

They termed it a "war-like" proclamation, the report said.
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Pravin Togadia, who went missing and was later found in an unconscious state on Monday evening, has claimed there is a threat to his life, and that his voice is being suppressed through threats of violence and false court cases.

Togadia, national working president of the VHP, was addressing a press conference in Ahmedabad on Tuesday, hours after doctors confirmed he was suffering from low blood sugar levels. But Togadia insisted he was on his way to Jaipur to present himself before a court when he fell unconscious.

"I told my security team I am going out by myself. I left alone at around 3 pm on Monday. But my health soon worsened and I fell unconscious. I don't remember anything after that point. When I regained consciousness, I was in a hospital. I don't remember which hospital this was, or even who brought me there. All I remember is that doctors told me my health isn't good and I shouldn't exert myself," Togadia said on Tuesday.

He also denied all the charges levelled against him, saying they were borne out of vendetta, in order to muffle his voice. "They have filed cases against me under various offences. I myself don't know about many of these cases. They are all attempts to suppress my voice," a tearful Togadia said. "I am in touch with lawyers in Rajasthan. They said they will try and get the cases quashed."

Furthermore, he said, there are also people making death threats. "A person came to me when I was praying and said they will encounter me. I didn't pay him much attention initially, but then I started receiving calls as well that alleged the same. So now they are using both violence and court cases to target me," he said.

These attempts, however, will not dissuade him from continuing on his path, he insisted. "I have never run from the law and I don't fear anybody. So, I am not running away. I am waiting until the doctors give me a clean chit of health and permit me to travel out of town. Once they do that, I will present myself before the court in Jaipur," he said.

He also urged VHP workers to keep calm. However, on Monday evening, after news of Togadia going missing made the rounds, the activists created a ruckus in Ahmedabad, alleging that the police, in connivance with their Rajasthan counterparts, had taken Togadia into custody in connection with a 10-year-old murder case. Angry VHP workers on Monday took to streets after reports said Togadia had been arrested and continued sit-ins even after a Gujarat police statement that he had gone "missing".

The police said that a contingent of Rajasthan Police had indeed come to arrest him under Section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the IPC in an old case, but could not find him at his residence.

Earlier this year, on 5 January, Togadia had alleged a conspiracy had been hatched against him by a "higher up in the BJP" to implicate and jail him in a 1996 murder case by ensuring he did not get the summons issued against him. The Metropolitan Court on Friday cancelled a non-bailable warrant issued against Togadia, once a powerful figure in the Hindutva camp.

"The police did not make those summons available to me. I have received information that this was done purposefully by someone higher up, without the intervention of (state) home minister or the chief minister," he had said.

Togadia added, "Just like it happened during the Patidar agitation, when (then chief minister) Anandiben Patel said she did not order the lathicharge on agitators, this case is similar. (Deputy chief minister) Nitin Patel, (chief minister) Vijay Rupani wouldn't do that. Why were the summons not made available to me despite my presence in Ahmedabad? Since some time I feel my voice is being gagged. I will later reveal who is behind it all," he added.

With inputs from agencies
Patidar leader Hardik Patel has come out in support of Pravin Togadia, agreeing with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader's contention that there are factions within the BJP that are targeting him.

"I don't agree with Togadia on a number of issues, but on this topic, we are as one. Everybody knows the conspiracy being run under Amitbhai and Narendrabhai. It's a known secret that the RSS is against Pravin Togadia," Patel said on Tuesday.

We know what Amit Shah and Narendra Modi are doing.. RSS is against Praveen Togadia: Hardik Patel pic.twitter.com/zG4nmS2PmS  News18 (@CNNnews18) January 16, 2018

He was addressing the media just hours after Togadia did, where the latter claimed there was a threat to his life. He had said his voice is being suppressed through threats of violence and false court cases.

"A person came to me when I was praying and said they will encounter me. I didn't pay him much attention initially, but then I started receiving calls as well that alleged the same. So now they are using both violence and court cases to target me," he said.

These attempts, however, will not dissuade him from continuing on his path, he insisted. "I have never run from the law and I don't fear anybody. So, I am not running away. I am waiting until the doctors give me a clean chit of health and permit me to travel out of town. Once they do that, I will present myself before the court in Jaipur," he said.

Reacting to these claims, Hardik Patel, who has often clashed with the Sangh Parivar on a number of issues, said a number of groups are under threat under the present government. "The poor people of the state and our farmers are also under threat. There is a real and present danger here. Hindutva isn't under threat, but Hindustan is," he said.
Media reports indicate that the Chief Justice of India (CJI) has reached out to his four dissenting colleagues and held a 15-minute meeting on Tuesday to sort out their "differences". They will meet again. This is a welcome step.

It will be interesting to note the outcome of the meetings, given the seriousness of the charge that the 'rebel' judges had brought against the CJI. It is difficult to see how an "amicable solution" may still emerge. If the judges fall in line, their dissent will be deemed pointless and an exercise in vanity that did little else other than robbing the Supreme Court of its veneer of respectability. If they don't, we are in for a protracted crisis.

However, we must not get ahead of the story. For now, the "heart-to-heart" chat is slated to resume on Wednesday. At this stage, it is still unclear whether the four rebel judges have achieved their purpose in approaching the media. What is already clear though is that public perception about the Judiciary and the land's highest court has taken a severe beating.

In breaking the code and bringing their grievances against CJI Dipak Misra out in the open, judges Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph have driven home the truth about the adage why judges should never be heard outside the court.

For the last few days, since that extraordinary press conference at Justice Chelameswar's residence, media, activists, lawyers, activist-lawyers, NGOs, sanctimonious "eminent citizens", members of the Lutyens' ecosystem, Opposition politicians and even the RSS have engaged in a free-for-all. As an institution, the Supreme Court is being hauled over the coals  doubts are being raised over everything, including the constitution of benches to verdicts. The denigration has been swift, tragic and irreversible.

For instance, a headline in Tuesday's edition of a national daily read: 'Four judges who criticised CJI Dipak Misra not on Bench that will hear 7 key matters'. It is possible to draw an inference from the headline that there is a correlation between the dissenting judges' conduct and their absence from "key matters". The implications of such an inference go further.

To recall, the point of friction that led four judges to attack the CJI in media was that "important cases" are being assigned to "junior judges" and "select benches" bypassing senior ones. As The Times of India had noted in a report, "the discontent over not being assigned important cases that get space in newspapers and TV channels was simmering for a long time, even before Misra took over the top post in August last year."

Though a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court had earlier ruled that the CJI is the 'master of the roster' and reserves the right to constitute benches, the dissenting judges had alleged through a letter to the CJI that "the convention of recognising the privilege of the chief justice to form the roster and assign cases to different members/benches of the court is a convention devised for a disciplined and efficient transaction of business of the court, but not a recognition of any superior authority, legal or factual, of the chief justice over his colleagues. It is too well-settled in jurisprudence that the chief justice is only the first among equals  nothing more or nothing less."

This is where the charges fail the logic test. If the CJI is merely the "first among equals" and possesses no "superior authority, legal or factual" over his colleagues, then where does the question of "seniority" or "junior judges" arise? The Supreme Court has 25 seasoned judges on its roster. These are men/women of high competence, eminence and experience. No one can walk his or her way into becoming a judge at the apex court without requisite qualifications. If that is so, why are the dissenting judges putting up seniority as a benchmark while demanding to adjudicate "key" cases?

A lawyer Lakshminarayanan Venkatachari writes in his column for The Times of India: "If every judge is equal to the other, then where is the question of seniority? The verdict is that of the Supreme Court, not of individual judges. Further, Supreme Court is not comprised by judicial greenhorns but by seasoned judges of constitutional courts, who have put in a decade or more in the Judiciary."

This fallacy has now paved the way for media, pressure groups and politicians to raise questions against the competence of the apex court. The Supreme Court has 21 other judges in addition to the four 'rebel' ones. How does it matter who adjudicates over the case? Questioning the constitution of benches is tantamount to raising doubts over the fairness of the verdict, and no judicial institution (much less the highest court of the land) may operate under that trust deficit.

When we consider media reports that "super sensitive" cases have been given to "junior" SC judges for the last 20 years under different CJIs, then the bone of contention that led the four judges to take such an unprecedented step makes even less sense.

As Dhananjay Mahapatra writes in The Times of India: "TOI tracked 15 'super sensitive cases of national importance' in the last two decades, including those relating to Bofors, Rajiv Gandhi assassination, LK Advani's trial in Babri Masjid demolition, Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter, Best Bakery and the case that changed how the BCCI is run. All of them have one thing in common  they were assigned by the then CJIs, not to any of the four senior-most judges of the SC but to 'select benches' headed by junior judges."

This not only points to the fact that "seniority" has never been an entitlement in the apex court, it also raises troublesome questions about the motive behind the four judges' pressure tactics. Let's revisit the letter.

"There have been instances where cases having far-reaching consequences for the nation and the institution had been assigned by the chief justice of this court selectively to the benches 'of their preferences' without any rational basis for such assignment. This must be guarded against at all costs," they wrote.

In voicing their lack of trust in the way CJI constitutes benches or performs administrative functions, the dissenting judges have made an implication that the departures from convention have been carried out with a motive to fix the outcomes. This is the most damaging charge against the CJI that not only raises doubts over his integrity but also suggests that their colleagues are amenable to influence.

If media reports are to be believed, the customary Monday morning meeting among the judges (the first since the public allegations) saw stormy scenes.

The Times of India quoted a source in claiming that a junior judge accused the 'rebels' of bringing the institution into disrepute. "Why did you go to the press without even informing other judges about the grievance of assigning of cases by the CJI to select benches? By going to the press, you wanted to tell the world that only senior judges are competent to handle cases and junior judges are not. You have killed the institution, its reputation and maligned every single judge," the junior judge reportedly said.

The gravity of the charges makes it difficult for an amicable solution to arise. It is difficult to see how there will be a reconciliation between the 'rebels' and other judges when entire reputations are at stake.

As Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in The Indian Express, "There is no half-way house when it comes to guilt or innocence. The judge's press conference, and the artfully evasive letter, seem to suggest there is. But now that they have gone public, they have to follow through on the seriousness of the charge; otherwise, this is just pressure tactics. It is dangerous pressure tactics because one implication will be that any 'pro-government' decision on a bench allotted by the chief justice, will now have the imprimatur of doubt over it."

The nature of the gambit is such that the dissenting judges must take their dissent to its logical conclusion. Any attempts at papering over the crisis or shutting the eyelids closely and hoping the dust storm will subside won't work.
Amid the ongoing rift between the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and four senior-most judges over the assignment of important cases, the Supreme Court on Monday announced the composition of a five-judge Constitution Bench headed by the CJI.

This bench will hear eight crucial cases on Wednesday, including Aadhaar, the validity of Section 377 of Indian Penal Code which criminalises homosexuality, the validity of adultery law under the IPC, entry of women into Kerala's Sabarimala temple and other cases.

None of the four judges who spoke out against the CJI  justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, MB Lokur and Kurian Joseph  feature on the Constitution Bench.

According to PTI, the five-judge bench, comprising CJI Misra, Justice AK Sikri, Justice AM Khanwilkar, Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice Ashok Bhushan, will commence the hearing on a range of crucial matters from 17 January.

Aadhaar-privacy row

The Aadhaar case will take a look at the legality of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act which was enacted in 2016.

The bench would sit at 2 pm on Wednesday to take up the interlocutory applications seeking interim relief against the Centre's decision on linking of Aadhaar with various schemes.

The Centre had on 7 December told the apex court that the deadline for mandatory linking of Aadhaar to avail various services and welfare schemes would be extended until 31 March next year.

On 27 November, the apex court had said it may consider setting up a Constitution Bench to hear pleas challenging the Centre's move to make Aadhaar card mandatory for availing various services and benefits of welfare schemes.

It had on 30 October said a Constitution Bench would commence hearing on the clutch of petitions against the Aadhaar scheme from the last week of November.

Back in August, a nine-judge bench of the apex court had held that Right to Privacy was a Fundamental Right under the Constitution. Several petitioners challenging the validity of Aadhaar had claimed it violated privacy rights.

Validity of Section 377

Alongside the crucial hearing on the Aadhaar-privacy issue, the bench will also hear a plea seeking decriminalisation of gay sex between consenting adults.

A bench comprising CJI Misra and justices Khanwilkar and Chandrachud had on 8 January said that 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 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.

The bench was hearing a fresh plea filed by Navtej Singh Johar, seeking that Section 377 be declared as unconstitutional to the extent that it provides for the prosecution of adults for indulging in consensual gay sex.

The same combination of judges had last year heard various Constitution Bench matters from 10 October, including the power tussle between the Centre and the Delhi government over administrative jurisdiction and a matter relating to passive euthanasia.

In their unprecedented press conference on Friday, the four senior judges of the apex court had mounted a virtual revolt against the CJI, listing a litany of problems, including assignment of cases. They had also raised questions over the listing of PILs concerning Loya's death.

An office bearer of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) said a copy of their resolution was submitted by its president Vikas Singh to the CJI on Sunday, but have not heard anything from the top court as yet.

Meanwhile, court sources said it was not confirmed whether the CJI met the four judges on Monday, who had hurled accusations against him at their controversial press conference on 12 January.

Singh had expressed hope that all judges of the apex court would consider the SCBA resolution seeking a full-court discussion to defuse the crisis plaguing the higher judiciary.

The SCBA, at an emergency meeting on Sunday, had passed the resolution expressing grave concern over the differences of four senior-most judges with the CJI.

It had said that all public interest litigation (PIL) matters, including the pending PILs, should be either taken up by the CJI or be assigned for adjudication to four senior judges who are part of the apex court collegium.

With inputs from PTI
Colombo/Rameswaram: At least 16 Tamil Nadu fishermen have been arrested and their four fishing trawlers seized for allegedly fishing in Sri Lanka's territorial waters near Katchatheevu islet, the Sri Lankan Navy said on Tuesday in Colombo.

The fast gun boats and the fast attack craft, attached to the Northern Naval Command of the Sri Lanka Navy, arrested the fishermen in the seas, northwest of the Delft Island and northeast of the Katchatheevu Island.

The fishermen and trawlers were handed over to the Assistant Director of Fisheries in Jaffna for further legal action, the navy added.

Meanwhile in Rameswaram, a fisheries department official said that more than 2,500 fishermen, from Mandapam and Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, had ventured into the sea on Monday.

They were fishing off Katchatheevu when the Lankan naval personnel came to the spot and snapped the fishing nets of 100 boats before chasing them away, Assistant Director of Fisheries Department, Mandapam, Gopinath said.

Condemning the frequent arrest of Indian fishermen, Rameswaram Fishermen Association president, P Sesuraja asked the Centre to intervene and help them fish in the traditional waters in Palk Strait.

The arrest of Indian fishermen by Sri Lankan Navy has become a flash point in India-Sri Lanka relations.

On 4 January, at least 13 Tamil Nadu fishermen were arrested by the Sri Lankan Navy, prompting Chief Minister K Palaniswami to urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi to secure their release.

On 7 January, over 4,000 Tamil Nadu fishermen were chased away by the Navy personnel who also snapped the fishing nets of 100 boats for allegedly fishing in the territorial waters off Katchatheevu islet.

Over 3,500 fishermen from Tamil Nadu were on 9 January chased away by the Lankan naval personnel who had damaged some boats by pelting stones and snapped the fishing nets of around 50 vessels.
A day after Attorney General KK Venugopal called the ongoing crisis in Supreme Court a "storm in a tea cup", on Tuesday said the crisis seems to be unresolved and hoped it will be "fully settled" in a couple of days.

We are in the process of resolving the issue. It would be resolved shortly: Attorney General KK Venugopal. #SupremeCourt pic.twitter.com/YceuNpqgsJ  ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

"Everything has been settled" is what Venugopal claimed on Monday after four senior judges openly castigated the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

"Everything has been settled is what I believe  Everything is under control. Everything has been settled," he told PTI. When asked if he has met any of the judges, Venugopal had said "nobody at all," including the Chief Justice. He added that all the four senior-most judges had held their courts today and conducted routine work.

On Tuesday, Venugopal told PTI, "Yes, I think it has not been settled. Lets hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days."

On 12 January, four senior Supreme Court judges  Justice J Chelameswar, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Kurian Joseph  openly castigated the functioning of the top court headed by the CJI.

Asked about reports about the impasse continuing, Venugopal said he has to agree with the view. On whether he had a meeting or spoke with any of the four judges or the CJI, Venugopal said, "Nothing of that sort has happened". However, he hoped things will be sorted out in the next couple of days.

Venugopal, on Friday, had said that the judges could have avoided going public with their complaints against CJI Misra. He also said that the judges were men of repute and statesmen and hoped that they would solve their difference amicably.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Principal Secretary Nripendra Misra was on Saturday morning seen driving to the residence of the Chief Justice. He was seen sitting inside his official car which returned from the gate of the Chief Justice's residence without entering there.

Not just the Attorney General, the Bar Council of India at a press conference on Monday said that "it was an internal issue and has been resolved internally". When asked how such a major development was solved "internally", BCI chief Manan Kumar Mishra said that it was a matter "within a family" which was resolved after the judges met in the CJI's chambers on Monday. The council said its members had met 15 judges of the Supreme Court following the crisis. "Kahani khatam ho gaya (the story is now over)," Mishra said.
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The CJI met the four dissenting judges and held talks for 15 minutes over possible solutions to the issues raised by them.

Judge BH Loya's death case must not be confidential, the Supreme Court said in a 5-minute hearing. Everything must be before the public. The Supreme Court, without fixing any specific date, listed the matter for hearing after a week.

Maharashtra Government handed over documents in a sealed cover to Supreme Court.

A day after Attorney General KK Venugopal called the ongoing crisis in Supreme Court a "storm in a tea cup", on Tuesday said the crisis seems to be unresolved and hoped it will be "fully settled" in a couple of days.

Further, a Constitution Bench comprising CJI Dipak Misra, Justice AK Sikri, Justice AM Khanwilkar, Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice Ashok Bhushan has been constituted to hear important cases including those on Aadhaar, decriminalisation of homosexuality, validity of adultery law under IPC, entry of women into Sabarimala temple etc. It will start the hearings from 17 January.

The informal meeting Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra had with the judges of the Supreme Court on Monday morning had some emotional moments. Justice Arun Mishra is said to have broken down for being "unfairly" targeted by the four judges raising questions about his "competence" and "integrity".

He said that though his name was not mentioned by the four judges, inferences have been drawn from the cases referred to by the four judges including that of late CBI special court judge BH Loya.

Justice Mishra said that he has been working hard and was overburdened. He said that even earlier the former Chief Justices TS Thakur and JS Khehar had assigned him tough cases.

At this point, the Chief Justice took Justice Mishra to his chamber while Justice J Chelameswar put his arm around his shoulder and told him that they were trying to raise issues and were not against him.

The benches in Courts Number two, three, four and five headed by the rebel judges  Justice J Chelameswar, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Kurian Joseph, respectively  attended to their business as usual.

Later, a lawyer RP Luthra in a mentioning before Court Number One headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra said that there is "a conspiracy to destroy the institution" and urged the Chief Justice to take action against the four judges.

However, the Chief Justice smiled and remained silent.
Even as tensions continue to simmer at the Supreme Court following the press conference held by four senior judges over the allocation of cases by the CJI, the court constituted a Constitution Bench to hear certain important matters. Comprising CJI Dipak Misra, Justice AK Sikri, Justice AM Khanwilkar, Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice Ashok Bhushan, the Bench will take up matters ranging from Aadhaar to the decriminalisation of homosexuality on Wednesday.

The Aadhaar case will be a look at the legality of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act which was enacted in 2016.

In December 2017, the court had extended the deadline for mandatory linking of Aadhaar with various services and welfare schemes till 31 March, 2018. It had also modified its earlier order with regard to linking Aadhaar with mobile services and said the deadline of 6 February, 2018 for this purpose also stood extended till 31 March.

The same judges who had heard the matter then will be hearing it on Wednesday.

Soon after the deadline extension was reported, lawyer Prasanna S pointed out that the order failed to look at the inherent lawlessness by the state which had mandated Aadhaar for bank accounts despite the court's own earlier orders disallowing Aadhaar's use for anything other than voluntary use for six schemes.

...the union govt never having applied to the Court to modify its earlier orders. An interim order without good reasons for condoning such apparent lawlessness of the state is to say the least, disappointing.  Prasanna S (@prasanna_s) December 15, 2017

LiveLaw had reported that the judgment in Binoy Viswam vs Union of India will continue to prevail as far as the requirement of Aadhaar for PAN under the Income Tax Act is concerned.

Right to Privacy and its effect on Aadhaar

In August 2017, the Supreme Court in a unanimous 9:0 judgment had declared the Right to Privacy to be a Fundamental Right. It was hailed as a big victory for pro-privacy advocates who could now point to the Constitutional Bench judgment should the right ever be questioned.

However, the judgment only established the theoretical Right to Privacy. It removed the earlier hurdles of the cases of MP Sharma and Kharak Singh which had held Right to Privacy not to be a Fundamental Right. However, the actual freedoms protected by the Right had to be enshrined into in separate judgments.

As far Aadhaar is concerned, the judgment did not invalidate it in any way. However, it did give a boost to anti-Aadhaar arguments which rely on privacy as now the government can no longer say that there is no Right to Privacy.

That being said, Soli Sorabjee while talking to The Economic Times said, "You cannot make a blanket and categorical statement that Aaadhaar will be banned or is unconstitutional. No Fundamental Right is absolute. It is always subject to reasonable restrictions." Thus even after recognising Right to Privacy as a Fundamental Right, the court could still save Aadhaar under a reasonable restriction.

Meghnad S had told Firstpost that "Aadhaar might slip through the cracks because an arbitrary restriction like national security might be used. It's about a larger question of privacy right now."

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said he was sure Aadhaar will stand the test of constitutionality. "The legislation has been passed and I'm sure it will stand the test of constitutionality. Even while upholding the idea of privacy as an important constitutional guarantee, the Supreme Court said that it is the question raised just now. (Violation of privacy) could be imposed by law but they have to be obviously reasonable," Jaitley had said.

He had said that the Right to Privacy has illustrative restraints like national security and dissemination of social benefits and Aadhaar is being used for the latter. "As some of the illustrative restraints, not exhaustive, are in the larger interest of national security or for the purposes of dissemination of social benefits," he said.

Writing for Firstpost, Kriti Trehan had argued that in principle, we are faced with issues of consent. In practice, we struggle with infrastructural deficiencies and an absence of safeguards and accountability. The large-scale centralisation of everything from personal identifiers to financial information, coupled with less than confidence-inspiring security systems to keep the data safe, is probably the greatest concern plaguing those who are sceptical of the Aadhaar process from a privacy perspective. A centralised database that amasses the personal information of the entire citizenry and links it across platforms and services has the potential of being used as a tool for Big Brother-esque policy implementation.

Finally, Suhrith Parthasarathy wrote in The Hindu that the government will, no doubt, argue that Aadhaar can bring about many benefits. However any policy, howsoever poorly framed, will likely bring about certain gains. The question is ultimately one of proportionality and justice. Arguing that the government's aim is to create a seamless police state, which will chill our freedom and give the State rampant power he asks whether the Supreme Court will dare to stop this?

With inputs from agencies
Hyderabad: The Telangana government would soon introduce a system similar to the 'core banking network', used in banks, in the administration of land records.

The system aims at facilitating immediate changes in land records whenever any transactions take place, thus avoiding delays in the process.

"The core banking network system would be introduced. Entries and changes would be done immediately in the passbooks of (lands) buyer and seller. We are arranging high capacity computers and servers for this," said Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao in a meeting with district collectors.

The changes would be updated in a proposed website, named Dharani, according to a state government release.

Rao said "revolutionary changes" would be initiated in the administration of land records from 12 March.

He said 'Pattadar' (land ownership) passbooks would be distributed to landowners from 11 March.

"Chief Minister Chandrasekhar Rao said that from 11 March, Pattadar passbooks should be distributed in all the villages," the release quoted the chief minister as saying at the meeting.

The Pattadar passbooks would be distributed in view of the land records updation and "purification" (rectification) exercise recently carried out in the state.

Rao said 93 percent of the land was found to be without any disputes (in the land records update programme).

He also talked about the changes proposed to be brought in the Panchayati Raj system. A new Panchayat Raj Act is proposed to be enacted.

The number of village panchayats is likely to increase by another 4,000 from the present 8,684, the chief minister said.

The government is discussing various aspects of the Panchayati Raj system, including whether to conduct direct or indirect elections, the release quoted him as saying.

The budget session of the Legislative Assembly would be held from 12 March, he added.
Lucknow: The Yogi Adityanath government has decided to seek a clarification from the Uttar Pradesh Haj Committee over the re-painting of its office boundary wall which had been given a saffron coat, a state minister said.

Uttar Pradesh's minister of state for Muslim Waqf and Haj, Mohsin Raza, has directed his department's principal secretary to get a clarification from the secretary of Uttar Pradesh Haj Committee. "The boundary wall of the Haj Committee of Uttar Pradesh was given a saffron coat as per the directives of the secretary of Haj Committee of Uttar Pradesh. A day later, the colour of the boundary wall was changed. Under which circumstances this was done is not clear."

"A number of queries came from the media following the change of colour from saffron to another shade. Hence a seven -point notice seeking clarification from the secretary Haj Committee of Uttar Pradesh has been issued," Raza said. According to the minister, a clarification has been sought as to what are the rules under which the maintenance and painting work of Haj Committee office is done.

Another point on which clarity has been sought is on whose orders was the boundary wall was painted for the first time. "When a saffron coat was already given, then under which circumstances there was a need to change the colour, and on whose orders was the colour changed?" Mohsin has asked in his notice.

Another query raised by the minister is "who is responsible for the second coat of paint, and who will bear the cost for the second coat of paint," according to the notice.

The minister also sought details of the tender floated in this regard and the companies involved. He also sought to know that why the secretary Haj Committee of Uttar Pradesh issued a press release (and on whose orders). "Whether any written orders were issued to the contractor? According to the press release, action was to be initiated against the contractor. Hence, what action has been initiated against the contractor?" Raza asked in the notice.

The UP minister also sought to know that on which date did the secretary of Haj Committee of Uttar Pradesh inspect the spot (Haj Committee office).
Lucknow: The Yogi Adityanath government on Tuesday removed RP Singh from the post of Uttar Pradesh Haj Committee secretary following the controversy over the saffron paint on Haj office boundary wall. The government had earlier issued a notice to Singh, seeking an explanation on who ordered its office boundary wall to be painted saffron and why it was subsequently repainted.

"RP Singh, who is joint director in the minority welfare directorate, has been removed from his additional post of secretary, UP Haj Committee, with immediate effect," an office order issued by Principal Secretary (Minority Affairs) Monika S Garg said.

Vineet Srivastav, an assistant director in the minority welfare directorate, will take charge as secretary, UP Haj Committee, the order added. The sudden development comes after UP's minister of state for Muslim Waqf and Haj, Mohsin Raza directed that a explanation be sought from the Haj Committee secretary on the circumstances pertaining to the painting and repainting of the wall.

Raza said the media has raised a number of queries about the incident. A notice was issued to the UP Haj Committee's secretary, officials said. The notice sought clarifications on the rules under which the maintenance and painting work of Haj Committee office was done. It also sought to know on whose orders the boundary wall was painted for the first time.

"When a saffron coat was already given, then under which circumstances there was a need to change the colour, and on whose orders was the colour changed?" the notice said.

"Who is responsible for the second coat of paint, and who will bear the cost for the second coat of paint," it asked. The notice also sought details of the tender floated for the painting and the companies involved.

The minister, in the notice, also sought to know why the UP Haj Committee secretary issued a press release, and on whose orders, regarding the paint job.

"Whether any written orders were issued to the contractor? According to the press release, action was to be initiated against the contractor. Hence, what action has been initiated against the contractor," Raza asked in the notice. The minister also sought to know on which date the secretary of Haj Committee inspect the office wall.

People in the state capital were caught by surprise on 5 January morning when they saw the boundary wall of the UP Haj office painted saffron.

The building, opposite the state legislature building, is right in the heart of the city. The fresh coat came days after the secretariat building facade was given the same orange hue. The painting job was carried out overnight by the Uttar Pradesh estates department, officials said. The saffron colour, mostly associated with Hinduism and especially with the Sangh Parivar of which the BJP is a part, was also painted on the front portion of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Bhawan Annexe where the offices of the chief minister and top bureaucrats are located.

After assuming office in March last year, Chief Minister Adityanath exhibited his fondness for the colour as the state government gave a saffron tinge to covers of official booklets and background of official posters issued by the public relations department and ministries.

In October last year, 50 saffron-coloured buses of the UP State Road Transport Corporation, named 'Sankalp Seva', were launched to provide service in rural areas.

The 45-year-old monk-turned-politician Adityanath is always seen wearing saffron robes. Interestingly, in Adityanath's home turf Gorakhpur, the historic "Ghantaghar" (clock tower) has the same tint.
New Delhi: The CBI on Tuesday said it has filed a chargesheet against 95 people in the multi-crore-rupee Vyapam examination scam linked with the 2011 Pre-Medical Test (PMT) case.

Those named in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) chargesheet include 83 candidates, four Vyapam officials and eight middlemen in a case relating to irregularities in Samvida Shala Shikshak Patrata Pariksha Varg-3 Examination in 2011 conducted by Vyapam.

The scam in Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal (Vyapam) or Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board broke out in 2013 wherein candidates bribed officials and rigged exams by deploying imposters to write their papers.

The scam, which began in 1995, involves politicians, senior officials and businessmen.

The CBI took over investigation following a Supreme Court order on 9 July, 2015. The chargesheet was connected to the Pre-Medical Test of 2011, one of several cases of irregularities in examinations conducted by Vyapam.

According to the CBI chargesheet, files from the hard disk of the computer of then Principal System Analyst Vyapam reveal that marks of certain candidates were allegedly increased to enable them to qualify the test.

"The same was verified with the OMR answer sheets of the candidates and it was found that marks of 84 candidates were increased, in the final result, to make them qualify the examination," it said. One candidate is on the run and investigation is on in his case.

"Investigation further revealed that the accused public servants and other private persons collected the examination details viz roll number, form number of the candidates and provided the same to then-Principal System Analyst, Vyapam," it said.

The Special Task Force, which was probing the case earlier, filed four chargesheets in the case.

The agency also said the examination details so received by said Principal System Analyst were entered into a digital file on the computer which contained the details of the candidates along with their names or roll numbers and the name of the middlemen who had sponsored the candidates.

"Just prior to the declaration of the result, the said Principal System Analyst created another database in respect of the candidates whose marks were intended to be increased," it said.

It was also alleged that in the result data base, he increased the marks as per the requirement of the candidates so as to make them qualify the examination and thereafter the actual marks obtained by the 84 accused were deleted from the result file, the agency said.

"However, no change in the OMR answer sheets could be made and thus the original marks obtained by the accused, as per the OMR sheets, were less than the marks declared in the result," it added.

In November last year, the agency has filed chargesheet against 592 persons in the scam linked with 2012 PMT case.

Of the total persons named in the chargesheet filed in a Bhopal court, 245 are new while remaining 347 are those who have already been named as accused in the CBI's October 31 Vyapam chargesheet on the probe related to the 2013 PMT case.

Over 40 persons, including witnesses, accused, and alleged beneficiaries, died in mysterious circumstances ever since the scam broke out. These included the son of the then governor Ram Naresh Yadav. Some died in freak accidents or of mysterious illnesses.

The opposition Congress has repeatedly blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan for the deaths, which it alleged is a cover-up for the racket. Chouhan and the BJP have denied the charges.
Kolkata: Sarod maestro Pandit Buddhadev Dasgupta died of cardiac arrest at his residence in south Kolkata on Monday (15 January). He was 84.

The Padma Bhushan awardee had been suffering from respiratory problems for the past few days, a family member said. He is survived by wife and two sons.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said his death has created a void in the field of classical music.

"My heartfelt condolences to his family and disciples," she said in a tweet.

The musician, born in 1933 at his maternal home in Bhagalpur, Bihar, learnt sarod under the tutelage of Pt Radhikamohan Moitra. His father, Prafulla Mohan Dasgupta, was a district magistrate and a music aficionado.

He was conferred Sangeet Mahasamman and Bangabibhusan in 2015.

Dasgupta's body is kept at the Peace Haven morgue for people to pay their last respects. He will be cremated on Wednesday (17 January) after his younger son returns from the US, one of his close disciples said.
Hyderabad: Attacking the BJP for calling Haj subsidy a form of Muslim appeasement and vote bank politics, AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi on Tuesday claimed the party's government in Uttar Pradesh gave funds for pilgrimages and wanted to know if that would be stopped.

Funds are also given for the Kumbh Mela, while the Congress government in Karnataka gives grants to those who undertake 'Chardham Yatra', Owaisi claimed, adding he himself had demanded the withdrawal of the Haj subsidy long ago.

"Haj subsidy this year is (Rs) 200 crore & it would have been phased out by 2022 as per Supreme Court order, since 2006 I have been demanding that should be removed & used for Muslim girls education upliftment," Owaisi tweeted.

There will be no subsidy for Haj from this year, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said on Tuesday, calling the step "part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement".

Owaisi, in another tweet, asked if the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh would stop the funds, which he said, are given for pilgrimage to Ayodhya, Kashi and other temple towns.

"#Haj Subsidy BJP /RSS had called It appeasement, vote Bank Pol my Qs to BJP will you bring a Bill in parliament remove Article 290A of Constitution, Will BJP Tell Yogi govt to stop 800 crore for pilgrimage to Ayodhya,Kashi,Mathura 1.5 lakh to each Manasarovar yatri?" he asked.

Article 290A relates to the annual payment to certain Devaswom Funds.

"Haj Subsidy 3 Qs to BJP/RSS Why did Haryana government give 1 Crore to Dera Sacha Sauda was it for electoral appeasement? 4qs why did Modi govt gave grant of 100 crore to MP govt for Simhastha Maha Kumbh & MP govt had spend 3,400 crore was this not appeasement," Owaisi said in a series of tweets.

Claiming that the Congress government in Karnataka gave Rs 20,000 to each pilgrim who undertook 'Chardham Yatra', Owaisi asked whether it was not "appeasement of majority".

Would the NDA government "walk the talk" by allocating enough funds for the education of Muslims girls, he asked.

"I challenge the Modi government to walk the talk by allocating 2,0000 crores for Muslim girls scholarships...will wait and see in next budget 18-19," he said.
Rae Bareli (UP): Police lodged two cases against Congress MLC Deepak Singh and others for allegedly misbehaving with security personnel on duty on Monday during the visit of party president Rahul Gandhi.

"Two cases were registered against Deepak Singh and others at Salon police station here late last night. One case was registered in the complaint filed by a citizen, while the other was lodged by the police," Additional SP Shashi Shekhar Singh said on Tuesday.

"In his complaint, Ramsajeewan Nirmal said that on Monday when the people of Salon were trying to meet their MP Rahul Gandhi to narrate their problems, Congress MLC Deepak Singh, party leader Jamal Anwar and 15-20 others had attacked them. In this Nirmal got injured. Those who tried to save him were also beaten up," the additional SP said.

Based on the complaint of Nirmal, a case under various sections of IPC including, 147 (punishment for rioting), 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt) and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace) has been lodged against the Congress MLC, Jamal Anwar and 15-20 others, he said.

The second case has been registered by in-charge of Salon police station Gaudeen Shukla against the Congress MLC Deepak, Anwar and 40-50 others, the additional SP said.

In his complaint, Shukla said that some people with placards reading "Where is the Railway line?" in their hands were standing near a nursing home lane. When asked, they told the police that they are local residents, and have come to peacefully convey their problems to their MP. They also said that they will not indulge in sloganeering or wave black flags. While searching them, nothing objectionable was found from them. The police then resumed its duty with full vigil.

"At that time, the convoy of Rahul Gandhi was seen coming. Before the arrival of the convoy, Congress MLC Deepak Singh, party leader Jamal Anwar and 40-50 others came running towards the protesters and attacked them. When police tried to intervene, they manhandled the police too," Singh said.

A case has been registered under various sections of the IPC, he added.
Mumbai: The Congress will take out `Save Constitution' rallies in every district of the state on Republic Day, Maharashtra Congress chief Ashok Chavan said on Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting of senior party leaders here, Chavan said his party will participate in the `Save Constitution' rally organised by Opposition parties in Mumbai on 26 January.

On the same day, the Congress will take out similar rallies in all district headquarters, he said.

He also mocked the BJP's decision to take out `Tiranga (tricolour) rallies' in response to the Opposition's rallies.

"BJP's parent organisation, RSS, has never accepted the Tiranga as the national flag and till recently did not hoist it. It is ridiculous that the same people are now taking out Tiranga Yatra," he said.

Meanwhile, some workers of BJP Yuva Morcha from Satara joined the Congress in Chavan's presence.

Former Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde, former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan and Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil were among those who attended the meeting.
Shillong: The Nationalists Congress Party (NCP) will contest at least 42 seats in Meghalaya where Assembly election is due in the first quarter of this year, party general secretary Praful Patel said on Tuesday.

"We are going to contest in 22 out of 24 seats in the Garo Hills region and at least 20 seats in the Khasi Hills," the NCP leader told reporters in Shillong after chairing a party meeting and also laying the foundation stone of the party office.

"In Nagaland, we are going to contest but in fewer seats. We have had four MLAs in Nagaland in the past. In Tripura we are not going to contest except for marginal token seats (maybe)," he said.

Elections in these states are due in the first quarter of the year as the tenure of their current assemblies ends by March. The term of the Meghalaya assembly ends on 6 March.

Patel, who was here on whirlwind two-day tour in the state, will be addressing a rally in the Garo Hills on Wednesday before returning to the national capital.

He also released the first list of six candidates (Khasi Jaintia Hills region) including former minister ECB Bamon.

The NCP national general secretary also formally announced the appointment of Saleng A Sangma as the state party president in Meghalaya. The appointment letter was handed over to Saleng on Monday after he quit the assembly.

Attacking the ruling Congress government, Patel said, "Misgovernance was of the highest order and the people are disillusioned and are looking for a change."

He also said that the party will contest this coming election along with some of the regional parties who would be having some kind of understanding (alliances), adding that the matter will be more clear as the elections approach.

Admitting the growing popularity of the BJP, Patel said, "The divisive policies of these parties (the BJP and its allies) right from their food habits, cultural and religious ethos we see fragmentations."

He said, "I am sure the people of Meghalaya will outrightly reject these kinds of infringement on their personal food habits, their beliefs, religious ethos and I am sure proper answer will be given by the state in this coming election."

He said, "The NCP is the alternative party which is aimed at bringing good governance and we intend to make that change and let people decide."
Cow lovers and fans of VHP leader Praveen Togadia will love this delicious coincidence. In khaanti (pure) Rajasthani, the word togadia means a calf. But unlike a cow, which is universally revered, a togadia is considered to be something of a nuisance.

Cattle owners often complain that togadias are unruly, undisciplined and always eager to break away from their tether to feast on the mother's milk. When let loose, they jump around, create a ruckus and fall in line only when beaten with a stick.

For Rajasthanis, there is a local saying for mischievous, disruptive boys that sums up the character of a calf: 'Togadia jiya udham kare, naache (Creates ruckus, dances like a calf)'. Another saying compares good runners with them: 'Togadia jiya bhaaje (bolts like a calf)'.

Though Praveen Bhai Togadia, firebrand VHP leader and self-proclaimed son of gau mata (cow) is no longer a boy, the Rajasthan government has every reason to feel it has been harassed by him, just like an unruly calf that just won't stay tethered to the long rope of law.

The latest togadia-esque incident happened on Monday when Praveen Bhai disappeared for almost 11 hours and resurfaced in a hospital in Ahmedabad, claiming he had become unconscious on a road a few hours after the Rajasthan police threatened to arrest him.

Only Togadia can tell us how a person under 24x7 Z-security cover can disappear in a city like Ahmedabad. According to his followers, he was arrested by the Rajasthan police and later abandoned, once the issue snowballed into a controversy and his supporters started protesting in Gujarat.

The other version, of course, is less flattering to Togadia. According to sources in Rajasthan police, Togadia had been evading summons from a local court for almost 15 years. In 2002, he had defied prohibitory orders to hold a rally in Gangapur town of Rajasthan, where a curfew had been imposed following communal riots.

In spite of the curfew, Togadia had appeared in Gangapur riding bikes across the mountainous terrain of the region, wearing a turban and local attire. But, his daredevilry did not impress the court. Once he was booked by the cops, the court issued several warrants demanding his appearance. Since then, he was on the run. On Monday, after years of playing the cat-and-mouse game, he was tracked by Rajasthan cops in plain clothes. Fearing arrest, according to sources, he had become incommunicado.

Now, why would the poster boy of Hindutva fear cops in a state run by the BJP? For that, we need to go further back into history.

In 2002, Togadia, unruly as a calf, was carrying out a programme of trishul deeksha across north India. In a bid to arm Hindus, he was going from place to place, distributing tridents. When he threatened to hold a trishul deeksha in Rajasthan's Ajmer, the then Ashok Gehlot government warned him against it, calling trishuls banned weapons whose distribution was a crime. Yet, Togadia defied the order and distributed tridents to local youth.

The police did not arrest him at first. The officers felt that perhaps Togadia had done a bit of nautanki by distributing wooden trishuls covered with silver foils. But, after watching the video footage of the event, he was arrested while coming out of a restaurant after lunch and put behind bars.

Togadia spent almost two months in jail. By all accounts, his jail yatra was miserable. During hearings, he would often complain that mosquitoes bite him at night and don't let him sleep. To this, the judge had famously replied asking him why did he commit acts that allowed mosquitoes to feast on his blood.

A few months later, when he was released, Togadia was welcomed like a hero by the top BJP brass. When the BJP won the next election, the case against him was withdrawn.

Later, as political grapevine goes, he fell out with Narendra Modi and, thus, became a pariah for the BJP leaders. No wonder, the case against him in Rajasthan, in spite the BJP being in power, is still alive.

Togadia now religiously avoids Rajasthan. Perhaps, the memory of Rajasthani mosquitoes still haunts this son of gau mata. And, at the sight of Rajasthani cops, his first instinct is to bolt, like a true togadia.
It was not so long ago that Pravin Togadia roared like a lion (at least to the ears of his believers). Though it's a different matter that over the past few years, both the number of people sympathetic to his hardline Hindutva and his vitriol diminished.

But on Tuesday, when Todagia appeared at a press conference to speak about his mysterious disappearance (he was brought to a private Ahmedabad hospital in an unconscious state while the Rajasthan Police was in Gujarat with a warrant for his arrest) he tried to play the victim card.

He said he was hunted by people who had previously been friends and were part of the larger saffron parivar. During that 15-minute media briefing, he broke down on more than one occasion.

Togadia was "unwell" and undergoing treatment at a hospital, but that does not explain why he chose to hold a press conference rather than wait until he'd recovered.

Togadia was apparently in a hurry to make a sensational disclosure: That there was a conspiracy to eliminate him in an encounter on Monday morning. He tried to suggest that a combined team of Rajasthan and Gujarat Police was on the move to kill him.

His statement raised more questions than he thought he answered: First, he said he was informed of the conspiracy by someone within the VHP while he was praying in the morning. Togadia was apparently advised to leave VHP headquarters immediately. Togadia, for those not in the know, has 'Z Plus' security cover. Which means he is guarded 24x7 by some of the best para-military security personnel.

Even if Togadia thought a team of Rajasthan and Gujarat Police were on their way to kill him (and let us for a moment assume that was the case), Togadia was safely ensconced amidst his followers at VHP headquarters. There couldn't be a more foolish time and place to conduct such an imaginary encounter.

Second, let's look at what Togadia did to secure himself. He gave the commandos guarding him the slip and left with a VHP companion in an auto. After making some calls to the high and mighty (Rajasthan chief minister and Gujarat home minister), Togadia turned off his phone so that he could not be tracked.

Third, after landing at the home of a VHP associate and making calls to folks all over the country, Togadia left for the airport in another autorickshaw (without a ticket or any flight details) to head to Jaipur and surrender before court. But on the way, he seemingly fell unconscious. Which does not explain how he was found inside a park (from where he was then taken to hospital). Togadia is a doctor. He was a cancer surgeon. He should have known what was ailing him.

Fourth, Togadia claimed his voice was being silenced by the powers that be. And yet, there he was, holding a press conference and sending his voice all over the country and indeed, the world. Remember, Togadia is working present of the VHP and is supposedly catering to an international Hindu audience. Unfortunately for Togadia, his claims made headlines, but did not cause a political earthquake.

The sad irony for Togadia, a man that was once such a towering figure within the Sangh Parivar, was that even after he claimed that there was a serious threat to his life, no Parivar leader called on him, he was offered no words of support or sympathy from his friends and associates from the larger saffron parivar. He, however, drew sympathy and support from the unlikeliest of quarters: The Congress party and Patidar activist Hardik Patel.

Togadia is from the Patidar community. It was, therefore, not surprising that Hardik, in his continuing endeavour for political relevance, landed at hospital to extend his support to Togadia and in turn, hoped to gain some support in the community. It is not known whether Togadia and Hardik  who acted as an ally of the Congress and its president Rahul Gandhi  were in touch during Gujarat election when the Congress and the Patidar community were challenging Prime Minister Modi and BJP president Amit Shah or if this was a one-off meeting.

What made bigger news than Togadias claims was former Congress president Arjun Modhwadia promptly paying a visit to his hospital room. The pictures of Togadia and Modhwadia carrying on a cordial manner and smiling reminded one of two old sayings: There are no permanent friends or enemies in politics and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The Congress has some explaining to do over the Todagia-Modhwadia meet. Modhwadia clearly forgot what his party colleague, Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah said about the BJP, RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal. "They are themselves like terrorists in a way. BJP, RSS and Bajrang Dal also have terrorists within... Whether it is the Popular Front of India (PFI), Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), Bajrang Dal, Vishwa Hindu Parishad or any other organisation... if they indulge in disturbing harmony and brotherhood in the society, and spread communalism, they will not be tolerated." Whether Togadia remembered Siddaramaiahs remark when he met Modhwadia is anyone's guess.

But what is clear is that within the VHP and the Sangh Parivar, Togadia has been marginalised. He may be the working president of the VHP, but that is a nominated post and made as per the wishes of the party president. The fact is, internal conflicts in the VHP have become so strong, it had to indefinitely postpone election of its new president. That election will decide Togadia's fate and an influential section of the Sangh Parivar does not want Togadia in a powerful position.

While recuperating in his hospital bed, Togadia will have enough time to reflect and wonder why he has become so lonely in his own outfit that he had to look for friends in the Congress. More so, at a time when his once upon a time friend Narendra Modi rules the nation and the BJP (a party that was once dear to him) rules Gujarat.
Chandigarh: Punjab Cabinet minister Rana Gurjit Singh, who has been under fire from the Opposition for his alleged involvement in sand mining auctions, has submitted his resignation as power and irrigation minister to Chief Minister Amarinder Singh.

"I have given my resignation from the ministry to the Captain sahib. I gave my resignation personally to the chief minister a week ago," he said on Tuesday.

Rana Gurjit Singh, who is an MLA from Kapurthala, has been handling the power and irrigation portfolios.

When asked why he gave his resignation, he said that the Opposition was trying to corner the chief minister by making false allegations against him and was demanding his resignation.

"I have now tendered my resignation," Rana Gurjit Singh said.

However, there is no official confirmation of the acceptance of his resignation.

The Opposition, especially AAP leader Sukhpal Singh Khaira, was demanding Rana Gurjit Singh's resignation from the chief minister after the Cabinet minister's name had in 2017 allegedly figured in the sand mining auctions.

The state government had then formed the Justice JS Narang Commission following allegations involving Rana Gurjit Singh in the sand mining auctions conducted by the mining department in May 2017.

The commission was mandated to probe all aspects of the allegations of impropriety against the irrigation and power minister in the multi-crore sand mining auctions.

The minister had claimed that there was no wrongdoing in the auctions.

This year, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had reportedly issued summons for 17 January to Rana Inder Partap Singh, son of minister Rana Gurjit Singh, in connection with the raising of funds abroad by floating global depository receipts for one of the family-owned companies allegedly without the mandatory permission of the Reserve Bank of India.

"Opposition again made hue and cry that ED had issued summons. Though, I am not looking after the business, the reply will be given to them (ED)," said Rana Gurjit Singh, who has been considered close to the chief minister.
Uttar Pradesh Police on Tuesday lodged an FIR against Congress leader Rama Shankar Shukla in relation to a poster depicting Congress president Rahul Gandhi as Ram and Prime Minister Narendra Modi as Raavan, according to media reports. The poster, which created a flutter of sorts in Amethi, appeared ahead of Rahul's two-day visit to the district.

The FIR was lodged by Bharatiya Janata Party leader Surya Prakash Tiwari, ANI reported.

Poster seen in Amethis Gauriganj pic.twitter.com/mR3VnjpJeP  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 14, 2018

In the poster, Rahul can be seen carrying a bow and an arrow, pointing towards Modi. The inscription mentions that Rahul is an incarnation of Lord Ram who will bring Ram Rajya by winning the general elections in 2019, defeating Modi, a Zee News report said.

On Monday, Rahul visited his parliamentary constituency of Amethi for the first time as Congress president, one month after he took over from his mother Sonia Gandhi.

Reacting to the visit, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath advised the Congress chief to shun "negative politics", and instead focus on development. "See the plight of his Lok Sabha constituency Amethi nursed by four generations of Nehru-Gandhi family," he said, "My advise to Rahul is that he should focus more on politics of development."

Rahul is scheduled to hold a roadshow and a padyatra from Musafirkhana on Tuesday in an effort to reach out to the people of his constituency, News18 reported. Thereafter, he will move towards Gauriganj, Jagdishpur and Mohanganj before finally going back to Lucknow.

With inputs from PTI
Congress and BJP workers clashed in Gauriganj town in Amethi on Tuesday, as Congress president Rahul Gandhi visited his parliamentary constituency, media reports state.

Clash between Congress and BJP workers in Amethi during Rahul Gandhi's visit pic.twitter.com/D5yebTHaq9  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 16, 2018

According to News18, police resorted to lathi charge as the clashes escalated in Amethi. BJP workers raised slogans against Rahul, questioning him over the issue of development in Amethi.

#BREAKING - Amethi turns into a war zone: BJP and Congress workers clash. pic.twitter.com/MKuVmDBtES  News18 (@CNNnews18) January 16, 2018

According to The Indian Express, Congress workers allegedly beat up protesters in Salon town as well. The report says that workers wearing Gandhi caps urged protesters to lift their demonstration, but after they declined, the Congress workers physically chased them away. The protesters have filed complaints at the Salon police station against these workers.

BJP supporters staged agitations against the Congress leader on Monday as well. Rahul faced protests during the first leg of his visit to Rae Bareli and Amethi, the two Lok Sabha constituencies represented by him and his mother Sonia Gandhi. Rahul is on a two-day visit to Uttar Pradesh, his first after taking over as the Congress party chief.

Some BJP workers raised slogans against the Congress president's convoy as it was leaving in Parshderpur. According to PTI, there were heated exchanges between Congress workers and protesters. A Congress MLC from Rae Bareli, Deepak Singh and Additional SP Shekhar Singh were seen talking to each other angrily. The protesters were later on chased away from the scene. The police on Tuesday lodged two cases against Congress MLC Deepak Singh and others for allegedly misbehaving with security personnel on duty on Monday during the visit.

Rahul also faced protesters at Rajiv Gandhi Chowk in Amethi, due to which he could not garland a statue of his father. Supporters of the BJP and the Congress fought a pitched battle, giving the local police and provincial armed constabulary personnel a trying time containing them.

A local BJP leader and trader Rajesh 'Masala' said it was the protesters' way to "welcome" their "missing" MP. They claimed that Rahul was not listening to the problems of the local people, ignoring health and education needs and laying foundation stones of "fake" projects.

With inputs from agencies
New Delhi: Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday described the Congress' act of taking the nation's issues to other countries as an act of "immaturity" and asserted that's why people are rejecting them.

"By taking national issues to international forums, Congress leadership has shown its immaturity and people are repeatedly rejecting Congress in polls," Rajnath Singh said while addressing the Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers at its national executive meeting in New Delhi.

The Home Minister was referring to Congress president Rahul Gandhi's recent visit to Bharain when he highlighted how job creation in India is at an eight-year-low.

Addressing the Indian diaspora in Bahrain, Rahul Gandhi also 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.

Praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah, he said: "Both of them have exemplary organisational skills and it is showing results.

"Now, we have 19 state governments today," he said.

Targeting the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi over the confrontation politics, the Home Minister said: "Centre is ready to extend all support to Delhi government but it is sad that the politics of confrontation run by Delhi government is acting as an obstacle."

"We are trying best to help Delhi in sealing matter," he said.

The Home Minister also called upon party workers to ensure people trust and party workers at ground level.

"We will have to leave 'all is fine in politics' attitude," he said, adding that "we need to work for taking society towards betterment".

Hailing his government's work, he said: "The world and the people of the country today feel BJP is the best party to govern India. An international survey has shown 88 percent feel Narendra Modi is best the prime minister for India... while 70 percent people have rated BJP as best political party."

Rajnath Singh was referring to the survey conducted among 2,464 respondents in India carried out by the Pew Research Centre last year.

He also said that today India is are fastest growing economy with stabilised GDP (gross Domestic Product) and greater ease of doing business.

"Now, we have highest foreign reserves as ever," he said.

The Home Minister also said that under the BJP's leadership "we have made our borders better guarded and we are always ready to retaliate in defence".

"We have almost contained Naxalism and terrorism," he added.
New Delhi: The Tripura unit of the CPM has requested the Election Commission (EC) to look into an "election meeting" of the BJP, which was attended by National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval.

The said meeting was held on 14 January at the official residence of Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in New Delhi.

In a letter written to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Tripura CPM secretary Bijan Dhar had on Monday alleged that the BJP violated norms by engaging the NSA for a political purpose. He had also urged the EC to take stern legal measures against the saffron party.

"You, being an authority to oversee that no political party, either incumbent or in the opposition, does not get an undue electoral opportunity by the use of administration, may I request you to kindly order an appropriate authority for an investigation into the matter," the letter said and urged the poll panel to take stern legal measures if it found the allegation to be true.

The letter claimed that the meeting was convened "purely for a political purpose and to evolve the strategy of the BJP for the forthcoming Assembly elections in Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland".

Quoting a PTI news report that the NSA was present at the BJP meeting to discuss the poll strategy in the north-eastern states, the CPM has alleged that it was a blatant misuse of the administration by the saffron party.

"The presence of any person holding a very important position like that of the NSA is not only undesirable and objectionable, it is a glaring instance of a blatant misuse of the administration by the ruling party at the Centre for garnering political mileage in the elections.

"Thus, such a misuse of administration is nothing but a real threat to the democratic system of the country", the Left party has said.

Besides the home minister, BJP in-charge of the north-east Ram Madhav and senior RSS leader Krishna Gopal were also present at the meeting.
In India's 65-year electoral history, the country's dominant Left party, the CPM, has never been in direct confrontation with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with such ferocity as it is now in a northeastern state. Political developments in Tripura however, have set the stage for a face-to-face battle in the February 2018 Assembly poll as the saffron outfit has emerged as the key opposition party in this Communist-ruled state.

The Assembly poll is likely to be held in the state in February. The state has 60 Assembly seats and the term of the current Assembly expires on 14 March.

After about a four-and-half-month-long summary revision of the voters' list, the final electoral rolls were published with 1 January, 2018, as the qualifying date of age. Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machine attached to the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) would be used in all the polling stations of the state.

High literacy in a small population

The state is one of the smallest in India with a population of a little over thirty lakh. Around one-third of the population are members of Scheduled Tribes. According to the 2011 census, the state's population is 36.74 lakh, with a density of 350 persons per square kilometre.

The population pattern and the demography have been fluctuating in the state. In 1941, the total population was 5.13 lakh with tribals accounting for 50.09 percent of the whole. But by 1981, the tribal population dipped to 28.44 percent of a total population of 20.5 lakh. The 2011 Census put the state's literacy rate at 87.22 percent which had risen to 96.82 percent by September 2014.

Political history

For years, the state government swung between the Congress and the CPM. However, in recent years the Congress has shrunk in influence and the Left has held nearly undisputed sway.

Over the past two decades, Manik Sarkar's CPM has held a stranglehold over the state. In the last three elections, it got 49, 46 and 38 seats in the 60-member Assembly. Sarkars government scripted what has been called one of the rare success stories of insurgency in the North East.

Interestingly, however, the vote share has not been as overwhelming as one would expect from the number of seats won, as Congress has run the CPM fairly close in terms of the votes cast.

The demand for Tipraland

The main issue which has kept the state in the news is the demand for a separate state called Tipraland (also spelt Twipraland) by the Indigenous People's Front of Tripura (IPFT). The party has demanded that a separate state be carved out for the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC) areas, which constitute two-third of the state territory and is the home to the tribals, who form one-third of the population.

In July, the IPFT blocked the vital NH8, the state's lifeline, and the lone railway line for more than 10 days to demand a separate homeland, causing an acute shortage of essential items and much hardship to the people. It withdrew the blockade after the Union home ministry agreed to hold discussions to resolve the issue.

Most of the political parties, including the ruling CPM, Congress and the BJP had earlier rejected IPFT's demands saying it is not practical to divide the small state. The INPT and NCT also opposed the IPFT's separate state demand.

The state was also rocked by a teacher recruitment scandal after the Supreme Court in March upheld a Tripura High Court verdict terminating the jobs of 10,323 government school teachers, citing irregularities. But, in a fresh order on 14 December, the apex court extended the termination deadline to 30 June this year instead of 31 December, 2017.

Ethnic tensions

The tribal and non-tribal population have been at odds with each other in the state and the ethnic tension along with a demand for autonomy of tribal regions have been deciding factors in the political history of Tripura since the 1940s. Partition and Bangladesh's independence led to the migration of a large number of displaced persons into the state.

According to the state governments Tripura Human Development Report of 2007, "Although the majority of the refugees returned within a year to Bangladesh under the largest repatriation programme since the Second World War, the episode left a deep imprint on the local economy and society."

The contenders in 2018

Tripura's main tribal-based party is the IPFT which has been agitating for Tipraland. In January, it said it would forge an alliance with the BJP for the Assembly election due in 2018, while the saffron party said talks are still on in this regard.

For its part, the BJP has been constantly attacking against the CPM with its party president Amit Shah saying said a regime change in Tripura had become inevitable as the incumbent government had failed on many fronts, including combating crimes against women and unemployment.

Two other important tribal-based parties are the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura (INPT) and National Conference of Tripura (NCT). The two parties have also started talks to form an electoral alliance with the Congress and Trinamool Congress (TMC) in Tripura.

Political analyst and writer Sekhar Datta said that in the outgoing year it had become explicitly clear that the Congress had become insignificant and that the BJP would take its place next February. "Since 1952, the Congress has played a considerable role. But, for the first time, it would fight for the third or at best second position in the polls," Datta told IANS. The Congress strength has been reduced to three in the 60-member assembly from the original 10 as six of its members quit, joined the TMC and then the BJP. Another Congress MLA joined the CPM.

Finally, the TMC has long eyed Tripura as it makes a push to expand beyond West Bengal.

With inputs from agencies
tech2 News Staff

Editor's note: This copy was published on 24 January, 2018. It is being republished in light of the Supreme Court's verdict on the constitutionality of Aadhaar likely being pronounced tomorrow.

Aadhaar Database is one of the largest government databases on the planet, where a 12 digit unique-identity number has been assigned to the majority of the Indian citizens. This database contains both the demographic as well as biometric data of the citizens.

With the sheer amount of private and confidential data amassed in one singular database, it is no surprise that Aadhaar and Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the authority that established the database, continue to be the focus of attention whenever there is any security shortcoming.

Irrespective of the number of complaints and objections against the program, the government of India has made it mandatory in almost all the facets of public life. Despite the number of reports over the last couple of years, UIDAI has constantly maintained that the server and the data itself, especially biometric data is safe. We are not contesting the claims by the authority. However, we do think that the number of security incidents has increased in past few years and we wanted to highlight everything major that has happened.

App-based flaws

Most recently, the entire controversy around Aadhaar and privacy concerns, captured centre stage after a French security researcher pointed the flaws in the mAadhaar app that is available on the Google Play Store. What is striking is the fact that this is not the first time when the issue has been raised about a government mobile app with flaws that can potentially allow attackers to access the Aadhaar database while accessing the demographic data.

An IIT graduate was arrested for illegally accessing the Aadhaar database back in August 2017 for accessing the database between 1 Jan and 26 July without authorisation. He created an app called Aadhaar eKYC by hacking into the servers related to an e-Hospital system that was created under the Digital India initiative. The eKYC app would then route all the requests through those servers.

Government Websites

Over the last one year, there have been multiple instances of Aadhaar data leaking online through government websites. The most recent case was when an RTI query pushed UIDAI to reveal that about 210 government websites made the Aadhaar details of people with Aadhaar, public on the internet. The report pointed out that the data was removed from the websites but it also did not mention about the time frame of the leak of the data.

The problem was so rampant that a simple google search would reveal thousands of databases along with demographic data including Aadhaar numbers, names, names of parents, PAN numbers, mobile numbers, religion, marks, the status of rejection of applications, bank account numbers, IFSC codes and other information.

Three Gujarat-based websites were also found disclosing Aadhaar numbers of the beneficiaries on their websites. Last but not the least, a website run by Jharkhand Directorate of Social Security leaked Aadhaar details about 1.6 million people living in Jharkhand due to a technical glitch.

Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) also pointed out that about 130 million Aadhar numbers along with other sensitive data were available on the internet. The reason for the data leak was narrowed down to four government-run schemes ranging from National Social Assistance Programme by the Ministry of Rural Development, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), also by the Ministry of Rural Development, Daily Online Payment Reports under NREGA by the government of Andhra Pradesh and the Chandranna Bima Scheme, also by the government of Andhra Pradesh.

Third party leaks

There have been a number of leaks when it comes to demographic data. Sometimes the leak happens because of a picture is tweeted to showcase the infrastructure such as the time when Aadhaar card application of MS Dhoni leaked on the internet. The reason for the leak of the form was that the CSC e-governance Services India Ltd tweeted the picture of the machine with Dhonis form still on the screen with a bulk of personal details visible. This prompted UIDAI to blacklist CSC e-governance services for 10 years.

UIDAI has also regularly shut down fraudulent websites and mobile apps that claim to provide Aadhaar services to users as done almost a year back. It also blocked about 5,000 officials from accessing Aadhaar portal after it was reported that the portal was accessed without any authorisation.

It is almost amusing to note that it was not the first time that UIDAI blacklisted officials or operators. Back in 2017, it blacklisted about 1,000 operators and filed FIRs against 20 individuals for malpractice. The report did not point at any security issues but did state that charging for Aadhaar was illegal.

The most recent case was the investigative story done by a journalist from The Tribune, who uncovered a racket wherein you could get access to the Aadhaar data if you paid a sum of Rs 500 to certain individuals on a closed WhatsApp group.

Misuse of Aadhaar

A report from a year ago implied that several parties illegally tried to store the biometric data and conduct multiple transactions using the same fingerprint. UIDAI detected the problem when it found multiple transactions done using the same fingerprint. The official who spoke on conditions of anonymity to Livemint, said that this would not have been possible without storing biometric data.

The story is not over about the misuse of Aadhaar as the organisation suspended the eKYC license of Bharti Airtel and Airtel Payments Bank after they violated the Aadhaar Act which barred the company from opening bank accounts of their customers without undertaking any informed consent from them.

Duplicate Aadhaar cards

Apart from the usual fear associated with hackers breaching the Aadhaar database, the menace of fake Aadhaar cards is also a problem for UIDAI. According to a report last year, a gang in Kanpur was running a racket in order to generate fake Aadhaar cards. UIDAI stated that its systems detected abnormal activities and filed a complaint accordingly. It clarified that the big scam to generate the fake cards was foiled by the system and it did not affect the database of the processing system.

What is interesting is that UIDAI refused to disclose the number of fake or duplicate Aadhaar cards in circulation citing the threat to national security. So much for transparency and accountability on the part of UIDAI and the government.

Demographic data on sale

A recent investigation by The Tribune uncovered that anonymous individuals were ready to sell the Aadhaar card details of any individual with an Aadhaar number against the payment of a sum of Rs 500. An additional Rs 300 would also let you print out these Aadhaar cards. The investigating team was able to get a Login ID and username that allows the team to check details of any of the users in the database. What was surprising to note is that the agents were running a racket using messaging platforms as WhatsApp to reach out to potential buyers.

Access to the Aadhaar demographic data is not the only issue here. An additional Rs 300 could also let the agent with a login ID and username to print any Aadhaar card after entering the card number. The report also pointed out that the agents hacked into the website of Government of Rajasthan to gain access to the software. According to the report, the investigator was able to gain immediate access to particulars of all the users listed by UIDAI including name, address, photograph, email ID as well as the mobile phone number.

Other claims

The claims about unauthorised access to the Aadhaar database is not limited to the websites in the country. According to a previous report last year, WikiLeaks tweeted claiming that CIA might have access to the database as well.

The series of tweets claimed that CIA was using Cross Match Technologies to access Aadhaar database as this company was one of the first suppliers of biometric devices certified by the UIDAI. The report claimed that CIA was using Express Lane, a covert information collection tool to ex-filtrate the data collection.
tech2 News Staff

Artificially intelligence robots from Chinese firm Alibaba and US tech giant Microsoft have beaten humans in the Stanford University reading comprehension test.

In a report by CNN, the Chinese firm Alibaba said, This is the first time that a machine has outperformed humans on such a test.

The comprehension test included passage reading from Wikipedia articles by the robots. This was followed by a question and answer round where the robots and humans competed against each other.

The robots both from Alibaba and Microsoft won by a narrow margin. The one from Alibaba scored 82.44, while Microsoft robot scored 82.650. Meanwhile, the human scored 82.34. Both Alibaba and Microsoft defeated the human, even though by a very narrow margin.

Designed by artificial intelligence experts in Stanford, the robot from Alibaba was the first to beat the score.

While both the robots are set to have covered a milestone, it poses a threat to the humans it competes against. It almost inches one step further in the direction of Technological Singularity, which is the hypothesis which states that artificial machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence.

When asked about the repercussions of such advancements, Luo Si the chief scientist of natural language processing at Alibabas AI research group said that this might lead to a loss of jobs.

A strong start to 2018 with the first model (SLQA+) to exceed human-level performance on @stanfordnlp SQuAD's EM metric! Next challenge: the F1 metric, where humans still lead by ~2.5 points!https://t.co/Uq10Dm2Ss5  Pranav Rajpurkar (@pranavrajpurkar) 11 January 2018

The jobs that Alibabas AI can take over are museum tutorials and online responses to medical queries from patients, he said.

Alibaba is said to have already put their robots to work in areas such as customer service.

Last year, China had said that it aims to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2025.
Nimish Sawant

Digital financial fraud is all around us. Everyone knows someone or the other who have faced issues such as credit card frauds, ATM skimming, phishing, voice call scams and much more. With India getting increasingly digital, the field is ripe for fraudsters who are looking at the prospect of so many people getting online.

Post demonetisation, the use of digital wallets has been on the rise. Online e-commerce has taken off like no other business in the recent past. We are paying for our cab rides, buying grocery, shopping for clothes, shopping for gadgets, hiring home help, booking flight and train tickets  all in the online environment. This certainly brings in a lot of convenience for many users. But if you are not careful with online transactions, you are leaving yourself vulnerable to be cheated off of your hard earned money.

Cybercrime is on the rise in India. A recent survey found that around 48 percent of Indian online users were hit by fraud. There's a prevalence of identity theft, frauds in areas such as telecommunications, retail as well as financial services.

We spoke to Richard Booth of RSA Security, who leads the fraud and risk intelligence business in RSA for Asia Pacific and Japan regions, on the current trends in the sphere of online fraud. The Dell Technologies-owned RSA helps credit card companies, online shopping merchants and anyone with a customer-facing business to protect their customers from financial fraud, especially in the digital channels.

Could you let us know about your work profile at RSA

I have been with RSA for nearly 12 years, most of which were spent in the UK. So I have a fair bit of experience with European banks and the frauds and challenges there. I am here to study the effects of demonetisation and Digital India, which aims to move everything online. While this digitisation has made things such as bill payments and shopping online easier, it has also made the fraudsters smarter and they have started taking advantage as well.

What are your learnings from the last one year after demonetisation, in the way Indians behave online and protect themselves from online fraud?

There may have been a few surprises in the speed and scale at which it (demonetisation) happened, but most likely the trends we predicted were followed. India isnt the first country in the world to go digital, and every country going through the same suffers from extraordinary attention from cybercriminals.

Within the RSA Fraud and Risk team, we look at cybercrime through the context of three aspects: volume, variety and velocity of fraud. So for instance when you consider the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), fraudsters are now able to get access to money much quicker than before. When you combine the UPI environment with demonetisation and transformation, it creates a perfect storm for criminals to focus on Indian institutes and consumers as they can easily get access to the money, as its all online. Once you have access to the accounts, it does not leave much time to review what happened.

What according to you are the challenges that online service providers have cut out for them?

The challenge is to strike the right balance for online services to provide ease for its customers while ensuring that their environments are safe. We have been in this field of enterprise security for quite a while now. Our fraud legacy is through our acquisitions. In that regard, we have acquired two companies back in 2006. So for more than 10 years we have been learning lessons on how to fine tune the banks' requirements and customer expectations. Between usability and security. For us, we try and understand the fraud ecosystem, because if we can understand that, then it becomes easier to decide what to do.

When we think about the life-cycle of a fraud event, it breaks down in four critical areas.

The fraudsters compromise the credentials  they steal the login details and other details about the consumer

The second state is to check if the information theyve stolen is valid. We call it credential-testing. They either go to an online store or try to login to the online banking environment to test the credentials. They do this at scale, as they are stealing tens of thousands of usernames and passwords. They are testing them in batches

Once they have a list of valid credentials, the third step is a combination of taking over the customers account or creating a new account with stolen identities to act as a mule. So that the stolen money can be transferred to the mule or third-party account

The final step is cashing out, wherein it involves taking the money out of the victim's account. Typically this involves someone standing at the ATM to withdraw the money or they will use an overseas money movement service to transfer money internationally.

A lot of banks have security measures in place, such as PINs, two-factor authentication or ways to log in. Is it still easier for the cyber fraudsters to bypass these measures?

In the fraud business within RSA, we look at controls. So if fraud is the financial risk, the OTP would be a control that you put in to prevent the risk from happening. We talk about visible and invisible controls. The challenge with visible controls is that the fraudsters know what they need to get past. So in the case of SMS OTPs in the banking world, criminals have figured out that if they cant attack the credentials, they go after the next weakest link which is the human interface.

Increasingly in India, social engineering is becoming a far more prevalent form of fraud attack. This is where they will use SMS or voice-based attacks to get the details after convincing the gullible victims that they are calling from the bank or service provider. They will tell the customers that there is a code coming to their phones. So the fraudster is sitting on the online bank, ready to log in. It is more labour intensive and cannot be easily automated. And then there are the more intense attacks where the hackers infect the customers phone with malware which will redirect the SMS with the OTP back to the fraudster.

So while I would say that the banks are doing a great job today, it is not that everything is under control. There is a continuous fight, where the banks have to evolve as quickly as the fraud evolves.

Do these trends travel across geographies or have a lifetime in a market before moving to another market?

Most fraudsters will try and reuse the same technique in different geographies. We conducted a study involving the underground cybercriminal world. Over a period of 6 months, we were observing the fraudsters over fraud forums. We found social media groups dedicated to fraud evangelisation across some of the most popular social media sites, across geographies including India. Sharing stolen credentials, trading secrets on how to be a better fraudster to even training courses on How to be a Fraudster? were widely discussed on these forums. Within these 500 or so social media groups, we also observed around 300,000 members and in the last six months, we have observed the memberships of these groups rise by 70 percent. So fraudsters have definitely become more braver. Two years ago, everything was quite secret. Fraudsters were operating from the Dark Web sitting behind Tor networks. But as the scale of cybercrime has grown, we now see fraud forums operating on the public internet, on social media sites and so on.

Could you elaborate on the aspect of behavioural profiling

Behaviour monitoring can be the most effective in the second step where the credential testing is being done. RSA was able to observe the techniques that fraudsters are using to test credentials in an automated way. They are using scripts and tools to take username and password files, and then very quickly run them against login screens  banks, online shopping sites and so on.

When you talk about behaviour monitoring, to give an analogy, when you look at the CCTV footage of a break-in at a mall, you notice that the burglar has striking behaviour. He or she will not behave like the rest of the shoppers, they will just barge in, take whatever they want and be on their way out, lest they are detained by the police. In the same way, a fraudster stands out online, if you know what you are looking for. We notice the robotic nature of the scripts and bots, and even if there was a human being behind a computer, the speed at which they click, their navigation path on the site, the activities that they perform are different from the genuine customers.

So when we think about some of the previous detection methods such as IP address, device profile, the fraudsters have mastered how to overcome that. One of the things they are struggling to overcome is behaviour monitoring. So we believe that by looking at certain aspects, we can easily identify criminal behaviour.

How big of a component are artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in fraud detection?

We utilise a lot of ML in our techniques. Machines can only take you so far just as it is with humans. The current state that we are in, it works best when it's a human and machine partnership. ML provides speed, scale and automation whereas people are needed to interpret the signals and point the tech in the right way. An AI system may be able to tell you, I think that there is a 90 percent degree of certainty that this is a fraud, but coming back to that balance of security and usability, would you let AI block the transaction? Chances are that with customer experience at the back of the mind for many of the banks today, there will still be some human intervention. It could be programmed according to each individual institutes policies, such as defining the threshold up to which AI can take decisions and when humans should take over.

Where does India stand on the global map in terms of security preparedness?

When we look at a geographical heat map of fraud, it depends on how you measure the different criteria. So clearly, economies like the US, UK, Australia  since the currencies are stronger  they get attacked frequently. In India, for instance, the size of the economy and the volumes is very different. So in certain areas, India is ahead of other countries, and not so great in others.

So far, we were talking of financial industry, but now you have FinTech industry in India and other countries. Even Europe is debating about the feasibility for banks to open their interfaces to third party service providers. As the bank starts to lose the direct connection with the customer, as they are now coming through another app or intermediary, where does the attack surface move to? Who is responsible? As more third parties want to access bank data, do they become the weak link as the fraudsters will attack these third parties instead of bank security fortresses? Supply chains' security breaches are growing as the criminals realise that if they can't attack the actual target, they will find a weaker link.

Chatbots, automated assistants, programmed to address certain queries  there is a risk of bias setting in, how do you tackle that?

The risk lies at the level of trust consumers are willing to share with these chatbots or virtual assistants. Authentication has to be a two-way street, just like a bank authenticates who I am before letting me do a transaction online, there should be methods to authenticate if a particular chatbot is real or fake. Its like some hacker getting access to my social media account  now yes, there is value in my account, but there is an even more value in a hacker impersonating me and getting data of and from my friends or contacts. My friends will trust that it is me operating the account and could share some important details without realising that it is a fraudster managing my account.

Data breaches such as Equifax, although not relevant in India, still leave a lot of concern that if such a huge organisation can be hacked where are the safe havens? Fraudsters are getting more advanced, so is there any way out of this?

RSAs business-driven security strategy is trying to help customers bridge the gap, we call it as the gap of grief, between the business objectives and the security risks. So these businesses are trying to grow their customer base, keep them happy, and ultimately grow the top line and bottom line to grow more money. Different companies will take different risks in order to achieve that. For instance, startups are more willing to take risks and larger organisations may have a lower risk profile. The challenge is that the bigger companies have a lot more data and so the reputational risk of a breach is much higher. Some companies never fully recover from the reputational damage.

On the other side, you have the security risks. We help our customers not only understand the risks but also respond to them in the appropriate way. I think breaches will continue. As long as there is value in data that companies hold, criminals will be targetting them. There is no specific vertical that will be targetted more than others. The lines are being blurred between hacktivists, industrial espionage to even state-sponsored terror attacks.

India has a terrible shortage of skilled resources in the security sphere. How do you think that issue can be tackled?

Skills shortage in the security space is not unique to India. As security becomes a high-demand industry there is a shortage of professionals trained well in security practices. Universities are starting to offer more cyber-security specific courses to train people. I dont want to comment on Indian govt policy specifically, but whether it is national identity or a social media identity, more data is being attached to consumers digital footprint now. What we need to avoid is that a single breach can compromise all these online identities.

There should be some form of tokenisation or encryption and compartmentalisation of identity data is pertinent. I think at a national level, protecting citizens is tough as there are so many of them. In a company, the policies are set by one chief technology officer (CTO) or one chief security officer (CSO) and that is adopted by everyone. In a government, you have multiple agencies and you have identities with different agencies, and you may want all of those linked to each other. Now each of these agencies may have its own policy which it may be trying to implement, so there has to be a lot of collaboration between the different agencies. This is true not just for the govt but for enterprise as well. Collaboration on security policies is critical.

Technology is just one part of solving the cybercrime problem, a lot of it also depends on the people, the processes, the collaboration on policies and so on. You may have the best technology at your disposal, but if the people are not on the same page in terms of implementing policies, then the technology will not add much value.

Using machine learning in fraud detection. Fraudsters are also getting intelligent over the years. Is there a fear of them pre-empting your solutions?

It all comes down to behaviour monitoring. For genuine users, we are able to determine a pattern to their usage, almost like a fingerprint, thanks to the data available. With the smartest technology available to us, I don't think any machine can replicate that usage pattern. When you look at the advancements in AI, theres a big gap between saying that the AI system can mirror a generic human behaviour and be repeating that as against mirroring a specific humans behaviour. Thats a huge gap that needs to be bridged if criminals are going to use machine learning to fool our systems.

I think Big data is not just about the size of it but also about the speed and variety. You can analyse the same data in a different way. I think its more how broad or wide your analysis can be on the same set of data, and how quickly you can do it.

With the privacy battles going on around the world, the amount of data banks will have to be dealt with will be huge. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, for instance, will be challenging. For instance, things such as Right to be forgotten, now what does that mean in the context of a bank? Does it mean that only your details will be deleted from the banks database? Because the bank employees may remember you as a person, so how do you delete memories?

Privacy legislation is important and there should be guidelines on how personal data should be collected, treated, stored and how it should be destroyed. If we look at GDPR, it is leading in a way in that field, both as an employee and as a consumer. For us, it provides an opportunity to innovate on coming up with safer and secure ways to analyse the data in a way that provide the same business outcomes that our customers seek.
Reuters

Alphabet Incs Google said on Tuesday it has made no changes to its mapping platform in China, denying an earlier media report that claimed it was re-launching the function in China, where many of its services are blocked.

Japan's Nikkei reported earlier that Google had set up a China-specific version of the Google Maps website for the first time in eight years and introduced a map application for Chinese iPhones for the first time.

Google, however, stated that the Google Maps browser has been available in China for many years while there is no Maps application offered in the country.

There have been no changes to Google Maps in China. Maps has been accessible on a desktop for years but does not have an official presence in Android or iOS app stores in China, Google Spokesman Taj Meadows said in comments sent to Reuters.

A Chinese version of Google Maps was accessible on Tuesday on mobile and desktop browsers with certain functions available, but Reuters was unable to find a Google Maps app available in Chinese app stores.

Nikkei reported users could find an app, but if they tried to use features like navigation they were automatically transferred to an app from AutoNavi, a mapping company owned by Chinas Alibaba Group Holding.

AutoNavi did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for a comment.

Google has tried to re-enter the China market, where its main search platform is blocked along with its popular video platform YouTube, limiting its access to Chinas internet users.

Google joined an investment in Chinese live-stream mobile game platform Chushou earlier this month after ramping up an artificial intelligence (AI) push last year, including launching an AI lab in December and hosting a match of the board game Go between its AI project Alpha Go and Chinese Go champion Ke Jie.

Last month, Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai spoke at a high-profile tech event in China organized by the Cyberspace Administration of China, which oversees internet censorship.

A full Google Maps app has not been available in China since the company pulled many of its services in 2010 after refusing to self-censor its search results. Since then, it has maintained a limited presence in the worlds top smartphone market.
Reuters

Danish toymaker Lego is teaming up with Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd to jointly develop online games and potentially a social network aimed at Chinese children.

Privately-owned Lego has seen a slowdown in sales growth in recent years, but the Chinese market has been a bright spot with sales growing 25-30 percent in 2016.

It is competing with Barbie maker Mattel Inc and Hasbro, the firm behind My Little Pony, for a slice of the $31 billion toys and games market in China.

On 15 January Lego said that the partnership with Tencent, Chinas biggest social network and gaming company, aimed to create a safe online environment covering content, platforms, and experiences tailored for Chinese children.

What we are looking for now with Tencent is just to find more creative ways... (of) reaching children, and creating bespoke content with Tencent, in this case, video games, Jacob Kragh, head of Lego in China, told Reuters on 15 January at a joint event with Tencent in Beijing.

The partnership includes developing a Lego video zone for children on the Tencent video platform, as well as developing and operating Lego branded licensed games, the toymaker said.

It also includes LEGO BOOST, a building and coding set that lets children turn their brick creations into moving objects, and will explore developing a joint social network for children in China.

Tencent is Asias most valuable company with a market capitalization of $537 billion.

Last year, Mattel struck deals with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and online content developer BabyTree to sell interactive learning products based on its Fisher-Price toys.

Lego has about a 3 percent market share in China, followed by Mattel and Hasbro with around 2 percent and 1 percent, respectively, according to Euromonitor International.

In November 2016, Lego opened a factory in Jiaxing, China, which it expects to produce 70-80 percent of all Lego products sold in Asia
PTI

On 15 January, industry body NASSCOM inked an agreement with startup accelerator MassChallenge Israel, committing scholarship support of USD 5,000 each for up to 10 Indian startups.

Besides, a Trilateral Fund of USD 50 million has been created by Israel-India Technology Group (I-ITG) to promote entrepreneurship and trilateral business opportunities between the US, India, and Israel.

The relationships and collaboration between the three countries, ranging from economic to socio-cultural exchanges, have nurtured mutual ties over several decades, NASSCOM President R Chandrasekhar told reporters here.

"By streamlining intellectual and economic exchange, as well as forging new alliances that foster collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship, we can create an osmosis of ideas within this tech triangle unlocking the joint potential of the three allies," he added.

NASSCOM, along with the Deshpande Foundation, will support a scholarship of USD 5,000 each for up to 10 Indian startups to help them access MassChallenges resources and focus on growing their businesses.

Selected Indian startups will join other finalists of MassChallenge Israel 2018 for a four-month equity-free accelerator programme in Jerusalem.

The announcement coincides with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to India.

"With MassChallenge Israel's resources and role as a leader in Startup Nation, Indian startups will be able to take their businesses to the international stage," Israel Ganot, Managing Director of MassChallenge, said.

The Trilateral Fund will invest in Israeli startups, working in areas like clean water and drones, and bring these technologies to the Indian market.

"India is a large market with a high growth rate, while Israel has the best technology in the world. US companies and investors have the capital and are looking at investing in high growth regions. I-ITG is bringing market-technology- capital together," I-ITG CEO and Chairman Dennis Mehta said.

According to a report by Zinnov, Israel and India have over 5,000 startups each that have raised up to USD 5 billion and USD 4 billion, respectively.

However, in terms of global innovation index ranking, Israel is 17th while India is at 60th spot.

The report titled USA-India-Israel: An Ocean of Opportunities highlighted that the trilateral collaboration can unlock significant potential, especially in areas like healthcare and agriculture.
tech2 News Staff

Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus is not known for disclosing its financial status. The company last declared its financial status in 2014 but is planning to change its stance and become more transparent on that front. Last year, the company launched the OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T.

In a interview to The Telegraph the company CEO, Pete Lau said that the company has doubled its revenue to more than $1.4 billion in 2017 as compared to the previous year. The CEO said that the increase in revenue had come with "healthy profits" as the company has started challenging bigger players. OnePlus is also planning to increase its network by collaborating with mobile networks in US and Europe.

Pete Lau mentioned that the company has been able to make more revenue by focusing on the high-end segment of the market. The company started distributing phones through O2 in UK in 2016 but it sells most of its mobiles directly to the core fans online.

OnePlus CEO said that they want to be more transparent about revenues so that shoppers have faith in the company. He said that if a company is not healthy, consumers will think twice before buying a product. They want to send a signal that OnePlus is a healthy company.

OnePlus also plans to release two new phones every year. The company will launch its next flagship in June 2018. Although no official name is out, we feel it will be called the OnePlus 6 going by the company's naming conventions. The smartphone is expected to come with Snapdragon 845 chipset confirmed Lau.
Karachi: At least six security personnel have been killed in terror attacks in Pakistan's troubled Balochistan province.

This morning, a police constable was gunned down in Quetta following an attack on Monday in Turbat when militants shot dead five Frontier Corps (FC) personnel.

The policeman identified as Naseer Ahmed was on his way to work when two unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle fired at him and sped away.

Last evening, a convoy of paramilitary FC came under attack in the mountainous region of Shapok in Kech district, 50 kilometres from Turbat town.

Five FC personnel were killed while six others were injured, officials said.

Since the start of the year, militants and separatists have stepped up their attacks on security personnel and installations in Balochistan.

The attacks started on 1 January when militants carried out twin assaults on a security checkpost in Chaman injuring three security personnel.

The next day, six FC officials were injured in a bomb blast near the suburbs of Quetta.

Last week, five policemen were killed when a suicide bomber rammed his motorcycle into a police truck in Quetta while two civilians also died in the attack.
Jerusalem: Visiting Israeli Prime Minister will present his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi a special gift - the G.A.L-Mobile water desalinisation and purification jeep the two leaders rode on Israel's Olga beach last year.

The jeep has reached India, sources here confirmed. "It has reached Delhi and is on its way to Bhuj," sources here said. "There will be a live demonstration of desalination of sea water that the two Prime administers will witness through video conferencing from the iCreate centre on Janaury 17," they said.

Netanyahu and Modi waded into the Mediterranean Sea and rode the "buggy" jeep on the coast during the latter's visit to Israel in July last year. The jeep is said to cost around 390,000 shekels (approximately $111,000).

Gal-Mobile is an independent, integrated water purification vehicle, designed to produce high-quality drinking water. It can be useful in natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, military use in difficult terrain and rural areas to provide drinkable water.

It can purify up to 20,000 litres per day of sea water and 80,000 litres per day of brackish/muddy or contaminated river water and bring it to WHO standards.

Modi and Netanyahu had witnessed the demonstration of sea water purification technology pioneered by Israel at a water desalination unit on the Olga Beach during the Indian Prime Minister's visit to Israel.

"When you and I walked shoeless along the Mediterranean shore, we drank sea water that was purified before our eyes using technology that will save untold lives. India and Israel are working together to provide clean water, to increase crop yields, to keep our people safe from terrorism and other challenges to the future we both seek," Netanyahu said yesterday in New Delhi.

Modi at the India-Israel Business Summit yesterday said Israel's technology for land, water or space has won appreciation.

"In fact, hailing from a water deficient state in India, I have particularly admired Israels water efficiency," he had said.
Islamabad: A hearing of corruption references against former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law, is underway in an accountability court in Islamabad, media reports said.

This is the 13th time the ousted prime minister is appearing before an accountability court.

Nawaz flew in with daughter Maryam Nawaz and her husband retired Captain Safdar from Lahore on Tuesday morning and made his way to court after a brief stay at Punjab House, Dawn.com reported on Tuesday.

A heavy contingent of police was seen stationed outside the court on their arrival.

Three witnesses are expected to record their statements in front of Judge Mohammad Bashir, who will hear the references.

A five-member bench of the Pakistan's Supreme Court on 28 July had directed National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to file references against Nawaz and his children in six weeks in the accountability court and directed the trial court to decide the references within six months.

The Supreme Court also assigned Justice Ijazul Ahsan a supervisory role to monitor the progress of the accountability court proceedings.

The former premier and his sons, Hassan and Hussain, have been named in all three NAB references, while Maryam and husband Safdar have been named only in the Avenfield reference.
Abuja: Nigeria will punish all those behind an outbreak of deadly clashes between cattle herders and farmers, President Muhammadu Buhari said on Monday pushing back at accusations that he failed to take action against members of his own ethnic group.

At least 83 people have been killed since the start of the new year in violence between the mainly Christian farmers and the semi-nomadic herders, who are mostly Muslims from Buharis Fulani ethnic group.

The outbreak of violence, mostly in the central state of Benue, has become increasingly political ahead of elections in February 2019, with Buharis opponents accusing him of failing to take action against the herdsmen.

"President Buhari said all those involved in the conflict that culminated in loss of lives would not escape justice, including any illegally armed militia in the state," said a statement released by Nigerias presidency, after Buhari spoke to a delegation of Benue political leaders.

Nigeria, Africas most populous country, is home to 250 ethnic groups, about evenly divided between Christians who mainly live in the south and Muslims who mainly live in the north. Central states such as Benue have often seen violence over religious, ancestral and cultural differences.

Farmers caught up in the clashes say herdsmen, who roam West Africa in search of pasture and often travel in and out of Nigeria through porous borders, are armed with guns and cutlasses. Groups representing herdsmen have also accused farmers of violent attacks in the last few years.

"I assure you that the police, the Department of State Service and other security agencies had been directed to ensure that all those behind the mayhem get punished," Buhari told the delegation, according to the statement.

Those who attended the meeting in the capital, Abuja, included the Benue state governor, members of parliament and traditional rulers. Buhari, a former military ruler who was elected in 2015 after vowing to improve security, has not yet said whether he will seek a new term next year.

Last week his spokesman said the suggestion that Buhari was not taking action regarding the herdsmen because of his ethnicity was "disturbing", adding that such clashes predated Buharis administration.
Ghaziabad: A 13-year-old girl, gang-raped two days ago, was still awaiting a medical examination as were the two minor accused detained in connection with the case, police said on Monday.

The minor victim was playing with two boys from her neighbourhood on Saturday evening when they took her to a secluded place and took turns raping her while the other gagged her, her father said in an FIR lodged under section 376 of the IPC and the POCSO Act.

The accused threatened her against disclosing the incident, the complainant said, adding that the victim narrated the ordeal to her parents after reaching home.

Medical examination of the victim and the accused could not be conducted even after two days due to non-availability of doctors at the government hospital, Senior Sub Inspector of Sahibabad Jitender Singh said.
Ankara: Qatar Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani held talks in Turkey on Monday with his chief ally President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as tensions again surged between the emirate and its regional foes.

The talks, announced only hours in advance, got under way at Erdogan's presidential palace in the capital Ankara, the Turkish presidency said.

Erdogan has been a major supporter of Doha in the crisis that has left Qatar diplomatically and economically isolated.

On 5 June 2017, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt cut ties with Qatar accusing it of backing extremism and fostering ties with their Shiite rival Iran.

Doha, however, denies the claims and Ankara has insisted there is absolutely no evidence to back them.

The latest meeting between the two men came as the UAE accused Qatar of "intercepting" two Emirati passenger planes en route to Bahrain.

Erdogan has strongly denounced the sanctions against Doha and, in a show of solidarity, Turkey has also sent cargo ships and hundreds of planes loaded with foodstuffs.

In recent years, Qatar has emerged as Turkey's top ally in West Asia, with Ankara and Doha closely coordinating their positions on a number of issues.

Notably, both are outspoken against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Ankara has a military base in Qatar, a key foothold for Turkey in the Gulf.

But Turkey also does not want to wreck its own relations with regional kingpin Saudi Arabia and its hugely powerful new Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Erdogan has carefully worked to improve Ankara's relations with Riyadh, hit in 2013 by the ouster of president Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, a close ally of Ankara.

The Turkish leader has levied only the most veiled criticism against Saudi Arabia during the crisis, although the pro-Erdogan Turkish press have repeatedly bashed the kingdom.

Tensions with the UAE however flared when UAE foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan retweeted a post on Twitter last month critical of the former Ottoman rulers of the region.

Ankara in response renamed the street in the Turkish capital where the UAE embassy is located after the Ottoman governor of the time.
New York: Hundreds of Haitian-Americans and others have rallied in Times Square to denounce racism and remarks that President Donald Trump is said to have made disparaging African countries and questioning further US acceptance of Haitian immigrants.

Politicians including Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio (dih BLAH'-zee-oh) joined the demonstration on Monday.

Protesters carried Haitian flags and signs with messages including "peace, love, power, dream."

Police at one point ushered demonstrators out of space designated for walking, but there were no immediate reports of any arrests.

Trump has been accused of using a vulgarity to describe African nations and questioning why to allow more immigrants from Haiti, rather than countries like Norway.

The Republican has said that the comments "weren't made" and that he's not a racist. He has said he has "a wonderful relationship with Haitians."
Tripoli: Libya's state-owned Afriqiyah Airways on Monday suspended all flights after heavy clashes damaged a number of its airplanes.

"As a result of the clashes at M'etiga international airport, we regret to inform you that our aircraft fleet (five airplanes, including a cargo plane) has suffered great damage. This damage, unfortunately, prevents the fleet from flying again." Afriqiyah Airways said in a press release, Xinhua reported.

The company said that flights from Misurata and M'etiga airports are suspended until further notice, including regular scheduled flights.

Security services closed Tripoli's M'etiga international airport on Monday morning, following a heavy attack by an armed group that killed 16 people and injured 48 others, including civilians.

The UN-backed government issued a statement condemning the attack, saying it "threatened the lives of travellers, nearby residents and the safety of air traffic."

The airport witnessed frequent clashes and armed attacks, most recently in October 2017.

However, Monday's attack is the most violent one the airport has witnessed so far, as gunmen attacked the air hub and the prison inside it, where hundreds of terrorists have been detained over the past few years.
Myanmar and Bangladesh have agreed to repatriate Rohingya displaced by an army crackdown "within two years", Dhaka said on Tuesday, outlining the first clear timeline for a return of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

The agreement says the process will be "completed preferably within two years from the commencement of repatriation", according to a statement from the Bangladeshi government following talks in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw.

The deal applies to Rohingya who fled Myanmar in two major outbreaks of violence since October 2016, when militants from the stateless Muslim minority first attacked border-guard posts in northern Rakhine state.

It does not cover Rohingya refugees who were living in Bangladesh prior to that date who the UN estimates the number at 200,000.

"During this two-day meeting, we agreed on the form that refugees will have to fill to be able to come back to Myanmar," Mohammad Sufiur Rahman, Bangladesh ambassador in Myanmar told AFP.

"We should be able to start the process in the coming days," he said, but added Myanmar's stated deadline of next week for starting Rohingya repatriation was "not possible".

The agreement follows a pact between the countries in November paving the way for repatriations from 23 January, a deadline that is likely to slip given the logistical challenges of the cross-border operation.

Myanmar has faced intense diplomatic pressure to allow the safe return of Rohingya refugees driven out by its army.

But many Rohingya in crowded camps in Bangladesh say they are reluctant to return to Rakhine state having fled atrocities including murder, rape and arson attacks on their homes.

Despite that, Myanmar authorities have pressed ahead with the construction of a "temporary camp" in Rakhine's Maungdaw district.

Eventually the site "will accommodate about 30,000 people in its 625 buildings" before they can be resettled permanently, Myanmar's state media reported this week. But only a fraction of the buildings have been finished.

Officials from Myanmar and Bangladesh met on Monday to discuss how to implement another deal, signed on 23 November, on the return of more than 650,000 Rohingya who escaped an army crackdown since late August.

Buddhist-majority Myanmar has for years denied Rohingya citizenship, freedom of movement and access to many basic services such as healthcare and education. They are considered illegal immigrants from mainly Muslim Bangladesh.

The authorities have said returnees could apply for citizenship if they can show their forebears have lived in Myanmar. But the latest deal  like the one in 1992  does not guarantee citizenship and it is unclear how many would qualify.

Monday's meeting in Myanmar's capital Naypyitaw was the first for a joint working group set up to hammer out the details of the November repatriation agreement. The group is made up of civil servants from both countries.

Last month, Bangladeshi officials said they had sent a list of 100,000 names to Myanmar for the first round of repatriation. Myanmar is yet to publicly endorse the list or even confirm it has received the names.

Bangladesh officials had said they would begin the process this month by sharing with Myanmar authorities a list of 100,000 Rohingya, picked at random from among registered refugees.

A Myanmar agency set up to oversee repatriation said in a statement recently that two temporary "repatriation and assessment camps" and one other site to accommodate returnees had been set up.

With inputs from AFP and Reuters
Islamabad: More than 1,800 Pakistani Muslim clerics have issued an Islamic directive, or fatwa, forbidding suicide bombings, a book due to be unveiled by the government on Tuesday says.

The South Asian nation has for years been plagued by violence by Islamist militants who often use suicide bombers and preach that their struggle is a holy war to impose Islamic rule.

Suicide attacks are frequently condemned as fanatical and immoral, especially when civilians are killed, but insurgents view the tactic as their most effective weapon.

Seeking to curb "terrorism" that has resulted in tens of thousands of casualties since the early 2000s, the clerics declared suicide bombings to be forbidden or "haraam".

"This fatwa provides a strong base for the stability of a moderate Islamic society," Pakistan president Mamnoon Hussain wrote in the book. "We can seek guidance from this fatwa for building a national narrative in order to curb extremism in keeping with the golden principles of Islam."

Foreign and domestic critics of Pakistan's government and military accuse them of cozying up to radical groups for political and military purposes and say the State has for too long turned a blind eye to hate preachers in mosques.

Pakistani officials deny frequent US allegations about collaborating with militant Islamist proxies in Afghanistan and India, and say vast gains have been made over the past decade against militant outfits such as the Pakistani Taliban.

But privately they also warn any moves against some popular hardline groups based in Pakistan would take a long time and need to be undertaken carefully.

Similar fatwas appear to have yielded scant results in the Middle East where the practice is used by Islamic State and other militant groups.

The Pakistani scholars, who declared that "no individual or group has the authority to declare and wage jihad (holy war)", said suicide bombings violate key Islamic teachings and were as such forbidden.

The book was prepared by the state-run International Islamic University and Hussain was due at a ceremony to mark the book's release in Islamabad on Tuesday.
Islamabad: The US has been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat to it and Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan has said.

He also said that it is time for a courteous yet "ruthlessly candid dialogue" with the US "with everything on the table" to remove all misunderstandings between Islamabad and Washington.

Reading out a policy statement on the government's foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly on Monday, he regretted that the US downplayed India's aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported on Tuesday.

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US.

"It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," the defence minister said.

Khan said that Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," he alleged. Pakistan accuses India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against it, a charge India has dismissed.

Khan alleged that "India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan" and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

"India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour," he claimed, adding that the unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace.

The minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan.

He said Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation 'Zarb-i-Azb' and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

He urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001.

He also criticised the US for not pursuing internal reconciliation in Afghanistan, which had now become a safe haven for terrorists.
Manila, Philippines: Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte's government rejected calls Tuesday to halt the potential closure a news website that has been reporting on his deadly drug war, with media watchdogs raising fears over eroding freedoms.

The country's corporate regulator revoked the incorporation papers for Rappler on Monday accusing the online portal of ceding control to foreign investors in an industry exclusively reserved for Filipinos.

Rappler, founded in 2012, has produced reports critical of Duterte's government, including its centrepiece drug war that has claimed thousands of lives and which has drawn criticism of alleged extrajudicial killings.

Duterte vowed in 2017 to expose Rappler's "American ownership", while suggesting the US Central Intelligence Agency funded the outfit. The government doubled down on the ruling Tuesday, with the justice department saying it was studying whether Rappler should now be prosecuted. "If a law has been violated, then we will file the necessary charges," Justice Undersecretary Erickson Balmes told AFP.

Duterte spokesman Harry Roque said the president "found it unfair" for Rappler to accuse him of threatening press freedom, adding he had "nothing to do" with the verdict. "If the president wanted to do that he could just have sent the armed forces to their offices and padlocked them, which has been done by other regimes. The president has never done that," Roque said.

The case concerns Rappler Holdings' decision to issue Philippine depositary receipts for shares of Rappler Inc. that the government said were sold to foreign companies.

In Monday's ruling, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Rappler had given a foreign fund veto powers in exchange for a 2015 investment in an industry that the Philippine constitution limits to Filipino entities. Rappler maintains the securities did not constitute equity nor given the investors veto on editorial matters and has vowed to appeal the ruling.

Rights groups and media watchdogs have condemned the move as the latest salvo in a series of attacks on critical media. "The order to close Rappler amounts to a direct assault on freedom of the press in the Philippines," Steven Butler, Asia programme coordinator for US-based monitor Committee to Protect Journalists said.

Duterte has also publicly attacked other media outlets including the Philippine Daily Inquirer and leading television broadcaster ABS-CBN, whose application for a franchise renewal he threatened to block.

The corporate regulator said the verdict would take effect in two weeks, while Rappler announced it would continue operating while appealing the ruling in court. "I will do everything in my power not to let Rappler go down," Rappler chief executive Maria Ressa told CNN Philippines on Tuesday.

Press organisations in Hong Kong, Thailand and the Philippines all released statements urging the government to reverse the ruling. "The order for Rappler to be shut down is part of a broader trend by Duterte to silence his critics," Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents Club said in a statement.
Santiago, Chile: Pope Francis begged for forgiveness on Tuesday for the "irreparable damage" done to children who were raped and molested by priests, opening his visit to Chile by diving head-first into a scandal that has greatly hurt the Catholic Church's credibility and cast a cloud over his visit.

Francis faced controversy on another front as well: Overnight three more Catholic churches were torched, including one burned to the ground in the southern Araucania region where Francis will visit on Wednesday to meet with Chile's indigenous peoples. While not causing any injuries, the nine church firebombings in the past few days have marked an unprecedented level of protest against history's first Latin American pope on his home turf.

In Santiago, though, an estimated 400,000 jubilant Chileans turned out in droves for his first public Mass, a massive gathering in the capital's O'Higgins park where St. John Paul II celebrated Mass three decades ago. Before the service began, Francis took a long, looping ride in his popemobile through the grounds to greet well-wishers, some of whom had camped out overnight to secure a spot.

In his first event of the day, Francis met privately with Chilean president Michelle Bachelet and addressed lawmakers, judges and other authorities at La Moneda palace. They interrupted him with applause when he said he felt "bound to express my pain and shame" that some of Chile's pastors had sexually abused children in their care.

"I am one with my brother bishops, for it is right to ask forgiveness and make every effort to support the victims, even as we commit ourselves to ensuring that such things do not happen again," he said.

Francis didn't refer by name to Chile's most notorious pedophile priest, Fernando Karadima, who was sanctioned in 2011 by the Vatican to a lifetime of "penance and prayer" for sexually molesting minors. Nor did he refer to the fact that the emeritus archbishop of Santiago, a top papal adviser, has acknowledged he knew of complaints against Karadima but didn't remove him from ministry.

Karadima had been a politically connected, charismatic and powerful priest who ministered to a wealthy Santiago community and produced dozens of priestly vocations and five bishops. Victims went public with their accusations in 2010, after complaining for years to church authorities that Karadima would kiss and fondle them when they were teenagers.

While the scandal rocked the church, many Chileans are still furious over Francis' subsequent decision, in 2015, to appoint a Karadima protege as bishop of the southern city of Osorno. Bishop Juan Barros has denied knowing about Karadima's abuse but many Chileans don't believe him, and his appointment has badly split the diocese.

"Sex abuse is Pope Francis' weakest spot in terms of his credibility," said Massimo Faggioli, a Vatican expert and theology professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia. "It is surprising that the pope and his entourage don't understand that they need to be more forthcoming on this issue."

Anne Barrett Doyle, of the online abuse database BishopAccountability.org, praised Francis for opening his visit with the apology, but said Chileans expect him to take action against complicit church leaders.

"This is a crucial opportunity for Francis: With luck, he will not make the mistake of his brother bishops in underestimating the savviness and moral outrage of the Chilean people," said Barrett Doyle, who last week released research showing nearly 80 Chilean priests have been credibly accused or convicted of abuse.

The Karadima scandal and a long cover-up has caused a crisis for the church in Chile, with a recent Latinbarometro survey saying the case was responsible for a significant drop in the number of Chileans who call themselves Catholic, as well as a fall in confidence in the church as an institution.

That distrust extends to Francis, who is making his first visit as pope to this country of 17 million people. The Argentine pope is nearly a native son, having studied in Chile during his Jesuit novitiate and he knows the country well, but Chileans give him the lowest approval rating among the 18 Latin American nations in the survey.

"People are leaving the church because they don't find a protective space there," said Juan Carlos Claret, spokesman for a group of church members in Osorno that has opposed Barros' appointment as bishop. "The pastors are eating the flock."

At a protest Tuesday near O'Higgins park where Francis celebrated Mass, police fired tear gas and water cannons before detaining several dozen demonstrators, according to an Associated Press photographer at the scene. Protesters carried signs with messages reading "Burn, pope!" and "We don't care about the pope!"

Other groups also called for demonstrations against the pontiff.

Victor Hugo Robles, an activist in Chile's lesbian and gay community, said the Vatican tries to paint an image of the pope as being close to the people, particularly those with the most needs.

"We are the ones who need help," said Robles. "Gay people, people living with AIDS. When it comes to those things, the church has an attitude of intolerance, of disgust."

Felipe Morales, from a group called the Workers' Socialist Front, said many were unhappy with the pope and the church's historical influence in Chile. They planned to protest outside while Francis celebrated Mass.

"The role of the church has been nefarious," said Morales. "Sex abuse cases have been covered up and people are unhappy with many other issues."

To be sure, many are excited to see the pope. Thousands lined the streets of Santiago to get a glimpse of Francis after he arrived Monday night, though the crowds were notably thin compared to previous visits to other Latin American capitals. O'Higgins Park, though, was teeming with faithful attending the pope's Mass.

"It was amazing to see him," said Luis Salazar, a young boy who came out with his family to see Francis pass by in his popemobile.

The pope will try to inject new energy into the church during his visit, which includes sessions with migrants, members of Chile's Mapuche indigenous group and victims of the 1973-1990 military dictatorship. It remains to be seen if he will meet with sex abuse survivors. A meeting wasn't on the agenda, but such encounters never are.
Doha: Qatar on Monday denied that its fighter jets had intercepted a passenger plane from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

"The state of Qatar announces that the claims of Qatari fighter planes intercepting a UAE civil aircraft (are) completely false," Qatari Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman Lulwa Al Khater said on her Twitter Monday.

Qatari military jets on Monday intercepted a UAE passenger plane which was on the way to land at Al Bahrain International Airport in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, the official Emirati news agency WAM reported.

The UAE's civil aviation authority has informed its Qatari counterpart that a second Emirati commercial airliner was intercepted by Qatari fighter jets while it was on a "regular scheduled and well-known journey."

The UAE authority added that it regards this incident "as a serious and renewed breach of international conventions and the safety of civil aircraft traffic."

Earlier in the day, the UAE reported another Emirates passenger plane was intercepted by Qatari military jets, calling the move as a "flagrant and serious threat to the safety of civil aviation."

The incidents came after Qatar filed two complaints on Friday and Sunday to the United Nations about the violation of its airspace in December and January by a UAE fighter jet.

On Sunday evening, Sheikh Abdullah Bin Ali Al-Thani, one of the Qatari royal family members, accused the UAE of holding him against his will. But the UAE denied the allegation.

A standoff has continued in the Gulf since early June, when the Saudi Arabia-led Arab quartet, which also includes the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt, severed diplomatic, trade and transport links with Qatar.

The quartet has accused Qatar of destabilising the region by supporting terrorism and interfering in their domestic affairs. Qatar has denied all the charges.

No breakthrough has been achieved in the international efforts to resolve the crisis, despite the mediation by Kuwait, the US, Turkey and European countries.
Mumbai: Four former defence officials on Monday expressed hurt and anguish at the remarks made by Union Minister for Shipping Nitin Gadkari against the Navy at a public function in Mumbai a few days ago.

The minister, during his speech, had said that his ministry would not "give an inch of land" for Naval housing in south Mumbai.

Retired officials Captain Raj Mohindra, Captain Ashok Batra, Commodore Mike Bhanda and Major SK Lamba in a statement said these were agonising and distressing to Navy personnel.

"We can well imagine the deleterious impact of these on not only morale of the officers, men and women of this proud fighting service but also on the gallant personnel of the other two services," the statement said.

The statement issued by these four retired officials asserted that they did not represent any organisation.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant lauded the Navy officials for taking a firm stand against the Union governments plan for a floating jetty at Malabar Hill.

"Many influential people under the disguised name of 'development' try to pressurise the administration to compromise on crucial security norms for their personal interest. The MPCC appreciates the Western Naval Commands objections whenever it felt the security of Mumbai is endangered for private helipads, floating hotels etc," Sawant said in a statement.

He added that the Navy "must not bow down to pressure from anyone even if he or she is at a very high position."
California: A California couple has been charged with torture after police rescued their 13 malnourished children from a home where some of them had been chained to beds, and neighbours on Monday described the family as shut-ins who shunned social contact.

Police made the discovery after a 17-year-old girl escaped the house in Perris, about 70 miles (113 kilometres) east of Los Angeles, and used a cellular phone she had found in the house to call them, the Riverside County Sheriffs Office said on Monday.

"Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults," police said in a statement. "The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty."

The children ranged in age from two to 29, police said.

The girl, who officers had initially thought was about 10-years-old, contacted police on Sunday after escaping the one-story house.

The parents, David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested and each charged with nine counts of torture and 10 counts of child endangerment. They were ordered held on $9 million bail each.

Neighbours said the Turpins and their children rarely emerged from their unkempt home in the newly built development of closely spaced single-family houses.

Wendy Martinez, a 41-year-old housewife, said her only contact with the Turpins came as she passed the house at night in October. Four children were installing sod in the yard while the mother watched from the door, and none responded when Martinez said hello.

They were very, like, afraid, she said of the children. Like they had never seen people before.

Police said six of the couples children were minors, while the other seven were over 18.

The siblings told officers that they were starving and police did not give the parents motive for holding the children captive.

A Facebook page that appeared to have been created by the parents showed the couple dressed in wedding clothes, surrounded by 10 girls in matching purple plaid dresses and three male children in suits.

California state records list David Turpin as the principal of the Sandcastle Day School, with its address at the Turpin house.

Records show the Turpins filed for bankruptcy in 2011. Nancy Trahan, who works in the Temecula, California, law office that handled the bankruptcy, said the couple were friendly and spoke highly of their children.

They seemed like very nice people, she said by telephone.

The Turpins are due in court on Thursday.
United Nations: The Security Council has concluded a secret fact-finding mission to Afghanistan in a show of support for the war-torn nation where it denounced the activities of terrorists there, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) announced Monday.

UNAMA said that the Council members "expressed concerns about the security environment in Afghanistan, including the presence of Al Qaeda, Taliban and ISIL (Islamic State)-Khorasan Province-affiliated fighters, as well as about the nexus of terrorism and organized crime."

"All parties reiterated the need for greater international and regional security cooperation," it added.

The three-day visit that began Saturday was lead by Council President Kairat Umarov, who is also the Permanent Representative of Kazakhstan. All the 15 members of the Council participated in the mission. They included US Permanent Representative Nikki Haley and the Netherlands Permanent Representative Karel van Oosterom, who is the Council member responsible for Afghanistan.

Umarov announced last Tuesday that a mission was forthcoming, but when it took place the visit was kept a secret because of the security situation in Afghanistan and was disclosed only after it ended.

During meetings with the Council members, Afghan officials expressed satisfaction with the development by India of the Chabahar port in Iran, which provides a sea link for Afghanistan, UNAMA said. It also has the potential to give other Central Asian countries a link to the warm waters.

India has already sent the first consignment of 1.1 million tonnes of wheat to Afghanistan using the port and roads it has built to connect it to the country.

The officials also said they hoped projects like the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India Pipeline (TAPI) for transporting gas would be implemented rapidly.

Council members met Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, other officials, NGOs, representatives of political parties and the leaders of the US-let NATO mission there.

This was the first visit of Security Council to Afghanistan in about seven years. The last visit was in June 2010.

The latest visit came ahead of a high-level Council meeting on Afghanistan on Friday to be presided over by Kazakhstan's Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov. Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani and ministers of other countries are also expected at the meeting.

Members of the Independent Election Commission and the Electoral Complaints Commission briefed the delegation on the preparations for the upcoming parliamentary and district council elections in 2018, UNAMA said.

Council members emphasised the need for electoral reforms and the importance of increasing the participation of women in elections, it added.

"Both Security Council members and Afghan officials called for improved cooperation and coordination in the region, underscoring the need for the international community, particularly neighbouring countries, to support and cooperate with Afghanistan, especially in countering terrorism," UNAMA said.
Beijing: Chinese president Xi Jinping told his US counterpart Donald Trump that there have been "positive changes" on the Korean peninsula, state media said Tuesday following a phone call between the two leaders.

Trump has pushed Xi to increase economic and political pressure on North Korea in the hopes of convincing it to stop the development of its nuclear weapons program.

Tensions have been high after the North staged a flurry of nuclear and missile tests and leader Kim Jong-un traded threats of war and personal attacks with Trump.

But in recent weeks there has been an apparent rapprochement, with the two Koreas meeting for the first time in two years and Pyongyang agreeing to send athletes to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea.

In the phone call, Xi "pointed out that the situation on the Korean peninsula has shown some positive changes," according to the official Xinhua news service.

"All sides concerned should make joint efforts to keep up the hard-won momentum for the easing of the situation on the Korean peninsula and create conditions to restart talks," he was quoted as saying.

The call comes as foreign ministers from 20 nations gathered in Vancouver to hold two-day crisis talks on North Korea's ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs.

But the US, which at the summit will review with its allies the effectiveness of current sanctions against the hermit kingdom and explore adding more, remains sceptical that Kim is ready to negotiate away his weapons program.

China has criticised the Vancouver talks  hosted by the US and Canada and which exclude both Beijing and Moscow  and called for sanctions discussions to remain within the United Nations framework.

During Xi's phone call with Trump, he also urged the US president, who has taken a hard line against the trade imbalance between the two countries, to come to the table on economic issues. "The two countries should adopt constructive means to properly settle economic and trade issue of mutual concern through opening up markets to each other and making the cake of cooperation bigger," Xinhua quoted Xi as saying.
Only around half of all households have 401(k) accounts. Even for those who do, the median 401(k) balance for those approaching retirement was just $135,000 in 2016. With few employees having access to defined benefit pension plans to provide guaranteed income, and with average Social Security benefits providing an income just above poverty level, it's clear there's a retirement crisis in America.

The Center for Retirement Research identified four key reasons why 401(k) balances are too small for most Americans. Fortunately, it's possible to overcome the challenges causing 401(k) balances to be too small and to save much more than the median. Let's take a closer look at those four items, along with some suggestions for individual investors to solve their retirement saving problems.

1. Less than full participation

One of the key reasons the median 401(k) balance for Americans is too low is that too few workers contribute to retirement plans.

Only around half of all workers in the private sector were offered access to a workplace retirement plan, and less than half of all 401(k) plans in the U.S. automatically enroll workers. This puts the onus on employees to sign up for 401(k) accounts, which they often don't do.

Participation rates in plans without auto-enrollment declined from 2013 to 2016, even as participation rates rose in workplaces where employees were enrolled by default. With the decline, just 80% of workers with access to 401(k)s contributed in 2016.

Solving this one is simple: sign up for your workplace plan if you have access to one. If you don't have access to a 401(k) at work, you can still use an IRA. IRAs allow you to invest up to $5,500 with pre-tax money in 2018 (or $6,500 if you're 50 or older) provided your income isn't too high. There are also additional retirement saving choices for people who have self-employment income, and you can also invest in a tax-advantaged health savings account (HSA) with pre-tax funds to set aside money for healthcare costs during retirement if you have a qualifying high deductible health plan.

Signing up for a 401(k) at work is simple; just talk to human resources and opt in. Signing up for an IRA and HSA can also be easy. Select a brokerage firm or use a robo-advisor service where you pay a small fee to have it invest for you.

When you sign up at work or open a brokerage account, set up automatic contributions to your account from your paycheck to ensure participation. You can contribute up to $18,500 to your 401(k) in 2018 and can make additional catch-up contributions of $6,000 if you're 50 or older. Your employer may also provide matching contributions, which is essentially free money.

2. Contributions that are too low

Employees contributing too little is another big reason why 401(k) balances are too low in America. The Center for Retirement Research explains average contribution rates actually declined between 2015 and 2016. This decline was attributed to auto-enrollment.

While auto-enrollment prompts more workers to sign up for 401(k)s, most plans set default automatic contribution levels at just 3% of income or less. Fewer than 40% of plans offering auto-enrollment also auto-increase contributions, so most people simply continue to invest 3% of their income.

This is far too little. In fact, while conventional wisdom suggested that you invest 10% of your income for retirement, people are living longer and returns are lower now so this 10% rule no longer works. Instead, if you want to ensure you have enough money to retire, aim to invest between 15% and 20% of income for retirement.

To boost your contributions, automatically increase them as soon as you get a raise before you get used to living on the extra money. Create a budget that allows you to prioritize savings, and consider taking steps to boost your income such as negotiating raises or taking on a side gig.

While you may have to gradually work up to saving 20% of your income, even a small amount of money makes a big difference. This chart shows how much adding $1,000 to your annual retirement contributions each year will impact the savings you end up with, depending upon the age when you get started, if you earn 7% annual returns.

Age When You Begin Investing Total Invested From

Your $1,000 Annual Contributions

Value of Your $1,000 Annual Investment

at Age 67 Investment Gains

on $1,000 Annual Investment 20 $47,000 $329,224 $282,224 25 $42,000 $230,632 $188,632 30 $37,000 $160,337 $123,337 35 $32,000 $110,218 $78,218 40 $27,000 $74,483 $47,483 45 $22,000 $49,005 $27,005 50 $17,000 $30,840 $13,840 55 $12,000 $17,888 $5,888 60 $7,000 $8,554 $1,554

3. 401(k) fees that are too high

Target-date funds have made it easier for investors to allocate investments appropriately because investors simply specify their risk tolerance and the age at which they wish to retire and will be invested automatically in a portfolio that's periodically rebalanced so risk tolerance is appropriate for their age.

Unfortunately, while target-date funds have made it easier for 401(k) investors to choose appropriate investments, the problem of high fees is still lowering account balances. Mutual funds are the primary investment vehicle in 401(k) accounts and fees on many of these funds are high. In fact, the expense ratio in 2016 was 0.51% for bond funds and target date funds, 0.63% for equity funds and 0.18% for money market funds. An expense ratio of 1% over 40 working years can cause a reduction of close to 20% in the value of assets at retirement.

To make sure you don't end up with a retirement account that's significantly smaller than it should be thanks to high fees, check expenses and costs carefully on all investments. If your 401(k) offers only high-fee choices, invest only as much in your 401(k) as necessary to get your full employer match and invest the rest of your retirement savings in an IRA with a wider array of investment options.

You can consider low-fee ETFs as an alternative to mutual funds to build a well-balanced portfolio with minimal effort, and may end up with much more money by not paying a fund manager.

4. Leakages from 401(k) plans

Another problem causing 401(k) balances to be too low: people are taking money out before retirement. This occurs when 401(k)s are cashed out -- which comes with huge penalties -- as well as when people take hardship withdrawals or borrow from 401(k)s and default on the loans.

Taking money out of a 401(k) before retirement is almost always a really bad idea because you typically get hit with a 10% early withdrawal penalty. Even taking a 401(k) loan is usually inadvisable -- even though it may seem smart to borrow from yourself, there are big risks including the fact the loan may need to be paid back immediately if you need to change jobs.

To avoid leakage, keep your money where it is once you've invested. If you run into financial hardship, a personal loan that doesn't put your retirement at risk is usually a better bet, even with paying interest to the bank.

You can beat the median

While the median 401(k) balance in America is too small, yours doesn't have to be. Get started today on investing more and investing smarter and you can retire with a nest egg large enough to provide you with real security as a senior.

The $16,122 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlook If you're like most Americans, you're a few years (or more) behind on your retirement savings. But a handful of little-known "Social Security secrets" could help ensure a boost in your retirement income. For example: one easy trick could pay you as much as $16,122 more... each year! Once you learn how to maximize your Social Security benefits, we think you could retire confidently with the peace of mind we're all after. Simply click here to discover how to learn more about these strategies.

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Lithium stocks remained on fire in 2017, with Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (NYSE: SQM), or SQM, taking the crown as the best-performing large lithium stock of the year. It returned 113.9% during the year, topping FMC Corp. (NYSE: FMC) and Albemarle (NYSE: ALB), which returned 64.2% and 68.8%, respectively. The S&P 500 returned 21.8%.

All three stocks of these diversified chemical companies managed to beat their robust 2016 performances, something that didn't surprise me, as I remained bullish on the group in late 2016, even as they were nearing clenching their annual returns of 59.6%, 46.6%, and 56.2%, respectively. Wall Street seemed to be underestimating the growth potential stemming from the electric vehicle (EV) revolution led by Tesla. Indeed, analysts have since raised their earnings estimates for these lithium stocks.

Lithium is used to produce the lithium-ion batteries that are currently the battery technology of choice for EVs. This application is the main catalyst that has lit a fire under lithium stocks in recent years.

Here's what you should know.

Why lithium stocks in general soared in 2017

The whopping returns of the stocks of SQM, FMC, and Albemarle in 2017 can primarily be attributed to the companies' improving financial performances, driven largely by strong results in their lithium businesses, though increasing investor confidence has also pushed up the stocks' valuations. Revenue growth in their lithium segments was due to the combination of increases in sales volumes and rising prices for the metal. Moreover, profits in these businesses expanded faster than revenue.

In the first nine months of 2017, revenue in SQM's lithium business jumped 37.7% year over year to $465.2 million, accounting for 29.4% of the company's total revenue. SQM doesn't provide the data needed to calculate the change in profitability for its segments, but we know that its lithium business accounted for 61% of its consolidated gross profit. FMC's lithium revenue increased 20.9% to $234 million over the same period, accounting for 12.3% of total sales, while operating profit for the segment soared 68.9% to $82.6 million, or 21.8% of total segment operating profit. Albemarle's lithium sales jumped 58.3% to $729.3 million in the first nine months of last year, accounting for 32.9% of its total revenue, while this business' EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) surged 66.8% to $328 million, or 51.3% of the total EBITDA for its operating units.

FMC, whose lithium business is the smallest of the three in absolute terms and relative to its business as a whole, had another major catalyst that propelled its stock price last year: In March, the stock surged on news that the company was acquiring the portion of DuPont's crop protection business that the European Commission ruled it must divest in order to merge with Dow Chemical. (This merger closed in August, with the new company called DowDuPont.) This business is widely considered complementary to FMC's existing agricultural business. In return, DowDuPont got FMC's health and nutrition business and $1.2 billion in cash when the deal closed in November.

Why SQM stock particularly outperformed in 2017

SQM stock's performance was lagging the performances of Albemarle and FMC stocks halfway through 2017, but the stock zoomed up last summer. We can attribute this to Reuters' July 5 report that Chinese private equity firm GSR Capital was exploring buying a substantial stake in SQM.

There's good reason to believe that some company (or companies) will be buying a big chunk of the world's second-largest producer of lithium. (Albemarle is the largest producer of the metal.) The former Potash Corp., now named Nutrien, following its merger last month with Agrium, has proposed a sale of its 32% stake in SQM. Moreover, there's reason to believe that a Chinese company would be particularly keen on owning a chunk of SQM. China is hungry for lithium because it's pushing domestic production of EVs. The world's largest auto market views the transition to electric-powered vehicles as necessary to help it cut down on its horrendous air pollution. In fact, on Sept. 11, news came out that China had started exploring a ban on the production of cars fueled by petroleum.

After giving up some of its second-half gains, SQM stock jumped again in December. The catalyst was Sebastian Pinera's election as the president of Chile, where SQM is domiciled. The market is optimistic that Pinera, who takes office in March and ran on a pro-business platform, will be successful at stimulating the country's economic growth.

How does SQM look going forward?

SQM has several catalysts for growth on the horizon that could help keep its stock party going. Like the other major players, it has been expanding lithium production capacity: It's hiking capacity at its Chile operation, has a new brine project in Argentina that should start coming on line in 2019, and recently announced a hard-rock lithium mining joint venture in Australia. Wall Street analysts expect SQM's earnings per share (EPS) to grow at a brisk average annual pace of 32.5% over the next five years -- much higher than the 17.2% and 15% growth rates they foresee for FMC and Albemarle, respectively. Moreover, the stock could get a nice boost if and when the Potash 32% stake is sold and if economic activity picks up in Chile.

That said, SQM remains a stock best suited for investors comfortable with a higher level of risk. It has increased political and financial risks associated with being based in a developing country. More risk-adverse investors are better off sticking to Albemarle or FMC, both of which are based in the U.S.

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Bitcoin slid as much as 18 percent on Tuesday to a four-week low, as worries about a regulatory crackdown on the market spread after reports suggested it was still possible that South Korea could ban trading in cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoins slide triggered a selloff across the broader cryptocurrency market, with biggest rival Ethereum down 23 percent on the day at one point, according to trade website Coinmarketcap, and the next biggest, Ripple, plunging by as much as a third.

Bitcoin traded as low as $11,191.59 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange. In New York trading, it edged up to $12,078, but that was still down 11.2 percent, leaving it on track for its biggest one-day fall since September.

With reports on a renewed crackdown on the cryptocurrency in China fueling anxiety over future restrictions, further losses could be on the cards (for bitcoin) in the near term, said Lukman Otunuga, research analyst at FXTM in the UK.

The sharp depreciation witnessed in bitcoin today should remind investors on how explosively volatile and unpredictable the cryptocurrency can be, he added.

South Korean news website Yonhap reported that Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon had told a local radio station that the government would be coming up with a set of measures to clamp down on the irrational cryptocurrency investment craze.

South Korea said on Monday its plans to ban virtual coin exchanges had not yet been finalised, as government agencies were still in talks to decide how to regulate the market.

FURTHER CHINA CRACKDOWN

That came amid news that a senior Chinese central banker had said authorities should ban centralized trading of virtual currencies and prohibit individuals and businesses from providing related services.

China shut down exchanges operating on the mainland last year - a move that also sparked a selloff, though the market later recovered.

Its mainly been regulatory issues which are haunting (bitcoin), with news around South Koreas further crackdown on trading the driver today, said Think Markets chief strategist Naeem Aslam, who holds what he described as substantial amounts of bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple.

But we maintain our stance. We do not think that the complete banning of cryptocurrencies is possible, he said.

Cryptocurrencies enjoyed a bumper year in 2017 as mainstream investors entered the market and as an explosion in so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs) - digital token-based fundraising rounds - drove demand for bitcoin and Ethereum.

The latest tumble leaves bitcoin down around 40 percent from a record high near $20,000 hit in mid-December, wiping about $130 billion off its total market value - the unit price multiplied by the number of bitcoins that have been released into the market.

From a technical standpoint, bitcoin is under pressure on the daily charts, said Otunuga. The breakdown below $12,000 may encourage a further decline towards $11,000 and $10,000, respectively.

A director at Germanys central bank said on Monday that any attempt to regulate cryptocurrencies must be on a global scale as national or regional rules would be hard to enforce on a virtual, borderless community.

The latest plunge in the market came as wealth management firm deVere Group, which has $12 billion under advisement, said it was launching a cryptocurrency app that would allow users to store, transfer and exchange five of the biggest digital coins, citing soaring global demand.
Prices of bitcoin and other digital currencies have skidded after South Korea's top financial policymaker said Tuesday that a crackdown on trading of crypto currencies was still possible.

Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon said in an interview with local radio station TBS that banning trading in digital currencies was "a live option." He said the decision was subject to a thorough government review.

"There are no disagreements over regulating speculation," such as using real-name accounts and levying taxes on crypto currency trading, Kim said. Shutting down digital currency exchanges is "a live option but government ministries need to very seriously review it," he said.

Bitcoin closed at $10,772.08, down 20.7 percent from the day before as of 10:15 p.m. GMT, according to Coindesk. The price of ethereum, another digital currency, tumbled 27.8 percent to $931.79 as of 10:15 p.m. GMT.

South Korean officials' remarks have swayed the global markets for bitcoin and other crypto currencies in the past few weeks. The country has seen a huge bitcoin craze, with young and old betting on the crypto currency to build wealth. The high demand from South Korean investors has created what investors call a "kimchi premium," the extra price the South Koreans have to pay to buy digital currencies, sold in South Korea at higher than the average global prices.

Last week, the justice minister's remark that the country will ban bitcoin and other digital currencies triggered big sell-offs and a public outcry. The presidential office then said that no final decision had been made.

An online petition on the presidential office's website has drawn more than 210,000 requests from people asking the government not to ban trading in digital currencies.

"We the citizens were able to have a happy dream that we had never had in South Korea thanks to crypto currency," the petition reads. "You may think you are protecting the public but we citizens think that the government is stealing our dream."
Cryptocurrency prices slid on Tuesday, after South Korea said shutting down exchanges is still an option.

According to Coinbase, bitcoin was trading around $12,287 Tuesday morning. Bitcoin started to sell-off mid-day Monday, falling from a peak of $14,079. Bitcoin has shed almost 38% of its value in the last month.

Last week, there were reports that South Koreas government was planning to ban cryptocurrency trading, but after bitcoin slid, the government backtracked.

On Jan. 1, Reuters reported that South Koreas Justice Minister Park Sang-ki said the government was preparing a bill to ban trading of the virtual currency on domestic exchanges.

"There are great concerns regarding virtual currencies and the justice ministry is basically preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency trading through exchanges," Park told a news conference.

But, after bitcoin collapsed, a few hours later, South Koreas presidential office said a ban on the country's virtual coin exchanges had not yet been finalized.

Fast forward to Tuesday, and South Korea's top financial policymaker said a crackdown on trading of cryptocurrencies was still possible.

In an interview with local South Korean radio station TBS, Finance Minister Kim Dong said that banning trading in digital currencies was "a live option," and that the decision was subject to a thorough government review.

While the government is still considering a ban, 210,000 South Koreans have signed an online petition on the presidential offices website asking the government not to ban trading digital currencies.

"We the citizens were able to have a happy dream that we had never had in South Korea thanks to crypto currency," the petition reads. "You may think you are protecting the public but we citizens think that the government is stealing our dream."

China is apparently accelerating its clampdown on cryptocurrency trading, Bloomberg reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
Japanese vehicle brands are exploring new design ideas  and figuring out what sets them apart from their U.S. and European rivals  with new prototype vehicles.

Nissan, Infiniti and Lexus are all unveiling new concept cars at the Detroit auto show, which opens to the public Saturday.

Concepts are used to test ideas and see how show visitors react. Some elements are glamorous but impractical, with sharply angled headlights or pencil-thin side mirrors that will never actually end up on a production vehicle. But other elements from concept cars do make it onto the road. Lexus's gaping spindle grilles, now a feature on the automaker's vehicles, were introduced in 2011 on the LF-Gh concept car.

"Maybe they don't develop that concept per se, but it makes a statement about where the brand is going," says Michelle Krebs, an executive analyst with the car buying site Autotrader.com.

This year's auto show concepts differ in many ways, but they're striving for one thing: simplicity. They all have serene interiors with real wood and minimal distractions. Karim Habib, Infiniti's executive design director, says designers are reacting to all the visual stimulation in the world.

"It is our intention to be an antidote to that," he said.

Here are some details on the concept cars at the show:

INFINITI Q INSPIRATION: The sleek sedan from Nissan Motor Co.'s luxury Infiniti brand explores how design will change as it moves to compact but powerful variable compression ratio engines. Karim Habib, Infiniti's executive design director, said the smaller engine allows for a shorter hood and a bigger passenger cabin than Infiniti's previous models. The exterior is bold and deceptively simple; there are few lines, but they're deeply etched into the surface so the curves shift as the viewer moves around the vehicle. At first glance, it's hard to see the grille, which is made of twisted metal painted the same color as the car. Inside, there are subtle details, like the traditional Japanese fabric made with gold rice paper that's tucked under the door handles. Each passenger has a touchscreen that offers guided meditation to reduce stress. Habib says the interior is meant to reflect Japan's tradition of polite, generous hospitality. Habib says elements from the Q Inspiration will eventually make it into production vehicles.

LEXUS LF-1 LIMITLESS: Vehicle brands have always had so-called flagship sedans, the big cars in the lineup that set the tone for all the others. Lexus, which invented the luxury crossover 20 years ago with the RX 300, is now playing with the idea of a flagship crossover SUV. The LF-1 is built so it can be powered by a fuel cell, a hybrid system, gasoline or a battery. By 2025, Lexus says, all of its models will have one of those options available. The LF-1 was designed in California but took its inspiration from a traditional Japanese sword, imagining smooth molten metal flowing into a solid, chiseled form. Inside, knobs and buttons are replaced by motion-activated controls and a wide, unobstructed dashboard. Lexus General Manager Jeff Bracken says Toyota Motor Corp.'s luxury Lexus brand will decide whether to build a flagship crossover based on customer and dealer response to the concept.

NISSAN XMOTION: Nissan Motor Co.'s XMotion  pronounced "cross motion"  differs from the Infiniti and Lexus concepts in exterior styling; instead of spare, undulating designs, the Xmotion is solid, square and blocky. It's ready for rugged use, with all-terrain tires and a retractable rooftop cargo box. But Alfonso Albaisa, Nissan's global design director, said the tough exterior protects the soft, cocoon-like interior. The long center console, which runs from the front to the rear seats, is made of cedar and uses a traditional Japanese architectural wood joinery technique. Cedar is also used for slats below the dashboard, which are meant to convey the sturdy "bones" of the vehicle. Nissan says the XMotion will serve as a blueprint for the company's SUVs and eventual autonomous shared vehicles.
U.S. President Donald Trump will deliver the closing address at the elite World Economic Forum conference in Davos next week, which focuses on "finding ways to reaffirm international cooperation on crucial shared interests," forum organizers announced Tuesday.

The WEF says international security, the environment and the global economy will be the key topics at the annual meeting of business leaders, civil society advocates, academics, celebrities and others in the Swiss Alpine resort from Jan. 23-26.

Klaus Schwab, the founder of the WEF, whose motto is "committed to improving the state of the world," said the world is facing an "inflection point." He noted a theme of rising competition between countries  and divisions within them.

One big issue, Schwab added, "will certainly be the future of global cooperation related to trade, environment, fight against terrorism, tax systems, competitiveness  and in this context it's absolutely essential to have President Trump with us."

Ten heads of state or government from Africa, nine from the Middle East and North Africa, and six from Latin America will join Western leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and British Prime Minister Theresa May in Davos.

The WEF announced the formal schedule on Wednesday, noting that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will deliver the opening address on Tuesday, while Trump is to make a "keynote" address before Friday's closing.

At its core, the Davos conference is an economic gathering  and more than 1,900 private sector leaders will be on hand.

Just over one in five participants will be women, a record high percentage for the Davos gathering. Top celebrities including actress Cate Blanchett, actor Shah Rukh Khan, and singer Elton John will turn up for an awards ceremony on Monday before the formal conference start.
The owners of a Trump-branded hotel in Panama sued President Donald Trump's family-owned company in federal court Tuesday, alleging that the namesake business committed mismanagement and fraud.

The lawsuit includes previously confidential arbitration filings before the International Chamber of Commerce. It alleges that Trump Hotels tried to "bully, intimidate and harass" its way out of a $15 million arbitration claim. The owners, led by investment firm Ithaca Capital Management, are seeking to fire Trump's company and abandon the Trump brand.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, was intended to terminate Trump's 20-year contract, and alleged "gross negligence and potentially fraudulent conduct" by the Trump Organization, including "looted" bank accounts. The hotel currently carries a $1.9 million deficit in its reserve accounts, Trump's opponents allege, because of improper use of funds.

Trump's hotel company, meanwhile, alleged in arbitration filings that Ithaca and other hotel unit owners committed fraud and racketeering. That claim on behalf of Trump International Hotels Management argued that the owners acted in bad faith and lacked the authority to terminate the contract. The Trump claim also alleged that Ithaca's managing director, Orestes Fintiklis, falsely promised to support the hotel's management before undertaking "a lawless coup" in the building.

At stake in the dispute is control over the operations of the Trump International Hotel in Panama City, a 70-story luxury waterfront high-rise. The hotel has been struggling, with occupancy in recent days  a period considered peak high season  ranging from just 26 to 28 percent. Ithaca and its allies among the unit owners blame that performance on mismanagement and damage to Trump's brand since he assumed the presidency. Trump attorney Alan Garten, meanwhile, blames a widespread downturn in Panama's hotel business.

Earlier Tuesday, The Associated Press reported that staff at the hotel ran off a team of Marriott executives invited to visit the property as part of the owners' search for a company to take over the hotel's operation from Trump. The head of Trump Hotels later called the head of Marriott to discuss the visit. Garten said the call was friendly.

"We have a great relationship with Marriott," Garten said. "They were appreciative that we let them know that we have a valid contract."

Marriott generally steers clear of properties facing ownership and management disputes. But the call from a senior Trump executive to the CEO of Marriott, which manages more than 6,000 hotels, raised the awkward matter of how American companies interact with a business owned by the president.

Marriott, like most major international companies, has significant business and public policy interests before the Trump administration. Federal employees who travel and hold government conferences pay to use its properties, and Marriott has been lobbying the administration and Congress over U.S. tourism, trade and legal restrictions against property ownership in Cuba, disclosures to consumers about resort fees, and other issues.

A spokeswoman for Marriott declined to comment.

The dispute between Ithaca and Trump's hotel business was previously known only due to the feuding parties' communications with individual hotel unit owners.

"Our investment has no future so long as the hotel is managed by an incompetent operator whose brand has been tarnished beyond repair," Fintiklis, the managing partner of Miami-based Ithaca Capital Partners, wrote in a letter.

Trump Hotels accused Ithaca of deceiving its fellow hotel owners and illegally terminating the Trump contract.

"Unfortunately, it is YOU, the unit owners, who will ultimately be the ones to bear responsibility for the bad acts of Mr. Fintiklis and his cohorts," Trump Hotels executive vice president Jeff Wagoner said in an earlier letter to the owners last week.

The effort to remove Trump hotels from managing the hybrid condo-hotel units on the property began last year, after Ithaca Capital Group purchased 202 unsold hotel units from the building's struggling developer.

After buying the units in August with Trump Hotels' blessing, Ithaca quickly turned sour on the brand.

Fintiklis did not respond to emails from the AP seeking comment.

Al Monstavicius, a retired Nevada doctor who owns a penthouse hotel unit in the building, said Trump's statements regarding Mexicans and his determination to strip hundreds of thousands of Central Americans in the U.S. of protection from deportation have made Trump's brand toxic in Panama.

If the owners in Panama succeed, it won't be the first time Trump has been ousted there. In 2015, amid the early months of Trump's presidential campaign, the owners of apartments and other businesses in the same building voted to fire Trump's management company over budget issues and allegations of misspent funds.

Since then, the property's overall finances have improved. Its annual deficits, which exceeded $1 million, have since turned into a surplus, according to financial documents provided to the AP by an owner.
Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Tuesday that he hoped two Reuters journalists will be freed in conjunction with his visit to Myanmar next week as a member of an international advisory panel seeking to resolve the crisis in the country.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested Dec. 12 after police accused them of illegally obtaining secret papers from policemen, who had worked in Rakhine State. Security forces there are blamed for rights abuses against Rohingya Muslims that sparked the exodus of some 650,000 people to Bangladesh since August when Myanmar's military launched a brutal crackdown. Myanmar's army has described it as "clearance operations" against terrorists, but the United Nations and the U.S. have called it "ethnic cleansing."

The fate of the two journalists, who could be sentenced to 14 years in prison, will be discussed when Richardson and three other members of the advisory board travel to Myanmar on Monday. The board is charged with helping implement recommendations for ending the crisis written by a commission led by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. One of those recommendations calls for a free flow of journalists in the Rakhine area.

"Hopefully we will get this resolved during the trip or before the trip," said Richardson, a former U.S. representative to the United Nations and energy secretary during the Clinton administration. "I think it would be a smart move on the part of the government to release them before we arrive, but I'm not optimistic that will happen. It would be a nice gesture."

Richardson has played key roles in the successful release of hostages and U.S. servicemen in North Korea, Cuba, Iraq and the Sudan. He was appointed to the International Advisory Board on Rakhine State at the request of Myanmar civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The chairman of the advisory board, former Thai foreign minister Surakiart Sathirathai, the Trump administration and former President Bill Clinton also have called for the journalists' release.

Richardson told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he sent a letter asking to meet with Myanmar's minister of home affairs during his visit to Southeast Asia.

Rights and media groups have criticized Myanmar's new civilian government led by Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate, for continuing to use colonial-era laws to threaten and imprison journalists. Such laws were widely used by the military junta that previously ruled the country to muzzle critics and the media.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Richardson wasn't traveling on behalf of the State Department in any formal capacity, but that the administration wished him well as he seeks the journalists' release.

"We certainly hope that he will be successful in doing that," Nauert said.
Britain's business secretary called Tuesday for a fast-tracked investigation into the collapse of construction giant and state contractor Carillion, expanding the remit of the probe to include the behavior of executives both past and present.

Greg Clark asked the insolvency service and the official receiver to expedite their inquiry as the ramifications of the collapse pulsated through the government. Company executives are under investigation for protecting their bonuses even as the failure of the company put some 43,000 jobs at risk worldwide.

"I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors," Clark said. "Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously."

Clark also asked the Financial Reporting Council to investigate the company's accounts and auditors.

Carillion had 450 government contracts that ranged from rail projects to providing school lunches. Opposition parties have criticized the government for continuing to award contracts to Carillion as it issued three profit warnings and struggled to finance 900 million pounds ($1.24 billion) of debt and a 587 million pound pension deficit.

"There are real suspicions that the government was too close to this company and too wedded to its privatization role," said John McDonnell, a senior Labour party member. "We need full transparency on meetings and discussions that took place between government ministers, civil servants and representatives of Carillion and what warnings were given to ministers and what actions recommended implemented or not."

The ramifications for the collapse are only beginning to be felt. Besides the risk to those who work directly for the company, small traders awaiting payment for Carillion-related work are also at risk.

Engineering services bodies told Clark that the loss of hundreds of millions of pounds owed by Carillion would likely hurt specialist suppliers, and force some out of business.
I'm still shaking my head over the 38 minutes of terror caused by Saturday's false missile warning in Hawaii. At 8:07 a.m. local time, all cell phones alerted, "Emergency alert: ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii, seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill."

Well that will drain some lava from your volcano! Residents panicked, children were thrown into storm drains, tourists emptied beaches and vowed to only ever go to Orlando.

This was obviously a huge failure of state government that added up to a big, Rick Perry-sized "oops!"

Hawaii's governor blamed it on a mistake during a standard procedure, yet there was no standard procedure to call the pig back to the luau for 38 minutes.

Maybe there really was a missile headed to Hawaii, maybe the real "whoopsie" is it was ours and not one of theirs. Maybe this was a ridiculous and cruel test to see how people would react knowing their lives were about to be cut short by a stubby psychopath with a bad haircut. Whatever the case, you can always judge a calamity not by the act itself, but by the reaction.

Emotionally charged actors took to the digital stage and began furiously blaming the president. Jamie Lee Curtis, in between spoonfuls of colon-soothing Activia, tweeted:

"This Hawaii missile scare is on you Mr. Trump. The real fear that mothers & fathers & children felt is on you. It is on your arrogance. Hubris. Narcissism. Rage. Ego. Immaturity and your unstable idiocy. Shame on your hate filled self. You did this!"

But what of strategic patience and the years of fissile hoarding and missile building? That doesn't fit into a hysterical narrative. The once funny Jim Carrey made it all about Jim Carrey.

"I woke up this morning in Hawaii with ten minutes to live. It was a false alarm, but a real psychic warning. If we allow this one-man Gomorrah and his corrupt republican congress to continue alienating the world we are headed for suffering beyond all imagination."

Where'd you learn that insightful diplomacy Lloyd Christmas, from your washed up bubble?

The point is, government ineptitude is nothing new, and it's time to let go of the sagging notion that the state can keep you safe or informed.
Martin Luther King Jr.s niece, Alveda King, on Monday said President Trump is not a racist and called on Lewis to make peace with the president.

On Sunday, John Lewis (D-Ga.) told ABCs This Week that President Trump is a racist when asked about the presidents alleged controversial remarks when questioning why the U.S. would allow immigrants from Haiti and other countries.

I understand that hes hurt and hes disturbed because he makes that point very clearly, but the answer is not to just call somebody a racist, in this case President Trump, and not make efforts to resolve the situation, she told FOX Business Melissa Francis on Risk & Reward.

Trump had made the controversial comment during a closed door immigration reform meeting, but denied using any derogatory language. He wrote on Twitter, Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country.

I do not believe that President Donald John Trump is a racist, she said. Sometimes leaders can be corrupt, take all of the resources from the people. [Trumps] talking about the conditions like a hell hole kind of thing. The people are suffering and their answer is, lets move to America. So I believe once our swamp is drained, he wants to help drain more swamps.

In addition, the civil rights activist also credited President Trump for the booming economy.

The economy is better, the unemployment rate in the black community and across the board. Job rates are going up across the board. People in business now are saying we will lower our own breaks to our employment. All of this is under the leadership of President Donald John Trump, she said.
Days after actress Eliza Dushku accused famed stunt coordinator Joel Kramer of molesting her at age 12, two more women have come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct. One of the new accusers claimed that he slept with her friend when she was 16 years old.

WARNING: DETAILS BELOW MAY BE DISTURBING

The two stuntwomen came forward following claims by Dushku that Kramer has since outright denied. One claim involved the friend of a girl who came to the North Carolina set of the 1997 film Virus. Laura Albert, who worked on the film, told Deadline that she invited her sister to the set to show her the industry as she was interested in becoming a makeup artist. Both girls were in the 10th grade.

Albert said the stunt crew, which included Kramer, went go-karting later that night. However, she said she did not know that Kramer invited the girls back to his hotel to swim. She claimed that he then exposed his penis saying, you cannot handle his. This prompted the sister to leave, but her friend stayed and allegedly had sex with Kramer.

Kramer admitted to Fox News that he fooled around with the 16-year-old but denied the claims of intercourse and exposing himslef as outright lies. Kramer said he never invited the girls back to the hotel but saw them while he was swimming laps. He claimed he left the pool by himself without talking to either of them.

Thirty minutes later there was a knock at my door and her friend was there and asked to come in. She came in and we fooled around but no intercourse. She left about 1/2 hour later. I honestly did not know she was 17. Tattoos, and yes, pretty. When I found out I was devastated. I also checked with the local laws and found out 16 was the consensual age. It bothered me for years. Yes all was consensual, he said.

Albert told Deadline she confronted Kramer about the incident, but there was nothing that could be done as she was of legal age in the state at the time of the encounter.

Deadline reported that another woman, who chose to remain anonymous, claimed Kramer forced her to perform oral sex on him in the late 1970s or early 1980s. While giving her a ride to a group outing, she claimed he stopped along the way and forced her head into his lap. When it was over, she said he drove them to meet the group. She said she never reported the incident because she was new to the business and worried she would lose her career.

The 2nd anonymous woman I have absolutely no idea of what who and why except its pure trolling and fabrication, Kramer told Fox News. That is a made up story. I have a feeling this witch hunt will bring out more of this vicious fabricated crap.

In a follow-up post on Facebook, Dushku voiced her support for the anonymous women who came forward.

My heart goes out to the women who came forward today & to everyone here who has shared their powerful stories in recent days. Thank you for your bravery. We will walk through this in strength, she said. And, from the deepest parts of my heart, thank you all for your unbelievable support.
Alec Baldwin is standing up for Woody Allen.

Allen's name has been brought up in recent weeks as stars have been speaking out about sexual harassment and abuse in Hollywood. Allen's daughter Dylan Farrow accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was a child.



Baldwin called the resurfaced criticism against Allen "unfair and sad."

"Woody Allen was investigated forensically by two states (NY and CT) and no charges were filed," Baldwin tweeted on Tuesday. "The renunciation of him and his work, no doubt, has some purpose."

The actor continued, "But its unfair and sad to me. I worked w [Woody Allen] 3 times and it was one of the privileges of my career."

Dylan Farrow, who was adopted Mia Farrow and Allen, claimed Allen molested her shortly before her mother and the director split up.

She recently wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times saying she can't fathom why women continue to work with Allen in the age of the #MeToo movement.

Allen has long denied the allegations and was never charged with a crime. However, a prosecutor in Connecticut said he had probable cause to prosecute Allen in 1993 but declined to press charges, reportedly to spare Dylan Farrow the trauma of a trial.

Baldwin said on Twitter that while he does not intend to "dismiss or ignore" complaints of sexual abuse, it is important to tread lightly.

"Is it possible to support survivors of pedophilia and sexual assault/abuse and also believe that WA is innocent? Baldwin tweeted. "I think so. The intention is not to dismiss or ignore such complaints. But accusing ppl of such crimes should be treated carefully. On behalf of the victims, as well."

Several actors have since expressed regret about working with Allen including Greta Gerwig and Rebecca Hall.

On Monday, actor Timothee Chalamet said he would donate his entire salary from his upcoming Allen film, "A Rainy Day in New York," to the Time's Up movement.

In October 2017, Baldwin made headlines when he addressed his friendship with another director -- James Toback. Toback has been accused of misconduct by about 300 women.

In all the time Ive known Jimmy, I never had one conversation about his sex life, which is not unusual for me because Im not sitting down with some guy and hes saying to me, 'Man, you should have seen what I did last night with this girl in this hotel.' I dont go there, he told the Los Angeles Times. ...I never knew any details of what he did that was assault in nature or rape in nature or criminally actionable. Never, never, never."
Ann Curry has her shot at taking revenge on Matt Lauer after she was unceremoniously ousted from the "Today" show in 2012. But will she take it?

Two months after her former "Today" co-anchor Lauer was fired by NBC following multiple reports of sexual assault, Curry is set to make her first TV interview since she was let go from the network.

Curry will appear on "CBS This Morning" on Wednesday and the network promised she will address Lauer's sex scandal, the #MeToo movement all while promoting her new PBS documentary series, "We'll Meet Again."

Cameras chronicled Curry's icy relationship with Lauer for years before she was ousted from "Today," reportedly thanks in part to Lauer. Her last day on the show came after a long, well-documented period of bullying by Lauer and the NBC show's largely male management. She finally left the network in 2015.

LAUER FIRED: A LOOK AT THE FALLEN 'TODAY' STAR'S CAREER



Curry spoke with People two days after Lauer's firing in November, but she said she didn't want to specifically address the anchor's departure.

However, the 61-year-old did open up about harassment in the workplace stating, "The battle lines are now clear. We need to move this revolution forward and make our workplaces safe."

Curry's time at "Today" was described as "professional torture" in a 2013 story in New York Times Magazine. It detailed that Curry complained to friends that male co-workers were intentionally mean to her and compared her to "Big Bird" simply because she wore a yellow dress. "Today" executives reportedly referred to the plot to remove Curry as "Operation Bambi."

During Curry's yearlong stint on "Today," Lauer reportedly told a colleague, "I can't believe I am sitting next to this woman."

EX-NBC NEWS PRODUCTION ASSISTANT REVEALS SECRET RELATIONSHIP WITH MATT LAUER

Curry's emotional on-air goodbye in 2012 became an infamous sore spot for the prestigious "Today" franchise, especially when Lauer sought to kiss her on the cheek on air and Curry cringed away.

The debacle sorely upset "Today" fans and the morning show's ratings cratered right after Currys departure  and never fully recovered.

With Lauer gone, "Today" has seen a surprise spike in ratings since his firing on Nov. 28. It's possible many assume that viewers are just tuning in temporarily to watch the train wreck, but a growing number of industry insiders are wondering if for years the $25 million star was actually turning viewers away.

"Women never forgave Matt for what he did to Ann [Curry] five years ago. We're now realizing that he was dragging down 'Today's' ratings ever since. He wasn't key to their ratings. He was actually actively hurting their ratings," a TV executive at a rival network told Fox News in December.

Fox News' Brian Flood contributed to this report.
Former Netflix talk show host Chelsea Handler celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day by tweeting that white people should think about what it must be like to not be white on the national holiday.

The 42-year-old comedians post read, Happy Martin Luther King day to a true hero. This day means more today than it ever has. We all must honor the spirit of his fairness and equality and tireless search for justice. It is up to white people to honor Dr King, and to think about what it must be like to not be white.

In addition to her first tweet about Dr. King, Handler, who is a well known critic of the Trump administration, re-tweeted a photo of Dr. King placing his hand over Trumps mouth, adding the comment: Yeah, seriously. Dont speak today.

After the cancelation of her Netflix show in October, Handler announced that she would be spending more time focusing on political activism. The Chelsea host cited one of the main reasons for the show ending was Trumps presidency, which inspired the comedian to become a more engaged citizen.

On Jan. 10, Handler made headlines once again for her tweet following the presidents meeting with Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the topic of immigration. Handler directed her anger at South Carolina senator Lindsay Graham.

Hey, @LindsayGrahamSC what kind of d--k sucking video do they have on you for you 2 be acting like this? Wouldnt coming out be more honorable?

Handlers tweet gathered more than 20,000 likes, but the former talk show host was also widely criticized for the crude tweet and called homophobic.

But despite the end of her talk show and with a new focus on politics, Handler will continue to work with Netflix on a new documentary featuring her talking to people of different ethnicities, religions and political philosophies.
As several victims of disgraced former USA Gymnastics team doctor, Larry Nassar, speak at his sentencing on Tuesday, Chrissy Teigen is doing her part to make sure one of his accusers gets her say.

The star tweeted a message to McKayla Maroney offering to pay the fine shed face for speaking publicly about Nassar.

In October, Maroney posted a note to social media adding her name to a list that now includes more than 100 people who claim Nassar sexually abused them while he was working as the doctor for the U.S. Olympic team.

Dr. Nassar told me that I was receiving 'medically necessary treatment that he had been performing on patients for over 30 years.' It started when I was 13 years old, at one of my first National Team Training camps, in Texas, and it didnt end until I left the sport, she wrote.

As previously reported, Nassar pleaded guilty to 10 counts of sexual assault and was sentenced in a separate case in which he was found to have received and possessed 37,000 images of child pornography in November. On Tuesday, many of his 140 accusers are giving statements regarding the now-disgraced doctor.

On Thursday, Teigen tweeted her regret that Maroney, who sued Nassar in 2016, cannot be among the voices at that sentencing because she signed a non-disclosure agreement as part of her $1.25 million settlement. If she speaks publicly on the matter, she will be fined a reported $100,000.

The entire principle of this should be fought - an NDA to stay quiet about this serial monster with over 140 accusers, but I would be absolutely honored to pay this fine for you, McKayla, Teigen wrote.

Since then, the post has gone viral on Twitter. AOL.com reports that the post received upwards of 7,000 retweets in its first half hour. So far, Maroney has not publicly accepted, denied or even commented on Teigens offer.

Meanwhile, other stars have come forward offering their financial support for Teigan's proposition as well. "The Good Place" creator Michael Schur and its star Kristin Bell offered to split the cost with Teigan in tweets of their own.
The head of a security company that worked on the set of the Netflixs House of Cards accused disgraced Hollywood star Kevin Spacey of racism, the Daily Mail reported on Monday.

Earl Blue, the head of VIP Protective Service and Navy veteran, told the Mail exclusively that Spacey would refuse to acknowledge the black team members and made racist remarks.

Blue said Spacey was overheard by some of his employees telling a member of his personal security team, I don't want n-----s watching my trailer, referring to the Netflix show in which he played the lead role, Frank Underwood.

Blue, 51, cited confidentiality as the reason why he waited four years to come forward, but told the paper it came to the point where people are being harmed, enough is enough.

Blue said his companys contract was not renewed despite receiving no complaints and being told by representatives of the Knight Takes King-- the company that hired them-- that they were really pleased.

He told the paper that he later learned through a production manager that Spacey said in a conference call that he "did not want n-----s on his set anymore."

Another source told The Mail that there were break-ins under VIPs watchincluding in Spaceys trailer. The contract was given to another firm.

Blue denied the account and said he wasnt given a reason for why his contract was terminated.

A former employee of the VIP Protective Service told the Mail that he has "no particular recollection" of Spacey eliciting racist behavior. Although, he added that Spacey was a real a--hole who would get temperamental.

Spacey was accused earlier this year of sexual misconduct from more than a dozen people, and has since been dropped by Netflix, as well as a number of other productions.

Iain Paterson, who was a producer on the show, told the paper that the work of VIP Protective Services was unsatisfactory, but would not comment further on the accusations made by Blue.

The Mail reached out to Netflix, which declined to comment, as well as Spacey himself, who did not reply.

Since losing the Netflix gig, Blue said his company has struggled to find work.
For decades, many have wondered if the infamous sex scene between Hollywood stars Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in their 1973 film Dont Look Now was real.

And now Sutherland, 82, wants to set the record straight.

The New York Daily News reported Monday that while attending the New York premiere of his new film The Leisure Seeker, the veteran actor attempted to finally put the rumor to rest.

Theyre idiots, the Canadian-born actor told reporters in attendance. There were two cameramen in there. The takes were 15 seconds long, maximum. All right, Julie, hold your head, OK, turn your head a little to the side...

The father of fellow actor Kiefer Sutherland added he adores the scene because it reminded you of making love.

Dont Look Now is an erotic thriller that tells the story of a married couple (Sutherland and Christie) who travel to Venice following the death of their young daughter. The film is still recognized today for its controversial sex scene that was considered explicit for its time.

And Sutherland isnt the only one who still has fond memories of bringing the story to life.

In a 2015 documentary on director Nicolas Roeg, Christie, now 77, described how filming the scene was absolutely lovely.

I loved the squirming bits and all those things you dont see, she explained, as reported by the Daily Mail at the time. It was just flesh squirming and rolling and touching, and God I thought it was absolutely lovely.

It wasnt even necessarily sexy, what it was, added the British actress. It reminded you of making love.

Warren Beatty, Christies then-boyfriend, allegedly demanded that the scene be cut.



In 2011, The Hollywood Reporter revealed former movie executive Peter Bart claimed in his book Infamous Players that Sutherland and Christie did actually have sex while filming the scene.

It was clear to me they were no longer simply acting, he wrote. They were f---ing on camera.

Sutherland immediately fired back and denied Barts claim.

Peter Bart mendaciously writes that he witnessed the shooting of the love scene in Dont Look Now and saw sex, he told The Hollywood Reporter. Not true. None of it. Not the sex. Not him witnessing it. From beginning to end, there were four people in that room. [Director] Nic Roeg, [DP] Tony Richmond, Julie Christie and me. No one else. Wires under the locked door led outside, and this was 20 years before video monitors.

Producer Peter Katz also came forward to address Barts allegation.

While there was a sex scene captured on film, it was not a scene that would lead to the creation of a human being," he said.

However, Katz mentioned the U.S. and Canadian versions of the film did include several cuts to the sex scene, making them different from the European releases. The changes were made to avoid an X-rating.
Keira Knightley is rarely seen in films set in the modern day, and there's a reason why. The actress said in a new interview that she often chooses period pieces because women are treated better.

I dont really do films set in the modern day because the female characters nearly always get raped, Knightley told Variety. I always find something distasteful in the way women are portrayed, whereas Ive always found very inspiring characters offered to me in historical pieces.

In the one-on-one interview, the 32-year-old actress talked about her latest period drama, where she stars a French author, Colette, who tries to fight her husband whos stealing her work and trying to pass it off as his own.

Knightley said playing the role of Colette was inspiring in the wake of Hollywoods sexual harassment scandals.

Its wonderful to play inspiring women and to get their stories and their voices out there, she said. The fact that the movie is coming out right now isnt a surprise. Womens stories are suddenly viewed as important, she added.

Though Knightley tends to shy away from playing modern-day roles, she said that she has seen some improvement in female characters through television and online streaming shows.

Theres been some improvement, she said. Im suddenly being sent scripts with present-day women who arent raped in the first five pages and arent simply there to be the loving girlfriend or wife.

The Pride and Prejudice actress also weighed in on sexual harassment within the industry and working with Harvey Weinstein.

My experience with Harvey Weinstein was always very professional. He was very good on the films we made. I was aware of his reputation of being a bully, she said. He was famous for phoning people in the middle of the night and screaming at them. He didnt do that to me, and he certainly never asked me for massages or anything like that.

Knightley worked with Weinstein on the films Begin Again and The Imitation Game, but unlike others who have claimed that Weinsteins behavior was somewhat common knowledge, she said she was not aware of film producers sexual harassment history.

I wasnt aware of any allegations of rape or sexual assault against him, she said. For the first time people are sharing their stories. People have been absolutely terrified to talk about it and were scared of retribution, so I dont think everybody knew the extent of what was going on.

And though Knightley said she has been fortunate to escape harassment in the workplace, she has experienced harassment in other ways.

I can count four times when Ive been what Id say was assaulted in a minor way. I think everyone has battled their fair share of monsters. Its not just actresses, she explained. Its teachers; its lawyers. Im not talking about rape, but Im talking about the people who had been grabbed in pubs or their breasts had been fondled by somebody they didnt know or theyd had someone shove a hand up their skirt."
Lebanon's censorship authorities have effectively banned Steven Spielberg's newspaper drama, "The Post," because the American director is on a regional blacklist for supporting Israel.

The directive by the country's General Security agency still needs to be signed by Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk to enter into effect, but that is considered a formality that is unlikely to stop the ban.

The directive accompanied another ban on "Jungle," a survival movie based on the memoirs of Israeli national Yossi Ghinsberg.

Lebanon and other Arab nations have long maintained a cultural boycott against Israel. But the twin bans reflect the growing strength of a once-fringe movement to extend the boycott to people and companies seen as too friendly to Israel.

General Security, which is also charged with running Lebanon's only commercial airport, detained acclaimed Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri as he arrived last year to promote his latest film, "The Insult." The drama is Lebanon's entry to the Foreign-Language awards category at this year's Oscars.

Doueiri was questioned on charges of doing business with Israel. His previous film, "The Attack," was banned in Lebanon and most Arab countries because it was filmed in Israel and featured several Israeli actors. All charges were dropped against him after news of his detention caused a scandal in the national media.

Also last year, Lebanese authorities banned "Wonder Woman" hours before it was due to premiere, following a campaign against its lead actress, Gal Gadot, who served in the Israeli army.

Supporters of the Campaign to Boycott Supporters of Israel in Lebanon could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Lebanon is officially at war with Israel and Lebanese law bans its citizens from visiting Israel or having business dealings with Israelis.

But General Security and its censorship bureau have been inconsistent in their application of a cultural boycott. Several previous Spielberg films have played in Lebanon, including "The Adventures of Tintin," ''The BFG," and "Bridge of Spies." And the ban against "The Post" and "Jungle" is unlikely to prevent Lebanese from watching them through streaming websites or on bootleg DVDs.

Lebanese cinemas were already showing "Jungle" when they were advised to pull it, said Isaac Fahed, the Sales & Distribution Manager at Grand Cinemas, a Middle East cinema chain.

Grand Cinemas had been marketing "The Post" for two months, before it became clear a ban was in the pipeline, said Fahed.

Cinemas around Beirut have taken down posters promoting the film, which was set to premiere on Thursday.

The film is effectively banned from Lebanon unless Machnouk reverses the General Security recommendation, said an official at the agency who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Lebanon officially follows an Arab League blacklist against supporters of Israel and organizations and companies seen as promoting or doing business with the country. A leaked U.S. State Department memo from 2007 revealed that Spielberg was blacklisted by the League for donating $1 million to Israel for reconstruction during its 2006 war with Lebanon.

Gino Raidy, a board member of the NGO March, which advocates freedom of expression in Lebanon, described the General Security's censorship regime as "pointless" and "frustrating."

"The real loss from censorship is against Lebanese filmmakers, who with every passing month get more and more 'red lines' they cannot cross."

"The rise in censorship means that the censors know they're losing the culture war, and that people are overwhelmingly against it, hence the frenzied, incoherent attempt to ban things they don't understand, or don't fall into their extremely narrow worldview," he wrote in his blog.
President Trump kicked CNN star Jim Acosta out of the Oval Office Tuesday after the networks senior White House correspondent badgered him with racially charged questions.

Acosta has made a habit of grandstanding and interrupting when Trump and his surrogates are available to the media. Tuesday was no exception, as Acosta yelled, Mr. President, three times before finally getting Trumps attention.

Did you say that you want more people to come in from Norway? Did you say that you wanted more people from Norway? Is that true Mr. President? Acosta frantically shouted.

I want them to come in from everywhere everywhere. Thank you very much everybody, Trump responded as Acosta continued to bark questions.

Just Caucasian or white countries, sir? Or do you want people to come in from other parts of the world people of color, Acosta shouted.

Trump then pointed directly at Acosta and simply said, Out!

A Trump staffer in the background can be heard saying, Jim, thank you, before the CNN star presumably exited the room. Acosta then took to Twitter, accusing White House aides of obstructing him from asking questions.

Acosta has been among the most outspoken critics of President Trump and is a significant part of CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zuckers apparent anti-Trump programming strategy. Trump has famously dubbed CNN fake news and pointed directly at Acosta and called him by the disparaging moniker in the past.

Last December, Acosta was shut down by White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders when the liberal reporter tried to hijack a press briefing. Acosta told Sanders that journalists make honest mistakes but that doesnt make them fake news before attempting a question. Sanders quickly cut him off.

When journalists make honest mistakes, they should own up to them. Sometimes, and a lot of times, you dont, Sanders said as Acosta tried to interrupt.

Im sorry, Im not finished, she said. There is a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people... you cannot say its an honest mistake when youre purposely putting out information you know is false.

Acosta has also gotten into combative arguments with other members of the administration including Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller. Meanwhile, CNN has been mocked for a variety of anti-Trump segments, such as focusing on the presidents soda intake amid unfolding breaking news related to a terror attack in New York City.

Acostas colleague, fellow CNN star Chris Cuomo, apologized on Tuesday after he referred to Principal Deputy White House Press Secretary Raj Shah as Raj whatever-his-name-is.

CNN has also aired the uncensored version of the word s---hole on a regular basis since Trump reportedly used the term to describe certain African countries. CNN anchors and guests said the profanity 195 times in one day last week, according to the Media Research Center.
This former Housewife likes to have fun, but she doesnt play games.

Yet thats exactly what Yolanda Hadid plans on doing as she attempts to discover Americas next supermodel in a new reality TV series on Lifetime, titled Making a Model with Yolanda Hadid.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alumni and mother of fashion It-girls Gigi and Bella Hadid is eager for her close-up after battling debilitating Lyme disease, as well as coping with her divorce with music producer David Foster. The 54-year-old former model is sharing her no-nonsense advice about becoming the next sought-after cover girl, and she has also found love again.

Fox News spoke with Hadid about her childrens success, dealing with sexual harassment and how her new beau has impacted her.

Fox News: What inspired you to launch Making a Model at this point in your life?

Yolanda Hadid: I just feel like I got out of a seven-year, really bad cycle where I was not able to work a lot and be creative. It just fell into my life and Im so excited to be back at work and creating things that I love to do.

Fox News: Your daughters are two of the most sought-after models in the fashion industry. What do you believe is the secret behind their success?

Hadid: The secret, I think, is to be authentic to who you are. Like I always say to my girls, there [are] a million girls who are as beautiful as you are and deserve success as much as you do. So how are you going to set yourself apart? And in my opinion, thats to be a good person, be kind to everybody, be the hardest working girl on set and be authentic. And it has worked for them.

Fox News: One of the setbacks of modeling is having to deal with certain photographers who may not have the best intentions. Have you and your daughters discussed sexual harassment in Hollywood?

Hadid: I think that obviously happens to strong women. It just does. But with my own children, we discussed a lot about setting boundaries.

Just because someone has a high position in an industry or somebody is a police officer or wears a badge, doesnt mean you can trust them or you should give them access within your boundaries. I personally believe thats really important. And you know, these things happen in life. You can walk in the street in the grocery store, at school, at work  it happens everywhere.

Fox News: You previously described how Lyme disease prevented you from frequently attending their shoots and shows. How did they manage to make it work?

Hadid: I think it all comes down to their work ethic. I was in bed in Los Angeles, and they were working in New York. I feel like the first 12 years of a childs life is when you really form and shape them and teach them about work ethic and responsibility. Then they have to embark on that themselves. They went for it and I can absolutely take no credit for that. I got them to the door at IMG when they turned 18 and the rest of the hard work, they really did it themselves.

Fox News: Its been said some people from the fashion industry arent thrilled some girls can become models just by having large social media followings. Whats your take on this?

Hadid: I honor any young woman who can create a business for herself and be financially independent. I dont think we should create labels. I think if anyone is able to make a business out of something, then more power to them.

Fox News: Between Real Housewives and Making a Model, what keeps you motivated?

Hadid: Ive always worked. I started working when I was 12 years old and I just love to be creative. And honestly, I like to make money and be financially independent. I still have drive and motivation to do that and I will continue to do so for as long as I can. If youre passionate about what you do, nothing feels better than that.

Fox News: You found love again. How has that impacted you?

Hadid: I took almost two and a half years to recover from my last relationship and thats something I really needed to do for me. I needed to be 100 percent complete as a woman alone, a woman my age independently away from a man. Today, it feels so good to be in love and I waited long enough. It just feels great to be in that position today and Im blessed.

Its funny, it completely changes you when youre in love. Everyones like, Gosh youre smiling every day. Your eyes are very twinkly. It must be that chemistry you release when youre in love! Its a great time. Im really enjoying it.

Fox News: Whats the biggest piece of advice youve ever given to your daughters?

Hadid: Keep following your heart and pursue what youre really passionate about. Thats what really delivers success. You have to be passionate in what youre doing and it will always show. In todays world with social media, a lot of people try to be someone theyre not or copy someone else.

Its all about being authentic and being the original you. Thats what shows in photographs and thats what people see. Theyre drawn to you because of that. Beauty shines from within. Its not just what you look like from the outside.

"Making a Model with Yolanda Hadid" airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on Lifetime.
A group of volunteers in California are facing misdemeanor charges after feeding the homeless in a park, violating a recent city ordinance that prohibits food sharing in public spaces.

The volunteers showed up to Wells Park in El Cajon, CA, to protest the ordinance and to hand out food, clothes, shoes and toiletries to the homeless, BBC reports.

FOOD PLANT WORKER GETS JAIL TIME FOR CONTAMINATING CHICKEN WHICH LED TO MASSIVE RECALL

The police came and wrote up citations for each of the people handing out food, including 14-year-old Ever Parmley who was handing out food before a man told her to step aside please, she told NBC 7.

Each of those handed citations were charged with a misdemeanor for violating the El Cajon municipal code prohibiting sharing food in public spaces, including city parks.

Charles Marks tells NBC 7, Ive been given a court date under the impression this represents being arrested on a misdemeanor, but its just a citation."

El Cajon passed the prohibitive ordinance in October, following a severe Hepatitis A outbreak that killed at least 20.

Councilmember Ben Kalasho told NBC 7, What we're saying is feeding them at city parks is a bad idea given the situation that we're in with the hepatitis A outbreak and the fact that it makes the place completely messy afterward.

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You can go out there, pick them up, take them back to your house and feed them and board them and room them and have them take a shower if you're really wanting to help," he continued.

Hepatitis A can be spread through close personal contact or sharing food and water that has been contaminated with undetected amounts of stool from an infected person.
A potentially deadly mistake has left officials in a Japanese city urging residents to avoid eating blowfish.

Officials of Gamagori, in the Aichi Prefecture along the coastline of central Japan, warned residents to toss fugu, known as blowfish or pufferfish, bought at a local supermarket after parts of the fish containing deadly toxins were sold, Japanese Times reported.

Five packages with the fishs liver, which contains the potentially lethal poison tetrodotoxin, still attached were sold at the supermarket. Three packages were found, but the rest are still missing. Officials broadcasted the warning through the citys loudspeakers.

We are calling for residents to avoid eating fugu [by] using Gamagori citys emergency wireless system, local official Koji Takayanagi said on Tuesday.

Eating fugu liver can paralyze motor nerves, and in a serious case cause respiratory arrest leading to death, the warning stated.

Blowfish is one of the winter delicacies served in Japan. Its also one of the most expensive fish sold in the country and is often eaten sashimi style or in a hot pot.

The fishs skin, intestines, ovaries and livers all contain poison that can kill people if the seafood isnt prepared properly, according to Japan Times. Chefs also need a special permit to prepare and serve the fish at restaurants.

Several people are killed each year in Japan from blowfish poisoning. Dozens of more people also suffer side effects.
Cant get enough of KFCs gravy? Well, thanks to the chicken chains latest marketing campaign, youve now got a whole new way to enjoy their savory sauce.

The fast-food restaurant just released a video featuring three cocktail recipes designed around their famous gravy. You read that right. These stock-tails offer a boozy drinkable twist on their thick meaty condiment.

MAN'S KFC CHICKEN BUCKET HACK GOES VIRAL

Theres been a growing trend for stock-tails, using broth in cocktails, over the last couple of years. Bartenders are stirring and shaking animal stock and bone broth into cocktails served warm and chilled to add a new savory element to seasonal drinking, according to a feature from Liquor.com on the trendy drink.

KFC cooked up three varieties of this new kind of drink: the Gravy Mary, Southern Twist and Fingerlickin Sour, with the tagline Gravy so good you can drink it.

Our fans repeatedly express their love for our gravy, which always sparks ideas within the team. We know our gravy is good enough to drink  so with 'stock-tails' being a real hit at the moment, what better ingredient to take them to the next level? Marion Racine, marketing manager at KFC UK & Ireland, told The Independent.

Not everyone seems sold on the idea, however.

[Youre] insane, one commenter wrote.

KFC you have officially lost it, another added.

Im confused, another user wrote.

If youre curious how these cocktails actually take, KFC provided step-by-step instructions and recipes for all three drinks so you can try them out for yourself.

The Gravy Mary

Ingredients:

20ml KFC Gravy

50ml vodka (optional)

90ml tomato juice

1 tsp horseradish cream

20ml worcester sauce

15ml lemon juice

Hot sauce

Paprika, celery salt, pepper

Highball glass

Ice

Celery

KFC Popcorn Chicken

Method:

Put paprika, celery salt horseradish, hot sauce & Worcester sauce in a cocktail mixer.

Add vodka (optional), lemon juice, tomato juice & KFC Gravy.

Throw cocktail between two mixers.

Pour over ice into a highball.

Garnish with celery & KFC popcorn chicken.

Recipes for the other two cocktails can be found on Youtube.

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?This isnt the first time KFC has used unusual marketing techniques. Late last year, KFC Japan was offering chicken scented bath bombs. The drumstick-shaped product was crafted with eleven secret herbs and spices, allowing you to soak in deep-fried scented glory.
A 6-year-old boy in Florida who reportedly touched a sick bat after his father told him not to has died after contracting rabies.

Ryker Roque died Sunday at a hospital in Orlando, his father, Henry, told NBC News on Monday.

The child was placed into a medically-induced coma as part of the Milwaukee protocol  an experimental treatment used on those affected by the rabies virus.

Henry Roque had found a rabid bat, put it in a bucket and told his son not to touch it, but Ryker did anyway, and was scratched.

The father said he washed Rykers wound but didnt take his son to the hospital because he cried when he told him hed have to get shots.

About a week later, Ryker developed numb fingers and a headache and, according to a GoFundMe page linked to Rykers medical bills, he also started hallucinating and convulsing. His parents took him to the hospital for treatment.

Deputies with the Lake County Sheriffs Office responded to the Roques' home after learning the familys pit bull may have had rabies.

FLORIDA RESIDENT DIES OF RABIES FROM BAT BITE, HEALTH OFFICIAL SAYS

Were told the bat had been in the house for a week or two prior to the boy going to the hospital, Maj. Chris Delibro told the Orlando Sentinel. The bat may have been on the dog.

Ryker was labeled on Facebook as a happy and quiet little boy who was adored by teachers and classmates by an administrator of the Christian Academy Preschool.

Rabies is almost always fatal once symptoms develop. A vaccine given after a wound but prior to symptoms almost always prevents the disease.

The number of rabies deaths in recent years in the U.S. has declined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The more than 100 annual deaths around the year 1900 dropped to just one or two per year in the 1990s.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A grateful mother is sharing remarkable photos of her baby son after being in a neonatal unit for 81 days. Little baby Markcus Cropper was born premature at 23 weeks, weighing in at 1 pound 10 ounces and measuring just 7.8 inches.

The amazing photos show the baby was so small he had to be transported to an incubator in a plastic bag, which was the size of a pencil case.

Now five months old, his relieved mother Christina Hahn posted a picture of little Markcus, weighing 12 pounds.

It was so so scary giving birth and then asking 'is he dead?' He was just so so small, the 27-year-old mother from Chincoteague Island, Virginia said, as reported by news service SWNS.

At lots of points we both thought that we would lose him and he pulled through  it was a miracle.

BABY BORN 4 MONTHS PREMATURE READY TO HEAD HOME

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the average length of pregnancy is 38 weeks. When Hahns water broke at 23 weeks, she and the babys father, Markcus Sr., were warned by doctors the newborn may not survive.

"It was weird seeing him in the bag, but it kept him from getting hypothermia. That was only a short time until he was put in an incubator cot," the mom said.

"Markcus then needed lots of steroid shots for his lungs to work properly because they were so underdeveloped."

When Hanhs water broke, doctors at her local hospital in Chincoteague said they could not admit her until she was 24 weeks. Luckily, a special neonatal facility two hours away was able to take the mother.

Markcus was born and cared for at Norfolk's Children's Hospital of The Kings Daughter.

ARTIFICIAL WOMB SUSTAINS PREMATURE BABY LAMBS FOR WEEKS

NIH data shows survival rates for premature babies have increased to 65 percent, but Christina recalled "two days before I gave birth the neonatal team told me due to the age of gestation it was only 50 percent survival rates outside the womb for Markcus."

Fortunately, Markcus is healthy besides a potential hearing problem in the right ear.

The proud mother said "Markcus is adorable, I am so proud of him. He's my little fighter."
Riot police have fired rubber bullets at protesters as they vandalized a string of H&Ms stores in South Africa and ordered the Swedish brand to stop trading.

Violence spilled over in at least four malls as the latest race row to engulf the Swedish brand escalated.

Mannequins and rails of clothes were sent flying and trampled on by activists as they stormed shops across Johannesburg and demanded the retailer shuts its doors or face "indefinite" action.

Innocent shoppers and bystanders were forced to flee as chanting gangs wearing uniforms of the countrys radical opposition party swept through H&M stores across the city - including Africas flagship store in the upmarket suburb of Sandton.

Floyd Shivambu, spokesman for the Economic Freedom Fighters party, praised the action, saying the retailer was "now facing the consequences for its racism".

Earlier this week, H&M was forced to apologize and order a mass withdrawal of stock after publishing an advert depicting a black boy wearing a green hoodie emblazoned with "coolest monkey in the jungle".

Terry Mango, originally from Kenya, is the mother of the five year-old featured in the ad.

She defended H&M and told its critics to "get over it", later saying she had suffered online abuse for her comments.

After police successfully dispersed the protesters, the EFF's firebrand leader Julius Malema said stores were targeted because they called our children baboons.

The chain decided to close its South African stores in the wake of the invasions for the safety of our staff and customers.

Mr Malema told a rally: We are teaching them a lesson, we are not going to allow anyone to use the colour of our skin to humiliate us, or to exclude us.

We are black and we are proud. We are black and we are beautiful. We are black and we are not ashamed of being black.

But he denied sending EFF supporters to trash the stores.

Mr Malema added: They went because they wanted to go.

To say people were sent, it means you are undermining black people that they cannot think on their own.

Although many online users across the country welcomed the radical action, other warned that if H&M did abandon the country it would mean hundreds of jobs, mainly held by black people, would be lost.

Others pointed out that the mess and chaos caused would also be left to black workers to clean up.

This article originally appeared on The Sun.
A woman is speaking out about the dangers of eyelash extensions after developing a severe allergic reaction to the treatment.

Ottawa resident, Isabelle Kun, had a new set of false eyelashes applied by an esthetician at a spa last Tuesday. By Thursday morning, Kun says her eyes were swollen almost complete shut.

My girlfriend had slept over and I couldnt even see her. And, I was having a hard time swallowing and even breathing, she told CTVNews.ca by phone.

The 20-year-old was rushed to the hospital where she was admitted immediately.

'VAMPIRE' BREAST LIFTS ARE THE NEW BEAUTY FAD

They took me right in within seconds when they saw my face. My eyes are swollen both above and under and my tonsils were apparently really inflamed, she says.

Kun had been getting eyelash extensions every few weeks for the past year without incident. But last month, she says she noticed her eyes became slightly swollen after a session and believed she was having a reaction to the adhesive used. Eyelash extensions are applied one at a time and secured to the lash line using an instant adhesive.

When she went back, Kun said she asked the esthetician what kind of glue they were using. Some people can develop severe allergic reactions to the cyanoacrylates in instant adhesives, which are used in other beauty services like fake nails.

Kun said the esthetician didnt know the name of the glue being used, but told her she should be good.

So I said okay. I continued with it when I really shouldnt have. I shouldnt have done it when I heard she didnt even know what glue she was using or what the ingredients were or anything, Kun says.

At the hospital, Kun was administered an antihistamine and steroid intravenously to reduce the swelling. She was eventually sent home with antihistamine pills, but says the swelling hasnt gone down.

My eyes are actually even worse now. Theres like a sac of fluid under my eye now. Its so gross, she said.

The beauty salon, Sara Beauty iLash Lounge, Kun went to states on their website the possibility of an allergic reaction to the lash adhesive.

Sara Du, the owner of the beauty salon, told CTV News that her business doesnt test every client for allergies, but will if the client requests it.

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Kun said she was unaware that people could develop sudden allergies  and wants to encourage other women to allergy test before getting any procedures.

Also be very careful where you go. These people are dealing with your eyes, with your vision. I mean, this morning I woke up and I wondered if I would ever be able to see again, she says.

Though Kun is unsure how her recovery looks at this time, she still would like to get eyelash extensions again.

I would want to do them again, but I will be going for allergy testing first, because I do love getting fake eyelashes.
The fight by Democrats to stop the deportation of about 700,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children and now protected under the DACA program isnt just an act of compassion. Its a political power play to win U.S. citizenship for the DACA recipients  known as Dreamers  and turn them into an army of new Democratic voters.

Dont take my word for it. Take the word of veteran Democratic political operative Jennifer Palmieri, who was the communications director for Hillary Clintons failed 2016 presidential campaign.

A memo obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation that was co-authored by Palmieri states this clearly: The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Partys future success.

Not clear enough? The memo also says: If Democrats dont try to do everything in their power to defend Dreamers, that will jeopardize Democrats electoral chances in 2018 and beyond.

DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. President Obama created the program by executive order in 2015 to allow children brought to our country illegally by their parents to temporarily remain here if they met certain conditions.

Contending that President Obama had no right to create the program without congressional approval, President Trump wants to end DACA in March unless Congress enacts legislation to preserve it. The president insists that funding for improved border security and a wall across our southern border must be part of any legislation to keep DACA alive.

Palmieri co-wrote the Democratic strategy memo for the Center for American Progress Action Fund. While the group calls itself an independent nonpartisan policy institute and advocacy organization just a quick look at the funds website shows it is devoted to attacking President Trump and Republicans.

In their desperation to turn the so-called Dreamers into Democratic voters, we saw Democrats fake indignation over claims that President Trump used a vulgar expression Thursday to describe certain countries in a closed-door meeting. The claim has been disputed by the president as well as two senators who were in the meeting.

Unlike the televised meeting between President Trump and a larger group of lawmakers a few days earlier, the Thursday meeting where the vulgar language was purportedly used was private, so only the people who were there know what was really said.

We havent seen people this up in arms over the use of a word since President Clinton forced the country to debate the definition of the word is when discussing his sexual misconduct with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

During his televised meeting with lawmakers, President Trump made it clear that he was very willing to work with Democrats on immigration reform  particularly on the extension of DACA  in exchange for a border wall and ending both chain migration and the diversity lottery program that grants visas to 55,000 people each year from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.

By all accounts it seemed to be an amicable meeting. Even Sen. Lindsey amnesty Graham, R-S.C., acted as though he wanted to work with the president.

But once the cameras were off it was business as usual. The Democrats idea of working together in a bipartisan way is for Republicans to roll over and cave in to just about every Democratic demand, while Democrats give up virtually nothing.

Without a deal to their liking, Democrats would abide by the Palmieri memo and make DACA a campaign issue for the 2018 midterm elections. It appears this is exactly what will happen.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., negotiated a proposed extension of the DACA program with pro-amnesty Republicans. They threw in a path to citizenship and proposed letting recipients sponsor relatives and parents to live in the U.S. for renewable three-year periods. Their deal would increase chain migration instead of ending it, and only allocated $1.6 billion for the construction of a border wall or fence that will cost $20 billion or more.

When Senators Durbin and Graham walked into the Oval Office, excited to offer President Trump virtually nothing he had asked for, did they think he wouldnt notice? You cant blame President Trump  a master dealmaker  for turning down that offer.

Durbin quickly set out to change the narrative. Democrats think if they can just fake moral outrage, get everyone to believe the president used the word s---hole, spin whatever was said out of context and accuse President Trump of racism they can cause a distraction.

With the majority of the mainstream media on their side to aid and abet them, the Democrats have managed to get the media and many Americans talking about a supposedly racist president instead of a merit-based immigration system, on which the American people largely agree with President Trump.

According to a Pulse Opinion Research poll, 57 percent of likely voters in the November midterm elections favor ending chain migration.

In the movie Wag the Dog, the White House fakes a war with the nation of Albania to cover up the presidents extramarital affair. The presidents political consultant, played by Robert De Niro, might as well be advising Durbin: What difference does it make if it's true? If it's a story and it breaks, they're gonna run with it. Unfortunately thats the sorry state of most journalism today.

Durbin has a history of having trouble with the truth when it comes to private White House meetings. According to Politico, in 2013 Durbin wrote on his Facebook page that a GOP House leader told President Obama I cannot even stand to look at you during a closed-door negotiation. Then White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said unequivocally that never happened.

No matter, Durbins outrage was straight out of the Palmieri memo. Its not about DACA, its about winning votes and seats in Congress for Democrats for many years to come. Democrats believe they need this issue because theyre out of ideas.

The clock is ticking on the next election cycle. You can almost smell the fear coming from the Democrats, whove spent the last year parading around Washington on their moral high horses, while offering no solutions or ideas. Now theyre scrambling for something to save their seats. Theyve decided that something is DACA.
President Trumps alleged use of tough language last week during a congressional meeting on immigration led to yet another partisan fight between bickering Americans. Democrats labeled the presidents remarks racist while Republicans mostly shrugged.

Just Trump being Trump.

In fact, some of the presidents supporters wondered why the fuss. Who died? No one, a man tweeted. So petty.

And that really is the heart of the matter. For Trump supporters, theres no harm if the president shoots from the hip and upsets the delicate egos of foreign leaders or snowflake Democrats.

To hell with them all. He wasnt elected to play nice.

Thats a fair point. Trumps victory represented a new direction for the country, with a mandate to shake up Americas democracy. And that he has.

But let no one be fooled that Trumps approach  even if you love it  is without costs. Indeed, as a former CIA officer, I can tell you that theres one in particular that worries me most.

The very future of humanity.



To explain, the world has entered the early stages of a new Cold War. On one side are nations like the United States who have come to embrace the often slow and messy path of democracy. Why stick with it? Our many wars and revolutions have taught us that no other path offers the freedoms we need for our people  any people  to thrive.

Unfortunately, there are other nations who fundamentally disagree. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea believe that communism, monarchies, and religious dictators are better suited to decide humanitys fate. They dont want individual freedom. They want control of the masses. Suppression of free will.

Dominance by force.

The toll on the American economy has been profound. U.S. intelligence officials estimate that the Chinese Communist Partys treachery has cost the American economy and her taxpayers in the low trillions of dollars.

This is not a new fight. The first Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and ushered in what many in the West hoped would be the dawn of world peace and prosperity. One important player, however, remained elusive.

Communist China.

In the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton  along with a Republican Congress  believed that if the West could get China to more fully engage with outsiders, the communist overlords might eventually come to embrace democratic freedoms.

But how would Clinton and Company do it? The spigot of global free trade.

Their reasoning was straightforward. If Chinas economy were more fully integrated with the rest of the world, their embrace of dictatorship would surely lessen.

Better yet, economists argued, cheap goods from China would allow Western consumers to buy more stuff. More stuff would in turn mean bigger, better economies for all.

Thus launched the successful effort to allow China into the World Trade Organization in 2001. American businesses flooded into Chinese provinces at a staggering pace, lured by the promise of cheap labor and big profits.

And thats when the wheels came off of Clinton and Companys grand experiment.

First went the economic promises. As researchers now acknowledge, the American economy didnt get bigger and better for all of its citizens. Only for some. The others  especially communities that lost out to cheap Chinese labor  were devastated.

They have yet to recover.

Second, there were unintended political consequences. Analysis shows that American communities hit hardest by Chinese trade abandoned moderate, consensus-driven politicians and instead hitched their wagons to political extremists.

The economic losers became the angry voters.

In short, China is aiming to lead the world. Democracy and its freedoms will be pushed aside while communism will be celebrated and encouraged in its place.

Clinton and Company could perhaps be forgiven if Western businesses at least provided their nations with trickle-down profits but that didnt happen either. Why?

China offered Western businesses a poisonous exchange: you can have access to Chinas market but only in partnership with Chinese companies.

Unbeknownst to most Western companies, however, was that these partnerships were not designed to last. Within a few years, Chinese businessmen would steal product designs and related intellectual property and instead launched their own enterprises that pumped out identical products.

Examples abound. Consider Germanys Siemens and Japans Kawasaki, both of whom partnered with a Chinese company to build high-speed trains. Not long after their agreement to collaborate, the Chinese stole the designs and started building a competing product.

Siemens and Kawasaki had, to their consternation, created a new global competitor.

One might assume that Chinese officials would vehemently deny such tactics. On the contrary. Theyve gleefully encouraged the idea, calling it bandit innovation.

Meanwhile, Chinese spies and hackers joined in on the attack. In one egregious example, an American company had a $1 billion research program stolen in a single overnight assault.

The toll on the American economy has been profound. U.S. intelligence officials estimate that the Chinese Communist Partys treachery has cost the American economy and her taxpayers in the low trillions of dollars (somewhere between $300 to $600 billion a year, for years).

And thats not counting the counterfeit goods that knowingly flow from much heralded Chinese companies like Alibaba.

As the communists stole the global economy, so too did they kill the dream of a democratic government. In October 2017, President Xi Jinping was elevated as Chinas unquestioned leader, with the party releasing a manifesto that specifically rejected democracy and individual freedoms.

Its economy, they promised, would remain open for business as usual.

And what of the Chinese people? Experts highlight that the average citizen lives in a dystopian police state where religious minorities are harassed and killed, dissidents are kidnapped or disappeared, and censorship  from imprisoning journalists to banning images of gay people  is the norm.

If their present is crushing, the future looks far worse. The government has announced an investment of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence designed to track and monitor the activities of each citizen.

An ascendant China has also flexed its destabilizing muscle around the world. The most publicized example is the seizure and militarization of vast amounts of contested space in the South China Sea. Next is the clandestine support of North Koreas nuclear program and sanction-busting trading of coal and oil.

Finally, Chinas communists have protected a man named Karl Lee, an indicted weapons dealer who has supplied Irans military with the nuclear and ballistic missile materiel it needs to threaten American allies throughout the Middle East.

If there were any confusion as to Chinas long-term plans, they made it abundantly clear with the launch of the multibillion dollar schemes Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB) and New Silk Road. While both programs ostensibly seek greater economic development, the ultimate goal is to degrade the influence of the United States, India, and Japan throughout Asia and beyond.

In short, China is aiming to lead the world. Democracy and its freedoms will be pushed aside while communism will be celebrated and encouraged in its place. In fact, the propaganda campaign has already begun.

And that takes us back to Trump and the allegations of s---hole countries.

During the first Cold War, we built global alliances to fight back. We knew that while our military and diplomatic strength could not be matched, we needed other nations to fight with us, and in their own backyards. GI Joe  and our stable of diplomats and spies  could not be effective everywhere at once. We needed partners.

In order to win Cold War II, America must rebuild and strengthen this coalition. This includes expected partnerships with the likes of England, France, and Germany. But it will also need proud nations like India, Japan, Kenya, Ghana, Israel, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia among others.

America cannot go it alone.

Yet building this diverse coalition of democratic nations is made unnecessarily difficult when Americas leadership  Republican and Democratic alike  makes disparaging comments about our friends. Indeed, it runs the risk of pushing weak-kneed countries into the eager arms of an intoxicating China thats willing to embrace dominance, control, and suppression of a restive people. Of any people. Of all people.

Thats why s---hole matters.

Make no mistake, this is the fight of our time. That doesnt mean we wont continue to have domestic debates about things like immigration. Thats good. Indeed, its the very strength of a democracy.

We argue. We bicker. We fight.

But we cannot allow our differences to distract us from the sobering reality that we are in the very beginning of Cold War II.

Every day counts. Every speech counts.

Every. Word. Counts.
The U.S. Senate should vote this week to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) because it is a vital tool needed to fight global terrorism and combat foreign intelligence operations.

Some critics  concerned about the Christopher Steele dossier and FISAs possible misuse by agents and lawyers at the FBI and the Department of Justice  want to let Section 702 expire. That would be an unwise and dangerous move.

Section 702 of FISA was originally created in 2008. The section, which expired at the end of December and was temporarily extended through Friday of this week, gives our intelligence agencies the ability to target non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside of the U.S. and collect their online activities and electronic communications.

It is a violation of the law to collect information from targets inside the U.S.  whether they are Americans or foreigners  or to deliberately target the online communications of American citizens.

The House voted to reauthorize Section 702 on Thursday and the Senate is expected to vote on the reauthorization this week.

There is no question that Section 702 has been essential to our success in detecting, discovering, and disrupting terrorist plots against the U.S. and our allies, with whom we share some of that intelligence.

In fact, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an Obama-era bipartisan panel of experts in the executive branch, reviewed Section 702 and reported that more than one-quarter of National Security Agency reports on international terrorism were based in whole or in part on information collected under the Section 702 program.

As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said recently, allowing Section 702 to lapse would rebuild the surveillance wall that existed before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It would likely also take America back to the post-9/11 anguish of investigation into why available intelligence was not used, why dots were never connected, he said.

Among other things, the FISA sets up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which must approve all applications made by the executive branch  the FBI, Justice Department and other intelligence agencies  for classified warrants to engage in electronic surveillance, physical searches and other forms of investigative actions for foreign intelligence purposes.

The court sits in Washington, D.C., and is composed of 11 federal district court judges chosen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. It is their job to make sure that the applications for warrants meet the legal standards under the FISA statute.

So how has the dossier complied by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele affected the debate about the renewal of Section 702? Over the last few weeks, there have been credible allegations that Obama intelligence officials and the FBI used the unverified, unsubstantiated Steele dossier  compiled for Fusion GPS and paid for by Hillary Clintons presidential campaign  as the basis for applying for a FISA warrant to engage in unlawful surveillance of the Trump transition team.

Other Obama officials, including National Security Adviser Susan Rice, then requested the unmasking of names in intelligence reports to obtain information on the Trump team.

The contents of this dossier are unsubstantiated rumors at best. Steele himself has admitted they were raw intelligence provided by unnamed Russian sources and were unverified.

It is clear from reports that many of the claims in the dossier are obviously fraudulent. For example, the dossier claimed that Donald Trumps lawyer, Michael Cohen, met with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016. Yet not only has Cohen never visited Prague, but he was in California with his son on the day the dossier claimed he was in Prague. This is just one of many inconsistencies and defamatory claims in this opposition research.

But this type of abuse, however serious, should not be allowed to damage our intelligence collection abilities. True or not, it is no reason to throw out what has been a valuable tool in our fight against terrorists who want to destroy us.

The situation is analogous to rare abuses that we see in the criminal justice system. For example, when law enforcement officials want to go after an individual who they believe has violated the law, they may have to apply to a court under the requirements of the Fourth Amendment to obtain a search warrant for whatever information, documents, or other physical evidence they believe is relevant to their case.

If a police officer lies to the court, and the court issues a search warrant based on false information, we dont throw out the Fourth Amendment or the ability of law enforcement officials in other cases to obtain search warrants. What we do is sanction the officials involved in providing false information and throw out what was illegally obtained, as the warrant itself was defective.

Similarly, lets suppose if it turns out to be true that FBI agents, Justice Department lawyers, and other intelligence officials applied for FISA surveillance warrants based on unverified, unsubstantiated, and/or false information that they had no reasonable basis to believe were valid.

In such a hypothetical case, federal officials should be sanctioned and possibly prosecuted for their unethical and potentially unlawful conduct. Any information or evidence derived through this surveillance could also be thrown out, and the courts would not allow its use in any proceedings.

Section 702 should be renewed because it is a vital national security tool. The Steele dossier is a separate and distinct matter. Anyone found to have corrupted the FISA process should be punished, and procedures have to be implemented at the Justice Department and the FBI to ensure that this type of abuse doesnt happen again.
One year into his presidency, Donald Trump is less popular than he was when he took office. The cacophonous scorched-earth politics that marked his campaign are now the hallmarks of his tenure. Despite numerous accomplishments, including a wholesale revision of the tax code and death of ObamaCares individual mandate, Trump appears destined to remain an unloved one-man act that careens from crisis-to-crisis of his own making. Modern presidential is no longer entertaining.

For Trump, disdain for and from his detractors may now be standard operating procedure. But for Republican office holders across the country, Trumps game of thumb-in-your-eye politics may cost the GOP the House, the Senate, and a passel of governors mansions. In the end, Trump may do to the Republican Party what Barack Obama did to the Democrats, namely hollow-out their ranks of office holders. Think of Nero fiddling as Rome burned, when hes not pouring gas on the fire.

On Sunday, Axios reported that Republican leaders believe that a loss of the House is unavoidably baked in." According to the last round of polls, the Democrats continue to hold a double-digit lead on the generic congressional ballot, with a Quinnipiac Poll released last week pegging that number at 17 points, and a majority of Americans giving Trump a grade of D or F, not exactly the kind of marks that one associates with a self-described very stable genius.

Even as the economy chugs along, and the stock market hits new highs almost daily, Trump cant get out of his own way. To put things in even clearer perspective, Trumps numbers are now underwater in Georgia, a state that he won with an absolute majority, and by more than 5 percent.

Apparently, politicians do not live on GDP alone, and it is not only the economy stupid -- at least not in the Age of Trump. The president is a cultural barometer, and three consecutive quarters of impressive growth have not been enough to make Americans adore him.

Regardless of whether a deal is ultimately reached on DACA or the budget, the GOP will likely pay a price for Trump and his antics in 2018, with the unanswered question being how big.

Indeed, for now, only white men without a four-year degree are staying true to Trump. In contrast, white working class women seem to be slowly heading toward the exits. Nowadays, where porn star NDAs are now a commonplace in American politics, according to the New York Times Tom Edsall, this shift cannot be called a complete surprise.

To further complicate matters, it is unclear that Trump or his base would countenance Republican candidates putting distance between themselves and him. When Republican senators have sudden cases of amnesia over just what Trump had to say over Haiti and Africa, it is fair to assume that blind loyalty to Trump is the operative coin of the realm. Regardless of whether a deal is ultimately reached on DACA or the budget, the GOP will likely pay a price for Trump and his antics in 2018, with the unanswered question being how big.

Even as Trump continues to unleash his daily barrage of Twitter-storms, those closest to the president recognize exactly just what is at stake  the I Word, impeachment. Take Corey Lewandowski, Trumps one-time campaign manage, for example.

According to Lewandowski, If you look at the numbers  the Democrats only have to take back 24 seats in the House in order to take over. And if that happens, weve got a real problem. In his view, if the Democrats retake the House, impeachment is a real possibility.

Lewandowski is not alone in prophesying a rough ride for Trump in 2018. Steve Bannon, Trumps ex campaign CEO, top White House adviser, and Michael Wolffs best source, gave Trump only a three-in-10 shot of completing his first term, while betting that special counsel Robert Mueller would crack Donald Jr. like an egg. Even with the debacle of Roy Moore and Alabama, Bannons forecasting skills cannot be ignored.

Election Day 2018 is more than 11 months away, and as 2016 taught us, never count Trump out. Yes, it is too soon to say that a GOP wipeout is assured. But with Trump evidencing no signs of self-control, and the Republican congressional leadership being forced to play cleanup, the odds of a Democratic takeover rise by the day.
From the campaign trail, to stump speeches across the country since his election, President Trump's made clear what he thinks of the North American Free Trade Agreement, known commonly as NAFTA.

NAFTA was the worst trade deal in the history of this country, the president told an audience in Monessen, Pa., back in June 2016.

He echoed that sentiment in April 2017 in Wisconsin when he called NAFTA a disaster for the United States, and again this month in a Wall Street Journal interview, when he promised to terminate the agreement if the U.S. couldnt secure a better deal.

But the administration's aggressive approach to the talks has set off shockwaves of concern from Mexico City to Ottawa that the United States might soon abruptly end the 24-year old agreement.

''While we hope for the best, we look for win-win outcomes. we also need to be very clear that we will defend our national interest, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said.

The Trump administration has dispatched U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to all five rounds of negotiations between the parties, talks that will continue this month.

The U.S. has proposed that a revised NAFTA include:

* lower trade deficits

* eliminate unfair subsidies

* end the dispute resolution panel

* sunset the deal every five years pending re-approval

* update the rules of origin

The latter, for example, would have a major impact on the U.S. auto industry.

Currently under NAFTA, at least 62 percent of the material in a car or light truck made in the region must be from North America to be able to enter the marketplace tariff-free.

The Trump administration has proposed increasing that minimum to 85 percent, with 50 percent made in the United States.

Canada appears poised to fight fire with fire. The country filed a 32-page complaint to the World Trade Organization in December accusing the U.S. of nearly 200 examples of what it deemed unfair trade practices. Lighthizer called it an ill-advised attack.

He added, Canadas claims are unfounded and could only lower U.S. confidence that Canada is committed to mutually beneficial trade.

Mexican officials have warned they'll leave the NAFTA negotiating table if President Trump decides to trigger the 6-month process to withdraw from the trade pact.

However, pulling out of NAFTA could prove costly to the American economy. Government figures estimate the U.S. has enjoyed a $1 billion trade surplus in agricultural goods with Canada alone.

Keenly aware of the tempest and its potential impact on his countrys economy, Canada's Ambassador to the United States David MacNaughton has been eager to extol the virtues of free trade, even if it might require a few tweaks to satisfy the parties.

Canada is actively engaged in modernizing NAFTA so that together we can create more jobs, grow our economies and secure better benefits for workers across North America, MacNaughton said, adding that almost 9 million U.S. jobs depend on trade and investment with Canada.

As the parties prepare for the next round of talks set to begin in Montreal on January 23, Congressional Republicans from U.S. border states whose economies depend on trade -- and some U.S. automakers who build their products in all three countries -- are urging the administration to modernize NAFTA, not end it. A unified appeal gaining momentum, just as the White House considers its next move.
President Trump is known for giving his political opponents and critics nicknames, especially on social media.

Read on for a list of Trump's most iconic nicknames.

Wacky Omarosa

Omarosa Manigault-Newman lasted one year in the White House, and her departure has been anything from cordial.

In particular, Manigault-Newman has been under fire from the Trump administration for secretly recording the chief of staff John Kelly in the Situation Room, raising national security concerns. She's since released some of the tapes.

Trump, in a series of tweets, called Manigault-Newman "wacky" and a "lowlife."

"Wacky Omarosa, who got fired 3 times on the Apprentice, now got fired for the last time. She never made it, never will. She begged me for a job, tears in her eyes, I said OK," Trump said. "People in the White House hated her. She was vicious, but not smart. I would rarely see her but heard really bad things."

"Nasty to people & would constantly miss meetings & work. When Gen. Kelly came on board he told me she was a loser & nothing but problems. I told him to try working it out, if possible, because she only said great things about me - until she got fired!" Trump said.

"While I know it's 'not presidential' to take on a lowlife like Omarosa, and while I would rather not be doing so, this is a modern day form of communication and I know the Fake News Media will be working overtime to make even Wacky Omarosa look legitimate as possible. Sorry!" he continued.

Slippery James Comey

Trump dubbed former FBI Director James Comey the "worst" in history while blasting his new tell-all book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership." In a series of tweets, Trump also nicknamed the former FBI chief "Slippery James Comey."

Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far! Trump tweeted.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017, citing the ex-director's handling of the FBIs investigation into Hillary Clintons email practices.

Trump also called Comey a slimeball and suggested the former FBI director deserved jail time for mishandling the Clinton email probe.

Animal Assad

In the aftermath of a suspected chemical attack in Syria, Trump blasted Syrian President Bashar Assad and warned that those responsible would pay a big price. Trump also nicknamed the Syrian president Animal Assad.

Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world, Trump alleged in a tweet. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay. Open area immediately for medical help and verification. Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!

Trump also blamed former President Barack Obamas foreign policy decisions for Animal Assad.

And in a later tweet, Trump warned Russia against shooting down any missiles the U.S. would fire at Syria in retaliation for the purported attack, saying the country shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Little Rocket Man

Trump has never really had kind things to say about North Korea leader Kim Jong Un  referring to him on Twitter as a maniac a whack job" and "rocket man"  which is a President Trump original," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told Fox News.

Trump tried out the "rocket man" nickname at the 2017 United Nations General Assembly.

He's also tried out the moniker on Twitter.

"The Chinese Envoy, who just returned from North Korea, seems to have had no impact on Little Rocket Man. Hard to believe his people, and the military, put up with living in such horrible conditions. Russia and China condemned the launch," he tweeted.

In addition, Trump has called the North Korean leader a "sick puppy."

Lamb the Sham

Ahead of a tight special House election in Pennsylvania, Trump visited the Keystone state to stump for Republican Rick Saccone  and hit Democrat Conor Lamb.

Trump accused Lamb of saying nice things in order to get elected in Trump country, but promised those at a rally that the Democrat is not going to vote for us if elected. And the president dubbed the 33-year-old Marine Lamb the Sham.

Lamb the Sham. Lamb the Sham. He is trying to act like a Republican. He won't give me one vote, Trump said.

Trump also said he is better looking than Lamb.

Sloppy Steve

Steve Bannon used to be in the presidents good graces, but the pair has had a very public falling out. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and ex-Breitbart executive, was quoted in a blistering tell-all book, painting the presidents son in a negative light.

Trump heavily rebuked Bannon in a public statement, saying Bannon lost his mind after he was fired from the White House.

Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books, Trump said.

Ahead of the release of the controversial book by Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Trump slammed both the author and Bannon on social media  giving Bannon his nickname.

Look at this guys past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve, Trump warned.

Trump reiterated the Sloppy Steve nickname in other tweets, including one which he praised the Mercer family  wealthy conservative mega-donors  for having dropped the leaker known as Sloppy Steve Bannon.

Pocahontas

The president reused one of his favorite nicknames for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., while he honored Navajo code talkers at the White House in November. At the event  held to honor the Native Americans who used their native language during World Wars I and II to help the U.S.  Trump mocked Warren as Pocahontas.

Trump has often criticized Warren, specifically over her claim to be of Native American heritage.

Shes got about as much Indian blood as I have. Her whole life was based on a fraud, Trump told The New York Times in May 2016.

Warrens potential Native American heritage was first questioned during her 2012 Senate run.

Trump also calls Warren goofy.

Dicky Durbin

Trump made waves when he referred to Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., as Dicky Durbin online.

Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting. Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our military, said Trump in a tweet.

Durbin was part of a group of lawmakers who visited Trump at the White House in January to discuss immigration reform. After reports surfaced that Trump referred to certain nations as s---hole countries at the bilateral meeting, Durbin accused the president of saying things that were hate-filled, vile and racist.

Trump has admitted to using tough language at the meeting but denied certain remarks attributed to him.

Sneaky Dianne Feinstein

A transcript of a Fusion GPS official's August interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee was unilaterally released by the committees ranking member, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

The release of the bombshell interview drew ire from some Republicans, including the president and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

In a tweet following the release, Trump blasted the 84-year-old senator and called her Sneaky Dianne Feinstein.

The fact that Sneaky Dianne Feinstein, who has on numerous occasions stated that collusion between Trump/Russia has not been found, would release testimony in such an underhanded and possibly illegal way, totally without authorization, is a disgrace, Trump tweeted. Must have tough Primary!

Jeff Flakey

Like Trump and Sen. Bob Corker, Trump and Republican Sen. Jeff Flake have been feuding for quite some time. In announcing his retirement from the Senate, Flake slammed both the Republican Party and Trump.

Flake was also caught on a hot mic saying if the GOP becomes the party of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, were toast. That comment gave Trump the opportunity to dub the Arizona senator Jeff Flakey.

Sen. Jeff Flake(y), who is unelectable in the Great State of Arizona (quit race, anemic polls) was caught (purposely) on mike saying bad things about your favorite President. Hell be a NO on tax cuts because his political career anyway is toast, Trump tweeted.

Al 'Frankenstien'

After Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., was accused of kissing and groping Los Angeles radio host Leeann Tweeden during a USO tour in 2006, Trump blasted the lawmaker on Twitter.

"The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps?" Trump wrote, including an apparent misspelling of "Frankenstein." "And to think that just last week he was lecturing anyone who would listen about sexual harassment and respect for women. Lesley Stahl tape?"

Liddle' Bob Corker

The feud between Trump and Sen. Bob Corker has been going on for some time, but the Tennessee senator finally got a nickname.

The Failing [New York Times] set Liddle Bob Corker up by recording his conversation. Was made to sound a fool, and thats what I am dealing with! Trump tweeted on Oct. 10.

Corker slammed Trump in an interview with the newspaper and said the president is so reckless that he might be on the path to World War III. A transcript from the interview revealed that Corker acknowledged the conversation was on the record.

Wacky Congresswoman Wilson

Trump and Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., became locked in a public feud involving a Gold Star family  earning the Florida congresswoman her nickname.

The Fake News is going crazy with wacky Congresswoman Wilson (D), who was SECRETELY on a very personal call, and gave a total lie on content! Trump tweeted.

Wilson accused Trump of making insensitive remarks to the pregnant widow of one of the four American soldiers killed during an attack in Niger. The White House, including chief of staff John Kelly, has ardently defended the presidents comments.

Jerry Moonbeam Brown

Trump hasn't seen eye-to-eye with California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, throughout much of his time in office  but the president was especially critical after Brown pardoned 56 convicted felons, including five ex-convicts facing deportation.

Trump blasted the pardoning on Twitter, calling the governor Jerry Moonbeam Brown.

Is this really what the great people of California want? Trump said.

Trump cant take full credit for Browns nickname. The Moonbeam moniker was given to the governor first in the 1970s by a columnist who said Brown was garnering the "moonbeam vote," or the younger, more idealistic voters in his gubernatorial campaign, according to The New York Times. The nickname continued as Brown pressed for California's space programs.

Crazy Joe Biden

It all started when former Vice President Joe Biden addressed an anti-sexual assault rally in Florida and cited lewd comments Trump made about women in the infamous Access Hollywood tape more than a decade ago.

Biden, who has crusaded against sexual assault and harassment, said, If we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.

A few days later, Trump lashed out on Twitter, nicknaming the former senator Crazy Joe Biden.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault, Trump said on March 22. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!

In the past, Trump has referred to Biden on social media as our not very bright vice president.

Little Adam Schiff

Trump accused Rep. Adam Schiff of leaking confidential information from closed committee hearings and called for him to be stopped. The president also referred to the Democrat from California as Little Adam Schiff.

Little Adam Schiff, who is desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington, Trump said in a tweet, comparing him to former FBI Director James Comey, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan. Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!

Schiff is the ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee which released a controversial memo that detailed alleged improper surveillance techniques used in the Russia investigation. Schiff was critical of the memos public release  supported by Republicans  calling it misleading and undermining of the probe.

Crooked Hillary

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump would often hit his opponent, Hillary Clinton, with criticisms on social media. Trump gave her the nickname Crooked Hillary, usually when he mentioned her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

The first time Trump tweeted about Crooked Hillary was in April 2016.

Sometimes Trump switched it up and would call the former first lady Lyin Hillary.

Wild Bill Clinton

While criticizing former FBI Director James Comey's memoir, Trump referenced the now-infamous meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch on a Phoenix airport tarmac in June 2016. The meeting was questioned because the then-attorney general was leading the investigation into Hillary Clintons email scandal.

Comey throws AG Lynch under the bus! Why cant we all find out what happened on the tarmac in the back of the plane with Wild Bill and Lynch? Trump said. Was she promised a Supreme Court seat, or AG, in order to lay off Hillary. No golf and grandkids talk (give us all a break)!

Lynch has said she and Clinton discussed only innocuous things on the tarmac but acknowledged that her speaking to the former president raised concerns in peoples minds about whether or not there was going to be any impact on the email investigation.

Cheatin Obama

Trump praised his own approval ratings on social media  while taking a jab at former President Barack Obama.

The president said the honest polling of Rasmussen shows his approval rating at 50 percent, which is higher than Cheatin Obama at the same time in his Administration.

The April 2 Rasmussen poll showed 50 percent of likely U.S. voters approved of Trump. However, 49 percent disapproved.

Little Marco

The rhetoric among the Republican presidential contenders hit a different kind of low as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio went after Trump for having small hands and Trump started to call the senator Little Marco. The two also discussed the size of Trumps hands  and other things  during a GOP debate in March 2016.

Trump first tweeted the Little Marco nickname in February 2016.

Lyin Ted

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Trump didnt start out as enemies during the 2016 campaign, but the two Republican contenders were soon at each others throats. Trump dubbed Cruz Lyin Ted when he went after him for his immigration policies in a campaign ad in March 2016.

Low Energy Jeb

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also got a Trump nickname when he was a 2016 Republican presidential contender  Low energy Jeb Bush.

Despite the exclamation point in Bushs campaign logo, Trump started to use the nickname to criticize his opponent during the campaign. Trump told Business Insider that there wasnt a backstory to the nickname, he just seemed like a low energy person to Trump.

1 for 38

When Ohio Gov. John Kasich attempted to team up with Cruz during the Republican primary to deny Trump the partys nomination, Trump took to Twitter to dole out a new nickname. And Kasich became 1 for 38.

Trump assigned Kasich the name because he won only one state in the primary and lost the others, Trump said in a statement in August 2016. Eventually Kasich would also be referred to as 1 for 42 by the eventual president.



Crazy Bernie

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the white-haired Independent socialist who became a progressive icon during the 2016 election, earned himself the nickname Crazy Bernie from Trump.

Trump first tweeted about Crazy Bernie in May 2016 when he criticized Crooked Hillary for looking very bad against Sanders.

Crying Chuck

After Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, N.Y., criticized Trump for firing F.B.I. Director James Comey, Trump hit him right back  with an original nickname.

Cryin Chuck Schumer stated recently, I do not have confidence in him (James Comey) any longer. Then acts so indignant, he tweeted on May 9, 2017.

Schumer shed some tears when he discussed Trumps immigration ban earlier in 2017.

But Schumer wasnt crying after Trump agreed to the Democrats short-term debt-limit increase and Hurricane Harvey aid.

Crazy Jim Acosta

Trump had a surprising tweet of gratitude Tuesday morning for CNNs White House correspondent, Jim Acosta  while also bestowing a nickname on his media adversary.

Even Crazy Jim Acosta of Fake News CNN agrees: Trump World and WH sources dancing in end zone: Trump wins againSchumer and Dems cavedgambled and lost. Thank you for your honesty Jim! Trump tweeted.

Trumps tweet referenced Acostas earlier social media post.

The president and his administration has often slammed Acosta and CNN for coverage they deem unfair  or fake news. Trump has also kicked Acosta out of the Oval Office.

Sleepy Eyes

Trump has thought NBC reporter Chuck Todd has looked sleepy long before the election or campaign. He first dubbed Todd sleepy in a 2001 tweet, but upgraded his nickname to Sleepy Eyes by 2012.

And in 2018, at a campaign rally for a Republican congressional candidate, Trump slammed the NBC anchor as a son of a b-----.

Trump mentioned a 1999 "Meet the Press" appearance when he discussed North Korea.

Its 1999, Im on 'Meet the Press,' a show now headed by sleepy-eyes Chuck Todd, Trump said. Hes a sleeping son of a b----, Ill tell you.

Dumb as a Rock Mika

From writer Toure to National Review, Trump has called many things dumb as a rock. But Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBCs Morning Joe earned the nickname in July after she and Joe Scarborough criticized the president.

Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses, he tweeted. Too bad!

His attack on the news anchor continued, as he called her low I.Q. Crazy Mika and said she was bleeding badly from a face-lift when she came to Mar-a-Lago around New Years Eve.

Psycho Joe

In a Twitter rant about his dislike of MSNBCs Morning Joe program, Trump dubbed host Joe Scarborough Psycho Joe.

Crazy Megyn

Trumps comments about then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly were often criticized and deemed misogynistic by critics. During their feud, Trump took to calling Kelly Crazy Megyn.

Little Jeff Zucker

Trump criticized CNN in an April tweet  and called its president Little Jeff Zucker.

Check out the fact that you cant get a job at ratings challenged [CNN] unless you state that you are totally anti-Trump, the president alleged on social media. Little Jeff Zucker, whose job is in jeopardy, is not having much fun lately. They should clean up and strengthen CNN and get back to honest reporting.

Fox News' Matt Richardson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Former Wall Street executive Phil Murphy, assuming elected office for the first time, prepared Tuesday to be sworn in as New Jersey's 56th governor and return Democrats to full control of state government.

"Today our great state turns a new page," Murphy said in a tweet that included a photo of him, his wife, Tammy, and their four children in a group hug.

Murphy, 60, succeeds two-term Republican Gov. Chris Christie, an ally of Donald Trump. Murphy promises to be an antagonist of the president.

Murphy and his wife started the morning by attending a prayer service at Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton.

The inauguration was taking place in a grand 1,800-seat theater at the state capitol complex in Trenton. Six ceremonial canons were set up out front for an expected salute.

Murphy takes over from a larger-than-life governor who oversaw the state as its economy rebounded but who also saw his popularity plunge after a failed presidential run and the George Washington Bridge lane-closure scandal.

He inherits a state with growing pension obligations and nearly perennial budget woes. He's said he would bring in new leadership at New Jersey Transit, the state's beleaguered commuter rail and bus agency, and has said the state faces a "fiscal crisis."

Murphy built his campaign around undoing the Trump administration's efforts on health care, immigration and taxes. He promises to raise taxes on millionaires and legalize recreational marijuana, allies himself with unions and says he will increase payments into the state pension system and school aid.

Trenton was gridlocked on Tuesday because of an ice-jammed Delaware River that flooded local roads and closed streets in addition to the traffic for the inauguration.

Murphy's inaugural ball Tuesday night was to be held under a tent at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford.

The new governor earned his fortune, which he used to help win the Democratic nomination last year, as an executive at Goldman Sachs. The last Democratic governor, Jon Corzine, who Christie ousted in 2009, was also an executive at Goldman Sachs.

He also served several years under the Obama administration as ambassador to Germany.


The Department of Homeland Security has asked federal prosecutors to examine the possibility of bringing criminal charges against leaders of so-called sanctuary cities, Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told lawmakers Tuesday.

"The Department of Justice is reviewing what avenues may be available," Nielsen told the Senate Judiciary Committee. The secretary added that sanctuary policies were "putting my [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers at risk."

The Trump administration has vowed to withhold federal money from localities that refuse to give federal immigration authorities access to jails and provide advance notice when someone in the country illegally is about to be released.

Earlier this month, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told Fox News' "Your World with Neil Cavuto" that politicians should be held "personally accountable" for crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

"We've got to start charging some of these politicians with crimes," Tom Homan said in the Jan. 2 appearance.

California recently passed a statewide sanctuary policy that took effect Jan. 1, and cities such as San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia have adopted them.

A federal judge has blocked the Justice Department's effort to halt funding to those locations.

Last month, Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., introduced a bill threatening elected officials in sanctuary cities with fines and prison time.

AFTER STEINLE VERDICT, REP UNVEILS BILL TO IMPRISON OFFICIALS WHO SHELTER ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

"Politicians don't get to pick and choose what laws to comply with," Rokita told Fox News at the time "Americans are dying because politicians sworn to uphold the law refuse to do so."

Rokita introduced the bill in the wake of the Kate Steinle trial, in which an illegal immigrant who had been deported to Mexico five times was acquitted of murdering Steinle on a San Francisco pier in 2015.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Kirstjen Nielsen came to Capitol Hill Tuesday to talk about key issues like border security and terrorism, but the Department of Homeland Security secretary instead found herself repeatedly answering questions about President Trumps language during a recent meeting.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sought Nielsen's description of the president's language at a White House immigration meeting she attended last week, where he reportedly referred to impoverished nations as 's---hole' countries.

Sir, respectfully, I have answered this question repeatedly, Nielsen finally told Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who was at least the third lawmaker to raise the issue.I have nothing further to say about it.

She acknowledged several times that the meeting, aimed at reaching a bipartisan immigration deal, was very impassioned and said several of the lawmakers including Trump used tough language. However, she said she did not hear Trump use the racially-tinged word or words attributed to him.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., emerged from the meeting saying Trump had made the crude reference about Haiti and African nations in a way that came off as racist. Republicans Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, and David Perdue, of Georgia, claimed Trump had used a variant of the term and in a less offensive manner. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has refused to say exactly what he heard, though he said he confronted Trump about it.

Trump and Republicans want funding for a wall on the sourthern border and an end to chain migration and the visa lottery. Demcorats want amnesty for DACA reclipients, known as "Dreamers."

What I heard him say was that hed like to move away from a lottery (based immigration system) to a merit-based one, Nielsen said.

To be sure, Nielsen confirmed to the DHS post just last month, was hoping to tout a report released earlier in the day by the White House that found that federal courts haves convicted at least 549 people on international terror-related charges since the 9/11 terror attacks.

But even that finding, which the administration presumably wanted to announce to make a case about the dangers of illegal immigration, was picked apart.

Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy questioned why Nielsen didnt know how many of those convicted came from countries on which Trump is imposing an immigration ban.

Democratic senators also questioned Nielsen about Trumps apparent suggestion that the U.S. should allow in more people from Norway -- a remark some have interpreted as racist, considering his displeasure for allowing poor, unskilled immigrants from third-world countries in Haiti or from African nations. He had met with the Norwegian leader the day before.

Nielsen said that she thought the president was repeating what the Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg had told him -- that Norwegians are work very hard.

Still, Nielsen said, even the president raised concerns about allowing more people from Europe into the country to move Americas diversity-based immigration program to a more skilled-based system, saying being from Norway is not a "skill."

Nielsen argued for the presidents call to build a complete U.S.-Mexico border wall, and knocked back criticism that a physical wall is obsolete.

Walls work, she said. I dont know about anybody saying its last century technology.

Nielsen also reinforced the administrations so-called four-column immigration-reform policy amid bipartisan, Capitol Hill-White House negotiation on comprehensive immigration reform.

She cited border security, permanent protection for young illegal immigrants, eliminating the diversity lottery and ending so-called chain migration, in which extended-family members can follow into the U.S. those with Green Cards.

Still, Nielsens hardest questions were about Trumps comments, which some think have set back such talks.

The sharpest criticism came from New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, who said: Im seething with anger. You are under oath  and you and others cannot remember.
House Republicans want to pull the plug on a controversial scheme in which unions collect dues from federal subsidies to people cared for by family members.

Despite a 2014 Supreme Court ruling barring unions from forcing family caregivers to pay union dues, 11 states allow health care labor organizations to classify them as public-sector workers who must pay dues. Those dues are then collected from federal payments to states through Medicaid and other government programs before funds are passed through to intended recipients.

Nobody is telling the providers who see the value of unions to stop paying dues. But let the providers get their money, then write a check. This way, theyre making their own decision.  F. Vincent Vernuccio, Mackinac Center for Public Policy

Even though the Supreme Court has spoken, were still seeing a lot a states deducting dues from benefit checks from people who do not want or need a union, F. Vincent Vernuccio, a senior fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said Monday. Nobody is telling the providers who see the value of unions to stop paying dues. But let the providers get their money, then write a check. This way, theyre making their own decision.

Health-care givers were on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to ask lawmakers to stop liberal-leaning states -- including California, Minnesota and Illinois -- from classifying family caregivers as public employees.

House GOP officials estimate as much as $200 million a year being diverted from caregivers to unions.

They say that paying unions is not what Medicaid is designed for.



Critics of the so-called dues skimming says some caregivers dont even know the money is being deducted from their checks and that opting out of the process remains complicated or onerous. Such caregivers in Oregon, for example, can reportedly only leave their union during a varying, 15-day annual period.

Among those on Capitol Hill this week to bring awareness to the issue was Miranda Thorpe and her 21-year daughter, Sarena, for whom she provides care.

What bothers me the most is, I know a lot of parents, because Im in this community, said Thorpe, a registered nurse. And none of them really understand that this is happening to them. They have no idea. I dont think the state should be the factor that colludes with unions to take out this money without peoples knowledge. If they really wanted people to have a choice, then they should let them know what their options are.  I think its very unfair, since this is a very vulnerable population.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, is set to introduce legislation in the coming weeks to stop the practice in all 50 states, her office told Fox News on Monday.

This is robbing our nations most vulnerable who need Medicaid the most. Every dollar that is diverted from a caregiver to a union hurts that familys ability to care for their loved ones. Paying unions is not what Medicaid was designed for, McMorris Rodgers office said in announcing the congresswomans plan for a bill that will ensure that Medicaid dollars are spent on caregivers, not unions.

The practice of collecting dues for unions started decades ago, when state governments were allowed to classify some workers getting government wages -- including health-care workers and correctional officers -- as public employees.

The states then allowed unions to collect dues from such employees even if they didnt join the union -- with union leaders arguing that their collective bargaining for better wages or working conditions benefits all of the workers, even those who are non-union.

The other states that set up to deduct funds from caregivers include Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey Oregon, Vermont and Rodgers McMorris home state of Washington.

One of the biggest unions benefiting from the system is Service Employees International Union, which represents as many as 2 million workers across the country, including janitors, probation officers and home-care workers.

As a voluntary dues paying member of SEIU775, I see how my union fights with me and for me. Knowing this allows me to focus on what I care about most, providing the highest level of care for the person I take care of  my daughter, said Sherri Gangitano who resides in Spokane Valley, part of Rep. McMorris Rodgerss district.

Critics of dues-skimming also suggest a lot of the money is being spent on political-related activities.

SEIU put more than $39 million into the 2016 election cycle, largely in support of Democratic candidates and their related political committees and groups, according to the nonpartisan, nonprofit group OpenSecrets.org.

Medicaid is a joint state-federal program that provides medical services for an estimate 74 million low-income Americans. However, the cost of the program continues to increase annually. Medicaid spending in 2016 increased 3.9 percent, to $565.5 billion, according to the Centers of Medicare and Medicare Services most recent data.

The McMorris Rodgers plan does not attempt to make structural changes to Medicaid.

House Republican leadership had made a priority this year of reforming so-called entitlement programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, which help the poor and elderly but is one of the federal governments biggest expenses.

House Speaker Paul Ryan last month called health-care entitlements the biggest drivers of our debt and sought to lower costs by making the U.S. health-care system more competitive, in large part by offering patients more choices.

But Ryan, R-Wis., appears to lack support for such efforts from some of the Houses more fiscally conservative members. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has essentially nixed the reform idea is his chamber, saying he doesnt have the needed votes from Democratic senators.
Fired White House chief strategist and ex-Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon has been subpoenaed by special counsel Robert Mueller, Fox News has confirmed.

The onetime Breitbart News executive chairman also testified behind closed doors on Capitol Hill Tuesday  for nearly 12 hours. Bannon appeared before the House Intelligence Committee as part of its Russia probe.

First reported by The New York Times, the Bannon subpoena was issued by Muellers team last week. Sources told Fox News that Bannons subpoena, which could require him to appear before a grand jury investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, was issued after the FBI initially was unable to contact him.

Even if you thought that was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s**t, and I happen to think its all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately."  Quote attributed to Steve Bannon in "Fire and Fury"

Sources familiar with the matter told Fox News that despite the subpoena to testify before a grand jury, there is a possibility that Bannon will, instead, be interviewed by Muellers office.

A spokesperson for Mueller did not immediately respond to Fox News request for comment.

Bannon left Capitol Hill on Tuesday after a nearly 12-hour, closed-door interview with the House Intelligence Committee where a top Democrat accused the president of placing a gag order on Bannon.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Bannon refused to answer questions about his time in the White House or his work on the presidential transition. His refusal prompted a subpoena from the committees Republican chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes of California.

Schiff says that was the first time Republicans on the committee had issued a subpoena in response to a witness refusing to answer questions at the instruction of the White House. Schiff says that the committee plans to bring Bannon back for another round of questioning.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., confirmed Bannons refusal to talk on Fox News Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Gowdy told Tucker Carlson, The reason we had a little hiccup this morning was because executive privilege now covers things before you become the chief executive, which is just mind-numbing, and there is no legal support for it. But, we cant make a witness answer a question.

Fox News has confirmed that Bannon will return to speak with the House Intel Committee Thursday afternoon.

Bannons subpoena and interview with congressional investigators came after the publication of Michael Wolffs book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, where Bannon made comments blasting Trumps eldest son Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, and ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Bannon described their infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya during the campaign as treasonous and unpatriotic.

STEVE BANNON TESTIFIES BEFORE HOUSE INTEL COMMITTEE AS PART OF RUSSIA PROBE

Even if you thought that was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s---, and I happen to think its all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately, Bannon said in the book.

Bannon also said that Trump Jr. would be cracked like an egg on live TV in any possible public testimony about the situation.

The president issued a multi-paragraph, blistering takedown of Bannon, who left his White House post in August, suggesting that sloppy Steve Bannon had lost his mind, seeking to distance himself from his former chief strategist.

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency, Trump said in the statement. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.

Bannon is just the latest Trump campaign associate to be summoned to interview with Mueller.

In October 2017, Manafort and his associate Rick Gates were indicted by a federal grand jury on 12 counts, as part of Muellers investigation. Both pleaded not guilty.

PAUL MANAFORT, RICK GATES INDICTED BY FEDERAL GRAND JURY IN RUSSIA PROBE

The special counsels office told Fox News that the counts included conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading Foreign Agent Registration (FARA) statements, false statements and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign banks and financial accounts.

Fox News learned Tuesday that Manaforts next court appearance would be Feb. 14 for a status hearing. The government had proposed the trial begin May 14, but the date may be pushed to October. At this point, there is no official start date.

FORMER TRUMP AIDE GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS PLEADS GUILTY TO MAKING FALSE STATEMENTS TO THE FBI

Muellers team also charged former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos with making false statements to FBI agents about his contacts with people close to the Russian government. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to the charges in the Mueller investigation.

Fox News Jake Gibson, Paulina Dedaj, Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Fallen former President Trump confidante Steve Bannon was served immediate subpoenas during his closed-door meeting with lawmakers Tuesday to provide testimony on information the White House instructed him not to share, according to sources with knowledge of the conversations.

In the now hours-long, ongoing interview conducted by investigators for the House Intelligence Committee, Bannons attorney told lawmakers that the White House directed his client not to answer questions about his time in the White House or during the transition.

Sources told Fox News Bannon did not invoke any sort of legal privilege, including executive privilege, to support this refusal.

The sources told Fox News that lawmakers grilled Bannon and his attorney over their refusal to answer. At that point, some members of the committee recommended subpoenas for Bannon, and documents related to the issues.

Bannon was also subpoenaed by Robert Mueller as part of the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling and potential collusion with Trump campaign associates during the 2016 presidential election. Bannon could be forced to testify before a grand jury.

Bannon's testimony behind closed doors is his first appearance on Capitol Hill since he ran afoul of the administration over quotes attributed to him in a bombshell book.

A source close to the comittee told Fox News that the former White House chief strategist and Trump campaign manager will likely be questioned over information in Michael Wolffs book: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

In the book, Bannon slammed the presidents eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner and ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Bannon called their infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with the Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya during the campaign treasonous and unpatriotic.

RUSSIAN LAWYER WHO MET TRUMP JR.: 'I WOULD HAVE' CONTACTED CLINTON, TOO, IF SHE COULD HELP

Even if you thought that was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s**t, and I happen to think its all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately, Bannon said in the book.

Bannon also said Trump Jr. would be cracked "like an egg on live TV in any possible public testimony about the situation.

Bannon, who stepped down as executive chairman of Breitbart News last week following a dramatic falling out with President Trump over the Wolff book, and who left his White House post in August, is also likely to be questioned over his role on the campaign, as opposed to his time working in the Trump administration.

STEVE BANNON STEPS DOWN AS EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF BREITBART NEWS

Bannon has a prominent role in Wolffs book, which enraged the president enough to have his personal attorneys demand the publisher halt the books releasea request that was quickly rejected. The lawyers also sent a cease and desist notice to Bannon, arguing that he violated a non-disclosure agreement signed during the campaign, by disclosing confidential information in speaking to the media about campaign and disparaging members of the Trump family.

The president issued a multi-paragraph blistering takedown of Sloppy Steve Bannon, after the first excerpts of Wolffs book were released, seeking to distance himself from his former chief strategist.

TRUMP SLAMS BANNON AFTER CRITICISM, SAYING EX-CHIEF STRATEGIST 'LOST HIS MIND'

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency, Trump said in the statement. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.

When he left the White House, Bannon said he would work to help Trump and wage a populist campaign from the outside.

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 said in August upon leaving his post.

Later this week, other Trump campaign officials, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former campaign spokeswoman now-White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, will testify before the same committee as part of its probe into Russian meddling and potential collusion with Trump campaign associates during the 2016 presidential election.

Fox News' Chad Pergram contributed to this report.
The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is withholding funding for a controversial U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians -- but has not cut funding to the organization completely.

The State Department confirmed Tuesday that the U.S. is withholding $65 million of a planned $125 million installment to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which provides health care, loans and other social services to Palestinian refugees in the region.

The U.S. gives approximately $364 million to UNRWA every year -- making the U.S. the biggest contributor to the organization.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert described the $65 million as frozen and being held for future consideration. She told reporters that the U.S. wants to see revisions in how UNRWA operates but would not be drawn into specifics.

Nauert added that the U.S. decided against withholding all funds as the administration wanted to be sure that schools and medical services were not shut down.

We felt that not providing that money would risk having the organizations and the people there run out of funds and those entities would potentially have to be shut down, she said.

The cut comes amid a growing push by the administration to get value for money at the U.N. and also to not fund agencies and countries that do not support U.S. interests.

Trump hinted at such a move in a tweet earlier this month, complaining about the amount the U.S. gives to the Palestinians and asking why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?

UNRWA was set up in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war to deal with displaced Palestinians, but is a frequent target of Israel, which claims it perpetuates a right of return that Israel rejects.

Critics claim that UNRWA uses too broad a definition for refugees, covering descendants of Palestinian refugees and those that are residents of other countries in the region. It has also been accused of promoting an anti-Israeli agenda.

Israels Ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, praised the move by the U.S., saying that UNRWA is an agency that misuses the humanitarian aid of the international community and instead supports anti-Israel propaganda, perpetuates the plight of Palestinian refugees and encourages hate.

Just over the last year alone, UNRWA officials were elected to the leadership of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, UNRWA schools denied the existence of Israel, and terror tunnels were dug under UNRWA facilities, Danon said in a statement. It is time for this absurdity to end and for humanitarian funds to be directed towards their intended purpose -- the welfare of refugees.

The move is likely to be strongly opposed by U.N. officials. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said ahead of the announcement on Tuesday that he was very concerned about reports of U.S. funding cuts and told reporters that UNRWA provided vital services to the Palestinian refugee population.

UNRWA's Commissioner General Pierre Krahenbuhl said in a statement that while the U.S. funding was important, "this reduced contribution threatens one of the most successful and innovative human development endeavors in the Middle-East."

"At stake is the access of 525,000 boys and girls in 700 UNRWA schools, and their future. At stake is the dignity and human security of millions of Palestine refugees, in need of emergency food assistance and other support in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At stake is the access of refugees to primary health care, including pre-natal care and other life-saving services," he said. "At stake are the rights and dignity of an entire community."

Fox News Ben Evansky contributed to this report.
President Trumps national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, secretly traveled to San Francisco over the weekend for a meeting on North Koreas nuclear weapons program, Fox News has confirmed.

According to sources, McMaster met with officials from South Korea and Japan, including Shotaro Yachi, the director of the Japanese national security council.

During the meeting, the group discussed the newly-resumed communications between North Korea and South Korea. They also agreed that these renewed communications  and agreement for North Korea to send athletes to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea next month -- are diversions and have no effect on North Korea leader Kim Jong Uns nuclear weapons program, the sources said.

All sides agreed on the need to increase pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear program.

Last month, during a speaking appearance in California, McMaster said the possibility of war with North Korea increases every day the problem over its nuclear program isnt solved.

MCMASTER: POTENTIAL FOR WAR WITH NORTH KOREA INCREASES 'EVERY DAY'

I think its increasing every day, McMaster told Fox News Bret Baier at the Reagan National Security Forum in California. It means were in a race. Were in a race to be able to solve this problem.

Added McMaster: There are ways to address this problem short of armed conflict, but it is a race because hes getting closer and closer and theres not much time left.

McMaster told Baier that North Korea dictator Kim Jong Uns nuclear ambitions are the gravest national security threat that America faces.

The greatest immediate threat to the United States and to the world is the threat posed by the rogue regime in North Korea and his continued efforts to develop a long range nuclear capability, he said.

McMaster added, So its immensely important that we work together with all of our allies, partners, everyone internationally, to convince Kim Jong Un that the continued pursuit of these capabilities is a dead end for him and his regime.
President Trumps tweet earlier this month about having a bigger nuclear button that Kim Jong Un is the spasm of a lunatic, North Koreas state-run newspaper said Tuesday.

The rogue regimes Rodong Sinmum newspaper took issue with the Jan. 3 tweet where Trump wrote that he has a bigger & more powerful nuclear button than North Koreas Kim.

The spasm of Trump in the new year reflects the desperate mental state of a loser who failed to check the vigorous advance of the army and people of the DPRK, the paper said. He is making (a) bluff only to be diagnosed as a psychopath.

Trump tweet earlier in the month was in response to Kims New Years Day warning that North Koreas nuclear arsenal is a real threat and he has a nuclear button on his desk and is ready to press it at any given time.

The U.S. should know that the button for nuclear weapons is on my table, Kim said during a televised speech. The entire area of the U.S. mainland is within our nuclear strike range. ... The United States can never start a war against me and our country.

Kim continued, We need to mass-produce nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles and accelerate their deployment.

Last week, the state-run paper said that a White House tell-all, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House predicts Trumps political demise.

The comments came after Trump said he would be open to talks with Pyongyang at the appropriate time, under the right circumstances.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Experts have discovered an ancient princes tomb in southern Siberia that may contain treasures or even an ice mummy preserved in the regions frozen soil.

Archaeologist Gino Caspari first noticed the circular structure while studying high-resolution satellite images of the Uyuk River Valley in Siberia. The Bern University scientist suspected that the unusual structure was a burial mound from the ancient Scythian civilization.

The nomadic Scythian civilization stretched from Central Asia across the Eurasian Steppes. The Scythians emerged around the ninth century B.C. and their society lasted until about the 1st century B.C.

500 YEARS LATER, SCIENTISTS THINK THEY'VE SOLVED GERM MYSTERY THAT NEARLY WIPED OUT MEXICAN POPULATION

Intrigued by the satellite images, Caspari took part in an initial dig at the site last summer with experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The team discovered a kurgan, or a Scythian princely tomb.

The area where the tomb was found is known as the Scythian Valley of the Kings, although experts say that the latest discovery is particularly noteworthy. The burial mound dubbed or Arzhan 0, or Tunnug 1, is similar to another kurgan, Arzhan 1, located about 6.2 miles to the northeast.

Arzhan 1, which was built at the turn of the 9th century B.C and the 8th century B.C. was excavated in the 1970s and has long been viewed as the oldest princely tomb in the region. Wooden beams found at the new excavation site, however, date back to the 9th century B.C., making it older than Arzhan 1.

PREHISTORIC 'PARADISE' WITH TROVE OF FLINT AXES DISCOVERED IN ISRAEL

We have a great opportunity here, said Caspari, in a statement. Archaeological methods have become considerably more sophisticated since the 1970s. Today we have completely different ways of examining material to find out more about the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

The expert is also hopeful that Arzhan 0 will eventually reveal its secrets. Positioned in an inaccessible location amid swampy terrain, the tomb is likely to have escaped the attentions of grave robbers. Siberias unique environmental conditions also improve the chances of finding preserved artifacts.

Kurgans are typically packed with stones that prevent the sun from thawing out the soil beneath them. This means that ice beneath the stones can prevent the decay of organic matter and sensitive material. If were lucky, we might even find some well-preserved wood carvings or carpets under the stones, or perhaps an ice mummy, said Caspari, in the statement.

1,000-YEAR-OLD STONE STRUCTURE IN MEXICO MAY DEPICT CREATION OF EARTH

Excavations by a joint German and Russian archaeological team at another Scythian tomb in the region, Arzhan 2, unearthed a host of treasure. The excavations, which ran between 2001 and 2004, revealed over 1,000 gold objects that were placed with two corpses in the tombs main burial chamber. A solid gold necklace found at the site, for example, weighs 4.4 pounds. Weapons, pots and the remains of horses with elaborate harnesses were also found.

Casparis research in the Russian Republic of Tuva is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
A family of four planets orbiting a distant star was discovered last April, with the help of citizen scientists around the world. In a new paper, researchers reveal some fascinating features of this alien solar system, including the presence of a fifth planet.

The planetary system K2-138 is home to at least five "sub-Neptune" planets, meaning they are between the size of Earth and that of Neptune, according to the new study. The planets all orbit extremely close to their parent star, even closer than Mercury orbits the sun.

What's more, the paper suggests that these planets may have formed farther away from their parent star than they are now, then journeyed inward together in an exceptionally calm manner. [Kepler Space Telescope's Alien Planet Bonanza Explained (Infographic)]

K2-128 was discovered using data from the K2 mission, which has observed over 280,000 stars in three years, according to a statement from the California Institute of Technology. The mission utilizes the Kepler space telescope, which suffered a series of hardware failures and could no longer operate the way it was initially intended. The K2 mission allowed Kepler to continue operating in another way.

Software programs can sort through the initial K2 data and select those stars that might be home to planets, but those programs aren't yet good enough to independently confirm the presence of a planet around a star in the K2 data. That leaves thousands of stars that need to be analyzed by the K2 scientists, which is far more than those researchers can handle in a reasonable amount of time, according to Jessie Christiansen, a K2 collaboration member and staff scientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who spoke at a news conference at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Washington, D.C. yesterday (Jan. 11).

To try and sort through the K2 data faster, the mission scientists initiated a crowdsourcing project. In this effort, members of the public would be able to review the data that the K2 software had sifted out and help identify the systems that host planets. The result was the Exoplanet Explorers citizen scientist project, developed by Christiansen, along with Ian Crossfield, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The program was launched in April and hosted on Zooniverse, an online platform for crowdsourcing research.

(Another citizen scientist project hosted on Zooniverse, called Planet Hunters, was started during the Kepler telescope's primary mission and allowed citzen scientists to search through telescope data for exoplanets before the data had been filtered by software.)

"People anywhere can log on and learn what real signals from exoplanetslook like, and then look through actual data collected from the Kepler telescope to vote on whether or not to classify a given signal as a transit or just noise," said Christiansen. "We have each potential transit signal looked at by a minimum of 10 people, and each needs a minimum of 90 percent of 'yes' votes to be considered for further characterization."

Project beginnings

The Exoplanet Explorers program got a big boost in publicity two weeks after it launched, when it was featured on the Australia Broadcasting Company's television series "Stargazing Live," co-hosted by celebrity physicist Brian Cox, for three consecutive nights. Within 48 hours of the program's debut, more than 10,000 people had participated in Exoplanet Explorers and classified over 2 million systems, according to the statement.

Following the first night of the program, the researchers watched the results roll in, as citizen scientists helped sift through the data. On the second night, enough people had participated that the researchers were able to share the demographics of the planet candidates that had already been flagged and were undergoing additional analysis: 44 Jupiter-size planets, 72 Neptune-size planets, 44 Earth-size planets and 53 sub-Neptunes (larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune).

On the third night, the scientists announced the detection of the K2-128 system, although at the time they could identify only four planets around the star. The researchers said in the statement that K2-128 is the "first multiplanet system of exoplanets discovered entirely by crowdsourcing."

Resonance

Some of the major findings reported in the new paper are the discovery of a fifth planet and hints of a possible sixth planet in the data.

The star at the center of this system is slightly smaller and cooler than our sun. While the innermost planet might be rocky like Earth, the other four known planets are gaseous, like Neptune. All five planets orbit around the star with periods shorter than 13 days. (Mercury's orbit around the sun is 88 days.) That close proximity means the planets have temperatures ranging from 800 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit (425 to 980 Celsius), so even the rocky planet is not habitable for life as we know it.

All five of the confirmed planets, which are lettered a through e, orbit their star in resonance with each other, meaning the length of each planet's orbit is related to the next planet's orbit in the same way. More specifically, dividing the length of one planet's orbit by that of the next nearest planet produces nearly the same ratio each time: 3:2 or 1.5. In each case, the exact ratio of two orbital lengths is slightly higher or lower than 1.5, but by less than 0.1. The TRAPPIST-1 system, which contains seven planets orbiting very close to their star, also displays orbital resonances but the ratio does not work out to whole integers. Resonances with whole integers are called "fundamental" resonances.

This planetary resonance indicates that the orbits of the planets are influencing each other and have probably been influencing each other for a long time, according to the statement. Some planetary-formation theories predict that these relatively large planets formed at locations farther awayfrom their parent star than they are now, and the resonances indicate that they moved in toward the star together, in a relatively calm manner, Christiansen said at the news conference.

"Some current theories suggest that planets form by a chaotic scattering of rock and gas and other material in the early stages of the planetary system's life. However, these theories are unlikely to result in such a closely packed, orderly system as K2-138," Christiansen said in the statement. "What's exciting is that we found this unusual system with the help of the general public."

Konstantin Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech who was not involved with the study, agreed that the resonances of the five planets indicated a calm migration period, according to the statement.

"Orbital commensurabilities among planets are fundamentally fragile, so the present-day configuration of the K2-138 planets clearly points to a rather gentle and laminar formation environment of these distant worlds," Batygin said.

Original article on Space.com.
A tiny chunk of stone that looks like nothing else ever seen in the solar system might be even weirder than scientists thought.

The Hypatia stone was found in southwestern Egypt in 1996. It was hardly more than a pebble, just 1.3 inches (3.5 centimeters) wide at its widest and a smidge over an ounce (30 grams) in weight. But analysis revealed that the stone (dubbed "Hypatia" for a fourth-century female mathematician and philosopher) fit into no known category of meteorite. Now, a new study suggests that at least some parts of the stone may have formed before the solar system did.

If so  and that is a big "if"  the stone might reveal that the dust cloud that eventually congealed into our solar system was not as uniform as previously believed. [Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events]

Oddball discovery

When the Hypatia stone was first discovered, researchers weren't sure where it came from. Because it is studded with microdiamonds 50 nanometers to 2 micrometers in size, one possibility was that it was a strange example of a type of diamond known as a carbonado diamond. But studies in 2013 and 2015 definitively knocked out that possibility: The ratios of noble gases in the stone show that it is most certainly from out of this world. (The diamonds probably formed from the shock when the space rock blasted through Earth's atmosphere.)

"This is a piece of extraterrestrial material," said Guillaume Avice, a postdoctoral scholar of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology who participated in the 2015 study. [Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Could Contact Us]

But that's about all that can be definitively said about the Hypatia stone. The makeup of the rock matches no known meteorite. In fact, the rock hasn't been officially categorized as a meteorite, even though it came from space, because only about 0.14 ounces (4 grams) of the original mass of the rock can currently be accounted for. It's not that the rest is permanently lost, Avice said, but it's been chipped apart and sent around to so many labs that fragments are all over the place. The Meteoritical Society requires 20 percent of a meteorite's original mass to be present to officially declare it to be a meteorite.

Mysterious minerals

In the new study, researchers focused on the minerals in the Hypatia stone. They discovered that the stone itself is not uniform, but consists of a carbon-rich matrix shot through with a variety of minerals. These mineral inclusions are as weird as the rest of the rock, the research team found. They include pure metallic aluminum nuggets, an extremely rare find in the solar system; moissanite and silver iodine phosphide grains; and strange ratios of elements that fail to match the typical ratios of solar system objects. For example, unlike any other solar object ever found, these minerals include a nickel-phosphide compound with very high ratios of nickel to iron.

"There is no known or imaginable mechanism that [this compound] could have been produced naturally in the solar nebula," study leader Jan Kramers, a geologist at the University of Johannesburg, told Live Science in an email.

The solar nebula is the dust and gas that remained after the formation of the very early sun at the dawn of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Kramers and his colleagues think that this portion of the Hypatia stone may have formed from the pre-solar nebula, making it older than the sun itself. The rest  the carbon-rich matrix  may have coagulated later in the coldest outer reaches of the solar nebula, according to Kramers, because forming large bodies requires a dense dust cloud like the solar nebula to provide the material.

But current theories of solar system formation hold that solar nebula dust was the same everywhere, and Hypatia doesn't fit that picture. The matrix of the stone contains no silicate minerals. The Earth and other rocky planets are full of silicates, and so are stony meteorites. If the matrix of the Hypatia stone formed from the solar nebula, that nebula couldn't have been totally uniform after all, Kramers said.

However, that interpretation of the Hypatia stone's formation is still questionable, Avice said. The test that would cinch whether any part of the object is presolar in origin is an analysis of the Hypatia stone's isotopes, or variations of atoms based on the number of neutrons in their nuclei.

"Presolar material has a very strange isotopic composition compared to the average values of the solar system," Avice said.

Kramers also said isotopic analysis of both the matrix and the mineral inclusions in the stone is the next step researchers need to take to better understand the mysterious space pebble.

Until then, Avice said, "we still don't know what this is, exactly."

Original article on Live Science.
Not everyone uses the Apple Health App thats pre-installed on their iPhones. But this app is playing an important role in a murder trial in Germany. An Afghan refugee named Hussein Khavari is being accused of raping and murdering 19-year-old medical student Maria Ladenburger, disposing of her body in a river.

Hussein has been on trial since September of 2017, and Ladenburger was murdered in October 2016. The authorities wanted to search the information on his iPhone, but Khavari refused to give them his password to unlock the device, Welt reports.. Investigators then turned to a private Munich company to gain access to his phone. Khavari has admitted to his guilt, but he also disputed some details.

Authorities went through the Apples Health app on his phone and learned what kind of activity Khavari was participating in on that particular day  the day Ladenburgers body was dumped in the River Dreisam. They discovered that a large bulk of his activity consisted of climbing stairs. They took this information and made a correlation between the time it would have taken Khavari to drag the body of Ladenburger down to the river, and climb back up.

An investigator of similar build to Khavari went to the scene of the crime to recreate how the police believed he disposed of the body. The investigators Apple Health app activity correlated with the information that was recorded on Khavaris phone.

Digital evidence is already more common in law enforcement, not only metrics from apps but also facial recognition, recordings from smart speakers, and, of course, smart devices with cameras, said Sean OBrien, a researcher at Yale Privacy Lab. Michael Kwet, another Yale Privacy Lab researcher, has suggested that data pulled from smartphones and other devices are likely to be used more in criminal investigations. It seems that the legal-system has not yet found a way to handle these kinds of cases.

In my opinion, the creators and distributors of software should, first and foremost, have a responsibility to their users, OBrien said. When and where they should hand over data to courts is a more complex question. It would be much better, in my view, not to collect such surveillance data at all. Such data is best kept locally on devices whenever possible. If it is collected, those who handle it have a deep responsibility to defend the privacy of their users.
The rise of bitcoin may have been one of the biggest stories of 2017, but its acceptance as a means of payment is still limited. Now, the Bunny Ranch, the famous Las Vegas brothel, is looking to cash in on the trend.

The setting of the HBO series "Cathouse," The Bunny Ranch announced it "is the latest retailer to get on board the Bitcoin bandwagon," due to popular demand for cryptocurrencies.

Dennis Hof said that his brothels are currently looking at ways to accept bitcoin as a payment for services. We have some of the richest men in the world coming in and out of my brothels Hof said in a press release. Our high dollar clientele is accustomed to getting anything they want here, so when I started hearing requests from them to look into accepting Bitcoin, I took those suggestions very seriously.

IPHONE X, BITCOIN, WANNACRY AND MORE: BIGGEST STORIES OF 2017

Hof also noted that bitcoin has become a popular topic among his celebrity friends, including Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, whom he had a previous relationship with.

Friends of mine like Heidi have been trusted with a lot of powerful secrets, and the anonymous nature of Bitcoin is a natural fit for people who have much to lose if their private matters were to ever fall into the wrong hands," he added.

Aside from the innovative nature of cryptocurrencies, Hof mentioned that he was intrigued by the security and safety concerns that come with it, as opposed to paying via credit card or cash.

We have guys carrying duffle bags full of cash right up to our cashiers window, and weve had to install a safe the size of Fort Knox to hold it all, Hof said. Not that I mind good old fashioned cold cash, but Bitcoin is making it so much more practical for those same clients to live out their sexual fantasies here at the Bunny Ranch without literally having to carry a lot of excess baggage.

In addition to The Bunny Ranch, Hof owns a total of seven legal brothels throughout the state, including The Love Ranch, Love Ranch South and Alien Cathouse. The Bunny Ranch was the setting of "Cathouse," which ran on HBO from 2002 to 2014 and was also the setting of two documentaries, looking into the inner lives of legalized prostitution, the working girls and some of their clientele.

AS BITCOIN TOPS $10,000, ELON MUSK DENIES HE IS ITS CREATOR

Cryptocurrencies and in particular, bitcoin, have had a volatile start to 2018, after spending the majority of 2017 in an upswing.

Since the start of the year, bitcoin has fallen nearly 20 percent, including a 15 percent drop on Tuesday to $11,530.79, according to CoinDesk.

Concerns about a ban on trading in South Korea, one of the largest bitcoin markets in the world, and China shutting down bitcoin miners and blocking access to cryptocurrency platforms have weighed on the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum and Ripple.

Follow Chris Ciaccia on Twitter @Chris_Ciaccia
A passenger aboard a United Airlines flight from Denver to Hawaii claims the airline ruined a lot of peoples vacations by failing to service the planes bathrooms before takeoff on Sunday.

United Flight 1219, which left for Hawaii just before noon, was forced to divert back to San Francisco after the lavatories had reached capacity before the aircraft was able to arrive at its intended destination of Lihue, in Kauai, United confirmed in a statement.

AIRLINE ATTENDANT SAYS YOU SHOULD NEVER DRINK THIS ON AN AIRPLANE

I am very sorry that our lavatories had reached capacity while Flight 1219 was en route to Lihue, said a representative for United in a statement to passengers, according to Fox 31. A decision was made to turn back and land in San Francisco where arrangements were made to change planes. I can appreciate that this experience was disappointing and unpleasant.

A representative for United further tells Fox News that the flight was "diverted to San Francisco for a mechanical issue with the lavatories," although he declined to specify the issue.

Passengers Rich and Kristen Anderson, who spoke with Fox 31, say the plane was only about three hours away from landing in Lihue when their pilot broke the news that they'd be turning back. They say the captain also revealed that the aircrafts bathrooms hadnt been properly serviced back in Denver.

As a result, the flight was forced to switch planes in San Francisco, which tacked on an additional eight hours to the expected travel time of eight hours.

AIRLINE SCREWS UP, WOMAN GETS PLANE ALL TO HERSELF

United has issued an apology to affected travelers, and reportedly offered each passenger 10,000 bonus miles or a $200 voucher towards a future flight.

But the Andersons  who booked the trip as an anniversary present to themselves  told Fox 31 they werent entirely satisfied.

Bottom line is they ruined a lot of peoples vacations yesterday, said Rich. They gave us a really crummy start.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

In addition to the Hawaii flight, United was forced to divert a Paris-bound flight to Dulles International Airport in Virginia on Monday, due to a passenger requiring medical assistance. The plane, which originally left from San Francisco, continued to Paris a few hours later, United confirmed to Fox News.
A United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Paris diverted to Washington-Dulles International Airport on Sunday due to a passenger requiring medical assistance.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Rick Breitenfeldt confirmed early on Monday that United 990 was diverting to Dulles, Va., following a medical issue on-board.

UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT DIVERTED AFTER 'TOILETS REACHED CAPACITY'

Jonathan Guerin, a spokesman for United Airlines, says the flight landed at 1 a.m. EST.

"On Sunday, United Airlines Flight 990 from San Francisco to Paris diverted to Washington-Dulles for a passenger requiring medical assistance. The flight landed safely and continued to Paris a couple of hours later," said United in an official statement.

Details surrounding the exact nature of the medical issue weren't immediatable available. The FAA is said to be investigating.

United also diverted a second plane over the weekend, due to a "mechanical issue with the lavatories," a spokesman for United confirmed to Fox News. Passengers on the flight, which left from Denver for Hawaii, but ended up turning back for San Francisco more than halfway into its journey, say the pilot informed passengers that the plane's bathrooms were not properly serviced before departing from Denver.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Blaze Bernstein was stabbed at least 20 times in what authorities are reportedly investigating as a possible act of rage, a report on Monday revealed.

The body of 19-year-old Bernstein, a pre-med sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, was found Jan. 9 buried in a shallow grave at Borrego Park in Lake Forest, California, after his parents reported him missing a week earlier.

Authorities on Friday arrested Samuel Woodward, 20, as a suspect in the Ivy League students death, and hes reportedly expected to be formally charged Tuesday, the Orange County Register reported.

A former high school classmate of Bernsteins, Woodward was the last person to see him alive. On the night of Jan. 2, the two drove to Borrego Park, and, according to Woodward, Bernstein exited the vehicle and walked alone into the park.

Woodward told investigators he waited for Bernstein for an hour, left to visit his girlfriend  whose name and address he claimed he couldnt remember  before he circled back hours later to find him.

Bernstein, according to the Orange County Register, had texted friends in June that Woodward was about to hit on me and he made me promise not to tell anyone  but I have texted every one, uh oh.

Woodward told investigators that on Jan. 2, Bernstein had kissed him on the lips and that he pushed Bernstein away.

Investigators stated in an affidavit that Woodward clenched his jaws and fists as he told the story of what happened, and said he wanted to tell Blaze to get off of him.

When questioned about Bernsteins death, police said Woodward appeared nervous, and had scratched hands and dirt underneath his fingernails.

He claimed the dirt was the result of participating in a fight club where he fell in a dirt puddle.

Investigators ultimately linked DNA evidence between Woodward and Bernsteins death, and the 20-year-old was arrested after a crime lab found that blood discovered on a sleeping bag in his possession was Bernstein's, the Register reported.

Authorities have not found a weapon.
A suburban Chicago couple was not surprised that President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump were not able to attend their 2017 wedding.

However, Brianna and Timothy Dargert of Orland Park decided to mail an invitation to the White House anyway. The couple was married in May, 2017.

Months later, a surprise came in the mail: a congratulatory letter signed by Mr. and Mrs. Trump. It read: "We join your family and friends in celebrating this joyous occasion and your love and commitment to one another. May your hearts grow fonder and your love deeper each day, and may God continue to bless your life together."

We both admire the President greatly," the couple wrote in an email to Fox 32 News, "and to receive something from him personally completely touched our hearts. It is wonderful to see that he truly cares about the American people!"

Click for more from Fox32Chicago.com.
A Pittsburgh pizza shop manager is behind bars after a video surfaced that appeared to show him attacking a woman, slamming her head against the floor.

Police were notified of the violent altercation when the woman was in the hospital, officials said. She had stopped into the shop, Pizza Milano, to use the bathroom, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

A video surfaced on social media showing the woman saying, push me again." The man then said, listen, you gotta go.

Eventually, the man restrained the woman, before knocking her to the floor and slamming her head on the floor repeatedly while he shouted, I said please!

Police arrested 41-year old Mahmut Yilmaz, and he was charged with one count of simple assault and one count of aggravated assault. He told police the woman had been loud and disruptive.

The woman's lawyer said she suffered a severe concussion.

Protesters gathered around the shop this week demanding that the owner close down all the pizza shop's locations.

Your times up, Kimberly Ellis said of the restaurant. You have to go. Were going to shut it down.

Protestors also called for the manager, Yilmaz, to face more severe charges.

Our lives have been threatened, Tisheika Walker said. Thats why we have to stand here as a people together because we have been threatened, as oneas one. But theres more than one of us. Theres all of us.

Pittsburgh Mayor William Peduto also voiced disapproval during the investigation into the attack.

It is my sincere hope that these charges are another step in sending a very clear signal that Pittsburgh will not tolerate violence against women and that we will work as a community to protect all women, and notably African American women, from physical and emotional violence, Peduto said in a statement.
One of four South Carolina law enforcement officers shot Tuesday morning was fighting for his life, as a report found that the suspected triggerman was found with several long guns and was previously arrested for assaulting an officer.

Christian Thomas McCall, 47, was taken into custody, suffering from wounds after allegedly firing at deputies at about 3:30 a.m., police said. Four South Carolina officers  three York County Sheriffs deputies and a K9 officer  were wounded and rushed to a hospital.

The York County Sheriffs Office confirmed the names of the four officers in a tweet Tuesday afternoon.

Det. Michael Doty remains in critical condition, Sgt. Randy Clinton is awaiting surgery with non-life threatening injuries, Sgt. Buddy Brown is recovering from surgery and Sgt. Kyle Cummings of the York County SWAT team is also in recovery, Fox 46 reported.

"His situation is very critical at this time. That's all I can tell you at this time. We really could use your thoughts and prayers," York County Sheriffs spokesman Trent Faris said in a news conference Tuesday afternoon about Doty.

McCall, a father of three children, was previously arrested in 1994 and was charged with assault, resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division spokesman Thom Berry told WSOC.

Around 10 p.m. Monday, he allegedly assaulted his wife in their York home, about 25 miles southwest of Charlotte, when the incident escalated, McCalls father-in-law told WSOC.

Authorities responded to a domestic call, but the suspect had already fled the scene on foot when they arrived, Faris said. K-9 units were sent to the scene when McCall fired his gun just after 1 a.m., striking one of the K-9 officers. McCall also allegedly shot at a police helicopter. The bullet struck the aircraft, but did not injure anyone, WSOC reported.

Three York County Sheriffs deputies were shot about 3:30 a.m. while searching the woods. McCall had several "long guns" with him at the time, but police did not specify what type of weapons they were.

McCalls father-in-law told WSOC-TV said it was uncharacteristic for McCall to act violently toward police. A neighbor, Roger Gilfillan, said he was stunned to find out who might be involved.

"This is baffling," Gilfillan said, noting McCall lived in the home with his wife and three children.

"They were real nice people. He just kept to himself," said Gilfillan.

McCall frequently walked around the neighborhood, but would only speak when someone spoke to him. McCall never appeared to cause any trouble, Gilfillan said.

Fox News' Paulina Dedaj and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A tweet by a radical, left-wing student group at the University of Texas that featured a photo of a police officer on fire has sparked widespread criticism for apparently advocating for violence against law enforcement.

The tweet  sent out by the Autonomous Student Network (ASN) at UT-Austin  states Instead of #LawEnforcementAppreciationDay how about #LawEnforcementIncinerationDay next to a photo of a French police officer engulfed in flames after being hit by a Molotov cocktail during last years May Day protests.

ASN-Austin describes itself as a pro-liberation, anti-capitalist outlet for radical student activism.

We see the state as integral to all forms of domination, as it provides a means for ruling classes to enforce their will and protect their power and enforces the ability to render individuals or entire populations disposable, the group states on its website. We see police as an extension of this and refuse any negotiation with the cops.

It stated: We hope to proliferate new forms-of-life on campus that break with all systems of control. Spread Anarchy, Live Communism!

ASN did not respond to Fox News request for comment about the tweet.

Sara Josephine Kennedy, a spokeswoman for the university, told Fox News the group is not affiliated with the UT-Austin, and if ASN is using the school's name without permission, "this is something that we will have to investigate.

The tweet drew strong criticism from law enforcment organizations across the country, who called the social media message "childish" and a "sign of disrespect for law enforcement."

"These types of antics are so disrepectful, especially coming from Texas where so many police officers helped with recovery efforts after the hurricanes and where police officers died in Dallas," Bill Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, told Fox News.

While sharing many similarities and ideologies with the Antifa movement, ASN does not appear to be affiliated with them and, while the group also focuses on disavowing white supremacy, the groups main target appears to be law enforcement.

Both ASN Austins Facebook and Twitter pages are full of announcements for marches and rallies against the police alongside memes and photos mocking law enforcement.

In one tweet  posted one day before Law Enforcement Appreciation Day on January 8  the group changes an infographic posted conservative radio host Dennis Pragers media page, PragerU.

The original graphic asked why are there so many anti-police activists?

But ASN Austin responded to the tweet, saying Hey @prageru, we fixed your graphic on the cops for you. Bet you feel real lucky being on the right side of that thin blue line though.

The reworked graphic states that police kill and rob oppressed peoples while protecting white supremacist capitalism. It ten asks why are there so many police sympathizers?

This is childish and unthinking," NAPO's Johnson said. "Instead of having the balls to actually protest, they do this stuff instead."
Authorities in southern California on Tuesday are working to determine how a couple allegedly managed to keep their 13 children captive and on the verge of starvation inside their home without any apparent red flags in the community.

David Turpin and his wife Louise are in custody after authorities discovered "several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings," inside their home in Perris, Calif.

David Turpins parents told ABC News that they last saw the children five years ago. They recalled the children looking thin, but told the network that they seemed like a happy family.

The grandparents said when they would speak to David Turpin or his wife, the children were never available.

Authorities have planned a 10 a.m. PT press conference to update the public on new information in the case that started with a 17-year-old girl who escaped the house on Sunday to call 911.

She reported that her 12 brothers and sisters were being held by their parents, according to a press release from the Riverside County Sheriffs Department.

The girl was slightly emaciated. Police believed she was 10 years old. The other victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty. They were given food and drinks after they "claimed to be starving."

Their conditions were not immediately clear, and were sent to nearby hospitals to be treated.

Neighbors said they were shocked to learn about the conditions. One neighbor told the Press-Enterprise of Riverside that he didnt even know children lived in the house.

Kimberly Milligan, 50, a neighbor who lived across the street, told the Los Angeles Times the few occasions in which she did see any kids come out of the house, they were very pale.

"I thought the kids were home-schooled," she said. "You know something is off, but you don't want to think bad of people."

Several other neighbors noticed red flags with the family  recalling an incident from a few months ago when some of the children were seen laying sod in the front yard late at night, the Times reported.

"I thought it was weird, but I'm the kind of guy that doesn't want to get in anybody's business," Gary Stein, 32, who lives on the street told the paper, adding that city officials were citing people with shabby lawns at the time.

Ivan Trahan, the couples bankruptcy lawyer, told The New York Times that they were a very nice couple. He said he never met the children, but the couple "spoke about them highly."

The Turpins previously lived in Texas before moving to California in 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The couple apparently ran a public K-12 institution out of their home called Sandcastle Day School that opened in 2011, with David Turpin listed as the principal, according to the Times citing public records. In the 2016-17 school year it had an enrollment of six with one student in each of the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, 10th and 12th grades.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
From time to time, parts of California are at risk of powerful mudslides as flooding causes mud and debris to slide down hillsides into communities.

A weather system known as an "atmospheric river" can help trigger mudslides in California. An atmospheric river, or a huge plume of subtropical moisture, can bring inches of rain in foothills and mountains. The flooding caused by such weather events can send mud and debris sliding down from wildfire-charred hillsides that are stripped of vegetation, eventually reaching the communities below.

LAKE EFFECT SNOW: HERE'S HOW IT IMPACTS THE GREAT LAKES

In 2018, some 21 people died from the mudslides that swept over parts of the states southern region, mainly in Montecito, Santa Barbara County  an area northwest of Los Angeles thats home to celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres, Rob Lowe and Oprah Winfrey, among others. Several homes were destroyed because of the mudslides, which were sparked after torrential rains caused flash flooding in the Santa Ynez Mountains.

Heres what you need to know about mudslides.

Why do mudslides occur?

Mudslides, also known as debris flows, are a type of landslide that can occur after a natural disaster, such as a wildfire. Debris flows often contain mud, rock and other materials.

Human modification of land can make certain slopes and steep areas vulnerable to landslides during and after heavy rains, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which estimates that roughly 25 to 50 people die each year in the United States because of land and mudslides.

But mudslides can also occur without a wildfire preceding it, according to Francis Rengers, a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the science agency for the Department of Interior.

In January 2018, you had a large amount of rain and a burn area that didnt need much to get going in the first place, Rengers said.

A few different factors contribute to debris flows in Southern California, David Peterson, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Washington, told Fox News.

The Thomas Fire, which burned more than 280,000 acres and primarily affected Ventura, Montecito, Carpinteria and Santa Barbara Counties, removed all of the living and dead vegetation that protected the soil beneath, Peterson said. The land quickly eroded when there was no vegetation to hold it in place.

The fire was also hot enough to cook out the organic matter in the soil, which helps the earth to absorb water when it rains.

When you have five or more inches of water in a day or two, it doesnt buffer the impact of the rain on the soil, he said, adding that the soil also became very hot from the wildfires. This results in the so-called hydrophobic effect, which causes the soil to repel water.

Different soil texture can also affect the severity of mudslides, Peterson said. As for the January 2018 incident, however, Peterson added that the upper layer of soil got so saturated [by the rain] that it became like Jell-O and just flowed downhill.

Where do they occur?

Mudslides typically occur in areas with steep hillsides, gullies and other narrow channels that make it easy for rain, mud and debris to flow through -- much like the terrain in Southern California, Peterson said. These gullies and other passageways form over millions of years.

In the West, the rains always come in the winter, flow downhill and create these big drainages, he said.

LIGHTNING SAFETY: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

While Peterson acknowledged the devastation that mudslides have caused, he said that the occurrence is a natural phenomena."

"Big mudslides are normal. This has happened for millions of years, he said.

Is there anything that can be done to prevent or stop mudslides?

The short answer: no.

Theres nothing to prevent the magnitude of these events, Peterson said. While dams might catch some of the sediment, he said, the structures wouldnt be of much use for a large mudslide.

Its unclear if the Thomas Fire made the mudslides worse. Peterson suspects not. But Rengers said the USGS is continuing to research the phenomena.

Basically, the really high rainfall rates are what controlled the really large response that we saw. And the damage inflicted by the debris flows is proportional to the rainfall, Rengers said in January.

What can people do to protect themselves?

Peterson cautioned those who choose to live beneath steep hillsides in Southern California.

There are many homes at the bottom of these steep drainages. But at some point mudslides will happen, he said.

He explained that when people choose to build their homes at the bottom of these steep drainages, they decide to take on the risk because they think its a low probability it [mudslides] will happen to them.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE WEATHER COVERAGE FROM FOX NEWS

Most of the stucco-style homes that are popular in California dont have basements or subfloors, meaning they have relatively little defense against the powerful mudslides.

Since many of the stucco homes are placed on top of a cement slab, the soil from the mudslide weighs more than the house. The result? The homes become like a little boat in the bathtub, he said. These are natural risks that people need to think about.

Peterson said most people would have better luck defending their home from fire than a mudslide. In 2014, debris and mud from a mudslide in Oso, Wash., covered a square mile in roughly 20 seconds, Peterson said.

Rengers cautioned people who do have homes in these areas to heed all evacuation warnings.

If they dont evacuate and are stuck, they should try contacting local authorities, he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A conservative Christian student groups lawsuit against the University of Iowa is pitting the right to religious beliefs and the institutions policies barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The 10-member group called the Business Leaders in Christ (BLinC) waged a legal challenge last December after the university suspended their activities on campus over the denial of a leadership position to a gay student.

The Christian group said anyone can become a member, but the leaders must affirm a statement of faith that rebukes homosexuality, which is within their rights according to laws guaranteeing freedom of religion.

In the lawsuit, the group says it "cannot and will not ask leaders who do not share its beliefs to lead members in prayer or to convey those beliefs."

The university prohibits any discrimination based on sexual orientation and accused the BLinC of violating the school's Human Rights Policy and the Iowa Civil Rights Act, Fox News reported last year.

The group, founded in 2015, was meeting weekly for Bible study and focused on service projects and to teach students how to continually keep Christ first in the fast-paced business world."

Since the loss of license to operate, the group is no longer able to reserve campus meeting space, attend student recruitment fairs or access funds from student activity fees.

The controversy between the Christian students and the university dates back to last February when Marcus Miller, a now-former student-member of the group, filed a complaint to the faculty after being rejected to serve as the groups vice president  because he was gay.

The group said the request was denied because Miller rejected the Christian beliefs and would not follow them, adding that all leaders in the group must affirm a statement of faith stating that they embrace, not reject, their God-given sex" and agree that marriage can be only between a man and a woman.

"Every other sexual relationship beyond this is outside of God's design and is not in keeping with God's original plan for humanity," the statement of faith says.

University spokeswoman Jeneane Beck said all groups operating on campus must ensure equal opportunity and equal access and the court "must carefully weigh the compelling interest of religious freedom on the one hand and the compelling interest of preventing discrimination on the other hand."

"Every organization to exist has to be able to select leaders who embrace its mission," the group's attorney, Eric Baxter with the nonprofit law firm Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said. "You would never ask an environmental group to have a climate denier as their leader. It's the same thing here."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Welcome to Fox News First. Not signed up yet? Click here.

Developing now, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018:

Steve Bannon to testify Tuesday before the House Intel Committee as part of its Russia investigation; Corey Lewandowski faces grilling later this week

A California couple has been arrested on the suspicion of child endangerment and torture after 12 of their children were allegedly found shackled in their home

The controversy over President Trump's alleged 's---hole countries' comment turns into a war of words between the president and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin with the possibility of a government shutdown looming

Exclusive: Syrian opposition leaders to meet with White House officials Tuesday to garner more support from the Trump administration

THE LEAD STORY: Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon will testify before the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday as part of its Russia probe, in what will be his first appearance on Capitol Hill since his fall from grace following his comments in Michael Wolff's Trump White House tell-all book ... Bannon, who stepped down as executive chairman of Breitbart News last week following a dramatic falling out with President Trump over Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, will be interviewed behind closed doors by congressional investigators. A source close to the committee told Fox News that Bannon would likely be questioned over information in Wolffs book. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski also is expected to testify this week before the House Intelligence Committee.

Fitton on Uranium One indictment: DOJ must 'aggressively' investigate Clintons and Russia

Mark Levin on Trump Probe: 'This isn't a dossier, it's 35 pages of crap'

HOUSE OF HORRORS: A Southern California couple is in custody on suspicion of torture and child endangerment after 12 of their children allegedly were found captive in the couple's home, with some of them shackled to beds ... David Turpin, 57, and Louise Turpin, 49, were each being held on $9 million bail, the Riverside County Sheriff's Office said in a statement Monday. Authorities said the investigation began after a 17-year-old girl "escaped" from the home and called 911 early Sunday to report that her 12 brothers and sisters were being held by their parents. The sheriff's office said investigators initially believed the "slightly emaciated" girl was just 10 years old when they first saw her.

IS 'DICKY DURBIN' FULL OF IT ON TRUMP?: In the face of ongoing backlash against his reported "s---hole" comments during a bipartisan meeting on immigration last week, President Trump has blasted his lead accuser in the controversy, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin ... Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting, Trump tweeted. Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military. Durbin insists Trump made the "vile and racist" comments, telling reporters over the weekend, He said these hate-filled things, and he said them repeatedly." Sources said Trump made the comments while Durbin was reading a list of temporary protected status countries. But Trump has fought back against the reports of the meeting, arguing on Jan. 12 that the language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made - a big setback for DACA!

FOX NEWS EXCLUSIVE: Leaders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are in Washington, D.C. where they will meet with White House officials Tuesday. Their goal is to increase cooperation between FSA and the Trump administration, and at the same time warn of the consequences of ceding control to Russia and Iran ... Last week they made their case to Congress. The Free Syrian Army was described to Fox News as the military wing of the Syrian opposition, and it has a small number of members who had been trained and armed by the Pentagon through the train and equip program that ended in 2015. The FSA says it successfully fought against ISIS and Iranian militias and claim to have approximately 60,000 troops. Its leaders say it has been reformed, and now employs rules of engagement similar to that of the U.S. military.

AS SEEN ON FOX NEWS

A PLEA TO CIVIL RIGHTS LEGEND JOHN LEWIS: "Don't throw hatred at the president. Come to the table and let's work together as Americans."  Bruce LeVell, member of President Trump's 2020 advisory council, on "Outnumbered Overtime," urging Rep. John Lewis on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to put aside his differences with Trump and unite the country. WATCH

STATE OF DISUNION: "People are really upset with their government. [They're] not confident their government is able to work together."  Law professor Jonathan Turley, on "The Story," criticizing four lawmakers who announced they're boycotting President Trump's state of the union address. WATCH

ACROSS THE NATION

Christian group's lawsuit against University of Iowa pits freedom of religion against gay rights.

Boeing's 'Son of Blackbird' hypersonic strike aircraft could go five times the speed of sound.

Gillibrand faces liberal backlash for cheering judge recall effort in high-profile rape case.

North American International Auto Show #NAIAS2018

Detroit auto show: New pickups from Ram, Chevy heat up big-truck competition.

Ford won't be giving one-time tax related bonuses.

Which car stock has spiked the most in 2018?

MAINSTREAM MEDIA MADNESS

Embarrassment at NBC over Megyn Kelly not traveling to the Olympics.

White House mocks CNN's Chris Cuomo for referring to Raj Shah as 'Raj whatever-his-name-is.'

Feminism reporter resigns after being accused of plagiarizing conservative Weekly Standard.

MINDING YOUR BUSINESS

Dow charging toward 26,000 in record time | U.S. oil industry set to break record

US military members receive biggest pay bump since 2010.

Tax season: Top tips for 2018.

NEW IN FOX NEWS OPINION

Starnes: Comic book convention bans Kevin Sorbo over friendship with Sean Hannity.

North Korea might be able to nuke the U.S. homeland right now.

I received the Hawaii missile alert: Here's what I told my kids when I thought I had minutes to live.

HOLLYWOOD SQUARED

Kevin Spacey accused of racism: report.

Eliza Dushku's alleged molester accused of misconduct by two more women.

Does the Aziz Ansari sexual misconduct story signal the end of the #MeToo movement?

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS?

Eyes on the sky: When and where will China's rogue space station fall to Earth?

99-year-old Vikings superfan gets free tickets to Super Bowl.

Traveler arrested at airport for wearing too many clothes.

STAY TUNED

On Fox News:

Fox & Friends, 6 a.m. ET: A "deplorable" NYU professor explains why he is suing his colleagues for defamation; author Bryan Garner offers a fascinating look inside Justice Scalia's life; White House press secretary Sarah Sanders takes on the hot topics facing the Trump administration; A grand jury indicts a Maryland executive in the Uranium One deal - attorney Victoria Toensing reacts.

The Story with Martha MacCallum, 7 p.m. ET: "12 Strong" author Doug D[Stanton tells the real-life story behind the upcoming film

Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8 p.m. ET: Rep. Martha McSally sounds off on her Senate campaign and the immigration battle between Congress and President Trump.

Hannity, 9 p.m. ET: Eric Trump and Anthony Scaramucci take on obstacles facing Trump's agenda.

Fox News @ Night, 11 p.m. ET: Rep. Dave Brat on the latest immigration talks in Congress with the threat of a government shutdown on Friday.

On Fox Business:

Mornings with Maria, 6 a.m. ET: Guests include: Dick Bove, Vertical Group research analyst and Bob Wright, former chairman and CEO of NBC Universal and co-Founder of Autism Speaks.

Varney & Company, 9 a.m. ET: Fred Smith, FedEx CEO; Kelli Ward, U.S. Senate candidate for Arizona

The Intelligence Report, 2 p.m ET: David Tafuri, former Obama foreign policy adviser.

On Fox News Radio:

The Fox News Rundown podcast: Saturday's ballistic missile false alarm had some Hawaiian residents saying their last goodbyes. Fox News' Will Carr explains how the state is searching for answers to prevent this mishap from happening again. The economy continues to pick up steam and President Trump is taking credit for the big gains since his election. Fox Business host Charles Payne discusses the record-setting year of 2017 and what this could mean for the stock market moving forward. Plus, commentary by Fox Business' Trish Regan.

Want the Fox News Rundown sent straight to your mobile device? Subscribe through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher.

The Brian Kilmeade Show, 9 a.m. ET: Allen West takes on the latest news from Afghanistan, North Korea and Iran. Author Brad Meltzer discusses his new project.

#OnThisDay

1991: The White House announces the start of Operation Desert Storm to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. (Allied forces prevailed on Feb. 28, 1991.)

1978: NASA names 35 candidates to fly on the space shuttle, including Sally K. Ride, who became America's first woman in space, and Guion S. Bluford Jr., who became America's first black astronaut in space.

1920: Prohibition begins in the United States as the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution goes into effect, one year to the day after its ratification. (It was later repealed by the 21st Amendment.)

Thank you for joining us on Fox News First! Enjoy your day! We'll see you in your inbox first thing Wednesday morning.
A Minnesota teen was fatally shot Sunday after he dared a man to shoot him following a two-vehicle crash, his friends told authorities.

Muhammed Rahim, 17, of Rochester, Minn., got into a confrontation with another driver, Alexander Weiss, 25, of Rochester, the Star Tribune reported.

Rahim was reportedly driving in a car holding three other teenagers when his car and Weiss car crashed.

Noah Dukart, one of Rahims passengers, explained the incident to KTTC.

99-YEAR-OLD VIKINGS SUPERFAN GETS FREE TICKETS TO SUPER BOWL

"My friend got out and confronted him, and the guy who we hit wanted to fight and my friend got in his face, Dukart said. Then the guy we hit pulled a gun out and my friend said, 'I dare you,' and he shot him right in the heart, and I watched him bleed out.

Riley Bongiorno, another passenger, said she attempted to put pressure on Rahims wound.

(I) tried putting pressure on it and everything and trying to make it stop it and I could just see in his eyes that he wasn't coming back, Bongiorno said.

Weiss, who has a permit for the gun, was arrested and held in Olmsted County Jail. He could face a second-degree murder charge. The suspect claimed he shot Rahim out of self-defense.

MINNESOTA VIKINGS SHOCK NEW ORLEANS SAINTS WITH FINAL-PLAY TD

There is a self-defense claim being made by [the other driver] at this time, that he was in fear and thats why he shot the victim, Capt. John Sherwin of the Rochester Police Department told Rochester Post-Bulletin.

Police were tracking down witnesses to help with their investigation, the Star Tribune reported.
The Mormon church appointed Russell M. Nelson, a 93-year-old former heart surgeon, as its new president Tuesday -- two weeks after the death of his predecessor, Thomas S. Monson.

Nelson was chosen as the religion's 17th president during a private meeting of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles leadership body in a temple, per church tradition that makes the longest-tenured member of the Quorum the new president. Nelson is now considered a "prophet, seer and revelator" by Mormons.

"If you have stepped off the path, may I advise you with all the hope in my heart to please come back," Nelson said in an address broadcast from Salt Lake City to Mormons around the world. "Whatever your concerns, whatever your challenges, there's a place for you in this, the Lord's church."

Nelson announced that his two counselors will be Dallin H. Oaks, 85, and Henry B. Eyring, 84, both members of the Quorum. Eyring was also a counselor for Monson, while this marks the first time Oaks will serve as a counselor to a church president. Oaks is the next-longest tenured member of the Quorum, making him next-in-line to become the next president.

Nelson is the second-oldest man to assume leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is based in Utah and counts nearly 16 million members worldwide. He will oversee the religious and business interests of the faith in collaboration with two top counselors and members of the Quorum, one of the faith's top governing bodies.

Nelson's record during his three decades in church leadership suggests he will make few changes as he upholds church teaching and seeks to draw new members.

Among the challenges he faces is adapting to the increasingly global nature of the church, which was founded in 1830 in the United States and now has nearly six in 10 members living in other countries.

Still, the rate of growth overall in membership has slowed in the past few decades, despite efforts to spread the faith including the lowering of the minimum age for those serving as missionaries.

Nelson takes the top position amid increased scrutiny of church teaching in the internet age, which has made more information on doctrine available. Under Monson, leaders released a series of essays explaining some controversial areas of Mormon history, including early polygamous practices and a past ban on black men in the lay clergy.

The church also faces some pressure to allow greater leadership roles for women, including those who want to be admitted to the priesthood.

Nelson also will have to navigate the issues raised by the LGBT rights movement. The church, at times, has expressed empathy and told members to be welcoming to LGBT people while also strictly defending opposition to same-sex marriage and all homosexual relationships.

Last year, Mormon leaders partially cut ties with the Boy Scouts of America, which in 2015 ended its blanket ban on participation by openly gay adults. The LDS church, which has been the biggest sponsor of troops, said the move wasn't about that decision.

Nelson fits the common profile of his generation of church leaders as someone who was successful in the private sector before leaving behind his career to help guide the faith.

Born in Salt Lake City in 1924, Nelson converted to Mormonism at the age of 16. He was a doctor by 22. He served a two-year Army medical tour of duty during the Korean War before resuming a medical career that included being director of thoracic surgery residency at the University of Utah.

Nelson learned Mandarin after church president Spencer W. Kimball challenged church leaders in 1979 to learn the language. The next year, Nelson spent a month in Jinan, China, working with doctors there as a visiting professor of surgery.

In the spring of 1984, he joined the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

The final surgery Nelson performed was the next year in China, when he operated on Chinese opera star Fang Rongxiang at the request of a doctor who knew and trusted Nelson, according to a church biography.

Nelson was scheduled to answer questions from reporters later Tuesday morning.

His past speeches offer some clue to how he will lead.

In October 2015, during a period of intense discussion about the role of women, Nelson spoke of women's unique contributions.

"My dear sisters, whatever your calling, whatever your circumstances, we need your impressions, your insights, and your inspiration," Nelson said. "Married or single, you sisters possess distinctive capabilities and special intuition you have received as gifts from God. We brethren cannot duplicate your unique influence."

That year, when the U.S. legalized same-sex marriage, Mormon leaders declared people in same-sex relationships "apostates," meaning they could be excommunicated, and banned baptism for children living with gay parents until the children reached age 18. The policy caused an uproar among gay rights activists within and outside the church. Nelson told a group of young adults in 2016 that the rules came from a revelation received by Monson and other leaders that gave "spiritual confirmation" for their stance.

Last October, in an address to the church general conference, Nelson implored members to closely read and understand the faith's keystone scripture, the Book of Mormon.

"When I think of the Book of Mormon, I think of the word power," Nelson said. "The truths of the Book of Mormon have the power to heal, comfort, restore, succor, strengthen, console, and cheer our souls."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A grief-stricken Minnesota mom is holding out little hope her 27-year-old daughter will be found alive after the girl's boyfriend, Joseph Porter, was arrested in the wake of Cristina Prodan's disappearance.

The deputies told me that they are looking for the body, but I dont know if they find it or not, Livia Prodan, of Richfield, Minn., told FOX9 Minneapolis on Monday.

Cristina Prodan lives in Edina and was reported missing there Jan. 5. Five days later her boyfriend Joseph Porter, 25, was arrested in Arkansas on a theft charge. His booking photo shows several apparent injuries to his face.

An Edina Police spokeswoman told Fox News on Tuesday that charges have been brought in connection with Prodans disappearance but declined to say what they were.

Since this is an active investigation, all were releasing at this time is that were working with multiple agencies on a missing person report that came in at 3:15 p.m. Friday, Jan. 5, spokeswoman Kaylin Eidsness said.

She said the charges had been submitted to prosecutors and could be filed this week.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Monday that Edina police anticipate charging Porter, perhaps as early as Tuesday. He was arrested Jan. 10 in Jacksonville, Ark., and was being held without bail at the request of Edina police and U.S. Marshals, according to the paper, which did not identify Porter by name.

Prodan invited Porter to move in with her after they met on Facebook in October, FOX9 reported.

In early December, Porter allegedly became abusive and was the subject of a court order barring him from having contact with Prodan, the station reported.

Records show on Dec. 28, Porter pleaded guilty to violating the order and was sentenced to time served.

Soon after that, Prodan reportedly took him back only to be reported missing days later.

Prodans mother told FOX9 her daughter loved people and had a nice personality. She said she also told her daughter Porter was just using her.

She felt in love with him -- she wanted to get married," the mother said. "I told her, 'He doesnt love you, he just came to you to steal from you -- he's homeless, he doesnt work.'"

She accused Porter of killing her daughter, according to the station.

Porters rap sheet includes arrests in the past few years for battery, burglary and property damage in Arkansas, where he also lived, FOX9 reported.

WCCO-TV reported last week that in one case a girlfriend said in court papers that Porter beat her unconsciousand killed her dog violently.

The Star Tribune also reported that Porter was the subject of a no-contact order involving another woman in Hennepin County in 2014. He was sentenced in that case to probation and ordered to undergo anger management treatment.
More than three months later, countless questions remain as to the motive of Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock. To get more answers, petitioners from several media organizations tried Tuesday to have State District Court Judge Elissa Cadish decide to unseal Las Vegas Metropolitan Police search warrants.

The attorney for the police, Nicholas Crosby, when arguing on the merits of the case, noted that potential charges against other people could be in the works. These new developments underscored his justification that the matter is still an ongoing investigation.

Crosby said that no new charges are imminent, but he highlighted that charges of individuals could come in the future, and therefore the documents should remained sealed.

Cadish decided not to release the files -- at least not right away -- giving Las Vegas police one week to further explain the need for ongoing secrecy in the matter. Cadish said she would read what's requested to be unsealed.

Crosby's revelation came as a surprise to most in the courtroom. It was the newest information in regards to the investigation that the public seems to have garnered unwittingly by Crosby when explaining to have the warrants remained sealed. Crosby did not say who would face charges.

Crosby, paradoxically, posited that he cannot argue the facts of the case without compromising what the police are trying to protect. He suggested having an in-camera hearing, meaning one in private.

Maggie McLetchie, attorney for the Las Vegas Review Journal, argued on First Amendment grounds that the public has a right to know what the search warrants contain. She argued that police could say their investigation is ongoing forever to delay access. Since the case is not a criminal matter, acknowledging that the suspect Paddock is deceased, McLetchie urged for transparency.

Just because Mr. Paddock shot himself doesnt mean the public doesnt have a right to know whats in the documents, McLetchie said.

Last Friday, 315 pages of federal search warrants were released to the public showing agents sought digital communications and social media accounts of Paddocks girlfriend, Marilou Danley.

Stephen Paddock opened fire from a Mandalay Bay hotel room and killed 58 people below attending a country music festival on October 1. Officials still have not determined a motive for the worst mass shooting in modern American history.
A California couple accused of shackling many of their 13 children to their beds had such a large family because God called on them, according to the children's grandparents, the insight coming as more details emerged Tuesday of what occurred inside the house of horrors that's left a community on edge.

David Turpin, 57, and Louise Turpin, 49, were still being held Tuesday on suspicion of torture and child endangerment after 13 of their kids allegedly were found captive in the couple's home in Perris, with "several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings," police said.

James and Betty Turpin, David's parents and the children's grandparents, also told ABC News the Turpin children were given very strict homeschooling and were forced to memorize long passages in the Bible, with a few trying to memorize the entire religious text outright.

James and Betty also told ABC News that, despite David and Louise being in the Pentecostal faith, they did not have a church in the area and knew of no friends of the couple. When they visited the family in Perris around four or five years ago, they remembered the children looking thin, but believed the kids appeared to be part of a happy family.

Police were notified of the home after a 17-year-old girl jumped out of a window there on Sunday and called 911.

Riverside County Sheriffs Department Capt. Greg Fellows said Louise Turpin was surprised when officers first encountered her at the home.

You never saw a bike in the front yard... You never saw a skateboard... A scooter... You never saw that."  Neighbor Kimberly Milligan

It seemed the mother was perplexed as to why we were at that residence, he told reporters Tuesday, adding that police had no history of visiting the home.

He also hailed "the courage of the young girl who escaped from that residence to bring attention so they could get the help that they needed."

Corona Regional Medical Center CEO Mark Uffer said the facility is treating seven of the children.

Its hard to think of them as adults when you first see them because they are small," Uffer said, but noted that they were being "friendly" and "cooperative".

The children ranged in age from 2 to 29 and appeared on the verge of starvation when they were rescued by police Sunday. Both Turpins are being held on $9 million bail and are scheduled to appear in court Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

The couple apparently ran a private K-12 institution out of their home called Sandcastle Day School that opened in 2011, with David Turpin listed as the principal, according to the Los Angeles Times, citing public records. In the 2016-17 school year it had an enrollment of six with one student in each of the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, 10th and 12th grades.

Private schools, they dont have to get any approvals from the local school district, Candace Reines, the Perris Union High School District deputy superintendent for business services, told The Press-Enterprise.

The newspaper said the family bought the four-bedroom, three-bathroom, 2,388-square-foot home in 2014  a year after it was built  for $351,000, according to county property records. They arrived in the Golden State in 2009, the newspaper added, citing a comment made on a family photo posted online.

Prior to making the move, the Turpins lived in Texas. They ran into financial struggles in recent years, declaring bankruptcy twice, according to the Los Angeles Times, which looked at their public records.

Ivan Trahan, who represented the couple in their 2011 filing, was quoted by the Times as saying the Turpins seemed like very nice people who spoke highly of their children.

They seemed like very normal people who fell into financial problems, Trahan added.

He said David worked as an engineer with Northrop Grumman, and a defense contractor confirmed to the newspaper that he was with the company until 2010.

The grandparents told ABC News that David, a computer engineer with a degree from Virginia Tech, also had a stint working with General Dynamics in Texas.

Amid the move and apparent financial troubles, the couple had three marriage renewal ceremonies at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas, Nev., in 2011, 2013 and 2015, The Press-Enterprise reported.

A Facebook page purportedly belonging to the couple shows numerous pictures of the couple, family and an Elvis Presley impersonator.

In a 2011 YouTube video of one of the ceremonies, David, being led by the Elvis impersonator, places a ring on Louises finger.

I offer you this ring as a symbol of my love, baby baby David Turpin says, before dancing with Louise in a rendition of the classic Elvis ballad Cant Help Falling in Love.

As of Tuesday morning, the video was steadily racking up views  and criticism in the comments section.

Surely one of the most awkward videos I've ever seen in my entire life... So f----n creepy... said one commenter.

The Facebook page also contains purported photos of Louise Turpin dressed as Snow White and holding an infant, and others of the family visiting Disneyland.

Thanks and next in 9 months we will have a new little one to add! a profile with the name David-Louise Turpin excitedly wrote in 2010 under an image of the family.

Neighbors in Perris say they still cant believe the alleged atrocities happened inside the seemingly ordinary home.

Every time I walk past, their home is desolate, Ricardo Ross told FOX11. It just looks scary.

Kimberly Milligan, who lives across the street from the Turpins, said the family rarely gave off the impression they had children in the two-and-a-half years she has lived in the neighborhood.

You never saw a bike in the front yard... You never saw a skateboard... A scooter... You never saw that, Milligan told the station. These children that we saw who I believe were the ones in their 20s... Social, mentally, emotionally... They are not in their 20s."

A woman who identified herself to the Daily Mail as Louise's sister said she hadnt seen her relative in 19 years, and never got an invite to do so.

Something didn't seem right about her parenting but never would I have expected it to be like this, Elizabeth Jane Flores, 41, from Cleveland, Tenn., told the website. They wouldn't let anyone visit and we didn't know their address We would talk on the phone from time to time, but every time I would ask to talk to her kids, she wouldn't let me.

Fox News' Benjamin Brown contributed to this report.
A suspect who had just tried to rob a credit union across the street from the high school in Vermont's capital city was shot and killed Tuesday by police officers on the school grounds, city and state police said.

In video of the shooting posted by local television station WCAX, the suspect can be seen standing at the edge of the athletic fields several hundred yards away from the school building before he falls to the ground. Multiple shots can be heard.

Before he was shot, the suspect can be seen holding a handgun in his right hand, but it was pointed at the ground. After the shooting the suspect can be seen moving on the ground as police and rescue personnel tend to him.

Montpelier Police Chief Anthony Facos said later at a City Hall news conference attended by the commander of the Vermont State Police and the city school superintendent that the suspect was deceased.

No officers were injured.

"We are treating this as an officer-involved shooting," said Vermont State Police Col. Matthew Birmingham.

Officials provided no additional details of the shooting. It was being investigated by the state police major crimes unit.

Credit Union spokeswoman Rachel Feldman told the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus it was the first robbery in the history of the institution. The suspect fled with an undisclosed amount of cash.

Cash was left on the floor of the credit union, which was closed pending the police investigation.

At least four bullet casings were seen behind a snowbank about 250 feet (76 meters) from where the suspect was shot.

Montpelier High School and the nearby state Department of Labor were placed on lockdown following the incident, which was reported just after 9:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Superintendent Brian Ricca said the high school was locked down at around 9:45 a.m. The students were moved into the auditorium. Other city schools were not affected.
When Idaho homeowner Brittany Bush and her husband heard a loud noise in the early hours of January 9, they thought someone was trying to break into their house. When they found nothing amiss and went back to bed.

Hours later, a trip to the garage of their Idaho Falls home uncovered the reason behind the early morning alarm.

They said dont be alarmed if there is a body down there."  Brittany Bush

As I was pushing the garage door open, my right foot was stepping into the garage and just kept going down, Brittany Bush told EastIdahoNews.com. I was holding onto the garage door and looked down and just started screaming. Im like, Our whole garage is sunk down!'

However, it was what they found in the giant sinkhole that shocked them more than the sinkhole itself. Under the rubble of their own things, the Bushes uncovered a secret room with shelving units that held childrens toys, a womans handbag, hair curlers and a letter.

[The room] doesnt appear on any city or county records, Brittany Bush said.

After a call to their insurance provider, an engineer came to inspect the damage.

Brittany Bush said the engineer found the cement of the garage floor was only two inches thick and was surprised it had not caved in sooner. He said it was not a bomb shelter and that there was a possibility of a second hidden room in the house.

Our home was built in the 50s and it was built as a basement home, she told the newspaper. Then someone came in the 70s and remodeled it and added the second story.

She added: [The engineer] says this looks sketchy and is wondering what the backstory is.

The homeowners said the secret room does not appear in any city or county records.

The Bushes said they are working on cleaning up the mess and hope they dont find something sinister.

They said dont be alarmed if there is a body down there, Brittany Bush said. We hope theres not but if there is stop what youre doing and call the police.
A Florida teen told police he was only joking when he posted a photo of a BB gun on social media in what appeared to be a threat to students at his high school.

Port St. Lucie police tell news outlets the 14-year-old Treasure Coast High School student posted the photo on Snapchat along with a caption that read: "I dare anyone to come to school Tuesday."

The Palm Beach Post reports that police learned of the threat late Sunday and met with the teen and his parents. The teen told police it was a joke. Police located the BB gun in the photo.

No charges have been filed.
The University of New Hampshire has been criticized for an upcoming event called, Unpacking Whiteness, that will help its faculty examine whiteness and what white people can do about racism, Campus Reform reported.

The event is scheduled for Jan. 17 and is described as a training workshop. The news site reported that a flyer for the event asks, Do you sometimes feel uncomfortable in multiracial groups?

Racism is not just about individual acts of meanness, the flyer read. It also includes those invisible systems that confer advantages on those people considered white while disadvantaging people of color. These invisible systems have concrete results on the social, economic, and political health of our communities and nation.

Organizers of the event told the website that the event is voluntary and offered to the universitys faculty and staff.

There have been similar events held in Manchester, The Union Leader reported. One event was held on Monday by New Hampshire Listens, which is an initiative by the universitys school of public policy.

The initiative asks, How do I unintentionally benefit from racism? and What does it mean to be 'white' today?

I believe the workshops offered in honor of Dr. King are, at best, a terribly misguided attempt to promote diversity and inclusion and, at worst, an insult to the city and citizens of Manchester, Rich Girard, a school board member, told the paper. Either way, there is reason to be manifestly displeased, even disgusted by them.

The citys mayor, Joyce Craig, took part in Mondays event.

Even though we all come from different backgrounds and varying life experiences, we are all united in our desire to make our city a better place for everyone, she said.
A fuller readout of President Donald Trump's health following his first medical check-up is expected later Tuesday.

Trump's White House physician - Navy doctor Ronny Jackson - declared Trump to be in "excellent health" following last Friday's exam at the Walter Reed military hospital in Maryland.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Jackson will attend her briefing Tuesday to provide a more complete readout on Trump's physical health.

Not expected are any conclusions about Trump's mental acuity. Questions about Trump's mental fitness have been raised following comments attributed to some of his close advisers in a new book, and his recent slurring of words on national TV.

Presidents aren't required to get a checkup, but modern presidents do so regularly and release a doctor's report on the findings.
Pope Francis flew in to Chile's capital Monday night for a visit expected to be met with protests over sexual abuse by priests and confronted by many Chileans deeply skeptical about the Roman Catholic Church.



It's the pope's first visit to the Andean nation of 17 million people since taking the reins of the church in 2013. It comes at a time when many Chileans are furious over Francis' 2015 decision to appoint a bishop close to the Rev. Fernando Karadima, who the Vatican found guilty in 2011 of abusing dozens of minors over decades.



The Rev. Juan Barros, bishop of the southern city of Osorno, has always denied he knew what Karadima was doing when he was the priest's protege, a position that many Chileans have a hard time believing.



"It's not just time for the pope to ask for forgiveness for the abuses but also to take action," said Juan Carlos Cruz, a victim of Karadima.



Cruz added that if it wasn't possible to jail bad bishops, "at the very least they can be removed from their positions."



After deplaning, Francis was greeted by President Michelle Bachelet and a band played while the two walked on a red carpet as night began to fall. The pope traveled in a black sedan to the center of the city, flanked by several cars. He then transferred to a popemobile, waving to small crowds of well-wishers who lined up along avenues.



Crowds were notably thin, particularly compared to papal visits in other Latin American countries.



"Long live the pope!" yelled some as he passed by in the pope mobile.



Others carried signs criticizing the pope or extolling him to act.



"Stop the abuse, Francis!" read one sign. "You can so you must!"



Over the next three days, Francis is scheduled to celebrate Mass in Santiago, the southern city of Temuco and the northern city of Iquique. On Thursday, the pope will go to Peru for a three-day visit.



Francis' trip was aimed at highlighting the plight of immigrants and indigenous peoples and underscoring the need to preserve the Amazon rain forest. However, sexual abuse by priests has taken front and center in the weeks before his arrival.



Hours before Francis landed, activists on issues related to sex abuse by priests called for sanctions against both abusers and anyone who helped cover up their actions.



About 200 people attended the first of several activities aimed at making the sex abuse scandal a central topic of Francis' time in the country.



The majority of Chileans continue to declare themselves Roman Catholics, but the church has lost the influence and moral authority it once enjoyed thanks to the scandals, secularization and an out-of-touch clerical caste.



"I used to be a strong believer and churchgoer," said Blanca Carvucho, a 57-year-old secretary in Santiago. "All the contradictions have pushed me away."



To be sure, many eagerly awaited a chance to see the pope and celebrate their faith.



Moises Lopez, a 35-year-old musician, took a bus from northern Chile to Santiago in hopes of seeing the pontiff.



"I consider myself a pilgrim," Lopez said. "I could have stayed comfortably at home and watched the pope on television, but I prefer to make an effort to see him in person once in my life."

The pope will try to inject new energy into the church during his visit, which gets underway in earnest Tuesday with a series of protocol visits for church and state.



He also plans sessions with migrants, members of Chile's Mapuche indigenous group and victims of the 1973-1990 military dictatorship. It remains to be seen if he will meet with sex abuse survivors. A meeting wasn't on the agenda, but such encounters never are.



Chile's church earned wide respect during the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet because it spoke out against the military's human rights abuses, but it began a downward spiral in 2010 when victims of a charismatic, politically connected priest came forward with allegations that he had kissed and fondled them.



Local church leaders had ignored the complaints against Karadima for years, but they were forced to open an official investigation after the victims went public and Chilean prosecutors started investigating. The Vatican in 2011 sentenced Karadima to a lifetime of "penance and prayer" for his crimes, but the church leadership hasn't won back Chileans' trust for having covered up Karadima's crimes for so long.



"The Karadima case created a ferocious wound," said Chile's ambassador to the Holy See, Mariano Fernandez Amunategui. He and others inside the Vatican speak openly of a Chilean church "in crisis" as a result, a remarkable admission of the scandal's toll on a church that wielded such political clout that it helped stave off laws legalizing divorce and abortion until recently.



Chileans' disenchantment has even affected their views of the pope himself. A recent survey by Latinobarometro, a respected regional polling firm, found that Chile had a lower esteem for history's first Latin American pope than 18 other Central and South American countries. Even among Chilean Catholics, only 42 percent approve of the job Francis is doing, compared to a regional average of 68 percent.



"The serious error of the Catholic Church in the Karadima case wasn't that the case existed, which the church couldn't avoid because it did happen, but rather the way in which the church reacted," said Latinobarometro's Marta Lagos.



Last week, The Associated Press reported that Francis had told Chile's bishops that the Vatican was so concerned about the Karadima fallout that it had planned to ask Barros and two other Karadima-trained bishops to resign and take a year sabbatical. But the plan fell through, and Francis went through with the appointment of Barros to Osorno, even criticizing parishioners against the decision.



"The people of Osorno suffer for stupidity," said Francis in 2015.


Leaders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are in Washington, D.C. where they will meet with White House officials Tuesday. Their goal is to increase cooperation between FSA and the Trump administration, and at the same time warn of the consequences of ceding control to Russia and Iran.

Last week they made their case to Congress.

The Free Syrian Army was described to Fox News as the military wing of the Syrian opposition, and it has a small number of members who had been trained and armed by the Pentagon through the train and equip program that ended in 2015. The FSA says it successfully fought against ISIS and Iranian militias. They claim to have approximately 60,000 troops. Its leaders say it has been reformed, and now employs rules of engagement similar to that of the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, their leaders warn of an oncoming catastrophe in Idlib, one of the last major strongholds of the opposition in Syria. They say they are facing a three-pronged attack from Russia, Iran and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Meanwhile the Russians, Iranians and Turks are set to launch another round of talks at the end of the month. But members of the FSA delegation have warned the Trump administration not to trust the Russians on Syria.

The Russians keep lying. They never actually do what they promise in negotiations, said Osama Abu Zaid, who was a senior negotiator with Russia during the fall of Aleppo and the Astana talks.

Abu Zaid added, The evidence is clear that Russia will not allow us democracy or independence. Russia is fighting with all its might to preserve the brutal security apparatus it has built for the Assad regime. This is our main challenge now: to rebuild the security services into institutions that are led by professionals working to protect Syrians and their democratic freedoms.

The Russians fired back earlier Monday in Moscow: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the U.S. of not wanting to maintain Syrias territorial integrity.

Members of the FSA delegation are pushing for more help from the Trump administration. We aspire to such cooperation because we cannot trust Russia, which provides unlimited air support, all types of military support, and political support in international forums to the regime, Saad Fahd Al-Shweish, also a part of the FSA delegation who was the former head of the Raqqa Provincial Council, told Fox News. He added, We cannot accept Russia as an ally or partner while this support continues.

Since the uprising began against the Assad regime in 2011, estimates of the number of Syrians killed range from 400,000 to nearly half a million.

Yasir Al-Haji heads the Foreign Relations office of the Syrian Interim Government. He said the main purpose of their current trip is to, Alert the administration of the Russian-Iranian threat to Syrians and the future of Syrians. He warned, Iran in particular seeks to control Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, and carve a land bridge from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Iran wants to become a big power, possibly with nuclear weapons as well, which will make it even harder to confront them.

Khalid Aba, another crucial member of the delegation, is also the political chief of the Levant Front, also known as Jabhat al-Shamiyah. He said his group was CIA-vetted and that they spearheaded rebel fighting against ISIS in Aleppo.

He said, Russia sees in Syria a chance to expand its global influence at the expense of the U.S. It wants to acquire a Mediterranean port, control the oil wells, preserve its Assadist proxy, and use Syrias key geopolitical location as a means of influence in the Middle East. All this will give Russia further leverage in future negotiations with the U.S. on other issues. Therefore, while Russia uses the regime to justify its presence in Syria, Russia is in fact an occupier.

The FSA is not alone in their concerns: David Adesnik, a Syria analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy (FDD), a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy, told Fox News that 2017 was a very good year in Syria for the likes of Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Assad, but 2018 could provide an opening for the Trump administration to act.

The way to start turning this around is to help the local partners who worked with us to defeat ISIS to take the next step and consolidate their hold of the territory they liberated in northeastern Syria, Adesnik said. Those areas have important oil and gas assets, which Assad wants to control. If our partners hold them, it would be the most important card in our hand at the negotiating table.

Another FSA leader attending the talks is Mustafa Sejari. He is the founder of the Motassem Brigade, which he says was supported by the Pentagon. Sejaris brigade is credited with leading the charge against ISIS in Northern Syria. Sejari told Fox News that he wont give up the fight, because it is impossible to return to the pre-war days. History teaches us that dictators cannot succeed in suppressing the popular will. The Syrian people have already decided to fight for their freedoms, and there is no going back.
An Afghan official says a mortar attack in northern Faryab province has killed five people.

Karim Yuresh, the provincial police chief's spokesman, says the attack took place during the weekly bazaar in Khwaja Sabz Push district, which was hit by three mortar shells on Tuesday morning.

He says 45 people, including women and children, were also wounded in the attack.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks but Yuresh blamed the Taliban.

In Kabul, meanwhile, Nasart Rahimi deputy spokesman for the Interior Ministry, says security forces arrested three suspects following a rocket attack late Monday night on Wazir Akbar Khan, a key central neighborhood in the Afghan capital that houses many diplomatic missions, news agencies and non-governmental groups.

Rahimi says no casualties were reported.
A fathers hunch in hiring a helicopter to search for his missing son may have saved the teen's life when the chopper spied the 17-year-old's wrecked car on the side of the road.

Tony Lethbridge, of New South Wales, Australia, said he feared the worst when his son, Samuel, did not return home Sunday morning after a Saturday night out with friends in the nearby city of Newcastle.

He reported his son as a missing person to police and then contacted a helicopter service to help him in the search, Sky News reported.

When I saw the police, they thought hed run away. I said thats not Samuel. When he doesnt show up or phone, somethings seriously wrong, Lethbridge told the Associated Press.

He added: "I understand that they've got a lot to do and they hear this every day, but I took matters into my own hands and was thinking all night that tomorrow morning, I'm just going to get a helicopter and go looking for him because we're running out of time  it's been long enough."

The search paid off. Samuels car was spotted among the trees off the road about 12 miles from the family's home in Lake Macquarie.

The teenager was cut out from the wreck some 30 hours after the crash. He suffered multiple fractures and remains in serious condition, officials said.

[Hes] very lucky to be alive, said Jeff Atkins, inspector with the New South Wales Ambulance, according to Sky News.

Lethbridge got in touch with Lee Mitchell, pilot and part-owner of Skyline Aviation Group at Lake Macquarie, for help.

He came in looking anxious and somewhat fatigued and said he needed a helicopter bad, Mitchell told reporters. He just said: 'I've got [$797] on me, will that be enough?' and we said: 'Yes, it would.

Mitchell said they usually charged a rate of $956 per hour, but the company gave Lethbridge a discount after he explained his plight.

Samuels uncle Michael Lethbridge joined Mitchell on board the helicopter for the search. The car was spotted within 15 minutes of taking off.

"It was fairly easy to spot from the air. It would've been near impossible to see from the road because it was well below the road level," Mitchell said.

The teens uncle was the first to reach the car. He said he was terrified of what he would find and feared the worst.

"I really didn't want to go. I was scared of what I'd find. As I got closer I seen Sam's head move," Michael Lethbridge said. "I went from being terrified to ecstatic in a couple of seconds."

Mitchell said everyone was overwhelmed by the great outcome.

Weve done a lot of search and rescue stuff in previous years and they dont always turn out so favorably, he said.

While Australians rarely pay for search and rescue operations, Tony Lethbridge, who works in a mail sorting room of the national postal service, has no complaints.

"It's priceless. If it's [$797] I've got to pay to get his life, I'm OK with that," the father said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
At least two bodies were pulled from the rubble of a Belgium house explosion Tuesday, police said.

The blast in the northern port town of Antwerp collapsed one house and damaged two adjacent homes late Monday, according to police.

Authorities quickly stated the explosion was not terror related.

Antwerp police said at least 14 people were injured in the blast including five seriously hurt and one person in critical condition. Police said eight others suffered minor injuries.

Rescue workers were still going through the debris early Tuesday, although they had no indication that there were more victims.

Investigations into the cause of the blast would only start after the search was completed, authorities said. Local media reported the blast may have been caused by a gas rupture.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Two countries, two erroneous alerts. A pair of islands long believed to be in the crosshairs of the rogue North Korean regime were plunged into panic when residents got warnings a missile was incoming.

Although the warnings, on Saturday in Hawaii and in Japan several days later, were mistakes, they underscore the jitters caused by Pyongyang's constant saber-rattling and the Trump administration's rhetoric, say North Korean experts.

"Its not just North Korea's threats -- which they have been making periodically for years -- that's contributing to the general anxiety," said Joel Wit, a former U.S. State Department official and senior fellow at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins SAIS.

"Everyones rhetoric is making the situation worse and previous administrations have tried not to inflame the situation."  Joel Wit, former U.S. State Department official

"The tension has only been ratcheted up by President Trumps responses," Wit told Fox News. "Everyones rhetoric is making the situation worse and previous administrations have tried not to inflame the situation."

Wit noted North Korea's testing in November of what its state-controlled media described as the "most powerful ICBM" carrying a "super-large heavy warhead" to unprecedented heights -- capable of reaching the "whole" U.S. mainland. He also cited a recent New York Times report about the U.S. military conducting exercises that could be in preparation for possible conflict with the North Koreans.

"It's all of the above," Wit said when speaking about the public's fear of a nuclear missile strike by Pyongyang.

Japan's public broadcaster sent an alert Tuesday warning people of a North Korean missile strike and urging them to seek immediate shelter. Minutes later, NHK television issued a correction and apologized for the mistake, claiming the error was made by a staff member operating the alert system for online news.

The false alarm came just days after Hawaii's Emergency Management Agency sent an erroneous warning of a North Korean missile attack to mobile phones throughout the state. The alert -- which was issued Saturday morning and not corrected for 38 minutes -- stirred panic across Hawaii as people frantically tried to contact their loved ones.

Officials later said the mistake was a result of human error -- that a staffer selected "live alert" rather than "test alert" during a training practice.

Though mistakes, the alerts reinforced fears that are real -- ones not seen since the Cold War.

"We are at greater risk of nuclear catastrophe now than we were during the Cold War," former secretary of defense William J. Perry said in a tweet days before the false alarm in Hawaii.

Wit and others, meanwhile, stressed the need for the U.S. to "tone down" its rhetoric in response to provocative moves by Kim Jong Un. In his New Year address, the North Korea dictator warned he has a "nuclear button" on his table which then prompted Trump to announce that his was "bigger and more powerful."

"Part of what the North Koreans are looking for is the tension," Wit said.

"We shouldnt feed their wanting attention by reacting in strong ways," he said. "This administration should not be escalating the rhetoric and should really project a message that is calm and strong and reassuring."
Japans largest broadcasting service alerted citizens early Tuesday to the launch of a North Korean missile allegedly bound for the country -- but no launch occurred and the message was sent in error, the second such blunder in four days for a region on edge.

NHK News sent the alert to users on the broadcaster's website and to people who downloaded the NHK app asking citizens to take cover and evacuate right away, USA Today reported.

The alert stated: North Korea appears to have fired a missile.

The warning was sent out around 6:55 p.m. in Japan. However, the government never released any news regarding a Hermit Kingdom missile launch.

A corrected version of the warning was sent out minutes later: "Patterns of North Korean missile launch is erroneous."

It was not immediately clear why the alert was sent out and what caused the mistake. A spokesman with the broadcasting agency told Reuters an investigation was ongoing.

In November, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile which landed in Japanese waters. Kim Jong Un's regime has threatened numerous times to launch a missile at Japan or the United States.

The false alarm Tuesday followed another alert mistake from Hawaii.

On Saturday, Hawaiis Emergency Management Agency mistakenly sent out an alert stating: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

For some 40 minutes, Hawaiian citizens and visitors across the islands panicked and sought shelter until a correction reached them. The agency tweeted a correction 10 minutes after the initial alert but the revised message didn't reach cellphones until about 40 minutes later.

Hawaiian officials apologized repeatedly and said the alert was sent when someone hit the wrong button during a shift change. They vowed to ensure it would never happen again.

"We made a mistake," said Hawaii Emergency Management Agency Administrator Vern Miyagi.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Police in Jordan say they've shut down a large factory making an illegal amphetamine-based drug said to be popular in the Middle East, including among Syrian militants.

Authorities seized enough material to make more than 100 million pills.

The official news agency Petra described the raid as a first for not only disrupting trafficking of pills, but also their production in the kingdom.

On Tuesday, the confiscated drugs and chemicals were on display at the anti-narcotics department in Jordan's capital, Amman. Rows of plastic-wrapped cardboard boxes and bins filled with the drug-making materials were stacked floor to ceiling.

Police say a factory purportedly making cleaning materials in an industrial area of Amman had served as a front for manufacturing the pills. They say nine people were arrested.
Kim Jong Uns rumored ex-girlfriend and the leader of the regimes only all-girl music group appeared at the meeting between the North and the South on Monday  one of the few images of Hyon Song Wol in public after years of speculation she was executed by the despots firing squad.

Hyon, the leader of the Moranbong Band, joined the four-member delegation Monday as part of the the talks to bring a 140-member art troupe to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

But before her unexpected appearance Monday, Hyon, said to be in her 40s, was reportedly Kims ex-lover. The former couple met in the early 2000s and dated before Kims father and former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il told him to end the relationship for unspecified reasons, Chosun Ilbo reported.

Hyon reportedly married a North Korean soldier while Kim married Ri Sol Ju. There were rumors Kim and Hyon continued to have an affair over the years.

The despot later hand-selected her in 2012 to be part of his beloved girl band. But a year later, reports surfaced that Hyon and a dozen other North Korean performers were executed by Kims firing squad for making and distributing pornographic videotapes, according to Chosun Ilbo.

The execution reports turned out to be false. In 2015, Hyon appeared in public in Beijing when the Moranbong Band was sent on a six-day friendship tour. The ex-girlfriend greeted reporters and grinned when asked about rumors of her death.

"Where do you come from?" she replied to a reporter, according to Yonhap.

Hyon also wields some political power within the regime. She was promoted last year to the Central Committee of the Workers Party, the Korea Herald reported. She is also a colonel in the Korean Peoples Army of the North.

Hyons appearance fueled rumors that North Koreas only girl group  known for their western-style outfit, North Korean propaganda and odes to Kim  will also be attending the Olympic Games. One of the ensembles hits include a cover version of the Rocky theme song, Yonhap reported.
The Omaha couple who launched 11 honor flights for Nebraska veterans will make it an even dozen  announcing plans Monday to take women who served in war zones on a free, daylong trip to Washington next fall.

I thought we were done, Bill Williams said. I know Ive been saying that. But Ive been thinking about this one for a while.

After guiding 3,400 Nebraskans around the nations war monuments and memorials, Williams wont make this trip. The all-female passengers will be accompanied by an all-female group of guardians, and flown by an all-female flight crew, he said.

He and his wife, Evonne, who run Patriotic Productions, have set a tentative date of Sept. 24. The flight would depart from and return to Omaha, and be open to any female Nebraska veteran who served overseas in World War II, or was deployed during the wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq or Afghanistan.

The tricky part is they have to have served in-country, he said, and not stateside.

Another tricky part will be finding veterans from the early wars. He spoke to a World War II veteran who took the second honor flight, in 2008, but shes 94 now and doesnt think she can travel again.

And when he and Evonne took more than 650 Vietnam vets to Washington last year, just one was a woman, he said.

But he expects little trouble finding women who spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan: 200 were deployed by the Nebraska National Guard, he said.

Those women were in severe danger, driving around the roads with IEDs, he said.

The plane he chartered can hold 135 veterans, but he would consider raising more money and reserving a second plane if hes overwhelmed by demand. And thats another tricky point.

The September trip  including the chartered jet, bus transportation, meals and other expenses  will cost about $175,000, he said.

But when he was organizing last years four-plane flight for Vietnam vets, he told his big donors that was his last trip  and assured them that was his last time asking them for money.

All of those people will not be asked for this one, he said. To make it happen, it has to be new donors.

The upcoming trip would follow the routines of past flights, starting with a sendoff dinner the night before at an Omaha-area hotel, an early morning bus ride to the airport and the nonstop flight to Washington, where the vets will visit memorials dedicated to those who served in Korea, Vietnam, World War II and Iwo Jima, the Lincoln Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. While at Arlington National Cemetery, the vets will also visit the Women in Military Service for America Memorial. Theyll return that night to a welcome home ceremony at the airport.

During other honor flights, Patriotic Productions also planned what it called Operation Home Front, a day of activities for the spouses  mostly wives  of veterans on the trip.

In September, the men who stay home in Nebraska that day can likely expect similar treatment, Williams said.

Theres a discussion about having Home Front for the husbands. What that would consist of, we have no idea.
Inventor Peter Madsen was formally charged with murdering Swedish journalist Kim Wall during a trip on his private submarine, a Danish prosecutor announced Tuesday, saying Madsen either cut Wall's throat or strangled her.

Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen said Tuesday the case is "very unusual and extremely gross," according to the Associated Press

Madsen, 47, is charged with murder, dismemberment and indecent handling of a corpse for the way he disposed of Wall's body. He is also charged with having sexual relations with Wall of "particularly dangerous nature."

The charges were made public by the Danish prosecution authority.

Buch-Jepsen said the killing was premeditated and prosecutors will urge that Madsen be sentenced to life in prison. Simultaneously, there is a secondary claim to put him in a secure mental facility if deemed necessary by psychiatrists for as long as he's considered sick and dangerous to others.

Madsen and Wall had gone on a trip in Madsen's submarine on Aug. 10. Wall, who was working on a story about Madsen, was last seen aboard the vessel as it left Copenhagen. The next day, Madsen  an entrepreneur who once dreamed of launching a manned space mission  was rescued from the sinking submarine without Wall.

Police believe he deliberately sank the vessel.

Madsen has offered a shifting variety of explanations for Wall's death. Initially, he told authorities he had dropped Wall off on an island several hours after their voyage began. Later, he said she had died in an accident on board and he had "buried" her at sea.

Madsen eventually admitted throwing her body parts into the sea. Her dismembered, naked torso was found on a southern Copenhagen coast in late August and her head, legs and clothes were discovered in bags at sea in October. Heavy metal objects were designed to take them to the ocean floor.

Authorities also want to destroy Madsen's submarine, the Associated Press reported.

The start of the trial has been set for March 8. A verdict is expected by April 25.

Buch-Jepsen said during a court hearing in October that investigators uncovered a hard drive from a computer Madsen owned containing video of the torture and killing of women.

"It's not just that we have the same grounds for arrest as before, but I think they are stronger than last time," Buch-Jepsen said, adding that Madsen should be detained during the hearing.

Madsen's body also had DNA traces from Wall, including scrapes on his face and neck, according to Buch-Jepsen.

Fox News Travis Fedschun and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Nigeria has released 244 people suspected to have been part of Boko Haram who officials said are repentant after undergoing rehabilitation.

The release occurred the same week that the terrorist group released video purportedly showing girls that it abducted from a school three years ago vowing to never return home.

Nigeria military officials said the group that was released, which included women and children, have been de-radicalized and can re-enter society. They have been handed over to the governor of Borno state, an area which has been targeted by Islamist violence in recent years, BBC News reported.

Nigerian army operation commander Maj. Gen. Rogers Nicholas said Tuesday that those released Monday included 118 adult males, 56 women, 19 teens and 51 children. He said they were freed after they were screened and denounced the Nigeria-based insurgency.

Their release came as part of activities marking Armed Forces Remembrance Day.

Boko Haram has killed more than 20,000 people during its eight-year insurgency. Nigeria has arrested thousands of suspected Boko Haram members in recent years. Human rights groups warn many detainees are arbitrarily arrested.

Nigeria's government established a de-radicalization program in 2016 that offers amnesty for those who repudiated the group.

The release of the suspects coincided with a new video released by Boko Haram, which purportedly showed some of the young women kidnapped by the group almost three years ago now vowing to remain with their captors and never return home.

Of the 276 girls abducted from their boarding school in Chibok in April 2014, about 100 are believed to remain in captivity.

Many of them were forced to marry their captors and several young women in the new video are shown with children.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A bright red burst of lava that spurted like a fountain and flowed down the side of the Philippines most active volcano sent more villagers scrambling for safety Tuesday, as officials warned tourists from entering the danger zone.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the lava flowed as much as 1.2 miles from the cloud-shrouded crater of Mount Mayon, while ash fell on several villages in northeastern Albay province.

This kind of eruption, it will take about weeks, so we have to sustain the operations in the evacuation centers, Albay Governor Al Francis Bichara told the ANC news channel, according to Reuters. We need to use the calamity funds.

At least 34,000 people have been displaced by Mayon's eruption since the weekend from two cities and six towns. Many of the people took shelter in schools turned into evacuation centers, Jukes Nunez, an Albay provincial disaster response officer, told the Associated Press by telephone. Others took refuge in the homes of relatives.

The Institute has recorded at least nine tremors in the area, four of which accompanied lava fountains from the volcano, according to Reuters. The activity could mean a possible hazardous eruption is coming within a few days.

Officials strongly advised people not to venture into a danger zone about 3.7 to 4.3 miles around Mayon. Those being cautioned included residents who want to check their homes, farms and animals, and tourists seeking a closer view, the Associated Press reported.

"They say it's beauty juxtaposed with danger," Office of Civil Defense regional director Claudio Yucot said.

Albay officials declared a state of calamity in the province of more than a million people to allow more rapid disbursement of disaster funds, Nunez said.

"We have witnessed lava fountaining yesterday, that's why we have additional families who evacuated due to the threat," said Romina Marasigan, spokeswoman of the government's main disaster-response agency.

Renato Solidum, who heads the volcanology institute, said the flows cascading down the volcano were not generated by an explosion from the crater with superheated lava, molten rocks and steam, but were caused by lava fragments breaking off from the lava flow and crashing on the lower slopes.

Scientists have not yet detected enough volcanic earthquakes of the type that would prompt them to raise the alert level to four on a scale of five, which would indicate an explosive eruption may be imminent, Solidum said. Emergency response officials previously said they may have to undertake forced evacuations if the alert is raised to four.

Mayon is in coconut-growing Albay province, about 210 miles southeast of Manila. With its near-perfect cone, it is popular with climbers and tourists but has erupted about 50 times in the last 500 years, sometimes violently.

In 2013, an ash eruption killed five climbers who had ventured near the summit despite warnings. Mayon's first recorded eruption was in 1616 and the most destructive, in 1814, killed 1,200 people and buried the town of Cagsawa in volcanic mud.

The Philippines lies in the so-called "Ring of Fire," a line of seismic faults surrounding the Pacific Ocean where earthquakes and volcanic activity are common.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The United Arab Emirates claimed Qatari fighter jets intercepted two of its commercial airliners in international airspace on the way to Bahrain, allegations denied by Qatar.

The claims Monday could further escalate tensions between Qatar and the four Arab nations that have been boycotting it for months, among them the UAE, home to the world's busiest international airport. They also could affect long-haul airline travel, as the region's carriers are a crucial link between the East and West.

It follows two complaints by Qatar to the United Nations about Emirati military aircraft allegedly violating its international airspace amid the diplomatic crisis. The UAE denies the allegations.

The UAE's state-run WAM news agency made the claim about the Qatari jet fighters on Monday, citing the country's General Civil Aviation Authority.

WAM quoted Saif al-Suwaidi, the director-general of the GCAA, as saying the intercepts happened at 10:30 a.m. and 11:05 a.m. He said Bahraini radar, as well as crew and passengers on board, saw the military aircraft, "which constituted a clear and explicit threat to the lives of innocent civilians."

WAM did not identify the aircraft involved, nor did it elaborate on details of the purported encounters. The GCAA did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press.

Bahrain's state-run BNA news agency, citing its own civil aviation authority, identified the two flights as Dubai-based Emirates flight No. EK837, a Boeing 777, and another flown by Abu Dhabi-based Etihad. The flight number it offered for Etihad did not correspond with any scheduled flight to Bahrain.

"Qatari military fighter jets came within two miles of the Emirates aircraft, which put the lives of passengers and crew at risk," BNA said. It offered few details about the Etihad flight.

Both airlines declined to comment when reached by the AP.

Qatar's Foreign Ministry called the UAE's allegations a "totally false claim" in a statement Monday night. "It seems that the UAE is trying to draw attention away from other incidents that have caused media crises," it said.

That appeared to reference a video released Sunday night of an exiled Qatari ruling family member, once promoted by Saudi Arabia as an alternative to the country's ruling emir, claiming he's being held against his will in the UAE, an allegation denied by Abu Dhabi.

The video of Sheikh Abdullah bin Ali Al Thani recalled the bizarre, now-reversed resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri while on a trip to Saudi Arabia, a Nov. 4 decision that was widely seen as orchestrated by Riyadh.

Emirates flight No. EK837 was scheduled to depart Dubai at 8:20 a.m. Monday, but pushed off nearly an hour late. It flew out over international waters near the northern tip of Qatar, a peninsular nation that juts into the Persian Gulf, before arriving in the island nation of Bahrain 46 minutes after takeoff. That's been the standard route of all Emirati commercial airliners since the crisis began.

FlightRadar24, a plane-tracking website, did not show any unusual routes between the UAE and Bahrain. "There appears to be no deviation from standard routing and approach patterns in today's flights," FlightRadar24 spokesman Ian Petchenik told the AP.

U.S. Air Force Central Command, which is based at the sprawling al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, did not have any reports of incidents involving commercial aircraft in the region, said Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, an Air Force spokesman. However, Pickart cautioned that U.S. forces don't routinely monitor the flights and operations of the Qatari air force.

Qatar's stock exchange dropped some 2.5 percent in trading Monday, one of its biggest jolts since the crisis began.

Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE cut off Qatar's land, sea and air routes on June 5 over its alleged support of extremists and close ties with Iran.

Qatar has long denied funding extremists. It recently restored full diplomatic relations with Iran, with which it shares a massive offshore natural gas field that makes the country and its 250,000 citizens extremely wealthy.

The crisis has hurt Qatar Airways, Doha's long-haul carrier that competes with Emirates and Etihad.

Qatar had complained to the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization about the boycotting nations cutting off its air routes, forcing the carrier to take longer flights through Iran and Turkey. Its regional feeder flights in Saudi Arabia and the UAE also have been cut off.

However, widening the Gulf dispute to include civilian aviation and airspace could hurt Emirati airlines already stung by President Donald Trump's travel bans, as well as last year's since-lifted ban on laptops in airplane cabins.

The White House said Trump spoke Monday with Qatar's ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, saying the president reiterated his support for unity among Gulf Arab nations. Trump also thanked Sheikh Tamim for Qatar's "action to counter terrorism and extremism," the White House said.

Qatar earlier accused Emirati military jets of violating its air space in December and January in two incidents, filing a complaint to the United Nations. Anwar Gargash, the Emirati minister of state for foreign affairs, wrote Friday on Twitter that Qatar's airspace complaints were "incorrect and confused," without elaborating.

Sheikh Tamim also traveled Monday to Ankara to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkish officials said Erdogan and Al Thani discussed bilateral ties and regional issues, without offering specifics. Turkey has a military base in Qatar and has supported Doha in the diplomatic dispute.

___

Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

___

Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellap . His work can be found at http://apne.ws/2galNpz .
PADDINGTON 2 (PG)

3.25 STARS

This is such a sweet, funny movie about a cute little bear and his misadventures in London that it works as well for adults as for children, maybe even better.

It certainly helps that the cast is a Whos Who of the British screen and stage, from Hugh Grant to Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent and Brendan Gleeson.

But whats most critical about the cute comedy is the sense of sweetness and decency that runs through it all, with Paddingtons core beliefs eventually affecting all, including a group of prison inmates he helps to rehabilitate.

The story is fairly slight, about the present that Paddington wants to give his adoptive mother bear and how its stolen before he can buy it for her. But each scene is so carefully delivered that the great cast cant help but impress.

The little bear thats perfectly animated into the film eventually is framed and goes to prison, which could be a tough thing for a childrens movie.

But its all handled in the same fashion of the whole movie, with the determined Paddington helping to make life better there as the family he loves tries to solve the real crime and clear his name.

Some of the scenes are childishly silly, like one where Paddington battles a bucket of soapy water as he tries to make money cleaning windows.

And some are just oh so sweet, like when the inmates rally to support the bear who helps turn prison gruel into a regular supply of delightful deserts.

Theres even a somewhat thrilling action sequence on a train at films end to send things to a satisfying ending.

All in all, this is truly a delightful little childrens movie that may have also have adults wondering one thing: How long until Paddington 3?

Rated PG for some action and mild rude humor. 104 min. Playing locally at Marquee Southpoint 9, Paragon Village 12.
Is it unworthy of a woman to wish to shine in society? I do not think so, I think all of us owe something to the world & in discharging our duty here we [may] fulfill our destiny.

These words from 17-year-old Ada Hutters journal document the concerns of a young woman in Civil War-era Lynchburg. Her diary is one of the artifacts included in the Virginia Association of Museums annual Virginias Top 10 Endangered Artifacts list for 2018.

A selection committee of Virginia collections and conservation professionals chose the diary from Historic Sandusky, which is operated by Lynchburg College, as well as a signed D-Day Order of the Day from the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford as one of 10 top items worth preserving for future generations.

The committee considers the importance of an item to state history and the historical site, the conservation needed, and whether the artifact has a compelling story associated with it, explained Jennifer Thomas, the associations executive director.

She said the association will now hold an online public voting competition to determine the top two artifacts, which will be recognized in late February. The program will award a $5,000 grant to the first place artifact and $4,000 grant to the item that receives the second-most votes from the public. This is the first year VAOM is able to provide monetary awards, Thomas said, thanks to a donation from the Blandford Rees Foundation.Representatives from Historic Sandusky and the National D-Day Memorial Foundation encouraged members of the community to vote for their artifacts to ensure conservation of items key to the areas history.

Kelly Childress, historical interpreter at Historic Sandusky, said she decided to nominate Ada Hutters 1864 diary because it is falling apart at the seams. A quick glance at the 154-year-old book reveals a detached cover and faded writing. But this isnt the only reason the artifact needs to be preserved.

We chose this piece because we wanted something that represented our site, something that had a story, she explained.

Ada Hutter was 17 when the Union Army invaded Lynchburg in 1864. Union Gen. David Hunter and his staff used Sandusky, Hutters family estate, as their headquarters while they attempted to capture the city, according to the Historic Sandusky website. The diary includes letters from before the occupation and Hutters personal reflections after the soldiers left her home.

Adas great-granddaughter donated the diary to the site.

Historic Sandusky provides visitors with an interpretation of the Civil War era and the Hutter familys daily life at Sandusky, Childress said, and the journal was the perfect way to pull together everything the site embodies.

Hutters diary is important not only because it includes descriptions about how the Civil War affected her family and the Lynchburg area, said Greg Starbuck, director of Historic Sandusky.When you read her, she is a young, teenage lady who is expressing some of the exact same concerns, fears, hopes, that a 17-year-old would today. I think when people read that and see that, even though the war seems so distant and those people seem so weird because they dress oddly, basically theyre the same as us today, he explained.

The last time an Historic Sandusky artifactthe journal of POW James Risque Hutterwas on the endangered list was in 2015.

If the diary receives a significant grant, Starbuck said, they can pull even more information from its pages to share with the public. Right now, some parts are so fragile they cannot examine the writing. The first step in preserving these delicate pages is an assessment from a conservator.

After that, Starbuck said, they may want to de-acidify the pages, they can rebind it, they can maybe clean it in a proper way.

This would be expertise over and above what Historic Sandusky currently has access to, according to Starbuck.

He and Childress said they would be grateful to have the item perfectly preserved for future generations with state-of-the-art technology.

Ive always been fascinated with the diary ever since I started working here because its human, Childress explained. She has all these thoughts, aspirations, and concerns and shes writing about life here, talking about her brother and her frustrations with her parents. You read things like that and it really connects you to the past.

A direct link to history is also the reason the D-Day Memorial Foundation hopes to conserve the D-Day Order of the Day, a document given to all soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, France on June 6, 1944. It was a pep talk from General Dwight D. Eisenhower meant to instill confidence before the invasion, said John Long, the foundations director of education.

He said when his team looked at the collection to determine which item could benefit most from a conservation grant, the Order of the Day immediately came to mind. The document was donated to the memorial by the widow of Robert Bob Slaughter, a Roanoke native who founded the D-Day Memorial and fought in the tide-turning battle.

This isnt just something that belonged to our founder, Long explained. Its something that was actually on Omaha Beach and signed by men who would give their lives a few hours after they wrote their name down.

Slaughter was 19 on D-Day, but had the wherewithal to understand the importance of the Order, Long said. While on the ship awaiting debarkation, Slaughter had 75 members of his unit sign the document. Eleven died on the beach that day, and four followed in the coming weeks.

The young soldier carried the signed Order in a plastic bag for the rest of World War II. Long said Slaughter called it his most cherished memento and would display it during educational programs.

The Order was named to the museum associations Top 10 endangered artifacts list in 2016. There was no financial or monetary award, only recognition the item submitted was deemed valuable.Currently, the Order is taped together in a glass and wood frame. If awarded a grant, Long said his team would have it assessed and taken to a conservation team. The foundations goal is to preserve the document enough to make high-quality reproductions for display at a future education center and museum.

According to Long, the Orders inclusion on the Top 10 Endangered Artifacts list honors the memory of the men who penned their names on its surface.I think its important to save this and make sure this little glimpse into history is preserved for future generations because what those guys did on June 6 deserves to be remembered. A lot of these guys never made it home. Its the last time they ever wrote their name when they signed this, Long said.

In 2014, another D-Day Memorial artifact was placed on the list, a miniature portrait of Thomas Boyle Campbell.

Other items on this years endangered list include a segregation era colored sink; an audio disk of a rare radio performance by the Stanley Brothers with the Clinch Mountain Boys; an Odd Fellows Ceremonial Collar; an electric car drivers permit for the first woman in Washington, DC; a James C. Foltz distillery still; an 18th century merchant ship, a Prince William County poll book; and a Paris Peace Conference parade flag.

Voting will take place online through Jan. 24 at vatop10artifacts.org.
Each table displayed a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. and something he said.

One read: Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Another: The time is always right to do what is right. And, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

At the tables were seated about 300 members of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others attending an annual breakfast Monday celebrating Kings birthday. Organized by the chapter, the breakfast was held at Fredericksburgs WalkerGrant Middle School.

Speakers shared many words at the gathering both honoring and attributed to the iconic civil rights leader recognized with a U.S. federal holiday every third Monday of January. This year, the holiday fell on Kings actual birthday, Jan. 15. He would have been 89 years old.

America today, for all its progress, has some distance to go before fulfilling the dream of Martin Luther King, said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, DVa., who shared remarks at the breakfast.

Warner quoted the opening lines of Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, he said. We are living in that moment.

On the worst side, the Democrat joked that he prays every day, Please God dont let that man [President Trump] tweet too much this morning! Adding, Those prayers have not been answered.

But Warner pointed out on the best side, people throughout the world are suffering less this year from poverty than they ever have in the past. And he said, There are fewer civil wars and other conflicts happening now than at any time in world history.

Warner shared two events that reflect the wisdom and vision of King.

While Warner was Virginias governor, he commissioned a civil rights memorial that now has been installed on Capitol Square in Richmond, telling the story of 16-year-old Barbara Johns, who led a walkout at her high school in Farmville to protest the poor conditions her segregated school endured compared to white schools.

Her courageous actions eventually led to Brown v. Board of Education, and the Supreme Court officially overturning racial segregation, Warner said. Barbara now has a memorial that honors her courage and determination, an example for us all.

Last Thursday, Warner said, in partnership with fellow Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, final passage of a bill was secured that officially grants federal recognition of six Virginia Indian tribes, including descendants of Pocahontas Powhatan tribe. This action gives the tribes legal standing and status when negotiating with the U.S. government.

Great things can happen if we follow the arc of moral justice, Warner said. Martin Luther Kings message of hope can uplift each of us with greater hope for the future.

Keynote speaker at the breakfast was the Rev. Dr. Aaron L. Dobynes Sr., who is serving as pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site).

A scholar with degrees in psychology, divinity and ministry, Dobynes also holds a Ph.D. in humanities with a concentration in Martin Luther King studies from the University of Cincinnati.

You can slay the dreamer, but you cant slay the dream, Dobynes said Monday. After describing the final poignant moments of Kings life, Dobynes honored those in the room who have carried Kings dream forward.

There are those in this room who have dedicated their lives to making this world a better place for all of us, he said. Though things happen every day that are so full of hatred they take your breath away, God has given us love and hope to overcome.

The chapter recognized in a special tribute Marguerite Bailey Young, who has worked for more than 60 years to improve Fredericksburg City Public Schools and the community at large.

Mayor Mary Katherine Greenlaw read a letter to Young recognizing her efforts. There are few in our community who have shown their love for humanity more than you, it said.

The service closed with a unity prayer, drawing from Thou, Dear God, by King.

Help us to work with renewed vigor for a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color, the audience said together. And above all, keep the fires of freedom burning in our hearts.




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.
A new analysis of genetic history confirms the long-held suspicion that Middle East respiratory syndrome virus, which alarmed global health leaders in 2012 when it spilled over from camels to cause an often fatal illness in people, does not spread easily between humans.

At least not yet.

In a paper published today in the journal eLife, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centers Drs. Gytis Dudas and Trevor Bedford modeled phylogenetic trees, or genetic histories, of all available MERS genome sequences  100 from camels and 174 from humans.

The genomic data confirms that the MERS virus is not at the moment spreading readily from person to person, said Bedford, an evolutionary biologist, and the papers senior author. Almost all of the cases in the Arabian Peninsula are short chains that spill over from camels, infect a few people and then die out. That had been suspected, but not quantified.

The new analysis compared evolutionary changes in the camel and human genetic sequences to show that the virus jumped from camels to humans hundreds of times since 2012, with the 2,000-plus human cases recorded since resulting mostly from repeated spillovers rather than person-to-person spread.

Andrew [co-author Andrew Rambaut, a professor at the University of Edinburghs Institute of Evolutionary Biology] had championed this idea for some time, and it had been accepted by most that it was not one introduction from camels into humans back in 2012, Bedford said. Our analysis placed it at somewhere between 300 and 800 introductions with each introduction being responsible for an average of three or four cases.
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HARRISBURG  A Dauphin County woman literally was speechless last week after winning the 102nd Pennsylvania Farm Show sticky bun contest.

Marel King of Susquehanna Township barely could speak on Friday evening after her pecan sticky buns beat 23 other entries from throughout the state. King, who has laryngitis, indicated that she was excited to win.

I thought that my sticky buns turned out well, she whispered. The secret is to find the right recipe and have a very gooey top.

King, who makes sticky buns at Christmas as gifts for family and friends, said she uses a family recipe for traditional sticky buns. King serves as the Pennsylvania director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission.

Sticky buns are popular as breakfast sweet rolls that include a yeast dough, brown sugar or cinnamon inside and a sticky top that often includes nuts. The gooey lining is at the bottom of the pan during baking, then the pan is inverted so the sticky part becomes the topping.

Entries in the contest sponsored by Good Foods of Honey Brook ranged from traditional sticky buns with and without nuts to lemon, cherry, key lime, poppy seed, apple, peanut butter and more.

Three judges evaluated the entries.

In some ways, the contest was a family affair.

Amanda Harry of Newville made chocolate delight sticky buns because I love chocolate. I used the dough from my grandmothers recipe. I think you need a good sugar-to-butter ratio in sticky buns. Her mother, Mary Miller of Strongstown, entered her traditional sticky buns.

Jim Harper of Pennsylvania Furnace made sticky buns featuring a Spam and brown sugar filling. His wife, Brenda, made pineapple upside down sticky buns with a pineapple filling.

Jordan, their 12-year-old son, made old-fashioned sticky buns.

I never made sticky buns before, he said. But Ive watched my dad make them hundreds of times.

Diana Gossard of Elliottsburg also made traditional sticky buns, using a family recipe.

I used dry yeast and real butter, she said. The secret of good sticky buns is airy dough. But this was a warm, muggy day, not a good day for dough to rise. It took 2 hours for it to rise, then I rolled them out. They got high and airy in the oven.

Renee Baum of Chambersburg also made traditional sticky buns.

People love my sticky buns, she said. I usually use pecans on mine but didnt today because I didnt know if the judges would like nuts. I use bread flour to keep them soft, King Syrup for a gooey topping and instant rapid rise yeast. This is the first Farm Show contest Ive ever entered.

Ron Glessner, a Good Food spokesman, said the Farm Show sticky bun contest is popular because everyone likes sticky buns. Im amazed that there is so much variety and creativity here.

Other winners were Frank Reinoehl of Valley View, second prize and $100; Tanya Sherry of Hegins, third prize and $50; Lorrie Rauch of New Tripoli, fourth prize and a ribbon; and Jennifer Konupka of Lancaster, fifth prize and a ribbon.

Kings prize winning sticky bun recipe:

Pecan Sticky Buns

Dough

1 teaspoon sugar

1 package active dry yeast

 cup warm water

 cup milk

 cup sugar

1 stick butter, melted

1 teaspoon salt

2 eggs, beaten

3 cups flour

Dissolve sugar and yeast in warm water in large mixing bowl. Let stand for 10 minutes.

In another bowl, combine melted butter, milk,  cup sugar and salt. Add milk mixture, eggs and half the flour. Mix well.

Add remaining flour and stir until flour is incorporated. Turn dough out onto floured surface. Knead for eight minutes. Place into large greased bowl, cover and let rise for 1 hours.

Preheat oven to 350.

Filling

 cup butter, melted

 cup cinnamon sugar

 cup chopped pecans

On floured surface, roll dough into a large rectangle 15 by 18 inches. With a pastry brush, apply melted butter to surface of dough. Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar on it, then the chopped pecans.

Roll up the dough from long edge to form a long roll. Cut this rolled dough into 18 slices.

Syrup

1 stick butter

1 pint Turkey brand table syrup from Good Food Inc.

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup chopped pecans, divided.

In small saucepan, melt the stick of butter. Add Turkey syrup, granulated sugar and brown sugar. Bring just to a boil, stirring continuously. Remove from heat.

Pour evenly into two 8 by 8-inch baking pans. Sprinkle  cup of pecans over syrup in each pan.

Arrange the 18 rolls, cut side down, into baking pans. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Cool 10 minutes, then invert sticky buns onto serving trays.
UPDATE: State Police in Carlisle say the two teens were found safe around 7 p.m. in Cumberland County without incident. They were both returned home.

Reported earlier:

State Police at Carlisle are searching for two missing teens after they said they would be hitchhiking together to Maryland.

Police said Cody James Neefe, 17, of Mount Holly Springs, and Kayla Hostler, 15, of Dillsburg, were last seen about 6 p.m. Saturday in South Middleton Township.

Police said the two currently don't have money, transportation or proper clothing for weather conditions. They are believed to be traveling together and indicated their plans to get to Maryland.

Police ask anyone with information to contact them at 717-249-2121.
Editors note: This editorial was written by the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Guest editorials in this space are intended to provide our readers with a sampling of opinion from other publications and do not necessarily represent the views of the Mid-Valley Media editorial board.
A womens rally and march titled Still We Rise are scheduled for Saturday in downtown Corvallis to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the national march and rally that brought millions of women and allies to the streets of the United States.

The rally, which will be held at 1 p.m. in Central Park, will include poet and activist Nasim Basiri, writer and professor Melissa Bird, indigenous poet and activist Luhui Whitebear, NAACP Corvallis-Albany branchs senior vice president Shelley Moon, and local band The Familiars. Other participants include Ada-Rhodes Short, Court Nicholas and the Rev. Jill McAllister. The march is scheduled to begin at 2 p.m.

The event is sponsored by the Corvallis Changemakers, Mid-Willamette NOW and the Corvallis-Albany Chapter of the NAACP.

An online fundraiser is being held at https://www.gofundme.com/womensrallycorvallis to help support the event. People interested in volunteering can contact midwillamettenow@gmail.com

Corvallis Changemakers began as a group of friends. Group members, inspired by the upsurge in activism in the community and the nation, sought to bring together fresh voices and ideas and to teach the tools to effect social, economic, and political change.

The Changemakers group recently joined forces with Mid-Willamette NOW (National Organization for Women) to become a committee of NOW that puts on programming centered on nonpartisan tools of activism.

For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/corvallischangemakers/ and https://www.facebook.com/mwillamettenow/
Measure 101 is being described by some folks as being a "new tax." That is flat-out a lie. It is neither. It is a continuation of what we now know as the Oregon Health Plan, and has been going on for years. It will help keep our economy going and growing.

It is not a tax at all  not even close. Here's how it works  the state of Oregon raises $300 million from fees provided by hospitals, clinics, and associated entities. That $300 million will be matched 7 to 1 by federal funds. Seven to 1! Over a billion dollars coming into the state.

And it will prevent medical fees and insurance increases. Why? Because hospitals are required to provide care for anyone who comes into the emergency room or hospital. Patients without insurance cause hospitals to raise our costs to cover those patients. The funding provided by Measure 101 and the over a billion dollars in funds coming will save all of us out-of-pocket money. It's a critical aid to our economy.

It's even more critical to our economy when you realize how many jobs will be lost if fewer people have medical coverage. Not just doctors and nurses, but aides, technicians, office workers ... literally 37,000 jobs are on the line if this measure fails. If you want Oregon's economy to boom, vote yes on 101. If you want Oregon's economy to tank, vote against it.

Terry Weiss

Philomath (Jan. 11)
Advocates for Measure 101 assert that all Oregon residents, insured or not, will receive medical care. The additional revenue needed to fund Measure 101 will come from assessments (or taxes, if you prefer) that allow Oregon to receive matching federal dollars for health care. Matching means Oregon would receive far more federal dollars than raised from the money we would raise locally. Without that additional funding, Oregon would not be eligible for the federal match.

Others contend that Measure 101 will take money from the schools, be hard on college students, or harm small businesses. While I advocate for better funding to our public schools, 101 does not take money away from our schools. And having taught at a community college, I remember many students  married, raising children, and holding jobswho were always close to having to drop out because of illness, child care problems, or other issues.

This tax affects insurance companies and health providers, all of which are supporting this measure. Why? When a patient shows up at the ER, the hospital provides care but is not able to recoup the cost of such care from that person. That extra cost is passed on to insured patients.

In an ideal world, we would somehow manage to back our favorite causes, but in the real world we have to decide what we can or cannot support. After living a year in Denmark, where medical care is available to all, I concluded that medical care was a right, not a privilege. Such care should be a right in this country, too.

Please vote yes on Measure 101.

Art Bervin

Philomath (Jan. 11)
Our president has stated (in somewhat indelicate language) that he prefers immigrants of a lighter skin tone that is common in certain African countries and Haiti. He would like to admit more Norwegians.

But why would any Norwegian give up comprehensive health care, government funded day care, free college education, guaranteed pensions and so on down the list of benefits, to come to the United States? What do we offer but crushing debt to access health care, college tuition, bloated military budgets, and government by billionaires. Taxes are higher in Sweden but they get something in return.
Every year that we continue polluting our atmosphere, we are adding to the enormous damage that we are just beginning to see. We cannot continue to put off the cap and invest legislation that has been introduced in Oregon as the Clean Energy Jobs bill.

I was hoping that you would point out that this legislation was first introduced in Oregon three years ago based on the successful model already in use by California. The 2017 legislative session set up four work groups for the Clean Energy Jobs bill to continue the work that had not been completed. These work groups met repeatedly in open session last fall and have presented two 60-page proposals for the legislative session. This short session can now pass this measure and give some certainty to our businesses and industries, knowing that minor changes can still be made in the 2019 session before the limitations begin to take effect.
An 85-year-old man who was injured Saturday after being struck by a pickup on Highway 20 remains in fair condition, a Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center spokesperson said.

Allan Deutsch, of Corvallis, underwent surgery at the hospital after the hit-and-run in Philomath, officials said. The crash killed 70-year-old Robert Ozretich, also of Corvallis. The men were struck while voluntarily picking up trash along the highway.

Authorities say the driver, Ricky Ray Ferguson, 54, fled the scene after the collision. Officials arrested Ferguson about four hours later.

The Benton County Sheriffs Office said that Ferguson stayed in the Philomath area for a while after the incident, and he attempted to modify the appearance of his 2004 Ford F250 pickup. Following tips from the public, police were able to locate Ferguson about 2:30 p.m. at the Blodgett Country Store.

Ferguson, of Toledo, was charged with first-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless driving, hit-and-run in an injury accident and tampering with evidence.
Remember the fun we had last year during flu season?

By the time the dust had settled, and the last tissue had hit the last waste basket (en route, we hope, to incineration), Oregon health authorities said it was the worst flu season on record in the state.

Sequels at the movies tend to be bigger than their predecessors  and, unfortunately, the same appears to be the case for this year's flu season, now fully underway. In fact, experts say this year's flu season is shaping up in Oregon as even worse than last year's record-setter.

Across the nation, the flu season already is rated as being "moderately severe"  and the word is that it could get worse.

Dr. Daniel B. Jernigan, the director of the influenza division of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The New York Times last week that the flu now is widespread across the country  no doubt getting a jump in transmission from the opportunities provided by the holiday travel season.

About 80 percent of the cases reported thus far are of the H3N2 strain. This is the same strain that hit Australia hard during its flu season, which peaks during July and August.

But here's a key difference between Australia and the United States: In Australia, the government recommends flu shots only for health care workers and people at high risk. In the United States, the government recommends a flu shot for everyone older than 6 months, so more people here likely have some immunity to H3N2, which also circulated to some extent last season in the United States.

This year's vaccine isn't a perfect match for the strains of flu active in the United States; producing the vaccine usually involves a bit of an educated guess as to which strains will be active, and the guesses some years are better than others. But the shot still remains your best defense against the flu, and it's not at all too late to get one: The flu season still has three months to go. And experts say that even in the cases in which the vaccine fails to prevent infection, it can help stop complications such as pneumonia and death.

Without putting too much of a point on this, the flu is a killer: Already, two flu-related deaths have been reported in Oregon. The CDC says the flu kills about 12,000 Americans in mild years and 56,000 people in moderately severe ones like the one we're having. Worldwide, a severe flu year can kill nearly 650,000 people.

So no wonder that doctors are insistent about people getting their flu shots.

Doctors also advise that people with the flu stay home until all their symptoms have subsided.

But we understand that this isn't always possible, so this is a good time to review how to proceed if you absolutely have to drag yourself  sneezing, shuffling, coughing and bleary-eyed  into the office.

 First, of course, remember what we've learned in previous years about coughing or sneezing into your elbow, not your hands.

 Wash your hands or use hand sanitizer after coughing or sneezing.

 Try to limit your contacts with other people. Remember how much you've complained about how most of your meetings at work aren't essential? Here's a good chance to test that theory.

 There's no need to shake hands; you won't want to be meeting new people anyway, not in your condition.

 Wipe surfaces down after you touch them.

 Consider wearing a mask to cover your nose and mouth to control the numerous respiratory droplets you'll be generating. That flu, it just keeps on giving and giving.

 Have we mentioned that you should get your flu shot? No? Well, then, you should get your flu shot. (mm)
Now that the storm system that dropped as much as an inch of patchy snow throughout the Parkland yesterday has moved off to the east, a strong blast of arctic air has brought the coldest temperatures of the year to southeast Missouri today where a high of only 14 degrees is forecast.

Add to the extremely cold temperatures, dangerous wind chill values colder than -15 are expected by this morning, the National Weather Service (NWS) has issued a Wind Chill Advisory for the entire area.

Area schools began calling off Tuesday classes at 4:30 p.m. Monday as the bitter cold was expected to refreeze wet roads, resulting in slippery and potentially hazardous driving conditions  especially on side and backroads.

With the extreme cold, the city of Farmington announced Monday that it is providing warm places for the public to stay during the day at any of its facilities  including the Farmington Public Library, 101 N. A St., which is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday; and the Farmington Civic Center, which is open from 5:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday.

According to Farmington City Administrator Greg Beavers, those needing a warm place for the night are asked to call the Farmington Police Department at 573-756-6686 in order to make arrangements to stay in the training room at the Farmington Fire Department, located at 222 E. Columbia St., in downtown Farmington.

Alan Wells, St. Francois County 911 director, also announced that all fire stations and ambulance district houses throughout the county will be available as warming centers, as needed.

When cold weather threatens, the NWS encourages the public to follow these important tips for survival:

Stay dry. Wet clothing results in much faster heat loss from your body. Wear waterproof insulated boots.

Stay covered. Wear mittens or gloves, and wear a hat. At least half of your body heat is lost if your head is not covered.

Dress layered. Trapped air between loose fitting clothing helps to insulate.

Stay informed. Have a portable NOAA weather radio nearby to keep you up-to-date with the latest forecasts and warnings. Use wind chill temperatures to guide you in dressing properly for the outdoors.

On very cold days, minimize your exposure to the outdoors if possible.

The good news is that a slow warmup begins Wednesday, and by the weekend, highs are expected to reach into the 50s, with a good chance of rain Saturday.

For the latest NWS advisories, watches and warnings, check out the Daily Journal website at www.dailyjournalonline.com.
Editor's Note: This article is being published with permission from the Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Cedric Dean had just left Sunday services in the chapel of a Louisiana prison when a killer offered him a deal.

Help me tell my story, fellow inmate Clay Waller said in the spring of 2013, and Ill pay you $10,000.

The plot for Wallers narrative would involve the murder of his estranged wife Jacque  a killing that sent him to prison and still tormented the Mississippi River town where it had occurred.

Dean, on the other hand, was a career criminal from Charlotte who says he had transformed himself into a jailhouse educator and mentor. He started a foundation aimed at-risk kids. He authored a series of books while teaching dozens of other inmates to write.

Now he and Waller found themselves on the same cell block, negotiating. Waller did most of the talking. He told Dean he already had a book contract from a New York publishing house and a $400,000 advance in the works. He even had a title in mind:

If You Take My Kids, Ill Kill You: The Confession of Missouris Most Notorious Wife Killer.

A blue bandana

When Dean was a boy, he and his best friend went to a Charlotte theater to watch the Sean Penn gang movie Colors. Within minutes of the final credits, he said, the two set off for the nearest store to buy bandanas. Deans new pretend gang color was blue.

Mean Dean and friends already had begun committing crimes, most of them drug-related. Now they escalated.

When he was 15, Dean says, an adult drug buyer pulled a knife on him during a disagreement over a sale. Dean says he drew a .38 and shot the man in the stomach. He says he was never charged.

This was the era of New Jack City, all this gangsta teenager stuff, says retired Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Detective Garry McFadden. Cedric and several other boys ... they ran the streets. They were tough guys, and they committed a lot of crime.

Around that same time, Deans formal education ended when he was thrown out of Olympic High for carrying a gun onto the school bus. He discovered his love for writing within his life of crime.

At 16, Dean was convicted of armed robbery and sent away to prison for the first time. A group of older inmates took over his schooling, Dean says. Each day he had to master five new vocabulary words or he would be beaten.

Less than a year after his release, Dean was indicted on federal drug-trafficking charges and accused of operating a crack ring off West Boulevard. The friend who bought bandanas with him gave key testimony.

After the verdict, a judge ordered Dean locked away for the balance of your natural life. That launched Deans odyssey through the federal prison system, with stays in North Carolina and 10 other states.

In 2001, with still a century of his 105-year sentence to serve, Dean says, he was sent to solitary confinement in an Atlanta prison. He picked up a copy of Sidney Sheldons crime saga Memories over Midnight that had been left in the single-occupancy enclosure. Instead of simply reading, Dean says he bored down through the books structure all the way to the punctuation marks. He saw how details fleshed out the story. By the time he finished the book, Dean says, he had taught himself how to write one of his own.

By 2013, when Dean and Waller wound up assigned to the same Louisiana cell block, Dean was almost 20 years into his drug sentence. He had also become a prodigious writer  churning out everything from regular legal filings challenging the harshness of his punishment to more than a half dozen books. He also taught writing and public speaking classes to his fellow inmates while helping dozens of them get their GEDs.

Deans creative reputation soon reached Waller. He had a story he wanted the world to hear.

River bottom grave

On June 1, 2011, Jacque Waller had a 3 p.m. meeting with her divorce attorney and her estranged husband, Clay. Afterward, the mother of 5-year-old triplets from Cape Girardeau, Mo., vanished.

Jacque Waller, 39, had hoped to start a new life with a boyfriend and her children. Now she was presumed dead.

Clay Waller, a former deputy sheriff, soon became the leading suspect. Prosecutors say he had physically abused his wife throughout their 17-year marriage. According to court documents, he once told her if she ever filed for divorce, she would be signing her own death warrant.

That July, while much of the community searched for Jacques body, Clay Waller sent an email threatening to kill Jacques sister, the court-appointed guardian of the Waller children. In January, he pleaded guilty to making an interstate threat of violence and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Waller was already in federal custody when he was charged with Jacques murder in April 2012. Investigators had found traces of Jacques blood in a hallway of her home. A bloody carpet had been stashed in a crawl space under the house.

The futile search for Jacques body, however, pressed on. With the second anniversary of her disappearance approaching, Waller played his trump card: He told authorities he would take them to Jacques remains if his charge was downgraded to second-degree murder  a plea deal that would add only 15 years to his sentence.

Jacques family, desperate to recover her remains and wanting closure for themselves and the triplets, asked authorities to accept the deal.

Waller led the search party to an island on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. After five days of searching, they found Jacques grave. She had been beaten and strangled, then stuffed in a garbage can and taken across the river in Wallers boat.

In June 2013, Clay Waller pleaded guilty to Jacques murder. His light sentence drew widespread outrage.

Larry Ferrell, a veteran Assistant U.S. Attorney from Cape Girardeau, say he was determined to find a way to keep Waller locked away for a much longer time. So he and his colleagues combed through thousands of pages of court documents, searching for a new opening in the case.

That same summer, Dean and Waller began working on their book.

50 pages a week

From the start, Waller had insisted that his goal with the tell-all was setting things right. While he couldnt bring back Jacque, he told Dean he would use any proceeds from the sales to establish a trust fund for the triplets. Dean, Waller knew, had a passion for kids.

He was a great manipulator, Dean now says. He was telling me what I wanted to hear.

Shortly into the collaboration, Dean says, he knew he had been misled. Waller displayed little contrition. Instead, his accounts took on a mocking tone, as if he were taunting both Jacques family and his prosecutors with the details of his crime, Dean says.

With a goal of turning out at least 50 pages a week, Dean says he wrote longhand for up to 12 hours a day. He used prison pencils and lined paper. He found himself injecting a sense of remorse or morality into Wallers point of view.

All through the writing, it creeped me out, he says. I saw how callous he was. I saw how self-centered he was. The type of stuff he was saying, the type of stuff he had done to his wife. That kind of stuff was too much.

After about six weeks, the 300-page manuscript was done. After a final editing, Waller smuggled the pages out of the prison and to the mother of another inmate.

Dean says he never saw a penny. Instead, he says Waller told prison authorities that Dean was attempting to extort $10,000 from him. Dean says he was put back in solitary confinement.

Back in Missouri, though, the federal investigation in Jacques murder was continuing. It would soon pick up speed.

I got a guy here

The break in the Waller case turned out to be a logistical one.

During their lengthy re-examination of Jacque Wallers murder, Ferrell and his team discovered that Clay Waller had spent the night before the killing with his girlfriend. She lived in Illinois. Which meant Waller had crossed state lines to end Jacques life.

In May 2016, a federal grand jury in Missouri indicted Waller on a charge of interstate domestic violence. Soon, federal authorities was interviewing Wallers fellow imates in the Louisiana prison. It was there that they learned of a 3-year-old manuscript. They tracked it down at the Louisiana home of the inmates mother who still had it.

They also became aware of Cedric Dean.

That October, Ferrell and an FBI agent traveled to a prison in northern Ohio to meet Dean face to face. The Missouri prosecutor carried a copy of the manuscript. He says he remained skeptical that Dean had truly written it.

I was a little bit pessimistic about it, Ferrell explained last month. He hadnt finished high school. Hed gotten a GED in prison.

When Ferrell asked Dean where he learned to write, the inmate told him about his long-ago dissection of the crime novel in solitary confinement. Then he handed Ferrell one of his own books.

It was on Thug-ology,  Ferrell recalls. Talk about a moment that stands out. He had become, you know, a significant writer. I got a guy here who has published a book.

Minutes into the conversation and without being shown the manuscript, Dean says he began telling Ferrell what was in the chapters. The he began listing details of the killing  beyond what was in the book, Ferrell says  that only Waller or investigators could know.

Dean says he told Ferrell how Waller had used soft drinks to clean blood from the walls of his wifes house; how he had cut off the fronts of a pair of very small shoes, which he wore to hide his own footprints.

Ferrell soon had heard enough.

A year later, after Waller and his attorneys learned of what Dean was prepared to say in court, the convicted killer pleaded guilty to the domestic violence charge. On Dec. 19, he was sentenced to an additional 35 years. Waller will now spend more than a half century in prison. He also has been blocked from receiving money from any book deals.

Dean says he cooperated with authorities against his former writing partner for one reason only. Waller had killed once. Weeks of interviews with Waller had left Dean with an unshakable belief:

If given the chance, Waller would kill again.

He told me he was trying to do the right thing with his book, but he lied, Dean said a few days before Wallers sentencing. With that kind of morality, he didnt need to be going back on the street.

Mayhem to Morality

To his surprise, Dean was headed in a different direction.

As a 22-year-old in the mid-1990s, he had been convicted and sentenced on federal drug charges during an era when crack cocaine defendants faced disproportionally severe punishments.

Sentencing reforms put in place while Dean was in prison, coupled with the efforts of his longtime Charlotte attorney Claire Rauscher, had dramatically reduced the time Dean had to serve. Still, several years of potential incarceration still lay ahead.

That was about to change. In late November, federal authorities filed a document that officially thanked and rewarded Dean for his help in closing the Waller case. When U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn of Asheville added his signature, the last years of Deans sentence from his long-ago drug conviction disappeared.

A few days after Thanksgiving  22 years and 11 months since he left Charlotte  the 45-year-old Dean came home.

No one can say that book wasnt a critical piece of evidence in us getting a guilty plea, Ferrell told the Observer a few days after Deans return.

He says he is already working with former detective Garry McFadden and others to expand the foundation he started in prison. His goal is to reach at-risk children before the prisons do. He has asked the newly retired Ferrell to join in.

Dean also intends to keep writing. He has already started on a memoir.

He calls it, From Mayhem to Morality.

Michael Gordon: 704-358-5095, @MikeGordonOBS
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.
Cluster of Excellence in Germany : Bonn mathematicians go all over the world

Bonn The Hausdorff Centre will be part of the GlobalMathNetwork that was founded in Bonn in November. It is an important instrument for promoting youth talent abroad.

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As part of the Cluster of Excellence for Mathematics in Germany, the Hausdorff Centre (HCM) feels particularly committed to international networking. Many young scientists from abroad are already doing their doctorates in Bonn, for example with grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). But young German researchers should also gain experience in the globalised science community. Therefore the HCM, along with four other selected partner universities on three continents, launched the GlobalMathNetwork in Bonn in November 2017.

We are playing in the big league, reports HCM director Theodor Sturm. The Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science at New York University and the Universities of Kyoto (Japan) and Peking (China) belong to the network. Sturm said they had not yet found partners with the necessary quality in research and teaching in South America, Africa and Australia. The network partners envisage a support programme for young scientists as a companion to the Erasmus programme for students.

Our goal is for a large proportion of our doctoral students to spend a considerable time abroad, explains Sturm. The five network members have therefore committed themselves to finance one semester abroad for at least 40 per cent of their doctoral students. The home university bears the costs of travel and accommodation. On site, the doctoral students have appointed contact persons to ensure quick integration and receive office space and access to the library, internet and computers. They are also exempted from tuition fees, something that is a considerable financial advantage, especially in the USA.

Around 120 students are currently doing their doctorates in mathematics in Bonn. From 2018, 15 to 20 of them will pack their bags each year for four to six months. Their trip may not only culminate in one of the partner institutes. The HCM is financed by funds from the German governments Excellence Initiative, which will be available until the end of 2018. As reported, the Bonn mathematicians have applied for a continuation of the Cluster of Excellence. The GlobalMathNetwork is to be expanded in future to include further international university partners.
Upgrade between Troisdorf and Oberkassel : Threat of three year delay to S13

Bonn Deliberations in the Deutsche Bahn boardroom are causing disquiet in the region. The faster connection to the airport could be delayed by another three years.

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Dear passengers, the S13 line towards the Cologne-Bonn airport is unfortunately three years late. Deutsche Bahn is apparently considering delaying the expansion works between Troisdorf and Oberkassel. However, the company told GA that nothing is decided yet. This explanation alone is enough to cause considerable disquiet among local politicians.

The reason for the railways deliberations is, by all accounts, construction works on the line between Hannover and Wurzburg. Part of the freight traffic there is to be temporarily transferred to the right side of the Rhine. But there could be no work on the S13 for at least three years. The city administration told the General-Anzeiger that Deutsche Bahn had orally informed the city of the deliberations last week.

However, there was apparently no sign of a delay along the upgraded route. Before the weekend, the city of Troisdorf announced clearing works for the rest of January to make space for the route. Deutsche Bahn itself published a detailed timetable at the start of the year with all small and large construction steps, closures and diversions that the expansion of the S13 would entail in the area in 2018.

The slow death of the S13 is imminent

The company also did not confirm the years long delay on Monday afternoon.

A spokesman for the railway responded to the effect that for any construction measures, the effects on the entire German network had to be considered and weighed up. If ongoing construction measures are affected during planning, the public will be informed accordingly at an early stage, said the spokesman.

Detailed studies are currently underway into numerous possible diversion routes, which would be looked at particularly with a view to minimising the impact on passengers. The first valid results will probably be available by the middle of the year. As a result, at this time no impact on the S13 has yet been determined, finished the railway spokesman.

This news seems to give the relevant departments of the city of Bonn, Rhine-Sieg district and the Rhineland local transport (NVR) a reason to ask for further clarity. A joint letter is currently being drafted to get information on what DB is planning, whether there are alternatives and how this fits in with the plans for the S13, said Marc Hoffmann from the citys press office and added: The NVR, the city of Bonn and the Rhine-Sieg district will do everything possible so that the works on the S13 will proceed quickly and so there are no interruptions to the construction work.

Meanwhile, Rolf Beu, chairman of the Bonn city council transport committee, has serious concerns. The slow death of the S13 is imminent, says the Green politician.  An unacceptably long construction period of 13 years has become 16  a record low for 12 kilometres, says Beu. He suggests an alternative to the railway: they should reduce the construction period for the S13 so that this is finished before the start of the upgrade between Hannover and Wurzburg.
DEAR ABBY: My husband has a long, bushy, ugly beard, and although I don't like it, I realize he's entitled to wear his facial hair any way he likes it. The problem is, when he eats, his beard gets into his plate and in the food, which I find nauseating. -- TOO MUCH HAIR IN TEXAS

DEAR TOO MUCH HAIR: If your husband's beard is so long it drags his food off his plate, the first thing you should do is suggest that he sit up straighter when he's eating. However, if he's unwilling -- or unable -- to do that, perhaps he would consider using one hand to hold his beard aside when he's about to take a forkful, or using hair clips to keep it away from his food.

Readers, if you have suggestions to help this grossed-out Texas wife, I'd love to see them.

DEAR ABBY: My mother is a smart, independent woman -- until she gets a boyfriend. She has been dating ever since Dad died in 1994.

Every relationship starts out well; the guy seems nice. Then he moves into her house and things change. Mom stops thinking for herself and turns into a brainless, spineless puppet. It causes conflict between us because she thinks I'm selfish and trying to sabotage her relationship.

She has had her current boyfriend for two years. I'm 37, disabled and require some help from Mom. So do my grandparents and a family friend Mom takes care of to supplement her income. The boyfriend is pushing Mom to spend three to four months of the year with him in Arizona, leaving those of us who need her without help.

None of these men ever help her out financially. Should I say nothing and let her disappear? What happens to the people who depend on her? -- JUST HER DAUGHTER IN COLORADO

DEAR JUST: What happens to the ADULTS who depend on your mother is they arrange for outside assistance during the time she's in Arizona. And if this is the first time in years that she will have taken a break, you should all wish her well.

DEAR ABBY: One of my co-workers constantly interrupts when I'm having a conversation with other people. It doesn't seem to matter who I am speaking with or what the subject is. She'll interrupt in the middle of the conversation, and everyone must stop and look at her or acknowledge her.

We are in a professional environment, and I feel her behavior is extremely discourteous. The subjects she discusses are things like the sandwiches her husband bought the day before, what they had for dinner that night or whatever is trending at the moment. She never discusses work-related issues.

This happens every day and it's disruptive. Would you kindly share some ideas on how to deal with her interruptions? -- BOTHERED OFFICE GUY

DEAR OFFICE GUY: Obviously, your co-worker was never taught that interrupting while others are talking is rude. Because it bothers you, the next time she does it, tell her it's distracting when she breaks into your conversations and to please stop. If she persists, and other co-workers feel as you do about it, bring it to the attention of your supervisor or HR and let that person handle it.

DEAR ABBY: I grew up watching my mom being abused by her husband. It was terrible. Unfortunately, he eventually murdered her. She was only 36. I was 16 at the time, and although it has taken almost 30 years, I have finally found peace.

My message is to people who are currently experiencing abuse. No one deserves to be battered physically, mentally or emotionally. When people suffer from addiction (alcohol, drugs, etc.), they can get help only when they are ready. However, with domestic violence, the victims must consider not only themselves, but also their children. If you are a victim of domestic violence, PLEASE get out and get help. -- HEALED IN GEORGIA

DEAR HEALED: Please accept my sympathy for the loss of your mother at such a tender age. In her memory, I will again print the phone number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. It is (800) 799-7233. There is a separate TTY number for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. It's (800) 787-3224. Its website is thehotline.org. Help is available if victims recognize they need it and reach out.

DEAR ABBY: I enjoy weekly massages from a popular self-employed masseuse. I have a standing appointment. If I cancel within 24 hours, I understand that I must pay her. However, if I give her more notice, must I still give her some remuneration? We have never discussed it.

I feel bad about canceling, as she may rely on this income, but it's difficult to pay for the event that requires me to cancel in addition to a massage that didn't happen. What would you do? -- UNSURE IN FLORIDA

DEAR UNSURE: Your masseuse has a 24-hour cancellation policy so when clients can't keep the appointment, she can fill in the time with someone else. Most personal service professionals understand that from time to time appointments must be skipped or changed.

Because you are worried about her, talk with her about it and ask if she can slot you in at a different time if there's a schedule conflict. It would be a win-win. She'll get the money, and you will still have your weekly massage, which, clearly, is important to you or you wouldn't have a standing appointment.

DEAR ABBY: I am worried about my best friend. She never eats at school, and I don't think she's eating at home either. She's beginning to get weak. Yesterday we were playing ball in P.E., and when she caught the ball, I saw her wince. I asked her if she was OK, and she said yes, but I'm still worried. What should I do? -- SCARED FOR HER

DEAR SCARED: Talk to your P.E. teacher about the fact that you are worried about your friend and why. She may not be eating because she thinks she needs to lose weight. Or she may have a serious eating disorder. The teacher will know what to do. Please don't wait.

DEAR ABBY: Recently a friend came over and took me to lunch. She has a small, 50-year-old vintage car that was very popular in the '60s. She had come from Marin County over the Golden Gate Bridge to my house.

As she drove us to the restaurant, her car stalled twice. It was very underpowered and, in my opinion, rickety. After she dropped me home, I sent her an email strongly expressing my concern that she is driving an unsafe car. I was worried for her safety. She took offense, so I apologized.

She has plenty of money to buy a safe used car like anyone else, but she says, "I like driving vintage." I don't want to get into her car again. Was I wrong to tell her I felt her car was unsafe? -- NERVOUS PASSENGER IN SAN FRANCISCO

DEAR PASSENGER: You weren't wrong to warn her. However, you may have been wrong to assume that she has "plenty of money to buy a safe used car." Nobody has as much money as others assume they do. Because you don't want to get into her car again, you should provide the transportation from now on or meet her at the restaurant.

DEAR ABBY: My across-the-street neighbor and I have become friendly. She has a 15-month-old and a newborn. Not only is she not married to the baby's daddy, but they don't even live together.

She has been asking me to help her a lot now that the baby is born. I'm 10 years older and raising three kids, all in their teens.

Abby, I don't want to raise anyone else's kids. How can I politely tell her that I have my own family to care for? She has a tendency to overreact. -- KEEPING DISTANCE

DEAR KEEPING DISTANCE: To tell your neighbor you "don't want to raise anyone else's kids" may be accurate, but it's a bit rough. When she asks you to do things for her, be pleasant and say -- consistently -- that you are busy, you don't have time, you have other plans, etc. If you do, she will soon realize that you are not to be depended upon.

DEAR ABBY: My son has lived overseas on and off for six years. He's being married to a wonderful young woman where they met, which was in Wales. Needless to say, not everyone can attend, so we are having a reception for them here in the States.

My son already has a fully furnished house overseas and doesn't need anything, plus the cost of taking gifts back would be astronomical! Anyway, he is thinking of asking for monetary help with the honeymoon. Would this be all right to do and, if so, how do you ask people for it? -- HELP FOR THE HONEYMOON

DEAR HELP: Many young people today post requests like that on their wedding website. Or, because friends and relatives may ask what they need after receiving invitations or announcements, the message can be conveyed verbally. According to the rules of etiquette, however, requests for gifts or money should NEVER be included WITH the invitations or announcements.

DEAR ABBY: I am president and co-founder of the Wildlife Center of Virginia, one of the leading teaching and research hospitals for wildlife medicine in the world. We have treated more than 70,000 wild patients since our organization was established 35 years ago. Like the reader ("An Apple a Day," Aug. 11) who is under the impression that throwing an apple core out the car window is doing something positive for the Earth, many individuals make "little" decisions without considering the unintended consequences.

The example of the apple core has been at the heart of our education program for more than three decades. Before throwing that apple core out the window believing that some small animal will come finish what's left, people should consider what will happen if the animal coming to eat their scraps happens to be on the other side of the road.

Throwing out that apple core will lure that creature into harm's way. Countless opossums, raccoons, skunks and other small mammals are killed every day because of human food waste on the shoulder of the road. And it doesn't stop there. Predators like owls also suffer. They hunt along the side of the road, not because they eat apple cores, but because they eat the mice, voles and other small animals who are attracted to feed on that apple core. Then, when the opossum, raccoon or owl is killed by a car, scavengers are attracted to the pavement, where their lives, too, are at risk.

If readers want to help the Earth, they should take their waste home and dispose of it or recycle it properly. The small act of throwing an apple core out of a car window can cost the lives of the very creatures they claim to want to help. -- EDWARD CLARK, WAYNESBORO, VA.

DEAR MR. CLARK: When that letter appeared, I received a flurry of mail about it. Many readers touched on some of the points you have expressed. Thank you for writing so eloquently to educate my readers -- and me. Lesson learned.

DEAR ABBY: I'm 29 and I'm having trouble holding down a steady job. I am a college graduate, and it's not because I don't like to work. My problem is I have a strong personality and I tend to butt heads with management. Deep down, I think I'll only be satisfied with a job if I'm the boss or own my own business. Do you have any suggestions about positions for someone who can't handle having a boss? -- MISS INDEPENDENT IN THE BRONX

DEAR MISS INDEPENDENT: No. Unless someone has rich parents or a magic lamp, most people have to work for -- or with -- others until they build enough capital to start a business. Even then, business owners must interact with clients they don't always agree with. Because you tend to butt heads with those in management positions, you would be wise to start working on becoming more patient and less dogmatic. Both qualities will help you in the future if you can develop them.

DEAR ABBY: The winter months are hard for me. They remind me that another year has gone by without my father and my younger sister.

Dad had been a smoker since his teens and died from pancreatic cancer at 39. I was 13, and my siblings were younger. In those days, we didn't know that smoking was a risk factor for pancreatic cancer.

My sister smoked from the time she was 13. She died from lung cancer at 44, leaving behind two young sons.

Neither my father nor my sister got to experience the wonderful family milestones and celebrations we have had. Their grandchildren will never know them. Each year during the holidays, I feel a sadness in my heart.

I urge every smoker to make a vow to quit and carry it through, not only for their own sake but also their family's. Stay determined to quit so you won't cause your loved ones sadness and won't miss out on their futures. With all my heart, I wish smokers the best of luck in quitting. -- MISSING DAD AND SIS IN SACRAMENTO

DEAR MISSING: I'm glad you wrote because the American Cancer Society's annual Great American Smokeout will be held on Nov. 16. It's a day when millions of smokers put down their cigarettes -- just for one day -- with the conviction that if they can go 24 hours without one, then they can do it for 48 hours, 72 hours, and stop smoking for good. The idea grew out of a 1970 event in Randolph, Massachusetts, and became a national event in 1977.

Readers, I'm not going to harangue you with death threats. We are all aware of the grim statistics associated with cancer-related deaths caused by tobacco. If you're interested in quitting, this is a perfect opportunity. Call (800) 227-2345 to be connected with counseling services in your community, provided with self-help materials offering information and strategies on quitting for good, and to receive information about medications available to help you quit. This service is free and provided 24/7. Or go online to cancer.org.

DEAR ABBY: I need your help. Over the past few weeks, I have been vacationing at my mother-in-law's home. The other day I was browsing on her computer and accidentally opened her browsing history. It turns out that she regularly looks at and responds to Craigslist personals.

I was shocked when I read some of the perverted requests she has responded to. The language she used would make a sailor blush. Keep in mind, my mother-in-law is a married woman.

I don't know how to react. Should I tell my wife? Keep it to myself? Make a fake Craigslist post and catch her in the act? -- KINKS IN THE FAMILY

DEAR KINKS: If you disclose this to your wife, it could damage her relationship with her mother. If she tells her mother what you found, it will create a breach in the family. If you trap the woman by creating a fake Craigslist post and she realizes she has been made a fool of, it will not -- to put it mildly -- endear you to her. Let it lie.

DEAR ABBY: I am in a predicament. My therapist is great, but sometimes I think she shares too much. Last time I went, she was running late. When I finally got into her office, she told me the previous patient was nonverbal and had painted her nails during the session. Later in the session, she confided that years ago she had been date raped.

Abby, I am in counseling because my father raped me when I was 15 (I am now 24). Her sharing has me worried because I don't want her telling others what I say or do during counseling. Further, her story of the date rape scared me. She described a situation that is not uncommon for me to be in, and it caused something almost like a flashback in me. I think what she did was insensitive, to say the least.

I have nobody else to ask, so what should I do? I'm getting counseling for free now due to my income, and it took months to get set up with a counselor. Should I report her or accept that this was a mistake and say nothing? If I need to report her, how would I go about doing that? -- CONFLICTED ABOUT IT

DEAR CONFLICTED: You should change therapists because it appears this one has more problems than you do. As to what agency you should report her breach of professional ethics to, contact the state organization that has licensed her to practice.

Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069
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.
DEAR HARRIETTE: I received gift cards from my family for Christmas. That was perfect, because now that I am a young adult, my taste is different from that of my mother or other family members. For years, I would either just stuff the clothing in my bottom drawer or ask if I could take it back. I know that probably hurt people's feelings sometimes, but I can't help it if we don't like the same things.

I appreciate that my family finally gave me something that I can use. Should I show them what I buy with the money they gave me, or is saying thank you enough? -- Best Gift Ever, Norfolk, Virginia

DEAR BEST GIFT EVER: Start by thanking your family members -- from your mother on down -- for the gift cards. Tell them how much you appreciate the fact that they realize that the best gift is to let you buy what you want. Ask your mother if she would like to see what you bought with the money or gift cards. If it would interest her, show her. Otherwise, just say thank you and let that be enough.

DEAR HARRIETTE: I just learned that my mother is going blind. She has macular degeneration. She says she cannot read well and generally she sees fuzzy. I am so scared for her. She lives by herself and has been independent forever. I have invited her to come and live with me and my family, but she said no. I am afraid for her to live by herself much longer, and we cannot afford to hire full-time care.

This is such a big shift. She stopped driving only last year, because we -- her children -- begged her to stop. Believe it or not, her doctor didn't even require that she stop, even though he knew she had this condition. How can I help my mother? -- Going Blind, New Orleans

DEAR GOING BLIND: It may be a relief to you to know that macular degeneration does not necessarily lead to complete blindness, even though it does lead to significant loss of vision. Indeed, in the early stages of the disease, many people continue to drive during the day without incident. Talk to your mother's doctor about her condition so that you can be clear about what she is facing. Ask for suggestions for how she can care for herself. Ask for the signs that she may no longer be able to live alone. When that time comes, you will have to address it with her and figure out how her Social Security and your support will be able to take care of her.

For more information about living with macular degeneration, go to macularhope.org/about-md/coping-skills/.

If she is willing, you can also have her learn how to live as a blind or partially blind person. There are many resources available to support her, including the American Foundation for the Blind. Visit afb.org/info/living-with-vision-loss/2 to get started.

Harriette Cole is a lifestylist and founder of DREAMLEAPERS, an initiative to help people access and activate their dreams. You can send questions to askharriette@harriettecole.com or c/o Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106
kacylee at 16-01-2018 08:33 AM (4 years ago) (f)

Boko Haram insurgent group has released a new video showing girls purported to be among the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped from their school hostel in April 2014.

Boko Haram insurgent group has released a new video showing girls purported to be among the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped from their school hostel in April 2014.

In the video, which was made available to Sahara Reporters, by Ahmed Salkida, a journalist who specializes in reporting on the conflicts in the Lake Chad region, one of the girls who spoke for the others can be heard saying, This is a message to our parents in Nigeria, they should repent and bow to Boko Haram, we wont come back.



BREAKING: Boko Haram releases videos showing some of the remaining Chibok girls who they claimed vowed not to go back to their parents #BringBackOurGirls

Videos obtained via Ahmad Salkida, a journalist that specializes on reporting the conflict in the Lake Chad region pic.twitter.com/5x9xwE1FzF  Sahara Reporters (@SaharaReporters) January 15, 2018

Speaking while her face was covered with a veil, the girl disclosed that they had all been married by Boko Haram factional leader Abubakar Shekau.



We live in comfort. He provides us with everything. We lack nothing, she added.



Shekau can also be seen in the video firing a heavy machine gun and making a 13-minute-long sermon.



I am not wounded, I am ready to fight and will continue to fight, he said as he read from a prepared speech in Hausa and flanked left and right by well-armed lieutenants.



BREAKING: Boko Haram releases videos showing how they shot down Nigeria fighter jet and second video of kidnapped women and remaining Chibok girls.

Videos obtained via Ahmad Salkida, a journalist that specializes on reporting the conflict in the Lake Chad region pic.twitter.com/4iwDFpA3eN  Sahara Reporters (@SaharaReporters) January 15, 2018

Shekau also claimed responsibility for the air force helicopter that crashed recently although, the military authority had earlier told Nigerians that the helicopter came down as result of technical issues.



BREAKING VIDEO: Boko Haram militants release video of women including police officers abducted on their way to a colleague burial in June 2017 pic.twitter.com/2zx304KiqA  Sahara Reporters (@SaharaReporters) January 15, 2018 The Boko Haram video also paraded some women believed to be police officers who were abducted in June 2017, the women sobbed as a Boko Haram speaker recited the Quran before asking some of them to speak on video, it appears theyre under duress as they were surrounded by armed Boko Haram fighters.



The jihadists seized 276 students from the Government Girls Secondary School in the mostly Christian town in Borno state on April 14, 2014, triggering global condemnation.



Fifty-nine of them managed to escape in the hours that followed.



A total of 107 girls have now been either found, rescued or released as part of government negotiations with the Islamic State group affiliate.



On January 4, the Nigerian army said it had rescued one of the girls classmates in the remote Pulka region of Borno, near the border with Cameroon.



Watch full video below:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRfrLXPi8N8 In the video, which was made available to Sahara Reporters, by Ahmed Salkida, a journalist who specializes in reporting on the conflicts in the Lake Chad region, one of the girls who spoke for the others can be heard saying, This is a message to our parents in Nigeria, they should repent and bow to Boko Haram, we wont come back.Speaking while her face was covered with a veil, the girl disclosed that they had all been married by Boko Haram factional leader Abubakar Shekau.We live in comfort. He provides us with everything. We lack nothing, she added.Shekau can also be seen in the video firing a heavy machine gun and making a 13-minute-long sermon.I am not wounded, I am ready to fight and will continue to fight, he said as he read from a prepared speech in Hausa and flanked left and right by well-armed lieutenants.Shekau also claimed responsibility for the air force helicopter that crashed recently although, the military authority had earlier told Nigerians that the helicopter came down as result of technical issues.The Boko Haram video also paraded some women believed to be police officers who were abducted in June 2017, the women sobbed as a Boko Haram speaker recited the Quran before asking some of them to speak on video, it appears theyre under duress as they were surrounded by armed Boko Haram fighters.The jihadists seized 276 students from the Government Girls Secondary School in the mostly Christian town in Borno state on April 14, 2014, triggering global condemnation.Fifty-nine of them managed to escape in the hours that followed.A total of 107 girls have now been either found, rescued or released as part of government negotiations with the Islamic State group affiliate.On January 4, the Nigerian army said it had rescued one of the girls classmates in the remote Pulka region of Borno, near the border with Cameroon.

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 16-01-2018 08:33 AM (4 years ago) | Addicted Hero
Nigeria Suffers Huge Embarrassment As It Is Ranked Second Worst Electricity Supply Nation In 2017

xspraise at 16-01-2018 08:34 AM (4 years ago) (m)

Nigeria has been ranked the second worst electricity supply Nation in 2017. This is according to the Spectator Index. The group released the ranking on its twitter handle. Yemen was ranked the worst electricity supply Nation. The tweet below



Nigeria has been ranked the second worst electricity supply Nation in 2017. This is according to the Spectator Index. The group released the ranking on its twitter handle. Yemen was ranked the worst electricity supply Nation. The tweet below

Post Reply I am Victor, I write reportage on sport news and latest metro happenings in Nigeria. Posted: at 16-01-2018 08:34 AM (4 years ago) | Hero

xspraise at 16-01-2018 08:38 AM (4 years ago)

(m) chai! Nigeria aaaaaaaaa........ my country country.....i hail oo I am Victor, I write reportage on sport news and latest metro happenings in Nigeria. Posted: at 16-01-2018 08:38 AM (4 years ago) | Hero chai! Nigeria aaaaaaaaa........ my country country.....i hail oo Reply

dynasty4all at 16-01-2018 08:59 AM (4 years ago)

(m) WHAT DO YOU EXPECT FROM SHITHOLE/ZOO COUNTRY?

ANOTHER BIG ACHIEVEMENT FOR BUHARI, AND APC!

WHO SAID BUHARI IS NOT WORKING?

NIGERIA IS A ZOO, THIRD WORLD ZOO FOR THAT MATTER..... Posted: at 16-01-2018 08:59 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac WHAT DO YOU EXPECT FROM SHITHOLE/ZOO COUNTRY?ANOTHER BIG ACHIEVEMENT FOR BUHARI, AND APC!WHO SAID BUHARI IS NOT WORKING?NIGERIA IS A ZOO, THIRD WORLD ZOO FOR THAT MATTER..... Reply

maxzy277 at 16-01-2018 09:13 AM (4 years ago)

(m) Naija carry second, una try wella Posted: at 16-01-2018 09:13 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac Naija carry second, una try wella Reply

fineboy77 at 16-01-2018 09:18 AM (4 years ago)

(m) The negative news coming out of that country has reached a dizzying height. why are we still together? What is the color beneath your skin? Posted: at 16-01-2018 09:18 AM (4 years ago) | Hero The negative news coming out of that country has reached a dizzying height. why are we still together? Reply

angesco at 16-01-2018 10:14 AM (4 years ago)

(f) The EMBARRASMENT is that we came SECOND!!



We should be in the FIRST POSITION!!!



STUPID Yemen.



Anyway the CONSOLATION is that we took FIRST POSITION for AFRICA.



UP NAIJA!!!!!!! Posted: at 16-01-2018 10:14 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac The EMBARRASMENT is that we came SECOND!!We should be in the FIRST POSITION!!!STUPID Yemen.Anyway the CONSOLATION is that we took FIRST POSITION for AFRICA.UP NAIJA!!!!!!! Reply

Wazubia at 16-01-2018 10:16 AM (4 years ago)

(m) NA THE CHANGE WE ALL VOTED FOR. BUHARI THIEF. FASHOLA THIEF. AMAECHI THIEF. BUKOLA SARAKI THIEF. IT IS WELL. Posted: at 16-01-2018 10:16 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac NA THE CHANGE WE ALL VOTED FOR. BUHARI THIEF. FASHOLA THIEF. AMAECHI THIEF. BUKOLA SARAKI THIEF. IT IS WELL. Reply

crocatum at 16-01-2018 10:29 AM (4 years ago)

(m) wasted times, by failures, by leaders who are failures in life. Posted: at 16-01-2018 10:29 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac wasted times, by failures, by leaders who are failures in life. Reply

chukkychukky at 16-01-2018 10:34 AM (4 years ago)

(m) shithole country i dey hail ooo Joramentity aka chukkychukky Posted: at 16-01-2018 10:34 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac shithole country i dey hail ooo Reply

slimber at 16-01-2018 10:55 AM (4 years ago)

(f) Nigeria make una changeooo see una life Posted: at 16-01-2018 10:55 AM (4 years ago) | Hero Nigeria make una changeooo see una life Reply

cypanyahucha at 16-01-2018 11:04 AM (4 years ago)

(m) That's a generous evaluation. Nigeria has no electricity Posted: at 16-01-2018 11:04 AM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac That's a generous evaluation. Nigeria has no electricity Reply

Otikadinje at 16-01-2018 12:14 PM (4 years ago)

(m) There must have been a mix-up somewhere else Nigerian should be number one up bubuuuuuu Oscardeejay Posted: at 16-01-2018 12:14 PM (4 years ago) | Gistmaniac There must have been a mix-up somewhere else Nigerian should be number one up bubuuuuuu Reply
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felicilin at 16-01-2018 11:12 AM (4 years ago) (f)

Border police on discovered four African migrants hidden within one car after it sped through the border crossing into Spain from Morocco.

Border police on discovered four African migrants hidden within one car after it sped through the border crossing into Spain from Morocco. The driver and a passenger drove at speed past police officers at the Beni-Enzar checkpoint before abandoning the car at a petrol station and running off.



Upon searching the car, officers found two men cramped inside the car boot, while another was curled up inside the bonnet. A woman was then found squeezed inside the car dashboard.



The driver and passengers were detained after a struggle with police during which two officers were hurt. The pair now face people trafficking charges.







The driver and a passenger drove at speed past police officers at the Beni-Enzar checkpoint before abandoning the car at a petrol station and running off.Upon searching the car, officers found two men cramped inside the car boot, while another was curled up inside the bonnet. A woman was then found squeezed inside the car dashboard.The driver and passengers were detained after a struggle with police during which two officers were hurt. The pair now face people trafficking charges.

Post Reply Posted: at 16-01-2018 11:12 AM (4 years ago) | Hero
G+D Wins 260 Million Contract in Egypt

January 2018 by Marc Jacob

Global security technology group Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) has announced the conclusion of a major contract. The Central Bank of Egypt has commissioned G+D with planning and building an integrated plant for the production and processing of bank notes in Egypts new administrative capital, southeast of Cairo. The project, with a volume of around 260 million, includes cutting-edge IT and security infrastructure as well as the setup of further regional centers.

After completion, the plant will cover the majority of the countrys banknote printing and processing capacity  thereby supporting Egypt in the smart automation of the cash cycle and in further enhancing banknote security. Construction of the new security complex is scheduled to complete in 2020.

With this significant order G+D expands on its almost 60-year partnership with Egypt. We are delighted to be supporting Egypt with our many years of experience and our leading integration competence, said Ralf Wintergerst, Chairman of the Management Board and CEO of G+D. It also clearly demonstrates how important cash will continue to be for national economies in the future. The volume of cash is growing by around 3-5 percent each year across the globe.

The G+D Currency Technology business sector will be responsible for implementing the project. As a technological leader in cash cycle automation, G+D has wide-ranging expertise to draw upon in building the plant. Our solution modernizes the production of highly secure banknotes in Egypt, and contributes to safeguarding one of the countrys critical infrastructures with efficient technology, said Dr. Wolfram Seidemann, CEO of G+D Currency Technology. We are particularly committed to supporting the Central Bank of Egypt in training the approximately 1500 employees of the plant.

G+D has been a technology partner to Egypt since 1960. Among other projects, the company has previously built a banknote printing plant and designed a series of banknotes for the country. In addition, G+D installed the national ID card system for Egypt and has also produced SIM cards as well as payment cards for the Egyptian market.
SINGAPORE, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

NTT Security, the specialized security company of NTT Group, has announced expansion into Thailand as part of its strategic growth plan. It will provide Managed Security Services (MSS) and specialized Professional Security Services based on its strength in Global Threat Intelligence and Cyber Threat Advanced Analytics accumulated through global operations. This will enable more effective and sophisticated cybersecurity solutions for Thailand enterprises and governments as well as global companies which have business operations in the region.



The services will be taken to market through the NTT Group companies of Dimension Data, NTT Communications and NTT DATA, forming part of its suite of integrated services to enable successful digital transformation initiatives for its clients.

Our Managed Security Services with expert security analysts and proprietary analytics platform powered by Global Threat Intelligence have been providing strong Threat Detection and Hunting capabilities to NTT customers worldwide. We are delighted to be expanding the availability of our advanced security services. NTT Security together with NTT Group companies will provide cyber resilience to secure digital transformation of organizations in Thailand," said Jun Sawada, CEO of NTT Security.

Martin Schlatter, CIO and Regional CEO for NTT Security in APAC adds, Thailands economy has great potential, occupying the 2nd largest GDP following Indonesia in the high growth economy of ASEAN, with its annual GDP set to grow to 3.329% in 2018 (and 3.357% in 2019). It has developed a global reputation for growth within the manufacturing and exporting of goods and services within the automotive and electronics sectors. Thailand is now working on shifting to high value-added manufacturing and growing the service industry. However, with this growth, comes an increase in targeted cyber attacks, particularly those aimed at manufacturers for their intellectual property. This, in turn, creates demand for cybersecurity services from specialised security companies such as NTT Security."

NTT Securitys Global Threat Intelligence Report (GTIR) reveals manufacturing as one of the top three industries to be heavily targeted in five of the six geographic regions. In Asia alone, manufacturing is the second most targeted industry (32%), trailing closely behind finance. The region is therefore feeling the impact of having significant manufacturing capabilities and, like its Asian counterparts, companies in Thailand are not immune from attacks and face a variety of threats.

According to NTT Securitys Global Threat Intelligence Center (GTIC), Thailand ranked 19th in hosting command and control servers used to remotely send commands to a botnet, with over 9% of all botnets attempting to talk back to servers in Thailand. In fact, Asia was a major contributor to the Mirai botnet used to conduct one of the largest Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.

Schlatter adds, Asian businesses are failing on a large scale to adequately secure their endpoints, and there is no question that cyber criminals are looking to capitalize on this. Its therefore increasingly important to embed security solutions and processes into the very fabric of the business. If compromised, corporate devices participating in such attacks may be blacklisted, damaging the organizations reputation and ability to function effectively online.

As a centre of excellence, NTT Security is committed to continued investment in the creation of innovative security services, and continues to expand its reach together with NTT Group companies, while improving its strength in Global Threat Intelligence and Advanced Analytics by collaboration with NTT R&D and alliances with technology partners.

Notes for editors:

About NTT Security

NTT Security is the specialized security company and the center of excellence in security for NTT Group. With embedded security we enable NTT Group companies (Dimension Data, NTT Communications and NTT DATA) to deliver resilient business solutions for clients digital transformation needs. NTT Security has multiple SOCs, seven R&D centers, over 1,500 security experts and handles hundreds of thousands of security incidents annually across six continents.

NTT Security ensures that resources are used effectively by delivering the right mix of Managed Security Services, Security Consulting Services and Security Technology for NTT Group companies  making best use of local resources and leveraging our global capabilities. NTT Security is part of the NTT Group (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation), one of the largest ICT companies in the world. Visit nttsecurity.com to learn more about NTT Security or visit www.ntt.co.jp/index_e.html to learn more about NTT Group.

For sales enquiries, please visit dimensiondata.com, www.ntt.com/en/index.html, www.nttdata.com/global/en/ or speak to your NTT account representative for more information.

For more information, please contact:

Janice Maurer

914 282 7186

janice.maurer@nttsecurity.com

www.nttsecurity.com

Sara Chaput/LRG Marketing

845 358 1801

schaput@lrgmarketing.com

www.lrgmarketing.com
TORTOLA, British Virgin Islands, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Orca Exploration Group Inc. (TSX-V:ORC.A) (TSX-V:ORC.B) (Orca or the Company) today announced that the escrow release conditions have been met regarding the first tranche of the previously announced investment of up to US$130 million by Swala Oil & Gas (Tanzania) plc ("Swala") in the Orca Group (the "Investment"). As a result, the definitive agreements for the Investment have been released from escrow and are delivered and effective and the first tranche of the Investment is complete.



First Tranche of the Investment

Under the first tranche of the Investment, Orca sold 7,933 Class A PAEM Shares (the "PAEM Shares") (7.93%) that it holds of PAE PanAfrican Energy Corporation ("PAEM") to Swala (PAEM) Limited ("Swala PAEM"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Swala, for gross proceeds of US$25,782,250 (US$21,022,450 net of certain purchase adjustments) payable in US$17,055,950 cash and the right to receive either US $3,966,500 face amount of Swala convertible preferred shares by 2 March 2018 or US $3,966,500 in cash in the event such Swala shares are not issued by such date.

Amendment and Consent Letter with International Finance Corporation

As part of the Investment, Orca entered into an amendment and consent letter with PanAfrican Energy Tanzania Limited ("PAET") and International Finance Corporation ("IFC") pursuant to which:

PAET agreed to prepay the IFC loan facility in part based on the proportion to the total percentage of PAEM Shares sold to Swala PAEM by no later than 10 December 2019;

upon each closing occurring under the Investment, IFC's 7% participation interest would be reduced pro rata with the percentage of the PAEM Shares sold to Swala in consideration for PAET paying IFC the sum equal to the liquidity participation interest (10%) of the proportion of PAEM sold based on a valuation of US$325 million; and

the parties agreed to make certain amendments to the IFC loan agreement and related financing documents in connection with the foregoing.

As part of the amendment and consent letter, Orca guaranteed the prepayments owed by PAET to IFC discussed above. As a result of the closing of the first tranche of the Investment, that guarantee covers US$4,759,800 in prepayments. Assuming that the second and third tranches of the Investment close, Orca's guarantee would cover an aggregate of US$24,000,000 in prepayments due 10 December 2019.

About Orca Exploration Group Inc.

Orca is an international public company engaged in natural gas exploration, development and supply in Tanzania through its wholly-owned subsidiary, PanAfrican Energy Tanzania Limited. Orca trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the trading symbols ORC.A and ORC.B. The Companys Project Agreements are more fully described in the Companys 2016 Annual Information Form, and available on www.orcaexploration.com .

About Swala Oil & Gas (Tanzania) plc

Swala is an independent oil & gas exploration and production company, the first to be listed on an East African Stock Exchange and having a significant local Tanzanian ownership. Swala holds exploration blocks in the world-class East African Rift System with a total net land package in excess of 14,000 km2. New discoveries have been announced by industry participants in a number of licences along this trend that extend the multi-billion-barrel Albert Graben play developed by Tullow Oil into the eastern arm of the rift. Swala has an active operational and business development programme to continue to grow its presence in the hydrocarbon provinces of East Africa and globally. More information on Swala is available at http://swalaoilandgas.com/ .

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.



Forward Looking Information

This news release contains forward-looking information. More particularly, this news release contains statements and information concerning, but not limited to, the potential completion of the remaining investment transactions; the potential amount of guarantees given by Orca to IFC; and other matters. Although management believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, it cannot guarantee future agreement, levels of activity, performance or achievements since such expectations are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies. As a consequence, actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking information.

Forward-looking information involves substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond Orca's control, and many factors could cause the actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking information presented by Orca, including, but not limited to: that the third parties perform their obligations under the Investment Agreement and other related agreements; risks associated with obtaining third party or government approvals; risks associated with international activity; the uncertainty associated with negotiating with governments; that PAEM and PAET are able to carry on their business activities as expected, and other risk factors. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, the forward-looking information and, accordingly, no assurances can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking information will transpire or occur, or if any of them do so, what benefits Orca will derive therefrom. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive.

Such forward-looking information is based on certain assumptions made by Orca in light of its experience and current knowledge of the circumstances, as well as other factors Orca believes are appropriate in the circumstances, including, but not limited to: that Swala will be able to obtain financing to close the investment transactions; that the necessary approvals will be obtained; that third parties will perform their obligations under the agreements; that Swala will obtain the necessary approvals to create and issue the preferred shares; that PAEM and PAET are able to carry on their business activities as expected; and other matters.

The forward-looking information contained in this news release is made as of the date hereof and Orca undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities laws.
To the editor:

To me, America and integrity comes first over party. The Republicans who were at that White House meeting and who are now denying what President Trump said about some countries are sh*tholes are un-American and are allowing him to lie, saying it was a Cemocratic hoax to make him look bad.

Its a wonder he didnt blame Barack Obama for all of it.

His base would agree with him, Im sure. These people know what he said and should tell the American people what this president is made of. Trumps comments are unkind, racists, crude, divisive and elitist and fly in the face of our nations values. He is dividing this nation each and every day. These Republicans who were there and heard this are empowering him to be the way he is. Im sure he feels he can do anything he wants now and get away with it. He only has to blame the Democrats, Hillary or Obama.

They will pay the price in the mid0term elections coming in November and I cant wait. Most Americans, except his base who believe this man is a god, are fed up with his lies and his racist and bigoted ways. This doesnt surprise me, because he said from the start of his campaign that Mexicans were rapists, drug dealers and killers; that all Muslims should be banned because they were all out to kill us or were a member of ISIS; and that he sided with David Duke, the white nationalists and neo-Nazis when he said they are were nice also. He really doesnt even know his own policies when he texts hes against something and minutes later he is for it when someone tells him he was wrong.

Trump gets his information and policies from what he hears on Fox News. Trump doesnt want dark-skinned people into this country  only white people like from Norway like a true white supremacists. Why would Norwegians want to move here when they have free health care, education and six weeks of vacation?

The day before, of course, when he was in front of the cameras he was all for the DACA Dreamers and said we should make a love bill to help them. Then the very next day he acts like this because he couldnt get his way to keep dark-skinned people out of this country.

The only love in this mans heart is for himself and the Party of Abraham Lincoln allows this to happen. Our great military is full of people from these very countries he calls shi*tholes. Many brave Americans that died at Normandy were also from the countries he calls sh*tholes. You would think his generals would say something. Are they afraid of this mental case? I know that Democratic Sen. Dick Durban, who was at this meeting, didnt lie about it because he was there to help the Dreamers, and House Speaker Paul Ryan didnt deny it and said it was unfortunate. He knows what Trump is very capable of saying.

Trump had the nerve to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day. How two-faced is that? The world is watching and cant believe what they are hearing. Children who want to grow up to be president are also watching and hearing. What a fine example he is. England didnt want him to come to open a new embassy and, of course, he blamed Obama for it.

We are so much better than this. Regardless of party, we should say something before its too late. I hope he doesnt become so unhinged to put our lives in peril. God, please help us and this once-great country.

ROBERT HAYDEN

Blairs
RICHMOND  A Senate panel voted Monday to scrap a bill that would undo a utility rate freeze and lower electricity rates for most Virginia residents.

For the second year in a row, the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee killed a measure to undo a controversial rate freeze that locked customers of Appalachian Power Co. and Dominion Energy into base rates that earned the companies millions.

But this year, several committee members said they're working on alternative legislation to get at the same issue. The bills will be filed later this week, said committee Chairman Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach.

Sens. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke County, and Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, pushed the bill that would undo a controversial 2015 law that locked in base rates for most Virginia energy consumers. Senate Bill 9 would have allowed the State Corporation Commission to once again review and adjust utility rates, including ordering Dominion and Appalachian Power to issue refunds when necessary.

"This is not an environmental bill, this is not a pro-business bill, this is a pro-ratepayer bill," Petersen said.

In a 13-1 vote, the senators tabled the bill indefinitely, effectively killing the legislation.

Wagner and Sen. Dick Saslaw, D-Fairfax, will present alternative legislation later this week. Some speakers who favored Petersen's bill referred to the alternative as Dominion-backed legislation.

"Let me be as clear as I can, there is no Dominion bill," Saslaw said. "That bill's being sponsored by Sen. Wagner and myself. What goes into that bill, we're putting in that bill." Dominion is Saslaw's top campaign donor  having contributed $318,000 to the senator over all of his campaign cycles  and company representatives are in talks with the pair about the pending legislation.

Sen. Steve Newman, R-Bedford, is also working on a related bill that would specifically pertain to Appalachian Power customers.

The 2015 rate freeze was a mistake, and allowing the utilities to write the remedy would be no different, Suetterlein said in a statement.

"Virginia families and businesses were overcharged by the unreviewed rates and their money should be returned to them and not spent on other utility projects," he said. "Today's vote was disappointing, but expected and I will continue working to reinstate the constitutionally required review of electric rates."

Wagner introduced the rate freeze in 2015 as a result of former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, a measure that utilities feared would raise electric rates. Petersen and his supporters have argued now that President Donald Trump has scrapped the Clean Power Plan, the rate freeze is unnecessary. State Corporation Commission officials have said the law has allowed the two energy giants to pocket millions.

"Recognizing that we have a degree of certainty, which we didn't have two or three years ago, this is the appropriate time to go back into a re-regulated environment," Wagner said. He has accepted $99,485 in campaign contributions from Dominion in past election cycles.

The largely pro-Dominion committee also killed a bill by Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke, that would have given landowners additional rights in the pipeline surveying process.

A representative from Dominion, the company behind the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, was one several pro-natural gas groups to speak against the bill. Several pipeline opponents from Southwest Virginia and conservation groups supported the legislation that would have required surveyors to inform landowners of the date and time they would enter the private property.

Edwards' bill, a companion bill to one presented by Del. Chris Hurst, D-Blacksburg, died on a 12-1 vote with one abstention.

Southwest Virginia lawmakers have also presented several other pipeline-related bills in Virginia's House of Delegates.
Vancouver BC. (FSCwire) - Kings Bay Resources Corporation (TSX.V: KBG), (FSE: KGB1), is pleased to announce that it has received the assays back from Phase 1 of the drilling on Kings Bays 100% owned Lynx Lake Copper-Cobalt Project in southeastern Labrador.

Kings Bay completed two diamond drill holes totaling 501.9 meters of drilling spaced 156.0 meters apart at the Lynx Lake Property.

The assay highlights are as follows:

Hole # Interval Width (From-To) Ni % Co % Ni + Co (%) LL-17-01 over 115.2m (47.6  162.8) 0.058 0.013 0.071 LL-17-02 over 110.8m (57.1-167.9) 0.057 0.014 0.071

***Drill holes represent approximate true widths, true widths cannot be determined at this time.

***Standard deviation for Ni=105.0 ppm and Co =23.5 ppm.

The assay results obtained are above background levels for nickel and cobalt and extend to over 100 meters at depth with a lateral extent of at least 156 meters. This indicates that there could be potential for a more localized zone of economic mineralization in the area.

These drill results represent only a small fraction of the Kings Bay land package, which is approximately 242 km.

Fire assays for Au, Pt, Pd are pending and expected to be received in late January 2018.

To view a map of the drill hole locations, visit https://www.kingsbayres.com/site/assets/files/1/18-01-16-KBG_Lynx_Lake_JEA.pdf.

2018 Exploration Plan

Kings Bay is currently reviewing results and plan to assemble a team specializing in geostatistics and structural analysis to delineate additional drilling targets to identify potential zones of economic mineralization. More work will be conducted in the southern claims at Lynx Lake in the 2018 field season.

The drill hole placement and orientation were determined based upon the amalgamation of the previously flown VTEM survey anomalies and the bedrock structure in the West Pit. The previously announced VTEM results identified an anomaly that is anticipated to be ranging in depth from 50-300 meters and estimated to be approximately 400 meters in diameter.

Kevin Bottomley states The results from our 2 preliminary holes at Lynx Lake are encouraging. The fact that we are encountering similar geochemical results in both holes that are over 150 meters apart is significant. Lynx Lake is road accessible from right off the Trans Labrador highway. This will allow Kings Bay to continue to define the area at a relatively low cost.

Lynx Lake Project

The Lynx Lake Copper-Cobalt Property consists of 959 mineral claims encompassing a land area of approximately 240 square kilometers, located 100 kilometers southeast of Happy Valley Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador. The west pit has been historically sampled yielding assays of up to 1.03% Copper, 0.56% Cobalt, 0.23% Vanadium, 0.10% Nickel and 5.0g/t Silver. The Lynx Lake Project has returned historical grab samples assaying up to 1.39% Cu, .94% Co, .21% Ni and 6.5g/t Ag. The Project is located directly adjacent to a 3 phase powerline and the Trans- Labrador Highway. The grab samples are selected samples and are not necessarily representative of the mineralization hosted on the property.

Quality Assurance/Quality Control and Analytical Method

The Company has implemented a quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) program to ensure and validate the accuracy and precision of the assay results. QA/QC protocols include the insertion of blanks, duplicates, and certified reference materials (standards) every 10-20 samples. Drill core was sampled utilizing two techniques. For non-mineralized zones, 3m composite samples were collected. For mineralized zones and intervals of interest, 1-2m saw-cut samples were collected and sent for assay. Samples have been submitted for assay to Eastern Analytical in Springdale, Newfoundland & Labrador, for base and precious metal analysis using Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) and Ore Grade Assay (Multi-Acid Digestion).

About Kings Bay

Kings Bay is a mineral exploration company that is focused on the exploration of cobalt and other high tech metals in North America. The Company believes in this emerging fast growth sector and will continue to seek out and evaluate properties that show promise for development. The Companys head office is in Vancouver, Canada.

NI 43 101 Disclosure

Nicholas Rodway, P. Geo. supervised the preparation of the technical information in this news release and is a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43 101.

On Behalf of the Board

Kevin Bottomley, President & Chief Executive Officer

O: 604 681 1568

E: Kevin@kingsbayres.com

For Investment Inquiries please contact:

Jared Rushton

O: 604 681 1568

E: jrushton@kingsbayres.com

Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking information which is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements 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. Forward looking statements in this news release include that there could be potential for a more localized zone of economic mineralization in the area; that fire assays for Au, Pt, Pd are pending and expected to be received in late January 2018; and that we can define our resources at relatively low cost. Risks that could change or prevent these statements from coming to fruition include that the Company may not raise sufficient funds to carry out our plans, changing costs for mining and processing; increased capital costs; the timing and content of upcoming work programs which might be delayed, included receiving results from programs; geological interpretations based on current data that may change with more detailed information; potential process methods and mineral recoveries assumption based on limited test work and by comparison to what are considered analogous deposits that with further test work may not be comparable; the availability of labour, equipment and markets for the products produced; and despite the current expected viability of the project, that the minerals on our property cannot be economically mined, or that the required permits to build and operate the envisaged mine cannot be obtained. The forward-looking information contained herein is given as of the date hereof and the Company assumes no responsibility to update or revise such information to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) acceptsresponsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view this press release as a PDF file, click onto the following link:public://news_release_pdf/kingsbay01162018.pdfSource: King s Bay Resources Corp. (TSX Venture:KBG)

To follow King s Bay Resources Corp. on your favorite social media platform or financial websites, please click on the icons below.

Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. https://www.fscwire.com

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When Doug Jones won Alabama's seat in the U.S. Senate, much of the national discussion centered around black women -- 98 percent of whom voted for him over Roy Moore, an accused pedophile who was suspended from the state's Supreme Court for refusing to recognize the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage.That wasn't the first time black women swayed an election. But to many, it was the first time so much of the population and media took notice of the political power of black women."Frankly, the 23 million black women in this country are being underrepresented and underserved," says Glynda Carr.She's the co-founder of Higher Heights for America, an organization dedicated to recruiting, training and supporting black women to run for office. She's also our first guest this year on "The 23%: Conversations With Women in Government."In this episode, Carr talks about the unique challenges that black female candidates face and why 2018 could see a wave of black women elected on the state and local level."When you fire up a black woman, she doesn't go to the polls alone," says Carr. "She brings her house, her block, her church and her sorority."Listen below. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes Google Podcasts or Stitcher , and check out our archives.
Texas Officials Promise Action

Violations of Federal Law

Disability advocates hailed the U.S. Department of Education's finding that Texas for years put roadblocks in the path of children who potentially qualified for special education--a clear violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act."It shows that they are willing to stand up when a state is clearly not doing what's right," said Robbi Cooper, a leader of the parent advocacy group Decoding Dyslexia Texas and the mother of a son with dyslexia. "Now let's just hope that we can get the policies right."The Jan. 11 monitoring report from the office of special education services--the first to be issued under the leadership of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos--outlines a series of IDEA violations by the state.In conversations with Texas parents and educators, federal officials heard conflicting reports about how children with dyslexia should be screened and served. Children who struggled in school were shifted to response-to-intervention programs that were supposed to meet their needs, but, once there, some languished for years, the monitoring report said.In other cases, the report said that districts sidestepped special education identification by providing services through Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 504 allows students to receive supports to access the general education curriculum, but it does not offer the same level of student rights and school responsibilities as the IDEA.All of those problems were tied to a Texas policy, now banned, that subjected school districts to additional state scrutiny if their special education enrollment rose above 8.5 percent. The state education department called the figure just a benchmark for districts, but many school officials treated it as a cap. The 8.5 percent figure came to light in 2016 through a series of investigative pieces published in the Houston Chronicle.In the wake of those news articles, the U.S. Department of Education embarked on a listening tour through Texas, solicited comments on its website, and interviewed Texas educators, culminating in the monitoring report.To fix the problem, Texas must now find and test students who may have qualified for special education but were not evaluated; provide guidance to districts about their responsibilities under the IDEA; and create a district monitoring plan. The federal office of special education programs indicated it would work with the state, still recovering from Hurricane Harvey, on an mutually agreeable timeline.State officials, who originally denied that the 8.5 percent benchmark had prevented any students from getting services, took a different tack, when the letter from the federal government was released.Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, directed the Texas Education Agency to create a corrective action plan within seven days."The past dereliction of duty on the part of many school districts to serve our students, and the failure of TEA to hold districts accountable, are worthy of criticism," Abbott said in a statement. "TEA must take steps now to significantly increase the oversight provided to ensure our special education students are receiving the services they deserve." In 2017, Abbott signed a law that would bar the state education agency from placing a cap or creating a benchmark on special education enrollment.Mike Morath, the state education commissioner, said in a statement: "I share Gov. Abbott's urgency to quickly address the issues identified in this federal monitoring report. More importantly, I share the governor's commitment to doing what's right for special education students in our public schools."Morath noted that his department has already increased the number of staff members who provide technical assistance and training to school districts."The corrective action plan called for by the governor will outline the specific steps TEA will take to address all the identified issues. Parent and special education advocacy group representatives will play an ongoing integral role in helping shape this plan, as well as all efforts of the agency in the years ahead," Morath said.The Houston Chronicle series said that the state created the 8.5 percent benchmark in 2004. That year, about 12 percent of the state's students were enrolled in special education. Nationally, the percentage stood at about 14 percent.Over the years, the special education enrollment in the state steadily dropped. Nationally, special education enrollment dipped a bit as well, but not at the same rate as in Texas. By 2014, special education students made 8.5 percent of the state's overall school enrollment, while nationally it was 13.5 percent.The articles in the Chronicle captured stories of children whose disabilities would automatically qualify them for special education services in other states. For example, a child with Down syndrome was initially denied special education services because he could read on grade level. Another child, who was born prematurely and was legally blind, was denied services because she could hold written materials close enough to her face to read.During its listening tour and interviews with school officials, the federal special education office captured other stories of special education denials.Federal officials were told, for example, that the state's "Dyslexia Handbook" said that children with difficulty reading must present an additional disabling condition before they could even be evaluated for special education services. This is a violation of the IDEA, which does not require a child to be suspected of multiple disabilities before a screening takes place.Texas' use of response to intervention was also called out in the monitoring report. RTI is an instructional framework that focuses on addressing problems early with students who show signs of academic weakness. Among its components are screening for academic trouble spots and targeted, research-based "interventions" of increasing intensity, based on a student's needs. The increasingly intensive interventions are generally known as "tiers."Many state educators said they thought a child had to go through every tier of an RTI process before they could be screened. In fact, the Education Department told states in 2011 that RTI can't be used to delay or deny a special education evaluation. Teachers also said they weren't clear about how much progress children should be making to move out of RTI.Dustin Rynders, the education director at Disability Rights Texas, discovered the special education enrollment target several years ago, when parents started complaining to his organization about the fact that they could not get services for their children."What I find most important is for the state to be reminded that you cannot ignore this population," Rynders said in an interview. The findings "have elevated a conversation around students with disabilities that I don't think we've ever had in our state."
'Serious weaknesses'

'Sitting ducks'

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission issued a stinging rebuke Sunday to Hawaii's emergency management as ripples from Saturday's nuclear scare spread far and wide.And the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency confirmed Sunday that some staff members have received death threats in the aftermath of the colossal blunder.Hawaii residents and tourists spent a terrifying 38 minutes Saturday thinking that an attack was imminent all because a state employee in a Diamond Head bunker clicked his mouse twice.The mistake shocked many in Hawaii and elsewhere and left them questioning the credibility of the government that they count on to protect them from geopolitical woes like heightened tensions with North Korea.President Donald Trump, state and federal lawmakers and agencies also are pushing for answers, which are slowly unfolding as investigations commence.So far, HI-EMA has reassigned the employee who made the mistake."He'll still come to work; he just won't be doing the same job," said Richard Rapoza, the agency's public information officer. "The reassignment was done pretty quickly. We know that he didn't do it on purpose and that he made a mistake."Rapoza said the agency also has implemented a new protocol that will require two people to send missile alerts."One person will make the selection off the menu, and a second person will respond to the 'Are you sure' confirmation," he said. "That confirmation message was there before, but it now requires two separate people."Rapoza said the department also has confirmed with the Federal Emergency Management Agency that it can use the agency's alert system to notify the public so that it "now has a process to immediately retract a false message if necessary."Rapoza said the department has now written a script for that purpose. HI-EMA also is conducting an internal review and plans to release an incident report by the end of the week, he said. The department also will brief state legislators Friday at 10 a.m. during a meeting that is open to the public.Rapoza said the agency already has briefed some members of Hawaii's congressional delegation and is cooperating with a Federal Communication Commission inquiry."I'm not sure what FCC's intention is, but we welcome any inquiry and we will cooperate," he said. "We know that we need to rebuild the public's trust, and transparency needs to be part of that. "FCC Chairman Ajit Pai issued a statement Sunday saying that the false emergency alert was "absolutely unacceptable" and "caused a wave of panic across the state -- worsened by the 38-minute delay before a correction alert was issued."About three minutes after an 8:05 a.m. alert went out, the head of the emergency management agency, Maj. Gen. Joe Logan, the state adjutant general, verified with U.S. Pacific Command that there was no launch and notified Honolulu police. Thirteen minutes after the erroneous text, HI-EMA finally posted to Facebook and Twitter that it was a false alarm, but it would take another 25 minutes for a correction text alert to go out at 8:45 a.m.Pai said the FCC's investigation into the incident is underway, and the investigators have been in close contact with federal and state officials, gathering the facts about how Hawaii's false alert was issued."Based on the information we have collected so far, it appears that the government of Hawaii did not have reasonable safeguards or process controls in place to prevent the transmission of a false alert," he said. "Moreover, false alerts undermine public confidence in the alerting system and thus reduce their effectiveness during real emergencies."Pai said steps must be taken to prevent a similar incident from happening again."Federal, state and local officials throughout the country need to work together to identify any vulnerabilities to false alerts and do what's necessary to fix them. We also must ensure that corrections are issued immediately in the event that a false alert does go out," he said.U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz said the incident "exposed serious weaknesses," which is why he's working closely with the FCC to investigate, identify vulnerabilities and develop solutions."This system failed miserably. We need to improve it and get it right," Schatz said.U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said she is addressing Hawaii's preparedness failure through the Armed Services Committee in Congress, but urged leaders not to stop there."What makes me particularly angry is that the people of Hawaii and this country live with the fear of a missile attack at all," Gabbard said in a statement. "I hope that leaders in Washington and the president truly understand the terror that Hawaii's families just went through and heed this wake-up call about the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war."Gabbard, who appeared Sunday on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," also urged Trump to immediately enter into direct talks with Kim Jong Un, without preconditions, to denuclearize North Korea.Ralph Cossa, president of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum, said the false threat made North Korea's posturing all too real. But Cossa doesn't think it will shape Kim Jong Un's game plan."The North Koreans are masters at trying to get us to pay them for the absence of bad behavior," Cossa said. "I think at a minimum they are probably amused, maybe even encouraged, but I don't think it makes a future attack any more likely. I continue to say that the probability is very, very low."Peter Tarlow, a Texas-based expert in tourism safety, said Hawaii "might get laughed at" but, barring any other black-swan events, will probably emerge stronger."I think this will morph into a major debate over missile defense -- that is separate from the state of Hawaii. I think you'll get more missile defense, which is what you need so that you aren't sitting ducks in the middle of the Pacific," said Tarlow, who served as safety consultant to the Olympics and helped Aruba's tourism industry recover from the disappearance and killing of U.S. teenager Natalee Holloway.While the state's tourism economy is fragile, Tarlow said it would take a cumulative effect to produce lasting dampening. The story made headlines around the globe, leading national and international newscasts. But by Monday, Tarlow said coverage likely will turn to why the nation celebrates the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and the next "stupid thing" Trump says.Still, Tarlow urged Hawaii to take inspiration from Israel, which has booming tourism despite conflict."They don't have a 15-minute warning; they have about a minute and a half," Tarlow said. "What Hawaii just experienced is what it's like for Israelis every day. But they have a great missile defense system, and every home and building, including hotels, has a bomb shelter. If there's a problem, people know what to do."That wasn't the case Saturday for many of Hawaii's 1.4 million or so residents. The event also affected Hawaii's tourists, who on any given day comprise 240,000 statewide, with some 100,000 on Oahu. While some managed to miss the morning event entirely, there were plenty of anxiety and inconvenience to go around.Gov. David Ige issued an apology to Hawaii residents and visitors Sunday. Ige's spokeswoman, Cindy McMillan, said he spent much of the day working with his team to ensure that this unfortunate situation doesn't happen again. He will provide an update to the public today, she said."As a state government, we must learn from this unfortunate error and continue to prepare for any safety threat to Hawaii's residents and visitors -- whether it is a man-made threat or a natural disaster such as a hurricane or tsunami," Ige's statement said. "We must also do what we can to demand peace and a de-escalation of tensions with North Korea."
President Donald Trump's frequent visits to South Florida make the area a high-risk target for terrorism, one that justifies more money from the federal government, Palm Beach County's top law enforcement agency says.The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office is pushing for the federal government to boost its funding for terrorism prevention by designating Mar-a-Lago _ Trump's private club _ a "high-risk critical asset," according to a memo obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel."Having the president governing from our county in an area bordered on water on each side in a facility never built to offer the level of protection the president requires is a challenge," Palm Beach County Commissioner Dave Kerner said. "We have to continue to supplement our local response."Trump is making his 12th visit to Mar-a-Lago this weekend since becoming president.In South Florida, anti-terrorism grants have been used to purchase automated license plate readers, cameras, mobile command centers, night-vision goggles, rescue boats and other specialized equipment.When the federal government awards anti-terrorism funds, one factor officials examine is the presence of symbolic targets and landmarks. The money is distributed through the Department of Homeland Security's Urban Area Security Initiative.Homeland Security gave $580 million in Urban Area Security Initiative funds in the 2017 budget year, including about $5.2 million for South Florida. New York City received the largest grant at $178 million.Funding decisions have been controversial.Orlando _ the site of the Pulse shooting _ hasn't received anti-terrorism funds through the Urban Area Security Initiative since 2014. Las Vegas leaders argued after the mass shooting there that Homeland Security undervalued their threat risk, leading to insufficient funding.The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office has been the lead agency supporting the U.S. Secret Service in protecting Trump's estate since Trump was elected.More than 1,300 employees have worked over 40,000 hours protecting Trump during his visits, an expense that has exceeded $3 million, according to the sheriff's office. Ultimately, the county received reimbursement for those expenses in a special appropriation through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.But sheriff's officials say additional Homeland Security funding could help offset future costs. They asked for the high-risk designation in an application to receive reimbursement for overtime costs associated with protecting the president.While anti-terrorism grants could help keep Mar-a-Lago safe, Trump's proposed budget calls for cutting the Urban Area Security Initiative program by 25 percent.The budget prioritizes building a border wall and hiring 500 more Border Patrol agents.
The Washington State Department of Licensing will no longer release personal information to federal immigration authorities without a court order unless required by law, the agency announced Monday.The move is among a series of changes the agency is making in response to outrage over its policy of providing photos and driver's-license applications to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- information that can be used to help arrest and deport people.The Seattle Times first reported the agency's practiceThursday, revealing that DOL was handing over personal information to federal authorities 20 to 30 times a month. The policy was surprising to many, given that Washington is among a minority of states to allow undocumented immigrants to get driver's licenses.In another major shift announced in a news release Monday, DOL said it would use emergency rule-making to end its practice of collecting "information that isn't mandated and could be misused," specifically information on license applications about where a person was born.The release did not say whether the application would continue to note the IDs a person used to obtain a license. Those IDs could include a foreign passport or other documents that might signal someone does not have legal status.The agency also has accepted the resignation of Deputy Director Jeff DeVere. DeVere oversaw compliance with an executive order that Gov. Jay Inslee signed last year, designed to prevent state employees from helping federal officials enforce immigration laws -- an attempt to thwart President Donald Trump's approach to immigration enforcement.Until questioned by The Seattle Times last week, Inslee's office didn't know the extent of DOL's cooperation with the feds, according to his spokeswoman, Jaime Smith.The response to the licensing department's policy of cooperating with ICE was swift and furious. The governor ordered DOL to direct future requests from federal immigration officers to his general counsel. State lawmakers pledged to file a bill to ensure the practice was stopped.Monday's announcement from the department included an apology, and made clear that the offices of the governor and Attorney General Bob Ferguson had a hand in the changes."We support the Executive Order, but failed to meet the Governor's intent regarding the protection of this type of information," DOL Director Pat Kohler said in the news release. "We are sorry that our work did not align with our state's values."She went on to say DOL "did not clearly communicate" the information federal law enforcement was requesting nor seek clarification with the governor's office and the Legislature about how to handle those requests.The agency also announced it would review its processes and computer systems with the governor's and attorney general's offices; hire a community liaison to ensure DOL practices "meet the needs of all Washington residents"; start a new hotline to answer questions about the issue; and educate agency staff on all policy and procedural changes and the governor's executive order."The recent revelations about our state Department of Licensing's failure to safeguard certain information from federal immigration officials has shaken and angered many communities" Inslee said in statement Monday. "It has angered me."He offered no further explanation for why he did not understand what DOL was doing despite his office being briefed on the department's practices after his executive order.His spokeswoman has said those conversations were not detailed enough.Smith added the governor's office is now checking with other state agencies to make sure there are no similar problems."I understand what's at stake in getting this right, and the ramifications of what it means when we get it wrong," the governor said. "I expect every employee in every one of my state agencies to understand this as well."
In an average winter, Kentuckys Department of Transportation spends between $45 million and $75 million on road salting and snow removal. But during the harsh winter of 2014-15, the states spending exceeded projections, putting it one storm away from exhausting its entire snow removal budget. One factor contributing to the excessive costs were inefficiencies in how the department used its plows and spread anti-icing agents.To fix the problem, the department turned to big data, analytics and edge computing. Using sensors in roads and on snowplows, as well as data from the popular driving app, Waze, along with information from weather reports and Twitter, staff and road crews developed a more precise and better-managed process for snow removal.That process included algorithms that analyzed in how fast cars traveled over roads, the number of vehicles on a road at a given time and other factors, such as temperature, wind speed and cloud cover. As a result, the department was able to use anti-icing and plowing schedules more precisely, which resulted in less waste and saved the department from 5 to 10 percent on snow and ice removal.Every 60 seconds, more than 80,000 records of information are fed into the departments computers, where engineers are able to deal with snow on roads more efficiently and in real time.These advances are part of a broad trend where analytics, machine learning and edge computing are starting to benefit government agencies in ways not seen before, according to Dave Shuman, industry leader for IoT and manufacturing at Cloudera, the analytics firm that developed Kentuckys snow removal program. Theres been a big focus on using algorithms for machine learning in advanced analytics, he said. The tipping point occurs when you have lots of data and want to apply lots of compute to the problem.Besides snow removal, versions of these kinds of data rich, analytical IoT solutions are popping up in a number of government functions, from the use of ankle monitors to improve prisoner and parolee rehabilitation and reduce recidivism, to body and dashboard cameras that improve law enforcement forensics to a host of infrastructure applications that include parking, lighting, traffic, transit and even garbage removal.A big reason this kind of robust, data-driven solution has become more popular is the maturation of edge computing. The consulting firm McKinsey projects IoT devices to reach 30 billion units by 2020 and government adoption to outgrow that of the private sector by 2019. While many of the sensors will simply gather data, they are also enhancing the ability for computing  and decision-making  to take place in cars, trucks, buildings and other government infrastructure, rather than back at a central IT location or in the cloud.Processing data at the edge allows for low-level latency on your decision-making processes, said Shuman. So, you are able to have devices that have enough intelligence, compute capacity and models to make the decisions that need to be made.Every day, more examples of edge computing emerge, from building elevators that know to stop and lock their doors open if theres an earthquake, to water valves that can shut down if theres a leak somewhere. Snapchat, the popular smartphone app, is another example of edge computing that crunches petabytes of data to create funny images of a persons face. More significantly, autonomous vehicles operate with edge computing in order to make split-second decisions on how to steer through an urban environment.In recent years, edge computing has generated significant attention. Gartner , the IT research company, believes edge computing will bring value where localized computing power is necessary. As IoT decentralizes an organizations computing infrastructure, edge computing will become an advantage over cloud or centralized computing.But state and local government IT executives arent ready to embrace the trend quite yet, certainly not going as far as to say edge will replace the cloud. Former Boston CIO Jascha Franklin-Hodge thinks edge computing is a bit overrated. What cloud infrastructure has taught us over the last 10 years is that centralized, high-efficiency computing infrastructure in most use cases is going to outperform distributed, lower-efficiency systems in price, performance, scalability, resiliency and all the other things we value, he told Government Technology Rather than viewing edge computing as an either/or choice, Shuman believes a hybrid approach will prevail, thanks partly to the vast amount of legacy technology that still operates in the public sector. While there are certain things where it makes sense to take advantage of edge compute analytics, other things will need to apply more significant context to make the right decisions, he said.The type of hybrid combinations Shuman sees unfolding are platforms where sensors are combined to drive CRM, ERP and supply chain systems in government agencies.Still, government CIOs and agency heads need to conduct due diligence before embarking on these kinds of data-driven, analytical processes. Shuman warns about the possibility of built-in biases in computer models meant to solve a problem. We have to be sure there is an open and transparent method to it, he said. Because governments rely not just on their own data, but what comes from data brokers, they have to watch out for the introduction of new biases that could affect outcomes negatively.Its less about getting data and more about what you are going to do with it, he said. To do that at scale, you have going to see more machine learning, advanced analytics and combinations of data driving these new cases forward.
(TNS)  BLUEFIELD  A Mercer County city is hoping to become part of a federal program thats addressing a new challenge: How to regulate the thousands of drones flying into the nations skies.The city of Bluefield is applying to join a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) program thats designed to help the agency learn how to regulate the many drones now being used across the nation. This program is known as the UASIPP, according to Brandon Saddler, a geographic information system (GIS) analyst for the city of Bluefield.The UASIPP stands for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program. Its an opportunity, for state, local and tribal governments to partner with private companies such as UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) operators and manufacturers to accelerate safe UAS integration, Saddler said. In this program, its kind of a divide and conquer method for the FAA. Theyve been hit with thousands of drones trying to get into airspace, and the problem they run into is resources and whats the best methods. Kind of using this application process, and each individual application is a case study.Bluefield and the surrounding area would be a good place to test the ways drones could be used, he said.I think we have a good chance because we have a 4,000-foot mountain on one side, we have the airport on the other side, our city lies in a valley and you can go from kind of an urban setting to a rural setting very quickly. We have a fair amount of traffic, private traffic, out of our airport. It will open up other doors, Saddler stated. One of the ideas we have going right now is like a large drone system that would ship goods say like FedEx parcels. Not on the level of Amazon where it would deliver to your door necessarily, but this would be more like bulk shipping. This would be large UAS flying between Beckley and Princeton because right now everything has to be trucked from Beckley to Princeton.These unpiloted aircraft would not be the small models commonly associated with drones.These are big drones, he said. Were talking about drones that have a 300-pound payload. Theyre fixed wing, kind of like a military drone; instead of delivering munitions, theyre carrying parcels. Thats kind of what I see in one of my visions and it would help with truck traffic on the turnpike.Under the UASIPP program, the city has a memorandum of understanding with the Center of Applied Research and Technology, a nonprofit entity housed at Bluefield State College. The FAA has a team reviewing the programs applications, and Bluefield could get a reply this spring, Saddler said.But plans are being made for drone projects the city can do if its application is approved. Saddler pointed out a map on his office wall. It outlined five possible flight zones including ones around the city, the Mercer County Airport, the area around local reservoirs, highway interchanges and the Bluefield Industrial Park. This map will later be available on the citys website.These are five airspaces Ive came up with (map on the wall). I thought if we had five airspaces instead of one large one, we might get into a give and take with the FAA, Saddler stated. We might be able to get the Core, which would be the main city. Maybe not the airport. Maybe the Reservoir, the Interchange and so on. This is where the R & D, the research and development flight areas would be.And would turn the Bluefield area into a drone research airspace. We will be partnering with CART, and well have another partner on the data processing, Vector Geo Analytics LLC. Theyre based out of Peterstown, he said.Drone exercises around the city could include LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging.) Its not a new technology, but it would be new to the Mercer County area. A larger drone would carry a LIDAR system and use it for scanning.It shoots a laser, and you get a point cloud. Each has a latitude, longitude, and an elevation associated with it, Saddler said. And when you put all of those together, you end up with 3D terrain. Its very accurate. You can use it to detect cracks in pavement, subsidence in roads where there are dips that are getting underwashed. And you can use it for 3D buildings.Part of the projects the city would want to do include sending alerts from the county airport which would tell pilots when drones are in their vicinity. Local drones wouldnt be flown very high.We are flying at or less 400 feet AGL: AGL is Above Ground Level, so 400 feet. Around here, you really dont need to get much higher than that because the higher up you go, the more degraded your data is, Saddler said. As far as operations we want to advance to BVS (Beyond Visual Sight) which Ive applied for the city....Ive already tested and Im a license commercial drone pilot.Saddler said he also wants the program to qualify for night operations, but another restriction to overcome is a prohibition against flying over people.The hardest one to do, and its the hardest one to apply for, and thats advancing to operations over human beings. You cannot fly drones over human beings unless you can prove to the FAA that your drone will not incur injury on a person should it fall out of the sky, which involves crashing drones, and I really dont want to use mine for that, he said.Bluefield wont become a place where drones can fly without restrictions. The city now has reporting system on the Fix It Bluefield website. Called Drone Incident Reporting Module, citizens can use it to report drone problems. These reports are sent to Saddler and Police Chief Dennis Dillow. Saddler recalled a recent instance when a drone crashed near a car going down Route 460. A driver retrieved the drone.Stuff like that needs to be reported, because if that had hit a car or someone on a motorcycle, it could have caused an accident, Saddler said.This is more a research and development program. If powerful enough sensors can be obtained, drones could perform tasks such as searching for cars and debris that have sunk into local reservoirs. Other exercises could be performed near the city.Most of our works going to be in what we call the Core Airspace. Thats where most of the population is, he stated. Weve included the city park. As far as missions go, theres a couple of mock training missions that we want to do with first responders. One of the sections were applying for is search and rescue. On the property that the city has on the north side, Im planning to do a mock search and rescue there because its heavily wooded and its not too far away where first responders couldnt leave and respond to a call. That was my main concern.Another mission I want to do is roof inspection; instead of sending a person onto the roof of one of the city-owned buildings, like the (Research and Development) Building in Bland Street, we can use a drone. Instead of sending guys out on the roof, I can shoot the whole roof in 4K and come back and look at it, and if you find anything then you send somebody up to look at it, Saddler added.City Manager Dane Rideout said drone technology has been exploding since the 1990s. Applying to the FAA program could help the city establish itself as a place utilizing such systems. The hope that having such technology in use could entice technology businesses into the city.The key piece is that a lot of folks are applying for it, Rideout said of the FAA program. Weve actually made an application and were putting our best foot forward.Another asset is the citys relationship with Bluefield State College, which has one of the best robotics programs in the world if not the nation, he added.Were going to do everything we can to be a pilot city in the program, and hopefully that will lead to technology-based companies establishing residence inside the city limits, Rideout said.
New Jersey Chief Technology Officer Dave Weinstein, who became the states first-ever CTO in June 2016 by Gov. Chris Christie, confirmed that Jan. 15 will be his last day in the position, as a new administration prepares to take office.Incoming Gov. Phil Murphy is due to take his oath of office on Jan. 16 at a ceremony in Trenton, N.J., and Weinstein and many other administration officials will likely be departing.In an email, Christies Press Secretary Brian Murray said the outgoing governors term ends at 11:59 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Jan. 16 and unless specifically retained by the incoming governor, all department heads and senior staff will leave effective that date and time.The hiring process for the states second CTO is unclear, but Weinstein said in an interview that the Office of Information Technologys (OIT) No. 2 official, Chief Operating Officer Odysseus Marcopolus, will stay on until he is replaced by the incoming administration.As for Weinstein, he said he will take at least two weeks off, but declined to reveal his next move yet. Asked whether he will remain in public service, Weinstein  who is coming off about eight years in the public sector  indicated that he will be taking a break from government.Weinstein, who was 28 when appointed CTO, came to OIT from the state Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, where he had been its chief information security officer and chief cybersecurity director. Previously, he had worked in the Defense Departments U.S. Cyber Command center.The CTO said he is proudest of the progress the state made as a result of implementing Executive Order No. 225 , which began the process of centralizing state IT.The order directed Weinstein to decentralize unique executive branch software and work with more than 70 state agencies to inventory computer, storage, network and data center assets to identify opportunities for centralizing common IT functions and operations.IT officials conducted an inventory of hardware and created a roster of all staff tasked with IT infrastructure functions and operations within 30 days. Agency heads submitted lists of legacy applications that needed modernizing within 60 days and created proposals for updating or decommissioning them within 180 days.And Weinstein himself submitted plans to Christie within 180 days documenting his strategy for consolidating IT infrastructure assets and functions.There was definitely a strong need to adapt to some major technological trends that are happening in the marketplace. I think both internally and across the executive branch, we made great strides in that respect, Weinstein said, adding that hes also proud this was not something that occurred just within my office but that demanded the contribution of all executive branch agencies.Doing so, the CTO said, disrupted the culture a little bit, in a positive way, of course, and really positioned the state as an enterprise for the future.His time at the U.S. Cyber Command prepared him well, Weinstein said, for working with a degree of daily ambiguity, and during his time as CTO he worked to flatten the organization, reward communication and break down the barriers inhibiting it.Just gathering data and information about the current state was critical to overcoming some of these hurdles. Governments default setting is often one of stasis and there are a number of natural bureaucratic barriers to change. What we did, particularly over the last year, was aggressively and vigorously challenge the status quo and reject the justification that we should do something because its always been done, Weinstein said.In that respect, I think we turned a major corner not only in our operations but in the culture of day-to-day IT in New Jersey, he added.Doing so has absolutely improved cybersecurity by standardizing platforms the state uses and performing robust and comprehensive asset management, Weinstein said, noting that it should continue to yield operational efficiencies.These cost savings will not be realized overnight, but by decommissioning unnecessary data centers, standardizing infrastructure platforms and automating functions that are performed by a rapidly attriting workforce, Im confident that the state will realize significant economies of scale over the next several years, he said.Dozens of data centers exist across the executive branch, along with hundreds of applications, some portable and others not. Many could be decommissioned or modernized, respectively, depending upon the Murphy administrations goals, Weinstein said.From roughly June 2016 to June 2017, New Jersey invested $10 million to improve its cyberdefenses and reduce any risk to IT. Weinstein described the OIT he will leave as currently in lockstep with the states risk management approach as it relates to cybersecurity, and expressed confidence in the incoming administrations perspective on IT modernization and cybersecurity.He spoke positively of the degree to which the Murphy administration has prioritized IT and innovation as policy issues and noted that its committee on technology and innovation was one of the most active and productive.Although they have not yet appointed a successor, Im encouraged by the dialog that has taken place and the degree to which theres a general understanding that this is an issue that transcends politics, Weinstein said.
Pirelli has defended its decision to expand its range of tyre compounds for 2018.

The number of compounds for the coming season has blown out to seven, with the introduction of the 'superhard' and the 'hypersoft' options.

One criticism is that fans struggling to understand F1 now have an even tougher task.

"You cannot always please everyone," Pirelli F1 boss Mario Isola told Auto Motor und Sport.

"But it surprised me that it made such big waves. Our task now is to explain to people that it does not complicate things.

"There are still three compounds per weekend, and if you take the superhard out, you only have to remember six colours. That's not rocket science," he said.

However, Isola admitted that Pirelli had considered trying to simplify the colouring system amid the criticism.

"We considered saying there is only a hard, medium and soft each weekend and then using the same three colours for all races," he revealed.

"But in my opinion that is not the right message. In formula one there are always different aero packages, cooling systems, setups and so on, which is part of the sport."

(GMM)
My answer is let people come into the United States, but the USA doesn't give anything to these people, nor offer anything except protection from harm. Poor *** Hispanic foreigners are not taking away jobs that the vast majority of Americans will do. I don't want to pick fruit, make beds in a motel, be a head knocker in a slaughterhouse or whatever else there is for people to do.



The Federal government needs to quit giving people everything for nothing. Do away with the welfare state. Allow businesses and people to simply hire whomever they want and agree with the worker what the pay will be instead of a minimum wage being imposed. Do away with Social Security which basically requires people to ask the government to allow them to take a job. Cut government down to the bone and return government to what it should do instead of playing Santa Claus. States like California and the urban, liberal cities are playing Santa Claus with these people giving them everything, which they cannot afford. Honestly, these fast food workers who are clammorimg for $15 an hour have a point, it takes $15 an hour to survive since the prices of rent are so high because of the influx of people and the taxes having to be paid so that Big Government can care for the "illegals", and so the Democratic Party can get new voters.



The guy of Mexican origin who has been in the USA for thirty years since he was a kid and being deported is a travesty. The guy has no criminal record, had a job and somehow paid taxes (did he have a social security number?). Did he somehow take some job away from an American? Oh, I am sorry, you are not a member of this country, you have to go. Isn't that sort of ridiculous? Why can't people live where they want? I don't get that.



Every Americans, outside the so called "Native Americans" came from somewhere else (and it can be argued that even Native Americans came from Asia so.....), the blacks wee mostly all sent here involuntarily to pick the cotton of some lazy *** landowners (which had what better things to do in 1750, what, get drunk and screw the house maid?) White people came here from somewhere else. Our ancestors got on boats and here we are. Bob Hope was a foreigner who came here as a child, but he never got **** or pursued by ICE or immigration. But if you look like Cheech and Chong or Pablo Fuentes, watch out, especially being chased by cops with ethnic names like Arpiao. Really?



My wife is a Chinese citizen and would like for her to live with me in the United States and shouldn't have to go through all the ******** hoops to make it happen. Look at all the inner city trash we have now. America should deport all the worthless eaters and succubuses and send them somewhere else, because that makes about as much sense.



This has been Paul Harvey, good day.
GREENSBORO  The hundreds of people who gathered on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on Monday to watch a parade honoring the streets namesake never thought their day would end in bloodshed.

High school bands marched past crowds.

Parents cried watching their children perform.

Young girls talked about how King fought against hate.

And in keeping with the famed civil rights leaders message, a woman opened up her home to strangers offering them food after the parade ended.

Witnesses said 40 minutes later  and only three minutes after police left the area  they heard a series of shots reverberate throughout the neighborhood and ruin what shouldve been a day of celebration.

Those shots wounded a 13-year-old boy, who was rushed to Moses Cone Hospital where he is in critical condition and undergoing surgery.

Greensboro Police Chief Wayne Scott, who came to the crime scene, said officers have no reason to believe the shooting was connected to the parade.

Still, in some ways it was hard not to relate the contradiction of the two events.

According to police, witnesses either offered little cooperation to investigators or gave them nothing of substance to help them determine a motive.

They said, Gunfire broke out and we all started running, Sgt. Matt Menshew said.

A mother and daughter, who asked not to be identified, planned to leave after the parade.

Then they heard about the woman offering free food.

I wanted to get me something to eat, the daughter said.

So the women went inside the apartment, located in the 1000 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, leaving another daughter sitting in the backseat.

On the way inside the women walked past the 13-year-old boy.

Inside the apartment, they heard two loud pops.

It was pow, pow, the daughter said.

Then she heard two more shots and realized it was gunfire.

I fell to the ground, the daughter said.

When the shots stopped, the women ran to the car and found the other daughter on the floor shaking in fear.

A bullet had torn into the hood of their car.

They wondered if the daughter in the car had been hit by a bullet, too.

Then she sat up.

Its ignorant, said the daughter who went to the womans apartment. Why on MLK Day on his street? People need to grow up.

And that was the conversation that filled the street Monday afternoon. It was a question that was repeated often: How can a 13-year-old boy be shot just moments after the celebration of a man who stood against hate?
GREENSBORO  A panel of federal judges denied a plea Tuesday from leading Republican legislators seeking to delay a recent order requiring the General Assembly to redraw North Carolinas congressional districts by Jan. 24.

The requirement stems from the panels finding last week that congressional districts the GOP-led legislature drew in 2016 stemmed from unconstitutional, partisan gerrymandering that went too far in tipping the scales toward Republican candidates.

The legislative defendants wanted the panel to put the Jan. 24 deadline on hold while they pursue an appeal.

But the three-judge panel said in its latest order that lawyers for GOP leaders had not made a convincing case they would win the appeal of last weeks ruling in the lawsuit filed by Common Cause North Carolina, the N.C. League of Womens Voters, the state Democratic Party and others.

The public interest strongly weighs against staying this courts order, the judges wrote.

The lawsuit is one of several pending in the Greensboro-based U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina that deals with various aspects of redistricting. Another prominent redistricting case addresses the alleged racial gerrymandering of state House and Senate districts.

Current and former legislators named in the congressional redistricting lawsuit include state Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Eden), state House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Kings Mountain), state Rep. David Lewis (R-Dunn) and former Republican senator Robert Rucho of Matthews.

They have appealed last weeks order in the congressional redistricting lawsuit to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the high court to overturn that decision and allow the states current, 13 congressional districts to remain intact.

As part of that appeal, they also have asked the Supreme Court separately to stay the three-judge panels order to redraw those congressional districts until the appeal has been decided.

The U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the separate motion to stay the Jan. 24 deadline. The high court has directed Common Cause, the plaintiffs and state government to file a response to the legislators stay request by noon today.

The three judges who make up the local panel in the congressional redistricting lawsuit include U.S. District judges Earl Britt of Raleigh, William Osteen Jr. of Greensboro and Judge James Wynn Jr. of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The judges noted that the legislatures original 2011 congressional map also was found unconstitutional after it had been in use for two election cycles, meaning that North Carolina voters have not cast ballots in a properly designed electoral format this decade.

That plaintiffs and other North Carolina voters cast their ballots under an unconstitutional congressional plan in 2012, 2014 and 2016 only enhances the potential prejudice to the plaintiffs associated with staying these proceedings, Wynn, Osteen and Britt said in their unanimous order.
A representative for Roberta Flack has announced that the legendary musician has ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrigs disease, and can no longer sing. Flacks manager Suzanne Koga said in a release Monday that the progressive disease has made it impossible to sing and not easy to speak" but will not silence this icon. The announcement of the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis diagnosis comes just ahead of the premiere of Roberta, a feature-length documentary debuting Thursday at the DOCNYC film festival. The release says that the 85-year-old Killing Me Softly With His Song singer plans to stay active in her musical and creative pursuits.
(I've updated this blog post below.)

While I was up in Rockingham County on Friday learning about UNCGs plans to widen its transfer pipeline, the N&Os Jane Stancill was talking with Hector Rivera Suarez, a senior at Guilford College who finds himself smack dab in the middle of the nations immigration debate.

Rivera Suarez is a DACA recipient who, because of a postal error and the usual sluggishness of bureaucracy, finds himself in limbo. His DACA status expires Sunday, and that opens up a whole range of possibilities, none of them good.

The N&O story (here and here) covers the basics. I talked to Rivera Suarez this morning on the phone to find out a little more.

Rivera Suarez came to Guilford College in 2015 on a full scholarship after graduating from The Middle College at GTCC-High Point with both a high school diploma and an associate's degree. At Guilford, he's a Bonner Scholar, one of the college's top honors, and he's on track to graduate in May. This short feature on the college's website tells of some of his volunteer work.

Rivera Suarez, now 20, got DACA status right after his 16th birthday. DACA protection lasts just two years, so he got an extension at age 18. Last summer, he didn't apply for a second extension right away. There were rumors that the Trump administration would kill off the program entirely and immediately, and there was no sense in wasting $495 if no one was going to look at his application. ("That sort of money doesn't come very easily when you're in college," he said.)

In September, the White House announced that it would wind down the program. The feds wouldnt consider new applications, but it would let current DACA recipients apply for a final two-year extension. Two days after the word came down, Rivera Suarez sent off his money and his application.

One problem: His form (and lots of others) got held up in Chicago and didnt make it to D.C. by the Oct. 5 deadline. The feds were unwavering. Rivera Suarez would lose DACA protection Jan. 21. There would be no final extension.

A month later, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reversed itself and said it would consider DACA renewals delayed by these processing problems. But the feds will need three to six months to review Rivera Suarez's application. That leaves him without DACA protection after Sunday until the bureaucracy runs its course.

His next four months on campus promise to be complicated. On Monday, in his personal post-DACA world, Rivera Suarez will lose his driver's license. He says classmates have offered him rides to and from his apartment, which is about a mile from campus. But hes not sure how hes going to get to the Doris Henderson Newcomers School, where he volunteers a couple of times a week. (As a Bonner Scholar, Rivera Suarez commits to 140 hours of community service during the academic year. "I love it," he said. "The kids are from all over the world. Seeing how fast they improve their language skills was an amazing thing to see.")

Without DACA, Suarez can't work legally. Thats not a problem right now because he doesn't have a paying job. But it could be an issue after graduation if his DACA renewal is still sitting on someones desk.

Even worse, Rivera Suarez could be deported. The chance is remote, he said. "We've been told we're not a priority for deportation because the government has all of our information," he told me. (DACA recipients are fingerprinted and photographed and undergo a criminal background check initially and each time they renew.) But the possibility exists, and its one more thing that weighs on him.

Rivera Suarez's staying busy and fighting back. He went to D.C. last Wednesday to lobby congressional reps with other young adults in similar predicaments. (The trip was organized by FWD.us, a tech industry group that supports immigration reform.) "One of our biggest goals was to share the urgency of doing something about DACA," he told me.

In D.C., Rivera Suarez found himself before C-SPAN cameras at a House Democratic press conference on immigration. (You can watch the whole thing here; Rivera Suarez speaks at the 15-minute mark.) He was quoted in the New York Times.

He plans to return to D.C. on Tuesday. This time, he'll be with Guilford's president, Jane Fernandes, who wrote about Rivera Suarez on her blog last week, and other members of the Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. (Fernandes is one of the founding members of this new group.)

Rivera Suarez said extending DACA indefinitely is better than nothing. (That's essentially what the feds announced Saturday in response to a court order.) Better than that would be a process that leads to permanent residency. Best would be a path to citizenship.

"For a lot of us, this is the country we grew up in," Rivera Suarez said. "We just don't have that legal status."

For more reading on DACA:

 This Vox-splainer from September will bring you up to to speed on the policy debate.
REIDSVILLE  In song, food and fellowship, the Reidsville Chamber of Commerce, Reidsville Branch NAACP and Reidsville Human Relations Commission paid homage to one of the nations greatest civil rights leaders on Jan. 15.

Marking its 20th year, the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Unity Breakfast brought out the community in droves to Zion Baptist Church, among them dignitaries from across the county including city council members, county commissioners, school board officials, the superintendent, the sheriff and others.

Author, radio host and Rockingham County Public Information Officer Mable Scott delivered keynote remarks in rhymes, recounting her experience growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was shot in 1968.

We lived not too far from the Lorraine Motel, she said. After the April 4 murder, I felt like going in a shell. The National Guard took over Memphis and put us on curfew. Dusk to dawn, indoors, nervous, not knowing what to do.

For most of her adolescence, she recalls being sheltered from racism, but her naivety was lost when she went to college and saw her apartment door decorated with the KKK cross.

I heard about racism through the grapevine, through a melancholic bird, she said. Beatings, burnings, tar featherings, strange fruit of the South were never discussed by my folks in our house.

At that time, segregation was still in effect, forcing black people to sit at the back of the bus or in the balcony of the theater.

We only went in bathrooms marked with a colored sign, so we learned to do reading early, she said. There was no crossing that line.

In her remarks, Scott called for people to follow Kings lead and to work to make a difference.

The ball is in your court. No time to stew. The ball is in your court. Its time to do, she said. Dr. King said fly, run, walk, crawl. King's plea to move is for us all.

As is annual tradition, each of the MLK Unity Committee groups presented memorial awards to local leaders and community members.

The Chamber awarded the James W. Daniel Memorial Unity Award to Chamber President Diane Sawyer  to her surprise.

As it came time to announce the award, Sawyers family poured out of a backroom and into the room to watch the presentation.

The definition of unity: the state of being united or joined as a whole, said Robbie Citty III. Well this years James W. Daniel Memorial Award recipient does just that. Involved in many ongoing projects and groups, she stays true to important issues based on the community.

The Human Relations Commission awarded the Rev. Eddie C. Hughes Memorial Award to Melissa Galloway, director of the Home of Refuge Outreach.

Rev. Hughes was a person that was really involved in the community and service for everyone, and we have such an individual here today who has been in service to the community, said Cathy Badgett.

The NAACP awarded the J. Arthur Griggs Civil Rights Memorial Award to Ashton Tom McLaurin.

J. Arthur Griggs Civil Rights Memorial Award is given to a person for accomplishments in the area of civil rights in our community, said Jacey Bell. This years recipient fits the history of the devotion to the cause of civil rights established by previous recipients.

His family accepted the award on his behalf.

Linda Bass presented the two Julius J. Gwyn Memorial Youth Awards to Zion Wade and Jade Ford.

Proceeds from the event go to support a scholarship fund for Reidsville High School students to attend Rockingham Community College.

To date, the event has raised about $19,000 for the fund.
U.S. Rep. Mark Walker wrote a very good op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal today, although he took one ill-advised turn.

No, it wasn't on a Bridge to Nowhere. Rather, it was a sarcastic reference to Russian vodka that steered him in the wrong direction.

Vodka wasn't the Guilford County Republican's topic.

It was earmarks, the practice by which congressmen grab pots of money for pet projects in their home districts. It was abandoned in 2011, but last week President Trump inexplicably suggested reviving it.

While not criticizing his president, Walker expresses alarm:

"This bad idea is gaining traction partly because most House Republicans took their seats after the 2011 ban. They have little memory of past abuses like Alaskas 'Bridge to Nowhere.' They never had to endure the meetings where lobbyists pressured them to grovel before the Appropriations Committee for pork. The moniker 'cardinals' for subcommittee chairmen is an anachronism; they no longer have unilateral powers to redirect billions in spending on a whim.

"When earmarks were allowed and encouraged, bills passed on shady favors and chumminess rather than on their merits. This practice helped produce what we now call the swamp. It wasnt so long ago that the GOP used a platform of banning earmarks and controlling spending to help ride a major political wave and take control of the House. This message was a precursor to President Trumps promise to 'drain the swamp' and end a status quo that benefits Washington insiders over ordinary Americans."

Returning to those ways could cost Republicans their congressional majorities, Walker warns, leaving this frightening thought:

"But if the political backlash helps Democrats take the House, the legislative agenda will consist simply of impeaching Mr. Trump for whatever the latest controversy is. Democrats likely will abuse the power of Congress to ramp up the Russia investigation and subpoena anyone who ever drank Russian vodka. (For the record, Id be safe.)"

I don't like vodka, either, but I have a stronger distaste for Russia's government and its attempt to sway our 2016 president election. I'm beyond disappointed that Walker thinks that ramping up the Russia investigation might lead to hounding "anyone who ever drank Russian vodka."

Frankly, it's not funny that House Republicans are trying to tamp down the Russia investigation, apparently hoping it all goes away lest it further upset their Moscow-friendly president.

Fortunately, Senate Republicans take this matter more seriously. In the absence of any meaningful attempt by the Trump administration to strengthen American election security, GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida (with Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland) today introduced what they call the Defending Elections from Threats by Establishing Redlines Act.

Among other actions, they wrote today in The Washington Post, "The Deter Act also spells out actions that would elicit retaliation. A foreign power cannot purchase advertisements to influence an election, including online ads, or use social and traditional media  such as the thousands of trolls and botnets deployed by the Kremlin  to spread significant amounts of false information to Americans. They also cannot hack, leak or modify election and campaign infrastructure, including voter registration databases and campaign emails. Finally, no foreign power can block or otherwise hinder access to elections infrastructure, such as websites providing information on polling locations."

The bill requires tough sanctions for violations. In the specific case of Russia, since Moscow already has done all of these things once, further transgressions would trigger even stricter penalties:

"Our bill would require the administration to impose sanctions on major sectors of the Russian economy, including finance, energy, defense, metals and mining. It would also block the assets of every senior Russian political figure or oligarch and prevent them from entering the United States."

Those actions are necessary, Rubio and Van Hollen write, because "Russia used social media channels to influence and mislead voters. It also hacked political campaign committees and local elections boards in a brazen attempt to undermine and subvert our elections."

They say nothing about anyone drinking vodka. They're talking about subverting our elections, our democratic system of government  not pickling livers.

I hope Walker succeeds in preventing a return to corrupt pork-barrel practices. But he'll do even more for our country if he works to keep the Russians out of future American elections. He should vote for this bill after it passes the Senate and moves to the House.
I wish him well, but I don't think he has a chance. Besides he doesn't have any experience in government. What would he bring to the table? Probably of nothing else, this will give him the name recognition that he has been wanting.



The last several years, people have stopped caring about him, and this is a way for him to get his spotlight back. I think he is better off getting psychological treatment for his mental illness but that's for him to figure out.
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When Isabel Ballesteros took over Old Greenwich sweet shop Darlenes Heavenly Desires in 2014, she and her husband developed a three-year business plan for the store. With three years come and gone and three children to raise, Ballesteros readied to close Darlenes late last year.

But prompted by some of the businesses loyal customers who didnt want to go without their favorite treats, Darlenes will live on with an online-only business model.

A giant sign now hangs in front of Darlenes storefront on Sound Beach Avenue. It proclaims that Darlenes has gone online and customers can order their candies and chocolates by emailing or calling Ballesteros, who will deliver them.

The idea to continue online was from the community, Ballesteros told Hearst Connecticut Media in an interview. We have a good base of customers, and theyre particular about what they like.

One such customer is Greenwich resident Douglas Fields who said hes dependent on Darlenes Dark Chocolate Break Up. Im just addicted to it. I have some every night, he said. When (Ballesteros) put up that sign saying she was closing, I went into a severe panic. I kept telling her that I could not be without it. I suspect I wasnt the only one telling her I couldnt be without her chocolate.

Beginning just before Christmas, Ballesteros began delivering Fields his Dark Chocolate Break Up in-person to his home. From here on, thats how she plans to fulfill all orders.

Though she said shell miss the store, Ballesteros is excited about having more time at home with her children and how Darlenes will evolve without her being tied to the shop.

With delivering peoples products, Im visiting people where they live and getting invited into a lot of homes and meeting customers spouses and kids, she said. I didnt have that before and it adds value to me.

Ballesteros seems undaunted by the business-model change, saying its just Darlenes next product. If anything, the transition is no harder than what she experienced taking over the shop with a background in advertising and no candy-making skills, she said.

The first couple months were hard, she said. I knew nothing about chocolate, so I took classes and watched YouTube. The customers challenged us and made us better, and they continue to.

Under her familys ownership, Darlenes has seen a variety of changes including updated branding and working with more nonprofits and bigger companies, according to Ballesteros. As an online business, she plans to work on more personalized orders. For holidays, when she anticipates an uptick in orders, Ballesteros said she plans to hire extra staff, including student workers she frequently employed at the storefront.

Its tough to be a small-business owner, but were lucky, she said. Nothing bad happened to us to cause us to close. It was just the end of our lease, and now were ready to go on to the next thing.

Contact the writer at mbennett@greenwichtime.com; Twitter @Macaela_
Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich is the nation's fifth most expensive street, based on average square-foot rent costs, according to JLL, a professional services firm that specializes in real estate and investment management.

Rents on the avenue average $86.53 per square foot, with top rents coming in at $101, a 177.4 percent premium compared with the rest of Fairfield County, according to the firm. JLL noted that Greenwich Avenue is home to a number of hedge funds, financial services companies and upscale retailers and restaurants.
Deciding to paint a room white is easy. Picking out the right shade, however, can seem downright impossible thanks to the sheer volume of highly-nuanced options available. We have you covered, though. Today, 15 of our favorite designers are sharing the tried-and-true hues they keep at the ready. From warm to cool, their go-tos are sure to work in any room, no matter the amount of light it gets or its underpinning style.

Jessica Blue, Jessica Blue Interiors
Kyler Baughman seemed to be the face of fitness.

The 21-year-old aspiring personal trainer filled his Facebook page with photos of himself riding motorbikes and lifting weights. He once posted an image of a kettlebell with a skeleton, reading: "CrossFit, hard to kill."

So when he came down with the flu last month, his mother said, he possibly assumed he simply needed some rest.

"I think he thought, 'I just got the flu; I'll be all right,' " his mother, Beverly Baughman, told NBC affiliate WPXI.

But days after Christmas, Kyler Baughman was worse - coughing and running a fever, his family told the news station. They said he went to a nearby hospital in western Pennsylvania and, from there, was flown to UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh.

Soon after, on Dec. 28, Kyler died of "organ failure due to septic shock caused by influenza," his mother told WPXI.

Kyler Baughman, from Latrobe, had gone home for the holidays with "a snotty nose," his mother recalled in an interview earlier this week with WPXI. "We saw him the 23rd for our family Christmas get-together and we noticed he wasn't feeling well," Beverly Baughman told the news station.

The day after Christmas, Kyler Baughman went back to work - he earned a living moving furniture at a local furniture store and unloading goods at Walmart, according to his social media accounts.

But he could not make it though the day.

Olivia Marcanio, who was identified by WPXI as his fiancee, declined to comment to The Washington Post, but told the news station that Kyler Baughman, "just laid down and went about his day, and that was the day he was coughing and said his chest hurt."

Now - not even two weeks after his death - his mother said, "It doesn't seem real."

Each year, as many as 650,000 people die from respiratory complications related to influenza - an increase from the previous decade, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

"These figures indicate the high burden of influenza and its substantial social and economic cost to the world," Peter Salama, executive director of WHO's Health Emergencies Programme, said in a news release last month. "They highlight the importance of influenza prevention for seasonal epidemics, as well as preparedness for pandemics."

However, according to the CDC, "most people who get influenza will recover in several days to less than two weeks." Complications range from sinus and other infections to pneumonia and organ failure.

The CDC reported that 6 percent of deaths in the United States during the week of Nov. 5 resulted from complications from pneumonia and influenza.

According to Kyler's obituary, he enjoyed "motocross, reading, and going to the gym."

And that's one reason his family is sending this message to others: Listen to your body.

"Try and know your body. Don't let things go," Kyler Baughman's father, Todd Baughman, told WPXI through tears. "Whenever you have a fever for multiple days, don't let it go, get it taken care of."
A ventless gas fireplace is one without a chimney or ventand it's an increasingly popular option for cash-strapped homeowners, since installing a fireplace vent can cost up to $3,000. But is a ventless gas fireplace safe and effective? Here's what you'll want to know before you buy one for your home.

In theory, a ventless gas fireplace should be safe because of how gas burns.

"When you have natural gas combustion, you're combining oxygen with methane," explains Allison A. Bailes, who has a doctorate in physics and is the founder of Energy Vanguard, which guides homeowners on healthy, eco-friendly improvements.

In a process called "perfect combustion," molecules of oxygen combine with methane's carbon and hydrogen to create two harmless byproducts: water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2). As a result, "When they're running correctly, ventless fireplaces do a pretty good job," says Bailes.

Safety issues come into play, however, when your combustion becomes less than perfect. A lack of oxygenwhich can be caused by fans, drafts, nearby candles, or older or improperly maintained fireplacescan "change the combustion process, making it incomplete," Bailes explains.

Incomplete combustion creates the dangerous molecular byproduct carbon monoxide (CO)an odorless gas that causes brain damage and even death at high-enough exposure levels.

Ventless gas fireplace safety concerns

The problem is that since gas fireplaces typically don't come equipped with a CO detector, most people won't realize their fireplaces aren't functioning properly. This, in turn, could put their health at risk.

According to Bailes, most home CO detectors are designed to detect high levels of the odorless gas, and the probable emission from ventless fireplaces is quite low. The popular Kidde CO detector, for example, will sound the alarm after four minutes of exposure to air with 400 parts per million of CO.

But to sound the alarm at lower levels, the exposure has to be much longer. At 40 ppm, it takes 10 hours for a Kidde detector to go off (and it doesn't measure below that concentration). Yet the World Health Organization's guidelines for CO exposure recommend no more than one hour of exposure at concentrations as low as 26 ppm. In other words, low levels of CO coming from a ventless gas fireplace might fly under a detector's radar entirely.

Ventless gas fireplace safety features

That said, ventless gas fireplaces do have several safety features that work to prevent potential issues with carbon monoxide. For instance, all ventless gas fireplaces come equipped with oxygen depletion sensors. These monitor how much oxygen is reaching the fireplace and, if it's too little, will automatically shut the fireplace off before incomplete combustion can create a hazardous situation.

Ventless gas fireplace manufacturers offer a variety of guidelines and restrictions that aim to mitigate harm.

For one, these fireplaces aren't meant to be installed in bedrooms or rooms without ample square footage. Guidelines also advise that they shouldn't be run for too long (typically no more than two hours).

So if you read the manual and follow the rules, you'll probably be fine. Yet a study conducted at the Building Research Council at the University of Illinois suggests that many may not adhere to these guidelines as much as they should. In this study of 30 homes with ventless gas fireplaces, half of the homeowners they observed ran them longer than recommended. Perhaps as a result, 20% of these homes had CO concentrations greater than what the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe (9 ppm over eight hours, a recommendation similar to the WHO's).

The study also found higher-than-recommended levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that can irritate the lungs. Because of CO safety concerns, ventless gas fireplaces are banned in California and Canada.

Other ventless gas fireplace concerns

Beyond CO poisoning, another concern with ventless gas fireplaces is water vapor. Remember, one of the two byproducts of perfect combustion is water vapor, which is harmless to people but maybe not great for your home. For people in dry climates, a little extra water vapor might be a plusyour fireplace is also a humidifier. But it does present a potential issue: Vapor hitting a cold surface will create beads of water, which can eventually start to grow mold.

Should you buy a ventless gas fireplace?

So should you install a ventless gas fireplace? If you're the better-safe-than-sorry type, you're probably better off sticking with something vented, even if the cost is higher. But if you do decide to go ventless, make sure to properly size and install the fireplace and follow the safety measures in your manual carefully.

For extra peace of mind, consider investing in a low-level CO detector to hang near the fireplace. You can buy a detector that measures down to a single part per million, called a low-level CO detector, for $75 to $150. Then you'll know for sure that your fire is as safe as it is snuggly.

The post Ventless Gas Fireplace: Is It Safe? Read This Before You Buy appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
Salt Bae is here. Photo: nusr_et/Instagram

Salt Bae has descended from his saline perch to grace New York with his meats. On Thursday, the Turkish chef and living meme, born Nusret Gokce, will open the New York location of his steakhouse Nusr-Et. This is his second United States location (and 13th overall) of the restaurant, described on its website as meatlovers favorite address. Bae already has plans to open another in this city, as well as in London.

The New York restaurant is located in the former China Grill in midtowns CBS Black Rock building, with seating for 150 people inside and an additional 80 outside once the weather warms up. According to the Times, the kitchen serves steaks like rib eye and a thin fillet called lokum, racks of lamb and veal over charcoal, kofta stuffed with kasseri cheese, and steak tartare. There will also be salads and seafood, as well as Turkish coffee and tea and baklava.

Salt Bae became an internet sensation after posting a video a little over a year ago in which he flashed the dramatic, sexy seasoning technique that would earn his moniker. Hes since parlayed his over-the-elbow salting into international notoriety; taking advantage of his standing as an already successful restaurateur to expand further, as well as friendships with DJ Khaled and an appearance in an ad for Ciroc French Vanilla with Diddy and French Montana. The chef also claims to the New York Times, through a translator, to have transformed butchering from a looked-down-upon job into a hot career in Turkey, saying, Now, thanks to me, all the kids want to become butchers.

Nusr-Et, 60 W. 53rd St., nr. Sixth Ave.; 212-315-3660

This post has been updated to reflect that the restaurant will open on January 18 and did not open January 15 as originally reported.




Haiti - ALERT : Baby milk Celia withdrawn from the Haitian market





Minister Marie Greta Roy Clement (Health) and Minister Pierre Marie Du Meny (Trade) "inform the Haitian population that the French authorities have suspended the sale of 'CELIA' baby milk produced by the LACTALIS Nutrition Sante Group (Groupe LNS), due to contamination with salmonella.



Since this milk is imported and sold in Haiti, the Ministries of Health (MSPP) and Trade (MCI) ask the population to do not buy or use CELIA baby milk.



Arrangements are made for the withdrawal of the product on the Haitian market. No trader is allowed to distribute or sell it to avoid health problems and not to fall under the law.



Minister Clement and Minister Du Meny are counting on everyone's understanding for the strict application of this measure."



Haiti joins the list of 83 countries concerned where some 12 million boxes of baby milk contaminated with salmonella will be withdrawn from the sale. Recall that these products have contaminated 37 babies in France who after the care of use are all out of danger.



HL/ S/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Digiciel : List of the 22 finalists of the campaign Konbit Pou Chanjman





Let's recall that in March 2017, the Digicel Foundation launched "Kombit Pou Chanjman", to promote sustainable development of communities in Haiti, with 10 grants of US $ 10,000 to 10 organizations for the implementation of a community project.



In June 2017 out of the 300 projects received, 63 were selected for the second phase. These projects were visited at the end of 2017 by members of the Board of the Foundation with the support of employees of the company to assess their impact within communities.



Now, in the final phase, 22 projects have been selected for the Grand Final to be held in March 2018 where a jury will determine the 10 organizations that will each benefit from the $ 10,000 grant.



"We are delighted with these various projects that organizations have submitted with great care and determination. This demonstrates the will of the Haitian people to contribute to the development of their country. We congratulate the finalists and wish them every success. We look forward to supporting the 10 organizations in the implementation and realization of their projects" said Sophia Stransky, Non-Executive Director of the Digicel Foundation.



List of finalist organizations :



Ministry of a New Hope for Integral Development in Haiti (Department of Artibonite)



Community Center for Integrated Development of Gros Morne (Department of Artibonite)



Community Action for Education around Lake Peligre (Center Department)



Cooperation of Young Haitians for Socioeconomic Development (Center Department)



Organization for the Rehabilitation of the Municipality of Roseaux (Department of Grand'Anse)



Groupe Soleil Jeunesse (Department of Grand'Anse)



Paillant in Development Path (Department of Nippes)



Haiti Land of Dreams (Nippes Department)



Training Center for Mutual Aid and Community Development (North Department)



Technical Assistance and Institutional Capacity Building Center (North Department)



Peoples' Organization Working for North-East Development (Northeast Department)



Congregation of the Little Brothers of St. Teresa / Laguamite Fraternity (Northeast Department)



Asosyasyon Peyizan Jasmin (North West Department)



Watershed Committee Moustique River for Sustainable Exploitation (Northwest Department)



The Ministries of the Online Choir / Heartline Ministries (West Department)



Organized Farmers Initiative for Sustainable Development (IFOSUD) (West Department)



Haiti Adolescent Girls Network (West Department)



YWCA-Haiti (West Department)



Progressive Movement Port-Salutain (South Department)



Association of Young Thinkers for Evolution (South Department)



Echo of the Young Tuff for the Advancement of the Valley (South Department)



Kodinasyon Pou Devlopman Pech Ak Agrikilti Nan Awondisman Belans (Southeast Department)



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Security : Balance-Summary in figures of the PNH (2017)





Monday at press conference, Inspector Gary Desrosiers Deputy Spokesman of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) unveiled some figures that enters the balance sheet of activities of the PNH carried out during the year 2017.



2017 balance sheet in figures :

588 arrests

329 wanted individuals (mostly gang members)

420 cases in treatment



SEIZURE :

48 kg of cocaine

954 kg marijuana

100,000 dollars (equivalent in several currencies: Gourdes, euros and USD)

66 vehicles including 20 motorcycles

92 firearms

2 boats

3 houses



However, no figures were provided on the number of kidnappings or the details of crime (murder, theft, rape and other crimes...) or the seizure of contraband, or the police officers under investigation, sanctioned or revoked, which makes impossible at the moment, any comparison on the evolution of the situation in Haiti during the year 2017 compared to 2016, pending a detailed balance...



In addition, Inspector Desrosiers said that on January 10, an individual identified as Noel Austant (74 years) was arrested at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport with 3 kg of cocaine in his possession, while he was preparing to leave Haiti to Florida.



TB/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - News : Zapping...





A police inspector commits suicide

Monday morning in Tabarre 27, the police inspector Donfred Saintima committed suicide, information confirmed by the deputy spokesman of the National Police of Haiti.



Towards another leadership in the lower house

The Chamber of Deputies proposes to vote this year on projects and proposals of laws useful to the improvement of the living conditions of the population, according to the new President of the office Gary Bodeau https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23243-haiti-flash-members-of-the-bureau-of-the-chamber-of-deputies.html who wants to demonstrate another model of leadership.



Insecurity at the Faculty of Ethnology

Jean Yves Blot Dean of the Faculty of Ethnology informs that he will reoccupy his office when the climate of security will be restored within the walls of the faculty. Dean Blot fully approves the controversial decision of the University Council authorizing the presence of PNH agents https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23208-haiti-security-towards-the-creation-of-a-university-police-force.html , currently sits on the premises of the rectorate of the State University of Haiti.



Les Cayes : lawyers blocking access to the TPI

On Monday, lawyers, members of the Bar of the Order of Les Cayes forced the Court of First Instance of Les Cayes to close by putting chains on the access barriers, to force the Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSPJ) to revoke the judge of instruction, Benit Noel that they accuse of corruption and embezzlement.



Public works, 30 trucks in breakdowns

Friday at the end of his equipment evaluation visit https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-23278-icihaiti-politic-evaluation-visit-by-moise-to-the-equipment-maintenance-service.html of the Urban and Rural Equipment Maintenance Service in downtown Port-au-Prince, President Moise said that the 30 trucks in breakdowns will start to be repaired from Saturday 13, to be in operation in the deployment of the caravan of change in the West department scheduled for 7 February.



Jeremie : Inauguration at the Hospital

On Monday Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant accompanied by Marie Greta Roy Clement, the Minister of Health and Max Rudolph Saint-Albin, the Minister of the Interior inaugurated the surgical blocks at the Saint-Antoine Hospital Jeremie and the vaccine and input storage depot in Chateau.



Jacmel : Pre-Carnival Festivities

Dimanche Colombe Emilie Jessy Menos, the Minister of Tourism participated in the pre-carnival festivities in Jacmel. She took the opportunity to participate in a radio program with members of the City Council on the measures taken to make the official carnival of Jacmel on February 4, a success.



HL/ HaitiLibre


















War over planting rights erupts in Champagne

By Barnaby Eales

A war over planting rights is being waged in France, where Champagne growers want to severely limit new plantings of vines by rival growers in areas surrounding Champagnes production zone.

Wine growers are aiming to secure planting rights for hundreds of hectares for the production of still wine as part of the restoration of Ile-de-France, which historically until the 19 century, was one of Frances leading wine regions.

The move to establish a new Ile de France production area, mainly in Seine-et-Marne and Aisne, comes however, amidst the most important transformation of Champagnes production area since 1927.

Patrice Bersac, Chairman of Syvif - the Ile-de France Growers union, said the powerful Champagne Growers Union, Syndicat General des Vignerons de Champagne (SVG), wants to establish a 25 kilometre wide cordon sanitaire along the perimeter of Champagnes production area in which the planting of vines would be prohibited.

It is part of the general revision of Champagne production area, which could see the authorisation for the expansion of Champagne in up to 40 villages around the existing production area by the end of this year which would come into force by 2021.

It would also lead to the removal of areas surrounding the municipality of Soissons from the Champagne production area.

In a move to resolve the conflict, the Syvif has made a proposal to France ministry of Agriculture for the creation of a buffer zone between Champagnes production area and neighbouring municipalities in which wine production would be limited to still wine production.

The SVG stands accused by rival growers of acting illegally against the EUs deregulation of vine plantings, which came into force in 2016.

Champagne producers are happy investing and growing vines elsewhere, like Kent in the UK, but do not want other producers growing vines on their doorstep. This is contradictory, irrational behaviour, said Bersac.

Rather than making a war with their neighbours, Champagne growers should be focusing on the economic competition from Prosecco, Cava and English wine, he told Harpers.

The conflict between growers has surged after the Syvif union of growers obtained planting rights for 30 ha of vines in 2016.

The EUs liberalisation of planting rights allows EU member states to increase plantings of vines by 1% each year, but Bersac said moves from growers to plant vines would not have a substantial impact on the bid from Champagne growers to enlarge their existing production area.

We pose no threat to Champagne. Our project is miniscule compared to the size of the production area of Champagne  this is a case of David versus Goliath, said Bersac.

On December 20, 2017, four civil servants of a wine council within Frances Ministry of Agriculture voted against a move to accept a demand from the SVG to severely limit plantings of new vines from rival growers to 0.10 hectares this year.

The conflict is far from over  this vote shows divisions within the ministry, a grower told Harpers.

The SVG has so far declined to issue a comment to Harpers on the issue, but according to a source close to the government, the agriculture ministry has called for dialogue between the parties in order to reach a negotiated settlement to the dispute.
Introducing GOP Hawaii's NEW Executive Director!

Aloha Fellow Republicans, January 15, 2018

It is my pleasure to introduce you to our NEW Executive Director, Aaron Wilson. As you recall, the RNC invested the money for us to hire the most perfect ED for Hawaii. After interviewing several people from around the country, it became perfectly clear to me that Aaron would be a perfect addition to our team. So, braving the single digit temperatures to meet Aaron in his home state of Pennsylvania, I met him in person and he was hired. Aaron starts immediately and will be training at the RNC and attending the Winter Meeting in Washington DC at the end of the month before flying to his new home here in Hawaii.

Aaron has extensive experience in policy, consulting, government relations, and advocacy. Having provided strategic advisement to officials at both the federal, state and local levels of government, he is adept at creating, evaluating, and employing effective strategies to advance Party interests both on and off the Hill. Aaron has worked closely throughout his career with congressional offices, regulatory agencies, states, stakeholders, private industry and media. He has an exceptional understanding of the macro policy environment and is particularly skilled at leading engagement and advocacy efforts across a broad range of settings - offering the Party a multi-front approach to achieving electoral goals.

Before joining the Hawaii Republican Party, Aaron was a Regional Field Director for the Pennsylvania Republican Party, where he was integral in converting the state of Pennsylvania back into a a Republican stronghold for the first time since 1988. He was also a policy analyst at USAID, where he advised agency efforts on federal legislative and regulatory policies affecting the International Relations sector. He has also served as the Political Director for a U.S. Congressional Candidate, and a Government Affairs Associate concentrating on grassroots organization and advocacy efforts focused on housing and energy initiatives.

Aaron received a Bachelors degree in Political Science from The Pennsylvania State University, a Masters degree in American Government from Florida Agriculture and Mechanical University, and currently is pursuing a Doctorate in Public Policy and International Political Economy from Howard University. Originally from Pennsylvania, Aaron possesses a deep underlying interest in politics and winning; which he gained from his father who was once a Republican elected official.

Please welcome Aaron to our HRP ohana.

Shirlene Ostrov

Chairman, Republican Party of Hawaii

LINK DONATE to the Republican Party of Hawaii
CLAIRE Jones is glorious bubbling proof that life can turn around.

From the wonderful peak of playing the harp at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton her life became mired in a battle against energy-sapping ME  also known as chronic fatigue syndrome.

But this week, as she prepares for a concert return to Henley, it was obvious life could hardly be more in tune for the Welsh musician.

She is now a mother, with her daughter Cadi about to celebrate her first birthday, a new album out and a tour under way.

There was a time when I was suffering from ME that I thought I would never have a child, says Claire.

I just didnt think I would ever get back to having the energy you need, but now I feel good and life is wonderful. I really havent looked back since.

Speaking to Claire, her accent leaves you in no doubt as to her proud Welsh roots.

I am doing three trips to America later this year but Henley will always be special to me  it is playing amongst friends.

Claire still gives harp lessons at Rupert House School in Bell Street a couple of times each term, while her husband Chris  a leading percussionist, composer and arranger  is a regular teacher.

Teaching is important to both Claire and Chris, and in August each year they decamp to Cardigan Castle to hold summer schools in their musical specialisms.

We both love teaching, says Claire. It is a wonderful way to give something back and encourage harp playing.

A lot of Henley children come on the summer course and while a harp can cost around 1,800 parents can rent one while they find if their child is going to take it up long-term.

But they are also an investment. My harp cost me 35,000 when I first got it but is now worth 48,000  although I dont have any plans to get rid of it.

As part of her fight against ME, Claire changed her lifestyle and now with her baby on board there is even more reason to plan life carefully.

Cadi is Welsh for pure and her middle name is Haf which means summer. Both a Chris and I are proud of our Welsh roots and that is why we chose the names. It sounds much more poetic in Welsh  I dont think we would have gone for a Pure Summer in English.

The couple live in West Drayton, not far from Heathrow, but Cadi gets to spend a good deal of time in Wales being cared for by Claires parents who live in Pembrokeshire. Where would we be without grandparents? They are wonderful.

Claires new album, This Love, reached number four in the classical charts.

I have had a number two and a number three  perhaps the next will make number one? says Claire.

It is made up of pieces of classical music that are popular at weddings. You may not know the full title of the music but you will know the tune.

We released it last July on the weekend which is the most popular in the country for weddings  that seemed appropriate.

The album is very much a joint venture with Chris, who has written some pieces and arranged it. I think people will love the music.

Claires tour is taking in venues as varied as Henley, Brecon and Devon, followed by a concert in Lisbon, Portugal. Then she is off to the States, where she has an enthusiastic following.

To her delight, Claire will next year be appearing at the world-famous Carnegie Hall in New York. I am really thrilled about that, as it is such an iconic venue.

In the meantime, pupils from Rupert House will be taking part in the Henley concert, which takes place at the town hall in Market Place on Tuesday, January 30, from 7pm to 9pm.

The school choir will be performing on the night and Claire is clearly relishing the occasion. It really is a family event, she said. I am looking forward to it  it is a lovely venue.

Tickets are priced 10.84 to 13.39 and can be booked via www.clairejones.co.uk  where full details of her new album can also be found.
When Carlos Valdes-Casillas first started working at Corvallis High School in 2015, he led a tour of the school for Spanish-speaking parents.

One mother in the tour group, Valdes-Casillas recalled, had a student in the 12th grade at the school. But the mother hadn't spent much time at the school before the tour because she wasn't comfortable communicating in English.

But with some exposure to the school and its extracurricular activities, she for the first time felt excited about having her child at the school, he said.

And that, in a nutshell, is what Valdes-Casillas job as the school's bilingual student and family advocate is all about: helping bilingual families feel more at home in the school.

Valdes-Casillas said Corvallis is an accommodating community, but people in the immigrant community often face challenges such as like economic insecurity, language barriers and a struggle to balance assimilation with retaining their own culture.

Through his work, Valdes-Casillas hopes to increase family and student involvement at the school, which in turn will lead to better outcomes.

His work involves advising the schools Latino club, serving as the schools coordinator for the Juntos college preparation program in collaboration with Oregon State University, tutoring students and even being an interpreter. But mostly, he said, his job is to talk to bilingual families, understand their concerns, and advocate for them at the school.

Valdes-Casillas said he thinks his impact is making bilingual families, not just Spanish-speaking, feel like they can come to the school for help. In all, 17 languages other than English are spoken at home by Corvallis High School families.

Mainly the comfort level for those families has been increased, he said.

Corvallis High School Principal Matt Boring said Valdes-Casillas is effective both on a micro level, working with individual students and families, and on a macro level, working with programs like Juntos.

He is a master of connecting with students and with getting things done. Carlos deserves a lot of credit for the improvement in outcomes for our Latino students. He cannot be replaced, Boring said.

Valdes-Casillas, who was originally from Mexico City, has been living in Corvallis since 2014, but also spent five years in Corvallis while earning a masters degree in marine resource management and a doctorate in geography, which he completed in 1996.

He said he and his family have moved 29 times between multiple states and countries. He moved back to Corvallis to be near daughter Ita Valdes-Chavarria, who was working on her own graduate studies at OSU at the time. When he returned, he said, he expected that he would end up working at OSU.

However, he said hes been happy with his work at Corvallis High School because it is rewarding to help struggling students succeed. The best moments, he said, come when he watches students whom he encouraged not to drop out reach graduation.

It gives you a feeling that is almost like being a parent."
Linn County deputies on Monday morning located a Lebanon hunter who had been reported missing from the Crabtree Lake area Sunday night.

Bryan Keith Spaulding of Lebanon, 52, was found walking out onto a logging road about a mile from where he had last been seen. He did not require medical treatment.

Sheriff Bruce Riley said Spaulding, who had a hunting rifle with him, was arrested on a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm and transported to the Linn County Jail after he was found.

Riley said the Linn County Sheriff's Office dispatch center received a call about Spaulding at 9:11 p.m. Sunday. The woman who called said her husband and his friend had not returned from hunting. The two had been hunting in the Crabtree Lake area off of Quartzville road outside of Sweet Home.

The woman called back an hour later to call off the search, saying she had heard from her husband that they would be heading home soon. But at 2:17 a.m. Monday she called back, saying they still had not returned and she would like the search to resume.

Deputies responded to the area and were able to find the caller's husband, 51-year old, John Boeder. He told deputies that his friend, Spaulding, of Lebanon, was trying to flush out some elk and never returned to where their vehicle was parked.

Deputies began searching the area and found Spaulding at 11:03 a.m. Monday.
Pull Quote [King] brought about a peace movement  thats probably the highlight of what his movement was to me. He did not view things with a get-back attitude. It really inspires me to be a peaceful person even today because its easy to let bitterness get a person down.  Eddie Mabry, Bristol, Tennessee, resident

Bristol-born civil rights leader Johnson deserves a memorial Bristol, Virginia, native Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the topic of a package of stories in tod

BRISTOL, Va.  On one side, Tybre Faws handmade sign honored Martin Luther King Jr.s dream. On the other, the 10-year-old had written Kings words about choosing love over hate.

Faw, who is from Johnson City, was participating in Bristols first ever The Legacy Lives event, organized by the YWCA and Bristol Train Station to honor King on the holiday that bears his name. But he was right at home. According to Faws grandmother, it was his fifth march.

Hes a little John Lewis, she said. A little activist.

Unity in action

Faw was part of a group that gathered at the Bristol Family YMCA on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to start the march. Another group met at the First Christian Baptist Church, located on the same street across the state line.

Around 2 p.m., police and salt trucks blocked off traffic while bundled-up citizens  carrying matching banners and singing  walked the boulevard toward the train station. Once outside, they paused for a moment before merging into a single mass.

The act was, in some sense, a reenactment of the march held when the boulevard was first renamed to honor Dr. King, organizer Tina McDaniel, a development coordinator at the YWCA, told the Bristol Herald Courier.

The fact that its been just over 10 years since the street was renamed and 50 years since Kings assassination wasnt planned, McDaniel said, but it makes the event even more special.

Wilhelmina Banks, founder of the Nyumba Ya Tausi-Peacock Museum and a key leader in the boulevards renaming, was one of three local civil rights leaders honored during the ceremony that followed this years march. Dr. W. A. Johnson of the Lee Street Baptist Church and Jewel Bell, a longtime employee of King University, were also honored.

[The march] is an opportunity to come together as a community and to celebrate not just Dr. King but the diversity that we have inside the community, McDaniel said.

Faith overcomes fear was a consistent motto during the events planning, she added. The King University Choir and MLK Community Choir provided music between readings of Dr. Kings speeches and videos honoring local leaders.

The Bristol Train Station was set up to house just over 200 people, according to McDaniel. On Monday, it was standing room only.

He was a seed

You have to know your history, Banks said in a video during the ceremony. She added that, while we cant bring King back, his life has proven to be a seed for new growth.

Eddie Mabry, 74, was born in Memphis but has lived in Bristol, Tennessee, for 34 years.

I reflect a lot back on the Rev. Martin Luther King and the movement, he said after the march.

[King] brought about a peace movement  thats probably the highlight of what his movement was to me, Mabry said. He did not view things with a get-back attitude. It really inspires me to be a peaceful person even today because its easy to let bitterness get a person down.

Organizers hoped that young attendees would learn from Dr. King through the event  just as Mabry has over the years.

We wanted to reflect on the past so we could learn from that, McDaniel said. But then we wanted to see how we could engage young people. Thats the group that could take this forward.

Mondays turnout suggests the march  which was pulled together in just under two months  could itself be a seed. According to McDaniel, organizers had an open meeting about the event in early December and were floored when nearly 50 people showed up.

McDaniel is hopeful thats an indicator of ongoing community interest in both organizing and attending events related to diversity.

Were looking for ways that we can engage the community and bring together diverse groups of people throughout the year, she said.
A missing woman last seen in Damascus nearly a month ago has yet to be located. Her family is asking the public for help.
SWEET HOME  Bob Briana, the newest member of the Sweet Home City Council, believes that if people take the time to stop in his city  and not just pass through while recreating  they will see that it is a nice, quiet town, where kids can still play on the sidewalks and where they can still afford to buy a nice home at a reasonable price.

Briana was recently appointed to fill the council seat after the resignation of Ryan Underwood. His term ends Dec. 31.

I love this little town, said Briana who has lived in Sweet Home since 1999. I dont know why anyone else doesnt.

A Massachusetts native, Briana said he spent his working career as a jack-of-all-trades and master of none.

He has been a bartender, carpenter and owned liquor stores in California before he and his ex-wife moved to Sweet Home to be closer to her family.

The way Oregon housing prices have gone up, maybe people will start figuring out there is opportunity here in our little town, Briana said.

Briana said he put his name in the hat to serve on the council, Because its time for me to get involved. I saw a lot of things that I think I can help the city change.

Everyone has a different idea of what this little town is about," Briana added. Its a nice, quiet town that offers all kinds of recreation from our lakes to the mountains and we are so close to everything, including the coast.

Briana said he doesnt like to hear people "talk down Sweet Home.

The more people spend time in our town, they more they will start liking it, he said.

Briana said revitalizing the core buildings in town will go a long way toward enhancing the communitys overall image.

Sweet Home has not been able to shake its image as an old logging town, Briana said. Thats still an important part of the towns history, but it has to move forward and to put on a new image.

Improvements to the citys wastewater system are definitely a key infrastructure issue, Briana said.

Briana said his varied career and exposure to living in a number of states will help him bring a new perspective to the council.

Asked if he will seek a four-year term after his appointment expires at the end of the year, Briana said, We shall see how it goes. Hopefully.
WASHINGTON  The past week of the Trump presidency felt like that point in a video game when you've reached a new level and the widgets suddenly start flying at you too fast to dodge. There was an attack on free speech. On an independent judiciary. And with the president's horrific reference to "s---hole countries," on America's tradition of offering a welcoming hand to the downtrodden. So much, so quickly that it's difficult to process it all.

But we must. To fail to note these departures from normalcy, from the institutions and values that have actually made America great all along, is to tacitly countenance the outrage and, worse, to risk that we will begin to fail to recognize it as such.

So, fresh from having dispatched his personal lawyers to make the laughable but, coming from a president, nonetheless scary effort to halt publication of a critical book, Trump renewed his assault on free speech. "Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not represent American values or American fairness," Trump announced during a Cabinet meeting last Wednesday.

In fact, our libel laws embody American values, balancing First Amendment imperatives with the need to provide a remedy for egregiously irresponsible conduct.

It's easy to dismiss Trump's words as more ignorant bloviating, without real-world consequences. After all, libel laws  beyond the constitutional limits placed on them  are essentially a state matter. And yet, it was scary enough when threats to "open up the libel laws" came from a presidential candidate. This man is the president. He took an oath to defend a Constitution about which he knows little and cares less.

More evidence for that conclusion: Trump's tweeted blast, earlier Wednesday, on a court ruling that blocked the president's plan to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to protect so-called Dreamers from deportation.

"It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts," Trump tweeted.

So goes the rule of law according to Trump: When he wins, the court is wise and good. When he loses, the system is rigged and the judge is so-called. Perhaps the district court's ruling was wrong and will be overturned. That does not prove our "Court System" is any more "broken and unfair" than when opponents of another Obama-era immigration order chose to file suit in a federal court in Texas likely to be sympathetic to their claim. The appropriate response to losing in court is respectfully disagreeing and filing an appeal  not spewing forth tweets that undermine the system's very legitimacy.

The next day found Trump once again demonstrating his disdain for free speech and, relatedly, his authoritarian impulses. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump accused an FBI agent of treason  yes, treason  for sending texts critical of his candidacy.

The question that unleashed this alarming tirade had to do with Trump's tweeted call for Republicans in Congress to "finally take control" of the Russia probe. From this prompt, Trump made his way to FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was removed from the special counsel investigation into Trump and Russia after the texts were discovered.

Trump: "And what went on with the FBI, where a man is tweeting to his lover that if [Hillary Clinton] loses ... we'll go to the insurance policy, which is  if they lose, we'll go to phase 2, and we'll get this guy out of office. ... I think that is  that is treason. See, that's treason right there. ... What he tweeted to his lover is a treasonous act."

Leave aside Trump's ultraparanoid interpretation of an ambiguous text. Leave aside the Constitution's careful definition of the crime: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

Trump  a man who claims the "absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department"  is accusing a lifelong public servant of the gravest offense. Lucky for Trump, the libel laws would probably protect him against the lawsuit he deserves.

So yes, Trump's reference to "s---hole countries" represents a terrible, tragic moment in our nation's history. Even more terrible and tragic: This was only the worst of so many more, over the span of just a few days, in a week all too typical of this appalling presidency.
The Trump administration last week announced a major change in Medicaid, allowing states to impose work requirements on able-bodied adults as a condition of enrollment in the health care program.

Ten states had expressed interest in running demonstration programs mandating the work requirements or similar "community engagement activities" for Medicaid recipients.

Oregon is not among those states, and this is an experiment we'll be happy to watch from afar. For starters, we're not sure that it will have the intended effect, in part because the requirements likely will apply only to a small percentage of Medicaid recipients.

Besides, if the federal government really was interested in getting poor people to work, it has a much easier option  albeit one that was ignored in the recent tax-reform bill. We'll get back to that in a bit.

The administration's legal rationale for giving the green light to the state experiments is the idea that the work requirements will make people healthier; improved health is the stated purpose of the Medicaid law. So the argument here is that "productive work and community engagement may improve health outcomes," in the words of Brian Neale, the director of the federal Medicaid office.

That's generally true, as far as it goes; generations of public health research have consistently shown a correlation between higher incomes and better health, as you might imagine. But it is not clear how much work or additional income by itself can improve health.

Besides, research into the Medicaid population suggests that most recipients either already work or will be covered under one of the allowed exceptions: For example, Trump administration officials said, states would have to make "reasonable modifications" of their work requirements for people battling opioid abuse or other drug addictions. In addition, the administration said, Medicaid officials cannot impose work requirements on pregnant women, elderly beneficiaries, children or people who cannot work because of disabilities.

So it's unclear exactly what impact this will have on Medicaid populations. It will be interesting to watch this experiment play out in the states that elect to take the leap.

In the meantime, we may be giving short shrift to a program that has a proven track record in terms of pulling people out of poverty and putting them back to work: the Earned Income Tax Credit.

A professor at Oregon State University recently touted the Earned Income Tax Credit as a program that offers real benefits to poor families, but noted that the program is underused. A recent article in The Atlantic underlined the program's effectiveness: In 2015, the credit supported about 28 million families with an average credit of $2,440, and helped elevate 3.3 million children over the poverty line.

The tax credit isn't a handout: A single mother needs to make income on her own in order to qualify for it.

And the credit works. A recent study suggested that a $1,000 increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit led to an increase in employment and a reduction in the share of families in poverty. A new study from the University of California, Irvine, concluded that the credit also improves the lifetime earning potential of single mothers.

In other words, a bump in the Earned Income Tax Credit likely would improve the financial status of working parents. (And such a boost, in theory, would improve the health of those parents and their kids.)

Yet the Earned Income Tax Credit didn't get much traction during the recent debate over tax reform. It's a shame: Over the years, the credit has enjoyed bipartisan support and, in fact, was expanded by none other than Ronald Reagan.

It may well be that these state Medicaid experiments will result in better health outcomes. But the administration and Congress are ignoring a proven tool that could net the same result. (mm)
NEWTON  As the Rev. Martin Luther Kings iconic I Have a Dream speech filled the air at St. Paul United Methodist Church in Newton on Monday, community members gathered to march from the church to the Catawba County Historical Museum to celebrate Kings birthday and his legacy.

As the crowd marched into the building, they began the celebration by singing, Lift Every Voice and Sing, a perfect match to the theme of this years Catawba County Branch NAACP Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day, Keep Moving Forward and Dont Look Back.

A handful of leaders in the county spoke during the program, including Newton-Conover City Schools Superintendent David Stegall.

Dr. King often spoke about progress not being linear. We make progress in our communities and nation, but there are ups and downs, Stegall said. We all know that, but we know that we cannot lose that spirit of moving forward and bringing our communities together to work towards a common good.

Stegall explained that by serving the children of Newton-Conover, he is able to assist in ensuring their futures are filled with abundant opportunities.

Matt Stover, superintendent of Catawba County Schools, also spoke during the celebration, reiterating Stegalls statement.

We love kids in education, every single one of them. We want them to graduate and have possibilities and opportunities, Stover said. Education in our mindset is that factor that puts us all on equal grounds.

As a testament to the importance of education in progression, Catawba County Branch NAACP invited Samantha Mungro to deliver the keynote speech.

Mungro, born and raised in Catawba County, graduated from St. Stephens High School in 2011, received Bachelor of Science degrees from Western Carolina University in criminology and criminal justice, and political science with a minor in international studies, in 2015.

Mungro has also recently graduated from Elon University School of Law, and plans to take the North Carolina Bar Exam in February.

Since I was 8 years old, it has been my goal to represent those who do not have a means to afford legal representation, Mungro said. In a few short months I plan to celebrate reaching that goal.

Mungro said she spends eight to 12 hours a day preparing for the bar exam.

After I pass the bar I plan to gain employment in North Carolina, so that I can continue to serve my community in a way that is meaningful and long-lasting, Mungro said.

Mungro led the audience through a timeline of Kings life and works, which began in 1929 and ended tragically on April 4, 1968, when he was assassinated.

This timeline is incredibly important so that we might understand the plight and perseverance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Mungro said. He was stabbed, punched, arrested, degraded, disparaged and ultimately killed all for one purpose  nonviolent racial and social justice.

Mungro added King committed his life to improving the system and society, so that all people may live in harmony.

Although great strides have been made, there is still quite a way to go, Mungro said. Brown and black men are incarcerated at a higher rate than any other, there is still a wage gap between working men and women, and we still have work to do.

History is literally repeating itself, and it is our job as citizens to make the change for the better.
Aadhaar is a game-changer. It has become an important technological instrument to empower the poor and entitle them to get their benefits without any interruption or middlemen. In this pursuit, Aadhaar is concretising the most important objective of Digital India: leading to digital inclusion and empowering common Indians. It is a marvel of innovation that uses safe and secured technology seeking to subserve the other objective of digital India namely transformation based upon technology which is affordable, inclusive and developmental. Today, 119 crore Indians have Aadhaar in a population of nearly 130 crore. The coverage of adult population is nearly 99%. Today, Aadhaar stands tall as an Indian innovation, globally acknowledged as the worlds largest digital identity programme.

One needs to understand the power of a smile on the face of a poor MGNREGA worker who had to run from pillar to post to get his entitlements. Now with Aadhaar linkage, MGNREGA wages are directly reaching into the bank accounts of poor people without the extraneous influence of any middleman. It has been widely reported in the media that with Aadhaar linkage nearly 80,000 fake teachers were found in a very small survey of the Ministry of Human Resource Development. Aadhaar is saving public money, which in effect is tax payers money. The net savings of nearly Rs. 57,000 Crore generated by disconnecting the subsidy in case of fake gas connection or fictitious ration cards or fake teachers will be utilised for more provisions for poor. Is it not a cause to celebrate when transparency is shinning upon the shoulders of Aadhaar?

One basic difference in the Aadhaar of UPA and Aadhaar of NDA needs to be appreciated. UPA-era Aadhaar was without any legislative approval: without any backing by a Parliamentary law. The first thing the Narendra Modi government did apart from making Aadhaar robust, safe and secure was to give it the security of a proper legal cover backed by a Parliamentary legislation. It has ample provisions for safe upkeep, creating a robust accountability mechanism and most importantly, powerful privacy provisions. Unauthorised use of biometrics data by anyone beyond permissible limits can invite severe punitive damages as also criminal prosecution. The core biometrics  the fingerprints and the iris  are duly protected by strong encryption.

More than six crore authentications are being done every day, nearly free of cost. A marvel of technology confirms digital identity by comparing the query of a number by fast matching with the iris and the fingerprint. UIDAI does not maintain a database of services or utilities of individuals linked with Aadhaar or individual details such as caste, religion, educational qualifications, medical records etc. Therefore profiling of individuals based on Aadhaar is nothing but an unfounded claim.

Aadhaar is a digital identity to supplement physical identity. Even the core biometrics under the present law can be revealed only in case of a compelling ground of national security when a designated joint secretary to the government of India makes a request based upon appropriate ground and the same is vetted and confirmed by a committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary and comprising the Law Secretary and IT Secretary and that too for a very limited period.

As many as 76 crore bank accounts have been verified using Aadhaar eKYC and this only gives a digital identity to your account so that in case of abuse for money laundering or terror funding, the ownership of the account cannot be denied. Ordinary citizens have nothing to worry but those who are involved in money laundering, patronising or promoting terror funding or other related heinous offences may have a lot to worry.

Some form of digital identity has become a common practice in todays world. From motor vehicle licence to a voter id card containing all the details being routinely available on websites of respective authorities these days. A digital identity regulates entry in the Supreme Court or High Courts or government and corporate offices or media headquarters. To visit certain countries, one is supposed to confirm identity through fingerprints either for obtaining the visa or for any other purpose. Under the relevant Registration Act and Rules there are provisions that while executing land transfer documents you need to confirm your signature with your thumb impression  a practice being followed for more than 100 years. Even smartphones operate with fingerprints or face-recognition systems. One is curious to note that in all this, one does not have any objection but when it comes to Aadhaar serious objections relating to identity verifications are raised.

The government is of the view that in accordance with the Aadhaar Act, no poor person shall be denied his or her entitlement. Whether it is food or other entitlements it must be provided using other identity documents and effort shall be made to bring them on Aadhaar.

On the issue of privacy we need to have greater clarity. In the wake of the Supreme Court judgment now the ground rule of privacy is well laid out. It is equally important to note that under the garb of privacy innovation cannot be killed. India is becoming a global hub of startups. Data is important for innovation and India has the potential to emerge as a big global centre of data analysis: the new exciting frontier of technological innovation, economy and employment. Artificial intelligence and IoT have great potential for innovation by using data. Most important, the plea of privacy cannot become the shield of the corrupt and terrorists. The government has already set up a panel under the leadership of an eminent retired judge of the Supreme Court Justice Srikrishna, to recommend for a robust data protection law and we expect the report soon.

However, it needs to be reiterated that the Aadhaar ecosystem, as far as safety and security of the core biometrics is concerned, is very safe and reliable and is subject to regular audits by experts. The UIDAI has recently added another feather in its cap by making provision for virtual ID for those who desire virtual ID coverage over Aadhaar numbers.

The success of Aadhaar is finding its resonance world over. The World Development Report 2016 released by the World Bank stated, A digital identification system such as Indias Aadhaar, by overcoming complex information problems, helps willing governments promote the inclusion of disadvantaged groups.

The poor man is happy and feels empowered. Aadhaar has given a big aadhaar (base) to Indias digital accomplishments. It is time to recognise its worth.

Ravi Shankar Prasad is Union Minister for law and justice, electronics and information technologyThe views expressed are personal. This is the first in a series of by-invitation opinion pieces on Aadhaar
Every Jew from India has always held India in great esteem right through our more than 2,000 years of peaceful sojourn in India. Even today, every Jew from India speaks, dresses and participates actively in every cultural activity which reminds him of India: whether it is in songs, movies, dance or publication of a newsletter in Marathi. According to Sharad Pawar, the Indian-Jewish community has made Marathi an international language.

Israel has always sought friendship with India from even before the independence of both countries from the same imperial power that played the same biased game against both our people. But thanks to recent political events our two countries have come even closer. In my opinion, the bond will only grow stronger.

The Indian Jewish community has played an important part in fostering these relations. It should be noted at the time of independence, many senior officers in the Indian Armed Forces were Jews. Many founders of medical faculties, leading doctors, senior teachers, lawyers and judges were from the Indian Jewish community. Few people know that Bombay University was the first in the world to revive the teaching of Hebrew as a second language way before Herzl even dreamt of the creation of the State of Israel.

Mahatma Gandhi was operated upon at the Sassoon Hospital in Poona and his personal physician and friend was Abraham Solomon Erulkar and some of the best schools in Ahmedabad have been established by Jews. Even the signature tune of All India Radio was written by Walter Kaufman, a Jew.

After the establishment of relations between our two countries, the first Israeli Ambassador, Ephraim Dowek, worked on establishing strong diplomatic and cultural ties between our two countries. Agricultural ties developed into the creation of miracle fruits and vegetables and the largest investor in a Kibbutz Naan-based industry is an Indian: Naandan Jain, a world leader in water sprinkler systems. Many Israeli companies have created India-based subsidiaries in the field of software development.

The young people of our countries are no less enamoured by each other. From a small trickle of sceptical youth in the early 1990s, tourism from Israel to India has grown to several tens of thousands every year and the same is happening in the other direction. Many of them keep returning to India for a more enhanced experience of hospitality, kindness, cuisine and nature. There are more than 10,000 Indian caregivers serving in Israel.

Finally, many Jews may have left India for Israel but there is one community the Chitpavan Brahmins, known to be of Jewish descent. Their second names such as Savarkar, Mulgaonkar and Kolatkar have roots in Hebrew and kar emerges from the Hebrew word for farmer.

Nissim Moses is a historian and president of the Indian Jewish Heritage Centre

The views expressed are personal
A lot of us dream about bringing that rare masterpiece to our home or workplace. But are you sure what you are investing your money in, is original? Recently, when 20 of the 21 paintings attributed to the iconic painter Amedeo Modigliani, displayed at the Ducal Palace in Genoa, Italy, in 2017, were revealed to be fakes, it sent art aficionados into a shock, and had ticket holders asking for a refund. Recently, consumer advocates have demanded refunds for ticket holders of the show devoted to Modigliani.

In India, where its difficult to chide the penchant for the (MF) Husains and the (SH) Razas, the story isnt very different. Artist and art curator Alka Raghuvanshi blasts the Modigliani art exhibit. As a curator, Im very surprised. Its strange that the curators didnt do their homework, and this happened abroad  where everyone calls themselves a curator, she voices her bafflement, and explains why this was surprising: The artist has only 300 works. There should be some familiarity with them. It makes no sense. The curator ought to be questioned about it.

Once, when SH Raza walked into an exhibition of his works organised by his nephew at an art gallery in the Capital, he said all of the artworks were fakes. It was ridiculous to see the artist come all the way from Paris to open a show, and say this.  Alka Raghuvanshi

Raghuvanshi also recounts her own experiences with fakes in India. A curator who was working with a renowned Indian artist, now dead, introduced many works into the market which to me were of questionable provenance. That artist never had so many works, sitting in a studio ever, she says. Once, when SH Raza walked into an exhibition of his works organised by his nephew at an art gallery in the Capital, he said all of the artworks were fakes. It was ridiculous to see the artist come all the way from Paris to open a show, and say this, she says, fuming.

Artist Samar Singh Jodha quotes Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali: Those who do not want to imitate a thing, dont produce nothing, and adds, Yes, this practice runs strong in exhibitions featuring works of artists who are no more. I have seen more [works of] Husain in Indian drawing rooms than in actual catalogues or publications of his work. In todays world, imitation itself has become an art form. There are fakes, there are copies, there are original copies of originals, and there are art criminals living off art and there are artists who are living off criminals. Jodha also explains how art forgery functions: Each year we hear at least one major scandal, and it gets buried with the next one. There are agents who can hire unemployed artists and commission them to create most outstanding fakes and make millions. I think art forgeries have become the new art form in the business. The appetite for art and new money will always have a market for this.

Artist Sanjay Bhattacharyya stopped auction of a fake painting at a premium event in Delhi in 2006. (Shivam Saxena/HT PHOTO)

Artists say despite spotting fakes of their own works at shows, they are forced to keep quiet, owing to threats and pressure from lobbies. Money is the best honey. Its very difficult to stop fake paintings from entering the market because the kind of return you can get from a fake painting is unbelievable. Show me any business where you invest 30,000, and make lakhs in return! Just choose painters who are no more so that nobody gets to know, explains artist Sanjay Bhattacharyya, as he narrates a personal experience from 2006: I stopped a fake of Bikash Bhattacharjee at a premium auction at a Delhi hotel. The last bid, before I intervened, had been for 33 lakhs! That painting could have easily fetched 40-45 lakhs, and it wasnt even a copy of Bikashs painting, but just a work by some young artist, which was printed even on the catalogue. [After that] I made a hundred enemies and my friends from the community stopped talking to me. I left Delhi for four months, and started photography.

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RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani on Tuesday announced Rs 5,000 crore investment in expanding telecom and petro-retail businesses in West Bengal and said his company is exploring the possibility of setting up a manufacturing facility for mobile phones and set-top boxes.

Speaking at the Bengal Global Business Summit, Indias richest man paid lavish compliments to chief minister Mamata Banerjee saying that under her leadership West Bengal is becoming Best Bengal!

Ambani said his company Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) had committed an investment of Rs 4,500 crore in the state but has ended up investing Rs 15,000 crore.

Didi, we could make this large investment only because you have created a friendly climate and an enabling policy infrastructure, he said, adding RIL has emerged as one of the largest investors in Bengal.

Most of the investment has been made in creating fourth- generation high-speed mobile and internet network for Reliance Jio, the telecom arm of RIL.

We are committing to invest another Rs 5,000 crore in Jio and the entire digital eco-system, retail and retro-retail in the next few years, he said.

Also, Reliance will work with multiple partners to explore setting up next generation state-of-the-art electronics manufacturing facilities and make West Bengal the hub for innovation and hi-tech technologies for consumer devices such as mobile phones, set-top boxes, and other devices, he said.

Starting in 2015 through a public Wi-Fi Experience Zone in Park Street, Jio has enmassed over 1.2 crore customers in the state, Ambani said.

He said the digital economy will bring prosperity at more than double the speed of the traditional economy.

While Jio will reach 100% of state population before the end of 2018, it is embarking on an ambitious project of connecting Bengal with Optic Fibre, he said.

Also, Reliance is setting up Digital Service Centres across India to bring Government to Citizen (G2C) services within easy reach of every citizen, particularly in the rural hinterland.

It will give birth to digital entrepreneurs in villages and small towns, kick-start e-commerce and support agriculture as well as small and medium enterprises.

Ambani said Bengal has said goodbye to the slow growth rate of the past and today is the fourth largest state economy in India, growing at 15.64%, much higher than the national average.

Investments in infrastructure have been unprecedented. A global think-tank ranked Kolkata second among the Indian metros on overall economic performance, even ahead of Mumbai, he said. Today, the state is famous for the ease of doing business! A miracle has happened.

Stating that Bengal today means business, he said the state has adopted a positive mind-set that can make the impossible possible..
The discontentment among legislators over non-distribution of ministerial responsibilities in Uttarakhand continues with another MLA raising his voice over the issue. Khanpur legislator Kunwar Pranav Singh Champion on Monday said that the Other Backward Classes (OBC) community should be given representation in the cabinet.

In Uttarakhand, we have a semblance of all the caste and religions. And in the cabinet we see grossly OBC has been neglected. The OBC population in state is about 24% and not a single representation is in the cabinet, said Champion, talking to Hindustan Times on the sidelines of core committee meeting at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) headquarters in Dehradun on Tuesday.

Ten months after the BJP came to power in Uttarakhand winning 57 of the 70 assembly seats, two cabinet berths are still lying vacant. At present, there is hardly any indication from the government to fill the vacant posts, which has increased the frustration of hopeful MLAs.

Champion said that non-inclusion of any OBC candidate in the cabinet has caused discontentment among the community, which has been a vote bank of the saffron party. We have shared this issue with the party high command and its the prerogative of the party heads to ensure OBC representation in the cabinet, he added.

Champion is not the only leader to voice his concern over the delay in distribution of ministerial responsibilities. Last week, senior BJP leader and Didihat legislator Bishen Singh Chufal had also expressed his disappointment over lack of Kumaon Rajputs representation in the cabinet.

In December, state BJP president Ajay Bhatt had claimed that the vacant cabinet berths would be filled by mid-January, but its not happening. Everyone is of view that the responsibilities shall be distributed in future, he told media persons in Dehradun.

Presently, chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawats cabinet has seven ministers  Satpal Maharaj, Madsan Kaushik, Harak Singh Rawat, Prakash Pant, Yashpal Arya, Arvind Pandey and Subodh Uniyal. Besides, there are two ministers of state with independent charge in Rekha Arya and Dhan Singh Rawat.

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A 19-year-old man, arrested on Monday for allegedly molesting and threatening a minor girl, died in police custody at the Karawal Nagar police station on Tuesday morning. He was found hanging from an iron rod in the ceiling of the interrogation room around 10 am.

Police said the man, identified by his single name, Deepak, committed suicide. His family members have alleged that he was tortured and then murdered by the police personnel because they failed to give them R 30,000 for letting him off. They alleged that the body was hanged to make it look like a case of suicide.

Ajit Kumar Singla, deputy commissioner of police (northeast), however, refuted the allegations, saying Deepak was alone in the interrogation room when he hanged himself. He said negligence on the part of some staff from the police station led to the incident.

The police staff were supposed to keep the arrested man in the lock-up of the Khajoori Khas police station because the Karawal Nagar police station did not have one. Four policemen have been suspended while an inspector, who was in-charge of the police station in the absence of the station house officer (SHO), has been sent to the district line, said Singla.

According to police, Deepak was arrested from Karawal Nagar area in a sexual harassment case that was filed against him by a minor girl in July last year. The girl, in her complaint, accused Deepak of molesting, threatening and outraging her modesty. A case was registered but Deepak went untraceable.

A non-bailable warrant was also issued against Deepak. He was arrested on Monday on a tip-off, said Singla, adding Deepak was previously involved in two theft and assault cases.

Deepaks uncle, Shyam Sunder, however, claimed that his nephew was arrested from Karkardooma Court where they had gone to attend the court proceedings in Deepaks previous case. The policemen took Deepak to the police station and asked me to arrange R30,000 for his release. When I showed my helplessness in arranging the amount, they threatened to arrest Deepak in the case, said Sunder.

Deepak was to be produced before a city court on Tuesday afternoon. The interrogating officers left him alone in the room and went out. In the meantime, he hanged himself using a shawl he was carrying, said police. A constable saw him hanging and raised an alarm. Deepak was rushed to Teg Bahadur hospital but was declared brought dead.

DCP Singla said a judicial probe has been initiated in the matter. Police have also requested the Delhi government to constitute a panel of doctors to conduct the autopsy.

Deepak lived with his uncle and his family members. His mother expired when he was just one year old. Deepaks father Deen Dayal works as a bus conductor in Kota, Rajasthan.
Main roads of New Delhi  such as Janpath, Akbar Road and KG Marg  are lined with old trees like neem, jamun, arjun, imli, pipal and amaltas, among others. The New Delhi Municipal Council, now plans to conduct a census of these majestic trees on main roads.

There is a necessity of having comprehensive information on the number, kind and health of trees on all avenue roads. Therefore, I am proposing trees census on all Avenue Roads in 2018-19 and digitise this data for better tree management, NDMC chairman Naresh Kumar said, while reading out the councils budget on Monday.

The civic body had last conducted a census of trees in 2005. While the database of trees in parks is regularly maintained, those on roads largely remain outside the monitoring net. According to Kumar, the census of trees on main roads will form the baseline database for New Delhis green cover which will help in scientific management of trees, including need to replace the old and diseased ones.

The proposed tree census will capture scientific and popular names, girth at breast height, height, crown area, GPS location, and so on of such trees. A dedicated team will be constituted in NDMC to complete the task in 2018-19, he said.

The NDMC area, a VIP zone in the citys heart, is home to a mere 1.5% of the Capitals 16.78 million people and covers just 3% of the city. But it has nearly 50% green cover of Delhi.

In recent years, residents of various localities have started counting trees of their respective neighbourhoods. The first tree census of Delhi conducted privately by residents of Sarvodaya Enclave in 2011-12 marked the total number of trees, their species and their individual health  whether they had any disease, were infested by pests or were encroached upon. This was followed by other localities like Gulmohar Park, Jor Bagh and Vasant Vihar.

The Delhi government in October 2015 had announced the decision to conduct the Capitals first-ever tree census by a third party, essentially an NGO, to arrive at a figure of the number of trees in the city. This has yet to become a reality.

The New Delhi Municipal Council also has plans to conduct an audit of its yearly plantation drive. In 2016-17, green survey audit was conducted through Indian Agriculture Research Institute, Delhi, which certified 72% survival rate of timber plants planted by the NDMC. Similar audit for the plantation drive conducted in 2017-18 will be completed by March, 2018 by the same institute, Kumar said.

Trees on Main Roads

Arjun: Janpath, Park Street, Mother Teresa (Mixed), BKS

Neem: Aurangzeb Road, Shahjahan Road, Prithviraj Road, Aurobindo Marg, Tees January Marg, Safdarjung Road, Kamal Attaturk Marg, K.G. Marg, Rafi Marg, Talkatora Road, Lodhi Road, Sansad Marg, Pandara Road, Jai Singh, Jantar Mantar, Gurudwara Rakab Ganj Road

Imli: Tilak Marg, Akbar Road, Teen Murti Marg

Jamun: Ashoka Road, Rajpath, Sunehri Bagh, Tughlaq Road, Motilal Nehru Marg, Firoz Shah Road, Raisina Road, Rajaji Marg, Tyagraj Marg, Kushak Road, Talkatora Road, Tolstoy Road, Mahadeva Road

Kigelia: Purana Quila Road, Babar Road, Bangla Sahib Road

Pilkhan: Dr Zakir Hussain Marg, Bhagwan Das Road, Balwant Rai Mehta Lane, Nyaya Marg, Niti Marg, Dalhousie Road, Satya Marg, Church Road

Peepul: Mother Teresa Road, Panchsheel Marg, Sardar Patel Road, Mandir Marg, K.G. Marg, Africa Avenue

Baheda: Dr Rajendra Prasad Road

Khirni: Maulana Azad Road

Semal: Niti Marg, Nyaya Marg

Ailanthus excelsa: Copernicus Marg

Mahua: Rajesh Pilot Marg

Pterygota alata (Budhas Coconut): Bishambhar Das Marg

Gmelina arborea: B- Avenue, Sarojini Nagar

Alstonia scholaris: Vinay Marg, Kautilya Marg, Kitchnar Road, Safdar Hashmi Marg, Tansen Road, RK Ashram Marg

Ficus Sheila: Krishna Menon Marg, Malcha Marg Market

Amaltas: Chandragupta Marg, Amrita Shergil Marg, Humayun Road

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Rebel AAP MLA Kapil Mishra was on Tuesday marshalled out from the Delhi Assembly after he entered the well of the House, demanding a discussion on the election of businessman Sushil Gupta to the Rajya Sabha. Mishra alleged that the Upper House seat was sold to Gupta.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Manjinder Singh Sirsa was also marshalled out after he opposed Speaker Ram Niwas Goels decision to throw Mishra out of the Assembly and allegedly obstructed the staff taking the suspended AAP leader out of the House.

The matter was referred to the Privileges Committee of the Assembly.

As the proceedings began, Mishra displayed a poster which had an image of the Aam Aadmi Partys (AAP) Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Gupta holding a snake with chief minister Arvind Kejriwals face photoshopped on it. Goel ordered the marshals to take Mishra out of the house.

Sirsa allegedly obstructed the marshals, after which he too was marshaled out.

I am forwarding the matter of Sirsa trying to obstruct the marshals to the Privileges Committee of the House, Goyal said.

Sirsa later clarified outside the House that he was not obstructing the marshals but merely asking Mishra to go out on his own.

Leader of the opposition Vijender Gupta later alleged that Mishra was beaten up by the police personnel when he was being marshaled out. Speaker Goel condemned Guptas remarks.

Mishra also denied reports of being beaten by the police personnel.

I was marshaled out but not beaten. I was demanding a discussion on Sushil Guptas election to the Rajya Sabha and bring an adjournment motion. The party sold its Rajya Sabha ticket to Gupta, Mishra said.
Shops and godowns operating from basements were sealed in south Delhis Defence Colony market Tuesday, leading to protests from shop owners and bringing one of Delhis most popular commercial hubs to a halt.

This was the second sealing drive in the market in 25 days, following the reconstitution by the Supreme Court of a monitoring committee that aims to curb violations at markets across the city.

On Tuesday, the South Delhi Municipal Corporation sealed 35 basements on the direction of the SC panel. These basements were used for running shops and restaurants or as godowns by shop owners, which the committee said was unauthorised.

On December 22, when the SDMC sealed 51 units for using residential properties for commercial purposes without paying the use conversion charges, it had largely concentrated on floors above the ground level. The use conversion charge is a fee paid by property owners who deviate from the zonal plan and change the use of their premises from residential to commercial.

However, on Tuesday, there was no clarity on the reason behind the sealing of basements. While the SDMC officials maintained that the shops were sealed for non-payment of reduced use conversion charges at 22,274 per square metre, the monitoring committee members gave a different reason. The basements in Defence Colony market should be used for residential purposes only. But traders are using them for commercial activities, which is illegal and cant be allowed even if they pay use conversion charge, said a monitoring committee member, who asked not to be named.

According to an official, the civic agency plans to target shops in Greater Kailash I on Wednesday. The shops and eateries that were sealed in Defence Colony market included portions of Moets restaurant, Teksons bookstore, Bansal stationery, Puma shoe store, Batra tent house and Chique clothing store. Basements of an upcoming store, Marque Retail, and two other vacant sites were also sealed.

The civic body could start sealing only at 3 pm because of a delay in getting adequate police personnel to enforce the drive. Shop owners congregated in large numbers in the market and started shouting slogans against monitoring committee members, SDMC and Delhi Police. An additional force from the CRPF was deployed at around 5.30 pm.

We had shown all the documents to SDMC officials, including the regularised building plan, payment slip for additional floor area ratio, one-time parking charge and use conversion charge (paid at old rates of 6,136 per square metre). We even promised to pay the balance use conversion charges at the revised rate (22,274 per square metre) but officials were not ready to hear us, said Nimit Bansal, owner of Bansal Stationary.

Two weeks ago, DDA reduced the charges from 89,090 per square metre to 22,274 per square metre for 80 local markets falling in categories A-D categories (as per circle rates notified by the Delhi government).

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A 25-year-old Delhi woman died of injuries she sustained after allegedly falling into a 250 feet gorge while clicking selfies with her husband in Nainital, police said Tuesday.

As per a preliminary report, Tamanna was standing on a parapet along the road and allegedly lost her footing in panic when she saw a snake.

Tamanna and Shadab, also a resident of Delhi, were on their honeymoon, police said.

Tamanna died within minutes of reaching the hospital in Nainital. After carrying out the post-mortem examination, the body was handed over to her father Mohammad Shabbir who reached here in the morning said Pramod Pathak, station officer, Tallital police station.

Tammana, who went by her first name, lived in Jal Board, Mandoli village in north-east Delhi, and married 30-year-old Saddam in November last year. The couple reached Nainital on Sunday. The next day, they hired a cab to go sightseeing in areas nearby. While returning from Bhowali, 11 km from Nainital, Tammana asked the cab driver to pull over as she was feeling nauseated.

Cab driver Kishan Singh told the police that Tammana and Shadab alighted from the vehicle and sat on the parapet  a safety barrier erected on one side of the road. Singh said he was inside the cab and soon heard someone shouting and crying.

The driver reportedly said, quoting Shadab, that Tamanna panicked after she saw a snake, lost her balance and slipped into a deep gorge.

The driver, passersby and Shadab rescued the woman who had sustained serious injuries. They took her to a government hospital where she died during treatment, police official said.

On Tuesday noon, Tamannas brother Arif filed a complaint with police alleging foul play and said she could have been killed by Shadab.

Shadab is employed as an Ayurveda practitioner at a private hospital in Noida. Police said they will investigative into the matter.

This is the third incident of a tourist dying in Uttarakhand in less than a month. A 33-year-old woman from Delhi drowned during rafting when her raft overturned in a rapid in Rishikesh. Prior to that, a 58-year-old tourist from Ghaziabad was found dead in a hotel in Nainital under mysterious circumstances.

Earlier, a 10-year-old girl from Rajasthan had died after sustaining critical injuries when she fell into a ditch while trying to escape a pack of stray dogs in Nainital.

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The sealing of basements of 35 establishments in Defence Colony market on Tuesday left shopkeepers confused and worried.

Last month, the sealing drive had started with south civic body officials, aided by Supreme Court-appointed monitoring committee, closing floors built above the ground floor for non-payment of use conversion charges.

A month later on Tuesday, officials of South Delhi Municipal Corporation sealed the basements of 35 establishments in Defence Colony, even as shopkeepers claimed they had the revised building plans with them.

We showed the municipal officials our sale deed, payment slip for additional floor area ratio, one-time parking charge and use conversion charge (paid at old rates of Rs 6,136 per square metre). But the officials refused to hear us. Why this repeated sealing action? Why did they not seal the basement on the first day of the drive if it was illegal, said Satish Gupta, owner of Kids Collection.

The shop owners said that they are running commercial activities in the basement of their shops since late 1970s and the municipal corporation had approved their building plan in 2000 after regularising the constructions done till 1998.

We had shown the building plan to the SDMC officials as well as the monitoring committee members during a meeting on Tuesday. But the members kept the plan with themselves without promising anything. In the approved building plan, our basements are clearly shown as commercial establishments, said Jagdish Gupta, general secretary of Defence Colony Market Association and owner of a Puma Shoe store (that operated from the basement).

The affected shopkeepers have now offered to pay the balance use conversion charges at the revised rate (Rs 22,274 per square metre).

A member of the Supreme Court-appointed monitoring committee said that basements of an establishment can only be used for residential purposes.  But traders are using it for commercial activities, which is illegal and cant be allowed even if they pay the use conversion charge, he said.

Traders of Defence Colony also alleged that repeated sealing action has left thousands jobless and at least on humanitarian grounds, the SC-appointed monitoring committee should reconsider their decision. The municipality officials who approved the building plan and allowed commercial activities in basements for the last five decades are equally at fault, said Rajinder Malik, president of Defence Colony market association and owner of Malik grocery store.

Acoording to Abhishek Dutt, councillor from Andrews Ganj, the monitoring committee should come out with detailed guidelines for the convenience of shopkeepers. The shopkeepers are not given any intimation by the municipal corporation about the deadline for submitting the use conversion charge and also till what time the reduced rates (R 22,270 per square metre) will be applicable, which is unfair, said Vishal Ohri, shop owner at GK-II M Block Market.

The sealing drive had restarted in Delhi on December 22 last year from Defence Colony market. A couple of weeks ago, the Delhi Development Authority had encouraged shopkeepers to pay conversion charges by reducing the charges from Rs 89,090 per square metre to Rs 22,274 per square metre for 80 local markets falling in A-D categories (as per circle rates notified by the Delhi government).

But even after reducing the rates, many traders didnt turn up to pay the pending charges, said a municipal corporation official.

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One of the more fundamental issues in the way higher education in India is regulated is the infantilisation of adult students, and the misplaced belief that the administration must exercise maximum control over students in order to create an effective learning environment. The issue of compulsory attendance which has recently reared its head in Jawaharlal Nehru University, is a symptom of this problem. The belief behind making attendance compulsory is that if students are forced to sit in the classroom, they will end up learning from the teacher, no matter how boring, insipid, or uninspiring a class may be.

The problem with such thinking is that it assumes that students  adults, with the right to vote and make their own decisions in life outside of the college environment  are not responsible enough to make their own learning choices. That they dont, or worse wont, attend lectures because of some childish impulse to play truant. This approach to learning assumes that the student is an empty receptacle in which the all-knowing teacher may pour in knowledge; and their choice to not attend certain lectures will deprive them of this knowledge. This attitude removes the student from the process of knowledge creation, effectively assuming that the student can have nothing important to contribute to the learning process.

But in order to stimulate critical thinking and the ability to question established rules, students must be included in the learning process. If professors are unable to hold the attention of students, there is no point in forcing students to attend; because as everyone who has ever been to a boring lecture knows, simply being present does not mean anything. Learning can only occur when the student is engaged with the subject and is ready and willing to grapple with the problems under consideration. Forcing unwilling adults to sit through long lectures will only contribute to the ennui that already plagues Indias higher education system. A robust education system must include students as partners in curriculum design; and not treat them as storage bins for information, instead of conscious beings capable of knowledge creation.
Digital boards are likely to be installed in all government schools in India in the next five years  a project that will bring technology to classrooms for teaching, learning and assessment of students.

The Centre on Monday decided to launch Operation Digital Board shortly, with the help of community and corporate help. This will help students view diagrams and presentations through digital tools.

We are moving towards digital education and so we need to change the tools through which we teach students. This will improve accountability of teachers as well. It will make learning more interesting, human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar said at a meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE).

At the meeting, attended by Union and state ministers, Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia suggested that the CBSE, NCERT and state education boards should reduce the syllabus by 50%.

As long as the sword of syllabus completion hangs over teachers, they can never shift their attention to learning outcomes, he said.

Presentations were made on several sub-committees of CABE, including extending the scope of the right to education (RTE) act to include pre-primary schools. It was discussed but a decision has not been taken. Further discussion with all the states will be taken up, Javadekar said.

Issues related to out-of-school children and devising ways to provide them education was also discussed. The government is planning a nationwide survey to identify such kids.

Union women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi said at the meeting that students should be exposed to religious books of all religions to promote greater tolerance.

Jammu and Kashmir has tied up with the HRD ministry for school reforms in the state. A roadmap has been drafted and it is the first step to provide an overarching framework for school education reforms for the state, said Anil Swarup, the ministrys school education secretary. Jammu and Kashmir education minister Altaf Bukhari highlighted issues such as providing better infrastructure and introduction of modern courses.
The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras will offer a two-month summer fellowship programme from May 16 for students from outside the premier engineering institutes.

The institute said in a press release that the deadline for submitting the applications is 5pm on February 28, 2018. A sum of Rs 6,000 would be provided every month as a stipend, it added.

The internship is designed to enhance awareness and interest in high-quality academic research among young engineering, management, sciences and humanities students through a goal oriented summer mini-project undertaken at IIT Madras, the press release said.

Candidates pursuing the third year of BE, BTech, BSc (English), integrated ME and MTech, first year of ME, MTech, MSc, MA and MBA are eligible to apply for the programme. Candidates with an outstanding academic background in terms of good ranks in university examinations are encouraged to apply.

Students should highlight their academic performance and achievement, including papers presented at seminars, projects executed, participation in design contests, score or rank in mathematics Olympiad if any and any other awards or distinctions.

This an opportunity for students to work with leading researchers on problems that are current and forefront of technology, Prof V Jagadeesh Kumar, dean of academic courses, said.

Departments offering the programme include:

 Aerospace engineering

 Applied mechanics

 Biotechnology

 Chemical engineering

 Civil engineering

 Computer science engineering

 Engineering design

 Electrical engineering

 Mechanical engineering.

 Metallurgical and materials engineering

 Ocean engineering

 Physics

 Chemistry

 Mathematics

 Humanities and social sciences

 Management studies

Candidates, who wish to apply, can visit following link: https://sfp.iitm.ac.in/howtoapply.
A plan by Norways government to phase out fur farms by 2025 dismayed producers and delighted animal rights activists on Monday as a sign that fur is out of fashion even in a nation that was once the worlds top producer of fox pelts.

Conservative Prime Minister Erna Solbergs government agreed to shut fox and mink farms that produce about one million pelts a year as part of a deal on Sunday to broaden her two-party minority government by adding the anti-fur Liberal Party.

Animal rights group Noah hailed the decision as part of a shift against what it views as an outdated and cruel business with dwindling appeal to fashion-conscious consumers.

Were very pleased, Noah leader Siri Martinsen said, adding the plan seemed sure of majority support in Norways parliament.

Fox farming peaked in Norway in 1939, just before World War II, when the Nordic nation was the biggest world producer with almost 20,000 farms, according to a government report.

Fox farming peaked in Norway in 1939, just before World War II, when the Nordic nation was the biggest world producer with almost 20,000 farms, according to a government report. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

In 2013, by contrast, Norway produced only about three percent of 7.3 million fox furs worldwide in a market dominated by China, with 69%, and Finland, it said. That same year, Norway produced one percent of world mink output of 72.6 million, a market also dominated by China.

Its not a very lucrative business in Norway, said Sveinung Fjose, of Menon Business Economics and an expert on fur farms. It wouldnt harm the Norwegian economy severely to close it down.

Humane Society International, which campaigns against the fur trade, said in a statement that Norway was the 14th European nation to phase out fur farming sparing animals who would otherwise spend their entire lives in cramped, barren cages.

Last year, Italys Gucci said it would stop using fur in its designs, joining a growing number of fashion houses looking at alternatives after coming under pressure from animal rights activists and changing consumer tastes.

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The Bar Council of India said on Tuesday there was absolutely no crisis now in the Supreme Court and normalcy will be restored soon in the higher judiciary that saw four top judges coming out in the open against the Chief Justice of India.

BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra told PTI that a seven- member delegation on Monday met Justice Ranjan Gogoi, one of the four judges who held the January 12 presser, and he assured him that there was no crisis at all.

Justice Gogoi said the crisis is over. He said there is no dispute at all, Manan said when asked about reports which projected a contrary situation.

A crisis erupted on January 12 after four senior judges -- Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph -- openly spoke against the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

The BCI chairman said he did not know the basis on which a section of media has been coming out with reports that the crisis was far from being resolved but stressed that there was a need not to further escalate the situation.

He said they had also met Justice MB Lokur and he had also said that there was no crisis as there was nothing personal about the issues raised by them.

Read | SC judges vs CJI Dipak Misra: How cases are allocated in Indias top court

When his attention was drawn to Tuesdays statement of attorney general KK Venugopal, he said, I dont know how and why the attorney general is saying like this. All judges are holding their courts and the work is going on normally in the Supreme Court.

Hence, nothing more will come out in public and very soon all issues will be settled. Absolutely there is no crisis now, he said.

The four top Supreme Court judges had on Monday resumed work, belying the simmering tensions sparked by their accusations against the Chief Justice, while the attorney general had described the unprecedented crisis as a storm in a tea cup.

In the presser, the four judges had flagged certain problems, including the assigning of cases in the apex court, and said there were certain issues afflicting the countrys highest court.

Chief Justice of India Misra had on Sunday met a seven-member delegation of the Bar Council of India and Supreme Court Bar Association President Vikas Singh and had assured them that the crisis would be sorted out soon and congeniality would prevail.
The Andhra Pradesh police on Monday arrested a self-styled godman who allegedly tried to extort money from the states textiles and transport minister Kinjarapu Atchannaidu by offering to organise special prayers to neutralise a Maoist threat to his life.

Murapaka Kalidasa Sarma, a self-styled astrologer and priest from Parvathipuram town in Vizianagaram district, had been collecting big money from rich people and political leaders of north-coastal Andhra Pradesh with an elaborate hoax of threats to their lives and that he would perform special puja to ward off evil forces, the Srikakulam police said.

A few days ago, he made a call to Atchannaidus personal assistant and told him that the minister who hails from Tekkali in Srikakulam district was on the hit list of Maoists and might face attack from them anytime. He offered to perform a special puja for his safety.

In the first week of January, the godman obtained a mobile sim card in the name of a tribal at Rayagadh in Odisha and made a call to the ministers assistant again posing as a Maoist and threatening that the minister would be killed soon. In order to substantiate their threat, Sarma, along with his accomplice J Sankara Rao from Rayagadh, stuffed some detonators in a vehicle tyre and placed it near Naidus village. The police who conducted security checks discovered these explosives on January 12, Srikakulam superintendent of police Trivikram Varma told the media.

After a complaint from the ministers office, five police teams swung into action and traced the threatening call to Odisha. They first arrested Sankara Rao and based on the leads given by him, they arrested Sarma from his ashram at Parvathipuram.

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Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and PM Narendra Modi attended Raisina Dialogue in Delhi

Earlier in the day,, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Taj Mahal in Agra on Tuesday, a day after New Delhi and Tel Aviv signed nine pacts to boost bilateral ties in strategic areas.

UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath received the Israeli Prime Minister at the Taj. As has been the practice during VIP visits, the Taj was closed for public viewing during Netanyahus visit.



Netanyahu will leave for Ahmedabad and then Mumbai on Wednesday.

Below are the live updates:



7:16pm: PM Natanyahus visit to India underlines the celebration of 25 years of diplomatic relations between India and Israel says External Affairs minister Sushma Swaraj.



7:14pm: Your (PM Modi) visit to Israel broke ground, your were the first leader of India to come to Israel in 3000 years, hope it will not take long for your next visit. I want to tell you that we believe in India as you believe in Israel says Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu in Delhi

7:12pm: Netanyahu says, The alliance of democracies is important to secure our common future, I believe possibilities are endless. In this visit, we have discussed how we can strengthen our two nations in civilian, security and in every area.

7:10pm: If you want to be an economic power, you must reduce and simplify taxes and must cut bureaucracy. The main job of both India and Israel is to cut this bureaucracy so the firms can go on with their business of doing business says Israeli PM.

7:03pm: I was astounded to know that PM Modi has moved India in the scale of ease of doing business 42 places in three years says Netanyahu.

7:00pm: PM Modi and Israel PM Netanyahu attend Raisina Dialogue in Delhi.

1:17pm: Israeli PM and his wife reach Taj Mahal, Uttar Pradesh CM is not accompanying them

1pm: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu leaves for Taj Mahal along with his wife Sara and UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.

12:01pm: Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara reach Amar Vilas Hotel in Agra

11:28am: Yogi Adityanath reaches Technical airport in Agra to welcome PM of Israel.

#Visuals from Agra ahead of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visit to Taj Mahal today #NetanyahuInIndia pic.twitter.com/BCUcCGwBSG  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 16, 2018

9:24am: Yogi Adityanath will host lunch for the Israeli PM at Hotel Amar Vilas in Agra.

9:23am: Israel PM will reach Taj Mahal at around 11:20am and is expected to stay for an hour.
A 42-year-old man, who is accused of throwing his four minor daughters off a moving train in the middle of the night, was arrested in Bihars Motihari district late on Monday after being on the run for almost three months.

The Uttar Pradesh Government Railway Police (GRP) arrested Iddu Mian from near his house in Motiharis Saraiya village and brought him to Lucknow on Tuesday.

According to interrogators, Mian confessed and said he threw his daughters off the Kamakhya-Katra Express under the influence of alcohol, but police said multiple factors were at play.

The accused is illiterate as well as a severe alcoholic and his initial interrogation suggested that getting rid of his daughters was certainly in the back of his mind, said Inspector General (IG) of Police, GRP Lucknow, Binod Kumar Singh.

Iddu Mian is accused of throwing four of his five daughters -- Rabina Khatoon (12), Algun Khatoon (9), Muniya(7), and Shamina (4) -- off the Kamakhya-Katra Express on the intervening night of October 23 and 24.

The train was passing through Sitapur, about 90 km north of Lucknow, when Iddu allegedly threw his children, who were sleeping, one after another.

Muniya died while the other three were found injured by the railway tracks the next day. The family was travelling from Bihars Bettiah to Jammu, where Mian worked as a labourer.

The plot thickened when days later, Mians 36-year-old wife, Afreena Khatoon, turned up at the village clutching their youngest daughter, two-year-old Shehzadi.

She told police he had thrown the four girls off the train when she was sleeping, and threatened her to keep quiet. Paanch-paanch ladkiyan ko kaun palat aur kaun shadi karawat (who will feed five girls and arrange for their marriages), she had quoted Mian as saying to her on the train.

Police said Mian managed to abscond for 83 days by hiding in a sugarcane field for a month-and-half, coming out only to get provisions, and threatening villagers to not go to the authorities. He also travelled Jammu, Patiala, Chandigarh, Delhi and Nepal to throw the police off his scent.

Police said Mian took care of his two sons from his first wife, and his elder son, Raees, stayed with him in Jammu. He, however, never spent money on his daughters and they stayed along with their mother at their maternal grandmothers house in Jharka village of Bettiah district.

According to interrogators, Mian said the family boarded the train from Bettiah on October 22.

He bought two bottles of liquor when the train halted at Gorakhpur railway station on October 23 and consumed it inside the toilet after his wife and daughters had slept on the night of October 23 and 24. Under the influence of alcohol, he then threw his four daughters while crossing Sitapur, Singh stated.

Mian also apparently told the police that he couldnt throw his youngest daughter as she was sleeping in her mothers lap. He said he informed his wife about throwing the girls out of the moving train after reaching Jammu as she was repeatedly asking about her missing daughters.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked BJP leader Ajay Agrawal to explain his locus in filing an appeal in the politically-sensitive Rs 64 crore Bofors pay-offs case.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra noted that the CBI has not filed any appeal in the apex court challenging the May 31, 2005, Delhi high court judgement and asked the petitioner to explain his locus in the case.

We expect the petitioner to argue the matter on the next date of hearing and argue the parameters on grant of leaves, said the bench also comprising justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud.

The matter will be now heard on February 2.

Justice RS Sodhi of Delhi high court, since retired, had on May 31, 2005, quashed all charges against the three Hinduja brothers  Srichand, Gopichand and Prakashchand  and the Bofors company, castigating the CBI for its handling of the case, saying it had cost the exchequer about Rs 250 crore.

Agrawal, who had contested the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 from Rai Bareli against the then Congress president Sonia Gandhi, has filed an appeal in the apex court against the 2005 verdict of the high court.

Before the 2005 verdict of Justice Sodhi, another judge of the Delhi high court, retired Justice JD Kapoor, had on February 4, 2004, exonerated late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in the case and directed the framing of charge of forgery under section 465 of the IPC against Bofors company.

The Rs 1,437-crore deal between India and Swedish arms manufacturer AB Bofors for the supply of 400 155mm Howitzer guns for the Indian Army was entered into on March 24, 1986.

Swedish Radio on April 16, 1987, had claimed that the company had paid bribes to top Indian politicians and defence personnel.

The CBI on January 22, 1990, had registered the FIR for alleged offences of criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery under the Indian Penal Code and other sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act against Martin Ardbo, the then president of AB Bofors, alleged middleman Win Chadda and the Hinduja brothers.

It alleged that certain public servants and private persons in India and abroad had entered into a criminal conspiracy between 1982 and 1987 in pursuance of which the offences of bribery, corruption, cheating and forgery were committed.

The first charge sheet in the case was filed on October 22, 1999, against Chadda, Ottavio Quattrocchi, the then defence secretary SK Bhatnagar, Ardbo and the Bofors company. A supplementary charge sheet was filed against the Hinduja brothers on October 9, 2000.

A special CBI court in Delhi on March 4, 2011, had discharged Quattrocchi from the case saying the country could not afford to spend hard-earned money on his extradition which had already cost Rs 250 crore.

Quattrocchi, who fled from here on July 29-30, 1993, never appeared before any court in India to face prosecution. He passed away on July 13, 2013. The other accused persons who died are Bhatnagar, Chadda and Ardbo.
In the heart of Maoist stronghold of Bastar in south Chhattisgarh, a road opening party now comprises only women police commandos.

The Chhattisgarh police deployed 60 women commandos recently to guard the road in south Sukma, where 25 CRPF commandos were killed in a Maoists ambush last April. Around 60% of the rebels who participated in the raid were women.

The women constables want to fight Maoists and therefore, we have trained them for 70 days in Sukma and deployed in hardcore Maoist area of south Sukma in road opening party (ROP), said Sukmas superintendent of police Abhishek Meena.

The woman commandos include surrendered Maoists and those who joined the police through the normal recruitment process.

A road opening party ensures safety of workers where a road is under construction and provides security to anyone travelling on the particular stretch.

Armed with automatic weapons, these commandos will guard one of most dangerous patches in south Sukma from Dornapal to Jagardonga, officials said. The road where the women commandos have been deployed is about 56 km and is under construction. There are 13 CRPF camps in this stretch of the road.

A woman commando of Chhattisgarh Police stands guard at a road building site in Sukma. (HT PHOTO)

There have been 12 encounters between security forces and Maoists since the roads construction began four years ago. A total of 32 security personnel have been killed in these encounters.

On Sunday, Maoists allegedly torched the only bus connecting about 50 villages in the remote Sukma district on the same road where the CRPF troopers had been ambushed. The bus service was reintroduced in May 2017 after 12 years.

After induction of the initial batch, the Sukma police are planning to train more women constables and deploy them in Sukma region to fight Maoists.

They (women commandoes) are brave and well-trained, special director general of police (anti-Maoist operations) DM Awasthi said. They are also very effective to counter the propaganda of Maoists of rape charges against police personnel.

Last year, the Bijapur police had trained 32 women for anti-Maoist operations but it is for the first time they have been deployed in a road opening party.
The four Supreme Court judges who publicly criticised the Chief Justice of India at a press conference last week met Dipak Misra on Tuesday in his chambers in a bid to resolve the rift between them.

The meeting, sources said, was called by Chief justice Misra in his Supreme Court chamber at 10.10 am.

It remained inconclusive, and the top five judges are expected to meet again on Wednesday to tide over the crisis, a first in the courts 68-year history.

Last week, four seniormost Supreme Court judges  Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, MB Lokur and Kurian Joseph  expressed their unhappiness about the functioning of the top court and raised concerns over the allocation of cases, warning a lack of impartiality could imperil Indias democracy.

The judges complained that administration of Supreme Court is not in order and there have been things less than desirable that have happened in the court.

The Chief Justice, the four judges claimed, was abusing his position as the master of the roster and assigning cases with far-reaching consequences for the nation and the institution selectively to benches of his preference without any rationale.

This must be guarded against at all costs, the judges said.

Since the Friday press conference, there have been efforts by sitting judges and advocate bodies to mediate a solution to the crisis.

The Bar Council of India, the apex regulatory body for advocates in the country, had set up a seven-member delegation and met Chief Justice Misra and 14 other judges of the top court on Sunday.

The Supreme Court Bar Association too pitched in with efforts and its president Vikas Singh met the Chief Justice of India and other judges.
A class 10 student was allegedly stabbed by his classmate in an area under the Nacharam police station limits here today, police said.

The minor accused used to tease the victims sister, and the victim had warned him against it, police said.

The incident took place when the two were returning from school.

The victim boys condition was stable, police said.

Police have registered a case under section 307 of IPC (attempt to murder).
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the opening plenary at the World Economic Forum in Davoss (WEF) Davos summit next week, while the keynote address will be given by US President Donald Trump at the annual jamboree of the global elite to be attended by 70 state heads.

Besides, 38 heads of major international organisations such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, as also nearly 2,000 CEOs including over 100 from India will be present at the five-day World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2018, beginning on January 22 with a welcome reception to be hosted by India.

Announcing the official programme in Geneva today, the WEF said the summit will see the largest ever engagement of global leaders this year where the key talking points would include international security, environment and the global economy.

The theme of the meeting, spread over 400 sessions, would be Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World, while the meeting would also see the largest ever proportion of women leaders (21%) including all co-chairs being women this time including social entrepreneur Chetna Sinha from India and IMFs Christine Lagarde, the WEF said.

Modi will be accompanied by six union ministers, including Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal, Suresh Prabhu, Dharmendra Pradhan, M J Akbar and Jitendra Singh.

Besides, two chief ministers (Devendra Fadnavis and Chandrababu Naidu) and over 100 CEOs would take Indias total presence to 129 -- the fourth highest after the US (780), the UK (266) and Switzerland (233 people). China will have 118 participants.

Women participants would account for 12% of total Indian presence, compared to 27% from the US, 24% from the UK, 22% from Germany, 20% from Switzerland, 19% for China and 18% for France.

The WEF said its 48th Annual Meeting will focus on finding ways to reaffirm international cooperation on crucial shared interests, such as international security, the environment and the global economy.

The meeting comes at a time when geostrategic competition among states is generally seen to be on the rise.

Alongside international cooperation, an additional priority of the meeting will be to overcome divisions within countries, said the WEF which describes itself as an international public-private organisation focussed on improving the state of the world.

The WEF said divisions have often been caused by breakdowns in the social contract as a result of failure to protect societies from the transformational impacts of a succession of shocks, from globalisation to the proliferation of social media and the birth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Collectively, these shocks have caused a loss of trust in institutions and damaged the relationship between business and society, it added.

Our world has become fractured by increasing competition between nations and deep divides within societies. Yet the sheer scale of the challenges our world faces makes concerted, collaborative and integrated action more essential than ever, WEFs Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab said.

He further said the summit aims to overcome these fault lines by reasserting shared interests among nations and securing multistakeholder commitment to renewing social contracts through inclusive growth.

This years opening plenary will be delivered by Modi on January 23, Prime Minister of India, while Trump will deliver a keynote address before the close of the meeting on January 26, the WEF said.

This year a record number of leaders from G7 economies will participate, including Paolo Gentiloni, Prime Minister of Italy; Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission; Emmanuel Macron, President of France; Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; and Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, in addition to President Trump.

Other leaders from the G20 countries would include Liu He, Member of Political Bureau and General Director of CPC Central Committee of the Peoples Republic of China; Argentina President Mauricio Macri, South Africa Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Brazil President Michel Temer.

From the host country, Alain Berset, President of the Swiss Confederation, will also participate.

Overall, the summit will have over 340 top political leaders with 10 heads of state/government from Africa, nine from Middle East and North Africa and six from Latin America.

These include Ethiopia Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn, Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Nigeria Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Lebanon President Saad Al Hariri, Jordan King Abdullah II Bin Al Hussein, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Columbia President Juan Manuel Santos.

The summit will also be attended by 40 arts and culture leaders, including Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, Cate Blanchett and Elton John.

One of the key issues to be discussed would be navigating a multipolar and multiconceptual world and the balance between global cooperation and local autonomy to prevent the disintegration of the world order.

Besides, the leaders will also discuss how to overcome divisions in society and if outrage cycles in media and political rhetoric are widening societal fault lines and undermining tolerance, then what solutions can be jointly developed to restore the social compact, the WEF said.
The Gujarat police on Tuesday dismissed Vishwa Hindu Parishad international working president Pravin Togadias allegation that there is a threat to his life, a day after he disappeared for nearly 12 hours and was found in a private hospital later.

Togadia alleged that he fell unconscious while trying to escape a Rajasthan police team that was out to kill him in an encounter, a term used for extra-judicial killings.

The Ahmedabad crime branch accused Togadia of staging the lost-and-found drama and faking his illness on Monday when Rajasthan police personnel came to execute a courts arrest warrant against him in a 2001 case of breaking prohibitory orders in that state.

According to police, the 62-year-old leader was fit and admitted to a hospital by his aide.

At 11.10am, Togadia left the VHP office in Paldi, Ahmedabad, with Dhiru Kapuriya and reached the house of Ghanshyambhai Charandas in Thaltej at 11.30am. Charandas rang up his driver, who then called an emergency ambulance service to the Kotarpur area, joint commissioner of police JK Bhatt said.

Togadia was allegedly driven to Kotarpur where he shifted to the ambulance when it reached the spot. He was conscious, his were parameters normal, and was accompanied by Ghanshyambhai, the officer said.

The ambulance staff wanted to take them to the nearby civil hospital but the duo allegedly insisted on going to Chandramani private hospital, where doctors later said Togadia was in a semi-conscious state when he arrived.

Police alleged that Togadia had planned everything in advance to evade arrest as Ghanshyambhai had contacted Dr Rupkumar Agrawal of the private hospital around 6am. The hospital is located barely 8km from the VHP office.

According to officers, Togadia left his office with an aide and wasnt accompanied by his guards. The VHP leader gets Z-category security cover.

Appearing in a wheelchair with a cannula for intravenous injections fixed on a hand, Togadia told reporters on Tuesday that he left the VHP office in an auto-rickshaw and reached a friends home after being informed that Rajasthan police had sent a team to kill him.

He then headed for the airport in another auto-rickshaw to catch a flight to Jaipur and present himself in a court, but couldnt as he fell unconscious on the way, the firebrand right-wing leader said. I woke up at the hospital in the night.

According to Gujarat police, two Rajasthan policemen accompanied by a local team visited Togadias home in the Sola neighbourhood, but never went to VHP office in Paldi. The policemen returned when they couldnt find the VHP leader in his home.

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The Centres decision to discontinue subsidy on Haj pilgrimage evoked mixed reactions from major political parties in Bihar on Tuesday.

While the RJD and Congress slammed the Centre for the decision calling it an unfair and insensitive decision, the JD(U) and BJP defended the Centres decision.

RJDs state spokesperson Ejya Yadav said the Centres decision to discontinue subsidy in the Haj pilgrimage was an unfair decision reasoning that it would deprive a large number of lower income group pilgrims of an opportunity to visit the Mecca.

The central government should have been more liberal in this case, especially when the matter is related to someones religion and faith, she said.

Yadav also stressed that the subsidy had continued for a long time and there was no reason for it to be discontinued, dubbing it as a political move by the BJP-led NDA government.

Congress state president Kauqab Quadri took a similar line and said the Centres decision had brought to fore the insensitive face of the PM Modi-led NDA government.

On one hand, the Centre talks about inclusive development whereas on the other hand it is taking such steps which will deprive the poor of an opportunity to go on pilgrimage. The discontinuation of the Haj subsidy is also an attempt to polarise the country for political gains and divert attention from the recent outbursts by Supreme Court judges about threat to democracy, he said.

Defending the central governments decision, JD(U) national general secretary KC Tyagi said the discontinuation of the subsidy for Haj pilgrimage was a demand being made by various Muslim groups for the last many years.

It is on the demand of various Muslim groups and other bodies that the Centre has taken the decision. It has been argued on many platforms  even by Muslim groups  that taking subsidy for Haj pilgrimage was not allowed in the Quran and other religious texts, he said.

State BJP leaders also defended the government saying the decision had been taken after a lot of discussions with the stakeholders.
With the Centre announcing the abolition of the Haj subsidy, the Congress said Tuesday it hopes the Modi government will utilise the money for the upliftment of the disempowered among the minorities.

Minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi announced that there will be no subsidy for Haj from this year.

Reacting to the development, Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said the Supreme Court bench headed by justice A Aftab Alam had in 2012 directed the abolition of the Haj subsidy.

Supreme Court bench headed by J Aftab Alam had directed abolition of Haj subsidy within 10 years in May 2012 besides asking for utilisation of money for education and upliftment of minorities.

We sincerely hope that Modi Government will honour the SC direction and utilise this money for the disempowered including -- Modern education to children, especially young girls from minority community..., he tweeted.

Surjewala also hoped that the government would provide special incentives for higher education, including in medical, engineering and other services, besides ensuring skill development of the children of the minority community.

He also urged the government to make provisions for helping the destitute women among the minorities, including those who have been widowed, abandoned or divorced, and make other provisions for the upliftment and social development of the minority community.
India and Israel are an alliance, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his inaugural address at the annual Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi on Tuesday.

The two countries officially hold each other as strategic partners, a stand reiterated in the joint statement of Netanyahu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi released a day before.

In a speech outlining the sources of national power, Netanyahu said democratic values were the most important source of power. If we are to live in a world that protects democratic norms, he said, countries such as India and Israel needed to form an alliance to secure our future. He also underlined the challenge of radical Islam and its terrorist offshoots to the quest for modernity.

He said Modi spoke often of the need to secure democracy. We have discussed how we can strengthen relations of our two countries in security, in civilian areas and every area, he said, before ending with the line god bless the India-Israel alliance.

Earlier in his speech, Netanyahu described India as one of the great powers of earth. He cited military capability as the first requirement of national power, noting that in Israels case this included considerable investment in intelligence to compensate for our size.

Military and intelligence, however, was expensive and therefore this required economic power. This in turn required education. Israels own defence forces, he said, were a giant education machine. But to convert innovation into economic might needed a free market environment that allowed firms to do business and add value to the economy. He cited the growing convergence of big data, connectivity and artificial intelligence. Countries that seize the future are those that innovate along these lines, he said.

He spoke of political power, the ability to build relationships and alliances with other countries before citing values and democracy as the fourth pillar. He said Israels long struggle to survive had led it to understand a lesson: The weak dont survive, the strong survive. He noted that you make peace with the strong, you make alliances with the strong, you are able to maintain peace by being strong.
India for the first time took part in a meeting of the international military cooperation departments of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) since joining the bloc last year.

An Indian delegation led by Major General Ajay Seth participated in the meeting, which discussed issues of practical cooperation among SCO nations, an Indian Embassy press release in Beijing said on Tuesday.

The two-day meeting concluded on Tuesay.

This is the first meeting attended by India in the field of defence cooperation under the SCO framework.

India and Pakistan were admitted last year into the grouping in which China plays an influential role.

The SCO is comprised of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan.

Officials say both India and China look to SCO as a major platform for improving bilateral ties bogged down by a host of differences, including the 73-day military standoff at Dokalam last year.
A tractor carrying Indian pilgrims met with an accident in Nepals Nawalparasi district on Tuesday, killing at least one person and injuring 13 others.

The accident in Triveni Village Council took place when the tractor was heading towards Trivenidham on the occasion of Hindu festival Maghe Aunshi for taking holy dip.

The driver of the vehicle died on the spot and 13 others sustained injuries as the tractor overturned, according to the police.

The injured pilgrims have been taken to a local health centre for treatment.

All the people in the tractor were from Gorakhpur, India.

Thousands of pilgrims have come to Trivenighat Tuesday to worship at the temple.
A Delhi court on Tuesday directed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to file its reply to a fresh bail plea of Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah in a 2007 money laundering case related to alleged terror financing, even as his wife claimed he was being slow poisoned in the prison.

Additional Sessions Judge Sidharth Sharma, who had in August last year denied the relief to Shah citing ongoing probe, directed Enforcement Directorates (Ed) special public prosecutor N K Matta to file a reply to the fresh bail plea by February 26.

In his bail application, the accused told the court that investigation in the case has been completed since the agency has filed its charge sheet and there was no chance for Shah to hamper the probe.

Advocate M S Khan, appearing for Shah, told the court that no purpose will be served by keeping him in custody.

Shah, who appeared before the court through video conference, also said he was lacking treatment inside the jail. Trial is only going on because I am alive. If there is no Shah, there will be no trial, 62-year old Shah said.

Meanwhile, Shahs wife Bilquies Shah, also moved an application before the court through the defence lawyer and claimed that her husband was suffering from various ailments and was on regular medicine for last six years.

She alleged that Shah was facing difficulty in getting those medicines inside the jail and was now also suffering from sudden loss of consciousness.

My husband had similar fainting attacks in Tihar Jail. Repeated requests were made to the jail authorities but no steps were taken in this regard. This is a clear indication of slow poisoning of my husband by the jail authorities, she told the court in her application.

The court, meanwhile, initiated the trial and started recording the statement of the prosecution witnesses. It posted the matter for further hearing on February 26.

The court had on August 22 last year rejected Shahs bail plea after the ED said it was probing whether he had received money from countries such as Pakistan to promote terrorism in India.

On November 15, the court had framed money laundering charges against Shah and alleged hawala dealer Mohammad Aslam Wani in the case. Both the accused pleaded not guilty and claimed trial.

The ED had on September 23 filed the charge sheet against Shah, accusing him being in touch with Pakistan-based terrorist Hafiz Saeed. It had also named Wani, who is in judicial custody along with Shah.

The court had taken cognisance of the over 700-page charge sheet which relied upon 19 witnesses.

The central probe agency, in the charge sheet filed under sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), had furnished Shahs statements where he had allegedly told the investigators that he has no source of income of his own and that he does not file any Income Tax Return (ITR).

The probe agency had recorded the statement of 36-year old Wani where he allegedly said that he came to Delhi from Srinagar at the directions of Shah sometime in April, 2003 and that was the first time he had met him. Wani was arrested by the ED on August 6 from Srinagar.

The ED alleged that Wani was asked by Shah to work for him (on a commission basis) in collecting hawala money from Delhi and deliver to him at Srinagar.

The case dates back to August 2005 in which the Delhi Polices Special Cell had earlier arrested Wani.

Wani had then claimed that he had given Rs 2.25 crore to Shah, following which the ED had registered a case under PMLA against the duo in 2007. He was arrested with Rs 63 lakh, allegedly received through hawala channels from the Middle East, and a cache of ammunition, on August 26, 2005.

In 2010, a Delhi court had cleared Wani of terror funding charges in 2005 case but had convicted him under the Arms Act.
The Supreme Court said on Tuesday any attack against an adult man and woman opting for an inter-caste marriage by khap panchayats or associations is absolutely illegal.

If an adult man and woman marry, no khap, panchayat or society can question them, a bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra said.

The bench, also comprising justice AM Khanwilkar and justice DY Chandrachud, asked the Centre to respond on suggestions given by amicus curiae (friend of the court) Raju Ramachandran on ways to prevent harassment and killing of young couples in the name of family honour for marrying out of their caste or in the same clan (gotra).

SC asks Centre to act fast

The top court added that if the Centre does not do anything to ban such panchayats then it would have to step in.

The court was hearing a petition against khap panchayats filed by a non-government organisation Shakti Vahini in 2010 seeking directions to the Centre and state governments for preventing honour crimes.

To my understanding, consumption of fast food contributes to such incidents. Chowmein leads to hormonal imbalance evoking an urge to indulge in such acts. -- Jitender Chhatar, Khap panchayat leader in 2012

Khaps, caste or community organisations representing a clan or a group of related clans, frequently make pronouncements on social issues and have often landed in controversies owing to their diktats. One such khap panchayat leader in Haryana blamed chowmein for the rise in rape cases in India.

To my understanding, consumption of fast food contributes to such incidents. Chowmein leads to hormonal imbalance evoking an urge to indulge in such acts, Jitender Chhatar, a resident of Jinds Chhatar village and khap panchayat leader, was quoted as saying.

Another suggested that the age of marriage should be dropped from 18 to 16 because being married would make young women less susceptible to rapes.

The bench told the Centre that it will not give its recommendation on the suggestions given by the amicus curiae assisting the court in the matter and would contemplate passing an order based on his suggestion.

Whenever there is any kind of collective attack on a boy or girl who is adult, it is absolutely illegal, the bench said and listed the matter for February 5 for further hearing.

Past hearing

The top court had earlier sought suggestions from Shakti Vahini, the amicus curiae and khap panchayats on the issue. It invited khap panchayats to hear their views before issuing an order to stop them from harassing and killing couples and women in the name of honour.

The Centre had pleaded with the top court to put in place a mechanism to monitor crimes against women by khap panchayats, as the police were not able to protect women facing ordeal at their hands.

The top court also said that as a pilot project, it would examine the situation in three districts of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh where khap panchayats were active. It summoned the superintendents of police of Rohtak and Jind districts of Haryana and that of Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh to apprise the court of the situation there.

(With agency inputs)
The gangrape and murder of a 15-year-old Dalit girl of Jhansa village in Kurukshetra district have raised questions about the delay in police action.

The victims family said a first information report was registered at the Jhansa police station on January 9, the day she went missing, but the police failed to act till her body was found near a canal at Budhakhera village of Jinds Safidon town, 110 km from Kurukshetra, three days later.

Kurukshetra superintendent of police Abhishek Garg said the main accused has been identified and efforts are on to trace him.

A grievously hurt father now seeks nothing less than capital punishment for the culprits.

Another police official requesting anonymity said that the accused is a Class 12 student and a neighbour of the victim. The girls family members also suspected his involvement. The official said that the accused and the victim studied in the same private school and used to talk over phone. The boy is also missing and his phone is switched off since January 9 .

Meanwhile, the SP said, six suspects have been detained and are being questioned.

The SP transferred Jhansa police station in-charge Ram Pal to the police lines and ordered a departmental inquiry.

Minister of state for social welfare and empowerment Krishan Kumar Bedi met the victims family members, who held a protest demanding a CBI probe and action against officials at the Jhansa police station. Bedi assured the family of financial assistance and a government job. He asked the police to depute two police personnel for the familys security and said they will be given an arms licence.

Victims genitals ruptured

The medical examination revealed that the girl was raped by several individuals and suffered serious internal injuries after the criminals inserted a blunt object into her genitals.

Internal injury is found, her liver was ruptured and apart from that wounds from sexual assault are seen in her private parts. They have been mutilated and ruptured, and it seems that more than one person was involved, said Dr SK Dhattarwal, the head of forensic science department in Rohtak. It seems a hard or blunt weapon was introduced, he added.

The post-mortem also indicates that there were attempts to drown the victim. To confirm that, we have sent the body for a diatom test, he said. The body was found naked from below the chest.

Victim wanted to be doctor, say kin

Inhabitants of her native village knew her as a bright student who aspired to be a doctor and was determined to become one despite odds.

She was a bright student. She wanted to become a doctor. Her uncle was also helping her to realise her aim. He was sure that she will become a doctor or some high-ranking officer, the girls father told reporters.

A grievously hurt father now seeks nothing less than capital punishment for the culprits. They should be hanged, they deserve that, he said.

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A lone chinkara races along the state transport bus as it winds its way on the Latur highway, past Limboti lake towards Malegaon, Maharashtra, where an annual jatra (fair) is being set up. It is late December 2017. As a wintry bite descends on the district, so do lakhs of devotees of Khandoba, the deity of hunters, gatherers and shepherds. For over 200 years, it has been the shade under which the largest jat panchayat of the Vimukta Bhatkya Jatis, or denotified nomadic tribes, takes place.

This is the only meeting point for all the wandering tribes, each of whom holds their own smaller panchayats. It is like their apex court, where they negotiate borrowings and lendings, fix and annul marriages, and settle disputes.

In principle, the assembly and functioning of the jat panchayats has been disbanded across Maharashtra by the Jat Panchayat Act, 2015, on grounds that they are extrajudicial bodies with no constitutional validity to pronounce judgments. In practice, regular meetings take place under cover and continue to hold sway over the tribes. Members scatter hurriedly if questioned, a watchful eye is kept on the police, and the caucus is restricted to three or four elders at a time, strategically positioned under trees, water tanks, and behind tents.

A stones throw from the Malegaon police chowki, there are concrete plinths beneath a grove of neem trees. Three elders sit on one of the steps with a young man to their left. To their right, a few feet away, sits a group of women. One of them  head covered, dressed in a bridal green sari with golden zari work  is summoned. She shyly approaches the men with a matron for a companion. She must answer the questions being put to her: Will she perform her duties? Will she obey her husband? Can she make bhakris (millet flatbread)? Will she uphold tribal values? Is she a virgin? She giggles as she answers, nodding acquiescence to all.

The local police, who keep a strict eye on these tribes, say the activities of these gatherings are now reduced to social customs, fixing marriages by elders of the community, which after all, cannot be prevented. The police say they will crack down on anything more.

But insiders say the panchayats still control their lives. Virginity tests are sought from married couples, and only when the blood-stained bedsheet is displayed on the morning after the wedding, is a marriage validated. Failing the presentation of it, marriages are annulled, monies returned, fines levied, and women sent to be remarried.

This violation of rights is a matter of form for the panchayats.

The Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (MANS) in Nashik has been working to push law and legislation against the exploitation of tribesmen. The organisation played a major role in the introduction of the 2015 act after a four-year battle. Avinash Patil, the bodys state executive president, located in Dhule, says there were no laws to counter what was happening at these panchayats and that some of the punishments handed out by them were cruel, just as some of their customs violated basic rights.

There are still no specific laws under which to book those who extract money through the panchayats  except regular sections of cheating and extortion. Krishna Chandgude, Maharastra state secretary of the Jat Panchayat Muthmati Abhiyan of MANS, has been working closely with these indigenous systems for decades. The fines meted out by the panchayats sometimes run into lakhs, he says. How can nomadic tribesmen, who dont even have houses, jobs, incomes, pay lakhs?

Apart from having to deposit their entire earnings as fines, tribesmen sometimes have to take loans from moneylenders who charge them up to 30% interest per month. Every stage of marriage requires the panchayats say-so. Divorces, adjudicating alliances outside caste and tribe, and even disputes between husbands and wives result in large fines. The mukhyas, pants, netas and leaders grow rich on this exploitation, alleges Chandgude.

The punishments are not just monetary. Until a few years ago, tribesmen at the jatra could be seen with bandaged arms, caused by thrusting their arms into burning oil to prove innocence or truth in a dispute  a common demand of the panchayat elders, they say.

Kiran Vantankar is 24 years old and a nomadic tribesman of the madaari tribe. He pulls out his Election Commission voter identity card to demonstrate his connect with the mainstream. Ashatai Dhutmal, an independent social worker from Lohagaon, has been trying to get many such tribesmen enrolled for their identification proofs, and for government healthcare and welfare schemes. But young people such as Vatankar believe life has already passed them by. It is too late for our generation, but at least our children will benefit, says his 18-year-old friend Sanjay, who never got a chance to enrol in school, and has remained a nomadic worker  now dubbed migrant labour and granted OBC status.

Despite its overbearing demands, Vantankar is still enamoured by the glory days of the panchayat. Before the ban, 25 tribes would sit together. The leader of each tribe, made rich by such fines, would arrive by helicopter in a blatant display of power, wealth, political backing, and status. He would charge a fee in the range of Rs 4-5 lakh just to show up.

The tribesmen, without faith in the Constitution and the courts in a troubled state, and the first to be accused of crimes by the police for being denotified criminals, still swear by the panchayats over administrative, elected or judicial authority.

For me, matters end with the panchayat. It preserves my identity, my customs, my parampara (tradition). Court matters drag for years and we know that we will never be given any benefit of doubt, says Vantankar, who has set up a dance school in Hyderabad, where other members of his tribe train and participate.

The number of tribesmen showing up at the jatra has dwindled this year and many of the elders have gone underground. Their traditional grounds are occupied by two circuses and tamasha tents that blare music through the night.

Some of the tribes  Vaidu, Kaikadi, Vadaar, Kumbhar and Madaari  have moved to the donkey bazaar nearby, where they bring animals to be sold. In the past, all transactions would happen on a rolling credit, which allowed those who didnt have resources to take animals for work and pay in instalments over the year, or at the next grand panchayat. This was a bond of trust for the tribes. Now, with the disbanding of the panchayats, the sellers say there is no credit as there are no guarantees of adjudication. Those who have the money pay upfront, those who dont have to take an outright loan.

Aminbhai Jamgaonkar, a tribe elder who has been a leader of the Bharatiya Vimukta Jamati Adivasi Vikas Sanghatana in Aurangabad, was traditionally a snake charmer. He pulls out a pack of cards and performs a trick  making the numbers on the cards appear and disappear. His community is now reduced to performing magic shows as they travel  in schools and factories, or at village festivals and bazaars. It is not that there arent avenues for them to rehabilitated, and not that they dont have the will to be included. Its that they dont have the means, information, knowledge and the bridges to make that journey.

Could you ask them (the authorities) to set up mobile roving schools for us? Or appoint one place where we can write exams after studying while roaming? suggests Sanjay. Jamgaonkar laughs, then adds chillingly, Dont tell them anything unless you never want to eat again.
The governments decision on revoking Haj subsidy has no meaning as there was no such concession and Muslims were being cheated in its name, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) said Tuesday.

The subsidy was not given to those going on Haj but it was for Air India that is running in losses. It was an eyewash. Muslims were cheated in the name of the subsidy, said AIMPLB general secretary Maulana Wali Rahmani.

In normal days, tickets for Saudi Arabia come for Rs 32,000 but during Haj, Air India used to charge Rs 65,000 to Rs 1 lakh from those going for Haj. The fare will be less without subsidy, he said.

Haj-bound Muslims are bulk purchasers of Air India tickets and so their fare should be less. Its rule of International Air Transport Association that if anyone is going for pilgrimage, he will be given 40% discount. If the fare is not less, it should at least the same as on normal days, he said.

All India Shia Personal Law Board Chairman Yasoob Abbas, on the other hand, said the board favoured subsidy on Haj.

The government used to give subsidy to reduce loss of Air India. If the amount is now spent on education of Muslim children, it will be good but the poor who used to go to Haj will not do so now, he said.

Samajwadi Party spokesman Rajendra Chowdhury said that Haj subsidy should not be revoked completely and facilities for those going for the annual pilgrimage should be increased.

Earlier in the day, Union minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi announced in Delhi that there will be no subsidy for Haj from this year and said the move was part of the governments efforts to empower minorities without appeasement.

A record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage this year from India, he said, adding the government had spent over Rs 250 crore last year on subsidising the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Saudi Arabia.

The decision is in line with a 2012 Supreme Court order, asking the government to do away with the subsidy, which had long been sought by the BJP.

The BJP had cited the subsidy as an example of Muslim appeasement by parties such as the Congress.
In an effort to shed West Bengals investor wary image and woo much-needed capital, chief minister Mamata Banerjee said on Tuesday the people of the state will dedicate their heart to Indian and foreign industrialists if they infused capital in the state.

She also assured industrialists that there is no pressure, discrimination, and intimidation in the state and Bengal has only love and affection for them.

If you invest in Bengal, the state will give you everything. We cannot invest, but we can dedicate our heart and ourselves to you.

We love India and unity of India. We love tolerance. You must invest in Bengal. The state is attracting businesses from all over the world like never before. There is no pressure, discrimination, intimidation... only love, affection and attraction is here, she said.

The business summit was attended by a host of prominent industrialists, including LN Mittal of Arcelor Mittal, Sajjan Jindal of JSW Steel, Kishor Biyani of Future group, Uday Kotak, the head of Kotak group, and Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of RP-Sanjiv Goenka group.

Czech Republic, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Japan, China, South Korea, the UK and the UAE are among the overseas nations represented at the mega business gathering.

The chief minister also said the state holds potential in power, port, agro-based industries, IT and ITes, urban development, health and education and many other sectors.

Reminding investors that West Bengal was the gateway to the north eastern states and neighbouring countries of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, Banerjee made a passionate appeal to them to come to the state.

Please consider Bengal as your home and the Bengal will work with transparency, accountability, credibility, sincerity and punctuality. We consider all of you as our family members. It is a collective family and without you, we account think and organise the event, she said.

Banerjee also said the state emerged as the number one in many parameters, including e-governance and digital applications in delivering public services despite the long legacy of the Left Front government of doing nothing.

No man-days were lost. Six years ago, man-days lost was 78 lakh due to agitations during the regime of the Left Front (that ruled Bengal between 1977 and 2011). We do not allow any strike and blockade. If there is a problem, we sort it out, she said.
In another show of strength, the Shri Rajput Karni Sena took out a massive rally in Dholpur in Rajasthan on Tuesday to demand a countrywide ban on Sanjay Leela Bhansalis Padmaavat, which is scheduled for release on January 25. They have threatened mass immolation if the film is not banned.

The rally was led by Rajput Karni Sena patron, Lokendra Singh Kalvi. Thousands of women were seen walking in the protest rally.

The protesters met the district collector and requested him to convey their message to the central government for banning the film across India.

Dholpur was chosen as the location for the rally as it is situated on the Uttar Pradesh border. We want the Yogi Adityanath government in UP to ban the film, as the Haryana government has already declared a ban in the state today (Tuesday), a senior member of Karni Sena told IANS.

Earlier, we had met Haryana Chief Minister Manoharlal Khattar requesting him to ban the movie, and he had assured us the movie would be banned once they check its legal aspects.

We want Prime Minister Narendra Modi to look into the issue and ban the movie across India. We met Home Minister Rajnath Singh on January 14 and apprised him of the challenges the country will face once the film is released, he said.

Why the central government is keeping mum on this issue is beyond our understanding, he added.

According to the Karni Sena member, 1,700 women have registered their names, addresses and consent letters from their families with the Jauhar Samiti in Chittorgarh.

If the films screening is not stopped, they will perform jauhar (mass immolation). The men will go to cinema halls with swords to stop its screening, he added.

All highways surrounding Chittorgarh will also be blocked on Wednesday as a mark of protest.

He warned that in case the film is released on January 25, Republic Day celebrations will turn into a dark day as there will be all chances of a war like situation in the country.

We are also planning a big protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi from January 22 where thousands of Rajputs from across the country will be gathering to stage a massive protest, he said.

Asked if Karni Sena members are supporting Congress in the Ajmer and Alwar bypoll, he said that looking at the silence of the central government and to protest against the injustice meted out to members of Shri Karni Sena who were demanding a CBI probe into the Anandpal issue, the Karni Sena members have vowed to ensure BJP loses the ensuing by-polls.
Pakistan is examining a proposal for a DGMO-level meeting with India, which last happened in December 2013, to reduce tension along the Line of Control and the Working Boundary through fresh confidence-building measures, according to a media report.

The report comes a day after Pakistan said four of its soldiers died and five others injured in cross-border firing by India across the LoC. The Indian Army, however, said seven Pakistani soldiers were killed in its retaliatory firing.

A Pakistan defence ministry official in a meeting on Monday told the Senate defence committee that a fresh proposal of DGMOs (Director Generals of Military Operations) meeting is being considered, the Dawn newspaper reported.

The official also briefed the senators about the latest trends in Indian ceasefire violations, it said.

According to the report, one of the confidence-building measures being considered for the planned meeting of DGMOs is calibre reduction of the arms being used at the LoC.

Pakistan-India DGMOs have a frequent hotline contact, but they last met face to face four years ago at Wagah, a village which serves as a transit terminal between Lahore and Amritsar.

The December 24, 2013 Wagah meeting had taken place after a break of 14 years. That meeting too was held to discuss ways to ensure peace along the LoC and the Working Boundary.

Meanwhile, a resolution adopted by the Senate committee through consensus condemned Indian Army chief Gen. Bipin Rawats statement about calling nuclear bluff of Pakistan as stupidity and provocative.

They termed it a war-like proclamation, the report said.
Home minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday hit out at the Congress over its president raising domestic issues at international fora, and said that it was one of the reasons behind its fast deteriorating political graph.

In his inaugural address at the Delhi BJPs executive committee meeting here, Singh said, It is a sad situation and one reason behind the Congresss fast deteriorating political graph in the country.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi during his USA trip last year and recent Bahrain visit had attacked the prime minister and the BJP, accusing them of doing divisive politics.

Today India is the fastest growing economy that is the result of ease of doing business facilitated by the Narendra Modi government.

Investors world over are today looking towards India as a investment hub, he said.

World over people feel that the BJP is best equipped to govern the country and in Narendra Modi, people see not only the best Prime Minister but a social crusader too who is fighting to change their lives, he said.

He congratulated the security forces for the way they worked to contain cross-border terrorism and Naxalism, and said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi acts as a guiding force behind changed attitude of defence forces.

Talking about the AAP government in Delhi, Singh said that Centre is ready to extend full support to it but politics of confrontation was an obstacle in it.

The Centre is ready to extend all support to the Delhi government but the politics of confrontation practised by the AAP is acting as an obstacle in it, he said.

Singh also said that the Centre is trying its best to help Delhi in the wake of an ongoing sealing drive undertaken by the municipal corporations.

Delhi BJP president Manoj Tiwari said that Singh addressed the Delhi BJP executive meeting as a guardian and his suggestions and guidance would be followed dutifully.

The political resolution passed by the executive committee slammed the Kejriwal government for its failures to fulfil its promises and for spreading misinformation regarding its achievements, Tiwari said.

We will start a district level campaign across Delhi to expose the failures of the Kejriwal government, he said.
Many students of the University of Hyderabad pledged on Tuesday to fight for justice to Rohith Vemula and keep alive memories of the PhD student whose campus suicide two years ago triggered nationwide outrage.

The Justice for Rohith Vemula, a committee of students and faculty members, will observe Rohith Shahadat Day  or martyrdom day  on January 17 and hold a convention at the university auditorium to discuss issues such as discrimination against Dalits.

Dalit activist Prakash Ambedkar, the grandson of BR Ambedkar, is likely to attend the event along with several prominent scholars.

The university authorities, the Centre and the state government might have thought the Rohith episode was a closed chapter. So long as the issues for which he attained martyrdom remain, his memories will continue to haunt the university and government, said Dontha Prashant, a leader of the Ambedkar Students Union, a Dalit union at the university.

The university took a tough stand as protests engulfed the campus immediately after Vemulas death, but peace seems to have returned two years on. Other than groups of students protesting and shouting slogans on and off at a memorial for the research scholar close to a shopping complex on the campus, no large-scale event has bothered the authorities.

The university didnt allow us to hold a meeting or pay tributes to Rohith on his first death anniversary. This time, they permitted us to meet at the auditorium, Prashant said.

He and Vemula were among five research scholars the university suspended and expelled from their hostel in August 2015 on a complaint by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which accused them of assaulting some of its leaders. The expulsion is believed to have driven Vemula to die by suicide in his hostel room in January 2016.

Vemulas death put the spotlight on student politics, campus unrest and atrocities against Dalits, making the 26-year-old student-activist the rallying point of protests, discourses and debates over societal prejudices against people of lower castes.

The controversy over Vemulas caste status continues to simmer after the Justice Roopanwal Commission, which probed his death, and revenue officials of Guntur district in Andhra Pradesh, the students birthplace, held that he was not a Dalit.

According to the revenue officials, who submitted a report in February 2017, Vemula was a Vaddera, a community in the other backward class category. The Justice Roopanwal panel had said as much.

University students rejected the panels report and that of the Guntur administration on Vemulas caste. Rohiths mother, Radhika Vemula, was asked to submit evidence to prove her Dalit status if she had any objection to the report. She provided all evidence and is awaiting a response from the state government. So, the issue of Rohiths Dalit status still remains, Prashant said.

Another case that still lingers is the police complaint against vice chancellor Appa Rao Podile, former Union minister Bandaru Dattatreya and three more people, who are accused of abetting the suicide.

Cyberabad police are yet to close the case because of the controversy surrounding Vemulas caste. The case was registered under the SC/ST law governing atrocities against Dalits. The law wont stand in this case if it is proved that Vemula is not a Dalit.

We sent the Guntur administration report to the law department for legal opinion before proceeding further, Cyberabad commissioner of police Sandeep Shandilya said.

Guntur collector Kona Sasidhar could not be contacted for comments.

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the Maharashtra government to give all documents pertaining to the death of Justice B H Loya to petitioners seeking an independent probe into the circumstances of the death of the CBI special judge.

A bench of Justices Arun Mishra and M M Shantanagoudar passed the direction after the Maharashtra government submitted before the court documents, including Loyas postmortem report, in a sealed cover.

The 48-year-old justice Loya was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in which BJP chief Amit Shah was an accused. Shah was discharged in the case.

Judge Loyas case is seen as a flashpoint and the reason for the judges of the top court to publicly accuse the Chief Justice of India of selectively allocating sensitive matters to benches of his choice. Loya died of a cardiac arrest in Nagpur on December 1, 2014, when he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleagues daughter.

The bench, which was hearing two PILs seeking independent probe into the death of Loya, adjourned the hearing for after a week without specifying any dates.

Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Maharashtra, told the bench that documents contained certain confidential material which cannot be shared in public and they cannot be given to petitioners -- a journalist and a Congress leader.

The counsel for the petitioners told the bench that they needed to look into these documents to argue the matter.

It is a matter where they (petitioners) should know everything, the bench observed.

Salve later told the court that the documents could be shown to the petitioners counsel but they should not make it public and they would mark the confidential documents.

The bench directed that all the documents be given to the petitioners within a week.

The petitioners counsel also assured the court that they would not make any of the documents public.

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A 22-year-old woman in Odishas Kalahandi district was attacked with acid by a man after she spurned his advances, police said on Tuesday, indicating the easy availability of corrosive liquid despite a 2013 Supreme Court ban on its open sale.

Police said 35-year-old Parsuram Majhi had been stalking the woman, a resident of Kalampur block of the district, for last one year and wanted to establish a physical relationship with her. However, she rejected Majhis proposal several times.

Majhi is yet to be arrested.

The boy used to threaten her with dire consequences. Two days ago he had left his village telling everyone that he was going to Hyderabad for a job. He was actually seeking revenge, said a police officer in Kalahandi.

Majhi intercepted her at Bankapalla square on Monday when she was on her way to attend computer classes and threw acid on her face. He fled the spot soon after the attack.

The woman was rushed to a hospital in district headquarters of Bahwanipatna and is undergoing treatment. She has received acid injuries over her face and hands.

India has the highest incidence of acid attacks in the world, with the number of such cases rising from 80 to 307 between 2011 and 2016.
The Supreme Court on Monday announced the composition of a five-judge Constitution bench that will begin hearing several important cases on January 17. None of the four senior judges, who publicly criticised Chief Justice of India Dipak Mishra in a press conference on Friday, is on the bench which will hear, among other cases, challenges to Aadhaar, a challenge to its own judgment criminalising homosexual relationships between consenting adults, and a petition on the ban on women between the ages of 10 and 50 entering the Sabarimala temple.

Attorney general KK Venugopal said that the judicial crisis hasnt been resolved. His statement comes a day after he told media outlets that the rift between four senior Supreme Court judges and the Chief Justice of India had been settled.

The four judges  justice J Chelameswar, justice Ranjan Gogoi, justice Madan B Lokur and justice Kurian Joseph  took up their respective business on the first working day of the top court, a week after they publicly criticised the Chief Justice of India (CJI) for his style of administration and raising the issue of assignment of cases.

Here are the highlights

1.45pm: Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra meet four dissenting judges. Another meeting to resolve SC crisis likely on January 17.

11.45am: When his attention was drawn to Tuesdays statement of Attorney General KK Venugopal, Manan Kumar Mishra said, I dont know how and why the Attorney General is saying like this. All judges are holding their courts and the work is going on normally in the Supreme Court.

11.30am: Justice Gogoi said the crisis is over. He said there is no dispute at all, Bar Council chairman Manan Kumar Mishra said when asked about reports which projected a contrary situation.

11.25am: The Bar Council of India said on Tuesday there was absolutely no crisis now in the Supreme Court and normalcy will be restored soon in the higher judiciary that saw four top judges coming out in the open against the Chief Justice of India.

10:40am: Supreme Court will hear the plea on Tuesday seeking a Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe into the death of CBI judge BH Loya.

9.40am: Attorney General KK Venugopal told PTI that the judicial crisis is not over, and it is likely to be resolved in 2-3 days.
Three people were killed Tuesday afternoon when a head constable of the India Reserve Battalion (IRB), posted at the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) camp, allegedly opened fire on them at Daund town near Pune, a police official said.

According to the Pune (Rural) Control, the head constable, Sanjay Shinde, opened fire at two busy public places in Borawake Nagar and Morinagar Chowk in Daund, around 80 km from Pune.

Police sources, who didnt want to be named, told HT that Shinde has been arrested from Supa in Ahmednagar district.

The deceased have been identified as Anil Jadhav, Gopal Shinde and Prashant Pawar. There were no reports of any other casualties.

According to the police, Shinde picked up a fight with the first victim over money and shot him dead. He then also shot two others.

Former SRPF commandant Srikant Pathak, who was also Shindes former boss, said there were negative reports about the constable and he always picked up fights with his colleagues.
The US has been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat to it and Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi, defence minister Khurram Dastagir Khan has said.

He also said that it is time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue with the US with everything on the table to remove all misunderstandings between Islamabad and Washington.

Reading out a policy statement on the governments foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly on Monday, he regretted that the US downplayed Indias aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported on Tuesday.

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US.

Its time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table, the defence minister said.

Khan said that Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

But the truism remains true. Both Indias capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan, he alleged.

Pakistan accuses India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against it, a charge India has dismissed.

Khan alleged that India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour, he claimed, adding that the unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace.

The minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan.

He said Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation Zarb-i-Azb and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

He urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001.

He also criticised the US for not pursuing internal reconciliation in Afghanistan, which had now become a safe haven for terrorists.
The Vishva Hindu Parishad on Tuesday welcomed the Centres decision to withdraw the Haj subsidy and said the money saved from it should be utilised for the education of poor Hindu girls.

Better late than never, VHP international working president Pravin Togadia said while welcoming the decision.

He said it was the result of the collective demand of Hindus.

We hope that this step will be followed by national laws for the construction of the Ram temple and stopping cow slaughter, Togadia said in a statement.

He said that money saved from the Haj subsidy should be utilised for the education of poor Hindu girls.

Union minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Tuesday announced that there will be no subsidy for Haj from this year.
For Sunil Bishnoi, a smalltime trader from Balhotra, the upcoming HPCL refinery at Barmer is already making an impact.

Paani ki botal dus rupiya, dus rupiya, (bottled water for Rs 10) shouts Sunil from atop a truck at a makeshift parking lot, about 1 km from the site at Pachpadra where Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the project commencement work of the Rs 43,000-crore refinery-cum-petrochemical project.

Like Sunil, many vendors have come all the way from Balhotra, about 15 km away, to sell a variety of snacks and pan masala. The business is brisk as hundreds of people have arrived at venue in buses, SUVs, cars, motorcycles and taxis.

There is renewed hope among people of the region after four years of wait. This time I am sure that the refinery will materialize as Modi ji is coming for the (foundation stone laying) ceremony, Udairam, a 65-year-old farmer from Deroi, a village about 45 km away from Pachpadra, said.

Sunil Bishnoi, a smalltime trader from Balhotra, sets up his kiosk on a tractor at Pachpadra on Tuesday. He did a good business selling bottled water, ibce cream and snacks to people who had gathered for the function that was addressed by Prime Minister narendra Modi. (HT Photo)

Udairam and his friends have hired an SUV to reach the venue. I am not happy with madam (chief minister) as she has not done much to address the problems of the farmers, but we will vote for Modi next time, he said when asked whether he was happy that the state BJP government has revived the refinery project.

Farmers in the region are unhappy as they have been able to sell only a portion of the moong crop at fair price.

So what hopes he has from the refinery once it becomes operational? The youth of our village will get employment. The refinery will change the face of the region, he said.

At a hotel, about 3 km from the venue, a group is animatedly discussing the impact of the upcoming HPCL refinery. Most of them having invested in property in and around Pachpadra, the site of the proposed refinery in Barmer district, the stakes are high.

The property prices have soared more than 10 times ever since the government announced the project four years ago, Punaram Nagana, a hotel owner said.

However, the token system, in which people bought property at exorbitant rates by giving some money upfront, has ruined many. With project facing delays, many people could not resell the land and forfeited the token money, he said.

In March 2013, the then Congress-led Rajasthan government had signed an agreement with HPCL for setting up a 9-million-tonne refinery-cum-petrochemical complex in Thar desert near the oil discovery made by Cairn India. After coming to power the same year, the Vasundhara Raje government put the project on hold citing an unfavourable deal and undue financial burden.

In April 2017, Raje government signed a fresh MoU with HPCL for setting up the refinery.

In the past decade, Barmers rural economy has been transformed by two big energy projects  Cairn Energys Mangala, Bhagyam and Aishwariya oilfields and a 1,080 MW thermal power plant operated by a subsidiary of JSW Energy.

The projects led to a spurt in ancillary industries and entrepreneurship, with residents investing in hotels and transport fleets. The real estate bubble created tremendous liquidity in the surrounding villages that, until recently, bartered goods in times of drought.

With another mega project with an investment of more than 43,000 crore about to take off, there is hope of another economic boom.

Meanwhile, some villagers are asked to put away the black jackets and sweaters by the security personnel who dont want anyone protesting against Modis visit to wave any black cloth at the Prime Minister.

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A 32-year-old man was killed after his throat was slit by a glass-coated kite string (manja) while driving a two-wheeler in the Muralipura area of Jaipur on Tuesday.

Pankaj Jangid, who worked as an accountant, was riding his motorcycle from Khaitan Chauraha to Dher Ke Balaji at 4.30 pm when a string got entangled around his neck, slashing it, said Naveen Khandelwal, the station house officer (SHO) of Muralipura police station. Local shopkeepers rushed him to a nearby private hospital, but he could not be saved, he added.

Jangid is survived by his wife and an eight-year-old daughter.

The glass-coated string that killed Jangid was locally made. The National Green Tribunal in July last year imposed a blanket ban on the glass-coated kite strings used for kite flying, citing threat to humans as well as birds and animals.

State governments were subsequently directed to prohibit the manufacture, sale, storage, purchase and use of both synthetic and cotton glass-coated strings. Despite the ban, the use of string in kite-flying continues in the state, especially on the occasion of Makar Sankranti.

At least 80 people were injured in kite-flying incidents in Jaipur on the occasion, including those who fell while kite-flying as well as those hurt by the kite string. Apart from these, more than 1,100 birds injured by kite strings were treated at the Bird Hospital. Some 200 succumbed to the injuries.
Hindu groups in Dholpur on Tuesday organised a swabhiman rally, led by Karni Sena founder Lokendra Singh Kalvi, to protest against the release of Sanjay Leela Bhansalis Padmaavat, which is scheduled for release on January 25.

Thousands of members from different Hindu groups participated in the rally to protect the image of the 13th century Hindu queen, Rani Padmini. They have threatened mass immolation if the film is not banned. Thousands of women were seen walking in the protest rally.

The protesters reached the district collectors office where they staged a demonstration against the released of the film and handed over a memorandum to the Prime Minister through additional district collector Harfool Yadav, demanding a ban on the film across the country.

Kalvi said that the Rajput community will not allow the film to be released across the country. The community will stage protests in states where the film is screened, he said.

If the government allows to the film to be releases on January 25, then the day will be a black day. All states will be forced to impose curfew on the day of the release of the film Padmavat.

He added that women from the Rajput community in Chittorgarh have threatened to perform jauhar (self-immolation) if the screening of the film is not stopped by the government. According to Kalvi, 1,700 women have registered their names, addresses and consent letters from their families with the Jauhar Samiti in Chittorgarh.

They have urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ban the release of the film Padmavat.

The film has banned in eight states, including Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Bihar and the Karni Sena is trying to ban it in Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh too, he said.

All highways surrounding Chittorgarh will also be blocked on Wednesday as a mark of protest. He warned that in case the film is released on January 25, Republic Day celebrations will turn into a dark day as there will be all chances of a war like situation in the country.

Asked if Karni Sena members are supporting Congress in the Ajmer and Alwar bypoll, he said that looking at the silence of the central government and to protest against the injustice meted out to members of Shri Karni Sena who were demanding a CBI probe into the Anandpal issue, the Karni Sena members have vowed to ensure BJP loses the ensuing by-polls.

With inputs from agencies
Police in Bengaluru on Tuesday detained nine men in connection with an assault on New Years Eve, a day after the footage of the incident surfaced showing a group of men brutally attacking three people riding a two-wheeler.

Police said the detained men have been identified as Ambareesh, Lokesh, Shekhar, Vinod, Nandeesh, Shakti Prasad, Charan, Chetan and Stephen. The incident took place in the Indira Nagar area in the city.

The incident comes a year after allegations of mass molestation and sexual assault on New Years Eve in the city known as the countrys information technology capital.

Bengaluru Police commissioner T Suneel Kumar said the incident came to light on January 15.

The video was released as a result of a rivalry between two gangs, he said without providing further details.

In the video, a group of men is seen celebrating on the 6th Main Road in Indira Nagar when a two-wheeler with two men and a woman approaches. An altercation follows after the two-wheeler grazes against one of the revellers. The group then assaults the two men while one person hits the woman.

#WATCH One person arrested today in connection with a CCTV footage of 31st December 2017 in which a couple was thrashed by a group of people #Bengaluru pic.twitter.com/mNZCdWySLU  ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

Kumar said a suo motu case of assault and public indecency has been registered and the two accused men were picked up on the basis of the video.

It appears to be a case of road rage in a bylane of Indira Nagar, the commissioner said.

We have tried to reach out to the victims, but even if we cannot contact them we will continue investigating based on the suo motu case, he added.

This year the police increased deployment on New Years Eve after the incidents of sexual assault in 2017.

As many as 15,000 police personnel were deployed on the night and majority of them were posted on the Brigade Road area to avoid any untoward incidents in the citys business hub.
Would Butler Palace go under the hammer? Around 166 other enemy properties in Lucknow may meet this fate, if the ministry of home affairs (MHA) plans to go ahead with the auction of such properties in the country.

The district administration has begun a survey of enemy properties after the home ministry initiated the process to identify enemy properties for auction.

The survey of the enemy properties is on. We have asked all sub- divisional magistrates (SDMs) to submit a detailed report of enemy properties falling in their jurisdiction within 24 hours, said Kaushal Raj Sharma, district magistrate.

The district magistrate also directed the SDMs to prepare a separate list of tenants (living in enemy properties) and the rent they are paying.

Often considered to be a landmark in Lucknow  Butler Palace was perhaps the first to be surveyed.

The grand palace was established in 1919. It was later transformed into an academic library of Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR) till 2005 when the palace was vacated following the Supreme Courts order. In its verdict, Supreme Court had said the property should be handed over to its owner  son of erstwhile Raja of Mehmudabad Mohammad Amir Mohammad Khan alias Sulemaan Miyan. But in 2010, the custodian took back the property again after the President promulgated an ordinance, Enemy Property (amendment and validation) Ordinance 2010.

The survey of Butler Palace has been completed. And now we are moving on to other enemy properties to complete the survey, said Neha Jain, sub divisional magistrate (SDM), Sadar  the tehsil that houses around 112 enemy properties  more than any other tehsil in the district.

Overall, the city has around 167 enemy properties. Of these, 112 disputed properties fall in Sadar tehsil, nine in Malihabad, 29 in Mohanlalganj and 17 in BKT. Of these, most properties belong to Raja Mehmoodabad. Apart from Butler Palace, Rajas property includes the Capoors Hotel-Royal Cafe Building in Hazratganj, a portion of Janpath Market, Halwasiya Market (given on lease) and Mahmudabad Mansion opposite it.

Rajas real estate empire is also spread over districts like Sitapur, Lakhimpur, Nainital and Barabanki. His lawyer, however, denied any effect of the governments move on the Rajas property, saying that the matter was sub-judice.

SEPARATE LIST OF TENANTS

The district magistrate also directed the SDMs to prepare a separate list of tenants (living in enemy properties) and the rent they are paying.

Often considered to be a landmark in Lucknow  the Butler Palace was perhaps the first to be surveyed.

The city has around 167 enemy properties. Of these, 112 disputed properties fall in Sadar tehsil, nine in Malihabad, 29 in Mohanlalganj and 17 in BKT. Most of these properties belong to Raja Mehmoodabad.

Apart from Butler Palace, Rajas property includes the Capoors Hotel-Royal Cafe Building in Hazratganj, a portion of Janpath Market, Halwasiya Market (given on lease) and Mahmudabad Mansion opposite it.
Koshu of Japan sets date for its annual UK tasting event

Koshu of Japan has announced the date for its 8th annual trade and press tasting; the event is due to take place on 14 February at 67 Pall Mall in London.

Koshu of Japan is an organisation established in July 2009 by leading wine makers from the Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan's premier wine-growing region.

At the tasting attendees will have the opportunity to taste an extensive list of Koshu wines from nine leading wineries. The focus of the tasting will be on the new 2017 vintage of Koshu, in addition to a smaller selection of international grape varieties including Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay.

The distinctly Japanese Koshu grape was developed from grapes that travelled the Silk Road across Central Asia from the Caucasus to China and then to Japan, at a period estimated to be around a thousand years ago.

Due to the beneficial climactic extremes, long days of sunlight and well-drained volcanic soils, the landlocked Yamanashi Prefecture (which emcompasses the northern part of Mount Fuji) has become Japan's most premium wine-growing region, producing some of the finest expressions of Koshu wines.

The wines are traditionally a pale, straw colour with soft, fruity aromas and overtones of peach and citrus that pair well with traditional Japanese dishes, such as sushi, tempura and yakitori. The distinctive characteristics of Koshu wine have been proving popular in the UK over recent years, with listings in major retailers such as Marks & Spencer and Selfridges.

Lynne Sherriff MW, European Director for Koshu of Japan, said: "2017 was a very good vintage for Joshu, due to a dry early summer, with the grapes being harvested in a healthy condition. Rains in September made it difficult for later ripening varieties, such as Cabernet Sauvignon. Almost all white grape varieties, including Koshu as well as early ripening reds such as Merlot, gave good results and the 2018 tasting in London will certainly reflect that."

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Angry with Rahul Gandhi for his recent hugplomacy tweet targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) went after the Congress chief over the welcome posters put up by his party workers, some of them showing him as god.

Both chief minister Yogi Adityanath and deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya had a word of advice or two for the Congress chief. While Adityanath advised Gandhi to focus on development of Amethi, Maurya said Gandhi should play human, not God.

Excited with Gandhis first visit to UP as Congress chief, party workers and sympathisers allegedly put up several posters, some of which showed him as Krishna and ridiculing PM Modi. The posters were quickly seized by the district administration.

The BJP mounted a counter offensive. Adityanath, who was ridiculed in a video put up by the Congress official twitter handle, led the charge.

The video on Congress twitter handle targeted Adityanath with the title, heres recipe for BJP star campaigner. It showed the UP chief minister as a divisive political campaigner.

Adityanath, who had earlier entered into a twitter war with Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah a few days ago, chose to target Gandhi for lack of development of his Amethi Lok Sabha constituency.

Rahul should focus more on the politics of development. Had the Congress focused on this, Amethi would not have languished. See the plight of Amethi that was nursed by four generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family, he said in Gorakhpur.

On cue, the BJP government and the party both launched a synchronised attack on the Congress chief with deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya advising Gandhi against playing God and UP minister Shrikant Sharma described him as suffering from an attention seeking disorder.

State BJP spokesman Manish Shukla said, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi is blaming BJP for lack of development in Amethi, but has failed to explain how in 70 years of being in power his party couldnt do anything for the constituency that has been sending the Gandhis to the Lok Sabha. In fact, despite losing, union minister Smriti Irani has visited Amethi more than Gandhi.
In 2017, there were only 17 days when Lucknowites breathed good quality air while there were 70 days when city folks had safe category air.

People in the state capital had bad air quality for 277 days (76%) last year and 170 of these days (61%) saw relatively high levels of pollution  poor to severe category. Only 70 days (19%) were under the satisfactory category.

These are the findings of Centre for Environment and Energy Development (CEED) that compiled the data sheet of the Central Pollution Control Boards (CPCB) daily reading for Lucknows air quality in 2017.

In November and December 2017, Lucknows air was not less than toxic smoke and was found under very poor to Severe+ category for 61 consecutive days.

The report cited Lalbagh as the most polluted place in Lucknow among the three locations where continuous air quality monitoring stations are installed. The annual mean PM2.5 concentration in Lalbagh was 130 g/m3, followed by Talkatora (129 g/m3) and Aliganj (104 g/m3).

Ramapati Kumar, CEO of CEED said, The air pollution in the city is a serious problem, with serious threat of particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration.

Lalbagh most polluted Lalbagh was found to be the most polluted place in Lucknow among three locations where real-time pollutants data is measured. As an immediate response to the state of ambient air quality in Lucknow, the UP government must formulate a Clean Air Action Plan with each action plan in a time-bound manner, said an expert The government must inform residents about the air quality and must also issue health advisory for the citizens, he added.

The purpose of the report is to summarise the ambient air quality of Lucknow in 2017 and to investigate the level of exposure of air pollution. Data from the CPCB real-time monitoring stations was used and further analyzed using varied statistical tools and techniques, he said.

Elaborating on the findings, Ankita Jyoti, senior programme officer of CEED said, According to CPCBs daily air quality bulletin, November 14 was the most polluted. The report highlighted November as the most polluted month, while July was found least polluted.

The state government should chalk out an affirmative clean air action plan with a time-bound implementation strategy to prevent perennial air pollution episodes. The action plan identifies a set of action priorities as per emission source, recognised regulations, and also includes institutional arrangement that will set it on track to mitigate pollution, suggested Kumar.
Lucknow Electricity Supply Administrations (LESA) drive against power theft got a jolt on Monday when its checking squad was attacked by alleged power thieves with sticks and roads in Lakadmandi area of old Haiderganj.

Executive engineer Anup Saxena said: A named FIR has been lodged in Sadatganj police station against the attackers, who have escaped. Police are hunting for them. The injured LESA men were treated in hospital and later discharged.

The LESA squad members were combing the area when they saw the power connections, which they snapped a few days back, restored by the residents.

Junior engineer Susheel Kumar then ordered immediate disconnection and as the powermen started cutting off the power supply, by removing the katia connections from the poles, around 20 residents, armed with roads and sticks, attacked them.

Taken aback, the LESA staffers ran away to save themselves. The residents, however, got hold of linesman Mohammed Arshad, who was on a pole removing illegal connection wires, and beat him up mercilessly. Some LESA staffers returned to save Arshad but they too were beaten up.

Meanwhile, LESA officials were informed about the incident and they came there with police force and saved the powermen from the attackers, who fled from the scene.
The Lucknow Metro has started a Share your selfie contest to attract passengers to the train service. To participate, passengers are required to click their selfies inside the train and send it for being displayed at the exhibition to be organised at Charbagh metro station in February.

The best 50 selfies will be displayed at the Charbagh station and the winners will be interviewed live by a city-based FM channel, which is also the radio partner of the Lucknow Metro Rail Corporation.

Interested people can whatsapp their selfies at the number 7705005520 till January 24, 2018. More details are available on the LMRC site.

CHARBAGH-HUSSAINGANJ TUNNELLING WORK ON

LMRC started tunneling work from Charbagh towards Hussainganj on Monday. The tunnel boring machine (TBM) Gomti was pressed into service at the Charbagh launching shaft (near Deen Dayal Park). Before that, a ceremonial puja was performed at the site by Kumar Keshav, LMRC managing director.

The TBM will cover a length of 462m from Charbagh to the Hussainganj underground metro station.

This will soon be followed by the launching of TBM Ganga on the down line from the same shaft near Deen Dayal Park, for undertaking the final 446m drive between Charbagh and Hussainganj.

The tunneling between Charbagh and Hussainganj is the third and final leg of the tunnel drives planned for the underground metro construction in this stretch. Tunnel drives between Bapu BhavanHazratganj and Bapu BhavanHussainganj, which constitute 75% of the total tunneling length of 3,717m, have already been completed.
UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath could seek Israeli investment in the state when he meets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Agra on Tuesday.

Netanyahu, who is on a four-day visit to India, is scheduled to visit the Taj Mahal on Tuesday and Adityanath would be there to welcome him.

Taj closed for public during Netanyahus visit As has been the practice during VIP visits, the Taj would be closed for public viewing during Netanyahus visit. Superintending Archaeologist for Agra circle of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) Bhuvan Vikram Singh issued notice of closure of Taj Mahal for general public from 10.20 am till 12.30 pm on Tuesday. The ticket windows are to close one hour before the VIPs visit.

The meeting assumes importance ahead of the two-day UP investors summit in Lucknow from February 21, in which Adityanath could also seek participation of Israeli investors.

The chief ministers Agra visit is aimed at showcasing the importance BJP is attaching to Netanyahus visit. But this is being opposed by a section of Muslims who blame Israel for alleged atrocities in Palestine.

A Muslim delegation in Agra also submitted a memorandum to the local officials against Netanyahus visit even as the UP government decided to roll out the red carpet for the visiting dignitary.

During his meeting with the Israeli PM, Yogi is also expected to seek Israeli collaboration and knowhow in agricultural mechanics.

I dont think there is anything wrong in meeting the Israeli PM. In fact, the then agriculture minister Shivpal Yadav, who was a dominant figure in the ruling Samajwadi Party, too had made a three-day visit to Israel soon after Akhilesh Yadav government had come to power, said Athar Husain from the Centre of Objective Research and Development (CORD).

In the run-up to the 2017 UP polls, the BJP had also promised drip irrigation technology from Israel for water-starved Bundelkhand region and the two leaders could also discuss the subject during their meeting. With much at stake, the state government has decided to take no chances with the VIPs visit. The home department is monitoring preparedness for the visit.

Foolproof security arrangements are going to be in place for the VIP visit, said Amit Pathak, the Agra district police chief.
After the pilot project of Aadhaar-enabled Public Distribution System (PDS) helped the state government save 4500 metric tonnes of foodgrain in it first month of implementation in Nagpur, the state is now planning to link the ration system with the Aadhaar system across the states 52,000 ration shops by March end.

The government has estimated that the move will help save Rs800 crores by plugging leakages and corruption.

In Nagpur, the project enabled the city to save Rs14 crore as beneficiaries falsely registered under the BPL (below poverty line) category did not turn up to claim the foodgrain.

While Nagpur city has 2.94 lakh ration card holders eligible for foodgrains under Food Security Act, as many as 65,000 cards holders did not turn up to claim the benefit.

This was reportedly to avoid the disclosure of their actual income due, as their identities were reportedly authenticated during the Aadhaar seeding process.

Prashant Kale, district supply officer, said, The ration card holders that fail to claim the benefits within three months will be made to fill the Give it Up form and will be shifted out of the food security category.

Of the 1.62 crore ration card holders in Maharashtra, about 10 lakh did not register during the Aadhaar seeding drive over the last few months. We expect to weed out more such fake beneficiaries and save Rs800 crore a year, said an official from the department.
Moshe Holtzberg, who survived the 26/11 siege at Nariman House in Mumbai but lost his parents in it, arrived in the city on Tuesday morning for the first time since their death.

Shalom ... Bahut khushi (I am very happy), a shy Moshe told news agency ANI after arriving at Mumbai airport a little after 8am.

The 11-year-old was accompanied by his maternal and paternal grandparents. Its a very special day. Thank God that Moshe could come again. Mumbai is a lot more safe now, his grandfather Rabbi Holztberg Nachman was quoted saying at the airport by ANI.

The visit comes almost six months after the young boy met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 5, 2017, and expressed a desire to visit the country. India then issued 10-year multiple entry visas to Moshe and his grandparents.

Moshe Holtzberg, 11, who survived the 26/11 siege, arrives in Mumbai on Tuesday. (Bhushan Koyande/ HT Photo)

Moshe said he would visit the Jewish centre in Colaba where his parents, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, were killed in the terror attacks in November 2008, and pray there. The couple had moved to Mumbai seven years earlier and were serving as directors of the cultural and outreach centre for the worldwide Chabad-Lubavitch movement when they were killed along with six others. Moshe was saved by his Indian nanny Sandra Samuels.

The young boy, who was just two days short of turning two when the attack took place, will unveil a memorial dedicated to the victims of the 26/11 terror attacks, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 18 at Nariman House.

After his parents deaths, Moshes maternal grandparents took him to Afula, a city in Israel, where he now lives.

Rabbi Israel Kozolovasky, who now heads Nariman House in Colaba, said they would be preparing a special meal for the boy. We are excited because this is Baby Moshes first visit to India in nine years. His visit to Nariman House is emotional and sensitive because this is where he received the last hug from his mother and the last kiss from his father, Kozolovasky said.

He added that Moshe was also looking forward to visiting the Gateway of India. Apart from Nariman House, the second place Moshe wants to see is the Gateway of India, Kozolovasky said.

The work on the memorial at Nariman House is expected to be partially complete by the 10th anniversary of the attacks, and might open for public then.
The Bombay high court (HC) on Tuesday said the allegations of embezzlement of funds from Neo Sanyas Foundation, formerly known as Osho Foundation, should be investigated by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Pune police.

The division bench of justice Bhushan Gavai and justice BP Colabawalla has now sought response from the commissioner of police, Pune, as to whether he was willing to handover the probe into the First Information Report (FIR) registered with Koregaon Park police station to the EOW. The judges felt that since the main crux of the accusations in the case involved financial transactions, it was necessary to handover the probe to a specialised agency like the EOW.

The FIR was registered on the basis of a complaint lodged by resident Yogesh Thakkar, an ardent follower of Osho, complaining of embezzlement of funds by some of the trustees and violations under FEMA (Foreign Exchange Management Act) by using a forged will of the spiritual guru.

According to him, a document stated to be Oshos last will and testament surfaced in legal proceedings in Spain, 23 years after death of the spiritual guru and a number of Osho followers subjected a photocopy of that document to forensic examination and found it to be forged.

The petitioner has accused Osho International Foundation (OIF), Switzerland, and its trustees Mukesh Sarda, Michael Byrne, John Andrews, DArcy Byrne and Klaus Steeg of defrauding the Neo Sanyas Foundation of crores of rupees.

The petitioners lawyer, advocate Pradip Havnur, submitted that the accused have floated private companies, and money which should legitimately come to the local Osho trust is being deposited in accounts of those private entities.

Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani, who represented two interveners from Italy, alleged that crores of rupees were earned by selling the Intellectual Property Rights which legitimately belong to the local Osho body were being siphoned off.

The petitioner has also demanded that a police complaint pending before the economic offences wing (EOW), Mumbai, dated February 9, 2017 also be registered as an FIR and that the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA), 1999 be invoked to look into this multi-million dollar fraud.

Advocate Sandesh Patil, who represented the Enforcement Directorate, however, contended that the agency would not be able to ascertain whether there were violations of the provisions of FEMA in the financial transactions involved in the case, unless the title to the intellectual property rights was decided.

The Osho disciple has also sought investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation into the suspicious death of the spiritual guru. In his petition, 57-year-old Thakkar has alleged that when Osho was on his death-bed, those close to him had kept a doctor present at his Ashram in Pune, but used him merely to issue death certificate after he left his body.
A fresh campaign started by the Aarey conservation group in Mumbai has got around two lakh missed calls from citizens within four days. The campaign initiated on January 12 asks citizens to give a missed call to seek alternate sites for the Metro car shed proposed in Aarey.

Green activists have been against the state governments plan to build a Metro car shed in Aarey, for which around 3,500 trees will have to be cut. Yash Marwah, member of Aarey conservation group, said, Everyday, there are reports of bad air quality in Mumbai. In such a scenario, we want citizens to ask the authorities on how do they plan to give us a better future in the city by ignoring alternate sites for the shed.

The car shed has been proposed for the Metro-3 corridor (Colaba-Bandra-Seepz). Earlier too, the group has held many campaigns to spread the message.

The campaign, which urges citizens to give a missed call, has also been publicised on Twitter by celebrities.

The situation has been more or less similar since the new year as activists are demanding that the shed be shifted to a site identified in Kanjurmarg instead of hacking a large number of trees in Aarey.

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Crimes by juveniles (those below 18 years of age) in the state rose by 13.8% in 2016 compared to 2015, according to the crime investigation departments report on Crime in Maharashtra released in the first week of January.

Maharashtra reported 6,239 cases of crimes by juveniles in 2016, compared to 5,482 in 2015. In 2016, Mumbai saw maximum cases under the category (901), followed by Satara (811), Pune (727), Nagpur (364) and Thane (344), states the report.

The numbers assume significance in the wake of recent incidents of violence, where juveniles were seen at the forefront. While 16 juveniles were booked in the recent riots during Maharashtra Bandh for pelting stones, a minor was found to be involved in the murder of ex-Shiv Sena corporator Ashok Sawant.

The report shows most juveniles were booked for theft, along with criminal trespass and burglary, robbery, rape and other serious crimes. Juveniles were also booked under the Prohibition Act, Gambling Act, NDPS Act and Arms Act, along with other special and local laws. All juveniles have been sent to remand homes.

In their report, CID experts suggest a legal approach, counselling and rehabilitation.

According to the police, currently, the Maharashtra government is considering defining juveniles as those below 15 years, in case of heinous crimes. Before initiating the amendment, the home department has been directed to prepare a report with opinions from the public health and law and judiciary departments. The move will need a nod from the Centre. The Centre has already passed a similar amendment to the Act in December 2015, which lowered the age for trial from 18 to 16 years.

The debate of trying those aged 16 and above as adults first began after the 2012 gang-rape case in New Delhi, in which one of the main accused was a juvenile. While the other accused in the case were given death, the minor accused was sent to a remand home for three years.

Former IPS officer-turned-lawyer YP Singh said, There are fewer economic resources now, forcing children to take to crime. It is not about the age, but intention. These days maturity comes in early. If we dont control juvenile crime now, it could spiral out of control. Proper investigation and conviction would definitely send out the right message.

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Train commuters in Mumbai who pass through Elphinstone Road and Currey Road stations will have to wait a little longer to use the new foot over-bridges (FoB) being built there by the Army.

The deadline to complete these two FOBs, which are being constructed by the Army, has been extended from January 31 to February 15 because of technical reasons, Union railway minister Piyush Goyal has said.

The FOB at Ambivli station, however, will be ready by the end of this month and meet the deadline.

While speaking at an event on Saturday, Goyal said: The Ambivli FOB will be ready, but there are technical difficulties with the other two FOBs, and their completion will take a months time.

Railway officials said the Army requires a few more mega blocks  blocks of time when train traffic is restricted  to complete the construction work. The new deadline for the two FOBs is February 15. The Army will require more blocks from both the central and western railways, said a senior railway official, who did not wish to be named.

A month after the Elphinstone Road station stampede, which claimed 23 lives, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had announced that the Army would construct FOBs at these three stations, following a review visit to the site of the stampede with Goyal and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

The FOBs are being constructed by the Armys engineering wing. Work to build the FOBs began on November 23.
After the Central government announced, on Tuesday, that its was cancelling Haj subsidy, the decision evoked mixed reactions from the members of Muslim community in Mumbai.

While some believe that the money saved should be utilised for the socio-economic development of the community, others said it was an undemocratic decision.

The subsidy procedure was a scam that was used to subsidise Air India. The money didnt really go in the bank accounts of the pilgrims, and they got better facilities at lesser price when they would travel through private operators, said Feroze Mithiborwala, co-convener, Indian Muslim for Secular Democracy (IMSD).

Mithiborwala said the pilgrims who choose to travel through private operators pay anywhere between Rs80,000 to Rs1 lakh, but those who registered themselves through Haj committee ended up paying Rs1.25 lakh.

Minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the subsidy funds will now be used for education of girls and empowering women of the minority community.

However, Hasina Khan, founder, Bebaak Collective, called the process undemocratic. Why is it that a particular community is being targeted? If the government is trying to maintain a balance, why isnt it putting a cap on the money that is used for development of big temples in the country, said Khan.

Khan added there are specific funds allocated for educational development of each community by the government, and the government neednt cut down on Haj subsidy funds.

Earlier, in a bid to cut down government spending on Haj, the government maintained 21 embarkation points, but asked pilgrims boarding from 12 of these points to pay an additional amount. This comes in the wake of Supreme Court order of 2012, wherein the Central government was asked to gradually abolish the Haj subsidy by 2022.
An email sent to students of one of the hostels at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) has left many of them angry. The email requests non-vegetarian students to use separate plates in their hostel mess to avoid mix-up of plates.

The request comes after several vegetarian students complained to the administration of hostel 11 of the institute. I am getting complaints from many students who want students who eat non-vegetarian food to use separate plates. Therefore, this is a request to all non-veg eaters, to please only use the tray type plates meant specially for non-veg dishes during dinner. Please do not use the main plates for non-veg dishes, said the email.

The email was sent by the mess council of hostel 11 which includes students residing in the hostel. Dated January 12, the email was sent only to students residing inside the hostel and availing its food facilities as well. A statement by the mess council, few days after the email was sent, said the email was only sent to reiterate a rule which is already in place. For years, non-vegetarian food has been served in a separate plate and we only asked students to maintain the rule. This was not meant to offend anyone, said a student.

Within a couple of days, students took to social media to raise their concerns against the hypocritical views of their fellow students. Purity pollution concern reaches new heights! Next therell be separate plates for different caste and religion, said one student, on condition of anonymity.

Students residing in the hostel will hold a meeting on Tuesday to discuss this matter. All hostels anyway have separate plates for vegetarian and non-vegetarian food so I dont know why this email was sent in the first place. Whats worse is that it is also being misunderstood by many, said Soumyo Mukherji, dean, student affairs, IIT-B.
The Maharashtra government on Monday assured the Bombay high court that it will come up with a mechanism to ensure vital organs of dying persons are retrieved and used to save lives of the needy, and offers of donating vital organs will not be turned down.

Government pleader Purnima Kantharia told a division bench of justice Naresh Patil and justice Nitin Sambre that a high-level meeting is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, wherein a solution to the problem of retrieving vital organs at unregistered hospital is expected to be found.

Kantharia was responding to a petition filed by a 71-year-old who wished to donate his vital organs, but could not do so as organ retrieval was not allowed at the hospital where he was admitted at the time of filing of the complaint. Swapnil Raut was admitted to the intensive care unit of a hospital at Powai in critical condition last year. He died on August 9  the day he filed the petition.

His death prompted another division bench to revive the cause underlying the petition, as it highlighted how important it was to have a mechanism to deal with such emergencies, especially because though the petitioner had expressed willingness to donate his vital organs, it could not be retrieved. His vital organs could have and should have been used and utilised for needy patients, the earlier bench had said.

The bench said the state must find a solution for willing donors. The problem has arisen in view of provisions of the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994, which permits retrieval of body organs only at hospitals registered under the law.

Kantharia had said the government authorities had suggested the petitioner to shift to a registered hospital if he wished to donate his vital body parts, but he could not. This prompted the judges to point out that nobody can predict when such emergency situations may arise and therefore some resolution of non-retrieval at unregistered hospital must be found.
Police sources said Amit Hazra, who was arrested on Monday in connection with the death of his friend Arpita Tiwari, an anchor, was interested in the emcee and may have pushed her to her death.

Twenty-five-year-old Tiwari was found dead at a Malwani high-rise on December 11, 2017. A month into the investigation, the police managed to arrest Hazra on Monday, but officials have remained mum on what transpired the morning Tiwari died. Police sources claimed that they are absolutely convinced that Hazra has pushed Tiwari to death.

Police sources said Hazra was interested in Tiwari. Investigating officials are inquiring about the same with Tiwaris boyfriend, Pankaj Jadhav. However, they are still trying to ascertain if Hazra attempted to sexually harass Tiwari between the time she arrived at his rented apartment and the time she died.

We are also questioning him to find out if he had apprised Tiwari of his feelings towards her, said an officer requesting not to be named.

The Malwani police on Monday placed Hazra under arrest. Officials said they suspect his involvement in Tiwaris murder as they have reasonable grounds to arrest him. However, the police seem to be still in the dark about the sequence of events that led to Tiwaris death.

Tiwaris sister Shweta said, I always maintained that there was an attempt to sexually target Tiwari and that it may be the motive behind killing my sister. With the arrest of Hazra, the case finally seems to be moving in the right direction.

Shweta added, The police have not shared anything with us about what happened that night. We only want the truth to come out and get justice for my sister by arresting the men involved in her murder.

Officials however have still not given a clean chit to Tiwaris boyfriend Jadhav. Jadhav, an animator, was questioned again on Tuesday and allowed to go in the evening. On Tuesday, the police also recorded the statement of a friend of Tiwari, who was acquainted with her on social media.

During the initial days of the probe, the police had questioned Hazra for over a week when he would be brought in for questioning and then allowed to go in the evening. However, even several hours of questioning seemed to have got the police barely enough to make any arrests, until now.

They were drunk throughout the night but so far the questioning of the accused has not revealed anything on the topic of a verbal or physical altercation. At this stage of the probe, we believe there was no fight at the apartment, the officer said.

The police have managed to secure Hazras custody till Saturday.

Tiwaris body was found in the duct of Manavsthal Heights, a high-rise in Malwani. She had gone to Manavsthal Heights around 3 am with her boyfriend to the 15th floor apartment where Hazra stayed with his roommates. Tiwari, Hazra and Jadhav had been out drinking and then returned home for a nightcap.

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In a setback for redevelopment projects in the suburbs, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has made it mandatory to enforce a cap on the floor space index (FSI) based on the state governments proposed modifications to the development control regulations (DCR) 1991.

FSI is the ratio of the total built-up area to the size of the plot. It indicates how high a developer can build on a plot.

The states recent notification on January 8 put a cap on maximum permissible FSI in the city and suburbs, including Transferred Development Rights and additional FSI on premium, in the range of 2 to 2.5. However, projects under cluster development, cessed building redevelopment and special projects such as the Dharavi revamp will be exempted from this order.

Earlier, projects handing over a part of their plot as setback for widening of roads were granted a compensatory FSI over and above the FSI of 2-2.5, which they were entitled to. However, a circular issued by the BMC on January 10 states that the compensatory FSI will be calculated within the cap. Industry experts said this move will limit the benefits (mainly affect the saleable component) that almost 40% of redevelopment projects would yield in the suburbs.

With an FSI of 2 in the suburbs on a nine-metre road width, an over and above setback benefit can take the overall count to 2.2 or 2.3, depending on the quantum of the setback. In some cases, the FSI would go beyond 2.5.

The circular states that it is mandatory to enforce the stringent provisions of the existing as well as proposed amendments. It also states that all proposals that were granted approvals earlier would have to be revoked.

Vilas Nagalkar, a member of the Practising Engineers, Architects and Town Planners (PEATA), said the body, along with other associations, will now meet the municipal commissioner over the issue. Nagalkar said, The state governments notification is on basic FSI, no changes have been proposed for additional FSI. The BMCs circular will prove disastrous for redevelopment projects in the suburbs that have already got sanctions for additional FSI.

Nagalkar also said the BMCs decision can affect close to 40% redevelopment projects in the suburbs. A senior civic official, however, said, The norms will affect only projects where a setback is applicable, not all redevelopment projects.

Last week, the state government issued a notification for modification to the regulation 32 of the DCR for granting the hitherto restricted 0.5 FSI in the island city by paying a premium. The notification also put a cap on permissible FSI allowed in the city and the suburbs and made it uniform across linking it to road width. So, maximum usable FSI for projects (barring cluster redevelopment or cessed properties etc) across in the city and the suburbs now stands in the range of 2 to 2.50.

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The 157-year-old Byculla station will soon be restored to its former glory as the heritage structure is set to get a makeover.

The restoration will be undertaken by Abha Lambah, a well-known conservation architect; Minal Bajaj, trustee of Bajaj Group; and Shaina NC, politician and trustee of the NGO I Love Mumbai.

The restoration work, which is expected to be complete post-monsoon, will be done in two phases. Phase one will begin by next month, and will include the revamping of the ticketing windows, the roof at the entrance, and old signage. Phase one will be completed in the next four months, said Shaina NC. The second phase will involve the improvement of the entrance and open spaces in the station, as well as areas around the station.

We are currently planning out the designs for the station, and will seek permission from the heritage panel. The work is expected to begin within one month,said Lambah. The immediate work will involve restoration of front facade at the entrance of the station and the ticketing windows. The historical events depicted on the stone walls will also be restored. The ceramic tiles in the bathrooms will be removed, as we are looking to make the station cleaner,Lambah added. The total cost of the project has not been finalised yet, said sources. Last year, the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Review Committee had suggested a revamp of Byculla and Reay Road stations. Hindustan Times had reported in November that the Central Railway (CR) was planning to revamp the Byculla railway station.

CR officials recently found a book of pictures of the station designs of the suburban railway stations, including Byculla, Sion, Kurla and Ghatkopar, drawn up by the railway engineers in the British era. SK Jain, divisional railway manager, CR, said, We are working with a corporate firm to restore the station to its old glory.

The CR is also working on beautification of the track between Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) and Byculla station. There are plans to get paintings done on the walls.
Intensifying its protest against the Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP government in the state over farmers loan, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Tuesday restarted its agitation Halla Bol Andolan from Osmanabad district of the drought-prone Marathwada region.

The party has been demanding loan waiver for the distressed farmers and has also opposed the move to disconnect power if farmers are unable to pay bills.

Do not disconnect power of the farmers. Farmers are not the one who siphon off your money. If attempts are made to crush us and the farmers, then we will not allow you to roam, said Ajit Pawar, senior NCP leader while addressing a rally at Osmanabad.

He also sought peoples support for bringing a change in the state regime.

The 16-day protest will conclude in Aurangabad on January 31 with a rally to be addressed by NCP chief Sharad Pawar. The protest rally will cover all the districts of Marathwada region, which has seen a large number of farmer suicides.

This is the second time the party has launched Halla Bol Andolan. In the first phase held in December last year, the party has covered districts of Vidarbha region.

The NCP will soon launch the third phase of its agitation which will cover districts of north Maharashtra.

The NCP has been under criticism for having cordial relations with the BJP leadership. The protest is being seen as an attempt to change its image and preparing for next year polls.

The partys youth wing is also planning a rally against unemployment in February.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Monday informed the Bombay high court that its contractor will complete within 19 months the construction of a new bridge in place of the now demolished Hancock Bridge.

We have brought down the time limit for our contractor for completing the construction work from 24 months to 19 months, the civic bodys lawyer told a division bench of justice Naresh Patil and justice Nitin Sambre.

The statement came after additional solicitor general Anil Singh expressed inability to construct a temporary structure at the site. Singh said if a temporary bridge is constructed at the site of the bridge  near Sandhurst Road railway station  work on the new bridge cannot be commenced and there is no alternate site to put up the temporary structure.

Even otherwise, Singh said, it will take at least a few months to put up the temporary structure. It cannot be put up overnight, he said. He also informed the court that pursuant to earlier orders of the court, even defence forces have examined the site and expressed inability to put up a temporary structure at the site.

Singh was responding to a public interest litigation complaining about lack of access from Sandhurst Road East to West after the bridge, which was on the Central Railway line, was pulled down in January 2015. According to the petitioners lawyer Pradeep Thorat, there are six public schools in the area and a large number of schoolchildren are compelled to take an 8-10km detour because of the removal of the bridge.
A day after three people were arrested for kidnapping a newborn, the six children found in their Kalyan house will undergo DNA test.

Although the accused claimed that the children were theirs, the Thane police will take the blood samples and send them to a forensic lab. The report will take almost a week.

On Sunday, six hours after a 19-year-old woman, Mohini Bhovar, delivered a boy, a woman came to her saying her mother-in-law was asking for the baby. The mother gave her the baby. The accused fled with the baby. Within 24 hours, the police managed to find the baby and arrested Gudiya Rajbhar, 35, her husband Sonu, 40, and their relative Vijay Shrivastav, 55.

When police raided their house at Pisavli village in Kalyan, they saw the six children working. Two were cleaning the floor, one was looking after a two-month-old baby, one was cleaning utensils and one was cooking food.

We have made a list of children kidnapped in the past five years and we are questioning the accused to know if they have abducted or sold babies, said a police officer from Thane crime branch.

The police will question the accuseds relatives, who are in Uttar Pradesh, to know if any child has been sold there. A police officer, who does not wish to be named, said, We suspect that the accused woman was planning to sell the infant after a few months.

He added that they were scrutiniting the CCTV footages of other civil hospital and maternity homes if the accused were seen there.

On Tuesday, two couples whose children were kidnapped came to the police station to get information after the incident.

WHAT HAPPENED

Mohini Bhovar delivered a baby boy on Saturday at 10.15pm and was shifted to labour ward on the ground floor.

On Sunday around 3am, Gudiya Rajbhar went to Bhovar and told her that her mother wanted to see the child. Bhovar did not suspect anything as she had seen the woman talking to her mother.

When Bhovar realised that her child was missing, she alerted the hospital authorities.

The police went through the CCTV footage and saw a woman carrying the baby.

The three accused went to Thane railway station and boarded a train. They reached CSTM around 4.56am. They took a Kalyan-bound train and got down at Dombivli.

Police trace them to Pisavli village in Kalyan and arrest them on Monday. They found the baby wrapped in paper and kept on a gunny bag which was also covered with a paper.

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January 23, 1949  January 10, 2018

Kent McAdoo passed away unexpectedly on January 10, 2018. Kent was born in Winfield, Kansas on January 23, 1949, to James and Joann McAdoo. Reared in Arkansas City, Kansas, Kent and his family often took camping trips to Colorado, instilling in him a love for the west. Kent married the love of his life and hometown sweetheart, Cathy in 1972, and soon after earned his bachelors degree in Forestry (Wildlife Management) from the University of Idaho. Kent went on to earn a masters degree in Renewable Resources from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1975. Kent always maintained a fondness for the Midwest, and went back often to enjoy time with friends and family.

Kent and Cathy moved to Elko, Nevada in 1978. During Kents 43 year career, which included work as a UNR research associate, an ecologist for Freeport McMoran, a consultant for JBR Environmental Consultants, Inc., and for the last 19 years as an area specialist for the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension, Kent was dedicated to the stewardship of natural resources in the state of Nevada and beyond. He truly took seriously Gods call for us to be good stewards of this earth. His love for wildlife ran so deep that it was hard to distinguish between his work-life and his hobbies. He greatly enjoyed hunting, fishing, and hiking, and his favorite work days were those spent out in the field. He instilled love and respect for the outdoors in both his children and his grandchildren.

Kents legacy extends well beyond the impact his professional work made on resource management in the state of Nevada. He loved his wife and family beyond compare and loved nothing better than to have them all together. Kent was born to be a granddad and he had a special relationship with each of his grandchildren. His affection for people was evident in the way he always made time to listen to a story or share his own. He was a teacher in every sense of the word, captivating his audience with his vast knowledge via presentations, journal articles, and Bible lessons. We will miss Kents wit, his infectious laugh, his love for music, his poetry, his accordion playing, his friendship, and most of all, time spent in his presence.

Kent lived a life of servant leadership and sought to honor God in all things. He was like a tree firmly planted by streams of water (Psalm 1:3). The love of Jesus flowed in and through him to all that were blessed to know him.

Kent was preceded in death by his father, James F. McAdoo, his mother, Joann McAdoo, and his brother-in-law, Jim Bean. He will be lovingly remembered by his beloved wife and best friend of 46 years, Cathy, his daughter Jamie Dickerson (James), his son Caleb McAdoo (Rachel), and by his 5 grandchildren, Samuel, Silas, Madeleine, Boone, and Adriana. Kent will also be fondly remembered by his sisters and brother, Carol Rehme (Norman), Wanda Bean, Rodger McAdoo (Kimberly), his 12 nieces and nephews, extended family, colleagues, and dear friends.

A celebration of Kents life will be held on Saturday, January 20th at 2:00 pm at Calvary Baptist Church, 577 Walnut Street, Elko, Nevada 89801.

Memorial donations can be made to: The Kent McAdoo Legacy Scholarship, P.O. Box 1225, Elko, NV 89803-1225.
Renowned sitar player Anoushka Shankar has reportedly decided to end her seven-year-old marriage with British director Joe Wright. A representative for the couple has confirmed the separation to PageSix.

PageSix, a website quoted the rep as saying, I can confirm that Joe Wright and Anoushka Shankar recently ended their marriage. All parties are committed to the welfare and happiness of their two beautiful children and ask that their privacy be respected. No further comments will be made on this matter.

Shankar is the daughter of Pandit Ravi Shankar and is a well-known musician across the globe. Wright is best known for Darkest Hour.

Almost a week ago, Anoushka posted about her upcoming lyrics. I said I loved you, and you heard me say, you were not enough...you asked me to hold you tighter, and I heard you say, I was not enough... how could we be enough for each other when we were never enough for ourselves? -new album idea scribblings #lyrics #newmusic #latenights, she wrote on Instagram. Will her next piece of work be about her own break up?

Anoushka and Joe tied the knot in 2010 in London at a private ceremony. They have two children together. Wright was earlier engaged to Hollywood star Rosamund Pike but their wedding was called off in 2008.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
A 13-year-old girl was allegedly gangraped and molested by two minor boys at a servants quarter in the Hindon air base in Ghaziabad.

The girls father lodged an FIR in the case on Saturday and named the two accused, who are 15 and 16 years old. The girl was taken for medical examination on Monday, but her parents refused to get her examined, police said.

The police said they have called the two accused for questioning and their medical examination will be conducted.

In his complaint, the girls father stated that the two boys allegedly gangraped and molested his daughter on two separate days inside the air base. He later approached the police on Saturday and lodged a case at the Sahibabad police station.

The FIR was filed under sections 376D (gang rape), 354 (molestation) of the Indian Penal Code. The boys have also been booked under the provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

The girl was raped in the servant quarters inside the air base on January 10, Noida city superintendent of police Akash Tomar said, adding that according to the complaint, the two boys allegedly molested his daughter inside the generator room of one of the residences at the air base on Saturday.

We have called the two boys for questioning and their medical exam will also be done. The girls family on Monday refused an internal examination to ascertain rape. The test couldnt be done earlier as doctors were unavailable, Tomar said.

However, chief medical officer AK Gupta said that the non availability of the doctors was not an issue.

The girl and her parents had come on Sunday but told the chief medical superintendent that they do not want her to be examined. They arrived yet again on Monday and refused to get her examined again. This time they have given it in written that they dont want to get the medical examination of their daughter done, Gupta said.

This is the second such incident of alleged assault against minor girls.

In an earlier incident at Kendriya Vidyalaya, Hindon Air Base, under the Sahibabad police station area, a class 2 girl was allegedly assaulted by minor boys of the same school. Her parents had lodged an FIR saying they tried to insert some object in her private parts. Later, they refused to pursue the case further.
The Gautam Budh Nagar district magistrate BN Singh has notified silence zones in Noida, Greater Noida, Yamuna Expressway areas and the other parts of the district.

The move comes following the Allahabad high courts order on curbing of noise pollution.

The DM has categorised areas as commercial, industrial, residential and silence zones as per the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2,000 enacted in line with the Central governments Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, said officials.

We have notified silence zones so that we can ensure rules are not violated in these areas and nobody honks or use loudspeakers during prohibited time, said BN Singh.

The 100 meters periphery around hospitals, educational institutes, courts and religious places have been declared as silence zone across the district, including Noida, Greater Noida and Yamuna Expressway areas.

The administration has allowed 50 decibels (DB) sound during daytime and 40 DB during nighttime, as per the sound standards in silence zones. Sound of 55 DB during daytime and 45 DB during nighttime will be allowed in residential areas.

Sound of 65 DB during daytime and 55 DB during nighttime will be allowed in commercial areas. In industrial areas, sound of 75 DB during daytime and 70 DB during nighttime will be allowed .

The daytime will be calculated from 6am to 10pm and nighttime will be applicable from 10pm to 6am, said officials.

The use of loudspeakers will be prohibited during nighttime across the district and if anyone wants to use loudspeaker during daytime then he or she will have to seek written permission, said DM.

In silence zones, honking, drums beating and playing loud music will be prohibited above permissible limits.

Whosoever will be found violating norms, will face action, said the DM.

Following the directions the high court, the UP government on January 8 had banned the use of loudspeakers at religious and public places in the state.

It directed the police and the administration to remove loudspeakers installed at religious places by January 20.

We will take action as per law to implement the governments directive, said DM.

Environmentalists hope the administration will implement the law.

Due to the violation of norms people blow horns or play loudspeakers at unbearable sounds. As a result, wildlife also gets affected immensely at bird sanctuaries such as Okhla bird sanctuary, Surajpur sanctuary and also Dhanauri wetland. Now we hope the law will benefit the wildlife in the district, said Vikrant Tongad, an environmentalist.

The Uttar Pradesh government had on May 6, 1997 established Gautam Budh Nagar district. Well planned industrial towns Noida, Greater Noida and Yamuna Expressway are part of the Gautam Budh Nagar district. Earlier parts of Noida, Greater Noida and Yamuna Expressway areas were part of neighbouring Ghaziabad and Bulandshahr district.

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Uttar Pradesh chief secretary Rajive Kumar on Monday said that the Uttar Pradesh Self Financed Independent Schools (Regulation of Fees) draft Bill 2017, aimed at checking arbitrary fee structures in private schools in the state, will come into effect in a months time.

He said the education department is having deliberations on the draft bill and the deputy chief minister of UP Dinesh Sharma has also promised that the regulation will come into effect shortly. Mr Kumar was replying to a question about the regulation of private schools on fees in the state on Monday while visiting Noida.

After the UP government had decided to introduce Uttar Pradesh Self Financed Independent Schools (Regulation of Fees) Bill 2017 on December 7, parent associations in Noida were happy and demanded for an early implementation.

The UP government has already made a draft of Uttar Pradesh Self Financed Independent Schools (Regulation of Fees) Bill 2017 and has started the process of resolving objections of parents from different cities. The state is expected to take the bill in its upcoming budget session scheduled in February.

The government is having deliberations on the provisions of the draft bill. We understand the problems faced by the parents, but we have to keep all prevailing laws in mind while finalising provisions in the bill. I hope that everything will be in place in a month, said Kumar.

Hundreds of parents, under different organisations, had protested on numerous occasions against private schools and demanded the introduction of a regulatory body. The parents also met UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath and BJP president Amit Shah seeking their intervention in the issue. However, parents said that the draft bill should remove some of the provisions that favour private schools.

We have demanded some provisions should be removed before passing the bill to make it an act. We hope that the new act gets implemented before the upcoming academic session, said K. Arunachalam, general secretary, All Noida Schools Parents Association.

The parents said that the regulation should ensure that the schools do not increase fees arbitrarily to put financial burden on them.

The regulation model should ensure that the parents have a say when the fee is hiked by private schools. There should be complete transparency and accountability while deciding the fee structure. We hope that the new regulation model, which is yet to be finalised, will be done while keeping our demands in mind, said Pooja Soni, a parent.

The chief secretary said that the state government is making all efforts to regulate education and health sector.

The deliberations in Lucknow are taking place that how we can regulate private entities in education and health sector within the preview of law, said Kumar.

We have met with the principal secretary UP education department once over the bill. Now, he has called us again for discussion next week. If the state government will include our five-point demands in the draft bill then we will welcome the new law. Our demands are formation of a regulatory body on the lines of other regulatory bodies such as real estate, capping of annual fee hike, representation of parents in a commissioner-level committee, Central Board of Secondary Education guidelines implementation and transparency in parents-teacher meetings, Arunachalam said.

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A team of Ghaziabad police on a police response vehicle (PRV) was allegedly attacked by men and women from Pabi Sadikpur village in Loni on late Sunday evening when the team was called to pacify two warring factions.

During the incident around 8pm, a police constable and a head constable had gone to the house of one accused where they were pulled inside the house by men and woman. Earlier, two men Kallu and Azeem were playing volley ball and went into some altercation which resulted in a head injury to Azeem. He later approached police with a complaint against Kallu. However, Kallu later got infuriated when he heard that Azeem had approached police for help.

Thereafter, he went to the nearby house of Azeem where both groups went into altercation. On this, the victim group called up police for help and we sent one PRV to sort out the issue. There, our constable and head constable were attacked by men and women, said Durgesh Kumar Singh, circle officer (Loni).

It is alleged that Kallus father Khaleel, his mother Sitara, his uncle Khaleel Nambardar and his wife Rukhsana pulled the policemen inside their house and thrashed them.

They policemen had parked the vehicle at the main road as the locality has narrow bylanes and the vehicle could not move in.

Leaving behind the PRV, the policemen walked to the village but got attacked by villagers.

Later, the policemen called Tronica City police station for help and the required force was sent to rescue the two policemen.

We have registered a case under IPC sections of assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty, voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty and other relevant sections. Two persons, including a woman, were arrested in this connection while a search is on for the other accused, Singh added.

A case was also lodged against Kallu and his relatives by father of Azeem.

Earlier, in December, 2017, a team of the National Investigation Agency and UP police were similarly attacked by villagers at Nahali village when the teams had gone to nab a man accused of supplying arms for the earlier murder of RSS Ravindra Gosain in Ludhiana.

Similarly, a team of administrative and police officials was attacked in Loni in January this year when they were returning after seizing several trucks carrying illegally mined sand mining at Mewla Bhatti. A man later fired in the air and fled from the spot, two others were arrested.
Uttar Pradesh chief secretary Rajive Kumar on Monday said the government will look into the need for a lift Act to define the guidelines and responsibility in case of an injury or fatality.

Such an Act would be especially beneficial for the lakhs of people staying in urbanized areas of the Gautam Budh Nagar and Ghaziabad districts where high-rise apartment complexes are the norm.

Chief secretary asked Noida authority chief executive officer Alok Tandon to look into the issue and write a letter so that adequate steps can be taken in this regard.

Residents in Noida and Greater Noida areas, that are home to 1,200 apartment complexes, said the Uttar Pradesh government is yet to come up with a suitable law that helps the administration in governing the installation, operation and maintenance of elevators in apartment complexes.

For a long time, residents have been demanding an Act to govern installation of lifts and to fix the onus of maintenance in case the lift develops a snag. Residents said that accidents in lifts due to poor maintenance have also become common and onus needs to fixed in case of an untoward incident.

In the absence of a lift Act the developers install poor quality lifts, which do not have automatic rescue device (ARD), no service lift for emergency and no monitoring by the local authorities.

If the Act will come into place then the local authority will use the Act and take appropriate action in case of a lift failure. Also, after the Act the local authority will not give a no-objection certificate to a lift if it does not fit the norms to be detailed out in the Act. Officials favour builders citing no proper guidelines in place, said Alok Kumar, a Ghaziabad based social activist, who has filed a plea in January, 2017 demanding for an Act for the state. Next hearing in the case will be next month.

The government will think over the issue of introducing a lift Act. The Noida authority chief executive officer, Alok Tandon, will write to the state government so it can take adequate steps on this important issue. The government will do the needful, Kumar said.

Kumar, on Monday, met with officials, farmers, representatives of residents welfare associations and industrial bodies in Noida authoritys Sector 6 office.

Noida is a very important city in terms of industrial development. And our meeting was planned in the run up to the investors summit scheduled in February. I have directed officials to expedite work on the Jewar International Airport and follow the timeline. The government wants to set-up industries (in this area) and create employment, he said.

Kumar added that to boost industrialization, the government need to improve all services here such as civic facilities, policing and infrastructure.

I have directed officials to improve the municipal services and finish all ongoing projects without any delay. I hope that there will be substantial work on municipal services in Noida, Kumar said, adding that he has directed the Noida authority to clean drains and improve the condition of roads.

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Globally, urbanisation is considered an engine of growth and indicator of development. Every civic amenity  sanitation, public utilities, safety, and social and health infrastructure originate from a group of buildings. If buildings come up in systematic way, it facilitates social and economic growth.

Unsystematic or leap-frog development leads to issues like lack of civic amenities, congestion, chaos, bad connectivity, poor safety etc. Further, it leads to urban local bodies (ULBs) utilising funds for creation of infrastructure in unauthorised areas against the spirit of the Punjab Municipal Act-1911, which suggests utilising funds for maintenance of infrastructure. Below are six action points the government can adopt to improve financial health of ULBs and rescue Punjab from worsening urban growth scenario.

First and foremost, the government needs to adopt measures to ensure compact development of cities/towns instead of allowing haphazard sprawling. In certain situations, vast areas are opened for urbanisation as per master plans and many rural areas are included within the municipal limits unnecessarily, ignoring all parameters for an urban area laid down in the municipal Acts.

Limited areas should be opened for urbanisation

Only limited areas should be opened for urbanisation, and in a phased manner as per population projections. This will avoid premature conversion of precious agriculture land and loss of livelihood in farming, dairy, poultry, horticulture and other allied activities. Further, it will drastically cut the cost of creation of infrastructure for connectivity, management of urban services and maintenance of law and order.

Instead of a populist and piecemeal approach, the government needs to take radical steps to stem the rot and put the states long-term urban growth on a planned trajectory.

Second, cities/towns are living entities and should be allowed to live their life and grow. To manage highway traffic, create bypasses instead of elevated roads disturbing the natural fabric of settlements and devaluing properties underneath.

Third, the government must hasten to create land corridors in cities/towns to manage traffic/parking requirements. Leaving it to ULBs/development authorities or adopting regulatory measures has not served the purpose. A prime example is the missing stretch between Sunny Enclaves 200-inch wide road and the Khanpur T-Point in Kharar, to complete the Airport Expressway.

Haphazard activities along highways need to be stopped

Fourth, haphazard intensive urban activities along highways/bypasses need to be stopped. State makes huge investments to create highways/bypasses but value addition is encashed by land sharks rendering such highways/bypasses as any other internal city road over a period of time, like the Ludhiana or Phagwara bypasses. The state should acquire at least 100 inch land on either side of bypasses/highways for future expansion, highway facilities and to ensure regulated development.

Fifth, a 200-feet wide road connecting Kharar Road with Chandigarh-Patiala road was planned to cater to the regional and International Airport traffic. Even though the intensive development has not hit the road yet and the airport has not started buzzing with frequent international flights or cargo, the airport road is full of traffic, with numerous junctions having traffic signals. The government needs to construct an elevated road for Mohali Airport before it gets converted into Delhi airport-Gurgaon scenario.

Last but not the least, while revisiting policy to regularise illegal colonies, the government must look into its environmental and financial implications.

Earlier in absence of any inventory, mere government intention to formulate a policy led to unscrupulous colonisers carving out numerous illegal colonies all around cities creating a downtown like situation. Further, no one has assessed the area required for urbanisation in a town/city as per population projection or the area under illegal colonies or the way licensed colonies can compete and come up in future or the quantum of financial loss and burden on the ULBs/Authorities.

Acts provide for fixing minimum street width

The Punjab Municipal Act-1911 and the Punjab Town Improvement Act-1922, even though enacted almost 100 years ago, provide for fixing minimum street width, formulation of street schemes to improve means of communications and facilities for traffic, and formulation of improvement schemes for areas unfit for human habitation for reasons of narrowness and bad arrangement of the streets, for want of proper light, air, ventilation etc.

But colonisers insist on regularisation of illegal colonies on as is where is basis, even for areas having street width of 15 inch or 20 inch, saleable area as high as 75% to 80% leaving no space for utilities/parks, that too at nominal fee 10% to 15% of the EDC/CLU charges to be paid for obtaining licence to develop a colony. This leaves the responsibilty to provide and maintain the infrastructure to ULBs/authorities. This should actually be borne by the coloniser and maintain for five years after obtaining completion.

Also, once such colonies are regularised on as is where is basis, their improvement can be done only through improvement/redevelopment/street schemes. In such situations, the government/ULBs have to pay for widening streets or implementing improvement schemes. This seems next to impossible because of quantum of such areas and financial health of ULBs or the government.

The government must consider the legislative wisdom exercised almost 100 years ago for financial sustainability of ULBs, better livability of the future generations and sustainable development of urban areas.

(The writer is former director, town planning, Punjab. The views expressed are personal)
Punjab power and irrigation minister Rana Gurjit Singh, who has been in the midst of controversy due to sand mine auctions and the enforcement directorates summons to his son, has resigned from the state cabinet.

Rana Gurjit handed over his resignation to chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh. A week ago, I met the chief minister and offered to resign from the state cabinet, he said. The chief minister is yet to accept his resignation.

Rana Gurjit said he was in politics because of Amarinder Singh and the government was being attacked daily. When the issue of notice by the enforcement directorate to my sons company came, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) again started levelling allegations. The companys managing director (Rana Gurjits son) has the right to respond. As a disciplined member of the party, I cannot let them run a smear campaign against my partys government and gave the resignation to the chief minister, he said.

The ED had, about 10 days ago, issued summons to the ministers son Rana Inder Partap Singh in connection with raising funds amounting to $18 million (over Rs 100 crore) abroad by floating global depository receipts for a family-owned company, Rana Sugars Limited, allegedly without the mandatory approval of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

A businessman-turned-politician, Rana had been in the eye of a storm for using frontmen to bid for sand mines in the state. The state government set up a one-member inquiry commission and the panel, in its report submitted to the CM in August, pointed out irregularities but absolved the minister on all counts.

Must read | HT Explainer : How Punjab sand mines auctioning got mired in muck?
Malayalam actor Sidhu R Pillai, who starred in Second Show, was found dead in Goa, reports Malayalam Manorama. He was 27. His body was identified by his mother on Monday, the report adds.

Sidhu, who made his Mollywood debut with Second Show along with Dulquer Salmaan and Sunny Wayne, went to Goa on January 12. While the exact reason for his death is unknown, unconfirmed reports suggest that drowning at the beach could be the reason, an Indian Express report says. The actors last rites will take place in his home town Thrissur, it adds.

PKR Pillai is a prominent producer who has at least 16 films to his credit including Chithram, Vandanam and Amrutham Gamaya.

Dulquer took to Twitter to express his shock at Sidhus untimely death. He wrote: Disturbed and sad about the passing of #SidhuRPillai ! Was an excited and vivacious youngster during #SecondShow. Prayers to his family.

Disturbed and sad about the passing of #SidhuRPillai ! Was an excited and vivacious youngster during #SecondShow. Prayers to his family   dulquer salmaan (@dulQuer) January 16, 2018

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Actor-filmmaker Samuthirakani, who shot to fame with his 2009 hit friendship-based action drama Naadodigal, has announced a second part in the franchise and the project will reunite him with actor Sasikumar, who played a pivotal role in the first part. Apparently, the film wont be a sequel but will carry forward the flavor of Naadodigal. Currently busy with the script work, Samuthirakani, who is looking forward to helming the project, has said that love and friendship will be the recurring theme of Naadodigal 2.

While Sasikumar is confirmed to play the titular role, Anjali and Atulya will play the leading ladies. Talking to Times of India, Kani has said that either Sasikumar or Anjali could bag National award. This might sound cliched, but both Anjali and Sasikumar have such strong roles that either of the two could be contenders for the National Award. Bharani and Namo Narayana, who were part of the first, have been brought on board as well. The storys focus is not on who is paired opposite whom, but on each of these characters, and how they become linked. I usually take inspiration for my characters from the society, and these characters, too, will be closer to real life. They will be representative of contemporary youngsters.

Slated to go on the floors from March, the film will have music by Justin Prabhakaran. Samuthirakani will take break from his acting assignments to complete this project. On the acting front, he will be seen playing a pivotal role in Rajinikanths Kaala.

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Nonprofit groups may submit announcements of upcoming events to events@elkodaily.com.

BLM to host blood drive Jan. 18

ELKO  The Bureau of Land Management Elko District office will host a United Blood Services community blood drive from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 18 at 3900 E. Idaho St.

The Elko community really stepped up last year and 70 donors gave 78 lifesaving units of blood. Said Camille Howes, associate district manager. This was more than double what we received the year prior. And, the event is growing, we hope to collect 100 units of blood during this drive.

According to United Blood Services, the winter months are a critical time for blood donations.

Some blood donation facts:

Save up to three lives with your donation

Northern Nevada needs 125 pints of blood a day to take care of the area hospital patients

You can donate whole blood every 8 weeks

Someone needs a blood transfusion every 2 seconds

80% of patients entering the hospital will receive blood

Almost everyone knows someone who has received blood

All blood types are needed!

Blood donors are encouraged to visit the United Blood Services website for more information and to complete the screening process prior to arrival at www.UnitedBloodServices.org, use sponsor code EBLM.

Libertarians to hold Cannabis Forum

ELKO  The Elko Libertarian Party will be hosting a Cannabis Forum at the next Liberty Salon, at 6 p.m. Jan. 19 at Sierra Java.

Councilmen Reece Keener and John Patrick Rice will be discussing Zoning Ordinance Amendment 3-17 that would prohibit cannabis dispensaries in the City of Elko. This forum is open to the public, and both councilmen will be fielding questions from the audience.

The Elko Libertarian Party promotes honest and respectful political discourse, and we are very thankful that Councilmen Keener and Rice have volunteered their time to such a cause, said Sean Fericks.

For more information, and to RSVP, view the event at the Elko County Libertarian Party on Facebook.

Guardianship presentation at the library

ELKO  Learn about guardianship procedures and reporting requirements at a Jan. 19 presentation by Nevada Legal Services.

Topics include Identifying the need for guardianship, filing of petition, and emergency situations.

The presentation is scheduled from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Elko County Library.

Elko Democrats plan for convention

ELKO  The Elko County Democrats will meet at 6 p.m. Jan. 23 at the Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital conference room.

Planning will occur for the Elko County precinct caucuses and county convention to be held on Feb. 24 in Elko.

All interested parties are invited to attend.

Ask a Lawyer Jan. 23 at the library

ELKO  Nevada Legal Services is sponsoring Ask a Lawyer from 2-4 p.m. Jan. 23 at the Elko County Library.

Attorneys will be present to answer questions and assist with legal paperwork regarding civil legal issues.

Pre-registration is required. Call Amy for an appointment at 753-5880.

Sweetheart Bingo at Carlin Senior Center

CARLIN  The Carlin Senior Center invites residents to Sweetheart Bingo from noon to 3 p.m. Feb. 10.

Free refreshments will be provided. For more information call the Carlin Senior Center at 754-6465.

Group to discuss historical novel

ELKO  The Elko County Library Book Club will discuss the historical novel Molokai by Alan Brennert on Feb. 12.

The book club will meet at 6 p.m. in the Library Meeting Room. Copies of the book are available for check-out. All are welcome to attend.

Call Patrick Dunn at the library for more information, 738-3066.

SBA state director coming to Elko

ELKO  Joe Amato, the new Nevada director for the U.S. Small Business Administration, will be in Elko on Jan. 25 to discuss the state of small business and SBA priorities,

Small businesses, chamber members, the financial community, development authority members, and economic development partners are invited to the session from 10 a.m. to noon at the Elko County Library, 720 Court St.

To RSVP contact Clint Koble at 775-843-4081 or ckoble@unr.edu.

Faith Lutheran sets annual meeting

ELKO  The annual meeting of Faith Lutheran Church congregation will be Jan.28 following the 10:30 service.

Agenda items include approval of the annual budget, confirmation of council members, and other items of concern to the congregation.

A potluck dinner will follow the meeting.

Nevada Humanities grant information

LAS VEGAS  Nevada Humanities will hold a series of free informational grant meetings, including one in Elko from 10-11 a.m. Feb. 2 at the Elko County Library.

These meetings are open to anyone interested in learning more about applying for project grant funding from Nevada Humanities. Nevada Humanities offers grants of up to $5,000 to nonprofit organizations and government entities, such as libraries and schools, to fund public and educational programs in the humanities.

Nevada Humanities funds projects that encourage community engagement and conversation. This may take the form of face-to-face dialogue, such as lectures, forums, and round-table discussions, or through programs that stimulate thought and reflection, such as media productions, film screenings, exhibitions, local history projects, and projects that explore local culture and Nevadas diverse heritage and unique places.

The Nevada Humanities grant application deadline is March 10, 2018, for projects taking place beginning July 1, 2018, and running through June 30, 2019. Applications requesting $1,000 or less may be submitted at any time, at least eight weeks prior to the proposed project date. Grant guidelines are available on the Nevada Humanities website at www.nevadahumanities.org.

Heart and Shield: Family violence prevention

ELKO  The Heart and Shield program provides parents and children with resources and skills to strengthen family relationships and build resilience. Parent survivors of former domestic violence and their children ages birth -18 may be eligible to participate.

This nine-week education program includes a light meal, separate skill building activities for adults and children, and family activities to practice skills together. Program topics include communication, emotions, problem-solving, healthy relationships, stress management and more.

This free program begins in February. A program demonstration for interested families will be held on Jan. 23 from 5:30-6:30 p.m.at the Elko County Cooperative Extension office, 701 Walnut St.

To RSVP call 340-8360 or email woodburyj@unce.unr.edu.
From the metallic confines of a spotless plane, Porto appeared to be a city living in the past. One of the largest cities of Portugal -- a country that has colonised faraway lands and was ruled by a dictator until 1968 -- was like starring in a vintage film; illuminated with abundance of sunlight in mornings and tinted with sepia at night.

From the airport, I reached the Sao Bento station nearly an hour later in a metro train that can easily be confused for a modern tram. In utter defiance of the nights silence, I pulled my blue strolley bag noisily on the tiled pavement and walked into Tattva Design Hostel, located 5 minutes from the station. There, I would crash on a squishy bunk bed and live with four strangers for the next three days. It was only the beginning.

December wind and a gleaming sun coupled together as I ventured out of the hostel to the sloped cobblestoned streets in the heart of the city next day. After a walk fuelled by a hearty breakfast spread from the hostel, I stopped after just half-a-kilometre to marvel at a baroque structure decorated with high arched windows and mounted with a clock. My curiosity kindled as hoards of people rushed inside determinedly, so I followed only to stop in my tracks. It was the Sao Bento railway station, standing tall in the heart of Porto without boastful recognition. Wall-sized paintings of indigo tiles painted with scenes of war and marriage procession opened into a magnificent shed where trains heaved and rested. I eventually learned that geometric patterns of azulejo tiles are a Portuguese eccentricity, which is traceable even in parts of Goa.

Read |Backpacking in Italy? When in Rome, dont do as the Romans do

Another five-minute trot from the railway station and a short climb stopped at Se Catedral, a brown stone church surrounded by grass that couldnt have been a brighter shade of green. Inside the cathedral, golden markings shimmered on the nave and lent it the sanctity common to places of worship. Like brothers in arms, the ornate Episcopal Palace, home of the bishop, stood beside the church in silent reverie. But alas! It was the view from the hill that stole the final glance. Lopsided red tiled-roofs shone till the horizon as seagulls, unafraid of human presence, accompanied me in my awe of Portos skyline.

By noon, I took the bold step of joining a free walking tour that congregated next to a fountain at the Liberdade Square -- located near prominent avenues of lower Porto, and home to luxury hotels and McDonalds. A theatre actor named Mafalda led our group of 15 through Old Town and towards the riverside. Id like to think, perks of spending 10-15 on the tour made me a smart tourist. Apart from learning about Portugals promiscuous kings and life under Salazar (dictator), I knew by the end of three hours not to thank the Portuguese with Gracias. (Its Obrigado/a by the way).

The marvel still wasnt over. A stroll downwards was easier on the heels and took me to the pier for a stunning sight of Dom Luis 1 bridge. The double-deck steel bridge, which was unsurprisingly designed by a disciple of Gustave Eiffel, arched proudly above river Douro and left me spellbound. Sandwiched between the banks, it connected Portos binary identities  the 21st century city that remains witness to Portugals tumultuous history. I opted for stairs to shorten the climb up to the bridge just in time for a spectacular sunset. Winds became a notch stronger and Porto faded into orange as blurry street lamps outlined Douros mesmerising swirls. Revellers thronged glass restaurants lined up along the river and sipped the citys patented Port Wine. Others absentmindedly followed waters trail like love-struck versions of explorer Vasco Da Gama. Somewhere in the distance, a stray musician sounded his guitars bugle as reflections shimmered on Douros darkening face.

Hours in Guimaraes

Travelling in Portugals trains is journey extraordinario. On my last day in Porto, I caught a 3 urban train from Sao Bento railway station to the historical town of Guimaraes, 55 km from the city. Cottages with terracotta roofs, verdant trees basking in winter sunshine and ivys protective twirls on abandoned buildings roused my senses as the train throttled towards Guimaraes.

I walked through the idyllic town, famous for its heritage square, as scores of tourists occupied tiny cafes and souvenir shops. Meanwhile, a cavalcade of clowns, Winnie the Pooh, and Santa and his elves spread the Christmas cheer as I walked into alleys that led up to the medieval Castelo de Guimaraes (entry ticket to castle and exhibitions ranged from 3-8). But Rua de Santa Maria -- a cobblestone street with colourful doors to houses and rounded passageways adorned with flowers -- was the most charming of them all.

Back in Porto at Igreja de Sao Francisco, a gothic church overlooking the river, it dawned on me that Porto, with its twinkling lights and gurgling water, would have been the perfect muse for Van Gogh.

Read | From Vienna to Rome: Heres how you backpack across Europe on a budget

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Fighting at the Libyan capitals only working international airport killed at least 20 people Monday, officials said, after militiamen attacked it in an attempt to free colleagues held at a jail there.

Mitiga airport, a former military air base on the eastern outskirts of the capital, was evacuated when the clashes erupted and roads to the facility were closed.

Six Libyan aircraft on the tarmac were hit by gunfire, an airport source said.

In an updated casualty toll, the health ministry of Libyas UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) said 20 people were killed and 63 wounded in the clashes.

It did not specify if the casualties were civilians or fighters.

Several assailants were arrested, according to Tripoli security services run by the interior ministry.

All the infrastructure of the military base and the airport are under control and undamaged, it said, although a resumption of flights had yet to be announced several hours later.

The airport source and a local resident said the assailants were repelled and that fighting moved to their headquarters around 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) to the east of the facility and had eased by late Monday.

Mitiga has been a civilian airport since the citys main international airport was badly damaged in fighting between rival militias in mid-2014.

The North African country has been wracked by chaos since the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed long-time dictator Moamer Gaddafi, with rival authorities and militias battling for control of its oil riches.

The airports closure was announced after Al-Radaa, a force loyal to the GNA and tasked with keeping the facility secure, said it had come under attack.

An armed group attacked Mitiga international airport... which is home to a prison where more than 2,500 people are detained for various reasons, Al-Radaa said on its Facebook page.

Unidentified gunmen launched the attack in a bid to free some of their colleagues detained there, it said.

The GNA, in a statement, condemned the premeditated attack on the perimeter of Mitiga International Airport... endangering the lives of passengers and the safety of civil aviation.

This attack was aimed at the release of terrorists belonging to the Islamic State and al Qaeda organisations and other groups from the detention centre run by Al-Radaa, it said.

Al-Ridaa said more than 2,500 people are detained at the centre for a variety of offences.

A Libyan pilot said earlier that the airport, the scene of frequent clashes between rival militias, was evacuated once the fighting broke out.

All the staff and passengers who were at the airport were evacuated, the pilot said, speaking on condition of anonymity. We saw tanks in the airports perimeter.

With all roads to Mitiga closed, artillery fire could be heard as far away as Tajura 30 kilometres (18 miles) east of Tripoli, AFP reporters said.

Only domestic airlines operate in the country, serving domestic routes and flights to Tunis, Egypts Alexandria, Amman, Istanbul and Khartoum. The EU has banned Libyan airlines for security reasons.

Since the 2011 revolution, Libya has descended into political and military chaos, with militias who had fought to topple Kadhafi often turning against each other.

Libya has rival administrations, with the authorities in the east not recognising the GNA based in the capital.

Al Radaa is loyal to the GNA and also serves as a police force in Tripoli, as well as tracking suspected jihadists and drug and alcohol smugglers.
At least 48 people were injured, 10 of them seriously, when a school bus in Germany crashed into a wall Tuesday, police said.

The accident, whose cause was not immediately clear, occurred at about 7:00 am (0600 GMT) en route to a school in the southwestern town of Eberbach.

The fully occupied school bus drove for reasons that were not immediately clear at full speed into several other vehicles and then into the wall of an electronics shop, police said in a statement.

Forty-three of those hurt were children and a total of 10 victims suffered grave injuries. The driver was slightly hurt, a police spokesman told DPA news agency.

Three rescue helicopters helped rush victims to local hospitals while first responders and ambulances were dispatched to treat the more lightly injured at the scene, the police statement said.

The site of the accident was cleared of traffic as investigators began work to determine the cause of the crash.

.
The Trump administration today said the current immigration system jeopardises the US national security, reiterating its call to end the chain migration and visa lottery system.

By failing to impose meaningful selection criteria, such as skills or likelihood to assimilate, our current family- based system is incompatible with national security, the White House said.

The remarks came soon after the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security released a new report showing three out of every four convicted terrorists entered the US through the current immigration system.

President Trump sent a list of priorities designed to enhance public safety and national security to Congress last October, which included the elimination of the visa lottery programme and extended-family chain migration, the White House said, adding that the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security have repeatedly explained that the current immigration system compromises US national security.

The report, produced at the direction of Trump, found that approximately three out of every four individuals convicted of terrorism-related charges between September 11, 2001 and December 31, 2016 are foreign-born individuals who entered the US through its immigration system.

The White House said a significant number of terrorists have entered the US solely on the basis of family ties and extended-family chain migration.

For instance, Mufid Elfgeeh, who benefited from chain migration, was sentenced to more than 22 years in prison for attempting to recruit fighters for ISIS.

Terrorists have also entered the US through the visa lottery programme, the White House said.

While the report does not contain information regarding the number of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses committed by individuals who are the children of foreign-born individuals, the White House said terrorist attacks carried out by children of foreign-born individuals include the attack in Orlando by Omar Mateen, which killed 49 people and the attack in San Bernadino, California by Syed Rizwan Farook, which killed 14 people and injured 22 others.

The report also found that in FY 2017, DHS had 2,554 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watchlist who had attempted to enter and infiltrate the United States.
Inventor Peter Madsen was charged Tuesday with killing Swedish journalist Kim Wall during a trip on his private submarine, with prosecutors saying he either cut her throat or strangled her.

Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen said the case is very unusual and extremely disturbing.

Madsen is charged with murder as well as indecent handling of a corpse for the way he disposed of Walls body.

Madsen claimed Wall died accidentally inside the submarine while he was on deck during the excursion in August. However, he later admitted throwing her body parts into the sea.

Madsen and Wall had gone on a trip in Madsens submarine on August 10. Wall, who was working on a story about Madsen, was last seen aboard the vessel as it left Copenhagen. The next day, Madsen  an entrepreneur who once dreamed of launching a manned space mission  was rescued from the sinking submarine without Wall.

Police believe he deliberately sank the vessel.

Madsen has offered a shifting variety of explanations for Walls death. Initially, he told authorities he had dropped Wall off on an island several hours after their voyage began. Later, he said she had died in an accident on board and he had buried her at sea.

Her dismembered, naked torso was found on a southern Copenhagen coast in late August and her head, legs and clothes were discovered in bags at sea in October. Heavy metal objects were designed to take them to the ocean floor.

The trial starts March 8 and a verdict is expected on April 25.
European Union President Donald Tusk said on Tuesday that the blocs hearts are still open to Britain if it changes its mind about leaving, in a fresh suggestion that Brexit could be reversed.

Tusks comments, which European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said he hoped London would heed, come shortly after talk about whether Britain should hold a second referendum on EU membership.

If the UK government sticks to its decision to leave, Brexit will become a reality with all its negative consequences in March next year, unless there is a change of heart among our British friends, Tusk told the European Parliament to light applause.

Wasnt it (British Brexit minister) David Davis himself who said if a democracy cannot change its mind it ceases to be a democracy? he told the assembly in Strasbourg, France.

We on the continent havent had a change of heart. Our hearts are still open to you.

The former Polish premier stressed however that the remaining 27 EU states would push ahead with negotiations with Britain on its departure, urging London to say what it wanted in terms of post-Brexit ties.

As regards our future relations, what we need today is more clarity on the UKs vision. Once we have that, the leaders will meet and decide on the way that we see the future relationship with the UK as a third country, Tusk said.

Juncker meanwhile echoed Tusks comments, which are far from Tusks first suggestion that bloc would be open to Britain changing its mind and rejoining the European fold.

Tusk said our door still remains open and I hope that that will be heard clearly in London, he said.

The issue of a second referendum after Britains original vote to leave in June 2016 returned to the agenda last week when leading Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage suggested he was open to the idea.

Farage later walked back the comments.
The European Union will remove Panama, South Korea and six other countries from its recently unveiled EU tax blacklist at a meeting of finance ministers next week, a European Union official said on Tuesday.

Barring a major surprise, EU finance ministers should remove eight countries from the blacklist of tax havens, the official said on condition of anonymity.

The United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Mongolia, Macau, Grenada and Barbados are also to be struck from the list.

The reversal comes just a few weeks after the EU announced an original blacklist of 17 non-EU states, which drew furious reaction from several of the states targeted.

The official said the countries removed from the list now move to the EUs so-called grey list, countries that have made unspecified commitments to the EU on reforming their tax laws.

The lists came a year on from the leak of the Panama Papers  a massive amount of data from a prominent Panamanian law firm showing how the worlds wealthy stash assets.

This is a worrying trend. Just one month after adopting the list they are taking people off, said Aurore Chardonnet, an EU tax policy advisor at Oxfam.

They are weakening the credibility of the list... which is becoming empty, she added.

Saint Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Bahrain, Guam, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Samoa, American Samoa and Namibia remain on the blacklist..
Japans public broadcaster on Tuesday mistakenly flashed that North Korea appeared to have launched a missile, warning people to take cover before apologising for the error only minutes later.

A news alert saying: It appears North Korea launched a missile... Evacuate inside buildings or underground: government was published by the NHK website and app at 6:55 pm local time (0955 GMT).

But after just five minutes, NHK admitted the alert was sent in error.

Were very sorry, NHK said on its website, without explaining further.

It comes just days after a false cellphone alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile terrified residents in Hawaii.

Japan and North Korea have a tense relationship, with Pyongyang routinely issuing verbal threats as well as firing missiles near or above Japan.

Dont scare me. Its good that (North Korea) didnt launch a missile, one Japanese Twitter user said.

I was surprised but it was a mistake. Do your work, NHK! urged another.

The mistake also comes less than two weeks after a fake earthquake alarm in Tokyo, where millions of residents received an alert warning them that a strong quake was about to hit the Japanese capital.

In Hawaii, the notification was sent out on Saturday, lighting up phones with a disturbing alert urging people to seek immediate shelter.

Emergency management officials later admitted the wrong button was pushed during a shift change.

But it took nearly 40 minutes for a corrected message to be issued -- with Hawaiis governor saying there was no automatic way to cancel the false alarm, meaning it had to be done manually.
A 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student whose body was found buried in a shallow grave at a California park had been stabbed more than 20 times, according to The Orange County Register. No weapon has been found.

Carrie Braun, a public information officer for the Orange County Sheriffs Department, would not confirm to The Associated Press if Blaze Bernstein was stabbed but said the condition of the body at the time it was discovered turned it from a missing person to a homicide immediately.

Samuel Lincoln Woodward, 20, was arrested and taken into custody Friday on suspicion of homicide after DNA evidence linked him to the death of college sophomore Blaze Bernstein, Orange County Undersheriff Don Barnes said.

Bernstein was home visiting his family in Lake Forest during winter break when Woodward picked him up on January 2 and drove with him to several places before winding up at a park.

The two knew each other from high school, Barnes said.

Woodward was interviewed by investigators after Bernstein was reported missing by his parents on January 3.

A sheriffs investigator wrote in court filings that Woodward appeared nervous, had scratched hands and dirt under his fingernails, and avoided touching doors with his hands while leaving the sheriffs office building.

Bernstein may have been planning to sexually pursue Woodward, according to a 16-page search warrant affidavit obtained by The Orange County Register .

Bernstein texted two female friends about a June interaction with Woodward, according to the affidavit. Bernstein wrote that Woodward was about to hit on me and he made me promise not to tell anyone.

Gideon and Jeanne Bernstein, parents of Blaze Bernstein, during a news conference in Lake Forest. (AP File Photo)

The affidavit also noted that Woodward told investigators that Bernstein kissed him on the lips at a stop before the park, and that he pushed Bernstein away.

Investigators said in the affidavit that as he recounted that part of his story, Woodward clenched his jaw and his fists, saying he wanted to tell Blaze to get off of him.

Woodward also told investigators that Bernstein entered the park alone and then he waited for Bernstein for an hour before driving to meet with a girlfriend, the Register reported. However, according to the affidavit, Woodward could not remember his girlfriends last name or where she lived.

It was not immediately possible to reach Woodward in custody, where he listed his occupation as Nerf games, according to the jails website.

Authorities searched for Bernstein for nearly a week with assistance from drone pilots and found his body on Tuesday after recent rains partially exposed it.

The death of Bernstein rocked the community of Lake Forest, 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles. Hundreds of people held a candlelight vigil to remember him.

It was the only homicide reported in Lake Forest in at least the past four years, according to authorities.
ELKO  City Councilman John Patrick Rice is seeking the publics support in preventing a permanent ban on the sale of marijuana within city limits.

Rice was the lone councilman to vote against an ordinance to ban marijuana sales establishments through the citys zoning law at the Jan. 9 city council meeting and at an October meeting in which the ordinance was sent to the city planning commission for review. Planners rejected the ban in a 4-3 vote, in part because city code already bans the issuance of a business license to a business that violates federal law.

The city has had a moratorium on businesses that sell medical marijuana since 2014, and it is set to expire in March.

Rice said he will propose extending the current moratorium on medical marijuana at the next city council meeting, along with adding recreational marijuana. Both would expire or need to be renewed in 2022.

In a commentary on todays Opinion page, Rice explains why he believes a moratorium would be better than a ban. He also presents arguments against the reasons cited by fellow council members who voted for a ban.

Marijuana sales dispensaries have been legal in Nevada since July 2017 but possessing or selling the drug remains illegal under federal law.

The councils next regular meeting is Jan. 23 at Elko City Hall.

The zoning ordinance must be scheduled for two public hearings before it can become law.
Pakistans ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif today compared the corruption cases against him to a flop movie as he appeared before an accountability court trying him for graft in the Panama Papers scandal that forced him to resign.

The cases were launched on September 8 following the Supreme Court verdict of July 28 that disqualified Sharif as prime minister and ordered the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) for institution of cases against him.

Sharif, 68, arrived in the court  his 13th appearance  in Islamabad.

He was accompanied by daughter Maryam and son-in-law Mohammad Safdar, who are co-accused in one of three cases.

During the hearing, at least two more witnesses produced by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) recorded their statements.

Sharifs lawyer Khawaja Harris cross-examined the witnesses.

Later, the court postponed hearing till January 23 and summoned three more witnesses.

Sharif after the court hearing narrated a story about a famous big-budget film in the 1960s to dismiss corruption charges against him.

After it was released, amid much fanfare, someone asked the producer and director how the movie was faring, to which they replied Pehlay haftay zabardast, doosray haftay zabardasti (The first week was great but the second was forced), Sharif said as he linked the flop movie to his own corruption cases.

You (media representatives) are here covering the case. You better know these cases and how strong they are?, he said.

He also criticised his political opponents planning protests this week against his partys rule in Punjab province. He asked them to wait for another four months when general elections are due to be held.

The three cases against him pertain to the Al-Azizia Steel Mills, several companies including Flagship Investment Ltd, and Londons Avenfield properties.

Sharif and some of his family members are facing charges relating to their overseas properties.

The political future of Sharif, who leads the countrys most powerful political family and the ruling PML-N party, has been hanging in balance since then. If convicted, Sharif can be jailed.
North Koreas state-run media say U.S. President Donald Trumps tweet about having a bigger nuclear button than leader Kim Jong Uns is the spasm of a lunatic.

Rodong Sinmun, the ruling party newspaper, lashed out at Trump in a commentary on Tuesday that took issue with the U.S. commander in chiefs Jan. 3 tweet that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

A summary of the commentary by North Koreas official news agency described the tweet as the spasm of a lunatic.

The spasm of Trump in the new year reflects the desperate mental state of a loser who failed to check the vigorous advance of the army and people of the DPRK, the Rodong Sinmun commentary said, using the acronym for North Koreas formal name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. He is making (a) bluff only to be diagnosed as a psychopath.

That tone is not uncommon for the North Korean media.

But Trumps willingness to respond in kind  he has repeatedly called Kim little rocket man  is rare for an American leader and has led to several fiery verbal barrages since he took office nearly a year ago.

Trump has more recently suggested he might be willing to meet with Kim, and reportedly told the Wall Street Journal the two probably have a very good relationship.

If so, however, the Norths propaganda machine doesnt seem to have gotten the memo.

Trumps controversial nuclear button tweet was in response to Kims New Years Day warning that North Koreas nuclear arsenal is a real threat and that he has a nuclear launch button on his desk at all times.

Rodong Sinmun also recently ran a story about the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which casts the president as a leader who doesnt understand the weight of his office and whose competence is questioned by aides. Trump and other White House officials have blasted it as inaccurate.

The title of the book comes from a Trump quote about North Korea.

Last summer, Trump threatened North Korea with fire and fury like the world has never seen in an exchange of taunts with the North, which claimed it was examining plans to launch missiles toward the American territory of Guam.

The books sales reflect rapidly surging anti-Trump sentiments in the international community, the article said. The anti-Trump book is sweeping all over the world so Trump is being massively humiliated worldwide.

The books popularity foretells Trumps political demise, it concluded.
Leading NRI businessman Yusuffali MA has acquired an iconic Scottish hotel based in Edinburgh in a 120-million-dollar deal clinched by Twenty14 Holdings (T14H), the hospitality investment arm of his Abu Dhabi headquartered Lulu Group International.

The Caledonian, a grand Edwardian hotel overlooking Edinburgh Castle, joins his portfolio of 650-million-dollar worth of luxury properties across the UK, the Middle East and India.

The T14H on Tuesday announced plans to invest $28 million for the expansion and enhancement of the historic hotel under its ownership, while retaining its heritage and distrinctive architecture.

We are excited to add The Caledonian to the portfolio of Twenty14 Holdings. With more than 100 years of history, The Caledonian brings with it a rich heritage, character and unique opulence, said Adeeb Ahamed, managing director of T14H.

Ahamed added that the company plans to honour the Scottish landmark, while adding to the experience the hotel already offers.

Among some of the plans for the site, the T14H intends to engage local craftsmen to work on the hotels historic Caledonian suites.

Luxury and style will be the keynote of these improvements. Bespoke furniture, eclectic artwork and en-suite bathrooms featuring marble and burnished chrome fittings will feature among a host of exclusive additions, T14H said.

The latest acquisition fits into the company strategy of investing in profitable luxury sites while preserving their historical legacy.

The Caledonian operates under the Hilton groups flagship Waldorf Astoria brand.

First opened in 1903 as part of the old Princes Street Railway Station, the hotel currently has 241 rooms and is home to two famous restaurants operated by Michelin-starred brothers Chris and Jeff Galvin -- the Pompadour by Galvin and Galvin Brasserie de Luxe.

It also houses the only spa by French skincare brand Guerlain in the UK, echoing the glamour of its counterpart in Paris.

Twenty14 Holdings was founded in 2014 as the hospitality arm of Lulu Group International to capitalise on the growth in the global hospitality industry.

The group, which had acquired the Old Scotland Yard headquarters in London in 2015, has struck a 110-million-pound agreement with property developer Galliard Homes to create a boutique five-star hotel on the site -- 1-5 Great Scotland Yard.

The custom-built 92,000 sq ft project is to be called the Great Scotland Yard Hotel.

Among its other properties worldwide, T14H co-owns the landmark Sheraton Oman Hotel in Muscat, a 230 room five-star hotel re-opened in 2016, and owns the Steigenberger Hotel Business Bay in Dubai besides hotels in Kerala and Karnataka.
Pope Francis expressed his pain and shame over Chiles sexual abuse scandal on Tuesday in his first comments in the country on a crisis that has scarred the Roman Catholic Churchs credibility.

Francis was making his first official address of the trip in the presence of President Michelle Bachelet, other Chilean officials and foreign diplomats.

Here I feel bound to express my pain and shame at the irreparable damage caused to children by some ministers of the Church, he said in the presidential palace, drawing sustained applause from his listeners.

I am one with my brother bishops, for it is right to ask for forgiveness and make every effort to support the victims, even as we commit ourselves to ensuring that such things do not happen again, he said.

Catholics have been upset with Francis 2015 appointment of Bishop Juan Barros to head the small diocese of Osorno in south-central Chile. Barros has been accused of protecting his former mentor, Father Fernando Karadima, whom a Vatican investigation found guilty in 2011 of abusing teenage boys over many years. Karadima has denied the allegations and Barros said he was unaware of any wrongdoing.

But the scandal has gripped Chile, and, along with growing secularization, has hurt the standing of the Church that had been praised for defending human rights during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Women home and abroad have hailed the Royal Mail, UKs most trusted letters and couriers company, decision to feature an image of the revolutionary princess Sophia Alexandra Singh (1876-1948), on a heritage stamp to be released on February 15 to mark 100 years since women were allowed to vote in the UK. Interestingly, the company had refused to print Brexit commemorative stamp.

Heritage stamps, which were started in 1967, are a much-awaited popular event, sport and pass time British style, reflective of the mood of the people.

Sophia Duleep Singh devoted her life to activism, championing womens rights and tending to the Indian soldiers in World War-1.

This decision has been warmly welcome in India and the UK across colour and creed differences. Parminder Kaur, Wolverhampton-based creative director of The Black Country visiting the city for a photography project says: This is heart-warming news from the cold climes of the country that I was born to as a second-generation immigrant of Punjabi origin. It is also a progressive decision to give an activist from South Asian origin the rank. Sophia Pde tweets: This is an honour..Thank you The #UK..a Sardarni at that..Well, what can i say we tend to be spunky women Well my Punjabi name is Sophia Surinder Kaur I am a namesake. Another white Brit writes: To my discredit, I had not heard of Sophia Duleep Singh until I read this tweet. It seems a real shame that the work and achievement of Singh is not taught in schools alongside work of the Pankhursts and other prominent female activists of the suffragette era.

The heritage stamp will be released on February 15 to mark 100 years since women were allowed to vote in the UK. Interestingly, the company had refused to print Brexit commemorative stamp.

That her father, son of the Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab, was made to abdicate his throne to the British Empire has made this gesture more meaningful. Indians in the UK and particularly Sikhs are in celebration mode. Sophia was the daughter of the exiled crown prince Duleep Singh and Bamba Muller, daughter of German merchant-banker Ludwig Muller and his partner Sofia. Of course, she had Queen Victoria for godmother.

Sophia devoted her life to activism, championing womens rights and tending to the Indian soldiers in World War-1. Journalist Anita Anand, who brought her life into focus in the 2015 biography Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, says: She transcended her heritage to devote herself to battling injustice. According to Anand, when asked to reveal her passion late in life, she said, The advancement of women.

Chandigarh-based educationist Sukoon Singh says: Sophias life narrative begins in the shadows, like that of her father, tinged somewhat with melancholia. She could have very much ended up like him but for the activism she embraced, particularly, to lobby for womens movement in England, of which she became a very significant player.
A South Korean man was formally charged on Tuesday with murdering his wife and six-year-old son at the five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel in Hong Kong.

Kim Min-ho, 42, was arrested after police found the bodies of his wife, Song Wha-jeong, 42, and son, Kim Tae-yun, on Sunday in a suite at the hotel which overlooks the financial centres Victoria Harbour.

Kim appeared in court wearing a dark blue jacket and hood. Slightly balding and wearing glasses, Kim stared blankly across the room as the two charges were read to him in Korean by an interpreter. He had been photographed earlier in hospital with his left hand bandaged and escorted by police officers.

When asked whether he understood the charges, he said, Yes, I do quietly.

A general view shows signage for the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Hong Kong. (AFP Photo)

A lawyer for Kim requested the case be adjourned till January 30 to allow time to obtain psychiatric reports to see whether is fit to stand trial. He will remain in custody until then.

The Ritz-Carlton takes up the top 15 floors of Hong Kongs tallest building, the International Commerce Centre. According to the charge sheet, Kim committed the alleged murders in room 31 on the 109th floor.

The South Korean consulate said in an email to Reuters that it had been informed of this tragic incident and was closely cooperating with the Hong Kong police to investigate while providing assistance to the family of the victims.
Former White House strategist Steve Bannon was expected to be peppered with questions on the Trump campaigns links to Russia in closed testimony to the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday.

Bannon, who has been mostly quiet since the release of an incendiary book about President Donald Trump in which he figured prominently as a source, was seen arriving in Congress for the hearing early Tuesday.

His insider role during the Trump election campaign and in the White House could provide crucial details to the committee, which is seeking to understand the extent of contact between Trump and his advisors and Russia, which is accused of interfering with the 2016 election.

It comes after the release of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff, who notably quotes Bannon as saying a pre-election meeting involving Trumps eldest son Donald Jr. and a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer was treasonous.

Bannon allowed Wolff, who painted a picture of an erratic and poorly informed president, substantial access to the White House during Trumps first year.

Bannon, 64, was a powerful figure in the Trump election campaign and the White House in the early months of Trumps presidency, pushing a hard-line nationalism aimed at shaking up US domestic and foreign policy.

But he was forced out from his job advising Trump in August, and his actions since then  most notably supporting the failed Senate campaign of Alabama Republican Roy Moore, but also his comments in the Wolff book  have left him increasingly isolated in conservative circles.

Last week, he was forced to step down from Breitbart News, which he had helped make a powerful conservative force, and he lost the support of the Mercer family, wealthy conservative power brokers.

Underscoring the break, Trump said Bannon had lost his mind and branded him Sloppy Steve via Twitter.
US President Donald Trumps planned visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos next week will likely eclipse the long list of other movers and shakers set to attend.

The WEF on Tuesday unveiled its lineup for the annual meeting at the luxury Swiss ski resort town, where this years focus is on how to create a shared future in a fractured world.

The sheer scale of the challenges our world faces makes concerted, collaborative and integrated action more essential than ever, WEF founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab said in a statement.

He added that the 48th edition of the Davos meeting would aim to overcome these fault lines by reasserting shared interests among nations and securing multi stakeholder commitment to renewing social contracts through inclusive growth.

But ironically this years main attraction will be Trump, who is widely blamed for deepening a range of diplomatic rifts and creating new ones with polarising policy and rhetoric.

Since taking office a year ago, he has doubled down on his America First agenda, which stands in stark contrast to the globalisation and regulatory integration popular among the Davos crowd.

The five-day event kicks off Monday and is expected to draw some 3,000 political and business elites, including 70 heads of state and government.

But attention is expected to be focused squarely on Trump, who will be the first sitting US president to attend the meeting since Bill Clinton in 2000.

- Large US delegation -

The White House has said he will be accompanied by a large delegation, including his son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

As something of a counterweight, former US vice president Al Gore and the countrys former top diplomat John Kerry will also be present.

Trump is slated to deliver a keynote address before the end of the meeting on Friday, WEF said.

This years line-up will also be headlined by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will give the opening address on Tuesday, and French President Emmanuel Macron, who is scheduled to address the forum on January 24.

British Prime Minister Theresa May and her Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau will attend, as will Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

The presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Zimbabwe, Switzerland and the European Commission will be there, along with the kings of Jordan and Spain.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres will attend, flanked by the heads of the UN agencies for trade, health, labour and human rights, as well as the heads of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The business world will also be well represented, with the leaders of some 1,900 companies expected to be on hand.

The list of Hollywood stars due at Davos this years includes actress Cate Blanchett, among others.
US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Tuesday hoped that the recent resumption of talks between North Korea and South Korea might prompt a change in Pyongyangs destructive behaviour, the White House has said.

The two leaders spoke over phone to discuss recent developments on the Korean Peninsula.

President Trump and President Xi acknowledged the resumption of inter-Korean dialogue and expressed hope that it might prompt a change in North Koreas destructive behaviour, the White House said in a readout of the call.

Trump is committed to sustain the United States-led global campaign of maximum pressure to compel North Korea to commit to denuclearisation.

The two leaders also discussed trade issues, and President Trump expressed disappointment that the US trade deficit with China has continued to grow. President Trump made clear that the situation is not sustainable, it said.
The United Arab Emirates claimed Qatari fighter jets intercepted two of its commercial airliners in international airspace on the way to Bahrain, allegations denied by Qatar.

The claims Monday could further escalate tensions between Qatar and the four Arab nations that have been boycotting it for months, among them the UAE, home to the worlds busiest international airport. They also could affect long-haul airline travel, as the regions carriers are a crucial link between the East and West.

It follows two complaints by Qatar to the United Nations about Emirati military aircraft allegedly violating its international airspace amid the diplomatic crisis. The UAE denies the allegations.

The UAEs state-run WAM news agency made the claim about the Qatari jet fighters on Monday, citing the countrys General Civil Aviation Authority.

WAM quoted Saif al-Suwaidi, the director-general of the GCAA, as saying the intercepts happened at 10:30 a.m. and 11:05 a.m. He said Bahraini radar, as well as crew and passengers on board, saw the military aircraft, which constituted a clear and explicit threat to the lives of innocent civilians.

WAM did not identify the aircraft involved, nor did it elaborate on details of the purported encounters. The GCAA did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press.

Bahrains state-run BNA news agency, citing its own civil aviation authority, identified the two flights as Dubai-based Emirates flight No. EK837, a Boeing 777, and another flown by Abu Dhabi-based Etihad. The flight number it offered for Etihad did not correspond with any scheduled flight to Bahrain.

Qatari military fighter jets came within two miles of the Emirates aircraft, which put the lives of passengers and crew at risk, BNA said. It offered few details about the Etihad flight.

Both airlines declined to comment when reached by the AP.

Qatars Foreign Ministry called the UAEs allegations a totally false claim in a statement Monday night. It seems that the UAE is trying to draw attention away from other incidents that have caused media crises, it said.

That appeared to reference a video released Sunday night of an exiled Qatari ruling family member, once promoted by Saudi Arabia as an alternative to the countrys ruling emir, claiming hes being held against his will in the UAE, an allegation denied by Abu Dhabi.

The video of Sheikh Abdullah bin Ali Al Thani recalled the bizarre, now-reversed resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri while on a trip to Saudi Arabia, a November 4 decision that was widely seen as orchestrated by Riyadh.

Emirates flight No. EK837 was scheduled to depart Dubai at 8:20 am Monday, but pushed off nearly an hour late. It flew out over international waters near the northern tip of Qatar, a peninsular nation that juts into the Persian Gulf, before arriving in the island nation of Bahrain 46 minutes after takeoff. Thats been the standard route of all Emirati commercial airliners since the crisis began.

FlightRadar24, a plane-tracking website, did not show any unusual routes between the UAE and Bahrain. There appears to be no deviation from standard routing and approach patterns in todays flights, FlightRadar24 spokesman Ian Petchenik told the AP.

US Air Force Central Command, which is based at the sprawling al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, did not have any reports of incidents involving commercial aircraft in the region, said Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, an Air Force spokesman. However, Pickart cautioned that U.S. forces dont routinely monitor the flights and operations of the Qatari air force.

Qatars stock exchange dropped some 2.5 percent in trading Monday, one of its biggest jolts since the crisis began.

Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE cut off Qatars land, sea and air routes on June 5 over its alleged support of extremists and close ties with Iran.

Qatar has long denied funding extremists. It recently restored full diplomatic relations with Iran, with which it shares a massive offshore natural gas field that makes the country and its 250,000 citizens extremely wealthy.

The crisis has hurt Qatar Airways, Dohas long-haul carrier that competes with Emirates and Etihad.

Qatar had complained to the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization about the boycotting nations cutting off its air routes, forcing the carrier to take longer flights through Iran and Turkey. Its regional feeder flights in Saudi Arabia and the UAE also have been cut off.

However, widening the Gulf dispute to include civilian aviation and airspace could hurt Emirati airlines already stung by President Donald Trumps travel bans, as well as last years since-lifted ban on laptops in airplane cabins.

The White House said Trump spoke Monday with Qatars ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, saying the president reiterated his support for unity among Gulf Arab nations. Trump also thanked Sheikh Tamim for Qatars action to counter terrorism and extremism, the White House said.

Qatar earlier accused Emirati military jets of violating its air space in December and January in two incidents, filing a complaint to the United Nations. Anwar Gargash, the Emirati minister of state for foreign affairs, wrote Friday on Twitter that Qatars airspace complaints were incorrect and confused, without elaborating.

Sheikh Tamim also traveled Monday to Ankara to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkish officials said Erdogan and Al Thani discussed bilateral ties and regional issues, without offering specifics. Turkey has a military base in Qatar and has supported Doha in the diplomatic dispute.
ELKO  Wintry weather is headed back to northeastern Nevada but Elko could see near record high temperatures before it hits.

The National Weather Service forecast calls for rain showers today and highs in the mid to upper 40s.

Skies should partially clear up on Wednesday, followed by warmer temperatures on Thursday and another chance of rain Thursday night. The high on Thursday is expected to reach 58 degrees.

Temperatures will plummet as the storm brings a 90 percent chance of rain and snow. Fridays chance of snow is 70 percent, with highs in the upper 30s.

Isolated snow showers will remain over our area on Saturday. The extended forecast calls for more rounds of snow and seasonal temperatures in the mid to upper 30s.
The UAE will lodge a complaint with the International Civil Aviation Organization after Qatari jets came within little more than 3 km of Emirati passenger flights, its civil aviation chief said on Tuesday.

Today we will file our complaint to the International Civil Aviation Organization about the two serious incidents, along with the evidence that weve gathered, and ask for the intervention of the council to stop Qatar from repeating the act, Saif al-Suwaidi, head of the general civil aviation authority, told AFP.

The United Arab Emirates said on Monday that Qatari fighter jets had intercepted two passenger flights headed for Bahrain, drawing a swift denial from Gulf rival Qatar.

Abu Dhabi is also looking at re-routing flights to Bahrain to avoid Qatari airspace, as a feud between Qatar and its Gulf neighbours escalates.

We are now studying changing the route to another one which is very far from Qatar, Suwaidi said.

However that will take some time as we have to reach an agreement with Bahrain.

Suwaidi declined to name the airlines operating the two flights, which he said had been forced to delay their descent into Bahrain International Airport as Qatari fighter jets came within little more than 3 km.

But Bahrains civil aviation authority identified the aircraft as Emirates flight EK837 and Etihad flight EY23B. Bahrain too plans to file a complaint to the ICAO, a Montreal-based specialised agency of the United Nations.

The allegations came after Qatar accused UAE fighter jets of violating its airspace in December and January, most recently on Sunday.

The Qatari foreign ministry charged that they were a baseless attempt to overshadow its own complaints against the UAE.

Bahrain and the UAE have no diplomatic ties with Qatar, which lies between the two Gulf allies and is banned from using their airspace.

In June, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt broke diplomatic relations and most trade links with Qatar, accusing it of ties to Islamist extremists and Saudi arch-rival Iran.

Qatar denies the allegations and accuses the four states of aiming to incite the overthrow of its government.
The United States on Tuesday reiterated its demand for Pakistan to act against the Haqqani Network and other terror groups operating from its soil, saying it wants to forge a new relationship with the country based on mutual interests.

Visiting US acting assistant secretary of state Alice Wells raised the issue of cracking down on terrorists with foreign secretary Tehmina Janjua and other Pakistani interlocutors, according to a statement from the US embassy.

Ambassador Wells urged the government of Pakistan to address the continuing presence of the Haqqani Network and other terrorist groups within its territory, the statement said.

Wells is the first top American official to travel to Islamabad since the US suspended security-related aid worth nearly $2 billion over Pakistans counter-terrorism efforts. The development took bilateral ties to a fresh low amid growing mistrust over the support of terror groups by Pakistans powerful military establishment.

During her meetings with Pakistani officials, Wells underlined that the US seeks to move toward a new relationship with Pakistan, based on our mutual interest in realising a stable and prosperous region, the statement said.

While acknowledging Pakistans sacrifices fighting terrorism, Wells emphasised that the US South Asia strategy represents an opportunity to work together for the establishment of a stable, peaceful Afghanistan, the defeat of (Islamic State) in South Asia, and the elimination of terrorist groups that threaten both Pakistan and the US.

During her meeting with Wells on Monday, foreign secretary Janjua had protested against what she described as the Indian Army chiefs irresponsible remarks and the pattern of escalation on the Line of Control, and called on Washington to advise New Delhi to exercise restraint.

She (Janjua) asked the US side to advise restraint to India and stop its escalation tactics, said a statement issued by Pakistans Foreign Office after the meeting.

There was no official word from the US or Pakistan on Wells response on this issue. Wells visit was described by the Foreign Office as part of the regular engagement between the two sides on bilateral and regional cooperation.

Pakistani media have described the visit as an attempt by the US to mend fences following the damaging New Years day tweet by President Donald Trump threatening to cut off all aid. Trump had said the US got nothing but lies and deceit after providing $33 billion in aid since 2002.

Besides the tensions with India, Janjua also raised the use of Afghan soil by elements hostile to Pakistans stability and called for strengthening border management mechanisms between Pakistan and Afghanistan to addressing concerns related to cross-border movements.
Part photographic history, part battle anthology, Brutal Battles of Vietnam emerged from VFW magazines award-winning Vietnam series. The result is a visually spectacular, year-by-year account of the bloodiest battles waged by American forces in Vietnam.

In this book, skillfully edited by Richard K. Kolb, brutal battles are clearly, if subjectively, defined according to American casualties. For battles fought from 1965 through 1968, explains Kolb, that number was generally 30. Starting in 1969 and running through 1972, it was roughly 20. Numerous exceptions were made, however, to include the historically significant invasions of Cambodia (1970) and Laos (1971) and to ensure that every major U.S. ground unit is represented.

While the accounts detailing the most highly publicized battles of the warIa Drang, Dak To, Khe Sanh, Hue, Ripcordwill resonate with many readers, Brutal Battles of Vietnam, to its credit, also recounts dozens of equally deserving, yet largely forgotten, fights.

The shockingly violent Battle of Suoi Tre in March 1967, for example, nearly ended in disaster for elements of the 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, when hundreds of well-armed Viet Cong stormed Firebase Gold north of Saigon. Fortunately for the Americans, the enemy assault was eventually crushed by devastating airstrikes, artillery fired at point-blank range and the timely arrival of armored reinforcements. Later, American troops searching in and around the base counted more than 600 enemy bodies, quite conceivably the highest single-day total of the war.

The four- to six-page battle vignettes, dedicated primarily to the boots-on-the-ground trigger pullers, demonstrate the extraordinary courage and sacrifice of the average grunt in Vietnam. Sidebars, special features and firsthand recollections memorialize the men who fought, and quite often died, in vicious close-quarters combat.

Sgt. Bruce Allen Grandstaff, a fearless career soldier from Spokane, Washington, embodies the unsung heroes whose stories are told in Brutal Battles of Vietnam. Grandstaff requested artillery fire on top of his own position to prevent the North Vietnamese from overrunning his hopelessly outnumbered 4th Infantry Division platoon in May 1967. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The human cost of that battle, as well as the toll in the more than 100 other actions covered in the book, is thoroughly documented with statistics that examine the characteristics of American casualties. Approximately 70 percent of the men killed in Grandstaffs platoon were draftees, according to contributor Susan Katz Keating, and most died of gunshot wounds.

Kolb ensured that the exploits of the Navy and Air Force in Southeast Asia were also duly recognized and honored.

Few are likely to forget the remarkable story of Lt. Clyde Lassen, the only Navy helicopter pilot to receive the Medal of Honor. Landing in North Vietnam on the evening of June 18, 1968, with small-arms fire rattling past his UH-2 Seasprite helicopter, Lassen daringly rescued two stranded crewmen from a downed F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber.

The book also includes the combat experiences of the Air Forces16th Special Operations Squadron as its AC-130 gunships, flying the perilous skies over Laos from 1968 to 1972, patrol the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail, destroying or damaging an estimated 10,000 enemy trucks a year.

Neil Sheehan, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Bright Shining Lie, ruefully observed that the Vietnam War was a war without heroes. Brutal Battles reminds us that the American fighting man in Vietnam was every bit as heroic as his more celebrated forebears.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he most trying events of history have often produced stirring and important art, and the Civil War was no exception. Out of that conflict arose French artist Paul Philippoteauxs monumental cyclorama painting of the Battle of Gettysburg, which took more than a year to complete and was unveiled to wide acclaim in 1883. Re-creating the third-day assault popularly known as Picketts Charge, Philippoteaux came closer to capturing the chaos and intensity of the battleliterally coming from all sides in a 360-degree viewthan arguably any other work of art since the war had ended. Veterans reportedly wept upon seeing it. It remains on view in a purpose-built gallery at Gettysburg National Military Park.

Philippoteauxs work was and is important in part because it doesnt romanticize the war. The painting beautifully depicts the Pennsylvania countryside, bathing it in a warm light, but the people in the painting are all marching, killing, bleeding, and dying. It is a difficult tableau. More than 150 years later, as many of us are still processing that painting, that battle, and that war, Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford has unveiled a provocative new work called Picketts Charge, on view at the Smithsonians Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington, D.C., through November 2018. Commissioned specifically for the circular gallery, the artwork uses Philippoteauxs work as the literal and figurative basis for a series of abstract panelslayered collages of paper and cord and glue, scored and ripped and slicedthat reflect our still-divided times. Sometimes, elements of the original painting can be seen clearly, sometimes not, and thats the point.

Rather than one continuous circular panel, Picketts Charge features eight separate panels that tell a story moving nearly 400 feet in a clockwise direction around the gallery. With titles such as Battle, The High-Water Mark, The Copse of Trees, and Dead Horse, the pieces are each self-contained takes on some element of the original painting, but they arent to be taken literally. Strictly speaking, this is not Civil War art. Instead, the pieces invite contemplation of what the war has wrought on modern times, and the enduring nature of conflicts along racial and political dividing lines.

Bradford printed sections of the Philippoteaux painting from the internet, and when blown up, the bits of original painting that emerge are often fuzzy and pixelated, emphasizing past and present at once. Battle opens the series with a scraped and striated image that is difficult to make sense ofa maelstrom. In Two Men, one can make out the image of two soldiers, but the most striking aspect of the image are the evenly scored lines that make the wall resemble that of an old wood-framed house. The idea here is that what seems old is not really old; what seems over is not really over. The High-Water Mark originally referred to the Battle of Gettysburg itselfthe high point of a string of victories for the South, the turning point of the war. Here, Bradford plays on the term with undulating, wave-like shapes and blue tones, emphasizing the fluidity of history, and of winners and losers.

Dead Horse is one of the most striking panels in the collection, featuring an image of a dead horse floating above the rest of the piece. Philippoteaux had painted a dead horse in a lane near the section of his painting that depicts General Meades headquarters, reflecting a gruesome reality for the civilians of Gettysburg after the fighting stopped, with dead men and dead animals strewn in the heart of their quiet town. Here, the dead horse echoes the old saying about something that is repeated ad nauseam, and to underscore the point, Bradford repeats several sections of the original painting in this panel. We see the same cavalry officer, the same marching soldiers, the same conflict, over and over again. Its hard not to see current conflicts over race and gender as a repetition of the past as well, Bradford seems to be saying. In this panel, too, Bradford includes one of the largest identifiable images in the whole collection, which is a corn-yellow haystack blown up from the original painting. These stacks werent actually on the Gettysburg battlefield, but Philippoteaux clearly liked their shape and bucolic sensibility, and Bradford seems to as well.

In remarks posted on the gallery web site, Bradford says that politically and socially, we are at the edge of another precipice. Im standing in the middle of a question about where we are as a nation. Its a question that the Civil War tried to answer, and a question were still trying to answer. Thankfully art exists to help us talk about such things.

Based in Arlington, Va., Kim OConnell writes frequently about history and preservation for a range of publications.
All whose lives are affected by Brexit are being encouraged to make submissions to a specially established House of Commons Committee.

The enquiry by the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee will give the people of Northern Ireland an opportunity to submit their views for consideration.

The Committee will look at a number of sub-inquiries, beginning with fisheries. Brexit will impact so many facets of life in Northern Ireland, affecting every industry.

Fine Gael Senator, Neale Richmond says: I implore the people of Northern Ireland to have their voices heard now.

The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in Westminster has launched an inquiry into Brexit and its impact on Northern Ireland is an excellent opportunity for people to air their views on Brexit formally.

With the lack of an Executive at this delicate time, the people of Northern Ireland are left without a voice at this monumentally important juncture.

The Irish Government has been working very hard to impress upon our European partners and our friends in Britain just how much Brexit will impact this island.

The Irish Government achieved the goals that they set out to achieve in Phase One. They have secured concrete commitments on the maintenance of the Common Travel Area, and on the protection of the Good Friday Agreement in all its parts and the gains of the peace process.

Submissions can be made at the following link: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/northern-ireland-affairs-committee/brexit-northern-ireland-tell-us-what-you-think/
The Scottish band have just released the first song from their eagerly anticipated new album, which is out next month.

Here's the new song The Signal and the Noise', which is taken from the new album 'Walk Between Worlds' to be released on 2 February 2018:

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Shell Oil Co. plans to plow around $200 million into a Tennessee solar company, the latest deal that finds a major oil company investing in renewable energy as the industry prepares for a day when crude demand plateaus.

A unit of Houston's Shell Oil will purchase almost half of Silicon Ranch Corp., a Nashville company that operates solar projects around the United States, for up to $217 million, the company's biggest investment in utility-scale solar energy yet, the company said on Monday. Shell Oil is the U.S. subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil major.

The transaction is Shell's answer to growing demand it sees for renewable energy options in the United States, said Marc van Gerven, vice president of solar for Shell New Energies, a business unit that focuses on alternative energy. Like its big oil rivals in Europe and the U.S., Shell is angling for a position in a rapidly growing sector that analysts say could provide a steady stream of profits in coming years as renewable energy technologies advance and oil demand falters.

"It doesn't matter when peak oil demand occurs," said Praveen Kumar, a finance professor at the University of Houston. "Once they figure out how to make renewable energy profitable, a lot of these oil companies are going to start to look very different. These technologies are improving very fast."

But make no mistake: Royal Dutch Shell is still very much in the oil business. The company on Monday also announced it plans to commission a major oil-production vessel in the North Sea off the coast of the United Kingdom, in an effort to redevelop an oil and gas field that has languished for several years.

It will build its first floating production, storage and offloading vessel in the United Kingdom's North Sea in almost three decades, pumping some 45,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day from the U.K.'s Penguins field at its peak.

It's the biggest investment decision the oil industry has made since mid-2015, and seems to mark an end of an era of cautious investing that has been the oil industry's modus operandi since crude prices cratered in 2014, energy research firm Wood Mackenzie said.

The oil industry approved 33 new major projects last year from Norway and Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico and Guyana, three times more than in 2016, the worst year of the recent oil bust. Globally, drillers spent some $76 billion on major oil and gas projects in 2016; in 2017, $90 billion.

"What we're seeing around the world is a move toward growth," said Julie Wilson, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie.

Shell's investment in the U.K. oil field comes as crude prices reach the highest levels seen in years. U.S. oil prices rose 50 cents on Friday to settle at $64.30 a barrel, the highest settlement since December 5, 2014.

Despite increased investment in renewables by companies like Shell, spending on wind and solar remains tiny compared to what the world's biggest energy companies spend on developing oil fields. In 2015, Shell spent $600 million and employed 1,500 people in Texas and Louisiana to build parts for its so-called Appomattox platform, expected to be the company's largest offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico, part of a multibillion-dollar project expected to start pumping oil by the end of the decade.

Still, analysts, government agencies and even European oil companies have predicted for years that the global oil demand will stop growing and start to decline sometime in the next few decades.

Both Shell and Norway's Statoil have published forecasts for peak oil demand hitting by 2030; others, like Total, predict 2040. Their American counterparts, like California-based Chevron and Texas-based Exxon Mobil, don't foresee oil demand peaking anytime soon.

"The Europeans are well ahead of U.S. energy companies in alternative energy," said Brian Youngberg, an analyst at Edward Jones in St. Louis. "They're diversifying the company into renewable energy to eventually drive growth for the company."

The shift to renewable energy seems inexorable. Last year, Wood Mackenzie told the Houston Chronicle that it believes major oil companies will shift $1 for every $5 they spend on drilling today into solar panels and wind turbines.

In recent years, as the fossil fuel industry has faced increasing regulations and public pressure aimed at slowing climate change, major European oil companies such as Shell have made investments in Texas and around the world to prepare for a low carbon future. For instance, the British oil giant BP operates four wind farms in Texas. Late last year, Total signed an agreement with the French merchant power company Engie to acquire its portfolio of liquefied natural gas - the cleanest burning fossil fuel - for $1.49 billion.

In September, Shell acquired MP2 Energy, a Woodlands-based power generator and retail electric company that has partnered with California-based SolarCity to offer rooftop solar panels for lease or to buy.

For Shell, which already has interest in six wind farms and trades renewable energy, the Silicon Ranch transaction adds to a growing renewable business.

If regulators determine that the deal does not violate anti-trust laws, Shell will acquire a 43.83 share in Silicon Ranch, with an option to expand its shares by 2021, the company said. Shell's stake in the company will include around 800 megawatts of solar projects currently operating or under contract. One megawatt is enough to power 200 homes on a hot Texas day.
In last weeks City Council meeting it was decided in a 4 to 1 vote to move forward with a zoning ordinance that will permanently prohibit the sale of medical and recreational marijuana in the City of Elko. Mine was the lone dissenting vote. I have for a number of years supported access to medical marijuana in the City of Elko. I have also expressed my support for the citizens initiative which legalized recreational marijuana in Nevada over a year ago.

It is evident to me by the positions my good friends on the City Council have taken that they presently have no appetite for allowing the sale of marijuana in any form in the city. That is why I will make the following proposal at our next city council meeting.

The city has placed a moratorium on medical marijuana sales in Elko, scheduled to expire later this spring. I am proposing we amend and extend that moratorium. The amendment will impose a moratorium on the sale of recreational marijuana as well. I will propose the moratorium be extended until the Spring of 2022, four years from now.

Some may argue this simply kicks the can down the road. I disagree. Attitudes in our community, our state and our nation continue to evolve in regards to legalized marijuana. It will be unfortunate for Elko to eliminate itself from taking advantage of the many opportunities it provides. A moratorium keeps the door open for our community and future City Councils to abide by the will of the citizens of Nevada.

In my view, the discussions in the council regarding marijuana can be broken down into three main concerns: compliance with federal law; health, safety and community values; and impact on the mining industry. Amending and extending the current moratorium provides a solution to each of those concerns. Let me address them one by one.

Federal Law. Currently the use of marijuana is illegal under federal law. As marijuana became legal in more and more states (now, more than half of the United States and the District of Columbia have legalized either medicinal and/or recreational marijuana) the U.S. Attorney Generals office issued what is known as The Cole Memo. The memo provided direction to U.S. Attorneys across the country. Specifically, the memo directed law enforcement to:

1) Prevent the distribution of marijuana to minors; 2) Prevent revenue from the sale of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs and cartels; 3) Prevent the diversion of marijuana from states where it is legal under state law in some form to other states; 4) Prevent state-authorized marijuana activity from being used as a cover or pretext for the trafficking of other illegal drugs or other illegal activity; 5) Prevent violence and the use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana; 6) Prevent drugged driving and exacerbation of other adverse public health consequences associated with marijuana use; 7) Prevent the growing of marijuana on public lands and the attendant public safety and environmental dangers posed by marijuana production on public lands; and 8) Prevent marijuana possession or use on federal property.

This memo was unequivocal guidance to sworn law enforcement officers. It allowed law enforcement to enforce state laws regarding marijuana within their sworn duty to uphold federal law.

On January 4, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued new guidance regarding federal law enforcement of state marijuana laws. In it he rescinded the provisions listed above. However, he directed U.S. Attorneys to weigh all relevant considerations, including federal law enforcement priorities set by the Attorney General, the seriousness of the crime, the deterrent effect of criminal prosecution, and the cumulative impact of particular crimes on the community. In short, he leaves federal prosecution of state marijuana laws up to the discretion of the states U.S. Attorney. De facto: nothing has changed.

Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and Attorney General Adam Laxalt both opposed the initiative to legalize recreational marijuana in Nevada. They do not condone its use. However, both declared after Sessions issued his memo that they will defend Nevadas marijuana laws. Almost every other statewide office holder and most federal delegates have made the same declaration. Republican and Democratic leadership in Nevada have sounded their support for Nevadas marijuana laws and will defend the will of the people of Nevada.

Health, Safety and Community Values. Some argue marijuana presents a significant health and safety concern to our community. I say the health and safety concerns of legal marijuana are no more significant than those already posed by alcohol consumption, opiate use, tobacco use, gambling, and legal prostitution in our community.

Reliable and easily accessible data shows alcohol kills 88,000 Americans each year  opioids kill 42,000 Americans each year, and many patients have found freedom from opioid addiction by turning to cannabis. There are no reported deaths from cannabis overdose  ever.

The Elko City Council permits and regulates legal prostitution. I have said in past council meetings that we are the Stewards of the Sex Trade. Each week prostitutes must submit to an examination to assure they are free of sexually transmitted diseases. Elkos prostitutes regularly test positive for sexually transmitted diseases. More alarming are a significant number of occurrences of Elko prostitutes testing positive for HIV. When any infection is found, prostitutes are removed from the line, but perhaps too late. Legal prostitution presents an immediate health and safety concern in our community. A marijuana dispensary simply cannot compare.

In regards to community values, residents of the City of Elko voted against the initiative by a margin of just over one percent  151 votes out of nearly 10,000 cast. However, if one takes the time to look at the breakdown of voting on the issue in individual Elko precincts, more precincts voted in favor of the initiative than against it. It gives one an excellent idea of what their neighbors think about recreational marijuana. It tells me most of my neighbors do not have a problem with it.

The Mining Industry. Other council members have argued the establishment of marijuana dispensaries in Elko does not support the mining industry. I say the mining industry is well equipped to and has successfully regulated marijuana use among its employees for decades. The industry is proactive, providing huge incentives to their employees, including excellent wages, educational opportunities, support for the community, and activities for their employees, their families and the public at large. Additionally, some mining organizations have made accommodations for their employees with medical marijuana cards.

A reasonably informed person can agree that for the last half century anyone who has wanted to obtain marijuana in Elko (or almost every community in America, for that matter) can readily do so. It has long been easy to obtain marijuana, and business and industry know how to deal with it themselves.

The City of Elko Vision Statement, a document presenting an aspirational view of our community, says we are a non-intrusive, efficient city government. Targeting and banning any legal enterprise in Elko discredits that vision statement. Amending and lengthening a moratorium on the establishment of marijuana dispensaries provides everything my friends on the council now desire, and leaves the door open for a future council to fulfill a shared vision for our community.

Please join me in supporting my proposal at the next Elko City Council meeting.

A moratorium keeps the door open for our community and future City Councils to abide by the will of the citizens of Nevada.
Citgo Petroleum said it will keep its headquarters in Houston, quashing speculation that it would move the offices of its top executives to the Caribbean following the appointment of a new chief executive.

The refiner is the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and its future has seemed uncertain since the arrest in November of six of Citgo's top executives on corruption charges by government of President Nicolas Maduro - arrests widely viewed as part of Maduro's efforts to consolidate power. The executives, five of whom hold dual U.S. citizenship, are still being held in Venezuela.
DETROIT - Ford plans to increase its investment in electrification to $11 billion by 2022, executive chairman Bill Ford Jr. said this weekat the Detroit auto show.

The company previously announced it would spend $4.5 billion by 2020.

"We're going to electrify even our most iconic vehicles," he said at Cobo Center. "The only question is, will the customer be there with us?"

During the first big media event at the North American International Auto Show, Ford officials discussed a Ford F-150 hybrid and a Mach 1 fully electric "performance" vehicle for 2020. While the Mach 1 has been a featured muscle car in action films, the Ford team indicated a new Mach 1 could be released as an SUV.

Raj Nair, president of Ford North America, explained that the manufacturing team is working to develop 16 fully battery electric vehicles by 2022 and 24 hybrid and plug-in vehicles - for a total of 40 electrified vehicles.

It now has one fully electric offering, a version of the Focus.

Ford officials spoke after the company's big product launches of the Edge SUV, Ford Ranger midsize pickup and special edition 2019 Mustang Bullitt.

Bill Ford said the company sees an opportunity to build on its legacy and provide leadership in the rapidly changing mobility industry. Electrification is where the company is headed, he said.

Unlike other companies, Ford wants to build on customer loyalty for established best sellers rather than try to market new brands that happen to be electric because it will speed up customer acceptance, Ford said.
Texans love their whiskey, that much is true. Another truism: A good whiskey party will always draw a crowd.

That's why Texas Monthly has organized the Whiskey Affair, a party where whiskey tasting meets mixology, food, educational seminars, book signings and live music. The second annual Whiskey Affair in Houston will take place on Feb. 8 from 6 to 10 p.m. at Silver Street Studios.
I first tasted harissa when I was 19, and I traveled on a lone adventure to Tunisia after spending a semester abroad in France. I browsed the open markets, with their appealing drapey white cotton clothing - I wore billowy pants from that trip for years to follow.

I was particularly drawn to the fragrant spice section of the market, which beckoned me over with its unfamiliar, dazzling aromas. I bought as many small pouches of mystery spices that my student budget could afford. My favorite was harissa, a mix of chilies and warm spices like coriander, cumin and paprika.
I teach at The University of Texas at Austin. Part of my teaching encompasses sharing research and insights with the public through opinion pieces like this one.

Today, I'm interested in writing directly to the five million students in Texas public schools and the 1.5 million college students in our great state  particularly those of Haitian, Nigerian, Latin American, and African heritage.

No doubt you have heard the lurid details of Donald Trump's disgusting and racist characterization of Haiti, Latin America and Africa. As the son of a Jamaican mother and someone with most of my genetic heritage from Nigeria, I was both offended as an American citizen and on a more personal level.

It is the same disgust I felt when Trump referred to Mexicans as "rapists" and stated that Judge Gonzalo Curiel, a Mexican American, could not fairly oversee a fraud case because he was "Mexican." I'm sure you can recount other instances when Trump has inveighed racial invective against undocumented people and other nationalities.

I was not, therefore, surprised by Trump's comments. But after my anger subsided, I had a more pressing issue to consider. In my career as an educator  from teaching in Houston public schools to teaching graduate students from across the state, nation and world  I have been inspired by many students from the places Trump has declared to be "shitholes." I have learned their stories of coming to America, how their families and their cultures have provided them strength and motivation to achieve beyond their own dreams.

PARTY OF COMPLICITY: Republicans find themselves in a 'shithole' with Trump

I'm concerned about the impact on students of hearing a sitting American president refer to their national and ethnic identity as an unprintable word. There is also the reality that a president making such comments will embolden others to repeat racial stereotypes. So in addition to starting new classes and purchasing books, there will be a psychological and emotional weight added to the shoulders of our hard-working students.

Psychologist Claude Steele has developed a concept called stereotype threat. Steele and his colleagues have found that even a passing reminder that one belongs to a group stereotyped as inferior can have a negative impact on academic performance. I worry about how responding to the president's racist characterization of young people will influence students' ability to focus on calculus or chemistry  that's an added burden that students who aren't from the nations and regions Trump characterized will not deal with.

I am angered that some of our students who are working hard and balancing multiple concerns in their lives have had this situation added to their already full plates.

I know the president is ignorant of many facts. Haiti defeated Napoleon's armies and became the first independent nation in Latin American and the Caribbean, the only nation established as a result of a slave revolt.

African immigrant educational attainment is higher than that of the overall American population. From laborers, to the most technically advanced positions in medicine and engineering, both Texas and this nation are indebted to immigrants  and continues to strive for excellence because of immigrants.

Less than one percent of the U.S. population has served in the military; however, among immigrant communities, the number is much larger. For example, more than one in 10 Honduran-American men older than 16 serve in the military. Five percent of active-duty U.S. armed forces are noncitizens and naturalized citizens.

LISA FALKENBERG: The world is listening to Trump  and you should, too

The contributions of African, Caribbean and Latin American immigrants are well established, robust and enduring. This state and this nation would not be anywhere as great without the contributions of immigrants  a status that every family in this land held at one point with the exception of Native Americans.

Today, there will be thousands of teachers, aides, counselors and professors welcoming students back to school. We will need to ensure that all students feel supported and know that we believe that they can achieve at the highest level. They will look to us to share examples of success and achievement in their communities, and to reinforce the fact that we are a nation of immigrants. Our work as allies to students, families and communities has never been more important than it is today. Leadership is making a stand about our values and what it means to be a "beloved community," in the words of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let's think of his example and that of the immigrants who have contributed to our state and nation as we start the semester.

Richard J. Reddick is an associate professor in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also holds courtesy appointments in African and African Diaspora Studies, the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and is assistant director of the Plan II Honors Program.

Bookmark Gray Matters. It's concerned. It worries.
WASHINGTON - Fifty Senate lawmakers have endorsed a legislative measure to override the Federal Communications Commission's recent decision to deregulate the broadband industry, top Democrats said Monday.

The tally leaves supporters just one vote shy of the 51 required to pass a Senate resolution of disapproval, in a legislative gambit aimed at restoring the agency's net neutrality rules.

Those rules, which banned Internet providers from blocking or slowing down websites, were swept away in a December vote led by Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. Republicans had argued the rules were too restrictive for the industry, while Democrats said they provided a vital consumer protection.

The resolution aims to overturn the FCC's decision and prohibit the agency from passing similar measures in the future. It has the support of all 49 Democratic senators as well as one Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

"With full caucus support," said Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., one of the lawmakers spearheading the effort, "it's clear that Democrats are committed to fighting to keep the Internet from becoming the Wild West where ISPs are free to offer premium service to only the wealthiest customers while average consumers are left with far inferior options."

To win passage of the resolution, its supporters must recruit one more Republican member to their ranks. But the measure must survive the Republican-majority House and be signed by President Donald Trump to take effect.

After an independent agency makes a decision - such as the FCC's net neutrality deregulation - federal lawmakers have a window of 60 legislative days to reverse the move under the Congressional Review Act. As of last Tuesday, 40 senators had signed onto the resolution to challenge the FCC under the act. Since then, another 10 have joined the effort.

Democrats have said they plan to make net neutrality a midterm campaign issue, forcing vulnerable GOP candidates to stand with their party and adopt a position that, according to some surveys, is at odds with that of the broader public.

For years, well-heeled lawyers and lobbyists for the telecom and cable industries battled the equally formidable influence of Silicon Valley over the ground rules that would determine how the Internet functioned in the future.

That debate broke into the public consciousness in 2015, as the FCC under chairman Tom Wheeler took the step of regulating Internet providers like legacy telephone companies. The new rules subjected companies such as AT&T and Verizon to strict bans on the blocking or slowing of Internet content. They also banned the practice of speeding up other content in exchange for extra fees, opened the door to new consumer privacy rules and even raised the prospect of future controls over the price of Internet service.

Industry groups sought to have the rules repealed - filing a lawsuit against the FCC that ultimately ended in defeat. Broadband providers said, among other things, that the FCC rules prevented them from developing innovative new business models. A three-judge panel ultimately sided with the FCC.

With the election of Trump, Republicans who opposed the regulations received another chance. Pai, who had been an outspoken critic of the rules, became the FCC's chairman, and quickly moved to dismantle the net neutrality rules.

Much as the broadband industry did in 2015, today's opponents of the FCC have vowed to open a new chapter of litigation and congressional action to reverse the vote. The first lawsuits to challenge Pai's decision could come as early as the end of this month. And a vote on the Congressional Review Act could take place this summer, depending on what else Congress has on its schedule.
WASHINGTON - An aggressive push to overhaul the decades-old system for sponsoring family members for citizenship is complicating the drive to protect Dreamers from deportation at a critical point in negotiations.

When two-dozen influential members of Congress left a White House meeting last week, it looked as though they would take up immigration in two phases - first, by increasing border security and tinkering with the entry system while fixing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Later, they would take up long-debated and vexing issues on immigration reform.

But things changed quickly, with hardliners insisting that a DACA fix be tied to significant changes in chain migration - and President Donald Trump seemingly undermining trust among negotiators with vulgar remarks about Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations.

A NEW AMERICA: Five storylines on the frontline of the immigration debate in Houston

We walked out of that meeting with people saying hey, we can work this out, said Laredo Democrat Henry Cuellar. Then I started talking to Republicans, and theyre telling me we want this and this and this.

What Cuellar heard repeatedly was the demand to end chain migration - an unflattering term embraced by critics, including Trump, for family migration.

Family-based immigrant visas have been a pillar of the American system since 1965, the instruments by which citizens and legal permanent residents bring family members to the United States. The visas are regulated by a quota system both for the countries of origin and categories of relatives, ranging from children and spouses of citizens to their parents and siblings.

They are widely used and as of Nov. 1, 3.9 million people were waiting in line.

Air Force veteran John Del Toro of San Antonio relied on the visas to gain legal status in the U.S. for his wife and four stepchildren. His 18-year-old stepdaughter became a lawful permanent resident last week.

Del Toro, 59, met his wife, a British citizen, in the United Arab Emirates, where he was stationed and later worked as a defense contractor. The process was difficult, he said, but he succeeded thanks to good legal counsel, assistance from Homeland Security officials in San Antonio and a family migration system that he believes should not be significantly altered.

Im sure our system can be better, but its definitely better than Ive seen outside of the United States, he said.

CRACKDOWN: Husband murdered, son taken away, mother seeking asylum tells judge, 'I have lost everything'

Nonetheless, organizations pressing to restrict immigration have long targeted family migration. A report last fall by the Center for Immigration Studies asserted that over the last 35 years, 20 million of 33 million immigrants admitted to the United States - nearly 61 percent - entered on family-based immigrant visas.

Jon Shapley/Staff

The report said that citizens of Mexican heritage use the visas most liberally, each sponsoring more than six additional legal immigrants.

The ability to reside and work permanently in the United States is probably the most valuable commodity, or status, in the world and is one that the United States should be very selective in granting, said Andrew Arthur, a Center for Immigration Studies lawyer.

Arthurs organization and others believe a change in the family system must be coupled with a new system in which applicants are judged by their capacity to contribute to the United States, financially or with special skills.

The demand to overhaul the system picked up steam in December when a Bangladesh immigrant in New York, who had entered on a family visa, strapped on a homemade pipe bomb hoping to kill morning commuters at a Times Square subway station. He injured himself and three others.

Trump seized on the incident to demand immigration reform and he stepped up his rhetoric since last week, tweeting Monday: Honestly, I don't think Democrats want to make a deal.

Immigrant advocates contend that the words chain migration offend and distort.

CONTROVERSY: Trump moves to end 'catch and release', prosecuting parents and removing children who cross border

It is misused to make it sound as though one person, like rabbits, can reproduce hundreds of family members and lead to exponential growth of immigration. In fact, the system has lengthy backlogs and quotas that prevent this, said Greg Chen, government relations director at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he brought up family visas at the meeting in which Trump made his crude remarks.

When it came to the issue of, quote, chain migration, I said to the president, Do you realize how painful that term is to so many people? African Americans believe they migrated to America in chains and when you talk about chain migration, it hurts them personally. He said, Oh, thats a good line.

On Monday, Trump referred in a tweet to Senator Dicky Durbin, adding that Durbin blew DACA.

Marie D. De Jesus/Houston Chronicle

A State Department report this month illustrated the challenges in gaining entry via family visas. It said that for most countries, family visas are just being issued for brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens who applied in 2004.

For unmarried Mexican sons and daughters of U.S. citizens, green cards are being made available for those who applied with sponsorship in 1996 - 22 years ago, according to the State Department.

Despite the restrictions, the family system is under attack on Capitol Hill and in the White House. Legislation introduced in the House this week by leading GOP conservatives would end categories for family visas except for spouses and minor children.

At the White House meeting on Thursday - when Trump is said to have made his vulgar remarks - a bipartisan proposal from a half-dozen senators to restore DACA protections was rejected in part because it didnt go far enough to rein in family migration, said Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican in the Oval Office meeting.

The agreement in principle offered to prohibit family visas for parents of DACA recipients.

But despite the presidents assurance two days earlier that he would sign any DACA-related legislation Congress sent to him, the White House signaled Thursday that any bill would need to restrict categories of family-based visas for all future immigrants, not just Dreamers.

LATEST: Trump ends special protections for immigrants from El Salvador

That demand makes it increasingly likely that Democrats won't support proposals being aired and may withhold votes this week on legislation to keep the government funded.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-San Antonio, said bipartisan efforts are needed to resolve thorny issues beyond a DACA fix, among them reauthorizing the Childrens Health Insurance Program.

Despite Trumps racist outburst, efforts are still underway to secure a more certain future for our Dreamers, he said.

Cuellar, a moderate in his party, said he believes that Democrats will need to make concessions on family migration to achieve a DACA fix. But, he noted, emotions and passions on both sides of the issue are making it difficult to get a deal.

Some of us in the middle believe we need to have border security and a few immigration changes in order to have DACA, he said. I support having families united. But does somebody bring in just their immediate family? Their father and mother? The question is, how do we address this issue?

blambrecht@express-news.net

***

OUT OF TIME: Candidate Donald Trump inspired anti-immigration fervor across the country - and created panic at Juan Rodriguez's home. His family felt that Juan, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador who had been regularly checking in with ICE, would be in danger of deportation. Soon after the election, he was told that he wasn't "a priority for this country anymore." An immigration lawyer came to his defense, and three high-profile attorneys signed on to assist Juan's wife, a U.S. citizen, and their three American daughters in the legal battle.
The "original" King Day parade hit downtown Houston's streets Monday morning in the shadow of Minute Maid Park. A little after 10 a.m., a string of convertibles holding elected officials - Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, U.S. Rep. Al Green, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee - gave way to drill teams, Girl Scout troops and the University of Houston Cougar Marching Band.

At the same time, less than 2 miles away in Midtown, the newer MLK Grande Parade cut a straight path down San Jacinto Street. People lined up two and three deep on the sidewalks to watch the stream of dancers, cheerleaders and three dozen marching bands, including Booker T. Washington High School's Baby Ocean of Soul.

For two decades, the festive events have observed the same leader's legacy, but dual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parades have become a spectacle of disunity too heavy for Houston to bear any longer, Mayor Sylvester Turner declared Monday morning before the processionals rolled.

In his strongest public remarks to date and after two years at the city's helm, he has had enough.

"This division in our city must come to an end, and it's got to come to an end right now, and we are the ones that must make the decision," the mayor said Monday at the annual King Day memorial scholarship breakfast downtown - raising his voice as the rousing applause and cheers intensified.

"That's not what Dr. King stood for," Turner shouted from the podium. "A house divided cannot stand."

MLK JR. DAY: Hundreds gather in The Woodlands to celebrate life of King Jr.

Speaking to nearly 1,000 attendees, the mayor called on residents, elected officials and community leaders "to stand behind one parade that the city and I will endorse."

Over the weekend, the mayor shared similar sentiments with leaders of the Greater Houston Frontiers Club, which hosted Monday's breakfast at the George R. Brown Convention Center, and said a more detailed statement will be forthcoming.

"In fact, before the week is up, I am going to announce where the city is going to be, and I am going to ask all the sponsors, the supporters, elected officials to line up behind one," Turner said. "We cannot go forward divided and confused."

Upon leaving the breakfast, the mayor appeared in the Black Heritage Society's "original" parade.

Even before the federal holiday came into existence in the 1980s, Houston originated the concept of hosting a parade on King's birthday.

The slain leader's pastor-father known as "Daddy King" visited the Bayou City in the mid-1970s to discuss a grassroots commemoration with the Black Heritage Society and its founder, anti-poverty activist Ovide Duncantell.

First parade in 1978

In 1978, the group hosted its first parade as a beacon of education and inspiration. The people involved had connections to community organizations committed to advancing King's ideals of social and economic justice.

In 1995, a society associate named Charles Stamps left the group to start the MLK Grande Parade under a new organization called the MLK Parade Foundation. That presentation has become a glamorous pageant, in contrast to the original parade, featuring celebrity grand marshals and financed by corporate sponsors.

Competing processionals have confused residents.

"I really don't understand the differences between the two, to be honest," said Anisha Ogbor, who brought her 6-year-old son, Jaxon, to the downtown parade. "I absolutely think there should be just one."

Floyd Newton attended the Midtown parade for the second year in a row.

"The difficult part was not whether or not to attend the parade," he said. "It was which parade to attend."

He said he's glad the mayor is pushing for a combined effort.

"I think the majority of us would like to have one event," Newton said. "One parade would definitely send the message that we are unified in our celebration."

People at both parades had mostly practical reasons for choosing one celebration over the other. For Tamela Lewis, who drove her two children from Rosharon, downtown promised easier access to parking. Alvin Gray chose the Grande Parade because Midtown is more familiar to him.

PROTEST: King children criticize Trump, decry racism on MLK Jr. holiday

Shelton and Sandra Ducksworth brought five of their seven offspring to the downtown parade, where they found space on the sidewalk across from Minute Maid Park.

"Today is really about what Dr. King wanted it to be about: a city of love, all different ethnicities out here enjoying each other  no fussing, no arguing," said Shelton Ducksworth, who would like to see an extra-long combined processional that could last all day. "We're just here to appreciate what Dr. King fought for and what we continue to fight for today."

Turner's efforts would not be the first to try to resolve the conflict.

Along with street names across the nation, parades became popular ways to honor the civil rights leader who was slain in 1968. Most are scheduled on King's birthday, which was first celebrated as a federal holiday on the third Monday in January 1986.

Three goals in beginning

At its founding, the Black Heritage Society had three goals: Name a street for King, work with other organizations to have his birthday  Jan. 15  declared a national holiday, and erect a "magnificent statue" in the leader's honor. The trio of aims was fulfilled in 2014, when the society unveiled an 8-foot bronze sculpture of King as the centerpiece of a memorial plaza in MacGregor Park at Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and Old Spanish Trail.

The parade was added as an additional tribute.

In 2005, the Houston City Council revised its parade ordinance to allow one downtown processional per day. The updates were made, in large part, to address the then-decade of dueling King Day parades.

A federal court order allowed both to proceed downtown on the holiday in 2007: the Grande Parade in the morning and the Black Heritage Society in the afternoon.

A coin toss determined who held a parade downtown in 2008. The Black Heritage Society won and the Grande Parade proceeded on Allen Parkway.

This week, both were held at the same time in close proximity  downtown and Midtown  as the city permitted.

Turner said that he has "visited" with leaders of both parade organizations and "just could not pull them together" to reach a compromise.

"I'm going to ask the people to decide," the mayor said. "We must choose and we must decide to stand behind one and only one."
The following are excerpts from reports generated by the Houston Police Department:

Christopher M. Emerick, 32, of 14659 Boiling Springs Road at Licking, was arrested Jan 1 for having several active Texas County warrants.

An officer made the arrest in the Walmart parking lot after being advised Emerick was there. The warrants included a felony drug possession charge from last September, and misdemeanor charges of possession of drug paraphernalia and four counts of passing bad checks.

Emerick was taken to the Texas County Jail, where he was unable to post an unreported bond amount.

A 27-year-old Houston woman reported on Jan. 2 that $1,000 had been transferred from her bank account to a PayPal account without her authorization. There are no suspects.

Jennifer L. Holloway, 40, of 1159 Zimmerman Avenue in Cabool, was issued a citation for driving while intoxicated after a traffic stop at Westwood Drive and Lone Star Drive at about 4:15 p.m. Jan. 6.

The officer made the stop after being advised to watch for a green Chevrolet Silverado containing two people who had threatened to shoot someone on Lone Star Drive. Once the officer observed the vehicle and pulled it over, alcohol was smelled and field sobriety tests conducted.

Holloway was taken to jail for a 6-hour hold period.

Jerold D. Pursifull, 65, of 16144 Horsehoe Drive at Houston, was cited for failure to yield after a two-vehicle accident at U.S. 63 and Highway B at about 5:40 p.m. Jan. 10.

Keeshaun Williams, 28, and Cody J. Clark, 23, both of 403 S. Grand Ave., Apt. 2, in Houston, were each issued citations for stealing under $750 after allegedly shoplifting at Walmart on Jan. 4.
A couple of weeks ago, a fool who didnt know nearly as much about the law as he thought he did, walked into a Lyon County government office building with a gun and a smartphone with the video camera on. He was very obviously there to provoke some kind of confrontation, and succeeded. It turns out that, while you certainly have a right to film public areas of a public building, doing it while being rude and deliberately suspicious-looking is incredibly stupid.

When armed men skulk about government buildings, people who work there get understandably nervous. In this case, the skulker came face to face in close quarters with one of the women who worked there, who it appears reached out and grabbed his camera. You cant see much from the edited video he posted online, but at that point he starts squealing like a naughty five-year-old who was told hed had enough TV time, and according to witnesses, drew his gun while spouting his (generally incorrect) theories on the law of self-defense.

The Lyon County employees got him outside, gave him his phone back, and spoke with him politely, professionally and firmly while the skulker continued his tantrum. The Utilities Commissioner went so far as to helpfully explain how to file complaints against his employees if he thought theyd done something wrong. When police arrived, they arrested him for drawing a deadly weapon in a threatening manner, a misdemeanor.

The story, standing alone, is really nothing more than a tale of aggravated buffoonery of a type anyone who has ever worked in the criminal justice system sees from time to time. But when the big Nevada news of the day is the criminal charges against armed-insurrection-against-the-federal-government-promoter Cliven Bundy being dropped, its tempting to see it as a symptom of something more, a symptom of some greater societal rot, or maybe the beginning of a wave of copycats.

I disagree with that more ominous view. Nonetheless, there are lessons to be learned in comparing the two incidents. The federal government has a lot to learn from a few county employees in rural Nevada.



The Bundys deserve none of the praise some conservatives are heaping upon them. I happen to agree that the feds own too much land in Nevada, and that more of our state lands ought to be available for utilization in a wider variety of ways. But cheering people who simply take the law into their own hands, or ignore the law altogether, will almost always backfire in the end. If Bundy can do whatever he wants on land he doesnt own, so can anyone else. And inviting an armed rabble to protect your continued right to break the law isnt an expression of patriotism, its something that the American government hasnt tolerated since President Washington rode at the head of an armed force to put down the Whiskey Rebellion.

The rule of law is a critical part of the American experiment. Those who cheer people thumbing their noses at laws they dont like are encouraging others to ignore laws they might like better. Honestly  how can you simultaneously think Cliven Bundy is a hero, and also believe the Mexican father who sneaks across the border in the hopes of a better life for his family should be locked up?

And what if the government itself followed Mr. Bundys lead? To some extent it did  like Bundy, federal agents in the BLM, FBI and US Attorneys office felt a sense of entitlement to ignore laws and rules they felt were inconvenient. To some extent, this talent for self-justification of the otherwise indefensible (Im the Good Guy, so its OK when I break the rules) is a character flaw every human carries with us. The founders of our nation understood this, and wisely created not only checks and balances to stop excesses when they cropped up, but limits to what government agents could do in order to limit this sort of thing in the first place.

The case against Bundy wasnt dismissed because he was innocent, but because the federal prosecutors themselves broke the law and were held to account for it by the judge. It seems to me difficult to accept this as the action of a tyrannical federal government bent on malicious oppression. I obviously have no problem with vigorous criticism of the government, but if the American government was made up of true tyrants, Mr. Bundy would either still be in jail or would have already been taken to The Wall by now.

Nevertheless, unlawful and/or foolish actions of various federal agents were not stopped or uncovered until well after they had contributed to putting lives in danger and wasting untold hundreds of thousands of dollars. They forgot who they were and who they served, and forgot that professionalism and courtesy, even to those you are actively prosecuting, is not just a good thing to be, but critical to the health of a civil society.



As someone perfectly comfortable with gun ownership and even open-carry, people who wear their weapons with the express purpose of goading people into freaking out are repellent to me. As the grandson of a cattle rancher, I have nothing but contempt for Bundy and his lawless clan. As a criminal prosecutor, I am viscerally offended by any of my colleagues failing to meet their most basic obligations to turn over all relevant evidence to the defense team. When people act foolishly in the service of any cause or institution, they harm that cause or institution immeasurably.

The folks in Lyon County confronted with an armed provocateur remembered this, and the result was a foolish-looking skulker beclowning himself all over the Internet, no one getting hurt, and an amusing side story instead of front page tragedy. Our society will be healthier when all of us  government supporter, agent and critic alike  take these lessons to heart.
A new wound therapy product has been used in recent months on some patients at Texas County Memorial Hospital

Mirragen, developed by Missouri Science and Technology student and ceramic engineer Steve Jung, is a bioactive resorbable glass fiber technology that has been found to help wounds heal faster. As a glass fiber, Mirragen can also be used for wounds with challenging geometries.

Bioactive glass has been used since the 1960s to grow bone tissue. The silica used in bioactive glass was not a suitable product for growing soft tissue, but Jung used boron in a glass fiber that was found to help heal soft tissue. The borate-based fiber is sturdy and durable for a period of time, but it also breaks down and dissolves as soft tissue heals.

Mirragen was tested on patients for almost 10 years and received approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 2017. It is the only product of its kind in the world, and its slated for release to the broader domestic market later this year.

As part of a controlled domestic release, Ellen Willis, board certified wound therapist at TCMH, received a donation of Mirragen product to use on some difficult wound cases at the hospital.

About half of Williss work as a therapist involves wound care. She provides wound care to TCMH inpatients, outpatients and TCMH Home Health of the Ozarks patients.

With the use of Mirragen, I was able to see positive improvement on chronic wounds within one to two weeks, Willis said.

Willis considers a chronic wound to be a wound that has been open for more than a month. Some of Williss chronic wound patients have some that have not healed for a year or more.

Because Mirragen is a fiber made up of layers, it can be placed on all areas of the woundbone, tendon and facia. Mirragen can also be used on wounds that cannot be treated with negative pressure wound therapy  a traditional treatment for large wounds or wounds that are not healing.

The borate-based fiber resembles the microstructure of a clot, which might help a wound heal on its own. Mirragen also absorbs up to 400 percent of the wounds moisture, another important factor in wound therapy.

With one difficult wound in a patient at TCMH, Willis saw more closure in a month of treatment with Mirragen than she had seen in nine months of traditional wound therapy.

I used Mirragen on this patient when all of my normal wound therapies had not worked, Willis said.

She said that in trials Mirragen had incredible success with diabetic and pressure ulcers, common wounds that Willis treats at TCMH.

Mirragen has also been tested and proven effective on venous ulcers, burns, surgical incisions and donor/recipient graft sites.

Willis has only treated patients with donated Mirragen product because its very expensive. Due to the newness of Mirragen to the market, its not a reimbursable product for Willis to use on most of her patients.

Mirragen is sold in small packets of four-inch by four-inch, two-inch by two-inch or one-inch by six-inch devices.

ETS Wound Care has a mission to help to serve patients in underserved areas like the Ozarks, where the product was developed. ETS committed to working with Willis and a few TCMH patients so Willis could try the product.

There are always variables in treating wounds, Willis said. Different body chemistries respond to treatment in different ways, but overall Mirragen will be a great tool in the wound therapy toolbox.

ETS hopes to continue to grow borate-based bioactive technology to develop and commercialize a broad range of breakthrough solutions for the wound care market.

We appreciate the mission of ETS to minimize the cost of treatment and improve patient outcomes, said Wes Murray, TCMH chief executive officer. We were honored to be asked to be part of their continuing studies and receive donated product to use with some of our patients.

Murray said ETS hopes that the Ozark region can become known as a place where some of the best wound care in the world is available.

Wound therapy is a growing need in our area, and we hope we can continue to use Mirragen and help ETS achieve their mission, Murray said.

TCMH has grown wound therapy services at the hospital over the past few years. Jason Loden, DO, a general surgeon joining the hospital in the summer of 2018, has hopes of making wound care a portion of his practice.

With Dr. Lodens and Ellens interest and skills in wound care, we should be able to provide more wound therapy services in to our patients in the upcoming year, Murray said.

Currently Willis is limited in the scope of wound therapy services shes able to provide without a physician working alongside her.

When Dr. Loden gets here, he will be able to oversee some new wound therapies for our patients, Willis said. It will be a great benefit for our area patients.

For additional information about wound therapy at TCMH, contact Willis at 417-967-1270. Additional information about Mirragen is available at etissuesolutions.com.
Dale Eugene Krewson, 82, passed away Monday, Jan. 8, 2018, at Texas County Memorial Hospital after battling bouts of pneumonia.

He was born Aug. 1, 1935, near Montauk, son of Otto Paul and Meda Helton Krewson. He and Joyce Miller were married Aug. 10, 1957.

His first job was in St. Louis as a supervisor over two cemeteries. In 1973, he and his wife, Joyce, returned to Licking and built a home south of town, where he enjoyed working with his cattle. He also drove a truck for his uncle, Gene Krewson, hauling cattle. He later hauled raw charcoal as a truck driver for Thomason Charcoal. After retiring from there, he worked for Robert Gifford part time until his health no longer permitted. His favorite pastime was working on cars and trucks as he had attended Rankin Trade School while living in St. Louis.

He was a member of boards with Sherrill Township, Boone Creek Cemetery and the Public Water Board. He was also a member of Licking Bridge Builders Senior Center. He belonged to the Masonic Order and was a member of Latimer Lodge in Licking and also Order of the Eastern Star of Mary S. Chapter #126 in Houston.

He enjoyed telling tall tales and playing practical jokes on his family and friends. He loved hunting and rescuing animals he found. He also enjoyed taking his pet dog, Lady, for rides on the four-wheeler.

He was a member of Licking First Baptist Church, where Pastor Robert Gifford baptized him. The last several years he had been attending Licking Assembly of God Church as long as his health permitted.

He was preceded in death by his parents; four brothers, Marvin, Carl, Dean and James; an infant brother, Darrell; and two sisters, Ruby Douglas and Opal McClahanan.

Survivors include his wife of 60 years, Joyce; a daughter, Stacey Dawn Foote of Laquey; two granddaughters; five great-grandchildren; and a host of nieces, nephews, cousins and friends.

Memorial services were Saturday, Jan. 13, at Fox Funeral Home with Pastors Robert Gifford and Paul Richardson officiating. Burial was in Boone Creek Cemetery.

Memorial contributions may be made to Licking Assembly of God Church or Licking Bridge Builders Senior Center. Online condolences may be made at www.foxfh.net.
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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

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
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Last year was a transformative one for both Royalty Exchange and the music business at large. Were not big on milestone-type posts, but allow us to share a few internal numbers for the sake of illuminating what we think are some broader, macro-industry trends we all should be following in the year ahead.

In 2017, Royalty Exchange saw quantum leaps forward in virtually every performance metric we track. We saw a nearly 100% increase in the number of auctions held (144) and an 84% increase in average auctions per month (12). In total, we helped artists using our platform raise over $8.8 million dollars, nearly 110% more than the year prior.

Thats new money coming into the music industry being reinvested into creative community. After more than a decade of digital/hardware companies pulling money out of the music community, thats got to be a refreshing change of pace.

But we cant take all the credit for these results, as much as wed like to. The fact is that these results are just as much a factor of broader industry trends just now starting to align.

Here are the main ones we think play the biggest role

New Industry. New Rules.

The music industry has changed. Nearly every rule has been broken or reinvented. Fans consume music differently, and as a result artists get paid differently.

But if the way fans pay for music has changed, it only stands to reason that the rules dictating how songwriters make a living should change as well.

First, that means properly recognizing songwriters for their contributions to the music we all love. Songwriting credits shouldn't be a secret. Over 70% of songwriters' income is regulated in some fashion by a government entity. The better these regulators understand the crucial role songwriters play, the better informed their rulings will be.

Second is the need to end any artificial restrictions on how songwriters choose to earn a living. The Music Modernization Act is a great first step to address the regulatory challenges. Equally important is to update the conventional wisdom around acceptable ways to finance a career.

Twenty years ago it was considered selling out for artists to license their music for a TV commercial. Now its not only an accepted revenue-generating move, but its considered a smart marketing/discovery move.

The same is becoming true to the concept of selling royalties. The old adage of never sell royalties is a rule for a different age when selling royalties meant giving up all your rights and all control.

Todays deals are more flexible, allowing artists to sell only a portion of their royalty income, while retaining all their copyrights, all their control, and all the future income from what they dont sell. This gives songwriters the options they need using a strategy that public companies have used for decades.

Catalog Demand

Music industry trade bible Billboard said it best: The songwriter catalog market is booming.

While large publishing catalogs sell for multi-million dollar deals, that demand is expanding into the market for individual songwriters. Although the Billboard story focuses on music publishers doing the buying, Royalty Exchange has seen a similar increase of interest from private investors.

Its a sellers market, which affects the closing multiple (or how much a catalog sells for compared to its last 12 months earnings). On Royalty Exchange, we saw the average closing multiple increase about 20% over the course of last year.

To understand why theres this increased demand for music royalties, you need to understand the situation in the broader investment landscape. Bonds yield remains at an all-time low, and in some cases returning negative yield (meaning investors get back LESS than what they paid). And while the stock market is soaring, that just means buying stocks today is ridiculously expensive.

Music royalties meanwhile deliver consistent returns, are relatively stable, and can offer far better returns (depending on the price paid).

Music Bull Market

After over a decade of getting pummeled through piracy and a clunky transition to digital, the music business is finally rebounding.

Its too early in the year to report industry-wide financial numbers. but consumption patterns are in, and theyre encouraging. According to Nielsen, in the US alone:

Total music consumption increased 12.5%

Audio/Video On Demand Streaming increased 43%

Audio-only On Demand Streams increased 58.7%

The most recent financial performance reported by the major labels is also very positive. Sony Music reported an 8.2% increase in recorded music revenues, driven by a 37.3% increase in streaming revenues, over the same timeframe of 2016.

Warner Music Group had similar results, with recorded music revenues increasing over 10%, with streaming revenues increasing 48%. Universal Music Group recorded music revenues jumped over 11%, with streaming up over 23%.

Financial analysts forecast strong growth going forward as well. Goldman Sachs famously predicted streaming revenues will jump 500% by 2030. Meanwhile financial analysts at Raymond James points to a fivefold increase in paid subscription accounts by 2023.

Add to all this the progress being made in licensing music for massive platforms like Facebook, Spotifys impending IPO, and all the great new music to be released in the months ahead, and 2018 is shaping up to be a pretty transformative year for the music business as a whole.

Whether youre an artist, rightsholder, investor, or a company or organization that support any of the above we look forward to working with you in the new year.
WMG Offers Worker Buyouts As Streaming Shift Accelerates

As it adapts to the shifting landscape for recorded music, WEA, Warner Music Groups global distribution, marketing and sales division, is reportedly offering buyouts to 130 employees who deal with physical product.

According to Billboard, WMG did not clarify their revised staffing goals, but the publication noted that the buyouts are likely related to the steep 19.6 percent decline in CD sales reported by Nielsen Music for 2017.

Sources told Billboard that staffers have about 45 days to decide to take the buyout offer and that WMG would likely use any cost savings from staff reductions to bolster their streaming music business.

WEA has always been at the forefront of evolution in the industry, and the current shift towards digital and streaming is no exception. As our business continues to evolve, and in order to maximize our artists impact globally, we are realigning resources within WEA, WEA President Tony Harlow told employees in an internal memo obtained by Billboard.

While streaming is an increasingly important part of the recorded music ecosystem, Billboard noted that WMG does not intend to drop physical completely. In 2017, WEAs two top-selling titles  Ed Sheerans Divide and Bruno Mars 24K Magic each sold hundreds of thousands of CDs. Sheeran led the charge with 450,000 units and Mars close behind with 426,000 unit sold.

- CelebrityAccess

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100 North St. has been the source of news for the last few years.

Pittsfield Extends Lease For Offices at 100 North St.

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Mayor Linda Tyer has no plans to move the city offices currently at 100 North St. back to City Hall.

An array of city offices were moved from the basement of City Hall back in 2014 to the mezzanine level of 100 North. The move, under former Mayor Daniel Bianchi, caused consternation from some of the city councilors at the time because it didn't need council approval.

The move had led to a battle outside of the City Council chambers when Bianchi charged former Councilor Barry Clairmont $63.95 for documents relating to the move  a charge Clairmont balked at. Clairmont and Bianchi had also clashed over the former mayor's use of an office in the building.

Now, nearly four years later, some city councilors asked if there is a plan to move the offices out of leased space and into property already publicly owned.

"Are we always going to rent it? Are we going to buy the building? Or are we just going to rent it forever?" asked Ward 7 Councilor Anthony Simonelli.

Simonelli had put in a petition a few years ago asking a full assessment of the condition of City Hall. He believes there isn't a time when the city would look to demolish it, so it should be fixed up now.

The city had hired Barry Architects to dig into the area around the front stairs as it looked to find what was causing flooding in the basement. And in 2016, former Director of Building Maintenance Denis Guyer had begun to mitigate the issues with the basement.

The moisture getting into the basement caused concerns with mold and the air quality that had been long cited as problematic  to the point where radon detectors were installed. That preceded the moving of offices out and now the space is only used for storage.

"I am not at all, at this point, thinking about 100 North St. returning to the basement," Mayor Linda Tyer said.

In fact, the administration had already signed an extension to the lease  which also did not need City Council approval. Director of Finance Matthew Kerwood said the newly signed lease is for three more years. It had gone to bid and CT Management (Scarafoni Associates) was the only company to bid on it.

"We are in that building for another three years," Kerwood said.

Further, the mayor said the city spent "almost $800,000" on making the actual move  though accounting delivered at the time placed that number at bit more than $80,000  and believes that money would be somewhat wasted if the city moved out so quickly.

"Its turned out to be a fairly productive space. It is good for the employees," Tyer said.

The conversation regarding the space derived from two donations to the employee gym. The gym had been pieced together by Director of Personnel Michael Taylor thanks to a grant from the city's insurance company.

The City Council voted on Tuesday to accept a Pro-Form 700 CardioCross Trainer Elliptical Exerciser from Lt. Gary Traversa and a Nordic Track cx995 Elliptical Exerciser from former City Councilor Clairmont.

For full disclosure: iBerkshires has an office at 100 North St.
Sheriff Thomas Bowler will be honored as the Irish Person of the Year on March 15.

Hillcrest Educational to Honor Sheriff Bowler, Officer Derby

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Sheriff Thomas Bowler will be honored as Hillcrest Educational Center's Irish Person of the Year.

Hillcrest will present the award at the 17th annual Robert "Bees" Prendergast St. Patrick's Celebration on March 15 at the Country Club of Pittsfield.

Bowler was a Pittsfield police officer for 24 years, serving in the detective bureau and in the drug unit, before his 2010 election as Sherriff. Recent winners of the Irish Person of the Year award were Fairview Hospital President Eugene Dellea, former Senate President Stanley Rosenberg, former state Sen. Benjamin Downing, and U.S. Rep. Richard Neal.

Hillcrest will also be honoring Pittsfield Police Officer Darren Derby with the Judge John A. Barry Community Service Award for his community outreach efforts.

The even includes hors d'oeuvres, a buffet, door prizes, a silent auction and music from the Brodie Mountain Boys. Tickets are $50 and the proceeds go toward the renovation of the former St. Mark's School, which Hillcrest purchased for students with disabilities.

"This traditional event captures the lively spirit of Hillcrest's founding board member, Bees Prendergast, and continues his legacy by bringing our longtime and new supporters together for an evening. It's also a tremendous opportunity to honor those who have shown outstanding leadership in Berkshire County with the Prendergast and Judge Barry Awards," Hillcrest President Gerard Burke said.

"Sheriff Thomas Bowler and Pittsfield Police Officer Darren Derby are emblematic of their drive and work ethic. Our agencys defining commitment of providing frontline and critical therapeutic care to students and their families could not be met without our communities support  we recognize and celebrate this dedication."
Setti Warren holds a discussion at Conte Community School on Sunday night.

Gubernatorial Candidate Warren Talks Opioids In Pittsfield



After brief opening remarks, the Democrat opened the floor to the community to hear what their thoughts on the best way to tackle the issue. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Gubernatorial candidate Setti Warren says five people a day are dying from opioid addiction.

"In 2014, Gov. Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency around opioid addiction. We were the first state in the country to do so. Since then, 6,000 people have died of opioid addiction in our state, 250,000 are living with addiction in our state right now and that number is growing. Over five people a day are dying from opioid addiction or are sick. This at a cost of $10 billion annually," Warren said.

Those numbers are what started him on hosting a series of forums across the state. The former Newton mayor said he had first recognized the issues in his hometown and his campaign for governor has shown him that the issue of opioid addiction isn't confined to pockets in Massachusetts, it is everywhere.

"We started to put some programming together in my own hometown, a path to bring people to treatment. When I announced for governor, I started moving around the commonwealth. I've been in over 150 communities. There was not one setting where someone didn't raise their hand in a public setting or come to me privately and say 'what are you going to do about opioids?'" Warren said.

The Democrat's approach to dealing with it would be based on three keys: ridding the stigma surrounding it, bringing in "the best ideas possible," and additional resources. He said the concept of addiction needs to be viewed more as a disease. He said there are not enough beds, stays, and time for detoxification. And it will take new ideas.

"This is going to take some new thinking, it is going to take new resources so that we have community-based, lifelong, wraparound services," Warren said.

To get those ideas, he is asking for assistance from people across the state. About two dozen Berkshire residents joined him at Conte Community School on Sunday night for an open discussion on the issue.

"We need a major cultural shift in how we view addiction. Addiction is a lifelong disease, it is not a moral failure," said Tess Lane, who introduced the gubernatorial candidate.

The group then dug into the weeds somewhat. A woman who works in the field told stories of how the bureaucracy of MassHealth often serves as a barrier for someone getting treatment. She said the paperwork involved can be tricky for someone looking to treat their addiction and becomes another challenge pushing them away from tackling the issue.

Meanwhile, she said there are insurance companies that will pay for visits but not medication. The medication can costs around $30 a day, making it difficult for those to stay with the program. At the same time, if they work too many hours, then they will no longer qualify for MassHealth and can't afford the care. She asked that doctors and clinicians have more discretion with the medications they prescribed and MassHealth should cover those medications.

Warren said the confusion over insurances can be eased by moving to a single-payer system. That way the insurance offerings are focused on results.

"Our system needs to be based on health outcomes for people not based on an insurance company's willingness to provide you access to services," Warren said.

Another man said back in the 1970s, he got addicted while in the hospital. He had to be weaned off the painkillers. And just last year, without being asked a doctor prescribed him more - even though he didn't want them. He ultimately filled the prescription and took the remainders to the prescription drop box at the Police Department.

Another resident added that doctors often do that because they have so little time with patients - treating the pain becomes easier. That resident added that acupuncture and other alternative pain treatments are available, but they are much more expensive and insurances won't cover many of them.

On the other hand, another man said his partner lives with chronic pain and opioids are what helps her. But, she now struggles to get access to those medications. He said there is a "witch hunt" going on in which doctors are afraid to prescribe them for fear of lawsuits.

"There needs to be some real training around opioids and prescribing. There are people who need opioids for pain," Warren responded, saying the "one size fits all approach" is wrong.

A nurse, meanwhile, said she has seen the occasions in which judgments were made automatically on someone seeking medication for pain.

"I have witnessed co-workers, and even myself cast judgment. They come in seeking pain medicine and that stigma and that judgment is there," she said, adding that there needs to be education around the issues of chronic pain.

But, she also saw the other side of the issue. She said back in 2013 she remembers in nursing school seeing a video shown in class claiming that opioids were not addicting  so there needs to be a better understanding of what prescribing them truly means as well, she said.

Meanwhile, a representative from the Brien Center said getting enough qualified workers is posing a challenge to those in the recovery field. She is also looking for additional funds for such things as a peer recovery center, which Berkshire County lacks.

"We can't fill positions for skilled providers of recovery care and we can't pay them enough," she said.

Warren agrees saying, "we're going to have to make some investment in growing those numbers of clinically trained people to do the kind of work we are talking about."

A North Adams woman suggest bringing more resources to the community, such as by providing information at places like libraries. It would be an attempt to reach people where they are at, rather than relying on them seeking out clinical care.

"Resources are scarce but they exist and a lot of times people don't know where they are," she said.

And to pay for those resources, Warren said he is supporting efforts to get that money from the wealthiest in the state.

"We are going to have to ask people who are doing really well in this state, making a lot of money, to contribute more so we can invest in people's lives," Warren said.

Warren is facing Bob Massie and Jay Gonzalez in the Democratic primary for governor.
Crissey Farm has been recognized for its wedding experiences.

Biz Briefs: Crissey Farm Honored for Excellence in Wedding Venues

'I do'

Crissey Farm has been named a winner of the 2018 WeddingWire Couples' Choice Award for Wedding Venue in Great Barrington, a recognition they have received five years in a row. WeddingWire Inc., the leading global online marketplace for the wedding and events industry, annually recognizes the top 5 percent of wedding professionals on WeddingWire who demonstrate excellence in quality, service, responsiveness and professionalism. The top local wedding professionals in more than 20 service categories from venues to florists are awarded the prestigious accolade.



Crissey Farm was recognized as a recipient solely based on reviews from newlyweds and their experiences working with them. Award-winning vendors are distinguished for the quality, quantity, consistency and timeliness of the reviews they have received from their past clients.

Eat out, shout it out

January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, and Shout Out Loud Productions, a not-for-profit organization committed to elimination of and education about sex trafficking, is sponsoring Dine Out nights at some of the area's favorite restaurants to raise funds for its education programs.



On select dates in January, restaurants throughout Berkshire County will host "Shout Out Loud to Dine Out" and will donate 20 percent of their profits earned from 4 to 7 p.m. to Shout Out Loud's education and training program for law enforcement, service providers and judicial leaders as they communicate, and determine the disposition for individuals who are victims of human trafficking.



Participating establishments and dates are: The Olde Heritage Tavern, 12 Housatonic St., Lenox,, Jan. 18, 4-7 p.m.; District Kitchen & Bar, 40 West St., Pittsfield, Jan. 18, 4-7 p.m.; Cafe Adam, 420 Stockbridge Road, Great Barrington, Jan. 18, 5-7 p.m.; Frankies Ristorante Italiano, 80 Main St., Lenox, Jan. 25, 5-8 p.m.; Public Eat + Drink, 34 Holden St., North Adams, Jan. 25, 4-7 p.m.

Bank scholarships

Berkshire Bank will honor 35 high school seniors across Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey and Pennsylvania for their volunteer service with Berkshire Bank Scholarships. The scholarships recognize students who excel academically, have a financial need and share in Berkshire Bank's commitment to community service. Additionally, students must attend a high school that is located in a county with a Berkshire Bank or Commerce Bank, a division of Berkshire Bank, office. The recipients will share in $52,500 of scholarship funds.



Giving back

Lee Bank recently announced the formalization of its Community Impact Dividend, which totaled $93,617 in 2017. That amount is approximately 5 percent of the bank's net income. The dividend represents a commitment by the bank to strengthen the community by contributing financially to local non-profit organizations. The bank will continue to set aside 5 percent of its net income each year as a community impact dividend.



Bank President and CEO Chuck Leach said that Lee Bank has always given back to the community, and always will, and this is simply a formalization of that practice. While Lee Bank contributes to a wide spectrum of groups, events and organizations, it gives priority to organizations that provide social services to low and moderate-income residents, and those involved in economic development activities. Secondary consideration is given to organizations that provide cultural and recreational opportunities to residents of Berkshire County and do not have the ability to raise significant funds outside of Berkshire County.



In addition, Lee Bank supports the Berkshire United Way's annual campaign by matching employee contributions. In 2017, 100 percent of the bank's employees donated to the United Way.
Richard Alcombright is this year's recipient of the Peacemaker Award. PreviousNext

Alcombright Honored Following MLK Day of Service



Mittens and scarves were among the items being made during Monday's Day of Service. More photos can be found here. NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  The culmination of Monday's Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service honored one of the community's best known advocates: Richard Alcombright.

Not Mayor Richard Alcombright, since he'd lost that title two weeks ago, but the Dick Alcombright who'd been involved in the community long before he took office eight years ago.

"I really think it's wonderfully appropriate we're recognizing the man and not the mayor today, because Dick's role as a peacemaker flows from who he is and not from any position that he's held," Mayor Thomas Bernard said.

Comments about Alcombright read by members of the MLK Committee ranged from his being "a special human being" to his passion for the city's trail system to to caring about his fellow citizens to his form of leadership that "shared responsibility and power."

"We felt that he went way beyond any job or responsibility he has had," said Kathy Keeser, a member of the MLK Committee that nominates each year's recipient. "He's always been an approachable leader who worked tirelessly to include others in the process of building committee and to improve the lives of others. ...

"He's done so much to support the work of many nonprofits, educational programs, small projects and community events throughout his years as mayor, on the City Council at the bank on and on."

Alcombright, surrounded by local leaders, the MLK Committee and members of the Northern Berkshire Community Coalition on a stage in Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts' Venable Hall, said the recognition was "humbling, heartwarming and, at some level, deeply spiritual."

His parents, Danny and Bernice "Red" Alcombright, had taught him the greatest gift was giving your time and listening.

"To think with my head and act with my heart," he said. "We cannot always understand but we can always empathize."

Many of the hundreds of people who had come out to make Martin Luther King Day a "day on, not a day off," were making the same efforts that he did, only that his time in office had made him more visible. That visibility had also brought in contact with numerous communities  those of veterans, the elderly, the poor, LGBTQ, faith, mental health and so many more.

"I recognize the greatest gift I was given was the gift of inclusion," Alcombright said. "It has just made me a better human being and I have all of you here to thank for that."

Committee Chairman Alex Daugherty made the presentation. Alcombright's name will be added to the honor roll kept in the NBCC offices. He also was presented with a certificate and a resolution from the state Senate read by state Sen. Adam Hinds.

Other parts of the county also marked Martin Luther King Day with service projects and programs. In Pittsfield, Berkshire Community College headed a day of service that began on campus with Francis Jones-Sneed, a professor at MCLA, giving the keynote address. Then volunteers took off to the Central Berkshire Habitat for Humanity office, Gladys Allen Brigham Community Center, and Harvest Table. BCC instructor Wendy Laurin gave up her day off to do some painting at Habitat for Humanity. She was joined by students and a volunteer from the OLLI program who offered to lend a hand there. "They do amazing things for the community. They take care of the community so I thought I'd come by to help," Laurin said. Construction Manager Mike Bedard said eight volunteers came from BCC and together with Habitat's Amicore volunteers a dated kitchen was demolished to make way for a future renovation and multiple other rooms were painted. He said the volunteers did "everything from carpentry work to painting and plastering." "The Amicore movement generally sees Martin Luther King day as a day on, not a day off. It is a day of service," Bedard said.

Northern Berkshire's 25th community day of service included service projects at the YMCA, Goodwill, Louison House, Adams Youth Center, Friendship Center Food Pantry and winterizing homes. At MCLa, volunteers made mittens, scarves and blankets, put up care boxes for veterans and Valentines for nursing homes, participated in writing and discussion workshops and decorated "magic trees."

A lunch was Papa John's Pizza, fried chicken from Walmart and sides and serving from Aramark and the Berkshire Food Project.

This was the first year the event has been held at Venable Hall. The last several years it had been held in MCLA's Church Street Center but Glenda Matos-Carter, program coordinator for NBCC's Northern Berkshire Neighbors, said the event had outgrown the building and was looking for something more accessible.

Quoting King's words that "every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle, the tireless exertions of passionate concerns of dedicated individuals," college President James Birge welcomed the crowd and thanked them for their exertions. "By your presence today, you have lifted up Dr. King's words as evidence his wisdom, his grace, his activism transcends generations to ensure that we continue to be brothers and sisters in the struggle toward justice."



One of the projects for the Pittsfield event was ripping out a kitchen for Central Berkshire Habitat for Humanity.

State Sen. Adam Hinds said the way to overcome the current divisive is "coming together on common projects, serving each other, serving with each other." State Rep. John Barrett III recalled how the event had begun during his tenure and spoke of how inspired he was by last year's Women's March, which he calls the "Peace March."

Donna and David Motta both read poems they had written; the MCLA Allegrettoes performed; and Daugherty and Keeser thanked those involved. Gwendolyn Hampton-VanSant of Multicultural Bridge, based in Lee, encouraged residents and organizations to sign a pledge to build safe, inclusive communities with a goal of 10,000.

"We're kind of leading the charge since we're doing it countywide," she said. "We're asking each of you to sign this and post it on social media with the hashtag #Allhandsin."

Several speakers referred to King and the more recent visit by U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a contemporary of King

who spoke at MCLA's commencement, and encouraged the crowd to make "necessary noise" when they see injustice.

"This country will heal more quickly with longer lasting results if we remember the principles upon which this country was founded," Alcombright said. "A country for all with liberty, equlity, and justice for all -- including people from places like Haiti, Nigeria, Sudan, Ghana and Egypt and from all over this world ... all these people who certainly are not less than."
Williamstown Community Preservation Committee Has Just Two Applicants

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.  The last couple years, there have been two constants in the deliberations of the Community Preservation Committee: a large number of applicants and a debate among committee members about whether the town should do more to build up a reserve of CPA funds.

The former will not be an issue this year.

The committee meets Wednesday to begin considering the two applications the town received for Community Preservation Act money in 2018.

The trustees of the town's Affordable Housing Trust are looking for $20,000 to help income-qualified residents purchase materials used to make needed home repairs under Northern Berkshire Habitat for Humanity's Critical Repairs Program.

The town's Conservation Commission seeks $19,000 to install a water treatment system to restore drinkable water at Margaret Lindley Park.

The combined $39,000 is less than 20 percent of the $196,501 sought by eight different applicants in January 2017. Ultimately, the CPC recommended all eight applications, some at reduced amounts, for an aggregate of $160,823; the eight were approved in separate warrant articles at town meeting.

The 2018 chair of the committee said last week she did not know whether the panel's past conversations about fiscal restraint had a "chilling effect" on potential applicants in the current funding cycle.

"Certainly, you could draw the conclusion that the committee made it clear there are limited funds, and maybe people rethought coming back," said Jane Patton, who fills the Select Board's seat on the CPC. "The other consistent message from the committee has been: Please don't keep coming back without doing your own fund-raising."

Patton is returning to the CPC after a couple of years off the committee. She said she was surprised to see only the two applicants for 2018.

The Community Preservation Act, as adopted by Williamstown in 2002, is funded by a 2 percent surcharge on property taxes, with the first $100,000 of valuation exempted.

There also is a match from the commonwealth, which was 100 percent at the time the town chose to participate in the CPA but which has fallen steadily. In 2017, communities like Williamstown received a 17.2 percent state match; communities where the local tax is 3 percent, the maximum allowed under the act, the state match came at a higher rate.

CPA money funds projects in three areas: historic preservation, open space and recreation, and affordable housing. The first decision for the committee each winter is whether each applicant satisfies at least one of those three areas.

The town is required to allocate a portion of its CPA funds to each of the three areas. For the next nine years, Williamstown satisfies that requirement with its payments on the bond to support the Cable Mills apartments. The Water Street development preserved a historic mill building, created recreational access to the adjacent Green River and set aside income-sensitive units, increasing the town's stock of affordable housing.

One frequent applicant in recent years has been the Williamstown Historical Museum, which last year received $5,000 after requesting $7,700 to help it preserve, conserve and display "historically valuable textiles."

The museum's executive director said last week that the organization's absence from the process is not due to any "chill" from past appearances before the committee.

"A lot of our energy was spent moving into our new location and getting settled in, learning how our new space works," Sarah Currie said, referring to the museum's move from the Milne Public Library to the former Little Red Schoolhouse building at the Five Corners in South Williamstown. "This year, I wanted to spend a quiet winter catching up on cataloging, which we're doing. Hopefully, that will be beneficial when we apply in the future, which we certainly will."

Currie said she thinks that the modest number of applicants this year will help the committee in its desire to build up reserves, but she did not think that desire influenced the museum's decision not to apply.

"I don't think that would have prohibited us from participating this year," she said. "If I felt there was something we absolutely wanted to receive funding for, we would have made the request."

In recent years, the CPC has added a couple of features to its application that hint at the committee's fiscal restraint.

Applicants the last couple of years have been asked to explain how they plan to match any CPA funds they receive. "The Williamstown CPC strongly encourages applicants to seek and secure funding for their projects from other sources. We will prioritize projects for which the CPC would participate with other funding sources," the application reads.

This year's application also notes that, "For Fiscal Year 2019, the Committee anticipates not recommending appropriations of Community Preservation funds in excess of $115,026 for all new applications."

In the fall, the CPC offered potential applicants the opportunity to meet with a few members of the panel to discuss the process prior to submitting an application. Patton said she did not know exactly how many people did, but she believed the number was fewer than three.

"It was fewer than I would have imagined, but that could go to the fact that a lot of the people who come to the CPC for funds know the lay of the land," Patton said. "I don't know who would have been a first-timer."

The small number of applications this time around probably will make for some short meetings when the committee does its review. While Patton said she won't complain about have a short committee meeting, she also would not have had a problem if this panel had a little more on its plate.

"This is my favorite committee," she said. "Often in town government, we're in a position to do very little and have to be more on the 'no' side than the 'yes' side. To do this, for me, has always been enjoyable."
The Regional Agreement Amendment Committee meets at Hoosac Valley High School on Monday.

Adams-Cheshire Hopes to Conclude Agreement Before Superintendent Retires

CHESHIRE, Mass.  The Adams Cheshire Regional School District's Regional Agreement Amendment Committee hope to complete the process before Superintendent Robert Putnam retires.

Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools Assistant Director Stephen Hemman recommended to the committee on Monday that it aim for a closer completion date to accommodate Putnam, who plans to retire at the end of the year.

"As you know Rob has announced his retirement," Hemman said. "I would like to get as much done as we can before he leaves because it will be difficult for someone new to come in in the middle of this without background."

Late last year, Putnam announced that he planned to retire at the end of the school year after serving the district as the interim superintendent and the permanent superintendent since 2016.

Hemman said the process, that began in November, would likely take a year and ultimately will be voted upon by town meeting. Now he said the committee should aim to pin down all its amendments before Putnam retires.

The committee continued discussion on the makeup of the school committee and how the school committee votes. The main focus of this change is to prevent the school committee from voting along town lines as it did when it was voted to close Cheshire Elementary School.

Last meeting it was suggested that the committee decrease the number of members on the board from seven to six to ensure equal representation from both towns.

Hemman did not recommend this.

"You will end up with too many ties and I would not recommend that," he said. "Some committees have six and they look to change that."

Cheshire representative Edmund St. John IV instead suggested that for certain votes a majority vote must contain representation from both towns.

He suggested that these votes be the hiring of a superintendent, business manager, district counsel, for entering into any legal action, changing the configuration of grades in the buildings and changing the configuration of buildings in the district

Cheshire representative Adam Emerson suggested just making these two-thirds votes.

"These are pretty hefty things and I think you would want two-thirds of the committee on board," he said. "You don't want a 4-3 vote on something like hiring a superintendent."

St. John said looking back on his tenure on the School Committee, most votes are unanimous.

"The only vote that really came down to contention was the recent one that went down town lines," he said. "There have been budget votes where it has been 6-1 or maybe 5-2 but usually nothing more than that."

Adams representative Michael Mucci agreed with St. John's idea but wanted to clear up the language and have very specific guidelines for what would trigger these votes.

"Unique things come up and they may not fall entirely in a category and it could set up some roadblocks," he said. "I think we need these bullet points to be as clear as possible."

Cheshire representative Justin Kruszyna moved the conversation toward the now closed Cheshire School and asked if it was possible to add language that would allow Cheshire to reopen the school without Adams' approval.

"If Cheshire wants to bring back its school in Cheshire, it is not Adams' decision," he said. "Everyone I have talked to wants to see that school open again."

Hemmon said the towns have given the district the right to make these decisions and it is not really up to the towns.

Kruszyna suggested allowing a town to fund its own school if they decided to.

"If one town wants to take on more of the financial burden it should be up to the town," he said. "Last year, we wanted to put in another $100,000 to keep the school open and we were told we couldn't."

Hemmon said this, too, could create complications with issues of unequal funding between schools. He added that, procedurally, they would have to address this concept in the assessment section of the agreement.

Kruszyna floated adding to the agreement that both communities must have elementary schools and noted that many students have left the district because Cheshire has closed.

Adams representative Christine Hoyt felt this could prevent the district from growing if it is forced to keep schools open.

"I hesitate to put any language in the agreement about specific schools ... I think that could hamstring us in the future especially with recommendations from the education task force ... to come together with more towns," she said.

Adams representative Paul Butler added that if the district is forced to fund the operation of another building, money would be taken away from education.

Kruszyna also advocated for language that would allow Cheshire to leave the district without Adams' approval if it so wanted.

Hemmon said that this is a different process and he did not recommend it.

"If that happens, there is a lot that has to take place and you would become three districts," he said. "Each one would need a school committee and a superintendent."

The committee will revisit these topics at a future meeting.
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Ed Sheeran has been named in a plagiarism lawsuit by the writers of a hit song recorded by Australian country music star Jasmine Rae.

The song The Rest of Our Life, which Sheeran co-wrote for US country artists Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, is accused of being an almost note for note copy of the song When I Found You, written by Sydney songwriters Sean Carey and Beau Golden.

Carey and Golden filed a lawsuit in New York last week accusing Sheeran and his co-writers of wilful copyright infringement, according to the Hollywood Reporter, and say the copying... is obvious to the ordinary observer.

They are being represented by Richard Busch, who won the major case which saw Marvin Gayes family win $5.3m against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, over similarities between their song Blurred Lines and Gayes song Got to Give It Up. Busch also led the $20m suit against Sheerans song Photograph, which was settled out of court.

The Rest Of Our Life was an international hit for McGraw and Hill in 2017. Sheerans co-writers Johnny McDaid, Steve Mac and Amy Wadge are also named in the suit, along with several publishers, which is seeking $5m in damages along with an injunction for the song to be permanently blocked.

The complaint says that during a studio writing session, Rae, who is named as a co-writer on When I Found You but is not named amongst the plaintiffs, mentioned a fan had tweeted at her about the similarities between the two songs. It goes on to note that Sheeran was touring extensively in Australia when Raes song was enjoying success on Australian radio stations.

The reason for Raes absence from the suit is, according to Carey and Golden, because her boyfriend  a marketing manager for Sony Music who was involved in promoting Sheerans The Rest of Our Life in Australia  was aware of similarities between the songs for more than two months before its release.

McGraw, Hill and Sheeran are yet to comment on the suit. Along with lawsuits over The Rest of Our Life and Photograph, Sheeran has been criticised in the past for apparent similarities between his song Shape of You and Sias hit Cheap Thrills, as well as Tracy Chapmans 1988 track Mountain O Things.

In March 2017, he quietly added credits for the writers of TLCs 1999 hit No Scrubs to Shape of You, which broke several records in sales and streaming.
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With winter comes the threat of flu - but this season the UK is at risk of contracting a new strain, the Australian flu.

Aussie flu is a particularly severe strain and has caused one of the worst epidemics in Australia. Now there are fears the Aussie flu is to blame for a tough bout of winter flu here in the UK, with deaths linked to the flu already reported in Ireland.

Here is what you need to know about strain H3N2.

This particular strain is an Influenza A virus, the most common type of flu. It can affect all people but has the potential to be deadly in the elderly, as well as any with pre-existing health conditions.

For most people, contracting the Aussie flu should only result in a week of illness.

If you do contract the Aussie flu, the NHS suggests plenty of bed rest, staying hydrated, and using Ibuprofen for any aches or pains. You should also stay home from work until you have recovered, as the flu is particularly contagious - you should be able to return within a week.

The Symptoms:

The symptoms of Aussie flu are similar to most flu symptoms but can be more severe. According to the NHS, these include:

A sudden fever - a temperature of 38C or above

Aching body

Feeling tired or exhausted

A dry cough

A sore throat

A headache

Difficulty sleeping

Loss of appetite

Diarrhea or stomach pain

Nausea

Prevention:

The flu jab - although the jab may not prevent this specific strain, it will protect you from other flu strains. It is also thought that getting the flu jab will lessen the severity of the flu if you do catch it.

Wash your hands, especially before eating, and avoid contact with people you know are infected. Use tissues.

Who is at risk:

Unfortunately, all people can catch the flu and you are more likely to spread the flu within the first five days.

However, high-risk groups include pregnant women, elderly, young children, and those who weakened immune systems.

Children are particularly susceptible to the flu and are also known to spread it more easily due to hygiene.

When to contact your doctor:

If you begin to have difficulty breathing, sudden chest pains, or begin to cough up blood.

If your symptoms dont improve after seven days

If youre over 65, pregnant, or in a high-risk group.
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From forgetfulness to poor decision-making and a lack of concentration, pregnant women have long complained of so-called baby brain but until now it has been dismissed by many as nothing more than an old wives tale.

However, according to a new study baby brain is a very real phenomenon.

Published in the Medical Journal of Australia, researchers from Deakin University examined the cognitive function of 709 pregnant women and 521 non-pregnant women in what is considered to be the first study of its kind.

Each woman was tested with a series of tasks including a digit span test where they were asked to memorise numbers in a line.

Unpredictably, the results found that compared to non-pregnant women, expectant mothers performed worse on tasks measuring attention, decision-making, planning and memory.

In addition, the scientists also said that baby brain affects women differently at various points of their pregnancy. While the decline appeared to start during the first trimester, it then stabilised from the middle to the end of the pregnancy.

That being said, its important to note that while the pregnant women didnt do brilliantly in the tests, they were still performing well within the normal range.

As such, while some women might not feel as sharp as usual during pregnancy, it is thought that these effects are unlikely to have a dramatic impact on everyday life.

The positive birth movement Show all 5 1 /5 The positive birth movement The positive birth movement Nahomie Hann from Canada had a "traumatic" first birth Epanouie Within by Nahomie Hann Photography The positive birth movement Hann advises parents-to-be: "Reach out. Talk. Listen. Educate yourself." Epanouie Within by Nahomie Hann Photography The positive birth movement Epanouie Within by Nahomie Hann Photography The positive birth movement "I remember a lot of people feeling the need to tell me about stitches, tearing and episiotomies. This was my biggest fear both times while pregnant and it made me so anxious," says Megan Porter who lives in Falkirk. The positive birth movement Megan has two children a three-year-old and a two-week-old.

Though it may have been confirmed as a real thing, the researchers do admit that there is a way to go before determining exactly why women experience baby brain, and just how long it lasts for after giving birth.

"An intriguing study published last year showed there were reductions in grey matter in the brains of pregnant women in regions known to be closely tied to processing social information, such as decoding infant facial expressions and establishing healthy bonding between mum and baby," Sasha Davies, one of the studys authors wrote in The Conversation.

Recommended Mummy blogger writes powerful message to expecting mothers

"This presents a compelling idea that 'baby brain' is actually an important adaptive phenomenon that might help women prepare for raising their children by allowing their brains to adapt to their new role as mothers."

Moreover, the same study showed that this loss of grey matter was restored two years after the birth of the child.
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Burberry is the first British brand to drop fashion photographer Mario Testino in light of sexual harassment allegations.

The 63-year-old photographer has worked with Burberry for more than 15 years on a number of high profile campaigns, including ones starring Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne.

However, after 13 male models and assistants accused the Peru-born photographer of molestation and masturbating in front of them in a New York Times article, the prestigious fashion house has vowed to stop working with him for the foreseeable future.

Recommended Mario Testino and Bruce Weber accused of sexual misconduct

In a statement, Burberry has said they employ a zero-tolerance policy against any form of harassment, abuse or discrimination and will not be working with Testino in light of the claims made against him.

Rumours regarding Testinos behaviour have been circling for months, so much so that some speculate its the reason why the royal photographer was not chosen to shoot the engagement portraits for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, after he took them for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2014.

Testino was formerly a favourite photographer of the royal family, having taken a series of iconic images of the late Princess Diana months before her death.

Acclaimed American fashion photographer Bruce Weber, 71, was also named in the New York Times report as an alleged sexual harasser, and several US brands have banned both photographers from shooting their ad campaigns in the future.

Recommended Terry Richardson barred from working with Vogue

In addition to Michael Kors and Stuart Weitzman, a statement released by Conde Nast said they will not be commissioning any work with either of the two men for now.

Titles managed by the leading publishing house include Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair and W.

While Testinos team have yet to release an official statement on the claims, a statement from Weber released by his lawyer reads:

Im completely shocked and saddened by the outrageous claims being made against me, which I absolutely deny. I have used common breathing exercises and professionally photographed thousands of nude models over my career, but never touched anyone inappropriately.

Given my lifes work, these twisted and untrue allegations are truly disheartening. Ive been taking pictures for over 40 years and have the utmost respect for everyone Ive ever photographed. I would never, ever, try to hurt anyone or prevent someone from succeeding  its just not in my character.
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Cryptocurrencies across the market are plunging amid new fears that trading them could be banned.

The drop comes amid suggestions that South Korea could ban trading in cryptocurrencies entirely, or at the very least impose sweeping new regulation on the market. South Korea has become hugely invested in bitcoin, with trading becoming mainstream and helping propel the until now rocketing price of the cryptocurrency.

The new fall is affecting every cryptocurrencies  bitcoin has dropped by more than 15 per cent, and is the best performing among its competitors . But it's not the first time that South Korea has suggested it will ban cryptocurrencies, and it's not the first time that saying so has led to wild volatility in the price of bitcoin and others.

:: The Independents bitcoin group is the place for the best headlines and discussion of all cryptocurrencies. Like it here for the latest on how people are making money  and losing it

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

Last week, a government minister suggested that the country ban trading in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. That suggestion was quickly revoked, with officials saying that less extreme regulation was likely.

But South Korea's most powerful financial policymakers has now said that a complete crackdown is still possible, and that new regulations like the use of real names will probably arrive soon.

Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon said in an interview with local radio station TBS that banning trading in digital currencies was "a live option." He said the decision was subject to a thorough government review.

Recommended Cryptocurrencies including bitcoin fall quickly amid new regulation

"There are no disagreements over regulating speculation," such as using real-name accounts and levying taxes on crypto currency trading, Kim said. Shutting down digital currency exchanges is "a live option but government ministries need to very seriously review it," he said.

Bitcoin was trading at $12,615.60, down 7.1 percent from the day before as of 8:03 a.m. GMT, according to Coindesk. The price of ethereum, another digital currency, had slipped 7.8 percent to $1,190.45 as of 8:04 a.m. GMT.

South Korean officials' remarks have swayed the global markets for bitcoin and other crypto currencies in the past few weeks. The country has seen a huge bitcoin craze, with young and old betting on the crypto currency to build wealth. The high demand from South Korean investors has created what investors call a "kimchi premium," the extra price the South Koreans have to pay to buy digital currencies, sold in South Korea at higher than the average global prices.

Last week, the justice minister's remark that the country will ban bitcoin and other digital currencies triggered big sell-offs and a public outcry. The presidential office then said that no final decision had been made.

An online petition on the presidential office's website has drawn more than 210,000 requests from people asking the government not to ban trading in digital currencies.

"We the citizens were able to have a happy dream that we had never had in South Korea thanks to crypto currency," the petition reads. "You may think you are protecting the public but we citizens think that the government is stealing our dream."

Additional reporting by Associated Press

Weve teamed up with cryptocurrency trading platform eToro. Click here to get the latest Bitcoin rates and start trading. Cryptocurrencies are a highly volatile unregulated investment product. No EU investor protection. 75% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs.
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Cryptocurrencies across the market are in the middle of a huge crash.

All cryptocurrencies are falling amid a major selloff. Most have fallen more than 10 per cent over the morning, and the price of bitcoin has dropped below $12,000.

Just days ago, bitcoin was marching towards $20,000. But just today it has fallen more than 10 per cent  taking it down almost 40 per cent over the last month, but still having risen more than 1,300 per cent over the year.

:: The Independents bitcoin group is the place for the best headlines and discussion of all cryptocurrencies. Like it here for the latest on how people are making money  and losing it

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

Bitcoin is the best performing of the various cryptocurrencies over the morning.

Ripple, the third largest cryptocurrency, had dropped by as much as 25 per cent amid major volatility. Ethereum fell by more than 15 per cent.

The price of cryptocurrencies tends to fluctuate wildly, and far more quickly than other more traditional assets and currencies. But the plunge on Tuesday morning is extreme even in that market.

The drop came amid increasing suggestions in South Korea that officials might look to impose new regulations on the currency. Finance minister Kim Dong-yeon suggested that the country might ban trading in the currencies entirely, pending a government review.

The government has said that the plans are only a suggestion and that more talks are needed. But another government minister said that trading could be banned last week, triggering another instant sell-off, and the plans have already led 200,000 people to petition the government asking to keep bitcoin trading legal.

Weve teamed up with cryptocurrency trading platform eToro. Click here to get the latest Bitcoin rates and start trading. Cryptocurrencies are a highly volatile unregulated investment product. No EU investor protection. 75% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs.
Bitcoin approached its 2022 price high on 28 March following a crypto market surge (Getty Images)

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After a meteoric rise throughout the month of March, BTC saw a slight correction ahead of the Bitcoin 2022 conference geting underway in Miami.

The worlds most valuable cryptocurrency is enjoying a rare moment of stability but could be boosted by any major positive news coming out of the worlds largest bitcoin conference.

Other leading cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum (ETH), Binance Coin (BNB) and Ripple (XRP), have all mirrored bitcoins movements, however dogecoin has seen big gains in recent days.

The crypto market calm could be about to come to an end, according to some analysts, who anticipate big moves from announcements coming out of Bitcoin 2022.

The Miami event is the same one that El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced last year that his country would be adopting BTC as a legal form of tender.

You can follow all the latest news and updates in our live blog below.
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More than 1,000 people face preliminary charges of sharing child abuse images in Denmark, in a major case.

Police say that the huge number of people have shared the material, which shows two 15-year-olds having sex. The videos being shared over Facebook Messenger could constitute distribution of child pornography, investigators warned  but the people doing it might not even realise they committed a crime.

Most of the people being charged with the crime are teenagers. And 15 is the age of consent in Denmark, but the material is still illegal.

For now, 1,004 people are facing preliminary charges, which could eventually lead to formal proceedings. But more may come under the investigation, if it is broadened out to include not only people who shared the video but also those who requested it to be sent.

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

Kjaerside said "young people know it can have huge consequences" to share such material, although he acknowledged they may not know it is a crime.

The case dubbed "Umbrella" was "very large and complex," said Lau Thygesen, another police investigator. The spreading of such material "must be stopped."

So far 1,004 people across Denmark face preliminary charges  a step short of formal charges. If found guilty, they face fines, jail or they can be banned from working with children for a decade. Police said it could also mean "problems" when it comes to entering the United States.

Kjaerside declined to give details about the couple saying they are "victims who have been filmed."

Talking about those who distributed the material, he added, "this is serious and it can have great consequences far into the future."

"People who send this around should ask themselves is this morally acceptable," he told the AP.

Made in 2015, the videos and photo had earlier circulated online, Kjaerside said. Last fall, they were shared through Facebook's Messengerchat platform, after which the social media informed U.S. authorities, which tipped off Denmark via Europol.

"We have picked 10 cases that we would like to test before the city courts," Kjaerside said. "With a little luck we may have it before city courts in a couple of months."

Additional reporting by Associated Press
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Bitcoins price dropped dramatically this morning, but the situation looks even worse for anyone who has invested in alternative cryptocurrencies.

At the time of publication, all of the other top 20 digital currencies by market capitalisation have plummeted further than bitcoin over the past 24 hours.

In fact, all of the top 100 digital currencies have seen their prices fall significantly since yesterday, according to CoinMarketCap.

:: The Independents bitcoin group is the place for the best headlines and discussion of all cryptocurrencies. Like it here for the latest on how people are making money  and losing it

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

While bitcoin is down 14.47 per cent, ethereum has slumped by 21.24 per cent and Ripple XRP is down by 28.76 per cent over the past 24 hours.

Bitcoin Cash and Cardano, the fourth and fifth biggest digital currencies by market capitalisation, have fallen by 22.5 per cent and 27.52 per cent, respectively.

Dentacoin and Binance Coin are two of the worst affected digital currencies in the top 100, having slipped by 49.05 per cent and 44.09 per cent over the past 24 hours.

Digital currencies are notoriously volatile, but this decline has been particularly noteworthy because so many bitcoin alternatives have been simultaneously affected.

Theyve all plummeted amid new fears that trading them could be banned.

Recommended Why South Korean regulation is killing bitcoin

South Korea is weighing up a total ban on trading in cryptocurrencies, and at the very least it could impose sweeping new regulation on the market.

There are no disagreements over regulating speculation, such as using real-name accounts and levying taxes on cryptocurrency trading, Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon said this week.

Shutting down digital currency exchanges is a live option but government ministries need to very seriously review it.

Weve teamed up with cryptocurrency trading platform eToro. Click here to get the latest Bitcoin rates and start trading. Cryptocurrencies are a highly volatile unregulated investment product. No EU investor protection. 75% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs.
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Public health experts are urging parents to immunise their children against measles as the potentially deadly bug has now spread to five regions in England.

With more than 100 cases confirmed, Public Health England warns that the UK could be on the verge of an outbreak due to a rise in cases across Europe.

People who have recently visited Romania, Italy and Germany and have not been fully immunised against measles via the MMR vaccine may be most at risk, they said.

This serves as an important reminder for parents to take up the offer of MMR vaccination for their children at one year of age and as a pre-school booster at three years and four months of age, explained Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at Public Health England.

Children and young adults who missed out on their MMR vaccine in the past or are unsure if they had two doses should contact their GP practice to catch-up.

While the outbreak was first reported in November as spreading through Leeds and Liverpool, there are now confirmed cases in Sussex, West Midlands, Surrey, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and West Yorkshire.

However, not all cases are being spread by those who have visited countries included in the European outbreak, a spokesperson for Public Health England told The Independent.

"We know that measles cases are showing a link to importation from Europe where there are ongoing outbreaks, but the cases are also spreading within the UK in under-vaccinated communities," they explained.

The highly contagious viral illness can be easily prevented by the MMR vaccination, which also protects against mumps and rubella, and is typically offered in two doses.

The first dose can be administered to babies when they are one year old and health experts stress the importance of getting the second dose in order to complete the immunisation - this is typically administered to babies before they start school.

Recommended Women more likely to survive famine and disease epidemics

While anyone can contract the disease if they havent been fully vaccinated, measles is most common in young children.

If there are no complications, the illness will normally clear in seven to 10 days with over-the-counter medication and plenty of rest.

According to the NHS, initial symptoms can include aches and pains, a fever and a runny nose. The most distinctive symptom, however, is a red-brown rash that usually appears on the neck before spreading.

If you experience any of these symptoms and you have not had the MMR vaccination experts strongly advise making a visit your GP.
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A teen with cystic acne has shared a powerful message about overcoming your insecurities and embracing your beauty to inspire others struggling with similar issues.

Hailey Wait is a 17-year-old from Colorado.

She regular shares makeup-free selfies on her social media channels to encourage others to accept themselves and feel comfortable in their own skin.

Wait has struggled with acne ever since she was in her early teens.

After years of trying to cover up her spots with makeup every time she left the house, Wait finally decided to stop hiding under her foundation.

As a result, shes since come out of her shell and her confidence levels have soared.

Wait was bullied at school by kids who made fun of her acne. However, she doesnt let the haters crush her spirit, tweeting: Reminder that acne doesnt make you ugly, a heart full of hate does.

Kyla Hermelyn, a 19-year-old student, responded to the cruel comments one of Waits posts received from people who described her acne as ugly and gross.

As someone with awful cystic acne, I have tried everything," she wrote.

Im so sick of hearing people call those with acne ugly and dirty.

She continued, saying: I wish I had enough confidence as @pigssart [Hailey Wait] to show more people and embrace my skin because acne doesnt make us any less beautiful.

According to the British Skin Foundation, acne affects eight out of ten people aged between 11 and 30 in the UK.

Acne can heavily influence a persons mental health.

In 2006, a study of secondary school students in New Zealand concluded that those suffering from acne were more likely to experience symptoms of depression.

More adults are starting to seek help for their acne, with 88 per cent of skincare specialists noting an increase in the number of adults asking for advice, according to WhatClinic.
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Whether its written in the sky or the ring is hidden in the chocolate souffle or the champagne flute, marriage proposals are fraught with cliches, making the art of popping the question quite the creative exercise.

It should come as no surprise that some people like to think outside of the box when it comes to proposing to your loved one, which is exactly what Rui Long did, whose unique proposal story has gone viral on twitter.

The acclaimed statistician from China tactically hid his proposal to partner Panpan Mao in one of his research papers.

While the paper itself was far from romantic in terms of content (the title was Performance analysis for minimally nonlinear irreversible refrigerators at finite cooling power), it was a hidden message in the acknowledgements that bolstered its tenderness.

In the acknowledgement notes, the paper reads: Rui Long wants to thank, in particular, the patience, care and support from Panpan Mao over the passed years. Will you marry me?

A screenshot of the message had been widely shared online after it was tweeted out by Imperial College London researcher Jess Wade, who said: Romance is not dead, its just behind a paywall, in reference to the papers subscription-only access.

Her tweet has since has had more than 1,000 likes and 500 retweets, with followers praising the young researcher for his creativity.

Long is a PHD student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, where he studies engineering.

Thankfully, after his masterful planning, Long has since revealed that his story had a happy ending as Mao said yes to his innovative proposal and the duo are due to marry, reports the Times Higher Education.
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The temperature in the worlds coldest village reached near-record lows, so much so that their digital thermometer broke as a result.

Oymyakon is a village in the Russian region of Yakutia.

Its named after the Oymyakon River, which literally translates to mean: unfrozen patch of water; place where fish spend the winter.

The digital thermometer in the village was installed last year to appeal to tourists.

However, as temperatures dwindled to -62C, the thermometer broke down because it was too cold.

The coldest temperature ever recorded in a permanently inhabited area was -68C in Oymyakon in 1933.

The freezing conditions of Antarctica reached a new low in 2013 when NASA announced a record temperature of -94.7C based on analysed satellite data.

Around 500 people live in the village of Oymyakon and they havent been letting the frost stop them from going about their lives as normal.

Anastasia Gruzdeva, a 24-year-old woman from Yakutsk in Russia, posted a selection of photos on Instagram showing her and her friends with frozen eyelashes as they braved the harsh outdoors.

Journalist Elena Potoskaya couldnt believe it when she witnessed Chinese tourists going for a splash in nothing more than their underwear.

We the locals, are afraid to go out into the cold even on the street, she wrote in an Instagram caption accompanying the video.

And then Tourists bathe

Petr Chugunov, a photographer from Yakutsk, took a stunning photo of a brave ballerina gracefully performing on the street.

I really did take pictures of the ballerina outside in minus 41, it is not Photoshopped, he told The Siberian Times.

It was my idea, actually it is my project, to photograph ballerinas on the city streets.

A number of people expressed concern for the ballerinas health.

However, Chugunov had a warm coat and valenki (felt boots) on hand for the ballerina to put on the second their photoshoot was over.
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Although everyone is entitled to their own opinions, one chef expertly responded to a customers review criticising the authenticity of her Thai food.

SoThai eatery in Gloucester has plenty of positive reviews on Facebook, where it is rated 4.8/5 - but one patrons unfavourable review on TripAdvisor was enough to convince head chef Thitapha Martin to fire back - and its likely the diner will think twice before posting another review.

The customer wrote on TripAdvisor: I visited this place hoping to finally have a truly authentic and good Thai food in UK.

Recommended Woman who left bad review on TripAdvisor could face legal action

Food was not bad but pretty disappointing, had tasteless tempura prawns and a Pad Kee Mao, my favourite when living in Thai and Sydney where Thai restaurant are great.

The ingredients were pretty right apart from using wrong noodles, but just it missed the deep flavour, the smokiness of the real Thai.

The unhappy customer then proceeded to offend UK citizens and the chef with her next sentence.

She continued: There is a tendency in small UK cities where Thai restaurant jump to the top of the reviews, I believe cause people is both bored to eat fish & chips and never tried good Thai. Having said that the food was not bad, 3 stars not more."

Customer review criticised authenticity of food

Clearly annoyed by the review, Martin took the time to comment on each of the patrons claims.

Responding on TripAdvisor, Martin wrote: I am sorry they did taste as good as the prawns you had in Thailand, fresh from the Pacific ocean and no doubt eaten in beautiful sunshine!

Martin, who was born and raised in Thailand, continued: The noodles are imported from Thailand and I confirm they are the correct noodles for the dish I presented.

I was born & bred in Thailand and all my dishes are cooked as I would cook them at home, with tastes specific to my home region.

The head chef of SoThai fired back at a rude customer

She concluded her post with: You underestimate and insult diners from small UK cities and our own customers' taste & knowledge of Thai food - let me assure you that you do not need to have lived in Sydney to recognise and appreciate authentic Thai cuisine!

Despite the negative review, SoThai still has four and a half stars on TripAdvisor and over 500 reviews.
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Airbus chief executive Tom Enders slammed Brexit and US President Donald Trumps pro-America trade policies as presenting twin threats to its business, while singling out the UKs vote to leave the European Union as posing the bigger issue.

The developments amount to a double whammy of protectionist hazards, Enders said in London at the annual dinner of the ADS trade association, which represents more than 1,000 aerospace, defence, security and space companies.

Brexit will weaken British industry and aerospace manufacturing in particular by increasing costs and curtailing competitiveness, the chief executive said late on Monday. While Airbus will seek to mitigate the impact on its business, whatever we can do, the net result Im afraid will be negative, he said.

The Toulouse, France-based company has 25 sites in the UK, including its main wing design and production facilities, while the wider supply chain extends to 672 sites and more than 5,000 links or relations in commercial aviation alone, Enders said.

Though Airbus should be protected from tariffs by an exemption granted to aerospace under World Trade Organisation rules, it desperately requires clarity in areas such as future customs procedures and the movement of employees, according to the executive, who said employees make 80,000 business trips a year between the UK and other EU states.

Ruthless Boeing

Under Trump, the US is no longer fighting for opening markets but to close the US market to foreign companies and foreign competitors, with arch-rival Boeing a direct beneficiary, Mr Enders said.

Boeing is ruthlessly surfing on this America-first wave, he said, citing the import duties imposed on the C Series jet built by Montreal-based Bombardier following complaints from the US company that the model had benefited from illegal state aid.

Labelling the levy to be imposed on US carriers that buy the Canadian plane  in which Airbus has acquired a controlling stake  as predatory and bullying, Enders said that the move may bring short-term success but will ultimately be self-defeating, adding: You dont attack customers.

Still, the wreckage that President Trump will leave after four or eight years in the White House might be easier to repair than the UK exit from the European Union, he said.

Airbus has revealed that it secured 1,109 jet orders last year, 52 per cent more than in 2016, marking its sixth straight annual sales victory over Boeing. Chief executive officer Fabrice Bregier said the trend means the European company should overhaul its competitors lead in aircraft deliveries by 2020.

Bloomberg
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Ireland could be a base for UK businesses worried about selling products and services to the EU after Brexit, the Irish financial services minister said on Monday.

"We're saying to people, if there are difficulties, Ireland can be part of the solution for passporting, said Michael DArcy, minister of state for financial services and insurance.

He told CNBC that Ireland could offer a very good solution for companies who potentially may have a difficulty selling goods and services to the single market.

We are a pro-business country, said Mr DArcy. We are non-protectionist.

Passporting rights currently allow UK businesses, in particular financial services firms, to do business with all countries in the EU.

In November, the EUs chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said that the UK will lose its passporting rights when it leaves the single market.

On financial services, UK voices suggest that Brexit does not mean Brexit. Brexit means Brexit, everywhere, said Mr Barnier.

Around 5,500 finance firms in the UK currently have EU passporting rights, with the industry exporting 27bn of services to the single market in 2016, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Brexit has also cast doubt over how many City jobs will remain in the capital. Recruiter Morgan McKinley in a report published last Wednesday said that Londons financial services industry had suffered an alarming drop in vacancies in December, with firms holding back on hiring plans because of Brexit.
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For a third consecutive year London has been named Europes most expensive city in which to rent, despite Brexit causing uncertainty about the future of the financial hub.

In a report published on Wednesday, analytics firm ECA International found that rent in London is currently almost 3,700 higher than the average monthly cost of renting across Europe.

An unfurnished mid-market three-bedroom apartment in prime areas of London costs around 5,398 a month, ECA found, also making rent in the capital almost four times higher than the average rent in other major UK cities.

Alec Smith, accommodation services manager at ECA, said that in recent months the biggest rent increases in the UK had been in Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow, due to high demand. He said that in Aberdeen, the downturn in the oil and gas industry had sent rents sliding.

He pointed out that in London there is still a large amount of uncertainty in the financial sector in light of the Brexit vote, but that this doesnt appear to be deterring renters in swathes.

It remains to be seen whether financial regulation in the City is likely to change much post-Brexit. Changes to stamp duty in 2016 led to a rush from landlords to purchase buy-to-let properties, which increased the supply of rental accommodation across prime areas of London. This increased competition among landlords contributed to the modest falls in average rent in the UKs capital, although it is still the most expensive in Europe, he said.

ECA found Moscow to be the second most expensive European city to rent in, followed by Zurich, Geneva, Istanbul, Kiev, Paris, Amsterdam and Dublin.

Globally, Hong Kong tops the ranking, with the cost of monthly rent for an unfurnished mid-market,three-bedroom apartment in prime locations averaging about $10,461, or about 7,586. ECA attributed Hong Kongs sky-high prices to high population density and a consistently limited supply of property.
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For centuries black rats have borne the brunt of the blame for the spread of the Black Death, which killed 25 million people across Europe during the first deadly pandemic in the mid-14th Century.

The plague was thought to have been largely transmitted by infected fleas living on rats, which would then bite humans. In total it is thought the disease has killed between 75  200 million people.

But has rattus rattus been unfairly accused of transferring the deadly bacteria?

Computer modelling carried out by a research team from the universities of Oslo and Ferrara suggests the first outbreak may not have been down to the rats, but instead can be largely ascribed to human fleas and body lice.

Using mortality data from nine outbreaks of the plague in Europe between the 14th and 19th centuries, the researchers plotted how the disease would likely spread by different means.

Seven out of the nine models indicated that transmission by human fleas and lice was the most likely cause of the diseases spread, when compared to transfer by rats fleas, or airborne transmission.

In the paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the researchers said: While it is commonly assumed that rats and their fleas spread plague during the Second Pandemic, there is little historical and archaeological support for such a claim.

Here, we show that human ectoparasites, like body lice and human fleas, might be more likely than rats to have caused the rapidly developing epidemics in pre-Industrial Europe.

Speaking to the BBC, Profssor Nils Stenseth, from the University of Oslo said: We have good mortality data from outbreaks in nine cities in Europe.

So we could construct models of the disease dynamics [there].

He added: The conclusion was very clear. The lice model fits best.

It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats.

It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats, rather than being spread from person to person.

Bubonic plague  believed to be the form of plague responsible for the Black Death  initially causes flu-like symptoms, and also causes lymph glands to swell up into painful buboes, often in the armpits, groin and neck.

People infected with plague require rapid treatment with antibiotics.

According to the World Health Organisation from 2010 to 2015 there were 3,248 cases reported worldwide, including 584 deaths.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. 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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. 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Currently, the three most endemic countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, and Peru.
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Two men accused of stabbing a gifted young model to death in London have appeared in court charged with murder.

George Koh, 24, and Jonathan Okigbo, 23, are alleged to have attacked 25 year-old Harry Uzoka outside a block of flats in Shepherd's Bush.

Mr Uzoka was signed to Premier Model Management, the same modelling agency that helped launch the careers of models Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford and was described on social media as an icon for black boys in the UK

He was the fourth person to be stabbed to death in the capital this year.

Koh, of York Way, Camden, and Okigbo, of Trevithick House, Kentish Town, appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Tuesday.

The pair, who wore grey jumpers and jogging bottoms, spoke only to confirm their names, dates of birth and addresses.

Koh has also been charged with the possession of an offensive weapon.

They were remanded in custody and will appear at the Old Bailey on Thursday.

Scotland Yard detectives believe Mr Uzoka was attacked outside Ollgar House in Ollgar Close shortly before 4pm on Thursday 11 January.

He collapsed in nearby Old Oak Road and was pronounced dead at the scene at 5pm despite the efforts of Air Ambulance doctors.

A 27 year-old man has been released under investigation while the police enquiry continues and a 28 year-old man has been released with no further action.

In an earlier appeal for information Detective Inspector Beverley Kofi said: 'This is another tragic murder with a young male victim who has met a violent death.

'We need to public's help to piece together what happened - who the victim was seen with, the incident itself and the immediate aftermath.'

Mr Uzoka, who had modelled for Mercedes and Zara and recently appeared in GQ, has been hailed online as a charming and inspirational individual who lit up a room.

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Model Jourdan Dunn posted a photo of Mr Uzoka on Twitter, with the caption: Rest in Paradise Young King.

A spokesman for Premier Model Management said their thoughts are with the Uzoka family.

Online clothing retailer Everlane tweeted: We're deeply saddened to hear about Harry Uzoka's passing. He was a wonderful model but even more so a good person and a pleasure to work with. There's so much more behind the person you've seen in our campaigns. Thank you, Harry, for being such a great person. Rest in peace.
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The head of the Parole Board has hit out at political interference in its decision-making as the Government seeks legal advice on keeping John Worboys behind bars.

Professor Nick Hardwick, chair of the Parole Board, said almost 400 pages of evidence were considered by the panel that decided to release the black cab rapist.

He said the serial sex attacker was questioned in detail by three officials, adding: The Parole Board itself has acted in accordance with the law and the evidence.

But questions remain over how Worboys risk was assessed after it emerged that the same body prevented him from being moved from a high-security jail to an open prison in 2015.

A written hearing was automatically triggered when the prisoner passed his eight-year minimum sentence but the transfer was immediately rejected for reasons that cannot be disclosed under current rules, a source told The Independent.

Widespread outrage greeted the announcement that Worboys was deemed eligible for release after serving just nine years of an indefinite prison sentence for public protection.

At the weekend, ministers pledged to do everything possible to ensure Worboys stays behind bars while it emerged the new Justice Secretary was considering taking the highly unusual step of seeking a judicial review.

John Worboys was found guilty in 2009 of raping or sexually assaulting 12 women  but police say he could have attacked at least 100 (PA)

Revelations that some of Worboys victims had not been informed of his release, 93 of his alleged crimes were never charged and the Parole Board could not give the reasons for its decision have sparked calls for wide-ranging reforms.

Mr Hardwick said he supported radical reforms of its transparency and other processes but not direct interference in decision-making.

We should be open to legal challenge but it is right we resist political interference in our decisions, he added.

Wanted The offenders released by the Parole Board who went on to commit further offences Brett Lill : Jailed in 2006 for causing grievous bodily harm with intent, he had 73 previous convictions including many for violence. Before being imprisoned he managed to escape York Crown Court by leaping from the dock and going on the run for 15 months. He was released on licence in June and is now wanted for breaching his licence.

: Jailed in 2006 for causing grievous bodily harm with intent, he had 73 previous convictions including many for violence. Before being imprisoned he managed to escape York Crown Court by leaping from the dock and going on the run for 15 months. He was released on licence in June and is now wanted for breaching his licence. Duane Edwards : The armed robber and gang member was released early from prison sentence for violent offences and is now wanted for breaching the terms of his licence by Greater Manchester Police.

: The armed robber and gang member was released early from prison sentence for violent offences and is now wanted for breaching the terms of his licence by Greater Manchester Police. Paul Redford: Also known as Paul Stevens, he is wanted by police in Yorkshire and London for thefts committed after he was released on licence, having served a burglary sentence. He previously had to be rescued after attempting to escape to France in a kayak.

Like any court, the Parole Board members must make independent decisions in accordance with the law and on the basis of evidence.

It would be a bad day for us all if peoples rightful abhorrence of Worboys crimes or even justified concern about a Parole Board decision allowed these basic principles of justice to be overturned.

Prof Hardwick, who formerly served at HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, said it would welcome a judicial review into the Worboys case instigated by David Gauke and a separate review of the closed and secretive system that was previously announced by the Government.

Emphasising that the Parole Boards does not have the power to re-assess sentences, he said it must make decisions based on the risk a prisoner presents, how they have changed and the plans to monitor and rehabilitate them after release.

The benchmark set is that it is no longer necessary for the protection of the public that they should be detained  a claim that has not convinced victims of Worboys who say they are living in fear.

Lawyers acting for the 12 victims he was convicted of sexually assaulting, including one woman who was raped, and 93 other complainants whose cases never reached court have called on him to be banned from London.

The black cab used by John Worboys (PA)

Prof Hardwick said public concern over the Worboys case was completely understandable but less than 1 per cent of released prisoners reviewed by the Parole Board commit a serious further offence.

I share the concerns that victims say they were not kept informed or consulted about licence conditions, he added, saying communication was the responsibility of the Victim Contact Service.

The Parole Board sought and received assurance on a number of occasions that victims who wanted to make a victim statement had the opportunity to do so and were informed about the outcome of the hearing.

Recommended Failing privatisation of probation services putting public at risk

There are very serious allegations that some victims who should have been kept informed were not and victims and the public deserve to know exactly what happened.

He called for an independent investigation into the failure to allow some of Worboys victims to make representations to the panel and said the National Probation Service (NPS) must ensure the women have a say on his licence conditions.

The NPS will be responsible for monitoring and rehabilitating Worboys following his release but a report released last week warned of weaknesses in the service in London.

The most dangerous convicts, including murderers and sex offenders, are released into probation hostels, where The Independent revealed some jobs guarding offenders are being handed to private companies.

A previous report by HM Inspectorate of Probation warned that the Governments partial privatisation of the service in 2014 was putting the public at risk, with private firms failing to properly assess the risk of harm in half of cases, while supervising thousands of convicts with phone calls every six weeks.

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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

London became Worboys hunting ground as he used his cab to pick up female passengers, ply them with spiked champagne by claiming he was celebrating a lottery win and assault them.

Police linked him with 83 crimes committed between 2006 and 2008 but more women came forward in light of the court case, pushing the potential number of victims over 100.

Lawyers representing 93 women whose allegations did not reach court called for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to reassess the cases.

In a letter sent last week, Richard Scorer and Harriet Wistrich claimed victims had been told Worboys would not be coming out for a long time and so a fresh trial was not necessary.

To the extent that this was the CPSs expectation at the time, this has clearly not happened and this justification for not bringing further prosecutions has fallen away, they added.

The CPS said the cases that were not prosecuted at the 2009 trial did not pass the evidential test needed for a realistic prospect of conviction.

Another 19 allegations that emerged following Worboys conviction were not prosecuted after consultation between the CPS and Metropolitan Police, and there are no cases currently live.

Scotland Yard said it had no new information to send to prosecutors, who confirmed they have no plans to review 93 allegations that were not charged.

If cases did not pass the evidential test there would have to be new evidence available that altered that assessment before they could be prosecuted, the CPS said.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said:The Secretary of State has commissioned advice on the possibility of a Judicial Review and will consider this carefully when it is received  he is minded only to proceed if there is a reasonable prospect of success.

He told Parliament just last week that he is absolutely clear the Parole Board should remain an independent body.


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A US Army dog that attacked a machine-gun nest during the Second World War has been posthumously awarded Britain's highest honour for animal bravery.

Chips, a German shepherd-husky cross, was awarded the Dickin Medal for actions during a 1943 beach landing in Sicily.

According to the soldiers, Chips raced into an Italian machine-gun nest, attacking an enemy soldier and pulling the gun from its mount.

The medal was awarded by veterinary charity PDSA in a ceremony Monday at the Churchill War Rooms in London.

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The honour was accepted by 76-year-old John Wren of Long Island, whose father donated Chips to the war effort.

PDSA director-general Jan McLoughlin said Chips could take his place in the history books as one of the most heroic dogs to serve with the US Army.

AP
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Britain could still change its mind about Brexit at this late stage and return to be a member of the European Union, the two highest officials in the European Union have said.

Speaking at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, European Council president Donald Tusk said that Europeans hearts are still open to our British friends to remain in the bloc.

If the UK government sticks to its decision to leave, Brexit will become a reality, with all its negative consequences in March next year, unless there is a change of heart among our British friends, he told MEPs.

Recommended EU will demand veto over UK trade deals for two years after Brexit

Quoting the Brexit Secretary, he added: Wasnt it David Davis himself who said if a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy? We here on the continent havent had a change of heart  our hearts are still open to you.

He was immediately backed up by Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission.

President Tusk also made some comments on Brexit, he said that our door remains open. I hope that will be heard clearly in London, Mr Juncker added.

Speaking at the same sitting of the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt, the bodys Brexit chief, added: What we will never allow as a parliament is that at the end you can have a better position, a better status outside the European Union, than inside the European Union.

Brexit coordinator Guy Verhofstadt speaks during a plenary session of the European Parliament (EPA)

Inside the European Union will always be the best solution for every European country and European state.

Commission president Mr Juncker had said last week during a discussion about the EUs Budget that he believed it was still probable that Britain would leave, and that the blocs finances have to be planned accordingly.

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

Mr Tusk has previously suggested Britain could change its mind, but the public statement from Mr Juncker breaks new ground. The Commissions line has long been one of getting on with the Brexit process.

On Monday night a leaked draft of the European Councils instructions to its negotiators obtained by The Independent showed the EU is set to toughen up its conditions on Britain if Brexit goes ahead.

The bloc is set to demand an explicit veto on British trade deals signed with other countries for around two years after Brexit, while EU free movement will be extended until the end of the transition period, with no controls on immigration until 2021.
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An increasing majority of people would back a second European Union referendum if Britain faced crashing out of the bloc without a deal, a new poll claims.

It comes after the national debate over a second referendum came under the spotlight last week when Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, signalled he would support the idea.

While both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have repeatedly dismissed such calls, the new poll by BMG Research found that 57 per cent of those who expressed a view would back a fresh public vote if the UK was set to leave the bloc and resort to World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms, with 43 per cent opposed.

Overall, 42 per cent of people backed a second referendum in a no deal scenario, 32 per cent opposed a second vote and 26 per cent said they did not know.

The poll, for the progressive Left Foot Forward website, found that 74 per cent of Labour supporters who expressed an opinion backed a second vote if the UK faced WTO terms and tariffs.

Recommended Second Brexit referendum debate explodes after Farage wades in

The overall 57 per cent figure is a marginal increase on last month, when 54 per cent backed a second vote if Theresa May fails to strike a deal with Brussels.

Pollsters also found that voters are in the dark when it comes to the main parties positions on EU withdrawal, with just 28 per cent of Labour voters thinking the partys Brexit stance is clear. In contrast, 37 per cent said the partys stance is somewhat or very unclear.

The results will also make uncomfortable reading for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, with just 28 per cent of voters for the former and 26 per cent for the latter knowing the Brexit stance of Ms May and Vince Cables parties.

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

Josiah Mortimer, the editor of Left Foot Forward, said that while Labour has been under fire in recent weeks for a lack of clarity on Brexit it seems the other parties are faring little better, with a majority of those with a view believing the Tories and Lib Dems stance on the issue.

This poll suggests parties need to get their messages straight when it comes to our departure from the EU. Leaders are understandably fudging the issue in the face of negotiations  but sooner or later Labour and the Conservatives will need to be open with the public.

He added: Voters are going to get restless at some point. Its anyones guess where that frustration might go.

Source Note: BMG Research interviewed a representative sample of 1,513 UK adults online between 9 and 12 January. Data are weighted. BMG is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by their rules.
 Close What is Article 50?

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Brexit is firmly back on the agenda today after leaked papers revealed Brussels was hardening its negotiating stance with demands for a veto over future trade deals signed by the UK.

Senior EU officials said Brexit could still be reversed, with European Council president Donald Tusk telling Britain, "Our hearts are still open for you".

Boris Johnson has stirred up anger by returning to his widely discredited claim that leaving the European Union would allow Britain to claw back 350m a week for the NHS.

In a provocative interview, the Foreign Secretary admitted his claim had been wrong - as the true total was much higher at 438m.

The Governments flagship Brexit bill returns to the Commons for its final stages, where opposition MPs will attempt to force the Government to protect devolution and EU regulations after Brexit.

Theresa May also chaired a meeting of her new-look Cabinet this morning, as the fallout from the collapse of construction giant Carillion continues.

Please see the live updates below
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If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy said Abraham Lincoln or Yoda or David Davis or someone like that, and if the British people are ever to change their mind on Brexit, the point at which they are evidently less funny than the Belgians should certainly be that point.

The British sense of humour, was meant to be the last hope to cling to, when were all eating out of bins probably by some point towards the middle of next week. That and the British language.

So when former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, the sort of chap you might ordinarily find hiding in the more eccentric corner of a David Mellor lookalike convention, can stand up in the European Parliament and so easily and so gleefully turn this once great country in to a laughing stock in its own language, something has gone even more wrong than had been previously understood.

Were making it easy for them, to be fair. To stomp out the EU is one thing. For a British Prime Minister to then, eighteen months later, take new widely popular EU regulations, re-badge them with their own Conservatives branding and pump them on to social media as if they were your own doing is quite another. On Saturday, Theresa May proudly claimed on Twitter, Were banning credit card charges. The truth is that the EU is banning credit card charges. What her party is trying to do is make it possible to bring them back.

I see the confusion is a little bit widespread in Britain at the moment, Mr Verhofstadt told a fairly empty room in Brussels. Michael Gove for example has forgotten that the ban on plastic bags is an EU regulation. The Prime Minister, Mrs May, doesnt know, apparently that the abolition of charges on credit cards is a consequence of a directive of the EU.

Over in the corner, David Coburn, the Last Kipper in Scotland, wobbled his jowels in intense disapproval. Come to Brussels and take the piss. That was the plan. Having the piss taken out of me? Whats that about?

It was David Davis, by the way, who said those words: If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.

In his defence, he cannot have known that five years later they would be repeated all around Brussels in hushed reverence. Back then, it was just another lame attack on the automatic transposition of EU directives into national law, not the now go to line for second referendum merchants.

And if a second referendum does happen, here is the question the public should be asked: Have you had enough of being laughed at by the Belgians?

Id be tempted to predict a landslide, but honesltly, who knows anything anymore.


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An influential committee of MPs has criticised the Government for an unacceptable failure to respond to the plight of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

The House of Commons International Development Committee said ministers had not acted quickly enough in sending experts to help prevent sexual violence against the Muslim minority group in Myanmars Rakhine province.

Despite substantial evidence of rape, sexual violence, torture and mutilations being carried out against the Rohingya, the committee said, barely any UK experts have been dispatched to the area.

The UK Governments 2012 Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI), established a group of 73 experts who can be sent to conflict areas around the globe to help prevent sexual violence and bring perpetrators to justice. However, just two of them have been sent to Myanmar and refugee camps in Bangladesh.

Recommended Rohingya Muslims found in mass grave in Myanmar

The UN estimates that more than 650,000 Rohingya have fled into neighbouring Bangladesh since last August, while charities say more than 10,000 people have been killed in the violence.

International observers have accused the Burmese military of carrying out widespread attacks against the civilian Rohingya population. The International Development Committee said rape and sexual violence had been been used continuously in Myanmar as weapons of war.

In a damning report, the MPs said: Given the airplay that the UKs Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative has been given by the Government, we are disappointed that it took so long to send any of its specialist resources on sexual violence to advise on dealing with the experiences of the Rohingya in Rakhine State.

The committees chair, Labour MP Stephen Twigg, added: The UK has 70 experts ready to deploy to Bangladesh to assist with this situation and yet we havent sent them. This flies in the face of the UKs commitment to deter gender-based violence, championed by William Hague in 2012.

It is unacceptable that it is taking the UK so long to send any specialist resources on sexual violence to advise on the experiences of the Rohingya in Rakhine State. Previous reports from our committee (2006 and 2014) reported the high incidence of rape in conflicts in Burma. The UK Government should have expected this and prepared accordingly. As an international community, we should consider what message this conveys to other regimes.

In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea Show all 8 1 /8 In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea Myanmar migrants Rohingya migrants swim to collect food supplies dropped by a Thai army helicopter after they jumped from a boat (R) drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman sea In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea Myanmar migrants Rohingya migrants pass food supplies dropped by a Thai army helicopter to others aboard a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman sea In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea Myanmar migrants A Rohingya migrant eats food dropped by a Thai army helicopter after he jumped to collect the supplies at sea from a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman sea. A boat crammed with scores of Rohingya migrants, including many young children, was found drifting in Thai waters, with passengers saying several people had died over the last few days In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea Myanmar migrants Rohingya migrants stand and sit on a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman sea In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea Myanmar migrants Rohingya migrants stand and sit on a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman sea In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea Myanmar migrants A Rohingya migrant eats food dropped by a Thai army helicopter after he jumped to collect supplies at sea from a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman sea In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea Myanmar migrants Rohingya migrants bring back food supplies dropped by a Thai army helicopter after jumping to collect them at sea from a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman sea In pictures: Burma migrants abandoned at sea Myanmar migrants A Rohingya migrant woman holding a child cries as she stands on a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman sea

The committee also expressed grave concern over plans to repatriate 100,000 Rohingya from Bangladesh to Myanmar without adequate guarantees about their safety.

The MPs said: We are concerned by the emphasis on returning refugees to the Rakhine by the Bangladesh and Burmese government when the situation still seems fraught and very far from safe, dignified and durable.

It is unacceptable to propose that the Rohingya be returned to live in Burmese-run internment camps; inevitably to be faced with further privations, potential abuses and uncertain access for outside agencies; and likely only to be displaced once again if there is further violence.

UK Government ministers have previously called on the Burmese authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into allegations of violence against Rohingya civilians. However, previous such reports have cleared the military of wrongdoing  a conclusion the UK Government called simply not credible.

The International Development Committee criticised the UKs approach, saying: We seriously doubt the efficacy of urging the Burmese authorities to investigate the conduct of its own forces personnel in a thorough and transparent manner.

The Burmese internal inquiry has already cleared its forces of any wrongdoing in a way which the UK Government describes as simply not credible. We urge the UK Government to seek other paths to a resolution of this issue.

 Rohingya Muslims flee violence in Burma

It added: The UK Government should reflect on why so much evidence of discrimination, marginalisation and abuse of the Rohingya people within Rakhine State in Burma was seemingly ignored for so long, rather than translated into effective action by the international community.

We recommend that the UK, and like-minded states, should reflect on how to establish a more proactive approach to atrocity awareness and prevention.

Kate Allen, Amnesty Internationals UK Director, said: MPs are right to express concern about the proposed returns of Rohingya to Myanmar (Burma), we share their alarm.

Amnesty has declared what's happening in Myanmar to be apartheid - both the civilian and military authorities in Myanmar need to dismantle that, before any of its victims can be expected to decide whether to return.

If Rohingya people do choose to go back to Rakhine State where they faced such appalling discrimination and violence, then Amnesty and other monitors must be allowed access.

A Government spokesperson said The UK has led the international response to the Rohingya crisis and this report recognises our swift action. We are providing lifesaving UK aid to victims of ethnic cleansing, calling on the Burmese military to stop the violence and pushing the international community to step up their support.

We have been clear in our condemnation of the terrible atrocities that have occurred in Rakhine State; we have now raised Burma five times at the UN Security Council to keep the international communitys attention focused on this crisis and we continue to engage with the Burmese authorities at the most senior levels to urge the inhumane violence to end.

As the International Development Secretary has said today and when she visited Bangladesh in November, the conditions for a safe, voluntary and dignified return of Rohingya people to Burma are a long way from being met. We continue to push for returns to be in line with UN principles and for international oversight on both sides of the border.
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Investment in wind and solar power has crashed since the Government slashed the help available, new figures show  while much of the world powers ahead.

The dramatic slump  a 56 per cent fall in a single year  sparked an accusation that the Government is failing in its environmental strategy, despite its green veneer.

Ministers were also warned they are in danger of missing their own legally binding carbon reduction targets and that Brexit will make the problem even worse.

The 56 per cent plunge in investment in renewable energy in 2017 marks the second successive year that financing has fallen in the UK.

It follows a ban on subsidies for onshore wind farms and huge cuts to help for solar power, both imposed by David Camerons government.

Meanwhile, the last Budget ruled out any fresh support for renewables before 2025 at the earliest  despite investors pleas that they need a long-term policy framework in order to act.

The decline in the UK was the largest in the world, while the likes of China (up 24 per cent), Spain (up 36 per cent), Canada (up 45 per cent) and the Netherlands (up 30 per cent) enjoyed strong growth.

Caroline Lucas, the co-leader of the Green Party, said: Behind the Government's green veneer we see continued failure on green energy.

Under the Prime Minister's watch, investment in clean technology has slumped, because of government policy changes. Make no mistake, these new statistics are damning.

And Mary Creagh, the Labour chairwoman of the Commons environmental audit committee, said: This is the second year in a row that renewable energy investment in the UK has nose-dived.

Current rates of investment simply wont deliver enough renewable energy to meet our legally binding carbon reduction targets. Losing European Investment Bank funding if we leave the EU could make the problem even worse.

The figures were revealed to Ms Creaghs committee by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, an organisation which compiles a database of projects and deals from across the world.

It noted that the UK investment decline - to $10.3bn  flowed from changes in policy support, which included a 65 per cent cut to subsidies to householders installing rooftop solar panels, in late 2015.

Minister said their priority was to ensure energy bills for hardworking families and businesses are kept as low as possible, rather than boost support for low carbon technologies.

Last November, the Chancellor confirmed there would be no fresh funds for new renewable energy projects levied through electricity bills until at least 2025.

Ms Lucas added: Rather than repeatedly patting themselves on the back for their eco credentials, the Government should be giving green technology investors the long term guarantees they need - and putting Britain at the centre of the global renewables revolution.
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In December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor beaten down by years of poverty and oppression, took his own life in the town of Sidi Bouzid by setting himself on fire. Weeks of protest followed across Tunisia leading to 23 years of authoritarian rule being swept away with President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fleeing the country.

The momentous events seven years ago turned out to be the beginning of the Arab Spring which would spread through the region, bringing down dictators and reshaping countries, but also start a cycle of strife which continues today.

The run up to the anniversary of Tunisias Jasmine Revolution has been marked by violent demonstrations in which government buildings, police stations and cars have been burned, roads blocked, a protestor killed, hundreds, including 97 members of the security forces, injured and around 800 people arrested.

With the army deployed in the streets, the current leader, Beji Caid Essebsi, has visited poor neighbourhoods of Tunis, promising to address grievances. On Sunday, as a rally took place to mark Liberation Day, he attended the hastily brought forward opening of a youth club in Ettadhmen, an impoverished suburb. It was, he acknowledged, the first time any senior government official had been to the neighbourhood.

But there were renewed clashes as night fell with police firing tear gas in response to bricks and bottles thrown by a crowd of young men who dismissed government pledges to improve conditions. The youth club has shiny new equipment, but that is not going to get us jobs, get us food with prices going up all the time, said Mehdi, a 22-year-old who has never had regular employment. They keep on making promises with fine words, but you cant eat words.

Tunisia has experienced some lethal violence which came as the Arab Spring turned into Arab Winter, with the beach massacre at Sousse and the attack on the Bardo museum in the capital, carried out by jihadists, claiming 60 lives. Governments have been formed and fallen, with the current one the ninth in place since Ben Ali.

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

Tunisia, nevertheless, is viewed by the West as the one state which had emerged from the upheavals with a democratic government and a functioning civic society. However, the deteriorating situation would be a cause of concern for the international community, with Libya next-door remaining a fragmented state ruled by militias, with a continuing Isis presence and the base for smugglers taking refugees into Europe across the Mediterranean.

The Interior Ministry in Tunis stated that 16 Islamist extremists have been among those arrested in the protests. Opposition parties charge that legitimate protests are being suppressed. Dhouha Bousetta, the leader of the left-wing Popular Front accused the government of reproducing the methods of the oppressive Ben Ali regime. What they are trying to do is tame us, to discourage us from supporting this popular movement.

Economic hardship and corruption fuelled anger against Ben Alis regime. But the craving for political change was a key driving force. Freedom and reform would help solve other problems, I was repeatedly told by idealistic young men and women while covering the events at the time. But financial hardship continues for a large part of the population. Prices are rising at 10 per cent a year, the unemployment rate among young graduates stands at 30 per cent.

The state of the economy remains precarious. The IMF, which loaned Tunisia 2.2bn in 2015 to avert a severe breakdown, warned last month of the need to take urgent action and decisive measures to reduce the deficit. Proposed austerity measures and raising of taxes, due to make a range of goods from cooking gas, to coffee, phone calls and cars more expensive, have become sources of the current discontent.

The government has promised action to improved medical care, housing and benefits. Social Affairs Minister Mohammed Trabelsi said: We are prepared to increase welfare payments to those in need by 170 million dinars (50 million). This will help 250,000 families; it will help the poor as well as the middle classes. But opposition parties and unions say they are deeply sceptical of the governments ability to deliver meaningful improvement.

The near collapse of the tourist industry has been a huge blow. The foreign visitors at Sousse and the Bardo had been deliberately targeted by the terrorists with the aim of hitting the countrys largest source of foreign income and destabilising the country. As well as prompting unrest it held the prospect of creating a recruiting pool of unemployed and disaffected young men.

Britain was among the first Western states to warn nationals not to visit Tunisia in the aftermath of the Sousse attack and continued with this travel advice despite the Tunisian government bringing in extensive security measures. The warning remained in place as Tunisia remained free of terrorist attacks while bombings and shootings, with mass casualties, took place in the UK, France and Germany.

Seifeddine Rezgui, the young student who carried out the Sousse murders, after being trained at an Isis camp across the border in Libya, lived with other members of his cell at the Islamic holy city of Kairouan. The imam at the Grand Mosque of Sidi Uqba, Taib al-Gazi, who had made a stand against radical clerics spoke to me about the dangers caused by the disappearing tourist trade.

We were being infected by extremism, it was very dangerous, we managed to put a stop to that, but these people are reappearing, we know the extremists are here and they will try to spread their poison again, he warned. Britain should help us get rid of them, not help them by taking away the livelihood of so many young people.

The UK governments travel warning has since been rescinded and some British and other Western tourists are slowly going back, but the industry will take time to recover. Nacer Belhouane, who saw his travel business in Tunis fold in the months following the Sousse attack, said: Its depressing that a company my father had built up was forced to close. Lots of people suffered because Tunisia is so dependant on tourism. The government should have invested in other industries. They should have attracted foreign investors, but they havent done that.

The protests now are more about jobs and prices than political, he added. People are fed up. Surely its in the interest of Europeans to invest in Tunisia, they would not want things to start getting bad again: all they have to do is look at Libya.

For those taking part in the anniversary march on Sunday, however, there were things to celebrate. Its not perfect, but we now have democracy, we have freedoms we didnt have before, we shouldnt forget that said Nadia Makhlouf, a 30-year-old teacher who had helped organise marches against the Ben Ali regime. But she warned: The government has got to be careful, there will be lot more trouble if things dont get better. People are getting very disillusioned.

Disillusionment came early to Sidi Bouzid, the cradle of the revolution. A year after the Tunisian uprising I went there while covering the Libyan civil war to find that the family of Mohamed Bouazizi had left town among acrimony with neighbours; a plaque put up to honour Mohamed had been torn down and graffiti praising him as a martyr painted over. A municipal official who had abused him had been freed from prison, all charges dropped, to cheers from a crowd gathered outside the courtroom

There is little to cheer in Sidi Bouzid at the anniversary of the revolution. A new statue was erected for Mohamed Bouzazi and various government projects to create jobs put forward after the town became briefly famous. But locals claim much of that has come to nothing: unemployment rate among young graduates is 15 per cent higher than nationally  45 per cent.

There was a march of around 40 people last Saturday. It reached the statue of Bouazizi. There were chants calling on the government to resign, and then people dispersed.

It was not much of a march. Sidi Bouzid is forgotten by those in power in Tunis, it is doing worse than other places, this is not a wealthy area and everyone is suffering, said Fethi Lajmi, whose degree in engineering has failed to get him a job. I have sent my details for 24 jobs, but nothing. My friends are in the same position. We dont have hope here any longer, we just feel angry.
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California authorities say they have rescued more than a dozen starving, filthy young people who were chained inside their parents home in Perris.

One of the captives, a 17-year-old girl, escaped over the weekend and notified the Riverside Sheriffs Department that her siblings were being held captive inside the residence by her parents, some of them bound with chains and padlocks, the Sheriffs Department said.

Initially, officials believed the slightly emaciated teenager was only 10 years old. They confronted a horrific scene at her home, according to a press release.

Recommended Couple charged with torture after 13 children found chained to beds

Further investigation revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, but the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner, the department said.

The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty, the department said.

Not all of them were children: of the 13 victims, seven were between the age of 18 and 29, much to the shock of the Sheriff's Department.

After interviewing both parents  identified as 57-year old David Allen Turpin and 49-year old Louise Anna Turpin  authorities arrested them on torture and child endangerment charges, setting bail at $9m (6.5m) apiece.

"The kids didn't come out very often," neighbours told NBC Los Angeles. None knew exactly how many children were in the house.

Another, who saw the couple being arrested, said the children "were very, very pale-skinned, almost like they've never seen the sun."

Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents Show all 15 1 /15 Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents David and Louise Turpin with their 13 children who were being held captive by their parents in the family home in Perris, California. Facebook Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin speaks during a press conference announcing charges against David Turpin and Louise Turpin in relation to their 13 malnourished children found chained in their home, in Riverside. The two parents were charged with multiple counts of Child abuse, torture, abuse of dependent adults and false imprisonment and could face close to 100 years to life in prison if convicted. EPA Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents The home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin, where some of their children were bound with chains and padlocks. Reuters Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents David Allen Turpin poses for a mugshot after being arrested. Riverside County Sheriffs Department via Getty Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents One of the captives, a 17-year-old girl, escaped over the weekend and notified the Riverside Sheriffs Department. Facebook/David-Louise Turpin Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents Perris residents watch as media gather in front of Turpin family home. The Sheriff's deparmtent said "the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner." AFP/Getty Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents The children were found in dark and foul-smelling surroundings and "The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty, the department said. Facebook/David-Louise Turpin Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents Neighbours stand outside the home. Getty Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents Louise Anna Turpin poses for a mugshot after being arrested. Not all of their victims were children: of the 13 victims, seven were between the age of 18 and 29, according to the Sheriff's Department. Riverside County Sheriffs Department via Getty Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents David and Louise Turpin in 2015. Authorities arrested them on torture and child endangerment charges, setting bail at $9m (6.5m) apiece. Facebook/David-Louise Turpin Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents David Turpin and Louise Turpin appear in court for their arraignment in Riverside Reuters Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents David Allen Turpin and his wife, Louise Anna Turpin celebrate a renewal of their wedding vows with Elvis impersonator Kent Ripley in Las Vegas in 2011 A Elvis Chapel via AP Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents David Allen Turpin appears in court for his arraignment in Riverside. Prosecutors filed 12 counts of torture, seven counts of dependent adult abuse, six counts of child abuse and 12 counts of false imprisonment against Turpin and his wife, Louise Anna Turpin. The Press-Enterprise via AP Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents Neighbour Liza Tozier, and her son, Avery Sanchez, 6, drop off his large "Teddy" as a gift for the children. AP Turpin family: 13 siblings who were held captive by their parents Louise Turpin appears in court for her arraignment in Riverside. Authorities say the abuse left the children malnourished, undersized and with cognitive impairments. Reuters

California records indicate that a David Turpin received state approval to open a private school, the Sandcastle Day School, which reportedly operated from the family home according to CNN. A representative for the California Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Th Turpins had moved into the Perris home in 2010, but by 2011 had declared bankruptcy.

The attorney who represented the couple, Ivan Trahan, told CNN "there was nothing out of ordinary" about to couple who did not seem distressed about the bankruptcy and appeared to dote on their 13 children, even showing Mr Trahan pictures of family trip to Disneyland.

In fact, the family had taken several family trips - notably three in 2011, 2013, and 2015 to Las Vegas in order for the couple to renew their vows.

In all the family pictures, the girls and boys wear matching clothes, respectively, and appear to be healthy and smiling.

Mr Turpin is listed in the public bankruptcy records as an engineer for Northrop Grumman, making approximately $140,000 a year. Ms Turpin is listed as a "homemaker."

However, the couple came to Mr Trahan with over $240,000 in debt from credit cards and a foreclosed farm in Texas.

All 13 victims are currently being treated in area hospitals. The names of the other adults in the home have not yet been released.

It is unclear whether the Turpins have obtained legal counsel at this time or if they entered a plea.
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Donald Trump has come under fire after holding an umbrella over himself  apparently leaving his wife and son unprotected from the elements.

Photographs of the US President boarding Air Force One at West Palm Beach in Florida show him holding a large black umbrella as he walks up the steps to the plane.

Melania Trump and their 11-year-old son, Barron, are seen walking behind Mr Trump without umbrellas or waterproof clothing amid blustery conditions.

President Donald Trump boards Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik))

Social media users criticised the President, saying his behaviour was not gentlemanly.

Twitter user Sonny Grewal said: Just seen @realDonaldTrump getting on his plane holding an umbrella for himself while his son and wife get soaked in the rain. Says it all about him! #selfishTrump.

Another person responded to the photographs by saying: Friday while in Pittsburgh a total stranger shared his umbrella with me in the parking lot at the hospital.

He even walked over to me over to my car he was elderly and I told him I was OK but, he insisted.

 Comparing Donald Trump and Barack Obama's inaugurations

It was not clear whether Mr Trump had offered the umbrella to his wife or son.

The photographs were taken on Friday at Palm Beach International Airport and weather reports showed there were thunderstorms, although it was not clear from the images whether it was raining at the time they were taken.

Mr Trump was on his way back to Washington after spending the weekend in Florida.
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A graduate of Americas West Point military academy has become a celebrated viral sensation after he was photographed crying with emotion during his graduation parade.

Second Lieutenant Alix Schoelcher Idrache, who was born in Haiti, graduated from the academy as the top-ranking physics student and aims to become a pilot.

At this moment, I was overwhelmed with emotions. Three things came to mind and led to those tears, 2nd Lt Idrache explained in a comment on Instagram. The first is where I started ... The second is where I am ... The third is my future.

2nd Lt Idrache went from speaking basic English in a poor area of the Haitis capital Port-au-Prince to graduating from the country's most prestigious military academy in seven years.

In an army press release, 2nd Lt Idrache is said to have begun working towards becoming a pilot after witnessing the US military conducting humanitarian missions in Haiti.

The press release quotes 2nd Lt Idrache as saying: People where I'm from don't grow up to be pilots right? Like they don't dream of flying a helicopter, that's not something you do.

He added: You don't just say I'm going to be a pilot and make it happen. Therere no aviation, therere no helicopters, no flight schools. Therere none of that.

Following his graduation he will enter the Amy Aviation Centre for Excellence in Fort Rucker, Alabama.

2nd Lt Idrache came to the US in 2009 after his father had migrated in search of better prospects for his family.

After joining his father, he enrolled in the Maryland National Guard before leaving to attend Westpoint.

In doing so 2nd Lt Idriche became the Maryland Army National Guards first West Point graduate.

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

He credited his father with giving him a strong work ethic. He said: My dad always said, education is the only gift I can always give you, because I dont have any anything material to give.

He added: I ask myself what is one thing I could never be if I didn't come to West Point  and thats a pilot.
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A woman who killed her daughter by shoving a crucifix down her throat because she thought she was possessed by the devil has been found guilty of first degree murder.

A jury in Oklahoma City convicted 51-year-old Juanita Gomez on Thursday of killing Geneva Gomez, 33. They recommended a life sentence without parole.

The 33-year-old womans body was discovered on the floor of her mothers Oklahoma home in August 2016.

She had been laid out in the shape of crucifix with a cross on her chest, according to police who found her.

The victims former boyfriend, Francisco Merlos, who gave evidence at the trial, also reportedly told the court about the state he saw her lifeless body in when he visited her mothers house.

According to reports by The Oklahoman, he told the court you couldnt even recognise her face before calling 911.

The medical examiner said that the Geneva Gomez, who had injuries to her head and face, died from blunt force trauma, News9 reported.

Gomez, 51, reportedly told police that bruises on her own hands and arms were from when she was fighting to rid Satan from her daughters body".

She also told them she forced a religious medallion and a cross down her throat and that she had punched her daughter repeatedly in the face, according to court documents.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

In footage from her arraignment in 2016, Gomez said numerous times that she believed in God, before complaining about the conditions in her jail cell.

Speaking about the lawyer she claimed to have, she said: Yes sir he believes in God like me.

The mother was found able to stand trial, a psychologist found, after she admitted pretending to have memory problems to appear incompetent.

Neighbours believed the mother and daughter had a good relationship, News9 reported.

Associated Press contributed to this report
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The award-winning Latin American actress who broke stereotypes beginning in the 1950s, Katy Jurado has been honoured through this week's Google doodle.

Ms Jurado, who would have been 94 today, died in 2002 in her native Mexico - but not before leaving a lasting impact on Hollywood.

Ex-husband and veteran Hollywood star Ernest Borgnine described Ms Jurado as "beautiful, but a tiger."

Here are five things to know about the High Noon star:

She began her career in secret

Ms Jurado almost did not make it to the silver screen during Mexico's golden age of cinema. She hailed from a wealthy family in Guadalajara - so wealthy in fact, they owned much of what is now Texas - who forbid the teenager from acting despite having an uncle who was an actor.

She was set on making it in the movie industry and proceeded to sign her first contract without their consent, in secret.

Though they threatened to send her away to boarding school as a result, it was the beginning of a career that spanned seven decades.

Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Show all 13 1 /13 Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Ida Wells An African-American journalist and activist born in Mississippi in 1862, she wrote prolifically on the fight for womens suffrage as well as the struggle for civil rights. She documented the practice of lynching black people in the southern states showing how it was often used as means of controlling or punishing black people who competed with whites rather than as a means of justice for crimes. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Lotifa El Nadi Egypts first female pilot born in 1907 in Cairo. Although her father saw no need for her to pursue secondary education, expecting her to marry and have a family, she rebelled and worked as a secretary and telephone operator at a flying school in exchange for lessons as she had no other means to pay for the training. Her achievements made headlines around the world when she flew over the pyramids and competed in international flying races. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Frida Kahlo A Mexican painter and activist born in Mexico City in 1907, her work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions and by feminists for its honest depiction of female experience. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Lina Bo Bardi A Brazilian architect, born in Italy in 1914, she devoted her life to the promotion of the social and cultural potential of architecture and design. She is also celebrated for her furniture and jewellery designs. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Olga Skorokhodova A Soviet scientist born into a poor Ukranian peasant family in 1911, she lost her vision and hearing at the age of five. Overcoming these difficulties in a remarkable way, she became a researcher in the field of communication and created a number of scientific works concerning the development of education of deaf-blind children. She was also a teacher, therapist and writer. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Miriam Makeba A South African singer and civil rights activist born in Johannesburg in 1932, she was forced to work as a child following her fathers death. She became a teenage mother after a brief and allegedly abusive marriage at 17, before she was discovered as a singer of jazz and African melodies. After becoming hugely successful in the US and winning a Grammy, she became involved in the civil rights struggle stateside as well as in the campaign against apartheid in her home country, writing political songs. Upon her death, South African President Nelson Mandela said that her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Sally Ride An American astronaut and physicist, she was born in Los Angeles in 1951 and joined NASA in 1978 after gaining her PhD. She became the first American woman and the third woman ever to go into space in 1983 at the age of 32. Prior to her first space flight, she attracted attention because of her gender and at press conferences, was asked questions such as, Will the flight affect your reproductive organs? She later worked as an academic at the University of California, San Diego. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Halet Cambel A Turkish archaeologist born in 1916, she became the first Muslim women to compete in the Olympics in the 1936 Berlin games as a fencer. She declined an invitation to meet Adolf Hitler on political grounds, and after the conclusion of the Second World War, she trained as an architect and later worked as an academic in Turkey and Germany. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Ada Lovelace An English mathematician and writer born in 1815, she became the worlds first computer programmer. The daughter of poet George Byron, she is chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine, and was the first to recognise the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, creating the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Rukmini Devi An Indian dancer and choreographer credited with reviving Indian classical dance, she was born in 1904 and presented her form of dance on stage even though it was considered low and vulgar in the 1920s. She features in India Todays list of 100 people who shaped India having also worked to re-establish traditional Indian arts and crafts and as an animal rights activist. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Cecilia Grierson An Argentine physician, reformer born in Buenes Aires in 1859, she became the first woman in Argentina to receive a medical degree having previously worked as a teacher. Women were barred from entering medical school at the time, so she first volunteered as an unpaid lab assistant before she was allowed to train as a doctor. She was acclaimed for her work during a cholera epidemic before going on to found the first nursing school in Argentina. The harassment she experienced at medical school helped make her a militant advocate for womens rights in Argentina. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Lee Tai-young Koreas first female lawyer and judge born in 1914 in what is now North Korea, she was also an activist who founded the countrys first legal aid centre and fought for womens rights throughout her career. Her often mentioned refrain was, No society can or will prosper without the cooperation of women. She worked as a teacher, married and had four children before she was able to begin her legal career after the Second World War, becoming the first woman to enter Seoul National University. She also fought for civil rights in the country and was arrested in 1977 for her beliefs, receiving a three-year suspended sentence and a ten year disbarment. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Suzanne Lenglen A French tennis champion born in 1899, she popularised the sport winning 31 championships and dominating the womens sport for over a decade. She was the first female tennis celebrity and one of the first international women sports stars, overcoming a childhood plagued with ill health including chronic asthma  which continued to plague her in her adult life. At 15, she became the youngest ever winner of a major championship and lost only seven matches during her entire career. She received widespread criticism for her decision to turn professional, but defended her right to make a decent living in the days when the grand slam tournaments paid a relative pittance to the winners.

She reportedly memorised English scripts by sound

For her first Hollywood film, 1951's Bullfighter and the Lady, Ms Jurado is said to have memorised her lines by how they sounded to her because of her limited English at the time.

It was a unique approach, but her acting skills still shone through as she was soon cast in the western classic High Noon the following year. She took language classes for two hours a day for months in order to star opposite Grace Kelly and Gary Cooper.

She would go on to work with the likes of Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, and Anthony Quinn.

Ms Jurado won several awards, including one for her contribution to Hollywood Westerns

Her hard work preparing for High Noon was not in vain. Her portrayal of saloon owner Helen Ramirez earned her a Golden Globe award for Best Supporting Actress.

She would go on to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in the 1954 Spencer Tracy film, Broken Lance.

Ms Jurado also won three Silver Ariel awards, the Mexican Oscars, for her portrayals as well as being nominated many more times for Academy Awards.

Her characters broke stereotypes

Ms Jurado was "stunningly beautiful," as Google's description of their tribute described, but it was also the characters she played that stood out.

Most roles for Latin American actresses at the time were "over-sexualised," but Ms Jurado became a specialist in villainous roles.

"Her talent at depicting a range of characters helped to expand the parts available to Mexican and other Latinx actresses in Hollywood today."

She planted the Mexican flag in the US film industry, and made her country proud", said National Actors Association official Mauricio Hernandez at the time of her death.

She was an expert on bullfighting and has the keys to New York City

According to her obituary in The Guardian, Ms Jurado also worked as a writer and commentator for Mexican newspapers, magazines, and radio in between being on sets. Not only did she write critiques of films but was also considered a bullfighting aficionado.

It was at one of her bullfight assignments that she was spotted by John Wayne and director Budd Boetticher, who cast her in his autobiographical Bullfighter and the Lady in 1951.

In 1954, thanks to her new and growing popularity in Hollywood, Ms Jurado became the first Mexican woman to be awarded the keys to New York City.
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The mother of a US Navy veteran was twice denied a visa to travel from Vietnam to the US to attend her sons funeral.

Ngoc Truong, 22 died on 17 December shortly after being diagnosed with leukaemia. He had already left the Navy in October after serving for four years.

His father lives and works in the US, but his mother, who is no-longer married to his father lives in Vietnam.

Mr Truongs mother made two visa requests to attend her sons funeral, but both were denied by the US State Department, CBS News reported.

Mr Truong's father Hung Truong, a jewellery store owner in eastern Arkansas, told CBSs WREG-TV the decision not to let his ex-wife attend had made him furious.

He said the denials had made me fuming mad. Fuming. Why?

The State Department said it could not provide further details about the case.

Visa records are confidential under US law, a State Department official said. We are unable to discuss specific visa cases.

According to CBS Mr Truong said his son had admired President John F. Kennedy's famous words, Ask not what your country can do for you  ask what you can do for your country.

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

Expressing his frustration with the US government, Mr Truong added: He's already done [a lot] for this country, but what [has] this country done for him?

What [will] this country do for him? he asked.
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Participants in a 20-nation summit on the North Korean nuclear threat have called for continued sanctions on the country, in an effort to pressure the regime to give up its rapidly advancing nuclear programme.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who participated in the one-day meeting in Vancouver, Canada, said the event sent a simple message: "We will not accept a nuclear-armed North Korea."

The sentiment was echoed by Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono, who urged the international community not to ease up on North Korea despite its recent cooperation with the South.

"It is not the time to ease pressure or to reward North Korea," he said. "The fact that North Korea is engaging in dialogue could be interpreted as proof that the sanctions are working."

The summit, composed of countries that supported South Korea during the 1950-1953 Korean War, took place as the North and South conducted their first diplomatic talks in years. The talks have so far been limited to North Koreas participation in the Olympic Games taking place next month in Pyeongchang.

North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Show all 13 1 /13 North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Pyongyang residents react after the news of the successful launch of the new intercontinental ballistic missile AFP/Getty Images North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un signing an order to test-fire the newly developed inter-continental ballistic missile KRT via AP Video North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch A news broadcast displays Kim Jong Un's signed document AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch People cheer as they watch the news broadcast announcing Kim Jong Un's order to test-fire the new inter-continental ballistic missile AFP/Getty Images North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Residents react after the document signing AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Pyongyang residents celebrate Kim Jong Un's announcement AFP/Getty North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Cheering Pyongyang residents react AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch To counter North Korea's missile test, South Korea fired missiles into the East Sea The Defence Ministry/Yonhap via REUTERS North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The Hyunmu-2 missiles firing during the drill South Korean Defense Ministry vi North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The exercise was carried out in an attempt to counter Kim Jong Un's order South Korea Defense Ministry via AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch The South Korean army continue to carry out military exercises AP North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch Where K-9 self-propelled howitzers were taking part in a drill Rex Features North Korea announces intercontinental missile launch US soldiers are also present in the border city of Paju AFP/Getty Images

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said the talks were a "significant first step towards restoring inter-Korean relations, but that the North had shown no indication that they were willing to abandon their nuclear programme.

UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson warned that Korean relations could revert back to normal after the Olympics, adding: "Our job is to help [North Korean leader Kim Jong-un] any way we can to make the right choice."

Mr Tillerson argued that a "maximum-pressure campaign" of sanctions was necessary to guide Mr Kims hand.

"We must increase the costs of the regime's behaviour to the point that North Korea must come to the table for credible negotiations," Mr Tillerson said.

 North Korean delegation to go to Winter Olympics in South Korea

The United Nations Security Council enacted stringent sanctions on North Korea last month, hoping to cut the country's energy supplies and starve its nuclear operation. The resolution banned exports of oil products, industrial equipment, machinery, transportation vehicles, and industrial metals to North Korea. It also required the repatriation of North Korean citizens working abroad within two years.

The US has accused China of illegally trading oil ship-to-ship with North Korea on the East China Sea, in violation of the sanctions. President Donald Trump recently tweeted that China had been caught red handed allowing oil to go into North Korea.

"There will never be a friendly solution to the North Korea problem if this continues to happen!" the US President said.

Mr Tillerson emphasised the need for maritime interdiction  or efforts to stop the flow of smuggled goods into North Korea  and urged both Russia and China to fully comply with the UN sanctions.

The American diplomat also reiterated his rejection of a Chinese-Russian proposal for the US and South Korea to freeze military exercises in return for a freeze in North Korea's weapons programmes.

Neither China nor Russia  two of North Koreas biggest trading partners were present at the meeting, raising concerns about the summit's usefulness. Both countries have criticised the gathering, which China called an example of Cold War thinking.

"When we found out about this meeting, we asked: 'Why do you need all those countries together?'" Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a news conference. "Greece, Belgium, Colombia, Luxembourg. What do they have to do with the Korean peninsula today?"

US officials said Chinese and Russian officials would receive a readout of the meeting afterward.

Additional reporting by agencies
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A man who murdered a gay couple in 2010 gave the middle finger to his victims families after being sentenced to death in Florida.

Peter Avsenew, a male escort, shot Stephen Adams and Kevin Powell dead in 2010 after being welcomed into their home in Wilton Manors.

The couple had taken him in weeks before their death after he posted an ad on Craigslist, according to 10 News ABC.

After shooting the couple, Avsenew stole their money, credit cards and car, went shopping for outdoor supplies and fled to the north of Florida, where his mother eventually turned him in.

Mr Adams and Mr Powell had been together for almost 30 years and their bodies were found wrapped in blankets the day after Christmas Day.

Avsenew showed no remorse or reaction when the death sentence was handed down to him, but he later gave the middle finger to the families of Mr Adams and Mr Powell as they left the courthouse.

In response to the disrespectful gesture, Missy Badget, sister to Mr Adams, said: After what happened in that courtroom just now, Im happy that hes being put to the death penalty.

Marci Craig, Mr Adams other sister, added: In my heart of hearts, I knew that he was making that gesture to us.

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. 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Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. 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Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The sentence was delivered on Friday, with jurors spending Thursday morning hearing the closing arguments from the state and from Avsenew, who represented himself.

In his closing statements he told the jury that he had no regrets in his life.

My job here is simple. I dont have to prove anything to you as clearly the states proven that, Avsenew said.

All I have to do is be here and behave. Its up to you to decide life or death based on the information provided to you throughout this entire trial.

I have no regrets in my life and I am proud of the decisions Ive made.

No one really knows what happened that day. Everyone can speculate what ifs and maybes until theyre blue in the face, which theyll never really know.
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Pope Francis has arrived in Chile on a visit intended to soothe relations as protesters remain angered by the legacy of a local child sex abuse scandal and the Vatican's alleged complicity in shielding its perpetrator.

Catholic demonstrators are still aggrieved over the pontiff's 2015 appointment of Bishop Juan Barros to head the small diocese of Osorno in the country's south.

Barros is accused of protecting his former mentor, Father Fernando Karadima, after a 2011 Vatican investigation found the latter guilty of abusing teenage boys over many years.

Recommended Pope Francis invites new mothers to breastfeed in the Sistine Chapel

Karadima has denied the allegations and Barros contends he was unaware of any wrongdoing.

Despite the lingering controversy, tens of thousands of people chanting Viva Papa Francisco lined the streets of his route from the airport, where the Pope was greeted by President Michelle Bachelet, to the Vatican embassy, his official residence for three days before he moves on to Peru.

A youth orchestra played on the tarmac at an otherwise low-key arrival ceremony when the pope arrived from Rome on an unusually cool and cloudy austral summer evening.

Bachelet said on social media shortly after greeting Pope Francis that Chilean society was much changed since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1987, during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Pope Francis is greeted by Chile's President Michelle Bachelet upon his arrival in Santiago (Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

We are a society more just, more free, and more tolerant, she said, adding, however, that inequality still persisted.

Hundreds of people, many of them children waving Chilean and Vatican flags, greeted Francis outside the Vatican nunciature, or embassy, chanting Pope Francis, friend, Chile is with you.

However, the festive atmosphere failed to conceal the hurt experienced by many Catholics over the Barros affair, a scandal that has gripped Chile and fuelled growing secularisation, hurting the Church.

A poll by Santiago-based think tank Latinobarometro this month showed that the number of Chileans calling themselves Catholics fell to 45 percent last year, from 74 percent in 1995.

Francis may speak to it and other problems when he makes his first address on Tuesday morning to national authorities and the diplomatic corps.

He then heads to the capital's sprawling Parque O'Higgins, to say a Mass expected to attract more than 500,000 people.

While in Chile, Francis will likely also face protests from indigenous Mapuche who accuse the state and private companies of taking their ancestral land.

Bachelet last year asked for forgiveness from the Mapuche community for such "errors and horrors."

Francis flies south to Temuco in Chile's Araucania region, home of the Mapuche, on Wednesday.

Several churches were attacked in the capital last week, including one with a homemade bomb where unidentified vandals left a pamphlet reading Pope Francis, the next bomb will be in your robe.

No one was injured in the attacks and no one has claimed responsibility.

Shortly before the pontiff's arrival on Monday, a small group of protesters shut down a street in downtown Santiago, but were quickly dispersed by police.

Speaking to reporters aboard the papal plane on the 15-hour flight from Italy, Francis expressed concern about the danger of nuclear war, saying that the world now stood at the very limit.

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

His comment came after Hawaii issued a false missile alert that provoked panic in the US state and highlighted the risk of possible unintended nuclear war with North Korea.

Asked if he was worried about the possibility of nuclear war, Pope Francis said: I think we are at the very limit. I am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things.

The Pope stopped short of overtly criticising US President Donald Trump or North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, whose sabre-rattling and trading of insults have jangled nerves across the globe.

Reuters
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Scientists believe they may have discovered the cause of an epidemic that struck Mexicos Aztec population in 1545, killing up to 15 million people.

In a paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, they describe how DNA extracted from the teeth of 29 skeletons buried in a cemetery in southern Mexico revealed previously unidentified traces of the salmonella enterica bacterium.

The bacterium is known to cause enteric fever, of which typhoid is an example. According to the study, the symptoms tally with those mentioned in records from the time, which describe victims developing red spots on the skin, vomiting, and bleeding from various body orifices.

The epidemic was one of several to hit the indigenous population soon after the arrival of Europeans in the early 16th century.

"When the Europeans arrived in Mexico, they brought with them lots of different diseases," Ashild Vagene, co-author of the study, told The Independent. "There were dozens of epidemics across the New World and Mexico was particularly hard hit."

Recommended Hidden Aztec temple unearthed in the middle of Mexico City

"What we're talking about is the devastating decimation of indigenous populations by previously unknown diseases," Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock, lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield, told The Independent.

"Mortality rates were maybe 80 or 90 per cent by 1600," she said. "Imagine nine out of every 10 people dying - it's almost unimaginable."

The cause of the 1545-1550 epidemic has been debated for more than a century. Measles, pneumonic plague and influenza have all been suggested as possibilities, but historians have never reached a consensus.

The indigenous population gave the outbreak the name cocoliztli, a generic term meaning pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language.

Although estimates vary, the epidemic likely wiped out between five and 15 million people  up to 80 per cent of the population.

It came just two decades after a smallpox epidemic that killed up to eight million people just after the Spanish arrival and is considered one of the most devastating epidemics in human history.

It affected large areas of central Mexico and Guatamala, perhaps extending as far south as Peru.

Ms Vagene and her team analysed the DNA from two sets of skeletons: 24 that were buried in a cemetery that is closely linked with the "cocoliztli" epidemic, and five found in a cemetery that was in use before the Spanish colonisers arrived in 1519.

The DNA was analysed using a new piece of software that allows scientists to screen for any known pathogen.

"This is ground-breaking for our field of ancient DNA," Ms Vagene said. "It allows us to screen for all pathogens that we know today without having to specify a target organism. We can look for the unknown, which is wonderful."

The salmonella strain was found in 10 of the 24 "post-contact" skeletons and none of the "pre-contact" bodies, which Ms Vagene described as a "great finding".

"Ancient DNA doesn't always preserve very well. It breaks down over time," she said. "So to be able to find it in 10 out of 24 is significant."

The fact that traces were found in the teeth is significant too, according to Ms Vagene.

"Salmonella is a disease that you would normally catch through contaminated food or water sources," she said. "It would start in the gut, so finding it in the teeth suggests it had got into the bloodstream. The disease had spread everywhere in their body."

This suggests that these individuals were not simply carriers of the disease - they were victims of it.

More research is needed to determine whether salmonella enterica was the sole cause of the epidemic or whether other viruses and pathogens were also present in these bodies. Ms Vagene also pointed out that her team only studied one group of skeletons from one burial site.

"We just don't know if this pathogen was present in other areas (affected by the outbreak)," she explained.

Whether it was Europeans who introduced salmonella to the indigenous population is also uncertain.

Several factors point towards this conclusion, however. Salmonella enterica existed in Europe well before the Spanish began their conquest of the region, while the "pre-contact" skeletons analysed for this study had no trace of the pathogen.

Furthermore, it is possible for someone to carry the pathogen without presenting any symptoms.

"Seemingly healthy individuals could have travelled from Europe to Mexico without knowing that they had it," said Ms Vagene.

If the infected person's faeces had come into contact with the local water supply, that could have led to a rapid spread of the disease, she explained.

Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice Show all 8 1 /8 Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice 243287.bin The Trustees of the British Museum Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice 243288.bin The Trustees of the British Museum Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice 243289.bin The Trustees of the British Museum Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice 243290.bin The Trustees of the British Museum Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice 243291.bin The Trustees of the British Museum Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice 243292.bin The Trustees of the British Museum Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice 243293.bin The Trustees of the British Museum Aztec artefacts: The art of sacrifice 243294.bin The Trustees of the British Museum

Elizabeth Graham, professor of archaeology at University College London, offered a different interpretation of the findings.

Salmonella wasnt necessarily the root cause of the epidemic, she told The Independent.

People may have been getting sick because of a different disease, which meant that they were less able to look after themselves and each other, increasing the risk of salmonella.

Everyone was hit at once. No one was able to care for anyone else," she explained. "Salmonella may be a sign of people not being able to care for one another.

But she welcomed the research and the development of enhanced DNA analysis tools that enabled it.

Even today, diagnosis of diseases is difficult, she said. Its so much more difficult to try to figure out how people died hundreds of years ago.

Infectious diseases are particularly difficult to identify, Professor Graham explained, as they usually dont affect the skeleton.

Almost no DNA could be detected on skeletons a while ago, she said. Detection methods have certainly improved.

Dr Dodds Pennock also welcomed the study and its measured conclusions.

"Salmonella is probably not the full story and this study doesn't answer all of the questions," she said. "But it offers very interesting additional evidence for what was happening in the valley of Mexico and beyond in the mid 16th century.
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A Mississippi inmate convicted in 2014 of the death of a Georgia woman through illicit silicone buttocks injections has died.

The Mississippi Department of Corrections said in a statement Monday that an autopsy will be conducted on the remains of Tracy Lynn Garner, who died on Sunday. She was 58 and had served less than three years of a life sentence.

Garner was convicted by a jury of depraved heart murder in the death of Karima Gordon, an Atlanta area resident who died eight days after receiving the injections in Jackson in 2012. Depraved heart murder is a killing caused by reckless disregard for human life.

Prosecutors said Gordon was referred to Garner by Natasha Stewart, an adult entertainer known as Pebbelz Da Model. Stewart was convicted of manslaughter in Garner's death and received a seven-year sentence.

Authorities initially identified Garner as a man, Morris Garner, after the arrest. Her attorney subsequently said Garner was born male and had sex reassignment surgery.

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

Angelina Barber, Gordon's best friend who travelled with her to Jackson, testified during Gordon's trial that she decided not to receive injections after meeting Garner. Barber testified that she and Gordon were led to believe Garner was a nurse. A nursing home administrator testified Garner had been a cook at a nursing home where she wore scrubs.

Garner was taken from Central Mississippi Correctional Facility to a hospital in Jackson, where she was pronounced dead on Sunday morning. The Department of Corrections did not elaborate on the circumstances surrounding the inmate's death.

AP
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Americans wanting to travel to North Korea should make preparations for their death, the United States Department of State has warned.

In updated travel information issued last week, the State Department advised US citizens to draft a will, plan their funeral and make arrangements for the care of their children and pets if they wish to visit the rogue state.

US travellers need to apply for special validation from the department "due to the serious risk of arrest and long-term detention of US nationals."

Tourists were banned from visiting the country without special validations following the death of US student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested while on holiday and sentenced to 15 years of hard labour. Mr Warmbier was subsequently released last June and died days after returning to the US in a coma.

Inside the daily life in North Korea Show all 19 1 /19 Inside the daily life in North Korea Inside the daily life in North Korea People reading a newspaper at the metro station Inside the daily life in North Korea Thoughts of the leaders on the tram. They have about a dozen of these on every tram, all with different thoughts Inside the daily life in North Korea Young people training for a big upcoming festival Inside the daily life in North Korea People at the Pyongyang's annual marathon Inside the daily life in North Korea Many stars on one of the trolleys in Pyongyang Inside the daily life in North Korea An intimidating poster in a primary school in North Korea. Inside the daily life in North Korea Solar panels installed on a street lamp. Inside the daily life in North Korea A poster on the window next to one of the venues we visited in Pyongyang Inside the daily life in North Korea Kids playing football next to the Arch of Triumph. After a while tourists were allowed to join, so some of us did Inside the daily life in North Korea Class in an educational center in Pyongyang (where people over 17 years old can attend any classes they choose after school, for free) Inside the daily life in North Korea People waving at me during the Pyongyang marathon Inside the daily life in North Korea People having a great time dancing at a public park Inside the daily life in North Korea A metro driver in a metro station in Pyongyang Inside the daily life in North Korea Fireworks to mark the birthday of the Eternal President Kim Il Sung on our last night in Pyongyang Inside the daily life in North Korea My wonderful tour guide at a public park Inside the daily life in North Korea One of the parks in Pyongyang Inside the daily life in North Korea A person rowing some boats for the day at a river in Pyongyang Inside the daily life in North Korea The National War Museum Inside the daily life in North Korea Public park in Pyongyang

North Korea is listed as a "Level 4 - Do not travel" country, alongside Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Yemen.

The department said those who receive a special validation to travel to the isolated nation should "draft a will and designate appropriate insurance beneficiaries and/or power of attorney" and "discuss a plan with loved ones regarding care/custody of children, pets, property, belongings, non-liquid assets (collections, artwork, etc.), funeral wishes, etc."

At least 16 US citizens have been detained by the authoritarian state over the last 10 years.

Those violating its laws could be "held in isolation without charges for lengthy periods of time," "interrogated," "compelled to draft public confessions" and "sent to a labour camp for years".

 UN security council unanimously agrees new sanctions for North Korea

The department said it is unable to provide emergency services to US citizens because it does not have an embassy in the hermit kingdom.

Instead, it relies on Sweden to act as the protecting power, but cautions: "The North Korean government routinely delays or denies Swedish officials access to detained US citizens."

Last year, Donald Trump declared the US had designated North Korea a state sponsor of terror, adding the country to the list with Iran, Syria and Sudan.

The US President said he made the decision because Pyongyang's "murderous regime" had assassinated Kim Jong-un's estranged half-brother in Malaysia and "tortured Otto Warmbier, ultimately leading to that fine young man's death."
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Donald Trumps repulsive presidential statements on the media will be compared to the propaganda of Russian dictator Josef Stalin, according to a report, in a speech by a Republican senator this week.

Jeff Flake will take to the Senate floor on Wednesday to condemn the 71-year-olds presidency and his unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press, according to an excerpt obtained by The Washington Post.

2017 was a year which saw the truth  objective, empirical, evidence-based truth  more battered and abused than any other time in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government," Mr Flake is expected to say.

He will continue: It was the year in which an unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press was launched by that same White House, an assault that is as unprecedented as it is unwarranted.

He goes on to say Mr Trumps use of the phrase enemy of the people to describe the media was also infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies.

Mr Flake will note that Nikita Khrushchev, Stalins successor, banned the use of the term and told the Soviet Communist Party it was used by Stalin for the purpose of annihilating such individuals who disagreed with him.

 US ambassador to Panama resigns because he can 'no longer work for Trump'

This alone should be a source of great shame for us in this body, especially for those of us in the Presidents party, he will say. For they are shameful, repulsive statements.

Mr Flake, one of the few vocal critics of the President in the Republican party, will also insist a powerful figure who brands the press fake news should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.

The speech will come just days after Mr Trump accused the Wall Street Journal of fake news after it reported the President as saying: I have a good relationship with Kim Jong-un.

Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Mr Trump insisted he said of the North Korean leader: Id have a relationship with Kim Jong-un.

Fortunately we now record conversations with reporters and they knew exactly what I said and meant, he added. They just wanted a story. FAKE NEWS!

Mr Flakes criticism comes despite his backing of almost all Mr Trumps positions in the Senate, including a failed attempt to repeal Obamacare and the successful overhaul of the US tax code, which was criticised as a tax cut for Americas wealthiest.

Excerpt of Jeff Flakes Wednesday Senate speech in full:

2017 was a year which saw the truth  objective, empirical, evidence-based truth  more battered and abused than any other time in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government. It was a year which saw the White House enshrine alternative facts into the American lexicon, as justification for what used to be known simply as good old-fashioned falsehoods. It was the year in which an unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press was launched by that same White House, an assault that is as unprecedented as it is unwarranted. The enemy of the people, was what the President of the United States called the free press in 2017.

Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies. It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase enemy of the people," that even Nikita Khrushchev forbad its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of annihilating such individuals who disagreed with the supreme leader.

This alone should be a source of great shame for us in this body, especially for those of us in the presidents party. For they are shameful, repulsive statements. And, of course, the president has it precisely backward  despotism is the enemy of the people. The free press is the despots enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy. When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesnt suit him fake news, it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.

I dare say that anyone who has the privilege and awesome responsibility to serve in this chamber knows that these reflexive slurs of fake news are dubious, at best. Those of us who travel overseas, especially at war zones and other troubled areas around the globe, encounter members of US based media who risk their lives, and sometimes lose their lives, reporting the truth. To dismiss their work as fake news is an affront to commitment and their sacrifice. Mr President, a new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists documents that the number of journalists imprisoned around the world has reached 262, which is a new record. This total includes 21 reporters who are being held on false news charges.
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A pastor has condemned Donald Trump during a sermon while Mike Pence reportedly sat in the church red-faced.

Maurice Watson, of the Metropolitan Baptist church in Largo, Maryland, branded Mr Trumps alleged s***hole remark to describe unspecified African nations as dehumanising and ugly.

Mr Trump has denied using the word during a meeting on immigration reform, despite a politician in the room publicly accusing the President of using the slur repeatedly.

On Sunday the billionaire described himself to journalists as the least racist person youve ever interviewed.

Dr Watson nonetheless launched into a scathing attack on the President, describing the remark as a hurtful, dehumanising, visceral, guttural, ugly" adjective he could not use in church.

I stand today as your pastor to vehemently denounce and reject such characterisations, he said.

Noting there were Africans and Haitians in the congregation, the pastor said they were owed an apology, but probably wont get one.

There was nothing that was loving in that adjective, nothing loving in that statement about Haiti, he said. Nothing loving. We can do better than this, we can do better than this as a nation.

The speech was met with repeated standing applause from the audience. Local television channel WUSA TV reported that Mr Pence became visibly red-faced while sat next to his wife in the audience.

Mr Pences office denied he became embarrassed in an email to news agency The Associated Press.

Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

The Presidents alleged comments last week triggered international condemnation, including by the UN, who branded them shameful and racist.

After being presented with a proposal to restore protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and unspecified African countries, Mr Trump reportedly said: Why are we having all these people from s***hole countries come here?

He asked to know why the US could not instead accept people from places like Norway, whose prime minister he had met the day before.

Mr Trump eventually issued a denial on Twitter, saying the language he used was "tough" but different to what was claimed.

But Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who was in the meeting, contradicted the President.

In the course of his comments he said things that were hate-filled, vile and racist... I cannot believe that in the history of the White House, in that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday, Mr Durbin said.

The White House has been contacted for comment.

Maurice Watson's comments on Donald Trump in full

It is alleged that a hurtful, dehumanising, visceral, guttural, ugly, adjective that I cannot repeat in church was used to characterise some of the nations of Africa, and a statement was made that we ought to welcome people from Norway, more than we welcome people from Haiti.

I stand today as your pastor to vehemently denounce and reject such characterisations of the nations [inaudible], and of our brothers and sisters in Haiti. And I further say, whoever made such a statement, and whoever used such a visceral, disrespectful, dehumanising adjective to characterise the nations of Africa whoever said it is wrong, and they ought to be held accountable.

My friends, my members from Haiti, from Africa, you are owed an apology but you probably wont get one. But even if you dont get one, as your pastor, and your Metropolitan family will stand shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart and breast to breast with you, as we acknowledge your worth, your dignity, your humanness.

Were getting ready to celebrate Dr (Martin Luther) Kings birthday I think the best way to honour Dr Kings legacy is to speak up for and stand up for the values for which he spoke and stood. And the main value which Dr King stood for is the value of love. He said I decided to go with love because hate is too great a burden for any man to carry.

There was nothing that was loving in that adjective, nothing loving in that statement about Haiti. Nothing loving. We can do better than this, we can do better than this as a nation.
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Thirty years after moving to the United States as a child, a 39-year-old landscaper and father has been deported back to Mexico.

Jorge Garcias eyes welled up as he said goodbye to his two children ad his wife  all American citizens  Monday in Detroit. United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers stood by, watching him closely.

The deportation marks an end to a nearly 9-year-long battle undertaken by Mr Garcia to stay in America with his family. His supports say that he doesnt have anything close to a criminal record: He never even got a traffic ticket, they say.

Recommended Trump administration forced by court to renew DACA applications

Mr Garcias case is not one that could have been helped by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program that is aimed at helping immigrants who came to the United States and is currently in peril  he is too old for the parameters of that program  but he did see some level of mercy from the administration of President Barack Obama.

He was marked for deportation all the way back in 2009, but was able to successfully argue for stays of deportation in the years since. But, in November, President Donald Trumps administration refused him another stay.

I feel kind of sad, Mr Garcia told USA Today Sunday night. I got to leave my family behind, knowing that they're probably going to have a hard time adjusting, me not being there for them for who knows how long. It's just hard.

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 Trump administration has overseen an increase in immigrant detentions in the United States, even while overall deportations have dipped since the Obama years.

But, while people arent being shipped out as frequently, critics have noted that federal law enforcement has been stripped of their discretion on who to target, even though official policy is to seek out undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

Mr Trump is currently in talks with Congressional leadership to attempt to develop an immigration law that could help undocumented immigrants who came to the US when they were children, and had little choice in the matter. Mr Garcia had asked ICE to let him wait out that potential deal with the hopes that his circumstance would be covered by the deal, but was ultimately denied.
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Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury as part of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The move marked a new tenor to the investigation  the first time a grand jury subpoena was used to compel a top member of the Trump team to testify  even as Mr Trumps lawyers insisted the special counsels probe was winding down.

The New York Times said Mr Mueller had summoned Mr Bannon last week, citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter. It was unclear, however, whether Mr Bannon will be forced to testify.

The subpoena may have been a negotiating tactic to convince Mr Bannon to sit down with Mr Mueller for a less-formal interview in the special counsels offices, legal experts said. A grand jury testimony is usually more taxing for the witness, as the entire proceedings are transcribed and the witness is required to answer every question.

Mr Bannons attorney was not immediately available for comment.

The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images

News of the subpeona came as Mr Bannon, who served as the Trump campaign director before his seven-month stint as chief strategist, testified before the House Intelligence Committee, which is also probing the campaigns ties to Russia.

It also comes on the heels of a public rift between Mr Bannon and the President, after the former strategist criticised the Trump administration to the author of a tell-all book on the White House. Mr Bannon was quoted in the book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, as calling a meeting between Trump campaign staff and a Russian lawyer treasonous.

Mr Bannon was not present at the meeting, nor during the drafting of the Presidents misleading statement on this issue  both of which are reportedly of interest to Mr Mueller. He was also not present for the controversial firing of Mr Trumps former FBI director, James Comey.

 Fox News host fact checks Trump on Russia 'hoax' claim immediately following news conference

Mr Trump responded to the book by distancing himself from Mr Bannon, claiming his former top adviser had little to do with the administration or the campaigns victory. Mr Bannon stepped down from his role as chief executive of Breitbart News shortly thereafter.

Mr Bannon was present for several controversial moments in the Trump administration, including the firing of former national security adviser Michael Flynn after he misled the Vice President about his dealings with Russia. The special counsel previously issued a grand jury subpoena for documents related to Mr Flynns business dealings. Mr Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Other than Mr Bannon, no member of Mr Trumps inner circle has been called to testify before the grand jury, which was impanelled in August.

Mr Muellers team has already interviewed Mr Trumps son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, his former chief of staff, Reince Preibus, and his former press secretary, Sean Spicer. The special counsel is reportedly preparing to interview Mr Trump as well.

Asked last week if he would sit down for an interview with Mr Mueller, the President replied simply: Well see what happens.
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The Trump administration is considering developing two new sea-based nuclear weapons to combat the growing threats of China and Russia, according to new Department of Defence review of its nuclear strategy.

The planned change to strategy comes at a moment of intense debate over proliferation in the world, with much of the international attention focused on North Koreas pursuit of a nuclear deterrent.

Supporters of such a strategy change say that it is about time that the Defence Department come up with a new path forward, nearly three decades after the end of the Cold War, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, which first noted the strategy change.

Recommended Our Hawaii hero may have prevented nuclear war in 2018

But others are concerned that the warheads  by all accounts, lighter and more agile tools of war  could lower the applicable threshold for using a nuclear warhead.

One of the weapons is a so-called low-wield warhead that could be used alongside American Trident missiles, which are currently stocked alongside larger nuclear weapons on submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles. That warhead could be developed in as little as two years, according to experts.

President Donald Trump hasnt signed off on the new strategy so far, and the plans arent expected to be unveiled until later this month. The Department of Defence did not immediately respond to a request for comment and confirmation from The Independent.

Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Mr Trump has frequently spoken highly of nuclear weapons  and wondered why the US doesnt employ the devices more frequently, according to reports.

The President has said that he would be the last person who would want to use nuclear weapons  and has backed that up with the dubious claim that he was openly against the Iraq War  but has said he wouldnt take anything off the table. That has included the open statement that he hasnt ruled out detonating a nuke in Europe, because its a big place.
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In the area in and around Grundy, coal dust lies by the edge of the road.

For more than a century, this community in the Appalachian foothills has thrived or suffered according to the shifting fortunes of mining.

When Barack Obama introduced tougher environmental regulations, which the mining industry termed the war on coal, those changes, combined with the impact of international competition, meant people here struggled. When Donald Trump vowed to restore jobs  I made them this promise, we will put our miners back to work  people cheered. They also voted for him in droves.

Steven Matney: 'Were not asking to be filthy rich like the Kardashians. We just want to be able to pay for our kids' (Andrew Buncombe)

During the 2016 election campaign, Buchanan County, of which Grundy is the seat, caught the attention of political pundits when it voted more heavily for Mr Trump in the Republican primary than anywhere else in America. In the general election that November, when The Independent first visited, he secured 79 per cent of votes, compared to 19 per cent for Hillary Clinton. And now, as Mr Trump marks his first year in office, those who cast their ballot for the brash billionaire have no regrets.

I would say things seem to be a lot better. Coal prices are up and there are a lot more jobs, says 39-year-old Heather Coleman, whose husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather worked as miners. Coal is so important here.

In interview after interview, residents of Grundy say the industry has picked up after Mr Trump took office and began dismantling regulations established by his predecessor. Many say the coal wagons are rolling more often. People are allowing themselves to feel more hopeful, optimistic.

He has got some of the coal jobs going since he came in. And that is important because I did not vote for him, says 50-year-old Sheila Shillings, who says she would score Mr Trumps first year in office eight out of 10. Next time? Yes, I think I would vote for him, she adds.

Official data backs up the anecdotes. The US Energy Information Administration says coal production was up by around eight per cent in 2017  and that around 1,000 new coal jobs were added across the nation.

Virginia has seen mining jobs fall by almost 40 per cent in the last few years (Andrew Buncombe)

In contrast, between 2011 and 2015, the number of coal-mining jobs in Virginia fell from 4,867 to 3,033, a loss of around 38 per cent. Between September 2014 and May 2016, the US lost approximately 191,000 jobs in the mining industry.

The shift has been felt particularly strongly in south-west Virginia, a major producer of metallurgical coal, which is used to produce steel. We put 25 new people to work [in 2017] and were planning to open a new mine this year that would add a further 65 jobs, says an official with Metinvest Coal, a global producer, who does not want to be named.

Larry Maclanahan, a 40-year-old mechanic who was applying for a job with Metinvest at its local offices in the centre of Grundy, says he heard of new jobs in the industry across the valley, in a change that kicked in after Mr Trump entered the White House.

He lifted some regulations. It used to be that the water coming off a strip mine had to be cleaner than the water you drink, he says, pointing to some former strip mines on a hillside. And thats hard to do.

Tim Potter, who heads the towns office of economic development, says he believed Mr Trump had brought an overnight change. He had typically voted Democrat but cast his ballot for Mr Trump after hearing him campaign.

 Donald Trump: I am the least racist person you've ever interviewed

We have a couple of retail units and we have really felt the change, he says. Especially at Christmas. Last year our numbers were down, but this Christmas we have had some fantastic numbers.

He even says he had been contacted by a US software company that wanted to relocate some of its overseas operations to little old Grundy. Its a domino effect, he explains, describing the way mining supported and helped secondary and tertiary businesses.

Yet while mining is on the up, and while residents are prepared to credit this to Mr Trump, it may have less to do with him than they think. Industry experts say the boost in south-west Virginia has come from a surge in demand for metallurgical coal, as China increases its steel production, and a shortage of supply from Australia.

Phil Smith, director of governmental affairs at the United Mine Workers of America, a union with 80,000 members, says there has been an uptick in production that started at the end of 2016 and continued into the last two months of 2017. He says that has resulted in around 800 new jobs being created over a 15-month period.

Yet he says neither the rolling back of regulations by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  or the scrapping of the Stream Protection Rule, issued in the last days of Mr Obamas presidency, which would have required coal companies to restore coal mine areas and nearby streams to their previous condition  was responsible. The EPA stuff has made no impact, he insists.

Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Even with coal, life in Grundy is hardscrabble. Unemployment in the county stands at more than 12 per cent, compared to the national average of 4 per cent. Around 20 per cent of residents under the age of 65 are on disability payments and a quarter live beneath the poverty line. One magazine said that per capita, Grundy, which is 95 per cent white, was the sickest town in America.

As such, this white working-class community, which felt the benefits of globalisation had passed it by, was a prime target for Mr Trumps populistic and nationalistic message.

Not everybody here thinks Mr Trump has helped. I live off a fixed income. If I didnt get food stamps I couldnt survive, says Theresa Kaiser in the carpark of the supermarket Food Giant. I dont like his personality  the things he says about people, the way he wants to rush us into war. My dad was in the Second World War. Id give him two out of 10. I dont think he has done anything well.

Others say Mr Trumps bombastic and sometimes racist rhetoric has unnecessarily stirred anxiety in the country. He doesnt like Mexican people or Hispanics, says Jerry Herardo, who works in a restaurant. I havent seen anything he has done.

Heather Coleman: 'Things seem to be a lot better. Coal prices are up and there are a lot more jobs' (Andrew Buncombe)

Dirk Hall owns and runs the local radio station, WMJD, which plays a mix of country and old-time favourites. One morning, Mr Hall, who guessed that most of his listeners were supporters of the President, arranged for people to call in and share their thoughts on his first term.

The ratio of fans of the President compared to those who disliked him was about 4:1, and many said the economy had picked up. Trump has done more in the past 12 months than Obama did in eight years, said one woman, who added that her son had recently gotten a full-time job in the mines.

Steven Matney is among those who believe Mr Trump has helped keep the town alive. He says he has seen his shifts driving a coal truck increase from two or three a week to five or six.

As he speaks at the bottom of a road leading to the coal-cleaning plant at the village of Big Rock, 10 miles north of Grundy, a succession of large vehicles thunder past bearing their loads.

Trump has opened things up so we can make a living, says Mr Matney. Under Obama, they were trying to chuck us out.

Mr Matney, 40, whose father also drove a coal truck, says he did not want the same for his 13-year-old daughter. Yet, he says, if a future government wanted to move away from the mining industry, as Ms Clinton proposed, it needed to provide something else for people to do, and to help that transition.

He said people in the area were not resistant to change  and they resented being mocked by liberals as being either hicks or racists, or both.

Were not asking to be filthy rich. We dont want to be like the Kardashians. We just want to be able to pay for our kids, he says. So far, President Trump is the only one who has done that for us.
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Venezuela's "Rambo" rebel helicopter pilot has been cornered by government forces as five of his band were arrested, with reports suggesting he may have been killed in the shoot-out.

Oscar Perez made international headlines last year when he stole a police helicopter and used it to attack government buildings.

On Monday, authorities detained members of a "terrorist cell" linked to him and killed several other militants during a shoot-out in a poor area outside Caracas.

An unnamed member of the Venezuelan government was quoted by CNN as saying Mr Perez had been killed during the incident.

Mr Perez appeared with a bloody face in nearly a dozen dramatic Instagram videos earlier on Monday, saying he was surrounded by authorities shooting at him with grenade launchers.

State television later read out an official statement that said two police officers were gunned down in the clashes but did not specify Mr Perez' fate.

A former police pilot, Mr Perez is wanted for using a stolen helicopter to lob grenades and shoot at government buildings in June as well as for breaking into a National Guard unit in December to steal weapons.

Recommended Venezuelan authorities hunt pilot after chopper attack on court

President Nicolas Maduro's leftist government has described him as a "fanatic, extremist terrorist" and a manhunt has been under way for months.

Some Maduro critics have questioned whether Mr Perez' attacks were staged in cahoots with the government to justify a further crackdown on the opposition.

Authorities finally tracked Mr Perez down in the poor hillside neighbourhood of El Junquito.

"We're wounded ... they're killing us!" said Mr Perez in one video, seemingly wearing a bulletproof vest as he crouched in what appeared to be a small house. Gunshots were heard in the background.

"Venezuela, don't lose hope ... Now only you have power so that we can all be free," he said in an earlier video, staring into the camera and telling his children he loved them and hoped to see them again.

 Oscar Perez explains reasoning behind police helicopter attack against Venezuela's Supreme Court

His last video was posted about 10.30 am (2.30am GMT). A Reuters witness in the area later saw an ambulance speed by and said gunshots were no longer heard.

The Information Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Members of Mr Maduro's government scoffed at Mr Perez on Monday.

"What a coward now that he's caught like a rat!" tweeted Prisons Minister Iris Varela. "Where is the courage he had to attack military units, kill and injure officials and steal weapons?"

Mr Perez, who also has been an action film star and portrays himself as a James Bond or Rambo-like figure on social media, has added surreal twists to Venezuela's long-running political drama.

He rose to fame in June after allegedly hijacking a police helicopter, flying over Caracas' centre and firing shots at and lobbing grenades on the Interior Ministry and the Supreme Court.

Mr Perez claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was to fight what he said was a tyrannical government.

He went into hiding afterwards, only to pop up two weeks later at an opposition vigil for anti-government protesters killed during demonstrations that rocked the country last year.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

In December, a video posted on Mr Perez's YouTube account shows armed, masked men taking control of military barracks under cover of night.

They smashed photos of Mr Maduro and his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, handcuffed about a dozen soldiers and berated them for supporting a "dictatorship" in Venezuela. Mr Perez says his team stole about 26 AK-103s and more than 3,000 munitions for the rifles, as well as pistols.

Opposition politicians called for due process.

"There is no death penalty in Venezuela," tweeted opposition lawmaker Yajaira Forero. "We demand that Mr Oscar Perez' right to life be respected. If he committed a crime he must be judged by a court, as the law establishes."
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A woman who admitted to causing her fiancees death by taking a plug out of his kayak after getting fed up with his sexual demands, has been released from prison.

The authorities grew suspicious of the bride-to-be Angelika Graswald after she posted videos of herself doing cartwheels on social media shortly after her fiancee's death.

Forty-six-year-old Vincent Viafore, from Poughkeepsie, drowned while kayaking on the rough waters of the Hudson River on 19 April 2015. Investigators said his boat had sunk after Graswald had removed a drain plug, while the prosecution suggested that she had stood to benefit from his $250,000 life insurance policy. They also accused her of pushing away a paddle that may have saved him and waiting some time before calling for help.

Viafores death was originally classed as an accident, but investigators grew suspicious of Graswald, 37, after her online activity sparked their interest. Not long before her arrest, her posts included seemingly carefree images of herself and Viafore, of herself kayaking and doing acrobatics and a video of herself driving to a yacht club.

In footage of her 2015 interrogation, which lasted more than 11 hours, Graswald said: I wanted him dead and now hes gone.

Her lawyer Richard Portale told ABC News in 2015 that her statement was not a confession. She denied killing him, so it is important to distinguish between what they are calling a confession is really just an interrogation. The news channel also said that kayaking experts told them removing the plug would not cause it to capsize.

The prosecution said Graswald, who is originally from Latvia, told authorities she had felt happiness and relief when she saw her fiancee enter the water, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal. But defence lawyer Portale, attributed her comments to a language barrier and said there was reason to believe her statements were coerced.

Investigator Dennis DeQuarto, had said in a 2016 hearing that she had said she felt "trapped" in the relationship, according to the New York Times.

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

Originally charged with second-degree murder by the Orange County District Attorney, which Graswald denied, she later pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. In November, she was sentenced to between 16 months and four years in prison, but was released just weeks later as she had already spent time in jail since her arrest in 2015.

Following her sentencing, defence lawyer Richard Portale read out a statement to the media on Graswalds behalf. Speaking in November 2017, he described Viafore as a bright light. He then read out Graswald's statement, which said: Never would I have imagined waking up one day and finding myself behind bars, charged with murdering the man I love. This entire process has been incredibly difficult for me. I love Vince very much and miss him terribly.

The statement added:I am not a murderer; I have said that from the very beginning, if I could do anything to bring Vince back. I would.

Upon her release in late December, her lawyer said that Graswald was keen to reconnect with her family in a "meaningful way", and to begin the difficult process of reconstructing her life.

She was released to a halfway house at the end of December. She could ultimately face deportation to Latvia prosecutors warned.

Additional reporting by Associated Press.
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Nearly 15,000 people have fled their homes near the Philippines most active volcano, which is undergoing a quiet eruption authorities warned could turn into a hazardous explosion within weeks or even days.

Mount Mayon was spewing lava that has been quietly flowing in some places but at others erupting like a fountain, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said. It has also been emitting ash which has fallen on nearby towns.

Technically, the volcano is erupting but the eruption is fairly quiet. It may escalate into a hazardous eruption, Paul Alanis, science research specialist at the institution, told the AFP news agency.

He said an explosive eruption would mean a lava fountain or spray of hot rocks and gases, which could move as fast as 60kmph.

Lava continues to cascade down the slopes of the Mount Mayon volcano (AP Photo/Earl Recamunda)

Phivolcs has recorded nine episodes of tremor, four of which accompanied lava fountains, and 75 lava collapse events as pressure builds up.

Several small pyroclastic flows were generated by fragments in the lava streams and not by an explosion from the crater vent, like occurred with Mount Pinatubo, Renato Solidum, who heads the volcano institute, told the Associated Press. Pyroclastic flows are superheated gas and volcanic debris that can race down slopes and incinerate everything in their path, and are feared in a major eruption.

The pyroclastic flows, there were several, were not generated by an explosion from the crater with lava, molten rocks and steam, shooting up the volcano then rolling down, Mr Solidum said. These were generated by lava fragments breaking off from the lava flow in the upper slopes.

He also said Mayon has not seen enough volcanic earthquakes of the type that would prompt scientists to raise the alert level to four, which would indicate an explosive eruption may be imminent. Emergency response officials previously said they may have to undertake forced evacuations if the alert is raised to four.

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

After steam explosions on Saturday and lava rising in the crater on Sunday, the alert was raised to three on a scale of five, indicating a hazardous eruption is possible within weeks or even days.

Mayon lies in coconut-growing Albay province about 210 miles (340km) southeast of Manila. With its near-perfect cone, Mayon is popular with climbers and tourists but has erupted about 50 times in the last 500 years, sometimes violently. In 2013, an ash eruption killed five climbers who had ventured near the summit despite warnings.

Mayons first recorded eruption was in 1616 and the most destructive in 1814 killed 1,200 people and buried the town of Cagsawa in volcanic mud.

The Philippines lies in the so-called Ring of Fire, a line of seismic faults surrounding the Pacific Ocean where earthquakes and volcanic activity are common.

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the northern Philippines exploded in one of the biggest volcanic eruptions of the 20th century, killing about 800 people.
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North Koreas state-run media has labelled Donald Trumps tweet about having a bigger nuclear button than leader Kim Jong Uns the spasm of a lunatic.

Rodong Sinmun, the ruling party newspaper, criticised the US President after he tweeted: I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

A summary of the commentary by North Koreas official news agency described the tweet as the spasm of a lunatic.

The spasm of Trump in the new year reflects the desperate mental state of a loser who failed to check the vigorous advance of the army and people of the DPRK, the article said, using the acronym for North Koreas formal name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

He is making [a] bluff only to be diagnosed as a psychopath.

The tone of the commentary is not uncommon for the North Korean media. But Mr Trumps willingness to respond in kind  he has repeatedly called Mr Kim little rocket man  is rare for an American leader.

Mr Trump has more recently suggested he might be willing to meet with Mr Kim, and reportedly told the Wall Street Journal the two probably have a very good relationship.

The US Presidents controversial nuclear button tweet was in response to Kims New Years Day warning that North Koreas nuclear arsenal is a real threat and that he has a nuclear launch button on his desk at all times.

Mr Kim said the entire US was within range of North Korean nuclear weapons, adding: This is reality, not a threat.

Rodong Sinmun also recently ran a story about the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which casts the president as a leader who does not understand the weight of his office and whose competence is questioned by aides. Mr Trump and other White House officials have blasted it as inaccurate.

Last summer, Mr Trump threatened North Korea with fire and fury like the world has never seen in an exchange of taunts with the North, which claimed it was examining plans to launch missiles towards the American territory of Guam.

The North Korean article said the sales of the expose reflect rapidly surging anti-Trump sentiments in the international community.

The anti-Trump book is sweeping all over the world so Trump is being massively humiliated worldwide.

The books popularity foretells Trumps political demise, it concluded.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

North Korea has come under increased international pressure over the past year over its nuclear weapons programme.

It claims to have a fully deployable nuclear weapon, although there is scepticism about its true ability to carry out such an attack.
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Soon after his arrest, 31-year-old Magomed-Alki Mezhidov was delivered to a police cell in Shali, Chechnya. There, detectives put terminals on his fingertips and turned on the current. They said they would torture him until he admitted to possessing drugs. Cries of pain would not stop them. No one had survived such questioning without eventually admitting their crime, they said.

Allegations of sadist interrogation techniques by Chechen security services are not new. Last year, the world found out about a state-led campaign of torture against gay people in the region; a purge that resulted in dozens of young men reported missing, some feared dead.

But these latest details, reported by the independent Russian publication Republic, suggest the regions erratic and all-powerful chief Ramzan Kadyrov has found himself a new target: drug users.

According to the publication, Mezhidovs arrest was one of dozens, possibly hundreds carried out in recent months, in an almost exact mirror of the gay purge. This time at least, no deaths have been reported. Instead, Republic carries claims of arbitrary arrests, extreme interviewing techniques, and torture.

Mr Kadyrov has long presented himself as a warrior against drugs. His first comments on the issue came in May 2006, where he drew a straight line between drug use, Wahhabism and terrorism.

It is one and the same thing, he was reported as saying. The drug user is no less of a source of evil than the terrorist, because he hooks the youth into dependence, and they are the future of our republic.

In September 2016, Mr Kadyrov called on his security forces to kill drug users  anyone who disturbs peace in the Chechen Republic  on sight.

Shoot them, to hell with them," he is quoted as saying. "Nothing matters  the law, no law. Shoot them, do you understand? As-salamu Alaykum! Thats law for you!

Later, officials said his comments had been taken out of context.

According to Tanya Lokshina, chief Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch and expert on the region, the reported crackdown would not be Mr Kadyrovs first violent campaign against drug users.

His authorities have routinely organised special operations to 'cleanse the region of what they consider to be undesirables, she told The Independent. Last year, the gay community was one of the targeted groups, but operations against suspected drug users have been going on for some time.

In interviews given to activists and journalists, survivors of the Chechen gay purge mentioned that drug users and suspected jihadis were frequently detained and tortured in the same secret facilities.

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

Activists contend that a large number of those detained and tortured are simply critics of the Kadyrov regime. It is unclear how many of last years 507 drug-related arrests fall under this category. Almost certainly, last weeks arrest of 60-year-old human rights activist Oyub Titiev is one of them. Police say they uncovered 180g of marijuana from his car; he says the drugs were planted and a confession forced out of him.

Mr Titiev is a well-known critic of the regions irascible leader, and took over running the Chechen office of rights organisation Memorial after the 2009 murder of his colleague, Natalia Estemirova.

Chechen authorities have yet to respond to the allegations contained in the new Republic investigation.
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Violent protests erupted outside Kievs parliament building on Tuesday as the government debated a controversial bill to reintegrate the Russian-occupied Donbas region with the rest of the country.

As the first parliamentary session of the year got underway, at least one policeman was injured and several protesters detained when the scuffles broke out in the Ukrainian capital.

Activists demanding that the reintegration bill be approved burnt the Russian flag and set tyres on fire as they called on the Ukrainian government to officially recognise Russia as an aggressor state.

Riot police attempted to control crowds which had gathered at a camp of supporters of pro-European Ukrainian opposition figure Mikheil Saakashvili, who is also the former president of Georgia.

But officers said the protesters used pepper spray and pelted the police with stones and tyres.

The situation near the Rada is now under control, Kiev Police said later, adding that local fire fighters had extinguished the burning tyres.

The protesters were led by Semyon Semyonchenko, the former commander of a volunteer battalion in eastern Ukraine suspected of human rights violations, Reuters reported.

Mr Semyonchenko and his supporters have criticised the new law as being too lenient on separatist leaders.

Protesters clash with police during their rally in front of the Parliament building in Kiev (EPA)

Russian News agency Tass reported that despite the heavy police presence Mr Semyonchenko is not planning to put an end to the protest encampment outside the Rada.

The Kremlin earlier denounced the reintegration bill as unacceptable saying the document goes against the Minsk Protocol  an agreement to halt the fighting in the Donbass region.

From a purely legal point of view, such a formula cannot be acceptable for us, neither de-jure nor de-facto, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week.

Recommended Former Georgian President says he is trying to save Ukraine

It is unacceptable. From the legal point of view it contradicts the letter and the spirit of the Minsk agreements.

A final vote on the bill still appears to be some way off due to the large number of amendments parliament must debate.

As the session closed at 6pm on Tuesday politicians had considered 482 of 675 total amendments, the English language paper the Kyiv Post reported.

The bill also seeks to create a legal framework for Ukraines armed forces in the contested region. If passed, all military operations in Donbas will be ultimately controlled by Kiev rather than the Security Service of Ukraine.

This is significant as it will redefine the key terms of the conflict. Until now, the conflict in Ukraine has been officially referred to as The Anti-Terrorist Operation. If the bill is passed, then Ukraine will openly refer to the regional conflict as Russian armed aggression, according to lawyers quoted by the Kyiv Post.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. 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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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The conflict between the Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government troops has been raging since 2014, killing more than 10,000 people.
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Norways government has pledged to shut all fur farms by 2025, a move welcomed by animal rights charities.

The country is the 14th European nation to phase out fur farming, according to Humane Society International (HSI), which campaigns against the fur trade.

Norways Conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg made the pledge to shut down all fox and mink farms as part of a deal with the anti-fur Liberal Party, which is now set to join her two-party minority government.

Guri Wormdahl, of the Norwegian Fur Breeders Association, said the organisation was "shocked [and] shaken to the core" by the news.

There are nearly 250 fox and mink farms in Norway, according to the organisations website, and mink production is currently increasing, with several new farms under construction. The country currently produces around one million pelts a year.

The number of farms used to be far higher, however. In 1939, Norway was the worlds biggest producer of fox fur and was home to almost 20,000 farms, according to a government report.

In 2013, the Nordic country produced just 3 per cent of the worlds fox furs and only 1 per cent of global mink output, with both markets now dominated by China.

"It's not a very lucrative business in Norway," said Sveinung Fjose, of Menon Business Economics and an expert on fur farms. "It wouldn't harm the Norwegian economy severely" to close it down.

Animal welfare organisations were delighted at the news.

We are thrilled to see such an unequivocal pledge from the Norwegian government to ban all fur farming, said Ruud Tombrock, executive director of Humane Society International's Europe branch.

We also hope that Norways fur farmers will decide to dismantle their businesses before the phase out deadline. Factory farming wild animals for fur in appallingly deprived conditions is unconscionably cruel, so to see a ban on this dreadful trade in a Scandinavian country is truly historic.

Campaigning charity Animal Defenders International (ADI) also welcomed the news. The group has been at the forefront of the movement to end the international fur trade, which it claims causes the death of more than 110 million animals a year.

In September last year, ADI activists released footage filmed on a Polish fur farm showing two Arctic fox cubs dragged from their cages and electrocuted to death.

The foxes seen on the farm allegedly had bent feet and overgrown claws, which ADI claimed was the result of the animals spending their entire lives standing on floors made of wire mesh.

Wherever this cruel trade exists, there is suffering and death, ADI said in response to the news from Norway.

The group was delighted at the announcement, but insisted that the closure of fur farms does not mean the demise of the fur industry.

Despite banning fur farming in 2000, the UK continues to export and import large amounts of fur, according to ADI.

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London Reuters UK news in pictures 28 October 2022 A cosplayer attends the MCM Comic Con London 2022 at the ExCel Centre in London Reuters UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA

In addition, an investigation by HSI last year allegedly found that real cat fur labelled as fake had been found in a pair of shoes sold in UK high street store Missguided.

We have been finding an increasing amount of fur either mislabelled or not labelled at all. This is misleading ethical consumers, who assume it is fake because its cheap. Consumers dont know what they are buying, said Claire Bass, director of HSI UK.

Ultimately, banning the import or sale of fur is the final nail in the coffin for this industry, Wendy Higgins, spokesperson for HSI, told The Independent.

It's also critical that we continue working with retailers and designers to take fur out of fashion from the top down.

Ms Higgins welcomed the announcement last year by fashion label Gucci that the brand would soon become fur-free - a pledge also made by Michael Kors - but said more needed to be done.

There are still far too many celebrities wearing fur. Whether it's Katie Price in her raccoon dog fur pom-pom hat or Kim Kardashian in a full length fur coat, it glamorises a grim industry and needs to stop.

Additional reporting by Reuters
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The Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic has been shot dead, his lawyer has confirmed.

"Unfortunately, I wish it weren't true, but doctors declared Oliver dead at 9.30am," Nebojsa Vlajic, Mr Ivanovic's lawyer confirmed.

Serbian media reported that unknown assailants opened fire on Mr Ivanovic in front of the offices of his Citizens' Initiative Party in Mitrovica.

The 64-year-old was one of the key politicians in Serb-dominated northern Kosovo, a former Serbian province where tensions remain high a decade after it declared independence.

A Kosovo court convicted Mr Ivanovic of war crimes during the 1998-99 war. That verdict was overturned and a retrial had been underway.

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

Serbian state television said President Aleksandar Vucic has called a top security meeting.

Mr Vucic also will address the public at midday GMT on Tuesday.

The attack is likely to heighten ethnic tensions in Kosovo, a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008.
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A former Auschwitz guard has pleaded for mercy in a bid to avoid jail for his role in the murder of more than 300,000 people.

Oskar Groening, known as the bookkeeper of Auschwitz, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2015 for being an accessory to murder at the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

But the 96-year-old German has not yet started his sentence due to a dispute about his health. He has now filed a plea for clemency, a regional justice spokesman said.

In December, Germanys constitutional court ruled Groening must go to jail, rejecting arguments from his lawyers that imprisonment at his advanced age would violate his right to life and physical safety.

Groenings court battle was seen as one of the last major trials related to the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered by Adolf Hitlers regime.

Prosecutors said Groening  who did not kill anyone himself while working at Auschwitz  had helped support the regime responsible for mass murder by sorting bank notes seized from trainloads of arriving victims.

Groening admitted he was morally guilty for the work he carried out at Auschwitz, which included sending bank notes he found in Jews luggage to SS offices in Berlin, where they helped to fund the Nazi war effort. But he did not admit participating in any crimes.

However, the court that convicted him ruled he was part of the machinery of death", helping the camp function and collecting money stolen from the victims to help the Nazi cause.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 119165.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119169.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119229.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119167.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119162.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119166.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119163.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119224.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119168.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119228.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119152.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119226.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119150.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119151.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119147.bin Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust 119231.bin Hannah Bills

Groening's last legal appeal was rejected at Germanys highest court in December. But the Federal Constitutional Court noted German law allows for prison sentences to be interrupted if a prisoners health deteriorates significantly.

Doctors have previously declared Groening fit to go to prison as long as there is appropriate medical care.

Christian Lauenstein, spokesman for the justice ministry in the northern state of Lower Saxony, where Groenings 2015 trial took place, said his plea for mercy had been passed on to public prosecutors.

He added: A plea for clemency does not have a delaying effect such as on starting the prison sentence.

Prosecutors spokeswoman Wiebke Bethke said her office would likely make a decision on the clemency request this week, in consultation with the panel of judges who convicted him.
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Prosecutors have charged Danish submarine owner Peter Madsen with the murder of journalist Kim Wall, whose dismembered body parts were found in the sea near Copenhagen.

Mr Madsen has denied killing her but previously admitted dismembering the Swedish writer's body.

Prosecutors alleged Mr Madsen either cut Ms Wall's throat or strangled her, describing the case as "very unusual and extremely gross".

He has been charged with the murder and dismembering of Ms Wall along with a charge of sexual assault without intercourse of a particularly dangerous nature, police said.

Recommended Arm found by divers in sea near Copenhagen may belong to Kim Wall

The inventor claims the journalist died accidentally inside the submarine while he was on deck during the excursion in August.

However, he has admitted throwing her body parts into the sea.

The start of the trial has been set for 8 March. A verdict is expected on 25 April.

Danish police said they were seeking to have the inventor jailed for life.

Ms Wall, 30, disappeared last August after boarding Mr Madsen's submarine in Copenhagen as part of research for a feature she was writing about the inventor.

Mr Madsen's submarine, which was recovered following Ms Wall's death last August (EPA)

The next day, Mr Madsen  an entrepreneur who once dreamed of launching a manned space mission  was rescued from the sinking submarine without Ms Wall.

Her dismembered torso was found on a southern Copenhagen coast in late August and her head, legs and clothes were discovered in bags at sea in October.

Additional reporting by agencies
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The US-Iran confrontation is already destabilising parts of the Middle East that were starting to settle down after the defeat of Isis in the second half of last year. The escalating American threats against Iran mean that the Iranians will be more vigorous in safeguarding their position in Iraq and Syria, said a former Iraqi minister who did not want his name published.

He warned that senior US officials, particularly those with a military background, will do everything short of war against Iran. They had convinced themselves that Irans clerical government was weaker than was really the case. They believe that they just have to kick the system and it will collapse, he said. This wishful thinking has been encouraged by the protests that have broken out in Iranian cities since 28 December.

US-Iran tensions increased last Friday when President Donald Trump said he had signed a waiver on the reimposition of draconian US sanctions on Iran for the last time. He would not do so when the issue comes up again in 120 days unless the nuclear deal agreed with Iran two years ago is substantially modified, something that is unlikely to happen. The uncertainty about sanctions has already cut the economic benefits to Iranians stemming from the agreement because foreign banks and companies do not want to risk spending money doing business in Iran and then find that they have to stop because of sanctions.

Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Nobody in the region is certain about how seriously they should take Mr Trumps belligerent rhetoric, but Iran will inevitably take precautionary measures to guard against a worst-case scenario. The Iranians are under the impression that others want to topple them and this is understandable, the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told The Independent in an interview in Baghdad last October. To protect themselves they have to fight outside their borders. They generally do this through the use of proxies and skilful manipulation of local forces.

Iraq has been enjoying its least violent period since the US and British invasion of 2003  but the unaccustomed peace is still fragile, as was shown on Monday when two suicide bombers killed 38 people and injured dozens more in an explosion in a market in Baghdad. This was the worst attack in the capital since the Iraqi security forces, backed by US airpower, captured Mosul in July after a nine-month siege  a major victory over Isis.

The US and Iranian relationship in Iraq has long been an unstable mixture of open rivalry and hostility, combined with covert and grudging cooperation. Both Mr Abadi and his predecessor as prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, were approved by both Washington and Tehran before being appointed.

This curious relationship between Iran and the US is tenuous, depending on both countries having similar aims, a recent example being the war against Isis. Iraqi governments try to balance between the two powers without becoming wholly dependent on either.

The US periodically hopes to establish a pro-American government in Baghdad, but the former Iraqi minister said that in present circumstances Iran would be determined, more than ever, to prevent this happening. He believed that American officials underestimate Shia solidarity and exaggerate the significance of the very real differences between Shia clerical leaders in the two countries. At the end of the day the marjaiya [the vastly influential Iraqi Shia hierarchy] would stand with Iran, he said.

A further complication arises if the US seeks to reimpose severe economic sanctions on Iran, because Iraq will become a centre for Iranian commerce and banking transactions. On the border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan there are three legal crossings and 13 illicit ones, according to the Iraqi interior ministry.

The US can stir the pot in Iraq but not achieve any decisive breakthrough in rolling back Iranian influence. In Syria, the American position is even more complicated because it relies, for leverage, on its alliance with the Syrian Kurds  the two million-strong minority that controls a great swathe of territory across northern and eastern Syria. The US has about 2,000 specialist soldiers in Syria, but its military strength depends on the use of airpower in support of Kurdish ground troops who belong to the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party, which has been waging a guerrilla war in Turkey since 1984.

This is not a stable political or military platform from which the US could try to diminish Iranian influence in Syria. Alliance with the Syrian Kurds means hostile relations with Turkey, as shown in the last few days when the US said it was supporting a 30,000-strong force to patrol the Syrian-Turkish border. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan furiously denounced the US move, saying a country we can call an ally is insisting on forming a terror army on our border. What can that terror army target but Turkey? Our mission is to strangle it before it is even born.

The US does not appear to have decided on its long-term policy in Syria. It could use its local assets to try to keep President Bashar al-Assad weak, which might be feasible, but it would be at the cost of chaos in at least part of Syria  and Iran has shown itself to be more adept than the US at exploiting chaotic situations.

Some observers say reassuringly that Mr Trumps aggressive rhetoric is frequently accompanied by prudent action and often by no action at all. But in the Middle East threats are taken seriously and, even when empty, may provoke a brutal counter-reaction. This is what happened in 2003 when US Neo-Conservatives spoke of following up the capture of Baghdad with regime change in Tehran and Damascus. The Iranians and Syrians became determined that the US and Britain would never stabilise their occupation of Iraq. If Mr Trump does succeed in capsizing the Iran nuclear deal, the US may soon regret reigniting a series of conflicts likely to end badly for them.
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A disabled Palestinian activist was shot dead by Israeli troops as he protested against Donald Trumps decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israels capital, an autopsy has found.

Ibraheem Abu Thuraya, 29, who lost both legs in an Israeli air strike, was one of four Palestinians killed during violent clashes on 15 December last year.

At the time of the shooting, the Palestinian Authoritys health ministry said Mr Thuraya was shot just east of Gaza City.

The Israeli military said it had opened fire on the main instigators of violent protests at the Gaza border, who it said were throwing firebombs and rocks.

Witnesses said Mr Thuraya was unarmed.

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

On Sunday, the justice ministry in Gaza said his body had been exhumed and a Hamas-affiliated commission said he had been shot by Israeli forces.

Multiple tests, including X-rays, revealed the bullet entered above his left eye and stayed in his head, Emad al-Baz, a spokesman for the organisation tasked with gathering evidence of alleged Israeli crimes, said according to the AFP news agency.

He said the autopsy showed the bullet was fired from around 30 metres away, which matches the distance between protesters and the Israeli army.

 Footage shows Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinian children

The Israeli military closed its initial probe into Mr Thurayas death after only a day, saying its forces had fired at protesters but not directly at the wheelchair-bound man. It said it was impossible to determine the cause of his death.

The IDF has since launched a criminal investigation into Mr Thurayehs death

Israel has maintained a blockade of Gaza for a decade, claiming it is necessary to contain the territorys Islamist rulers Hamas, who called for a new uprising in response to Mr Trumps Jerusalem declaration.
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Born in London and raised in Gibraltar, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum has Donald Trump to thank for making her new job one of the most interesting and controversial in the world.

She has been named as the new deputy mayor of Jerusalem, weeks after the US President declared that his country would recognise the city as Israels capital, sparking international condemnation.

Ms Hassan-Nahoum is the first British citizen to hold a senior political role in Israels history. Yet despite her own international background and her evident pleasure with Mr Trumps recent Israel policy, the 44-year-old makes clear in an interview with The Independent that it is not a matter for any foreigner to decide how Israel conducts its affairs.

The perception among the international community of her adopted country  she completed her aliyah (or move) to Israel in 2001  is more a matter of atrocious PR than the reality on the ground, she says, adding that there must be something more sinister at work to explain how the liberal public in Europe have so blindly accepted the rhetoric of the Palestinian side.

The world shouldnt take this totally one-sided narrative of the poor Palestinian and this brutal, apartheid Israeli rule, she says. I can only conclude that the oldest hatred in the world, antisemitism, is just at play here.

In Israel, Ms Hassan-Nahoum is a member of the Yerushalmim party and is proving to be something of a revolutionary figure, seeking to woo supporters from the fringes of Israeli society, from Ethiopian Jews to ultra-Orthodox Charedi women.

It has seen the Israeli media dub her an Orthodox feminist.

Im a religious woman and in this country the extremist groups have women excluded from the public sphere and political life," she says. I dont think if you are religious or Orthodox that you then cant have a voice as a woman."

Her campaign was regarded by many as a breath of fresh air - contrasting with traditional Israeli politicians who typically pander to powerful members of ultra-religious groups.

But she says she believes that her city must cater to all who call Jerusalem home, from zealot Haredi rabbis born in Israel to Jewish orphans who have relocated to the city from former Soviet bloc nations.

Ms Hassan-Nahoum was born in London but spent her childhood in Gibraltar where her father, Sir Joshua Hassan, was the Chief Minister for over 20 years.

She moved back to the UK at the age 18 to study law at Kings College London and fondly recalls legal dinners with friends from across the globe and watching Bob Dylan live at the first Party in the Park.

She then worked as campaign director at the World Jewish Relief charity and credits her time living in the multicultural capital as inspiring her pluralist policy in Israel.

The mother-of-four moved back to the UK at 18 to study law at Kings College London, and fondly recalls legal dinners with friends from across the globe (Supplied)

But despite her London connection, she is dismissive of the citys former mayor Boris Johnson and his recent comments, as Foreign Secretary, suggesting Israel must make the two-state solution a reality and face up to the actuality of its apartheid system.

I dont think it is up to Boris Johnson to tell us how any peace deal should look, she says. We should have the say on what our borders will look like, not a British Foreign Secretary.

Conversely, Ms Hassan-Nahoum embraces the recent recognition given by Donald Trump when affirming Jerusalem as the capital of the Israeli state.

Recommended Palestinian leaders call on PLO to suspend recognition of Israel

Absolutely, we welcomed it, even if it does nothing more than confirm a reality which already exists on the ground, she says.

Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, always has been, every independent country should have the right to choose its own capital.

It is not just the capital of the state of Israel but also the capital of the Jewish people and it has been for thousands of years.

Yes, Im very happy that they gave us that recognition. Did we need it? No. Is it significant geopolitically? Yes.

For her own part, Ms Hassan-Nahoum believes a two-state solution is indeed the answer to the Palestinian question  the details of which should be agreed between Israel and the Palestinians beforehand.

On the morning of our interview, Ms Hassan-Nahoum visited a school in underdeveloped East Jerusalem, home to a significant Palestinian population, and says that as municipal leader the first thing I want to do is to even out spending and make sure they get more resources.

Hassan-Nahoum was born in London but spent her childhood in Gibraltar where her father, Sir Joshua Hassan, was the Chief Minister for over 20 years (Supplied)

From her political leader father, Ms Hassan-Nahoum says she picked up many things ... but the one I always think of is his love for people.

Ms Hassan-Nahoum traces the start of her career in politics to being president of the Kings College Jewish Society.

And she is outspoken about what she sees as the rising levels of antisemitism on university campuses across the UK and its pervasion through British politics.

I think its tragic what is happening in the Labour party, she says. When I went to England in April I met with a lot of city councillors from the Labour party. They are so angry at what is going on in the party.

I do feel that this has only got worse since my time at university and in England  its what I hear from my friends in London. The fact is that you can wear a hijab and not have to make an excuse for yourself, yet friends of mine in London have to take off their yarmulkes because they are scared of getting attacked.

She adds: You can agree or disagree with Israeli policies but ultimately if Jewish students feel threatened in a campus environment there is something very wrong with this picture.

A proud Zionist with otherwise liberal policies, Ms Hassan-Nahoum has been tipped as a future prime minister of a modern Israeli state, but she says she sees herself more in a diplomatic role.

While dismissing the UN as a morally warped organisation which sanitises world dictatorships, she says she can see [herself] in a foreign role long term, [such as] Israeli ambassador to the UN.

Israels PR is currently atrocious and we are war criminals in the foreign media. I intend to become an important figure for Israel in terms of how we are represented outside of our country, she says.

People around the world believe a false narrative propped up by the media, she says, of a brutal genocidal Israeli apartheid rule.

She insists it is in fact the Palestinians who time and again, when they are at a crossroads of peace or war, have chosen the path of war.

I will never understand how the liberal public in Europe have so blindly accepted the rhetoric from misogynist, homophobic and genocidal groups in Palestine without question, she adds. It does just make you wonder if antisemitism is not just that little bit deeper than everything else.
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More than 22 million Yemenis  nearly 80 per cent of the population - now require humanitarian aid and more than a third of those are at risk of famine, the UN has said.

Nearly three years of war between Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and a pro-government military coalition led by Saudi Arabia has cost thousands of civilian lives, and a coalition-enforced port blockade prevented supplies from getting in last November in response to a ballistic missile launch.

The Red Sea ports of Hodeidah and Saleef have reopened in a 30-day reprieve but aid workers said they hoped authorisation would be extended beyond the current deadline of Friday.

Recommended Norway suspends arms exports to UAE over war in Yemen

Before the conflict, the now-Houthi-controlled Hodeidah handled about 70 per cent of Yemens imports.

Closing the ports again risks catastrophic loss of life, according to Stephen Anderson from the UNs World Food Programme (WFP).

Meritxell Relano, of Unicef, said getting fuel into Yemen was vital to power water and sanitation services. In addition, the country imports 85 per cent of its food and medicines.

The Saudi-led coalition has authorised the use of four US-funded cranes to offload goods from ships until 19 January, each capable of lifting 60 tonnes.

The number of Yemenis in need of aid amounts to three-quarters of the countrys population of 29 million. Eleven million are in what the WFP called acute need and 400,000 children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition, a potentially fatal condition.

 Devastation on the ground in Yemen displayed by International Rescue Committee in shocking video

Disrupting humanitarian access would deepen what the UN has already called the worlds worst humanitarian crisis, said Rosanne Marchesich, a Rome-based emergency response team leader at the bodys Food and Agriculture Organisation.

With 70 per cent of the rural population dependent on agriculture for food and income, sustaining production is crucial, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

But below average rainfall, fighting and limited, expensive inputs such as fertilizers, have pushed down yields, she added.

Yemenis have exhausted strategies to cope with the crisis and some are selling off their assets for short-term survival, deepening poverty and food insecurity, she warned.

In December the UK pledged 50m-worth of aid to stave off human tragedy for an additional month.

More than 10,000 people have died in the conflict as a result of violence, a huge cholera epidemic, starvation and other illnesses.

Yemenis are facing an extremely bleak outlook, with continued conflict, high fuel and food prices and disease concerns such as the cholera outbreak and the spread of diphtheria, the WFPs Mr Anderson added.

Cases of the latter disease have reached 678 with 48 proving fatal. The outbreak is spreading quickly, the World Health Organisation said.

Additional reporting by agencies
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Palestinian leaders have urged the Palestinian Liberation Organisation to suspend its formal recognition of Israel, a potentially grave blow to peace prospects.

Efforts toward an accord have been upended by Donald Trumps decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. With that turmoil in the background, Palestinian officials voted to have the PLO cease recognising Israel until it dissolves its annexation of East Jerusalem, halts settlement-building and recognises a Palestinian state, according to reports.

Mr Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital drew global opprobrium, including a United Nations censure. Palestinian leadership warned that the peace process would be irrevocably damaged and that America had forfeited its role as a neutral mediator.

In turn, Mr Trump and administration officials have floated cutting aid to Palestinians in retribution.

Earlier, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered a biting speech castigating Donald Trump and rejecting America as a mediator. He rebutted Mr Trumps suggestion that Palestinians had said they would no longer negotiate a peace deal and called the Jerusalem decision a slap in the face.

Mr Abbas also denounced Israel as a bulwark for European interests, a colonialist project that has nothing to do with Jews.

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

Those remarks drew rebukes from Israeli leadership, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying on Facebook that Mr Abbas demonstrated that The root of the conflict between us and the Palestinians is their steadfast refusal to recognise the Jewish state in any borders whatsoever.
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Donald Trumps tenure in the White House may have driven a wedge between Washington and Europe, but it is fundamental changes in demographics and the weakening of institutions like Nato that pose the greatest long-term threat to transatlantic relations, a leading think tank has warned.

A report from Chatham House said migration patterns were having a far more profound impact in the US and Europe than the election of Mr Trump.

The increase in Latin American and Asian groups in the US, and to a lesser extent, Middle Eastern populations in Europe is likely to cause the US and Europe to continue to diverge in terms of their regional interests and attention, said Xenia Wickett, an international relations expert who authored the report.

The US Hispanic population has grown in recent years, with one in five Americans now from the Latino community. That has coincided with a surge in the flow of refugees and migrants to Europe from the Middle East, triggered by wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ms Wickett, head of the US and Americas programme at Chatham House, said the election of Mr Trump would cause real and meaningful shorter-term disruptions but that he posed less of a long-term threat to the relationship between the US and Europe.

The report noted: While many fear that Trumps presidency will lead to a permanent decline in the transatlantic relationship and that the Trump years may be fundamentally different from anything that has gone before, history suggests otherwise.

While his policies may have reverberations beyond his time in office, there is no reason to believe that the consequences are likely to be profound and long-lasting for the fundamental interests of the transatlantic relationship.

The decline of international institutions is highlighted as a secondary trigger of US-European divergence.

 Theresa May refuses to tell Trump to stop tweeting

Organisations and treaties, including Nato, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, are "perceived as unable to meet todays challenges", wrote Ms Wickett.

"As their relevance declines, so they weaken as levers of transatlantic cooperation."

The report also said the likelihood of a post-Brexit deal with the US had been thrown into doubt, with political uncertainty causing agreements on free trade and environmental protections to halt or even go into reverse.

With the EU currently looking inward, and President Trumps antipathy to a number of historically common USEuropean interests  from Nato to the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris Agreement and the decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israels capital  the continuation of close transatlantic collaboration is in question, she wrote.

The British Government has defended moves to court Mr Trump, including with an invitation for a state visit later this year, saying it was crucial to secure a favourable post-Brexit trade deal.

But the Chatham House report noted Mr Trump may be less pivotal to the future of the UK-US special relationship than Theresa May has suggested.

At the weekend, Jeremy Corbyn said Britains relationship with the US was culturally and economically significant but not necessarily the most important.

I think there are many important relationships, he said.

In contrast, Ms May has defended close ties to the US, saying she and Mr Trump work very well together.
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Ive always followed the philosophy, Serve where youre called, not where youve been or where you might be, Thomas S Monson said in 2008, shortly after being elected president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints  better known as the Mormon Church.

During his 10-year tenure steering the organisation, Monson, who was regarded as a prophet by many of his Mormon devotees, dramatically grew the organisations missionary operations.

The church has nearly 15 million followers worldwide, with 6.6 million in America, where it was founded around 1830 by Joseph Smith, who claimed to have received messages from God and Jesus from the age of 14.

It is published in 188 languages. In the UK, the church has nearly 186,000 members. In Kazakhstan, there are 200, while South Korea has more than 87,000.

Monson upheld the Mormons longstanding opposition to same-sex marriage, despite the increasing acceptance of rights within and beyond the faith  in October, New Zealands 37-year-old Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern renounced her faith to highlight LGBTQ rights.

The preacher, who died aged 90, stopped attending regular leadership meetings in May.

A former advertising and printing executive at the church-owned Deseret News in Utah, Monson spent half a century as a top Mormon leader. He helped expand the churchs reach through ecumenical charity work and through the construction of Mormon temples from Peru to what was then East Germany, where religious groups faced hostility under Communist rule.

Monson assumed leadership of the church in 2008 after the death of President Gordon Hinckley, whom Monson had advised as First Counsellor  effectively second in command. While Monson was president in name, Mormons commonly referred to him as the prophet  the teacher who relayed messages from God to humanity.

His messages, whether spiritual or secular, were relatively few. Unlike his predecessor, an energetic speaker who jetted around the world well into his nineties, he maintained a low profile, calling few news conferences and rarely holding forth on Mormon doctrine.

Instead, he filled his public addresses with folksy parables that emphasised humanitarian service and care for others, an outlook that he said was rooted in his Depression-era upbringing in Salt Lake City.

Time and time again those who were riding the rails came to our home. I think they had it marked, he once told The Salt Lake Tribune, recalling the migrants who called on his family asking if they could work for food. My mother would say, You come right in and sit down; wash your hands over there in the sink. And then shed make a sandwich.

Monson sought to spread a Mormon message of charity at a pivotal time in the faiths history. He helped usher in the churchs transformation from a Western, American institution to one thats more international, said Matthew Bowman, author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.

The group grew from some half a million members at the time of Monsons birth to about 16 million at his death, with the majority located outside the United States. The growth was spurred in part by the churchs missionary programme, in which young Mormon men are heavily encouraged to spend two years abroad spreading the faith or performing humanitarian work. Young women are encouraged to serve 18-month missions.

Monson presided over a significant expansion in the programme, announcing in 2012 that the church would lower the minimum age for missionaries from 19 to 18 for men and from 21 to 19 for women. The church subsequently expanded leadership opportunities for female missionaries, although it continued to bar women from the priesthood. Since the changes were enacted, the programme has grown from about 58,000 missionaries to more than 70,000, by church estimates.

Monsons tenure coincided with what some observers christened a Mormon moment  a period in which Mormonism was frequently at the centre of national news with the campaigns of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon. Amid its growing prominence, the church became embroiled in controversy during the debates in America over same-sex marriage.

In one of his first major acts, Monson oversaw a church lobbying against same-sex marriage in California in 2008. The church encouraged members to work with groups such as Protect Marriage, a principal backer of the ban; according to a New York Times report, as many as 90 per cent of the organisations early volunteers were Mormon, and about half of its hefty $40m (29m) war chest was donated by Mormons.

Following a backlash, the church scaled back its efforts to oppose same-sex marriage rights, and threw its support behind legislation in the state of Utah that combined anti-discrimination provisions for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people with protections for religious groups that oppose homosexuality.

After a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalised same-sex marriage across America, however, the church adopted new rules stating that Mormons in same-sex marriages would be considered apostates, and that the children of same-sex couples could not be blessed or baptised until the age of 18. Baptism could only occur, according to the new policies, once the individual no longer lived in a same-sex household and had disavowed the practice of same-sex marriage or cohabitation.

Mormons who supported LGBTQ rights reacted with dismay and confusion, prompting Monson to issue a tweet: I plead with you to avoid anything that will deprive you of your happiness here in mortality and eternal life in the world to come.

One week later, more than 1,000 members gathered for a mass resignation ceremony in Salt Lake City.

Thomas Spencer Monson was born in the late Twenties. His father worked in the printing industry, and the young Tom developed an interest in pigeons, which he raised and trained throughout his life.

He served in the US Navy towards the end of the Second World War and received a bachelors degree in business management from the University of Utah in 1948, later graduating with a masters degree in business administration elsewhere.

Monson joined the Deseret News in Salt Lake City as an advertising executive and went on to serve as chairman of the church-controlled Deseret News Publishing Co. He became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, the churchs second-highest governing body, in 1963  aged 36 he was one of the youngest men to ever hold the position.

Monson also served on the board of the Boy Scouts of America and maintained its close link with the Mormon Church, which accounts for about 20 per cent of the organisations members.

The church distanced itself from the Scouts in May, withdrawing its participation in some programmes for teenagers. It said the separation was unrelated to the Scouts decision to admit gay and transgender Scouts and to allow gay men to serve as troop leaders.

Monsons wife of 65 years, the former Frances Johnson, died in 2013. The couples survivors include three children, Thomas Monson, Ann Dibb and Clark Monson; eight grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.

Thomas S Monson, President of the Mormon Church, born 21 August 1927, died 2 January 2018

 The Washington Post
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The little fella bobs along the seaweed washed up on the beach, clearly in search of something to eat. The North Island saddleback is only a small bird with a distinctive brown patch on its back, and it shouldnt get you as excited as, say, a panda or tiger sighting. But that it exists at all is a remarkable story.

Tiritiri Matangi  a 75-minute ferry ride from downtown Auckland  is one of several offshore islands that New Zealand has turned into sanctuaries for its native birds. Some of these are essentially closed to all but the Department of Conservation and scientists, but Tiritiri Matangi is kept open to visitors in an ambassadorial role. Essentially, seeing whats being done here gives a window into the heroic work being done elsewhere to stop these birds fluttering off into extinction.

Fate has thrown the mother of all curve balls at New Zealands bird life. The land broke off from the Gondwana supercontinent before mammals came on the scene, which allowed the birds millions of years to evolve in isolation.

With the only danger coming from the air, many species learned that the best way to avoid being eaten was simply to sit still so that falcons and swamp harriers couldnt see them moving. Some stopped flying altogether, preferring just to scuttle along in the leaf litter.

The views aren't bad, either (David Whitley)

Then, between 800 and 1,000 years ago (late in the evolutionary scale), the Maori showed up. They brought rats and dogs with them. Suddenly the tactic of just sitting quietly on the ground was catastrophically counterproductive.

Next came the Europeans, with their cats, stoats and ferrets, stripping the natural habitat as they went. For the native birds, this became a bloodbath of epic proportions, with some species surviving only in remote mountain valleys or on offshore islands that the interlopers werent much interested in. In the saddlebacks case, by the late 19th century, there were just 500 left in total: all on Hen Island in the countrys far north.

Intervention came just in the nick of time. Thomas Potts, a naturalist from Dunedin, first proposed island sanctuaries in the 1870s. The first temporary sanctuary was set up in 1891, with a permanent haven being declared on Little Barrier Island in 1895.

Little Barrier is visible from the hilltop on Tiritiri Matangi, and is off-limits to the public. Not that what youd see there is very different to what you see here. Many of the birds on Tiritiri Matangi have been moved from Little Barrier in a bid to expand the range of the threatened species.

The plant life is equally impressive (David Whitley)

This before-its-time conservation drive has now morphed into one of the most ambitious environmental projects on earth  Predator Free 2050. New Zealand is attempting to eradicate all introduced mammalian predators by the middle of the century, and these islands are the trailblazers. First task: eradicating all island nature reserves of non-native predators by 2025. Tiritiri Matangi had a head start  it was already largely free of the pests, and a controversial poison drop in 1993 did for the remaining Polynesian rats.

But its not just about the birds, as becomes clear on the guided walk from the ferry wharf up to New Zealands oldest working lighthouse. For the volunteers who lead the walks, this is the easy job. They get to walk through the forests, pointing out the flax plants used for weaving and the red-flowering pohutukawas that are known as the New Zealand Christmas tree.

The kereru, or New Zealand pigeon (Martin Saunders)

But those forests didnt exist 30 years ago. Old photos by the wharf show how bare Tiritiri Matangi once was in its former incarnation as a farm. Once it became clear that the island wasnt going to regenerate on its own accord, a large-scale planting programme was embarked upon. Between 1984 and 1994, 283,000 trees were planted.

The results are extraordinary. The birdsong in the forest is a near constant. Tiny riflemen shoot through, as noisy green bellbirds and bright blue kokako drop into feeding stations. Somewhere in there are the little spotted kiwis, but New Zealands totemic animal is unlikely to stir until dusk.

Then, near the top of the hill, comes the most remarkable sighting of all. Two robust strutters with distinctive red beaks are ambling along the track. They are takahe, a bird so rare that they were thought to be extinct for 50 years until a few survivors were found in a nigh-on inaccessible alpine valley. Even today, there are only around 275 of them in the world. To be able to stop and watch them is both a remarkable privilege, and testament to a conservation drive that has been going for over a century in a place where humans have otherwise brought little but pain.

The island is an unspoiled paradise (David Whitley)

Travel essentials

Getting there

Air New Zealand flies from Heathrow to Auckland from 814. From there, day trips to Tiritiri Matangi, including the ferry and 90-minute guided walk, cost NZ$80 (45) with Fullers.

Staying there

Pacific Island art-packed rooms at the Great Ponsonby Art Hotel cost from NZ$162 (90) including breakfast.

More information

tiritirimatangi.org.nz

newzealand.com/uk
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Flight 1 from Heathrow to Kuala Lumpur is Malaysia Airlines flagship service. On Tuesday evening, the plane with this flight number that touched down at the capitals airport was a very new arrival.

In place of the mighty double-decked, four-engined Airbus A380, the aircraft that taxied to the terminal at the end of a 6,600-mile journey was a single-deck twin-jet that had been delivered fresh from the factory in Toulouse only three weeks ago.

The Airbus A350 may be smaller, but according to Malaysia Airlines publicity, it offers passengers a more spacious interior on the long-haul from London.

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Yet the Airbus A380 was made for long-haul routes from London. With a capacity around 500, it can extract the most value from precious slots at Heathrow, the worlds most congested hub.

So why has the Malaysian Airlines carrier downsized? The carrier believes that combination of improved efficiency and passenger appeal will prove more profitable than the superjumbo on its key intercontinental link, and make it better able to compete with British Airways nightly Dreamliner service using the Boeing 787.

The airlines sales team may be quietly relieved, too. In a ferociously competitive market, they have 42 per cent fewer seats to sell on each departure.

For the A380 sales team at the Toulouse HQ of Airbus, last year was not a good year. Airbus had predicted a market for an average of 70 very large aircraft sales annually to 2036. At present the only aircraft in this category are the A380 and the Boeing 747-8. But Boeing has predicted a much smaller market, with an average of just 26 sales a year.

Last month the planemaker Airbus delivered a record 127 aircraft. The vast majority were from its highly successful A320 family. Of the 22 wide-bodied planes, a dozen were A330s and nine fresh young A350s. Just one superjumbo was delivered.

According to the maker, the A380 is a marvel of science and engineering, and no other travelling experience comes close. But the firms own spreadsheet reveals net sales last year were minus two: no new orders, and a couple of cancellations.

Only Emirates has demonstrated a strong commitment to the A380: the jet is at the heart of its business model to become people-carrier for the world. The Dubai-based airline has ordered 142, of which around two-thirds have arrived. But at Novembers Dubai Airshow, an expected new order for the A380 failed to materialise. Instead, Emirates opted for 40 Boeing 787 Dreamliners.

Shortly before Malaysia Airlines new kid in town took off from Heathrow, the bosses at Airbus sounded a warning.

If we cant work out a deal with Emirates, said the planemakers top salesman, John Leahy, I think there is no choice but to shut down the programme.

Such a move would be deeply humiliating for the European consortium, and an admission that Airbus wasted tens of billions of euros backing the wrong horse. So what went awry with the A380, and is there any prospect that it could come good? These are the key issues.

One careful owner

In the high stakes game of ordering new aircraft, the key unknowable is: a decade from now, what will they be worth?

The launch customer for the A380 was Singapore Airlines. Last summer returned its first superjumbo to the lessor. A 10-year-old, well-maintained jet should have a natural secondhand market. But the aircraft that triumphantly flew from Singapore to Sydney on 25 October 2007 is currently in storage at Lourdes. If a buyer cannot be found, the plane may be broken up for parts.

Until the market establishes a meaningful value for secondhand A380s, airlines and lessors will be disinclined to commit to the superjumbo. And the longer the 9V-SKA (the registration of the launch plane) sits on the ground in south-west France, the more it looks like a dead plane walking.

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Too many seats

At a time when aviation is expanding globally at 7 per cent a year, the idea that a plane could have too many seats may seem absurd. Surely it would be far more efficient to replace the motley mix of 757s, 767s, 777s, 787s, A330s and A340s on the London-New York run with A380s, halving the number of flights and freeing up slots? Well, leaving aside the reality that no US airline has expressed interest in the A380, the market on the worlds premier intercontinental air route demands frequency. American Airlines, British Airways, Delta, United and Virgin Atlantic know that the premium passengers who bankroll the link are more interested in the next departure being only an hour away than in the aesthetic appeal of a double-deck jet.

BA, the only one of those carriers with the A380, deploys it mostly on transatlantic routes  but to relatively low-frequency destinations, such as Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco and Vancouver. (It also flies the superjumbo to Singapore, Hong Kong and Johannesburg.)

You could envisage BA up-gauging some Boeing 747 and 777 routes, such as Dallas and Toronto. The move would cut the cost per seat. But that adds a lot of extra seats to be sold on a wet Wednesday in late January. And all at a time when BAs Heathrow hub-and-spoke model is already being attacked by budget airlines offering point-to-point options  a model not foreseen a quarter-century ago, when Airbus began looking at a Very Large Commercial Transport.

Too many engines

In 1993, an aircraft of the scale of the A380 could only be conceived with four large engines. In an era when oil was comfortingly below $20 a barrel, fitting two engines on each wing was in vogue  and appreciated by passengers. The four-engined Airbus A340 was about to enter service; when Virgin Atlantic became the launch customer for the A340-600, the stretched version, Richard Bransons airline promoted it with the slogan 4 engines 4 long haul  BAs big rival was the twin-engined Boeing 777.

Today, Sir Richard and just about every other aviation entrepreneur is quite happy with two engines. The fuel burn per seat on the A350 is lower than the A380, while capital and maintenance costs are commensurately reduced.

 Pilot films A380 take-off from Heathrow

No prestige premium

Projections for the A380 anticipated inflight shopping malls and gyms, but from the economy passengers point of view the reality has been seats, seats and more seats. An unscientific Twitter poll I am conducting suggests about one in three passengers could be more attracted to an airline offering an A380. But the same proportion believe New planes are better, and they could switch in the opposite direction. It is telling that Emirates chose to roll out its ultra-luxurious first-class product on a Boeing 777, not an Airbus A380.

Grounds for optimism?

Unless you a first-class passenger on Emirates from Gatwick, you may have noticed the quiet revelation that one of the airlines three daily departures to Dubai is shortly to change. Same A380, different configuration: no first-class cabin (complete with shower), many more seats in economy, with room for more than 600 (one-third more than on BA). Tickets from the Sussex airport are sold at a discount to those from Heathrow, and this move will help keep fares down. Perhaps the airlines which have installed increasingly elaborate facilities have been looking in the wrong direction; could the answer lie in cramming in many more passengers?

Recommended US ranks UK as dangerous as the Congo in new travel advisory

The A380 is certified for 873 seats, but so far no airline has gone for anything like than number. Passengers are seated a maximum of 10 across, though on the main deck it could easily be 11. While that may horrify travellers who see Ryanair-style standards on long-haul flights, it could transform the economics of flying between very large population centres: Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai

Airbus chief executive Fabrice Bregier believes there is huge potential in China for the A380: We need to convince the airlines that they can increase their market share, that they can increase tremendously their image buying the A380 and operating them from big Chinese hubs.

The biggest market deserves the biggest aircraft.

It could happen. The rising star at Airbus right now is the A321. When it first appeared in 1993, the stretch of the successful A320 earned little attention and few orders. A quarter-century on, with new engines, the A321 has become the aircraft of choice for airlines wanting to open up long-range point-to-point routes, and is very popular with passengers.

The A380 could take a stretch, increasing capacity beyond 900 and cutting seat costs still further. But first an airline needs to take a chance on secondhand superjumbo jets. Malaysia Airlines has some spare now.

Click here to compare flight options with Skyscanner
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Virgin Hyperloop One could be used to connect Londons airports in five minutes according to the companys CEO, Rob Lloyd.

The Branson-backed high-speed transport project is still in development, but Mr Lloyd envisages a future when it could join up Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted in super-quick time.

[Were] thinking about how technology could make it a much different proposition than the third runway, Lloyd told The Telegraph. Youd think of this as moving between terminals instead of moving between airports.

The companys technical advisory board estimated it would take five minutes to travel between Heathrow and Gatwick airports, while Heathrow to Stansted would take seven minutes  turning the three airports into one giant transport hub.

Calculations suggest that Hyperloop One, which comprises a series of carriages or pods carried by electric propulsion in a low-pressure tube, could transport people and goods at speeds of up to 670mph (1,080kph).

The aim of the company is to have a fully-operational hyperloop to transport cargo by 2021; however, a paper published by the Department for Transport in December 2017 said a hyperloop in the UK would be at least two decades away.

Sir Richard Branson joined the company board in October 2017, investing an undisclosed sum and rebranding it as Virgin Hyperloop One. He claimed that the revolutionary technology could cut journey times between London and Scotland to 45 minutes.

The entrepreneur said in a statement: After visiting Hyperloop Ones test site in Nevada and meeting its leadership team this past summer, I am convinced this groundbreaking technology will change transportation as we know it and dramatically cut journey times.

Virgin has been known for investing in and creating innovative companies over the years, and I look forward to making history together as we bring Hyperloop to the world as Virgin Hyperloop One.

He added: Virgin Hyperloop will be able to transport people from London to Scotland in 45 minutes.

I have a funny feeling that Ill get a lot of satisfaction from people saying its transformed their lives.

The hyperloop concept was originally the brainchild of American inventor and businessman Elon Musk. Although Musk is not directly involved in the company, Hyperloop One is already ahead of the curve, having become the first company in the world to test a full-scale Hyperloop back in May 2017 on its 500m Development Loop (DevLoop) in Las Vegas.
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Theres a law that forces the Government to consider the social consequences of giving contracts to big companies like Carillion.

In Oxfordshire, firefighters are on standby to deliver school meals now Carillion, propped up for months by government contracts, has gone bust.

I wonder if many of those Oxfordshire families had heard of Carillion until they read in the paper on Monday that firefighters, already overstretched in their duties fighting fires and saving lives, might be needed to deliver food to their children.

Its not just school lunches. A road-building project in Leeds has been thrown into doubt, a bypass in Lincolnshire may need a new contractor to finish works, academies sponsored by a Carillion trust will have to get a new name.

At least 25 local councils had contracts with Carillion, including catering and cleaning, major engineering, library management and road gritting. We need wonder no more how one company could properly provide so many specialist services. It couldnt.

 Jeremy Corbyn attacks Conservatives' 'rip-off privatisation policies' after Carillion collapse

These contracts made Carillion bosses rich: Richard Howson, the former chief executive, took home 1.5m in 2016.

But they also made Carillion too big to fail. While hedge funds were raking in 18m as Carillion shares slumped after a profit warning in July, the Government continued to award the company contracts, including High Speed Two, worth 1.3 billion.

Carillion is part of what is known as the shadow state: a group of large companies secretively awarded Government contracts to run Britains public services. There are others. G4S will be remembered for its failures in the run up to the 2012 Olympics; Serco is the stock markets best bet to mop up the contracts lost by Carillion.

What if, instead of awarding those contracts to another faceless FTSE 100 company, councils employed local businesses to do the work? It would boost jobs and training, nourishing communities, rather than leaving them vulnerable to market forces outside their control.

Five years ago, this kind of thinking was the basis for the Public Services (Social Value) Act. Since it came into force in January 2013, public bodies are required to consider the social value of the contracts they award.

One-third of local councils have since used the Act. This amounts to 25bn of public spending being shaped by social values, out of total public spending of 268bn, according to Social Enterprise UK.

In Preston, local councillors used the Act as the basis to redirect contracts, from printing services for the police to food for council buildings, towards local businesses. In Plymouth, the local council used the Act to employ CATERed, a co-operative company jointly owned by the council and 67 local schools, to provide school meals.

The Act gives smaller, local businesses a natural advantage. Bidders must prove that how they do business positively impacts the local social and economic value of their area, incentivising good practice and rewarding companies that support communities.

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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

But many of the groups that use it say that it does not go far enough. Public bodies have only to consider social value rather than to embed it in their criteria for awarding contracts. And they only have to do so above a threshold set by the EU, which has increased to over 600,000 for services tendered by the central government, ruling out many smaller contracts.

A review of the Act, called for in January 2017, lost momentum after the snap election. But a review is now essential to give the public sector more confidence to use social value when deciding on how to award contracts  not least because after Brexit, the UK will have to redefine how it wants to run procurement for public services.

The Social Value Act is not a catch-all solution to the shadow state. It will take a change of culture in the Government to stop awarding the same handful of companies lucrative contracts with the understanding that they deliver profits for shareholders over the short term. But it is certainly a good place to start.
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British-American politics has fallen victim to the cult of old age. Donald Trump, 71; Hillary Clinton, 70; Vince Cable, 74. Jeremy Corbyn is a bit of a youngster at just 68. Theresa May, aged 61, is the only leftover from the previous era of hero-worshipping the gilded youth.

One of the by-products of Trumps controversial unconventionality was that his age simply wasnt an issue in the presidential election. Nobody was very interested, when he was inaugurated in front of vast crowds, the hugest ever seen, that he was the oldest person ever to assume the office of President.

Jeremy Corbyn is an unconventional candidate too, but, unlike Trump, his age is part of his appeal. He has been around a long time, and he has been resolutely consistent all that time, through all the years in which his views were unfashionable, marginalised and ridiculed. So it is not perhaps a surprise that his age is brought up by his critics.

If Corbyn became prime minister at the next general election in 2022, he would be 72. He would be the oldest prime minister on taking office, even older than Lord Palmerston, who was 70 in 1855. There have been older prime ministers. Gladstone was 84 by the end of his fourth ministry. Churchill was 80 at the end of his second term.

Actuarially, politicians this old are more likely to suffer some loss of faculties, or to be ill, or to die. Churchill was gloriously unfit for office by the end of his time in it, according to Roy Jenkins, one of his biographers.

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

But these are probabilities, not automatic disqualifications. Corbyn seems remarkably healthy. Hes virtually a vegan, he hardly drinks, he never smokes, he walks and cycles. As he told The Independent recently, he attributes his energy to his daily porridge.

Psychologically, he has been transformed by the election last year. Before it his body language was closed, defensive and unhappy. Since he won 40 per cent of the vote and deprived the Conservatives of a majority, he strolls around the Palace of Westminster with his shoulders back, arms open and a permanent smile on his face. He loves campaigning and draws strength from it. He would enjoy the next election campaign and he would be energised by it.

Being in government would be another matter, of course. The burden of decisions would weigh on him, as he would quickly discover that sometimes his principles are not compatible either with each other or with economic realities.

That is why, perhaps, his opponents, including as we report today some in his own shadow cabinet, point out that he would be putting himself forward to lead a Labour government for five years, which would take him to 2027. He would then be nearly 78, and 77 is the same age as Ronald Reagan, the oldest US President so far while in office, at the end of his two terms. Reagan was only diagnosed with Alzheimers five years after he left office, but his critics thought he was losing his capacity while he was still in the White House. (Although, as with Trump, and with George W Bush, opposition to Reagan was so partisan that he was widely derided as stupid or incapable from the start).

It would be wrong to put an arbitrary age limit on prime ministerial office-holders, however. No one would set it as low as 60, but Harold Wilson, who stood down voluntarily when he turned 60, was widely thought to be aware that he was beginning to suffer the early effects of dementia.

 Jeremy Corbyn attacks Conservatives' 'rip-off privatisation policies' after Carillion collapse

Paradoxically, Corbyns health matters more than it might because the revolution he and his supporters have wrought in the Labour Party depends so much on him personally. It is his unique personality, never seeking high office, fighting losing causes for decades with no prospect of power, that enables him to hold together the coalition that did so well in June 2017.

That is why all the fuss about rules changes to allow a left-wing candidate to succeed him is irrelevant. Even if another Core Group Corbynite, such as Rebecca Long-Bailey or Laura Pidcock (or even John McDonnell, 66), did stand for the leadership, I think Labour members would elect Emily Thornberry or Angela Rayner  neither of them pure Corbynites  instead. The Corbyn revolution depends on Corbyn carrying on, and all the signs are that he is up for that fight.

If people dont want Corbyn to be prime minister, they need to fight his ideas, rather than complaining that he is too old for the job.
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What Boris chooses to forget (or dismiss) is that the retention of the UKs contribution to the EU budget has already been promised to sectors other than the NHS.

Farming alone has already been promised a continuation of the 4bn per annum, support currently contributed to our farmers through the EU.

The truth is that our exit from the EU will reduce our GDP and will not contribute any additional funding for the NHS.

Our exit will accelerate the exodus of EU doctors and nursing staff from our NHS and leave the NHS with an increasing staffing problem that additional funding could not rectify.

Boris and his fellow fanatical Brexiteers will do and say anything that might justify their decision to take our nation out of a united Europe.

Those of us who voted to leave the EU have been misled with lies and promises that could never be delivered.

Britains place is as a reforming and leading nation within a united Europe.

A united Europe could provide the stabilising balance between Putins Russia and a USA under an unstable Trump, both of whom hate the prospect of a united Europe.

More than ever before, our European nations need to stay united.

Martin Deighton

Woodbridge

Finally the Government has realised that taxpayers do not have bottomless pockets

The Carillion fiasco gives absolute credibility to the saying of putting all your eggs in one basket and that of chickens coming home to roost!

It beggars belief, with the Government giving this failing firm 1.5bn of state contracts when over the past six months this giant construction firm has issued three profit warnings with its share price tumbling from 2.30 last January to less than 20p now. During this period a contract worth 1.4bn was awarded for the HS2 project  a project that no sane taxpayer desires when the rest of the rail network is in such dire straits!

What a tangled web encompassing schools, hospitals, rail, roads, armed forces, prisons, libraries and energy  what due diligence measures by the Government were undertaken before awarding contracts worth billions of taxpayers money  has the village idiot truly come to town?

Surely this scenario proves privatisation has been, and is nothing but a colossal scam, for who or what does Carillion compete against in gaining its contracts? The only saving grace being the Government realising taxpayers pockets are not a bottomless pit and there will be no offer of state aid as with the err appreciative banks.

Dave Haskell

Cardigan

A wish list for a better Britain

For many, it is traditional to make a wish at the new year.

If I had a magic wand, here are just a few of the wishes I would make, if such was possible.

The return of coppers on the beat.

The removal of all speed bumps.

A weekly rubbish collection.

The removal of all wind farms, as they are only a success if the wind is gently blowing.

The return of free hospital parking.

The cancellation of all high-speed train contracts.

The return of the railway lines dug up by Dr Beeching.

A return to the simple way of purchasing a railway ticket, namely, first class, second class, day return or an open ticket.

Bring back the tax disc for all motor vehicles.

No doubt my wishes will never materialise, but it is fun to dream.

Colin Bower

Sherwood

Let the young have a higher proportion of the vote

A proposal for a second referendum if one does take place. Lets agree to recognise that the younger the voter, the longer that voter will have to live with the result. Therefore, lets weight the votes:

Age 18-30 vote x 4

Age 31-45 vote x 3

Age 46-60 vote x 2

Age 61 and above vote x 1

Jeff Brooks (age 65)

Godalming

Small enterprises must be protected after the liquidation of Carillion

The British Woodworking Federation (BWF) represents the UKs 3.8bn woodworking sector, a craft at the heart of the UKs construction sector, which employs approximately 60,000 people around the country.

As the news of the liquidation of Carillion breaks, it is almost ironic that we are putting our final comments on the Governments consultation into retention payments in the construction industry. This debate is not about whether the state should bail out Carillion, but whether Government can in all conscience turn its back on a supply chain of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) who will end up carrying the can for poor procurement, bad business management and an endemic failure by the Government to address some of the archaic procurement practices surrounding late payments and retentions that place risk unfairly on SME sub-contractors.

Many of the creditors are SMEs, and the sums, whilst likely to be significantly lower than the liquidators will take, could define the future of these businesses  it would be a gross injustice if their money unfairly held is lost in this process.

Frankly, to my mind, the Government is complicit in the sorry saga that is unfolding and we need decisions fast. In the short term we need to see some security against these retentions and unjust payment clauses. Moving forward we urge the Government to develop a structured and more consistent legislative process to deal with market failures, be it banks, construction firms or steel manufacturers. We cannot rely on arbitrary decision making and political posturing. There needs to be clear process to ensure those responsible foot the bill and ensure society and supply chains do not suffer unduly. The Government consistently fails to recognise the stress of running a small business and keeping people employed  a lot of business owners in this supply chain wont be sleeping soundly until this is resolved.

Ian Mcllwee, CEO, British Woodworking Federation

From Russia with love

Why were RAF Typhoons scrambled from Lossiemouth to intercept Russian jets? Surely it was just some of Alex Salmonds new besties dropping in for a cuppa?

Martin Redfern

Edinburgh
HARRISBURG- Fire departments across the nation have honored a 4-year-old that was killed in a house fire in South Carolina, including the Harrisburg Fire Department.

Nathan Raugh and his three children were killed in a house fire in McCormick County on January 8. Four-year-old James Raugh was the oldest of the three children and dreamed of becoming a firefighter.

To fulfill that dream, his family started using the hashtag #JRaughOnDuty and asked any fire department to send him on duty before he was laid to rest on Friday, Jan. 12.

On Thursday, Jan. 11 the Harrisburg Fire Department assigned James to its Engine-1 as its fifth man. Harrisburg Station 3 also put James on duty on its Engine-3.

Officials with the department said they were proud to have James riding along with them that day, saying it was truly an honor.
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The One Fact Which Disproves Russiagate, But Nobody Wants To Talk About

By Caitlin Johnstone

January 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - Yesterday the people of Hawaii were temporarily terrorized by a notification sent to their mobile phones that a ballistic missile was headed straight for them and they needed to seek shelter immediately. They were not notified that it was a false alarm for 38 minutes , despite its reportedly being a simple human error triggered by an employee who pushed the wrong button.

Many who are less trusting of official CNN narratives when it comes to the US power establishment have been voicing skepticism of this explanation, finding the timing highly suspect given that the Trump administration just caused international controversy by giving the okay for a $133 million sale of an anti-ballistic missile system to Japan. A sale which, according to Russia , violates international ballistic missile treaties and will put a strain on Moscows relationship with Tokyo.

Russia states this violates international arms treatiesUS says it will protect Western Pacific. What a Quinky Dink of the #Hawaii Opsie today as they are in middle of closing this deal! https://t.co/ARkSMuegoS  Debbie Lusignan (@saneprogressive) January 14, 2018

The general idea is that this deal has a lot less to do with the threat posed by North Korea, its ostensible object, and a lot more to do with the Russia-China tandem that the US power establishment is continually working to undermine. Placing an anti-ballistic missile system in the hands of a US ally right on the east edge of Asia weakens the effectiveness of mutually assured destruction (MAD), the understanding that if any nation launches a nuclear attack on another nuclear-armed country there will be full-scale retaliation and both countries will be destroyed. If some American officials get it into their heads that their countrys rivals can be taken out via nuclear strikes and any retaliatory strikes nullified via missile defense systems, MAD is no longer a deterrent to this and were looking at potentially billions of deaths and possible planetary extinction.

Regardless of whether the false alarm was a psyop designed to manufacture support for the anti-ballistic missile sale or a genuine human error, the fact remains that the deal itself is undeniably a move taken by the Trump administration against the will and interests of the Kremlin. This is just the latest in a string of maneuvers against Russia that have been made by this administration, despite Trumps continued outward assurances that he wants to improve relations with Moscow. As is so often the case, a US president is saying one thing and doing something very different.

And it completely kills the Russiagate narrative.

2 An NSC official proposed "withdrawing some US military forces from Eastern Europe as an overture to Putin." This was "first known case of [Trump aides] seeking to reposition U.S. military forces to please Putin"  but yet, "this first known case" was *"ultimately not adopted"* pic.twitter.com/AoI4GiwoBt  Aaron Mate (@aaronjmate) January 10, 2018

Just a few days ago Russiagaters were having yet another BOOM! We got him! social media parade about an article from the Clinton-directed Daily Beast, claiming that a senior national security aide within the Trump administration had suggested scaling down the US troop presence along Russias border, a dangerous escalation which all peace advocates support eliminating. In the first sentence of the articles second paragraph, the author Spencer Ackerman acknowledges that the proposal was ultimately not adopted.

Huh?

So President Trump, alleged to have been groomed early and at great expense by the Kremlin in anticipation of a presidential victory nobody else imagined possible at that time, was pitched a recommendation to scale down new cold war escalations with Russia and he refused? Thats how youre starting your article about the return on Russias election-time investment in President Trump?

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Russiagate is so weird. You need to plug yourself into Louise Mensch and Rachel Maddow ramblings so extensively that you can contort your sense of reason to the point where it looks perfectly rational to believe that Putin was omniscient enough to know that Trump could defeat all primary opponents and take the fight to the heir apparent Hillary Clinton back when virtually no one else imagined such a thing was possible, recruited his team reportedly at the cost of billions of dollars , poured all kinds of intel and resources into ensuring Trumps election using hackers and bots to influence American opinion, only to get a US president who is, when it comes to facts in evidence, already just a year into his administration demonstrably more hawkish towards Russia than his predecessor was.

Again: huh?

Nobody wants to think about this because it doesnt fit in with Americas stale partisan models; Democrats would have to admit that their best shot at getting a rival president impeached is pure gibberish, and Trump supporters would have to acknowledge that their swamp-draining populist hero is actually just one more corrupt globalist neocon like his predecessors. But when it comes to actual facts in evidence, thats exactly what were looking at.

Over and over and over again this alleged Russian asset has been choosing to undermine Moscow instead of advancing its interests. He approved the sale of arms to Ukraine, a move loudly encouraged by DC neocons which Obama refused to do because of the dangerous tensions it would inflame with Russia. His administration forced first RT and now Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigning established Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shutting down a Russian consulat e in San Francisco and throwing out Russian diplomats as part of continued back-and-forth hostile diplomatic exchanges, and signing the Russian sanctions bill despite loud protests from Moscow. If he is indeed an expensive Russian asset, then Russia got ripped off.

The one area Russiagaters can claim Trump hasnt gone against Russian interests is in Syria, where the administration has cooperated with Putin in fighting terrorist forces. Or at least, they would have been able to make that argument had Obama not been in favor of it as well . If Syria proves Trump is a Putin puppet, then the White House must have been offering a two-for-one deal, because they bought Obama as well.

Obama proposes new military partnership with Russia in Syria https://t.co/JtOAeDVmLK by me @PostOpinions  Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) June 30, 2016

Russiagaters can claim Well, Trump colluded with Russia, but because were putting political pressure on him not to align with Putin he isnt able to do anything to advance Moscows interests. Okay, but whats the charge, then? That Russia bought Trump, and accomplished absolutely nothing other than bringing new sanctions and cold war escalations down upon itself? Again, the Steele dossier upon which the collusion narrative is based alleges that Trump was recruited at great expense long before anyone in the US thought of him as a serious presidential contender. Were expected to believe that Putin was psychic enough to know Trump could win with enough confidence to invest accordingly, but not psychic enough to know that collusion and election meddling could be detected by Americas sprawling surveillance networks and cause backlash, sanctions and escalations?

No part of any of this makes any sense at all. If you can see past the stupid corporate media-fed filters of Trumpism and anti-Trumpism enough to look at whats actually happening, the collusion narrative is nonsense on its face.

Maybe the false missile alarm wasnt a psyop, but Russiagate definitely is. Americas unelected power establishment had a plan to manufacture support for new escalations to hobble the Russia-China tandem regardless of who won the 2016 presidential election, and since their prefered candidate didnt win theyve been employing what is surely the most extensive single psychological operation ever performed in human history.

And its working so far. Sure will cause a lot of problems for them if people start waking up to it, though.

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Amnesty International Is Barking Up The Wrong Tree

By Paul Craig Roberts

January 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - I have received a letter from Margaret Huang, Amnesty Internationals executive director. She is fundraising on the basis of President Trumps chilling disregard for our cherished human rights and his exploitation of hatred, misogyny, racism and zenophobia, by which he has emboldened and empowered the most violent segments of our society.

Considering the hostility of Identity Politics toward Trump, one can understand why Ms. Huang frames her fundraiser in this way, but are the Trump deplorables the most empowered and violent segments of our society or is it the security agencies, the police, the neoconservatives, the presstitute media, and the Republican and Democratic parties?

John Kiriakou, Ray McGovern, Philip Giraldi, Edward Snowden, and others inform us that it is their former employers, the security agencies, that are empowered by unaccountability and violent by intent. Certainly the security agencies are emboldened by everything they have gotten away with, including their conspiracy to destroy President Trump with their orchestration known as Russiagate.

The violence that the US government has committed against humanity since the Clinton regime attacked Serbia was not committed by Trump deplorables. The violence that has destroyed in whole or part eight countries, murdering, maiming, and displacing millions of peoples, was committed by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes, their secretaries of state such as Hillary Clinton, their national security advisers, their military and security establishments, both parties in Congress. The murder of entire countries was endorsed by the presstitute media and the heads of state of Washingtons European, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese vassals. Trump and his deplorables have a long way to go to match this record of violence.

Whether she understands it or not, Ms. Huang with her letter is shifting the violence from where it belongs to where it does not. The consequence will be to increase violence and human rights violations.

The most dangerous source of violence that we face is nuclear Armageddon resulting from the neoconservative quest for US hegemony. Since the Clinton regime every US government has broken tension-easing agreements that previous administrations had achieved with Moscow. During the Obama regime the gratuitous aggressions and false accusations against Russia became extreme.

Why doesnt Amnesty International address the reckless and irresponsible acts of the US government that are violating the rights of people in numerous countries and pushing the world into nuclear war? Instead, there have been times when Amnesty International aligns with Washingtons propaganda against Washingtons victims.

By jumping on the military/security complexs get Trump movement, human rights and environmental organizations have increased the likelihood that rights and environment will be lost to war.

There can be no doubt that Trump is undoing past environmental protections and opening the environment and wildlife to more destruction. However, the worst destruction comes from war, especially nuclear war.

Would things be different if the liberal/progressive/left had rallied to Trumps support in reducing tensions with Russia, in normalizing the hostile relations that Obama had established with Moscow? Would the support of the liberal/progressive/left have helped Trump resist the pressures from the neoconservative warmongers? In exchange for support for his principal goal, would Trump have mitigated industrys attacks on the environment and vetoed the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that violates human rights?

We will never know, because the liberal/progressive/left could not see beyond the end ot its nose to comprehend what it means for the environment and for human rights for nuclear powers to be locked into mutual suspicion.

Thanks to the failure of the liberal/progressive/left and to the presstitute media to understand the stakes, the military/security complex has been successful in pushing Trump off his agenda. The damage that a mining company and offshore drilling can do to the environment is large, but it pales in comparison to the damage from nuclear weapons.

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 .
What It Was Like Thinking a Ballistic

Missile Was Speeding Toward Us in

Hawaii

By Robert Barsocchini

January 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - Yesterday morning, while I was drinking coffee and reading and my wife was getting ready for work, we heard an emergency alert sound from our phones. I figured it would be a storm warning, but the weather was clear. My wife looked at her phone and said a missile was coming. She immediately sprang into action, grabbed a gallon of water from the fridge and brought it and our dogs into the bathroom, while I looked at the message on her phone and tried to process what it said. It was an emergency alert from the state:

Oh, no.

Right now, theres a ballistic missile actually flying through the air at 15,000 miles per hour toward Hawaii  probably Honolulu, where we are located. This is happening.

As a graduate student in American Studies, I both follow politics closely and have studied what happens in a nuclear explosion. I knew that during the week, North and South Korea had been engaged in peace talks regarding the Olympics, and in response, the Trump regime had threatened illegal military strikes on North Korea and had flown nuclear-capable bomber planes over the area. So I figured either Trump, following in Nixons self-proclaimed madman tradition, had decided to carry out a surprise attack and NK had responded, or NK had simply been scared into a suicidal first strike. Either way, I thought, this would probably mean the start of a huge war.

A ballistic missile attack had always seemed like a fairly remote possibility, but something that could certainly happen any time  and was probably a lot more likely than wed prefer to imagine. And now, we were told by the government in very certain terms, it had happened. The missile was on the way. It would hit at any moment.

So, we hunkered down in the bathroom and braced for an extremely painful death or near death. As we waited, we looked online for more news. All that came up in a search was people tweeting about the alert, expressing shock or saying things like Missile headed to Hawaii. Im going to die now.

So we sent a group text to our families saying good bye. This might very well be it for us, as it has been in similar fashion for so many, before.

After about two minutes of waiting and imagining the heat wave, third degree burns, frying organs, storm of flying glass and metal, 600 mile per hour winds, and collapsing building that was about to happen, we decided to make a break for shelter and higher ground further away from Honolulu.

We took the dogs and hurried outside. Some people were out there crying, with desperate expressions that said this is the end, this is going to be very bad. We asked if they wanted to come with us, but they declined. We got in our car and drove uphill away from Honolulu, and went into a Safeway parking lot. Some people were running from the building with cases of water. We hurried inside Safeway with our dogs. People were sitting on the floor, heads in hands, waiting for the impact. It had been ten minutes. This was about to happen.

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Once we felt like we were in the best place in the building, we frantically checked our phones again as we continued to envision the apocalypse that was going to occur any second. I then saw that Hawaiian representative Tulsi Gabbard had just announced on Twitter that she had been calling authorities, and had confirmed it was a false alarm.

At this point, we had spent twelve minutes thinking that a nuclear ballistic missile was actually speeding towards Hawaii, and that everything was about to become extremely terrible.

Going from thinking your world is about to change like that to hearing oops, false alarm, is quite a reversal.

We started telling people that we had heard from Gabbard that it was a false alarm. We went outside and told others. The news seemed to be spreading around that there was no missile. People were still wary, but calming down. We got in touch with our families.

As we tried to decompress and discuss what had happened, we agreed it wasnt so much a matter of being angry at whoever had accidentally sent the alert (though obviously that was a bad mistake), but more the existence of circumstances in which getting nuked is actually a thing that can realistically happen any time.

We thought about the millions of people who have actually been wiped out or seriously maimed by these kinds of weapons, paid for by our tax dollars and deployed by racists and armchair warriors in lieu of negotiations, in wars of aggression, and extra-judicial execution-by-explosive of suspects by the regime that controls the territory where we live. We thought of the people living under this and far greater levels of stress and threat constantly, being killed and horribly maimed constantly by explosives we are being made to pay for or by proxy regimes supported by this government  the worlds biggest arms trafficker and in 2013 named in a global poll as by far the greatest threat to world peace. (US provides aid to about 75% of the worlds dictators, as defined by the US.) We saw that corporate propaganda outlets like CBS were already using the false alarm in Hawaii to continue their highly successful efforts to prepare the US public for aggression against the rogue nation of North Korea, which suffered a massive genocide at the hands of US bombers and has been surrounded and under siege ever since.

A friend outside Hawaii, who consumes virtually only Western corporate propaganda news media, actually said to me that if we had been nuked, yesterday, at least North Korea wouldnt be a problem, any more, since the US would wipe it off the map. Millions of people, including us, would be dying horribly, but a people-group that has been a victim of American genocide and lives under constant, intense pressure and military threat from that same, genocidal state, would be completely wiped away for eternity. Lovely.

This disturbing experience thus highlighted, for us, the importance of resisting nationalistic, group insularity by seeking, in addition to mainstream Western sources, regular exposure to non-Western, international, global, and non-corporate, non-oligarchic information sources and opinions. Sources like Democracy Now, The Real News, Antiwar.com, Telesur, PressTV, RT, Al Jazeera, WSWS, Consortium News, and many others. All of these sources, including US-aggression-supporting and oligarchic outlets like the Bezos Post, NYT, NPR, and Fox, provide information, but also important contrast with, and insight into, each other.

In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Robert Browning notes that one of the reasons Nazis who refused to support their murderous government gave for their dissent (for which none were seriously punished) was that they had had experienced international exposure. They had broken their German insularity.

Those who had been exposed predominantly to information from German sources largely followed directives from the German regime and supported or carried out aggression and killing. The two most crucial values that had been cultivated in their minds were that Germany was superior, and that its actions, though they might at times be firm, were carried out for good reasons.

Breaking group insularity allowed some to discover that these assertions were absurd, wrong and, regardless, irrelevant.

Robert J. Barsocchini is a graduate student in American Studies. Years working as a cross-cultural intermediary for corporations in the film and Television industry sparked his interest in the often astounding discrepancy between Western self-image and reality. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists.
Home Norman Finkelstein Slams Chuck Schumer for Pushing Trump to Declare Jerusalem Israels Capital Watch "If you look at Schumers money, he gets it mostly from conservative, right-wing Jews and from Wall Street, the same sources of income as Trump. Posted January 15, 2018 Never Miss Another Story Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter AMY GOODMAN : Before we get to speak more extensively about Gaza, I wanted to quickly ask you what you felt the motivation was for President Trump recognizing Jerusalem as the capital, saying hed move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv, the massive response in the United Nations after he announced this recognition, the overwhelming vote against the United States, and the United States threatening people who voted against them. Before we get to speak more extensively about Gaza, I wanted to quickly ask you what you felt the motivation was for President Trump recognizing Jerusalem as the capital, saying hed move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv, the massive response in the United Nations after he announced this recognition, the overwhelming vote against the United States, and the United States threatening people who voted against them. NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, its a little complicated question, how U.S.-Israeli policy works. But in general, you could say, when major U.S. national interests are at stake, the Israel lobby has very little power. We saw that, for example, during the negotiations over the agreement with Iran. That was a major U.S. international interest. The lobby was dead set against it. Netanyahu was dead set against it. But the agreement went through. And many of Israels strongest supportersDianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, the whole gangthey supported the agreement. But when a major U.S. interest is not at stake, the lobby is quite powerful. So you take, in this particular case, it was clear the Saudis, which is a U.S. major interest, didnt care what the U.S. did with Jerusalem. They gave the green light: If you want to give it to Israel, thats fine with us. We dont care. So, no U.S. natural interest is at stake, and so Trump does what anybody does: He rewards his donors. In this case, it was Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, who was strongly supporting the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. But we have to bear in mind, it wasnt just Trump. You know, sometimes the media wants to pile up on Trump. And they forget its not just Trump. Charles Schumer, the current Senate minority leader, Schumer was constantly attacking Trump, right after he got elected: Why arent you recognizing Jerusalem as the undivided capital? When Trump did recognize it, Schumer, Charles Schumer, he said, He did it because of me. I was the one that urged him to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital. So thats the Senate minority leader speaking. And for the same reasonif you look at Schumers money, he gets it mostly from conservative, right-wing Jews and from Wall Street, the same sources of income as Trump, the same streams of income. And on these questions, a lot of the Democrats, including Schumeror especially Schumer, I should sayare worse than Trump. So, for example, after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010, when Israel killed the passengers aboard the humanitarian vessel, the Mavi Marmara, killed 10 passengers, Charles Schumer, he went before a group of Orthodox Jews, and he said, The people of Gaza voted for Hamas. They voted for Hamas, and therefore economic strangulation is the way to go. Now, bear in mind what that means. Were talking about a population, more than half of which are children, who are living under a medieval siege. And what hes effectively saying is we should continue starving them, until they vote or get rid of Hamas. Now, what do you say about something like that? You know, Charles Schumer, he went to my high school, as did, incidentally, Bernie Sanders. I didnt know him. He was, I think, four years ahead of me. I knew his sister pretty well, Fran. Extremely bright. You know, even now, looking back almost a half-century, she still stands vividly in my memory. Extremely bright young woman. They were decent, actually. Chucksas he was called Chuckhis father was an exterminator. You know, thats really rising. It was an impressive show. Hes an extremely bright guy. He was valedictorian of his class, and he was way ahead of everybody else, as was Fran, you know? But what they turned into, what can you say? He grew up in Kings Highway in Brooklyn, right near where Bernie grew up, by the way. I passed the house every day, because I bicycled to the pool. What do you say about a person who recommends starving children? Thats what he did. AMY GOODMAN: Were going to NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: You know, hes a moral monster. And you have to face up to that fact. Hes a moral monster. And yet everybody wants to dump on Trump. What about people like Schumer? AMY GOODMAN: Well, were going to break, and when we come back, were going to talk about the situation youre describing in Gaza. Your new book, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. Were speaking with author and scholar Norman Finkelstein. The book has just been published. Stay with us. Norman Finkelstein: author and scholar. His new book, titled Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, has just been published. He is the author of many other books, including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Human Suffering and Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End. This article was originally published by Democracy Now! - ==== 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. 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'We Look at Them Like Donkeys'



What Israel's first ruling party thought about Palestinian citizens



By Adam Raz

January 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - The Arab question in Israel was the term used in the top ranks of Mapai, the ruling party in the young State of Israel  and forerunner of Labor  to encapsulate the complex issue that arose after the War of Independence of 1948-49. In the wake of the fighting, and the armistice agreements that concluded the war, about 156,000 Arabs remained within Israel (out of an estimated 700,000 before the war), accounting for 14 percent of the nascent states population. So it was with some justification that Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett stated in a meeting of Mapai Knesset members and the partys senior leadership, on June 18, 1950, that this is one of the fundamental questions of our policy and of the future of our country. He added that the issue was one that will determine the direction of the countrys morality, for our entire moral stature depends on this test  on whether we pass it or not.

Almost 70 years later, the Arab question in Israel continues to pose a conundrum for politicians when they address the issue of the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel (or, as they are often imprecisely called, Israeli Arabs).

The minutes of the meetings held by Mapai, which are stored in the Labor Party Archive in Beit Berl, outside Kfar Sava, attest to the deep dispute in the party over two conflicting approaches concerning the Arabs in Israel. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his associates  Moshe Dayan (Israel Defense Forces chief of staff 1953-1958) and Shimon Peres, at the time a senior official in the Defense Ministry  urged a policy of segregation and a hard hand against what he argued was a communal threat to national security; while Sharett and other Mapai leaders  Pinhas Lavon, Zalman Aran, David Hacohen and others  promoted a policy of integration.

The disagreement between Ben-Gurion and Sharett mirrored the respective approaches held by the two regarding the Arab world in general. Sharett was critical of Ben-Gurions policy, which he said, held that the only language the Arabs understand is force, and called for an approach that preferred the matter of peace. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, then a Knesset member, and later Israels second president (1952-1963), summed up succinctly the alternatives in a meeting of the Mapai MKs several weeks later, on July 9, 1950: The question is the attitude the state takes toward the minorities. Do we want them to remain in the country, to be integrated in the country, or to get out of the country We declared civic equality irrespective of race difference. Does this refer to a time when there will be no Arabs in the country? If so, its fraud.

'Transfer' option

The discussions within the party were quite freewheeling, even if speakers frequently expressed concern of leaks to the press, which could have lead to international pressure on Israel to improve the treatment of its Arab citizens. Indeed, the future of the relations between the peoples who inhabited the country demanded weighty political decisions. Among the issues in question: the right to vote, the Absentees Property Law, the status of the Arab education system, membership of Arab workers in the Mapai-affiliated Histadrut federation of labor, and more.

One proposition that arose frequently in the discussions was that of a  transfer   the expulsion of the Arabs who continued to reside in Israel  a term that some found grating already then. In the June 1950 meeting, Sharett took issue with the allegation, voiced by Ben-Gurion and his supporters, that the Arabs in Israel were a fifth column. That was a simplistic assumption, Sharett said, which needs to be examined. As he saw it, the fate of the relations between the two peoples depended overwhelmingly on the Jews. Will we continue to fan the flames? Sharett asked, or try to douse them? Even though a high-school education was not yet mandatory under law (and the state was not obligated to offer one), a large number of the Jewish youth in the country attended high school, and Sharett thought that the state should establish high schools for the Arabs as well. Israel needs to guarantee them their cultural minimum, he added.

For political reasons, the segregationists tended to ignore the difference between the Arabs living in Israel and those who were left on the other side of the border following the war, many of whom made attempts to infiltrate and return to their homes. Sharett took the opposite view: A distinction must be made between vigorous action against Arab infiltration and discrimination against Arabs within the country.

Ranking figures such as Sharett and Lavon, who was defense minister in 1954-55, viewed positively a further exodus of Arabs from the country, but only by peaceful means. Sharett vehemently objected to the position taken by Dayan, who not only wanted to bring about a situation in which there would be fewer Arabs in Israel, but sought to achieve this through active expulsion. In Sharetts view, We must not strive to do this by a wholesale policy of persecution and discrimination. Sharett spoke of distinctly unnecessary forms of cruelty, which are tantamount to an indescribable desecration of Gods name.

Dayan, notwithstanding the fact that he was serving in the army at the time  as head of Southern Command  participated in Mapais political meetings and helped set public policy. He was one of the leaders of the aggressive stance against the countrys Arabs and was against a proposal that they should serve in the army (an idea that came up but was shelved). He opposed granting the Arabs permanent-citizenship certificates, opposed compensating those who had been dispossessed of their land, and in fact opposed every constructive action that could contribute to bridge-building between the peoples. Lets say that we help them live in the situation they are in today and no more, he proposed.

Dayan's approach remained consistent over the years, and conflicted with the view taken by Sharett and the stream in Mapai that he represented. Speaking in the same June 1950 meeting, Dayan asserted, I want to say that in my opinion, the policy of this party should be geared to see this public, of 170,000 Arabs, as though their fate has not yet been sealed. I hope that in the years to come there will perhaps be another possibility to implement a transfer of these Arabs from the Land of Israel, and as long as a possibility of this sort is feasible, we should not do anything that conflicts with this.

Dayan also objected to Sharetts proposals to improve the level of education among the countrys Arabs. It is not in our interest to do that, he said. This is not the only question on which the time for a final solution has not yet arrived.

Zalman Aran, a future education minister, objected to the military government that had been imposed on Israels Arabs at the time of statehood and remained in effect until 1966. Under its terms, Arabs had to be equipped with permits both to work and to travel outside their hometowns, which were also under curfew at night. As long as we keep them in ghettos, Aran said, no constructive activity will help. Lavon, too, urged the dismantlement of the military government. In 1955, a few months after resigning as defense minister, he savaged the concept at a meeting in Beit Berl. The State of Israel cannot solve the question of the Arabs who are in the country by Nazi means, he stated, adding, Nazism is Nazism, even if carried out by Jews.

Even earlier, Lavon was a sharp critic of the line taken by Dayan and other advocates of transfer. At a meeting of another Mapai leadership forum, on May 21, 1949, he said acidly, Its well known that we socialists are the best in the world even when we rob Arabs. A few months later, on January 1, 1950, in another meeting, he warned, It is impossible to take action among the Arabs when the policy is one of transfer. It is impossible to work among them if the policy is to oppress Arabs  that prevents concrete action. What is being carried out is a dramatic and brutal suppression of the Arabs in Israel... Transfer is not on the cards. If there is not a war, they will not go. Two-hundred thousand Arabs will be citizens in terms of voting... As the state party, we must set for ourselves a constructive policy in the Arab realm.

Back in December 1948, during the discussions on granting the right to vote for the Constituent Assembly  Israels first parliamentary institution, which was elected in January 1949, and a month later became the Israel Knesset  Ben-Gurion agreed to grant the right to vote to the Arabs who had been in the country when a census was taken, a month earlier. About 37,000 Arabs were registered in the census. The decision to enfranchise them apparently stemmed from party-political considerations. The thinking was that most of them would vote for Mapai.

This assessment was voiced in the discussions on the Citizenship Law in early 1951, when Ben-Gurion expressed the most assertive opinion. He refused to grant the right to vote to the Arabs who were living in the country lawfully (as Sharett demanded) but who had been elsewhere during the census (because they had fled or had been expelled in the wake of the war); or to those Arabs who resided in the Triangle (an area of Arab towns and villages on the Sharon plain), which was annexed to Israel only in April 1949, under the armistice agreement with Jordan. Is there no country in the world that has two types of citizens in elections [meaning voting and non-voting], Ben-Gurion asked rhetorically in a meeting of Mapai MKs on February 20, 1951.

In the view of Sharett, who submitted a conflicting draft resolution, it would not be possible to defend this situation in regard to ourselves and in regard to these Arabs, and in regard to the Arabs in Israel as a whole and in terms of world public opinion. Accordingly, I suggest granting them the right to vote... Discriminate only against the Arabs who entered Israel without permission.

Sharett maintained that Ben-Gurion had not given consideration to the root of the problem. Terrible things were being done against Arabs in the country, he warned. Until a Jew is hanged for murdering an Arab for no reason, in cold blood, the Jews will not understand that Arabs are not dogs but human beings. Sharetts view carried the day in the vote, and the Arabs in the Triangle voted in the elections.

In the July 9, 1950, meeting, MK David Hacohen disputed the argument that discrimination against the Arabs and the institution of the military government were essential for the countrys security. Assailing the Absentees Property Law  a series of measures that allowed the state to expropriate land and homes abandoned by Palestinians who were displaced during the war, even if they subsequently returned to the country  he said, I dont know whether it was clear to us all, when we voted, how grave it is. He noted that, According to the law, when an Arab dies, his property does not go to his wife but to the Custodian of Absentees Property It is inconceivable for us to declare equality of all citizens and at the same time have a law like this on the books.

Apparently, no one took issue with the next comparison Hacohen drew: These laws that we are coming up with in regard to Israels Arab residents cannot even be likened to the laws that were promulgated against the Jews in the Middle Ages, when they were deprived of all rights. After all, this is a total contrast between our declarations and our deeds.

A similar approach was voiced during the same meeting by Zalman Aran, who viewed Mapais handling of the Arabs as a process of despair that must be rejected instead of finding excuses for it.

Morally, if we are a movement that does not lie, and we do not want to lie, we are here living a total lie, he said. All the books and articles that have been written, and the speeches made internally and for external consumption, are groundless when it comes to implementation. I am not talking about the attitude of individuals in the country toward the Arabs. I am talking about a [policy] line. I reject this line, which has emerged within society and has a thousand-and-one manifestations. I do not accept all the excuses that have been put forward.

Taking issue with Dayans approach, Aran compared the situation of the Arabs in Israel with the situation of Jews in other countries. On the basis of what we are doing here to the Arabs, there is no justification for demanding a different attitude toward Jewish minorities in other countries I would be contemptuous of Arabs who would want to form ties with us on the basis of this policy. We would be lying in the [Socialist] Internationale, we are lying to ourselves and we are lying to the nations of the world.

Dayan  still an officer in uniform, it must be remembered  objected to the opinions voiced by Hacohen and Aran, and saw no reason to draw a distinction between the Arab public in Israel and Arabs in enemy countries. I am far more pessimistic about the prospect of viewing these Arabs as loyal, he countered.

Flawed democracy

During the same period of a decade-plus when Ben-Gurion was premier, a political battle raged in Mapai over the continued existence of the military government. Ben-Gurion persistently defended the military government, which he saw as a deterrent force against the Arabs in Israel. In a meeting of the Mapai Secretariat on January 1, 1962, he railed against the dominant naivete of those, such as Sharett and Aran, who do not understand the Arabs, and warned of the possible consequences: There are people living under the illusion that we are like all the nations, that the Arabs are loyal to Israel and that what happened in Algeria cannot happen here.

He added, We view them like donkeys. They dont care. They accept it with love... To loosen the reins on the Arabs would be a great danger, he added: You and your ilk  those who support the abolition of the military government or making it less stringent  will be responsible for the perdition of Israel. A decade earlier, on January 15, 1951, Shmuel Dayan, Moshe Dayans father, a Mapai leader and longtime Knesset member, had voiced similar sentiments in a meeting of Mapai MKs. The Arabs, he said, could be good citizens, but its clear that at the moment they become an obstacle, they will constitute a terrible danger.

A decade later, Aran offered an opposite assessment of the situation. Speaking at a meeting of the Mapai Secretariat in January 1962, he maintained that it was the military government that is exacerbating the situation. He also rejected the Algeria analogy. On the contrary, he thought, the existence of the military government would not delay an Arab uprising but would only spur it. He reiterated his critique of the early 1950s a decade later. He was against a situation in which the Arabs are second-class citizens who lack rights like the Jews, and he was critical of both himself and his colleagues: We accepted this thing, we became accustomed to it... We took it in stride... Its hard to swallow... No Arab in the State of Israel is able, needs to, is capable of  whatever you give him economically, educationally  accepting that he is a second-class citizen in this country. I think that the world does not know the true situation. If it did, it would not let us keep going on this way.

Already then, Finance Minister Levi Eshkol, under whose term as prime minister the military government would be abolished, foresaw the dire consequences: It would not surprise me if something new suddenly emerges, that people will not want to rent a stable  or a room  to an Arab in some locale, which is the [logical] continuation of this situation. Will we be able to bear that?

One person who was not impressed by such arguments was the deputy defense minister, Shimon Peres. In a Mapai Secretariat meeting on January 5, 1962, he maintained that in practice, the military government is not a strain on the Arabs. The military government, he added, was [effectively] created by the Arabs, who endanger Israel and as long as that danger exists, we must meet it with understanding. In contrast, Isser Harel, head of the Shin Bet security service (1948-1952) and the Mossad (1952-1963), stated in 1966, days after resigning as Eshkols adviser for intelligence and security, that the military government is not a security necessity, and therefore there is no need for its existence. The army should not be dealing with the Arab citizens. That is a flaw in terms of our democracy (quoted in the daily Maariv, July 10, 1966). That had been the view of the security hawks, including Yigal Allon, since the early 1950s.

Over the years, it was claimed that the military government had served as a tool in Mapais hands for reinforcing its rule, both by giving out jobs and by distributing benefits, and also by intervening in election campaigns through the creation of Arab factions within existing parties that were convenient for the ruling party (and suppressing opponents on the other side). This is not the venue to discuss that allegation  for which evidence exists  but its worth noting one of the motifs of the hard-hand policy, which preserved the segregation between Arabs and Jews, as expressed candidly by Ben-Gurion in the meeting of the Mapai Secretariat on January 5, 1962: The moment that the difference between Jews and Arabs is eliminated, and they are at the same level If on that day there does not exist a regime in a world where there are no more wars, I do not have the shadow of a doubt that Israel will be eradicated and no trace will remain of the Jewish people.

This article was originally published by Haaretz -

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Russian Journalists Blow Lid Off Alleged US Terrorist Training Network in Syria By Sputnik January 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - Two Russian Syria-embedded journalists have put together a damning firsthand report on the true purpose of the secrecy-laden US military mission at At-Tanf, southern Syria. The Pentagon was forced to go into full public relations mode late last month amid fresh allegations by the Russian General Staff that US instructors were providing training assistance for some 350 ex-Daesh (ISIS) militants at the US Army's al-Tanf garrison in the southern Syrian province of Homs. Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov accused Washington of intending to use the militants to create a so-called 'New Syrian Army', a military formation aimed at further destabilizing the war-torn country after Daesh had been defeated. A Pentagon spokesperson soon responded, telling Sputnik that Moscow's allegations were "false and absurd," and stressing that the US and its allies engage in capturing and killing Daesh, not training them. In a special investigative report for Russia's Federal News Agency, embedded Syria correspondents Igor Petrashevich and Roman Martynovich made their way south to try to figure out what was really going on in the US-occupied area with their own eyes.

Al-Tanf, a settlement situated near Syria's border with Iraq and Jordan, is one of three official border crossings between Syria and Iraq, and the main border checkpoint along the Damascus-Baghdad highway. Intense fighting for the area took place in the spring and summer of 2017, as US-allied militia attempted to solidify their foothold in southern Syria. However, a Syrian Army counteroffensive backed by Russian air power stopped the militants' advance, prompting them and their US-led coalition allies to secure a patch of territory running about 55 km deep into Syria.

this is the at tanf border crossing an important crossing to iraq not mutch more.. the blue pocket are us forces together with thier jihadi buddy's (still) thier mission is fighting isis as you can see they are surounded by the syrian army so why are they there? pic.twitter.com/0fnfgfP0vW  serem00 (@Serem001) 6  2018 .

Late last month, General Gerasimov pointed to al-Tanf as being one of two staging areas for the continuation of an armed struggle against the Syrian government by the jihadists, with the other located at Shaddadi camp, under the control of Kurdish forces operating in Syria's north. According to the general, the al-Tanf militants, many former members of Daesh, were brought into the area by US special forces from Deir ez-Zor province, where Daesh had suffered total defeat.

According to Petrashevich and Martynovich, the presence of these former Daesh fighters made local residents wary of helping them to make their way into the US military-administered enclave. "A young man named Marshod warned our correspondents about this and said that two of his own attempts to make his way to a nearby village beyond the line of demarcation led to threats against his life from militants guarding the enclave's inner perimeter."

Undeterred, the journalists continued their investigation via interviews with eyewitnesses and representatives of the Syrian military stationed in the region.

There May Be Close to Four Times as Many Militants as Previously Estimated

Although the Russian military conservatively estimated the presence of roughly 350 Daesh militants at al-Tanf, Syrian military sources speaking to Patrashevich and Martynovich explained that the number may, in fact, be upwards of 1,200 fighters, some 200 of them Daesh jihadis brought to the area by US special forces, mostly from Deir ez-Zor province. Other forces include the so-called 'New Syrian Army', the Forces of Martyr Ahmad al-Abdo (formally part of the Free Syrian Army), and the Martyrs of Islam Brigade (an Islamist group). According to the Syrian military, these forces' armament includes large-caliber mortars, anti-tank missiles, tanks and other heavy weaponry.

The New Syrian Army, commanded by one Mekhenda Talla, reportedly has a strained relationship with the other formations, who cooperate with his forces only on a for cash basis.

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"In general, the relationship between the militants from the individual groups is quite tense, as civilian testimony makes clear," Patrashevich and Martynovich wrote. "One local, a man named Amjad Sahim, who managed to escape the US-controlled territory to neighboring Damascus Governate, told us that he and his brothers witnessed clashes between the NSA forces moving toward the border and former Daesh fighters attempting to leave the area into Jordanian territory. As a result of the clashes, the small group of Daesh terrorists was completely wiped out."

A new base has been set up by #US forces and rebels 70km east of At Tanf in southern #Syria pic.twitter.com/2hAN1cjjeg  ScienceOfDiscontent (@SciOfDiscontent) 4  2017 .

Furthermore, the journalists' Syrian Army source said that other members of the US-led coalition were also deployed in the area, with about 400 mercenaries, intelligence operatives and members of the special forces of the UK, France, Jordan, and possibly other countries, operating in the region. These forces' arsenal includes HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems, as well as anti-aircraft artillery, tasked with defending the US base.

'Passive Reserve' of 5,000 More Jihadists

Local freelance journalists told Patrashevich and Martynovich that in addition to the so-called 'active reserve' of militants, the US and its allies also has a passive one.

"While the main jihadists are based at the US Armed Forces base and receive a monthly allowance, another 5,000 Islamists reside at the Rukban refugee camp, some still armed and in contact with their field commanders. Last November, militants began voicing their dissatisfaction with the noticeable decline in US funding. As a result, the al-Tanf base's command, fearing military insurrection, decided to pay out a severance payment of several thousand dollars to each fighter, and gave them the right to remain inside the enclave in the tent camp zone."

As for the New Syrian Army, their job, according to a Syrian Army serviceman stationed near the front line, includes guard duty at checkpoints along the makeshift border, and defense of the perimeter of the al-Tanf base and the Rukban camp. Talla's troops maintain discipline over the other units via payments the performance of various duties.

Life in Region a Living Hell for Civilians

Speaking to locals, Patrashevich and Martynovich were told that the jihadists' presence in the region has had a severe impact on civilian life. In the town of Al-Qaryatayn, the correspondents met with Farah Alhamsih, a young woman who had lived outside al-Tanf before managing to escape the area once it fell under US and jihadist control.

According to Alhamsih, while some militants engaged in "building homes or carried out shooting practice, most of them, left almost without a livelihood, robbed local houses, or trucks passing along the Damascus-Baghdad highway." According to the eyewitness, while US forces first tried to exert pressure on the radicals or even evict them from the Rukban camp, they eventually gave up, closing their eyes to their criminal activities.

Last fall, a group of some 300 Daesh militants carried out an offensive toward Al-Qaryatayn, successfully avoiding the Syrian Army's hidden outposts using coordinates Moscow and Damascus later alleged were obtained through aerial reconnaissance provided by the US. Although the offensive was stopped, the Syrian military has concerns that new attacks may be in the offing. Furthermore, US and jihadi occupation of the area put important roads, including the Homs-Deir ez-Zor and Damascus-Palmyra highways, as well as strategically important oil and gas fields, under threat.

At Tanf is a strategic point on the Baghdad-Damascus highway. The US wants to block this vital artery between Iraq and Syria: pic.twitter.com/JyMRow0ORr  Ron Black (@TiredOldCat) 7  2017 .

Russian officials have also voiced concerns about the state of the Rukban refugee camp, the Russian Center for Reconciliation describing the situation there as being close to 'catastrophic,' and the US military closing access to the camp to the UN and other humanitarian organizations. Thus far, Patrashevich and Martynovich recalled, "any attempts by Syrian government convoys or pro-Russian forces to come close to the enclave have been met with airstrikes by the US coalition." This includes incidents in May and June 2017 .

Sahim, the local man now living in Damascus Governate, confirmed to the journalists that the humanitarian situation in the US-occupied territory is approaching desperate, with basic foodstuffs and other necessities unavailable, while militants have seized local wells, selling water to locals at marked up prices.

"When I was very thirsty, I had to spend a fortune. A bottle of water which could earlier be bought for 50 lira is sold by the terrorists for 500. And people buy it. What else could they do? Many parents tried to save their children. I know several local families who gave away their girls for marriage just to get them out of the area," Sahim recalled.

The eyewitness added that when locals tried to organize to get the attention of US military command about arranging the supply of necessities, their requests fell on deaf ears. This, combined with the lack of any effort to rein in the militants, has given rise to anti-American sentiments, as well as hopes for cooperation with the Syrian government or even representatives of the Russian military.

The Russian Center for Reconciliation has offered to assist refugees from the Rukban camp. Despite the absence of any security guarantees from the US side, and the presence of roaming jihadist militants in the region, last month, Center representatives assisted in the evacuation of a small group of refugees from the camp. The reporters captured the evacuation on video.

For now, Patrashevich and Martynovich noted, the fate of the occupied Syrian enclave is in American hands. So long as the illegal US occupation of the border area continues, Damascus will not be able to rest easy with regard to the security of its southern territories.

This article was originally published by Sputnik -

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U.S.-led coalition helps to build new illegal force in Syria, angering Turkey : Syria's government decried the "blatant attack" on its sovereignty, and Russia warned it could lead to partition.

Erdogan claims that he could attack Washington's allied militias at any time

US military admits training Syrian militants, says they do not care if fight with terrorist organizations

Russia Knows Perpetrators of Attack on its Syrian Bases, It's Not Turkey - Putin

Join the Discussion
US Strategy in Syria Includes Balkanization



By Stephen Lendman



January 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - Syria is Obamas war, now Trumps  in cahoots with Israel and their rogue partners in high crimes.



Their aim is replacing its government with pro-Western puppet rule  a diabolical scheme Washington pursues against all sovereign independent countries, naked aggression its favored strategy.



Russias intervention in September 2015 to combat US-supported terrorists at the request of Assad changed the dynamic on the ground  forcing Washington to change tactics, not its objective.



It includes occupying and controlling northern Syria bordering Turkey and its southern territory bordering Iraq  balkanizing the country, a step toward destroying its sovereign independence.



US forces operate in Syria illegally, their presence a flagrant violation of international law. They occupy a 55km area in southern Syria  off limits to its government and military.



The same holds in northern Syria  along the 820 km border with Turkey. Thousands of US special forces and other combat troops prevent Syrian control over its own territory.



Washington intends creating a 30,000-strong Border Security Force (BSF)  comprised of Kurdish YPG fighters and terrorists, a permanent occupying force.



The Pentagon and CIA are working with these elements on the phony pretext of combating ISIS they created and support.



According to the Defense Post, (t)he BSF will be stationed along the Euphrates River Valley  marking the western edge of the territory within Syria currently controlled by US-supported anti-government YPG fighters and terrorists  so-called Orwellian-named Syrian Democratic Forces.



Last month, US CENTCOM commander General Joseph Votel said a training program was being established for Kurdish and Arab fighters  to become a permanent US occupying force in Syria, he failed to explain.



Turkey slammed the scheme, Erdogan spokesman Ibrahim Kalin, saying Ankara has the right to defend itself against terror groups (referring to Kurdish YPG fighters), calling Washingtons plan unacceptable, adding:



Turkey will continue to take all necessary precautions aligned with its national interest to preserve its national security.



Separately, Turkeys Foreign Ministry said US cooperation with YPG (fighters) jeopardize(s) our national security and territorial integrity of Syria, and that is unacceptable. We condemn the persistence of the United States in this erroneous approach, and once again remind that Turkey is determined to eliminate any threats against it, and has all possibilities to do this.



Syria calls all anti-government forces in the country traitors. Russia strongly opposes Washingtons plan.



On Sunday, lower house State Duma Defense Committee chairman Vladimir Shamanov said the Trump administrations plan stands in direct confrontation (with Russias interests), and we and our colleagues will certainly undertake certain measures on stabilization of the situation in Syria.



His deputy Defense Committee head Yuri Shvitkin added:



Theres a clear equivocation here. I think its an obvious attempt to reanimate the militants, who can flow from neighboring states, namely Iraq, to achieve (Washingtons) geopolitical goals, escalate tensions, and, probably attempt to overthrow the legitimately elected president Bashar Assad.



US and Russian aims for Syria are worlds apart. Moscow wants conflict resolved, peace and stability restored to the country, its territorial integrity protected and preserved, along with the right of Syrians alone to decide wholl lead them  free from foreign interference.



Washington wants Assad removed, a pro-Western puppet replacing him, Syrian sovereign independence destroyed, the country balkanized for easier control by a permanent occupying force comprised of US combat troops, Kurdish fighters and terrorists.



How Russia intends challenging this unacceptable scheme remains to be seen.



Will Syria become a flashpoint for confrontation with Washington? Is US/Russian confrontation inevitable?

Visit Stephens website: www.stephenlendman.org (Home  Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net . - My newest book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III. http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html - Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

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US military admits training Syrian militants, says they do not care if fight with terrorist organizations

Join the Discussion
Chelsea Manning Confirms US Senate Run

The Associated Press

January 15, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - NORTH BETHESDA, Md. (AP)  Chelsea Manning on Sunday confirmed via Twitter that she is a candidate for U.S. Senate.

Three days after making her intention known to federal election officials, Manning tweeted "yup, we're running for senate" with an attached campaign video indicating her intention to run in the 2018 Maryland Democratic primary. She sent a subsequent tweet seeking donations to her campaign.

The 30-year-old Manning filed her statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday.

Known as Bradley Manning at the time of her 2010 arrest, the former Army intelligence analyst was convicted of leaking classified documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

Manning came out as transgender after being sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Barack Obama granted Manning clemency before leaving office last year.

Manning is running as a Democrat and will likely challenge two-term Sen. Ben Cardin in the primary.

When Manning was released from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in May, she told the AP in an email that she was eager to define her future  but made no mention of politics.

The Oklahoma native had planned to move to Maryland, where she has an aunt. She has been registered to vote at the apartment in North Bethesda since mid-August, according to the Maryland State Board of Elections.

Her recent move would not affect a Senate bid. To run for that office, a person must be at least 30 years old, a U.S. citizen for nine years and an inhabitant of the state at election time, according to the Maryland State Board of Elections. A felony conviction does not appear to preclude a run.

Manning is yet to file for the primary with the state elections board, which she must do in person by Feb. 27, according to the board's website.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the European Union (EU) on Monday evacuated 132 more Nigerians from Libya.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the new batch of returnees arrived at the Cargo Wing of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos at 5.30 p.m. on Monday.

The Nigerians returned aboard a chartered Global Africa aircraft with Registration Number LZ MDO.

The returnees comprised 35 adult females, 88 adult males and nine children and infants.

They were received by officials of the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS), the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and the Police.

An official of the IOM, Frantz Celestin, said this was the second chartered flight by IOM in 2018 making it 313 Nigeria returned so far in the new year.

Migration is not a problem in itself. It engenders socioceconomic development if properly managed, he said.

Mr. Celestin affirmed IOMs commitment in collaborating with Nigeria in ensuring protection and safe arrival of Nigerian migrants from Libya.

NAN reports that 6,806 Nigerians have been returned from Libya in 2017 through the efforts of the IOM and EU.

The Nigerians were stranded in the volatile North African country where they had been stranded enroute Europe and were being subjected to various abuses in the country.

Source : (NAN)
Governor of Akwa Ibom State, Mr. Udom Emmanuel, on Monday sacked Mr. Umoren, who was nominated into the cabinet by Mr. Akpabio, the Senate Minority Leader.

The first official to be sacked from the cabinet was the then commissioner for local government and chieftaincy affairs, Udo Ekpenyong, about two weeks ago.

However, the state Commissioner for Information, Charles Udoh, who announced the sacking of the SSG, said the move was to rejig the governance structure in the state.

The sacked officials, Mr. Ekpenyong and Mr. Umoren, are from the Ikot Ekpene Senatorial District where Mr. Akpabio comes from.

Political analysts in the state believe Governor Emmanuel is likely to remove more people from the government in order to weaken Mr. Akpabios structure and influence as the governor seeks re-election in 2019.

The state government has appointed a new SSG, Emmanuel Ekuwem, a renowned telecom engineer from Mbo Local Government Areas.

The Akpabio-Udom feud became public in December when the senator said in a public gathering that the governor has neglected Ikot Ekpene Senatorial District.

Apart from his former allies turning against the senator, Mr. Emmanuel has personally warned that he was going to deal decisively with any politician who instigates trouble in the state, irrespective of his status.

Mr. Akpabio, when he was still the governor, single-handedly brought Mr. Emmanuel from Lagos where he was serving as a director in Zenith Bank. The ex-governor made Mr. Emmanuel his successor despite the opposition from his party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and others.
The Taraba State Police Command, confirmed the death of an abducted state lawmaker, identified as Hosea Ibikunle, the

police spokesman in the state, David Misal, said Mr. Ibi, who represents Takum 1, at the assembly was found dead early Monday.

Its very unfortunate while we were working assiduously to track down the kidnappers, we found the dead body along Kashinbila road. Despite this unfortunate development, we will not relent until we fish out the assailants.

So, we are calling on the general public to please assist with useful information that could assist in tracking them (killers) down, the police spokesman said.

Also confirming, a political ally of the deceased lawmaker and former commissioner of information, Emmanuel Bello, said it was a shocking news.

Its with great shock and despair that I am talking to you now, because of this loss. Its a great loss not only to people of Takum, but to all Tarabans.

Those who found the body of Hosea said he might have been killed two days ago. Body going to Yoka now. Our heart is broken tonight and we condole with the family and Tarabans over late Hosea Ibi, he said.

Family sources said that the kidnappers had earlier opened up negotiations with the late lawmakers family members and had asked for a ransom of N100 million.

A family member, who pleaded anonymity, revealed that the abductors warned the family members not to involve the police.

The source also said one of the family members was allowed to speak with late Mr. Ibi to confirm that he was safe.

He said that talks were ongoing between the family members and the kidnapers before he was killed.

Yes, we were talking with them through telephone. They demanded we should pay a sum of N100 million. They assured us that our brother is healthy and we were allowed to speak with him to confirm that he is the one talking, only to hear now that he was killed, the source said.

Source: ( Premium Times )
Nigeria just added another win to its bag of trophies for 2017, and that is being ranked second worst electricity supply nation and infant deaths in 2017.

Heres the list released by Spectator Index on their official Twitter page.

Infant deaths per 1,000 live births; Angola: 96 Nigeria: 89 Pakistan: 69 Kenya: 59 India: 41 South Africa: 38 Indonesia: 25 Brazil: 15 Iran: 15 Turkey: 12.6 China: 11.6 Russia: 8.2 US: 5.9 UK: 4.2 Australia: 3.9 France: 3.3 Germany: 3.1 Japan: 2.2 Singapore: 1.7 (UN)

Worst electricity supply nation, 2017 (out of 137 countries) 1. Yemen 2. Nigeria 3. Haiti 4. Lebanon 5. Malawi 10. Venezuela 23. Pakistan 25. Argentina 29. Ethiopia 37. Bangladesh 41. South Africa 42. Sri Lanka 45. Algeria 46. Philippines 50. Turkey (WEF) Recall that in there was power outage across Nigeria on Tuesday, 2nd January, 2017s night .

Gas constraint, maintenance issues and other challenges forced Nigerias power generation down amid New Year celebrations on Monday and later Tuesday night, an industry report obtained by PREMIUM TIMES revealed.

According to the operational report prepared by the Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN, for Monday, the power generated for the first day of the year stood at 4,685 MW, out of a peak demand forecast of 17,720 MW and generation capacity of 7,871 MW.

The report put the eight-hour power generation for the day at 4,257 MW between 12 a.m. and 8 a.m., 3,915 MW between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. and 4,686 MW between 5 p.m. and 12 a.m. Tuesday morning.

The report revealed that power plants such as Kainji, Trans-Amadi and Olorunsogo were shut down due to gas constraints. Others like Alaoji and Geregu NIPP were out due to maintenance issues.

The report said that the peak generation till date, put at 5,222 MW, was recorded on December 18, 2017, while the maximum available capacity  what can actually be generated  to date, put at 7,652 MW, was recorded in April 2014.

The power ministry, in a statement in the early hours of Wednesday blamed the outage on fire at a gas pipeline system which interrupted gas supply and affected the national transmission grid.

The sudden loss of generation due to interruption in gas supply from these stations caused the national transmission grid to trip off around 20:20 on 2nd January 2018. The national transmission grid is owned and operated by the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), the ministry stated.

The statement signed by the power minister, Babatunde Fashola, said the problem would be temporary,

By Wednesday morning, electricity had been restored in many parts of the country.
The Nigerian Army handed over 244 repented Boko Haram suspects to the Borno State government, of which they have given up membership of the terrorist group.

The handing over of the suspects was in commemoration of the 2018 Armed Forces Remembrance Day.

The suspects comprise 56 women, 118 adult male, 19 under aged persons and 51 children.

Presenting the suspects at the Military Cemetery in Maiduguri, venue of the Armed Forces Remembrance Day celebration, the Theatre Commander of Operation Lafiya Dole, Rogers Nicholas, a major-general, said the release of the repentant Boko Haram members was approved by the Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, a Lieutenant-General .

He said the suspects had been properly screened and confirmed to have sincerely repented of allegiance to the group.

The Governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima, commended the military for its ongoing de-radicalisation efforts in the war against the almost nine year old Boko Haram insurgency.

Mr. Shettima took time to speak with some of the insurgents who assured him of their readiness to be absorbed into the society and promised to be law abiding citizens.

The high point of the Remembrance Day event was the laying of wreaths by the governor and top military officers.

Source : ( Premium Times )
Dont you just love a couple who have dated for quite a long time

There have been several memes on Social as regards long-term courtship.. But Fara and Demi have stood the test tof time, as theyve been dating since their high school days.
Tribune

President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday admonished the people of Benue to accommodate their countrymen following incessant deadly clashes between communities and suspected Fulani herdsmen.

Leadership

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, has said he was shocked by a news report ostensibly quoting the Benue State Governor Sam Ortom as saying that the VP was warned of the savage and inhumane killings by alleged herdsmen in Logo and Guma local government areas which took place on the 1st of January 2018.

The Nation

President Muhammadu Buhari has directed security agencies to fish out the herdsmen who killed no fewer than 73 farmers in New Years Day in Benue State.

Vanguard

The leadership of Taraba State chapter of Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, yesterday, disclosed that there was a grand conspiracy among the Federal Government, the police and killer Fulani herdsmen over the recent killings across Nigeria, particularly in the state.

Punch

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has started a fresh move to seize funds in 15 bank accounts linked with the wife of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, Patience.

The Sun

The metropolitan Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, has expressed deep concern over the recent killing of over 70 persons in Benue State.

Thisday

Indicted by the judicial panel of inquiry set up by the Ekiti State Government, a former governor and Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, and his Finance Commissioner, Mr. Dapo Kolawole, have been barred from holding any public office in the state and Nigeria for 10 years.

Daily Times

The Enugu State chapter of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) on Monday inaugurated a 22-member committee on Lasa Fever following reported re-emergence of the disease in the South East.

Guardian

Daily Trust

A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Abia State, Prince Chamberlain Adiaso, has said that President Muhammadu Buhari will run and win the 2019 presidential election.
One person was confirmed dead, while another was injured on Sunday when armed men attacked Dundi-Maiyanga village in Kwall, Bassa Local Government, Plateau State.

A source from the village told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday that three men were attacked by the armed men that used machetes and cutlasses.

The three men are brothers; they were in the house when the attackers descended on them, killing one and injuring another, while the other one escaped unhurt, the source told NAN.

Confirming the incident, Terna Tyopev, spokesman of the Plateau Police Command, told NAN that the incident took place Sunday night.

From the report sent to us, unknown armed men attacked three people at Dundi-Maiyanga village in Kwall District and killed one Sunday Lale, using machetes.

Lales brother, Ayuba, also suffered massive cuts on his body and is currently at the Catholic Hospital, Kwall, he said.

Mr. Tyopev said that Sundays corpse had been evacuated by personnel of the Special Task Force on security in Plateau.

He said that investigation was in progress and urged the affected community to be calm and avoid the temptation to attack people they suspected might be responsible for the incident.

Source : (NAN)
The Benue State Police command have confirmed the arrest of 59 persons in connection with the recent cult-related crises in some parts of Makurdi, the state capital.

Several people were injured and property worth millions of Naira destroyed during the crisis.

The Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO) in the state, Moses Yamu, made the disclosure in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Makurdi.

He said the command had already deployed additional personnel to the affected parts of the town to restore peace and and order as well as to check the spread of the crisis.

The PPRO said the arrested suspects would be charged to court as soon as investigations were concluded.

He advised Makurdi residents not to panic as security operatives were in control of the situation.

NAN reports that Gov. Samuel Ortom, had on Sunday during an emergency meeting in Makurdi, appealed to parents and guardians, to advise their children and wards against involvement in cult activities.

He warned that his administration would neither condone cult activities nor spare anyone culpable of the act.

NAN reports that security operatives are now patrolling the streets to prevent further break down of law and order.

NAN also reports that shops and other business places howwever, remained closed in the affected area.

Source : (NAN)
Nigerian comedian Seyi Law has shown love and passion towards his one time sworn enemy, blogger, and journalist, Kemi Omololu Olunloyo.

Recall the comedian and the controversial journalist got involved in a horrid social media drama, after Kemi alleged that Seyis daughter, Tiwa is Obese and diabetic.

Seyi immediately fired back at the blogger and described Olunloyo as someone whos hating on his daughter. Then, some persons mediated in the online battle and both parties seemed to sheathe their swords.

But days later, Olunloyo made another post in which she insisted that Tiwaloluwa wasnt healthy and that a relative of Seyis wife in London had told her that Tiwa indeed had Type 1 diabetes.

Anyway, thats by-gone now as both parties are now in good terms and has finally called a truce.

Well, Aunty Kemi who just got out of prison for the third time in a row, reported about her failing health and urged Nigerians to help her by contributing to her medical trust fund.

She has now taken to her Instagram page to break the news that Tiwa Lawrence, the daughter of Seyi Law had emptied her savings to help her meet her needs.

Kemi could not hide her joy as she prayed for the comedian and his family while thanking him profusely for the great help rendered to her.

She wrote:

#BREAKING HA!!! TIWA JUST EMPTIED HER SAVINGS ACCOUNT TO HELP AUNTY KEMIS MEDICAL FUND!! @seyilaw1 tell my cute pumpkin #hnntiwa @fameuxtiwa thanks for her donation to my medical fund.

You will NEVER LACK! This is your year of more blessings. Your family are FREE from evil IJN Amen @HNNAfrica @kemiolunloyo. Love to Mommy Ebere. Thx for the phone call my brother. Come visit me in Ibadan when I recover and go home. I am smiling. My chest still hurts a lot but ma baby made me smile!

#SeyiLaw is a Nigerian comedian and father to Nigerias most famous female toddler. FOLLOW #hnntiwa to see my journey with her.
A slay queen who apparently was not too happy with her life and planned to use her baby daddy for rituals has been caught.

According to the story the couple have been together for over seven years and even have a 3-year-old son, but the lady was not happy and content with the little they had, she planned to draw blood from her boyfriends left testicles for the sacrifice.

Read full story below:

#Repost PLEASE READ & SHARE TO WARN OTHERS ABOUT WICKED SLAY QUEENS.

ZAMBIA, BE INFORMED!!!!!

Admin please hide my ID.

I have been dating this lady named Eunice for 7 years, we even have a 3 year old son together whos ID is also with held. I have never cheated on this woman neither have I hurt her physically or emotionally. I have always supported her with what ever she wanted I even support her education and take care of our son when she is at work or school. Everything between us was fine until nearly 3 weeks ago when her behaviour towards me changed for the worst. She was always so angry with me and tried to pick fights over petty issues. At first I suspected that she might be pregnant and so the hormonal imbalance in her body is causing all of her terrible mood swings. But I was wrong, she was staying out late at night and buying expensive hair and heels for herself. I grew concerned and asked her where she got the money because i never gave her any money to buy those things and she told me that her cousin from the U.K sent her all the items. I brushed it off and just the day before yesterday I found a plastic full of hospital syringes hidden in one of our kitchen pots. When I asked her, she told me that her aunt in Livingstone was severely sick and so she was taking the syringes to her for medicinal purposes. I asked her why her aunts family in Livingstone are not taking her to the hospital and why she is the one to travel all the way to livingstone to take care of her sick aunt. All hell was broken loose and she got so angry and shouted at me, she called me ignorant and uncaring for her side of the family. I didnt say anything and then she suddenly started crying. Yesterday in the morning i was getting ready to go for work when she was in the bathroom taking a bath. I couldnt find my phone so I decided to use hers to beep my phone. A Facebook message popped up on her screen via Facebook messenger and below are the screen shots of her conversation with a witch satanist who she was going to meet in order to sacrifice me. I am in total shock and disappointment. The woman I love and the mother to my 3 year old son was planning my death this whole time. That is when I knew that she was going to use the syringe to draw blood from my manhood. All this so that she can be a slay queen. May God deliver this world. Please admin expose this woman I called my lover and the witch from livingstone she is conspiring with. Her names are Anitah lweendo and her satanic partner is some man named Chris.

See pictures and screenshot of chats below:
Motorists were held up for some hours on Monday following a multiple accident on the popular Kara Bridge axis of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway.

Witnesses said the crash occurred after a long truck headed towards Mowe rammed into several vehicles, including that of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC).

They said the situation was later brought under control by FRSC operatives and officials of other emergency management agencies who were at the scene.

However, it was uncertain if there was any casualty.

Source: ( Channels Television )
F ormer presidential media aide, Reno Omokri is known for his views on many political issues being a strong critic of all things APC, he is however also known for his so called RenoNuggets which usually contains relationship advise to Nigerian youths.

In his latest one, Reno is advising against per-marital sex and having multiple sex partners as it is according to him, a tool used by Satan to dilute destiny.

Read his Tweet below;

-Gistreel
Virtual Reality (VR) has been slowly creeping into the mainstream lexicon as its prevalence is becoming more apparent. The result is a new world of possibilities in the public mindset and with it a revolution in the relationship between businesses and their customers. Innovative VR applications like the ability for Live Nation to stream a concert or Lowes to showcase potential renovations in VR is leap in the future that has been anticipated for generations.

What was once merely a pipe dream is quickly becoming a reality and the businesses of today must turn to tomorrow to keep up with the future. Here are 3 reasons why companies should embrace virtual reality:

1. The Market Is Expanding

The sales numbers for VR were initially not encouraging but as time has gone on and the prices have dropped, we are seeing a market rising to formidable heights. Google is even offering cardboard VR headsets to drive the market even further while increasing affordability for everyone. This means one simple thing, that the market is creating a large customer base and with that a whole new host of possibilities.

In 2016 major VR shipped about 1.7 million units but that number may double in 2017 which will definitely create broader innovations. The least of which is the revelation that profit is now possible in a broader way. Virtual Reality is shifting away from being purely for gaming or media and is now in the world of tourism, shopping and experience. Innovations in this space are seemingly unending and with that will be ways of interacting with the world that excite businesses, customers and everyone else in the world.

2. The Connection With The Customer

People using Virtual Reality are not simply window shopping but rather experiencing on a deeper level of sensory communication with their interactive arena. When Toms shoes did the Walk in their shoes campaign to take people on a journey through Colombia they were interacting with their customers and the public on a much deeper level.

In VR we can experience what it is like in the corners of the world and feel the environment all while being in our living rooms. When watching an ad or viewing a billboard businesses rely on temporal communication but with Virtual Reality they can go beyond the eye and illicit a far deeper range of emotions. This creates a relationship with the customer beyond buying and selling, something that will truly last. The goal of business is not just to turn profit but to affect lives positively.

3. Business Operation Consolidation

One of the more exciting but less discussed innovations in Virtual Reality is how it can affect businesses in operational capacities. For instance, a company needs to train an employee in piloting an aircraft. They could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a physical simulation or they could just purchase the simulation application and train them in VR. The same goes for just about any situation from training Python programmers to training retail specialists there is an application in Virtual Reality.

On the other side VR can help immensely in R&D and manufacturing as the need to physically build prototypes or potential products is no longer necessary. Instead a business can simulate a product in VR and test it without the cost of production weighing them down. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses without the cash flow for testing before launching an initial product to market. Virtual Reality can also be used to simulate organizational meetings or massive presentation while having a present audience from around the globe. This creates a fully integrated employee base while not requiring physical offices for structure.

Conclusion

Though Virtual Reality started out slow, the market is building rapidly and isnt slowing down anytime soon. VR brings with it possibilities once thought to be pure science fiction and its revolutionizing how we do business and interact with the world around us. For businesses VR means a whole host of new innovations that will undoubtedly change the way we do business for the better. Businesses will be able to connect with their customers cerebrally and bring new products to market in a cost effective way.

About the author: Lisa Froelings is a business and productivity consultant with over 4 years of experience in human resources working for a major retailer in the country before she decided to build her own business. Her interests include technology, mindfulness as well as time management.

Edited by Ken Briodagh
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions has warned of a growing wage gap that will inevitably lead to a rise in wider inequality following the publication of its annual survey of executive pay levels in the private sector.

The Because Were Worth It: The Truth About CEO Pay in Ireland annual survey, which was first published in 2017, examines the remuneration for chief executives in 20 of the largest companies listed on the Irish Stock Exchange, along with CEO pay at the 12 largest commercial state companies.

The latest study shows pay differentials between top CEO pay and average earnings. In some instances, the study suggests it would take people on average earnings up to 270 years to earn what the CEO of some companies make in one year.

The report also reveals pay increases for some chief executives of up to 100%, between 2015 and 2016 and along with a near doubling of cash bonuses for some.

According to one the reports authors, Dr Peter Rigney the study clearly has significant implications for wider Irish society, given the enormous disparity it reveals between senior executive pay and average earnings.

"In our view, if this trend is left unchecked it will inevitably lead to greater levels of inequality across society.

To that end we need to see greater transparency and accountability around senior executive pay and remuneration packages.

He went on: Overall, the debate around corporate pay is part of a wider debate around corporate governance, an issue on which Ireland generally lags behind other EU countries.

In addition, there is also the issue of pay and performance and we have yet to see conclusive evidence of a direct causal link between high CEO pay and company performance.

Indeed some studies warn that high and exorbitant levels of pay at senior levels can lead to lower productivity, perverse incentives and a focus on short-term indicators, Dr Rigney said.

The Congress study also looks at the issue of gender diversity at senior level and finds that three out of the four companies having no women on their boards are London based."

If this is a regulatory gap it needs to be closed. This is a matter for government, for the stock exchanges and for fund managers, the Congress report notes.

The report was compiled by Dr Peter Rigney and Eileen Sweeney.

A seminar and briefing on the report will take place in Congress House Parnell Square, on Friday January 19 with financial journalist Martin Fitzpatrick.

For more information on that event see here

A copy of Because Were Worth It can be downloaded here
The European Unions two most senior officials have said "our door remains open" to Britain holding a second referendum which could cancel Brexit amid growing speculation a fresh vote may take place, writes Fiachra O Cionnaith.

European Commission president Jean Claude Juncker and European Council president Donald Tusk made the comments after quoting British Brexit secretary David Davis by saying "if a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy".

Speaking in Strasbourg, France, before Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on Wednesday comes face-to-face with Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage during a European Parliament debate on the future of the EU, Mr Juncker and Mr Tusk said Britain could still opt to stay.



In a tense discussion which also heard claims Brexit is a "scam" and about little more than "blue passports", the senior officials said they would support a second referendum being held if this is what Britain chooses to do.

"Our door still remains open and I hope that will be heard clearly in London," Mr Juncker told MEPs including Mr Farage, before his views were repeated by Mr Tusk, who added:

"If the UK government sticks to its decision to leave, Brexit will become a reality, with all its negative consequences, in March next year unless there is a change of heart among our British friends.

"Wasnt it David Davis himself who said if a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy?"

The clear indication from Mr Juncker and Mr Tusk that the EU would support a second referendum being held comes just days after high-profile Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage said he wanted a fresh vote to increase support to leave the EU.

While British prime minister Theresa May has dismissed the prospect, there is growing speculation in Britain a new vote which could potential cancel Brexit may take place, with British Brexit secretary David Davis and others not ruling out the possible plan.

David Davis

Meanwhile, during the same debate, the European Parliaments chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt ridiculed Mr Farages sudden interest in a second referendum, mockingly asking his adversary if Mr Juncker had "put something in his coffee or tea" to instigate the change of mind.

Despite further claims from German MEP Manfred Weber, who is the leader of the European Parliaments largest group the EPP, that Brexit is a "scam" and has only achieved "blue passports", Mr Farage and other pro-Brexit MEPs are likely to hit back at the criticism today.

The response is expected to come during a debate on Wednesday morning on the future of the EU which will be addressed by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, and which will see Mr Varadkar questioned directly by Mr Farage on Irelands Brexit strategy and own future in the EU.

It is expected that Mr Varadkar will use his speech to the European Parliament to stress Irelands ongoing commitment to the EU and to underline the need to ensure guarantees there will be no hard border agreed in the first stage of the Brexit negotiations are acted on.

Mr Varadkar is also likely to indicate his backing for Mr Juncker and Mr Tusks comments by saying if Britain ultimately decides to seek a second Brexit referendum before its March 2019 divorce from the EU no country should stand in its way.
Update 11.06pm: The Dail has passed a Sinn Fein motion calling on the government to take more action on the trolley crisis.

The party called on the Health Minister to re-open all hospital beds closed during the austerity years.

It also wants full implementation of the Slaintecare report, which is aimed at introducing universal public health care.

It also wants the Emergency Department Taskforce to work on a permanent basis to monitor overcrowding.

Health Minister Simon Harris admitted the system is currently under pressure.

Update 4.43pm: Government won't oppose Sinn Fein motion on 'indefensible' trolley crisis

The government won't oppose a motion from Sinn Fein on the trolley crisis.

The motion calls for all the hospital beds closed during austerity to re-open, and calls for a pay commission for healthcare workers.

Sinn Fein will raise the issue in the Dail this evening.

Update 4.28pm: The Taoiseach has admitted that the ongoing hospital trolley crisis is "not defensible".

Leo Varadkar said that more than 400 sick patients were waiting for a hospital bed this morning and he insisted that the Government was doing all it could to alleviate the problem.

He said that plans to increase bed capacity were ongoing and that the health minister will present his review to the cabinet within the next few days.

"It is not defensible. If this was simply a matter of political will and not finance we would have resolved this a long time ago," Mr Varadkar said during leaders' questions in the Dail.

The Fine Gael leader added that an additional 2,500 new inpatient beds are needed by 2031.

He warned however that the problem will not be resolved by increased resources alone.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin accused the Government of a "lack of planning", "lack of urgency" and "inertia".

"Three years ago you as minister for health said you were sick to death of the problem and would resolve it once and for all. That plan never materialised. The situation has become much worse," added Mr Martin.

The Taoiseach hit back, saying: "You were a member of the government in 2006 that declared this a national emergency and you were in government for another five years after that and that was 11 years ago."

He added: "A decision was taken in 2007 to start reducing our hospital stock. From 2007 onwards the number of acute hospital beds was reduced every year. I took the decision to reverse that."

Mr Varadkar said he does not want any citizen "to face the indignity or clinical risk that comes with long stays on hospital trolleys."

"As a doctor who worked for seven years in the health service, as a former minister for health and someone who has elderly relatives ... this is something the Government is doing everything we can to alleviate both short-term and long-term issues."

Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams described the bed crisis as a "damning indictment of the Government's health policy".

Original story (10.55am): There are 541 patients waiting for hospital beds around the country today, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.

That is nearly 40 more than yesterday.

The INMO's trolley watch has recorded 41 patients on trolleys and in overflow wards at Cork University Hospital today.

University Hospital Galway was the next overcrowded with 38, while there are 36 awaiting hospital beds at Letterkenny General Hospital.

Overall, there are 413 patients on trolleys and 128 in overflow wards in hospitals around Ireland today.

- Digital desk
By Tom Tuite

A protester who was tackled by the Canadian Ambassador at a 1916 commemoration ceremony in Dublin has avoided a jail sentence and a criminal record.

Brian Murphy had publicly apologised in his bid to have his recorded conviction for a public order offence overturned.

Last year the Circuit Court hearing district court appeals had held that he could be given he Probation Act if he donated 900 to charity and apologised to the Garda who arrested him.

The case resumed on Tuesday when Judge Martina Baxter noted that Mr Murphy had complied and affirming the order she applied the Probation Act.

Canadian Ambassador to Ireland Kevin Vickers tackles protester at ceremony to honour British soldiers killed in 1916https://t.co/idQ3g16gG8  RTE News (@rtenews) May 26, 2016

Youth club manager Murphy, 48, of Newcastle Manor, Newcastle, Co Dublin interrupted a televised 1916 commemoration service for members of the British army, held at Grangegorman military cemetery on May 26, 2016.

Murphy, whose great great grandfather had served in the British military was buried in the cemetery, was an invited guest at the commemoration. His paternal grandfather had fought in Bolands Mills in the 1916 Rising and was a republican who entered politics and later became a TD.

The 1916 event at Grangegorman military cemetery was attended by about 30 people including the then Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan as well as the British ambassador Dominick Chilcott and members of Irish and British armed forces and relatives of the deceased.

Mr Vickers, a former Canadian House of Commons sergeant-at-arms, who was appointed as the Ambassador of Canada to Ireland in January 2015, was also present.

He was hailed a hero two after he shot Islamist gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau who had killed a soldier at the Canadian National War Memorial in Ottawa in October 2014.

Father-of-five Murphy was found guilty following a district court trial in 2016 on a Public Order Act charge of engaging in threatening and abusive behaviour. He had pleaded not guilty but was convicted and received a two-month sentence which was suspended for one year.

However, he launched an appeal in the Circuit Court which came before Judge James ODonohue last July who rejected defence arguments about right to protest or that the accused had not caused a breach of the peace.

Garda John Cahill told the appeal hearing he saw Brian Murphy stand up in the seated area and go into the courtyard He unbuttoned his jacket and brandished a T-shirt saying Justice for the Craigavon Two, a reference to republican prisoners and a campaign that they have been wrongfully imprisoned.

The appeal heard he said Free the Craigavon Two, this is an insult, this is an insult. A speaker at the ceremony was momentarily interrupted.

The judge heard how Canadian ambassador Kevin Vickers wrestled and subdued Mr Murphy before bringing him over to gardai on duty at the event. Gda Cahill agreed with the defence that after making his protest Murphy was very co-operative. He was handcuffed and taken to Blanchardstown Garda station.

Garda Cahill also agreed with Murphys barrister Jane MacGowan that the comment he made was the height of it and he had not made any obscene gestures to the graves.

However, he said he believed it was Murphys intention to stop the ceremony and what he did was insulting to people.

In evidence, Murphy told the court that he had applied to the Department of Foreign Affairs to go the event which he found objectionable. He said he stood up and was intent on leaving and went to an open area in front of the seated guests. He said his first words were this is an insult, we fought for Irish freedom and he was grabbed by his lapels.

He agreed that he mentioned the Craigavon Two case. He said it was not his intention to insult the people there. He said, the ambassador intervened and it became a much bigger thing than was expected.

Judge ODonohue asked him why he had not set out his objections in writing. Murphy replied that there was no particular reason. He denied that he had deluded the authorities to get into the event and said that he did not give them any false facts.

Judge ODonohue rejected the appeal but allowed him the chance to avoid a recorded conviction or a sentence.

Pleading for leniency the defence barrister asked the court to note her client has worked as a youth club manager for 14 years, he has no prior criminal convictions and was law abiding. He accepted that insult could have been taken, the court was told.

The appeal had heard he was involved with a republican prisoners association and brought family members on prison visits. Testimonials from councillor Paul Hogan and TD Brid Smith were furnished to the court. Murphy told the court he apologises to anyone who was insulted.
A 17-century book by a Czech philosopher forms the basis of an upcoming exhibition at the equally ancient Elizabeth Fort in Cork, writes John Tynan.

Johann Amos Comenius is known as the father of education and he lends his name to an element of the EU Erasmus programme.

His book Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart is still in print and it made an impression on Czech artist Tomas Penc when he learned of it in school.

Penc, while exploring the idea of a collaborative exhibition with Peter Nash, suggested the books themes could inspire their artwork.

Comeniuss allegorical literary work follows a pilgrims journey through the world, at conclusion of which he finds peace in his heart.

This heart is described in the book as an abandoned dwelling in disrepair. We work with this interpretation in the exhibition and draw a parallel between the disused dwellings located in the Elizabeth Fort and the inner life or psychological state of an individual as an intrinsic theme relating to all of us, said Penc, who was smitten with Ireland when he came for a short visit in 2004.

The exhibition will occupy two houses in the fort. We will have seven works, three by me and four by Peter, consisting of sculptures, audio/visual work, animation, projections and drawing.

Nash has purposively adopted processes he feels act as a counter to the technological revolution the world is experiencing.

Im interested in how technology is changing our personal interactions with each other and with the wider world, along with affecting how we access information, said Nash.

Things have changed so fast in my own lifetime and a lot of my work is an attempt to keep up and adapt to this change.

I deliberately use quite archaic, slow-working methods, such as woodcarving and drawing, to investigate these themes, as a counterpoint to the rapidly moving digital age in which we find ourselves.

The exhibition at Elizabeth Fort, Cork, runs from January 26  February 8.
Irelands leading fashion and art competition for second-level students has added another dimension to the competition.

The Bank of Ireland Junk Kouture has launched a new App for students and teachers to register their designs, making the competition entry process more simple and accessible.
Rescue services have recovered the bodies of two people from the rubble of three adjacent houses in northern Belgium after an explosion ripped through them.

Fourteen people were taken to hospital after they were injured in the blast in Antwerp late yesterday including seven rescued from under the debris.
Economics, however, is a far broader discipline. Its really about the application of the tools of economic analysis to almost any area of human behavior.

For people who doubt that this is the case, a look at the diversity and breath of papers presented at the American Economic Association meeting in Philadelphia would swiftly disabuse one of that notion.

Papers analyse the role of development, the history of technology, the impact of gender on boards, issues around birth order, and a whole plethora of socioeconomic issues.

One area in which economics might well be critiqued is in relation to gender. Perhaps the most impactful paper last year came not from a top-ranked Ivy League professor but

instead from an undergraduate.

Alice Wu undertook a detailed textual analysis of gender and racial discrimination and bias on a popular economics bulletin board. Within economics, it ignited a firestorm.

An updated version was presented in Philadelphia.

Beyond that, however, the Philadelphia meetings had been a wide-ranging and welcome discussion of the role of gender economics, the role of gender discrimination in bias in publication, and on efforts to ensure neutrality in terms of publication and tenure process. All this is welcome.

Economics as a profession has risen to the challenge of gender issues and at least seems to be serious about addressing it.

Beyond gender another issue remains. This is whether or not studying economics has an effect upon your brain.

An abundance of evidence suggests there is at least a correlation between studying economics and conservative or right-wing views.

There is an abundance of evidence, accumulated over decades, that economists tend to free ride more than those who have not studied economics. Recent research suggests MBA students who had taken more economics courses tended to believe in greed compared to those who had not.

The greater the exposure to economics courses, the less likely people are to give to charity, and more likely to have a tolerance for corruption. Most of these findings have been replicated across different cultures. Most of these findings tend to be relative to the general population.

More economics is also associated with a greater belief that market mechanisms and power of the market can achieve socially desirable outcomes.

More economic training is associated with more inhibition in terms of social co-operation. Some evidence suggests it is the active studying of economics that causes these changes.

The more economics courses students take the more sensitive they could become to income loss as opposed to distributional effects.

Interestingly these effects are significantly greater for non-economics majors than for economics majors.

In other words there is both the nature and nurture effect. Non-economics majors studying economics become more selfish than those who do not study economics. Economics majors do not exhibit this change of behaviour.

They are already coming into in an economics major more selfish than the non-economics majors peers.

Thinking about issues in economics as opposed to other terms frames one and predisposes one to be more selfish and less compassionate.

While all of these individual researchers can be challenged, the broad thrust of results is reasonably well attested.

I might suggest its a greater problems than gender. The economics profession is a reflection of the society in which it is embedded. If there are few female senior economists, and there are, thats a societal problem as much as a problem of the profession.

Across all areas of society we need to ensure we de-bias in relation to gender.

But what if the studying of economics itself induces behaviour which is not socially desirable? What if mere exposure to the issues, framed in economic terms, causes a shift of

perception? Is it possible to rewire the entire methodology of a profession?

Brian Lucey is professor of finance at the School of Business, Trinity College Dublin.
Judge Olann Kelleher said he could not leave the 62-year-old defendant without a conviction even though she had none before yesterday.

She was in a position of trust. She abused that, the judge said. It is a very sad and terrible crime. It is such a serious matter I have to convict her. I will imposed a fine of 400.

Josephine Minihan, of 10 Castle Park, Mahon, Cork, admitted that at the SuperValu shopping centre, Main St, Carrigaline, on January 20, 2017, she stole 600.

Inspector Ronan Kennelly outlined the background to the crime. He said that, while Minihan was working as a part-time carer companion with the woman with the intellectual disability, she had the womans bank card.

With this, she withdrew 600. A sister of the injured party noticed something amiss with the transaction and gardai were notified. The defendant was questioned about the matter and admitted keeping 300 to 400 of the 600.

Frank Buttimer, solicitor, said the offence was admitted by the defendant. However, he said that 200 to 300 was given by the defendant to the injured party on the day. Irrespective of that, she brought 600 to court yesterday as full reimbursement.

Mr Buttimer said that, while the admission was made, there was an explanation for how it occurred.

The victim has psychological challenges, he said. It was identified by her family that she might benefit from some level of care. Ms Minihan was assigned to attend with her for two to three days a week, bringing her to the shops and such matters.

Some concern was raised about a financial irregularity. The only matter raised is in relation to the 600.

The way it happened was that my client was given the cash machine card. She went to cash to the pay-out point. With it present, she withdrew 600 because complainant wanted that to be done.

While doing it, my client had slight concerns about someone who was talking to the lady and was afraid [if she handed over the money there and then], it might be accessed by the other person so she kept it.

She is culpable in that respect. She paid back 200 to 300 but not the full 600.

She expressed shame, remorse, sorrow, etc for it. She has never been in court, she has never been prosecuted. She is obviously gone from the job.

Judge Kelleher told the court that, despite the absence of previous convictions and the guilty plea, he could not give the defendant the benefit of a dismissal under the Probation of Offenders Act as he deemed the theft too serious in all the circumstances.

Judge Kelleher then fined Minihan 400.
Tanaiste and Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney visited Smarttech247s state-of-the-art facility at its headquarters in Cork yesterday and saw first-hand how the firms staff are at the cutting-edge of cyber-security.

He watched them analyse in real-time the emergence of global cyber-security threats and then moving quickly to protect their clients networks and data.

The team at the centre, which has been developed in a specially-built hub at the companys offices at the Cork Airport Business Park, is capable of analysing millions of cyber security events every day.

They use the latest sophisticated technologies, including artificial intelligence, IBMs Watson Supercomputer, which can in seconds, run millions of calculations that would take a team of people several weeks to assess, and Palo Alto Networks, to identify and tackle emerging threats on behalf of some of the worlds leading companies.

The company, which has operations in Dublin, London and Atlanta, has plans to expand its workforce this year with the creation of new roles in security monitoring, project management and data security.

Smarttech247 chief executive, Ronan Murphy, said cyber-security is one of the biggest issues facing companies today.

There has been a 15-fold increase in the number of ransomware attacks since 2015, Mr Murphy said.

Cyber-security is rapidly becoming the biggest issue facing companies, with many having learned the hard way how breaches can irreparably damage their reputation.

The technologies in our Security Operations Centre allow us to further close the gap and stay on top of the threats facing our customers.

As an Irish company we are immensely proud of growing our business and attracting some of the best global talent to Cork.

Mr Coveney hailed the development of the new hub as an important development in Corks positioning as a rapidly emerging cyber-security cluster.

As an international player in the global IT sector, Smarttech247 helps its international client base to secure their networks, infrastructure and information, he said.

Smarttech247 is an excellent demonstration of the continuous evolution in Irelands enterprise base in terms of value-added services and the development of new sectors.

Smarttech247 is a wholly-owned Irish company. Enterprise Ireland has provided the firm with R&D funding and other supports since 2012 to help drive its international growth.

Niall ODonnellan, divisional manager of ICT and International Services with Enterprise Ireland, said the company is an example of an innovative Enterprise Ireland client company that is expanding internationally and creating employment domestically. He said the opening of its new security and operations centre was a response to the proven demand for cyber-security solutions.
Mr OHare, 61, with an address at Slaterock Rd, Newtownhamilton, Co Armagh, was charged last week and was remanded in custody, with consent to bail in his own bond of 100 and a 20,000 independent surety.

He faced a hearing yesterday, when he appeared again before Judge Alan Mitchell, at Dublin District Court. Judge Mitchell noted, from defence solicitor Ciaran Mulholland, that Mr OHare has taken up bail.

He was charged with threatening to kill, or cause serious harm and false imprisonment of a man at Rathcoole in Saggart, Co Dublin, on June 9, 2015, and falsely imprisoning two others members of the same family, a male and a female, at a house at The Towers, Garter Lane, Saggart, on the same date.

He was also charged with engaging in violent disorder and assault causing harm to another named male, at the same location.

Garda Inspector Columbanus OMalley asked for an adjournment to allow time for a book of evidence to be completed and he expected it to be ready in four weeks.

Insp OMalley also said the adjournment was to see if the Director of Public Prosecutions will be granted a certificate for trial in the Special Criminal Court.

Judge Mitchell said that because the accused lived in the North and had to travel to Dublin for hearings, it would suit better to put the case back for five weeks.

He said it would give the State time to finish the book of evidence and to see whether the case will be sent forward to the non-jury Special Criminal Court or remain in the ordinary courts. The case resumes at the district court on February 19 next.

Mr OHare has not yet indicated how he will plead. Dressed in navy trousers, a grey, zipped jacket, with a blue shirt and tie, he nodded when his next hearing date was given.

His bail terms stated he must reside at his current address and the PSNI and the gardai must be notified of any change.
They welcomed changes announced by Education Minister Richard Bruton and Higher Education Minister of State Mary Mitchell OConnor to how each colleges share of 1bn annual public funding is decided.

Although most of the details are not yet finalised, the ministers backed recommendations of experts who reviewed how funding is divided.

The changes would see more money allocated for courses in science, technology and related fields (STEM), and financial incentives to increase student numbers on distance and part-time courses, or from disadvantaged backgrounds.

But the experts included stipulations that many of their proposals are only possible if funding to the sector is significantly increased.

The Irish Universities Association (IUA) highlighted those views as it welcomed the expert panels report.

Our members have delivered a substantial amount of reform and introduced largescale efficiencies over the last decade, said IUA director general Jim Miley.

This reform agenda will continue but it must be accompanied by meaningful investment measures if we are to deliver on [Mr Brutons] goal of having the best education system in Europe by 2026, he said.

Mr Miley pointed to an expected 30% increase in students by 2030, which the 2016 Cassells Report estimates will require an extra 1bn a year in the sector.

The Government has yet to decide whether extra funding of that scale will come mainly from taxpayers or from students, with the 2016 report including a system of income-contingent student loans as one option.

Mr Miley said IUA supports the national objective of increasing STEM graduates but that it is critical to nurture the broader contribution of other disciplines.

He stressed the importance of non-STEM graduates for innovation in business, education, health, public service and other economic sectors, and in social and cultural life.

The proposals being adopted by the ministers could also see more favourable funding for institutes of technology by allowing them to borrow for capital purposes and to get a bigger share of overall third-level funding.

Their representative body, Technological Higher Education Association, said plans to increase support for applied research will help develop the sectors close alignment with enterprise.
In the 33 years since the body of Baby John was found on White Strand, Caherciveen, Co Kerry, no light has ever been shed on who his parents are and how he ended up there  despite a murder investigation and lengthy tribunal that reflected poorly on garda behaviour, and even less favourably on the prevailing unpalatable attitudes towards female sexuality, and unmarried mothers in particular.

However, on last nights Claire Byrne Live show, it was revealed that a full DNA profile of the Caherciveeen baby had been generated, which may explain the re-opening of the case.

Two years ago, the Hayes family said it believes tissue samples retained from the dead infant could dispel doubts over their innocence in the childs death.

The Kerry Babies case divided society like no other. Joanna Hayes, from Abbeydorney, outside Tralee, was an unmarried mother who had been having an affair with a local married man, Jeremiah Locke, resulting in a pregnancy, with ultimately no baby to show for it.

This raised garda suspicions during their investigations into the mystery behind the baby washed up on the beach. Ms Hayes was arrested and confessed to the murder.

The 25-year-old initially told gardai she had miscarried after four months, but later said she had a baby boy, which she delivered while standing up in a field.

The baby appeared to be dead and she panicked and went home, and the following morning she returned to the spot and placed it in a drain, she told them.

Gardai then extracted confessions from other members of the family that Ms Hayes had beaten and stabbed the baby to death, and that her siblings had disposed of the body at Slea Head, suggesting that the baby found on Caherciveen Beach on April 14, 1984, was hers.

Charges were preferred against Ms Hayes and family members, but in a sensational twist the day after their court appearance, the body of a second baby was found in a hole of water on the Hayes farm, bearing out Ms Hayes story.

The garda presumption then was that twins were born to Ms Hayes, but results of blood tests on tissue from the Caherciveen baby, which became known about three weeks after the charges had been preferred, debunked this theory.

The charges were not dropped until October 1984 and there was an immediate outcry after details of the case became public knowledge. The Hayes family claimed they had been ill-treated by the gardai and forced to make statements, and that the charges had been fabricated.

The then justice minister, Michael Noonan, ordered a public tribunal of inquiry.

The Kerry Babies Tribunal lasted 82 days in 1985. It ended with High Court Judge Kevin Lynch clearing the garda investigating teams, in general, while finding that the investigation was slipshod.

He unequivocally found that Joanne Hayes did not have twins, but one baby  the Abbeydorney baby.

The news that the case of Baby John is being revisited may not be welcomed in all quarters. The review will be conducted by gardai in Caherciveen supported by the Serious Crime Review Team.

At a news briefing scheduled for Caherciveen garda station at 2pm today, investigating gardai will appeal for information from anyone living in Caherciveen and surrounding areas around April 1984 that could help finally unravel the mystery of where Baby John came from and who his parents are, while simultaneously bringing closure for Joanna Hayes and her family.
It was a story that gripped the country in the 1980s, a decade remembered for scandals surrounding female sexuality. And it might never have come to light had a quiet-living farmer not decided to take a leisurely run on a beach.

In the evening of April 14, 1984, Jack Griffin was jogging along White Strand, near Caherciveen, Co Kerry, when he spotted what he first thought was a doll on the sand beside a grey fertiliser bag, close to rocks.

On closer examination, he was horrified to find it was the body of a baby boy, which had almost 30 stab wounds, including two to the heart. It seemed the little body had fallen out of the plastic bag washed in by the tide.

Gardai were called and local undertaker Tom Cournane baptised the baby, christening him John, on the beach. Thus began an investigation which led to the Kerry Babies Tribunal.

At times, the probe intruded into peoples private lives. Suspected cases of incest were probed, as were some people in extra-marital relationships and women known to have been pregnant. People dubbed the exercise as the building up of a sexual profile of the area.

Organisations such as Cura offered to help, but there was no response to pleas to the mother to come forward. All leads were checked out in the Caherciveen area, but gardai drew blanks and became convinced the person responsible for the babys death did not live in the area.

Joanne Hayes: Subjected to interrogation at the tribunal.

On April 30, the name of Joanne Hayes, a single mother of one from Abbeydorney, around 80km away in north Kerry, came to the attention of the gardai. She had been in a relationship with a married man, Jeremiah Locke, and had a daughter by him.

On the day the body of the baby was found on White Strand, Ms Hayes was admitted to hospital in Tralee for a threatened miscarriage, but was found to have given birth to a

full-term baby.

Following conversations with medical staff, gardai believed they had unearthed vital information which made Ms Hayes a suspect for the murder of the Cahersiveen baby.

Her babys body, later determined to have been stillborn, was found in a field at the family farm in Abbeydorney, where, in a panic, she said she had left him.

However, gardai persisted in the theory that the Caherciveen baby was also hers, even though blood tests showed she would have to have had twins by two fathers.

Jeremiah Locke, the father of Joanne Hayes children.

Murder and conspiracy charges against the Hayes family were dropped, but serious questions about the Garda investigation and claims of coercion in the familys signing of false statements implicating themselves in the murder of a baby and the disposal of its body at Slea Head, in the Dingle Peninsula, led to the setting up of the tribunal.

Continuing to trace the killer of the murdered Caherciveen baby, gardai believed, after making calls to hospitals, that Ms Hayes was the culprit.

She was eventually charged with the murder of an unnamed infant and members of her family were charged with concealing the birth of the child.

When questioned earlier by gardai, Ms Hayes was adamant she had given birth to a baby in a field and placed its body on the land in the family farm.

Following the court hearing, her family members returned home, searched for the baby and found it in a plastic bag in a stagnant pool of water.

They reported the find to gardai, who went to the scene.

Judge Brian Curtin, senior counsel, at the Kerry Babies Tribunal.

This was a major development in the sorry saga and this discovery called into question the credibility of statements made by the Hayes family about collusion and also in the disposal of a baby off Slea Head.

However, the gardai insisted the statements were still valid and a twins

theory started to gain currency among investigating officers. They were now arguing she gave birth to two babies, the one found in Caherciveen and the other in Abbeydorney.

Inside a few weeks, however, the twins theory was further undermined when blood group findings showed that Jeremiah Locke could not be the father of the Caherciveen baby. That, of course, effectively ruled out Ms Hayes as the mother of that baby with whose murder she had been charged.

Judge Kevin Lynch, left, at the Kerry Babies Tribunal in Tralee, Co Kerry.

Another garda theory was that Ms Hayes had twins by two different fathers. The babies had different blood groupings. This theory stretched the bounds of credibility and was not taken seriously.

The murder charge against her was dropped in October 1984. The tribunal started in early January, 1985 and continued for six months. Essentially, the tribunal, under Judge Kevin Lynch, tried to probe why Ms Hayes came to confess to a murder she could not have committed and how her family members could make incriminating statements.

A highly emotional affair, the tribunal was marked by claim and counter claim, with the Hayes alleging they made statements under duress to gardai.

The tribunal attracted huge media coverage and generated much public sympathy and support for Ms Hayes and her family.

She was cross-examined in detail about her private life and her relationship with Mr Locke  who also gave evidence  was forced to relive the harrowing experience of childbirth in a field, and was interrogated about how much she had bled before, during, and after childbirth.

Feminists and locals protested outside the tribunal, in Tralee, at her treatment. She collapsed a number of times while giving evidence and was often sick.

Meanwhile, the mother of the Caherciveen baby and its frenzied killer have never been identified. Soon after the publication of the tribunal report, gardai indicated investigations into the murder of the Caherciveen baby might be reactivated.

Now, 33 years later, thats going to happen.

Baby John was buried in the towns Holy Cross Cemetery. People still visit his resting place and recall the burial, when a tiny white coffin was lowered into the grave in the presence of local clergy and schoolchildren, poignantly, formed a guard of honour.
The boiler at La Rambla restaurant in Killarney had broken down on the day and the porter said he was told to fill a pot of water in the sink and then carry it over to a hob on the cooker.

Robert Tokar commenced his civil action yesterday before Mr Justice Michael Hanna at the High Court sitting in Cork, against Theos Restaurant Ltd, trading as La Rambla in Killarney.

The plaintiff described working on for six months afterward but then on a particular day he went down on his knees in pain and said he could not stand it anymore.

Dr John OMahony, senior counsel, said Mr Tokar was left with lower back pain radiating to both legs.

The plaintiffs other senior counsel, David Sutton, examined the plaintiff for the purpose of his direct evidence given through a Czech interpreter.

Mr Tokar said his job was to wash dishes and help the chefs, a job he did for two years prior to the accident on February 27, 2013.

I had to fill the pot with cold water and carry the pot onto the stove, he said. He testified that he told his boss that he did not want to perform this task but she allegedly told him that if didnt do it there were 10 people around whom she could get to do his job.

He said he filled the large pot to within four inches of the brim and lifted it out of the sink. I felt a crack (in back) and dropped the pot into the sink. I felt pain in my lower back and left leg. I felt obliged to work on (from 12 noon when the accident happened until 12 midnight when the shift ended) because I was afraid to stop work as she told me before I might lose my job, Mr Tokar said.

The case continues today.
The residents of Leeside Apartments called last night on the complex owners, Lugus Capital, to withdraw the notices to quit which were issued before Christmas, and to move swiftly to implement the required upgrades.

Residents spokespersons Aimee ORiordan and Gaston Behal said they and their neighbours want these fire safety improvements done as a matter of urgency, and they are willing to cooperate.

But this report clearly shows that they can be completed without recourse to evictions, they said. The notices to quit should be withdrawn and the owners should enter into talks with the residents group to make arrangements for the fire safety work to take place.

The apartment block was bought in October by Lugus Capital, which is effectively acting as local agent on behalf of the vulture fund Bain Capital, founded by former US presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Lugus Capital has said as part of its acquisition of the complex, it carried out a full structural survey and fire safety inspection of the building which established that the apartments are not in compliance with their fire certificates.

It said a full refurbishment is necessary to bring the building up to modern standards and to maintain residents safety.

More than 25 households are fighting eviction which Lingus says is necessary to facilitate a 3m refurbishment.

Solidarity TD for Cork North Central, Mick Barry, commissioned Kieran Spitere of Kieran Spitere Consulting Engineers to conduct an independent assessment of the building.

The report says the buildings fire prevention and protection measures fall far short of legal safety requirements and that significant work is required. It outlines 14 necessary and urgent changes, including an upgrade to doors in common areas, and assess and upgrade where necessary all apartment doors to fire-rated doors and an upgrade to the buildings emergency lighting systems, fire detection and alarm systems.

But crucially, it says that the works could be done without huge disruption to tenants and that tenants may have to be moved for a period of just a week or so to facilitate the works.

The report said the layout of the complex lends itself well to the work being undertaken in stages and adds that such an approach would be assisted significantly by the fact that many units are already, or will be in the near future, vacant.
An audit by the Environmental Protection Agency of the 2016 water monitoring programme by Cork County Council found 302 out of 523 small private supplies were not monitored for E.coli.

While small private supplies are often wells on farms, some are operated by hotels and B&Bs.

Twelve audits were carried out on individual supplies in Cork during 2016 as a result of E.coli being detected in the water.

Council records indicated 66 small private schemes had recorded non-compliant samples for breaches of the safety limits for various components.

The council also monitors 293 group water schemes in Co Cork including 157 private group schemes not operated by Irish Water.

The audit revealed a total of 14 boil water notices were issued to small private supplies during 2016 and advice to boil water was issued to three group water schemes. The majority of notices were lifted last year.

The results of the EPA audit said arrangements by Cork County Council to assess the quality of private water supplies for 2016 were not totally satisfactory.

The environmental watchdog said there were several weaknesses in the councils monitoring programme including the lack of a documented procedure for selecting and taking samples and the lack of pre-determined locations and dates to ensure samples were evenly spread and representative of water supplies in an area.

The audit also revealed that Cork County Council does not monitor nursing homes or food premises as it regards them as within the remit of the HSE.

At the same time, it found that some relevant information held by the HSE is not shared with the council because of data protection issues. The council said it was confident that it is informed by the HSE of failures at public nursing homes but both it and the EPA are not notified of compliant properties.

The HSE has recently informed the EPA that while it monitored private supplies in the past, it may not do so in future unless to honour contractual agreements already in place.

The council has indicated it is considering taking samples from nursing homes in future. It also said it would prioritise sampling from national schools in future.

Cork County Council needs to satisfy itself that private supplies are being monitored at the required frequency and for the correct parameters to ensure wholesome clean water is being delivered to its consumers, the EPA said.

It recommended that all private supplies regardless of size should be monitored at least once per year for E.coli. It added that supplies which provide drinking water to 50 or more people should be monitored at least twice a year.
Simon Coveney said details of the new initiative, designed to bring certainty to the project, should emerge in the coming weeks. But he said other issues, aside from the additional funding request, are now part of the negotiations.

He declined to say if or when construction on the proposed 6,000-seat venue will start, insisting however that all parties involved are still committed to delivering the project.

The events centre is a key part of BAMs 160m Brewery Quarter regeneration of the historic former Beamish and Crawford brewery site.

BAM won a competitive tender just over three years ago for 20m in State aid to support the development of an events centre in Cork. Next month marks the second anniversary of the sod turning on the project by former taoiseach Enda Kenny. Construction has yet to start.

Following a major redesign, costs have soared, resulting in a request for an additional 16m. However, legal advice suggests Government can only sanction a further 10m before the original tender process could be open to legal challenge.

The additional funding request was submitted to the Government late last year and Mr Coveney said the State is still looking at that request.

Weve been assessing that ask in detail and theres been a lot of work over Christmas on this, he said.

The last meeting I had before we broke up for Christmas was with the department of public expenditure, specifically on the event centre. And the first meeting I had in the new year was with the chief executive (of Cork City Council) and her team on the events centre.

"There is a good partnership between local and national government and we are determined to make it happen.

I suspect that in the coming weeks, youll see a new proposal on the basis of the same process that weve been following now for four years. There will be a new initiative to try to finally get certainty on when this is going to happen, the Tanaiste said.

However, Mr Coveney also confirmed that other issues are now at play.

We have legal advice which is very clear  that if the Government chose to put an extra 10m into the project, that that would be as far as we could go in terms of funding the actual building of the events centre itself.

That poses some questions that we need to make sure that we are clear of, in terms of the answers. We cant go beyond that without changing the process itself. That has posed some challenges but I think we can work through that.

Construction is well under way on the student apartment element of the Brewery Quarter project.

A report last week confirmed the existence of important Viking artefacts on a portion of the site.
The assurance was offered by the National Development Finance Agency (NDFA) in response to the collapse of Carillion Group which owes over 1bn to debtors and has over 20,000 employees.

The Department of Education is expected to pay out 268.5m over the next 25 years for the construction and maintenance of five schools being built by a consortium in which Carillion is a partner. Contracts for the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) deal were signed with Inspired Spaces Consortium, a 50-50 joint venture between Carillion and Dutch Infrastructure Fund, in July 2016.
Ten months ago, when the script first landed on his desk, Donald Trump had just begun his attacks on news broadcaster CNN declaring them fake news.

Now, in the week of the films release, the US president is due to deliver The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media.

Challenging times indeed. With the freedom of the press at the forefront of our minds, cinema will serve as a much-needed reminder of that the role of the press was to serve the governed, not the governors, as the US Supreme Court put it in 1971.

The critical message is perhaps why Spielberg was able to attract Hollywoods top names at short notice. Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks take top billing, formulating Hollywoods trinity who have, miraculously, never worked on a film together in their lengthy careers.

The day after The Posts European premiere, Meryl and Tom are entertaining journalists in a five-star hotel with their expected charm. Both are at perfect ease with each other  a chemistry that forms the backbone of the movie in which Streep plays Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, and Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, its larger-than-life editor.

Together, they faced the decision on whether to report on the Pentagon Papers. If they did, theyd be faced with a potential prison sentence for breaching an injunction placed by the Nixon administration, and a court battle that would have shut down the paper if they lost. If they didnt, it would have spoken volumes about the value of business concerns and government scare-mongering over their remit as a democratic pillar.

What were the Pentagon Papers?

The Pentagon Papers was the name given to the US Department of Defenses secret document that detailed the political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.

The 7,000 page study, given the ordinary title History of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-66, concluded that the war in Vietnam could not be won, a belief that had been kept from the public despite the continued loss of lives.

It also revealed the true extent of military expansion to include the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, and that Congress had repeatedly been misled by the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.

Only 15 copies of the document were made, which were accessed by Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst for the RAND Corporation, a foreign policy think- tank.Believing the public had a right to know about the facts of the war, he leaked the document to Neil Sheehan in the New York Times in March 1971, who began the chain of events played out in The Post.

[Freedom of press] comes down to the practitioners within that estate, begins Hanks, before adopting the spirited accent we hear in movie. Ben Bradlee would say things like, well you got a story, but you dont have the story, come back to me when youve got the story. Meaning he wanted to aim at confirmable  almost empirical  truth. Because you cannot suffer by going out and printing the truth. That code of ethics, that discipline and desire in itself, comes down to an individual mandate that only the practitioners themselves can give.

The movie also captures another pertinent social issue: the buck stopped with publisher Katharine Graham, despite women being otherwise absent from the newspaper industry at the time.

What was interesting about the screenplay is that it fell to a woman to hold the line for press freedom at a time when women were excluded from any kind of leadership role in the press, Streep says.

There were no women reporters, or it was very unusual. Our friend Nora Ephron [the writer of When Harry Met Sally] to whom this film is dedicated, went to Newsweek to be a reporter and was told she was very welcome to be a researcher, a copy girl or secretary, but reporters were men.

So for the crucial decision to hold the line and risk everything, to have that fall to a woman who was alone in this position, thats what interested me  both holding the line for press freedom, and the fact that it was a transitional moment for women.

The transition continues today. The film industry-fostered #metoo movement has morphed into the Times Up movement, demanding the end of male abuse of dominance in Hollywood, and by example, other industries.

Streeps leading role in this has not been without criticism; particularly from Rose McGowan, a victim of disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein, who accused Streep and actresses like her of being complicit in her silence (she tweeted: Youll accept a fake award breathlessly & affect no real change. I despise your hypocrisy.). Its an accusation Streep denies, and continues to lobby regardless.

Its a global seismic change thats happening, she says of the movement. Somebody said its like an airplane being put together while its going down the runway, so its a little patshke [messy].

Its pretty interesting to be involved because there isnt a leadership hierarchy, we dont know who the top dog is. Its like a hive of bees; everybodys doing the good work, but its a moving thing, And thats good, because it needs to light on many different industries and enterprises: government, military, church. The inequities and imbalance of power isnt just in Hollywood.

Under-representation of females in the film world is an issue that Tom Hanks has observed as the industry shifts around him, though his most memorable work has been with strong female peers like Penny Marshall (director of Big), the aforementioned Norah Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle) and Meg Ryan (a formidable counterpart in Sleepless In Seattle, Joe Versus the Volcano and Youve Got Mail).

Im of a certain generation that quite frankly didnt give too much of a shit about the gender  the person in charge was the person in charge, he says. What is going to come about because of this great Rubicon thats been crossed, is in boardrooms and also in the artistic aspects of [filmmaking], youre going to see a different proportion, more women are going to be awarded their position based on merits.

For a while, why not just make it specific? Theres no reason not to say we need more women on this board, we need more women running these departments, we need more women in our company and the decision-making process, so it truly represents the numbers it is in our society.

And its no surprise that next to him, nodding, Meryl Streep agrees.
A judge sentenced a Blowing Rock woman to prison last week after she pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges last September, authorities said.

Judge Richard Voorhees of U.S. District Court sentenced Haley Raquel Rhodes, 23, to serve five years in prison and put her on five years of supervised release, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement.

Rhodes pleaded guilty in September 2017 to one count of conspiring to traffic in methamphetamine and one count of possession with intent to distribute meth, the Justice Department said.

Rhodes was accused of conspiring with other people to distribute meth in Mecklenburg and Watauga counties from November 2016 to March 2017,. Rhodes also was accused of transporting large amounts of meth from Charlotte to Watauga County.

After her arrest, Rhodes admitted to investigators that she regularly traveled to Charlotte to pick up meth, which she then brought to Watauga County, the Justice Department said. Rhodes was responsible for receiving and distributing slightly more than three pounds of meth, the Justice Department said.
GREENSBORO  Police say a 13-year-old boy was shot in the parking area outside of 1003 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive around 2:30 p.m. on Monday afternoon.

The juvenile was taken by private vehicle to Moses Cone Hospital where he is in critical condition and is undergoing surgery.

Greensboro Police Chief Wayne Scott said he does not believe the boy was connected to the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade that had ended about an hour-and-a-half before the shooting.

Witnesses said people started running when the gunfire began, according to Greensboro Police Sgt. Matt Menshew.

MLK Jr. Drive is closed between Tuscaloosa Street and Ross Avenue is currently closed due to the ongoing police investigation. Motorists are asked to use alternate routes and to use caution in the area.

Police are actively looking for the suspect in the area, according to Menshew.
Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency Tuesday for all of North Carolina as a winter storm was predicted to bring up to 4 inches of snow overnight to much of the state.

Were making sure that North Carolina is ready, Cooper said at a news conference at the N.C. Department of Transportation maintenance yard in Winston-Salem.

Its been fairly warm. Hopefully, we wont get a lot accumulation on our roads.

Cooper also urged state residents to keep their vehicles off roads and highways as travel becomes hazardous.

The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools will be closed today because of the snowstorm. School systems in Davie County and Lexington also will be closed because of the weather.

The state of emergency triggers a state law that prohibits merchants from charging excessive prices in the storms aftermath.

Cooper also said he signed an executive order that waives truck weight, size and hours-of-service restrictions to ease the movement of supplies and equipment to areas hard hit by the storm. Cooper said that state troopers and transportation crews will remove disabled vehicles.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for Forsyth and Guilford counties to be in effect from 11 p.m. Tuesday until 4 p.m. today.

The forecast called for 2 to 4 inches of snow in central North Carolina, including Forsyth, Guilford and Davidson counties, the weather service said.

Drivers should expect difficult driving conditions especially for this mornings commute.

Visibility will be significantly reduced at times, especially between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m.

Unnecessary travel not only puts you at risk, but it can also put our first responders lives at risk if you end up needing help, Cooper said.

The more vehicles we have on the road, the tougher it is for DOT crews to treat and clear those roads and get them open again.

Cooper and Pat Ivey, the DOT division engineer in Forsyth County, said that state transportation crews have applied more than 1.7 million gallons of salt brine across roads and highways in 52 counties.

Crews are prepared to remove snow and ice on the roads as well.

Ivey urged drivers to give DOT trucks enough room on the roads and highways, so their crews can clear snow and ice from the roads.

Troopers with the N.C. Highway Patrol will mark abandoned vehicles along the roads and coordinate with local police officers to make sure that people are not stranded in those vehicles, Cooper said.

City crews spread brine Tuesday on city-maintained roads, said Randy Britton, a spokesman for the citys Department of Transportation.
HONOLULU  When Jonathan Scheuer got an alert on his phone of a ballistic missile headed for Hawaii, he and his family didn't know what to do. They went to their guest bedroom, then decided it would be safer on the ground floor of their Honolulu home.

"What do we do?" he wondered. "Where do we go?"

People should immediately seek shelter in a building "or other substantial structure," once an attack-warning siren sounds, according to guidance the state distributed previously. The state recommends having 14-day survival kit of food and water.

Residents and tourists alike remained rattled a day after the mistaken alert was blasted out to cellphones across the islands with a warning to seek immediate shelter and the ominous statement: "This is not a drill."

"Clearly there is a massive gap between letting people know something's coming and having something for them to do," Scheuer said Sunday. "Nobody knew what to do."

Lisa Foxen, a social worker and mother of two young children in east Honolulu, said the best thing to come out of the scare was that it pushed her family to come up with a plan if there is a real threat.

"I kind of was just almost like a deer in headlights," she said. "I knew what to do in a hurricane. I knew what to do in an earthquake. But the missile thing is new to me."

The blunder that caused more than a million people in Hawaii to fear that they were about to be struck by a nuclear missile fed skepticism Sunday about the government's ability to keep them informed in a real emergency.

"My confidence in our so-called leaders' ability to disseminate this vital information has certainly been tarnished," said Patrick Day, who sprang from bed when the alert was issued Saturday morning. "I would have to think twice before acting on any future advisory."

The erroneous warning was sent during a shift change at the state's Emergency Management Agency when someone doing a routine test hit the live alert button, state officials said.

They tried to assure residents there would be no repeat false alarms. The agency changed protocols to require that two people send an alert and made it easier to cancel a false alarm  a process that took nearly 40 minutes.

The error sparked a doomsday panic across the islands known as a laid-back paradise. Parents clutched their children, huddled in bathtubs and said prayers. Students bolted across the University of Hawaii campus to take cover in buildings. Drivers abandoned cars on a highway and took shelter in a tunnel. Others resigned themselves to a fate they could not control and simply waited for the attack.

The 911 system for the island of Oahu was overwhelmed with more than 5,000 calls. There were no major emergencies during the false alarm, Mayor Kirk Caldwell said.

President Donald Trump said Sunday the federal government will "get involved," but didn't release details.

An investigation into what went wrong was underway Sunday at the Federal Communications Commission, which sets rules for wireless emergency alerts sent by local, state or federal officials to warn of the threat of hurricanes, wildfires, flash flooding and to announce searches for missing children.

The state of Hawaii "did not have reasonable safeguards or process controls in place to prevent the transmission of a false alert," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement, calling the mistake "absolutely unacceptable."

"False alerts undermine public confidence in the alerting system and thus reduce their effectiveness during real emergencies," he said.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen urged Americans not to lose faith in their government.

"I would hate for anybody not to abide by alerts and warnings coming from government systems," Nielsen said on "Fox News Sunday." ''They can trust government systems. We test them every day. This is a very unfortunate mistake, but these alerts are vital. Seconds and minutes can save lives."

With mobile phones ubiquitous, wireless alerts can quickly disseminate information to a wide number of users, but there have been concerns about creating a panic if they are sent too broadly.

Authorities were criticized for not sending an alert to mobile phones when fires ripped through Northern California in October, killing 40 people. Officials had decided not to use the system because they couldn't target them precisely enough and feared a wider broadcast would lead to mass evacuations, including people not in danger, snarling traffic that would hamper firefighting and rescues efforts.

Saturday's mistake was not the first for the state's warning system. During a test last month, 12 of the state's 386 sirens played an ambulance siren. In the tourist hub of Waikiki, the sirens were barely audible, prompting officials to add more sirens and reposition ones already in place.

People need to step back from questioning who pushed the button and why and focus on military de-escalation, Scheuer said.

The false alarm triggered a broader discussion about national security at a time when North Korea has been flexing its muscles by launching test missiles and bragging about its nuclear capability. Its leader, Kim Jong Un, has also exchanged insults on Twitter with President Donald Trump about their arsenals.

The standoff has whipped up nuclear fears on Hawaii and led the islands to revive Cold War-era siren tests that drew international attention.

Rep. Tusi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat, said officials should be held accountable for the "epic failure of leadership" behind the warning. She said the nuclear threat underscored the need for Trump to meet with Kim to work out differences without preconditions.

"The people of Hawaii are paying the price now for decades of failed leadership in this country" by setting "unrealistic preconditions," she said. "The leaders of this country need to experience that same visceral understanding of how lives are at stake."

Melley reported from Los Angeles. Tom Strong in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Martin Luther King Jr.'s eldest son is calling out President Donald Trump following accusations the president used a vulgarity to describe African countries during a meeting last week and expressed a preference for immigrants from countries like Norway.

Martin Luther King III spoke in Washington on Monday, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

King says: "When a president insists that our nation needs more citizens from white states like Norway, I don't even think we need to spend any time even talking about what it says and what it is."

He says: "We got to find a way to work on this man's heart."

Referring to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, King added: "George Wallace was a staunch racist and we worked on his heart and ultimately George Wallace transformed."
Supreme Court dismissed Texas Democratic Party v. Abbott [PDF] today, claiming want of jurisdiction. This dismissal may seem surprising, given that the Court has chosen to hear other gerrymandering cases this term.

This past October the Supreme Court heard Gill v. Whitford, a redistricting action challenging a gerrymander claim in Wisconsin. In addition, two consolidated cases [JURIST report] have been added to the merits docket late last week.

The second case, Abbott v. Perez, involves a claim under the Equal Protection Clause. The Appeals Court sided with voting groups holding that the republican legislature drew district lines in a way that was discriminatory against voters of color, with tendencies to vote democrat.

Following the appeal by the Texas Democratic Party, Greg Abbott, in his official capacity as Governor of Texas, filed a motion to dismiss claiming that the Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction over an appeal of an interlocutory order filed over three years ago. In addition, Abbott claims the district courts decision to dismiss the case should be affirmed because of appellants lack of reliable standard for claims.

Though courts may continue to find lack of justiciability based on the inherent political nature of gerrymandering itself and lack of judicial standard, the Texas Democratic Party, filed a response supporting their jurisdictional argument. They argued that in light of Whitford and Perez, the Court should find a judicially manageable standard.

Regardless of the procedural complications that may have contributed to the cases denial, the Supreme Court is in a position to potentially change interpretation for electoral redistricting.
On January 5, 2018, Nepals cabinet decided to extend the tenure of the countrys two transitional justice (TJ) bodies for another year. But this was done without consulting primary stakeholders and without evaluating the work of the commissions over the last three years.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) were set up in February 2015 with an initial two- year mandate and a one-year extension to complete the assigned tasks. However, in three years both commissions failed to deliver satisfactory results. They continue to suffer because of their limited mandates and the fact that the government financially controls them. They seem incompetent and passive, and have failed to deliver a result on time.

Victims groups and civil society are demanding that the law be amended in line with Supreme Court directives of January 2, 2014 and February 26, 2015 related to transitional justice and war era crimes. Nepals Supreme Court has made clear rulings to bring laws and procedures that create a justice-friendly environment, directing that: (a) there should not be amnesty or pardon for grave human rights violations such as extra-judicial killing, enforced disappearance, torture, rape and other acts of sexual violence; (b) the statute of limitations for grave offences must be removed; (c) the cases recommended by the TRC and the CIEDP must be prosecuted; (d) torture and enforced disappearance must be criminalized through the enactment of laws; (e) cases before court cannot be transferred to the TRC or the CIEDP; (f) dignified and respectable reparation for victims; and (g) reconciliation cannot be made without the consent of victims.

The National Network of Families of the Disappeared and Missing (NEFAD) strongly demands the criminalization of enforced disappearance, and that families' truth seeking and reparative needs be addressed. We will not accept this unilateral political decision without amending the legislation according to the Supreme Court decisions, says NEFAD General Secretary Bhagiram Chaudhary. Just extending the tenure will further instrumentalize and paralyse the commission, indirectly protect the perpetrators and legitimize the state-led process against the spirit of victims justice.

Without criminalization of enforced disappearance and torture and establishing a Special Court to hear conflict-related crimes, both commissions will likely not produce a credible report but rather waste another year merely serving the interest of the State and alleged perpetrators. It seems the government and political parties only wish to continue the TJ bodies to convince the international community that Nepal is committed to addressing its past and human rights violations. As Nepal begins its UNHRC membership from January 2018, the international community should closely watch how Nepal handles rights issues at home.
Prominent Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was killed in a brazen drive-by shooting on Tuesday that could reignite ethnic tensions in the region.

The assassination of Ivanovic -- who was facing a retrial on war crimes charges over the 1990s Kosovo conflict -- occurred on the very day that Belgrade and Pristina resumed talks on normalising ties after a hiatus of more than a year.

Marco Djuric, the Serbian government official in charge of Kosovo, described the murder as a "criminal, terrorist act against the entire Serbian people".

Ivanovic, 64, was shot dead by gunmen firing from a car as he arrived at the headquarters of his party in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica at about 8:15 am (0715 GMT), according to police.

The moderate politician, who had publicly spoken out against Belgrade's policies in Kosovo, was hit by five bullets and died on the spot, his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic told AFP.

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and the government in Pristina "strongly" condemned the assassination, as did representatives of the United Nations and the United States in Kosovo.

- EU appeals for restraint -

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini spoke with Thaci and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and "called on all sides to show calm and restraint and allow the rule of law and justice to take its course," a statement from her office said.

Vucic called an emergency meeting of his national security council to discuss the killing, national broadcaster RTS reported.

Following the assassination, the Serb-populated northern part of ethnically divided Mitrovica was unusually calm and its streets deserted.

Public prosecutor Shyqri Syla told AFP that investigators were at the scene, but that it was not yet known who was behind the attack.

Police said they found a burnt-out car that was presumably used in the shooting.

- 'Serbs afraid to raise their voices' -

An EU-backed Kosovo court sentenced Ivanovic in 2015 to a nine-year jail term after it found him guilty of encouraging the killings of captured ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovska Mitrovica in April 1999.

In February last year, a Pristina appeals court quashed the sentence and ordered a retrial for Ivanovic, who had been in detention since his arrest in January 2014 until the acquittal.

In May, the social-democrat politician and father of four told AFP that his private car had been set on fire in front of his home, describing it as an attempt to silence him.

In local polls in October, he was elected a deputy on northern Mitrovica's municipal council, running against a Belgrade-backed party.

"Serbs are more afraid of Serbs than Albanians," Ivanovic -- a rare Kosovo Serb in that he spoke Albanian -- said at the time. "Serb people are afraid to raise their voice" against Belgrade's policy.

Mitrovica is a town of 85,000 people where tensions remain high between the majority ethnic Albanian residents who number about 72,000 and the 13,000-strong Serb community,

A former Serbian state secretary for Kosovo, Ivanovic was a key interlocutor with NATO, the United Nations and later the EU after the war and was seen as backing dialogue with Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.

- 'Must be brought to justice' -

"Whoever is behind this attack... whether these are Albanian, Serb or any other criminals, they have to be punished, they have to be brought to justice," Djuric said in Brussels, where he was heading the delegation due to hold talks with Kosovo Albanians on Tuesday.

However, after the assassination, the Belgrade delegation walked out of the talks, according to local media in Belgrade.

Under pressure from the international community and European Union auspices, Kosovo and Serbia have been trying to normalise ties some 20 years since the start of the bloody war that claimed 13,000 lives, mostly ethnic Albanians.

The 1998-99 war between Serbian security forces and Kosovo Albanian guerrillas was ended by a NATO air campaign.

Predominantly ethnic Albanian Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in February 2008 but Belgrade has rejected the move and still considers the breakaway territory as its southern province.

About 120,000 of Kosovo's 1.8 million inhabitants are ethnic Serbs.
Prominent Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was shot dead in a brazen drive-by shooting on Tuesday that risked fanning ethnic tensions in the volatile region.

The killers struck on the very day that Belgrade and Pristina resumed EU-moderated talks on normalising ties after a hiatus of more than a year.

Both Serbian and Kosovo Albanian officials refrained from explicitly accusing each other of being behind the killing as the international community urged the two sides to remain calm.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic described the murder as a "terrorist act" against "Serbia as a whole".

Social democrat Ivanovic, 64, a father of four, was facing a retrial on war crimes charges over the 1990s Kosovo conflict.

But he was seen as a moderate politician and as favouring dialogue with Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanians.

He had publicly spoken out against Belgrade's policies in Kosovo, which Serbia still claims as a province despite its independence declaration in 2008.

A former Serbian state secretary for Kosovo, he was a key interlocutor with NATO, the United Nations and later the European Union after the war.

- Drive-by shooting -

Ivanovic was shot dead by gunmen firing from a car as he arrived at the headquarters of his party in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica at about 8:15 am (0715 GMT), police said.

He was hit by five bullets and died on the spot, his lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic told AFP.

Public prosecutor Shyqri Syla told AFP it was not immediately clear who was behind the attack.

Police said they found a burnt-out car that was presumably used in the shooting.

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and the government in Pristina "strongly" condemned the assassination, as did US and UN representatives in Kosovo.

Russia warned of the "risk of contagion in an atmosphere of terror and a resurgence of interethnic conflict in the region", in a statement from the foreign ministry.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini spoke with Thaci and Vucic and "called on all sides to show calm and restraint and allow the rule of law and justice to take its course," her office said.

After holding an emergency meeting of his national security council, Vucic told reporters Serbia needed to be "actively included in the probe".

In Pristina, Kosovo premier Ramush Haradinaj met with his national security council and said foreign intelligence would be asked to help the probe "if needed".

- 'Serious blow' to stability -

Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said the murder was a "serious blow" to the stability of the entire region.

"It is very important to preserve peace and stability," he told reporters in Podgorica during a visit to neighbouring Montenegro.

Following the assassination, the Serb-populated northern part of ethnically divided Mitrovica was unusually calm and its streets deserted. Dozens of citizens laid flowers and lit candles at the spot of the murder.

Late on Tuesday citizens gathered in front of Serbian Orthodox churches in cities throughout Serbia to light candles and pay tribute to the slain leader, Beta news agency reported.

Serbian opposition leaders joined hundreds in front of the Saint Sava temple in central Belgrade.

- 'Serbs afraid' -

In 2016, an EU-backed Kosovo court sentenced Ivanovic to a nine-year jail term after finding him guilty of encouraging the killings of captured ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovska Mitrovica in April 1999.

But in February last year, a Pristina appeals court quashed the sentence and ordered a retrial for Ivanovic, who had been in detention since his arrest in January 2014.

In May, he told AFP his private car had been torched in front of his home. He said it was an attempt to silence him.

Ivanovic speaks Albanian -- rare for a Kosovo Serb.

He was in October elected as a deputy on northern Mitrovica's municipal council, running against a Belgrade-backed party.

"Serbs are more afraid of Serbs than Albanians," Ivanovic said at the time.

Tensions remain high between Mitrovica's ethnic Albanians who number about 72,000 and the 13,000-strong Serb community.

- Call for justice -

The 1998-99 war between Serbian security forces and Kosovo Albanian guerrillas claimed 13,000 lives, mostly ethnic Albanians. It was ended by a NATO air campaign.

Predominantly ethnic Albanian Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. Belgrade rejected the move and still considers the breakaway territory as its southern province.

The Serb government official in charge of Kosovo, Marko Djuric, was in Brussels heading the delegation due to hold talks with Kosovo Albanians on Tuesday.

After the assassination, the Belgrade delegation walked out.

"Whoever is behind this attack... whether Albanian, Serb or any other criminals, they have to be punished, they have to be brought to justice," Djuric said.


Logo of the APPF 26 (Photo: APPF26.vn)



Ngan, who is also APPF Chair for 2017 - 2018, told the media in an interview before the APPF-26 that the Vietnams hosting reflects its increasing role and prestige in regional and international parliamentary diplomatic activities.

The event, slated to open on January 18th in Hanoi, is an opportunity for the NA to enhance diplomatic relations with its regional counterparts and to promote its innovative, dynamic and reliable image among international friends, she added.

In an article on the upcoming event, Vice Chairman of the NA Office and head of the information section for APPF-26 Do Manh Hung highlighted the meetings mission of defining the direction for member parliaments in building an APPF vision of a common future for all and practical benefits of all nations and all people.

NA Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan inspects preparation for the event

The APPF-26 under the theme of Parliamentary partnership for peace, innovation and sustainable development, will focus on several key topics, one of which is how to boost parliamentary diplomacy for peace, security, and prosperity in the region and in the world. Participants will discuss pressing issues related to peace and security in Asia-Pacific, such as the Korean Peninsula, maritime security, cyber security, international terrorism, and trans-national crime.

Second, the meeting will hear reports on outcomes of the 2017 APEC Economic Leaders Meeting and discuss economic cooperation for Asia - Pacific. Member parliaments will share their views on and contribute to regional efforts toward expansion of trade-investment engagement and sustainable development. They are set to mull over parliaments role in boosting inclusive and extensive economic links, food security and green farming, and the development of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in the digital age. These sub-topics are closely related to the APEC meetings agenda.

Third, delegates will delve into the promotion of joint actions for climate change adaptation, mobilisation of resources for sustainable growth, and culture-tourism collaboration across the region.

Fourth, they will examine initiatives on improving APPFs performance toward effectiveness and APPFs role in regional peace and cooperation. In this regard, the meeting will examine amendments to the New APPF Rules of Procedure and to the Meeting of Women Parliamentarians. The Meeting of Women Parliamentarians is set to focus on promoting gender equality for sustainable development and shared prosperity.

According to Mr Hung, the Vietnamese NA will propose a draft of the Hanoi Declaration: A New Vision for Asia - Pacific Parliamentary Partnership, which stresses commitments by member parliaments to common goals and benefits based on mutual respect for each others independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, diversity in political institutions, culture and religion; upholding of the rule of law and international law. It aims at enhancing the APPFs role as a partner of APEC and helping the APEC to realise its commitments via parliaments main functions of law making, supervision and budget decisions.

The APPF meeting will take place in Hanoi from January 18th-21st. Vietnam first hosted an APPF annual meeting in 2005.

The APPF was officially formed in Tokyo, Japan, in 1993. It now gathers 27 members: Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Fiji, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, the Marshall islands, Mexico, Micronesia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, the RoK, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, the US, and Vietnam.

The APPF is a mechanism that enables parliamentarians to discuss issues of common concern, and to deepen their understanding of the region and the interests and experience of its diverse members. The forums proceedings address political, security, economic, social and cultural issues, thus furthering regional cooperation and building relations between and among parliamentarians from the Asia-Pacific region./.
KEARNEY  Forget beauty, talent, congeniality and swimsuits. The Miss America pageant is a scholarship competition.

Thats what Allison Tietjen, Miss Nebraska 2017, told the Noon Rotary Club Monday.

Miss America is the leading scholarship provider for women in America. Every girl who competes for Miss Nebraska will walk away with a scholarship. Miss Nebraska will allow me to graduate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln debt-free. Even on the local level, you can earn scholarship money, she said.

Since becoming Miss Nebraska last June, shes been practically living in a Honda Accord  its hers to use for a year  while making a dizzying schedule of statewide appearances, public speeches and more. She also won $13,500 in cash scholarships, and $13,000 in gifts, a wardrobe and more.

Raised on a farm near Chester, the daughter of Cary and Amy Tietjen shunned makeup and played four sports. Then, in 2012, she met Mariah Cook, Miss Nebraska 2012. She told me the contest paid her way through college. I thought, I want to do that! she said.

She was even more convinced after watching the Miss Nebraska pageant. I was hooked. I was amazed by what these ladies had accomplished as local titleholders. I learned what the job of Miss Nebraska is, and I decided that I wanted that job, she said.

In 2013, Tietjen entered the Miss Milo Day Queen Contest in Chester. She did not win, nor did she win the Miss Kool-Aid Days pageant in Hastings the following year. But in the fall of 2014, she was named Miss Heartland at the Nebraska State Fair.

That made her eligible for her first Miss Nebraska pageant. She finished as the third runner-up, I was more excited than if Id won the title. I took a leap of faith. I went outside my comfort zone. In 2015, she was named Miss Kearney. Last June, she became Miss Nebraska.

She was terrified, she said, when she headed for Atlantic City in September to compete in the Miss America pageant. My goal was never to be Miss America, but to be Miss Nebraska. Miss America was just icing on the cake, she said. Nevertheless, she loved the two-week romp of appearances, rehearsals and new friends. I had a blast, she said.

Since taking the crown, her life has turned upside-down. She has traveled the state extensively. She spent a day with Gov. Pete Ricketts honoring Nebraskas four Blue Ribbon schools. Ive been to every tiny corner of Nebraska. Ive been to so many towns Id never heard of. We live in an amazing state, she said.

Her platform, United We Stand: Honoring Our Military, remains strong. Her grandfather was a proud Marine during the Korean War. He died when Tietjen was in high school. In his memory, she raised money to send a Korean War veteran on the next Korean Honor Flight. She was asked to serve as a guardian on that flight as well as a later flight with Vietnam veterans.

Tietjen, a 2014 graduate of Thayer Central High School in Hebron, has also helped students across Nebraska raise $25,000 for future honor flights. She accompanied 16 secondary school students on a Gold Star flight from Omaha to Lincoln. They visited the Capitol and the Governors Mansion and watched the Nebraska-Michigan State game in a suite owned by Larry the Cable Guy.

Its the duty of all of us, as American citizens, to support our military and everything they sacrifice for our great nation, she said. She also made 700 beaded bracelets and sent them to mothers of men and women in the armed forces.

Tietjen, who will graduate from UNL in 2019, hopes to become an occupational therapist. She plans to remain in Nebraska.

Tietjen said she is shocked about the sexual harassment findings that led to the recent resignation of Sam Haskell III, the CEO and executive chairman of the Miss America Organization, and two other top executives. She met Haskell in North Platte in June when she was crowned Miss Nebraska.

She is glad that the 1989 Miss America, Gretchen Carlson, will become chairwoman of the organizations board. She knows exactly what it means to be Miss America, Tietjen said proudly. The pageant made me who I am. As Miss Nebraska, I have learned to become the best version of myself.
President Tran Dai Quang (Source: VNA)



In a recent interview granted to the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, the Vietnamese President affirmed Vietnam and Japan have become important partners of each other in many fields.

Since the two nations upgraded their ties to the Extensive Strategic Partnership for Peace and Prosperity in Asia in 2014, bilateral relations have witnessed strong and comprehensive development, he said.

Regards political ties, the two sides have maintained high-level meetings, with the highlights being visits to Vietnam in 2017 by Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, and Japanese President Shinzo Abe. The year also marked a new development step in the relations as the two countries issued a joint statement on deepening the extensive strategic relationship during the official visit to Japan by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc.

Vietnam and Japan have closely and effectively coordinated in multilateral forums such the UN, ASEAN, APEC and ASEM. In particular, Japans active involvement contributed to Vietnams successful hosting of the 25th APEC Summit during the year.

In the economic field, Japan is the largest ODA provider for Vietnam, and the fourth biggest trade partner of the country. In 2017, Japan became the leading foreign investor in Vietnam, with over 2,500 Japanese companies operating in the Southeast Asian country. The two countries are working together on many large-scale infrastructure and energy projects in Vietnam.

Japans ODA provision has significantly contributed to Vietnams socio-economic development.

Collaboration in terms of security-defence, agriculture, education-training and labour have also recorded practical results.

Cooperative links between localities of the two countries have been fostered with 37 pairs of localities setting up twinning relations. People-to-people exchange activities and cultural and tourism cooperation have been expanded, with 230,000 Vietnamese now living and working in Japan and 16,000 Japanese in Vietnam. Japan is the third largest source of tourists to Vietnam.

President Quang said he discussed with PM Shinzo Abe major orientations and specific measures to further bolster the bilateral ties in the time ahead on the sidelines of the APEC Economic Leaders Meeting in Da Nang last November.

He noted that the two sides agreed to enhance political trust via maintaining visits and meetings at all levels, and dialogue mechanisms among their ministries, sectors and localities.

They will take advantage of their respective strengths to promote win-win cooperation and economic links. Vietnam will closely cooperate with Japan for the more effective use ODA capital, while continuing to improve its investment environment to facilitate Japanese firms operation in the country.

The two sides will also forge links in fields of good cooperative potential such labour, clean agriculture and hi-technology, he added.

The President stressed that with its policy on proactive international integration, Vietnam has been and will be a sincere friend, reliable partner and responsible member of the international community. In that spirit, the country will maintain its close and effective collaboration with Japan at international and regional forums in issues of common concern for peace, stability and development in the region and the world as a whole.

He expressed his belief that the Vietnam-Japan Extensive Strategic Partnership will continue developing for the sake of the two people.

President Quang said in the time to come, Vietnam hopes for Japanese investment and technology transfer in six priority sectors in Vietnams industrialisation strategy, including electronics, agricultural machines, farm and aquatic product processing, shipbuilding, environmental protection and energy saving, and automobile industry.

Vietnam also wants to benefit from Japans investment and technology in fields of its strengths such as support industry, manufacturing, infrastructure development, energy, clean agriculture, waste and waste water treatment.

The President also reaffirmed Vietnams consistent policy to create favourable conditions for foreign investors, including those from Japan to operate business and production activities in Vietnam.

Japanese direct investment in Vietnam totaled almost USD9 billion during January-November, 2017, a four-time increase from the figure of the entire 2016./.
ROANOKE, Va.  Janet Crowder drives a 2007 Mercury Milan, which she said she bought used in 2010 from a Ford dealer in North Carolina. In July 2016, the retired state government worker in Hillsville, Virginia, received a letter from Ford Motor Co. saying the car was subject to recall.

The problem was an airbag inflator. Unfortunately, the letter continued, Ford didnt yet have the necessary parts to fix it. The automaker advised Crowder to sit tight. Ford would let her know when the parts were available. Then she could make an appointment with the dealer for a no-cost repair.

Flash-forward to this past December. Ford wrote Crowder again. This time, the letter was more ominous. The parts have been delayed but might be available this spring.

In the meantime, the letter continued, Do not allow anyone to sit in the front passenger seat. The airbag inflator could rupture during deployment in a crash and cause injuries or death.

In other words, Crowder has a potential grenade in her car and shrapnel from it could kill someone. That part got her attention. And shes far from alone.

The issue goes way beyond Ford Motor Co. In fact, it is the largest automotive safety recall in U.S. history: So far it covers 42 million cars and just about every brand youve ever heard of. Two of my daughters who drive Hondas have been affected, too.

The first recall for this problem was in 2013 and involved six brands and cars dating to 2001. Since then, its been expanded to include specific makes and models from most other automakers.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the number is expected to grow to as many as 70 million cars by the end of 2019.

The danger seems to vary by year, make and model. Generally, the older the car, the higher the risk.

But its not at all theoretical. A December article by the Associated Press noted Honda has confirmed 20 deaths in its cars related to ruptured airbag inflators. There have been many more injuries. People in Fords have died, too.

Just last week, Ford issued a press release noting that it had advised owners of certain 2006 Ford Rangers to stop driving them altogether. This came after a 2017 death in West Virginia that was traced to a defective airbag inflator.

All of the cars in question have inflators manufactured by Takata Corp. The Japanese company used the chemical ammonium nitrate as a propellant in its inflators.

That can degrade over time and cause the inflators to burst with too much power if a car is involved in a crash. The high-powered inflator blast might produce deadly shrapnel.

Takata supplied these defective air bags to many vehicle manufacturers for years, creating one of the largest and most complex recalls in U.S. history, the NHSTA says on its website.

Crowder wrote me out of concern regarding the second letter from Ford. Shes a little miffed at the company for not fixing the problem by now but hasnt felt too worried about it.

But my friends and family are, she said when we talked Monday. Nobody wants to ride with me. I tell them pretend Im an Uber driver! They can sit in the back.

She was surprised to learn the inflator problem could have deadly consequences. She also noted she had friends who owned Hondas that were recalled for the same reason. But their cars already are fixed. Crowder said they told her Honda came to their homes for the repairs.

Im like, why didnt Ford do the same thing? Crowder asked. Its a fair question.

Without luck, I tried to get some answers Monday from Ford. The company didnt respond to my email Monday morning. Perhaps the office was closed for the Martin Luther King holiday.

I also called the Scenic Ford dealership in Mount Airy, North Carolina, where Crowder purchased her car. But I didnt get any answers there, either.

Were just not free to talk about the recall issues because of legalities, Sales Manager Jeff Jessop told me.

As you might imagine, theres been no shortage of those.

The website for Car and Driver magazine is a great resource on this matter. Its cataloged many of the legalities on a blog titled Massive Takata airbag recall: Everything you need to know, including a full list of affected vehicles.

Here are some snippets I gleaned from that:

In January 2017, after pleading guilty to criminal wire fraud in the airbag-inflator scandal, Takata Corp. agreed to pay the U.S. government $1 billion  $25 million for a criminal fine, $125 million to establish a victim settlement fund and $850 million to compensate car manufacturers for the recall.

In May, four automakers  BMW, Mazda, Subaru and Toyota  agreed to pay a total of $553 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by car owners. They were seeking compensation for economic losses they suffered while their cars were undergoing repairs. The settlement covered nearly 16 million vehicles in the recall. (It didnt cover damages for injuries or arising from lower valuations of the cars.)

In June, Takata filed for bankruptcy and sold off the portion of its business that doesnt involve airbags.

In August, Nissan agreed to a $98 million settlement similar to the one reached by BMW, Mazda, Subaru and Toyota.

Car and Driver noted that of the 4.4 million recalled Nissan and Infinity vehicles, only 30 percent had been repaired.

That suggests an awful lot of unrepaired cars are out there, literally millions.

One of my daughters had her Honda CRV fixed last year. But my other daughter had no idea the used 2010 Honda Civic she bought in 2016 was subject to it.

We determined it was after I entered her vehicle identification number into the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations recall website. That told us she had an airbag inflator problem that has not yet been repaired.

You might want to try that yourself, no matter what kind of car you drive. You can look it up at https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls.

If you dont have a computer, call the nearest dealer for the car youre driving and ask someone there to check for you.

And if yours turns out to have been recalled, and you didnt know it, you can thank Janet Crowder of Hillsville, Virginia, for raising the question.
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A member of Central Okanagan Search and Rescue is shown aboard a helicopter in a 2018 training flight. Last year was the busiest ever for the group as they responded to a record number of both back-country and urban call-outs.
Labor export sets new record in 2017. (Photo: VGP)

The figures were provided by the Overseas Laborer Management Department under the Ministry of Labour, War-Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA).

Accordingly, the Japanese market received 54,504 laborers, and over 100,000 trainees, becoming the country with largest number of trainees sent, among 15 other countries.

Chinas Taiwanese market continued to be the largest market for Vietnamese labourers, with 66,926 laborers in 2017.

The Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Algeria and Romania, also received Vietnamese.

The results were brought about by MOLISA efforts in organizing dialogues with 280 labor export businesses to tackle their difficulties, raising the quality of businesses operation and services, and the quality of labourers sent.

During the Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phucs official visit to Japan and attending the 23rd Asia Future Congress, on June 6th, 2017, under the witness of the Vietnamese Prime Minister and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe, the two sides inked a memorandum of cooperation (MOC) on technical internships. This was the first time the Japanese Government signed such document with a foreign country on internships, marking a great progress in labor cooperation.

By joining labor markets providing high income, labourers remittances increase year by year, contributing to boosting poverty reduction and building new style rural areas./.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is greeted by U.S. President Donald Trump as he arrives at the White House in Washington, D.C., on October 11, 2017. A progressive group says it's baffled that the Canadian government has worked at the NAFTA negotiating table to protect a dispute resolution system that allows companies to sue governments, estimating it has cost Canadian taxpayers $314 million. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says in a report to be published Tuesday that Chapter 11 provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement have cost Canada $95 million in unrecoverable legal fees, calculated based on data it obtained through an access to information request. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, right, and Korean Foreign Affairs Minister Kang Kyung-wha, listen as Secretary of State for the United States, Rex Tillerson speaks at the opening remarks of the meeting on Security and Stability on the Korean Peninsula in Vancouver, B.C., Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward
People carry the coffin of Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic in front of his office in the northern, Serb-dominated part of Mitrovica, Kosovo, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Ivanovic was gunned down Tuesday morning in the northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica. (AP Photo/Bojan Slavkovic)
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
(Repeats item issued earlier. The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.)

* GRAPHIC: Asia refining margins vs. Oman crude futures: By Clyde Russell

LAUNCESTON, Australia, Jan 15 (Reuters) - The standout feature of China's crude oil and product trade data for December was the surge in exports of refined fuels to a record, but it already appears that this dynamic may not be sustainable.

China shipped out 6.17 million tonnes of refined products in December, equivalent to about 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd), using the BP conversion factor of 8 barrels of product per tonne.

This was up 6.6 percent from November's 5.79 million tonnes, and took the total for the year to 52.16 million tonnes, equivalent to about 1.14 million bpd.

The strength in December's exports of products, which include gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, was most likely a reflection of strong crude imports in November, when 9.01 million bpd were brought in, the second highest on record.

The glut of crude available to Chinese refiners in November and December was also coupled with still strong margins for products across Asia.

The profit for processing a barrel of Dubai crude at a refinery in Singapore averaged $7.17 in December, according to Reuters data .

This was above the current moving 365-day average of $7.05 a barrel, although it was down from a 2017 peak of $9.07 for the month of September.

This meant that Chinese refiners were able to take advantage of strong prices for products in December, while processing crude oil that was most likely bought in October, when the price of Middle East benchmark Oman crude was still around $55 a barrel.

But this dynamic has shifted fairly dramatically in recent weeks, with crude prices surging and refining margins dropping.

Oman crude futures ended at $67.10 a barrel on Jan. 12, the highest in just over three years, while the refinery margin dropped to $5.85 a barrel, close to the lowest since May last year.

Crude prices and refinery margins have an inverse relationship, with the profit from producing fuels tending to peak in the weeks after crude prices reach lows.

For example, when the refinery profits reached their 2017 peak of $11.01 a barrel on Sept. 1, it was about six weeks after Oman futures recorded their closing low for the year of $43.47 on June 21.

CHINA'S INDEPENDENT REFINERS ARE KEY

The sharp jump in crude benchmarks in recent weeks may well be a reflection of the market view that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies in the deal to cut output are successfully tightening the market.

But higher crude prices undermine the profitability of their refinery customers, thus making it more likely that output will decline, at least to the point where inventories of refined fuels are low enough to cause their prices to rise, thus restoring margins.

For Chinese refiners, the trick is to work out whether it's still worth importing crude for processing into fuels for exports.

In some ways the current market dynamic in Asia is an exercise in working out which of the refiners who export product have the most efficient plants, and can therefore withstand lower product margins.

While the major, state-owned refiners in China operate new generation units, it's likely that the smaller, independent refiners may struggle to compete on level terms with their larger domestic counterparts, and also efficient large-scale export refineries in other parts of Asia, such as those in Singapore or India's west coast.

Given that smaller refiners were behind much of the gain in China's crude imports in 2017, any sign that they may pull back on purchases would be bearish for crude imports.

Independent refiners, sometimes referred to as teapots, imported about 70.5 million tonnes of crude in 2017, up from 42.1 million in 2016, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters Oil Research and Forecasts.

This means that the independent refiners imported about 568,000 bpd more last year than they did in 2016, accounting for much of China's overall increase in crude imports of about 800,000 bpd.

In some ways China's independent refiners have become the single most important driver of overall global crude demand growth, meaning their health becomes of increasing importance.

The current expectation is that these refiners will continue to import more crude, given the authorities in Beijing appear to be enabling this by granting them quotas to buy foreign oil directly.

But ultimately, what will determine if this turns out to be the case is whether China's independent refiners can compete domestically and regionally with the bigger players.

(Editing by Richard Pullin)
HANOI, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Here's a snapshot of Vietnamese dong exchange rates in the official and unofficial markets, indicative SJC gold prices in Hanoi and interbank offered rates at 0403 GMT.

January 16 USD/VND mid-point 22,386 USD/VND interbank 22,708/22,709 USD/VND unofficial 22,700/22,715 SJC gold (mln dong/tael) 36.76/36.98

Interbank offered rates Overnight 1.8-2.7

1 week 2.2-3.0

1 month 3.8-4.5

3 months 4.5-5.0

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)
KIEV, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The Belarussian economy grew 2.4 percent in 2017 compared with a contraction of 2.6 percent the previous year, state news agency BelTA reported on Tuesday, quoting Prime Minister Andrei Kobyakov.

The result is higher than the government's forecast of a 1.7 percent rise last year - a return to growth after two years of recession that was caused in part by contagion from an economic downturn in neighbouring Russia, where many Belarussians work.

The authorities expect the economy to grow 3.5 percent in 2018. The International Monetary Fund forecasts growth of 1.7 percent.

The Fund expects average economic growth to remain around 2 percent annually over the next few years if state-run heavy industries don't modernise.

(Reporting by Andrei Makhovksy, writing by Alessandra Prentice, editing by Larry King)
LONDON, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Borrowing costs across the euro area fell on Tuesday after a source-based report that the European Central Bank is unlikely to ditch a pledge to keep buying bonds at next week's meeting.

Germany's 10-year government bond yield, the benchmark for the region, fell to day's low of 0.49 percent and was down 4 basis points on the day.

Italian and Spanish bond yields dropped 6-7 basis points, extending earlier falls .

ECB rate setters also need more time to assess the outlook for the economy and the euro, three sources close to the matter told Reuters. (Reporting by Fanny Potkin; Editing by Dhara Ranasinghe)
BRASILIA, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The Brazilian central bank has called for all vice presidents of state lender Caixa Economica Federal to step down following the investigation of alleged corruption at the bank, a person with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Tuesday. The central bank's request follows similar demands by federal prosecutors last month which the government initially ignored, sources told Reuters last week. The central bank is in charge of regulating the nation's financial system. (Reporting by Ricardo Brito Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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.
BRASILIA, Jan 16 (Reuters) - * Brazil Agriculture Minister Blairo Maggi said on Wednesday that it is possible to resolve the ban on fresh beef exports to United States before he is expected to step down in April. * The Agriculture Ministry is studying whether to remove a 20 percent tax on ethanol imported from the United States, Maggi said.

(Reporting by Jake Spring and Mateus Maia Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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.
* Leu nears record low after PM resignation

* Leu, Romanian stocks rebound as ruling party proposes new PM

* German stocks rally helps Prague, Warsaw hit multi-year highs

* Czech PM Babis loses confidence vote, but seen staying

(Adds Romanian PM candidate, Czech confidence vote, central bankers)

By Sandor Peto and Luiza Ilie

BUDAPEST/BUCHAREST, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Romanian assets rebounded from a plunge on Tuesday as the ruling Social Democrat party (PSD) quickly picked a candidate to replace prime minister Mihai Tudose, who resigned on Monday.

The move reduces the odds of a drawn-out political crisis, but does not eliminate them as President Klaus Iohannis is not certain to accept the candidate, Member of the European Parliament Viorica Dancila. Iohannis appointed Defence Minister Mihai Fifor as interim prime minister, prompting speculation that he was Iohannis's preferred candidate for premier.

Tudose was forced to quit after a row with Liviu Dragnea, the powerful leader of the party, which has been racked by corruption scandals.

The leu traded at 4.6535 against the euro at 1522, still down 0.3 percent, but off the day's low of 4.6635, drifting away from its end-2017 record low of 4.68.

Bucharest's main index , which had hit 4-1/2-month highs in the previous two sessions, slipped 0.26 percent.

Other bourses in Central Europe hit or tested multi-year highs, pulled up by optimism over the region's economies, gains in equities in Germany and a positive mood in emerging markets.

Warsaw's blue-chip index hit its highest levels since late 2013. It rose by 1.7 percent, with Poland's biggest bank, PKO BP ,leading the rally.

PKO shares were at their highest in almost seven years.

Czech stocks set a 6-1/2-year high, boosted by strong economic growth, even though Prime Minister Andrej Babis's minority government lost a parliamentary vote of confidence.

The defeat had been expected and opens a possibly lengthy period of talks to form a new government. Czech central bank (CNB) board member Vojtech Benda said inflation risks to the CNB's latest forecasts had risen slightly and might allow faster interest rate rises than the bank's outlook foresees. The CNB has increased its interest rates twice since August.

The crown firmed 0.2 percent against the euro to 25.48.

Romania's central bank delivered its first interest rate hike in a decade last week, but inflation is soon expected to rise above 3.5 percent, the top of its target range.

Deputy Governor Liviu Voinea said the bank was confident that the current level of the leu was very close to the level suggested by the economy's fundamentals. CEE SNAPSHOT AT

MARKETS 1622 CET

CURRENCI

ES

Latest Previous Daily Change

bid close change in 2018 Czech <EURCZK= 25.4800 25.5250 +0.18% +0.24% crown > Hungary <EURHUF= 308.5900 308.9300 +0.11% +0.75% forint > Polish <EURPLN= 4.1725 4.1765 +0.10% +0.09% zloty > Romanian <EURRON= 4.6535 4.6385 -0.32% +0.56% leu > Croatian <EURHRK= 7.4240 7.4325 +0.11% +0.08% kuna > Serbian <EURRSD= 118.2900 118.1900 -0.08% +0.18% dinar > Note: calculated from 1800 CET daily change

Latest Previous Daily Change

close change in 2018 Prague 1113.28 1109.090 +0.38% +3.26%

0 Budapest 39670.80 39579.11 +0.23% +0.75% Warsaw 2586.49 2542.65 +1.72% +5.09% Bucharest 8240.06 8254.85 -0.18% +6.27% Ljubljana <.SBITOP 822.05 828.40 -0.77% +1.94%

> Zagreb 1879.60 1870.76 +0.47% +1.99% Belgrade <.BELEX1 774.65 768.01 +0.86% +1.95%

5> Sofia 715.40 714.31 +0.15% +5.60%

BONDS

Yield Yield Spread Daily

(bid) change vs Bund change

in Czech spread Republic 2-year <CZ2YT=R 0.6500 0.0170 +123bps +2bps

R> 5-year <CZ5YT=R 0.8990 -0.0520 +103bps -4bps

R> 10-year <CZ10YT= 1.7410 0.0000 +118bps +3bps

RR> Poland 2-year <PL2YT=R 1.6070 -0.0040 +219bps +0bps

R> 5-year <PL5YT=R 2.5880 -0.0280 +272bps -1bps

R> 10-year <PL10YT= 3.2790 -0.0190 +272bps +1bps

RR>

FORWARD RATE AGREEMEN

T

3x6 6x9 9x12 3M

interban

k Czech Rep 1.04 1.21 1.36 0.76

<PRIBOR=

> Hungary 0.10 0.18 0.26 0.02 Poland 1.75 1.77 1.86 1.72 Note: FRA are for ask prices quotes ************************************************* *************

(Additional reporting by Radu Marinas in Bucharest/Bartosz Chmielewski in Warsaw; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky, William Maclean)
AMSTERDAM, Jan 16 (Reuters) - A commission representing Eneco shareholders called on Tuesday for the urgent appointment of a third-party mediator to try to repair ties between the Dutch energy company's supervisory board and its investors.

Eneco's shareholders -- municipal governments -- voted in October to privatise the company, which is estimated to be worth around 4 billion euros ($4.9 billion). The company's management has called for the company to seek a partial sale or Initial Public Offering, which would ensure it remains under Dutch control.

Shareholders would prefer to keep all options open, including an outright sale, which would likely result in a bigger return. Sources close to the matter have said Shell, which has appointed Morgan Stanley to advise it on a possible bid, could be interested. Shell has declined to comment.

In an open letter, Adriaan Visser, the alderman for Rotterdam alderman who chairs the shareholders committee, said shareholders had lost confidence in Eneco's supervisory board.

He said that remarks made by members of the board at an extraordinary meeting on Jan. 12 showed the board understood its responsibility as "overseeing the board of management and not interacting with shareholders".

"It seems the board of managers don't take into account that Eneco has no other shareholders than public ones."

Rotterdam is the company's largest shareholder with a 37 percent stake. Visser said the board is meant to represent shareholders' interests, as well as those of the company's managers and employees.

The letter, dated 15 Jan. and published on Tuesday, called for a mediator to bring together representatives of the board and shareholders this weekend, before shareholders begin taking legal steps to have the board removed.

An Eneco spokesman said he could not immediately comment. ($1 = 0.8184 euros)

(Reporting by Toby Sterling; editing by Alexander Smith)
FRANKFURT, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The following are some of the factors that may move German stocks on Tuesday:

CONTINENTAL Germany's Continental AG has hired JP Morgan to advise on a possible break-up, sources told Reuters, as the auto parts maker repositions for a market focused on electric and self-driving vehicles. DEUTSCHE BANK Nine large banks, including Deutsche Bank, have been accused in a lawsuit of conspiring to rig a Canadian rate benchmark to improve profits from derivatives trading. SIEMENS Capital Markets Day for unit Healthineers due.

COVESTRO The chemicals group said it expects a 85 mln eur positive one-off for 2017 from the new U.S. tax regime. UNIPER Fortum's bid for Uniper due to run out.

OVERSEAS STOCK MARKETS

US markets closed. Nikkei +1.0 pct, Shanghai stocks +0.2 pct.

Time: 0611 GMT. GERMAN ECONOMIC DATA

No economic data scheduled.

EUROPEAN FACTORS TO WATCH DIARIES REUTERS TOP NEWS (Reporting by Arno Schuetze and Christoph Steitz)
* Iraq emerged as top supplier in 2017 replacing Saudi Arabi

* Iran displaced Venezuela as No. 3 supplier

* Apr-Dec Iran oil imports down about 18 pct y/y

By Nidhi Verma

Jan 16 (Reuters) - India's oil imports rose by about 1.8 percent in 2017 to a record 4.37 million barrels per day (bpd) as the country boosted purchases to feed its expanded refining capacity, ship-tracking data obtained from sources and data compiled by Thomson Reuters Oil Research & Forecasts showed.

To meet its growing fuel demand India, the world's third-biggest oil consumer, raised its refining capacity in the second half of 2017. India's capacity expansion to about 5 million bpd was aided by Reliance Industries , owner of the world's largest refining complex, declaring 30 percent higher capacity of its export-focused plant. In December the country's oil imports totalled 4.38 million bpd, a decline of about 6.4 percent from the previous month and about 2 percent from a year ago, the data showed. In 2017 Iraq for the first time emerged as the top supplier to India on an annual basis while Saudi Arabia slipped to the second position, the data showed.

Iran was the third biggest oil supplier to India in 2017, replacing Venezuela. India's imports from Iran in 2017 totalled about 471,000 bpd, marginally lower than a year ago, the data showed.

In April-December, the first nine months of this fiscal year, Iranian supplies to India averaged at about 437,000 bpd, a decline of about 18 percent from a year ago, the data showed.

Indian state refiners plan to cut imports from Iran by about a fifth from a year over a dispute on the award of development rights of a giant gas field.

India's oil imports from Iran surged to the highest level in nine months in December. The Middle East continued to be the biggest oil supplier to India, although the region's share in imports declined to about 63 percent from about 64.5 percent a year ago.

Imports from the Middle East declined due to the narrowing price differential with Atlantic Basin oil tied to Brent .

The average premium for Brent eased against Dubai crude to about $2 a barrel in 2017 from around $3.5 in 2016.

Oil supplies from Africa rose marginally, accounting for about 16 percent of overall imports, while that from Latin America declined for a third year, with the region's share shrinking to about 15 percent from 16 percent.

The opening of an arbitrage window due to a supply glut led to India buying more from central Asia and shipping in oil from the United States.

(Reporting by Nidhi Verma, editing by Louise Heavens)
ABIDJAN, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Ivory Coast aims to raise 1,310.7 billion CFA francs ($2.35 billion) in bonds on the regional CFA franc market in 2018, treasury director Jules Coulibaly told Reuters on Tuesday.

The sum would be an increase on the 1,296.8 billion CFA francs collected last year and will go towards financing the budget, Coulibaly said.

He said the country will raise 325 billion CFA francs in the first quarter, including a 35 billion CFA franc bond launched on Tuesday.

(Reporting By Loucoumane Coulibaly; Writing by Edward McAllister; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
TOKYO, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Japanese government bond prices were steady to slightly firmer on Tuesday, after an auction of 2.2 trillion yen ($19.8 billion) five-year government bonds attracted strong demand.

The auction drew bids 5.24 times the offer, the highest bid-to-cover ratio in 4-1/2-years, with the lowest price coming in higher than expected.

Following the tender, the five-year yield dipped 1.0 basis point to minus 0.090 percent , edging further away from its three-month high of minus 0.075 percent touched last week.

The 10-year JGB futures price also ticked up 0.04 point to 150.51 while the yield on the cash 10-year JGB was flat at 0.070 percent .

The market had no reaction to data showing Japan's wholesale prices in December rose 3.1 percent from a year earlier, slightly less than expectations of 3.2 percent. The data came a day after Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda made an upbeat assessment on the Japanese economy.

($1 = 110.93 yen)

(Reporting by Tokyo Markets Team; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
NAIROBI, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Kenya has changed its market regulations to allow short-selling of shares by participants to boost liquidity on the bourse, market officials said on Tuesday.

Pension funds hold the bulk of shares and the lack of securities lending, borrowing and short-selling framework has curbed activity as the funds typically don't trade their holdings frequently.

"Making the Kenyan capital markets highly vibrant and liquid is a key priority for the capital markets industry and the Securities Lending, Borrowing and Short-Selling Regulations are expected to facilitate this," said Paul Muthaura, chief executive of regulator CMA.

The Nairobi Securities Exchange is a key entry point for foreign investors looking for exposure to the region's fast-growing economies.

(Reporting by Duncan Miriri; editing by Jason Neely)
DUBAI, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The continued surge in the oil price may give most major Gulf stock markets a firm tone on Tuesday while Qatar could rebound after a sharp fall in late trade on Monday.

Brent crude oil rose above $70 a barrel on Monday for the first time since December 2014, while MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan is up 0.3 percent at a record high.

Qatar's index tumbled 2.5 percent on Monday on heavy selling in the final half-hour, ending a seven-day rising streak; sentiment was hit after the United Arab Emirates said Qatari fighter jets twice intercepted Emirati civilian aircraft during routine flights to Bahrain, which Qatar denied. It is not clear that the incidents will escalate further so some investors may buy back on Tuesday, resuming the index's strong uptrend of recent weeks. U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday thanked the ruler of Qatar for "action to counter terrorism and extremism in all forms", the White House said. In Dubai Emirates NBD , the emirate's largest lender and the first major lender from the UAE to report its quarterly earnings, was in line with expectations; fourth-quarter net profit rose 17.2 percent on year to 2.18 billion dirhams ($593.5 million). SICO Bahrain had forecast 2.23 billion dirhams and EFG Hermes, 1.98 billion dirhams.

The Saudi index , last at 7,483 points, faces strong technical resistance on last July's peak of 7,586 points.

(Reporting by Andrew Torchia)
OSLO, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Norway's $1.07 trillion sovereign wealth fund has excluded nine more companies from its portfolio based on breaches of its ethical investment criteria, the Norwegian central bank, which manages the fund, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Evergreen Marine Corp (Taiwan) Ltd , Korea Line Corp , Precious Shipping PCL , Atal SA and Thoresen Thai Agencies PCL were among those that were excluded.

AECOM , BAE Systems , Fluor Corp and Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc were also removed from the portfolio, while the earlier exclusion of Honeywell International Inc was maintained.

Pan Ocean Co. Ltd was placed under observation, the central bank added.

($1 = 7.8783 Norwegian crowns)

(Reporting by Terje Solsvik, editing by Louise Heavens)
WARSAW, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Polish financial market regulator KNF said on Tuesday it will not approve Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International's plan to start a new bank in Poland, which the lender hoped would help it successfully list the existing Polish unit.

KNF has for years insisted that large banks in Poland list their shares to assure transparency and safety of the sector. The regulator has extended the deadline for Raiffeisen Bank Polska initial public offering earlier this year. Last year the IPO plan was shelved as investors offered a much lower price for the Polish bank's shares than Raiffeisen was willing to accept because of its Swiss franc-denominated loan portfolio, which is seen by investors as a long-term risk.

In November RBI said it planned to carve out the FX mortgages portfolio and eventually take it over. Two sources familiar with the situation said on Tuesday that RBI had planned to start a new bank in Poland which would take over the FX portfolio from Raiffeisen Bank Polska and then conduct the new bank's cross-border merger with RBI, hoping that would help make IPO of Raiffeisen Bank Polska successful.

But the regulator said refused to endorse the plan.

"The commission has unanimously refused to issue an approval to launch by Raiffeisen Bank International a bank in a form of a joint-stock company," the regulator said in a statement.

KNF has justified its decision by pointing to RBI's failure to meet requirements to list Raiffeisen Bank Polska on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.

RBI said its the plan "is a measure to facilitate the IPO of RBPL or a potential sale of a majority stake. We continue to work with the KNF to find an acceptable structure."

In November, sources said that BNP Paribas has approached RBI to express interest in buying the Austrian bank's Polish division. (Reporting by Agnieszka Barteczko and Pawel Sobczak, additional reporting by Alexandra Schwarz-Goerlich in Vienna, editing by Louise Heavens)
JOHANNESBURG, Jan 16 (Reuters) - South Africa's central bank said on Tuesday it had appointed Fundi Tshazibana as the seventh member of its monetary policy committee, and that the former IMF staffer will also act as advisor to the current governors.

In a statement, the Reserve Bank said Tshazibana had 17 years of experience in public policy analysis and formulation. She has previously worked at the International Monetary Fund, National Treasury, and the National Energy Regulator of South Africa.

Tshazibana becomes the first female member of the interest-rate-setting body since Gill Marcus quit as governor in 2014.

(Reporting by Mfuneko Toyana; Editing by Catherine Evans)
COLOMBO, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The Sri Lankan rupee closed slightly weaker on Tuesday as dollar demand from importers and banks surpassed greenback inflows due to inward remittances and conversions by exporters, dealers said.

The spot rupee ended at 153.97/154.05, compared with Friday's close of 153.95/154.05.

Sri Lanka's stock , bonds, and foreign exchange markets were closed on Monday for a bank holiday.

"Today there was heavy demand (for dollars) from some foreign banks for a payment. There was heavy remittance flow too, but rupee ended weaker due to heavy demand," said a currency dealer.

Sri Lanka aims to raise $500 million this month via development bonds (SLDB), the central bank said last week, 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 currency fell 2.5 percent last year and 3.9 percent in 2016.

The central bank, while announcing its key economic policies for the year on Jan 3, said it has allowed more flexibility in determining the exchange rate based on market conditions.

It has also said intervention policies will be adopted consistent with a flexible exchange rate regime and supportive of improving foreign exchange market functionality, and maintaining a competitive exchange rate will be an important objective.

(Reporting by Ranga Sirilal and Shihar Aneez; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)
BUDAPEST, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The Hungarian Government Debt Management Agency (AKK) sold three-month Treasury bills worth 40 billion forints ($158.55 million) on Tuesday at an auction, as planned. Series: D180425 Issue status: Auction data: AUCTION DATE 16/01/2018 09/01/2017 TOTAL BIDS (bln HUF) 52.70 132.78 ALLOTTED (bln HUF) 40.00 40.00 AVERAGE YIELD (pct) -0.01 -0.01 ($1 = 252.29 forints)

(Reporting by Sandor Peto)

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.
(Kitco News) - Mining companies struggling to attract investor capital need to start thinking outside the box and pay more attention to their environmental footprint, according to one tech mining executive.

Kurtis Vanwallegham, CEO of Bio-Mine at #DisruptMining 2017

In an interview with Kitco News, Kurtis Vanwallegham, CEO of Bio-Mine, said that mining companies are starting to really focus on the importance of their social corporate responsibilities and environmental issues are at the forefront.

If you can keep the people in the area happy and the environmental impact low; where communities are supporting you and your business model is more accepted in society, that will be reflected in your share price, he said.

Vanwallegham added he has seen this sentiment continue to grow in the mining space as he works with more and more researchers to develop green technology. 2017 was a big year for Bio-Mine after it competed in the #DisruptMining event at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention.

Last year it pitched the idea of using bio-intelligent, augmenting consortium of organisms to recover metals and remediate mines, an evolution from all microbes currently being used today. The idea Vanwallegham said is to use zero-toxic technologies and innovation to replace all harmful chemicals currently found on a typical mine site

Since the PDAC event, Bio-Mine has had to move twice as its business saw rapid expansion. Vanwallegham added that they still have a waiting list of companies that are interested in our partner program.

This past year has been unbelievable. We just didnt have the capacity to handle all the project requests but that is going to change in 2018, as we move into our new state of the art facility, he said.

Looking at Mining at a Microscopic Level

What makes Bio-Mine a unique tech mining company is the way it is approaching the problem of developing a sustainable mine. Vanwallegham explained that they are working with some of the worlds top medical researchers to develop new technologies. He added that the medical field has some of the best researchers in areas that can be transferred to the mining sector.

We are working with the elite of the elite when it comes to nanotechnology, biotechnology, molecular science and organic chemistry, he said. We are not coming at mining from an engineering viewpoint but from a molecular viewpoint.

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel that there are non-toxic substitutions and options for mining companies to utilize innovation to reduce their environmental footprint, he added.

As an example, Vanwallegham said that Bio-Mine is working with a leading global expert in cyanide, which is a deadly toxin that is used to extract gold and silver.

The goal is to eliminate cyanide completely, so we try and bring in the best in the world as mentors and consultants to our team he said.

Vanwallegham said one of the critical roles he sees for Bio-Mine is as a solutions incubator, as the company works with its researchers to develop viable commercial non-toxic technologies. He added through their incubation process they can evaluate what technology will realistically work within a typical mining project.

Unfortunately 90% of the research out there are not viable for a mine for one reason or another, so how does a mining company find the right technology. Not easily.

While partnering with a variety of mining companies, Vanwallegham said that its business model is based on the medical sector. He explained that they have a variety of projects at different stages of development. He added that they are continually researching new ideas, with the best ideas moving forward through the incubation phases toward commercialization.

We have modeled our business after medical research because they are the best examples of rapid innovation, he said. Similar to their stages, we have some projects that can be adopted now, we have some projects that are about a year away and we have some projects that have just been added to the workbench.

Bio-Mine, Vanwallegham said, was able to expand its business because of the exposure from the 2017 #DisruptMining event, which allowed him to showcase his innovative ideas to a room full of mining executives.

Goldcorp is planning its second annual #DisruptMining event and is accepting applications for companies to present their ideas in front of a panel of mining and tech executives. Tuesday is the final day for companies to submit their proposals.
ISTANBUL, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Here are news, reports and events that may affect Turkish financial markets on Tuesday.

The lira stood at 3.7980 against the U.S. dollar at 0500 GMT, little changed from Monday's close of 3.8025.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year bond was at 11.81 percent in spot trade on Monday and rose to 11.90 percent in Tuesday-dated trade.

The main BIST 100 share index fell 2.17 percent to 112,159.21 points on Monday.

GLOBAL MARKETS

Asian shares pushed higher on Tuesday, erasing early modest losses while the euro stood near a 3-year peak on rising expectations that the European Central Bank could pare its monetary stimulus. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was up 0.4 percent. ERDOGAN

President Tayyip Erdogan will make a speech to lawmakers from his ruling AK Party in parliament (0830 GMT). Opposition party leaders will also make speeches in their parliamentary group meetings.

INTERNATIONAL INVESTORS

Finance Minister Naci Agbal, Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci and Industry Minister Faruk Ozlu attend a meeting of the International Investors Association (YASED).

TREASURY AUCTION

The Treasury will issue a new 12-month zero coupon bond maturing on Jan. 16, 2019.

PEGASUS AIRLINES The airline says its passenger numbers rose 15.2 percent to 27.8 million last year. For other related news, double click on:

Turkish politics Turkish equities Turkish money Turkish debt Turkish hot stocks Forex news All emerging market news All Turkish news For real-time quotes, double click on:

Istanbul National-100 stock index , interbank lira trading , lira bond trading (Writing by Daren Butler)
ISTANBUL, Jan 16 (Reuters) - The Turkish Treasury sold a net 96.2 million lira ($25.26 million) in a new issue of a 12-month zero coupon bond at an average compound yield of 13.53 percent on Tuesday, central bank data showed. Earlier in non-competitive bids, it sold a net 804 million lira to primary dealers and public institutions, data showed. ($1 = 3.8087 liras)

(Writing by Ezgi Erkoyun; Editing by Daren Butler)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.
(Adds details, background)

By Lamine Chikhi

TIGUENTOURINE, Algeria, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Algeria's Sonatrach plans to send oil abroad for refining as it seeks to lower a fuel bill that reached a record $2.5 billion last year, the head of the state energy firm said on Tuesday.

Abdelmoumen Ould Kaddour said Sonatrach would pay the processing costs before bringing refined fuel back to Algeria, and was also negotiating to buy shares in a foreign refinery.

"Our goal is to reduce our imports of gasoline, they are too high," Ould Kaddour told reporters.

Algeria, which needs to meet surging domestic demand, paid $800 million for fuel imports in 2016, but last year the bill more than tripled to $2.5 billion because of refining problems, a Sonatrach source said.

Ould Kaddour was speaking during a visit to the southern gas complex of Tiguentourine, where he said production was stable at 8.8 billion cubic metres per year, just below maximum capacity of around 9 billion cubic metres.

Algeria, a key supplier of gas to Europe, exported 55 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas in 2017, Ould Kaddour said. That was just up from the 54 bcm that the North African nation exported in 2016, according to Sonatrach officials.

Ould Kaddour's visit marked the fifth anniversary of an attack by al Qaeda-linked militants at Tiguentourine that killed 40 mostly foreign contractors. The plant is operated by Sonatrach, BP and Statoil .

Ould Kaddour also said Sonatrach was improving relations with its foreign partners and had resolved "more than 10" out of 15 litigation cases.

(Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Louise Heavens and David Evans)
(Adds minister comments, context)

By Jake Spring and Mateus Maia

BRASILIA, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Brazil is studying the removal of a 20-percent tariff on ethanol imports from the United States, Agriculture Minister Blairo Maggi said on Wednesday, in a decision that could depend on Washington lifting a ban on fresh beef exports from Brazil.

Last year, Brazil imposed a 20-percent tax on ethanol imported from the U.S. that exceeds a 600 million liter annual quota to protect local producers as imports spiked.

Also in 2017, the U.S. banned shipments of fresh beef from Brazil following on a food safety scandal involving bribes paid to inspectors that led to heightened inspections by the U.S. and in turn uncovered potential health risks.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Maggi implied that a decision on removing the ethanol import tariff could depend on resolving the dispute on beef exports.

"There is on the part of the United States a big demand to withdraw this (ethanol tariff) and we also have this problem with beef," Maggi said. "Obviously one thing influences and contaminates the other."

The ban on fresh beef exports could be lifted by April, Maggi said, when he is expected to step down in order to meet a deadline to run for elected office in October.

Brazil has already submitted all of the material requested by the United States to address concerns over beef exports and is awaiting for the United States to decide whether the issue is resolved, he said.

(Reporting by Jake Spring and Mateus Maia; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
(Adds Greenlight 2017 performance, Einhorn comments on tech, industrials, gold)

BOSTON, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Hedge fund manager David Einhorn told investors on Tuesday that he made a "large" bet on insurer Brighthouse Financial late last year, and had made money on General Motors but lost by shorting Amazon and Tesla .

Einhorn's Greenlight Capital bought into Brighthouse, MetLife's former U.S. retail life-insurance business, at an average cost of $57.92, according to a letter sent to clients and seen by Reuters. The stock is now trading at $63.90.

The fund manager said General Motors, which was his firm's biggest winner last year, remains "significantly under valued" given the automaker's "impressive fundamental performance."

But Einhorn also said he again lost money by betting that a group of fast-growing technology stocks, including Amazon, Netflix , and Tesla, would fall. "The biggest losers for the year were our short positions on the 'bubble basket'," Einhorn wrote.

Greenlight Capital, whose annualized 15.4 percent return over more than two decades make it one of the world's most closely watched hedge funds, posted only a modest return in 2017. The firm's 1.6 percent gain trailed the Standard & Poor's 500 21.8 percent gain and Einhorn said it was a tough year for so-called value investors like himself.

"While it feels like we have been running face first into the wind, we don't intend to capitulate and are sticking to our strategy of being long (on) misunderstood value and shorting 'not value'," he wrote.

Greenlight made money on German energy company Uniper and performance chemicals business Chemours , and took new stakes in offshore rigs operator Ensco and social media company Twitter .

Time Warner was bought again because Greenlight thinks the planned merger with AT&T will go through. And if it doesn't, "TWX has several strategic options to create value," said Einhorn. Einhorn was candid about his losses, noting that his bet on pharmacy retailer Rite Aid , in which he invested at $7.45 a share, did not turn out the way he expected. He exited at $2.78 a share.

Greenlight is still betting that the price of gold will rise, but Einhorn said the firm lost money on the VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF and got out. "We don't need additional exposure to mining equities to express that view," he wrote.

(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Rosalba O'Brien)
(adds Taiwan foreign ministry spokesman's comment)

SYDNEY/TAIPEI, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Australia's Qantas Airways said on Tuesday it had amended its website to no longer refer to Taiwan and Hong Kong as countries, rather than Chinese territories, after China issued a warning to foreign airlines last week.

China has stepped up efforts to police how foreign businesses refer to parts of China, or territories claimed by Beijing, including Taiwan and Hong Kong - even if only in pull-down menus on websites.

"Due to an oversight, some Chinese territories were incorrectly listed as countries on parts of our website. We are correcting this error," said Qantas in an emailed statement.

China's civil aviation authority told foreign airlines to check their websites and make any needed changes, but the campaign goes beyond just airlines. To comply, Qantas has now deleted several lists that categorised destinations by country.

China last week suspended Marriott International's Chinese website for a week to punish the world's biggest hotel chain for listing Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as separate countries in a customer questionnaire.

A Qantas spokeswoman did not immediately respond to questions as to whether the airline expected a similar action by the Chinese authorities.

Public apologies from Delta Air Lines , Zara and Medtronic for similar offences have so far satisfied China, which has grown increasingly sensitive to issues of sovereignty.

Qantas is the first Australian company to respond to Beijing's heightened vigilance, though all firms exporting everything from iron ore to baby formula should be taking heed. China, which is easily Australia's biggest trading partner, bought A$93 billion ($73.98 billion) worth of Australian goods and services last year.

Hong Kong and Macau are former European colonies that are now part of China but run largely autonomously. China annexed Tibet in 1950, although Beijing has long claimed the Himalayan region has been an indivisible part of China throughout history.

Taiwan is China's most sensitive territorial issue. The ruling Communist Party considers the self-ruled, democratic island a wayward province and refuses to renounce the threat of force to bring it into the fold.

On Tuesday, Taiwan's foreign ministry said it had contacted relevant companies to comply with its own government's strict position on this issue, and to reject China's difficult and unilateral requests.

"We are closely watching the following developments," said foreign ministry spokesman Andrew H.C. Lee.

"Of course, with the fact that Taiwan is a sovereign, independent country, there won't be any change to this as a result of China's unilateral way of handling things." ($1 = 1.2571 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Colin Packham in SYDNEY; Additional reporting by Jess Macy Yu in TAIPEI; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
(Adds Raiffeisen CEO comment, more detail)

WARSAW, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Poland's financial market regulator said on Tuesday it would not approve a plan by Austrian bank Raiffeisen Bank International to set up a new bank in Poland.

RBI wanted to create the new bank to take on a batch of mainly Swiss franc-denominated loans from its existing Polish bank Raiffeisen Bank Polska.

RBI was due to list Raiffeisen Bank Polska to comply with the Polish regulator's requirement that large banks in Poland list their shares to assure transparency and safety of the sector. Last year, the IPO plan was shelved as investors offered a much lower price for Raiffeisen Bank Polska's shares than Raiffeisen was willing to accept. This was partly because of its Swiss franc-denominated loan portfolio, which is seen by some investors as a long-term risk and means the bank must hold more capital.

Two sources familiar with the situation said on Tuesday that RBI had planned to create the new bank to take over the FX portfolio from Raiffeisen Bank Polska which could help to make IPO of Raiffeisen Bank Polska successful.

But the Polish regulator said it would not endorse the plan.

"The commission has unanimously refused to issue an approval to launch by Raiffeisen Bank International a bank in a form of a joint-stock company," the regulator said in a statement.

The regulator pointed to RBI's failure to meet requirements to list Raiffeisen Bank Polska on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.

RBI said its plan aimed to facilitate the IPO of Raiffeisen Bank Polska or a potential sale of a majority stake. "We continue to work with the KNF to find an acceptable structure," it said.

RBI Chief Executive Johann Strobl said the decision meant this specific kind of carve-out for the loan portfolio was no longer an option, but there were other ways it could split the core bank in Poland from the Swiss franc loan portfolio.

"If we have a buyer, we can carve out the core bank so that the foreign currency portfolio remains, if they want," he told reporters on the sidelines of a Euromoney conference on Central and Eastern Europe.

That was just one option, and both an IPO and a sale of the Polish unit remained possible, he said.

In November, sources said that BNP Paribas had approached RBI to express interest in buying the Austrian bank's Polish division. (Reporting by Agnieszka Barteczko and Pawel Sobczak,; Additional reporting by Alexandra Schwarz-Goerlich and Francois Murphy in Vienna; editing by Louise Heavens and Jane Merriman)
(Adds Kolomoisky comment, quote from central bank deputy governor, background)

By Natalia Zinets

KIEV, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Ukraine's central bank said on Tuesday an investigation into the country's largest lender, PrivatBank, which was taken into state control in 2016, showed it had been used for money-laundering and shady deals over the course of at least a decade.

One of the bank's former main shareholders, Ihor Kolomoisky, dismissed the report as "nonsense," but a central bank deputy governor said the findings had been passed to prosecutors for use in a possible criminal investigation.

The allegations of the central bank, which echo those it made at the time of the bank's nationalisation and follow a probe it commissioned by the global investigation firm Kroll, are part of a long-running dispute over PrivatBank that has spawned hundreds of legal cases.

"The investigation has identified that PrivatBank was subjected to a large-scale and coordinated fraud over at least a 10-year period ending in December 2016, which resulted in the bank suffering a loss of at least $5.5 billion," the central bank said in a statement.

The bank was nationalised as part of an International Monetary Fund-backed drive to clean up the financial system. Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk has said the resulting legal fights will be a litmus test for the effectiveness of law enforcement. The central bank, which asked Kroll and other international companies to dig into PrivatBank's finances, said the investigation had revealed that 95 percent of corporate loans extended by the lender during the period had gone to companies linked to the former owners and their affiliates.

"It is nonsense, which there is no point commenting on," ex-shareholder Kolomoisky told online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda in response to the central bank's statement.

"The main question is where was the money withdrawn to and when? All the rest is fiction," he said.

He has launched lawsuits to challenge the nationalisation, including a move to prevent Ukraine cooperating with external companies to investigate the reasons for PrivatBank's insolvency. The former owners have long disputed the central bank's assessment of PrivatBank's finances and say it was nationalised for political reasons.

Gennadiy Bogolyubov, the other main former shareholder, has previously said the Ukrainian authorities declared PrivatBank insolvent on grounds that were fabricated and unfounded, creating an "artificial hole" in the balance sheet.

He did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the latest development.

The results of the Kroll audit have been passed to prosecutors for use in a possible criminal investigation into the deals made before its nationalisation, central bank deputy governor Kateryna Rozhkova said at a briefing.

"We received assurances from the general prosecutor that the results of the forensic audit were received by the general prosecutor's office for use in carrying out a criminal investigation," she said.

(Reporting by Natalia Zinets; Writing by Matthias Williams and Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Gareth Jones)
French politician Joachim Son-Forget, center, speaks during a press conference held Tuesday at COEX Intercontinental Seoul, ahead of the Korea Image Awards ceremony organized by the Corea Image Communication Institute (CICI). From left are President Sohn Kyung-shik of CJ Group, Son-Forget and Russian social media influencer Angelina Danilova. The three are recipients of this year's Korea Image Awards. / Courtesy of CICI



By Yun Suh-young



Conglomerate CJ Group, French politician Joachim Son-Forget and Russian social media star Angelina Danilova were recipients of this year's annual Korea Image Awards given by the Corea Image Communication Institute (CICI) which aims to promote Korean culture overseas.



The Korea Image Stepping Stone Award went to CJ Group for its "ceaseless efforts to spread Korean food, content and culture, and localize them in order to help global citizens experience and enjoy the essence of Korean culture through their daily lives," CICI said in a statement prior to the award ceremony held at the COEX Intercontinental Hotel in Seoul, Tuesday.



In receiving the prize, CJ Group President Sohn Kyung-shik said, "We hope to build hallyu not as a temporary trend but as a proud culture that has deep roots into the lives of global citizens."



The Korea Image Stepping Stone Bridge Award went to Joachim Son-Forget, a French politician and member of the French National Assembly as well as president of the France-Korea Friendship Association.



"Joachim Son-Forget was the first Korean-Frenchman to become a member of the French assembly and by being appointed president of the France-Korea Friendship Association he has attracted much attention to Korea globally. He also acted as a bridge between Korea and the world through exchanges in information technology, medicine, science, culture and arts, and businesses," CICI said in its statement.



Joachim Son-Forget is a radiologist and cognitive scientist who was born in Korea but adopted by a French family and grew up there.



At the press conference Tuesday, Son-Forget said he felt deeply connected to Korea because he was "born here and married a Korean which means I married the country." His last name includes his wife's surname, Son.

The third award, Korea Image Flower Stone Award, went to Russian social media influencer Angelina Danilova, known as the "Russian elf" for her doll-like appearance.



"Angelina Danilova introduced various content about Korea globally through her social media platform as a young Russian artist living in Korea. She contributed to promoting Korean culture and the country to young people across the globe who will lead the future," CICI announced.



In receiving the award, Danilova said she was just "sharing my love of Korean culture."



"It had always been my dream to come to Asia. I think I inspired a lot of people to work on their dream and visit Korea and see the beautiful parts of this country," she said.




By Oh Young-jin



The European Union is likely to remove South Korea from its blacklist of tax havens.



According to Reuters news service, Korea would be one of the eight "jurisdictions" to be removed from the list. The others include Panama, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Barbados, Grenada, Macao, Mongolia and Tunisia. They were among 17 blacklisted by the EU in December.



EU officials recommended their removal following their commitments to change their tax rules, Reuters reported.



The proposal will be discussed at a meeting of EU ambassadors Wednesday and be adopted by the finance ministers in Brussels next week, it added.



South Korea has strongly protested the listing, saying it is not in accordance with international standards and poses the risk of violating taxation sovereignty. The decision did not come with sanctions, but South Korea feared damage to its national brand.








By Jhoo Dong-chan



Lawmakers are preparing a bill that requires government officials to report their possible ownership of cryptocurrencies.



Rep. Noh Woong-rae of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) said he is preparing a bill to include virtual coins worth 5 million won ($4,700) as an asset for public servants to report.



Under the bill, government officials, who are required to report their property, are also subject to reveal their cryptocurrency transaction history.



Rep. Ki Dong-min of the DPK is also preparing a similar bill that obliges government officials to reveal their ownership of virtual coins valued at more than 10 million won. Ki said he will propose the bill by the end of this week.



"Cryptocurrencies will soon become an investment asset or a means of payment," Ki said.



"An increasing number of people have invested in cryptocurrencies. We need to consider them as a part of property like cash and stocks, and government officials are supposed to report their property in a proper way."






By Kim Yoo-chul



The Moon Jae-in administration's top policymakers are sending confusing messages about how to curb speculative investment in virtual currencies.



Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon said Tuesday that shutting down cryptocurrency exchanges was still a policy the government could implement.



"The shutdown of cryptocurrency exchanges is an option that is still alive. But we need a serious study of this among related ministries," Kim said in a radio interview. "The government will soon come up with comprehensives anti-speculation steps."



His remarks came just a day after Chung Ki-joon, head of the economic bureau at the Office for Government Policy Coordination, attempted to soothe investors' fears about the possible closure of the exchanges.



Justice Minister Park Sang-ki said last Thursday that the government was preparing a bill to shut down the exchanges, roiling the market and alarming investors.



Since then, policymakers have tried to talk down the idea, saying it was a mere idea proposed by the justice ministry and needs to be reviewed by relative ministries.



However, Kim's remarks indicate the government could still shut down the exchanges.





Bitcoin will become assets to report 'Cryptocurrency can be major payment option' Science ministry losing presence in cryptocurrency plan He reiterated the government will unveil steps to curb the cryptocurrency market, including taxing capital gains from the trading of virtual coins.



"We need reasonable regulations in whatever form as there is continued irrational speculation in virtual money," Kim said. "There is no unified global standard for cryptocurrency. We are discussing a series of anti-speculation steps, including tax imposition and real-name based transactions.



If the plan goes through, Korea will become one of a few countries to levy taxes on capital gains on cryptocurrency investment. Singapore and Germany levy taxes on investments in virtual currencies depending on factors such as the amount of gains and the length of the holding period. In contrast, other countries like Japan recently eliminated fees.



Kim said millions of Koreans are jumping into speculative trading, which could cause huge social problems.



"It's fair to say there is high risk in the market. There is a flip-side to today's cryptocurrency craze. It's a new technology and could be beneficial on the industrial and economic fronts. But we have to protect investors as well," he said.



The minister noted the government will keep a close eye on the development of blockchain-based technologies.



"One thing I just want to make sure is that the upcoming steps are aimed at developing the cryptocurrency market not oppressing it. Therefore, regulations should be acceptable and understandable to win public support," the minister said.



But Kim made it clear the government can't and won't cover any losses for individual investors who invest in digital tokens, as virtual currencies are highly volatile assets.




By Choi Yearn-hong



I love Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury," an instant bombshell book in the United States, the most current American political book on President Donald Trump, his family and his associates inside and outside the White House.



I chose this book for my political science course, American Government 101. The 151-year-old publisher Henry Holt has never had as great a success as with this book. Trump denied that any interviews or access to the White House staff were granted, but all 200 interviews, including with Trump, have been quoted in the audio book just released.



The key interviewee Steve Bannon has stepped down from Breitbart News Network. A key architect of the Trump victory in the 2016 presidential election, he was appointed as the chief strategist in the Trump White House, and then fired. He designed Trump's first 100 days as president. Wolff was lucky to have Bannon's rise and fall for this book. Without Bannon's accounts of Trump and his children and his close associates, this could not have reached its status as the fastest-selling book in the publisher's history.



Almost everything written in the book is already known to the public, but it confirms all the rumors as true, even though some critics say this book is a sensational half-backed truth written in tabloid style. Of course, the words uttered and written in the book are interpreted by the author. This kind of book cannot be scientific. Each sentence does not need to be proven and verified by the interviewees.



Trump people in the White House do not read a memo of more than one page. They just read Trump's tweets. Bannon was the only one who read memos longer than one page. This may be exaggerated, but Trump does not read. He only listens and watches Fox and Friends and tweets in response to Fox and Friends. What do you expect from the Trump White House?



Wolff claims that "100 percent of people around the president question his intelligence and fitness for office." That may be exaggerated. However, everyone surrounding Trump may know in their hearts that Trump is not intelligent and is not fit for office.



Most probably, Trump himself knows it. He knew that he was an unelectable president during the campaign period and an un-presidential president after the inauguration, accidentally elected by an antiquated electoral system. He himself was once critical of that system.



One chapter is devoted to the Election Day; the scene and mood of the Trump people. Wolff sketched all their pursuits after the Election Day, not in the White House. Trump and his campaign staff tried to take advantage of finding other jobs using their campaign experience. Two campaign managers and key staff members were kicked out during the campaign period. Trump believed that the campaign managers were not competent enough to lead the campaign, and never believed his own weaknesses and faults.



The final campaign team lost hope when Billy Bush revealed Trump's words about his relationships with women, that all women liked to be touched and groped by him, such a famous and rich man. This statement was very convincingly fatal to their campaign. On the last day, FBI director James Comey rescued him when he opened Hillary Clinton's email server. Anyway, many competent men and women did not join the campaign due to Trump's supposedly unelectable character.



Bannon said a meeting of Trump's children and campaign manager Paul Manafort with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York after the election victory was "treasonous and unpatriotic" for basically money-laundering. Bannon's words will be very critical information to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation team.



Trump immediately attacked Wolff's book as fake. He does not remember his meeting with Wolff during his presidential campaign and Wolff's article, "Donald Trump Conversation: Politics Dark Heart is Having the Best Time Anyone's Ever Had," in the Hollywood Reporter in June 2016.



This article was Wolff's stepping stone to the White House after the Trump inauguration. Trump's shouting is not a surprise at all to me and many people. But I question his mental fitness. He may not remember things that have happened not long ago. His mental fitness was first brought up by a Yale psychiatrist. Ronald Reagan was much older than Trump. Reagan's mental illness was revealed much later after he retired from the White House. Trump is just entering his second year in the White House.



Since the Trump inauguration, the stock market has been booming with record-breaking highs and the war with ISIS has been subdued. That must be credited to him. However, his character and mental fitness to run the United States of America are serious matters in predicting his future in the White House. Reckless deregulation and massive military intervention in the Middle East may herald a rising stock market and subduing the war. However, the soundness of all presidential policymaking is to be seen.



Wolff made it clear that he "inserted his moral right" into the book. His moral right as a writer is his fair interpretation of 200 interviews conducted for the book. That insertion is desirable and justice-as-fairness. He also made it clear that "Fire and Fury," the title of the book, came from Trump's response to North Korean nuclear and missile programs. I recommend this book to all those who are interested in American politics.



Choi Yearn-hong is a political scientist who retired after a long teaching career in the U.S. and Korea.




Hong Joon-pyo speaks at the Liberty Korea Party's event at the Ulsan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, South Gyeongsang Province, Monday. / Yonhap





By Jung Min-ho






Ruling party chairwoman Choo Mi-ae speaks in a press conference at the party headquarters, Tuesday. / Yonhap



By Choi Ha-young



Ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) Chairwoman Rep. Choo Mi-ae said Tuesday she is willing to assume a diplomatic role to mediate between the United States and North Korea.



"If the North makes a decision for peace and coexistence, the Moon Jae-in government and the DPK will actively respond to it," Choo said during a press conference.



"I and the DPK are determined to arrange dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington to coincide with the inter-Korean dialogue."



Choo called for a "soft landing" in tackling the denuclearization of North Korea. "The goal of (North Korea's participation in) the PyeongChang Winter Olympics is to gradually attract the country to dialogue. It is important not to lose sight of the drive of the talks."



The liberal chairwoman has consistently revealed peace overtures. In her parliamentary speech last September, Choo proposed to send special envoys to Washington and Pyongyang simultaneously, causing some dissonance with the Moon administration which had been keeping pace with international sanctions.



During a U.S. visit last November, she said "establishing U.S.-North Korea diplomatic ties will be discussed" once the North comes to the dialogue table.



In Tuesday's press conference, she urged the conservatives to abandon "hawkish" measures such as redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons. "The conservative opposition parties should break from the Cold War. I call for them to join hands with the Moon government's policy which has received widespread support from international society."



Regarding domestic affairs, she elaborated on "reform on rent" to relieve the financial burden of small business owners and young entrepreneurs. "Young entrepreneurs are suffering from mountainous rent," she said.



"How can they pioneer the Fourth Industrial Revolution with such an enormous burden? Conservatives are up in arms against the government's bid to raise the minimum wage, citing hardships of small business owners. However, the fundamental reason for economic polarization is not rising wages but reckless rising rents."



The ruling party will draw up a bill for a constitutional amendment by the end of this month, she noted. President Moon has promised to carry out a national referendum for the amendment in June, while opposition parties are against it.



Asked about the power structure  the most contentious issue in the bipartisan talks over the new Constitution  Choo backed a U.S.-style four-year two-term presidency. "The semi-presidential system doesn't fit in with the nation's reality," she said.


By Nam Sang-so





Fashion refers to the various styles in clothing, accessories and beauty, and fashion trends are influenced by economic, social and other factors, which change constantly. Even politics plays a critical role in such trends. A close examination shows that fashion is not only a matter of aesthetic but also of politics.
For a brief moment Thursday, President Donald Trump gave the world a glimpse of his capacity for reasoned calm.



The Wall Street Journal had posted an interview in which Trump came across as insightful and philosophical. Other news outlets were reporting progress on an immigration bill the president had promised to sign.



Then something hit the fan.



In a meeting with lawmakers about the proposed immigration legislation, Trump stunned visitors with a nasty, vulgar comment about immigrants from Haiti and African countries, the Washington Post reported. Trump wanted to know why the United States should accept immigrants from "sh countries."



Trump's comment  made in the Oval Office, leaked to the Post and not denied by the White House  is offensive and insulting to all Americans. It's insulting to all immigrants to this country, to all people of all nations. Most Americans, after all, arrived on these shores as "wretched refuse," as a Statue of Liberty plaque proclaims.



What Trump said is beneath the dignity of the highest office of the land. But it isn't surprising. His Twitter feed is a cesspool of negative thoughts uploaded directly from the president's raging id.



Trump has a boorish streak, a lack of respect for others and limited self-control. He should have recognized what he said was inappropriate and would be leaked. The president owes the country an apology.





The above editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune. It was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.






In 2001, following massive earthquakes that killed more than 1,000 people and displaced more than 1 million in El Salvador, the United States made room for people who had come here illegally fleeing the catastrophe. It was an act of generosity taken by President George W. Bush under a federal program known as temporary protected status. Some 200,000 people took advantage of the offer to live and work legally in this country.



On Jan. 8, 17 years later, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen announced that the Salvadorans who were accommodated will be required to end their stays in the U.S. "The original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist," the Department of Homeland Security said. "Thus, under the applicable statute, the current TPS designation must be terminated."



Put simply, she understands that "temporary" is not a synonym for "permanent." The change follows similar determinations on people who have come here from Haiti (after a 2010 earthquake) and Nicaragua (after a 1998 hurricane). In each case, the emergency that precipitated mass flight has abated, but the status has been repeatedly renewed.



Critics of the latest decision regard it as cruel. Kevin Appleby of the Center for Migration Studies said it "will uproot families and children who have lived here for years." Adrian Reyna of United We Dream said these people "will be forced from the place they've called home for nearly two decades."



These complaints confirm the proverb that no good deed goes unpunished. The United States had no obligation to take in these unfortunates, but it did so  on the understanding, made clear both to the people of El Salvador and the people of America, that they would eventually return home. Eventually, in this case, turns out to be far longer than anyone could have anticipated.



Panic is not in order. Under the terms announced by DHS, no one would have to leave until next year. And Mark Silverman, a lawyer for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco, told the New York Times that anyone arrested after losing TPS is entitled to a deportation hearing  which "gives them at least seven to 10 years" because immigration courts are so overloaded.



We don't blame anyone who would prefer to live in this country rather than the places they left. But TPS was not meant to be, and shouldn't be, a way to admit immigrants or refugees who are covered by other programs. It was meant to allow the rescue of foreigners in dire, immediate need until the emergency has passed. The nature of that trade-off is that people who have made homes here will be obligated to leave them in due course.



Those denouncing the decision have a point when they warn that many of the beneficiaries will not go home but will stay in the United States, becoming unauthorized immigrants. If that's the case, it will provide fuel to anti-immigration advocates who would rather scrap TPS entirely. But we expect that many if not most of those who lose their protected status will comply with the law.



Those who oppose the change have a point in saying that, even though these countries have largely overcome the original disasters that caused the U.S. to offer help, they remain poor, chaotic and dangerous. That's not a reason to extend TPS forever, but it's a reason for Congress to take a close look at whether these foreigners should be allowed to stay.



The controversy is a reminder that our elected leaders should be hard at work on a comprehensive measure to reform our laws to balance the American tradition of accepting immigrants with the need for reasonable controls on the volume and type. If Congress favors permanent legal status for the people affected by DHS decisions, it can pass legislation to accomplish that.



Stretching the TPS program far beyond its primary purpose has been a convenient alternative to hammering out a sound consensus on policy. But it has gone on long enough.





The above opinion piece appeared in the Chicago Tribune. It was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.






By John J. Metzler





UNITED NATIONS  Surging crowds thronged the streets of Tehran and cities across Iran screaming "Death to the Shah," "Death to America." A revolutionary situation brewing for a few years reached its boiling point with the return of an obscure ayatollah from exile.



The old order collapsed as the mob triumphed, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from Paris, and darkness descended across the land.



Those chaotic events between late 1978 and February 1979 jolted the Middle East.



Recent demonstrations which rocked Iran offered a curious deja vu for those of us who painfully recall 1979. This time though the Islamic Republic regime as well as the mainstream media pundits were caught totally off guard when cities across Iran exploded in largely peaceful but doggedly passionate demonstrations.



Contrary to 1979, where seething political opposition triggered the violent revolt, in 2018 the protestors opposed massive corruption, economic shortages, and trashed symbols of a venal clerical regime out of touch with a frustrated largely young population.



Global reaction to the demonstrations was cautious; with few exceptions. The United States called for a U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss the percolating political situation inside Iran.



American Ambassador Nikki Haley, despite the misgivings of many delegations, led the rhetorical charge in the council, "Let there be no doubt whatsoever: the United States stands unapologetically with those in Iran who seek freedom for themselves, prosperity for their families, and dignity for their nation. We will not be quiet."



Amb. Haley added poignantly, "Once again, the people of Iran are rising up. They are asking for something that no government can legitimately deny them: their human rights and fundamental freedoms."



Britain's delegate Matthew Rycroft stated, "The United Kingdom's concerns about the human rights situation in Iran extend beyond the recent treatment of protesters."

While declaring "The Iranian people represent an ancient and important civilization that has a rightful place in the modern world, with a modern economy. But too often Iran's security interests are pursued in a way that destabilizes, and at times directly threatens others, supports terrorism and distorts the Iranian economy."



He cited "Iranian assistance to groups in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq," which are stoking the embers of ongoing conflicts.



Sadly most other countries on the council while expressing "concern" over the disturbances didn't wish to rock the boat to directly chastise the Tehran regime.



Tehran's delegate went so far as to crudely claim that the U.S. was not only behind the protests but added "there is a long history of U.S. bullying at the U.N." to support such a meeting.



Let's face it, many countries, especially the Europeans don't want to jeopardize cozy commercial relations with the Islamic Republic especially in the wake of the lifted economic sanctions in 2015. Countries view Iran and its oil wealth and huge domestic market as a potential golden goose; thus the tepid condemnation of Tehran.



For the U.S., Iran remains a raw geopolitical nerve. During the shah's reign, Iran stood as a regional pillar of Mideast stability for U.S. and Western interests. We know what later happened after radical Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days.



Indeed the Islamic Republic of Iran ruined a reformist, modernizing and secular Iran creating an authoritarian theocracy which rules to this day.



Briefly in 2009 after a blatantly rigged presidential election, there was a massive popular uprising in the capital Tehran which opposed entrenched political corruption. What was dubbed the Green Revolution tragically lost momentum after the Obama administration's pathetic inaction towards the pro-democracy movement.



In late 2017 protesters re-emerged but with a different agenda. As the adage goes, "It's the economy, stupid." And in the Islamic Republic's case we see a potentially prosperous country marinated in corruption and mismanagement.



The conflict is often presented as a tug of war between the clerical hard-liners of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the so-called reformist President Hassan Rouhani.



Alas, the crisis goes much deeper and to the core of Iran's expensive waste of blood and treasure in supporting terrorist surrogates such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, Yemen's rebels, and Iranian militias fighting in Syria's civil war.

.

The Islamic Republic of Iran remains a regressive and repressive regime rooted in clerical incompetence and civil corruption. Thus far over 25 protesters have died, with mass arrests of over 3,700 people, mostly students, a predictable crackdown on social media, and a mobilization of pro-regime elements which seem to have temporarily quelled the protests.



Revolutionary Guard hard-liners claim to have bottled the genie of dissent, at least for now. Yet, as deep social and economic resentments smolder, could a Persian Spring be in the future?





John J. Metzler (jjmcolumn@earthlink.net) is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of "Divided Dynamism: The Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China."










By Ko Dong-hwan







The South Korean military will have intelligent surveillance cameras with more stringent technological support than ever after the nation's defense ministry scouted the leading online network agency to vet the equipment.







Intelligent surveillance cameras are equipped with software that can pinpoint any abnormal movement in real time and track a target's possible routes. They are expected to boost the military's defense capabilities as they can help detect an enemy force's infiltration.







Certifying the equipment's technological quality has become the job of the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA), according to the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) on Tuesday. The administration said the agency, under the Ministry of Science and ICT, will vet the equipment more effectively and allow the military to employ the system more promptly and efficiently.







DAPA minister Jeon Jei-guk said that with KISA, the South Korean military will have a state-of-the-art surveillance system. "The system will empower our unmanned defense and surveillance system in case of decreasing manpower in our force," Jeon said.


Pictures from Kim's Facebook page show happier times with his family. / Courtesy of Facebook



By Clifford Lo

A South Korean man arrested over the murders of his wife and six-year-old son at a five-star Hong Kong hotel told police he was too drunk to recall what had happened, the Post has learned.

Police were also investigating if a failed business in Seoul had led to the actions of Kim Min-ho, 42, CEO of Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory in South Korea.

On Monday, Kim was being held for questioning at Tsim Sha Tsui police station and had not been charged.

The arrest was made after his wife, Song Wha-jeong, 42, and son, Kim Tae-yun, were found dead in bed in a luxury suite at The Ritz-Carlton hotel in the city's tallest building  the International Commerce Centre  in Kowloon West on Sunday morning.

"Initial examination showed multiple cut wounds were found on the neck of the woman and a cut wound was found on the throat of the boy," Superintendent Chan Tsz-leung of Yau Tsim district said.

He said an autopsy would be carried out to ascertain the cause and time of the deaths.

As there were no signs of a struggle in the hotel room, Chan said police would also look into whether the pair had been drugged before they died.

Chief Inspector Frances Lee King-hei said police would continue to investigate the case with help from South Korean authorities and the country's consulate in Hong Kong.

"Police will investigate the case in all directions, including the motive, as well as other details," she said.

The consulate is closely cooperating with Hong Kong police to investigate this incidentSouth Korean consulate

The South Korean consulate on Monday told the Post it had been well informed of the incident from an early stage.












FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

British Construction Giant Carillion Goes into Liquidation

Jan. 15, 2018 (EIRNS)The huge British construction company Carillion collapsed this morning, after negotiations among the company, the government, and the companys creditor banks fell through. The company employs more than 43,000 people, half of whom work in the U.K., and is involved with over 450 government projects, including high-speed rail; it also runs privatized prisons, housing for the Defense Ministry, and maintenance for Net Rail, the national rail grid. It is one of the premiere companies involved in the government privatization program. The company is said to have defaulted on 2 billion in debt.

Questions are being asked as to why the government kept giving the company contracts despite the fact that it was publicly known to be in trouble.

Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative Party chairman of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee, said, This really shakes public confidence in the ability of the private sector to deliver public services and infrastructure.

Mick Cash, the general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, remarked, This is disastrous news for the workforce and disastrous news for transport and public services in Britain.

Carillion has debts and liabilities of 1.5 billion with creditors that include RBS, Santander U.K., and HSBC, among others. By late morning the debt figure was 2 billion, which includes a pension deficit within of 580-900 million. Its pension fund will now be managed by the Pension Protection Fund, according to media reports.

Rebecca OKeeffe, Head of Investment at Interactive Investor brokerage firm, warned It is far from clear at this stage what the wider implications will be from the liquidation of Carillion, both in terms of its impact on the construction industry and on the wider economy as a whole, not least from the enormous uncertainty that now afflicts the tens of thousands of Carillion staff and those other companies directly dependent upon it. How Many Zombie Companies Are There, Actually, in Europe?
FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

High-Level Military Conference in Hawaii Day Before False Missile Alarm

Jan. 15, 2018 (EIRNS)On Jan. 12, the day before the state of Hawaii was thrown into existential chaos with the issuance of an erroneous nuclear missile attack alert, several hundred military commanders, politicians, and others were in Honolulu for the Chamber of Commerces Hawaii Military Affairs Council. An annual event, this years conference had the added intensity of the media-induced hysteria of the war of words between American President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

The gathering included an impressive representation of the U.S. Pacific Command, including Adm. Harry Harris, head of the PACOM, who gave the closing keynote; Maj. Gen. Russ Mack, deputy commander of Pacific Air Forces; Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Leaf, a former PACOM deputy commander; and George Kailiwai, Pacific Commands director of the requirements and resources directorate, according to an accounting by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

The air was heavy with neo-con saber rattling.

There is a real threat to Hawaii, General Leaf told the community leaders. Were closer to Korea than the U.S. mainland, he said. Easier. He then insisted that Pyongyangs nuclear missiles are not aimed at South Korea, not at Japan. The U.S. is the designated recipientand thats because we are public enemy No. 1 to North Korea.

In his summary presentation, Admiral Harris got straight to the point, telling the nervous attendees that, While the possibility of a nuclear strike is slim, we now live in a world where we must be prepared for every contingency.

The next morning the accidental nuclear attack warning set the entire state into panic, under the observation of the leading U.S. military command for Asia.
FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Ironclad Guarantees Are Needed To Extend Turkish Stream to Europe

Jan. 15, 2018 (EIRNS)In a hard-hitting press conference today in Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that Russia would extend the Turkish Stream natural gas pipeline farther west to Europe only if the European Commission provides ironclad guarantees that the contract will not be broken.

Foreign Minister Lavrov pointed out that the first line of the Turkish Stream pipeline is being built to deliver natural gas to Turkey now. He continued that

the second [line] will only be constructed if we receive ironclad guarantees from the European Commission that they will not pull the same trick as happened with the South Stream pipeline regarding Bulgaria. Lavrov also stated that Bulgaria is again ready to consider the possibility of taking the second line of the Turkish Stream.

Lavrov characterized the European Commissions action as

Rather dirty play, of course, but hopefully, the purely economic nature of the project, and the fact that leading European energy companies support it as an economic and commercial project, will still prevent those dishonest games from getting the upper

hand, according to coverage by TASS.

The Turkish Stream project enters Turkeys exclusive economic zone, and Russia and Turkey have agreed upon the Turkish Stream landfall. Lavrov stressed that Russia will be ready to accept any option wholly guaranteed by the European Commission, reiterating,

It is only possible to extend the Turkish Stream natural gas pipeline further to Europe if the European Commission provides ironclad guarantees that the project will not be broken.

Lavrov explained that, in such European Commission actions, he sees the fear of fair competition. As they are not yet good enough at fair competition, they are shifting to unfair competition, to political pressure, to making European countries build respective facilities [which would import U.S.-made liquified natural gasTASS] and thus receive more expensive gas. This is the choice of European countries; we assume that they should be aware of their economic interests themselves.
David Simon, the award-winning writer and producer of the hit series Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire, is adapting Philip Roths novel The Plot Against America into a six-part television miniseries.

The news was announced in a New York Times interview with Roth, which noted that Simon had visited Roth, and that Roth was sure his novel was in good hands.

Simon confirmed his involvement with the project on Twitter, writing, Not actually cool to be reminded by the paper of record that you are tasked with doing justice to greater work than any on which you have so far trespassed.

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Roths 2004 novel is an alternate history that imagines an America after the 1940 election of aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh as president. Lindberghs election leads to an increase in anti-Semitism in America, after the president signs a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany.

Reviewing The Plot Against America for The Times, critic Greil Marcus called the novel a fabulous yarn, writing, It may be plumbed in years to come as a cautionary tale about the fragility of the democratic spirit in America or as a metaphorical rendering of the United States and its president today.

In the New York Times interview, Charles McGrath mentioned the novel to Roth, saying that the novel seems eerily prescient today, alluding to its conservative president in parallel with Donald Trump.

Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also ... an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency, Roth responded. Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.

Neither Simon nor Roth indicated which network would be producing the show.

In response to a Twitter user who asked whether the miniseries would be an HBO project, Simon responded, Shopping it.
For all its faults, the Internal Revenue Service at least is expected to know the value of a dollar. But its math skills  and management savvy  have been called into question by a recent internal report finding that in setting up a program allowing private bill collectors to dun taxpayers for back taxes, it spent $20 million in 2016 and 2017 to collect only $6.7 million.

The report came from Nina E. Olson, head of the agencys Taxpayer Advocacy Service. Olson found not only that the IRS was paying the private bill collectors commissions they didnt earn, but that it also allowed them to go after money thats exempt from collection under the law.

What may be worst about the program is that it was focused on low-income taxpayers and resulted in some repayment agreements that left the taxpayers without enough money to live on.

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Maybe this program eventually will pay for itself. But...the evidence suggests its a much better deal for the debt collectors than for the rest of us.  Howard Gleckman, Tax Policy Center

Blame for the fiasco belongs to Congress, which has systematically demolished the ability of the IRS to collect unpaid taxes from wealthy taxpayers while demanding that the agency step up its pursuit of working-class Americans. No one can say that Congress didnt know better: As Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center observes, this was the third time that Congress sponsored a private bill-collection program  and the last two attempts failed, too. Indeed, Olson herself stated in 2016 that they were dismal failures just from a business case. By then, the die had been cast, as Congress had slipped the bill-collection provision into a highway bill in 2015.

Almost immediately, Olson warned that the program was being implemented illegally and was targeting taxpayers facing financial hardship. Her latest report found that the IRS paid out $1 million in commissions to the bill collectors and spent an additional $19 million setting up the program. For every year it continues, she noted, the IRS expects to spend $16.5 million in recurring costs. That suggests the program will continue to lose money on every dollar it brings in, on a scale that cant be made up in volume.

Maybe this program eventually will pay for itself, Gleckman writes. But, so far, the evidence suggests its a much better deal for the debt collectors than for the rest of us.

Olson listed the bill-collection program first among the 21 most serious problems with the IRS she found in 2017. (By law, the Taxpayer Advocate is required to list at least 20 such problems each year.) Here are the issues she pinpointed in the latest bill-collection effort:

 The IRS paid commissions to bill collectors for tax payments that the IRS itself collected. About one-fifth of the back taxes the IRS received  $1.2 million of the total $6.7 million collected  actually came in within 10 days of the agency sending the taxpayers letters informing them their debt was about to be turned over to bill collectors, but before the private collectors took action.

Those accounts were supposed to be withdrawn from the bill collectors portfolios, but werent. As a result, the IRS paid the collectors more than $1 million in commissions for doing nothing.

 The bill collection program targeted low-income taxpayers. Among the 4,141 taxpayers whose accounts were checked by the Taxpayer Advocate, the median income was $40,955, or about 30% below the national median of about $59,000. About 28% had annual income less than $20,000, and 1 in 5 had incomes below the federal poverty level, with median income of $6,386. Five percent were receiving Social Security retirement or disability benefits; the median income for that group was $14,365.

According to IRS regulations, Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits are exempt from IRS attachment. The IRS told Olson that it couldnt be sure if the bill collectors honored the exemptions because the records it used to deliver accounts to the bill collectors didnt distinguish among sources of income.

 The bill collectors placed some taxpayers into repayment plans they couldnt afford. The IRS typically judges whether paying off a tax debt will leave a taxpayer without enough money to cover basic living expenses. If repayment will leave the taxpayer with less than this so-called allowable expense standard, it designates the bill as not collectible-hardship and ceases collection efforts.

Olson found that installment payment deals made by the private bill collectors violated that standard with unacceptable frequency. Among the 1,676 taxpayers who entered those agreements, nearly half were left with income less than the allowable standard.

None of this should have come as a surprise. Previous programs outsourcing tax collection to private bill collectors were similarly underwhelming. The Taxpayer Advocate Service determined that under the last such program, private bill collectors performed fairly well during the first six months of the two-year study period, but fell sharply behind the IRS after that. The reason, the advocate conjectured, was that the private collectors disposed of easy cases first  chiefly those involving taxpayers who responded promptly to their first phone calls.

After that, the private collectors stopped pushing. The IRS, however, kept up its own collection efforts over subsequent months. The agency also was able to collect back taxes by offsetting them from refunds due the same taxpayers. As a result, the IRS did much better over time even though it had inherited the tough cases at which the private collectors failed.

The fundamental issue with these programs is why collecting taxes should be outsourced at all. Not only has it been proved time and again to fail, its a basic government function.

The IRS needs to remain involved in collections, Olson told a taxpayer advocacy forum in 2016, in part so it can figure out the reason for shortfalls and educate taxpayers about what they owe and why. The private debt collectors arent interested in any of that, Olson said. There is just pressure to get as much money upfront from the taxpayer.

Turning this function over to bill collectors is especially perilous, she added, because private debt collectors have the highest number of complaints to the Federal Trade Commission [of any] industry whatsoever. Thats important because we want people to comply with the law voluntarily, and bill collectors strong-arm tactics dont meet that standard.

You want decisions about how firmly to go after delinquent taxpayers to be made by an agency that has the legal authority to make decisions that arent based on the profit motive, tax law expert Adam Chodorow of Arizona State University wrote last year.

He didnt say so, but the best historical lesson of the downside of farming out tax collection to private entities comes to us from 18th century France, when Louis XVI turned the task over to an entity known as money farms. Their behavior infuriated peasants, and the king ended up losing his head. How many lessons does Congress need before it gets the message?

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.
An attempt by Qatar-owned film company Miramax to buy Weinstein Co. has thrown a wrench into plans to sell the struggling studio to a group of investors led by former Obama administration official Maria Contreras-Sweet, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment.

Weinstein Co. has been in negotiations to sell its assets to Contreras-Sweet, who is lining up investors said to include Ron Burkles Yucaipa Cos. and Lantern Asset Management to back the deal. Such an agreement would set up a fund to compensate women who say they were sexually abused by Harvey Weinstein, oust his brother Bob Weinstein and pay the brothers nothing, according to people familiar with the terms.

But Harvey and Bob Weinstein  who co-founded Weinstein Co. in 2005 and own about 46% of the business  have been trying to steer the company toward a deal with Miramax, two people familiar with the negotiations said Tuesday. They built Miramax into an indie powerhouse before the studio became a shell of its former self.

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The brothers founded Miramax in 1979, naming it after their parents Miriam and Max. They sold the studio to Walt Disney Co. in 1993 and left in 2005 to form Weinstein Co., ending a contentious relationship with the parent company. Miramax, now known mostly for its substantial film library, is owned by Qatar-based broadcaster BeIN Media Group.

A BeIN Media spokeswoman confirmed the bid on Wednesday. In a statement, she said neither of the Weinstein brothers would be involved in the companys management if a deal is reached.

Should BeIN be successful in bidding for the Weinstein company there isnt a scenario that Bob and/or Harvey Weinstein would return to the management of the company, the spokeswoman said in a statement. No one from Miramax or BeIn has had any conversations with the Weinstein brothers during this bidding process.

Representatives for Weinstein Co. and Harvey Weinstein did not have an immediate comment. Terms of the Miramax bid were not disclosed.

A source familiar with Contreras-Sweets bid said the Weinsteins pursuit of a sale to Miramax has caused talks with her coalition to stall. The Miramax bid further complicates a process that has dragged on since Weinstein Co.s board put the company up for sale in October, shortly after allegations against Harvey Weinstein first surfaced. Weinstein was fired by the board Oct. 8.

There have been no [meetings] for over a week and there are no meeting[s] planned at this time, the person familiar with Contreras-Sweets bid said in an emailed statement.

Sources said last week said that Weinstein Co. was close to a deal with Contreras-Sweet, who was head of the Small Business Administration from 2014 to 2017 under President Obama. Now it appears that a deal may still be weeks, not days, away.

Others close to the negotiations downplayed the effect of the Miramax bid. Two people close to Weinstein Co. said the talks with Contreras-Sweet remain on track.

Contreras-Sweets offer would be valued at less than $500 million, including the assumption of hundreds of millions of Weinstein Co. debt, according to one person familiar with the matter. The proposal, laid out in a 96-page asset purchase agreement, would give Contreras-Sweets consortium control of Weinstein Co.s assets and install a majority female board of directors.

The Contreras-Sweet deal was first pitched in November as a way to keep the company whole and retain employees while moving forward under a different name and compensating alleged victims. The proposal won the early support of lawyer Gloria Allred, who is representing many of Weinsteins accusers.

Contreras-Sweet has an influential backer in Burkle, who has previously been connected with the Weinsteins. In 2010, Burkle teamed with Harvey and Bob Weinstein in a failed attempt to buy Miramax, the brothers previous company, from Walt Disney Co. He has invested in movies with the Weinsteins, including Our Idiot Brother and The Iron Lady.

Dozens of women have accused Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault. Weinstein has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.

Bids for New York-based Weinstein Co. came due in December and attracted interest from a handful of players, including New York-based production company Killer Content and Santa Monica-based studio Lionsgate. Most bids would require the company to go through Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect the buyers from the mounting legal liabilities.

In a strongly worded statement issued Monday, Killer Content blasted the sale process for a lack of transparency, saying the only way to protect victims is likely through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process.

Our first commitment is to survivor justice, and as such, we believe that the sale should not be an optical rebranding of management or name, Killer Content said. Only a true dismantling of pernicious practices can advance the healing process for our industry and beyond.

ryan.faughnder@latimes.com

@rfaughnder

UPDATES:

Jan. 17, 5 p.m.: This article was updated with a statement from a Miramax spokeswoman.

Jan. 16, 4:20 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details.

This article was originally published at 12:10 p.m.
Californias top law enforcement official and his counterparts in 18 states and territories say Congress must act to end the banking industrys prohibition on serving the marijuana industry, calling the current state of affairs a public safety threat and a hindrance for law enforcement.

In a letter sent Tuesday to leaders of the House and Senate, California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra and other state attorneys general urged Congress to pass legislation that would provide legal protection for banks that accept deposits from state-licensed cannabis businesses.

Most banks, even in states where the drug is legal, wont offer accounts to marijuana-related businesses for fear of running afoul of federal regulators or law enforcement officials. That leaves the fast-growing marijuana industry largely reliant on cash.

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This grey market, state officials argue, makes it more difficult for states to ensure businesses are paying their taxes and contributes to a public safety threat as cash-intensive businesses are often targets for criminal activity.

Giving banks the go-ahead to work with cannabis companies would bring billions of dollars into the banking sector, and give law enforcement the ability to monitor these transactions, according to the letter.

The letter  whose bipartisan signatories include the attorneys general of Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Alaska, North Dakota, Maine and Iowa  comes little more than a week after U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions revoked some of the agencys Obama-era guidance regarding cannabis law enforcement, a move that some have suggested could portend a federal crackdown.

Among other things, Sessions move could force changes to anti-money laundering guidelines that some banks and credit unions have relied on to work with cannabis businesses. State attorneys general said that makes it important for Congress to act quickly.

The recent rescission of that guidance has made the need for Congressional action to get the cash generated by this industry into a regulated banking sector even more urgent, they wrote.

james.koren@latimes.com

Follow me: @jrkoren
A second lawsuit has been filed against some of the nations largest poultry producers, alleging they have conspired to fix the price of broiler chickens for nearly a decade.

The complaint filed by Winn-Dixie Stores and its sister grocery, Bi-Lo Holdings, against Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms and Koch Foods comes two months after a federal judge refused to dismiss a similar lawsuit against the three companies.

In the suit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Chicago, Winn-Dixie Stores and Bi-Lo Holdings  based in Jacksonville, Fla.  allege that the poultry companies conspired to fix the price of chickens for nearly a decade, in part by destroying their own breeder hens and eggs to hamper production. Since 2008, the coordinated production cuts have resulted in a roughly 50% increase in the price of broiler chickens, the most popular kind of chicken meat in the country, according to the lawsuit.

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Earlier: Is there a vast conspiracy to overcharge for chicken? 

The chicken manufacturers named in the suit together control about 90% of the $30-billion broiler market, according to the lawsuit.

Tyson spokesman Worth Sparkman called Fridays case an add-on lawsuit and said it doesnt change the fact that these claims are unfounded because weve not done anything wrong. We will defend our company in court.

Representatives from Koch Foods could not be reached for comment Monday. A lawyer representing Winn-Dixie and a spokesman for Perdue Farms declined to comment.

The grocery stores allege they paid artificially inflated prices for chicken and have suffered as a result. Its an injury of the type that the antitrust laws were meant to punish and prevent, the suit says.

Maplevale Farms, a food service distributor based in New York, led a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago in 2016 that made similar allegations. A judge declined to dismiss the suit in November.

amarotti@chicagotribune.com
The new tax law delivers a massive tax cut for corporations. Republicans sold the plan in part with the argument  heavily disputed by critics  that lower business taxes would trickle down through higher wages and be a boon to the middle class.

But the law offers a more direct benefit to one seemingly growing segment of the workforce: independent contract workers.

Information technology consultants in Silicon Valley stand to benefit, as do freelance Hollywood visual effects artists. Many so-called gig workers who accept individual jobs through an app  such as Uber or Lyft drivers or TaskRabbit freelance laborers  will also see tax rates fall.

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Every Uber driver, as far as I can see, gets a benefit, said Edward Kleinbard, a USC professor and former chief of staff to Congress Joint Committee on Taxation.

Whether its beneficial in the long run to be an independent contractor, rather than an employee, will still be hotly debated. The tax changes do nothing to address other criticism of so-called contingent work, such as its low pay, uncertain scheduling and lack of healthcare, retirement or other benefits.

But the new tax law lets independent workers deduct 20% of their income before paying the new, lower individual tax rates signed into law by President Trump.

Thats the same deduction received by other pass-through businesses, which, unlike corporations, pay taxes through the individual code. That category accounts for the majority of American businesses, including most independent contractors.

A single Uber driver with a net income of $40,000 a year who takes the 20% income deduction and the standard personal deduction would save $960 in federal income taxes compared with an employee with the same income, according to DeDe Jones, a certified public accountant and managing director of Innovative Financial in Colorado.

The exact number of independent contractors who stand to benefit is unknown and the law places restrictions on who can take the full deduction. For example, there are limits for taxpayers making more than $157,500 if they file individually or $315,000 as a couple.

But many contractors, especially gig workers, make less than that. And experts say some of the limits  such as what types of businesses will face stricter caps  are susceptible to evasion.

Americans, in surveys from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, report lower rates of self-employment than in previous decades. But other data show a rise in independent contracting. Lawrence Katz of Harvard University said many contractors report themselves as employees in the BLS survey. A study he did with Alan Krueger of Princeton University found 8.4% of workers in 2015 were working as independent contractors, up from 6.9% in 2005.

Internal Revenue Service data also back up the conclusion, showing a rising share of people who are independent contractors and have no W-2 income, Katz said.

Workers who get gigs through an online intermediary like Uber were only 0.5% of the workforce in 2015, the study said. But the number is growing.

TurboTax maker Intuit predicts the gig economy will almost double to 7.7 million workers in 2020, up from 3.9 million today.

TurboTax is updating its software for the new tax law, so independent contractors will know whether they qualify for the new deduction after answering a few questions.

Because much of the debate over the tax law focused on its breaks for the wealthy and lost deductions for mortgage interest and state taxes, many contractors may not even realize theyre in line for a cut.

Cecily Jamelia of Studio City was excited when told she could take advantage. The 41-year-old said that, before business deductions, she took in around $40,000 through several freelance gigs last year, including driving for Uber and video blogging under the title Drive Girl Drive, where she gives advice to female drivers.

The new tax benefit would help, she said, because Los Angeles has been saturated with people driving for Uber and Lyft.

Its not as easy to make money as it was before, she said.

Whether it actually makes sense to become an independent contractor is far from certain.

Some experts have blamed the rise in such work arrangements for worsening income inequality by cutting out traditional employment benefits such as health insurance and workers compensation. Employers like the arrangement because they can save on those costs and more easily rid themselves of an independent contractor than they can an employee when business falls off.

Just because there is an added incentive doesnt really mean people will act on that incentive, said Shu-Yi Oei, a tax professor at Boston College Law School, who has researched the gig economy.

Furthermore, not everyone can simply switch their status to become an independent contractor. The IRS and other government agencies have rules on what makes someone an employee.

Many companies  including trucking firms at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports  have been fined for misclassifying workers as independent contractors. Authorities have alleged such businesses try to have it both ways  skimping on labor costs while retaining significant control over worker schedules.

You still have to be in a profession where, with a straight face, you can say, I am an independent contractor, Oei said.

For those currently in that situation, the cost-benefit analysis is simple.

If you are already an independent contractor its pure good, Kleinbard said of the tax change. Whats not to like?

andrew.khouri@latimes.com

Follow me @khouriandrew on Twitter
Paul Marciano, cofounder of the Guess clothing brand, has bought a condominium in West Hollywood for $1.36 million. He made the purchase through a corporate entity, records show.

Found within a remodeled 14-story building, the two-bedroom, three-bathroom unit features such details as raised ceilings finished in raw concrete, brushed wood floors and exposed cement beams. Fleetwood doors, which lead to a private balcony, take in unobstructed city views.

A custom granite wall surrounds the fireplace and television in the living room. Italian marble lines the breakfast bar in the kitchen, which is equipped with stainless-steel appliances. The common area and master bedroom feature designer grasscloth wallpaper.

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At 1,679 square feet, it is the largest condo in the building. Two covered parking spaces were included with the unit.

The condo last sold five years ago for $725,000, records show.

Chris Jacobs of Keller Williams Realty-Beverly Hills represented both the buyer and seller, according to the Multiple Listing Service.

Marciano co-founded the denim powerhouse Guess Jeans with his brothers in 1981. He stepped down from his position as chief executive of the fashion firm three years ago.

Last year the Moroccan-born fashion executive sold his estate in Beverly Hills for $18.25 million in a deal completed off-market.

neal.leitereg@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATHotProperty

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Southern California News Group, which includes newspapers such as the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Daily News, will be hit with significant layoffs in the coming months, the groups management announced Friday in newsroom meetings that took place across five publications.

Meetings were also held at the Daily Breeze in Torrance, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune in Monrovia and the Press-Enterprise in Riverside.



For the record: An earlier version of this story said the Mercury News has a staff of 39. That number includes staff members represented by the union, but not additional non-union staff.

Up north, the Bay Area News Group, which is owned by the same parent company, Digital First Media, and includes publications such as the Mercury News and East Bay Times, also informed staff on Friday that buyouts and involuntary terminations were on the way.

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A spokesman for SCNG confirmed the layoffs in a statement sent to The Times on Monday. Bay Area News Group executive editor Neil Chase confirmed with The Times that the group is making cuts as revenue continues to decline.

Its not limited to certain topics [or] sections, and we didnt lay out specific numbers, Chase said.

SCNG went through buyouts last summer, which eliminated 65 newsroom positions. The forthcoming layoffs across all 11 SCNG papers are expected to be greater than 65, according to Todd Harmonson, senior editor at the Register who spent about 45 minutes on Friday afternoon answering questions from staff. A recording of the meeting was shared with The Times.

SCNG has 315 newsroom employees.

The layoffs affecting SCNG will begin in late January with the sports, features and photo sections, said executive editor Frank Pine, who spoke via speakerphone at the SCNG meeting. Layoffs will hit the news section in February, followed by the design section in March.

I dont expect well have a single area that will go unscathed, Harmonson said during a question-and-answer session with the staff.

In a statement sent to The Times, Pine said continued financial pressures forced the company to make reductions in its newsrooms. The demand for reliable local news has never been stronger. Unfortunately, continued financial pressures require us to make reductions in our newsrooms, and we will have some very talented people leaving us in the weeks to come.

Pine declined to comment further on the number of reductions because plans are not yet finalized.

A SCNG staffer who was present during the meeting and asked not to be named because of fear of retribution said some editors had told their reporters that Digital First Media wanted to cut as much as a third of the newsroom.

A similar meeting was held Friday at the Mercury News, where employees were told that those who had worked at the paper for more than 25 years were eligible for buyouts. A person who attended the meeting said the company did not specify a target number for the buyouts. Employees were told that the news group would probably have to do involuntary terminations after that.

At its peak size in the 1990s, the Mercury News had a newsroom staff of 440, according to the Pacific Media Workers Guild, which represents staff at the Mercury News, East Bay Times, San Francisco Chronicle and other Northern California newspapers. The Mercurys newsroom currently has a staff of 39 represented by the Guild, with some additional non-union staff.

Faced with drops in advertising revenue and circulation, a number of U.S. newspapers have been forced to cut editorial positions, consolidate publications and close bureaus. Some have gone from offering daily print editions to publishing only a few times a week.

Southern California publishers in particular have in recent years experienced turmoil. Alternative paper LA Weekly was sold late year to a group that immediately slashed staff. Freedom Communications, which previously owned the Register and the Riverside Press-Enterprise, filed for bankruptcy in 2015, and in 2016 the two newspapers were sold to Digital First Media, itself owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

The parent company of the Los Angeles Times, Tribune Co., emerged from bankruptcy in 2012. Its publishing business, which includes The Times, was spun off in 2014 and renamed tronc in 2016. The Times newsroom began voting Jan. 4 on whether to form a union. Results of the election are expected Jan. 19.

Once largely owned by families, newspapers have over the years increasingly been snapped up by private equity investors and hedge funds and stripped down to cut costs.

Were run by a hedge fund; their business is making money, said Lisa Krieger, a reporter for the Mercury News who is also on the contract bargaining committee for the Pacific Media Workers Guild. They have a short-term investment perspective. Our mission, as reporters and editors, is long-term  providing the same high-quality coverage that our readers have depended on since 1851, and which is essential to a well-functioning and informed democracy.

Yes, our revenue is down substantially, as is newspaper revenue nationally. But our editors are leading efforts to reinvent ourselves, to push hard into new ways of doing business to create an essential product, Krieger said. This requires an investment in staff, not cuts.

tracey.lien@latimes.com

Twitter: @traceylien
Most movies about politicians depict either slippery narcissists  Nixon, The Deal (about Tony Blair), Game Change (Sarah Palin), this springs Chappaquiddick (Ted Kennedy)  or complicated personalities driven to achieve the greater good, as in Lincoln and the Franklin Roosevelt love story Hyde Park on Hudson.

This year, LBJ and Darkest Hour dramatize how American President Lyndon Baines Johnson (Woody Harrelson) and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) transcended personal demons to lead their countries through perilous times. Written before the 2016 election, both films offer heartening reminders that democracy in action can sometimes be a beautiful thing to behold.

WATCH: Video Q&As from this seasons hottest contenders 

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Darkest Hour writer-producer Anthony McCarten, who built his script around three 1940 Churchill speeches that galvanized the British people to resist Adolf Hitlers fast-approaching Nazi juggernaut, marvels at the prime ministers mastery of language, particularly for a man riddled with uncertainty and doubt. What separates Winston Churchill as a leader from contemporary politicians, and most politicians throughout history, is that he had an astonishing ability with words, McCarten says. His life seemed to be devoted to the proposition that words can be tasked with the job of persuading people towards a certain course of action. Churchill spent a lifetime perfecting that skill, which found a perfect forum in May 1940.

In addition to his uncommon eloquence, sense of humor and audacity, McCarten says, Churchill stood out from the pack because he abhorred lying. By nature, Churchill was incapable of deceit, sometimes to the detriment of his own career, McCarten says. Even when the news was bad, he told the people the truth. By contrast, McCarten observes, Truth and untruth, right now, are given almost equal authority. In the age of tweetdom, we have to be vigilant and call people out when language is abused because trust can be broken very quickly, but it takes a long time to repair it.

If Churchill changed the course of history by galvanizing public sentiment with brilliant rhetoric, LBJs Johnson pushed through the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act with his genius for backroom negotiations. Though he never wrote a book about it, Johnson had mastered the art of the deal in the corridors of Congress by the time he became the United States 36th president following John F. Kennedys assassination.

LBJ director Rob Reiner says, He cajoled, he sweet-talked, he twisted arms, he reached across the aisle, he used all these tools to push for civil rights. People think of Johnson as this boorish bull in the china shop, but he possessed enormous skill as a lawmaker. LBJ understood, in his bones, the nexus between policy, politics and government as opposed to the guy in the White House now, who does not understand how government works and has no interest in learning.

Like Churchill, a heavy drinker given to bouts of Black Dog depression, Johnson suffered from self-doubt and would soon be brought low by his catastrophic decision to escalate the Vietnam War. But during their finest hours, both leaders set aside personal foibles and partisan concerns to preserve democracy.

LBJ was deeply insecure, Reiner says. He wasnt good-looking like the Kennedys and had recurring nightmares about being paralyzed. As much as he championed civil rights and the war on poverty, Johnson wanted to achieve those things so the American people would love him. On some level, all politicians are narcissists. Look at Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill  many great leaders have all kinds of character flaws, but at least they understood how to get things done. Right now, it seems we only have the character flaws, without any of the functionality.

calendar@latimes.com
In wake of the overtly political Golden Globes, ongoing allegations of sexual impropriety in Hollywood and just days after the presidents infamous shithole comment, the 49th NAACP Image Awards provided a platform to focus on black pride and empowerment.

Host Anthony Anderson opened the show with a nod to the Globes, calling the Image Awards Oprah for president headquarters.

Can you believe Oprahs speech? Now thats what you call a stable genius, he said in reference to Winfreys rousing Globes acceptance speech for her Cecil B. DeMille Award. I know Donald Trump calls himself one, but I think it would be best if we just locked him up  in a stable.

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Held on Martin Luther King Day, the show saw several presenters and winners directly mention King in their remarks, including Anderson in his opening monologue.

Our new air date tonight on Dr. King Day builds upon the shows great tradition as a night of hope and pride, honoring our history and those that make history, he said.

1 / 38 Scandal actress Kerry Washington poses on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards at the Pasadena Civic Center. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 38 Kyra Anderson, Alvina Stewart, host Anthony Anderson, and Nathan Anderson are on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 38 Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 38 Black-ish actres Tracee Ellis Ross is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 5 / 38 This Is Us actress Mandy Moore and black-ish actor Lawrence Fishburne arrive for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 6 / 38 A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards at the Pasadena Civic Center. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 7 / 38 Black-ish and Grown-ish actress Yara Shahidi is on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 8 / 38 Insecure actress Issa Rae is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards at the Pasadena Civic Center. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 9 / 38 Halle Berry is on the red carpet, and poses in front of fans, at the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 10 / 38 Singer Andra Day appears on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 11 / 38 Lethal Weapon actress Keesha Sharp, Survivors Remorse actress Erica Ash and Greenleaf actress LeToya Luckett make their way down the red carpet to the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 12 / 38 Actress Imani Hakim is on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 13 / 38 Actress Kenya Moore, Caleb McLaughlin from Stranger Things and actress Claudia Jordan pose on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 14 / 38 Get Out director Jordan Peele is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 15 / 38 Lynn Whitfield is on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 16 / 38 Willie Moore Jr. and Darlene McCoy are on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 17 / 38 Ballers actor Omar Benson Miller is all smiles on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 18 / 38 Insecure actress Yvonne Orji at the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 19 / 38 Samira Wiley is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards at the Pasadena Civic Center. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 20 / 38 Common is on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 21 / 38 Orange is the New Black actress Laverne Cox is on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 22 / 38 Tyler James Williams smiles on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 23 / 38 Joe Morton poses at the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 24 / 38 Marsia Martin is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 25 / 38 Danny Glover and wife Eliane Cavalleirois on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 26 / 38 MC Lyte is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 27 / 38 Ryan Michelle Bathe and This Is Us actor Sterling K. Brown are on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 28 / 38 Bobby V takes a selfie with the crowd on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 29 / 38 Danny Glover, left, and wife Eliane Cavalleirois are greeted by Derrick Johnson, right, president of NAACP with wife Tamika Johnson on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 30 / 38 Adrienne Bailon is on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 31 / 38 Brooklyn Nine Nine actor Terry Crews and Rebecca King-Crews is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 32 / 38 Natia Lil Mama Kirkland poses on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 33 / 38 Judge Greg Mathis with wife Linda Reeseis pose on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 34 / 38 Tiffany Boone of The Chi is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 35 / 38 Tina Lifford walks the red carpet at the 49th NAACP Image Awards at the Pasadena Civic Center. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 36 / 38 Bianca Lawson at the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 37 / 38 Logan Browning is on the red carpet. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) 38 / 38 Dawn-Lyen Gardner is on the red carpet for the 49th NAACP Image Awards. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Immediately after Andersons monologue, six Hollywood women took to the stage for a special #TimesUp presentation: actresses Kerry Washington, Tracee Ellis Ross, Lena Waithe, Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Laverne Cox and director Angela Robinson urged the audience to shift the balance of power by voting in this years coming midterm elections.

Everyone knows that when we show up, we make change, said Smollett-Bell. But we cant do it alone, said Robinson.

During the commercial break, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) introduced the audience to her guest Esaw Garner, the mother of the late Eric Garner, who was killed by police in 2014.

This is my friend, and shes here from New York, said Waters. And were fighters and we appreciate Martin Luther King Jr. and all that hes done, but were gonna impeach Trump.

Actor, producer and humanitarian Danny Glover, who received the Presidents Award, opened his speech by acknowledging the 50th anniversary of Kings assassination before making a statement that seemed to be directed at President Trumps insult last week.

In proclaiming this decade, we are recognizing that people of African descent represent a distinct group whose human rights must be protected and honored, he said. James Baldwin stated that when we cannot tell ourselves the truth about our past, we become trapped in it. This is especially true about race in America.

Andra Day performed a haunting rendition of Billie Holidays Strange Fruit as the screen behind her displayed the names and hometowns of lynching victims. Afterward, she was joined onstage by Common to perform Stand Up for Something  an original song from the Image award-nominated film Marshall  with images of King and the Black Lives Matter movement projected on-screen. Visibly moved, the audience rose during the final notes of the song.

ABC sit-com black-ish was a big winner of the night, taking home awards for comedy series, actress in a comedy series for Ross and actor in a comedy series for Anderson. The series has dominated each of those categories for four years running.

Starz serial show Power triumphed in the drama series category for the first time after two previous nominations, and leading man Omari Hardwick took home the actor in a drama series award.

On the film side, Get Out breakout star Daniel Kaluuya beat 17-time winner Denzel Washington for the outstanding actor in a motion picture award, after telling The Times on the red carpet that its factual that Denzel is the best actor in the world.

I dont think Im allowed to do stuff like that, he said. I dont think anyones allowed to, so if it happens, there would have to be a revote. It would be very fitting for the time that were in.

Taraji P. Henson won the award for actress in a drama series for her role on Empire, but was not present to accept the award. Ditto Octavia Spencer, who won for actress in a motion picture for the Fox Searchlight release Gifted.

The surprise hit comedy Girls Trip pulled something of an upset in the top motion picture category, beating out Get Out, Detroit, Marshall and Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Girls Trip producer Will Packer returned to the ongoing Trump theme in his acceptance speech. Sisters, especially the ones from Haiti and Africa, we love you as your brothers, he said, and dedicated the win to the films female ensemble  Tiffany Haddish, Regina Hall, Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett-Smith.

Director Ava DuVernay won the entertainer of the year award, thanking her peers (including Waithe, Shonda Rhimes, Kenya Barris, Donald Glover, Courtney Kemp and Lee Daniels) for their contributions in a speech that moved the audience both to tears and to their feet.

This is our time, she said. We can say we were here when all this gorgeous art was happening, that we lifted each other up, that we did as Dr. King said he would do: live the dream. Were the dream.

sonaiya.kelley@latimes.com

follow me on twitter @sonaiyak
Move over, Gigi  theres a new It girl in town. Only three months after her stellar debut catwalk season, Kaia Gerber has inked her first big design collaboration, with Karl Lagerfeld, no less. The 16-year-old daughter of Cindy Crawford has worked on a capsule collection that will hit stores in September, WWD has learned exclusively.

Consisting of ready-to-wear and accessories, including footwear, sunglasses and jewelry, the line is described as blending Lagerfelds Parisian chic aesthetic and Gerbers signature West Coast casual style, which has garnered her 2.7 million followers on Instagram.

The Karl Lagerfeld x Kaia collection will launch globally in Karl Lagerfeld stores, online at Karl.com and with select wholesale partners.

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Lagerfeld singled out Gerber as a rising talent months before her breakout season in September, which saw her walk the catwalk for 18 brands, including Calvin Klein, Prada, Saint Laurent and Versace.

She ended it with an honor most seasoned models would die for: Opening the Chanelshow for Lagerfeld, who in addition to heading his own label is creative director of Chanel and Italian fur specialist Fendi.

When Karl first told us his idea to collaborate with Kaia, we were all excited by the incredible potential and power of bringing their two worlds together, Pier Paolo Righi, chief executive officer of Karl Lagerfeld, said in a statement Tuesday.

We have been working intensely over the last months with Kaia in L.A. and at our studio in Paris. It was exciting to see her clear vision, passion and engagement, and the collection will definitely inspire many young women, he added.

Though the brand only provided a preview of the collection  in the shape of the elbow-length studded leather gloves Gerber can be seen inspecting in a behind-the-scenes shot from one of her meetings with Lagerfelds design team  early reports indicate it will be a round-the-clock offering with a mix of California cool for day and French sophistication for after dark.

It is set to be launched with a series of events in Los Angeles, New York and Paris in the fall.

Lagerfeld is no doubt betting that the collection will have an effect similar to the one Tommy Hilfiger has enjoyed with the launch of his collaboration with Gigi Hadid. When the Tommy x Gigi line debuted as Hilfigers first see-now-buy-now show in September 2016, it generated 900 percent increased traffic to tommy.com in the 48 hours following the show. Hilfiger has continued the collaboration with Hadid for the last two seasons and will do so again in February, in Milan.

Gerbers fashion month dominance in September and October dramatically overshadowed the usually clickbait-y Kendall Jenner and Gigi and Bella Hadid phenomenon, which has ruled on the runway in recent years. For last season, at least, she effectively eclipsed her older  and much more followed  peers.

Earlier this year, Jenner told Love magazine of Gerber: Listen, were all trying to get all our work in now before she hits the scene. When that happens, well all go broke!
Rain expected later this week could hamper the cleanup process for crews trying to remove tons of debris and mud from Montecito and surrounding areas, after mud flows killed 20 people and destroyed more than 100 homes last week.

The area is far from recovered after last weeks deluge. Officials say three people are still missing, about 1,400 are without power, and a stretch of the 101 Freeway remains closed between Santa Barbara and Carpinteria, even after crews have spent a week trying to clear the muddy, debris-filled river created by the deadly flows.

About 3,500 tons of debris was delivered Monday to the Ventura County Fairgrounds, where it will be stored until officials sort through the material. The load includes 25 tons of clean soil that will be sent to Goleta Beach, said Lance Klug, spokesman for the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recoverys Office of Emergency Services.

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To help with cleanup efforts, the Calabasas Landfill will accept up to 1,000 tons of debris from Montecito through mid-April.

The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors on Tuesday passed a temporary waiver to allow the dump to take the material, and CalRecycle is working to identify other regional landfills that can take debris.

The cold storm should arrive Thursday evening and drop between a tenth and two-tenths of an inch of rain over the Thomas fire burn and debris flow area through Friday morning, said Weather Service hydrologist Jayme Laber.

While thats not enough rain to create slides in the area under normal conditions, officials are proceeding with caution and warning evacuees to stay away, unsure of what more precipitation could do to a landscape that has already been massively altered in the last months.

Were dealing with a very, very new area of disaster. ... Were unsure of how that landscape is going to react to even a small amount of rain, said Capt. Jon Heggie with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Theres two things were dealing with  one being the way the landscape has changed due to the mudslides and also obviously the overwhelming impact the whole landscape has taken due to the removal of the  holding material, all the brush thats been burnt away.

The rain could also make cleanup efforts tougher, he said.

Its difficult to work in any type of rainy, wet situation, Heggie said. Were trying to get rid of water, and now were going to be adding more water.

But Tom Fayram, the deputy public works director for Santa Barbara County, told a crowd at a community meeting Tuesday night that the anticipated rain does not pose a significant threat.

Workers have made good progress clearing debris out of creek channels that run down the steep hills above Montecito, opening the channels so rainwater can run down the creek beds and not into the streets, he said.

This rain will give us the first test but we believe the creek systems can handle this next rain, he said.

Fayram said the rain is not expected to be significant and may actually be beneficial because it will test how well workers have cleared the channels of debris.

We dont know the full extent of the capacity of our drainage system, he said. But we will find out, we will find its weaknesses and we will fix it.

About 20 crews are also trying to restore power, but are hampered by significant mud flow and debris blocking roads, Southern California Edison spokesman Steve Conroy wrote in an email. Dozens of poles, wires and other equipment need to be replaced. There is progress, but it will continue to be slow due to current conditions.

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)

Authorities have not yet identified the cause of the Thomas fire or the extent that human involvement affected the mudslides, said Cal Fire spokeswoman Blanca Mercado.

But those affected by the damage are already trying to assign blame.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of four Santa Barbara County residents accuses Southern California Edison and the Montecito Water District of negligence that contributed to the damage wrought by the Thomas fire and then the rains last week. The lawsuit was filed in Santa Barbara County last week and updated Tuesday.

The lawsuit alleges that one area of the Thomas fire was ignited Dec. 4 when, amid high winds, SCE-operated equipment exploded and/or caught fire. The power company did not properly maintain its equipment and the vegetation around it, the lawsuit claims, and as a result the states largest wildfire in recorded history created a landscape more susceptible to dangerous mud and debris flows.

We understand that Cal Fires investigation is ongoing, and it would be premature for SCE to speculate about potential litigation associated with the recent mudslides, Southern California Edison said in a statement.

The lawsuit holds the Montecito Water District responsible for some of the damage during last weeks storm. According to the lawsuit, a water main running between two reservoirs ruptured Jan. 9 and released between 8 to 9 million gallons into creeks in the area. Shutoff valves should have been activated automatically, but that system failed because of a power outage, according to the lawsuit.

Mark Vance shovels mud away from his house on Olive Mill Road in Montecito, California. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times )

Nick Turner, general manager of the Montecito Water District, confirmed Saturday that the 14-inch pipeline connecting reservoirs at the top of the district was washed out in six spots, releasing up to 8 million gallons of water kept in storage.

The pipeline once partly aboveground is now sometimes 50 feet in the air after the ravines beneath it washed out. Access is difficult  and some crews have to reach it by foot, Turner said.

Turner said the pipes leaked very slowly and that it was at 4 or 5 p.m. on the Tuesday of the mudslides  roughly 13 to 14 hours after the debris flows began  when the reservoirs were finished emptying. He compared it to a slowly draining pool.

Debris flows also knocked out a 100-foot section of the pipeline to Jameson Lake, which accounts for up to 40% of the areas water supply.

A Montecito Water District spokeswoman did not immediately respond Tuesday to requests for comment about the lawsuit.

Times staff writers Melissa Etehad, Javier Panzar and Alene Tchekmedyian contributed to this article.

Reach Sonali Kohli at Sonali.Kohli@latimes.com or on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli.

UPDATES:

6:50 p.m.: This article was updated with more information about the debris, as well as information from a community meeting late Tuesday.

4:30 p.m.: This article was updated to include that the Calabasas Landfill will accept debris to help with cleanup efforts.

This article was originally published at 12:55 p.m.
A Los Angeles County sheriffs deputy has been charged with operating a large-scale drug trafficking scheme in which he boasted that he hired other law enforcement officers to provide security to dealers and could assault people for his clients, according to court records.

Deputy Kenneth Collins and three other men were arrested by FBI agents Tuesday morning in a sting operation when they arrived to what they thought was a drug deal, according to records unsealed after the arrest.

Court documents outlining the case show that Collins, 50, has been under investigation for months. He was recorded by agents discussing his extensive drug trafficking network, past criminal conduct, and willingness to accept bribes to use his law enforcement status for criminal purposes, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court.

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I fix problems, Collins was recorded saying to an undercover agent, court records show. I make a lot of things go away.

U.S. Atty. Nicola T. Hanna said in a statement that Deputy Collins sold his badge to assist an individual he thought was a drug trafficker. The deputy allegedly used his status as a law enforcement officer as a guarantee when he promised safe travels for large quantities of illegal narcotics.

Thom Mrozek, a U.S. attorneys office spokesman, said that the investigation is continuing but that no other law enforcement officers had been implicated so far.

Last year, an undercover agent met with Collins while posing as the relative of a wealthy investor looking to finance an illegal marijuana grow house. The deputy offered to provide security and said he had three teams already working in the region, including one that was protecting an illegal marijuana grow house disguised as an auto repair shop, according to the complaint.

At another meeting to discuss the security plan for the grow house, Collins showed off his sheriffs badge and lifted his shirt to show a gun in his waistband, the complaint said.

He later said that he could provide teams of security made up of cops who travel  with guns and boasted that he and two comrades were hired by a client to set ablaze an $85,000 Cadillac truck in order to intimidate someone, federal authorities alleged.

Collins sold about 2 pounds of marijuana to the agent for $6,000 as a test run to demonstrate his ability to arrange and carry out deals, federal authorities allege. The deputy said he had connections to marijuana operations in Northern California and could sell the agent $4 million of marijuana each month, according to the court records.

His contacts were the best growers you can find in the north, Collins is alleged to have boasted to the agent.

Undercover agents then hired Collins to provide security while they drove several pounds of methamphetamine and other contraband from Pasadena to Las Vegas, the court records said.

When one of the agents initially balked at the price, Collins explained that his services were worth it:

Were cops, Collins said, according to the complaint. We deal with a lot of, you know, kind of high-end clients, and $25,000, theyre like, you know, its like as long as you can make sure my shipment gets from here to there, thats fine.  They make profits in upwards of $5 million on certain, certain transports.

On the drive to Las Vegas, one of the other men charged in the case, David Easter, drove a lookout car while another, Grant Valencia, rode with the undercover agent in the vehicle with the drugs, according to court records. Collins rode in a third car keeping watch from behind.

The methamphetamine the agents were carrying on the trip was not real.

In the complaint, agents said that Collins, Easter and Valencia had agreed to provide security for a large drug transaction Tuesday at the Rosemont Pavilion, an events venue in Pasadena.

In exchange for as much as $250,000, Collins and his team were planning to help oversee the transport of a large cache of drugs and cash, agents alleged in court records. At first, the agent and Collins agreed to a $75,000 payment to oversee the shipment of 20 kilograms of cocaine, 6 kilograms of methamphetamine and cash, but Collins later suggested that they increase the amount of drugs to fill a moving truck and upped the price tag for the job, according to an undercover informant cited in the complaint.

Collins said he had a team of six men, including three other law enforcement officers, who could ensure the cargo made it to its destination untouched, unscathed, the document says.

After a meeting Dec. 11 to plan the transport that was set for Tuesday, Collins called another L.A. County sheriffs deputy to discuss the deal, according to the complaint. The other deputy is not named.

Like Collins, Easter, 51, and Valencia, 34, each face a charge of conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance. Federal authorities did not publicly detail the allegations against the fourth man who was arrested, Maurice Desi Font, 56.

The Sheriffs Department issued a statement saying the agency notified federal authorities about the criminal allegations against Collins several months ago and had been cooperating with the FBI. Collins, a 15-year-department veteran most recently assigned to provide security at county buildings, was placed on leave and would be suspended without pay during the criminal case, the statement said.

In court Thursday afternoon, Collins was denied bail despite his attorneys argument that he posed no risk to the community and that his wife and mother-in-law would put up $115,000 as assurance he would not flee. Except for a drunk driving conviction in 1999, the attorney said, Collins had no criminal past.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Lindsay Greer Dotson rebuffed the idea of bail, repeatedly calling Collins the mastermind of the alleged drug operation and saying the deputy had indicated in conversations with agents that he had family in Cuba and had recently traveled to the country.

Wearing a plaid shirt, Collins remained expressionless throughout the proceedings and answered the judges questions in a monotone voice.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Steve Kim set Easters bail at $110,000. The other defendants did not seek bail.

Collins has served as an instructor in a life-skills course for former inmates, according to a 2014 article in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

The Emerging Leaders Academy, run by a retired sheriffs sergeant, features deputies who act as mentors for people with criminal pasts who want to improve their literacy and career skills in order to stay out of prison.

Valencia also is featured in the Tribune article. He is described as an ex-offender who attended the program at the time Collins was teaching.

Collins was quoted in the article as saying he grew up poor before joining the military and later the Sheriffs Department. He said the cognitive behavior program he went through to be able to teach forced him to change his perception of himself from that of a hardcore deputy who busted down doors and chased guns and dope slingers.

I was so used to putting my foot on their neck, he was quoted as saying. This was kind of foreign to me. It goes against what we do  our profession.

A call to the academy was not answered Tuesday morning.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

maya.lau@latimes.com

For more Southern California news, follow us on Twitter: @joelrubin and @mayalau

UPDATES:

5:55 p.m.: This article was updated with details from Thursday afternoons court hearing.

4:10 p.m.: This article was updated with a statement from the Sheriffs Department and additional details about the allegations.

2:50 p.m.: This article was updated with a scene from the federal courthouse before the mens appearance.

2:25 p.m.: This article was updated to include that Collins was a 15-year Sheriffs Department veteran and would be placed on administrative leave.

1:45 p.m.: This article was updated with a comment from a U.S. attorneys office spokesman.

1 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details of the investigation and quotes from officials.

This article was originally published at 12:20 p.m.
Stephen Paddock was the only gunman spraying bullets on an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas last fall, but on Tuesday police said criminal charges could still be filed in the mass shooting that left 58 people dead.

The revelation came in district court as Nick Crosby, a lawyer representing the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, argued to keep search warrants, affidavits and findings sealed as charges were being investigated. Police have said Paddock was the lone gunman in the Oct. 1 massacre.

Crosby said that because the investigation was ongoing, he couldnt reveal who those charges might be aimed at or what they might entail.

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He said the charges could emerge within the next 60 days.

Lawyers for media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, sought to have search warrants, affidavits and findings unsealed after Paddock killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival from his 32nd-floor room at the Mandalay Bay hotel. After the rampage, Paddock shot and killed himself in the room.

Paddocks girlfriend, Marilou Danley, has not been charged but has been called a person of interest by authorities. She was out of the country when the massacre occurred, but returned to the United States days later from the Philippines and cooperated with authorities. Through her attorney shortly after the shooting, she issued a statement saying Paddock had never told her anything about his plans to commit the crime.

Calls and emails to her attorney, Matthew Lombard, were not returned.

District Court Judge Elissa Cadish chose to keep the warrants, affidavits and findings under seal pending arguments made by police that would show why opening them to the public would hamper the investigation.

Cadish agreed to consider Crosbys request to allow a private meeting to show why revealing details in the sealed documents could interfere with the investigation, but did not say who could be charged and what they could be charged with. Lawyers for the police were told they had a week to explain why they should be kept sealed.

Lawyers for the media  along with attorneys representing victims engaged in a civil lawsuit  claimed the department should have made that request sooner.

Marwan Porter, a Texas-based attorney representing victims, said the lack of information being provided has been hard on his clients.

Its very important after situations like this  these types of tragedies  its very difficult for the victims to have any type of closure without knowing what happened. Why it happened? What could be done in the future to prevent this type of tragedy from happening? Porter said. Our clients are extremely frustrated. They need answers.

MGM Resorts International, which owns Mandalay Bay, issued an email statement after the hearing saying the company had no stance on whether the warrants should be unsealed. The company also said it was not aware of any employees under investigation.

Officials with the FBI did not return requests for comment.

The hearing to unseal the search warrants in state court came days after a federal judge unsealed 315 pages of search warrants and affidavits that revealed Paddock had amassed an arsenal of weapons and explosives in his room and vehicle and that also sought to trace the planning of the attack through email and social media accounts.

The warrants and affidavits revealed an exchange about a money wire transfer, Danleys deletion of her Facebook account hours after the shooting, and finding her casino players card in the room where Paddock sprayed bullets down into the crowd of more than 20,000 at the concert on the Las Vegas Strip.

It also showed she told authorities that her fingerprints would probably be found on the ammunition used during the attack. Danley explained to investigators that she occasionally participated in the loading of magazines.

Little is known about the relationship between Danley and Paddock. They lived together in Mesquite, Nev., and were largely not known among neighbors. Workers at a Starbucks in a Mesquite casino recalled that he berated Danley in public for using his casino card to make purchases.

Esperanza Mendoza, a supervisor at the Starbucks, told The Times in October: He would glare down at her and say  with a mean attitude  You dont need my casino card for this. Im paying for your drink, just like Im paying for you. Then she would softly say, OK, and step back behind him. He was so rude to her in front of us.

Paddock was known around several casinos as a high-stakes gambler, with a preference for video poker. Though a motive remains elusive for the shooting, KLAS-TV reported in November that the 64-year-old had bouts with depression and had lost a significant amount of money since 2015.

david.montero@latimes.com

Twitter: @davemontero

UPDATES:

5:45 p.m.: The article was updated with additional background and comments from Marwan Porter.

The article was originally published at 12 p.m.
Every day Americans use  and almost immediately discard  up to half a billion plastic beverage straws. At least, thats the figure widely used by environmental activists to explain why people should embrace going straw-less.

Its not clear where that number came from, but it seems credible considering how many takeout sodas, frappuccinos, smoothies, cold-press juices, boba teas and other beverages Americans buy every day, most of which are accompanied by a complimentary plastic straw. Lately, even some sit-down restaurants have taken to serving the obligatory glass of water with a straw already in place, as if humans havent been expertly consuming liquid from containers using only their lips for millennia.

The realization that disposable plastic waste is piling up in landfills and leaching into the environment has fueled a nascent straws-on-request movement around the country, and its gaining traction in California. Having won the battle to curb the use of disposable plastic bags statewide, environmentalists are now pushing California cities to require restaurants and other food services to keep their plastic straws to themselves unless a customer asks for one. Davis and San Luis Obispo passed straw restrictions last year. Officials in the San Diego County beach town of Encinitas and in Berkeley are currently considering taking straw-reduction action as well. Other coastal cities will likely follow their lead.

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Even if a stray straw doesnt find its way into the orifice of a sea animal, plastic doesnt biodegrade like organic matter.

Oh great, you may be thinking, another convenience that California wants to ban like plastic grocery bags and polystyrene takeout containers. And why pick on straws, which are so puny? Surely they arent as much of a problem as plastic bottles.

Actually, they are. More than three-quarters of the plastic water bottles used by Californians are recycled, thanks to a state law that puts a bounty on each container. Theres no similar payoff for turning over plastic straws, which are typically dumped in the trash along with the cup and lid they came with.

These diminutive sticks of hollow plastic that we use for a few minutes then toss, maybe in a trash can and maybe in the street, are adding substantially to the tons of plastic waste discharged into the ocean and lakes every year. Plastic straws are commonly found during beach clean-ups, which is a good indicator of their presence in the ocean. Why is that bad? If you can stomach it, check out this video of marine biologists removing a plastic straw lodged deeply in the nose of an endangered sea turtle. Warning: it contains profanity. (Not from the turtle.) Its horrifying to know that one errant straw can do such damage when you can enjoy that frosty cola just as easily without it. Even if a stray straw doesnt find its way into the orifice of a sea animal, plastic doesnt biodegrade like organic matter but breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that clog the ocean and get consumed by marine life.

So yes, little straws are a big problem. But getting a handle on them may not require something as drastic as a ban. A straws-on-request policy, which would be easy for restaurants to adopt, could make an immediate difference. Not only would it save food service providers a few bucks on overhead (bulk straws may be inexpensive, but theyre not free), it would convey a potent message to customers about the little plastic tubes environmental cost they may not have previously considered.

Heres another, potentially powerful argument in favor of straws-on-request policies: Some dermatologists believe repetitive sucking may cause or exacerbate wrinkles on the lips or around the mouth. Environmentalists should add that to their talking points. Vanity can be a powerful motivator.

A number of California restaurants have already adopted straws-on-request policies, and good for them. Government-mandated bans and restrictions on consumer products ought to be a last resort, but they could and should be deployed when other conservation efforts have failed. It would be great if the food and beverage industry saw the wisdom in voluntarily curbing the use of single-use plastic straws rather than waiting for a government crackdown.

Then we can start talking about detachable plastic bottle caps and disposable plastic drink lids.

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For years, residential developments in the hillsides and canyons of Los Angeles have encroached on wildlife as our neighborhoods have spread into, well, theirs.

Its not surprising that we keep expanding; the city has more people than it used to, and we need housing desperately. But we also need open space, not just for our sanity and for the beauty of our city, but also if we care about maintaining an urban wildlife population.

One way to preserve open space is to buy it. Thats what an alliance of community groups and wildlife advocates vowed to do to protect a 17-acre mountain ridge in the Hollywood Hills above the Laurel Canyon neighborhood. Two years after starting their fundraising campaign, Citizens for Los Angeles Wildlife, a nonprofit preservation group, and Laurel Canyon Assn., a neighborhood organization, announced in late December that that they had successfully raised the $1.6 million they needed to buy the mountain ridge. Donations came from individuals (including $100,000 from musician Don Henley), the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, foundations, L.A. City Council members Paul Koretz and David Ryu, who contributed from their discretionary funds, and County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, who persuaded the Board of Supervisors to approve a $100,000 grant.

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Its challenging but its possible to leave space in the bustling metropolis for the wildlife that was here long before us.

It was an ambitious community effort that will save what is in effect an oasis for a passel of creatures otherwise stuck in an increasingly dense city. Anyone who doubts its importance to those animals need look no further than the nature cam on the site of the preserve that has photographed deer, coyotes, quail, a bobcat, a fox and one untagged mountain lion strolling about. The land has now been given to the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority, a local government entity, to manage and preserve. That makes the land public, open to everyone, although its difficult to access and has no hiking trails. Mostly, it is animals that will use this stretch of land and drink from its natural spring. For them, this is the definition of a hot property.

Still, there should be less dramatic and less costly ways to help animals survive. In fact, the city passed an ordinance nearly two years ago that would require developers in a designated wildlife habitat linkage zone to build pathways or leave space through their properties to serve as wildlife corridors. The problem is that the ordinance has yet to be implemented. The city should get moving.

In another recent development, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is changing its policy in the Santa Ana and Santa Monica mountain areas for issuing depredation permits requested by residents whose pets or livestock have been killed by mountain lions. Until now, these permits have allowed people whose livestock or pet has been killed by a lion to kill the lion in return, despite laws that make it illegal to hunt them. Interactions between mountain lions and humans  or, more specifically, their domestic animals  have increased as people have moved closer to wildlife territory. The problem is, when mountain lions kill easy prey they are only doing what comes naturally to them. Revenge killing is not a sound policy for dealing with these interactions.

Now, instead of immediately issuing a permit to kill a lion after it has killed an animal, the department will, essentially, give the lion three strikes before issuing a depredation permit that could lead to its death. On a first report of a mountain lion killing a pet or livestock animal, the resident will be taught about measures to take for future protection (such as securing animals in enclosures at night so they dont become easy prey). They will also be allowed a permit to haze or shoo the lion away with, say, motion-sensitive lights or loud music. If the lion comes back and kills again, the resident can get a permit to escalate measures  shooting bean bags at the lion, for example. If the lion kills a third time, a permit can be issued to kill the lion. This is a rational approach because it protects these majestic creatures unless it becomes clear they cannot be discouraged from stalking specific locations.

Los Angeles County is an extraordinary mix of urban and wild, humans and wildlife. Its challenging, but its possible to leave space in the bustling metropolis for the wildlife that was here long before us.

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Fifty-seven thousand eight hundred. Thats approximately how many people are homeless in Los Angeles County on any given night. If they all came together, they would constitute a city the size of Arcadia.

What would such a city look like? What can we say about its residents, its health, its future?

If we walked through Homeless City, we would see that more than two-thirds of its residents are male. Four of every 10 people we meet would be African American  many more than in the surrounding areas, where only 9% of residents and 12% of those living in poverty are African American.

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We wouldnt get very far before being struck by the children of Homeless City. One of every 10 city residents is a child. We ought to be particularly worried for these 5,370 youths because experiencing homelessness as a child powerfully predicts later homelessness.

The average homeless woman in the city experiences as much major violence in a single year as the average American woman experiences in her lifetime.

Homeless Citys elderly population is also visible, vulnerable and growing. Nearly one-quarter of its residents are 55 or older. Over the last five years, average rents in Los Angeles County have increased two times faster than the median income of senior households. Squeezed by soaring rents and fixed incomes, more seniors move in to Homeless City all the time.

People on our tour will be surprised if we smile or offer a kind word. They are used to being ignored by those who sleep in beds at night. We will see weariness and heartache on their faces. But we will also be struck by residents hope and resiliency. People sweep the sidewalks in front of their tents and share food with their neighbors. Even in the midst of dire poverty, community and kindness are common.

Homeless Citys population is exploding. Though many people find housing and leave the city, about 400 others arrive daily. Homeless City is growing far faster than Conroe, Texas, which is the fastest-growing U.S. city with a population of more than 50,000. In 2016, Conroe grew by 7.8%. Homeless City grew by 23%. Though Homeless Citys growth comes predominantly from the return of former residents, around 8,000 of this years arrivals never experienced homelessness before.

Most residents rest uneasily in Homeless City. Only 26% sleep in shelters. The other 42,000 or so sleep in places not meant for human habitation. Day and night, well find people sleeping in one of the 15,000 vehicles, tents or makeshift shelters spread throughout the city.

Its unhealthy and unsafe to live in Homeless City. People who are homeless use the emergency room four times more often than other low-income residents. These visits are particularly challenging because 30% of the citys residents have a serious mental illness, 18% have a substance abuse disorder, and 2% are HIV-positive. The violence in Homeless City disproportionately affects female residents. The average homeless woman in the city experiences as much major violence in a single year as the average American woman experiences in her lifetime.

Death is ever present. Last year, 805 people died in the city. Whereas Californians, on average, can expect to live to 80, the average age of death in Homeless City is just 48.

Perhaps most striking, we know that our quick walk through Homeless City at a particular point in time dramatically understates its population. Over the course of a year, more than 200,000 people experience homelessness in Los Angeles. Thats enough to fill Dodger Stadium four times over.

There are many reasons why so many people end up in Homeless City. To name just a few: poverty, institutional failures, racism, greed, indifference and an inadequate safety net. As we walk through Homeless City, we can be overwhelmed by manifestations of these injustices. But if we stop for a moment and consider what is around us, we see what will make Homeless City a smaller and healthier place: more affordable housing, higher incomes, more healthcare and social services and earlier interventions.

We know that many of these interventions are cost-effective. Just last month, a Rand Corp. study of 890 homeless individuals with complex health issues who received housing and services through L.A.s Housing for Health program found that the county saved $1.20 for every $1.00 invested in the program.

Statistics alone cant capture the heartbreak and horror of homelessness. Every one of these numbers reflects a human being  someones son or daughter. Even though 14% of likely voters in Los Angeles report having been homeless at some point in their lives, it is too easy to see Homeless City as a place where someone elses children reside. Until we all start treating it as a place where our children live, Homeless City will be with us.

Adam Murray is executive director of Inner City Law Center, which serves homeless and working-poor clients from its offices on skid row.

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As year two of the Trump administration begins, a workaround has emerged to deal with the presidents mercurial rantings: Ignore them, deny them or try to wish them away.

At first, Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue merely did not recall the president using a much-reported vulgarity in a White House meeting; then they were certain it had never happened. The head of the White House Correspondents Assn., Margaret Talev, has dismissed Trumps persistent denigrations of the press as rhetoric and says her organization wont react to threats unless they are backed by action. White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly claims he does not follow the presidents tweets, nor does he allow other aides to do so. In October, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan urged the public to do the same: All this stuff you see on a daily basis, on Twitter this and Twitter that  forget about it. When Trump had an attorney pledge to sue the author and publisher of Fire and Fury:Inside the Trump White House, many observers dismissed it as empty legal saber-rattling, another bullying bluff.

The desire to play down the presidents tirades is understandable: His unscripted utterances, tweets and threats tend toward the gratuitous, unfounded and confounding. The impulses that drive them seem to evaporate long before the retweeting is done. That Trump cannot be taken at his word, however, doesnt render his words inconsequential. The incontrovertible fact that he is president gives his pronouncements potency independent of their veracity, or the intent and actions of the man doing the talking. Declining to credit what he says doesnt neutralize its power.

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The only thing more dangerous to the United States than taking the president at his word would be a collective decision to no longer do so.

One essential reason we are not at liberty to ignore Trumps words is that others wont or cant. Readers of the Los Angeles Times may dismiss his self-serving rants, but the presidents core supporters believe him when he calls CNN or the New York Times fake news. The mistrust he has sown has helped drive record low public perceptions of the media, fortifying Trumps hard-line supporters inside a bunker that cant be penetrated by facts or reason. Employees of the federal government also dont have the luxury of ignoring the boss. In a November filing, attorneys from the Department of Justice told a federal court that the presidents tweets are treated as official statements.

In foreign capitals around the world, other nations leaders and officials are rightly hesitant to disregard Trumps statements, no matter how baseless. Given the United States economic and military might, any chance that the president is serious about, for example, his baiting of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un or his contempt for NATO demands that foreign governments react. And because international leaders must factor Trumps pronouncements about them into policymaking, his musings can change facts on the ground when it comes to the health of the trans-Atlantic partnership or the fate of the Korean peninsula.

Dismissing Trumps rhetoric carries another risk. As in the fable of the boy who cried wolf, sometimes he really means it. Some of his assertions are every bit as deliberate and consequential as presidential pronouncements used to be. He has made good on pledges to cut aid to Pakistan and to repudiate long-standing U.S. policy on Israels capital. Trumps unpredictability renders the boundary between serious and spurious virtually indiscernible at the time his remarks are made. Nothing he says can be taken for its plain meaning, nor can anything be disregarded as definitively meaningless.

Some analysts have argued that the structure of our federal government, with its strong institutions and checks and balances, offers protection against the gale force of contradictory and radical presidential talk. By this logic an irrational and unreliable president could gradually be relegated to the margins of policymaking, or even impeached. So far, though, the required quorum of government officials hasnt emerged to safeguard the republic.

The presidents brazen falsehoods about the implications of the new tax law for the middle class, the wealthy and even for Trump himself were lapped up by Republican lawmakers hungry for a legislative win. Rather than excoriating Trump for threatening to ban Fire and Fury, congressional Republicans rejoiced that the presidents outrage led to the ouster of antagonist Stephen K. Bannon. When Trumps tirades serve their interests, his accomplices play along, to the point of lying if necessary to quell a crisis.

To refuse to dismiss Trumps bloviating does not mean that his every tweet should dominate the news cycle. Trumps blather  however incendiary or inopportune  demands confrontation. This means vociferously defending the truth, calling out falsehoods, decrying recklessness, standing up for the victimized and countering absurdity with reason. The idea that Trumps folly will eventually collapse under its own weight itself collapsed on the day he was elected president.

That citizens, pundits and even his own chief of staff have often decided to tune out President Trump may help blunt the force of his most ill-conceived pronouncements. But denying the power of the presidential bully pulpit brings with it a weakening of the U.S. presidency as a whole, an impairment that may well outlive Trumps tenure. The only thing more dangerous to the United States than taking the president at his word would be a collective decision to no longer do so.

Suzanne Nossel is the executive director of PEN America.

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Election year 2016 was like no other year in American history, but it was 2015 that left its mark on the life and the heart of former Vice President Joe Biden. He was at the Los Angeles Times Ideas Exchange last week to talk about his book Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose, the year of the illness and death of his son Beau, and of his long debate with himself about running for president.

Click here for the full archive of "Patt Morrison Asks" podcasts 

As you dealt with your sons illness, and tried to keep it private, you were also weighing whether to run for president.

I had planned on running before Beau got sick. I have great respect for Hillary [Clinton]. She would have made a hell of a president. But I thought I was far and away the most qualified person to finish the job Barack [Obama] and I started.

When Beau got sick, Beau was absolutely insistent that I not let anybody know. The people who had begun to organize for me, if I had told them, Stop, they would have known we didnt expect Beau to live. So this developed into people thinking the reason I wasnt running [was] because I was worried about Hillary.

When Clinton told you privately in early 2015 that she was running, you wrote, She didnt evince much joy at the prospect of running. She seemed to me like a person propelled by forces not entirely of her own making. What were those forces?

I didnt feel sorry for her, but I felt a little sad. Because she knew how brutal this was going to be. Shed been there before. She knew what she was going to go through  not that she couldnt win, but it was going to be awful. And everybody thinks Hillary has this overwhelming ambition. I dont see her that way. I saw her as a woman who thought it was her responsibility to run. A woman who knew that if she didnt run, shed be letting down millions of women around the world. She wouldnt say this, but other people thought that was her manifest destiny. So this was nothing she was looking forward to.

It takes enormous courage. And I think Hillary would be able to die a happy woman never having been president of the United States. It wasnt like this burning thing she had to do. Maybe earlier on it was. But I thought she felt an obligation. She knows all this, and she was ready to go do it. Thats what I meant.

You turned down Barack Obama when he first asked you about being his running mate, but your family  including your son Beau and your mother  had other ideas.

I never wanted to be vice president. I thought I could help [Obama] most [as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee], so I told him no. He said, I need an answer now,and I told him no. Then he said, Go home and talk it over with your family. So we called a family meeting and to my great surprise everyone thought I should run, particularly Beau and [wife] Jill. I looked over at my mom and said, Honey, you havent said anything. And she said, Remember I asked you about a month ago what Barack Obama was like? You said hes a man of real character and you liked him. I said, Yeah, Mom. She said, Joey, let me get this straight  the first black man in American history who has a chance to be president, who says he needs you to win Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida, and you told him no? I said, Dammit, Mom! So I said yes. It turned out to be the best decision I ever made, but I really didnt want to do it.

You and President Obama were so close that he joked that there were places in Indiana that wouldnt serve the two of you pizza any more. What do you think as youre watching the effort to dismantle the administrations legacy?

We both worry about it. The most fundamental things we did, [President Trump] cant dismantle. He can hurt the progress on same-sex marriage. He can try to dismantle the civil rights effort. But the American people have crossed the Rubicon on these things. This will be able to snap back. A lot of damage will be done in the meantime.

What I worry most about is the conduct of foreign policy. Unrelated to whatever idiosyncratic things bother us about him, he came to the office with no background whatsoever in this area. I worry about what hell do by omission almost as almost as hard as what hell do by commission. And I dont think he fully realizes how consequential the words of a president are. The whole world listens. And it matters.

[New York Times columnist] David Brooks talks about this invisible moral fabric that holds up and gives buoyancy to our democratic system. My worry is that, as he says, its being rent, its being ripped apart by presidential actions.

And theyre not legislative in nature. I never thought Id live to see the day when youd see people literally coming out of fields with lighted torches, carrying Nazi flags, chanting the same anti-Semitic bile used in Hitlers Germany. And those who countered them being told they were the moral equivalent of these folks. It gives license to the most unappealing aspects of humanity to crawl out from under the rocks.

What has been the unrelenting systemic attack for two years, coming from the alt-right? Going after the guys in the striped shirts, the referees: the press and the courts. That has been the history of the demise of every democracy in Europe from the late 19th century through the 20th. Theres a lot at stake and its less [Trumps] policies than it is this abuse of power. And the American publics not going to stand for it.

Would you assess the last year  the Trump year?

He should simply just grow up. Stop focusing everything through the prism of me, me. it is dangerous. And the damage that hes doing is to our credibility around the world  Ive got 14 heads of state calling me. And Im not going to set up a separate foreign policy. But this borders on dangerous. My dad used to have the expression, The only war worse than one thats intended is one thats unintended. And this childish behavior of my button is bigger than your button  its not just ridiculously funny, it is dangerous.

Every serious [career] person in our administration, I begged them to stay in the [Trump] administration. There is a need for stability.

The president acts as if this [job] is about bargaining to determine who gets the last square footage downtown to build a skyscraper. It is so much more complicated.

Size up the Democratic field for 2020, starting with Oprah Winfrey and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Id be happy to be on either one of their tickets  Im a good vice president! Eric Garcetti has character. Eric Garcetti is smart as hell. He is strategic. This is a guy whos extremely thoughtful. [Oprah] is bright, she is tough, she is consequential. Can she do it? Yes. Is that what she wants to do? I have no idea. Youve got guys like [Sen. Cory] Booker from New Jersey  solid. Your new senator from California [Kamala Harris].

Our former [party] chairman [Howard Dean], said we should get rid of the old guys and get young blood. I agree with him. But heres the deal: It requires ideas. And what are those new ideas? What are the attributes needed? We badly need someone who has a strategic view of Americas role in the world. You need to have a confidence thats grounded in some deep sense of what your foreign policy should be. You need to be able to convince the American people that youre totally authentic. You have to have the ability in my view to reach across the aisle. America cannot constitutionally function without consensus.

I saw that youve got a 67 Corvette. Youd be right at home on the L.A. freeways.

Im a hell of a good driver, man. For eight years, I wasnt allowed to drive [for security reasons]. But I got one chance when Jay Leno said would I drag-race out at their test track [against former Secretary of State] Colin Powell in his big Corvette. I actually was able to take him. Then I tried a Porsche and got it up to 182 miles per hour. Anyway, I like cars.

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MORE PATT MORRISON ASKS

Ken Burns on making his Vietnam War documentary: 'I was humiliated by what I didn't know'

Jimmy Webb on Auto-Tune, lying to keep John Lennon from being deported and how cocaine changed music

Caitlyn Jenner talks Trump, being a transgender Republican and missing Bruce
To the editor: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Jeff Orlowski make a compelling case regarding the worlds marine resources. (What the Trump administration doesnt understand about ocean conservation, Opinion, Jan. 10)

As a lifelong surfer who has never lived more than a mile from the ocean, I heartily agree with every claim they make about the perils of overfishing and the destruction of coral reefs. I am afraid my young grandson will inherit oceans that are vast wastelands and never know the joys I experienced in the water over my 70 years.

But like many environmentalists, the authors do not address the root cause of the problem. Why is there so much overfishing? Why are the seas acidifying? Why are coral reefs on track to collapse by 2050?

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All this is happening to feed and entertain people, the global population of which is increasing at an incredible rate. In 1947, there were 144 million people in the U.S. and about 2 billion globally. Just 40 years later, in 1987, the numbers were 242 million people in the United States and 5 billion worldwide. Today, 325 million people live in the U.S., and there are 7.6 billion humans on the planet.

Until we get a handle on explosive population growth, efforts at restoration and conservation will be for naught. We must provide birth control for the world. Extreme? Sure it is, but find a better answer.

Steve Switzer, San Pedro

..

To the editor: Johnson and Orlowski compare the ocean to a trust fund off which people live. They cite food security and jobs related to the fishing industry as driving factors to protect the ocean, and stress the importance of increasing the number of marine protected areas. I applaud them for that.

However, I think that they left out a much more important reason why we need to protect our ocean.

Phytoplankton are microscopic organisms that live in the upper layers of water, where they photosynthesize. In so doing, they create their own food with the energy of the sun and absorption of carbon dioxide. An important byproduct of this process is oxygen, which is released into the air.

Because approximately three-quarters of Earth is covered with water, phytoplankton and algae produce up to 70% of the oxygen we breathe. In other words, the majority of our air gets produced in the ocean. That itself should be enough of a reason to protect our waters.

Hands off our oceans  humans need to breathe.

Evi Meyer, Palos Verdes Estates

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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 
The White House clashed with the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday over testimony from President Trumps former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, a dispute that could alter the course of congressional investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Bannon, who was ousted from the White House in August and recently had an acrimonious falling out with Trump, was directed by the White House to avoid answering questions about the presidential transition or his work in the administration, according to committee members who were left frustrated by the daylong closed-door hearing.

Even conversations with the president after Bannon left the administration and returned to running the right-wing website Breitbart News could be subject to executive privilege, the committee was told by Bannons lawyer.

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Rep. Adam B. Schiff of Burbank, the panels top Democrat, told reporters that the White Houses stance was completely unsustainable. Republican lawmakers appeared to agree.

Follow live coverage of the Trump administration on Essential Washington 

Republicans and Democrats served Bannon a subpoena during the hearing, a much more aggressive step than the committee has previously taken when faced with witnesses who declined to answer questions.

But the subpoena did not spur the cooperation that the committee wanted.

Large portions of the hearing were spent arguing how the White House claim of executive privilege could apply to Bannons testimony. Lawmakers said they expected to bring him back despite spending about 10 hours behind closed doors with him.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to say whether Trump administration officials had asked Bannon to claim executive privilege to protect confidentiality in the White House.

Congress must consult with the White House prior to obtaining confidential material, she said, reading from a statement. This is part of a judicially recognized process.

The House Intelligence Committee has been split along partisan lines in recent months, with Democrats repeatedly criticizing their Republican colleagues as failing to more aggressively investigate the 2016 campaign.

But Tuesday brought a rare spirit of bipartisanship, and members of both parties were displeased.

There are questions that we asked that were not answered, said Rep. Michael K. Conaway, a Texas Republican who is leading the Russia investigation. We are going to get the answers from Mr. Bannon.

Bannon helped guide Trumps upset victory in the 2016 campaign and then joined his administration to help remake U.S. politics from inside the White House. But he was ousted in August, and his relationship with the president unraveled this month after the publication of Fire and Fury, a book about Trumps first year in office.

Bannons next step could be even more significant. He has been subpoenaed to appear before the criminal grand jury working with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to determine whether the Trump campaign assisted the Russian intelligence operation, according to the New York Times.

Bannon confirmed to the committee that he has received a subpoena from Mueller, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity to discuss private testimony.

The presidents former senior advisor could provide new details under oath about conversations and meetings inside the Trump campaign and White House at crucial moments, as well as his claims in Fire and Fury that Muellers investigation would be all about money laundering.

Four former Trump aides, including his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, already have faced criminal charges. Manafort has pleaded not guilty to fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, and Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

A lawyer for Bannon did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday, and a spokesman for Mueller declined comment on the reported subpoena.

Like his tenure in the White House, Bannons appearance on Capitol Hill was not short on drama.

Rep. Tom Rooney, a Florida Republican and a member of the panel, said during a break that disagreements about whether executive privilege could prevent Bannon from answering some questions were sort of dominating the day.

Mieke Eoyang, a former committee staff member now at Third Way, a Washington think tank, said subpoenas were sometimes used when lawmakers questions are met with hostility.

They really dont like it when the witness treats them with contempt, she said. Everything about Bannons personality suggests that he wouldnt show the kind of deference and respect that the committee would want from a witness.

Bannons testimony has been anticipated since the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff, hit the headlines and the bestseller lists this month.

Among other surprises, the book quotes Bannon denouncing a controversial meeting between a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer and her entourage with three top campaign officials at Trump Tower in June 2016 as treasonous.

Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad  and I happen to think its all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately, Bannon is quoted as saying.

Bannon later backpedaled by saying he was not aiming his barb at Donald Trump Jr., the presidents eldest son, who said he had arranged the meeting because he expected the Russians to provide damaging material on Hillary Clinton. Manafort and Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law and advisor, also attended.

But Bannons harsh comments destroyed what was left of his once-close relationship with Trump, who issued a statement saying his former advisor had lost his mind when he was forced out of the White House last summer.

The fallout also cost Bannon his job running Breitbart News after his support from major political donors evaporated.

Corey Lewandowski, another former Trump campaign manager, is scheduled to testify to the panel behind closed doors on Wednesday, according to a source who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Hope Hicks, the White House communications director and a close confidante of the president, also is expected to appear before the panel as soon as this week.

She is likely to be questioned about her role in helping the president craft a misleading response on Air Force One about the June 2016 meeting between the Russian lawyer and the three top campaign officials.

Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican from Tulare, was forced to step back from the Russia inquiry during a controversy last year over how he handled classified information.

An ethics committee investigation later cleared him of wrongdoing, and Nunes has aggressively pursued his own lines of inquiry, examining whether the Department of Justice improperly investigated the Trump campaign.

chris.megerian@latimes.com

Twitter: @chrismegerian

ALSO

Trump has given dozens of depositions in lawsuit-laden business career, but he could face tougher grilling in Russia inquiry

Feinstein releases Senate testimony from co-founder of research firm behind notorious Trump dossier

UPDATES:

6:35 p.m.: The article was updated with details of the arguments over executive privilege in the House hearing.

3:55 p.m.: The article was updated with reports that Bannon has been subpoenaed to appear before a criminal grand jury and other details.

The article was first published at 7:40 a.m.
The number of Americans without health coverage, which declined for years after passage of the Affordable Care Act, shot up in President Trumps first year in office, according to data from a new national survey.

At the end of 2017, 12.2% of U.S. adults lacked health insurance, up from 10.9% at the end of 2016, as President Obama was completing his final term.

The increase of 1.3 percentage points, although modest, marks the first time since at least 2008 that the share of adults without insurance increased from the previous year, according to the report from Gallup, which conducts a widely followed survey asking Americans about their health coverage.

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The increase indicates that 3.2 million Americans lost health coverage in 2017, Gallup concluded.

The decline in coverage was most pronounced among slices of the population on which the Obama administration and its allies had focused enrollment efforts: young adults, blacks, Latinos and households making less than $36,000 a year, Gallup found.

Obamacare 101: A primer on key issues in the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. 

The losses follow years of historic insurance gains driven by the healthcare laws expansion of coverage, which started being fully implemented in 2014.

National survey data from the federal government and other sources suggest that more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans gained coverage between 2013 and 2017.

There is increasing evidence that these gains are improving patients access to medical care and relieving financial pressure, particularly on poorer households.

A recent study of data from two states that have dramatically expanded coverage, Arkansas and Kentucky, found, for example, that low-income patients with chronic illnesses are now much more likely to seek recommended care.

By contrast, there has been significantly less improvement among such patients in Texas, which has not expanded coverage fully through the healthcare law.

But many Republicans, including leading Trump administration officials, have dismissed the coverage gains as meaningless. They have argued that the coverage provided under the healthcare law is unaffordable  because out-of-pocket costs are too high  or that patients face too many restrictions in their choice of doctors.

Trump came into office last January pledging to roll back the law, commonly called Obamacare. His administration undertook a sustained campaign throughout 2017 to discredit the law while congressional Republicans tried to repeal it.

The repeal campaign failed. But it helped weaken health insurance markets around the country, particularly in regions that already had few insurers and higher prices than the rest of the country.

At the same time, the Trump administration dramatically cut outreach and advertising efforts.

It is unclear how much each of those actions contributed to the erosion in health coverage, but the Gallup survey indicates a decline in the percentage of adults who bought insurance on their own rather than got it from an employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid.

That is the part of the insurance market that has been affected most by political turmoil surrounding the health law.

Further, media coverage of the policies to repeal and replace the healthcare law may have caused some consumers to question whether the government would enforce the penalty for not having insurance, the Gallup report notes.

Enrollment for coverage in 2018 has been roughly on pace with last year, despite the Trump administrations continued hostility to the law.

But the Republican tax bill that passed last month will eliminate the penalty on Americans who dont get coverage in 2019. The elimination of that penalty, the so-called individual mandate, is widely expected to further reduce the number of Americans with coverage, although forecasts vary about how big a decline to expect.

And recent moves by the Trump administration to weaken insurance rules are expected to further destabilize insurance markets.

It seems likely that the uninsured rate will rise further in the years ahead, the Gallup report notes.

The survey was based on a random sample of 25,072 adults living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia who were interviewed between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31. The margin of error is plus or minus 1 percentage point.

noam.levey@latimes.com

Twitter: @noamlevey
While political debate over the long weekend centered on whether the president is a racist, several major storylines played out and Hawaiians were startled by a false alarm warning of an incoming missile.

The biggest news was the Trump administration saying it would allow the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who came to the country illegally as children to submit renewal applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The move, done because of a court order, came as a standoff with Congress intensified over the programs future.

Nearly a week after horrific mudslides hit Californias Central Coast and killed at least 20 people, President Trump sent his condolences to those affected in his first public statement on the disaster.

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And late last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Trumps personal lawyer brokered a $130,000 payment to a porn actress to stop her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter.

With Congress still working out major issues, the one-year anniversary of Trumps inauguration approaching and his first State of the Union address already drawing protest from Democrats, the weeks ahead are going to set the tone for his second year in office.

THEY WANT TO BE CALIFORNIAS NEXT GOVERNOR, AND NOW THEY ARE MAKING THEIR CASE

In the first major debate of the 2018 governors race, front-runner Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom had a bulls-eye on his back. Newsom took the brunt of the blows from his rivals on the stage at USC in what turned out to be a raucous event filled with sharp political blows and a lively audience. Six of the major candidates took part in the face-off, held at the Empowerment Congress Summit on Saturday morning at the University of Southern California.

Watch a replay.

Newsom also took some heat a day later in Los Angeles during a town hall. A group of Trump-supporting protesters crashed the event, banging on the doors to get inside until police were called in to break it up.

In other news in the race, Antonio Villaraigosa supporters launched an independent expenditure committee, Treasurer John Chiang took down a Newsom attack website as part of a campaign reboot and Newsom called on Trump to resign after reports of the president making a vulgar remark about certain countries.

Its become a drumbeat for Villaraigosa: Newsom is an elitist, he says, over and over. In his latest salvo, the former L.A. mayor called on Newsom to drop a State Lands Commission lawsuit challenging the right of San Francisco voters to set height limits on new buildings along the citys scenic waterfront. As Michael Finnegan explains, the Newsom campaign lashed back.

A NEW TONE FROM FEINSTEIN

Sen. Dianne Feinstein has long relied on a reputation for compromise she developed in city politics, but she has been going after Trump more often since state Senate leader Kevin de Leon decided to run against her.

Deemed sneaky by Trump, Feinstein apologized for not telling the GOP before she released Russia testimony.

SOAP OPERA ACTOR ALSO DID PROVOCATIVE FILMS

Congressional candidate and prominent Trump supporter Antonio Sabato Jr. is best known for his roles as a soap opera hunk. But some conservatives in his Ventura County district are more concerned about some of the more risque chapters in his acting career. Seema Mehta has the details.

RETIREMENTS SEND A SIGNAL IN CALIFORNIA

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) will not run for a 10th term representing the 49th Congressional District. Hes the second California Republican to say he wont seek reelection, following fellow Orange County Rep. Ed Royce of Fullerton, who announced last week as well.

But the wording of the Issa announcement prompted speculation that he might consider running for a colleagues seat, namely the nearby 50th District, which is represented by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine). Hunter is under investigation by the FBI for misusing campaign funds, but he has made clear he plans to run for reelection.

Several Republicans already have said theyll run for Issas seat, including Board of Equalization chair Diane Harkey, GOP Assemblyman Rocky Chavez and Josh Schoonover, who initially wanted to challenge Hunter but switched districts.

Royces announcement prompted an O.C. edition of musical chairs. With a flurry of GOP entrants into that race, Jay Chen became the latest Democrat hoping to replace Royce.

The two surprise retirement announcements prompted Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Ken Calvert, both Republicans, to say they are definitely running for re-election.

Four Democrats running against Rohrabacher debated each other in Huntington Beach over the weekend, and there was plenty of apprehension from the audience about winnowing down the field of candidates.

A reminder well keep track of the intrigue in the moment via our Essential Politics news feed on California politics.

LOTS OF CASH TO TOP OFF CALIFORNIAS RAINY-DAY FUND

If theres a title that could be given to Gov. Jerry Browns new state budget, it might be this: Dont spend all the extra cash.

The $190.3-billion spending plan he sent to the Legislature last week would completely fill the states rainy day cash reserve fund. Weve got a quick overview of what else it would do.

BIDEN TAKES ON TRUMP

Before the shithole dustup, former Vice President Joe Biden had a stern warning for Trump.

Speaking to Times columnist Patt Morrison at our Ideas Exchange event last week, Biden said the president doesnt seem to understand his words have enormous impact and are, frankly, dangerous, especially when it comes to foreign policy.

Grow up, Biden said.

Evoking the civil rights movement, he also suggested millennials have no idea what it means to live through difficult times.

Christine Mai-Duc has the top Bidenisms from the evening, and Colleen Shalby asked the former vice president for his message to Californians in Trumps America.

WILL TRUMP TALK IN THE RUSSIA INVESTIGATION?

Despite assurances from Trumps lawyers that the Russia investigation would be wrapping up soon, theres no sign that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is ready to wind things down. The president is also backing down from his previous promises to speak with Mueller, telling reporters last week it seems unlikely that youd even have an interview because theres been no collusion.

What would it be like if Trump sat down with Mueller for an interview? Chris Megerian spoke with lawyers who have questioned the president during depositions through the years. They said he could be charming and focused but also arrogant and dishonest, with a reluctance to prepare  all characteristics that could prove challenging in an interview unlike any other Trump has faced before.

More developments could be on the horizon in the congressional probes of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential campaign. Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist, is scheduled to testify behind closed doors to the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday, just two weeks after his relationship with the president frayed over his comments to Michael Wolff about a treasonous meeting with Russians at Trump Tower. Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, and Corey Lewandowski, Trumps former campaign manager, also are expected to testify in the near future.

Meanwhile, the partisan rift on the House Intelligence Committee continues to widen. Rep. Adam Schiff, a Burbank Democrat and the top member of his party on the panel, told reporters that Republicans are preventing a more thorough investigation.

NATIONAL POLITICS LIGHTNING ROUND

-- Martin Luther King III called out Trump on the immigration slur: We got to find a way to work on this mans heart.

-- Trumps shithole remark was the latest in a long string of racial provocations since he launched his campaign for president in 2015.

-- Trump is transforming the GOP against legal immigration. Will Congress follow?

-- Former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is back. So too are Latino voters who helped oust him.

-- Chelsea Manning is running for U.S. Senate in Maryland.

Get the latest about whats happening in the nations capital on Essential Washington.

NO EXPANSION OF RENT CONTROL

Legislation that could have led to the expansion of rent control across the state died in an Assembly committee last week after hours of public testimony from landlords and tenants.

Democrats on the committee who didnt vote for the bill said they were worried that more rent control could lead to less home construction, Liam Dillon reports. But thats not the end of the story. Tenant activists are working on a November ballot measure that would do the same thing as the failed legislation.

THE EFFORT TO HELP CALIFORNIANS DODGE THE FEDERAL TAX PLAN FACES QUESTIONS

New legislation from De Leon to help Californians avoid the effects of the federal tax overhaul will primarily help a subset of higher-earning residents.

Those Californians are the ones who paid more than $10,000 in state and local taxes, and De Leon wants to let them donate to a new state-run nonprofit to reduce their tax payments. But he hasnt figured out how generous he wants to make the state tax credit.

SKELTON ON BROWNS STATE BUDGET

Browns plan to create a statewide community college that offers only online courses seems headed for a bruising legislative brawl, George Skelton wrote in his Monday column.

Brown wants to provide an affordable, easily accessible way for working adults to improve their job skills and financial futures by going online at home to take classes. The concept is generally applauded, Skelton writes, but the way the governor wants to run the online system worries some educators.

But Browns goal with the final budget he sent the Legislature is to leave state government in sound financial shape for his successor  and to protect his rear, Skelton wrote Thursday. He isnt embarking on any major new projects, and instead hes polishing up existing ones, in some cases endeavoring to assure theyre sustainable, Skelton writes.

I dont want to get caught in the jaws of the persistent fiscal instability of the state of California, Brown once told reporters. One thing we know is when governors leave town with big deficits, theyre more scorned than praised.

BROWN AND PROP. 13: NOT ON THE AGENDA FOR 2018

No California law enacted by voters has ever had as much of an effect as Proposition 13, the 1978 tax-cutting initiative. But is it overdue for a tuneup?

If so, its not going to be done by Brown. In his Sunday column, John Myers writes how the governor laid out the unintended consequences of Proposition 13 last week. But Brown also made it clear that hes not prepared to take a look at the law that was written during his first term in office four decades ago.

TODAYS ESSENTIALS

-- Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra told Fox News that Trump has been racist in every respect.

-- In a phone call, Brown told Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke that California should be exempt from the Trump administrations plans to expand offshore drilling.

-- Is the legal threshold for sexual harassment cases too high? California lawmakers explored the standard and pondered if it should be changed.

LOGISTICS

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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?

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Please send thoughts, concerns and news tips to politics@latimes.com.

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California Sen. Dianne Feinstein has long relied on her reputation as a compromiser to get things done in Washington, D.C.

But since President Trump was elected last year, Feinstein has faced loud grumbling from progressive activists back home who are upset by her penchant for moderation. Anger toward Feinstein crystallized last fall when she told a San Francisco audience, I think we have to have some patience with Trump in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

Soon after, state Senate leader Kevin de Leon announced he would challenge Feinstein, a fellow Democrat, and set himself up as a bombastic counterweight to Trump. Since then, things have changed for the 84-year-old senator, who is seeking a fifth full term.

Heres how Feinstein has taken on Trump since De Leon entered the race in October:

Theres no room for racism in the Oval Office

Feinstein had some of her harshest words for the president to date on Friday, when she reacted to reports that Trump questioned why the U.S. allows immigrants from shithole countries such as Haiti and African nations. It was the closest she's come to calling on Trump to resign, and the closest shes come to calling the president a racist.

We all need to stop pretending that there are no consequences when the most powerful person in the world espouses racist views and gives a wink and a nod to the darkest elements in our society. If the president cant control himself and lead this country with the authority, dignity and leadership it requires, then he shouldnt be the president. Theres no room for racism in the Oval Office, Feinstein said in a statement.

Taking a stand for Dreamers

Feinstein was under a lot of pressure in December to withhold support for a spending bill in exchange for protections for people brought to the country illegally as children. So-called Dreamers, a large chunk of whom are Californians, protested at her California and Washington, D.C., offices after she initially said she wouldnt try to block the bill and offered no explanation. At a Los Angeles rally, De Leon told her dont come back to California without a deal.

Feinstein reversed her position at the last minute. She said she wouldnt vote for the spending bill without a solution for Dreamers and that it was absolutely unconscionable that Republicans were leaving Washington for the holidays without a deal for Dreamers.

Feinstein also pushed hard for a simple solution for Dreamers in front of cameras at a White House meeting last week, asking Trump to consider a straightforward bill for Dreamers with an agreement to address wider immigration reforms soon after: What about a clean DACA bill now with a commitment that we go into a comprehensive immigration reform procedure?

That prompted Trump to say he would support such a bill until House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) reminded the president that he also wanted to include border security efforts as part of a deal.

Releasing testimony on Russia investigation

Feinstein earned a wave of progressive accolades last week when she released a transcript of congressional testimony from the co-founder of Fusion GPS, the research firm behind a notorious dossier of allegations about Trumps ties to officials in Russia.

Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans had resisted making the testimony public, claiming it would interfere with multiple congressional investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

The transcript did not include many surprises, but the fact that Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the committee, released it over Republican objections sent ripples through Washington.

Feinstein said in a statement that the innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice. The only way to set the record straight is to make the transcript public.

Feinstein later apologized to Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) for not giving him a heads-up before she released the transcript.

Feinstein's actions prompted Trump to call her Sneaky Dianne Feinstein, a nickname likely to endear the senator to liberals who want to see her on Trumps bad side.

The concern rises

Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd asked Feinstein in early December about Trumps ability to be president.

The concern rises with the day, Feinstein said.

Still, she stopped short of calling for his impeachment or removal. Asked if it was time to think about getting Trump out of office, Feinstein replied like her usual moderate self: I believe its time for us to finish our investigation and I dont want to bias any part of the investigation with premature thinking.

But Feinstein threw a bone to liberals when she added that indictments and the FBIs plea deals with people connected to the Trump campaign show the agency is putting together a case of obstruction of justice.
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
A man convicted of using a Costa Mesa-based company to scam nearly 200 people out of more than $9 million was sentenced Friday to 10 years in federal prison, according to authorities.

Jerry Aubrey, 51, a former Santa Ana resident, pleaded guilty in January to one count of mail fraud in the massive scheme that bilked investors who thought they were putting money into developing oil and gas wells, the U.S. attorneys office in Los Angeles said in a statement.

As part of Aubreys sentence, U.S. District Judge James Selna ordered him to pay back the $9,408,184 in investors money he lost, according to authorities.

Aubreys company, Progressive Energy Partners, promised victims 50% annual returns on their investments, but instead, most of the cash coming in was spent on personal expenses, exorbitant commissions to salespeople and payments to earlier investors, which is the hallmark of a Ponzi scheme, according to federal prosecutors.

As part of the scheme, PEP salespersons used purchased lead lists to make cold calls to potential investors, who were told about the alleged profits they could earn from investing in PEP, prosecutors said in a news release.

Victims were not told that, in reality, only 10% of their investments went toward developing gas and oil wells, according to court papers.

Aubrey was indicted in 2013 along with his brother Timothy Aubrey, 56, of Moreno Valley and Aaron Glasser, 33, of San Jacinto, prosecutors said.

Timothy Aubrey was a manager at PEP, prosecutors said. He is scheduled to face mail fraud and wire fraud charges at trial in October.

Glasser was a salesman who pleaded guilty in February to one count of mail fraud, prosecutors said. He is scheduled to be sentenced in December. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, according to authorities.

Jerry Aubrey ran Progressive Energy Partners from October 2005 to April 2010, when he began serving a five-year prison term in Florida for an earlier scam, prosecutors said.

jeremiah.dobruck2@latimes.com

Twitter: @jeremiahdobruck
Fountain Valley City Councilman Mark McCurdy has resigned, the city said.

McCurdy informed City Manager Rob Houston of his resignation in an email, according to a statement posted Monday on the citys website.

At this time, I find it necessary to secure employment outside the area, and having no other option, to effective immediately, step down from my position serving on the City Council, he wrote. It has been an honor to serve the citizens of Fountain Valley, and for that I will always be grateful.

McCurdy, who works as an insurance broker, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

The City Council may discuss steps for replacing McCurdy during a closed session Jan. 23.

We thank council member McCurdy for his service and commitment to this great community, the city said in its post.

McCurdy was first elected to the council in 2010. Some council colleagues in recent years have frowned on his absences at meetings about the citys strategic plan, which includes goals to help the city increase economic stability, promote business and maintain facilities.

The council has passed over McCurdy in its mayoral rotation process the past two years. In December, Michael Vo was appointed mayor, and in 2016, Vo was named mayor pro tem. McCurdy was skipped in the rotation both times.

Vo said Tuesday that he has no quarrel with McCurdy but said his resignation is like abandoning his post.

I think its a disservice for the people that support and voted for him, Vo said. Obviously the decision is entirely up to him, but I think he should have waited until his term ended this fall.

In December, councilman Steve Nagel, who is now mayor pro tem, asked McCurdy if he would still not attend strategic planning meetings, and McCurdy said he would not, citing their lack of detailed minutes. He also noted that they are not televised and are held early in the morning away from City Hall.

McCurdy said last month that he felt targeted by the leadership votes.

I feel that this happened because I simply have a different opinion, he said. We were not elected to be a club of like-minded people, but in fact as a deliberative body. We are here to discuss things, not to all agree. So having a different philosophy, opinion or vote should not be a crime. You should not be penalized.

Nagel told McCurdy that he also had skipped other city events and that this doesnt have anything to do with your voting record but rather your behavior and showing up for events.

McCurdy supporter Leston Trueblood said Tuesday that he was ticked to see McCurdy go.

He said voters liked that McCurdy was willing to ask incisive questions and not be in constant agreement with the rest of the council.

He did the right thing, Trueblood said. He would take things from a citizens perspective.

Trueblood said he reached out to McCurdy after hearing about his resignation but hasnt heard back. He said he wasnt surprised though, saying McCurdy was hurt after last months mayoral decision.

I certainly dont blame Mark McCurdy for just saying Ive had enough, Trueblood said.

hillary.davis@latimes.com

Twitter: @Daily_PilotHD

UPDATES:

4:15 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Michael Vo and Leston Trueblood.

This article was originally published at 10:45 a.m.
Join Ron Glazier on an 11-day African safari to Botswana organized by the nonprofit Friends of the Santa Ana Zoo. Participants on the trip will explore the Makgadikgadi and Nxai national parks as well as the Okavango Delta.

Botswana, known for its diverse wildlife, is ideal for viewing rare, endangered wild dogs as well as lions, leopards, elephants and bird life.

Highlights also include night game runs and dugout canoe excursions. Accommodations are in secluded lodges and tented camps. Retired zoo director Glazier has led 23 safaris.

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Dates: July 6-17

Price: $7,995 per person, double occupancy; $2,995 single supplement. Includes all meals, beverages and guides. International airfare not included. Optional pre-trip extension to Cape Town, South Africa, ($2,895) and post-trip extensions to Chobe National Park in Botswana and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe for $3,595.

Info: Ron Glazier, (480) 662-5213, rjglazier1105@gmail.com

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravel
Rappler, a digital pioneer in the Philippine media scene, won international awards for its critical, unabashed look at President Rodrigo Dutertes deadly drug war.

Now the independent online news site is trying to stay alive.

Philippine authorities this week ordered Rappler to close, infuriating media rights groups and casting uncertainty on the sanctity of press freedoms in the three-decade-old democracy.

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Rapplers troubles appear to stem from its connection to prominent American tech czar Pierre Omidyar, founder of Ebay, whose philanthropic investment network has poured money into the upstart website.

Rappler is one of several news outlets supported by the California-based Omidyar Network, which Omidyar runs. The 50-year-old billionaire has also helped start Honolulu Civil Beat in Hawaii and the online investigative website the Intercept, founded by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. Since its launch in 2012, Rappler has become the Philippines third most-popular website.

But the nations Securities and Exchange Commission this week concluded that Rappler had used a deceptive scheme to violate constitutional rules that require media companies to be fully owned by Filipinos.

The ruling essentially revoked the publications license.

The commission is ordering us to close shop, to cease telling you stories, to stop speaking truth to power, and to let go of everything that we have built  and created  with you since 2012, the editors said in a note to their readers. This is pure and simple harassment.

Rappler has acknowledged it has two foreign investors: Omidyar and North Base Media, a firm that focuses on media companies in emerging markets. But the news site has insisted that the investments went through so-called depository receipts that allow companies to access international funding without ceding Filipino ownership.

Other media companies operating in the country have used similar depository receipts. But regulators pointed to a clause in the deal between Rappler and Omidyar Network that they said could allow the California company to vet management decisions.

Omidyar Network denied any interference in the site, either on a managerial or editorial level. This is an unfortunate interpretation of Filipino law that reduces press freedom and independent news coverage in the Philippines, it said in a statement.

North Base Media, the other investor, also questioned the order. Revoking a companys license to operate over a contractual clause that the SEC could just as easily have ordered changed seems both extreme and political, Marcus Brauchli, the organizations cofounder and a former top editor of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, said in an email.

The SEC did not require the website to shut down immediately; it continued to operate Tuesday with an article about its own future as the lead story.

The decision in this Southeast Asian nation follows the shuttering last year of Cambodias independent English-language newspaper because of government pressure in an increasingly autocratic country. The paper titled its last article, Descent into outright dictatorship. Rights advocates fear that, as in Cambodia, the Philippines decision signals a further step toward strongman rule.

Duterte, who took office in 2016, has pursued a war on drugs that resulted in the extrajudicial killing of thousands and led to condemnation from the United Nations.

Rappler has received acclaim for its chronicling of the brazen impunity with which Dutertes officials have conducted the drug campaign, and the ways innocent families have suffered from its effects.

My bet is if Rappler hadnt been so critical of the government  this case wouldnt have come about, said Malcolm Cook, senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, who studies the Philippines.

The situation with Rappler adds to concerns that Duterte is abandoning the democratic principles of his predecessor for an approach closer to that of Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator who silenced newspapers and jailed opponents during his rule from the mid-1960s to 1986.

Police arrested one of Dutertes toughest critics last year on drug-trafficking charges, and his vice president has accused him of quashing dissent. Duterte this December extended martial law in the countrys south despite the misgivings of lawmakers.

The president has repeatedly attacked news outlets, accusing Rappler during his state of the nation address last year of having total American ownership.

Harry Roque, the presidents spokesman, told reporters Tuesday that Duterte had nothing to do with the order from the five-person commission on Rapplers registration. It was made by individuals who were not his appointees, Roque said. He could not control the majority of the commissioners.

A surge of Philippine journalists, lawmakers and international rights organizations launched immediate protests over the SECs ruling.

Sen. Risa Hontiveros called the decision Marcosian on Twitter and a move straight out of the dictators playbook.

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the order as a direct assault on freedom of the press. The Foreign Correspondents Assn. of the Philippines said it was tantamount to killing the online news site.

Not everyone sees the decision through the veil of politics. Rappler is just crying foul over a legal issue, said Eduardo Araral, associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, who tracks Philippine contemporary society. There are so many media critics against Duterte and hes let them be.

Rappler  whose name comes from slang rap, to discuss, and ripple, to make waves  plans to try its luck in court.

We will continue bringing you the news, holding the powerful to account for their actions and decisions, calling attention to the government lapses that further empower the disadvantaged, the news outlet said in its note. We will hold the line.

Meyers is a special correspondent.

Twitter: @jessicameyers

A Philippines grandmother fought to get a toxic coal stockpile out of her neighborhood. Three bullets stopped her

In the Philippines, poverty and corruption fuel the drug trade

Ties between the U.S. and Philippines run deep. It wont be easy for Rodrigo Duterte to unravel them

UPDATES:

1:15 p.m.: This article was updated with additional background on politics in the Philippines.

This article was originally published at 9:25 a.m.
The world learned of Vietnams anti-corruption drive on a warm summer day in Berlin, when park goers reportedly watched as agents crammed a Vietnamese oil executive into a car.

Germany accused the Vietnamese Embassy of helping kidnap Trinh Xuan Thanh, former chairman of a construction company tied to state energy giant PetroVietnam. Vietnamese officials say he returned home voluntarily after a year on the run.

The controversy demonstrated the lengths to which Vietnam would go in its pursuit of high-level graft. Thanh now stands trial  alongside the most senior Communist Party official to face prosecution in decades  on corruption charges that have ensnared Vietnams banking and energy sectors and exposed layers of deceit inside state-run companies.

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Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong last month called such efforts unprecedented.

This crackdown underscores the partys desire to maintain its legitimacy. But its also spurred accusations of a deeper, more insidious power struggle over one of the worlds fastest growing economies.

Heres what you need to know about a campaign thats captured the attention of Vietnamese around the world:

Twenty-two defendants, including Thanh and Dinh La Thang, a former Politburo member and PetroVietnam chairman. The National Assembly fired Thang last year as party chief of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, the countrys lively financial hub. Hes the most high-level official to stand trial since the 1970s.

Thang, once a rising star in the party, faces more than a decade in prison for mismanaging tens of millions of dollars in PetroVietnam investments. Thanh, charged with embezzlement, could receive life imprisonment.

The other 20 defendants include three former chairmen of PetroVietnam, the countrys largest oil producer and a sprawling state enterprise that owns stakes in assets from banks to power plants.

Such incidents occur with increasing frequency. Nearly 50 bankers and executives currently stand trial more than 900 miles south in Ho Chi Minh City. Last summer, judges sentenced a former PetroVietnam head to death for embezzlement and abuse of power in a trial that involved 51 people.

Thang and other prominent defendants were close to former Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, who lost a 2016 bid for party chief. Lawmakers instead gave Trong, the incumbent party chief, special permission to extend his post.

The question is what do these trials mean, not simply for corruption per se, but for the direction of Vietnamese politics and the way in which the party operates the state? said Jonathan London, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who studies contemporary Vietnam.

Many people in Vietnam perceive what is occurring as not just an anti-corruption campaign, but a political purge.

Corruption pervades this country of 93 million. It filters up from the traffic cop at the roundabout to the principal who enrolls a student based on the thickness of his gift envelope.

Vietnam ranked 113th out of 176 countries in Transparency Internationals 2016 corruption index, just below Egypt and ahead of Pakistan and North Korea.

The anti-corruption drive took off after the former prime minister left office. Dung, 68, helped integrate Vietnam into the global economy, but he also drew criticism for his familys ties to powerful state businesses. His rival, 73-year-old Trong, is a modest party ideologue more focused on old-school collective leadership.

Vietnamese officials reject any links between political infighting and the graft campaign. The government advocates dealing with wrongdoings and corruption, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said in September.

Authorities havent just gone after greedy executives for graft; theyve arrested bloggers and activists for anti-state views. In one of the more high-profile cases last June, Facebook blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh  also known as Mother Mushroom  was sentenced to a decade in prison for conducting anti-state propaganda. She wrote about human rights and environmental mismanagement.

The corruption campaign has focused on positions of financial influence. Just days ago, police arrested real estate developer Phan Van Anh Vu for revealing state secrets. The tycoon, who also worked as a senior officer in Vietnams intelligence service, was arrested after he slipped into Singapore using a fake ID.

Not everyone views the campaign as a tale of competing factions. Officials are serious about cleaning up extravagance permitted under Dung, said Carlyle Thayer, a professor emeritus at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Canberra, who has studied Vietnam for more than three decades.

If people flourished under the former prime minister and engaged in corruption, they are the targets of corruption, he said. This is politics as usual.

The countrys anti-corruption drive resembles its northern neighbors. Early in his administration, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to root out both tigers and flies in an attempt to eviscerate a tumor eroding society. His effort, while widely supported, also sidelined political rivals.

Vietnam, which shares a tangled and tense relationship with its Communist comrade, watched closely. In China, Xi unilaterally leads the charge. In Vietnam, where no single leader wields as much control, numerous lawmakers oversee it.

The Southeast Asian countrys current campaign  perhaps to its detriment  only targets the top.

If the leaders keep following the current process, I dont think they will perform something that better helps Vietnam be more integrated and have more transparency, said Ha Hoang Hop, chairman of Think Tank Viet Know, a consulting firm in Hanoi.

Germany expelled two diplomats for the Berlin incident, which strained relations and threatens to blow up a trade deal between Vietnam and the European Union. Many Vietnamese view the trials with ambivalence. They question whether the crackdown will ever trickle down to that traffic cop.

Private sector corruption in comparison to the state is very big, and its untouched, Hop said. I dont see that it will be a better future.

ALSO

Trump visits Vietnam after helping to reopen old war wounds at home

In Mekong Delta backwaters, Vietnam vets find peace in a town that war destroyed

Chinas heralded solar highway closed after thieves stole one of the panels

Meyers is a special correspondent.

Twitter: @jessicameyers

ALSO

In Mekong Delta backwaters, Vietnam vets finds peace tin a town that war destroyed

Their parents lives were defined by war. Now Vietnams youth are pushing their country toward a new identity

Born in America, Sriracha sauce tries its luck in Vietnam
The gray carry-on glides along the conveyor belt toward the X-ray machine.

Its almost midnight at Guarulhos International Airport, just outside Sao Paulo, and the suitcase and its owner, a bald Nigerian man in jeans and a T-shirt, are first in line at Terminal 2 security for the 2:30 a.m. flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The X-ray machine operator peers at the images on her screens, then asks federal agent Elza Lucia de Melo to take a look and decide if the bag should be searched. Melo gives a curt nod.

Hard-shell suitcases like this one have become a staple for drug traffickers, who slip a second shell inside to create a thin hiding spot for their illegal cargo. The flight to Ethiopia, a transit point for cocaine destined for markets in southern Africa, is a favorite too.

At Guarulhos  the busiest airport in South America, with 6.5 million people passing through its corridors every month  federal agents confiscated more than 1.34 metric tons of cocaine in the first 11 months of 2017. Seizures for the year were expected to top the previous total of 1.41 metric tons.

Brazil has become one of the most important shipping points for cocaine in the world. While the main trafficking routes to the United States  the biggest consumer of cocaine  go through Central America and Mexico, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 2017 identified Brazil as the most frequent point of departure for shipments bound for Europe and Africa between 2010 and 2015, the most recent period measured.

The reason is probably geography: Brazil borders the worlds top three producers of cocaine  Colombia, Peru and Bolivia  and the airport at Sao Paulo offers direct flights to four continents.

Brazil has become South Americas biggest destination market for cocaine in recent years, the U.N. reported, but exports can be even more lucrative. The street value of cocaine rises dramatically the farther it moves from its source  a gram is $12 in South America, $60 in parts of Europe and up to $300 in Australia.

The airport isnt Brazils only transit hub: In January 2017, Djibouti authorities reported the seizure of half a ton of cocaine from a container ship en route from Brazil to Spain.

It was disguised as flour.

Left, Melo, a Brazilian federal agent, analyzes the X-ray at Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Right, Melo checks baggage at Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo.(Flavio Forner / For the Times)

The man with the gray suitcase fidgets with an envelope as he approaches the metal detector. In her 32 years as a federal agent, Melo has learned to notice such things.

When she asks to see his passport and ticket, he pulls them out of the envelope and hands them over. Melo recognizes his name. It was on a list of targets she memorized.

How long will you be staying in Addis Ababa?

Until March, he says. Thats three months.

You already speak Portuguese well, Melo says. You must be living here for some time now.

She drops her eyes to the passport, then raises them back up to his face. Hes been in Brazil since 2008, he says, shifting from one foot to the other.

As an airport employee goes through the clothing in the suitcase, Melo walks around the conveyor belt to talk to a bearded agent on her team named Momm.

Those sandals, she says. Theyre the same kind that had cocaine in them that other time, remember?

Momm  who like most of the security workers agreed to a reporters presence one weekend last month only if his full name was not published  nods slowly.

We need to swab the suitcase, he says.

With gloved hands, the employee who emptied the bag passes a wand over the suitcase and inserts it into a small blue machine that detects traces of explosives and narcotics. The readout appears in a few seconds: 14% cocaine.

Top, the camera surveillance department of Guarulhos International Airport. Left, the interior of the boarding lounge at Guarulhos International Airport. Right, a federal agent and sniffer dog walk among suitcases at Guarulhos International Airport in search of drugs and explosives. (Flavio Forner / For the Times)

Thats not enough to take action. Drug shipments register at least 50%. Anything less could mean the man used cocaine and left traces when he picked up his suitcase. Another bag touching his could also lead to the low-level reading.

The team swabs it again, this time on the inside lining. It comes back 8%.

Momm calls the desk at Ethiopian Airlines to ask somebody to bring over the mans two checked items. Nobody answers. At this time, especially on a Saturday night, airlines have a limited number of staff working.

He calls again, the phone resting between his left shoulder and ear.

Theyre already in X-ray downstairs, he reports to Melo. Theyll bring them up.

Melo tells the man to wait in one of two chairs along a wall of windows.

As others start making their way through the security line, Momm hands Melo a small slip of paper with the name of another Nigerian  Emmanuel  who is expected to check in for the Addis Ababa flight. A few days earlier, he missed a $1,800 flight, then a $430 flight, before pleading with an attendant to get him on the next one available. A $2,000 seat in first class today was his only option. He took it.

If he makes it to check-in, the airline attendants will let the agents know.

Shortly after 1 a.m., the first Nigerian passengers luggage is brought up: a large black suitcase and a cardboard box, both wrapped tightly in plastic. In an X-ray, the box appears to contain electronics, and the suitcase is full of shoes.

An X-ray shows the stomach of a Nigerian suspect in international drug trafficking detained at Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo. The man is suspected of swallowing cocaine capsules and trying to travel to Ethiopia. (Flavio Forner / For The Times)

An agent named Dennis uses a box cutter to remove the plastic from the suitcase. He opens it and starts pulling out the contents.

Melo picks up a pair of white sneakers.

Are these all new? she asks the man.

He nods.

She picks up a womans boot and smells the heel.

The phone rings.

Hes here, Momm calls over to Melo, already putting the receiver down.

Go, she says.

Momm and Dennis run to the Ethiopian Airlines check-in area. The man theyve been waiting for, Emmanuel, is there, a hard-shell carry-on suitcase at his feet and a green plastic bag in his hand.

What do you have there? Dennis asks.

Emmanuel hands over the bag, which contains two medication boxes that are well known to the agents looking for drug mules who swallow narcotic-filled capsules or balloons. The box of loperamide, an anti-diarrhea drug, is empty. The box of bisacodyl, a laxative, is full.

Melo arrives.

He was clean, she says of the first passenger, who is allowed to board the flight to Ethiopia but will remain on a watch list.

When Dennis asks for Emmanuels tickets, he passes them over. His hands are shaking.

The team takes him back to the security area.

The agents pull everything out of the small suitcase that is his sole piece of luggage: a cellphone, wooden prayer beads, an empty duffel bag, clothing, shoes.

What do you do for work here, Emmanuel? Melo asks.

I sell clothes on 25 de Marco Street, he says.

How much do you make doing that?

Around $75 a day.

He says hes going on to Nigeria after Ethiopia. Melo asks if he has any drugs with him.

There are no drugs here, he says.

The medication, he says, is for a sore stomach.

Melo calls the federal police station in Terminal 3 to explain the situation. She needs paperwork drawn up to be able to take Emmanuel to a nearby hospital for an X-ray, the only way to know for sure whether he has capsules of cocaine in his stomach.

Top, federal agents question a passenger who disembarked from a flight from Africa at Guarulhos International Airport. Left, Brazilian federal police test capsules found in the belly of a Nigerian at Guarulhos International Airport. Right, a Nigerian is arrested at Guarulhos International Airport, suspected of swallowing cocaine capsules and trying to travel to Africa. (Flavio Forner / For the Times)

After a full body search behind closed doors, Melo and Dennis take Emmanuel down a series of long, winding corridors to the station. There, he gives an agent his basic information. He entered the country in 2014 seeking refugee status, he says, and has a wife, daughter and legal residency here. The story checks out.

He continues to deny that hes carrying drugs. If he is lying  and a capsule bursts  he could die in seconds.

The agents take him to a door at the back of the station that leads to a parking lot where a black SUV is waiting.

We wont be back tonight, Melo tells another agent before turning on the siren.

With all the medication he took, this could take days, she says.

Hours later, Emmanuels X-ray shows he swallowed upward of 100 capsules, all positive for cocaine. By Monday morning, 90 were expelled. Pairs of agents would wait in shifts with him for the rest.

Langlois is a special correspondent.
A leading Serb politician in northern Kosovo was shot and killed Tuesday morning, raising ethnic tensions in the region and halting EU-mediated talks between Kosovo and Serbia on the day they were due to resume.

Assailants opened fire on Oliver Ivanovic close to the offices of his political party in the Serb-controlled northern city of Mitrovica. He was taken to a hospital but doctors were unable to save him.

The doctors said that Ivanovic suffered at least five gunshot wounds to his upper torso. The assailants escaped in a car that was later found burned out. Kosovo police sealed off the area of the shooting and were looking for the attackers.

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The Serb delegation at EU talks due to start in Brussels on Tuesday immediately left to return to Belgrade.

Delegation leader Marko Djuric said that whoever is behind this attack ... whether they are Serb, Albanian or any other criminals, they must be punished.

Ivanovic, 64, was one of the key politicians in Serb-dominated northern Kosovo, a former Serbian province where tensions remain high a decade after it declared independence. Serbia does not recognize the independence of its former province and the killing is likely to raise tensions between ethnic Albanians and minority Serbs in the region.

In Belgrade, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic called a top state security meeting to discuss the shooting, and was later due to address the public.

In Pristina, the Kosovo government strongly denounced the slaying and called it a challenge to the rule of law and efforts to establish the rule of law in the whole of Kosovo territory.

A Kosovo court convicted Ivanovic of war crimes during the 1998-99 war. That verdict was overturned and a retrial was underway.

Ivanovic was considered a moderate opposition Serb politician. In July, his car was set on fire in Mitrovica, the Serb stronghold in northern Kosovo.
Pope Francis will step into the middle of one of South Americas longest-running conflicts Wednesday when he visits the largely indigenous Araucania region of Chile.

In the century and a half since they were conquered by Chiles military, the Mapuche people have continued to resist, demanding greater autonomy, legal recognition of their language and the return of their ancestral lands.

While the vast majority of the estimated 1.4 million Mapuche people are peaceful, some have at times employed violence in their fight.

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In recent years, masked men have firebombed timber trucks and land owned by non-Mapuche people that they say is rightfully theirs, sometimes leaving pamphlets calling for Mapuche rights. They set fire to more than two dozen churches in 2016 and 2017, according to the Chilean prosecutors office.

Three more churches were firebombed in Chiles capital, Santiago, on Friday. Leaflets dropped at the scene criticized the upcoming visit of Francis and called for a free Mapuche nation. No one took responsibility for the attacks, and authorities said they were unsure whether Mapuche activists were to blame.

Many view the popes visit to Temuco, the capital of Araucania, as a sign of support for the tribe and its struggles. Francis has expressed solidarity with other indigenous groups. While visiting Bolivia in 2015, Francis apologized for the grave sins committed against native communities by the Roman Catholic Church during colonial times. The popes familiarity with the region  he was born in Argentina  may also help explain his decision to visit Mapuche lands.

The pope will touch down in Temuco on Wednesday, celebrate Mass at the Maquehue air base and have lunch with a number of residents handpicked by local church leaders. Protests are expected outside the air base, which was built on land taken from the Mapuche.

This Roman Catholic Church in Santiago, Chile, is one of three firebombed on Jan. 12, 2018. Leaflets dropped at the scene decried the upcoming visit of Pope Francis and called for a free Mapuche nation. (Esteban Felix / Associated Press )

While some in Chile complain about the Mapuches tactics, many are sympathetic to their plight.

These acts of force or political violence such as burning churches or trucks or even homes reflects that there is an open wound, said Jesuit priest Carlos Bresciani, who has lived for 15 years near Tirua, a traditionally Mapuche village.

The Mapuche famously resisted Spanish conquest during colonial times, using guerrilla warfare tactics to evade European fighters seeking to lay claim to their historic homeland in what is now Chile and Argentina. They eventually signed a treaty with the Spanish, becoming the first and only South American indigenous group whose sovereignty and autonomy the Spanish legally recognized.

Because the Mapuche were not conquered, the Catholic Church had little success converting them. Even today, it is rare to see churches in Mapuche communities, which are scattered from the Andes mountains to the Pacific coast in Chile, as well as in parts of western Argentina.

After Chilean independence in 1818, the tribe fended off soldiers for decades. In the 1860s, the military won. The Mapuches ancestral lands shrunk from 24 million acres to 1.2 million as the government signed over property to the military, arriving European immigrants and the Catholic Church.

A billboard welcomes Pope Francis in Temuco, Chile. (Esteban Felix / Associated Press )

How far the pope goes in expressing support for the Mapuche will be closely watched. The tribes leaders and Chilean officials have both said they hope he can help moderate the conflict, which experts worry could worsen.

Its a sore spot that could potentially grow, said Tom Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who has studied the tribe.

The possibility of the Mapuche taking up arms like the Zapatista indigenous group in southern Mexico is not out of the question, Dillehay said.

In certain aspects, life has improved in recent years for the Mapuche, who make up about 8% of Chiles population.

Since the return of democracy to Chile in 1990, successive governments have purchased land to give back to the Mapuche. Scholarships have been created for Mapuche students. The government also created the National Corporation for Indigenous Development, which addresses issues related to Chiles indigenous people.

But many tribe members believe the changes are not enough. The Araucania region, where many Mapuche eke out livings farming subsistence crops of potatoes and wheat, is the poorest in Chile. And Mapuche complain of abuse at the hands of authorities.

This month, some Mapuche clashed with security forces at a protest marking the 10-year anniversary of the killing of an activist by police.

Like indigenous groups everywhere, they are subject to racism and discrimination, Dillehay said. Theyre a force to be dealt with. Chiles got to be careful.

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

Twitter: @katelinthicum

Times staff writer Linthicum reported from Mexico City and special correspondent Poblete from Santiago.
Pope Francis arrived here in the Chilean capital Monday evening to start a weeklong swing through Chile and Peru in which he is expected to highlight the plight of indigenous peoples, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the precarious status of immigrants and the poor.

In an eleventh-hour schedule shift, Francis stopped in Santiago at the tomb of a Chilean prelate who was known as the bishop of the poor and who aided those seeking loved ones detained during Chiles former military dictatorship.

Francis was welcomed at Santiagos international airport by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. A childrens orchestra celebrated his arrival on the tarmac as the pope, who was born in neighboring Argentina, listened with a broad smile and an aide held his cassock against a blustery wind.

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The 81-year-old pope, known for his low-key style, took the passenger seat of a blue Hyundai sedan. The car traveled from the airport through the streets of the capital in a convoy of white SUVs as tens of thousands of well-wishers, many waving Vatican and Chilean flags, lined the streets.

His first stop, in the working-class Pudahuel district at the tomb of Chilean Bishop Enrique Alvear Urrutia, the bishop of the poor, seemed fitting.

When Francis became pope in 2013, he vowed to lead a poor church for the poor, embracing the values that many here say Alvear embodied.

Alvear, who died in 1982 and is a candidate for sainthood, was a fierce defender of human rights, notably during the initial years of the military dictatorship that ruled from 1973 to 1990 and was headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. It was an epoch when many assailed the church leadership for failing to speak out against the abuses of the government.

But Alvear was undeterred, despite death threats and the constant risk of arrest.

He would show up at detention and torture centers  including the notorious Villa Grimaldi in Santiago  in search of the disappeared.

The stop at the bishops tomb, announced shortly before the papal plane left Rome for Santiago, raised the question of whether Francis will speak about the victims of the dictatorship during his visit.

The Latin American church has long featured both conservative, pro-establishment tendencies and social activist elements, occasionally leading to tension within its hierarchy.

Pinochets legacy is still a deeply divisive issue in Chile, which remains a highly conservative, predominantly Roman Catholic country, despite the growth of Protestant evangelical sects.

On Monday evening, Francis switched from the Hyundai to the popemobile during a ride through central Santiago.

Outside the apostolic nunciature, where he was to spend the evening, he embraced and bestowed blessings on adults and children  including a disabled boy  gathered there and received flowers and other gifts from well-wishers. He took off his white skullcap, or zucchetto, to put on one offered by a boy, then returned it to the boy and placed his own back on his head. Ecstatic Chileans who had waited for hours recorded the pope on their cellphones.

Francis begins a full schedule of public events Tuesday, which features a morning Mass at OHiggins Park in central Santiago. The popes homily at the service is expected to be his first major address during the trip.

On Wednesday, he heads to the southern city of Temuco, a center of Chiles Mapuche indigenous population. The pope is expected to address the Mapuches struggle for the recuperation of ancestral lands and other rights.

A series of firebombings at Roman Catholic churches in the Santiago area preceded the popes arrival. Authorities downplayed the incidents, which caused minor damage and no injuries. Police have not named suspects in the attacks.

Victims of sexual abuse by priests  an issue that has shaken the Catholic Church at its core over the last two decades  have sought a meeting with the pope. But no such session has yet been scheduled.

On Thursday, the papal visit switches to Peru, where the pope is scheduled to travel to the city of Puerto Maldonado, the gateway to Perus Amazon region and a center of illicit gold mining that has ravaged the environment and forced many from their homes.

The weeklong papal visit concludes on Jan. 21 in Lima, the Peruvian capital, where the pope will recite the Angelus prayer at noon in Plaza de Armas, in the citys historic center.

The trip is the fourth to South America for Francis, the only pope born in the Americas.

On the papal plane en route to Chile, Francis distributed to reporters a disturbing black-and-white photo of a child who, after the U.S. atomic bombardment of Nagasaki in 1945, carries his dead brother on his shoulders to a crematorium. The boy is barefoot, his lips are tightly sealed, and he stands at attention, with his dead brother strapped onto his back. The pope told reporters said he was very moved by the photo, taken by a U.S. photographer, Joseph Roger ODonnell.

The pontiff, who has backed the banning of nuclear weapons, captioned the photo The Fruit of War.

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington and special correspondent Jorge Poblete in Santiago contributed to this report.

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Twitter: @PmcdonnellLAT
Pope Francis opened the first full day of his visit to Chile with a somber apology for clerical sexual abuse, confronting a scandal that has roiled the Roman Catholic Church here and elsewhere.

I cannot help but express the pain and shame, shame that I feel over the irreparable harm caused to children by church ministers, Francis said at La Moneda presidential palace here in the Chilean capital.



For the record: An earlier version of this article misspelled Bishop Juan Barros last name as Barrios.

It is fair to ask for forgiveness? he asked.

Later, after presiding over an open-air Mass with an estimated 400,000 faithful gathered in the capitals OHiggins Park, Francis expanded on his apology in a doleful address at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago, the nations principal Catholic house of worship.

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I know the pain resulting from cases of abuse of minors, and I am attentive to what you are doing to respond to this great and painful evil, Francis told gathered bishops and other clerical dignitaries. Painful because of the harm and suffering of the victims and their families, who saw the trust they had placed in the churchs ministers betrayed. Painful too for the suffering of ecclesiastical communities.

In some cases, he noted, priests had been insulted in the metro or walking on the street, and that many had paid a heavy price for being seen in public in clerical attire.

A wounded church, Francis suggested, could recover and be in a better position to provide guidance in a turbulent world.

We are not seeking to ignore or hide our wounds, Francis said in the cathedral. A wounded church can understand the wounds of todays world and make them her own, suffering with them, accompanying them and seeking to heal them.

The raging controversy here about clerical sexual abuse  combined with recent firebombings of several churches  have injected a sense of tension and unpredictability into Francis visit to this traditionally Roman Catholic nation.

The pope has previously declared a zero tolerance policy for clerical sexual abuse, moved to discipline pedophile priests and enacted guidelines to protect children. But some groups representing victims say the pope has not gone far enough, especially in the cases of clerical superiors who tolerated abuse or covered it up.

In Chile, the clerical sexual abuse crisis has been cited as a factor in a sharp decline of those identifying as Catholic.

Francis in particular has been heavily criticized for his 2015 appointment of a bishop, Juan Barros Madrid, to head the Diocese of Osorno in southern Chile.

Some abuse victims have accused Barros of protecting a mentor, Father Fernando Karadima, who was investigated by the Vatican and found to have abused teenage boys and adults for years from his parish post in Santiago. He was never prosecuted criminally, but in 2011, the Vatican sentenced him to a life of prayer and penance.

As he has in the past, Barros denied that he had covered up for his former mentor.

I would like to reiterate that many lies have been told about me, he told the Chilean media Tuesday.

I have said many times that it is one thing to have participated in a parish community and quite another to have witnessed the things for which this priest [Karadima] was condemned, he said. I never witnessed that.

The Vatican said Tuesday that victims of clerical sexual abuse met with Francis for about half an hour at the papal nunciature in Santiago but offered no further details. Victim advocates had been pushing for such a meeting.

The last papal pilgrimage to Chile was in 1987, when Pope John Paul II sought to heal deep rifts in a society still ruled by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Chile has since returned to democracy and boasts one of the continents most robust economies, though deep social divisions remain.

La Moneda palace, where Francis issued his apology Tuesday for sexual abuse by priests, was famously attacked by warplanes during the coup of Sept. 11, 1973, that brought Pinochet to power.

Francis appeared alongside Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, whose father, an air force general, was imprisoned and tortured for opposing the coup and died the next year after a heart attack.

The drama of the visit has been heightened by a string of firebombings of churches.

Three days before Francis arrival in Chile, three churches were attacked with gasoline poured into bottles and ignited. On Sunday, another church was firebombed. Then on Tuesday, authorities reported that three more churches had been torched  two in the southern region of Araucania and another just south of Santiago.

Police have not named any suspects, but Francis was scheduled to meet Wednesday in the city of Temuco with Mapuche leaders, who have been fighting for greater autonomy and a return of ancestral lands. Mapuche activists have set fire to churches in the past as a form of protest.

Despite the violence and the clerical abuse scandal, enthusiastic crowds have greeted the pope since he arrived here Monday from Rome.

Tens of thousands lined up in the predawn hours Tuesday outside OHiggins Park in anticipation of Francis arrival for the open-air Mass. Throngs waved greetings as the pontiff arrived in the popemobile.

Its a great honor to be here, said Jacqueline Olguien, 48, part of a group of 15 from a parish in Santiago. This pope speaks to us directly.

Vendors sold coffee and snacks as lines of papal well-wishers waited to get in the park. Some sang religious songs. The Mass began beneath a blazing, midsummer South American sun.

Worshipers waved flags of their home countries. And while Chilean flags dominated, there were many from neighboring Argentina, the birthplace of the first pope from the Americas.

Yes, we hope to see Francisco someday in Argentina, said Dahiana Veroitza,19, part of a contingent from southern Argentina attending the Mass. We are all very proud of him. But its very moving to be in his presence here in Chile as well.

The Argentine press has been filled with speculation about why Francis has not yet made an apostolic visit to his homeland, though he has now made four trips to South America. Some observers have suggested that the pope  well versed in the contentious political scene in his native country  did not want a papal visit to be dragged into Argentinas divisive internal political debates.

Francis is scheduled to continue to Peru later in the week and is expected to preach on indigenous rights, environmental destruction in the Amazon and the plight of immigrants.

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Twitter: @PmcdonnellLAT

tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com

Twitter: @TracyKWilkinson

Times staff writers McDonnell reported from Santiago and Wilkinson from Washington. Special correspondent Jorge Poblete in Santiago contributed to this report.

UPDATES:

6:40 p.m.: This article was updated throughout with details of the visit.

9:30 a.m.: This article was updated with information about violence at churches.

This article was originally published at 6:40 a.m.
In the ever-shifting landscape of the Syrian civil war, the line between allies and enemies is rarely clear.

It was further muddied this week when the U.S.-led coalition revealed plans for a 30,000-strong security force to police Syrias northeast borders with Turkey and Iraq. The plan instantly enraged Turkey, a NATO ally of the U.S., because it would rely heavily on Kurdish fighters who are viewed as terrorists by the Turks.

Is the duty of protecting NATO borders left to terror groups? We can protect our own borders, said Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, according to Turkeys state-run Anadolu news agency. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the United States of betraying an ally and threatened to attack Kurdish terror nests along the border.

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Those who stabbed us in the back and appear to be our allies ... cannot prevent it, said Erdogan, according to an Anadolu report.

The establishment of the force also stands to rankle Syrias government and its two main allies, Russia and Iran. It could derail a rapprochement between the Kurds and Damascus, who have worked together on occasion as reluctant allies against Islamic State, as well as against rebels trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.

With the fight against Islamic State winding down, the coalition envisions that the Border Security Force would be stationed eastward, policing the militants traditional smuggling route between Iraq and Syria, as well as passageways with Turkey to the north. Those were once used by the groups foreign fighters to travel to and from its caliphate.

In his remarks, as reported by Anadolu, Erdogan said he did not even think of calling U.S. President Donald Trump to discuss Syria, adding that as he long as he does not turn to me, I do not turn to him.

Rojda Felat, a Syrian Democratic Forces commander, waves her groups flag at the iconic Al-Naim square in Raqqah, Syria, on Oct. 17, 2017. (Bulent Kilic / AFP/Getty Images )

The Kurds are an ethnic group whose population ranges primarily through Syria, Iraq and Turkey, and has long sought an independent homeland. Syrias Kurds have leveraged their alliance with the U.S. and the chaos in the country to carve out the beginnings of a semi-autonomous federation of provinces in the northern part of Syria.

Erdogan has long threatened to overrun Afrin, a Syrian town about 15 miles from the Turkish border. On Tuesday, three rebel commanders confirmed their participation in a new Turkish-backed campaign to oust the Kurds from areas in Syrias north.

Weve completed preparations to wage this battle to liberate our invaded Arab lands from the terrorist separatist gangs, Lt. Col. Abdul Munem Turki, commander of the Northern Division rebel faction, said in a conversation using the WhatsApp messaging service.

The rebel force, which Turki said comprised three companies totaling some 25,000 fighters, were all supplied and equipped by the Turkish army.

Turkeys army chief, Gen. Hulusi Akar, told his counterparts at a NATO meeting in Brussels that his country would not allow the Kurds to be supported and armed under the guise of being an operational partner [of the U.S].

We expect [the U.S.] to reverse the mistake as soon as possible, said Akar, according to a report from Anadolu.

It was a rare moment of consensus between Ankara and Damascus, one-time friends turned enemies, forced together against what may now become a common enemy: the Kurds.

The Syrian government condemned the border force, describing it in a statement on Monday as a blatant aggression upon the sovereignty, unity and integrity of Syrian lands, as well as a clear violation of international law.

Russias foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, echoed that sentiment, accusing Washington on Monday of not wanting to preserve the territorial integrity of Syria.

However, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition played down the significance of the move.

This is a natural progression from the blueprint we have already used in areas throughout northern Syria and the Euphrates River Valley, said Col. Ryan Dillon in a phone interview on Tuesday. He said the force was aimed at monitoring unpopulated areas east toward the border where there has been freedom of maneuver by ISIS fighters attempting to flee.

Dillon insisted that, despite its name, the new formation was strictly focused on security and to identify and stop the movement of fighters of Islamic State. It would not perform tasks such as passport control or levying tariffs.

Nouri Mahmoud, a Kurdish commander with the Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed militia that includes both Kurds and Arab fighters, said in a phone interview that this security force had already been present when it worked with the U.S. to end Islamic States presence in northeast Syria. The militias new focus, he said, would be stability in Syria.

The border force represents a significant change for Washington, which has declared in the past that, with Islamic States caliphate all but destroyed, it would draw down its support for the Kurds.

The U.S. has redefined its goals in Syria to include two important additional reasons for its continuing presence: not only to police against a comeback of ISIS, but to also gain leverage for a political process to gain traction, and roll back Russia and Iran, Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said in a phone interview. They believe they can deny Iran and Russia the fruits of their victory in Syria by keeping Assad weak and Syria poor.

Russia and Iran are set to be the big winners in the proxy war in Syria. By pouring money, men and materials into the conflict, they turned the tide in favor of Assad.

But the area the Kurds hold is one of Syrias richest: They control Tabqa dam, a major electricity source, as well as some of Syrias largest oil fields and agricultural wealth.

Denying it to Damascus, Landis said, would beggar Assad and make sure he wont have money to rebuild.

The Syrian war, almost in its seventh year, has turned wide swaths of the country into a wasteland of jagged masonry and rebar. In major cities like Aleppo and Homs, whole neighborhoods were pulverized by the fighting.

The reconstruction projects, thought to be a bonanza in the hundreds of billions of dollars, is the prize for Moscow and Tehran  provided Syria can pay.

Bulos is a special correspondent.

Twitter: @nabihbulos

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by

This is the commercial I did called the Road trip to Happiness for BMW. We filmed this over 12 days doing a road trip from India to Nepal to Bhutan. Without question it was one of the most challenging and memorable road trips Ive ever done-and Ive done a ton of them! Check out the Road trip to Happiness for BMW plus you can see the original article here!

One of the trends in advertising these days is that commercials and ads are no longer just 30 second ads with some celebrity or random actors. The trend is storytelling with real people doing real things. I was thrilled to be asked by BMW to be in this commercial. It was such a memorable experience and traveling with my crew of 4 Germans was great.

It was fun navigating the chaotic streets of Indian cities like Delhi, Agra, Lucknow and Darjeeling. It was amazing driving up in the mountains of Sikkim, West Bengal and Nepal into the amazing Kingdom of Bhutan. Driving is a challenge in these countries but this road trip to happiness for BMW is one Ill never forget as long as I live.

Sharing is caring!
Taylor Hendricks (Photo courtesy Philadelphia Police Department)

A Lehigh Valley Eagles fan who didn't have a ticket was ejected from the Lincoln Financial Field grounds on Saturday, Philadelphia police said.

If only things ended there.

The Eagles were playing the Atlanta Falcons Saturday at the stadium.

Police identified the fan as Taylor Hendricks, 22, of the 1900 block of Somerset Road in Whitehall Township. They said he was intoxicated.

After he was ejected, Hendricks walked over to a mounted police officer and his horse on Pattison Avenue, and began punching the horse, authorities said.

Hendricks hit the horse in the face, neck and shoulders, and also hit the officer in the legs, according to police.

Another officer came over and grabbed Hendricks. The horse and officer were not injured, police said.

Hendricks was arrested and charged with aggravated assault, taunting a police animal, simple assault and defiant trespass, records show.

He was released Sunday after posting 10 percent of $5,000 bail. An attorney has not yet entered an appearance for Hendricks.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
By Rudy Miller | For lehighvalleylive.com

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Do you drive an hour or more to work? Many Lehigh Valley residents do. Theyre lured to the Valley by the promise of affordable real estate but unwilling to give up jobs they can only find in New York City or northeastern New Jersey. So where in the Valley do these long-distance commuters live? Thats what a recent U.S. data release tells us.

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The American Fact Finder community survey by the U.S. Census Department measures the relative wealth, diversity and education levels of communities down to the township and borough level. On Dec. 7, 2017, the census released a compilation of data for the previous five years from 2012-2016. Among the information released is the length of commute for residents in each of the municipalities in Northampton, Lehigh and Warren Counties. Below are percentages of commuters for each town who travel an hour or more each way each day to work.

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More than a third of Portland residents drive an hour each way to work. The 34.9 percent figure is the highest of any community in the area. Forks and Upper Mount Bethel township residents also tend to drive far to work. More than twenty percent of residents in those communities drive an hour or more to work. The number of long-distance commuters is relatively high in Warren County communities, but drops considerably for residents in Lehigh County communities.

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Other residents have the benefit of driving less than 10 minutes to work or even working from home. The following charts show municipalities with the most residents who commute 10 minutes or less.

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If you think the Lehigh Valley has the most long-distance commuters in the state, you're wrong. Many more residents in the Poconos travel an hour-plus to get to New York City and northwestern New Jersey every day. In Pike County, 28 percent of residents travel an hour or more to work. That's tops in the state. Second is Monroe County, at 23 percent. In Northampton County, 11.6 percent of residents travel an hour or more each way, the 11th highest total in the state. Lehigh County is in the middle of the pack at 8 percent, 31st place out of 67 counties.

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Residents in townships or boroughs with long commutes might consider carpooling to save money on fuel and cut down on time behind the wheel. Heres the breakdown for the top municipalities for carpoolers per commuter.

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What about early risers? Where do the commuters live who leave for work between 5 and 6 a.m.? These charts give you the answers.

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You can make your commute more manageable by checking for travel alerts at www.511pa.com and www.511nj.org. Each site sends alerts in the event of crashes and has viewable travel maps and traffic cameras. The Pennsylvania site has a downloadable app for your phone that sends voice alerts in the event of traffic issues so you aren't distracted by looking down at your phone for updates while you're driving.

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These are the most flood-prone roads in the Lehigh Valley, per PennDOT

The 45 most congested roads in the Lehigh Valley by 2040

Is your car one of the 30 that AAA says are distracting to drivers?

Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.
By Eric Jespersen

Last month the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a bill to modernize the National Flood Insurance Program, which is set to expire soon. The proposal takes a very serious look at the growing problem of properties that repeatedly flood, and solutions, including more effectively communicating risk through transparency. Moreover, it introduces the concept of the federal government denying coverage to the riskiest and costliest properties.

In 2017 our country experienced one of the priciest hurricane seasons on record, with repair costs more than $50 billion, and more to come. Businesses, homes, and communities were destroyed and are now faced with the daunting task of rebuilding. The question remains: Will it be done with an eye toward resiliency and sustainability, or will we rebuild without decreasing our collective risk?

Pennsylvania is not immune to repeated flooding, nor is it immune to throwing good money after bad things. I believe Pennsylvania needs to enforce local ordinances that protect taxpayers from the vicious cycle of flooding and rebuilding, and ultimately get development out of the floodplains. If Congress implements smart reforms during the NFIP reauthorization process, it will send a signal to legislators in Harrisburg to take additional action to address policy and enforcement weaknesses unique to Pennsylvania.

Congress should enact reforms that encourage innovative mitigation techniques. They exist. Why aren't more members of Congress -- especially those in flood-prone communities -- willing to champion reforms that restrict building along hazardous floodplains, or at least require developers and property owners to take the necessary steps to make structures flood-ready? The simple but unfortunate answer is no one has wanted to curb development or make development costlier. The most recent disasters and the reauthorization process provide an opportunity to change.

Numerous studies show that every $1 spent in pre-disaster mitigation saves $4 in post-disaster recovery. The proposed legislation in Congress capitalizes on this and proposes a new federal-state partnership to create a revolving loan fund that allows states to provide low-interest loans to communities and organizations to fund flood mitigation projects, such as flood proofing, buyouts and storm water system upgrades.

As the Senate considers NFIP authorization, there are key opportunities included in the House version to help reduce our nation's flood risk - and better prepare communities and individuals for when the water rises. Sens. Pat Toomey and Bob Casey should support measures that encourage flood-prone communities to take measures to address and prioritize them. Also, homebuyers and renters need to be aware of a property's flood risk and history before purchasing or leasing their next home.

Congress has the ability to get this right at a time when we cannot afford to delay these decisions any longer. Let's hope they see the greater good and adopt NFIP reforms that salvage a critical federal program.

Eric Jespersen, of Drums, Pa., is a certified floodplain manager.
Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr. says the city planning commission's reasoning for rejecting Lafayette College's proposed dorm expansion doesn't hold water.

Panto, who supports the proposal to build dormitories for 400 students at the edge of the campus, says the denial isn't justified. Instead of allowing some degree of exception to the zoning ordinance, the planners made a strict interpretation of the law, he says. One example is the zoning code's 55-foot height limit on buildings at the location, which the planning board cited as a failure to comply.

Planning Commission Chairman Charles Elliott said the board's objections speak for themselves, and are clearly outlined in a 27-page report.

City council's planning and code committee has scheduled a meeting to talk about amendments to clarify the intent of the zoning code. Panto wants council to adopt clarifications to improve the college plan's chance for approval.

The project has been delayed for a year and a half. Some neighbors say it will increase on-street parking pressure, and the construction of a parking lot on Bushkill Drive won't address the problem. Some say the dorms would detract from the historic character of the neighborhood and remove affordable housing stock.

What do you think? Is the mayor correct? Should the planning board give a little? Are the planners right to stick to the specified code standards? Have a say in our informal poll, and feel free to join the conversation in the comments section.
THE LIMERICK priest based in the home parish of the late Dolores ORiordan has said that funeral plans have not as yet been finalised.

In a statement issued this Tuesday via the Catholic Communications Office, Fr James Walton, priest in Dolores' home parish of Ballybricken, said that details concerning the Funeral Mass for the late Dolores ORiordan RIP have not as yet been finalised.

When information on the funeral liturgy becomes available, it will be circulated to media by the Catholic Communications Office, the statement adds.

It is expected that her funeral will take place in Limerick, however.

Speaking to the Limerick Leader on Monday following the 46-year-olds sudden death in a London hotel, Fr Walton said he wished to extend my deepest sympathies to the family.

Police in London have confirmed that the Limerick rock stars sudden death at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane on Monday is not being treated as suspicious.

The Metropolitan Police said after a preliminary investigation that her death was not being treated as suspicious and the case will be handed over to the coroner's office.

A book of condolence was opened in her native Limerick this Tuesday morning, while a massive outpouring of grief and tributes have followed her death.

Her bandmates have said that they are devastated on the passing of our friend Dolores.

She was an extraordinary talent and we feel very privileged to have been part of her life from 1989 when we started the Cranberries. The world has lost a true artist today," they said.

Meanwhile, a close friend of Dolores' has said he received a call from the Limerick musician on Sunday night and that she was "full of life, joking and excited".

Record label boss Dan Waite of Eleven Seven Music said in a statement: "The news that my friend Dolores has passed deeply shocked me. I worked with the Cranberries at Universal Records and have kept in touch ever since.

"Dolores left me a voice message just after midnight last night stating how much she loved Bad Wolves' version of Zombie. She was looking forward to seeing me in the studio and recording vocals.

"She sounded full of life, was joking and excited to see me and my wife this week. The news of her passing is devastating and my thoughts are with Don her ex-husband, her children and her mother."
MANAGEMENT of the public health service in Ireland must be taken out of the political arena and handed over to experts, a Limerick councillor has said.

Thats according to Fine Gael councillor Daniel Butler, who was speaking as the trolley crisis continues to spiral out of control this winter.

People waiting in emergency departments for treatment climbed to a record high of 677 over the New Year period, and at this weeks metropolitan council meeting, members called for change.

Locally, that means re-opening the emergency unit at St Johns Hospital, proposed by Cllr Kieran OHanlon, while Cllr Cian Prendiville lodged a formal notice of motion urging beds axed over the last decade to be brought back into use.

Our health service has fewer beds then in the 1980s, even though the population has gone up hugely in that time. Its an emergency, its a crisis, but its no accident, he said, One-third of people who go to A&E wait more than six hours. And we are now in a situation where people feel that is not too bad, Cllr Prendiville said.

Cllr Malachy McCreesh seconded the motion, laying the blame for the pile-up at University Hospital Limerick on the closure of beds in St Johns Hospital, plus Ennis and Nenagh.

No matter who is in government, we will have this crisis. Its not going to be solved here  the best political minds seem to be unable to solve this problem, Labour councillor Joe Leddin said, calling for a higher rate of investment.

Fine Gael councillor Michael Hourigan pointed out a spend of 14bn on the health service.

No-one likes to see people on trolleys, but there needs to be a recognition that quite a lot is being done. This government has one of the highest budgets in the European Union on health, he said.

Cllr OHanlon also called for a return of the Mid-West health board.

Sinn Fein councillor Seighin O Ceallaigh called on members to invite new University of Limerick chancellor, and former Health Minister Mary Harney to ask her why, when she predicted an impending crisis, during her time in office, did she not act?

Cllr Butler said: Take the health service out of the political arena and have it dealt with on a cross-party basis. I am fed up to the back teeth of hearing stories of people waiting on trolleys. Its unfathomable whats going on.

Councillor Elena Secas called on bosses at University Hospital Limerick to be asked to attend the next council meeting to update members on their plans for Dooradoyle.

This was adopted by members at the meeting.
THE COUNTY Limerick farmer who chairs the ICMSAs dairy committee says that global dairy markets have shown some strength at the start of the New Year and he expressed hopes that a trend could develop.

Gerald Quain said the latest Global Dairy Trade showed a positive return of 2.2% after negative trends of the last quarter of 2017 and the GDT index itself was largely stable over the course of 2017 with its peak-to-trough ratio at it lowest in over five years.

Last year saw the range of the index go from a high of 1096 in June to a low of 955 in December; contrast this to 2014 where the peak reached 1482 before falling back to 734 in December of that year.

While the GDT softened over the course of 2017 it is extremely encouraging to see that those kinds of huge swings did not occur.

ICMSA is looking for gradual improvement over the coming months given the Fonterra forecast of a 4% lower production in New Zealand for their milk season, said Mr Quain, who farms in Creggane.

European quotes also softened over the course of 2017, but butter remains historically high with no signs that demand for this reputationally rehabilitated product is wavering. European average prices for the last week of 2017 record butter at 4,580 per tonne but, more importantly, Irish butter is returning 5,040 per tonne. This is very encouraging as we face into 2018 and it is vital that all returns are maximized and returned directly to farmers on the ground. While powders remain weak they have shown increases in the last week of the year and it would be helpful if powders could continue to increase in the coming months to match those returns of butter, he continued.

Mr Quain concluded by saying that he expected the relative stability in the market to convince dairy processors to start the year off on a positive note by holding milk price at its current levels and, above all, to spare no effort towards ensuring that this price remains strong running up to and through the peak milk production months.

Meanwhile, Limerick ICMSA chairman Tom Blackburn, who made national headlines after his comments in last weeks Farm Leader about the dangers of taking photos of newly-born calves and cow, has hit out at the ongoing problems associated with calendar farming.

The open period for slurry spreading in Limerick begins on Monday, January 15. Mr Blackburn expects the drawbacks associated with this rigid adherence to the calendar to be painfully obvious in the weeks immediately after that date.

Current weather conditions - or anything like them - from the 15th onwards will prevent many local farmers from spreading slurry when the period opens. Farmers are extremely frustrated and anxious in many areas as tanks are rising and many anticipate difficulties getting it out once the period opens due to the poor weather conditions and massive rainfall.

Weve always felt that the system needs to be more responsive so that when a window of opportunity presents itself that farmers can get going then. Realistically calendar farming was always too rigid and inflexible and was based on traditional weather patterns, but as climate change kicks in and changes - often drastically  traditional weather patterns then this old reliance on historical weather patterns is becoming even more cumbersome and irrelevant. Its going to have to change and ICMSA will be pressing for the new reality to be faced and factored-in, he said.
TRANSPORT Minister Shane Ross has pledged 34m for opening works on the Killaloe bypass.

Fellow Independent TD Dr Michael Harty, who represents Clare, confirmed the good news in a statement yesterday.

The funding will cover the period between now and 2021, and, Dr Harty said, will allow the heritage town of Killaloe to breathe once again.

The announcement from the Minister follows the conclusion of the Capital Plan Review process and nationally an increase of 486m was secured for roads over that four year period bringing the total road investment for the period to 4.26 billion. This increased allocation will allow the Minister to commence a number of significant road projects including the Killaloe bypass/R494 upgrade, Dr Harty confirmed.

Clare County Council has already announced that construction of the Killaloe Bypass is set to commence in early 2019.

It said work will get underway depending on funds available in next years budget.

The Killaloe bypass is part of the new River Shannon crossing scheme aims to create a western bypass around the town which will connect with the proposed new Shannon bridge south of Killaloe and to the N7 at Birdhill.

The announcement of 34 million from Mr Ross is a clear commitment from Government and I warmly welcome his decision, he added.
LIMERICK council has agreed to install a closed circuit television (CCTV) camera to help combat anti-social behaviour in a northside estate.

The CCTV at Canon Breen Park in Thomondgate will be monitored from the Moyross community centre, and come following lobbying by Willie ODea.

He said: Many residents have been in touch with me about the consistent problem of anti-social behaviour in Thomondgate and in particular around Canon Breen Park. Many areas of Limerick have experienced very severe anti-social behaviour, particularly from gangs of youths congregating in large numbers and wreaking havoc in the local area. The camera in Canon Breen Park will assist the Gardai in locating the trouble spots and pin pointing the culprits."

The cameras will be installed on a trial basis within the next month.

Sinn Fein councillor John Costelloe, who has also raised the issue of anti-social behaviour on the northside at local authority meetings, welcomed the move.

He said: Its a welcome development, and not before time. We have had years of anti-social behaviour. We are also in the process of closing a laneway in Canon Breen Park which has become a magnet for anti-social behaviour. I have been working with residents in the area to try and close it, and it is in the process of happening.

This matter is progressing through the planning stage.
Business Founder of 5x5 Media Mr. Guy Zajonc to lead SponsorsOnes (CSE: $SPO.C) transactional media business as President



16.01.2018 19:37:52 - Mr. Zajonc, Founder and former CEO of Five By Five Media Inc, 5X5 produced EMMY winning Jamie Olivers Food Revolution for ABC, The Hero and Wake Up Call with Dwayne the Rock Johnson, and Fashion Star for NBC



(live-PR.com) - Founder of 5x5 Media Mr. Guy Zajonc to lead SponsorsOnes (CSE: $SPO.C) transactional media business as President; #SponsorCoin



Mr. Zajonc, Founder and former CEO of Five By Five Media Inc, 5X5 produced EMMY winning Jamie Olivers Food Revolution for ABC, The Hero and Wake Up Call with Dwayne the Rock Johnson, and Fashion Star for NBC



Waterloo, Ontario, January 16, 2018: - Founder of 5x5 Media Mr. Guy Zajonc to lead SponsorsOnes (CSE: $SPO.C) transactional media business as President; #SponsorCoinMr. Zajonc, Founder and former CEO of Five By Five Media Inc, 5X5 produced EMMY winning Jamie Olivers Food Revolution for ABC, The Hero and Wake Up Call with Dwayne the Rock Johnson, and Fashion Star for NBCWaterloo, Ontario, January 16, 2018: (Investorideas.com Newswire) SponsorsOne Inc. (CSE: SPO) (Frankfurt: 5SO) (the Company), has developed the SponsorsCloudTM platform to support the worlds first scalable digital cryptocurrency for social networks called the SponsorCoin.



SponsorCoin support smart contracts between Brands, Consumers and Influencers which automatically determines compensation for authentic social engagement. SponsorsOne is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Guy Zajonc as President of SponsorsOne Media Inc. in the USA.



Read this news in full at



We are very pleased to add Mr. Zajonc to the management of SponsorsOne. His experience in content creation and transactional media is invaluable to the Brands we have engaged, stated Myles Bartholomew, Founder and CEO of SponsorsOne. This will be critical as we take the marketing lead for our Brands and develop engaging content in the form of video production to be distributed through all digital channels worldwide.



I envision Sponsors One Media creating, producing, owning and distributing excellent video content capable of delivering multiple streams of revenue to SponsorsOne. We intend to broadcast digitally through channels such as Amazon, Netflix, and others, as well as our own channels. states Guy Zajonc, President of SponsorsOne Media Inc. The audience engagement model is established through the SponsorsCloud, which will aggregate millions of consumers into communities around each brand featured in this content.



Mr. Zajonc, Founder and former CEO of Five By Five Media Inc, (5x5) 5X5 produced over $100M USD in television programming including EMMY winning Jamie Olivers Food Revolution for ABC, The Hero and Wake Up Call with Dwayne the Rock Johnson, and Fashion Star for NBC, distributed to over 100 countries.



Mr. Zajonc will lead the buildup of the delivery teams for Specialty Food, Fashion, Beauty, eSports and more, including original creative development, content production, sales, marketing, distribution, Brand support and crypto-commerce.



About SponsorsOne:

SponsorsOne is positioned as a leader in the next evolution of social digital marketing and crypto-commerce with the SponsorsCloudTM platform and its highly scalable digital  smart contract based crypto-currency called SponsorCoin. Combined, this allows Brands to build and manage their own proprietary and highly engaged communities of influencers within the social realm. The SponsorsCloudTM platform allows for data driven marketing campaigns that will change the way brands connect to their customers and compensate the consumer for authentic engagement using the SponsorCoin digital crypto-currency. SponsorsCloudTM and SponsorsCoin is a tool for brands to inspire real movements around their products and services in which their most valuable customers become their best salespeople, producing far greater ROI than current social media advertising methods.



ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Gary Bartholomew, Executive Chairman



To learn more please visit

Or



The Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this Press Release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements and information that are based on the beliefs of management and reflect the Companys current expectations. When used in this news release, the words estimate, project, belief, anticipate, intend, expect, plan, predict, may or should and the negative of these words or such variations thereon or comparable terminology, are intended to identify forward-looking statements and information. Such statements and information reflect the current view of the Company with respect to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in those forward-looking statements and information.

By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the following risks: risks associated with marketing and sale of securities; the need for additional financing requirements and access to capital, reliance on key personnel; the potential for conflicts of interest among certain officers or directors with certain other projects; the volatility of the volume and price of the Common Shares, the failure of the business strategy, the integrity of the Companys patents and proprietary intellectual property and competition. The Company cautions that the foregoing list of risk factors is not exhaustive and is subject to change and there can be no assurance that such assumptions will reflect the actual outcome of such items or factors. When relying on the Companys forward-looking statements and information to make decisions, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events, including the risk factors set out in the Companys Listing Statement. The Company has assumed a certain progression, which may not be realized. It has also assumed that the material factors referred to above will not cause such forward-looking statements and information to differ materially from actual results or events.



THE FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS NEWS RELEASE REPRESENTS THE EXPECTATIONS OF THE COMPANY AS OF THE DATE OF THIS NEWS RELEASE AND, ACCORDINGLY, IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AFTER SUCH DATE. READERS SHOULD NOT PLACE UNDUE IMPORTANCE ON FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION AND SHOULD NOT RELY UPON THIS INFORMATION AS OF ANY OTHER DATE. WHILE THE COMPANY MAY ELECT TO, IT DOES NOT UNDERTAKE TO UPDATE THIS INFORMATION AT ANY PARTICULAR TIME EXCEPT AS REQUIRED IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE SECURITIES LEGISLATION.

SponsorsOne Inc. (CSE: SPO.C) is a featured company on Investorideas.com



View the profile on Investorideas.com



This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders



Sign up for free news alerts

www.investorideas.com/Resources/Newsletter.asp



Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investment involves risk and possible loss of investment. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Contact each company directly regarding content and press release questions. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. More disclaimer info:

Additional info regarding BC Residents and global Investors: Effective September 15 2008 - all BC investors should review all OTC and Pink sheet listed companies for adherence in new disclosure filings and filing appropriate documents with Sedar. Read for more info:





Bitcoin, Blockchain and Digital Currency Stocks and ICO's

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Join our Crypto/blockchain group on Linkedin

(Investorideas.com Newswire) SponsorsOne Inc. (CSE: SPO) (Frankfurt: 5SO) (the Company), has developed the SponsorsCloudTM platform to support the worlds first scalable digital cryptocurrency for social networks called the SponsorCoin.SponsorCoin support smart contracts between Brands, Consumers and Influencers which automatically determines compensation for authentic social engagement. SponsorsOne is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Guy Zajonc as President of SponsorsOne Media Inc. in the USA.Read this news in full at www.investorideas.com/CO/SPO/news/2018/01161GuyZajonc.asp We are very pleased to add Mr. Zajonc to the management of SponsorsOne. His experience in content creation and transactional media is invaluable to the Brands we have engaged, stated Myles Bartholomew, Founder and CEO of SponsorsOne. This will be critical as we take the marketing lead for our Brands and develop engaging content in the form of video production to be distributed through all digital channels worldwide.I envision Sponsors One Media creating, producing, owning and distributing excellent video content capable of delivering multiple streams of revenue to SponsorsOne. We intend to broadcast digitally through channels such as Amazon, Netflix, and others, as well as our own channels. states Guy Zajonc, President of SponsorsOne Media Inc. The audience engagement model is established through the SponsorsCloud, which will aggregate millions of consumers into communities around each brand featured in this content.Mr. Zajonc, Founder and former CEO of Five By Five Media Inc, (5x5) 5X5 produced over $100M USD in television programming including EMMY winning Jamie Olivers Food Revolution for ABC, The Hero and Wake Up Call with Dwayne the Rock Johnson, and Fashion Star for NBC, distributed to over 100 countries.Mr. Zajonc will lead the buildup of the delivery teams for Specialty Food, Fashion, Beauty, eSports and more, including original creative development, content production, sales, marketing, distribution, Brand support and crypto-commerce.About SponsorsOne:SponsorsOne is positioned as a leader in the next evolution of social digital marketing and crypto-commerce with the SponsorsCloudTM platform and its highly scalable digital  smart contract based crypto-currency called SponsorCoin. Combined, this allows Brands to build and manage their own proprietary and highly engaged communities of influencers within the social realm. The SponsorsCloudTM platform allows for data driven marketing campaigns that will change the way brands connect to their customers and compensate the consumer for authentic engagement using the SponsorCoin digital crypto-currency. SponsorsCloudTM and SponsorsCoin is a tool for brands to inspire real movements around their products and services in which their most valuable customers become their best salespeople, producing far greater ROI than current social media advertising methods.ON BEHALF OF THE BOARDGary Bartholomew, Executive ChairmanTo learn more please visit sponsorsone.com Or www.sponsorsone.com/de/ The Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this Press Release.Forward-Looking StatementsThis news release contains forward-looking statements and information that are based on the beliefs of management and reflect the Companys current expectations. When used in this news release, the words estimate, project, belief, anticipate, intend, expect, plan, predict, may or should and the negative of these words or such variations thereon or comparable terminology, are intended to identify forward-looking statements and information. Such statements and information reflect the current view of the Company with respect to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in those forward-looking statements and information.By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the following risks: risks associated with marketing and sale of securities; the need for additional financing requirements and access to capital, reliance on key personnel; the potential for conflicts of interest among certain officers or directors with certain other projects; the volatility of the volume and price of the Common Shares, the failure of the business strategy, the integrity of the Companys patents and proprietary intellectual property and competition. The Company cautions that the foregoing list of risk factors is not exhaustive and is subject to change and there can be no assurance that such assumptions will reflect the actual outcome of such items or factors. When relying on the Companys forward-looking statements and information to make decisions, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events, including the risk factors set out in the Companys Listing Statement. The Company has assumed a certain progression, which may not be realized. It has also assumed that the material factors referred to above will not cause such forward-looking statements and information to differ materially from actual results or events.THE FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS NEWS RELEASE REPRESENTS THE EXPECTATIONS OF THE COMPANY AS OF THE DATE OF THIS NEWS RELEASE AND, ACCORDINGLY, IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AFTER SUCH DATE. READERS SHOULD NOT PLACE UNDUE IMPORTANCE ON FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION AND SHOULD NOT RELY UPON THIS INFORMATION AS OF ANY OTHER DATE. WHILE THE COMPANY MAY ELECT TO, IT DOES NOT UNDERTAKE TO UPDATE THIS INFORMATION AT ANY PARTICULAR TIME EXCEPT AS REQUIRED IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE SECURITIES LEGISLATION.SponsorsOne Inc. (CSE: SPO.C) is a featured company on Investorideas.comView the profile on Investorideas.comThis news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leadersSign up for free news alertsDisclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investment involves risk and possible loss of investment. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Contact each company directly regarding content and press release questions. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. More disclaimer info: www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp . Disclosure: SponsorsOne Inc. (CSE: SPO)- paid PR, media, news publishing and social media client on Investorideas effective January 8, 2018 for fourty five daysAdditional info regarding BC Residents and global Investors: Effective September 15 2008 - all BC investors should review all OTC and Pink sheet listed companies for adherence in new disclosure filings and filing appropriate documents with Sedar. Read for more info: www.bcsc.bc.ca/release.aspx?id=6894 . Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country.Bitcoin, Blockchain and Digital Currency Stocks and ICO'sAt Cryptocurrencyinvestorideas.com, Blockchaininvestorideas.com and Investorideas.comLike Bitcoin, Blockchain and Digital Currency Stocks? Check out our Bitcoin, Blockchain and Digital Currency Stocks DirectoryAnd also at Bitcoinandblockchainstocks.com - Get News Alerts on Bitcoin StocksJoin our Crypto/blockchain group on Linkedin Contact information:

SponsorsOne



Waterloo, ON



Contact Person:

Gary Bartholomew

Executive Chairman

Phone: 416-855-9305

eMail: eMail



Web: http://sponsorsone.com

Author:

Dawn VanZant

e-mail

Web: http://www.investorideas.com

Phone: 800-665-0411 16.01.2018 19:37:52 -

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Computer & Technology HID Global to Unveil New Physical Access Solutions for Regional Organizations at Intersec 2018



16.01.2018 08:30:32 - Company will also demonstrate Workforce Optimization with HID Location Services



(live-PR.com) - Dubai, UAE, January 16, 2018  (S2-G16): HID Global, a worldwide leader in trusted identity solutions, will unveil a new physical access solution tailored for SMBs in the Middle East region and will showcase its innovative HID Location Services offering for workplace optimization at Intersec 2018 Booth Number S2-G16. The company will also feature its broad range of trusted identity - Dubai, UAE, January 16, 2018  (S2-G16): HID Global, a worldwide leader in trusted identity solutions, will unveil a new physical access solution tailored for SMBs in the Middle East region and will showcase its innovative HID Location Services offering for workplace optimization at Intersec 2018 Booth Number S2-G16. The company will also feature its broad range of trusted identity offerings, including its latest embedded solution that facilitates integrating mobile access capabilities into products and services.



Physical access security is rapidly moving to the cloud to support regional businesses that are adopting an IoT environment. This move is creating a growing demand for increased, real-time visibility into the most important areas of the organizations operations across multiple locations or a specific area, said Wisam Yaghmour, Regional Director at HID Global. Through our participation at Intersec we aim to enable organizations with solutions to efficiently manage their security needs and reduce risk with cost-effective yet advanced technology which only HID Global brings to the market.



From January 21-23, 2018, HID Global will present its extensive portfolio of trusted identity solutions and provide visitors hands-on demonstrations that include:



 HID Location Services is designed to address a growing market need for accurate, real-time location of an organizations workforce. By combining innovative Internet of Things (IoT) technology with the power of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi and cloud-based solutions, organizations can gain increased visibility into the location of their workforce in a facility.



 Identification & Sensing Technologies that monitor the location, performance, condition and health of assets and motorized equipment using HID Location Services and HID Condition Monitoring. New frequency-agnostic tamper-evident Tamper Seal Tags that detect missing or unauthorized access for high-value items, plus new BEEKs Mini Tamper Proof Bluetooth beacon with anti-theft protection for tracking high value assets.



 High definition and eco-friendly printing solutions with HID FARGO DTC1500 ID Card Printer & Encoder that brings new convenience and security features to its proven entry-level offering while further reducing ID card printing expenses for cost-conscious organizations.



 Embedded reader modules to support growing demand for mobility, security and privacy. The iCLASS SE Reader Module MK2 hardware and Service Pack 1 firmware offers numerous new features, including full iCLASS Seos and MIFARE DESFire APIs for full read/write applications utilizing these technologies. The firmware supports future use of mobile access credentials utilizing Bluetooth Smart, as well as support for legacy Indala Prox credentials.



 The power of Seos technology adds trust to identities so users can confidently embrace and use new applications that simplify and enrich their lives. It is at the heart of HID Mobile Access, which provides a safe and secure way for people to use their phones alongside traditional cards for access control and other trusted applications. The transformational power of Seos has been demonstrated in applications at universities, banks, hotels, hospitals and other institutions, simplifying issuance through over-the-air provisioning.





 Quantum Secure SAFE Enterprise software brings together everything organizations need to streamline and centralize management of the entire lifecycle for employee, contractor and visitor identities. SAFE Enterprise transforms the security function, enabling collaboration across different departments and teams to address identity management and compliance challenges through a single, centralized platform. SAFE Enterprise enables organizations to manage all of their identity types at a lower cost and without having to purchase separate, stand-alone products.



Stay Connected with HID Global

Visit our Media Center, read our Industry Blog, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.



About HID Global

HID Global powers the trusted identities of the worlds people, places and things. We make it possible for people to transact safely, work productively and travel freely. Our trusted identity solutions give people secure and convenient access to physical and digital places and connect things that can be accurately identified, verified and tracked digitally. Millions of people around the world use HID products and services to navigate their everyday lives, and over 2 billion things are connected through HID technology. We work with governments, educational institutions, hospitals, financial institutions, industrial businesses and some of the most innovative companies on the planet. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, HID Global has over 3,000 employees worldwide and operates international offices that support more than 100 countries. HID Global is an ASSA ABLOY Group brand. For more information, visit

offerings, including its latest embedded solution that facilitates integrating mobile access capabilities into products and services.Physical access security is rapidly moving to the cloud to support regional businesses that are adopting an IoT environment. This move is creating a growing demand for increased, real-time visibility into the most important areas of the organizations operations across multiple locations or a specific area, said Wisam Yaghmour, Regional Director at HID Global. Through our participation at Intersec we aim to enable organizations with solutions to efficiently manage their security needs and reduce risk with cost-effective yet advanced technology which only HID Global brings to the market.From January 21-23, 2018, HID Global will present its extensive portfolio of trusted identity solutions and provide visitors hands-on demonstrations that include: HID Location Services is designed to address a growing market need for accurate, real-time location of an organizations workforce. By combining innovative Internet of Things (IoT) technology with the power of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi and cloud-based solutions, organizations can gain increased visibility into the location of their workforce in a facility. Identification & Sensing Technologies that monitor the location, performance, condition and health of assets and motorized equipment using HID Location Services and HID Condition Monitoring. New frequency-agnostic tamper-evident Tamper Seal Tags that detect missing or unauthorized access for high-value items, plus new BEEKs Mini Tamper Proof Bluetooth beacon with anti-theft protection for tracking high value assets. High definition and eco-friendly printing solutions with HID FARGO DTC1500 ID Card Printer & Encoder that brings new convenience and security features to its proven entry-level offering while further reducing ID card printing expenses for cost-conscious organizations. Embedded reader modules to support growing demand for mobility, security and privacy. The iCLASS SE Reader Module MK2 hardware and Service Pack 1 firmware offers numerous new features, including full iCLASS Seos and MIFARE DESFire APIs for full read/write applications utilizing these technologies. The firmware supports future use of mobile access credentials utilizing Bluetooth Smart, as well as support for legacy Indala Prox credentials. The power of Seos technology adds trust to identities so users can confidently embrace and use new applications that simplify and enrich their lives. It is at the heart of HID Mobile Access, which provides a safe and secure way for people to use their phones alongside traditional cards for access control and other trusted applications. The transformational power of Seos has been demonstrated in applications at universities, banks, hotels, hospitals and other institutions, simplifying issuance through over-the-air provisioning. Quantum Secure SAFE Enterprise software brings together everything organizations need to streamline and centralize management of the entire lifecycle for employee, contractor and visitor identities. SAFE Enterprise transforms the security function, enabling collaboration across different departments and teams to address identity management and compliance challenges through a single, centralized platform. SAFE Enterprise enables organizations to manage all of their identity types at a lower cost and without having to purchase separate, stand-alone products.Stay Connected with HID GlobalVisit our Media Center, read our Industry Blog, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.About HID GlobalHID Global powers the trusted identities of the worlds people, places and things. We make it possible for people to transact safely, work productively and travel freely. Our trusted identity solutions give people secure and convenient access to physical and digital places and connect things that can be accurately identified, verified and tracked digitally. Millions of people around the world use HID products and services to navigate their everyday lives, and over 2 billion things are connected through HID technology. We work with governments, educational institutions, hospitals, financial institutions, industrial businesses and some of the most innovative companies on the planet. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, HID Global has over 3,000 employees worldwide and operates international offices that support more than 100 countries. HID Global is an ASSA ABLOY Group brand. For more information, visit www.hidglobal.com. Contact information:

HID GLOBAL







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S&P Global Ratings has assigned its 'B-' long-term corporate credit rating to Metinvest B.V., the holding company of a group of mostly Ukraine-based vertically integrated steel and mining assets, the outlook is stable, reads a report on the rating agency's website.

"Metinvest, with operations in Ukraine and abroad, is a midsize producer with steel capacity of 8.3 million tonnes (Mt). This compares with rated peers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, such as Severstal (11.6Mt), Evraz (13.5Mt), and SSAB (8Mt). Metinvest had revenues of $6.2 billion and S&P Global Ratings-adjusted EBITDA of $874 million (excluding contributions from joint ventures) in 2016. The company's iron ore production was about 30Mt in 2016, and a substantial part of group earnings derived from third-party sales of iron ore," according to the report.

"Established in 2006, Metinvest is a private company, majority owned (71.2% as of June 30, 2017) by System Capital Management (SCM), a large Ukrainian financial and industrial group that had consolidated 2016 revenues of $11.4 billion. SCM's credit standing does not currently constrain the ratings on Metinvest, in our view. We note that a shareholder agreement requires unanimous decisions by shareholders and a eurobond and pre-export finance (PXF) documentation limits dividends. We note the ongoing legal proceedings between SCM Group and Raga Establishment Ltd. Metinvest does not expect any impact on its business from these proceedings. The current rating on Metinvest assumes that SCM Group will maintain its current shareholding in the company. Our assessment of Metinvest's business risk profile as vulnerable takes into account the very high risk of operating in Ukraine and high earnings volatility over the past two to three years, hampered by the loss of assets and receivable impairments in Ukraine. We also consider the volatile global steel markets, the company's focus on commodity steel grades, and its relatively high-cost mining assets. These risks are partly mitigated by improving steel margins and access to European markets by way of rolling mills based inside the EU," S&P experts said.

"The company's vertical integration gives it the flexibility to alter its product mix and redirect volumes for internal use or export depending on market prices. The company is self-sufficient in iron ore (267% during the first nine months of 2017) and coke (116%), and, to a lesser degree, in coking coal (about 30%) from its U.S.-based subsidiary United Coal. Metinvest's rolling mills in Italy, the U.K., and Bulgaria somewhat enhance its competitive advantage over other exporters, as these are not subject to EU import duties. That said, the company has a high concentration of assets in Ukraine, which weighs on its business risk profile, in our view. This risk materialized in the loss of several of its production assets in Eastern Ukraine last year and significant receivable impairments in 2016 (related to receivables that had been due for over five years)," they stated.

"Of the revenues generated in the first nine months of 2017, 74% came from international sales, mostly in Europe, where market conditions improved and steel prices were supportive over the period. This compares with the Ukrainian steel market, which has seen crude steel production decrease since 2013, due to unfavorable market conditions and lower domestic demand, amid the economic crisis and conflict in the Eastern Ukraine. We expect Metinvest will report stronger profitability in 2017, with an S&P Global Ratings-adjusted EBITDA margin of 15-20% (assessment includes the distribution of third-party production, which slightly depresses margins) on more supportive steel, iron ore, and coking coal prices. However, the company's historically volatile profitability in the steel segment particularly following the depressed iron ore and steel environment in 2014-2016, constrains our assessment. We see Metinvest's mining cash cost in the fourth quartile (CFR China basis) as higher than levels at rated peers like Ferrexpo PLC and Metalloinvest. Our assessment of Metinvest's financial risk profile balances the company's current and expected funds from operations (FFO) to debt above 30% with the company's typically volatile earnings, the high levels of catch-up capital expenditures (capex) we expect in the next few years, and lower price assumptions for iron ore in 2018 and 2019. The cash sweep mechanism and the dividend restrictions under the eurobond and PXF documentation provide comfort and visibility on financial policy in terms of expectations of deleveraging and lack of dividend payments," reads the document.

"We expect 2017 to be a good year for Metinvest, buoyed by higher prices, which will likely allow the company to achieve S&P Global Ratings-adjusted FFO to debt of about 35%, compared with below 20% in 2016, and adjusted debt to EBITDA of around 2.0x, compared with 3.4x at end-2016 and around 10.0x at end-2015. Under our forecast of somewhat lower iron ore prices and debt, but higher pellet premiums and capex, we expect FFO to debt in the 35-40% range in 2018," according to the agency.

"In March 2017, the company completed its debt restructuring of its eurobonds and PXF facilities. Post restructuring, the capital structure consists of $1.2 billion eurobonds, $1.1 billion PXF facilities, trade finance, other debt (leasing and export credit agency financing), and $0.4 billion shareholder loans (SHL) - excluded from S&P Global Ratings-adjusted debt. The restructuring agreement resulted in an improved capital structure, with maturities extended to 2021, and has strengthened the company's liquidity position. The new loan has a two-year quasi-grace period, during which only 30% of interest payments and no principal repayments are made, unless the cash balance exceeds $180 million. In addition, the loan documentation restricts Metinvest from paying dividends unless certain conditions are met, including consolidated net leverage below 1.5x (defined as per loan documentation) and at least 55% of bonds and PFX amounts outstanding as of the restructuring that must have been repaid," S&P said.

"As of June 30, 2017, S&P Global Ratings-adjusted debt for Metinvest was $2.95 billion. We also include in our measure of adjusted debt $276 million of defined benefit pension obligations, $115 million of trade receivables sold, $54 million of asset retirement obligations, trade finance, and other debt (leasing and export credit agency financing). We exclude the shareholder loan of $443 million in our adjusted debt calculation, since this is subordinated, has no ongoing debt service requirements, and matures after other debt obligations," it stated.

"The stable outlook reflects our base-case expectation that Metinvest will be able to improve and sustain higher margins in 2017 and thereafter, from a low base in 2015. We expect high planned capex to constrain free operating cash flow generation over the same period, however. We also assume that Metinvest will maintain adequate liquidity. Furthermore, we take into account that Metinvest's majority shareholder SCM will pose no constraint on Metinvest and that there will be no further geopolitical risk escalation in Ukraine. The rating on Metinvest is currently not constrained by our view of the sovereign's creditworthiness," the report says.

"We expect that the company will maintain adjusted FFO to debt of over 20% under normal market conditions and could withstand a weakening to 12% under a lower commodity price scenario. We could lower our rating on Metinvest if its steel margins fail to stabilize in 2018, as we expect in our base case, because this would lead to higher leverage than we currently forecast. A deterioration in the company's liquidity could also lead us to review the rating. Moreover, a weakening of the credit profile of the SCM group could squeeze the current 'B-' rating," according to the document.

"Given the debt restructuring and changes in the business in 2017, a potential upgrade would hinge on the company demonstrating, over the next 12-18 months, operating performance in line with our base case. The credit quality of the controlling shareholders and maintenance of sufficiently robust liquidity to withstand a sovereign default are also factors we would consider before taking a positive rating action," the experts summarized.
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has authorized Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk to sign a letter on amendments to the agreement with the European Investment Bank on the rehabilitation of hydroelectric power stations, the website of the president of Ukraine has said.

"Authorize Finance Minister of Ukraine, Danyliuk Oleksandr Oleksandrovych, to sign Letter of Amendment No. 1 to the Financial Agreement ("Rehabilitation of Hydro Power Plants" Project) between Ukraine and the European Investment Bank," Presidential Decree No. 12/2018-rp dated January 15, 2018, reads.
The Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC) has taken Vodafone's appeal for access to a damaged cable through which communication has disappeared in the uncontrolled territory of Donbas, Donbas.Realii Radio Liberty has reported referring to the head of Vodafone's communications department Viktoria Ruban.

"Literally a few hours ago, JCCC informed us that our appeal was taken to task. We are waiting. The situation can be solved if we are provided with physical access to the cable even in the gray zone. If our brigades are provided with more or less safe access, then we can repair cable and this will solve the problem with communication if not for all subscribers, then for most of them," the radio website quoted her on Monday evening.

At the same time Ruban assured that Vodafone does not have direct contacts with illegal armed formations.

"We appeal to the Ukrainian authorities, because we are a Ukrainian company and act according to Ukrainian laws," she said.

As reported, the Vodafone Ukraine mobile network operator asked for repair teams to be allowed to enter Donbas to repair communications networks in the ATO zone.

"We have appealed to all those responsible, including the Ukrainian administrations in Luhansk and Donetsk regions, the [Joint] Coordination and Control Center, and the OSCE mission: please let our repair team into the grey zone to repair the damaged line. So far, no results. The only hope is that we have not received a definitive 'no' to our requests. But we would very much like a decision to be made as quickly as possible," Ruban wrote on Facebook on Monday.

More than a third of the cellular operator's equipment in the uncontrolled areas of Donbas is currently out of order, the operator said.

Earlier, Vodafone-Ukraine stated that it could not restore the connection that had disconnected due to a cable break in the territory of the so-called 'LPR' in case the cable was cut off in territory that was not under Kyiv's control.

The Mass Communications Ministry of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) said earlier that Vodafone Ukraine's service in the LPR was lost on January 11 due to a fiber optic cable rupture near the village of Olenivka in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. Vodafone Ukraine said it cannot repair damage if the cable is damaged in an area not controlled by Kyiv.
The Individuals' Deposit Guarantee Fund (IDGF) has initiated a new criminal case against former President of VAB Bank (Kyiv) Serhiy Maksymov on suspicion of large-scale embezzlement of the financial institution's funds, reads a report posted on the IDGF's website.

The debts of firms that are subordinate to and connected with Maksymov, under the loans granted by the bank, currently exceed UAH 2 billion.

"The issue concerns more than 25 loan agreements signed in 2004-2009... The last payment for servicing such loans was made five years ago, and the lion's share was not served for more than eight years. In addition, the vast majority of legal entities that borrowed the funds started the bankruptcy procedure, and some of them have already been liquidated," the statement reads.

According to the report, due to the revealed criminal actions of the bank's former president, the IDGF's authorized person applied to law enforcement agencies with a statement about large-scale embezzlement of the bank's funds, legalization of proceeds from crime.

According to the results of the investigation, the chief investigation department of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry notified Maksymov of suspicion of committing a number of particularly serious crimes. The pre-trial investigation found that the bank's ex-president, in preliminary agreement with other persons, seized VAB Bank's funds in especially large amounts by issuing fictitious loans to enterprises controlled by him. The funds received as a result of a number of fictitious transactions were transferred to other controlled companies and then to the personal accounts of Maksymov and those controlled by him.

The court chose for him a measure of restraint in the form of detention. Due to the fact that the whereabouts of the suspect were not established, Maksymov was placed on the international wanted list. However, at the beginning of 2017, the criminal proceeding against Maksymov on suspicion of embezzlement of the bank's funds was closed. VAB Bank, which has the status of a victim in the proceeding, disagreed with this decision and, on the complaint of the IDGF's authorized person, the unlawful decisions of the investigator and the prosecutor were canceled by the court and the investigation in this case resumed.

On March 20, 2015, the NBU decided to revoke the banking license and liquidate VAB Bank.
The twisted, true story of Andrew Cunanan's 1997 killing spree exists in whatever dark sliver of cultural space remains between lurid and sordid. It dangles just out of satisfying reach, even with all the fresh attention being lavished upon it by Ryan Murphy and company in FX's watchable yet incrementally disappointing "The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story."

A stylish but depressing nine-episode tragedy (premiering Wednesday), the series heralds, of course, the much-awaited return of the true-crime anthology that launched two years ago with a marvelously textured retelling of O.J. Simpson's murder trial.

This time the series (eight episodes of which were made available for review) takes a big swerve into a dead-end story that is far less compelling. Fascinating yet repellent, "The Assassination of Gianni Versace" demonstrates why some celebrity-related crimes acquire lasting notoriety and others just fade away.

The brilliance of "The People v. O.J. Simpson" was how it made a widely famous and well-raked case seem entirely new. The failure of "Versace" is that it takes a case that is at best vaguely remembered (mostly by fashionistas and gay men) and tries to apply to it the same degree of resonance and insight.

Alas, the themes that so easily presented themselves for fresh scrutiny in "People vs. O.J." (systemic racism and sexism, media manipulation, elusive justice) are far from evident in "The Assassination of Gianni Versace": Is it about beauty? Is it about psychosis? Is it about gay rights?

Yes to all that, but never effectively. (And why has Versace's murder been upgraded to an "assassination?" We'll get back to that.)

It's far from a total bust, however. As with "People v. O.J.," the series has that intoxicating mix of reported fact (drawing on Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth's 1999 book "Vulgar Favors" for details) and a dash of invention that now defines the "American Crime Story" style.

"Glee" star Darren Criss is plenty creepy and believable as Cunanan, a 27-year-old charlatan and chronic fibber who mooches off the kindness of strangers. Criss capably holds the series together when the writing and dialogue can't, particularly in how he portrays the smarmy banality of Cunanan's evil. Sometimes he's a charming creep. Sometimes he's a violent creep. It works like a light switch, and it does get predictable; as such, the scary legend of Cunanan might have better lent itself to a serial-killer season of Murphy's "American Horror Story."

In the first episode, Cunanan arrives in Miami in July 1997 and wastes no time locating his ultimate target, the Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez), who lives in an ornate South Beach mansion. Versace takes a morning stroll to a nearby newsstand to buy a stack of magazines; when he returns to his front gate, Cunanan walks up and shoots him a few times, including a bullet through his face. As the murderer flees, Versace's longtime companion, Antonio D'Amico (Ricky Martin, crying sufficient soap-opera tears) cradles a dying Versace in his arms.

By night's end, Versace's formidable younger sister, the brutally blond Donatella (Penelope Cruz, savoring each snarl) arrives and immediately takes charge of her brother's empire. Cunanan has fled; Miami police soon learn that the FBI has been pursuing the suspect for weeks, tying him to four other killings.

The episode flashes back and surfs along the quasi-true world of its killer. Among the many falsehoods Cunanan regaled his friends and acquaintances with is the claim of a dalliance with Versace, circa 1990 in San Francisco. True, or not true, or sort of true? If you need to know definitively, with "Law and Order"-like objectivity, then "The Assassination of Gianni Versace" will be tough going. If, on the other hand, you're tantalized by the fantasies Cunanan created for himself, then carry on.

For sensation's sake, obviously, "The Assassination of Gianni Versace" has started at what should be its penultimate chapter, with a handsome gunman on the loose and an exquisitely - if grotesquely - displayed corpse in the morgue. Anyone with a search engine (or a good memory) knows that Cunanan never went to trial; he took his own life once the police caught up to him a week later.

In a serious miscalculation of structure and coherence, each episode of "Versace" stutters and skips along a chronology that moves mainly backward, further into Cunanan's deceits in the 1990s and late '80s, until it finally arrives (in the eighth episode) at his spoiled yet abusive childhood, marred by his Filipino crook of a father (Jon Jon Briones). Along this same disordered timeline, the show wanly offers a story about Gianni and Donatella's struggle to keep the House of Versace in the black.

Thus, the Cunanan sequences play like reheated "Dateline" episodes while the Versace scenes are like paging through a stack of old Vogues. Ramirez brings a dour elegance to Versace's creativity and moods - and one episode somewhat opaquely references Orth's reporting that Versace was HIV positive, which was supposedly kept private to protect the business.

As you may have already heard, an outraged Donatella Versace and her family have lashed out at Murphy and FX, calling "The Assassination of Gianni Versace" an unauthorized work of fiction and gossip. For what it's worth, the Versaces come off sympathetically in the series, which is a surprise; Maya Rudolph's impression of Donatella years ago on "Saturday Night Live" was probably more damaging than this. Carping about the new show only gives it more publicity.

Rather than exploit too many of Donatella's glycerin tears, "The Assassination of Gianni Versace" is best (and most disturbing) when it chronicles the dismal fates of Cunanan's other victims - quiet, nonfamous men who made the terrible mistake of crossing paths with a dangerous liar.

Particularly good is the third episode, which stars Mike Farrell (yes, of "M*A*S*H") and "Transparent's" Judith Light as Lee and Marilyn Miglin of Chicago. While Marilyn is out of town shooting a home-shopping network segment for her successful line of cosmetics, her husband, Lee, a successful real estate developer and closeted homosexual, invites Cunanan over for a night of sex.

Though what happens is indeed gruesome (Cunanan murders Lee), it is the scenes of Marilyn's return to their townhouse and her particular responses in grief that strike the sort of thematic chord we expect from "American Crime Story": This is an episode about the insidious nature of the closet, especially within a long marriage, where there really can be nothing left to hide - only something left to dutifully ignore.

A similar theme runs through the episodes that chronicle the sad ends of two of Cunanan's other victims (skip reading if these already reported details feel like spoilers), including two of his friends: Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), a former Navy officer in San Diego, and David Madson (Cody Fern), a young architect from Minneapolis who meets Cunanan on a trip to California and repeatedly rejects his professions of love.

Both Jeff and David are uncomfortable with how their friend supports his Champagne (and methamphetamine) tastes by leeching off older gay men and regaling his admirers with lies about his background and employment.

Cunanan flies into a rage whenever anyone suggests he get a job and support himself. "It's ordinary!" he screams, after his last sugar daddy has locked him out of the mansion. After a drugged-out nadir, a jealous Cunanan travels from San Diego to Minneapolis, where Jeff now lives - perhaps to be closer to David.

In "Assassination's" confusing backward-is-forward timeline, we've already seen what happened when Cunanan got there: one body is found bludgeoned and rolled up in a carpet; the other is full of bullets and left by the side of a lake.

It's never entirely clear what Murphy, et al., are asking us to see in all this. Is Lee Miglin's closeted shame related to Jeff Trail's anguish with the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policies? And does that line up with David Madson's difficulty in coming out to his father? And does Cunanan kill them all (plus a cemetery caretaker, if only to steal his truck), because of the tenuous state of gay rights in mid-'90s America?

From this clumsy tangle of themes, a killer who is more deranged than on-message winds up at the Versace mansion's front gate. Apparently, class resentment (slathered in self-loathing) is the reason that Murphy deems this crime an "assassination" rather than just another murder. It just doesn't wash.

---

"The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story" (90 minutes) premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. on FX.
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The so-called Tide Pod Challenge has dirtied its share of social media, with reports of teens popping liquid laundry detergent packets into their mouth and posting videos online of the dangerous dare.

At least in San Antonio, it looks like nobodys biting.

A search for the hashtag #TidePodChallenge yielded no San Antonio-based videos on Facebook or Twitter, just mostly snarky remarks about the dares absurdity. And calls answered Tuesday by available area doctors offices revealed no cases of detergent pod poisonings.

Nevertheless, like rapidly downing a gallon of milk or a spoonful of cinnamon, the Tide Pod Challenge is the latest viral phenomenon to once again leave observers shaking their heads and medical experts warning of potential health dangers.

I am a father with four teenage boys, so I am aware of the Tide Pod Challenge, said Dr. Stephen F. Ramirez, owner of Stone Oak Family Practice and Womens Health. And it would be easier to tattoo STUPID on your forehead than to take a Tide Pod in your mouth. Theyre exquisitely dangerous.

Ramirez noted that besides causing nausea, biting into a detergent pod can burn your mouth and even deliver chemical burns to your lungs.

Ramirez also warned that ingesting detergent pod contents can cause changes to blood pressure and heart rate, loss of consciousness, seizures and even death.

So of course the bottom line is, you should never ingest any household cleaning products, he said.

Ramirez said cases of detergent pod poisonings historically have centered on toddlers and also seniors or those with dementia, since the pods look a lot like brightly colored candy.

According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC), poison control centers last year received reports of more than 10,500 exposures to highly concentrated packets of laundry detergent by children ages 5 and younger.

Still, a 19-year-old told CBS News in a recent report he did it even though he knew better.

You would hope that a teenager would have more sense, but we wouldnt be having this discussion if that were the case, said Texas MedClinic chief operating officer Dr. David Gude, who noted he didnt know of a single detergent pod case in their 18 facilities across San Antonio and New Braunfels.

So where did the idea for this challenge even come froom? Perhaps from the internet.

The March 2017 clip, Dont Eat The Laundry Pods by comedy website CollegeHumor, centers on a young man contemplating eating laundry pods. He calls them candy ravioli and Googles their toxicity before ultimately gorging on them and ending up on an emergency backboard, uttering I dont regret it.

The video has more than 3.2 million views on YouTube, where CollegeHumor posted the following message:

In light of recent news reports of idiot teens actually eating laundry pods, we want to make very clear that our position is the title of this video: DON'T EAT THE LAUNDRY PODS, you moron. Not even a little tiny bit, to impress your dumb friends or the internet. You will get poisoned and die.

Meanwhile, Tides official Twitter account has a clip with more than 5.6 million views featuring New England Patriots star Rob Gronkowski repeating a finger-wagging No to the idea of eating Tide Pods.

Ramirez noted Tide and other detergent brands have made a concerted effort to make the pods look less like candy. Tide also has a safety tips page on its website that advises to drink a glass of water or milk if a product is swallowed and to contact the Poison Control Center (1-800-222-1222) or a doctor immediately.

As for what parents can do to prevent their children from taking part in the inane challenge, Gude recommends keeping detergent pods out of the reach of toddlers and keeping an eye on teens time on social media.

Teens still-developing brains make them more prone to take risks, Gude said, so help them have a clearer perspective on the dangers of such dares and to take more breaks from what they see on their smartphones.

Im not one of those people that wants to make social media the devil in everything, Gude said, but I have a tendency to believe if we spend too much time in front of our devices, it has an impact on how our brain is wired.

rguzman@express-news.net | Twitter: @reneguz
The Houston Eats! Conference  an exploration of the Texas Gulf Coast food scene past and present  has been rescheduled for Feb. 2 and 3 at the University of Houston. The conference, originally planned for September 2017, was canceled after Hurricane Harvey.

But many of the same speakers and original itinerary are back on track for the two-day immersion into the area's rich culinary heritage with presentations on topics such as rice farming and history, Asian supermarkets, local farms and farming, regional barbecue, Chinese bakeries, Syrian cooking, Jewish community cookbooks, Mexican tortilla factories, and many other aspects of Houston's culinary diversity.
Ukraine ready to consider possibility of talks on FTA with Albania - Klympush-Tsintsadze

Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has said that Ukraine is ready to consider the possibility of negotiations on a free trade zone with Albania.

According to the press service of the deputy PM, she said this during her meeting with Albania's Minister of State for Diaspora Pandeli Majko.

According to the deputy prime minister, the Ukrainian side is ready to analyze the possibilities for concluding an agreement on free trade within the framework of the bilateral Intergovernmental Commission on Trade and Economic Cooperation. The draft of the provision on such a commission in November 2017 was transferred by the Albanian side to Ukraine for further processing.

"The intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation, which work is continuing, should become a good basis for the start of negotiations on the establishment of a free trade zone between Ukraine and Albania," the press service quoted Klympush-Tsintsadze as saying.

She also noted that Kyiv is also ready to resume the work of the Honorary Consulate of Ukraine in Tirana.
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Most City of Laredo and Webb County offices closed at noon Tuesday due to weather conditions.

Laredo Independent School District also announced that it will delay the start of the school day on Wednesday. Classes at United ISD said will resume at their normal schedule, the district said in a letter to parents and employees.

Classes at LISD elementary schools are set to start at 9 a.m., middle schools 9:20 a.m. and high schools 9:40 a.m.

Middle and high school students will report to second block. All LISD staff will report to work at 8 a.m. Bus routes start at 8:40 a.m. for elementary school students, 9 a.m. for middle school students and 9:20 a.m. for high school students.

Highlights Most City of Laredo and Webb County offices closed at noon Tuesday

Laredo ISD to delay the start time for classes on Wednesday

City Council's regularly scheduled meeting canceled

TAMIU to delay opening of offices Wednesday

School districts released students around noon Tuesday

Commodity Supplemental Food Program's monthly distribution postponed See More Collapse

Parents are reminded to dress their children warmly and appropriately for the cold weather. Students and staff are urged to dress warmly and in multiple layers, making use of caps, gloves, coats and closed footwear.

Some city departments will remain open Tuesday, including the Police and Fire departments, 3-1-1, Public Works and the Traffic Department.

Solid Waste garbage pick-up crews paused their routes at noon Tuesday. Pickup will resume Wednesday.

Also, the regularly scheduled City Council meeting that was set to begin at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday is cancelled.

Regular hours of operation will resume Wednesday for all City of Laredo offices.

Webb County said that people wishing to visit any Webb County department Tuesday are encouraged to call the department first to make sure that they are open.

"Both local school districts have issued official notices releasing students and staff at or around noon time today in anticipation of possible sleet or ice on our roadways and recurring power outages in the area," Webb County said in a statement. "Many members of the Webb County family are parents and need to tend to their families and children during their time off from school."

The local school districts released students around noon Tuesday. Texas A&M International University and Laredo Community College were also open this morning but they will close by early afternoon.

TAMIU will also delay opening offices until 10 a.m. Wednesday, with classes beginning thereafter at 10:30 a.m. In light of this weather event and resulting scheduling changes, late registration for the spring semester has been extended through Jan. 24.

The South Texas Food Bank said the Commodity Supplemental Food Program's monthly distribution scheduled for Wednesday at the LISD Performing Arts Center has been postponed until Jan. 26. For more information, contact the food bank at 956-726-3120. The food bank closed this afternoon and will resume regular business hours Wednesday.
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Texas' campus libraries are shuttling books off site, adding exercise machines and transforming the spaces from information hubs to collaboration centers.

As we reported in December:

Campuses across the state are pouring money into renovating libraries, adding study rooms, cafe-like booths and exercise machines so students can multi-task while studying.

Librarians have shuttled books off-site as circulation has dropped, opening up floor space for clubs to gather or for makerspace centers to build electronics or use a 3D printer.

But the Lone Star State's approach to library management isn't unique. Here are a few other examples of campus library innovation across the U.S.

WISCONSIN: The University of WisconsinMadison said in early December that it would create six library "hubs" out of 22 smaller libraries, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. Library officials said the changes reflect new uses for library facilities. Students and faculty, they said, use the space for group work, not examining physical documents.

CALIFORNIA: At the University of California at Berkeley, you'll find nap pods, glass-walled meeting spaces and colorful furniture in a recently remodeled library for undergraduates, the LA Times reported.

ILLINOIS: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that DePaul University has a Genius Squad counter for technical help, tall bookshelves were gutted and students can ask for help from a librarian via instant messenger.

VIRGINIA: A $50.8-million library renovation project at Virginia Commonwealth University brought in a media studio and a makerspace with laser cutters. Event space will hold up to 300 people.

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 lesson we might draw from the Russian documentary The Road Movie is that something bad is going to happen sooner or later, and more likely sooner than later. The film is a compilation of found footage taken by dashboard cameras depicting many incidents of vehicular mayhem and some plain weirdness  after a while, it feels like we must be watching a real-life demolition derby.

Dash cams are evidently common in Russia, and we can see why, given the strange, deranged and simply scary events we behold. Some of the bits are even funny, and overall theres a keen sense of absurdity, such that, if you choose to believe the Russian people have a fatalistic streak, The Road Movie suggests why.

Theres no commentary or explanation provided for the events; we simply overhear the words of the drivers and passengers, whose language is remarkably full of profanity, if the English subtitles are accurate. Trucks jackknife on snowy roads, cars plunge into bodies of water, or flip over without explanation, or pile up on a freeway.

In a textbook case of road rage, one flipped-out driver pulls a handgun from his car and begins firing at the front of the vehicle filming the scene. In a nighttime incident, some men quiz a roadside prostitute about her rates for various activities, then guffaw about it as they drive off. A woman pumping gas in the evening flicks on a lighter to check how much fuel shes purchased, with spectacularly fiery results.

When two cars on a narrow street approach each other head-on, any possibility of confrontation ends abruptly when one of the drivers takes a sledgehammer from his car and begins walking toward the other vehicle. And the most out-and-out frightening event has a lunatic leaping on the hood of a car driven by a terrified woman who is unable to dislodge him.

A few sequences show events with an apocalyptic edge: We see a comet streak across the sky, or a plane heading downward toward a crash, or find ourselves being driven through the middle of a forest fire.

At no point does filmmaker Dmitrii Kalashnikov push an interpretation on us, but he hardly needs to. Despite the sometimes wacky nature of the content, the movie has no trouble inspiring a sense of dread in the viewer, as catastrophe succeeds catastrophe. Kalashnikov is also smart enough to keep The Road Movie down to 67 minutes, which is all he needs to create this particular vision of hell. (And, by the way, he does so without showing bloody or mangled bodies.)

Stick around for the credits, which include some bits of information about each incident, including how many online viewers have seen uploaded versions of each sequence.

Walter Addiego is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: waddiego@sfchronicle.com

The Road Movie

Documentary. Directed by Dmitrii Kalashnikov. In Russian with English subtitles. (Not rated. 67 minutes.)
Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Valeriy Chaly held a meeting with President and CEO of U.S. General Electric Transportation Rafael Santana to joint project of Ukraine's railway modernization, the Ukrainian Embassy to the United States has reported.

"In particular, the Ambassador stressed the importance of finalizing of the Long-term Framework Agreement between Ukrzaliznytsia and GE, that will allow to bring the American company's world class locomotive technology to Ukraine," the embassy said on its Facebook page on Tuesday.

Special attention Chaly paid to the issue of localization of the production of new GE locomotives in Ukraine as well as the modernization of existing fleet.

"In this regard, sides agreed that the delivery of the 30 new diesel GE Evo locomotives will be the first step for further partnership between Ukraine and General Electric, including cooperation in the energy sphere, infrastructure and healthcare," the embassy said.
1 Low approval: President Trump is wrapping up a year in office with the lowest average approval rating of any elected president in his first term. Thats according to polling by Gallup, which shows that Trump has averaged just a 39 percent approval rating since his inauguration. The previous low was held by Bill Clinton, whose first-year average stood 10 points higher than Trumps, at 49 percent. Recent surveys show most Americans view Trump as a divisive figure and even question his fitness for office. One relative bright spot for Trump is his handling of the economy, though even there his ratings are not as high as might be expected given a relatively strong economy.

2 Health coverage: The number of Americans without health coverage, which declined for years after passage of the Affordable Care Act, shot up in President Trumps first year in office, according to data from a new national survey. At the end of 2017, 12.2 percent of U.S. adults lacked health insurance, up from 10.9 percent at the end of 2016, as President Barack Obama was completing his final term. The increase of 1.3 percentage points, although modest, marks the first time since at least 2008 that the share of adults without insurance increased from the previous year, according to the report from Gallup.
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Dog lovers might want to add Basset Buddies Rescues of Texas to their contact list. The nonprofit organization focuses on finding homes for unwanted, abused, and homeless basset hounds in Houston and surrounding areas.

Since forming in 2007, Basset Buddies Rescues of Texas has rescued nearly 1,300 basset hounds. The organization is continuing its efforts to reduce the stray dog population in Houston. Occasionally, mixed-breed basset hounds are accepted into the group as well.

"Houston is probably one of the largest places that has the largest amount of stray dogs," said Jan Trapp, Basset Buddies Rescues of Texas event chairman and board member. "Our main objective is to get the dogs off the street and get them in loving forever homes."

To help the dogs be seen in the community, the organization partners with local businesses to hold pet adoption and fundraisers.

Recently, Brian Johnson who owns the Honest-1 auto shop with his wife in Copperfield, hosted a pet adoption with Basset Buddies Rescue of Texas.

"This is the second pet adoption that we have done. We (work) with different nonprofits. My wife and I are both animal lovers," Johnson said. "After going through everything with the hurricane, that's when we started getting involved in nonprofits for pet adoption. You see it on the news and it just tugs at your heart a little bit."

Johnson believes the location of the auto shop on Texas 6 is an ideal place to host pet adoptions due to the heavy traffic along the street. Johnson and his wife are excited to partner with nonprofit organizations for a good cause in the community.

"We are just small business owners that are (trying) to find ways to give back to the community," Johnson said. "We are trying to get some dogs placed and hopefully makes some families complete."

Mel's Country Cafe in Tomball holds adoptions once a month and a portion of dessert sales go to Basset Buddies Rescue of Texas.

"Partnerships with businesses helps us to get the word out into the community. The dogs that are available for adoption can be seen and people can come and meet them," Trapp said. "It helps the dogs get adopted a lot quicker."

Basset hounds are taken from shelters and directly from owners who are unable to care for the pets. The process includes, before adoption, placing the bassets in foster homes. In the homes, the dogs are evaluated by their temperament and behavior. The group updates the animal's vaccinations, insert microchips, addresses medical conditions, and spay/neuters all unaltered hounds. Heartworm treatment is given when needed.

Foster dogs are located in the Cypress, Klein, Spring, and Tomball areas. Cities such as Austin, San Antonio, and Orange also host the dogs as well.

Once adoption applications are placed, organizations members call the person's veterinarian to receive past and present pets' medical records. After that, group members will speak with the adoption applicants over-the-phone and conduct a home visit.

Interested individuals are encouraged to contact Basset Buddies of Rescue. The group continues to look for volunteers, sponsors, fosters, and forever homes. The organization does plan on attending the Houston Pet Expo in May.

Want to know more?

Basset Buddies Rescues of Texas

http://www.bbrtx.org
About 5,500 people visited the second annual Bethalto Christmas Village, according to estimates from organizers Gary and Jane Ahasay.

The event was held at Bethaltos Central Park, which was transformed into a Christmas wonderland with glass cottages decorated for the holidays, animated lighted-wire art and lighted trees.

It opened Friday, Nov. 24 and ran each weekend through Dec. 16.

We had a greater presence from the Edwardsville area and surrounding areas like Staunton and Bunker Hill, Jane Ahasay told Bethalto trustees at their monthly meeting on Monday. Weve had a lot of first-timers and a lot of repeats. Were very, very happy with that.

The Bethalto Christmas Village gets support from the Bethalto Spirit Group, a local non-profit group that organizes charitable and educational events in the Bethalto area. The group added four more cottages this year and made some enhancements to the gazebo. Mr. and Mrs. Claus got really cold and we wanted to keep them happy, because theyre great Clauses, she said. The group also added plush red carpeting and bright red chairs for the Clauses to sit on.

Jane Ahasay thanked the Bethalto Police Department for keeping an eye on the park during the event and trustees for allowing them to use it again this year.

Its kind of exciting because last year we came to the trustees and said we would really like to put this on, and you could kind of see everybody go, Yeah, right, Gary Ahasay said after the meeting. But it really went well. We lost one weekend because of sleet, but this year we were fortunate to make it all the way through. That was exciting. The neat thing is you can bring a family of five  which many people did  and it wont cost you a thing, because of the sponsors.

One of the sponsors this year is the Edwardsville law firm Gori Julian & Associates.

During the event, dozens of children had their pictures taken with Santa and Mrs. Claus. Visitors also had a chance to stroll through the park and see the cottages and animated lighted wire art, and enjoy hot chocolate, coffee and treats at the farmers market. Carolers and local musicians supplied the holiday music.

The arboretum near the park is also undergoing construction for a walking, running and riding path.

The Christmas Village is unique to the area. This years version included a petting zoo and a live nativity scene. Visitors could also relive moments in Bethalto history with venues dedicated to farming, mining, milling, trains and planes.

Gary Ahasay says he got the idea from a city in New York state that had a similar village.

Last year the group didnt begin planning for the Bethalto Christmas Village until September. We put the program together pretty quickly and, thanks to great volunteers and great sponsors we were able to launch it, he said. We will try to have something different every year so it isnt the same old thing.
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WASHINGTON - A burst of public acrimony across Capitol Hill Tuesday exposed how much President Donald Trump's use of a vulgar expression during a meeting on immigration and border security had set back negotiations on the issue.

Under intense questioning from both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen confirmed that the president had used "tough language" in the meeting Thursday.

At the same hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who had joined Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., at the meeting in trying to persuade Trump to sign onto their bipartisan immigration proposal, said the negotiations had turned into an "s-show."

And in a radio interview, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., a conservative ally of Trump's, dismissed the bipartisan pact as "utterly ridiculous" and said it "probably set us back in trying to find a deal."

Behind the drama, a Friday deadline loomed to pass a new spending bill in time to avert a government shutdown. Aides to top congressional leaders met again Tuesday to try salvaging a deal to meet a March deadline to legalize the status of undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children, or "dreamers," while also beefing up border security. But leaders publicly doubted that they had time to pair such a deal with a short-term plan to keep the government open beyond Friday.

"With no imminent deadline on #immigration, and with bipartisan talks well underway, there is no reason why Congress should hold government funding hostage over the issue of illegal immigration," Majority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., tweeted on Tuesday.

And while Graham continued to seek support for his pact with Durbin, White House officials declared the proposal dead and began encouraging lawmakers to start over.

Aides to leaders from both parties and both chambers gathered Tuesday in the office of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to keep negotiations going. In addition, the White House continues to seek a vote on a separate, conservative proposal floated last week by two immigration hard-liners, Reps. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., and Mark Meadows, R-N.C., according to Trump's legislative affairs director, Marc Short.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders kept pushing Tuesday to pass a short-term, stand-alone spending bill with no immigration reforms included. Talks included the possibility of provisions to court both liberal and conservative votes: eliminating a tax on high-priced health plans including in the Affordable Care Act, as well as a proposal to renew the Children's Health Insurance Program for six years.

If such a measure succeeds, it would likely push negotiations on immigration into February, an outcome that Democrats had hoped to avoid because of the leverage they believed they had to exact an immigration deal alongside the spending deadline.

The lack of progress and acrimonious words Tuesday exposed the extent to which Trump's vulgar comments had injected mistrust into already-tense negotiations.

"You can't remember the words of your commander in chief," Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said to Nielsen during the hearing, slamming his hand to the table, his voice shaking. "I find that unacceptable."

Durbin began his questioning of Nielsen by saying, "I hope you remember me. We were at two meetings together" last week. He asked her to clarify what kind of language Trump used.

"Ah, let's see," Nielsen said. "Strong language, there was - I apologize, I don't remember a specific word." She added that "general profanity" was used by several attendees.

"Did you hear me use profanity?" Durbin asked.

"No, sir, nor did I," Nielsen said, adding that Graham had used "tough language" in response to Trump.

Later, Graham detailed how Durbin had phoned Trump around 10 a.m. Thursday to let him know about their bipartisan breakthrough. Graham said that he and Durbin then made arrangements to meet with Trump at noon.

"So what happened between 10 and 12?" Graham asked Nielsen.

"I don't know," Nielsen said.

"I don't either, and I'm going to find out," Graham said. He credited Trump for hosting lawmakers the previous Tuesday and encouraging them to present a bipartisan deal.

"Tuesday we had a president that I was proud to golf with, call my friend, who understood immigration had to be bipartisan," Graham said, adding later: "I don't know where that guy went, but I want him back."

Graham blamed hard-liners on the president's staff - not the president - for sinking a potential bipartisan deal.

"We cannot do this with people in charge at the White House who have an irrational view of how to fix immigration," Graham told reporters.

The public exchanges also showed how much advocates for both sides are seeking to reach Trump directly.

During a Senate floor speech, Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., told Trump: "Everyone is talking about how bigoted your comments were last week."

"If you want to begin the long road back to prove you're not prejudiced or bigoted, support the bipartisan compromise that three Democrats and three Republicans have put before you," Schumer said.

But in a radio interview on "The Hugh Hewitt Show," popular with conservative listeners, Cotton said Trump had already agreed with Democrats to permanently legalize dreamers.

"That's his concession to their position," Cotton said as he called on Democrats to also agree to restrict family migration policy, which conservatives like Cotton deride as "chain migration," and to curb a diversity lottery system that grants visas to 55,000 people from countries with low immigration each year.

"If the Democrats want to shut down the government over this, they can," Cotton said. "They have the ability to filibuster any bill in the Senate. I don't think that will work out very well for them, so I suspect they will not."

During the Judiciary Committee hearing, Durbin and Nielsen also revealed that Trump had pressed lawmakers in the Thursday meeting to provide $20 billion this year so that a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border could be constructed in the coming year. That's more than the $18 billion the Trump administration told Congress earlier this month it wants to build out physical barriers over the next decade.

"I think the president is encouraging us to go as quickly as we can," Nielsen said. "As you know, it's a very complicated issue, building the wall, for a whole variety of - a whole variety of reasons."

Durbin dismissed Trump's request as "physically, legally impossible as a condition" for giving dreamers permanent legal status.

At the White House, Trump dismissed reports that he had called for more immigrants from Norway and other parts of Europe during the Oval Office encounter.

"I want them to come in from everywhere - everywhere," he told reporters.

Trump also met with Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, the only black Republican woman in Congress, whose parents are from Haiti. She was sharply critical of Trump's comments in the immigration meeting last week.

In a statement, Love said she held a "substantive and productive" 30-minute meeting with Trump and she pledged to work on a bipartisan solution for dreamers and border security.

At the Capitol, Short, who met with aides to top House and Senate leaders, said negotiators are "fairly optimistic there could be a deal" on immigration. But doing so this week, he said, would be "fairly herculean."

In a sign that the White House is still trying to work with Democrats, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly is scheduled to meet Wednesday morning with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a bloc he has sparred with in the past over immigration policy.

During Tuesday's hearing, Nielsen served as the proxy for Democrats eager to vent their frustrations with Trump. At one point, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., persistently questioned her over Trump's campaign pledge to make Mexico pay for new construction along the southern border.

"Have we opened an account that Mexico can put the money in to pay for it?" Leahy asked. "What arrangements do we have with Mexico to pay for it?"

"I know that we have arrangements with Mexico to secure our border . . ." Nielsen said, before Leahy cut her off.

"Do we have arrangements with them to pay for the wall, as President Trump promised the American people he would do?" he asked, raising his voice. "That's an easy answer, yes or no."

"I am not aware. I don't know what you mean by arrangement. We have a lot of agreements with them to increase border security," Nielsen replied.

"Are any of them to pay for a wall?" Leahy asked.

"How do you mean pay, sir?" Nielsen responded. "Do you mean fees? Do you mean through - there's a variety of ways."

"Well, usually when something is paid for you pay for it with money," Leahy said.

Nielsen did not directly answer the question about a bank account for Mexican border wall deposits.

"My priority is to increase border security and to build that wall, that will work," she said. "That's my priority, sir. That's what I'm focused on."

---

The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey, Mike DeBonis and Erica Werner contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON  Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump's former chief strategist, was subpoenaed last week by special counsel Robert Mueller to testify before a grand jury as part of the investigation into possible links between Trump's associates and Russia, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

The move marked the first time Mueller is known to have used a grand jury subpoena to seek information from a member of Trump's inner circle. The special counsel's office has used subpoenas before to seek information on Trump's associates and their possible ties to Russia or other foreign governments.

The subpoena could be a negotiating tactic. Mueller is likely to allow Bannon to forgo the grand jury appearance if he agrees to instead be questioned by investigators in the less formal setting of the special counsel's offices about ties between Trump's associates and Russia and about the president's conduct in office, according to the person, who would not be named discussing the case.

But it was not clear why Mueller treated Bannon differently than the dozen administration officials who were interviewed in the final months of last year and were never served with a subpoena.

The subpoena is a sign that Bannon is not personally the focus of the investigation. Justice Department rules allow prosecutors to subpoena the targets of investigations only in rare circumstances.

On Tuesday, Bannon testified behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee, which is also investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 election and ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Bannon did not address reporters before entering the proceeding Tuesday, and a spokesman for Mueller and a senior White House lawyer did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Mueller issued the subpoena after Bannon was quoted in a new book criticizing Trump, saying that Donald Trump Jr.'s 2016 meeting with Russians was "treasonous" and predicting that the special counsel investigation would ultimately center on money laundering.

After excerpts from the book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," were published this month, Trump derided Bannon publicly and threatened to sue him for defamation. Bannon was soon ousted as the executive chairman of the hard-right website Breitbart News.

Some legal experts said the subpoena could be a sign that the investigation was intensifying, while others said it may simply have been a negotiating tactic to persuade Bannon to cooperate with the investigation. The experts also said it could be a signal to Bannon, who has tried to publicly patch up his falling-out with the president, that despite Trump's legal threats, Bannon must be completely forthcoming with investigators.

Prosecutors generally prefer to interview witnesses before a grand jury when they believe they have information that the witnesses do not know or when they think they might catch the witnesses in a lie. It is much easier for a witness to stop the questioning or sidestep questions in an interview than during grand jury testimony, which is transcribed, and witnesses are required to answer every question.

"By forcing someone to testify through a subpoena, you are providing the witness with cover because they can say, 'I had no choice  I had to go in and testify about everything I knew,'" said Solomon L. Wisenberg, a prosecutor for the independent counsel that investigated Bill Clinton when he was president.

Significant grand jury activity may undermine the case that White House officials have made for months: that they believe the inquiry is coming to an end and are convinced that the president will be cleared. Mueller has told Trump's lawyers that he will probably want to question the president before the investigation concludes, but no interview has been scheduled.

Bannon has limited firsthand knowledge about two key issues within Mueller's purview  the president's firing of James Comey as FBI director, a decision made without Bannon present, and the drafting of a misleading statement about the subject of the June 2016 meeting with Russians, in which they promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

But even Bannon's secondhand knowledge could be used to draw a contrast with statements from people with firsthand knowledge whom Mueller has already interviewed. And Bannon was directly involved in a number of other major moments, including the decision-making around the firing of Michael Flynn, the president's first national security adviser, who was dismissed after he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about phone calls with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

Bannon also helped run the transition after Chris Christie, the outgoing governor of New Jersey, was fired as head of that team. And Bannon was the chief executive of the Trump campaign in October 2016 when WikiLeaks began releasing thousands of stolen personal emails from the hacked account of Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta.

In "Fire and Fury," Bannon was quoted by the author, Michael Wolff, as suggesting that Donald Trump Jr.; the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner; and Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman at the time, were "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" for attending the meeting with Russians at Trump Tower. Bannon said that he believed there was "zero" chance that the younger Trump did not take them to meet his father, who has said he knew nothing about the meeting.

"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor  with no lawyers," Bannon said in the book.

Trump erupted in anger after the excerpts were published, calling Bannon "Sloppy Steve" on Twitter and saying he had "cried when he got fired and begged for his job."

"Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone," Trump wrote. "Too bad!"

Days after the excerpts were published, a statement was issued in Bannon's name in which he tried to back away from his assertions in the book. He said that his reference to treason was aimed at Manafort, not the president's son. Bannon did not apologize, however, and though he had approved the statement, an associate sent it to reporters without his knowledge.

The president appeared to ease his anger toward Bannon at the end of last week. When asked in an interview with The Wall Street Journal whether his break with Bannon was "permanent," the president replied, "I don't know what the word 'permanent' means."

People close to Bannon took the president's comments as a signal that Trump was aware that his fired strategist would soon be contacted by investigators.

Trump has a history of reaching out to people he has fired, including those under investigation, directly or indirectly, as he did with Flynn after he was dismissed and before he struck a plea deal with Mueller's investigators.

Bannon has hired William A. Burck of the Washington office of the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan law firm to represent him in the defamation threats from Trump and the congressional inquiries. Burck also represents several current and former administration officials who have been interviewed as witnesses by Mueller's investigators. Among them are the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, and the former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus.
Fulfilling its duty to the law, the Glen Carbon Board approved an ordinance establishing a Sexual Harassment Policy.

An Illinois Law, which came in to effect on Jan. 1, requires all 7,000 units of government in Illinois to adopt sexual harassment policies.

While the Illinois law might be new, Glen Carbons Sexual Harassment Policy is not.

Mayor Rob Jackstadt said the village has had a policy on the books for many years.

We have had a sexual harassment policy on the books for many, many years. It is new that it is required by state law, but not new to the village, Jackstadt said. Rest assured weve had this policy in place for a long time.

Village Administrator Jamie Bowden said the sexual harassment policy has been part of the village employee handbook and the new law will make it a village code.

Village Attorney Jim Schrempf said the ordinance will provide clarity.

As part of the village code, there will be no confusion about the policy and it will be easily found and a better historical record than just approving a policy, he said.

While many municipalities have policies in place, the new law requires four specific provisions prohibiting sexual harassment, detailing how an allegation can be reported, prohibiting retaliation for making a report and naming the consequences of both violating the policy as well as knowingly making a false report.

Illinois Municipal League Executive Director Brad Coles said his agency has been working with local governments and has shared a model ordinance with municipalities.

Schrempf said Glen Carbons ordinance contains some of the recommendations from the Illinois Municipal Leagues model.

Bowden said he will discuss the new policy with the Glen Carbon staff.

We are planning to have some training sessions on what the policy is and make sure that everyone is aware of how it works and what to be aware of, Bowden said. We will be doing this with staff within the next 30 to 60 days.

Trustees approved the village ordinance unanimously. Trustee Micah Summers was absent from the meeting.

At the state level, the law sparked the hiring of an inspector general who was given the power to investigate old sexual harassment complaints at the ethics commission.

All 7,000 units of government in Illinois were required to adopt the new ordinance by Jan. 15.
WASHINGTON - Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort will face trial no sooner than September, the judge hearing his case indicated after an hour-long hearing Tuesday in which prosecutors and defense attorneys sparred over his continuing house arrest and a separate lawsuit challenging the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Prosecutors told the court Friday that they intended to ask for a May 14 trial date for Manafort, 68, and his former business partner, Rick Gates, 45, whose Oct. 30 indictments on fraud, conspiracy and money laundering counts were the first disclosed in Mueller's probe of Russian influence in U.S. political affairs.

Both men have pleaded not guilty to the charges, which arose out of Manafort's secret lobbying for a Russia-friendly political party in Ukraine.

Attorneys for the defendants said they have been swamped by the government's handoff of more than 590,000 pieces of evidence, plus an additional 46,000 records turned over Tuesday.

"They can't possibly be ready for trial if they don't have what you have," U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington reminded prosecutors. "I don't have a problem with a trial in September or October," she added. "I don't want [to set a date] that we have to continue."

Prosecutor Kyle Freeny said that the handoff is mostly done but that investigators are still scouring the products of at least 19 search warrants, including 87 electronic devices and thousands of domestic and foreign business records. She also said the government continues to mine "pockets of discoverable material in less-obvious places."

Jackson called the hearing to discuss the status of the criminal case, which has become bogged down by the lawsuit. She noted what she called "a fairly unique situation," saying court rules "don't contemplate the potential that people would sue civilly to forestall a criminal prosecution.

Manafort attorneys Kevin M. Downing and Thomas E. Zehnle on Jan. 3 filed a 17-page lawsuit asking to void Mueller's appointment and dismiss the case against Manafort as government overreach in using the special counsel legislation.

Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said in court Tuesday that the government by Feb. 2 will ask a different federal judge in Washington overseeing the lawsuit to toss it, arguing that, among other reasons, the criminal case is the proper venue to seek dismissal of the indictment.

Downing briefly appeared to forget Tuesday that his lawsuit included the request to dismiss the criminal case, before deferring to Jackson and saying, "I don't have it in front me."

Jackson ordered both sides to tell her by Friday if they want to have her decide both cases, and she told the defendants to file by Feb. 23 any motions seeking to dismiss charges or the indictment.

Gates was released on a nearly $5 million bond Tuesday afternoon after agreeing to forfeit three properties and financial and other assets if he fails to appear in court. Under a bail deal, Gates also agreed to abide by a nighttime curfew, electronic monitoring, and a ban on international travel as well as travel outside the Richmond area for anything but court appearances without permission.

Jackson expressed impatience that Manafort has yet to finalize a similar $10 million secured bond deal. In one of several sharp exchanges with Downing, the judge asked, "As for Mr. Manafort's bond, what are we waiting for?," adding that the defendant "held the keys" to his freedom.

Downing disagreed, saying: "You actually set another $7 million security. You set a $17 million bond; we didn't agree to that."

"You had a month to point that out to me. . . . I get bond motions all the time . . . [and] I'm happy to hear them," the judge replied.

Late Tuesday, Manafort asked to file a sealed motion urging the judge to revisit his bond deal and to provide "an analysis of sensitive financial information" focusing on his net asset statements and those of family members who pledged to secure his bond, "including the names of financial institutions where deposits are located and details about the types and amounts of assets and liabilities."

On Manafort's request for a temporary health-related modification of his detention that she did not detail, Jackson in court said tartly: "While he is subject to home confinement, he is not confined to his couch. He has plenty of opportunities to exercise."

Downing said he would respond in a court filing.

Finally, Jackson again rebuked but declined to punish one of the defendants, this time Gates, for appearing to violate a court's gag order on making public statements about the criminal case that could bias potential jurors.

The judge cited Gates' video greeting thanking supporters and lobbyist Jack Burkman for hosting a Dec. 19 fundraiser for Gates' legal defense at an Arlington, Virginia, hotel. The judge noted that members of the media were invited and reported that Burkman attacked what he said was Mueller's "unfair prosecution" after Gates thanked him for assuring that supporters "hear our message and stand with us."

Jackson said that if surrogates attack the prosecution at a fundraiser to which the press is invited, "I suggest that that's a pretty big red flag."
SPF to lease site of 60,000 sq m in Chornobyl to build solar power plant

The State Property Fund of Ukraine (SPF) plans to lease a site of 60,000 square meters in Chornobyl to build a solar power plant, the Vidomosti Pryvatyzatsii newspaper has reported.

According to the fund, currently there is on bid for leasing the site. During 10 days (starting January 15) the fund accepts bids from other bidders.

"If the bids were two and more, the regional division of the SPF will announce a tender to lease the site. The winner will be selected considering offers for rent rates," First Deputy SPF Head Dmytro Parfenenko wrote on his Facebook page.

A solar power plant with a capacity of around 3 MW could be placed on 60,000 square meters.

As reported, the SPF at the end of last year announced a tender to select an appraiser for a part of the coolant system of Chornobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) located on 2,500 square meters for placing a solar power plant.

Earlier Solar Chornobyl rented part of the concrete site near the construction of the second-order switchgear with an area of 1.7 hectares in Prypiat.
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SACRAMENTO  Gov. Jerry Brown is considering scaling back his controversial twin-tunnels plan to move water around the state, from two tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to one.

In a Department of Water Resources memo sent Friday to potential contractors, state officials for the first time indicated that they are considering a single-tunnel plan. The memo also says the Department of Water Resources is in the process of evaluating other possible changes to the tunnels project, including constructing the project in stages.

Although no decision has been made on whether to scale back the $17 billion project that Brown has championed for years, the water resources department sent the memo so that interested contractors could determine how such changes would affect their bids, Lisa Lien-Mager, a spokeswoman for the California Natural Resources Agency, which oversees the department, said in a statement Tuesday.

The project has not changed, Lien-Mager said.

Browns plan to build two tunnels under the Delta has faced significant financial obstacles and opposition from environmental groups.

The proposal envisions two 35-mile tunnels that would move water from Northern California to farms and cities to the south, including in the Bay Area. Supporters have argued that the Deltas existing water infrastructure is outdated and distributes too little water to the Bay Area, the Central Valley and Southern California.

The tunnels would bypass that aging system of canals.

Brown has argued that the project has had more environmental review than any other project in the history of the world.

It is absolutely essential if California is to maintain a reliable water supply, Brown said in December 2016 after the final environmental impact report was released.

The supporters of California WaterFix, as the tunnels project is called, say the diverted water from the Delta would deliver more water around the state without harming dwindling fish populations.

Opponents include many environmental groups and Delta farmers who worry about the tunnels effects on the Deltas fragile ecosystem. While some  including the Natural Resources Defense Council  have argued for a single tunnel, they also want to reduce overall water diversions from the Delta.

Its unclear whether a single-tunnel alternative would achieve this because details have yet to be released.

Im very skeptical, unfortunately, said Doug Obegi, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. It is clear the larger project was economically infeasible. They didnt have the money for it. My fear is that although they appear to be downsizing the project, they are likely to divert as much water or more from the estuary  and thats not consistent with what is needed to restore and protect the health of the Delta.

The twin-tunnel project hit a financing snag in September when Westlands Water District, a politically powerful San Joaquin Valley supplier, voted against paying 20 percent of the price.

With Brown in his final year as governor, his office began talks with other water agencies in recent weeks about a single-tunnel plan in hopes of garnering support. The Santa Clara Valley Water District voted in October to conditionally support the project if it becomes one tunnel. Santa Clara County receives 40 percent of its water from the Delta.

Support from the Santa Clara water district was seen as critical to push back against opponents who have characterized the project as a water grab by Southern California cities and corporate farmers.

Richard Santos, the water districts board chair, said the agency continues to work with the state on the Delta proposal and that the board could vote on any changes announced by the state in the spring.

Were optimistic that the state will be able to present a project that meets the principles we approved in October, Santos said in a statement.

State water officials said construction could still begin later this year.

Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez
Pope Francis is in Chile this week on something of an apology tour.

Chile has historically been a stronghold of the Catholic Church. Nearly half of the population identifies as Catholic. But secularism has made considerable inroads in the South American country lately, thanks in part to a clergy sex abuse scandal that has roiled the faithful.

In 2011, after decades of complaints, Chilean priest Fernando Karadima was found guilty of abusing dozens of minors. He was dismissed and sentenced to a life of "penance and prayer."

But Karadima's victims say the church was too slow to investigate and dismiss the priest. They are angry, too, that he was replaced by his protege Juan Barros. Barros' opponents say he knew of Karadima's crimes and did nothing. (Barros has denied this.) "I still don't understand how we, the thousands of victims of abuse, were not protected by our priests, who were silent witnesses to what was happening to us," James Hamilton, one of the victims, wrote in an open letter about the appointment.

Much of that ire is directed at Francis. When Chileans were asked to evaluate the pontiff on a scale of 0 to 10, they gave him a 5.3, the lowest ranking he has received in Latin America. In the days before his visit, at least nine churches were firebombed. No one was hurt, but the vandals left fliers at some sites threatening to kill the pope.

On Tuesday, as Francis arrived in Santiago, the capital, a handful of protesters gathered to criticize the Chilean church for spending a reported $17 million to host him while much of the country lives in poverty. "People are leaving the church because they don't find a protective space there," Juan Carlos Claret, a spokesman for a group of church members who opposed Barros's appointment as bishop, told The Associated Press. "The pastors are eating the flock."

Even his major events have not been free of controversy. At a public Mass in O'Higgins Park on Tuesday, as thousands cheered and prayed, someone threw a newspaper at the pope's head.

That hasn't deterred Francis, who began his three-day visit with a request for forgiveness.

"Here I feel bound to express my pain and shame at the irreparable damage caused to children by some ministers of the church," Francis told Chilean government officials, including President Michelle Bachelet, lawmakers and the diplomatic corps in Santiago. "I am one with my brother bishops, for it is right to ask for forgiveness and make every effort to support the victims, even as we commit ourselves to ensuring that such things do not happen again."

The pope also visited a women's prison. Later this week, he is set to address the Mapuche people, an indigenous group struggling to reclaim ancestral land from the government.
Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk is concerned about the government's decision to cancel its earlier decisions on reforming the State Fiscal Service (SFS).

"I am concerned about the decision of the Cabinet of Ministers, which was made while I was on a business trip to the United States, regarding the cancellation of decisions aimed at institutional reform of the SFS, in particular, reorganization of the structure, the attraction of new people and the final liquidation of the tax police. I'm planning to fix this misunderstanding," he wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday.

According to the minister, the cancellation of decisions will not impede the reform of the service.

"Those who hoped that the decision of the Cabinet of Ministers will end the reform hurried to rejoice. I have already talked with Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, and he assured of the support of the SFS reform. The prime minister is well aware of the importance of these changes to the country, its economy and people. Therefore, I am sure that the correction of this misunderstanding will be an impetus for rapid changes in the SFS," Danyliuk wrote.
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WASHINGTON - The Justice Department on Tuesday said it would take the "rare step" of asking the Supreme Court to overturn a judge's ruling and allow the Trump administration to dismantle a program that provides work permits to undocumented immigrants raised in the United States.

The Trump administration said it has appealed the judge's injunction - which said the Obama-era program must continue for now - to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

But the Justice Department will also petition the Supreme Court later this week to intervene in the case, an unusual action that would allow the government to bypass the 9th Circuit altogether in its bid to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program starting in March.

"It defies both law and common sense" that a "single district court in San Francisco" had halted the administration's plans, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. "We are now taking the rare step of requesting direct review on the merits of this injunction by the Supreme Court so that this issue may be resolved quickly and fairly for all the parties involved."

Last week, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco issued a temporary injunction halting plans to end the program while a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's decision is pending.

He ordered the government to resume renewing DACA and work authorizations for the 690,000 immigrants who held that status when Sessions announced the end of the program Sept. 5. Homeland Security officials said Saturday that they would comply with the court order and resume accepting applications to renew work permits for the immigrants, also known as "dreamers."

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D), who filed one of the federal lawsuits that led to the temporary injunction, said Tuesday he was confident that the higher courts will uphold the judge's order.

"The unlawful action by the Trump Administration to terminate DACA impacts the lives and livelihood of hundreds of thousands [of] Dreamers, their colleagues, our universities, our businesses and our economy," Becerra said in a statement.

As Sessions noted, it is rare to ask the Supreme Court to step in before the lower courts have completed their work. The justices could take the case if they decide it is important enough, or rely on their usual pattern of waiting until the appeals court has acted.

Until the Justice Department files its specific request with the Supreme Court, it is hard to predict how quickly the justices might act. The department did not ask the Supreme Court for a stay of Alsup's ruling, which would have prompted quicker action on the part of the court.

The fate of DACA recipients is at the heart of a legislative dispute on Capitol Hill that could result in a government shutdown later this week. President Trump says that President Barack Obama exceeded his authority when he created the DACA program in 2012, and that Congress must pass legislation protecting dreamers if they are to be allowed to stay.

Trump has expressed sympathy for the immigrants, who were brought to the United States by their parents as minors and did not knowingly break the law. But he is also pushing for border security and other measures as part of any legislative deal.

Alsup's ruling said that California and other plaintiffs had shown they were likely to succeed on their claims that the Trump administration's revocation of the nearly six-year-old program was "capricious" and not in compliance with federal laws.

He said states, immigrants and public universities faced significant losses if a court found that the administration had acted improperly in terminating the program.

Government lawyers have argued that Trump had the authority to rescind DACA in September, and that the courts did not have the power to review it under federal law.

The American Civil Liberties Union blasted the Trump administration for appealing the decision as "the latest in a disturbing pattern of hostile actions directed at young immigrants across America."

Lorella Praeli, the ACLU's director of immigration policy, said that Trump has failed to broker a deal with Congress that would protect the immigrants.

On Tuesday, more than 300 immigrants who have DACA protections went to Capitol Hill to lobby key Republican senators to pass legislation that would grant them U.S. citizenship. Democratic leaders in Congress want to include protections for the dreamers in any spending deal hammered out before government funding expires Friday.

"Republicans today have a choice: To follow the leadership of Donald Trump or to come out and understand that it's not okay what's happening," said Ambar Pinto, a 24-year-old Alexandria resident whose parents brought her to the United States from Bolivia when she was 12. "They need to make a choice. We can no longer wait. They need to do it now."

Pinto has DACA protection, but said her 17-year-old brother was not old enough to apply before the Trump administration ended the program.

---

Robert Barnes and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.
Public joint-stock company Ukrgazvydobuvannia was raided on Tuesday regarding the case on purchase of spare parts to pumps at the high price, which has been investigated since May 2017, Spokesman of Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (PGO) Andriy Lysenko has said.

He said that on May 5, 2017, a criminal case under Part 5 of Article 191 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (misappropriation, embezzlement or conversion or property by malversation committed in respect of an especially gross amount or by an organized group) and the department for investigating important cases of the main investigative department of the PGO started a pretrial investigation.

"It concerned the purchase of spare parts for pumps in Ukraine-2000 LLC in October 2016 for the total amount of more than UAH 51 million exceeding their market value by 3-20 times. During the pretrial investigation it was already established that officials of PJSC Ukrgazvydobuvannia with the purpose of capturing the funds entered into a conspiracy with representatives of enterprises supplying spare parts, organized and implemented a scheme for procurement of inventory items at inflated prices," Lysenko wrote.

The pretrial investigation is underway.

Earlier the press service of Ukrgazvydobuvannia reported that PGO and Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) again raided the company. Last year PGO and SBU raided the company several times.
A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a request by a relative of one of the Sutherland Springs shooting victims permission to interview several Air Force officials about the agencys handling of the shooters case, but will determine next month whether to allow the deposition of those responsible for reporting the shooters military convictions to the FBI.

Lawyer Thomas J. Henry sought to interview 10 potential witnesses using Rule 27, a federal rule of civil procedure that allows depositions before a lawsuit is filed if there is a danger that the testimony would otherwise not later be available. Henry represents Roy White, a son of Lula White, one of the 26 people killed in the Nov. 5 church shooting. Lula White was the grandmother of the estranged wife of the shooter, Devin Kelley.
As teenagers, Fred Anderson, MacArthur Cotton, Barbara Bowie and Kredelle Petway had decided theyd had enough and seen enough. Raised in the South, separate restrooms, drinking fountains and schools, and bus seats of segregation were the norm.

The onset of the civil rights movement and the demand for equal rights for all U.S citizens inspired them to take action and be a part of the process of change.

But that change did not come without danger. Anderson, Cotton, Bowie and Petway took time last week to talk to Judson Independent School District students about their experiences as Freedom Riders in 1961 in the Deep South.

Anderson, a Hattiesburg, Mississippi native, told the packed Judson Performing Arts Center that family and community involvement was instrumental in his life. He said his grandmother always pushed him to make a difference.

When I was 13, I (lost) a younger first cousin who was killed by white violence in the South, he said.

At 15, Anderson was pulled off a bus when he refused to sit in the back. He was arrested and spent 39 days in a county jail, where I was brutalized, and beaten while jailed.

It was that experience that linked me up to other Freedom Riders, people who were doing the same thing and led to my participation in the civil rights movement in the South, he said. Those were the events that motivated me and inspired me to stand up and try to do something different.

Petway told students she was arrested in the summer of 1961 for attempting to drink from a drinking fountain. She spent three days in jail, she said, For the simple act of trying to exercise what we thought were rights that we had, only to find out that those rights could not be exercised in the segregated South.

San Antonian Barbara Bowie was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. There were some terrible things that happened during that time, she said. She was 13 when her older brother, the late Jesse Davis, became a Freedom Rider at age 19.

Bowie detailed her mothers trip to a hospital emergency room that took 8-9 hours before she was seen. As white people kept coming in, they would see the white person, and my mother would have to continue waiting.

Audible gasps rumbled through the PAC crowd when Bowie recounted how the next day, My mother went into surgery and my mother did not come out, she passed away.

At that time, I thought, Wow, they did not care about my mothers life. They dont care about mine, they dont care about any of us, she said. This was a movement we all needed to be involved in. This was not just about going to the restaurant, or sitting on a bus, this was life and death. So I became dedicated at that particular time.

Judson High School junior Nathaniel Cullors said MacArthur Cottons statement about how few things have changed and how some racial undertones are still prevalent today hit home for him.

From my point of view, Ive always had that in my mind. There are not huge differences between the 1960s and today, to hear someone who actually lived in that time and fought through it, I was blown away, Cullors said. Just because its been swept under the rug and its not outward and blatant like it used to be, doesnt mean these issues are not happening today.

Senior Gabrielle Hearn said she knew little about Freedom Riders and was hesitant to attend the Jan. 11 event, but said she was glad she did.

I knew it was bad, but I didnt really think it was as bad as people were saying, Hearn said. So to hear it first-hand from someone who experienced it, that really put everything into perspective for me.

To hear (Mrs. Bowie) tell about her mom, and how she passed away in surgery and how it didnt seem like they really cared, that hurt me, Hearn said. How can someone not care about someone elses existence, whether youre the same race or not? That hurt.

The Freedom Riders appearance at Judson is an annual event leading up to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

jflinn@express-news.net
Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Viktor Muzhenko has begun an official visit to Brussels, where he will take part in the work of the NATO Military Committee at the level of chiefs of staff.

"The head of the Ukrainian delegation will participate in the meeting of the NATO military committee in the format with Ukraine, as well as in the meetings of the operational partners of the NATO mission in Afghanistan "Strong support,"and in the meeting devoted to cooperation in the format "Projecting stability," Liaison Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said on Tuesday.

At the NATO headquarters, Muzhenko will also hold a number of bilateral meetings with the political and military leadership of the Alliance, the heads of the general staffs of the armed forces of other countries. The topic of the discussion will be current aspects of regional security and practical issues of military cooperation with NATO countries and partners.
A Texas teacher has been arrested and charged with having an improper relationship with a student after the 16-year-old teenager reportedly told his mother about the sexual relationship.

Marisela Mendoza Winn, 39, taught at IDEA McAllen Public Schools and is accused of having sexual relations with a student who was in her English class.
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LOS ANGELES - A Perris couple were arrested on suspicion of torture and child abuse after police found several of their children chained to beds in putrid surroundings, authorities said Monday.

The discovery came Sunday after one of the children, a 17-year-old girl, escaped from the house and dialed 911 on a cellphone she found in the home, according to an account released by Perris police.

When officers from Perris and deputies from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department met the girl, she appeared to be about 10 years old and emaciated, police said.

Inside the house officers found "several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings," the statement said. The youngest was 2 years old. Like their sister, the 12 siblings in the house appeared to police to be minors and malnourished, but authorities determined that seven of them were adults from the ages of 18 to 29, police said.

Police provided food and drinks to the children, who "claimed to be starving," before they were admitted to hospitals.

The parents, David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49 were jailed; bail was set at $9 million.

Public records show the couple own the nondescript tract house. Its address is also listed in a state Department of Education directory as the location of the Sandcastle Day School, a private K-12 campus that opened in 2011.

The New York Times reported the school enrolled six students this year, in grades six through 12.

Public records indicate the couple have lived at the Perris address since 2010 and lived in Texas for many years before coming to California. They declared bankruptcy twice, public records show.
Russia's hybrid military forces have attacked Ukrainian army positions in Donbas three times in the past 24 hours, with no Ukrainian soldiers reported as killed or wounded in action, the press center of the Anti-Terrorist Operation Headquarters has reported.

"The situation in the ATO area is under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The tension along the contact line has slightly weakened over the past day, but the Russian occupation units failed to fully adhere to the ceasefire," the press center said.

In particular, the enemy used grenade launchers and heavy machine guns to shell the defenders of the village of Zaitseve, which is in the Luhansk sector.

In the Donetsk sector, the militants used 82mm mortars, machine guns and small arms near the village of Shyrokyne. The Ukrainian positions near the village of Kamianka came under fire from grenade launchers of various types, heavy machine guns and small arms.

No violations of the ceasefire were recorded in other areas.
Six years ago, I received a telephone call from a professor at a small community college in East Texas. He told me that a student of his named Carlos had written a paper about my work as mayor of San Antonio for a history course and it had been selected as the best student paper of the year by a Texas history association. He said he was taking Carlos to present the paper in Houston in a few weeks and they wanted to drive to San Antonio to meet me. I replied that a Sunday lunch would work and I would read his paper before our meeting.

When I read the paper, I concluded it was the best analysis of the economic development strategy I tried to execute as mayor written by any journalist or analyst at any level. So when we met for lunch the following Sunday, I complimented Carlos and told him he had the skills to be a good journalist or writer. He replied that he had his heart set on being an engineer. I asked how prepared he was to study engineering, and he told me he had earned straight As in his math and science courses. I asked how he planned to make the transition from an East Texas community college to an engineering school, and he answered that he honestly had no idea.

I also learned in that lunch that at age 9 Carlos had crossed the Rio Grande on an inner tube with his mother. They traveled to North Texas to join his father and sisters in Dallas, where each parent was soon working two jobs in restaurants. One morning as they drove to work, a truck barreled through a red light, hit the family car, killed his mother and disabled his father. Some years later, the father and boy moved to East Texas where the father was offered a food service job. They lived in an aluminum garage with a concrete floor, slept in their car, and showered at a local gym. Despite working long hours in a restaurant, Carlos became a straight-A student.

Before the lunch was over, I committed to help him qualify for the engineering program at the University of Texas at San Antonio and provide him a place to live if he got into the program. The dean of the engineering college told me Carlos was clearly qualified and would be admitted as a second-year student that fall. But the dean explained that engineering courses are usually spread out over four years, Carlos would have to take up to five engineering courses in certain semesters to complete the curriculum, and such a schedule would be daunting for even the best prepared student.

The first year Carlos lived in a guest house on our property. I saw his light on until one oclock or later almost every night as he tackled thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, materials science, systems controls and other engineering courses. At the end of the first semester, he brought home five As. And he did it semester after semester, except for the one when he came with tears in his eyes with a C and four As. All this he accomplished while commuting on multiple buses daily, some 20 miles to the campus, for fear that if he drove a car, a minor traffic infraction or broken taillight could result in deportation.

When President Barack Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, my wife, Mary Alice, secured an attorney and walked Carlos through the application process. I have never seen a bigger smile on any human being than the day he came from the mailbox with a green card labeled U.S. Government.

Carlos continued to work hard, took courses in an honors program, and graduated after an extra semester. He was selected to be a manufacturing engineer in a San Antonio-based automotive supplier firm, and his employer tells me he is a valued member of their team.

I tell his story to describe in human terms what DACA means to people who struggle through adversity and who strive for worthwhile dreams. I want to provide a sense of who the Dreamers actually are. Carlos is one; there are 800,000.

Carlos came to the U.S. at 9 years old. His extended family is here. He has never been back, nor does he know anyone in his birthplace of Guanajuato, Mexico. If DACA is not extended, the first thing that will happen is that without renewal he will lose his legal status, and then he will lose his job. Then he will be subject to deportation. The government already has access to all the personal contact information needed to deport him. He provided it in his DACA application.

Congress must extend the DACA program and enact a permanent solution for the Dreamers. They should be allowed to pursue eventual citizenship. I pray that the lessons we will all learn through this DACA process will help us find our way to the broader immigration reforms our country needs.

Henry Cisneros served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton and for four terms as mayor of San Antonio. He is a partner at the infrastructure finance firm Siebert Cisneros Shank & Co.
1 False alarm: In a sign, perhaps, that the world is on edge about a potential nuclear war, Japans public broadcaster on Tuesday accidentally sent news alerts that North Korea had launched a missile and that citizens should take shelter  just days after the government of Hawaii had sent a similar warning to its citizens. The broadcaster, NHK, corrected itself five minutes later and apologized for the error on its evening news. The initial texts cited J-Alert, a system used by the government to issue warnings to its citizens about missiles, tsunamis and other natural disasters.

2 Treason charge: Irans supreme leader has accused Saudi Arabia of treason against Muslims because of its alleged ties to Israel. Addressing representatives from the Muslim-majority countries in Tehran on Tuesday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said governments that help the United States and cooperate with the Zionist regime to fight Muslim brothers are committing treason, like what Saudis are doing. However, he also said Iran is ready to adopt a brotherly attitude toward countries that have been hostile toward it, and called for Muslim unity. Iran and Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties in 2016 and support opposing sides in the wars in Syria and Yemen.
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Construction of second stage of Holodomor victims museum to begin in Feb, take two years - PM

Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has said that the construction of the second stage of the National Museum "Memorial to Holodomor Victims" will begin in February and will take two years, the press service of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine has reported.

Groysman participated in a meeting of the organizing committee on preparations for the 85th anniversary of the Holodomor, which was also attended by Head of the Presidential Administration Ihor Rainin.

Groysman said at the meeting that the completion of the construction of the Memorial to Holodomor Victims was "a matter of honor," with UAH 320 million envisaged in the state budget for 2018 for this purpose.

He said that additional funds could be attracted from international sources.

"We begin work in February. We must commission the facility within 24 months. I instruct Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Kistion to monitor the project... Now the task is to decide on the effective use of funds," the press service quoted Groysman as saying.

The plan of measures provides for holding major exhibitions and meetings to inform the world about the scale of the tragedy, as well as holding an international forum in November 2018 dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the Holodomor. The group on preparations for the forum is headed by Deputy Prime Minister Viacheslav Kyrylenko.

Groysman also supported the idea of creating a film about the Holodomor and stressed the importance of honoring the memory of Holodomor researchers, first and foremost, U.S. scientist James Mace.

A report posted on the website of the president says that the meeting participants discussed the construction of a monument to outstanding Holodomor researcher in Ukraine Mace, the resumption of work on the creation of the National Book of Holodomor Victims, and the publication of historical books devoted to the Holodomor genocide of the Ukrainian people.

On November 21, 2017, Groysman stated that the project cost of the construction of the second stage of the Memorial to Holodomor Victims was UAH 700 million, 50% of which will be allocated by the state and the rest by Ukrainian cities and philanthropists.
Ukraine faces the Russian aggression and internal challenges to its security, head of the EU Delegation to Ukraine, Hugues Mingarelli has said.

In the EU we see two sources of threats to the security of Ukraine and its neighbors: first of all, obviously, this is a conflict with Russia and the second direction is ineffective governance, weak institutions, lack of rule of law, which make Ukraine and other countries of the region more vulnerable to internal and external threats, he said, speaking at the round table titled "Threats to security of Ukraine and other countries of the Eastern Partnership: possible answers" in Kyiv on Tuesday.

Mingarelli noted that the military conflict had already led to the death of more than 10,000 people, forced displacement of 1.6 million people, more than 1 million refugees in neighboring countries.

In addition, the ambassador pointed to the economic challenges that Ukraine faces. It is absolutely clear that with the occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions the Ukrainian economy has weakened, in particular, in industrial production, the diplomat said.

Mingarelli also noted the role of the economic blockade of the occupied territories in the difficult economic situation in Ukraine.

At the same time, the head of the EU mission stressed the importance of carrying out reforms in Ukraine.

"The association agreement will include the economy of Ukraine in the EU single market. It is also a way to strengthen Ukraine's resistance to internal and external challenges, the ambassador said.
An altercation between activists and police occurred outside Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada on Tuesday after persons set fire to a Russian flag.

The situation was quickly brought under control.

As earlier reported, a protest rally, dubbed "Stop Revenge," demanding passage of several laws involving the de-occupation of Donbas, imposing sanctions on Russian companies and the establishment of an anti-corruption court. Some demonstrators are also demanding that several politicians "with connection with the country's previous rulers" be brought to justice.

Some 3,800 police and National Guard troops have been deployed to keep the peace outside parliament.

Demonstrators are expected to march on Presidential Administration to deliver their demands. Organizers of the rally include Free People group, Ukrainian People's Rada of Donetsk and Luhansk, National Alliance, Musical Battalion, and C-14 and Ukrainian nationalist groups.

Ukraine's parliament on Tuesday is scheduled to floor the "Law on certain aspects of state policy for ensuring state Ukrainian sovereignty in temporarily occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions" in its second reading. The bill identifies Russia as the 'state-aggressor' against Ukraine.
For many places in Asia, winter is much less a winter, much more a wet and humid season. Here in Southeast Asia, we are braced with hot months from December to March with almost daily showers. If youre looking to escape somewhere with more favourable weather, take an under four-hour flight and find yourself in the beautiful landscapes of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

With its average year-round temperatures of 28 degrees Celsius and in its driest season between January to April, Colombo is a direct flight away from the gateway to Sri Lanka, home to a range of activities and at its peak during these months.

Sri Lanka maintains warm temperatures year-round, with two monsoon seasons: May to September are rainy in the West and Southwest, while October to February are rainy in the North, meaning there is always perfect weather to enjoy somewhere on this charming little island.

Admittedly, the country is not always on the top of everybodys travel list, but is perfect for those who want to do everything. Want to go somewhere beach-bound, but feel a little lazy for lying around? Looking to climb mountains for beautiful scenes but want to avoid excessive endurance on a holiday? Or perhaps wildlife is your thing? Sri Lankas got you covered.

The island spans just under the size of Ireland, but is home to almost 1,000 tea growing estates, a large gemstone industry and heartwarming hospitality, thanks to its friendly locals.

Have a look through the slideshow above for 9 reasons why Sri Lanka will give you a lot of everything youre looking for in a trip to kickstart your year.

Shelina Assomull

Photos: Getty Images

Read More:

Boundless Beauty: 9 Most exotic beaches in Southeast Asia

Luxurious Getaways: 10 Private islands you can rent in Southeast Asia
SANDY LEVEL  A frosty morning didnt stop more than 200 people from participating in the 8th Annual Stop the Violence Walk in Sandy Level.

The two-mile walk began Monday morning at Cross Road Baptist Church and concluded at St. John Baptist Church with a program themed around The Next Level. The program featured speakers, song, and even a little gospel stand-up comedy.

The annual walk is in memory of the members of the Sandy Level community who lost their lives to violence. It is organized by Garrett Dillard, whose brother Glen Dillard was fatally shot in 2010.

Garrett Dillard said that the goal of Mondays Martin Luther King Jr. Day program was to inspire, motivate and encourage people to take their lives to the next level. For some, he said, that might mean the next level spiritually; for others, it could mean improving their health or their finances.

Our goals often seem far away, Dillard said, but when we keep our goals on the front burner, we can accomplish incredible things.

During the two-mile Stop the Violence Walk, Dillard said, he noticed that once people could see St. John Baptist Church on the horizon, they tended to speed up because their goal was within their sights.

That makes me think: If we wrote down our goals and every morning envisioned, This is my goal today, think about how hard we would work, Dillard said.

Speaker Tara Scales said that while Sandy Level once had serious problems with drugs and violence, the community has pulled together and healed itself.

Since the inception of the (Stop the Violence) event in January 2011, no citizens from Sandy Level have been murdered or been involved in a murder, Scales said. To God be the glory.  Although we are a small community of many different families, when one family hurts, we all hurt. We started out being known as Logtown, where drugs were the main focus. But now they call us Sandy Level. We picked up the pieces and love joined us together. We are now on the next level.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sacrificed so much so that we all could live in harmony and pursue the American dream without limitations, Scales continued. Although we have not completely reached this point, his life created an ongoing conversation that allows us to get closer and closer to making his dream a reality.

Other speakers at the event included Caleb Dillard; Saundra Yates of Mountain Valley Hospice and Palliative Care, who spoke about dealing with loss and grief; Vietnam Veteran Joe Scales of the Montford Point Marine Association; Jarrett Hagwood, who performed gospel stand-up comedy; and Lionel Hagwood, among others.
A teachable moment

This week our President exploded in frustration and anger with, in his mind, a broken immigration system that continues to admit people from African countries, El Salvador, and Haiti. The reports of two U.S. Senators in the room with Trump at the time of his explosion indicate that Trump expressed a preference for countries such as Norway over the countries sending people of color---countries which he referred to as  ***holes.  Although Mr. Trump later denied the outrageous and racist tone of his remarks, members of his own party, Democrats, civil rights organizations, and diplomats world-wide expressed dismay and disgust.

Its time for the rest of us to weigh in. Lets make this a teachable moment when talking to our children and grandchildren who, no doubt given their technological prowess, are fully aware of the use of these shockingly racist comments by our President. Lets remind them of the importance of valuing every individual equally regardless of their skin color, gender, socio-economic background, religion or sexual preference. Lets point out the true heroes of our country whose actions during the recent disasters from fire, mudslides, hurricanes and tornadoes saved lives even at the cost of their own and raised countless millions to rebuild communities. These are the people who can provide the role models our children need to emulate as they grow toward adulthood. Lets encourage our children to aspire to be compassionate, honest and responsible citizens with the courage to call- out those in our communities and government who engage in bullying and divisive speech and actions. It is these children who will lead us through the 21st Century with grace and strength.

Carol Meyer

Ridgeway

A new start

The Virginia General Assembly, the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World established on July 30, 1619, was gaveled in as scheduled on Wednesday, January 10. With the exception of our new office space, the Senate membership remains unchanged from last year with the same 40 senators, in the same seats and on the same committees as we served on last year. There are however lots of other changes happening in Capitol square both in the Executive Branch and in the House of Delegates.

The House of Delegates has a new Speaker, Kirk Cox of Colonial Heights, who was elected on the opening day of session. And as a side note, the former Speaker, Bill Howell, is currently recuperating from surgery - our best wishes for a speedy recovery go out to him. The Speaker of the House presides of the House of Delegates.

The membership of the House has changed with the addition of 19 new delegates. Of those new delegates, 16 are Democrats and 3 are Republicans, and the Houses balance is now 51 Republicans and 49 Democrats. Likewise, there are 21 Republicans and 19 Democrats in the Senate. I continue to serve the Republican Caucus in the Senate as the Majority Whip, a leadership position that I have held for the past seven years.

Marking the end of Governor McAuliffes term and the inauguration of our new Governor Ralph Northam, the citizens of the Commonwealth are presented with three different formal addresses: Governor McAuliffes final State of the Commonwealth Address, and Governor Northams Inaugural Address this Saturday at noon followed by his address on Monday to the joint session of the House and Senate outlining his plans and priorities for the 2018 session.

In addition to our new Governor, The Commonwealths Executive Branch will also be swearing its new Lieutenant Governor Justin E. Fairfax and the return of Attorney General Mark R. Herring. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate.

The inauguration of our Governor is a very formal affair. My family and I were in attendance when Governor Northam was sworn in at noon, Saturday. The ceremony itself is held on the south steps of the Capitol, a setting that has appeared in several films as a stand-in for the United States Capitol (where, apparently, it is more challenging to get permission to film). The Capitol lawn has large temporary grandstands installed for invited guests  who number in the thousands  to view the swearing-in ceremony. I have previously served with Governor Northam both when he was a Senator, and in his role as the Presiding Officer of the Senate during his term as Lt. Governor. While we dont agree on certain issues, he and I both agree on issues concerning economic development, education and workforce development in Southside and Southwest Virginia. He and I had a very productive meeting before he was sworn in this weekend, and we agreed to work together on these issues during his term. Our new Governor is an honorable man, and I look forward to working with him over the next four years.

Bill Stanley

District 20 Rep.

Virginia Senate
TODAYS WORD is alembic (e-lem-bik). Example: Jason quickly rose to the top of his profession, with his wide experience feeding the sheer alembic of his audacity.

MONDAYS WORD was bifurcate (bahy-fer-keyt). It means to divide into two branches or forks. Example: I thought I was all alone in the crawlspace until I saw the snakes bifurcated tongue flicking at me from the rafters.

Property management

The Martinsville and Henry County Property Management Association will have their regular meeting over at the Dutch Inn today. The meeting will start at noon, with Blue Ridge Airport Manager Jason Davis as the guest speaker. All owners and managers of commercial and residential rental properties in Martinsville and Henry County are invited to attend and bring a friend. The board of directors will meet at 11:30 a.m. prior to the regularly scheduled meeting. For more information, call Chris Harvey at (276)-666-1527.

TODAY IS: National Religious Freedom Day

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was signed this day in 1786 by Thomas Jefferson. It later became the basis for the establishment clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, written by Congressman Fisher Ames. That clause states that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Beginning in 1993, Jan. 16 became a national day of recognition, acknowledging the freedom we have to worship as we choose.

American Legion

The American Legion Homer Dillard Post #78 will have its January meeting tonight. The meeting will start at 7 p.m. over at the Post Home, which is at 139 Creekside Drive in Fieldale. The Executive Board will meet at 6 p.m.

TRIVIA QUESTION: Books are a big part of life now. In fact, the Stroller was just introduced to the world of digital books at Christmas, when he was given a Kindle. But still, theres nothing like an actual paperback book, fresh off the press. What was the first book ever written and where was it found? The answer will be in tomorrows Stroller.

MONDAYS TRIVIA ANSWER: What unusual animal is considerably larger as a baby than it is as an adult? That would be a paradox frog (also known as a shrinking frog). Its found in South America and gets its name from the fact tadpoles of this species grow up to 10 inches long. Then it shrinks back down as it matures into a frog, down to 4 to 5 inches at most. Why do they shrink as they grow? Its still not completely clear, although some scientists believe the tadpoles gain an ecological advantage by doing some of their adult development in the juvenile stage.
In Defence of Marxism is committed to safeguarding your privacy. At all times we aim to respect any personal data you share with us, or that we receive from other organisations, and keep it safe. This Privacy Policy (Policy) sets out our data collection and processing practices and your options regarding the ways in which your personal information is used.

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Mingarelli on misinformation: Vision of Ukraine in Western Europe has nothing to do with reality

The disinformation campaign has seriously weakened Ukraine and its image in Western Europe, Hugues Mingarelli, head of the European Union Delegation to Ukraine has said.

One of the challenges [of Ukraine's security] is the disinformation campaign that was carried out and which, in my opinion, weakened Ukraine to a large extent, he said at a roundtable on "The threats to the security of Ukraine and other countries of the Eastern Partnership: possible answers" in Kyiv on Tuesday.

Mingarelli noted that such misinformation campaign had influence not only inside Ukraine, it also affected the image of the country abroad. The vision of Ukraine in Western Europe has nothing to do with reality in this country, largely because of the propaganda, disinformation activity that was carried out in Western Europe, the diplomat said.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston welcomed hundreds of thousands of guests for free on Monday in honor of Martin Luther King Junior.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh greeted visitors at the museum and contributed to an interactive art piece by "Artists For Humanity." The local group of teen artists created a painting celebrating "themes of social justice, equality, and unity," according to the MFA. Guests were able to add their personal touch by shading in parts of the mural as well.

The mayor made a stop at the MFA after joining volunteers helping ESL students at Boston Latin High School. In his speech at the museum, Walsh echoed sentiments of inclusiveness throughout the city. He has long voiced support for immigrants and refugees, defending Boston as a sanctuary city shortly after President Donald Trump announced a travel ban last year.

Walsh recalled MLK's connection to Boston. King studied theology at Boston University and met his activist wife, Coretta Scott King, at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury. The mayor quoted Martin Luther King Jr. from a speech on Boston Common in 1965: "Boston must become a testing ground for the ideals of freedom."

Walsh added that this year, Boston has plans to create a memorial to MLK Jr. and Coretta Scott King.

"We believe in the power of public art...it says something about who we are," Walsh said. "Our memorial to Dr. King and Coretta Scott King will say a lot about Boston."

A large audience looked on and helped shade in the interactive art piece on display following the mayor's remarks.

The museum spilled with visitors on Monday, which marked the 16th year in a row that the MFA has hosted an open house to celebrate the legacy of King.

Outside the museum, an entrance line wrapped around the staircase down Huntington Avenue. Guests were eager to partake in some of the MFA's special events, including art activities, scavenger hunts, special tours and live musical performances.
WARE -- Church Street is expected to reopen Tuesday afternoon with work crews having removed huge ice chunks and broken trees from a section of the road where flooding of the Ware River followed heavy rain and high temperatures.

The street was forced to close Saturday as it was impassible.

Nothing could be done to fix the problem until Tuesday morning, when water finally receded, Ware Department of Public Works Director Richard Kilhart said.

Crews were then able to begin chopping the ice and trucking it, and all the debris, away, he said.

The section of the road is a low spot located between a bridge over the Ware River and a railroad crossing.

Although a lot of ice remains under the bridge, the debris has not completely blocked the flow of water streaming under the ice.

Kilhart said state highway inspectors told him the bridge was not damaged.

He said the prolonged cold snap that finally broke last week, and contributed to the road closure, was the worst stretch of frigid weather he has experienced in Massachusetts.
BROCKTON -- Authorities continue to investigate the death of a 42-year-old Brockton man who was shot several times at closing time outside a city bar Saturday morning and died minutes later at a local hospital, the Brockton Enterprise reported.

Police said David J. Carroll was leaving Dylan's Bar at 789 Centre St. just after 2 a.m. when he apparently got into a confrontation with another person in the bar's parking lot. Police said Carroll suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was transported to Brockton Hospital, where he died.

Brockton police and Massachusetts State Police detectives attached to the Plymouth District Attorney's Office are investigating.

Anyone with information can contact Brockton police at 508-941-0234 or the DA's office at 508-894-2600.
In part of its effort to combat the nationwide opioid epidemic, CVS has added 42 drug disposal boxes to locations across the state.

The new units will be placed in CVS pharmacies across Massachusetts so people can get rid of unwanted, unused or expired medication. CVS, alongside state officials, unveiled the first unit at the Medford CVS Pharmacy on Friday.

Those units will be available for drug disposal during regular pharmacy hours, CVS said.

"The units give our residents more safe and reliable ways to discard unwanted medications and using them will prevent unnecessary exposure to addictive opioids for anyone in your home," Gov. Charlie Baker said in a statement.

Those new disposal units complement the nearly 40 drug drop-off boxes CVS Health has already donated to Massachusetts police departments.

Between 2011 and 2015, nonfatal overdoses in Massachusetts increased by about 200 percent. But, for the first time in years, opioid-related deaths in the state declined by 10 percent for the first nine months of 2017.

Nationwide, CVS Health is planning to launch more than 750 medication disposal units in its pharmacies and has donated more than 800 units to police departments, according to a statement. The units have collected more than 220,000 pounds of unwanted medication.

CVS has a presence in nearly 10,000 communities across the country.

"Massachusetts has led the nation in legislation to address this epidemic, including being the first to institute a seven day limit on opioid prescriptions," said Thomas M. Moriarty, the executive vice president, chief policy and external affairs officer, and general counsel of CVS Health.

In addition to the disposal units, CVS Health and the CVS Health Foundation also announced $150,000 in grants to prevention, intervention, treatment and recovery efforts at Boston Medical Center, Mattapan Community Health Center and Greater Lawrence Family Health Center.

The in-store CVS pharmacy drug disposal locations are:

Acton

400 Massachusetts Ave.

Andover

68 Main St.

Beverly

19 Dodge St.

Brockton

1267 Main St.

Cambridge

36 White St.

Chicopee

1616 Memorial Drive

Dorchester

715 Morrissey Blvd.

Fall River

1620 President Ave.

Falmouth

105 Davis Straits

Framingham

1280 Worcester Road

Franklin

272 E. Central St. (Rte. 140)

Gardner

314 Main St.

Greenfield

137 Federal St.

Haverhill

425 Lowell Ave.

Hyannis

176 North St.

Leominster

9 Nelson St.

Lowell

1815 Middlesex St.

336 Bridge St.

Mansfield

261 Chauncy St.

Marlboro

264 East Main St.

Marshfield

1880 Ocean St.

Medford

590 Fells Way

Milford

137 South Main St.

Natick

137 West Central St.

New Bedford

1145 Kempton St.

Newburyport

13-1/2 Pond St.

North Attleboro

8 East Washington St.

Norwood

136 Nahatan St.

Plymouth

8 Pilgrim Hill Road

Quincy

626 Southern Artery (Rte. 3A)

Randolph

171 North Main St.

Shrewsbury

197 Boston Turnpike (Rte. 9)

Springfield

615-621 Belmont Ave.

600 State St.

Taunton

284 Winthrop St.

Waltham

12 Harvard St.

Watertown

27-43 Main St.

Weymouth

474 Washington St.

Wollaston

42 Beale St.

Worcester

115 Stafford St.

400 Park Ave.

500 Grafton St.

CVS drug disposal boxes are in these Massachusetts police departments:

Acushnet

62 Middle Road

Attleboro

12 Union St.

Barre

655 South St.

Berkley

3 North Main St.

East Freetown

225 Chace Road

Fairhaven

1 Bryant Lane

Georgetown

47 Central St.

Hampden

100 Allen St.

Hubbardston

7 Main St. #9

Lawrence

90 Lowell St.

Longmeadow

34 Williams St.

Ludlow

612 Chapin St.

Lunenburg

655 Massachusetts Ave.

Mansfield

50 West St.

Marblehead

2 Humphrey St., as well as at Marblehead High School

Mendon

22 Main St.

Methuen

90 Hampshire St.

Milford

250 Main St.

Millville

10 Central St.

Monson

110 Main St.

Nahant

198 Nahant Road

Newburyport

4 Green St.

North Attleboro

102 S. Washington St.

Norton

82 E. Main St.

Raynham

53 Orchard St.

Rehoboth

334 Anawan St.

Seekonk

500 Taunton Ave.

Somerset

465 County St.

South Dartmouth

249 Russells Mills Road

Spencer

9 Main St.

Sturbridge

346 Main St.

Swampscott

531 Humphrey St.

Taunton

23 Summer St.

Tyngsborough

20 Westford Road

Uxbridge

275 Douglas St.

West Brookfield

2 East Main St.

Westborough

2400 Computer Drive

Westminster

7 South St.

Westport

818 Main Road
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Friday said it won't reconsider its construction permit for a Massachusetts pipeline, and also rejected a Rhode Island Indian tribe's late bid for full legal standing in the matter of the Connecticut Expansion Project.

Now the Narragansett Indian Tribe plans to sue the five-member commission in federal appeals court, a lawyer representing the tribe's historic preservation office confirmed.

A Narragansett tribal official in late 2016 helped identify dozens of "ceremonial stone landscapes" along the pipeline right-of-way through the Otis State Forest in Berkshire County, and refused to sign a mitigation agreement. The tribe asserts that FERC violated federal historic preservation law in its permitting process.

The 14-mile Kinder Morgan pipeline, with loops in three states, went into service in late 2017 and serves three natural gas utilities in Connecticut.

"Naturally, FERC is trying to stop (the Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office) from bringing this case -- by denying NITHPO party status -- because it doesn't want an appellate court to be scrutinizing its actions," said New York lawyer Anne Marie Garti on Monday.

Parties with intervenor status have robust rights, including automatic standing to challenge any final agency decision in federal appeals court.

Garti said Monday that a panel of three judges will be asked to decide whether FERC violated the National Historic Preservation Act and federal trust law. She has argued that the pipeline was approved before tribal consultation was complete, and that consultation occurred too late in the process to be meaningful.

In its Jan. 10 order, FERC rejected the tribe's request for a rehearing of the agency's April 12 authorization to cut down trees and build the pipeline, with its loops in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York.

The tribe's separate motion to intervene was also dismissed. The motion was filed nearly three years after the regular intervention deadline had passed, and 13 months after FERC issued its March 2016 conditional certificate for the project. An entity may not "sleep on its rights" and then seek untimely intervention, wrote FERC secretary Kimberly D. Bose.

Tribal historic preservation officials were made aware by late 2015 that a cultural survey of the pipeline route would be completed, yet waited until mid-2017 to try to intervene, according to FERC.

Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co., a Kinder Morgan subsidiary, has argued that delays in the tribal consultation process were introduced by the tribes themselves. Eight months of 2016 were spent negotiating payments from Tennessee to the tribes for their cultural survey work, according to the company's timeline. Meanwhile, FERC in March of that year issued its certificate of public convenience and necessity for the pipeline.

Four tribes in the fall of 2016 identified 73 "ceremonial stone landscapes" along the pipeline corridor. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation later agreed that 21 of the landscapes would be documented, dismantled, and reconstructed, and the rest avoided. Doug Harris, deputy historic preservation officer for the Narragansett Tribe, refused to sign the mitigation agreement and said the solution amounts to "sacrilege."

Not much is known about the ceremonial stone landscapes, because the tribal survey report has been marked "privileged" in the FERC docket and sealed from public view. The Narragansett Tribe claims it has a historical connection to the project area because some of its members traveled to southern Berkshire County in the 17th century.

The group Climate Action Now has raised nearly $36,000 to support the tribe's legal effort, and an online appeal directs donations to the group's non-profit fiscal sponsor. Dozens of fracking and fossil fuel protesters have been arrested trying to block construction of the natural gas pipeline through the state forest in Sandisfield.

FERC on Friday also dismissed motions from the Massachusetts Pipeline Awareness Network that tried to stop construction and gain a new hearing on the project. MassPLAN asserts that the commission should not issue pipeline certificates until all other state and federal permits are in place, and that tree-felling and construction should wait until all appeals have been heard.

That position was echoed by U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey in a May 2017 letter to FERC protesting the pipeline's construction permit.
Three finalists will be interviewed for the job of commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

According to the department, they are:

Angelica Infante-Green

Jeffrey C. Riley

Penny Schwinn

The three finalists, who emerged from a pool of 18 applicants, will be interviewed by the full state board of elementary and secondary education. The board will vote to recommend the finalist after the final round of interviewed.

The interviews of the finalists are scheduled to take place during a public board meeting on Friday, Jan. 26, at the Omni Park House Hotel in Boston.

The board is eyeing Monday, Jan. 29 to pick one finalist out of the three. The meeting is set to take place in Malden.

Massachusetts school officials started the commissioner search after the sudden death of Dr. Mitchell Chester, who was undergoing cancer treatment. Chester died in June 2017 at the age of 65.

Jeff Wulfson is serving as acting commissioner and did not apply to take the job on a permanent basis.

In a statement, Paul Sagan, chair of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, said, "I am very pleased with this group of finalists and confident that whoever is ultimately selected to serve as our next commissioner will be extremely qualified to build on our track record of educational excellence and address the need to close the achievement gaps that remain among our most urgent challenges."
Kyiv's Shevchenkivsky District Court has included new materials  intercepts of telephone conversations  to the case against Ukrainian Armed Forces Colonel Ivan Bezyazykov, who is accused of collaborating with Russian special forces, Ukraine's TV Channel 5 has reported.

"According to prosecutors, the recordings show how the Ukrainian officer started working for the enemy during war. In some of the recordings he is a participant, in others he is talked about," the report said.

Bezyazykov and his lawyers deny wrongdoing. The Ukrainian officer has asked for protection for his family.

"There is a series of conversations that I would call 'an attempt by militants to discredit the prisoner.' They not only tried to discredit Bezyazykov. There were also ordinary soldiers, persons whom militants regarded as super prisoners, that is, those who could be exchanged for 15 prisoners held by Ukraine," defense lawyer Oleh Veremeyenko said.

Ukraine's SBU Security Service detained Bezyazykov on suspicion of cooperating with Russian special services. Deputy chief of the SBU Main Investigative Department Vitaliy Mayakov said in December the SBU had collected evidence that he cooperated with Russian special services.

Bezyazykov is a regular officer of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He had headed the intelligence unit of the former eighth army corps, which was disbanded in March 2015.

Bezyazykov was freed from captivity in Donbas on July 5, 2016. He was taken captive in August 2014.
"Elon Musk is either a visionary trying to make humans a multiplanetary species or a trapped alien just trying get back home." SilkSatin Paradise

Many thanks to Chelsea V. for sharing.
While downtown businesses will be missing the energy  and economic clout  of the Outdoor Retailer trade show for the first January in 20 years, organizers of a homegrown tech convention are, in true entrepreneurial spirit, aiming to disrupt memories of the mega-gear exposition by creating an even better event.

"The Silicon Slopes Tech Summit will become Utahs replacement for Outdoor Retailer," said Clint Betts, Silicon Slopes executive director. "We expect 40,000-50,000 in the next three to five years."

By

Art Raymond

@DNTechHive

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900007647/tech-summit-works-to-fill-outdoor-retailer-void-with-titans-of-innovation-10000-attendees.html
Idaho regulators twice rejected the companys https://www.franklinenergy.com/ request, saying the project is allowed only a two-year contract because the batteries would be charged with solar power.

The case could have far-reaching ramifications for emerging battery-storage technologies.

Franklin Energy is seeking to build a $200 million lithium-ion battery storage facility in Twin Falls County. It contends the project, under federal law, qualifies for a 20-year contract with Idaho Power, which has more than 500,000 customers in southern Idaho and eastern Oregon.

By Keith Ridler Associated Press

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/jan/13/company-idaho-regulators-at-odds-over-battery-stor/
Croatia confirms uncompromising support for the territorial integrity of Ukraine, Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak said.

"During an official visit to Croatia, I met with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense of the country, Mr. Damir Krsticevic. We exchanged views on many issues of cooperation between the two countries. And I once again felt uncompromising support from the territorial integrity of the friendly Republic of Croatia and the sovereignty of Ukraine, its European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations," Poltorak wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.

At the same time, the head of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry stressed the extreme importance of cooperation with Croatia, as a member state of NATO, "a country that has overcome external aggression and restored territorial integrity."
Fifty Senate lawmakers have endorsed a legislative measure to override the Federal Communications Commissions recent decision to deregulate the broadband industry, top Democrats said Monday.

The tally leaves supporters just one vote shy of the 51 required to pass a Senate resolution of disapproval, in a legislative gambit aimed at restoring the agencys net neutrality rules.

Brian Fung Washington Post

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-net-neutrality-regulations-20180115-story.html
The U.S. Labor Department rolled out new guidelines this month that make it easier for companies that want to hire interns but dont want to pay them.

Rebecca Greenfield Bloomberg

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-unpaid-internships-labor-department-20180115-story.html
Top automakers say the first generation of the technology will be used for commercial purposes, not by the general public.

Ford plans to own its initial fleet of self-driving cars and sell the use of those vehicles as a service to businesses. Thats a contrast from automakers traditional business model.

by JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press

http://www.govtech.com/fs/transportation/Companies-Will-Likely-Have-First-Dibs-on-Fully-Autonomous-Vehicles.html
System Technology Consultants provide customized IT Support, Consulting, Cybersecurity,

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"Our goal is to deploy 2,500 aircraft at the nations 50 largest cities by 2026"

Airspace Experience Technologies, LLC (AirSpaceX) has given a preview of its vision for the future of air taxi services at this years North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit. The company unveiled a sub-scale model of its vertical take off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, Mobi-One, an autonomous, tilt-wing electric aircraft designed to carry both passengers and cargo at speeds of up to 250 mph (400 km/h).

David Szondy

https://newatlas.com/airspacex-mobi-one-detroit/52985/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=1c74cc3e44-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-1c74cc3e44-92465361
2018-01-23 16:00:00

City Council Chambers

Contact: Will Sebern  [email protected]

A Year in Review and Looking Ahead

Reaching Home was approved unanimously by the Missoula City Council and Board of County

Commissioners in 2012, and lays out clear solutions for ending homelessness in Missoula.

A Year in

Review and Looking Ahead

is a panel discussion moderated by

Eran Pehan,

Director of the

City of Missoula Office of Housing & Community Development.

Panelists include:

http://files.constantcontact.com/863903a9001/152a2db6-7835-4c11-897c-9870f03de66c.pdf
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects the correction of a draft law on the Anti-Corruption Court in accordance with Ukraine's obligations as part of the EFF program during the bill's preparation for second reading, the Finance Ministry has told Interfax-Ukraine.

"Last week, during my working visit to the United States, I had more than one meeting with representatives of the IMF and the U.S. government. One of the issues discussed with representatives of the fund was the creation of the Anti-Corruption Court. The IMF put forward several proposals to the respective draft law and expects them to be considered and taken into account by parliament when preparing the document for second reading," the ministry's press service quoted Finance Minister Oleksandr Danilyuk as saying.

According to him, it is important for the IMF to see an effective and productive Anti-Corruption Court, which is the last stage in the formation of anti-corruption bodies.

"It is important that we, as a result, get a law that will start a new stage in the fight against corruption in Ukraine and launch an effective independent Anti-Corruption Court," Danyliuk said.

As reported, on December 22, 2017, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's draft law, titled "On the High Anti-Corruption Court" was registered in Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada. The text of the bill was published on December 26, 2017.

The IMF, in turn, officially notified the Ukrainian authorities that the adoption of the presidential bill in its current wording would mean the violation by Kyiv of its obligations to international partners.

"The submission by the President of the draft law on the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC, draft law 7440) was expected to be a positive step in this direction [fighting corruption]. However, we have serious concerns about the draft law that was submitted to Parliament on December 22, as several provisions are not consistent with the authorities' commitments under Ukraine's IMF-supported program and the recommendations of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe," reads a letter from IMF Mission Chief for Ukraine Ron van Rooden to Head of the Presidential Administration Ihor Rainin.

The IMF has nine systemic concerns.

In particular, the IMF insists that the Public Council of International Experts includes not only international organizations, but also donors in line with the recommendations of the Venice Commission and its representatives' negative decision about the appointment of an ineligible judge should be binding on the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ).

"The role of the Public Council of International Experts (PCIE) in the selection of the HACC judges should be made crucial, not just advisory A negative decision about a candidate by the PCIE should be binding on the HQCJ," the IMF said in the letter.

The jurisdiction of the HACC should align with the investigative jurisdiction of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO).

The IMF said that the draft law opens opportunities for additional delays in establishing the HACC.

"The establishment and operation of the HACC is a key pillar of Ukraine's anti-corruption agenda In its current form, however, we would not be able to support the draft law of the HACC. In this respect, the IMF staff stand ready to support the Presidential Administration to revise the draft law in line with the authorities' commitments under the IMF-supported program and the Venice Commission's recommendations," the IMF said in the letter.

The letter was also sent to a number of high-ranking Ukrainian officials, in particular, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman and Verkhovna Rada Chairman Andriy Parubiy.
The killer, who attempted unsuccessfully last year to murder Anti-Terrorist Operations veterans Adam Osmayev and Amina Okuyeva, refuses to testify. The assassins who successfully murdered Amina Okuyeva remain at large, advisor to Ukraine's Interior Minister and Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine deputy (People's' Front Party faction) Anton Gerashchenko has said.

"Last year there were two attempts to kill Amina and Adam, who escaped the first. That assassin is in pretrial custody and the case will go to court this year. He will receive, I believe, a life prison sentence. The suspect refuses to give testimony," Gerashchenko told reporters in Kyiv on Tuesday.

Gerashchenko said the primary version of the second successful assassination of Okuyeva in October is as follows: revenge by Russian terrorist saboteurs with the assistance of Russian special forces.

Osmayev was wounded in first attack in June 2017 and wounded on October 30, 2017 attack that killed Okuyeva.
Foreign Minister of Albania, Ditmir Bushati, intends to visit Ukraine on February 22-23, the press service of the Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has reported.

Klympush-Tsintsadze held a meeting with Albanian State Minister for Diaspora Pandeli Majko, the message reads.

Majko noted that the intensification of bilateral cooperation is extremely urgent today, as mutual trade is growing, more and more Ukrainians are opening Albania as a tourist destination. The state minister also stressed that Albania is one of the Balkan countries that unequivocally support Ukraine in countering Russian aggression.

"He reminded that the Albanian side remains interested in exchanging visits with Ukraine at the high and highest levels, in particular, on February 22-23 the foreign minister of Albania is expected to visit Ukraine," Majko was quoted.

The minister added that since 2017 in several schools in the south of Ukraine, where a significant number of representatives of the Albanian Diaspora live, optional teaching of the Albanian language has been introduced according to a program approved by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, where Albanian university graduates teach it, because the relevant specialists are not trained in Ukraine.

Therefore, according to the minister, the opening of the Albanian language department in one of the higher educational institutions of Ukraine is topical. There is a preliminary agreement to open such a department at Kharkiv National University named after Karazin.

Klympush-Tsintsadze expressed her gratitude to the Albanian side for its clear and consistent support of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, in particular, for joining the sanctions against the Russian Federation.
International non-governmental human rights watchdog Freedom House, engaged in the support and research of the state of democracy, political freedom and respect for fundamental human rights, has designated Ukraine as a "partly free" country in its new report "Freedom in the World 2018."

According to the rating published on the website of the organization, in the rating of "Freedom in the World 2018," the rating of Ukraine on two criteria (the level of political rights and civil freedom) comprised three points (by both criteria) of the possible seven, so the country remained in the category partially free. On a 100-point system, Ukraine scored 62 points (the more - the freer the country).

Crimea, occupied by Russia, which received seven points in terms of political rights and six points - according to the level of civil freedom, was recognized as not free. Crimea scored nine points on the 100-point system.

It is reported that Ukraine continues to recover from the disorder that surrounded the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych from the presidency in 2014, as well as the related crisis sparked by Russia's occupation of Crimea and military support for separatists in Donbas area of eastern Ukraine. The authorities' failure to prosecute extensive high-level corruption has undermined the popularity of the government and affected some reform efforts. In the sphere of civil liberties, political pressure and attacks on journalists have threatened freedom of the press, the report says.

At the same time, it is reported that the government made progress in crafting and implementing a number of reforms during the year, including changes to the healthcare and education systems, as well as measures designed to empower local and regional administrations.

It is noted that efforts to fight widespread corruption stalled, as the independent National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) faced political interference, and the chair of a key parliamentary anti-corruption committee was dismissed," Freedom House said.

In addition, the organization said that journalists in Ukraine face political interference, as well as violence and harassment.

"Authorities continued to censor some Russian news sources and ban individual Russian journalists from entering the country," the organization said.
Members of an organized criminal group led by a deputy head of the Opposition Bloc faction in Mykolaiv City Council have been caught red-handed, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has said.

"Tonight in Mykolaiv, members of a criminal organization, headed by deputy head of the Opposition Bloc faction in Mykolaiv City Council I. M. Kopiyka, with the participation of his son, M. I. Kopiyka, an assistant, two heads of enterprises under his control in the sphere of housing and utility services, were caught red-handed," he wrote on his Facebook page late on Monday, January 15.

Lutsenko specified that the detainees had systematically embezzled budget funds during 2016-2017.

"In December 2017, members of the organized crime group, trying to hide their criminal activities, were convicted of transferring a bribe of 250,000 hryvnias to an employee of the prosecutor's office, who informed his leadership about it in advance," he wrote.

Lutsenko added that five members of the criminal group had been detained.
WASHINGTON

Jan. 16, 2018

Lauren Roth

Kara Nguyen

Washington

Pennsylvania

Lauren Roth

Rockville, MD

the United States

Frederick, MD

Harrisburg, PA.

Kara Nguyen

Lauren Roth

Melissa Esposito

Harrisburg, PA

Reading, PA.

Maryland's

Rockville, MD

Harrisburg

Harrisburg

Pennsylvania

Warrington

/PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Shady Grove Fertility (SGF), a national leader in infertility and in vitro fertilization (IVF), has announced that Drs.andwill be bringing their services and expertise to theMetro region and centralregion, respectively, starting early January. Dr.will now be seeing new patients at SGF's, locationhome to the largest freestanding IVF lab in, in addition to her current locations inandDr.will now be joining Drs.andin SGF's convenientlocation in addition to our current location inDr. Roth joined Shady Grove Fertility in 2015 and is double board-certified in obstetrics/gynecology and reproductive endocrinology and infertility. She was recently namedThe Daily Record 2017 Leading Women Honoree. "I look forward to joining themedical team and helping even more Washingtonians build their families," says Dr. Roth."Dr. Roth was extremely knowledgeable from the start of our process until the very end. She went over all our possibilities and made sure we understood each one of them. She made the process worry free and exciting! She answered any questions we had through the process without hesitation. She personally called us when it was confirmed we were pregnant! I would recommend Dr. Roth to anyone!" shared one recent patient of Dr. Roth's.Dr. Nguyen is triple-board certified in obstetrics/gynecology, reproductive endocrinology and infertility, and medical genetics. Her patient care approach has earned her the Patients' Choice and Compassionate Doctor awards on Vitals.com and Honor Roll on Healthgrades.com. Dr. Nguyen has provided fertility services to the central PA region for nearly 5 years. She joined Shady Grove Fertility in early 2017. "I am honored to join themedical team alongside Drs. Roth and Esposito who have provided thecommunity with compassionate patient care and treatment success.""My husband and I had given up hope on completing our family. We had previously visited another reproductive specialist in the area and had a horrible experience. We were exhausted from trying, we were heartbroken year after year. My husband and I agreed this would be our final stop. We saw Dr. Nguyen and she looked through our history with a fine tooth comb, adjusted a few things, and then we got pregnant. And here's the miracle, we stayed pregnant. I feel so grateful," remarked one Dr. Nguyen patient recently.Shady Grove Fertility has five locations in, with a new location just opened inthis month, and plans to open additional locations in 2018.New patients may schedule a consult with Dr. Roth or Dr. Nguyen, or any other SGF reproductive endocrinologist by calling the Shady Grove Fertility New Patient Center at 1-877-971-7755 or completing this brief online form.About Shady Grove Fertility (SGF) SGF is a leading fertility and IVF center of excellence with 50,000 babies born and counting. With 41 physicians and 28 locations throughout MD, PA, VA, GA, and D.C., we offer patients individualized care, accept most insurance plans, and make treatment affordable through innovative financial options, including treatment guarantees. More physicians refer their patients to SGF than any other center. Call 1-888-761-1967 or visit ShadyGroveFertility.com.SOURCE Shady Grove Fertility
An inter-faction parliamentary association "Coalition in Support of the Economic Development and Investment Plan - the Marshall Plan for Ukraine" has been created in the Verkhovna Rada, Parliamentary Speaker Andriy Parubiy said at the morning plenary session on Tuesday.

Parubiy said independent MP Hanna Hopko was elected head of this association.

The speaker also said that the inter-faction parliamentary association "Human Rights Coalition" was also created in the Verkhovna Rada and co-chaired by Olena Sotnyk of the Samopomich faction and Ihor Lutsenko from the Batkivschyna faction, as well as the inter-faction association "Drinking Water" headed by Andriy Reka of the People's Front faction.

As reported, on November 6, in Vilnius, the ambassadors of the EU countries, the U.S., Canada and Japan presented the "New European Plan for Ukraine for 2017-2020" (the so-called 'Marshall Plan' for Ukraine). It is designed for ten years and in the medium term (2018-2020) provides for the allocation of $5 billion per year.

According to the text of the resolution adopted on March 30, the EPP called upon the European states to develop a long-term plan for Ukraine's support that would include various programs of assistance in the military, humanitarian and economic spheres, promoting democratic reforms and supporting European and Euro-Atlantic integration.
The State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine has refused to issue permits for import to Ukraine of 25 books published in Russia in 2015-2017 on the basis of a negative conclusion by the expert council on the analysis and evaluation of printed products.

The list of products banned to be sold in Ukraine, which was approved on January 10 this year, includes Antony Beevor's "Stalingrad," two books by Boris Akunin from the series "History of the Russian State," "Lenin's Daughter - A Look at History" by Edvard Radzinsky, "To My Matilde. Love Letters and Diaries of Nicholas II" by Boris Sokolov," "Orthodoxy: An Honest Conversation" by Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin and others, including several books of children's literature.

Nine of the books banned for sale in Ukraine were published by the AST publishing house, seven by the Eksmo publishing house, five by the Zakharov publishing house, two by the Azbuka-Attikus publishing group, and one each by Hit-Kniga and Algoritm.
Several Ukrainians accused of terrorist activity in occupied Crimea illegally taken to Russia

Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Ministry has lodged a protest about the illegal transfer to Russia of several Ukrainian citizens arrested in Russia-occupied Crimea on trumped up terrorism charges in 2016. The ministry demands the immediate return of the detainees to Ukrainian territory.

"Ukraine's Foreign Ministry expresses its outrage in connection with the illegal transfer to Russia of Ukrainian citizens Muslim Aliyev, Emir-Usein Kuku, Vadym Siruk, Enver Bekirov, Refat Alymov, Arsen Dzhepparov who were detained in Russia-occupied Crimea on trumped up terrorism charges," the ministry said on Tuesday.

The ministry said international humanitarian law forbids occupying countries from carrying out forceful transfers of citizens of the occupied state to the territory of the state-occupier. Committing such an act is a punishable offense, according to international law.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister demands Russia cease the practice of illegal transfers of Ukrainian citizens to Russia from Russia-occupied Crimea and Sevastopol and demands the return of Ukrainian citizens to the territory of Ukraine.

As earlier reported, in November 2016 several Ukrainian citizens were arrested and charged with terrorist activities. Russian occupying forces obliged the detainees to undergo obligatory psychological tests.
A group of people's deputies has registered in the Verkhovna Rada a resolution proposing that the parliament ask President Petro Poroshenko to immediately dismiss Valeriya Gontareva as governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU).

According to the former head of the parliamentary committee for financial policy and banking, Serhiy Rybalka, the initiators of the decision, in addition to him, are Mykhailo Dovbenko, Pavlo Rizanenko (both from the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko), Viktor Romaniuk and Maksym Poliakov (both from the People's Front).

"The parliament cannot stand aside and watch that the NBU has been working without a leader for the eighth month already, which is not normal. Of course, we cannot oblige the president to introduce a motion about dismissal, but we must state the inadmissibility of delay," Rybalka said.

It is expected that the resolution comes into force from the date of its adoption.

Gontareva sent in her resignation request to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on April 6, 2017. She was on paid vacation starting from May 11, 2017. First Deputy NBU Governor Yakiv Smolii was appointed as acting head of the central bank. Until now, Gontareva is on leave and does not plan to return to work at the NBU.

The media said the main candidate for the post of NBU governor was Raiffeisen Bank Aval CEO Volodymyr Lavrenchuk.
Court in Crimea sentences Ukrainian activist Balukh to 3 years and 7 months in low-security colony, Kyiv demands his release

The Rozdolne District Court in the occupied Crimea on Tuesday sentenced Ukrainian activist Volodymyr Balukh, charged with possession of ammunition, to three years and seven months in a low-security colony and a fine of 10,000 rubles, the Crimea.Reality website reported.

Spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Mariana Betsa said this ruling was fabricated and stressed that Ukraine will strengthen international pressure on Russia to free Balukh.

"The fabricated judgment of illegal courts. We express our protest. We will step up international pressure on the Russian Federation to release Balukh," Betsa wrote on Twitter.

Earlier, the prosecutor asked to put Balukh in low-security colony for five years and one month and fine him for 20,000 rubles.

As reported, Ukrainian farmer Balukh was arrested on December 8, 2016 in his house in the village of Serebrianka of Rozdolne district of Crimea temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation. Russian authorities charged him with possession of ammunition.

Crimea's Rozdolne District Court sentenced Balukh to three years and seven months of imprisonment in a low-security penal colony and to a fine of 10,000 Russian rubles. Balukh's defense team said the case was fabricated, and his verdict would be appealed in courts of higher instances.

On December 1, Rozdolne District Court changed the measure of restraint for Balukh to two-month house arrest.

On December 6, new charges were brought against Balukh allegedly for disorganizing the activities of institutions ensuring isolation from society.
Supporting separatism is a dangerous tendency that threatens Europe, Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine deputy (Petro Poroshenko Bloc) Iryna Friz, who chairs the parliament's subcommittee on state information system security, has said. Friz, a member of the Rada's national security and defense committee, was commenting on the situation that has developed in Transdniestria.

"Russia uses unrecognized Transdniestria to avoid sanctions. Russian goods arrive there on territory not controlled by Moldova and receive "Transdniestria origin stamps" before being exported to European Union member states. Tiraspol has received access to the Deep Free Trading Area (DFTA) as a part of Moldova, in order to ensure its reintegration with Moldova. Meanwhile, Transdniestria leaders continue discussing plans to integrate with Russia or set up their own independent state," Friz said.

Friz said the carrot and stick policy with Tiraspol is mistaken if a big stick is not used.

"While Transdniestria gives Russia the opportunity to use its access to EU markets, Tiraspol does nothing to demilitarize and remove Russia's occupation contingent from its territory," Friz said, adding that Russia's involvement in the peaceful regulation of conflicts it itself has created should be stopped.

"The expansion of separatism is a dangerous trend that threatens the whole of Europe," Friz said.
Fiat Chrysler revealed its redesigned 2019 Jeep Cherokee with wider headlights and a fresh front-end look early Tuesday morning, Jan. 16.

Jeep planned a press conference later in the morning at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

There are five new wheel designs -- including a 19-inch option -- along with a new front fascia, hood, and LED headlamps, daylight and fog lamps. FCA touts an all-new 2.0-liter, direct-injection, turbocharged, four-cylinder engine that can generate 270 horsepower and 295-pounds of torque. This engine option will come with a stop-start feature to improve fuel economy and limit emissions.

The 2019 Cherokee can also come with a 3.2-liter Pentastar V6 engine that generates 271 horsepower and 239-pounds of torque, or the "fuel-efficient" 2.4-liter Tigershark MultiAir2 engine with 180 horsepower and 170-pounds of torque.

"A stunning, more premium design and the addition of our new fuel-efficient 2.0-liter turbo engine make the new 2019 Jeep Cherokee even more desirable in the mid-size SUV segment," Mike Manley, head of the Jeep brand, said.

"In addition, Cherokee builds on its benchmark 4x4 capability and on-road dynamics with refinement and style, a host of new attributes, powertrains and the latest technology that is perfectly situated for consumers worldwide."

On the safety side, FCA says the 2019 Cherokee will come with more than 80 available safety features with park assist, lane departure warning, electronic stability control, electronic roll mitigation, blind-spot monitoring, rear path detection, among many more.

Included in those features is adaptive cruise control, which FCA says can "bring the vehicle to a complete stop without driver intervention, in certain conditions."

The Cherokee will use radar and video sensors that keep on eye on both other vehicles and where the distance between them. If this distance between is "dramatically breached" then the adaptive cruise will "aggressively deploy the vehicle's brakes" for a full stop. If this happens, the driver can reactive control by tapping a button on the steering wheel.

The 2019 Jeep Cherokee has a body of 65-percent high-strength steel with other materials, such as hot-stamped and ultra-high-strength steel, used throughout for a "strong, lightweight, solid vehicle architecture."

"The architecture Cherokee is built on is comprised of common, modular and interchangeable components and allows for modularity of the wheelbase, front track, rear track, front overhang, length and width across vehicle lines," FCA announced.

On the inside, customers can choose betweeen the 7- or 8.4-inch touchsreen that can come with three different Uconnect systems.

The Cherokee has five different terrain traction control modes in auto, snow, sport, sand/mud and rock. It also has five different trim options in the Latitude, Latitude Plus, Limited, Overland and Trail Rated Trailhawk.

As for those exterior color options, FCA will release the Cherokee in Blue Shade, Sting-Gray, Velvet Red, Firecracker Red, Olive Green, Hydro Blue, Light Brownstone, Granite Crystal, Billet Silver, Diamond Black Crystal, Pearl White and Bright White.

FCA says it will make the 2019 Jeep Cherokee at the Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois, and that it is due out in the first quarter of 2018.

The automaker revealed the long-awaited Jeep Wrangler at the LA Auto Show back in late-November. The new Wrangler will come available in both a hybrid and four-cylinder engine option. The V6 engine remains available, and FCA has introduced the U.S. to a diesel engine option on the Wrangler.

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.

Full coverage here.
Michigan's unique test track for autonomous vehicles is moving into a new realm of financing that will allow it to continue its development - and to further connect leading players in the automotive revolution.

The American Center for Mobility will receive a $2 million sponsorship from Subaru of America, which has operated in Ann Arbor for decades.

That amount signifies the first investment since a group of founding sponsors helped to launch the facility in 2017.

The ACM, said president and CEO John Maddox, "is on the leading edge of getting self-driving cars safely on the world's highways and roads."

The sponsorship announcement came Tuesday, Jan. 16 at the North American International Auto Show as state, education and business officials filled the main stage to celebrate the next step in the ACM's development.

"This is another exciting milestone for Michigan," said Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder.

Snyder noted that it comes just a few years after Michigan's auto industry struggled.

Today, the state is an automotive engineering center with leading-edge testing sites. The first was Mcity at the University of Michigan, which continues to work with corporate partners on self-driving technology.

Many also turn to ACM - located in Ypsilanti Township on the site of a closed General Motors factory - as it advances the testing capacity in southeast Michigan. The testing is not just for auto development, but also for regulatory and infrastructure development in the emerging realm.

"We are at the center of the future of the American auto industry," Snyder said.

The $2 million private investment from Subaru follows founding partners AT&T, Visteon Corporation, Toyota, Ford and Hyundai America Technical Center, along with the state of Michigan and several of its entities, into giving the site the financial underpinnings - totaling $110 million- for further development.

It also comes just weeks after the ACM test track opened in mid-December, with Toyota and Visteon using the snow-covered test track east of Ann Arbor.

Subaru trained at the site in early January, and will start testing by January 20. Other companies heading to the test track - which includes a 2.5-mile former highway stub - include Hyundai and Ford.

The announcement at Detroit's auto show about Subaru's new connection to the ACM is only the first significant development projected for the site in 2018. ACM officials promise more to come as the site gains traction.

"There will be more announcements to come in the next weeks and months," said Maddox.

Construction on the next phase of the ACM begins in spring, when it creates an urban driving environment, along with a headquarters building and tech park.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder announces the American Center of Mobility's first sponsor, Subaru, at the North American International Auto Show at Cobo Center in Detroit on Tuesday, January 16, 2018. Melanie Maxwell | The Ann Arbor News

The $2 million private investment from Subaru follows founding partners AT&T, Visteon Corporation, Toyota, Ford and Hyundai America Technical Center, along with the state of Michigan and several of its entities, into giving the site the financial underpinnings - totaling $110 million - for further development.

It also comes just weeks after the ACM test track opened in mid-December, with Toyota and Visteon using the snow-covered test track east of Ann Arbor.

Subaru trained at the site in early January, and will start testing by January 20. Other companies heading to the test track - which includes a 2.5-mile former highway stub - include Hyundai and Ford.

The announcement at Detroit's auto show about Subaru's new connection to the ACM is only the first significant development projected for the site in 2018. ACM officials promise more to come as the site gains traction.

"There will be more announcements to come in the next weeks and months," said Maddox.

Construction on the next phase of the ACM begins in spring, when it creates an urban driving environment, along with a headquarters building and tech park.

Full coverage of the Detroit auto show here.
Russia's actions in Ukraine are aimed at destroying the Ukrainian state, and returning it to its sphere of influence, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said.

"Everything that Russia is currently doing in Ukraine has one single goal: to return us to its so-called sphere of influence, to destroy the Ukrainian state as such," Poroshenko said during a meeting with heads of diplomatic missions of foreign countries and international organizations accredited in Ukraine on Tuesday evening in Kyiv.

According to him, the most efficient safeguard against the revival of Russia's imperial ambitions is a democratic, successful and independent Ukraine.

Poroshenko also added that it is the Ukrainian army that defends peace, stability and democracy in Europe.

"Attempts to appease the aggressor always lead to its growing appetite and always result in a new aggression. Therefore, the need for a tough, uncompromising rebuff to those who grossly violates the norms of international law is now evident," Poroshenko summed up.

He noted that this year Kyiv will work for the early return to Ukrainian hostages from the occupied Donbas and Crimea and political prisoners held in Russian jails.

"We will continue to pave the way for the reintegration of the occupied Ukrainian lands peacefully, politically and diplomatically," the president stressed.

He recalled that the bill on the restoration of state sovereignty in the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which the Verkhovna Rada is currently considering, is a signal "both for Donbas and Crimea: you are an integral part of Ukraine, and we will do everything possible for you to return home as soon as possible. "
[January 16, 2018] Cellcom Israel Reports its Controlling Shareholder Announced Examination of Submitting a Creditors Arrangement Proposal in Eurocom

NETANYA, Israel, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cellcom Israel Ltd. (NYSE: CEL) (the "Company") reported today that Discount Investment Corporation Ltd., or DIC, its indirect controlling shareholder, announced that it is examining the possibility of formulating an outline of a proposal for a creditors arrangement in Eurocom Communications Ltd. and/or companies in the Eurocom group. DIC clarified it has not yet formulated final principles for such a proposal and that there is no assurance that such a proposal will be made, among others, due to various factors, some of which are not under DIC's control. DIC further clarified that if such proposal is made, approved and implemented, it may, under certain conditions, have implications on DIC's holdings in the Company. About Cellcom Israel Cellcom Israel Ltd., established in 1994, is the largest Israeli cellular provider; Cellcom Israel provides its approximately 2.805 million cellular subscribers (as at September 30, 2017) with a broad range of value-aded services including cellular telephony, roaming services for tourists in Israel and for its subscribers abroad and additional services in the areas of music, video, mobile office etc., based on Cellcom Israel's technologically advanced infrastructure. The Company operates an LTE 4 generation network and an HSPA 3.5 Generation network enabling advanced high-speed broadband multimedia services, in addition to GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks. Cellcom Israel offers Israel's broadest and largest customer service infrastructure including telephone customer service centers, retail stores, and service and sale centers, distributed nationwide. Through its broad customer service network Cellcom Israel offers technical support, account information, direct-to-the-door parcel delivery services, Internet and fax services, dedicated centers for hearing impaired, etc. Cellcom Israel further provides OTT TV services, Internet infrastructure and connectivity services and international calling services, as well as landline telephone communications services in Israel, in addition to data communications services. Cellcom Israel's shares are traded both on the New York Stock Exchange (CEL) and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (CEL).



For additional information, please visit the Company's website http://investors.cellcom.co.il. Company Contact:

Shlomi Fruhling

Chief Financial Officer

[email protected]

Tel: +972-52-998-9755

Investor Relations Contact:

Ehud Helft

GK Investor & Public Relations In partnership with LHA

[email protected]

Tel: +1-617-418-3096

SOURCE Cellcom Israel Ltd.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has invited Czech counterpart Martin Stropnicky to visit Ukraine in the near future.

"I have spoken with my Czech counterpart Stropnicky. As a former defense minister, Martin understands what a threat Russia currently poses to Europe, and invited him to visit Ukraine in the near future," Klimkin wrote on his Twitter page on Tuesday.

In turn, the Foreign Affairs Ministry of the Czech Republic reported that Stropnicky and Klimkin discussed the situation in the occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

The Czech Foreign Minister confirmed the support of Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty. "We consider the illegal annexation of Crimea to be a serious violation of international law," Stropnicky was quoted by the press service of the Czech Foreign Ministry.

The minister also confirmed the readiness of the Czech government to continue supporting reforms in Ukraine.
In the last one month, Bitcoin has shed over USD 7,300 (Rs 4.67 lakh) in its valuation. According to CoinMarketCap, the cryptocurrency closed at USD 19475.80 on December 17 and at the time of reporting was trading at USD 12,120.

The massive drop in its valuation is a result of multiple steps taken by governments across the world to clamp down on the cryptocurrency.

The Chinese government is mulling over cutting the supply of subsidised electricity to Bitcoin miners. This, if realised, could be a massive blow to Bitcoin movement as over two-thirds of the mining power for the currency is stationed in China.

South Korea, on the other hand, recently raided major cryptocurrency exchanges in the country. It is also considering to ban Bitcoin in the country.

South Korean news website Yonhap reported that Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon had told a local radio station that the government would be coming up with a set of measures to clamp down on the "irrational" cryptocurrency investment craze.

South Korea had said on Monday that its plans to ban virtual coin exchanges had not yet been finalised, as government agencies were still in talks to decide how to regulate the market.

Riding on these negative reports, Bitcoin has seen a drop of about 38 percent in a month.

"It's mainly been regulatory issues which are haunting the cryptocurrency, with news around South Korea's further crackdown on trading the driver today," Reuters quoted its ThinkMarkets chief strategist Naeem Aslam, who holds what he described as "substantial" amounts of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple.

"But we maintain our stance. We do not think that the complete banning of cryptocurrencies is possible," he said.

On Tuesday itself, the cryptocurrency tumbled over 13 percent from previous days valuation at the time of reporting.

The bearish trend was so strong on Tuesday that 99 out of top 100 cryptocurrencies (based on market cap) were trading in red with some of them slipping as high as 40 percent in the days trade.

Ether was down by 16 percent, Ripple by 23 percent, Bitcoin Cash by 22 percent, Litecoin by 14 percent at the time of reporting.

Only among the top 100 currencies which gained during the days trade was Tether, which was up by mere 1 percent.

The cryptocurrency market has lost over USD 130 billion in market cap in the last 24 hours.

(With inputs from Reuters)
Praveg Communications (India) Ltd.

The Drugs Technical Advisory Board (DTAB) will set up an expert committee to decide the fate of 300 fixed dose combinations (FDCs) after complaints surfaced from the pharmaceutical industry.

According to a Mint report, the committee will look at the safety, efficacy and therapeutic justification of these drugs, before finally recommending any action in its 22 January meeting.

Drug makers claim that the government did not seek guidance of the bodies before banning FDCs.

The paper spoke to DTAB chairman Jagdish Prasad who said that many of these drugs should not have been banned in the first place.

We will constitute committees, which will consult all the stakeholders concerned, before taking a final call and submit the report to the government for action within six months. Patients safety is paramount to us and we will do our best to make sure that the safety is not compromised. Simultaneously, we have to ensure industry should not get severely impacted, said Prasad.

In January last year, the government filed an appeal against a Delhi High Court notification issued on 10 March 2016 for 344 FDC drugs. The ban cited health risks and lack of therapeutic justification.

On 31 March, the Supreme court had stayed the proceedings in all high courts against the ban on 344 FDC drugs.

The apex court in December referred the matter of FDCs to DTAB so that they can re-examine whether these drugs should continue to be marketed.
Datawind today said tablet PCs have became costlier as well as unaffordable among low-income groups after GST rollout and urged the government to bring the devices in 5 per cent tax slab.

Tablet personal computers (PCs) carried a 5 per cent sales tax before the implementation of the goods and service tax (GST) and due to tax rebates in certain states, as part of make-in-India, the 5 per cent was waived-off, Datawind CEO & President Suneet Singh Tuli said.

"In the last financial year, we have seen a steep rise in prices due to GST from nil to 18 per cent. The GST rate for 7 -inch tablets is also at disparity with 6-inch smartphones, which have a 12 per cent, while both sets of products carry the same functionality. This made educational tablets costlier and unaffordable among low-income groups," Tuli said in a statement.

He said the company expects some relief in terms of GST from the government in the upcoming budget.

"We look forward to reduction in GST on low-cost educational tablets from 18 per cent to 5 per cent and if possible remove it completely. We are hopeful that the process of GST refunds gets expedited thus helping to run the business with ease," Tuli said.

As per CyberMedia Research, Datawind led Indian tablet market in second quarter of calendar year 2017 with 27 per cent market share, followed by iBall at second with 16 per cent, Lenovo and Samsung with 14 per cent each.

Tuli said India as a country imports a large number of electronic goods from neighbouring countries and there should be a focus to substitute imports with domestic manufacturing with attractive tax slabs.

"There are a lot of low-end items being imported and if produced locally they present a good opportunity to indigenous companies by providing local employment. We hope this budget would be sympathetic towards the sector so as to resurrect the affected businesses again," Tuli said.

Datawind head said he expects that new budget will create a conducive environment for new job creation, exports and future economic growth of the country.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted a private dinner for his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu and wife Sara at his 7, Lok Kalyan Marg residence. (PTI)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu today announced joint research and development projects under the India-Israel Industrial R&D and Technological Innovation Fund (I4F).

The 'I4Fund Call for Proposal' was announced with the launch of a website as well as the unveiling of a brochure by the two prime ministers at the India-Israel Business Summit here.

The fund was announced in July, 2017 during Modi's visit to Israel. Under this, the Department of Science and Technology, India and the National Innovation Authority of Israel have established a USD 40 million fund.

Through this flagship bilateral programme in the field of science, technology and innovation, support will be extended to research and development (R&D) projects, official sources said here.

The fund will provide a comprehensive set of support tools to encourage joint projects that convert "know-how" into "show-how", they said.

It will lead to joint development of affordable technological innovations in identified areas such as water, agriculture, energy and digital technologies.

India and Israel will make a contribution of USD 4 million each for the fund annually for five years.

The fund will also promote bilateral industrial R&D and innovation cooperation in the fields of science and technology by extending support to joint projects for innovative or technology-driven new or improved products, services or processes.

Institutional support in building up consortia, including private industry, enterprises and R&D institutions from India and Israel will be enabled through these collaborative projects, the sources added.
The Indian rupee opened lower by 11 paise at 63.60 per dollar on Tuesday versus previous close 63.49.

Bhaskar Panda of HDFC Bank said, "The euro had started moving higher post the ECB meeting and consequently the US dollar has now moved below 91 levels now."

"I expect the rupee to continue to appreciate and expect the USD-INR to trade within a range of 63.40-63.60."

"Post the CPI and WPI release, expectation of a rate cut has receded. The 10-year benchmark yield has been flat for a couple of days and expect it to trade within a range of 7.43-7.46 percent," he added.

Dollar remained under pressure though it has marginally gained versus the Japanese yen after disappointing producer price index figures from Japan. Meanwhile, the euro held onto overnight gains.
A volatile day on markets but bears pushed the index towards its crucial support level of 10,700 on Tuesday, and a slip below 10,700-10650 in Wednesdays sessions could further weigh on the markets.

The index formed a bearish belt hold kind of pattern after an inverted candle which suggests that momentum is lacking. Although the index is trading well above its crucial short-term moving averages, traders should avoid creating aggressive long positions on dips.

The Nifty50 slipped on the back of profit booking losing marginal percentage though it closed above its crucial psychological support level of 10700. A bearish momentum was seen due to profit booking across indices from Nifty bank to Smallcap and mid-cap as well.

The Nifty made a bearish belt hold today post a shooting star pattern recorded on Monday, indicating a follow up selling momentum. A bearish belt hold is a bearish reversal pattern which is characterized by same open and high of the trading session, Mustafa Nadeem, CEO, Epic Research told Moneycontrol.

A bearish belt hold is a bearish reversal pattern which is characterized by same open and high of the trading session. In short term, the support which is important for bulls is 10590. This is a crucial support and a close below that will cause a deeper correction to 10400, he said.

Nadeem is of the view that resistance for the Nifty is placed at 10770 - 10800 since there are multiple confluences of resistance along with 161% of the previous swing. We remain cautiously optimistic only above 10750 on closing basis while we also suggest to trail stop-loss aggressively to 10600 mark in the case already in the trend, he said.

We have collated the top fifteen data points to help you spot profitable trade:

Key Support & Resistance Level for Nifty:

The Nifty closed at 10,700.45, down 41 points on Tuesday. According to Pivot charts, the key support level is placed at 10,671, followed by 10,642. If the index starts to move higher, key resistance levels to watch out are 10,745 and 10,791.

Nifty Bank:

The Nifty Bank closed at 25,974.90, down 94 points. Important Pivot level, which will act as crucial support for the index, is placed at 25,892, followed by 25,809. On the upside, key resistance levels are placed at 26,096, followed by 26,219.

Nifty Bank ended down after making a fresh all-time high of 26,136 while it closed below 26k level on a weaker note. PSU banks, along with NBFCs ended lower in the session weighed down by a rise in yields.

Banks are caught up in between surging yields (which entails MTM losses) and still tepid credit demand environment. So its a difficult time for deployment of funds, Lalitabh Shrivastawa, AVP Research, Sharekhan told Moneycontrol.

While the yield surge will impact most banks, in our view PSU banks with a large dependency on treasury profits and large corporate (for credit growth) will be more impacted, he said.

Call Options Data:

Maximum call open interest (OI) of 52.20 lakh contracts stands at strike price 11,000, which will act as a crucial resistance level for the index in the January series, followed by 10,800, which now holds 49 lakh contracts in open interest, and 10,700, which has accumulated 43 lakh contracts in OI.

Call writing was seen at a strike price of 11,000, which saw the addition of 4.2 lakh contracts, followed by 10,900, which saw the addition of 4.5 lakh contracts and 10,800, which saw the addition of 4.3 lakh contracts.

Call unwinding was seen at 10,600, which saw shedding of 2.2 lakh contracts, followed by 10,500 at 1.3 lakh contracts.

Put Options Data:

Maximum put OI of 75 lakh contracts was seen at strike price 10,500, which will act as a crucial base for the index in January series; followed by 10,600, which now holds 68 lakh contracts and 10,700 which has now accumulated 51 lakh contracts in open interest.

There was hardly any Put Writing but unwinding was seen at 10,500 which saw shedding of 7 lakh contracts in Open Interest, followed by 10,700 (sheds 4 lakh contracts), and 10,400 (sheds 3.7 lakh contracts).

FII & DII Data:

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) bought shares worth Rs 693 crore, while domestic institutional investors sold shares worth Rs 246 crore in the Indian equity market, as per provisional data available on the NSE.

Fund Flow Picture:

Stocks with high delivery percentage:

High delivery percentage suggests that investors are accepting the delivery of the stock, which means that investors are bullish on the stock.

23 stocks saw long build-up:

16 stocks saw short covering:

A decrease in open interest along with an increase in price mostly indicates short covering.

88 stocks saw short build-up:

An increase in open interest along with a decrease in price mostly indicates short positions being built up.

88 stocks saw long unwinding:

Long unwinding happens when there is a decrease in OI as well as in price.

Bulk Deals:

Bharti Airtel: SRS Partners (Cayman) LLC bought 3.8 crore shares at an average price of Rs499.10

Bharti Airtel: Merrill Lynch Markets Singapore PTE Ltd sold 3.8 crore shares at an average price of Rs499.10

Sybly Industries Ltd: KLB Securities Pvt Ltd sold 2.5 lakh shares at an average price of Rs7.85

(For more bulk deals click here: https://goo.gl/qrXHCH)

Analyst or Board Meet/Briefings:

Indowind Energy: A meeting of the board of directors of Indowind Energy Ltd will be held on January 17 for the approval to issue and allot up to 3 crore warrants convertible into equity shares of the company to promoters and non-promoters.

Stocks in news:

Sun Pharma: Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd including its subsidiaries and/or associated companies) on Tuesday announced that its wholly-owned subsidiaries have reached an agreement with Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Allergan plc to resolve the patent litigation.

ICICI Lombard: Leading private general insurer ICICI Lombard today reported a 5.20 percent year-on-year increase in net profit at Rs 231.76 crore for the December quarter.

Reliance Nippon: Reliance Nippon Life Asset Management reported 25 percent jump in profit after tax to Rs 130 crore for the December quarter of the current fiscal.

GAIL India: Gas utility GAIL (India) Ltd has renegotiated the terms of a long-term liquefied natural gas (LNG) purchase deal with Russias Gazprom PJSC, the Indian company said on Tuesday, in third such negotiation by India to make the imported fuel affordable to its price-sensitive customers.

BSE Ltd: BSE Ltd on Tuesday said its board has approved a plan to buy back shares worth Rs166 crore, a move that comes within one year of its listing.

TCS: Indias largest IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Tuesday said it has signed an over GBP 500 million ($690 million) deal with M&G Prudential, the UK and European savings and investments business of Prudential plc.

Bajaj Finance: Bajaj Finance today said it will acquire 12.60 percent stake in mobile wallet company Mobikwik as against 10.83 per cent stated earlier due to a change in the conversion price of the compulsory convertible cumulative preference shares.

Den Networks

The company had posted a net loss of Rs 38.75 crore during the same period of the previous fiscal, Den Networks said in a regulatory filing.

GAIL India has in the past renegotiated LNG deals with Qatar's RasGas and Exxon Mobil Corp, as spot prices declined substantially amid a supply glut.

Tata Motors

Jaguar Land Rover launches new of Range Rover Evoque priced at Rs 50.20 lakh. The vehicle is powered by a 2-litre Ingenium diesel engine. It has features such as WiFi hotspot, keyless entry and powered gesture tailgate as standard on all variants.

MCX

Q3 net profit down 45 pc to Rs 18.7 cr. The company had clocked a net profit of Rs 34.04 crore in the same quarter last year, the exchange said in a BSE filing.

Bayer Cropsciences

Bayer expects CCI nod by April-May for $66 billion Monsanto deal. India is one of the 30 countries whose approval is needed for the merger to go through. As many as 14 countries have approved the merger.

RIL

Reliance Industries has declared a 30 percent increase in the installed capacity of its export-focused oil refinery, a government report showed, increasing the size of the world's largest refinery complex.

15 stocks under ban period on NSE

Security in ban period for the next trade date under the F&O segment includes companies in which the security has crossed 95 percent of the market-wide position limit.

Securities which are banned for trading include names such as Balrampur Chini, CAPF, Dish Tv, Fortis Healthcare, HCC, IFCI, India Cements, Jet Airways, Jindal Steel, JP Associates, Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd, Kaveri Seeds, Reliance Comm, Reliance Power, and Wockhardt.
Going by mutual fund assets in absolute terms, the data from Association of Mutual Funds in India reveals that 37 percent of total equity assets under management is from Maharashtra.

As per the data released by Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI), of the total Rs 9.80 lakh crore of total equity assets, Rs 3.64 lakh crore has been contributed by Maharashtra.

Also, Maharashtra continues to dominate the mutual fund industry with the highest equity AUM.

The state has registered an increase of a whopping 80 percent or nearly Rs 1.6 lakh crore in the last one year. The category of Equity AUM includes pure equity funds, ELSS, balanced funds and equity ETFs.

New Delhi followed Maharashtra with equity AUM of Rs 89,712 crore with a rise of 67 percent or Rs 36,138 crore in a year. Gujarat stood third in terms of equity participation. The equity AUM of Gujarat almost doubled in one year. The equity AUM of Gujarat was Rs 77,064 crore in December 2017. This state registered an increase of 91 percent from Rs 40,322 crore in December 2016.

According to mutual fund officials, investor education in aiding growth from these major states. Last year, AMFI had launched Mutual Funds Sahi Hai campaign which has largely helped garner interest in mutual funds from many states.

Karnataka and West Bengal stood at fourth and fifth position, respectively, in terms of equity AUM. The equity AUM of West Bengal increased by 79 percent to Rs 57,000 crore in a year.

According to AMFI data, investors in small states and union territories such as Sikkim, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Andaman and Nicobar Islands have also been witnessing investments in equity funds.

Interestingly, Andaman and Nicobar Islands has registered the highest growth of 259 percent in equity AUM from a year ago.

Overall, the industry has recorded 77 percent growth in equity AUM. Also, in the last one year, the 42-player MF industry has added around Rs 4.30 lakh crore to its equity AUM kitty to touch nearly Rs 10 lakh crore.
Three weeks after announcing a new revival plan to limit its focus to B2B opportunities, Reliance Communications today said shutting down the flagship wireless business and building enterprise business is not easy but a "challenge".

The 'new RCom' also announced a USD 600-million investment to build a 68,000-km undersea cable network that will carry data to Europe and Hong Kong from its headquarters and expects USD 700-billion in annual revenue on completion.

"One of the challenges is that we are going through setting up an enterprise company while we are actually taking down a wireless company. These aren't easy," RCom chief executive Bill Barney told reporters here.

He said the enterprise business of the Anil Ambani-led company was only 10-15 percent of the overall business, before scaling it down.

It can be noted that in late-2017, the company had decided to exit wireless business due to its worsening debt profile forcing it to sell its spectrum licence and announce other monetisation plans.

Comparing its situation with that of the competition, Barney said peer companies have had the comfort of having two separate holding companies looking after the consumer and enterprise sides, which it did not have.

The company had amassed a debt of over Rs 45,000 crore and the promoters avoided the possibility of ceding majority control to banks through a debt reduction plan late last month, which will depend heavily on monetisation of assets.

Within days of convincing bankers on December 26, it had announced a deal to sell-off core spectrum assets to Reliance Jio, the market disruptor promoted by Ambani's elder brother Mukesh for a reported Rs 23,000 crore, helping it pare its debt and retain management control.

The rescue measures also involve other assets to be sold, including the 125-acre DAKC in Navi Mumbai, which is its operational headquarters.

Ambani had said the debt of the new RCom will go down to Rs 6,000 crore post-monetisation and exit process, it will be in businesses with low capital intensity and wider profit margin because it will serve enterprises.

"What has happened over the past three-five years is that we have had a shift in the mobile industry from being a capital-light industry, to a capital-heavy industry. One of the things about data is that it is extremely capital intensive," Barney said.

Barney termed the "new RCom" in the making as an "exciting" business and said it will be updating everyone about the progress of its initiatives.

He said the enterprise's businesses, including Global Cloud Exchange, which is putting up the undersea cable, has done "extremely well" over the last four years.

"We've got a very strong team and have managed to navigate through a very difficult time," he said.

The proposed cable system, which will connect its India base with Italy to the West and Hong Kong on the East, is expected to treble revenue in five years for its wholly- owned arm Global Cloud Exchange, the company said.

It is expected to be operational by the third quarter of 2020 and will have a revenue potential of USD 1 billion per year, Barney said, adding the new cable will increase its total capacity by 10 times as against the current capacity.

The cable will be financed by partners, whose numbers can go up till 30, he said, adding the company expects to get over USD 700 million through such pre-sales as against the cost of USD 600 million.

It has already tied up with six partners, including Alibaba, for the cable and raised USD 300 million in commitments, he said.

Barney said the company expects a spurt in IT and telecom activity in the country over the next five to 10 years, due to which it is betting on the cable business.

The cable potentially reaches over 75 percent of the youth in the globe, which is also very educated, he said.
SpiceJet | Company reported loss at Rs 105.6 crore in Q2FY21 against loss at Rs 461.2 crore, revenue fell to Rs 1,070.5 crore versus Rs 2,848.3 crore YoY.

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Private low-cost carrier SpiceJet would explore the possibility of manufacturing sea-planes in West Bengal, its chairman Ajay Singh said.

He said the company would also start flights from the greenfield airport at Andal near Durgapur and also starting flights from Kolkata to Chittagong.

Speaking at the Bengal Global Business Summit 2018 here today, Singh said there was a potential for making West Bengal a hub for sea-planes which can fly to Gangasagar, Sunderbans and other parts of the state.

"We would like to fly these sea-planes in the state to boost tourism as well to explore the possibility of manufacturing them in the state," Singh said before a gathering of eminent industry captains of the country.

Presently, 75 SpiceJet flights operate from Kolkata airport and the number would increase once more aircraft arrives.

Singh also said the carrier could also connect the city with several Asean countries.

SpiceJet would also operate flights from Andal to Bangalore and Hyderabad, he said.
Shares of Delta Corp gained over 6.5 percent intraday on Tuesday as investors cheered the companys healthy results for the December quarter.

The company reported a jump of over 300 percent at Rs 44.7 crore for the quarter, while revenues grew 56 percent at Rs 162 crore.

The operating profit, meanwhile, rose 113 percent at Rs 68.7 crore, while the operating margin came in at 42.4 percent against 31 percent year on year.

Emkay has maintained its buy call on the stock with a target of Rs 411. It believes that margin slightly off estimate due to high marketing costs. Further, some costs reported in Q3 were one-time which would boost FY19 footfalls. It sees EPS CAGR of 40% over FY18-20. It continues to like the firm as a gaming play in India.

The stock has gained over 26 percent in the past one month, while its three-day gain stood at 4 percent. At 09:30 hrs Delta Corp was quoting at Rs 329.40, up Rs 11.65, or 3.67 percent, on the BSE. It touched a 52-week high of Rs 338.90.
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Shares of information technology stocks surged in the morning trade as investors reacted to a weaker rupee. as well as an upbeat view by Morgan Stanley.

The BSE Information Technology index is up over 2 percent, led by gains in Rolta, Wipro, HCL Tech, NIIT, Tech Mahindra, TCS and Infosys, among others. Meanwhile, the Nifty IT index is also up over 2 percent. Stocks such as Wipro, HCL Tech, Tech Mahindra, TCS, KPIT, Tata Elxsi and Infosys gained 1-4 percent, which contributed to the Nifty IT index.

The rupee weakened by 12 paise to 63.61 against the US dollar in opening trade at the interbank foreign exchange after concerns over trade deficit ballooning to a three-year high.

Trade deficit or difference between imports and exports was USD 14.88 billion in December, up about 41 per cent year- on-year, as crude oil and gold import bill inflated, the commerce ministry data showed.

Global research firm Morgan Stanley is upbeat about the sector and believes there could be a turnaround in 2018.

It highlighted that the valuations are at or below long term averages. There could be a rerating going ahead, it believes.

Meanwhile, it also said that improving global macro could spur tech spending.

Among stocks, it has rerated a few stocks, which are listed below.

Infosys: Upgrade to Overweight from Equal-weight; Raised TP to Rs 1,300 from Rs 1,028

Tech Mahindra: Upgrade to Overweight from Equal-weight; Raised TP to Rs 635 from Rs 500

HCL: Upgrade to Overweight from Equal-weight; Raised TP to Rs 1,060 from Rs 939

TCS: Upgrade to Equal-weight from Underweight; Raised TP to Rs 2,900 from Rs 2,500

Wipro: Remains Underweight; Raised TP to Rs 290 from Rs 275

Persistent: Remains Overweight; Raised TP to Rs 915 from Rs 840

Mphasis: Upgrade to Overweight from Equal-weight; Raised TP to Rs 830 from Rs 688

Cyient: Remains Overweight; Raised TP to Rs 650 from Rs 620

Mindtree: Remains Underweight; Raised TP to Rs 560 from Rs 440

Hexaware: Downgrade to Underweight from Equal-weight; Raised TP to Rs 290 from Rs 221

(With inputs from PTI)
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Indian market touched fresh record highs week-after-week helped by strong cues from global markets and domestic liquidity which continues to dominate in the year 2018.

The next big question in front of investors is  to buy stocks now or wait for declines? The general theory says that it is very tough to time the market but if investors keep a disciplined approach to investing, heavy losses could be avoided.

Instead of looking at the Index, investors should focus more on stock specific opportunities and if you look for them, there are plenty available. Sectors which are related to Indian economy should do well, suggest experts. Hence, sectors like consumption, GST-related, as well as rural focussed themes, are likely to do well in the coming years.

Going ahead, we expect Equity market to continue to deliver consistent returns in 2018 as well on the back of stronger economic growth, recovery in corporate earnings. However the scale of returns expected would be in the range of 10-15% on the back of a high base and normalization of valuations playing out in 2018, Siddharth Khemka, Head- Retail Research, MOSL told Moneycontrol.

Our year-end target for Nifty is ~11450-11650. Some of the themes that we believe should do well in 2018 are Cyclicals like Cement, Infra, capital goods (benefit from the higher government spending), GST beneficiaries like jewelry retail, footwear, building material (value migration from unorganised to organised layers), rural recovery (sectors like Auto, FMCG, vehicle financing, etc.), he said.

We have collated a list of top 10 stocks from different brokerage firms which could give multibagger returns in the next 2-3 years:

Analyst: Ravi Kataria, Managing Director, Imperative Associates Pvt. Ltd.

Talbros Automotive Components Limited:

Talbros Automotive is an industry leader in the manufacturing of Gaskets & Heat Shields, Forgings, Suspension Systems & Modules, Anti Vibration components, and Hoses. With experience and expertise, it has established a presence across all auto category from two-wheelers to Farm Equipment.

The company is expected to achieve revenues of Rs.700 crores by 2020, operating margin of 14 percent, and return on capital employed of 20%. Low leverage, higher promoter stake and lower than industry average valuations are factors imperative for investment in the company.

Ujaas Energy Ltd:

Ujaas Energy Limited has completed projects totalling 200 MW of solar power plants for corporates and retail clients. The company is also operating and maintaining more than 200 MW for its corporate clients like KRBL (KRBL), SRS, Friends Group, Rockwell, Avon Cycles, Solar Energy Corporation India or SECI.

We are expecting Ujaas topline to grow on the back of hybrid solar-wind policy, rooftop sales, and a gradual shift towards solar for sustainable low-cost power producing option. The company can double its EPS over the next couple of years on capacity augmentation.

Analyst: Sanjeev Mohta is the COO of East India Securities Ltd (EISL).

Nitin Spinners:

Nitin Spinners Ltd. (NSL), is a Rajasthan based manufacturer of 100% cotton yarn and knitted fabrics. Nitin has an installed capacity of 225,000 spindles.

Strong promoter pedigree - NSL is promoted by R. L. Nolkha who has spent around 25 years in the Industry before setting up NSL. Over the last 25 years, the Nolkha family has grown the business very efficiently and have successfully navigated the challenges and threats.

NSLs expansions have been prudently planned in order to keep gearing in check and the management has consciously capped the interest cost to sales at 5%.

The company has been successful in maintaining best among the industry operating metrics resulting in a healthy RoAE  27%/24%/25% for FY15/FY16/FY17. Trading at an attractive valuation of 9x FY19.

Westlife Development (WDL):

Indian food retail market is the sixth-largest in the world and estimated to grow to Rs.61trn by 2020, posting a CAGR of more than 15% over a six-year period. QSR segment contributes 16.3% to overall sales of food retail division.

WDL enjoys certain competitive advantages like long-term rent agreements with a longer tenure for acceleration on a relative basis which leads to faster store breakeven periods. The Company continued with the strategic and consistent expansion of its store base by setting up 22 stores in FY17.

Piramal Enterprises Ltd (PEL):

In a span of just five years, PEL has evolved to become one of the largest real estate financiers in India. NBFC business - largely catering to real estate developers financing is expected to remain on a robust growth path.

In 2013, PEL acquired 10% stake in Shriram Transport. It followed this up with the acquisition of 20% stake in Shriram Capital and 10% stake in Shriram City Union Finance in 2014. With these investments, PEL has also diversified into retail financing.

PEL is the third-largest player (after Abbott and Baxter) in the global inhalation anesthesia space. PELs consumer product business is the 7th largest amongst all OTC companies in India. It has a good portfolio of high-ranked brands.

Agrotech Foods Ltd:

Sales growth has picked up, clocking 22% YTD FY18 (excluding CSD) doubling the growth rate from 11% during the year-ago period. Nachos is a nascent but fast growing segment in India and Agro Tech has become the No.2 player in this market.

The company plans to launch different flavours and spin-offs of peanut butter (combination with jelly or chocolate). Peanut butter is expected to clock sales of Rs400-500m, and we expect it to touch Rs1bn by FY21.

The company has five plants currently and the sixth one is under construction at Chittoor. Once the company has its seven-plant model in place, we should see better growth in RTE popcorn.

Analyst: Abhinav Gupta, President - Capital Markets, Share India Securities

Rajoo Engineers:

Rajoo Engineers supplies machinery for packaging products and is bound to gain with strong consumption demand and an uptick in FMCG sales.

Currently trading at higher multiples with respect to trailing multiples we confident strong sales and higher profitability due to positioning in the industry. Rajoo has maintained strong return ratios and will continue to do so.

Greaves Cotton:

Greaves Cotton has tied up with Piaggo to supply BS VI diesel and alternative fuel engines. Policy embargo on CV's and environmental concerns from NGT make us confident on prospects of the company.

Greaves Cotton drive a significant portion of its revenue from agri-equipment and construction equipment. This makes Company uniquely positioned to gain from all quarters of government policies. Strong return ratios make us confident on management's capabilities to deliver.

Flex Foods:

Flex Foods is an associate company of Uflex and a leader in flexible packaging technology. Flex Foods cultivates and processes food products and supplies vacuum freeze-dried, air-dried, frozen and an individually quick frozen (IQF) product range.

It sources its raw materials through contract farming through a dedicated network of 500 farmers. Strong pedigree, good product range, and low forward earning multiples make us confident of a better outlook for the stock.

Hindustan Oil Exploration:

First O&G company in private sector with the professional board, debt-free balance sheet and proven development/operating experience puts this company in the sweet spot with rising crude prices and gas demand in India.

The company is planning to ramp up production capacity, raise capital for inorganic growth and acquire additional acreage.

Open Acreage Licensing Program & Discovered Small Field (DSF) bid round 2 announced by the Government present excellent opportunities to grow the portfolio.

The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts on moneycontrol.com are their own and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
The finance ministry may tweak the provisions on Minimum Alternate Tax (MAT) in the forthcoming Union Budget to help the industry overcome the impact of tax reforms in the US, say experts.

The purpose behind the introduction of MAT in the Income Tax Act was to bring all zero tax companies and to neutralise the impact of certain benefits/incentives.

Both the leading industry chambers, Ficci and CII, have suggested to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to reduce the incidence of MAT which has "impacted significantly" the cash flow of companies who otherwise have low taxable income or have incurred tax losses.

Tax expert Amit Singhania, Partner at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, said that considering the recent slashing of the corporate tax rate in the US, there is a need to revisit the corporate tax rate in Union Budget 2018-19, to be presented to Parliament on February 1.

"In order to encourage a flow of funds (in form of dividend) from overseas subsidiaries, the reduction of MAT on such dividends is warranted," he said.

In a memorandum to the finance ministry, Ficci said that with the phasing out of exemptions and deductions available under the Act, "the burden of MAT should also be gradually reduced from the current levels of 18.5 percent to a rate which will be commensurate with the phasing out of tax exemptions and incentives.

"It is recommended that dividend received from a foreign company should be exempt from MAT just like domestic dividend is exempt from MAT".

CII, in its memorandum, suggested that MAT be abolished in view of removal of all incentives or, alternatively, the rate be brought down to 10 percent.

"It is submitted that levy of MAT should be restricted to those incomes that are taxable under regular provisions and incomes that are exempt under normal provisions such as LTCG (Long Term Capital Gains) on sale of listed equity shares or incomes that are not taxable such as Capital Receipts, should be kept out of the ambit of MAT," CII said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had last week brainstormed with economists and experts on the state of the economy as the government looks to revive growth which is estimated to be at a 4-year low of 6.5 percent in 2017-18, against the backdrop of an introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is scheduled to present the Union Budget 2018-19 on February 1. It will be the last full budget of the current NDA government.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has beefed up Aadhaar's security to address privacy concerns around leakage of Aadhaar numbers and data.

Earlier this month, The Tribune found in an investigation that details of any of the about billion Aadhaar numbers issued in India can be accessed for as little as Rs 500 on WhatsApp. Following the allegations, the authority has announced several steps to secure Aadhaar data.

Here are some measures taken by the UIDAI to safeguard Aadhaar:

>Virtual ID

The virtual identity or virtual ID (VID) will be a random 16-digit number mapped to the Aadhaar number of a citizen.

The VID will not be duplicable by agencies performing authentication of Aadhaar number, and hence, will ensure safety of the Aadhaar number. The ID, similar to a debit card, will come with an expiration date.

Also Read: UIDAI chief says virtual ID like a debit card, can be changed daily sans theft scare

According to a statement by UIDAI, which administers Aadhaar, the VID can be generated and revoked only by the Aadhaar number holder through channels such as the Aadhaar portal and the mAadhaar mobile app. If so required, a new VID can be generated by the Aadhaar holder for each new transaction, and the previous ID will automatically become redundant.

Last week, Nandan Nilekani, the man behind the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) also backed the virtual ID arrangement announced by the UIDAI.

Also Read: Nandan Nilekani backs virtual ID, calls for constructive views on Aadhaar

> Limited KYC

The UIDAI has further introduced limited KYC (know your customer) process wherein only some entities, categorised as global authentication user agency (global AUA), will be allowed to store a citizen's Aadhaar number, while others, known as local AUAs will not be allowed to store Aadhaar numbers.

These agencies will be given a UIDAI token specific to them, to enable them to uniquely identify their customers.

The UID token, a unique character for system usage, will be unique to every authentication request made by a global or local AUA.

Currently, every agency that uses Aadhaar for KYC authenticates a user and often stores a person's Aadhaar number.

As of now, the new measures do not specify what happens to the Aadhaar numbers that have already been stored by public or private entities. It also does not mention which AUAs would qualify as global or local.

> Facial recognition

As another measure to tighten security, UIDAI has rolled facial recognition for authentication of Aadhaar number.

On Monday, the authority stated it will enable face authentication in conjunction with existing authentications such as biometric or iris scan or one-time password to be able to successfully authenticate an Aadhaar number holder on registered devices from July 1.

Also Read: From July, you'll be able to authenticate Aadhaar via facial recognition

"This facility is going to help in inclusive authentication of those who are not able to biometrically authenticate due to their worn out fingerprints, old age or hard work conditions," UIDAI said in a statement. Several cases have been reported of people being unable to complete biometric authentication due to skin of the fingers being worn out on account of age or working conditions.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his arrival at Air Force Station, Palam, in New Delhi on Sunday. (PTI)

India and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding to enhance cooperation and boost research in homoeopathy, a system of alternative medicine.

The pact was signed between Central Council for Research in Homoeopathy, Ministry of AYUSH, and Centre for Integrative Complementary Medicine, Shaare Zedek Medical Centre, Jerusalem.

The MoU is a part of the nine agreements signed between the two countries after talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu.

The MoU envisages cooperation in the field of research in homoeopathic medicine. It included establishment of a joint working group.

Netanyahu, who arrived here yesterday, will visit Ahmedabad and Mumbai during his six-day stay in India.
Private hospitals have come under the scanner after cases of negligence and over-charging bills were reported in such places. To keep a check on the functioning of these hospitals, a committee has asked them to prescribe only from the list of 376 drugs on the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM). In addition, the hospitals cannot charge a premium of more than 15 percent over market rates on diagnostic tests they conduct, reports Hindustan Times.

The nine-member committee was set up in December after a case of negligence was reported at Max Hospital, Shalimar Bagh and another case of overcharging at Fortis Memorial Research Institute (FMRI), Gurgaon, has put a question on the practices followed by private hospitals. The committee is headed by Delhis director general of health services.

For the drugs that are not mentioned in the NLEM list, the committee has suggested capping the profit at 50 percent on the procurement price.

This will make a huge difference. The drug price control orders fix the rates of NLEM drugs by calculating a market average of the selling price of drugs in a particular category, ensuring some profit for manufacturers but not too much, said Professor Vijay Bhalla, director, SGT College of Pharmacy, Gurgaon to the paper.

Many pharmaceutical companies create irrational drug combinations just to get out of the NLEM list; this removes the cap on pricing and allows them to fix high MRPs, he added.

As pharmaceutical companies do not get high-profit margins from NLEM drugs, the firms do not bring the drugs to the market. Hence, the committee has asked Delhi government to ensure that the NLEM drugs are also available at pharmacies.
Supporters of Congress party are framed by the party's symbols installed at the venue where Rahul Gandhi is addressing a rally at Bardoli

The Congress asked BJP to appreciate humour in politics, and said there was nothing vicious or malafide in the video put out by it that made fun of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for hugging world leaders.

"I think it is time that we started appreciating the virtues of humour in politics. I think it is time that we stop tilting at windmills. Whatever the view depicts is nothing but a sense of humour and a coining of words," Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi said when asked about BJP taking strong objection to the tweet.

"Puncturing of pomposity with humour is very important," he said.

The Congress leader also said the content cannot be said by any stretch of perverse or normal imagination to be vicious or in any sense meant to create a malafide intent.

"I will say that certain sense of humour should not escape us and that is all that depicts," he said.

The Congress had yesterday put out a tweet along with a video mocking Modi for hugging world leaders while carrying the hashtag "Hugplomacy" on its official twitter handle.

"With Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu visiting India, we look forward to more hugs from PM Modi! #Hugplomacy," the Congress had said in the tweet.

The tweet came hours after Modi received Netanyahu at the airport, setting aside protocol, and embraced him as he deplaned.

The Congres today put out another tweet that said: "Does the 'shah of shahs' not take his criticism even jokingly." It that carried a cartoon of Modi, along with top BJP leaders Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitley.

In yet another tweet, the Congress highlighted the five "U-turns" made by Modi on issues like Aadhaar, FDI and ties with Pakistan and China, before and after he became prime minister.

Union Human Resource Development minister and senior BJP leader Prakash Javadekar had reacted strongly to yesterday's tweet, saying it showed the Congress's lack of political sensibility.

"What they have tweeted shows their immaturity and lack of political sensibility. We condemn this. I hope wisdom prevails on them some day," Javadekar had said.

He said the Congress lacke concrete issues, and since it cannot defeat the prime minister electorally, it posted such a tweet.

"This not only insults our prime minister but also the guest (Netanyahu). The Congress should not only withdraw the tweet but also issue an apology for it," he said.

BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said the Congress consistently abusued the prime minister and that the tweet was "appalling and unpalatable".
What may first appear as a sunny side up egg is actually NASA Hubble Space Telescope's face-on snapshot of the small spiral galaxy NGC 7742 released October 21 by the Hubble Heritage Program. This spiral is known to be a Seyfert 2 active galaxy, a type of galaxy that is probably powered by a black hole residing in its core. CLH/ - RP1DRIGPVDAA

Scientists have discovered a new black hole that burps not once but twice after swallowing stars and hot gas.

The black hole was discovered through an examination of data collected by NASAs Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The massive, double-burping black hole is situated at the center of a galaxy named SDSS J1354+1327, which is around 800 million light years away from Earth.

According to a report in The TeCake, the image of the galaxy harboring the massive black hole was first released by the scientists during American Astronomical Societys winter meeting in National Harbor.

What makes the finding unique is the fact that while scientists already knew about the existence of black holes that belch, this is the first time a black hole that burps, not once but twice, has actually been traced.

We know a lot of examples of black holes with single burps emanating out, but we discovered a galaxy with a supermassive black hole that has not one but two burps, Julie Comerford, an astronomer at the University of Colorado Boulder, was quoted saying in the report.

According to the scientists working at the Chandra observatory, there is a gap of around 100,000 years between the two burps.

According to them, the first the case of burping of galaxy occurred when electrons got stripped from atoms about 30,000 light years south from the galaxys center, followed by a second burp 100,000 years later when the black hole engulfed a different clump of cosmic gas.

The second time, the burp was in form of shockwaves similar to sonic booms that occurred to the north of galaxy, almost 3000 light years away from the black hole. Scientists also found that the supermassive black hole is surrounded by a thick cloud of cosmic dust and gas.
Royal Enfield posted a fall of 7 percent in domestic volumes in October

Pothole-ridden, back-breaking roads are a nuisance for riders, commuters and civic bodies alike. The nightmare, however, has become a lifeline for and is sprucing up sales if 100cc geared motorcycles  a segment the auto industry had written off owing to dipping sales.

The affordable 100cc bikes segment, typically priced under Rs 45,000, grew 19 percent in December. The growth is a departure from the norm in an otherwise dull month for two-wheeler sales. It is also much higher than 125cc commuter bike segment. Bike manufacturers say growth in demand for 100cc bikes has been a sustained affair over the past few months.

Consistent fall in demand, gradual move to higher engine capacity bikes coupled with skyrocketing demand for easy-to-ride gearless scooters prompted manufacturers to write off the affordable 100 cc bike segment.

Not a Rocky Ride

Indias rural areas, marked with poor quality roads, are the biggest markets of such bikes. The Ministry of Rural Development data shows that 40 percent of villages are not connected by roads. Rural areas account for 75 percent of the countrys overall demand for bikes and contribute to more than 50 percent of two-wheeler sales.

Rural areas have rough roads or no roads at all. The buyer there knows that the motorcycle is the more stable vehicle compared to scooters. A scooter cannot handle the rural roads whereas the bigger tyres of a motorcycle can easily navigate through them. A rapid moving scooter is bound to fall on bad roads, but a motorcycle wont, Eric Vas, president (motorcycle business), Bajaj Auto told Moneycontrol.

Pune-based Bajaj Auto gave up scooter manufacturing a decade ago to focus solely on motorcycles. The company has seen enthusiastic response for its budget bikes CT100 and Platina, both of which make up for half of the companys monthly sales.

Companies like Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI), who is the market leader in scooters, have been trying to push scooters in such markets in the hope of higher scooterisation. HMSIs budget 110cc bikes have received lukewarm response from the buyers.

Indias largest two-wheeler maker Hero MotoCorp is also the market leader in the budget bike segment with models such as HF Dawn and Splendor leading the pack. The company sells such bikes in large numbers in low income states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa where road conditions are poor.

Mileage Matters

One of the other reasons why the 100cc has made a comeback is because of better fuel efficiency. Economy bikes will always give better fuel economy than scooter and this is very important in cost sensitive markets like rural market, Bajaj Autos Vas said.

Typically, a 100cc bike can return a mileage of up to 75 km/litre compared to around 40 km/litre offered by scooters.

The Silver Lining

With petrol prices inching closer to Rs 80 per litre, the two-wheeler industry could again see a paradigm shift in buying pattern as customers will likely opt for easy-on-pocket budget bikes rather than higher engine capacity bikes that are comparatively less fuel-efficient and expensive.
Airbnb, a community-driven hospitality company, has decided to spend USD 100,000 promoting locations which the US president reportedly slammed as shithole countries.

The company said that it will use the money to boost tourism in Haiti, El Salvador and countries in Africa, reported Fortune.

Airbnb said that it wants to encourage more travelers to visit these special and beautiful places, as part of our mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, as per Fortune.

Lately, the social media team of Airbnb and its CEO Brian Chesky have started tweeting about the destination which Trump said to have badmouthed.



This is what the view from breakfast in Senegal, Africa looks like. Wake up overlooking the coast, break bread with your host, then explore the pink waters of nearby Lake Retba. No matter where you go, youre struck by the warmth of the Senegalese people. #weaccept pic.twitter.com/vTbXO4IgBO  Airbnb (@Airbnb) January 13, 2018





Finally, how 'bout this home in Kenya. These are nice places! https://t.co/6NST46TbMG pic.twitter.com/jVQKp8eHMx

 Brian Chesky (@bchesky) January 13, 2018



Another magical place to stay in the beautiful country of Ghana https://t.co/ouKDH8jx5q pic.twitter.com/sjQyvWJDNL  Brian Chesky (@bchesky) January 12, 2018





Here is a beautiful home you can stay in Haiti: https://t.co/6SczKwPMt6 pic.twitter.com/Bzy36tkSCY

 Brian Chesky (@bchesky) January 12, 2018

Chesky, in a tweet, last week had said,Five years ago, there were 3,000 hosts across Africa, El Salvador, and Haiti who earned USD 6 million. Today there are 75,000 hosts who earned USD 170 million.

2.7 million guests from Airbnb decided that countries in Africa, El Salvador, and Haiti were beautiful enough to visit. When we embrace the world, we see its beauty, added Chesky.

Donald Trump while questioning why the United States would want to have immigrants from Haiti and African nations, had referred to them as "shithole countries".

Trump's remarks, made in the White House, had come as Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham briefed the president on a newly drafted immigration bill being touted by a bipartisan group of senators.
India's captain Virat Kohli celebrates the dismissal South Africa's batsman Dean Elgar during Day 4 of the second Test at Centurion Park in Pretoria, South Africa. (AP/PTI)

Indian Navy's marching contingent during a rehearsal for the Republic Day parade in New Delhi. (PTI)

The 2019 Hyundai Veloster is unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show. (Reuters)

Devotees take holy dip at Sangam, a confluence of the three rivers Ganga, Yamuna and the mystical river Saraswati, on the occasion of 'Mauni Amavasya' during Magh Mela festival in Allahabad. (PTI)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara Netanyahu pose for a picture during a visit to historic Taj Mahal in Agra. (PTI)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes a tour of an exhibition in Barmer Refinery in Barmer, Rajasthan. Union Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje are also seen. (PTI)

Participants trying to tame a bull during the Alanganallur Jallikattu in Madurai district. (PTI)

Moshe Holtzberg, who lost his parents during the 26/11 terror attacks, arrives at Nariman House in Mumbai. (PTI)

View of a bridge under construction that collapsed leaving dead and injured workers near capital Bogota, Colombia. (Reuters)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks during India Israel Business Summit in New Delhi on Monday. (PTI)

President Donald Trump with first lady Melania Trump waves as he returns to the White House in Washington. (AP/PTI)

Pope Francis blesses a child upon his arrival in Santiago, Chile. (Reuters)

A member of a rescue team carries a migrant baby after being rescued by Libyan coast guards in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya. (Reuters)

People walk past a frozen fountain in Kansas city. (AP/PTI)

Border Security Force (BSF)'s women daredevils perfom on motorcycles during a rehearsal for the Republic Day parade, in New Delhi. (PTI)

Rodrigo Huilpang, 34, a Mapuche indigenous, poses for a photo at Santiago Linconir village, near where Pope Francis will hold a mass in Chile's Araucania region. (Reuters)

Devotees sit along the banks of Bagmati River as they gather to offer prayers at Pashupatinath Temple during the Swasthani Brata Katha festival in Kathmandu, Nepal. (Reuters)
Education

Montgomery County Community College will present the spring installment of the interview/talk show program Issues and Insights April 20 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in Science Center room 214, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The programs will be simulcast to the Colleges West Campus in South Hall room 216, 101 College Drive, Pottstown. Dr. Kolsky will offer a humorous presentation, Carrots, Sticks and Politics: A State of the Nation and the World Message. In this speech, he will provide his interpretation of domestic and international politics and then welcome questions from the audience for discussion. Issues and Insights, is free and open to the public. For information, contact Dr. Thomas Kolsky, professor of political science, at 215-641-6380 or tkolsky@mc3.edu.

Montgomery County Community Colleges STEM Scholars Program will host a STEM Jam! open house April 25 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the Advanced Technology Center at the Colleges Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The drop-in event is designed for students interested in learning more about careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities will include STEM program information and career advising, STEM speakers throughout the day from industry and academia, micro-helicopter and robotics competitive obstacle courses and demonstrations and static models of STEM student and faculty work. For more information about STEM Jam! or STEM programs at MCCC, contact William Brownlowe at wbrownlowe@mc3.edu or 215-641-6644, or Robin Zuhlke at 215-619-7440 or rzuhlke@mc3.edu.

Temple Ambler, located at 580 Meetinghouse Road, presents the following events:

International Club Global Bazaar April 15 from 5 to 8 p.m. The Ambler Campus International Club invites all students, faculty, staff and the community to celebrate a multitude of diverse cultures, which will be showcased at the organizations Global Bazaar. This family friendly event will highlight cultural traditions and celebrations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South American, North America and Africa through music, entertainment, food and informative displays developed and presented by students at the Ambler Campus. Young visitors will be provided with passports, which they may get stamped at each country they visit. Prizes will be awarded to world travelers who talk to cultural representatives, answer questions about the countries theyve visited and take part in fun-filled activities designed to help them learn about the rich diversity of cultures found throughout the world. Refreshments will be served. The event is free. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail tuc36466@temple.edu.

EarthFest 2011 April 29 from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. More than 75 exhibitors, including the Philadelphia Zoo, The Franklin Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Elmwood Park Zoo and the Insectarium, will take part in EarthFest 2011. School students of all ages are invited to attend and develop displays of their own. EarthFest partner the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society also offers its Kids Grow Expo, featuring the Junior Flower Show, as part of the event. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail duffyj@temple.edu.

Annual Spring Plant Sale May 7 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The plant sale  an Ambler Campus tradition dating back to the early 1900s  will feature woody plants and perennials in portable sizes, hardy trees, shrubs, and vines, native plants that are attractive to wildlife, herbs, and hanging baskets. There will also be numerous special plants for sale to highlight Amblers special anniversary year. Garden books and garden tools will also be available for sale. Students, staff, and volunteers from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture and the Ambler Arboretum Advisory Committee will be available to answer questions. All proceeds from the Spring Plant Sale will support the Ambler Arboretum Fund and the Pi Alpha Xi National Honor Society. Information: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

June Homecoming/Louise Bush-Brown Garden Dedication June 5 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. (June Homecoming), Bright Hall Lounge; 2 p.m. (Garden Dedication), Ambler Campus Formal Perennial Gardens. Tickets  June Homecoming: Participant  $18 per person; Sustainer  $25 per person; Benefactor  $40 per person. The 2011 June Homecoming, sponsored by the School of Environmental Design Alumni Association, will include the Alumni Association annual meeting and luncheon. June Homecoming will be followed by the formal dedication of Temple University Amblers Formal Perennial Gardens as the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Gardens. During this 100th anniversary of the campus, Temple University Ambler and the Ambler Arboretum of the Temple University is honoring Louise Bush-Browns many contributions to the history of the campus by formally dedicating the gardens in her honor. During the program, campus Executive William Parshall will welcome guests, Ambler Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey will speak about the Bush-Browns and the history of the garden, and an official ribbon cutting will be held for the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Garden. Following the ribbon cutting, guests are invited to take a tour of the gardens, which will wend their way to the Campus Greenhouse for the School of Environmental Designs annual Plant Auction. Information (Garden Dedication): 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Information (June Homecoming): 215-482-0722. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

Northview Garden Tour and Fundraiser for the Ambler Arboretum June 12 from noon to 5 p.m. Call for reservations. Tickets: $15 per person or $20 at the door. In addition to the gardens of the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University, Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey has a garden oasis all her own right in Ambler  Northview. Visitors will have the opportunity to take self-guided tours throughout the many gardens, where garden experts will be available to answer questions about the various designs. The Ambler Keystone Chapter of the Womans National Farm and Garden Association will also provide tea and refreshments. All proceeds from the tours will support the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University. Information or to register: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

The Senior Adult Activities Center of Montgomery County, 536 George Street, Norristown, will hold the following events:

SAAC Adult Day Care, an alternative to Nursing Home Care is available  for information call 610-275-1960

Volunteers are needed for Meals on Wheels Program (call the number above)

SAACs Fifth Avenue Boutique opens Monday through Friday from 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m.

Exercise with Theresa will be held every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 1 p.m.

Dance class is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Tai Chi is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Yoga is held every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.

Line Dancing is held every Thursday at 10:30 a.m.

Dancing with Joan is held every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.

Sculpture Class is held Wednesdays from 2 to 3:30 p.m.

Why Should I Learn Spanish? will be held Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m.

Generations On-Line computer classes for seniors will be held Monday through Friday from 8 a.m.  4 p.m.  computers are available during those hours.

Health Living will be held every Tuesday at 1 p.m.

Boomer U will hold the following events. Boomer U is located at 45 Forest Avenue, Ambler. Registration & payment is required for all events: 215-619-8863.

Pilates Class is held Wednesdays and Fridays at 9:30 a.m. First class is free; please bring a mat. For information call 610-291-5376.

Blue Bell School of Dance, 921 Penllyn Blue Bell Pike, Blue Bell, hosts Argentine Tango Classes and a Milonga dance party every Friday evening. Lessons start at 8:30 p.m. followed by dancing at 9:30 p.m. Andrew Conway, master Argentine Tango dancer, instructor and performer and his partner Linda Chase will instruct. All levels welcome and no partner is needed. Refreshments will be served. Fee is $12 per person and includes lesson and dancing. Information: 215-634-1101 or www.amoretango.com.

The Montgomery Hospital Medical Center will offer the following classes:

Childbirth Education Class- all parents are invited to participate, including those who are delivering at

other hospitals. For more information on maternity services or classes, call 610-270-2020.

CPR and First Aid Courses are offered for beginners to experiences health care providers. Call 610-270-2313.

The Ambler SAAC (Senior Adult Activities Center), located at 45 Forest Ave in Ambler will hold the following events:

Tai Chi every Monday and Thursday at 11 a.m.

Yoga is every Tuesday at 1 p.m. and Friday at 10:30 a.m.

Strength and balance training every Wednesday at 10 a.m.

Armchair Aerobics is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Gourmet Weight Wise every Thursday at 12:30.

Fitness Center and Pool Room open daily 8 a.m.-4 p.m.

The Diabetes Education Center will offer day and evening classes each month. Health insurance pays for diabetes education classes. Preregistration is required. Call 610-270-2301.

For Kids & Families

The Ambler Kiwanis Club will host its annual Easter Egg Hunt April 26 at 10 a.m. in Ambler Borough Park, located just off of the intersection of Hendricks Street and Valley Brook Road. Members of the Wissahickon Key Club will assist Kiwanians in hiding thousands of wrapped chocolate eggs in a designated area of the park. Also hidden will be plastic colored eggs, which are redeemed for prizes. Elementary school children are separated by age.

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation will hold its 21st annual Storybook Egg-Stravaganza April 15 fom 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Upper Dublin Township Building. Toddlers and preschoolers love this annual event where photo opportunities with favorite friends abound! Treasures are collected from UDP&Rs assortment of lifesize cutouts of favorite cartoon characters from Disney, Sesame Street, Nickelodeon and other well-known animation. Children can have their picture taken with Bugsy OHare; bring your own camera. And dont forget a basket for goodies! $7 for UD residents; $12 for non-residents. Pre-register at 215-643-1600 ext. 3443.

Splash Week is a free week-long program that teaches children and families basic swimming skills and water safety practices. All YMCA branches will host multiple classes each day from April 11 to 15. For more information, contact the Ambler Area YMCA at 215-628-9950.

Healthy Kids Day is April 16 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The day is filled with fun, engaging and artistic activities that cultivate healthy living as part of the YMCAs larger efforts to help more kids and families become physically active. All activities are free and open to the community. For more information, contact the Ambler YMCA at 215-628-9950. No reservation is required.

The Ambler Area YMCA has added several new programs for area youngsters. Classes are held late afternoons or evenings on various weekdays. For more information, visit philaymca.org or call 215-628-9950.

Basic Beading: Ages: 10+. Wednesdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. This class will teach you the fundamentals of wiring and stringing along with how color can be used to create unique and vibrant beadwork design. You will create various jewelry including earrings, bracelets, charm pendants and much more! Supplies will be provided. Bringing your own jewelry pliers or tools would be a plus.

Messin with the Masters: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. Learn about some of the worlds greatest artists. You will be inspired to create your own Starry Night with oil pastels and tempera paints, a tissue paper painted Monet garden, a Picasso head using scraps of paper, a Georgia OKeeffe clay flower bowl and a Rousseau jungle collage.

Super Scientist: Ages: 5-7. Mondays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Well be concocting chemistry experiments such as making slime, mixing potions and having fun with magnet magic. Your budding little scientist will enhance his/her creative thinking and motor skills and to top it off will learn that science can be serious fun.

Wacky Junk Art: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 6 to 6:45 p.m. Why throw it away! Instead join us to make household junk into aliens from outer space, wacky specs, crazy hats, body masks or a recycled train.

Globe Trotters: Ages: 4-6. Tuesdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Youre never too young to start thinking globally. Each week, we explore a new country through crafts, games, music, stories and even some taste-testing. A perfect introduction to our great big world!

Crazy about Crafts: Ages: 5-7, Thursdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Let your childs creative juices flow with our fun arts and crafts projects each week. Fine motor skills and creative thinking skills will be enhanced with this crafty class.

Come out and join the Ambler Area YMCAs Teen and Junior Leaders Club. Participants are given the freedom to plan community service projects year round and truly make a difference in the lives of people in need. Those in Teen and Junior Leaders also attend leadership retreats all along the East Coast three times a year and meet other leaders who are doing the same great work in their respective areas. Dont miss out on this inspiring opportunity. Teen Leaders, ages 13-17, meet every Wednesday from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Junior Leaders, ages 10-12, will begin in the spring and will meet every Monday. For more information, contact Mike Miles, Teen Director, 215- 628-9950 x 1540 or mmiles@philaymca.org.

Did you know that the new Ambler Area YMCA holds childrens birthday parties at its site for members and non members as well. The Ambler Y does all the work from start to finish and birthday parties include a personalized cake, ice cream, beverage and paper products. Parties are held on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and include two party hosts to lead activities, set-up, clean-up and assist with serving. You can have a Splash Party for children ages six to 12 in the new zero depth entry pool with water slide and spray fountains. Up to 25 children have exclusive use of the pool area with 30 minutes in the party room. Sports Parties are offered for kids ages four to 12 with age appropriate activities and games, and sports such as floor hockey, soccer, basketball or dodge ball. Children ages three to five years of age will enjoy parties in the Family Active Center with use of the Moon Bounce and organized activities, such as parachute play and songs. For information, 215-628-9950 ext. 1583.

Community Events at the Ambler Y:

-YAchievers YMCA Achievers is a developmentally based, extracurricular, educational and team mentoring program designed to help students in grades five through 12 prepare for fulfilled livelihoods in college and beyond. Participation is free and all students in this program receive a free YMCA membership. Registration for the 2009 program begins now. You do not need to be a YMCA member to utilize these special services. Call 215-628-9950 to register.

Greater Norristown Art Leagues Childrens Weeklong Summer Art Camps will be held at 800 West Germantown Pike in East Norriton, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday throughout the summer. The cost per session is $125 per student for ages 6 and up. Jo Ann Cooksey Bono teaches an introduction to basic drawing skills and techniques from 10 a.m. until the lunch break each day. In the afternoon sessions, Mary Vogel Lozinak involves the students in hands on projects such as collage, papermaking, T-shirt printing, 3D design and sculpy clay. Fridays Graduation Day includes an art show, awards ceremony and reception for parents, siblings, grandparents and friends. All supplies are included. Students provide their own lunch. A refrigerator is available and the building is air-conditioned. This is the 15th year to run this successful program. Both instructors are professional artists with State Police and Child Abuse Clearances. To register, call Jo Ann at 610-279-1008, or register on-line at www.gnal.org.

Health

Dresher Physical Therapy is hosting an interactive seminar discussing its Golf Assessment Progam April 30 from 10 a.m. to noon at Dresher Physical Therapy, 1075 Virginia Drive, Suite 200, Fort Washington. Physical therapist Chris Miller, certified through the Titleist Performance Institute, will discuss why your body may be the most important piece of golf equipment you invest in and how this can drastically improve your game. $10 in advance; $15 at the door. Call 215-619-4545 to reserve your spot.

The Chestnut Hill Center for Enrichment, Center on the Hill and Chestnut Hill Hospital will host a Senior Health and Resource Fair April 14 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church, 8855 Germantown Ave. The event is free. For more information, call 215-248-0180 or e-mail chseniors@cavtel.net.

The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is hosting Help Yourself to Health, a new six-week workshop for older adults with ongoing health conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, anxiety, heart disease and others. The free workshop will take place at the Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center, 45 Forest Ave. on six Thursdays, May 12 through June 16 from 9:30 a.m. to noon. Although there is no charge to participate, registration is required. To register, call 215-619-8863.

The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is sponsoring an eight-week program called A Matter of Balance: Managing Concerns About Falls. Presented by the Montgomery County Health Department, this workshop will be held on Tuesdays, May 3 to June 21 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Ambler Center, 45 Forest Ave. If you pre-register by April 27, the fee is only $5! Registration at the first class is $10. (Checks should be payable to SAAC and will benefit our Meals on Wheels program that serves homebound seniors.) A workbook will be provided and refreshments will be served. Call 215-619-8863 to register or for more information.

Fort Washington Wellness Center classes are ongoing. There are several offered during lunch or right after work, for your convenience: Boot Camp from noon to 1 p.m. on Monday; Zumba is MWF from 11 a.m. to noon and Friday at 4 p.m.; there are 25 cycling classes; Ashtanga and Vinyasana Yoga and Pilates; and a group Womens Strength Training class M-F from 10 to 11 a.m. Questions, call Cathy DeMarco at 215-641-1245.

Following the success of other local area programs, Impact Sports and Upper Dublin Parks and Recreation are delighted to team up again to offer a spring program for the 2011 season! Upper Dublin area children ages 3-5 years old can attend a Sports Program featuring their favorite sports games; soccer, rugby, hockey, track and field, basketball, and more. The program will start on April 27 and run through June 1. Cost for the program is $85 for the six weeks. The classes will be running 12- 1 p.m.; 1- 2 p.m.; 2- 3 p.m. For more info or to register, call Upper Dublin Township on 215 643 1600 or visit their website a http://www.upperdublin.net.

Spring Aquatic Programs  UDHS Pool:

-Summer is just around the corner  Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool can help get you into shape! Programs begin in March; preregistration is required.

 Shallow Water Aerobics  Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 8-8:45 p.m., $40R/$50NR.

 Adult Swim Instructions  Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 7-8 p.m., $50R/$60NR

-Open Rec Swims are fun for the whole family! Come out on Fridays from 7-9 p.m. or Saturdays from 1-4 p.m. and enjoy use of the pool and diving area. Fridays are offered through June 17; Saturdays are offered March 12-May 21.

-Join a growing group of adult lap swimmers and water walkers. Lanes are set aside evenings and weekends for use; lanes are shared. Monday  Thursday from 7:30-9:30 p.m.; Fridays from 7-9 p.m. and Saturdays (March 12-May 21) from 1-4 p.m.

-Private Swimming & Diving Lessons for ages 3-adult are offered at the UDHS Pool through a partnership with the Upper Dublin Aquatic Club (UDAC). Visit the UDAC website for more information, www.udac.us, and click the link to UDHS Private Lessons.

-Looking for local programs for US Masters Swimming (adults) or Water Polo (all ages)? UDAC and UDSD are working together to develop programs that will be offered at the UDHS Pool. Add your name to Interest Lists by emailing slohoefer@upperdublin.net. emails will be sent about clinics and program start dates.

Questions about Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool, group use of the pool or pool rental? Contact Susan Lohoefer, Facility & Community Affairs Manager at slohoefer@upperdublin.net or call 215-643-8800 x8994.

SilverSneakers Fitness Program. The Healthyways SilverSneakers Fitness Program is a result-oriented program that enables older adults to take charge of their health. The program is an innovative blend of physical activity, healthy lifestyle and socially oriented programing. Members of the program are eligible for a free YMCA membership, with use of the pool and exercise equipment, along with customized classes designed for older adults who want to improve their strength, flexibility, balance and endurance. If you are a subscriber to Independence Blue Cross (Personal Choice 65 PPO) or Keystone 65 HMO, Bravo Health, or Health Options Programs (HOP), call the Ambler Area YMCA, 215-628-9950 or Hatboro Area YMCA, 215-674-4545. You can also visit www.silversneakers.com.

Zumba Fitness offers Zumba dance/fitness classes at Academy of Dance and Music/BBAD Studio located at 1524 DeKalb Pike in Blue Bell (behind Sherwin Williams). Classes are offered three times a week: Tuesdays at 6 p.m., Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 8 a.m. For a free trial pass for your first class, email us at info@danceandmusic.biz or call 610-277-2557. For more info, visit our site at www.academyofdanceandmusic.org.

Chestnut Hill Health Systems presents the following Health Education Programs:

FITNESS CLASSES

Golden Yoga: A Breathing, Stretching and Relaxation Class. Fridays, 2:30-3:30 p.m. Lea Auditorium, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. Registration for four classes at a time required. Golden Yoga is Classical Yoga, adapted by the SKY Foundation, to accommodate those who have difficulty getting up and down from the floor. The program includes postures, breathing, relaxation and meditation techniques, all performed while sitting in a chair and standing. Registration required. Call 215-247-3029. Cost: $20 for 4 classes per month.

Tai Chi: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:30  9:30 a.m. Springfield Residence, 8601 Stenton Ave. Classes, for the novice or beginner/intermediate student, are designed to improve balance, power, posture, coordination, flexibility and mental focus. Slow, gentle movements are modified to most everyones abilities. For more information or to sign up for a free introductory class, call 215-882-2804. Cost: $8 per class/paid monthly.

SUPPORT GROUPS

Weight Loss Surgery Support Group: Fourth Wednesday of the month, 7-8 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. Join us for a monthly get-together where well share information for those interested in weight loss surgery, learn from guest speakers discussing current news on issues including lifestyle modification, nutrition and exercise and provide ongoing support for those who have completed surgery. Registration required. Call 215-753-2000.

Breast Cancer Networking Group: Fourth Tuesday of the month 5:30  7 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. A free, confidential support group for women living with a diagnosis of breast cancer designed to provide a forum for sharing information, feelings and concerns associated with breast cancer. Facilitated by Tish Wakefield, LCSW, Oncology Social Worker. Registration required. To register or for more information, call 215-248-8047.

New Moms Support Groups Tuesdays 10:30 a.m.  12 p.m.; contact Jeanine ORourke, MSW or 2:30  4 p.m.; contact Susan Schack, Ph.D Volunteer Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. The Center for Postpartum Depression at Chestnut Hill Hospital is pleased to offer two new support groups to support new moms. Both groups will be run by experienced mental health professionals who really get it when it comes to new motherhood and juggling relationships, extended family, work/family balance and self-care. If you are experiencing new mom challenges that often heighten anxiety and involve hormonally driven depression, join us for an informative and supportive forum to connect with other moms. Infants are welcome. $30 per session (flexible based on need). Registration is required. Call Dr. Schack, 646-265-2484, or Ms. ORourke, 215-206-2931.

Man to Man Prostate Cancer Support Group Third Thursday of the month 8-9 a.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. A networking group for men diagnosed with prostate cancer designed to provide education, support and encouragement. Spouses and partners welcome. Harry M. Baer, MD, Chief, Urology Division, will host Ask the Doctor. Registration required. Call 215-248-8325.

Contact the Senior Center by phone 215-248-0180 or email (chseniors@cavtel.net) with your questions about these programs or any of our on-going activities and classes.

Holy Redeemer HomeCare and Hospice seeks compassionate and emotionally mature volunteers to provide support to local hospice patients and their families in Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. Volunteers may also assist with pet therapy and administrative work within the hospice department and are requested to have daytime availability. Hospice patient care volunteers visit with patients in their homes or nursing facilities once a week for two to three hours. They provide emotional support and companionship to patients and family members, assist with errands or provide respite for caregivers. Bereavement volunteers support the families of hospice patients following the loss of a loved one, while administrative volunteers assist with typing, mailings and/or filing. Hospice care workers provide a great service to families and loved ones of hospice patients. Many volunteers also report a great deal of personal satisfaction as a result of their services. Patient care and bereavement volunteers complete an application and attend an 18-hour volunteer training program that covers the medical, psychological and spiritual aspects of hospice volunteering. Day and evening training programs are offered. To sign up for volunteer opportunities in Pennsylvania, contact Holy Redeemer Volunteer Coordinator Jean Francis at 215-698-3737 or email jfrancis@holyredeemer.com.

Librarytalk

Upper Dublin Public Library, 805 Loch Alsh Avenue, Ft. Washington, 215-628-8744

www.upperdublinlibrary.org

APRIL CHILDRENS PROGRAMS:

Storytimes: Please register in the library.

o Wee Ones: 0 to 23 months Thursdays and Fridays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m.

o Tiny Tots: age 2. Wednesdays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m. and Fridays 11 to 11:20 a.m.

o Jr. Book Lovers: ages 3 to 6. Tuesdays 10:30 to 11 a.m.

o Bedtime Storytimes: 7 to 7:30 p.m. April 20 and 27. Wear your jammies, bring your teddy & hear Miss Barbara read bedtime stories! For ages 3 to 6.

APRIL TEEN PROGRAMS:

North Hills Library Teens April 28 from 4 to 6 p.m. Movie Matinee

APRIL UDPL ADULT PROGRAMS:

NEW! ESL Conversation Group. Tuesdays from 7 to 8 p.m. Interested in practicing your English in a safe and caring environment? Come to our conversation group and improve your skills! Please register with Kay Klocko at 215-628-8744 or kklocko@mclinc.org.

One-on-One Computer Mentoring. Get personalized assistance from experienced computer volunteers! Sign-up for a one-hour session. Limit one session per month. Please register  contact info above.

Book Groups Please register with Kay Klocko 215-628-8744.

o Daytimers: April 21 at 1:30 p.m. Tired of book groups where you all read the same book? Read any fiction or non-fiction book on this months theme: Explorers. Please register.

Meetings:

Annual Meeting of the Friends of UDPL: April 14 at 1 p.m.

Board of Directors: April 20 at 7 p.m.

Blue Bell Library www.wvpl.org Upcoming Events: The Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 650 Skippack Pike (Route 73) in Blue Bell, is diagonally across from the Blue Bell Inn. Call 215-643-1320 or visit their website at www.wvpl.org.

For children and teens at Blue Bell:

* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.

* Mondays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.

* Fridays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Family Movies, new releases, second Saturdays of the month at 1:30 p.m.

* May 14  Despicable Me

* June 11  Alpha and Omega

* Special Events

* April  watch for date of spring/Easter events

* April 14 at 4:30 p.m.  Junior Lego Club for children ages 3 through 5. Parents and caregivers need to stay with children.

* April 14 at 7 p.m.  Jeopardy for ages 11 to 18. Test your book and library knowledge for prizes. Sign up to be a contestant. No sign up to be in the audience. Snacks provided.

* April 16 at 1 p.m.  Adult Mystery Book Group discussing The Beekeepers Apprentice by Laurie King.

* April 16 at 1:30 p.m.  Childrens event for One Book, Every Young Child celebration. Story and craft for book Whose Shoes?

* April 19 at 7 p.m. and April 26 at 1:30 p.m.- Adult book group discusses The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Group led by Adam Button.

* April 30 through May 3  Friends book sale with about 10,000 items for sale for children, teens and adults.

* May  sign up for Science in the Summer

* June  sign up for Enrichment Programs for Elementary-Age children

* June  sign up for Summer Reading, all ages

For adults at Blue Bell:

* Daytime Book Discussion Group  fourth Tuesday, Jan  April at 1:30 p.m.

* April 26  The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

* Night-time Book Discussion Group  third Tuesday of each month at 7 p.m.

o April 19  The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

* Art Series with Dr. Sheldon Weintraub, docent at The Barnes and speaker at local colleges

o April 27 at 2 p.m. The Art of Looking at Art-Is She Nude or Is She Naked?

*Mystery Book Discussion Group, third Saturday of the month at 1 p.m.; new mystery theme each month; www.wvpl.org/programs

* Yoga on Mondays at 1:30 p.m. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop-in class.

* Tai Chi on Mondays at 3 p.m. with Dr. Kurt Findeisen. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop in class.

* Philadelphia Museum of Art presents class on their Marc Chagall exhibit, April 13 at 2 p.m.

* Giant Book Sale, April 29  May 3

o Starts with almost 10,000 items for children and adults!

o Held during library hours.

o Preview for members of the Friends of the Library, April 28 at 7 p.m.

o Join the Friends and attend the preview sale. Modest fee to join.

* Blooms at Blue Bell Gardening Series

o May 11 at 1 p.m.  Summer Bulbs by PA Horticultural Society

* Knitting group Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 a.m. Work on your project or observe and learn. The groups continue year-round in the community room.

* Socrates Cafe discussion group every Monday at 7 p.m. You pick the topic to discuss each week. No sign-up, nothing to read.

* Bridge every Friday at 12:30 p.m. New players welcome.

* Mah Jong every Wednesday at 1 p.m. New players welcome.

*Chess every Wednesday at 7p.m. for adults and teens 14 and older.

* Movie Matinee showing recent releases every Thursday at 2 p.m. April 14: Maos Last Dancer; April 21: Welcome to the Rileys; April 28: Conviction; May 5: Inception; May 12: Inside Job; May 19 The Kings Speech; May 26 The Fighter; June 2 Rabbit Hole; June 9 Black Swan; June 16 127 Hours

* Ongoing like-new, year-round book sale for adults & children during library hours

* Library opening at 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday!

Ambler Library, a branch of the Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 209 Race St., 215-646-1072. www.wvpl.org. All the following events occur at the Ambler Library.

* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.

* Tuesdays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.

* For adults:

* Beading Group meets the first and third Monday of every month at 1 p.m. Work on your own projects or come to watch and learn.

* Free Family History Lookup with Connie Briggs. Email Connie for an appointment at the Ambler Library. conniebriggs@comcast.net

* Special Events:

* April 14 at 1:30 p.m.  Book Group discusses Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian.

* April 19 at 7 p.m.  Travel to Paris with world traveler Harry Balin. Tea and scones at 6:30 p.m.

* April 21 at 7 p.m.  Art with Sara for children in fourth through seventh grades.

*May 2 at 6:30 p.m.  Discuss the movie Lone Star with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.

*May 10  Robert Capucci discusses Art into Fashion. Tea and scones served at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.

*May 12 at 1:30p.m.  Book Group discusses The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.

*May 17  Tour the gardens of Devon and Southwest England with Lois McMullen. Tea and Scones at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.

*June 13 at 6:30 p.m.  Discuss the movie Blade Runner with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.

Meetings and Lectures

The Unisys Blue Bell Retiree Group will meet in the Church on the Mall in the Plymouth Meeting Mall April 14 at 1:30 p.m. Kathy Sacket Young, director/trainer with the North Penn YMCA, will speak on Keeping Fit in Retirement. For more information, contact Membership Committee Chairperson Jerry Feldscher at 610-275-3538 or President Al Rollin at 215-368-4833.

The next FWBA meeting will be April 28 at the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Networking begins at 11:30 a.m.; meeting from noon to 1 p.m. Leon Singletary, Principal, First Contact HR and FWBA Executive Board, will present: Social Media: How to Use It To Get More Business. Lunch is provided courtesy of the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Members are welcome to bring a guest. An RSVP is requested by return email or 215-628-0313.

Big Brothers Big Sisters Southeastern PA is hosting a information sessions over the next few weeks on how to become a Big Brother. The information sessions will take place: April 16 at noon, April 19 at 8 a.m. and April 28 at 6 p.m. All sessions will be held at the groups Norristown Office,t 530 DeKalb St., Norristown. For more information, call 610-277-2200.

The North Penn Chapter of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) normally meets on the third Tuesday of each month from now until May. Meetings are held at the William Penn Inn on Route 202 and Sumneytown Pike, Upper Gwynedd, PA. Social hour starts at 5:30 p.m., dinner is served at 6:30 p.m., and the technical program begins at 7 p.m. Cost with reservation is $28 for members. Members without reservations and guests pay $30. Students with reservations pay $15. Reservations may be made by noon on the Monday preceding the meeting by phoning 215-371-1854 or emailing the reservation to northpennima@yahoo.com northpennima@yahoo.com. Information about the North Penn Chapter is available at http://northpenn.imanet.org/.

LeTip, a professional organization of men and women who are dedicated to the highest standards of competence and service meets every Tuesday at Cedar Brook Country Club, 180 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell at 7 a.m. -meeting officially starts at 7:16 a.m. and ends at 8:31 a.m. Our purpose is the exchange of business tips, leads, and referrals. Each business category is represented by one member and conflicts of interest are disallowed. Guests are welcome to visit any of our breakfast meetings.

Every third Thursday of month, Sunrise Assisted Living of Blue Bell (795 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell, PA 19422, 215-619-2777) serves as a satellite site to 148th Legislative district PA congressman Mike Gerber from 10 a.m. to noon. Stop by for help needed with things such as disability placards and license plates, vehicle registration, utilities issues, birth/death certificates,property tax/rent rebates, etc. Notary services arranged by appointment.

The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce is an action-oriented organization dedicated to promoting its members and the economic health of eastern Montgomery county. The Chamber is committed to serving as a catalyst by uniting business, community agencies, government and education to make our county a great place to live and work. For information, call 215-887-5122 or visit www.emccc.org.

Do you have a fear of public speaking? Blue Bell Toastmasters Club can help. We meet from 7 to 9 p.m., on the second and fourth Tuesday at the Marriott Courtyard, located on Route 202, directly across from the Montgomeryville Mall. Learn how to improve communication and leadership skills in a friendly and supportive environment. Guests are welcome. Admission fee: $5. For more info, visit www.bbtoast.org.

The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will hold the following meetings (for reservations to any of the following, email info@PennSuburban.org)

-Breakfast News Network, 7:30-8:45 a.m. at Normandy Farm Hotel (1401 Morris Road, Blue Bell, PA 19422) $15 members, includes full buffet breakfast. Join us for a networking program at Normandy Farm Hotel every Thursday morning for breakfast, business news, informative speakers, and plenty of networking. The cost includes a full breakfast buffet. Copies of the business cards will be made available to those who would like them.

The BNI, Fort Washington Chapter meets every Monday at The Hilton Garden Inn, 520 Pennsylvania Ave., Fort Washington for a networking meeting. Meetings are from 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m. Visitors are welcome. The only cost to attend is the cost of your meal. For information or a reservation to attend, please call Luanne Cram at 215-947-7784, or visit our Internet site at: http://www.BNIDVR.Com and click on the menu item Find a Chapter.

For the past seven years, people have enjoyed participating in WVWAs Adopt-a-Tree program. Individuals can support the Association in its reforestation efforts by purchasing native trees to be planted. Supporters can plant their adopted tree or have WVWA volunteers will plant it. Trees cost $30 each. If you would like to volunteer or purchase a tree(s), please contact: Bob Adams at Bob@wvwa.org or call: 215-646-8866 for more information. Check www.WVWA.org for directions and maps.

Sustainable Upper Dublin, http://sustainableupperdublin.org, meets the first Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m., at the Upper Dublin Township Building, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington, PA 19034. Please send any questions to suec@sustainableupperdublin.org or call 610-996-6316. To learn more about Sustainable Upper Dublin, view or join the discussion at http://googlegroups.com/group/sustainableupperdublin.

Special Events

The Mattie N. Dixon Community Cupboard will hold its first nutrition class April 19 at 10 a.m. at the Community Cupboard, 150 N. Main St., Ambler. Lynne Sinclair, a nutritionist from Abington Memorial Hospital specializing in diabetic nutrition, will conduct the class. Topics will include healthy eating, beneficial foods, recipes, making meals with every day foods, and how to use unfamiliar produce. A healthy snack will be provided.The class is is open to all residents in Montgomery County.

The Historical Society of Fort Washington presents The History of Conshohocken April 19 at 8 p.m. at the Clifton House, 473 Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington. Jack Coll will present an illustrated program on the history of the Borough of Conshohocken. Coll is a longtime resident of Conshohocken and a member of the Conshohocken Historical Society. He is co-author with his son, Brian, of the Arcadia Then and Now Series book Conshohocken. He has also done books Conshohocken and West Conshohocken Sports and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Italian Feast. He has taken many photos for the Conshohocken Record and the Norristown Times Herald. This program is free. Refreshments will be served. For additional information, call 215-646-6065.

Taste of the White House Soiree featuring former White House Chef Walter Scheib will take place April 29 at 6 p.m. at Manufacturers Golf & Country Club in Fort Washington to celebrate HealthLinks 10th anniversary and honor its founders, the Eugene Jackson Family. The evening will heat up with a Chef Meet & Greet, followed by a specially selected presidential menu. Gala tickets are $150 per person. Proceeds benefit HealthLink, a free clinic providing compassionate, quality medical and dental care to uninsured, working adults in Bucks and Montgomery counties who fall in between the health care cracks. Go to http://tasteofthewhitehouse.charityhappenings.org to make reservations online or lend support through sponsorship. For event information, call 267-699-0124 or email jmarushak@healthlinkmedical.org.

The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association will hold an open house at the Evans-Mumbower Mill April 17 from 1 to 4 p.m. The Mill is at the corner of Swedesford and Township Line Roads in Upper Gwynedd. The open house is free but donations are welcome. For more information, call 215-646-8866 o email info@wvwa.org.

The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce will host Breakfast With Your County Commissioners and State Representatives April 21 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Holiday Inn Fort Washington, 432 W. Pennasylvania Ave. Commissioners: James R. Matthews (Chairman), Joseph M. Hoeffel (Vice Chair), State Representatives: Todd Stephens (District 151) and Josh Shapiro (District 153). Register onlineat www.emccc.org. $10 for EMCCC member; $20 for non-members.

Upper Dublins Districtwide Allied Art Show will be held April 27 from 5:30 to 9 p.m. in the Upper Dublin High School Athletic Complex.

The Rev. Alfred Muli, chaplain at Fort Washington Estates, will be the featured speaker at the Kiwanis sponsored breakfast observing the National Day of Prayer May 5 at 7 a.m. at the William Penn Inn. The breakfast is open to the public ($15). Reservations can be made by calling 215-646-4356 or by emailing georgesaurman@Juno.com.

The Upper Dublin Shade Tree Commission invites people to participate in its spring bare root planting events, sponsored in part by Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Friends of Robbins Park. On April 9, zix trees will be planted at the Evelyn B. Wright Park & Community Pool, 401 Logan Ave., North Hills, at 9 a.m., followed by the planting of 10 trees at Sheeleigh Park, Loch Alsh Avenue and Douglas Street, Ambler, at 10:15 a.m. On April 29, students from Upper Dublin High School will join the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to plant 16 trees in Robbins Park, Butler Pike and Meetinghouse Road, Ambler, to help launch the societys Million Trees campaign. This event will occur in conjunction with Temple Amblers EarthFest. Experienced tree-tenders are sought to assist the students. For more information,contact Ron Ayres at 215-653-0421 or 215-483-4348.

The Friends of the Wissahickon and the Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association are teaming up once again to clean the Wissahickon Creek from top to bottom April 30 from 9 a.m. to noon. This spring marks the 41st anniversary of Wissahickon Valley Watershed Associations annual Creek Clean Up, and the second year that FOW has teamed up with WVWA. Volunteers of all ages will clean the creek, the surrounding trails and the many tributaries of the Wissahickon Creek. Armed with bags, volunteers will be assigned to sections of the creek. Following the clean up, all volunteers are invited to WVWAs Talkin Trash picnic in Fort Washington State Park, with food provided by Whole Foods Market of North Wales. The pavilion is located on Mill Road in Flourtown. To help out in Montgomery County, all volunteers must be pre-assigned a section of the Wissahickon Creek to clean. Please contact Bob Adams, WVWA director of stewardship, at 215-646-8866 ext. 14 or bob@wvwa.org. To work with the Friends of the Wissahickon in Philadelphia, meet at the pavilion along Forbidden Drive, a short distance south of the intersection of Forbidden Drive and Northwestern Avenue. Limited parking is available along Northwestern Avenue and other nearby streets. Volunteers are encouraged to bike or carpool to the event. To participate, register at www.fow.org. Contact Kevin Groves with questions at 215-247-0417 ext. 105 or groves@fow.org.

Montgomery County Community Colleges International Club invites the community to the second annual International Festival April 20 from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The rain date is April 26. The International Club will transform the outside quad area into multicultural celebration with various performances by dancers, singers and musicians. Artists will share their artwork at various display tables. Activities include games, raffles, Easter egg decorating and henna tattoos. Students will have samples of international cuisine at tables representing different countries and will serve food from various local ethnic restaurants. Throughout the evening, volunteers will accept donations and will raffle gift baskets and prizes to raise funds for Habitat for Humanity. Donations of food, international clothes and prizes are needed. Volunteers, including artists and performers, are welcome. For more information or to sponsor an activity, contact Gillian Nel, International Club president, at gnel9277@students.mc3.edu or 267-974-0163.

The Arts and Humanities Division at Montgomery County Community College is partnering with the Philadelphia Writers Conference to host Memoirs Matter: How Life Stories (Including Yours) Can Transform Your Relationship to Literature April 23 from 1 to 3 p.m. in Advanced Technology Center room 101, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The event is free and open to the public. In the first part of this two-hour seminar, professor and author Robert Waxler will explain how writing his two memoirs affected his life as well as his relationship to literature. In the second part, blogger and workshop leader Jerry Waxler will present a sequence of steps to help writers find their own story. For information, contact Dana Resente at dresente@mc3.edu.

The Maple Glen Garden Club will hold its fourth annual Plant Sale on May 7 from 8 to 11 a.m. Perennials, shrubs, vegetables and native plants grown by the club members will be sold. The club uses the plant sale proceeds to fund community projects, a college scholarship and community plantings. The sale will be held in the 500 block of Coach Road, Horsham, as part of a neighborhood garage sale. Plants will be sold at bargain prices. For more information, email MapleGlenGardenClub@gmail.com.

The Relay for Life Craft Show is looking for local crafters to participate in show, which will be May 21 from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the Wissahickon High School track, 521 Houston Road, Ambler. There is a $10 entry fee, and 20 percent of sales are donated to the American Cancer Society. Participants will receive a 6-foot table under a tent. For information, contact Joanne at joannescoles@comcast.net or Mindy at mcamsilver@comcast.net.

Spring House Estates is hosting its annual book fair on April 18 from 4 to 7 p.m. and April 9 from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Included will be hardback and paperback used books. Spring House Estates is located at 728 Norristown Road, Lower Gwynedd.

The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will present the Penn Suburban/Hatfield Joint Business Card Exchange April 20 from 5 to 7 p.m. at Univest Bank Lansdale Area Financial Service Center, 120 Forty Foot Road, Hatfield. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. Join Univest National Bank and Trust Co. for a spring-inspired Business Card Exchange at its newest office in the Hatfield Pointe Shopping Center. Come out and meet members of Univests executive management team while enjoying fine food and beverages.

13th Annual Community Reading Day Kick-off Breakfast Get Together April 26 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the North Wales Area Library, 233 Swartley St., North Wales. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. For more information, contact the chamber office at 215-362-9200 or info@pennsuburban.org. Join presenting sponsor Verizon, chamber staff and fellow members for the Community Reading Day volunteer get together. The Community Reading Day program allows volunteers to read a designated book to second-grade students throughout 38 area public and private schools and present the book as a gift to each class. Even if you are not a volunteer, you are cordially invited to stop by to network, enjoy coffee and pastries.

Ambler Mennonite Church is hosting a Spring Craft Show and Flea Market May 21 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Rain date will be May 28. The community is invited to shop the great craft booths, find some gifts and deals, as well as enjoy home baked goods and tasty lunch specials. Childrens activities are planned. All vendors are encouraged to contact the church at 215-643-4876 or AmblerMennonite@verizon.net. Advertising, signage, customer parking and a shuttle to auxiliary parking at nearby lots for vendors will be provided. 10 foot by 10 foot spaces can be rented for $5 each and tables for an additional $5 each. All proceeds from space and table rentals go toward school kits for children around the world. The church is located at the corner of East Mt. Pleasant Avenue and North Spring Garden Street, Ambler.

The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association presents The Life & Times of Aquatic Insects in the Wissahickon Creek April 16 from 1 to 3 p.m. Join WVWA for a hands-on program. RSVP required: www.wvwa.org or 215-646-8866. WVWA member fee: $5 per person / $15 per family. Non-WVWA member fee: $10 per person / $20 per family.

The photography exhibition Natures Palette by photo-artist Judy Miller will run March 18 to May 19 at the Art in the Storefront gallery, 41 E. Butler Pike, Ambler.

JPRN  Networking For People in Transition & People Who Can Help Them  Unemployment remains high. JPRN, the Jarrettown Professional Relationship Network can help. Are you trying to network your way to a new job? Do you have expertise or contacts that can help people in transition? Is your company or organization looking for people in the area? This is a free outreach program to support those seeking work, involve people with contacts and networking know how, and involve local companies. Meetings held monthly at Jarrettown United Methodist Church, Limekiln Pike.

Pennsylvanias Low-Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) grant program is now open for the 2010-11 heating season. Grants are based on income, family size, type of heating fuel and region. Additional information, such as specific income limits, and applications for LIHEAP grants are available online via the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Access to Social Services (COMPASS) website at www.compass.state.pa.us. Applications are available at most public officals district offices, county assistance offices, local utility companies and community service agencies, such as Area Agencies on Aging or community action agencies.

Begin your holiday shopping at Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation! Entertainment books for 2011, Philadelphia North, are now on sale at $30 each. Regal/United Artists movie tickets are on sale for just $7.50 each, and tickets to the Adventure Aquarium, Baltimore Aquarium, and the Philadelphia Zoo are also available. Discounted ski vouchers to area mountains will be arriving in December; call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information. Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation office hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

RSVP of Montgomery County and the Wissahickon Valley Public Library have partnered again to offer the public their popular free mock interview sessions. The mock interviews are conducted by RSVP volunteers who are retired professionals, some of whom were in hiring positions themselves. Packets of information which include a sample employment application and interviewing tips with mock interview questions are available at the library to pick up prior to a scheduled mock interview or will be sent via email once the interview is scheduled. To schedule your interview, please contact Janis Glusman at RSVP 610-834-1040, ext. 16. The library is also offering a free resume review service. Bring in your current resume and the professional reference staff will assist you with hints and tips on capturing your work history accurately.

Registration for Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation summer playgrounds, Camp B.I.G. and Small Folks, X-Zone, and sports camps has began. Register online at www.upperdublin.net/store, or at the UDP&R office, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington. Call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information.

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Danielles Espresso Cafe presents Mornings at Mondaug Bark Park April 16 and May 21 from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Meet fellow dog lovers. These events include complimentary coffee, treats for people and pups and raffles/giveaways.

Upper Dublins Annual Spring Flea Market will be held June 4 from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Reserve a table, or come and shop. Tables are $15 for UD residents, $20 for non-residents. This successful event occurs rain or shine. Refreshments available. Call 215-643-1600 ext. 3443 to register for a table.

Regal movie tickets available for purchase at Upper Dublin Township Parks & Recreation. Reduced rate: $7.50 per ticket. Some restrictions apply. Call 215-643-1600 x3443.

Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation movie tickets $7.50 Regal Cinemas, United Artist & Edwards Cinemas on sale throughout the year Monday  Friday from 9 a.m.  4 p.m.

Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation Camp Sign-ups for Stony Creek Day Camp  Stony Creek Tracers and Park n Tots. Register on-line at www.whitpaintownship.org OrCome to Township Building with check or Visa MasterCard Monday  Friday from 9 a.m.  4 p.m. For additional information call 610.277-2400 ext. 374

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation offers exciting new programs for the fall:

-Returning favorites include UK Elite Petite Soccer, Tiny Dancers, Kiddie Tennis, Fun-nastics, Messy Playtime, Little Chefs, and more. Babysitters Training will be offered in November and December. Continuing Adult Fitness Classes include Cardio Circuit, Core & More, Yoga, Boxing, and Adult G.Y.M. For more information call 215-643-1600 x3443. Register for programs online at www.upperdublin.net/store.

Music and Theater

The community is invited to a Cantors Concert April 16 at 8 p.m. Congregation Beth Or, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen. Listen and hum-along to the Yiddish, pop tunes and classical music performed by Congregation Beth Ors own Cantor David Green and his special guest, Cantor Irvin Bell, from Temple Beth Israel in Deerfield Beach, Fla. The cantors will be accompanied by Mark Sobol and his Klezmer musicians. Tickets are $18 in advance and $25 at the door. RSVP with payment to Barb Murtha, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen, PA 19002, or call 215-646-5806 ext. 220.

Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse will host the Jameson Sisters May 14. Doors open at 7:30 pm, performance at 8:00 pm. Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse is located at the corner of Rte. 202 & Sumneytown Pike, Gwynedd. $5 suggested donation. Light refreshment available at a modest cost. For further information, call 215-393-9576 or visit gwyneddmeeting.org/coffeehouse.html.

Celebrate patriotism through song with Gwynedd-Mercy Colleges choir, the Voices of Gwynedd, as it presents Hear America Singing April 15 at 8 p.m. The choir will perform song selections from all over the country, including Georgia on My Mind, New York State of Mind, and a medley including Philadelphia Freedom and Allentown. The performance will end with When the Saints Go Marching In to acknowledge the choirs upcoming tour in New Orleans. Hear America Singing will take place in the Julia Ball Auditorium, located in St. Bernard Hall. Parking is available in lots A, C and D. Admission is free.

The Choristers will present Anton Dvoraks Stabat Mater April 16 at 7:30 p.m. at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church in Ambler. The choir will be accompanied by a 41-piece orchestra. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for senior citizens, $10 for students and children are free. Tickets will be sold in advance or at the door. For more information, call 215-542-7871 or visit TheChoristers.org

Religious News

The Staircase Gallery at Or Hadash: A Reconstructionist Congregation in Fort Washington will feature the work of Emily Ennuat-Lustine. The artist will be showing paintings and graphics inspired by her own personal spiritual journey and quest for meaning. Some of the works to be shown have been inspired by Biblical Psalms and writings. Her work has been shown at Abington Art Center, Cheltenham Arts Center and Old City Gallery of Jewish Art among others. The exhibition is open Friday evenings starting Feb. 18 after Shabbat services. Gallery hours are: Mondays through Thursdays 10-4:30, Fridays 10-3 and following Shabbat Services and Sundays 10-1. The synagogue is located at 190 Camp Hill Road in Fort Washington. For additional information contact the synagogue office at 215-283-0276.

Reunions

St. Matthews High School Conshohocken Class of 1961 is looking for classmates. For details, contact Greg Marincola at 215-646-2239, 215-740-1296 or gregcola@comcast.net.

Olney High School Class of 1971 is Lloking for classmates for a 40th reunion Oct. 28. For details, contact Judy at ohsclassof71@yahoo.com or 215-870-7572.

Abington High School Class of 1961 is seeking classmates for a 50-year reunion to be held Oct. 14-15, 2011.Visit the website, www.abington61.com, for details or call 215-947-1779.

Overbrook High School class of January 1956 is having a 55 year reunion on May 22, 2011 at the Bala Golf Club in Philadelphia. For information please contact overbrookreunion56@comcast.net

Germantown High School Class Of January 1961 is looking for classmates for 50th year reunion to take place in May of 2011. Please contact: 215-362-9148, 856-577-0659 or samdelcomo@comcast.net

The June 1961 class of Germantown High School is holding their 50th reunion on May 15, which will be a brunch. For further details please contact Linda Dorfman Alten at lindaalten@yahoo.com or call 215-441-8411.

Support

New Life Presbyterian Church in Dresher, will host GriefShare, a special seminar and support group which will run on Monday evenings from 7 to 9 p.m., from March 7 through June 6. At each meeting there will be a DVD about the grief process, discussion and reference to a grief workbook. Preregistration is required to secure a place in the group and to purchase a GriefShare notebook (for a one-time fee of $15). The notebook goes along with the 13-week schedule covering such topics as: living with grief, the effects of grief, and stuck in grief. For more information or to register, call: Sandy Elder at 215-884-5149.

PUPS (People Understanding Parkinsons) A self-help group for those adjusting to a new diagnosis or dealing with the early stages of Parkinsons Disease. Meets fourth Tuesday of the month from 1 to 2:30 p.m., at Abington Health Center, Schilling Campus, Willowood Building, 2510 Maryland Road, Suite 251, Willow Grove. For more information or to RSVP, contact Lorna at 215-542-2931.

The North Penn Visiting Nurse Associations Meals on Wheels program is looking for volunteers to pack or deliver meals to the elderly and infirmed. Meals are packed and delivered mornings, Monday through Friday. You can volunteer for as many days per week or month as you would like. Packaging meals requires approximately 2-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves making sandwiches, packaging food into individual serving containers and packing coolers with the meals. Delivering meals requires approximately 1-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves loading coolers into your car and delivering a route of approximately 10 to 15 stops. The Meals on Wheels program is also in need of emergency, winter-weather volunteers to pack and deliver meals in bad weather. North Penn VNA is located at 51 Medical Campus Drive in Lansdale and delivers meals in the Lansdale, North Wales and Blue Bell areas. For more information or to volunteer, please call Bridget, North Penn VNA Meals on Wheels coordinator at 215-855-8296.

Elkins Park Area CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) meets the first Tuesday of every month, 7- 8:30 p.m., at Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital in Elkins Park. For information on CHADD or ADHD, please see our website www.chadd.net/249 or call Claire Noyes at: 215-779-6656.

Center for Loss and Bereavement, 3847 Skippack Pike, Skippack (610-222-4110) www.bereavementcenter.org Offers professional counseling for individuals, couples, children and families dealing with issues of loss and bereavement. Six-week adult support groups: Newly forming young adult grief support group  every other Wednesday, 7  8:15 p.m. (free of charge); Monthly loss of child support  second Mondays, 7-8:15 p.m.; Six-week young loss of spouse/partner  Thursdays, 10-11:15 a.m.; Other groups scheduled as interest is shown for suicide loss support, adult loss of parent, motherless daughters, adult loss of sibling, coping with chronic illness and disability and mens loss of spouse. Nellos Corner Family Bereavement program offers peer grief support groups for ages 4 through teen and their caregivers  Every other Tuesday or Wednesday (free of charge) Local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children also meets at the Center. Registration required. Call for further information.

CHADD is a national organization for children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder, providing education, advocacy and support for individuals and their families with AD/HD. Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital, 60 Township Line Road, Elkins Park, PA 19027, will host children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder on the First Tuesday of each month 7  8:30 p.m. Free, no childcare provided.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphias Kehillah of Old York Road is sponsoring a free Caregiver Support Group for individuals who care for an elderly person with cognitive and/or physical impairments. The group meets at SarahCare Adult Day Care Center, 101 Washington Lane, Suite G-6, Jenkintown, Pa., on the first Wednesday of each month. Patty Rich,
Thanks to Nigel the Nutcracker from The Warehouse, we are granting wishes across the country!
Stratford Schools Morgan Hill campus will host a Family Benefit Game Night from 6:30pm to 8pm Jan. 19 to benefit the construction of a Magical Bridge Playground in Morgan Hills Community Park.

Magical Bridge Playgrounds are designed to address the complex needs of the entire population living with disabilities, from the physical to the cognitive.

Stratford Schools goal is to raise $10,000 for the playground.

Stratford School, located at 410 Llagas Road, is a leading independent private school that offers an unparalleled education where tradition meets 21st century learning, according to the press release.
Fund selection has never been more important, particularly in sectors that investors perceive as being safe, according to BMO GAMs multi-manager team.

The vast majority of asset classes made positive gains in 2017, as risk assets surged. But the team, which manages over 3 billion in assets including the Morningstar Bronze rated F&C MM Navigator Distribution, point out that the difference between the best and worst-performing funds in each sector is vast.

They also point out that many funds in Investment Association (IA) sectors that investors perceive to be safe asset classes, such as Targeted Absolute Return and Property, actually lost significant amounts of money last year.

Looking back on 2017, Scott Spencer, investment manager within the BMO GAM multi-manager team, notes that, while asset allocation was important to ensure youre invested in the correct areas, fund selection was key to maximising returns.

Asia Pacific Excluding Japan was one of the best-performing sectors last year, with the average fund returning 25.3% according to Morningstar Direct data. It was a region the team were overweight, Spencer says. But that wasnt enough.

Its impossible to buy the average sector fund and, while two Asia Pacific funds saw healthy gains of over 50% in the calendar year, the worst performing, JOHCM Asia ex-Japan Small and Mid Cap gained just 8.4%.

Closer to home, UK funds were generally unloved by investors last year due to Brexit concerns. Investors withdrew billions of pounds from UK-focused funds during the year. But, although UK All Companies funds saw mediocre returns, 14 of them actually beat the average returns from the Asia Pacific Excluding Japan sector.

We believe that getting the asset allocation call right is important, but that means squat if you dont get the fund selection right, Spencer explains. Getting that call right is vital in terms of how to deliver consistent returns.

Away from equity-focused sectors, bond funds suffer the same fate. Kelly Prior, who leads the team's fixed interest research, says that the biggest differences between best and worst-performing bond funds is in those sectors where the managers have more levers to pull. "It's no surprise to see this," Prior says. "You need to pick the right funds."

One of these has become more popular with UK investors over the past few months - the Sterling Strategic Bond sector. Here, the best fund, GAM Star Credit Opportunities, ended 2017 up 14.37%; the worst, City Financial Diversified Fixed Interest, was down 0.61%.

M&G Optimal Income, which pulled in the majority of fund flows into the sectors, was mid-table rising 5.77%.

Safe Asset Classes May Not Be So Safe

Another assertion Spencer makes on divergence of fund performance is that perceived safe sectors can end up losing investors significant sums should fund selection miss the mark.

Returns from funds in the Targeted Absolute Return category are not supposed to be stellar. The top performer in 2017, City Financial Absolute Equity, gained just 17.37%. However, they should be smart choices for cautious investors.

Funds in the sector aspire to make positive absolute returns for their holders in any market condition. Morningstar data shows the sector saw net inflows for every month between September 2014 and August 2017.

Funds positive return must, according to the IAs sector definition, be gained over a clearly stated timeframe of no longer than three years.

While clearly one year is not, therefore, always a realistic period to judge such funds over, considering the scale of returns investors made over the last 12 months, it could reasonably be expected that these funds should also have appreciated in value.

However, thats not necessarily the case. While the majority did deliver positive gains, some did not. The worst-performing of the lot, BlackRock Emerging Markets Absolute Alpha, in fact lost almost 10% in a year when emerging market equity was the best performing asset class.

Thats a huge difference for any client thats gone in and said I just want absolute returns  they could be up or they could be down, Spencer cautions. Huge flows have gone into [the sector] and, despite it being a good year for risk assets, some of these funds have actually lost money.

Property is also perceived by investors to be a safe haven  especially in times where homeowners have seen astronomical growth in the values of their properties.

However, Spencer notes that the worst-performing property fund lost a quarter of its value over the course of 2017. Thats a huge loss for anyone whos decided to buy property because they regard it as a safe asset class.

All in all, investors must be careful and do their research when searching for fund investments, whether they have a cautious midset or a higher risk tolerance.
Construction giant Carillion (CLLN) went into liquidation yesterday, as plans to restructure the companys debt failed to come to fruition. The firm had been in talks with key stakeholders  including the UK Government, since Thursday.

Despite considerable efforts, discussions have not been successful, and the board of Carillion has therefore concluded that it had no choice but to take steps to enter into compulsory liquidation with immediate effect, the statement released yesterday read.

Carillion had applied to the Government for a 20 million loan to avoid liquidation, but ministers were unwilling to offer financial support. The collapse puts 20,000 jobs at risk, and the pensions of employees and investors are in the balance.

Investors range from the corporate  according to reports 30,000 firms risk losing out on 1 billion, including Balfour Beatty  to creditors  including Santander, Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays  and private and professional shareholders.

Major shareholders are listed as Standard Life Investments with 4.96% and hedge fund firm Kiltearn Partners has 4.94%. The company is held in thousands of tracker funds and ETFs which invest in the FTSE All Share or UK smaller companies indices.

3 Actively Managed Funds Which Own Carillion

Value and Income Trust (VIN) owns 1 million Carillion shares. This is a mixed asset closed-end fund, investing in UK equities, UK commercial property and cash. It currently delivers a dividend yield of 4.02% and is trading at a 17.7% discount to net asset value. The trust has a four star performance rating and is up 15% over the past year.

Lowland Trust (LWI) owns two million Carillion shares, as part of a portfolio of UK-listed stocks. This trust has a Silver Analyst Rating. The approach is not simply to focus upon the income component of the portfolio but to aggressively grow the capital, as a larger capital base should allow for significant dividend growth. The opportunity set is to look diligently across the full range of the market capitalisation to seek out contrarian investment opportunities.

Morningstar analyst David Holder is particularly positive on the trusts management: James Henderson has demonstrated his ability to manage this multi-cap equity income investment company with notable success over the 27 years of his tenure.

For the past four years he has been assisted by Laura Foll, who in recognition of her input was appointed co-fund manager in November 2016. Whilst this appointment has an element of long-term succession planning, we think that the partnership has merit for shareholders, marrying as it does differing and complementary skills.

Janus Henderson UK Equity Income and Growth has 1.9 million shares. This fund aims to provide dividend income with prospects for both income and capital growth over the medium to long term by investing primarily in UK companies. It has a two star performance rating, reflecting lacklustre performance against peers in recent years.

An earlier version of this article stated that the Schroder UK Dynamic Smaller Companies fund owned Carillion. However, the manager sold his position last year.
Morningstar's "Perspectives" series features investment insights from third-party contributors. Here, Thomas Fitzgerald, of EdenTree Investment Management discusses how to invest in AI.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving into a fundamental technology for all industries. As with the evolution of mobile phones a decade ago, the continual development and deployment of AI presents a number of opportunities for long-term investors. According to the IDC, global annual revenues for cognitive and artificial intelligence systems are estimated to rise from $8 billion in 2016 to $46 billion in 2020, a compounded annual growth rate of 55.1%.

The industries investing the most in AI related services include banking, retail, healthcare and manufacturing, which generate more than 50% of AI industry revenue. But, this figure ignores the potential economic value available to other enterprises that embed AI technology.

Longer-term, AI will have a profound impact on all industries, introducing efficiencies and innovative catalysts. In the shorter term however, the spread of AI is ramping up the demand for hardware, semiconductors, memory, big data, and software.

Hardware

The development of AI means that machines are becoming smarter  able to understand the physical world with more accuracy and depth  enabling machines to process and act on information automatically. This, in turn, should drive more demand for hardware and sensor technology. Humans obtain 83% of their information from the sense of sight.

The information embedded within visual data far outweighs other senses, which means that cameras should be the most important source of input data for AI Key beneficiaries of this trend include Sony (6758), which is the indisputable leader in image sensors with 48%, and growing, market share by revenue.

Semiconductors

Artificial intelligence is a seismic opportunity for the semiconductor industry. At the NVIDIA investor day in 2017, the companys management estimated that the total market value for semiconductor accelerators used for deep-learning training and inference applications could reach $26 billion by 2020.

Considering the processing capability of graphics processor units, we believe that this will remain the dominant accelerator for training workloads. Once a neural network is trained for a specific type of task, it will need to be deployed across varying technology platforms, particularly at the network-edge, smartphones, cars and other connected devices.

We believe that field programmable gate arrays and application specific integrated circuits will gain from this increase in AI application, benefitting leaders within this space such as Microsoft (MSFT), Intel and Alphabet (GOOGL), as well as semiconductor foundry companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (2330).

Memory

According to researchers at DeepMind, the ability to learn tasks in succession without forgetting is a core component of biological and artificial intelligence. The human brain can transfer old skills to new problems in order to reach a desired outcome. This requires a competent thought process and most importantly, memory.

Until recently, this had been a shortcoming of machines. During training, artificial neural networks would learn to master a single task and then call it quits. Now, artificial neural networks are being combined with a random-access memory in order to achieve multi-step reasoning.

To think and learn faster, systems need to be able to access larger amounts of data, at a much faster rate. Memory technology needs to achieve a balance of high performance, power efficiency and reasonable unit cost. High Bandwidth Memory using dynamic random-access memory is a great option  Samsung Electronics (005930) currently dominates both these markets.

The Internet and Big Data

Over the last decade, global technology conglomerates like Alphabet have developed the largest pools of data on the planet. As data and computer efficiency are the two primary ingredients to further neural network-backed technology advancement, we believe that the largest internet companies have a major advantage.

This combination of technological superiority and unrivalled monetary commitment to investment and research will help the large digital platforms sustain their leadership in AI The data sets required to train these models are growing exponentially, as are the number of nodes within these networks and their technological advantages are enabling these firms to conduct huge statistical data exercises at costs that appear increasingly inexpensive.

We believe Alphabet to be the clearest example of an AI driven business model today, and already leads the industry in terms of research, investment and technological development. The company is already leveraging its scale  seven platforms each with more than one billion users, expertise in AI and the technology it acquired from DeepMind to enhance the performance of its core products and services such as Search, YouTube and Android as well as supporting the development of new opportunities including autonomous driving and biotechnology.

Software

The software building blocks for AI are largely established and we are now starting to see AI functionality being monetised across the industry. AI represents a large up-sell opportunity for software vendors - the first way these companies can monetise AI is by bolting an add-on AI service or product to an existing core product. We have already seen a few examples of this from companies such as Salesforce (CRM) and Coupa.

Software vendors can also provide the building blocks to construct a machine learning model, such as a platform or toolkit. For example, a customer may be looking to embed some AI functionality into their payroll software, but may not have the time or money to do so internally. An AI platform solves this by providing all of the tools necessary to build a machine learning model and then deploy it. Microsoft Azure is one of the major vendors offering this.

We believe that Microsoft is well-positioned to become one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI within the global software industry. The companys cloud business, Azure, is the worlds largest cloud computing environment, with double the capacity of its closest rival Amazon (AMZN) Web Services.

Disclaimer

The views contained herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of Morningstar. If you are interested in Morningstar featuring on our website, please email submissions to UKEditorial@morningstar.com
BEIJING, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The People's Daily, the Communist Party of China (CPC) flagship newspaper, published an article Monday calling for efforts to grasp the historic opportunity facing China.

The article under the byline of Xuan Yan said China was facing a period in which the timeframes of the two centenary goals converged, and both dreams and hard work were needed to achieve the country's goals of creating a moderately prosperous society, modernization and building China into a "great modern socialist country."

The article said socialism with Chinese characteristics had blazed the trail for China's prosperity and the people's happiness, which had allowed scientific socialism to prosper.

Noting the problems facing the world, such as a "democratic deficit," "governance deficit," "development trap," wealth gap, terrorism and climate change, the article said "the drawbacks of capitalism-led political and economic systems are emerging; the global governance system is experiencing profound changes and a new international order is taking shape."

"The world needs China, as all humans are living in a community with a shared future," the article said. "That creates broad strategic room for our efforts to uphold peace and development and gain an advantage."

The article said China was at a historic period for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics to leap forward, for the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics to mature and for the world pattern to reshape.

"It is also a key period for the realizing of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and for the CPC and the Chinese people to carve out their career," it said.

"The historic opportunity is an all-round one, which refers to not only economic development but also the speeding up of science, technology and industrial revolution, the growing influence of Chinese culture and the increasing acknowledgement to the Chinese wisdom and Chinese approach," it said. "We are more confident, and more competent, than any time in history to grasp this opportunity."

The article noted that the banner of new thought had provided China a guide to take the opportunity, as the 19th CPC National Congress has enshrined Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as a guide for action.

It went on and said that China was contributing to the world on economic growth, trade, poverty alleviation, green development as well as development and governance.

"China has become an important source and stabilizer for world economic growth, as well as an important protector and advocate of world peace and development and human civilization progress," it said. "The development of China is rarely seen in the world and the explorations of the CPC are unprecedented."

It called for "down-to-earth efforts with no hesitation and improved competence to take the opportunity firmly."

The article said that now "everyone can live a wonderful life at stage of the times."

"We are fully aware of our responsibilities. We should resolutely support the core, faithfully follow the leader, use our courage and morale...and make strides toward a brighter future," it said.
Puerto Rico has struggled since it was devastated in September 2017 by Hurricane Maria, but a small Midland company is looking to make a big impact in the territorys recovery.

Among Texas Energy Raters services is using a drone-mounted thermal camera to inspect roofs for water leaks and damage. Texas Energy Raters will take its equipment to Puerto Rico in the coming weeks to inspect factories.

They had a national disaster and are trying to build back, owner Peter Walper told the Reporter-Telegram recently. A lot of the large buildings have sustained roof damage. Weve been hired to fly over several roofs and see how badly theyre damaged and what kind of repairs need to be made.

Texas Energy Raters was hired after speaking up and offering to help. An employee mentioned in an off-hand comment during a training session the company would consider working in Puerto Rico. Not too long after, the Midland business got the call.

Were members of a national infrared group called United Infrared, Walper said. They have contracts with larger companies; if they get a job, theyll call us and ask if we can fly it. Were part of the National Roofing Partnership, also, which gives us a foot in the door.

At a minimum, Texas Energy Raters will inspect three factories over the course of a week; however, Walper said the company will check as many roofs as needed  theres just one problem: We have found its a logistics nightmare.

Road accessibility and other issues could hinder the number of roofs Texas Energy Raters can inspect. To be honest, I have no idea what Puerto Rico looks like. Were flying by the seat of our pants, Walper said.

Plus, precipitation is an issue. Walper said Puerto Rico has seen rainy weather recently, which inhibits accurate water damage assessments and has caused delays in departing Midland for the Caribbean island territory.

Still, Walper isnt dismayed.

Heres an area thats been demolished because of a natural disaster, and everyone is pulling together to rebuild it, he said. If we can go down there, fly the drone and do what we do so they can get back up faster, cheaper and easier, then, for us, its a positive because our drone is working for not only an economic benefit, but a personal benefit as far as the population is concerned.

What were flying down there for are factories, he added. If a factory cant run because the roof is leaking, then it changes the whole economic scales. If we can get down there and map out the roof and the roofing company can come back and finish it. We might find they need to only replace a portion of the roof, the factory is back in business faster. Thats somewhat of a way for us to give back to the community.
Citgo Petroleum said it will keep its headquarters in Houston, warding off speculation that it was considering moving its executive hub to the Caribbean.

The Venezuelan refiner confirmed it is maintaining its Houston home after its new president and CEO, Asdrubal Chavez, a cousin of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, arrived in Houston last week to attend his first meetings. But Citgo at first would not address the potential headquarters change.

The CEO change came amid the company's ongoing controversies regarding the arrests of the company's previous leadership team in Venezuela late last year. Citgo is a subsidiary of the state oil company in Venezuela, which is mired in economic and political turmoil.

Chavez was installed as the new president at the end of November by current Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Earlier in November, the Venezuelan government swept up much of the previous Citgo leadership team, most of whom are dual American citizens living in the Houston area, on embezzlement and corruption charges. The moves are widely seen as an effort by Maduro to further consolidate power. Those arrested remain in custody.

RELATED: New Citgo President Chavez arrives in Houston

Argus Media reported last week week that Citgo was considering moving its headquarters from Houston to Aruba, where Citgo also has a refinery. However, Maduro recently cut off ties temporarily with Aruba and some other neighboring Caribbean nations because of concerns about smugglers.

Chavez, a chemical engineer, plans to unveil his vision for the future of the company over the coming months, Citgo said. Chavez also is a politician and former Venezuelan oil minister.

Citgo is a U.S. company with a more than 100-year history that was acquired by Venezuela's state-run oil company nearly 30 years ago. Citgo now acts as the U.S. refining and gasoline marketing arm of Venezuela.

Citgo employs about 4,000 people in the U.S., including more than 800 in Houston. The company has roughly 160 branded gas stations in the Houston area, and about 5,500 nationwide. Citgo owns oil refineries in Corpus Christi, Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Illinois.
The Shanghai Consumer Council said Monday it has sent an inquiry letter to Apple over the slow-down of older iPhones after an iOS update, demanding a reply before Friday.

File photo shows the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on display at the Apple store in Pasadena, California. [Photo: VCG/Robyn Beck]

The council demanded the cause of the performance and remedy measures as well as complete information regarding the interests of consumers.

The council said it received 2,615 complaints on Apple products and services in 2017, compared with 964 complaints in 2015.

In late December, Apple apologized for the slow-down of the of old iPhones with older batteries amid lawsuits and consumer outrage. It said the company will cut the price of out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacements from late January 2018 to December.
Via Facebook

When we first reported about HTeaO in Small Bites, marketing director Steven Liles said the shop was looking to open in mid-January. In a press release from parent company TBevCo LLC, the shop is right on track. The beverage store will open this week.

HTeaO will be located at at 1119 Andrews Hwy. The location will also have a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 2 p.m. on Friday. During the grand opening weekend, guests can enter to win one of three giveaways of free tea for a year. The store will also offer perpetual free beverages for law enforcement and uniformed first responders inside.
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Oversized loads caused a pair of bridge strikes in Midland and Stanton that closed the overpasses.

The westbound Business 20 interchange bridge over Interstate 20 at mile markers 154 and 155 in Stanton was struck Monday and suffered major damage to its beams, according to the Texas Department of Transportation Odessa District.

The tank farm bridge in Midland that carries County Road 1150 across I-20 was also closed after it was struck.

The Stanton bridge is severely damaged and will be closed for weeks or months; the Midland overpass will be further evaluated this week. Both have loosened concrete, and it was too windy Wednesday evening to wrap them, TxDOT said. Because of this, westbound driving lanes at both locations are closed.

There have been four bridge hits in the past week, TxDOT said. The now-closed Business 20 bridge in Stanton suffered minor damage Thursday or Friday. State Highway 307 received minor damage Sunday night.

It was unknown late Monday who was responsible and whether the bridge strikes were by the same vehicle. TxDOT will try to recoup money for damages if a culprit is found.
Research Partnership Expands to France

London-based healthcare specialist Research Partnership has opened an office in Lyon, France, led by Associate Director Claire Fradet-Aubignat.



The firm, which also has offices in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York and Singapore, supplies primary qual and quant market research and consulting services to the sector. It also runs RP Therapy Watch, which collects data from an online community of specialist physicians across the globe, enabling clients to monitor their market and competitors in real time.



Fradet-Aubignat (pictured) joined the firm's London office in 2013, with day-to-day management of all aspects of international MR; and was promoted to the role of AD two years ago. Earlier, she worked for FOP Healthcare in Paris as SRE, Healthcare, having begun her career as an intern at Ipsos. Her career to date has included conducting both qual and quant studies across a wide range of therapy areas, with a particular interest in oncology, vaccines and cardiovascular diseases.



In her new role, Fradet-Aubignat's remit is to grow and expand the Lyon office, while servicing existing clients based in France, Switzerland and Germany. Commenting on the expansion, founding Director Mark Jeffery said: 'We are delighted to have Claire spearheading this initiative, which demonstrates our ongoing commitment to servicing the European market. Having an office in France supports our long-term objectives to expand and grow the business in Europe and we hope to make announcements of further expansion in 2018 and beyond'.



Web site: www.researchpartnership.com .




Students across country call for anonymous complaints mechanism

The Ministry of Education(MOE) is considering how to prevent sexual harassment at colleges in a move that was welcomed by an expert and social groups who advocate reform that includes an anonymous complaints mechanism.

In response to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct by Beihang University Professor Chen Xiaowu, the ministry stripped him of his Changjiang Scholar honor, the highest academic award issued to an individual in higher education by the ministry, news site thepaper.cn reported on Sunday.

The ministry said that it had no tolerance for those who violate teacher ethics and hurt students and that it was considering setting up a mechanism to prevent sexual harassment at colleges.

In early January, Luo Qianqian, a former student of Chen, posted a microblog article accusing him of sexually harassing her and other students.

The university announced late Thursday that an investigation found Professor Chen Xiaowu "did sexually harass female students" and he would lose his post as vice president of the university's graduate school. His teaching certificate was also canceled.

Students from more than 70 colleges called for a harassment mechanism, a student participant told the Global Times on Monday. Some universities had responded by saying they planned to create a department to handle complaints, she said.

Students from more than 40 universities including Peking and Tsinghua universities in Beijing, Wuhan University in Central China's Hubei Province and Fudan University in Shanghai have all appealed for such a mechanism, thepaper.cn reported.

A mechanism should include lessons on preventing sexual harassment for teaching faculty and students, anonymous student surveys and channels to receive reports of sexual harassment, they urged.

A third-party harassment mechanism was desperately needed for colleges, said Chu Zhaohui, a research fellow at the National Institute of Educational Sciences in Beijing.

"The Ministry of Education is responding to the appeal from students as reports of sexual harassment appeared in recent years," Xiong Jing, managing director of Beijing-based NGO Media Monitor for Women Network, told the Global Times.

"Teachers who sexually harass students should not be regarded as individual cases of ethics violations and there should be a prevention mechanism that weighs the teachers' influence over a student's life at college," Xiong said.

Nearly 70 percent of 6,592 respondents said they experienced sexual harassment, according to a 2017 survey by a Guangzhou-based gender education center and a Beijing-based law firm.

"Colleges should launch a mechanism to prevent sexual harassment in accordance with their own situation," said Chu. "And the mechanism needs to have channels for victims to report as well as for those accused to explain themselves."

Sexual harassment at colleges shocks and damages a Chinese society that tends to hold higher education to a higher moral standard, Chu said.

Setting up a third-party organization, a teacher association for example, would help deal with these reports and their investigative results could be released to the public, said the student participant.
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Father Nelson Pinder is an 85-year-old great grandfather. He is also a civil rights icon in the Central Florida area.

Father Nelson Pinder recalls fight for civil rights

Pinder describes how Orlando was segregated

While the priest can chuckle about it now, Pinder remembers the sharp sting of segregation well as he describes the words used against him and other demonstrators pushing for integration.

"2, 4, 6, 8  we not gone integrate! and "You blackies go home" are just some of the words Pinder recalled.

The words uttered in the City Beautiful during the civil rights movement came from those wanting Jim Crow laws to stay in place forever.

However, he says he knew when he flew into Orlando in 1959 that change needed to happen. He says his welcome to the city was not so warm.

"They told me they couldn't serve me coffee at the counter. I had to go around," Pinder remembered.

He tried to hail a cab to get into town but says the brakes were put on that effort too when he was told he was only allowed to take a "colored cab."

He adds, "They told me I couldn't get in there. So, what I had to do was call a cab from town to come and get me and I had to pay twice as much. It cost me to be black."

Those sweeping Jim Crow laws dictated just about everywhere that blacks and people of color could go, even in sickness. Pinder says patients were even segregated in the hospital, including babies.

"Yeah they were put in the basement with all the pipes," Pinder said.

He says education and job opportunities were just as limited.

"We had two different sets of schools. One white. One black. The bus system, most blacks had to ride in the back," explained Pinder.

But he said the winds of change were coming and that people felt like enough was enough.

He organized the community and talked to the police chief. Pinder trained dozen of students in nonviolence tactics that they used at downtown Orlando lunch counter sit-ins in hopes of integrating them.

"Our message to everyone was: 'Know where you are  what we have to do  let us not start any trouble.' Let us be calm, cool and be able to win people over to what we are doing," the priest explained.

It took time but it worked without the violence seen in other cities across the country as Orlando demonstrators walked away when provoked and were trained to take insults.

Pinder says the biggest changes came when schools were forced to integrate. He says, "I've seen this community change and move forward and I think that because of people of good will want to see this happen."

These days his life has come full circle as he acts as a consultant to young people wanting advice on peaceful protest.
Police in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have detained 166 people in a telecom fraud scheme that targeted Chinese migrant workers through online dating messages.

Police in Baotou City received reports in December about victims being swindled out of money through online dating. On Thursday, police busted the gang at 22 sites in Baotou.

According to the gang leader, named Long, the group targeted migrant workers from the southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan using mobile apps. They won the trust of victims, then asked for reimbursement for fake train and air tickets or requested money to cover emergencies or hardships.

Most of the scammers are from Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan, police said. They joined the group through acquaintances. So far, more than 100 migrant workers were tricked by the swindlers, and the amount of money involved exceeds one million yuan (154,800 US dollars).

Further investigation is under way.

Many people in the southwest have left their hometowns to seek better-paying jobs in more developed areas of China. According to government figures, China had about 282 million migrant workers in 2016.
A significant portion of Tuesdays Canadian River Municipal Water Authority meeting was spent discussing whether to authorize the preparation of a wellfield assessment report, specifically with respect to the CRMWA II project, before the CRMWA board of directors unanimously approved going out for a request for qualifications regarding the report.

CRMWA was created by the Texas legislature in 1963 to serve its member cities and all citizens of the Texas Panhandle and South Plains by providing a dependable and safe source of municipal and industrial water. The 11 cities who are members of CRMWA include Plainview, Lubbock, Amarillo, Borger, Brownfield, Lamesa, Levelland, ODonnell, Pampa, Slaton and Tahoka. The group held its quarterly board of directors meeting at the Plainview Convention Center Tuesday.

During the meeting, one of the topics revolved around the creation of a wellfield assessment report, primarily regarding what is known at CRMWA II or the second phase of a long-term project to obtain more water rights for the entity. Discussion regarding the report was also conducted at CRMWAs October 2017 meeting. During that time, Aubrey Spear, director of water utilities with the City of Lubbock, said he would like to see a wholistic report that pulls together all the information CRMWAs hydrologist, Lee Wilson, has put together, according to minutes from the October meeting. In the October meeting, Spear wanted something to provide to officials in Lubbock to show that due diligence requirements had been met.

During Tuesdays meeting Spear said he had met with officials in Amarillo and Plainview regarding the need for the report. He noted that part of the reason he was requesting the report is that Lubbock will be expected to make a significant contribution to the project, which will ultimately flow down to the customers. He said it is important to plan ahead to avoid rate shock for the customers. He said the primary purpose of the reports would be to prepare modeling information relating to the proposed usage and how that information may pan out based on a number of scenarios with the idea being to optimize the use of the well field. Spear said the information for the report already exists and that it would simply require an engineers report to get to the specifics Lubbock is looking for in the data.

Plainview City Manager Jeffrey Snyder suggested that the CRMWA board go out for a request for qualifications and then select the most qualified consultant to provide the report. He added that Plainview is in support of the report as the city wants to take a strategic look at the project, specifically how the well field is going to be developed and how that ties into the citys local water supply plans.

One of the CRMWA board members suggested going out for a request for proposal and some discussion was had as to whether the board could in fact do an RFP or and RFQ. After consultation with the boards attorney, it was determined that they could only go out for an RFQ as requested by Snyder due to the services being sought being of a professional nature.

Ultimately a motion was made to go out for an RFQ, with the understanding being that CRMWAs operating committee would determine the specific scope of the RFQ and then would select the top candidate for consideration by the full board.

The board also received an update on the status of CRMWAs water supply. According to CRMWA Deputy General Manager Chad Pernell, Lake Meredith reached over 75 feet in Dec. 2017, which is the highest it has been in 15 years. He said a significant reason for this increase is the over 135,000 acre-feet per year the lake received in inflow for 2017. During a 36-month drought period spanning from 2010-2013, the lake only had an average of 5,933 acre-feet of inflow per year. According to a chart provided by CRMWA, if the lake follows regular historical inflow patterns, the lake depth should increase to around 84 feet by 2020.

Pernell said that based upon information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, drought for the area could persist throughout the spring with a warmer and drier climate expected for that period of time.

Updates were also provided for the John C. Williams Wellfield. Pernell said that currently six wells are down, which means CRMWA is at about 65 million gallons a day capacity, he said he anticipates the downed wells to be back up and running by February.

On the CRMWA II update, the entity currently has 34 fully executed water-rights agreements out of just under 100 such agreements they are seeking.
Tax receipts were down for Plainview and mixed for other area communities as the first tax report of 2018 was released this week by Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar.

This week, Hegar announced that his office would be sending, counties, transit systems and special purpose taxing districts nearly $709 million in local sales tax allocations for January, 9.5 percent more than in January 2017. These allocations are based on sales made in November by businesses that report tax monthly.
MERIDEN  A local garage owner known for his aggressive off-road racing style will be appearing in a new History Channel reality show.

Filming for Truck Night In America took place in Georgia. The show featuring Steve Oakes and his modified, bright orange Jeep Cherokee, is scheduled to air in March.

Im pretty ruthless, said Oakes, owner of Expert Auto Services on Hanover Street. Either Im going to come in first place or Im going to destroy my truck trying.

Oakes said his aggressive style prompted area race organizers to recommended him to the producers of Truck Night In America.

It looks like chaos, but he knows what hes doing, said Josh Schwalb, of New Hampshire, who helps organize the Great American Jeep Rally, held in Ellington.

The rally is mostly a car show, but also holds a rock course where drivers can take their truck over piles of rocks and boulders. Most drivers take five to 10 minutes to get across the 100-foot pile, but Schwalb said Oakes does it in under a minute.

He slams it down and goes, Schwalb said. He just knows how to handle his jeep.

Schwalb said Oakes driving skills and travels have helped raise awareness of truck drivers and modifiers in New England, in a pastime usually associated with the South. Oakes is also working to improve the image of jeep and truck enthusiasts among the general public, Schwalb said.

Were not all just crazy people, trespassing and damaging the environment, Schwalb said. He hopes Truck Night in America will amplify Oakes message and give him recognition of his skills and work.

The races in Georgia already gave him a challenge, Oakes said, with terrain varying beyond the local flat rock races hes used to taking part in.

It was one of the greatest experiences in my life, Oakes said of the filming. I like the rush of it, nothing gets your adrenaline going like trying to get over the rocks.
France is banning the use of mobile phones at school, encouraging students to interact more with one another, January 15, 2017. Photo: Reuters

Paris (Peoples Daily)  France education officials are putting the finishing touches on a measure that will prohibit students from using cell phones at the nations primary, junior, and middle schools.

Frances Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, said last month the measure would go into effect at the beginning of the next school year.

Blanquer wasted no time in rolling out the initiative as it was one of French President Emmanuel Macrons campaign promises.

Without specifying the details, the Education Minister acknowledged that mobile phones could be used for educational purposes and for emergency situations and said a study on the subject is underway and could be released this spring.

In 2015, more than eight out of 10 teenagers had a smartphone. In the same study four years earlier, two out of 10 used them.

Mobile phones have a ubiquitous presence at primary and secondary schools. But banning them at school is not a new thing in France.

In 2010, mobile phones were first banned on school campuses as part of the countrys code of education. The measure stated that the use of mobile phones was prohibited during teaching activities and in places restricted by internal rules at education institutions.

But teachers and school officials found the regulation too complicated to enforce.

At least half of Frances schools already have a mobile phone ban place, while others allow students to use them during breaks, or at designated areas.

At Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz, a middle school in Loiret, France, the ban has been in place for years.

Phones will be confiscated when students use them, said Laurent Foussereau, the schools principal.

This ban avoids the temptation to take pictures in the schoolyard or play stupid games on social networks, said Foussereau.

But implementation offers its own set of challenges, and some have suggested using cell phone jamming devices or providing mobile phone lockers at school.

The Ministry of Education has listed the initiatives used at schools across the country and has also started looking at foreign examples.

A preferred method of enforcement has not been decided, and schools will have a few options.

Teachers and parents applauded the measure as they felt the mobile devices were a source of conflict among teenagers.

The consensus was that young students should learn how to enjoy playing and interacting with one another rather than always staring at their cell phones.

But some expressed concerns over the efficiency of a new mobile phone ban as the current one in place has not proven to be successful.
OKLAHOMA CITY - One of the most formative experiences of J. Clifford Hudson's life happened about 20 minutes away from the glass-walled office he now occupies as chief executive of Sonic Drive-In, the burger-and-milkshake chain.

It happened in 1969, Hudson's freshman year of high school and the first year of court-ordered desegregation for his school district.

"You had school board members really inciting hatred. You had parents showing up at public meetings screaming, 'You better frisk those kids before they go to school with my daughter,' " recounted Hudson, now 63. But his parents did not protest the desegregation or remove him from the school.

"My parents had become strong believers that our country had a real problem," he said, "and that we needed to embrace it and confront it, not run from it."

The experience, he said, "helped me with some sensitivity to the richness and breadth of our society, and that the more you limited yourself, as in the white males only chumming with white males, the more you cut yourself off from that richness."

That lesson has helped shape Hudson's worldview and his management approach at Sonic, which he has led for more than 20 years. During that time, he has cultivated something of a rarity in corporate America - a management team that is mostly women and minorities and a board that is close to that.

Commenting on issues

And in choosing to speak publicly about his personal views in recent months, Hudson has joined other corporate executives, normally as tight-lipped a bunch as can be found, who are commenting on social and political issues like never before. Many have forcefully denounced policy proposals from Washington or actions by President Donald Trump that they think threaten to harm society, the environment and their employees.

That Hudson would speak for diversity and inclusion is not surprising. He is a longtime Democratic donor whose office features, in addition to photos of his wife, who is a doctor, and two sons, a picture of him with former President Bill Clinton, who appointed him chairman of the board of the Securities Investor Protection Corp. He has served on boards related to the Oklahoma City public schools and with the Ford Foundation.

Varying political views

But he noted at a recent conference in New York that nearly 95 percent of Sonic's roughly 3,600 locations, largely concentrated in the south central United States, are run by franchisees who have varying political views. He also referred to a report that came out during the presidential campaign suggesting that people who ate at Sonic supported Trump.

And he is aware that people who are drawn to Sonic because they like the food - or are fans of the company's popular commercials featuring two male improv comedians in a car - may not want a side of political talk from the chief executive. In today's fractured political climate, it does not take much to end up on the wrong side of a boycott.

"I do feel one of my chief responsibilities is to work to ensure the success of our brand and our franchisees' opportunities," Hudson said. "Our franchisees make big bets on us doing the right thing with the brand - and by big bets, I mean they bet their futures, homes, mortgages, hopes and aspirations for their kids."

That means, he said, "you've got to be careful where you step."

"I'm very aware that Cliff is very socially conscious and does a lot of things to demonstrate that," said one of Sonic's franchisees, Max Gelwix, who operates restaurants in California. "But we've never talked politics."

Navigating such terrain is tricky for most business leaders, who have traditionally chosen to steer well clear of these topics because of the very real risks of alienating consumers and damaging their brands. For all the executives who have proactively used Twitter, there are plenty of cautionary tales of companies getting ensnared in social media maelstroms split along partisan lines based on comments from their celebrity representatives or where their ads show up online.

"Sonic has not, nor do I think it's appropriate, for its brand to make political statements," said Susan Thronson, a board member at Sonic since 2015. Franchisees "have different financial objectives, they have different investor expectations, different growth expectations. But around the brand experience, you have to be in lock step."

At a morning meeting last month, Sonic executives were discussing a new marketing strategy. In a show of how successful its two-men-in-a-car commercials have been - TV ad spending is the company's biggest marketing expense - they were hoping to replicate that formula with two women. (Company executives frequently mention that 58 percent of the Sonic's customers are women.) Names of female comedians and actresses were being tossed out. Among the hoped-for criteria projected on the room's wall was a note to avoid political choices.

Sonic is rare for the number of women and minorities in its top ranks, including its chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, chief brand officer and general counsel. And as of this month, white males are a minority of the independent directors on its board; including Hudson, they account for half of the group. (To put that in perspective, recent data from Equilar shows that women account for only 16.5 percent of the board members of Russell 3000 companies as of Dec. 31.)

Thronson, who was previously senior vice president of global marketing at Marriott, said that it was new for her to serve on a board with four women but that the change didn't take place overnight.

As for how it influences boardroom dynamics, she said, "When there's one, we're a token, and by four, it takes gender off the table."

Big tent

Hudson started at Sonic's legal department in the 1980s after attending law school at Georgetown University.

"There's a lot of folks that feel like the America they understood in the '50s, '60s and maybe the early '70s is an America they don't understand today as much, and they're reacting to that," Hudson said. "But this is where leaders of all sorts can talk about a big tent instead of talking about a divisiveness, and talk about how we approach this so we have opportunity for everybody instead of a divide-and-conquer approach.

"The strongest thing we can do," he added, "is attempt to lead by example and be open about it."
CBRE

The oil and gas company Hess Corp. said it will lay off about 300 employees or 13 percent of its workforce this year as it labors to sell assets, slim down operations and post its first quarterly profit since 2014.

Cuts will start this week, the company said. Houston, as the home to a majority of Hess' employees, will absorb more layoffs than any other location, according to spokeswoman, who declined to provide further details.
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Cold temperatures and icy road conditions were settling across Central and South Texas, with many businesses across the region closing operations and telling workers to stay home.

Schools and universities in San Antonio are closed Tuesday as the National Weather Service expects an "Arctic cold front" to drop temperatures to the mid-20s.

Though South Texans hit the grocery store in droves on Monday night to stock up in advance of the storm, the winter weather largely hadn't affected H-E-B's operations in San Antonio on Tuesday morning, company spokeswoman Dya Campos said. Many employees were present at the company's headquarters at the Arsenal complex in downtown San Antonio but some worked from home, Campos said.

All stores in the San Antonio area were open and operating with normal hours Tuesday morning, Campos said.

"H-E-B focuses on Partner (employee) safety first," Campos said in an email. "Every Partner knows not to risk their safety."

RELATED: Freezing weather causes San Antonio restaurants to close for the day

Sixty-one flights at the San Antonio International Airport scheduled for Tuesday have been canceled because of the inclement weather, airport spokeswoman Tonya Hope said. Another 32 flights have been delayed, she said.

Dozens of flights arriving at and departing from San Antonio International are shown as "on time," according to the airport's web page for departures and arrivals.

Like other City of San Antonio departments and agencies, the San Antonio airport is operating with essential personnel including the executive team  including aviation director Russ Handy  and maintenance workers, Hope said. Employees are working to keep airplanes and runaways free of ice with granular and liquid deicing agents, respectively, she said.

Restaurants at the airport may have limited staffing but they are open for business, Hope said.

There were at least 180 crashes in San Antonio between midnight and noon Tuesday, including two that involved police officers, according to the San Antonio Police Department. But AAA Texas had received "lower than expected" calls from members seeking roadside assistance Wednesday as a result of the storm, AAA Texas spokesman Daniel Armbruster said.

"People are heeding the advice and, for the most part, staying off the roads," Armbruster said.

RELATED: 180 crashes reported as major highways, streets ice over

See the list below for current information regarding business closures:

Broadway Bank: All offices and financial centers in San Antonio, Austin and the Hill Country closed Tuesday.

All offices and financial centers in San Antonio, Austin and the Hill Country closed Tuesday. CentroMed clinics: Will be closed Tuesday.

Will be closed Tuesday. Frost Bank: The following locations would be closed all Tuesday: UTSA, Boerne, Fair Oaks, New Braunfels, Schertz, San Marcos (Wonder World, Guadalupe motor bank, Highway 80 motor bank); and Frost Insurance in San Antonio, San Marcos and Austin. Frost said its Austin financial centers are now open. Its San Antonio financial centers are opening at 12:30 pm. Frost's Houston financial centers, however, are closing at 2 p.m.

The following locations would be closed all Tuesday: UTSA, Boerne, Fair Oaks, New Braunfels, Schertz, San Marcos (Wonder World, Guadalupe motor bank, Highway 80 motor bank); and Frost Insurance in San Antonio, San Marcos and Austin. Frost said its Austin financial centers are now open. Its San Antonio financial centers are opening at 12:30 pm. Frost's Houston financial centers, however, are closing at 2 p.m. USAA: Austin and San Antonio offices closed Tuesday in an effort to help our employees stay safe from possible winter storm impacts in these areas. Employees who have the ability to work from home are expected to do so."

Austin and San Antonio offices closed Tuesday in an effort to help our employees stay safe from possible winter storm impacts in these areas. Employees who have the ability to work from home are expected to do so." SWBC: Closed Tuesday.

Closed Tuesday. Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union: Branch and administrative service locations in the Austin and San Antonio areas are closed. RBFCU will resume normal operations on Wednesday.

Branch and administrative service locations in the Austin and San Antonio areas are closed. RBFCU will resume normal operations on Wednesday. Botanical Gardens: Closed Tuesday.

Closed Tuesday. University Hospital System: All clinics, with the exception of dialysis, are closed Tuesday. Business opeartions and administrative services closed. Clinical operations at University Hospital are open.

All clinics, with the exception of dialysis, are closed Tuesday. Business opeartions and administrative services closed. Clinical operations at University Hospital are open. VA clinics: All clinics at Audie L Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital, Kerrville Campus, Frank M. Tejeda Outpatient Clinic, North Central Federal Clinic, Data Point, Shavano Park, Balcones Heights and South Bexar Outpatient Clinic will be closed.

All clinics at Audie L Murphy Memorial Veterans Hospital, Kerrville Campus, Frank M. Tejeda Outpatient Clinic, North Central Federal Clinic, Data Point, Shavano Park, Balcones Heights and South Bexar Outpatient Clinic will be closed. L.A. Fitness at Loop 410 and Blanco Road: Closed from noon today until noon Wednesday.

Icy road conditions were also delaying delivery of the Express-News in some locations  in the meantime, you can access a digital version of the paper by clicking here.

Check back for updates throughout the day. And please send us information on your company's plans for the winter storm.

Text "WEATHER" to 77453 for weather alerts from mySA.com

Staff writers Joshua Fetcher Patrick Danner, Lynn Brezosky, Madalyn Mendoza and Caleb Downs. contributed to this report.

jhiller@express-news.net | Twitter: @Jennifer_Hiller
Preferred Shipping has acquired a 63,000-square-foot warehouse in Sugar Land.

The Missouri City-based shipping and logistics company purchased the industrial facility from Wormser Family Trust for an undisclosed price. The property is located at 12835 Jess Pirtle Blvd. within the Sugar Land Business Park.

Chris Caudill, a broker with Houston-based NAI Partners, represented the seller in the deal.

RELATED: Massive new hub helps FedEx prep for holidays

Global shipping and logistics companies are opening new distribution centers as online shopping becomes more popular.

FedEx last year opened its largest distribution center in Texas. The 800,000-square-foot facility, located off the Grand Parkway north of FM 529 in Cypress, can sort up to 22,500 packages an hour.The Memphis, Tenn.-based logistics company plans to expand its northwest Houston hub in the coming years to 1.3 million square feet, which will increase the processing rate to 75,000 packages an hour.

UPS also plans to build a 260,000-square-foot distribution center in northwest Houston. The Atlanta-based logistics company filed a building permit late last year for an industrial building at 11770 N. Gessner, near Willowbrook Mall.
Steven G. de Polo / Getty Image

A 17-year-old boy was shot and wounded in before driving himself to safety Monday evening in Santa Rosa, authorities said.

Officers responded at 7:26 p.m. to reports of a gunshot victim on the 900 block of Corporate Center Parkway, said Sgt. Justin Farrington of the Santa Rosa Police Department. The victim, a 17-year-old boy, apparently drove himself to an urgent care facility in the area to get help.
Consumer affairs authorities in Shanghai have sent an inquiry letter to Apple Inc over consumers' complaints that the company secretly slowed down its older versions of iPhones, the Shanghai Consumers Council said Monday.

File photos

Some of the old models of iPhones were reported to be functioning slowly after being upgraded to the iOS 10.2.1 software, triggering an increasing number of complaints among users.

The number of complaints concerning product quality and services of Apple reached 964 in 2015, 4,021 in 2016 and 2,615 in 2017, centering on numerous questions over flagging batteries, unexpected shutdowns and insecure personal accounts.

Apple is one of the major players in China's smartphone markets, while its service and product quality is not in line with its large market share, reports said.

The council listed four queries: the reasons for the slowing down of old models, the remedies for solving the problem, how the company informs consumers that updates may have side effects, and the company's transparency in sharing information about its policies with consumers.

Apple was asked to give a reply to the Shanghai Consumer Council by January 19, said the letter.

(Compiled by Han Xiaomeng)
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BRIDGEPORT  Standing in the doorway of his office at the Discovery Museum and Planetarium, Bill Finch was every bit the pitchman for his new employer.

People do discover things here about science and themselves and their place in the natural universe, he said.

Finch just might have been talking about himself, too.

At 61, after tenures in the state Senate, as Bridgeports mayor, and more recently a stint as acting head of New Yorks Thruway Authority, Finch may have found his place as the 60-year-old museums new executive director.

Yeah, pretty much, Finch said when asked if this was a perfect fit. Want to see our little meteorite?

And he was off to one of the displays, a kid in an adult body, gray hair on his head, enthusiasm on his sleeve.

The museum, on Park Avenue in Bridgeports North End, is really a place for kids up to 70, Finch said.

My goal is to get more people to come here, he said. It doesnt really matter their age.

Tuesday was Finchs first formal day in charge, after he was offered and accepted the job over the holidays. He said he agreed to stay for at least three years. The museum, through new communications consultant Brett Broesder  Finchs spokesman during his final couple of years as mayor  offered interviews and tours with the new boss.

A science playground

Ive been here dozens and dozens of times with my kids, Finch said, as he demonstrated displays aimed at teaching and inspiring  including a contraption that shoots out a loop of rope, like a cowboys lasso, and creates shapes in the air.

Isnt this cool? he said. I sat here for about 15 minutes the other day. Its like, How does that work? 

Between spurts of child-like wonder, Finch revealed that adult, wonky side that often came out when he was mayor and would discuss the environment and climate change.

Theres a great book called The Physics of the Future  have you heard of it? he said.

That passion for science made Bridgeport a leader in the new green economy during his eight years in office. But Finch lost the bitter 2015 Democratic primary to ex-Mayor Joe Ganim, who ran on bread-and-butter issues like reducing crime and taxes.

The full title of the book Finch referred to  Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100  could be a mission statement for the museum  to emphasize science and technology and to help ensure that people are participants in that future.

At the very least, Finch said, he recently read in The New York Times an article that said those predisposed to scientific inquiry are less politically partisan. So, he said, the museum is positioning for a better society of people who can get along better.

Finch admitted that museum executive had not been on his resume. His new employer, however, saw potential.

Hes going to do a lot for us, raising the visibility of the museum, said Tom Vos, chairman of the museums board of directors. Hopefully, we can capitalize on his visibility and Rolodex.

Post-political

Back in Finchs new office, which is quite a bit smaller than the mayors suite downtown, he called himself a recovering politician.

But reminders of his mayoral past decorate Finchs work space: photos with then-President Barack Obama; a ball cap from Bass Pro Shops  the retailer the Finch-administration lured to a long-vacant strip of harbor front land; awards for Finchs efforts on the part of the environment and construction unions.

He declined to discuss Ganim, or Ganims gubernatorial bid.

Is Finch done with politics?

Being mayor of Discovery is more important than being mayor of any city, Finch said, and he can focus on important issues without having to worry about elected politics.

Finch also said hes glad he no longer has to commute to New York. He ran the Thruway Authority from June 2016 until last summer, when he was shifted over to an environmental position at the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

Ive missed a lot of things at my kids schools, said Finch. Now Ill be here.

Everybody wants a job that not only provides a paycheck, but also gives meaning to their lives, he said: This place gives me reams of that.
BRIDGEPORT  A 52-year-old man is facing up to 30 years in prison after a jury on Tuesday found him guilty of molesting a 5-year-old girl.

The six-member Superior Court jury deliberated for a day before finding Freddy Trinidad guilty of two counts of risk of injury to a child by sexual contact.
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The greater Houston area can expect to see more locations of a chicken restaurant chain in the near future.

Charley Donaldson, Chuck Cain and Robert Drisaldi make up the ownership team of the Cain Holding Group, which is the sole developer of the Slim Chickens' Houston-area franchise.

The group plans to undertake a 25-restaurant expansion across the greater Houston area over the next seven to 10 years.

Slim Chickens celebrated the opening of its Humble location in November 2016; it was the fifth Houston-area restaurant. It was one of four sites originally developed by Slim Chickens Corporate that the Cain Holding Group purchased.

Next on their list for the Lake Houston area is Kingwood.

The Kingwood Slim Chickens is currently under construction at Northpark Drive and Texas 494 Loop and is scheduled to open in February.

The Humble Slim Chickens is performing well, according to Donaldson. However, the Humble location's metrics did not play into the Cain Holding Group's decision to expand to Kingwood.

"We knew Kingwood would be a good market for us, so we were planning to do it regardless, but we had a good feeling that Kingwood would do just as good if not better than the Humble location," Donaldson said. "Kingwood's a great market. It has a great demographic and if you're developing in the city of Houston, Kingwood is one of the top markets to develop in."

Ultimately, they want to have a location in the south part of Atascocita as well. Between the Kingwood, Humble and Atascocita locations, Donaldson said they feel they'd have good exposure to this part of the Houston area.

The Cain Holding Group agreed to build-out the Houston market a couple of years ago.

"The greater Houston area has 8 million people, so if you want brand recognition, you can't be a five, or six-unit operation. It has to be much larger," Donaldson said.

He said their strategy to move the needle is to expand quickly and enter the market the right way, starting with suburban areas.

The 25-restaurant expansion may be a bold undertaking, but Donaldson said the group is confident in their ability to follow through. This is not the first time the Cain Holding Group has introduced and cultivated a restaurant chain in the Houston market.

The group is also one of two Panera Bread franchisees for the Houston area.

Chuck Cain, majority owner of the Cain Holding Group, brought Panera to Houston about 15 years ago, Donaldson said. It started out on a similar level as Slim Chickens is now, but within a few years it had expanded its following and brand recognition.

Donaldson said the Cain Holding Group has the background, experience, infrastructure and financial backing necessary to carry out this venture as well.

"We have everything needed to follow through with the expansion," Donaldson said. "We not only have a great product, but a really great organization."

Cain said the stability of the group is due in large part to choosing strategic sites for their restaurants and maintaining a standard of food quality.

"We've stayed consistent and have been able to do that through all of our systems we have in place," Cain said.

Slim Chickens vice president of franchise operations, Brian Simowitz, said Slim Chickens Corporate lauds the Cain Holding Group's Houston market expansion.

"We've selected a great franchise partner," Simowitz said. "We're with them step-by-step in the process and are excited to be developing in the Houston market."

Something the Cain Holding Group has done through their Panera locations for the past 15 years is become involved in local schools and sports.

"That will continue to be a focus of ours," Donaldson said.

Typically, a couple days before their locations open, they host a VIP night during which community members are treated to meals and are encouraged to make donations that will benefit a local organization partnering with the Cain Holding Group. They match the donations collected during the VIP night and the money goes to benefit the donation partner.

The Cain Holding Group looks forward to finding a donation partner for the Kingwood Slim Chickens' VIP night.

"Given Hurricane Harvey and the destruction, I'm sure there's significant need," Donaldson said.

Donaldson said the Cain Holding Group tries to hire associates locally and promote management from within.

"It's easier to retain employees that way," Donaldson said. That's our practice at Panara and Slims. We like to grow our own managers, meaning the typical 'rock star' manager starts as an associate and grow from within."

In the beginning, the new Slim Chickens will have to hire people as managers because they're starting from scratch, he said, but they already have a good pipeline of potential candidates.

For more information about Slim Chickens, visit slimchickens.com.
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People across The Woodlands and Montgomery County are being urged to stay off the roadways Tuesday, while students across the region are enjoying a very rare snow day off from classes as a wintry blast of cold air and freezing rain moved across the region early Tuesday.

As an Arctic cold front dropped freezing rain, residents across The Woodlands woke up to ice-covered windshields and frozen car door locks Tuesday morning. The National Weather Service reported some areas saw the windchill factor drop into the early 20s before the sun came up Tuesday,

Although roads and highways in Montgomery County were mostly free of snow early Tuesday, dustings of snow were seen on lawns and grassy areas. Forecasters said temperatures were expected to drop throughout the day Tuesday, with the windchill factor dropping down into the teens. The weather service cautioned that driving conditions would worsen during the day Tuesday as more bridges and roads iced over.

In The Woodlands Township, Montgomery County Precinct Commissioner 3 James Noack said early Tuesday that Lake Robbins Drive at Interstate-45 and The Woodlands Parkway bridge at I-45 were closed. Lisa Spitz, the owner of Waterway Events, the company that operates the ferries that make their way up and down the township's waterways was unable to get to her boats Tuesday morning because of the road closure.

"That puts that a little bit further behind," Spitz said, referring to the ongoing repair work being performed on her boats that were damaged by Hurricane Harvey. "We're just stuck for the day."

The Woodlands Township also closed its offices Tuesday at 10 a.m. because of the icy conditions. Calls to the township's main number went unanswered, though the township said in a posting on its website that essential emergency services personnel were not impacted by this office closing and remained on duty.

Reached on his cell phone late Tuesday morning township Board of Directors Chairman Gordy Bunch said the decision to close the offices came as forecasters warned that weather conditions would worsen during the day.

"We thought it was better that folks get home before conditions get worse," he said.

Bunch also urged residents to stay home "if you have no reason to be out."

Bunch said he had been planning to fly to Washington, D.C. early Tuesday for meetings with federal officials and members of Congress to discuss flood mitigation requests and other matters, but his flight was cancelled because of the weather. He said he booked a flight late Tuesday and was hopeful it would get him to the East Coast in time for his meetings.

Officials at George Bush Intercontinental Airport said the weather has forced the cancellation of "numerous " flights and delays of inbound and outbound flights. Airport officials were advising passengers to contact their airline for more detailed flight information.

Also on Tuesday the township announced there would be delays in their trash service because of the storm. Waste Management said it has pulled its trucks off the road because of the icing and closure of bridges on I-45. Township officials said in website posting that the trucks will be operational as soon as it was safe to drive again.

The Woodlands trolley service also cancelled service for Tuesday. And, The Woodlands Express said it was closing all its terminal buildings early, but that its gates at park and ride lots would be open.

As for schools, students throughout Montgomery County and the region had the day off with school officials at scores of school districts announcing school closures late Monday. It's estimated about 1.1 million students had Tuesday off because of the weather.

The trustees of the Conroe Independent School District cancelled the board's scheduled meeting Tuesday night because of the storm. The trustees were expected to hold the meeting some time Wednesday.
Four South Carolina law enforcement officers were shot early Tuesday during an hours-long incident that began with a domestic violence call, authorities said.

It began shortly after 10 p.m. Monday, after deputies responded to reports of a man assaulting a woman at a home outside York, South Carolina, about 35 miles southwest of Charlotte, York County Sheriff's Office spokesman Trent Faris said at a news conference.

By the time officers arrived at the home, the male suspect had already fled on foot, Faris said. A K-9 unit was dispatched to search for him.

Around 1:07 a.m. Tuesday, in an area near the home, the suspect opened fire and struck an officer from the K-9 unit, Faris said. That officer was rushed in a deputy's vehicle to Piedmont Medical Center in nearby Rock Hill, South Carolina, Faris said.

Multiple agencies then began "actively looking for the suspect" and issued emergency alerts to area residents, Faris said.

Two hours later, around 3:30 a.m., the suspect opened fire again and struck three more officers, the sheriff's spokesman said.

In all, three York County sheriff's deputies and one York police officer were shot, authorities said.

Two of the injured deputies were flown to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte by helicopter, and a third officer was transported to the same hospital by ground, Faris said.

Authorities did not release the names of the injured police officer and sheriff's deputies, nor their injuries or conditions.

"I'm just trying to gather my thoughts," Faris said. "There's a lot of officers that are concerned about our deputies . . . The main concern is for our guys who are in the hospital right now. We could really use your prayers."

The suspect, identified as 47-year-old Christian Thomas McCall, was taken into custody. Faris did not say whether McCall had a criminal history or a history of domestic violence.

McCall also sustained gunshot wounds and was taken to a hospital for treatment, Faris said.

York Police Dept. tweeted "Please pray for the York PD Officer and York County Sheriff's Deputies who were shot early this morning."
Chinese President Xi Jinpings speech to the Davos World Economic Forum one year ago, on January 17, 2017, decisively shaped international discussion - the US magazine Newsweek summarized its impact as being that China was now seen as: the linchpin of global economic stability. Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group, the most influential Western risk analysis company, noted: Davos reaction to Xi speech: Success on all counts.

This impact has increased. Analyzing the 19th CPC Congress the Financial Times summarized: Mr Xi has clearly had a very good year, beginning with his January address to the World Economic Forum in Davos. The announcement President Trump will speak at Davos this year in large part reflects the impact of President Xis speech last year.

Given this speechs great influence in shaping international discussion it is important to understand why it made such a deep international impact.

The first, most important, reason was naturally its content  an unequivocal explanation of the fundamental concept of Chinas policy of a shared future for humanity and its conclusion that Chinas foreign policy seeks win-win solutions between countries and rejects international relations as a zero sum game.

The speech noted how this flows directly from globalizations nature: Economic globalization is a result of growing social productivity, and a natural outcome of scientific and technological progress.

The Chinese dictum seek truth from facts confirms this. Numerous factual studies demonstrate the positive correlation of an economy's international openness and its development speed. Growing globalization was decisive during the global international economic stability and growth after World War II  in contrast 1929-39s global economic fragmentation created the greatest crisis in modern history.

Given economic progresss dependence on globalization, maintaining an internationally open economy is therefore vital not only for governments but for the world's people. Globalization has brought immense benefits to the majority of the world's people, strongly confirming economic theory. Certainly, China decisively took advantage of globalization's benefits  achieving since 1978 the world's most rapid rise in living standards, while 75 percent of those in the world lifted out of poverty were in China.

But other countries also strongly benefitted. India has now consciously learnt from China's economic model of opening up and African countries basing themselves on globalization have achieved growth rates of 6-9 percent a year.

President Xis Davos speech therefore clearly articulated how globalization simultaneously corresponded to China's national self-interest but also to the national self-interest of other countries. That mutual self-interest is the firmest of foundations for cooperation is why the speech was widely characterized as embodying global stability.

The second reason for the speechs great international impact was timing. For most of the post-World War II period the US supported globalization  playing a key role in agreements culminating in the creation of the World Trade Organization. But, regrettably, recently protectionist voices have become more vocal in the US. It is to be hoped protectionist words are not turned into actions but many countries believe there cannot be 100 percent certainty that the US retains a commitment to globalization.

Because Xis Davos speech made clear China remains unequivocally committed to an open international economy, China emerged as the largest economy committed to globalization and win-win development. The great majority of other countries understood the importance of globalization for themselves and therefore agreed strongly with Xi's statements.

Finally, the speech was extremely skillfully presented. Naturally, as Chinas president, Xi Jinping made extensive reference to classical Chinese authors such as the Book of Rites. But the speech was equally understandable in a Western idiom, quoting Dickens and strikingly explaining the theoretical underpinnings of economic openness's advantages.

The first sentence of the founding work of modern Western economics, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, is, "The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor  have been the effect of the division of labor." But division of labor in a modern economy has reached a point where it is necessarily international  attempts to create self-contained economies therefore necessarily fail.

Given how fundamental the issues Xi Jinpings Davos speech dealt with are to the present world its already great impact will continue to increase.

John Ross is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He is also the former director of Economic and Business Policy for the Mayor of London.
Heartbreak and jealously were the twin engines driving the scheme, police would later say.

Ishnar Marie Lopez-Ramos was in love. The object of the 35-year-old Floridian's affection, however, was tangled up with another woman. To solve her heart's woes Lopez-Ramos allegedly concocted a scheme straight from a dime novel or a telenovela: eliminate the other corner of the love triangle.

Alexis Ramos and Glorianmarie Quinones Montes, both 22, allegedly agreed to help, and in the early hours of Jan. 8 they were waiting in the parking lot of a suburban shopping center in Kissimmee, Florida, south of Orlando, police reports say.

They were looking for a woman who worked at the Ross Dress for Less. They watched a woman matching the description of their target leave the store and drive off. They followed.

The next morning, the body of 42-year-old Janice Zengotita-Torres was found in an overgrown area in Ormond Beach, a 90-minute drive from Kissimmee. The victim, who had moved with her husband, mother and 14-year-old son to central Florida from Puerto Rico a year earlier, was beaten and bound with zip ties, the Orlando Sentinel reported. She suffocated inside a garbage bag wrapped around her head and secured with duct tape.

Last Friday, law enforcement arrested Lopez-Ramos, Montes and Ramos in connection with the killing. At a news conference over the weekend Osceola County Sheriff Russ Gibson told reporters Zengotita-Torres was dead because of a murder-for-hire plot born from Lopez-Ramos' "love triangle."

But Zengotita-Torres was not actually the romantic rival Lopez-Ramos had hoped to eliminate, he said. It was a mistake. They had kidnapped and killed the wrong woman.

"The victim was mistakenly - again, mistakenly - targeted and murdered," an emotional Gibson told reporters. "This woman lost her life for no reason. This mother, this wife, this daughter - for no reason."

Lopez-Ramos, Montes and Ramos are now in custody and face first-degree murder charges. Gibson told reporters all three have confessed to the crime.

The tragedy has shaken central Florida's large Puerto Rican community - a population that has swelled since Hurricane Maria hit the island in September. The three suspects in the botched murder plot were among the recent arrivals from the island, moving to the mainland in late December, authorities stated.

According to Gibson's account, the plot started with Lopez-Ramos.

"The woman that was the target of the murder for hire, she was in a relationship with a man that the suspect Ishnar loved," the sheriff told reporters.

On the night Zengotita-Torres disappeared, the suspects followed Zengotita-Torres from the store to her apartment. In the parking lot, they forced Zengotita-Torres into the back of her own car, then drove to a nearly bank. "They forced the victim to give her ATM card and her pin card to them," Gibson said. "Ishnar then got out of the vehicle and withdrew money from the victim's account."

The suspects then drove to an apartment in Orlando. "While Glorianmarie was in the apartment, Alexis and Ishnar were in the victim's car with the victim," Gibson said. "While in the vehicle, the two of them realized they had mistakenly taken the wrong person." The suspects, however, "continued with their plan of murder, and tied the victim with zip ties, and then her head with duct tape and garbage bags. The victim struggled and Alexis began beating the victim until she was unconscious."

Zengotita-Torres suffocated inside the bag and the suspects dumped her body, Gibson said.

The victim's ATM proved to be the key to solving the case, Gibson said. The suspects continued to remove money from Zengotita-Torres's account. On Wednesday night, 45 undercover detectives were monitoring cash machines in Osceola and Orange counties, waiting for someone to use the victim's accounts. That night, one of the suspects did withdraw money from an ATM, but not one of the machines police were watching. "We missed them by just a few minutes," the sheriff said.

Tapping neighboring police departments for additional officers, authorities covered more ATMs on subsequent nights. On Friday, Lopez-Ramos was arrested allegedly using the card. Police said she was also wearing Zengotita-Torres's clothing.

Lopez-Ramos gave police a full confession, Gibson said. She also pointed law enforcement to Ramos and Montes, who were both arrested at a nearby motel on Friday. News cameras caught Ramos, in a red and black Chicago Bulls shirt, as he was led into the police station. "I'm sorry," he said to reporters, according to WFTV. Lawyers are not currently listed for any of the defendants in the case. None have filed pleas or commented.

Florida's Puerto Rican community has reacted intensely to the murder. On Monday Florida Rep. Bob Cortes told Puerto Rico's El Nuevo Dia he would push for the death penalty in the case, even if it means asking Florida Gov. Rick Scott, R, to reassign the case to a state attorney more inclined to pursue capital punishment.

Back on the island, Montes's mother told Metro her daughter had expressed concern something strange may happen after moving to Florida.

"Those who know us and Glorian know that right now she must be in that place terrified, scared to death," Gladys Montes told the paper. "She was a very happy girl."

As for the original target of the plot, Gibson told reporters she knows how close she came to dying.

"We have been in contact with her, we explained the circumstances . . . that she was potentially the intended victim," the sheriff said. "We've offered her protective services, and she had declined all offers."
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The first astronaut of Puerto Rican heritage reached out to schoolchildren on the hurricane-bashed island.

Flying aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Joe Acaba fielded questions from students at the Puerto Rico Institute of Robotics in Manati. One student asked how Puerto Rico looked from space after Hurricane Maria struck in September. Acaba said the first thing he noticed was he lack of lights, making the island almost impossible to see at night.
WEST HAVEN  Even during a time when it seems as if all of the progress that we have made is being stalled, religious faith continues to be a driving force behind the push for civil rights, an Episcopal bishop said Monday in West Havens second Martin Luther King Jr. Day tribute in as many days.

We are living in a contemporary moment where it seems that all the progress that we have made is facing it seems like, from the highest offices ... a consistent pattern of derogatory diminishment, the Right Rev. Nathan D. Baxter, retired bishop of Central Pennsylvania, said at a tribute to the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The tribute service, of which Baxter was celebrant, was sponsored and organized by the Union of Black Episcopalians Southern Connecticut Chapter.

We find ourselves in a time when we cant think of the hard issues because were so distracted by the abusive issues, Baxter said.

But history is on our side and the God who created the universes and who has shaped the rainbow of the moral ark of justice is on our side, he said.

At a eucharistic celebration in the Church of the Holy Spirit, 28 Church St., that began with a procession to Lift Every Voice And Sing, aka the black national anthem, Baxter asked, Where do you  we  want to go from here?

He spoke about the progress that has been made over the years for both African Americans and women, among other groups.

Years ago, If you were a woman, who would have imagined that we would have women in leadership locally and nationally? he asked.

But how did we get over? How did we get to this place? Baxter preached, reciting a litany of other social and ethnic groups that also had to fight for equality.

For immigrant families  the Irish, how they were treated, he said. The Italians  the Germans. Im from Central Pennsylvania  Im a little bit Amish. Baxter recalled how the Germans ... came, principally as indentured servants. Those who built the railroads, from Asia.

The answer in many cases was that we not only see political action, but we see people drawing on their faith  Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist  whatever it may be, Baxter said. They brought that power.

The service  which also featured a rousing rendition of We Shall Overcome  followed by one day the West Haven Black Coalitions 32nd annual Tribute to Dr. King, which took place Sunday across Church Steret at First Congregational Church of West Haven.

Mondays service was organized by Union of Black Episcopalians Southern Connecticut Chapter President Steven R. Mullins.

Now Playing: Eucharistic celebration of the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King - Church of the Holy Spirit, West Haven - Jan. 15, 2018. Video by Mark Zaretsky - New Haven Register. Video: CTGlobal

Baxter was joined for the service by the Rev. Canon Diane Peterson of Trinity Church in Southport, who served as deacon, as well as by the Rev. Charles Kamano of East Havens Christ and The Epiphany Church and the Rev. Judith Alexis and the Trinity Boys Choir of New Havens Trinity Church on the Green, among others.

Other clergy were in the audience, including Bishop Harold W. Golston, the now-retired founder and longtime pastor of House of Jacob Church in West Haven.

Mullins son, Christian Mullins, read a prayer as part of the service. Christians sister, Nora Mullins, also participated, along with Maame Edjah and her brother, Kofi Edjah.

mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com
Saida team and local medical personnel (Photo: You Ming/People's Daily)

Algiers (Peoples Daily)  With the aid of Chinese Medical Assistance Team, the Ophthalmic Hospital in Khenchela province of Algeria last year set a record by having no maternal deaths and no complications in a year for the first time in Khenchelas history, a huge accomplishment in the southern part of Algeria.

The director of Khenchelas Public Health Department rewarded the team with a certificate of honor, on which there is a mark with the Chinese and Algerian national flags symbolizing the friendship between the two countries.

A 80-year old Algerian grandma receiving a traditional Chinese way of treatment to quit smoking (Photo: You Ming/People's Daily)

The Medical Assistance Team is one of the many Chinese development assistance modalities to Africa. Since sending its first medical team to Algeria in April 1963, China has successively dispatched 25 medical teams to Algeria by the end of 2017.

The 25th Chinese Medical Assistance Team, with 77 members, arrived in Algeria in May of 2016. They are divided into 7 small teams working in 7 different regions. Most of the teams work in desert and mountainous areas where local people suffer from poverty, underdevelopment and harsh natural conditions.

In Algiers Ben Aknoun Hospital, three Chinese acupuncture doctors have to treat as many as 100 patients per day and five days a week. The narrow corridor is always full of people waiting for treatment. According to doctor Ye, it takes a patient two months to get a new appointment.

Doctor Zeng is giving an acupuncture treatment for an Algerian patient (Photo: You Ming/People's Daily)

A young father said that his daughter, who has four needles on her face, fell down and hit her head which led to facial paralysis. He already has been to the biggest state-run hospital, but the doctor there recommended him this hospital and Chinese doctors here.

The man said the acupuncture treatment is working well on his daughter. In Algeria, people agree that acupuncture is the best way to cure paralysis and muscle pain.

The little girl in acupuncture treatment with four needles on her face (Photo: You Ming/People's Daily)

During the 55 years, the Chinese Medical Assistance Teams have provided diagnoses and treatment to more than 20 million Algerians, as well as various kinds of surgeries. This includes replantation of severed limbs, surgeries for deep intracranial tumors and nasal reconstruction, which no one has ever completed in Algeria.

The headquarters of Medical Assistance Team in Algeria (Photo: You Ming/People's Daily)

The team has also traveled to treat Moroccos King Hassan II, and American journalist Edgar Snow, an old friend of the Chinese people in Switzerland.

The Medical Assistance Teams have forged the Sino-Algeria friendship through their advanced skills and hard work. They dedicate selflessly in tough conditions, and three of them have remained in Algeria.
Midland businessman Brent Hilliard put his money where his heart was when it came to the campaign to pass a $100 million road bond this past November.

Hilliard contributed more than half of the $208,473 through donations  including those made as non-monetary contributions from a corporation  through his company, Hilliard Office Supplies, according to campaign finance reports. Monday was the deadline for filing the final report. Hilliard had filed Midland Road Bonds final report last week.

The report showed Midland Road Bond taking in more than $110,000 in political contributions during the third reporting period of the campaign, including $104,011 in non-monetary contributions from corporations. The most came from Hilliard Office Solutions, which showed a contribution for $72,186.02 for marketing and printing costs.

I saw the Midland Road Bond as a vehicle for change, and I made the decision to do whatever was necessary to see that our community was afforded the benefit to come to the same investment conclusion, Hilliard wrote in an email to the Reporter-Telegram. Thank you to all those that invested with me and most of all thank you, Midland for helping us all make the Midland Road Bond a reality.

Nearly 10,000 people came out and made the decision by more than 15 percent to endorse the bond campaign run by Hilliard and Councilman J.Ross Lacy.

Those contributing to the campaign during the three periods included Pioneer Natural Services ($25,000), Diamondback Energys Travis Stice ($10,000), Parsley Energys Bryan Sheffield ($10,000), William Kent ($5,000), Paula and Jim Henry ($5,000), Endeavor Energy Resources ($5,000), Jack Wilkinson ($1,000) and Rosalind Redfern Grover ($1,000).

Non-Monetary contributions included more than $114,000 from Hilliard Office Solutions. WS Digital added $3,710 in in-kind contributions for advertising. JumBurrito restaurants added more than $28,000, according to campaign finance reports. JumBurrito gave away more than 7,700 burritos to those who voted in the election.

It was a crazy amount in a two-week stretch, JumBurrito owner Jose Cuevas said. I am happy people appreciated the burrito and we were able to get them involved.

Most of the expenditures, not accounted for through in-kind donations, were for advertising. The report shows advertising through Hilliard Office Solutions (more than $12,000 during the first two periods), Hilliard Energy ($2,811), Lamar Advertising (more than $13,000), Townsquare Media (more than $10,000), the Midland Reporter-Telegram (more than $6,600), Majority Strategies ($4,400) and the Midland Chamber of Commerce ($2,266). Other expenditures included spending for printing, polling and banking fees.

Why would I invest and dedicate my time, our employee staff time, and my money to help pass the Midland Road Bond? Hilliard wrote. I really love solving problems. Historically infrastructure structure investments are attributable to approximately 20 percent of United States economic growth. Infrastructure investments represent the single largest investment made on behalf of Midland taxpayers. Our single largest asset (roads, water, and sewer) have been ignored by our taxpayers for too long.

In spite of limited funding, our city staff and past councils have done a very good job over the years to protect the overall life of our infrastructure. The infrastructure was ignored because we had limited funds in failing times to protect them in a way that prolonged the assets. Midland was able to turn its back on infrastructure funding while times were slow because there was a limited demand on each aspect of operating the infrastructure. The good news is that the changes in drilling and completion technology have paved the way for Midlands growth.

** ** **

Findings from the campaign finance reports associated with the road bond. The third and final report from the reporting period from Oct. 28-Dec. 31 was due Monday.

First period

Total political contributions: $61,587.50

Total political expenditures: $21,643

Contributions

$25,000: Pioneer Natural Services

$24,987.50: Hilliard Office Solutions

$5,000: William B. Kent, Paula and Jim Henry

$1,000: Jack B. Wilkinson

$500: Jim M. Alsup

$100: Taylor Mayne

Expenditures

$9,323.33: Hilliard Office Solutions (advertising)

$8,705: Lamar Advertising (advertising)

$3,500: Mike Stevens of Lubbock (polling)

Second reporting period

(Sept. 29-Oct. 28)

Total political contributions: $36,875

Total political expenditures: $16,070

Contributions

$10,000: Travis Stice, Bryan Sheffield

Non-monetary contributions from corporation or labor organization

$16,875: Hilliard Office Solutions

Expenditures

$2,811.87: Hilliard Energy (advertising)

$4,486.50: Lamar Advertising (advertising)

$580.60: Paypal (banking fees)

$8,192: Townsquare Media (advertising)

Third reporting period

(Oct. 28-Dec. 31)

Total political contributions: $110,011.16

Political expenditures of $100 or less, unless itemized): $61.85

Total political expenditures: $24,885.70

Contributions

$1,000: Rosalind Redfern Grover

Contributions from corporation

$5,000: Endeavor Energy Resources

Non-monetary contributions from corporation or labor organization

$72,186.02: Hilliard Office Solutions (marketing and printing costs)

$28,115.14: JumBurrito (marketing)

$3,710: WS Digital (advertising)

Expenditures

$4,400: Majority Strategies (advertising)

$2,266.44: Midland Chamber of Commerce (advertising)

$390.41: Action Printing (printing expense)

$488: KWEL radio (advertising)

$8,622: Action Printing (printing expense)

$4,116: Midland Reporter-Telegram (advertising)

$2,000: Townsquare Media (advertising)

$2,541: Midland Reporter-Telegram (advertising)
WASHINGTON - With President Donald Trump and Congress turning their attention to infrastructure in the coming weeks, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is preparing for an uphill battle: a push to raise the federal gas tax by 25 cents per gallon to help pay for the initiative.

The proposal by the nation's largest business lobby, which will be formally unveiled later this week, is part of a series of principles it will offer in a bid to help shape the debate over upgrading the nation's roads, bridges, airports and other critical infrastructure.

Chamber president Thomas J. Donohue said his organization wants "to put our oar in the water" and acknowledged that it would be "a tough vote" to raise the gas tax for the first time since 1993. But he argued that support has been building in the business community and elsewhere.

"I've been pushing this for a long, long time, but now gangs of people are pushing it," Donohue said in an interview in which he also said immigration reform would be critical to ensuring there is sufficient labor available for construction of public works projects.

An infrastructure bill was touted by Trump as a first-100-days priority - and one with potential for bipartisan support - but put on the back burner amid other bruising legislative battles over health care and taxes.

The White House has pledged to unveil its vision of a bill ahead of Trump's State of the Union address later this month.

In private meetings, Trump has floated the idea of raising the federal gas tax by as much as 50 cents per gallon but received a chilly reception from Republican lawmakers in particular. Still, aides say the idea of an increase hasn't been completely taken off the table.

As envisioned by the Chamber, the 25-cent increase would be applied both to the current taxes of 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon for diesel fuel. The increased levy is estimated to raise more than $375 billion over the coming decade, according to Chamber staff.

That is significantly more than the White House has suggested the federal government should pump into an infrastructure initiative. Administration officials have said publicly for months that they believe that $200 billion in additional federal money could spur at least $800 billion more spending by state and local governments and the private sector.

In its last budget proposal, the White House said the federal government's $200 billion share could be paid for with cuts in other programs.

Part of the federal funding would be used to reward states and localities that raise taxes or other revenue to fund infrastructure in their jurisdictions. The White House is also looking at grants for new projects in rural areas and money for "transformational" work such as plans to build tunnels for high-speed trains.

Donohue said he is hopeful that with Trump's support, Congress can come up with a meaningful measure to address what the Chamber sees as a long-overdue priority.

"We just got a new tax bill for the first time in 31 years," Donohue said. "We're making some significant changes in regulatory reform. We've got a president - everybody's got all their own views about him and what he stands for and all that - but the guy's getting stuff done . . . and he's a builder. I think we can get some help here."

Donohue said the Chamber also plans to offer ideas to encourage additional private investments in infrastructure projects, including expansion of existing federal loan programs. And he said the Chamber shares Trump's goal of streamlining the permitting process for highways and other projects, including at the local level.

"It's not worth spending the money to do this or the time if we don't fix the permitting deal," he said.

In the interview, Donohue also sought to make the case for addressing immigration policy in a way that ensures there is sufficient labor to construct the array of new projects that could be funded. That includes "a fix" to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump has canceled, Donohue said.

"We don't need this the day we do a bill," Donohue said of immigration reform more broadly. "We need it as we ramp up to start building the stuff we're talking about."

The Chamber also plans to call for other steps to enhance the workforce, including advancing recommendations on apprenticeships developed by a Labor Department task force.
China's State Council has dissolved the administrative borders of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SSEZ) to facilitate its integration with surrounding areas.

The decision aimed at the development of the facility in Guangdong Province is in keeping with the new situation. It is also meant to develop Shenzhen, a first-tier city, said the State Council in a written reply to the Provincial Government on January 6, which was released on Monday.

File photo

After the decision, patrols on the frontier between the province and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will be stepped up.

Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (File photo: Chinanews.com)

State Council departments have been urged to carry out their duties to support the move.

Screenshot via gov.cn

Established in August 1980, the SSEZ, which originally covered an area of 1,996 square kilometers, has played a key role in China's reform and opening-up.
Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi gives a speech during a ceremony for the signing of documents outlining the roadmap for the formation of a national unity government in Tunisia at the Carthage Palace in Tunis on July 13, 2016. (Photo: VCG )

Cairo (People's Daily) - Tunisia announced a raft of social reforms pledging improvements for the poor and the jobless, after nationwide anti-austerity protests earlier this month.

Following a meeting at the presidential palace on Saturday, Social Affairs Minister Mohamed Trabelsi announced reforms aimed at providing relief for the economically disadvantaged, according to state news agency TAP.

The reforms will include free medical aid for unemployed youth, increased state pensions, and financial assistance to poor families, and the establishment of a housing fund to make housing more affordable.

While the reforms address the concerns of the poor, they do not effectively change the 2018 budget legislation -- which many have protested against.

Protesters shout slogans against rising prices and tax increases in Tunis, Tunisia January 13. (Photo: VCG)

Protests seem to be a common feature each January in Tunisia, as people commemorate the 2011 rallies.

This year, an increase in value-added tax and social security contributions brought in at the start of January has led to heightened emotions.

Protesters are calling for a review of the 2018 budget, and a push to combat corruption. More than 800 people have been arrested, according to the interior ministry, which accused them of theft, vandalism and violence.

Tunisia is the only country to dislodge its long-standing leader in the Arab Spring without descending into serious violence.

But Tunisia has had nine governments since former president Ben Alis overthrow, none of which has been able to resolve deep-rooted economic problems.

President Beji Caid Essebsi gave his promise to enhance youth employment during a speech when he went to a neighborhood in the capital to announce a new youth center.

This is the first time that a senior official has visited this neighborhood, Essebsi said. Today, we inaugurate this youth housing complex, which was burned down during the previous revolution. This project will serve as a pilot, financed not only by the government, but also by private investors and members of civil society.

Joblessness among the young is considered a key indicator of a country's economic prospects, and Tunisia's stands at around 35 percent.

The economy has worsened since a vital tourism sector was nearly wiped out by a wave of deadly militant attacks in 2015, and has yet to recover despite improved security.
An SUV apparently fell from the West Commerce bridge Tuesday morning, as dozens of weather-related crashes were reported across the metro.

Accidents and road closures piled up Tuesday as icy conditions plagued San Antonio and photos on social media chronicled the dangerous morning commutes.
A San Antonio man convicted Friday of murder in the 2015 fatal shooting will learn his fate when the jury begins deliberations for his punishment.

Robert Martinez, 21, was convicted Friday in the death of Steven Cerna. 19. The state and defense were to start closing arguments in the punishment phase Tuesday  the Bexar County Courthouse and Justice Center was closed Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday. But on Tuesday, it was closed because of inclement weather.

Closing arguments now are expected to begin Wednesday morning in the 290th state District Court, presided by Judge Melisa Skinner.

Martinez faces up to life in prison.

Martinez was 19 when he was listed as a person of interest in Cernas death. Cerna was found shot to death Feb. 20, 2015. His body was left in a drainage ditch known as Hells Gate, located in the 1100 block of Shadwell on the West Side.

The case had gone cold for about two years before Martinezs arrest in June. The trial, which lasted almost a week, began Jan. 9.

The defense argued that Martinez was not the shooter, there were no witnesses who could place his client at the scene, and that authorities arrested the wrong man.

Prosecutors Melissa Saenz and Kristina Escalona argued that Cerna was mistakenly implicated in the death of one of Martinezs friends and was killed as an act of retaliation.

Martinezs uncle, Larry Isaac, 31, testified for the state last week and said that his nephew admitted to him in a telephone call that he had shot Cerna and left him in the dirt. Letters that Isaac and Martinez had sent to each other while in the Bexar County Jail and shown to the jury implied that Martinez asked Isaac not to say anything about the incident to authorities.

Isaac admitted under cross-examination by defense attorney Leland McRae that he had made a deal with prosecutors in exchange for his testimony. Isaac was being held in connection with an aggravated kidnapping charge involving his wife that would have sent him to prison for 20 years.

In exchange for his testimony, the plea agreement reached would cap his punishment at nine years in a lesser charge of kidnapping, something Isaac said was the deal of a lifetime.

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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WASHINGTON - The Trump administration on Tuesday cut tens of millions of dollars in money for Palestinian refugees, demanding that the U.N. agency responsible for the programs undertake a "fundamental re-examination," the State Department said.

In a letter, the State Department notified the U.N. Relief and Works Agency that the U.S. is withholding $65 million of a planned $125 million funding installment to the body. The letter also makes clear that additional U.S. donations will be contingent on major changes by UNRWA, which has been heavily criticized by Israel.

"We would like to see some reforms be made," said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, adding that changes are needed both to the way the agency operates and is funded. "This is not aimed at punishing anyone."

The State Department said it was releasing the rest of the installment - $60 million - to prevent the agency from running out of cash by the end of the month and closing down.

The U.S. is UNWRA's largest donor, supplying nearly 30 percent of its budget. The agency focuses on providing health care, education and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes during the war that led to Israel's establishment in 1948. Today, there are an estimated 5 million refugees and their descendants, mostly scattered across the region.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization reacted angrily to the move, saying it is targeting "the most vulnerable segment of the Palestinian people and depriving the refugees of the right to education, health, shelter and a dignified life."

"It is also creating conditions that will generate further instability throughout the region and will demonstrate that it has no compunction in targeting the innocent," the PLO leadership said in a statement.

Israel's ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, praised the move, arguing that UNRWA misuses humanitarian aid to support propaganda against the Jewish state and perpetuate the Palestinians' plight.

"It is time for this absurdity to end and for humanitarian funds to be directed towards their intended purpose: the welfare of refugees," Danon said in a statement..

The U.S. plan to withhold some, but not all, of the money was backed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis, who offered it as a compromise to demands for more drastic measures by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, officials said.

Haley wanted a complete cutoff in U.S. money until the Palestinians resumed peace talks with Israel that have been frozen for years.
Middle schoolers will descend Saturday on Johnson Space Center's grounds in a battle to determine who can create the most "age-friendly city."

It was a task laid out in this year's 26th annual Future City Competition. Working in teams that include an educator and a mentor in a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math field, students will present their vision for a city that can accommodate the country's aging population.

"Older adults are living longer, staying in the workforce longer and living independently for longer than ever," a competition news release stated. "By 2050, older adults will outnumber children under the age of 14."

The competition's theme was developed after the World Health Organization released a plan to help cities respond to this change. That plan includes accessible and safe transportation options as well as proper social welfare programs and health care services.

Students used SimCity software to develop a virtual design, wrote a 1,500-word essay and built a scale model of the city. Their Saturday presentations are open to the public, from 12:15 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Gilruth Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center. More information can be found here.

The team that wins in Houston will advance to the finals, held in Washington, D.C., in February. Along with more than 40 teams from the United States, the Houston winner will face off with international teams from countries including China and Egypt.

The first place winner at February's competition will get a trip to Space Camp and $7,500, second place will get $5,000 and third place will get $2,000, according to the competition's website.

Alex Stuckey covers NASA and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at alex.stuckey@chron.com or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey.
Outer space enthusiasts willing to travel 1,000 miles to Cape Canaveral could appear in a movie about Neil Armstrong.

The movie, "First Man," explores the life of the very first man to walk on the moon in 1969. Armstrong will be played by Ryan Gosling in the film that comes to theaters in October.
RIJEKA, Croatia - A prominent Serb politician in Kosovo, a rare voice for coexistence of ethnic Albanians and Serbs, was shot and killed Tuesday, heightening tensions between Kosovo and Serbia, which has refused to recognize Kosovo's independence.

Oliver Ivanovic, 64, the leader of the Citizens' Initiative Party, was shot outside the party's offices in Mitrovica, a northern city that is divided along ethnic lines.

Though seen as a moderate in Serb politics in Kosovo, Ivanovic, whose party was not backed by the government in Belgrade, also faced war crimes charges, which he and his allies described as politically motivated.

In a news conference, Serbia President Aleksandar Vucic insisted that his government had no role in what he called "a terrorist act," and he suggested that the killing was part of a campaign by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority to take control of the country's predominantly Serb north.

He called a meeting of his security council and warned the government of Kosovo not to use the assassination "as a pretext to send their boots on the ground in the north."

But an opposition leader in Serbia, Sasa Jankovic, noted Tuesday that Vucic's government, which he described as repressive, had been harshly critical of Ivanovic in the past. "Whoever did this - and we do not know who it is - works against the interests of the Serbs and of Serbia and the Albanian people and everyone else," he said.

The Kosovo government condemned the killing, which it said "challenges the rule of law and any attempt to establish order throughout the entire territory of Kosovo."

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci said, "I call on the law enforcement authorities to expose the circumstances of his assassination as soon as possible and the perpetrators of the crime come to justice."

In Brussels, after the assassination, a Serb delegation walked out of talks Tuesday on normalizing relations between Kosovo and Serbia. The European Union has served as a mediator as Serbia and Kosovo seek to join the 28-nation bloc. But recognizing Kosovo's independence is a condition for Serbia's membership in the bloc.

A doctor who treated Ivanovic said he had been shot five times in the upper body. Police responded by blockading the Serb-majority northern part of the city as they searched for the gunman.
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan - Taliban insurgents using sophisticated night vision and laser targeting equipment overran Afghan army positions near the northern city of Kunduz on Tuesday, killing at least eight people and wounding five more, Afghan officials said.

The officials blamed what they said was a Taliban Red Unit, an insurgent formation that has increasingly featured in attacks on government positions, especially at night. "The unit is equipped with American weapons and night vision," said Imamuddin Rahmani, a spokesman for the police in Kunduz. "The Red Unit carried out several attacks on check posts in Kunduz, captured the check posts and killed several soldiers. The Red Unit is a headache for security forces in Kunduz."
Kazakhstan is to export 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas to China each year, according to KazTransGas, Kazakhstans national operator in the field of gas and gas supply, on Jan. 15, China News reported.

KazTransGas and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) agreed that the former is to increase its export of natural gas to China from 5 billion to 10 billion cubic meters.

KazTransGas disclosed that the both sides regard it necessary to further develop the gas transportation infrastructure, for example, to build new compressor stations and increase the capacity of the existing gas pipeline.

Kayrat Sharipbayev, vice-president of KazTransGas, stressed that Kazakhstans gas exports to China has important strategic significance for both countries, and both sides are ready to increase the amount.

The vice-president added that agreements reached by both countries in energy cooperation and docking of Kazakhstans economic policy with the Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China have made a series of cooperative projects between the two counties possible.
Chinas Ministry of Education has announced plans to work with related departments to establish a long-term mechanism to prevent sexual harassment at universities and colleges, ThePaper.cn reported on Monday.

The move came after authorities made a decision to cancel the academic title of Changjiang Scholar for Professor Chen Xiaowu at Beihang University. Chen has been accused of sexually harassing seven of his former students.

Students and graduates from over 40 Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University and Peking University, have launched a campaign for the creation of a mechanism to prevent sexual harassment.

Zhang Yi, a graduate of Wuhan University, says they have proposed five ways for colleges and universities to better protect their students from potential sexual harassment, which include training for both teachers and students, conducting regular online surveys about sexual harassment, and creating an open channel to report sexual harassment.

Some universities have responded to the suggestions. Peking University said on Jan. 11 that it had noticed the proposals. The school said it issued regulations to discipline the behavior of its staff in 2016, which clearly state that abnormal student-teacher relationships, including sex harassment, would be investigated and punished.

Students from other universities also disclosed that their schools have paid attention to call for the creation of the mechanism soon after the campaign started.

A survey about sex harassment among students and graduates in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou in 2016 found that 69.3 percent of the 6,592 respondents had been sexually harassed at school.

Though sex harassment of women is prohibited by law in China, legal responsibilities and conviction and punishment standards are not clearly defined, said a researcher with the National Institute of Education Sciences, who is calling for enhanced sexual harassment prevention and legislation.
The fire and fury over Michael Wolffs book has largely centered on the personalities and power struggles within the White House. But behind all of that lies an important political development, one that explains the real rift between Donald Trump and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

President Trump seems to have abandoned populism.

Candidate Trumps signature issue was immigration, on which he promised an unyielding hard line, including a border wall and mass deportations. His Contract with the American Voter was brimming with populist measures, from tough actions against China to a trillion-dollar public works program. His economic plans focused on goodies for the middle class, from a 35 percent tax cut for middle-class families to deductions for child and elderly care. He called for severe restrictions on lobbying and for term limits on members of Congress.

Flash forward to President Trump today. There is no wall, and the president (before his shithole countries comment) speaks of a bill of love that could offer a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants he once promised to deport. His relations with China have been decidedly chummy, as have those with another country he excoriated on the campaign trail, Saudi Arabia. The main focus of his economic program has been to return vast sums of money to large corporations. Most of his tax laws benefits go to those firms and to people in the highest income brackets.

Oh, and these economic policies are being designed and implemented by Lloyd Blankfeins former No. 2 at Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, and a former Goldman partner, Steven Mnuchin.

Bannon must have watched with incredulity as the candidate who campaigned as a fiery outsider against the Republican establishment essentially handed over the reins of his government to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Where did Trumps populism come from in the first place? To answer this question, the book to read is not Wolffs gossipy confection but Joshua Greens highly intelligent Devils Bargain. In it, Green points out that Trump had a mish-mash of political views that leaned in no particular direction. But he began going on talk radio and addressing conservative audiences and realized that it was not economics but social and cultural issues like immigration that got the crowds fired up.

Unencumbered by any deep ideology of his own or any ethical qualms  as demonstrated by his embrace of birtherism, for example  Trump was able to adopt these issues far more quickly than his 16 competitors in the Republican primaries. He distinguished himself by taking on the most hard-line positions, and thus winning over the GOP base. That, in addition to his colorful, charismatic style, created a bond between him and a new bulwark of the Republican Party, the white working class, that appears, for now, unbreakable.

I dont agree with many of Steve Bannons proposals, but he was surely right in recognizing the populist fury that runs through a large swath of the country. One wonders what will happen to it as time passes and Trumps voters notice that they have ended up with something quite different than they had imagined. During the presidential transition, Bannon told Wolff that the Trump era would be like America in the 1930s, with a massive public works program that would get blue-collar workers back into shipyards, mills and mines. Instead we appear to have a return to the 1920s, an era of unrestrained capitalism, giddy market exuberance, a shrunken state and dramatically rising inequality.

Is this what the laid-off steelworker in Ohio voted for?

comments@fareedzakaria.com
Guess what? Donald Trump is a raving idiot. Every sentient person knows this, and if Michael Wolff is to be believed, so does most everyone in the White House. So why are we talking about Wolffs book Fire and Fury as if its the news sensation of the decade?

The answer lies in that timeless definition of the word gossip: Hearing something you like about someone you dont. Fire and Fury is catnip for everyone who detests this president.

But gossip isnt journalism. And Wolffs book is Exhibit A in how not to damage Trumps presidency, much less his chances of re-election.

So much was apparent in last weeks televised meeting of the president with congressional leaders to discuss immigration. This was not a good performance by past presidential standards: Trump seemed unable to grasp what a clean bill meant, or where Republicans stood on it.

Yet to a normal person casually tuning in, the president appeared reasonably affable and businesslike. He listened. He cracked an appropriate joke. He said he was prepared to defer to the wishes of Congress.

The net result is that Fire and Fury has so thoroughly succeeded in lowering public expectations for Trump that it makes it that much easier for him to exceed them. If the White House were smart it would tweet photos of Trump reading Dean Achesons Present at the Creation looking deeply engrossed.

Thats not all the damage Wolff has done. The president often misuses the term fake news, typically by treating every media mistake as evidence of willful and systematic mendacity. This may be enough to bamboozle his ardent supporters, even if the rest of us understand the distinction.

In Fire and Fury, however, Trump really does have something resembling fake news. The book is replete with casual errors of fact. Invidious stories are unsourced or unverifiable or, on close inspection, simply nonsensical. It was written with white-hot venom. The books only truly credible voice, if credible is the right word, is the peerlessly self-serving Steve Bannon.

The book also comes from a writer already accused of playing it fast and loose with the facts.

Wolffs book does more than just lend substance to the administrations corrosive fake-news allegations. It brings out the worst in Trumps critics, admittedly including me. Isnt it vindicating to know that White House insiders take the same appalled view of the dim bulb in the Oval Office?

But if the anti-Trump movement has a crippling defect, its smugness, and Wolffs book reflects and richly feeds it. Were the moral scolds who struggle to acknowledge the skeletons in our own closet, the smart people whose forecasts keep proving wrong. We said Trump couldnt win. That the stock market would never recover from his election. That he would blow up NATO.

By constantly predicting doom and painting the White House in the darkest colors, we have set an almost impossibly high bar for Trumpian failure. (Will anything less than provoking a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula suffice to convince Trump loyalists that hes an unfit commander-in-chief?)

This is not a winning strategy. One of Trumps underappreciated strengths is his sly command of irony, on display again last week when he tweeted that his two great assets in life were mental stability and being, like, really smart. Note the superfluous like, which is stupid when spoken but intended as humor when written. The president isnt making a fool of himself. Hes having a laugh thats part self-deprecation, part trolling, and actual wit.

I believe that Trump is ignorant, incurious, vain, gauche, bigoted, intemperate, bullying, suggestible, reckless and morally unfit for his office. But hes not deficient in cunning, and that cunning deserves healthy respect from his political opponents. That Michael Wolff fails to appreciate it only shows whos the biggest dope in Fire and Fury.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.
Educational authorities in Chengdu, Sichuan province, on Monday announced a plan for two special scholarship programs in an effort to attract talents from countries along the Belt and Road to study in China.

According to the local governments official website, the first program, which is called Belt and Road Initiative Scholarship Scheme, will be open to international students who are pursuing bachelor, master, or doctoral degrees from one of the Belt and Road countries. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) scholarship program, on the other hand, mainly targets students from Southeastern Asian countries who major in humanities and fine arts.

In addition to students from the countries that are mentioned above, students from European countries and America can also apply for the scholarship, though their quotas are limited to less than 25 percent of the total.

The scholarship will be used to cover foreign students cost of living, health insurance, and tuition fees in Chengdu, with a maximum amount of 42,000 RMB ($6,530) per person per year.

Cooperation in science, education, culture, health, and people-to people exchange has helped lay a solid foundation for pursing Belt and Road development. Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a keynote speech at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in 2017 that the Chinese government will provide 10,000 government scholarships to relevant countries, with special Silk Road scholarships set up by local governments.

In addition to Chengdu, many cities and provinces in China have launched their own scholarship program to attract talents from Belt and Road countries. According to Xinhua News Agency, Beijing will award scholarships to students from Belt and Road countries studying in 160 programs at universities in the city by 2020, while the Macao Foundation has set up a program for students who want to study in Chinas Macao Special Administrative Region.
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January 16, 2018

WASHINGTON -- The National Academy of Sciences will award the first annual Michael and Sheila Held Prize to Prasad Raghavendra, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Steurer, professor of theoretical computer science at ETH Zurich. The pair are receiving the $100,000 prize for a body of work which revolutionizes our understanding of optimization and complexity in computer science. The prize honors outstanding, innovative, creative, and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimization, or related parts of computer science, such as the design and analysis of algorithms and complexity theory.



Researchers who study computational complexity identify problems that are classified as hard -- in other words, impossible for computers to solve within a reasonable time frame. They then work to determine the hardness of approximation, or whether a computer can efficiently find an approximate solution to such a problem. Individually or in collaboration, the work of Raghavendra and Steurer suggests that among all efficient algorithms, semidefinite programming (SDP) gives the best possible approximation guarantees for a host of hard optimization problems.



Raghavendra built upon the revolutionary 2003 Unique Games Conjecture theory to show that a concrete algorithm based on SDP is optimal for every constraint satisfaction problem -- problems that involve a set of required decisions, a fixed set of possibilities, and a set of constraints that allow only certain combinations of possibilities. Later, Raghavendra and Steurer developed the small set expansion hypothesis, which yields an even greater array of algorithmic implications than those implied by Unique Games Conjecture. Their work yielded a potential characterization of the limits up to which efficient algorithms can approximate broad classes of NP-hard optimization problems. Subsequently, the awardees have advanced a theoretical framework for SDP, which has led to new algorithms and a deeper understanding of SDPs limitations.



The prize, made possible through a bequest from the estate of Michael and Sheila Held, will be presented to Raghavendra and Steurer on April 29 during the Academy's 155th annual meeting.



The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and -- with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine  provides science, technology, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.



Contacts:

Molly Galvin, Director, Executive Communications

Office of News and Public Information

202-334-2138; e-mail: news@nas.edu

http://www.nasonline.org/

Twitter: @theNASciences

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theNASciences
President Xi Jinping (L) holds a grand ceremony to welcome US President Donald Trump at the square outside the east gate of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Nov 9, 2017. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING -- President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, on Tuesday discussed bilateral trade and the situation on the Korean Peninsula via phone.

The China-US relations maintained overall stability and achieved significant progress in 2017, said Xi.

Keeping bilateral ties on a track of healthy and stable development is in the interests of both countries and both peoples, and conforms to the common aspiration of the international community, the Chinese president said.

The two sides need to maintain high-level and various levels of interactions, bring the four high-level dialogue mechanisms between them into full play, and hold the second round of dialogues at a proper time, Xi said.

As economic and trade cooperation brings tangible benefits to both peoples, the two countries should adopt constructive measures to properly settle economic and trade issues of mutual concern by opening up the market to each other and "making the cake of cooperation bigger," Xi added.

The Chinese president also called for advancing the cooperation between the two militaries, in law-enforcement, drug control, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and cooperation on local levels, as well as close communication and coordination on major international and regional issues.

The two sides need to meet each other halfway, respect each other, focus on cooperation, deal with sensitive issues in a constructive way, respect each other's core interests and major concerns, and maintain the momentum of sound and steady development of China-US relations, he said.

Trump said that the US side attaches great importance to its relations with China as well as to the US-China cooperation, and that it is willing to work with the Chinese side to enhance bilateral exchanges at all levels, expand pragmatic cooperation, and properly handle problems in bilateral trade so as to achieve even greater results in bilateral relations.

Regarding the situation on the Korean Peninsula, Xi said that there are some positive changes and related parties should work jointly to keep up the hard-won momentum for the easing of the situation on the Korean Peninsula and create conditions for the resumption of talks.

Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and safeguarding peace and stability in the region accord with the common interests of all sides, said Xi, adding that it is vital for the international community to stay united over the issue.

China is ready to continue its joint efforts with the United States and other members of the international community to achieve progress that would finally lead to a proper resolution of the issue, said Xi.

In response, Trump said the US side values China's significant role in resolving the Korean Peninsula issue and is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China over the issue.
By Ethan Wilson

Just off the holiday season, youve probably been a beneficiary of insanely cheap shipping. Perhaps you ordered an item that arrived with foreign postmarks. If so, you likely paid shipping rates far lower than you would ever see at your local post office.

The astronomical rise in e-commerce has brought a lot of attention to shipping rates, specifically, rates for shipping items into the U.S. from countries like China. Just last week, President Donald Trump tweeted about the massive financial losses facing the U.S. Postal Service. So whats really at issue here? What are the mechanisms involved? Are Americans truly subsidizing shipping costs for foreign online retailers?

It all starts with the Universal Postal Union (UPU) an international organization established by the Treaty of Bern (1874) and now a special agency of the United Nations. Tasked with creating cooperation between postal sector players, the UPU claims to ensure a truly universal network of up-to-date products and services.

One of these products is the terminal dues system. Terminal dues are fees paid by the post in the country of origin to the post in the destination country to process and deliver the item(s) being shipped. According to a report by the U.S. Postal Services Office of Inspector General, terminal dues are based upon setting rates by majority agreement rather than reflecting the true economic cost of inbound international mail delivery. The report notes that the goal of terminal dues is to provide posts with some compensation for international mail while also supporting a single worldwide postal network by subsidizing developing country participation in international universal service.

The terminal dues system is designed to promote international postal activity by subsidizing such activity in countries the UPU determines to be developing. On its website, the UPU states that not all countries are at the same stage of development and there are significant variations in their mail volumes, postal tariffs and cost absorption. The aim is to progressively incorporate the developing and least developed countries into a target system that already applies to industrialized countries. (Read more on UPU country classification methodology.)

We know that different countries pay different fees for international shipping activity. But what does this mean for the U.S. and businesses located here? The reality is that, yes, in general, it does cost more, sometimes a lot more, to ship both domestically within the U.S. and internationally from the U.S. to most countries compared with shipping from foreign countries into the U.S.

A sharp rise in e-commerce has resulted in a massive increase in the number of small, lightweight packages being shipped into the U.S., predominately from China. And yes, China is designated as a developing country by the UPU. In fact, Chinas UPU postal development index (PDI) is about the same as Argentina, Botswana, Jamaica, and Lebanon (just to name a few). See the whole UPU classification list.

The process goes something like this: A Chinese manufacturer/retailer/wholesaler sells small, lightweight electronics through an online marketplace. Its final price likely includes the cost of shipping and shipping is noted as free. When an order is placed by someone in the U.S., the Chinese business ships the item through China Post airmail, paying the comparably lower shipping costs afforded to it by the set prices of the UPU terminal dues system. China Post then remits the exact cost required by the UPU to the USPS. Somewhere along the logistics line, the item is transferred to USPS possession where it is sorted and shipped out to its final U.S. destination.

U.S. based business face two problems.First, artificially low shipping costs persuade many shoppers to buy goods online and forego shopping at brick-and-mortar locations. Second, for those U.S. businesses that offer online shopping, it is very hard, if not impossible, to offer the same shipping costs as retailers located in China. Many U.S. based retailers must eat the cost of shipping to level the cost playing field on the consumer end.

What can be done? Well, its tough to say. In June 2015, the House Subcommittee on Government Operations issued a report titled Fair Competition in International Shipping. The U.S. State Department outlines its strategy in the U.S. Strategic Plan for the UPU. A starting point is for the UPU to change postal development indices to more accurately identify countries, like China, that are designated as transitioning but have the retail and manufacturing capacity of a developed nation.

The UPU sets terminal dues and other fixed postal costs every four years. Developing countries postal development indices also change during these meetings. The current cycle is Jan. 1, 2018 -Dec. 31, 2021. The next UPU Congress will be held in 2020 in Abidjan, Cote dIvoire (Ivory Coast).

This issue was recently explored at NCSLs Capitol Forum during a session titled Buyer Beware - Counterfeit and Hazardous Goods Bought and Sold Online. The session, focusing on consumer awareness and protection, touched on the recent influx of dangerous items entering our country, primarily via shipments originating outside of the country. This session hosted shipping, manufacturing and law enforcement experts who discussed how these items get through customs and into our country.

Ethan Wilson is NCSLs policy director for Commerce and Financial Services in Washington, D.C.

Email Ethan
VANCOUVER, Jan. 15 -- Canada's case against the United States at the World Trade Organization (WTO) aims to show that it won't be bullied at the trade table and the case could proceed if Washington terminates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a Canadian trade expert said Monday.

While trade tensions between the two nations appear to be ratcheting up, Canadians shouldn't panic over this latest development, said Michael Manjuris, chair of global management studies at Ryerson University.

Last month, the Canadian government launched a wide-ranging 32-page complaint to the WTO, accusing the United States of imposing unfair anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties against Canadian products.

"We want to fight (those actions) directly," Manjuris told Xinhua in an interview.

In its complaint, Canada said the United States broke the WTO Agreement on Anti-Dumping, the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes.

This isn't the first such case against the United States brought to the WTO by Canada, Manjuris said.

"We've done this five times at least," he said. "I think even six for the softwood lumber industry, and every single time at the WTO level we've won."

He said similar, successful complaints have also been raised by Canada at the NAFTA arbitration level. "Again, five times we've gone and we've won," he said.

In the official complaint, Canada cited nearly 200 examples of what it framed as inappropriate duties and tariffs, including those the United States has applied against other trading partners, including India, Brazil and the European Union.

Canada says it has been falsely accused of dumping softwood, newsprint and Bombardier's C Series commercial jets into the United States and this complaint aims to rebuke those punitive import duties with facts, Manjuris said.

Ultimately, Canada wants to use this complaint to show the United States that it won't be bullied at the trade table amid the NAFTA renegotiations, Manjuris said.

Canada raised the stakes in its December complaint, highlighting U.S. trade missteps against other countries. The United States is not just taking these actions against Canada, he said.

"They're doing it to China, they're doing it against South Korea and Japan. That's more concerning," he added.

In a statement last week, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer called Canada's case an ill-advised attack on the U.S. trade remedies system, saying the complaint could lower U.S. confidence that Canada is committed to mutual beneficial trade.

"Canada is acting against its own workers' and businesses' interests. Even if Canada succeeded on these groundless claims, other countries would primarily benefit, not Canada," he said.

Washington has 60 days to try to settle the complaint or Canada could request an adjudication by the WTO.

Despite the rhetoric that has laced this dispute, Canada and the United States remain friends, Manjuris said. "I don't think that the United States and Canada (have) ever not been friends ... I think right now however, the seriousness of NAFTA and modernizing a free trade agreement means there's going to be some pretty hard-core negotiation."

The relationship is likely strained, but is likely not headed for disaster, said Manjuris, adding that he expects a solution to be reached before the WTO is forced to weigh in.

But if U.S. President Donald Trump indeed cancels NAFTA as he has threatened, then Canada would likely push forward with the WTO case, noted the expert.

"We're serious about it, but we would also use it in terms of leverage to get the negotiations back on the table in what I would call a more reasonable approach," he said.
The University of Texas at Austin (www.utexas.edu)

The University of Texas at Austin recently rejected a donation to the China Public Center from the Hong Kong-based China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) on the grounds that it is linked to the United Front Work Department and could place limits on academic freedom and the robust exchange of ideas. U.S. media emphasized that the foundations leader, Tung Chee-hwa, is vice chairman of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference, which is listed as a united front organization.

The university will not accept programmatic funding from CUSEF. Neither will we accept any funds for travel, student exchanges or other initiatives from the organization, Gregory Fenves, President of the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in a letter to U.S. Senator Ted Cruz.

The Global Times recently contacted CUSEF but did not get a response. According to its website, CUSEF was established in Hong Kong in 2008 as a privately funded, non-governmental, non-profit entity. The website also lists the names of several sponsors.

Li Haidong, a professor at China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times that one of the most important principles emphasized by China is that it will not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. The United States has a habit of interpreting the behavior of other major nations in the way of its own thinking, which can lead to distorted conclusions.

Li said that there are many cultural exchanges between China and the United States and sources of funding vary, but the purpose is to promote a healthy China-U.S. relationship. CUSEF is not supported by the Chinese government but by private donors, Li added. Unfortunately, U.S. media and politicians interpret Chinas goodwill in a distorted and even sinister way.

Those who have heard this news may be surprised to learn that an effort to promote understanding between China and the United States is being viewed as political influence. What comes to mind is how many American foundations and non-governmental organizations are carrying out political activities in China. If China was to respond in the same manner, every single one of them would probably have to take a hike.

At the end of last year, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a hearing titled The Long Arm of China: Exporting Authoritarianism With Chinese Characteristics, which was described by some media outlets as a counterattack on Chinas ideological invasion. Imaginations are running so wild in the West that it is now a trend to link artificial intelligence to Chinas so-called infiltration efforts.

Fort Leonard Wood, an Army base in the U.S. state of Missouri, just removed surveillance cameras made by Hikvision. Colonel Christopher Beck, the chief of staff at the base, said he never believed the cameras were a security risk, but removed them to remove any negative perception surrounding them. Just this month, the U.S. government blocked U.S. business deals involving Alibaba and Huawei on the grounds of national security.

Ironically, a lot of Chinese now think that Americans are the narrow-minded ones. In their view, the United States has put politics in command and is constantly on the lookout for foreign influence. If China was to follow the U.S. standard in guarding against China, then it would be virtually impossible for China to reform and open up.

All countries must safeguard their national security. But the recent wave of warnings about China in the United States and other countries, such as Australia, has been borderline hysterical.

First it was Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election, then Chinese infiltration of American universities. But it is the United States that is by far the worlds largest exporter of intellectual and artistic products and the largest exporter of technology, which means that it is the United States that has the greatest ability to infiltrate other countries.

To put it simply, the voices that are wary of Chinas infiltration are a little scared of China. But neither side should let fear of the other influence the bilateral relationship.
These wine choices will have you covered on Thanksgiving

Turkey and a whole lot of other stuff pose challenges to pairing wines with the meal as there truly is a cornucopia of flavors, all to be enjoyed.
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RM 053-01  Richard Mille

There is no better person that Pablo Mac Donough who understands the violence of shocks in polo. Six years after the first RM 053 was designed for his wrist, Richard Mille has pushed the limits of resistance even further with the RM 053-01, which now has a tourbillon! Two years were required to develop the new, patented layered sapphire crystal, a world-first in watchmaking. The spirit of innovation is also seen the movement architecture, with crossed cams and a system of pulleys and tensioners that leave the mainplate floating in mid-air. The 0.27mm thick cables (thats three hairs breadths!) keep the entire movement suspended, making it capable of resisting accelerations of up to 5,000 g. It is a limited edition of 30, but the structure of the TPT carbon case makes each one unique. The watch naturally comes in the colours of the Argentinean flag and the aesthetics and functions work together as well as the polo player and his steed.. - Brice Lechevalier

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Yes, my favourite of the day is a simple base calibre. After all, this is the kind of thing that powers the overwhelming majority of watches in the world. But there was nevertheless still room for progress. In terms of precision, resistance to magnetic fields, and especially in terms of power reserve. Baume & Mercier has used the expertise of the Richemont group to develop, for its own exclusive use, the Baumatic. The result: five days of power reserve, resistance to magnetic fields of 1500 Gauss, a chronometer movement and  the icing on the cake  service intervals of five years. Maybe even more, depending on the tests that the brand is carrying out. And the finished watch costs just 2,500 Swiss francs in stores. Many people may overlook this watch in the mass of new watches seen at the SIHH. But that would be a mistake: the Baumatic is quite simply redefining the specifications of a non-complicated watch. Its a must-have. - Olivier Muller

Audemars Piguet : Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon Volant GMT

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Audemars Piguet. The Tourbillon GMT model has just been taken in an even more radical direction. The dial is in titanium and breaks with the tradition of its predecessor, which was characterised by a ceramic hour-glass-shaped bridge. It now has three-dimensional facets which evoke the facadism of contemporary architecture and have rose-gold accents. The 10-day movement has also changed, since it now has a flying tourbillon. The bridges have been reworked and the model is now uncluttered. The Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon GMT is one of the rare watches at the SIHH 2018 that resolutely refuses to play the tradition/nostalgia/classic card. - David Chokron


Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 17F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 17F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph.
Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said that the countrys most favoured investment destinations have exhausted themselves to extend any cooperation to industry and her state is most suited to take their place.

Banerjee was speaking at the inaugural session of the 4th edition of Bengal Global Business Summit in the city even as top business leaders like Mukesh Ambani, Lakshmi Mittal, Uday Kotak and Sajjan Jindal flanked her on the dais.

The two-day summit is being attended by 32 nations, including nine partner countries of Europe and Asia. Close to Rs 20,000 crore investment commitments in the state was made at the inaugural session itself.

Despite the conspicuous absence of a central minister at the summit, Banerjee called the show top of the top clarifying this was the best performance of the state compared to the three previous editions.

Union Roads and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari, who had reportedly confirmed participation initially, backed out following recent clashes between the Trinamool Congress and BJP in the state.

The other highlight of day one of the summit were the slogans coined by top industrialists while showering heaps of praises for what they felt was a changed business environment in the state under the current political leadership. While Mukesh Ambani maintained that West Bengal was steadily headed towards becoming Best Bengal, Niranjan Hiranandani, MD of the Hiranandani Group, hailed Banerjees leadership as Super Se Upar.

These words of praises only add to prestige of Bengal which the people of this state so richly deserve. We are doing all this to ensure employment for our future generation, Banerjee said in the sidelines of the summit.

Ambani promised an investment of Rs 5000 crores in the Reliance Groups non-Jio businesses over the next three years in the state besides confirming that Jio services would reach every individual of Bengal by the end of this year and every education and health institution by the end of the next. He also extended assurances of setting up a hub for manufacturing telecom equipment in the state and sponsoring a chair in honour of physicist Satyendra Nath Bose in a top Bengal university.

While Sajjan Jindal confirmed that JSW Steel has finalised a blueprint of Rs 10,000 crore investment over the next two to three years, Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, pitched in with an investment promise of Rs 1,000 crore in power sector infrastructure.

Asked about the absence of Centres representatives at the summit, state finance minister Amit Mitra said: It only makes sense for them to come if they have a major policy announcement to make. Else their presence only becomes participation for the sake of it.

Mitra confirmed that the Bengal government has received proposals of interest in various sectors from the Adani group and is hoping they would follow it up with real action. The group already has some 700-800 crore investment in the food processing sector here. But for a group as big as Adani we consider it too little. We hope to see some more activity from their side, the finance minister said.

Asked if there was something to be read between lines behind Lakshmi Mittal refraining from quoting concrete investment figures, Mitra said: A person of his stature doesnt fly into a city at 8.30 in the morning for a mere visit. He surely has something in mind and with time we will know what that is.
The Manero watches in the John Wick chapter 3 ... The Manero watches in the...

The brand was present on May 9th, 2019, in New-York for the global premiere of the Hollywood movie. The brand was present on May 9th, 2019,...
Alrounder Hardik Pandya gave away his wicket to Proteas in the most unfortunate manner on Day 3 of the 2nd Test in Centurion.

As Virat Kohli's heroic efforts helped India cross the 300-run mark, it was Pandya's casual run out that ruined India's party to take a lead over the hosts.

While facing Rabada in the 68th over, Pandya tried to sneak in a single, little did he know, his captain wasn't too keen.

This resulted in Pandya gifting away his wicket as neither was his foot grounded nor his bat during his half-hearted attempt to return to his crease.

Naturally, the Internet got innovative and turned the TV replays of the bizarre run out into hilarious memes.

Ravi Shastri & Hardik Pandya in the Dressing Room#SAvIND pic.twitter.com/Wd1GjGGrad Hariharan Durairaj (@hari_durairaj) January 15, 2018

Hardik Pandya. Wowww!! Bumrah hits headlines often for crossing the line, Pandya does for not crossing one !!. #SAvInd #IndvSA ScreenGrab courtesy @SPN_Cricket Sony Ten 1. pic.twitter.com/LCEqxAPKRf Prabhu   (@Cricprabhu) January 15, 2018

Me: Sirf ek night padhke exam pass kar lunga!Result: #INDvSApic.twitter.com/mAAVghOV8l Sunil- The Cricketer (@1sInto2s) January 15, 2018

The run out gave some the deja vu.

Hardik Pandya is following the footsteps of Been Stokes too seriously, check out this #SAvIND #INDvSA #SAvsIND pic.twitter.com/jVula7mgXY Omkar Mankame (@Oam_16) January 15, 2018

And got the commentators angry.

Early lesson for Hardik Pandya that this game will come to bite you back if you let confidence become arrogance. Sanjay Manjrekar (@sanjaymanjrekar) January 15, 2018

Fortunately for Pandya, Internet shifted its focus towards captain who celebrated his ton in the most Kohli way.

Celebration says it all. pic.twitter.com/0XdvyGjhx6 Virendra Vaishnav (@VaishnavDevta) January 15, 2018

RT when u see it pic.twitter.com/qm5NDFHnFP Dr. Gill (@ikpsgill1) January 15, 2018

Superman Vs Batman pic.twitter.com/WvL7ZeUV43 ScarFace Swamy (@RAC7R) January 15, 2018
Guwahati: Ahead of Republic Day, miscreants set ablaze nine oil tankers in Assams Tinsukia district at around 4.30 pm on Tuesday.

The attack took place near Namphai Reserve Forest along the Assam-Arunachal border. No casualty was reported.

Assam DGP Mukesh Sahay said the attack could have been carried out by NSCN-K militants. Fire tenders from neighbouring areas in Tinsukia were rushed.

Additional DGP RP Meena also moved to the site to review the situation. The Army, assisted by Assam Rifles and Assam Police, has launched area domination operations in and around the border areas.

Meanwhile, security forces of Dao Division in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam apprehended one NSCN-(IM) member on Tuesday. Based on specific inputs about the presence of an over ground worker of NSCN-IM at Niausa village, an operation was launched in southern Arunachals Longding district. The suspect, identified as Wangnyai Wangsu, reportedly revealed the outfits plan to recruit more cadres. Rs 3240 and multiple mobile phones were seized from him.

In a separate operation in Tinsukia, a self-styled sergeant major of NSCN-K was apprehended at Ledo along the Assam-Arunachal border. The arrested cadre admitted to being part of the Himalayan group of the banned outfit, and had undergone weapons training in Myanmar. His wife is also believed to be an active member of the outfit.

In view of the upcoming Republic Day celebrations, Pangsau winter festival and panchayat elections in Arunachal, constant vigil is being maintained. All the units are on alert, said Defence PRO, Col Chiranjeet Konwer.

In January last year, two jawans were martyred when militants attacked an Assam Rifles foot patrol escorting tourists to the annual winter festival at Pangsau along Indo-Myanmar border.

(With inputs from Rina Kakoti Gogoi)
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed its reservations against reopening the politically sensitive 2005 Bofors gun kickback case, which had once implicated late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and other Congress leaders.

"We will finish this case on the next date," remarked a bench, headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, as it adjourned the matter to February 2.

The bench lamented that the courts were sought to be used for political battles and publicity and hence, it was necessary for the judges to stick to the law.

Meanwhile, the CBI kept mum on challenging the exoneration of all accused, including Europe-based Hinduja brothers, in the case by filing an appeal 12 years after the discharge order.

The Court was hearing BJP leader and lawyer Ajay Agarwal, who has sought to challenge the 2005 Delhi High Court order whereby the FIR in the matter was quashed.

It questioned the locus standi (legal standing) of a private litigant in the criminal cases, asking how a criminal can be reopened at the instance of a third party.

"How can you maintain a petition when the CBI has not filed an appeal? What can be your locus? This has become a national problem now. Even in a criminal case, a third party seeks to intervene as if it is a PIL," said the bench.

It then turned to Additional Solicitor General Maninder Singh, who appeared for the CBI.

"You have not filed an appeal in the last 12-13 years. What do you propose to do now?" it asked Singh.

The ASG replied that it is a fact that the CBI did not file the appeal in time. "In fact, there was a special leave petition filed but withdrawn later. Thus, the appeal was not filed when it should have," maintained Singh, indicating the CBI is not inclined to file an appeal now.

But Agrawal said he as a public spirited citizen should be allowed to lead the case since no crime should go unpunished. He added that the top court had earlier allowed him to file the special leave petition, and therefore, preliminary questions of maintainability should not be raised now.

At this, the Court told Agarwal that since the CBI has not filed an appeal, he would have to first establish his locus standi in this case.

"We cannot allow anyone and everyone to start entering in criminal cases. That is not the criminal law jurisprudence. You will have to satisfy us within the parameters of the law," it told him, fixing the case for February 2.

While seeking details of the accused in the case, the court also questioned how it can admit an appeal against the accused, who have been acquitted 20 years ago.

The Rs 64-crore Bofors pay-off scandal, occurred between India and Sweden during the 1980s and 1990s, initiated allegedly by the Congress party politicians and implicating former PM Rajiv Gandhi, and several other members of the Indian and Swedish governments.

The Bofors 155 field howitzer deal was mired in controversies after members of both Indian and Swedish governments were allegedly found involved in accepting kickbacks for facilitating the deal between the two countries.
New Delhi: The central government has withdrawn the subsidy given to Haj pilgrims. Minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the decision is in line with the governments agenda to empower miniorities without appeasement.

Naqvi said that for the first time in independent India, 1.75 lakh pilgrims will go to Haj without a subsidy, a rise from the 1.25 lakh that went for the annual pilgrimage last year.

The union minister said the government would save Rs 700 crore by stopping the subsidy, and would use the funds for education of minorities, particularly girls.

The decision to abolish Haj subsidy comes just a day after government allowed Muslim women above the age of 45 to go on the pilgrimage without a male guardian, in groups of at least four.

Naqvi also said that the Saudi Arabian government has in principle agreed to allow Haj journey from India by ships and officials of the two countries will sit together to finalise the modalities.

All India Muslim Personal Law Boards Kamal Farooqui welcomed the move, saying that a wrong impression was being created that Muslims were gaining from the government aid. Instead, it was national carrier Air India that was the biggest beneficiary of this government scheme, he said.

The Centre had in May last year formed a six-member committee to look into the Haj subsidy issue in light of a 2012 Supreme Court order on gradually reducing and abolishing subsidy given to pilgrims by 2022, sources said.

The Supreme Court had in 2012 directed the Union government to gradually reduce and abolish Haj subsidy by 2022. It had asked the government to invest the subsidy amount of approximately Rs 650 crore a year then on the educational and social development of the community.
New Delhi: The Chief Justice of India has finally offered an olive branch to the four dissenting senior judges in the Supreme Court.

On Tuesday morning, CJI Dipak Misra met the four other judges, Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph.

The meeting lasted for around 15 minutes where all "relevant issues" were discussed amid cordiality.

Sources tell CNN-News18 that the meeting took place in the chamber of the CJI, who had requested all four to meet him.

The meeting remained inconclusive and is likely to resume tomorrow as well.

According to the sources, the deliberation was amicable and all five agreed that the institution was capable of resolving all issues by itself.

The breakthrough has happened three days after the four dissenting judges had a press conference to raise certain grievances about the administrative orders of the CJI.

The judges had said they were discharging their debt to the nation and that addressing media was their last resort.

While their method divided the Supreme Court judges, many felt the issues were real and that they required to be addressed.

On Monday morning, many of these judges met over the customary tea.

The CJI today decided to finally break the ice.
New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate has issued a fresh summons to Karti Chidambaram, the son of senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, in connection with its probe into the INX Media money laundering case.

Official sources said that in response to the agency's second summons issued for today, Karti Chidambaram's authorised representative appeared before the agency and replied to their queries.

As the agency needed further clarifications, the ED, in the fresh summons, has asked Karti Chidambaram to appear before it in person or through his authorised representative on January 18.

The first summons was for January 11 when Karti Chidambaram's legal representatives appeared before the agency.

Last week, the ED searched the premises of Karti Chidambaram and those associated with him in a separate money laundering case pertaining to the Aircel-Maxis deal. The central probe agency had registered a case against him and others in May last year.

It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the ED's equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a CBI complaint, including Karti Chidambaram, INX Media and its directors, Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. The ECIR was lodged under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

The sources said that the ED would probe the alleged "proceeds of crime" generated in this case.

It was the ED which had provided information about the alleged illegal payments made by INX Media, based on which the Central Bureau of Investigation had filed its FIR.

The CBI had also carried out searches at the homes and offices of Karti Chidambaram across four cities for allegedly receiving money from the media firm owned by the Mukerjeas to scuttle a tax probe.

The Chidambarams have denied all the charges made against them.

The CBI had filed the FIR against Karti Chidambaram and the Mukerjeas on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, receiving illegal gratification, influencing public servants and criminal misconduct.

The agency has alleged that Karti Chidambaram received money from INX Media for using his influence to manipulate a tax probe against it in a case of violation of Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) conditions to receive investment from Mauritius.

The CBI has said it has also recovered vouchers of Rs 10 lakh which were allegedly paid for the services. These vouchers were issued in favour of Advantage Strategic Consulting (P) Limited, a firm "indirectly" owned byKarti Chidambaram, the CBI had alleged.

Former finance minister P Chidambaram, after the CBI searches on May 16, had issued a strong statement in response to the raids, saying the government was using the CBI and other agencies to target his son.

The FIPB approval was granted in "hundreds of cases", the senior Congress leader had said.

The CBI FIR was made out against Karti Chidambaram, his company Chess Management Services, the Mukerjeas (currently in jail on charges of murder of their daughter Sheena Bora), INX Media, Advantage Strategic Consulting Services and its director Padma Vishwanathan.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday observed that "everyone should know everything" about circumstances under which CBI judge BH Loya died in 2014. Justice Loya was trying the politically sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

A bench led by Justice Arun Mishra said that "it is a case where nothing should remain confidential".

"What could be confidential about it? It is better if they know everything. Everyone should know everything," the judge told senior advocate Harish Salve, who was appearing for the Maharashtra government.

The bench, also comprising Justice MM Shantanagoudar, asked Salve to go through the report, remove anything personal about the judge and then supply copies to the two petitioners in seven days.

On Friday, the court had asked the Maharashtra government to examine the contentions of the PILs and come back with pertinent medical reports of the judge.

Salve rendered the report on Tuesday in a sealed cover envelope, saying even he has not seen it so far.

At this, the bench asked him to peruse them and give copies to the two petitioners, who want a court-monitored probe into the circumstance of Justice Loya's death.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court will on Tuesday hear two PILs demanding investigation into 'mysterious' death of CBI judge BH Loya, who was trying the politically sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter killing case.

There has been a never-seen-before controversy surrounding the bench of two judges who are going to hear this case.

Questions have been raised not only by certain senior lawyers but by no less than four senior-most judges, who had decided to come out in the open against the Chief Justice of India over allocation of cases to some handpicked judges.

Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph had raised issues about "select" benches getting such cases and the posting of Judge Loya's case to Court No. 10 was apparently the trigger.

But Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, even after 72 hours of this open opposition, has evidently decided to stick to his position.

And hence, the two petitions have remained before a bench of Justices Arun Mishra and MM Shantanagoudar in Court No.10.

There are now only two ways how this matter can go to a different bench in the Supreme Court. First, if either of the two judges of the bench recuses from hearing the petitions, and second if the bench sends petitioners to Bombay High Court where there is already a similar PIL filed by a lawyers' body and an appeal comes back to the apex court.

But in any case, the hearing of Judge Loya's death case have now become a matter of public perception.

Not just the outcome but also the preliminary hearing has attracted a lot of interest only because this case has now come to symbolise an issue which will divide people's opinion about the institution.

It has been repeatedly ruled by the apex court that a court must decide on the basis of Constitutional principles and the law, uninfluenced by the public opinion or populist demands. But to exemplify this would definitely become difficult when the question marks are raised even over manner of adjudication.

There is indeed going to be a battle between the principle of "justice should not be done but also seem to be done" and a pure legal adjudication bereft of any opinion.

Judge Loya's case is certainly a test case also for the highest court of the land and everything, right from the constitution of the bench till a final decision is reached, will be scrutinised keenly in the people's court at the same time.
Mumbai: The co-owner of Mojos Bistro, where 14 people died on December 29 during the fire at Mumbais Kamala Mills compound, has been placed under arrest after he surrendered early on Tuesday morning.

Yug Tuli had been absconding ever since the incident. Police had, on Thursday, claimed that Tuli was spotted at Hyderabad airport but could not fly out. By the time, the police reached the spot he had disappeared.

Tuli's partner in Mojos Yug Pathak, son of retired Director General of Police and former Commissioner of Police (Pune) KK Pathak, was arrested in the first week of January.

On December 29, a fire had swept through 1Above and adjacent Mojo's Bistro resto-pub in Kamala Mills compound in central Mumbai, resulting in the death of 14 people.

On Thursday, owner of the '1Above' pub Abhijeet Mankar was arrested after he was also on the run along with co-owners of the pub, Kripesh Sanghavi and Jigar Sanghavi.

"Our team arrested the owner of the 1Above pub, Abhijeet Mankar, from Marine Lines in the early hours," Ahmed Pathan, Senior Police Inspector, N M Joshi Marg Police Station told PTI.

On Wednesday night, the investigating team of the city police had arrested 1Above's Jigar and Kripesh Sanghvi from Andheri, he said.

During the interrogation of the duo, we got the information about Mankar's whereabouts and apprehended him from Marine Lines, Pathan said.

The Sanghvi brothers were arrested from the Andheri area, Additional Commissioner of Police S Jaikumar said.

The arrest came just a day after hotelier Vishal Kariya was arrested for sheltering the three accused at his suburban residence in Juhu.
Returning to the place where he was orphaned nine years ago in a terror attack, 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg on Tuesday appeared bewildered with the media frenzy as cameras popped to catch his glimpse.

Moshe, who was a toddler when Pakistan-based terrorists killed his parents at Nariman House, appeared visibly moved as he spent almost two hours going around the five-storey building in south Mumbai.

The Israeli resident had kosher food at Nariman House. His grandparents and two uncles, who accompanied him from Israel, were with him during his Nariman House visit. Moshe's Indian nanny Sandra Samuels, who had saved him during the terror attack, was also present.

His father Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and mother Rivka were killed in Nariman House, which was a terror target during the 26/11 Mumbai attack in 2008. The Jewish couple ran a cultural and outreach centre for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement at the Nariman House in South Mumbai's Colaba area.

"The visit to Nariman House was an emotional experience for Moshe," his grandfather Shimon Rosenberg said. During Moshe's visit to Nariman House, there was a large gathering of members of the Jewish community, police, security personnel and media around the building, whose entry was restricted.

Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, who runs the Chabad House, said, "Finally, Moshe is back home. The visit is very emotional for him. He is here to see the living memorial project".

Last year, Rosenberg had requested the Indian ambassador to Israel that the Nariman House building be registered with the land registry department as belonging to Moshe. Moshe, who landed here this morning from Israel, went to the iconic Taj hotel in Colaba, and then proceeded to Nariman House.

"Shalom...bahut khushi (I'm very happy)," said a shy Moshe, speaking to media at the Mumbai airport. "I feel very happy to come to India, to Nariman House where I am going to pray. I will say hi to the people of India. I feel very good in this country," Rosenberg said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met Moshe and his grandparents during a visit to Israel in July last and told him that he could visit India anytime. While meeting Modi, Moshe had said, "I remember our connection to Nariman House. I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai and when I get older, live there".
Russian flagship carrier Aeroflot said it will resume flights from Moscow to Cairo on 3 February, marking the first direct flight to the Egyptian capital since the deadly crash of a Russian passenger plane in Sinai in late 2015, Magdy Ishaq, the chairman of Cairo Airport Company, told Ahram Online.

Two flights will be operated to the Egyptian capitalevery week --on Saturdays and Wednesday, according to a letter sent by the airliner to the Egyptian company.

Aeroflot is currently perparing its office at the Cairo airport to resume operations.

However, Aeroflot's official website has not yet listed any direct flights from Moscow to Cairo on 3 February.

Meanwhile, Officials from Egypt's flagship carrier EgyptAir announced recently that it would run three flights to the Russian capital weekly, starting in early February.

Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree approving the resumption of commercial air traffic between Russia and Cairo.

Moscow grounded all commercial passenger flights to Egypt in 2015 over security concerns after a Russian Airbus A321 crashed in Sinai shortly after taking off from Sharm El-Sheikh Airport, killing all 224 people on board.

Egypt has since boosted security procedures at many of its airports in response to Russian conditions on the lifting of the flight ban.

Egypt's civil aviation ministry announced recently that a new round of talks between Egyptian and Russian officials is planned for April to discuss the resumption of charter flights from Russia to the Red Sea resorts of Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh, two of the most popular destinations for Russian tourists.

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Mumbai: Moshe Holtzberg, who lost his parents during the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, will return to the Nariman House on Tuesday for the first time since the tragedy struck the family more than nine years ago.

Moshe was two years old when his parents - Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and Rivika - were killed during the siege at the Nariman House by 10 Pakistani terrorists in November 2008. The terrorists carried out the attacks over three days and killed 166 people.

The Jewish couple ran a cultural and outreach centre for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement at the Nariman House in South Mumbai's Colaba area.

Moshe's grandfather Shimon Rosenberg said he and his wife will accompany their grandson when he lands in Mumbai on Tuesday.

"We are all very excited to visit India. This will be Moshe's first visit to the Nariman House in over nine years," Rosenberg told PTI over phone from Israel.

"Moshe will later fly back to Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 19," he added.

Also accompanying Moshe will be Sandra Samuels, the brave Indian nanny who saved him during the terror attack. Samuels, who was awarded an honorary citizenship by the Israeli government so that she could live in the country and be with Moshe, continues the same bond she had with the little boy.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Moshe and his grandparents during a visit to Israel in July last year and told him that he could visit India anytime.

While meeting Modi, Moshe had said, "I remember our connection to Nariman House. I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai and when I get older, live there."

"Dear Mr Modi, I love you and the people in India," Moshe had said.

While accepting the long-term visa which India issued to Moshe and his grandparents, Rosenberg had requested the Indian ambassador that the Nariman House building be registered with the land registry department as belonging to Moshe Holtzberg.
Speaking at the Raisina Dialogue in Delhi Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu lauded Prime Minister Modi for Indias improved ranking in ease of doing business rankings. India had jumped 30 places to become the 100th friendliest business destination, as perceived by World Bank. He said: The strong survive, the weak dont survive, you make peace and alliances with the strong." Stressing upon the need for greater cooperation between the two nations, he said: I like soft power, but hard power is usually better. You need F-35s, you need cyber, you need a lot of intelligence especially for a country like Israel." Earlier in the day Netanyahu and his wife Sara visited the Taj Mahal. They stayed at the Taj Complex for a few hours, posed for photos and learnt about the 17th century monument. Benjamin Netanyahu is the first Israeli Prime Minister in 15 years to visit India but he comes at a time when his political standing is at the weakest in his three-decade long career. He is visiting India for a six-day trip and is being accompanied by a 130-member delegation from various sectors including cyber, agriculture and defence.

Stay tuned as Sanchari Chatterjee brings you the LIVE updates:

Read all the Latest News , Breaking News , watch Top Videos and Live TV here.
Bhopal: The police thwarted the plans of saffron groups to recite Bharat Mata aarti inside a missionary college on Tuesday and arrested Vishwa Sanatan Sangh chief Updesh Rana and other right wing activists before they could reach Vidisha, around 60km from Bhopal.

Right-wing groups had earlier too tried to storm St Marys College and sing the hymn but police had foiled the efforts. They had then sung the hymn at the college gates, but vowed they would return on January 16 and recite it inside the college premises.

The administration fortified the town since morning and deployed heavy police force and SAF battalion to stop them. Rana was arrested at Sanchi along with half a dozen other activists before they could reach the college.

Rana had risen to prominence after being arrested by UP STF in Agra last year, along with his associate Amit Jani, on charges of morphing Taj Mahals picture and placing saffron flags atop the monuments dome and minarets.

Apart from Rana, several volunteers of right wing organizations in Vidisha were also put under house arrest to keep things in check, said sources.

Sensing trouble, the college administration wrapped up the day early. They held an exam in the morning but did not hold any classes afterwards. College director, Father Saju Devassy, did not respond to queries.

The Catholic Diocesan Schools Associations had moved the Madhya Pradesh High Court, saying that there had been concerted attempts to organise religious functions and activities in minority colleges and schools.

The association had sought directions from the HC that no individual or groups be permitted to hold aarti, maha aarti or Bharat Mata aarti at minority and unaided institutions. The state government had assured the HC of offering security to these institutions.
New Delhi: Justice Arun Mishra may have decided not to hear any further petitions relating to the CBI judge BH Loya death case, which triggered the open revolt in the Supreme Court.

An order released late in the evening on the Supreme Court website says the case should be Put up before the appropriate bench, hinting that a new bench could be formed to hear the Public Interest Litigation.

Does it mean that the bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra is not the "appropriate" bench to hear this case any further? The court order gives rise to a possibility that the case may not be heard by this bench whenever it is listed for hearing next.

Usually, when an order ends with 'Put up before the appropriate bench', it is placed before the Chief Justice of India to place the matter before any other bench as per the roster system and his discretion.

Thus, the order may very well mean that the PILs demanding inquiry into death of judge Loya, who was trying the politically sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, could go to some other bench.

A recusal by Justice Arun Mishra assumes significance because posting this case before his bench was apparently the trigger that had led the four senior-most judges to come out openly against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra on Friday.

While the matter was not moved out of Justice Arun Mishra's court on Tuesday, the order passed by this bench gives an indication that some other bench may hear the case on the next date. The order, however, did not mention the next date of hearing.

On a day when the CJI broke the ice by meeting the four dissenting judges for around 15 minutes - the first after the open opposition, the order by Justice Arun Mishra's bench may also connote that discretion has been given to the CJI yet again to change the bench as one of the measures to resolve the ongoing crisis.
New Delhi: Hinting at Israel-India ties, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that to ensure peace, strong alliances need to be made.

The weak dont survive, strong survive. You make alliances with the strong. You make peace by being strong, he said, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi sat in the audience.

Netanyahu was speaking at the Raisina Dialogue in the national capital. Seen in the audience were external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, foreign secretary S Jaishankar, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor among others.

Addressing Modi as his dear friend and a friend of Israel, Netanyahu said that it was a natural friendship that both nations had.

I was moved to see the sympathy and friendship of people in Agra. They called me their friend since I was friends with their Prime Minister, he added.

The Israeli PM also said that he was astounded to know under Modi, India had gone up 42 places on ease of doing business, adding that India was a place that showed that humanity can be governed with freedom.

He further said that it was democracy binds India and Israel together and the two nations can grow together.

The PM also said that while military, economic and political powers were critical, there was a fourth power that was necessary for growth- the power of values.

We have powerful traditions, ancient tradiitons that we are proud of and yet inquiring minds that reach out to the skies. Thats what India and Israel have in abundance, he further added.
New Delhi: A day after claiming that the crisis in the Supreme Court was over, Attorney General KK Venugopal on Tuesday said the situation is not resolved yet.

Yes, I think it has not been settled. Let's hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days, said Venugopal.

On Monday, the AG had said everything has been settled" in the higher judiciary in the aftermath of the crisis after four senior judges openly castigated the functioning of the top court headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. Everything has been settled is what I believe... Everything is under control. Everything has been settled, he was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.

When asked if he has met any of the judges, Venugopal said nobody at all, including the Chief Justice.

He added that all the four senior-most judges had held their courts on Monday and conducted routine work.

After the crisis had erupted on January 12, Venugopal had said that the unprecedented move by the four senior Supreme Court judges in holding a press conference could have been avoided and the judges would now have to display statesmanship to ensure complete harmony.

Venugopal, who had a meeting with CJI after the press conference on Friday, had expressed hope that all judges, including Justice Misra, would rise to the occasion and wholly neutralise the

divisiveness.

(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi: The informal meeting Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra had with the judges of the Supreme Court on Monday morning saw some emotional moments.

Justice Arun Mishra is said to have broken down for being "unfairly" targeted by the four judges raising questions about his "competence" and "integrity".

He said that though his name was not mentioned by the four judges, inferences have been drawn from the cases referred to by the four judges, including that of late CBI special court judge BH Loya.

Justice Mishra said that he has been working hard and was overburdened. He said that even earlier the former Chief Justices TS Thakur and JS Khehar had assigned him tough cases.

At this point, the Chief Justice took Justice Mishra to his chamber while Justice J Chelameswar put his arm around his shoulder and told him that they were trying to raise issues and were not against him.

The benches in Courts Number two, three, four and five headed by the rebel judges  Justice J Chelameswar, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Kurian Joseph, respectively  attended to their business as usual.

Later, a lawyer RP Luthra in a mentioning before Court Number One headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra said that there is "a conspiracy to destroy the institution" and urged the Chief Justice to take action against the four judges.

However, the Chief Justice smiled and remained silent.
Madurai: The Jallikattu casualty count in Tamil Nadu grew to three on Tuesday after two more people were gored to death by a bull in Sivagangai district.

This comes after a 19-year-old was gored to death by a bull In Madurai on Monday.

The two deceased have been identified as 45-year-old Ramanathan from Karaikudi and 45-year-old Kashi from Pudukottai.

On Monday, 19-year-old Kalimuthu was gored to death by a bull at the end of the bull taming enclosure, known as the collection point.

Kalimuthu, was a participant in the first round of the event and was attacked by a bull at the collection point few minutes before the event concluded.

"Kalimuthu was out after his turn in the event and he was playing with the bull outside the arena in an open space when the bull attacked him," Madurai collector Veera Raghava Rao told CNN News18.

The ring and corridors through which the bulls ran out were barricaded to keep the non-participants at a distance and ensure public safety. Kalimuthu, who was injured when the bull's horns pierced through him, was taken to a nearby hospital but was declared brought dead.

A rural sport played in the state, Jallikattu grabbed national attention only after last year's massive protests.

Jallikattu is a sport that involves taming a bull. The bull is released into a crowd of people and the participants try to hold on to its hump or horns. The event is celebrated on Mattu Pongal, which is the third day of the popular harvest festival.

The tradition derives its name from the Tamil words "salli" which means coins and "kattu" which means package. This refers to the prize of coins that is tied to the horns of the bulls, which participants try to retrieve.

If the taming attempt is unsuccessful, the bull's owner takes home the prize.

The Supreme Court had banned Jallikattu in 2014 after animal rights activists said it constitutes extreme animal cruelty. After massive protests, Tamil Nadu enacted a law last year to bypass the apex court's ruling.
Spain is set to replace the United States as the world's second tourism destination while France has retained the top spot, the World Tourism Organization said Monday.

The UN agency said 2017 was a bumper year for the sector as tourists appeared to have ditched security concerns and were once again travelling to countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey once shunned for fears of extremist attacks.

"It is expected" that Spain will take the second position with some 82 million visitors last year, UNWTO chief Zurab Pololikashvili told reporters.

Definitive figures, however, will only be published in the spring.

"The United States doesn't have its information for 2017. They usually publish it in June," Pololikashvili said.

He did not give any further details about the United States, nor did he explain what earned Spain the second spot despite a terror attack in August and a highly mediatised independence crisis in tourism magnet Catalonia, home to Barcelona and Costa Brava beaches.

John Kester, head of tourism trends at the UN agency, added that "everything indicates" that France would retain its top spot in 2017 -- a good year for the industry as the number of global tourists leapt seven percent on 2016 to 1.32 billion.

This is the biggest increase in seven years, the UNWTO said, putting it down to a "global economic upswing" that saw a general rebound in tourism spending, particularly from Brazil and Russia "after a few years of declines".

Europe was the star of the show as it attracted a large number of visitors, up eight percent from the previous year, lured in particular by Mediterranean countries' sea and sun, including in Turkey.

This contrasts with 2016 figures that saw security fears hit visitor arrivals in Europe.

- Recovering from attacks -

"We do see that demand for European destinations has been very strong," said Kester.

"We also see important recovery in France," he added.

"The trend is clearly positive -- eight percent growth -- after two weak years as a consequence of terrorist acts."

Pololikashvili added that other countries that had suffered a drop in visitor numbers due to deadly attacks were recovering some of their past glow.

"We are pleased with the recovery of many destinations once affected," he said.

"The situation in Turkey, in Tunisia has improved a lot."

Spain also suffered a deadly jihadist attack in August in Catalonia, the same region whose leaders tried unsuccessfully to break away from Spain, triggering a major crisis that shook Europe.

And while the political crisis sparked a drop in visitor numbers to the northeastern region as massive demonstrations were staged following the independence bid, it does not appear to have dented overall tourist figures for Spain in 2017.

In 2016, Spain welcomed 75.3 million visitors, just behind the United States with 75.6 million, while France easily remained the world leader with 82.6 million visitors, according to the UNWTO.

International tourism to the United States shrank during the first five months of Donald Trump's presidency, according to the US International Trade Administration.

Arrivals fell five percent in the first quarter and three percent in the second quarter, official figures show.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had already announced last week that tourism numbers had soared, saying total earnings in a sector that accounts for 11 percent of Spain's gross domestic product (GDP) rose 12 percent to 87 billion euros ($107 billion) in 2017.

He praised the Spanish tourism sector's "great effort" to become more competitive.
Sherif Ismail sought to calm tensions after comments earlier this week from newly-appointed Minister for Local Development Abu Bakr El-Guindy that some deemed insulting to Upper Egyptians

Egypt's Prime Minister Sherif Ismail has stressed that his cabinet respects Upper Egyptians and that the development of the country's south is a priority, following controversial remarks by a newly-appointed minister which seemed to blame Upper Egyptians for contributing to the growth of Cairo's expansive slum areas.

Earlier this week, the newly-appointed Minister for Local Development Abu Bakr El-Guindy told satellite TV channel Al-Hayat that he aims to encourage investment in Upper Egypt to create job opportunities so that "Upper Egyptians stop taking the train and coming to Cairo ... and forming slums here."

His comments sparked uproar, with several MPs demanding that he apologise for what they deemed prejudiced comments.

The minister apologised shortly after, saying that his remarks were "misunderstood".

In a cabinet statement late on Monday, PM Ismail said that Upper Egypt is a "precious" part of Egypt and is "at the heart of the comprehensive development plan that aims to offer a better future" and prosperity for Egyptians living in Upper Egypt.

In Egypt, where tens of millions of people live below the poverty line, large numbers of people from the impoverished rural south migrate to the capital Cairo in search of jobs and better living conditions.

A 2016 report by Egypt's official statistics agency CAMPAS said that 57 percent of rural areas in the country's south are poor, with the highest poverty rates appearing in the southern govenorates of Sohag, Assiut and Qena.

Many Egyptians have long blamed previous governments for neglecting to develop that part of the country.

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Prabhas, who has played a double role in Baahubali, has won hearts globally with his acting skills. Interestingly, the superstar was inspired by one movie which made him took up acting.

The film was 1976 Telugu movie Bhakta Kannappa, which is based on the life of a Shiva Devotee. The actor played the character of a huge Shiva Bhakt in his last release Baahubali. Even one of the characters he played in the movie was named Shiva. His scene of carrying a Shivling in Baahubali: The Beginning also became one of the most loved scenes in the movie.

The actor is currently gearing up for the release of Saaho alongside Shraddha Kapoor. A UV Creations production, Saaho is produced by Vamsi and Pramod. Directed by Sujeeth, the project is being filmed at striking locations in India and abroad.
Kangana Ranaut's alleged affair with Hrithik Roshan made it to the headlines for months while the duo kept sending legal notices to each other. There had been a lot of speculation that it was allegedly one of the reasons behind Hrithik's separation from ex-wife Sussanne Khan. In October, Hrithik, who chose to remain silent over the entire controversy for two years, had opened up about the entire Kangana row, saying "the truth is, I have never met the lady in question one on one in my entire life."

And just when we thought it was finally over, Kangana took a dig at the actor yet again. The Simran actor recently appeared as a guest on Karan Johar and Rohit Shetty's India's Next Superstar, where she indirectly talked about her alleged affair with Hrithik, again.

"Mere ishq ke kisse toh saare newspapers mein likhe gaye hain," Kangana said on the show when asked about her own love story, according to DNA.

The actor also recited a poem, which she had apparently penned when she was in love, Ishq ki aankhon mein khuda dekha hai humne, na woh roshni thi na andhera, na jaane kaunsa manzar dekha hai humne.

When asked about her marriage plans, the actor said, "I dont know why our society wants women to marry by the age of 30. It is very unfortunate. I am not getting married anytime soon, and I am not even 30.
Often I have felt that an actor or an actress needs to be gutsy to experiment. It may not be easy for a star to slip into a slot where he or she is stripped of his or her stardom  appearance, mannerism and dialogue delivery among other aspects. Even a fantastic actor like Irrfan Khan was a trifle apprehensive about a physical transformation (which actors like Sivaji Ganesan once and Kamal Hassan now - both from Tamil cinema  have indulged in). He paused when I shot this question at him at the recent Dubai International Film Festival. I will he answered with a trace of hesitation, if the role calls for it. I hope he would, but I wonder sometimes. For, seeing him in a blazing crimson color jacket there, he looked every inch a star.

Getting back to courage, and how it pushes actors to cross the boundaries of comfort (which is looking as they do off screen), I have always felt that the fabulous looking and rivetingly performing Iranian actress, Golshifteh Farahani, had that daring in her to step into the scandalous.

My first meeting with Farahani was on the screen, in a movie called The Patience Stone, helmed by Atiq Rahimi  where she plays the young wife of an older man, who because of a bullet in his neck is in a deep coma. Shot by fellow jihadists and abandoned by his own brothers, the man is tended with love and care by Farahani (who does not have a name in the film), married to him for 10 years. Set in war-ravaged Afghanistan, she is lonely and frustrated, and decides one day to pep up her own life by telling her comatose husband all about her desires and dreams  and also about her affair with a young soldier. As the days of story-telling pass one after another, her descriptions become more and more saucy, and are punctuated by the sexual escapades she has been having with the soldier. And a moment comes, when the husband is shaken into consciousness, and he tries to strangle her.

I have seen Farahani in several other movies, the latest being Anup Singh's Rajasthan-based The Song of Scorpions, where she essays a healer, who has the magical ability to draw the deadly insect's poison from a victim by humming a tune. Khan is a camel dealer, whose unrequited affection for Nooran (Farahani) evokes such a rage in him that he does something beastly. A hauntingly wonderful work, The Song of Scorpions is lyrical, the undulating sands of the desert in Rajasthan forming a perfect backdrop to what I felt seemed like a Shakespearean tragedy. And I found the actress devoid of makeup and appearing so ordinary that she could have easily blended with the women of the region.

Now, Farahani is all set to portray a Kurdish fighter in the French director, Eva Husson's The Girls of the Sun. As Bahar, the commander-in-chief of an all-women battalion  known as the The Girls of the Sun  she is all set to recapture a town taken by extremists. This part comes to the versatile, Paris-based Farahani after Pirates Of The Caribbean: Salazars Revenge. This year, she will be seen in The Upside, and the zombie thriller, The Night Eats The World. Farahani's character in Husson's work has been inspired by real-life Kurdish women  who were taken hostage by Islamic fighters in Syria and Iraq, but who later took up arms against their captors.

Incidentally, Farahani's own life has been no less adventurous. At school in Teheran, she protested against lack of heating, and took love letters from one to another playing Cupid. At 16, she tonsured her head, because she did not want to wear a scarf and cycled the streets of her city  unthinkable in a nation run by conservative clergy. At 20, she acted with Leonardo Di Caprio in Body of Lies. The mullahs were not pleased at all. She fled to Paris, divorced her husband and made up her mind to enjoy freedom to its fullest in the French ambiance. In 2012, Farahani posed nude for a French magazine, Madame Figaro, And appeared topless in a film by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, titled Bodies and Souls.

This was it, and the Iranian administration banned her entry into her homeland.

(Gautaman Bhaskaran is an author, commentator and movie critic)
Prime Minister Narendra Modis chipko moments with world leaders have obviously titillated the Congress. The partys #hugplomacy video mocking the PMs warm and fuzzy diplomatic style reveals a puerile urge towards low-brow social media sensationalism and lack of empathy with popular culture.

The PMs penchant for the jhappi, the crass youngsters in charge of the Congress optics should have noted, is shared by tens of millions of Punjabis. Not to mention Hugging Amma Mata Amritanandamayi, a spiritual leader with a global following, whom the PM reveres. Amma is said to have delivered 36 million hugs and people (including Congressmen) are lining up for more.

Perhaps the post-Sonia Gandhi phase whiz kids missed Munnabhai MBBS, the smash Bollywood hit which put the bro-hug on the map: Aye mamu, jadoo ki jhappi de daal aur baat khatam. Lets face it, the jhappi is no less a cultural export than Yoga and all power to Modi in promoting it.

In seeking to hug-shame Modi, the Congress has shown a peculiarly un-Indian approach to the concept of personal space. It sees Modis buddy hugs as awkward, i.e., an unwarranted intrusion. Jawaharlal Nehru, on the other hand, had no problem getting up close and personal with Edwina Mountbatten and Jacqueline Kennedy.

Is the hug too close for comfort, a breach of some subjective minimum distance mandated by diplomatic etiquette? Should the PM adapt his hellos to the cultural practices of his counterparts? If so, he should have met his Japanese counterpart with a carefully calibrated bow. And he should practice la bise (air kiss) to greet Brigitte Macron with a pappi or two.

Speaking of pappis, US president George Bush famously smooched the Saudi king and for good measure, held hands with him. German chancellor Angela Merkel is known to have a penchant for pappis. Heads of state such as Bush, Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, etc. have received the pappi treatment. But no one dares to read their warmth as weakness.

So theres no earthly reason why PM Modi should eschew the bear-hug for a handshake, la bise or a bow. For us Indians, the namaste is a formal greeting, but to break barriers and establish a personal bond, nothing beats the good old jhappi.

A hug, modern science tells us, is a handshake from the heart, a way to establish an emotional connect. Hugging and kissing raises oxytocin levels and aids person-to-person bonding. The bro-hug thus has its place in diplomacy, signifying affinity, agreement or reconciliation.

The jhappi-mocking video argues the kind of cynical, shallow mindset which derisively refers to green activists as tree-huggers (like the village women who started the chipko movement). And only a dyed-in-wool homophobe would equate a bro-hug with a gay hug.

If Congress president Rahul Gandhi did, in fact, personally approve the video, he has revealed a distressing immaturity. If he didnt, then he needs to exercise greater control over his party. Putting out the video betrays an insecurity vis-a-vis Modi and a lack of focus on real issues. In trying to establish that Modi has clay feet, the Congress has put its own foot squarely in its mouth.

Whatever happened to Rahuls development rant? He was on a roll, studiously avoiding personal attacks on the PM, which have always proved counter-productive. The strategy won him the approval of the media and revived the Congress in Gujarat. In fact, he sacked Gandhi family loyalist Mani Shankar Aiyar for describing Modi as neech.

The Congress social media cell is currently headed by Divya Spandana aka Ramya, a smart young woman who specialises in sharp tweets. She took over in May, 2017 and turned the Congress barely-there social media presence around. Ramya has deservedly been showered with fulsome praise by the media in recent months.

The #hugplomacy video, however, was an error of judgment which takes the Congress back to square one. The timing of the video made it even more unfortunate; it was posted minutes after the PM had greeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the airport, breaking protocol to do so. If the Congress was seeking to undermine Indias diplomatic efforts vis-a-vis Netanyahu, it could have fielded credible senior leaders to make a statement.

The cheap shot strategy signals that the Congress has no alternative vision to offer and is, as HRD minister Prakash Javdekar said, at its lowest ebb. If anyone needs a hug from voters, its Rahul Gandhi. But at this rate, they are more likely to give him a shove.
Ahmedabad: Vishwa Hindu Parishad's international president Pravin Togadia at a press conference on Tuesday alleged that there was plan to kill him in an encounter, a day after he went missing and then was found at a hospital in the city.

Togadia alleged that "people do not want me to talk of Hindutva and Ram Mandir" and that a conspiracy to eliminate him is in the works.

"When the appropriate time comes, I will state who wants to silence my voice. I will give proof," said Togadia.

Following Togadia's allegations, the Gujarat unit of the Congress demanded an official inquiry into them, calling it a serious issue.

Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia visited him in hospital. "We have ideological differences but our culture does not teach us enmity. I had gone to enquire about his health," Modhwadia said.

"He has made some startling allegations. They should be probed independently. Unlike the BJP, we do not believe in eliminating people who do not toe our line," he added.

On Monday, a team of Rajasthan police had come to Ahmedabad, but could not find him.

"I am being targeted for a decade-old case, there is an attempt to suppress my voice. Rajasthan Police team came to arrest me. Someone told me a plan was being made to kill me in an encounter," said Togadia.

Narrating his ordeal, Togadia said a karyakarta came and "told me that he feared I would be killed". "I left the karyalaya with one karyakarta in an autorickshaw and asked my security guards to come at 2:30pm. At that time, I got a call on my phone that a team of Rajasthan police have come with an arrest warrant against me. I went to the house of a karyakarta in Thaltej," said Togadia.

Upon learning from the Rajasthan home minister that no such team has been sent, Togadia switched off his phones.

"I got in touch with advocates who advised me to be appear before a court in Jaipur. At around 3pm, I got into an autorickshaw alone from Thaltej to go to the airport to take a flight to Jaipur. I pulled a shawl over my face to ensure I would not be recognised by cops. I suddenly felt unwell, was giddy and asked the rickshaw driver to take me to Dhanvantari hospital in Bapunagar. After that I don't remember anything. At around midnight, when I regained consciousness, I was here," said Togadia.

While narrating the sequence of events, the emotions got the better of this firebrand leader and he was seen sobbing midway through the press briefing.
New Delhi: The Congress on Monday asked BJP to appreciate humour in politics, and said there was nothing vicious or malafide in the video put out by it that made fun of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for hugging world leaders.

"I think it is time that we started appreciating the virtues of humour in politics. I think it is time that we stop tilting at windmills. Whatever the view depicts is nothing but a sense of humour and a coining of words," Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi said when asked about BJP taking strong objection to the tweet.

"Puncturing of pomposity with humour is very important," he said.

The Congress leader also said the content cannot be said by any stretch of perverse or normal imagination to be vicious or in any sense meant to create a malafide intent.

"I will say that certain sense of humour should not escape us and that is all that depicts," he said.

The Congress had on Sunday put out a tweet along with a video mocking Modi for hugging world leaders while carrying the hashtag "Hugplomacy" on its official twitter handle.

"With Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu visiting India, we look forward to more hugs from PM Modi! #Hugplomacy," the Congress had said in the tweet.

The tweet came hours after Modi received Netanyahu at the airport, setting aside protocol, and embraced him as he deplaned.

The Congres on Monday put out another tweet that said: "Does the 'shah of shahs' not take his criticism even jokingly." It that carried a cartoon of Modi, along with top BJP leaders Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitley.

In yet another tweet, the Congress highlighted the five "U-turns" made by Modi on issues like Aadhaar, FDI and ties with Pakistan and China, before and after he became prime minister.

Union Human Resource Development minister and senior BJP leader Prakash Javadekar had reacted strongly to Sunday's tweet, saying it showed the Congress's lack of political sensibility.

"What they have tweeted shows their immaturity and lack of political sensibility. We condemn this. I hope wisdom prevails on them some day," Javadekar had said.

He said the Congress lacke concrete issues, and since it cannot defeat the prime minister electorally, it posted such a tweet.

"This not only insults our prime minister but also the guest (Netanyahu). The Congress should not only withdraw the tweet but also issue an apology for it," he said.

BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said the Congress consistently abusued the prime minister and that the tweet was "appalling and unpalatable".
Hyderabad: Soon after the Centre announced that it would end Haj subsidy from this year as part of its agenda to empower minorities without appeasement, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi attacked the Narendra Modi government and asked it to end the Hindu appeasement politics too.

Owaisi said the government should walk the talk and allocate Rs 20,000 crore for scholarships for Muslim girls in the upcoming budget session. He also challenged the government to withdraw all subsidy given to Hindu pilgrims as well.

He said he was not against the decision, and in fact welcomed it, but there should be no double standards. Owaisi has been demanding that Haj subsidy be removed and used for Muslim girls education since 2006.

Haj subsidy is merely Rs 200 crore. BJP called it appeasement. I ask BJP, the PM and RSS that if Muslim Haj subsidy is appeasement, what about Kumbh Mela? The government had allocated Rs 1,150 crore when Kumbh Mela was held in 2014, he said.

Will BJP tell the Yogi government, which is painting everything saffron, including Haj House, to stop Rs 800 crore for pilgrimage to Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, and Rs 1.5 lakh to each Manasarovar yatri? Owaisi asked.

He also pointed out that the Haryana government had given Rs 1 crore to disgraced godman Ram Rahim Singhs Dera Sacha Sauda.

Was it for electoral appeasement?, he asked, adding that Modi government had also given a grant of Rs 100 crore to Madhya Pradesh government for Simhastha Maha Kumbh. Was this not appeasement? he asked.

Rajasthan government allocated Rs 38.91 crores in 2017-18 for Devasthan department. The previous government had allocated Rs 26 crore for temple renovation and training of Hindu priests. Is this not appeasement and vote bank politics?

Owaisi also did not spare the Congress. Congress is in power in Karnataka. In 2015, the government there said it would give Rs 20,000 to anyone who goes on char dham yatra. They are doing Janeyudhari politics. Will they end? he asked.
Ahmedabad: He went missing on Monday, was found later in an Ahmedabad hospital the same day and on Tuesday in a press conference alleged that attempts were being made to silence his voice. Soon after people were lining up to meet Vishwa Hindu Parishad's international president Pravin Togadia.

Among the notable visitors were the Congress' Arjun Modhvadia, Patidar leader Hardik Patel and retired Gujarat IPS officer DG Vanzara.

The Congress has been extremely critical of leaders like Togadia over the past several years and Modhvadia's visit raised several eyebrows.

Speaking to News18, Arjun Modhvadia said: "This visit was only on humanitarian grounds because he is not keeping well and unlike the BJP which has a culture of eliminating people who do not fall in line, the Congress believes that nobody who is against you is anti-national."

Curiously, senior Congress leaders, like Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee president Bharatsinh Solanki and AICC secretary in-charge of Gujarat Ashok Gehlot also echoed the same sentiment.

Soon after, Hardik Patel, whose Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) extended support to Congress during the recent Gujarat Assembly elections, reached the hospital to meet Togadia, who is also a Patidar.

"Hardik Patel said that Dr Pravin Togadia is being targeted because he has been critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah. It is a known fact that the BJP and RSS leadership were not in favour of Dr Togadia being re-elected as the international president of the VHP in Bhubaneswar a fortnight ago... There ought to be an independent investigation into the allegations that Dr Pravin Togadia has made," Hardik Patel said.

Togadia, during his press conference, had alleged that "people do not want me to talk of Hindutva and Ram Mandir" and that a conspiracy to eliminate him was in the works.

"When the appropriate time comes, I will state who wants to silence my voice. I will give proof," said Togadia.

Retired IPS officer D G Vanzara said that the contribution of the VHP leader for the cause of Hindutva has been immense and the state government ought to properly investigate the allegations made by him.

The BJP refused to be drawn into any controversy and played it straight.

"The matter is being investigated by the police. The outcome of the investigations will be conveyed to you by the security agencies," said state BJP President Jitu Vaghani.
New Delhi: Social activist Anna Hazare on Tuesday said he would ask volunteers joining his new movement to submit affidavits to the effect that they will not join politics in future and remain dedicated to social causes.

Arvind Kejriwal had made me a promise before the 2011 anti-corruption movement that he will never join politics  but he formed his party. Had there been such an affidavit, he would never have become the Chief Minister, Hazare told the media while talking about his protest here on March 23 for remunerative crop prices and a strong Lokpal.

He said the affidavits will include conditions that the volunteers will never join any political party or contest any election.

We want untainted and dedicated persons to join our movement. We will ask them to sign affidavits to ensure that only honest people join us. No issues if the number of such persons is less.

The social activist said that if one dared to join any political party after signing the affidavit, he would be taken to court. He refused to comment on the controversy regarding Rajya Sabha nominations by the Aam Admi Party (AAP), saying it was the partys internal matter.

Hazare said he had nothing to do with disgruntled AAP leader Kumar Vishwas as he had also joined politics. Hazare said he toured several states in the last one month to understand various social and agrarian issues.

I held public meetings in Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Karnataka. I also spoke to our volunteers about the preparations for the protest rally on March 23, he said.

He said he will visit the remaining states in the next two months. Hazare said the government should ensure remunerative prices for agricultural produce and pensions for farmers.
Bengaluru: A pre-poll survey leaked to the media by unknown people has left the ruling Congress and main opposition BJP in Karnataka both worried and fuming. But it has made the third player in the state, Janata Dal (Secular), pleased.

The survey, conducted by a little known poll agency called CHS, strongly predicted a hung assembly and claimed both Congress and BJP should bin their current strategies and work hard in the next three to four months if they want to bolt ahead of the other.

It has given 77-81 seats to Congress, 73-76 seats to BJP and a whopping 64-66 seats to JD(S) in the 224-member Assembly. This prediction was sent to several WhatsApp groups that also feature politicians on Sunday.

The agency claimed that it had surveyed 2,000 people in each constituency, making it a mammoth exercise. And it had some interesting observations to share. According to the highlights shared by the agency, the lower castes are still with the Congress but the upper castes have moved away from it. It also said that the image of the ruling party has taken a beating in the last five years and CM Siddaramaiahs Ahinda policy is not yielding expected results.

It also revealed that BJPs Hindutva card is not accepted majority people and the saffron party is likely to finish second in the polls.

However, the most interesting observation was that announcing a Dalit chief minister before the elections could help the Congress gain some lost ground.

This observation made many in Congress and BJP suspect the hand of state Congress president Dr G Parameshwara behind the survey. A Dalit, Parameshwara has been KPCC president for the past eight years. He had lost the 2013 Assembly polls by a big margin.

His supporters had blamed Siddaramaiah for the defeat. Later, he became an MLC and held the home ministry portfolio for some time. According to insiders, he is still in the race for the CM post and wants to play the Dalit card closer to the election.

Parameshwara strongly denied his involvement in the survey and alleged that some anti-Congress elements were behind it. Speaking to News18, he said he had already filed a case against the CHS and unknown people with the cyber cell of police. I suspect the involvement of some miscreants. I have nothing to do with it. The Congress is comfortably winning Karnataka Assembly polls. I have asked party people not to worry about such surveys, he said.

The Siddaramaiah camp claimed that the chief minister was initially taken aback by the findings and was convinced about the possibility of foul play only after the KPCC chief spoke to him denying his involvement in it.

KPCC representatives file a complaint against the people behind the leaked survey with the cyber cell of police. (Photo: CNN-News18)

Among those who received the survey on WhatsApp, some said the findings were shared with them by the JDS media managers and fingers are also being pointed at the Gowdas. A senior journalist who has been covering the JDS for decades told News18 on condition of anonymity that it could be the handiwork of the Gowdas to create a huge rift between OBC leader Siddaramaiah and Dalit Parameshwara by raising the bogey of a Dalit CM.

There is one more reason for it. All pre-poll surveys are giving the JDS less than 30 seats. It has upset the Gowdas. This survey gives them almost 70 seats. Who will benefit from it? he asked.

Speaking to News18, JDS chief and former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda rubbished these claims. He said, We have nothing to do with it. Entire state knows that relationship between CM and KPCC chief is not good. No need to conduct a survey for that. Actually the survey has given us lesser seats. We will be the single largest party this time.

The BJP also trashed the survey. Its CM face, BS Yeddyurappa, said that BJP would come to power on its own and there was no need of a survey to tell that.

The leaked survey though is still being shared on social media with all kinds of comments and conspiracy theories. A classic case of Whodunit?
Egypts minister of religious endowments told MPs on Monday that all precautionary measures are being taken to ensure that atheism does not become a phenomenon in the country

In a statement before parliaments religious affairs committee on Monday evening, Egypts Minister of Religious Endowments Mokhtar Gomaa said his ministry is taking steps on all fronts to make Egypt immune to "atheist, heretical and extremist ideas and to contain the spread of atheism in Egypt."

During a session to respond to an inquiry on the spread of atheism in Egypt, Gomaa affirmed that the ministry has already developed a comprehensive strategy to contain the spread of inappropriate ideas.

Gomaa said his ministrys strategy is based on fighting the spread of atheist and heretical ideas in media outlets and via online social-media networks like Facebook and Twitter.

We are taking precautionary measures to stem these ideas, Gomaa told MPs. But let me say that, in spite all of the talk on this issue, I want to stress that atheism has not become a phenomenon in Egypt.

This does not mean that Egypt is almost free from atheists, he continued. "No, we have some atheists and some individual atheist ideas, but we should not allow this to spread to form a public phenomenon.

According to the minister, All efforts should be mobilized to fight irresponsibility and deviation in our society, because these are the ones which lead to the spread of atheism. Irresponsibility begets atheism, and we should fight both, because they are two faces of the same coin.

He insisted that the mere appearance of atheists gives them a degree of power and influence, and it was now necessary to take the precautionary measure of completely preventing them from appearing on television channels, thereby preventing their heretical statements from spreading.

Gomaa urged parliaments committee of religious affairs and the committee of culture, media and antiquities to create a code of ethics with the owners of television channels in order to prevent atheists and heretics from spreading their ideas.

The minister said, Egyptians, whether they are Muslims or Christians, are religious by nature, and so they reject atheism.

Egypt is the country of Al-Azhar and it has mosques with 120,000 minarets, and so it is quite difficult to find an atheist phenomenon in our nation, he said.

On another front, Gomaa said the ministry has issued a book entitled Towards a Rational Discourse, which is "based on fighting extremist, takfiri and atheist thoughts. We aim to distribute this book among young people and aim to convince them in a logical and rational way of the dangers of espousing takfiri and atheist ideas.

We also aim to publish this book on social networking websites in order to prevent individual atheist ideas from turning into a public phenomenon, he said.

Anti-atheism legislation

Gomaas statement came during a debate on an anti-atheism legislation proposal by Omar Hamroush, secretary general of the Religious Affairs Committee, who said he is afraid that atheism has become a phenomenon in Egypt.

It is just as dangerous as the phenomenon of takfirism and radicalism, and we should do our best to fight both, said Hamroush.

According to Hamroush, Atheists are people who like bizarre and petit ideas.

"They are people without culture or deep thoughts and our responsibility is to fight them, said Hamroush.

Deputy Minister Gaber Tayie told MPs that the ministry is closely observing the spread of atheist and extremist ideas in media outlets and in schools and universities.

In some elementary schools, we were shocked when we learned that some students refused to shake hands with the deputy of Cairo governor because she was a woman, and that a young girl refused to shake hands with the governor because he is a man, said Tayie.

This was very alarming to us, and we decided at once to review what is going on in the minds of young students in these schools, because this behavior reflects the spread of extremist ideas at an early age, Tayie added.

Tayie said, The Ministry of Endowments has also instructed clerics to devote the Friday sermons to standing up to atheist and extremist ideas, not to mention that we are currently targeting as many as 589 schools, including 11,000 students, across Egypt to contain irreligious ideas and fight extremism.

Osama El-Abd, the head of parliaments religious affairs committee, said the spread of Western liberal thoughts in Egypt via television and internet channels in recent years has led to the spread of atheist ideas among young people.

Young people who suffer from psychological problems can easily fall prey to such thoughts, said Al-Abd. But I do not agree that atheism has become a phenomenon in Egypt.

It is a passing cloud and not a phenomenon, and we should conduct a dialogue with young people to rid their minds of any atheist, extremist and bizarre ideas and thoughts, he said.

Late last year, a draft-law proposal from some MPs aiming to criminalise "atheism" sparked controversy, meeting with opposition from among Egyptian intellectuals and members of the general public.



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New Delhi/Agartala: The CPI-M on Monday, citing media reports, said it was "shocking" that National Security Adviser Ajit Doval attended a meeting at Home Minister Rajnath Singh's house to discuss the election strategy in Tripura.

"It has been reported in sections of the media that a meeting was held at the residence of Rajnath Singh attended by BJP and RSS leaders to discuss the forthcoming elections in Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland," a CPI-M statement said.

"Some of the media have also reported that Doval also attended the meeting. If correct, this is a shocking violation of norms and serious misconduct," the Communist Party of India-Marxist said.

"How can a senior government functionary like the NSA be present in a meeting to discuss the BJP's election campaign? The Home Minister must immediately clarify."

In Agartala, CPI-M state Secretary Bijan Dhar said Rajnath Singh on Sunday held the meeting with Bharatiya Janata Party General Secretary Ram Madhav and senior Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader Krishna Gopal, among others.

In a letter to Chief Election Commissioner A.K. Joti, he said Doval was also present in the meeting.

Dhar, also a CPI-M Central Committee member, said the presence of any person holding a very important position like that of NSA is not only undesirable and objectionable, it is a glaring instance of blatant misuse of administration by the ruling BJP.
Dhaka/Cox'S Bazaar: Bangladesh said on Tuesday it would complete the process of returning within two years many of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who had fled a conflict in Myanmar, following a meeting of the neighbours.

The bilateral repatriation plan, which Myanmar said would begin next Tuesday, was greeted with some skepticism from NGOs, who said it did not adequately address questions of safety, livelihoods and permanent resettlement.

A statement by the Bangladesh foreign ministry said the return effort envisages "considering the family as a unit," with Myanmar providing temporary shelter for those returning before rebuilding houses for them.

Bangladesh would set up five transit camps to send Rohingyas to two reception centres on the Myanmar side of the border, the statement said.

"Myanmar has reiterated its commitment to stop (the) outflow of Myanmar residents to Bangladesh," it said.

The statement also called for repatriating orphans and "children born out of unwarranted incidence", a reference to cases of rape resulting in pregnancy, a Bangladesh foreign ministry official said.

The rape of Rohingya women by Myanmar's security forces was widespread, according to interviews with women conducted at displacement camps by U.N. medics and activists. The military denies it was involved in any sexual assaults.

The crisis erupted after Rohingya insurgent attacks on security posts on Aug. 25 in the western state of Rakhine triggered a fierce military response that the United Nations denounced as ethnic cleansing. Some 650,000 people fled the violence.

The military denies ethnic cleansing, saying its security forces had mounted legitimate counter-insurgency clearance operations.

VERIFICATION PROCESS

The meeting in Myanmar's capital Naypyitaw was the first for a joint working group set up to hammer out the details of the November repatriation agreement.

The Myanmar government did not immediately issue its own statement after the meeting concluded on Tuesday.

Ko Ko Naing, director general of Myanmars Relief and Resettlement Department in the Ministry of Social Welfare, told Reuters by telephone that Myanmar had signed the agreement with Bangladesh and was aiming to start the repatriation process by Jan. 23.

Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay told Reuters last week the returnees could apply for citizenship "after they pass the verification process".

A Myanmar agency set up to oversee repatriation said last week two temporary "repatriation and assessment camps" and one other site had been set up to accommodate returnees.

Myint Kyaing, permanent secretary at Myanmar's Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population, told Reuters this month Myanmar would begin processing at least 150 people a day through each of the two camps by Jan. 23.

Left out of the talks between Myanmar and Bangladesh were the fears and concerns of the refugees themselves, "as if they are an inert mass of people who will go where and when they are told," Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told Reuters in an email.

"Where are considerations for protection of the Rohingya from Myanmar security forces who months ago were raping and killing them? How come the discussions ignore the deprivation of rights of people held in indefinite detention, which is what these so-called temporary accommodations may become?," Robertson asked.

'LIVING LIKE PRISONERS'

A group of refugees at the Kutupalong Rohingya camp expressed doubt about the two temporary settlement camps Myanmar has agreed to establish on its side of the border.

Mohammad Farouk, 20, who arrived in Bangladesh from Maungdaw following the Aug. 25 attacks, said exchanging one camp for another made little difference - except "the camps in Myanmar will be far worse, because we will be confined there and there will be a risk to our lives.

Another resident of the Kutupalong camp compared the new transit camps to ones set up near the Rakhine state capital of Sittwe following bouts of violence in previous years "where people are living like prisoners.

First, ask the military to give those Rohingya their homes and property back, then talk to us about returning, said the Rohingya refugee who did not want to be identified.

Some said the kind of violence they witnessed toward their community in Myanmar made it hard for them to trust the military. Even if I dont get food or anything else here, at least there is safety. I wont feel safe if I go back to Myanmar, said Rashid Ahmed, 33.

Noor Alam, 37, who came to Kutupalong five months back, wondered if he could ever get a job in Myanmar. They dont even call us Rohingya. Until they consider us citizens we wont go back.

Some young men in the camp worried they might be arrested on accusations of terrorism if they returned.

Camp conditions in Bangladesh are dire enough, but more than 520,000 Rohingya children are at even greater risk ahead of the cyclone season that generally begins in April, the United Nations Children's Fund said on Tuesday.

"Hundreds of thousands of children are already living in horrific conditions, and they will face an even greater risk of disease, flooding, landslides and further displacement, said Edouard Beigbeder, UNICEF Representative in Bangladesh.

Nearly 1 million Rohingya live in Bangladesh, including those who came after previous displacements dating back to the 1990s.
Ramallah: Palestinian leaders voted on Monday to call for the suspension of recognition of Israel in a move with potentially deep implications as they met in response to US President Donald Trump's declaration of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

While withdrawing the Palestine Liberation Organisation's recognition of Israel could spark international backlash, it was unclear whether the vote was binding.

A previous vote by the same Palestinian Central Council, a high-ranking arm of the PLO, in 2015 to suspend security coordination with Israel was never implemented. That vote was also reaffirmed on Monday.

However, even if the move goes no further, the vote was another expression of Palestinian fury over Trump's Jerusalem declaration and what they see as the White House's attack on their long bid for statehood.

On Sunday as he opened the meeting, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, who voted in favour of the suspension, called Trump's peace efforts the "slap of the century."

The vote ordered the Palestine Liberation Organisation to suspend its recognition of Israel until it "recognises the state of Palestine", cancels its annexation of east Jerusalem and stops settlement activity, a statement said.

The PLO is considered the official representative of the Palestinians internationally and formalised its recognition of Israel in 1993.

In a statement, the delegates also backed comments on Sunday by Abbas that the Oslo peace accords of the early 1990s, which form the basis of the Palestinians' relations with Israel, were "finished."

Abbas had said that Israel had ended the accords through its actions, referring to activities seen as eroding the possibility of a two-state solution such as persistent settlement building.

Removing the 'mask'?

There was no immediate Israeli reaction to the vote, but earlier Monday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Abbass comments had torn off his mask as a supposed moderate.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip and does not recognise Israel, appeared to welcome the vote but said in a statement that the "real test" would be "to implement it effectively on the ground and put in place the necessary mechanisms."

The rare meeting of the PCC was called after Trump's controversial December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Palestinians want the annexed eastern sector of the city as the capital of their future state, and Abbas has said Trump's stance means the United States can no longer be the mediator in peace talks with Israel.

The US president has sought to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table, with talks stalled since 2014.

Speaking late Sunday at the opening of the council, which brought together Palestinians from multiple political parties, Abbas told delegates: "We said 'no' to Trump, 'we will not accept your project'."

"The deal of the century is the slap of the century and we will not accept it," the 82-year-old leader added, referring to Trump's pledge to reach the "ultimate deal".

He instead called for an internationally mediated peace process.

Threat to cut aid

The Palestinians' relations with the US leadership have deteriorated rapidly since Trump's election.

He came to power promising to lead the most pro-Israel administration in history, but also to pursue a peace deal.

His envoys, including senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, had been shuttling between the two sides in search of common ground.

But Trump also infuriated the Palestinians by refusing to commit to the idea of an independent Palestinian state, and recently threatened to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid.

The Jerusalem announcement prompted the Palestinians to freeze ties with the administration, and Abbas is expected to shun Vice President Mike Pence when he visits the region next week.

On Sunday night, Abbas slammed the US ambassadors to Israel and the United Nations, David Friedman and Nikki Haley, calling them a "disgrace".

Both Trump appointees have been strong supporters of Israel, with Friedman having backed Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

An indignant Abbas also said that Trump had accused them of refusing to engage in peace negotiations.

"May God demolish your house. When did we refuse?" he said, using a common Arabic curse.

He also said the Oslo accords that led to the creation of his Palestinian Authority and envisioned a final resolution to the conflict were in effect finished.

"I am saying that Oslo, there is no Oslo. Israel ended Oslo," Abbas said.

In response to Abbas's comments, the European Union said its position on the conflict remains "based on the Oslo accords".

"A negotiated two-state solution which fulfils the aspirations of both sides, Israel and Palestine, is the only realistic way of bringing the lasting peace and security that both Israelis and Palestinians deserve," European Commission spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic told reporters in Brussels.

France, which organised an international conference in support of the two-state solution a year ago, issued a similar reaction, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow "understands" Abbas's anger.

"For years they made concessions without receiving anything in return," Lavrov said at an annual press conference in Moscow.

"We constantly hear that the US is about to unveil an important deal that would satisfy all sides. We have not seen this kind of document."
Brussels: The top US military officer, Marine General Joseph Dunford, said on Monday he was committed to the US-Pakistan relationship, which has been strained in recent weeks as Washington piles pressure on Islamabad to crack down on militants.

"Do we agree on everything right now? No we don't. But are we committed to a more effective relationship with Pakistan? We are. And I'm not giving up on that," Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a small group of reporters during a trip to Brussels.

The United States has long blamed militant safe-havens in Pakistan for prolonging the war in neighboring Afghanistan, giving insurgents, including from the Haqqani network, a place to plot attacks and rebuild their forces.

Still, Pakistan is a crucial gateway for US military supplies destined for US and other troops fighting a 16-year-old war in Afghanistan.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump's administration, frustrated over Pakistan's failure to do more to combat militants, announced a plan to suspend up to roughly $2 billion in US security assistance.

That triggered outcry in Islamabad. Pakistan's military said its army chief told US General Joseph Votel, head of the US military's Central Command, that Pakistan "felt betrayed" by US criticism.

In a possible sign of efforts to improve relations, Alice Wells, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, met with Pakistani Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua in Pakistan on Monday.

A statement from Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said Wells "acknowledged Pakistan's efforts in eradicating terrorism" and "underlined the need for strengthening intelligence cooperation" to fight terrorism.

Dunford was careful in his public remarks but made clear that Votel would continue to lead the military-to-military discussions. Dunford said he and US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would also contribute to that dialogue.

"I'm not going to talk about the relationship in public because I'm committed to try to improve the relationship and I do believe that the military-to-military dialogue led by General Votel, with occasional reinforcement from Secretary Mattis, myself and others, is the right approach," Dunford said.
Dubai: The United Arab Emirates said on Monday Qatari air force jets had twice intercepted its civilian aircraft during routine flights to Bahrain, but Qatar called the claim "completely untrue".

Qatar said the allegation, reported by the UAE's state news agency WAM, was intended to divert attention from what it said were violations by Emirati military aircraft of its airspace.

The UAE is one of four Arab countries, along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, that imposed travel, diplomatic and trade sanctions on Qatar in June 2017, accusing it of supporting terrorism.

Qatar has denied the charges and accused the four countries of trying to make it conform to their foreign policy positions.

Qatar's rivals have banned Qatari aircraft from their airspace but Doha has not reciprocated with a ban of its own.

The UAE General Civil Aviation Authority said two Emirati airliners, carrying 277 passengers, had encountered the jets from Qatar, which lies between the UAE and Bahrain, while en route to Bahrain, according to WAM.

One of the planes was intercepted at 10:30 a.m., and the second at 11:05 a.m. at between 9,000 and 10,000 feet. The report did not specify a date, but appeared to mean the incidents happened on Monday.

"Bahraini radars have tracked the Qatari military planes while intercepting the Emirati civilian aircraft," WAM quoted civil aviation director Saif al-Suwaidi as saying.

"The incident could also be seen by the naked eye by both the crew and passengers, which constitutes a clear threat to the lives of innocent civilians," he added.

The UAE condemned the Qatari action as "a serious and renewed breach of international conventions and the safety of civil aircraft traffic".

The UAE Civil Aviation Authority did not say which airlines were involved, but Bahrain's state news agency BNA said the first flight was from Emirates. The airline is owned by the government of Dubai, one of seven emirates in the UAE federation. It gave no details of the second flight.

Qatar's foreign ministry said the UAE allegation followed incidents on Dec. 21 and Jan. 3 in which UAE military aircraft had violated its airspace.

Ministry spokeswoman Lulwa Rashed al-Khater said Qatar planned to take legal action against the UAE over the incidents.

"It seems that the Civil Aviation Authority in the UAE, by publishing false claims, is trying to pre-empt events and cover over news of the Emirati plane penetration of Qatari airspace," Khater said in the statement, posted on the ministry's website.

On Friday, Qatar said it had filed a complaint with the United Nations about the alleged violation of its airspace on Dec. 21. The UAE denied the allegation.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates: The UAE will lodge a complaint with the International Civil Aviation Organisation after Qatari jets came within little more than three kilometres of Emirati passenger flights, its civil aviation chief said on Tuesday.

"Today we will file our complaint to the International Civil Aviation Organization about the two serious incidents, along with the evidence that we've gathered, and ask for the intervention of the council to stop Qatar from repeating the act," Saif al-Suwaidi, head of the general civil aviation authority, told AFP.

The United Arab Emirates said on Monday that Qatari fighter jets had "intercepted" two passenger flights headed for Bahrain, drawing a swift denial from Gulf rival Qatar.

Abu Dhabi is also looking at re-routing flights to Bahrain to avoid Qatari airspace, as a feud between Qatar and its Gulf neighbours escalates.

"We are now studying changing the route to another one which is very far from Qatar," Suwaidi said.

"However that will take some time as we have to reach an agreement with Bahrain".

Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have no diplomatic ties with Qatar, which lies between the two Gulf allies and is banned from using their airspace.

In June, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt broke diplomatic relations and most trade links with Qatar, accusing it of ties to Islamist extremists and Saudi arch-rival Iran.

Qatar denies the allegations and and accuses the four states of aiming to incite regime change.
Islamabad: The US has been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat to it and Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan has said.

He also said that it is time for a courteous yet "ruthlessly candid dialogue" with the US "with everything on the table" to remove all misunderstandings between Islamabad and Washington.

Reading out a policy statement on the government's foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly yesterday, he regretted that the US downplayed India's aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported today.

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US. "It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," the defence minister said.

Khan said that Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," he alleged. Pakistan accuses India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against it, a charge India has dismissed.

Khan alleged that "India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan" and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

"India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour," he claimed, adding that the unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace.

The minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan. He said Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation 'Zarb-i-Azb' and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

He urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001. He also criticised the US for not pursuing internal reconciliation in Afghanistan, which had now become a safe haven for terrorists.
Halle Berry arrives at the 49th annual NAACP Image Awards at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on January 15, 2018, in Pasadena, California. (Image: AP)
Governor Hesham Abdel Baset is facing charges for reportedly accepting a bribe of EGP2 million from a businessman

Egypt's state security prosecutors have ordered the detention for four days of the governor of Menoufiya along with two businessmen on bribery charges.

Governor Hesham Abdel Baset was arrested on Sunday and faces charges of "requesting and receiving sums of money as bribery."

A source at the Administrative Control Authority (ACA), the country's anti-corruption body, told Ahram Arabic earlier this week that the authority has voice recordings confirming that the governor received a EGP2 million bribe (approximately $113,000) from a businessman to illegally allocate a plot of land to the latter.

The two other men, the businessman and his partner, face charges of "offering a bribe to a state employee."

An order has been issued for the detention of the trio for four days pending investigations.

ACA is in charge of fighting corruption and enforcing laws and regulations within state bodies.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi had stressed the country's efforts to combat corruption, urging that those involved in wrongdoing must be held accountable.

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Egypt's Al-Azhar  the world's foremost institution of Sunni Islamic learning  is holding an international conference on Wednesday that will be attended by officials from 86 countries to discuss the issue of Jerusalem.

The conference, which will be held on 17 and 18 January at Al-Azhar Conference Centre in Cairo, will highlight a number of issues including raising awareness about the issue of Jerusalem and emphasising its Arab and Islamic identity, according to a statement by Al-Azhar.

The event, which comes under the auspices of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, will be held nearly one month after a decision by US President Donald Trump decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

The conference will be attended by the head of Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church Pope Tawadros II, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as well as the heads of Arab Islamic and Christian organisations.

The conference will tackle three main themes; affirming Jerusalems Arab status, raising awareness about the Jerusalem issue, and highlighting the international community's responsibility regarding the holy city.

The event, which will be led by Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayyeb, is expected to conclude with several recommendations that support the Palestinian cause and stress the rights of Palestinians to establish an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital.

The conference will also discuss preserving Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem in addition to a number of measures and decisions that will educate young people about the issue of Jerusalem, its history and its holy sites, the statement added.

Following Trump's decision on Jerusalem, which sparked protests in several Arab countries, Egypt presented a draft resolution to the Security Council on behalf of Arab countries that would have required the US to reverse its decision.

The resolution was vetoed by the US, though it gained support from all 14 other members of the Security Council, including key US allies Britain, France, Italy, Japan and Ukraine.

A total of 128 countries later voted in the UN General Assembly in favour of a resolution condemning Trump's decision and calling on the US to reverse the move.

Egypt has consistently maintained its full support for a two-state solution along the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state.

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A few words on the difficulty of voting while black.

As we mark what would have been his 89th birthday, it seems fitting to recall that Martin Luther King spoke to that difficulty in a 1957 speech whose words ring relevant 61 years later. All types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, lamented King.

As he saw it, neither political party was blameless. He castigated Democrats for capitulating to the rabid racists of their Southern wing  the so-called Dixiecrats  and blasted Republicans for caving in to right-wing reactionary Northerners.

Both political parties, he said, have betrayed the cause of justice.

While there are no more Dixiecrats and the right-wing reactionaries to whom the GOP kowtows are more likely to be found in the South and Midwest now than in the North, it is noteworthy that Kings central point remains valid. Neither party covers itself with glory where African Americans are concerned. To the contrary, African-American issues  police reform, job discrimination, mass incarceration  routinely go unaddressed by both.

And here, someone will demand to know how it is, if both parties share blame, black voters remain overwhelmingly loyal to one of them, reliably casting about 90 percent of their presidential ballots for Democrats. But it isnt that hard to understand.

Imagine you have two suitors. One of them tends to ignore you, often seems ashamed to be seen with you, but occasionally brings you flowers. The other beats you.

If you must date one, is it any wonder youd choose the former?

So Republicans, who pioneered the Southern strategy, opened the 1980 election praising states rights, demonized Willie Horton, gutted the Voting Rights Act, issued coded appeals to white racial resentment, demeaned the first African-American president, and were hit just last year by federal judges for a photo I.D. law designed with surgical precision to stop black North Carolinians from voting, have no standing to ask black people, Why dont you like us?

Unfortunately, the GOPs resort to these conniving methods has left Democrats no meaningful competition for the black vote  and where competition is absent, neglect invariably flourishes. Although they occasionally come bearing flowers  e.g., Barack Obamas quiet dismantling of the War on Drugs  Democrats are far too likely to ignore black issues or, at best, pay lip service to them. And they are forever stepping over black voters while giving the high sign to white ones, like a married man winking and mouthing call me to some other woman while his wife is standing there.

Witness Democrat Doug Jones, elected to the Senate in December over that odor in a cowboy hat, Republican Roy Moore. According to election postmortems, Jones owed the upset in large part to African-American voters, women in particular. Yet days later, there he was on cable news, pivoting to the right, warning that he would side with Republicans on certain issues. So much for gratitude to the voters who gave him his victory.

But one gets used to being shoved aside when voting while black.

Indeed, it says something that presidential candidates routinely spend more time discussing the concerns of 50,000 coal miners than those of 43 million black people. What it says is that African-American votes, like African-American lives, count for less.

Give us the ballot, demanded King in 1957. And yes, much has changed since then.

But in some sense, were still waiting.

Pitts is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald. Email him at lpitts@miamiherald.com.
Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry will hold talks with his Ethiopian counterpart Workneh Gebeyehu in Cairo on Wednesday as part of meetings by a high-level joint cooperation committee.

The ministerial talks of the sixth meeting of the joint Egyptian-Ethiopian Higher Committee will set the stage for discussions between Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn this week.

The last meeting of the committee was held three years ago.

The new round will tackle regional and international political developments as well as discuss means of boosting bilateral economic, social and artistic ties, Egypt's foreign ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

The talks will also involve the signing of multiple memorandums of understanding, with officials from the ministries of trade, investment, irrigation, tourism and electricity to attend.

Tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia heightened in recent years over Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam, which Egypt worries could reduce its share of Nile water.

Ethiopia, which aims to become Africas biggest power exporter, says the dam will not have a negative impact on Egypt.

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Zimbabwes government has injected $2 million into David Whitehead to resume operations.



David Whitehead, a large textile firm that used to employ 2 500 people in Chegutu, 100km southwest of Harare, collapsed in 2011 after being placed under judicial management since 2006.







A deal had been reached with Zimbabwe Asset Management Company (Zamco)  a special purpose vehicle to buy secured bad debt from the banking sector  allowing David Whitehead to resume operations.





We are going to make a statement jointly, myself, Zamco and workers of David Whitehead, Chegutu West Zanu PF MP Dexter Nduna told the Daily News.





Zamco has given $2 million to David Whitehead. The government has ploughed more than $100 million in the cotton industry and they have given $2 million to ailing David Whitehead. We are expecting the company to be reopened soon.





The resumption of David Whitehead operations would create employment. The benefits of the reopening of this company are expected to be felt in the communities in Chegutu and Kadoma.





David Whitehead has been under judicial management since 2006. A new investor came on board in 2008 promising to inject millions.





By the time the investor exited in 2010, the textile giant had lost more than what was injected.

David Whitehead used to produce about 20 million metres of fabric per year while directly employing 2 500 workers and thousands in down and upstream industries.





Zimbabwes textile sector used to be one of the countrys major employers, providing jobs to about 51 000 people at its peak.





Job losses in the clothing industry between 2009 and 2012 totalled 8 752, or 65 percent after dollarisation.





The textile industry fared even worse than the clothing industry during the same period with such giants as David Whitehead, once the sectors largest firm, Cone Textiles or Modzone, Merlin and Cotton Printers all collapsing. Zimbabwe has major competitive advantages over other textile manufacturing countries.





These include proximity to the industrys primary raw material cotton, in addition to skilled labour and a highly literate population. Daily News
A Norton woman lost $26 000 to a deregistered lawyer, Tichaona Mawere, who never attended any court session and always left her outside the court premises.



The woman whose name was not mentioned in court, realised that she was duped after her house and property was advertised in a local newspaper by a micro-finance company claiming she had failed to clear a debt.



Mawere was issued with a warrant of arrest on Wednesday after he failed to turn up for the case. Mawere of Goodhope, Westgate, Harare, was deregistered by the Law Society of Zimbabwe in 2012. He is facing fraud charges.





The prosecutor Ms Linda Gadzikwa is alleging that sometime in 2010, the farmer borrowed $3 000 from Yambukai micro-finance.





It is alleged that she repaid the money in full, but received a notice in 2012 of intention to attach her property on allegations of failing to repay the loan.





It is alleged that the farmer approached Mushangwe and Associates for representation in the matter. Mawere who was eavesdropping on the conversation later approached the farmer promising to help her. He misrepresented that he was a practicing lawyer and was in a position to represent her provided that she pays $26 000 as legal fees.





It is alleged that the farmer approached her church the United Family International Church led by Prophet Emmanuel Makandiwa for assistance with the legal fees and was given the $26 000.

She gave the money to Mawere, the court heard.

It is alleged that the farmer also gave all the receipts she had been issued after paying at Yambukai to Mawere as proof that she cleared the debt.





It is alleged that sometime in March 2016 and on different occasions Mawere, took the complainant to Harare Civil Court purporting that he was representing her.





The court heard that Mawere never represented the woman and never attended any court session. He always left the complainant outside the court premises and would later tell her to go home.

The offence came to light on July 11, 2014 when the complainant saw an advert in a local newspaper where Yambukai micro-finance was advertising her house and property. Herald
"We are getting towards important elections this year. I came here in 2008 when things were bad. I don't know where Masvingo had got this spirit and I came and sorted things out. I came back again in 2013 and led the campaign team and I moved around the province addressing rallies and the results were impressive and this saw the current Party president giving Masvingo the post of political commissar. I expect you to give Zanu PF all seats in Masvingo now that I am full time in politics," said Rugeje.
She Died on Vacation

in Mexico. From

There, It Gets Murky
At least 12 people are wounded after a knife attack on a school in the city of Perm in central Russia this morning. The New York Times reports that two masked teenagersone a current student of the school and the other a former studententered the back entrance of School 127 at about 10 this morning and broke into a fourth-grade classroom, where they proceeded to stab students and teachers. According to one witness, the teenagers said they were going to "slaughter everyone." Twelve people were taken to the hospital with stab wounds. Two students and one teacher suffered serious wounds. The two attackers were wounded as well.

The motive for the attack is unclear, as are many of the details. Initial reports said the boys started a knife fight in the hallway before the entering the classroom. Some witnesses said the two teenagers attacked the teacher and only slashed at students when they tried to help her, BBC reports. Another witness said one or both of the boys were angered by comments on social media. Police said in a statement that one of the assailants was a patient at a mental hospital. Investigators in the city 700 miles northeast of Moscow said they have detained the two suspects and that they have opened a criminal case, Reuters reports. (Read more knife attack stories.)
With Vice President Mike Pence sitting in the pews, a Maryland pastor denounced Donald Trump's vulgar description of African nations. Maurice Watson, pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Largo, delivered the sermon Sunday while Pence was visiting. Watson called Trump's remarksin which he reportedly used an obscenity to describe African nations and Haiti during an immigration discussion with Congressional leaders"dehumanizing" and "ugly." The pastor said "whoever made such a statement" is wrong and should be held accountable.

Watson said he felt "led by God to do it" and noted many of his congregants come from African nations. Worshippers stood and applauded as Watson spoke. WUSA-TV reports Pence became red-faced at times during the sermon, though Pence's office denied that in an email Monday to the Associated Press.

(Read more Mike Pence stories.)
The United Arab Emirates said on Monday Qatari air force jets had twice intercepted civilian Emirati aircraft during routine flights to Bahrain, state news agency WAM reported, amid a months-old feud between the Gulf Arab states.

Qatar denied as "completely untrue" the initial interception report, but did not immediately comment on the second.

The UAE is one of four Arab countries, along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, that imposed travel, diplomatic and trade sanctions on Qatar in June 2017, accusing Doha of supporting terrorism. Qatar has denied the charges.

Qatar's rivals banned Qatari aircraft from their air space though Doha did not reciprocate with a ban of its own.

The UAE Civil Aviation Authority said the two Emirati airliners encountered the jets from Qatar, which lies between the UAE and Bahrain, while en route to Bahrain. It condemned the Qatari action as "a serious and renewed breach of international conventions and the safety of civil aircraft traffic".

A Qatari official did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Sheikh Saif Bin Ahmed al-Thani, director of Qatar's government communications office, said on his official Twitter account that the first UAE charge, made earlier on Monday, was "completely untrue".

The Bahraini state news agency BNA said the first flight was from Emirates, which is owned by the Dubai government, but gave no details on the second flight.

On Friday, Qatar filed a complaint with the United Nations about an alleged violation of its air space in December by an Emirati military aircraft. Qatari authorities said the violation on Dec. 21, which the UAE denied, lasted one minute.

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It isn't often that a member of the U.S. Senate compares the president of the United States and the leader of his own party to Josef Stalin, but that's just what Jeff Flake did today, Politico reports. Appearing on MSNBC, the Arizona Republican said that Trump's description of the press as "the enemy of the people" is reminiscent of the Soviet dictator. "I'm saying he borrowed that phrase," Flake said. "It was popularized by Josef Stalin, used by Mao as well'enemy of the people'. It should be noted that Nikita Khrushchev, who followed Stalin, forbade its use, saying that was too loaded and that it maligned a whole group or class of people, and it shouldn't be done." Trump first used that description for the media on Twitter last February.

But Flake isn't content with just criticizing the president on the Sunday shows. Per CNN, he will be delivering a speech on the floor of the Senate Wednesday chiding the president for his attacks on the news media, calling them "an assault as unprecedented as it is unwarranted." "The free press is the despot's enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy," Flake will reportedly say. "When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn't suit him 'fake news,' it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press." Flake's speech is scheduled for the same day as Trump's "Fake News Awards," though there is some controversy about whether presenting those awards would put the president's staff in legal trouble. (Read more Jeff Flake stories.)
President Trump is accusing Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of misrepresenting the discussion on immigration during a recent meeting at the White House. And he says the Illinois senator is threatening prospects for a deal to protect certain immigrants, per the AP. Trump tweeted Monday: "Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting. Deals can't get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military." It's at this meeting last Thursday where Trump is said to have used a vulgarity to describe African countries.

Durbinthe only Democrat in attendancetold reporters that Trump made the comments that were attributed to him. Trump and fellow Republicans have disputed public accounts of the discussion. Some say Trump did not use the word. Recently some sources claimed the president used a different, but similar-sounding, vulgarity. Trump has said comments attributed to him weren't made.

(Read more Dick Durbin stories.)
An ordinary house in a California subdivision concealed a bizarre and disturbing case of torture and child abuse, police say. In a press release, the Riverside County Sheriff's Office says a 17-year-old girl called 911 early Sunday morning after escaping a home in Perris and told police her 12 siblings were being held captive by their parents. Police say that inside the residence, they found several malnourished and dirty children "shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings"and parents David and Louise Turpin were "unable to provide a logical reason" why they were restrained. Investigators initially thought the couple's 13 children were all juveniles, but they were shocked to discover that seven were adults and the oldest was 29.

David Turpin, 57, and Louise Turpin, 49, were arrested on charges of torture and child endangerment and are being held on a $9 million bond each, the Los Angeles Times reports. The 13 victimsthe youngest just 2 years oldwere hospitalized. Police say they gave them food after they said they were starving. Horrified neighbors tell the Press-Enterprise that they had no idea what was going on. Some didn't even know there were children in the house. A joint Facebook page shows the Turpins, accompanied by their children, renewing their wedding vows in Las Vegas. A 2011 bankruptcy filing seen by CNN states that David Turpin made $140,000 per year working as an engineer at Northrup Grumman. He is listed as principal of the Sandcastle Day School, a private school with just six students, at his Perris address, KTLA reports. (Read more child abuse stories.)
It's said to be "exceedingly rare," but a study in the BMJ Case Reports journal documents the case of a 34-year-old UK man who showed up at a Leicester hospital complaining he was having a hard time swallowing, and that he felt a "popping sensation" in his neck. After some prodding, doctors discovered the man had suppressed a sneeze by pinching his nose and clamping his mouth shut. That ended up rupturing his throat from the force of the stifled sneeze, rendering him voiceless and landing him in the hospital. Anthony Aymat, a London doctor not involved in the study, explains to the AP that sneezes can escape your body at 150mph or so, and that if you try to keep one inside, "it could do a lot of damage and you could end up like the Michelin Man with air trapped in your body."

Although they say a throat rupture like this is rare, the study's researchers elaborate on other potential complications, including a brain aneurysm or eardrum damage, per the Guardian. The University of Texas' Dr. Zi Yang Jiang, who says he sees a couple of sneeze-induced issues each year, tells the AP a collapsed lung is also possible. Doctors used scans to assess this patient and found the popping sound was caused by air bubbles that had formed in his throat tissue and neck. "The whole point of sneezing is to get something out of your body, like viruses and bacteria ... if you stop that, those may end up in the wrong part of the body," Jiang says. The patient was given antibiotics, fed through a tube, and released a week later, with strict instructions to let future sneezes fly. "The safest thing to doalthough it's not socially acceptableis just to sneeze loud," Aymat tells the AP. (Allowing yourself a hearty sneeze could also dislodge the toys stuffed up your nose for decades.)
A Japanese city activated its emergency broadcast system Monday not for a missile alert, but for a warning about the country's deadliest delicacy. Emergency system loudspeakers in Gamagori, central Japan, warned residents that a supermarket had sold packages of fugu without removing the liver, one of the deadliest parts of the notorious fish, SBS reports. The livers, ovaries, and skin of the fugu, or blowfish, contain tetrodotoxin, a nerve poison that authorities say can cause a "rapid and violent" death after a single bite, reports the BBC. Incorrectly prepared fugu kills several people in Japan every year.

Regional heath officials say the supermarket sold five packages of assorted fugu meat, all of which could have been contaminated by the liver, the AP reports. Asahi Shimbun reports that after the emergency broadcast, which urged citizens who had bought the packages to return them to the Super Tatsuya supermarket, all five packages were accounted for. Four were returned unopened and the supermarket president says it was contacted by a fifth person who had consumed the fugu but had suffered no ill effects. "I'm very sorry," says the supermarket president, who has promised not to sell fugu again. (In a previous incident, seven people were sickened when an unauthorized chef served fugu testicles.)
Venezuelan special forces on Monday captured five members of a band led by a rebellious police officer who has been on the run since stealing a helicopter and launching grenades at government buildings in the capital last year, officials say. It wasn't clear if the renegade officer, Oscar Perez, had been killed or captured in a deadly gun battle after more than six months on the lam, the AP reports. Two officers were killed and five seriously wounded during a shootout with Perez and his comrades, the Ministry of Interior Relations said in a statement. "The members of this terrorist cell who conducted armed resistance were taken down and five criminals captured and detained," the statement said.

President Nicolas Maduro in a televised address Monday night claimed the group was preparing a car bomb to use against an embassy. Earlier Monday, Perez, 36, posted video clips showing blood dripping across his face as gunshots rang in the background. Perez said officers were firing at the group and wanted to kill him instead of permitting his surrender. "We're going to turn ourselves in!" Perez shouted. In the video clips, he urged Venezuelans to fight against the socialist government. "I want to ask Venezuela not to lose heartfight, take to the streets," he said. "It is time for us to be free, and only you have the power now." In numerous videos posted on Instagram, Perez has claimed that he is fighting for Venezuela's freedom from a tyrannical government that is starving its people.

(Read more Venezuela stories.)
Those poor, misjudged rats? According to infectious disease experts in Norway and Italy, rats aren't to blame for the spread of the Black Death, which has previously been referred to as the species' most infamous crime. In fact, humans might've been directly involved, reports the CBC. While studying nine European plague outbreaks that killed 125,000 people between 1348 and 1813considered the second pandemic of the bubonic plague, following the first in the sixth centuryresearchers at the University of Oslo and University of Ferrara used mathematical models to compare scenarios of transmission by humans, by fleas carried by rats, and by parasites carried by humans, reports CNN. In seven of nine European cities, the latter scenario best matched evidence in mortality records.

The theory is that fleas and lice carried by humans would bite an infected person, then jump to another victim and bite again, quickly spreading the disease, per the Independent. Researchers believe this is what led to the deaths of 10,000 people in Florence in 1400, 17,000 people in London in 1563-64, and more than 53,000 people in Moscow in 1771, according to the study published Monday in PNAS. Experts believe this may also explain more recent plague outbreaks in Africa. But perhaps you shouldn't feel so bad for those misjudged rats after all. The study notes the flea-carrying rodents did help spread the plague in the third pandemic, starting in 1855. There are also researchers who continue to believe rats were involved in the Black Death, reports National Geographic, suggesting this "provocative" study won't be the final word. (The Black Death had an upside.)
A leading Serb politician in Kosovo was assassinated outside the offices of his Citizens' Initiative party in the northern city of Mitrovica early Tuesday. Doctors say Oliver Ivanovic received at least five gunshot wounds to his upper torso when shot by unknown assailants. Milan Ivanovic, the head of Mitrovica hospital, says doctors attempted to save Ivanovic but could do nothing. The action is likely to stir tensions in Kosovo almost exactly 10 years after it declared independence from Serbia, the AP reports. The region has remained tense despite efforts by EU officials to mediate talks between Serbia and Kosovo leaders on normalizing ties. Serbia does not recognize Kosovo's independence.

Marko Djuric, the Serbian government's official dealing with Kosovo, said Tuesday that "whoever is behind this attack ... whether they are Serb, Albanian, or any other criminals, they must be punished." Djuric added that the attack "is an attempt to push the Serbian people into chaos, to push Serbia into chaos." The Kosovo government also strongly denounced the slaying, saying it considers it to be a challenge to "the rule of law and efforts to establish the rule of law in the whole of Kosovo territory." "Violence is unacceptable, without taking into consideration where it comes from and toward whom it is directed," said the statement. Serbian state television says that President Aleksandar Vucic has called a top security meeting.

(Read more Kosovo stories.)
North Korea's state-run media say President Trump's tweet about having a bigger nuclear button than leader Kim Jong Un's is the "spasm of a lunatic." Rodong Sinmun, the ruling party newspaper, lashed out at Trump in commentary on Tuesday that took issue with the US commander in chief's Jan. 3 tweet that "I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!" A portion of the commentary: "The spasm of Trump in the new year reflects the desperate mental state of a loser who failed to check the vigorous advance of the army and people of the DPRK" (that's the acronym for North Korea's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea). "He is making (a) bluff only to be diagnosed as a psychopath."

That tone is not uncommon for the North Korean media, reports the AP. Rodong Sinmun also recently ran a story about the book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which casts the president as a leader who doesn't understand the weight of his office and whose competence is questioned by aides. Trump and other White House officials have blasted it as inaccurate. The title of the book by Michael Wolff (a co-founder of Newser) comes from a Trump quote about North Korea. Last summer, Trump threatened North Korea with "fire and fury like the world has never seen" in an exchange of taunts with the North, which claimed it was examining plans to launch missiles toward the American territory of Guam. The book's popularity "foretells Trump's political demise," the paper concluded.

(Read more President Trump stories.)
Ryker Roque told his friends his father could "fix anything." Rabies was one thing that proved beyond him. Six-year-old Ryker died at a Florida hospital Sunday, weeks after putting his hand in a bucket holding a bat his father had found, reports NBC News. Henry Roque says he specifically told his son not to touch the bat, but Ryker didn't listen, and ended up with a scratch. With his son in tears at the thought of getting a vaccine shot in case the bat had rabies, Roque avoided the hospital and thoroughly washed the scratch instead. It wasn't enough. A week later, Ryker told his parents he had a headache and his fingers were numb. "I picked him up and I put him on the ground and he fell right to the floor," Roque tells Today. "I could not believe this  I said 'Walk for me, Ryker,' and he couldn't walk."

At a hospital, doctors told Roque that Ryker indeed had rabies and that cases are almost always fatal once symptoms appear. Doctors hoped placing the boy in a medically induced coma might allow his body to fight off the virus in an experimental treatment known as the Milwaukee protocol, which has saved two other children in the US, per NBC Miami. But that wasn't enough, either. Experts are now warning people to seek out a life-saving vaccine immediately after exposure to rabies and to limit possible exposure. In this case, the infected bat may have been in the Roque family's home for "a week or two prior to the boy going to the hospital," a Lake County sheriff tells the Orlando Sentinel. He adds a dog and cat were taken from the home to be tested for rabies, with the results not yet clear. (Rabies killed a woman shortly after she gave birth.)
Anti-riot police fired tear gas and beat protesters with batons Tuesday as hundreds of Sudanese demonstrated against soaring bread prices near a presidential palace in Khartoum, an AFP correspondent said.

Bread prices have more than doubled after a jump in the cost of flour due to dwindling wheat supplies, after the government decided to stop importing grain and allow private companies to do so.

The protest was the biggest in Khartoum since demonstrations erupted in some parts of the country earlier this month following the price increase.

On Tuesday, hundreds of protesters poured into the streets near a presidential palace in central Khartoum after the opposition Communist Party of Sudan called for an anti-government rally.

"No, no to hunger! No, no to high prices!" protesters shouted near the palace.

Police fired tear gas and hit protesters with batons as they tried to break up the protest.

A senior leader from the Communist Party, Siddig Yousif, was detained along with several protesters, the correspondent reported.

Later on Tuesday police dispersed the rally near the palace but protesters staged small demonstrations in nearby streets as they were chased away.

On Monday last week, students also rallied against the rising prices near Khartoum University but police swiftly broke up the protest.

The day before, in the town of Geneina in the war-torn region of Darfur, a student was killed during a similar protest. It was unclear how he was killed.

Anti-government protests erupted after the cost of a 50-kilo (110-pound) sack of flour jumped from 167 ($9) to 450 Sudanese pounds ($25).

Similar protests were held in late 2016 after the government cut fuel subsidies.

The authorities cracked down on those protests to prevent a repeat of the 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.

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Inventor Peter Madsen was charged Tuesday with killing Swedish journalist Kim Wall during an Aug. 10 trip on his private submarine, with prosecutors saying he either cut her throat or strangled her. Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen said the case is "very unusual and extremely disturbing." Madsen is charged with murder as well as indecent handling of a corpse for the way he disposed of Wall's body. The Guardian reports he was also charged with a sex assault that did not involve intercourse, and it notes 14 of the 15 stab wounds identified on Wall's body were located near her genitals. Madsen claimed Wall died accidentally inside the submarine while he was on deck during the excursion. However, he later admitted throwing her body parts into the sea.

Madsen has offered a shifting variety of explanations for Wall's death. Initially, he told authorities he had dropped Wall off on an island several hours after their voyage began. Later, he said she had died in an accident on board and he had "buried" her at sea. Her dismembered, naked torso was found on a southern Copenhagen coast in late August and her head, legs, and clothes were discovered in bags at sea in October. Heavy metal objects were designed to take them to the ocean floor. The trial starts March 8 and a verdict is expected on April 25, reports the AP. The Guardian reports Madsen faces a life sentence.

(Read more Kim Wall stories.)
It's deja vu all over again. Following Saturday's erroneous alert of an incoming "ballistic missile threat" in Hawaii comes a similar gaffe from Japanese national broadcaster NHK. A message was sent out via the NHK app Tuesday that read: "NHK news alert. North Korea likely to have launched missile. The government J alert: evacuate inside the building or underground."

Unlike the 38 minutes Hawaiians spent cowering, this mistake was acknowledged within minutes, reports CNN. The AP reports several on-air apologies were made and says the broadcaster blamed a mistake in the use of its alert system for the error. (More on the two clicks that led to Hawaii's goof here.)
The fallout over Steve Bannon's comments in the Fire and Fury book just took a new form, that of a subpoena from Robert Mueller. The New York Times reports that the former Trump strategist was issued the subpoena last week compelling him to answer questions about alleged collusion between the president's election campaign and Russia. What's more, Bannon is the first from Trump's inner circle to get a subpoena, notes the Times, though the reason for that is unclear. One theory is that if he agrees to be forthcoming, he could skip the grand jury appearance and instead be interviewed under less formal circumstances in Mueller's office. Among his comments to author Michael Wolff (a co-founder of Newser) was that a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russians was "treasonous."

News of the development comes as Bannon was being questioned behind closed doors on Tuesday by the House Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own investigation into Russian meddling in the election, reports the Hill. The panel also was expected to focus on Bannon's comments about the 2016 meeting, and what President Trump might have known about it. One bright spot for Bannon: The subpoena strongly suggests that he is not under investigation himself, but is instead being asked to supply information about others, notes the Times. (Read more Steve Bannon stories.)
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U.S. President Donald Trump and European Union leaders should increase the pressure on President Bashar al-Assad and his allies Russia and Iran to return to talks to end Syria's civil war, Syria's chief opposition negotiator said on Monday.

Nasr Hariri, the chief negotiator for Syria's main opposition grouping, said that unless the West forced President Assad and his big power allies to seek peace then the blood of Syrian civilians would continue to be spilled.

"I would like to ask all those countries that promised they would support the Syrian people and their aspirations for democracy and peace: why didn't they fulfil their promises?" Hariri, speaking in English, told Reuters in London.

He called for Trump and EU leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May to get tougher with Assad.

All diplomatic initiatives have so far failed to yield progress in ending the Syrian civil war, which is now entering its eighth year having killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven 11 million from their homes.

The map of Syria's conflict has been decisively redrawn in favour of Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies during the past two years. They have recaptured major population centres in western Syria from rebels seeking to overthrow him and pushed back Islamic State (IS) militants in the east.

In the face of the collapse of rebel-held territory, most Western countries have quietly softened their positions that Assad must leave power as part of any peace deal. But the opposition entered the last formal talks last month without softening its demand Assad go, prompting the government to declare the talks pointless.

Nevertheless, Hariri suggested Western powers still had enough influence to push the government to negotiate.

"It is time for President Trump, Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister May to say: 'Stop'," the former cardiologist said.

"It is time for Trump, Merkel and May to increase pressure and bring the international community together to get a genuine and just political situation in Syria."

Hariri represents the Saudi-backed umbrella group of Syrian opposition groups which are opposed to Assad and supported by the West. He said the next round of the so-called "Geneva talks" on the fate of Syria would take place in late January, probably around Jan. 24-26 in Vienna.

MORE TALKS?

Hariri said discussions in Washington, including with White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster, had been positive and that the Trump administration understood the situation.

"Iran and Russia are trying to deprioritise the transition," he said. "We need the international community's help to put pressure on the regime and their backers, Russia and Iran."

"The Americans want to test the Russians and the regime in the next round of talks. They want to move the Geneva process forward," Hariri said.

When asked about U.S. plans to help support a 30,000-strong force dominated by the mainly Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), he said it could lead to Syria's partition.

"What are the benefits of establishing such an army?" he asked. "It will open the door wide for a future struggle in the region. It could open the door to the future partition of Syria."

Assad has responded to the plan by vowing to crush the new force and drive U.S. troops from Syria. Iran said on Tuesday creation of the SDF force would "fan the flames of war", echoing the vehement response of Syria, Turkey and Russia.

Hariri said it was very unlikely that the Syrian opposition would attend a meeting on Syria organised by Russia in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. The opposition had received no invitation so far, and no final decision on attendance had been made.

"We have not been invited yet," he said. "The general mood is not to go to Sochi. My personal view is that in its current shape, it is unacceptable to attend Sochi."

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The Daily News-Miner encourages residents to make themselves heard through the Opinion pages. Readers' letters and columns also appear online at newsminer.com. Contact the editor with questions at letters@newsminer.com or call 459-7574.
New Delhi:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be visiting the Taj Mahal on Tuesday. He will be welcomed by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath who will also accompany him to the symbol of love.



Prime Minister Netanyahu will also deliver a speech at the third edition of the annual Raisina Dialogue in the evening where more than 150 speakers and over 550 delegates from around 90 countries are expected to be present.



He will meet with the Indo-Israeli CEO forum.



Prime Minister Netanyahu will also call on President Ram Nath Kovind.



Later, he will leave for Gujarat where he will visit the Center of Excellence in Vadrad and inaugurate Center of Excellence for date palms in Bhuj.



In Mumbai, Prime Minister Netanyahu will meet Jewish community leaders and select members of the Indian business community. He will also reach out to Bollywood in an exclusive Shalom Bollywood event.
New Delhi:

Just two days after UP Shia Waqf Board chairperson Waseem Rizvi claimed to have received a threat call allegedly from underworld don Dawood Ibrahims D Company on his recent remarks on madrasas, a Bareilly based organization has announced a bounty on his head.



The bounty consists of Rs 10 lakh and 786 and a free Haj journey has been announced by All India Faizan-e-Madina Council (AIFMC) which is a Bareilly-based religious organization.



AIFMC has alleged that Rizvi had painted Islam and Muslims in an evil light by branding madrassas as places which produce terrorists.



Moeen Siddiqui Noori, the head of AIFMC said if Rizvi didn't take back his statement and apologise within two days the followers of his organisation would behead him.



"Wasim Rizvi has become a big threat as he wants to ruin the social fabric of the country," said Noori.
New Delhi:

In what can be termed a case of criminal negligence on part of the authorities and local administration, a 13-year-old victim of gang rape could not get medical attention for two days after she was violated.



The girl was gang-raped on Saturday by two minors who have been detained in connection with the case, police said on Monday.



Senior Sub Inspector of Sahibabad Jitender Singh said the medical examination of the victim could not be conducted even after two days due to non-availability of doctors at the government hospital.



The girl was playing with two boys who live in her neighbourhood when they coaxed her to accompany them to an isolated place and took turns to rape her, said her father in an FIR.



A case has been registered under section 376 of the IPC and the POCSO Act.
New Delhi:

After Rajasthan and Gujarat, Haryana became the third BJP ruled state to ban Sanjay Leela Bhansalis upcoming period drama Padmavat. The movie has been mired in controversies since inception.

The order came a day after Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said they will take a call on Padmavat after a private screening.

Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij on Tuesday took to micro-blogging site Twiiter to make the announcement.

Imposing a ban on Deepika Padukone-starrer Vij wrote, Film Padmavati/Padmavat banned in Haryana.

Talking about their latest decision Vij told media that the decision has been taken in view of the safety and security of the state."

The issue has been raised in the last cabinet meeting and Vij advised a ban on the Rs. 190-crore costume drama.

In this movie, they have distorted all the historical facts... today again, I have raised this issue, now that the Censor Board cleared this movie, he added.

Film Padmavati/Padmavat banned in Haryana

 ANIL VIJ MINISTER HARYANA (@anilvijminister) January 16, 2018

Earlier, Rajasthan banned 'Padmaavat' following huge protests by Karni Sena and other Rajput groups all over the country.

Also Read: Deepika Padukone-starrer Padmaavat's re-released trailer will give you goosebumps!

Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje had also written to Union broadcasting minister Smriti Irani urging a ban on the film. Gujarat too, has imposed a ban on Deepika, Shahid, Ranveer-starrer even after necessary cuts and changes, suggested by the Censor Board of the Film Certification.

However, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has not yet cleared the air regarding release of 'Padmaavat' in the state.

Based on 16th century Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasis epic poem 'Padmavat', the movie faced resistance due to misinformation campaigns and rumour-mongering.

Starring Deepika Padukone as Rani Padmavati, Shahid Kapoor as Maharawal Ratan Singh & Ranveer Singh as Alauddin Khilji, the Sanjay Leela Bhansali directorial is slated to release nationwide on January 25.

Also Read: Akshay Kumar not WORRIED about PadMan-Padmaavat clash

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Lucknow:

The Allahabad High Court on Tuesday issued a contempt notice to censor board chairman Prasoon Joshi in connection with the release of the film 'Padmaavat' on January 25.

The Lucknow bench of the court granted three weeks time to Joshi for filing his response to the contempt notice.

It fixed next hearing of the matter in the week commencing February 12.

A bench of Justice Mahendra Dayal passed the order on the petition filed by Kamta Prasad Singhal, who had submitted that he had earlier filed a Public Interest Litigation seeking ban on the release of the movie because it promoted Sati, which is an offence.

After hearing the PIL, the court had on November 9, 2017 dismissed the petition but, simultaneously, it had permitted the petitioner to move his grievance through a representation to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).

Also Read: Deepika Padukone-starrer 'Padmaavat' (Padmavati) banned in Haryana, says state Health Minister Anil Vij

Accordingly, he moved the representation before the chairman of the board on November 13, 2017 but Joshi is yet to decide on it and three-weeks time given to him by the high court has expired.

At this, the high court issued contempt notice to Joshi.
Escalating violence in northwest Syria has caused more than 200,000 displacements since mid-December, the United Nations said on Tuesday, warning that medical facilities in the area were struggling to cope.

Russian-backed Syrian troops launched an offensive in late 2017 against Islamist militants and allied groups in Idlib, the last province in the country still fully outside the government's control.

The assault has seen tens of thousands flee, with many displaced multiple times.

In a new situation report published Tuesday, the UN's humanitarian coordination branch (OCHA) said it had recorded 212,140 instances of displacement between December 15 and January 16.

The largest displacement -- 58,338 people -- was to the village of Dana in Idlib province, but other waves of civilians fled to areas in the adjacent provinces of Aleppo and Hama.

In a first, OCHA said, around 6,700 families fled rebel-held areas of Hama province to nearby government-controlled territory.

Idlib and slivers of the neighbouring provinces are now hosting more than 1.1 million internally displaced Syrians, according to the UN.

As hostilities between Syrian troops and anti-regime forces escalate, OCHA said it had received reports of several health clinics in the area being rendered out of service in bombardment.

Other facilities, it warned, were "running low" on medical supplies.

"Facilities are strained due to the increasing caseload because of the recent displacement," the situation report said.

"The low winter temperatures and the lack of shelter is exacerbating the health situation of the IDPs (internally displaced people) causing winter-related illnesses."

More than 340,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the Syrian war, which began in 2011 as the regime brutally crushed anti-government protests.

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New Delhi:

A proposal worth Rs 3,547 crore to procure assault rifles and carbines was cleared on Tuesday by the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), which also announced simplified norms to give a boost to Make in India programme.

Under the proposal, which was cleared at the DAC meeting chaired by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, 72,000 assault rifles and 93,895 carbines will be procured on the fast track basis, a defence ministry release said.

The procurement is to enable the defence forces to meet their immediate requirement for the troops deployed on the borders and is expected to address the shortage of small arms for the armed forces, the ministry said.

Tenders will soon be floated to set the ball rolling for the procurement process, sources said, adding the procurement could also be done at the government to government (G to G) level.

To encourage participation of private sector in defence design and production and to give a boost to Make in India programme, the DAC introduced significant changes in the Make II category of the Defence Procurement Procedure, it said.

The DAC also simplified the procedure to make it industry friendly, with minimal government control.

Also Read: Pakistan Army Chief in Sri Lanka, to discuss matters of professional interests with counterpart

The revised procedure will now allow the defence ministry to accept proposals from the industry and also allow start-ups to develop equipment for the Indian Armed Forces.

The minimum qualification criteria to participate in Make II projects has also been relaxed by removing conditions related to credit rating and reducing financial net worth criteria.

According to the earlier Make II procedure, only two vendors were shortlisted to develop prototype equipment.

Now, all vendors meeting the relaxed eligibility criteria will be allowed to participate in the prototype development process. The vendor will not be required to submit Detailed Project Report, the statement said.

After accord of approval of the Make II project by the council, all clearances will be accorded at Service HQ (SHQ) level, it added.

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New Delhi:

In what comes as a brutal case of murder, a 30-year-old man was shot dead in broad daylight, allegedly by Delhis most-wanted criminal Jitender alias Gogi and his men in Rohini Monday.

Police said that the incident happened when three men came in a car and sprayed at least 15 bullets into the head and face of the victim, outside a roadside eatery around 1.30 pm. Even though this is the third such alleged killing by Gogi and his men in the last four months, police are yet to find a lead to nab him.

DCP (Rohini) Rajneesh Gupta said the victim, Ravi Bhardwaj, was declared brought dead after being rushed to a hospital. He had sustained multiple gunshot wounds, Gupta said.

CCTV footage shows three men shooting Bhardwaj at a crowded intersection of a market in the area. The video also shows pedestrians running helter skelter. The three men are then seen getting into their grey Honda City and fleeing the spot.

The investigation has revealed that Bhardwaj, a resident of Alipur, was earlier an alleged associate of Gogi and had committed various crimes in Delhi and Haryana. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Police sources said they established Gogis involvement in the case based on the way he was killed. Gogi generally guns down his targets by pumping bullets on their face. Bhardwaj too sustained bullet injuries on his face, a source said.

Police sources also said Bhardwaj was arrested by the Delhi Police Special Cell in 2014, after a Rs 1 lakh reward was declared for his arrest in 2013. In 2015, he was bailed out. After coming out of prison, he and Gogi fell out over a financial dispute.

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Mumbai:

Three persons were killed after an Indian Reserve Battalion (IRB) head constable allegedly opened fire at two locations in Maharashtras pune on Tuesday.

Pune Police said, the shooter was identified as IRB head constable Sanjay Shinde. He is posted at State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) camp, police said.

Shinde opened fire at two busy places  Borawake Nagar and Morinagar, around 80 kilometers from Pune city, said police.

A senior police officer said, Shinde moled himself inside his house after the shooting.

The three killed have been identified as Anil Jadhav, Gopal Shine and Prashant Pawar.

According to police, the reasons behind the shooting is yet not clear. Till the time report was filed Shinde was not arrested.

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Mumbai:

Two days after Special CBI Judge BH Loyas son claimed that he is convinced that his father died a natural death, Maharashtra Police on Tuesday said that there was no foul play in his death.

Nagpur Joint Commissioner of Police Shivaji Bodkhe said, Judge B H Loya died due to a heart attack.

After our thorough investigation we have found that Loya died a natural death. Postmortem and forensic report confirm his death due to heart attack, added the joint commissioner.

The officer added that postmortem and medical reports did not find anything unusual or any poisonous substance in his body.

Also read: CBI Judge Loya died natural death, family convinced about it, says son



The Nagpur Police investigated the matter after a report of accidental death was filed in Loyas case.

Judge Loya died on December 1, 2014. His death raised a massive political storm since he was hearing the Sohrabuddin Shaikh fake encounter case, in which BJP chief Amit Shah is one of the accused.

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New Delhi:

Mauni Amavasya Vrat 2018 is being celebrated on Tuesday. This is the occasion where people observe Maun Vrat, in which people dedicate and try connecting to one's inner self and to God.

According to Hindu calendar, Mauni Amavasya falls in the month of Magh. While observing Maun Vrat one is able to check his/ her patients and try controlling rough and tough words against others.

Amavasya Tithi:



Amavasya Tithi Begins = 05:11 on 16/Jan/2018

Amavasya Tithi Ends = 07:47 on 17/Jan/2018

Why Is Mauni Amavasya Celebrated?

As per the mythology, during the churning of an ocean in ancient times, a pot filled with Amrit came out. Some drops of the Amrit fell down in the river due to which it became extremely valuable. This is the reason that Mauni Amavasya is considered as sacred and people take a holy dip in river Ganges and observe Maun Vrat.

Importance of Mauni Amavasya:

Maun Vrat is a way to make people realise about how and what they speak and the effects it creates on others. You can hurt your enemy in any way, but you friend may be hurt by the way or in a manner you speak or your silence may speak out louder. Word have the ultimate power of making and breaking a relationship. Your words can motivate as well as demotivate others. Mauni Amavasya is a chance to dedicate at least a day of your life to yourself.

Here are the updates:

# Devotees take holy dip in Triveni Sangam in Allahabad

a ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 16, 2018

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New Delhi:

Pakistans Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan said that the United States has been trying to convince them that India is not a threat and hence Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi.

Khan claims, Both Indias capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan.

It is time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Islamabad with Washington with everything on table, Khan said while reading out a policy statement on the governments foreign policy contours on Monday.

The defence minister asserted that the US downplayed Indias aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported.

Khan alleged that India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

Also read: Pakistan challenges India on NUCLEAR WAR, says 'Test our resolve'



The current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace, said Khan.

He also accused India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against Pakistan.

The defence minister further added that Pakistan is being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning the war against terror in Afghanistan.

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New Delhi:

Five years after then Congress President Sonia Gandhi laid its foundation stone, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday arrived in Rajasthanas Barmer to launch 'work commencement' of the Pachpadra Oil refinery.

Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje and Union Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan will also be present during the 'work commencement' of the oil refinery.

The refinery has become the latest issue of confrontation between BJP and Congress with both parties alleging each other of adeceivinga the youth of Rajasthan by stalling the project for five years.

Former Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot under whose tenure the foundation stone of the refinery was laid, hit back at the BJP and said Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje stalled the project for four years.

Gehlot tweeted, aCM kept trying to mislead ppl of state by repeatedly questioning state's share 26% in this project wd claims that wen land is ours, oil is ours & water is ours, then why only 26%? I ask her why state share in #Refinery has not been increased from 26% in new MOU?a

However, amid the allegations of delay, Prime Minister Narendra Modi willA inaugurateA the commencement of work for the Rajasthan Refinery at Pachpadra in Barmer.

Here are the live updates:

#A The way in which Vasundhara Ji tackled drought crisis during both her terms and helped people is praiseworthy. It is in contrast to the opposition in the state, whose poor drought management in Rajasthan is widely known: PM Modi

The way in which Vasundhara Ji tackled drought crisis during both her terms, and helped people is praiseworthy. It is in contrast to the opposition in the state, whose poor drought management in Rajasthan is widely known: PM Modi a ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

#A Congress and drought are twin brothers. Congress brings drought where ever it goes.

# Meanwhile, Congress has taken a dig at Modi for launching Rajasthan refinery.

#A This is a time for 'Sankalp se Siddhi.' We must focus on our aims and work towards achieving them by 2022, when we mark 75 years of freedom: PM Modi

This is a time for 'Sankalp se Siddhi.' We must focus on our aims and work towards achieving them by 2022, when we mark 75 years of freedom: PM Modi pic.twitter.com/vNiLL7kZY4 a ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

#A I am elated to be in Rajasthan that too for a project that will bring happiness and prosperity to the lives of many: PM Modi at inauguration of project commencement of oil refinery in Barmer

The way in which Vasundhara Ji tackled drought crisis during both her terms, and helped people is praiseworthy. It is in contrast to the opposition in the state, whose poor drought management in Rajasthan is widely known: PM Modi a ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

I am elated to be in Rajasthan that too for a project that will bring happiness and prosperity to the lives of many: PM Modi at inauguration of project commencement of oil refinery in Barmer pic.twitter.com/cdBwvJQYtD a ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

#A PM Narendra Modi in #Rajasthan's Barmer; at the inauguration of the project commencement of an oil refinery.

PM Narendra Modi in #Rajasthan's Barmer; at inauguration of the project commencement of an oil refinery pic.twitter.com/NOvbEyDUQb a ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

# Former Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot has launched a spree of attacks on BJP government and CM Vasundhara Raje on twitter.

CM kept trying to mislead ppl of state by repeatedly questioning state's share 26% in this project wd claims that wen land is ours,oil is ours & water is ours, then why only 26%? I ask her why state share in #Refinery has not been increased from 26% in new MOU? #RefineryRajasthan a Ashok Gehlot (@ashokgehlot51) January 16, 2018

Still waiting for an appropriate answer as to why CM Smt. Vasundhara Raje stalled the ambitious #Refinery project for more than 4 years that would have changed the fate & face of our state. #RefineryRajasthan a Ashok Gehlot (@ashokgehlot51) January 16, 2018

Still waiting for an appropriate answer as to why CM Smt. Vasundhara Raje stalled the ambitious #Refinery project for more than 4 years that would have changed the fate & face of our state. #RefineryRajasthan a Ashok Gehlot (@ashokgehlot51) January 16, 2018

#A PM Narendra Modi arrives in #Rajasthan's Barmer; he will inaugurate the project commencement of oil refinery in Pachpadra today

PM Narendra Modi arrives in #Rajasthan's Barmer; he will inaugurate the project commencement of oil refinery in Pachpadra today pic.twitter.com/39rXT9QSja a ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

#A The Rajasthan refinery will be the first in the state, which is blessed with immense oil and gas reserves. This refinery will benefit Rajasthan, especially the industrious youth of the state: PM Modi twitted on Monday.

# PM Modi on Monday twitted: Looking forward to visiting Rajasthan tomorrow. Will attend a programme to mark the commencement of work for the Rajasthan Refinery at Pachpadra, in Barmer and will also address a public meeting.A

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New Delhi:

The four senior Supreme Court judges  Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph  who had publicly criticised the Chief Justice of India (CJI) last week met Dipak Misra on Tuesday in his chamber in a bid to resolve the rift.

According to sources, the meeting was called by CJI Deepak Mishra in his Supreme Court chamber and more meeting will be held between him and the dissenting judges.

It is yet not known what issues were discussed in the meeting between the CJI and four judges.

Attorney General K K Venugopal, earlier in the day had expressed doubts over whether the crisis has been resolved and hoped it would soon be settled.

I hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days, said Venugopal.

On Friday, the four judges held a press conference and levelled serious charges against Chief Justice Dipak Misra. They had said that CJI Misra was ignoring rules and assigning important cases to select benches with no rationale.

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New Delhi:

A day after Indian Army killed seven Pakistani soldiers in retaliatory action along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the Pakistan Army chief has undertaken a visit to the South Asian island neighbour Sri Lanka.

Bajwa, on a three-day visit, would be meeting the country's top leadership and is expected to sign several agreements to boost military-to-military relations between the two countries.

Bajwa landed in capital Colombo on Monday at the invitation of his Sri Lankan counterpart, Lieutenant General Mahesh Senanayake.

The Pakistan High Commission in Colombo said that during his Sri Lanka visit General Bajwa will hold discussions on matters of professional interests with General Mahesh Senanayake.

He is also expected to pay courtesy calls on President Maithripala Sirisena, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, State Minister of Defence, Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, Chief of Defence Staff, and Commanders of the Navy and Air Force.

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US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have jointly voiced hope that the resumption of talks between North and South Korea could pave the way for a change in Pyongyang's attitude, the White House said Tuesday.

In telephone talks, the two leaders "acknowledged the resumption of inter-Korean dialogue and expressed hope that it might prompt a change in North Korea's destructive behavior," according to a White House statement.

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Inspired by a poem, Souad Mardam Bey's new solo exhibition Adam, at Zamalek Art Gallery, looks into religious, gender, social and conceptual divisions created by humankind

In her new solo exhibition, which opened on 8 January at the Zamalek Art Gallery, Souad Mardam Bey was inspired by a poem from the Syrian poet Mohamed El-Maghoot entitled Adam.

The brilliant poem, the name of which provides a title for Mardam Bey's exhibition, reads as follows:

I will beget a child and name him Adam

Because in our times names are charges in themselves

I wont name him Mohamed or Jesus

Aly or Omar ... Saddam or Hussein ... Zakareya or Ibrahim

Nor David or George

I fear he will grow up a racist and get a share from his name

Foreigners would consider him a terrorist

Radicals would see him infidel

Sunni would call him Shiite or Alawi

And Shiites would count him as Sunni

I worry that his name becomes his passport

I want him Adam the Christian, the Moslem

I want him to know that the religion is for God and homeland is for everyone

I will teach him that religion is what lies in the heart not its name

I will tell him that Arabism is an illusion and make him believe in humanity instead

I will teach him that hunger is faithless, ignorance is faithless and injustice is faithless

I will teach him that God is in the heart not in churches or mosques

That God is love not fear

I will teach him what our parents forgot to teach us

That what we lack is what we have

I will tell him that I want him a boy because girls are still facing death for being females

And that Arab society is still flawed

The poem rejects the discrimination that exists in the Arab world, with the poet making intelligent use of given names to demonstrate that idea.

In her new solo exhibition, Souad Mardam Bey searches for a unity that rises above the religious, gender, social and conceptual divisions created by humankind.

The 35 masterpieces in the exhibition took about a year to accomplish and represent the artist's journey from the poem to her psyche and then to the paintings. The message is strong and the themes are creative.

The large paintings  no easy task for any artist  use dim colors, so as not to shock viewers with flaming, bright lights. This allows the paintings to slide subtly into the viewer's spirit.

The display is testimony to the artist's constant evolution in style, ideas inspiration and messages; her work shows a deep sense of culture and her passion towards her pieces.

The painting bearing the name of Adam was the most time-consuming piece to accomplish. Applying many layers of paint and color, Mardam Bey used the features of a regular man, adding a glare to the eyes, which are the painting's source of attraction.

The dark coloring is a reference to the material from which Adam was created, while the stern features suggest that he is carrying the burden of Original Sin. Adams penetrating eyes show a hypnotic strength  facing the unknown on earth after leaving Heaven.

It is a memorable masterpiece.

The rest of the paintings have no titles. Mardam Bey allows the viewers to decode the paintings with their own eyes.

We can see the theme of Adam and Eve dealt with in another of the paintings, with an angel enticing them to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

The act of seduction here is not perpetrated by a serpent or a snake. Mardam Bey's idea is that anyone or anything that beautifies wrongdoing would do so in their most attractive form  making an angel the perfect medium.

Adam and Eve in Heaven look worry-free, with Eve looking meaningfully at Adam as he simply enjoys the environment.

The center-piece of the exhibition shows four persons standing, facing in different directions. One is in profile, while the second shows a face above the shoulder, and the last two are by themselves, not touching. We cannot determine the gender of the four persons, an intentional move by the artist; the message is that we are all humans, we are all the same and yet different and unique.

The problems we face in life are similar, and we have more in common than we realize. The characters in the paintings have a half-smile as they face life in different directions. There is no fear, joy or confidence in their expressions.

The mystery of the gender adds to the beauty of the painting. The brush strokes are confident, showing great talent, expressing the painters ideas and message.

Mardam Bey also provides her own take on Akhenaten, the king of monotheism, showing him in a new light. The creativity in this painting requires some reflection on the concepts of religion, God and beliefs, which have been dealt with since the beginning of time  since Adam was created.

In portraying the one who unified all the gods, the artist maintains the link to the poem. Akhenaten is like another Adam, not attached to any preset religion, but simply looking for the good in life.

The crown on his head underscores that he represents the authority and power of the king, while the heart in the corner of the painting sends a blunt message of love.

It is a painting filled with hope: Akhenaten unified the gods; hence it should be possible for humans to be unified in support of the more noble values.

By adopting the Adam theme, Eve was strongly present in the exhibition.

Mardam Bey drew and painted Eve in different stages and situations: from being pregnant, to being seductive, to nurturing birds, all dressed up, with a crown on her head, dating her man and socializing with friends.

In these paintings, the artist's philosophy is clear: when there is Adam, there is Eve as well. And as such, Mardam Bey makes a stand against discrimination, unifying the human race in yet another way.

The exhibition continues until 24 January at the Zamalek Art Gallery, 11 Brazil Street, Zamalek, Cairo



For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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The Romanian musician will perform in a charity concert at the Fairmont Towers Hotel on 18 and 19 January, with several Egyptian musical and movie stars in attendance

The Romanian pan-flautist Gheorghe Zamfir will perform a benefit concert in Cairo on 19 January in support of female cancer patients and their treatment.

Zamfir, 76, is world famous for his renditions of traditional music performed on pan-flute, as well as his own compositions.

The musical event, titled Music Against Cancer, has been arranged in association with the Breast-Gynecological International Cancer Society (BGICS), a Cairo-based organization that aims at "promoting optimal standards of care for patients with breast gynecological cancers."

The concert will form part of the 10th Breast, Gynecological and Immuno-oncology International Cancer Conference (BGIICC), which will take place on 18 and 19 January at Cairo's Fairmont Towers Hotel.

Many members of the international medical community, as well as Egyptian film and music stars, are due to attend the event, which aims at spreading awareness of cancer and its treatment, while raising funds to support patient care.

In a press release, the president of BGICS, Prof. Hesham El-Ghazaly, stressed his interest in the search for modern cancer treatments with the highest cure rates.

"With our interest in scientific research, we are equally focused on the emotional condition and quality of life of the patients. No doubt, music plays a role in raising the morale of patients, so we chose to involve music in our fight against cancer," he said.

"I am grateful to Gheorghe Zamfir for agreeing to come to Egypt and perform in support of cancer patients. All the proceeds from the event will be utilised for the benefit of cancer patients," he added.

Zamfir, meanwhile, expressed his happiness at being part of the charitable event in "the Land of Pharaohs".

His musical education began on the accordion, but he later changed instruments, playing an expanded version of the traditional Romanian pan-flute and earning the title Master of the Pan-Flute.

In 1966, he was appointed conductor of Romania's prestigious Ciocirlia Orchestra, and in 1969 he launched his own band, releasing several original compositions, including Messe pour la Paix, which brought him international attention.

Zamfir's musical career has taken him to many countries, including Egypt. In 2009, he held a concert at the Cairo and Alexandria Opera Houses. In 2016 he was featured as a guest of honor during Richard Clayderman's concert in Cairo.

He currently resides and teaches in the Romanian capital Bucharest.



For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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BRIDGEPORT  As downtown continues to welcome restaurants, the latest addition to the Bijou Square is serving up hot ramen and noodle soups in minutes.

Easton resident Skye Kwok opened Eat Noodle in downtown Bridgeport on Jan. 8 at 269 Fairfield Ave. The eatery opened in the space that once housed Can Tiin, which closed last summer.

A former Bridgeport resident, Kwok said the area has changed since his days growing up in the Park City. As residential development and the office market has grown over the years, he said a community vibe has developed that he felt his restaurant could thrive in.

Bridgeport is growing right now, he said. When I came to this area I was surprised (at how) it changed a lot, and I saw a lot of potential.

Kwok began working in the restaurant industry 22 years ago, after attending Sacred Heart University, and has since opened restaurants in other parts of Fairfield County. He also owns Sweet Basil in Fairfield and Pink Sumo Sushi & Sake Cafe in Westport.

According to the business owner, he wanted to bring his own spin on the growing noodle soup market to the city, with options like pho, ramen and specialty items like curry soup.

Curry soup is definitely in high demand here, Kwok said. Other restaurants dont have that because its so hard to get the curry-soup-based ingredients and do it right. Everybody has their pho and ramen noodles. You can go to YouTube or Google to get (a recipe), but with curry to do it right, you have to know the ingredients.

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 Eat Noodle space has also previously housed Bare Tapas & Vino and Cafe Roma.

Like his other restaurants, Kwok said he opted to open Eat Noodle in a smaller space where customers can get a quick bite during their lunch break.

In his first week, the Easton resident said his staff cut their customers wait time from a half-hour to within 10 minutes. The goal in coming weeks is to cut that time in half, as well, Kwok said.

While he wants the new business to thrive, Kwok said his goal goes beyond financial success.

I do want to make money fast, but my biggest interest is I want to see the downtown Bridgeport (area) grow, he said, adding that hed like to see more opportunities for people to shop along with dining out.

You want people who live upstairs to head out into the area to eat and drink, and thats the main thing, Kwok added. Then, if you have a shopping area where they can buy a phone or buy clothing or something, we dont need to go to Stamford or we dont need to go to downtown Fairfield or Norwalk.

While this is his first restaurant in Bridgeport, Kwok said he wants  if business is good  to expand and open more lunch-style spots in the city with different themes. But first he wants to create a positive community feel around Eat Noodle.

When people come in, I want everyone to know each other, Kwok said. Thats how you create a family-type (place with) a warm feeling.

Eat Noodle is open Monday through Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Thursday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Saturdays from 3 to 10 p.m.

jordan.grice@hearstmediact.com; Twitter: @JordanEGrice
Scott Mullin / For Hearst Connecticut Media

BROOKFIELD  The bishops meeting with St. Josephs School parents was postponed Tuesday because of the forecasted snowstorm.

Bishop Frank J. Caggiano was scheduled to speak Tuesday evening to the St. Josephs community about the future of the school, as well as the enrollment and fiscal challenges Catholic schools like St. Josephs are facing.
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NEW FAIRFIELD  Friends and family of a Guatemalan-born man who has been ordered to leave the country by the end of the month will rally in Hartford on Thursday in hopes of winning him a reprieve.

Joel Colindres, 33, who came to the U.S. in 2004, was ordered out of the country last summer but won a temporary stay on Aug. 17, minutes before he was supposed to board a flight back to Guatemala. But on Dec. 27, during one of his required weekly check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was again told that he would be deported.

The second deportation order has sent his family  including his wife, Samantha, a U.S. citizen, and their two American-born children, 6-year-old Preston and 3-year-old Lila  scrambling again to keep him in the country until his request for asylum is processed.

An online petition argues that he deserves an opportunity to make his case.

Joel just wants his day in court  an immigration judge to hear his side of the story, to hear what its like to have to return to the dangerous and violent environment from which he originally fled, the petition reads. To return to Guatemala now would be a death sentence.

The Colindres family has urged supporters through a Facebook page to call lawmakers on Joels behalf and a friend has set up a GoFundMe page to help pay legal fees.

Colindres asylum request argues that his life would be in danger should he return to Guatemala. His family there has faced violent attacks and three of his family members were murdered in the last year, the family has said.

When he first came to the United States in 2004, Colindres has said, a mix-up with paperwork led him to miss a court date, resulting in an order for his removal. The order has created a barrier in seeking legal residency based on his 2010 marriage to Samantha.

Another attorney for the family then filed a request to reopen the case with the wrong office, causing further delays.

The familys current attorney, Erin ONeil-Baker, said immigration authorities have denied jurisdiction for the asylum request, forcing the family to apply through the complicated appellate process. Colindres has an appeal pending with U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The recent deportation order has exacerbated the situation, ONeil-Baker said.

Putting these arbitrary dates of deportation creates such an extreme level of stress for not just Joel, but his wife and his children, his extended family, his boss, his employer  there is a ripple effect when this type of news is set out, she said. Theres no reason to make him leave the country now. It goes against the law that says if someones life or liberty is in danger they can seek protection here in the U.S.

U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty and Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, who all worked to support Colindres during his first order of removal, submitted a letter asking that he be granted another stay.

It does not appear that Mr. Colindres poses a threat to the integrity of the immigration system, the letter reads, noting that Colindres has no criminal history. In fact, it appears that Mr. Colindres and his family are assets to their community as homeowners and taxpayers. The needless separation of this family does not have a clear benefit to our country or Connecticut.

ONeil-Baker said Colindres has also complied with all the immigration restrictions during his temporary stay, including weekly appointments in Hartford, weekly home checks and keeping a GPS tracking device on his ankle.

She hopes Thursdays rally, to be held at 11 a.m. at the Abraham A. Ribicoff Federal Building, will help convince immigration officials to drop the deportation order.

The point of the rally is...to make the public aware that these policies are happening and destroying families, ONeil-Baker said. And, it is to ask immigration to reconsider their position and let Mr. Colindres stay.

We dont have a lot of time. We are actively pursuing all the legal measures, but its not enough to stop this train. We need immigration to rethink their policies.

aquinn@newstimes.com
NEW HAVEN  A full day of activities honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on what would have been his 89th birthday ended Monday in a call to work together for the causes to which King dedicated himself: equality for all, organized labor and close-knit communities.

The Call to Unity and Action, held at historic Varick Memorial AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue, was sponsored by New Haven Rising, the social action organization, as well as unions from Yale University and elsewhere and other organizations advocating for undocumented immigrants, economic justice and racial equality.

The featured speaker was Bishop W. Darin Moore, leader of the Mid-Atlantic Episcopal District of the AME Zion Church and chairman of the board of the National Council of Church of Christ in the U.S.A., which represents 40 million Christians in 38 faith communities.

One of Moores strong messages was about supporting young people but also expecting more of them, particularly in intellectual rigor and spirituality and in respecting the wisdom of their elders.

When we combine intellectuality and spirituality, we are a powerful force, he roared from Varicks pulpit. If you have an educated head but dont have a consecrated heart, you are a menace to society.

He said of young people, Yes, they are our future, but they are right now a part of our churches and our communities. But, addressing the youth, he added, Dont be deceived by the intoxicant of youthfulness.

Todays youth are the most educated young people in history, but just because you have a smartphone doesnt make you a smart person. Because theres a difference between information and wisdom.

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He and other speakers, including Mayor Toni Harp, the Rev. Scott Marks, co-founder of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, and state Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, reminded the energized crowd of what they called a threat to everyones well-being from the Trump administration.

Moore said that in 2016, 70 percent of my white brothers and sisters in Christian churches voted for Donald Trump ... a leader who is antithetical to everything that Christianity represents. He paraphrased evangelical leader Jim Wallis who put it this way: For too many in the United States, they are more white than they are Christian and they privilege their whiteness over their Christianity. It is time for red, yellow, black and white to come together.

We are here tonight to say to those people who want to take us back to the 1950s that we arent going back. We are going forward together, Harp said. We will resist and we will resist with love.

Marks said, I dont know of a city with more activism than the city of New Haven. ... New Haven Rising is a grass-roots organization thats fighting for social and economic justice and its one thing to lift our voices but we dont want to forget that we have feet that we can put boots on and put our boots on the ground.

Porter warned that things could get worse for poor, working-class and middle-class Americans but we have to get past the things we think make us different. ... Lets put our hands to the plow and lets get this done in a spirit of love, she said.

Fighting for immigrants rights

Standing with a group of immigrants, Elsa Pinos, wife of Nelson Pinos Gonzales, who has taken sanctuary in First and Summerfield United Methodist Church on Elm Street, said through an interpreter, Its a very difficult experience we are going through right now. Its hard because Immigration [and Customs Enforcement] is trying to separate me and my family and I hope we make it through with the help of God.

Donald Jean Marie of Bridgeport, a native of Haiti, spoke out against termination of Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from his country, as well as El Salvador and Honduras. TPS was granted to us after the devastating earthquake that struck our beautiful island in January 2010, Jean Marie said. Fast forward to 2017: Instead of creating a path for these people who have been working here for years [Trump] revoked it. That will result in sending nearly 50,000 people to a country that is still struggling from the earthquake and two major hurricanes in 2017.

Entertainment for the event was provided by the Heritage Chorale of New Haven and the Hamden Academy of Dance and Music.

Contact Ed Stannard at edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com or 203-680-9382.
The Giza Plateau archaeological site will be open to visitors one hour earlier in the mornings starting on Tuesday as part of a Ministry of Antiquities' effort to encourage more tourists.

Opening hours will now run from 7:00am to 5:00 pm instead of 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Ashraf Mohi, director general of the Giza Plateau site, told Ahram Online that the decision was approved by the board of directors of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

"These changes aim to make the site available for more time, especially as the countrys tourism season has just started, Mohi said.

He said that earlier this month the board of directors approved the extension of visiting hours at the Edfu and Kom Ombo temples in Aswan Governorate through the winter months.

The move was intended to accommodate delays in the arrival of River Nile cruise boats due to the low water levels on the river.

Edfu temple will remain open until 5:00 pm every day instead of 4:00 pm, and for Kom Ombo temple will be open until 9:00 pm instead of 8:00pm.

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Scott Furey

TOWN OF TYRE, N.Y. -- A Wayne County man was charged after making threats of violence against the del Largo Casino in the town of Tyre, according to New York State Police.

Scott C. Furey, 47, of Walworth, was banned from the casino in June 2017 after casino officials learned he was engaging in fraudulent gaming activities. Furey was reported to state police Thursday for trespassing on casino property.

When troopers arrived, they found Furey sleeping on a couch inside the casino hotel lobby, state police said.

Furey was charged with third-degree trespassing, police said. When he was being processed at the Waterloo State Police barracks, he made several verbal threats to return to the casino property after his release and commit acts of violence in retaliation for his arrest, police said.

Due to the nature of these threats, Furey was also charged with making a terroristic threat, a felony, police said.

He was arraigned at Tyre Town Court and remanded to the Seneca County Jail in lieu of $20,000 bail or $40,000 bond, police said.
In the first part of this series, I drew many distinctions between those experts who focused on the clash of ideas as the way to deal with radicalisation and those who preferred to consider terrorism to be the result of a kind of anomy," psychological problems, identity crisis, et. cetera.

On Friday, 5 January, during a serious talk show on a French TV channel, experts concurred: the de-radicalisation paradigm was a total failure. It should belong to historys dustbin. It was impossible to prevent people from believing whatever they wanted to believe, it was more appropriate to focus on preventing them from moving and doing something bad.

Disengagement should be the new keyword.

Im no expert, but I had bought some books on terrorism, so I decided to begin studying them. I avoid beginning with the thesis focusing on the clash of ideas and of discourses. Egyptians are working a lot on the renewal/correction of religious discourse," so I prefer to start with the other paradigms.

I began by reading Marc Sagemans seminal Understanding terror networks." It was widely lauded and many consider it a must-read. It is more or less divided into three sections. The first deals with the history of Jihad, how it went from local to global.

The Sageman paradigm is quite simple. Traditional Salafism says Muslims should obey the Muslim ruler, even if he is unjust, as this is necessary for civil peace. Therefore, to circumvent this prescription, at some point or another one willing to justify rebellion would have to say the ruler is an apostate. This one was Sayyid Qutb. His understanding of Salafism gave birth to takfirism. It was revolutionary and inspired generations of militants.

Violent Salafism, at first, was local -- mainly Egyptian. Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and militants from different countries went east, to help the Afghan resistance and sometimes to fight. Jihad acquired an transnational dimension. At the beginning, this Jihad was defensive and traditional: it was just aimed at repelling a non-Muslim invader.

Abdallah Azzam, a Palestinian religious scholar and founding member of Al-Qaeda, did not like the idea of rebellion against Muslim leaders. The many Egyptians who went to Afghanistan unsuccessfully tried to convince him to change his mind and interpretation. These foreign fighters converted his principal aide, Osama Bin Laden, to their views, and finally killed Azzam.

For them, Jihad, according to Qutbs teachings, should be offensive and directed against rulers of the Muslim world who were not "real" believers, but rather apostates. This was the second moment.

The third one saw a change of target: instead of fighting the Muslim leaders, Jihad tried to strike at the distant enemy," the USA -- the world's only remaining superpower.

Sageman says global jihadism includes four components: the central command, where Egyptians are overrepresented, the southeast command, with many Indonesians, the Machriq command, where Egyptians and Saudis are the main players, and the Maghreb command, which includes Arabs and Europeans from Maghreb origins.

This presentation is useful. Of course, we can contest many points and detect some inaccuracies  it is clear Sageman is unfamiliar with the Egyptian theater, a crucial one. The relation between Qutb and Salafism, or between Qutb and Ibn Taymiyya, is much more complicated than his description suggests. But this does not concern our series.

Far more interesting is his discussion of the thesis saying the USA is the indirect father of al-Qaeda, as Washington was willing to endorse and support the presence of foreign fighters in Afghanistan, thus creating the monster. Some still say the USA and the West are willing to occasionally use the jihadists, and say Syria is a case in point. Sagement categorically denies this. He says that Jihad went through different phases: defensive Jihad repelling an invader has nothing to do with offensive Jihad targeting a superpower and attacking innocent civilians without any justification.

The USA never foresaw the mutation, from one to another, which occurred 15 years later. Therefore, the US government is not accountable for it. He also adds the US helped the Afghan resistance and no American official ever met with a foreign fighter. These went to Afghanistan using other channels, of which the Americans knew nothing. Those who oversaw the training and the distribution of American military aid were the Pakistanis, and this made perfect sense. The Pakistanis trained the Afghan Mujahidin who eventually trained the foreign fighters.

This might be true, but it is astonishing. I was very young, I was not working on these issues, and yet I knew many Islamists who went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. All the Arab States knew it. I am quite sure someone told the Americans these were dangerous people. The argument we could not foresee the mutation is thus even weaker.

Reading any piece of the literature produced by Qutb, or by the militants, or studying what they did in Egypt, is not that difficult. Qutb produced a fierce defense of offensive Jihad, acknowledges Sageman, and he was not alone. Attacking innocent civilians was considered acceptable for these militants. Their hatred for American policies in the Middle East and for liberal societies was obvious. Probably some decided the stakes were too high in Afghanistan to waste time checking and pondering the pedigree and the worldviews of those who came. The future would take care of itself.

The funny thing is that Sageman complains about some Arab States who were reluctant to participate in the global war on terror, and which only changed their minds after being themselves hurt by terrorist incidents. Well, we can return that point to both the USA and Great Britain.

The second section of the book deals with the militants. Sageman is cautious and forewarns us two different things. First, there is no guarantee his sample is representative. Second, no serious analysis is complete if we do not have a sample of people sharing the same characteristics with terrorists, but who do not opt for violent terrorism.

Let me explain this: if, for instance, you say people become terrorists because they are poor, or because they suffer from identity troubles, you have to explain why so many poor people, or so many with identity problems, do not opt for terrorism, and a truly scientific explanation requires two samples.

Then Sageman reviews the explanations provided by the conventional wisdom, with a clear purpose: he wants to prove they are inappropriate. They may be inappropriate for all kinds of terrorists, but they are clearly wrong for the jihadists.

Sageman wants also to prove the jihadists can differ one from another. For instance the Maghreb section is widely different from the others.

To be followed.

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NEW HAVEN  There were tears and hugs at a goodbye gathering for Martha Okafor on her last day, while a program director under Okafor has also tendered her resignation.

Okafor, who headed the large Community Services Administration since May 2014, resigned as of Jan. 12. Joy Johannes, the food systems policy director, will leave at the end of the month.

Okafor said it was her decision to leave, but she plans to continue living here for awhile, helping with the transition to a new leader, while also conducting some previously promised workshops for community management teams.

Okafor wouldnt elaborate on her reasons for resigning, but did pass on advice to her staff and friends after they finished off the Italian cream cake brought to the gathering.

You shouldnt allow yourselves to be discouraged. You should persevere because peoples suffering does not stop because we want to take our time to do things. As public servants we are here to serve. We are here to give selflessly and lift people up from where they are and help people to know that there is a lot they can accomplish besides what is limiting them externally. Try to get people to see that in themselves, Okafor said.

It is not easy always. But it is the call of service, Okafor said.

Johannes, in her resignation letter, was more pointed in her reasons to resign after 1.5 years.

Due to the current working conditions within CSA, I feel I can no longer perform my duties in a manner that best serves the community, Johannes wrote.

She didnt elaborate, but said the problem was not Okafor.

She is a person of integrity. She is honest and trustworthy ... She has done an amazing job given the obstacles put in front of her, Johannes said. She said Okafor was a boss who was supportive, but also expected results.

Im sad to be leaving, said Johannes, who wants to make sure food pantries she is setting up in several police substations get off the ground before she leaves, given food deserts in the city where it is difficult to buy food conveniently.

The seven substations, which are in the Hill, Fair Haven, West Hills, Dixwell and Newhallville, will have pantries in an arrangement with Connecticut Food Bank.

Besides program leaders, several alders and others connected with social service agencies in the city either stopped by or talked, in separate interviews, about the job Okafor has done in New Haven.

Martha brought us a much more ambitious way of approaching problems. We have tended to respond to issues as they arose and crises as they arose, rather than planning and thinking through how we are going to do things. I think Martha brought a kind of academic spirit, looking at problems over the long term, rather than what we have to do today to keep it going, Ed Mattison said.

Mattison knows Okafor because of his interactions as director of South Central Peer Services for Continuum of Care.

We will miss her, said Mattison, who is also chairman of the City Plan Commission.

Mayor Toni Harp issued a statement on Okafors resignation.

Dr. Okafor brought an extraordinary skill set to New Haven and used it to advance programs and services provided by CSA to address hunger and food insecurity, financial literacy, and work for homeless residents, she said.

The Citys nascent Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, to help substance abusers avoid criminal prosecution, is CSAs most recent initiative under the leadership of Dr. Okafor, and Im very enthusiastic about its prospects, Harp said.

Velma George, who heads programs for the homeless under Okafor, was one of several who addressed her contributions.

She was an excellent leader, a visionary who was full of compassion for the people of New Haven. She really has left her imprint on New Haven, George said.

Okafor had a reputation as a demanding boss, but engendered loyalty from the majority of staff across different fields for which she was responsible.

She expected you to do your job. That was the bottom line. She feels the taxpayers expect a certain level of service. It behooves us to do our best for the city of New Haven, George said.

Alder Delphine Clyburn, D-20, thanked her for the work she did for, by and with the people. I dont want you to go away. I want you to stay and continue helping myself and the other alders with true service to the people.

Alice Forrester, chief executive officer of Clifford Beers, a nonprofit that provides mental health services for children, said she enjoyed working with Okafor and built on comments by Mattison.

I think Martha was an incredible breathe of fresh air. She did a great job developing the Citywide Transformation Plan, Forrester said, which set out a comprehensive vision for New Haven.

Having worked in academia and at the state level on health issues in Connecticut and Georgia, Forrester said Okafor had a wealth of knowledge and passion for health and wellness and understood how it intersects across multiple fields.

Jason Bartlett, who runs city youth services and clashed with Okafor when she was his boss, came to wish her well.

It is no secret that we butted heads, but I have butted heads with most people in City Hall so that is no biggie. But I want to thank you for your leadership and your commitment to this city and to the constituents and I want to thank you for your guidance as my boss... , Bartlett said.

Some workers were relatively new to the city, but others had a longer perspective from which to speak.

I have worked with a lot of community service administrators, said Karen DuBois-Walton, executive director of the Housing Authority of New Haven and before that chief of staff to former Mayor John DeStefano Jr.

You have made it so an intentional act to ensure residents of Elm City Communities were included in anything that happened in the city, DuBois-Walton said, referring to Housing Authority residents.

Keith Lawrence, who heads special projects under the CSA, said it was a sad day that Okafor is moving on.

What struck me most ... has been your energy, your intelligence, ... your professionalism and your absolute dedication. Those attributes stood out for me ... I really appreciate it, Lawrence told her.

Alder Richard Furlow, D-27, the new majority leader, said he hoped standards she set will be maintained because we have literally thousands of residents who are dependent upon this department to function the way it should.

Alder Anna Festa, D-10, thanked her for the homeless initiatives and those around mental health, as well as for her due diligence in trying to be creative and getting a handle on the real story, rather than just dry data.

mary.oleary@hearstmediact.com Call 203-641-2577.
NORTH HAVEN  A 55-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly breaking into a restaurants outside storage freezer in October of 2017.

Dino Francis, of East Haven, was arrested Tuesday and charged with third-degree burglary and fifth degree larceny for breaking a lock on the freezer of the restaurant on Washington Ave. and removing $800 worth of restaurant products.
Months after Hurricane Maria hit the island, Puerto Rico is still recovering from the storms devastating aftermath and continues to need help.

Quinnipiac University recently sent the first academic group to aid the relief effort in Catano, where eight students and three professors have been helping restore the mangrove forest and seeing firsthand the effects of the disaster.

The group is there working with CARAS de las Americas, a nonprofit organization that works on environmental and educational efforts in San Juan, Catano and Guaynabo. They landed on the island Jan. 10.

Mangroves are important to the environment here, Margarita Diaz, associate professor of journalism at Quinnipiac, said from the island where shes a native. Its a plant designed to survive coastal water and provides habitat for wildlife, birds, fish and crustaceans that rely on mangroves. Its a really strong resilient plant.

Mangroves are trees and shrubs that live in coastal intertidal zones and help stabilize the coastline by reducing erosion from storm surges, waves, tides and currents. Their roots, which can often be recognized by their dense tangles, allow the trees to handle the daily rise and fall of tides and also makes them a natural habitat for wildlife.

The group has been clearing the mangrove forest of fallen trees, branches and debris, and cleaning up the trails to give local environmental workers access, she said. On Monday, they were preparing the soil for new mangroves to be planted, weeding out invasive species and placing potted plants for new growth.

This trip has been Diazs first to Puerto Rico in two years and seeing the wreckage has been difficult, she said.

It has been emotional, coming back to this seeing the damage, she said and working in poor neighborhoods where 20 percent of the houses are destroyed and the rest damaged has been very tough, especially in areas she is familiar with. It was heartbreaking. To see familiar landmarks that were there my entire life gone and never (coming) back, it was really hard. I didnt anticipate how I was going to feel when I saw that.

Some students on the trip have family on the island who survived the hurricane, and having a personal connection to the crisis motivated a few to volunteer. Stephen Oliveras of New Haven is one student on the trip whose family lives on the island and saw Hurricane Maria hit.

Soon after it happened, some of his cousins left Puerto Rico to live with him while his grandparents, aunts and uncles stayed with other family members across the country. Hearing from his cousins about the islands devastation, Oliveras jumped at the opportunity to help with the relief effort when the school opened the trip to the campus.

We see on the news the destruction, but when you step out of the airport and trees are down and bent permanently from the wind, its a shocker and eye opener, he said. Even in the capital, its better, but theres still trash everywhere. You can still see the after effects.

Oliveras had spent summers in Puerto Rico as a child and remembered the island before the disaster, saying he anticipated seeing devastation but took it harder than he expected seeing it firsthand.

Mia Martinez of North Haven also was motivated to volunteer because of her family connection to the island. Most of her family was there when Hurricane Maria hit, traveling right through where her grandmothers live, she said. Their homes saw a good amount of damage and she wasnt able to contact them for six weeks after the hurricane.

I knew we were going to San Juan and expected it to be more cleaned up and based on what weve seen ... thats true, but half of the signals are down and you see in the trees how the wind has blown them, she said. Those towns where the damage is a little bit more, thats something that hurts me but Im glad we have opportunity to be working in those cities to help.

U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both D-Conn., recenlty returned from visiting the island and spoke about their trip with members of the Puerto Rican community at Fair Haven Middle School in New Haven. Blumenthal called the situation in Puerto Rico a humanitarian crisis.

While Quinnipiacs trip initially focused on working with a local after-school program, once Hurricane Maria hit the island, the trips purpose changed to aid in the relief effort. Amanda Pullano, who was enrolled in the class that planned on taking the trip, said the work in the mangrove has been very rewarding, adding that its been a lot of manual labor but rewarding, knowing that theyre making a change.

Oliveras said the work to restore the mangrove has been intense.

We wanted a challenge and to be put to work, he said. Were sweating every day under the sun but the group is enthusiastic about it.

While the emphasis of their work has been restoring the mangroves, the students have also been learning about the islands culture and visiting historical sites, Diaz said. They also donated supplies to an after-school program through money the students raised over the past few months. They brought science kits, microscopes, soil testing kits, books, flashcards, games, puzzles, rechargeable solar lamps and flashlights.

To me it feels good and I hope its making a difference, Diaz said.

mdignan@hearstmediact.com
President Muhammadu Buharis kinsman, Alhaji Muhammad Ibrahim Daura, has called on him to resign from the office of Petroleum Minister and concentrate on his duty as the President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria.

Daura who is also a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Katsina State, while briefing newsmen in Kaduna, Tuesday, said the office of the President was very demanding and required full concentration of the President to chart forward the affairs of the nation.

He explained that the petroleum ministry was a very sensitive one, adding that it was the mainstay of the nations economy that needed to be handled by professionals who were not distracted by any other demanding duty.

Alhaji Daura added that President Buhari, since assumption of office, had not toured all the refineries in the country to see how they were in order to map out a new policy that will rejuvenate the refineries.

It is also saddening that the minister of state for petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu, is a lawyer by training and might not have the rudiment to manage the affairs of the ministry.

We all know that eighty percent of our revenue comes from the petroleum sector and if we dont take proper care of the ministry, the country might be thrown into chaos.

The recent fuel scarcity in the country might not be unconnected with the policy on ground where the president runs the ministry from the Aso Villa.

Yes, some will say that President Buhari decided to hold onto the ministry to checkmate some malpractices, but I can tell you that we have experts who can do same, remember Prof. Tam David West, Obaseki and Abubakar Yaradua, they are all experts in Petrochemical Engineering who have proved that they have what it takes to move the oil industry forward.

We also have thousands of graduates with PHD, and are roaming the streets. Some of which are Petrochemical Engineers who the president can engage.

I am a core supporter of President Muhammadu Buhari, and I want him to succeed that is why Im coming out with this advice to help him move the country forward, he explained.

Speaking on the call that President Buhari should contest in 2019, Alhaji Daura said there was nothing bad in the call because according to him, he has started some good work and needs to be given some time to complete them, so if another four years is what it will take, then let it be.
Kayode Fayemi, the minister of mines and steel development, has challenged the 10-year ban slammed on him from holding political office by ...

Kayode Fayemi, the minister of mines and steel development, has challenged the 10-year ban slammed on him from holding political office by an Ekiti state government white paper.

In a statement issued on his behalf by Yinka Oyebode, his senior special assistant on media, Fayemi described the action as a big joke.





According to the statement, the contents of the white paper was a pre-meditated verdict that cannot stand.





It said neither Ayo Fayose, Ekiti governor, nor his government had the constitutional powers to ban him from holding political office, either in Ekiti or any part of Nigeria.





While we believe it is part of the responsibilities of the state administration to look into the finances of the state at any point in time, we are also of the belief that such must be done in a very responsible manner devoid of prejudice, witch hunting and a calculated attempt to victimise a citizen.





In this particular case, the entire process is discredited right from the beginning, as the only agenda of the panel was to rubbish Fayemis public service record.





One is therefore not surprised at the recommendations of the white paper, it only goes to confirm our initial position that the panel was compromised right from inception and targeted against the former governor.





In his desperation, Fayose chose the crude and ignoble path towards hitting a perceived political foe.





The statement added that: In the process, they ignored the rule of law and behaved as if the court does not matter, thus making their actions subjudiced to the court.





Fayose was misguided into believing that he could pass a death sentence on Fayemis public service with the white paper, this is not only laughable, but ridiculous, as neither him nor his paid agents have the power to bar anyone from political participation.





The entire process and the character personae involved are discredited and since it is impossible to build something on nothing, legally speaking, their recommendation is not only null and void, it is a joke taken too far.




Management of the Nigerian Gas Company, NGC, has kick-started the process of fixing the gas pipeline that exploded at Ugbokodo community in...

Management of the Nigerian Gas Company, NGC, has kick-started the process of fixing the gas pipeline that exploded at Ugbokodo community in Okpe Local Government Area of Delta State.

Our Delta State correspondent who visited the scene of gas explosion which took place in the early hours of Thursday, January 11, 2018, authoritatively report that an indigenous company, NANPIST Venture, was on ground clearing the affected area for proper assessment and evaluation of the damaged caused.





An Official of NANPIST, Kingsley Onaipia noted that he was on site at the instance of NGC, stressing that excavation was being carried out to enable NGC Management ascertain the level of damage before real work will commence.





Reacting to the developmet,the Ugbokodo-Okpe community said that they have no problem with NGC in her bid to restore the damaged pipeline.





They, however, expressed dissatisfaction over the steps taken, saying that, NGC did not officially consult the community before mobilizing to site for work.





Ugbokodo-Okpe community Spokesman,Mr. Tobore Adjisha in a chat with newsmen stated that the gas pipeline explosion caused serious damage in the community, adding that they are still in shock as a result of the panic caused by the ugly incident.





Adjisha who emphasised that no life was lost from the incident that forced many to scamper for safety in such an odd hour, noted that their major concern was for the gas pipeline to be fixed with appropriate compensation paid to his community.





According to him,The extent of damage was much. You saw the extent of the flame of the fire inside the creek, both the mangrroves and other things were damaged. Both nets, fishing boats, were consumed by the fire.





NGC has come to see us. They promised to come back after they had ascertained the extent of the damage. But we are not satisfied with the step they have taken so far. We are not happy because they didnt tell us before they mobilized to site.





While assuring the management of NGC of their readiness to dialogue towards amicable settlement and compensation, Adjisha disclosed that as a peace loving community, they will provide the convivial atmosphere for peaceful negotiation.
















The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has asked the Federal High Court in Lagos to order the temporary forfeiture of $8,435...

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has asked the Federal High Court in Lagos to order the temporary forfeiture of $8,435,788.84 and N7.35bn suspected to be owned by Mrs. Patience Jonathan.The EFCC yesterday told Justice Mojisola Olatoregun that the funds, which it believes came from Bayelsa State, were found in 15 bank accounts linked with the wife of former President Goodluck Jonathan.The anti-graft agencys counsel, Mr. Rotimi Oyedepo, said the order would prevent Mrs Jonathan from dissipating them.According to the EFCC, the funds were moved from Bayelsa States coffers at a time when the former First Lady served as a permanent secretary.The agency alleged that Mrs. Jonathan gained access to the funds by fraudulently assuming the identity of one Esther Oba as the signatory to the said account.The EFCCs claims were contained in an ex parte application presented by Oyedepo before Justice Olatoregun.The proceedings were, however, interrupted by a train of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs) led by Mr. Ifedayo Adedipe (SAN) and Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN), who challenged the courts jurisdiction to entertain the ex parte application.The SANs told the judge that the funds, which the EFCC seeks to seize, were already subject of litigation.But Oyedepo maintained that the SANs had no right of hearing in the court, since his application was ex parte.Wondering how they got wind of the move by the anti-graft agency, he urged the judge to disregard their appearance.The judge upheld Oyedepos submission, following which the SANs left the courtroom.In view of the development, the judge adjourned till January 23, 2018 and directed the EFCC to file an affidavit to convince the court that there were no pending lawsuits relating to the funds sought to be forfeited.In the said ex parte application, the EFCC listed Patience Jonathan and five firms and Esther Oba as respondents.The firms that were listed as second to sixth defendants were Globus Integrated Services Ltd., Finchley Top Homes Ltd., Am-Pm Global Network Ltd., Pagmat Oil And Gas Ltd. and Magel Resort Ltd.The ex parte application was backed by a 15-paragraph affidavit deposed to by an investigator with the EFCC, Huleji Tukura.Tukura claimed that investigation by the anti-graft agency revealed that the funds found in the bank accounts linked to Patience emanated from the coffers of Bayelsa State and that the funds were moved at a time when the former First Lady served as a permanent secretary in one of the ministries in Bayelsa State.According to Tukura, Patience first opened a First Bank account and then procured the then Senior Special Assistant to former President Goodluck Jonathan on Domestic Affairs, Waripamo-Owei Dudafa, to fund the account with proceeds of unlawful activities.Tukura averred, That the said Dudafa Warripamo-Owei procured one Festus Isidohomen Iyoha and Arivi Eneji Peter, who were domestic staff attached to the State House, Abuja, to deposit the funds, reasonably suspected to be proceeds of unlawful activities, in the account of the 1st respondent (Patience).That in depositing the funds into the account of the 1st respondent, the said domestic staff, in a bid to conceal their identity, deposited the funds, reasonably suspected to be proceeds of unlawful act, into the 1st respondents account, using fictitious names.That the total sum of $4,036,750.00 (Four million, thirty-six thousand, seven hundred and fifty United States dollars) reasonably suspected to be proceeds of unlawful activities, were deposited into account No. 2022648664 domiciled in First Bank Plc in the name of the 1st respondent.That on the 28th day of September, 2016, the 1st respondent, in dissipating the property sought to be forfeited, transferred the sum of $3,640,794.72 to the 1st respondents account No. 2031277178 domiciled in First Bank Plc.That on the 5th day of October, 2016, the 1st respondent withdrew the sum of $1,000,000.00 cash from the said account leaving the balance of the sum of $3,645,013.73 which sum we are urging this honourable court to forfeit in the interim to the Federal Government of Nigeria.That as at the time the various sums were deposited in into exhibit EFCC01, the 1st respondent was a serving permanent secretary in the employment of the Bayelsa State Government.That the funds sought to be forfeited to the Federal Government of Nigeria are not the 1st respondents lawful earnings but are rather reasonably suspected to be proceeds of unlawful activities.The investigator further explained that the firms mentioned in the application were not into any legitimate income-yielding business venture but were rather incorporated at the Corporate Affairs Commission for the purpose of warehousing proceeds of unlawful activities for the former First Lady.He claimed that every now and then domestic servants at the Presidential Villa were sent to deposit money into the companys accounts for Patience.The depositors into this account are domestic staff of State House, Abuja, who were procured by the said Dudafa Waripamo-Owei to deposit the funds sought to be forfeited in a bid to conceal the true origin of the funds, Tukura said.Making specific reference to Globus Integrated Services Ltd., Tukura said, None of the Directors of the 3rd Respondent are signatories to the said account.
Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose has banned his predecessor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, from joining the 2018 governorship race, as speculated in...

Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose has banned his predecessor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, from joining the 2018 governorship race, as speculated in many quarters.The Fayose administration, yesterday, accepted the recommendations of the Judicial Commission of Enquiry to bar Fayemi from holding public offices in Ekiti State and other parts of Nigeria for 10 years.The panel, which was chaired by former Acting Chief Judge, Justice Silas Oyewole (retd.), submitted its report on December 13, last year, to Fayose and recommended that Fayemi must refund over N2 billion and return 17 vehicles.Also recommended for 10-year ban from public office is the former Commissioner for Finance and Economic Development, Mr. Dapo Kolawole, who served under Fayemi.The recommendation followed the receipt of a White Paper on the report of the Judicial Commission of Enquiry which investigated the handling of the states finances during the Fayemi administration between October 2010 and October 2014.The White Paper also recommended that the duo should refund various sums of money to the coffers of the state government.The State Executive Council (Exco) accepted the recommendations and adopted the White Paper at an emergency meeting yesterday.Fayemi is the Minister of Mines and Steel Development while Kolawole is a board member of the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA).The ex-governor refused to appear before the panel on account of a lawsuit he filed to the effect that he would not get justice at the panel.He claimed that members of the panel are loyalists, associates and card-carrying members of Fayoses party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).Although Fayemi is yet to declare intent to run for the July 14 governorship election, his foot soldiers are working to draft him into the race.His posters with inscription Happy New Year, JKF Again appeared in Ado-Ekiti and other major towns last week.The recommendation banning Fayemi and Kolawole appears on page 22 of the White Paper.It reads: Government accepts the recommendation to bar Dr. John Kayode Fayemi and the Commissioner for Finance, Mr. Dapo Vincent Kolawole, from holding public offices in Ekiti State for 10 years.On Page 15 of the White Paper, Fayemi and Kolawole were declared unfit to hold any public office for their refusal to appear before the seven-man jury to give evidence on how they managed the state treasury when they were in office.It reads: Both His Excellency, Dr. John Kayode Fayemi, and Commissioner for Finance, Mr. Dapo Vincent Kolawole, are recommended as unfit to hold any public office in the state for their refusal to appear before this Commission of Enquiry, even, after the determination of the case challenging the inauguration of this commission before the Ekiti State High Court.Their disrespect to the constituted authority and the undignified roles they played in the whole contract saga, were obviously against the interest of the state.The White Paper recommended that Fayemi, Kolawole and other members of the erstwhile Exco should account for N2,750,000,000 allegedly allocated for the execution of the contract for the ultramodern market which was never executed.Governors kangaroo panels recommendations laughableThe Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Dr Kayode Fayemi, has said the White Paper the state government released yesterday on his alleged probe is a joke taken too far.A statement by his Senior Special Assistant (Media), Olayinka Oyebode, reads: The attention of the Media Office of the Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Dr Kayode Fayemi, has been drawn to the pre-meditated verdict of the Ekiti State government, as contained in the White Paper submitted by the panel set up by Governor Ayo Fayose to investigate the finances of the state between 2010 and 2014.While we believe it is part of the responsibilities of the state administration to look into the finances of the state at any point in time, we are also of the belief that such must be done in a very responsible manner devoid of prejudice, witch hunting and a calculated attempt to victimise a citizen.In this particular case, the entire process is discredited right from the beginning, as the only agenda of the panel was to rubbish Dr Kayode Fayemis public service record.One is therefore not surprised at the recommendations of the White Paper: It only goes to confirm our initial position that the panel was compromised right from inception and targeted against Dr Fayemi.In his desperation, Governor Fayose chose the crude and ignoble path towards hitting a perceived political foe.In the process, they ignored the rule of law and behaved as if the court does not matter; thus making their actions subjudice to the court.Fayose was, however, misguided into believing that he could pass a death sentence on Dr Fayemis public service with the White Paper. This is not only laughable but also ridiculous, as neither Governor Fayose nor his paid agents have the power to bar anyone from political participation.The entire process and the character personae involved are discredited and since it is impossible to build something on nothing, legally speaking, their recommendation is not only null and void, it is ultra vires.We urge the teeming supporters of Dr Fayemi, the good people of Ekiti State and the general public not to be disturbed by the development. It is simply another act of illegality, from an administration that has elevated political debauchery to state craft.It shall not stand. It is nothing but a joke taken too far, perhaps joke of the century.
Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State has signed the States anti-kidnapping bill into law. The law prescribes death penalty for kidnappe...

Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State has signed the States anti-kidnapping bill into law. The law prescribes death penalty for kidnappers.

This was contained in a communique issued this morning (Tuesday) by the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) signed by the Public Relations Officer, Cross River State branch, Dr Ernest Ochang after meeting in Calabar.





The Governor on his part informed the NMA that the anti kidnapping bill had been signed into law and he was not going to rest until the kidnappers are caught and brought to book.





This law prescribes the death penalty for kidnappers. His Excellency mandated the State Security Adviser to work closely with the NMA in information gathering and sharing, and expressed concern at the lack of inter-agency synergy, with a promise to do all in his power to address the issue.





He also informed the NMA of other specific measures including the provision of a patrol boat for the waterway identified as the escape route for kidnappers and enforcement of serious consequences for local chiefs aiding and abating this criminal element, the NMA stated.





NMA however, expressed its dissatisfaction with the poor security situation in the state, leading to the frequent kidnappings which she felt were targeted at doctors and their family members.





It is worthy of note that at least 6 doctors or their family members had been kidnapped within the last year alone. Following the kidnap of Dr Usang Ekanem, we had warned of an impending sit-at-home should he not be released unconditionally.





He was quickly released after a ransom and another doctor grabbed on same day. We are also aware of a litany of other kidnappings across the state including a Red cross volunteer/primary school teacher who is still in captivity and the NMA demands his unconditional release, they said.





NMA appreciates the introduction of homeland security but expresses concern at the poor information sharing and synergy between security agencies.





We feel this is the real challenge and possible cause of the absurdity which permits victims to be transported at ease within the state particularly between the hours of 12 and 4am.





We are glad to inform you that beyond the security challenges, we had time to discuss other issues and proffered ways forward on health issues in the State particularly the dearth of doctors in the State service, possible collaboration opportunities between the State and health care resources in the Teaching Hospital and other tertiary health facilities, implementation challenges on Ayade-care and multiple taxation of private health facilities.





We wish to thank the general public particularly the press for standing with us in this struggle to emancipate our State from hoodlums and mean-minded criminals.





We swore to save lives but our lives were continually being threatened. We had to look over our shoulders. The terror and fear was beginning to affect our work.




Hosea Ibi, a member of the Taraba state house of assembly, kidnapped earlier, has been found dead.

Hosea Ibi, a member of the Taraba state house of assembly, kidnapped earlier, has been found dead.





His body was found on Monday, 16 days after he was kidnapped by unknown gunmen.





David Misal, spokesman of the Taraba police command, confirmed this to TheCable.





He said Ibis body was discovered by some residents on Monday afternoon in Takum local government area of the state.





His body was found this afternoon in Kashim Dira road, in Takum council, he told TheCable.





We are still working on that (any arrests and attempts to find the culprits). We will make sure that the culprits are brought to hook. So we are working.





The lawmaker, who represented Takum 1 constituency in the state house of assembly, was whisked away by three gunmen on the night of December 31.





The gunmen had arrived Ibis mothers residence in Takum, in two motorcycles that night.




The Movement Against Fulani Occupation, MAFO, a civil society organisation against the activities of herdsmen in Benue State, has warned that the activities of herdsmen in parts of the country was a clear indication that the Miyetti Allah was planning a coup against the Nigerian states.This is just as suspected herders, on Sunday night, attacked a village in Kwall district of Irigwe chiefdom, Plateau State, leaving one person dead and another injured, the State Police Command confirmed yesterday.The attack was said to have occurred at about 9 p.m. when unsuspecting villagers were retiring to bed.The State Police Public Relations Officer, PPRO, ASP Mathias Tyopev, told Vanguard: On Sunday, at about 9p.m., unknown armed men attacked three people at Dundu-Maiyanga village of Kwall district, Bassa Local Government Area.As a result, one Sunday Lale was macheted to death, his brother, one Ayuba Lale, sustained various machete cuts on his body and is admitted in a hospital in Kwall, while Gimba Lale escaped unhurt.The corpse has been evacuated and investigation in progress; efforts are in top gear to track down the perpetrators.Recall that Irigwe chiefdom in the last three months, has recorded series of attacks by suspected herders, leaving more than 60 dead.On Miyetti AllahSpeaking to newsmen yesterday in Makurdi, MAFO leadership, through Dr. Sam Abah, cautioned that Miyetti Allah, as a group, is executing the plot state by state through it murderous activities.The group said: Miyetti Allah is plotting a coup against Nigerian states and they are executing the pilot state by state.A phenomenon is going on now in the rise of an ethnic group that has no regards for the law. The killings, therefore, are not acts of aggrieved herdsmen, but the handiwork of well-trained, well-paid, well-armed gangs/militia terrorists that act as a standing army of invasion, sponsored by elites to wage war across Nigeria, particularly Benue State.The terrorists and their sponsors are not foreigners from Mali, Chad, Niger, Libya and Senegal.Rather, the murderers are Nigerians sponsored by Nigerians to kill and destroy Nigeria.It urged President Buhari to stand up in defense of Nigerians by declaring Miyetti Allah a terrorist group and also take a step further to proscribe it.
The Osun State Governor, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, has said that Nigerians are inadvertently pushing the nation towards another civil war through hate speeches, wickedness and massive killings going on in the country.The governor said the nation was lucky to come out of the first civil war but stressed that Nigeria might not be lucky if it was plunged into another round of civil war now.According to a statement in Osogbo by the governors media aide, Mr. Sola Fasure, Aregbesola said this at the 2018 Armed Forces Remembrance Day celebration on Monday.Making an allusion to the widespread killings by the Fulani herdsmen, the governor sued for caution, saying it had become imperative for every Nigerian to work assiduously for the peace of the nation by avoiding anything that could lead to war.He said, Through carelessness, thoughtlessness, selfishness, wickedness and hate mongering, the country may unwittingly be pushing itself towards another war.War is a very bad business. It is costly, deadly and ruinous, even for a supposedly winner.It is worse for the loser. Indeed, all are losers in a war. The resources, human and material, used to prosecute wars could have been used for the development of the people. The lesson of history is that nations and people emerged from wars weakened, devastated, poor and vulnerable.The worst part is that though a nations decision to go to war or not may be easy before the outbreak of hostilities, it is more difficult and sometimes impossible to decide to stop a war; thus we have prolonged and sometimes an indeterminate war. This is the hard part.We see the devastations of war in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon (and closer home) in Liberia and Sierra Leone. While some like Liberia and Sierra Leone are fortunate to put the war behind them, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq have found it difficult to stop their own wars.Lebanon lost its Paradise and Pearl of the Middle East status to the United Arab Emirates. The mutual antagonism and distrust that the Nigerian Civil War bred are still with us.Aregbesola described peace as the foundation for economic and political development while stressing that no development could take place in a crisis situation.He said Nigeria was placed in a strategic position to lead the African continent out of backwardness and crisis, saying the nation could not afford to fail in discharging its responsibilities.The governor called on Nigerians, especially the youths, to break away from the culture of dependence on the free money from crude oil. He urged them to apply their education to solving problems facing humanity, saying that would be the way to make sustainable wealth because oil would soon lose its importance.He said, In the interest of the black race, Nigeria must not just exist, it must be strong to be able to lead the continent to achieve its manifest destiny.The greatest riches of the continent are domiciled in the Great Lakes Region comprising Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.Nigeria should be strong and provide leadership with South Africa and the leaders of the region to be able to develop these riches for the development of the people of the continent and for Africa to be able to take her place in the world.
President Muhammadu Buhari has directed security agencies to fish out the herdsmen who killed no fewer than 73 farmers in New Years Day...

President Muhammadu Buhari has directed security agencies to fish out the herdsmen who killed no fewer than 73 farmers in New Years Day in Benue State.Victims of the incident were buried last Thursday in Makurdi amid a nationwide outrage.Governor Samuel Ortom told reporters that the President gave the order during a meeting with the states leaders of thought on the security situation.At the meeting were Deputy Governor Benson Abounu, Tor Tiv Prof. James Ayatse, Ochi Idoma, former Senate President David Mark, Senator George Akume, Senator Barnabas Gemade, Gen. Lawrence Onoja (retd.), Speaker Terkimbir Kyambe and Senator Joseph Waku, amog others.Presidential spokesman Femi Adesina quoted President Buhari as telling the delegation:Your Excellency, the governor, and all the leaders here, I am appealing to you to try to restrain your people. I assure you that the Police, the Department of State Security and other security agencies had been directed to ensure that all those behind the mayhem get punished.I ask you in the name of God to accommodate your country men. You can also be assured that I am just as worried, and concerned with the situation.The President told the delegation that his administration had already begun a process of finding lasting solution to the perennial challenge of herdsmen conflict with farmers and communities around the country.The Tor-Tiv, said his domain had been thrown into mourning due to the incessant attacks.We want you to put an end to the gruesome situation.Ortom said Benue leaders demanded that the killer-herdsmen be arrested and prosecuted.His words: The situation as at today is relatively calm, although there are pockets of issues. For the past five days we have witnessed two killings compared to what was happening before. Other places are relatively calm. The security men and the IGP and the Benue State Government have been working day and night to ensure that we bring the situation under control and stop the killings.There are still security issues from one town to the other, like some few days ago we had an uproar in Makurdi Local Government, headquarters of Benue State where some hoodlums wanted to take advantage. That is one of the things we have discovered in trying to create confusion so that they can go in there and loot.We have made it known that for us in Benue State is that there is no room for anyone taking laws into his hands. It is expected even when you are offended or someone violates the law, the best thing to do is to report, by that we will be able to meet our sanctions on such people. But when you take laws into your hand, you are inviting anarchy and we will not accept this.So we are here to appreciate Mr. President for providing security. Yesterday (Sunday), we also received relief materials based on his directives to NEMA and is being shared among the five IDP camps that we have in Benue State.But beyond that we made strong appeal to Mr. President to arrest those people that perpetrated this act, the Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, because they are not above the law. They made inciting statements against our people and they came and perpetrated this act. We are law abiding citizens; we are not going to let our people go out of control.The governor was full of praises for Buhari. He said: We believe in the leadership of Mr. President because he is disciplined and is an upright man and we believe he will be able to sanction this people and he did assure us that there is no room for impunity, the law of the land must take its cause. So, those perpetrators; the IG was at the meeting; he directed the IG to arrest those who perpetrated this act and prosecute them according to the law.And he assured us that he would do everything possible to ensure that Benue State lives peacefully and there are no further killings. So, basically, that is why we came to see Mr. President.Asked if the issue of arming militia groups came up, Ortom said that the allegation was false.He said: It is not true. I see that as distraction, completely from the main issue that we are talking about. These people were not even arrested in Benue State. If we are being killed in the magnitude that we saw and we had weapons of what I saw in the media, I know that five AK 47s can sack a whole community. So if we had such weapons and I as governor my local government had been attacked and people killed, property destroyed and so on, so will I go and sponsor militia in Taraba State? I organised an amnesty programme, which saw the disarmament of over 800 youths and more than 700 weapons were turned in which were destroyed in the presence of security men and the UN and the committee on small weapons and light arms from the Presidency.So it is not true; it is false. It is meant to turn facts away from the reality that is happening on ground.Ortom said the meeting with the President was at the instance of Benue State as he defended the anti-open grazing law made by his administration but which the Fuluni are opposed to.The law is a win win; it provides security for the herdsmen and the farmers. And as far as we are concerned the implementation of the law is going on smoothly.We have also arrested more than 18 herdsmen who violated the law and they were arraigned before the court of law.Ortom said that the state is open to suggestions from the Federal Government on finding a lasting solution.The Minister of Agriculture happens to be a son of the soil. There are many options that are put on the table.Like I told you the last time I came here, I did not understand what cattle colonies meant. Today, I was privileged to meet him and he did explain to me that a colony is many ranches in one place, restricted in one place. So, for us in Benue State, there is no 10,000 hectares; they are looking for 5,000 hectares, we have no 10,000 hectares to allow it for that kind of a thing to take plac.Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai said the Federal Government had very clear plans to end herders/farmers clashes in the country.The governor told reporters after laying a wreath to mark the Armed Forces Remembrance Day in Kaduna that the issue was being tackled head-on.We met with the Minister of Interior. There are very clear plans to curtail these issues. I want to assure everyone, the President and other security agencies are doing their best.
Stuart Symington, US ambassador to Nigeria, says the administration of Donald Trump has a high regard for Nigerians.

Stuart Symington, US ambassador to Nigeria, says the administration of Donald Trump has a high regard for Nigerians.





Tope Elias-Fatile, foreign ministrys spokesperson, quoted the US ambassador as making the statement when he was represented by David Young, the embassys charge daffairs, in an audience with Geoffrey Onyeama, minister of foreign affairs.





The minister on Monday summoned the US ambassador to clarify issues regarding the alleged shithole remark made by Trump.





Onyeama said the racist remarks credited to Donald Trump was unacceptable if found to be true.





According to Elias-Fatile, the minister sought clarification on the veracity or otherwise of the substance of the remarks, stressing that if they were true, they were deeply hurtful, offensive and unacceptable, especially given the cordial relations that exist between Nigerian and the US.





Elias-Fatile quoted Young as saying there were contradicting accounts by those present as to the veracity or otherwise of the substance of the remarks.





Young stressed that Trumps government continues to hold the people of Nigeria in very high regard and valued the warm relations and excellent cooperation between the two countries.





Trump also looks forward to building on this relationship for the mutual benefit of the two countries.





The US president reportedly made a racist comment at a meeting with congressional leaders in the Oval Office.





Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Trump allegedly said after being presented with a proposal to restore protection for immigrants from Africa and other countries.





Trump was also alleged to have said African countries, alongside Haiti and El Salvador, constitute shitholes from where migrants into the United States were undesirable.





The US president had, however, denied describing any race as coming from shithole countries.





Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said take them out. Made up by Dems.




By Kelly Heyboer | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

There were 138 reported rapes at New Jersey's four-year colleges and universities in 2016 -- a 24 percent increase over the previous year -- as many schools stepped up efforts to encourage students to report sexual assaults on campus.

The number of reported rapes rose at about half of the state's 28 four-year residential college campuses, according to an NJ Advance Media review of campus crime reports.

Reports of other sex crimes also rose. There were 70 reports of fondling in 2016 (a 46 percent increase) and 63 reports of dating violence (a 13 percent increase), according to the reports.

School officials said the increases may be a result of national attention on campus sexual assault and efforts on campuses to make it easier for students to file reports.

At The College of New Jersey, the number of reported rapes doubled to 12 in 2016, according to the the crime reports. School officials credited new sexual assault training and awareness efforts with helping boost the numbers.

As part of our overall effort to protect students from sexual violence, TCNJ has developed initiatives aimed at removing barriers that prevent victims from reporting incidents," said Luke Sacks, the college's spokesman.

Here are the number of reported incidents at each of New Jersey's four-year colleges with residential campuses:

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(Princeton University photo)

Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Enrollment: 49,577

2016:

Rapes: 23

Fondling: 8

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 26

Fondling: 14

Dating violence: 0

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Princeton University

Enrollment: 8,181

2016:

Rapes: 13

Fondling: 5

Dating violence: 1

2015:

Rapes: 7

Fondling: 3

Dating violence: 0

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The College of New Jersey

Enrollment: 7,396

2016:

Rapes: 12

Fondling: 11

Dating violence: 9

2015:

Rapes: 6

Fondling: 2

Dating violence: 9

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Ramapo College

Enrollment: 6,234

2016:

Rapes: 11

Fondling: 5

Dating violence: 2

2015:

Rapes: 6

Fondling: 2

Dating violence: 1

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Don't Edit

Rowan University

Enrollment: 17,372

2016:

Rapes: 11

Fondling: 5

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 7

Fondling: 5

Dating violence: 0

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Kean University

Enrollment: 14,070

2016:

Rapes: 7

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 4

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 6

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William Paterson University

Enrollment: 10,583

2016:

Rapes: 7

Fondling: 5

Dating violence: 14

2015:

Rapes: 5

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 7

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Montclair State University

Enrollment: 20,987

2016:

Rapes: 7

*Other forcible sex offenses: 5

Dating violence: 6

2015:

Rapes: 7

Other forcible sex offenses: 1

Dating violence: 7

*(Montclair's report did not break out fondling.)

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Centenary University

Enrollment: 2,203

2016:

Rapes: 7

Fondling: 2

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 7

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 1

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Fairleigh Dickinson University- Florham campus

Enrollment: 3,363

2016:

Rapes: 7

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 4

Dating violence: 3

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Drew University

Enrollment: 2,129

2016:

Rapes: 7

Fondling: 7

Dating violence: 6

2015:

Rapes: 7

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 1

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Stockton University

Enrollment: 8,728

2016:

Rapes: 5

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 3

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 6

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Monmouth University

Enrollment: 6,371

2016:

Rapes: 4

*Criminal sexual contact: 0

Dating violence: 5

2015:

Rapes: 3

Criminal sexual contact: 3

Dating violence: 2

*(Monmouth's report did not break out fondling.)

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New Jersey Institute of Technology

Enrollment: 11,317

2016:

Rapes: 3

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

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Seton Hall University

Enrollment: 9,836

2016:

Rapes: 3

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 6

2015:

Rapes: 6

Fondling: 3

Dating violence: 6

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Stevens Institute of Technology

Enrollment: 6,617

2016:

Rapes: 2

Statutory rapes: 1

Fondling: 6

Dating violence: 1

2015:

Rapes: 3

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 1

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New Jersey City University

Enrollment: 8,504

2016:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

Don't Edit

Rutgers-Newark

Enrollment: 12,768

2016:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

Don't Edit

Bloomfield College

Enrollment: 1,996

2016:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 3

2015:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 2

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

College of Saint Elizabeth

Enrollment: 1,200

2016:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 1

2015:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 1

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Felician University

Enrollment: 2,014

2016:

*Forcible sex offenses: 1

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Forcible sex offenses: 0

Dating violence: 0

* (Felician's report did not break out how many rapes were among the forcible sex offenses in 2016.)

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Caldwell University

Enrollment: 2,214

2016:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 3

2015:

Rapes: 2

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

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Saint Peter's University

Enrollment: 3,544

2016:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 6

2015:

Rapes: 2

Fondling: 3

Dating violence: 3

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Rider University

Enrollment: 5,057

2016:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 7

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 5

Fondling: 2

Dating violence: 0

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Fairleigh Dickinson University- Metropolitan campus

Enrollment: 8,149

2016:

Rapes: 1

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 3

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

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Rutgers-Camden

Enrollment: 6,853

2016:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 1

Dating violence: 0

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Georgian Court University

Enrollment: 2,302

2016:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

2015:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: 0

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Pillar College

Enrollment: 529

2016:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: Not reported

2015:

Rapes: 0

Fondling: 0

Dating violence: Not reported

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Defining 'rape'

The data on campus sex crimes and dating violence comes from the yearly Clery Act reports that colleges and universities must file under a 1990 federal law requiring them to be more transparent about crime on campus.

The act was named after Jeanne Clery, a student raped and murdered in her dorm room at Lehigh University in 1986.

A recent change in the law requires colleges to break out how many rapes were reported on campus. Previously, schools were required to report an overall total number of "forcible sex offenses," which included rape and other sex-related crimes.

Some critics say the Clery sexual assault data may be misleading because the majority of college campuses nationwide reported no rapes last year. That could be because many students do not report sexual assault crimes. But critics say it could also be because colleges fail to properly report crimes on school grounds in their Clery reports, including crimes in neighborhoods bordering their campuses.

The federal law defines rape of women or men as "the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus, with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."

Fondling is defined as "the touching of the private body parts of another person for the purpose of sexual gratification, without the consent of the victim, including instances where the victim is incapable of giving consent because of his/her age or because of his/her temporary or permanent mental incapacity."

Dating violence is sexual or physical abuse by someone in a relationship, including the threat of violence, according to the federal definition.

In 2011, President Barack Obama's administration stepped up pressure on colleges and universities to respond promptly and appropriately to sexual violence complaints. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden started the "It's On Us" campaign to raise awareness about campus sex assaults after a White House task force recommended ways to prevent sexual violence on campus.

President Donald Trump's administration rescinded some of Obama-era campus sexual assault guidelines last year, saying that colleges need to be more fair and impartial when investigating sex assaults.

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What's happening at Rutgers?

Rutgers, the state's largest university, continues to lead the state in reported campus rapes. In 2016, there were 23 rapes reported on the New Brunswick-Piscataway campus, according to the campus crime report.

But, the numbers have been dropping each year at Rutgers' main campus (there were 31 reported rapes in 2014 and 26 in 2015). And school officials point out the numbers are relatively small on a per capita basis considering there are nearly 50,000 students on the New Brunswick-Piscataway campus.

Rutgers University-New Brunswick remains a nationally recognized leader in providing comprehensive support, advocacy and evidence-based prevention on issues of sexual violence. We are proud of this accomplishment and believe the year-to-year decrease in reported sexual violence crimes is related to our multi-pronged approach," said Felicia McGinty, Rutgers' vice chancellor for student affairs.

Rutgers received a $2 million Victims of Crime Act grant last year to improve its sexual assault reporting and services and develop new programs for survivors. In October, former Vice President Joe Biden appeared at an "It's On Us" rally on campus to raise awareness about sexual assault.

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The ripple effects of #MeToo

The latest rape report statistics are from 2016, the latest available Clery Act data from college campuses. It remains to be seen if the recent national focus on sexual harassment and sexual assault, prompted by the allegations of sexual misconduct by against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and other celebrities, will result in more rape or sex assault allegations on college campuses in 2017.

An anonymous open source document detailing more than 2,000 allegations of sexual assault and harassment on college campuses, including some in New Jersey, has been circulating around college campuses since December.

Though the Trump administration has dialed back the Obama-era pressure on colleges to revise their procedures on investigating sexual assault, many colleges say they are moving forward with reforms.

At Ramapo College in Mahwah, school officials are continuing to implement recommendations in a 2015 report they commissioned to improve safety on campus. They include adding a new full-time director to coordinate sexual assault investigations, hiring more public safety officers trained to respond to sexual assault trauma and offering more peer training for students on rape prevention.

The number of rapes reported at Ramapo rose from six in 2015 to 11 in 2016. The school credited some of its new training and education programs with the increase in reports.

"At Ramapo College of New Jersey, claims of sexual assault and/or other acts of violence are taken very seriously. The college continues to work tirelessly to educate and provide resources to the entire college community on this issue and to provide a prompt, thorough, and fair investigation whenever a complaint is reported," college officials said in a statement.

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More about N.J. colleges

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Kelly Heyboer may be reached at kheyboer@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KellyHeyboer. Find her at KellyHeyboerReporter on Facebook.
Hundreds of Newark airport workers joined union leaders and federal, state and local elected officials Monday for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day march and rally to demand higher wages.



Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, former mayor and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), the state Assembly's new speaker, Craig Coughlin, and others addressed more than 600 aircraft cabin cleaners, custodians and others who had gathered inside Terminal C at Newark Liberty International Airport, after marching through Terminal B, then outside along the airport road on the frigid but sunny federal holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader.



Officials noted that King was pressing for economic equality when he was assassinated in April 1968 while in Memphis to support sanitation workers seeking higher wages.

"It's important for us to understand when we celebrate Dr. King, we have to celebrate what he stood for," Baraka told the large crowd inside Terminal C.

More than 600 airport workers carried placards reading "Justice for Airport Workers," "I AM a woman," and "I AM a man," and chanted in call-and-response refrains, "No justice! No Peace!" and "When we fight...We win!"

Many of the workers wore purple beanies of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union,which represents about 2,500 airport workers in Newark. Others wore the trademark red colors of UNITE HERE, the merged Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union, which also represents some Newark airport workers.

About 10,000 people work in low-wage ground support jobs at Newark Liberty for firms contracted by Newark Liberty's main tenant, United Airlines, and other carriers there.

The unions have been gradually organizing airport workers into bargaining units at their respective companies in recent years, while at the same time pushing for higher airport wage requirements by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the which operates Newark Liberty in New Jersey and John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports in New York.

Workers at LaGuardia and JFK typically make more than their counterparts at Newark Liberty despite doing the same work at airports run by the same bi-state agency because New York State has a higher minimum wage than New Jersey.

Specifically, the minimum in New York -- which applies to workers at Kennedy and LaGuardia -- rose to $12 an hour on Dec. 31, and is scheduled to rise to $15 an hour as of Dec. 31, 2018, under the law signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York.

New Jersey's minimum wage, by contrast, rose to $8.44 an hour on Jan. 1.

The effective minimum wage at Newark Liberty is higher than that thanks to a Port Authority airport minimum wage policy that took effect in 2015, requiring airport tenants or their contractors to pay their workers at least $10.10 an hour. But that still lags behind the New York State minimum that applies to workers at Newark and JFK.

Millie Perez, a 47-year-old terminal cleaner at Newark Liberty who was at Monday's rally, said she makes $11.70 an hour. That's $1.60 above the Newark airport minimum, but still barely enough to cover the $950 rent on the 2-bedroom Newark apartment she shares with her twp kids.

"It's not much for me," Perez said in Spanish. "I'm always struggling."

The unions staged a similar airport march on the King holiday last year, with little immediate effect.

But Perez, her coworkers and their advocates are hoping things will be different this year, when Gov.-elect Phil Murphy is scheduled to be sworn-in Tuesday to replace Gov. Chris Christie.

Murphy, a Democrat who enjoyed union support in the November election, had appeared before the Port Authority Board of Commissioners during his campaign urging members to adopt a $15/hour airport wage that would apply to both sides of the Hudson River. The board declined.

But because the governors of the two states share control of the Port Authority through their power to appoint commissioners and to veto their actions, officials say Murphy will be able to do more than just urge the 12-member Port Authority board to raise airport wages.

Specifically, said 32BJ President Hector Figueroa, Murphy can direct the Port Authority's New Jersey commissioners to reconsider the airport wage issue, while working with Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, to insure that New York's commissioners also support a $15/hour airport wage policy.



Murphy issued a statement released by 32BJ, saying he was "proud to stand with all workers who demand a stronger and fairer New Jersey economy that works for every family."



"Today, we honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy of fighting for justice - a legacy kept alive by airport workers fighting for a fair wage. Tomorrow, and together, we will turn the page and begin anew the work to strengthen our communities and our economy."

Dan Bryan, a spokesman for Murphy, declined to say just what concrete steps Murphy intended to take once he is sworn in.

Figueroa and Booker both said that, based on their conversations with Murphy, they were confident there would be action soon.

"Tomorrow we have a new governor in New Jersey," Figueroa said in an interview after the march. "We are not going to waste time, and aiport workers are going to get a raise."

Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
The death of a 53-year-old Monroe Township man found dead in his home Wednesday night is being investigated as a homicide, the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office announced Tuesday.

The county medical examiner determined Steve M. Bucher, of the Timber Lakes section of the township, died of a gunshot wound and ruled his death a homicide, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

Authorities did not elaborate on the circumstances under which Bucher's body was found.

The prosecutor's office has urged anyone with information about the case to contact prosecutor's Detective Greg Malesich at 856-384-5626 or Monroe Detective Kristyn Armstrong at 856-728-9800, ext. 577.

Authorities said anonymous tips can also be submitted via email to tips@co.gloucester.nj.us, or online at https://mypolicedepartment.org/gloucester-county-prosecutors-office/tipform/.

Tips can be placed from mobile devices via the prosecutor's office MyPD smartphone app, available for free on the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips
Remi, the Maywood Police Department dog who helped recapture a man who was charged with sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in Union City. (Maywood Police Department photo)

JERSEY CITY -- He got away once, and now the state doesn't want to give an accused child molester the chance to do it again.

The state has moved to detain Luis Bescome, 31, of Queens, New York, who is charged with sexually assaulting a 10-year-old Union City girl. Bescome was quickly arrested after Friday's incident, but escaped and rearrested the next day.

On Sunday, Luis Bescome, 31, of Queens, made his first court appearance on the charges of sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child in connection to the alleged sexual assault of the girl outside a Union City apartment building Friday, officials said.

After being recaptured Saturday, he was additionally charged with escape and obstructing a government function, according to the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office.

The state moved to detain Bescome through the course of his prosecution when he made his first appearance on the charges in Criminal Justice Reform Court on Sunday via video link from Hudson County jail in Kearny.

A detention hearing is scheduled for Thursday before Hudson County Superior Court Judge Paul DePascale in the Hudson County Administration building in Jersey City.

The girl was able to flee and she alerted an adult who called police and the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office was notified. Bescome was arrested "at a nearby shelter." He was taken to a Prosecutor's Office facility in Jersey City where he escaped "a short time after arriving," officials said.

It's not clear how Bescome managed to escape. Union City police spotted him on Saturday at about 11:30 p.m. near 39th Street and arrested him, officials said.

Hudson County Prosecutor Esther Suarez credited the Union City Police Department, the New Jersey State Police, the Maywood Police Department K-9 Unit, the Jersey City Police Department and the Hudson County Sheriff's Office for their assistance.

Maywood Police Department Chief David Pegg said today that his department's bloodhound, Remi, played a role in the investigation.

The prosecutor's office is releasing no further information at this time.
JERSEY CITY -- A Jersey City woman has been charged with throwing hot coffee on a gas station mini-mart employee and robbing more than $350 -- the third time since Thanksgiving she is accused accosting someone with liquid.

Port Authority police responded to a call of a robbery in progress at the Exxon station on 14th Street and Marin Boulevard at 8:20 p.m. on Jan. 10 and saw April S. Harris, 40, holding a coffee pot inside the store, police said.

A 56-year-old employee outside the mini-mart told police Harris threw coffee at him before cleaning out the cash register, Port Authority police spokesman Joe Pentangelo said. Harris complied when ordered to put down the coffee pot and she was arrested, Pentangelo said, adding that police found she had $360 on her.

After each of the first two incidents, Harris, who also goes by the name Alicia, was released on her own recognizance. She has not appeared in Criminal Justice Reform Court for her latest charge and is still in Hudson County jail.

After her Jan. 10 arrest, police also found there was a warrant for Harris out of Jersey City Municipal Court with a bail set at $2,000, Pentangelo said. Harris was charged with robbery, receiving stolen property and bail jumping before being remanded to the jail in Kearny, Pentangelo said.

On Nov. 24, Harris was arrested on a bus at Communipaw and Garfield avenues after police said she sprayed a bus driver with the cleaning liquid Windex. Harris had just gotten on the bus and she apparently grew angry when the bus driver demanded that she either pay the fare or get off the bus, police said.

The bus driver told police that this wasn't the first time Harris doused her with liquid. In a prior incident that was not reported, Harris threw hot tea on the bus driver, police were told.

In the Nov. 24, incident, police said Harris said she was bipolar and schizophrenic and that she would punch the bus driver in the face the next time she saw her, the police report said. Harris was evaluated by a Jersey City Medical Center doctor and cleared for incarceration, police said. She was issued a summons through the city's municipal court and given a Dec. 14 court date.

Three days later, on Nov. 27, at 10 p.m., police say a gas station store clerk was hospitalized with burns to his face and forehead after Harris threw boiling water and hot coffer in the employee's face.

According to a police report, Harris became irate when a debit card she tried to use at the Exxon station at Communipaw and Kennedy Boulevard was declined. She admitted to police that she threw the boiling liquids -- "because she felt like it."

Harris was charged with aggravated assault and taken to the jail. She was released after a detention hearing.

Jersey Journal Managing Editor Ron Zeitlinger contributed to this report.
Firefighters responded to a chimney fire at a Lebanon Township home on Monday.

The fire was reported just before 1:30 p.m. at a Forge Hill Road residence.

Responding were Lebanon Twp Fire Department and EMS Division, Hampton Fire Department, High Bridge Fire Department, the Glen Gardner Fire Department and township police.
Ashley Woodcox was on her way to the mall to buy Christmas presents in mid-December. On her way there, she spotted an elderly, short man walking along the road with a cane.

The 27-year-old pulled over to offer him a ride, recognizing him as the same man her mother picked up 10 years ago after seeing him hike 14 miles to work every day, and asked how he's been since she moved away from Clinton a decade ago.

Risto Kotewski, the 75-year-old Macedonian man well known around Clinton, had bad news. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and didn't have enough money to cover treatment.

Woodcox was moved to launch a GoFundMe for him, raising more than $6,000, and hoping to raise more.

"I was just thinking, 'Why am I going to the mall to buy all these stupid things when this man has nothing?'" she said. "I wanted to do something for him, and this is one of those days I would never forget."

She surpassed her original goal of $5,000 within two weeks, raising it to $10,000. So far, people have donated $6,560. She and her boyfriend, Corey Schoenig, also take him out to eat a few times a month, to spend time with him and ensure he's getting a hot meal.

Many of us in Clinton know this man. You may not know his name, but you have seen him walking in town, occasionally... Posted by Town of Clinton, New Jersey on Tuesday, January 2, 2018

"We gave him a soup and a salad and he acted like we were giving him a million bucks. We gave him a $50 and he had tears in his eyes," she said.

The money raised won't only be used for treatments, but also necessities, and a new pair of hiking boots, Woodcox noted. He's completing radiation at Hunterdon Medical Center in Raritan Township, but she doesn't know what treatment options will be available to him next because of patient privacy laws.

Woodcox, who now lives in Glen Gardner, often visits him at his home, she said, explaining he lives in Whitehouse Station, living out of one room that includes a microwave, bed, a small TV from the 90s and a mini fridge stocked with two cans of cat food.

So for Kotewski to have an entire community rallying behind him to offer him the best life is unfathomable to him, Woodcox said.

"It means the world to him to know he has a ton of support from complete strangers," she added. "Our community as a whole has come together and it's good to see that for him."

Her next plan for Kotewski is planning his 76th birthday on March 29.

"He has no idea about all the people that care about him, and I can guarantee he's never had a birthday party," she said. "I just want to change that."

Sophie Nieto-Munoz may be reached at snietomunoz@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her at @snietomunoz. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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For a state that's tired of watching its governor stand behind President Trump like a bedraggled shadow puppet, Phil Murphy is a breath of fresh air.



In his inauguration speech on Tuesday, he vowed to fight "Washington's all-out assault on New Jersey," and defend our state against punishing Trump policies on everything from taxes to oil drilling to health care.



But this wasn't just a series of liberal applause lines, although there were plenty. Murphy brought the crowd to its feet with a defense of American values, vowing to protect people from all countries - and "that includes Haiti and the continent of Africa," a clear jab at the president.

Phil Murphy sworn in, replaces Chris Christie as N.J. governor



"We will resist every attempt to define who is, and who is not, a real American," he said.



How refreshing; a governor who sticks up for his state's interests, and basic decency for a change.

For all his thuggish bullying, Christie used to go to bat on stuff like that, too - standing by his appointment of a Muslim judge in 2011, for instance, and denouncing the "crazies" in his own party who insisted we were on a path to becoming a "Sharia state."



But he's since abandoned that equanimity. It was all part of his rollover to Trump, the man who questioned Barack Obama's citizenship, wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country, falsely insisted that he saw thousands of New Jersey Al Qaeda supporters cheer on 9-11, and said the U.S. should be taking people from "Norway," not "shitholes" like Haiti.



Christie made it clear that he was more concerned about his own political ambitions than the good of our country or state. That's how he got to his 14 percent approval rating.

He refused to join lawsuits filed by more than a dozen other states to challenge Trump's decisions to end protections for young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, or eliminate the federal subsidies that help New Jerseyans afford health care.



And unlike other, outspoken Republican governors and members of the federal opioid panel that Christie chaired, our governor made hardly a peep about Trump's attempt to gut Medicaid - even though this would have destroyed Christie's own campaign to fight addiction in New Jersey, by killing drug treatment.



So it was good to hear Murphy repeat over and over: "We will resist." He called out Trump's tax gifts to rich corporations at the expense of ordinary New Jerseyans. He vowed to fight attempts to divide families and strip protections from striving young immigrants, and stand up to the Trump administration as it attempts to defund our tunnel to Manhattan and slash health care for millions.



All areas where Christie failed to lead. But most of all, Murphy made it clear that he embraces his role as a spokesman for the resistance.



He has license to take this tack. After all, he won by tying his opponent, Kim Guadagno, to Christie and Trump. When she released a race-baiting, fear-mongering ad that attempted to smear Murphy, he said: "What you're doing is what Donald Trump does, and Chris Christie; you pit us against them. You cast a pall over entire communities of people. It's un-American."



On Tuesday, he provided the alternate vision, one much better suited to our state.

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This is an era of abundant energy and growing environmental risks, so the Trump Administration - which has mastered the dark art of compromising the practical future for the political present - has decided it would be the perfect time to hang a massive choker of oil rigs around the country's neck.

The president has proposed opening up more than 90 percent of the waters surrounding the continental U.S. - that's 100 million acres - to offshore drilling.

Currently, drilling is banned in 94 percent of the outer continental shelf, because our leaders are well-practiced in kill-the-drill efforts, and most politicians from our state - Democrats and Republicans alike, including Gov. Christie - have already told Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke that his proposal is inherently reckless and potentially catastrophic.

These voices must only become louder, because this fight is about our economy, our future, and the stewardship of our cherished coastline.

Sure, it's a Nimby issue. Proof arrived a few days after Zinke's announcement, when he exempted Florida from drilling - presumably because President Trump realized that a spill off Palm Beach would be very bad for business at Mar-A-Lago.

It was also a sloppy kiss for Florida Gov. Rick Scott - a drilling advocate even after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster desecrated his Gulf coast beaches, whose upcoming Senate campaign will likely crash if he continues to put black sludge ahead of the voting public.

So the Florida leases are already off the board because Zinke says "its coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver."

Only an inexcusable ignorance would lead him to believe that this is unique to Florida.

The Jersey Shore has a $44 billion tourism industry, which supports a half-million jobs either directly or indirectly. That is 10 percent of our workforce.

It is home to more than $700 billion in coastal properties.

Our commercial fishing industry supports another 50,000 jobs and generates $8 billion annually, and our shores are home to one of the largest recreational fishing industries in the nation.

All of that would be imperiled by one spill off our coast.

Meanwhile, all the risk is on the shore communities, and all the rewards go to Big Oil.

As Sen. Robert Menendez put it, the Zinke plan "is a gift for corporate polluters at the expense of our coastal economies."

No doubt, the proposal is merely the opening wager in a byzantine process - rigs may not pop up for another decade. But it's clear where all this is heading.

Just two weeks ago, congressional Republicans gave oil companies a $500 million tax break. That money - generated through a 9 cents-per-barrel tax on crude oil - was the main source of revenue for the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which has been around since 1986.

This program that helped government respond quickly to oil accidents on land or offshore. But now the GOP has allowed the tax to expire.

So if there is ever another incident like the Deepwater Horizon tragedy - the largest marine spill in history, which caused $17 billion in damage to natural resources - it will be up to American taxpayers to clean up the mess left behind, not the oil companies themselves.

Other regulations put in place after that Gulf disaster also were rolled back recently, and liability caps were lowered.

Moral of the story: It's a great time to be in the oil business, now that it has a champion in a president who at any time is willing to take a drunken swerve away from common sense.

Are your interests being served in Congress? Use this tool to keep track.

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In an interview with the Star-Ledger, outgoing Gov. Chris Christie rated his performance during his eight years in office as a B-plus.

As he leaves office today let me issue my own report card, broken down by subject.

The budget

Christie took office in 2010 with state finances in a mess. The recession had hit hard the prior year and state revenues had dropped by 14 percent. He got the state budget back on track that year and slowed its annual growth in later years.

So I'll give him an A.

Pensions

The state budget still has a "structural deficit," a shortfall that hangs over the state's finances from year to year. That's mainly because of the size of the estimated annual payment required for the state's pension funds to be considered solvent.

Christie inherited that deficit from prior governors who were generous with pensions but stingy with paying for them. He has put more money into the pension funds than all of them put together.

But that still doesn't satisfy the actuaries. As of this afternoon that's Democrat Phil Murphy's problem.

In the meantime I'll award Christie another A for highlighting the problems with the pensions.

Property taxes

The most recent Fourth of July weekend did not go well for our sun-bathing chief executive. He fared a bit better on the first such weekend of his term.

In 2010, Christie convened the Legislature with a demand that they stay in their seats over the holidays until both houses voted to put on the ballot a constitutional amendment requiring a 2.5 percent "hard cap" on property taxes.

Christie soon settled for a 2 percent "soft cap" that can be repealed or eroded by a subsequent administration. How long before the "soft cap" gets even softer after he's gone?

That's also the new governor's problem. As for the outgoing governor, he at least capped taxes, even if he didn't cut them. He gets a B.

The state Supreme Court

Back in 2009, candidate Christie kicked off his campaign with a pledge to "gut COAH." The Council On Affordable Housing was formed to comply with state Supreme Court decisions in the Mount Laurel zoning cases.

Christie has criticized as activist those decisions as well as the high court's many decisions in the Abbott v. Burke school-funding cases. He promised he would name a more conservative court.

Instead, he reappointed Chief Justice Stu Rabner, who had been named to the post by Christie's liberal Democratic predecessor, Jon Corzine. Meanwhile he declined to reappoint Helen Hoens, a Hunterdon County Republican who was the most conservative justice on the court.

The court is now arguably more activist than the court he inherited. That merits a D.

Bridgegate and his presidential campaign

Christie decided to use his 2013 re-election campaign to fashion an image of himself as the Republican candidate who could work with Democrats. The idea was to promote a presidential run in 2016.

But the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee declined to endorse him. That led Christie's minions at the Port Authority to try a trick that probably seemed funny at the time - ordering a "traffic study" that restricted access to the George Washington Bridge.

Once Bridgegate broke, Christie's odds of winning the 2016 GOP nomination were close to zero. He jumped in anyway. But that required him to spend half his time out of state. His popularity rating plummeted into the teens, never to recover.

Meanwhile his party didn't pick up a single seat despite his personal 22-point landslide in 2013. So that's another D.

Transportation

The Transportation Trust Fund debt was basically broke when Christie took office. The entire revenue from the gas tax was needed to service the existing debt.

Christie didn't want to take the heat for raising the gas tax, however. He just borrowed more money. By the time he finally agreed to a gas-tax hike of 23 cents, most of that revenue had to go to pay off debt.

Meanwhile he failed to straighten out the mess at NJ Transit. Mass transit is not a winning issue in the red states. But it's a big issue in the most densely populated state in the union.

So there's another D.

The Veto

In his 2009 campaign, Christie promised, "I will make full use of my veto pen - the absolute veto, conditional veto, and line-item veto - to shape legislative and budget policy."

He kept that promise. Among the measures he pocket-vetoed Monday were bills that would have required licensure for music and drama therapists, apparently because the state needs to know if they can really sing and act.

Christie used his veto to keep hundreds or similarly silly bills from becoming law.

So that's a solid A.

Add it all up and the governor gets a C-plus for his two terms in office.

That's not great. But consider that none of his three Democratic predecessors even managed to make it to a second term.

There's a cautionary tale in that for the new governor.

And the marking period begins Tuesday afternoon.
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Joseph Smooth, 24, was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday (Jan. 16) to manslaughter and obstruction of justice.(Orleans Justice Center jail)
Savannah Stucker makes a snow angel at Betty Virginia Park in Shreveport, La., Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The National Weather Service on Tuesday issued winter storm warnings in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. (Henrietta Wildsmith / The Shreveport Times via AP)
Winter weather has forced cancellation of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority's monthly meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 17. Hearings on BP oil spill related recreational and Barataria Bay restoration projects scheduled for just before Wednesday's meeting have been postponed to Jan. 24.
Guillermo del Toro poses in the press room with the award for best director, for his work in "The Shape of Water," 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)
Former President Donald Trump is preparing to launch his third campaign for the White House with an announcement Tuesday night. Trump is looking to move on from disappointing midterm defeats and defy history amid signs that his grip on the Republican Party may be waning. The former president had hoped to use the GOP's expected gains in last week's elections as a springboard to win his party's nomination by locking in early support and keeping potential challengers at bay. Instead, Trump now finds himself being blamed for backing a series of losing candidates in last week's midterm elections.
New Orleans Saints offensive tackle Terron Armstead (72) warms up with teammates before an NFL football game against the Atlanta Falcons in New Orleans, Sunday, Dec. 24, 2017. (AP Photo/Bill Feig)
Today

A mix of clouds and sun. High 54F. Winds light and variable.

Tonight

Cloudy. Low 48F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph.

Tomorrow

Showers early, becoming a steady rain later in the day. High 52F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch.
Hallie Wagoner, right, and her family took a little time from their day off yesterday to do something positive for a community organization.

Wagoner, 11, is a fifth-grader at College View Elementary School, which was closed Monday in observance or Martin Luther King Day. Kristen Wagoner, her mom and a substitute teacher with the Council Bluffs Community School District, took Hallie, Hallies friend and classmate Baily Williams, 10, and Hallies cousins Kaison Mauer, 8, and Addison Mauer, 7, to Midlands Humane Society.

They didnt arrive empty-handed.

The group donated a sizeable shipment of towels, blankets and other assorted linens for the shelter and its various animals to use. Hallie, a dog lover, said that she was happy to be able to help provide Midlands with things that the shelter uses day in and day out.

It feels good, she said. Im excited to help.

Her mom said she tries to instill the spirit of giving in her kids.

Its important to teach them about giving to others, she said. Whether its animals or people.

Hallie and her group made sure to get some face time with cats and dogs at the shelter. She said that she would love to get another dog, but her familys 8-year-old Shih Tzu, Stanley, is very much against any notion of that ever happening.

Cat litter, dry cat and dog food, wet cat food, toys, linens, cleaning supplies and more are hot commodities at the shelter. For instance, Midlands goes through 75 to 100 pounds of cat litter per day to keep the hides of 150-plus cats clean. Shelter staff says that item donations are always more than welcome, as supplies of all kinds get used up rapidly each and every week.

More information about fostering, volunteer and donation opportunities can be found at midlandshumanesociety.org or by calling 712-396-2270. Those looking to fulfill the shelters wish list should call in to ask which brands of food and other items MHS uses.
Authorities have arrested an Omaha man suspected of shooting a man during a carjacking at Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs.

John E. McAuliffe Jr., 51, turned himself in on Sunday at the Pottawattamie County Jail on warrants for attempted murder, first-degree robbery and willful injury, according to the Council Bluffs Police Department.

Around 4:40 a.m. on Dec. 30, McAuliffe allegedly shot, robbed and carjacked an Elkhorn, Nebraska, man in the casino parking lot. The Elkhorn man was treated for non-life threatening injuries. McAuliffe fled the scene in the victims gray 2006 Ford F-150 Super Crew pickup.

The vehicle was later recovered  burned  by the Omaha Police Department in the 2000 block of South 45th Street in Omaha.

The police department credited assistance from the public in identifying the suspect.

McAuliffe remains at the jail, currently held without bond.
The person involved in the theft of 34 head of cattle stolen Jan. 7 has come forward.

The Montgomery County Sheriffs Office said it was advised by the cattles owners to close the investigation as it would be handled internally and that no charges would be pursued, according to a release from the office.

The person behind the theft contacted the Red Oak-Omaha Livestock Market anonymously and paid for the cattle, according to Pat Wolfe, who runs the market with his father, Don.

Asked if this is a strange thing to happen, a deputy with the Sheriffs Office noted its not uncommon for individuals to report a crime and later not proceed with criminal charges.

Pat Wolfe said the company will beef up its security measures.
DES MOINES  Gov. Kim Reynolds highlighted a range of priorities in her Condition of the State speech to Iowa lawmakers last week, but recent history shows those ideas can easily morph or be tossed as members of her party weigh in.

Republicans have indicated strong support for several proposals Reynolds brought up in her Jan. 9 speech  reducing taxes, expanding workforce opportunities and enacting a voluntary water quality program. But topics not discussed or only briefly mentioned could rise to the top of the legislative agenda.

When former GOP Gov. Terry Branstad delivered his Condition of the State speech last year to the new Republican-controlled Legislature, several issues were missing that later dominated the 2017 session: eliminating most collective bargaining rights for public workers; reducing workers compensation benefits; requiring voter identification at the polls; and banning local counties from raising the minimum hourly wage.

Republicans say lawmakers have different priorities than the governor.

When you get 100 different representatives and 50 different senators that put ideas through this process, sometimes the legislative priorities end up a little bit different than the governors, said Rep. Chip Baltimore, a Boone Republican.

Baltimore is trying to get GOP lawmakers to agree on a bill offering voluntary approaches to cleaning Iowas polluted waterways. Reynolds didnt specify in her speech what she wants in such legislation, but noted it is the first bill she wants to sign into law.

Branstad prioritized water quality in his speech last year, too. He didnt end up signing a bill.

Republican lawmakers have made clear they plan to pitch a range of bills this session that touch on several social issues, like adding restrictions on abortion, reinstating the death penalty and revamping immigration enforcement.

While Reynolds noted her anti-abortion stance in her address, she didnt say if she would support legislation seeking to ban the procedure, a move that could plunge the state into litigation that could reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Last year, the Senate approved a bill that would add penalties to communities that didnt comply with federal immigration enforcement. The House didnt take up the legislation but its alive for debate this session.

Although Reynolds didnt mention the immigration bill in her Condition of the State speech, she previously indicated support for the proposal.

Ricardo Corona, of the nonprofit American Friends Service Committee, which supports immigrant rights, said many immigrants are worried but fear arrest and deportation if they attend rallies protesting such legislation. Corona said Reynolds exclusion of immigration in her speech wasnt necessarily comforting.

All we can do is prepare for the worst, he said.

Rep. Walt Rogers, a Cedar Falls Republican, has long supported policies that would redirect public education funding to individual students so they can use the money for options like private school. Reynolds said in her address she supports so-called school choice, though she proposed allowing parents to use tax-free college saving accounts to pay for K-12 tuition.

I didnt take that speech as a hard and fast, set in stone, roadmap for where were going to go, Rogers said. I took it as, This is a possibility. This is where she would like to see things. It doesnt mean underneath all that, we cant do some other things that are more in line with what some of our personal passions are.

Democratic legislators said Reynolds speech ignored future budget cuts to departments that they believe will change government more than any policy bill.

With lower-than-expected revenue projections, Reynolds has proposed cutting at least $19 million from the current $7.2 billion budget. Thats on top of agency cuts last session. Lawmakers are also weighing how to repay about $144 million in borrowing from reserve funds.

In this speech, I think she just artfully dodged all the difficult issues that shes confronted, she is confronting and she will have to confront going forward, said Sen. Matt McCoy, a Des Moines Democrat.

Branstads speech last January did have items that came to fruition, like removing state funding for Planned Parenthood. That required Republicans to give up federal money to exclude family planning money for abortion providers. Federal and state money doesnt pay for abortions in Iowa. Branstad also achieved a priority to better regulate texting while driving.

Sen. Brad Zaun, an Urbandale Republican who supports a bill to reinstate the death penalty, which was abolished in 1965, said GOP lawmakers share most priorities with Reynolds but theyll always have their own ideas. He said last session was unique because it was first time the GOP had secured a trifecta of legislative control in nearly 20 years.

Zaun offered a prediction: This year, I can assure you, is not going to be as controversial as last year.
A report released last Friday by Mary Kramer, a past Iowa Senate president and U.S. ambassador, said the Iowa Legislature has done nothing to prevent additional inappropriate behavior and ensuing problems after sexual misconduct allegations were reported in the Republican Senate caucus.

Kramers report calls for establishment and implementation of a formal process by which all employees at the Capitol could file misconduct complaints. Her report also stressed there must be assurance that any complaint will be investigated in a fair and impartial manner.

It behooves the Iowa Legislature to take the matter seriously and to act quickly, said Kramer, who was appointed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Dix of Shell Rock to review workplace policies in part because of her experience in human resources.

Kramers voluntary recommendations were requested in response to public criticism that Dix mishandled the release of an internal investigation of Senate Republican staffers that found many were unlikely to report workplace misconduct because of fear of retaliation.

The investigation was launched after a $1.75 million settlement last year between the state and a former staffer who said in a lawsuit she was fired after reporting sexual harassment. Senate Republicans initially refused to release results of the investigation, citing employee privacy concerns.

Dix relented to pressure from his party and released a heavily redacted document in late November. It showed that senators made sexually suggestive comments or discussed sexual preferences on the chamber floor in recent years, along with the concerns about reporting misconduct.

Non-partisan staff members who work in the Republican-controlled Senate and House have since hired a human resources director to oversee harassment complaints and other issues. That person begins work later this month. Kramer acknowledged the role such a director can have in addressing the issue, but she made clear much more needs to be done.

She recommended establishing clear guidelines for discipline if allegations are substantiated against workers at the statehouse, including elected lawmakers, nonpartisan staff, lobbyists and the media. She also suggested that all of those workers receive training every legislative session regarding what constitutes inappropriate behavior.

In the Senate, an existing legislative ethics committee should clarify the process for investigating misconduct allegations against senators, Kramer said. The report specifically cited Senate policies because Kramer was asked to review the chambers workplace issues, but she said she wanted to provide suggestions for the entire Legislature.

Kramers recommendations are spot on. Iowans should demand their lawmakers adopt  and follow  them.
A response to Greg Casadys Nietzsche letter

Mr. Greg Casady, do you truly expect readers to accept your conclusions on the supposed teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was much more than just a philosopher?

Apparently, the mainstream media you often refer to (the majority of Americans are in the mainstream) fosters big government health and welfare. You claim that both the opioid and the suicide crises are the fault of weak individuals unable to surmount their own personal inadequacies, that these weak individuals are propped up by a societal safety net. Wow. I wish everyone possessed your innate strength and lack of empathy and compassion.

If opioids fail to kill, surely suicide will decrease the surplus population (a quote from Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol). If society doesnt intervene, think how many namby-pamby Americans will permanently end their selfish cries for help. A tax savings for people like yourself and a big shout-out to bullies and abusers. What do those suffering from mental illness, despair, and, of course, teens in the throes of puberty have to offer you  absolutely nothing, right?

Mr. Casady, your suggestion that women enroll in self-defense classes to avoid sexual harassment is so patently asinine that I must assume you have never had a sister, a daughter, a wife, worked with women, or even walked past a construction site. Perhaps you were reared in a plastic bubble or with a pack of wolves? Do you believe sexual harassment is limited to physical threats and/or contact? Why should any woman have to take a class to protect herself? Isnt it my right to live in a society where I am not threatened, frightened or made to feel less than I am?

Mr. Casady, you state Americans (I assume you reference only white Americans) could stop eating green produce from California or pay higher prices to quell the illegal immigration problem. Your insights are truly stunning. I had no idea that most immigrants picked lettuce and avocados to earn a shady living. California is not the only state offering sanctuary to immigrants. Many young people remember nothing about their countries of birth, regard themselves as Americans and contribute their intellects, talents, and taxes to support what it is to be an American.

A man who quotes Conan the Barbarian to indicate his deep knowledge of Nietzsche  wow.

Kathleen Jurgens, Council Bluffs

Now is the time to act on water quality

Iowa legislators reconvened this week. First on the agenda is expected to be a fast-tracked water quality bill. Critics say the bill is inadequate for providing short-term funding that fails to use a targeted watershed approach. Iowas water quality continues to decline as the Legislature delays on creating a stable, dedicated funding source to improve it.

By limiting debate and rushing a bill, Iowans are missing an opportunity to deliver a water quality bill that includes:

 A dedicated, stable funding source through the Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Trust Fund.

 Required water quality monitoring at the watershed level with public data access.

 Funding and support for established Watershed Management Authorities and agencies who administer them.

 An emphasis on local planning and control.

Voters approved the establishment of the Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Fund in 2010, which remains unfunded. Despite public support, Republican majorities in the legislature are not interested in raising the sales tax to fund the trust. Senate File 512, which is expected to pass, does include a provision voiding its proposed funding structure if the sales tax is passed to fund the trust at a later date.

Katie Rock, Center for Rural Affairs, Lyons, Nebraska

Why CCI Action endorsed Cathy Glasson for governor

Our vision for changing business as usual politics starts and stops with people.

Thats why the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund challenges big-money interests and brings real people  lots of them  into the center of our political system.

Thats how well win an Iowa that puts clean water first and serves the public interest, common good. And thats how well make sure Iowans get paid a living wage.

Nobodys going to move that agenda for us. Its up to us to engage and deliver.

Were happy to announce weve found a gubernatorial candidate who agrees with us  and thats Cathy Glasson, a longtime registered nurse and union leader from Coralville.

Cathy has bold positions on issues like clean water, healthcare for all, Fight for $15 and more. She knows elections are an opportunity to build the people-power base we need to move our issues and win policies that make life better for a lot more people.

She also shares our understanding that no single candidate will solve the problems facing everyday people. We need a grassroots movement of Iowans all over the state standing up, speaking out and being active in our communities  and in the streets  365 days a year, not just at election time.

Thats how well create the change we need.

Barb Kalbach, president, CCI Action Fund
The music would waft its way through the heating ducts into his bedroom every Sunday night.

Mark Mendenhalls mom would play the piano and his dad would sing and he would fall asleep to the sounds of their music.

Growing up there was always music in the house, Mendenhall said. My mom gave piano lessons.

He had three sisters and all of them have their masters degree in music.

Two of my sisters have pipe organs in their house, Mendenhall said. One of them had a pipe organ and two grand pianos in her living room and one had a harpsichord, a grand piano and the pipe organ in her house.

Mendenhall said he plays a little piano, but mainly guitar and bass guitar. After high school, he went to college in Kansas.

I went to a bible college called Barclay College, Mendenhall said. When I got out of college, I thought I might do something ministry-wise and I had applied for some jobs.

At that time in the early 1970s, he said his mom developed cancer.

So I went back and helped my dad out on the farm, Mendenhall said. One thing led to another and before I knew it, 11 years had gone by and I was still on the farm.

The 1980s were rough on the farming community and Mendenhall sought other employment.

It just wasnt working out financially and I ended up at the radio station as news director and selling advertising for 13 months, Mendenhall said. Then I got in the insurance business in 1985 and will have 33 years on July 1 with Farm Bureau, not all in the same position.

He moved to North Platte in 1992 and has been here since and said the reason he likes it here is The people, there are a lot of wonderful people in North Platte.

He is married to Jami and they will celebrate 18 years of marriage in June.

Mendenhall has a number of hobbies he enjoys.

I spend quite a bit of time on Twitter, photography, music and a variety of things, Mendenhall said. Also, Im kind of involved in a father-son fishing trip to Canada that happens yearly. I dont go every year, but a church in Denver started it, so I help get people lined up to go from North Platte.

One place in Nebraska he would like to visit is Ashfall in the northeast part of the state.

He and Jami share the cooking duties.

I love to cook, Mendenhall said. I have an Italian shrimp pasta I think is pretty good and wild rice soup. Those are my two favorites.

He likes to grill stuff and smoke stuff, too.

Mendenhall has a nickname given to him when he was a young boy on the farm.

Marcos  when I was a kid, we had people from Mexico who would thin our beets and hoe and stuff, the Zuniga family, Mendenhall said. So I think thats where that came from.

One thing thats important to Mendenhall is his faith.

What I would say is how much Gods grace has meant in my life, he said with some emotion in his voice. I probably learned more in the last five years than in the rest of my life all put together.

He said God has taught him some lessons that he needed to learn.

Its no fun to learn lessons like that, but its good for me and Im glad it happened, Mendenhall said.
Cutting and reforming taxes is key to growing Nebraska. Over the years, together, the Legislature and I have done the hard work needed to hold the line on taxes. Additionally, we have worked together to deliver over $840 million in property tax relief over four years.

While this is significant, Im continuing to make tax relief a top priority. Throughout the state, senators and I hear stories of how high taxes are hurting Nebraskans. Theres one story that has really stuck with me: This fall, a farmer approached me at an event to let me know that his high property taxes had driven him to sell his farm, leave Nebraska and move to Missouri.

Stories like this are reflected in how Nebraska ranks on taxes nationally. The Tax Foundation ranks Nebraskas property taxes as 11th highest in the nation, which is the worst among surrounding states. The only surrounding state with an income tax higher than ours is Iowa. Right now, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and their Legislature are lowering their taxes. Additionally, Missouri just lowered their tax rates this month.

If we are going to remain competitive, Nebraska must take action to deliver tax relief for our farmers, ranchers, homeowners and small businesses. To accomplish this, Revenue Chairman Jim Smith and I are proposing the Nebraska Property Tax Cuts and Opportunity Act. This bill reforms our tax code to focus existing property tax relief on Nebraskans, fits within our existing budget and sets up the state for future relief as our states economy grows.

Our proposal has three major components:

First, property tax relief is the No. 1 priority. Our proposal reforms how the state delivers property tax relief and sets the state up to provide additional major relief in future years. The Nebraska Property Tax Cuts and Opportunity Act restructures existing property tax credits as a new refundable credit on state taxes, which ensures that Nebraskans  not out-of-state landowners  receive the credits. The credit will refund 10 percent of the property taxes paid by Nebraskans on residential or agricultural land. For residential property, the proposal focuses the relief on the average Nebraska homeowner.

Our proposal also provides for major additional relief in future years as the state grows. Every year that revenue exceeds budgeted receipts by 1 percent, well increase the tax credit until it reaches 30 percent of the property taxes paid by Nebraskans. Over the next 10 years, we expect our proposal would provide over $4 billion in property tax relief for farmers and ranchers as well as homeowners. This is major relief that is achieved without raising taxes.

Second, our proposal brings down income tax rates to help put more money back into the pockets of families and small businesses. Right now, 90 percent of individual income taxes paid by Nebraskans are at that top individual rate, and 90 percent of Nebraska businesses pay at the top individual rate. Lowering these rates will lower the burden on small businesses that drive our economy and will help attract new opportunities.

Finally, our proposal provides for an additional $10 million over two years for workforce development. Job training dollars can help us connect more Nebraskans with great opportunities and others looking for a different career.

The Nebraska Property Tax Cuts and Opportunity Act is a framework that can help bring people together to get tax reform done this legislative session. Sen. Smith and I will continue to work with senators and other groups seeking tax relief. Pro-growth senators, groups and everyone involved will all need to be open to compromise as we work together. It will need to be a bipartisan effort for the good of our entire state.

If you want to see tax relief this legislative session, I encourage you to reach out to your senator and encourage them to support the Property Tax Cuts and Opportunity Act. You can find your senator and their contact information by visiting nebraskalegislature.gov. As always, we also want to hear your ideas and priorities.

Contact Gov. Pete
To kick off 2018, the American Farm Bureau welcomed President Trump to their annual meeting. It was the first time a U.S. president addressed this gathering in 26 years.

Our country depends on ag producers every day for our food, feed, fuel and fiber, which makes it all the more surprising so much time had passed without a president speaking directly to this assembly of thousands of ag leaders from across the nation.

In his address, Trump expressed appreciation for the hard work of U.S. farmers and ranchers, and reinforced his administrations commitment to rural America. He also signed an executive order to invest in rural broadband installation, which is a crucial step for the 23 million Americans in rural areas who still do not have access to a high-speed, reliable internet connection.

Rolling back regulatory barriers to producers success remains one of my top priorities, and I am glad to be able to work with the Trump administration on this initiative. President Trump noted in his address, As we put money back in the pockets of all Americans, including our farmers and ranchers, we are also putting an end to the regulatory assault on your way of life.

From tax reform to rolling back the Waters of the U.S. rule, or WOTUS, we are off to a good start on getting government off the backs of producers. In fact, for every new regulation added last year, 22 were eliminated or reset.

WOTUS was one of the leading regulatory concerns for agriculture. When the Obama administration pushed forward with this rule in 2015 despite legal challenges, I introduced the House resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. The Senate companion to my legislation passed Congress but was quickly vetoed by President Barack Obama. I am pleased the Trump administration fulfilled its commitment to take swift action on sending WOTUS back to the drawing board and preventing a power grab by federal bureaucrats over producers land and farming practices.

With tax reform signed into law at the end of last year, producers now have more certainty when investing in their operations with full and immediate expensing. The doubling of the death tax exemption helps to ensure farmers and ranchers can pass their operations down to their children and grandchildren without having to jump through burdensome hoops.

Another important aspect of tax reform is the property tax deduction on agricultural land is kept intact. This means farmers and ranchers can continue to deduct the full amount of property tax on agricultural land and structures, as land remains a primary input in their work to feed the world.

There is still more work to do. For example, a fix was achieved in the final tax reform bill to prevent tax increases for ag co-ops. However, there are now concerns this fix could have unintended consequences for privately and publicly owned grain elevators and ethanol producers. I am focused on finding a resolution which maintains a level playing field  and making sure we get it done quickly and correctly.

I also continue to stress to the Trump administration the importance of NAFTA and opening more markets for producers. Over the past few months, I have spoken with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in Ways and Means Committee meetings and hearings to make the case for why we must keep this key trade agreement in place.

In his address to the American Farm Bureau, Trump said, On NAFTA, I am working very hard to get a better deal for our country and for our farmers and for our manufacturers. Within the last week, he also reiterated in the Wall Street Journal his intention to negotiate a modernized deal and said he will not rush the process. NAFTA is vital to U.S. agriculture, and I will continue working with my colleagues to keep up the drumbeat on trade.

With so many consequential issues currently impacting farmers and ranchers, especially as we prepare to undertake negotiations on the farm bill, Trumps supportive speech to the American Farm Bureau showed rural America has a priority seat at the table. We must keep up the momentum on delivering results for U.S. agriculture.
JOIN A WINNING TEAM right here in northwest indiana We have been covering Northwest Indiana for over 100 years and were still growing. We are, by far, the main source of news, information and advertising in the Region and are looking for great people to join out team. Whether youre just starting out or looking for a place to step up,TheTimes has opportunities you need to explore. DIgITAL SALES ExECuTIvE Are you ready for the next step in your career? Do you have what it takes to be on a winning team with the drive to go above and beyond? We have an exciting opportunity for experienced sales professionals to join our Digital Sales team. This individual will work closely with clients to help them understand and exceed business objectives with smart, cutting edge ad campaigns. In this role, you will be evaluating the digital footprint of local businesses to identify additional opportunities to grow their digital marketing for a greater ROI and retention. We are looking for a highly motivated performer with ambition, passion and creativity. You must have a deep understanding of digital media with ability to credibly articulate insights for clients that are based on data and research. Position requirements include:  Advanced knowledge of online advertising sales including online and targeted display on all devices, SEO, SEM, social media, websites, video, mobile and analytics.  Previous experience selling digital media or competitive media such as radio,TV and/or agency.  Extensive knowledge of digital devices and apps.  Excellent verbal and written communication skills.  Proven presentation skills to diverse audiences.  Efficient time management skills  must be able to work independently and handle multiple ongoing tasks with rapidly changing priorities.  Knowledge and experience using Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint).  Bachelors degree from accredited college or university. We offer a competitive compensation package with a base plus bonus structure. In addition, we offer a variety of medical, dental and vision options to best fit your needs. We also offer 401k and life insurance options as well as paid vacation, sick and personal time. TheTimes is part of the Lee Enterprises group of companies. Lee provides local news and information, and a major platform for advertising. In its markets, with 46 daily newspapers and a joint interest in four others, rapidly growing digital products and nearly 300 specialty publications in 22 states. Lees newspapers have circulation of 1.1 million daily and 1.5 million Sunday, reaching nearly four million readers in print alone. Lees websites and mobile and tablet products attract 20 million plus unique visitors monthly. Lee Common Stock is traded on the NewYork Stock Exchange under the symbol LEE. For more information about Lee, please visit www.lee.net. Apply now at http://nwi.com/timesjobs Equal Opportunity Employer PAgE DESIgNER TheTimes Media Co., located 20 miles from downtown Chicago, is looking for highly motivated, creative page designers who can bring a new dimension to our brand of local newspapers and magazines. As our design center has expanded, so has our drive to find designers with innovative newspaper and magazine design and illustration skills. Our energetic design staff is working hard to change the perception of designers as merely visual people. We work with the belief that good content drives readership, and we push our staff to be content editors. If you possess the heart of a journalist and an innovative mind, we want you to join our close-knit, talented design team. Our ideal candidates will have experience in design at a newspaper or magazine, understand the fast-paced, newsroom environment, have the ability to manage several tasks simultaneously, and are experienced in information and content design. Candidates also must display a strong instinct for problem solving, a sense of urgency, and a passion for news. Experience with InDesign and Photoshop is preferred. In this position you must be willing to work a varied schedule with night hours. TheTimes Media Co. is one of Lee Enterprises 46 daily newspapers. Lee also publishes 300 weekly newspapers, shoppers and classified and specialty publications. In addition, Lee provides a wide variety of associated online services. EOE ASSISTANT DISTRIBuTION MANAgER TheTimes is currently looking for part-time Assistant Distribution Managers to work in one of our Distribution Centers, working an average of 35 hours per week. Our centers are located in Valparaiso, Merrillville, and Hammond, IN. Work hours are in the early morning and include holidays and weekends. The work consists of:  opening and closing the distribution center  stacking bundles on tables  assisting with the delivery of newspaper routes  other duties assigned by the District Manager Candidates must have a valid drivers license and good driving record, as well as a reliable vehicle and proof of auto insurance. Mileage reimbursement is available if asked to use your vehicle for work purposes. Other requirements include basic computer skills and the ability to lift up to 40 pounds. The starting hourly wage for this position is $12.00/hour.This is an excellent entry level position for a company with a history of promoting from within. TheTimes is a drug-free workplace and all candidates offered a position will be asked to complete a pre-employment drug screen. Interested candidates should apply online at www.nwi.com/timesjobs. Equal Opportunity Employer MuLTI-MEDIA SALES ExECuTIvE  OuTSIDE SALES Base Salary PLUS Un-capped Commissions Join a winning team! We reach more consumers than we ever have before through NWI.com and our award winning print products. Consumer in NW Indiana rely onTheTimes and NWI.com for local news and information that no one else can deliver. Over 75% of all adults in NW Indiana connect with us through our on-line and print products on a weekly basis. We deliver 1.6M unique visitors per month with over 12.6M page views and 8.2M mobile sessions per month! We are looking for Multi-Media Sales professionals who possess the drive and passion to help local business owners increase market share through real time solutions and products that deliver superior results! We offer:  Competitive base salary  Un-capped commissions  On-going incentives and spiffs  Mobile phone  Mileage reimbursement  Benefits including: 401K (matching too), medical, dental, vision, paid vacation and personal time, life insurance, flexible spending accounts  Laptop and tools to be successful Our Multi-Media Sales professional manage an existing base of wellestablished accounts along with the responsibility and ability to hunt and develop new accounts... we want HUNTERS. Plus work alongside a team of sales professionals in a competitive market serving 6 counties! You Are:  Competitive  Driven to be the best  Results and goals oriented  Mentally tough  Possess a strong work ethic  Tech savvy  High character  Want to grow a great career  Willing to have fun! Ideal candidates possess:  3 + years of sales experience with a demonstrated track record of success  Prospecting & cold calling experience in successfully opening new accounts  Excellent communication skills  Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, high transactional sales environment  College degree preferred  Valid drivers license, good driving record and access to a reliable vehicle Were willing to train the right candidate! If you bring the heart and desire to succeed we will equip you with the tools and knowledge to be successful! Drug Free Workplace Equal Opportunity Employer APPLY AT NWI.COM/TIMESJOBS
Research and development spending in Indiana rose to $7.6 billion in 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, up from $7.3 billion in 2014, according to a new report from Indiana University's Stats Indiana.

The National Science Foundation estimates Indiana ranked 17th nationwide in R&D expenditures in 2015, up from 18th the previous year. Local facilities such as ArcelorMittal Global R&D in East Chicago, Monosol's corporate headquarters in Merrillville and Purdue University Northwest's Center for Innovation through Visualization and Simulation in Hammond contributed to the estimated $1,159 in per capita R&D spending in Indiana in 2015, which ranks 23rd nationally.

R&D is one of the most high-end economic activities, accounting for 7 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product growth between 1995 and 2004, according to the National Science Foundation.

Though R&D spending rose in Indiana in 2015, it still fell short of the peak period between 2011 and 2013 when as much as $8 billion a year was being invested in research and development across the state, according to Stats Indiana.

Industry accounted for the bulk  about $6.2 billion, or 81.6 percent  of Indiana's R&D spending in 2015, Stats Indiana reported. Universities contributed about $1.3 billion, or 17.3 percent of the total.

The Hoosier state, the 16th most populous in the union, ranked 15th in industry spending on R&D, 16th in funding for research at public universities and 20th for funding at private colleges, according to the National Science Foundation. The vast majority of funding for R&D at the state's colleges comes from the federal government and institutional sources.
VALPARAISO  Len "Uncle Len" Ellis, country music pioneer and founder of Radio One Communications, died Sunday at the age of 89.

Ellis was the former owner/operator of four radio stations serving Northwest Indiana. The company began under the name Porter County Broadcasting in the 1960s. Indiana 105, WLJE-FM, remains the longest-running country station in the Chicagoland radio market.

He was the holder of card member No. 1 as a charter member of the Country Music Association, on the CMA's first board of directors and one of 15 people in 1957 who co-founded the CMA.

In 1983, he became a member of the Country Music DJ Hall of Fame; named one of 10 "Legends of Country Radio" in 1994 by the national radio and recording industry trade journal R&R; named Mr. Dee Jay USA in 1963 by the Grand Ole Opry; the CMAs Small Market Disc Jockey of the Year in 1978; and was elected to the Country Broadcasters Association DJ Hall of Fame in 1983.

The Radio One Communications' cluster of oldies stations  1500 WAKE-AM, classic rock 103.9 WXRD-FM, adult contemporary 107.1 WZVN-FM and country 105.5 WLJE-FM  was sold in 2014 to Adams Radio Group of Lakeville, Minnesota.

Ellis was born Feb. 28, 1928, to Nikola and Riketa (Cerenich) Elezovich. Both parents were born and raised on Croatias Dalmatian coast and emigrated to Chicago before 1920. Ellis was a lifelong member of the Croatian Fraternal Union.

In October 1949, after a stint in the U.S. Army, Ellis got his first radio job as a morning disc jockey at WFYC-AM in Alma, Michigan, a station that aired country music in the morning. Less than a year later he started working at an AM station in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Ellis moved back to Chicago in the early 1950s to complete his education at Columbia College, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1952.

He took a job at WJOB-AM in Hammond, where the "Uncle Len" moniker was born.

Ellis began playing country music on the air as a way to appeal to the NWI residents who had moved from the southern United States to the Region to work in the steel mills.

Ellis later worked for radio stations in Gary and Chicago before applying for a license. He founded the company that would be known later as Radio One Communications with his wife, Bee, going on the air in November 1964 with WAYK AM-1500  changed to WAKE-AM  from a small concrete-block building built on unincorporated farmland about a mile south of U.S. 30.

In 1968, the first full-time FM stereo station in Chicagoland, WAKE-FM 105.5, went on the air. WAKE-FM changed its call letters to WLJE-FM in 1974 with the letters LJE representing Ellis' initials.

Ellis also worked as a concert promoter for 12 years.

He continued his morning radio program as Uncle Len on WLJE through the 1970s and '80s and then returned again in 2006 with "Uncle Len's Legends," his reminiscences about classic country music and musicians he had known and loved. He retired in the late-1980s and his son Leigh Ellis ran the company until its sale in 2014.

In 2001, Radio One Communications began operating WXRD-FM and WZVN-FM, acquiring and becoming owner/operator of both in 2004.

Ellis was named an Alumnus of the Year for 2013 by Columbia College Chicago.

Ellis was on an episode of "Hee Haw" in the early 1970s.

Visitation will be held from 2 to 7 p.m. Thursday at Aberdeen Banquet Center, 216 Ballantrae St., in Valparaiso. Funeral services are 11 a.m. Friday at Aberdeen Chapel.
CROWN POINT  A former employee at a doctor's office in Munster is accused of forging prescriptions for pain medication.

Michele Anna Marie Kawzinski, 25, of Hobart, was charged Friday in Lake Criminal Court with two counts of forgery, two counts of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud or forgery, unlawful possession of a legend drug and misdemeanor theft.

Kawzinski is alleged to have forged prescriptions while employed at Orthopaedic Specialists of Northwest Indiana, 730 W. 45th St. in Munster, according to court documents.

A manager for the doctor's office told Munster police Aug. 17 that Kawzinski created several fraudulent patient accounts, and those phony patients were prescribed Norco, an opioid medication, documents state.

Doctors told police their signatures were forged on the opioid prescriptions, according to documents.

Kawzinski was taken into custody and a search of her handbag turned up a blank prescription pad for one of the doctors, documents state.

A search of patient records revealed Kawzinski created fraudulent prescriptions for several persons who shared her last name.

One of those prescriptions was filled Aug. 9 at a Walgreens in Lake Station. Surveillance footage from the Walgreens showed Kawzinski was the person who picked up the prescription.

Kawzinski remained wanted on the warrant Tuesday, according to the Lake County Sheriff's Office.

Kawzinski's bond is $10,000, according to court records.

A manager for Orthopaedic Specialists declined to comment.
HAMMOND  A federal judge has sentenced former Sheriff John Buncich to immediately begin serving a 188-month prison term  a little more than 15 years  for public corruption.

The man who had been the face of law enforcement in Lake County for decades appeared stunned by the pronouncement, which his lawyer, Bryan Truitt, called tantamount to a death sentence for his 72-year-old client.

U.S. District Court Judge James Moody refused the usual courtesy to public corruption figures, the freedom to report directly to his federal penitentiary at a later date.

Moody said the embarrassment Buncich caused to his police department and the harm he caused to Lake County's reputation in the state was staggering and denounced Buncich's abuse of power for self-enrichment and his "blind obedience to the political cult. Shame on you."

Buncich's voice was reduced to a whisper after learning of his sentence. He only had time to briefly look back to the court audience, which contained a number of his supporters, before court security officers led Buncich in restraints out of the court and into a holding cell.

The court also imposed a $250,000 fine on Buncich.

U.S. Attorney Thomas Kirsch II said his office requested Buncich be detained immediately for fear he would flee to avoid having to serve such a lengthy sentence. Kirsch said there was evidence of large amounts of "unexplained cash" associated with Buncich's bank accounts.

Truitt said it was ridiculous to believe a man of Buncich's age and poor finances would be able to live long on the run. Truitt said his client will appeal the conviction and sentence within weeks.

What's next?

Buncich likely would spend the next 45 to 60 days at Chicago's Metropolitan Correctional Center until he is transferred to a federal penitentiary. Truitt said Buncich preferred to spend his sentence at a federal camp in Yankton, South Dakota.

"This is the darkest day of my life," Buncich told the judge earlier in the six-hour sentencing hearing. Nevertheless, he said he was proud of his career and that he brought more minority police officers and civilian employees into the department than any previous sheriff.

The judge said he was struck by Buncich's almost complete lack of remorse, as was Kirsch, who said he is forming a new task force "to root out public corruption wherever it exists in the Northern District of Indiana."

Kirsch declined to comment on who might be indicted next, although testimony by FBI Agent Nathan Holbrook during the sentencing hearing hinted the towing investigation extended beyond the Sheriff's Department to the towns of Merrillville and Schererville.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Philip Benson reminded the court of evidence during Buncich's trial in August that the sheriff received tens of thousands of dollars in illegal payments from William Szarmach, a Lake Station towing firm owner and longtime Buncich associate, and undercover government informant Scott Jurgensen, owner of Samson's Towing of Merrillville, between 2014 and 2016.

Buncich found guilty of bribery

A jury last August found Buncich guilty of bribery counts on evidence the payments from Szarmach and Jurgensen amounted to bribes because they were made on condition Buncich provide them the choicest towing districts, and that Buncich delivered.

Prosecutors said the bribery took place under the cover of campaign fundraising. Buncich was elected sheriff in 1994, 1998, 2010 and 2014, and named chairman of the Lake County Democratic Party in 2014.

A federal grand jury indicted Buncich, Timothy Downs, Buncich's second-in-command at the time, and Szarmach in November 2016. Downs later revealed he had become a cooperating government witness, as did Szarmach eventually. Both have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing themselves.

The government equipped Jurgensen with audio and video equipment that recorded payments. The evidence was used by the government to win its conviction of Buncich, who was forced from office by the guilty verdict.

Buncich told the court he worked 70-hour weeks to ensure public safety as well as rehabilitate the County Jail, which was under federal mandate to correct nearly 100 deficiencies in inmate medical and mental health care.

But Benson presented evidence that Buncich was so obsessed with receiving bribes from towing firms that he directed his gang unit to put off their regular duties to ticket more cars for towing.

Holbrook said the department was receiving complaints from the public about their cars being towed for minor infractions and costing their owners hundreds of dollars to recover their vehicles. Holbrook said the joke around the Sheriff's Department was they had become the "towing police."

Benson said Buncich's list of approved towing firms were all political contributors, and he considered those who didn't buy fundraising tickets, or who contributed to his political opponents, to be unfriendly and unworthy of county business.

Truitt argued Buncich didn't feel remorse, because he still doesn't believe he did anything wrong. He said Buncich only engaged in political fundraising like any other local elected official and had cars towed for legitimate reasons.

The guilty verdict in August forced Buncich from office. One of his political opponents, Oscar Martinez Jr., now occupies Buncich's old office. The Lake County Board of Commissioners has taken control of awarding towing contracts away from the Sheriff's Department.
CROWN POINT  A federal judge with a history of being tough on corrupt politicians will sentence former Sheriff John Buncich on Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge James Moody will imprison the county's former top cop for soliciting and receiving bribes from towing firms competing for county police business.

The question before Moody is for how long.

Court papers indicate the court's probation office is recommending a term of between 151 months and 188 months.

U.S. Attorney Thomas Kirsch II is arguing for a sentence as long as 235 months, and Buncich's defense lawyers, Bryant M. Truitt and Larry Rogers, are pleading for no more than 60 months.

Moody has sentenced a number of officials to prison during his 36 years on the bench, including: former East Chicago Mayor George Pabey, former Lake Station Mayor Keith Soderquist, former County Clerk and Coroner Thomas Philpot and Michael Mokol, a former top-ranking county police officer the judge sent away for 20 years in 1990 for accepting bribes to protect illegal gambling establishments.

Buncich, elected sheriff in 1994, 1998, 2010 and 2014, and named chairman of the Lake County's Democratic Party in 2014, has spent much of his public career campaign fundraising. He testified last summer it cost $200,000 to run for sheriff. Testimony at his trial indicated he had loaned $80,000 in personal funds to his re-election efforts, and he wanted that money back.

Kirsch argues this is why Buncich pushed fundraising demands on the department's towing firms.

Timothy Downs, Buncich's former second-in-command, pleaded guilty to selling Buncich's fundraising tickets on public time, and William Szarmach, a Lake Station towing firm owner and longtime Buncich associate, pleaded guilty to paying bribes.

Testimony during the 14-day trial in August to a U.S. District Court jury established that Szarmach and undercover government informant Scott Jurgensen, owner of Samson's Towing of Merrillville, paid Buncich tens of thousands between 2014 and 2016.

Federal prosecutors argued successfully the payments from Szarmach and Jurgensen amounted to bribes, because they were made on condition Buncich provide them the choicest towing districts, and that Buncich delivered.

The investigation of Buncich began with the frustration of Jurgensen, who started his towing business almost a decade ago, but couldn't get a towing contract in the town of Merrillville despite being a retired 22-year veteran of the Merrillville Police Department.

Kirsch states Jurgensen met with the FBI in 2012 to discuss ongoing corrupt practices "in numerous Lake County municipalities."

The FBI investigation later moved to the Lake County Sheriff's Department where Jurgensen got a towing contract through his friendship with Downs. A federal grand jury indicted Buncich, Downs and Szarmach in November 2016.

Downs and Szarmach admitted their guilt in the scheme, while Buncich chose to go to trial where federal prosecutors presented FBI video of:

* Downs delivering $7,500 July 15, 2015, to Buncich in the sheriff's office.

* An FBI video surveillance recording of Buncich leaning into Szarmach's tow truck and Jurgensen giving Buncich $2,500 on April 22, 2016, in the parking lot outside of Delta Restaurant in Merrillville.

* An FBI video surveillance recording of Jurgensen giving Buncich $2,500 on July 21, 2016, in the parking lot outside of Delta Restaurant in Merrillville.

* FBI surveillance photographs of a meeting Sept. 2 between Jurgensen and Buncich in which Jurgensen gives the sheriff $7,500.

Buncich's lawyers argue he "resolutely maintains his innocence" and "on the whole, the citizens of Lake County are far better off because of John Buncich, regardless of how one views his conduct herein."

They argue county and municipal police have legitimate reasons for having vehicles towed, and Buncich had a legitimate right to solicit campaign contributions. "Buncich is simply guilty of what every politician is guilty of," they said. The defense lawyers argue the towing contributors got nothing from Buncich in return.

They acknowledge Buncich's campaign finance reports failed to reflect many of the payments in question, but it wasn't done with criminal intent. They indicate they will appeal the conviction.
CROWN POINT  A man was found guilty at trial Tuesday afternoon of murder and attempted murder for killing one man and wounding another in a Gary shooting.

Nicholas A. Pelissier, 20, of Chicago, was found guilty of murder for shooting Jonquell Golida, 23, of Gary, on Nov. 12, 2016, near the intersection of 49th Avenue and Massachusetts Street in Gary. He was also found guilty of attempted murder for shooting Timothy Fryerson.

The jury deliberated for about 2 1/2 hours before reaching its verdicts. The trial began Jan. 8.

Fryerson testified last week he and Golida were shot after a confrontation with passengers in a red Dodge Durango parked outside a Gary gas station.

Fryerson identified one of the shooters as William Buddha Galloway, whom he knew from middle school, but he could not identify the second shooter.

The red Dodge Durango was found the night of the shooting parked in the 4800 block of Monroe Street. A homeowner said the vehicle was used that night by Kendall Vaughn and Tammarashea Jones.

Prosecutors relied on statements by Vaughn and Jones to convict Pelissier.

Vaughn told police he drove Galloway and Pelissier away from the scene after they shot Golida and Fryerson. Tammarashea Jones, Vaughn's girlfriend, was a passenger in the Dodge Durango.

Deputy Prosecutor David Rooda said in closing statements Tuesday that Pelissier's fingerprints were also found on the rear driver's side door of the Dodge Durango.

Defense attorney Angela Jones hammered on the witnesses' credibility in closing statements. She pointed out Fryerson initially told police he was at a bar before the shooting, and described the suspect vehicle as purple.

A blood test at the hospital where Fryerson was treated for his gunshot wound determined he had a 0.21 blood-alcohol content, the defense attorney said. He also was not taking medication for schizophrenia.

Vaughn and Tammarashea Jones also provided multiple contradictory statements to police about the shooting.

Pelissier is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 15.

Galloway, 25, of Gary, is scheduled to go to trial April 30 on murder and attempted murder charges for his alleged role in the shooting.
LANSING  A 24-year-old clerk was shot in the leg Sunday night during a robbery at a Family Dollar store, police said.

The shooting may be linked to another armed robbery earlier in the night at a Munster Burger King, Lansing police said.

Lansing police were dispatched about 9:50 p.m. to the Family Dollar at 17829 Burnham Ave. after three men robbed the business and shot the clerk.

Police said the suspects were described as three males wearing dark clothing. The three men entered the store about 10 minutes before closing and demanded money from the clerk. One of the men fired a gun at the clerk, and an undisclosed amount of money was taken before the three men fled through a parking lot, police said.

In a statement released at 9:17 p.m. Monday night, Lansing police said the clerk, who reportedly suffered a gunshot wound to the leg, was transported to a local hospital. Police said the clerk underwent surgery and currently is listed in stable condition.

The three suspects were described as black with dark clothing and their faces partially covered. One had a handgun, police said.

Police said the first suspect, the one with the gun, had on a black hoodie sweatshirt with white trim and black sweat pants with white stripes down the legs.

The second suspect was wearing all black and had a distinctive brown backpack with light colored trim. The third suspect was wearing all black clothes with white and gold shoes and acted as a lookout during the robbery, authorities said.

Police said footprints in the snow led to a residential street where it appeared as if the men entered a vehicle.

Illinois State Police Crime Scene Investigation responded to the scene and processed the business for evidence.

The Lansing Police Department Criminal Investigations Division has an on-going investigation and is requesting that anyone with information call Lansing police at 708-895-7150.
LAKE STATION  Snow and blustery winds Monday may have kept area residents from participating in the 17th annual Talk to a Lawyer Today that offered free legal consultations at eight locations in four counties.

Still, nine people signed up to talk with three lawyers during the morning sessions at the Lake Station-New Chicago Public Library at 2700 Central Ave. Traditionally, the library is one of the busiest sites each year.

Most of the free legal consultations revolved around family law, Stephanie Wicke said about the 15-minute appointments. Wicke, of Hobart-based NWI Volunteers Lawyers Inc., also served as one of the lawyers at the library.

For example, misspellings and other errors on a childs birth certificate brought one woman to the Lake Station Library.

The birth certificate had the moms name wrong and the wrong date of her birth. The dads name was also misspelled, Wicke said. I helped her with the paperwork.

The parents are from Mexico, and errors on the childs birth certificate need to be corrected to obtain a passport so the child can visit relatives, the lawyer said.

Another woman sought help with paperwork allowing her large service dog to accompany her everywhere she goes. Although the dog wears a vest indicating he is a service animal, the woman has experienced difficulties, Wicke said.

We have victims of domestic abuse. They need a support system. I give them contact information for shelters, she said. We also have landlord-tenant disputes and Social Security questions.

Setting up a paper trail is vital in many cases, especially those involving domestic abuse, Wicke said.

Many of the attorneys who volunteer for the public service pro bono program of the Indiana Bar Association and the Indiana Supreme Court are sole practitioners, Wicke said.

Volunteering for this program is good for the attorneys, she said. Many of the attorneys are sole practitioners, and Talk to a Lawyer Today gives them exposure to a wide range of legal issues, she said.

Each participating lawyer also receives a book, "Most Commonly Asked Questions in Indiana Law," published by the Indiana State Bar Association, Wicke said.

Its a good reference to have, she said.

We havent seen as many people because of the snow. Maybe people will come in after work today, Wicke said.

We didnt have anyone come in at the Portage Township site this morning when I stopped by there. It opened at 8 a.m.
CHICAGO  Illinois will postpone submitting fresh voter information to a controversial multi-state voter registration database because the Kansas-based program has not offered updated security plans, election officials confirmed Tuesday.

The move comes as several states debate ending their participation in the free and voluntary Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program.

It was designed in 2005 as a way to help four neighboring states share information and clean voter rolls by making sure voters weren't registered in more than one state. The program has grown to include about two dozen states, including Illinois, which began submitting information in 2011.

But questions have been raised in Illinois and elsewhere about the security of passwords, accuracy of the information and the political leanings of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who oversees Crosscheck and helped lead President Donald Trump's now-disbanded election fraud commission. It was investigating unproven claims of illegal voting in 2016.

Kansas vowed late last year to review the program's security in the wake of scrutiny. Kansas officials didn't immediately return a message seeking comment Tuesday. They've previously said it's a free service that offers hard-to-compile information and states are briefed on potential data issues.

Officials in Illinois, which typically submits data to Crosscheck in January, said they were yet to receive any new guidance.

"We plan to review and discuss those proposed enhancements upon receipt and we will transmit no data to Crosscheck until security issues are addressed to our satisfaction," Illinois State Board of Elections executive director Steve Sandvoss wrote in a letter sent to lawmakers last week, which election officials confirmed Tuesday.

After questions were raised by voter rights advocates and Democrats, Illinois election officials considered the issue, but voted in November to remain in Crosscheck. They were split 4-4 on party lines.

That prompted Democratic lawmakers to file legislation requiring Illinois to quit, which a handful of states have done over the years.

Other states are also considering leaving the program. A New Hampshire Democrat has proposed legislation to end multi-state voter information sharing, and Idaho election officials have also considered leaving Crosscheck.



Follow Sophia Tareen on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sophiatareen.
Heavy snow fell Tuesday morning in parts of Northwest Indiana, leading to multiple spin-out and slide-off crashes.

Snow squalls reduced visibility to a quarter of a mile or less, and gusty winds were likely to affect travel, according to the Indiana Department of Transportation Northwest.

Winter weather watches for Porter, LaPorte and Starke counties were upgraded to winter weather advisories, according to the National Weather Service.

The advisory for Porter County will continue until midnight. LaPorte and Starke counties will be under the advisory from 3 p.m. Tuesday to 6 a.m. Wednesday.

A winter weather advisory for Lake County remained in effect until 9 p.m.

Indiana State Police for the Lowell post responded to multiple crashes Tuesday morning, including a jackknifed semitrailer on westbound Interstate 94 near Burns Harbor.

The semi was the only vehicle involved, and no serious injuries were reported, state police spokeswoman Sgt. Ann Wojas said. Minor injuries were reported in a separate single-car crash about a tenth of a mile ahead of the jackknifed semi, and none of the crashes reported as of 1 p.m. resulted in serious injury, she said.

Traffic moved slowly throughout the morning on parts of I-80/94, I-65 and the Indiana Toll Road.

Heavier bands of lake-effect snow were expected to persist in Porter County and areas to the east through Tuesday night.

INDOT warned drivers to take it slow and stay clear of plow trucks.

LaPorte and Jasper counties were under a travel advisory, which means routine travel may be restricted because of hazardous conditions, according to the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.

Starke County was under a travel watch, which means only essential travel is recommended.

The new snow expected Tuesday comes after 4 to 6 inches were reported throughout southern Lake and Porter counties and much of LaPorte County during a 24-hour period from Sunday morning to Monday morning.

Additional accumulation of 2 to 5 inches was expected Tuesday in localized areas of Lake County.

In Porter and LaPorte counties, snowfall rates of 1 to 2 inches per hour for short durations. Porter County could see new accumulation of up to 6 inches.

LaPorte and Starke counties could see total new accumulation of 3 to 5 inches.

Residents were urged to continue to monitor weather forecasts before heading out.

Several schools have announced delays and closures Tuesday because of the weather.

Check back at nwi.com for updates.
The Shirley Heinze Land Trust recently donated 17.34 acres of protected natural land to Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

The transfer consists of four parcels adjacent to park boundaries. The additional acres will help buffer the parks current holdings and reconnect fragmented high-quality natural areas.

"Shirley Heinze Land Trust has the ability to obtain and leverage funding opportunities to protect strategically located natural lands as they become available," Executive Director Kristopher Krouse said. "We work in partnership with other land conservation organizations such as the National Lakeshore to identify and acquire high-quality areas with the eventual goal of transferring ownership to the best suited conservation entity."

The work of Shirley Heinze Land Trust continues to help protect critical lands supporting the National Park Service mission for the benefit of all Americans. We are fortunate in Northwest Indiana to have a land trust to respond to conservation opportunities," said Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore Superintendent Paul Labovitz.

The largest property is 13.73 acres of prairie, acquired by Shirley Heinze in 1999 through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agencys North American Wetlands Conservation Act. The land is adjacent to IDNLs 300-acre Hobart Prairie Grove unit in Lake County.

Another 1.88-acre parcel of land adjacent to the southern edge of Mnoke Prairie will now become part of the Bailly/Chellberg and Little Calumet River Trail section of the park in Porter County.

An assortment of 16 lots totaling 1.55 acres of wooded dunes becomes part of the Miller Woods portion of the park in Lake County.

Another small group of lots totaling 0.18 of an acre has been added to the Tolleston Dunes unit in Porter County.

For more information on Shirley Heinze Land Trust, visit heinzetrust.org or facebook.com/heinzetrust or call 219-242-8558.
PORTAGE  The circular, concrete observation deck overlooking Lake Michigan at the Portage Riverwalk and Lakefront collapsed over the weekend.

It is the latest blow to the park that has been suffering from erosion the past few years. The continued erosion was compounded recently as high waves and strong winds battered the shoreline.

Portage Park Superintendent Jenny Orsburn said she was informed of the collapse Sunday night. The area was roped off with caution tape and barriers to prevent people from wandering onto the area.

The 60-acre park is owned by the National Park Service and managed by the Portage Park Department. Federal officials were unavailable Monday because offices were closed in observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Orsburn said she planned to meet with Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore Superintendent Paul Labovitz this week to assess the damage, determine a monetary loss and devise a plan to move forward.

The park department, along with the NPS, have been monitoring this area for the past six years, Orsburn said.

"The ramp to the beach was closed by the NPS for public access when we started losing beach and the ramp structure was compromised. When we started noticing significant erosion along the walkway, we implemented erosion control, placing rock and sand along with dune grass in the area. This held the walkway and prevented further erosion," Orsburn said of efforts taken to help stop erosion.

"Over this past summer we noticed the slope in front of the node (observation deck) was eroding at a significant rate. We placed sand and rock in front on the slope. Unfortunately, in a matter of two months with the waves and storms impacting the shoreline, we lost most of the slope," Orsburn said.

"First and foremost public safety is our concern, so NPS placed snow fence to prevent the public from walking down the slope. In November, the NPS installed fencing to close off the walkway completely. The NPS engineer determined there to be a public safety concern; the west nodes concrete slab simply sits on top of the sand dune," she said.

The $16 million park, funded through Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority, federal, state and local funding opened to the public in 2009. Developed as part of the Marquette Plan, the park reclaimed a former dump site operated by the former National Steel.

At the time, Lake Michigan water levels were low and visitors enjoyed using the park's beach.

Erosion issues began to rise in 2014, along with lake levels. By 2015, the beach disappeared, and the walkway to the beach was closed by the NPS.

The erosion issues initiated talks and meetings between the Army Corps of Engineers, Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Portage, the office of U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Merrillville, and Ogden Dunes. That resulted in the need for a study to develop a beach nourishment management plan. At the time, officials said it could take three to five years to complete the study.

The lakefront and riverwalk are west of the Burns Waterway breakwall, Port of Indiana and other structures which jut out into Lake Michigan and block the natural drift of sand along the lakeshore. The blocking of natural sand drift to the west of the structures causes the deprivation of sand to the area. The proposed study would look at how to compensate for that lack of natural beach re-nourishment.

"The Army Corps, National Park Service and the city have still been working on a plan for a study," Orsburn said. "We are still trying to secure funding for the study."
PORTAGE  It could be late Tuesday before city officials learn whether a settlement has been reached regarding a threatened lawsuit against U.S. Steel over alleged violations of the Clean Water Act.

Ken Elwood, attorney for the city's Utility Service Board, said at a board meeting Monday that the 60-day deadline for filing a threatened lawsuit against the company was Jan. 13. However, since that was a Saturday and Monday was a holiday, they likely won't know if an agreement was reached until Tuesday.

The notice of a possible lawsuit was filed two months ago by the University of Chicago's Abrams Environmental Law Clinic for repeatedly violating the Clean Water Act at U.S. Steel's Midwest plant for the last six years. The clinic is representing the Surfrider Foundation.

The threat of a lawsuit came after U.S. Steel twice dumped chromium, a byproduct of industrial processes, into the Burns Waterway. The spills occurred in April and October.

The April spill contained hexavalent chromium, a more toxic form of the chemical. It's unknown if the October spill contained hexavalent chromium, because U.S. Steel didn't test for it, records show. The October spill did not come to light until the law clinic filed the notice of intent to sue.

That outraged Portage officials, who had received the word of U.S. Steel officials that the April spill was a one-time incident and that the steelmaker would improve communications with the city. The city learned of the October spill through a newspaper article.

Last month, the USB sent a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Indiana Department of Environmental Management and Indiana Attorney General asking they be part of any agreement that may come from the legal action.

Elwood said he hoped to find out Tuesday if an agreement was reached and, if so, have Portage as a party to that agreement. If an agreement was not reached, it would be up to the EPA to file a lawsuit for the violations against the steelmaker. It would be up to the city then to decide if they would join the lawsuit.

Member Mark Oprisko said he has had conversations with Mayor James Snyder and that Snyder has been reaching out to Chicago to work with that city toward a resolution.

Snyder, who was not at the meeting, confirmed he has been in discussion with Chicago officials, but that there was noting to report from those discussions.

"We are feeling out the options. The city doesn't have the financial resources to embark on something on its own. I want to make sure that Portage has a seat at the table when these resolutions are made," Snyder said.
More than just an adornment on a feline face, whiskers have an almost science fiction kind-of-thing going for them.

On the tip of each whisker is a proprioceptor, a sensory organ with muscles and nerve endings that send messages to a cats brain and nervous system, says Dr. Norman Brooker, a veterinarian at the Hobart Animal Clinic. A cats whiskers can sense a difference in wind surfaces" and can help them when chasing prey, he said.

Put a cat in a dark room theyve never been in before and his whiskers can help him determine where the furniture is based on how the air currents change. See them jump through a small space and wonder how they knew they could. Its all about those proprioceptors. Call it cat radar.

Proprioceptors are tactile sensors, Brooker says.

Messing with a cat's whiskers is not a good idea. Even loving cat owners can unwittingly cause a problem for their felines: Whisker fatigue.

Whisker fatigue? According to the website Cathealth.com, signs your cat could be suffering from whisker fatigue include: Pawing at or pulling food out of the bowl to eat it on the ground.

Making a big mess around the bowl while eating or drinking.

Leaving food in the bowl while still seeming to be hungry.

Approaching the food bowl with caution.

Acting as though he or she wants to eat but pacing around nervously.

Refusing to eat unless the food bowl is filled to the top.

Acting aggressively around mealtimes.

The term whisker fatigue is a newer theory which states that cats can become stressed from eating and drinking out of deep food bowls because their whiskers are in constant contact with the sides of the bowl, says Lisa Polazzi, an emergency room veterinarian at North Central Veterinary Emergency Center in Westville and Highland. This hyperstimulation can lead to avoidance behavior, one that owners would typically dismiss as their cat being a picky eater. Since a cats whiskers are extremely sensitive and provide them with important information about their environment and space, they should never be trimmed.

Brooker says he discussed whisker fatigue with the 14 doctors on staff at the Hobart Animal Clinic but at the time no one was familiar with the term.

It could be a phenomenon thats been around since cats have but never really was diagnosed, he says.

If your cat is showing reluctance to eat or drink, it is important to have them examined by your veterinarian to make certain that they are not suffering from dental problems or other health issues and once your veterinarian has ruled out a medical problem, then various possible behavioral and environmental factors can be addressed, says Polazzi, noting that at this time, there is little scientific evidence to support this theory. But it cannot hurt to try various sized/shaped bowls to find the one that best suits your cat.

Though the diagnosis has been getting more attention since an article ran last year in The New York Times, the website veterinarynews.dvm360.com, which caters to veterinary professionals, questions whether its a ploy by pet product companies to sell special bowls. However, even the site says shallow and oval stainless-steel bowls are better than plastic for preventing feline chin acne, a common dermatological condition affecting cats.

Before making a diagnosis of whisker fatigue, pet owners need to check with their vet to if there are dental problems, says Brooker. A good oral exam will show if their gums or tongues have sores which might be preventing them from eating. Its also important to get a good physical exam to check to see if the cat has gastrointestinal problems.

Because cats can be very fastidious about their eating habits, some cats prefer flat, low-sided bowls, whisker fatigue notwithstanding, says Polazzi.

It is best to offer food and water from several different dishes before settling on one that your cat likes, she says.

Brooker says that after reading up on whisker fatigue he wondered whether his cats might have it since they eat out of small bowls.

But since theyre overweight, he says, it doesnt seem like a worry.
The world appears in a tizzy over President Donald Trumps undiplomatic reference to certain countries as expletive-holes. It was undiplomatic, maybe even intemperate, but his penchant for flair and showmanship were established long ago. Unlike the average politician, he didnt take the electorate for suckers by thinking one thing while saying another.

The blogoshpere, television commentators and editorial writers are having a field day castigating him. His comment has been called insulting and racist. Yet upon dispassionate reflection, we might find that Trump isnt wrong at all. Lets look at it from two perspectives.

One: Trump is invariably compared to President Barack Obama, who is generally considered the sine qua non of cool and erudition. However, in The Obama Doctrine," a lengthy interview with Jeff Goldberg published in the April 2016 issue of Atlantic magazine, Goldberg wrote, discussing Libya, that Obama said: Despite all the good we did in Libya, its a mess.

Mess is the presidents diplomatic term. Privately he calls Libya an expletive-show. It became so, Obama believes, for reasons to do with the passivity of Americas allies and the obdurate power of tribalism.

Wait a minute. Expletive-show? Tribalism? Was Obama being anti-Islamic or racist? Or, like Trump, was he merely telling it like it was?

Furthermore, Obama felt he was being manipulated by foreign policy poobahs. Heres what he said in that interview:

There is a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It is a playbook that comes out of the foreign policy establishment. The book can be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.

Could it be Trump recognizes the same thing and is determined not to be entrapped?

On tribalism, Obama said: Tribalism in the Middle East and Africa is a destructive force. It is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism. I understand the tribal impulse and acknowledge the power of tribal division. Ive been navigating tribal divisions my whole life. In the end, its the source of a lot of destructive acts.

Do such comments make Obama racist?

Two: Are Trumps references to certain other countries all that egregious? Any objective observer could fairly lump some of those countries in the Clintonesque "basket of deplorables."

The so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo is ruled by Joseph Kabila, who lost the presidency in an election over a year ago but refuses to step down despite sanctions by the United States and European Union. Potentially the richest African country, it is wracked by tribal and regional insurrections, human rights abuses and hunger.

Post-Mandela South Africa is foundering under President Jacob Zuma, and people in the townships are no better off than under the apartheid bantustans. In desperation, the ANC recently dumped Zuma as its leader in favor of Cyril Ramaphosa, who has as vile and corrupt a reputation as Zuma.

Zimbabwe finally got rid of its 40-year oppression under Robert Mugabe last year in a bloodless coup that installed his Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa as president.

Nigeria, once the hope of black Africa, is embroiled in a deadly campaign against the terrorist group Boko Haram, infamous for kidnapping hundreds of high school girls a couple years ago.

Acaps, an international human rights NGO recently said about Africa: If 2017 did not look good, predictions for 2018 are no better. Violence, insecurity and hunger are likely to escalate in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Ethiopia, Mali, Somalia and others."

Closer to home, Haiti is in a class by itself. It has long been the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, plagued by rampant corruption, dictators and natural disasters. Like all Caribbean island states, Haiti couldnt survive without international aid and handouts.

The foregoing doesnt mean there arent good, decent people in those countries. It doesnt mean the United States shouldnt extend a helping hand to aid their economic and political development.

We should do so because its in our interest from a humanitarian and economic point of view.

But there must be transparency and accountability in any country where the hard-earned dollars of American taxpayers are spent.

Obama also said: I believe the world is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place full of hardship and tragedy. There are going to be times when the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something thats terrible but not be able to believe we can automatically solve it.

Trumps comment was perhaps a harsh spotlight, but in reflection, aside from the fact he is arguably more abrasive than Obama, they dont seem that far apart concerning Americas role in the world.
We have friends who work for Christian missions, and they describe Haiti exactly as our president did "behind closed doors."

I'm glad U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illlinois, never sat next to me in a bar. I'd be in big trouble. Why isn't Durbin concerned about the millions that were earmarked for Haiti and disappeared from our last administration?
As the world knows, on Jan. 11, during a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House, President Donald Trump referred to Haiti and some African nations as expletive-hole countries during discussions on immigration policy.

Trump would like to banish many people of color and implement a policy forbidding certain people of color from coming into our country, in particular Haitian and African people. He is turning more and more into a very dangerous president.

Another world leader from another time, Adolph Hitler, oversaw Nazi Germany and its policies against the Jews. It was a sad point in time in history.

Trump is now taking the United States into a sad point in time. The dangerous question remaining to be seen now is, who is next? He already has targeted certain religious groups. What group or class of people is next?

Brian Vukadinovich, Wheatfield
Roadside roast meat may not be safe either

Last weeks crackdown on butchers and fishmongers accused of dousing their meats in inorganic salts and formalin, a preservative for dead bodies, to expand the meats shelf life, has resurrected old questions about poor regulatory controls of farm produce.

Concerns that some farmers and middlemen are selling beef, poultry products and vegetables that are contaminated with antibiotics, pesticides and herbicides have been reawakened.

More than 10 people have been arrested by Kampala Capital City Authority health teams working with officials from the Uganda National Bureau of Standards.

However, as authorities target butcheries and fish stalls, other chemicals which could be harmful to human health are being applied to preserve tomatoes, vegetables, beans and groundnuts in markets.

On Monday, The Observer walked through Nakasero and Wandegeya markets, talking to traders and sellers of cooked food. Many admitted to adding chemicals to perishable foodstuffs to extend their shelf life.

Partly because of the ongoing clamp-down, most traders requested not to be named so they could speak freely. Some of them said they get around the high cost of cooking gas, other fuels and electricity by adding pellets of panadol in beans, chicken and cow hooves, which makes these foods cook faster.

It is very normal here because when you use it [panadol], those beans can get ready very fast. We do it to save charcoal, one restaurant owner in Wandegeya market said, adding that they think it is not dangerous since panadol is swallowed by people to kill pain.

Dr Yasin Ssebuko, working with Joy Medical Centre in Bweyogerere, told The Observer on Monday that panadol is preferred because it has an element called acetaminophen, which when used softens the testa of a bean seed and makes it easy to boil.

[But] when it is boiled at those high temperatures, it changes the normal functioning of the body cells, which could lead to cancer, Ssebuko said.

Other unscrupulous vendors inject steroids into both live animals and packed meat to increase their mass and weight. Steroids are organic compounds used among other things to build muscle.

Ssebuko said steroids can weaken the immune system if consumed in meat and can also cause obesity.

When they weaken the immunity, it gives chance for opportunistic infections to attack a person and there will be little defence in the body. These diseases can be candida, pneumonia, diarrhoea and many others, he said.

An article published in the US newspaper, Los Angeles Times on July 11, 2016 titled,Why antibiotic use on farms helps fuel antibiotic-resistant diseases, warned that farm animals are a key player in the emergence of antibiotic resistance.

Around the world, livestock producers feed antibiotics to cattle, pigs, chickens and other animals in a bid to prevent diseases and boost their growth. In the United States, for instance, some 30 million pounds of antibiotics are used on the farm. Thats 70% of all the antibiotics used in the USA each year, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts, an NGO dedicated to improving public policy, informing the public and stimulating civic life.

Experts believe this practice has hastened the emergence of antibiotic-resistant diseasesWhen farm animals poop, these drug-resistant bacteria wind up in soil and water. From there, they can spread to other animals, fuelling the cycle. The organisms can find their way into humans if people consume undercooked meat of infected animals, or eat produce grown in soil contaminated by their waste.

To keep rats, cockroaches and weevils, away from shops and storage facilities, vendors in Uganda like to use rodenticides and ammonia sprinkled in sacks of beans, groundnuts and other cereals. These contain chemicals such as cholecalciferol, which when consumed by humans could cause a burning nose, throat and respiratory respiratory distress.

Jackline Nagawa, a resident of Ntinda who runs a restaurant business, said poor regulation will lead to loss of lives in the long run. She worries that the ongoing operations will yield nothing if they are not carried out regularly and countrywide.

It is not just meat or fish; when you go to many markets to buy beans or groundnuts, you will discover that these people put chemicals in them to keep away the rats and weevils. They dont care about peoples health because they know they can easily get away with it, Nagawa said.

One tomato vendor in Nakasero market said if growers didnt spray pesticides on tomatoes before transporting them to the market, most produce would be spoilt within days.

Florence Isabirye Muranga, a lecturer in the department of Food Science and Technology at Makerere University, told The Observer on Monday that vegetables should last be sprayed with chemicals at least two weeks before harvest. Harvested produce must also be washed to reduce the health hazards it can cause, Muranga said.

The problem is that we have unqualified people doing these treatments. Meat or vegetables can remain good simply by packaging [and not by chemicals], he said.

She said government should only allow packed meat or vegetables on the market.

Slaughtering meat and delivering it packed to the consumers after maturing it is the only solution to weeding out these middlemen, she said.

There is, however, a less visible though equally potent hazard concerning meat sold at the butchery. Several cows are slaughtered while sick and with too much antibiotics in their blood.

First of all, when you eat meat with antibiotics, it can mean that the animal didnt cure and, therefore, you can also contract that disease. Then the too many antibiotics in your body can make it resistant to several drugs; you are treated but your body doesnt respond to certain drugs, Ssebuko said.

He added that if ones body is free from disease and you take in meat with antibiotics, useful defensive cells in the body called normal flora will be killed, thus weakening your immunity.

It also could affect other body organs such as the liver, kidney and the heart just like any other antibiotics, he added.

Experts say that for an animal to be slaughtered, it should have last been injected with any drug about two weeks before but this window varies from drug to drug. On December 7, 2017, The Observer columnist Dr Jimmy Spire Ssentongo wrote that nsenene (grasshoppers) trappers were poisoning the insects to boost their catch.

They use pesticides and other intoxicating substances which they smoke and spray up in the air at the nsenene. It has also been suspected that some use formalin to keep the nsenene from smelling, he wrote.

One nsenene trader in Nakasero confirmed the truth in Ssentongos writing, saying she knows that some chemical is put in them before bundling the insects into sacks for sale.

Hussein Kiguli sells meat in the main market at Kireka in Kira municipality.He was one of six butchers interviewed who acknowledged using some chemicals to preserve meat and keep away flies.

How could I know that these things are toxic when none of my customers has ever complained about any complication? I and my family, we eat this very meat I sell and I can tell you I have never fallen sick, Kiguli said.

Like Kiguli, several butchers and dairy products dealers are not aware of the potential dangers and they dont care to find out as long as they are making money.

But how dangerous is consumption of formalin and inorganic salts to human life?

Dr George Okello, a gastroenterologist with Kampala International hospital, told The Observer last week that the consumption of both chemicals will hurt the people in the long run.

Formalin, for example, cant be used in large quantities before you detect it because it smells and could harden the meat. So, I think these fellows will use small amounts that will not have an immediate effect on a person but if consumption is prolonged, then it gets really dangerous, Okello said.

He said in the short run, one can experience burning sensations in the eyes, nose, and throat; coughing, nausea and skin irritation. Okello further said this could also depend on the body of the person because some people are more sensitive to exposure than others.

Although the short-term health effects of formalin exposure are well known, less is known about its potential long-term health effects. Medical experts said the chemical could cause cancer and damage to kidneys although this has never been proven scientifically.

According to the US National Cancer Institute, 1980 laboratory studies showed that exposure to formalin could cause nasal cancer in rats. This finding raised the question of whether formalin exposure could also cause cancer in humans.

kamogajonathan50@gmail.com


Tim Smith

Tim Smith, who was executive VP at Edelman, has joined APCO Worldwide as managing director in Seattle to spearhead the DC-based firms West Coast push.

He joined Edelmans Seattle in 2009 and rose to lead the offices its corporate and PA practice.

Prior to work at the No. 1 independent firm, Smith held the senior VP slot at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, where he led the technology-oriented shops PA, issues management, crisis and CSR offerings.

Smith has a wealth of overseas corporate experience gained from stints at Japan Tobacco International (VP-global affairs & communications in Moscow and Geneva) and RJ Reynolds (senior director-corporate affairs in Moscow).

He also worked as a commercial officer for the State Dept. with postings in Russia (Moscow and Vladivostok) and Uzbekistan (Tashkent).

In announcing Smiths hiring, Nelson Fernandez, North America chair, said his ability to navigate reputational challenges, corporate communications crises and complex geopolitical issues is at the core of APCOs mission.
Eric Starkman

Ive never met Anna Wintour, Conde Nasts artistic director and longtime editor of Vogue, but the title of a book based on the fashionista, The Devil Wears Prada, captures how shes uniformly portrayed. Wintours management style might charitably be described as demanding, but it also underscores a double standard in todays political climate. An abusive 60-something male executive known for hiring only attractive young female assistants, routinely making judgments about their clothing, and asking them about their personal lives in job interviews would be severely reprimanded, if not fired.

Wintour displayed her legendary insensitivity last week in announcing that shes named Samantha Barry, CNN Worldwides executive producer for social and emerging media, as editor-in-chief of Glamour. Barry, 36, has no background in magazine publishing, but Wintour diminished the skill-set of Conde Nasts legacy editors. Sam is Glamours first digital-native editor, which is to say she arrives from the future rather than the past, Wintour said in a statement. Hopefully, Conde Nasts print editors can read the writing on the wall as well as on glossy paper.

Conde Nast isnt the first publishing company to hail a supposed digital expert as a surefire savior for the declining magazine industry. Time Warner seven years ago announced with great fanfare that it had hired Laura Lang, CEO of the ad firm Digitas, to oversee its magazine publishing division. (Lang) is the right person to lead the company as it aggressively evolves its businesses during a time of great change and opportunity in publishing, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes declared.

How did that turn out? Lang was gone after two years on the job, and Time Warner had to pay her nearly $16 million to make her go away. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that severance could cover the salaries of dozens of the nations best and most experienced reporters for several years. Under Langs watch, Time Warners magazines went into a tailspin from which they never recovered. The business was recently sold to The Meredith Corp.

Perhaps Barry is indeed a digital wunderkind, but you wouldnt know it reading her New York Times profile. The Ireland native communicates in digitalspeak and sounds more like a Bain & Company media consultant than a journalist. Social media is supposedly all about storytelling, and Barry said her heritage makes her uniquely qualified. Irish people are such storytellers, she said. Her lack of journalism experience isnt an issue. At the end of the day, I bring to the table being an expert in content.

Another valued skill is her ability to pivot. And, of course, she appreciates that Glamour is much more than a print publication. Glamour is a brand  its not just a magazine. You get the picture.

For what its worth, I dont associate CNN with deft brand management. Millions of Americans, including President Trump, associate the network with fake news and obnoxious anchors.

Ironically, Barrys appointment came a few days after veteran publishing executive David Carey expressed skepticism that digital is the future of the magazine industry. We reject this notion of digital first because we think that denigrates the core business, Carey, the president of Hearst Magazines, told Recode. We think there is a lot to be made in the print business.

Perhaps Carey is a publishing dinosaur like most of Wintours editorial subordinates. But the jury is still out on digital publications. Its far from certain that engaging masses of people with compelling journalism such as an exploding watermelon is the pathway to profitability. Indeed, Carey predicted that digital media companies are headed for a crash, so Conde Nast likely wont have any problem attracting other great storytellers to work alongside Barry.

As for Wintour, shed best hope that the accelerating trend to eradicate abusive executives from corporate America never becomes an equal opportunity movement.

***

Eric Starkman founded STARKMAN PR firm in 1999. It has offices in New York and San Francisco.
Prime Policy Group is working with the American Immigration Council as it seeks a bipartisan legislation alternative to President Trumps decision to kill the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration status, which covers nearly 800,000 people, in March.

Beth Werlin, executive director of the Council, said the White Houses move on DACA ignores our American identity of being a nation of immigrants and fails to embrace the energy, innovation and opportunities that immigrants bring to our country.

The Council is pushing for a clear and permanent path forward for the Dreamers. We must not squander the potential of this generation of young people who will write the next great chapter of American history, said Werlin in a recent statement.

PPG, which is part of Burson-Marsteller, also reps the Council on the temporary protected status program, which provides immigration status to people living in countries that experienced armed conflict and environmental disasters.

Trump this month ended TPS for 200,000 people from El Salvador.

The Council criticized Trumps move as a tragic decision for people who have lived here, paid taxes and registered with the government for nearly 20 years.

PPG Chairman Charlie Black, former aide to Ronald Reagan/George Bush I and Republican National Committee spokesperson, leads his firm's five-member lobbying team.
Omahan Julian Flores worked all the time at his job hanging drywall to provide for his seven children, his daughter said.

He was walking to a job about 7 a.m. on Jan. 10 when he was fatally struck by a car near 21st and Cuming Streets. The 24-year-old driver has been accused of driving drunk.

Flores, 47, suffered a head injury and died two days later at the Nebraska Medical Center.

His daughter describes her father as devoted to his family and faith.

After working all week, Flores enjoyed cooking, traveling and helping out at his church, daughter Cynthia Flores of Omaha said Tuesday.

He was well-known in construction, and he had a lot of companies calling him for their jobs. He was always busy, Flores said.

A funeral Mass will be held for Flores at 10 a.m. today at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, 2310 O St.

Donations to the Memorial Account for Julian Flores are being accepted at any SAC Federal Credit Union locations in Nebraska and Iowa.

The driver of the car, Justin W. Peters of Bellevue, is being held in the Douglas County Jail on $500,000 bail after being charged with DUI resulting in bodily injury and leaving the scene of an accident. Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine said he intends to amend the charges against Peters to include motor vehicle homicide-DUI.

We still have a little bit of work today, but thats what we intend to do, Kleine said Tuesday.

Flores moved to Omaha from California as a teenager and began working in construction, his daughter said. He later operated his own company, Julian Flores Drywall, and held a contracting license.

Flores married his wife, Amparo, in 1992. The couple had seven children, three of whom are 13 years old or younger.

His faith was very important to him, Cynthia Flores said. He would often spend the night at the church keeping an adoration vigil. He looked out for everyone, and he did as much as he could for the church or our friends.

Nights and weekends, Flores liked to spend time at the park with his children. He also had a flair for cooking, especially desserts, his daughter said.

He was good at baking cakes, she said, but he liked to cook other things, too. He was just a good, good man, and he should have had more time with us.
Conagra Brands says an effort to collect food and money for 1.4 million meals in the Omaha area has succeeded.

The effort was aided by Food Bank for the Heartland as part of the 11th annual Shine the Light on Hunger campaign. The goal was met with four weeks remaining in the 13-week campaign, officials said Tuesday.

The NRG Energy Ice Rink in the Capitol District was the focal point of the campaign. Through Valentines Day, a part of rink admission fees will continue to go to Food Bank for the Heartland. More than 7,000 skaters have been on the ice since the campaign began, officials said.

Skaters also can continue to make donations of nonperishable food at collection barrels located at the ice rink and at the various drop-off sites around town, including all Bakers stores.

A schedule of hours, rink events and nearby parking information, plus a list of drop-off sites, can be found at holidaylightsfestival.org.

Bakers also will host a stuff-the-truck event Jan. 27 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the North 132nd Street and West Maple Road store.

Conagra Brands says it will match all skate-rental donations and additional funds up to $100,000. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska has also pledged $12,500 to the Food Bank.

Last year, Conagra Brands and Omahans collected more than 78,000 pounds of food and raised more than $463,000 during the Shine the Light on Hunger campaign. Thats the equivalent of more than 1.4 million meals donated to Food Bank for the Heartland, officials said.

Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert will announce the final number of meals raised during the campaign at a March 7 ceremony at the Food Banks headquarters.
Family and Children's Services will host two LGBTQI psycho-educational groups starting Wednesday.

These free groups, one for adults and one for teens, are called Compass and provide a confidential, safe environment for people who are questioning or identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender or allies to receive support and information with a goal of promoting health and well-being and reducing risk. The program works through acquisition of skills in building self-esteem, healthy life styles and relationships. It includes strategies to deal with family rejection, social isolation and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Gender non-conformism can have debilitating effects on people of all ages. Research indicates that LGBTQ individuals have a higher prevalence of depression, anxiety, suicide attempts and substance abuse than members of the majority population. Youth are at unique risk for school related violence and harassment, which can contribute to their almost six-fold risk for depression compared to other teens. For 30 percent of them, this becomes so intense that they miss school because they feel unsafe, which can lead to poor school performance, school failure or dropping out.

The groups will meet on the first and third Wednesday of each month. Compass Teens meets from 4 p.m to 5:30 p.m. and Compass Adults meets from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Both groups are staffed by a licensed, qualified therapist with specialized training as a sex educator and sex therapist and in the Michigan Department of Education program, A Silent Crisis: Creating Safe Schools for Sexual Minority Youth.

For information on these groups, call Family and Children's Services at 989-631-5390.
This past weekend's 4th Congressional Roundup presented an opportunity for Republican legislators to review the year past, but also preview upcoming events.

One of the biggest previews shared, at the Doherty Hotel on Saturday, came from Rep. Gary Glenn regarding his wife, Annette. Gary fell just short of a formal announcement for Annette and her anticipated run to fill her husband's seat representing the 98th House District.

Glenn has already announced that he will vacate his 98th House seat to campaign for the 31st Senate District.

"I'm going to be running for the Senate for Bay, Lapeer and Tuscola counties. But, I have a notion that you are going to be left in good hands with somebody who has a $500,000 head start due to her last name. That is what I have spent on our campaign in the last couple of years," Gary said.

Stating that the candidate is "smarter, better looking, friendlier, nicer, more electable, has a public administration degree from a university and used to run campaigns until our children were born," Gary Glenn would enjoy spending more time with her in Lansing should both candidates be elected.

"I'm looking forward to the possibility of seeing her in Lansing a whole lot more often after the turn of next year," he said.

He added that a formal announcement should be forthcoming in the next few weeks.

Annette Glenn has already spent a lot of time with her husband due to his life threatening prostate cancer. She drove Gary to Lansing each day so he could achieve a 100 percent voting record.

"Without her, I couldn't have made the votes on the House floor that I made. So, Annette, I would like to say publicly, 'Thank you for everything you did for me,'" Gary said.

During his second term as a representative, Gary was named chair of the House Energy Committee. His first two-year term, saw Glenn serve as vice chair of the same committee.

"Energy is the 'single most complex issue that we face in Michigan,'" he said. "It's the biggest cost of business for the biggest employer (DowDuPont) in this region."

Moving into Glenn's old position as vice chair was freshman Rep. Roger Hauck, R-Union Township. Hauck represents the 99th District, which consists of Isabella County along with 10 townships in Midland County and the City of Coleman.

Glenn and Hauck have been working to revise the state's energy policy and open it up for more free market competition.

"I'm going to continue to be an advocate for that position for the simple Republican position of a free market," Glenn said. "Competition will bring down prices and I will be an advocate for that as long as I have the privilege of serving in the Legislature."

Glenn also shared regarding the legislation he co-sponsored with Sen. Judy Emmons, R-Sheridan, involving sexual encounters between law enforcement officers, and prostitutes or human trafficking victims. Michigan had been the only state in the U.S. that exempted law enforcement officials from prosecution.
The Mid Michigan Cattle Network, coordinated and supported by Michigan State University Extension-Gladwin County, will host its next meeting at 7 p.m. Jan. 18.

The meeting will in the Houghton Conference Room at Mid Michigan Community College-Harrison Campus, 1375 S. Clare Ave. in Harrison.

The program will feature Dr. Dan Grooms, department chair and professor in the MSU Large Animal Clinical Sciences department. He discuss vaccinations for cattle health.

For more information, contact Kable Thurlow at 989-426-7741 orl thurlowk@anr.msu.edu; or visit the Gladwin County Building Annex, 555 W. Cedar Ave., Suite A, Gladwin, Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to noon and 1-5 p.m.
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The preschool children at Longview Early Childhood Center in the Midland 3 Head Start Inclusion program disagree with the opinion of Midland as the most boring city in Michigan.

During the children's recent clothes study, the students spent a week focused on uniforms or clothes people wear for work. The children were treated to visits from James McDaniel, senior safety specialist for Great Lakes Safety Training Center; Sheila King, retired Dow employee; and Jamie Agnew, of Jamie Lyn's Catering.

McDaniel showed the children his hardhat, steel-toed boats and reflector vest. He explained how these items helped to keep him safe on his job. The children were given an opportunity to try out the articles of clothing.

King showed the children how she makes items from yarn. Their teacher got to wear one of the headbands she made. The children got to take home trees make from yarn.

Agnew showed the children what she wears when she prepares their food each day. She talked about the purpose of her chef's coat and apron, and how her hairnet protected their food from germs. The children got a chance to touch and try on one of her hair nets.

Leaders at the Longview Early Childhood Center said they appreciate the participation of the community in this "not so boring" city coming in and sharing with the children.
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BLOOMINGTON  Central Illinois is no longer under a winter weather advisory, but the mercury is starting to drop.

McLean, Woodford, Tazewell, Logan, DeWitt, Champaign and Peoria counties were under the advisory issued by the National Weather Service until 3 p.m.

While the falling snow has ended or diminished to flurries, gusty west-to-northwest winds are producing blowing and drifting snow in some areas. That is causing slick roads and reduced visibility, with the most significant problems expected on north to south oriented roads, said NWS. The advisory expired at noon.

While one advisory has ended, another one, a wind chill advisory, will take effect at 6 p.m. The National Weather Service has extended that advisory until noon Tuesday.

Wind chills will be 12 degrees to 22 degrees below zero Monday night and into Tuesday morning. The temperature in B-N at 6:30 a.m. was 21 degrees, but it had dropped to 7 degrees by 4:30 p.m.

A wind chill advisory means that frost bite and hypothermia can occur in as little as 30 minutes if precautions are not taken. Make sure you wear a hat and gloves when outside.

The snow that began falling late Sunday afternoon ended Monday morning in the Twin Cities. Plow crews were out much of the day.

The situation was helped by the fact that schools were closed Monday due to the Martin Luther King holiday.

A snow parking ban went into effect on all streets in the Town of Normal at 9 a.m., but expired at 5 pm.

Normal police also are advising returning Illinois State University students to be aware of where they are parking; classes resume on Tuesday.

A snow parking ban is activated to allow snow plow crews to clear the entire street, including parking areas. Town officials advise motorists, when approaching operating salt vehicles, to stay at least 100 feet behind the equipment and not try to pass.

Illinois State Police in most of the state were busy much of the day with accidents on interstate highways, including Interstates 55 and 39 in the Twin City area. No serious injuries have been reported.

The Illinois Department of Transportation reports all area interstates are snow covered but were in better condition by 4 p.m. with the exception of Interstate 55 north in Livingston County that remains mostly snow and ice covered, said the agency.

The Twin Cities recorded about 3 inches of snow overnight.
BLOOMINGTON  To quote Patrick Bak, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lincoln, the next few days are going to be more than just bitterly cold.

Its going to be pretty nasty, he said Monday afternoon, just before a wind chill advisory went into effect for all of Central Illinois that will expire at noon Tuesday.

And the weather is thought to have played a role in at least three Central Illinois crashes involving at least two deaths, according to the Illinois State Police.

Temperatures are expected to drop and wind chill factors could be 12 degrees below zero to 22 degrees below early Tuesday morning. A wind chill advisory means that frostbite and hypothermia can occur in as little as 30 minutes if precautions are not taken.

The temperature in the Twin Cities at 7 a.m. was minus 3 degrees.

The deep freeze wont be as bad or as long as the cold snap that hit the area during the last week of December and the first week of January, Bak said.

The high temperatures on Tuesday and Wednesday will be about 18 degrees, and the mercury may reach 32 degrees Thursday and close to 50 degrees by Sunday, Bak said.

It seems like we have had a roller coaster of temperatures all season, Bak said. But I see signs that the last half of January should be warmer than it has been during the first half of the month.

The cold snap comes on the heels of another storm system that dropped several inches of snow on most of Central Illinois on Sunday and Monday.

Amounts varied. For instance, Streator reported 6.1 inches of snow, but most reporting stations around the Twin Cities reported 3 inches.

There should be no threat of rain or snow for the rest of the week, according to the NWS. There is a chance of showers on Sunday, but Bak said it is too early to tell how significant that system will be if and when it arrives.

Blowing and drifting snow caused problems through much of Monday. Local and state law enforcement agencies reported several crashes and calls for cars in ditches or medians Monday.

State police are also investigating a serious accident on Interstate 39 near Kappa that occurred Monday morning. Police confirmed at least two vehicles were involved and there were at least two serious injuries. Details have not yet been released as of Monday night.

In Sangamon County, a 44-year-old Springfield man died following a two-vehicle crash on Interstate 55 near Auburn about noon Monday. In Champaign County, a 58-year-old Savoy man was killed in a crash at 10:18 a.m. on Interstate 57 near Thomasboro.

The crashes remain under investigation.

There also was a power outage Sunday night that left several hundred Cornbelt Energy customers without power for about two hours. About 810 homes were without power in Arrowsmith, Bloomington, Downs, Ellsworth, Farmer City, Heyworth and LeRoy.

Officials said an upstream transmission issue caused the substation outage, and crews restored power to all customers by 10:10 p.m. Sunday.
BLOOMINGTON  The influenza outbreak that began in December appears to be slowing down, Central Illinois medical professionals said Monday.

But hundreds of Central Illinoisans remain ill, meaning everyone should remain vigilant about reducing the spread of flu and other upper respiratory infections.

"We continue to have a high volume and we're seeing it in all our patient-care centers  doctors' offices, immediate care, the emergency department," said Laurel Mode, infection preventionist at Advocate BroMenn Medical Center, Normal. "But our number of positive flu test results is tapering off."

OSF HealthCare St. Joseph Medical Center, Bloomington, has seen the same trends.

"The numbers are still high for mid-January," said Deb Smith, the hospital's vice president for nursing and operations. "We absolutely have seen more cases this year."

Flu hit early and hard in December. No one knows how many Central Illinoisans have had the flu because the only numbers that are required to be reported to the state are pediatric deaths and hospital intensive care unit admissions.

So far this flu season, nearly 220 people have tested positive for flu at BroMenn as inpatients or through the emergency department or lab, Mode said.

At OSF PromptCares and doctors' offices in Bloomington-Normal, 513 people have tested positive for flu, Smith said.

At St. Joseph there have been 42 confirmed cases since flu season began and three of those patients were admitted to the ICU.

At Advocate Eureka Hospital in Eureka, the emergency department and immediate care continue to treat patients with flu and other upper respiratory infections, said Mark Lareau, manager of the emergency department and immediate care.

Strep, gastroenteritis, bronchitis and RSV in children are among other circulating illnesses, medical professionals said.

Why flu season hit harder and earlier this year isn't known. One reason appears to be that one circulating virus has mutated, making the flu vaccine less effective. That H3N2 strain is associated with more hospitalizations.

"Some people (who have gotten flu) have had the vaccine," Mode said. "Some have not received the vaccine. The vaccine may not be as effective as in some years in the past."

Still, Mode continues to recommend a flu shot for people who haven't had one this year.

"You will still get some protection from other strains of the flu," she said. The result may be that people who get the flu aren't as ill as if they didn't get the vaccine.

But Smith said 76 percent of OSF PromptCare and doctors' office patients who tested positive for flu had not been vaccinated.

Illinois Department of Public Health reports that flu remains widespread throughout Illinois and 617 people statewide have been admitted to hospital ICUs.

Smith said the extreme cold and schools' winter break may have limited the spread of the virus because many people stayed indoors.

Sue Rutherford, school nurse at Bent Elementary School in Bloomington District 87, said "We have seen a slight decrease in absences compared to before winter break."

Susy Marcum, curriculum chair for McLean County Unit 5 school nurses, said "Illness (at Unit 5) is increasing and decreasing in pockets. We aren't seeing anything that's alarming or unusual for this time of year."

Mode said the number of positive flu tests may be declining because some doctors are no longer ordering flu tests because they know that flu is widespread in the community and they can diagnose flu based on symptoms.
LINCOLN  A new position to oversee the womens division within the Illinois Department of Corrections was signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Bruce Rauner, following a tour of the Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln.

We need to help these women get the help they need so that once they serve their time, they can be productive in society, Rauner said. Female prisoners are often different from male prisoners in the fact that they are often mothers and are the main caregiver in their home. Prison should not be a punishment, but instead a place to reform and better themselves for their release.

On the tour, Rauner said he was encouraged by the amount of support the female inmates received and also encouraged by the new legislation, which is intended to provide more services. In addition to creating the post of chief administrator, the legislation also incorporates gender-responsive programming and addresses specific challenges that female offenders face.

Its time we adjust our strategies and find solutions that set women up for success when they leave prison, Rauner said. Many of these women are mothers. If we dont take steps to help put them on a better path, we will see their sons and daughters cycle through the prison system. We cant have that.

Rauner also said that many of the offenders were abused physically, emotionally and/or sexually prior to their incarceration, and the new division will allow for more committed resources to help them.

Rauner was joined on the tour by IDOC Director John Baldwin, LCC Warden Glen Austin and former Warden Maggie Burke, who helped write the legislation.

State Rep. Tim Butler, R-Springfield, also joined Rauner for the signing of the new legislation.

The governor has said all along that he intends to improve our correctional facilities and this legislation is a step in that direction, said Butler. This makes Illinois a leader on trauma-informed services specific to the female population in our correctional system. Other states are looking at us as a model on prison reform.

LCC inmates said the bill was a positive step forward for women in Illinois prisons.

"I am ecstatic," said Claudette Lowe of Decatur. "Some people come in here angry or shy or in need of mental health and what this will do is provide more of those services that they need."

Rauner met with some of the inmates in a self-help class.

"We were told that there would be some media coming, but we didn't know until this morning that the governor was going to be here," Lowe said. "It's exciting that he came, but more importantly, it's a positive step toward helping the women that are in here."

The Logan County facility opened in 1978 and can hold 2,284 inmates, but currently houses 1,658. It is one of two female prisons in Illinois  the other is in Decatur.

The LCC was transitioned from a male to a female prison in 2013 in conjunction with the closure of the Dwight and Lincoln correctional centers.

That left us with a lot of issues with the training of staff, different populations who werent used to living with each other, and it was very difficult for us, Burke said. This will allow this facility to assist with the challenges these women face.

Baldwin said both offenders and staff will benefit from the new legislation.

We recognize that making change means investing in our staff and giving them the tools to keep them and those who are incarcerated safe, Baldwin said. Were teaching staff how to use their authority effectively, how to understand the needs of female offenders and how to help the women restructure their thinking about challenging situations. Our staff had never received these types of training before 2015.

Rauner said he will continue to work on criminal justice reform and pointed to the services, such as the cosmetology program already established at LCC as a model.

We need to focus on training these offenders so that when they get out, they not only have the skills to get a good job, but a good-paying job as well, he said. The cosmetology program is a great example, but we want to add more such as welding and other programs.
Hawaiian residents and vacationers spent 38 horrific minutes preparing for an incoming ballistic missile and possible death on Saturday, until the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency corrected a false alarm message.

Some of their family members tried to warn others of the impending danger they thought was headed to the islands; others said their goodbyes.

Sara Donchey, in Hawaii

"I was in a bit of a stupor because I had just woken up from a nap," said Donchey, an anchor at CNN affiliate KPRC in Houston who was visiting Hawaii. "The first thing I noticed was nine missed calls from my dad, then my mom's texts telling me to take shelter and that she loved me."

"Perhaps the most upsetting part came several hours afterward, when I realized the agony my mother went through for those 38 minutes," she says. "She thought her daughter was going to die alone. No one would console her. That's what I felt the worst about."

Stephanie Warner, family in Hawaii

"When I read the text, Ben, Abbey and I were just watching TV so we started Googling looking for answers," says Warner. "Sarah didn't know any more than the alert she received so she didn't have many answers either."

"I think we were too shocked to react emotionally," Warner remembers. "I just wanted to know why I couldn't find any information on what was happening. ... Sarah sent us a picture of a sleepy Emmalinn to calm us down, which was appreciated."

"I don't think the reality of what was happening hit me until a few hours later when she FaceTimed me with Emma," Warner says. "I went into a panic mode of how do we fix this? Can they come home? Can Blaine find a new career? Would it matter if they did any of that if this is what the world is coming to? I felt very small and helpless. I've been reading most of the articles that have been released since and I think it really hits home knowing this is a reality. It could happen at any moment and again, there's nothing we can do about it but pray that everything is in control."

Lori Citro, daughter in Hawaii

"[The other family members] had the wherewithal to check if it was a hoax," Citro said. "I just melted down and cried and sobbed. Couldn't even think straight. Seemed like an eternity."

"I had a total meltdown at the restaurant sobbing crying and barely able to read the rest of the messages," Citro said in a Facebook post. "The good-byes, 'I love yous' and finally quite thankfully, the message it was a mistake or a hoax."

"My daughter was going to die, today, alone," Citro remembers thinking. "I wanted to run from the restaurant and fly to Hawaii to be with her."

Kimberly McMurray, in Hawaii

"My first initial thought was pure fear at the idea that my 2-year-old daughter's life was going to be instantaneously cut short," said McMurray. "That melded into the thought on what was it going to feel like - would I die in the initial blast or get lingering affects from the radiation exposure and die later on?"

"I wasn't sure if I should text my family because I was honestly more worried about the fear and helplessness they would feel," McMurray remembers thinking. "I debated sending a text at all, but felt that if I only had minutes left, I wanted them to know we loved them.

Chris Sutherland, daughter in Hawaii

"Helpless," Sutherland wrote on Facebook. "The feeling you have when your daughter sends you the following text..."
The past week of the Trump presidency felt like that point in a video game when you've reached a new level and the widgets suddenly start flying at you too fast to dodge. There was an attack on free speech. On an independent judiciary. And with the president's horrific reference to "s***hole countries," on America's tradition of offering a welcoming hand to the downtrodden. So much, so quickly that it's difficult to process it all.

But we must. To fail to note these departures from normalcy, from the institutions and values that have actually made America great all along, is to tacitly countenance the outrage and, worse, to risk that we will begin to fail to recognize it as such.

So, fresh from having dispatched his personal lawyers to make the laughable but, coming from a president, nonetheless scary effort to halt publication of a critical book, Trump renewed his assault on free speech. "Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not represent American values or American fairness," Trump announced during a Cabinet meeting last Wednesday.

In fact, our libel laws embody American values, balancing First Amendment imperatives with the need to provide a remedy for egregiously irresponsible conduct.

It's easy to dismiss Trump's words as more ignorant bloviating, without real-world consequences. After all, libel laws  beyond the constitutional limits placed on them  are essentially a state matter. And yet, it was scary enough when threats to "open up the libel laws" came from a presidential candidate. This man is the president. He took an oath to defend a Constitution about which he knows little and cares less.

More evidence for that conclusion: Trump's tweeted blast, earlier Wednesday, on a court ruling that blocked the president's plan to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to protect so-called Dreamers from deportation.

"It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts," Trump tweeted.

So goes the rule of law according to Trump: When he wins, the court is wise and good. When he loses, the system is rigged and the judge is so-called. Perhaps the district court's ruling was wrong and will be overturned. That does not prove our "Court System" is any more "broken and unfair" than when opponents of another Obama-era immigration order chose to file suit in a federal court in Texas likely to be sympathetic to their claim. The appropriate response to losing in court is respectfully disagreeing and filing an appeal  not spewing forth tweets that undermine the system's very legitimacy.

The next day found Trump once again demonstrating his disdain for free speech and, relatedly, his authoritarian impulses. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump accused an FBI agent of treason  yes, treason  for sending texts critical of his candidacy.

The question that unleashed this alarming tirade had to do with Trump's tweeted call for Republicans in Congress to "finally take control" of the Russia probe. From this prompt, Trump made his way to FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was removed from the special counsel investigation into Trump and Russia after the texts were discovered.

Trump: "And what went on with the FBI, where a man is tweeting to his lover that if (Hillary Clinton) loses ... we'll go to the insurance policy, which is -- if they lose, we'll go to phase 2, and we'll get this guy out of office. ... I think that is  that is treason. See, that's treason right there. ... What he tweeted to his lover is a treasonous act."

Leave aside Trump's ultraparanoid interpretation of an ambiguous text. Leave aside the Constitution's careful definition of the crime: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

Trump  a man who claims the "absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department"  is accusing a lifelong public servant of the gravest offense. Lucky for Trump, the libel laws would probably protect him against the lawsuit he deserves.

So yes, Trump's reference to "s***hole countries" represents a terrible, tragic moment in our nation's history. Even more terrible and tragic: This was only the worst of so many more, over the span of just a few days, in a week all too typical of this appalling presidency.
Brazilian drag pop star Pabllo Vittar first drew in the spotlight with her vlog series, "Vlog Da Pabllo," and Portuguese rendition of Major Lazer's "Lean On" in 2015. Since then, she has proven to be one of the cultural pioneers bringing drag voices and aesthetics into the mainstream.

Related | Meet the Stars of Charli XCX's 'Pop 2'

With each passing year, Vittar continues to grow and shine brighter, last year with a string of viral videos, her debut LP Vai Passar Mal, and her feature on Major Lazer's chart-topping "Sua Cara;" and this year with her Up Next documentary for Apple Music.

Vittar discusses her goal to celebrate and highlight Brazil's LGBTQI community in the nine-minute profile: "Brazil is about many colors, many rhythms that are played here every day for the people," she says. The video comes alongside a beautiful acoustic session with Vittar, as well.

Watch the trailer, below, and the full mini-doc on Apple Music.
Patna: An early morning fire in the New Market just outside Patna Junction destroyed a clothing and a shoe warehouse causing loss of several lakh rupees. No one, however, was said to be hurt in the incident.

As reported, people noticed smoke coming out of one of the warehouses on Monday morning. However, they thought that it was coming out of one of the restaurants in the market, and there are several of them in there.

Only when the smoke became dark and start to bellow out of the shops that people became alarmed and rushed to see where it was coming from. Initially they tried to douse the fire themselves but when it started to spread in other shops in the market, someone called the fire station.

Soon four fire tenders arrived at the market but had to struggle to get in the narrow lanes that makes up the market. Somehow, they managed to find their way to the burning warehouses  one storing cheap, plastic shoes while the other storing clothing items - after which it took them nearly an hour and a half to bring the situation under control.

The owners of the two shops Ajay Kumar and Dharmnath Kumar also arrived at the market only to find their business burnt to ashes.

Initial estimate put the loss at about Rs. 12 lakh.

People in the neighborhood said most of the shops in the market are actually used as storage facilities by street vendors doing their business around Patna Junction, R-Block, Frazer Road, Harding Road and other close by areas.
A new mineral, lithium has been discovered in Ghana, the Ghana Minerals Commission has confirmed to Joy News.



The discovery was made in the Volta, Western and Ashanti regions.



Chief Executive of the Minerals Commission Mr. Kwaku Addai Antwi Boasiako told Joy News that the discovery was made during a nationwide exploration by the Minerals Commission.



Mr. Boasiako says the commission is in the process of exploring the commercial value of the mineral ahead of comprehensive exploration activities in the identified areas.



The country can play a leading role in electronic car business if the mineral is discovered in commercial quantity, he says.



Mr. Boasiako also says the commission is set to put up 14 new satellite stations to monitor the discovery sites and deter illegal miners from encroaching on them.



if we [authorities] dont block it and give it the prominence it deserves, then we are going to lose it because this is the first time of hearing that the Volta Region is as good as any other region in terms of minerals, he said.



He also says the commission is keen on publishing the mineral map of the country so individual consigners can apply to take charge of them.



Mr. Boasiako says the commission hopes to change the notion of corruption at the minerals commission by making the application process by internet thereby depersonalizing the process.



Both lithium metal and its compounds have many uses. Lithium stearate is mixed with oils to make all-purpose and high-temperature lubricants.



Lithium hydroxide is used to absorb carbon dioxide in space vehicles



Lithium is alloyed with aluminum, copper, manganese, and cadmium to make high-performance alloys for aircraft.



Bahnmetall consists of lead-containing 0.04% lithium, 0.7% calcium and 0.6% sodium is harder than pure lead and was used for railroad car bearings in Germany.



Compounds such as LiAlH4 and organolithium reagents (LiMe, LiPh, etc.) are very important as reagents in organic chemistry



Lithium metal has the highest specific heat of any solid element and its sometimes used as battery anode material (high electrochemical potential). Lithium compounds are used in dry cells and storage batteries.



Lithium is used in the manufacture of special high strength glasses and ceramics sometimes, lithium-based compounds such as lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) are used as drugs to treat manic-depressive disorders.

Source: Joy News









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The Minister of State in charge of Public Procurement, Hon. Sarah Adwoa Safo, has told world leaders to do their best to let their respective countries affirm womens right to property to ensure their economic autonomy.



Effective access to ownership of property contributes to economic autonomy for women which in turn enhances the bargaining power of women in households and socio-political spaces. If womens voice in and access to decision making must change, then our respective countries must affirm womens rights to property, she noted.



Hon. Adwoa Safo who is also the deputy Majority Leader of Ghanas Parliament made this observation when addressing a forum of world leaders on Property Rights, especially, the predicaments of women to access to property in Iceland.



Commenting further on the issue, she said recognition and the application of property rights which gives exclusive rights to any individual to acquire and to determine to use property has been undermined and tilted towards the most powerful in society.



According to her, it is sad to note that women own only an estimated 1-2 percent of all titled land worldwide, which in addition to other real properties represents about 75 percent of a nations overall wealth.



In rural Ghana for instance, she said despite womens enormous contribution towards the agricultural sector, producing about 50% to 70% of the food crop within the sector, they earn less than 10% of its incomes and have very limited access to land.



Admittedly, predicaments of women access to property continue to persist because just as with distribution of all resources, rules, norms, and customs for allocation are developed through various institutions in society  families, communities, states, the legal system, and economic markets which are discriminatory. For example, womens inability to directly inherit land in both patrilineal and matrilineal systems excludes women from the economic benefits of ownership and secure tenure, she underscored.



She added Although these statutory laws exist, property ownership and inheritance are regulated in practice by customary laws. The customary laws have greater influence than statutory laws. Some of these customary laws effectively deprive women of property rights, particularly land and housing rights both in their natal and marital clans. Customary laws, commonly based on traditionally conceived gender distinctions, give men greater rights than women over property.



For every 10 units of land in Ghana, nearly 8 units is controlled by traditional leaders and family heads. The remaining two units is controlled by the state, although there is a negligible proportion of the land which are controlled by individuals who have acquired them through the customary freehold. Thus for any individual in Ghana and indeed for rural women who want to acquire land for any purpose, the significance of traditional rulers and family heads cannot be overlooked. Whilst the fraternity of traditional leaders and family heads is male dominated and potentially biased against the interests of women, the threat is generally pronounced in patrilineal societies in Ghana.

According to her, although attempts are being made to address the challenges inherent in Ghanas patrilineal system, the situation continue to persist because of cultural norms and values, as the practices are handed down from one generation to the other by oral history.



These underlying challenges, Hon. Safo noted, requires reforms, especially, in the countrys land registrations and tilting, removing constraints facing women access to economic opportunities, and public education on the importance of granting unfettered property rights to women.



The process of creating a new or reformed land titling system is a massive undertaking. The land title registration aims at providing certainty to land titles, and to render dealings in land safe, simple, cheap, devoid of fraud and require minimum litigation. This serves to provide tenure security to various types of landholders. Despite the huge investments, land titling and registration programme usually have relegated gender issues and in many early cases have focused on individualization of rights such as registering ownership only in the name of the head of the family to the exclusion of women who previously had access at least through customary use rights, she revealed.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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The Cabinet has given a directive to the Ministry of Health (MoH) to take oversight responsibility for the administration of the University of Ghana Medical Centre (UGMC).



The Public Relations Officer of the MoH, Mr Robert Cudjoe, explained that the directive had become necessary because it appeared the hospital was going to be run by the university as a private entity, a situation which would disadvantage the public.



The government has given directives for the running of the hospital to come under the Ministry of Health. The Interim Management of the UGMC initially made it to look like the hospital was going to be run by the university. But, just like other health facilities which are under the ministrys purview, the UGMC is not different and should be run as a public health facility, he stated.



We want to beef up security



Last Saturday, operatives of the National Security were said to have gone to the UGMC to take over the facility.



But Mr Cudjoe denied the reports of a take-over of the facility, explaining that the National Security was at the site on the ministrys orders to assess the security situation and make recommendations on how to beef up security at the centre, which is currently being guarded by the security of the university.



He further explained that the contractors on the facility had notified the ministry that they would leave the site soon, since they had finished their work, hence the need to beef up security to protect the facility.



Although the facility was being guarded by the university security, he said, there had been cases of pilfering there.



Therefore, he said, it had become necessary for the ministry to engage the National Security to assess the situation and make recommendations appropriately.



The security personnel will complement the work of the university security to ensure that the facility is kept safe until it is officially opened for use by the public, he explained.



We are not taking over



Mr Cudjoe refuted claims of a takeover of the UGMC by the ministry, saying that the ministry only wants to streamline the activities of the facility in the interest of the public.



When asked about the appointment of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for the UGMC, he said it was supposed to be done in consultation with the Cabinet, just the way CEOs of other big hospitals were appointed.



Now that the way has been cleared, few things need to be done, after which the hospital will start operations, he added.



UG comment

However, in an interview, the acting CEO of the UGMC, Professor Aaron Lawson, said the management was under the University Council and was, therefore, not an interim board.



Although he declined to comment on the governments directive, he said management had been given the clearance to recruit staff for the UGMC, saying the positions had been advertised and applicants shortlisted were currently being interviewed.



Background



More than a year after the UGMC had been inaugurated, the multi-million-dollar facility is yet to become operational.



The first phase of the centre was expected to be fully operational by July last year.



There were speculations that there was a tussle between the ministry and the university authorities as to who should be responsible for the management of the centre, but the ministry refuted the claims, saying that it was carrying out due diligence on the facility and how it would be managed.



First phase



Phase one of the project comprises eight separate buildings which house different specialised centres, such as emergency, imaging, operating theatres and laboratories.



The project was funded with a loan facility from Israel, with counterpart funding from Ghana. It was executed by Messrs Engineering and Development Consultants Limited, with medical consultation provided by the Sheba Medical Centre.



The super-tertiary or quarternary facility, which is an extension of tertiary care in reference to advanced levels of medicine, will also provide training and research.



The project is expected to have a phase two to add 350 beds to the facility.



The second phase will provide specialist facilities, including a heart centre, a cancer treatment centre, a rehabilitation centre and a hotel for families of patients.

Source: Daily Graphic









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The management of the Kaneshie Polyclinic has called on the government to complete a multi-purpose building for the hospital, which has been abandoned for 14 years.



The Medical Director of the polyclinic, Dr Patrick Amo-Mensah, who made the appeal on behalf of the management, told the Daily Graphic that the urgent completion of the building would ease congestion at the overstretched facility.



The building project was initiated in 2004 but stalled midway for lack of funds.



Dr Amo-Mensah said reminders to various quarters for the completion of the facility had not yielded any fruitful results.



We have made every available effort over the years but no action has been taken to complete the facility, he stated.



He added that the polyclinic needed more structures to meet the increasing demand for quality health services by the people.



Abandoned building



The uncompleted structure has space for theatres, a dental unit, recovery wards, consulting rooms, and eye and ear clinics. It has, however, gathered dirt and garbage, with moss covering its floors, paving the way for rodents, insects and reptiles to take over.



The Swedish government constructed the Kaneshie Polyclinic in 1966 and is Ghanas oldest polyclinic. The facility has not seen any expansion since and has, therefore, become too congested to cater for the needs of residents in its catchment area.



The 35-bed 24-hour polyclinic receives more than 500 patients a day, excluding pregnant women who go there for antenatal services alone.



It provides medical services for people from highly densely populated places such as Kaneshie, Bubiashie, Awudome, Darkuman, Fadama, Akweteyman, Alhaji, Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Darkuman, Abeka, Lapaz, Avenor and Achimota.



It is the only government facility serving a population of 373,239 people in the Okaikoi Sub-Metro area. Due to lack of space, not many patients can be admitted, so others have to seek medical attention elsewhere.



In the records room of the polyclinic, for instance, the shelves are full due to inadequate space for patients folders. It has, thus, made the retrieving of patients folders laborious.



Other polyclinics



Amazingly, polyclinics such as the Mamobi Polyclinic and the La Polyclinic, which came after the establishment of the Kaneshie Polyclinic, have been upgraded to hospital status.



Facilities at the polyclinic are overstretched when there are outbreak of diseases such as cholera. In such events, makeshift facilities are mounted to cater for patients.



Moreover, Dr Amo-Mensah said, the lack of theatres had resulted in the constant referral of patients, especially pregnant woman, who had to be attended to urgently.



He stated that although management had tried expanding the wards, with the construction of a VIP ward, that was still not enough as a result of the number of people who needed services.



The comfort of patients is a problem. I believe when the building is completed and the theatres are operational, pressure on nearby facilities such as Korle Bu and the Greater Accra Regional hospital, where patients are referred, will reduce, he explained.

Source: Graphic.com









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Ripples of United States President Donald Trumps derogatory comments about Africans and Haitians continue in diplomatic circles despite his denial late last week.



The African Union (A.U.) envoys in Washington issued a strongly worded statement demanding a retraction and apology whiles a number of African governments have also condemned and sought clarification from U.S. envoys in their countries.



The African Union Commission chair Moussa Faki Mahamat also expressed dismay last week. Mahamat on Monday met with the U.S. ambassador to the A.U.



Ambassador MaryBeth Leonard assured the A.U. chief that Washington deeply respected Africans and valued the shared relationships and partnerships between the two parties.



I received US Amb MaryBeth Leonard and took the opportunity to reiterate the African Unions outrage at the comments attributed to Donald Trump. For a mutually beneficial partnership to flourish, we have to relate on a respectful and dignified basis, Mahamat said in a tweet accompanied by photos of their meeting.



Trump is quoted to have said: Why do we want all these people from Africa here? Theyre shithole countries  We should have more people from Norway.



He made the comments whiles meeting a bipartisan group of Senators at the White House on Thursday. He has tweeted today denying the use of the word.

Source: Africanews.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Odorkor Police yesterday put their own lives and that of Ghanaians close to the police station in danger as a result of how they handled the arrest of three persons with seven hand-held grenades.



Photos of the arrest show the dangerous weapons placed on a table in the police station.



Sources at the police headquarters have confirmed that grenades are real and can explode.



In the photos, two of the suspects had only one of the hands cuffed while their other hands were free.



If any of the suspects had pulled the pin out of one or more of the grenades with their other hands not in cuffs, all persons in the room, as well as people near the police station, would have been victims of an explosion.



This reckless display of unprofessionalism on the part of the Odorkor Police exposes the weaknesses in the security apparatus of the country.



In addition, the suspects have been accused of belonging to some terrorist groups.



Therefore, the recklessness of the Odorkor Police in making the news public without conducting thorough investigations means that accomplices of the suspects would run away from arrest.



The arrest was carried out after a Police tip-off.



The first to be arrested was a 30-year-old man whose name was given as Abdul Karim.



He was found armed with seven grenades.



The suspect, after interrogation, led the police to two others, Ishmael Ali Musah and Osman Alhasan, at Nyamekye around Lapaz, a busy district in Accra.



A statement issued by Assistant Commissioner of Police (ASP) David Eklu, Director General of Police Public Affairs, said the police are investigating the matter in collaboration with the relevant agencies, and therefore assured the public to remain calm. Police are continuously working to ensure public safety.



One of the arrested persons is suspected to be a land guard and a robber while the other two are believed to be the suppliers of the explosives and other arms.



Police have intercepted some objects believed to be explosives of varied species at Odorkor in Accra.



The explosives were intercepted based on police intelligence.



Three persons (names withheld) have also been arrested in connection with the intercepted explosives and are in police custody.



Police [sic] is investigating the matter in co-ordination with the relevant agencies and, therefore, assures the public to remain calm. Police is continuously working to ensure public safety.



Anybody with information related to the case under investigation is urged to promptly call 191 (on all networks) or 18555 (on Vodafone and MTN), the statement said.

Source: The Finder









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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Dr Kwabena Sarfo-Kantanka, a political analyst, has described President Akufo-Addos appointment of Mr Martin Amidu as the Special Prosecutor as apt and sincere.



He said the aura surrounding his persona, public utterances and resolve to expose acts of corruption would scare people to engage in the act.

Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Dr Sarfo-Kantanka, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Coast (UCC), said Mr Amidu has the "requisite integrity, competence, courage and independence of character to discharge effectively the responsibilities of his new office.



He said his stature, character, boldness and competence added to his credentials made him the best person to occupy the office of the Special prosecutor".



Dr Sarfo-Kantanka said Mr Amidus appointment sent the signal that at least the nation was on the right track to bringing the cancerous act of corruption to the barest minimum.



He, however urged Mr Amidu not to give up in his fight against corruption but continue in the same spirit in fighting and exposing corrupt acts to save the nation from the hands of corrupt duty bearers.



Dr Sarfo-Kantanka commended the President for his bold decision to appoint a known member of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to fill such a position.



He said Mr Amidus nomination is however subject to Parliamentary approval and the President is to forward same to the Legislature when the House reconvenes on January 23, 2018.



Mr Amidu, an astute politician and anti-corruption campaigner, was the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice from January 2011 to January 2012.



He is noted for his relentless campaign against the abuse of public funds, evident in the role he played in the State Versus Woyome in the Waterville financial saga.

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 Northern Development Authority will in the coming weeks advertise in the national dailies for would-be applicants to bid for projects under the New Patriotic Party (NPP) campaign flagship programme - the One Village, One Dam.



The Vice President of the Republic, Dr. Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, who announced this at the 69th Annual New Year School and Conference in Accra today, January 15, 2018 assured of transparency in the bidding process and called on all qualified companies to put in their bid for a successful project.



This Years New Year School and Conference is on the theme: Job Creation for Accelerated National Development: The Role of the Private Sector.



Acknowledging the importance of the theme, the Vice President noted that, the high unemployment is the key and most pressing issue of our time and the government is putting in measures to deal with it.



According to him, unemployment is a national security issue, assuring the government will not look on for it to escalate into a time bomb.



This is why the President has placed job creation as the number one priority of government. It goes without saying, however, that the governments role is to put in place the enabling environment for the private sector to drive job creation, Vice President Bawumia stated.



Dr Bawumia said the country needs to do things differently, since the same things cannot help us achieve the needed results.



After 60 years of independence, it is clear that we have to do things differently because you cannot do the same things and expect different results. Countries such as China, South Korea, Malaysia, UAE, etc. have shown that transformation can be achieved in one generation and therefore it is possible for Ghana to do same, he said.



The New Year School is under the aegis of the School of Continuing and Distance Education under the College of Education. The 69th Annual New Year School and Conference is under the theme: Job Creation for Accelerated National Development: The Role of the Private Sector from Monday, 15th January 2018 to Friday 19th January 2018.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The President of the Millennium Excellence Foundation (MEF), Mr Ashim Morton, on Monday took his turn at the Parliamentary Special Committee hearing and categorically debunked allegations that expatriate businesses paid money in order to gain access to the President at the Ghana Expatriate Business Awards (GEBA) held in Accra on December 4, 2017.



He said per the sponsorship benefit package of the event designed solely by the foundation, persons who paid $100,000 would sit on the Presidential Gold Table, as well as have an exclusive dinner with the President of the MEF after the event.



Assuming that we had 10 to 15 companies paying $100,000, I would never have expected to think that the Head of State would have dinner with 10 or 15 people. Certainly it was for the president of the foundation to show gratitude to expatriate businesses for their support to this initiative, he stated.



Grilled seven hours



Mr Morton was testifying before the committee investigating the cash-for-seats saga on Monday.



He was accompanied by the Chairman of the MEF, Ambassador Victor Gbeho, and his counsel, Mr Charles W. Zwennes.



Mr Morton and Mr Gbeho were grilled for close to seven hours by the five-member committee, who interrogated them on the nature of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) the foundation signed with the Ministry of Trade and Industry, the collaboration, the sponsorship package, the account into which the proceeds of the event were lodged, their expertise in organising such event, among others.



Payment of sponsorships



Using a chart to illustrate the seating arrangement at the GEBA event, Mr Morton said there were a number of companies that sponsored the event with various sums of money, including $15,000, $25,000 and $50,000, with one paying $75,000.



He said there were some companies and chief executives of other expatriate businesses that also paid nothing, while a number of the award recipients who also sat on the presidential table did not pay anything to receive awards.



He explained that on the Gold Table were 20 seats, with 11 expatriates businessmen who did not pay the alleged $100,000 to sit at the table, except the Chairman of Interplast Ghana Limited, who paid $100,000 after the event.



He named the expatriate businessmen and women as the Chairman of the Mohanni Group, the Chief Executive of Japan Motors, the Chief Executive of Tigo-Airtel Ghana, the Executive Chairman of Zenith Bank Group, the Chief Executive of Melcom Ghana, the Chief Executive of Geo Grill Ghana and the Chief Executive of B+5 Ghana.



He identified the nine non-expatriates who sat on the presidential table as President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo; the Minister of Trade and Industry, Mr Alan Kyerematen; his deputy, Mr Carlos Ahenkorah; the Greater Accra Regional Minister, Mr Ishmael Ashittey; the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre, Mr Yofi Grant, former President Jerry John Rawlings and his wife Nana Konadu.



According to him, out of the 23 expatriate businesses that received awards, 13 did not provide sponsorship and yet received awards, which illustrated the fact that people did not pay to receive awards.



Out of the 11 businessmen who had complementary seats on the Gold Table, five sponsored the programme before the awards, with two giving only extraction contributions after the awards, he said.



Expertise



Mr Morton recounted how the foundation began organising awards from 1999/2000, held similar events in 2005, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016 and 2017 in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, with various Presidents of Ghana, including Flt Lt Rawlings, Mr John Agyekum Kufuor, the late Professor John Evans Atta Mills and Mr John Dramani Mahama, attending, sitting on the presidential high table and being honoured.



Besides, he said, the event had also bestowed honours on a number of African Heads of States, including Mr Robert Mugabe, Col Muamar Qaddafi of Libya, Mr Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria, as well as renowned African businessmen.



Sponsorship package



Answering questions on how funds were raised for the event, Mr Morton said per the MoU with the Ministry of Trade and Industry, it was the foundations exclusive responsibility to raise funds for the initiative.



As a result, he said, it went ahead to design the benefit sponsorship package, met with potential sponsors and convinced them to understand the purpose of the initiative and its package categories from which they could choose.



Denial



Asked if he, as the President of the MEF, was familiar with the benefit package document titled: Ghana Expatriate Event and signed by Mr Ahenkorah that was sent to the expatriate businesses, he denied knowledge of it, saying the document had been doctored.



While acknowledging the fact that he was privy to the content of the document that contained first cover sheet, a second cover sheet that had Mr Ahenkorahs signature and a third sheet attached containing sponsorship criteria, he blatantly denied ever administering to potential sponsors such document which the foundation sent out in a sealed envelope.



Event account



The President of MEF told the committee that the idea to have an account at the Ministry of Trade and Industry for the event was initiated by the ministry to ensure accountability, transparency and the integrity of the entire process of fundraising by the foundation.



Touching on how much the foundation spent towards the event, he said it expended GH40,000 but received in total GH2,367,426.06 from the ministry.



No one was coaxed



For his part, Mr Gbeho said in organising the event, the foundation did not coax or levy any expatriate business to come up with sums of money to enable the chief executives to sit next to the Head of State.



He said the foundation rather found voluntary sponsors to support the first-class event and did not engage in any cash for seats, nor did it indicate that any expatriate business would be excluded if it did not sponsor.



I wish to confirm that the foundation did not participate or encourage any strategy to steal money from any businessman or the government.



On other hand, the foundation appreciated the scheme that we developed with the Ministry of Trade and Industry, including the procedure to open an account with the ministry for purposes of accountability and setting up a large committee to ensure the participation of as many stakeholders as possible, he said.

Source: Graphic.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 plagued Brong Ahafo Regional Youth Organizer of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) Kwame Baffoe, popularly known as Abronye DC has been asked by the General Secretary of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) Asiedu Nketia to take lessons from his severe beatings.



According to him, Abronye DC should learn not to take the law into his hands with the excuse of citizen arrest law, as such attitude of his has encouraged others in his party to take the law into their hands to beat him up.



Speaking on Okay FMs 'Ade Akye Abia' Morning Show, Johnson Asiedu Nketia blamed NPPs Acting Chairman Freddie Blay for Abronye DC's recent behaviour of taking the law into his hands to seize cars purportedly belonging to the state instead of reporting to the state assigned authority to do its work.



If you remember after the 2016 election, Abronye DC came from Brong Ahafo to Accra to seize cars. Some of us advised him to stop because we knew that after he has been used for their purpose, they would dump him, he recalled.



But people like Freddie Blay encouraged Abronye to go on with the law of citizen arrest, where a citizen can effect arrest if they think something is going wrong; they can take the law into their hands to take any action, he alleged.



He added that since Abronye DC is not the only citizen who can take the law into his hands, his party members in Brong Ahafo have also taken the law into their hands to beat him up for insulting the Brong Ahafo Regional Chief Imam and the Regional Minister . . . 



He stressed that Abronye DC is being suffered by his own law as he decided to seize cars with his macho men without reporting to the authorities to carry out that assignment.



He however described the act meted out to Abronye DC as nasty which should not be encouraged, adding that as adversary comes with a lesson, Abronye should learn from it and not take the law into his hands again.



 . . I believe this will serve as a lesson to Abronye DC not to take the law into his hands and accept that there are laws in this country as well as authorities responsible for these laws, he cautioned.



The NDC Chief Scribe therefore condemned the NPP Deputy General Secretary, Nana Obiri Boahen for trying to decriminalize the act meted out against Abronye DC with the notion that it is a party matter.



It is wrong for Obiri Boahen to say that what has happened to Abronye is a party issue and has nothing to do with the law. He should not encourage that in the party; this is a criminal act and has nothing to do with the party, he chided.

Source: Daniel Adu Darko/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected]









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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NDC Deputy Communications Director, Fred Agbenyo has called on President Nana Akufo-Addo to sanction the Executive Director of the Economic and Organized Crime Office (EOCO), ACP Mr. K.K. Amoah (rtd).



Fred Agbenyo, speaking to sit-in host Nana Yaw Kesseh on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo', wondered why the EOCO Boss is still at post after deploying armed Police personnel to storm the office of EC Deputy Commissioner Georgina Opoku Amankwah.



The EOCO on Monday afternoon, January 15, 2018 barged into Mrs. Opoku Amankwah's office demanding her exit with immediate effect.



Mrs. Opoku Amankwah refused to be driven out from her office despite the presence of the EOCO Boss with joint action from about five armed Police officers at her office.



She couldn't fathom why she alone was being forced out when all the Commissioners under investigation have been coming to work.



She disclosed she's been in the house for several months and written to the EOCO several times demanding feedback but to no avail, thereby triggering her decision to also come to settle in her office.



Fred Agbenyo lambasted the EOCO Boss asking why he would take armed Police officers to hassle the EC Deputy Commissioner.



According to him, the EOCO has no authority to sack the EC Deputy Commissioner and so, their action yesterday was very appalling and condemnable.



What investigation were they doing? Is it a murder case that were searching for where the persons blood is? What investigation at all was the EOCO doing for you to go her office with about five armed Police personnel? Is the woman an armed robber? Is she a hardened armed robber wielding guns for to go to her office with armed Policemen? he questioned.



To him, "it's complete disgrace on the EOCO Boss. In any civilized society, he would have been sacked by now. Its not right. This rambo style attitude, people must stop it.



Also touching on the issue, the aspiring National Chairman for the Progressive People's Party (PPP) Nana Ofori Owusu commended the EC Deputy Commissioner for her bravery to have not succumbed to the pressure from the EOCO.



He reinforced his conviction that all the EC Commissioners should be laid off to ensure peace and harmony at the Electoral Commission.

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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Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Chief Bobby Cameron speaks at the opening of the Assembly of First Nations annual general meeting in Regina, Sask., Tuesday July 25, 2017. A small northern Saskatchewan First Nation is once again in mourning after two teenagers committed suicide in recent weeks. Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations says the community has been through a difficult time emotionally and spiritually. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Taylor
Wine and sparkling wine are shown on display at a B.C. liquor store in Vancouver, Friday, Dec. 19, 2008. Australia has filed a complaint about Canada's rules around wine sales with the World Trade Organization. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward
Deron Bilous is sworn in as the Alberta Minister of Municipal Affairs, Service Alberta in Edmonton on Sunday, May 24, 2015. Alberta and Saskatchewan have a date for their joint meeting to resolve a licence plate dispute. Alberta Economic Development Minister Deron Bilous says Saskatchewan has agreed to January 31, but wants to move the location from Lloydminster to Medicine Hat.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson
A memorial at a school in north Toronto is shown on Tuesday, January 16, 2018. Grief counsellors were at a north Toronto school Tuesday to help students and staff cope with the news that a five-year-old girl had died after being pinned between two SUVs. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov
FILE - In this July 13, 2017 file photo, Oscar Perez speaks to the press at a night vigil to honor the more than 90 people killed during three months of anti-government protests, in Caracas, Venezuela. Venezuelan officials say on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018 theyAove exchanged fire during an attempt to capture the fugitive police officer who led a high-profile attack in Caracas last year from a stolen helicopter. (AP Photo/Miguel Rodriguez, File)
In this image released by Taronga Zoo Conservation Society, Dr. Larry Vogelnest, senior veterinarian at Taronga Zoo, checks a wallaby is checked at Taronga Wildlife Hospital in Sydney Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. The wallaby disrupted downtown traffic by bounding across the Sydney Harbor Bridge on Tuesday with police in pursuit. The adult male was captured without any apparent serious injury and is expected to be released back into the wild within days. (Taronga Zoo Conservation Society via AP)
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is pictured in Edmonton on Monday, December 18, 2017. The new legislature calendar is out for 2018, and Alberta politicians will be back in the house for the spring sitting on March 8th. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson
By Yuka Obayashi and Josephine Mason

TOKYO/BEIJING

Petroleumworld 01 16 2018

Black smoke was billowing from the East China Sea site where a burning Iranian oil tanker sank, Japanese authorities said on Monday, as worries grow about damage to the marine ecosystem from the worst oil ship disaster in decades.

The blazing vessel, which was carrying 136,000 tonnes - almost one million barrels - of condensate, an ultra-light, highly flammable crude oil, sank on Sunday evening after several explosions weakened the hull.

The tanker Sanchi (IMO:9356608) had been adrift and ablaze after crashing into the freighter CF Crystal (IMO:9497050) on Jan. 6. Strong winds had pushed it away from the Chinese coast, where the incident happened, and into Japan's exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

China's State Oceanic Administration said on Sunday that because the explosions had ruptured the hull of the ship, a large amount of oil in surrounding waters was on fire.

The sinking marks the biggest tanker spill since 1991, when 260,000 tonnes of oil leaked off the Angolan coast.

Japan's coast guard has sent two patrol boats and an airplane to the area to search for missing crew members and assess the latest situation, a spokesman for the Japan Coast Guard said on Monday over the phone.

The Japanese authorities lost track of the tanker as of 0840 GMT on Sunday, the spokesman said. The ship's last confirmed location was about 315 km (195 miles) west of Sokkozaki on the island of Amami Oshima.

Amami Oshima is one of the northern islands in the Ryukyu island chain that includes Okinawa.

A Chinese salvage team on Saturday recovered two bodies from the tanker, China's state news agency Xinhua reported. Another body, presumed to be one of the Sanchi's sailors, was found on Jan. 8 and brought to Shanghai for identification.

The salvage team recovered the Sanchi's voyage data recorder, or black box from the bridge of the tanker, Xinhua also said on Saturday. But the team was forced to leave the ship after just half an hour because the wind shifted and thick toxic smoke had complicated the operation.

Iranian officials said on Sunday the remaining 29 crew members and passengers of the tanker were presumed dead. The crew consisted of 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis.

SINKING VS BURNING

Experts worry the ship's sinking is potentially more damaging to the marine ecosystem than letting the condensate oil burn off. The sinking will likely expel the remaining condensate and the tanker's bunker fuel, or the heavy fuel oil that powers a ship's engines, contaminating the surrounding waters.

Bunker fuel is the dirtiest kind of oil, extremely toxic when spilled, though less explosive. Condensate is poisonous to marine organisms.

A harmful plume of condensate would likely be in the water, out of sight of observers on the surface, said Rick Steiner, a U.S. marine scientist based in Anchorage, Alaska, who has experience of oil spills.

As with all major oil spills, time is of the essence. This is particularly so with condensate spills, as the substance is so toxic and volatile, Steiner said in an emailed statement.

The East China Sea is known for its rich, although already polluted, marine ecosystem, with whales, porpoises, seabirds and fish, he said.

Fuel oil is relatively easy to contain because volumes are lower and its viscosity means it's easier to extract from water, but even small volumes can harm marine life.

A Suezmax tanker can hold a maximum of 5,000 tonnes of bunker fuel. The Sanchi may have been carrying about 1,000 tonnes by the time it hit the grain freighter CF Crystal, according to bunker fuel traders' estimates.






More charges filed against Shell Singapore refinery oil theft suspects

By Fathin Ungku

SINGAPORE

Petroleumworld 01 16 2018

A Singapore court on Monday filed additional charges against nine men accused in a large-scale oil theft at Shell's biggest refinery, the latest development in an extensive investigation in the city-state.

The nine Singaporean men, eight of whom were employees of the Singapore subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, faced initial charges in court last week alongside two Vietnamese nationals, who are due at court on Tuesday.

At least one additional charge was brought against each of the Singaporean men on Monday, court documents showed.

The charges on Monday relate to incidents on Nov. 11, Nov. 14 and Dec. 31, in which the authorities say gasoil totalling 2,222 metric tonnes worth S$1,222,815 was stolen.

Charges against three other men on Saturday accused people at Sentek Marine & Trading Ptem, one of Singapore's biggest marine fuel suppliers, of participating in the oil theft scheme, which involves incidents going back months.

The three men charged on Saturday were not part of an initial 11 charged early last week, according to court documents, bringing the total number of people charged in the case to 14.

Seventeen people were initially arrested in the case. The fate of the six who were not charged at that time is unclear.

The Singapore subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell Plc first contacted the authorities in August 2017 about theft at its Pulau Bukom industrial site, just south of the country's main island.

Police have seized millions of dollars in cash and a small tanker in the sting operation involving simultaneous raids across Singapore, one of the world's most important oil trading centres and a major refinery hub.

Experts say illicit oil trading is widespread in Southeast Asia, where stolen fuel is sold across the region, often offloaded directly into trucks or tanks at small harbours away from oil terminals.

This is the second high-profile case of wrongdoing at companies in Singapore to hit headlines in recent weeks. In December, Keppel Corporation Ltd's KPLM.SI rig-building business agreed to pay more than $422 million to resolve charges it had bribed Brazilian officials.






Shell again into solar, investment in Silicon Ranch Corp. to reach up to $217 mln

By Ron Bousso

LONDON

Petroleumworld 01 16 2018

Royal Dutch Shell agreed on Monday to acquire a stake in a U.S. solar company, 12 years after exiting the sector, in the latest in a series of deals to grow beyond its core oil and gas business.

The Anglo-Dutch company also gave the green light for its first major new project in the North Sea in six years, signalling a cautious return to spending following three years of belt tightening in the face of lower oil prices.

Shell agreed to buy a 43.86 percent stake in Silicon Ranch Corporation from funds linked to Partners Group for up to $217 million. It follows on the heels of British rival BP, which last month also re-entered the solar sector with the $200 million investment in Lightsource.

Nashville, Tennessee-based Silicon Ranch develops, owns and operates solar plants across the United States with a capacity of 880 megawatts. Shell also has an option to increase its ownership after 2021.

With this entry into the fast-growing solar sector, Shell is able to leverage its expertise as one of the top three wholesale power sellers in the U.S., while expanding its global New Energies footprint, Marc van Gerven, Shell vice president of solar, said in a statement.

In November, Shell doubled its planned investment in its new energies division, which focuses on renewables and low carbon technologies, to $1 billion-$2 billion until 2020.

The investment in renewables far exceeds those of other major oil companies but still represents a fraction of Shell's overall capital expenditure of around $25 billion.

Oil companies have come under growing pressure from investors to adapt to the transition to lower carbon energy as governments seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century.

The deal follows a number of recent investments by Shell in the rapidly growing electric vehicle sector, including the acquisition in October of Dutch-based NewMotion.

Last month, Shell agreed to buy British household energy and broadband provider First Utility, targeting a market for its gas supplies which it expects will play a growing role in the transition to low carbon energy sources.

Shell first entered the solar sector when it acquired Siemens Solar in 2002, only to sell the entire business six years later. It still retains a tiny stake in Showa Shell's solar business after selling most of the business in 2016.






Shell into first UK North Sea project in six years

By Ron Bousso

LONDON

Petroleumworld 01 16 2018

Royal Dutch Shell gave the green light on Monday for an expansion of the Penguins oil and gas field in the UK North Sea, its first major new project in the ageing basin in six years.

Shell said the development, which includes the construction of a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel, reaffirmed the Anglo-Dutch company's commitment to the region after it sold around half of its assets there last year.

Penguins demonstrates the importance of Shell's North Sea assets to the company's upstream portfolio, said Andy Brown, director of Shell's oil and gas production, known as upstream.

The FPSO is expected to produce up to 45,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d).

Shell shares were 0.3 percent lower at 1145 GMT.

The Shell-operated Penguins redevelopment is the first major project Shell has announced since 2012, when it made a final investment decision for the Fram field in the central North Sea.

The project will generate a profit even with oil prices below $40 a barrel, Shell said in a statement, making it competitive against other offshore basins and most of North America's shale production.

We struggled to make it economic until the last couple of years when we closely worked with supply to redefine and redesign the development to reduce costs, Steve Phimister, head of Shell Upstream in the UK and Ireland, told Reuters.

After Penguins, Shell is expected to decide on a number of new projects in the central North Sea in the next year or two, Phimister said.

Shell gave no details on the cost of the project, which analysts at Bernstein last September estimated would be up to $2.5 billion.

Production in the UK North Sea has steadily declined since the late 1990s but has seen a modest recovery in recent years thanks to a number of new projects, including the BP-operated Quad 204 field in the western Shetlands last year, in which Shell holds a 55 percent stake.

Operators have drastically reduced operating costs as a sharp drop in oil prices since 2014 forced companies to become more efficient and service providers to slash costs.

Shell's production is currently around 135,000 boe/d in the UK North Sea after completing the sale of a $3 billion package of assets to private-equity-backed Chrysaor last November, Phimister said.

The company intends to maintain its production at this level into 2030, he added.

The Penguins field was discovered in 1974 and first developed in 2002. It is a 50-50 joint venture with Exxon Mobil .






S. Arabia aims to prequalify firms by April or May for first nuclear plant

By Reuters

ABU DHABI

Petroleumworld 01 16 2018

Saudi Arabia plans to prequalify for bidding firms from two or three countries by April or May for the first nuclear reactors it wants to build, a consultant for the government body working on the nuclear plans said on Monday.

Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, wants nuclear power to diversify its energy supply mix, enabling it to export more crude rather than burning it to generate electricity.

It plans to build 17.6 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear capacity by 2032, the equivalent of around 16 reactors, making it one of the biggest prospects for an industry struggling after the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan.

Currently we are in the evaluation process for RFI (request for information) and we will hold discussions with them (suppliers) next month, Abdul Malik al-Sabery, a consultant at the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy told reporters in Abu Dhabi.

Sabery said a joint venture between the Saudi government and the winning developers would be signed in 2019 after the shortlisting by end of 2018. Commissioning of the first plant, which will have two reactors with a total a capacity between 2 and 3.2 GW, is expected in 2027.

Saudi Arabia's energy minister, Khalid al-Falih, said last month that he expected to sign contracts to build two nuclear reactors by the end of 2018.

Saudi Arabia has sent a request for information to international suppliers to build two reactors, the first step towards a formal tendering competition.

Sabery said Riyadh was currently evaluating requirements from five countries; China, Russia, South Korea, France and the United States.

Russian and South Korean companies have said they plan to bid and sources have told Reuters that Toshiba-owned U.S. company Westinghouse is in talks with U.S. rivals to form a bidding consortium. French state-controlled utility EDF also intends to take part in the tender.

Saudi Arabia is interested in reaching a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Washington, and Riyadh has invited U.S. firms to take part in developing the kingdom's first atomic energy programme.






Venezuela regime, opposition conclude talks without agreement

By Reuters

SANTO DOMINGO

Petroleumworld 01 16 2018

Members of Venezuela's leftist government and opposition leaders concluded a round of talks in the Dominican Republic on Saturday, failing to reach a deal to address the country's political and economic crisis.

Saying they had made strides but needed more time, the parties announced another round of talks to begin in the Dominican Republic on Jan. 18.

The result prolongs the standoff between the government and the opposition, who have tried and failed for years to strike a pact. The two sides last met for talks in December.

Nevertheless, Dominican President Danilo Medina, who led the negotiations, expressed optimism about the progress made during the round.

Although we have made extremely important advances, we still have pending matters that must be discussed, he said at a press conference following the end of the talks.

Representatives from Bolivia, Chile, Mexico and Nicaragua also participated in the discussions.

The parties did not detail where they had made progress.

As millions of Venezuelans grapple with shortages of food and basic goods, the opposition leaders are demanding that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accept humanitarian assistance from abroad, in addition to releasing several hundred jailed political activists.

These days and hours of intense work are not enough to achieve what our people, the Venezuelan people, need to have an avenue, a path of hope, said Julio Borges, former president of the country's opposition-controlled National Assembly, at the press conference.

For its part, the government wants the opposition's help in pushing for the elimination of sanctions levied last year by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration.






In October, the Democratic members of the House Veterans Affairs Committee wrote a letter asking VA secretary David Shulkin why his department is not conducting research into medical marijuana.

In the letter, ranking member Tim Walz (Minn.) and the other nine Democratic committee members note that in many states that have medical marijuana programs, cannabis is recommended for PTSD and/or chronic pain  conditions that afflict many of our wounded warriors. The members do not ask Mr. Shulkin to start dispensing medical marijuana from VA facilities. Instead, they ask the secretary why the department is not conducting rigorous research.

Below are copies of the committee letter and the response from Shulkin. That response is an unfortunate combination of false information, incomplete analysis, and incomprehensible logic. Rather than engaging in an honest, comprehensive discussion of the merits of the VA's position, the secretary appears to wave off committee members' concerns about an issue that affects the lives of millions of soldiers and veterans across the United States.

There are seven major problems with Shulkin's response to the Democratic members of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Those problems range from a mischaracterization of federal law to a faulty analysis of current medical research to a failure to put medical findings in context and more. The shortcomings in the secretary's response should alarm Democrats and Republicans; House members and Senators; soldiers, veterans, and civilians alike.

What the Veterans Affairs Committee wants

It is important to start by discussing what ranking member Walz and his colleagues request of the secretary. They do not say that they want VA to come out in support of medical marijuana or that they want VA to begin dispensing medical marijuana nationwide or in the states that have passed medical marijuana reforms. They are simply asking that VA's research arm  the Office of Research and Development  conduct clinical research on the efficacy of marijuana as a therapy for veterans.

This is not a debate about whether states should legalize marijuana nor does it pit liberal reformers against conservative elements of the Trump administration. The request centers on an empirical question in science: can marijuana be used to treat conditions in soldiers? Americans want our veterans to have the best care possible  and they want to make sure the VA is doing all that it can to provide up-to-date, cutting edge, and effective medicines for patients. With hundreds of thousands of patients across the country reporting benefits from medical marijuana and with veterans self-medicating on a daily basis, VA owes it to veterans to conduct high quality, rigorous research into this substance.

No, Mr. Secretary, the VA is not restricted from conducting medical marijuana research

In Shulkin's response, he claims that "  Federal law restricts VA's ability to conduct research involving medical marijuana " That claim is simply false. Doctors and researchers at the VA or in VA hospitals could conduct research into the medical efficacy of marijuana while remaining completely compliant with federal laws, regulations, and the United States' obligations under international agreements. Doctors and other researchers across the United States conduct research into the health effects, risks, and benefits of marijuana for medical purposes every day. Nothing under federal law treats a VA researcher differently than it does a doctor at Sloan Kettering or a researcher at the University of Michigan.

Yes, there is a protocol that must be followed in order to conduct such research. I have written extensively about how the bureaucracy surrounding the approval process for federally-approved medical marijuana research has a chilling effect on science, is inappropriately arduous, and puts the government between doctors and their patients who want answers. However, that arduous bureaucracy does not stop VA from conducting research.

If the secretary's use of the word "restricts" is given the most generous interpretation, he may mean that the bureaucratic process is burdensome for VA. That would be accurate. However, it would be inappropriate for the VA secretary to claim that a challenging bureaucratic process is a reason to avoid research that may help our wounded warriors get well. What's more, if that bureaucratic process is so onerous that it is preventing VA from conducting important research that should help veterans, it is incumbent upon the secretary to do something about it. Most of the red tape exists because of rules set by HHS and DEA with regard to registration, licensure, evaluation, and the supply of research-grade cannabis. Shulkin should not complain about bureaucracy, but instead work with leadership at HHS, DEA, and DOJ to create a workable process that puts veterans' needs above bureaucratic inertia.

VA analysis of existing research is embarrassingly incomplete

In his letter to Walz, Shulkin notes that his department "commissioned a report from its Evidence-Based Synthesis Program, which conducted a systematic review of research and literature on the 'Benefits and Harms of Cannabis in Chronic Pain or PTSD.'" This program may have conducted a review; systematic it was not. In discussing the findings, Mr. Shulkin notes, "[t]he review found insufficient evidence to demonstrate benefits of cannabis use for patients with PTSD or chronic pain." He also explains the review "identified 10 randomized, controlled trials of cannabis for chronic pain, and two randomized, controlled trials of cannabis for PTSD that are currently underway. For purposes of the review, the literature search included 12 systematic reviews and 48 primary studies."

That review may seem significant, but one need look no further than another government entity for a review of the literature that is actually comprehensive and systematic. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published "The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: The Current State of Evidence and Recommendations for Research," eight months before VA published their assessment. The National Academies report examined "10,759 unique articles, including 1,488 articles initially categorized as systematic reviews  After filtering  6,540 primary literature articles and 288 systematic reviews were left to be reviewed by the committee" (411-12). Granted the National Academies report focused on more conditions than simply chronic pain and PTSD; the disparity in numbers is still staggering.

Moreover, the National Academies report notes in its conclusions that "There is conclusive or substantial evidence that cannabis or cannabinoids are effective for the treatment of chronic pain in adults" (14) and "there is limited evidence that cannabis or cannabinoids are effective for improving symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder" (14). The latter statement on PTSD could square with the findings of the VA report. However, the National Academies' findings with regard to the treatment of chronic pain precisely refute the VA claims, demonstrating the errors that can be made when a non-exhaustive review of important medical literature is passed off as comprehensive.

The flawed logic surrounding cannabis side effects

The VA's limited review of cannabis' side effects notes that epidemiological studies show "significantly increased odds of a suicide; an increased incidence of new-onset mania among populations without a diagnosis of bipolar disorder; and low-strength evidence of an association between cannabis use and development of psychotic symptoms."

The National Academies report would suggest different findings such as "moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and increased incidence of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts with a higher incidence among heavy users" and "moderate evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and increased mania and hypomania in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorders" (20). However, it is critical to put this information in context  which Shulkin's letter inappropriately fails to do. First, the findings to which the VA report points are statistical associations and not causal relationships. What does that mean? On the point of suicidal ideation or suicide attempts, we do not know if people attempt suicide because of the use of marijuana or if people who are suicidal are more likely to use marijuana in an effort to self-medicate or other possible causal relationships. Correlation does not equal causation. The secretary knows that, and as a science professional, he should have been far more forthcoming about that reality than he was in the letter.

Additionally, much of the research VA relies on is observational research. That is, it is research focused on observing individuals consuming marijuana on their own terms, at their own rate, and in the amounts that they choose. Such studies are not based on marijuana use in a controlled, clinical setting. Finally, statistical associations between the use of a substance should be studied thoroughly to assess causation. Many medicines have side effects including suicidal ideation or attempts, mania, as well as a host of other symptoms and behaviors. Finding out whether a substance causes those symptoms, how clinical dosing can minimize those symptoms, or understanding how specific subgroups (i.e., those diagnosed with bipolar disorder referenced above) tolerate a medicine are basic questions in medical and pharmaceutical research. If VA wants to commit itself to finding the most effective therapies for veterans it will assess the literature in a manner that is truly exhaustive  rather than a handful of studies  and support peer-reviewed, clinical research to find answers. We don't want to give veterans medicines that will increase incidence of suicide. Nor do we want to take a medicine off the table because of preexisting bias or incomplete information.

The risk of impaired driving is no excuse for limiting research

In discussing risks of harm, the secretary's letter leads by noting "moderate-strength evidence from analysis of multinational observational studies found that acute cannabis intoxication was associated with a moderate increase in motor vehicle collisions." Secretary Shulkin is correct that individuals using marijuana should not drive a car. However, this argument is asserted as a reason not to conduct research into marijuana's medical efficacy. That argument is nonsensical and undermines the medicine practiced in VA hospitals across the U.S. every day.

There are numerous pharmaceuticals that can cause impairment or other symptoms that make the operation of a motor vehicle risky. In fact, many drugs prescribed by a doctor and/or dispensed at a VA hospital come with warnings such as "Do not drive or operate heavy machinery while taking this medication." If the risk of impaired driving were the threshold for banning a substance, pharmacies would lose significant percentages of their supply. It is further unacceptable to suggest that such a risk serves as a basis for refusing to conduct clinical research on a substance.

VA has an opportunity to do cutting edge research

In his letter, Shulkin notes that "most of the studies were not specific to populations with PTSD or chronic pain" when examining risk of harm. It is true that many cannabis studies do not focus on populations with those conditions or the intersection of those conditions, or on veteran populations more generally. However, that reality is not a legitimate reason for refusing to conduct research into marijuana's medical efficacy. In fact, VA has a significant opportunity to study the therapeutic benefits and risks not afforded to other research institutions. The secretary's letter admits what everyone knows  veteran populations have significantly higher rates of PTSD and/or chronic pain than the general population. As a result, VA has an ideal population to study the effects of cannabis among those suffering from such conditions.

Further, some veterans are hesitant to enroll in cannabis-related clinical studies (of course conducted outside of VA hospitals) for fear that they may test positive for cannabinoids in a VA doctor visit or unrelated hospitalization, resulting in a disciplinary action or change in course of treatment from the facility. Even as VA has ended its prohibition on patients talking to doctors about their medical marijuana use, those fears still remain within veteran populations, and VA must be sensitive to the fact that cultural changes often lag policy changes in such situations. However, a VA-conducted trial will provide a safe space for veterans to enter such trials, knowing that the same institution will recognize the legitimacy of the clinical trial.

Veterans and non-veterans who suffer from PTSD and/or chronic pain can see benefits from VA-conducted clinical trials into the medical efficacy of cannabis. If research demonstrates medical efficacy, it can help change policy and improve lives. If research shows no relationship or a negative relationship between marijuana and specific disorders, the public will be better informed about the risks.

The spillover effects of Sessions marijuana policy

Of late, VA has patted itself on the back for scrapping the so-called gag rule. The gag rule as mentioned above forbade doctors and patients from discussing medical marijuana use, even in states that have reformed their medical marijuana laws. While the rollback of that guidance has its skeptics in veteran populations, it was an important step toward ensuring that patients are being honest and forthcoming with doctors, providing physicians with a complete disclosure of their medical history.

However, Attorney General Jeff Sessions' decision earlier this month to rescind the Cole Memo that protected state-legal marijuana businesses and consumers from federal prosecution reignited a concern among marijuana users about the administration's position. While the repeal of the Cole Memo does not affect medical marijuana, Sessions has stated that he wants Congress to repeal the provision of law that restricts his ability to spend funds to prosecute medical marijuana companies and users. If marijuana users are skeptical of the administration, its position on marijuana policy, and its likelihood to change policy on a whim in ways that punish marijuana and medical marijuana advocates, problems can abound. Such concerns can and will have a chilling effect within veteran populations. That chilling effect will mean that more veterans will self-medicate, without physician consultation, and such behaviors can lead to some of the same risks the secretary lays out in his letter.

Combining concerns about the attorney general, language from the White House supporting Sessions, and a VA Department unwilling even to conduct research into the possibility that marijuana could have medical value speaks loudly to veterans. It tells them that this administration will be tough on marijuana and that it has no interest in answering important medical questions  even those that could improve the lives and well-being of our wounded warriors. In fact, that message is amplified by a VA secretary who is not even willing to provide an honest assessment of the state of scientific research or the realities of American public policy to a Congressional committee with oversight.

Moving forward

Shulkin has an obligation to do better. He should recommit that his own department examine the questions posed by the House Veterans Affairs Committee more carefully and rigorously than it has previously as outlined in his letter. He should have a frank conversation in-house that distinguishes between conducting research on the medical efficacy of marijuana and endorsing the legalization of marijuana. Conducting basic medical research is important for the advancement of therapies for our veterans and the VA has unique opportunities to advance such efforts. Instead, old-fashioned biases, incomplete evaluations of existing literature, and a mischaracterization of policy has, to this point, won the day at VA.

The irony in the secretary's response to Walz's query is that the department's position and behaviors do not advance health care for our veterans. Instead, it adds further risk that frustrated veterans with a variety of conditions will self-medicate, procure medicine through illegal means and/or fail to be forthcoming with their VA doctors. Veterans deserve better than an administration that produces letters like the one sent to the Congress on December 21.

John Hudak, the author of Marijuana, A Short History, is deputy director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institute, where this piece was originally published.
The buyer of an 84-mile pipeline encircling Philadelphia has disclosed detailed plans to convert the pipeline from oil to natural gas, saying the project would require several new compressor and valve stations to move fuel to its Marcus Hook destination.

Adelphia Gateway LLC, which announced in November it is buying the underused pipeline for $189 million from Talen Energy Corp., filed its 1,285-page application Friday with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Adelphia, a subsidiary of New Jersey Resources, announced the filing late Monday.

"This important project will utilize existing infrastructure to provide greater access to clean, safe, affordable natural gas to underserved markets in the Greater Philadelphia region," Stephen Westhoven, chief operating officer of New Jersey Resources, said in a statement.

The company asked FERC to approve the project by Aug. 1 so that it can complete the purchase of the pipeline, which is now known as Interstate Energy Co. LLC.

The underground pipeline now delivers either oil or natural gas to two Talen power plants in Northampton County, but would be converted to exclusively transport gas. Adelphia Gateway plans to convert the southern 50-mile portion of the pipeline, which formerly carried oil and has been idle since 2014, to transport gas southward to customers in Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware Counties.

The pipeline is the latest piece in a massive regional build-out of energy infrastructure to accommodate new demand for natural gas, triggered by the boom in fracked gas from the region's shale fields. The pipelines have aroused fierce resistance from neighbors and environmentalists, who oppose the expansion of fossil-fuel consumption.

The Adelphia conversion project would require construction of two new 5,625-horsepower compressor stations, near Quakertown and in Marcus Hook. Adelphia also wants to build a new valve station at one of two proposed locations in Concord Township, Delaware County: Off Baltimore Pike, west of Stoney Bank Road, or next to Springlawn Road, near Purple Martin Drive.

The plans include several meter and regulator facilities, typically where the pipeline connects with customers or meets other pipelines, and eight new "blowdown" assemblies located at existing valve stations. A blowdown is the release of gas from a pipeline to the atmosphere to relieve pressure so the pipe can undergo maintenance.

Adelphia also proposes to build two new 16-inch-diameter lateral pipes to connect the planned Marcus Hook compressor station to the gas distribution systems of Peco Energy Co. and Delmarva Power.

The company said the conversion would create "minimal environmental impacts" and the need to acquire few new easements. Nevertheless, the project has already drawn flack from environmental groups.

Adelphia in November conducted an "open season" to solicit bids from potential new customers who would use the pipeline, and said it received more than twice as many bids as the pipeline's 250,000-cubic foot capacity. The robust interest prompted the Sierra Club of New Jersey to warn that Adelphia wants to double the pipeline's capacity, though the company's filing does not include any expansion plans.

The company did not disclose its primary customers, but the interconnections with Peco and Delmarva Power suggest that local utilities and their customers could tap into the new capacity. Other potential customers include the Energy Transfer Partners' Marcus Hook Industrial Complex, the Monroe Energy refinery in Trainer, and the Braskem polypropylene plant in Marcus Hook, which could use the gas for power generation or as a raw material in petrochemical production.

"The project will also increase the reliability and flexibility of the natural gas pipeline grid in the area by adding new capacity to the market and increasing the number of interconnections along the grid," the company said in the filing.

The 18-inch diameter pipeline connects with the Texas Eastern natural gas pipeline at an existing interchange near Rich Hill Road in Richland Township, Bucks County, where a new compressor station is proposed. The pipeline also intersects with two other interstate pipelines.

The pipeline was built in the 1970s to deliver oil from Sunoco's former Marcus Hook refinery to power plants owned by Pennsylvania Power & Light Co. It was partly converted to natural gas in 1996 as oil began to fall from favor as a fuel source for electricity generation.

Adelphia will continue to supply natural gas on the northern 34-mile section of the pipe to Talen Energy's Martins Creek and Lower Mount Bethel generating stations.

Adelphia's parent company, New Jersey Resources, which is based in Wall, N.J., also owns New Jersey Natural Gas.

In addition to FERC approval, the project will require review by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, which regulates the current pipeline.
A scene from the 2016 Philadelphia Antiques and Art show at the Navy Yard. Read more

Sponsorship of the annual Philadelphia Antiques and Art Show, a regional and national mainstay for more than a half-century, is being handed off from Penn Medicine to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, officials report. The longtime hospital fund-raiser will be jointly sponsored by the two groups this year, and the Art Museum is likely to take sole responsibility in 2019.

"This is a transitional moment," said Timothy Rub, head of the museum. "This show has been a Philadelphia tradition for a long time. Many people feel it has been the premiere show for American antiques and American decorative arts, Americana, in the country. It's a tradition worth extending."

The show began in 1962 as the University Hospital Antiques Show at the 33rd Street Armory in West Philadelphia. This year's show is scheduled for April 20 to 22 at the Navy Yard, where it has been for the last two years.

Ralph Muller, chief executive of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, said that over time his organization has seen "a shift in focus" for volunteers "toward charitable events that benefit the fight against specific diseases," while the antiques show represents a more general charitable approach.

"The Philadelphia Museum of Art's mission is more closely aligned with the spirit of the Philadelphia Antiques and Art Show, and we believe this transition offers a unique opportunity to continue and strengthen a wonderful Philadelphia tradition," Muller wrote in an email.

Rub said it "no longer made sense for Penn Medicine" to continue its historic role of sponsorship.

"They decided to step away, and the question was whether the museum would step in," Rub said. "I thought, why not?  We've not had a formal role. This is new."

Richard B. Worley, a member of the show's advisory committee for many years, said Penn Medicine and the Art Museum would partner on all aspects of the show this year, but in 2019, the museum would probably take over full sponsorship, probably becoming sole charitable beneficiary.

"This has been a very friendly handoff, and Penn Medicine has been very helpful," he said.

The show raised $250,000 for Penn Medicine in 2017, said Muller.

"This year, the show's proceeds will be split between the two institutions and will support the historic preservation of Pennsylvania Hospital as well as the Art Museum," Muller said.

While it is likely that the museum will become the sole beneficiary in 2019, officials said no decisions have been made thus far.

Worley acknowledged that the show has had financial difficulties in recent years. It departed from its long-time armory venue for the Navy Yard in 2008 but was forced to move to the Convention Center in 2012 when Urban Outfitters bought its Navy Yard building.

The Convention Center proved an uncomfortable and costly fit for the show, which canceled its 2015 edition and reopened in 2016 at a different Navy Yard location.

Worley characterized the last two years at the Navy Yard as "very successful."

The involvement of the Art Museum makes sense, said Rub. Fine art will have more of a presence on the floor, where 60 or so vendors display their wares. The museum will put together a small exhibition this year, something it has also done in the past.

Antique show officials say they hope a large presence of art and the museum's active involvement will encourage a broader range of visitors.

Said Rub: "It would be a wonderful thing to bring it closer to the museum."
Maybe you did a double take when you saw that new storefront in Chinatown: Paris Baguette.

But if you went inside, you'd realize that the shop, with its cashiers clad in Breton stripes and gray berets, is quite at home next to the Chinese grocers and hot-pot spots. Paris Baguette is a ubiquitous Korean brand  some liken it to a Korean Starbucks  that stirs nostalgia for those raised in South Korea. It's why you'll find them in locations of H-Mart, the Korean grocery chain, in places like Elkins Park and in Edison, N.J., where people go to buy strawberry croissants and kouign amman, as well as sweet rice doughnuts and iced milk bubble tea. (Noteworthy is that Paris Baguette is opening another location in the non-Asian enclave of Center City as part of a play for a wider customer base.)

Paris Baguette's French Asian connection is nothing new in Philadelphia. Some of the city's most beloved French bakeries are owned and run by Asian immigrants  from Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and South Korea. For some, like Vietnamese-owned bakery Ba Le, it's a story of colonialism: Ba Le's founder, Le Vo, trained under a French chef in Saigon in the 1950s. Vo is part of a history that stretches back to what was known as French Indochina in the 19th century under French colonial rule. It was often Vietnamese and Chinese bakers doing the hard, hot work in French bakeries, said Erica J. Peters, a professor at the University of the Pacific and author of Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century.

For others, it's a story about immigrant entrepreneurship, the cultural cachet of anything French, and the globalization of French cuisine.

Anna Chen, the brains behind two-year-old French Asian dessert shop A La Mousse in Chinatown, studied French baking in Hong Kong before moving to Philadelphia. "It's the top cuisine," said Chen, whose shop used to be home to a French macaron store. At A La Mousse, you can get a traditional French Paris-Brest or a matcha mille crepe cake, which layers crepes and cream with a Japanese influence.

At ICI Macarons in Old City, where Michael and Aici Tan sell 26 flavors of macarons, including some Asian-inflected flavors, like rose lychee and matcha, there's no straightforward tie to France  they even pronounce the name of their store, which draws from self-taught baker Aici Tan's name but which is also French for "here," "I-C-I." The Tans, whose families are from Guangzhou, China, just found that people loved the French treats and that the recipe was endlessly customizable.

It's not always easy for nonwhite chefs to succeed at cooking "white" food, especially in higher-end restaurants. "The media and customers expect a certain amount of 'ethnic-ness' from chefs of color  no matter what kind of food they are cooking," wrote GQ's Khushbu Shah in her 2017 article "What Happens When a Brown Chef Cooks White Food?" "But it's very much a Goldilocks problem. If the food is too white or too brown, it will not sell. It has to be just the right level of 'ethnic.' "

Despite that, some Asian-owned French bakeries in Philly have been able to find staying power. Here's a look at their stories:

Artisan Boulanger Patissier

The first year was the hardest for husband-and-wife pair Andre Chin and Amanda Eap.

In April 2002, they opened their shop on East Passyunk Avenue, when it was still a largely older, Italian neighborhood, and every day the Paris-trained Chin worked before sunrise to make all the French classics: baguettes, croissants, eclairs, quiches. Every day, they waited.

Hardly anyone came.

The bakery was a gamble for Chin and Eap, who left their native Cambodia in the '70s and '80s to escape war. They had sold their coffee shop at 22nd and Cecil B. Moore to try their hand at a business where Chin could put his skills to work. They called it Artisan Boulanger Patissier, like many of the bakeries Chin saw in Paris.

The tide began to turn when Inquirer food writer Rick Nichols wrote about them, gushing about the honesty and authenticity of their bread and pastries. (Chin initially was suspicious of Nichols and his odd habit of asking for receipts, even when he bought just one croissant, but now speaks fondly of the retired columnist.) Today, the bakery, which has since moved a few blocks south, is a neighborhood institution helmed by a baker who's been nominated for a James Beard Award.

Chin, 62, and Eap, 50, who own a rowhouse in the neighborhood, cite the changing demographics of Passyunk as part of what drove their success.

Loyal customer Fabien Douillard, who grew up near Nantes, France, and who now lives in South Philly, says he loves the bakery because it reminds him of his country.

Does it matter that Chin is not French?

Not at all, Douillard said: "He respects the artisan boulangerie tradition."

Paris Baguette

In his white chef's jacket, apron, and jeans, Sang Phil Han gives a tour of his shop. One side is French: madeleines, chocolate-covered cream puffs, waferlike almond cookies. The other is Korean: milk cream bread, sponge cake, red bean doughnuts.

Which sells better?

"Korean style," he says, laughing.

Han, 60, is the baker behind Philadelphia's first Paris Baguette, in East Oak Lane, known to some as Philly's Koreatown. Yes, it shares a name with the chain, but, no, he's not affiliated with it and there doesn't seem to be an issue, he said. Han, who worked in Seoul as a baker for 20 years before emigrating to Philadelphia, opened the bakery in 2001, years before corporate Paris Baguette opened its first U.S. location, in Los Angeles. Now, there's a Paris Baguette franchise just a mile up Cheltenham Avenue from Han's bakery, but one patron, carrying a fruit cream cake in a box, says she and her family have been coming here since she was young and they like to support a local business.

Han's first business was a grocery store at 54th and Race, which he left to open Paris Baguette. The European influence, he says, comes from his training in South Korea and his European coworkers in the hotel kitchen where he worked.

At Han's Paris Baguette, the French and Korean sides live in harmony. Customers bow and greet Han in Korean as they walk past a light-up Eiffel Tower and a stack of Korean newspapers.
Sophie, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel owned by Jeanne Navratil, waits patiently while undergoing an echocardiogram at the Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center in Levittown, Bucks County to check on the progress of her mitral valve repair done at a clinic in France. Read more

Jeanne Navratil knew that Cavalier King Charles spaniels were prone to heart disease. So when her 3-year-old dog, Sophie, began to slow down and sleep more in 2011, she made an appointment with her veterinarian. They discovered a mild heart murmur  an early warning sign of a deadly heart disease in dogs.

Six years later, she was diagnosed with mitral valve endocardiosis. And after a trip to France in November for open-heart surgery performed by a team from Japan, the bright-eyed pup with the sweet disposition is almost as good as new.

"She's my baby," said Navratil, of Washington Crossing, during a recent follow-up appointment at the Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center (VSEC) in Levittown, Bucks County, where Sophie is a patient. "I could not accept that this was a long-term death sentence for her."

In the general population of dogs, the prevalence and severity of mitral valve disease increases with age, said Beth Bossbaly, a board-certified veterinary cardiologist at VSEC, and Sophie's doctor. It is mostly a disease of small-breed dogs, however, and by age 10, about 30 percent of breeds such as poodles, Pekingese, Pomeranians and Chihuahuas will have mitral valve disease, she said

"In Cavalier King Charles spaniels, the disease is overrepresented," Bossbaly said. "By the time they are 10 years old, I believe, 60 percent will have a heart murmur."

The mitral valve helps regulate blood flow from one heart chamber to another. When the valve is damaged, blood flows backward, depriving the chamber where it should be going. Over time, the disease can weaken the heart muscle, leading to congestive heart failure.

Sophie was initially treated in 2012 with drugs and monitored closely because the disease was progressing so rapidly. She was stable until November 2015 when her murmur became louder and she was switched to another drug. Eight months later, her valve began to deteriorate. By March 2017, she developed pulmonary hypertension, or high blood pressure in her lungs, said Bossbaly. Sophie was headed for congestive heart failure.

"I just couldn't take that answer that there is nothing you can do," said Navratil, a retired product manager at a bank. "There just had to be something."

Mitral valve repairs are made on people all the time. But there is no cure available in the United States for canine mitral valve disease, said Bossbaly. "At some point the disease gets ahead of us."

PennVet is not currently offering open-heart surgery for mitral valve repair, said Mark A. Oyama, professor and chief of cardiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine.

At the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech, a team has begun to explore options for a less expensive and less invasive treatment, said Mindy Quigley, clinical trials coordinator.

Although the disease is not rare, the current treatment is so complex and prohibitively expensive that only a few places in the world are willing to perform that type of surgery, said Quigley.

The Virginia Tech team is exploring a procedure that could be done on a beating heart involving "a series of knots and cords that mimics heart tendons and creates a synthetic anchor to help the mitral valve do its job," said Quigley.

The University of Florida Small Animal Hospital in Gainesville hopes to start an open heart surgery program in 2018, said Simon Swift, clinical associate professor of cardiology at the school.

"We desperately need this here," said Swift. The procedure requires the use of a bypass machine and the right combination of people on the team, including anesthetists, perfusionists, and emergency critical-care staff to continually monitor the dogs after surgery for an extended period, he said. Swift said nearby UF Health Shands Children's Hospital has offered help and expertise.

"This is not a procedure you can do once every six months," Swift said. The mitral valve procedure would form the basis of the open-heart program and allow them to do other procedures. "You will never be busy enough if all you are doing is the odd congenital repair."

There is, however, help available outside the U.S.

Japanese veterinary surgeon Masami Uechi, of the JASMINE Veterinary Cardiovascular Medical Center in Yokohama, has a 90 percent success rate with an open-heart procedure to repair the valve. He and his team regularly travel to the Clinique Veterinaire Bozon in Versailles, France, to operate on dogs.

Navratil saw a posting on Instagram about the Mighty Hearts Project, a group of dog owners who have taken their dogs outside the country for treatment.

"We are basically all people that had the surgery" performed on their dogs, said Nathan Estes, who helped found Mighty Hearts. He took his dog Zoey to France for the procedure. He estimates about 50 people have contacted him and proceeded with the surgery.

The hefty price tag  about $50,000  can put the procedure out of reach for most dog owners. Estes took out a loan to cover it, but said he's known people to run up their credit cards or skip vacations for years to cover what equates to a nice car, numerous vacations, or a year in college. It's worth it, he said, considering how important his dog is to his family.

The cost to have the surgery in Japan averages $25,000 but there is a 15-hour flight. Plus, dogs have to be quarantined for six months at home before they can get into Japan  too long for a sick dog to wait, Estes said

Navratil and her ex-husband, Kurt Fuoti of Long Valley, N.J., decided to share the cost for the surgery in France. Pet insurance covered some of the U.S. vet bills prior to and after the surgery, she said.

The logistics for travel to France were daunting, so Navratil turned to Mighty Hearts for assistance.

A USDA-certified veterinarian must sign off on the trip, owners must produce rabies certificates and ensure their dog has a microchip. There are also the airline reservations, pet-friendly accommodations, and taxis that must be set up in advance, Estes said.

Navratil said she had Sophie certified as an emotional support dog so she would be able to travel in the airplane's cabin. On the way home, the dog needed to walk in the aisles for three minutes every two hours to prevent blood clots from developing. She also bought a dog stroller for 18-pound Sophie so she didn't have to carry her.

"You could never put them in cargo," she said, adding United Airlines, and especially its flight attendants, were "wonderful" during her trip. (And it should be noted that Sophie demonstrated during a recent visit from a reporter that she is an exceptionally well-behaved dog.)

Sophie's treatment was not without complications.

The dog needed two transfusions during surgery. She also developed a urinary-tract infection and three blood clots and was placed on heavy-duty antibiotics and blood thinners. Her time in France was extended an extra week, said Navratil.

Following the surgery, there is a very strict three-month recovery program to give the heart time to heal, said Navratil. There would be no jumping or dog parks. Getting on or off furniture required assistance. Navratil's house is now filled with baby gates, and she has disconnected her doorbell so it doesn't startle Sophie and send her heart rate soaring, she said.

Now, almost two months into her recovery, Sophie is starting to pick up, said Navratil. She sleeps less, shows more interest in her toys, and takes longer walks.

Last week, during an echocardiogram at VSEC, Bossbaly reported that two of the blood clots were no longer visible.

"It's an improvement," said Navratil. "We are going in the right direction."

Sophie's tongue, once a pale lavender, is now back to bright pink. Where once Navratil could feel every strained beat of Sophie's heart, now there is nothing out of the ordinary, she added.

"Her quality of life is pretty darn good," she said.
The National Weather Service issued this snow projection map Tuesday morning. Read more

A winter storm that is projected to bring up to three inches of snow to Philadelphia is expected to spare the evening rush hour, but could affect Wednesday morning's commute.

Some snow has fallen around the area, including flurries in Center City, but it has been light and is fleeting.

Heavier snow is expected later in the day, arriving around 7 p.m. in western Chester County and upper Montgomery and Bucks counties, where a winter weather advisory is in effect.

The National Weather Service says the snowfall is likely to begin in Philadelphia around 10 p.m. and after midnight in South Jersey.

Accumulation projections range from 3-4 inches in Reading, to 2-3 inches in Philadelphia and 1-2 inches in Atlantic City.

The high Tuesday is expected to be 39 in Philadelphia with a slight chance of rain after 3 p.m.

Meanwhile, the weather service has continued a flood warning for the Delaware River at Trenton because of an ice jam.

"Minor flooding is expected along the river in Trenton, Yardley, Morrisville and Ewing Township," the NWS said.

Trenton residents also are still being advised to boil water because of a malfunction at a treatment plant.
The man charged with fatally stabbing a University of Pennsylvania sophomore at least 20 times was described by a former teacher Tuesday as quiet, humorless, and outspoken in his political views.

"I can't remember a single joke or a single light-hearted moment from him," said Philip Schwadron, who taught acting to Samuel Lincoln Woodward in 10th grade in the fall of 2012 at the Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, Calif.

Still, "I never thought I was looking into the 15-year-old eyes of a killer," Schwadron said.

Both Woodward, 20, and his alleged victim, Blaze Bernstein, 19, had attended the exclusive school. Schwadron, who didn't teach Bernstein, described Woodward as "very quiet, very serious, very direct."

Meanwhile, Jake Chustz, a former student who knew Woodward at the school, said in an interview Tuesday that Woodward "had a reputation for being very strange and for rubbing people the wrong way."

Bernstein, a Penn psychology student visiting his Southern California hometown on winter break, disappeared Jan. 2 after driving to Borrego Park in Lake Forest with Woodward, the last person to see him alive, authorities said. After a weeklong search, Orange County investigators found his body in a shallow grave.

News of Bernstein's slaying shocked a West Philadelphia campus already reeling from the death of William Steinberg, a freshman killed in a plane crash Dec. 31 in Costa Rica. Bernstein, who recently had been elected managing editor of the student-run food magazine Penn Appetit, is the ninth Penn student to die since January 2017.

On Monday, the day Bernstein's family held a memorial service for him, a search-warrant affidavit acquired by the Orange County Register detailed the gruesome condition of his body and described strange behavior by Woodward, who was taken into custody three days earlier after DNA evidence linked blood found on his sleeping bag to Bernstein.

In comments to investigators included in the affidavit, Woodward said Bernstein had unsuccessfully made romantic advances toward him multiple times, including on the night Bernstein disappeared.

Before his arrest, Woodward told investigators that he had dropped off Bernstein at Borrego Park, only to leave after an hour to visit a girlfriend when Bernstein did not reappear. When questioned by Orange County authorities, Woodward could not remember the girlfriend's last name or where she lived, according to the Register, but said he returned to search for Bernstein later that night.

Investigators uncovered text messages Bernstein sent to two female friends in June that implied he had previously rejected a romantic advance from Woodward. "He made me promise not to tell anyone  but I have texted every one, uh oh," Bernstein wrote in one message cited in the affidavit. Woodward later told authorities that Bernstein had tried to kiss him on the lips just hours before the Penn student's disappearance.

According to the affidavit, Woodward "clenched his jaw and fists" while describing the interaction, noting that "he wanted to tell Blaze to get off of him." During his interview at the Sheriff's Department, Woodward "avoided touching doors with his hands," according to court filings reviewed by the Associated Press. He also drew investigators' suspicion by attributing dirt found under his fingernails to "falling into a mud puddle" and participating in what he termed a "fight club," the Register reported.

In Schwadron's class, Woodward occasionally voiced conservative beliefs, mentioning at one point that President Barack Obama's policy in Iraq was "wimpy" for not including more troops on the ground, the teacher said.

In his online musings, Woodward veered more sharply to the right.

Woodward defended the Confederate flag in a post as a symbol of "Southern pride, not hate," according to the CBS Los Angeles affiliate, and in a thread on ask.fm, a site that invites anonymous commenters to post questions to a specific person, said atheists will go to hell, and called Obama a "spineless coward" and an "arrogant, hypocritical, spineless socialist."

These views unnerved Woodward's classmates at the generally liberal performing arts school, which Schwadron said Woodward left after his sophomore year.

Michael Joseph Wells, a classmate of both Bernstein's and Woodward's, said in a public Facebook post that Woodward was "aggressive and made scary remarks to people."

Bernstein was remembered by friends and by his academic adviser at Penn as a skillful creative writer with omnivorous interests in science, psychology, and food writing.

Wells, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, wrote that Bernstein was "playful and kind hearted" while Woodward always "was drawing guns when prompted to draw our favorite things."

On ask.fm, Woodward said that if left stranded on a deserted island, he would want "the Bible and a Colt .45." In response to a separate query about what "new skill" he wished he could learn, Woodward said, "Waterboarding."

When a user told Woodward, "You are violent. And it scares me," he replied, "Haha what?? Me? I wouldn't fight anybody unless they attacked me. I don't know why you think that way about me."

Bernstein's parents released a statement Tuesday describing the circumstances of their son's death as a possible hate crime.

"If it is determined that this was a hate crime, we will cry not only for our son, but for LGBTQ people everywhere that live in fear or who have been victims of [a] hate crime," the family's statement said.

Woodward was not immediately reachable Tuesday. The Orange County Jail listed his occupation as "nerf games." He is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday, a Sheriff's Department spokeswoman said.

Correction: A previous version of this story described text messages it said Woodward sent friends about an encounter with Bernstein. It was Bernstein who sent the texts.
Zane Johnson (left) of Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity speaks with Leon Sullivan at a pardon and expungement workshop at Shepard Recreation Center on Monday during MLK Day. (MENSAH M. DEAN / Staff) Read more

While thousands of volunteers fanned out across the region Monday to spruce up forlorn places to mark Martin Luther King Day, about 100 people gathered at West Philadelphia's Shepard Recreation Center to learn how to clean up their own backyards  that is, their criminal records.

Leon Sullivan was among them. Twenty-eight years ago, he was charged with possession of a weapon when police found a gun in his car during a traffic stop. He maintains that the stop and search of his car were illegal, and that the gun was not in plain sight as the police claimed. Nevertheless, Sullivan said, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and served a probationary sentence.

He thought he'd moved on with his life until years later it dawned on him that the conviction from the 1980s still loomed large over his present and future.

"I want this off my record. It's held me back from jobs and moving forward in my career," said Sullivan, 54, of West Philadelphia, a real estate investor who also manages the records department of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. He began working for Penn 30 years ago  two years before his arrest  and wonders whether he could have moved on to a more lucrative job if not for the conviction.

"I was pretty much stuck in this job that I had at the time of the incident. Just pretty much stuck there," said Sullivan, who serves as the 34th Ward Democratic committeeman. "I didn't harm anyone. I didn't commit any violent acts. I just want this off my record."

MLK Day gave Sullivan the chance to get some guidance in how to do that. He went to the rec center at 5700 Haverford Ave. for a three-hour workshop, "Pathways to Pardons and Expungement," hosted by State Rep. Morgan Cephas and Lt. Gov. Mike Stack.

He learned about processes for getting a criminal record expunged or sealed, getting a pardon, and how those who are incarcerated can get sentence commutations. The elected officials and others also gave words of inspiration to an audience composed largely of folks who have struggled financially for years under the weight of their criminal records.

"Martin Luther King talked about equality so that we all have an equal playing field," said Cephas, who told the audience that her father had served five years in prison and had a hard time finding work after he was released. "Today represents the need to move the needle  so you are not wearing the scarlet letter and you can get the job that you need."

"Everybody makes mistakes," said Stack, a member of the state Board of Pardons. "I'm about more than second chances. I'm about third chances, fourth chances, if you've shown that now you've got it right and you understand.  The key thing is we want everyone to have a clear record."

Radee Hammett, 35, who spent four years in prison until November 2016 for DUI and drug possession, said he was glad he spent MLK Day at the workshop. "You don't know what's coming your way, whether it's a job offer or somebody who can offer you better employment than what you have. Your past might come up, so it's good to get that clear now so that in the future it won't limit you from being more successful than where you are now," said Hammett, a painter who has started a nonprofit agency to help people recently released from prison.

Sullivan was advised by Zane Johnson of Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity that his best option would be to seek a limited access order to have his criminal record sealed to prevent prospective employers from seeing his conviction. Johnson told him that because of his conviction Sullivan would first have to get a pardon before he could seek an expungement of his record, which could take years.

Sullivan was satisfied.

"Pardon, expungement," he said. "Anything to get the job done to remove something off the record that was done 30 years ago that is holding people like myself back from moving forward with their lives."
WASHINGTON  Chances of a government shutdown grew Monday as Republicans concluded that they would be unable to pass a long-term spending bill by the Friday deadline. GOP leaders are now turning to a short-term funding measure in hopes of keeping agencies open while talks continue, but Democratic leaders say they are unlikely to support any deal that does not protect young illegal immigrants.

Aides to key negotiators from both parties planned to meet Tuesday in an effort to rekindle budget talks, setting up a Wednesday meeting of the leaders themselves. If they cannot agree, the government would shut down at midnight Friday for the first time since 2013.

House Republican leaders are scheduled to discuss their plans for a stopgap spending measure with rank-and-file lawmakers on Tuesday evening.

Hopes of a deal to keep the government open have been complicated by lingering mistrust following an Oval Office meeting last week in which, according to several people familiar with the gathering, President Trump used vulgar terms to describe poor countries sending immigrants to the United States.

The meeting was to consider a bipartisan immigration deal to protect the "dreamers"  young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, including roughly 800,000 enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program Trump has canceled. Democratic leaders are demanding protections for the dreamers be part of any spending deal. They have the leverage to do so because Senate Republicans would need at least nine Democratic votes to support any spending deal. Democrats also want Republicans to match military spending Trump and many GOP lawmakers are seeking with an equal increase in nondefense funding.

"If they need Democratic votes, the overall legislation needs to meet certain Democratic criteria and be reflective of the values of the Democratic caucus and what we believe are the values of the American people," said Rep. Joe Crowley (D., N.Y.), the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, in an interview.

There is also no guarantee that House GOP leaders will be able to rally a majority of their members to support a short-term spending measure, which multiple congressional aides and a senior Trump administration official said would likely last through mid-February.

Defense hawks, in particular, are livid at further delaying a planned boost in military funding. That could mean House Republicans would also need Democratic votes to pass a short-term deal  something the minority party may not be inclined to provide this time around.

On Capitol Hill, however, there are hopes that tensions will ease as the shutdown deadline approaches. The government last shut down in October 2013, when Republicans opposed to President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul demanded its defunding. Government offices closed and hundreds of thousands of federal employees were furloughed for two weeks before the GOP relented.

Last week's meeting went off the rails when Trump angrily rejected a tentative deal negotiated among a small bipartisan group of senators  one that did not include any Republicans who support the strong restrictions Trump favors.

That deal would offer dreamers an eventual path to U.S. citizenship in return for border security funding, including some that could be used to construct the U.S.-Mexico border wall Trump campaigned on. But it did not include other restrictions Trump is seeking, including an end to rules that allow naturalized citizens to sponsor their relatives for legal status in the United States.

At a Thursday meeting to discuss the deal, according to Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) and multiple other people familiar with the meeting, Trump referred to certain poor nations as "shithole countries" from which the United States should not accept immigrants.

Two Republican senators who attended the meeting accused Durbin Sunday of misreporting the remark, and Trump himself waded back into the controversy Monday, accusing "Dicky Durbin" of having "totally misrepresented what was said" in the meeting.

"Deals can't get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military." Trump tweeted Monday.

Durbin stood by his comments Monday, while fellow Democrats backed him up and said it was Trump who had a credibility problem, adding they had no plans to back off their litany of demands.

GOP aides believe that the group of four deputy leaders from both chambers  the "No. 2's," as they are being called on Capitol Hill, including Durbin, Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), and House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.)  is more likely to produce a workable immigration accord, which would then unlock an agreement on spending levels and other outstanding issues.

"At the end of the day, if something's going to be produced that can pass both chambers and get signed by the president, it's going to come from this group," said a Republican familiar with the talks but not authorized to comment on them publicly.

But even if the leaders are able to make progress in the coming days, lawmakers and aides say another temporary spending measure  the fourth since the fiscal year began on Oct. 1  will be necessary in order to keep the government open past Friday.

When the Senate returns to work Tuesday, its first official order of business will be a procedural vote on reauthorizing the government's authority to conduct foreign surveillance on U.S. soil. Senate GOP leaders are hoping to send the measure to the president's desk with bipartisan support this week.

That leaves the chamber with perhaps only two full legislative days to pass a short-term funding measure, depending on what happens in the House.

"Even if we had a deal, which we don't, there's no time left to draft it," said a senior Senate Republican aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

There was frustration and uncertainty among some GOP congressional aides and lawmakers Monday with the state of the spending talks.

The discussions appeared to be headed in a positive direction, until the president "dropped a grenade into the middle of everything this weekend," said a second Senate GOP aide, also granted anonymity to speak candidly. The aide voiced uncertainty about how the talks would proceed in the coming days.

There is also annoyance at the prospect of having to pursue yet another stopgap funding bill that would punt the budget talks deeper into the year.

But Republicans moved to pin blame on Democrats for a potential shutdown. "For several years now, Democrats have blasted us for trying to extract policy goals when funding the government, and now they're doing the same thing," said a House GOP aide.

Echoing many other Republican lawmakers, Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) said in a Monday interview on Fox News Channel that the immigration debate should be resolved separately from the spending talks.

"That's a question: Will the Democrats hold up spending and funding of the government over this issue?" Paul said.

Senior Democratic aides said they would be waiting for cues from Republicans about what to expect next and repeated what they have said for months: Republicans have total control of Washington and should be able to advance short-term spending agreements easily out of the House. In the Senate, they said that Democratic priorities must be met if they expect support for a short-term plan.

Thirty-two Senate Democrats voted against the last short-term spending plan, and progressive and immigrant-rights groups are pressuring the remainder to oppose any must-pass bill that fails to protect dreamers.

Some Democrats say they feel emboldened now that a bipartisan group of senators reached a bipartisan deal they believe could prevail in the closely divided Senate. Durbin spent the weekend contacting fellow Democrats to build support for the deal struck with Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona, according to an aide familiar with his outreach.

"We've shown a willingness to do the right thing, and we've shown a willingness to work in a bipartisan fashion," said Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii). "The problems are on the Republican side."

But praise for the deal was not universal among Democrats. Crowley said it was "not a deal that I would support," citing funding for "border infrastructure" that could include Trump's wall.

"I think there was some good aspects in terms of progress being made within that process, but I think the bill fell short in terms of what I believe is a bill that would pass muster for me personally and I think for many colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus, as well," he said.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D., Ill.), a longtime proponent of comprehensive immigration reform, warned "you have to be very, very careful in embracing anything from the Senate, because when it gets to the House it dies." He cited the collapse of a 2013 bipartisan immigration bill that passed overwhelmingly in the Senate before being shelved by the GOP-dominated House.

A close ally of Durbin's, Gutierrez said he has not yet seen a formal document outlining the bipartisan Senate compromise and would withhold judgment, but he said he's wary that Democrats might once again be heading down a "slippery slope" and ceding too much ground in talks with Republicans.

"First, it was get some border wall enhancements for the dreamers. Now, they took 200,000 Salvadorans hostage and they want to do more," Gutierrez said, referring to the roughly 200,000 people from El Salvador with Temporary Protected Status now set to expire in Sept. 2019.

Across the country over the weekend, Democrats continued harping on Trump's remarks in the Oval Office and said they would draw a hard line against the president's policies.

In Boston on Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) used a speech at an event marking the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to tell the crowd, "We face the challenge of an openly racist president of the United States," according to local news reports. In Michigan, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.) called Trump's comments "terrible" and "divisive."

At an appearance in Atlanta on Saturday, Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) urged Trump's critics to speak out and put pressure on lawmakers: "This not a time to be neutral. This is not a time in this country's history that we should treat our political space like a spectator sport and sit on the sidelines."

And Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.), speaking at a breakfast kicking off a holiday parade in Los Angeles, suggested Trump was "politically profiting off of sowing hate and division in our country."

"We know these are dark times that require us to fight and march and resist," she added.
New Jersey Gov.-elect Phil Murphy has pledged to fully fund schools, although details are still unclear. Read more

As the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Phil Murphy pledged to "fully fund" New Jersey's schools, vowing to end years of failure by the state to abide by its own funding law.

To keep that promise, all he'll have to do is find a spare billion or two after he becomes Gov. Murphy on Tuesday.

How Murphy plans to accomplish that remains unclear. He hasn't spelled out how he will ramp up state aid; a key tax proposal, which targets the wealthy, has been endangered by the Trump tax plan; and lawmakers aren't racing to legalize marijuana, another potential revenue source.

Murphy will be the latest governor to take on what has been a challenge for states all over the country: how to pay for public education adequately and fairly. The issue has continued to vex states as they try to move past band-aid solutions employed during the recession.

"School funding is often a queen-size sheet on a king-size bed. If you pull it over to one corner to cover it up, you pull it away from another corner," said Mike Griffith, a school finance consultant with Education Commission of the States.

"The way states make these changes palatable is by putting more money into the system."

In Pennsylvania, where the state Supreme Court last year reinstated a lawsuit challenging the school funding system, per-pupil spending increased 3.4 percent in 2014-15, according to a report last week by the National Center for Education Statistics. In New Jersey, spending fell slightly. Average per-pupil spending in New Jersey was $18,838 compared with $14,405 in Pennsylvania.

Murphy's spokesman did not respond to questions last week about how precisely Murphy would inject more money into the state's schools, which have been repeatedly shorted since New Jersey passed its progressive funding formula in 2008.

Grounded in the landmark Abbott v. Burke New Jersey Supreme Court rulings that steered resources into poorer districts, the formula directs added money for students who are poor, have disabilities, or aren't proficient in English. It determines how much in education costs a district can afford to raise locally and how much state money is needed.

But the state hasn't spent the required money. Murphy has priced full funding at an additional $800 million to $1 billion  although the formula currently caps aid to growing districts. If those caps are removed, districts are short about $2 billion, or close to 6 percent of the $34.7 billion state budget, according to legislative staff.

The governor-elect has said previously he would cover new costs in part by raising income taxes on millionaires and other tax changes totaling a projected $1.3 billion in new revenue.

But the millionaires tax has lost some support among legislative leaders, given the recent federal tax overhaul limiting deductions for state and local taxes. "Raising taxes should be a last resort," Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester), who had previously described the millionaires tax as a top priority, said in an interview Thursday.

Marijuana legalization, which Murphy has pointed to as another revenue source, also isn't a guarantee. Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D., Middlesex) said last week he wants "thorough and thoughtful" consideration of the ramifications.

Sweeney, who met with Murphy on Wednesday but said the two didn't discuss Murphy's school funding plan, said he would continue to push for the reallocation of existing dollars to underfunded districts.

Not all New Jersey school districts are underfunded: Some are receiving more state aid than the formula says they should  the result of a deal to pass the 2008 funding law that spared districts from any cuts. But while the money was intended to be temporary, phasing it out has been highly controversial, including with the state's largest teachers' union.

"We do not believe that the state should be taking needed funding away from some students," said Steve Baker, spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, which spent millions trying to defeat Sweeney's recent reelection.

Sweeney said districts with shrinking enrollment are "getting funding for children they don't have." If existing money were shifted, "at least then everyone's being underfunded at the same level," he said.

Lawmakers and Gov. Christie agreed last year to increase aid to underfunded districts by $130 million and shift $31 million away from other districts; about $600 million more could be moved to help compensate underfunded districts, according to Sweeney's office.

Richard Bozza, executive director of the New Jersey Association of School Administrators, said he expects that redistribution will continue "given the tightness of this budget." Besides funding schools, Murphy has also pledged to put more money into reducing the state's looming pension liability and has called for making community college free, among other proposals.

Balancing those priorities "is going to be a very difficult task for him," Bozza said.

Some underfunded districts aren't waiting for Murphy to present his budget. On Friday, a group of 10 districts  including Chesterfield Township in Burlington County and Kingsway Regional in Gloucester County  filed a petition with the state Department of Education, arguing that the state's method of awarding aid is "arbitrary" and violates the funding law, and that inadequate aid has forced them to overtax residents.

Chesterfield Township technically received more than "full" funding under the formula last year, with $820,000 in state aid. But take off the formula's growth caps, and the K-6 district, where enrollment has doubled in the last eight years, should be getting $4.2 million.

"Every year, the amount we have to cut out gets higher and higher and higher," Scott Heino, superintendent of the Chesterfield district, said of the district's $10 million budget. Although the district was able to save its library and instrumental-music programs last year thanks to an added $401,000 in state aid in the budget deal, Heino doesn't know whether it will get to keep that money in the coming year. If it doesn't, he said, more staff will have to be cut.

Chesterfield has repeatedly raised taxes at the state-imposed 2 percent cap  although health-care increases next year will eat up the extra $184,000, Heino said. The district raises more than $9 million in school taxes, though its "fair share" under the formula is $7 million.

Cherry Hill, while not part of the petition, is also short on state funding. The district raises $168 million in taxes, $34 million more than its fair share of $134 million. While it has increased taxes the last four years, it is planning a referendum for later this year to make health and safety upgrades.

"We literally need to go out and ask the community for additional funds because there's work that has to be done," said Superintendent Joe Meloche.
Democrat Phil Murphy, right, raises his hand as he takes the Oath of Office administered by State Supreme Court Chief of Justice, Stuart Rabner, during the 56th Governor of New Jersey Swearing In Ceremony. Tuesday, January 16, 2018. Murphys wife and four children joined him as he took the oath Tuesday on the same Bible that John F. Kennedy used when he was sworn in as president. Read more

TRENTON  Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat and former Wall Street banker who has never before held elected office, pledged in his inaugural address as New Jersey governor Tuesday to resist what he called President Trump's "unrelenting assault on our values."

Murphy, 60, was sworn in as the state's 56th governor amid a cannon salute outside the Trenton War Memorial and other traditional pageantry that accompanies the transfer of power in the capital.

"We must reject the president's dark belief of an America in decline and in carnage," Murphy said, referring to Trump's own inaugural address. "Let there be no doubt: Ours is an imperfect, but great, nation."

Democrats already control both houses of the Legislature, and November's election of Murphy to succeed Republican Chris Christie as governor positioned New Jersey at the forefront of some states' efforts to fight the Trump administration.

Murphy, of Middletown, Monmouth County, said his administration would protect unauthorized immigrants brought to the country by their parents, and fight federal efforts to "gut health care" and enable drilling off the coast of the New Jersey Shore.

Murphy also took a swipe at Trump for his incendiary recent remarks about immigrants, saying America is "a place where immigrants still come in hope of a better future  and that includes from Haiti and from the continent of Africa."

While New Jersey Democrats may be united in wanting to confront Trump, Murphy's relationship with key power players like Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester) is already strained. Recently, Sweeney lashed out at Murphy when he appeared to kill a lame-duck legislative deal to bail out a nuclear power plant in Sweeney's district.

As if to underscore the treacherous political terrain that awaited Murphy, flooding from the Delaware River closed roads near the Statehouse on Tuesday, causing traffic delays.

Christie was masterful at playing the Trenton game during his two terms as one of the most recognizable and colorful political figures in the country.

"The work of our administration will be about you, your families, and your communities," Murphy told hundreds of supporters, lawmakers, lobbyists, and others. "We will never lose sight that we are one state and one family, with different beliefs but common dreams, and that we do not succeed unless we all succeed together."

Murphy did not shy away from the progressive platform he campaigned on. Before he walked on stage, music by the Grateful Dead and Bob Marley blared from the speakers.

Murphy pledged to legalize marijuana as part of a broader reform of the criminal justice system, called for free community college, and asked the Legislature to immediately send him bills that would fund Planned Parenthood, nearly double the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and "strengthen our gun laws."

Hours after his inauguration, Murphy signed an executive order aimed at closing the pay gap that he said would prohibit state agencies from asking prospective job applicants about their wage history or investigating their previous salaries.

During his 34-minute address Tuesday morning, the new governor didn't directly address the state's most pressing issues, such as its underfunded retirement plans for public workers. But Murphy pledged to adopt a "budget that is balanced fiscally and morally" and send "a loud and clear message that our days of muddling through from crisis to crisis are over."

Murphy set an inclusive tone for his administration  pointing to his diverse senior staff standing on stage behind him, among them the nation's first Sikh attorney general, Gurbir Grewal  and said the public had "rejected the politics of division."

"There is no ambiguity in their mandate: They voted to build a stronger and fairer New Jersey that works for every New Jersey family," he said.

With Murphy's inauguration, New Jersey joins a handful of states where Democrats control both the governor's mansion and the legislature.

During the swearing-in ceremony, Murphy placed his left hand on the same Bible that was used during President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, according to his administration. Murphy, who grew up outside Boston, frequently cites the Kennedys in speeches as inspirational figures, and did so again on Tuesday.

Among the dignitaries on stage behind him were his wife, Tammy, and their four children, Josh, Emma, Charlie, and Sam; Christie and his wife, Mary Pat; Sweeney; Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin; U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez; and Christie's lieutenant governor, Republican Kim Guadagno, whom Murphy defeated in November.

Murphy, who campaigned as the anti-Christie in style and substance, was gracious toward his predecessor, praising his leadership in fighting the opioid epidemic and thanking him for his public service. The men shook hands on stage.

During last year's campaign, Murphy said he would "fully fund" schools and public workers' pensions and spend more on public transportation, but it's unclear how he'll accomplish all of that.

Murphy had been counting on raising taxes on millionaires for a projected $600 million in annual revenue, but Sweeney appeared to scuttle that plan after Trump signed a federal tax overhaul that is expected to hurt filers in high-tax states like New Jersey and New York.

On Tuesday, the governor signaled he would still like to raise taxes on the rich. "A stronger and fairer New Jersey ensures the wealthiest among us pay their fair share in taxes so working and middle-class families can keep more of their hard-earned money," Murphy said.

State GOP Chairman Doug Steinhardt said Democratic control in Trenton limited his party's ability to thwart what he called Murphy's "radical liberal agenda."

"Now more than ever, New Jersey's citizens must be vigilant," Steinhardt said in a statement. "They must keep close watch on the Murphy administration and hold it accountable. New Jersey's taxpayers cannot afford to be the personal piggy bank for his liberal policies."

Also sworn in Tuesday was Lt. Gov. Sheila Y. Oliver, a Democrat and former Assembly speaker from Newark, who became the first woman of color to hold statewide elected office in New Jersey. "I recognize that while these moments are historic," she said, "we make history not in the moment but in what we do with it."
The US and Canada are bringing together foreign ministers from around 20 nations on Tuesday in Vancouver to discuss security and stability on the Korean Peninsula. It's strange that many of the countries invited are not stakeholders in the situation, but those who participated under UN Command during the Korean War (1950-53). Washington seems to be reviving the long-forgotten multinational military alliance.

Yet the international community harbors little hope that the meeting can bear fruit as China, Russia and North Korea are not invited. There is widespread speculation about what the US hopes to achieve out of such a meeting.

The US and Canada were abruptly announced as co-hosts of the meeting on December 19 during US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's visit to Canada. Washington apparently has more intentions than simply reflecting on the 1950s war by bringing together nations that sent troops to the peninsula over 60 years ago while bypassing those highly relevant nations amid tensions in the region.

First of all, Washington wants to pressure Pyongyang by signaling that it is indeed preparing to use force. Those invited countries, no matter how many troops they sent, were participants in the Korean War.

Attending this meeting, they may not mean to repeat their actions, but Washington can thus tell Pyongyang that they stand ready to follow the US onto the peninsula.

Having had China and Russia demand it talk to North Korea, the US wants to justify the high pressure it has exerted on North Korea and get others' endorsement for its policy on the peninsula.

Among the invitees are traditional US allies like Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and nations that have no relation to the nuclear issue but can be easily manipulated by the US, such as Ethiopia and Columbia.

While the US finds it too hard to manipulate the UN Security Council, with the Vancouver meeting Washington wants to highlight its dominant role in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue and cripple the clout of China and Russia. Washington can say these 20-some nations stand for the international community to make its extremely hard-line stance against Pyongyang more legitimate.

But the meeting will likely accomplish little. Over the peninsula, only international decisions made under the UN framework are legal and valid. No one can stop the US from pressuring North Korea to the utmost, but Washington will eventually be held accountable if war breaks out or even worse, nuclear weapons are employed.

The Donald Trump administration may possibly be holding the Vancouver meeting for his domestic audience. With a more hawkish policy toward North Korea than previous administrations, Trump has pushed US-North Korea confrontation toward a high-stakes climax. Hawaii's false missile alert on Saturday set off wide-scale panic. Washington needs more support for its policy from countries beyond Japan and South Korea.

The recent Seoul-Pyongyang detente over the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games has placed the Vancouver meeting in a somewhat awkward position. At such a meeting with ulterior motives and little authority, what attendees need to do is just clap their hands for the organizers.
Students can agree with President Trump about immigration, if theyd like. But they cant talk like him, at least not in school. Read more

Let's suppose you're teaching a current-events lesson at an American public school. The talk turns to President Trump's comments last Thursday at a discussion with members of Congress, where Trump questioned whether the United States should accept immigrants from "shithole countries"particularly those from Haiti and Africa  rather than from places like Norway.

A student in the class defends the president's remarks. "Norwegians are wealthier and better educated," the student says. "We need more people like that."

What should you do?

Here's what you shouldn't do: dismiss the student's statement as racist. The question of who should become an American is one of the most hotly contested issues in the United States, across our history and into the present. Decent and reasonable people can differ on whether we should favor more more skilled and educated immigrants, which is what Canada and many other democracies do.

But decent and reasonable people do not call poor countries "shitholes," ever. Although students should be free to make up their own minds about controversial public questions, they should not be allowed to malign entire peoples or nations. They can agree with President Trump about immigration if they'd like. But they can't talk like him, at least not in school.

That's the key distinction that we all need to keep in mind amid the ongoing controversy over Trump's comments. In a democracy, by definition, we must debate differences of policy. But we also need to uphold shared norms of civility, or our democracyand the debates that define itwill fall apart.

The threat is real. When the president of the United States denigrates whole groups of human beings, he sends a clear message that this kind of behavior is OK. And if you think it's not influencing our kids, well, you just haven't been listening.

According to a recent survey of American teachers by researchers at UCLA, over one-quarter of the teachers reported an increase during the past year in students' making racist and sexist comments in school. And nearly half said that student anxieties were affecting classroom learning. Many students were reluctant to discuss controversial issues, the teachers reported, for fear of drawing attention to themselves.

That isn't all Trump's fault, of course. Well before he ascended to the White House, American political culture was fracturing into bitterly polarized camps. On cable television and the internet especially, citizens have been degrading each other for many years in a 24/7 slugfest of snark and invective.

But surely Trump has accelerated those trends, particularly via his own intemperate use of social media. And that's all the more reason that our schools need to teach young people a more kind, measured, and respectful brand of behavior than the president has displayed.

That means prohibiting any kind of slur against a group of people, particularly if the president uses one. In no uncertain terms, our teachers must emphasize that Trump's remarks about Haiti and Africa were offensive and inappropriate.

But they also need to explain why. The president's language wasn't simply "tough," as he later claimed. His words echoed a long history of racial slurs against people of African descent, dating to the dawn of slavery.

Meanwhile, Trump's brazen claim that he hadn't used the word shitholein the face of enormous evidence that he had done sofueled the cynicism that mars so much of contemporary political life. So did denials by GOP Sen. David Perdue (Ga.) and other Republican apologists. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped, all are entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts. Trump did call other countries "shitholes," of course; the only question is whether that's OK.

There's only one answer: no. That's why Republicans are rallying to deny Trump's remark, which is  quite simply  indefensible. And our kids need to hear that, too.

Regardless of what they think of President Trump's policies, teachers must make it clear that his language violated basic norms of democratic dialogue. It's perfectly OK to argue for laws that favor more highly educated immigrants, if that's what you believe. But when you do that using racist idioms, like the president did, you shut down discussion before it begins. You can't hold a debate on humane and equal terms, if the very terms of the debate undermine human equality.

So in this week following Martin Luther King Day, let's re-dedicate our schools to the democratic values that King proclaimed. That means conducting full and robust debates about immigration and everything else. But it also means teaching decency and civility, which our own president has done so much to erode. That's a lesson everybody needs to learn, over and over again, until we know it by heart.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author (with Emily Robertson) of "The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools" (University of Chicago Press).
Camden Mayor Dana Redd speaks at a ceremonial groundbreaking for the for the Rutgers-Rowan Health Sciences building in downtown Camden last October. Read more

The political organization that has long dominated life in Camden and beyond is often called a machine  although a more apt term might be limousine.

A machine suggests back rooms, cheap suits, and ashtrays  images that are too retro for the sleek operation that is the Camden County Democratic Party under George E. Norcross III.

A limousine, on the other hand, is a far more fitting metaphor: Contemporary, powerful, intimidating.

Those invited to ride in it are pleased  even grateful  to be going somewhere in style.

Especially if they end up going farther than they'd ever imagined.

The limo came to mind last wee, as the revealing drama about former Camden Mayor Dana Redd's future reached an unsurprising and uninspiring conclusion.

The story began in early 2017. After several months of public speculation and personal reflection, Redd announced she would not seek a third term.

A loyal Democrat, Redd has been a staunch ally of Republican Gov. Christie, who gave Norcross a shout-out during a valedictory Statehouse speech last week.

Redd opted not to run for mayor again with the unstated but obvious expectation that a new public job would soon be made available to her.

In other words, she was waiting for the limousine.

But first, details of Redd's participation in the state pension system had to be ironed out. Just after Christmas, the Democratic fiefdom/charitable foundation otherwise known as the state legislature completed the protracted process of giving Redd a raise.

Supposedly designed to help others as well, the tailor-made-for-Redd measure was signed into law by Christie on Monday and will initially boost the former mayor's annual pension from $32,408 to more than $50,000. And if Redd stays for three years in her new job (see below), her pension will more than triple, Politico reports.

Redd, who was paid $102,000 annually as mayor, was named CEO Friday of the Rowan University/Rutgers-Camden Board of Governors, a post that more than doubled her salary and will pay her $275,000 a year. The job was recently vacated by Kris Kolluri, who, like the former mayor, is a talented, respected, and wired South Jersey Democrat.

Kolluri, in turn, was chosen as the new CEO of the Cooper's Ferry Partnership, a quasi-public entity that is essentially in charge of redeveloping much of the city. Or perhaps all of it, depending upon the results of newly inaugurated Mayor Frank Moran's proposed "forensic audit" of the Camden Redevelopment Agency.

Meanwhile, Kolluri won't say how much he's making in his new job. It seems the partnership that is tasked with redeveloping public land and rebuilding public infrastructure in Camden (who decides this, anyway?) actually is a private enterprise, so Kolluri says the CEO's salary is private.

Some had expected Kolluri, a lawyer and former state transportation commissioner, might be offered a job in the incoming gubernatorial administration of North Jersey Democrat Phil Murphy.

When it appeared this would not immediately be the case, Cooper's Ferry CEO Anthony Perno was shown the door so Kolluri could take that job and free up a lucrative post for Redd.

After all, she'd been waiting quietly for the limousine to show up for a year.

The Camden job-arama was made possible by the longtime Democratic strategy of having the city abdicate key functions, sometimes with welcome results.

The replacement of city cops with county cops has made Camden safer. An effort largely engineered by Norcross Democrats and the Christie administration is transforming public education in the city into a hybrid menu of choices, including a far smaller but arguably better traditional school district. And the same bipartisan alliance is behind the unprecedented array of ambitious  if heavily subsidized  development projects in the city's core. Anyone who, like me, has long marveled at how excruciatingly difficult it can be for anything at all to get done in Camden can't help but be impressed.

But politics in the city, the county and to some extent the rest of South Jersey has become zero-sum: You're either in the limo, or you're not. Or perhaps you've been thrown out of it and are now on the curb.

Aspiring public servants must either pledge allegiance to the Party and its demanding  if not dictatorial  culture, or migrate to the dwindling handful of towns where Republicans or independents may occasionally manage to win a seat on a local school board.

The chances for an independent city candidate to win any elective office or be appointed to any position of power is virtually nil. So it's no wonder the interior of the limousine breeds an intense loyalty with elements one might find in a cult of personality.

Mainly, however, the fierce devotion stems from the fact that generations of families in some way owe their livelihoods to this system within a system.

In an insular and in some ways elitist political community like this, leaders can suggest, with straight faces, that cutting a special deal for one mayor symbolizes fair play for many, even as the state pension system that ostensibly serves the many is running out of money.

This insularity has especially pernicious effects in Camden, where so many have been disenfranchised for so long.

There, the ostensible leaders have precious little actual authority.

Because they don't own the keys to the limousine.

They don't even get a chance to drive it.
If the Darwin Awards were given to political campaigns that died under tremendously stupid circumstances, Joe Gale's bid for lieutenant governor may soon qualify.

Gale, a 28-year-old Montgomery County commissioner, announced Tuesday that he is running for gubernatorial sidekick in the Republican primary. The only potential problem? You have to be 30 years old to hold the office.

"No person shall be eligible to the office of governor, lieutenant governor or attorney general except a citizen of the United States, who shall have attained the age of 30 years," reads the state constitution.

Gale, who has never been the type to back down from a challenge, insisted he can legally become lieutenant governor. Eventually.

"You do not have to be 30 to run or be elected  you just must be 30 at the time of the swearing-in. So I would have to wait only two months to assume office," he said. "There was a U.S. senator from West Virginia, Rush Holt Sr., who was under 30 and had to wait six months to take office. And a congressman from Kentucky, John Y. Brown, who was under the required age of 25 and had to wait until the second year of his term to get sworn in. For me, it's only two months."

Asked if this is an accurate reading of the law, local elections attorney Lawrence Otter said: "That's nonsense."

Otter noted that neither of the examples cited by Gale took place in Pennsylvania. "This is not a federal question. This is strictly a state law question  and it would appear that he doesn't meet the age requirement, which is constitutionally mandated."

Gale, for his part, said that he had consulted "a legal team of lawyers and retired judges" and that "there is no question that I am eligible for lieutenant governor." He declined to provide any of the attorneys' names.

In his campaign announcement, Gale said he wanted to run "because families and taxpayers across this great state deserve a proven conservative watchdog who can be trusted to clean out the cesspool in Harrisburg." In 2015, the proud Trump supporter defeated two establishment Republicans in the race for county commissioner.

Even if Gale isn't the serious candidate that he claims to be, he may have a reason to run: One of Gale's Republican opponents in the lieutenant governor primary, Jeff Bartos, has ties to the Montgomery County GOP elite. Gale slammed Bartos in his campaign announcement, saying Bartos "actively opposed" him in the general election for county commissioner.

"Jeff is a conservative outsider running to change the way business is done in Harrisburg," said Bartos spokesman Chris Grant.

"I can tell you this," said Gale, articulating what could become his campaign slogan. "The people of Pennsylvania would rather wait two months for me to get in there and clean things up than be stuck with four more years of the same old politics as usual."
Marilyn Price Birnhak, 85, of Bala Cynwyd, founder and longtime president of Weight Watchers of Philadelphia Inc. and a local philanthropist, died Saturday, Jan. 13, of complications from pancreatic cancer at Lankenau Medical Center, Wynnewood.

Mrs. Birnhak had her first experience with the weight-loss industry in 1963 while living in New York. She and her husband, J. Robert Birnhak, signed up for a weight-loss class. They lost the weight and gained a vocation.

The Birnhaks were so impressed by the weight-loss program taught by Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch that when they were offered an opportunity to buy a franchise, they jumped at it, creating Weight Watchers of Philadelphia in Mrs. Birnhak's hometown.

From a fledgling operation in 1964 with two meetings and eight members in Mount Airy, the couple grew the franchise into an enterprise with 500 employees serving up to 20,000 members each week in 450 meetings across Southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey.

Mrs. Birnhak's mother, Reba Jurnovoy Price, worked with the franchise for 25 years before retiring at age 88. "My grandmother helped by clerking at the meetings, and ended up running the bookkeeping department," said Mrs. Birnhak's son, John, now the company's president.

Before her death from breast cancer in 2004, daughter Tracey Birnhak was vice president of marketing and business development for the franchise.

Weight Watchers works by offering members nutritional information and behavior modification techniques in a supportive group setting.

Mrs. Birnhak never retired from the franchise, which is in its 54th year. "She was in the office two weeks ago, running a management meeting," her son said.

Her son attributed Mrs. Birnhak's success in business to the support of her husband, an altruistic spirit, and plain old hard work. "Even when she started to lecture, she would practice and practice and practice what she would say for my father before she went and did it," he said.

A native of Fern Rock, Mrs. Birnhak graduated from Olney High School. She and her husband married in 1955 and reared their children in Mount Airy and later Cheltenham.

The Birnhaks served on the board of directors for the Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life, where the Birnhak Transitional Care Unit was named in their honor.

The Birnhak Transitional Care Center at Lankenau, which the couple also helped underwrite, is under construction and due to open in 18 months.

They supported Ben Gurion University of the Negev; Magen David Adom, Israel's national emergency ambulance and blood bank; Philadelphia Theatre Company; and the National Liberty Museum.

Mrs. Birnhak was a founding contributor to the AIM Academy, an educational program for gifted children who learn better outside a mainstream classroom.

In addition, the Birnhaks raised money for and contributed to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, the Cancer Support Community of Philadelphia, United Way of Greater Philadelphia, Hero Thrill Show Inc., American Heart Association, Alzheimer's Association, Beth Sholom Congregation, Weight Watchers of Philadelphia Feeds the Hungry, National Kidney Foundation, and Susan B. Komen for the Cure.

Mrs. Birnhak founded the "I Have Strength Fund" at the Abramson Center at the University of Pennsylvania to memorialize her daughter Tracey. The fund supports breast cancer research. The Birnhaks also endowed the Nutritional Counseling Center in the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine.

Mrs. Birnhak appeared on numerous television and talk radio shows and as a panelist for health-themed events. She lectured at area medical colleges so that physicians could learn how to support people who need to lose weight.

Besides her husband of 63 years and her son, Mrs. Birnhak is survived by daughter Valerie, four grandchildren, and a brother.

A funeral service will be held at noon Wednesday, Jan. 17, at Beth Sholom Congregation, 8231 Old York Rd., Elkins Park, followed by interment at Roosevelt Memorial Park, Trevose. The family will sit shivah at 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday nights at the Birnhak residence in Bala Cynwyd.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life, 1425 Horsham Rd., North Wales, Pa. 19454.
State Sen. Scott Wagner (R.,York), is seeking the Republican nomination for governor in Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Read more

If you want to spark a political fight in Pennsylvania, mention guns.

If you want to ignite agreement about a crisis we all recognize, mention opioids.

But please, let's not mix together the issues we fight about with the issues we agree upon. That's a recipe for inaction, a problem all too common in Harrisburg and one we simply cannot afford as an opioid crisis sweeps across the state.

Last Wednesday, State Sen. Scott Wagner offered a few backhanded compliments for Gov. Wolf's decision that day to declare a statewide disaster emergency to deal with the opioid crisis.

Wagner, a York County Republican seeking his party's nomination to challenge Wolf's bid for a second term in November, said he welcomed the governor's "decision to finally get serious" about the problem.

A day later, Wagner was back with a warning, claiming Wolf's declaration "has infringed on the rights of any Pennsylvanians who could generally carry a firearm in public without a license."

Wagner's theory: A statewide disaster emergency declaration triggers laws prohibiting the open carrying of firearms on public streets or property during that declaration.

Aside from the misplaced priorities this view represents that borders on the heartless  if not clueless  there's one big problem with that theory: The state issues emergency declarations every year  for hurricanes, windstorms, blizzards, floods and more  and Wagner can offer no examples of people being prosecuted for possessing firearms during those events

By Friday, Wagner was on a local talk-radio show, explaining how he was a co-sponsor of "pretty critical" legislation that would rewrite state laws to prevent emergency declarations from impinging on gun rights.

That legislation is so critical that it was introduced on Jan. 12, 2017  one year and four days ago  and then immediately sent to a committee overseeing emergency preparedness. There it has sat  no hearings, no votes, no action at all  in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Wolf's team notes that firearms can't be confiscated during a disaster and the existing laws have no impact on people with concealed carry permits, hunters with a license or someone acting in self-defense with a firearm. The law's punishment amounts to a citation, and Wolf's administration said it worked in advance with law enforcement to make sure the opioid declaration didn't impact gun rights.

"Any implication otherwise to score cheap political points around the greatest public health crisis in our lifetimes is flat-out wrong," said Wolf spokesman J.J. Abbott.

Still, the issue lingers. State. Rep. Sheryl Delozier, a Cumberland County Republican, on Friday circulated a memo to her colleagues, asking them to co-sponsor legislation to protect gun rights during Wolf's declaration.

Delozier also had no examples to offer of people being prosecuted for possessing firearms during an emergency declaration.

It's our view that guns are a public health crisis, one that Harrisburg has virtually ignored. Inserting this issue into the public health crisis of opioids that is killing Pennsylvanians across the state is petty and wrong-headed. Stop looking for ways to trip up the state with a manufactured crisis when we are dealing with a true emergency in opioids.
China should remain alert of possible border disputes with India in 2018 as India regards China as the biggest threat and some of its military officials have an unfavorable view of bilateral ties, a Chinese expert said on Monday in response to news that India plans to deploy 15 battalions to border areas.

"The Doklam standoff has harmed the mutual diplomatic and military trust between China and India. Some senior officials in India bear hostility toward China and regard China as the biggest threat," Zhao Gancheng, director of South Asia Studies at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, told the Global Times on Monday.

The Times of India reported on Monday that the Indian government plans to deploy 15 battalions to the country's two important border forces to fortify defense along the strategic frontiers with Pakistan, Bangladesh and China.

China should stay alert and make preparations for possible disputes like the Doklam one as India is strengthening its military deployment in the border area, Zhao said.

Indian Army Chief Gen Bipin Rawat told a press conference on Friday that China was exerting pressure on India along the border, but asserted that the Indian Army is fully capable of dealing with any security challenge on the northern frontier. He said that India would focus on the northern border.

A public WeChat account affiliated with the People's Daily said in a Sunday article that Rawat's remarks revealed that India deliberately trespassed the border in June 2017 and had prepared for possible military clashes with China.

"The Doklam area belongs to China. The Sikkim section of the China-India boundary was delimited China will continue to exert its rights in the Doklam area and firmly safeguard territorial sovereignty," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang told a daily briefing on Monday.

"We asked the Indian military to learn their lessons and abide by the boundary treaty in an effort to safeguard the peace and stability in the border areas and create a good atmosphere for developing bilateral ties," Lu said.
Editor's note: This blog post is a collaboration between an image processing enthusiast (Damia Bouic) and three professional scientists (Thomas Widemann, Emmanuel Marcq, and Colin Wilson). Bouic has dived into a data set and processed images, and Widemann, Marcq, and Wilson have interpreted them. In the blog post below, the scientists' words are set off in block quotes preceded by "WMW"; the rest of the text and all the images are Damia's work. --ESL

Akatsuki (also known as PLANET-C and Venus Climate Orbiter) is a Japanese mission that launched almost eight years ago, in 2010. It missed its first attempt to orbit Venus on December 7, 2010 due to the failure of its orbital insertion rocket. It was only on December 7, 2015, after several years of wandering around the Sun, that Akatsuki succeeded in placing itself in orbit around the enigmatic planet. Even though the new orbit of Akatsuki is distant and highly elongated, a large portion of the original science objectives may still be achieved.

That's Akatsuki's story. I was not very interested in this mission until one day when curiosity took me to its website, where I found the archival images from the mission. I thought it might be nice to try to process some images, just to see what happened. I am not disappointed with the result, which I present to you below.
Detective Mike Doty (top left), Sgt. Buddy Brown (top right), Sgt. Randy Clinton (bottom left), and Sgt. Kyle Cummings (bottom right) (Photo: York County Sheriff's Office)

Addressing local media this afternoon York County (SC) Sheriff Kevin Tolson said one of his detectives is "hanging on to life" after an early morning ambush that wounded two other law enforcement officers. A York County SO K-9 handler was also shot earlier during the incident.

Tolson said Det. Mike Doty was "very critically" wounded during a 3:31 a.m. gunfight with the suspect. He addressed the public, saying, "We need your continued prayers." He added that York County law enforcement appreciated the outpouring of support from the community.

Two other law enforcement officers were wounded in the gunfight between the suspect, Christian Thomas McCall, and York County Multi-Jurisdictional SWAT. One of the wounded SWAT operators was York County SO Sgt. Buddy Brown. Tolson said Brown was out of surgery and expected to recover. Another wounded SWAT operator was identified by Chief Andy Robinson of the York (SC) Police Department as York PD Sgt. Kyle Cummings. Cummings' wounds were described as non-life-threatening.

A fourth officer wounded in the incident was identified as Sgt. Randy Clinton of the York County SO. A K-9 handler who was involved in the initial manhunt for the suspect, Clinton was shot around 1 a.m. and rushed to a local hospital by a fellow deputy. His wound was characterized as non-life-threatening.

The incident began with deputies responding to a domestic violence call around 10 p.m. Monday night. Before officers arrived, suspect Christian Thomas McCall had escaped into the surrounding woods. Sheriff's K-9 units and a South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) helicopter were called in to search for the suspect. The helicopter was reportedly hit by ground fire from a rifle during the manhunt. The crew was not injured.

McCall, 47, was shot and taken into custody during the gunfight with York County SWAT. His medical condition was not released.

He was reportedly assaulting a woman when law enforcement was called to the home. Sheriff Tolson said his deputies had been called to the address previously in 2015. In that incident, McCall was reportedly the victim.
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Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin fought back on Monday, telling Donald Trump to release any tapes that the White House may have from the infamous meeting in which the president referred to brown-skinned nations as shithole countries.

Earlier today, Trump attacked the Democratic senator, calling him Senator Dicky Durbin and saying he totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting.

Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting. Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 15, 2018

Sen. Durbin was having none of it, saying if Trump truly feels his comments are being misrepresented then he should release any existing recordings from the Oval Office meeting.

I want to just call on the White House right now, release whatever you have, the Democrat said earlier today. If they dont have it, so be it.

Durbin said he stands by his claim that Trump did, in fact, make the racist shithole countries comment and that if the White House cant take the backlash, they should find another line of work.

If you dont have a tough skin, this is not a good business to get into, Durbin said. I know what happened. I stand behind every word that I said in terms of that meeting.

Video:

Sen Durbin this morning stands by his previous comments about what Pres Trump said in DACA meeting pic.twitter.com/AAgCEfBCJW  Tony Arnold (@tonyjarnold) January 15, 2018

The public is likely to brush off Trumps claims that he never made the offensive remarks during the meeting. After all, this is a man who has made more than 2,000 false or misleading claims in just 355 days in the Oval Office, according to the Washington Post.

Add his unprecedented lies to his well-documented history of racist rhetoric, and its clear that Trump calling African nations shithole countries is the least surprising things hes ever done.

Trumps half-hearted Twitter denials are fooling nobody, certainly not a U.S. senator who was in the room when he made the comments.
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Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison said whether Donald Trump made the shithole countries comment in an Oval Office meeting doesnt matter. Whats important is that this president has a long history of racism and the fact that these views are now living in the White House is endangering the country.

The Democratic congressman said, Weve all got to step up and deal with Trumps bigotry.

Video:

Keith Ellison Calls Trumps Blatant Racism A Danger To The American People #inners pic.twitter.com/0dbOexC06P  Sean Colarossi (@SeanColarossi) January 16, 2018

Ellison said:

The point is that Donald Trump has a long history of racism. And whether he said shithole or shithouse, he has deprecated people and people of color, people who are Muslim people who are Mexican. He has done it for literally years. And so the real question for me is not house or hole. The question is what are we going to do about it. The chief executive of the United States, the commander in chief has racist ideas about America and this country, and the American people, all 320 million of us, better figure out what the do about it. Because if somebody is just some regular person who holds his attitudes, maybe it doesnt make that much of a difference. But this guy is a commander in chief. He controls the largest military economy and surveillance in the world. And so his racism is dangerous to people. And weve all got to step up and deal with that.

While a bipartisan group of senators claims that Trump did, in fact, make the widely reported racist Oval Office comments last week, some Republicans have rushed to protect the president, saying his remarks are being misrepresented or that they dont recall what he said.

But the argument over the infamous DACA meeting is missing the point that Trump has a long history of racism that he has taken with him into the White House. Its not just harmless rhetoric anymore; its now being used to shape actual policy.

As Ellison said on Monday, the American people need to step up and combat the behavior of this hateful and dangerously incompetent commander-in-chief. That starts by removing GOP members of Congress who continue to bow to Trump and replacing them with Democrats who will hold the president accountable.
DAMASCUS, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian government is concerned that the latest U.S. move to form a new army in northern Syria aims to fragment the country.

On Sunday, reports cited the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition as saying that the U.S. is working to form a 30,000-strong border security force, which will be under the command of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurds, Arabs, and Assyrians supported by the U.S. in northern Syria.

The force will be deployed in northeastern Syria along the border with both Turkey and Iraq, a move that came after the SDF captured the northern city of Raqqa from the Islamic State (IS). Raqqa was the de facto capital of the terror group.

The SDF also captured other areas from IS in the northern countryside of Deir al-Zour late last year to consolidate its positions near the Iraqi border.

The situation in northern Syria and the growing influence of the Kurdish militias have raised the ire of the Syrian government, which has for long accused Washington of playing a destructive role in Syria.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry slammed the decision on Monday, saying the U.S. bid to form an armed militia in northern Syria is "a flagrant violation of Syria's sovereignty."

The U.S. declaration "constitutes a flagrant aggression on the unity and sovereignty of Syria and a violation of the international law," the ministry said, vowing Syrian government's resolve to end the U.S. presence in the war-torn country.

"The U.S. action comes in the framework of its destructive policy in the region to fragment the countries and spur tensions to hinder any solution to the crisis," the ministry charged.

Meanwhile, the ministry warned that it will regard any Syrian citizen taking part in this U.S.-backed militia as a "traitor" and will be dealt with accordingly.

The ministry denounced the new U.S. move as a "renewed conspiracy" that will be defeated by the Syrian army, which will end any form of the presence of the U.S. and its tools in Syria.

Meanwhile, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad told the pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV that his country is determined to preserve Syria's unity, while slamming the U.S. tactics for damaging global stability.

Russia, Syrian government's main international ally, also expressed fears that the U.S. is "pursuing a policy to cut Syria into several pieces."

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday that the U.S. does not intend to preserve Syria's sovereignty, accusing Washington of seeking to create a Kurdish-controlled entity along the Turkish and Iraqi border zones.

"The U.S. actions that we have been observing indicate that the U.S. does not want to keep Syria as a state in its current borders ... The U.S. wants to help the Syrian Democratic Forces to set up some border security zones," Lavrov said.

For its part, Turkey, the main backer of the opposition group and staunch opposer to the Kurdish forces in Syria, also slammed the U.S. decision as Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the U.S. of forming a "terror army."

"Our mission is to strangle it before it's even born," Erdogan said of the border force.

Erdogan's government has for long opposed the growing influence of the Kurdish forces along its border in northern Syria, fearing that any separatist move could inspire Turkey's 14 million Kurds.

Now, the U.S.-backed fighters, the Russia-backed Syrian forces, and the Turkey-backed rebels are racing to achieve territorial gains in northeastern Syria following the near defeat of IS.

The SDF fights IS in the northern countryside of Deir al-Zour, while the Syrian army is fighting the Turkey-backed rebels in the northern province of Idlib.

The Turkey-backed rebels are trying to foil the advance of the Syrian army while bracing to fight against the Kurdish groups as well.

So the U.S. decision further flames the situation in northern Syria rather than helping to resolve the conflict.

Also Monday, Kurdish activists said the U.S. has provided the SDF in the Afreen region in northern Syria with anti-aircraft missiles.

A report by the War Media, the media wing of the Syrian army, said the U.S. has stipulated that Kurds should only use these weapons in case of an attack on Afreen area, which is regarded as target of an imminent Turkish military campaign.

The U.S. has been carrying out military operations in Syria since 2014, under the name of fighting against the IS militants.

The SDF captured Raqqa late last year, and the Syrian army captured the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, another IS bastion almost in the same time.

However, the Syrian government said Raqqa is still occupied by the U.S. and its fighters on the ground, refusing to acknowledge its liberation from IS.

Mekdad charged in a recent interview that the Kurdish groups in Syria were the new form of IS, in another escalation between both sides.
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Trump called the White House a dump, and African countries shitholes, but it was his private club Mar-a-Lago that was cited for 15 code violations that pose a serious threat to public health and safety.

The Miami Herald reported:

Trumps club, located on a beachfront property where the historic main house was built in the 1920s for cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, was cited Nov. 8 for two violations deemed high priority: the lack of smoke detectors capable of alerting the hearing impaired through flashing bright lights; and slabs of concrete missing from a staircase, exposing steel rebar that could cause someone to fall.

High priority lodging violations are those which could pose a direct or significant threat to the public health, safety, or welfare, the inspection code reads.

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The November inspections of the clubs two main kitchens, meanwhile, yielded a total 15 violations.



These are the types of violations that indicate that a business is poorly run with little attention paid to the law and details. In other words, it is a typical Donald Trump operation. Trump once complained to friends that the White House is a dump, but maybe the problem is that the White House is too well maintained for Trumps tastes.

Apparently, Trump prefers to stay in places with dangerous food standards and hazardous conditions that could potentially kill him. Trump has spent decades trying to pass off his corner-cutting junk as high quality.

Mar-a-Lago is no different than the Trump presidency. Beneath a self-aggrandized exterior is crumbling structure that it a danger to anyone who sets foot inside of it.
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Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) was asked by reporters if Trump was racist. His emotional response should inspire those who believe in decency and equality to fight on.

Video:

Booker was asked if the President is a racist, and he went off.

Sen. Booker said, I think the presidents words on a consistent basis have been bigoted and discriminatory towards others. I dont want to judge his heart. I cant look into his soul. But when the president of the United States makes statements like did from the oval office, those statements as I said in my testimony, dont just disappear in the air like mist. They become feted, they fester and they explode. They give others license to hate, to reflect that kind of ignorance and bigotry. And we have a real tangible problem in this country with hatred and bigotry. Often manifested in outrageous acts of violence. Since 9/11, the majority of the attacks in this country have been right-wing extremist groups who often preach white supremacy and we have a president of the United States that cant even condemn it. That does not feel a sense of moral outrage, that isnt hurt, and that is reflecting and underlining and strengthening those sentiments by his own. By his own. Every American, every citizen has dignity and worth and value, no matter where theyve come from, no matter what their religion. No matter what their race and their ethnicity. But he seems to think that the countries of origins of some Americans are less worthy than the countries of origins of others.

Booker also had strong words for the DHS Secretary who lied to Congress to protect Trump:

Sen. Booker (D-NJ) said, Let us rejoice in who we are, but we have a president who doesnt even seem to understand our own history of our country. So this hearing was so troubling to me. That somebody would sit there under oath and say that she doesnt recall the words of the president of the United States of America. That she just doesnt happen to remember. And I believe that that kind of complicity, that kind of  as King would say, sincere ignorance and conscientious absentmindedness, that that is  its worse than the person who says the bad things. As King said, what we have to repent for is not just the vitriolic words and violent actions of bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people. And so here in this country, we know the history of what happens when bystanders stand by and do nothing. Or when people just follow orders, like Im sure she got, to try to nuance her testimony to not answer direct questions from United States senators. We know what happens when people follow orders or just stand by while bigotry, hatred, and that kind of language is used.

When Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen lied under oath to a Senate committee to protect Trump; she sent the message that this White House will commit crimes to protect their president. Facts are dead. The racist president must be protected at all costs.

Sen. Booker is correct. We have seen this story before in our own country. Members of the Nixon administration lied to Congress to protect their president, and we all know how well that turned out for them, but this isnt about a lie. This is about a President Of The United States who is enabling and encouraging bigotry, hatred, and violence.

Trump and his administration might be able to get away with this behavior with their fellow Republicans in charge, but if Democrats take back all or part of Congress, the hammer will drop on this White Houe.
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According to Gallups latest poll, Trump is set to end his first year in office with the lowest approval rating of any POTUS since the approval of presidents began getting tracked. Presently, only 39% approve of Trumps performance, while 57% outright disapprove.

Before this low point, Bill Clinton held the record for the lowest first-year approval rating with 49%  still a whopping 10 points higher than Trumps.

Since voters tend to be more forgiving of presidents during the beginning of their administrations while theyre still adjusting to the role, this makes Trumps extreme unpopularity even more embarrassing than it would normally be.

And the new low hasnt come suddenly  Trumps weekly numbers have been consistently below 40%, and hes spent more time under that mark than any of his predecessors.

Trump, whos proven to be obsessed with having the approval of the media and the public, has been in consistent denial about his low popularity. In August, he retweeted a Twitter poll on whether he or Barack Obama made a better president showing him in the lead; in December, he attempted to downplay reports of his low ratings by claiming that he had the same level of popularity Obama had had at that point of his presidency.

He wrote, While the Fake News loves to talk about my so-called low approval rating, @foxandfriends just showed that my rating on Dec. 28, 2017, was approximately the same as President Obama on Dec. 28, 2009, which was 47%and this despite massive negative Trump coverage & Russia hoax!

The poll he referenced, conducted by the typically right-leaning Rasmussen Reports, was in fact an outlier among other polls; Obamas overall approval rating was nearly four points higher than Trumps.

This is the latest sign that Trump will likely not last eight, if four, years in office.
When it comes to recuperating after an illness or dealing with lifes difficulties, sometimes all the medicine in the world isnt complete without a helping handor rather, a helping paw.

According to UCLA Health, therapy animals can help lower patients blood pressure, reduce the amount of necessary medication, lower anxiety, increase mental stimulation, and even diminish overall physical pain.

Rochesters Mayo Clinic offers patients the chance to interact with therapy dogs through Caring Canines , a volunteer-based program that currently includes 34 dogs and their owners. The dogs range from terriers to pit bulls to German shepherds and more. They make 30 to 40 hospital visits a day, visiting everywhere from the pediatric ward to outpatient waiting rooms, and even to employee offices.

"Its amazing to see how many patients connect with the dogs and how meaningful it is," said Jessica Smidt, who coordinates the program. "There are multiple people daily who cry and say that seeing the dog in the hospital was the best part of their day. Even people who arent dog lovers find value in the visits."

Minnesota State University, Mankato is another place that has seen the value of therapy animals. For several years, the campus has hosted therapy dogs during finals week as a way to help students cope with stress. According to Lenny Koupal, who works in MSUs Office of Student Affairs, there was such a great response to these visits that they expanded to monthly Hound Hugs and Kanine Kisses events. The 2017 fall semester opener drew 300 students to interact with five dogs, which are provided and overseen by the Mankato Chapter of Therapy Dogs International.

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"Some instructors are offering class assignments for students to attend and journal their experiences," Koupal said. "Comments shared by students express the beneficial need for such therapeutic animal sessions."

While these specific programs focus on dogs, there are many other types of therapy animals. North Star Therapy Animals , which is based out of St. Louis Park, Minn., works with more than 150 animals, including rabbits, hamsters, cats, dogs, and even horses.

Patti Anderson, one of the founding members of North Star Therapy Animals, explained that the group decided to branch out into different species since some people are uncomfortable around dogs.

"[Some] kids who are afraid of dogs, or allergic to dogs, etc. it really opened up opportunities for those children," Anderson said, adding that she takes her own guinea pigs to visit patients at the Minnesota Childrens Hospital. "The kids just really respond well to them. You see dogs everywhere, but you dont usually walk in with a guinea pig."

The Rochester Public Library also offers people a chance to connect with a therapy animal, a cat named Timba, with its Cafe Fuzz program for teens. "The teens really love having the chance to hang out with the animals  some do and some dont have pets at home, but animals are neutral and non-judgmental and they all have lots of love to give, so it can be a really great way for them to relax or relieve stresses from school or home for an hour," says Sarah Joynt, teen librarian at the library.

Mankato resident Karen Wright knows firsthand the power of animal therapy, thanks to her Bombay cat, Cleo. After hearing about how Bombays can be a soothing influence on people with developmental disorders, Wright purchased Cleo as a companion for her 13-year-old son, Grant, who has autism. While Cleo isnt officially a registered therapy animal, Wright said she has done wonders for Grant from the first time he held her.

"Grant has a lot of anxiety, [but] it was like all his anxieties melted away," she said. "It was amazing."

Wright said they bring Cleo to Grants class at the beginning of the school year as a way for him to help explain his autism to classmates.

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"It helps the kids understand him better," Wright said. "Thats a way hes able to express himself to the kids, because theres an animal there and they get it. Its been a real blessing to have the cat there to help his classmates understand."
Dear Most Learned: I read in the Today in History column over the weekend that the principal of Rochester Junior High School was helping recruit young women into the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II. But I was more thrown by her name, Belva Snodgrass. It seems made up.  Dean of Students Ed Rooney

First off, thanks for the Ferris Bueller reference. Life moves pretty fast, but the Answer Man is here to make sure you don't miss it.

There's no doubt Miss Snodgrass had a unique name. And since the A-Man never takes a "day off," I will pass along this tidbit: Belva herself recognized her name's uniqueness.

In 1982, when there was a push to name Rochester's new middle school after Snodgrass, she intervened, saying "No child wants to attend a school named Snodgrass." (The board went with Willow Creek instead, to the audible sigh of legions of teens and tweens.)

But, based on her accomplishments in Rochester Public Schools, Snodgrass made a name for herself.

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Snodgrass came to Rochester as a teacher in 1922 and joined the administration staff in 1925 as principal of Rochester's junior and senior high schools. In 1940, the school board reorganized the administration and named her principal of the junior high school. The board also created the new position of senior high school principal and expressed hope  and this is the 1940 school board members talking here  the new position would be filled by a man.

Snodgrass was a champion of education for both boys and girls. She brought the Girl Scouts to Rochester in 1927, organizing troops for high school juniors and seniors. She gave talks to high school girls on maintaining proper balance in extra-curricular and outside activities.

In 1939, she helped establish the "big sister" program that paired new students at Rochester High School with older girls who would help the new students adjust.

She was known for persuading drop-outs to return to school and bought graduation suits for boys whose families couldn't afford them.

She also conducted surveys of graduates, sometimes years after they'd left school, in order to gauge the district's success. In 1940, she surveyed the class of 1939 and found that 112 students, 39 percent of the class, had gone on to study in college.

But many who attended her school remember her as a stern disciplinarian. Boys were required to wear ties. Students at school dances were required to dance slightly apart.

In 1935, the city was having such a problem with vandalism on Halloween, that the city council passed a resolution requiring parental responsibility for their children on Halloween. Police Chief Claude said any children caught destroying property would be held at the police station.

Snodgrass laid down the law to the students, saying, "The idea that Halloween is a time to insult your neighbors and friends cannot be tolerated."

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She planned a big Halloween party at the school and required total attendance. The vandalism stopped.

In addition to being a leader in the schools, Snodgrass was also a leader in the community. In 1936, she was elected treasurer of the newly formed Rochester Minnesota Kennel Club. In 1954, Rochester Mayor Claude McQuillan placed Snodgrass on the police civil service commission, the first appointment of a woman.

She retired from the school system in 1956.

In 1971, Mayor Dewey Day proclaimed Oct. 20, 1971, Belva Snodgrass Day, and the community honored her with a party given by 300 former students.

In 1975, she returned to her hometown of Indianapolis. She died there on May 1, 1983. She was 92.
STEWARTVILLE  Minnesota Adult & Teen Challenge and Ironwood Springs Christian Ranch have joined together to create a new outdoor fundraising event that will support the work of both organizations.

The Inaugural Iron Challenge will be held beginning with registration at 9:45 a.m. Feb. 24 at Ironwood Springs Christian Ranch, 7291 County Road 6 SW in Stewartville. The event will include two races, a three-quarter-mile course for the fat-tire bike race and a 4K run through the woods and over the hills at Ironwood Springs.

There will be three categories for the bike race, with each level taking more laps on the course.

In addition to the races, there will be snow shoeing, snow tubing and a sleigh ride available. A bonfire and hot chocolate will help keep racers and spectators warm.

Entry fees are $50 for the bike race and $25 for the 4K run, and 100 percent of the proceeds go to the organizations. For more information, visit www.ironchallengemn.org .
The Rochester Downtown Alliance will observe National Popcorn Day by providing downtown employees with a free bag of Carroll's Corn popcorn.

The popcorn will be available at two locations from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday while supplies last. The locations are:

 On the subway level, outside Associated Bank, 101 First Ave. SW.

 Shops at University Square, 111 S. Broadway, on the first floor by the escalator.

For more details, updates, and information, visit: Downtownrochestermn.com/do/popcornday.
A local man was injured Monday afternoon after two cars collided on the snow-covered U.S. Highway 52.

Gregory Neil Bremseth, 45, of Preston, was traveling northbound just south of Rochester at 1:30 p.m. when Kaitlyn Marie Martell, 28, of Clear Lake, lost control of her vehicle. The ensuing collision caused both vehicles to go off the road and into the median, according to Minnesota State Patrol's incident report.

Bremseth suffered non-life threatening injuries and was transported to Mayo Clinic HospitalSaint Marys for medical care. Martell was not injured.
RED WING  The League of Women Voters-Red Wing will host discussion on money in politics Jan. 25 at the Red Wing Public Library.

Campaign finance activist Richard Painter to speak as part of the LWV's yearlong exploration into the topic of "Money in Politics  and Government" beginning at 7 p.m. that evening in the Foot Room at the library. Painter served as chief ethics advisor to President George W. Bush, and has appeared on numerous national political talk shows. He has also written op-eds for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other publications.

He currently serves as the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota School of Law.

"We are thrilled that Professor Painter has agreed to speak here in Red Wing," said League Co-Chair Kathy Bibus. "During these interesting political times, we can all benefit from hearing all points of view on such a complicated issue. We are looking forward to a lively debate."

The event, titled "Taxation Only With Representation: the Urgent Case for Campaign Finance Reform," is free and open to the public.
ALGIERS, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Algerian Defense Ministry on Monday said counterterrorism troops seized a batch of war weapons on the border with Mali.

The troops seized ten S-5KO rockets in the southernmost town of Bordj Badji Mokhtar along the borderline with Mali on Monday, the ministry said.

In the eastern Skikda province, army troops also destroyed a home-made bomb and discovered 7 kilograms of chemicals used in making explosives.

Algeria faces ongoing terrorist threats as it is located in a region plagued by unprecedented security and political instability.

Tens of thousands of the country's troops are deployed on eastern and southern border to thwart potential intrusion of militants and arms, amid instability reigning in Mali and civil war hitting Libya.
LYLE  A semi tractor-trailer smashed into the Lyle Public School building Tuesday morning in an incident that injured two people, according to Lyle Superintendent Bryan Boysen.

The crash forced the evacuation of the building, where smoke and dust could be seen immediately after the crash, Boysen said. Classes at the school were canceled for the day and for Wednesday as well.

Sgt. Troy Christianson with the Minnesota State Patrol said the crash occurred during first period at about 8:30 a.m. and began when a 2012 Chevy Malibu driven by Tina Corporon, 49, of Austin, was stopped on Minnesota Highway 218 to turn left onto Pershing Avenue. A 2009 Peterbilt semi tractor-trailer driven by Jeffrey Kohls, 52, of Plato, was also heading south on Highway 218. Kohls was unable to stop and stuck the rear passenger side of the car, pushing it into a ditch.

"After that collision, (Kohls) lost control, went into the ditch and went across and into the school," Christianson said. "The semi did go into the building. The whole cab is in the building."

The cab of the truck crashed through the outer wall, leaving the trailer sticking out of the building. A long line of tire and skid marks could be seen across the lawn of the school grounds, tracing all the way back through the ditch and to the highway.

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According to the state patrol, Corporon was not injured in the crash, but her passenger, Ivy Corporon, 16, of Austin, was transported to Mayo Clinic Health Systems-Austin with non-life threatening injuries.

"We had one student injured in the classroom, another injured in her car with her mother," said Boysen. While the injuries were not described as life threatening, there were head and neck injuries. "It's a very traumatizing event."

Boysen said there was no indication of criminal activity. It was simply part of an accident, he said.

The crash activated the fire alarm and the sprinkler system. Boysen said he exited his office to see smoke and dust coming from the direction of the crash. The truck struck the building between two classrooms.

"The semi destroyed the art room and another adjacent classroom," he said.

"The staff handled it like a fire alarm evacuation drill," he said. "Instead of standing around in 20-below weather, we all came to  Our Saviors (Lutheran) Church. Pastor Woyen did an exceptional job helping us out and providing shelter for us."

At the church, many students could be seen without their coats. Boysen said the evacuation did not allow students to get their personal belongings.

Parents were alerted about the crash via text messages through the Infinite Campus system, he said.

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By Tuesday afternoon, work had already begun to get a cost estimate on repairs and board up the hole so classes could resume as soon as possible, he said.
Worker stabbed to death at senior living facility in Crosby

CROSBY  Authorities have a suspect in custody in the weekend stabbing death of a worker at a senior living facility in Crosby.

Police say the suspect is a male relative of the female victim. Neither person was immediately identified.

The incident at the Heartwood Senior Living facility in the Crow Wing County town of about 2,400 people happened about 8 a.m. Saturday. The suspect was arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder.

The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is assisting Crosby police in the investigation.

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Woman's death marks 3rd Alexandria fire fatality this month

ALEXANDRIA  Officials say a 19-year-old woman has died in a fire in Alexandria, the third fire fatality in the city this month.

Alexandria Fire Chief Jeff Karrow said that fire broke out in a multiple-dwelling residence Monday morning. The building was on fire when officers and deputies arrived.

The name of the victim has not been released. The fire remains under investigation.

The fatality follows the deaths of two people in a mobile home fire on Jan. 5. Karrow says before that there had not been a fire fatality in the city in 15 years.

Minnesota State Fairgrounds slated for $11.1 million upgrade

MINNEAPOLIS  The Minnesota State Fairgrounds is getting an $11.1 million face-lift.

The State Fair's board of managers on Sunday approved $7.2 million in capital improvements and $3.8 million in maintenance projects for the coming year.

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The work will include construction of a new restroom and new pet exhibition area, improvements to the livestock complex and upgrades to infrastructure.

The projects will be funded through State Fair operating revenue and grants from the Minnesota State Fair Foundation.

The board also decided to keep admission prices the same last year. The 2018 fair will be held Aug. 23 through Sept. 3.

Minnesota farmers produce record sugar beet crop in 2017

MINNEAPOLIS  Minnesota farmers produced slightly smaller corn and soybean crops last year than in 2016, but they produced a record sugar beet crop.

The Agriculture Department reports Minnesota's sugar beet crop at 12.5 million tons, up slightly from the previous record in 2016. Farmers harvested fewer acres but had a record average yield.

Soybean production in the state was down 2 percent and grain corn production was down 4 percent. Alfalfa hay and other hay production also was down, along with sunflowers and corn for silage.
Daniel Horowitz reports on a new study by criminologist John Lott. It finds that illegal aliens commit crimes at a disproportionate rate relative to their share of the population.

Lotts study is based on data from the state of Arizona. His team examined data on all prisoners who entered the Arizona state prison from January 1985 through June 2017.

Of particular interest, given the current debate over DACA, is this finding:

While undocumented immigrants from 15 to 35 years of age make up slightly over 2 percent of the Arizona population, they make up almost 8 percent of the prison population. Even after adjusting for the fact that young people commit crime at higher rates, young undocumented immigrants commit crime at twice the rate of young U.S. citizens. These undocumented immigrants also tend to commit more serious crimes.

Thus, Lott observes:

Unfortunately, if the goal of DACA is to give citizenship to a particularly law-abiding group of undocumented immigrants, it is accomplishing the opposite of what was intended. DACA age eligible undocumented immigrants are 250% more likely to be convicted of crimes than their share of the population. Those too old for DACA status are convicted at a relatively low rate (45.7% more than their share of the Arizona population.

What about the illegal immigrant population as a whole? Lott found they are more likely than non-illegals to be convicted of serious violent crimes: 163 percent more likely for first-degree murder; 168 percent more likely for second-degree murder; and 189.6 percent more likely for manslaughter.

In addition, illegal immigrants in Arizona are more likely than non-illegals to commit sexual offenses against minors, sexual assault, drunk driving, kidnapping, and armed robbery, according to Lotts study.

DACA advocates note that dreamers with criminal records will not receive amnesty. But many crimes do not result in arrest and conviction, and it may very well be that a disproportionate share of crimes committed by illegal immigrants within their communities go unreported, partly because the victims sometimes are here illegally. Thus, it matters for the current DACA debate if the Dreamer-age population is particularly prone to criminality.

Moreover, Horowitz points out that Obamas DACA program tried to avoid scrutinizing juvenile records. Of the current DACA-fix bills, only Rep. Goodlattes would open up juvenile records.

This state of affairs renders worrisome another of Lotts findings. Illegal immigrant criminals tend to go to jail at an earlier age than non-immigrant criminals, and therefore are released at a younger age (despite having committed more serious crimes).

Lotts general findings are consistent with data released by the Department of Justice showing that of those convicted of non-immigration federal crimes between 2011 and 2016, 21.4 percent were not U.S. citizens. By comparison, non-citizens are 8.4 percent of the adult population.

Milton Friedman once said of John Lott, he has few equals as a perceptive analyst of controversial public policy issues. Congress should take Lotts study into account as it considers what to do about the DACA population.
Today being Martin Luther Kings birthday, I took time off from thinking about the dossier/s***thole and read an essay written for the Heritage Foundation by Peter C. Myers: The Limits and Dangers of Civil Disobedience: The Case of Martin Luther King, Jr. I recommend it.

Myers argues:

(1) Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived. (2) American civil disobedience in the theory and practice of Martin Luther King, is mainlybut not perfectlyin accord with those founding principles. (3) As King rightly understood, civil disobedience may only be undertaken: (a) for the right reasons; (b) in the right spirit; and (c) by the right people. (4) Kings notion of civil disobedience in the later phase of his career diverges significantly from the relatively moderate argument he presented in his earlier, more successful phase.

In the later phase of his career, King radicalized his theory of civil disobedience. Previously, he had stipulated that civil disobedience needed to be for reasons clearly supported by the natural law philosophy exemplified in the U.S. constitutional tradition. Later, he argued that it should be employed not just to overturn unjust laws, but to bring about socioeconomic equality across lines of class and color. This imperative finds no support in the U.S. constitutional tradition.

Moreover, civil disobedience, though it still had to be non-violent, no longer needed to be demonstrative or persuasive in character. Instead, it should be be disruptive and coercive, e.g., blocking traffic and thereby infringing on a right of access to a public road. This would entail violating not merely unjust laws, but also just laws ones that facilitate normal functioning.

In addition, and not surprisingly given the radicalized form of civil disobedience he was now advocating, King no longer relied mainly on a population of churchgoers imbued with a Christian ethic of love and service. He decided to recruit three thousand of the poorest citizens from various urban and rural areas to participate in a Poor Peoples March on Washington.

Might this cohort overlap with urban rioters who had torched Newark, Watts, Detroit, etc? Yes. But, says Myers, King attempted to find even in the riots themselves support for his contention that the disaffected urban poor constituted a promising new class of potential pilgrims to nonviolence. Among the most striking features of the city riots, he argued, was that the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people.

King had moved the goals posts.

Today, the portion of the left that does not embrace violence outright wants to use Kings later goal posts, and to move them some more.

Myers warns:

Recent protesters have been generally heedless of the obligation to compose well-reasoned, empirically careful, rights-based arguments to support the justice of their cause, and their protests have consisted largely in efforts at disruption and coercion rather than persuasion. Moreover, the most prominent eruptions in the past decade of what supporters persist in calling civil disobedience, including the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the anti-Trump Resistance, have in fact featured a volatile mixture of acts of nonviolent and violent disobedience. Those two facts are related: The disruptive form of disobedience, even if it qualifies as civil at the outset, is likely to issue in acts of uncivil or violent disobedience, because by endorsing acts of coercion and rights violation, it undermines the rationale for a principled commitment to civility or nonviolence. . . . In sum, at the present moment in American public life, the practice of purportedly civil disobedience is becoming increasingly normalized even as its proper basis, tactics, and objectives are subject to increasing confusion. Such a condition poses a clear danger to the rule of law.

Kings Letter from Birmingham Jail, the centerpiece of his original theory of civil disobedience, is a potential antidote. Myers believes that reading it, with particular attention to the conservative dimension of his argument, might serve to initiate a renewed and enhanced public appreciation of the rule of law, both of its basis and its centrality to the health of Americas constitutional republic.

This is something devoutly to be wished on Martin Luther Kings birthday.
January is School Board Recognition Month and Crestwood School District is joining 541 local and 56 intermediate school districts across the state to thank these community volunteers for their untiring dedication to public education.

Serving on a school board has been described as the toughest volunteer job in America. Yet Michigans public school board members dedicate countless personal hours to attending meetings, school functions, and hours of preparation for the decisions they make, Crestwood Supt. Laurine VanValkenburg said. On top of that, many pursue their own professional development to stay on top of the ever-changing education landscape. Collectively, school board members in Michigan have spent more than 7,500 hours attending training and professional development. Theyre dedicated individuals who are committed to the continuing success of our schools and students.

Its an exciting and challenging time in public education. School board members in Crestwood School District develop policies and make tough decisions that help shape the future of our education system. They bear responsibility and oversight for an annual budget of more than $41 million, 4,142 students, 436 employees and six buildings.

We proudly join educators and community members in saluting these education advocates as they provide vision and leadership for student achievement, academic programs, district funding and school facilities, VanValkenburg said. They preserve the core of our democracy-public education.

The men and women serving Crestwood School District and their years of service are Colleen Krizanic, 20 years; Donna Ancinec, 17 years; Ed Garcia, 17 years; Lynne Senia, 17 years; Kevin Sauve, eight years; Sue Kaminsky, three years; and Nadia Berry, one year.
TEHRAN, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Iran's military destroyer Damavand crashed into wave breakers at a port in the Caspian Sea and two of its crew members are missing, Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.

A search operation is underway to find the two servicemen missing in the accident that happened on January 10, the report quoted army spokesperson General Shahin Taqikhani as saying.

Strong winds and a sea storm led to the crash, said Taqikhani.

Contrary to the initial reports about minor damages to the destroyer, the assessment teams have found out that the vessel has suffered serious damages and needs a complete overhaul, he said.

On Wednesday, Damavand destroyer crashed into wave breakers when it was docking at port in Iran's northern province of Gilan in stormy weather.

The 100-meter-long destroyer that weighs more than 1,300 tons officially joined the Navy's northern fleet in the Caspian Sea in March 2015.
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Barmer: Vedantas Cairn Oil and Gas- operating Indias largest onshore oil block in Rajasthan, is planning to invest INR 37,000 Crore to ramp up the crude production from prolific oil fields of Barmer. On Sunday, Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Mr. Dharmendra Pradhan inaugurated the Enhanced Oil Recovery program for Mangala-Bhagyam-Aishwarya (MBA) fields. The program will help in achieving the production target of 5 lakh barrels oil per day (bopd) from the Rajasthan assets.Production will go up to 3 lakh boepd based on the capital investment plan of Rs 12,000 Crore already initiated. The production will further go up to 5 lakh boepd with a full investment plan of over Rs 37,000 Crore over next few years.Soon after unveiling the stone at Central Polymer Facility at Barmer, the Union Minister interacted young engineers at the site and also with the group of lady petroleum engineers who are a symbol of diversity at this state of the art oil facility.Welcoming the Minister at the Mangala Processing Terminal, CEO, Cairn Oil and Gas Mr. Sudhir Mathur said that the company has proposed to double the output and MBA-EOR project will play a vital role in achieving the goal.Briefing about the EOR technology and the project that would be one of the largest polymer floods in the world, Chief Operating Officer Suniti Bhat said that the Mangala EOR project can deliver another 200 million barrels plus while Bhagyam and Aishwarya EOR can deliver nearly 60 million barrels in the next 12 years. These fields have successful polymer injection trials.It may be mentioned here that Cairn has planned the upgrade of Mangala Processing Terminal to handle 1.3 million barrels of liquid. In Mangala, the plan is to apply Alkaline Surfactant Polymer flood with the drilling of another 200 or more wells. For Bhagyam and Aishwarya, full field Polymer flood will be there in both the fields with nearly 70 additional wells.
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Many of us would not know about Fish-plate in Railways. .. a little definition how this word has been derivedA fish-plate is a metal or wooden plate that is bolted to the sides at the ends of two rails. Derived from the French word 'Fiche' - which means a Peg, or 'Fichier - which means to fasten, thus a fish-plate means a plate that fastens. In railway terminology, a fish-plate is a metal bar that is bolted to the ends of two rails to join them together in a track.It is true, in railways, if the quality of the fish-plate is poor, the caused consequences would be unimaginable. Many accidents have been attributed to Fish-plates. A story in leading national daily while reporting on recent rail accident of Indore-Patna Express, also attributed one of the causes of accident as corrosion of Fish-plates.Not just the Fish-plates, even the bolts need protection, protection from corrosion.Experts have estimated losses of almost 4 per cent of GDP per year on account of corrosion which may be avoided if the railway tracks are galvanized.International Zinc Association advocates, "Indian Railways requires corrosion-free tracks in case India is considering Bullet Trains. The entire change would not only be cost effective but India would also be the first country to initiate such step towards passengers safety. One of the significant aspects of railway track maintenance is the detection of corrosion and the replacement of corroded rails. The rails have a life of 800 gross million tons, which works to approximately 12-13 years under normal traffic conditions in India. Corrosion reduces the life of rail to nearly half its expected life.India's rail tracks, spanning 115,000 km, happen to be the world's third largest. The annual loss due to pre-replacement of corroded rails is huge about Rs 440 crore.Needless to mention the role of Zinc, to make the rails and fish-plates last longer Zinc coating is the keyLet no one say Fish-plates are indeed Fishy !!!Hindustan Zinc is Indias only and worlds leading Zinc-Lead-Silver Producer..Article by- Pavan Kaushik, Head  Corporate Communication, Hindustan Zinc
The People's Daily, the Communist Party of China (CPC) flagship newspaper, published an article Monday calling for efforts to grasp the historic opportunity facing China.

The article under the byline of Xuan Yan said China was facing a period in which the timeframes of the two centenary goals converged, and both dreams and hard work were needed to achieve the country's goals of creating a moderately prosperous society, modernization and building China into a "great modern socialist country."

The article said socialism with Chinese characteristics had blazed the trail for China's prosperity and the people's happiness, which had allowed scientific socialism to prosper.

Noting the problems facing the world, such as a "democratic deficit," "governance deficit," "development trap," wealth gap, terrorism and climate change, the article said "the drawbacks of capitalism-led political and economic systems are emerging; the global governance system is experiencing profound changes and a new international order is taking shape."

"The world needs China, as all humans are living in a community with a shared future," the article said. "That creates broad strategic room for our efforts to uphold peace and development and gain an advantage."

The article said China was at a historic period for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics to leap forward, for the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics to mature and for the world pattern to reshape.

"It is also a key period for the realizing of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and for the CPC and the Chinese people to carve out their career," it said.

"The historic opportunity is an all-round one, which refers to not only economic development but also the speeding up of science, technology and industrial revolution, the growing influence of Chinese culture and the increasing acknowledgement to the Chinese wisdom and Chinese approach," it said. "We are more confident, and more competent, than any time in history to grasp this opportunity."

The article noted that the banner of new thought had provided China a guide to take the opportunity, as the 19th CPC National Congress has enshrined Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as a guide for action.

It went on and said that China was contributing to the world on economic growth, trade, poverty alleviation, green development as well as development and governance.

"China has become an important source and stabilizer for world economic growth, as well as an important protector and advocate of world peace and development and human civilization progress," it said. "The development of China is rarely seen in the world and the explorations of the CPC are unprecedented."

It called for "down-to-earth efforts with no hesitation and improved competence to take the opportunity firmly."

The article said that now "everyone can live a wonderful life at stage of the times."

"We are fully aware of our responsibilities. We should resolutely support the core, faithfully follow the leader, use our courage and morale...and make strides toward a brighter future," it said.
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Steel has been used to make automobiles since the early 1900s but corrosion resistance features became standard in vehicles beginning in the early 1980s when Japanese cars gained entrance to the U.S. market. North American-made vehicles were having real rust problems that couldnt be fought merely with heavier, and more expensive, paint. By the mid-1980s, one really had to galvanize the whole car if wanted to issue warranties.By 1987, what became standard was a 10-year perforation and five-year cosmetic warranty from all the North American, European and Japanese automakers for vehicles sold in the North American market. That really put the burden on the steelmakers to ask, how are we going to galvanize cars? The first process adopted was electrogalvanizing(EG). So large-volume electroplating lines were built and they processed 20 million tons of steel per year through the early 1990s. However, the industry found this process expensive because of the amount of electricity required. At the time, EG was the only process approved for automotive quality. Everyone saw the Holy Grail was to hot dip galvanize automotive steels. It was already done for building panels and appliances. Getting that to be automotive quality was the key, and that happened by the mid-1990s.The annual consumption of zinc for autobodies today is roughly 120,000 metric tonnes. There is almost no galvanized steel on Chinese-made vehicles except for exports from China by Volkswagen AG, General Motors Co., and others. Thats 20 million cars in China not using galvanized steel.India is a huge and growing market for passenger vehicles, but galvanized steel is not used in auto manufacturing. Indias emerging market economies could bring 600,000 metric tons of zinc consumption per year. The need is to formulate standards for corrosion protection.
Question: Will you please consider reviewing other appliances? Less than two years ago I purchased all new appliances for my new kitchen. They were supposed to be good quality, but I think all of them are cheaply made and difficult to operate.  M.S., Bethel Park, Pennsylvania

Answer: When I reviewed appliances in the past it was because they were new or novel, such as the Panasonic Countertop Induction Oven. I dont know when I will review a major appliance again, but due to reader demand, appliances will be featured occasionally in the column now.

As I expected, the column featuring Speed Queen laundry equipment touched a nerve. I received quite a few emails about Speed Queen specifically and major appliances in general. The Speed Queen correspondence was overwhelmingly positive. Of the few critical emails, one reader who had one was not satisfied with its performance on delicates, saying the agitator does not swish enough  only two times per load. I ran a load of delicates to see for myself, and my own washer swished quite a few times before I got tired of watching it and moved on to other things. A few others suggested front-load washer problems with smells and mold can be minimized by leaving the washer and detergent doors open, and by not using too much detergent.

The remaining feedback was from people stating their intention to buy Speed Queen products, mail from other Speed Queen owners raving about their machines, and a lot of universally negative commentary about the appliance industry. One reader, J.F. of Golden Valley, Minnesota, lamented that he ditched a 34-year-old Maytag pair simply because he thought they were old, and then had what he called three of the worst possible washing machine purchase experiences on the planet, with the exception of the infamous exploding Samsungs. I am running, not walking, to buy a new Speed Queen. Dont even get me started about the new gas ranges.

A few readers asked if it is possible to get other types of appliances with Speed Queens old-school quality, reliability and longevity. I did some research online, and spoke with repair personnel as well as longtime industry veteran Rick Voss, of Voss Appliance in Pittsburgh. The general consensus is no, you cant. I was also advised that the more electronics and complexity in the appliance, the more likely it will break and the more expensive it will be to fix. If longevity is what you are after, you may be better off repairing older, simpler appliances in a lot of instances.

Soon I may be able to say more myself. Within a day of moving into my new home I replaced the early 1980s GE kitchen appliances  which all still worked perfectly  as part of a kitchen remodeling project. I chose a Frigidaire Gallery range based on the look, feel and positive reviews, then added a side-by-side Frigidaire Gallery refrigerator so the stainless finishes would match exactly. Both have worked reliably for five years now, though the icemakers poor design often dumps ice into the freezer compartment. (How did that make it past product testing?) I also bought a Bosch dishwasher that has been reliable, though I miss the perfect drying of a heating element and a food grinder so I dont have a filter to clean. These are minor quibbles, and Rick did complement the Bosch dishwashers as, a solid product that has been out for a while.

Keep those emails coming, and I look forward to providing more appliance coverage soon.
TRENTON  Former Wall Street executive Phil Murphy replaced Chris Christie as New Jerseys governor Tuesday, taking the oath on the same Bible that President John F. Kennedy was sworn on as he promised to take an aggressive approach against President Donald Trump.

Atlantic City officials, meanwhile, hope Murphy and his administration will take a less aggressive approach in the city with the state takeover.

Theres a lot more work that has to be done, Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam said. But I believe at some point well find some middle ground and Im almost sure it wont be the same level of authority that currently exists.

Murphy, 60, was sworn in and succeeds Christie after two terms, returning full control of state government to Democrats. While Christie was a friend and ally, Murphy built his campaign  his first run for elected office  around undoing the Trump administrations efforts on health care, immigration and taxes.

We will resist every move from President Trump and a misguided Republican Congress, Murphy said in his inaugural address.

Hinting at Trumps reported vulgar comments last week about immigration, Murphy called the country a beacon of light for immigrants including those from Haiti and Africa.

We will resist any attempt to define who is and who isnt a real American, he said.

Trump called Murphy and new Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, on Sunday to congratulate them. The White House said Trump and Murphy agreed to work together and to seek improvements to the countrys infrastructure.

Working with Washington on a $13 billion project to build new rail tunnels under the Hudson River needed to alleviate problems throughout the Northeast Corridor will be an early test of Murphys ability to work with the Trump administration while he criticizes him on other fronts.

A federal transportation official said last month an earlier agreement with the Obama administration for the federal government to pay for half of the project is nonexistent.

Murphys running mate, former Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver, was sworn as lieutenant governor. Oliver will head the states Department of Community Affairs and will serve as acting governor whenever Murphy is out of state.

During her inauguration speech, she mentioned getting Atlantic City back on its feet and free of state intervention among her goals as head of the department. She also talked about housing affordability and safety and helping people who have yet to return to their homes after Hurricane Sandy.

Eight years of continuously, constantly being bombarded, and in my opinion disrespected, hearing the lieutenant governor say she was eager to help Atlantic City out and remove some of these barriers we have is not only refreshing but has me optimistic, Gilliam said.

But Gilliam said nothing will change drastically immediately. He said he plans to meet with Murphy, his administration and Oliver to figure out the next steps for a fruitful relationship regarding the states involvement in the city.

Atlantic City Council President Marty Small said he looks forward to a prosperous relationship with Oliver and working with her in the future.

Shes already proven that shes a supporter of Atlantic City, he said. City Council will be a ready, willing, able partner to do whats right.

State Sen. Chris Brown, R-Atlantic, said he looked forward to working with Murphy and the city to establish a long-term, transparent plan which focuses on right sizing the Citys budget while making Atlantic City clean and safe.

Murphys wife, Tammy, and their four children joined him on stage as he was sworn in by state Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner.

A salute of cannons went off outside of the inauguration at the grand War Memorial in Trenton and Murphy went down a line of officials shaking hands. He hugged Christie and later praised his work addressing the opioid crisis and his role as a father.

He thanked him for more than two decades of public service to the state. Christie served as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey before he ran for governor.

Murphys inaugural address was unabashedly liberal, calling for the wealthy to pay higher taxes, more funding for Planned Parenthood and a $15 minimum wage. He said his vision for a stronger and fairer New Jersey includes criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization.

The new governor earned his fortune, which he used to help win the Democratic nomination last year, as an executive at Goldman Sachs. The last Democratic governor, Jon Corzine, whom Christie ousted in 2009, also was an executive at Goldman Sachs.

Murphy, who like Kennedy grew up in Massachusetts, also served several years in President Barack Obamas administration as ambassador to Germany.

He takes over from a larger-than-life governor who oversaw the state as its economy rebounded but who also saw his popularity plunge after a failed presidential run and the George Washington Bridge lane-closure scandal.

Thank you to all the people of New Jersey for the honor of being your Governor for the last eight years, Christie wrote on Twitter after the inauguration. It was a true privilege.

Murphy inherits a state with growing pension obligations and nearly perennial budget woes. He has said he would bring in new leadership at New Jersey Transit, the states beleaguered commuter rail and bus agency, and has said the state faces a fiscal crisis.

He also allies himself with unions and says he will increase payments into the state pension system and school aid.

An inaugural ball Tuesday night was to be held under a tent at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford.

Staff Writer Erin Serpico contributed to this report.
When Jacquelyn Nixon was diagnosed with lung cancer, it came with shock and confusion.

Nixon had never been a smoker, was never exposed to harmful chemicals and had an exemplary health history. After finding out she was at the beginning stages of lung cancer, it sent her on the hunt to find the likely cause: radon.

Radon is an invisible, odorless and tasteless radioactive gas commonly emitted from rocks and soil in the ground. Scientists and health experts have labeled it the No. 1 cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers, yet most people dont know what radon is. Activists and experts are trying to change that.

There were people who never even knew what radon was until they got lung cancer, said Casey Sky Noon, program coordinator at the Eastern Regional Radon Training Center at Rutgers University. They had never heard of it, and its hard to get the word out. People are busy doing and focusing on other things.

State environmental and health departments are encouraging radon testing and awareness of its effects during Radon Action Month. Scientists estimate about 20,000 lung cancer deaths per year are related to radon.

Experts say seven counties, mostly clustered in North Jersey, have an overall high radon potential, while 14 others have moderate to low potential.

Despite the overall county estimates, experts say everyone should test their homes for radon, as levels can differ even by neighborhood. Christopher Rinn, acting commissioner of the state Department of Health, said only 30 percent of New Jersey residences have been tested.

Radon, a carcinogen, often comes up through the ground and into homes through the basement, cracks, pipes and even some water openings such as showerheads.

It is considered unsafe if a home tests at 4 picocuries per liter (pCi/L) or higher of radon. Officials recommend those homes be seen by state-certified measurement and mitigation experts.

Health officials identified some parts of the state over others with higher radon potential, including Bridgeton, Stow Creek, Greenwich, Lawrence and Upper Deerfield townships in Cumberland County.

Noah Hetzell, assistant health officer at the Cumberland County Environmental Division, said the county has made many efforts to provide radon test kits to residents, but getting people to take action on a substance they cant see or smell is difficult.

We did campaigns a few years back, in the 90s and 2000s, but the thing with radon is, theres no odor or colored gas, so if you dont have those elements, people kind of lose interest in it and dont see the risks, he said.

Hetzell said Cumberland County offers free home-test kits, which are placed in the lowest point of the home and kept there for several days. The kit is then mailed to a laboratory, where experts determine the results.

Nixon, 69, of Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, didnt know anything about radon and its testing procedures. She was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma in her lung in 2015 shortly after visiting a doctor for a case of shingles.

Although the tumor was successfully removed that September, questions remained.

During a consult with my doctor, after all the tests, he sat down with my sister and I and asked, How do you think you got this? Nixon recalled. I said I didnt know, and it wasnt until we left that we realized, he didnt know either.

A colleague who owned a home-inspection business asked if she had ever heard about radon, and that piece of information spurred Nixon and some of her neighbors to test their homes at a condominium association just 20 minutes south of Pittsburgh.

Results revealed radon levels as high as 21 pCi/L on the ground floor. Nixon, who lives on the third floor, had been living at the condo for 38 years.

Observational studies involving uranium miners and cancer patients, as well as experiments in animals, have proven the link between radon and lung cancer, but there are limited ways scientists and doctors can absolutely prove radon as the cause for someones lung cancer.

Nixon has since become the Pennsylvania representative for the Citizens for Radioactive Radon Reduction, a national nonprofit awareness, activist and educational organization.

She hopes the organizations work will elevate radon testing and awareness to the same level of concern people have for lead testing and for other risk factors for cancer. That work includes getting medical professionals on board with better informing their patients on the health risks of radon.

I said, I survived and Im going to do something about this, Nixon said. I dont think people are taking it seriously enough, and theres got to be more awareness. Im not going to stop until the day I die, because I was given my life back.
2:40 p.m.: Judge Bernard DeLury orders pre-trial detention for Ferdinand Augello, the alleged co-conspirator with James Kauffman.

"These are very serious charges that carry life sentence upon conviction," DeLury said.

12:15 p.m.: The motion for pre-trial detention for Joseph Mulholland was denied by Judge DeLury. He will be released on conditions.

11:30 a.m.: Judge Bernard DeLury orders that James Kauffman be detained until trial. Kauffman's lawyer did not contest the order.

10:30 a.m.: Judge Bernard DeLury denied a state motion for pre-trial detention for defendant Tabitha Chapman on Thursday. She would be released with conditions.

The ruling took place during a detention hearing to determine whether to hold Dr. James Kauffman, his alleged co-conspirator, Ferdinand Augello, and two other Pagans motorcycle gang members and associates until trial in the murder case of April Kauffman.

The detention hearing was scheduled for 9 a.m. at Atlantic County Superior Court in Mays Landing before Judge DeLury.

Kauffman, 68, who is charged with his wifes murder as well as racketeering for allegedly running an opioid drug ring out of his Egg Harbor Township medical office with Augello, has been in jail since June, when he pulled out a gun while police attempted to execute a search warrant at his endocrinology practice.

Augello, 61, of the Petersburg section of Upper Township, faces racketeering and murder charges for helping to hire the since-deceased hitman, identified as Francis Mulholland, who allegedly killed April Kauffman in May 2012. He is also charged with conspiring to kill Dr. Kauffman while he was in the Atlantic County jail over the summer on weapons and obstruction charges. Kauffman has since been moved to Hudson County jail.

In addition, Joseph Mulholland, 52, of Villas (no relation to Francis Mulholland); and Tabitha Chapman, 35, of Absecon, have been in Atlantic County jail since their arrests last week on racketeering charges.

Paul Pagano, 51, of Egg Harbor Township will have his detention hearing on Jan. 25.

All of the defendants had initial appearances before DeLury last week. Joseph Mulhollands appearance was supposed to occur last Thursday but was postponed until Friday.

Atlantic County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Seth Levy is representing the state. Kauffman is represented by Jacobs and Barbone of Atlantic City. The remaining defendants are represented by the Public Defenders Office.

The charges against these defendants, as well as Augellos ex-wife Beverly Augello, 47, of Summerland Keys, Florida; Glenn Seeler, 37, of Sanford, North Carolina; and Cheryl Pizza, 36, of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, were announced Jan. 9 during a press conference by Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon G. Tyner.

The investigation and arrests were the result of a joint operation between the Atlantic County Prosecutors Office, the FBI, the Linwood, Egg Harbor Township, Somers Point and Lower Township police departments; and the Cape May County Prosecutors Office.

Atlantic County Prosecutors Office Sgt. James Scoppa Jr. and FBI Special Agent Daniel A. Garrabrant are the lead investigators on the case.
HAMILTON TOWNSHIP - The creation of a new housing development of 99 low- and moderate-income rental apartments has been underway since June at a site at New York Avenue and Harding Highway.

The first fully framed buildings are visible inside of the development now known as Pinegrove at Hamilton, but which was originally called Harding Homes.

The $28 million project features eight buildings with apartments, said Charles M. Lewis, senior vice president for the developer, Conifer Realty LLC, Mount Laurel, Burlington County.

The cold weather slowed us down a little bit. Early on, we were a little bit ahead of schedule, so we had a little cushion built in. So, we are pretty much on schedule right now, said Lewis, who added the plan was always 13 months for construction.

The first three of the eight buildings should be completed in July and the last building or buildings should be finished in October, said Tom Amato, the project manager for the construction company, Conifer LeChase, a separate, but affiliated company with Conifer Realty.

The apartments will be basically townhouses with some flats mixed in, Lewis said. There will be 15 one-bedroom, 51 two-bedroom and 33 three-bedroom apartments.

Along with the eight buildings with apartments, a fenced-in playground area and a freestanding clubhouse are also being built for the developments residents to use.

The clubhouse will have office space for management, a community room for parties and events, a washer and dryer, a small fitness room and computers, Amato said.

Besides the two fully framed buildings, a third building was 95 percent framed by Thursday, Amato said.

"Two buildings were just started today," said Amato on Jan. 18.

The single-story units will be on the first floor, so that people with mobility issues can rent them. The two-story units will start on the second floor, Amato said.

There were no issues dealing with the Hamilton Township Planning Board during the approval process, Lewis said.

One of the items the planning board asked the developer to add to the site was a walking path for residents, who live inside the development, and for people who would like to walk to the site via Route 40, Lewis said.

The New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency is providing Hurricane Sandy funds for this project, Lewis said.

We did a market study prior to acquiring the site, and it showed that there was a big demand for affordable housing in Atlantic County, Lewis said. We also have developments in Atlantic City and in Egg Harbor City, so for us it made a lot of sense from a management perspective because we already had a presence in the area.

Conifer Realty LLC is responsible for the Meadows in Atlantic City, which was done in conjunction with the Atlantic City Housing Authority. The Egg Harbor City development is known as Conifer Village at Rittenberg. The company also was behind a housing project in Absecon known as Clayton Mill Run, Lewis said.

We always keep our eyes out for good locations. A realtor had brought this (piece of property) to our attention, and we really liked the site, Lewis said.

For further information about Pinegrove at Hamilton, including the rental rates for the apartments, call Conifer Realty at 609-829-3016 or visit online http://www.coniferllc.com/properties/entry/view/254-pine-grove-at-hamilton
Three North Jersey towns with residents facing higher federal taxes because of the new cap on state and local tax deductions could blunt the impact through a loophole proposed by Democratic leadership.

The loophole, described in a recent press conference by Gov.-elect Phil Murphy and U.S. Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-5th, and Bill Pascrell, D-9th, calls for municipalities to let residents make charitable donations in the same amount they would have paid in local taxes and give homeowners credits on their property-tax bills for what they donate.

The three towns set to try the new loophole are Fair Lawn, Paramus and Park Ridge, all in Bergen County.

(President Donald Trump) and the Republican Congress slammed NJ taxpayers by eliminating SALT, Murphy tweeted after the press conference. Today, were fighting back  the towns of Fair Lawn, Park Ridge, and Paramus will allow taxpayers to pay their taxes as charitable donations, preserving the deduction.

The new federal tax law signed last month, called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, puts a $10,000 cap on state and local tax, or SALT, deductions for taxpayers across the country. An unlimited amount of charitable donations still can be deducted.

The average amount paid in state and local taxes nationally is a little more than $12,000, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

In New Jersey, where property taxes are the highest in the nation, the SALT deduction cap is a big problem, particularly in the northern part of the state.

In Fair Lawn, the average SALT deduction is more than $19,000, according to the IRS. For all of Bergen County, the average is higher than $17,000.

But its also a problem for some towns in South Jersey. In Avalon and Linwood, for example, the average SALT deduction is about $24,000, while in North Wildwood, the average is about $14,000.

Sen. Jeff Van Drew, D-Cape May, Cumberland, Atlantic, who served as mayor of Dennis Township as well as a county freeholder and a state assemblyman, said while the new cap wont have a big effect directly on South Jersey, the hit to North Jersey could prompt wealthier people to leave the state.

That could have a ripple effect throughout central and South Jersey when it comes to taxes, he said.

But since the new law has not yet been implemented, it is not clear if the loophole will be legal and allowed by the federal government.

Van Drew said he has never heard of a town setting up a charitable fund to collect taxes. He also said he believes the definition of charity will be tested.

This is a very untested idea and new ground, he said. Whether this is constitutional or legal is going to be a major question.

As of Sunday, the IRS had not publicly commented on the proposal.

This isnt the first time New Jersey lawmakers have tried to help taxpayers circumvent the new law.

Last month, Gov. Chris Christie signed an executive order requiring towns to accept property-tax prepayments for 2018.

This executive order will not only save thousands of dollars for countless New Jersey families, but also provide municipalities with a prepayment windfall that they will be able to invest and use the interest for the benefit of their taxpayers, state Senate President Steve Sweeney, D-Salem, Gloucester, Cumberland, said at the time.

Frank Donato III, director of financial management for Ocean City, told The Press in December the city traditionally carries a balance of prepaid taxes, but in 2017, that number tripled.

Last month, Murphy told the Associated Press his team is looking at possible legal action to stop the new law from being implemented.

Im certainly not a constitutional lawyer, but the notion that this is not constitutional is something we want to pursue, he said.
Today, breast cancer kills 39 percent fewer women than 25 years ago. Prostate cancer kills 52 percent fewer men, the American Cancer Society announced recently. You can thank new technologies that detect cancer early and defeat it for many of the lives saved. Americans diagnosed with most types of cancer have better odds of surviving it in the U.S. than anywhere else on the planet.

But watch out. These staggering achievements are at risk. A chorus of Democratic politicians is kicking off 2018 with renewed calls for universal, government-run health care. Leading the pack for single-payer are presidential contenders Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Single-payer advocates intend to make their scheme affordable by slashing the use of costly medical technology and new drugs. Thats a death sentence for many cancer patients. It would rob them of what they need to beat their illnesses.

Decades of medical inroads against cancer and Americas other top killer  cardiovascular disease  mean the average American turning 65 now will live nearly four years longer than someone who turned 65 in 1970. Four more years of life.

Washington politicians who claim American health care is broken ignorantly disregard these facts. They measure progress by how many people have insurance rather than by how many patients can survive cancer and heart disease, the two diseases responsible for almost half the deaths in the U.S.

The lead editorial in the current issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, by Stanford economist Victor Fuchs, claims the way to make universal health insurance affordable is to curtail use of mammograms, costly new drugs and diagnostic technologies.

Arguing that the U.S. spends nearly 18 percent of GDP on health care, while European countries spent about 12 percent, Fuchs and other single-payer proponents claim Americans are too enamored with high-tech care. The answer, the left says, is to go low-tech. That argument would be laughable if it werent so dangerous. Countries that limit use of technology, like the United Kingdom, have abysmal cancer survival rates.

Millions of American women have survived breast cancer thanks to high-tech screening and new gene-based therapies. And millions of men and women have escaped death by taking statin drugs to lower cholesterol and through thrombolytic therapy to prevent stroke damage.

In fact, strokes and heart attacks could be reduced by an additional 31 percent if statins were used more widely than the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends, according to a new report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Fuchs claims that less innovation is not always harmful. Baloney. Lives depend on it. The next cardiovascular breakthrough may be injections of the anti-inflammatory canakinumab, which researchers report produces a 15 percent reduction in cardiovascular incidents and can eliminate the need for stents and bypass surgery.

No one denies health care costs must be reined in  to spare consumers, employers and taxpayers. But instead of slamming the door on new technology, reform should tackle the biggest money wasters:

First, obesity, a major factor in hypertension and many cancers. Americans are twice as likely to be obese now than they were in 1980.

Secondly, hospital infections. When a patient undergoing a heart procedure gets infected, it adds a whopping $38,000 to the cost, according to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Thirdly, deplorable care at nursing homes. Patients discharged from hospitals to nursing homes for rehab have higher death rates than patients who get more care in the hospital instead, data from the Journal of Health Economics show. The rogue nursing home industry wastes money while causing needless deaths.

Finally, an excessively long and costly FDA approval process, requiring more than a decade, on average, to bring a new treatment bedside.

The American Cancer Society reports we are on the brink of a wave of cancer breakthroughs. Dont let the politicians kill it.

Betsy McCaughey is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and a former lieutenant governor of New York State. Contact her at betsy@betsymccaughey.com.
Chinese Foreign Ministrys spokesperson Lu Kang. Photo: Chinese media

BEIJING: Chinese Foreign Ministrys spokesperson Lu Kang on Monday said the Indian army chief's negative remarks about China and the Donglong border area were against the consensus reached between the two countries.

Source: https://www.geo.tv/latest/177034-indian-army-chief-remarks-area-china

Unconstructive remarks by the senior Indian official not only go against the consensus reached between the two heads of state, they also do not conform to the efforts made by the two sides to improve and develop bilateral relations, spokesperson Lu Kang said during his regular press briefing.

According to the Indian media, on January 12, Indian army chief General Bipin Rawat said at a press conference that China is a powerful country, but India is not a weak nation, and that India should shift its military focus to the northern border. He had said that the Dong Lang area doesn't belong to India and that Indian soldiers did cross into foreign territory during the standoff.

Kang said that the Indian army chief's remarks will not help to preserve the peace and stability of the border areas.

He asked the Indian military to learn lessons, abide by the historical conventions between the two countries, and earnestly uphold peace and stability of the border area, in addition to creating a sound atmosphere for the positive development of bilateral relations between the two countries.

Lu Kang remarked that China-India relations had witnessed some twists and turns in the past one year and said in the BRICS leaders summit meeting in last September, the two heads of state had reached some important consensus to properly handle the differences and promote bilateral relations back to the track of sound and steady development.

Recently, the two sides had enhanced dialogue and consultations and the bilateral relations had shown sound momentum of improvement and development, he added.

Terming China and India as important neighbours, he observed that both the countries were at the critical stage of national development and rejuvenation.

The two countries should enhance strategic communication, eliminate strategic doubts and conduct strategic cooperation, he added.

Kang urged the Indian side to follow the important consensus reached between the leaders of the two countries and do more things to preserve peace and stability on the border areas and refrain from doing things that may complicate the situation.

He also called upon India to constructively handle the relevant affairs and promote sound and steady development of the bilateral relations.

This is in common interest of the whole region and also serves the interest of Indian side," said Lu Kang.

The spokesperson also pointed out that the remarks of the Indian army chief once again showed that the illegal trespass of the Indian border troops was clear-cut in nature.

He, however, made it clear that the Donglong area belongs to China and Sikkim section of the China-India boundary had been delaminated by a historical convention.

Donglong is Chinas territory and China will continue to exercise its sovereignty rights in Donglong area in accordance with historical conventions and steadfastly uphold its territorial sovereignty, he added.

As I said just now, we hope India can learn from it and avoid the recurrence of some incidents that took place last year, he added.

He said the relations between the two sides had also shown signs of improvement in overall development for some time.

I believe everybody can feel that against this background, the remark made by the top Indian military official is inconsistent with the spirit of the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries and the current efforts of both China and India to improve the general trend of the relations between the two parties and the promotion of strategic cooperation is also incompatible, he added.

We believe such remarks are not conducive to the joint efforts of the two countries to maintain peace and stability across the border and to India itself, he concluded.


Wang Fuman, dubbed "Snowflake Boy" by netizens, shares a meal with his family on Thursday. [Photo by ZHANG YUJIE/FOR CHINA DAILY]

An 8-year-old boy from rural Zhaotong, Yunnan province, has received donations of more than 10,000 yuan ($1,500) from all over the country as of Monday.

He became an internet sensation recently after a picture of his ice-covered hair went viral.

He has also done well in his final examination at school.

Wang Fuman, which means "full of happiness", said on the phone on Monday that he got 82 points in Chinese and 90 in math, ranking third out of 17 in his Grade 3 class in Zhuanshanbao primary school.

His father, Wang Gangkui, said their family has received donations from all over the country totaling 10,000 yuan. In addition, some warmhearted people have sent the boy and his little sister winter clothes, shoes, books and notebooks.

"I like this book because there are lots of interesting stories in it," the boy said of a donated cartoon book called Tianfangqitan, which features fairy stories.

The boy attracted attention nationwide after his photograph was posted on the internet by the principal of his primary school on Jan 8. The picture showed him with his hair covered in ice after he walked more than four kilometers in freezing temperatures to reach his school.

The boy lives in Ludian town with his father, 10-year-old sister and his sick grandmother in Zhaotong's impoverished mountainous area. His mother left home two years ago.

At the end of 2017, there were 1.13 million people living under the poverty line in Zhaotong, according to Yunnan Daily. And there are 9,338 left-behind children in Ludian, accounting for 11.2 percent of more than 80,000 students in total, according to thepaper.cn

Yunnan China Youth Development Foundation launched a public donation campaign for all the poor students in the province on Jan 9. It has promised to give each needy child 500 yuan to help them stay warm in winter.

As of 4 pm on Monday, the foundation had collected nearly 2.8 million yuan in public donations, according to its website.

Between Wednesday and Friday, the foundation had already organized three activities to give out donations to thousands of left-behind children and children living in cold mountainous regions in nine prefecture-level areas including Kunming, Zhaotong, Nujiang and Lijiang.

On Jan 9, the Zhaotong city government said that the education department has been urged to ensure heating is provided to all schools in mountainous areas as soon as possible.

After the boy's photograph circulated on the internet, a construction company in Zhaotong city offered his father a job building houses, which pays up to 200 yuan a day. He has been doing similar temporary work in Kunming, earning about 2,500 yuan per month.

"I have a dream of being a policeman when I grow up," said Wang Fuman, "Because there are many bad people in the world and I want to beat them righteously."
New research challenges European Union policy that wood bioenergy is carbon neutral

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Wood is increasingly being used to replace coal as a source of electricity generation in many regions such as the European Union, where policymakers have declared it "carbon neutral." However, new research from researchers at MIT, Climate Interactive, and UMass Lowell reveals that displacing coal with wood for power generation can make climate change worse for many decades or more.

In the new study, Does replacing coal with wood lower CO 2 emissions? Dynamic lifecycle analysis of wood bioenergy, the researchersJohn Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at MIT Sloan School of Management;Juliette Rooney-Varga, Director of the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative; and Lori Siegel, PhD, Senior Modeler for Climate Interactiveexamine the climate impact of replacing coal power generation in the EU and UK with wood pellets sourced from forests in the Southern United States. The research is slated for publication on Friday, January 19, 2018 in the academic journal, Environmental Research Letters. The paper can be accessed online at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512/pdf

The researchers found that wood pellets burned in European and UK power plants, such as the Drax facility in North Yorkshirewhich has transitioned some of its coal power generation capacity to wood pellets with the support of UK government subsidiesactually emit more CO 2 per kilowatt hour than that generated by coal. This is because wood is both less efficient at the point of combustion and has larger processing and supply chain emissions than coal. Their research shows that using wood instead of coal in power generation increases the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere, worsening climate change untiland only ifthe harvested forests regrow.

US forests are a main source for EU wood pellet imports, which have been rising as demand has grown. These forests grow back slowly, so it takes a long time to repay the initial "carbon debt" incurred by burning wood instead of coal. For forests in the central and eastern US, which supply much of the wood used in UK power plants, the payback time for this carbon debt ranges from 44 to 104 years, depending on forest typeand assuming the land remains forest. If the land is developed, or converted to agricultural use, then the carbon debt is never repaid and grows over time as the harvested land emits additional carbon from soils.

The research was conducted with the use of a system dynamics model, based on the award-winning Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support (C-ROADS) simulator. Launched in 2008, the model was reviewed by an external scientific review committee, chaired by Sir Robert Watson, former Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A summary of their review can be accessed here.

The researchers also explored an increasingly common scenario in which hardwood forests harvested for bioenergy are replaced with faster-growing loblolly pine plantations. Surprisingly, replanting with fast-growing pine plantations worsens the CO 2 impact of wood because managed plantations do not sequester as much carbon as natural forests.

They found that continued growth in wood use, as many predict, will worsen climate change throughout the rest of this century, or longer. This is because the first impact of substituting wood for coal in power generation is an increase in CO 2 emissions. Even if the forests eventually regrow, notes Prof. Sterman, each year the new carbon debt from increased harvest and combustion outweighs the regrowth, just as borrowing more on a credit card each month than one is able to pay back will steadily increase what he or she owes. For countries using wood bioenergy as a component of their climate policies this could take them backwards. Indeed, bioenergy from wood made up 44% of the EU's renewable energy production in 2015.

"A molecule of CO 2 emitted today has the same impact on the climate whether it comes from coal or biomass," says Prof. John Sterman. "Declaring that biofuels are carbon neutral, as the EU, UK and others have done, erroneously assumes forest regrowth happens quickly and fully offsets the emissions from biofuel production and combustion. One way to address the challenges raised in this study would be to count emissions where they occur, for example, at a power plant, and monitor and count carbon removed from the atmosphere by regrowth on the harvested land."

Critically, the analysis doesn't support continued coal use as it is the most carbon intensive fuel and a major contributor to climate change. The researchers stress energy efficiency, solar, wind and storage as the cheapest, safest, and quickest ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions while meeting energy needs.

The model behind the research is available for scientists and policymakers to design their own scenarios for bioenergy, conduct sensitivity analysis, and get immediate feedback showing the full dynamics, including both short and long run impacts.

The MIT Sloan School of Management is where smart, independent leaders come together to solve problems, create new organizations, and improve the world. Learn more at mitsloan.mit.edu

The UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative brings faculty, students, and communities together to address climate change through research, education, and developing solutions to transition to a more sustainable and resilient society. Learn more at www.uml.edu/Research/Climate-Change/.

About Climate Interactive

Climate Interactive is a US-based not-for-profit think tank that helps people see what works to address the biggest challenges facing our lives on Earth. Learn more at climateinteractive.org

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As projects across the process industries become more complex, driven by increased demands for productivity and profitability as well as asset and operator safety, it is essential for MES to accurately and efficiently gather data from all assets, irrespective of location, ensuring the right information is available to the right people at the right time. Providing real-time digital intelligence through data, analytics and collaboration helps support increased safety, reliability, compliance and improved productivity and agility across the supply chain.

"Most MES software offered by automation companies includes services to improve process safety, increase profit margins, and integrate and optimize equipment and processes. The real challenge for solution providers is to develop an end-to-end MES solution, that would provide either a customized product or a range of products from which the customers can pick the best solution to meet their needs," said Srividhya Murali, Senior Research Analyst.

HPS addresses this key customer need with its Smart Operations MES solutions portfolio, which provides customers with a wide range of software from which they can choose the optimal module(s) that will meet their defined project requirements. The HPS MES portfolio includes the following capabilities:

Big Data & Analytics: integration of production, ERP and other business data coupled with analytics tools to provide business intelligence; cloud enterprise historian & data lake, asset management, predictive analytics, visualization, collaboration and mobility;

Alarm and Operations Management: operations integrity through better plant safety, availability, and compliance; alarm management, metrics and reporting, operation logbooks, operations monitoring;

Blending and Movement: planning, execution and performance monitoring of blending and movement operations; blend instructions, blend controller and optimizer, blend monitor, tank and inventory monitor, movement and inventory control and tracker;

Production Accounting and Reconciliation: accurate production and consumption data to improve decision making and deliver margin improvements; reconciled production/consumption, inventory positions.

Honeywell Smart Operations deliver an enterprise decision-support solution that is built around the alignment of business objectives to operational decisions and includes the important element of work process transformation. Leveraging best practices and domain expertise helps organizations capture the maximum value of technology with their people. In addition to work process transformation, value-driven rapid deployment of these solutions enables operational agility  both valuable steps in business transformation.

"The added value Honeywell brings to the table is its deep expertise in both automation and process optimization," said Srividhya Murali. "This enables the company to make appropriate recommendations to customers, using data analytics and process know-how, on how best to obtain desired results."

For over two decades HPS has worked closely with energy-based companies across the value chain to help them improve productivity, safety, compliance, and their decision-making capabilities. As they embark on their digital transformation journey, Honeywell's Smart Operations MES solution is a solid foundation to build upon. Through its software services and expertise, Honeywell offers solutions that deliver improved safety, reliability, efficiency, sustainability and profitability. For these reasons, Honeywell Process Solutions has earned Frost & Sullivan's 2017 Europe Customer Value Leadership Award.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products. The award recognizes the company's unique focus on augmenting the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and customer base expansion.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About Honeywell

Honeywell Process Solutions (www.honeywellprocess.com) is a pioneer in automation control, instrumentation and services for the oil and gas; refining; energy; pulp and paper; industrial power generation; chemicals and petrochemicals; biofuels; life sciences; and metals, minerals and mining industries. It is also a leader in providing software solutions and instrumentation that help manufacturers find value and competitive advantage in through Honeywell Connected Plant, Honeywell's Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solution. Process Solutions is part of Honeywell's Performance Materials and Technologies strategic business group, which also includes Honeywell UOP (www.uop.com), a leading international supplier and licensor of process technology, catalysts, adsorbents, equipment, and consulting services to the petroleum refining, petrochemical, and gas processing industries.

Honeywell (www.honeywell.com) is a Fortune 100 software-industrial company that delivers industry specific solutions that include aerospace and automotive products and services; control technologies for buildings, homes, and industry; and performance materials globally. Our technologies help everything from aircraft, cars, homes and buildings, manufacturing plants, supply chains, and workers become more connected to make our world smarter, safer, and more sustainable. For more news and information on Honeywell, please visit www.honeywell.com/newsroom.

Contact:

Stefanie Cuene

P: 480-420-5186

E: Stefanie.cuene@honeywell.com

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion.

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P: 210.247.3823

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By Li Wanmei

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in Tokyo at the New Year's party hosted by the Jiji Press that this year marks the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of the Japan-China Treaty of Peace and Friendship and he hoped that this year can be a year for both the Chinese and Japanese people to recognize that the relations between the two countries have greatly improved.

In response, a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that he hopes the Japanese side can work with China in improving and developing China-Japan relations.

Amid the prolonged tensions in Chinese-Japanese relations, Abe's positive remarks on improving the relations are welcome. However, as the saying goes, we should "listen to what they say and see what they do" and therefore we also hope Japan will take concrete actions.

In recent years, Japan has been "staging" similar remarks several times a year. However, it seems that Japan's position and actions have been different. In fact, Japan is making moves that are against the improvement of the relations between the two countries and the duplicity seems to have become "normal" for Japan.

Japan's wrong views on historical issues

The historical issues are related to the political foundation of Chinese-Japanese relations and the feelings of the Chinese people.

Since the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and Japan, Japan has solemnly stated its position and commitment to China on historical issues. However, in recent years, Japan has been secretive over the nature of their militarism war of aggression and their responsibility. They are reluctant to give clear explanations and they refuse to apologize to the victims.

Issues such as visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, comfort women and textbooks have made it hard for Japan to gain trust from its Asian neighbors and the international community. It has also become an obstacle towards the development of Chinese-Japanese relations.

Japan challenges China's core interests

The Japanese government tries to create "two Chinas" and "one China, one Taiwan" by acquiescing in the naming of non-governmental organizations from time to time. The Diaoyu Dao and its adjacent islets have been the inherent territories of China since ancient times but Japan has staged a series of farce and friction in an attempt to confuse the public and realize "de facto control."

It must be pointed out that those practices can not in any way change the objective facts about the Diaoyu Dao and can hardly shake the firm determination of the Chinese side to safeguard the sovereignty over the Diaoyu Dao.

China has indisputable sovereignty over the Nansha Islands and its adjacent waters and has always been committed to resolving disputes peacefully through consultations and negotiations with the relevant parties and jointly safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea. Japan, as a country outside the area, has been ignoring the truth and has repeatedly made false remarks.

Japan slanders China in military development

While China unswervingly follows the road of peaceful development, Japan has often accused China of increasing military spending and the "lack of transparency." It even uses the "China threat theory" as an excuse to develop its military power and lift the collective self-defense ban.

A series of moves by Japan including the promotion of "overlooking the global diplomacy", the advancement of "proactive pacifism" and the TPP, and the marketing of the concept of "Indo-Pacific Strategy" have all targeted China to certain extent.

Leaders of China and Japan have met on many international multilateral occasions in recent years, and the relations between China and Japan are facing opportunities for further improvement and development.

However, the fundamentals still remain fragile and complicated. It is still a long way to go to bring Chinese-Japanese relations back to the path of proper development. What the Japanese government needs to understand is that each territory dispute, each visit to the Yasukuni Shrine and each tampering with history hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, and erode the mutual trust between the two countries.

China and Japan are close neighbors separated by a strip of water. The long-term healthy and stable development between the two countries conforms to the interests of the two countries and their people and is also conducive to regional peace and stability.

We hope that Japan can honor its promise and match words with deeds and work with China under the four political documents between the two sides and the four-point principled agreement, and seize the opportunity presented by the 40th anniversary of the signing of the China-Japan Peace and Friendship Treaty to create favorable conditions for all-around exchanges and cooperation and work for the improvement and development of China-Japan relations.
The picture shows the new corvette Wuhai docking at a naval port in Dalian, north China's Liaoning province, on Jan. 15, 2018. (81.cn)

DALIAN, Jan. 16 (ChinaMil) -- The commissioning ceremony of the new corvette Wuhai of the PLA Navy was held at a naval port in Dalian, north China's Liaoning province on Monday.

Rear Admiral Lv Baoqiang, political commissar of a naval base under the PLA Northern Theater Command, conferred the ensigns of the PLA and the PLA Navy and the naming certificate on the corvette Wuhai at the ceremony. A grand flag-raising ceremony was later held on the corvette.

The Type 056 corvette Wuhai, with good stealth performance and powerful surface attack and air defense capability, will undertake multiple mission such as costal patrol, fishing boats escort, attacking surface warships and submarine of the "enemy" independently or in joint operations.

The new corvette Wuhai in rainbow dressing berths at a naval port in Dalian, north China's Liaoning province, Jan. 15, 2018. (81.cn)
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
Mumbai, Jan 11 : Thirteen days after the Mumbai pub blaze, the city police made a breakthrough and arrested three owners of the 1Above restaurant from Bandra late Wednesday, an official said on Thursday.

They would be produced before a court here on Thursday afternoon, the official said.

The three absconding owners -- Kripesh Sanghavi, Jigar Sanghavi and Abhijit Mankar -- carried a reward of Rs 100,000 announced by Mumbai Police. They have been booked for culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

They were nabbed while on their way to meet a lawyer late Wednesday night on Linking Road in Bandra west.

This takes the total number of arrests in the December 29, 2017 pub fire that killed 14 and injured another 55, to six.

Besides three others nabbed for shielding the accused, including a co-owner of The Mojo's Bistro, Yug Pathak, son of a former DGP-rank IPS officer K.K. Pathak.

Another partner of Pathak, Yug Tuli was still absconding and was spotted in Hyderabad two days ago but managed to give the police a slip.

On Wednesday, a friend Vishal Kariya was nabbed for helping the absconding trio after blaze in The Mojo's Bistro, 1Above and other establishments in the sprawling Kamala Mills Compound in Lower Parel.

A probe by the Mumbai Fire Brigade (MFB) has said that the fire first erupted in rooftop pub The Mojo's Bistro, spread to the adjoining 1Above and other premises that fateful night.
Santiago, Jan 13 : Chilean authorities are investigating a series of attacks and threatening incidents at churches in the Santiago metro area ahead of Pope Francis' three-day visit.

Members of the national police force's Police Special Operations Group (GOPE) were deployed to the municipality of Estacion Central after a bomb was found on Friday inside the Jesus Maestro church, the latest of five incidents, Efe news reported.

Although that home-made device did not detonate, the targeting of five churches in a short span has sparked concern among authorities three days before the pontiff's arrival.

Carabineros said a barrel of flammable liquid and pamphlets denouncing the Pope's visit, which is scheduled for January 15-18, also were found at the latest crime scene.

Three bombs exploded early on Friday in Catholic churches in the municipalities of Recoleta, PeAalolen and Estacion Central, while a fourth was found outside a church in the capital.

"Pope Francis, the next bombs will be in your cassock," a pamphlet found in one of the churches read.

Prosecutors suspect the so-called Lautaro Youth Movement, which allegedly carried out similar attacks on political offices in November and December, in the lead-up to the December 17 presidential runoff, also is behind these latest incidents.

In an interview with Oasis radio, President Michelle Bachelet described the attacks as "very strange," while the Archdiocese of Santiago said they "run counter to the spirit of peace inspired by the pope's visit."

President-elect Sebastian PiAera also condemned the attacks on Twitter as driven by "hatred and intolerance" and urged Chileans to receive Pope Francis with joy and in peace.

Separately, members of the "Andha Chile" movement of mortgage debtors protested at the Apostolic Nunciature, where the pontiff will stay while in Santiago.

The pope, who was born in neighbouring Argentina, also will make stops in the northern Chilean city of Iquique and the southern city of Temuco during his visit.
San Francisco, Jan 13 : Apple, which announced its first data centre in China will be operational from February, mistakenly sent a notice to some of the US users saying their iCloud data is being migrated to the servers in the Asian country.

The Cupertino-based Apple has now apologised.

In an email obtained by TechCrunch, the company said: "We are very sorry that you received this email. This email was intended only for customers whose Apple ID country is China. A very small number of our customers whose Apple ID country is not China also received this email by mistake".

In a move to increase transparency and make inroads into China, the first data centre of the Cupertino-based tech giant Apple in China will be put into operation on February 28.

From then on, photos, documents and other personal information uploaded to iCloud accounts by Apple customers in China will be stored at a data base in southwest China's Guizhou Province, Xinhua news agency reported.

The move is aiming to increase transparency and offer Chinese customers a safer and more fluent experience of iCloud, the company was quoted as saying.

Apple announced the constructing of the new data base in Guizhou last July, with an investment of $1 billion.

Apple's gets most of its products manufactured in China and also sources its best electronics engineers from the there.
Ahmedabad, Jan 16 : Vishwa Hindu Parishad's international working president Pravin Togadia was found unconscious in a hospital in Shahibagh locality in Ahmedabad late on Monday after being reported "missing" earlier.

The police said he was brought by people to a private Chandra- Mani hospital in an unconscious state, which the doctors claimed was caused by low level of sugar.

He was admitted in the hospital around 9.20 p.m. and later his condition was stated to be stable, the police said.

The police, however, still have no idea how the VHP leader reached Sardarnagar which was about 15 kilometres away from the VHP office from where he reportedly left in an autorickshaw. It was also not clear why he fell unconscious as he had no past history of sugar levels falling so alarmingly.

The details would emerge after the police could speak to Toghadia on Tuesday.

Earlier, the Ahmedabad Crime Branch said it had constituted a special team to look for the Vishwa Hindu Parishad Pravin who went missing amid allegations that the Rajasthan Police took him away.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the umbrella body of all saffron outfits, in a one-line statement also expressed concern over the "goings-on around Togadia" and hoped the state government and the police would initiate immediate action.
Beijing, Jan 16 : The Shanghai Consumer Council has sent an inquiry letter to Apple over the slow-down of older iPhones after an iOS update, demanding a reply before Friday.

The council demanded the cause of the performance and remedy measures as well as complete information regarding the interests of consumers, Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.

The council said it received 2,615 complaints on Apple products and services in 2017, compared with 964 complaints in 2015.

In late December, Apple apologised for the slow-down of the of old iPhones with older batteries amid lawsuits and consumer outrage.

Apple also apologised to its iPhone community over the issue.

It said the company will cut the price of out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacements from late January 2018 to December.

The news came after Apple last week announced that the first Chinese data base of the Cupertino-based iPhone maker bill be put into operation on February 28.

From them on, photos, documents and other personal information uploaded to iCloud accounts by Apple customers in China will be stored at a data base in southwest China's Guizhou Province.

The company has started informing its Chinese iCloud users.

The move is aiming to increase transparency and offer Chinese customers a safer and more fluent experience of iCloud, the company said.

Apple announced the constructing of the new data base in Guizhou last July, with an investment of $1 billion.

Other major technology companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, have also made similar deals to run data centres in China.
Days after high-level talks between South and North Korea, U.S. Secretary State Rex Tillerson will join foreign ministers in Vancouver on Tuesday to discuss the latest diplomatic push to counter Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile threats.

Foreign ministers of the UN Command Sending States are set to gather on Jan. 16 to assess progress made by the international pressure campaign aimed at thwarting North Korea's efforts to evade UN sanctions through smuggling.

While participants in the talks will be from countries that have sent troops and humanitarian aid to support South Korea during the Korean War, U.S. officials said the gathering itself would not be focused on coordinating a military plan.

The goal of the talks, State Department policy planning director Brian Hook said Thursday, is to find ways "to exert continued pressure on the Kim [Jong-un] regime while demonstrating that diplomatic options remain open and viable."

Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, told VOA "there will be no discussion of a military option" at the Vancouver ministerial meeting. "This is about making sure that everyone is on the same page regarding the sanctions," he said. Participants will explore whether "there are additional things that we can do to ensure these sanctions are in place and implemented."

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis will also take part in the Vancouver welcome dinner to demonstrate a comprehensive U.S. approach, according to the Pentagon.
London, Jan 16 : Europes fastest-growing public cloud provider Nordcloud has collaborated with technology giant Microsoft to deploy Azure-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions across Europe.

"Nordcloud allows customers to make use of the entire Azure AI stack, creating scalable intelligent services and adding cutting-edge smart features to existing solutions in a fast, agile manner with the total cost of ownership benefits only cloud services can deliver," Nordcloud wrote in a blogpost late on Monday.

Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.

"Nordcloud has partnered with Microsoft for jointly deploying Azure AI-based solutions for our enterprise customers," Antti Alila, Lead, Cloud and Enterprise Business, Microsoft, said in a statement.

"Nordcloud has already delivered AI projects for its clients. This is important to stress: AI is here and now and helping businesses innovate and gain a competitive edge," Alila added.

The partnership comes as Microsoft is making AI an ever-growing part of its vast portfolio, ranging from adding more AI smarts to Office 365 and Cortana, to establishing partnerships for an AI-powered health bot project.

Microsoft is also focusing on developers, recently announcing the launch new tools to help them build conversational bots, according to Windows Central.
Kolkata, Jan 16 : Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani said on Tuesday the Jio network will cover 100 per cent of West Bengal's population by December 2018 and also committed over Rs 5,000 crore of investments in the state for non-Jio businesses in the next three years.

Addressing the Bengal Global Business Summit here, Ambani said the company will be exploring opportunities for setting up an electronics manufacturing facility in the state.

"Our current Jio network covers 1,000 towns and nearly 39,000 villages in the state. Jio will reach 100 per cent of West Bengal's population by December 2018. Every last village will be covered by 4G digital technology. We are embarking on an ambitious project of connecting Bengal with optic fibre," he said.

According to him, Jio will connect every education institution and hospital and medical delivery facility in the state in the next two years by December 2019.

He said the group is also setting up digital service centres across India to bring government to citizen services within easy reach of every citizen, particularly in the rural hinterland.

"I am happy to announce that with the support of state government, we will launch this initiative in five districts of Bengal with immediate effect," he said, adding that it would create employment and wealth generating opportunities in both rural and urban Bengal.

"It will give birth of digital entrepreneurs in villages and small towns... kick-start e-commerce and support of agriculture, as well as small and medium enterprises," he added.

He also said the group will be working with "multiple partners to explore setting up next generation electronics manufacturing facilities" and make West Bengal the hub of innovation and hi-tech technologies for consumer devices such as mobile phones, set-top boxes and other devices.

Ambani said the group has prioritised the availability of 4G Jio phone in the state with effective zero cost.

"We are committing to invest over Rs 5,000 crore in our non-Jio businesses which are across our ecosystem of retail and petroleum outlets (in Bengal) in the next three years," he said.

Applauding the West Bengal government's economic activities and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Ambani said: "Didi, under your leadership, Bengal is becoming the best Bengal."

Ambani said he attended the second edition of the business summit in 2015.

"At that time, we were new to Bengal... Reliance had committed an investment of Rs 4,500 crore in Bengal... We have invested not just committed Rs 4,500 crore but we have completed an investment of over Rs 15,000 crore, nearly triple that amount, in the last two years in Bengal."

He said the company could make this large investment because the state created a "friendly" climate and enabling policy and infrastructure.

He said the company would focus on digital space.

"We want to empower small retailers with digital tools that help them enjoy the benefits of connecting with their chain of suppliers to customers... our cloud based digital solution will enable digital billing and payments, loyalty, GST compliance and supplier management," he said According to him, these tools will help them do their businesses more efficiently, grow faster, improve supply chain efficiency and increase customer satisfaction.

"We will be creating this set of digital tools and roll them out to the small retailers over the next two years," Ambani said.

Jio will set up a Chair in the honour of Physicist Satyendra Nath Bose in a prestigious institution in West Bengal, he said.

Ambani said Bengal has showered "so much of love and affection" for Reliance and Jio and assured the state to be "reliable partners" in its growth agenda.
Jammu, Jan 16 : The opposition National Conference (NC) and Independent MLA Engineer Rashid on Tuesday interrupted the proceedings of Jammu and Kashmir assembly over the arrest of a Kashmiri businessman by Delhi Police.

Bilal Ahmad Kawa, 37, a Kashmiri businessman was arrested by Delhi Police and the Gujarat anti-terrorism squad at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi on January 12 for alleged involvement in the Red Fort attack of 2000.

Delhi Police said Kawa's bank account had been used for Lashkar-e-Taiba terror funding.

Ali Muhammad Sagar, senior NC leader and MLA on Tuesday accused the state government of being "afraid of the Central government over the arrest of an innocent Kashmiri businessman".

Sagar, while speaking in the state assembly, demanded a statement from Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Abdul Rehman Veeri on the businessman's arrest.

"When he is innocent, why is the state government shying away from its responsibility to protect him", Sagar asked.

The National Conference leader also questioned the businessman's arrest being made after 17 years since the Red Fort attack had taken place in 2000.

Independent MLA, Engineer Rashid said "would the state government wait for Kawa being hanged like Afzal Guru (Parliament attack convict) and then come out with a statement on this sensitive issue".

The businessman's mother had on Monday appealed to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti to intervene in the matter to get him released.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : Claiming that seizures of smuggled cigarettes has doubled in the last two years, a pan-India farmers body on Tuesday urged the Central government to curb the growing menace of cigarette smuggling in India to protect the interest of legal Indian tobacco growers.

The Federation of All Indian Farmers Association (FAIFA), representing the cause of millions of farmers and farm workers of commercial crops across the States of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Gujarat, has stated that the steep increase in tobacco taxation in the recent past led to growth of the smuggling of cigarettes in the country.

"Increase in smuggling of cigarettes is evident by the growing number of seizures of smuggled cigarettes which has more than doubled to 3,108 in 2016-17 from 1,312 in 2014-15 as per the details shared by the Finance Ministry in Parliament in December 2017.

"It is important to note that the reported seizures are only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger operation, as for every seizure dozens of consignments escape any surveillance," said the body which has also initiated letters to Prime Minister's Office and the Union Health Ministry.

Illegal cigarette trade is more than 25 per cent of the Cigarette Industry in the country making India the fourth largest and fastest growing illicit market in the world. This has resulted in revenue losses of approximately Rs 13,000 crore to the government and is growing annually.

"Unlike India, no other country in the world has a huge and wide-spread dependence on the tobacco crop for livelihood.

"All efforts of the tobacco control programmes, in the form of high taxation, Graphical Health Warnings (GHW), or other regulatory overreach are largely focused on the FCV type of tobacco crop, which has boosted illicit trade in the country," said Murali Babu, General Secretary, FAIFA.

FAIFA has also urged the government to have a taxation policy, that disincentivises cigarette smuggling.

"Protection of the domestic legal industry in the country will help in sustaining livelihood opportunities and reduce revenue leakages," said FAIFA in a statement.
Srinagar, Jan 16 : A civilian injured in clashes with security forces in Shopian district of Jammu and Kashmir last month died in hospital on Tuesday.

Muhammad Ayub Bhat, who had sustained gunshot injuries in Batmuran village of Shopian district during clashes between protesters and security forces on December 19, succumbed in the hospital.

Two militants were killed by security forces in the gunfight in Batmuran village on that day after which protests had broken out.

A woman was killed and over four dozen civilians injured in the protests.
Mumbai, Jan 16 : Bollywood actor Sidharth Malhotra, who turned 33 on Tuesday, is looking forward to the release of "Aiyaary". His friends and colleagues from the film industry have wished him good luck for the movie and beyond.

Sidharth, along with "Aiyaary" filmmaker Neeraj Pandey and actors Manoj Bajpayee, Rakul Preet Singh and Pooja Chopra, have been mingling with soldiers in Jaisalmer. They even visited the BSF camp there, and Sidharth also cut a cake there.

While the film will hit the screens on February 9, Sidharth's celebrity friends have wished that the year turns out fruitful for him. Here's what they tweeted:

Manoj Bajpayee: Happy birthday my junior major Jai Bakshi. 'Aiyaary' Sidharth Malhotra. May you keep shining bright all your life. Love and happiness always!

Abhishek Bachchan: Happy Birthday Sid. Have a great year. Good luck at the movies.

Shraddha Kapoor: Happy birthday Sidharth Malhotra! Keep shining, smiling and killing it!

Riteish Deshmukh: To my sweetest co-star and fellow villain Sidharth Malhotra, a very happy birthday. Have a stupendous birthday brother and 'Aiyaary' is looking fabulous.

Kriti Sanon: Happy birthday Sidharth Malhotra! Have a fabulous year fellow Delhiite! Looking forward to 'Aiyaary'!

Harbhajan Singh: Happy birthday Sid, have a good one brother... Milde aa jaldi (Let's meet soon). Rab rakha. Cheers.

Rakul Preet: Happy birthday to the not so aiyaar in real life Sidharth Malhotra. Wishing you the best of everything. Keep slaying!

Pooja Chopra: Since pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real, happy birthday to a very very real star Sidharth Malhotra. Have an awesome one boy. Tons of love and luck.

Kunal Kohli: Sidharth Malhotra happy birthday buddy. Looking forward to 'Aiyaary' and a great year from you.

Ajaz Khan: Happy Birthday Sidharth Malhotra. Allah bless you brother.
Pune (Maharashtra), Jan 16 : In an unique initiative, an NGO, 'Law and Order' comprising prominent citizens, retired judges of the Supreme Court, High Courts and District Courts will now take up grievances of sitting judges across the country, an official said here on Tuesday.

The initiative - which comes against the backdrop of last week's unprecedented media interaction of four senior apex court judges - will seek to ensure that even the sitting judges in District Courts, all High Courts and Supreme Court have an outlet to vent their grievances which can be resolved to ensure "an effective and transparent judiciary", said lawyer Asim Sarode.

"We appeal to all sitting judges and the legal fraternity to join hands in this initiative. The names of any sitting judge with a grievance will be kept completely confidential while the Law and Order's expert committee examines and resolves them," Sarode told IANS.

He said the aim is to create an atmosphere where no judge is compelled to voice his/her grievances on a public platform in future, through the 'Law and Order', which includes social-political intellectual Vishwambhar Chowdhary and Litigants Forum of Maharashtra secretary Bhalchandra Joshi.

Later, addressing the media here, the three said that currently in Maharashtra, the Department of Justice's secretary is mandated to deal with all grievances pertaining to judges, legal assistance, awareness, computerisation of various lower courts and judicial reforms.

However, grievances concerning Special Courts, Tribunals - barring the Family Courts - like CBI Courts, Labour, Industrial, Consumer Courts and Consumer Appellate Tribunals, DRT and DRAT, Armed Forces Tribunals, Juvenile Justice Boards and CATs, are handled by their concerned ministries.

As far as High Courts are concerned, the grievances are sent to the Secretary General of Supreme Court or the Registrars General of the concerned High Courts for appropriate further action as required, Joshi said.

In turn, these officials forward them to the Chief Justice of India or the Chief Justices of the concerned High Courts for suitable action.

"This is because the judiciary is independent and the government neither seeks any action taken report or sends reminders, and the aggrieved persons are advised to seek information directly from their concerned courts. This is where transparency and accountability is required," Joshi explained.

As per existing apex court guidelines of 2015, he said the aggrieved members of the subordinate judiciary need to submit a sworn affidavit along with verifiable material to substantiate allegations raised, which must be sent directly to the Registrars General of the concerned High Courts.

"We at 'Law and Order' initiative' feel these requirements must be done away with at the primary stage to encourage greater participation in the judicial reforms process," said Sarode.

"The difference between current mechanism and our initiative is to help the sitting/working judges resolve their grievances and they can continue working as fearless judicial officers without any botheration," Choudhary said.

The 'Law and Order' has also demanded that all the courts, right from Supreme Court to District Courts, should telecast proceedings of all important and sensitive cases to ensure greater transparency in the system, since in 2013 the Law Ministry had already recommended video recordings of court proceedings as part of reforms.

This is will help eliminate the 'disconnect' of society with the judicial system and improve the common citizens' understanding of the courts and legal processes, they said.
Dehradun, Jan 16 : Two teachers of Sherwood College in Uttarakhand have been sentenced to a year in jail after being found wanting in discharge of their duties during an excursion in which two students were killed after a tractor trolley they were travelling in overturned, an official said.

A group of 42 students had gone to an excursion to Sitawani in Nanital district in 2010. They were accompanied by two teachers -- Ashish Dwivedi and Rohit Jalaal. The children were driven in a tractor trolley which overturned, killing two students and injuring seven others.

The parents of the two students -- Anmol Bhatt (14) of Haldwani and Ibrahim Ansari (14) of Kanpur -- had filed a case against the tractor's driver, Anand, and the two teachers.

Judicial Magistrate Manju Devi agreed with the prosecution that the teachers were callous and held them and the driver guilty, the official said.
Chandigarh, Jan 16 : Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Padmaavat" has been banned by the BJP government in Haryana.

Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij tweeted on Tuesday about the ban being imposed on the movie, which is set to release nationwide on January 25.

"Film Padmavati/Padmavat banned in Haryana," Vij wrote on Twitter.

The decision was taken at a Haryana cabinet meeting.
New Delhi/Agartala, Jan 16 : The Tripura unit of CPI-M on Tuesday wrote to Election Commission (EC), asking for an investigation and action over the reports of NSA Ajit Doval attending a BJP meeting in the national capital, pertaining to assembly elections in Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland.

Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) Tripura State Committee Secretary Bijan Dhar, in his letter to EC termed National Security Advisor Doval's involvement in a BJP-RSS meet at Home Minister Rajnath Singh's house as "blatant misuse of administration by the ruling party at the Centre for garnering political mileage in the elections".

Referring to news items appearing in a local daily as well as in national media on Sunday, Dhar wrote: "Central BJP leaders including Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, BJP in-charge of North East Ram Madhav and senior RSS leader Krishna Gopal had met at the residence of Rajnath Singh and, according to the reports, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval was also present in that meeting."

"The report says the meeting was convened purely on political purpose, that is, to evolve electoral strategy of the BJP in the forthcoming assembly elections in Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland.

"Presence of any person holding very important position like that of National Security Advisor is not only undesirable and objectionable, it is a glaring instance of blatant misuse of administration by the ruling party at the Centre for garnering political mileage in the elections," Dhar wrote.

Dhar asked the EC to "to order an appropriate investigation into the matter and take stern legal measures" if the report is found true.
North Korean officials in recent cross-border talks demanded the return of a group of women who defected from a restaurant in China in 2016.

Seoul is legally bound to refuse but seemed acutely embarrassed by the demand. Asked for a formal comment on Monday, a senior Cheong Wa Dae official said, "This is a very sensitive time to answer such a question."

The 12 women escaped their minders at the Ryugyong restaurant in Ningbo in the Chinese province of Zhejiang in April 2016 and boarded a flight to South Korea.

The North also demanded the return of another woman named Kim Ryon-hui, who defected to South Korea by another route but has since asked to go back to the North.

The regime has stressed that there will be no further reunions of families separated by the Korean War without their return.

Unification Ministry spokesman Baek Tae-hyun told reporters, "It's a matter that will be discussed later as the inter-Korean relations make progress." He added there was no heated argument about the matter but the two sides agreed to keep talking about it.


Barmer (Rajasthan), Jan 16 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday laid the foundation stone of the Rs 43,129 crore big-ticket refinery project here and said it will change the economic landscape of Rajasthan.

"Rajasthan is taking the lead to become the energy power of the country," Modi said while addressing the event.

The refinery, a joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited and Rajasthan government, will have the capacity to refine 90 lakh crude oil annually.

Due to be completed by 2022, the project is expected to bring Rs 34,000 crore to the state government coffers annually.

He appreciated the efforts of Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje who initiated the process to turn this project into reality.

"We cannot mislead people by installing stones. As in 2022 we complete 75 years of independence, we will ensure that our refinery starts functioning in the same year," Modi said.

He took a dig at the Congress, saying: "We don't want people to come and ask us that after installing the stone why you did not take action on implementing the same."

The foundation stone laying ceremony had been performed four years ago by then Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

Hitting out at the Congress on the issue of inaugurating the Rajasthan refinery twice, Vasundhara Raje said: "We don't believe in installing stones, but we believe in working hard to build a building. We work to turn our efforts into reality."

Accusing the Congress government of not doing anything after the stone-laying ceremony, she said: "There was no planning, no seriousness and no projection of implementing this scheme. We are doing this with a lot of planning."

The programme was also addressed by Pradhan who said the refinery will bring in lot of growth and development in the state.
Chennai, Jan 16 : Three spectators of Jallikattu or bull taming sport were killed and several injured at different places in Tamil Nadu when bulls attacked them, according to reports reaching here.

In a village in Sivaganga district -- around 500 km from here -- two persons were killed when a bull attacked them on being released. Around 50 persons were injured in the attack.

Similarly, in a Jallikattu in Trichy district, around 350 km from here, one spectator was killed and several were injured in a bull's attack.

Meanwhile, at Alanganallur in Madurai district, Jallikattu was jointly flagged off by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami and Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam.

Around 1,000 bulls and over 1,200 bull tamers participated in the event.

Jallikattu is Tamil Nadu's traditional sport which is part of Pongal festivities.

The rules of the sport say that a bull tamer will be awarded a prize if he hangs on to the hump of the animal for a certain period of time.

The winning bull tamers and the owners of untamed bulls would be awarded prizes like cash, consumer durables, two wheelers and others.

This year, two cars has been added to the prize list for the Allanganallur event.

After mass protests last year against banning the sport, Jallikattu was held following the passing of an ordinance amending the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.

The first Jallikattu event of this year was held in Madurai on January 14.
Lucknow, Jan 16 : Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has broken a 16-year-old myth by spending a night at the Agra Circuit House -- a place not chosen by any state Chief Minister for the last 16 years, officials said on Tuesday.

The monk-turned-politician also broke a 29-year-old myth by visiting Noida last year.

The last Chief Minister to have stayed in the Agra Circuit Couse, a government accommodation, was Rajnath Singh who was here 16 years back.

Incidentally, he lost his chair after the visit and none of his successors have dared to stay there since.

Neither Mulayam Singh Yadav, nor Mayawati and not even Akhilesh Yadav mustered the courage to stay at the circuit house for fear of losing power.

They stayed at plush five-star properties whenever in the Taj city. Adityanath stayed at suite number 1 at the circuit house and when he was asked about the jinx, he reportedly smiled and scoffed at it.

He has in the past said that he did not believe in myths.

Prime minister Narendra Modi also lauded the chief minister last month for not believing in myths.

Adityanath is in Agra to receive the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sarah as they come to visit Taj Mahal on Tuesday.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : Aiming to expand its footprint in the country's FMCG sector, Baba Ramdev promoted Patanjali on Tuesday launched its e-commerce platform under the tagline "Haridwar to har dwar" (Haridwar to every door step online).

The company has also announced its partnership with leading e-retailers and aggregators to authorise online sales of its products which include Paytm Mall, BigBasket, Flipkart, Amazon India, Grofers, Amazon India, netmeds, 1mg and Shopclues, among others.

Launching the e-commerce platform "www.patanjaliayurved.net", Ramdev added that online sales have yielded good dividend that helped the company's sales cross Rs 10 crore mark in December 2017.

"We have been successful in delivering orders of Patanjali products to over 10 lakh people per day," Ramdev said here addressing the launch event.

The company estimated that shares of online sales will contribute 15 per cent in total turnover in future.

Congratulating the company on its recent launch, Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu tweeted: "Congrats yogrishiramdev, Acharya Balkrishna, Vijayshekhar (founder of Paytm) for emerging as top FMCG, in short time. We shall promote exports of Ayurveda globally."

P.P. Acharya Balkrishna, Managing Director and CEO of Patanjali Ayurved, explained that with the new mechanism of collaborating with various e-commerce partners, the company will reach out to more people including the youth who prefer and use online platform for shopping more these days.

Ramdev said the company has created an annual production capacity worth Rs 50,000 crore.

"Besides, operational big units at Haridwar and Tejpur, work is in progress at full speed in Noida, Nagpur and Indore as well," he added.

To cater to the export demand, the company has initiated a "100 per cent export oriented unit" in Mihan SEZ (special economic zone), Nagpur (Maharashtra), Ramdev said.

According to the company, the export unit will facilitate export of Patanjali swadeshi products to the UAE, the US, Cananda, Europe, South America, African countries besides others.

Commenting on the partnership, Manish Tiwary, Vice President Category Management, Amazon India said: "We are committed to work together with Indian-grown brands with the aim of giving customers unique products combined with a delightful online shopping experience."

"For the next 3-4 years, FMCG and groceries are going to be the top prioroties for us. 'Haridwar se har dwar tak' resonates Flipkart's vision of making top quaity products available to customers at the best value, so this partnership benefits consumers in a big way," said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of Flipkart.
Kolkata, Jan 16 : In an effort to shed West Bengal's investor wary image and woo much-needed capital, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday said the people of the state will dedicate their heart to Indian and foreign industrialists if they infused capital in the state.

She also assured industrialists that there is "no pressure, discrimination, and intimidation" in the state and Bengal has only "love and affection" for them.

"If you invest in Bengal, the state will give you everything. We cannot invest, but we can dedicate our heart and ourselves to you.

"We love India and unity of India. We love tolerance. You must invest in Bengal. The state is attracting businesses from all over the world like never before. There is no pressure, discrimination, intimidation... only love, affection and attraction is here," she said.

The business summit was attended by a host of prominent industrialists, including L.N. Mittal of Arcelor Mittal, Sajjan Jindal of JSW Steel, Kishor Biyani of Future group, Uday Kotak, the head of Kotak group, and Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of RP-Sanjiv Goenka group.

Czech Republic, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Japan, China, South Korea, the UK and the UAE are among the overseas nations represented at the mega business gathering.

The Chief Minister also said the state holds potential in power, port, agro-based industries, IT and ITes, urban development, health and education and many other sectors.

Reminding investors that West Bengal was the gateway to the north eastern states and neighbouring countries of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, Banerjee made a passionate appeal to them to come to the state.

"Please consider Bengal as your home and the Bengal will work with transparency, accountability, credibility, sincerity and punctuality. We consider all of you as our family members. It is a collective family and without you, we account think and organise the event," she said.

Banerjee also said the state emerged as the number one in many parameters, including e-governance and digital applications in delivering public services despite the "long legacy" of the Left Front government of "doing nothing".

"No man-days were lost. Six years ago, man-days lost was 78 lakh due to agitations during the regime of the Left Front (that ruled Bengal between 1977 and 2011). We do not allow any strike and blockade. If there is a problem, we sort it out," she said.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : Social activist Anna Hazare on Tuesday said he would ask volunteers joining his new movement to submit affidavits to the effect that they will not join politics in future and remain dedicated to social causes.

"Arvind Kejriwal had made me a promise before the 2011 anti-corruption movement that he will never join politics -- but he formed his party. Had there been such an affidavit, he would never have become the Chief Minister," Hazare told the media while talking about his protest here on March 23 for remunerative crop prices and a strong Lokpal.

He said the affidavits will include conditions that the volunteers will never join any political party or contest any election.

"We want untainted and dedicated persons to join our movement. We will ask them to sign affidavits to ensure that only honest people join us. No issues if the number of such persons is less."

The social activist said that if one dared to join any political party after signing the affidavit, he would be taken to court.

He refused to comment on the controversy regarding Rajya Sabha nominations by the Aam Admi Party (AAP), saying it was the party's "internal matter".

Hazare said he had nothing to do with disgruntled AAP leader Kumar Vishwas as he had also joined politics.

Hazare said he toured several states in the last one month to understand various social and agrarian issues.

"I held public meetings in Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Karnataka. I also spoke to our volunteers about the preparations for the protest rally on March 23," he said.

He said he will visit the remaining states in the next two months.

Hazare said the government should ensure remunerative prices for agricultural produce and pensions for farmers.
MECCA, Aug. 30, 2017 - Muslim pilgrims are seen around the Kaaba at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on Aug. 29, 2017. The annual pilgrimage officially started on Aug. 30. Image Source: IANS

New Delhi, Jan 16 : The central government on Tuesday said it has decided to withdraw subsidy given to hundreds and thousands of Muslims for the annual Haj pilgrimage.

Announcing the decision, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said it was in line with the government's agenda to empower minorities without appeasing them.

"This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi told reporters here.

He said the government would utilise the funds saved from withdrawing the subsidy for education of minorities, particularly girls.

The government had drafted the policy to abolish the Haj subsidy in phased manner after the Supreme Court asked it in 2012 to withdraw it gradually by 2022.

This year, the highest number of Indian pilgrims are likely to go for the pilgrimage after Saudi Arabia increased India's quota by 5,000.

A total of 1.75 lakh Indian Muslims can go for Haj this year.
Tokyo, Jan 16 : Japanese authorities recovered seven corpses, allegedly of North Korean fishermen, as another "ghost ship" from the country ran ashore along the western coast of Japan, the police said on Tuesday.

The fishing boat was discovered on January 10 along the Kanazawa coast, although authorities could only inspect the boat on Monday owing to strong currents, a local police spokesperson told Efe news agency.

Although the corpses could not be identified, the police believe them to be of North Korean fishermen, since the wooden boat was carrying a badge with a picture of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea.

Apart from the seven highly decomposed bodies, the authorities also found an eighth corpse nearby, although its origin or identity has not been established yet, according to the spokesperson.

In 2017, 104 North Korean ghost ships with a total of 35 corpses, had run ashore in Japan.

Some experts believe tougher economic sanctions against North Korea owing to its repeated weapons tests, along with a bad winter harvest, might have led the fishermen to venture away from North Korean waters in search of a good seafood catch.
Alappuzha (Kerala), Jan 16 : A probationary Sub-Inspector of the Kerala Police attached to a station near here and a police constable, besides two others, have been arrested for rape of a 15-year-old girl, police said on Tuesday.

Addressing reporters here, Alappuzha Superintendent of Police S. Surendran identified the arrested policemen as Sub-Inspector Liju and police constable Nelson.

"Another two men also have been arrested. We have set up a special investigation team also to probe the case in detail and to look up if more people are involved," he said.

The involvement of the policemen surfaced after the arrest of a woman named Athira, who was a relative of the teenage victim, and after examining her mobile phone, police found interactions between her and Liju.

The crime came to light when local residents stopped Athira and the teenage girl when they were going out and informed police, who then began a probe.

Meanwhile, the police team is also probing if there are more police officials involved in having exploited the girl, who hails from a poor background.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday called for a new regulatory system to enhance availability of doctors and medical professionals as work load of the existing doctors was incredibly high.

"Doctors need help in the form of more colleagues. And this is where we need a new regulatory system to enhance availability of doctors and medical professionals in our society.

"In the absence of this, the work load on our doctors is very high," said Kovind during his address at the 45th Convocation of the All India Institute of Medical Science here.

Stressing that currently the medical colleges in India, whether run by the government or private institutions, have only about 67,000 undergraduate seats and 31,000 postgraduate seats, Kovind said: "In a country of 1.3 billion people this is highly inadequate.

"We have to overcome regulatory bottlenecks and interest groups that have prevented the growth of quality medical education in our country."

"This gives us far fewer medical graduates and postgraduates every year than our people need. It also leads to aspiring medical students seeking admission in colleges in other countries, simply because they have limited options at home."

"This is simply not acceptable. As a nation, we need to address this situation very urgently. We need to create more opportunities for those young people who want to make medicine their calling," said Kovind.

Urging doctors from AIIMS to give back to society, the President also said that doctors need to be legitimately rewarded for their academic excellence, their medical skills and their expertise.

"Yet, as doctors, their services must be available both to those who can afford their fees and also to those who are less fortunate and cannot. A disease does not distinguish between rich and poor but unfortunately the poor suffer the most.

"It is for society to profit from medical science -- it is not for medical science to profiteer from society," said Kovind.
Actress Lee Honey has donated W10 million to international charity Oxfam to help Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (US$1=W1,064).

Lee has supported the charity's efforts to help women and children in need since 2015.

Lee promised to contribute part of her pay to the beauty show "Get it Beauty" when she left the show last November after hosting it for three years.

Thousands of Rohingya people who fled a military crackdown in Myanmar are sheltering across the border in Bangladesh. Women and children in particular lack access to sanitary facilities and are vulnerable to sexual assault at night, as the shelters lack power.

Oxfam plans to use Lee's donation to install lighting.
Pune, Jan 16 : Three persons were killed when a trooper with the SRFP posted on duty in Pune allegedly opened indiscriminate fire at two public places here on Tuesday afternoon, police said.

According to the Pune (Rural) Control, the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) trooper, Sanjay Shinde, opened fire at two busy public places in Borawake Nagar and Morinagar Chowk in Daund.

Immediately after the incident, he managed to escape to his residence in a nearby locality even as police teams rushed to the spot.

The deceased have been identified as Anil Jadhav, Gopal Shinde and Prashant Pawar. There were no reports of any other casualties.

The motive behind the trooper's action, or whether it was triggered by some health condition, is not clear yet, police said.

A large number of police personnel and local residents gathered outside Shinde's home and efforts were on to arrest him.
Islamabad, Jan 16 : Defence Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan has said that the US has been trying to convince Pakistan that India is not a threat and that Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards its neighbour.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," Dawn on Tuesday quoted Dastgir Khan as saying.

Regretting how the US "downplayed" India's "aggressive posturing" along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning in Afghanistan.

He called for "ruthlessly candid dialogue" with Washington to remove all types of misconceptions and misunderstandings.

"It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," Dastgir Khan said.

He alleged that "India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan".

Terming 2017 as the "deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians", he said that India today is a "highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour".

"The unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace," the Minister added.

Dastgir Khan also said the Indian government had "accelerated Pakistan bashing".

"The case of Kulbhushan Jhadav is a proof of his attempts to create unrest in other countries," nation.com.pk quoted the Minister as saying.

He said Pakistan was a responsible nuclear state and it would continue with its policy of "full spectrum deterrence".

"Pakistan will continue its policy in line with the policy of credible minimum deterrence and avoidance of armed race," the Defence Minister said.
Chandigarh, Jan 16 : Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Padmaavat" was banned on Tuesday by Haryana's BJP government, even as massive protests against the movie's upcoming release continued in Rajasthan.

The decision to ban the film was taken on Tuesday at a meeting of the Haryana cabinet, chaired by Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar.

"Padmaavat" is already banned in Rajasthan and Gujarat, both ruled by the BJP.

Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij tweeted about the ban being imposed on the movie which is set to release nationwide on January 25.

"Film Padmavati/Padmavat banned in Haryana," Vij wrote on Twitter.

Vij took up the issue regarding the impending release of the film and said the Rajput community in the state was against the film. He said the entire cabinet supported him on the move to impose a ban on screening of the film in Haryana.

The film, cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification with U/A certificate, has been caught in a row over claims by Rajput groups backed by a section of the BJP that it distorts history.

Shree Rajput Karni Sena, at the forefront of the protests, has demanded a nationwide ban on the film.

On Tuesday, Karni Sena members took out a massive rally led by its chief Lokendra Singh Kalvi in Dholpur, Rajasthan to protest against the Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh and Shahid Kapoor starrer.

"Dholpur was chosen as the location for the show of strength as it is situated on the Uttar Pradesh border. We want the Yogi Adityanath government in UP to ban the film as Haryana government has already declared its ban in their state," a senior member of Karni Sena told IANS.

The spokesperson said a huge protest is also being planned at Jantar Mantar in Delhi from January 22.

On their part, "Padmaavat" producers have stated that the film is based on "Padmavat", a poem by Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, in an ode to the famed valour, legacy and courage of Rajputs, and portrays Rani Padmavati with utmost respect and does not tarnish her repute or misrepresent her character in any manner.
Shimla, Jan 16 : The public sector power generator Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam (SJVN), a company that owns and operates India's largest hydropower project in Himachal Pradesh, on Tuesday contributed Rs 1 crore to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund.

Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur was presented a cheque of Rs 1 crore by SJVN Chairman-cum-Chief Managing Director Nand Lal Sharma here.

The Chief Minister said the funds would go a long way in helping the poorest of poor to meet their medical expenses. The employees of boards and corporations should also voluntarily donate towards the Chief Minister's Relief Fund, he added.

Sharma informed the Chief Minister that against the target of generating 8,700 million units, the SJVN has generated 9,045 million units for the year 2016-17. In this fiscal, it has generated more than 8,660 million units till date.

He said the revenue from operation of the plant was Rs 2,468.66 crore and the net profit after tax was Rs 1,544.14 crore in 2016-17.

The SJVN is a joint venture of the government of India and the Himachal Pradesh government.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : The trial of Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah and alleged hawala dealer Muhammad Aslam Wani in a money laundering case began in a court here on Tuesday.

Testifying as a prosecution witness, Enforcement Directorate (ED) official Ajay Kumar got recorded his statement before Additional Sessions Judge Sidharth Sharma.

The court fixed February 26 for recording of statement of another prosecution witnesses.

As Shah had moved a bail application, the court asked the ED to file its response by January 29.

The Enforcement Directorate had in September last year filed a charge sheet against Wani and Shah under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Wani, arrested on August 6 last year, had reportedly confessed that he passed on the hawala money of Rs 2.25 crore to Shah.

Shah was arrested on July 25, 2017, on charge of money laundering in the case dating back to 2005 when the Delhi Police Special Cell arrested Wani.

In the 2005 case lodged by the Special Cell, the court had acquitted co-accused Wani of the charges of criminal conspiracy and other offences but convicted him under the Arms Act.

The Enforcement Directorate had submitted that the conviction under the Arms Act was the trigger point to take action under the PMLA.

Both have denied the charges.

The court had framed charges under Sections 3 and 4 of the PMLA act against both accused.

Public Prosecutors Navin Kumar Matta and Rajeev Awasthi had told the court that Wani and Shah were involved in generation of huge money from various countries, including Pakistan, to foment and fuel unrest in Kashmir.

Defence counsel M.S. Khan had claimed innocence of his clients who he claimed were falsely implicated.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : The central government on Tuesday said it has decided to withdraw subsidy given to Muslims for the annual Haj pilgrimage.

Announcing the decision, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said it was in line with the government's agenda to empower minorities without appeasing them.

"This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi told reporters here.

He said the government would utilise the funds saved from withdrawing the subsidy for education of minorities, particularly girls.

Naqvi said the subsidy amount ranged from Rs 500-700 crore, which mainly went to the national carrier Air India that flew the pilgrims to Jeddah, along with Saudi Airlines, in a 50:50 ratio.

With the government already moving ahead with privatisation of Air India, the subsidy would not make sense, he felt.

Naqvi said the withdrawal of subsidy would not make much difference in the airfare from major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Kolkata, though it would make travel costlier from smaller cities.

"But to offset this cost hike, we have for the first time given the choice to pilgrims to select their point of embarkation. So, for example, a pilgrim from Srinagar may now embark from Delhi, or a pilgrim from Gaya may embark from Kolkata etc., to avoid extra expenses," Naqvi said.

However, the Minister said that the government would "fulfil all its responsibilities it has towards its citizens" and would make all the arrangements for the pilgrims in Saudi Arabia apart from ensuring their safety, security and comfort.

The government had drafted the policy to abolish the Haj subsidy in phased manner after the Supreme Court asked it in 2012 to withdraw it gradually by 2022.

Last year, the government had formed a committee comprising eminent Muslims headed by retired IAS Afzal Amanullah to revise India's Haj policy. The committee had recommended abolition of Haj subsidy and allowing women above 45 years of age to proceed on Haj without "mehram" (male guardian), among other things.

The government accepted most of the recommendations made by the committee.

This year, the highest number of Indian pilgrims are likely to go for the pilgrimage after Saudi Arabia increased India's quota by 5,000.

A total of 1.75 lakh Indian Muslims can go for Haj this year.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : There was an uneasy truce in the country's top court on Tuesday as Chief Justice Dipak Misra reached out to four dissenting judges to resolve a rift with them over the allocation of cases in the Supreme Court.

Justice Misra met the four judges -- Justices J. Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur and Kurian Joseph - separately in the course of the customary tea gathering at the judges lounge on Tuesday morning, sources privy to the development said.

The nearly 15-minute conversation between the Chief Justice and his four senior most colleagues would be followed by a similar meeting on Wednesday morning as the talks remained inconclusive, the sources said.

During the meeting, the sources said, Justice Misra and the rebel judges discussed all the outstanding issues, point of contentions and differences.

The sources said the Chief Justice took the initiative of meeting the four judges as they were not satisfied with the outcome of a meeting of all judges on Monday morning.

An impression was generated on Monday that issues were resolved after Attorney General K.K. Venugopal said the events since January 12 were a "storm in a tea cup" and that "everything is settled".

The country's top court was hit by unprecedented crisis, after the four senior most judges at a press conference expressed their unhappiness about the functioning of the court and how cases were being allocated arbitrarily.

They complained that "administration of Supreme Court is not in order and there have been things less than desirable that have happened in the court".

The judges also released a letter they had written to the Chief Justice questioning how he was arbitrarily deciding which bench should decide which case even as he is the "master of the roster" but that did not make him a "superior authority".

"The Chief Justice is only the first amongst equals - nothing more or nothing less," the letter said.

Efforts by sitting judges and advocate bodies to mediate a solution to the crisis have not succeeded.

The Bar Council of India even set up a seven-member delegation and met Justice Misra and 14 other judges on Sunday. The Supreme Court Bar Association also met the Chief Justice and other judges.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : Amnesty International India on Tuesday launched a postcard campaign and online petition to ban use of pellet guns by security forces.

Under the campaign, postcards and a petition will be used to urge the Jammu and Kashmir government to ban pellet-firing shotguns, provide reparation to those affected and set up independent investigations into cases of deaths or serious injuries.

A statement by Amnesty International India said it will submit signed postcards and the petition to Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.

"Pellet-firing pump-action shotguns have been responsible for killing, blinding and injuring thousands of people in Kashmir. The campaign aims to bring people from across Jammu and Kashmir to write postcards to Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti," the statement said.

"It is shameful that the serious concerns raised repeatedly regarding the use of pellet-firing guns have failed to receive sufficient attention from the state government," said Aakar Patel, Executive Director, Amnesty International India.

"The use of pellet shotguns is inherently inaccurate and indiscriminate. These so called 'non-lethal' weapons have killed at least 14 people since July 2016.

"Thousands more have suffered extensive and debilitating physical and psychological harm. It is unconscionable for authorities to continue using pellet-firing shotguns despite being aware of the damage they cause," he said.

Zahoor Wani, a campaigner of Amnesty International India, said: "Through this campaign, we want to send a message to the state government that the people of Kashmir want an immediate end to the use of pellet-firing shotguns.

"The voices of the victims and those who stand in solidarity with them must be heard."

The state government admitted recently in the legislative assembly that 6,221 persons received pellet shotgun injuries, including 782 eye injuries, between July 2016 and February 2017.

In September 2017, Amnesty International India released a report, "Losing Sight in Kashmir: The Impact of Pellet-Firing Shotguns", which documented cases of 88 people whose eyesight was either temporarily or permanently damaged by metal pellets fired by security forces between 2014 and 2017.

Amnesty International India also obtained information which suggests that at least 16 Jammu and Kashmir Armed Police personnel suffered pellet injuries in 2016.

Security forces have used metal pellet-firing shotguns for crowd control in the Kashmir valley since at least 2010.

The statement added that the use of pellet shotguns in Kashmir violates international norms on the use of force.

The UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials states that law enforcement officials may use force "only when strictly necessary and to the extent required for the performance of their duty", the statement said.

The UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms states that force should only be used when "unavoidable", and law enforcement officials should "exercise restraint" in using force and "minimise damage and injury", the statement added.
Barmer (Rajasthan), Jan 16 : In a fierce attack on the Congress party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said that drought and the Congress are "twins" and accused the party of "fooling people by making false promises".

"Congress and drought are twins. No matter where Congress goes, drought always follows," Modi said while addressing the public in Pachpadra in Barmer, during a function to lay the foundation stone of the much-awaited Rajasthan Refinery Project.

Modi's attack on the Congress comes in the wake of a letter written by former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot in which he had questioned why the Rajasthan Refinery's foundation-laying ceremony was being held for the second time when it was already done by then Congress president Sonia Gandhi four years back.

Modi said: "Congress party has misled people by simply laying foundation stones for projects and has done nothing for the poor. We cannot mislead people by installing stones. As in 2022 we complete 75 years of independence, we will ensure that our refinery starts functioning in the same year," Modi said.

He took a dig at the Congress, saying: "We don't want people to come and ask us that after installing the stone why you did not take action on implementing the same."

He appreciated the efforts of Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje who initiated the process to turn the project into reality.

Modi began his address saying 'Khamma ghani' - a greeting in Marwari language - and went into an aggressive mode where he attacked Congress and its working on several occasions.

He said that Congress has the tendency of fooling people by making false promises, and that the OROP scheme could have never been implemented successfully if the Congress' plans and projections were kept in mind.

"They misled us as well by allotting funds worth Rs 500 crore for OROP in the budget. However, after calculations, the entire costing for the OROP came to over Rs 12,000 crore. We took the help of Army officers in this context and ensured that Rs 10,004 crore is deposited into their account. The remaining shall also be deposited soon," he assured.

Continuing his attacking mode, Modi said "When we assumed office, one of the first things we did was to see what work has been done on promises made earlier in the Railway Budget. Just for applause in Parliament, some people made promises they could never keep. We were determined to end that culture of misleading," said Modi, adding that "we had to close the practice of calling the Railway Budget each year as it focussed on making false promises."

Modi said that 1,500 policies planned by the erstwhile government "were seen only on paper and there was no planning chalked out for their implementation".

Urging the country to work in unison, he said that this is a time for 'Sankalp se Siddhi'. "We must focus on our aims and work towards achieving them by 2022, when we mark 75 years of freedom," he added.

Recalling the times when getting an LPG connection was a challenge, he said people used to go to MPs for a letter recommending a gas cylinder. "Many MPs sold coupons in black. It was not acceptable to me that women of India should suffer due to lack of cooking gas facilities," he said.

Targetting Congress, he said "Garibi Hatao was an attractive slogan for them. They nationalized the banks but the doors of the banks were never allowed to be opened for the poor. Jan Dhan Yojana changed such parameters and the poor got access to banking facilities."

Over 32 crore people opened their accounts in the Jan Dhan bank accounts, he said.

He praised the efforts of Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje in tackling the drought crisis during both her terms. "It is in contrast to the opposition in the state, whose poor drought management in Rajasthan is widely known," Modi said, in a dig at the Congress.

Modi expressed his happiness to be in Rajasthan, "especially for a project that will bring happiness and prosperity to the lives of many". He thanked Dharmendra Pradhan and Vasundhara Raje for their "untiring efforts to make this project a success".

He said the project will change the face of Rajasthan in next five years as Barmer will emerge as an industrial hub which will create infinite job opportunities for people of the state.

Modi also praised former Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat who according to him was the face behind modern Rajasthan. "This man was a visionary who first envisioned the dream of setting up this refinery," he said.
Thiruvananthapuram, Jan 16 : The Congress' Kerala unit on Tuesday demanded that the central government should continue with the Haj subsidy, terming its removal yet another of its acts against the minority community.

Former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy termed it as the most unfortunate and called for it to be reversed.

"Giving subsidy for Haj is historically relevanA and has been going on for ages. This is a clear act of targeting the minority community and will disturb the secular fabric of our country and hence should be reversed," he said.

The Narendra Modi-led central government on Tuesday announced it had decided to withdraw subsidy given to hundreds of thousands of Muslims for the annual Haj pilgrimage with Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi saying it was in line with the government's agenda to empower minorities without appeasing them.

He said the government would utilise the funds saved from withdrawing the subsidy for education of minorities, particularly girls. The government had drafted the policy to abolish the Haj subsidy in phased manner after the Supreme Court asked it in 2012 to withdraw it gradually by 2022.

This year as total of 10,981 Haj pilgrims from Kerala were supposed to benefit through the subsidy.

State Congress president M.M. Hassan said that this is the latest example of the attitude of the Centre towards the minority community, adding that subsidy has been on since the days of first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Of the 3.34 crore Kerala population (1.61 crore males and 1.73 females), Muslims comprises 88.73 lakh - 41.76 lakh males and 46.97 lakh females.

State Haj Committee chairman Thodiyur Moulavi however said that now that this has been stopped, the Centre should see that the airlines stop exploitation by charging high fares.

"If they are able to do that, then it's fine. However the decision to divert the subsidy amount to provide education to Muslim girls, is nothing but a ploy to project an image that this government is for the welfare of Muslim women, will not stand," he said.

Senior woman Congress leader Shanimol Usman said the Centre has again proved of how things can be done in haste.

"The decision to divert the subsidy for providing Muslim girls education can only be seen with extreme caution as if one looks into what this government has done so far, proves they have messed up everything," she said.

Former state BJP president V.Muraleedharan however said the Congress is just playing "appeasement politics" to please the Muslim community.

"Providing subsidy for just one community destroys the principles of secularism and the decision to use this subsidy for the education needs of the Muslim girls is most welcome," he said.
North Korea's Rodong Sinmun daily on Monday lambasted U.S. President Donald Trump, picking up on a controversial new book about Trump's chaotic White House by the journalist Michael Wolff.

The paper echoed Wolff's book by saying Trump's thinking is at the "kindergarten level" and demonstrates "signs of dementia."

It added the U.S. does not want to see tensions ease on the Korean Peninsula and peace take root.

Meanwhile, a body describing itself as North Korea's journalists' association threatened South Korea with its own version of fire and fury.

The association warned that the "party table" of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics could end up becoming a "funeral ceremony" unless the South Korean government reins in hostile reporting about North Korea in the South Korean press.


New Delhi, Jan 16 : The CBI on Tuesday said it has filed a chargesheet against 95 people in the multi-crore-rupee Vyapam examination scam linked with the 2011 Pre Medical Test (PMT) case.

Those named in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) chargesheet include 83 candidates, four Vyapam officials and eight middlemen in a case relating to irregularities in Samvida Shala Shikshak Patrata Pariksha Varg-3 Examination in 2011 conducted by Vyapam.

The scam in Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal (Vyapam) or Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board broke out in 2013 wherein candidates bribed officials and rigged exams by deploying imposters to write their papers.

The scam, which began in 1995, involves politicians, senior officials and businessmen.

The CBI took over investigation following a Supreme Court order on July 9, 2015. The chargesheet was connected to the Pre-Medical Test of 2011 -- one of several cases of irregularities in examinations conducted by Vyapam.

According to the CBI chargesheet, files from the hard disk of the computer of then Principal System Analyst Vyapam reveal that marks of certain candidates were allegedly increased to enable them to qualify the test.

"The same were verified with the OMR answer sheets of the candidates and it was found that marks of 84 candidates were increased, in the final result, to make them qualify the examination," it said.

One candidate is on the run and investigation is on in his case.

"Investigation further revealed that the accused public servants and other private persons collected the examination details viz roll number, form number of the candidates and provided the same to then Principal System Analyst, Vyapam," it said.

The Special Task Force, which was probing the case earlier, filed four chargesheets in the case.

The agency also said the examination details so received by said Principal System Analyst were entered into a digital file on the computer which contained the details of the candidates along with their names or roll numbers and the name of the middlemen who had sponsored the candidates.

"Just prior to the declaration of the result, the said Principal System Analyst created another database in respect of the candidates whose marks were intended to be increased," it said.

It was also alleged that in the result data base, he increased the marks as per the requirement of the candidates so as to make them qualify the examination and thereafter the actual marks obtained by the 84 accused were deleted from the result file, the agency said.

"However, no change in the OMR answer sheets could be made and thus the original marks obtained by the accused, as per the OMR sheets, were less than the marks declared in the result," it added.

In November last year, the agency has filed chargesheet against 592 persons in the scam linked with 2012 PMT case.

Of the total persons named in the chargesheet filed in a Bhopal court, 245 are new while remaining 347 are those who have already been named as accused in the CBI's October 31 Vyapam chargesheet on the probe related to the 2013 PMT case.

Over 40 persons, including witnesses, accused, and alleged beneficiaries, died in mysterious circumstances ever since the scam broke out. These included son of the then Governor Ram Naresh Yadav. Some died in freak accidents or of mysterious illnesses.

The opposition Congress has repeatedly blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan for the deaths, which it alleged is a cover-up for the racket. Chouhan and the BJP have denied the charges.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : The BJP's Delhi unit on Tuesday said it had launched the partys Mission 2019 by highlighting what he called the misgovernance of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in the national capital.

"The party's Executive meeting should be treated as the beginning of the countdown to the 2019 general elections," Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Manoj Tiwari told reporters here after the two-day meeting.

"We will move across the city to highlight the AAP government's misgovernance," he said.

Tiwari, who represents the northeast constituency of Delhi in the Lok Sabha, also attacked the Delhi government for "not fulfilling its poll promises".

"The Arvind Kejriwal government came to power by promising to regularise unauthorised colonies in Delhi. But today, residents of these colonies feel cheated as the government has not done one work to benefit them," he alleged.

"The BJP will strive to provide all amenities to unauthorised colonies here and, if needed, will petition the Centre to amend the Constitution accordingly," he said.

Tiwari also urged Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh for central funds for the development of unauthorised colonies.

Slamming the AAP government for its alleged failure to notify 351 roads, he said: "Even after completing three years in power, the Kejriwal government has asked for more time for the purpose.

Tiwari said that Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was unable to fulfil even one per cent of the 70 promises his paty made to the people of Delhi during the assembly elections.

The BJP leader attacked the city government over the death of 225 homeless people in one-and-a-half months.

"Over 225 homeless people have died but the government has remained mute," he said.

Tiwari said that the Delhi people voted Kejriwal for good governance and development but got in return a government that functions on Twitter and publishes false advertisements.

The BJP leader highlighted depleting number of Delhi Transport Corporation buses, functioning of Delhi Jal Board, and alleged delay in work on Delhi Metro Corporation's third and fourth phases.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday said the 67,000 undergraduate and 31,000 postgraduate medical seats in India are highly inadequate for a country with a population of 1.3 billion.

"Currently our medical colleges, whether run by the government or private institutions, have only about 67,000 undergraduate seats and 31,000 postgraduate seats. In a country of 1.3 billion people, this is highly inadequate," said Kovind speaking at the 45th Convocation of the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) here.

It was time that regulatory bottlenecks and interest groups that hindered the growth of quality medical education in our country were removed, said the President.

Terming the numbers of pass-outs joining the profession every year as insufficient for the overall Indian population, Kovind said fewer seats also led to aspiring medical students seeking admission in colleges in other countries simply because they had limited options at home.

"You will agree that this is simply not acceptable. As a nation, we need to address this situation very urgently. We need to create more opportunities for those young people who want to make medicine their calling," said Kovind.

During the address, he also called for a new regulatory system to enhance availability of doctors and medical professionals as the workload of existing doctors was incredibly high.

"Doctors need help in the form of more colleagues. And this is where we need a new regulatory system to enhance availability of doctors and medical professionals in our society.

"In the absence of this, the workload on our doctors is very high. We have to overcome regulatory bottlenecks and interest groups that have prevented the growth of quality medical education in our country," said Kovind.

Exhorting the doctors from AIIMS to give back to the society, the President also said that doctors needed to be legitimately rewarded for their academic excellence, their medical skills and their expertise.

"Yet, as doctors, their services must be available both to those who can afford their fees and also to those who are less fortunate. A disease does not distinguish between rich and poor but unfortunately the poor suffer the most. It is for society to profit from medical science -- it is not for medical science to make profit from society," said Kovind.

According to Kovind, despite the progresses India has made, gaps remain.

"Indian companies are among the world's biggest manufacturers of vaccines. These vaccines are supplied across the globe. Our innovative medical scientists have even developed new vaccines. But even then, our own immunisation record remains below desirable levels," said Kovind.
Kolkata, Jan 16 : Protesting the provisions of a bill that allegedly seeks an apolitical students' union, students of Jadavpur University continued their sit-in for the second day on Tuesday.

Students allege that the West Bengal Universities and Colleges (Administration and Regulation) Bill 2017 is an attempt to dissolve students' union.

The protestors were seen sitting in front of the meeting room of the Executive Council members on Tuesday, demanding immediate revocation of the bill which was passed in the West Bengal Assembly last year.

"This (the sit-in) will continue till the Vice Chancellor takes steps to ensure the students' union elections are held before January 31," an Arts Faculty Students' Union (AFSU) leader said.

The sit-in involving AFSU and Faculty of Engineering and Technology Students Union (FETSU) started on Monday afternoon.

"We have nothing to do with the bill. We have already communicated the sentiments of students to the Higher Education Department," VC Suranjan Das had said on Monday.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's picture on a hoarding was found defaced inside the campus -- an act condemned by the VC as well as the agitating students.

Last year in August, students had conducted a similar movement against the VC and other Executive Council (EC) members on the same issue for over 36 hours.
New Delhi, Jan 16 : Australian state Victoria is taking action to double the value of its annual goods export to India to AUD 1 billion over the next decade, it was announced on Tuesday.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said the new plan focusses on doubling the number of Victorian businesses engaged in India from 150 to 300.

"Recognising India's economy as the third-largest and fastest growing on Earth, we believe that a close bond with India will be beneficial for both economies," Andrews said during the launch of 'Victoria's India Strategy'.

He described it as an ambitious blueprint aimed at growing exports to India, attracting more international students to enrol at Victoria's education providers and encouraging more people from India to experience what a visit to Victoria can offer.

Andrews said it is aimed at increasing the cultural exchanges between both India and Victoria.

It includes growing the number of Indian postgraduate research students in Victoria by 25 per cent and increasing the exchange between educational institutes of both the communities.
Hong Kong, Jan 16 : With automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and disruptive technologies increasingly replacing human beings, industry experts on Tuesday called for re-skilling techies for their retention and creating more jobs for future.

"The skills that were required for jobs 20 years ago and the present day are not the same just as the skills that will be required are. So, we have to keep retraining our people," said International Finance Corporation's Director, East Asia and Pacific region, Vivek Pathak at a panel discussion during the 11th Asian Financial Forum here.

Addressing a session on "Jobs of the Future - Supporting the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs" at the two-day financial summit that concluded on Tuesday, he said that countries need to create ecosystems to encourage and support start-ups.

"If jobs are being lost in the IT sector due to automation technologies, they are being created in other areas. Governments and public at large should focus on whether techies and people in other professions are skilled enough for the new jobs," Pathak said.

Countries should also work on making reasonably-priced internet accessible so start-ups and new technologies can grow, said panelist Nicolas Aguzin, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for Asia Pacific region at American banking and financial service firm J.P. Morgan Chase.

"Technology has played a critical role in the creation of newer jobs in the past few years," he said.

Another panellist, Melissa Guzy, the founder and managing partner of Arbor Ventures, a Hong Kong-based venture capital firm, predicted that the future start-ups would be spread across the world, and not centralised in Silicon Valley in the US, which is home to several global technology companies.

"With the restrictions in doing business in the US during President Donald Trump's regime, the Silicon Valley will continue to dwindle over time, which great as there will be successful startups and entrepreneurs in the rest of the world," she said.

According to the International Labour Organisation's projections, at least about 200 million people in the world would be unemployed in 2018.

While jobs in production lines and coal mines etc., would soon be replaced entirely by machines, several new jobs which didn't exist earlier like data scientists and cybersecurity specialists will also grow, the experts believed.

Organised by the Hong Kong government and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, the Forum witnessed the participation of around 100 speakers and nearly 3,000 delegates from around 50 countries including China, the US and others.

Some of the key speakers at the Forum included the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) First Deputy Managing Director of David Lipton, Asian Development Bank President Takehiko Nakao, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank President and Chairman Jin Liquin among others.

Global economy, emerging financial technology sector in Asia and how it can transform the future of banking, AI and big data opportunities were some of the topics discussed.

(Bhavana Akella is in Hong Kong at the invitation of Hong Kong Trade Development Council. She can be contacted at bhavana.a@ians.in)
Ranchi/New Delhi, Jan 16 : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday said it had arrested two persons in connection with the murder of former state Minister and Janata Dal-United legislator Ramesh Singh Munda in 2008.

Residents of Jharkhand capital Ranchi, both suspects -- Prafull Kumar Mahto, 27, and Jaiganesh, 37 -- were arrested on Monday and have since been remanded in agency custody for five days by an NIA Special Court in Ranchi.

Munda was gunned down by Maoist guerrillas on July 9, 2008, while attending a programme at a school on Ranchi's outskirts.

Maoist commander Kundan Pahan's name figured in the killing. Pahan surrendered to police in May last year.

The probe was handed over to the NIA in September 2017.

An official of the counter-terror probe agency in Delhi said that the role of the two suspects had emerged vis-a-vis the murder conspiracy.

On October 9 last year, the agency had arrested former Jharkhand Minister Gopal Krishna Petre in the case, exposing the Maoist-politician nexus in Jharkhand.

Besides Petre, the NIA arrested Assistant Sub-Inspector Sheshnath Singh who was accused of providing advance information regarding Munda's movement to the Maoists. Singh, a bodyguard of Ramesh Singh Munda, is in NIA custody till October 15.

It is the first case in which a politician has been arrested in the killing of another politician.

Petre created history by defeating the then Jharkhand Chief Minister and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha chief Shibu Soren in January 2009 by-election to the Tamar seat, which fell vacant after Munda's murder.

After Shibu Soren lost the poll, President's Rule was imposed in Jharkhand.

Petre was again elected the legislator in the November 2009 assembly polls and he became a Minister.
Beijing, Jan 16 : Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli on Tuesday called for more efforts in building the One Belt One Road initiative.

Addressing a conference on the initiative, Zhang said China should continue to push pilot projects under the initiative to connect infrastructure and policy, Xinhua reported.

Trade and investment cooperation should be improved and new growth drivers found for the common development along the intiative's route, he said.

China needs better financial products and services for the initiative, he said, adding that people-to-people exchanges should provide public support for the initiative.

China should also strengthen environmental protection to ensure green development.
Panaji, Jan 16 : Even as Goa and Karnataka slug it out over the disputed waters of the Mhadei/Mandovi river water, former Goa Chief Minister Ravi Naik has suggested a 'unique' idea to tap the excess river water flowing into the Arabian Sea.

Naik, a Congress legislator, told reporters here on Tuesday that river water in the state should be harvested by building dams and selling it off to water-deprived regions of the country and even exporting it to the Arabian region to generate revenue.

"So much of our water is wasted. Now, our government could build dams and privatise it. The water can then be exported by putting up dams and give us (the state) some revenue. Dams can be put up all over Goa.

The water can be stopped and sent to Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Haryana or even Arab countries," he said.

"They (Arab countries) export petrol, we can export water. We do not get enough water to drink, despite there being an abundance of water in Goa," Naik said, calling for better harvesting of excess water which spills into the sea.
Santiago, Jan 16 : Pope Francis had a private meeting Tuesday with Chilean President Michele Bachelet in the La Moneda palace's Blue Hall and was introduced to her 91-year-old mother, Angela Jeria, who was tortured by the military regime that ruled the South American country from 1973 to 1990.

Bachelet, whose term ends in March and will be succeeded by Sebastian Pin era, spoke with the leader of the Roman Catholic Church for about 25 minutes before exchanging gifts, reported Efe news agency.

The Pope gave Bachelet a medallion minted to commemorate his visit and depicting Teresa de los Andes and Alberto Hurtado, two Chilean saints.

At the end of the meeting, he was introduced to Jeria.

In an address to government officials earlier, Francis congratulated Pinera, saying "he has recently received a mandate from the Chilean people to lead the country over the next four years."
Hyon attended the talks in a blue formal dress with a badge bearing the portraits of North Korean nation founder Kim Il-sung and former leader Kim Jong-il. She greeted the South Korean delegates with a smile.

Hyon Song-wol appears to be a powerful figure in her own right and apparently still enjoys the trust of her ex-boyfriend.

The two sides met in the truce village of Panmunjom to discuss details of the North's participation in the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, which will involve a vast contingent of cheerleaders for a tiny group of athletes.

The leader of North Korea's famous Moranbong girl band and rumored former girlfriend of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was among North Korean officials who met their South Korean counterparts on the border Monday.

One Unification Ministry official who was there said, "I could feel an air of composure and confidence." Another South Korean delegate said North Korea's chief delegate Kwon Hyok-bong and Hyon "spoke almost equally" -- a noteworthy detail in obsessively hierarchical North Korea.

There was speculation that Hyon's clutch bag was a Hermes product costing W25 million, but others said it was knock-off (US$1=W1,064).

A former vocalist for the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble, which is famous for revolutionary songs and one of North Korea's most popular bands under Kim Jong-il, Hyon has long been rumored to have been Kim Jong-un's lover.

She was promoted to the Central Committee of the Workers Party last year.

She apparently impressed Kim in 2015, when she abruptly canceled a performance by the band in Beijing just four hours before it was to start and flew back to North Korea, protesting against Chinese officials who demanded a change to the repertoire and objected to projections of a missile launch on the backdrop.

But there was no mention of the band in the agreement between the two sides. Instead, the 140-member Samjiyon Orchestra is to perform in Seoul and Gangneung.

The South informed the North that folk songs or classical music will be acceptable but not propaganda songs, while the North said it would compile a repertoire "befitting the atmosphere of unification."
New Delhi/Guwahati, Jan 16 : Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal called on Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday and discussed with him issues related to sealing of Indo-Bangla Border by year-end and the publication of the first draft NRC in the state.

They deliberated on the critical aspects of border fencing and vowed to remove all bottlenecks to ensure complete sealing of India's international border that Assam shares with Bangladesh.

The discussions, which took place at the official residence of the Union Home Minister in New Delhi, also took note of the unprecedented cooperation and support the state government had received from all sections of the society.

The meeting called for the same level of cooperation in the updation process of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in future as well.

They also discussed development of road communication along the India-Bhutan borders and development of infrastructure in the hamlets there.

Earlier in the day, Sonowal also met Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitely in the latter's office at North Block in New Delhi and apprised him of the steps taken by the state government for the success of the forthcoming "Global Investors' Summit" on February 3 and 4.
Chennai, Jan 16 : Vice President M.Venkaiah Naidu on Tuesday here urged Indian states to follow the example of Tamil Nadu in respect organ transplantation.

Addressing a function to felicitate surgeon Mohammed Rela of Gleneagles Global Health City for touching a milestone of 1,000 liver transplants over a seven year period, he noted Tamil Nadu is a pioneer in organ transplantation in the country.

Naidu pointed out the transformation happening in the Indian healthcare field with people from overseas coming to the country for liver transplant from the days of Indians going abroad for such a treatment.

According to State Health Secretary J.Radhakrishnan, 24 free surgeries have been done by Rela and his team under the MoU between Government Stanley Medical College Hospital and Gleneagles and Chennai has become a hub for liver transplants.

According to Health Minister C. Vijayabaskar, it was late Chief Minister J.Jayalalithaa who brought a change in the organ transplantion in the state.

He said Jayalalithaa started a corpus resulting in conduct of around 300 free transplants and supply of immune-suppresants.
Beijing, Jan 16 : Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, on Tuesday discussed bilateral trade and the situation on the Korean Peninsula by phone.

The phone call came amid strengthening of efforts to keep China-US trade relations right on track and at a time when tensions on the Korean Peninsula have shown signs of easing, reported Xinhua news agency.

China-US relations maintained overall stability and achieved significant progress in 2017, said Xi in the phone call, adding keeping bilateral ties on a track of healthy and stable development is in the interests of both countries and both peoples, and conforms to the common aspiration of the international community.

The two sides need to maintain high-level and various levels of interactions, bring the four high-level dialogue mechanisms between them into full play, and hold the second round of dialogues at a proper time, Xi said.

As economic and trade cooperation brings tangible benefits to both peoples, the two countries should adopt constructive measures to properly settle economic and trade issues of mutual concern by opening up the market to each other and "making the cake of cooperation bigger", he added.

The Chinese President also called for advancing cooperation between the two militaries, and in law-enforcement, drug control, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and cooperation at local levels, as well as close communication and coordination on major international and regional issues.

The two sides need to meet each other halfway, respect each other, focus on cooperation, deal with sensitive issues in a constructive way, respect each other's core interests and major concerns, and maintain the momentum of sound and steady development of China-US relations, he said.

Trump said that the US side attaches great importance to its relations with China as well as to the US-China cooperation, and that it is willing to work with the Chinese side to enhance bilateral exchanges at all levels, expand pragmatic cooperation, and properly handle problems in bilateral trade so as to achieve even greater results in bilateral relations.

In response to Trump's request for comments on the development of the situation on the Korean Peninsula, Xi told him that China was "ready to join the US for proper settlement of the nuclear issue"

Xi said that there are some positive changes and related parties should work jointly to keep up the hard-won momentum for the easing of the situation on the Korean Peninsula and create conditions for the resumption of talks.

Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and safeguarding peace and stability in the region accord with the common interests of all sides, said Xi, adding that it is vital for the international community to stay united over the issue.

China is ready to continue its joint efforts with the United States and other members of the international community to achieve progress that would finally lead to a proper resolution of the issue, said Xi.

Trump said the US values China's significant role in resolving the issue and is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China over the issue.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have shown signs of easing as senior officials from Pyongyang and Seoul met face-to-face on the borders earlier this month in what was their first direct talks in more than two years.
Kolkata, Jan 17 : West Bengal's opposition parties - the Congress, BJP and CPI-M - on Tuesday demanded "white paper" from the Mamata Banerjee government on the number of actual fructified proposals that the state had received in earlier business summits.

Meanwhile, inaugurating the fourth edition of Bengal Global Business Summit at the Biswa Bangla Convention Centre, Banerjee on Tuesday made a passionate appeal to investors to invest in the state.

However, the opposition described the Trinamool Congress government's effort of organising the business summit every year to woo investors in the state as "waste of public money".

State Congress President Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said: "The state government has never given a complete report on how many proposals have fructified from the previous business summit. The state government tries to fool everyone in the name of business summits."

Had the state managed to fructify even 50 per cent of the earlier proposals, there would not have been so much unemployment in the state, he said.

Leader of Opposition in the Assembly and Congress leader Abdul Mannan said these business summits are nothing but a "complete waste of public money".

Echoing Mannan, senior CPI-M leader and Left Front legislative party leader Sujan Chakraborty demanded that the state government should publish a "white paper" on the how the proposals have actually been fructified in the state.

West Bengal BJP President Dilip Ghosh said these business summits are "attempts to fool the masses" and only organised to derive political gains.
Washington, Jan 17 : President Donald Trump warned his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, that Washington's trade deficit with China "has continued to grow" and that the situation "is not sustainable," the White House said on Tuesday.

Trump and Xi spoke by telephone late on Monday in Washington, when it was already Tuesday morning in Beijing, and also discussed diplomatic progress on the Korean peninsula, Efe reported.

"President Trump expressed disappointment that the United States' trade deficit with China has continued to grow. President Trump made clear that the situation is not sustainable," said the White House in a statement after the call.

The US trade deficit with China increased by 13 percent in 2017, the first year of Trump's presidency, to 1.87 trillion yuan ($288 billion), according to official figures released last Friday in Beijing.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Commerce reported in early January that the negative trade balance between the US and China totalled $344.4 billion between January-November 2017, with figures for December still being unavailable at the time.

Trump considers the trade deficit to be a sign of economic weakness and has blamed it on the existing trade agreements with other countries that, in his judgment, are the root cause of job losses in the US manufacturing sector.

The US president during his election campaign threatened to impose tariffs of up to 45 percent on Chinese products and to declare China to be a currency manipulator, but for the moment he has not taken any action on those two issues, believing that first he must develop a closer working relationship with Xi to resolve the crisis involving North Korea.

In their telephone conversation, Trump and Xi "acknowledged the resumption of inter-Korean dialogue and expressed hope that it might prompt a change in North Korea's destructive behaviour," the White House said.

"President Trump committed to sustain the United States-led global campaign of maximum pressure to compel North Korea to commit to denuclearisation," the White House added.

According to the official Chinese press, Xi insisted during the call that all parties must join efforts to capitalize on advances on the Korean peninsula and create the conditions for resuming diplomatic negotiations.

Regarding trade, Xi emphasized that economic and trade cooperation between Washington and Beijing has provided concrete benefits for both parties, and thus constructive methods should be used to resolve bilateral differences in this area via greater opening of both markets, according to the Chinese version of the call.
National Taiwan University Opts for Ex Libris Alma Library Services

Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is pleased to announce National Taiwan University has chosen the Alma library services platform to replace the schools library management system.

TAIWAN, Japan, January 16, 2018  Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is pleased to announce that National Taiwan University (NTU) has chosen the Ex Libris Alma library services platform to replace the schools library management system. In addition, NTUs local implementation of the Ex Libris Primo discovery and delivery solution will be migrated to the cloud and integrated with the Alma platform. Through the software-as-a-service model, the university library services will enjoy benefit from the real-time synchronization and automatic updates of the Alma and Primo software solutions.

The evaluation process for the library platform focused on several main requirements: open access, flexibility, extension capabilities and plug-ins, support for traditional Chinese characters, and adaptability to accommodate the librarys specific needs. Furthermore, as NTU embarks on a restructuring of its library and the adoption of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard, Almas support for this standard will facilitate the review and streamlining of workflows and processes.

Hui-Hua Chen, the division director of the IT Services Division at NTU Library, commented, Most important, we are impressed by the diverse flexible options that Alma provides. Using the open platform, we will be able to develop services on top of Alma and Primo. The mature API environment not only makes such development easy but is also available free of charge. Another major benefit is the local support provided by Ex Libris, including a Taiwanese-based distributor and staff and the availability of product documentation in traditional Chinese characters."

Ziv BenZvi, vice president of Ex Libris Asia Pacific, said, We are happy to welcome National Taiwan University to our Alma and Primo communities. We are proud that our stable, cloud-based solutions will be the backbone of an ultramodern library that is almost 90 years old.

About National Taiwan University

The National Taiwan University Library was established in March of 1928. On November 14, 1998, the new building for the main library officially opened for use. It is one of the largest academic library in Taiwan. The 35,000 square-meter library holds over 7 million items and it houses the largest collection of Taiwan history studies in the country. The library includes Social Science branch and Medical Library branch that provides support to related fields. For more information, please visit http://lib.ntu.edu.tw/.

About Ex Libris

Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is a leading global provider of cloud-based solutions for higher education. Offering SaaS solutions for the management and discovery of the full spectrum of library and scholarly materials, as well as mobile campus solutions driving student engagement and success, Ex Libris serves thousands of customers in 90 countries. For more information about Ex Libris, see our website, and join us on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

About ProQuest (http://www.proquest.com)

ProQuest is committed to supporting the important work happening in the worlds research and learning communities. The company curates content that matters to the advancement of knowledge, assembling an archive of billions of vetted, indexed documents. It simplifies workflows so that people and institutions use time effectively. And because ProQuest connects information communities, complex networks of systems and processes work together efficiently. With ProQuest, finding answers and deriving insights is straightforward and leads to extraordinary outcomes.

ProQuest and its companies and affiliates  Ex Libris, Alexander Street, Bowker  stand for better research, better learning, better insights. ProQuest enables people to change their world.
Partnering with MC+A extends our ability to address organizations' needs for making all information available to employees and customers at the moment they need it

Attivio, the leading cognitive search and insight platform company, and MC+A, a Chicago-based search technology innovator and systems integrator, today announced a new partnership. MC+A will resell Attivio's platform, seamlessly integrate their enterprise-grade connectors into it, and provide SI services in the US market.

"Partnering with MC+A extends our ability to address organizations' needs for making all information available to employees and customers at the moment they need it," said Stephen Baker, CEO at Attivio. "This is particularly critical for companies looking to upgrade legacy search applications onto a modern, machine-learning based search and insight platform."

Attivio's mission is to put search at the core of every enterprise. Its integrated, enterprise-grade platform efficiently helps customers uncover truths and surface insights that transform productivity, create greater customer intimacy, and yield competitive advantage. By combining self-learning technologies, such as natural language processing, machine learning, and information indexing, the Attivio platform is helping Fortune 500 enterprises leverage customer insight, surface upsell opportunities, and improve compliance productivity.

MC+A has over 15 years of experience innovating with search and delivering customized search-based applications solutions to enterprises. MC+A has also developed a connector bridge solution that allows customers to leverage existing infrastructure to simplify the transition to the Attivio platform.

"Attivio provides an out-of-the-box cognitive platform with unique patented capabilities that deliver significant differentiation," said Michael Cizmar, Managing Director of MC+A. "We are excited to work with them to bring this technology to the marketplace."

About Attivio

Attivio (http://www.attivio.com) is the leading cognitive search & insight platform company. Our mission is to put search at the core of every enterprise. By easily integrating every data source into one always-learning platform, Attivio enables Fortune 500 enterprises to answer the most complex questions, by providing immediate insight across all of their information. Our solutions power innovation, drive operational efficiencies, and transform business outcomes at scale, and feature industry-leading capabilities including natural language processing, machine learning, analytics, and knowledge graphing.

About MC+A

MC+A (http://www.mcplusa.com) is a leading independent search and big data consultancy servicing clients in North and South America from its head office in Chicago, IL. MC+A is a re-seller and systems integrator specializing in the strategy, execution, and implementation of Cognitive Search and Insight Engine technology. MC+A focuses on delivering solutions that help clients increase revenue, reduce costs and mitigate risk.
Berkshire Blanket & Home Co. It is honestly the softest robe I've ever owned, but here's the best part - it STAYS SOFT!

Berkshire Blanket & Home Co. is showcasing their latest line of Berkshire Lounge robes in their Manhattan showroom for during the NY Intimate Apparel Market. Berkshires Lounge lines have seen great traction at national retailers and now, they are expanding their collection for 2018 with new styles featuring the latest fabric techniques. The trusted name for comfort textiles in the U.S., Berkshire applies this technical knowledge to its sleepwear lines, to great acclaim from customers of the national retailers and small boutiques featuring these collections.

The feedback from consumers is overwhelming positive. Berkshire has been applauded for their understanding of market shifts and their execution of warmth and comfort products that evolve with consumer expectations. Customers want the best of both worlds - a robe that is fashionable and feels amazing, and they trust Berkshire to deliver just that.

Their trademarked fabrications are sought after for washability, softness and style and have been for over 25 years. From Serasoft  and Fluffie, to VelvetLoft, the message is clear: consumers love these plush wearables, and they want more.

Actual consumer testimonials:

It is honestly the softest robe I've ever owned, but here's the best part - it STAYS SOFT!

This is the warmest and softest robe I've ever owned! I needed the small/medium but I chose the large/extra large because I wanted to feel as though I was wrapped in a blanket! I LOVE it!!

Berkshire will have their latest line of lounge robes on display in their showroom at 60 Madison Ave., Suite 1115 from Monday, February 5th through Friday the 9th, 2018. Buyers are welcome to walk in, or contact Berkshire for an appointment.

About Berkshire Blanket & Home Co.

Berkshire Blanket & Home Co. has 25 years in the soft textile industry as a top supplier to international retailers and a trusted name for consumers. Their industry-leading in-house designers build lines in on-trend palettes and patterns, in unexpected, impactful packaging that delights the consumer. With a New England heritage that understands the value in quality, every piece in the Berkshire brands lines is quality guaranteed for life - something unusual in the marketplace. As the trusted designer of both tried and true textures and technologies, and a pioneer of new fabrics and techniques, Berkshire Blanket & Home Co.s claims to fame include Microfleece sheets, and breakthrough fabrications such as Serasoft, Fluffie and VelvetLoft.
Chairperson of the Elder Law Section of The Florida Bar, Ellen S. Morris, Esq. I hope to connect with fellow elder law attorneys across Florida and discuss issues that affect our clients on a broad scale, as well as learn about the Jamaican judicial system and determine if some of their procedures laws should be incorporated into ours for the benefit of our clients.

The 2017 Elder Law Section Retreat was held in Jamaica from October 5 - 8, 2017. In attendance at the retreat was Chairperson of the Elder Law Section of The Florida Bar, Ellen S. Morris, Esq. The retreats purpose was to provide a forum for Elder Law Attorneys in Florida and Jamaica to connect.

Prior to the retreat, when asked about her expectations, Ellen shared this,

I hope to connect with fellow elder law attorneys across Florida and discuss issues that affect our clients on a broad scale, as well as learn about the Jamaican judicial system and determine if some of their procedures and laws should be incorporated into ours for the benefit of our clients and Florida residents.

Much to her satisfaction, Ellen was given a chance to meet Chief Justice Zaila McCalla at the Comparative Law Seminar at the Supreme Court of Jamaica on October 6th. Justice McCalla is the first woman in Jamaican history to hold the position of most senior Judge and Head of the Judiciary. Called to the bar in 1976, Justice McCalla has held multiple positions in the Courts prior to her appointment as Chief Justice in 2007.

During the retreat, Ellen was most excited to learn about the Jamaican judicial system and how some of their practices can be incorporated into the American judicial system. Ellen has served as an attorney since 1990 after graduating from the University of South Florida in 1989. Ellens career is focused on Elder Law as she serves as Chairperson of the Elder Law Section of The Florida Bar. She is also co-chair of the Joint Public Policy Task Force of the Elder Law Section of The Florida Bar and Academy of Florida Elder Law Attorneys (AFELA)

Also included in the three day agenda were an Executive Council Meeting, a visit to the Supreme Court of Jamaica and a trip to Dunns Fall.
Arkansas IT Symposium We are excited to have a conference of this caliber right here in Little Rock. Weve gotten lots of great and pertinent information from this conference over the years and always value the opportunity to come together with other IT professionals from around the state. Barbara Sugg, VP of IT/CSO, SPP

The 6th Annual Arkansas IT Symposium will be held on April 4th, 2018 at the Embassy Suites in Little Rock. This one-day, executive-level event is geared toward knowledge-sharing and networking for CIO's and their direct management teams. Last year, this event drew in over 200 local IT executives and is expected to bring in even more this year. A limited amount of sponsorship opportunities are available giving vendors the perfect opportunity to get in front of local business leaders. Non-sponsoring vendors, consultants, or sales representatives are not allowed to register, which is beneficial for both our attendees and the sponsors underwriting the event.

EFM, the company coordinating the IT Symposium, engages the local IT leadership to help build relevant content that is important to like-minded executives. Sponsorship revenue helps fund local initiatives that benefit the community- as a company, EFM distributed more than $700,000 in 2017.

Sponsoring vendors have the opportunity to share information about problem-solving technology and ideas local executives can use in their day-to-day business practices. Most sponsors use this opportunity to present themselves as experts who can be utilized to help with the issues that present themselves in the workplace.

For more information about the event or sponsorship opportunities, please contact Matt Emick at matt(at)efminc(dot)com or at (515) 332-7940.
Avitus Group Professional Acceleration Companies willing to invest in their employees in areas like communication, leadership and time management benefit as well. These skill sets improve a companys overall communication, productivity and company culture while reducing risk and employee turnover.

Avitus Group continues to expand our services to meet businesses ever changing needs, says President of Avitus Business Services, Inc. Ken Balster. Avitus Professional Acceleration will enable companies to maximize their greatest assets, their employees.

Professional business services provider Avitus Group is launching a substantial offering of training and consulting services that are designed to help companies develop their managers and employees. Avitus Professional Acceleration services focus on communication and teamwork for individuals and teams, leadership and management and foundational skills such as service excellence.

We are committed to providing customers with all the tools they need to make their companies successful, says Avitus Group Public Relations Manager Dianne Parker. To that end, we have recently partnered with two companies that have extensive knowledge in the area of professional development, The Growth Company and HRnovations.

Beginning January 2018, Avitus Group is offering training on how to better communicate, deal with difficult employees, identify and prevent harassment, lead employees, manage time and stress, serve customers and even reduce risk in the workplace, particularly during active shooter events.

Todays business leaders understand the value of skilled employees, says Avitus Groups Bellevue, Washington-based Regional Director Mike Komola. They know that investment in an employee is an investment in the business as a whole because it leads to better overall organizational performance.

Interested businesses can get a preview of Avitus Professional Acceleration courses and meet the trainers at two events in the spring of 2018. The company is holding Active Shooter training April 10th and Dealing with Difficult People training May 22nd in the Denver metropolitan area in partnership with the Aurora Chamber of Commerce.

These workshops are extremely beneficial to everyone from college graduates just starting out in the workforce to seasoned executives, says Avitus Groups Anchorage, Alaska-based Regional Director of Training and Business Consulting Lynne Curry. Companies willing to invest in their employees in areas like communication, leadership and time management benefit as well. These skill sets improve a companys overall communication, productivity and company culture while reducing risk and employee turnover."

Avitus Group is a worldwide company that simplifies, strengthens and grows businesses by providing 'back- office' support (payroll, accounting, taxes, recruiting, information technology, human resources and much more). When a business uses Avitus Group, all of the necessary yet burdensome functions of the business become Avitus Group's responsibility, so the business can focus on what it does best. Avitus Group serves clients nationwide through regional office locations from coast to coast. The company also serves international clients around the globe.
Given a growing recognition that companies must include design rights in their global intellectual property (IP) strategy, the International Trademark Association (INTA) will hold its 2018 Designs Conference: The Power of Design in London on February 26 and 27, 2018 in London, United Kingdom. The conference will delve into design protection and the importance of harnessing the power of design in a competitive marketplace.

Protecting valuable design assets in a global marketplace is becoming increasingly important to brands of all sizes and in all industries. According to a 2016 European Patent Office (EPO)-European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) report, design-intensive industries generated 18 percent of GDP and created 38.7 million jobs in the European Union in 2013. Beyond economic impact, design protection continues to garner widespread attention as a result of political changes such as Brexit, and developments in innovation like three-dimensional (3D) printing.

At the conference, leading business and legal experts and government officials will address effective strategies and best practices for protecting design rights, as well as current and future global design challenges. Speakers include Gregoire Bisson, World Intellectual Property Organization - WIPO (Switzerland); Sheila Henderson, Richemont International Limited (United Kingdom); Lisa Ritchie, Philip Morris International Management SA (Switzerland); Laura Bonnes, Philips Intellectual Property & Standards (Netherlands); and Klaus Hoffmeister, Central Customs Unit for IP (Germany).

Sessions will cover hot topics such as leveraging design rights in anticounterfeiting efforts; multi-national design enforcement; design protection tactics to preserve and grow your business; and how to best navigate the global design filing maze, including filings under the Hague System. This conference is designed for IP and trademark professionals, in-house counsel, and members of the design industry across sectors; and it provides numerous opportunities for networking.

As design laws evolve, INTAs global advocacy initiatives continue to be at the forefront of change. Recently, INTA developed Model Design Law Guidelines, which serve as the standard for INTA analysis and comment on national and regional design laws and regulations. INTA also recently released a Brexit Position Paper outlining the impact of Brexit on IP rightsincluding design rights. Additionally, INTAs 3D Printing Report identifies emerging legal issues and opportunities for change.

To register for the 2018 Designs Conference: The Power of Design, visit http://www.inta.org/2018London.

About INTA

The International Trademark Association (INTA) is a global association of brand owners and professionals dedicated to supporting trademarks and related intellectual property (IP) to foster consumer trust, economic growth, and innovation. Members include more than 7,100 trademark owners, professionals, and academics from 187 countries, who benefit from the Associations global trademark resources, policy development, education and training, and international network. Founded in 1878, INTA is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Singapore, and Washington, D.C., and representatives in Geneva and New Delhi. Visit http://www.inta.org.

For media inquiries, contact:

Sari Schwartz

Senior Strategist, Communications, INTA

+1-212-642-1774

sschwartz@inta.org
Visiun announced today the promotion of Tim Bickley MT(ASCP),MBA,CPHIMS, to Vice President of Sales. In this leadership role, Tim will be responsible for all company sales-related functions, including sales operations and marketing. Tim will continue to be responsible for consumer and B2B product lines, as well as all U.S. and international sales.

Tim joined Visiun in April 2014 as Director of Sales. Since that time, Tim has led the company to unprecedented growth and expansion. Specifically, under his leadership, Visiun has been awarded contracts in some of the largest not-for-profit hospitals throughout the U.S., including prestigious academic medical centers, multi-entity large hospital networks, commercial laboratories, and government entities.

"It is my extreme pleasure to announce that Tim Bickley is being promoted to Vice President of Sales, says Tom Joseph, Visiun President and CEO. Since joining Visiun, Tim has been responsible for our rapid growth, positioning Visiun as the clear leader in Business Intelligence and Analytics in the industry. His extensive relationships with laboratory leadership in the industry and many exceptional abilities have impressed us all at Visiun. This promotion is a recognition of the extraordinary contribution he has made to our success."

About Visiun, Inc.

Visiun, Inc. is the leading provider of performance analytics to the laboratory industry. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Visiun has been providing services to the laboratory industry for over eight years, with hundreds of laboratories installed across the United States. Performance Insight, Visiun's core product, provides laboratory managers with a comprehensive suite of analytics that deliver immediate improvements in performance, efficiency, and quality. For more information, please visit http://www.visiun.com
UniKey Technologies, world's largest smart access control platform provider, today announced a new partnership with RemoteLock, the leading provider of remote access control software and WiFi locks for vacation rental and small business users. The companies will combine their advanced technologies to bring a new, secure Bluetooth enabled smart lock to the physical access control market, expanding both RemoteLock and UniKeys presence in the commercial space.

RemoteLock, based in Colorado, has been delivering remote access control solutions for customers in the vacation rental, retail, commercial and apartment industries since 2011. The company focuses on convenience and connectivity so owners can remotely manage and monitor access to their properties from anywhere they have an internet connection. RemoteLock has partnerships with leading companies such as Airbnb and HomeAway to provide access to millions of users around the world, and will continue to enhance its solutions through this partnership with UniKey.

The Bluetooth enabled commercial smart lock will be powered by UniKeys patented technology and will feature RemoteLocks advanced hardware design, setting a new standard for smart locks in the commercial industry. With security being top of mind for consumers, the lock will include BLE capabilities with robust credentialing features and a trusted public key infrastructure. This will be the first business Bluetooth lock to use the RemoteLock Connect software that allows property owners and managers the ability to manage one to hundreds of locks on the enterprise software. RemoteLock also offers an Integrated Access Platform Open API, allowing integrators to incorporate access control with their own applications, like scheduling and queuing applications.

UniKey Founder and CEO Phil Dumas states, This partnership with RemoteLock will help raise the bar for mobile key solutions in the space by continuing the advancements in reliability, convenience, and security. By leveraging UniKeys distinctive mobile key platform, the product will also feature Touch-to-Open and Inside/Outside Intelligence, which provide an extra layer of authentication for security purposes and seamless entry for a more intuitive at-door experience.

Nolan Mondrow, CEO of LockState said, We are excited to add UniKey technology to our RemoteLock smart locks. With this functionality, property owners can manage one to hundreds of Bluetooth enabled locks on the RemoteLock platform.

The BLE enabled smart lock solution is expected to launch in late 2018.

###

About UniKey

UniKey Technologies is the industry leader and pioneer of smart lock and access control platform technology. UniKey provides companies and manufacturers the ability to rapidly develop and deploy smart lock or access control products on a proven, scaled and secure platform. For more information about UniKey Technologies, please visit http://www.unikey.com.

About RemoteLock

RemoteLock develops and sells cloud-based software that controls smart locks. The company also develops wifi lock technologies. LockStates technologies allow property owners in the vacation rental, retail, commercial and apartment industries to remotely monitor and control access to their properties. For more information about RemoteLock please visit http://www.RemoteLock.com.
Advera Health Analytics, Inc., a global leader in pharmacovigilance software, analytics, and data at the leading edge of drug safety science, and Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE:BAH), a global management and technology consulting firm, today announced a new partnership that will provide Adveras clients with access to Booz Allens health vigilance data that examines publicly-available social media for adverse drug side effects within Adveras Evidex drug safety analytics platform. This partnership is key to identifying adverse events earlier, enabling the medical community to take action sooner.

Booz Allens social media data and analytic capability observes and classifies online discussions of drug side effects. Public data collected from social media platforms are processed with an extensive library of natural language processing and machine learning tools that are tailored to the health domain. These automated aggregation processes are combined with manual curation to detect potential safety issues. In 2014, Booz Allen acquired Epidemico, Inc. which was working with regulatory agencies such as FDA and EMA, as well as pharmaceutical safety and epidemiology teams for early signal detection and hypothesis generation regarding both labeled and unlabeled safety events. The group has continued to invest and work in this area, coupling traditional consulting services with innovative tools and technology.

Advera Healths Evidex data aggregation platform is a scalable, flexible, and agile way for pharmacovigilance professionals in the healthcare industry to access and analyze drug safety data. Powered by Adveras proprietary RxFilter data optimization technology, Evidex supports a broad array of safety signal detection, signal management and risk mitigation use cases.

Were very excited to include Booz Allen Hamiltons data in Evidex, said Brian M. Overstreet, president & CEO of Advera Health Analytics. Social media monitoring for drug safety issues is no longer just an emerging area of importance for pharmacovigilance professionals, but one that is required by regulatory agencies. Epidemico, now Booz Allen, has been a pioneer in this space, offering subject matter expertise, human data curation, and validated tools that will provide our clients the best possible solution. This partnership brings us one step further toward our vision of Pharmacovigilance 2.0  the next generation of signal detection, management and mitigation from multiple real-world data sources.

Chi Bahk, Epidemico Operations Lead at Booz Allen said, This partnership expands the use of Booz Allens data further into the pharmacovigilance and drug safety space. Were excited to partner with Advera Health to help their clients analyze social media data alongside Adveras proprietary clinical trials safety outcomes data, their optimized spontaneous reported data from FDAs Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) and Vigibase to better detect, manage, and evaluate emerging drug side effect risks directly within the Evidex platform. We believe this partnership will add a needed level of new insight into the post-approval drug safety industry.

Epidemico is a Booz Allen tool used to identify and understand health topics derived from publicly-available online conversations across media sources, offering custom portfolios by topic. The scanning of public, social posts about drugs automates data collection from over 200,000 online sources to offer insights into drug-related conversations online.

Evidexs integration of Booz Allens data allows for active monitoring of public social media posts for product side effects alongside clinical trial results, spontaneous reporting, and other real-world data. The data is fully mapped to all existing Evidex data to facilitate early signal detection and hypothesis generation.

For those interested in learning more, Advera Health has set up an information and inquiry web site specifically for the Booz Allens Epidemico Data: https://info.adverahealth.com/booz-allen-epidemico-social-media-data-in-evidex

About Advera Health Analytics

Advera Health Analytics is a global leader in pharmacovigilance software, analytics, and data at the leading edge of drug safety science. Founded in 2010 by a group of passionate healthcare entrepreneurs, Advera Healths mission is to mitigate risk in the healthcare system by improving the transparency and actionability of drug safety data through the curation and aggregation of large disparate datasets and the application of proprietary analytics. Please visit http://www.adverahealth.com as well as our newsroom, blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages for more information about the company.

About Evidex

Advera Healths Evidex is a drug safety data aggregation platform that makes disparate drug safety data actionable though a simple to use yet powerful web-based application, empowering use at all organizational levels. Evidex is the gold standard resource for drug safety knowledge and insight, generated through proprietary curated data and analytics and powerful data integrations, enabling previously unavailable in-depth, rigorous adverse event analysis.

About Booz Allen

Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH) has been at the forefront of strategy and technology for more than one hundred years. Today, the firm provides management and technology consulting and engineering services to leading Fortune 500 corporations, governments, and not-for-profits across the globe. Booz Allen partners with public and private sector clients to solve their most difficult challenges through a combination of consulting, analytics, mission operations, technology, systems delivery, cybersecurity, engineering and innovation expertise.

With international headquarters in McLean, Virginia, the firm employs approximately 24,225 people globally, and had revenue of $5.80 billion for the 12 months ended March 31, 2017. To learn more, visit http://www.boozallen.com.
Shuttle Finance, a financial service that is mutually beneficial for employees and employers alike, today announces that it has joined Science Inc., the disruptive media, marketing and brand building company that creates, invests, acquires and scales successful digital businesses, as its newest portfolio company. Shuttle provides employees a simple way to set financial goals and automatically save while offering employers a benefit that creates a happier and more productive work environment.

Nearly 30% of Americans are borrowing against their 401(k), and 6 in 10 Americans don't have $500 in savings. Shuttle was created with this in mind, offering a solution that makes it easy for employees to create personalized goals and empowers them to save.

Shuttle lets employers create a customized Savings Assistance plan where employees create either custom savings goals or pre-selected goals chosen by their employer. These goals range from creating an emergency fund to saving for physical wellness  and almost everything else in between. Employees then set up automated ways to save, including the Round Ups feature, which ties savings to spending. Their employer can also opt-in to help employees reach specific goals, thereby creating a relevant personal bond.

"We're excited to be working with Science Inc.and their super smart team. Theyve built huge businesses in the past and leveraging their knowledge and network will help Shuttle crack this new market opportunity,," said Brendon McQueen, Co-Founder & CEO of Shuttle Finance. "Science has seasoned experience in using technology to create simplified customer experiences and with Shuttle, we are driving change for employers to look for new and better ways to benefit employees.

Shuttle introduces a simple way to create realistic financial solutions that benefit both employers and employees," said Mike Jones, Co-Founder & CEO of Science Inc. "It helps employers provide the tools employees need to seamlessly navigate their financial benefits and creates a stronger, more meaningful relationship between employers and employees. Were thrilled to have them join the Science team."

Shuttle Finance is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. To learn more visit https://www.shuttlefinance.com.

About Shuttle Finance

Headquartered in Santa Monica, CA, Shuttle Finance is co-founded by Brendon McQueen, Nick Roberts and Alex Tamoykin. Mr. McQueen previously founded and led Tuition.io, a market leader in student loan employee benefits. Mr. Roberts previously served as launch CMO of savings App Acorns and led marketing at Experian. Mr. Tamoykin previously served as Head of Mobile for Victorious and Head of Engineering for AwesomenessTV. For more information, visit https://www.shuttlefinance.com.

About Science Inc.

Science Inc. is the disruptive media, marketing and brand building company that creates, invests, acquires and scales successful digital businesses. Science brings together the best ideas, talent, resources and financing through a centralized platform. The platform is leveraged to develop new businesses, provide emerging startups with operational strategy and capital and transform later-stage Internet ventures with new talent and innovation. The company has co-founded and invested in more than 70 companies, including Dollar Shave Club, DogVacay, HelloSociety, FameBit, Earny, Pray and Mammoth, the media company that reaches 30% of U.S. teens every month through social broadcasting and App Store top 100 apps like Wishbone and Yarn. The company most recently launched Science Blockchain, its incubator focused on blockchain-based companies. Science Inc.s investors include top venture capital firms such as Tomorrow Ventures, founded by Googles Eric Schmidt, and Hearst Ventures. For more information, visit http://www.science-inc.com.
"Our partnership with KnowBe4 enables Weidenhammer to ensure that our customers employees are trained to identify and help prevent potential cyber-attacks, states Rick Phillips, Weidenhammers Vice President, Platforms.

Weidenhammer is proud to announce its partnership with KnowBe4 Security Awareness. Your employees are your weakest link in your IT Security. Social engineering is the number one security threat to any organization. Our partnership with KnowBe4 enables Weidenhammer to ensure that our customers employees are trained to identify and help prevent potential cyber-attacks, states Rick Phillips, Weidenhammers Vice President, Platforms.

In 2017, Phillips continued, CSO, an IDG Communications website, reported that the average cost of a data breach in North America was $1.3 million and $117,000 for small and medium-sized businesses. Comparatively, Phillips said, KnowBe4 statistics reveal security awareness training reduces phishing susceptibility by 75%.

We are proud to be an authorized partner for KnowBe4s security awareness programs, said John Weidenhammer, CEO of Weidenhammer. Helping clients avoid the trauma and costs of cyber-attacks is very important to helping them stay focused on their core service capabilities.

Phillips further mentioned, We are very excited that Gartner recently moved KnowBe4 into their Magic Quadrant for computer-based training in 2017. We congratulate them for achieving such an important milestone of success.

About KnowBe4

KnowBe4, provider of the worlds most popular integrated security awareness training and simulated phishing platform, is used by more than 14,000 organizations worldwide. KnowBe4 is ranked #231 on the 2017 Inc. 500 list, #70 on Deloittes 2017 Technology Fast 500 and #6 in Cybersecurity Ventures Cybersecurity 500. KnowBe4 is headquartered in Tampa Bay, Florida with European offices in London and Amsterdam. For more info, visit http://www.knowbe4.com.

CSO, IDG Communications, Inc.

CSO serves enterprise security decision-makers and users with the critical information they need to stay ahead of evolving threats and defend against criminal cyber-attacks. For more information visit: http://www.csoonline.com

Gartner Group

For more information on Gartners rankings and reports on KnowBe4 please visit: https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/security-awareness-computer-based-training/vendor/knowbe4.

About Weidenhammer

Weidenhammer has core competencies in security solutions, consulting, software development, platform solutions, e-Commerce, and digital/interactive design. The company identifies and integrates new technologies that help companies manage the complexities of digital transformation. Founded in 1978, Weidenhammmer has corporate headquarters in Reading, PA with six additional offices across PA, MI and CO. For more information visit http://www.hammer.net or follow us on LinkedIn.
Lighting is such an intrinsic part of building automation so we are excited to welcome Hubbell Lighting to the BACnet International community.

The BACnet community is happy to announce that Hubbell Lighting has joined the BACnet International association. As one of the largest lighting fixture manufacturers in North America, Hubbell Lighting features a suite of brands that provides a full range of indoor and outdoor lighting products serving the commercial, industrial, institutional, and residential markets.

In the last ten years Building Management System (BMS) integration has evolved to become a driving influence in how commercial lighting systems are installed, said Scott Ziegenfus, manager, Government and Industry Relations, Hubbell Lighting. The teams at both Hubbell Lighting and Hubbell Control Solutions are taking a proactive approach to BMS integration by adding BACnet natively into the NX lighting control platform.

In late 2017, Hubbell Control Solutions announced the expansion of its distributed lighting control platform for commercial and industrial facilities, NX Distributed Intelligence. The Distributed Network Architecture (DNA) of NX eliminates common operational dependencies on software, gateways and servers found in other lighting control systems by distributing control logic to each lighting control device.

Ziegenfus continued, Our NX Area Controller is classified in BACnet speak as a B-ASC. If the BMS system is connected to the same network that the NX Area Controller is they will be able to talk, simple as that. The BACnet automatic discovery process will conveniently find the NX and ask what it can do. Our customers appreciate this level of simplicity.

Hubbell Lighting joins more than 125 of the leading building automation vendors and integrators in the world advocating BACnet as a communication protocol.

Lighting is such an intrinsic part of building automation so we are excited to welcome Hubbell Lighting to the BACnet International community, said Andy McMillan, president and managing director of BACnet International. Scott has already contributed as a volunteer on our Educational Committee and we look forward to more collaboration with Hubbell going forward.

More information on BACnet International members can be found here. Companies interested in enjoying the benefits of BACnet International membership can get more information here.

About BACnet International

BACnet International is an industry association that facilitates the successful use of the BACnet protocol in building automation and control systems through interoperability testing, educational programs and promotional activities. BACnet International oversees operation of the BACnet Testing Laboratories (BTL) and maintains a global listing of tested products. The BACnet standard was developed by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and has been made publicly available so that manufacturers can create interoperable systems of products. BACnet International complements the work of the ASHRAE standards committee and BACnet-related interest groups around the world. BACnet International members include building owners, consulting engineers and facility managers, as well as companies involved in the design, manufacture, installation, commission and maintenance of control equipment that uses BACnet for communication. For more information, please visit http://www.bacnetinternational.org.

About Hubbell Lighting

Hubbell Lighting is elevating the lighting experience. Empowered by lighting solutions that integrate seamlessly into their environment, save energy, provide improved quality of light, deliver return on investment and armed with Hubbells unflinching support, its customers are able to think differently about how, where, and when they can use light. As one of the largest lighting fixture manufacturers in North America, it features a suite of brands that provide a full range of indoor and outdoor lighting products serving the commercial, industrial, institutional, and residential markets. Learn more at hubbelllighting.com and engage with the company online at LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Winning the ACCESS Scholarship took a huge load off of my shoulders!" -Hiedi Seekle, 2017 ACCESS Scholarship Recipient

Gary Keisling ACCESS Scholarship Program applications for 2018 are now available to incoming Ashworth College students. Scholarships will be awarded in two categories: degree program students and career program students.

Eligibility for the awards is based on a combination of academic performance and an essay submission. Applications must be received via electronic submission by March 1, 2018. Recipients will be announced April 2, 2018, and awards will be made April 18, 2018.

Winning the ACCESS Scholarship took a huge load off of my shoulders, said 2017 ACCESS Scholarship recipient Hiedi Seelke from Washington.

Seelke returned to college after more than a decade, earned a certificate of human resources from Ashworth College and secured part-time work in her field. The 2017 ACCESS Scholarship award boosted her journey toward finishing her associate degree. She will tackle her bachelors in the fall of 2018.

Knowing how far Ive comeand how far Ill gowith my education makes me and my family proud, Seelke said. I hope by the time I graduate with my bachelors degree, Ill have the funds to travel to Georgia to walk across the stage.

Weve awarded 71 ACCESS Scholarships since we started the program in 2011, said Ashworth College president Rob Klapper. Its an honor when we get to share our students' educational dreams in this way. I can't wait to award more scholarships this year to deserving students.

For degree program students, the award is a single-semester, full-tuition scholarship open to first-time, current and transfer students of Ashworth College associate and bachelor's degree programs. To be eligible, new student applicants must have a 3.0 GPA (or better) on their high school transcripts. Current and transfer student applicants must have a 3.0 GPA (or better) on their college transcripts. For an application, please visit https://www.ashworthcollege.edu/pdfs/gary-keisling-access-ashworth-degree-application-2018.pdf.

For career program students, the award is a full-program scholarship open to first-time students of Ashworth College diploma and certificate programs. There is no requirement for the applicant's incoming GPA, but scholarship recipients must maintain a 3.0 GPA throughout their studies in order to retain their awards. For an application, please visit https://www.ashworthcollege.edu/pdfs/gary-keisling-access-ashworth-career-application-2018.pdf.

For high school students, the award is a four-year, full-tuition scholarship open to incoming freshman or transfer students who enroll after Jan. 1, 2018. To be eligible, freshman applicants must have completed the 8th grade with a 3.0 GPA (or better). Transfer student applicants must have a 3.0 GPA (or better) on their high school transcripts. The scholarship is renewable upon entering each grade level based upon academic performance. For an application, please visit https://www.jmhs.com/pdfs/gary-keisling-access-jmhs-application-2018.pdf.

For questions, contact ACCESS-DegreeAssociates(at)ashworthcollege(dot)edu or 1-800-224-7234.

ABOUT THE GARY KEISLING ACCESS SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM

The Gary Keisling Ashworth College Continuing Education for Student Success Scholarship Program was established in 2011 to honor Gary Keisling, former president and CEO of Ashworth College and James Madison High School. The late Keisling devoted his career to developing affordable and accessible educational programs for those who may have limited access to accredited educational opportunities.

ABOUT ASHWORTH COLLEGE

Ashworth College is a nationally-accredited online institution that provides flexible and affordable education to students located around the world. Areas of study include more than 125 career-focused programs in the high-demand fields of healthcare, technology, business, creative services, education, legal studies and trades. Since its founding 30 years ago, more than 300,000 students have graduated from Ashworth College with diplomas, professional certificates, associate, bachelors and masters degrees. In a 2016 survey by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission, 95 percent of graduates said they were satisfied with their studies and would recommend Ashworth College to a friend. For more information, visit http://www.ashworthcollege.edu.

Ashworth College is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC). The Distance Education Accrediting Commission is listed by the U.S. Department of Education as a recognized accrediting agency. The Distance Education Accrediting Commission is recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA).
With the millions of people affected by several healthcare data breaches this year, organizations cant afford to keep any part of their security network left vulnerable, including mobile devices.

SyncDog, Inc., the leading ISV for mobile application security, today announced they are once again sponsoring the HiMSS conference on March 5-9 in Las Vegas. SyncDog will be exhibiting their leading mobile application security product, Secure.Systems, with live demonstrations from booth #12449.

We are proud to be a part of the HiMSS conference, said Jonas Gyllensvaan, founder and CEO of SyncDog. With the millions of people affected by several healthcare data breaches this year, organizations cant afford to keep any part of their network security vulnerable, especially mobile devices. Secure.Systems is able to improve mobile device security without sacrificing application functionality or infringing on employee privacy, while keeping up with HIPPA regulation.

The HiMSS conference brings together 45,000 plus professionals from around the world for five days of education, innovation, and collaboration to help uncover the promise of health information and technology. For more information click here.

About the Conference and Expo

When: March 5-9, 2018

Where: Venetian-Palazzo Sands Expo Center | Las Vegas, NV

SyncDog Booth: 12449 (Hall G, Level 1)

Event Website: Link

Register: Link

The Secure.Systems Workspace

The Secure.Systems workspace provides a secure application platform that encrypts and transports data between the enterprise and secure, sandboxed applications running on employees mobile devices. The workspace delivers a highly functional and easy app experience for users, and protects client enterprise networks with secure, partitioned FIPS 140-2 certified* container on both iOS and Android devices. Secure.Systems secures data both on the device and in transit using AES 256-bit encryption. A full suite of mobile-enabled productivity applications is available in the defense-grade container, including SharePoint, Enterprise Chat, Geo-location Services, DropBox, a Personal Information Management (PIM) suite, Office Suite, Office 365, File Sync, and Secure Mobile App Management & Development functions. Secure.Systems can be deployed via on-premise or through cloud-based managed service. For more information about Secure.Systems deployment via managed service please visit https://secure.systems. SyncDog offers a free 30-day trial of Secure.Systems at https://mmc.secure.systems/SignUp.

About HiMSS

HIMSS is a global voice, advisor and thought leader of health transformation through health information and technology with a unique breadth and depth of expertise and capabilities to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of health, healthcare and care outcomes. HIMSS designs and leverages key data assets, predictive models and tools to advise global leaders, stakeholders and influencers of best practices in health IT so they have the right information at the point of decision.

HIMSS drives innovative, forward thinking around best uses of technology in support of better connected care, improved population health and low cost of care. HIMSS is a not-for-profit, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with additional offices in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom and Asia.

About SyncDog, Inc.

SyncDog is the leading ISV for building mobile IT frameworks that extend enterprise app functionality to mobile devices while securing networks from mobile-endpoint threat. SyncDog Secure.Systems delivers an unimpeded, fully-functional mobile app experience that supports Microsoft OneDrive, Office 365, Skype for Business, and other Microsoft productivity apps within a NIST-certified, FIPS 140-2 workspace. The Secure.Systems mobile-app mobile workspace is ideal for organizations that want to deliver a rich mobile app experience across BYOD, CYOD, or other device policy. Secure.Systems can be deployed as managed service from https://secure.systems or as an on-premise solution.

Secure.Systems can be found on both the Microsoft Azure and MobileIron marketplace exchanges. For more information about SyncDog, please visit https://syncdog.com.
The winner of the WearRA Innovation Challenge will receive international recognition and $5,000 to support development and commercialization of the wearable robotics technology.

The Wearable Robotics Association (WearRA) is excited to announce the third annual Innovation Challenge at WearRAcon. Anybody from solo developers to small companies have the opportunity to show their prototypes and ideas in front of the movers and shakers of the exoskeleton industry!

We enjoyed sponsoring the Innovation Challenge at WearRAcon 17 and look forward to seeing whats new in 2018, said Sean Pettersen, Founder and CEO, StrongArm Technologies. As a judge, I have the unique opportunity to see first-hand the up and coming technologies in the wearable robotics industry.

All entries will be examined by a panel of wearable robotics experts. Finalists will be selected to present at WearRAcon 18(Scottsdale, Arizona, March 21-23, 2018). WearRA would like to thank the Innovation Challenge Sponsors: StrongArm Technologies and ASUs Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

Click here for more information: http://www.wearablerobotics.com/wearracon-18/program/innovation-competition/

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: February 1, 2018.

About WearRA:

The Wearable Robotics Association (WearRA) is the only professional association dedicated to the entrepreneurs, businesses and academics fueling the wearable robotics industry. WearRA provides a forum for the wearable robotics community to share ideas and collaborate in a way that expands and improves the ecosystem of technologies and participants. The group's mission is to shape a global future leveraging technology in a purposeful and synergetic fashion to improve quality of life and accelerate the advent of transformative human capabilities. http://wearablerobotics.com/about-us/
Managing Partner Derrick Gordon returns to Brooks International "Derrick has a successful, 'hands-on' approach to tackle business challenges and possesses a unique blend of operational, business development, strategic and financial acumen."

Brooks International (http://brooksint.com) announces the rehiring of highly experienced senior executive Derrick Gordon as a managing partner/account director and member of the Brooks International Leadership Team. Mr. Gordon has already hit the ground running as an important and influential contributor on one of the current Brooks International engagements.

As a top executive, Mr. Gordon partners directly with Brooks Internationals client CEOs. Hes responsible for developing and maintaining client relationships and leading/managing engagements to deliver significantly enhanced profits and predictable business performance for Brooks client organizations. Mr. Gordon has extensive international business consulting experience and a reputation for building and leading superior teams to accomplish aggressive business objectives for private equity and multi-billion-dollar organizations. He returns to Brooks International after a successful stint as a business development executive.

Mr. Gordon has consulted for corporations across Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. His areas of expertise include engineering, supply chain management, manufacturing operations, revenue enhancement and post-merger integration. He has worked in such diverse industries as consumer goods, aerospace, automotive, oil and gas, banking, insurance and private equity.

Brooks International is pleased to welcome experienced Account Director and Managing Partner Derrick Gordon back to the firm. Derrick has a successful, hands-on approach to tackle business challenges and possesses a unique blend of operational, business development, strategic and financial acumen, said Brooks International Chief Executive Officer Lui Damasceno. He is an important and valued new member of our leadership team and were looking forward to leveraging his experience and expertise for the benefit of our clients.

ABOUT BROOKS INTERNATIONAL:

Headquartered in West Palm Beach, Fla., with locations in Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe, the award-winning, global professional services firm Brooks International delivers significantly enhanced profits and predictable business performance to its Fortune 500 CEO clients worldwide. Brooks International specializes in execution performance capabilities across all industries and sectors. Visit http://www.brooksint.com, call 561.214.8800 or connect on Facebook or LinkedIn for more details.
For both hospitals and public health, health assessments provide useful tools for identifying opportunities to improve the health of the community with a particular focus on populations that have the greatest health needs.

A concerted effort is underway in Cuyahoga County to identify areas where hospitals, the Cleveland Department of Public Health (CDPH) and the Cuyahoga County Board of Health (CCBH) can collaborate on 2018/2019 health assessment planning. For both hospitals and public health, health assessments provide useful tools for identifying opportunities to improve the health of the community with a particular focus on populations that have the greatest health needs.

Hospitals are required by the IRS to conduct a community health needs assessment (CHNA) once every three years. Public health departments in Ohio are newly required by the Ohio Department of Health to shift from conducting a community health assessment (CHA) once every five years to once every three years to align with hospital reporting timelines. Guidance released by the state also encourages hospitals and public health partners to collaborate on health assessments and improvement plans.

2018/2019 Health Assessments Happening in Parallel

Several stakeholders  including the Cleveland Department of Public Health, the Cuyahoga County Board of Health and University Hospitals  are required to conduct a health assessment in 2018. These partners are in the process of meeting monthly to develop a 2018 joint health assessment.

The majority of Cuyahoga County hospitals are required to conduct a health assessment in 2019. In parallel to the 2018 joint health assessment discussions that are underway, and to help achieve alignment with Cuyahoga County hospital stakeholders that are required to report in 2019, CDPH, CCBH and University Hospitals are also participating in 2019 health assessment planning. In addition to University Hospitals, hospitals involved in the 2019 planning meetings include Cleveland Clinic, MetroHealth, Southwest General Health Center and St. Vincent Charity Medical Center. Stakeholders are in the process of determining areas where they may be able to collaborate.

These parallel 2018/2019 health assessment planning efforts will ensure that all stakeholders are able to satisfy regulatory requirements while enabling Cuyahoga County hospitals and health departments to align on the same health assessment planning timeline. Dr. Heidi Gullett, Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, and Kirstin Craciun, director of community outreach at The Center, are co-leading the 2018/2019 health assessment planning meetings.

On the public health side, this work supports HIP-Cuyahogas goal of more closely linking clinical and public health. On the hospital side, these efforts support population health planning efforts and help realize the CHNA vision of identifying the health needs of vulnerable populations.

For more information on 2018/2019 health assessment planning, contact us.

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With a rich history as the Northeast Ohio hospital association, dating back to 1916, The Center for Health Affairs serves as the collective voice of hospitals and the source for Northeast Ohio hospital and healthcare information. As the leading advocate for Northeast Ohio hospitals, The Center aims to enhance the effectiveness of the healthcare community and the health of the communities it serves by providing expertise, resources and solutions to address the challenges faced by the regions healthcare providers. The Centers efforts focus on areas that benefit member hospitals from a regional approach, including healthcare workforce; emergency preparedness; public policy and advocacy; finance and reimbursement; and community initiatives. And because of its business affiliation with CHAMPS Healthcare, The Center has the resources to provide a broad level of professional services to its members. The Center, located in downtown Cleveland, is proud to represent 36 member hospitals in nine counties. For more, visit neohospitals.org. The Center for Health Affairs is honored to be named as one of The Cleveland Plain Dealers Top Workplaces in 2014 and 2015, as well as to ERCs NorthCoast99 List in 2003, 2004, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.
Linda Shaughnessy We dont fall in love with brick and mortar, remarked Shaughnessy were attracted to design and architecture, white glove service, a bucolic street. ChicagosLuxuryCondos.com was created with that in mind, and those subtleties are given the same attention as a propertys features.

Linda Shaughnessy, senior vice president -sales at Chicagos Jameson Sothebys International Realty and a twenty-five year veteran of Chicagos luxury real estate market, is proud to announce the launch of her new website http://www.ChicagosLuxuryCondos.com. While all MLS listings are searchable, the website showcases high-end luxury condominiums, co-ops, single family homes, and new developments with beautiful photography, informative videos, and descriptive content. Shaughnessy explains that its a customized approach for mass marketing. Everything is there that you will find on any major real estate website, but the information is categorized for a more enjoyable and efficient property search. You dont have to spend time wondering, for example, if a Gold Coast house has parking, or if a condominium has a balcony. We customized criteria so visitors can quickly search by their preferred neighborhood, lifestyle, and property features."

The high-performance website with full mobile responsiveness navigates at lightening-speed but the pages were carefully designed to enhance and inform, often in a magazine format, rather than just presenting volumes of listings. We dont fall in love with brick and mortar, remarked Shaughnessy were attracted to design and architecture, white glove service, a bucolic street. http://www.ChicagosLuxuryCondos.com was created with that in mind, and those subtleties are given the same attention as a propertys features.

In addition to quickly bookmarking favorite properties, saving search criteria for easy referencing, and receiving timely email alerts of properties on their watch-list, registered buyers have access to pre-MLS and off-market pocket listings through Shaughnessys membership in the Top Agent Network.

LINDA SHAUGHNESSY

A native New Yorker with a merchandising and marketing background, Linda Shaughnessy relocated to Chicago and launched her real estate career at a boutique Gold Coast brokerage and property management company. After three years of selling real estate successfully, she was named senior vice president of brokerage to oversee the companys three residential sales offices. There, she started the first in-house marketing department of a Chicago real estate company and designed the first luxury marketing program. Shaughnessy returned to residential sales in 1996, and for more than two decades has specialized in Chicagos Near North luxury market, integrating her keen marketing skills and business acumen with the latest technology to enhance and grow her business.

Contact information:

Linda Shaughnessy

Jameson Sothebys International Realty

Linda(at)ChicagosLuxuryCondos(dot)com

http://www.chicagosluxurycondos.com

+1 312.961.6212
SchoolMints flexibility in allowing us to configure lotteries and preferences as required by the state law, as well as the companys overall expertise in the field, made them the right partner for our district.

To help meet the requirements of Floridas recent open enrollment legislation, Lake County Schools in Tavares, FL partnered with SchoolMint, the leading provider of cloud-based strategic enrollment management software for PreK-12 school systems worldwide. SchoolMints software platform allows the district, which serves approximately 42,000 students across 51 learning sites, to meet the new state mandate that allows students to apply to any public school in the state, and streamline this expanded school choice for all of its families.

We knew it was important to invest in a simplified, scalable solution from an experienced technology provider to help our families navigate the states expanded school choice process, said Julie Summerlin, supervisor of choice, charter and community education of Lake County Schools. SchoolMints flexibility in allowing us to configure lotteries and preferences as required by the state law, as well as the companys overall expertise in the field, made them the right partner for our district.

Since 2013, over 6,000 district and charter schools nationwide have partnered with SchoolMint to improve the enrollment experience for both parents and staff. These include schools in innovative, forward-thinking districts such as Boston Public Schools, Camden City School District, Chicago Public Schools, Cleveland Metropolitan School District, Denver Public Schools, Oakland Unified School District, and Spring Branch Independent School District, among others.

As an increasing number of districts across the country are expanding choice and school options for their families, we are honored that more school systems, like Lake County, are looking to SchoolMint for our expertise in school choice," said Jinal Jhaveri, founder and CEO of SchoolMint. SchoolMint offers the system and the tools to make the school choice application process transparent, equitable, and more accessible for families. And, we are encouraged by the interest we are seeing among Floridas school districts, given the states unique school choice requirements.

SchoolMints student enrollment solutions extend beyond the school choice and application management solutions being implemented in Lake County and can provide staff and parents with a holistic end-to-end enrollment experience. The breadth of solutions include:

 Family Outreach and Marketing

 School Application and Lottery Management

 Student Registration Management

 Digital Forms and Documents

 School Choice and Unified Enrollment

School districts benefit from increased family engagement, improved operational efficiency, lower costs, and greater analytic and planning insights through the platforms robust enrollment reporting tools. Furthermore, SchoolMints integration with leading SISs helps ease the burden on school staff and increases data accuracy.

To learn more about SchoolMint, visit http://www.SchoolMint.com.

About SchoolMint

SchoolMint provides a cloud-based student enrollment and school choice platform to PreK-12 school systems worldwide. Since its founding in 2013, close to 6,000 schools have chosen SchoolMint to streamline all aspects of student enrollment - student registration management, application, lottery, and school choice management, and digital forms and document uploads. Available online and on mobile devices, SchoolMint integrates with leading student information systems (SIS) and transforms the end-to-end enrollment experience for school staff and parents. SchoolMint is a fully owned subsidiary of Edtech Holdings, funded by BV investment Partners. Visit http://www.SchoolMint.com to learn more.
The efforts by our Associates to produce high quality, highly engineered products utilizing our business systems has given our Customers the confidence to reward LAI with this tremendous growth opportunity.

LAI International, Inc, a manufacturing solutions provider to the aerospace, military, energy and medical industries, is excited to announce that they are expanding their Southwest location. The company will hold a ribbon cutting ceremony on January 30, 2018 to celebrate the opening of the new 39,410-square-foot factory in Tempe, AZ.

The new state-of-the-art factory will house a next generation engine program for the commercial aerospace industry. The program and factory will focus on machining, specifically Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) capabilities, as well as coordinate measuring machines. The need for additional factory space stems from several long-term purchase orders and contracts with some of the aerospace industrys top manufacturers.

The efforts by our Associates to produce high quality, highly engineered products utilizing our business systems has given our Customers the confidence to reward LAI with this tremendous growth opportunity, said Mike Koesling, LAIs Vice President of Engineering. In addition to the cornerstone program that enabled this expansion, LAI will be expanding capabilities to support our Additive Manufacturing offerings. We will provide Customers better turnaround times to minimize their need to have extra inventory on the assembly lines. This is one of the key benefits that our Customers see with leveraging Additive Manufacturing technology  shrinking the time it takes to complete the complete value stream.

The original Tempe location is the companys headquarters and home to a world-class Additive Manufacturing and waterjet facility. With the new Southwest expansion, LAI will have more than 260,000 square feet of manufacturing space across its nationwide locations, including Tempe, AZ; Green Island, NY; Scarborough, ME; and Westminster, MD. Manufacturing capabilities across the locations include Additive Manufacturing, Waterjet, Laser, EDM, CNC machining, Welding and Fabrication.

ABOUT LAI INTERNATIONAL:

LAI International is a premier provider of highly-engineered, mission-critical components for industries including Aerospace, Defense, Energy, Industrial and Medical. LAI helps OEMs meet production goals by delivering high quality complex components on time, every time, at the right value. A culture of innovation, exceptional engineering, optimized processes and cutting-edge technology differentiate LAI from the traditional manufacturing and supply-chain model, as demonstrated by becoming the worlds first NADCAP certified additive manufacturer. As a true strategic partner, LAI is focused on solving tomorrows complex component manufacturing problems today. For more information, please visit http://www.laico.com/.
Anesthesia Progress Volume 64, Issue 4 Office-based anesthesia rendered by dentist anesthesiologists is clearly a unique and efficient mode of anesthesia care for dentistry.

Anesthesia Progress  Dentist anesthesiologists are a unique medical provider. Their training is related more closely to medical anesthesiologists than to dentists in that they do not receive clinical training in dental or oral surgery. During their three-year residency program, dentist anesthesiologists receive most of their training in a hospital-based setting, performing a minimum of 800 cases of general anesthesia, of which at least 125 must be performed on children younger than seven years of age. However, very little is known about the post-residency practice characteristics of dentist anesthesiologists.

Researchers from the Indiana University School of Dentistry in Indianapolis, Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston, and the University of California at San Diego recently published a study in the current issue of Anesthesia Progress that examines the procedural differences between dentist and physician anesthesiologists. Using two main dental databases, the National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (NACOR) and the Society for Ambulatory Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (SCOR), for dental and oral surgery procedures, the researchers compared 7,133 office-based procedures performed by dentist anesthesiologists with 106,420 in-hospital procedures provided by physician anesthesiologists.

The information from the SCOR database focused on office-based settings, while NACOR included hospital-based. The data showed that in both groups children six years and younger were the predominant recipients receiving anesthetic dental treatment (two-thirds of NACOR patients; three-fourths of SCOR patients); however, the average age for SCOR was approximately nine years and for NACOR approximately 12 years. The researchers also found a 46 percent longer surgical time for the cases from the NACOR database versus those from the SCOR. Both databases noted that early childhood caries (tooth decay) was the main diagnosis for the dental procedures needing anesthesia.

In reviewing the data, the researchers found a clear correlation between early childhood caries and the need for anesthesia during dental procedures. Given that this is the most common disease among children six years and younger, with more than 4.5 million cases developing each year, pediatric dentists need dentist anesthesiologists. The researchers also found that the overall cost of pediatric dental procedures with anesthesia performed in a hospital-based setting has increased between three and four times than that of 20 years ago. Currently, an 84 percent cost savings is found when anesthesia is administered in an office-based setting.

Overall, there is a consistent trend with more dental anesthetic procedures being performed in an office-based setting, particularly for pediatric dentistry. The researchers have found that, The anesthesia care provided by dentist anesthesiologists is also separate and distinct from anesthesia provided by oral and maxillofacial surgeons. Oral surgeons are the only other dentists who can legally administer general anesthesia; however, they receive approximately 6 months of general anesthesia training. Dentist anesthesiologists provide care to younger patients for procedures of longer duration using an independent anesthesia provider model versus oral and maxillofacial surgeons who use the operator-anesthesia model for shorter procedures on older patients.

More research in this field is necessary because the data collected from the SCOR and NACOR are fairly limited as to the amount of information that is collected from providers on a volunteer level. The researchers concluded that despite the limitations on data collection, they are confident that, Office-based anesthesia rendered by dentist anesthesiologists is clearly a unique and efficient mode of anesthesia care for dentistry. They also believe that the increasing trend in office-based procedures with dentist anesthesiologists will continue.

Full text of the article, Comparison of Anesthesia for Dental/Oral Surgery by Office-based Dentist Anesthesiologists versus Operating Room-based Physician Anesthesiologists, Anesthesia Progress, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2017, is now available here: http://www.anesthesiaprogress.org/doi/full/10.2344/anpr-65-01-04.

###

About Anesthesia Progress

Anesthesia Progress is the official publication of the American Dental Society of Anesthesiology (ADSA). The quarterly journal is dedicated to providing a better understanding of the advances being made in the science of pain and anxiety control in dentistry. The journal invites submissions of review articles, reports on clinical techniques, case reports, and conference summaries. To learn more about the ADSA, visit: http://www.adsahome.org/.
According to NBC News, 70 percent of Americans believe that race relations in America are harmful. The questions as to where the tension originated is just as complicated as finding an answer to the problem. D. Durand Hall looks to open those discussions with The Memoirs of a Hoodstar: Americas Nightmare: Young, Black & Misunderstood

The Memoirs of a Hoodstar follows the story of a young black mans trials and tribulations as he navigates his urban life in contemporary America. Jamal Isaiah Jackson is trying to survive on the streets as a serious hustler, but eventually lands himself behind bars. He soon realizes the disproportional number of African Americans incarcerated and the political game involved to keep them there.

With his book, Durand addresses serious socioeconomic issues reoccurring in urban communities such as premarital sex, teenage pregnancy, generational poverty, drug abuse, gangs, violence and the high rate of crime and imprisonment. The Memoirs of a Hoodstar fearlessly confronts the reality that many American find themselves facing.

For those that live in these kind of environment, The Memoirs of a Hoodstar hopefully acts as a beacon of hope that these situations are not permeant. Evolution and maturation is possible, Hall said. For those outside of urban America, this is a raw and authentic look at how these individuals survive.

For more information, please visit memoirsofahoodstar.com.

The Memoirs of a Hoodstar: Americas Nightmare: Young, Black & Misunderstood

By D. Durand Hall

ISBN: 9781532020155 (softcover) 9781532020148 (ebook)

Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and iUniverse

About the author

D. Durand Hall is an African American businessman and rehabilitated citizen. During his incarceration, he studied over seven hundred books to understand the legal and cultural ramifications of imprisonment on African American men and their families. As founder and CEO of Urban Multimedia Communications, LLC, he is now committed to creating platforms that inform and promote the minority struggle to the world.

Review Copies & Interview Requests:

LAVIDGE  Phoenix

Jacquelyn Brazzale

480 998 2600 x 569

jbrazzale(at)lavidge.com

General Inquiries:

LAVIDGE  Phoenix

Satara Williams

480-998-2600 x 586

swilliams(at)lavidge.com
The Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) today announced that, following rigorous review, BESLER has once again achieved the Peer Reviewed by HFMA designation for its Transfer DRG Revenue Recovery service.

BESLERs Transfer DRG Revenue Recovery Service identifies patients transferred to post-acute care for which Medicares payment, upon retrospective review, was less than the transferring hospital was entitled to receive, and re-files affected claims to Medicare, recovering otherwise-lost revenue.

Were very proud of the fact that our Transfer DRG Revenue Recovery Service is so well regarded among our customers, said Jonathan Besler, President and CEO of BESLER. The results of HFMAs thorough Peer Review process confirm the value that our clients see in the service. Our revenue cycle experts have continuously enhanced our service while keeping the focus squarely on compliance.

HFMA's Peer Review process provides healthcare financial managers with an objective, third-party evaluation of business solutions used in the healthcare workplace. The rigorous, 11-step process includes a Peer Review panel review comprising current customers, prospects who have not made a purchase, and industry experts. The Peer Review status of the healthcare business solution and its performance claims are based on effectiveness, quality and usability, price, value, and customer and technical support.

Were pleased to have BESLER renew their HFMA Peer Reviewed designation, says HFMA President and CEO Joseph J. Fifer, FHFMA, CPA. The HFMA Peer Review process assures our members, through a rigorous evaluation, that the reviewed healthcare business solution meets an objective, third-party assessment of overall effectiveness, quality, and value."

About HFMA

With more than 38,000 members, the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) is the nation's premier membership organization for healthcare finance leaders. HFMA builds and supports coalitions with other healthcare associations and industry groups to achieve consensus on solutions for the challenges the U.S. healthcare system faces today. Working with a broad cross-section of stakeholders, HFMA identifies gaps throughout the healthcare delivery system and bridges them through the establishment and sharing of knowledge and best practices. We help healthcare stakeholders achieve optimal results by creating and providing education, analysis, and practical tools and solutions. Our mission is to lead the financial management of health care.

About BESLER

BESLER combines best-in-class healthcare finance expertise with proprietary technology to help hospitals recover more revenue. Our reimbursement and recovery solutions have delivered more than $2 billion of additional revenue to hundreds of hospitals across the United States. We serve as advocates for hospitals, so that they, in turn, can better advance the health and well-being of their patients.
Michigan Optical, a full-service eye care practice founded by Douglas E. Cramer, ABOC, NCLE, has partnered with Great Lakes Management Services Organization (MSO). Built on the dual foundation of opticianry and optometry, Michigan Optical has expanded three times since its establishment in 2006 to meet strong patient demand.

Michigan Optical has been built on a foundation of repeat customers and referrals, said Bill Hughson, CEO of Great Lakes MSO. This is evidence of high-quality service and customer satisfaction. Great Lakes MSO is excited about partnering with their dedicated staff to help grow their business and exceed customers expectations.

Michigan Optical provides a full line of eye care services for the entire family, including comprehensive medically-based eye exams, imaging services, and an extensive line of eyeglasses, contact lenses, and eye care products.

Our decision to partner with Great Lakes MSO makes sense to sustain our continued growth. Well have direct access to services that will serve our patient base while continuing the personal care our patients have come to expect, said Mr. Cramer, who will remain on as an optician and location director. Utilizing the efficiencies and administrative support of the MSO enables us to better focus our attention on the needs of our patients.

Michigan Optical has over 2,000 frames to choose from, including Oakley, Tura, Proof, Hugo Boss, Vera Bradley, Ted Baker, Scott Harris, and many more. They also carry a full line of tactical eyewear for Police, Fire, and EMS use  available with and without prescription lenses. Michigan Optical also excels in specialty contact lenses including RGP, Multifocal, Keratoconus, and others.

About Michigan Optical

Michigan Optical offers a full line of eye care services, including eye exams, eyeglasses, and contact lenses. The practice is based on the belief that customer needs are of the utmost importance. Conveniently located at 511 Wilson Ave. NW, just north of the intersection at Lake Michigan Drive, the vision of Michigan Optical is to provide professional service, quality care, and products while remaining competitively priced. Michigan Optical accepts most medical and vision care plans. For more information, visit: http://www.michiganoptical.com.

About Great Lakes Management Services Organization

Great Lakes Management Services Organization (MSO) is dedicated to providing world-class support to leading providers of eye care services. Great Lakes MSO was created in early 2017 through a partnership between Grand Rapids Ophthalmology and Sterling Partners. Our Purpose is to Lead the Way, Improve Sight, and Change Lives; our Vision is to be the model for unsurpassed patient experience, inspiring and empowering our team through innovation, dedication to excellence, and the creation of opportunity through growth. If you are interested in learning more about a partnership with Great Lakes MSO, contact Dan Hosler at: dhosler@seeitclear.com.

About Sterling Partners

Sterling Partners is a private equity firm with a distinct point of view on how to build great companies. Founded in 1983 and having invested billions of dollars, Sterling is guided by its stated purpose, INSPIRED GROWTH, which describes Sterlings approach to investing in differentiated businesses and growing them in inspired ways. Sterling provides valuable support to the management teams of the companies in which the firm invests through a deep and dedicated team of professionals, including a strong network of outside directors and advisors. The people at Sterling believe in ideas and ideals, in people and in partnerships that drive long-term success. For more information, visit: http://www.sterlingpartners.com.
We have a long history with OnSSI and look forward to what the future brings with this latest solution hitting the market, states Melissa Stenger, VP of Product Management & Marketing at ISONAS.

ISONAS Inc., a leading Pure IP access control system manufacturer, today announced the company has integrated its software application, Pure Access with the Ocularis platform, an award winning IP-based surveillance software, from On-Net Surveillance Systems (OnSSI). OnSSIs Ocularis IP security and surveillance VMS platform increases security, reduces operational costs, and helps organizations move closer to prevention. Ocularis delivers open architecture, flexibility, and scalability for a range of applications. The powerful integration expands across all versions of Ocularis including Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate; enabling customers to have a direct integration between their access control and video management systems.

Pure Access is a cloud-based access control software application that provides users the ability to manage their access control from anywhere at any time, on any device. ISONAS fosters an open platform philosophy and a complete ISONAS and OnSSI integrated system allows customers to easily connect disparate video and access control systems together on one platform. The combined power of network-based Pure IP, panel-less access control technology and IP video management software provides a unified, efficient solution. The integration delivers real-time monitoring with video verification and the ability for users to control both their video cameras and access control systems from one centralized platform. Customers benefit with greater interoperability and a powerful security solution that is second to none. ISONAS is extremely excited to expand the Pure Access integration network to now include our longtime partner OnSSI. This integration gives customers more flexibility and opportunity to choose the products they prefer. We have a long history with OnSSI and look forward to what the future brings with this latest solution hitting the market, states Melissa Stenger, VP of Product Management & Marketing at ISONAS.

The integration of Ocularis and Pure Access provides a highly integrated and intelligent platform for both video and access control for many applications, said Ken LaMarca, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, OnSSI. Integrations such as this allows us to provide a comprehensive solution to our respective bases of new and established valued customers.

The updated integration of the OnSSI Ocularis solution and Pure Access delivers all the features and power of the Ocularis solution to a customers front door, thanks to ISONASs long-time partner, C2P. C2P, Inc. is a technology leader in IP device connectivity to video management systems and completed the Pure Access integration to OnSSI in December. In the future, C2P will expand their platform to integrate additional VMS platforms to Pure Access and further the ISONAS mission of giving customers choice in access control and video solutions. Im pleased to announce that C2P has recently completed the ISONAS Pure Access integration with the OnSSI Ocularis family of products. Both ISONAS and OnSSI have been part of the C2P integration framework since 2010 and we are excited to now be able to say that partnership includes Pure Access, states Paul Eaton President and CTO of Convergence TP. The Pure Access platform has a very modern look and feel to it and is extremely easy to deploy and utilize as a result.

ISONAS and OnSSIs open community philosophies are in sync, making them a perfect combination for success. Their systems integration gives customers choice in their hardware, software and video management system, thus freeing them from the limits of closed systems and providing a path to the best of all platforms. ISONAS and OnSSI have a long-time partnership and are committed to creating a unified video and access control solution now and in the future. For further information on the integration, please visit the ISONAS Website here.

About OnSSI

On-Net Surveillance Systems, Inc. (OnSSI) was founded in 2002 with the goal of developing comprehensive and intelligent IP video surveillance management software. OnSSIs Ocularis IP security and surveillance VMS platform increases security, reduces operational costs, and helps organizations move closer to prevention. Ocularis delivers open architecture, flexibility, and scalability for a range of applications including education, gaming, government, healthcare, manufacturing, public safety, transportation, and utilities. OnSSI is headquartered in Pearl River, New York and has representation in over 100 countries. With its acquisition of Germany-based VMS company, SeeTec GmbH and the launch of Ocularis 5, OnSSI continues to drive global expansion and technological innovations. For further information, please visit the OnSSI website at https://onssi.com/.

About ISONAS Inc.

Since 1999 ISONAS has been revolutionizing access control with one simple solution and is todays leading manufacturer of Pure IP Access Control hardware. When paired with their industry leading cloud hosted software solutions or 3rd party full featured access control software, a complete access control platform is formed. An ISONAS system provides the perfect product solution for securing facilities while reducing costs and providing all of the advantages that Pure IP technology brings to the door. ISONAS is based in the global technology hub of Boulder, Colorado, and has one goal; to change the global access control market, and provide a product solution that is secure, reliable, trusted, and more technologically advanced than anything before. Today, the company is realizing that vision with the ISONAS solution installed globally in over 30 countries in a wide variety of vertical markets. ISONAS has been recognized as one of Boulder Countys fastest growing companies as well as by industry partners such as Milestone Systems, year after year for its powerful video and access control integration. For more information, visit: http://www.isonas.com or call 800-581-0083.

ISONAS Company Contact:

Melissa Stenger, VP of Product Management & Marketing

ISONAS Inc.

Phone: 303-951-7216

Email: melissas(at)isonas(dot)com

ISONAS PR Contact:

Monique Merhige, President

Infusion Direct Marketing & Advertising, Inc.

Phone: 631-846-1558

Email: monique(at)infusiondirect(dot)com
Livability.com has released its fifth annual Top 100 Best Places to Live list. The new rankings are the culmination of months of exclusive research into what factors most influence the livability of the United States small to mid-sized cities. More than 30 states are represented from coast to coast.

The list is an exclusive, independent, editorial ranking by Livability.com. The research team was supported by a stellar advisory board of the leading academics, authors, policymakers and practitioners in the places space. The 2018 ranking builds on a process initially developed with one of the worlds leading urban theorists, Richard Florida. Livability.coms research team worked with the University of Torontos Martin Prosperity Institute and later with The Initiative for Creativity and Innovation in Cities at New York Universitys Schools of Professional Studies a program he directed along with Steven Pedigo.

The 2018 Best Place to Live list includes a fascinating mix of familiar cities and first-timers that are starting to carve out a reputation as wonderful places to live, says Winona Dimeo-Ediger, Livability.coms managing editor. Its great to see these under-the-radar cities getting more attention on a national scale  and the accolades are certainly well-deserved.

More than 2,300 cities with populations between 20,000 and 350,000 were ranked on 40 data points measuring economics, housing, amenities, infrastructure, demographics, social and civic capital, education and health care. The eight scores were weighted based on an exclusive survey conducted for Livability.com by Ipsos Public Affairs, a leading global market research firm. Respondents were asked about factors that make their communities great places to live, as well as the factors they would consider in selecting another city. Sources included the best public and private data available from organizations like the U.S. Census Bureau, Walk Score, GreatSchools.com and Esri.

This years #1 city, Ann Arbor, has appeared on Livability.coms Top 100 Best Places to Live list every year, says Dimeo-Ediger, so it feels like a special  and long awaited  victory for a deserving city.

The top 100 cities are featured on Livability.com, along with their LivScore and information about the qualities and amenities that helped them make the list.

###

About Livability.com:

Livability.com explores what makes small to mid-sized cities great places to live, work and visit. We examine issues related to livability such as walkability, cultural amenities, transportation, urban planning, and sustainability through exclusive research and discussions on our blog. We celebrate the accomplishments of these cities through our monthly top 10 lists, our annual ranking of livable cities, our rich photography and conversations with readers in social media. Livability.com is a division of Journal Communications, Inc.

For more information or to schedule an interview:

Winona Dimeo-Ediger, managing editor

Livability.com

wdimeo-ediger(at)livability(dot)com
Whaile's Tail According to Mary Alice Cerrito Fettis, Chair of Whalefest Monterey, "We invite visitors from around the world to experience all of the wonders of this unique festival in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary!"

Dont miss a free fun and educational, interactive family event for all ages that celebrates the migration of the gray whales and much more! The event also benefits many local and national marine organizations that educate, inspire, and empower the public to protect the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary

At a Glance:

What: The Monterey Fisherman's Wharf Association will sponsor and hold the 8th Annual

Whalefest Monterey including a 2-Day Symposium.

Where: At and around Old Fishermans Wharf, Monterey, California. Directions: https://www.montereywharf.com/map.html

When: Saturday, January 27 and Sunday, January 28, 2018 from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

Special discount Hotel Rates: Special Whalefest Monterey discount room rates are available at the Portola Inn and Spa. Subject to availability, guests can reserve rooms for January 26, 27 or 28 at this website: https://gc.synxis.com/rez.aspx?Hotel=65712&Chain=18268&promo=WHALEFEST

or call reservations at 855-516-1090 and mention Whalefest. Discount room rates available at Comfort Inn on North Fremont and on Munras. Call 372-2908 or 831-373-3081.

Parking:

Park in Waterfront parking lot. Monterey County Residents with local ID (939) can park free for four hours on January 26-28, courtesy of the City of Monterey.

About Whalefest Monterey:

Whalefest Monterey celebrates the migration of the gray whales, and benefits the many local and national marine organizations that build awareness about the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary which educate, inspire, and empower the public to protect it

Among the highlights will be an outstanding 2-day Symposium with lectures by world renowned marine experts and documentaries related to ocean and marine life conservation presented at the Wharf Theatre. Check https://www.montereywharf.com/event/two-day-symposium-at-8th-annual-whalefest-monterey.html for details. There will be many educational displays by organizations that affect the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

Weather permitting, whale watching tours, fishing, sailing and glass bottom boats will be operating from the Wharf (for a fee). Wharf restaurants will be serving lunch and dinner and shops will also be featuring marine-themed merchandise.

The two-day event will feature a wide array of fun and informative activities including:



Dee: The Beautiful Inflatable 43-foot Whale will be back at Whalefest. Attendees are able to go inside and see the ribs, heart, lungs, baleen, stomach and esophagus.

A 13-foot whale from MAOS.

Gyutaku, the Japanese art of stenciling fish.

Scrimshaw, the antique art of carving created by Basque and Portuguese whalers.

The popular animatronic Coastie the Safety Boat, a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, Flotilla 64 Monterey, will talk with attendees.

A Fire Boat, US Coast Guard 47' Surf Boat and US Coast Guard 29' Fast Response Boat.

Seafloor Science ROV Summer Day Camp will have underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) for visitors of all ages to "drive" in an enclosed tank!

Marine Life Studies Take it to the Streets is partnering with Surfrider for the Whalefest Community Beach & Bike Path Cleanup on Sunday.

Chef Tene Shake of the American Culinary Federation will do seafood cooking demonstrations.

Abalone Races sponsored by Monterey Abalone Company. Watch multi-footed mollusks race marathons.

There will also be many colorful photo ops with costumed animals roaming the Wharf area including a whale, leatherback turtle, mola-mola, shark and the Bag Monster.

The event will feature many other interactive edutaining displays and activities on both days from American Cetacean Society, California Coastal Commission, Camp SEA Lab, Coast Guard Auxiliary, Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reservation, Friends of the Monterey Public Library, Heirs to Our Oceans, Hess Design, Marine Life Studies, Marine Mammal Center, Monterey Academy Oceanographic Science (MAOS), Monterey Fire Department's Fire Boat, Monterey Peninsula Yacht Club, Mt. Madonna School, Otter Project, Pacific Grove Museum, Save the Whales, Seafloor Science ROV. Sea Otter Savvy, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Student Oceanography Club, Sustainable Monterey, United State Coast Guard and more.

Whalefest commemorative t-shirts will be available for a donation of $10 and whale and dolphin print aprons will be available for a $18 donation or both for a $25 donation. This year, the donations will benefit the non-profit, CASA, which helps the underserved children of Monterey County.

Live Musical Entertainment

The event will feature an array of great live music both days including Nick Fettis and his Orcastra, Richard Carr (Creator/performer of piano/keyboard soundtracks for the soul, mind & body), Mark Richardson (Mountain Dulcimer of an Eclectic Kind), Bill Minor (keyboards) & Richard Rosen (harmonica), Kuumbwa Jazz Honor Band, Monterey High School Jazz Band and Jonah and the Whale Watchers.

Event Sponsors

The events sponsors include Monterey State Historic Park, Marine Life Studies, MAOS, Monterey Signs, Fashion Streaks, Santa Cruz Waves, Pepsi, U. S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, Catalina Photography and the Wecker Group. Media sponsors include KAZU Radio, Monterey Herald and KSBW TV, Central Coast ABC, Estrella TV.

Check out video excerpts from prior years of outstanding Whalefest Monterey Symposium Presentations:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJFlU5j65V2FipOks9r6TbFp00JDLjdS_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QJ0cVmPtK0&list=PLJFlU5j65V2H4fdLimcb_hklyBvbF9VxU

For more updates, go to http://www.montereywharf.com or call (831) 238-0777.
Sullivan on Comp has been the most comprehensive treatise in the industry. Now its a digital suite of resources for workers compensation professionals.

Sullivan on Comp, a California Workers Compensation resource, today announced the release of its new eponymous app. This mobile application is available for free download on Apple iOS and Android devices and may be obtained at https://www.sullivanoncomp.com/app.

Sullivan on Comp has been the most comprehensive treatise in the industry. Now its more than that. Its a digital suite of resources for workers compensation professionals, said Michael Sullivan, lead author of Sullivan on Comp. Were growing and modernizing our product to make life easier for all our subscribers and now they can access the digital suite anytime, anywhere.

The app provides subscribers to Sullivan on Comp with on-the-go access to the sixteen-volume treatise, dozens of MCLE/CE accredited webinars, and hot-topic editorials. The digital platform makes finding answers easy with search, digital index, and clickable in-text references. Current online subscribers get complimentary access to the new app.

Sullivan on Comp is best known for its published works. The treatise was first made available to the public seven years ago. Shortly thereafter Sullivan produced its Special Report: SB 863 which was met with industry-wide acclaim. Sullivan more recently published a follow up report titled SB 863 Five Years Later, available for free at https://www.sullivanoncomp.com/sb-863-five-years-later.

ABOUT SULLIVAN ON COMP:

"Sullivan on Comp" is the most comprehensive treatise available on California workers' compensation law. The material is explained thoroughly and clearly, using jargon-free language. The publication is used by attorneys, claims adjusters, employers, and anyone else that needs current, complete, and easily accessible information on this body of law. Subscribers access Sullivan on Comp online or receive a multi-volume print edition that is updated annually.

To learn more about Sullivan on Comp, visit https://www.sullivanoncomp.com.

To download the app for Apple iOS and Android devices, visit https://www.sullivanoncomp.com/app.

To obtain SB 863 Five Years Later, visit https://www.sullivanoncomp.com/sb-863-five-years-later.

Media Contact: Karen Wolcott, +1-914-213-4278 or at kwolcott(at)sullivanoncomp.com

Sullivan on Comp Media Relations, 400 Continental Blvd. #250, El Segundo, CA 90245 U.S.A.  Telephone: +1-914-213-4278
We firmly believe the newer and interesting concepts of mobility like flying car and flying taxi can bring about a revolution. Yes, there is no denying the fact that there are a lot of hurdles to be overcome but let`s not forget that once even cars were a novelty for the rich.

Mobility Foresights announces the publication of a new syndicated report titled Flying car and Flying Taxi market in US and Europe 2018-2025

Scope of the report

This report details the present market and future prospects of flying car and flying taxi market in US and Europe 2018-2025.It discusses the market dynamics in detail and its impact on the market. It also presents the competitive landscape and an independent outlook on major companies (mostly start-ups) operating in this market. The scope of this report is limited to flying cars and flying taxi only and does not take into consideration commercial aircraft, helicopters and other aircraft included in General aviation. The period of study is 2018-2025, where the volumes and value are estimated for 2018 (based on pre- orders) and forecasted for 2019-2025.

Download a sample of the report at our website- https://mobilityforesights.com/product/flying-car-market-research-report/

Introduction

The worldwide loss of productive man hours due to increased road congestion has become a major cause of concern for employees, enterprises, government bodies and environment protection bodies alike. Although improved digitisation by courtesy of smartphones has strengthened the cause of ride hailing and car sharing services, they are still a long time away from being called an effective long term sustainable mobility solution. This has made innovative brains around the world to look to sky in a bid to fight this growing and long standing menace of what we call traffic. Whether it will bear any fruit or not, we will see further in the report.

Market Size and Forecast

US and Europe is characterized by a number of inhabitants belonging to the category of early technology adopters and richest individuals on this planet. The light aircraft market is heavily concentrated in US and Europe, making up for close to 60% of the global market. Although the share of Asia has been growing of late along with Latin America, its nowhere close to that of these matured economies. This is one of the major reasons why flying car and flying taxi manufacturers are targeting this region.

Up until this point, the possibility of an individual flying machine has been constrained to small aircrafts and helicopters, both have a high procurement and maintenance cost, accordingly restricting its ownership to a chosen few. The helicopters have long been the favourite mode of air transportation of high net worth individuals as well as military due to their versatility in operation. Therefore, if the concept of flying car has to be successful, then its acceptance has to go beyond that of helicopter and lighter compact aircraft.

Market Dynamics

This increased interest in autonomous vehicles is fuelling interest for autonomous flying car and flying taxi as well. This is understandable since, once the autonomous technologies are proved to be safe and reliable in real world, they would enter mass production which will bring down the cost of the major components. Dubai is one city which is embracing the idea of autonomous vehicles faster than even US and Europe. It has plans to make 25% of its public transport autonomous by 2030 and it is following its target very keenly. Dubai will deploy a fleet of autonomous police cars by the end of 2017 and flying taxis early next year. In both the cases the technology would be sourced from either US or Europe.

Conclusion

We firmly believe the newer and interesting concepts of mobility like flying car and flying taxi can bring about a revolution. Yes, there is no denying the fact that there are a lot of hurdles which needs to be overcome to make them a reality but let`s not forget that once even cars were a novelty for rich and look where they are now. It`s all just a matter of time and persistence in efforts.

Companies mentioned in the report-

Volocopter GmbH

PAL-V International B.V.

Aeromobil s.r.o

Terrafugia Corportation

Moller International

Urban Aeronautics

Carplane Gmbh

Samson Motorworks

Joby Aviation

Lilum GmbH

EHANG, Inc.

Airbus Ventures-A^3

To purchase the report,visit us at

https://mobilityforesights.com/product/flying-car-market-research-report/
AVOXI, a leading provider of Communications as a Service (CaaS) worldwide, is pleased to announce its expanded focus in Asia Pacific (APAC). This latest development reflects AVOXIs commitment to serve growing demand in the Asia Pacific region. AVOXI added a global point of presence in Asia to improve coverage, call quality and reliability within the region.

In addition to its Fall 2017 announcement of added and expanded services within South Asia, AVOXIs focus on the entire region of APAC helps meet growing demand for cloud communications in the area. Along with the added point of presence, AVOXI updated all APAC services with its recent expansion that includes new Asia Pacific minute packages in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.

According to the World Bank Group data, the combined gross domestic product for South Asia, East Asia and Pacific was 25.373 US$ for 2016 indicating an overall GDP growth of 3.6%. An example is Australia: a recent Frost and Sullivan report stated that the country has one of the highest adoption rates of cloud computing in APAC. The growth indicators in several APAC countries led to the decision to add a point of presence server to route regional calls. With its cloud communications services available internationally, AVOXI is well-positioned to continue cultivating its client base in the region.

Providing an excellent customer experience is paramount to the AVOXI Service. In addition to network, product and pricing enhancements in Asia, AVOXI is also investing in additional customer service resources in the region.

Year over year, we saw a 47% increase in Asia Pacific customers, explained David Wise, chief executive officer at AVOXI. Our mission is to ensure we provide the best and most comprehensive communications service to our clients and to meet increasing demand. I am pleased to add infrastructure in Asia that allows call termination regionally and to offer competitive telephony rates to help us in that effort.

AVOXI Core, AVOXIs cloud communication platform, provides 40+ business phone features. Its online portal uses an intuitive interface that allows customers to manage international numbers from over 140 countries, dynamically set forwarding rules, customize IVRs, and oversee call activity. AVOXI Core integrates with all IP and TDM PBX systems to deliver cloud-based solutions on a global basis. Customers can update costs, coverage and quality with no impact to their existing infrastructure or users. More information about AVOXI and AVOXI Core is available online at avoxi.com.

About AVOXI

AVOXI is a cloud communications provider focused on meeting the international calling needs and call center requirements for its clients in the travel and hospitality, online retail, consumer packaged goods, and other global enterprise industries. We provide telecommunications and enhanced VoIP solutions including toll free services, call recording, call termination, Cloud PBXs, call center solutions, toll free numbers worldwide, local numbers worldwide, SIP trunks, DID/DDI numbers, VPN solutions, business telephone systems, VoIP phone systems, and conference calling.
At Icon Foods, we are dedicated to producing the food and beverage industrys purest, all-natural, high-intensity sweetening solutions.

When you collaborate with Icon Foods, you can be assured of the highest-possible standards for quality control, food safety and reliability. Continuing its efforts to put its money where its mouth is, the company (formerly named Steviva Ingredients) recently earned its Safe Quality Food (SQF) Level 2, Oregon Kosher and Non-GMO Project Verification certifications at its new headquarters in Portland.

At Icon Foods, we are dedicated to producing the food and beverage industrys purest, all-natural, high-intensity sweetening solutions, said Yishu Hou, quality and document control specialist at Icon Foods. These certifications reinforce the ongoing commitment we make each day to our customers as a reliable, quality supply-chain partner.

Additionally, Icon Foods is in compliance with the USDA National Organic Program and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and its stringent guidelines.

About Safe Quality Food (SQF) program:

The SQF program, a division of the Food Marketing Institute (FMI), is recognized by retailers and foodservice providers around the world as a rigorous, credible food-safety management system. It is the only major system recognized by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) that offers third-party accredited certification for primary production, food manufacturing, distribution and agent/broker management. http://www.sqfi.com/about-sqf/

About Oregon Kosher:

Oregon Kosher is a nonprofit corporation founded by leaders of the Oregon Jewish Community in 1997 to serve the Kashrus needs of Oregonian consumers and businesses. For more information, visit http://www.oregonkosher.org.

About the Non-GMO Project:

The Non-GMO Project, a 501(c)(3) organization, offers North Americas only third-party verification and labeling for non-GMO foods and products. It has verified nearly 35,000 products from more than 1,900 brands, representing well over $13.5 billion in annual sales. Non-GMO Project Verified is one of the fastest-growing labels in the natural food sector, and it increasingly is an attribute sought by conventional brands. http://www.nongmoproject.org

About Icon Foods:

Established in 1999, Icon Foods (formerly known as Steviva Ingredients) is a natural food ingredient supplier committed to helping manufacturers bring clean, healthy food and beverages to the global market. Based in Portland, Oregon, and Salinas, Spain, Icon Foods focuses on all-natural, high-intensity sweetening solutions. Icon Foods sweeteners and bulk ingredients are certified organic and Kosher, and they are free of GMOs, soy, corn and allergens. More information is available at: http://www.iconfoods.com.

###
Luis and Giovanna Fernandez People trust me with their single largest asset, time and time again. It is a responsibility I take very seriously. I give 110 percent because I know that their success is ultimately my success.

Haute Residence welcomes Luis and Giovana Fernandez to its invitation-only real estate network. As haute Residence partners, they exclusively represent the high-end real estate market in Pinecrest and South Miami, Florida.

Luis and Giovanna Fernandez are among the most prominent names in the luxury real estate market in South Florida. With decades of expertise in the industry, they can handle the most high-profile and complicated transactions, while ensuring the best deals for their clients, be they buyers, sellers or investors. Both Luis and Giovanna specialize in high-end properties in Coral Gables, South Miami, Coconut Grove, Pinecrest and Brickell among others.

Luis possesses in-depth knowledge not only of the South Florida market, but also of international trends and cultural preferences. Giovannas attention to detail and personalized customer care are the perfect match for Luis expertise. Together, they founded and managed for over a decade a boutique real estate company in Coral Gables.

Today, Luis heads the award-winning LRF Group, whose industry-wide recognition stems from the specialized core competences of each team member. This distinction has earned the LRF Group a multitude of referrals and repeat customers, who make up over 65 percent of the business.

People trust me with their single largest asset, time and time again, said Luis. It is a responsibility I take very seriously. I give 110 percent because I know that their success is ultimately my success.

The LRF Group provides clients with personalized services that speak of unmatched quality, integrity, honesty and professionalism. The teams passion for real estate translates into unrivaled opportunities for its customers.

Luis holds a BA from the University of Miami and a post-graduate degree from Florida International University, while Giovanna has earned a Luxury Certification and several awards for customer service and top production.

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
Helping others is the true mission of the credit union movement, said Anderson (who is also the CEO at the Government Printing Office Federal Credit Union in Washington DC). The people we visited suffered great loss. Some may never fully recover, while others are praying for some sense of normalcy.

The African-American Credit Union Coalition (AACUC) continues to live the credit union motto of people helping people. During the holiday season, Chairman Timothy L. Anderson and Board Secretary Sheilah Montgomery, visited Houston, Texas and delivered financial aid to those still severely affected by Hurricane Harvey. Donations were solicited through a humanitarian outreach that permeated the credit union industry.

Through this call for aid, the United States Senate Federal Credit Union donated $40,000 to the AACUC for the expressed purpose of helping people of color and low-income individuals, who are disproportionally affected by these types of natural disasters. Led by Secretary Montgomery, AACUC worked with four Houston credit unions and their CEOs, Houston Metropolitan FCU  Malcolm Rene, Light Commerce CU  Harlene Johnson, Team Financial CU  Lynda Milton and BCM FCU  Tony Black, along with local city officials, to identify individuals in distress. Overall, we were able to help 36 families, many still displaced and not able to live in their homes. Some lost everything, and to hear their stories of despair, was heartbreaking.

Helping others is the true mission of the credit union movement, said Anderson (who is also the CEO at the Government Printing Office Federal Credit Union in Washington DC). The people we visited suffered great loss. Some may never fully recover, while others are praying for some sense of normalcy. The stories of being trapped in homes submerged with water up to your neck, is just unimaginable.

The AACUC Board of Directors made assisting our member credit unions and their members a top priority at the close of 2017. In 2005 the AACUC was instrumental in assisting credit unions hit with devastation caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Many credit unions in the southeast region of Louisiana were affected. As a result of the devastation to credit unions, the AACUC Mentorship Committee established an assessment team. The purpose of the assessment team was to work with affected credit unions in identifying immediate and long-term needs, and providing resources for survival. Members of the assessment team visited New Orleans and other immediate surrounding areas to work with the stabilization of approximately 12 credit unions. Grants totaling approximately $90,000 were secured from the National Community Development Credit Unions (NFCDCU) the Canadian League and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives to assist in the relief effort.

About AACUC:

The AACUC was created to increase the strength of the global credit union community. In 1999 the AACUC became a 501c3 non-profit organization. Over the years, AACUC has grown and is ever changing to meet the needs of the dynamic credit union community which it serves. We are an all-encompassing organization for individuals (professionals and volunteers) in credit unions, insurance, regulatory, consultants and other entities in the credit union movement.
Shanghai transcosmos Marketing Services Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of transcosmos inc., was awarded the Intelligent Business Innovation Award for its intelligent business model and service philosophy at the 2017 Ebrun Future Retail Convention hosted by Ebrun, a major e-commerce news media company in China.

Under the theme of Intelligence and Business, the 2017 Ebrun Future Retail Convention was held from December 20th to 22nd, 2017. The convention advocates the slogan Intelligence changes business and e-commerce leads the future of the retail business. Leaders including retail industry experts, scholars and leading e-commerce company executives gathered in Guangzhou and discussed the future path of the retail industry.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence and the concept of New Retail, the global e-commerce business is going through a new growth path. In order to keep up with the times, e-commerce businesses are seeking ways to innovate their business models in various ways. As a global BPO player with a 51-year history, transcosmos continues to evolve and innovate its services. Now, transcosmos develops and offers new technologies and services including DataRobot, a machine learning automation platform, AI Copywriter KOTOBA TAKUMI (beta version) which excels at infeed ads, and DEC (Digital marketing + E-commerce + Contact center) total solution services, as well as establishing an AI laboratory Communication Science Lab, to name a few.

transcosmos has also been working on service innovation in China. Since August 2017, transcosmos has been introducing Dianxiaomi, an Alibabas intelligent customer service robot, to brand stores on TMALL. Making Dianxiaomi serve customers on behalf of human customer service agents, clients can improve support efficiency and service quality whilst reducing costs. Through continuous optimization of its official and custom knowledgebase and data tracking, Dianxiaomi significantly improved its support accuracy and showcased its capability on 2017 Singles Day (W11). The average solution rate of Dianxiaomi surpassed 60%, and for apparel stores the ratio achieved was over 75%, and as a result, Dianxiaomi successfully avoided customer losses that occur due to delayed response during peak support hours. Whats more, the service reduced customer support costs by over 50% and received high remarks from clients.

In the award ceremony held on December 21, 2017, Jackie Ding, Director of Operations of E-Commerce Business Division at transcosmos China received the Intelligent Business Innovation Award by Ebrun.

Since its entry to China in 1995, transcosmos continued to achieve drastic business growth and currently has 26 offices across 13 cities in China. In the e-commerce sector, transcosmos provides one-stop services ranging from e-commerce website development and operation, fulfillment (ROG, picking, packing and shipping), customer care, website sales promotion, to data analysis and more. The company also offers outsourcing services including call centers, system development, BPO and digital marketing.

As a leading global BPO company, transcosmos continues to deliver integrated services that help clients expand sales whilst reducing costs.

*transcosmos is a trademark or registered trademark of transcosmos inc. in Japan and other countries.

*Other company names and product or service names used here are trademarks or registered trademarks of respective companies.

About transcosmos inc.

transcosmos launched its operations in 1966. Since then, we have combined superior people with up-to-date technology to enhance the competitive strength of our clients by providing them with superior and valuable services. transcosmos currently offers services that support clients business processes focusing on both sales expansion and cost reduction through our 177 locations across 33 countries with a focus on Asia, while continuously pursuing Operational Excellence. Furthermore, following the expansion of e-commerce market on the global scale, transcosmos provides a comprehensive One-Stop Global E-Commerce Services to deliver our clients' excellent products and services to consumers in 49 countries around the globe. transcosmos aims to be the Global Digital Transformation Partner of our clients, supporting the clients transformation by leveraging digital technology, responding to the ever-changing business environment.
Clients know RoviSys as a trustworthy partner who has helped make their business stronger and more profitable

RoviSys, a leading independent provider of comprehensive process automation, systems integration, and building management solutions, announced today three large project wins and the promotion of two Group Managers in Boston, MA. Since opening the Boston regional office in 2011, RoviSys has capitalized on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, establishing a formidable reputation as an automation and information systems integrator across the New England region.

The three project wins will drive continuous client and staff growth, with efforts that involve migrations as well as new process automation systems that help customers improve operational efficiency and performance reliability. New Group Managers Sean Galligan and Edgar Rivera will support multi-million dollar labor efforts well into 2018, focusing on client relationships and project and resource management.

Being awarded three significant integration projects is evidence of technical expertise, attentive customer service, and a commitment to independence, said Chris Phillips, Northeast Regional Manager. These wins not only position us well for the short-term, but also for future growth. Clients know RoviSys as a trustworthy partner who has helped make their business stronger and more profitable.

Edgar Rivera joined RoviSys as an experienced engineer, having worked previously at Proconex in Royersford, PA. Edgar earned a BSME from the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and has worked in Life Sciences automation industry throughout his career supporting clients such as Merck, Aquasol, Lilly, Eastman, and Pfizer. Rivera has developed strong customer relationships that he will continue to build and support RoviSys growth in Boston and the Northeast region.

Sean Galligan earned a BSChE from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and joined RoviSys shortly thereafter. He has supported several major Life Sciences client and is familiar with industries in multiple regions including North Carolina, Puerto Rico, California, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Galligan has grown into a leadership role, managing relationships across North America.
HTS University attendees will gain first-hand experience and receive the latest product knowledge on state-of-the-art HVAC equipment, empowering building owners and maintenance teams to feel comfortable managing their systems operations.

HTS Texas, the Texas partner of the largest independent commercial HVAC manufacturers' representative in North America, announced that the company is expanding its training program, HTS University, with the addition of a new regional training instructor and diversified course offering. HTS University will provide free training sessions on a wide range of HVAC equipment to industry professionals and end users throughout Texas.

As the regional training instructor for HTS Texas, James Adkinson will take on the role of providing relevant training with hands-on demonstrations to building owners, maintenance teams, contractors, and end users. Adkinson possesses strong industry expertise, with more than 23 years of experience working at Daikin Applied. His extensive knowledge of air handlers, packaged rooftop systems, air cooled and screw chillers, water-cooled chillers and magnetic bearing centrifugal chillers will allow him to provide necessary training and information to ensure attendees can confidently operate their systems.

Im excited to have the opportunity to pass on my HVAC knowledge to others in the industry, Adkinson said. Everyone who works with these systems should have the ability to understand and operate them independently, and resolve issues without the need for outsourced help. I hope I can deliver that power to the individuals I train.

HTS University classes can include customized on-site instruction for each facilitys system, or be taught in a classroom setting at one of HTS Texass six offices across Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, and Round Rock. Attendees will gain first-hand experience and receive the latest product knowledge on state-of-the-art HVAC equipment, empowering building owners and maintenance teams to feel comfortable managing their systems operations.

James Adkinsons depth of knowledge will be a great asset to our clients, and the HTS University training initiative will deliver vital resources and education that will benefit our industry in the short and long term, said Todd McCullough, principal at HTS Texas. Providing this solution at no cost for industry professionals ultimately saves facilities money on maintenance costs, and enhances the user experience for everyone involved.

As a full-service HVAC solutions provider, HTS Texas is committed to delivering real success to all parties who interface with a projects HVAC equipment, including end users. HTS University allows the company to offer support for the systems provided by HTS Texas, and contribute to growth of collective industry knowledge. HTS Texas will continue to offer HVAC fundamentals courses for a fee, and is consistently working to expand its offering of free HTS University courses to cover the full range of the companys HVAC expertise. This expertise, combined with a full suite of specialized departments focused on equipment, building automation systems, airside products, parts, and service, allows HTS Texas to provide support for HVAC systems through the entire product life cycle.

For more information on HTS University training programs, contact HTS.University@hts.com.

About HTS

HTS is the largest independent commercial HVAC manufacturers' representative in North America. The company represents more than 100 HVAC suppliers and has approximately 700 employees in 16 cities across Canada and the United States. Delivering Real Success to all involved in its projects, HTS provides HVAC and refrigeration solutions to commercial, institutional, and industrial markets from leading manufacturers such as Daikin, Epsilon, AcoustiFLO, and Haakon Industries. For more information about HTS, visit http://www.hts.com/ or connect via LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Attorney Vincent F. Cornelius - Joliet Criminal Defense Lawyer I have had the honor of serving the legal profession and the community at large in many significant areas. My combination of courtroom experience and leadership service have prepared me well to serve Will County as its next Circuit Court Judge. - Attorney Cornelius.

Joliet Attorney Vincent F. Cornelius is pleased to announce his candidacy for the position of circuit judge for the Twelfth Judicial Circuit Court of Will County, Illinois. He is running for the Democratic nomination in the March 20 primary.

I have had the honor of serving the legal profession and the community at large in many significant areas, Cornelius said. My combination of courtroom experience and leadership service have prepared me well to serve Will County as its next Circuit Court Judge.

Vincent Cornelius is the founder and principal attorney of the Law Offices of Vincent F. Cornelius in Joliet and Wheaton. He has tried hundreds of cases during his 28-year career, as a prosecutor, criminal defense attorney, and civil litigator. He has been selected to Super Lawyers from 2015 to 2018 and was named to the 2018 edition of the Best Lawyers in America.

Cornelius has dedicated himself to service and leadership in his career, church, family, community and the schools he has attended. He has given keynote speeches to numerous organizations, including to the Illinois Supreme Court at its judicial conference.

Cornelius is the immediate past president of the Illinois State Bar Association, being both the first African American and first Will County attorney to hold the position. He has also served on Governors Commissions, Supreme Court Commissions, legislation committees and university boards.

Cornelius received his bachelors in business administration from the University of St. Francis in Joliet and his Juris Doctor from Northern Illinois University. He remains active with both schools and has received their outstanding alumni awards. He is a proud alum of Joliet Catholic Academy and he received the schools 2017 Career Achievement Award.

Cornelius is a native of Joliet and resident of Will County for nearly 40 years, including the last 13 years in Naperville. He and his wife, Zina, have been married for 26 years and are the parents of two college students.

About Vincent F. Cornelius:

Vincent F. Cornelius is a Joliet attorney seeking the Democratic nomination as a candidate for circuit judge in the Twelfth Judicial Circuit Court of Will County, Illinois. He has practiced law for 28 years as a prosecutor, criminal defense attorney and civil litigator through the Law Offices of Vincent F. Cornelius. Cornelius recently completed his term as president of the Illinois State Bar Association. As a long-time Will County resident, he prides himself on being a leader in his profession and community.
G.L. Huyett announces the appointment of Terry May of ProWest Marketing, Inc. as an authorized manufacturers representative for distributor sales in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska.

G.L. Huyett has appointed Terry May of ProWest Marketing, Inc. as its authorized business development agent for the Pacific Northwest, encompassing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska. May is a highly respected and experienced manufacturers representative and has been a long-time member of the Pacific-West Fastener Association.

Founded in 1989 by George Schneider, ProWest Marketing, Inc. serves the diverse needs of Industrial Distributors throughout the Pacific Northwest, and is well-versed in integrated industrial systems.

This appointment expands G.L. Huyetts coverage and canvass intensity and Terry will help us better support distributors serving the Aerospace, Agriculture, Food Processing, Metals, Energy, Technology, Electronics, Maritime, Forestry, and Military & Defense sectors, noted Dan Harriger, G.L. Huyetts Vice President of Sales. Harriger also noted that with this appointment, G.L. Huyett now has field sales personnel covering all of North America, including Canada and Mexico.

ProWest welcomes the opportunity to partner with G.L. Huyett as their breadth of line, exceptional customer service, and manufacturing capabilities will support our efforts to provide impeccable service to our distributor customers and a select handful of hand-picked manufacturers, May stated. Along with their easy-to-use e-commerce platform, their extensive training and technical tools will help our customers secure more business by providing knowledgeable guidance for a broad range of fastening solutions.

To contact Terry May, call 360-921-3898, e-mail prowestmkt(at)gmail(dot)com, or visit http://www.prowestmkt.com.

About G.L. Huyett

Established in 1906 by Guy Huyett in the other Minneapolis, the company is one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in Kansas. The firm is a leading innovator of products and services geared to support industrial distributors in the non-threaded fastener and power transmission sectors, delivered by competent customer-centric people operating in a Culture of Excellence.
Customer success is not just a division within Jazel, it is one of our core principles. With Stephen on board, we expect our industry-best customer service to prosper and grow to the next level." - Jazel President Jay Rhodus

Today, Jazel is pleased to announce that Stephen Christensen has joined the Company in the role of Vice President, Customer Success. He will be responsible for Jazels New Client On Boarding, Customer Success and the associated support team, and support of key company initiatives.

Hiring Stephen represents the continuation of Jazels longstanding commitment to the success of our customers, said Jazel President and Co-Founder Jay Rhodus. Customer success is not just a division within Jazel, it is one of our core principles. With Stephen on board, we expect our industry-best customer service to prosper and grow to the next level. His experience working directly with hundreds of dealers has given him a unique insight into dealer operations, and we fully expect to leverage that expertise on behalf of Jazels growing client base.

Prior to joining Jazel, Mr. Christensen held the position of Director of Customer Engagement at Dealersocket. In this role he was a member of the leadership team focusing on employee development, customer satisfaction and key customer engagement. "Im excited to be joining Jazel and look forward to contributing to Jazels level of care and exceeding the standard of excellence that our customers have come to expect, said Mr. Christensen.

Christensens time at Dealersocket was marked by a flurry of positive activity as his hands-on leadership saw the successful expansion of the companys primary support center in Orange County, CA and the opening and ongoing integration of a new center in Utah. Christensens skill in employee training will be particularly valuable as Jazel grows its support staff.

Im confident that we will continue to pursue excellence as we move forward with our next level initiatives to bring our best in class level service to an ever increasing base of automotive retail dealership partners who value our unique customer-centric model.

Accepting the role at Jazel represents a bit of a homecoming for Christensen, who got his start in the industry at Jazel in 2009. Added Jay Rhodus, When Stephen went to our then partner Dealersocket, we were happy for both of them and as always, the door is open for talented people that truly care about what they do and the clients we serve. Im delighted on behalf of our clients that Stephen is coming back home to Jazel.

Mr. Christensen earned a BA from Cal State Fullerton University with a focus on History and Political and Social Economics.

About Jazel Automotive

Jazel Automotive is the #1 provider of customer-centric websites to car dealerships and automotive retailers. Founded in 2003 and based in Lake Forest, CA, Jazel Automotive is on a mission to help dealerships provide experiences that car shoppers love. For more information, visit jazelauto.com or contact sales@jazel.com
The Continental Products Company (http://www.continentalprod.com), a leader in the specialty coatings, industrial paints and sealants industry, is pleased to announce the hiring of Albin (Al) Lorkovic and Ronald (Ron) Ellis into the positions of National Sales Manager, Wood Coatings & Sealants and National Sales Manager, Horticultural Products, respectively.

Both candidates have successful histories of profitable sales growth and strategically focused new business development across a diverse set of industries and bring with them nearly 50 years of combined sales experience. Lorkovic and Ellis also have valuable experience in territory and customer relationship management and a track records of targeted sales and profit growth. Prior to joining Continental Products, Al Lorkovic worked as a Finish Specialist, Outside Sales Representative for Distributor Services Inc. and Ron Ellis held the position of Sales Manager for Tampa, Florida-based Lennox Chemical.

Both new roles will be responsible for maintaining and growing business with existing customers as well as seeking out and targeting new growth opportunities from within and without the existing market niches of log homes and greenhouse shading. Both roles will be field-based and will report to Bob Lesher, Business Development Manager, Wood Coatings, Sealants & Horticultural Products.

"If we wish to grow and continue the legacy of Continental Products as a leader in specialty paints and coatings, we need to have dedicated resources in the field actively seeking out new opportunities, said Bob Lesher, Business Development Manager. "Im excited to have highly qualified and motivated folks like Ron and Al joining our team and Im confident that theyll both do a great job as the newest members of the Continental team.

Lorkovic has a BA in Communications from Cleveland State University and Ron Ellis attended Lakeland Community College where he studied mathematics and business management. You may contact Ron Ellis at RJE(at)continentalprod(dot)com or directly at 216-333-1385 and Al Lorkovic at AJL(at)continentalprod(dot)com or directly at 216.904.4005.

Founded in 1916 and acquired by KEENE Family Holdings of Mayfield Heights in October of 2016, The Continental Products Company specializes in compliant water-borne, high solids, 2K (epoxy & urethane) and customized paint technologies for use in various Industrial manufacturing markets. Continental also manufactures stains, waterborne varnishes and sealants and specialty coatings and sealants for the commercial Greenhouse Industry.
The NanaWall SL73 is specifically designed and engineered to perform in hurricane climates well beyond Miami-Dade standards. Miami-Dade County certification is just the starting point for NanaWall, and the SL73 far exceeds those standards to ensure safety, security and structural performance.

NanaWall Systems, the pioneer of the opening glass wall category, announces the NanaWall SL73 as one of the industrys toughest hurricane-resistant folding systems. The glass walls feature reinforced structural posts (or astragals) down each panel side that enable the SL73 to meet and exceed Miami-Dade AAMA certification requirements.

As homeowners are looking to rebuild after such an intense hurricane season, builders and architects are looking for glass wall systems that can withstand future storms, said NanaWall CEO Ebrahim Nana. Miami-Dade County certification is just the starting point for NanaWall, and the SL73 far exceeds those standards to ensure safety, security and structural performance.

TWEET THIS: The @NanaWall #hurricane-resistant SL73 features reinforced structural posts and impact-rated laminated glass for added strength and longevityanother reason why the SL73 performs above and beyond Miami-Dade ratings. bit.ly/NanaWallSL73 #glasswallsystems

Available for residential and commercial applications, the SL73 allows homeowners and business owners in hurricane-prone areas to enjoy their views while remaining safe and dry. It received high ratings on both static and dynamic pressure water resistance tests, and is tested to demanding standards for preventing water, wind and debris from entering the buildingnot only at the ground level, but up to 15 stories. Its performance is due to several key factors:



Reinforced structural posts: With reinforced vertical posts (or astragals) down each panel side for added performance, the glass walls pivot on and are hinged to either side of the vertical post providing strength against high winds and water.

Multipoint Locking System: NanaWalls multi-point locking system includes top and bottom locking rods that securely lock into the upper and lower frame with polyamide capped locking rods to prevent vandalism and burglary once cleanup efforts are underway.

A floor supported system: Using gravity as an advantage, the floor supported system leverages extra stability to withstand hurricane force winds.

Raised floor sills: High performance raised sills are the most weather resistant sill and prevent both static and dynamic water penetration, also yielding higher pressure ratings against heavy wind loads.

Combats wind and rain: Specialized seals and panel design provide superior wind and rain resistance, while the engineered sills resist wind-driven water from entering the home or business.

Due to the attributes above, the SL73 scored high in tests developed for windows and doors by the American Architectural Manufacturers Association and Miami-Dade County, Florida.

For more information about the NanaWall SL73, please visit the blog post Rebuilding After a Hurricane.

About NanaWall Systems

For over 30 years, NanaWall Systems has pioneered the category of opening glass wall systems. The company has earned the trust of architects, builders, design professionals and homeowners as a custom solution for re-imagining how buildings, people and the elements interact. By combining precision engineering and outstanding design options throughout more than 25 unique award-winning systems, NanaWall Systems advances design possibilities beyond the conventional for almost any space. NanaWall Systems is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with 24 showroom and design studio locations across North America.
TEKLYNX and AIS will discuss the FDAs UDI regulation and the important role barcode verification plays in meeting requirements. Were excited to partner with AIS to educate medical device manufacturers about the importance of barcode verification. Its another way TEKLYNX helps AIDC end users leverage technologies and technology partners to make their companies work better.  TEKLYNX Enterprise Product Manager, Nick Recht

TEKLYNX International, the worlds leading barcode and RFID labeling software developer and solutions provider, and leading barcode verification provider Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) today announced it will co-present a live free webinar titled Barcode Verification for UDI and Global Medical Device Labeling. Scheduled for January 25th at 12:00 PM CST, the webinar will be co-presented by TEKLYNX Enterprise Product Manager Nick Recht and AIS President Mike Nolan.

The FDAs Unique Device Identification (UDI) regulation continues to be a critical aspect of the transition that the medical device community is making in its digital global future. Print quality and content have minimum quality standards set by regulators to ensure the healthcare community goals of patient safety and efficiency are met. Barcode verification plays an important role within this effort as the FDAs UDI regulation requires medical device labels to have a barcode with a grade C or better to be UDI compliant.

Were excited to partner with leading barcode verification provider AIS to educate medical device manufacturers about the importance of barcode verification, states TEKLYNX Enterprise Product Manager Nick Recht. Its another way we help AIDC end users leverage technologies and technology partners to make their companies work better.

During the webinar, TEKLYNX and AIS will discuss the FDAs UDI regulation and the important role barcode verification plays in meeting these requirements. Webinar attendees will also learn:



Why barcode verification is critical for medical device labeling

Why barcode verification is necessary to comply with FDA and EU regulations

How barcode verification plays an important role in meeting industry-specific regulations

What the components of designing and printing a UDI compliant label include

Nolan will also provide its first-ever live demonstration of SCANALYST 3 GUDID, its barcode verification and compliance solution for UDI labeling. This comprehensive system inspects against print quality minimums, normally referred to as barcode verification, as well as checks barcode data formatting and synchronization with the FDAs Global Unique Device Identification Database (GUDID). Nolan says, This thorough inspection approach will play an important role in UDI implementations for manufacturers, distributors and providers as they prepare their organizations for the future.

The January 25th Barcode Verification for UDI and Global Medical Device Labeling webinar also features a live question and answer format so attendees can gather insights specific to their organizations needs. To register, visit https://www.teklynx.com/en/ais-udi-webinar. To learn more about UDI labeling requirements including information on the upcoming September 24th, 2018 compliance deadline, download TEKLYNX free eBook: Are You Ready for UDI?

About TEKLYNX International

TEKLYNX International is the worlds leading barcode and RFID labeling software developer and solutions provider. An industry innovator for over 30 years, TEKLYNX helps companies operate smoothly and efficiently by implementing labeling solutions that streamline operations while staying ahead of industry-specific compliance and emerging regulations. TEKLYNX is world-renowned for its customer service; offering flexible purchase options, unparalleled service and support, and a comprehensive product offering that grows with companies over time. With operations in the United States, Europe, Japan, Latin America, China and Singapore, more than 630,000 companies in over 120 countries look to TEKLYNX integrated software solutions for their standard of success. Learn more by visiting teklynx.com, LinkedIn, Twitter @Teklynx, and Facebook.com/TEKLYNXInternational or call 888-629-4444.
Tierney has a long, difficult life ahead of her; these funds will help her obtain all the necessary medical care for the remaining decades of her life.

The City of Chicago and its insurance carrier have paid $115 million to a young woman who was paralyzed by a collapsed pedestrian shelter at OHare International Airport.

The settlement was reached after the city of Chicagos attorneys challenged a record $148 million jury verdict that was awarded on August 23, 2017 in a Cook County courtroom.

According to the complaint, on August 2, 2015 around 2:40 p.m., 24-year-old Tierney Darden was standing with her mother and 19-year-old sister outside of the airport near the outer lane of the lower level street that accesses Terminal 2 (2 W. Terminal Street) by Vestibule 2C. The three women had just returned to Chicago from Minneapolis where they were shopping for bridesmaid dresses for a wedding. A storm rolled through the area as the women were waiting to be picked up and a pedestrian shelter weighing more than 750 pounds became loose and fell onto Tierney.

Tierney, who was a dancer and college student at the time, sustained dislocated vertebrae at T11-T12, which resulted in a severed spinal cord that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Pain experts testified Tierneys spinal cord stretched until it popped and ripped.

My face hit the ground, there was a crack and a white light and everything went numb. I knew I was paralyzed. The pain I feel every day is like torture, Tierney said during the August trial.

It was determined the shelter that injured Tierney had missing bolts. An investigation later found other shelters at O'Hare Airport were poorly maintained, also with missing bolts, corroded parts, or broken brackets. According to court documents, five months prior to trial, the city of Chicago admitted wrongful conduct for the incident that dramatically changed Tierneys life. During the trial, the Plaintiff turned down a $30 million offer.

The record $148 million verdict was obtained after a 10-day trial by attorneys Patrick A. Salvi, Jeffrey J. Kroll, Tara R. Devine, Patrick A. Salvi II, and Eirene N. Salvi of the Illinois personal injury law firm Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard.

Following the trial, the City of Chicago filed post-trial motions arguing, among other things, that the verdict was excessive. After an extensive mediation with Hon. Donald OConnell, Tierneys attorneys and the insurance carrier for the City of Chicago agreed upon a $115 million settlement. This settlement represents the largest personal injury settlement for an individual plaintiff in Illinois state history, according to the Illinois Jury Verdict Reporter. The prior highest reported Illinois personal injury settlement for an individual plaintiff was a $47.5 million medical malpractice settlement secured in 2017.

We felt the entire verdict was supported by the evidence. In post-trial motions, the defendant pointed out that the jury awarded $32 million for future medical expenses, wherein our life care plan called for $15 million. Although we were prepared to show the $32 million was justified, we had to consider this. Further, I believe anyone who sat through the trial would not find the award to be excessive, lead plaintiffs counsel Patrick A. Salvi said. Although we believed the verdict would have been upheld on appeal, when weighing the risks and benefits, we felt this was a fair compromise. Tierney has a long, difficult life ahead of her; these funds will help her obtain all the necessary medical care for the remaining decades of her life.

It is important to note that the city of Chicago was insured up to $500 million for any incidents occurring at OHare.

For more information or to obtain additional editorial materials, please contact Marcie Mangan at (312) 372-1227 or mmangan(at)salvilaw(dot)com.
We are proud of this significant step to support global nuclear nonproliferation. Being 100% LEU is an outstanding example of how Curium continues to deliver safe & reliable diagnostic tools to the medical community. We continue to invest in new research & technology, & theres much more to come."

Curium, a leading nuclear medicine solutions provider, announced today that the company is the first North American manufacturer to meet the deadline established by the American Medical Isotopes Production Act of 2012. This legislation effectively mandates the full conversion away from highly enriched uranium (HEU) as soon as possible and no later than January 2020. Curiums multi-year project to transition its molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) processing facility from HEU to low enriched uranium (LEU) was completed in late-2017. This project makes Curium the only North American Technetium Tc 99m Generator manufacturer able to supply its customers exclusively with 100 percent LEU Tc 99m generators. Mo-99 is the parent isotope of Tc 99m, which is used in 30 to 40 million nuclear medicine procedures worldwide every year (1).

Curium is the worlds largest supplier of Tc 99m generators and the largest user of Mo-99 in the world. This milestone helps satisfy the goals set forth by the Department of Energys (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and confirms our support for the NNSA project to eliminate the use of weapons-grade uranium in the production of medical isotopes. We are eager to see others follow our lead and comply with the governments call for full conversion as soon possible says Curium North American CEO, Dan Brague.

This project is the culmination of more than seven years of work, requiring close collaboration with Curiums irradiation partners: the Dutch High Flux Reactor, the Polish MARIA reactor, and BR2 in Belgium, as well as, the DOE and NNSA. Roy Brown, Vice President, Government Affairs for Curium North America, states, Our 100 percent LEU conversion helps Curium generator customers eliminate the inefficiency of balancing the availability of both HEU and LEU generators in their inventory and helps them to control costs better. Something that is especially important when you consider the special reimbursement guidelines surrounding LEU versus HEU patient doses.

Brague concluded, We are proud of this significant step to support global nuclear nonproliferation. Being 100 percent LEU is an outstanding example of how Curium continues to deliver safe and reliable diagnostic tools to the medical community. We continue to invest in new research and technology, and theres much more to come.

To view a video related to Curiums conversion to 100 percent LEU, please follow this link.

Ultra-Technekow V4 (technetium Tc-99m generator)

INDICATIONS AND USAGE

Sodium Pertechnetate Tc 99m is used IN ADULTS as an agent for: thyroid imaging, salivary gland imaging, urinary bladder imaging (direct isotopic cystography) for detection of vesico-ureteral reflux, and nasolacrimal drainage system imaging (dacryoscintigraphy).

Sodium Pertechnetate Tc 99m is used IN PEDIATRIC PATIENTS as an agent for: thyroid imaging and urinary bladder imaging (direct isotopic cystography) for the detection of vesico-ureteral reflux.

IMPORTANT RISK INFORMATION

Radiation risks associated with the use of Pertechnetate Tc 99m are greater in pediatric patients than in adults and, in general, the younger the patient the greater the risk of owing to greater absorbed radiation doses and longer life expectancy. These greater risks should be taken firmly into account in all benefit risk assessments involving pediatric patients. Long-term cumulative radiation exposure may be associated with an increased risk of cancer.

Radiopharmaceuticals should be used only by physicians who are qualified by training and experience in the safe use and handling of radionuclides and whose experience and training have been approved by the appropriate government agency authorized to license the use of radionuclides. As in the use of any radioactive material, care should be taken to minimize radiation exposure to occupational workers.

After the termination of the nasolacriminal imaging procedures, blowing the nose and washing the eyes with sterile distilled water or an isotonic sodium chloride solution will further minimize the radiation dose.

Allergic reactions including anaphylaxis have been reported infrequently following the administration of Sodium Pertechnetate Tc 99m.

Please visit the Curium website for full Prescribing Information for the Ultra-Technekow V4 (technetium Tc-99m generator)

https://curiumpharma.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/UTK-V4-a901is-in-171115.pdf

About Curium

Curium is a world-class nuclear medicine solutions provider with more than a century of industry experience. Formed by the merger of IBA Molecular and Mallinckrodt Nuclear Medicine LLC, Curium is the largest vertically integrated radiopharmaceutical product manufacturer in the industry.

With manufacturing facilities across Europe and the United States, Curium supports over 14 million patients around the word with SPECT, PET, and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals to provide potentially life-saving diagnostic solutions. The Curium brand name is inspired by the work of radiation researchers Marie and Pierre Curie and emphasizes a focus on nuclear medicine. To learn more, visit curiumpharma.com.

About NNSA

Established by Congress in 2000, NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy responsible for enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science. NNSA maintains and improves the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear explosive testing; works to reduce the global danger from weapons of mass destruction; provides the U.S. Navy with safe and effective nuclear propulsion; and responds to nuclear and radiological emergencies in the U.S. and abroad.

1 HLG-MR; 2016 Medical Isotope Supply Review: 99Mo/99mTc Market Demand and Production Capacity Projection 2016-2021
By detecting growths suspicious for skin cancer and making appropriate referrals to dermatologists early, hair professionals can help to prevent the progression of dangerous skin cancers.

The American Society for Dermatologic Surgery (ASDS), the largest specialty organization representing dermatologic surgeons, will present its Stylists Against Skin Cancer Program at the Professional Beauty Associations 2018 International Salon and Spa Expo (ISSE) on January 27-29 in Long Beach, California. The 2018 ISSE will showcase its largest line-up of class options in the shows 19-year history.

Ramona Behshad, MD, will lead interactive sessions that:

-Teach the warning signs of the most common scalp skin cancers.

-Demonstrate basic ways to look for scalp skin cancer.

-Discuss when and how to refer clients to a dermatologist.

-Educate stylists on how to approach clients about skin abnormalities in a way that promotes positive attitudes towards visiting the doctor with any concerns.

-Discuss effective preventive measures for skin cancers, including patient education resources.

Most hair care professionals do not receive skin cancer education while in cosmetology school, said Dr. Behshad. By detecting growths suspicious for skin cancer and making appropriate referrals to dermatologists early, hair professionals can help to prevent the progression of dangerous skin cancers. With this training, stylists will be able to provide their clients with valuable information that they can then share with a dermatologist and potentially save a life.

The sessions will take place at the Long Beach Convention Center on:

-Saturday, Jan. 27 at 2:45 p.m.

-Sunday, Jan. 28 at 2:45 p.m.

-Monday, Jan. 29 at 9:30 a.m.

Videos, print and electronic educational materials can be found at http://www.asds.net/SHADE.

ISSE lives up to being The Biggest & Best Beauty Expo on the West Coast with 40,000 guests from around North America, over 200 classes offered in areas such as hair, nails, lashes, advocacy and more, and 400 exhibitors showcasing the industrys most popular brands  all this is from the ultra-walkable, beach-side Long Beach Convention Center, located in Long Beach, CA. For those attending, there is no question why ISSE is nationally recognized by Trade Show News Network as one of the industrys leading shows.

Please visit PBAs website at http://www.probeauty.org/isse for more information about the show. For ISSE event pictures, please visit: https://probeauty.smugmug.com/Events/ISSE-Long-Beach

# # #

About American Society for Dermatologic Surgery

American Society for Dermatologic Surgery (ASDS) is the largest specialty organization exclusively representing dermatologic surgeons who have unique training and experience to treat the health, function and beauty of your skin. ASDS members are pioneers in the field. Many are involved in the clinical studies that bring popular treatments to revitalize skin and fill and diminish wrinkles to the forefront. Their work has helped create and enhance many of the devices that remove blemishes, hair and fat, and tighten skin. Dermatologic surgeons also are experts in skin cancer prevention, detection and treatment. As the incidence of skin cancer rises, dermatologic surgeons are committed to taking steps to minimize the life-threatening effects of this disease. For more information, visit http://www.asds.net.

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ASDSSkinMD

Become a Facebook fan: http://facebook.com/ASDSSkinMD

Locate a dermatologic surgeon in your area: http://www.asds.net/FindADermatologist.aspx

About Professional Beauty Association

The Professional Beauty Association is the largest and most inclusive trade organization representing the entire beauty industry. PBA exists to elevate, unify and serve the beauty industry and the professionals that improve peoples lives.

Formed by the merger of the Beauty and Barber Supply Institute (BBSI), American Beauty Association (ABA), The Salon Association (TSA), and the National Cosmetology Association (NCA), the Professional Beauty Association is the only organization to represent the entire beauty industry. PBA members include manufacturers, distributors, salons, spas, schools, independent practitioners, students and industry suppliers.

In addition to advocacy, PBA provides its members with opportunities to save money on events and education, and access to industry research and resources. Committed to the long-term success of the stylist and the businesses that employ and support them, PBA is focused on enhancing the professionalism of the industry and committed to helping members achieve personal and professional excellence.

For more information on membership levels and dues please visit: http://www.probeauty.org/join.

ASDS Media Contact:

Katie Allodi

kallodi(at)asds(dot)net

847-956-9143

PBA/ISSE Media Contact:

Sarah Culbert

press(at)probeauty(dot)org
Cosmetic Town, an online plastic surgery and information community based in Los Angeles, begins the New Year by making it easier for patients looking to have breast surgery in Beverly Hills. They recently published a list of the Best Breast Surgery Doctors in Beverly Hills on their website.

According to the senior editor of Cosmetic Town, Beverly Hills is known for being a hot spot for breast surgery. The interest in traveling to Beverly Hills for breast surgery is a combination of the large number of quality doctors in the area as well as the allure of being treated by the same surgeons that perform plastic surgery on Hollywood celebrities. With so many choices of surgeons in the Beverly Hills area, we knew that patients needed an easy way to help them find the best doctors currently performing breast surgery.

The senior editor went on to say one of the first steps in the plastic surgery process is conducting the research necessary to find the right doctor to help a patient achieve the desired results. While some doctors might have performed breast surgery in the past, they might not have recent experience using the latest techniques and methods. Our list includes Beverly Hills doctors with the proper training and board-certifications that will give patients the peace of mind they need entering the surgery.

When asked how the list was compiled, the senior editor shared the method used to choose the Best Breast Surgery Doctors in Beverly Hills. He said an intelligent algorithm is used to pick the doctors and it also focuses on the field of cosmetic surgery. In addition, our staff performs extensive consumer research on patient satisfaction with the doctors. Plus, we take into account the number of articles the doctors write in their ongoing efforts to educate the public and their peers.

When asked if the doctors on the list have any influence on being chosen, the senior editor stated the doctors have no input in the decision making process. He said Cosmetic Town does not accept any monetary deals for being part of our lists. Our main goal is to spotlight doctors who specialize in superior results and patient satisfaction in Beverly Hills and surrounding cities like Los Angeles and Santa Monica.

About Cosmetic Town

Cosmetic Town is an online cosmetic medicine publication that also features doctors who were endorsed and highly recommended by their peers. This reliable and streamlined database allows users to easily navigate the website and access the information they need with just a click of a button. Users can also stay informed and get the latest news on plastic surgery by reading the regularly updated news section. Visiting the forum page is also another way for users to stay engaged and keep each other up to date.
Motorcar Logo

Over the years, competition within the motor vehicle market has only grown stronger. With the biggest companies now investing hundreds of millions of dollars each and every year, the world is enjoying brand-new features, sleek designs, and even the start of the electric revolution. With this in mind, its always interesting to see which cars and manufacturers are having the most success.

In 2017, the market was more competitive than ever before in the US and the top six best-selling cars makes for interesting readingbut who came out on top on https://www.motorcar.com/ ?

#1: Honda Civic

As a name recognizable around the globe, Honda decided to take their compact model, add some room, improve the power, and adjust the style slightly and, as this result shows, it worked. All year, customers were talking about the slightly futuristic design for the 2016 Honda Civic which suggests that Honda did their research very well.

Despite the many changes to the car, the Honda Civic 2016 kept everything the country has grown to love including its reliability, affordability, and even the fun customers seem to get when driving. Compared to 2016, sales increased slightly and this is a testament to the hard work of the Japanese manufacturer.

#2: Toyota Camry

In the second of this list of famous vehicle names, the Toyota Camry takes the runner-up spot of best-selling cars in 2017. With the new Camry, it only reached dealerships in August but it captured the imagination of buyers around the country. Despite the origins of Toyota and the transition the company has seen through the years, there was no predicting their move into the sporty sedan niche. Essentially, they took tips from Honda and it worked because the model retained all the classic Toyota charm.

#3: Toyota Corolla Sedan

Not only did Toyota claim second place, they rounded off a Japanese top three with the Corolla Sedan. With the theme continuing of famous names, this brand has been one of the most popular in the US for quite some time and third place in this years best-selling list suggests things aren't going to change any time soon.

When looking through the catalog of Corolla models through the years, its the consistency that seems to have garnered the success. No matter what technological changes have come, the Corolla has always had a solid foundation of reliability and good value for money. As customers look at pictures of the new Corolla Sedan model, they see a car that lasts because there have been so many success stories.

#4: Honda Accord

Although outside the top three this year, the Honda Accord still finds a place within the top five; a position Honda is used to now having been somewhat of a stalwart in the midsize sedan market. In Honda and Toyota, the industry has two very similar companies that haven't changed even as the world around them has. Of course, Honda has always gone for the sportier designs and performance thanks to their background in racing but this is one of only a few differences.

With the 2018 Accord, it would surprise nobody to see them in this list again next year because the incoming model has more space, its a safe option for families, its well-equipped (as most models are these days), and it offers a little slice of fun. Despite sticking to their successful formula, they have introduced one special surprise in a six-speed manual transmission and it is touches like this that keep Honda at the top.

#5: Nissan Sentra

When it comes to the Nissan Sentra, its certainly an interesting entrant into this best-selling list. On the whole, sales have improved where most companies have endured a solid decrease but the reviews of the customers haven't all been pleasant. For example, many customers, and even industry experts, have noted the loud engine, cramped interior, and its overwhelming unremarkable nature.

How has it managed to sneak into the top five best-selling cars of the year? Aggressive discounting. As the industry has seen from Nissan for many years, their strategy of offering aggressive discounts means that it becomes easy to buy the latest models for a price well below the sticker suggestion.

#6: Nissan Altima

To cap off this list of best-selling vehicles in the US last year, Nissan makes its second appearance thanks to the Altima. Once again it isn't exactly a favorite for the reviewers out there but it ticks all the right boxes for consumers. As an example, the interior has plenty of room for the driver and all guests while the car is also a good performer for fuel economy.

Just as we saw with the Sentra, solid discounts towards the end of the year enabled the Altima to climb the list but it didn't actually help the brand overall since sales took a tumble. With the basics in place, the Altima clearly showed enough to the public and it made its way into this list.

Summary

Despite having six different cars in this list, there are only three manufacturers and a number of recognizable brands. In 2017, it looks as though the old favorites are still the best and its going to take something special to change this in 2018. Interestingly, all three manufacturers are originally Japanese so this may also suggest something about the tastes of the US consumer right now.

Although no accurate predictions can be made for 2018, its certainly going to be another interesting year for https://www.motorcar.com/
CAMILLA Chooses Centric for Creative Collaboration Centric is capable of smoothly integrating with Adobe Illustrator and Centric PLMs ability to handle sketches, patterns and designs is crucial for our very visual product development process.

Centric Software announces that CAMILLA, leading global fashion and lifestyle brand, has selected Centric Software to provide its Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to fashion, retail, footwear, outdoor, luxury and consumer goods companies to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

CAMILLA was founded in Sydneys Bondi Beach in 2003 by actress Camilla Franks, who got into fashion design by making her own costumes for the stage. Asked numerous times whether her designs were for sale, she set up a one-woman business. CAMILLAs hand-crafted kaftans took off and the brand now creates a range of clothing, accessories and gift items, all featuring CAMILLAs colorful and intricate bohemian prints. Today, CAMILLA employs over 120 people and has a thriving wholesale and e-commerce business. CAMILLA is available in over 55 countries and 500 retailers worldwide and the company has consistently achieved annual sales growth of over 40 percent.

Jane McNally, CEO of CAMILLA explains that design is the center of the brands DNA and that they needed to find ways to streamline the design process to make it easier for teams to collaborate.

Every year, our designers gather inspiration from exotic locations around the world to produce our unique print designs, says McNally. These designs are then applied to multiple products, from womenswear to swimwear to surfboards. We needed a system that could handle the design and product development process smoothly, allowing us to easily apply our intricate prints to multiple canvasses and products in order to improve collaboration between our design, product development, sourcing and merchandising teams.

We had been operating with Excel spreadsheets and email, which meant that information and design files were scattered in different locations, continues McNally, We looked for a PLM system so we could manage and access data from every stage of the product lifecycle, such as sketches, colors, trim materials, inspiration, vendor information and merchandise plans, in one single, up-to-date location.

CAMILLA selected Centric Software to provide its PLM solution after seeing how Centric 8 could support merchandise planning and product development.

As McNally says, We were very impressed by Centrics merchandise planning module, which gives us better visibility into our collections and an improved ability to plan ahead in line with our larger business objectives. Centric is capable of smoothly integrating with Adobe Illustrator and Centric PLMs ability to handle sketches, patterns and designs is crucial for our very visual product development process. We are also planning to integrate PLM with our ERP system down the line and Centric PLM is built in a way that encourages integration with other software solutions.

CAMILLA expects that Centric PLM and the best practices behind it will help streamline their development process, especially in terms of managing design, explains McNally.

We have hundreds of different patterns that need to be managed against hundreds of different products, says McNally. Were eager to start streamlining and weve also been looking for better ways to handle and automate processes as well as reducing human error and the manual workload of transferring data. Were looking forward to getting started with Centric PLM.

Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software, says, We would like to welcome CAMILLA to the Centric family. CAMILLA is a vibrant and exciting company that is growing very quickly and we are very pleased that they have chosen Centric PLM to support their brand development in Australia and beyond.

CAMILLA (http://www.camilla.com)

CAMILLA has captured the imagination of the world with its vibrant and bespoke bohemian lifestyle offering. Camilla Franks is a celebrated Australian designer and artist who launched her namesake brand fourteen years ago. CAMILLAs vision is to awaken the adventurous heart that resides within all of us. Each CAMILLA piece is infused with a story, the destination and adventure of Camillas off the beaten track travels. These unique and quite often, intimate encounters unite to inspire a story or a moment to craft a CAMILLA print collection. Renowned for colourful prints, CAMILLA showcases meticulous placement detail and artisan craftsmanship in womens, mens and kids apparel and accessories as well as home and gifting. Across 20 owned CAMILLA boutiques, 24 David Jones stores and 500 international stockists, the brand is available in 55 countries worldwide.

Centric Software (http://www.centricsoftware.com)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley and offices in trend capitals around the world, Centric Software provides a Digital Transformation Platform for the most prestigious names in fashion, retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor and consumer goods. Centric Visual Innovation Platform (VIP) is a visual, fully digital collection of boards for touch-based devices like iPad, iPhone and large-scale, touch-screen televisions. Centric VIP transforms decision making and automates execution to truly collapse time to market and distance to trend. Centrics flagship product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning, product development, sourcing, business planning, quality, and collection management functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries. Centric SMB packages extended PLM including innovative technology and key industry learnings tailored for small businesses.

Centric Software has received multiple industry awards, including the Frost & Sullivan Global Product Differentiation Excellence Award in Retail, Fashion, and Apparel PLM in 2016 and Frost & Sullivans Global Retail, Fashion, and Apparel PLM Product Differentiation Excellence Award in 2012. Red Herring named Centric to its Top 100 Global list in 2013, 2015 and 2016.

Centric is a registered trademark of Centric Software. All other brands and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

(end)

Media Contacts:

Centric Software

Americas: Jennifer Forsythe, jforsythe(at)centricsoftware.com

Europe: Kristen Salaun Batby, ksalaun-batby(at)centricsoftware.com

Asia: Lily Dong, lily.dong(at)centricsoftware.com
Veterans can meet hiring representatives from more than 40 military-friendly, award winning employers. Registrants can also participate in job matching for potential interviews with hiring companies on the day of the event.

BestCompaniesAZ is hosting its 4th annual Military Career Event in conjunction with Career Connectors and Birdies for the Brave on Wednesday, March 7, 2018, at the North Phoenix Baptist Church Conference Center, 5757 N. Central Ave., Phoenix, AZ, 85012. The Career Expo will be held from 9 AM - Noon where veterans can meet hiring representatives from more than 40 military-friendly, award winning employers. Attendees will also have the opportunity to participate in the hiring event that conducts job matching and potential interviews with hiring companies from 9 am - 3 pm on the day of the event.

The hiring and networking event is open to all military - active, retired, reservists -- as well as their spouses and significant others. Visit MilitaryAZ.org for the registration link, event details, hiring companies, open positions and on-site resources.

"Military men and women are often celebrated for their leadership, team-building, organizational commitment, decision-making skills and advanced technical training skills," says Denise Gredler, founder and CEO of BestCompaniesAZ. "Our goal is to bring together Arizona's best employers and veteran resource groups to actively connect hundreds of qualified veterans with great companies who are hiring."

BestCompaniesAZ's Military Career Event is comprised of businesses, agencies and community partners that support the hiring, training and development of veterans. Veteran committed hiring companies include: Charles Schwab, Direct Energy, GoDaddy, Hyatt Regency Phoenix, Freedom Financial Network, State Farm, USAA, Vanguard, Allstate, NESCO Resource, Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona, Staff Logic and many more. Many have won workplace awards such as Arizona's Most Admired Companies, Top Companies to Work for in Arizona, FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For in America, FORTUNE Most Admired Companies, Military Times Best for Vets Employers, or US Veterans Magazine's Best of the Best.

The hiring event is sponsored by Cisco and the Arizona Roadmap to Veteran Employment, an initiative of the Arizona Department of Veterans' Services and the Arizona Coalition for Military Families, in partnership with the Governor's Office of Youth, Faith and Family and the Arizona Department of Economic Security. Additional event sponsors include Maricopa Community Colleges and Arizona State University.

Arizona veteran committed companies interested in sponsoring and participating in this event may contact Denise Gredler at dgredler(at)bestcompaniesaz(dot)com or call 480-545-5151 by January 31, 2018.

About BestCompaniesAZ - Arizona's Employer Branding Partner

BestCompaniesAZ specializes in helping corporate clients develop, strengthen and market their unique employer brands through a variety of events, awards and communications programs. For more information, visit BestCompaniesAZ.com. Interested sponsors can email military(at)bestcompaniesAZ(dot)com or call 480-545-5151.

About Career Connectors

Career Connectors' mission is to connect professionals in career transition to hiring companies and quality resources. As Arizona's fastest growing job seeker program, the organization hosts no-cost monthly job seeker events in Chandler/Gilbert, Phoenix, Glendale and North Scottsdale. For more information, visit careerconnectors.org, or call 480-442-5806.

About Birdies for the Brave

Birdies for the Brave is a national military outreach initiative proudly supported by the PGA TOUR. Birdies for the Brave was originally created in 2006 by PGA TOUR player Phil Mickelson and his wife, Amy, to support combat-wounded veterans. The PGA TOUR subsequently adopted Birdies for the Brave and expanded it to include a variety of military outreach initiatives, including military appreciation activities during PGA TOUR tournaments and a series Birdies for the Brave fundraising events conducted at the TOUR's TPC clubs nationwide - an effort that has raised millions for military home front groups that are supported by TOUR players, which provide critical programs and services to meet the specialized needs of wounded heroes and military families. For more information, please visit birdiesforthebrave.org or follow them on Facebook.

Media Contacts for BestCompaniesAZ:

Denise Gredler

dgredler(at)bestcompaniesaz(dot)com

480-545-5151 - office
Worldwise Logo with tag line As a trusted innovator in the pet travel and safety segments, PetEgo's products and design expertise further enhances innovation and new technologies within the Worldwise portfolio, creating a comprehensive offering that supports an active lifestyle for pets and people," states Kevin Fick, CEO.

Worldwise, Inc., an industry leader in smart, stylish and environmentally responsible pet product solutions, is proud to announce their latest strategic acquisition of the Chicago, IL, based PetEgo, LLC, makers of innovative and award-winning travel and lifestyle pet products. This exciting acquisition reinforces Worldwises commitment to further invest in the market-leading SHERPA brand, infusing contemporary design into the pet travel and lifestyle categories. The extensive PetEgo product lines are a perfect complement to the SHERPA travel line, scheduled to premier at Global Pet Expo in Orlando, Florida, March 21-23, 2018.

The PetEgo line includes crash-tested carriers, thoughtfully-designed products to protect a cars interior, and patented, innovative solutions for the active outdoor lifestyle, all designed with modern Italian flair. Dedicated to stylish, safe, and functional travel solutions for all pets, PetEgos renowned, award-winning products have the highest quality standards worldwide. These products have caught the attention of auto industry leaders like Mercedes Benz and Subaru, who now internationally distribute PetEgo products under their own brands.

As a trusted innovator in the pet travel and safety segments, the PetEgo product line and their design expertise further enhances innovation and new technologies within the Worldwise portfolio and positions our company to have one of the most comprehensive offering that supports an active lifestyle for both pets and people, said Kevin Fick, Chief Executive Officer of Worldwise, Inc. In addition, PetEgo brings strong relationships with international retailers to propel Worldwises growth outside of the North American market. We are excited to build upon and expand the strong PetEgo following that mirrors our commitment to innovation, design, safety and quality, which are the cornerstones of the Worldwise mission and model.

Emanuele Bianchi of PetEgo will become an integral part of Worldwise's product development efforts and join the Worldwise executive team. He will head up the Travel Design Group under the leadership of Denver-based Managing Director Of Canine Products, Neil Werde.

The fact that PetEgos high quality products caught the attention of the executives at Worldwise, Inc is truly a remarkable achievement for me personally and professionally, said Emanuele Bianchi, founder and lead designer of PetEgo. In my career as an inventor and designer, Ive always had tremendous respect for the innovation in the SHERPA brand and product execution, and have thought many times about the countless opportunities I could achieve merging our strengths. I am thrilled to not only have my products as part of the SHERPA line, but also now have the opportunity to be involved in on-going development and the creation of new innovative products that are both safe and unique, incorporating the design elements Ive been developing for many years.

The acquisition is effective immediately.

For more information on Worldwise, Inc., please visit http://www.worldwise.com. For more information on PetEgo, LLC please visit http://www.petego.com.

About Worldwise, Inc.

Worldwise, Inc. is committed to creating the most innovative and solution-oriented products for pets and pet parents everywhere. Our family of brands - goDog, Petlinks, SHERPA, Hear Doggy!, SmartyKat, TrustyPup, Guaranteed On-Board, and more - all stand for the highest in quality, safety and satisfaction, and incorporate environmentally-responsible materials and processes whenever possible. Our thoughtful, fun and effective products promote the bond between pets and pet parents across diverse categories such as cat toys, cat bedding, cat scratchers, dog toys, dog bedding, travel accessories, and more. For more information, please visit http://www.worldwise.com.

About PetEgo:

PetEgos drive for Relentless Italian Style combined with our innovative and forward thinking solutions for active lifestyle travel with our pets has proven to be a winning combination for pets and pet parents. The results have been an award-winning line of clever design concepts affording the ultimate in comfort, safety and style providing ease of travel by air, car, sea, bicycle, motorcycle and on foot. http://www.petego.com
Katy and Travis McCabe, owners of Greenbean Coffee House Were excited to welcome owners Katy and Travis McCabe and their team to the Crimson Cup community. Helping entrepreneurs put their unique stamp on their own businesses is a big part of our success as a coffee roaster and coffee shop franchise alternative.

Columbus, Ohio Coffee Roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea recently welcomed Greenbean Coffee House to the group of independent coffee shops, cafes and bakeries it supports in 36 states. The shop at 720 6th Ave. in Altoona, Pennsylvania held its grand opening in October.

Were excited to welcome owners Katy and Travis McCabe and their team to the Crimson Cup community, said Greg Ubert, founder and president. Helping entrepreneurs put their unique stamp on their own businesses is a big part of our success as a coffee roaster and coffee shop franchise alternative.

The McCabes learned how to open a coffee shop through Crimson Cups 7 Steps to Success coffee shop franchise alternative program, which is based on Uberts Book, Seven Steps to Success in the Specialty Coffee Industry.

As a coffee roaster and coffee shop franchise alternative, Crimson Cup believes that our company only succeeds when our customers do, Ubert said. As a result, we support coffee shop owners at every step  from scouting a great location and writing a coffee shop business plan to choosing equipment, hiring staff and providing comprehensive training.

To support customers ongoing success, we supply award-winning wholesale coffee beans, coffee shop supplies and marketing support, he added. Our coffee-buying team travels more than 25,000 miles annually to bring back the finest coffee beans available to our customers.

As the owner of two franchise-based cleaning businesses, Katy McCabe was intrigued by Crimson Cups model, which offers all the support of a coffee shop franchise without the associated costs. Tired of paying franchise and royalty fees to others, I absolutely wanted to do my own business this time around, she said. Crimson Cup made it easy, and were off to a great start.

Green Bean Coffee House sold a record 1,545 $1 drink specials during its October 18 grand opening. The opening featured live broadcasts from local news and radio stations, face painters, live music, costumed characters, and a Tumble Bus toddler playground built onto an old school bus.

Imagine yourself in a comfortable nook, surfing the web (Free Wi-Fi), holding a business meeting, hanging out with friends, listening to great music (sometimes LIVE), admiring local art, catching some rays on our patio, participating in open mic night, hearing a poetry reading, going through our drive-thru for a quick cup of joe before or after work and you will understand the draw and excitement of the Greenbean Coffee House, Katy McCabe said.

The new coffee shop serves a full menu of hot, iced and frozen espresso drinks  including mochas, lattes and cappuccinos  as well as iced coffee and tea, cold-brewed coffee, hot chocolate, fruit smoothies and other custom drinks. Its signature drink is the Green Bean Mocha, which melds white chocolate, caramel and steamed milk with an espresso base. Gourmet muffins and other treats round out the menu.

The shops interior features many personal touches of the McCabes, including a piece of decor representing each of their children, and a wall where Travis displays a rotating selection of his comic books.

Through its 7 Steps program, Crimson Cup has helped hundreds of independent coffee shops develop into thriving businesses over the past 26 years. It currently supports shops in 36 states, Guam and internationally in Bangladesh.

About Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea

Columbus, Ohio coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea is Roast magazines 2016 Macro Roaster of the Year. Since 1991, Crimson Cup has roasted sustainably sourced specialty and craft coffee in small batches, which it sells directly to consumers and as wholesale coffee beans. The company also teaches entrepreneurs to run successful coffee houses through its coffee franchise alternative program, which includes a coffee shop business plan. Crimson Cup coffee is available through a community of more than 350 independent coffee houses, grocers, college and universities, restaurants and food service operations across 36 states, Guam and Bangladesh, as well as the companys own Crimson Cup Coffee Houses. To learn more, visit.crimsoncup.com.
Eugenia Foxworth

Haute Residence welcomes acclaimed realtor, Eugenia Foxworth to its invitation-only real estate network. As a Haute Residence partner, Foxworth exclusively represents the high-end real estate market in Upper Manhattan, New York City.

Foxworth is a unique real estate Broker without borders, specializing in exceptional properties in New York City, Riverdale, NY as well as internationally. She has acquired a reputation with both buyers and sellers for her tenacity, knowledge of the market, professionalism and personality. She has an out of the box approach to the industry, which has catapulted her among the best brokers worldwide.

Foxworth is the President and Owner of Foxworth Realty, and Vice President of the Americas for FIABCI-ORG (the International Federation of Real Estate). She is a New York state-licensed Broker, CIPS (Certified International Property Specialist), a member of REBNY (Real Estate Board of New York), NYRS (New York Residential Specialist), NAR (National Association of Realtors), MANAR (Manhattan Association of Realtors), NYSAR (NY State Association of Realtors), and MWBE (Minority & Women-Owned Business Enterprise). She sits on the Executive Board of Directors for FIABCI-USA that is an NGO (non-governmental organization) with the United Nations and is in 65 countries. Foxworth holds the prestigious FIREC designation with NAR, which cements her position as an elite real estate agent. She is also a vice president of the Harlem Tourism Board and sits on the Board of Directors for the New York Womens Chamber of Commerce.

Foxworth earned the Jack Sharp Memorial Membership Award and the Presidents Award of FIABCI-USA during the 64th Annual International Real Estate World Congress Award Ceremony in May 2013. On June 15, 2013, she was honored by Chase Bank and the Women in the Black, and was given the Woman on a Mission Award and New York State Senator Bill Perkins honored her with the Proclamation for Exemplary Service. She received a Medal of Honor (2007-2008) for distinguished service from the U.S. Chapter President of FIABCI. She is currently serving as a Vice President of Networking and Marketing for FIABCI International.

Prior to opening Foxworth Realty, Foxworth earned membership in the 2006 International Diamond Society for her performance, which ranked her in the top 13 percent of all Coldwell Banker sales associates from around the country in 2005. In 2007, she was recruited as an associate broker for Warburg and in the fall of 2008, Foxworth opened Foxworth Realty, Inc. a boutique real estate firm.

Foxworth has lived and travelled extensively throughout the world and now resides in New York.

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
We are grateful to the speakers for their support of our first entrepreneurial summit, said Rod Brown, COO of OnceLogix. Our aim for the panel partnership is to transition the attendees from good to great with a higher chance of achieving success in their respected fields of business.

Monica Lewis, Source Thought CEO and Romina Brown, CEO & Founder of Strategic Solutions International will lead a panel discussion at The Small Business Cookout Summit to be held February 9-10, 2018, at The Hilton Center City of Charlotte.

The seven-figure sandbox panel is a discussion amongst individuals that will demystify the theory behind the difficulties of achieving more than six figures in revenue. The panelists will provide tips that will hack the benchmark of six-figure businesses.

Hosted by the Founders of OnceLogix, The SBC will consist of a two-day experience. Attendees will immerse in knowledge and best practices that will take the individual and their business to the next level.

At the Summit, Brown will discuss will discuss the following topics: The Value of Minding Your Own Business, Pioneering in Niche Service and Strategic Growth.

As business owners, we sometimes get so focused on achieving goals that we may unintentionally neglect the need for continuous professional development, said Brown. Further, as the owner of a niche professional service consultancy, Ive had the opportunity to blaze a path into unknown territory. On this journey, I have embraced and fully utilized my God-given talents and skills to develop a service platform that rivals any multi-national Fortune 100. I am honored to share my experience and to listen and learn at the Small Business Cookout.

Monica Lewis is a sought-after consultant, successful multi-business owner, accomplished mental health professional, and bestselling author who is determined to help others through their journey to obtain joy consciousness.

The Small Business Cookout gives me the opportunity to network with an exclusive group of serious players that are constantly positioning themselves to take their personal lives and businesses to the next level, Monica concluded.

About OnceLogix

OnceLogix, LLC is a nationally recognized award-winning Software Company in Winston-Salem North Carolina. Over the past 10 years, OnceLogix founders have created several successful, profitable businesses that continue to sustain profitability year after year. In 2016, Inc. magazine ranked our Winston-Salem based company 3,719th on its 35th annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nations fastest-growing private companies. The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economys most dynamic segment  its independent small businesses. After learning that less than 1.5% minority-owned companies were on the list, the founders concluded that they wanted to do something to help with this systemic problem creating The Small Business Cookout.

For more information about Romina Brown, please visit http://www.ssiconsults.com.

For more information about Monica Lewis, please visit http://www.powersourcelife.com.

For more information about the Small Business Cookout and to register, please visit the conference website here: http://www.Thesmallbusinesscookout.com.
The words "gas station" may stir up thoughts of oil-stained floors, bathrooms keys attached to a hubcap, or small racks of gum near the cash register, but todays top brands prove that buying gas can be a whole new experience.

GasBuddy, the only smartphone app that connects more than 70 million drivers with their Perfect Pit Stop, today issues its list of the Top 10 Gas Station Brands in the U.S.revealing which gas station convenience store brands made the rankings in 2017.

These are destination brands that directly compete with restaurants, coffee shops, andin some caseseven supermarkets, said Frank Beard, convenience store and retail trends analyst at GasBuddy. Although gas stations are still in the business of selling gas, the leading brands have become so much more. Theyre a refuge for motorists looking for great food, an amazing cup of coffee, or some of the best customer service youll find anywhere.

Top 10 Gas Station Brands in The U.S.

1. Buc-ee's

Leading the pack is Texas-based Buc-ees! With 33 U.S. locations, Buc-ees sweeps the ranking by capturing the highest ratings and reviews in all six GasBuddy categories: coffee, cleanliness, customer service, outdoor lighting, restrooms and overall. Buc-ees has announced plans to expand into Florida in 2019.

2. Kelleys Market

Illinois-based Kelleys Market, with 48 locations in Rockford, IL and Madison, WI, also made a strong showing by placing second in the overall category and second in the five individual categories demonstrating their commitment to all facets of the customer experience.

3. Kwik Trip

Headquartered in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, there are 545 locations throughout Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. Kwik Trip places 3rd overall and in the top 5 for cleanliness (#4), customer service (#4) and restrooms (#4).

4. QuikTrip

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based QuikTrip is operating 740 locations in Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. QuikTrip places in the following categories: overall (4th), cleanliness (5th), customer service (3rd), outdoor lighting (5th) and restrooms (5th).

5. Wawa

With 730 locations throughout the East Coast, this Wawa, Pennsylvania-based company places 5th overall and appears in the individual categories of coffee (3rd) and outdoor lighting (3rd).

6. Hy-Vee

With 141 locations, Iowa-based Hy-Vee continues to hit the mark with GasBuddy customers by ranking in all six rating categories.

7. QuickChek

Headquartered in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, QuickChek has 154 locations throughout New Jersey and New York and ranks #7 overall.

8. Sheetz

Ranking #8 overall is Sheetz, a family-owned convenience store chain based in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Sheetz has 565 store locations throughout Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio and North Carolina.

9. Parkers

Parkers is based in Savannah, Georgia, with 46 stores throughout Georgia and South Carolina. They appear 9th overall when it comes to customer ratings.

10. NOCO Express

Rounding out the top 10 is NOCO Express. They have 37 gas stations and convenience stores in Western New York and are headquartered in Tonawanda, NY.

GasBuddys data science team compiled the findings by examining the customer ratings and reviews data between January 1  December 31, 2017, only considering convenience stores with more than 30 retail locations in the United States. Previous quarterly rankings can be viewed here: Q1, Q2 and Q3.

About GasBuddy

GasBuddy is a smartphone app connecting drivers with their Perfect Pit Stop. With 70 million downloads, GasBuddy is the leader in crowdsourced information to help drivers find the best gas prices, closest stations, friendliest service, cleanest restrooms, tastiest coffee and much more. GasBuddy is the leading source for the most accurate, real-time fuel prices at more than 140,000 gas stations in the U.S., Canada and Australia. The Companys B2B Retailer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), known as GasBuddy Business Pages, provide Fuel Marketers and Retailers their best opportunity to maintain their station information, manage their brand, and promote to their target consumer audience. For more information, visit http://www.gasbuddy.com or email press(at)gasbuddy.com.
We will be serving our primary mission of providing employment supports to people with disabilities while at the same time, offering affordable office space to local small businesses  and engaging those businesses in our mission.

Community Options Enterprises, the business enterprise division of national non-profit Community Options, Inc. is planning to open its fifth Daily Plan It this Spring in Charleston, SC. The enterprise is expected to employ between 10 and 15 individuals with disabilities.

The Daily Plan It is a complete office, conference and copy center that offers furnished office rental space or virtual tenancy to a variety of businesses. Some of the services provided to the tenants include professional receptionist services, clerical support, and high-speed color copying. Located at 29 Leinbach Drive in Charleston, the 7,200 square-foot space will support 10 office rentals as well as provide the Community Options, Inc Charleston staff with administration offices. There will be two separate entrances; one for the office-space tenants and supported employment program, and one for the administrative offices of Community Options  Charleston.

We are thrilled that we will be able to provide these services to our community, said Dorothy Goodwin, Community Options South Carolina State Director. We will be serving our primary mission of providing employment supports to people with disabilities while at the same time, offering affordable office space to local small businesses  and engaging those businesses in our mission.

This location will join the four existing Daily Plan It locations in New Jersey, expanding a proven program for developing workplace skills for people with developmental disabilities. Our primary goal has always been to bring people with disabilities into the workforce within the local community, exposing both the individual who is learning workplace skills and members of the business community to one another, Robert Stack, CEO of Community Options, Inc. states. Its beneficial for everyone involved  it allows for real-world experience and fostering empathy, and eventually, creation of advancement opportunities for people with disabilities.

Rekha Rao, Esq. of Rao Legal Group, LLC has been a tenant at one of the New Jersey Daily Plan It locations for nearly two years. She says, This office space was intentionally chosen because the Daily Plan It is actually a subsidiary of Community Options Enterprises, Inc., a non-profit organization. All of the revenues generated from office space rentals go right back into the organization, whose mission is to develop housing and employment opportunities for people with disabilities. As an attorney who does special needs planning and guardianships, this mission is near and dear to my heart.

For more information about the Charleston location or to inquire about available office space, please contact Dorothy Goodwin at 803-576-0111.

About Community Options, Inc.:

For 28 years, Community Options has developed housing and employment programs for people with disabilities  serving thousands of people through over 40 offices across 11 states. Community Options provides advocacy assistance to empower people with disabilities because all people  regardless of ability level  should live and work in the community with dignity, choice and self-determination. For more information please visit our website: http://www.comop.org and to follow along with the ComOpCares campaign, search #ComOpCares on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
At Novant Health, we are always looking for ways to make health care simpler and more convenient for our patients, said Dave Garrett, senior vice president and chief information officer, Novant Health.

Novant Health patients can now use Amazons electronic personal assistant, Alexa, to find the nearest physician clinic, urgent care or medical center.

Users will have an opportunity to ask Alexa to find local Novant Health locations and get details like wait times and office hours. Alexa can also outline services provided at varying locations, including walk-in appointments, flu shots and X-rays.

At Novant Health, we are always looking for ways to make health care simpler and more convenient for our patients, said Dave Garrett, senior vice president and chief information officer, Novant Health. Technology is changing the way we view the world and interact with one another. We have continued to invest in emerging technology for our patients and Amazon Alexa is another example of that.

Users will need to enable the Novant Health skill on Alexa. From there, patients can say Alexa, ask Novant Health for nearby care locations, which can be filtered by:



ZIP code, city and mileage

Location type (urgent care, medical center, primary care clinic, specialty care clinic or pharmacy)

Name of clinic or hospital location

For more information, visit NovantHealth.org/Alexa.

About Novant Health

Novant Health is an integrated network of physician clinics, outpatient facilities and hospitals that delivers a seamless and convenient healthcare experience to communities in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. Named in 2016 by Beckers Hospital Review as one of the nations 150 best places to work in healthcare, Novant Health network consists of more than 1,500 physicians and over 26,000 employees that provide care at over 470 locations, including 14 medical centers and hundreds of outpatient facilities and physician clinics. Headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the health system serves more than 4.4 million patients annually and in 2016 provided more than $725.5 million in community benefit, including financial assistance and services. Diversity MBA has recognized the organization as one of the 50 best places for women and managers of diverse background to work and SK&A ranks Novant Health among the top 25 integrated health systems in the nation. In 2017, the magazine Hospitals & Health Networks also recognized Novant Health as one of the countrys Most Wired Hospitals. Novant Health provides care in Virginia under the joint operating company, Novant Health UVA Health System.

For more information, please visit our website at NovantHealth.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

###
As demand for home care and the desire to age in place increases, theres never been a better time for ownership opportunities, said Larry Kraska, Interim HealthCare Inc. CEO and President.

Interim HealthCare Inc. recently ranked in Entrepreneur Magazines Franchise 500, the worlds first, best and most comprehensive franchise ranking. Placement in the Franchise 500 is a highly sought-after honor in the franchise industry, as evidenced by the fact that Entrepreneur received more than 1,000 applications this year, making it one of the companys most competitive rankings ever. Recognized as an invaluable resource for potential franchisees, the Franchise 500 ranks Interim HealthCare as No. 102 in outstanding performance in areas including unit growth, financial strength and stability, and brand power.

Demand for home care services continues to rise as growing numbers of seniors nationwide are living longer, said Larry Kraska, Interim HealthCare Inc. CEO and President. In fact, according to The Atlantic, the healthcare industry surpassed manufacturing and retail for the first time in history to become the nation's largest employer. This recognition as a top franchise would not be possible without our dedicated franchisees across the country providing extraordinary levels of care. As demand for home care and the desire to age in place increases, theres never been a better time for ownership opportunities.

"This years Franchise 500 ranking features both up-and-comers who bring fresh ideas to an ever-changing industry, as well as savvy stalwarts that have thrived for decades. We are proud to highlight and celebrate them all, says Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur. Our results show that the industry is strongand that the most enduring franchisors are those who learn to balance innovation with reliability. Thats how to attract new customers while keeping the old ones happy.

The key factors that go into Entrepreneurs evaluation include costs and fees, size and growth, support, brand strength, and financial strength and stability. All franchises are given a cumulative score based on more than 150 data points, and the 500 franchises with the highest cumulative scores become the Franchise 500 in ranking order.

Over its 39 years in existence, the Franchise 500 has become both a dominant competitive measure for franchisors and a primary research tool for potential franchisees. Interim HealthCares position on the ranking is a testament to its strength as a franchise opportunity.

Interim HealthCare offers extensive training and innovative marketing programs for all franchisees through one of the most experienced franchise support teams in the industry. Its legendary brand has been built on 50 years of home care, hospice and staffing expertise. A deep understanding of todays regulatory environment and complexities of building franchise operations, such as marketing, sales, finance, training and human resources, continues to drive business success for franchise owners.

For more details about the companys franchisee opportunities, visit http://www.interimfranchising.com.

To view Interim HealthCare in the full ranking, visit http://www.entrepreneur.com/franchise500. Results can also be seen in the January/February issue of Entrepreneur, available on newsstands January 16th.

About Interim HealthCare

Interim HealthCare Inc., founded in 1966, is a leading national franchisor of home care, hospice and healthcare staffing. It is part of Caring Brands International which also includes UK-based Bluebird Care and Australia-based Just Better Care, both well-known franchise brands in their countries. With more than 530 franchise locations in seven countries Caring Brands International is a global health care leader.

Interim HealthCare in the United States is unique in combining the commitment of local ownership with the support of a national organization that develops innovative programs and quality standards that improve the delivery of service. Franchisees employ nurses, therapists, aides, companions and other healthcare professionals who provide 25 million hours of home care service to 190,000 people each year, meeting a variety of home health, senior care, hospice, palliative care, pediatric care and healthcare staffing needs. For more information or to locate an Interim HealthCare office, visit http://www.interimhealthcare.com.

###
The United Nations Foundation today announced that Rajesh Mirchandani has been named the Foundations new Chief Communications Officer to lead the Foundations strategic communications work supporting the United Nations and UN causes. Mirchandani brings to the Foundation a wealth of experience communicating international issues to global audiences as an experienced BBC News journalist and broadcaster and, most recently, as Vice President of Communications and Policy Outreach at the Center for Global Development, a leading voice in innovative and critical thinking about international development.

Rajesh Mirchandani is taking the communications helm at the UN Foundation at a pivotal time in world affairs when making the case for the United Nations, global engagement, and collaborative solutions is more vital than ever, said Kathy Calvin, President and Chief Executive Officer of the UN Foundation. Rajesh is a strategic and creative communicator who will help us engage global audiences in even more powerful and innovative ways at a time when communications tools and technologies are changing by the minute and audiences are hungry for smart and purposeful content.

Mirchandani has over 20 years of global journalism experience with the British Broadcasting Corporation, including five years based in the U.S. He has covered a wide variety of stories and issues, from two U.S. presidential elections to the Haiti earthquake, global health security in the Horn of Africa to green energy investments in California. More recently, Mirchandani has helped the Center for Global Development navigate a redrawn political map, bringing the substance and relevance of the Centers pioneering economics research to wider audiences. On a wide range of issues, he has helped bring hard evidence to heated political debates at a time when power and influence in the world are shifting, attention spans are shrinking, and the traditional consensus around international cooperation is fraying.

For me the UN Foundation has always played a unique and powerful role, said Mirchandani. It connects individual action to global progress through phenomenal campaigns and alliances, as well as through mobilizing expertise to help advance UN priorities. At this critical time for human progress, I am excited to join the great team at the UN Foundation and its wider network of friends and influencers to support the UN and UN causes.

In 2012, Mirchandani was awarded a graduate degree in public diplomacy from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Over the years, he has been a frequent collaborator of the UN as a moderator and commentator.

Mirchandani will join the UN Foundation in February and will be based in the Foundations Washington, D.C. office. He will lead a team of skilled communicators working to advance progress on important global issues.

###

About the United Nations Foundation

The United Nations Foundation builds public-private partnerships to address the worlds most pressing problems, and broadens support for the United Nations through advocacy and public outreach. Through innovative campaigns and initiatives, the Foundation connects people, ideas, and resources to help the UN solve global problems. The Foundation was created in 1998 as a U.S. public charity by entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner and now is supported by philanthropic, corporate, government, and individual donors. Learn more at: http://www.unfoundation.org.
2018 IoT Breakthrough Awards

IoT Breakthrough, an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Internet-of-Things (IoT) market, today announced that American Tower, a global leader in wireless infrastructure, and Philips Lighting, the world leader in lighting products, systems and services, have been selected as winners of the 2018 Overall Smart City Solution Provider of the Year and Industrial Smart Lighting Solution of the Year awards respectively.

American Tower and Philips Lighting were recognized for their innovative efforts to co-develop an aesthetically designed smart light pole that blends seamlessly into the urban landscape, delivering both 4G/5G wireless network capacity for multiple mobile network operators and quality energy-efficient LED lighting in a single solution. The new smart city solution will enable new applications, including E911, smart parking, traffic management and more.

The award nominations for the Smart City award category were full of impressive products and technologies that we are confident will improve the lives of citizens and businesses around the world as the solutions are rolled out, said James Johnson, Managing Director, IoT Breakthrough. The smart light pole solution from American Tower and Philips Lighting stood out from the field of award nominees for delivering a practical solution with maximum positive impact in a range of smart city applications for cities around the world. We are thrilled to recognize American Tower and Philips Lighting as 2018 IoT Breakthrough Award winners.

The mission of the IoT Breakthrough Awards program is to recognize the innovators, leaders and visionaries from around the globe in a range of IoT categories, including Industrial and Enterprise IoT, Smart City technology, Connected Home and Home Automation, Connected Car, and many more. This years program attracted more than 3,000 nominations from companies all over the world. All nominations were reviewed and evaluated by an independent panel of experts within the IoT industry, with the highest scored nomination selected as winner for each category.

With industry analysts predicting that street lights will prove to be an important communications infrastructure opportunity for smart cities, we are confident that American Tower is well positioned to contribute significantly to the rollout of that connectivity, said Steven Marshall, President of U.S. Tower, a division of American Tower Corporation. We are excited to be recognized, along with our alliance partner, Philips Lighting, with this prestigious industry recognition from the IoT Breakthrough Awards organization.

Lighting is an essential and ubiquitous part of the urban landscape, and a powerful tool to help cities achieve their smart ambitions, said Susanne Seitinger, global smart cities lead at Philips Lighting. The IoT Breakthrough awards further validate how our collaboration with American Tower can enable, and really drive, smart city capabilities that improve safety, livability and sustainability.

For further information, please contact:

American Tower

Matthew Peterson

matthew.peterson(at)americantower(dot)com

617-585-7723

Philips Lighting

Matt Marcus

matt.marcus(at)philips(dot)com

+ 1 551-227-6790

About IoT Breakthrough

IoT Breakthrough, part of the Tech Breakthrough Awards organization, is devoted to honoring excellence in Internet-of-Things technologies, services, companies and products. The IoT Breakthrough Awards program provides a forum for public recognition around the achievements of IoT companies and products in categories including Connected Home and Home Automation, Connected Car, Industrial IoT (IIoT) and Smart City, Consumer IoT and more. For more information visit http://www.IoTBreakthrough.com.

About American Tower

American Tower, one of the largest global REITs, is a leading independent owner, operator and developer of multitenant communications real estate with a portfolio of approximately 149,000 communications sites. For more information about American Tower, please visit http://www.americantower.com.

About Philips Lighting

Philips Lighting (Euronext: LIGHT), the world leader in lighting products, systems and services, delivers innovations that unlock business value, providing rich user experiences that help improve lives. Serving professional and consumer markets, we lead the industry in leveraging the Internet of Things to transform homes, buildings and urban spaces. With 2016 sales of EUR 7.1 billion, we have approximately 34,000 employees in over 70 countries. News from Philips Lighting is located at the Newsroom, Twitter and LinkedIn. Information for investors can be found on the Investor Relations page.
Ferrari is throwing down the gauntlet and challenging Tesla by jumping into the electric car space.

CEO Sergio Marchionne said on Tuesday at the Detroit auto show that the automaker plans to build an electric supercar, according to a Bloomberg report. Marchionne also said that the company plans to launch its first SUV by late 2019 or early 2020 and that the vehicle will be the fastest SUV on the market, according to the report.

"If there is an electric supercar to be built then Ferrari will be the first," Marchionne said.

Ferrari pushing into electric cars isn't a complete surprise. Marchionne said in 2016 that all Ferraris would have some hybrid technology by 2019 and he said during an earnings call last May that the company was moving towards electrification.

"I think that there is now a view inside the house that electrification is a core skill that needs to be mastered and needs to be part of the offering of the combustion engine world," Marchionne said.

Ferrari isn't the only automaker investing in battery-powered cars, though.

According to a Reuters analysis, global carmakers have invested some $90 billion in electric vehicles. So once the automaker's first electric car hits the market, it will likely have some stiff competition.
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LONDON  EU Council President Donald Tusk has told Britain that Brexit can be stopped.

Speaking to MEPs in Strasbourg on Tuesday morning, Tusk said Britain's departure from the European Union can be cancelled if "there is a change of heart" among British people.

"If the UK Government sticks to its decision to leave, Brexit will become a reality  with all its negative consequences  in March next year unless there is a change of heart among our British friends," he said.

"Wasn't it David Davis himself who said 'if a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy'?"

He later posted this tweet:

Unless there is a change of... @ Donald Tusk

Fresh talk of a second referendum was ignited last week when former UKIP leader Nigel Farage said he was "changing his mind" on a second referendum as it could be a means of stopping the "whinging" of Remainers.

Theresa May's government has repeatedly insisted that there will not be a second referendum.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson played down the chances of a second vote in an interview with The Guardian this week.

"Weve just had one, and I think it went pretty well but it was something that caused an awful lot of heartache and soul-searching, and everybody went through the wringer on it," he said.

The Labour Party leadership is yet to completely rule out a second referendum on Britain's EU membership.

On Sunday, Jeremy Corbyn told ITV political editor Robert Peston that the party is "not supporting or calling for a second referendum" but refused to rule out backing one in the future, should public opinion shift significantly.

"Im not convinced that the public is absolutely gagging for another Brexit referendum," Corbyn said.

May under pressure to reveal Article 50 legal advice

The UK government is under pressure to publish legal advice it has received on whether Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty  the official mechanism for leaving the EU  can be reversed.

Lord Kerr, the author of Article 50, has said that it can be revoked. Numerous European figures, including French President Emmanuel Macron, have also hinted that the process could be reversed.

Ian Murray, Labour MP and supporter of anti-hard Brexit group Open Britain, today said Tusk's comments have put more pressure on Theresa May to publish legal advice the government has received regarding Article 50.

"Until we've actually left, Brexit is a reversible process, that much is clear. If people decide that Brexit isn't the right path for the country, they have the right to change their minds.
Bush was right that a war on an abstract noun like "terror" would take awhile.

It began in October 2001 with the US' invasion of Afghanistan. And although former President Barack Obama officially ended "The Global War on Terror" in 2013, the fight against terrorism continues nearly 17 years later.

In fact, it has spread.

Between October 2015 and October 2017, the US fought terror in 76 countries, or 39% of the total number of countries in the world, according to data recently published by Brown University's Costs of War Project.

The graphic shows where the US military had troops and bases, where it trained other forces in counterterrorism and where it conducted drone and air strikes.
Authorities have revealed that Blaze Bernstein, the 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania sophomore who was found dead in California last week, had been stabbed more than 20 times, according to an Orange County Register report Monday night.

The Register added that Bernstein's killing is being investigated as an act of rage.

Police with the Orange County Sheriff's Department arrested 20-year-old Samuel Woodward, Bernstein's former classmate from high school, on suspicion of homicide on Friday, after DNA evidence linked him to Bernstein's death. No murder weapon has been found, the Register reported.

Bernstein was visiting family in his hometown of Lake Forest before the start of the spring semester at UPenn. He was reported missing more than a week before police found his body in Borrego Park.

According to police, Bernstein had previously texted friends that Woodward was about to "hit on me" and that "he made me promise not to tell anyone." Police said on the night of Bernstein's death, the two former classmates drove to multiple locations before arriving at the park. At one point in the evening, Bernstein tried to kiss Woodward, who pushed him away.

Authorities later confirmed that blood found on a sleeping bag in Woodward's rental car was Bernstein's. He had become the primary suspect in the teen's death because of inconsistencies in his story  for example, he said he dropped Bernstein off at the park to meet with his girlfriend, but couldn't remember her name or where she lived. When questioned about scratches on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, he said he had been participating in a "fight club."

Bernstein's death rocked the small town of Lake Forest, which according to CBS News, hadn't seen a homicide in at least four years. Meanwhile, his death is the latest tragedy for UPenn, which has lost nine students and faculty members since the start of 2017.
The selfies are seemingly parallel in nature to the artwork.

You probably know what I'm talking about. These things:

As it turns out, all those photos are from a Google app that's over a year old. It's called the Google Arts & Culture app, and it's free on Google Play and the Apple App Store.

But the ability to compare your face to famous works of art is a new feature. And it's one that's clearly caught on. You may be wondering how to use it, and I'm here to help with that.

The first thing you have to do is download the app.

In case you missed them above, here are the direct links:

The Google Arts & Culture app works on a variety of iPhone and Android phone, as well as other iOS and Android devices. It's free, and easy to find through search on Google Play and Apple's App Store.

Next, after downloading and installing the app, all you have to do is find the section dedicated to taking selfies and comparing them with famous artworks.

It's as simple as scrolling down until you see the "Is your portrait in a museum?" box.

When I first opened the app, I didn't really know what to do or where to go. Since the Google Arts & Culture app isn't dedicated solely to comparing selfies with art, there's a bunch of other stuff to sift through to get to the new function.

I opened the menu on the left, which is full of stuff but doesn't have a "take selfie" option. I closed the menu, and returned to the main "feed" of the app  a scrollable main content area laid out vertically. After scrolling past a few different featured stories, the white box surrounded by portraits appeared. Aha!

To note: While people in other countries can download the Google Arts & Culture app, this feature is exclusive to the US for now.

After tapping "Get Started," Google warned me that it would send my selfies to Google.

As you can see here, though Google receives any selfies you take through the app, the company promises it's only holding onto the image for a limited time  the duration of the time the app takes to match your face with a portrait.

After that brief warning, you're able to get started. And so I began!

Since I'm an adult and a professional, I make really adult, professional faces when I'm taking selfies.

As you can see here, the main interface of the Google Arts & Culture selfie comparison tool is a selfie camera. You line up your face inside the boxed area and snap a photo. Easy!

It then analyzes your face:

You can tell the app is analyzing your face because of the various colored lines animating all over the screen, and because it's gone black and white.

In all seriousness, the processing time is minimal and there's a hilarious moment of suspense as you wait for the app to tell you which art work your face most closely resembles. Perhaps I'd be compared to a self-portrait by Van Gogh! Or maybe a royal guard in the background of a glorious Goya painting.

And here's what I got:

Sure!

As you may have already noticed, the app doesn't just identify portraits that you resemble, but it also identifies how much you resemble them. There's a percentage with each comparison.

Results vary pretty wildly  here's Business Insider's own Tony Villas-Boas comparing his post-CES malaise with that of Charles I:

Celebrities are getting in on the fun as well. Here's "Silicon Valley" and "The Big Sick" star Kumail Nanjiani, for instance:

Hey this one ain#emo#t so bad. ... @ Kumail Nanjiani

Twitter's own CEO Jack Dorsey gave it a shot over the long weekend:

#emo# <a href="https://t.co/Sx... @ jack

Google says the app's feature is available in "parts of the US" so far and, given the popularity, it seems very likely to go wider than that.
Joining the likes of Sarkodie, Akoxs tracks, including memorable tunes like "Gyae Roff" and "Sorry", are putting Ghana on the map.

The pioneer of Australian Afrobeats is back with another track "Love Me", thats sure to turn up the heat.

With the marked growth in the embrace and celebration of Afro culture in Australia shown through sellout events like Afrobeats, Soul of Sydney and Reggae Carnival, this Ghanaian/Australian artiste is passionate about highlighting the vibrant musical culture from the Motherland.

And hes done just that with his latest track produced by long-time collaborator, Miracle. Love Me is a collation of the things we all wish wed said to the One that got away.

With a beat thatll have you on the dance floor in a matter of seconds.

With support around him from his management (Claude Essuman) and a stellar team of collaborating artistes, fans wouldnt be surprised to see another AAMMA Award nomination in the near future.
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He said the practice of homosexuals is at variance with the countrys norms, culture and values.

It appears his comment has given the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community some sort of confidence to come forward and make their presence felt.

In the heart of Madina, one of the most populated and muslim dominated community in Ghana, a transgender has come out publicly. She goes by Madina Broni.

Madina Broni, according to reports is 26year old and a fashion designer, make up artist and professional beautician.

Her name was prince, she stayed in Madina most of her life and on August 26, 2015 she took a decision that she won't be a man again.

She hopes to become a fashion, make up celebrity in Ghana.

She said she had transitioned from male to female and underwent her surgery in Spain.

She noted: her family and friends are supportive of her adding that she runs her own business as a stylist.

READ ALSO: Peace Council urges Ghanaians to love homosexuals

The transgender who recently spoke to the media said most people dont know she's transgender but think she's a woman.

"People always used to call me broni, maame, shake botos, and all kind of names when i was growing up. I knew then that i would feel better identifying as a woman than a man so in 2015 i went to spain and payed about 60,000 dollars to get do a surgery to become a complete woman.

"I love being a woman... who would want to be a man? Chaii'," she said.
Though details of the suspect have not yet been made public, Africafeeds.com reported that the Kenyan state prosecutors produced the remains of the said goats in court as evidence against the 35-year-old man.

Per the laws of the East African country, anyone found guilty of bestiality could be sentenced to a jailed term of up to 14 years.

However, the suspect has been granted a $1,000 bail so that he would be taken to the hospital for examination.

This follows his claimto that he had been assaulted by the police officers who arrested him.

The trial proceedings will reportedly resume on January 29.
However, he took undue advantage and had carnal knowledge of her against her will after removing her from cells to do some cleaning within the station, cell authorities told local media.

According to africafeeds.com, the said police officer was detained in the same OCS Joshua Nyasimu Gatundu cells, while the victim was taken to the hospital for examination.

It is not yet clear what was the basis of the girls detention in the first place.
Speaking on Kessben TV, Kusi Boafo alleged that the former president and his Chief of Staff sold over 376 state vehicles to themselves at cheap prices.

I was even charitable with the information given earlier. In 2016 they sold as many as 129 cars that were manufactured in 2015. Its very sad that cars which were procured by the former administration were sold back to suppliers at a ridiculously low price, some within just 14 days intervals of buying. Some were very special vehicles with high specs from Dubai but were auctioned cheaply in six months. Julius Debrah made reference to a long-standing policy under which salon cars aged two years and above are permitted to be bought by departing government officials. Im confused here, let me ask is V8 vehicles saloon cars?

For me, as an auditor, a professional Accountant with over 19 years experience on the job, youll expect that Ill raise pertinent questions on such clandestine deals that cars that were procured at such huge prices will be sold within a period of 6 months, he added.

The issue of state-owned vehicles sold by the former the government has been in the news for some time now.

READ ALSO: EOCO storms EC office to oust embattled Deputy EC Chair

However, the former Chief of Staff, Julius Debrah has indicated that the accusation by the governing NPP is false.

He indicated in a press statement that the allegation was false and malicious.
In an interview with Accra-based Joy FM, Sheik Barry said they do not understand the flushing out exercise in the 2 regions.

READ ALSO: Fulani herdsmen justify shooting of soldiers

The way things are going, its unconstitutional in the first place. It is also a clear flouting of the international convention, clear flouting of the regional protocols for the free movement of personsso, unless there is some other explanation or interpretation given to those conventions and agreements and protocols, then we cant understand [this exercise].

Some 200 joint police and military personnel have been deployed to Asante Akyem North and Sekyere Afram Plains districts following recent attacks on residents and security personnel in the area by Fulani herdsmen.
The CDS was speaking to the chiefs of Agogo when he visited the area on a fact-finding mission.

He told them an attack on the soldiers was an attack on the state which will not be left to go without a response.

If anybody dare attack them, then they have defied the authority of government, and, as I said, such attacks cannot go without response and this response will be proportionate. It will be graduated; depending on the level of attack, we will up our game. It will address the core problems of the Traditional Area.

In response to that we decided under the authority of the Commander-in-Chief to send in reinforcements to send a clear message to those involved in this dastardly act that they cannot continue to act with impunity in the state of Ghana, he added.

A joint police and military team has been deployed to Agogo, the epicentre of violent clashes between nomadic Fulani herdsmen and the locals, to restore law and order.

The troops have been given the mandate to push back the herdsmen from new areas they have occupied, arrest perpetrators of recent acts of violence for prosecution and augment the efforts of Operation Cowleg, an ongoing security operation aimed at dealing with the operations of the herdsmen in the area.
He said the attack came after Abronye had refused to apologize to a Chief Imam after raining insult on him, during a radio discussion.

In a statement, the Minister said "Information filtering in has it that Abronye was attacked for insulting the regional Chief Imam on radio and failing to apologize after several appeals. It had nothing to do with me or anything related to me."

Background to the attack

READ MORE: Abronye DC hospitalised after beaten by irate NPP youth

He was immediately rushed to hospital for treatment by some good Samaritans who came to his rescue.

His vehicle was also vandalised and he is currently receiving treatment at the hospital.

He was transferred to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, Ashanti Region, for further treatment due to the fractured arm.

Brong Ahafo regional Minister reacts

Kwaku Asomah-Cheremeh has accused the muslim community of orchestrating a life threatening brutality on Abronye DC.

He said Abronye received a call from a muslim friend called Jafaru, threatening to deal with him if he [Abronye DC] ever steps foot in Atebubu.

He added: "Let me address one more misconception. I have my security detail and Jafaru is not one of them. I am in Sunyani and he is in Atebubu. That makes the point that he is part of my boys moot."

"Moreover, it is true that I acted as his lawyer and got him out when he was arrested sometime ago. It can be recalled that the NDC confiscated an outboard motor belonging to the NPP prior to the 2012 elections. This happened on the Krachi water near Kajeji in the Brong Ahafo Region. The security personnel at the time would not act upon our complaint to them after six months. Jafaru and a few others were later arrested and charged for confiscating some outboard motors which belonged to the NDC. They were quickly arrested and arraigned before court, and as a lawyer and the regional chairman of the NPP then, I had to defend them and successfully got them out eventually else they would have been remanded and imprisoned," he added.

Read below the Minister's full statement:

ATTACK ON ABRONYE AND MATTERS ARISING

The past weekend was marked by an event which nearly marred the peaceful atmosphere being enjoyed in the region.

My younger brother, Kwame Baffoe, as reported on some airwaves, had been at the mercy of some thugs when he visited would-be delegates in the Atebubu-Amantin constituency in his bid to vie for the First Vice Chairmanship position of the party in the Brong Ahafo Region.

While I was frantically trying to get in touch with the regional police command in an effort to arrest and deal with the perpetrators of that alleged assault on Abronye, much to my surprise, I heard that I was the one who had instigated and masterminded the alleged attacks on my brother.

I initially dismissed it since it wasn't coming from Abronye himself but someone who claimed to be his aide. I waited, expectantly, for Abronye DC to clear the air.

I was to be disappointed when Abronye DC granted an interview in which he categorically stated that I had ordered for him to be brutalized because the alleged leader of the gang Jafaru Yakubu is my 'boy' and that I once got him out of prison as a lawyer. Needless for me to bombard you with the other allegations made against me as a result of that incident.

Let us look at this simple logic. Assuming without admitting that I would want Abronye to be taught a lesson, why would I employ the services of my 'boys' knowing very well that I would be the prime suspect? If, I wanted something bad done to Abronye DC, I would not have hired 'thugs' always seen with me to perpetrate such an act. I would be the first person to be accused if I do that. Let me state emphatically that I have no intention to ever hurt Abronye in any shape or form. This is democracy, and as a lawyer, I fully understand its tenets and would not use such a crude methodology to bulldoze my way through.

In any event, the allegations which informed Abronye to bastardize me in public have been responded to, and in due course, the outcome will be made known to the general public.

Is it not strange that someone like Abronye would receive a call from Jafaru, threatening to deal with him if he ever steps foot in Atebubu, and he failed to record and lodge complaint to the police? One is tempted to believe that Abronye's continued efforts to denigrate me informed him to steal that incredible line into the equation.

Let me address one more misconception. I have my security detail and Jafaru is not one of them. I am in Sunyani and he is in Atebubu. That makes the point that he is part of my boys moot.

Moreover, it is true that I acted as his lawyer and got him out when he was arrested sometime ago. It can be recalled that the NDC confiscated an outboard motor belonging to the NPP prior to the 2012 elections. This happened on the Krachi water near Kajeji in the Brong Ahafo Region. The security personnel at the time would not act upon our complaint to them after six months. Jafaru and a few others were later arrested and charged for confiscating some outboard motors which belonged to the NDC. They were quickly arrested and arraigned before court, and as a lawyer and the regional chairman of the NPP then, I had to defend them and successfully got them out eventually else they would have been remanded and imprisoned.

It is instructive to note that the regional youth organizer of the NPP, Abronye, was also involved in some issues on three different occasions that I got him out as regional chairman, pro-bono. Per the logic he is advancing, then those cases I defended him over and got him out make him my boy too!

What is the fact is that since 2010, as regional chairman of the NPP, I have toured almost every constituency representing party members in courts, defending them, getting them out of trouble. I have done this for so many party members in the region without charging for services rendered. This renders Abronye's claim that because I defended Jafaru, it makes him my boy automatically quite strange.

Information filtering in has it that Abronye was attacked for insulting the regional Chief Imam on radio and failing to apologize after several appeals. It had nothing to do with me or anything related to me.

Let me not mince words. I have no hand in whatever happened to the young man. It would be foolhardy on my part to hire thugs to go after him knowing very well that I would be the one to be suspected. Please, I am appealing to Abronye and all those helping him to assassinate my character, I need peace of mind to effectively carry out the work of the government. The security persons are dealing with what happened to Abronye, and my interest is to ensure that the law enforcement agencies expedite action on the issue.

Though disturbing, I am not perturbed by such false allegations against my person and the work I do.

I wish my brother Abronye a speedy recovery. Thank you.
Speaking to Joy News, Mr Bagbin said he believes delegates will choose him to lead the NDC in 2020 and not Mahama or the other contenders.

We are now going to go out there with our messages and we will give the good people of our party as to which personality and which message they prefer and I believe that by the end of the day, I dont see His Excellency the former president [Mahama] winning. I dont see it.

The NDC after it suffered a serious defeat in the 2016 general elections has been reorganising for what they say will be a massive comeback in 2020.

Even though former President Mahama has not made public his intentions to contest the partys primaries, some party supporters hope he runs for the position.

Meanwhile other bigwigs in the NDC have expressed their readiness to lead the party.

Current Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin; former Greater Accra Regional Chairman of the party, Prof Joshua Alabi and former Trades Minister, Dr Ekow Spio Garbrah are leading the pack of those who have declared their intentions to lead the opposition party.

The rest are former CEO of the National Health Insurance Authority, Sylvester Mensah and former; MP for La Dadekotopon, Nii Amasa Namoale and Stephen Atubiga.

Mr Bagbin argued that they supported ex-president Mahama when he was in power but it was time for a new face to lead the party.

He said although a survey conducted by the University of Ghanas Political Science Department shows that the former president has a high approval rating, he foresees that figure will go down before the party's primaries which will lead to another defeat for him.

We were under him, he was the first gentleman, so he had all of us supporting him 100 percent, so if that support has now reduced to 58 percent, which means that 58 percent of us are now supporting him, that is good news for us [the aspirants]."

It means as we go along, that will still be ebbing away and it is most likely that by the time we get to the national primaries, it would have reduced to something below...I see myself as the winner.

He added that the low turnout during election 2016 in areas seen as the party's stronghold showed that supporters had rejected former president Mahama.

"Look at the turnout in Volta Region; the lowest ever...Upper West, Northern, Brong Ahafo Regions, these are sometimes very supportive of the NDC anytime we did something good."
LIVE Razboi in Ucraina, ziua 268: Rusii au tras asupra Kievului o racheta din care au desurubat focosul nuclear / Schauble o critica aspru pe Merkel / Trupele lui Putin se concentreaza pe intarirea pozitiilor defensive / Presa rusa se bucura ca Ucraina e in pragul inghetului si al intunericului total
Some Police personnel with AK 47 assault rifles led by the Acting Executive Director of the EOCO, ACP K.K Amoah (Rtd) stormed her office.

She had been on forced leave since July 2017 at the instance of the investigative agency.

Her resumption in office was against an advice from the investigative body urging her follow due process since their investigations into the Staff Endowment Fund of the election management body has not been concluded.

Apart from Mrs Opoku Amankwah, two other EC officials also being investigated in connection with the GH480,000 are Finance Director Dr Joseph Kwaku Asamoah and Chief Accountant Kwaku Owusu Agyei-Larbi.

The money in question was allegedly withdrawn from the Endowment Fund of the EC between 2012 and 2013 by the three officials during the tenure of Dr Kwadwo Afari Gyan as EC Chair and used for official business pertaining to the commission.

READ ALSO: Chief Justice begins impeachment process against EC bosses

However, lawyer for Mrs Amankwah, Nana Boakye Adu-Poku in an interview on Accra-based Class FM said EOCO requested for a meeting after which they agreed to speed up investigations within the next 14 days.
He said the decision by EOCO to storm the offices of the Deputy Commissioner of the Electoral Commissioner, Mrs Georgina Opoku Amankwah is a disgrace.

The deputy EC boss is being investigated along with two others over the missing of GH480,000.

Some Police personnel with AK 47 assault rifles led by the Acting Executive Director of the EOCO, ACP K.K Amoah (Rtd) stormed her office.

She had been on a forced leave since July 2017 at the instance of the investigative agency.

Her resumption in office was against an advice from the investigative body urging her follow due process since their investigations into the Staff Endowment Fund of the election management body has not been concluded.

Apart from Mrs Opoku Amankwah, two other EC officials also being investigated in connection with the GH480,000 are Finance Director Dr Joseph Kwaku Asamoah and Chief Accountant Kwaku Owusu Agyei-Larbi.

The money in question was allegedly withdrawn from the Endowment Fund of the EC between 2012 and 2013 by the three officials during the tenure of Dr Kwadwo Afari Gyan as EC Chair and used for official business pertaining to the commission.

READ ALSO: Chief Justice begins impeachment process against EC bosses

But Kennedy Agyapong said he could not understand why Mrs Opoku Amankwah has been singled out when all the EC bosses under investigation are still in their offices.

"The principle by EOCO was wrong. EOCO is a bogus organization. They are very bias. I know there are officers who have been accused but why have they turned their guns on only one person. I dont know that woman but I think they have not been fair to her," he said.

Speaking on Adom TV, the maverick politician accused some members of the ruling government at the Flagstaff House of protecting the EC boss, Charlotte Osei.

"NPP members are protecting and taking orders from EC boss; I dont hate Charlotte Osei but her utterances and behavior is very bad and needs to be condemned. I know some small boys at the Flagstaff House are influencing the situation and are only embarrassing the President.
According to him, he was expecting the president to learn from the wrongs of the erstwhile NDC government.

He said the president has surrounded himself with inexperienced young people who could not offer him the right counsel to govern the country as his predecessor did.

Speaking on Accra-based Joy FM, he said experienced politicians and the elderly cannot be taken out of governance.

"There are positions that you put them [youth] to bring them up," he said.

He said "I had an opportunity of even telling him [Mahama] that it is very important to get very seasoned members who have gone through it all, who have made it in life and who are not going to look for material gains, but they are looking at the legacy they can leave behind, they will speak to you truthfully so that some of the mistakes you are making you dont.

"His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is repeating some of the mistakes of John Mahama."

Speaking on his presidential ambitions, he said former president John Mahama consider him a liability to the party.

He said some power brokers associated with Mahama disregard his views in the party for selfish reasons.

"My views are being heard but they are not being accepted by some power brokers from former President Mahamas camp some of whom were unhappy with some early warning signs I gave in 2013
Dr Mahamudu Bawumia was speaking as the special guest of honour at the 69th New Year School Conference of the University of Ghana on Monday (January 15, 2018).

He said the government is committed to curbing corruption in the country, hence its appointment of an Independent Special Prosecutor.

With the appointment of Martin Amidu, the message is very clear that he [President Akufo-Addo] is very serious about dealing with this issue [corruption]. It is not a partisan issue; you can have corrupt people across the partisan divide.

The message is that not even the President can protect you if you are corrupt, he indicated.

READ ALSO: Government accused of hiding full list of presidential staffers

Dr Bawumia, therefore, called on the general public to give Amidu the maximum support he needs to ensure corruption ends in Ghana.
His trial will begin on March 8, charged with premeditated murder as well as dismemberment and "sexual relations other than intercourse of a particularly dangerous nature", prosecutors said.

They said it was not known exactly how Wall was murdered, "but the homicide could have taken place by cutting of the throat or strangulation."

In a grisly case that shocked the public, the remains of 30-year-old Wall were found over a series of weeks in Koge Bay, weighed down by metal objects, after she vanished while interviewing Madsen on his submarine on August 10.

Prosecutors have previously said they believe Madsen killed Wall as part of a sexual fantasy. Madsen has denied any sexual relations with Wall.

Wall worked as a freelance journalist based in New York and China, and her articles were published in The Guardian, The New York Times and others.

After intentionally sinking his submarine early on August 11 in Koge Bay, some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the Danish capital, Madsen was picked up by a rescue vessel and initially told police he had dropped Wall off on land after their interview the previous evening.

He then went on to change his version of events several times.

A 46-year-old self-taught engineer, Madsen is an eccentric, well-known figure in Denmark.
"I would like to join with my brothers in the episcopate, because if it is right to ask for forgiveness and to support the victims with strength, we must at the same time commit ourselves to make sure that this does not happen again," he said.

Francis made his comments during a visit to Socialist President Michelle Bachelet's official Moneda palace residence, drawing applause from pilgrims watching on giant screens in a Santiago park where he later celebrated an open-air mass for some 400,000 people.

But the pope did not receive a universal welcome, with scuffles breaking out between riot police and demonstrators in the vicinity of O'Higgins Park.

Francis' visit -- his first to Chile as pope -- has been overshadowed by a report outlining the depth of sexual abuse in the local Church, and his appointment of a bishop who many here believe covered-up the country's most prominent sex abuse scandal.

The US-based NGO Bishop Accountability said ahead of the visit that almost 80 Roman Catholic clergy members had been accused of sexually abusing children in Chile since 2000.

For victims, the pope's request for forgiveness did not go far enough.

"We need concrete actions that the pope has not taken with the Chilean church," said Juan Carlos Claret, spokesman for a lay association in the southern city of Osorno.

Claret's group is demanding Francis remove Osorno bishop Juan Barros, who he appointed in 2015, despite Barros' ties to disgraced pedophile priest Fernando Karadima.

Karadima was accused of abusing children in 2010 and convicted by the Vatican to a life of penitence in 2011.

Growing exasperation

The pope was to address representatives of Chile's clergy later Tuesday at Santiago cathedral, before holding a meeting with the country's 50 or so bishops.

In his homily at the mass, where the congregation included Mapuche women in traditional dress, Francis called for the rights and culture of indigenous people to be respected, so they could be treated as "a worthy child of this country".

Earlier, he said in his speech to officials that indigenous peoples "can make a great contribution" to the environmental protection of the planet.

"We can learn from them that there is no true development in a population that turns its back on the earth and everyone and everything around it," he said.

However, there was no specific mention of the Mapuche, with whom the pope is scheduled to meet Wednesday during a visit to Temuco, over 600 kilometers (370 miles) south of the capital Santiago.

Meanwhile, the pope also called for people to "listen" to migrants, whom he said "knock on the doors of this country in search of improvement, and in turn, with the strength and hope of wanting to build a better future for everyone.

Crowds have turned out to greet the pope, who will also visit Peru later this week, but the welcome has not been unanimous.

Three Catholic Churches were vandalized on Tuesday, including one in the Araucania region, where most of the Mapuche people live.

In a sign of growing exasperation at Church inaction, activists from several countries meeting in Santiago on Monday launched a new global organization, Ending Clerical Abuse (ECA).

The organization "seeks to stop child sexual abuse by the clergy," said one of its founders, Jose Andres Murillo.
The deal, hammered out in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw this week, applies to approximately 750,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar in two major outbreaks of violence since October 2016, when militants from the stateless Muslim minority first attacked border-guard posts in northern Rakhine state.

A statement by the Bangladeshi government said the agreement aims to return Rohingya "within two years from the commencement of repatriation".

The statement did not give a date for when refugees will start returning, although Myanmar's government has said it is on track to welcome returnees from January 23.

The deal does not cover the estimated 200,000 Rohingya refugees who were living in Bangladesh prior to October 2016, driven out by previous rounds of communal violence and military crackdowns.

The countries had finally agreed on the form refugees will need to fill out to verify their belonging in Rakhine state, where hundreds of Rohingya villages were incinerated by an extensive army 'clearance operation' last August.

While thin on details, Dhaka said the verification form would be based on "family units" and include orphans and "children born out of unwarranted incidence."

"We should be able to start the process in the coming days," Bangladesh's ambassador to Myanmar, Mohammad Sufiur Rahman, told AFP.

He ruled out Myanmar's stated deadline of next week for starting Rohingya repatriation as "not possible".

Myanmar has faced intense diplomatic pressure to allow the safe return of Rohingya refugees driven out by its army, a campaign the UN and US have described as ethnic cleansing.

Massacre admission

Last week the army for the first time admitted to an atrocity when it said security forces had taken part in the massacre of what it described as 10 Rohingya "terrorists".

The murdered men were in their custody days after militant raids on police post prompted the unrelenting crackdown.

Many Rohingya in the crowded, unsanitary camps in Bangladesh say they will not return to Rakhine, having fled atrocities including murder, rape and arson attacks on their homes.

Rights groups and UN investigtors say they have gathered comprehensive testimony of massacres and campaings of sexual violence against Rohingya women, while satellite photos show the complete destruction of scores of Rohingya villages.

Aid agencies have stressed the need for a safe and voluntary return for repatriation to be considered legitimate.

"We believe that the pace of the return should be dictated by the refugees themselves. That it's really important to hear what they want, and they have been telling us that before they return they would like to see certain conditions in place," Vivian Tan, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency told AFP.

Repeated rounds of violence since the 1970s have sent the Rohingya fleeing across the narrow neck of water that separates Rakhine from Bangaldesh.

Some refugees have never returned, while others have been repatriated in previous deals only to be forced out by fresh vioelnce.

The UN's Tan said Rohingya in Bangladesh have cited their legal status in Myanmar and a safe environment as conditions for their return.

Myanmar does not recognize the Rohingya as an ethnic group entitled to rights protections or citizenships and considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh despite many living there for generations.

Under the deal, Bangladesh said it would establish 5 "transit camps" to process refugees into two reception centres in Myanmar's Rakhine state.

Despite repatriation concerns authorities in Myanmar have pressed ahead with the construction of a "temporary camp" in Rakhine's Maungdaw district.

Eventually the site "will accommodate about 30,000 people in its 625 buildings" before they can be resettled permanently, Myanmar's state media reported this week.

But only a fraction of the buildings have been finished. Myanmar authorities were not immediately reachable for comment.
Americans are divided on whether the latest provocative remark from President Donald Trump was racist.

The comment in question was Trump's reported use of the word "shithole" to describe African nations and Haiti during a meeting with top senators about immigration last week.

According to a poll from Business Insider's partner MSN, 48% of respondents thought Trump's comment was racist, while 51% said it wasn't and 1% wasn't sure.

The results were split heavily along party lines: 83% of Democrats considered the comment racist, while just 10% of Republicans felt the same. Exactly 50% of independents said Trump's comment was racist.

Trump's comments sparked outrage from Democratic lawmakers, and prompted numerous commentators and columnists in the media to accuse Trump of racism.

A day later, the African Union, comprising all 55 African nations, condemned Trump's remarks, saying they "dishonor the celebrated American creed and respect for diversity and human dignity." The union demanded that Trump retract the statement and deliver "an apology not only to the Africans but to all people of African descent around the globe."

Trump has denied that he used the specific word in the meeting, which was first reported by The Washington Post, citing several people briefed on the meeting.

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" Trump said, according to the report.

The comments were later confirmed by other news outlets. Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, who was in the meeting, also confirmed Trump made the remark, although some Republican senators in the room said they did not remember hearing it.

The Post added that Trump said he would prefer if the US accepted more immigrants from Norway, which is predominantly white.
Over the weekend, the publication Babe ran a report detailing a woman's allegation that the award-winning comedian Aziz Ansari repeatedly tried to get her to have sex with him even though "she used verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed" she was.

The report has since gone viral, and op-ed articles in defense of Ansari in major publications, including The New York Times and The Atlantic, have gotten both criticism and support.

The Babe report  titled "I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life"  is written in the third person, though the title suggests it's written in the first.

The woman, a 23-year-old photographer, told Babe that when she left Ansari's apartment she "felt violated." She described it as "sexual assault."

Ansari said in a statement that from his point of view all indications were that the encounter was "completely consensual."

The 34-year-old comedian, who wore a pin in support of the anti-sexual-harassment Time's Up movement at the Golden Globes  where he won best actor in a comedy series for his work on "Master of None"  has in the past received praise for supporting women.

An episode of the second season of "Master of None" shows the aftermath of sexual-harassment allegations surfacing online. In it, Ansari's character is shocked to find out his colleague and friend was capable of such behavior.

Since the report surfaced on Saturday, some have come out in support of Ansari, while others have debated whether his actions constitute "sexual assault." Here's everything you need to know about the allegations and aftermath.

On Saturday, Babe posted a story detailing a woman's accusation of a disturbing sexual encounter with Ansari.

The woman, a 23-year-old photographer who was given the pseudonym Grace in the Babe report, said she met Ansari at the 2017 Emmy Awards. He gave her his number, and they flirted over text for about a week before going on a date in New York City.

The woman told Babe that when they got back to Ansari's Tribeca apartment, he made a move while she was sitting on his kitchen counter.

"I said something like, 'Whoa, let's relax for a sec, let's chill,'" she told Babe.

But she said he continued kissing her and performed oral sex on her. She said she performed oral sex on him as well.

She also said Ansari moved her hand onto his penis multiple times. "He really kept doing it after I moved it away," she told Babe.

Ansari kept trying to have sex with her throughout the night, she said.

She said that she eventually told Ansari she wanted to leave and that he got her an Uber back to her Brooklyn apartment. She said she cried all the way home.

She told Babe that Ansari texted her the next day saying he had fun on the date. According to a text message exchange that she showed the publication, she replied that he'd upset her with his advances.

The exchange shows that Ansari replied that he was "sad to hear this" and said: "It would never be my intention to make you or anyone feel the way you described. Clearly I misread things in the moment and I'm truly sorry."

In a statement, Ansari said he thought the sexual encounter was consensual.

Ansari said in a statement on Sunday:

"In September of last year, I met a woman at a party. We exchanged numbers. We texted back and forth and eventually went on a date. We went out to dinner, and afterwards we ended up engaging in sexual activity, which by all indications was completely consensual.

"The next day, I got a text from her saying that although 'it may have seemed okay,' upon further reflection, she felt uncomfortable. It was true that everything did seem okay to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned. I took her words to heart and responded privately after taking the time to process what she had said."

The New York Times published an op-ed article calling the accusation "the worst thing that has happened to the #MeToo movement."

In a Monday op-ed article  titled "Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader."  The New York Times' Bari Weiss wrote that the report in Babe was "arguably the worst thing that has happened to the #MeToo movement," which encourages people to come forward with their stories of sexual harassment and assault.

Weiss, who has previously expressed right-wing views, also wrote: "There is a useful term for what Grace experienced on her night with Mr. Ansari. It's called 'bad sex.' It sucks."

The op-ed article received a lot of backlash on Twitter, and it was the top post on the front page of Reddit on Monday night.

This article sucks, is cond... @ Scout Tafoya

really got to hand it to ba... @ Nicole Silverberg

But some agreed with the take.

FANTASTIC article. #emo#Aziz An... @ Christina Sommers

The Atlantic also published an op-ed article with a similar defense of Ansari in which the writer called the Babe report "revenge porn."

In the op-ed article, Caitlin Flanagan speculated that the woman "hoped to maybe even become the famous man's girlfriend" and that she was bitter after a bad date.

Many people on Twitter expressed disappointment with the op-ed article.

.@TheAtlantic's criticism o... @ #emo##emo##emo##emo# Annalisa Merelli

.@TheAtlantic's criticism o... @ #emo##emo##emo##emo# Annalisa Merelli

Good morning I just have to... @ Adam Goldman

I highly do not recommend r... @ San

But some came to Flanagan's (and Ansari's) defense.

@TheAtlantic @azizansari @C... @ Jessica Lynn-Lato

I don't think anyone could ... @ Scott Feinberg

In an open letter, the HLN host Ashleigh Banfield said the woman who accused Ansari had "chiseled away at a movement."

Speaking directly to Ansari's accuser on her HLN program, "Crime & Justice," Banfield said: "By your own clear description, this was not a rape, nor was it a sexual assault. By your description, your sexual encounter was unpleasant."

Banfield said the woman had "chiseled away at a movement that I, along with all of my sisters in the workplace, have been dreaming of for decades  a movement that has finally changed an oversexed professional environment that I, too, have struggled through at times over the last 30 years in broadcasting."

"The #MeToo movement has righted a lot of wrongs, and it has made your career path much smoother ... what a gift," Banfield said. "Yet you looked that gift horse in the mouth and chiseled away at that powerful movement with your public accusation."

Tonight on @CrimeJusticeHLN... @ HLN Public Relations

Some also criticized some of the editing choices in the Babe report.

All this weekend#emo#s Aziz pie... @ Ira Madison III

Some said the report didn't include any strictly illegal activity and did not occur in the workplace. Others also latched onto an anecdote in the Babe report about wine.

The reporter, Katie Way, quotes Ansari's accuser commenting on the wine they drank on the date: "'It was white,' she said. 'I didn't get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.'"

In an op-ed article for The Washington Post, Sonny Bunch wrote: "There's no grander point about consent in this anecdote  if she had asked for white and he had laughed at her and said no and forced her to drink red, well, okay, maybe that would fit a piece like the one we are reading. This isn't that. It's simply out of place in a piece that should have immense gravity."

People have also struggled with how to define Ansari's behavior as described in the report.

In The Post, Bunch wrote:

"The only issue with all this is that this story about Ansari is nothing like the ugly tales of sexual abuse that have wafted out of Hollywood over the past six months or so. Not really. From Harvey Weinstein's decades of sexual assaults and use of blacklists to Kevin Spacey's predatory behavior toward young men to Louis C.K.'s masturbating in front of people without asking, these were all stories that were both criminal in nature and involved an abuse of power over underlings.

"The #MeToo movement's story has been a relatively straightforward one that garners support from both sides of the aisle and all decent people, because it is a tale of how powerful people humiliate and subjugate those who want nothing more than a chance to chase their dreams."

Some debated whether "sexual assault" was appropriate to describe the behavior in the report. A tweet addressing that went viral over the weekend:

I saw someone tweet somethi... @ Arnesa

Despite criticism, the Babe editor-in-chief stood by the decision to publish the story.

Joshi Herrmann, the editor-in-chief of Babe's parent company, Tab Media, told CNN Money, "We would publish this again tomorrow."

"It's newsworthy because of who he is and what he has said in his standup, what he has written in his book, what he has proclaimed on late night TV," Herrmann said. "Her account is pointing out a striking tension between those things and the way she says he treated her in private."

Some people have defended the woman, calling Ansari's behavior part of a problem in our culture.

A lot of the criticism of Ansari stems from his image as a feminist and his wearing a Time's Up pin at the Golden Globes.

An episode of his Netflix show, "Master of None," that detailed fictional sexual-harassment allegations received high praise when it debuted.

Anna North, a Vox reporter, wrote on Tuesday that the behavior detailed in the Babe report revealed "broken attitudes" toward sex:

"Unlike many reports that have emerged in the wake of revelations about Harvey Weinstein, Grace's story is not one of workplace harassment. But what she describes  a man repeatedly pushing sex without noticing (or without caring about) what she wants  is something many, many women have experienced in encounters with men.
This is according to Open Doors 2018 World Watch List (WWL), an annual ranking of the 50 countries where being a Christian is literally the worst thing you could be.

Open Doors researchers say that approximately 215 million Christians live in countries where Christianity is illegal, forbidden, or punished.

The first on the list is North Korea. For 16 years in a row, this country has remained the worlds worst persecutor of Christians.

The report says, With more than 50,000 in prison or labor camps, such a ranking is a little surprise for the totalitarian regime that controls every aspect of life in the country and forces worship of the Kim family.

Next is Afghanistan, which scored 93 under North Koreas total score of 94 (on a 100-point scale).

Open Doors USA president and CEO David Curry says, Never before have the top two countries been so close in incidents. Both countries are extreme in intolerance and outright persecution of Christians in every area Open Doors monitors.

The rising persecution in Afghanistan is a tragedy considering the efforts being made by the international community to help rebuild Afghanistan are failing to ensure freedom of religion.

Reports of violence and human rights atrocities from North Korea are pervasive, while the situation faced by Christians in Afghanistan may be underestimated. It is hard for Westerners to imagine a second country could nearly meet the levels of persecution seen in North Korea, but Afghanistan has reached that level this year.

ALSO READ: How Russia continues to abuse religious freedom of Christians

The 50 countries on this years World Watch List are:

Highlights of the report:

Christians suffered the most violence in Pakistan.

Egypt, India, Libya, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkey are the countries where persecution increased the most.

Thankfully, Comoros and Tanzania are no longer on this list. Unfortunately, they have been replaced by the newcomers, Nepal and Azerbaijan.

Cury adds: The most disturbing trend weve seen .. is the increased attacks on Christian women. That is particularly shocking this year.

Reportedly, six women are sexually harassed, forced into marriage with Muslim men and raped every single day.

According to Open Doors, the list helps to highlight this problem.

As Christians, we are called to take a stand for our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ. The Bible calls us to be a voice for the voiceless," Open Doors USA says on its website.
A lot of children, women and innocent people were recently killed by Fulani herdsmen in Guma and Logo Local Government Areas of Benue State.

Bishop David Oyedepo of Living Faith Church Worldwide has reacted to the killings by placing a curse on the Fulani herdsmen.

Daily Post reports that he announced that the perpetrators of the killings and their unborn children will not see peace.

Where are the security agents? You mean they cant get the herdsmen arrested? Those Fulani herdsmen and their unborn children will not see peace."

During the One night with the King telecast across the nation, on Saturday in Otta, Ogun State, Oyedepo also stated that Nigeria is in a state of slumber.

He added that he had known this would happen. In his words, I saw this coming, documented it because God confided in me. I saw it on May 23, 1982.

Nigeria is in a state of slumber and the politicians wont say anything. They (politicians) are always looking for the next election whether people are dying or not.

Pastor Adeboye

Reacting to this violence, Pastor Enoch A. Adeboyes Assistant General Overseer on Administration and Personnel and pastor-in-charge of Region 1, called on the Federal Government.

According to Pastor Johnson Odesola of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), the government needs to do something fast in order to stop these killings.

In his words: I kept on wondering on the silence of government as regards the recent violent attacks by Fulani herdsmen which have always lead to loss of lives of innocent citizens. The situation could best be described as barbaric, terrible, devilish and heartless, looking at the way innocent citizens of the country are being killed. "

The government should do something as it appears that the will to take positive action on this unnecessary protracted problem is conspicuously lacking. Our worry is that these Fulani herdsmen carry out these heinous crimes and no single person is prosecuted. It only translates to the assumption that the evil work by these group is approved. It is not just for the government to say something but to act decisively.

Vanguard reports that his statement was made after the church annual Thanksgiving service at the national headquarters of the church in Ebute-Meta, Lagos.

Paul Enenche

The Senior Pastor, Dunamis International Gospel Centre (DIGC), Abuja has also reacted to the killings.

Daily Post reports that Pastor Eneche has urged people to start defending themselves from the killers.

Speaking at a Friday evening service, he said: It is time for us to pray to God to whom vengeance belongs to show himself in Nigeria. One of the greatest challenges that can happen on earth is the challenge of ignorance

In Benue, just yesterday, about 75 people were given a mass burial because of some satanic vagabonds but enough is enough. Let me say two things before we pray because we have a high level of ignorance.

In other words, it is not an offense for someone to defend himself or another from being killed.

So what is the useless nonsense about those who think they have the claim to take life at will and go unarrested and, unharassed. The end of it has come. Enough is enough."

Lets back it up from the bible. Gen 9:6 says, who Whoever sheds mans blood, By man his blood shall be shed; For in the image of God He made man, so shed mans blood by man.

Meaning the killer is qualified for killing. That action is not an offense because he came to finish people and the people gathered and finished him. Those people did nothing wrong.

Exodus 22:2 summed it up thus: If a thief is found breaking up, and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him."

Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him. Proverbs 26:27.

Also in Rev 13:1 He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity; he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

Did you read what the penal code said, you are entitled to defend yourself and another person around, against attackers, and you want to watch them waste your wife and children?

They went into one house, pulled down everybody, ripped womans pregnancy open, plucked out the eyes of a little boy and left him alive with the two eyes plucked out. Enough is enough

CAN weighs in

The Chairman of Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, South-South, who is also the Chairman of Niger Delta Bishops, Archbishop GodDowell Avwomakpa, has reacted to the crisis in the North.

Vanguard reports that he is calling for a nationwide prayer for the people affected the most by this violence.
Daily Mail reports that this new rule by St Stephens primary school affects only girls under eight.

The school has also stopped these young pupils from fasting during the school day when they have to take their exams during Ramadan.

The chairman of governors at St Stephens, Arif Qawi said: We did not ban fasting altogether but we encouraged them [children] to fast in holidays, at weekends and not on the school campus.

It is unfair to teachers and very unfair to governors. We are unpaid. Why should we get the backlash?

Here we are responsible for their health and safety if they pass out on campus. It is not fair to us.

He also said that he had spoken with Muslim clerics who recommended that boys should fast from puberty.

The chairman added that most of the parents were happy with the schools stance on fasting.

Qawi called on the government to follow suit and to the Department for Education to step up and take it out of our hands.

Reactions to Hijab Ban

This ban has got major support from the headmistress of St Stephens, Neena Lall.

She says she is backing this change because it will help pupils feel more integrated into the school.

Amina Lone of the Social Action and Research Foundation has started a campaign.

She is trying to ensure that young Muslim girls do not to have to wear the hijab in primary schools.

The Department of Education has also weighed in saying: It is a matter for individual schools to decide how to accommodate children observing Ramadan, and to set uniform policies. We issue clear guidance on uniform and to help schools understand their legal duties under the Equality Act.

Meanwhile, a survey has shown that the hijab is listed as part of the uniform for children aged four to eleven in at least 20% of Britain schools.
A popular evangelical megachurch in Northern China named The Golden Lampstand, located in the City of Linfen, Shanxi Province, just got demolished.

World Religion News reports it was damaged by the Chinese Government who put dynamite into the structure before ruining it completely by using bulldozers and cranes.

Witnesses say demolition was carried out by local officials and the Peoples Armed Police who were seen at the scene.

Prior to this, the Zhifang Catholic Church was the first to receive this same treatment for no apparent reason from the local authorities. This incident happened 20 years after it opened.

Asia News reports that it was the only Catholic church in Zhifang, a village near Shaanxi.

While the Golden Lampstand was an unregistered independent church with over 50,000 people. It was reportedly started by an evangelist couple.

Both churches were destroyed between December 2017 and January 2018.

Reactions to Chinese governments persecution of Christians

Now, sources say Christians are quite afraid of the Communist Party who appear to be attacking their basic human right to hold on to their faith.

They are also afraid that these two church cases may be the beginning of a trend by the government.

The U.S. State Department reports that the government of China has physically abused, detained, arrested, tortured, sentenced to prison, or harassed adherents of both registered and unregistered religious groups for activities related to their religious beliefs and practices.

China Aid, a Texas-based Christian human rights organization, has also weighed in on this two incidents.

In a statement, the group said: Chinas military police has been under the direct control of the central government since the head of the public security bureau, which previously commanded it, was arrested last year. This indicates that the order to destroy the church came from Chinas top officials instead of the less-powerful local authorities.

Speaking with The Guardian, Bob Fu, the founder of China Aid added: I think this might be a new pattern against any independent house churches with an existing building or intention to build one.

It also could be a prelude to enforcing the new regulation on religious affairs that will take effect in February.

Right now, all religious groups are demanded to register with local authorities before they can operate freely.
According to the General Overseer of The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), the current administration needs to focus on dealing with the increasing rate of unemployment in Nigeria.

Daily Post reports that he offered this advice at a thanksgiving and prayer programme organized by the Throne of Grace Chapel at the Churchs headquarters in Lagos State.

Pastor Adeboye advised the government to find a solution to this problem as it affects the future leaders.

In his words, Government at all levels should focus on creating jobs and other social investment programmes that would help in ameliorating the suffering of the people.

Our children are graduating without any hope of employment. This is a sad tale and in 2018, the government must galvanize all relevant stakeholders to get our children employed.

We will be creating a lot of social problems and insecurity if we fold our hands and refuse to act.

Pastor Kumuyi offers advice to church leaders

The General Superintendent of the Deeper Life Bible Church, Pastor William Kumuyi, has also offered some advice.

Unlike Pastor Adeboyes advice, Kumuyis advice is directed at church leaders. The Nation reports that he is urging these leaders not to lose sight of the important thing which is evangelism.

According to the Deeper Life G.O, this is still the great commission that the church needs to continue to hold on.

Kumuyi also encouraged them to seize the opportunities presented on the streets, hospitals, motor parks, bus stops, inside the bus or taxi, prisons and so on.

In his words, We cannot remain idle or indifference to the acts of winning souls for Christ. It is one thing that should matter to us as believers as the end of the world is near.

Believers must, therefore, throw aside all flimsy excuses as there is no trouble too great, no humiliation too deep, no suffering too severe, no labor too hard, and no expense too much in saving souls. We must arise, therefore, pray and do the work.
Obasanjo who is among 14,771 students expected to receive honours at the 7th Convocation of the university will receive a doctorate in Christian Theology.

According to the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Abdalla Adamu, Obasanjo conducted himself properly and deservedly bagged Doctor of Philosophy in Christian Theology in spite of being a former president.

The VC said, one of the graduands is the first PhD graduate the institution will produce; a university must graduate students at academic Masters Level before graduating PhD.

Only one candidate has been able to do that and that is Obasanjo; the Senate has found him worthy of the award and approved the conferment of PhD on him.

There are lessons to be learnt from Obasanjos feat  one is never too old to learn. Obasanjo was about 80 years when he started the programme and has finished it at 82.

Again, one is never too powerful to learn; he was the president twice and yet subjected himself to learning; learning is a humbling process''.

ALSO READ:

Obasanjo may become a lecturer

Meanwhile, the open university is considering the former president for an appointment as a facilitator or supervisor for the university's Abeokuta study centre.
Kayode Umarudeen alias Tyconne is a former US soldier according to Linda Ikeji. He served voluntarily for one year at Afghanistan for a year between 2015 and 2016. Guess we all know where he got his strength from to have been able to assault officials of the airport.

The fight at the airport

It would be recalled that Kayode, got into a fight with the customs officers and baggage check officials when they attempted to check the tags on the checked luggage of Davido who arrived on an Emirates flight.

Davido arrived around 5 pm and it was reported that his aides refused to allow the officials of the Check port verify the attached tags on his luggage. In the process of resisting the airport officials from checking the luggage, it led to a scuffle which caused a scene at the airport.

When the crew member became uncontrollable, he was taken to the 'Tango City', where touts and people with unruly behaviours are kept until they are handed over to the police.

Kayode's arraignment before the court

Thereafter, he was arraigned on Friday, January 12, 2018, before a Lagos state Magistrate court on a 5-count charge, including assault, breach of public peace and for resisting arrest.

According to Sahara Reporters, the first charge levelled against him was of obstructing and resisting a public officer, an offence contrary to section 117(1) and punishable under the same section of the Criminal Law of Lagos State.

Count 2 reads, That you, Umarudeen Kayode M, on the same date, time and place, in the aforementioned magisterial district did unlawfully assault a public officer causing him harm and thereby committed an offence punishable under section 171 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State 2011.

The reports reveal that the magistrate granted him bail in the sum of N50, 000 and two sureties in like sum. Both sureties must have variable addresses within the jurisdiction of the court.

His inability to meet the bail conditions
The police were said to have, on many occasions, denied the whereabouts of the deceased, Lukman Ogundele, until his family members independently found out that he died in detention.

Lukman, who sold auto parts and iron in the Owode Onirin area of Lagos, had been arrested by SARS men alongside his friend, Saheed Abayomi, for allegedly facilitating the sale of a stolen Toyota Camry.

Lukman and Abayomi were reportedly arrested in the midnight of December 29, 2017 and they were detained at a police station in Ikeja, alongside two other suspects.

The families of the two traders said they searched for them at police stations across the state, until on December 31 when Abayomi's mother traced him to the Ikeja SARS office.

ALSO READ: 10 things SARS doesn't want you to know

According to Punch, Lukman's wife, Wunmi Ogundele, and relatives consequently visited SARS office on several occasions, but were not allowed to see him.

"Any time we went there, policemen would chase us away and they did not allow us to see his friend, Saheed (Abayomi), so we could ask after him (Lukman). I had travelled with the children for the Yuletide when he was arrested," Wunmi added.

His cousin, one Isaac, who went to the station on January 6, was told that the Investigating Police Officer, Inspector Edwin Obam, had taken him out, the report said.

Lukman's mother, Yemisi Ogundele, who lives in Taraba State, was forced have travelled down to Lagos after unsuccessful attempts to see him.

The mother said, "He sold auto parts and iron in Owode Onirin. A man wanted to sell a car. He and Saheed got a buyer for the vehicle and the person sold it to someone else. On December 29, in the night, some SARS men went to his house in Itowolo, Ikorodu, with Saheed, and arrested him.

"Our family members went to the SARS office, but the policemen did not give them any attention. Last Wednesday, I came down to Lagos State and went there. The policemen I met said they did not know anybody by that name.

"I saw Saheed while he was being taken to the Ikeja Magistrates Court that day with two others. I asked for my son, but they chased me away. They did not allow me to get close to Saheed."

She said she went with Lukmans brother and official at the court, who showed them the charge preferred against him.

The woman said that she and Lukman's brother went to the court and met with an official, who showed them the charge preferred against him.

She said she was shocked to discover that her son was charged with robbery along with one Kehinde Hassan.

She added, "His name on the heading of the charge sheet had been cancelled, but in the content, it was written as late Lukman Ogundele. That was when I realised that my son died in the police custody, but they were trying to cover up.

"When my daughter prodded the IPO further, he made a call. After a few minutes, about eight armed policemen came to scare us away."

An uncle to the deceased, Pastor Bolaji Michael, said a policeman confided in him that Lukman was dead.

He said, "Lukman and Saheed were arrested for introducing a buyer to a stolen vehicle. But he was charged with a separate count bordering on robbery. We will be in court on Tuesday (today) to see what happens. We will also get a lawyer to petition the Inspector-General of Police.

"Officially, SARS has not told the family that he is dead, which is wrong. It was a policeman that told us that the boy slumped in custody and died. He said he was not tortured and advised us to let go of the matter. He said he would help us to collect his corpse. He said if we let the case drag on, we might not get his corpse in one year.

"I disagreed with him and said we would take it up. This was a man who had two kids of seven and nine years old and a wife. He must not die just like that."

Also speaking, Abayomi's mother said a SARS officer had promised her that Lukman and her son would be released on bail as soon as the prime suspects in the case were arrested.

She said, "The officer promised that Saheed and Lukman would be released once they got one Idowu and Kehinde, the prime suspects, arrested. But after the two were caught, they did not release them.

"I was surprised when I got a call last Tuesday that they would be charged to court. Saheed, Idowu and Kehinde were brought to the Ikeja Magistrate's Court last Wednesday, but Lukman was not there. The police have postponed their arraignment to Tuesday (today)."

However, the Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer, SP Chike Oti, denied that the police covered up Lukman's death.

He said Lukman died naturally on January 2, 2018, adding that the victim's relatives were informed about the death through a family member, who is a policeman.

Oti said, "The boy was arrested for armed robbery with four others. Along the line, he was sick while in the cell and was taken to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Ikeja. The doctor treated him and the police took him back. He was returned to custody.

"The next day, he collapsed and was rushed back to the hospital. On getting to the hospital, he was confirmed dead by a doctor. Other gang members have been arraigned and remanded in prison."

SARS, the police unit has been criticised by Nigerians over the unruly conduct of its operatives.
According to New York Times, the couple's activities were revealed to the police after one of their daughters, a 17-year old escaped the torture to alert the authorities.

The authorities had swung into action and rescued 12 of the girl's siblings in their parents' Perris home with some chained to bed when found.

In 2014, a couple in Houston, USA were arrested for endangering the life of their 5 year old son after police found the boy malnourished in the cupboard.

The Escape

According to the report, Miss Turpin had, after her escape, found a mobile phone in the home, which she used to call the police telling them about the activities of her parents.

She had reportedly claimed that she alongside her 12 siblings were been held captive in their home by their parents against their will. She also claimed some of her siblings were been chained to beds in a filthy room.

ALSO READ: Malnourished Child Found Hidden In A Cupboard By Parents

The Revelation

Police officers who swung to action after the startling call, reportedly found 12 individuals that ranged from the age of 2 to 29 been locked in a foul-smelling house living in the dark without access to adequate food or water.

The Riverside County Sheriff's Department also revealed that some of the children found were restrained from moving freely or about with chains and padlocks.

The officers also revealed that some of the 13 siblings found were adults though they were so malnourished and looking younger than their ages. The 17-year old girl that blew her parents' activities opened reportedly looked 10.

The Turpin couple's arrest

The Turpin couple, who were arrested after the call to the police were unable to give any cogent reason for their actions as of the time of arrest, the New York Times reported.

57-year old David and 49-year old Louise were reportedly arrested on charges of child torture and child endangerment.
The accused allegedly raped the 19-year-old model after offering a ride from a bar where they partied Thursday night.
One minute its in and the next its out and so trends come and go. Gucci has been reigning supreme for the last year but it may finally be time to give it a rest.

Gucci saw a resurgence in popularity thanks to the new Creative Director Alessandro Michele who turned the whole brand upside down and a variety of innovative point of reference for his collections most notably the inclusion of Harlem legend, Dapper Dan.

The Re-birth of Gucci

Back in May 2017, Alessandro Michele found himself the subject of industry gossip as eagle-eyed fashion aficionados noticed a look Michele sent down the runway looked naggingly familiar.

While showing Guccis Resort 2018 collection, Michele sent a jacket down the runway; a brown bomber with ballooning sleeves done up in brown-and-tan Gucci Gs. The piece looked a lot like one made by Dapper Dan in the 80s.

Before the uproar grew legs, Alessandro and Dapper Dan confirmed a partnership that brought together high-end luxury and the cool streets of Harlem. The collaboration gave Gucci street cred and they gained new respect and an increased following. Gucci was officially for the culture. Alessandro succeeds in injecting pop culture into the brand, therefore, making it relevant but the Gucci juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down.

Why Gucci?

Fast forward a few months and Gucci is the body and feet of everybody worth their salt. From Beyonce to French Montana, Kevin Hart, Wizkid, Davido, Toke Makinwa and most recently Tiwa Savage.

The label has become somewhat of a status symbol not only because of the hefty price tags attached but wearing the label puts the wearer in an exclusive club popularly known as the Gucci Gang, thanks to rapper Lil Pump.

People purchase designer goods for a variety of reasons, among them because they convey a sense of status, wealth, and exclusivity.

These purchases lead others to make rapid inferences about the character of the purchaser (e.g., successful, arrogant, rich etc). We understand the psychology behind buying luxury goods but in the curious case of Gucci, does the overexposure decrease the overall value of the brand?

Overkill

When does it become too much? The monogrammed clothing is hard to miss and we must draw a line between making a statement and flogging a dead horse. From headbands right down to the shoes, celebrities are stepping out in all Gucci outfits but what was once a trend has now become overkill.

Gucci is fast entering territory that Versace occupied circa 2012 when it was the label du jour. Everyone from bloggers to rappers was wearing Versace. Rapper, Tyga did a song in homage to the Italian label, Meek Mill also did. Of course how could we forget Migos who broke through with 'Versace'. And if you thought that was enough, Drake jumped on the remix to make it bigger. But where is Versace now? The brand was forced to retreat and rebrand to stop it suffering the same fate as Burberrys check.

In 2002, the world of Burberry clashed with the world of Hip-Hop. When rapper Cam'ron raised his feet to show his Burberry timberlands, Hip-Hop fell in love with a new style.

But like most trends, it burned too fast. Burberry is still searching to regain its cool factor.

End of Gucci Gang?

They say all publicity is good publicity but that is not necessarily the case. With fashion brands, they have to tow the line of being relevant without being obnoxious. Human beings are fickle and over-saturation can signal the end of a brand.

In the eyes of many, luxury and exclusive are synonymous when it comes to brands. A large number of the great luxury brands maintain their status purely because of their exclusivity, ensuring their products are coveted by many and owned by a few through prohibitive pricing.
Shakira the doll has a changeable face, thick thighs; huge, firm boobs, and a really big butt. It sells for $2,289 - thats 800K or thereabouts!

Social media has been filled with comments from boyfriends excitedly hailing the arrival of the doll, pointing out that having one of these artificial creatures would free them from the stress theyve had to put up with, with girlfriends and partners.

undefinedOf course babes have been quick to point out, too, that if guys ever hope to replace them, they would need to find better substitutes than sex dolls.

A doll cant cook, and cant wash, they say in their own defense.

Is it cheating if a boyfriend has sex with a doll?

So lets try an alternate reality. What if guys do not leave their babes for sex dolls, deciding instead to have both - a real girlfriend and an artificial girlfriend?

Crazy, right?

But how feasible is that?

Its cheating, plain and simple, says a Lagos big girl who chooses to stay anonymous. [Hereafter referred to as Lagos Big Girl]

A sex doll is a full woman with an intelligence of sorts, she says.

Sex dolls and Dildos

If women say having a sex doll is cheating and cannot be permitted for guys, why should women continue having dildos? asks a young male Pulse reader who prefers to have his identity hidden. [He's hereafter referred to as Pulse Reader]

And he has a point. The end goal of a dildo and sex doll is to create some sort of sexual release for men and women, often without the involvement of their human partners.

Same logic goes for masturbation, another contentious issue when it comes to partners and their sexual behaviours in relationships/marriages.

Lagos Big girl stands on the argument that sex dolls like Solana, another hyper-realistic sex robot, are inherently and structurally designed to be different and superior to dildos.

A dildo is just a dildo, she says. A doll on the other hand is formed and built to not only look like a woman, but also implanted with artificial intelligence.

Its configured to speak and have emotions. The difference is absolutely clear. I dont think you can have a girlfriend and a sex doll at the same time. Its cheating, plain and simple, she reiterates.

Having a sex doll is not cheating if...

Provided that partners have an agreement and have no qualms with it, nothing is wrong with a boyfriend owning a sex toy.

As a matter of fact, only two people own a relationship and the ship is theirs to steer as they please; the wave theirs to ride as roughly or gently as they deem fit.

Individual sexual behavior is a mystery that needs not be unraveled to anyone except ones partner.See, we cant rule out the existence of relationships where masturbation is not wrong; others wherein partners view pornography together; and there are men who purchase all types of sex toys for their partners in the hope of boosting and making their sex life more fun.

Whether or not sex toy is a cheating will therefore be a function of sexual relationships and the people involved in it, regardless of what society says or thinks.
Recall the viral gist of the woman who proposed at Ikeja City Mallbut was left in tears after her boyfriend said no to getting engaged to her and walked away.

Why he rejected the proposal

The boyfriend's reason for turning down his babe's proposal was previously unknown but that has now been revealed by a Facebook user who claims to be friends with the embarrassed girlfriend.

Apparently, the woman who proposed has been a sidechic all along!

The Facebook user and supposed friend of the bold girlfriend, Christy Glo, who claims to be the rejected woman's friend posted on timeline on Sunday and said:

This lady is actually my friend, but not close friends and we just spoke on phone She said the reason she cried bitterly after her boyfriend rejected her marriage proposal in public was that when he came close and whispered into her ears, he actually said he was already married.

My question is why are men this wicked and heartless? Tufiakwa.

Is he truly married though?

In yet another twist, the post which alleges that the boyfriend is a married man has been deleted.

Logically, that could be in some respect to the distraught woman and to probably let the matter die down as quickly as possible.

Or it could also be some quick trick pulled some random Facebook user.
They were charged before Justice Mohammed Idris on a 34-count charge bordering on N3.2billion fraud.

They pleaded not guilty.

When the case was called on Tuesday, EFCCs counsel, Mr Rotimi Jacobs (SAN), informed the court that the matter was for continuation of trial, but his witness was absent.

Jacobs told the court that the witness, Mr Mike Udoh, had repeatedly made himself unavailable whenever he was due to appear in court to give evidence.

He accused some unknown persons of being behind Udohs absence, adding that such persons would also be prosecuted.

The EFCC counsel then applied for a short adjournment to enable the agency to tidy up the situation.

The counsel to Kalu, Mr Awa Kalu , accused the EFCC of a ploy to foist an adjournment on the court.

He said that there were several other witnesses listed by the prosecution, and the absence of one witness should not delay the court.

The counsel to the second accused (Udeogu), Mr Solo Akuma (SAN), adopted Kalus submissions, describing the EFCCs application for adjournment as unnecessary.

Mr C.C. Nwofo, counsel to the third accused, Slok Nig. Ltd, also aligned himself with the submissions of other defence counsel in objecting to the request for adjournment.

In a bench ruling, Justice Idris upheld Jacobs application for adjournment, but added that it would be the final adjournment allowed.
The Chairman of the local government, Mr Yusuf Mohammed, confirmed the incident to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday in Yola.

Mohammed said the insurgents attacked the village around midnight in an operation that lasted for over one hour, killing three people.

They shot and killed a security man guarding the village Clinic and slaughtered a man that tried to escape, while the third victim was a shop owner who was burnt to death in his shop when they set fire on 18 lock-up shops in the village, he said.

He said soldiers and local hunters who chased the insurgents were able to shoot down two of them.

The Spokesman of the Police Command in Adamawa, SP Othman Abubakar, also confirmed the incident but said he had no details yet.

Abubakar said information reaching him was that three people lost their lives with shops destroyed.

Also commenting, the Administrative Officer of Hunters Association in Madagali Local Government Area, Malam Bakura Madagali, said three villagers were kill with one injured.
According to him, Raising false alarm and making inflammatory statements regarding the security situation in Makurdi, the State capital to desist from such acts or face arrest.

Daily Post also reports that he condemned people who are taking advantage of the recent violent incidents in the state to promote fear.

The Governor advised residents of the state to go about their normal activities without fear.

Mass burial for farmers killed in herdsmen clash

On Thursday, January 11, 2018, the Benue state government organised a mass burialfor 73 victims who were allegedly killed by Fulani herdsmen.

The herdsmen have also called on the Governor of Benue state to modify the anti-grazing law in the state.

According to the National Vice President of Miyetti Allah Cattle Herders Association (MACBAN), Husaini Yusuf Bosso, there will be more bloodshedin Benue state if the anti-grazing law is not scrapped.
According to a report by Premium Times, local officials and residents said the attack lasted for about three hours.

An eyewitness of the attack, Abamu Japhet, said the terrorists sneaked into the town around 11pm and started shooting sporadically, killing and burning houses, before they abducted some people.

He said, "I escaped by the whiskers and fled into a nearby hiding place before escaping; no soldier came to our rescue. For now I cant tell the exact figures of the casualty. It was terrible!"

The representative of Madagali, Michika at the state's House of Representatives, Adamu Kamale, confirmed the attack, adding that the militants also killed livestock during the attack.

He said, "I had a distress call that they have again launched night attack at Pallam. As I am talking to you now, the casualty figures is yet to be ascertained but they killed and abducted people and also burnt houses.

"Even before this attack, the terrorists had earlier ransacked Wanu, Kamale and Kafin Hausa communities. In fact, hardly a day will pass without attack, let the government wake up.

"We want President Buhari to visit us and see the horrible scenario being meted on our communities."

Boko Haram menace

Since the insurgency of the terrorist group escalated after a 2009 crackdown by the military, Boko Haram, chiefly under the leadership of Abubakar Shekau, has been responsible for the death of over 20,000 people and the displacement of more than 2.5 million scattered across Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps across the country and its neighbours.
The court, presided by Justice Abdulazeez Anka, dismissed the suit for lacking in merit.

Evans, through his lawyer, Mr Olukayode Ogungbeje, had filed the suit against the Inspector General of Police (IGP) alleging wrongful detention.

Also joined as respondents were the Nigerian Police Force (NPF), Commissioner of Police (COP) Lagos State and the Lagos State Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).

In the suit, Evans, had urged the court for an order, directing the police to charge him to court immediately or release him on bail.

Evans had also alleged that he was subjected to media trial during his arrest.

Ogungbeje had argued that Evans detention since June 10 to 22, 2017 without being charged to court was a violation of his clients rights as enshrined in sections 35 (1) (c) (3) (4) (5) (a) (b) and 36 of the Constitution.

However, the police through its counsel, Mr Emmanuel Eze, had urged the court to discountenance Evans application, and dismiss same accordingly for lacking in merit.

Eze added that no infraction was committed against the applicant.

Delivering judgment in the suit, Justice Anka held that Ogungbeje was unable to argue his case based on Section 35 and 36 of the constitution.

ALSO READ:Brave policeman who arrested Evans shot dead by kidnappers

The judge also ruled that the decision of the police to detain Evans from June 10, till June 22, 2017, was reasonable, as the police had showed that it had an order to that effect.

On the allegation of subjecting the applicant to media trial, the judge held that no law forbids the media from carrying out its constitutional duty.

Consequently, Justice Anka held that suit could not succeed and accordingly, dismissed same.
The ministrys Spokesperson, Dr Tope Elias-Fatile, in a statement, said that the Ambassador was represented by the Embassys Charge dAffairs, Mr David Young.

He said the minister sought clarification on the veracity or otherwise of the substance of the remarks, stressing that if they were true, they were deeply hurtful, offensive and unacceptable, especially given the cordial relations that exist between Nigerian and the U.S.

Young stressed that Trumps Government continues to hold the people of Nigeria in very high regard and valued the warm relations and excellent cooperation between the two countries.

Trump also looks forward to building on this relationship for the mutual benefit of the two countries.

The U.S. president reportedly made a racist comment at a meeting with congressional leaders in the Oval Office.

Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Trump allegedly said after being presented with a proposal to restore protection for immigrants from Africa and other countries.

Trump was also alleged to have said that African countries, alongside Haiti and El Salvador, constitute shitholes from where migrants into the United States were undesirable.

The U.S. president had, however, denied ever describing any race as coming from shithole countries in a Friday morning tweet.

He said never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said take them out. Made up by Dems.
The trio in their congratulatory letters described Gani Adams new title as a well deserving, based on his antecedent and immense contributions to the development of Yoruba race and Unity of Nigeria.

Goodluck Jonathan in a letter personally signed said "you have consistently championed the Unity and Progress of the Yoruba race over the years without wavering in the face of challenges'

While commending the new Aare for his doggedness and commitment to the advancement of the Yoruba race which resulted in his nomination as the 15th Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland, the former president expresses confident that Adams will continue to play a unifying role in Nigeria by exploiting his relationship with people across the Nation.

The Director General of Nigeria Maritime Administration and Safety Agency ( NIMASA) Dr Dakuku Peterside in his letter said " The love of your people, selfless service and leadership especially among the youths have earned you this honor , As you assume the important and responsible duties of the Aare Ona Kakanfo, I am hopeful that the Yoruba race and our dear country will continue to enjoy progress and prosperity"

ALSO READ: Pastor Sam Adeyemi eulogises Gani Adams over Aare Ona Kakanfo

The European Union delegates to the Federal Republic of Nigeria and The Economic Community of West African State in a letter signed by Ketil Karlsen in their congratulatory note said they are looking forward to promoting dialogue on peace, security and stability on political spheres of Nigeria.
He inaugurated the operation during a town hall meeting hosted by Area G Command in Ogba, Lagos.

According to Imohimi, people have taken the act of knowing ones neighbour for granted, and this is militating against the safety of the society.

Community policing is based on partnership. It is the people that know how their problem can be solved. I hereby call on everyone that we have decided to launch Operation Know Your Neighbour.

We have long taken this act for granted as everyone wants to be on their own. We dont want to know the person sitting or living beside us.

This is, however, not possible as the next persons act can easily influence yours. If you see something, say something and dont keep quiet at your own detriment, he said.

The commissioner of police said no fewer than 25 persons were in police custody for cult-related crimes and having arms and ammunition in their possession.

Cultists are also members of the society, and I know we are not happy.But what do we intend to do about it?

It is high time all traditional, civil and every other group that have influence on youths take issues of cultism and awareness very serious.

You should dedicate time to talk about the evils of cultism during your gatherings or town hall meetings.

Now, l want you to warn your children that anyone arrested for cult-related crimes will be diligently prosecuted, he said.

Edgal also urged residents not to allow drug peddlers to hide in their neighbourhood and turn their children into drug addicts.

We must take back our communities from drug peddlers. We know where they are, we cant say we dont.

We should be able to share this information with the police and not let these hoodlums hibernate in our community to hide and sell drug to our children, Edgal said.

He urged members of the public to be vigilant, as crime is dynamic in nature.

The CP told the audience of how a suspected of armed robber who disguised as a mad man was arrested in Ikeja.

Imohimi said that he discovered that people find it hard to share information with the police because they seem not to trust the police.

ALSO READ:Edgal Imohimi narrates how Badoo cult murder their victims

Policemen should be warned that this fight against social vices does not exclude them. Policemen must be professional in their conduct.

Members of the public are hereby advised to report any policeman being unprofessional or seen associating with cultists, he said.

Imohimi subsequently gave out the Citizens Complaint Hot Centre (CCHC) numbers for members of the public to report police unprofessional conduct.
The participants were drawn from the three states that make up the Zone 5 Police Command comprising Edo, Delta and Bayelsa.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the course is organised for Deputy Superintendents o Police (DSPs) and Chief Superintendents of Police (CSPs), as well as their counter parts in sister security agencies under the zone.

The inspector-generals message was read by Assistant Commissioner of Police, Administration, Edo Command, Emmanuel Aina.

He said the training would help to build and deepen the capacity of officers to respond adequately to any situation they would face in the course of their work.

The Commissioner of Police in Edo, Babatunde Kokumo, said the training was timely as the nation was presently facing a lot of security challenges never envisaged before now.
THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER

Weve no land for cattle colony, Benue leaders tell Buhari

Benue leaders led by Governor Samuel Ortom yesterday declared that their state had no empty land to be designated as a cattle colony as being proposed by the Federal Government.

Seven die, many injured in Lagos gas explosions

No fewer than seven persons were killed and many others injured yesterday following gas explosions in Magodo and Badagry areas of Lagos.

Ekiti bars Fayemi, ex-commissioner from public office for 10 years

Former governor of Ekiti State and Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, and his finance commissioner, Mr. Dapo Kolawole, have been barred from holding any public office in the state and Nigeria for 10 years.

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VANGUARD NEWSPAPER

Duke indicates interest for 2019 presidency

A former Governor of Cross River State, Mr. Donald Duke, has said that he will contest for presidency in the 2019 general elections.

7 die, many injured as gas plant, depot explode in Lagos

TWO persons died when a gas plant at Magodo, Ikosi-Isheri Local Council Development Area of Lagos, belonging to Second Coming Company Nigeria Limited, exploded yesterday.

Benue killings: You lied, Osinbajo tells Gov Ortom

The Vice-President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, yesterday, denied receiving any letter from Benue State governor, Samuel Ortom, warning him of attacks planned by herdsmen.

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THE PUNCH NEWSPAPER

Lagos auto parts dealer dies in SARS custody

An auto parts dealer in the Owode Onirin area of Lagos State, Lukman Ogundele, has died in the custody of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, Lagos State Police Command.

Benue killings: Ortom says herdsmen must obtain permits

The Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, on Monday insisted that the state did not have land for the establishment of cattle colonies as being proposed by the Federal Government.

NNPC begins direct fuel supply to independent marketers

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has commenced the direct supply of Premium Motor Spirit, popularly known as petrol, to independent oil marketers in order to effectively clear the fuel queues still prevalent in some parts of the country.

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THISDAY NEWSPAPER

Accommodate Your Fellow Country Men, Buhari Appeals to Ortom

President Muhammadu Buhari Monday in Abuja appealed to the Governor of Benue State, Dr. Samuel Ortom, to accommodate his fellow countrymen, promising that all perpetrators of violence in the state would be made to face the wrath of the law.

Crude Oil Price Hits $70 P/B Despite Surging US Output

Crude oil price hits $70 per barrel Monday despite surging production by the United States, which is offset by the production cuts led by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia.

Stock Market Sustains Rally as Index Hits 43,119.08, Market Cap Now N15.4tn

Nigerian stocks rose further Monday as the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) All-Share Index (ASI) climbed to a new high of 43,119.08 while market capitalisation hit N15.447 trillion.

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BUSINESSDAY NEWSPAPER

Directors of Nigerias 20 largest listed firms became N70bn richer in 2017

Directors of some of the most capitalised companies on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) became N70 billion richer in 2017, as stocks recovered from a blighting downturn to reach record highs.

FBN Holdings sees NPLs below 5%, RoE above 20% in 2019

FBN Holdings, Nigerias second largest bank by assets expects its current elevated non-performing loan (NPL) ratio to normalize below 5 percent next year, helping to boost net income and drive its share price.

NAICOM moves to end underpricing on compulsory insurance
During its first plenary session of the year on Tuesday, January 16, 2018, Honourable Douye Diri introduced a motion on the reported disappearance that allegedly happened around the time President Muhammadu Buhari appointed Ahmed Abubakar as the agency's new Director General.

While speaking on Tuesday, Diri, the representative of the Yenagoa/ Kolokuma/Opokuma constituency in Bayelsa state, described the incident as an unfortunate one that should be probed "for urgent national interest".

He said, "These issues paint a poor picture of our national security and dents the reputation of the agency in the eyes of the public.

"We must bear in mind that the agency represents us not only in Nigeria but in the eyes of the international community.

"So we should immediately look into these matters in a bid to resolve them because if the image we present before other countries remains dented this way, then we are doomed."

While backing up Diri's motion, Honourable Toby Okechukwu, representing Aninri/Agwu/Oji-Uzo constituency in Enugu state, described the incident as a "monumental embarrassment", especially as it is coming on the heels of the controversial Ikoyi loot that led to the dismissal of the agency's former DG, Ayodele Oke.
This position was sequel to the consideration of a report of the Senate Ad Hoc Committee on the Review of the Current Security Infrastructure in Nigeria.

The committee had on Friday last week, visited Benue to ascertain the level of killings in the state.

The report was presented by Chairman of the Committee, Sen. Ahmed Lawan during plenary on Tuesday.

He said the recommendations of the committee included re-examining, revamping and reinventing the nations security architecture and infrastructure in order to ensure that no community or entity was left unsecured and unsafe.

Lawan who is also the Senate Leader said other recommendations are for the Senate to convene as a matter of utmost urgency a national security summit.

He said the committee recommended that government should examine the recurring violence and mayhem visited rural communities before they become an existential threat to national cohesion and national survival.

The Federal Government should examine the deployment of security personnel in our rural communities and borders to ensure that no one gets in or out of the country without proper documentation and regular surveillance.

The Federal Government should ensure full compliance with the letter and spirit of the ECOWAS protocol on free movement of persons, cattle and goods with a view to ensuring that it is administered strictly to preserve the interests, safety and security of Nigeria and its people.

The Federal Government should immediately re-examine the current deployment of security forces, particularly the Police, DSS and Civil Defence Corp, etc. in order to strengthen their presence in the rural areas, he said.

He said government should beef up and re-strategise its deployment of security intelligence capabilities with a view to obtaining actionable intelligence about impending attacks and plots in order to forestall and prevent the recurrence of rural violence and inter-ethnic conflagrations.

The Federal and Benue State Government should ensure that all those living in IDP camps are properly catered for and the burnt infrastructure in their communities are properly rebuilt to enable the people return and resume their normal lives.

The government through the Ministry of Agriculture should as a matter of urgency convene a special National Council on Agriculture meeting to deliberate on the development and modernization of Nigerias livestock and dairy industry.

In an additional prayer Sen. Philip Aduda (PDP-FCT) said the President of the Senate should meet with President Muhammadu Buhari with the recommendations for immediate implementation to douse the tension in the country.

The prayer was supported by Sen. Kabiru Gaya (APC-Kano)

In his contribution, the Deputy President of the Senate,Mr Ike Ekweremadu said the killings that is going on in Nigeria are assuming an alarming proportion and very disturbing.

He said as a responsible parliament, the senate must rise to the situation by saying enough is enough.

I dont expect us to sit down here and not do anything. Nigerians expect us not only to say something but do something.

I believe that the recommendations of the Senate Leader would be of great help in addressing these problems.

Nigerians are not only worried but the international community are also worried.

He, however, stressed the need for social contract which hinged on security and welfare of the citizenry.

Similarly, Sen. David Mark (PDP-Benue South) said this was a national issue.

There are immediate solutions and long term solutions to the problem. Creation of cattle colonies, devolution of power and state police those are long term solutions because we cannot do that first thing tomorrow.

Presently, there is no intelligence transmission between the herders, villages and the government or if there is, government is not proactive, government is not acting on intelligence.

Nigeria is not the country with the largest cattle in the world. There are modern ways of doing things and we must grow with time. We cannot be operating on archaic system.

On his part, Sen. Shehu Sani(APC-Kaduna) cautioned against viewing the crisis from religious and ethnic perspective adding if you are faced with a crisis and you use ethnic or religious lenses to view at it, you will see a religious, ethnic or sectional image.

This is not the time for diplomacy and courtesy. This is the time to provide leadership for a nation that is in national emergency and national distress, Sani said.

He said there must be a clear distinction between armed herdsmen who must be confronted frontally and Fulani cattle rearers.

Also speaking, Sen. Mao Ohuabunwa (PDP-Abia) attributed the killings to lack of jobs in the country.

He urged the Federal Government to pass the Peace Corps bill into law for intelligence gathering at the grassroots.

In his remarks, President of the Senate Dr Bukola Saraki noted that the Senates debate on the clashes between herdsmen and farmers in Benue and other states had shown that it was not religious-based.

ALSO READ:Benue conducts mass burial for victims of herdsmen attack

It was a breakdown of law and order in that part of the country.

I commend my Distinguished Colleagues for their sincerity and patriotism during this debate. This killing is also a wake up call for all of us to put all hands on deck to address this crisis.

We want to see immediate action. One point raised here today is the issue of justice. Without justice we cannot see unity and that justice stands as one of our recommendations.

In the next 14 days, the Inspector General of Police must find the perpetrators, arrest them, and the Attorney General of Benue State must prosecute them. That is the minimum requirement and it must happen, he said.

Our resolution is that some of our discussions here need to be conveyed to Mr. President. We appreciate his actions for calling us and giving us a brief on what has happened. Hence, we owe it to him to tell him what we have discussed and the seriousness with which we have taken the issue.
Sani stated this at plenary on Tuesday, January 16, 2018 while reacting to a report by the Senate adhoc committee on the review of the security infrastructure of the country, especially the Benue killings.

The Kaduna state lawmaker condemned the failure of his colleagues to direct the issues of security to President Muhammadu Buhari who is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

These were his words:

When you use a religious and ethnic or religious lenses to view an issue, you will see a religious, ethnic or sectional image. This is not the time for diplomacy and courtesy. This is the time to provide leadership for a nation that is in a national emergency and national distrust.

There is something that I like with the presidency. When it comes to the issue of directing attacks to the National Assembly, they dont in anyway curtail, reduce or suppress any of the missiles. But when it comes to our turn to point the finger where the problem is, you will see some form of crowdies, escapism and people who try to water-down the truth.

In the report that was presented to us, Federal Government was mentioned about seven times. The security of this country is under the direct control of the President. Why are you shying away from calling on the President to wake up and stand up to the challenge of protecting this country?

Few days ago, I saw leaders and elders from Benue state in the villa. What were you doing in the Villa? You are bereaved. Your people were killed. The villa should go to Benue and not Benue coming to Villa, for goodness sake.

Were in a country where there is no complacent reward for violence. The villages and victims are blamed. We must tell ourselves the truth.

Governors that supposed to be chief executives of their states leave their duty posts on a daily and weekly basis to the villa to endorse and re-endorse the President. Too much and over-endorsement. We should tell ourselves the truth.

Things are not going right in this country and we are failing. People are dying in their thousands, kidnappings, bloodshed in their thousands from Zamfara to Kaduna to Taraba to Benue to Plateau to Nasarawa state.

About this report, it is: The President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria should rise up to the occasion

Were all here shifting blames and trying to evade the truth. We cant solve this problem. Nigerian political class and politicians are more interested in the 2019 general election than the lives of our people.

From the executive, legislature and state governors, people are more interested about the INEC timetable. We cant solve this problem if we see everything through ethno-religious lens.

There must be a clear distinction between armed herdsmen who must be confronted frontally and Fulani cattle rearers but were not doing that.

We have reached a point that people have lost hope in the government. Were here trying to massage egos; we dont want to confront the president because people want to come back to the 9th Senate. They do not want to lose their tickets while people are being killed in this country, he added.
Recall that seven governors had endorsedPresident Muhammadu Buhari for a second term.

But addressing lawmakers at the resumption of plenary on Tuesday, January 16, 2018, Saraki advised all elected officers to avoid acts capable of distracting them from delivering on their mandate to the people.

This is my appeal: it is too early for 2019 politicking to override the legislative agenda and the larger work of governance, Saraki began.

We have begun a good thing with the economic core of our agenda; let us see it to its proper conclusion. It would be most insensitive to the needs of the people of this country if we were to do otherwise.

"I am directing this appeal not only to us in the chamber but to the National Assembly as a whole, as well as to the Executive and indeed all political actors.

Distinguished colleagues, let me opine that 2018 will be defined by the collaboration between the two chambers of the 8th National Assembly as regards the number of items due for concurrence.

"We must work to build on the very cordial relationship between the two chambers as witnessed so far, and elevate the level of cooperation, for the benefit the people.

To this end, I urge you all to reach out to our counterparts in the House, so that we can fulfil the lawmaking function in the most expeditious manner. This will help streamline the process - and clear the way for the passing of various legislations  making for improved synergy and joined-up working between the two chambers, the Senate President said.

Saraki described the fuel scarcity situation experienced by Nigerians during the yuletide season as a man-made occurrence.

We seek the cooperation and understanding of Nigerians as we try to get to the bottom of the fuel scarcity. My own estimation of the fuel scarcity phenomenon is that it is man-made. We thought we had left the problem of fuel queues firmly in the past in this country, but sadly, that appears not to be the case."

Saraki further condemned the killings in Benue state adding that the Senate would ensure that justice is served.

You will agree with me that even more sober reflection attends the killings in some parts of the country, particularly recent tragic events in Benue State.

We condemn these killings in the strongest terms, and we declare that mindless bloodletting has no place in our society. I offer our sincerest condolences to the people of Benue, and indeed to all who have suffered the loss of their loved ones as a result of these wanton acts.

Human life is sacred. We state without equivocation that Nigerian life must become sacred. When we fail in our duty to protect Nigerian lives, it is a tragedy and an indictment on us all. We as the 8th Senate stand ready to help find solutions to assuage the hurt to affected parts, to bring the perpetrators to justice and to enthrone peace in all four corners of this country, Saraki added.
Santiago Ebee Ela, 41, died at the central police station in capital Malabo on Saturday night as a result of "cruel torture", Citizens for Innovation (CI) said in a statement.

"The death of Santiago Ebee Ela is a consequence of the cruel and inhumane treatment shown to CI detainees by security forces of the PDGE regime," it said, referring to the ruling Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea headed by President Teodoro Obiang.

The death was not confirmed by Equatorial Guinean authorities nor reported by state media.

Ebee Ela was arrested at home on the night of January 2, according to CI, which believes more than 200 of its activists have been detained over the past two months as part of a government crackdown following the mid-November elections.

During the vote, the PDGE won 99 out of 100 seats in parliament in a result condemned as fraudulent by the opposition.

The sole opposition MP, who is from CI, did not attend the opening of parliament on Friday as he was also in detention, the party said.
Campaigning on an anti-corruption, anti-euro and anti-migrant ticket, Babis's ANO (YES) movement won 78 of 200 seats in parliament in October's general election, far outstripping eight other elected parties.

But potential coalition partners have snubbed the chemicals, food and media tycoon dubbed the "Czech Trump", suspicious of his communist past and recent police charges over alleged fraud, which Babis flatly denies.

Addressing parliament on Tuesday, Babis insisted that "no one stole anything, there was no corruption" as he requested to be stripped of his immunity, something police also want.

The mogul, whom Forbes pegs as the second wealthiest Czech citizen, is facing fraud charges for allegedly breaking rules back in 2007 to obtain EU subsidies granted to small companies.

Despite this, Babis's ANO beat the right-wing eurosceptic ODS, the anti-establishment Pirates, the far-right, anti-Islam and anti-EU SPD and five other parties at the ballot box in October.

But party leaders in the EU state of 10.6 million people, where corruption is perceived to be rife, have shunned the 63-year-old Babis over the fraud charges related to his Stork Nest farm.

The Slovak-born billionaire allegedly pulled the farm out of his sprawling Agrofert chemicals, food and media holding in 2007 to make it eligible for an EU subsidy granted to small companies, before eventually returning it to the holding.

Liberal democracy?

Parliament was due on Tuesday to resume its debate ahead of a vote of confidence in Babis's minority administration, made up of members of ANO and unaffiliated experts.

Babis is expected to lose the vote but can count on getting a second chance from incumbent Czech President Milos Zeman, who is a staunch ally.

Zeman, who named Babis prime minister in December, said he would give the tycoon a second shot to win over parliament.

But he added that Babis should prove he has the necessary backing for his second cabinet.

Under the constitution, the president has two attempts to decide who will form the government, leaving the third and final try to the speaker of parliament, who is an ally of Babis.

The prime minister said his government would formally resign on January 17 if it loses the vote but will continue to exist in practice as he puts together a new team.

The pro-Russian Zeman clinched pole position in round one of a presidential election last weekend, setting up a challenging run-off against pro-European Jiri Drahos on January 26-27.

Analyst Jiri Pehe told AFP a victory for Zeman might "pave the way for a deeper alliance with Andrej Babis, which could lead to a change in some basic parameters of liberal democracy in the country."

But he believes that Babis's chances to govern could be torpedoed should Drahos become president.
Washington is concerned the deal, thrashed out over 12 years of talks, does nothing to punish Iran's continuing ballistic missile programme, interference in conflicts around Middle East or its human rights abuses at home.

The EU's Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn said the bloc was consulting with Britain, France and Germany -- signatories to the deal known as the E3 -- on how to respond.

"You will have seen that last Friday the United States extended the sanctions waivers," Hahn told the European Parliament.

"We are now, together with the E3 and the other EU member states, carefully assessing the statement and its implications."

Trump on Friday agreed to waive US nuclear-related sanctions but warned it was the "last chance" to fix the Iran deal, demanding that US lawmakers and European allies draw up a new deal to curb Iran's ballistic programme, among other issues.

The EU has insisted the nuclear deal must remain separate from discussion of other matters, but officials have been keen to stress that they challenged Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during talks in Brussels last week.

"These issues include the tensions in the Middle East, Irans ballistic missiles program, as well as the protests that took place in Iran in recent weeks," Hahn said.

"Let us be clear: all these issues must be addressed, and must be addressed outside the scope of the nuclear deal," he said.

"None of them would be easier to address if the JCPOA was not in place -- on the contrary," Hahn stressed, using the deal's technical name.

Iran has ruled out any change to the deal, which was signed with the US, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia.
Now that victory has been declared against the jihadists, Iraq's ethnic and religious minorities are taking the future into their own hands.

In Baz Gerkan village, where fighting damaged or destroyed most of the houses, Shabak residents have rebuilt their school themselves.

A few kilometres (miles) away, they have restored the shrine of Imam Rida, the eighth of Shiite Islam's 12 imams, which was blown up by the Sunni Muslim jihadists who consider Shiites to be heretics.

Shabaks, who number around 60,000 in Iraq, have their own language and say they first settled in the Arab country several centuries ago from northern Iran.

Their places of worship, such as those of Christians, Yazidis and other minorities, were targeted by IS, and many fled their homes during the three years of jihadist occupation.

There are now only 400,000 Christians in Iraq against more than one million before the US-led invasion of 2003, making up three percent of the country's population along with Yazidis, Sabeans and Shabaks.

Today, several months after the entire northern province of Nineveh was retaken from the jihadists, churches and monasteries have been restored.

And for the first time in four years last December, Christmas carols were heard.

Yazidis rebuild their temples

The Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority has also managed to rebuild 20 of 23 temples destroyed by the jihadists in the Bashiqa area, east of Iraq's second city Mosul.

"All this was done thanks to donations from Yazidis and other inhabitants of the region," said Hilal Ali, who is in charge of the Yazidi sites of worship.

Mutassem Abed, 47, is a Shiite who joined the Hashed al-Shaabi coalition of paramilitary units following a call to arms in 2004 by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric.

The Hashed was formed specifically to counter the rise of IS in the country, and played a key role in the jihadists' defeat in 2017.

Now that the fighting has ended, Abed is looking to his future.

"We must rebuild a sanctuary that is even more beautiful and even bigger, to say to IS that it did not win," the Shabak fighter told AFP, wearing a parka over his uniform.

Life may slowly be returning to normal, but many checkpoints have been set up, usually manned by members of Hashed units from the Shabak, Turkmen, Christian or Yazidi minorities.

Iraq is relying on local forces to maintain security on the ground, after declaring in December that the war against IS had been won.

Such fighters know the local people, speak their languages and can easily spot any intruders, commanders say.

Fighters with local knowledge

"Even before IS, other terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda tried to chase out minorities," said Zein al-Abidine Jamil, a Shabak commander with the Hashed.

Another Bartalla Shabak, a policeman manning a checkpoint in the old part of Mosul, recalled the days when he could only enter the city under escort.

"Mosul? I went there on patrol. But never in a personal capacity. A lone Shiite? That would have been madness!" he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Sunni Muslims are a minority in Iraq, but in Mosul they form the majority and also have a presence in villages around the city.

The Shabak minority has a small Sunni community within it. But, residents say, many of them joined IS and were killed. Others fled with their families, joining the ranks of the displaced.

Today, several months after Nineveh province was rid of IS, "we are directly responsible for the security of citizens", said Jamil.

Because of their local knowledge, such fighters were a major asset to the armed forces in their fightback against IS.

But human rights groups have charged that some minorities targeted by the jihadists were themselves guilty of abuses.

In December, the New York-based Human Rights Watch accused Yazidi fighters of executing 52 civilians in apparent revenge killings after capturing territory from the jihadists.
On Sunday, the North African country marked the anniversary of the 2011 uprising that gave birth to the Arab Spring.

Chibani said 41 people aged between 13 and 19 were detained on Sunday amid fresh protests.

The authorities say that in a week of clashes, 105 members of the security forces were injured, but no record of the number of protesters injured was available.

One protester died last Monday in circumstances that remain unclear.

The results of an autopsy due to be released last Thursday have not yet been made public.

Minor incidents including youths burning tyres were reported overnight Sunday-Monday in two Tunis suburbs, media reports said.

The North African country is seen as having had a relatively smooth democratic transition since the January 14, 2011 toppling of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after 23 years in power.

But anger has risen over new austerity measures after a year of rising prices, with protesters on Sunday again chanting the 2011 slogans of "Work, Freedom, Dignity".
Tudose handed in his resignation on Monday evening after senior members of the ruling Social Democrats (PSD) voted to withdraw their support at a leadership meeting.

"I am leaving with my head held high. I'm going to get my things at parliament," Tudose told journalists after the party gathering.

The move heralds fresh turmoil for Romania, one of the European Union's poorest countries plagued with corruption scandals, and comes on the eve of a historic visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Tudose's resignation will have to be signed off by centre-right President Klaus Iohannis. He also needs to approve the PSD's new prime ministerial nominee, to be chosen at a party meeting Tuesday.

It is the second time in a year that the PSD has torpedoed its own government.

In June 2017, the party filed a no-confidence motion in then-prime minister Sorin Grindeanu, after he fell out with powerful PSD boss Liviu Dragnea, 55.

Dragnea, who is barred from running for office because of a fraud conviction, is widely acknowledged to pull the strings behind the scenes.

The party chief nominated former economy minister Tudose as Grindeanu's successor, but their relationship also turned into an increasingly bitter sparring match in recent months.

In a recent television interview, Tudose slammed Dragnea for taking key decisions without consulting other senior party members.

Things took a turn for the worst last week when Tudose demanded the resignation of Interior Minister Carmen Dan, a Dragnea ally, over a paedophilia scandal involving Romania's police force.

Back in October, Iohannis expressed doubt over the "PSD's ability to govern" given its shaky track record in government.

Tudose's departure is the third major crisis to hit the Social Democrats since they rode back into power in December 2016, barely a year after being forced from office over a deadly nightclub blaze blamed on corruption.

In February 2017, the Romanian government was forced to back down on altering anti-corruption laws in the politicians' favour after the biggest protests since the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.

Despite ongoing opposition, the PSD approved a fresh set of controversial judicial reforms last month.

Critics say that the changes will reduce the independence of magistrates and curb the powers of the DNA, the respected anti-corruption investigative body.

Brussels worries that Romania is backtracking on tackling graft, and Washington has also expressed concerns.
Bachelet's socialist government has ushered in recognition of same-sex civil unions, decriminalized abortion and introduced a bill on same-sex marriage.

Bachelet, who will meet Francis on Tuesday, has called on Chileans to welcome the pope, though a positive reception may not be universal.

The once-dominant Catholic Church has seen its influence decline, never more so than now, in the aftermath of a wave of sexual abuse scandals involving priests.

After his arrival in Santiago, the 81-year-old pontiff moved with his delegation to the parish of San Luis Beltran to pay homage to the "Bishop of the Poor" figure.

He then boarded the "Popemobile" for the drive to the Vatican property where he will spend three nights while in Chile.

The spiritual highlight of Francis's visit will take place Tuesday -- a giant open-air mass for some 400,000 pilgrims at the city's O'Higgins Park.

Several groups protested near Argentina's embassy over the cost of the trip, including a group of people who climbed onto a crane, an incident that led to five arrests.

Other demonstrations against sex abuse in the Church and from members of the gay community were expected, amid heightened security.

'Action -- not forgiveness'

In a sign of growing exasperation at Church inaction, activists from several countries meeting in Santiago on Monday launched a new global organization, Ending Clerical Abuse (ECA).

The organization "seeks to stop child sexual abuse by the clergy," said one of its founders, Jose Andres Murillo.

The body aims to form a group of prosecutors "to bring to court these crimes against humanity," said Sara Oviedo, former vice-president of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

It also plans to set up a global database of child abuse cases and present it to the United Nations.

"In Chile there are bishops who have been involved in cover-ups and who should be in jail," said Juan Carlos Cruz, a member of the organization.

"Specifically here in Chile we are asking the pope for action -- not forgiveness."

US-based monitoring group BishopAccountability.org said ahead of the visit that almost 80 Roman Catholic clergy members had been accused of sexually abusing children in Chile since 2000.

The group, which cited court and media records, said the list represented "a fraction of the total number of accused clerics who would be known if Chile's church leaders were required to report to law enforcement."

Victims of pedophile priests have campaigned for greater openness from the Church in dealing with offending priests, and Francis himself has declared a "zero tolerance" policy towards those who prey on children, something he is likely to reiterate in his speech to the clergy on Tuesday.

But he has come under fire in Chile over his decision in January 2015 to appoint Bishop Juan Barros as head of a diocese in the south of the country, despite Barros' ties to disgraced pedophile priest Fernando Karadima, whose actions he is accused of helping to cover up.

Karadima was accused of abusing children in 2010, and convicted by the Vatican to a life of penitence.

Barros' appointment was challenged by lay experts of the Vatican Commission for the Protection of Minors. And religious bodies, MPs and lay organizations have protested to the Vatican. Barros has denied knowledge of Karadima's actions.

Following the open air mass and lunch, the pope will make a short address to the 620 inmates of the central women's prison in Santiago.

During his three days in Chile, Francis will also meet with victims of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, while there are no formal plans to meet victims of pedophile priests.
But that outcome, wished for by advocates who despise Kleins Independent Democratic Conference and its seven-year collaboration with Republicans in the Senate, was far from a certainty, even in the highly charged #MeToo atmosphere.

Indeed, in many ways, the allegations surrounding Klein have laid bare Albanys cumbersome mechanisms for self-policing and the seeming ability of some here to shrug off scandal. The Republican leader of the Senate, John J. Flanagan, announced Thursday that Klein would face no investigation there, saying his chamber had no jurisdiction, noting no formal complaint was ever made. (The Senates own ethics committee is famously somnolent, having met for the first time in eight years in June.)

Klein, unsurprisingly, has rebuffed any suggestions he should resign, and vehemently denies he ever kissed the former staff member, Erica Vladimer. Nonetheless, he has asked for the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, or JCOPE, to begin an investigation, and on Monday, his lawyer said the senator had, in fact, been approached by a lawyer from JCOPE and was cooperating.

In a statement to The Times, Vladimer also issued a call for JCOPE to investigate.

I would gladly cooperate, she said. Because I am telling the truth.

Vladimer has said Klein forcibly kissed her outside Justins bar in 2015. All of a sudden there was a hand on the back of my head and he shoved his tongue down my throat, Vladimer, 30, told HuffPost. In my head it lasted forever, I dont think it lasted even three seconds.

Klein has conceded that he and Vladimer had briefly conversed, while outside smoking on the street that night in spring 2015, and even that hed heard a rumor about himself and her the next day, but insists nothing untoward happened.

My immediate reaction then, as now, was to say this did not occur, Klein said in a conference call Wednesday.

Klein, a lifelong Bronx resident known for his political pugnacity and personal flair, has responded aggressively to the accusations, issuing a pair of letters Friday testifying to his good character. The letters were signed by nearly three dozen women, both former and current employees and female constituents of Kleins district.

The senators pushback began even before Vladimers story was published, with a pre-emptive conference call with reporters last week alongside his girlfriend, Sen. Diane J. Savino of Staten Island. Kleins lawyer then offered an investigative memo, accusing Vladimer of acting unusually and drinking heavily the night of the incident, during a post-budget celebration in Albany. (In her statement, Vladimer characterized Kleins campaign against her claims as all-too-familiar gaslighting methods, which help to compel victims of abuse to remain silent, particularly when abuse comes from men in positions of high authority.)

Asked about the motivation for the letters of support, a spokeswoman for the IDC, Barbara Brancaccio, said, Individuals who currently and have formerly worked with, and for, Jeff Klein throughout his 30 years in public service have every right to stand up for his character, just as Senator Klein has the right to defend himself.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has worked closely with the Independent Democratic Conference, and has been accused of facilitating the groups partnership with Flanagan, has twice called for an investigation, but has offered no details on who would handle it.

That has not satisfied some activists and protesters who feel that the governor should be more outspoken, particularly considering the national reckoning over sexual harassment in the workplace  something Cuomo has promised will be a major part of his 2018 agenda.

He has said the bare minimum to slip away from any responsibility, said Heather Stewart, of the group Empire State Indivisible, calling Cuomo a poor champion for justice.

The governors office flatly rejects that assertion, noting the governors call for an independent investigation into Kleins actions, and saying Monday that Cuomo will include a raft of measures aimed at fighting sexual harassment in his budget presentation Tuesday, effectively forcing the issue into immediate negotiations. Melissa DeRosa, the secretary to the governor, said the issue would be Cuomos highest priority. He recognizes its a moment for change, she said Monday. And he wants to seize upon it.

Vladimer said in an interview Sunday that she appreciated the governors call for an investigation, though what that means to him remains to be seen. She also said she understood that Cuomo and Klein had a working relationship. You cannot overlook that the IDC has, in some ways, been helpful to him, she said, of the governor.

DeRosa counters that Cuomo works with legislators from all conferences  thats his job.

The Klein imbroglio erupted as the Legislature had just begun its six-month session in Albany, a period that was already figuring to hold some significant drama. The continuing defection of the IDCs eight members has been the source of great consternation for a 23-member bloc of mainstream Democrats in the Senate led by Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Westchester County. (Another Democrat, Sen. Simcha Felder of Brooklyn, also votes with the Republicans, citing loyalty to his districts constituents.)

Both sides have indicated something of a willingness to unite, potentially taking back the chamber from Flanagans control sometime this year. Stewart-Cousins has also called for an investigation into the extremely disturbing allegations, but has not called for Klein to step down.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

Many of the women who spoke at the City Hall rally Friday made no secret of their distaste not only for Kleins alleged conduct, but also for his politics; they suggested the two were inextricably linked. Jessica Ramos, a former City Hall aide who is running to unseat Sen. Jose Peralta, another IDC member, called Kleins denials straight out of the Republican playbook. Two of Kleins primary challengers  Alessandra Biaggi, a former aide to Cuomo, and Lewis Kaminski, a lawyer  also seized upon the allegations, writing on social media that they believed Vladimer.

Savino noted Friday that many of the rallys backers were opponents of the IDC, like the New York Working Families Party, which has called for Klein to temporarily step aside pending an investigation. So its pretty clear that calls for resignation have more to do with politics than anything else, Savino said.

Klein is expected back in Albany on Tuesday for the first time since the allegations arose, as budget talks begin for the coming fiscal year, which begins April 1. That date is also the third anniversary of the incident Vladimer says changed her life. She says she had been bothered by Kleins attempts since her allegation to disparage me and manipulate public perception, but stopped short of asking him to step down.

He has a chance if he wants to step up: He can accept responsibility and be a leader, she said. But, based on the way hes chosen to immediately deny it and then try and attack my credibility, I doubt were going to see him do that. And thats disappointing.

She added: If hes not going to, then it is up to his constituents: If they call for him to resign, then so be it.
Many of the injured appeared to have suffered fractures, according to police and hospital officials.

People could be seen lying on the ground after the collapse, which occurred near a Starbucks coffee shop. The building complex is in a business district near the city center, and international businesses and agencies, including the World Bank, have offices in the building where the stock exchange is located.

Officials ordered the immediate evacuation of the complex as rescue workers descended on the accident site and began looking into the cause of the collapse.

Maj. Gen. Setyo Wasisto, a police spokesman, ruled out the possibility of terrorism. I am sure that this was not caused by a bomb, he said.

Wasisto said late Monday night that of the 73 people hospitalized for injuries, 11 had been released.

Jakarta has been hit by multiple terrorist attacks in recent years, including an attack against a police post in central Jakarta in January 2016. The Indonesia Stock Exchange building was also struck in 2000 by two rogue army soldiers who planted a car bomb in the buildings basement, killing 15 people.

Farida Riady, a spokeswoman for the Indonesia Stock Exchange buildings management, apologized for the accident.

Suddenly the mezzanine floor collapsed, she said at a news conference Monday. We have not been able to provide any detailed information right now about why this happened.
They spoke up for the Affordable Care Act at town-hall-style meetings, and knocked on doors for Alabama Senate candidate Doug Jones, the Democrat who beat Roy Moore in a stunning victory last month.

But when Selman-Lynn tried to register her anniversary event on the website for Womens March Inc., the high-profile group formed by the organizers of last years event in Washington, she received an unusual letter. It said that while the group was supportive of any efforts to build our collective power as women, it asked that she not advertise your event as a Womens March action.

Its kind of silly, Selman-Lynn said. We are clearly the womens march in Mobile.

The Womens March a year ago aimed to start a movement of women from all walks of life who would continue their activism long after they had gone home.

In many ways, that goal has been realized. In the wake of the march on Washington  and simultaneous marches in more than 600 towns and cities across the country  thousands of women threw themselves into activism for the first time in their lives, especially in red states where the events provided a rare chance to build a network of like-minded people.

In Texas, emails collected by the organizers of the Womens March in Austin are being repurposed to promote candidates who support abortion rights. In Arkansas, Gwen Combs, the elementary schoolteacher who organized the Little Rock march, is now running for Congress. Thousands of women in October attended a convention in Detroit training them on everything from lobbying elected officials to confronting white supremacy.

But as the movement evolves, differing priorities and tactics have emerged among the women, nearly all of them unpaid and spread across the country. Now, on the eve of the anniversary, a rift is emerging between two groups: Womens March Inc., which organized the march on Washington and spent much of the year creating more social justice protests, and another organization of activists who planned sister marches last year and believe that winning elections, particularly in red states, should be the primary goal. The split has raised questions about who can claim the mantle of the Womens March  and the funding and press attention that goes with it.

The newer group, named March On, formed after some female activists in red states felt the protests being encouraged by Womens March Inc., which is based in New York, were not resonating in their communities.

We can march and take to the streets and yell about all the stuff we want to change, but unless were getting people elected to office who are going to make those changes, were not really doing anything, said Lindsey Kanaly, who organized the womens march in Oklahoma City and is now a March On board member.

The group is now focused on helping liberal women in Republican-led districts organize before the pivotal midterm elections this year.

Mindful of the optics of dividing the movement, March On founders describe the organization as a complement, not a competitor, to Womens March Inc. Both groups have refrained from criticizing the other in public. But behind the scenes, there has been some frustration.

Winnie Wong, a Womens March Inc. volunteer and adviser, wrote recently in a public Facebook post that March On seems like an ill-conceived attempt at organized co-option.

Somebody got to tell the truth! replied Tamika Mallory, a co-president of Womens March Inc.

Bob Bland, also a co-president, said the new group was welcome in the resistance. But she noted that its creation had led to a lot of confusion among activists on the ground who did not realize that it was a separate entity.

Thats why it is so important for new groups coming into this movement, like March On, to make sure they have distinct branding and messaging that is specific to them and their group that doesnt appear as if it is directly Womens March related, Bland said.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Selman-Lynn in Mobile had been unaware of the difference between the two groups and organized her event using online tools from March On. To satisfy Womens March Inc., she reprinted her banner to remove March Ons slogan, March On the Polls.

It was a minor inconvenience, she said. But she hopes the two groups will work together in the future.

The Womens March is really iconic and of course we want to be a part of that, she said. But March On has a great tool kit. Most of us have never done this before. We need all the guidance we can get.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

The dispute over branding gives a glimpse of how much has changed since ad hoc committees of volunteers put together the marches in the weeks after President Donald Trumps election.

The marches grew out of a Facebook post by a woman in Hawaii who floated the idea, attracting widespread interest. A core group of organizers in New York City planned the march on Washington, while hundreds of other women organized similar marches in their own communities.

The organizers of the march in Washington made a point of picking leaders from communities who have historically been ignored by mainstream feminist groups. Of the four national co-chairwomen of the Washington march, three were minorities. But the groups leadership had very little geographic diversity. Nearly all of the board members of Womens March Inc. are from New York City.

After the march, Womens March Inc. used its powerful platform to advance social justice causes, urging marchers to hold conversations about racial injustice, protest the deportation of unauthorized immigrants, attend vigils for Syria and participate in a national strike called A Day Without Women. Womens March Inc. activists said they saw social justice protests as crucial to forming effective and diverse coalitions.

Yet many of their protests failed to catch on in red states.

What they are doing is great, but its difficult to tap into here, Kelly Smith, a librarian from Berea, Kentucky, who organized buses from Kentucky to Washington for the march last year. A general strike could not work in Kentucky, a state where many women depend on hourly wages and do not have union protections, she said.

Women would have come back to work the next day and had no job, she said. I cant be on board with that.

Kentuckians have other urgent priorities, like saving the pensions of public-school teachers that were cut by a conservative governor, she said.

In Texas, Melissa Fiero, who helped organize a march of 100,000 people in Austin, said her group had not participated in any of the protests urged by Womens March Inc. Instead, it has focused on promoting Democrats for local office.

The needs are different from Texas to New York, said Fiero, who lives in the rural community of Oatmeal. A womans right to choose is constantly under assault in Texas.

Both Kelly and Fiero have chosen to affiliate with March On.

The goal of March On is to take a bottom-up approach that can draw women in rural places, said Jaquie Algee, who helped plan the Womens March in Chicago and now serves as the board chairwoman of March On.

We wanted to make sure that women in red states who need the most support are in positions of leadership, said Algee, who is also an organizer in Kansas, Indiana and Missouri for the Service Employees International Union. Algee, who is black, said that March On also strives continually for racial diversity in its leadership. Four out of 13 board members are minorities.

Bland disputes claims that Womens March Inc. has had difficulty in conservative areas. Red states are where theres actually the most activity, she said. Were here to facilitate the vision of the actual state organizers and the grass-roots groups that are doing the work.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

March Ons founders say the group grew out of weekly conference calls held by the organizers of sister marches as they swapped tips on applying for permits, finding sponsors and obtaining event insurance. After the marches, they met for the first time at a retreat and decided to form a new organization that would focus on giving organizers tools to help win elections.

In October, March On began an initiative called March on the Polls, which urges local activists to use the anniversary to help register and educate voters in advance of the midterm elections.

Two months later, in December, Womens March Inc. announced its own campaign called Power to the Polls, with an opening rally in Las Vegas on Jan. 21.

Womens March Inc. has struggled to bring the decentralized womens march movement under its umbrella.

Before the march, the Womens March logo, created by Nicole LaRue, a designer who worked pro bono, was shared freely with groups all over the world. Since then, Womens March Inc. has tried to exert greater control over who can use it.

Canadian activists who held marches in solidarity with the Womens March on Washington were outraged when American activists with Womens March Inc. in New York registered the name Womens March Canada and appointed a board without consulting them.

We believe our network has shown itself to be excellent custodians of the Womens March spirit and ethos, and respectfully request the time and space to prepare a plan to move ahead in unity and solidarity, they wrote in an open letter to national co-chairwomen of the Womens March on Washington.

After they did not get a response, they renamed themselves March On Canada and created the Twitter hashtag #DontTradeMarkTheMovement. They are now affiliated with, but not controlled by, March On.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Jo Roger, professor of sociology at Oakland University in Michigan, says the feminist movement, like other important social movements, has always had people coming together and then breaking apart.

We think it looks so chaotic and full of factions and what it really looks like is every other social movement, Roger said. Often those factions end up coming back together later on.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

So far, the split between Womens March and March On has not dampened the enthusiasm for marking the anniversary. Many activists in the field said they were unaware of the division. Those who are say they seek resources from both organizations: Womens March Inc. provides a unifying vision and a national spotlight, while March On gives on-the-ground support, such as legal advice on applying for nonprofit status.

Many women say the marches last year unleashed a new era of activism and a level of energy that shows no sign of flagging. Selman-Lynn said she simply wanted all the help she could get to win more elections for Democrats in Alabama.

We have a lot of work to do, convincing people that theres a grass-roots group with a lot of energy who is willing to work, said Selman-Lynn. Weve got a lot of ground to gain here.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  The current state of nuclear plants will be among the topics discussed by a U.S. Department of Energy official during the School of Nuclear Engineerings weekly seminar series.

Suzanne Jaworowski, senior advisor in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy, serves as the Political Liaison between the Office of Nuclear Energy and the Secretary of Energy, as well as the White House.

For the seminar, Jaworowski will discuss various topics on nuclear energy, including the what nuclear technology means to our country  now and in the future, the current mission for the U.S. Department of Energy regarding nuclear energy and the Office of Nuclear Energys proactive approach.

The seminar is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Wednesday (Jan. 17) in Room 112 of the Physics Building, 525 Northwestern Ave. Opportunities for open discussion during the seminar will be available with questions from the audience.

Jaworowski provides political and strategic leadership to the office and manages outreach and educational efforts in the area of civil nuclear energy.

Seungjin Kim, the Capt. James F. McCarthy, Jr. and Cheryl E. McCarthy Head of Nuclear Engineering, said Jaworowski is a strong advocate for educating the public on the importance of nuclear energy.

As one of the nations leading nuclear engineering programs, Purdue Nuclear Engineering is in a great position to assist the DOEs mission toward nuclear energy by providing technical expertise and a technically-skilled workforce to government, industry and research laboratories, he said.

Kim said nuclear energy can make a broad impact in lives through power, medical, industrial and many other scientific applications.

Writer: Brian L. Huchel, 765-494-2084, bhuchel@purdue.edu

Source: Seungjin Kim, 765-494-5742, seungjin@purdue.edu

Note to Journalists: Suzanne Jaworowski will be available for media questions immediately following the seminar. Contact Brian Huchel at 765-494-2084 in advance if you would like to speak to her.
Strive For Unity So We Can Thrive

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Lessons From Ukraine To The Editor: After occupying the Crimea in 2014 without any pushback by world powers, Russian President Putin decided to invade Ukraine...
The accord on the Johor Bahru - Singapore Rapid Transit System Link (RTS Link) was reached following the conclusion of negotiations led by Singapores Ministry of Transport and Land Transport Authority (LTA) and Malaysias Land Public Transport Commission (Spad).

The agreement encompasses technical, safety and security requirements and commercial, financing and regulatory structures, as well as customs, immigration and quarantine arrangements.

In a similar arrangement to the Singapore - Kuala Lumpur high-speed line, each country will appoint an Infrastructure Company (InfraCo) to fund, build, own and maintain civil infrastructure and stations within their respective territories. The LTA will act as InfraCo on the Singaporean side, with Prasarana assuming this role on the Malaysian section of the line.

The two governments will jointly appoint an operations company (OpCo) to own, design, build, finance, operate and maintain operating assets including track, signalling and rolling stock for a period of 30 years. The OpCo - a joint venture between Malaysian and Singaporean companies - will pay a concession fee to the two governments in return for the right to collect fares revenue from the operation of the line. Fares will be set commercially by the OpCo and will not be regulated by the two governments.

The OpCo concession agreement is due to be signed by the end of September.

The RTS Link will cross the Strait of Johor on a 25m-high bridge between Woodlands North station in Singapore and Bukit Chagar station in Johor Bahru. The line is due to open in December 2024 and will have capacity to carry 10,000 passengers per hour per direction.

LTA says the RTS Link will adopt standards for rolling stock, signalling communications and integrated control from Singapores Thomson East Coast Line (TEL), which will interchange with the RTS Link at Woodlands North. Heavy maintenance will be outsourced to TEL operator SMRT Trains, and carried out at the lines Mandai depot, although a light maintenance depot will be constructed at Bukit Chagar.

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The delivery is the first of 14,000 tonnes of rail being supplied by Liberty OneSteel Whyalla steelworks for the Parkes - Narromine section under a $A 20m contract awarded at the end of last year.

After flash butt welding into 165m lengths at Port Augusta, South Australia, the rail is being transported to various worksites between Parkes and Narromine (P2N) on dedicated trains operated by Genesee & Wyoming Australia.

Over the next eight years, 262,000 tonnes of 60kg/m rail will be laid as part of the Inland Rail project.

Joyce says Inland Rail is a key plank of the governments commitment to create jobs and investment opportunities for regional Australians. This project is a game-changer for our regions, creating thousands of jobs nationwide, and returning $A 16bn to the national economy during the delivery phase and the first 50 years of operation, he says.

Upgrading of the P2N section is expected to begin in May 2018 once all necessary approvals have been received. Works will include reconstruction of the existing track and formation, replacement of bridges and culverts, and improvements to level crossings and passing loops.

This section has been declared critical infrastructure by the NSW state government and the entire project given priority project status by Infrastructure Australia.
Saga Rail was established by Mr Mats Nyblom, founder and former CEO of Hector Rail, which was sold to equity fund EQT Infrastructure II in 2014.

The operator has yet to reveal its timetable or a start date for the low-fares services, which will run at weekends with intermediate stops at Nykoping and Norrkoping.

Saga Rail services will be operated by a fleet of class X10 EMUs acquired from Stockholm Local Transport (SL).
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Russian court confirms Transaero owes $177.6 mln to Irish companies

MOSCOW, January 16 (RAPSI)  The North-Western District Commercial Court has upheld a ruling to include a 10.1-billion-ruble (about $177.6 million) debt owed by bankrupt Transaero airline before several Irish companies in the creditors demands list, the court documents read.

On July 19, 2017, the Commercial Court of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region granted motions filed by Sky Castle 1 Limited, Sky Castle 2 Limited and Sky Castle 3 Limited to include the debt into the list. The ruling was appealed by creditors of Transaero, including Gazpromneft-Aero, RN-Aero and Russian Agricultural Bank.

In December of the last year, the Supreme Court of Russia upheld a lower courts ruling including the airlines 38.3 billion-ruble (about $655.8 million) debt before Irish company VEBL-767-300 in the creditors demands list. This decision was also contested by the creditors, who believe that the foreign firm did not provide proof of inflicted damages.

On September 13, the Commercial Court of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region declared Transaero bankrupt.

Transaero found itself unable to pay its debts valued at 250 billion rubles (about $4 billion) in 2015. The government-approved plan of transferring 75% of companys shares to Aeroflot failed. Its problems resulted in a large number of flight cancels and delays.

In October 2015, Sberbank and Alfa Bank filed bankruptcy petitions against the troubled airline. The Commercial Court of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region initiated bankruptcy procedure against Transaero on December 16.
Russian court returns lawsuit against VIM Airlines to Hong Kong company

MOSCOW, January 16 (RAPSI)  The Tatarstan Commercial Court has returned a lawsuit of Aviation Service (HK) Limited, a company registered in Hong Kong, on inclusion of VIM Airlines 472.5-million-ruble (about $8.3 million) debt into the creditors demands list, back to the applicant, the court documents read.

According to the court, a motion to declare the airline bankrupt, has not been reviewed yet and as such the motion on inclusion of debt in the list is premature.

In addition, the Eleventh Commercial Court of Appeals has earlier dismissed an appeal against a court ruling refusing to proceed with a bankruptcy claim against Vim Airlines.

In late October, the Moscow Commercial Court dismissed the Aviation Service Limiteds motion lodged as part of a lawsuit on recovery of a 293-million-ruble (about $5.1 million) debt from the airline.

The applicant sought to arrest the accounts of Vim Airlines in a bank, seize its mortgaged property as well as prohibit it from making deals with officially registered real estate. According to the applicant, the defendant may be bankrupt.

The court, however, stated that the Aviation Service Limited did not provide sufficient evidence proving need for adoption of interim measures.

On October 17, a criminal case was launched over premeditated bankruptcy of VIM Airlines.

Investigators believe that certain top managers and owners of the air carrier intentionally made losing bargains in 2016 and 2017 including those aimed at siphoning of assets abroad. The deals led to enormous financial outlay and undoubtedly resulted in the companys failure to pay debts to creditors in full.

Earlier, probe was opened into VIM Airlines employees over alleged embezzlement.

According to investigators, employees of the VIM Airlines continued to sell tickets to clients despite being aware that the airline was not able to transfer passengers because there were not enough funds to buy fuel. Investigators believe that the employees embezzled more than one million rubles ($17,000).

In late September, the Investigative Committee official representative Svetlana Petrenko told RAPSI that investigative authorities took measures to recover damage caused by employees of the airline as part of the notorious embezzlement case.

VIM Airlines CEO and chief accountant, Alexander Kochnev and Yekaterina Panteleyeva, have been arrested as part of the case. Co-owners of VIM Airlines Rashid Mursekayev and Svetlana Mursekayeva fled Russia and are currently residing abroad, according to investigators.

On November 1, the High Court of Ireland issued temporary orders against three aviation firms linked to Mursekayev and appointed a receiver of their shares.
Prosecutor seeks up to 10 years in jail for $23 mln Vostochny embezzlement case defendants

MOSCOW, January 16 (RAPSI)  A prosecutor has asked the Simonovsky District Court of Moscow to sentence four defendants in a criminal case over embezzlement of 1.3 billion rubles ($23 million) during construction of Vostochny Cosmodrome to prison terms ranging from 7 to 10 years, the court spokesperson Viktor Vasilyev has told RAPSI.

The prosecutor has demanded 8 years in prison for former CEO of Volga-Vyatka construction company (VVCC) Yevgeniya Degtyareva, 10 years in prison for her father Sergey Degtyarev, who is believed to be the real owner of the company, and 7 years in prison for ex-VVCC managers Alexander Bazankov and Murat Matuyev each, according to the courts representative.

Moreover, the prosecutor asked the court to fine Degtyareva 1.2 million rubles, her father 1.5 million rubles, Bazankov and Matuyev 1 million rubles each.

Sentencing of the defendants, who stand charged with embezzlement and money laundering, is scheduled for February 12.

The construction of the space center, due to become Russia's main launch site, began in 2012. The first launch vehicle operation was carried out on April 28, 2016.

Dozens of cases over construction of Vostochny Cosmodrome have been launched in several Russian regions.
Russian ministry demands $2.3 mln from defendants in high-profile embezzlement case

MOSCOW, January 16 (RAPSI)  Russias Ministry of Culture has filed a lawsuit seeking to recover 133 million rubles (about $2.3 million) from defendants in the Seventh Studio embezzlement case, lawyer Irina Poverinova told RAPSI on Tuesday.

According to Poverinova, the ministry was recognized as the victim. The lawsuit has been lodged after completion of the preliminary investigation into the case against the Gogol Center theater director Kirill Serebrennikov and other defendants charged with embezzling budget funds allocated for arts promotion.

On Monday, the lawyer said that investigation into the criminal case had been completed.

Serebrennikov was arrested in late August and then placed under house arrest. In early November, Moscows Basmanny District Court seized assets belonging to Serebrennikov including apartment, car, and money in the amount of more than 360,000 rubles ($6,000), over  60,000, and $4,000.

Investigators believe that he was an organizer of the budget money embezzlement. The defendant denied wrongdoing.

He allegedly created Seventh Studio stage company to actualize the Platforma project for promotion of art and invited other defendants into the organization.

Investigators believe that former head of the company Yury Itin, ex- general producer Alexey Malobrodsky, and former companys chief accountant Maslyayeva were falsifying data for the Platforma projects plans in 2011-2014 on request of the theater director. This data was provided to the Ministry of Culture as the rationale for financing from the state budget.

Earlier, Maslyayeva has testified against Serebrennikov. She said that Serebrennikov, Malobrodsky and Itin organized embezzlement of money allocated for a cultural event. Serebrennikov and Malobrodsky cashed the money with the assistance of Maslyayeva. The woman also said that she entered falsified data in financial reports.

Former official of Russias Culture Ministry and current director of the Russian Academic Youth Theater Sophia Apfelbaum has been also arrested and put under house arrest on embezzlement charges. According to investigators, from 2011 to 2014, Apfelbaum signed contracts on state grants in the amount of more than 214 million rubles ($3.7 million) with Serebrennikovs Seventh Studio stage company on behalf of the Russian Culture Ministry, and provided further agreement of received reporting documents, which contained overstated information on quantity and cost of the held events. Thus, she has abetted the embezzlement of about 68 million rubles ($1.2 million) by Serebrennikov and his alleged accomplices, investigators claim.

Apfelbaum admitted that she controlled the movement of cash but pleaded not guilty to embezzlement.

One more defendant, producer Yekaterina Voronova, has been arrested in absentia and put on the international wanted list.
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Indias rank in the World Banks ease of doing business index cannot get better unless more attention is paid to bringing about procedural reforms in the way states run their governments and provide various approvals for trade and industry, says A K Bhattacharya.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

Much of the debate on public finance in India in recent years has been focused on how the Union government manages its expenditure and revenue flows.

Public policy commentators have written in plenty on why the Centre must adhere to a path of fiscal prudence even while it allocates adequate resources to promote growth.

Much less attention, however, is paid to what the 29 states in India are doing with regard to fiscal prudence.

Its true that institutions like the International Monetary Fund or the rating agencies worry more about the consolidated fiscal deficit in the country that includes the fiscal gaps at the Centre as also in the states.

But with most media commentaries remaining primarily focused on the fiscal deficit levels of the Union government, necessary pressure on the states has been lacking in nudging them to a more responsible path of steady fiscal consolidation. This must change.

Until about five years ago, the combined size of budgets of all the states used to be less than the total Union Budget.

In 2011-12, the Union Budget size was Rs 13.04 trillion, higher than the combined size of the state budgets estimated at Rs 12.85 trillion.

The following year saw the state budgets at Rs 14.55 trillion surpass for the first time the size of the Union Budget estimated at Rs 14.1 trillion.

The gap has been widening since then and in 2016-17 the combined size of the state budgets at Rs 27.24 trillion was more than a third of the Union Budget size of Rs 20.14 trillion.

States have become even more critical as far as fiscal prudence is concerned.

For instance, in 2011-12, the combined fiscal deficit of states was estimated at 1.9 per cent of gross domestic product or GDP, compared to the Centres fiscal deficit of 5.8 per cent.

In 2016-17, the combined fiscal deficit for states rose to 3.66 per cent, surpassing the fiscal deficit of the Union government estimated at 3.5 per cent of GDP.

So, it is not just the size of the budgets of the states, but even their fiscal deficit is more than that of the Centre.

Yet, barring a few commentaries here and there, the debate on fiscal consolidation continues to be largely focused on what the Union finance minister plans to do about reining in the Centres fiscal deficit.

There is a clear imbalance in this focus and this must be corrected.

Take a look at the reforms scorecard for states and the Centre.

The latest World Bank report on the ease of doing business in India provides a perspective that few policymakers can ignore.

Indias overall rank has improved from 130 to 100.

Remarkably, though, the areas where India has notched the largest gains pertain to paying taxes, resolving insolvency, getting credit and protecting minority investors.

And all these gains are a direct outcome of the procedural improvements introduced by the Union government in these four areas.

In sharp contrast, the policies and procedures, overseen by the states, are where the World Bank report shows Indias ranks either deteriorating or languishing at a poor score.

Indeed, India slipped by a few notches in the ranking for starting a business, getting electricity and registering property.

All these activities are governed by rules framed and overseen by state governments.

And in enforcing contracts and issuing construction permits, once again areas governed by the states, Indias rank has slightly got better, but continues to be pretty low at 164 and 181, respectively.

Foreign investors, too, have become conscious of this dichotomy.

They are usually very keen on subscribing to bonds issued by the Union government, but their interest in loans issued by state governments is lukewarm.

Foreign portfolio investors have used up almost 99 per cent of their investment limit of Rs 1.9 trillion in central government bonds.

They are allowed to invest an additional Rs 300 billion in state government bonds, also known as state development loans or SDL.

But till now this year, these foreign investors have subscribed only up to 17 per cent of this limit.

This will have serious implications for the state governments finances.

Last year, they borrowed over Rs 3.5 trillion and with their fiscal deficit widening, they are expected to borrow an estimated Rs 4.5 trillion in the current fiscal year.

Muted interest of foreign investors in SDLs is perhaps a reflection of inherent weaknesses of the states finances.

But what is of greater concern is that it adversely affects the pricing of these bonds at a time when states are going for higher borrowing.

Foreign portfolio investors have pointed out that their lukewarm response to state bonds is because of the lack of transparency in the way state governments conduct their financial operations.

Indeed, the manner in which state governments present their finances makes it difficult for analysis and comparison without much delay.

The central bank does come out with these numbers, but that happens after a lag of a couple of years.

This is also a big hurdle most commentators and analysts face.

There is, thus, an urgent need for a standardised format in which budget numbers could be presented by each of the 29 states without any delay.

The fact is that the combined budget size of all the states and their deficit are now bigger than those of the Centre.

The states, therefore, cannot be allowed to follow different formats for presenting their budget numbers.

The international rating agencies might soon cite this as a major drawback and this might influence their overall rating of India.

Indias rank in the World Banks ease of doing business index cannot get better unless more attention is paid to bringing about procedural reforms in the way states run their governments and provide various approvals for trade and industry.

Paying attention to improving transparency and fiscal policy norms is in many ways a federal responsibility as any neglect of these areas will impact the entire country.

The Narendra Modi government often talks about cooperative federalism.

It is time the spirit of cooperative federalism was taken to its logical conclusion by compelling the states to introduce greater transparency in their public finances and expedite their reform initiatives.

Can NITI Aayog take this up as one of its major tasks?
The keynote address will be given by United States President Donald Trump.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the opening plenary at the World Economic Forum's Davos summit next week, while the keynote address will be given by United States President Donald Trump at the annual jamboree of the global elite to be attended by 70 state heads.

Besides, 38 heads of major international organisations such as the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as also nearly 2,000 CEOs including over 100 from India will be present at the five-day WEF Annual Meeting 2018, beginning on January 22 with a welcome reception to be hosted by India.

Announcing the official programme in Geneva today, the WEF said the summit will see the largest ever engagement of global leaders this year where the key talking points would include international security, environment and the global economy.

The theme of the meeting, spread over 400 sessions, would be 'Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World', while the meeting would also see the largest ever proportion of women leaders (21 per cent) including all co-chairs being women this time including social entrepreneur Chetna Sinha from India and IMF's Christine Lagarde, the WEF said.

Modi will be accompanied by six union ministers, including Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal, Suresh Prabhu, Dharmendra Pradhan, M J Akbar and Jitendra Singh.

Besides, two chief ministers (Devendra Fadnavis and Chandrababu Naidu) and over 100 CEOs would take India's total presence to 129 -- the fourth highest after the US (780), the UK (266) and Switzerland (233 people). China will have 118 participants.

Women participants would account for 12 per cent of total Indian presence, compared to 27 per cent from the US, 24 per cent from the UK, 22 per cent from Germany, 20 per cent from Switzerland, 19 per cent for China and 18 per cent for France.

The WEF said its 48th Annual Meeting will focus on finding ways to reaffirm international cooperation on crucial shared interests, such as international security, the environment and the global economy.

The meeting comes at a time when geostrategic competition among states is generally seen to be on the rise.

Alongside international cooperation, an additional priority of the meeting will be to overcome divisions within countries, said the WEF which describes itself as an international public-private organisation focussed on improving the state of the world.

The WEF said divisions have often been caused by breakdowns in the social contract as a result of failure to protect societies from the transformational impacts of a succession of shocks, from globalisation to the proliferation of social media and the birth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

"Collectively, these shocks have caused a loss of trust in institutions and damaged the relationship between business and society," it added.

"Our world has become fractured by increasing competition between nations and deep divides within societies. Yet the sheer scale of the challenges our world faces makes concerted, collaborative and integrated action more essential than ever," WEF's Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab said.

He further said the summit aims to overcome these fault lines by reasserting shared interests among nations and securing multistakeholder commitment to renewing social contracts through inclusive growth.

This year's opening plenary will be delivered by Modi on January 23, Prime Minister of India, while Trump will deliver a keynote address before the close of the meeting on January 26, the WEF said.

This year a record number of leaders from G7 economies will participate, including Paolo Gentiloni, Prime Minister of Italy; Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission; Emmanuel Macron, President of France; Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; and Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, in addition to President Trump.

Other leaders from the G20 countries would include Liu He, Member of Political Bureau and General Director of CPC Central Committee of the People's Republic of China; Argentina President Mauricio Macri, South Africa Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Brazil President Michel Temer.

From the host country, Alain Berset, President of the Swiss Confederation, will also participate.

Overall, the summit will have over 340 top political leaders with 10 heads of state/government from Africa, nine from Middle East and North Africa and six from Latin America.

These include Ethiopia Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn, Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Nigeria Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Lebanon President Saad Al Hariri, Jordan King Abdullah II Bin Al Hussein, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Columbia President Juan Manuel Santos.

The summit will also be attended by 40 arts and culture leaders, including Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, Cate Blanchett and Elton John.

One of the key issues to be discussed would be navigating a multipolar and multiconceptual world and the balance between global cooperation and local autonomy to prevent the disintegration of the world order.

Besides, the leaders will also discuss how to overcome divisions in society and if outrage cycles in media and political rhetoric are widening societal fault lines and undermining tolerance, then what solutions can be jointly developed to restore the social compact, the WEF said.
Foreign banks were ahead in terms of technology, but that is no longer the case as Indian private banks steal the innovation march.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

Foreign banks are increasingly shrinking their presence in India and are also becoming more conservative than private and public sector counterparts.

While many of them have sold some of their businesses in India as part of their global strategy, some are trying to keep their core expertise intact.

Others are branching out to newer areas to continue business momentum.

For example, HSBC and Barclays Bank in India have got out of the retail business, whereas corporate-focused Standard Chartered Bank is now trying to increase its focus on retail.

Building a retail franchise is a huge exercise and takes a long time. You cannot afford to lose it, said Shashank Joshi, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJs head of corporate banking for India.

According to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data, foreign banks combined loan book shrunk nearly 10 per cent from Rs 3.78 trillion in fiscal 2015-16 to Rs 3.42 trillion last financial year.

The banking industry, which includes foreign banks, grew its year-on-year advances by 5.1 per cent. Private sector banks grew their loans by nearly 15 per cent.

Despite the rush of deposits after demonetisation, foreign banks deposits grew only 1.4 per cent against industry growth of 11.8 per cent.

Foreign banks are also reducing their branch count, or at least, not opening new ones as branches dont seem as relevant in the world of mobile technology.

According to the data from the RBI, the number of foreign banks reduced from 46 in 2015-16 to 44 last year, and the number of branches was down from 325 to 295 in the same period.

In addition, there were 39 representative offices of foreign banks in the country.

A classic case of contraction is HSBC Bank. After exiting its retail broking business in 2013, and private banking in 2015, in 2016, HSBC downsized the number of branches from 50 to 26.

With technology advancing rapidly, the need for branches is declining, former HSBC India chief executive officer (CEO) Stuart Milne had told Business Standard in an interview.

Prior to the credit crisis of 2008-09, foreign banks would lobby hard to have a share of the 12 branch licences that the RBI would issue every year.

While the central bank allowed foreign banks to open wholly owned subsidiaries, which would be treated on par with local banks without restrictions on branches, only two foreign banks - DBS and State Bank of Mauritius are interested.

Bankers say one of the major reasons why foreign banks dont want to expand their business in India is the huge priority sector requirement.

By 2019, all foreign banks have to give 40 per cent of their loans to the priority sector, at par with locally incorporated lenders.

At the same time, there is almost no scope for these banks to expand inorganically in India.

A banks shareholding has to be diversified in India, and no individual shareholder can hold more than 10 per cent.

There are foreign banks present in India with only a few branches, focused on providing cross-border services to corporate clients only because of this limitation.

But in other markets, these banks have extensive retail networks.

Change of stance

Foreign banks were ahead in terms of technology, but that is no longer the case as Indian private banks steal the innovation march.

Unlike public and private banks, foreign banks have always targeted the upmarket retail customer base.

For example, Citibank has a current and savings account ratio of nearly 60 per cent of its total deposit base.

But its total assets at the end of March remained unchanged at Rs 2.02 trillion.

Standard Chartered Bank, under CEO Zarin Daruwala, plans to increase the retail share to 40 per cent of the book, from 25 per cent, and for that it is building a retail franchise network and hiring an experienced team.

But these banks are exceptions, rather than the rule. Royal Bank of Scotland exited its retail business in India in 2016.

Swiss lender UBS surrendered its commercial banking license to RBI in 2013.

Barclays shut down its equity and broking business in India in early 2016, after having sold its retail business in 2011-12.

What foreign banks are doing now is focusing on their traditional core strengths.

Some banks are good in providing advisory for mergers, or in global fund raising.

Some are also large lenders to corporate groups. Most of the revenue for foreign banks come from investment and fee income.

After the credit crisis, foreign banks decided to scale down their operations everywhere for want of capital.

Retail operations also shrunk as a result, which got taken over by private sector competitors.

For a long time, foreign banks in India have been lying low. The idea was to recover as much as possible before selling things off. Frankly, survival of the parent was the underlying principle, said a senior banker with a foreign lender.

Banks incorporated in the US got out of it relatively faster, but those in Europe are still trying to get up on their feet, especially as Brexit uncertainties are on, said the banker.
Presenting the list of Top 10 most searched for travel destinations between March 2017 and February 2018.

Photograph: Vaani Kapoor and Ranveer Singh in Bekifre.

In 2017, Asian countries dominated the list of places people wanted to travel.

However, this year it seems like travellers have set their eyes on Europe.

Travel search engine Kayak, which just released their 2018 travel hacker guide, looked at the top 10 most searched for travel dates between March 2017 and February 2018, and identified the cities around the world with the greatest year-over-year increase in searches.

10. Rome, Italy -- February is the cheapest time to go there.

9. Paris, France -- January is the cheapest time to go.

8. Athens, Greece -- February is the cheapest time to go.

7. Madrid, Spain -- March is the cheapest time to go.

6. Las Vegas, Nevada -- August is the cheapest time to go.

5. Lisbon, Portugal -- February is the cheapest time to go.

4. Amsterdam, Netherlands -- January is the cheapest time to go.

3. Bali, Indonesia -- November is the cheapest time to go.

2. Barcelona, Spain -- January is the cheapest time to go.

1. Maui, Hawaii -- September is the cheapest time to go.

The research also said that the right time of booking certain destinations is crucial.

The most inexpensive period to book is 10 or 11 months ahead of travel in over half of the top destinations.
'First sold to us as a voluntary scheme for government subsidies, Aadhaar has since sprouted multiple heads and tails, horns, fangs, warts, and a nasty case of halitosis.'

'It is unacceptably intrusive, our data is hilariously unsafe, and fraud, corruption, and criminality is rampant,' says Mitali Saran.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

The new year is traditionally our chance to reflect soberly on what a big pile of doo-doo the previous year was.

It's a chance to admit that we stepped in poo, and there's nothing to do but to hose off our shoes, and resolve to step more carefully in the future.

Without the forgiveness of a fresh start we'd just have to keep congratulating ourselves on how clean our feet are while clutching handkerchiefs to our noses, which flies in the face of fact and only prolongs the stench, all because we have too much pride to admit that we misstepped, and not enough self-preservation to do something about it.

An example of this latter behaviour is the giant mess called Aadhaar, administered by the giant mess called the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

First sold to us as a voluntary scheme for government subsidies, Aadhaar has since sprouted multiple heads and tails, horns, fangs, warts, and a nasty case of halitosis.

It is unacceptably intrusive, our data is hilariously unsafe, and fraud, corruption, and criminality is rampant.

In short, Aadhaar is hurting people and violating their fundamental rights, including the right to privacy and the right to life, and also, its absurd.

For example, The Tribune discovered that for less than the cost of a bottle of fancy pants shampoo, you can access the personal details of a billion fellow citizens, including names, addresses, and phone numbers.

The Quint reported that an Aadhaar portal admin can invite anyone he or she likes to also become an admin, with the same access.

So your identity is being passed along in some huge direct marketing scheme, vulnerable to theft and fraud at every stage.

For example, the UIDAI said there was no breach, the data was safe, and they were going to prosecute the villains.

It also claims that Aadhaar numbers are not secret, even though it penalises those who share them.

Maybe the UIDAI just likes to prosecute people for no reason.

For example, if your data is erased, accidentally or not, you can suffer civic death -- officially cease to exist.

For example, the government is threatening to block our bank accounts unless they are linked to Aadhaar, even as criminals are siphoning money out of linked accounts.

For example, doctors swear a Hippocratic oath, but hospitals are refusing admissions for lack of an Aadhaar card.

For example, children are our future, but those who don't have an Aadhaar card are being denied their midday meal, and cannot take their exams.

For example, the government is obliged to feed those who cannot afford food, but several people have starved to death because they were refused rations because they didn't have Aadhaar cards, or because the biometric authentication machine did not work.

Let me repeat that: People have died because the government is violating their Constitutional right to food.

O people of India, imagine starving to death because, say, you did hard manual labour your whole life and your fingerprints have worn off.

Imagine calling this 'development', or 'rationality'. It is murder.

The UIDAI, the government, and the pom-pom waving tech businesses that are slavering to make scads of money off your data, have all stuck their fingers in their ears and are rocking back and forth going 'La-la-la-la-la-la', thus also losing sight of their own basic decency.

Dear UIDAI, government, and pom-pom waving tech businesses, it's a new year.

Admit that you've made a grotesque mess and that the whole thing stinks.

Destroy the Aadhaar database, and resolve never to perpetrate this cruel nonsense on us again.
'At this stage we are closer to military confrontation than at any time since 1971.'

'Given the known positions of the two governments, it will not be surprising if this happens sooner rather than later,' says Vice Admiral Premvir Das (retd).



IMAGE: General Bipin Rawat, Chief of Army Staff, Admiral Sunil Lanba, Chief of the Naval Staff, and Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh Dhanoa, Chief of the Air Staff, pay tribute at Amar Jawan Jyoti in New Delhi on the 70th Army Day, January 15, 2018. Photograph: Kind courtesy ADGPI/Facebook

At Prime Minister Narendra D Modi's oath-taking ceremony, leaders of South Asian countries were guests, the most notable of them being the then Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

Everyone spoke of the 'acche din' that this meeting ordained.

Relations between the two countries remained quite stable for over a year-and-a-half and Prime Minister Modi, in one of his predictably spontaneous and unplanned moves, visited Pakistan for the wedding of Mr Sharif's grand-daughter.

Everything appeared to be moving along the desired track and then came the attacks on Uri and Pathankot and the surgical strikes that followed.

Since then, more lives have been lost in Kashmir, both civilian and military, than at any corresponding time in the last two decades. Talks between the two countries remain suspended.

Militancy in the valley, both indigenous and abetted from outside, shows little sign of abating. A recent visit to a supposedly Indian spy by his wife and mother has created more acrimony and anger than if this had not taken place at all.

For all practical purposes, India sees Pakistan as a nation which can be termed an 'enemy'. All efforts made by this administration and the previous ones have failed to alter this perception.

In the recently held elections in Gujarat, the ruling BJP was seen by most as the losing side, at least until end-November, when Prime Minister Modi personally took over the campaign.

Brushing aside claims to development, the focus shifted to just two things. One, how the Congress viewed Gujaratis in general and Mr Modi in particular as inferior people.

Just when the 'chaiwala' jibe of Congressman Mani Shankar Aiyar in 2014 was getting forgotten, came the quip on 'neech', which the prime minister said was targeted at him, even as Mr Aiyar claimed it was a result of his poor knowledge of Hindi.

As if this was not enough, there came a poorly timed seminar on 'India-Pakistan Friendship' followed by a dinner hosted by -- who else? -- Mr Aiyar; present at this get-together were not only retired officials with deep knowledge of Pakistan but also a former prime minister.

This was a Godsend; the Congress party was immediately branded as inherently Pakistan-friendly, even as that country threatened our internal stability and territorial integrity.

Whether this accusation had validity is neither here nor there; the fact is that this was a Brahmastra needlessly handed over to an adversary who was fighting for the survival of his party.

That despite all this, the BJP still went below 100 speaks dramatically of what the results might have been.

But let us leave the Gujarat elections aside and focus on Pakistan.

First, we must recognise that Pakistan is geopolitically a very important country and it is very difficult for the world to wish it away.

So, to get carried away by the 'admonitions' by various American dignitaries, including President Donald J Trump, and expect it to change course in its dealings with India is hugely simplistic.

To inflict wounds on us, either through cross-border violations or through militancy and terrorism, has to be integral to any Pakistan strategy towards India.

Let us not forget that it is a country which was reduced in half by Indian military action; something which has not happened to any major country in the last six decades.

This is not a trauma that will be easily forgotten, either by the Pakistan army or political dispensations in that country.

Apart from this, Pakistan will always seek military parity with India which, frankly, it enjoys even today, given our commitments on the other border.

Add to this political support for it from China and our choices are not easy.

In short, the existing tensions are certain to continue and we will keep seeing actions from them and reactions by us, call them by whatever name.

The net result of all this is that in India, at least in the foreseeable future, Pakistan will continue to be seen as an enemy country by the great majority of people. This is the bottom line and any number of seminars and discussions will not help change this.

Therefore, for the Congress party to have talked of India-Pakistan friendship was to commit hara-kiri. That such a relationship might come about at some period of time is a different matter, but at this stage we are closer to military confrontation than at any time since 1971.

What will be its scope or duration is difficult to tell, but its possibility cannot be ruled out.

Given the known positions of the two governments, it will not be surprising if this happens sooner rather than later, and if we look at some recent pronouncements of Pakistani terror groups, the new year could be worse than the one that has gone by.

In this scenario, the bulk of the responsibility will fall upon the army, with the air force being a close adjunct. Neither is seriously superior to the adversary, and their capabilities need to be bolstered.

The navy enjoys that position, but its role in a short-duration skirmish can only be so much.

It could be argued that any military conflict, even a skirmish, might bring in nuclear weapons into play and immediate global intervention.

The first is hardly a possibility unless very serious damage is incurred by Pakistan; as for the second, then prime minister Indira Gandhi coped with a tougher environment in her days.

India's position in the world is much stronger today. This is not to suggest that military conflict is imminent, but to point out that its possibility cannot be ruled out.

Therefore, clear and credible military superiority over Pakistan is essential; this alone will impose a degree of restraint on its anti-India activities.

That country will continue to be seen in inimical terms by ordinary Indians and any school of thought that presently suggests friendship with it is doomed to failure.

It is not so much Mr Aiyar's 'neech' comment that brought the Congress grief in Gujarat as the perception that it wanted to be 'friendly' with the 'enemy'.

These are not the days to talk of India-Pak friendship.

Vice Admiral Premvir Das (retd), former Director General Defence Planning Staff, has been a member of the National Security Advisory Board.
By raising a banner of revolt against the CJI, the 4 judges have dealt a body blow to the faith of many Indians in the Supreme Court, argues Sudhir Bisht.



IMAGE: Supreme Court Justice Jasti Chelameswar, second from left, with Justice Kurien Joseph, to his right, and Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Madan B Lokur to his left at their press conference in New Delhi, January 12, 2018. Photograph: Ravi Choudhary/PTI Photo

I dashed to my room to switch on the TV after Rediff.com alerted me that the four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court -- No 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the pecking order after the Chief Justice of India -- were holding a press conference against the CJI's arbitrary way of functioning.

Two clips were being shown repeatedly on various television channels. One was of Shekhar Gupta, the eminent journalist, being signalled by Justice Jasti Chelameswar to come forward and join the group of journalists. Gupta signalled as if to say, 'It is ok, I am fine here.'

The second clip that was repeatedly shown was of Communist Party of India leader D Raja exiting Justice Chelameswar's home later.

These two images registered in my mind immediately and I must add here that they could be completely wrong. But in the world of 24x7 media, impressions carry far more weight over reality. My questions arising from them are:

1. Did the four judges seek the help of someone like Shekhar Gupta before executing their plan?

2. Was there political backing before going public on January 12, 2018?

For me, the press conference had a somewhat intriguing beginning and an undesirable postscript.

I would like to focus on the real issue raised by the judges which revolves mainly around the formation of benches by the CJI.

It is an established practice that the CJI is the sole and final master of the roster and is the only one entitled to form a bench.

In the recent past Justice Chelameswar had tried to assign this right to himself, but this was swiftly neutralised by a five-judge Constitution Bench.

The primary allegation by Justice Chelameswar and his fellow judges is that the present Chief Justice was assigning cases to benches as per his will.

This argument seems to have no merit as the eminent lawyer and former Union minister Salman Khurshid has said that the roster and bench assignment was 'largely' taken care of by a computer system.

But the four judges alleged that the formation of benches was not proper. Having leveled such a serious allegation against the CJI, it was the moral duty of the four judges to have proved their charge by giving detailed examples.

In fact, I don't understand the logic of going to the press. I feel it was very enigmatic and strange.

I had thought the Supreme Court was an assembly of 25 wise men who were the ultimate resolvers of all the conflicts plaguing our country. Now the citizens of the country have realised that the august body is itself a divided house.

How can a group of people who are at conflict with one another provide justice to others?

What did the four judges think they would achieve by going public?

Did they think impeachment proceedings would commence, forcing the CJI to resign?

Why could the four judges not have written a letter to the President of India seeking his mediation in the matter?

I know the Judiciary is independent of the Executive, but it is better to approach the Head of State and seek his help rather than wash dirty linen at a presser.

At the press conference Justice Chelameswar on one hand said the Chief Justice of India was only the 'first among equals', and on the other hand said the CJI sometimes forms a bench which doesn't take care of the seniority of judges. Isn't this an oxymoron of sorts?

On one hand you tell the CJI, 'Mr CJI, You may be the chief, but that's only a title, otherwise you and we are equals!'

And on the other you seem to be complaining, 'Look, Mr CJI, that case is an important case and it has far-reaching consequences. So you can't assign it to a bench with members who are No 10, No 13, No 16 and No 19 in seniority.'

We all know that Supreme Court judges have served as high court judges for at least five years before being elevated to the Supreme Court. Many of them have been chief justices of high courts too.

Then how is it that matters of 'far-reaching consequences' can't be allotted to judges who are not part of the Collegium system (that comprises the five senior-most Supreme Court judges)?

Justice Chelameswar and his three brother judges, in raising a banner of revolt against the CJI, have dealt a body blow to the faith of many Indians in the institution of the Supreme Court, by hinting that some benches are less qualified than other benches of the same court.

Is this what the four judges wanted to convey?

I hope the four judges will answer the questions haunting the minds of people like me.

I am glad that no political party has tried to make a killing from this press conference. Salman Khurshid's reflective mood gives me hope that politicians will let the 25 judges of the Supreme Court sort it among themselves.

Sudhir Bisht, PhD, Delhi-based author and columnist, tweets at @sudhir_bisht
In a bid to resolve their differences, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra on Tuesday met the four senior most judges of the Supreme Court who had hurled several accusations against him including on the issue of allocation of PILs of sensitive nature.

The apex court sources said the Chief Justice met the four judges -- Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, M B Lokur and Kurian Joseph -- for about 15 minutes before starting the normal work of the day.

Some other judges were also present in the meeting, the sources said.

After the meeting, the CJI and the four judges went ahead with their listed business.

Despite optimism expressed on Monday by legal bodies, the crisis in the Supreme Court over complaints against the chief justice seemed far from over.

At a press conference last week, the four judges had flagged certain problems, including the assigning of cases by the CJI, and said there were certain issues afflicting the countrys highest court.

Earlier in the day, Attorney General K K Venugopal said, I think it (crisis) has not been settled. Lets hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days.

Supreme Court Bar Association President Vikas Singh also exuded confidence that there was a likelihood of the crisis being resolved by the end of this week.

On Monday, Venugopal and Bar Council of India Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra had said the crisis has ended and there is no dispute now.

Image: Justices Kurian Joseph, Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi and Madan Lokur. Photograph: Reuters
The Manohar Lal Khattar government in Haryana has banned the release of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's controversial film Padmaavat, Health Minister Anil Vij said on Tuesday.

Vij said a decision to this effect was taken at a meeting of the state Cabinet keeping in view the sentiments of a large number of people who felt that historical facts had been "distorted" in the period drama.

The minister said that in the previous Cabinet meeting too he had demanded a ban on the film.

"In the last cabinet meeting, I had raised the issue of banning the film because of distortion of historic facts by the filmmaker," Vij said.

In that meeting, the chief minister had assured that when the censor board clears the film, a decision will be taken by the government, he added.

"In today's Cabinet meeting, I again raised the issue and said the film should be banned in Haryana keeping in view the law and order situation of the state as the film was facing stiff opposition from various quarters," Vij told reporters in Chandigarh after the meeting.

He said the entire Cabinet, which met under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Khattar, supported him after which a decision was taken to ban the release of the film in Haryana.

"Film Padmavati/Padmavat banned in Haryana (sic) ," the senior cabinet minister had tweeted earlier.

Significantly, the film, which stars Deepika Padukone, Shahid Kapoor and Ranveer Singh in lead roles, had faced opposition from various quarters including from the Rajput community.

Vij had earlier said that he would not allow the movie to be screened in the state.

He had alleged that Bhansali had wrongly presented historical facts in the movie to "defame" the image of Rani Padmavati which had hurt the sentiments of lakhs of people.

"Rani Padmavati is the symbol of Indian women' pride. The character assassination of Padmavati will not be tolerated at any level," he had said earlier. Industry and Commerce Minister in the Khattar cabinet, Vipul Goel had also expressed concerns over the film.

The film, mired in controversy over its plot line, had been given the go-ahead by the Central Board of Film Certification, which asked the makers to change the title from Padmavati to Padmaavat and suggested some other modifications.

The movie is set for release on January 25.
Authorities in California have said that they rescued 13 malnourished siblings from a home in Perris, about 70 miles east of Los Angeles. Some of them were even allegedly chained to beds.

Police made the discovery after one of the captives, a 17-year-old girl, escaped over the weekend and notified the Riverside Sheriffs Department that her siblings were being held captive inside the residence by her parents, reports the Independent.

Initially, officials believed the slightly emaciated teenager was only 10 years old. They confronted a horrific scene at her home, according to a press release.

Further investigation revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, but the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner, the department said.

The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty, the department said.

Not all of them were children: of the 13 victims, seven were between the age of 18 and 29, according to the Sheriffs Department.

The childrens parents, David Allen Turpin and Louise Anna Turpin, were arrested and each charged with nine counts of torture and 10 counts of child endangerment. Furthermore, a bail was set at $9 million (Rs 57 crore).

-- With inputs from ANI
A central team wants to know if Sri Lankan Tamils want to return to their country.

Rediff.com's A Ganesh Nadar reports from the Mandapam refugee camp.

A two-member central team visited the refugee camp in Mandapam, Ramanathapuram district, Tamil Nadu, to find out if the Sri Lankan Tamils want to go back to their country nine years after the civil war that devastated the island-nation ended.

The Mandapam camp, which houses 850 refugees, is the receiving camp for those coming from Sri Lanka before being sent to other camps in Tamil Nadu.

A notification said the objective behind the central team's visit was 'to know about the facilities being given to the refugees, and their wishes and requirements to go back to their country'.

The central team comprised Prasanthajith Dev, director for refugee rehabilitation at the home ministry, and Satheesh Kumar, secretary for rehabilitation, apart from Tamil Nadu government officials.

"They did not meet all of us, but met only those who wanted to meet them," one Sri Lankan Tamil refugee tells me. "They asked about the facilities here and we said we are happy."

"Most of us are happy here and don't want to go back. Some want to go back and they informed the central team that they are willing to go back."

"I have been here for 20 years now, I don't know what awaits us there (in Sri Lanka)," confides a Sri Lankan Tamil who wants to go home.

"I want to take all my things as setting up house is not easy," the man adds. "They should start a ferry service so we can take our things. By air we can only take our clothes. In that case I will have to leave everything here or sell it at a throwaway price."

A ferry service from Tuticorin to Sri Lanka was launched in June 2011, but it was shut down five months later by then chief minister J Jayalalithaa citing security concerns.

"OfERR (Organisation for Eelam Refugees Rehabilitation which works among the refugees) volunteers are canvassing the refugees to go back, but everyone is not willing to," adds a third Sri Lankan Tamil.

"My mother came here with me and my sister 25 years ago after we lost our father in Sri Lanka," a young woman tells me.

"All my life I have been here, so I don't want to go back ever," she declares. "My sister is married to another Lankan Tamil. I also want to get married and settle down here."

Over 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees are spread across Tamil Nadu, with at least one camp in each district.

These Sri Lankan Tamils live under the watchful eye of the Tamil Nadu police's 'Q' branch, which is why none of those I speak to reveal their names.

Since these Sri Lankan Tamils have lived in India for many years, some observers feel they should be granted Indian citizenship.

Maintaining the refugee camps and sustaining the refugees, they feel, is an unnecessary burden on the government.

Kindly note: The photograph of the Mandapam camp has been published only for representational purposes. Photograph: A Ganesh Nadar/Rediff.com
Returning to the place where he was orphaned nine years ago in a terror attack, 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg on Tuesday appeared bewildered with the media frenzy as cameras popped to catch his glimpse.

IMAGE: Moshe at the Nariman House where he lost his parents. Photograph: Courtesy Chabad House

Moshe, who was a toddler when Pakistan-based terrorists killed his parents at Nariman House, appeared visibly moved as he spent almost two hours going around the five-storeyed building in south Mumbai.

The Israeli resident had kosher food at Nariman House.

IMAGE: Moshe was only two when terrorists killed his parents at Mumbai's Jewish house. Photograph: Courtesy Chabad House

His grandparents and two uncles, who accompanied him from Israel, were with him during his Nariman House visit.

Moshe's Indian nanny Sandra Samuels, who had saved him during the terror attack, was also present.

IMAGE: Moshe's Indian nanny Sandra Samuels had saved the child during the terror attack. The wounds of the deadly attack can be seen on the wall behind Sandra. Photograph: Courtesy Chabad House

His father Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and mother Rivka were killed in Nariman House, which was a terror target during the 26/11 Mumbai attack in 2008.

The Jewish couple ran a cultural and outreach centre for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement at the Nariman House in South Mumbai's Colaba area.

IMAGE: Moshe with Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, who runs Chabad House. Photograph: Courtesy Chabad House

"The visit to Nariman House was an emotional experience for Moshe," his grandfather Shimon Rosenberg said.

During Moshe's visit to Nariman House, there was a large gathering of members of the Jewish community, police, security personnel and media around the building, whose entry was restricted.

IMAGE: Moshe -- then 'Baby Moshe' became a face of the innocent victims of ruthless terrorism -- poses with his grandparents. Photograph: Courtesy Chabad House

Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, who runs the Chabad House, said, "Finally, Moshe is back home. The visit is very emotional for him. He is here to see the living memorial project".

Last year, Rosenberg had requested the Indian ambassador to Israel that the Nariman House building be registered with the land registry department as belonging to Moshe.

WATCH: 'We are very excited about the visit of Baby Moshe'

In the video, Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, who represents Chabad Mumbai, speaks to the media about 26/11 survivor Moshe Holtzberg's return to India and to the home in Colaba where his parents Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who were slain in 2008.

Moshe, who landed here this morning from Israel, went to the iconic Taj hotel in Colaba, and then proceeded to Nariman House.

"Shalom...bahut khushi (I'm very happy)," said a shy Moshe, speaking to media at the Mumbai airport.

IMAGE: After arriving in Mumbai, Moshe visited Taj Hotel in Colaba, in Mumbai. Photograph: PTI Photo

"I feel very happy to come to India, to Nariman House where I am going to pray. I will say hi to the people of India. I feel very good in this country," Rosenberg said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met Moshe and his grandparents during a visit to Israel in July last and told him that he could visit India anytime.

While meeting Modi, Moshe had said, "I remember our connection to Nariman House. I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai and when I get older, live there".
There will be no subsidy for Haj from this year and the funds saved will be used for providing education to minorities, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said on Tuesday, while projecting the move as an effort by the government to "empower minorities" without appeasement.

The minister also said a record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage this year from India despite the subsidy withdrawal.

"There will be no subsidy on Haj now," he told reporters, adding that the government had spent over Rs 250 crore last year on subsidising the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Saudi Arabia.

The decision is in line with a 2012 Supreme Court order, asking the government to do away with the subsidy, a long standing demand of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The BJP had cited the subsidy as an example of "Muslim appeasement" by parties such as the Congress.

Following the order, the subsidy was being gradually reduced every year.

"It is part of the Modi government's efforts to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi said.

The funds would be utilised for providing education to minorities, he said.

Asked if the subsidy withdrawal will make the cost of the pilgrimage too high for many Muslims, Naqvi said the government was making efforts to bring it down.

The Saudi Arabian government has agreed to allow Indians to go on Haj by the sea route and officials of the two countries will work out the modalities, he said.

Naqvi said his ministry is also organising an event in Lucknow on January 18 in which he and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will speak on "empowering minorities without appeasement" with the help of central schemes.

Minority affairs ministers of nine states will also attend the event, he added.

Reacting cautiously to the government's decision, the Congress said it hopes that the Modi government will honour the apex court's direction and utilise this money for the education and development of the disempowered among the minorities, including young girls.

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board said the government's decision on revoking Haj subsidy has no meaning as there was no such concession and Muslims were being cheated in its name.

All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi said the subsidy had to be stopped, since it was a Supreme Court judgement.

"But it is important to see where the funds saved will be utilised. Will they increase allocation of funds for scholarships to Muslim girls.

"The verdict is around the corner. Let's see if government makes a separate allocation for funds to scholarships to Muslims, especially girls," he said.

Welcoming the Centre's decision, the Vishva Hindu Parishad said the money saved from it should be utilised for the education of poor Hindu girls.

The Left parties -- the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the CPI -- refrained from commenting on the development.

Various Muslim organsiations said that the move will have little effect on the pilgrimage as it was airlines that were benefiting from the subsidy.

It will not have much effect because the subsidy was meant for Air India and not for the pilgrims, said Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind president Kari Mohammad Usman.

All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, a federation of Muslim outfits, said that the government should end all kinds of subsidies given for religious purposes.

AIMMM president Naved Hamid demanded that the government should float a global tender so that the Haj pilgrims could avail cost-effective travel.

According to sources in the minority affairs ministry, till 2017, the notional savings following gradual abolition of subsidy since 2012 was to tune of Rs 636.56 crore. In case, the government had chosen to reduce the subsidy gradually till 2022, the total national savings would have have been around Rs 5970.6 crore, the sources said.

Haj pilgrims from certain regions will have an additional option to choose from where they want to fly to Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage, Naqvi said and claimed that this would bring down the cost by up to 70 per cent on some routes.

There are a total of 21 Haj embarkation points in the country -- Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Cochin, Indore, Srinagar, Bhopal, Guwahati, Mangaluru, Aurangabad, Varanasi, Jaipur, Nagpur, Ranchi, Gaya, Ahmedabad and Goa.

Haj aspirants -- for whom the 10 airports of Srinagar, Guwahati, Ranchi, Gaya, Indore, Bhopal, Mangaluru, Goa, Aurangabad and Varanasi are the nearest EPs -- will now get an additional economical option to fly from.

The pilgrims from Jammu and Kashmir, whose nearest EP is Srinagar, can opt to travel from Delhi now, helping them save on (per head) airfare. In 2017, the airfare for the pilgrimage from Srinagar was Rs 1,09,692 as against Rs 73,697 from Delhi.

The airfare for Haj 2018 may vary, ministry sources said.

Similarly, aspirants whose basic EPs are Guwahati, Ranchi and Gaya will have the alternative of undertaking the journey from Kolkata. Those having Indore, Bhopal, Goa and Aurangabad as the nearest airports, can opt for flying from Mumbai.

Those with Varanasi as the basic airport can choose Lucknow as their optional embarkation point while those with Mangaluru as their EP will have the option of Bengaluru.

Embarkation point once selected cannot be changed later on as tendering will be done accordingly, the sources said.

Naqvi also cited a host of measures, such as providing jobs and job opportunities to 8.5 lakh minority youth and scholarships to 1.83 crore students, to claim that the BJP-led NDA government has been working to empower minorities.

His ministry is entrusted with welfare measures for minorities that include Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Zoroastrians (Parsis), Buddhists and Jains.

Naqvi, the lone Muslim cabinet minister in the government, also claimed that his ministry had succeeded in helping a lot of youths in getting employment by training them as GST facilitators.

Image: Muslim pilgrims pray around the holy Kaaba at the Grand Mosque ahead of the annual haj pilgrimage in Mecca. Photograph: Ahmad Masood/Reuters
The government's decision on revoking Haj subsidy has no meaning as there was no such concession and Muslims were being cheated in its name, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board said on Tuesday.

"The subsidy was not given to those going on Haj but it was for Air India that is running in losses. It was an eyewash. Muslims were cheated in the name of the subsidy," AIMPLB General Secretary Maulana Wali Rahmani said.

"In normal days, tickets for Saudi Arabia come for Rs 32,000 but during Haj, Air India used to charge Rs 65,000 to Rs 1 lakh from those going for Haj. The fare will be less without subsidy," he said.

"Haj-bound Muslims are bulk purchasers of Air India tickets and so their fare should be less. It's rule of International Air Transport Association that if anyone is going for pilgrimage, he will be given 40 per cent discount.

If the fare is not less, it should at least the same as on normal days," he said.

All India Shia Personal Law Board Chairman Yasoob Abbas, on the other hand, said the board favoured subsidy on Haj.

"The government used to give subsidy to reduce loss of Air India. If the amount is now spent on education of Muslim children, it will be good but the poor who used to go to Haj will not do so now," he said.

Samajwadi Party spokesman Rajendra Chowdhury said that Haj subsidy should not be revoked completely and facilities for those going for the annual pilgrimage should be increased.

The Congress said that it hopes the Modi government will utilise the money for the upliftment of the disempowered among the minorities.

Congress Communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said the Supreme Court bench headed by Justice A Aftab Alam had in 2012 directed the abolition of the Haj subsidy.

"Supreme Court bench headed by J Aftab Alam had directed abolition of Haj subsidy within 10 years in May 2012 besides asking for utilisation of money for education and upliftment of minorities.

"We sincerely hope that Modi Government will honour the SC direction and utilise this money for the disempowered including -- Modern education to children, especially young girls from minority community...," he tweeted.

Surjewala also hoped that the government would provide special incentives for higher education, including in medical, engineering and other services, besides ensuring skill development of the children of the minority community.

He also urged the government to make provisions for helping the destitute women among the minorities, including those who have been widowed, abandoned or divorced, and make other provisions for the upliftment and social development of the minority community.

Earlier in the day, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi announced in Delhi that there will be no subsidy for Haj from this year and said the move was part of the government's efforts to "empower minorities" without appeasement.

A record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage this year from India, he said, adding the government had spent over Rs 250 crore last year on subsidising the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Saudi Arabia.

The decision is in line with a 2012 Supreme Court order, asking the government to do away with the subsidy, which had long been sought by the BJP.

The BJP had cited the subsidy as an example of "Muslim appeasement" by parties such as the Congress.
Rabble-rouser Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Pravin Togadia on Tuesday created a storm with his claim that there was a plot to get him killed in an encounter by the police of Gujarat and Rajasthan, states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, setting off calls by the Congress for an inquiry into his allegation.

Togadia, who is convalescing in a hospital in Ahmedabad after having gone missing for some time on Monday and found "unconscious", told journalists that some people were trying to stifle his voice and not allowed to speak on issues like Ram temple, farmers' issues and cow slaughter.

The Ahmedabad police, however, dismissed Togadia's claim that he could have been killed in a fake encounter, saying it is nearly impossible to eliminate someone who has 'Z-plus' security.

It also disputed Togadia's claim that he had fallen unconscious, suggesting the entire episode was staged.

A VHP statement had claimed that Togadia, who had low blood sugar levels, was found lying in an unconscious state at a park in Shahibaug and was taken to Chandramani Hospital.

"Yesterday morning, I was performing pooja, when messages came that a large contingent of Rajasthan Police, along with Gujarat Police, was coming to encounter me (kill me in an encounter)," a teary eyed Togadia claimed.

"After informing my security guards, I, along with a VHP worker, took an auto-rickshaw, and went to Theltej area of the city. I called up Rajasthan chief minister (Vasundhara Raje) and home minister (Gulabchand Kataria) but they denied their police had come to Gujarat to arrest me. This raised more suspicion and I switched off my mobile phones," he said.

Togadia, a 'Z plus' category protectee, and one of the most vocal Muslim baiters in organisations linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, said he then contacted his lawyers in Rajasthan to get the warrant against him issued in an old case cancelled.

On being told that it cannot be done, Togadia said he decided to take a flight to Jaipur and appear before the court in Gangapur. He claimed when he was on way to the airport on an auto-rickshaw, he felt dizzy, and asked the driver to take him to a hospital. Togadia claimed he then fell unsconscious, and on regaining consciousness, found himself in a hospital.

A team of Rajasthan Police had approached their Gujarat counterparts for help to execute an arrest warrant against Togadia under section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the IPC, but could not find him at his residence.

"I do not fear death, I do not fear encounter. But I had to protect myself while following the law of the land," he said.

"I have been raising my voice for Hindus. I am raising issues like Ram temple, national law to ban cow slaughter, resettlement of Kashmiri Hindus in that state, giving farmers fair price for their crops. But an attempt is being made to silence my voice," he said.

Speaking to reporters, Joint Commissioner of Police, Crime Branch, J K Bhatt said investigation revealed that Togadia was conscious -- contrary to his account that he became unconscious -- on his way to airport. He reached a spot near the airport in a car owned by his aide Ghanshyam Charandas, who then called a '108' ambulance.

"Z-plus is one of the best security cover, as you get a pilot vehicle, a bulletproof vehicle and inspector-level armed personnel having AK-47 rifles. So it is nearly impossible to get killed in an encounter. It (Togadia's apprehension) is just a figment of imagination," Bhatt said.

The Congress, a known ideological foe of the BJP-RSS, and its Gujarat ally Hardik Patel rushed to the Chandramani Hospital to inquire after Togadia's condition.

"The ruling dispensations in Rajasthan and Gujarat have engaged in fake encounters even earlier. Togadia's apprehension is not without a reason," senior Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia said.

"An internal wrestling is going on in the BJP where attempts are being made to finish off the opponents," Modhwadia said, and sought an "independent and court-monitored" probe into the allegations levelled by Togadia, who was marginalised in Gujarat's Hindutva politics after Narendra Modi became the chief minister in 2002.

Patidar quota agitation leader Hardik Patel also met Togadia separately. Patel, who backed the Congress in the recent Assembly elections in Gujarat, pointed fingers at Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah over claims made by Togadia.

"Rights of common people are being snatched away. We (he and Togadia) can have different 'mat' (ideology) but our 'mann' (heart) is one. We all know what kind of conspiracies are being hatched by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. I don't know about Hindus, but a leader of a Hindu organisation is definitely in danger now," he said.

Though the BJP did not react to Togadia's claims, veteran RSS leader M G Vaidya said only the VHP leader can reveal who was behind the alletged plot to eliminate him.

"Togadia has said he will provide evidence (to show who was behind the conspiracy). We should wait till then," Vaidya said in Nagpur.

"Only Togadia can reveal who was behind the conspiracy to kill him," Vaidya said, wondering how someone with Z-plus security can be eliminated in an encounter.

Image: VHP international working president Pravin Togadia during a press conference at Chandramani Hospital in Ahmedabad. Photograph: Santosh Hirlekar/PTI Photo
Hours after being untraceable from Ahmedabad in the morning, Vishwa Hindu Parishad international working president Pravin Togadia was found in an unconscious state in Shahibaug area of the city on Monday night and was rushed to a hospital.

The VHP leader, a Z Plus category protectee, went missing after stepping out of the VHP headquarters in Paldi area of the city when a contingent of Rajasthan Police came to arrest him in an old case.

According to a statement issued by the VHP in Delhi, Togadia, 62, who suffered from low blood sugar levels, was found in an unconscious state in Shahibaug and was taken to Chandramani Hospital located in the same area.

Gujarat VHP general secretary Ranchod Bharward said here that Togadia was traced, but didnt disclose where he was found.

Togadia was brought to the hospital by someone in the 108 ambulance service. He was in an unconscious state, said Dr. Rupkumar Agrawal at the hospital.

He said Togadia became unconscious as his sugar level had dipped, but was stable now.

He is stable now. He was unconscious as his sugar level had dipped... he is stable now, Dr. Agrawal said.

Shahibaug is around 12 kilometre away from the Paldi office of the VHP.

The city police formed four teams to locate the Hindutva leader after he went missing from the VHP office on Monday morning.

VHP spokesperson Jay Shah said, Togadia was brought to the hospital by somebody in an 108 ambulance.

As the word spread, hundreds of VHP workers rushed to the hospital.

The VHP had earlier claimed Togadia was detained by the Rajasthan Police in connection with the case, but the latter denied this.

The mystery over Togadias disappearance had deepened, with a senior police officer maintaining that neither the local Sola police nor the Rajasthan Police arrested him.

Sola police station officials said a team of Rajasthan Police visited them on Monday to execute an arrest warrant against Togadia under section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the IPC, but could not find him at his residence.

According to a senior Crime Branch officer, Togadia, a resident of Thaltej area in the city, boarded an auto-rickshaw from the VHP headquarters in Paldi area on Monday morning and has been untraceable since.

Addressing a press conference, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) J K Bhatt said neither the Sola police nor the Gangapur police in Rajasthan have arrested Togadia.

The Rajasthan Police went to Togadias residence in Thaltej area with the Sola Police to execute an arrest warrant (around 10:45 am) this morning. But, Togadia was not found there. However, VHP workers thought that he was arrested, which is not true, Bhatt told reporters.

The officer said Togadia was present at the VHP state headquarters in Paldi area of the city since Sunday night.

He left the office in an auto-rickshaw with a bearded man around 10:45 am today, said Bhatt.

A State Reserve Police jawan, who was deployed outside the VHP office, told us that Togadia and a bearded man called an auto-rickshaw and left the office at around 10:45 am. Before leaving, Togadia told the security staff the he will be back within 30 minutes. We have formed four teams to trace him, the JCP said.

Earlier in the day, VHP spokesperson Jay Shah claimed that Togadia was detained by the Rajasthan Police in an old case.

Rajasthan Police had denied having detained or arrested Togadia.

Togadia was not at all arrested by our team. As per my information, the police team of Gangapur (in Rajasthan) is returning without executing the arrest warrant, as he (Togadia) was not found in Ahmedabad. It is a rumour that Togadia is in our custody which is not true at all, said Inspector General of Police, Bharatpur range, Alok Kumar Vashishtha had said.

Gangapur town is in Sawai Madhopur district of Rajasthan and falls under the jurisdiction of Bharatpur range of the state police.

Around 4 pm, a group of 40 workers of the VHP laid a siege to Sola police station and shouted slogans for the release of their working president.

Later, another group of VHP workers blocked the busy Sarkhej-Gandhinagar highway, but police broke up the protest. Similar protests were held in Paldi area and in Surat city during evening.

In Paldi, VHP workers had blocked roads and damaged some buses.

The situation was brought under control after police rushed to the spot.
Despite being hailed as one of Indias most progressive and most developed states, Maharashtra is witnessing the fallout of lopsided progress, observes Sunil Gatade

IMAGE: Members of the Dalit community shout slogans as they block a highway during protests in Mumbai during the Maharashtra bandh on January 3. Photograph: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

There are no straight answers to exactly what happened at Koregaon Bhima on New Years day, hailed as shaurya divas by Dalits for the valour of their ancestors in the Anglo-Maratha war 200 years ago that put an end to Peshwa rule.

An incident took place, detail unclear, at nearby Vadu Budruk where the samadhi of Sambhaji is located. It led to stone throwing, near-rioting and sit-ins that engulfed large parts of Maharashtra, including the state capital, in the first week of the new year.



Now, its become a cocktail -- Dalits vs Marathas, Dalits vs Brahmins, Dalits vs ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and within the BJP, the chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, vs others. It is also clear that with the impending Lok Sabha and assembly elections, everyone is trying to extract the maximum out of this muddle.

Opposition parties are blaming Hindutva fringe elements for the incidents that brought Ambedkarite youth on the warpath; the BJP is targeting outside forces, an apparent reference to Jignesh Mewani, a Dalit leader from Gujarat, who addressed the massive rally there.

While the police, initially caught unawares, brought the situation quickly under control there, the fallout started elsewhere -- in parts of Mumbai, Pune, and Aurangabad. It was followed by a call for a Maharashtra bandh by Prakash Ambedkar, one of the original rally organisers and grandson of the late B R Ambedkar, which was a success.





Fadnavis happens to be a Brahmin. It was said at the rally that the fight now is against the neo-Peshwas, a reference to both him and the prime minister. Peshwa Bajirao II, also a Brahmin, defeated at the battle of Koregaon Bhima which helped bring the British East India Company to full power in India, was the PM of the then tottering Maratha empire.



The protests have led to Prakash Ambedkar being treated as the Dalit voice in the state. A development the BJP can ill-afford, as it dents its social engineering platform under which it made another Dalit voice, Ramdas Athawale, not only an MP but a Union minister.



Maharashtra is changing fast. Despite being hailed as one of Indias most progressive and most developed states, it is witnessing the fallout of lopsided progress. It also has the dubious distinction of being a state reporting a large number of suicides by farmers.

The demand for reservation by the dominant Marathas is indicative of the plight of sections of various communities that have failed to become part of the technological society. The fault lines are at a time when Dalits are not happy over Marathas demands for reservation, fearing it might lead to encroachment on their rights.

The Marathas are also for scrapping the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, saying its been misused in the state. Silent marches taken out by Marathas over the state, with big participation and from leaders of various hues, has also alarmed others, including Dalits and Other Backward Classes about the intentions of this community.



With 48 Lok Sabha seats, Maharashtra is politically an important state in the country. The emergence of Narendra Modi has propelled the BJP, for long a laggard in state politics, to centre-stage. And, pushing to secondary status the Shiv Sena, so far treated as its elder brother in Maharashtra. It is no secret that the sulking Sena is playing the role of the opposition while sharing power.

Bhima Koregaon is near Pune and part of prosperous western Maharashtra, where the BJP has made deep inroads in what was once the bastion of Sharad Pawars Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress.

With the Congress giving the BJP a run for its money on Modis home turf of Gujarat, if Muslims, Dalits and some others join hands, it could be a formidable combination all over. In the 1998 Lok Sabha polls, Maharashtra had seen a Dalit-Muslim-Maratha combine, leading to the Congress and its allies bagging 42 out of 48 seats.



Police firing at Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar in Mumbai in 1997 in which 10 Dalits were killed had seen the community up in arms against the then Sena-BJP government. The caste pot has again been stirred in Maharashtra. How the government stems the effects needs to be watched.
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.
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John Shearer for GettyAfter close to a year of preparation, Dierks Bentleys signature honky tonk is now open in downtown Nashville.

Thomas Rhett, Cole Swindell, Jon Pardi, Kelsea Ballerini, Maren Morris, Brothers Osborne, LANCO, Lauren Alaina, Maddie & Tae, Ryan Hurd and more all turned out Sunday night to welcome Dierks new bar to the Music City scene.

Its really a full-circle moment for me to be opening Whiskey Row on this street, Dierks said. When I first moved to Nashville, Broadway was my second home..."

"I was the first artist to be hired and fired from The Stage, he revealed, mentioning a competing venue. Its surreal to think that now I can just jump in my truck and run over here anytime, and that it might possibly be a place where new artists could get their start.

Dierks and his famous friends turned the night into a tribute to the country classics of the nineties: TR did his dad Rhett Akins hit That Aint My Truck, while Maren covered Deana Carters Strawberry Wine. Brothers Osborne tackled Alan Jacksons Chattahoochie, before Dierks returned with Lauren Alaina and LANCOs Brandon Lancaster to do Brooks & Dunns Brand New Man.

The three-story historic building on Nashvilles Lower Broadway boasts the highest rooftop bar among the famed stretch of honky tonks.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Sam Rainsy, former president of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) who has lived in exile since 2015, on Jan. 14 in Houston, Texas unveiled to supporters his plan to launch the Cambodia National Rescue Movement (CNRM) as a way around the governments ban on his opposition party. The CNRM concept was rejected out of hand by the government in Cambodia, where courts on Tuesday ordered Sam Rainsy to pay National Assembly President Heng Samrin $60,000 over a defamation charge. Vuthy Huot of RFAs Khmer Service spoke to Sam Rainsy about the CNRM scheme.

RFA: What is your purpose in forming the so-called Cambodia National Rescue Movement?

Sam Rainsy: (We formed the CNRM) in order to carry out our mission, which is to rescue the nation, through another form and that is through a movement. Each of us shall take part in the mission to rescue our nation by any form. Yet we are of the opinion that, in the meantime, the movement formula is the best formula to attain our objective in 2018.

RFA: Does this mean that it will not suffice to use the existing organizational structure of the CNRP framework? You and CNRP officials have always mentioned that the dissolution of the CNRP only exists on paper and that the CNRP remains alive. Why dont you use the existing mechanism of the CNRP and why do you find it necessary to form this new movement?

Sam Rainsy: In reality, we must acknowledge that CNRP supporters and activists in Cambodia are facing difficulties. They find it hard [to carry out their activities]. They are really concerned. They get lost and get confused about the future of the party. This is because of the fact that following the arrest and jailing of the party president Kem Sokha and following the dissolution of the CNRP, the theft of the CNRP parliamentarian and councilor seats, we find it hard to work. We have since repeatedly faced all kinds of persecution, intimidation, and threats. We must acknowledge that some of our supporters and activists have had to take refuge by leaving their village or commune/sangkat. Some have to take refuge in Thailand. So it is very hard to communicate with one another. This is without mentioning the 55 leaders of the CNRP, the 25 members of the CNRP Permanent Committee. They all find it hard to meet with one another. They even dare not to make any decision as their president is in jail while two deputy presidents are taking refuge overseas. Another deputy president, Pol Ham, is in Cambodia and he dares not to do anything or speak out. So if we are waiting for the party via its organizational structure to make any decision or to seek advice from Kem Sokha who is in jail  Kem Sokha dare not say anything. He is under all kinds of great pressure from [authorities] as we can see. Therefore, we have to overcome this very challenge that we cannot do anything. We must come up with a formula and the formula that we think is the best choice is the Cambodia National Rescue Movement.

RFA: I still dont understand clearly. You mentioned that the CNRP is facing several issues already. To what extent can the newly formed movement help facilitate its work?

Sam Rainsy: This can help a great deal, because a movement is a new framework with which we can carry out our activities without anyone daring to take action against us. Our movement cannot be dissolved. Not even on paper! We dont have to register our name or request authorization from any authorities so that government ministries can monitor us. Not at all. A movement is broad and is flexible by necessity. Hence, with such a movement, we can gather more support than through the party framework. For instance, civil society, members of non-governmental organizations, human rights organizations, land issues organizations, environmental organizations, journalists, and others cannot take part in any political party. But they can join with a broader movement with concrete goals. Our utmost purpose is to demand the release of Kem Sokha and all political prisoners. Also, we demand the return of civil rights and freedom  namely freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, or freedom to hold demonstrations. There should not be any crackdown against our citizens like what they are experiencing at the moment. More importantly, we demand free, fair and just elections. Such elections absolutely must have the participation of the CNRP. All of us can make such demand. It is not merely the task of a political party. It is the promotion of democracy in Cambodia and the protection of civil rights and freedom. Therefore, through this movement formula, we are opening up extensively. I believe, and I have noticed, that there are many people from several walks of life which in the past were not supporting the CNRP, but now they are supporting the CNRM.

RFA: You mentioned that there is interest in the CNRM from outsiders. You also mentioned that this movement will also open to civil society organizations and other networks to join. Up to now, can you elaborate a bit the name of these organizations that have shown signs of interest in joining this movement?

Sam Rainsy: I am afraid I cannot disclose it now and that I must not specify any organizations now. We will announce the formal formation of the CNRM in late January. Then we will see the presence of those who are joining our movement. They will show up by themselves or they will send us petitions with their names and signatures. It will be more conspicuous then, rather than disclosing (supporters) one by one. We will stage an event to celebrate the official formation of this movement.

RFA: Will this movement replace the CNRP in campaigning with the international community to put pressure directly against Prime Minister Hun Sens government and his officials? Or will the CNRP continue to carry out its campaign with the international community?

Sam Rainsy: If there are any leaders of the CNRP who can carry out activities in order to push for the release of Kem Sokha and demand proper elections, they can do it. We can do it concurrently and there would be nothing wrong with that. Yet I trust that within the new framework as a movement, we enjoy full rights and freedom. We will have leaders who are free and are not being incarcerated. We dont need to wait for a command from anyone, not knowing who exactly is entitled to make decisions or from whom to receive advice.

RFA: Arent you afraid that the international community will find it confusing, not knowing whether to communicate with the CNRP or the CNRM? What would you do to ensure that the international community can recognize the CNRM?

Sam Rainsy: They will examine the movements legitimacy and representation of the citizens. The [movement] will be valued so long as it represents citizens at large in ways that can be noticed. We will see at least half of the CNRP lawmakers support this new movement. And we dont need to have support from all the CNRP lawmakers, because I understand that some of them still fear carrying out activities with the CNRP or the CNRM. So these individuals can remain quiet. But for those who dare to come out, they must come out to represent themselves with the CNRM. This also includes CNRP councilors since they all enjoy legitimacy to represent citizens who voted for them. These people can come out to support the movement. They will give legitimacy to the CNRM.

Translated by Sovannarith Keo.
Confusion surrounded the status of Liu Xia, widow of late Nobel laureate and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo, on Tuesday following a report that she had been cleared by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to leave the country.



The Australian newspaper reported that Liu "will be allowed to leave China," citing online posts by close friend and outspoken journalist Gao Yu.



"[Gao] has posted online that the authorities had agreed to release Ms. Liu, as long as she did not create any issues for them in the meantime," the paper reported.



The report followed a tweet from Pin Ho, editor of New York-based Chinese news magazine Mingjing News, who wrote: "I am hearing that Liu Xia has already been informed by the Chinese foreign ministry that she will get her normal level of freedom back, and that she will be allowed to leave the country."



But fellow Beijing rights activist Hu Jia said there were no indications that Liu Xia is indeed free to leave China, as reported.



"There are no indications that any certainty of commitment will be made, not from Liu Xia or her brother Liu Hui, nor from any of the diplomatic missions in China that have been involved in trying to free Liu Xia," Hu told RFA on Tuesday. "There is no commitment that she will be able to go to a Western country, or that she will be able to leave the country at all."



Meanwhile, Liu Xia's defense attorney Mo Shaoping declined to comment on the rumors, saying only: "I haven't been able to confirm this with Liu Xia."



Concerns have been mounting for Liu after she described herself in a recent note as being shut up in an apartment, "talking to myself and lying here like a dead thing," a hand-scrawled note posted by a friend to Twitter has revealed.



Liu, who has committed no crime, but who has been under tight surveillance or house arrest since her husband's Nobel prize was announced in October 2010, suffers from a number of mental and physical health problems.



Activists have repeatedly called on the ruling Chinese Communist Party to allow her to go overseas and seek medical treatment, and Liu herself has repeatedly requested permission to leave China.



Sourcing unreliable



Germany-based author Liao Yiwu said Ho's sources are unlikely to be reliable.



"[He] doesn't have any really reliable source for this," Liao said. "I haven't heard anything about it, although people are continuing to work [for it to happen], and there has been no real progress."



"Physically, her health has seen a slight improvement, but her depression is still very severe."



Guangdong-based writer Ye Du, who is also a close friend of Liu's, said he would like to be able to believe the reports.



"On an emotional level, it would be wonderful for Liu Xia if this story were true," Ye said. "But rationally speaking, I don't think it is reliable. The foreign ministry would never contact Liu Xia directly; it would be people like the state security police; it doesn't make sense in terms of the way the party and the government operate."



And in Hong Kong, the Information Center for Human Rights and the Democracy Movement in China said in a statement that it had contacted Liu Xia to try to corroborate the reports.



"She just said 'I don't know, I don't know,' and then 'there's been no change from before,'" the group said in a statement on Tuesday.



Incommunicado detention



Rights groups say Liu Xia remains in a state of de facto incommunicado detention, cut off from the outside world and barred from making her own free decisions about where to go, or whom to associate with.



Liu Xiaobo died last July, weeks after being diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer, and after repeated requests from his family to seek medical treatment overseas were ignored.



Police have since detained a number of activists who staged memorials in his honor, and his name is still a banned search term on China's tightly controlled internet.



Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Wen Yuqing for the Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
People walking past advertising as they cross the Chinese border from the city of Shenzhen into Hong Kong, Sept. 6, 2017 .

Falling numbers of new residents in Hong Kong are now able to speak the city's lingua franca, Cantonese, amid warnings that a growing emphasis on Mandarin could threaten the city's indigenous culture.

Around 166,000 thousand "new Hong Kongers" were listed on the city's 2016 census, which indicates residents who were born across the internal immigration border in China, but who became resident in the city within the previous seven years, the city's census and statistics department said in a new analysis of the data.

While inward migration from China fell slightly compared with the previous census in 2006, mainland Chinese citizens settling in Hong Kong are now better educated than in the past, and fewer of them said they could speak Cantonese, one of the city's official Chinese languages.

Cantonese is the "usual spoken language" for more than 91 percent of the city's population in 2016, but was spoken by just under 70 percent of inward migrants from China, the report found.

"I have lived in Hong Kong for more than 20 years, and my feeling is that the status of Cantonese is changing in favor of Mandarin," resident Chen Yang told RFA. "When I had just moved to Hong Kong, Mandarin was looked down on as the language of a hick from the sticks, a closed society."

Now, as China flexes its muscles and deploys growing international "soft power," it's Beijing's money that talks, Chen says.

"It's economics that decides the status of a language," Chen said. "I don't think this has anything to do with politics."

Social activist Sze Lai-shan, who heads the Society for Community Organization, said many of those who indicated they couldn't speak Cantonese in the census data are the spouses of businessmen who initially settled in neighboring Guangzhou, then sent for their wives to join them from elsewhere in China.

"A lot of them come from other provinces in China," Sze said. "In the past, about 80 percent of new Hong Kongers hailed from Guangzhou [where Cantonese is also spoken.] Nowadays, only about 60 percent of them do."

The scenario is still far from that imagined in the independent Hong Kong movie 10 Years, which envisages a dystopian future dominated by the ruling Chinese Communist Party where Cantonese is outlawed in favor of Mandarin, mainland China's national language.

But it has still sparked fears among local commentators, who say the city's traditional freedoms and way of life are already increasingly vulnerable amid growing political influence from Beijing, and point to the rise of Mandarin within the city's education system.

Campaign group Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis reported earlier this year that more than 70 percent of the city's primary schools have classes that use Mandarin as a teaching medium.

Gradual shift since 1997

In a recent commentary broadcast on RFA's Cantonese Service, political commentator Lam Kei said the shift away from Cantonese in Hong Kong's education system has been gradually accelerating ever since the 1997 handover to Chinese rule.

While the city's government talked up "mother-tongue medium education," shortly after the handover, Lam said, the plan hadn't been popular, as it left fluent Cantonese speakers ill-equipped to pursue degrees in Hong Kong's English-medium colleges and universities.

"Hong Kong is discovering, just like Guangzhou and Shenzhen a few years ago, that it is the last bastion of Cantonese, and that [the language] is heading towards extinction," Lam wrote.

Instead of "mother-tongue education," there has been an increasing focus on Mandarin as a language of instruction from schools, which have been offered huge financial incentives to teach Mandarin by Hong Kong's own government.

"Politicization is inevitable, because the teaching materials and textbooks come from mainland China," Lam wrote. "They are taking the opportunity to turn Mandarin teaching into brainwashing sessions."

"This will create favorable conditions for the destruction of Hong Kong's Cantonese culture," Lam said.

He said the growing popularity of Mandarin in Hong Kong schools is no accident.

"The Chinese Communist Party is trying to fundamentally change the thinking of the younger generation in Hong Kong," Lam warned.

In 2010, thousands of people took to the streets of Guangzhou to protest government plans to reduce Cantonese-language broadcasting in the city ahead of the Asian Games

The movement to "protect Cantonese" had its roots in social media, participants said, quickly becoming a trending topic on microblogging services like Twitter and on the QQ chat network.

Activists said at the time that the protest was about respecting the rights of a linguistic minority to preserve their language and culture, as enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Generally, television stations in China are required to use Mandarin, but Guangzhou TV was given special approval in the 1980s to broadcast in Cantonese to attract viewers from neighboring Hong Kong and Macau, which were still under British and Portuguese rule, respectively.

Reported by Fok Leung-kiu and Ma Lap-hak for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
The freedoms guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong in its mini-constitution, the Basic Law, have been increasingly eroded after two decades of Chinese rule, according to a recent report by a U.K.-based human rights group.



In Hong Kong, the rule of law is under pressure, human rights are undermined, and the city appears no closer to democracy [and] the situation appears likely to worsen in the coming years unless the people of Hong Kong and international governments unify to protect the rights of those living there, a report penned for the rights NGO Hong Kong Watch by former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown said.



Citing the rule of law in the city as a key concern, the report said that while judges are still independent, the same cant be said for government officials in charge of the judiciary.



The independence of officials at the Department for Justice is in doubt, which has led to questions being raised about the threat to the rule of law in Hong Kong, Ashdown wrote in a report on human rights in the city after two decades of Chinese rule. This must be monitored closely.



The report found that Hong Kongs democracy has been further damaged by the recent changes to the rules of the Legislative Council [LegCo], which will limit the ability of the minority pan-democratic opposition to properly scrutinize and question legislation.



The anti-filibustering measures undermine the ability of the pro-democracy opposition in Hong Kong to properly fulfill their mandate, and therefore undermine the democratic process in Hong Kong, the report said.



It said the changes come as Beijing and Hong Kong officials have said they will push through unpopular legislation governing such notions as treason and subversion, legislation that the report said has the potential to breach human rights.



Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam hit out at the report, saying it was inappropriate for a member of the U.K. parliament to make such remarks, which were totally unfounded and unfair.



"I take great exception to the comments and conclusions in that report, Lam told reporters. Those comments are totally unfounded and unfair," Lam said.



Standing up for Hong Kong

She rejected suggestions that Beijings central liaison office in the city had been interfering in its internal affairs.



"Quite on the contrary, the central peoples government has been fully backing and supporting Hong Kong," Lam said. "In order to better integrate into the national development, we do need a lot more liaison  and this sort of liaison will help Hong Kong," she said.



But Democratic Party chairman Wu Chi-wai said Lams job should be to stand up for Hong Kong.



I think Carrie Lam is full of mainland Chinese fervor for [President] Xi Jinping right now, Wu said. She has a duty to make a proper response [to the report], not to stand up for China by saying others cant comment on our internal affairs.



The bilateral Sino-British Joint Declaration treaty signed in 1984 by then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, set out how Britain would end its century-and-a-half long rule over Hong Kong, and how China would govern the city using the "one country, two systems" principle thereafter.



But President Xi Jinping shrugged the treaty off during handover anniversary celebrations last year, saying it is a historical document that no longer has any practical significance,



Recently, a string of legal interventions by China's parliament, as well as the cross-border detentions of five Hong Kong booksellers and the expulsion from LegCo of six pan democratic lawmakers, have heightened concerns that Hong Kongs promised high degree of autonomy may now be a thing of the past.



Hong Kong Watch was founded by a U.K. ruling Conservative Party human rights activist after he was refused entry to the city in October, amid apparent concerns that he would visit three jailed democracy activists in the former British colony.



Benedict Rogers, deputy chair of the party's human rights commission, was taken aside by Hong Kong immigration officers and put back aboard a plane to Thailand, where he had come from, prompting calls from London for an explanation. None has yet been forthcoming.



Reported by Lam Kwok-lap for RFAs Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.


The Marriott International Hotels' website and app in China were shut down for listing Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as "countries" in a customer questionnaire.

China has reprimanded a number of multinational companies over "ignorance and lack of sensitivity" after they referred to Taiwan -- a democratic island that has never known communist rule but which is nonetheless claimed by Beijing -- as a separate country.

Warnings were also issued to companies over inaccurate references to Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau, all of which fall within internationally recognized boundaries of the People's Republic of China.

Last week, Beijing's Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) demanded that Delta Airlines immediately correct its website listing the Tibet Autonomous Region and Taiwan as "countries."

It called for an "immediate and public apology."

Marriott International Hotels' website and app in China were later shut down for listing Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as "countries" in a customer questionnaire.

"Foreign companies operating in China have displayed their bias, ignorance and lack of sensitivity when it comes to understanding China's sovereignty," the Global Times newspaper, which has close links to ruling Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, said in an opinion article.

International fashion chain Zara was also reprimanded; the country menu on its website appeared to have been edited on Monday to read "mainland China" and "Taiwan." An earlier version available on Google cache had simply read "China" and "Taiwan."

The Global Times said China is "insist[ing] proper respect be paid to the country's inherent and lawful territories."

Taiwan was a Japanese colony during the 50 years prior to the end of World War II, but was handed back to the nationalist Kuomintang government of the pre-communist Republic of China as part of Tokyo's post-war reparation deal.

De facto self rule

The KMT government relocated entirely to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong's communists on the mainland, but Beijing still regards the island as part of Chinese territory and has threatened to invade if Taiwan seeks formal independence.

The island's President Tsai Ing-wen swept to victory in 2016 on the back of broad political support for de facto self-rule, where the majority of voters identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.

Taiwan began a transition to democracy following the death of KMT President Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, in January 1988, starting with direct elections to the legislature in the early 1990s and culminating in the first direct election of President Lee Teng-hui in 1996.

Professor Liou To-hai, a professor of diplomacy at Taiwan's Chengchih University, said the companies involved had no role in such political matters, however.

"They are commercial concerns, and they shouldn't get involved with politics," Liou said. "The information needs to be accurate enough to ensure correct logistics and convenience; but they shouldn't have to worry about such political sensitivities."

Foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Tibet were all part of China.

"The companies that come to China should respect Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity, abide by Chinas laws, and respect the feelings of the Chinese people," Lu told a regular news briefing on Friday.

"This is the minimum requirement of any company going to another country to carry out business and investment," he said.

Reported by Gao Feng for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie
Bangladeshi and Myanmar officials have agreed to return hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to Myanmar from refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh preferably within two years of beginning their repatriation, the two sides said Tuesday, without specifying when the process would begin.



Following its first round of meetings on Jan. 15-16 in Myanmars capital Naypyidaw, a 30-member joint working group (JWG) led by Bangladeshs foreign secretary Shahidul Haque and Myanmars permanent secretary Myint Thu finalized the text of an arrangement to facilitate the return of Rohingyas from Bangladesh, according to a statement by Bangladeshs Foreign Ministry.



The Physical Arrangement stipulates that the repatriation would be completed preferably within 02 (two) years from the commencement of repatriation, the statement said, without providing a starting date for the process.



Under the agreement, Bangladesh will repatriate the Rohingyas through five transit camps to two reception centers in Myanmar, which will shelter the returnees in a temporary accommodation and expeditiously rebuild the houses to resettle them.



In the meantime, Myanmar will consider resettling the people staying at the zero line on a priority basis, and reiterated its commitment to stop outflow of Myanmar residents to Bangladesh.



The arrangement will also allow for the repatriation of orphans and children born out of unwarranted incidence, according to the statement, which Reuters news agency said referred to pregnancies that occurred as the result of rape, citing a Bangladesh foreign ministry official who declined to be identified.



Interviews with refugees suggest the rape of Rohingya women by Myanmar's security forces was widespread, although the military denies it was involved in any sexual assaults.



The first round of meetings came days before the Jan. 22 scheduled deadline for the first 100,000 refugees to start returning to their home state of Rakhine. Both countries have touted the process as a voluntary one, by which refugees could choose to stay in Bangladesh or go back to Rakhine.



Despite agreeing in November to begin the repatriation process later this month, the two countries have not established the necessary protocol for the first batch of refugees to return.



Start date unclear



Myint Kyaing, Myanmars permanent secretary of the Ministry of Labor, Immigration, and Population, told RFAs Myanmar Service Tuesday that government staff were mostly in position to begin the process of accepting refugees, adding that buildings and other necessary items are ready.



He noted that the refugees include orphans, which he said Myanmar will accept if their parents really lived in Rakhine state, based on comparisons between his governments data and court documents from Bangladesh.



Myanmars state media reported Monday that a 124-acre camp in Hla Po Khaungthe nations first repatriation facilitywill hold around 30,000 people in 625 buildings, and that at least 100 buildings will be completed by the end of the month.



Bangladeshs state minister for foreign affairs Shahriar Alam told reporters Tuesday he could not give an exact start date for the repatriation, but said it should begin by late January or early February.



The 100,000 refugees targeted for the first wave of repatriation are among about 1 million Rohingyas sheltering at cramped and squalid refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, who fled cycles of violence in neighboring Rakhine state.



These refugees include at least 655,000 Rohingyas who crossed into Bangladesh since late August 2017 amid a brutal military crackdown that followed attacks on government security posts by Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) insurgents. Refugees have accused soldiers of committing random killings, rape, and arson in their villages.



Tuesdays arrangement does not allow for the return of an estimated 200,000 Rohingyas who fled to Bangladesh to avoid communal violence and military operations prior to October 2016.



UNHCR concerns



UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, underscored the importance of ensuring that the protection of refugees is guaranteed in Bangladesh and on return in Myanmar in a statement Tuesday, and said it was willing to assist in the process.



In any refugee situation, UNHCR hopes that refugees will be able to return home when they themselves choose to, the agency said.



Before considering return to Myanmar, some Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have informed UNHCR staff that they would need to see positive developments in relation to their legal status and citizenship, the security situation in Rakhine State, and their ability to enjoy basic rights back home.



Rohingyas are not recognized as an ethnic group in Myanmar and are ineligible for citizenship and accompanying rights under the countrys Citizenship Law. According to the government, Rohingyas must first obtain national verification cards before they can be granted a status according to the law, such as guest citizens or people who can apply for citizenship.



UNHCR called on both sides to ensure that refugees are informed about the situation in their areas of origin and potential return and consulted on their wishes; that their safety is ensured throughout  and that the environment in the areas of return is conducive for safe and sustainable return.



The agency urged Myanmars government to grant it unhindered access in Rakhine state, in order to assess the situation, provide support to those in need, and to help with rebuilding efforts.



Myanmar has strictly limited access by international agencies and media to the conflict zone in Rakhine.



Local fears



Meanwhile, officials from government-aligned groups observing the situation in Rakhine state mostly addressed the concerns of the regions majority Rakhine ethnic group when speaking with RFA about the refugee repatriation on Tuesday.



Al-Haj U Aye Lwin, a Muslim leader in Myanmar and a member of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, welcomed Tuesdays agreement and Myanmars pledge to return [refugees] to their homes and improve their living standards, although he acknowledged that the process could be difficult.



[The refugees] have endured trauma, and local ethnic groups also fear more problems with themit is reasonable for both communities to have concerns, he said.



He said that many Muslims never left and instead built trust with local ethnic groups, while it was unclear whether those who fled Myanmar did so because of imagined fear or legitimate threats.



He also questioned the role of NGOs in assisting with the repatriation, saying that each side has organizations and individuals who both help and incite them.



Aung Tun Thet, the chief coordinator of Myanmars Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development (UEHRD), said the repatriation process will be handled with extreme scrutiny to address local fears.



The authorities keep saying that the refugees will be sent to their old homes, but they will first be sent to a place where they are verified  and only then will we try to send them homeas much as possible, he said.



It is very important to check if there are any terrorists among the people who come back from Bangladesh. We have heard the concerns of local ethnic groups and we must consider them in the process.



Reported by Thinn Thiri, Nay Rein Kyaw and Kyaw Kyaw Aung for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
A court in north-central Vietnams Nghe An province on Tuesday upheld a five-year prison term for jailed blogger Nguyen Van Oai, rejecting his appeal and returning him to jail, Vietnamese sources said.



Oai. 36, had been sentenced in September 2017 to five years, with an additional four years to be served under house arrest, after allegedly violating the terms of his probation after serving an earlier prison term for attempting to overthrow Vietnams government under Article 79 of the countrys penal code.



Article 79 is one of a number of vague statutes that authorities often use to detain writers and bloggers who criticize the countrys communist government and its policies.



Speaking to RFAs Vietnamese Service following Tuesdays court hearing, defense attorney Ha Huy Son said that Oais sentence had been imposed for violating the terms of his probation, for which he received a two-year term, and for acting against persons on duty, for which he was sentenced to three years.



That verdict was unfair and not objective, though, Son said, adding, I told the court that he is not guilty.



Also speaking to RFA, Oais mother Nguyen Thi Lieu said that Oai at his trial last year had not pleaded guilty to the charges made against him.



My child is innocent, and the court was unjust, Lieu said. They should hold another trial.



Oai looked thin and appeared to be in poor health at his appearance in court on Tuesday, said Oais wife Linh Chau, who along with Oais mother was one of the two relatives allowed to attend the hearing.



He was also sometimes prevented from expressing his thoughts, she said.



Two of the witnesses who spoke at his hearing were the police officers Oai was accused of resisting when they came to arrest him on Jan. 19, 2017 for violating the terms of his probation, Chau said.



Both Oai and his lawyer considered this unreasonable, she said.



Oai is a patriot and is not guilty, Chau said. He simply raised his voice for freedom in his country.



Supporters beaten, banners torn away



Supporters outside the court building on Tuesday were beaten by police, with banners calling for Oais release ripped from their hands, some of those present told RFA.



At around 10:30 a.m., some plainclothes men attacked the crowd and snatched the banners from Oais relatives, one protester said, speaking on condition of anonymity.



One guy named Thong was beaten by thugs in civilian clothes, who then grabbed him and dragged him into a car. Someone named Huynh was also arrested, and some women who tried to intervene were beaten too, he said.



Ho Huy Thong, 16, and Nguyen Van Huynh, 17, were struck repeatedly with batons by police during their arrest and at the police station, the two men told RFA following their release.



When I was put in the car, they hit me 15 to 16 times in the head, and when I refused to answer their questions later at the police station, they hit me on the hands another five to six times, Thong said.



Accused by police of recording the protest on his mobile phone, Thong was forced to kneel facing the wall and was then beaten again, he said.



After being forced into a car, Huynh was also beaten, he said.



One man held me down by my neck, while two others jumped and stomped on my back. Another man hit me with his elbow, and another man slapped my face,Huynh said. My shoulders and spine still hurt.



Police upset by cameras



Police were especially angered by supporters attempts to record the protest on their phone cameras, another protester, Nguyen Thi Huong, told RFA.



They took our phones away and tore down our banners, he said, adding, Most of them were in civilian clothes, but a few were in police uniform.



As a member of the outlawed Viet Tan pro-democracy group and cofounder of the Association of Catholic Former Prisoners of Conscience, Oai had frequently campaigned against social injustice on his Facebook page.



In August 2011, he was among a group of 14 Catholic and Protestant youths arrested as part of a crackdown on activists with ties to religious organizations.



Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Emily Peyman. Written in English by Richard Finney.
With harassment prevention receiving needed attention, employers may take their eye off making sure that their compensation house is in legal order in 2018.

Virtually all organizations, including nonprofits, are governed by the Fair Labor Standards Act, a law passed in 1938.

The FLSA is outdated and complicated, as it is a 20th century law trying to fit into a 21st century workplace. Employers need to navigate through the counterintuitive legal obligations to avoid substantial legal penalties that can result from violations.

Studies show that most employers are out of compliance with one or more provisions of the FLSA.

Start the year by making sure exempt employees are properly classified, and then making sure non-exempt employees are paid properly.

Here are five steps every employer should take this year to get their FLSA house in order:

1. Properly classify your employees: Too often employers wrongly classify employees as exempt from overtime, believing that paying a salary can make a person exempt, or that all office workers are exempt professionals.

The law only permits certain workers to be exempt from overtime, and the criteria is significantly more complex than most employers realize.

The criteria: administrative, professional, executive, highly compensated, computer, outside sales and the like have titles that sound like they would fit certain workers, but the definitions behind these titles arent what you think.

Employers can visit DOL.gov for fact sheets explaining the criteria. Employers should carefully evaluate any employee making less than $50,000 to verify if that individual performs exempt duties.

2. Pay for all hours worked: Employers too often permit non-exempt employees to record only scheduled hours, not working time.

Employers cannot follow the theory that it all works out in the end.

Non-exempt employees must be paid at time and a half of their regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 hours in a workweek. All working time  including certain travel time, training time and after hours work to include responding to emails and text messages - must be counted to determine if overtime is necessary.

3. Compensatory time off is not permitted: The law permits public sector employees to accumulate compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay, but it does not permit private sector employers to provide comp time in lieu of overtime pay.

This means that even if the employee and employer agree that in lieu of overtime this week, the employee can take time off in a subsequent week - this arrangement is not legal.

4. Breaks and meal periods must be adhered to. The act does not require that employers provide employees with breaks or meal periods, and Virginia has no law requiring them.

If an employer provides for meal and break periods, however, the FLSA places strict requirements on pay.

For example, a non-exempt employee who takes a break lasting 20 minutes or less must be compensated.

I worked with an employer who was requiring employees to clock out every time the employee took a five-minute personal call or went on social media. This is not legal. The employer can require that employees not engage in personal business during working time, but short breaks during the work day must be compensated.

5. Lunch periods require that the employee be fully relieved of duty: Meal periods of 30 minutes or more need not be compensated, but the employee cannot be interrupted during this period, nor can the employee be engaged to wait (for instance, sitting at the reception desk).

If an employee does not receive a full 30 minutes or more of uninterrupted time, the meal period needs to be compensated.

Employers should avoid a system where employees automatically record a set meal period each day, even when it is not taken. The employee should record actual time away during the meal period.
In March 2007, Michael Swanson was overjoyed when told that after more than a half-dozen tries, he finally had been granted parole. He called his mother with the news.

Less than a week later, however, the Virginia Department of Corrections notified him that it had determined he was not eligible for parole and that he was not going anywhere. Once again, he telephoned his mother, who had prepared his room and was planning a welcome-home meal.

Mae Hall, 74, of Talbott, Tenn., remembers the call well. She said last week, I answered the phone. He said, Mom, and as soon as he said, Mom, I knew he was going to give me bad news. I just about died with him.

For the most part, offenders like Swanson who were convicted of crimes that occurred before Jan. 1, 1995, remain eligible for parole in Virginia. Parole ended for crimes committed on or after that date.

But as reported in a 2008 Richmond Times-Dispatch story, roughly 500 otherwise parole-eligible inmates like Swanson were barred from early release because of a 1982 law intended to protect the public from dangerous repeat criminals.

Interest in the now-36-year-old law was renewed by a recent detailed report on problems with it that appeared in The Virginian-Pilot. The Virginia Parole Board has a new policy that is expected to help restore eligibility to many offenders like Swanson, and a bill pending in the General Assembly could turn the policy into law.

The bill would amend what has been dubbed the three-time-loser or three-strikes law, under which inmates convicted of three separate murders, rapes or robberies  or any combination of the three  involving deadly weapons, could be stripped of parole eligibility if the offenses were not part of a common act, transaction or scheme.

It was left to employees of the Virginia Department of Corrections to determine if an inmate is ineligible for parole under the law, not a judge or appointed or elected official. A provision was later added allowing an inmate to appeal to the Virginia Parole Board, which, if it chooses, can review cases and restore eligibility if warranted.

Helen Fahey, the parole board chairwoman in 2008, said at the time that before an inmate is released on parole, the Department of Corrections audits the inmates records.

Occasionally, they determine that their initial determination was incorrect, she said.

Unfortunately, in Swansons case, it determined he was ineligible after he was granted parole.

In 2015, the Governors Commission on Parole Review concluded in its final report, Under the Three Strikes Law, many offenders were declared ineligible for parole who allegedly did not commit the requisite three offenses.

The commission recommended that the parole board, the Department of Corrections and the Virginia Attorney Generals Office review the then-289 inmates held ineligible for parole to make sure they had been properly designated.

The Department of Corrections said last week that there are still 260 such inmates in Virginia prisons.

Parts of the law are open to interpretation. As it had been interpreted by the Department of Corrections, three separate robberies could result in parole ineligibility even if there had been no arrest and conviction until after the third crime was committed.

The amendment proposed by state Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, would require that there was a conviction, some incarceration or other legal sanction between each crime in order for it to count as a strike.

Adrianne Bennett, appointed to the board in 2015 and made chairwoman last year, said, Addressing the issues surrounding three strikes was made known to me from day one as a priority of the McAuliffe administration.

Bennett said three-strike statutes are recidivist statutes.

A recidivist is a convicted criminal who commits new crimes. Laws aimed at them are meant to protect the public from criminals who have been locked up or convicted of serious crimes but who have not learned their lesson and committed new crimes.

If there is no legal interruption between convictions, the offender is not a recidivist, Bennett said. In short, the Parole Board (now) uses its authority to apply this statute to matters that are appealed to us in the same manner that all other recidivist statutes are applied by courts, Bennett said.

Previously, there was no requirement for a prior arrest or conviction in order for a subsequent crime to count as a strike.

Swanson appealed his case to the parole board in 2007, arguing that two of the three robberies he participated in were of the same person, committed the same way within weeks of each other and, therefore, constituted a common scheme.

The parole board at the time disagreed and he was not released until February 2012, when the parole law in effect when he committed his crimes required him to be released.

Bennett said that once the parole board determines a previously ineligible inmate is eligible, that does not mean parole will be granted. Such inmates must still go through the regular parole process, which Bennett said is grounded in public safety and victim impact.

Lisa Kinney, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Corrections, said, We did a broad search through the offender population and sent letters to 260 potentially affected offenders giving them a fresh opportunity to appeal to the Parole Board in light of the Parole Boards change in Three Strikes policy.

The change sought in the Surovell amendment would have the effect of writing the parole boards policy on three strikes offenders into the law, Bennett said.

Swanson is no longer under any parole or state supervision. Reached briefly by telephone last week, he said, Im doing pretty good.

But, he added, if he had been released in 2007, when he was first deemed suitable for parole  instead of his mandatory release five years later  it would have made a positive difference.

It would have been huge, he said.

His mother said, Just that short five years was a lifetime for me.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day meant school was closed Monday, but the cafeteria at George Wythe High School in Richmond was busy with volunteers paying tribute to the slain civil rights leader.

Students, parents and community leaders  with help from an expert couponer  provided lunch, haircuts and health screenings to members of the South Side community as a way of giving back. The MLK Community Day at George Wythe was hosted by the Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker Educational Foundation and For the Love of Others, an organization started by Lauren Puryear to help others through her hobby of extreme couponing.

We need to inspire people and show that every day should be Martin Luther King Day, said Patrick Sapini, the vice chairman of the Richmond School Board and a board member of the Walker foundation. You can do good things for other people every day.

Volunteers made bagged lunches for an estimated 250 people. The total cost: about $15.

Puryear, of Woodbridge, was taught the importance of giving back by her grandmother when she was growing up in Paterson, N.J. The creation of Puryears organization in 2012 was prompted by the death of her grandmother.

It was instilled in me at a young age that I can make a difference in the community, she said.

The 30-year-old came to Richmond to study at Virginia Union University. When she moved to Northern Virginia, the discrepancy in the lives of wealthy and poor people upset her. She went to homeless people in her community and asked what they needed. Their response? Food.

Feeding the large crowds of homeless people became expensive, though, so when she was introduced to couponing, she thought it would be a good way to feed the people she cared about. She created a goal: Deliver 30,000 meals by the time she reached 30.

Her 30th birthday came in September  and, to date, her organization has fed more than 68,000 people.

Puryears most trusted source of coupons is the Sunday newspaper. She also uses digital advertisements and coupons from grocery stores themselves, she said.

When shes not couponing, the mental health clinician and cancer survivor is the director of a homeless shelter in Arlington County.

With the help of the Walker foundation, she was able to assist members of her alma maters community on Monday. The two groups teamed up last year as well, delivering food, but this year they opted to keep the meals and other services all in one place.

Whatever youre good at, use it for the betterment of other people, Puryear said about having other services. No matter your situation, you can still spread love.

Ryan Bell, the executive director of the Walker foundation, said its important to show children the value of giving back.

The true message of Dr. King is serving, he said. Its about community service. Its about what goes on in the background.

The lunches featured a sandwich, chips and iced tea. Children decorated the outside of the bags with inspirational messages, with some paying tribute to King.

Puryear said she hopes the MLK Community Day will become an annual event.
A federal prosecutor in Roanoke accused of attempting to pay off a defense witness in a drug case has fired back that the charge is baseless and was made in an attempt to influence the jury.

Earlier this month, John L. Brownlee, the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia now representing a physician charged in a 70-count indictment, asked that the charges be dismissed, accusing Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennie L.M. Waering of prosecutorial misconduct.

The allegations were reported in newspapers and other media. The U.S. attorneys office in Roanoke declined to comment last week noting it has until Friday to formally respond.

But last week, in a filing concerning jury questionnaires, Waering asked U.S. District Judge Elizabeth K. Dillon that no questionnaires be sent to prospective jurors ahead of time with specifics about the case. She cautioned that could lead some of them to Google the case to see what it is about.

With the recent baseless and factually inaccurate pleading filed by the defense, and its resulting premature widespread media coverage, potential jurors could be improperly influenced by false information, Waering wrote.

She added, Given the inflammatory nature of the allegations in the pleading, the misstatements in the pleading, the naming of the prosecutor in the pleading, and the fact that the United States has until January 19, 2018, to respond to that filing, the United States believes that the pleading, combined with the questionnaire is specifically designed by the defense to influence the jury pool against the United States. Therefore, the United States opposes any juror questionnaire in this case.

If it is decided a questionnaire should be sent out, Waering argued that, The United States believes that, because of the inflammatory pleading filed by the defense, all references to the case, the name of the defendant, and the names of the representatives should be removed. This would include removing the style of the case on the instruction page.

Frank Purpera, the owner of the Virginia Vein Institute, was indicted Dec. 14 on 68 charges of obtaining controlled substances by fraud; failing to keep proper records; and making false statements.

Brownlee has alleged that on Jan. 3, Waering called a Radford physician, Dr. Charles Judy, whom she knew treated Purperas wife, and told Judy that Purpera was a liar, asked him to serve as a government witness and offered to pay him for his testimony.

Brownlees motion to dismiss the indictment contends that Judy is the central exculpatory fact witness for the defense and that the prosecutors attempt to corrupt Dr. Judy is grievous misconduct.
Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe told a radio station in Richmond that the city of Charlottesville is to blame for what happened Aug. 12.

In an interview with Matt Demlein at Newsradio 1140 WRVA, McAuliffe said the state should have been in control on Aug. 12 and that he wished Charlottesville had never given the permit for the Unite the Right rally in the first place.

We clearly, at the state, knew exactly what was happening, he said. The FBI and the [Department of Homeland Security] had been briefing us for quite a while and we passed all of it on to the city of Charlottesville.

Unite the Right was billed as a rally in support of the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park. While it was scheduled to begin at noon, it fell quickly into chaos as white nationalist groups entered the park hours earlier and ralliers and counter-protesters clashed. An unlawful assembly was declared by late morning.

That afternoon, area resident Heather Heyer was killed near the corner of Fourth and Water streets after a car drove into a group of counter-protesters. Later in the day, two Virginia State Police troopers died when their helicopter, which had hovered over the rally for much of the day, crashed in Albemarle County. Authorities determined that the helicopter crash was an accident.

In the radio interview, McAuliffe said the state had asked the city to move the rally for a long time.

They never should have given the permit in Emancipation Park, that park is just too small, he said. The key to controlling a protest is to keep the two sides as far apart as you can.

City Councilor and then-Mayor Mike Signer said the council was advised by its attorneys that any denial of the permit would have been struck down in court.

Moreover, three troopers from the Virginia State Police met with council in closed session on August 3, Signer said in an email Monday. They had access to intelligence from the state-level fusion center. But they failed to provide us with any evidence that could have met the credible legal threat standard of specific planned violence that would in turn have enabled the city to deny the event.

McAuliffe said he sent nearly 1,000 state police personnel to Charlottesville, and that current unified command laws need to be examined.

I think we need to look at that, I think if were committing the most law enforcement we, the state, if were doing that, we should make the final decisions, he said.

He said the city finally at the last minute filed to move it and then the ACLU filed a lawsuit.

Unfortunately, the judge ruled with the ACLU against us, McAuliffe said.

On Aug. 7, Charlottesville officials announced that they would only grant a permit for the rally if the event was relocated from Emancipation Park to McIntire Park due to the projected size of the rally. Organizer Jason Kessler, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and the Rutherford Institute, was successful in petitioning a federal court to keep the event at Emancipation Park.

A motion for an injunction was granted on Aug. 11; a judge said he did so because testimony indicated that Kessler could successfully prove that the city revoked his original permit based on his ideas.

McAuliffe has made similar comments to NPR and WTOP regarding how the city handled the Aug. 12 rally, state control of the rallies and the ACLU lawsuit.

The ACLU of Virginias executive director, Claire G. Gastanaga, issued a statement in August about the comments directed at her organization.

The ACLU of Virginia does not support violence. We do not support Nazis. We support the Constitution and laws of the United States, she said in the statement. We would be eager to work with the governor and the attorney general on efforts to ensure that public officials understand their rights and obligations under the law.

She said they asked the city to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and ensure peoples safety at the protest, and that it failed to do so.

Rather than seeking to scapegoat the ACLU of Virginia and the Rutherford Institute for the devastating events on Saturday, it is my firm hope and desire that the governor and other state and local officials will learn from this past weekend how constitutionally to prevent events like the horror we saw in Charlottesville from ever happening again, Gastanaga said in August.

A report by former federal prosecutor Tim Heaphy, with the law firm Hunton & Williams, was highly critical of both city and state officials at various levels on Aug. 12, including that they failed to adequately prepare for the rally, train officers and to effectively communicate during the rally.

Another report commissioned by the state focused on local permitting regulations and how state and local officials prepared for the rally, but did not go into as much detail as the Hunton & Williams report.
Whats happening today?

The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association holds an 11 a.m. news conference in the Senate Briefing Room at the Pocahontas Building.

Felony larceny threshold bill advances in Senate

Members of a Senate committee on Monday approved raising the felony threshold for property crimes, but not as high as the Northam administration wants.

Currently, larceny above $200 is a felony. Members of the Senate Courts of Justice Committee voted 12-3 to advance Senate Bill 105 from Sen. David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke County, which raises the threshold to $500.

Brian Moran, Virginia secretary for Public Safety and Homeland Security, said the administration of Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam wants the threshold raised to $1,000, which would still put Virginia in the middle of the pack in comparison with other states. Retail merchants groups opposed any change in the existing law. The Virginia Association of Commonwealths Attorneys supported the change to $500.

Charlottesville to blame for violent rally, McAuliffe says

Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe told a radio station in Richmond on Monday that the city of Charlottesville is to blame for what happened during the violent Aug. 12 rally.

In an interview with Matt Demlein at Newsradio 1140 WRVA, McAuliffe said the state should have been in control on Aug. 12 and that he wished Charlottesville had never given the permit for the Unite the Right rally in the first place.

We clearly, at the state, knew exactly what was happening, he said. The FBI and the (Department of Homeland Security) had been briefing us for quite a while, and we passed all of it on to the city of Charlottesville.

Unite the Right was billed as a rally in support of the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park. While it was scheduled to begin at noon, it fell quickly into chaos as white nationalist groups entered the park hours earlier and ralliers and counterprotesters clashed. An unlawful assembly was declared by late morning.

That afternoon, area resident Heather Heyer was killed after a car drove into a group of counterprotesters. Later in the day, two Virginia State Police troopers died when their helicopter, which had hovered over the rally for much of the day, crashed in Albemarle County. Authorities determined that the helicopter crash was an accident.

City Councilor and then-Mayor Mike Signer said the council was advised by its attorneys that any denial of the permit would have been struck down in court.

Moreover, three troopers from the Virginia State Police met with council in closed session on August 3, Signer said in an email Monday. They had access to intelligence from the state-level fusion center. But they failed to provide us with any evidence that could have met the credible legal threat standard of specific planned violence that would in turn have enabled the city to deny the event.

Senate commerce panel spikes minimum wage hike

A $15-an-hour minimum wage, one of the policy goals of Gov. Ralph Northam, was spiked Monday at the hands of the GOP-controlled Senate Commerce and Labor Committee.

Sen. Rosalyn Dance, D-Petersburg, filed a bill to raise the minimum wage in Virginia from $7.25 to $15 by 2020. Her bill was merged with another bill and then killed by an 11-3 vote.
Del. Dawn Adams, D-Richmond, said Monday that she intends to keep her job at a state agency while serving in the General Assembly, despite a legally murky rule laid out in the state Constitution that says no person holding a salaried office under the government of the Commonwealth may serve in the legislature.

Adams is on unpaid leave from her job as director of the Office of Integrated Health in the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, but she said in an interview Monday that she will return to the job after the 60-day legislative session. An out-of-office reply set up at her government email address indicated she will be back to work on March 19, about a week after the legislatures March 10 adjournment date.

In an interview, Adams said that when she began her winning campaign against former Del. Manoli Loupassi, a Richmond Republican, she initially believed she would have to give up her state job if she won. After narrowly defeating Loupassi last year, Adams said she and her department investigated the legal technicalities and determined she could stay. After seeking guidance from state human resources officials and the Attorney Generals Office, Adams said, a determination was made that theres precedent for a state employee being in the legislature.

Everything is above board, Adams said.

Though theres a long history of Virginia lawmakers also holding teaching posts at public colleges, others who made the jump from the state workforce to the legislature have opted to give up their day jobs to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. For example, Del. Jeff Bourne, D-Richmond, gave up his job in the Attorney Generals Office when he was elected to the House of Delegates last year.

The section of the state Constitution that lays out qualifications for serving in the General Assembly bans judges, sheriffs, court clerks and other local constitutional officers who receive funding from the state.

What the rule means for state employees is somewhat unclear, but two prior legal opinions from the Attorney Generals Office suggested the law would not preclude a community college faculty member or a classified state employee from serving in the legislature.

By going on unpaid leave, Adams will avoid the issue of receiving two publicly funded salaries simultaneously. State delegates receive a salary $17,640 plus a per diem allowance of $203 for each day of the session. According to state data, Adams receives a six-figure salary from DBHDS, which provides mental health, substance abuse and developmental disability services.

My intention has been to demonstrate excellent practice models that serve individuals with quality programs affordably, then leave and return to clinical practice, Adams said.

Adams said she plans to consult with state ethics attorneys if shes ever unclear about whether she should or shouldnt vote on a policy that may affect her department. Delegates can abstain from votes if they feel they have a personal conflict.
Republicans were so taken aback by Gov. Ralph Northams first policy speech of the General Assembly that they marched into a news conference early Tuesday morning to say how much they hated it.

That speech last night truly set us back, House of Delegates Speaker Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, said after several of his colleagues voiced their extreme disappointment with what they said was an in-your-face, campaign-style speech from the new governor who cruised to victory in a Democratic wave election last year.

Partisan feuding overtook the state Senate a few hours later when a rural lawmaker, Republican Sen. Bill Stanley of Franklin County, accused Democrats of blocking his emergency bill to help reopen a Southside Virginia hospital, in order to pressure him to vote in favor of Medicaid expansion.

This cannot stand. It will not stand! Stanley exclaimed during a floor speech. I would never do it to you! Never.

As state legislators settle in for the 60-day session, the first few days featured optimistic speeches about bipartisanship and the feeling that a new Democratic governor and a closely divided legislature where Republicans still hold the upper hand could make for an unusually peaceful and productive session. But a little less than a week in, cracks are beginning to show.

Stanley said his Senate Bill 134 should have been passed with an emergency designation because it will help find a new operator for a closed hospital in Patrick County, a rural area on the North Carolina border.

Legislation passed with an emergency clause takes effect immediately with the governors signature, rather than on July 1. Emergency bills require passage by 80 percent of lawmakers instead of a simple majority. Stanleys measure got 30 of the 40 votes, falling two short.

The opening of this session has undertones and overtones which make me not want to be here, Stanley said.

Democrats did not deny they were trying to strong-arm Stanley. But they said they had constituents, too.

It just so happens that our goals happened to collide. But we get things like this worked out. Thats what the legislative process is all about, said Senate Democratic Leader Dick Saslaw of Fairfax.

Republicans from the House and the Senate spoke at the event Tuesday morning to say they felt personally let down that Northam, a mild-mannered former state senator, hadnt set a new tone after taking the keys to the Executive Mansion from his loud-and-proud predecessor, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

House Republicans in particular said they felt the friendly stance they had tried to adopt from the beginning of the session  by tweaking rules to give Democrats more spots on subcommittees and allow recorded subcommittee votes  was met by a posture that seemed to define bipartisanship as Republicans doing what Democrats want.

That speech was so partisan that I wonder if he found it in his predecessors desk and just pulled it out and gave a McAuliffe speech, said House Majority Leader Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah.

In his first address to state lawmakers from the well of the House chamber, Northam said he wants to work with Republicans on bread-and-butter issues like jobs, education and workforce training. But he coupled it with a forceful call for Medicaid expansion  a Democratic priority Republicans still see as a nonstarter  and more ambitious priorities such as abortion rights, gun control, expanded voting access and clean-energy measures to address climate change.

Northam spokeswoman Ofirah Yheskel said the issues Northam discussed Monday night are not partisan issues, but real problems that affect real people.

As he said last night and in his inaugural address, he is eager to begin the discussion with leaders from every political perspective about the best way to solve those problems and many others, Yheskel said of the new governor. But bipartisanship does not mean sweeping big issues under the rug because common ground has been hard to find in the past.

Earlier Monday, Senate Republicans killed several Democratic gun control measures in committee, including universal background checks, a Northam priority that went down just hours after he began his first business day as governor. Northam spokesman Brian Coy, who held the same job under McAuliffe, said Northam was deeply disappointed in the committee votes. The speech was edited accordingly, Coy said.

He thought it important to express that to them honestly and candidly in his address, Coy said.

Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, said he felt Northam chastised the Senate Courts Committee for its actions on the gun bills without noting that the committee unanimously passed a bill sponsored by Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, to ban minors who are subject to mental health orders from possessing firearms.

That would have been nice if that acknowledgement had been made, Obenshain said.

Cox  who became speaker with a slim, 51-49 Republican majority after the GOP lost 15 House seats  said he met with Northam on Tuesday morning to share his disappointment in person. Cox said he wouldnt reveal details of a private conversation, but he said its now up to Northam to explain what his vision of bipartisanship means.

I do think the ball now is squarely in the governors court, Cox said.

About a half-hour later in the same briefing room at the Pocahontas Building, House Democrats held a news conference to lay out their policy agenda for the 2018 session and take veiled jabs at Republicans for crying foul over Democrats talking about policies they campaigned on.

Today, we are not complaining about anything. But talking about issues to help Virginia families, said Del. Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria, the Democratic caucus chair.

Democratic leaders went on to complain that Republicans were routing important bills to the GOP-stacked House Rules Committee under Coxs direct control.

We have some concerns that perhaps those bills are being sent there in order for them to die, said House Minority Leader David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville. Nothings happened yet but were going to see.

Toscano said he may have more to say in the coming days about whether Democrats will challenge the partisan makeup of the committee, which has 11 Republicans and six Democrats.

Coxs office has said the Rules Committee will serve as a sort of traffic cop, allowing senior lawmakers to discuss some of the most big-ticket bills filed by both parties.

The Senate hostilities continued Tuesday afternoon when a discussion grew heated in the Privileges and Elections Committee.

The committee had approved a redistricting bill from Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, that also included provisions in a bill from Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel, R-Fauquier.

After Lucas left, Sen. Frank Ruff, R-Mecklenburg, made a motion to reconsider the bill and it then failed on a 7-7 vote. Sen. Lionell Spruill, D-Chesapeake, let loose:

At least you would have given her the courtesy while she was here to do it to her face, Spruill said. Do what youve got to do  were going to fix it two years from now.
WASHINGTON  The Washington area is already home to the countrys largest Catholic church, the dramatic Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Now the Vatican has designated for the region a second basilica, this time a 223-year-old congregation in Northern Virginia whose first donor was George Washington.

The Rev. Michael Burbidge, bishop of the Diocese of Arlington  which covers northeastern Virginia, including D.C.s busy suburbs  announced the news at 8:30 a.m. Mass Sunday at the historic St. Mary Catholic Church.

The parish will now be called The Basilica of Saint Mary and will likely attract Catholic tourists as a result of its new designation and seal.

St. Mary is now the 84th minor basilica in the United States, structures honored for special attributes that can be architectural, historical or geographical. The Churchs four major basilicas are all in Rome.

According to the Arlington diocese, St. Mary was founded in 1795, at a different location, and was the first Catholic parish in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

George Washington made the first financial contribution to the parish in the late 1700s, giving an amount equivalent to $1,200 today, the diocese said in a statement.

Initially built at the south end of Alexandra, the parish moved in 1810 to its current location at 310 S. Royal St..

While Maryland was the home of the first diocese in the United States, discrimination against Catholics was fierce in Virginia. They were forbidden from holding office and voting, among other inequities.

Prior to American independence, Catholics in Alexandria often worshipped in fear, in a hidden way, because the Roman Catholic Church was greatly restricted in Virginia, as it was throughout most of the English colonies, the Rev. Edward Hathaway, St. Marys pastor, told parishioners Sunday, according to a transcript.
Today is Religious Freedom Day, a chance to remember the critical importance to our nation of Thomas Jeffersons Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom and the liberty that it enshrined.

Recent celebrations of this anniversary have reminded us that our Founders embraced religious freedom for all, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination, in Jeffersons words. As battles over wedding cakes and club memberships have proliferated, commentators have also rightly noted that religious freedom was not intended to override neutral laws that did not directly regulate religion; after all, not long ago claims of religious freedom were misused in an effort to justify racial discrimination in education, housing, and commercial services.

Those are important issues. But this year as Religious Freedom Day approached, I was thinking about another: Why did Jefferson think that this issue was so critical for the country, remembering it on his tombstone along with authorship of the Declaration of Independence and founding of the University of Virginia  religious freedom, political freedom, educational opportunity? And why did he believe that religious freedom demanded strict separation of church and state?

In Jeffersons time, most countries and most states had an official religion. In some, it was the Catholic Church, in others, Anglican. Some recognized a special status for Protestants; others endorsed all Christians. For Jefferson, all of these created a serious danger. When government and religious officials worked together, even when they simply classified a particular belief as orthodox or preferred, they inevitably sought to control what people would think and believe, creating a pernicious aristocracy  kings, nobles, and priests, to use Jeffersons phrase. But if the republic was to survive, people must be free to think, free to challenge any orthodoxy, particularly any official position. In fact, Jefferson understood that of the three great achievements of his life  religious freedom, political freedom, and educational opportunity  religious freedom was the foundation; without it, you could have neither political freedom nor enlightened education.

Eighteenth-century evangelicals were equally passionate in embracing separation of church and state. Theologically, keeping government out of religion, not even providing an indulgence, preferment or even protection, as Baptist preacher John Leland said, was the only way to ensure that an individuals religion was purely a free-will offering to God; otherwise people might think that one was religious for the loaves and fishes. Leland warned that letting government endorse religion was a species of idolatry  acknowledging a power, that the head of the church, Jesus Christ, never appointed. Mixing church and state corrupted both.

Politically, evangelicals knew that if government had authority to officially recognize Christianity, it could also choose to promote Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Judaism, or Islam. Government had no such authority. Chesterfield dissenters insisted that the government should not establish the Christian religion lest thereby we become our own enemys and weaken this infant State. Even associating a particular religion with being patriotic Americans, a preferment in public opinion according to Jefferson, was dangerous. Your religion could have no official influence on your place in the republic; our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, the Virginia Statute says.

Thankfully for the new nation, Article VI of the Constitution embeds these concepts, declaring that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. A free, democratic republic demands no less.

All of this was brought to mind in December when a Roy Moore spokesperson insisted that Muslims could not serve in Congress under the Constitution because they could not take the oath of office on the Bible  never mind that Jews, agnostics, and atheists would be precluded under the same logic. (CIA Director John Brennan took the oath of office on George Washingtons copy of the Constitution, a firm reminder that we have a government of laws, not of men, and not of religion.) Now, Moore is no expert on the Constitution and religious freedom, as he demonstrated repeatedly by his efforts as Alabamas chief judge to endorse officially the Ten Commandments and ignore Supreme Court decisions. But ignorance of Article VI is important and Religious Freedom Day is an excellent opportunity to remind ourselves of its central role not only to our heritage, but the functioning of the republic. People can, of course, elect whom they choose to office, and do so for whatever reasons they choose, including religious reasons. But in America, no one is precluded from serving (in the government or the military) by reason of his or her religion, and no one can claim that good Americans come only from one religion, race, ethnicity, or gender.

E Pluribus Unum: Americas strength and exceptionalism is in its diversity. Or, as Jefferson said with respect to religion, divided we stand, united we fall.
The latest Wednesday morning forecast is posted here.

Forecast from Tuesday afternoon:

Snow is still on track for the Richmond area beginning early Wednesday morning, and it will add up to 1- to 3-inch amounts by the afternoon.

Chesterfield and points southwest will be on the higher end of that range, with slightly lower totals for Hanover and points northeast.

Timing

Tuesday evening should be dry in Richmond, but snow will be falling across the Shenandoah Valley and Northern Virginia before midnight.

That snow will slowly move in from the northwest, and at the very earliest some flakes could appear in the Richmond area around midnight.

It's more likely to start between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., so plan for a coating of snow before the morning commute starts.

The snow may come down at the heaviest rate between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., then taper off into occasional light-to-moderate snow during the late morning and afternoon as it slowly pushes to the southeast.

Richmond could see the snow stop as early as noon, but it may not clear out of the metro area entirely until 5 p.m.

Totals

In Richmond, the most likely total is around 2 inches by Wednesday afternoon. At the very least, expect 1 inch; but it's possible that it could go as high as 3 inches.

Expect totals to be slightly higher in Chesterfield, Powhatan, the Tri-Cities and areas southwest of Richmond, on the order of 3 inches, give or take 1 inch.

Amounts will be lower for points northeast toward Fredericksburg, the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula, where the snow may amount to 1 inch or less.

The highest amounts in the state should be found in the southern Piedmont, where 4 or 5 inches are possible in the region between Farmville and South Hill.

Type

This is an all snow event for Richmond and central Virginia, though the snow may begin with a very brief period of rain or sleet around Petersburg and Southside Virginia.

Like our last snow, it will be the fluffy kind with the ratio of snow to liquid water at about 15-to-1.

That means the 1 to 3 inch snow amounts would translate into roughly 0.10 to 0.2 inches of liquid water.

Temperature

We'll stay below freezing from late Tuesday evening until Thursday afternoon.

The coldest point will be a low in the mid-teens on Thursday morning.

A breeze from the northwest will give an added wind chill factor on Wednesday and Wednesday night, but it won't be as bitter as our last cold snap.

Sunshine and highs in the 40s on Thursday and Friday will melt most of our snow, then 50s and 60s will return over the weekend.
Students losing sleep because of study demands

VietNamNet Bridge - A survey has found that 80 percent of students sleep less than seven hours a day.









80 percent of students sleep less than 7 hours a day

Ninety percent of students said they cannot sleep if they have to prepare for examinations, 89 percent cannot sleep to prepare for the tests the next day, and 86.8 percent need to spend time to do home exercises and learn lessons.

The survey was conducted by two high school students Tran Thuy Trang and Pham Thi Khanh Vy from Gia Dinh School in HCMC and made public at a city competition for high school students.The survey was carried out both directly and on online of 7,363 students from high schools in HCMC.Eight out of every 10 polled students said they cannot concentrate in class because of lack of sleep. 81.8 percent of students said they slept for less than 7 hours a day, 13.7 percent said they slept for less than five hours, and 44.1 percent cannot take an afternoon nap.Nearly 40 percent of students said they go to bed between 11pm and midnight while 20.7 percent go to bed after midnight and only 8.6 percent go to bed before 10 pm.Two reasons behind the lack of sleep have been cited  the pressure from lessons/exams and the effects of technological devices, while the former is the major problem.Ninety percent of students said they cannot sleep if they have to prepare for examinations, 89 percent cannot sleep to prepare for the tests the next day, and 86.8 percent need to spend time to do home exercises and learn lessons.More than 62 percent said the timetable is unreasonable.The survey shows that the majority of students cannot get enough sleep, which is contrary to the recommendation that everyone needs 8-10 hours of sleep per day, Trang said.Trang and Vy decided to conduct the survey after they noticed classmates nodding off in class. They also were sleepy and had to go outside or pinch their arms and legs to wake up.Vo Van Nam, a lecturer of the HCMC University of Education, warned that the lack of sleep will harm students health and affect intellectual and personality development.It will do more harm than good in the end if educators still insist on maintaining the current overloaded curriculum, he added.Pham Minh Duy, a parent of a student at Go Vap High School, complained that students have to take too many tests and exams.The Ministry of Education and Training has been violently criticized for overloading students with heavy curricula. Most students complain that they are so busy that they nearly do not have free time to relax or go out with friends.
Local hospitals are not immune to the IV bag shortage being experienced nationwide that began soon after Hurricane Maria knocked out power in Puerto Rico four months ago.

Ive been with Carilion 11 years. Drug shortages have been going on the entire time. A lot of it takes place behind the scenes, and there is very little impact to the end user, Jason Hoffman, director of clinical pharmacy services at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. In terms of the severity and the impact on day-to-day workflow, this is probably the biggest weve seen.

Most drug shortages center on medications that treat specific diseases. This shortage is of the small IV fluid bags that are used to administer a vast array of medications.

Hoffmans team used to mix 1,500 bags each day.

Thats one per minute around the clock, to give some perspective on the number of bags we were using in the pharmacy, he said.

Now, some of the medication is being given orally, pushed directly into a patients vein or mixed into larger bags, which is now increasing demand on that supply.

There are so many moving pieces to the puzzle, Hoffman said. What the pharmacy is doing today might differ from what it is doing when the next shipment of bags and fluids arrive.

Hoffman said Carilions leadership, physicians and nurses are all involved in figuring out if we cant do it this way, how are we still going to get that medication to the patient in a safe manner. It could be looking at different medication or a different route.

Soon after the hurricane hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 30, concern developed that a shortage of IV bags of saline fluids would soon hit the United States. The storm wiped out the islands electrical grid and disrupted production at three plants owned by Baxter International, the nations largest supplier of IV bags.

The Food and Drug Administration in November temporarily permitted the import of IV products from facilities outside the U.S., encouraged other IV product makers to expand production and expedited its reviews of new products.

But all of that takes time.

The Salem VA Medical Center and the HCA-owned LewisGale hospitals also are experiencing shortages.

We have implemented alternative strategies to minimize any impact as a result of the shortfall, said Nancy May, vice president of marketing for LewisGale. Being affiliated with HCA has enabled us to collaborate with our multi-disciplinary resources and sister facilities throughout the country to ensure patients continue to receive the highest level of care.

Hoffman said pharmacy directors at Carilion hospitals are having twice-weekly telephone conferences to share resources.

Salem VA spokesman Brett Robbins said patients have not been affected.

The shortage has been an issue that we continue to manage closely to ensure we have an adequate supply, he said.

Supplies began to change in October.

Shipments were coming in later than they normally were. Sometimes we were getting a partial shipment, Hoffman said.

While we would normally order a week at a time to have a week or two on hand, now were given a number of what we can order a month, and typically we cannot go above that, and sometimes we dont get fully what we are allocated on a particular month, he said.

Robbins said the VA is paying more  up to five times as much, though he didnt have a dollar amount  as its had to buy through the open market and outside of contracts.

Carilion, too, has seen price hikes on certain items that make them four to five times more expensive. Some items are 10 times as much. Carilion said it is absorbing the costs and not passing them on to patients.

The shortage is expected to ease in the next couple of months.

After this is all over, we will take a big-picture approach, and what worked well we will continue to do, Hoffman said. Anytime youre forced to change, its a good opportunity to evaluate what you are doing.
Sneezing is an astoundingly powerful human action, blasting mucus and air from the nose and mouth at up to 100 miles per hour, according to the Cleveland Clinic. That power exists whether a sneeze is held in or not.

"Occasionally, people will cause some damage to their eardrums or their sinuses if they stifle a very violent sneeze," Rachel Szekely, an immunologist at Cleveland Clinic, said in an article urging people to sneeze freely and not to hold back posted on the health provider's website.

A healthy 34-year-old man living in the United Kingdom learned that the hard way, according to a case study published Monday in the British Medical Journal. His attempt to stifle a sneeze backfired, and the force of that would-be sneeze tore through the soft tissue in his throat, rupturing part of it.

The study - "Snap, crackle and pop: when sneezing leads to crackling in the neck" - described the man, whom it did not identify, as "previously fit and well." One day, he felt a sneeze forming, so he did what he often did: tried to stop it. He clamped one hand over his mouth while pinching his nose.

"This 34-year-old chap said he was always trying to hold his sneeze because he thinks it is very unhygienic to sneeze into the atmosphere or into someone's face. That means he's been holding his sneezes for the last 30 years or so, but this time it was different," case report author Wanding Yang told CNN.

While trying to hold back the sneeze, he felt a "popping sensation" in his neck, which began to swell. His voice also changed.

Doctors asked if he had "eaten anything sharp," which he denied.

Subsequent X-rays showed that the built-up pressure from the sneeze, which needed to escape his body somehow, tore through the throat's soft tissue when its preferred exit - his nose and mouth - were blocked. It ruptured the pharynx, the membrane-filled cavity connecting the mouth and nose with the esophagus. It also caused air bubbles to form in his neck's soft tissue, which caused the popping sensation.

Fearing that a deep neck infection could form, doctors hospitalized the man, who was given a feeding tube and put on a regimen of antibiotics. He was released a week later, after the wounds in his neck healed.

Sneezing is the body's way of ridding itself of potentially harmful irritants in the nose, throat or lungs. Pressure builds up in the lungs and then forcefully explodes up the esophagus and out of the nose and mouth. But if those orifices are blocked, the pressure needs to escape somehow.

"It's like forcing water through a pipe," Michael Benninger, an otolaryngologist and chairman of the Head and Neck Institute at Cleveland Clinic, told Time magazine in 2015. "If the air can escape through your nose and mouth, that creates less pressure than forcing it through a smaller opening."

While complications from stifling sneezes are rare, they can be dangerous, the case study noted.

"I've seen patients with a ruptured eardrum or pulled back muscles, and you hear about cracked ribs," Michael Benninger, an otolaryngologist and chairman of the Head and Neck Institute at Cleveland Clinic, told Time magazine in 2015.

The other fallout from stifling sneezes is that the body doesn't rid itself of the irritant, which is usually a mucus discharge. That mucus has to go somewhere.

"By stifling a sneeze, you could push infected mucus through the eustachian tube and back into the middle ear," Szekely said in the Cleveland Clinic article. "You can get middle ear infections because of that."
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(INTERFAX.RU) - Russias Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) won't consider the complaint filed by Rosneft regarding the terms of the auction for the acquisition of gas assets held by ALROSA as the oil producer has recalled it, head of the FAS construction and natural resources control department Oleg Korneev told Interfax.

"The applicant (PJSC Rosneft) filed an application to the FAS Russia to withdraw the complaint against the actions of ALROSA at an open auction," Korneev said.

He noted that, according to Art. 18.1 of the Law on Protection of Competition, the applicant, having withdrawn the complaint submitted by him, is not entitled to file a second complaint on the same actions of the auction organizer.

Meanwhile, in the run-up to the auction Mikhail Leontiev, Press Secretary of Rosneft said that Rosneft will not participate in the auction for the sale of gas assets of ALROSA on the terms proposed by the diamond mining company.

ALROSA is selling Geotransgaz and Urengoy Gas Company owned by Cyprus-based Maretiom Investments and Velarion Investments.

The sale is carried out "as is" and ALROSA does not undertake to provide customers with guarantees regarding the absence of financial, tax, legal and other risks in respect of Maretiom and Velarion, as well as regarding the obligations of these companies.

Earlier, the Federal Antimonopoly Service informed that NOVATEK and Gazprombank, as well as three offshoots of Rosneft (RN-Holding, RN-Gaz and Bashneft) applied to take part in the auction for the gas assets of ALROSA.

Meanwhile, in the run-up to the auction Mikhail Leontiev, Press Secretary of Rosneft said that Rosneft will not participate in the auction for the sale of gas assets of ALROSA on the terms proposed by the diamond mining company.

According to Interfax, the Investment Committee of Rosneft convened on Wednesday considered the oil companys possible participation in the announced auction for the sale of gas assets of ALROSA. After the consideration, it was decided not to take part in the auction, the statement posted on the Rosneft website said.




The Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Cap Metro) Board of Directors in Austin, Texas, has named Randy Clarke as the agency's next president and CEO.

The regularly scheduled January board meeting is set for Jan. 29, and board members plan to vote on approval of a contract with Clarke following his negotiations with executive search firm Krauthamer & Associates.

Clarke has served as the vice president of operations and member services at the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) since April 2016.

The boards criteria for a candidate for this role included: an ability to develop Cap Metros long-term strategic vision; engage the community at all levels; and forge partnerships in areas such as new and existing infrastructure, development, land use and public policy.

Another priority of the boards was finding a candidate with the ability to secure new funding sources for the agency.

Before Clarkes time at APTA, he spent seven years in various roles with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), including serving as deputy chief operating officer and assistant general manager of engineering, maintenance and preparedness, and senior director of security.

Cap Metro said it carried out a rigorous search process to ensure the agency found the best possible leader. Krauthamer & Associates assisted Cap Metro with its search for a new leader beginning in late July, when Linda Watson announced her retirement after more than seven years in the position.

The transit agency gathered public feedback at multiple board meetings about the search since July, the company said.

Cap Metro said the Central Texas community had the opportunity to hear from the companys final four candidates at a public meeting on Jan. 8 and to provide further feedback on the candidates via email and social media throughout the past week.
Apple's CarPlay platform has finally arrived in a Toyota car, according to AppleInsider.

Toyota launched its 2019 Avalon at the 2018 North American International Auto Show, which includes CarPlay, the Apple infotainment system that enables a car radio or head unit to be a display and also act as a controller for an iPhone.

Toyota will reportedly also install CarPlay in other in other 2019 model year vehicles including its luxury Lexus brand.

Earlier, Toyota has avoided installing either CarPlay or Android Auto in its cars.

On the 2019 Avalon, users will be able to interact with CarPlay through the 9-inch capacitive touchscreen.

Meanwhile, Toyota has not added Android Auto on its new Avalon.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
(Agencia CMA Latam) - Colcap, the main index of the Colombian Stock Exchange, traded 0.60% lower near the end of the session, at 1,512.24 points, due to Ecopetrol, Sura, and Bancolombia low performance.

Marcela Ramirez, an analyst at Acciones & Valores, said that the recent attacks against Ecopetrol's infrastructure, in addition to profit-taking by investors, influenced the performance of the state-owned oil company's shares.

On Monday, the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group was accused by the Colombian military of a new attack against the Trans-Andean Pipeline.

The shares of Canacol (+1.70%), Avianca (+1.57%), and Celsia (+1.39%) trade higher, while Ecopetrol (-2.11%),Sura (-2.00%), Conconcreto (-1.49%), and Preferencial Bancolombia (-0.46%) are falling.

The locally traded U.S. dollar fell by 0.24%, closing at 2,844.01 Colombian pesos, amid a holiday in the United States and the euro rebound. Natalia Granados, an analyst at Global Securities, noted that the greenback's losses against strong currencies are deepening due to the optimism generated by the eurozone's monetary policy and its economic figures.

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.
Royal Dutch Shell Plc. (RDS-B, RDSB.L, RDSA.L,RDS-A) said that it agreed to sell a stake in the West Qurna 1 oil field in Iraq to Japan's Itochu Corp. for an undisclosed amount . The company is also expected to give up its holding in Iraq's Majnoon oil field later this year, though it will retain its natural-gas interests in the country.

Separately, Royal Dutch Shell announced a final investment decision on the redevelopment of the Penguins oil and gas field in the UK North Sea.

The decision authorises the construction of a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel, the first new manned installation for Shell in the northern North Sea in almost 30 years.

The redevelopment is an attractive opportunity with a competitive go-forward break-even price below $40 per barrel. The FPSO is expected to have a peak production (100%) of circa 45,000 boe/d.

The Penguins field currently processes oil and gas using four existing drill centres tied back to the Brent Charlie platform. The redevelopment of the field, required when Brent Charlie ceases production will see an additional eight wells drilled, which will be tied back to the new FPSO vessel. Natural gas will be exported through the tie-in of existing subsea facilities and additional pipeline infrastructure.

The Penguins field is in 165 metres (541 feet) of water, approximately 150 miles north east of the Shetland Islands. Discovered in 1974, the field was first developed in 2002 and is a joint venture between Shell (50% and operator) and ExxonMobil (50%).

In a separate press release, ITOCHU said it reached an agreement with E.R. Probyn Ltd., a Canadian Corporation and Welco Lumber Company, a US Corporation to acquire all of the issued and outstanding membership interests of Alta Forest Products LLC from Probyn and Welco.

Alta is the largest wood fence board manufacturer in North America, producing 360 million board feet annually in its four (4) manufacturing plants located in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
The ire over President Donald Trump's reported use of foul language while referring to immigrants last week is fomenting in the United States and abroad with hundreds converging on Times Square to protest racism, and Nicaragua joining the international chorus of criticism against Trump.

"Why are we having all these people from sh*thole countries come here,?" Trump was quoted as saying in a meeting with senators and House members last Thursday about immigration reform.

The office of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said in a statement that Trump's apparent reference to impoverished African, Central American and Caribbean countries was "racist, disrespectful and humiliating."

Nicaragua joins the ranks of Botswana, El Salvador, Ghana, Haiti, Nigeria, the 15-nation Caribbean Community, the African Union and the African Group of UN ambassadors who have slammed the derogatory term.

Hundreds of protesters carrying Haitian flags and signs held a demonstration in Times Square Monday in protest against Trump's racist remarks.

New York City's Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio was among politicians who joined the rally against racism marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

"We are a country built by immigrants and we will not stand by as Donald Trump denigrates the people who come to this country," he said on Twitter before attending the rally.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, who was in the Oval Office when Trump addressed 23 members of Congress, insisted that the President made the remark, and said other offensive things.

Trump replied that he was "totally misrepresented" by Durbin, and said the allegation was hurting efforts to strike a deal to protect so-called Dreamer immigrants.

Mitt Romney, A vocal critic of Trump, criticized his controversial comment. An immigrant's "nation of origin is as irrelevant as their race," he wrote on Twitter.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
The UK government on Tuesday ordered a fast-track investigation into directors at the failed construction company Carillion.

Carillion on Monday collapsed into liquidation after struggling with huge debt and heavy losses on contracts. The company's liquidation, which managed hundreds of public sector projects worth 1.7 billion pounds, has put 20,000 UK jobs at risk.

Business Secretary Greg Clark has asked Insolvency Service to fast-track investigation into Carillion's directors and broaden scope to include those directors previously employed.

"It is important we quickly get the full picture of the events which caused Carillion to enter liquidation, which is why I have asked the Insolvency Service to fast- rack and broaden the scope of the Official Receiver's investigation," Greg Clark said.

"In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors. Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously," he added.

The probe has been ordered because Carillion's former director Richard Howson is still receiving a hefty 600,000 pound payout despite the firm's weak financial .

According to reports, Howson received 1.5 million in salary, bonuses and pension payments during 2016 and, as part of his departure deal, Carillion kept paying him a 660,000 pound salary and 28,000 pound in benefits until October.

Several other executives, including former finance chief Zafar Khan and interim CEO Keith Cochrane, also received similar benefits.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
The Swiss stock market dropped again on Tuesday, adding to the losses of the previous day. The weak performance by index heavyweight Roche pressured the overall market.

The Swiss Market Index decreased by 0.77 percent Tuesday and finished at 9,464.48. The Swiss Leader Index dropped 0.55 percent and the Swiss Performance Index lost 0.64 percent.

Roche tumbled 3.4 percent. The stock was under pressure due to an interview of Severin Schwan by the Financial Times. In it, he warns against pressure on margins and demands "realistic expectations" of investors.

Vifor finished lower by 0.8 percent. Newron, Cosmo and Kuros suffered losses between 2.1 percent and 1.5 percent in the broad market.

Geberit, Swatch and Logitech lost between 1.0 and 0.8 percent. Geberit is expected to report sales figures for 2017 this Thursday.

Credit Suisse weakened by 0.8 percent, Julius Baer fell 0.7 percent and UBS lost 0.6 percent.

Novartis rose 0.02 percent. Sandoz, a Novartis division, announced that it has received approval from the U.S. regulator for proposed biosimilar adalimumab to the reference medicine, Humira.

Lonza climbed 1.1 percent, ABB gained 0.6 percent and SGS added 0.5 percent.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market Analysis
Voluntary recruitment campaign kicked off in Otemah of Yemen's Dhamar



DHAMAR, Jan 16 (Saba)  Governor of Dhamar province, Mohammed Al-maqdashi on Monday inaugurated a voluntary recruitment campaign to reinforce army and popular committees in the battlefronts, a Saba reporter said.



In the inauguration, which was interrupted by a protest condemning US-backed Saudi aggression crimes, the governor stressed on the importance of success of the campaign to strengthen steadfastness in the face of Saudi aggression and maintain the victories achieved on various fronts.



"The aggression destroyed all the capabilities and infrastructure of the homeland and seeks to tear down the social fabric, but the solidarity of the people of this country is the guarantor to thwart all these schemes." Maqdashi said.



He called on the sons of Otemah district to go to the registration centers to join the armed forces and be at the forefront of the ranks in defense of the homeland and its sovereignty and independence.



The campaign aimed to support the heroes of the Yemeni armed forces in the fighting against enemy US-backed Saudi-led aggression coalition.



The participants denounced the continuation of suspicious international silence towards the genocide crimes committed by the aggression coalition in Yemen for more than a 1000 days.





Sameera H.-Zak







Saba

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[16/January/2018]
Report: 6 civilians killed in 34 Saudi airstrikes in one day





SANAA, Jan 16 (Saba) - The US-backed Saudi-led aggression coalition warplanes have waged 34 air strikes over the past 24 hours, killing six civilians and wounding three others, military officials told Saba on Tuesday.



In the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, 4 civilians were killed when the aggression warplane launched an air strike on an onion farm in Khokhah district.



Also in Hodeidah, two civilians were killed and three injured in an airstrike which targeted a resident's farms in Dafshah area of Jerahi district.



In northern province of Saada, the warplanes launched three strikes on Advain area of Kutaf district, two strikes targeted the main road toward Maran area in Haidain district, another one raid hit Sabah area of Dhaher district.



In Bagem district of Saada, four airstrikes hit Thuaban area, and two others on Mandabah area.



A warplane of the aggression waged a raid on Ahma area of Sehar district, also in Saada.



Meanwhile, artillery and missile force of Saudi enemy shelled Ghor area of Ghamer district, and several areas of Munabeh border district of Saada.



In central province of Marib, three air strikes hit Bohra mountain of Serwah district.



In Amran province, about 50 km north of the capital Sanaa, the Saudi aggression warplanes waged 12 airstrikes on several area of Harf-Sofian district.



In Lahj province, the warplanes launched two strikes on east of Kahbub district.



In border province of Najran, the fighter jet of the aggression waged an air strike on Makhroq site.



In Jizan border province, the Saudi aggression fighter jet waged a strike on Jarah valley.







Writing by Sameera al-Mahdi, Editing by Zak



Saba

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[16/January/2018]
By SA Commercial Prop News

ENL Ltd., a Mauritian company with interests in agriculture and property, plans to develop a town in the islands center, Chief Executive Officer Hector Espitalier-Noel said after opening the countrys largest shopping mall.

In the coming years, a business hotel, residences, an office park, warehousing facilities as well as a micro-brewery and a motor city will confer to Bagatelle the status of a small town, Espitalier-Noel said today. Bagatelle is located south of the capital, Port Louis.

The first phase of the town project, which was opened today, is a 42,000 square-meter (452,000 square-foot), 3.5 billion-rupee ($120.7 million) shopping mall developed by ENL Property Ltd., a unit of ENL Land Ltd. in partnership with South Africas Atterbury Investment Holdings.

Real estate and construction accounted for more than 38 percent of foreign direct investment in Mauritius over the past five years, Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam said at the opening. Investment in the industry is expected to grow by more than 8 percent in 2011, he said. In 2010, the industry invested 22.4 billion rupees.

Permits have been secured, Gilbert Espitalier-Noel, CEO of ENL Property Ltd., said in an interview in Bagatelle. Works would be completed by end of 2012 and the project will span more than 225 acres (91 hectares) of land in Bagatelle, he said. Investments will amount to about 1.5 billion rupees for residential units, office spaces and a motor city, he added.

ENL Property manages about 20 billion rupees of projects including high-end villas and residential developments. ENL plans to develop a 25,000 square-meter project in Lusaka, Zambias capital.
Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani on Tuesday said the Jio network will cover 100 per cent of West Bengal's population by December 2018 and also committed over Rs 5,000 crore of investments in the state for non-Jio businesses in the next three years.

Addressing the Bengal Global Business Summit here, Ambani said the company will set up an electronics manufacturing facility in the state.

"Our current Jio network covers 1,000 towns and nearly 39,000 villages in the state. Jio will reach 100 per cent of West Bengal's population by December 2018. Every last village will be covered by 4G technology. We are embarking on an ambitious project of connecting Bengal with optical fibre," he said.

According to him, Jio will connect every education institution and hospital in the state by December 2019.

The group will launch the digital service centre in five districts of the state, with the immediate effect of facilitating digital entrepreneurs.

He promised to set up an electronics manufacturing facility in the state.

Ambani said the group has prioritised the availability of 4G Jio phone in the state with effective zero cost.

"We are committing to invest Rs 5,000 crore in non-Jio businesses in Bengal in the next three years," he said.

Applauding the West Bengal government's economic activities and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Ambani said: "Didi, under your leadership, Bengal is becoming the best Bengal."

Ambani said he attended the second edition of the business summit in 2015. "Reliance had committed an investment of Rs 4,500 crore in Bengal...We have invested and committed not just Rs 4,500 crore but we have completed an investment of over Rs 15,000 crore in the last two years."

He said the company was able to make the investments as the state created a "friendly" climate and enabling policy and infrastructure.

He said the company would focus on digital space.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday laid the foundation stone of the Rs 43,129 crore big-ticket refinery project here and said it will change the economic landscape of Rajasthan.

"Rajasthan is taking the lead to become the energy power of the country," Modi said while addressing the event.

The refinery, a joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited and Rajasthan government, will have the capacity to refine 90 lakh crude oil annually.

Due to be completed by 2022, the project is expected to bring Rs 34,000 crore to the state government coffers annually.

He appreciated the efforts of Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje who initiated the process to turn this project into reality.

"We cannot mislead people by installing stones. As in 2022 we complete 75 years of independence, we will ensure that our refinery starts functioning in the same year," Modi said.

He took a dig at the Congress, saying: "We don't want people to come and ask us that after installing the stone why you did not take action on implementing the same."

The foundation stone laying ceremony had been performed four years ago by then Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

Hitting out at the Congress on the issue of inaugurating the Rajasthan refinery twice, Vasundhara Raje said: "We don't believe in installing stones, but we believe in working hard to build a building. We work to turn our efforts into reality."

Accusing the Congress government of not doing anything after the stone-laying ceremony, she said: "There was no planning, no seriousness and no projection of implementing this scheme. We are doing this with a lot of planning."

The programme was also addressed by Pradhan who said the refinery will bring in lot of growth and development in the state.
Punjab's powerful cabinet minister Rana Gurjit Singh has submitted his resignation from the Congress government in the state led by Chief Minister Amarinder Singh following allegations of corruption and money laundering against him.

The resignation is yet to be accepted by the Chief Minister, sources in the government said.

Rana Gurjit, who is the Irrigation and Power Minister, has courted controversies in the past few months in the multi-crore sand mining auctions done in the 10-month-old Amarinder Singh government.

The minister and his son were recently issued summons by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) following allegations of money laundering abroad.

The billionaire minister, who has business interests in liquor and sugar manufacturing, is considered close to the Chief Minister.
Following allegations of corruption and money laundering against him, Punjab's powerful cabinet minister Rana Gurjit Singh has submitted his resignation from the Congress government in the state. However, Chief Minister Amarinder Singh is yet to accept the resignation, government sources said on Tuesday.

Sources in the Punjab Congress told that Amarinder Singh is likely to meet Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday to discuss the resignation issue and expansion of his cabinet.

Rana Gurjit Singh, who is the Irrigation and Power Minister, has courted controversies in the past few months in the multi-crore sand mining auctions done in the 10-month-old Amarinder Singh government.

People associated with Gurjit Singh and his companies had bagged multi-crore rupee sand mining contracts in May last year. One of these people was a cook with Rana Gurjit earlier.

It was alleged that these people were just fronts for the minister and his companies and the sand mining contracts were picked up through benami means.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) were seeking the resignation of Rana Gurjit following the serious allegations of corruption against him.

AAP leader and Punjab's Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Singh Khaira said on Tuesday that Rana Gurjit's resignation was long overdue.

The Minister and his son were recently issued summons by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) following allegations of money laundering abroad.

The billionaire minister, who has business interests in liquor and sugar manufacturing, is considered close to Amarinder Singh. The Chief Minister had been defending him despite the corruption controversies around him.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara arrived at Agra on Tuesday morning to see the Taj Mahal.

The Israeli Prime Minister and his wife were welcomed by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Soon after, the Netanyahu couple and the delegation accompanying them drove to the Amar Vilas hotel in the Taj city.

Netanyahu and his wife then drove to the Taj Mahal where they are to spend more than an hour, a district official informed IANS.

Tight security arrangements have been made for the VVIP visit and the Taj, the ivory white marble mausoleum on the south bank of the Yamuna, will be closed for common visitors till the Israeli Prime Minister leaves.

No car or person was allowed to be in a periphery of 500 metres around the Taj since morning.

Guides of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) are to take the Netanyahu couple around the Taj Mahal and apprise them about the architecture and the love story of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal.
Lupesoliai Laauliolemalietoa Joseph Parkers mother has mixed feelings about the biggest fight her son is about to enter on 1 April 2018.

Having finalised the deal to take on Anthony Joshua in Cardiff, Sala Parker, has told Newshub she is nervous  not necessarily about the result  but she does not want her son to get hurt, as she fears in every fight he has entered.

"At the back of my head I've got Joshua's image in front of me, knowing he's a huge guy," she told Newshub from the family's Papatoetoe home.

"Heavy arms, heavy hands, muscular, quite a bit taller than Joe. But I'm trying to think it's just another fight."

Sala said every time her son takes the ring, she is worried.

I do not know what's going to happen in that ring, she said.

"I guess I'm more worried than proud, because the fight is not yet done. When he wins that's when I perhaps feel that way, but in the meantime no to be honest, I don't feel proud at all.

"What if anything happens in the ring? I don't want to watch him on the floor, getting hurt or anything. So being proud is far, far, far away from me and my husband."

The following is the full story written by Newshub staff:

Kiwi heavyweight Joseph Parker may have just signed on for the biggest bout of his career, but in the eyes of his doting mother it's "just another fight."

At least, that's what Sala Parker keeps telling herself.

The 26-year-old South Aucklander's title unification fight against Anthony Joshua was finally made official late Sunday night, with an April 1st (NZT) date booked for Cardiff's Principality stadium.

It shapes to be the biggest stage arguably any New Zealand sportsman has ever appeared upon, with an audience of over 80,000 inside the stadium and the eyes of the wider sporting world certain to be tuned in.

The hulking Joshua is indisputably Parker's sternest test to date and for as much as his mum prefers to take a clinical view of things, she admits she's doing her best to look past the hype as a means of coping with the danger her WBO champion son is putting himself under.

"At the back of my head I've got Joshua's image in front of me, knowing he's a huge guy," she told Newshub from the family's Papatoetoe home.

"Heavy arms, heavy hands, muscular, quite a bit taller than Joe. But I'm trying to think it's just another fight."

She admits that the uncertainty of the outcome takes a heavy toll, so much so that she finds it hard to even muster any sense of pride in her son's achievements, at least until the result has played out.

"I guess I'm more worried than proud, because the fight is not yet done. And I do not know what's going to happen in that ring.

"When he wins that's when I perhaps feel that way, but in the meantime no to be honestaI don't feel proud at all.

"What if anything happens in the ring? I don't want to watch him on the floor, getting hurt or anything. So being proud is far, far, far away from me and my husband."

That maternal concern has been a constant throughout Joseph's career, and has extended further after his younger sibling John entered the professional ranks in late 2016. He will also be fighting in Cardiff as a part of on the event's undercard.

"I worry about every fight...every single fight ever since he was an amateur. I've been there since his first fight, so I'm not sure how I'm still alive," she says with a smile.

While it's something she's learnt to live with, there's already something different about this one which has had her more on edge prior to the pair's departure after their recent family holiday in Samoa.

"I got really, really emotional. I was crying all week before they went away.

"We play together and shadowbox together, then when they leave it's half of yourself gone too, because you know they're not going to be around for some time," she said between the tears.

"It's a bit scary. But he said 'don't worry, you're going to see the best of me when I'm in the ring on the 1st, so that really helps comfort me."

Fears aside, the mother of two has no doubt that her son's capable and utterly committed to the cause.

"He's worked really hard for the past five years to get to where he's heading now, to unify the belts for New Zealand and Samoa.

"It's not only about for him and his family, but he's looking at the two countries and his fans worldwide to repay their support and love for him."

The enormity of the pay packet on offer is something Sala downplays despite a prize purse which will likely be in the realm of $15 million. She's simply happy her son is able to make a good living and pave a future for his family using his exceptional talents in a sport he loves. That, and the prospect of him finally moving out of the family home.

"Whatever money he's going to get, we just want him to get a house of his own so that he can get away from here," she laughs. "No matter how many times I've told him he needs to move out, oh no he still comes back home."
A visitor from the United States of America caught with marijuana in his possession at the airport has told the authorities the joint is for his medication.

John Robert Harden appeared before Chief Justice, His Honour Patu Tiavaasue Falefatu Sapolu, yesterday.

Harden, a U.S. citizen, arrived at the Faleolo International Airport on 8 January 2018.

He was allegedly found in possession of 2.7 grams of marijuana, which is equivalent to one joint.

His lawyer, Lefau Harry Schuster, entered guilty plea to the said charge.

But the defendant argued that the joint was for medical reasons. This is why he brought it into the country.

Lefau further argued that his client had a medical certificate.

It came from a qualified Physician, whose recommendations prove his client needs marijuana for medical reasons.

A decision is due today.

The defendant is scheduled to depart Samoa tomorrow.
Not reporting traffic accidents to the Police is a crime.

So said Police Superintendent and Media Spokesperson, Auapaau Logoitino Filipo, in response to questions from the Samoa Observer.

He pointed out that it is illegal under the Traffic Ordinance Act of 1960.

During the holiday season, there were numerous traffic accidents that damaged government properties.

While some accidents were reported, other incidents were not reported to the Police.

Auapaau says its it is mandatory under the law for members of the public to report any traffic incident.

He quoted that under duty to give information, members of the public are required to report instances where the driver of a vehicle is alleged to be guilty of an offence.

This involves dishonesty towards a passenger or with respect to any goods or freight carried on the vehicle, the owner of the vehicle shall, on demand by any police officer, give such information as he or she can as to the identity of the driver, and if he or she fails to do so shall be guilty of an offence.

Auapaau told the Samoa Observer that any person who fails to do any act required by this Ordinance and any person who does any act which this Ordinance forbids to be done commits an offence.

A person convicted of an offence under this Ordinance or any regulation made thereunder for which no special penalty is provided is liable in the case of the first offence to a fine not exceeding 2 penalty units and in the case of a second or subsequent conviction to a fine not exceeding 4 penalty units or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 months, Auapaau said while quoting the Traffic Ordinance Act of 1960.

Land Transport Authority C.E.O, Leasi Vainalepa Galuvao, supports the call for traffic incidents to be reported so the drivers can be held accountable.

Responding to questions from the Samoa Observer, Leasi reminded the public that L.T.A. offers monetary reward for bystanders who report people who damage government properties.

If the information provided leads the L.T.A. to the person responsible and the recovery of costs of repair/replacement, then the individual who provides the information will be given a $200 reward from the L.T.A.

The L.T.A. has issued four rewards to date.

Leasi says any government asset that is damaged because of an accident or vandalism, is the responsibility of the L.T.A. to repair/replace immediately if damaged in an accident or vandalism, to ensure the safety of all road users and the general public.

To recover the costs of repair/replacement, the L.T.A. works closely with the public and/or the Ministry of Police (M.O.P).

If the matter is with the M.O.P. (traffic accident), the M.O.P. assists the L.T.A. by providing details of the person charged with causing the damage, and the L.T.A. pursues the individual for the required costs.

If the damage is not reported to the M.O.P., members of the public are encouraged to report damaged assets directly to the L.T.A., said Leasi.
Plans are in place to replace the MV Lady Naomi that has been servicing the Upolu-American Samoa route for twenty years now.

This was confirmed by the General Manager of Samoa Shipping Corporation, Papalii Mapuilesua Willie Nansen.

There is already a proposal in place to have a new ferry to replace MV Lady Naomi, he said.

The MV Lady Naomi will also be used to travel between Savaii and Upolu once its services end and it will be helping the MV Lady Naomi III and other ferries if needed.

During the Festive season, some members of the public raised concerns about not having enough ferries to cater for people travelling between Upolu and Savaii.

Onoafaese Salemuliaga from Paia told the Samoa Observer that getting a new ferry is paramount.

The small ferries are no longer safe because once it rains; there is nothing for passengers to use as shelter, she said.

Those ferries should only be used for our vehicles to be transported to Savaii.

I do not travel between the islands using the MV Fotu o Samoa and Samoa Express; I usually travel on the MV Lady Samoa III because I feel a lot safer on that ferry.

The government should look at getting a new ferry.

Similar sentiments were echoed by Enoka Pese.

There should be a new ferry to provide quality and safe services because there is no need to have expensive ferry fare and our safety is at risk, said the 57-year-old.

However, Papalii said the service during the festive season went well.

The usual problem that we face is that our people still do not plan ahead by not doing their bookings.

They have that mentality that they can just go to the wharf and they will be given the chance, however we have to give priority to those who booked their vehicles first.

Figures from the Samoa Shipping Corporation show that between 19 December 2017 and 1 January 2018, some 34,509 passengers and 3,640 vehicles used the Savaii-Upolu service.

During those times, the Samoa Shipping Cooperation scheduled extra trips to accommodate everyone.

Papalii said their commitment is to provide the best service for Samoa.

This is also why renovations being done to wharves are critical.

The Mulifanua Wharf is slowly turning out to be well organized and structured with spaces, he said. Weve got businesses that can cater for the needs and wants of tourists as well as waiting passengers.

We want to see Samoa Shipping Corporation to be self sufficient in having the ability to rely on its own to offer and provide good facilities, improved terminals and safe vessels for the people of Samoa to enjoy. Yet, the bottomline is to ensure S.S.C. continues to deliver to the people of Samoa safe, reliable and affordable shipping services.

The terminal renovations are a facelift which will further add value to our service and bring new businesses for convenience and comfort of the travelling public who will be visiting the domestic port 365 days a year.
The Festive Season is over and with schools starting again soon, many parents are already worrying about how they will pay fees and buy stationeries and school uniforms.

Lusia Iosefo from Manono-uta is among many of them.

Today, she is seeking financial assistance to help her children at the beginning of the new academic year.

She is desperate because her husband is the only one who works and his earnings are not always enough.

Mrs. Iosefo says whenever there is not enough money for her childrens education, they would loan from N.P.F. or her husbands office.

We loan because we do not know where else to run to for help, she sai.

I am unemployed and it is only my husband who works. Every time when he gets paid, it will be deducted to his loans and by the time we get the money, it does not reach a $100, the 29-year-old told the Village Voice team yesterday.

With the expensive cost of living in Samoa these days, Mrs. Iosefo is left to struggle with trying to provide for her four childrens education.

She adds for four years they have had to live without a steady supply of water.

They dont have a water tank.

She says they have tried contacting Red Cross for assistance, but to this day, their request has been unsuccessful.

Her eldest is a 10-year-old boy. She says her children would walk to their neighbours to collect water.

We really need water so that my kids would not have to walk in the hot sun to get buckets of water. I cannot do it because I have my seven-month-year-old boy who I have to attend to as well.

Mrs. Iosefo says she has so many unfulfilled wishes, but only hopes that her dream for her children will one day come true.
The Chief Justice, His Honour Patu Tiavaasue Falefatu Sapolu, has expressed concerns about the non-appearance of suspects remanded at Tafaigata Prison when their cases are called.

His Honour Patu is especially concerned about the number of them missing during their initial mention hearing.

The Chief Justice raised the issue during the Supreme Court proceedings yesterday.

We need to have a solution for such a problem because it seems like a continuous issue, he said.

He even asked the Prosecutors about why these detainees are not in Court on time.

The Prosecutors responded that the detainees were on their way.

But the Chief Justice was not impressed.

The matter was then stood down.

But the detainees never appeared, including Samoas most wanted man, Uili Sa Manuleleua, who remains on the run since he escaped from Tafaigata just before Christmas.

Contacted for a comment, the Samoa Prisons and Correctional Services Assistant Commissioner, Ulugia Niua Aumua, said there were matters that the Correctional officers had to attend to yesterday.

This is why they were late in taking the detainees to Court.

He reassured that such a problem will not happen again.
Prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi has admonished the Samoan public for being lax in heeding warnings from the Ministry of Health on the dengue fever outbreak.

On Thursday, Tuilaepa told Radio 2AP that there had been a strong educational campaign by the ministry on prevention but people did not seem to be listening.

They dont listen and take action on these prevention issues but when they get sick they start complaining, but the Ministry is doing its job, he said.

The Prime Minster called on village based womens health committees to work more diligently in ridding the country of dengue through clean up campaigns.

He also challenged village mayors to be in the forefront of the effort.

The village mayors and government representatives should take the lead and if people are not cleaning up, then they should do this themselves, urged Tuilaepa.

Last week, the Ministry of Health confirmed five deaths related to dengue as of 31 December 2017.

Dengue fever was declared an outbreak by the Ministry of Health in the last week of October 2017.

Over the past five months, a total of 2,446 Dengue related cases - both clinical and confirmed dengue Serotype 2 have been recorded, according to the Ministry.
LAS VEGAS (AP)  The flash of the CES technology show in Las Vegas is all about robots, drones and smart gadgets. But its subtext is all about Google versus Amazon.

Both companies usually shun conventions like CES, preferring to debut gadgets at their own press events. But these tech giants have built an imposing presence here this year as they work to weave their voice-operated digital assistants more deeply into our personal lives.

Google has plastered digital billboards and the Las Vegas Monorail with the "Hey Google" wake-up command. It's announced a range of new gadgets featuring its assistant on everything from smart displays to pressure cookers. And it's sent out the clowns  a jumpsuit-wearing army of advertising associates wearing brightly-colored Converse sneakers and hovering around partner firms' booths to explain how Google's technology works.

Amazon, which grabbed an early lead in this market, opted for a more subtle approach. Instead of an advertising blitz, its Alexa digital assistant has merely been popping up regularly in "smart" products across the convention  everything from mirrors and toilets to headphones and car dashboards.

Executives from both companies have also been turning up at press conferences held by other companies such as Panasonic, LG and Toyota. "What we're seeing is heavy competition between all the personal assistants," says Gartner analyst Brian Blau.

THE STAKES

The two companies  and to a lesser extent, Apple, with Siri, and Microsoft, with Cortana  are waging a fierce struggle to establish their assistants as de facto standards for a new generation of voice-controlled devices. It's similar in some respects to the decade-old battle between the iPhone and Google's Android system in smartphones, or to the much older fight between Apple's Mac computers and Microsoft's Windows PCs.

Both companies see the competition in existential terms. Getting shut out of voice devices could imperil Google's lucrative digital-advertising business, the source of its financial strength. Amazon, meanwhile, wants to ensure that its customers can directly access its "everything store" in contrast to now, when they mostly shop via devices and software systems controlled by Amazon's rivals.

For consumers, meanwhile, the spread of these assistants offers new convenience in the form of an ever-present digital concierge. But there could also be some uneasiness about revealing even more about their habits, preferences and routines to distant computers that are always listening for their commands.

THE EVERPRESENT COMPUTER

In a video presentation by LG, one consumer cooks while reading a recipe from the smart screen of the company's voice-activated robot CLOi. Another prepares to embark on a vacation and shuts off her lights by saying, "Hey, Google, I'm leaving."

Google said this week it's integrating its voice assistant to allow remote control of some settings in Kia and Fiat Chrysler vehicles, while Toyota announced a similar arrangement with Amazon that enables drivers to ask Alexa turn the heat up at home before they arrive.

But these smart products can  and sometimes do  support multiple assistants. Toyota Connected CEO Zack Hicks told reporters that "we're not exclusive" with Amazon, and that nothing prevents Toyota from partnering with others.

General Electric is showing off a suite of smart kitchen gizmos that connect its "Geneva" voice assistant to those of Amazon and Google. For example, you can preheat your oven by saying, "Alexa, tell Geneva to preheat the upper oven to 350." China's Baidu on Monday announced it was integrating its voice assistant into a lamp speaker and dome ceiling lights.

Whether people will truly pay more for the ability not to walk over and flip a switch themselves is unclear. But manufacturers aren't taking the chance that they'll be left behind if one or the other assistant becomes dominant.

"Five years ago, no one could predict what was going to happen with the smart home," says LG Electronics USA marketing vice president David VanderWaal. "Five years from now, we're not quite sure either. So this open partner, open platform system, is definitely the way to go."

THE RUNNERS UP

For the moment, voice competitors to Amazon and Google remain largely in the wings.

Microsoft's Cortana assistant, which is available on PCs running Windows 10, allows hundreds of millions of users to search the web using Bing. But it hasn't been a huge factor in gadget announcements leading up to CES. In fact, Alexa is even starting to encroach on Cortana's turf by making its way onto some PCs.

Apple hasn't been prominent this year, either. But many manufacturers have adopted its HomeKit software in order to ensure they'll work easily with iPhones and Siri. Apple, however, had to push back release of the HomePod, its almost-$350 smart speaker, until "early" this year; it was originally scheduled for December 2017.

Some analysts also say it's too soon to rule out Bixby, Samsung's AI assistant, which the company vowed to make a more central part of all its connected devices by 2020.

__

Associated Press writer Matt O'Brien contributed to this report.
The Minister of Prisons and Corrections Services, Tialavea Tionisio Hunts attempt to defend the indefensible on the front page of yesterdays Samoa Observer is pathetic at best.

At worst, it is typical of whats happening in this country today where leaders and senior public officials try to sugarcoat wrongdoing and butter up mistakes so that everyone can pretend that all is well when clearly it is not.

Folks, anywhere else in the world, heads would be rolling. There would be an outcry of some sort with members of the public calling for blood.

And yet here in Samoa, weve become so accustomed to these ridiculous excuses that weve just taken it on the chin and accepted them as normal.

Its just another day in paradise, right? Pathetic, absolutely pathetic ladies and gentlemen!

Now the issue in question involves a convicted murderer. He is none other than well-known criminal, Tagaloasa Filipaina.

During the Festive Season, the Samoa Prisons and Corrections Services (S.P.C.S.) apparently approved his release so he could attend a ceremony where he was bestowed a chiefly title.

Dont us get us wrong, everyone deserves a second chance, even criminals.

But the idea that prisoners can be granted special favours is disturbing.

Whats the point of locking them up then?

Why dont we just forget about all those laws and let the prisoners come out for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

Why dont we invite them too to all cocktails and special openings and closings attended by who is who of Samoa?

Weve got to be very careful about the messages we are sending out not just to the public but also the prisoners themselves, especially from a Prison that can barely contain convicts who keep running away at will.

Now when concerns from members of the public about the Tagaloasa decision were put to the Minister, he insisted that the prisoner had shown enough proof that he has changed his ways.

Filipaina is a low risk prisoner, he said. We believe he has very minimal chances of reoffending. The release depends on the condition of the prisoner, good behavior and low risk (of reoffending).

Fine then.

But here is a little snag.

According to the Prisons New Act, signed into law in 2016, it says that people convicted of murder, manslaughter, sexual connection, rape, incest, burglary and robbery are not eligible for special release, holiday release and weekend release.

Pressed about what the law says, the Minister said there is a clause under the Prisoners Act, which gives the S.P.C.S. the authority to release a prisoner.

Go and read the Act, he said.

Are you serious?

Why dont you read your own Act?

We only release the prisoners with special conditions, meaning they are at low risk of reoffending, he insisted.

For Filipaina, he has been before the Parole Board five times already and he will appear again next month. He is a low risk prisoner.

Let me tell you something Mr. Minister, members of the public are tired of being hurt by prisoners who are granted special permission only to come out and re-offend.

Try telling this rubbish to the innocent woman who was attacked at Ululoloa just before Christmas when four prisoners  including one who remains at large  escaped from Tafaigata?

Try justifying this decision to the family of people hurt by these criminals?

Try explaining yourself to many families whose homes have been broken into, robbed and whose young girls end up being raped while these convicts are outside of prison?

Low risk, high risk or whatever risk, prisoners belong behind bars until theyve done the time for the crime. It is that simple.

Keep in mind that weve still got that silly thing called the law. It is what everybody should be following. No one is above the law.

The irony of it all is that the law to keep people like murderers behind bars was created by Parliament.

Which means Cabinet Ministers and Members of Parliament then should lead by example in making sure these laws are respected and obeyed.

But if prisoners are granted special exemptions to do whatever they like, then whats the point? Why do lawyers and Judges of the Court waste their time sending convicts to jail?

Whats the use of a Judiciary system? Even worse, why waste money having a Parliament where laws are created?

We might as well just let the criminals run wild and free and let chaos reign.

What do you think?
Re: P.M. on China

I have said this many times; the only thing China wants is a vote for them in the UN. China is doing this in many countries, and they are controlling these countries like puppets.

The U.S. is with Taiwan, and they will never accept this Lousy One China Policy which Samoa is tied to because of these loans.

Taiwan is already an Independent Nation from the Communists, and the UN needs to recognize it.

For Samoa, we need to adhere to what Australia is saying. We have to remember that many Samoans are enjoying living in Australia and New Zealand, who were supposed to be taken care of by our Govt.

The Australian Govt. had offered a lot in developing our poor country, especially educating our people since we became independent.

There are numerous and countless things, because we cannot measure the quality of our people graduating from their Universities and Colleges.

It seems like our Govt. is forgetting the generosity of Australia to us, and many other Nations of the Pacific. For our PM, focus on the Ball.

Vaai le Polo, le mealelei le la e fai mai ai Ausetalia, ae le o le vave ika!

Latai
Prime Minister Tuilaepa Dr. Sailele Malielegaois administration has ordered government Ministries and Corporations to submit their Annual Reports to Cabinet immediately.

It has also demanded that starting from the financial year 2018/2019, it is now compulsory for all government bodies to submit Annual Reports to the Ministry of Prime Minster and Cabinet, no later than 30 September every year.

The instructions are given in a Special Cabinet Paper (FK (17) Faapitoa 13) obtained by the Samoa Observer.

The document shows that a special Cabinet meeting had resolved for the Ministry of the Prime Minister and Cabinet as the focal point of receiving and following up with individual offices about the progress of their annual reports.

The Ministries and Corporations have also been told not to waste money on using colour photographs and glossy papers to print them.

The Cabinet Paper is dated 22 November 2017. It was issued following a special Cabinet meeting on 17 November 2017 where the issue of annual reports was discussed.

The Samoa Observer understands that during the meeting, concerns were expressed about the delay in the submission of a number of annual reports.

This prompted the follow up letter from Cabinet to all the heads of government Ministries and bodies, signed by the Chief Executive Officer of the M.P.M.C, Agafili Shem Leo.

A translation of the letter in Samoan reads:

During its special meeting on Friday 17 November 2017, Cabinet discussed PK (17) and resolved:

1. That the Ministry of Prime Minister and Cabinet will follow up on the progress of all annual reports for government Ministries and Corporations. That the M.P.M.C. will work with all state owned enterprises to submit their annual reports to Cabinet.

2. Ensure the annual reports include:

 Targets set and achieved

 Targets that have not been achieved and the reasons

 The link between work in the Sector Plans and S.D.S.

 Expenditures and Revenues

 Staff

 Major challenges faced by the Ministry/Corporation

 Recommendations for Cabinet

3. We are enforcing the ban on the use of colour photos and glossy papers to print the reports

4. For reports for the Financial Year 2016/2017 that have not been submitted, it is compulsory that these be submitted to the Ministry of the Prime Minister and Cabinet no later than Monday 11 December 2017.

5. For the 2018/2019 Financial Year, it is now compulsory to submit all Annual Reports to the Ministry of Prime Minster and Cabinet no later than 30 September every year, so they can be submitted to Cabinet.

The Cabinet paper also demands a report from the Audit Office to detail which State-Owned-Enterprises have not been audited for the Financial 2016/2017.

This report should be submitted as soon as possible.
The Samoa Post has responded to criticisms of their services after a member of the public received an opened mail.

In doing so, the Post says they are willing to address and clarify any concern customers may have on their mail items as soon as they receive them.

The offer is made in a statement issued by the Samoa Post with regards to a customer who expressed her disappointment with how her mail was handled.

The woman said when she received her post card from Australia, it was already opened. Another issue was a Christmas card that was sent through the mail on December 8th, 2017, was only received last week.

She said that has happened to her before. It led to her and her family halting all use of the mail service to send or receive important documents or items.

However, according to the statement issued by the Samoa Post, there were postal items received from overseas postal administrations that were torn, opened, partially opened, wet and damaged.

These were due to mail handling and transmission throughout their journey from the office of origin, transit points, to the office of destination, the statement reads.

In addition, postal items went through automatic cancelling/sorting machines in developed countries, before they arrive to Samoa, says the statement.

The Samoa Post also laid out their operational procedures.

1. All mail items received torn, opened, partially opened, wet or in damaged with condition, are repaired at the office of destination, with the corresponding notation stamped on the items, indicating the condition of arrival;

2. They are date stamped, signifying date of arrival in Samoa, and signed by two postal officials, as witness on the condition of arrival;

3. Torn letters are inserted into plastic bags and stapled, for security and to ensure they are delivered to addressees, in an acceptable condition; and

4. Samoa Post officials do not open any mail items, as alleged in the article.

Questions sent to the Samoa Post on how they can ensure no repetition of such issues have not been answered as of press time.

The disappointed customer told the Samoa Observer that her mail was opened.

This is what I received last week, the concerned citizen explained, showing the letter.

It arrived like this. It was sent on the 8th of December last year and we just got it last week and when we got it, it was all torn up and wrapped in this plastic bag."

It says over here received open in Apia, initial Mark, Witness  Whoever. They cannot do that. I didnt sort of put this inside, I received it like this."

This is a big thing; you read a lot of things about the Post Office. The first issue is that they opened it and then they put it inside and stapled it, the second issue is that it arrived very late.

The unhappy citizen explained that the same issue happened to her two years ago, her trust for S.P.O. withered away.

So what we did before with our credit card and other important mail, we mail it to New Zealand before we bring it back, she said.

We dont want to bring it over here anymore because we dont get the mail. We dont want to get mails delivered here anymore."

But this is from my cousin in Australia who always sends Christmas cards every year. And I thought where is this years Christmas card because this time we didnt receive anything."

Now that we actually did get it, it has already been opened.

She adds she suspects people opened up the mail hoping to find money.

I think at one time they found that people have been opening mail at the place where they store all the mail and then throw away the envelopes, she said.

This has happened to me before, two years ago, which is why we refuse to send important items through the mail now."

This is not done in Australia, it is done here or where they store the mail here."

I think the only reason they do this is that they think that there is money inside. So they open it and try.
The government needs to consider the safety of people who swim at the Tufuiopa village pool.

The concern has been raised by village member, Tuifao Sauala, following a string of incidents where vehicles have crashed into the pool.

As of last week, three vehicles have found themselves in the Tufuiopa pool and luckily no one was swimming when the accidents occurred he said.

Otherwise it would have been a disaster. Are we going to wait for a tragic incident to happen in order to act accordingly?

According to Sauala, the traffic incidents have occurred only after the resurfacing of the Tufuiopa road.

I blame the L.T.A. and the Police for not enforcing the speed limit in the town area and the condition of the road now, he said.

Also why is this road slippery compared to other roads overseen by L.T.A that are not slippery when it rains?

You see what is going on, there are speed limit signs everywhere, but it is not being enforced that is why the drivers continue to drive like maniacs.

Sauala lives next to the pool and he says sometimes there are about 25-30 children swimming in the pool.

Imagine if a car slides into pool, it would be a disaster, he said.

And that is why the government should make this a priority in order to ensure the safety of our children."

The road is slippery and as a parent, I am highly concerned for the safety of our children."

So now we have stopped our children from going to take a dip in the water, which to me is unfair, this literally deprives our children from enjoying what they grew up doing and that is swimming in the pool, he said.

According to Sauala, the drivers need to play their part and that is to heed the speed limits of the main road.

"To the drivers who take this road, please be considerate when you drive around this area, we have our children walking to the stores."

And also when it rains please do not speed in case your car slips into the pool again."

This used to be a safe area, but Im afraid after the accidents, it has become an unsafe area and the government needs to fix the issue at hand, said Sauala.

He said their village has a meeting scheduled and he intends to raise the need for speed bumps and maybe huge rocks to protect the pool.

But then even the big rocks will just present such danger for the driver if they crash onto it and that is why its important that our concerns are addressed to the L.T.A. and the Ministry of Police, he said.

Emails sent to Acting L.T.A. Chief Executive Officer, Mataafa Sepelini Poufa, and Police Superintendent and Media Spokesperson, Auapaau Filipo Logoitino, were not answered as of press time.

Last week, a Holden vehicle veered off the road and crashed into the village pool.

An eyewitness, Jadyn Ualesi, said the person who drove the car was test-driving the vehicle.

The vehicle was speeding, she told the Samoa Observer.

It came down from where Island Rock Company is and it couldnt stop on time to slow down at the curve and it went straight in the pool.

Ms. Ualesi said the driver was not hurt.

This pool is usually full of young kids and people nearby who come and take a swim and it would have been a disaster if there were people in the pool.
People travel for leisure, but a group of students from Griffith University, Australia, are in Samoa for a totally different reason.

Apart from enjoying Samoas natural scenery and friendly hospitality, these students are here to study Samoas health sector and culture.

The trip is a study tour; the students are all health students at Griffith University, some are bio-med science, health science, exercise science, public health and nutrition and diabetic, Lecturer, Neil Harris, said.

The idea of the tour is for them to go somewhere thats not where they live, somewhere quite different and to experience the culture of that society.

The core of why were here is to look at the health of Samoa, what is the health status and what are the determinants of Samoan health and what is being done in Samoa to try and improve health.

Were working with the Ministry of health and the National University of Samoa.

So we visited N.U.S. where there were some lectures and history of the development of Samoa.

We also visited the Ministry where we were given some lectures on what is being done, what is being done, what are their programs, what are some issues in Samoa.

We will also visit some N.G.Os, Samoa Cancer Society, the U.N, W.H.O, Australian High Commission, well visit some N.G.Os working directly with the population to try and improve Samoan health.

Away from that, the trip to Samoa provides the students with a different experience.

Australia is a highly industrialised nation and completely versatile, and they just think everybody has that, and they think that our health system is not very good, until they come to somewhere like Samoa to see how youre living, how youre working and how youre dealing with your issues.

Volunteering on behalf of the 17 students to speak of their experience are Emma Norton, Julia Shuker, Emma Hay and Esther Dancewicz.

This is our first time to Samoa, the ladies said.

Weve tasted the food during the S.T.A. culture tour, and dancing was my favourite part, Emma said.

The weather is hot, its beautiful and the people are just so lovely, culture and food, everything is just so lovely, Esther added, saying the coconut cream was just so nice.

So far weve loving our stay, but I wanna come back, Julia said.

Were here with the Griffith University for a Public Health Study Tour, Emma explained.

Were here to observe Samoas health, the public health, health challenges and compare it to other countries and look at their health systems. So today we visited like a few hospitals in the sub centre and its also interesting to see how its different to Australia.

The students also noted the difference between their countrys health sector and Samoas.

There are very different health systems. The hospital was like outdoors for starters, Emma Hay said.

The way the funding works and peoples attitude towards healthcare, Emma said.

I like the way the Ministry is putting in a lot of effort to address and incorporate both the traditional and medicinal health, Esther added.

To improve the local health sector, they need more resources I think, people, staff; apparently there was not enough medicine, not enough ambulances, more funding, Emma added.

They were also amused at the level of interaction between Samoas Ministry of Health and the local community.

I love the way they are incorporating the community womens committee to promote healthy living and healthy habits; I think its just powerful, Julia said.

We have practices that are similar, but its just like more doctor services and not community based, Emma added.

We dont just use regular people.

The students, apart from understanding how the different health system works and Samoas culture, they look forward to experiencing some good island vibe.

I think Samoan culture is amazing, its just amazing to see how its still so strong, a lot of countries have lost it because of colonization and migration, but you guys have kept it going so well, Emma said.

Its nice and beautiful. I dont know why most people dont come here, Julia said.

I think its stunning. Im going to tell everyone to come to Samoa, its so beautiful, Esther added.

The greenery and the cute little houses, the people are lovely, Emma Hay said.

Were looking forward to snorkeling, canopy work and everything, Emma added.

Everyone has just been so welcoming and so nice, and were like still in awe because when we wave at people they just wave back at us and its never like that back at home to see how happy it is, Julia said.

Also sharing her experience was lecturer, Ernesta Sofija.

Samoa is a beautiful location. Well spend three days in Savaii, thats when we really experience the beauty of Samoa, because everyone whos been talking say that if you dont go to Savaii, you havent been in Samoa, well enjoy beach fales, Ernesta said.

She also had a taste of the local food during the tour and it was nothing less than perfect for her.

Its my first time to try local food, its not bad, very nice and its my first time to be eating from something like this.

Referring to Samoas tourism sector, Neil said: I think its up to the people of Samoa what they want. Its still a very natural location, and its all about the natural beauty of the island. As a tourist place, I think they should maintain it; its such a beautiful place.

Ernesta adds one thing she will take with her home is the friendliness of the locals.

One thing is for sure, Samoa will be seeing these students again, and this time not on a study tour.
When Mathias and Markus of Austria introduced themselves to Dear Tourist along the seawall, it was only natural that we ask after the famous town of Salzburg in Austria where it seems everyones childhood movie, the Sound of Music was filmed.

Really? said a surprised Markus. Not many people know that it was filmed there. We live two hours from Salzburg.

Mathias added: Awww I dont think it ever looked like it did in the movie.

He joked: Oh actually yeah, the town still has some buildings still standing and the bridge is still there and the Von Trapps house still exists and of course lots of rolling hills alive with the sound of music.

We see what he did there.

The two travellers have been backpacking all over the world and have found themselves in a region that they only ever heard about as existing at the end of the world.

The Pacific just seemed like a faraway fairytale, said Mathias. Like we didnt even know that Vanuatu existed.

Markus added, And its just that idea of the tropical island paradise, like if you mention Samoa or Fiji in Europe everyone is like oh wow, they will be jealous that you get to go and visit.

Wanting to discover the worlds best kept secret in the Pacific, the friends had their eye on the islands as they were planning their itinerary.

We thought about what Pacific countries we could visit, said Mathias.

We were really interested in the Pacific cultures like the different cultures there are and the similarities that there are between them, said Markus.

For us, very, very externally - the languages sound kind of familiar just the vowels and the sequences of letters sometimes and syllables.

We just came from Vanuatu and Fiji and then last year we visited New Zealand which I think that technically counts as South Pacific.

The friends had only been in Samoa two days and so far their impressions have been kept to just the town area of Apia,

Compared to Vanuatu, Samoa seems fairly well off and it just seem like theres more money. Vanuatu seems like a poor place in comparison.

My general impression before coming here was that Samoa was that it was a luxury resort-y place and that if youre wealthy enough, you can come and stay here.

And thats the impression that most people in Europe would have of the Pacific anyway. Because its so far away and its hard to get here and its so far away. Of course you have seen all the fancy resorts that Fiji and French Polynesia market online.

The two Austrians were staying at Olivias but were heading to Lalomanu yesterday hoping to catch the next bus out.

Planning on staying two weeks, they hoped to see more of the old Samoa outside of the capital city township and they were looking forward to spending some time in Savaii where they heard was more of the slow pace they were looking for.
Not having enough money is an issue most families in Samoa face today.

And Sani Howard, from Nuu, is not spared from such misery.

The father of two shared with the Village Voice team that while he faces water and electricity problems, the $30 he makes from his small business is not enough to support his childrens education.

My wife takes our kids to school, he said.

My eldest is in Year 2 and my youngest son is in Year 1. In the next two weeks, school will begin and once again we will have to look for money to take care of them, the 39-year-old said.

Mr. Howard adds the land they relocated too does not have water and electricity supply.

He says they have been living in their new half-built home on a quarter-acre land for six months without water and electricity.

Mr. Howard continuously searches for help and he is desperate to have water connection.

I make homemade hot dogs and sell it in town.

So every day I make about 60 hot dogs and I sell it for $2.50, but my customers usually complain with the price so I drop it down to $2.00 and the sales I earn at the end of the day would be only $150.

Then I use that money to buy goods to make hot dogs for the next day and I also have a loan to pay, after all of that has been cleared away, I will be left with only $30 to spend on my family which is not enough.

He works to look for his childrens school fees, their uniforms and stationeries.

As a parent, he said, we must always meet our childrens demands.

My childrens welfare is the reason I am working. There is no better way for me to give them a better life than to put them in school and push them on the right track.
For any country, the exercise of good governance in its leadership is reflected by the way citizens live.

That means if the leaders do whats right, the people they are leading should thrive.

Such is the view of elderly father, Galoma Eliuta Tunumafono, from the village of Faleu Manono.

Mr. Tunumafono, 71, says life in Samoa today is a struggle.

The cost of living is really expensive and unaffordable for most people, he said.

In our village, the major problem is running water. Our water hardly comes on and we dont know why.

Its not just water. There are challenges with the lack of jobs, incomes and so forth.

Most of the people here depend on their plantation and the sea for a living, he said.

They dont work regular jobs.

This brings its own challenges. Without jobs, people secure loans to develop themselves.

Mr. Tunumafono is also concerned about another matter.

He said he doesnt support the increasing presence of Chinese in Samoa.

I really dont support the Chinese entering our country; they take our land and our money.

Our government receives so much help from the Chinese government, but not the people of Samoa.

The Chinese businesses are shutting down the local businesses who are also trying to support their families.

Mr. Tunumafono says Samoans are the ones who suffer.

A lot of the Samoan people are suffering, including me and the government doesnt even care.

A lot of people suffer because of the high cost of living and the Prime Minister is not doing anything about it.

Mr. Tunumafono adds its about time we change our government.

We have suffered so much and the only way to end that is to change the government.

There is no other way for us to end this struggle, but to change the government.
Villagers in the mainland of Faleu Manono continue to pray and hope for water connection.

Misitaga Vasa, 42, says most families in his village cannot afford the installation cost.

This is an issue we have been facing for so long in my village, the farmer told the Village Voice team yesterday.

The water from government has been installed in our place and not everyone has water connection because they cant afford the installation.

But for people who can afford it, there are other challenges.

The issue that we face with running water is that it doesnt work most of the time.

At one stage water will be running and then it wont like today.

Mr. Vasa says its a daily struggle not having water.

Especially that my house is in the mainland, it is really hard for me to collect water from houses in the coastal area.

Cooking washing and cleaning will be so hard for us here, so even if we have the connection, we would still need something to store water in.

Mr. Vasa says the expensive cost of living is not helping at all.

Life is really hard and expensive here in Samoa and we really cant afford to struggle finding water.

We have struggled enough and the water issue is too much.

Mr. Vasa is desperate for water connection.

Water is needed, especially for families around here.

Water has been an issue for so long, and we really want our connection to be the same as everyone, where water runs every day without a problem.
The musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying ran on Broadway from October 1961 to March 1965 a total of 1,417 performances. The truth is we are always trying (even when we say we arent really trying) so I decided to go back a few centuries to look for some early practitioners of that skill.

Meet Benedetto Cotrugli, a 15th century Italian rug merchant, who wrote a modest tome, The Book of the Art of Trade, which seems to embody some principles that are still deeply relevant today. Translated by Harvard historian, associate professor Sophus Reinert, this is the first English translation.

Cotrugli advised his peers that in order to succeed in business, leaders need to be charitable, ethical and treat people fairly, be modest, look for the right qualities in a wife and retire at 50, when his blood calms down and his intelligence dims and his memory becomes less quick, so that he risks committing many errors in his business.

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Six hundred years ago, the early concepts of capitalism and corporate social responsibility were already being explored. Cotrugli came to the merchant business reluctantly. He was an intellect, but he felt that the necessary activity, known as commerce/business, had fallen into the hands of undisciplined and uncouth people, who carry on without moderation or orderliness, ignoring and perverting the law.

Stop. Please re-read the above paragraph. Then send it to your friends on Wall Street or Main Street.

Cotrugli took a holistic approach to this dilemma, laying out principles of trade, religion, civic engagement, modesty, fairness and finally wife selection. (Im not going there, let it suffice that I got very lucky). He also opined on what to avoid -- chess, board games, dice, fencing, musical instruments, dancing, hunting and fishing. (As I am an avid fly fisherman, my suggestion is to take some of Cotruglis axioms with a grain of salt.)

What is impressive though is his deep concern for others who are less fortunate. The merchant must be generous in extending his hand to the poor and in giving alms out of his own property, he wrote. We just finished Christmas, so maybe a little carry-over here is appropriate. We cant just do it a couple of days a year.

Here is a big one. Merchants should not be involved in politics or the courts, because these are perilous areas. I think he could have mentioned this in November, 2016.

But Cotrugli also knows the scales can be tipped unfairly, and he says, the shrewdness of the merchant, or his cunning, must be employed in moderation. However, Cotrugli is no roll-over artist. He also says that the merchant should not allow himself to be got better of by deceit and falsity.

Cotrugli saw the merchant as a noble figure, literate, educated and cultivated. At the same time, the art of the trade requires a strong technical base. Today, this would include computer skills, finance, marketing and accounting etc. He also spoke about the importance of the location of the operation and taking on excessive debt, and he supported mentoring the young merchant as he learns his trade.

Charging interest back then was illegal and so credit was secured with insurance premiums that skirted the usury laws. But in the matter of nonperforming loans, Cotrugli is very clear, after one year, the amount due should be cut in half, and written off entirely after two, because for the merchant losing time and losing money are the same thing. Are you listening head of the government student loan program, and all the debt collection industries that have sprung up around it? Maybe also send that sentence to the credit card industry.

This guy Benedetto Cotrugli is rather unique  not only for his time back then, but clearly relevant today (although he didnt see the eventual rise and power of women). But Benny and I part company when he gets to retirement. Even factoring in life expectancy increases, Cotrugli supports getting off the stage pretty early  by 50, a man has a good name, possessions, he has made his pile, married off his children  what more does he want.

I will tell you what he wants -- to stay relevant, to continue to wage war, to play more hands, to beat down more doors and walls and make a difference in the grand game of life.

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. 543: Im going out kicking and screaming.
Mondays Martin Luther King Day march through downtown San Diego ended with a rally. Several speakers noted that, while the late civil rights leader cherished eloquence, he placed a higher value on action.

This is a journey, said Abdur-Rahim Hameed, not a speech.

So Hameed, president and CEO of the National Black Contractors Association, stood on the plaza near San Diego City Hall and called for more opportunities for African-Americans in the building trades.

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Bishop Cornelius Bowser of Charity Apostolic Church called for criminal justice reform.

And the Rev. Shane Harris, head of the National Action Networks San Diego chapter, demanded a solution to a homelessness crisis that is more permanent than the temporary tents approved by Mayor Faulconer and the City Council.

We have a mayor who is doing something about homelessness, but is not doing enough, said Harris, who organized the mid-day event. A tent does not provide a transition back into society.

King, who was assassinated 50 years ago this April, may not have directly addressed each of these issues. But the 220 people who marched from San Diego City College to the San Diego Concourse said they were honoring the late civil rights leaders spirit.

We come, O God, like he did, Pastor Peyton Blanchard Harrison Jr. of the Grace Covenant Christian Church said in an invocation, to march in peace, to march in love, to march as witness.

The marchers included several dozen clergy, both Christian and Muslim; members of Local 30 Unite Here!, a hotel workers union; the San Diego Black Panthers; Indivisible San Diego; San Diego City Council member David Alvarez and Ammar Campa-Najjar, a former Obama administration official running for Congress against Republican Duncan Hunter Jr. in the 50th District.

The crowd was dotted with signs referencing national political issues and movements: Black Lives Matter, Refugees and Immigrant Rights Are Human Rights, Impeach 45! Now!

In the current political environment, Wendy Batterson said, the lines between national and local issues have been blurred.

Everybodys got friends, family, co-workers of all colors and ethnicities, said Batterson, one of the leaders of Indivisible San Diego. We are all mixed, all inter-related and we need to stand up for each other.

Several speakers cited reports that President Trump had referred to immigrants coming from shithole countries. Those words  and actions like the administrations attempt to build a border wall  fly against Kings compassionate example, Alvarez said.

We are going backwards, the council member said. If we could just reflect a little bit of the way Dr. Martin Luther King was in the 50s and 60s  throughout his life  this would be a better world.
Long before it was trendy, Isabel Cruz, of Isabels Cantina and Coffee Cup, was putting a healthy spin on Latin cuisine. Back in the 1990s, when she opened her first restaurant, The Mission, she put dishes on the menu she wanted to eat and would be healthful but that wouldnt make her feel that she was depriving herself.

All these years later, she follows the same philosophy. Our dishes have simple ingredients and are made from scratch, she said. Theyre healthy and simplified and allow for restrictions, like gluten free, low-fat, and paleo.

Cruzs family is Puerto Rican, and her dishes reflect that tropical origin story with a lot of produce and seafood. Starting out with clean food, she said, has made it easier to lighten up and still keep flavor in each dish. She pointed out that Latin food doesnt have a lot of dairy, such as butter sauces. She bakes instead of fries. And she switches out better oils for lard. Cruz also incorporates a lot of Asian culinary influences.

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They have many of the same ingredients and feature bold, bright flavors, she explained.

Growing up, what was often on the Cruz family table were black beans and rice, roasted chicken and plantains, as well as salad. Youll find them on the menu at Isabels Cantina, too. At home, Cruz loves a good roasted chicken, salt-brined for two days to create crispy bird on the outside and juicy inside, along with seasonal vegetables.

Cruzs upcoming book, The Latin Table, which will be published by Skyhorse this spring, features all whole foods and everything made from scratch.

Among the recipes in the book is Turkey Albondigas  turkey meatballs bathed in a simmering broth. The meatballs are simple to make, including a twist of fresh mint leaves that brighten the flavor. Even the breadcrumbs are homemade  a simple pulsing of white bread in a food processor.

The broth, too, is the result of simple technique, but unlike a basic chicken broth, the addition of chipotle chilies in adobo and tomato paste adds a zing of flavor. Be sure to wait to add the kale until the broth is finished. That will let the leaves gently wilt but still keep some nice texture.

The inevitable New Years resolution of eating more healthfully usually involves salad. And somehow that often feels like punishment. But Cruzs composed Citrus Salad is so gorgeous  with its brilliant reds and oranges  and her Cilantro Lime Sauce dressing so powerfully bright that it will feel like an indulgence. Its marvelously easy and quick to prepare: just sliced oranges, tangerines and grapefruit, along with bursts of red onion, cilantro and mint over a bed of spicy arugula, and topped with that dressing.

Cruz is a brilliant sauce maker  and there are at least 30 in her new cookbook  so keep this one and her Orange Coconut Chili Oil that accompanies her sea bass dish below in your back pocket, or more literally in your refrigerator, to add to all sorts of dishes. The Cilantro Lime Sauce has all of four ingredients: fresh chopped cilantro, fresh lime juice, olive oil and salt. If its bitter (that can happen with cilantro), she said, just add a touch of honey to fix it. Drizzle on the citrus salad, but also over roasted vegetables, fish or chicken. Or use it as a marinade.

So, lets talk about that Pepita-Crusted Sea Bass. Cruz gets most of her seafood from friend Dan Nattrass shop, Fishbone, in Liberty Public Market. If sea bass isnt available, no worries. You can make this dish with any other fish  or even chicken or a thin pork loin chop. But the fish is divine and feels so light that youll crave this version. The breading is roasted and crushed pumpkin and sunflower seeds, along with coarse salt. Dont overdo the pulsing of the seeds; you want texture here. Dredge the sea bass fillets in a shallow bowl of the seed mixture after rubbing them with oil. Then youll saute them fairly briefly before putting them in the oven to finish cooking. Once they come out, youll drizzle the fish with what may be the best component of the whole dish  the Orange Coconut Chili Oil.

This is a two-step condiment  and if you like orange chili oil on its own, you can even stop here. Itll last in the fridge for a couple of months and is something you can use on a variety of dishes or as a dip. But for this dish, take that extra step. First, youll combine orange zest with dried chili flakes, garlic and a good-quality vegetable oil, along with sesame oil, in a saucepan and slowly heat it for about 10 minutes. Cool and save. To make the sauce, whisk together your orange chili oil with soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, brown sugar and coconut milk. The result is a multidimensional, tangy dressing perfect for the sea bass but also guaranteed to have you eating salads daily.

Golden is a San Diego freelance food writer and blogger.

Citrus Salad With Arugula

and Cilantro Lime Sauce

Serves 4

1 navel orange

1 pink grapefruit

1 blood orange (if in season; otherwise more citrus)

1 tangerine

3 cups baby arugula, washed and dried

 small red onion, thinly sliced

 cup cilantro, chopped

 cup fresh mint, chopped and whole for garnish

Cilantro Lime Sauce (recipe follows)

Finishing salt of your choice, such as Maldon sea salt (optional)

Remove the peel, white pith and seeds from the orange, grapefruit, blood orange and tangerine and discard. Slice the citrus into -inch rounds. On a large platter, lay arugula and top with all citrus, red onion, cilantro and mint. Drizzle with Cilantro Lime Sauce. Salt to taste.

Note: An easy way to cut the citrus is to slice off the top and bottom ends of the fruit. Place a flat end on a cutting board and, using a chef s knife, cut away the peel from top to bottom, removing as much of the white pith as possible. Slice into wheels and half wheels.

Cilantro Lime Sauce

Makes 1 cup

 cup chopped cilantro

 cup lime juice

 cup olive oil

Salt to taste

Combine cilantro and lime juice in blender or small food processor. Puree on low while pouring in the olive oil in a steady stream.

Blend until combined. Add salt to taste. Best used the day made.

Note: Sometimes cilantro will have a slightly bitter taste. If this is happening, just add a bit of honey, and the honey will fix it.

Pepita-Crusted Sea Bass With Coconut Chili Oil

Serves 4

 cup roasted pumpkin seeds

 cup roasted sunflower seeds

1 teaspoon salt (coarse salt works best here)

4 (6-ounce) sea bass fillets (or other fish), skin removed

Olive oil

Orange Coconut Chili Oil (recipe follows)

Pulse pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and salt in blender or food processor. Cruz says she likes a nutty texture, so dont pulse too long. The longer you pulse, the closer youll get to a powder, which you dont want.

Place pepita salt mix in a shallow dish. Rub the sea bass with oil, dredge the fillets in the pepita-salt mix, and gently press to get a nice coating. Repeat on opposite side. Set pepita-crusted sea bass fillets on a plate.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Heat 1/8-inch olive oil in a cast-iron pan or large saute pan over medium heat. Place the sea bass fillets in the hot pan. Brown for about 2 minutes on each side, then transfer to oven and bake until opaque throughout, about 5 minutes, more or less, depending on how thick your fish is.

Transfer to desired serving container. Serve over rice or the Citrus Salad. Drizzle Orange Coconut Chili Oil over fish and rice.

Orange Coconut Chili Oil

This recipe takes two steps. You can use the Orange Chili Oil as a condiment on its own. Adding the soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, brown sugar and coconut milk turns it into a luscious sauce.

Makes 1 cup

STEP 1 (ORANGE CHILI OIL)

Zest from 3 large oranges, washed thoroughly before zesting

 cup dried red chili flakes

1 large garlic clove, peeled and lightly smashed

1 cup vegetable oil (a good-quality corn or peanut oil works well)

 cup sesame oil

Combine ingredients in a heavy, non-aluminum saucepan on medium-low heat. The goal is to heat the oil and ingredients slow and low and for the mixture to slightly bubble (if the bubbles get big, turn it off  you dont want to burn the ingredients) for about 10 minutes. Adjust the heat accordingly. Remove from the heat and let stand until cool or overnight.

Transfer the oil and seasonings into a clean glass mason jar. Discard the garlic. If refrigerated, chili oil can last a couple of months.

Notes: Cruz suggests using organic oranges. If you dont have a good zester, you can peel away the orange skin with a good peeler (try to leave as much of the white pith behind as possible) and finely mince.

STEP 2 (ORANGE COCONUT CHILI OIL

 cup orange chili oil (stirred well so you get a good amount of the orange rind and chili flakes)

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar

2 tablespoons brown sugar

 can full-fat coconut milk

Whisk chili oil, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and brown sugar until combined. Slowly stir in the coconut milk. If properly refrigerated, sauce can last 3 days.

Turkey Albondigas

Serves 6

FOR THE MEATBALLS:

1 pound ground turkey, preferably white meat

2 cloves garlic

 yellow onion, minced

2 tablespoons fresh mint leaves, finely chopped

1 egg

 cup breadcrumbs, preferably homemade (See note)

1 teaspoon salt

 cup flour, for dredging

 cup vegetable oil, for frying

FOR THE BROTH:

2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 chipotle chilies in adobo

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 yellow onion, peeled and diced

5 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

3 carrots, diced

2 celery stalks, diced

1 cup white wine

8 cups chicken stock

3 cups lacinato kale, chopped

Fresh mint, chopped, for garnish

 red onion, chopped, for garnish

Combine the first 7 meatball ingredients in a medium mixing bowl. Use your hands to lightly form small meatballs, about 1 inch in diameter. Set the meatballs on a platter, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until ready to cook. This can be done up to 1 day in advance.

For the broth, combine the tomato paste and chilies in a blender or food processor. Pulse and set aside. Heat olive oil in a stockpot over a medium-high flame. Add the onion and garlic and cook until soft and translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the carrots and celery. Continue cooking for a few minutes more, stirring well to coat the vegetables with the olive oil. Add the white wine and simmer for 5 minutes. Stir in the tomato/chipotle mixture. Add the chicken stock and simmer until the vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes.

While the stock is simmering, lightly coat the meatballs with the flour. Heat the vegetable oil in a large saute pan over a medium flame. Add the meatballs in batches until cooked through, about 5 minutes. When the meatballs have browned, transfer the cooked meatballs into the simmering broth. Stir in kale. Remove the pot from the heat.

Serve the soup steaming hot, topped with a sprinkling of chopped mint and red onion.

Note: To make Quick Homemade Bread Crumbs, place 4 slices of hearty white bread in a food processor and pulse to a fine crumb.

Recipes courtesy of Isabel Cruz, of Isabels Cantina and Coffee Cup.
Vice Adm. Tom Rowden, the Navys top surface warfare officer, will depart the service on Thursday, and a slew of fellow sailors face possible criminal charges, the latest fallout in an ongoing probe into a rash of collisions in the Western Pacific that killed 17 sailors over the summer.

Nicknamed the SWO boss because of his perch atop all Navy surface warfare officers, Rowden also was tasked with training and equipping the crews of most of the the U.S. Pacific Fleets warships at his Coronado-based command.

On Sept. 14, Rowden asked Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson to let him retire earlier than planned  around April instead of in the summer.

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Today, I have informed the chief of naval operations that this Thursday I will step aside earlier than previously planned as the commander, Naval Surface Forces, and commander, Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Rowden told The San Diego Union-Tribune in an emailed statement.

This was a difficult decision to make, but I make it with the best interest of the surface warfare community and the Navy in mind. In December, the Senate confirmed Rear Adm. Richard Brown to be the next commander of Naval Surface Forces and Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet. The surface warfare community will be in good hands as Rich is a superb and talented naval officer.

In this job, Ive spent three and a half years traveling around the world spending time with our surface force and the men and women who bring life, energy and purpose to our ships. Ive loved this job and the people Ive worked with. It has been the highest honor to serve our nation and the Navy for more than 40 years.

Rear Adm. Brown was serving as the director of Navy Personnel Command and the deputy chief of Naval Personnel.

There will be no change of command ceremony when power is transferred between the two admirals on Thursday.

Citing anonymous sources, both the U.S. Naval Institute and Defense News claimed an ongoing investigation by Adm. James Caldwell, head of the Navys reactor program, into accidents involving the warships John S. McCain, Fitzgerald, Lake Champlain and Antietam last year recommended the dismissal of Rowden.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Caldwells Consolidated Disposition Authority announced courts-martial proceedings against leaders on both the Fitzgerald and McCain.

In the military, these proceedings are called Article 32 hearings and theyre convened to determine if a service member should be charged with a crime.

The ex-commander of the Fitzgerald, Cmdr. Bryce Benson, will be summoned to the inquiry as will two of his lieutenants and another unnamed sailor at the rank of lieutenant junior grade.

The potential charges include dereliction of duty, hazarding a vessel and negligent homicide, according to a written statement emailed to the Union-Tribune by Capt. Greg Hicks, the Navy Chief of Information.

Cmdr. Alfredo J. Sanchez, the former skipper of the McCain, also faces possible criminal charges including dereliction of duty, hazarding a vessel and negligent homicide, Hicks said.

An unnamed Chief Petty Officer aboard the McCain also has been recommended for a charge of dereliction of duty.

Additional administrative actions are being conducted for members of both crews including non-judicial punishment for four Fitzgerald and four John S. McCain crewmembers, Hicks added.

Previous probes into the crashes already had triggered the firings of the top officers aboard the McCain and Fitzgerald and the commodore of Japan-based Destroyer Squadron 15.

The commander of the Japan-based 7th Fleet, Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, retired earlier than expected and Adm. Scott Swift, the U.S. Pacific Fleets commander, also indicated he would depart early.

Rowdens Thursday exit occurs on the same day Richardson and Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer are slated to testify before members of the House Armed Services Committee concerning the warship collisions.

Rowden was one of the primary architects of distributed lethality, a suite of tactics designed to deter potential enemies like Russia or China but creating an offensively-minded, nimble and lethal legion of American surface warfare officers who could strike and scoot quickly to avoid detection and destruction.

He toiled to revamp the embattled littoral combat ship program, pausing operations in late 2016 to reboot the testing and training of all the vessels engineering departments. His innovations reconfigured the sizes of their crews and crafted new squadrons in both San Diego and Mayport, Florida.

The newest of the vessels, the Omaha, is slated to arrive in San Diego early Friday morning, a day after Rowden is relieved.

Despite those triumphs, Rowdens command was dogged in recent months by the four accidents in the Western Pacific, especially the lethal incidents involving the destroyers McCain and Fitzgerald.

An interim report into the deaths of the 17 sailors that was published on Nov. 1 spotlighted a Navy struggling to train, test, credential and deploy warships in the Japan-based 7th Fleets area of operations, a region stretching from the Arctic south past Australia.

Completed on Oct. 23, the 71-page unclassified report was scathing in its denunciations of the leadership teams aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers and detailed in the harrowing descriptions of what sailors faced below deck when their vessels were struck by commercial ships.

Two of the dead sailors were from San Diego County and both served aboard the Fitzgerald  Yeoman 3rd Class Shingo Alexander Douglass, 25, of Oceanside, and Fire Controlman 2nd Class Carlos Victor Ganzon Hitch Sibayan, 23, of Chula Vista.

Military Videos  On Now D-Day paratrooper from Coronado jumps again in France  at age 96 On Now Remembering war's fallen, one name at a time On Now In Ramona, an airplane and an aviator provide living lessons on World War II 1:43 On Now Video: Navy's newest vessel sails into San Diego and a new future in surface warfare On Now Video: U.S. Navy files homicide charges over warship collisions On Now Stopping Marine hazing On Now Video: U.S. Navy Air Crew Grounded After Creating Vulgar Sky Drawing On Now Navy says Asia Pacific ship collisions were avoidable On Now Hundreds of recruits get sick at Marine boot camp On Now Cutler Dawson Talks Navy Federal

cprine@sduniontribune.com
The San Diego County Sheriffs Department incurred nearly $900,000 in added costs to provide patrols and security during the month-long construction of eight border wall prototypes by the federal government on Otay Mesa, records show.

Those costs pushed the total law enforcement expenses for the project to more than $1 million.

Most of the expense for the Sheriffs Department came in overtime pay for deputies: $764,278. But overtime wasnt the only expense for the county, which patrolled the area between Sept. 26 and Oct. 26 near where the prototype walls were constructed.

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Other costs were:

$118,092.66 for miles of chain-link fencing, K-rail barriers and signs installed before the construction of prototypes began. The fencing wrapped around large parcels of private property on Otay Mesa. The county said it was needed to protect environmentally sensitive habitats in the event that large-scale protests against the project materialized.

$11,101 for services and supplies.

$4,470 for an environmental consultant and permits.

Adding it all up, the county paid out $897,942.22 in overtime, supplies, consultant and permit costs for the project. With the $715,000 in regular wages that would have been paid to the deputies working the border project detail, the total comes to $1.6 million.

The costs to the county, provided under a California Public Records Act request by the San Diego Union-Tribune, far exceed the costs to the city of San Diego, which also had police patrolling near the building site.

The city paid out $277,898 in overtime, services and supplies. It paid out another $548,446 in regular salaries and fringe benefits to officers scheduled to be on duty anyway and re-assigned to the border project. That brought the citys total expenses to $826,345.

Adding the overtime, supplies and other non-salary costs for the two agencies together shows that the city and county spent $1,175,840 for security for the border wall project.

The city said it is unlikely it will be reimbursed, though it is exploring options. Alex Bell, a spokeswoman for the county, could not say whether it would be reimbursed.

The prototypes were constructed on a small plot of federal land on Otay Mesa, a stones throw from the border with Mexico. As the first tangible examples of President Trumps centerpiece promise to construct a big, beautiful wall on the southwest border, the project was the subject of national and international interest.

In the weeks before the work began, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo to local law enforcement, warning of the possibility of large-scale protests that could turn violent.

The county took that to heart and developed security plans, Bell said.

In the current environment of social-media-driven events and pop-up demonstrations, the Sheriffs Department evaluated the need to staff law enforcement in sufficient numbers during the initial phases of the border wall prototype construction, Bell said in an email that accompanied release of the data.

There were no protests or demonstrations during the 30 days of construction, and no one was arrested at or near the site.

Nonetheless, Bell said the county planning and precautions were worth it.

We are convinced that this uniformed presence coupled with the temporary fencing eliminated any inclination by individuals interested in establishing encampments  as well as polarizing demonstrations, she said.

greg.moran@sduniontribune.com

Moran writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Blaze Bernstein was on winter break and visiting his parents in Lake Forest when they proudly explained that his namesake was Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century child prodigy who went on to become a mathematician, inventor and master of prose.

The 19-year-old pre-med student at the University of Pennsylvania flashed a shy smile when they added, We expect great things from you, too, according to a website the family created in his memory.

A few hours later, Bernstein left the house without saying goodbye. He was reported missing the next day by his family, who became concerned after he didnt show up for a dental appointment.

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On Friday, three days after his body was found in a shallow grave in an Orange County park, detectives said they had arrested Samuel Lincoln Woodward, a 20-year-old high school classmate of Bernsteins, in the slaying. The Orange County coroners office said Monday that the cause of death remains under investigation.

Bernstein had been stabbed more than 20 times, and detectives are probing whether the killing was an act of rage, the Orange County Register reported Monday, citing a search warrant affidavit. Authorities said the document has been placed under seal as of Monday night.

The affidavit also said Woodward told investigators that Bernstein kissed him on the lips, but Woodward pushed him away, the newspaper reported.

Woodward is to be arraigned in Superior Court this week.

At the University Synagogue in Irvine on Monday, Rabbi Arnold Rachlis led more than 500 people in a tribute to Bernstein.

Rachlis voice quivered with emotion as he launched the 90-minute service with these words: We are gathered here today because this is a death that we never expected and still find hard to believe.

Bernstein was eulogized as a personable, sensitive and innovative young man whose passion for gourmet cooking and writing intersected in his work as a managing editor of Penn Appetit, a student-run food magazine.

I cant help but think how Blazes name is a verb  and not just any verb, but one that means to burn fiercely and brightly, said Jamie-Lee Josselyn, who was among Bernsteins creative writing instructors at Penn.

In an interview later, she added, What we see here is a tremendous amount of potential that was not allowed to fully materialize, and that has lit a fire in the hearts of thousands.

Authorities said Bernstein left behind personal belongings, including his keys, wallet and eyeglasses, when he left his parents home to see a friend around 10:30 p.m. on Jan. 2.

During the memorial, Gideon Bernstein, Blazes father, addressed his son this way: You were like a young pony just getting into a steady gallop, with your face to the wind and so looking forward to what was coming next.

Blaze, I know you didnt like the spotlight, he said, gazing out at the crowd, but youd be amazed at all the good things being done in your honor here today.

Louis.Sahagun@latimes.com

Twitter: @LouisSahagun

UPDATES:

8:05 p.m.: This article was updated with information from the Orange County Register about a search warrant affidavit.

This article was originally published at 5:50 p.m.
The 911 call came in at 6 a.m. Sunday. A teenage girl was on the line with an unsettling tale.

She had managed to escape from her familys home in Perris, where her parents had been holding her captive. Her brothers and sisters were still locked inside  12 of them. Some were chained to their beds, she said.



For the record: An earlier version of this article gave David Turpins age as 57. He is 56.

Riverside County sheriffs deputies were dispatched to find the 17-year-old girl. When they saw her, they were struck by her small size and emaciated appearance. She looked to be only 10, according to the sheriffs account released Monday.

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The nightmarish scene deputies discovered when they entered the house on Muir Woods Road was as bad as the girl had described. They found several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, the statement said.

The parents, David Allen Turpin, 56, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner, deputies wrote. The couple were arrested on suspicion of torture and child endangerment and each was being held Monday night in lieu of $9-million bail.

The youngest child was 2. At first deputies assumed from their frail and malnourished appearance that all in the group were minors, but they later determined that seven of them were adults ages 18 to 29, the sheriffs statement said.

It was not clear from the statement how many of the children were found locked to their beds.

Deputies provided food and drinks to the children, who claimed to be starving, before they were admitted to hospitals.

Public records show the couple own the tract house where the children were found. Its address is also listed in a state Department of Education directory as the location of the Sandcastle Day School, a private K-12 campus. David Turpin is listed as the principal.

During the last school year, the school was listed in state records as a non-religious and co-ed institution. There were six students enrolled  one each in the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, 10th and 12th grades.

David Turpins parents, James and Betty Turpin of West Virginia, told ABC News they were surprised and shocked at the allegations. They said their grandchildren are home-schooled, and that they had not seen their son and daughter-in-law in four or five years.

Public records indicate the couple have lived at the address for several years and lived in Texas for many years before coming to California. They declared bankruptcy twice, public records show.

Ivan Trahan, an attorney who represented the couple in their latest bankruptcy in 2011, said Monday he was shocked at news of the arrests.

To me and my wife, Nancy, who was with me during the interviews, we always thought of them as very nice people who spoke highly of their children, the attorney said. They seemed like very normal people who fell into financial problems.

Trahan said that David Turpin, who worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman, an aeronautics and defense technology company, had a relatively high income, but had trouble keeping up with his expenses because he had so many children.

Bankruptcy documents show David Turpin earned more than $140,000 in 2011, when the records were filed, but that the familys expenses exceeded his take-home pay by more than $1,000 a month. Louise Turpin, listed as a homemaker, had no income, the records show.

A spokesman for Lockheed Martin, another aerospace and defense company, said Turpin worked for the company until 2010, but had no other information.

The neighborhood where the children were found is a development of neat ranch-style homes built in recent years, residents said.

The Turpins house is the type found in developments all across Southern California  a single-story residence with stucco walls painted a reddish brown and a tile roof. A nativity star was placed in one window, and a van and three newer model Volkswagens were parked in the driveway.

Kimberly Milligan, 50, who lives across the street, said that when she first moved in she would see a woman outside the house with an infant, but eventually stopped seeing the child.

Over the years, Milligan also occasionally saw three children who looked like preteens coming out of the house to get into a car with their parents.

A lot about the family struck her as strange, she said. The children she saw were very pale  an observation several other neighbors made as well. And she often wondered why, if there were so many children in the house, they never came out to play.

I thought the kids were home-schooled, she said. You know something is off, but you dont want to think bad of people.

Once about two years ago, she said, she came across the preteens putting up Christmas lights at the home and said hello.

They looked at us like a child who wants to make themselves invisible, she said.

On Monday, Milligan was struggling to grasp how the alleged cruelty could have gone unnoticed in the neighborhood.

Were not acres apart, she said. How did no one see anything?

As neighbors gathered in disbelief and news trucks descended on the neighborhood Monday afternoon, an ice cream truck roamed the streets and little boys rode skateboards on the sidewalk.

Several neighbors recalled an incident several months ago in which a number of children were out in front of the house late at night working under floodlights to put sod in the yard.

That was kind of weird, all four of them were on the ground rolling out sod, said Wendy Martinez, 41, who lives around the corner from the family. A woman who appeared to be the childrens mother was standing in front of the home, in an archway, watching, Martinez recalled.

At the time, code enforcement officers from the city had visited the neighborhood and were citing homes with unkept yards, said Gary Stein, 32, who lives on the street.

I thought it was weird, but Im the kind of guy that doesnt want to get in anybodys business, he said.

Anyone with additional information was asked to contact Master Investigator Tom Salisbury at the sheriffs station in Perris at (951) 210-1000, or by email at PerrisStation@RiversideSheriff.org

Sheriffs officials plan a press conference Tuesday in Perris to discuss the case further.

Esquivel reported from Perris, Rubin and Lau from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Anna Phillips contributed to this report.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

Twitter: @joelrubin

paloma.esquivel@latimes.com

Twitter: @palomaesquivel

maya.lau@latimes.com

Twitter: @mayalau

UPDATES:

8:25 a.m.: Updated with upcoming press conference.

8 p.m.: Updated with additional background.

6:50 p.m.: This article was updated with an interview of the couples bankruptcy attorney.

5 p.m: This article was updated with interviews of neighbors.

4:20 p.m.: This article was updated to say that authorities did not make clear how many of the siblings were found shackled to their beds.

3:35 p.m.: This article was updated with public records showing that the address where the victims were found is listed as a private school.

This article was originally published at 2:55 p.m.
A homeless rights advocacy group plans to take legal action against the City of El Cajon after at least a dozen people were arrested Sunday for feeding the homeless.

At a news conference Monday in Balboa Park, attorneys and leaders of the group known as Break the Ban said they plan to file a lawsuit against the city, arguing that its ordinance  which bans food sharing in public spaces  is unconstitutional and discriminatory.

El Cajon City Council members unanimously passed the ban in October, saying it would help protect the public from hepatitis A, which has spread predominantly among the homeless population. The temporary ordinance is set to be in place until San Diego Countys state of emergency related to the health crisis is lifted.

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This isnt a ban on compassion, and there is certainly no restriction or lessening of access to food, said El Cajon City Councilman Steve Goble. This is about protecting the public, both those at-risk, and those around them.

Councilman Bob McClellan said the city has published a list of churches where people can get food and where activists can help serve food, in an effort to contain food sharing to closed and sanitary environments.

They dont have to feed them in the park where it could cause a problem according to the health authorities, McClellan said. If they want to help the homeless, look at the list of places. All they have to do is read the list.

Scott Dreher, one of the attorneys representing Break the Ban and one of the people arrested Sunday, said city officials were using the hepatitis A outbreak as an excuse to punitively dehumanize and criminalize the homeless.

Its discriminatory against a vulnerable class of people. Plain and simple, Dreher said. And on top of that, it abridges the First Amendment rights of the people who want to feed them.

Dreher said attorneys will file the lawsuit in 10 days, before Break the Bans next event on Jan. 27. They will also be filing motions to dismiss the charges against the activists who were arrested, citing constitutional grounds.

Court dates for those who were arrested are spread out over the next few months, Dreher said. The first is scheduled for Wednesday.

About 50 people attended Sundays event to feed members of the homeless at Wells Park on East Madison Avenue in El Cajon. Everyone who was handing out food was arrested by El Cajon police officers, including a 14-year-old child. They were given misdemeanor citations with a date to appear in court and released. No one was taken away in handcuffs.

It was the fourth event hosted by Break the Ban, which was formed and named after the ban took effect. Organizer Mark Lane said the goal of the event was to feed the homeless, but it was also a strategy to eventually contest the ordinance in court.

Lane quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the news conference and said the group was determined to fight until the ordinance is overturned.

If a law is unjust, youre obligated to reject it, Lane said. We saw an unjust law and were rejecting it.

Shane Parmely, one of the organizers arrested at Sundays event, said the ban opens up the opportunity for more restrictions, not just in El Cajon.

If El Cajon gets away with passing an ordinance like this, then whats to stop Ramona or Santee or La Mesa from passing ordinances like this? Parmely asked. We need to stop it now.

Mayor Bill Wells said the event was pure political opportunism, because there are multiple locations where the homeless continue to be fed on a daily basis.

Political protest groups ignore this reasonable step to insure the public safety and look for a grander conspiracy, Wells said. This is not a game, and I believe that public safety is more important than political posturing.

Similar incidents have occurred outside California. Seven activists in Tampa, Florida, were arrested in January for feeding the homeless because they didnt pay for a permit. In November 2014, a 90-year-old man and two pastors were arrested for feeding the homeless in public in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where a city ordinance bans public food sharing.

We just have this way of criminalizing and stigmatizing the most neediest members of our society, Parmely said. Where would they like them to go? Thats the question.

Lane said Break the Ban will continue to organize events to feed the citys homeless.

They have partnered with a second group called Food Not Bombs that has also hosted two food-sharing events. Another is planned for Jan. 27 at Wells Park.

Contact Lauryn Schroeder via Twitter or Email.
Laura Davis woke up on a sidewalk in downtown San Diego on Monday morning, pulled back the blanket she used as a makeshift tent and looked to her side.

The two bags that held the bulk of her possessions were missing.

I woke up, and they were gone, she said.

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The apparent theft was frustrating, a setback  and not uncommon for homeless people on the street. Davis said a friend of hers recently lost her childrens birth certificates and other important documents to thieves in the night.

You need storage facilities so people can get out of being homeless, she said. It almost feels like society wants to keep people homeless.

Help may be coming within a few months. Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced in his State of the City address last week that the city plans to open a second storage facility for homeless people this spring, an addition that would more than double what is available now.

Details were sparse in the speech, but Faulconer spokesman Greg Block said Friday that the new facility will be in a 25,000-square-foot, two-story building at 20th and Commercial streets with space for 700 to 1,000 storage bins.

The second floor will have public restrooms, and the facility will be run by the San Diego Housing Commission, which will hire an operator to manage it, Block said.

Besides helping keep sidewalks clear and protecting property from being stolen, the new facility will allow homeless people like Davis to look for work and go to other appointments.

1 / 8 Danny McCray runs Think Dignitys Traditional Storage Center in the East Village of San Diego, shown on Jan. 15, 2018. The facility allows homeless people to store their belongings. (Photo by K.C. Alfred/ San Diego Union-Tribune) (K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune) 2 / 8 Danny McCray runs Think Dignitys Traditional Storage Center in the East Village of San Diego, shown on Jan. 15, 2018. The facility allows homeless people to store their belongings. (Photo by K.C. Alfred/ San Diego Union-Tribune) (K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune) 3 / 8 Laura Davis speaks about the need for a facility to house homeless peoples belongings in the East Village of San Diego, shown on Jan. 15, 2018. The City of San Diego has proposed a place in Sherman Heights for such a place. (Photo by K.C. Alfred/ San Diego Union-Tribune) (K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune) 4 / 8 Danny McCray runs Think Dignitys Traditional Storage Center in the East Village of San Diego, shown on Jan. 15, 2018. The facility allows homeless people to store their belongings. (Photo by K.C. Alfred/ San Diego Union-Tribune) (K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune) 5 / 8 David Sandoval, 50, who has been homeless for three years, adjusts various bags hanging off his cart while at the intersection of 5th Street and J Street in downtown San Diego on Saturday. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 6 / 8 Robin Phillips, who said she was homeless until she went to rehab and now lives a womens shelter, laughs as her friend Paul Miller, who is homeless, opens her birthday present, a shirt, for his 48th birthday on J Street in San Diego on Thursday. The two met when she was on the streets. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune) 7 / 8 Mayor Kevin Faulconer identified two locations for buildings to house services for the homeless downtown. One is the Indoor skydiving building at 14th and Imperial, (shown here), and the other is on one of the corners at 20th and Commercial Street. (John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune) 8 / 8 David Sandoval, 50, who has been homeless for three years, pushes his cart past people sitting outside of Joltn Joes on J Street in downtown San Diego on Saturday. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune)

I have a job interview Thursday at Forever 21, and I dont know what Im going to do with all my stuff, she said.

The mayors announcement about the new facility comes at a time when the city is facing a class-action lawsuit over arrests and citations of homeless people for having tents and other property in the public right of way.

Scott Dreher, the attorney who filed the suit last year with partner Kath Rogers, has helped transform city policies toward homelessness through previous lawsuit settlements and said the storage facility could lead to a resolution of the latest suit.

It came up in connection with the lawsuit, he said about discussions hes had with the mayor. He wanted us to know they were doing this, and we said, Thats a great idea.

The suit argues the city is improperly citing homeless people for violating an encroachment ordinance originally intended to prevent such things as restaurants putting large planters on sidewalks.

Giving homeless people ample places to store their possessions could help the city keep sidewalks clear while also assisting homeless people, Dreher said.

This will be really big, he said. It will be nice to have a win-win.

In 2007, Dreher and attorney Tim Cohelan sued the city for arresting homeless people for illegal lodging, arguing that they had no choice other than to sleep outside because there were not enough shelters. The suit was settled when the city agreed homeless people would not be arrested between 9 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. unless offered a shelter bed.

In a 2009 lawsuit, Dreher argued the city and the Downtown San Diego Partnership had unlawfully seized and thrown away homeless peoples property found in the public right of way.

A 2011 settlement in that case required the city to provide at least three days notice before sweeping homeless encampments and to set up a storage facility that will give homeless people a place to store their things.

The Transitional Storage Center for homeless people opened in 2011 at 252 16th St. as a result of the settlement, and since 2012 it has been operated by the nonprofit Think Dignity.

Danila Hendrix is among the homeless people thankful for the facility, which she has used for two years.

I walked with my stuff in a stroller, and I couldnt leave it, she said, describing the physical toll that caring for her property took. I had to take it everywhere. Thats why I have two tears in my meniscus (cartilage in the knee).

Besides storing property checked in by homeless people, the facility also stores for 90 days any unattended property picked up by Downtown San Diego Partnerships Clean and Safe program crews after a three-hour notice.

Think Dignity Executive Director Anne Rios said the facility serves about 400 people a day, but it clearly isnt large enough to handle the demand.

No duh they could use another one, she said upon hearing of Faulconers announcement.

The Transitional Storage Center usually has a waiting list of about 130 people, she said.

Rios said she was surprised to hear of the mayors announcement because she had been asked twice by his office last year to prepare a budget for opening a new storage facility, and nothing came of it.

But you know, kudos for the city for recognizing there should be a place for homeless people to place their stuff, she said. I would say were a little surprised that we werent approached first-hand because we already run those programs, but besides that, Im happy.

On Monday morning, Transitional Storage Center site supervisor Danny McCray produced a volume of papers that clients had filled in about the facility.

It allowed me to hold onto my most cherished possession, read one. Others wrote the center gave them peace of mind and allowed them to look for work.

The center has 304 metal lockers and 96 80-gallon plastic bins, filled with clothing, shoes, books, toiletries and other personal items.

A man who gave his name as Blessed said hes thankful for the chance to store his things.

These lockers are super-important, he said. I have a guitar in here and make money with it. And I have some interview clothes. Im trying to do the right thing. Im trying to get a job.

With a waiting list of more than 100 people, McCray said people are turned away every day.

Kimberly Buchanan is among the people still waiting. In frail health  she has a hernia and said the raw patches on her arm were from lupus  Buchanan struggled to carry out a large bag weighed down with clothes, bottled water and other items.

They stole everything else, she said. I just have stuff to wear. Every night, you get ripped off if you go to sleep.

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gary.warth@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @GaryWarthUT

760-529-4939
Anyone who is not a U.S. citizen should use extreme caution before partaking in Californias newest legal recreational activity because it could have serious immigration consequences, according to attorneys.

Marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, and it doesnt take a conviction for using it to affect a non-citizens future. If a port official finds out that someone entering the U.S. with a visa has used the drug, the official can ban the person from the country for life.



For the record: This article originally said that non-citizens convicted of simple possession of less than 30 grams could apply for a waiver if they can show their absence from the U.S. would cause hardship to a U.S. citizen. In fact, there are several ways to be eligible for a waiver under immigration law.

That means if a green card holder is selected for a search after traveling outside the U.S. for vacation and officials find a receipt from a dispensary, cellphone or social media photos at a pot shop, or anything else to suggest the immigrant has consumed marijuana, that person can be kicked out of the U.S. forever.

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Some immigration attorneys in San Diego emailed warnings to their clients after the drug became legal at the state level for recreational use on Jan. 1.

One of the grounds for inadmissibility is whether you are a drug abuser or drug addict, immigration attorney Andrew Nietor explained. That is interpreted fairly conservatively. Any admission of prior drug use will often lead to a presumption that the person has a controlled substance problem.

Nietor said that clients are often surprised when he tells them what can happen if they smoke pot.

One thing the law should always do is provide clear guidelines for people so they know what is going to violate the law and what is not going to violate the law, Nietor said. The big problem right now is that there is so much confusion that someone could engage in an activity that involves them getting a license from the state, and the federal government could say that activity is unlawful and result in permanent exile from the U.S.

An official from Customs and Border Protection said the agency doesnt track how many people are turned away at the border for drug use.

Non-citizens should also avoid working at dispensaries or growing marijuana, attorneys said, since thats still considered drug trafficking under federal law.

Stories about non-citizens being banned from the U.S. over marijuana surfaced after other states legalized the drug, and some California residents had problems once it became legal for medical use.

Allan Lolly, an immigration attorney, said he ran into an issue involving a pot plant when one of his clients was being interviewed for a green card. She was here from Bulgaria on a student visa, and she had married a U.S. citizen.

When the officer asked the couple about their home, the husband mentioned that he grew a small marijuana plant in one of the rooms.

Both of us were surprised, Lolly recalled, referring to himself and the officer. We paused for a moment, and everybody was quiet. I said, Can I talk to my client privately?

The officer allowed them to meet, and after the wife explained that she wasnt in any way connected to the plant and actually disapproved of it, the officer authorized her green card.

Lolly has also seen clients applying for visas, particularly from the United Kingdom or Jamaica, who are denied over marijuana use, he said.

More than 1,300 immigrants were unable to get visas because of drug use in fiscal 2016, according to a report from the State Department. More than 3,000 people were unable to get temporary visas for the same reasons.

Marijuana use can also affect someones ability to become a U.S. citizen.

Any offense other than simple possession of less than 30 grams of marijuana is a permanent bar from the U.S., Lolly said. Simple possession also results in a ban, but a non-citizen can apply for a waiver.

Green card holders have a right to a court hearing before losing their green card for pot use, according to immigration attorney Ginger Jacobs, but people traveling on temporary visas, like students and tourists, can be turned around at the border with no recourse.

She had a client who was a legal permanent resident and had a medical marijuana card. He periodically drove to Los Angeles with weed in the car to have it turned into butter.

He was stopped and charged with possession with intent to distribute, and the charge was reduced to simple possession after he explained the situation.

Later, when he left the U.S. on a trip and came back, he was detained and ended up in court fighting to keep his green card. Jacobs was able to help him keep it.

If hed been a citizen, there wouldnt have been a complication, Jacobs said. He wouldnt have had to deal with proceedings that were expensive and stressful.

Dispensaries scanning ID cards and tracking purchases especially concerned her.

I would highly encourage immigrants to be very, very wary of making a purchase until theyve naturalized, Jacobs said.

She also cautioned non-citizens not to get caught with marijuana at national parks or on other federal land. Officers can and will charge people under federal law there, and a controlled substance conviction can lead to deportation even for green card holders.

If an immigrant does get caught, Jacobs said, he or she should not leave the U.S. and should talk to an attorney.

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kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on Twitter
Carlos Dominguez was waiting at a traffic light in the northern Mexico border city of Nuevo Laredo with his son, his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren when men armed with knives flung open the car door.

Dominguez, a 77-year-old opinion columnist who had worked as a journalist for nearly four decades, was stabbed 21 times, according to Mexican authorities. They said he was attacked by at least three men who remain unidentified and at large.

The killing Saturday afternoon underscores the lethal risks faced by journalists in Mexico and the growing wave of violence gripping the nation.

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Officials said they were investigating to determine whether the attack was connected to Dominguezs work. He wrote frequently about politics, organized crime and occasionally their intersection  a perilous beat in a country that was second only to war-torn Syria in the number of journalists killed last year.

Eleven journalists were slain across Mexico in 2017, with no culprits arrested in most of those cases. Dozens of reporters have fled the country or gone into hiding.

In the Gulf Coast state of Tamaulipas, where Nuevo Laredo is located, 15 journalists have been killed since 2000, according to Mexicos National Human Rights Commission. The commission, an independent government watchdog, has sent investigators to Nuevo Laredo to look into Saturdays attack.

The organization Reporters Without Borders said it believed Dominguez was targeted because of his controversial columns.

The day before his death, in a column published on a news website called Horizonte de Matamoros, Dominguez lamented growing political violence ahead of Mexicos July presidential election, calling out the federal government for its failure on the matter of public security. He also took aim at a local mayor, one of several Tamaulipas politicians he frequently criticized, complaining that she lashes out against journalists who expose her flagrant faults.

For Carlos colleagues, there is no doubt that his assassination is linked to his journalistic work, Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Monday.

Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexico representative for Committee to Protect Journalists, another nonprofit press freedom group, said his organization was still investigating the motive behind the slaying. But he said that in Tamaulipas, threats of violence and bribe-paying have created a silence zone in which many reporters opt against publishing specific information about crimes and their perpetrators.

Its very, very dangerous to be a journalist in Tamaulipas, Hootsen said. Theres a lot of self-censorship of journalists who are often too afraid to report on whats really going on for fear of reprisals. Doing serious investigative journalism in that state can cost you your life.

So many journalists have stopped reporting on what is happening in the state that news about killings and other crimes often comes from Twitter and Facebook posts by ordinary citizens. In 2014, a cartel killed one of them, a doctor in the city of Reynosa, and then tweeted from her account about her murder.

While Dominquez frequently antagonized public authorities and often decried cartel wars in Tamaulipas, he had not applied for a protection program offered to Mexican journalists and human rights activists who have received threats, said Irving Barrios, the attorney general of Tamaulipas. He said Dominguezs relatives had been placed under state protection.

In Tamaulipas, the bloodshed is being driven by fighting between two long-dominant drug gangs  the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel  that experts say have begun to splinter in recent years. Tamaulipas leads the country in kidnappings and is home to rampant extortion.

Violence has been on the rise throughout Mexico, where last year the murder rate hit a 20-year high.

Last week, the U.S. State Department warned its citizens not to travel to Tamaulipas and four other Mexican states. Violent crime, such as murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion and sexual assault, is common, the U.S. travel advisory said, adding that local law enforcement has limited capability to respond to violence.

Jan Jarab, the Mexican representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Monday that the terrible murder of Mr. Dominguez confirms the risk of being a journalist in Mexico and in particular in Tamaulipas.

In November, a U.N. team urged authorities in Tamaulipas to adopt measures to protect journalists after an investigation into attacks on free speech there and in four other Mexican states.

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

Twitter: @katelinthicum

Cecilia Sanchez in the Times Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.
A 29-year-old woman whose body was found on the slope of a ravine in Encanto over the weekend had been stabbed to death, a San Diego police official said Monday.

Homicide unit Lt. Todd Griffin identified the woman as Lavaughn Rawshanda Nicole Williams of San Diego. She had been stabbed in the upper torso, he said.

A father and daughter walking a dog found Williams body off South 66th Street near Skyline Drive about 2:30 p.m. Saturday.

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The father reported the find to San Diego police officers working a recruiting event at nearby Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Park. Police said the body was about 12 feet off a dirt path on a steep slope.

Police are asking anyone with information to contact the homicide unit at (619) 531-2293 or Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-8477.

teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945

Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT
A suspected drunken driver slammed his car into a police cruiser in Lincoln Park early Monday, then took off running before he was caught and arrested, police said.

Just before 12:40 a.m., the officers were checking into another call when they spotted a car driving toward them, headed eastbound on Logan Avenue toward Euclid Avenue, Officer John Buttle said.

To avoid the car coming up behind them, the officers turned on the cruisers lights and made a U-turn, Lt Dean Grubbs told San Diego News Video.

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But the coming car passed another car and moved into the westbound lane, where it struck the police car, Grubbs said.

The driver checked on his female passenger, then took off on running, Grubbs said. Other police officers caught and arrested him on suspicion of drunken driving.

The woman in his car was taken to a hospital for minor injuries. One of the officers was also treated for minor injuries, authorities said.

teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945

Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT
Two thieves  one of who was wielding a gun  held up a convenience store clerk in Clairemont Mesa early Monday morning, police said.

The pair entered the AM/PM on Balboa Avenue at Mt. Abernathy Drive about 4:45 a.m., and one of the men pointed a gun at the clerk and made a demand, Officer Dino Delimitros said.

After the heist, the two men took off in a gold car, he said.

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One of the men was described as Latino, about 5-feet, 7-inches with a heavy build. He wore all black clothes and had a bandanna around his face.

The second man was only described as smaller, and also wearing a bandanna.

Detectives with the Robbery Unit are investigating.

teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945

Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT
San Diego State University on Tuesday opened a new $90 million science and engineering center as part of its push to improve teaching and turn the campus into one of the nations top 50 public research schools.

The center will focus on everything from developing wearable health sensors and artificial limbs to upgrading unmanned aerial vehicles and designing better ways to screen for potentially harmful microbes.

SDSU also equipped the center with a 13.5-ton magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine that will enable brain researchers to better understand such things as Alzheimers disease, autism and post-traumatic stress disorder.

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The campus has been rising in the rankings issued by U.S. News & World Report. But SDSU remains far from the top.

The university, founded as a teachers college in 1897, finished in a tie for 99th place in undergraduate engineering in the latest rankings. San Diego State tied for 140th place among national universities  schools that offer undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs.

The campus has moved up 25 spots in its national university ranking over the past five years.

Sally Roush, San Diego States interim president, struck a note of optimism Tuesday, saying, As we dedicate this new Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences Complex, we celebrate the insights and innovations it will inspire. We celebrate a new chapter in university history and what this complex will add to our 120-year tradition of academic excellence and public service.

The 85,000-square-foot complex will benefit both teaching and research. Its coming online as San Diego State continues its rise in basic and applied research. The campus obtained $134.3 million in contracts and grants last year, a figure that is roughly $26 million higher than it was three years ago.

San Diego State leads the 23-campus California State University system in research funding, largely because Thomas Day made it a priority when he served as the schools president from 1978 to 1996.

Many faculty members initially didnt like the idea because the CSU has historically focused on teaching. But Days vision has been carried on by his successors.

Three years ago, SDSU said that it would have to push funding to between $200 million and $250 million to break into the top 50 public research schools. But it would likely have to surpass $300 million to achieve its goal, based on current rankings.

SDSU is also pushing to expand graduate education, where enrollment has been sliding. The campus had 4,063 graduate students in fall 2017, almost 1,300 fewer than it had only eight years ago.

The universitys overall enrollment continues to rebound after it plunged by 6,500 during the recession. The campus started fall 2017 with 34,828 students  about 1,700 fewer than the schools peak year, 2007, when it had 36,599 students.

Campus officials say the slow growth reflects limited state funding. But its sister school  Cal State Fullerton  has shot past San Diego State in enrollment and now has nearly 40,500 students.

Exterior of the new $90 million Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences Complex at SDSU. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune )

Twitter: @grobbins

gary.robbins@sduniontribune.com
The portable bathroom north of the San Diego River in Lakeside is empty most of the time, though the door hangs slightly ajar so people know its available.

Nearby a security guard stands watch 24 hours a day, seven days a week. More precisely, he sits  sometimes on a folding chair beneath a canopy, sometimes in the front seat of his car.

Since last fall, when officials began fighting a hepatitis A outbreak by installing temporary toilets in areas where homeless people congregate, San Diego County has spent more than $500,000 on security guards to protect the rented restrooms.

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The protection costs, thousands of dollars every day, are ongoing. The existing contracts, signed in September and October, have been amended multiple times and now run through February.

County leaders say the security is needed to prevent unwelcome elements often associated with the homelessness community where the infection was deadly  crime, drug use, prostitution and worse.

We have placed 24/7 security at the portable restroom locations to maintain a safe and secure environment for both the users of the restrooms and the surrounding communities, county spokesman Michael Workman said by email.

Others question whether those resources could be invested more strategically than paying for around-the-clock bathroom security.

Any time you spend money managing an issue, you take money away from solving the issue, said Michael McConnell, a small business owner who advocates for homeless people. Theres no plan. Theres no strategy. Thats how we end up willy-nilly throwing our money around.

Late last year, as hundreds of people were sickened by hepatitis A, county officials installed 13 portable bathrooms in various locations where homeless people are known to camp.

At one of the porta potties in Lakeside near the corner of Riverford Road and Riverside Drive a security guard is positioned not far. Onsite security says that security is in place to prevent vandalism as well as preventing the possible use of illegal drugs in the space. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune )

Others were installed by city officials in downtown San Diego, an epicenter of the public health threat that claimed 20 lives.

The idea was to provide 24-hour availability to sinks and toilets to help stop transmission of the deadly virus, which is spread through so-called fecal-oral contact when people do not wash their hands after defecating.

The county rented 13 portable bathrooms, most of which were placed in Lakeside and Spring Valley. Three other portable restrooms were installed on county property inside San Diego city limits, Workman said.

Through Jan. 10, the county spent $531,739.85 on security for the units. The costs continue to pile up at a rate of approximately $286 an hour, or $6,864 a day.

Providing access to restrooms and handwashing facilities is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and an important sanitation facet to the hepatitis A response, Workman said.

The restrooms cost much less than the security protecting them.

According to county records, basic portable units cost $85.80 per month; premier toilets are $105.80; handicap-accessible units are $115.80; and portable bathrooms that comply with the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act are $220.80.

The facilities leased by the county appear to be the ADA-compliant model, but the county was not able to confirm which kind it selected.

By contrast, the security contractor -- Allstate Security Services Inc. of San Diego -- charges the county $22 per hour for unarmed guards. Workers told The San Diego Union-Tribune they earn $13 an hour -- $15 if they carry a gun.

No one from the company would discuss the security work on behalf of San Diego County.

The contracts call for security officers to monitor how many people use the restrooms. Guards also are told to make sure that only one person uses a bathroom at a time and they spend no more than 10 minutes inside.

One guard stationed along Riverside Drive in Lakeside said he makes a note of each bathroom visit during his eight-hour shift. He passes the notebook on to his successor at each change of shift. Someone from the county stops by regularly and snaps a photo of the latest written record.

Half-way through a recent shift, the report showed four people had used the bathroom.

Most of the people who use the bathroom are just walking by, said the guard, who did not want to be named because he feared losing his job. Theyre not homeless.

Workman was not immediately able to provide official usage data and no information is collected about the living status of people who employ the restrooms.

The guard, who was camped in the front passenger seat of his car scrolling through his cellphone when approached for an interview, said drivers routinely honk at him as they pass and sometimes yell at him to get a different job.

They stop by and ask What are you doing? and some of them get mad, he said.

The guard said he has never had to call police or report any disturbance over the months he has worked outside the restroom. He said hes never even had to knock on the door after 10 minutes.

Hasnt happened, he said.

Shawn Worst, who owns a small business in Lakeside, said county officials should find more effective ways to invest public resources than spending $530,000-plus on 24-hour security outside rarely used bathrooms.

I drive by there twice a day and Ive never seen anybody using it, with the exception of the guard, he said. There could be a way better use taxpayer funds than to pay for these guards.

The city of San Diego has spent less than the county on its portable-bathrooms program.

According to its latest estimate, the city paid $325,000 for the program since it was initiated in September, most of that on security.

San Diego spokeswoman Katie Keach said the monthly cost for the 10 portable bathrooms the city now leases is about $73,000, including about $50,000 for armed security and $19,000 for unarmed guards.

Those bathrooms are clustered on three sites so fewer guards are required.

One armed guard monitoring the four city-leased bathrooms near 14th and G streets said he has to shoo away troublemakers several times a week and summons police once a week at most.

He said he makes $15 an hour and has yet to unholster his gun.

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jeff.mcdonald@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1708 @sdutMcDonald
For nearly four years before federal and state environmental watchdogs descended on Camp Pendleton during a late June inspection, contractors had warned military leaders about apparently persistent problems with the bases water system, according to newly released documents.

Obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act, the records were generated between 2014 and mid-2017 by contractors hired to clean and inspect Camp Pendletons 34 water reservoirs. They buttress an Environmental Protection Agency summer survey of a much smaller portion of the sprawling bases water system.

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In late June, EPA investigators found rodents rotting on a grate, a dried out frog clinging to a reservoir ladder and another animal carcass floating in treated water, triggering a consent decree between the Marines and federal environmental watchdogs to remedy a decade of shoddy maintenance and inspections of the bases water system.

Red flags of past problems appear throughout the contractor files:

* An apparent lack of inspections by paid contractors or Marine personnel at many reservoirs. Although the Corps mandated visits to all 34 reservoirs every three years, records show that only 27 tanks had been inspected and disinfected during the nearly four-year span. For nearly the first nine months of 2014, no inspections of any kind took place on the base.

* Sediment in the water. Of the 27 sites contractors inspected, 18 had dirt in the system, suggesting poor sealing that could let in vermin. Vendors reported finding rodents in one reservoir on the northern side of the base and mouse holes in another. In 16 tanks, they found cracks, deterioration or settling in the foundations  with one reservoir leaking due to fissures.

* Broken or nonexistent water level indicators. Contractors reported a range of sensor problems in 14 of the reservoirs, including malfunctioning measuring devices, rusted housings, failing or missing equipment and dead or inaccurate devices that left system operators in the dark about how much water was left in the tanks.

* Problems apparently allowed to fester for years. For example, contractors voiced concerns about the anti-corrosion cathodic protection anode plates in a reservoir called 2481 in 2014 and 2016, but theres no evidence in the forms that the rust-busting system was ever fixed. At another reservoir, contractors recorded problems with an apparently deteriorating interior protective coating and potentially unsafe corroded ladders leading into the tank but never noted their repairs.

On Oct. 30, 2014, a contractor visiting a different steel tank wrote Needs coating (ASAP) on all areas of interior, top, bottom, sides, fill line, discharge!

Almost two years later, another inspection revealed many of the same issues, along with foundation cracks, a corroded steel base and pitted interior, no cathodic protection and another device rusted out. Plus, the site was overgrown with weeds.

When contacted by The San Diego Union-Tribune, Marine officials declined to say if this reservoir or any others marked as defective in the contractor reports dating to 2014 were repaired.

In a written response to a series of questions asked by the newspaper, Camp Pendleton officials conceded that the EPA found an inadequate number of reservoir inspections but military leaders insisted the bases water was and continues to be safe to drink.

During the June 2017 inspections, the systems water quality monitoring did not indicate an exceedance of any maximum contaminant level. Marine Corps Installations West-Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton is committed to providing all Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton water consumers with safe and compliant drinking water. This is a duty and responsibility we take seriously. The drinking waters quality is compliant, and EPA and state regulators agree the water is safe to drink, the statement said.

The consent decree requires the Corps to hire contractors to resurvey and clean all the reservoirs, the statement added.

In a September circular issued by the Marines in response to the consent decree with EPA, Marine leaders told Camp Pendletons water users that the base violated a federal rule on disinfectant byproducts, some reservoirs were vulnerable to bacterial intrusion and the system lacked enough staffers and needed maintenance.

Citing federal privacy laws, Camp Pendleton officials redacted the names of the contractors who performed the inspections. The forms they submitted were stamped at the bottom AMI-Acepex-jv.

That title points to a joint venture between the Acepex Management Corp. of Montclair and Guam-based Advance Management Inc., which collectively hold janitorial, facilities management and other service contracts tied to Navy and Marine Corps bases worldwide.

Multiple telephone messages placed with Acepex regional operations manager Rob Rosacker in El Centro were not returned. He sent the Union-Tribune an email referring the newspaper to Marine public affairs officers.

Unfortunately I cannot discuss critical infrastructure systems on Camp Pendleton outside the execution of our contract with the government, he wrote.

EPAs late June inspection wasnt the first time Camp Pendleton received poor marks from federal or state environmental watchdogs.

In 2013, EPA entered into a different consent decree with the Marines over the bases Superfund toxic waste site. Wrangling over Camp Pendletons heavy metal, pesticide, polychlorinated biphenyls and used oil contamination took 23 years and triggered an estimated $52.9 million in spending to bring it into compliance with federal law, according to EPA files.

While contractors kept noting persistent problems in Camp Pendletons water reservoirs from 2014 through 2017, the base accrued numerous violations tied to other rules designed to protect drinking water and prevent the discharge of pollutants into the environment.

In fact, the Marines notched violations of both the Clean Water Act and the Safe Water Drinking Act in seven quarters between Oct. 1, 2014 and Sept. 30, 2017, according to the EPA.

The drinking water system alone garnered four separate groundwater violations, another four for breaking disinfectant rules and six concerning Coliform bacteria contamination.

But all of the problems tied to the violations of both statutes were resolved before the Marines entered into the consent decree with the agency, EPA records indicate.

EPAs enforcement documents estimate it will cost the Marines $1 million to bring Camp Pendletons water reservoirs into compliance with federal regulations.

During the EPAs June investigation, documents show, Camp Pendletons Water Resources Division director John Simpson pointed inspectors to deeper problems dogging the bases treatment center that wont be solved quickly.

They include a six-year lag between Congressional funding for new plants and breaking ground on construction projects and the lack of an electronic system that monitors water treatment and tank sensors measuring reservoir levels in remote locations, according to the EPA inspection report released at the Union-Tribunes request in September.

Simpsons biggest concern, however, was his treatment operators, who work 12-hour shifts but make $20,000 less per year than employees in neighboring water districts. Those conditions hurt hiring and staffing problems and high turnover in his division, he told regulators.

EPA spokesman Dean Higuchi told the Union-Tribune in an email that if Camp Pendleton fails to comply with the terms of the consent decree the agency could threaten financial penalties, but that likely wont be necessary.

EPA is currently engaged with top military officials for Camp Pendleton, providing a higher level of scrutiny for all work completed for the drinking water systems. In addition, detailed inspection reports with photographs are sent to EPA for review, he wrote.

While the deal with EPA requires the Marines to fix major deficiencies in the reservoir system, Higuchi said that military officials had pledged to correct minor glitches uncovered by regulators, too.

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cprine@sduniontribune.com
By now we know the oceans are not too big to fail, but theres still time to save the planets liquid life-support system.

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Join a boat tour to the Farallon Islands, about 25 miles west of San Francisco, and youll likely see humpback and blue whales, gracefully arcing dolphins, sea lions, and thousands of seabirds. A bracing, salt-scented breeze scours these islands as the squawks of gulls, cormorants, and common murres create an outdoor symphony. Uninhabited by humans, the 3,295-square-mile Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary is a poster child for healthy oceans, but beneath the surface, the planets marine conditions are far from ideal.

Once thought to be so vast as to be immune to human degradation, the oceans supply us with copious amounts of seafood, regulate global temperatures, absorb a tremendous amount of carbon, and serve as venues for both transportation and recreation. But now we know oceans are not too big to fail. The health and stability of the sea is threatened by an array of powerful forces: rapacious overfishing, plastics pollution, acidification, and rising temperatures.

These dramatic shifts in the oceans have largely happened since the middle of the 20th century, a blip in geologic time.

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Heres the thing: The ocean comprises the great majority of our life-support system, says renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle, 82, the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and now a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. It shapes climate and weather and holds the planet steady with respect to temperature. Its where most of life on Earth exists; its where most of the oxygen is generated; its where a great amount of the carbon is captured. Its one big system, and until recent decades, the oceans have been largely unaffected by us. Now we have evidence, clear evidence, of the cause-and-effect relationship of what we are doing. Now we know, maybe just in time to save us from ourselves. This is good news.

On the other side of the country, 71-year-old Rip Cunningham has been fishing along the Eastern seaboard since he was 7 or 8. He recalls the remarkable abundance of striped bass and other species, a plenitude that wouldnt last into his adult years. In the 1970s, we went into a huge decline for striped bass, Cunningham says. Fishery managers put a moratorium in most every state along the Atlantic coast where there were migratory striped bass. Some fishermen were outraged  this was considered very drastic action at the time.

But the fishing restrictions made a difference. By 2006, striped bass had reached levels that for 50 years we hadnt really seen, Cunningham says. Striped bass essentially became the crown jewel of fisheries-management success.

New Englands iconic fish is the Gulf of Maine codfish, he says. This is not a success story: The codfish population is down to 3 to 4 percent of its virgin stock. Some say its environmental impact; the other end of the spectrum would say its all a product of long-term, chronic overfishing. My opinion: Its both, he says. It was a fish that was very important to a lot of communities on the New England coast, and its essentially gone. There are some people who believe it can be brought back, and maybe it can.

Today, it takes more than restricting fishing to bring a species back from the brink of extinction. Environmental factors, such as rising ocean -temperature and acidification, are affecting marine species in ways were just beginning to understand. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than any place along the coast of the continental United States, Cunningham says. We dont know what that ultimately means to the fish out there. We know its impacting plankton production; we know its impacting the shellfish industry. What that might ultimately do to the second most iconic species up here, the Maine lobster  the jury is out on that.

In late August, in response to the Trump administrations indication that it would seek to reduce the size of some national monuments, including protected ocean areas, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman called a public hearing in Sausalito, a coastal town just north of San Francisco. Opening the hearing, Huffman noted that protecting special marine areas has never before been a partisan issue. President George W. Bush designated our first four National Marine Monuments. No president has ever attempted to revoke a predecessors national monument designation.

Representing a district with more than 500 miles of coastline  Californias second congressional district stretches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border  Huffman has become an expert on marine policy. These underwater parks provide many benefits, he said at the hearing. They help fish populations where the fish can actually grow large enough to reproduce, not only benefiting ocean ecosytems but also global fishing communities like the ones that I represent on the North Coast.

We are drawn to protect the ocean because it is beautiful and because it inspires awe.

Fishermen are especially concerned about proposals for opening new areas to oil drilling along the West Coast, says Noah Oppenheim, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermens Associations. Speaking at the hearing, he said oil and gas drilling inevitably causes oil spills that kill fish. He had one message for the more than 500 people who gathered at Sausalitos Bay Institute: Keep oil in the ground; keep it out of our ocean; keep it out of our marine sanctuaries.

Perhaps the most heartfelt statement at the hearing came from an ordinary citizen who has long worked for ocean preservation, Rachel Binah of Little River, a seaside village near Mendocino: Our emotional connection to the ocean is often ignored by those who would industrialize it. We are drawn to protect it because it is beautiful and because it inspires awe. The beauty and magnificence, our universal appreciation, fills a spiritual need for personal renewal and creativity.

The creators of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which re-defined the role of aquariums, recognize that healthy oceans can be a source of spiritual renewal. At first glance, the aquarium appears to celebrate fish (and other sea creatures) as art. As visitors enter the Open Sea exhibit, hundreds of glittering silver Pacific sardines race around a circular tank near the ceiling as ethereal music plays. Nearby are orange lions mane jellies (not called jellyfish because theyre not fish) and bioluminescent jellies that create their own colorful light.

The aquarium aims to let visitors know how they can help preserve the ocean by changing personal habits ranging from what we eat to how much plastic we use and how we dispose of it. The goal is to explain ocean environments and see how species live in harmony, says Margaret Spring, Monterey Bay Aquariums chief conservation officer. So rather than a tank with one animal in it, you walk into a room and see the kelp forest, the cathedral of the ocean, and animals that live within the kelp. The idea is to help the general public learn to love the ocean like scientists do.

To that end, a key part of the aquarium is outdoors. Its back deck is equipped with binoculars and spotting scopes trained on the wildlife in the bay. Visitors almost always spot sea otters swimming on their backs; those who are lucky may see dolphins and whales. Aquarium officials call Monterey Bay our best exhibit.

Program Engagement Manager Ryan Bigelow says the aquarium grew out of a desire to open up the ocean, to show that natural beauty to our guests. Without getting political, Monterey Bay Aquarium explains some of the problems facing the ocean, such as the plastic bags swallowed by fish or seabirds, often killing them.

An early exhibition discussed overfishing, which led aquarium visitors to ask: What should I eat? This sparked the aquariums Seafood Watch program, which includes a downloadable chart and smartphone app that sort fish choices into three categories: Best Choices (green), Good Alternatives (yellow), and Avoid (red). Best choices are well managed and caught or farmed in ways that cause little harm to habitats or other wildlife, according to the guide.

Monterey Bay Aquarium works with influencers ranging from institutional food services like Aramark to individual chefs who broker accords to protect species on the brink of extinction, such as the Pacific bluefin tuna, which is down to 2.6 percent of its historic numbers. Yet Spring was optimistic that the bluefin fishery is fully capable of being recovered if we could just stop taking so many fish. They are fishing in the spawning areas; youve got to let them get bigger. The math isnt working here. I would just say, dont eat Pacific bluefin tuna. Dont do it.

In September 2017, when it was announced that Pacific nations had agreed to restore populations of bluefin tuna to sustainable levels, Spring called it a historic moment for the survival of the species. If it is implemented appropriately, it will recover the population of bluefin tuna to 20 percent of historic populations by 2034.

Fish is the last widely available wild protein  we dont eat wild chickens or pigs or beef for the most part  and its efforts like the bluefin tuna accord that could sustain fisheries for many generations.

Asked if were in the era of the last wild fish for human consumption, Spring cites cause for hope: Thats up to us. Weve driven the ocean to the brink, but we can bring it back. Sunfish take a long time to grow and mature, so if everyone is eating those, yes they will disappear, she says. But there are other fish, like mahi mahi, which reproduce quite quickly, and theyre delicious.

Farmed fish and shellfish are inevitably going to be part of the equation  and thats not necessarily a bad thing, Bigelow says. At least 50 percent of the fish Americans eat is farmed. The public overall has a very negative image of what farmed seafood is, he adds, explaining that while some of it is very, very red, many fish farms are well-managed. So if theres a good farmed seafood story, well tell it.

The idea that were going to feed ourselves solely with wild seafood, thats never going to happen, Bigelow adds. We have to have farmed products, and if thats the case, then we have to do it well. If you needed a panacea, we could just farm mussels and clams. You could provide all the protein for the world in a very small area with clams.

Bigelow explains that mussels and clams can be cultivated in large numbers relatively easily because they dont need feed, and everything that we think about farmed fish overcrowding, they love.

Limiting the catch of wild fish raises the question: What about the people around the world who depend on fish for sustenance? Most of the fish that have been taken out of the ocean have not gone to poor populations, says David Helvarg, executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean advocacy group. High-tech fishing fleets have stripped coastal waters from poor countries in order to provide a constant supply to the supermarket and white-linen-tablecloth restaurants in Europe, North America, and Japan, and increasingly China.

But sometimes the little guys fight back  and win. A few years ago, Senegal took away fishing permits from foreign trawlers, and within six months, local fishermen were catching levels of fish they hadnt seen in a generation, Helvarg says. And after Indonesias navy helped banish almost 400 pirate vessels, hundreds of thousands of local Indonesian fishermen are seeing a recovery of their livelihood.

Yet the overall recovery of oceans depends on forces beyond the seas. Helvarg says hes more frustrated than despairing with the ongoing disasters on our blue planet because we know what the solutions are. If you stop killing fish, they tend to grow back. If you stop producing 100 million metric tons of throw-away plastic every year, then you dont face huge plastic pollution of our oceans.

Another issue is that ocean acidification threatens shellfish, says Helvarg, author of 50 Ways to Save the Ocean: I love oysters, raw oysters; they are mostly grown [farmed] now. But those who are growing oysters are facing problems due to acidification. As the ocean becomes more acidic, it eats away the shells.

With the evidence piling up about ocean stability reaching a tipping point, we havent taken more decisive action because the problem with environmental stories is they dont break, they ooze, Helvarg says, explaining, for example, that the full impact of carbon emissions on oceans wont be felt for many years. The trend lines are still challenging, but at least we recognize what the solutions are, and now we have to start working seriously to build the resilience for our coasts and oceans.

Its not just a matter of no longer getting to dine on bluefin tuna. If humans push the ocean past the point of no return, we could go down with the ship.

Putting the seriousness of the issue in perspective, Sylvia Earle says, Its not just a matter of no longer getting to dine on bluefin tuna. If humans push the ocean past the point of no return, we could go down with the ship. Our life-support system is at risk.

When humans act responsibly, Helvarg says, oceans tend to rebound. In the 19th century, whalers started killing elephant seals for their oil. By 1896, there were an estimated 20 to 100 elephant seals left along the Pacific coast, Helvarg says. In the 1960s and 70s, we changed our attitudes and created the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Clean Water Act, and we protected offshore breeding islands in the Channel Islands. In 1990, the first elephant seal hauled up on the beach near San Clemente, the first breeding pair was there in 1992, and last year 27,000 returned just to that one beach.

When we do the right things, life comes back.

The March for the Ocean will be June 9, 2018, in Washington D.C., and in cities across the country. For more info, see www.marchforocean.com.

Michael Shapiro is author of A Sense of Place and writes for National Geographic Traveler, Hemispheres, and The Washington Post. More at michaelshapiro.net.

This article is featured in the January/February 2018 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
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NASA engineers have successfully demonstrated X-ray navigation in space  a capability that could revolutionize NASAs ability in the future to pilot robotic spacecraft to the far reaches of our Solar System and beyond.

The demonstration was carried out by NASA in an experiment called the Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT).

It showed that millisecond pulsars could be used to accurately determine the location of an object moving at thousands of miles per hour in space  similar to how GPS provides positioning, navigation, and timing services to users on Earth.

This demonstration is a breakthrough for future deep space exploration. As the first to demonstrate X-ray navigation fully autonomously and in real-time in space, we are now leading the way, said SEXTANT project manager Jason Mitchell, of NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center.

This technology provides a new option for deep space navigation that could work in concert with existing spacecraft-based radio and optical systems.

The SEXTANT demonstration took advantage of the 52 X-ray telescopes and silicon-drift detectors that make up NASAs Neutron-star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER).

Since its successful deployment as an external attached payload on the International Space Station in June 2017, it has trained its optics on some of the most unusual objects in the Universe.

Were doing very cool science and using the space station as a platform to execute that science, which in turn enables X-ray navigation. The technology will help humanity navigate and explore our Galaxy, said NICER principal investigator Keith Gendreau, also from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center.

Although NICER is studying all types of neutron stars, the SEXTANT experiment is focused on observations of pulsars.

Radiation emanating from their powerful magnetic fields is swept around much like a lighthouse. The narrow beams are seen as flashes of light when they sweep across our line of sight. With these predictable pulsations, pulsars can provide high-precision timing information similar to the atomic-clock signals supplied through the GPS system.

In the SEXTANT demonstration in November 2017, the researchers selected four millisecond pulsars (J0218+4232, B1821-24, J0030+0451, and J0437-4715) and directed NICER to orient itself so it could detect X-rays within their sweeping beams of light.

The pulsars used by SEXTANT are so stable that their pulse arrival times can be predicted to accuracies of microseconds for years into the future.

During the two-day experiment, the payload generated 78 measurements to get timing data, which the SEXTANT experiment fed into its specially developed onboard algorithms to autonomously stitch together a navigational solution that revealed the location of NICER in its orbit around Earth as a space station payload.

The team compared that solution against location data gathered by NICERs onboard GPS receiver.

For the onboard measurements to be meaningful, we needed to develop a model that predicted the arrival times using ground-based observations provided by our collaborators at radio telescopes around the world, said Paul Ray, a SEXTANT co-investigator with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

The difference between the measurement and the model prediction is what gives us our navigation information.

The goal was to demonstrate that the system could locate NICER within a 10-mile radius as the space station sped around Earth at slightly more than 17,500 mph.

Within eight hours of starting the experiment on November 9, the system converged on a location within the targeted range of 10 miles and remained well below that threshold for the rest of the experiment, Mitchell said.

In fact, a good portion of the data showed positions that were accurate to within three miles.

This was much faster than the two weeks we allotted for the experiment, said SEXTANT system architect Luke Winternitz, also from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center.

We had indications that our system would work, but the weekend experiment finally demonstrated the systems ability to work autonomously.

Although the ubiquitously used GPS system is accurate to within a few feet for Earth-bound users, this level of accuracy is not necessary when navigating to the far reaches of our Solar System where distances between objects measure in the millions of miles. In deep space, we hope to reach accuracies in the hundreds of feet, Mitchell said.

This successful demonstration firmly establishes the viability of X-ray pulsar navigation as a new autonomous navigation capability, he added. We have shown that a mature version of this technology could enhance deep-space exploration anywhere within the Solar System and beyond. It is an awesome technology first.

The team presented its results in January 2018 at the 231st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.

_____

Keith C. Gendreau. 2018. NICER Mission Overview, Status, and GO opportunities. 231st AAS Meeting, abstract # 160.01

Julia Deneva et al. 2018. Millisecond Pulsar Timing Precision with NICER. 231st AAS Meeting, abstract # 157.11

Paul S. Ray et al. 2018. Searching for X-ray Pulsations from Neutron Stars Using NICER. 231st AAS Meeting, abstract # 243.17

This article is based on text provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
FLORENCE, S.C.  More than 90 students and parents gathered Monday at Southside Middle School to learn how to properly address issues such as gang involvement, human trafficking, relationships and grooming.

Brothers from Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. said positive male role models are scarce, so they want to create mentorship opportunities. Through breakout sessions, speeches and handouts, the annual Project Alpha Conference is an initiative to do so.

Craig Washington, president of Florences chapter of the fraternity, said young men are approached to sell drugs and join gangs. He said that without positive role models, especially male role models, they will participate in activities that do not align with a successful path.

We have an opportunity to change them, Washington said. I feel like its our duty and responsibility to our society.

John Greene, a former student at the Project Alpha Conference, said the conference taught him the importance of family, physical health and giving back. This year, he attended the conference as a volunteer.

Its amazing, because I look at so many young men, and I literally see myself 10 years ago, Greene said. It just makes me happy that Im in a position that I can give back.

Greene is now a senior at Francis Marion University and assistant district director of South Carolina chapters of Alpha Phi Alpha.

Anytime that youve been fortunate enough to have a certain type of lifestyle, you should always try to help those who are less fortunate than you, Greene said.

E.J. Bridges, a fraternity brother, taught a breakout session about proper grooming. He said good grooming positively shapes impressions, so it can determine whether someone gets a job.

Whether it is right, Bridges said African-American males have to be particularly mindful not to adhere to certain stereotypes.

In this generation and in this culture, certain attributes have been adopted in the African-American culture, and unfortunately it may not mesh well in the professional world, Bridges said.

Brothers taught students how to tie a tie during the Proper Grooming breakout session. This provided interaction between fraternity brothers and younger students.

Lewis Hicks, a fraternity brother, said that engaging with young people boosts college enrollment. When young men are introduced to the fraternity, they want to attend college so they can pledge, Hicks said.

The theme for this years conference was To Raise a King. Washington said Martin Luther King Jr. taught to lift up your fellow man, and the conference does just that.

The conference is always on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Washington said this years turnout was one of the largest to date.
#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...
Between March 2016 and April 2017 attacks on merchant ships to abduct crew for ransom in the southern Philippines, claimed largely by Abu Sayaaf, saw 59 seafarers abducted from 13 vessels in the region.

While there have been no actual or attempted attacks in the area since April last year Masafumi Kuroki, executive director of ReCAAP, said at a media briefing for the release of its annual report on Tuesday: The concern and threat is not yet eliminated.

Kuroki said the three littoral states had made efforts with coordinated patrols and the Philippines government was making a lot of progress on the issue.

But still I think that the perpetrators who conducted this abduction of crew, the Abu Sayaaf group is still there. They are not completely eliminated so there is still the potential that the Abu Sayaaf group make conduct other similar types of attacks against ships so I think more needs to be done by the Philippines authorities and the regional states to make sure for the shipping industry this area in the Sulu Celebes sea particularly for ship passage is safe for navigation for merchant ships, he explained.

The first four months of 2017 saw three actual abduction incidents from the Fishing Bianca, Giang Hai and Super Shuttle Tug 1, and four attempted attacks against the Ocean Kingdom, Donghae Star, Phu An 268 and the Dona Annabel. Some nine seafarers continue to be held hostage.

The Philippines government has extended martial law in the province of Mindanao, which has seen fierce fighting with insurgents, until 31 December 2018.

ReCAAP continues to advise shipping to reroute from the area if possible. Of course it is up to the shipping industry whether they reroute or not, Kuroki commented.

ReCAAP also remains concerns about the hijacking of small tankers to steal oil cargoes, with such hijackings in the Asian region.
Press Release

January 16, 2018 Dispatch from Crame No. 222

Sen. Leila M. de Lima's statement on Judge Guerrero's decision to inhibit from hearing the drug case against the Senator 1 / 16 / 18 The news of the inhibition of Judge Guerrero is a welcome one. We do not rejoice that it became necessary to ask for the inhibition of a member of the judiciary, but circumstances, and especially the way she has thus far handled the case, have shown that it had to happen if justice has any chance of being truly and faithfully served. This is not just my own personal fight, but a fight to make sure that the justice system is not being exploited by the rich and powerful as a tool to oppress their enemies. If it can be done to a sitting senator to silence and destroy her, it can be done to anyone, especially the most vulnerable. We count this as a step in the right direction, but we have to remain vigilant in ensuring that constitutional and human rights are not again trampled upon. Judges, after all, are among those who ought to be at the forefront of our fight for justice.
Press Release

January 16, 2018 Dispatch from Crame No. 223

Sen. Leila M. de Lima's Statement on SEC's Revocation of Rappler's Corporate Registration 1/16/18 I condemn in the strongest terms the revocation by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Rappler's corporate registration. This is an alarm that signals State repression of the freedom of the press, unwittingly started by an otherwise apolitical government institution that has all but ignored the repercussions of its decision on constitutional liberties, instead seeing the matter as a purely technical issue on corporate control and ownership. The timing of the decision is held suspect, given the context of the President's direct and personal attacks on Rappler and other media organizations such as the Inquirer and ABS-CBN. The SEC decision, coupled with the present wave of authoritarian and anti-democratic actions of the Duterte regime, cannot but give the impression that it is but part of the trend of government assaults on institutions vital to our democracy. The SEC decision is unprecedented in that it is a direct and frontal attack on a media organization. Never was a media entity stripped by government of legal protection since the Marcos dictatorship. This fact alone should alarm each and every member of the media that the formality of their organizations' corporate existence can now be threatened by this regime through the SEC with the Damocles' Sword of juridical delegitimization. The members of the SEC are professional and respected experts in their field. It is therefore most alarming that in an atmosphere of government impunity, they too have succumbed to disregard basic constitutional liberties. They failed to realize the broader anti-democratic repercussions of their decision, beyond the technical issues raised by the Duterte regime, thus allowing themselves to be used as a State instrument of attack on a media organization most critical of the regime's authoritarian policies and actions. The shortsighted and myopic action of the SEC is therefore extremely disappointing as it was unexpected from its leadership, given the high regard given to them by the past administration. Day by day, the Duterte regime manages to turn respected and reliable government institutions, taking them into its authoritarian fold, one by one, and transforming them into instruments of State repression and injustice. We are thus fast approaching another fascist era in the Philippines. Before any hope is lost, the Filipino people must act in support of a free press and call for the restoration of democratic values in our government institutions. We must not let the days where our government institutions only serve the whims of one man and his regime return to oppress us once more. We must fight once again to liberate this country from the curse that this abomination of a President and his pack of power-hungry jackals has brought upon this country and our government institutions.
Press Release

January 16, 2018 Sponsorship Speech of Senator Loren Legarda

Treaties on EU-PH Framework Agreement on Partnership and Cooperation, and Social Security Agreements with Sweden and Germany

16 January 2018 | Senate Session Hall Mr. President, distinguished colleagues, I have the honor to seek approval of three treaties, namely: Senate Resolution No. 570 under Committee Report No. 193, "Resolution Concurring in the Ratification of the Framework Agreement on Partnership and Cooperation Between the European Union and Its Member States, of the One Part, and The Republic of the Philippines, of the Other Part";

Senate Resolution No. 571 under Committee Report No. 194, "Resolution Concurring in the Ratification of the Agreement Between The Republic of the Philippines and The Federal Republic of Germany on Social Security"; and,

Senate Resolution No. 572 under Committee Report No. 195, "Resolution Concurring in the Ratification of the Agreement on Social Security Between The Republic of the Philippines and The Kingdom of Sweden". PH-EU Partnership and Cooperation Agreement Mr. President, It has always been in the interest of our country to establish and fortify formal relations with international partners that will protect and improve the welfare of Filipinos here and abroad. Our august chamber has never been remiss in initiating and supporting efforts to achieve this goal. The Philippines and the EU have long established diplomatic relations since 1964, and this partnership has matured and evolved over the years. The EU remains to be a robust economic partner of the Philippines. In 2016, our country was ranked as the EU's 4th largest trading partner, 4th export market, and 5th import supplier. For the first half of 2017, total Philippine merchandise exports amounting to 4.38 billion comprised 14.9% of overall exports to the EU, which made the EU our 2nd largest export partner during this period. Moreover, foreign direct investments (FDIs) from the 28 EU member states represent the largest FDIs in our country, supporting over 500,000 Filipino jobs. The EU also continues to prove to be a committed development partner. As of June 2017, the EU ranks 4th among sources of grants from official development assistance (ODA) and 8th among the combined sources of loans and grants of ODA. The EU's total ongoing ODA portfolio to the Philippines amounts to 190.48 million, comprising of ten grants. The EU is also a major contributor to the Mindanao Trust Fund (MTF), a multi-donor grant facility that consolidates international development assistance for the recovery of conflict-affected communities in Mindanao; and a committed member of the International Monitoring Team (IMT) in our peacekeeping efforts with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). In addition, the EU is home to an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 of our kababayans. The largest Filipino communities are in Italy, the United Kingdom, and Greece. The EU is the 3rd largest source of remittances from overseas Filipinos and is the 5th largest source of tourists in Philippines. Mr. President, The legal basis of our ties with the EU is still a 37-year old agreement that does not truly reflect this dynamic partnership. It is time that we bring this relationship up to date through the PCA. The Agreement commits the Philippines and the European Union and its member states to pursue dialogue in 41 areas of cooperation, which include combatting terrorism, human trafficking and illicit drugs; countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, small arms, and lights weapons; protecting human rights; encouraging environmental sustainability; reducing the impact of climate change; promoting development cooperation, and capacity-building and technical cooperation initiatives; and exchange of experts in the areas of science, technology, statistics, food, and drugs. The PCA will also bolster our status as a beneficiary country under the EU's Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+) and provide basis for concluding a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU. The prospective FTA aims to enhance market access for goods, services, and investments for the two sides, thereby ensuring benefits for our micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), which comprise 99.5% of total businesses and employ 61.6% of the total workforce in the country. The PCA allows both Parties to address issues and challenges in a more coherent, efficient, and sustainable manner. It provides an overarching mechanism for formal and regular dialogue between the Philippines and the EU. Without the PCA, what we currently have is an ad-hoc dialogue in the form of the PH-EU Senior Officials' Meeting (SOM) and its working groups, which do not meet regularly. Issues of concern to either PH or EU are only discussed in a compartmentalized manner. Through the PCA, discussions on these issues would take place in an institutionalized mechanism, which will ensure greater coordination between the Philippines and the EU. In cases of dispute on any of the issues covered by the Agreement, the PCA provides that both Parties shall resort to dialogue through the Joint Committee with the view of seeking a mutually acceptable solution. The entry into force of the Framework Agreement will not necessitate the introduction of any new legislation as it does not create any new legal commitments, and the language is expressed in general terminologies. Upon the PCA's entry into force, a Joint Committee, composed of PH and EU senior officials, will be established. The Joint Committee will set out the priorities within the framework of cooperation, provide recommendations for promoting the objectives of the Agreement, and monitor and oversee the proper functioning of the Agreement. Each Party may refer to the Joint Committee for any divergence with the application or interpretation of the PCA. Mr. President, Given the current realities of our bilateral relations with the EU, the Framework Agreement on Partnership and Cooperation will serve as a solid platform for dialogue to explore ways to achieve our shared goal of a stronger partnership based on mutual respect, trust, and equality. I, thus, seek the Senate's concurrence in the ratification of this Agreement. Social Security Agreements Meanwhile, Mr. President, the Philippines has also entered into social security agreements with several countries, especially those that host a sizeable number of Filipinos, not only to protect the interest of our kababayans, but also as a way to boost our diplomatic relations with other countries. Since the early 1980s, the Philippine Government has undertaken negotiations on social security agreements. Among the countries that have signed the Convention on Social Security with the Philippines are Austria, United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, Spain, France, Canada, Quebec, Switzerland and Belgium. Now, we seek to also approve our social security agreements with Germany and Sweden. Overseas Filipinos play an important role in sustaining the strength of the Philippine economy. However, many of the countries where our countrymen live and work do not have social safety nets for foreign nationals, thus leaving them in a precarious situation should the need for such safety nets arise. On the other hand, Filipinos who migrate to countries that have coverage for foreign nationals are unable to accumulate enough insurance periods to qualify for full social security pensions because they do not meet the minimum requirement for coverage. Furthermore, without a social security agreement between the Philippines and the host country, many employers risk the payment of double contributions or dual coverage when sending a worker on a temporary basis to the other country. Germany is host to more than 21,000 Filipinos. It is also a strong and strategic partner of the Philippines. It ranks as the 11th major trading partner of the Philippines worldwide. In 2016, overall trade between the Philippines and Germany amounted to USD 4.192 billion and the balance of trade was in favor of the Philippines (USD 394.503 million). New German investments, in particular in the IT-based service sector, are growing. German companies also see the Philippines as a future market in the maritime, transport and industrial manufacturing sectors. In 2016, Investment Promotion Agencies-Approved German investments in the Philippines amounted to Php4.9 billion. With the Exchange of Notes between the Philippines and Germany on the German-Philippines Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GPCCI) on 23 September 2015, officially admitting the same as part of the German Chamber Network, German nationals are expected to invest and relocate to the Philippines. Thus, the Philippines-Germany Social Security Agreement, which was signed by both Parties on 19 September 2014 in Berlin, Germany, is seen as beneficial to both countries as it will provide greater impetus towards the promotion of the Philippines as a retirement haven for qualified German pensioners under the Philippines Retirement Act, and will also ensure that Filipinos living and working in Germany are covered with social security benefits. Meanwhile, among the Nordic countries, Sweden is our largest trading partner and the ninth largest among the European Union (EU) Member States. Bilateral trade between the Philippines and Sweden in 2016 amounted to US$ 134.29 million, slightly down from the US$ 143.40 million total trade registered. But despite the downturn in trade, Sweden remains confident in the Philippines given our consistent strong economic performance. Many Swedish companies have also established a presence in the Philippines. A most solid illustration of Sweden's confidence in the Philippine economy is the visit to Manila in November 2016 of a 70-member Swedish business delegation headed by Swedish Minister for Enterprise and Innovation Mikael Damberg, who also presided over the re-opening of the Swedish Embassy in Manila. The Philippines-Sweden Social Security Agreement was signed in Stockholm, Sweden, on 15 October 2015. Both the social security agreements with Germany and Sweden contain standard provisions consistent with International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 118 on the Equality of Treatment and ILO Convention 157 on the Maintenance of Social Security Rights. These Agreements aim to contribute to equality of treatment, allow the portability of benefits to overseas Filipinos and nationals of the host country, and improve the processing of claims while eliminating dual coverage, among others. Mr. President, We must pursue initiatives that will help uplift the lives of our overseas workers and help secure their retirement in their twilight years. It is, thus, my hope that the Senate concurs in the ratification of the Social Security Agreements with Germany and Sweden, as we actively pursue similar social security agreements with other countries that have compatible social security schemes with the Philippines and home to most number of Filipino workers. Thank you, Mr. President.
Press Release

January 16, 2018 Legarda Seeks Senate Concurrence on PH-EU Cooperation Agreement, Social Security Agreements with Sweden, Germany As Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator Loren Legarda today sponsored three treaties with the European Union, Germany, and Sweden--all of which have been ratified by President Rodrigo R. Duterte but still require concurrence from the Senate in order to enter into force. The following treaties are: the Framework Agreement on Partnership and Cooperation Between the Philippines and the European Union (PH-EU PCA); the Agreement between the Republic of the Philippines and the Federal Republic of Germany on Social Security (PH-Germany SSA); and the Agreement on Social Security between the Republic of the Philippines and the Kingdom of Sweden (PH-Sweden SSA). "It has always been in the interest of our country to establish and fortify formal relations with international partners that will protect and improve the welfare of Filipinos here and abroad. Our august chamber has never been remiss in initiating and supporting efforts to achieve this goal," said Legarda, in her sponsorship speech. Legarda said that the Philippines and the EU have long established diplomatic relations since 1964, with the EU remaining to be a robust economic partner and committed development partner of the Philippines. She added that the EU is home to an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 of fellow Filipinos, with the largest Filipino communities living in Italy, the United Kingdom, and Greece. The Senator said that Filipinos stand to benefit from the PH-EU PCA, which commits Parties to pursue dialogue in 41 areas of cooperation, which include combatting terrorism, human trafficking and illicit drugs; countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, small arms, and lights weapons; protecting human rights; encouraging environmental sustainability; reducing the impact of climate change; promoting development cooperation, and capacity-building and technical cooperation initiatives; and exchange of experts in the areas of science, technology, statistics, food, and drugs. She emphasized that the PCA also ensures benefits for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), which comprise 99.5% of total businesses and employ 61.6% of the total workforce in the country. The treaty will bolster our status as a beneficiary country under the EU's Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+) and provide basis for concluding a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which aims to enhance market access for goods, services, and investments for the two sides. "Without the PCA, what we currently have is an ad-hoc dialogue in the form of the PH-EU Senior Officials' Meeting (SOM) and its working groups, which only discusses issues of concern in a compartmentalized manner. Given the current realities of our bilateral relations with the EU, the Framework Agreement on Partnership and Cooperation will serve as a solid platform for dialogue to explore ways to achieve our shared goal of a stronger partnership based on mutual respect, trust, and equality," she said. Meanwhile, Legarda said that since the early 1980s, the Philippine Government has been negotiating on social security agreements with countries that host a sizeable number of Filipinos--such as Austria, United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, Spain, France, Canada, Quebec, Switzerland, and Belgium--not only to protect the interest of Filipinos, but also as a way to boost our diplomatic relations with other countries. She said that many overseas Filipinos do not have social safety nets, thus leaving them in a precarious situation. On the other hand, Filipinos who migrate to countries that have coverage for foreign nationals are unable to accumulate enough insurance periods to qualify for full social security pensions. Furthermore, many employers risk the payment of double contributions or dual coverage when sending a worker on a temporary basis to the other country. It is in this context that Legarda is seeking Senate concurrence on the ratification of the social security agreements with Germany and Sweden. Legarda said that the PH-Germany SSA will ensure that the more than 21,000 Filipinos living and working in Germany are covered with social security benefits, while promoting the Philippines as a retirement haven for qualified German pensioners under the Philippines Retirement Act. Legarda also noted that both the social security agreements with Germany and Sweden contain standard provisions consistent with International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 118 on the Equality of Treatment and ILO Convention 157 on the Maintenance of Social Security Rights. "These Agreements aim to contribute to equality of treatment, allow the portability of benefits to overseas Filipinos and nationals of the host country, and improve the processing of claims while eliminating dual coverage, among others. We must pursue initiatives that will help uplift the lives of our overseas workers and help secure their retirement in their twilight years," she explained. "It is, thus, my hope that the Senate concurs in the ratification of the Social Security Agreements with Germany and Sweden, as we actively pursue similar social security agreements with other countries that have compatible social security schemes with the Philippines and home to most number of Filipino workers," Legarda concluded.
Press Release

January 16, 2018 SEN. EMMANUEL D. PACQUIAO

SPONSORSHIP SPEECH - SB 1620 ABOLITION OF ROAD BOARD

January 16, 2018 MR. PRESIDENT, MAJORITY FLOOR LEADER, FELLOW PUBLIC SERVANTS, MAGANDANG HAPON. I STAND BEFORE THIS AUGUST CHAMBER AS THE CHAIRPERSON OF THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC WORKS TO RECOMMEND THE APPROVAL OF SENATE BILL NO. 1620 UNDER COMMITTEE REPORT 171 "AN ACT ABOLISHING THE ROAD BOARD AND TRANSFERRING ITS POWERS AND FUNCTIONS INCLUDING THE MANAGEMENT OF THE MOTOR VEHICLES USER'S CHARGE FUNDS TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS AND HIGHWAYS (DPWH) AND TO THE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION (DOTR), AMENDING FOR THE PURPOSE REPUBLIC ACT NO. 8794, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE MOTOR VEHICLES USER'S CHARGE." ON JUNE 27, 2000 REPUBLIC ACT NO. 8794, "AN ACT IMPOSING A MOTOR VEHICLE USER'S CHARGE (MVUC) ON OWNERS OF ALL TYPES OF MOTOR VEHICLES AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES", WAS SIGNED INTO LAW. THE MOTOR VEHICLE USER'S CHARGE WAS SET IN PLACE 1. TO IMPOSE BURDEN ON THOSE THAT IMPOSE THE GREATEST ABRASION OR DETERIORATION ON OUR ROAD SYSTEMS; AND 2. TO IMPOSE PENALTY FOR OVERLOADING - ONE OF THE CAUSES OF THE RAPID DETERIORATION OF OUR ROADS; BEYOND THE BEARING CAPACITY OF SOME ROAD NETWORKS THE MVUC COVERS ALL MOTOR VEHICLES, WHETHER FOR HIRE OR FOR PRIVATE USE, INCLUDING GOVERNMENT MOTOR VEHICLES, CLASSIFIED INTO LIGHT, MEDIUM, OR HEAVY. THE FUNDING WAS INTENDED FOR 1. ROAD MAINTENANCE AND THE IMPROVEMENT OF ROAD DRAINAGE; 2. INSTALLATION OF ADEQUATE AND EFFICIENT TRAFFIC LIGHTS AND ROAD SAFETY DEVICES; AND 3. AIR POLLUTION CONTROL ON THE OTHER HAND, THE ROAD BOARD WAS CREATED TO "IMPLEMENT THE PRUDENT AND EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT AND UTILIZATION OF SPECIAL FUNDS." AS WE KNOW, THE ROAD BOARD IS COMPOSED OF THE 1. DPWH SECRETARY AS EX OFFICIO HEAD 2. DOF SECRETARY 3. DBM SECRETARY 4. DOTC SECRETARY 5. REMAINING THREE MEMBERS SHALL COME FROM PRIVATE SECTORS (TRANSPORT AND MOTORIST ORGANIZATIONS) THE NEED TO REVISIT THE FUNCTION OF THE ROAD BOARD IS HIGHLY NECESSARY NOT JUST BECAUSE IT HAS BECOME OBSOLETE OVERTIME BUT IT HAS BEEN A SOURCE OF GRAFT AND CORRUPTION IN THE GOVERNMENT. MR. PRESIDENT, THE PRIMARY ISSUE AGAINST THE ROAD BOARD IS THE IILEGAL UTILIZATION OF ROAD USER'S TAX AS REVEALED IN PAST COMMISSION ON AUDIT REPORTS. PAST COA REPORTS EXPOSED THE ILLEGAL UTILIZATION OF ROAD USER'S TAX OR THE COLLECTION FROM THE MOTOR VEHICLE USER'S CHARGE (MVUC). THE MVUC COLLECTION FROM 2001 AND 2014 WAS ESTIMATED AT P112.5 BILLION. HOWEVER, THIS FIGURE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN FULLY ENJOYED BY THE TAXPAYERS ENDED UP BEING ALLOCATED ELSEWHERE. THIS IS A BIG ANOMALY, MR. PRESIDENT. 1. FOR INSTANCE, COA REPORTED THAT BETWEEN 2004 AND 2008, THE ROAD FUND WAS USED FOR PAYMENT OF SALARIES, ALLOWANCE, MAINTENANCE AND OTHER OPERATING EXPENSES OF THE BOARD. THIS HAPPENED DESPITE THE FACT THAT SUCH EXPENSE WAS ALREADY CHARGEABLE TO THE REGULAR BUDGET. THUS, A TOTAL OF 515.5 MILLION PESOS WAS UNLAWFULLY SPENT BY THE BOARD. 2. FURTHERMORE, A DISCREPANCY AMOUNTING TO 1.495 BILLION PESOS WAS NOTED BY THE COA FROM THE TOTAL COLLECTION OF ROAD USER'S TAX IN 2001 UP TO 2010. SUCH REPORT WAS BACKED UP BY RESPECTIVE CERTIFICATIONS OF THE LAND TRANSPORTATION OFFICE AND THE BUREAU OF TREASURY. 3. IN 2011, COA REPORTED THAT P62.52 MILLION FUND OF THE ROAD BOARD EARMARKED FOR ROAD MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR WAS INSTEAD USED FOR ITS ENGINEERING AND ADMINISTRATIVE OVERHEAD EXPENSES. 4. COA ALSO REPORTED THAT THERE WERE IRREGULARITIES IN THE BOARD'S EXPENDITURE OF MORE THAN 1.66 BILLION PESOS IN 2013. 5. WHILE IN 2015, FUND TRANSFERS TO VARIOUS NATIONAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT UNITS, AMOUNTING TO MORE THAN P1 BILLION REMAINED UNLIQUIDATED. 6. MOREOVER, ONLY 80.34% OR P11.5 BILLION OUT OF THE P14.5 BILLION TOTAL ALLOTMENTS FROM THE MVUC FUND WAS OBLIGATED. THUS, AN ALLOTMENT OF P2.8 BILLION FOR ROAD SAFETY, ROAD REPAIR AND MAINTENANCE, AND VEHICLE POLLUTION CONTROL HAVE EXPIRED. 7. ON TOP OF THESE, ONLY 127 OUT OF 520 MVUC PROJECTS PROGRAMMED FOR IMPLEMENTATION IN 2015 WERE COMPLETED. THESE REPORTS CLEARLY INDICATE THAT THE ROAD BOARD IS JUST ANOTHER LAYER OF BUREAUCRACY. SADLY, THE ROAD BOARD BECAME A SOURCE OF CORRUPTION. MR. PRESIDENT, THIS HUMBLE REPRESENTATION STRONGLY SUPPORTS THE CALL FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE BOARD. WHEN APPROVED, THE PROPOSAL WILL AFFECT THE MANNER IN WHICH THE COLLECTION OF MONIES FROM ALL MOTOR VEHICLE OWNERS AND ITS DISTRIBUTION WILL BE CARRIED OUT. WITH THIS, SENATE PRESIDENT PIMENTEL, SEN. ZUBIRI, SEN. GATCHALIAN, SEN. EJERCITO, AND I FILED S.B. NO. 1620, "AN ACT ABOLISHING THE ROAD BOARD AND TRANSFERRING ITS POWERS AND FUNCTIONS INCLUDING THE MANAGEMENT OF THE MVUC FUNDS TO THE DPWH AND DOTR, AMENDING FOR THE PURPOSE R.A. 8794" MR. PRESIDENT, IT IS HIGH TIME TO ABOLISH THE ROAD BOARD TO FURTHER RIGHT-SIZE THE GOVERNMENT AND APPROPRIATE THE AGENCY'S FUNDS DIRECTLY TO THE IMPLEMENTING AGENCIES, THE DPWH AND THE DOTR, TO BEST DELIVER THE SERVICES TO WHICH THE ROAD USER'S TAX IS RIGHTFULLY ALLOCATED, AS PRESCRIBED BY THE LAW. PURSUANT TO THE ONE-FUND DOCTRINE, ALL FUNDS COLLECTED UNDER THE EXISTING LAW SHALL BE DEPOSITED TO SPECIAL TRUST ACCOUNTS IN THE NATIONAL TREASURY. THE FUNDS WILL REMAIN CREATED FOR SPECIAL PURPOSES AND WILL BE ALLOCATED FOR SUCH PRINCIPLE BUT WITHOUT THE PARTICIPATION OF THE ACTUAL BOARD. COLLECTED REVENUES, BOTH THE MOTOR VEHICLE USER'S CHARGE AND THE OVERLOADING PENALTY, SHALL REMAIN DEPOSITED INTO FOUR TRUST ACCOUNTS THAT WILL BE DIRECTLY UNDER THE MANAGEMENT AND DISPOSAL OF THE DPWH AND DOTR. THE SPECIAL ROAD SUPPORT FUND, THE SPECIAL LOCAL ROAD FUND AND THE SPECIAL ROAD SAFETY FUND WILL BE UNDER THE DPWH WHILE THE SPECIAL VEHICLE POLLUTION CONTROL FUND WILL BE UNDER THE DOTR. ONE MAJOR DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE OLD LAW AND THIS PROPOSED LEGISLATION IS THE DISTRIBUTION OF COLLECTED FUNDS INTO THESE SPECIAL TRUST ACCOUNTS. WE DEEM IT PROPER TO HIGHLIGHT THE NEED TO SUPPORT LOCAL AND CITY ROADS. SO INSTEAD OF ALLOCATING 80 PERCENT OF OUR COLLECTED REVENUES TO NATIONAL ROADS ONLY, WE TRIM IT DOWN TO 50 PERCENT AND INCREASE THE ALLOTMENT FOR PROVINCIAL AND CITY ROADS. THROUGH THIS, WE CAN GUARANTEE THAT EVERY MOTOR VEHICLE OWNER WHO IS BURDENED BY THIS USER'S CHARGE WILL BENEFIT REGARDLESS OF WHERE THEY MAY BE IN THE COUNTRY. IN ORDER TO ENSURE THAT THE FUNDS ARE APPROPRIATELY ALLOCATED AND USED FOR THEIR PURPOSE, THE MVUC SHALL BE MANAGED WITH FULL TRANSPARENCY AND FULL PUBLIC DISCLOSURE. THE DPWH AND DOTR SHALL MAKE AVAILABLE ALL RECORDS OF HOW THE FUNDS ARE UTILIZED AND DISBURSED, IN ACCORDANCE WITH EXISTING LAWS. A PRE-AUDIT AND POST-AUDIT RULES FOR THE PREVENTION, IMPROPER APPLICATION AND DISALLOWANCE OF ILLEGAL, IRREGULAR, EXTRAVAGANT, EXCESSIVE, UNCONSCIONABLE OR UNNECESSARY USE OF THE MVUC FUNDS SHALL BE PROMULGATED. WITH THIS PROPOSED BILL, THE SECRETARY OF THE DPWH SHALL PREPARE THE IMPLEMENTING RULES AND REGULATIONS PERTAINING TO THE SPECIAL ROAD SUPPORT FUND, THE SPECIAL LOCAL ROAD FUND, AND THE SPECIAL ROAD SAFETY FUND. THE SECRETARY OF THE DOTR SHALL PREPARE IMPLEMENTING RULES AND REGULATIONS PERTAINING TO THE COLLECTION OF THE MVUC STATED UNDER SECTION 3 OF THIS ACT AND ON THE DISPOSITION OF MONIES ACCRUING TO THE SPECIAL VEHICLE POLLUTION CONTROL FUND. THESE RULES AND REGULATIONS SHALL BE PROMULGATED WITHIN 30 DAYS FROM THE EFFECTIVITY OF THIS ACT. A CLEAR SET OF CRITERIA SHALL BE FORMULATED BY THE DPWH AND THE DOTR. APART FROM PREPARING THE IMPLEMENTING RULES AND REGULATIONS AS WELL AS THE CRITERIA FOR FUND ALLOCATION, THEY SHALL LIKEWISE DEVELOP JUDICIAL GUIDELINES AND DOCUMENTARY REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AVAILMENT OF THE FUND ALLOCATION. A REPORT OF WHICH SHALL BE SUBMITTED TO CONGRESS ANNUALLY. WE WANT TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT UNDER SB NO. 1620, ALL EXISTING PERSONNEL OF THE ROAD BOARD SECRETARIAT WILL BE ABSORBED BY THE DPWH. SECRETARIES OF THE DPWH AND DOTR SHALL BE PROHIBITED FROM CREATING ANOTHER SECRETARIAT AND MAY ONLY BE ASSISTED WITH MINIMAL NUMBER OF STAFF IN THEIR ADMINISTRATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE FUND. MR. PRESIDENT WITH ALL THESE THINGS THAT I HAVE PRESENTED, IT IS HIGH TIME FOR US TO ACT ON SENATE BILL NO. 1620. DAGHANG SALAMAT UG MAAYONG HAPON SA TANAN.
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California Attorney General Xavier Becerra joined other state attorneys general on Tuesday in a joint lawsuit challenging the Federal Communications Commissions repeal of net neutrality rules.

The lawsuit by 21 states and the District of Columbia asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to review the FCCs 3-2 vote on Dec. 13 to repeal Obama-era rules designed to guarantee equal access to the Internet.

Internet access is a utility  just like water and electricity, Becerra said in a statement. And every consumer has a right to access online content without interference or manipulation by their internet service provider. In repealing the net neutrality rules, the FCC ignored consumers strong support for a free and open Internet.

Becerra joined the lawsuit led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. It includes the attorneys general of Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and the District of Columbia.

A free and open Internet drives innovation, economic growth, and consumer choice, Becerra said. As home to countless startups and technology giants alike, California knows this better than anywhere else.

The FCCs order has not been published and finalized in the Federal Register. The states filed a brief protective petition, which means the full lawsuit with all its arguments will still be filed later, said Tejas N. Narechania, associate law professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

This is just to make sure that the suing states dont miss their opportunity to challenge the rules, and to make sure that they have some say over where the case will be heard. It looks like the court of appeals that hears this case will be determined by lottery, Narechania said.

Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C., public interest group, filed a similar petition Tuesday.

The petition asks the court to review the FCCs order that overturned rules originally written to prevent Internet service companies from favoring certain content or websites over others. Net neutrality opponents, including major Internet providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, said those rules, enacted in 2015, amounted to an unnecessary layer of regulations.

The states are asking the court to determine that the FCCs order is arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion.

The FCCs order is facing challenges on several fronts. Senate Democrats reportedly said Tuesday they had 49 votes to restore net neutrality rules, plus the support of one Republican. However, that leaves the Democrats one vote short in the Senate for a bill that would also need House approval.

Meanwhile, California has two bills pending to create the states own net neutrality rules, one by state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon and the other by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

Restoring net neutrality should be an all-hands-on-deck effort and Im glad that Attorney General Becerra and others are going to court to fight this terrible move by the FCC, Wiener said in a statement.

Dane Jasper, CEO of the Santa Rosa Internet service company Sonic, said he supported Californias decision to join the lawsuit. Jasper has long been an ardent net neutrality proponent.

Between this and recently introduced legislation in the state legislature, its clear that California is making up for where the federal government has fallen short, Jasper said in an email.

The FCC did not respond to a request for comment.

Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: bevangelista@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChronicleBenny
State legislators have introduced a package of bills that would beef up or extend insurance coverage to policyholders following declared disasters, but only one would be retroactive and apply to victims of the recent wildfires.

Critics say the bills could drive up insurance premiums and reduce competition in California.

Under SB897, insurers would have to offer policyholders, following a declared state of emergency, a settlement equal to 80 percent of their contents coverage without requiring them to submit a detailed inventory. This provision would apply to claims filed July 1, 2017, or later by homeowners and renters.

Most insurers require policyholders to compile a detailed list of every item they lost  down to socks and aspirin bottles  along with its original price and purchase date. This can be a long and painful process.

The bills author, state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, said his office is getting calls from survivors literally experiencing PTSD, having to relive the most horrific night of their lives in an attempt to put a price on their most priceless possessions. Its simply too much to ask. His bill would not preclude them from seeking 100 percent of their policy limit if theyre willing to put up with the hassle.

In December, California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones asked insurers to voluntarily provide up to 100 percent of contents coverage to fire victims without a detailed inventory and let his office know by Jan. 8 if they planned to comply. His office has not yet compiled results of that request.

Allstate said than in response to that request it is providing 100 percent of an insureds claim without requiring an inventory of personal property, provided that the policy is a personal lines policy with replacement cost coverage and the claim is a covered total loss, unless fraud is suspected.

Jones and other legislators announced their package of bills in a news conference Tuesday.

Most homeowner policies have separate limits for their primary structure, outbuildings, contents and additional living expense. Under SB894, future disaster victims who had too little coverage on their main structure but more than enough under their other limits could apply that unused coverage to their structure. This bill also would require insurers to offer to renew policyholders who experience a total loss for at least two renewals or 24 months, whichever is greater. Under current law, they must renew it only once. It also would extend the time consumers have to collect additional living expenses following a disaster to 36 months, up from 24 months currently.

AB1722 would extend the time a policyholder has to rebuild and collect the full replacement cost to 36 months, up from 24 months currently, following future declared disasters.

AB1800 would clarify that policyholders have a right to collect the full replacement cost of their home after a total loss, whether they decide to rebuild, replace at another location or purchase an existing home elsewhere. Jones said in an interview that some insurers have not been letting customers who purchased additional coverage  such as extended replacement cost or building code upgrade  collect on it if they bought or rebuilt at a new location. This bill would ensure they could.

AB1797 would require insurers to conduct a replacement cost estimate when they sell or renew a residential policy. Current regulations do not require insurers to do a replacement cost estimate, but if they do, they must follow the insurance departments consistent and comprehensive methodology, Jones said. This bill would require them to do the estimate according to those rules.

Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Healdsburg, plans to introduce a bill that would require insurers to offer extended replacement cost coverage of no less than 50 percent upon issue or renewal of a residential insurance policy to make sure customers are adequately insured.

Amy Bach, executive director of consumer group United Policyholders, applauded the bills, especially McGuires. Most insurance companies require not only a detailed contents inventory, they also require customers with replacement cost coverage to actually replace each item and provide a receipt if they want to collect its full replacement cost, rather than just its depreciated value. I have never seen the logic on a disaster claim of requiring people to replace all their stuff, she said. I could see on an individual claim, its an anti-fraud measure. But in a wildfire, you know the person didnt burn their house just to collect insurance money, she said.

Under the bill, people who settled for 80 percent of their contents limit would not have to replace lost items, McGuire said.

These bills are solutions in search of a problem, said Robert Hartwig, director of the University of South Carolinas Center for Risk and Uncertainty Management. Hartwig previously was president of the Insurance Information Institute, an insurance trade group.

While perhaps well intended, most of these bills would require additional coverages or higher limits on coverages to be provided to many if not most customers, whether they want it or not, he said. Because there is no such thing as a free lunch ... these bills could have a material impact on the cost of insurance in the state and in some cases could reduce competition because some insurers would simply not offer some coverages in these markets.

Jones said anyone who thinks these are not real problems should spend a minute talking to one of the fire survivors in California. These are very reasonable, common-sense solutions, he said.

Janet Ruiz, a spokeswoman for the institute in California, said in an email that the industry will work with the Legislature on the wildfire bills. We are committed to helping communities recover, rebuild and become resilient.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kathpender
Giants broadcaster Duane Kuiper met his future wife, Michelle, on Waikiki in Hawaii. They exchanged vows there, too, a special place for them.

When we got married there in 1985, I didnt think the marriage was going to blow up there in 2018, Kuiper said.

He was joking, and he wasnt.

At 8:08 a.m. Saturday, the Kuipers were at the Moana Surfrider Hotel on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu when every cellphone on the islands buzzed with the false-alarm text that said a missile was headed toward Hawaii, and THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

For the next 38 minutes, Kuiper, like thousands of others in Hawaii, thought that in moments they could be dead.

I dont think Id ever had a this could be it moment, Kuiper said Monday from the safety of his home in Contra Costa County. This was one of those this could be it moments.

The Kuipers were just finishing a five-day trip. Michelle was asleep in their 14th-floor room overlooking the beach and Duane was outside walking toward the front desk to print their boarding passes for the flight home.

He saw a lot of movement. Security guards were ordering people to go to their rooms. At first, Kuiper thought somebody might have stolen something from one of the hotel shops.

The guards were yelling at swimmers to get out of the pool. An older man doing laps while wearing earplugs did not hear the order, so a guard walked into the pool fully clothed to drag him out.

The outdoor restaurant was emptied with breakfasts still on the tables.

When people leave food, thats not a good sign, Kuiper said. Especially if youre from Wisconsin. You dont leave food.

Kuiper finally looked at his phone and saw the missile warning and headed to the elevator. One woman on the lift was really upset. A man said nobody should worry because he lived in Washington and he got texts like that all the time.

Im thinking, Really? Kuiper said. They have missiles on their way to Washington all the time?

Michelle was still asleep and Kuiper did not wake her, figuring if a missile was coming, better to let her keep sleeping because there was nowhere to go anyway.

He stood on his balcony and saw parents with children on the beach running toward their hotels, and he thought to himself as he looked toward the ocean, I might be able to see this thing coming.

Local TV channels were no help. Neither was CNN.

He finally saw a tweet from an islander reporting the false alarm. An instant later, the official false-alarm text from authorities crossed his phone.

So much went through his mind, including the fact his son and daughter-in-law were in Maui, although he figured if a missile were headed toward the islands, it would be directed toward Honolulu to inflict maximum casualties.

The first thing you feel is obviously incredible amount of relief, Kuiper said. The second thing you feel is that youre pissed.

All was calm when Duane and Michelle got to the airport, but Kuiper kept wondering what went through everybodys mind  on the islands and the mainland.

I kept thinking, Really? This is about somebody pushing the wrong button? he said. Youd think there would be a safeguard. Do you really want to send this? Do you really want to push this button?

It was good to get home.

Henry Schulman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
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Shake Shack, the famed New York burger chain, is making its first foray into the Bay Area restaurant scene.

The company plans to open its first Northern California outpost this fall in Palo Alto at the Stanford Shopping Center. A second location is scheduled for Larkspur, though the lease agreement is still being worked out.

Finally, most likely by 2019, a location will open in San Francisco. Shake Shack CEO Randy Garutti told The Chronicle hes eyeing the Marina district, a place he says has appeal as a community gathering space.

Without a doubt, San Francisco has been one of, if not my favorite city to eat in, Garutti said. We have a profound respect for the city and its chefs. We were just wanting to find the right time to come here.

Shake Shacks roots go back to 2004 to a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park. Though hot dogs have remained on the menu, its the brands burgers that have elevated its status over the years beyond a hyper-regional East Coast chain.

Shake Shack currently has 160 locations, 100 of which are in the United States. Seven of those U.S. restaurants are in California, but theyre in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas.

The Bay Area Shake Shacks will feature the chains classics: the Shackburger, crinkle-cut fries and hand-spun shakes. There could also be a regional special, Garutti said. (In Los Angeles, for example, the chain added a Roadside Double  two patties topped with Swiss cheese, Dijon mustard and onions that have been cooked in bacon and beer.)

As for why San Francisco hasnt gotten a Shake Shack sooner, Garutti said the brand was taking a calculated approach. He said both he and Danny Meyer, the companys founder, have spent a lot of time in San Francisco exploring the citys eclectic restaurant landscape. Upon its Bay Area area debut, Shake Shack will join a competitive market, with a number of local gourmet burger chains, such as Super Duper (11 locations), Gotts Roadside (six locations) and Roam (four locations).

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Garutti said finding the right location in San Francisco was more important than rapid growth. Plus, even at 100 locations in the U.S., Shake Shack still operates with a mini-chain mind-set, he said.

Were not that big of a company yet. When we decide to go, its kind of a big deal, he said. We wanted to get it right.

Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
Its a measure of the current frenzy surrounding self-driving cars that a year-old startup can haul in more than $100 million in its first fundraising round.

Pony.ai reported Monday that it raised $112 million to develop autonomous vehicles. The company  with offices in Fremont and Guangzhou, China  already has test cars prowling Bay Area streets and plans to begin running an autonomous fleet in Guangzhou in the next three months.

Pony.ais substantial fundraising round, led by Morningside Venture Capital and Legend Capital, also may have something to do with the startups pedigree.

Co-founders James Peng and Tiancheng Lou both spent time at Google before moving to the Internet search giants Chinese competitor, Baidu. Peng, Pony.ais chief executive officer, oversaw the direction of Baidus self-driving car division. Lou, who worked on autonomous vehicles at both Baidu and Google, is now Pony.ais chief technology officer.

Their startup is developing level-four autonomous technology, meaning the vehicle can handle an entire trip driving on its own but still offers controls for humans. In addition to tests in California, Pony.ai has also been running its cars in Guangzhou, near Hong Kong.

The self-driving vehicle is an inevitable trend that will disrupt the transportation system, said Wenji Jin, managing director of Legend Capital. This markets enormous potential makes its development opportunities and directions similarly vast.

Sequoia China and IDG Capital, both of which provided seed funding for Pony.ai, also participated in the round. They were joined by Hongtai Capital, Legend Star, Puhua Capital, Polaris Capital, DCM Ventures, Comcast Ventures and Silicon Valley Future Capital.

David R. Baker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DavidBakerSF

Self-driving car levels explained

The federal government and the auto industry have developed ranking systems to describe the different levels of autonomous-car technology. Although there are slight differences among systems, heres the general outline:

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.

Level zero Driver performs all control functions.

Level one Driver performs most functions, but a few  such as driver-assist braking  are augmented by automation.

Level two At least two of the cars control functions can work together in automated mode  such as adaptive cruise control combined with lane centering  but the driver still must pay attention.

Level three Driver can turn over total control of the car under certain conditions, with the car largely responsible for monitoring for any sudden changes to the environment. Driver must still be available to take control if needed.

Level four Car is capable of driving itself but has controls for humans to drive when they choose.

Level five Car drives itself, with no option for human driving.
President Trumps profanely expressed racism has reverberated across the nation and globe, roiling international relationships and his anti-immigration agenda. He and his allies were rattled enough to venture a series of dubious, hairsplitting denials.

Anyone acquainted with Trumps history of race-baiting might wonder why he would take pains to obfuscate the latest example. The answer is that his campaign against nonwhite immigration relies on the thin pretense that the law, economics, security or anything else besides ethnicity is at issue. Deploring legal immigration for no reason other than its origin threatens to expose his project as politically untenable bigotry.

Trump reportedly longed for immigration from Europe rather than shithole countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Central America when presented with a bipartisan agreement to restore Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, President Barack Obamas order protecting those brought to the country illegally as minors. Accounts by the Washington Post and others were confirmed in no uncertain terms by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. and, in essence, by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., both of whom attended the Oval Office meeting.

The denials, by contrast, were worded all too carefully. Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga., who were also present, said initially that they did not recall the president saying these comments specifically and later that he didnt utter that particular obscenity. Trump Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen maintained that she didnt recall him saying that exact phrase. Trump himself said his language at the meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. The delicate distinctions apparently at issue concerned whether Trump applied the vulgarity only to Africa or also to Haiti and El Salvador and, of even weightier diplomatic significance, whether he actually said shithouse or shithole.

No matter which excrement-based epithet the president applied to other peoples homelands, the trouble for him and his allies is not just that governments from Pretoria to Port-au-Prince are demanding an explanation. Its that he plainly admitted  on the weekend set aside to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., no less  that this all comes down to sorting one color from another, a habit that is rooted deep in the presidents past and extends even to his prolific junk food consumption.

That is why the president was compelled to wax Nixonian by proclaiming Im not a racist, while blaming the all-but-powerless Democrats for failing to restore DACA. In fact, it was Trump who rescinded those protections and, rather than using those affected as hostages to push effectively complexion-based restrictions on legal immigration, could grant them relief if he wanted to with the stroke of a pen. His vulgar commentary is dogging him because it explains, in damning and unvarnished terms, why he wont.

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.
My partner, Eric, and I landed in Maui late Friday for an impromptu long weekend getaway. So impromptu that Eric had to pack for me while I was in a Friday afternoon meeting, and my biggest concern upon landing was that I was in Hawaii wearing a turtleneck, black wool pants and winter dress shoes. I fell asleep Friday night fretting about whether Eric had packed the right beach sandals for me.

I was semi-awake Saturday morning, lying in bed and still worrying about my shoes, when Eric barreled into the room from the balcony, shouting Get up! Get up! Theres a missile attack headed for Hawaii! At that same instant, my cell phone lit up.

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

I jumped out of bed, scrambling to get dressed as Eric nervously shouted questions as much to himself as to me: Long pants? Car keys? Wheres the bottled water? Grab the cell phone charger! And then, Whats that sound?!

We both stopped and listened, and there indeed seemed to be the sound of movement in the sky above. I ran out onto our 22nd-floor balcony and scanned the horizon. No missile in sight, but a truly surreal scene worthy of a Hollywood disaster film.

Everywhere I looked, people below me were running for cover. I saw one man who had gone for a morning swim come racing out of the water and run up the beach toward the nearest building, soaking wet and not stopping for his little pile of clothes and beach towel. By now, sirens were sounding, and the hotels intercom system was repeatedly announcing, Seek shelter inside. Stay away from windows. If you can, please make your way to the basement or the ballroom and await further instructions.

We grabbed our backpacks and ran down the stairwell to the basement.

The hotel basement wouldnt have been the prettiest place in the best of circumstances, but it felt even more claustrophobic and tomb-like in the current one. It was eerily quiet  some people scanning their phones for information, others trying to call loved ones, a few praying or quietly crying. Some of us started to debate whether it made more sense to try to head for high ground and risk radiation poisoning from nuclear fallout, or stay underground and face drowning from the inevitable tsunami that would hit post-blast impact. We would later learn from a friend at a neighboring property that hotel staff in their location were going around instructing people to limit cell phone usage or otherwise save battery power because, That is how they are going to find you when this is over.

What most struck me, as we sat there during that interminable 38 minutes before the alert was declared false, was that EVERY person in that room fully believed that a nuclear attack was imminent. Even as the social media reports started trickling in about a false alarm, nobody moved to leave.

An hour later, as we were sitting on the beach on a gloriously sunny day, I found myself thinking, If I were Kim Jung Un, this would be the exact time that I would launch a strike against the U.S., because no one would believe it now. But the fallacy in that bit of my own twisted logic is that I now do believe that such a strike is possible.

I believed it all morning, as did the million-plus residents of Hawaii. The White House has created a climate in which anything (and therefore everything) is completely plausible, from hush money to cover up an affair between President Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels to Kim Jung Un rising to the bait of My button is bigger than yours and taking a preemptive strike against Honolulu  or San Francisco. And I say the latter in complete seriousness.

So what is my call to action (to myself or others) from my morning date with the bomb that stood me up? The easy one is to stop worrying about the correct shoes for the beach. The harder one is to not allow myself to become desensitized and inured to the constant stream of reckless and irresponsible comments emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And I say that not as a Democrat (which I am) or a Republican (which Im not), but as a proud American who is worried that our countrys vitally important role as a stabilizing force in the geo-political safety of the planet is being undermined every day by this White House.

Ive become so accustomed to the constant barrage of misinformation and disinformation saturating my world every day that it took the threat of death from a nuclear missile to shake me out of my sense of complacency. Im glad that it did so, but hope that it wont take something similar or worse to keep me vigilant. But perhaps thats what it takes. Back down in the basement, I had called my sister. When she answered, I shouted, Were in Maui and they just said a ballistic missile is heading this way! To which she replied, You didnt tell me you were going to Hawaii.

Timothy Wu is the former deputy director of the September 11th Fund, created in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. He is an attorney and philanthropic giving expert serving as the vice president of philanthropy at the San Francisco Zoological Society.
Just under a decade ago, Philippe Bourgeois published Righteous Dopefiend, his chronicle of homeless, heroin-injecting San Franciscans making their lives on the citys streets. The books publication turned out to be chillingly well-timed: Since 2010, opioid-related deaths have skyrocketed, tearing apart communities and leading, for the first time in decades, to declining life expectancy across swaths of the American population.

Those featured in Righteous Dopefiend often encountered heroin in the hard-living years of the 1970s and 1980s. By contrast, the current epidemic largely started with prescription painkillers. But, efforts to crack down on pills are leading a new generation to turn to heroin, and with it, the needle.

Drug injection, an efficient way to get high, is also a dangerous one.

Dosing can be hard to control, increasing overdose risk. Equipment sharing can lead to HIV, hepatitis C, and other serious chronic illnesses. Bacterial infections of the skin, heart or central nervous system can send people to the hospital for days or weeks. When I worked as a medical intern at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, these sorts of infections were among the most common reasons for admission to our service. As more people turn to injection, all these complications will become more common. The costs, both human and economic, will be high.

If theres any good news, its this: Effective addiction treatments exist for opioid use disorders, and many of injections most serious harms are preventable. Treatments include methadone and buprenorphine, the mainstays of opioid replacement therapy. Naltrexone, a medication that blocks opioid receptors, is a promising option as well.

Psychiatric medication, therapy, and group programs can all play important roles. Then there are critically important harm-reduction programs, which often take the form of needle and syringe exchange, where people who inject can get clean supplies. More recently, the distribution of naloxone, an effective overdose antidote, has gained widespread popularity.

Now, San Francisco is debating an approach that, though not new, is still viewed by many as radical: the supervised injection facility, a place where people who inject drugs can drop in  with their own supply  and use. An on-site needle exchange allows easy access to clean equipment. Clients then go to a clean location  be it a booth or a lounge chair, where they can inject. All the while, staff trained to respond quickly to overdose or other emergencies stand at the ready.

These facilities offer people who inject drugs safety, support and dignity, worthy goals in and of themselves. Furthermore, they offer a one-stop point of connection to detox, treatment, counseling services and other resources, gaining the trust of people who may have more than a little well-earned skepticism of government and public health authorities.

Worldwide, there are around 100 supervised injection facilities, most of them in Europe. For more than a decade, North Americas only facility was Insite, which opened in 2003 in Vancouver, British Columbia (more recently, the city added a second facility).

Insites statistics speak for themselves. In 2016, the facility served more than 8,000 clients, providing approximately 1,700 overdose interventions, 4,000 clinical interventions, 517 referrals to the facilitys attached detox program, and more than 5,000 referrals to other social and health services. By conservative estimates, Insite offered an economic benefit of $6 million per year, a return of $5 for every $1 spent, with no substantive evidence that it encouraged continuing drug use for those intent on quitting. Perhaps most impressive of all, in its 15 years of operation, Insite has not seen a single overdose death.

Despite opposition among conservatives, Insites remarkable success led the Canadian government to approve additional sites. The United States still has no sanctioned facilities, which would make San Franciscos the first (if Seattle doesnt beat us to it). Even if we were to move forward here, the potential for both clients and operators to face legal jeopardy is substantial. In Sacramento, a recent effort to create a framework for supervised injection facilities failed, leaving a lack of clarity as to how, if at all, California authorities might respond. Federal law may be an even tougher barrier. Recently, the U.S. Attorney in Vermont  relying on unsubstantiated claims about the supposed dangers of supervised injection sites  threatened legal action against a proposed facility there. Needless to say, any effort to open a site here would require careful assessment and negotiation of the legal risks to city officials, site operators, and clients themselves.

And yet, how can we wait? We, as a country, are faced with a true public health emergency, and its time to act like it. Thus far, the worst of the opioid epidemic has largely spared California, relatively speaking, but with an estimated 22,500 people who inject drugs in San Francisco, the need for a supervised injection facility remains great.

A recent San Francisco study estimated that a 13-booth site would, through averted infections and increased opioid treatment, generate a net return of $3.5 million annually. Even greater than the economic savings is the opportunity to clearly take the position that we, as a city, value the safety, health and lives or all our citizens  and to demonstrate that this model can work in the United States. California can once again set an example for the nation; the stakes are too high to wait.

Jacob Izenberg is a resident physician in psychiatry at UCSF and a drug-use researcher, with his most current research focused on gentrification and health in California.
As Paul Shapiro prepared for the publication of Clean Meat, his new book on meat from cultured animal cells, a thought struck him: What if he could bind one of the books in animal-free leather?

A San Leandro company named Geltor took up Shapiros challenge, becoming only the third company in the country to make leather from cultured cells. Tanned and embossed, the lab-grown bioleather appears chestnut-colored and supple. It looks and smells just like a leather-bound book, Shapiro recounted.

For his book, published on Jan. 2, the former vice president of policy engagement for the Humane Society of the United States, profiled the companies racing to culture animal cells into edible meat, a field sometimes called cellular agriculture. (As the title suggests, Shapiro prefers the more market-friendly phrase clean meat.) Many of these firms are in the Bay Area, close to the regions biotech industry and Silicon Valley funders.

Shapiros book traces the industrys growth from a cultured beef hamburger that a Dutch team of scientists fed journalists in 2013 to toasts spread with foie gras pate that Hampton Creek Foods recently made from duck-liver cells grown in its San Francisco headquarters.

Eric Day

Geltor, founded in 2015, has been known for engineering yeast cells to produce collagen for sale to the cosmetics industry. Its foray into bioleather is a bit of a surprise. Until Geltors book cover became public on Jan. 16, the only companies that produced cultured bioleather were Modern Meadow in New Jersey and VitroLabs in San Francisco.

In its San Leandro facility, Geltor ferments genetically engineered yeast cells capable of spitting out several different varieties of collagen. The collagen is separated from the cells and combined, then molded into floppy, pallid sheets before being tanned.

Youd think that the most realistic book cover would come from cow or pig collagen, but the companys scientists preferred jellyfish collagen instead. In fact, said CEO Alexander Lorestani, Geltor wants to dispense with hidebound notions of what leather should be.

Not only can you make the thing that people have come to know as a material that gets used on car seats, gloves and book binding, he said, we can start telling stories and building materials that have different properties than what youve relied on. In fact, Geltor has already cultured mastodon collagen, whose protein sequences came from scientific analysis of long-frozen mastodons.

Shapiro said that the advantage of bioleather isnt merely alleviating animal suffering or reducing the environmental footprint of the meat and leather industries.

Cows dont come in the shapes of wallets and car seats, he said. Because youre growing (bioleather) in a liquid form, you can shape it into any shape. The potential to profit from this new development is huge: Market-research firm Lucintel has estimated that the global leather industry will be worth $91 billion in 2018.

Shapiro and Geltor have released a video displaying the leather-bound book, and as of 6 p.m. on Jan, 16, it is up for auction on eBay. Proceeds from the sale will go to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit active in promoting the growth of the cultured meat industry.
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Deck chairs and wads of blankets along Market Street usually signal a parade, but Monday evening's crowd was waiting for something different. They came for sneakers.

Or, more accurately, they came for limited-edition Air Jordan IVs, designed in collaboration with San Francisco's own Levi's jeans brand and sewn with blue denim.

The shoes will not be available for purchase until Wednesday. But by 5:30 p.m. Monday, the line in front of the Levi's store at 815 Market Street stretched more than halfway down the block, past the entrance to the Westfield Mall. The sneakers will be accompanied by a matching reversible denim trucker jacket, and each pair of shoes will retail for $225, according to fashion site Hypebeast.

The appeal? Matt Ball, waiting near the rear of the line, said he hopes to resell them for anywhere between $600-$800. The shoes will only be sold at 69 stores worldwide.

"That's why everyone is out here," he said.

ALSO READ: Locol opens in San Jose, thanks to new Whole Foods venture

Police were on-site monitoring the growing crowd. The city's sit-lie ordinance permits "sitting in line for goods or services," according to the San Francisco Police Department's website, so long as the queue does not obstruct sidewalk traffic.

It wasn't Ball's first time waiting in line to buy sneakers, though it would be his first attempt at camping out. As he waited for friends to join him in the cold, though, he said he was having second thoughts.

ALSO READ: See the new Ford Mustang Bullitt, a tribute to the SF movie

"I'm not sure if I'll get my hands on the shoes or not," he said. "It was chaotic when it came time to buy the shoes (last time)."

Kanye Powell, a longtime sneaker collector who said he had been waiting since Thursday, expected thousands more prospective buyers to arrive. When asked why, he gave a different reason.

"We wear our shoes," he said of those in line.

The manager of the Levi's store was unable to comment.
Two men frustrated with what they call an "ungovernable" California have launched a new campaign to divide the rural areas of the state from its coastal cities.

Founders of the "New California" movement, Robert Paul Preston and Tom Reed, write on the campaign's website that California is "a failed state" and that "citizens of California are living under a tyrannical form of government that does not follow the California and U.S. Constitutions."

The campaign cites high taxes, and a decline in housing, health care, prisons, state parks, education, and "business climate," among other things, in both high-density and rural areas as reasons for a division.

"There's something wrong when you have a rural county such as this one, and you go down to Orange County which is mostly urban, and it has the same set of problems, and it happens because of how the state is being governed and taxed," Preston told CBS Sacramento.

Unlike other, similar campaigns, this is not a secession; rather, proponents of New California want to create a brand new economy with a new constitution via Article IV, Section 3 of the United States Constitution.

That section, which is related to statehood, dictates that no new state within an existing one already in the union may be created "without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress."

The New California campaign most resembles the "Six Californias" initiative, which aimed to divide California into six regional states. That movement did not garner enough signatures to make it onto the 2016 ballot.

New California has little chance of succeeding, comparable to other campaigns to alter the makeup of California, but the group is nevertheless pushing forward and organizing meetings around the cause. On Monday, the group released a "Declaration of Independence" calling for "a free and Independent State" with "full power to establish and maintain law and order, to promote general prosperity."

According to CBS Sacramento, representatives for New California say it will be 10 to 18 months before they'll be ready to work with the current state's legislature.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.


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7:45 a.m.

A severe accident with injuries on Southbound US-101 north of Cesar Chavez street blocked traffic blocked the right lanes of the highway. A severe traffic alert was issued for the area by CHP.

An accident in Tracy blocked the center divider of Westbound I-580, west of South Corrall Hollow Road.

An accident with injuries on Southbound US-101, north of Cesar Chavez Street in San Francisco blocked the right shoulder.

In Pleasanton, an accident and obstruction on on Southbound I-680, south of Bernal Ave, blocked the third lane from the left.

An accident on Southbound I-880, near the exit at Hegenberger Road in Oakland affected the right shoulder.

An accident with injuries and overturned vehicle on Westbound CA-4 at in Cummings Skwy in Port Costa blocked the left lane and shoulder.

7:11 a.m.

After the rain subsided early Tuesday morning, fog and slick roads slowed traffic around the Bay Area.

On the Golden Gate Bridge, fog is currently affecting northbound and southbound lanes and causing delays for morning commuters.

An accident with injuries was reported around 6:35 a.m. on Westbound I-80 west of the Bay Bridge, California Highway Patrol said. The center divider was blocked and commuters should expect delays.

An overturned vehicle blocked the center divider on Westbound CA-4, east of Sycamore Ave., according to CHP.

Other accidents reported around the Bay Area include a crash in Pacifica, which blocked northbound lane on CA-1, north of Monterey Road, and an incident that blocked the right shoulder of Eastbound CA-37, west of Wilson Ave in Vallejo. CHP warned commuters to anticipate delays.

Were seeing low clouds and some fog, said Will Pi, of the National Weather Service in Monterey. But we havent seen any dense fog, just some because its been raining this morning.

Pi cautioned that there is a lingering chance of rain Tuesday morning.

Today will be mostly cloudy, maybe some clearing by late in the afternoon, and then should be mostly clear with some high clouds tonight and Wednesday, Pi said, adding that people should expect highs in the upper 50s and lows in the upper 40s.

Sophie Haigney is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sophie.haigney@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SophieHaigney
Police confirmed a missing woman from Williams, whose sister was killed by a suspected wrong-way driver on I-5, was found dead in a Woodland parking lot, and investigators are calling it a homicide.

Karen Garcia, 21, was last seen at 11:30 a.m. Jan. 8. She told a friend she was going to either Roseville or Vacaville to go shopping to clear her head after her younger sister, along with her four friends, were killed in a crash, according to Williams police.

When Garcia didn't show up that night for her sister's vigil, her family reported her missing.

Someone called officers about 3:45 p.m. Sunday about a body inside a parked car in a Marshalls parking lot.

Detectives determined the car was Garcia's, and it was the missing woman inside.

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Karen Garcia and her mother worked at Granzella's Deli Restaurant in Williams.

"Karen was very well-liked, very respectful. She didn't have an enemy," General Manager Dino McCarty said. "Always kind, always a smile on her face, always happy -- a great spirit."

Colusa police searched the home of Salvador Garcia, Jr. and found evidence of a homicide. He is Karen Garcia's ex-boyfriend and the father of her 2-year-old daughter, Colusa Police Chief Josh Fitch said, adding the two lived together on and off.

The 2-year-old girl is with Karen Garcia's mother, according to Fitch.

Investigators believe Karen Garcia was killed on Jan. 8, but her body wasn't found for days.

No additional details about how Karen Garcia was killed have been released.

This is the second tragedy for Karen Garcia's family in a week.

Her sister, 19-year-old Jessica Garcia, was one of five people killed when a wrong-way driver slammed into their vehicle about 12:30 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 7, on I-5 in the town of Yolo as the group was on their way home from dinner.

"We are praying for Jessica and now what happened to Karen-- I don't understand," said Jose Martin-Vega, a cousin of the sisters. "What person would do this, when someone has already died, and then to cause another death?"

The close-knit Williams community has lost six lives under the age of 25 in less than a week.

"Everyone is kind of devastated right now," Williams resident Benjamin Perez said. "There's a lot of family who lost a lot of friends, so everyone is pretty shook up"

"We are trying to come together. We are trying to lean on each other and give hugs," McCarty said. "Everybody knows everybody here in this small community. So it's very tough, very tough."

The Refuge Restaurant and Bar is hosting a taco fundraiser, at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday until closing. All proceeds, donations and tips will go to the families affected by both tragedies.

"Money doesn't bring people back, at least it'd be able to help support em," Refuge bartender Abel Godoy said.

Granzella's will hold a spaghetti fundraiser on Monday to raise money for Karen and Jessica Garcia's funerals.

"Two losses, great losses," McCarty said. "We're not sure how Gloria, or any mother, could handle that."
Hello Joe, read the November 2016 email from someone identifying himself as John Doughs. I have found a major vulnerability in Uber.

The email appeared to be no different from other messages that Joe Sullivan, Ubers chief security officer, and his team routinely received through the companys bug bounty program, which pays hackers for reporting holes in the San Francisco ride-hailing services systems, according to current and former Uber security employees.

Yet the note and Ubers eventual $100,000 payment to the hacker, which was initially celebrated internally as a rare win in corporate security, have since turned into a serious black eye for the company. In November, when Uber disclosed the 2016 incident and how the information of 57 million driver and rider accounts had been at risk, the companys chief executive since August, Dara Khosrowshahi, called it a failure that it had not notified people earlier. Sullivan and another colleague were fired.

In the weeks since, Ubers handling of the hacking has come under major scrutiny. Not only did Uber pay a richer amount to the hacker than what it typically paid, but it did not disclose what had transpired for a year, raising questions of a coverup and whether the payment really was just a ransom paid by a security operation that had been left alone to act on its own for too long.

The hacking is now the subject of at least four lawsuits, with attorneys general in five states opening investigations into whether Uber broke laws on data-breach notifications. In addition, the U.S. attorney for Northern California has begun a criminal investigation.

Most of all, the hacking and Ubers response have fueled a debate about whether companies that have crusaded to lock up their systems can scrupulously work with hackers without putting themselves on the wrong side of the law.

Uber is illustrative of a breed of company that aimed to bulletproof its security. While many corporations were for years blissfully unaware of the bad actors penetrating their systems, Uber and others recruited former law enforcement and intelligence analysts and installed layers of technical defenses and password security. They joined other companies in embracing the same hackers they once treated as criminals, shelling out bug bounties as high as $200,000 to report flaws.

Yet since the fallout from Ubers disclosure, tech companies have taken a harder look at their bounty programs. At least three have put their programs under review, according to two consultants who have confidential relationships with those companies, which they declined to name. Others said criminal prosecutions for not reporting John Doughs would deter ethical hackers who would otherwise come forward.

Anything that causes organizations to take a step backwards and not welcome contributions from the security community will have a negative impact on all of us, said Alex Rice, a co-founder of HackerOne, a security company that works with customers, including Uber, to manage interactions with and payments to hackers.

The situation is complicated by Ubers track record for pushing boundaries, which put it under scrutiny last year and helped spur the resignation of Travis Kalanick, its longtime chief executive, in June. Khosrowshahi has since vowed to change the way the company conducts itself.

This account of Ubers hacking and the companys response was based on more than a dozen interviews with people who were involved in the situation, many of whom declined to be identified because of the confidentiality of their exchanges. Many are current or former members of Ubers security team, who defended their actions as a prime example of how executives should respond to security problems in their systems. The New York Times also obtained more than two dozen internal Uber emails and documents related to the incident.

In a statement, Sullivan disputed the notion that the 2016 episode was a breach and said Uber had treated it as an authorized vulnerability disclosure.

I was surprised and disappointed when those who wanted to portray Uber in a negative light quickly suggested this was a coverup, he said, adding that he was proud its engineers had been able to fix the issue before it could be abused. He declined to discuss disclosure because of the active state investigations.

Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman, said, We stand by our decision to very publicly disclose the 2016 data breach  not because it was easy, but because it was the right thing to do.

Through a spokesman, Kalanick declined to comment.

Uber started its bounty program in March 2016, challenging hackers to find bugs that could specifically lead to the exposure of sensitive user data. The higher risk the bug was, the more Uber would pay. In Ubers calculus, the payouts were better than learning about a vulnerability only after attackers had abused it.

By the time Sullivan got John Doughs email, Uber had paid rewards to hundreds of hackers. Sullivan forwarded the John Doughs note to his team for vetting and, if all checked out, patching and payment.

Ubers security team used monikers for hackers, particularly the colorful, anonymous ones who engaged with the company. John Doughs was called Preacher for his admonitions that Uber should be better at security.

Its very disappointing to be finding this vulnerability in such way, the hacker wrote in an email to Rob Fletcher, Ubers product security engineering manager. Especially coming from a company like Uber.

Other emails obtained by the Times show Fletcher treated the incident as a bounty and encouraged Preacher to provide proof of the vulnerability, including sending a few lines of data from the database he had breached.

According to the emails obtained by the Times, Uber soon discovered that some of its employees had left keys on a programming site called Github. Those keys had allowed Preacher to gain access to Ubers Amazon Web servers, where it stored source code as well as 57 million customer and driver accounts, including drivers license numbers for some 600,000 Uber drivers. It was a major oversight. To fix it, Uber had to inform everyone at the company that it was temporarily shutting down access to Github.

Meanwhile, emails between the hacker and Fletcher continued. In some, Fletcher thanked the hacker for helping the company fix the oversight. In two emails, Preachers motivations appeared less altruistic. In one, he demanded high compensation for his findings. After Fletcher wrote that the companys maximum bounty was $10,000, Preacher said he and his team would only accept six digits.

Fletcher said he would need to seek authorization for a $100,000 payment, and would need Preachers reassurances that he would delete the data he had downloaded. Fletcher also pushed the hacker to take payment through HackerOne, which requires bounty recipients to disclose their real identities for tax requirements.

Fletcher drew further details about the hacker out through emails, including tidbits about his identity, his Internet hosting provider, the location of his computer and proof that he deleted his copy of Ubers downloaded data by looking at a virtual copy of his system provided by his host.

Id like to thank you and your team for your excellence in dealing with this issue, Preacher wrote in one email.

According to the emails, Uber at one point extended Preacher an all-expenses paid trip to San Francisco. Uber asked the hacker to discuss his security techniques and offered to introduce him to companies that might be interested in his skills. Preacher declined.

Preachers trail of digital breadcrumbs eventually led to a 20-year-old whose first name was Brandon and who was living in a Florida trailer park with his family, according to the emails. In one email, Uber offered to send someone to meet Brandon at a local coffee shop. Brandon declined to leave his home and suggested that the employee meet him there. It was there that Brandon signed agreements assuring Uber that he had deleted the data he had downloaded.

The Times was unable to learn Brandons full name. An email to the John Doughs account bounced back.

By then, Ubers security team was celebrating its response to what could have been a major security breach. Sullivan and his colleagues were praised in year-end performance reviews, including by Kalanick, according to current and former employees.

What is now at issue is whether Uber executives broke the law with the $100,000 payment and should have quickly notified customers or officials of the discovery. The issue is not legally clear cut.

Laws concerning bug bounties  particularly those that let hackers view or save sensitive customer data  are ambiguous. The Justice Department weighed into bug disclosure programs for the first time in July and largely left it to organizations to decide what access they will authorize for hackers and what they can do with the data. In Ubers case, its bounty guidelines authorized and encouraged hackers to look for vulnerabilities that exposed its most sensitive user data.

Breach disclosure laws also differ state to state. The state laws most relevant to Ubers case require disclosure if names are exposed in combination with drivers license numbers in a breach of security.

Brandon received two payments of $50,000 each from Uber on Dec. 8, 2016, according to the emails. Uber continued trading emails with Brandon during 2017, until the conversation eventually dwindled.

The matter seemed settled  until Sullivan received a phone call while preparing Thanksgiving dinner, according to two people familiar with the matter. He was being fired, effective immediately, for failing to disclose the incident to the proper authorities at the time.

Nicole Perlroth and Mike Isaac are New York Times writers.
Recently the founder of something called ripple briefly became richer than Mark Zuckerberg. Another day an anonymous donor set up an $86 million bitcoin-fortune charity called the Pineapple Fund. A Reddit user spotted a Tesla with a BLOKCHN license plate. More people are looking to buy bitcoin on their credit cards. After the Long Island Iced Tea company announced it would shift to blockchain, its stock rose 500 percent in a day.

In 2017, bitcoin went from $830 to $19,300, and it now quivers around $14,000. Ether, its main rival, started the year at less than $10, closing out 2017 at $715. Now its over $1,100. The wealth is intoxicating news, feverish because it seems so random. Investors trying to grok the landscape compare it to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when valuations soared and it was hard to separate the Amazons and Googles from the Pets.coms and eToys.

The cryptocurrency community is centered around a tight-knit group of friends  developers, libertarians, Redditors and cypherpunks  who have known one another for years through meetups, crypto conferences and Internet message boards. Over long hours in anonymous group chats, San Francisco bars and Settlers of Catan game nights, they talk about how cryptocurrency will decentralize power and wealth, changing the world order.

The goal may be decentralization, but the money is extremely concentrated. Coinbase has more than 13 million accounts that own cryptocurrencies. Data suggests that about 94 percent of the bitcoin wealth is held by men, and some estimate that 95 percent of the wealth is held by 4 percent of the owners.

There are only a few winners here, and, unless they lose it all, their impact going forward will be outsize.

They also remember who laughed at them and when.

James Spediacci and his twin brother, Julian, who bought Ether when it was about 30 cents, now run one of the most popular whale clubs: private cryptocurrency trading communities where crypto syndicates are coordinated in group chats. He showed me a screenshot of his Facebook post from 2014 telling everyone to buy Ether.

One like, he said, pointing to his phone. It got one like.

Whether its all built on sand or not, the crypto castle has risen. Theres an actual house called the Crypto Castle, and the king is Jeremy Gardner, 25, a rakish investor with a hedge fund who has become the de facto tour guide for crypto newcomers.

Early one afternoon, he opened a bottle of rose while he charged half a dozen external batteries so he wouldnt have to ever plug in his phone in Ibiza, Spain, the next week.

I do ICOs. Its my thing, he said. He wore a pink button-front and pink pants. Its me, a couple VCs and a lot of charlatans.

An initial coin offering is a way to raise money: A company creates its own cryptocurrency and investors buy into the new coin, without actually buying a stake in the company. Gardner led an initial coin offering for his startup Augur, creating an Augur token that he then sold to raise real-world money. These tokens sold fast, and it is one of the forces that kicked off this boom. For a time, the value of Augur, a market-forecasting startup with few customers, exceeded $1 billion.

About eight people live in the Crypto Castle on any given night, and some of Gardners tenants brought out snacks (Cheez-Its and a jar of Nutella). One of the bedrooms has a stripper pole. Gardner leaned back into the sofa and rested his feet on the table. He recently did an ICO for a startup after-party. You can ICO anything, he said.

He is now raising $75 million for his hedge fund, Ausum (pronounced awesome) Ventures. He said his closest friends are moving to Puerto Rico to get around paying taxes.

Theyre going to build a modern-day Atlantis out there, he said. But for me, its too early in my career to check out.

As the bitcoin price exploded in December, Gardner seemed shaken. People had begun making pilgrimages to the Crypto Castle, knocking on the door, hoping Gardner could help them invest.

Nothing feels real. It doesnt feel real, he said. Im ready for crypto assets to go down 90 percent. Ill feel better then, I think. This has been too insane.

Nearby is a building residents call the Crypto Crackhouse.

Grant Hummer, who runs the San Francisco Ethereum Meetup, lives there. Long hallways called Bitcoin Boulevard and Ethereum Alley lead to communal bathrooms. Hummer and his co-founder committed $40 million of their own crypto-made money to their new $100 million hedge fund, Chromatic Capital.

My neurons are fried from all the volatility, Hummer said. I dont even care at this point. Im numb to it. Ill lose a million dollars in a day and Im like, OK.

His room is simple: a bed, a futon, a TV on a mostly empty media console, three keyboard cleaning sprays and a half-dozen canisters of Lysol wipes. His T-shirt reads, The Lizard of Wall Street, with a picture of a lizard in a suit, dollar-sign necklaces around its neck. He carries with him a coin that reads, memento mori, to remind himself he can die any day. He sees the boom as part of a global apocalypse.

The worse regular civilization does and the less you trust, the better crypto does, Hummer said. Its almost like the ultimate short trade.

At the annual San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup Party, hundreds gathered at a co-working space, and there was a line out the door. The waiting list had to be told not to show up. Many wore bitcoin- and Ethereum-themed clothes.

Those closest to the technology are the most cautious. Pieter Wuille, 33, a bitcoin core developer, kept his backpack on as he wandered the party. Hes part of the team working to develop the bitcoin technology.

The technology still needs time to evolve, Wuille said. This infusion of interest is bringing the wrong kind of attention. Some people believe bitcoin cant fail or this technology solves many more problems than it does. It can. And it does not.

He said everyone is asking him whether to buy bitcoin. I tell them I have no idea, he said. I dont know!

Theres so many people rushing into the space, if its a bit of speculation, Im OK with that, said the Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong, whose company has become the de facto portal for casual investors. But we cant guarantee the websites going to be up exactly when you need it. Everyone needs to take a deep breath.

Maria Lomeli, 56, came to the party to find the people she had put a lot of trust in. A housekeeper from Pacifica, she said she had invested $12,000 in cryptocurrencies over the past few weeks after reading about it in the news.

She wore running shoes and a zip-up jacket that said, Cinemark, the best seats in town. She worked there cleaning out theaters. Now she cleans houses. Banks, she said, were designed to steal. Taxes left her supporting a government that she felt didnt support her.

Charges for sending money to my daughter, interest on our loans, she said. And then the money we pay in taxes goes to wars and whatever else they want.

She found a bitcoin event in the city and asked people there how to buy bitcoin on her phone. She invested $1,000. It went up. So she put in $10,000 more, she said, along with $1,000 in a currency called Litecoin. Both her children have discouraged this.

And maybe Im going to lose it, she said. Maybe Im going to keep cleaning houses. But something is telling me I can trust this generation. My instinct is telling me this is the future.

She had to leave the party early because parking downtown is expensive, she said. She zipped her jacket and left on her own.

Nellie Bowles is a New York Times writer.
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Four Bay Area residents  who say they were assaulted last year at a riot that prompted UC Berkeley police to cancel a talk by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos  have sued the University of California, UC Berkeley, two former UC employees, and the city of Berkeley over their injuries.

The suit, filed Thursday in federal court in Oakland, accuses UC and the city of failing to protect the plaintiffs, who say they were beaten and pepper-sprayed in the Feb. 1 melee. They are seeking unspecified damages.

Three of the plaintiffs, all from San Francisco, said they were assaulted when trying to attend the Yiannopoulous event on campus. The fourth, an Oakland man, was at an off-campus bar when he learned that the event was canceled, but then entered the fray and was injured, according to the complaint.

The riot began as masked agitators joined a peaceful protest against Yiannopoulos, then spilled onto city streets as UC police and other officers shut down the campus after several hours.

John Jennings, Katrina Redelsheimer and Trever Hatch of San Francisco and Donald Fletcher of Oakland accuse city and university officials of agitating the mob by issuing feckless disbursal (sic) orders, erecting barricades that blocked the plaintiffs escape, and conducting their duties with deliberate indifference to safety. The suit says the officials actions exposed the plaintiffs to an angry mob of violent anarchists.

UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said the university had not seen the suit and could not comment. A spokesman for Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin did not respond to a request for comment Monday, a federal holiday.

According to the suit, half a dozen masked rioters attacked Jennings and Redelsheimer in Sproul Plaza with sticks and pepper spray, leaving them with concussions, broken or bruised ribs, cuts, and burns. The suit accuses two then-employees of UC Berkeley and UC Davis of participating in the beatings.

The former employees could not be reached for comment Monday.

The suit says Hatch suffered a bruised back, welts and burns after being attacked in Sproul Plaza by demonstrators who knocked off his red Make America Great Again cap and aimed pepper spray into his eyes.

Fletcher spent the night at Highland Hospital and suffers psychologically after being beaten unconscious and kicked to the ground on Bancroft Avenue, the suit says.

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov
An Ohio teacher who told a black eighth-grader that his friends would lynch him if he didnt finish his work has been put on leave, the school district said, calling the student a hero for standing up to her.

The 13-year-old student, Nathan Bell, was chatting with his friends at Mason Middle School in Mason, about 25 miles north of Cincinnati, on Dec. 4 when his social studies teacher became frustrated, his mother, Tanisha Agee-Bell, said in a phone interview Sunday.

The teacher told Nathan, who was the only black student in the class, that if he didnt get back on task, then his friends were going to form an angry mob and lynch him, Agee-Bell said. Nathan responded that her comment was racist, and the teacher, Renee Thole, kept asking him why, Agee-Bell said.

Her job is to teach American history to eighth-graders, Agee-Bell said. How can you teach American history and you dont understand the impact of your words to your students, given our nations history?

Nathan waited a week to tell his mother what happened because he was afraid he might get in trouble for having questioned an authority figure, Agee-Bell said.

Thole could not be reached for comment. A petition on Change.org called for her to be fired.

The superintendent of Mason City Schools, Gail Kist-Kline, said Saturday in a statement posted on Facebook that we understand and respect the passion of these viewpoints, but that Thole had not been fired.

She was formally reprimanded, received a disciplinary report in her personnel file and was placed on administrative leave, the statement said. She will take further training while the district investigates.

It is not lost on me that this comes as we prepare to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day and his legacy of fighting for justice. Dr. King reminded us that, the time is always right to do what is right. In this case involving our teacher, the right thing to do is apologize, make amends, and take steps to be better, Kist-Kline added in the statement

Agee-Bell responded on Facebook that the actions taken against the teacher were a great first step.

I never wanted her fired, she wrote. I want her trained properly.

But just as important, I want the district to institute practices that give student and families confidence in being heard, valued and respected when they have been wronged, she added.

The superintendent applauded Nathan because he bravely stood up and called his teacher to account.

The student could have reacted poorly and could have rightfully berated the teacher for her thoughtlessness, the statement said. Yet, he extended grace to the teacher. The student is the hero in this story.

Christina Caron is a New York Times writer.
It's often easy to forget how good Conan O'Brien is when you consider how many late night talk shows are currently on the air and battling for viral clips.

He's possibly the most comedically gifted host in the medium and we've often gotten lost down a rabbit hole of Team Coco clips.

One thing O'Brien and his team have done recently is to travel abroad to do specials from different countries - Mexico, Germany and Korea etc - and his latest couldn't be more topical.

After Donald Trump apparently referred to the place as "a shithole" Conan O'Brien will travel to Haiti to "try and make some new friends" and explained why on the show last night after it was announced yesterday.

You go Coco!
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LOS ANGELES  A Riverside County husband and wife are in custody on suspicion of torture and child abuse after police found several of the couples children chained to beds in putrid surroundings, authorities said Monday.

The nightmarish discovery came Sunday after one of the children, a 17-year-old girl, escaped from the house in the 100 block of Muir Woods Road in the town of Perris and called 911 on a cell phone she found in the home, according to an account released by Perris police.

When officers from Perris and deputies from the Riverside County Sheriffs Department met the girl, she appeared to be about 10 years old and emaciated, police said.

Inside the house, officers found several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, the statement said.

In all, police counted 13 siblings living at the house, including the teen who escaped.

The youngest was 2 years old. Like their sister, the 12 others in the house all appeared to police to be minors and malnourished, but authorities determined that seven of them were adults ages 18 to 29, police said.

It was not clear from the police statement how many of the young people were locked to their beds.

Police provided food and drinks to the victims, who claimed to be starving, before they were admitted to hospitals.

The parents, David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were being held in jail in lieu of $9 million bail each.

Public records show that the couple own the tract house. Its address is also listed in a state Department of Education directory as the location of the Sandcastle Day School, a private K-12 campus that opened in 2011. David Allen Turpin is listed as the principal.

Public records indicate the couple have lived at the address since 2010 and lived in Texas for many years before coming to California. They declared bankruptcy twice, public records show.

The neighborhood where the children were found is a development of neat ranch-style homes built in recent years, residents said.

Kimberly Milligan, 50, who lives across the street, said that when she first moved in, a worker doing construction on her home told her that the family had 12 children.

At first, she said, she would see a woman with an infant, but she eventually stopped seeing the child.

Over the years, she also occasionally saw three children who looked like pre-teens coming out of the house to get into a car with their parents.

A lot about the family struck her as strange, she said. The children she saw were very pale. And she often wondered why, if there were so many children in the house, they never came out to play.

I thought the kids were home-schooled, she said. You know something is off, but you dont want to think bad of people.

Once about two years ago, she said, she came across the pre-teens putting up Christmas lights at the home and said hello.

They looked at us like a child who wants to make themselves invisible, she said.

On Monday, Milligan was struggling to grasp how the alleged cruelty could have gone unnoticed in the neighborhood.

Were not acres apart, she said. How did no one see anything?

Several neighbors recalled an incident several months ago in which a number of children were out in front of the house late at night working under floodlights to put sod in the yard.

Code enforcement had visited the neighborhood and was citing homes with unkempt yards, said Gary Stein, 32, who lives on the street.

There were two adults and maybe four or five kids who looked relatively young  maybe around 10 years old, Stein said.

I thought it was weird, but Im the kind of guy that doesnt want to get in anybodys business, he said.

Paloma Esquivel and Joel Rubin are Los Angeles Times writers.
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A 32-year-old San Francisco man was charged Tuesday with killing his mother in her apartment, in a savage stabbing that a neighbor said took place in front of her young granddaughter.

The defendant, Islam Moustafa, was charged with murder and assault with a deadly weapon, prosecutors said. He was being held without bail.

The victim, identified by the city medical examiner as 65-year-old Hoda Nasar, was pronounced dead in her apartment in the two-story building at 333 Randolph St., next to the Ocean View branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

A neighbor, Naim Ed Nouar, said Nasars son had been tormenting his mother for months, and had recently left her with a black eye.

The guy was crazy, and she was scared of him, said Nouar, who said the suspect had slashed him across the arm as he fled the building on foot after the killing Friday night. Its so sad, so, so messed up.

Police arrested Moustafa a short distance from the scene.

Nouar, still shaken four days after the attack, showed off his wounds to a Chronicle reporter on Tuesday. He said Nasars granddaughter, who is about 13 years old, was in the apartment when the woman was killed.

Nouar said he had just finished watching the Warriors game in his downstairs studio when he heard a scream around 10:40 p.m. Friday. He ran barefoot into the buildings foyer and toward the back staircase.

I was brushing my teeth and I heard screaming like Ive never heard before, he said. I saw the guy with the butcher knife, bloody. He was coming at me with the knife.

He said he recognized the assailant as Nasars son. The man, he said, had been there before and was always trouble.

Nouar said that on Friday, standing at the bottom of the stairs, he had shouted at his neighbors to go back into their homes.

I saw the monster coming  the monster with the knife, he said. I put up my arm and he hit me and then I fell and hurt my knee. I prayed to Allah. He could have killed me, but he turned and ran.

He said that after one visit from her son three months ago, Nasar suffered from a swollen face and black eye.

Hes been bending her, breaking her, and she told me, Its my business. Let me deal with him. Hes my son, Nouar said. She kissed me and said, Please dont get involved.

Nasar immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt, and her son lived with her for a time in the apartment starting in 2007, Nouar said. He said the son had once offered to sell him methamphetamine, and that he had refused.

He said he last saw Nasar alive on Friday afternoon as she stood in the foyer, laughing and joking with neighbors. Hours later, she would be dead.

She had told him that week she was tired of all the trouble and planned on returning to Egypt in March, Nouar said.

Shes was going back, he said.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com
MUSHTAQ GHUMMAN



ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has reportedly refused to finalise negotiations with China on second phase of Free Trade Agreement until Beijing allows export of at least 70 high priority items of Pakistans interest duty free, well informed sources told Business Recorder.



The 8th meeting of 2nd Phase Negotiations of China-Pakistan FTA (CPFTA) is expected to be held next month in Islamabad but so far discussions are deadlocked.



The sources revealed that both sides are engaged in discussions through video link on the proposed draft of CPFTA-II but nothing is final yet.



Pakistan will proceed ahead with China on final round of talks if something substantive is achieved prior to concluding the FTA-II, the sources continued.



Pakistan, sources said, has sought some safeguards for local industry, Trade Reduction Modalities (TRMs) and specific mechanism for balance of payment clause.



The clauses related to safeguards for local industry and balance of payments were not part of FTA-I but both clauses are proposed in FTA-II, the sources maintained.



Explaining the benefits of safeguards, the sources said, Pakistan can invoke this clause if imports from China flood our markets and a need to project local industry is felt whereas the clause relating to balance of payment cannot be invoked for any one country.



We are preparing TRMs for CPFTA-II but so far consensus has not evolved on three or four issues, the sources further added.



Commerce Minister was apprised that China-Pakistan trade which was around $4 billion in 2006-07 reached an all time high of $13.77 billion in 2015-16. Pakistans exports jumped to $1.669 billion in 2015-16 from $575 million in 2006-07. Correspondingly, Chinas exports to Pakistan increased to $12.1 billion in 2015-16 from $3.5 billion in 2006-7.



Chinas proposed TRM for the second phase of the CPFTA entails overall tariff elimination on 90 per cent of tariff lines. On 70 per cent tariff lines, duties would be immediately reduced to zero on the date of entry into force of the second phase of CPFTA whereas the remaining 20 per cent tariff lines would be divided into two equal slabs.



There is discrepancy of at least $ 3 billion in trade figures of the two countries due to massive under invoicing which has been discussed on a number of occasions in the Senate Standing Committee on Commerce and Textile.



According to the proposal, on the first 10 per cent of these tariff lines, duties would be reduced to zero within five years and on the remaining tariff lines within ten years. The 7th meeting on the negotiations of the second phase of CPFTA was held in Islamabad on December 6-7, 2016. Pakistan once again conveyed its concerns to China on the impact of the 1st phase of the CPFTA.



Both sides are discussing issues relating to the structure of tariff reduction modality, including final elimination level, phase-out periods and response to key items of export interest, etc.



Pakistan and China have also discussed Chinese investment (relocation and Greenfield) in Pakistans export oriented and value added industrial sectors including discussion on amending protocol to the CPFTA. Both countries are also discussing implementation issues relating to Electronic Data Exchange under CPFTA. China is also putting pressure on Pakistan for removal of the recently imposed regulatory duty.



According to sources during the 8th round, dead lock was created several times due to Chinas rigid stance. The round was not so successful. Pakistan had proposed the immediate reduction of TRMs to 40-45% - 15 percent to be reduced from 3 to 7 years, 20 percent in 5 to 15 years and 20 percent where there would be no change.



For China, 70 percent immediate reduction - 10 percent in 5 years, 10 percent in 10 years and 10 percent where there would be no change. The minutes of 8th round have been finalised after months of written letters and deliberations through video link, sources concluded.




WASHINGTON  Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle held out hope Tuesday for legislation to provide permanent legal status for nearly 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers despite a near meltdown in negotiations with the White House and the prospect of a government shutdown over the issue at midnight Friday.

To the 700,000 young people, were not going to leave you behind, said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has bucked his party on immigration issues. I don't know how this movie ends, but youre going to be taken care of.

Two moderate House Republicans, Jeff Denham of Turlock (Stanislaus County) and David Valadao of Hanford (Kings County), on Tuesday announced long-awaited bipartisan legislation to provide legal status for an estimated 1.7 million young immigrants living in the country without documentation.

That number takes in the young immigrants who arrived into the U.S. as children without documentation but registered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA created under former President Barack Obama, and other young immigrants without documentation who didnt register for the program.

The bill also calls for a smart wall between the U.S. and Mexico that could include some physical barriers as well as technology and orders the administration to submit a detailed mile-by-mile assessment of the southern border to determine what would work best.

Weve got to create some certainty for these young people, said Denham, who, like Valadao, has a large Latino population in his district.

But prospects for a solution to immigration as part of any spending bill seemed dim.

The federal government will shut down at midnight Friday unless Congress can come up with a short-term spending bill. To pass a bill, Senate Republicans, with a 51-49 majority, will need at least nine Democratic votes. Congressional Democrats are under pressure to oppose any bill that lacks a DACA fix. But 10 Democrats face re-election next year in states Trump won and do not want to be responsible for shutting down the government over an immigration issue that many conservatives call an amnesty.

Efforts to prevent a government shutdown through bipartisan negotiations on immigration were poisoned last week by an angry, profanity-riddled and racially explosive Oval Office exchange from President Trump on Thursday. On Tuesday, Graham blamed Trump and his administration.

We cannot do this with people in charge at the White House who have an irrational view of how to fix immigration, Graham said.

DACA was created by the previous administration in 2012 after Congress failed to act to protect immigrants who arrived in the country as children without authorization. In exchange for making themselves known to the federal government, those immigrants obtained temporary legal status to work, go to school and otherwise carry on with their lives. A third of DACA recipients reside in California,

Trump canceled the program in September and gave Congress until March 5 to devise a permanent resolution. Last week, a federal judge in San Francisco imposed a nationwide injunction to keep the program running, but both sides fear an adverse ruling by a higher court and agree that legislation is necessary to resolve the issue. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice said it would ask the Supreme Court later this week to review the ruling.

Members of both parties contend that providing certainty for young immigrants is urgent because more than 15,000 have already lost their legal status since Trumps order. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., pushed back Tuesday, noting that Congress has at least until March 5 at a minimum and possibly even longer to devise a DACA fix, depending on how things play out in court.

Meanwhile, the administration released a report by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security on Tuesday in an attempt to bolster GOP demands to limit visas for extended family members, which Republicans call chain migration, and cancellation of the visa lottery program, which admits 50,000 people a year from countries that do not have large immigration flows to the United States and is used heavily by Africans.

The report says that 3 of 4 persons convicted of international terrorism-related charges between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Dec. 31 of last year were foreign-born migrants who entered the country legally.

A significant number of terrorists have entered the country solely on the basis of family ties as well as through the visa lottery system, the report said.

Democrats, including California Sen. Kamala Harris, and other critics quickly shot down the report for neglecting domestic terrorism perpetrated by white supremacists. Outside critics accused the administration of cherry-picking numbers.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, where Department of Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen testified, Harris and fellow California Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, cited individuals in California who had been arrested or deported since the administration canceled the DACA program.

Harris noted the case of UC Berkeley student Luis Mora, who she said is missing classes because of his detention by federal immigration authorities. Harris said noncriminal immigration arrests have tripled under the administration.

Mora came to this country as a child, he is a political science major, he volunteers at his church, Harris said, accusing Nielsen of backing off of her promise to prioritize criminals in enforcing immigration law.

Feinstein cited Oakland-area residents Maria and Eusebio Sanchez, who were deported last year after living and working in the United States for 23 years.

They werent criminals, Feinstein said. They owned a home. They paid their taxes.

Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead
A man who was arrested in the 2014 killings of two Northern California deputies appeared in court Tuesday, laughing, smiling and shouting out that a deputy was a coward as the prosecution laid out the timeline of the crime spree that spanned Sacramento and Placer counties.

Luis Bracamontes, who was in the country illegally after having previously been deported twice to Mexico, is on trial in the shooting deaths of Sacramento County sheriff's Deputy Danny Oliver and Placer County sheriff's Detective Mike Davis.

Investigators said Bracamontes and his wife, Janel Monroy, led officers on a chase on Oct. 24, 2014 from Sacramento's Arden area up through Placer County, where the crime spree ended in Auburn. In addition to the killings of Oliver and Davis, another man was shot and Bracamontes carjacked several people, investigators said.

After several hearings that took into consideration Bracamontes' competency to stand trial in a case that could seek the death penalty, the long-awaited proceedings got underway Tuesday morning with the opening statement from the prosecution.

Bracamontes, who had his hands handcuffed at his waist, sat in a Sacramento County courtroom, guarded by two bailiffs.

At times during the opening statement, Bracamontes laughed with his attorney, and at other times, he smirked at the audience, which included family members of the victims.

On several occasions, Bracamontes laughed out loud when the prosecutor described the shootings and multiple exchanges of gunfire throughout the day.

Sacramento County District Attorney Rod Norgaard described in court that Deputy Scott Brown exchanged gunfire with Bracamontes after Oliver, who was his partner, had been shot in the head at the now-demolished Motel 6 on Arden Way.

Norgaard said Brown started backing away from the car when Bracamontes allegedly came out with an assault rifle.

Bracamontes blurted out in court, calling the deputy a coward and smiled.

The judge then ordered Bracamontes to remain quiet and not blurt out again.

Later on during the opening statement, Bracamontes again shouted out.

"I wish I could have killed more of those motherf---ers" Bracamontes said. "I will break out soon, and I will kill more."

This isn't the first time Bracamontes has had outbursts in court.

During a hearing in February,Bracamontes told the courtroom he "killed those cops." After the hearing, his attorney told The Associated Press that the outburst was due to anxiety.
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A person was robbed possibly at gunpoint Monday evening in South San Francisco, police said.

The victim was robbed at about 7:40 p.m. in the 600 block of Southwood Drive.

Police said the victim was walking home when two male suspects approached him from behind and punched him in the face multiple times, knocking him to the ground.

On the ground, the victim felt a hard object pressing against his back and suspected it was a gun. The suspects stole an undisclosed amount of cash and ran away, according to police.

Police said the suspects were described as youths wearing thick hooded jackets. One suspect was about 6 feet 2 inches tall and the other was about 5 feet 6 inches tall.

Anyone with information about the robbery is asked to get in touch with police at (650) 877-8900, on an anonymous tip line at (650) 952-2244 or by email at tips@ssf.net.
SAN JOSE (BCN)

An armed man who was shot by San Jose police at the Metcalf Energy Center last week was identified by the Santa Clara County medical examiner's office as 27-year-old San Jose resident Thompson Nguyen.

Nguyen was killed in the officer-involved shooting on Jan. 9 after he allegedly charged at officers with weapons after receiving no less than 23 commands to stand down.

San Jose police Chief Eddie Garcia said officers responded at 5:02 p.m. to a call from a power plant employee about a suspicious vehicle at the site at 1 Blanchard Road in South San Jose.

The employee described an Asian man in his 20s, standing about 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing about 145 pounds as suspicious when he pulled up in a Mercedes-Benz and pulled something out of his trunk that was unidentifiable, Garcia said.

The chief said investigators believe Nguyen gained access to the property by jumping over the fence after the call was made.

The employee called back to police to report that Nguyen had a backpack, a pipe and possibly an ax with him. Police did not discuss how close he got to employees.

When officers arrived, they found Nguyen's black Mercedes unoccupied and located a large sword laying in the driver's seat.

When police ran the man's license plate, the vehicle was identified as armed and dangerous by the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office because of a prior incident.

Nguyen had led authorities on a pursuit in Santa Cruz County after he brandished a weapon around security guards and possessed a sword in that event as well, Garcia said.

At the power plant, officers eventually located Nguyen in a matter of minutes based on the employee's description, Garcia said.

At that time, the two police officers who reported to the scene, later identified as Adam Hutson and Timothy Faye, saw that Nguyen was wielding a 6-foot pipe and an ax.

They gave Nguyen verbal commands to surrender or drop the weapons, but he refused to comply and walked away from them, according to Garcia.

The officers followed Nguyen at "a safe distance" and continued to give him verbal commands to drop his pipe and ax, but he continued to act defiantly and turned toward them yelling "shoot me" and "kill me" multiple times, Garcia said.

Nguyen then advanced toward the officers still armed with his weapons and got 5 to 6 feet away from one officer, at which time the first officer shot at Nguyen. Nguyen continued toward the second officer present with his weapons, which is when the second officer shot at him too, according to Garcia.

Nguyen was hit at least once by a bullet and was pronounced dead at the scene.

A search of Nguyen's possessions afterward revealed that he was also carrying an additional ax, six throwing knives and pepper spray, Garcia said.

Hutson and Faye were both wearing body cameras that were activated during the shooting, police confirmed. The Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office has custody of the footage and it is under review.

Hutson and Faye are on routine paid administrative leave while the investigation is taking place, according to Garcia.

Nguyen had a history of numerous prior offenses, which included narcotics, weapon violations and resisting arrest. In September 2017, he was submitted for a 72-hour psychiatric hold.

Nguyen was not on probation or parole but had three active warrants against him in Santa Clara County for traffic-related offenses, resisting arrest and various drug offenses, Garcia said.

Police do not think Nguyen had ties to the power plant itself and do not know his motive for entering the premises. They are doing an extensive search into Nguyen's history for clarity, according to Garcia.

The district attorney's office and San Jose police are doing a joint investigation into the case.

793-1900

San Jose police (408) 277-5339
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A San Francisco man was killed in a shooting in San Francisco's Lower Nob Hill neighborhood early Sunday morning, police said today.

Manuel Valladares, 35, was shot at Mason and Geary streets around 4:40 a.m., according to police.

He was transported to San Francisco General Hospital but died of his injuries, police said.

Police are searching for a male suspect but did not release a detailed description.
FAIRFIELD (BCN)

A man was shot in the leg as he sat in a vehicle near Hillview Park in Fairfield late this morning, a police sergeant said.

The shooting was reported around 11:15 a.m. at Marigold and Atlantic avenues, Fairfield police Sgt. Matt Bloesch said.

Police followed a vehicle that was speeding away from the scene to the NorthBay Medical Center. The male shooting victim was treated inside for an injury that is not life-threatening, Bloesch said.

The victim was sitting in his vehicle parked on Marigold Avenue when a green or teal SUV-type car stopped and fire multiple shots into the car before it sped away north on Marigold Avenue.

Anyone with information is asked to call Fairfield police at (707) 428-7300, Solano Crime Stoppers at (707) 644-7867 or to text "TIP FAIRFIELD PD" followed by a message to 888777.
LIVERMORE (BCN)

Students at two Livermore high schools now have larger, custom-designed and updated periodic tables in their classrooms thanks to a donation from Sandia National Laboratories, lab officials said today.

Livermore and Granada high schools received the periodic tables that now have the city's namesake element Livermorium as well as Lawrencium.

Livermorium is a synthetic element discovered at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia, while Lawrencium is also a synthetic element named in the honor of Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, which has been used to discover numerous artificial radioactive elements.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry adopted Livermorium in 2012.

The idea to create the tables came from conversations between a Sandia National Labs employee and Livermore science teachers who said their current tables were outdated.

Lab officials said the employee thought that providing new tables was something the lab could and should do.

"My own chemistry teachers in college had me memorize the table because the information it contains is so crucial for understanding how atoms interact with each other," Sandia National Laboratories employee Madeline Burchard said in a statement.

Burchard worked with a designer at the lab to create 6-by-4-foot tables and surprised teachers with them, drawing positive comments from teachers and students.

Livermore High School life science teacher Elias Fiadoyor said in a statement that the previous periodic table in his classroom was small.

"This one, students all the way in the back will be able to see it," Fiadoyor said. "I will have to find a way to cover it during exams."

294-2612
California lawmakers in an announcement today with the state insurance commissioner put forth several bills and proposals intended to ease the recovery process for wildfire survivors.

The announcement came in Sacramento where Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones gathered with state legislators who have introduced some of the bills.

"These are very common sense, reasonable proposals," Jones said.

Most of the ideas in the package will not have any effect on survivors of this year's wildfires but would affect survivors of future disasters, Jones said.

Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Ukiah, introduced Senate Bill 897, which seeks to amend the coverage for contents, allowing policyholders to settle for 80 percent of the contents limit without having to compile a home inventory during a declared state of emergency.

The bill, if it becomes law, would be retroactive for the North Bay fires and the Thomas Fire in Southern California.

Some insurance companies have already dropped the requirement to provide an inventory, McGuire said.

Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, has proposed SB 894, which among other things, would require insurance companies to guarantee two renewals or renewal protection for 24 months, whichever is greater.

Also, insured people could collect additional living expenses benefits for 36 months rather than 24 months.

Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, D-Winters, has introduced AB 1722, which would extend the time to rebuild and collect full replacement costs from 24 to 36 months after a declared disaster.

Aguiar-Curry introduced the bill because often after a disaster, there is a shortage of construction workers and an increased demand for construction workers in areas affected by the disaster.

Assemblymember Marc Levine, D-Marin County, introduced three bills. AB 1797 would require insurance companies to perform a replacement cost estimate for both new policies and at each annual renewal.

"One major issue is underinsurance," Levine said.

The yearly estimate would keep replacement costs up with rising costs of construction over the life of the policy.

Levine, when he looked at his homeowner's policy, said he thought, "Wow, this is a woefully inadequate number to rebuild."

AB 1799 would require insurers to provide residents with a copy of their complete policy upon request, while AB 1800 would allow an insured person to collect the full replacement cost of their property whether they decide to rebuild at the same location, rebuild at another location or purchase a home at a new location.

Assemblymember Monique Limon, D-Santa Barbara, who was not present at the announcement, is proposing a bill, which has yet to be introduced, that would add the consolidated debris removal program to the insurance code.

The bill would require insurance companies to participate in the program after a wildfire or other disaster, but Limon's office couldn't immediately say how.

According to Sonoma County officials, the Army Corps of Engineers has coordinated the cleanup of 865,872 tons of debris from the North Bay wildfires, with 694,607 tons from Sonoma County.

Jones did not say whether insurance rates would go up or if coverage would drop because of the package of bills and proposals.

He said the state's insurance market is robust and thinks it can accommodate the package without significant impacts.
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

Residents of some streets in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood could soon be among the first to test out proposed new limits on the city's residential parking permit program.

While the city's residential parking permit program currently allows up to four vehicles per household, a pilot program set to be voted on at Tuesday's San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors meeting for 16 blocks in Bernal Heights would allow only one per person and a maximum of two per household.

Residents would also have the option of applying for permits for health care or childcare workers or seeking a waiver to allow up to four permits for a household, but fees are higher for additional permits.

The residential parking program has traditionally been intended to prevent commuters and outsiders from parking in a neighborhood for long periods.

Within the area affected the new residential parking program, a 2015 survey found that parking space occupancy was over 80 percent and 59 percent of the parked vehicles were registered to non-residents, according to the SFMTA.

Of the residents who signed petitions seeking the residential parking program, 49 percent said they do not have off-street parking.

Only those blocks where more than 50 percent of residents signed a petition seeking a residential parking permit program are included in the pilot program set for approval Tuesday.

The program has raised concerns from nearby residents who fear it will push more drivers on to their streets in search of parking.

The SFMTA board is scheduled to meet at 1 p.m. at City Hall.
A California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer was struck and injured by a vehicle Monday evening in Concord, according to a CHP spokesman.

At 6:15 p.m., the officer was investigating a collision on eastbound state Highway 4 near Port Chicago Highway. He was off of his motorcycle when he was struck by another vehicle, CHP spokesman Officer Brandon Correia said.

The male officer suffered major injuries that were not considered life-threatening and he was taken to a hospital.

At least two lanes on eastbound Highway 4 were closed, but reopened at 8:20 p.m., CHP officials said.

Further details were not immediately available.

The California Highway Patrol called off a search late Monday afternoon for a suspect who allegedly stole a box truck from San Francisco and led CHP officers on a chase that ended in Sunnyvale.

CHP officials initially said officers were searching for three suspects involved in the theft, which occurred early Monday afternoon on Post Street in San Francisco, but later clarified that they were only searching for one suspect, according to CHP Officer Art Montiel.

That suspect is described as a Hispanic man, about 5 feet 8 inches tall wearing blue jeans and a dark sweatshirt.

According to Montiel, workers first notified the truck's owner that his truck was stolen in San Francisco and the truck's owner, who was in South San Francisco at the time, began driving north on U.S. Highway 101. The truck's owner then saw the suspect driving his truck on southbound Highway 101, caught up with the man and called 911, Montiel said.

CHP officers began pursuing the suspect driver on Highway 101 in Redwood City. The suspect driver, however, got onto state Highway 237, then somehow made a U-turn and began driving in the opposite direction, before crashing the stolen truck. After the crash, the suspect fled on foot, according to Montiel.

Just after 2 p.m., Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety officials said they were assisting CHP officers with the search near West Maude and North Mathilda avenues.

Around 4:20 p.m., CHP officials said they were unable to apprehend the suspect and that the search had been called off.

A 26-year-old Livermore man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after he allegedly punched his mother Monday morning in a hospital parking lot in Pleasanton, leaving her with major injuries to her head, police said.

Officers were dispatched at 6:44 a.m. to a parking lot at Stanford ValleyCare Medical Center on West Las Positas Boulevard where the alleged assault occurred.

Police said before officers arrived, the suspect, identified as Brian Bertoli, ran toward Old Santa Rita Road. Officers arrived and started searching the area when an officer saw Bertoli in front of 3657 Old Santa Rita Road.

Police said Bertoli was agitated, covered in blood and refused to obey an officer's commands.

Bertoli allegedly struggled with officers as they tried to detain him and officers shot Bertoli with a stun gun and were able to take him into custody.

Police said officers found the victim, Bertoli's mother, at Stanford ValleyCare Medical Center being treated for major head injuries including a large cut over her left eye that appeared to have been made with a sharp weapon. She also had cuts to her hands and swelling to her eyes and nose.

She was then taken to Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley for possible head trauma, according to police.

Officers arrested Bertoli on suspicion of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, assault with intent to commit mayhem and resisting arrest.

Anyone with more information about the alleged assault is asked to call the Pleasanton Police Department at (925) 931-5100.

Light rain was expected Monday evening in the Bay Area and will continue through this morning, with the most rain falling in the North Bay, National Weather Service officials said.

The rain will take a break late today into Wednesday but will resume late Wednesday night, continuing into Thursday and lingering into Friday, according to weather service officials.

Rain is expected to be light for most places, but could be moderate for brief periods of time in the North Bay early Thursday morning.

Weather service officials said through this morning most urban locations will receive less than a tenth of an inch, with isolated locations receiving up to a quarter-inch, especially in the North Bay.

From late Wednesday night into Friday, rain amounts will only be slightly greater, according to the weather service.

Breezy and locally gusty winds will be possible as each system passes with gusts of up to 30 mph possible, mainly along the ridges and near the coast.

The most significant weather impact will be at area beaches where a large west/northwest swell, which has already started, is expected to last until this afternoon. The large swell prompted weather service officials to issue a high surf advisory until 4 p.m. today.

A larger, more energetic swell, possibly the largest of the season, may arrive Thursday, with waves of larger than 20 feet possible.

A potentially stronger rainstorm is forecast for the Bay Area starting Sunday and lasting into Monday, weather service officials said.

A man was shot in the leg as he sat in a vehicle near Hillview Park in Fairfield late Monday morning, a police sergeant said.

The shooting was reported around 11:15 a.m. at Marigold and Atlantic avenues, Fairfield police Sgt. Matt Bloesch said.

Police followed a vehicle that was speeding away from the scene to the NorthBay Medical Center. The male shooting victim was treated inside for an injury that is not life-threatening, Bloesch said.

The victim was sitting in his vehicle parked on Marigold Avenue when a green or teal SUV-type car stopped and someone inside fired multiple shots into the victim's car before speeding away north on Marigold Avenue.

Anyone with information is asked to call Fairfield police at (707) 428-7300, Solano Crime Stoppers at (707) 644-7867 or to text "TIP FAIRFIELD PD" followed by a message to 888777.

A 25-year-old Oakley man died Sunday night in a motorcycle crash in Antioch, police said.

At 9:38 p.m., an Antioch police officer was on patrol on East 18th Street at Blossom Drive when he came upon a motorcyclist lying in the road.

The man had major injuries. Life-saving efforts were made but paramedics pronounced the man dead at the scene.

Police said investigators responded and began an investigation. Police said no other information about the crash was immediately available.

Anyone who saw the crash is asked to call Officer Eric Johnsen at (925) 779-6900, ext. 84265. People may also text a tip to 274637 using the keyword ANTIOCH.

A 17-year-old boy was injured in a shooting Monday evening in Santa Rosa, according to police.

At 7:26 p.m., officers responded to an urgent care facility in the 900 block of Corporate Center Parkway on a report of a gunshot victim. The victim drove to the facility to seek medical aid after he was shot in the 2500 block of Gardner Avenue, police said.

Officers contacted the victim at the facility. He suffered a gunshot wound that was not life-threatening and was taken to a hospital where he received treatment, police said.

Police said the victim's identity is not being released at this time. They did not provide any information about possible suspects.

The case remains under investigation and anyone with information is asked to call police at (707) 543-3590. Callers can remain anonymous, police said.

The Sonoma County Alliance is offering a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspect or suspects involved in this crime.

A 63-year-old woman who went missing last week in Antioch has been located, police said Monday.

Ruby Ormond walked away from her Antioch home Friday at about 3 a.m. and hadn't contacted her family since.

Police said Ormond's family told officers that they believed she might be suffering from early stages of dementia.

"Thank you to everyone who provided information to assist us in locating her," police said on social media.

Today will be mostly cloudy with highs in the upper 50s. Southwest winds will be between 5 and 10 mph, becoming northwest winds in the afternoon.

Tonight will be mostly cloudy with lows around 50. Northwest winds will be between 5 and 10 mph.

Wednesday will be mostly cloudy with highs in the upper 50s. Northeast winds will be between 5 and 10 mph, becoming west winds between 5 and 15 mph in the afternoon.
A California Highway Patrol officer suffered major injuries in a traffic collision on state Highway 4 in Concord this evening, CHP officials said.

The collision occurred around 6:15 p.m. on eastbound Highway 4 near Port Chicago Highway, according to the CHP.

Although the male officer suffered major injuries, they are not considered life-threatening. He was taken to a hospital.

At least two eastbound lanes of Highway 4 were closed initially, however, by about 8:20 p.m. all lanes had reopened, CHP officials said.

Further information was not immediately available.
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A 65-year-old San Francisco woman was killed with a knife in the city's Oceanview neighborhood Friday night, police said today.

Hoda Nasar, a San Francisco resident, was found in the 300 block of Randolph Street around 10:30 p.m.

Police released few details about the case but indicated she died at the scene and said they had arrested a 32-year-old man.

The suspect's identity was not immediately released.
OAKLAND (BCN)

A 19-year-old woman pleaded not guilty today to a murder charge stemming from the fatal shooting of another woman while they were riding together in a car in East Oakland in September.

Diamond Cooper, 19, is scheduled to return to Alameda County Superior Court on Feb. 26 for a pre-trial hearing in connection with the death of 62-year-old Schevette Butts.

Oakland police Officer Jose Barocio wrote in a probable cause statement that Butts was in the front passenger seat and Cooper was in the rear seat of a white Honda Accord that was being driven by 19-year-old Tonea Thomas on Sept. 12.

Thomas passed a loaded semi-automatic pistol to Cooper, who he said "began manipulating the firearm and shot a round toward Butts' front seat" and struck Butts in her buttocks area, Barocio wrote.

Thomas and Cooper drove Butts to Highland Hospital in Oakland, where they gave officers false information and then left on foot, according to Barocio.

Officers who searched the Honda Accord found the semi-automatic pistol, a shell casing and a slug, Barocio wrote.

Butts died at Highland Hospital in Oakland on Oct. 2, three weeks after she was shot, according to Barocio.

Multiple witnesses identified Cooper as the woman who was in the rear seat of the Honda Accord who shot Butts, Barocio wrote.

On Oct. 12, Cooper was arrested at her home in San Jose and Thomas was arrested in Oakland, according to police.

Thomas is charged with being an accessory after the fact and Cooper and Thomas are both charged with carrying a loaded firearm in a city.

Barocio wrote that after Thomas was arrested, she admitted to having a loaded firearm in a public place inside a vehicle.

272-6213
"Grey's Anatomy" star Ellen Pompeo has made a name for herself on screen, but fans of the long-running show may not know her hobby is creating unforgettable home design. Now, the actress is showing off her skills with the listing for her gorgeous home in Sag Harbor, NY.

On the market for $3.8 million, the home was a summer residence for Pompeo and her family. But now, they need more space.

Originally, Ellen had two children and she designed it with two separate family suites in mind, listing agent Jane Babcook of Brown Harris Stevens told Newsday. But now that she has had her third child, she has outgrown the house. Babcock, along with Mark J. Baron, is representing the property.

The home was featured in Architectural Digest last summer, and Pompeo told the magazine that the property's history initially attracted her. When she purchased it in 2011, the property had a cabin, which was built by a woman who was a civil rights activist and lawyer.

Exterior realtor.com

Kitchen realtor.com

Pool realtor.com

"She actually built it with her own two hands, Pompeo told the magazine. "Originally, I was given the advice to build on the original footprint of the cabin, because it would save time and money. Well, it didnt save either, she said.

Pompeo razed the existing structure and, in its place, built a 2,400-square-foot home. Completed in 2013, the home has a rustic-looking exterior but is modern and luxurious on the inside.

The living room features a double-height ceiling and two sets of french doors which open to a screened-in porch, complete with cozy fireplace. The "country kitchen," according to the listing, has an attached dining area. The home has four bedrooms and four bathrooms, including a guest wing off the den and two rooms off the upstairs loft.

There's also a finished lower level with media room and full bath. Outdoors, there's a bluestone patio and heated pool.

The property is in the process of being subdivided into two 2-acre lots and a 4-acre preserve.

Pompeo's initial plan was to use the farmhouse as a guesthouse and build a larger, main house on the prime Hamptons property. But the plan was upended when Pompeo fell in love with a modern beach house in Malibu, CA, and threw herself into that project.

Pompeo and her husband, Chris Ivery, welcomed their third child in December 2016. We can't wait to see what kind of home Pompeo decides to dream up next and, for what it's worth, we'd love a peek at the Malibu beach house when it's ready.

The post Ellen Pompeo Lists Gorgeous $3.8M Modern Farmhouse in Hamptons appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
A new analysis by the BBC selects six countries that it says are the most well-governed in the world. Does that mean these six are also the best countries to visit? The BBC analysis doesnt consider attractions, hotel quality or cuisine, but instead focuses on overall governance and how well these nations provide for their citizens.

It relies on rankings from the studies of various global organizations that try to measure how closely a nation adheres to the rule of law; how much trust its government inspires in its citizens; and how much social progress is in evidence. (Regrettably, the US is not to be found on this list...)

TravelSkills with Chris McGinnis sponsored by: See More Collapse

Whenever I visit well-run countries, I always end up walking through residential areas, checking real-estate prices and wondering, "Hmmmm maybe I could live here one day." Do you do that, too?

At the top of the BBCs list is Denmark, which achieved near-perfect scores on meeting basic human needs and providing a wide variety of free social services to all residents whether or not they are native-born Danes. Although its taxes are high, the benefits outweigh the costs, and residents seem happy and welcoming. I traveled there in 2013 to write up BBC Business Trip: Copenhagen and agree it's quite a place. As a matter of fact, I remarked that it might be the BEST place in the world for a business trip.

Next on the list is New Zealand, cited for its overall political stability, fundamental rights and lack of violence/terrorism. The BBC said New Zealand is also noteworthy for generous social policies that help out single parents, students, children and senior citizens.

Canada is third of the list. The BBC says that while both Canada and the U.S. rank high on the various indexes consulted in the analysis, Canada scores higher in political stability and lack of violence/terrorism, and is more progressive in its values than the U.S. Since I'm half Canadian, this is a no brainer. Every time I set foot in Vancouver, Toronto or Ottawa, the "Gee, I could live here" bell rings loudly in my head.

Japan is on the Top Six list for having an effective government, stable political environment and adherence to the rule of law, but also for providing its citizens with access to basic knowledge, water and sanitation, and access to nutrition and medical care. Japan is one of my favorite places in the world to visit. Anthony Bourdain recently said that Tokyo is one of the few places he'd like to live in forever.

You might not expect to see any African nations on the list, but Botswana is there, earning high marks for governance after it took effective steps to eliminate corruption starting in 1994. The country brings in significant revenues from diamond mining, the BBC said, and instead of benefiting only a wealthy elite, that money has been fairly well distributed throughout the country. I never really knew this about Botswana, so now I'm intrigued and look forward to visiting one day.

Finally, the nation of Chile  although it went through some serious political turmoil in decades past  now has one of South Americas most stable and corruption-free governments. It has affordable health care, high-quality infrastructure, and its easy for foreigners to purchase property or start businesses there, the BBC said. Chile's climate is a lot like California's so the transition would be easy... plus I speak Spanish, so ...quizas deberia mudarme?

Read the full analysis on BBC.com here.

Which countries have you visited that you wished you lived in? Please leave your comments below.

Get TravelSkills via email! Daily or weekly updates. Sign up here

Chris McGinnis is a travel blogger and editor of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis.
1 Nuclear pact: Russia spoke out strongly Monday against the U.S. push for modifying a nuclear agreement with Iran, while Germany said it would seek more detail on what the U.S. wants and analyze the situation with its European partners. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that Moscow wont support the U.S. demand for changes in the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers that saw Iran accept curbs on its nuclear program in exchange for lifting international sanctions. President Trump on Friday kept the accord alive by extending sanctions waivers, but warned that the U.S. would pull out of the deal in a few months unless terrible flaws in the deal are fixed. Lavrov called the new U.S. demands on Tehran deplorable.

2 Kashmir violence: Four Pakistani soldiers were killed Monday after Indian and Pakistani troops traded fire in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, leading both of the nuclear rivals to blame the other for initiating the latest cease-fire violation. Separately, at least five suspected militants were killed in a gunbattle with Indian troops Monday after they crossed into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir from the Pakistani side, officials said. Rebel groups demand that Kashmir be united either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country. India accuses Pakistan of arming the rebels, which Pakistan denies.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark  Danish inventor Peter Madsen was formally indicted Tuesday on charges of homicide in connection with the death in August of Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist who had boarded his submarine to interview him.

Danish prosecutors and the Copenhagen police indicted Madsen on charges of killing Wall with prior planning and preparation  the equivalent of murder  according to a statement released by the police, as well as with dismemberment, indecent handling of a corpse and improper sexual relations. While a news release was posted online Tuesday, the actual wording of the charges is expected to be made public only next week.

Wall, a freelance journalist, vanished Aug. 10 after leaving the port of Copenhagen on the UC3 Nautilus, a submarine that Madsen had built and operated. Her torso was found on a beach on Amager Island near Copenhagen after 11 days, and divers later recovered her severed head and legs in plastic bags.

Madsen, 47, has given various explanations for the disappearance of Wall, 30. But he eventually said that she had died on board his vessel after a hatch unexpectedly collapsed, and that she had hit her head while she was climbing stairs in the submarines tower. An autopsy revealed that she had no head injuries to support that claim, however.

Now Playing: Danish submarine inventor Peter Madsen admitted to dismembering journalist Kim Wall but denies killing her, Danish police. Madsen claimed Wall died due to carbon monoxide poison. Madsen previously said Wall died after he accidentally hit her head on a hatch in the submarine. Divers are now searching the Bay of Koege in Denmark where Madsen said he dumped Wall's dismembered body parts. Video: Brandpoint

Prosecutors said in the statement Tuesday that the exact cause of Walls death was not known, but that it could have taken place by cutting of the throat or strangulation. An autopsy had found that she had been stabbed at least 14 times, but it was not able to establish the cause of death.

During questioning in October, Madsen admitted to dismembering Walls body and to tossing body parts overboard, but he denied killing her.

Betina Hald Engmark, a lawyer for Madsen, said in a text message Tuesday afternoon that she would review the indictment with her client later Tuesday, adding that she had no further comment about the charges.

A trial by jury is expected to begin March 8 and to last eight days. Jakob Buch-Jepsen, a prosecutor, said in a short news briefing Tuesday that he would seek a life sentence, which he added translates in Denmark to an average of 14 years in prison.

Martin Selsoe Sorensen is a New York Times writer.
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The company that runs ANU College has had its registration to teach vocational education and training courses cancelled amid a separate and ongoing investigation into its accreditation as a higher education provider.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority announced this week that Study Group Australia would no longer qualify as a vocational education provider from February 19 after the private company failed to meet a suite of requirements linked to the VET Quality Framework.

The company behind ANU College has had its registration to teach VET courses cancelled. Credit:Andrew Quilty

The revocation of Study Group Australia's VET accreditation does not affect its operations at ANU College. However, a spokesman for the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency said the regulator was conducting a compliance assessment of the company's higher education activities.

That audit was being done outside the regular compliance and accreditation assessment cycle, the spokesman confirmed.
The Third Act. By Emma Wood. Directed by Jordan Best. The Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre. International Women's Voices - Just Shut Up and Listen. Sunday, January 21, 5pm. Admission free. No bookings required, first in best seated.

On Sunday, January 21, there will be worldwide public and private readings of unproduced plays by women in the International Women's Voices Theatre Festival. As part of this, in Canberra, Pigeonhole Theatre, formed to highlight women's voices in theatre, is holding a reading of Emma Wood's unproduced play The Third Act. It will be directed by Jordan Best and feature a cast of Canberra actors: Karen Vickery, Lainie Hart, Liz Bradley, Amy Dunham, and Michael Sparks.

From left, Liz Bradley, director Jordan Best and Karen Vickery form Pigeonhole Theatre, presenting The Third Act. Credit:Kelly McGannon

Best played the lead role in Pigeonhole's award-winning 2017 production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and last year also took the company's 2016 production of Playhouse Creatures that she directed to an international festival in Monaco.

She says what attracted her to former Canberran Wood's play was that "It's not about the pretty young people. It's about a woman at that stage in life when we become largely invisible, as you get older and you try to figure out what to do with your marriage and your children and you're trying to refind who you are and what the next stage is for you."
Former and current politicians have questioned the secrecy surrounding a whopping fine handed down to a Canberra club after its staff allegedly failed to intervene in the case of a problem gambler.

The Raiders Club fronted the ACT Civil and Administration Tribunal on Monday to contest a $120,000 fine for breaching the ACT's poker machine laws.

Problem gambler Laurie Brown and her partner John Formby: Sharing her story of poker machine addiction in the hope of getting change. Credit:Karleen Minney

The fine is the largest the commission has ever handed down and came after nearly a year-long investigation sparked by a complaint from problem gambler Laurie Brown, who fed more than $200,000 through gaming machines at Raiders clubs in Canberra.

The ACT Gambling and Racing Commission and the Raiders Club opted for mediation on February 13, but will return to the tribunal if that fails on March 5.
New Acton's Hotel Hotel will be rebranded with Canberra developers Molonglo Group selling the leasehold for the 68-room hotel to Ovolo Hotels.

The Hong Kong-based boutique hotel chain will take over the space in the award-winning Nishi Building in March, with the new hotel name yet to be determined.

Hotel Hotel in New Acton will be taken over by Hong Kong-based boutique hotel chain Ovolo Hotels in March Credit:Nic Walker

Under a long-term leasehold deal with Molonglo, Ovolo has acquired the businesses, operations and the staff that work for the hotel and its hatted restaurant, Monster kitchen and bar.

The new brand will come into effect on March 1, 2018, with only minor changes to the existing hotel.
Currently, more than 80 per cent of NBN users are on speeds of 25 Mbps or less. Recent discounts offered to wholesalers by the NBN are expected to see more people shift towards a 50 Mbps speed plan. This pricing shift has become part of a larger debate, with experts increasingly questioning the value of the network and tipping a possible write down from the government. The government has ploughed $30 billion of public money into the NBN with a plan to eventually privatise the network to recoup the investment along with a return. Any writedown would potentially jeopardise that plan. A Macquarie Wealth Management note on Tuesday said it expected the NBN pricing structure to continue to evolve, and the merits of writing down the NBN to continue to be debated.

Price cuts announced in December could see the NBN considering "the long-term impacts of such a model if widely adopted". The note said a "catalyst" for a write-down could be a change in the NBN business model, or deteriorating economics from higher building costs, delays and lower than anticipated take-up, or a combination of these factors. In a document outlining its investment strategy, wealth management firm Morgans said a write down was required to make the NBN work and to bring down costs. It considered the NBN a "great social investment" but a "poor financial investment" due to lower customer take-up and lower revenue per customer than the NBN had forecast thanks to competing technologies that sometimes offered better speeds more cheaply. Its calculations suggest the last mile access price needs to be cut back to pre-NBN levels of $15 a month  from $43 now, and a $52 medium-term target. The last mile is the final stretch of wires that connects homes to the wider network.

Essentially, this would require a large portion of the NBNs capital base to be written off, the report says, speculating it is equally conceivable that our current Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, could write down the NBN to improve the consumer outcome and attract votes. In December, JPMorgan analyst Eric Pan also called for a restructure saying it would be in the best interest for the public if the government required a lower return on investment and could focus on service over profitability. To do so would likely involve a write-down. Ord Minnett research from December outlined a possible write-down in a "long-term scenario". Most analysts predicted upwards movement for the share price of telcos if this happened.

Despite the growing chorus pushing for a write-down, minister for finance Mathias Cormann said there was no basis for it. He said the investment could only be written down in line with accounting standards, which required the NBN Co to assess that it was required. The NBN has determined independently that a writedown is not appropriate at this time, he said. There seems to be some confusion by some about the relationship between the valuation of NBN and the internal rate of return. He said the estimated peak funding "remains unchanged at $49 billion, with forecasts expecting revenue to double to $1.9 billion in fiscal 2017.

Ultimately the NBN should be privatised, which is already envisaged in the NBNs governing legislation." Loading Opposition communications minister Michelle Rowland said a writedown was not about accounting rules but whether it would help to strike a better balance for consumers, taxpayers, industry and the broader economy. Another expert calling for a write-down, telecommunications consultant and former advisor to the UN Broadband Commission Paul Budde, said it was firmly on the agenda. He pointed to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commissions late-2017 comments that an "asset revaluation" may be needed to enable the NBN Co to charge lower prices.

Using figures from a 2016 report from auditing firm PwC, which indicated the NBN might only be worth $27 billion when complete, and his own calculations, he predicted a 50 per cent write-down. About $30 billion of the cost to build has come from taxpayers. Mr Budde encouraged telcos to mediate the politics in 2020 when the NBN is rolled out to create an official industry-led commission. The major telcos have also queried the financial viability of the NBN. When asked about whether industry-led action could be on the cards, John Stanton, chief executive of industry body Communications Alliance, said it was vitally interested ... in the nature of access technologies and how they combine with commercial arrangements.
Technology is revolutionising the way supermarkets do business but Australian shoppers aren't yet ready to embrace some of the futuristic innovations retailers are trialling, Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci says.

"Technology has become crucial to the future of retail - this is the key for us," Mr Banducci told Fairfax Media on the sidelines of the National Retailers Federation's annual expo in New York City.

Mr Banducci was scouring the expo on Tuesday looking for the latest innovations from tech giants and start-ups that could be used in Woolworths' almost 1000 stores.

Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci says shoppers aren't yet ready to embrace some of the futuristic innovations retailers are trialling. Credit:Jessica Hromas

Among those that caught his eye was a new barcode scanning technology from software company Digimarc which embeds a code that is imperceptible to the human eye into a product's packaging design, meaning any part of the item can be scanned at checkout.
As the court date for Australian filmmaker James Ricketson, currently detained in a Cambodian jail, draws close, it remains unfortunate that our government has, so far, declined to act on his behalf.

Cambodian authorities are holding Mr Ricketson on suspicion of "espionage", but have so far provided no details of the charges against him, nor told him what the specific allegations are, beyond accusing him of "receiving or collecting information, processes, objects, documents, computerised data or files with a view to supplying them to a foreign state or its agents, which are liable to prejudice the national defence".

Australian filkmmaker James Ricketson appears in a Phnom Penh court earlier this month. Credit:Fresh News Cambodia

Earlier this month the Turnbull government insisted that its policy meant it was unable to intervene on his behalf, which means it cannot tell the Cambodian government that the 68-year-old is not an Australian spy, if that is the case.

Meanwhile support for Ricketson is growing in Australia with thousands of people signing a petition calling for his release and criticising Canberra for failing to intervene in the case.
Stories captured Ken Inglis' life. He liked the thought that his storytelling touched the lives of those who read them and, just possibly, changed their way of seeing things. "All good historians try to do this," he said. "I am first and foremost a storyteller."

He had thought that the nicest thing ever said to, or about, him came from a student in Papua New Guinea, who thanked Inglis for a lecture that was "clear but good". The historian said years later: "I'd like to think I was clear but good."

Professor Ken Inglis: One of the front rank of Australian historians. Credit:Jacky Ghossein

Inglis' very clear and very good work is best known through his examination of Anzac. This first surfaced in a 1965 Meanjin article, which the late Geoffrey Serle described as "the first serious modern discussion of Anzac and the digger legend". It continued through to Sacred Places, his award-winning exploration of Australian war memorials, which demonstrated how Anzac had become a civic religion, not anti-Christian but which venerated dead comrades.

His leadership and editorship was vital to the 11-volume Australians: A Historical Library, published for the 1988 Bicentenary, and his two-volume history of the ABC is the definitive appraisal of perhaps Australia's most important cultural institution. His wide-ranging work covered newspapers, magazines and book collaborations, with more to come this year  the first volume of the story of World War II internees who arrived in Australia on the Dunera and Queen Mary.
On January 21, 1788, when Arthur Phillip's advance party rowed in longboats through the Heads at the entrance to Sydney Harbour, he and his men were the first Europeans in all history to enter the waterway that Phillip described as the "finest harbour in the world". When the 11 ships of the First Fleet arrived a few days later, the dispossession of the Aboriginal people from the Sydney Basin commenced. Tribal lands were appropriated; trees cut down; fishing and hunting grounds ruined.

Phillip's official instructions may have required him to "conciliate the affections of the Aborigines" and to encourage everyone to "live in amity and kindness" with them, but he could not see that he and his men were invaders. Nor could he understand why Bennelong, whom he kidnapped and treated like a son, would choose to run away. But one winter's day in 1790, perhaps the penny dropped. Phillip wrote wistfully, and probably insightfully, to Sir Joseph Banks, saying that "nothing will make these people amends for the loss of their liberty".

Dancers from the Koomurri perform on Sydney Harbour to promote Australia Day festivities. Credit:James Alcock

This is the conundrum that we face every year. How do we make amends? There is no doubt that the symbolism of January 26 is uncomfortable for many Australians. It is not a date that celebrates the unity of the nation. It is not a date that applies with equal force to all of its peoples.

Furthermore, it is a somewhat arbitrary date, whose description as "Australia Day" and celebration as a national holiday, are of relatively recent origin. January 26 is not the day when Phillip first came to Sydney Cove. Nor is it the day when the fleet first arrived. Nor is it the day when the royal proclamation was read in the name of George III.
A judge who helped design Victoria's anti-corruption watchdog says it remains weak and defective, and has warned Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull not to adopt it as the model for any federal corruption body.

Mr Turnbull opened the door to establishing a national watchdog last month  after years of Coalition resistance to the idea  and suggested its powers would emulate Victoria's Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) rather than the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).

Former judge Stephen Charles has warned Malcolm Turnbull against adopting Victoria's anti-corruption model federally.

But former Court of Appeal judge Stephen Charles, who helped the Baillieu Coalition government design IBAC, says the body continues to fall short despite improvements made by the Andrews government.

"It has a narrow jurisdiction, weak investigative powers and a limited ability to use them, including public hearings, which are critical to exposing corruption to the public," he said. Mr Charles argues it should be able to use the full suite of its investigative powers at the start of any investigation, unhampered by thresholds  much like ICAC.
With Milan Men's Fashion Week in full swing, the progeny of some already pretty fine stars have been walking the runway.

First it was Kaia Gerber, the daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford, owning Fashion Month last September, and, now, it's the boys' turn.

"Could not be more proud of my oldest son @jackmmarsden walking his first show for @dolcegabbana and their Men's Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2018/2019 campaign in Milan today! Thank you Domenico and Stefano for having us!" Marsden wrote, adding the hashtag "#proudpapa".

Given Marsden has modelled for Versace in the past, the apple isn't falling too far from the tree. The actor previously said he would help his son achieve his dreams.

"He's slowly dipping his feet in the waters a little bit. He's testing it out to see what it's about and what it means and if it feels right for him. He's taking it very slowly and cautiously," Marsden told celebrity site Wonderwall. "If it's something that I can help him with, then I will. He's 16 and figuring out his world and who he is and what his strengths are and what his passions are and what he wants to do."

Marsden has two other children, Mary, 12, and William, 5.
Theyre not well presented. Theyre far from articulate. And they dont often get a reach-around from national TV news programs .

Dumb guys who think Adolf Hitlers picture should be hung in classrooms usually cover themselves in tattoos of swastikas and Iron Crosses.

Listening to Blair Cottrell, Seven viewers were left in no doubt that suburban Melbourne was terrified. Credit:Eddie Jim

Hes well presented, articulate and all the more dangerous because of it.

Cottrell, whos done prison time but doesnt look it, is the United Patriots Front leader described in the mildest terms by Channel Seven as a "right wing activist".

Young Liberals are right wing activists. The Institute of Public Affairs are right wing activists.

Blair Cottrell is something else, a man who happily claims to have used violence and terror to manipulate women and who apparently thinks the Maximum Nazi is an excellent role model for schoolchildren to contemplate.

But he lifts weights, he dresses well and so he got to appear in a news story on Seven about "activists" in Melbourne "hoping to harness the power of social media to protect them and their families" to "create a kind of neigbourhood watch" to dispatch "locals" to incidents and attacks as they are reported.

Watching the story on Seven, listening to Blair Cottrell, viewers were left in no doubt that there was a crisis, suburban Melbourne was terrified, the state government was paralysed and it was all the fault of African gangs.

None of this is true.
It became harder to get into university this year.

After a nervous wait over summer, tens of thousands of school leavers found out on Tuesday whether they had been accepted into their preferred university course.

But fewer students received a first round offer, although more school leavers are vying to study at university.

The first round of offers revealed students are flocking to nursing, Victoria's most popular university course has become easier to get into and medicine remains the most competitive degree.
Thousands of Victorian students will this afternoon receive their university offers, and find out if their VCE results were enough to score them a place in the subject of their choice.

More than 65,000 people have applied for a tertiary place through the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre, seeking a spot in one of more than 1800 courses that are offered in the state.

Monash University is the destination where almost one in four students want to study, with 14,832 putting a course there as their first preference. A total of 11,736 people want to study at RMIT, while 11,006 are hoping to enrol at Melbourne University.
They included professional drivers and a young family, lone drivers and others travelling in pairs.

Fate had them meet at roadworks on the Newell Highway, about 20 kilometres north of Dubbo in the Central West on Tuesday afternoon where they patiently waited for the go-ahead to pass the road crews replacing the highway's surface.

But just after 12.30pm, tragedy struck.

Crash experts are investigating why a prime mover, carrying a load of concrete barriers, careered into a line of five cars and a B-double as they sat stationary at the roadworks.
NSW train workers will strike for 24 hours on January 29 after negotiations over pay and conditions fell apart.

The Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) announced the strike on Tuesday, saying it was the result of Sydney Trains and NSW Trains management "refus[ing] to negotiate a fair and reasonable enterprise agreement".

Workers will stop work at 12.01am on Monday, January 29, and continue until midnight, on a day some students will be returning to school after the holidays.

Alex Claassens, the union's NSW secretary, said commuters were given as much notice as possible to make alternate arrangements.
The owner of a Brisbane bridal boutique has been ordered to pay more than $15,000, including a $14,000 fine, after leaving four wedding parties in the lurch close to their big day by not supplying their dresses.

Sharon Lucille Bennett, owner of Serenity Bridal Boutique, pleaded guilty to four counts of

failing to supply wedding and bridesmaid dresses within a specified timeframe in the Beenleigh Magistrates Court on Tuesday.

Four groups of brides and bridesmaids were let down by Ms Bennett ahead of their big day.

The court heard Ms Bennett accepted more than $3000 in deposits for wedding and bridesmaid dresses from the customers between February and August 2016 and provided them with expected delivery dates.

When the dresses became overdue, the clients contacted Ms Bennett asking where they were and their messages were either ignored or they were told their orders were coming.
A cyclist has been rushed to hospital in a critical condition after a collision with a car at a busy Brisbane intersection.

Emergency services were called just after 2.30pm on Tuesday to the intersection of Gregory Terrace and Brunswick Street in Bowen Hills.

The High Acuity Response Unit along with paramedics first on scene treated the cyclist before taking them to the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital.

Police closed one northbound lane at the intersection while the Forensic Crash Unit investigated.
An allegedly unlicensed woman accused of driving an unregistered car along a busy Brisbane pedestrian boardwalk has been charged with drink driving.

The 40-year-old woman was stopped after driving onto the riverside pedestrian and cycle path at South Bank about 6.50pm.

Pedestrians watch on as police stop a car on the South Bank pedestrian boardwalk near the Kurilpa Bridge. Credit:MrCameltan / Twitter

It was alleged the woman was three times the legal drink-driving limit when she drove about 85 kilometres from her Atkinsons Dam home in the Somerset region, west of Brisbane, before getting onto the boardwalk.

The path, near the Kurilpa Bridge in the citys cultural precinct, was busy with pedestrians and cyclists at the time, according to police.
Detectives have arrested 10 people and recovered a stolen Audi after a violent carjacking on Brisbane's southside on Monday night, according to police.

It would be alleged four men went to a Comet Street home in Runcorn about 9.30pm to test-drive a 2008 beige Audi A4.

Police said two of the men got into the car with the 33-year-old resident and his 21-year-old friend and they began the test drive.

It would be alleged one of the men pulled a gun during the drive, punched the 21-year-old in the head and forced the resident and his friend out of the car.

The accused drove back to the house and collected their accomplices before driving off, according to police.
A group of teenagers who gatecrashed a gathering at a Gold Coast home have been charged after police officers who tried to move the group on were surrounded and attacked.

Two officers came across a large group of teenagers after they were called to an Upper Coomera home following a noise complaint about 1.15am on Tuesday morning.

An Upper Coomera mother speaks to media from her home after two police officers were assaulted outside the property overnight. Credit:7 News Queensland.

The pair attempted to move the group on but some of the teenagers became belligerent and surrounded them, police said.

A 29-year-old female constable was punched in the face and grabbed around the neck while the 25-year-old male constable was punched and kicked by the teens, police alleged.
Based in the outer Melbourne suburb of Bayswater, ANCA is one of an increasingly rare cohort of Australian manufacturers.

The precision tool manufacturer employs more than 1000 staff globally, with 450 in Australia, and turned over $180 million last year, but when its power supply contracts were up for renewal co-founder Pat Boland was in for a nasty shock.

ANCA co-founder Pat Boland was quoted a 200 per cent price increase on energy. Credit:Wayne Taylor

"Like all other companies we were faced with our existing contract coming to an end for power, and initial quotes were coming in with a 200 per cent increase," says Mr Boland.

ANCA was spending $460,000 a year on power but its existing provider, Alinta, quoted an increase to $1 million a year while competing provider Resolve Energy quoted $1.4 million.
Michael Maynes at his graduation in 2009. Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius, the policeman leading mammoth cultural change in the force, put it more bluntly. "He was treated terribly," Mr Cornelius said. Rob Maynes says his late son Michael dreamed of being in the police force. Credit:Joe Armao "He was the subject of homophobic behaviour that was back then and is absolutely now completely unacceptable.

"We are deeply sorry." Michael Maynes and his father Robert on his graduation day. Credit:Victoria Police Mr Maynes' father Robert Maynes strongly believes that what his eldest son went through in the force contributed to his suicide and was the catalyst for his spiral into mental illness and drug-taking after he resigned. "The police force started the ball rolling. They started it. Michael was never on drugs, never had an issue until he joined the police force and it just snowballed," he said. Mr Maynes' death prompted an internal and coronial investigation. Credit:Anna Sublet

The Michael Maynes story is well known in Victoria Police's LGBTI community, some of whose members were serving police when homosexuality was decriminalised, when gay bashings occurred, and during the targeted raid of the Tasty Nightclub in Flinders Lane. But we are not talking about the 1980s or even 1990s; the coronial and internal police investigation that followed the 30-year-old's death probed the culture Mr Maynes experienced in his short time in the force between 2008 and 2011. Mr Maynes joined the police force at 24, a job his father said he had dreamed of doing. "He loved it. He absolutely loved it," Robert said. "But it became torture. It was just torture for him every day going to work."

A senior policeman who acted as Mr Maynes' peer support officer told the coronial inquiry that what started in the outer eastern suburbs station as snide remarks like "That's a nice haircut. The boys down at Pride March will like that" morphed into daily references to "faggots", "poofters" or being gay. "Although he did consider being more open, the relentless and intrusive curiosity of some members made him fear their reaction if he actually admitted his orientation," he said. This, a gay policeman told The Age, is a common experience. "If you're out and confident often the path is easier. If you're private, if you're not sure, if you're insecure, you'll be forced to come out." In a diary the Mr Maynes kept, he wrote about a colleague calling the Pride March "sick" and "people don't need to see this shit". He also detailed another occasion where a senior constable had said: "You're gay, you've got AIDS. You're going to die alone." Neither of his diary entries could be substantiated.

There were more serious allegations. Another policeman who gave a statement said an information report was submitted from police in the eastern suburbs who said Mr Maynes was seen at a "known homosexual beat" in his private car. The "valueless" report was considered "gratuitous and homophobic" by the police's internal watchdog, the Professional Standards Command, the policeman said. Then, while Mr Maynes was still in the force, he drove through a roadside breath testing site in the eastern suburbs without stopping, telling colleagues he believed it was a traffic accident. He was issued with an infringement notice for failing to stop, but without the input or notification of Professional Standards, which is against police policy. He was then charged with refusing a breath test, despite Mr Maynes saying he was never asked to undergo one, in a move another policeman said was an "abuse of process". One member was disciplined over the allegation. Overall, seven accused members were questioned after Mr Maynes' death, including a former Professional Standards investigator who lived in Mr Maynes' street the suburb over from the station. He was charged with unauthorised access to the police's internal database to look up Mr Maynes and his housemates 359 times. The case against him was later dropped and the officer resigned. By the time Mr Maynes took sick leave in 2010 over the bullying, he had become a "problem" to police in his division and he transferred to Melbourne North, where there were other gay members.

He told the peer support officer he was "finally enjoying his work" and one of his new bosses described him as an "exuberant, quick-witted, and intelligent individual" who was respected by his peers professionally and socially. "He started expressing delight in his work for the first time. He loved catching crooks," another policeman said. It was when he was at Melbourne North that he received the infringement notices over the roadside breath test and Mr Maynes pleaded guilty and resigned. "He steadfastly maintained that he had done nothing wrong but felt completely worn down by everything that had happened," the peer support officer said. On his last day as a Victorian policeman, Mr Maynes wrote a farewell email to his colleagues at Melbourne North.

"My decision to leave Victoria Police was made more difficult due to the implausibly positive, passionate and supportive environment at Melbourne North," he wrote. "I hope environments at stations like Melbourne North have the ability to become the dominant culture across the organisation." Mr Maynes moved to the Northern Territory with a boyfriend and started to use the drug ice. In 2014, three-and-a-half years later, he took his own life. In an unusually emotional statement, one of the senior officers Mr Maynes disclosed the bullying to said he was deeply distressed he didn't lodge a complaint without his consent. "I wonder if that course would have resulted in a different outcome. I know that I cannot undo the decisions I made not to breach that request ... I was trying to engender Michael's trust in me and the system. Any trust that I was trying to build would have been destroyed had I lodged a complaint without consent," he wrote.

Mr Cornelius is leading Victoria Police's response to the Human Rights Commission's review into sexual discrimination, harassment and predatory behaviour in the force, which includes the vilification of LGBTI members. In 2015, more than a thousand Victorian police participated in a national survey on LGBTI workplace inclusion. It found 70 per cent of respondents experienced some form of negative gay commentary or joke, 20 per cent had witnessed or were made aware of serious homophobic bullying at work, while 11 per cent said they experienced harassment because of their orientation in the past year. Mr Cornelius said there were police still in Victoria who had a "jaundiced and inappropriate" views about the LGBTI people in the police force and the wider community. "We have an absolute commitment to being very clear to our workforce at large that these behaviours won't be tolerated and these people will be held to account," he said. "There is no place for them in Victoria Police."

Mr Cornelius said Victoria Police expect to release an LGBTI inclusion strategy and action plan on the International Day Against Homophobia in May. He said it was incumbent on all members to call out homophobia. "These behaviours invariably happen within the hearing and in the presence of other people ... It needs to be called out in the moment. The individual that's doing it needs to be made to feel very uncomfortable and needs to be held to account," he said. Loading For support or advice, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or beyondblue on 1300 22 4636.
Australia Post is reviewing its security measures in WA after parcels and letters were stolen from several depot boxes in Perth last month.

At least three Australia Post depot boxes were broken into in December across Perth, resulting in the theft of parcels and letters, some of which are still unaccounted for.

Australia Post said it was reviewing security measures after the thefts. Credit:Glenn Hunt

Both WA Police and Australia Post are now investigating.

Australia Post has told WAtoday two depot boxes in Bibra Lake were broken into before and after Christmas.
WA Transport Minister Rita Saffioti says Labor will not reconsider going ahead with the Perth Freight Link despite the federal government still offering $1.2 billion for the project.

The controversial Roe 8 project, which was pushed by the Liberal party, was one of the key issues in the March election and Labor moved quickly to stop construction and cancel contracts when Mark McGowan became premier.

The Roe 8 project sparked widespread protests. Credit:Facebook

Ms Saffioti told 6PR radio on Monday the previous government had eight-and-a- half years to deliver the project and failed to do it, showing it was not even a priority for the Liberal party.

WA Opposition Leader Mike Nahan told reporters that scrapping the project would prove to be Labor's biggest mistake.
It was business as usual at Perth Airport on Tuesday morning following overnight chaos that saw planes delayed due to record wild weather.

The city experienced its second wettest January day on record thanks to the remnants of Cyclone Joyce dumping 96mm on the metropolitan area in 24 hours.

The Qantas flight from Brisbane was forced to circle for 40 minutes. Credit:Flight Radar.

Torrential rain, coupled with wind speeds in excess of 60 kilometres per hour, led to several flight delays and two aborted landings.

Qantas and Virgin flights from Brisbane were forced to circle the airport after strong cross winds played havoc with their landing.
Raleigh, North Carolina: New evidence points to someone aboard the pirate Blackbeard's flagship harbouring books among the booty.

In an unusual find, researchers have discovered shreds of paper bearing legible printing that somehow survived three centuries underwater on the sunken vessel. And after more than a year of research that ranged as far as Scotland, they managed to identify them as fragments of a book about nautical voyages published in the early 1700s.

A piece of paper from books found on board Blackbeard's ship the Queen Anne's Revenge. Credit:AP

Conservators for Blackbeard's ship the Queen Anne's Revenge found the 16 fragments of paper wedged inside the chamber for a breech-loading cannon, with the largest piece being the size of a quarter. They determined that the words "south" and "fathom" were in the text, suggesting a maritime or navigational book.

As for the word "Hilo" in the fragment, Johanna Green, a specialist in the history of printed text at the University of Glasgow, pointed to the Spanish settlement of Ilo  or Hilo  on the coast of Peru. The fragments eventually were determined to be from a 1712 first edition of a book by Capt. Edward Cooke titled "A Voyage to the South Seas, and Round the World, Peform'd in the years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711."
Copenhagen: Danish inventor Peter Madsen has been charged with the murder and dismembering of Swedish journalist Kim Wall on board his homebuilt submarine.

He has also been charged with sexual assault without intercourse of a particularly dangerous nature, police said.

Danish prosecutors will seek to have inventor Peter Madsen jailed for life, police said on Tuesday, adding that he may have killed Wall by cutting her throat or by strangulation.

Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen said the case is "very unusual and extremely gross."
Pristina, Kosovo: Kosovo Serb leader Oliver Ivanovic, who was standing trial over the killings of ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 war, has been shot dead in what Serbia called an act of terrorism.

The killing on Tuesday increased tension between Kosovo and Serbia, and a round of European Union-sponsored dialogue on normalising relations that was due to take place in Brussels was suspended at Belgrade's request.

Flowers, candles and a picture of Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic, at the spot where he was shot dead on Tuesday. Credit:Bojan Slavkovic

The European Union, NATO and the United States urged both sides to remain calm, and Kosovo's authorities to bring the killers to justice. They also urged Serbia and its former province, which won independence a decade ago, to recommit to establishing normal relations.

After an emergency session of Serbia's National Security Council, President Aleksandar Vucic called the killing "an act of terrorism" and said Belgrade must be included in the investigation. He declined to say whether he believed the killing was ethnically motivated.
Caracas: Rogue Venezuelan helicopter pilot Oscar Perez was killed in a police operation on Monday along with six other anti-government militants, the interior minister said on Tuesday, spurring opposition complaints of human rights violations.

Perez, a photogenic former police officer who once starred in an action film, last year used a hijacked helicopter to attack government buildings. He also stole weapons from a military base in what he called a rebellion against President Nicolas Maduro.

He appeared with a bloody face in nearly a dozen Instagram videos early on Monday, saying he was surrounded by authorities shooting at him with grenade launchers even though he was promising to surrender.

Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said seven "terrorists" including Perez were killed in the operation outside Caracas along with two police officers involved in the raid.
Phnom Penh: Journalists and human rights advocates have condemned a move by the Philippines to shut down a popular news website that has been critical of President Rodrigo Duterte.

It's the latest rollback of free expression in Asia's biggest countries.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. Credit:AP

Echoing US President Donald Trump's cry of "fake news", governments have been forcing independent media outlets to close, or jailing, harassing, censoring or subjecting to violence journalists in Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia and Myanmar.

The Philippine Security and Exchange Commission late on Monday announced the revocation of the operating licence of Rappler following months of criticism of the journalist-led outlet by the Durerte government and its supporters.
David and Louise Turpin are pictured with their 13 children in April 2016. Credit:Facebook/David-Louise Turpin Police said they found several of the brothers and sisters "shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings." Officers thought the children were all under 18 because they looked so emaciated. Kimberly Milligan, 50, who lives across the street from the family, said she only saw the infant in the mother's arms and three other children since she moved in across the street two years ago, describing them as small and pale. "Why don't we ever see the kids?" Milligan said she asked herself. "In hindsight, we would have never thought this. But there were red flags. You never don't hear or see nine kids."

David Allen Turpin and Louise Anna Turpin were charged after their children were found in captivity in California. Credit:Handout Two years ago, while walking around the neighbourhood admiring Christmas lights and decorations, Milligan said she encountered three of the Turpin children and complimented them on the manger with a baby Jesus set up outside the house. She said the children froze, as if by doing so they could become invisible. "Twenty-year-olds never act like that," she said. "They didn't want to have a social conversation." Nicole Gooding, 35, who has lived in the neighbourhood for three years, said the first time she saw the family was two months ago when the mother and children were cleaning up the yard that was full of weeds and overflowing trash cans. "I had never seen them at all until that day," she said.

The Turpin home in Perris, California. Credit:AP The parents, who were scheduled to appear in court this week, are being held on $US9 million ($11.3 million) bail each, police said. A police statement did not indicate the parents' motives and a police spokesman said he had no further details. Six of the couple's children are minors, while the other seven are over 18, parents said. Facebook photos appear to show a normal, happy, family life with trips to Disneyland and several trips to Las Vegas for wedding vow renewal ceremonies.

Facebook photos appeared to show a normal, happy life with trips to Disneyland and Las Vegas. Credit:Facebook/David-Louise Turpin David and Louise Turpin appeared to have had marriage-renewal ceremonies at least three times, in 2011, 2013 and 2015, at an Elvis Presley-themed chapel in Las Vegas, according to the chapel's YouTube page. One video shows the couple exchanging renewal vows in front of an Elvis impersonator. Another video showed 10 female children in matching purple plaid dresses walking down the aisle ahead of Louise toward David, who waited at the altar with two male children in suits. A third male child dressed in a suit appeared later in the video during various dance performances with the Elvis impersonator and the family. On the California Department of Education website, David Turpin is listed the principal of Sandcastle Day School - a private school operated out of his home.

The school was opened in March 2011, the website says. In the 2016-17 school year, it had an enrolment of six with one student each in the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, 10th and 12th grades. Louise Turpin is listed in public records as a housewife, with no income. The couple declared bankruptcy twice. Bankruptcy documents show David Turpin earned more than $US140,000 in 2011, when the records were filed, but that the family's expenses exceeded his take-home pay by more than $US1000 a month, the Los Angeles Times reported. Ivan Trahan, an attorney who represented the couple in their latest bankruptcy in 2011, told the Los Angeles Times that, during interviews, the couple spoke highly of their children.

"They seemed like very normal people who fell into financial problems," he said. Trahan said that David Turpin worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman, an aeronautics and defence technology company, and had a "relatively high" income but had trouble keeping up with his expenses because he had so many children. David Turpin's parents, James and Betty Turpin, told ABC News they were "surprised and shocked" at the allegations. They said their grandchildren were home-schooled, and that they had not seen their son and daughter-in-law in several years, although they were in contact by phone. They said "God called on them" to have as many children as they did (referring to David and Louise).
Washington: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey lashed out on Monday against a proposed US-trained force that would potentially position thousands of Kurdish militia fighters along Turkey's southern border.

Erdogan denounced the move, vowing to "drown this army of terror before it is born," as Russia and Syria also rejected the idea.

Fighters from the Kurdish female militia, the Women's Protection Units, or YPJ, hold a celebration in Paradise Square in Raqqa, Syria, last October. Credit:AP

The allied military headquarters in Baghdad, which is leading the fight against the Islamic State in Syria, has said it had started recruiting and retraining members of a Syrian Kurdish and Arab militia to protect the borders of territory captured by the group.

The militia, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces or SDF, currently controls a large swath of north-eastern Syria, and, over time, it could grow to 30,000 members, the headquarters said in an email.
Istanbul: The United Arab Emirates has accused Qatar of intercepting two of its civilian airliners during routine flights, in a sign of rapidly escalating tensions between the quarrelling Persian Gulf neighbours.

It said the flights, by an unnamed carrier, were intercepted by a fighter jet. It was not immediately clear what was meant by "intercepted". A spokeswoman for Qatar's Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the reports as "baseless."

An F-16 fighter jet. Credit:Bloomberg

The accusation comes against the backdrop of Qatar's own claims of interference by the UAE. In recent weeks, Qatar has accused the fellow gulf country of violating its airspace twice with military flights, raising concerns that their lengthy but low-intensity feud could soon escalate into an armed confrontation.

The two countries broke off diplomatic relations in June, when the UAE, Saudi Arabia and two other Arab states severed air, land and sea links with Qatar. The Arab bloc accused Qatar of supporting Iran and terrorist groups. Qatar denied the accusations and said it was being punished for pursuing regional policies independent of Saudi Arabia and its allies.
Dear people of Sint Maarten,

There is a time for hellos, and a time for farewells.

As my tenure as Minister Plenipotentiary of Sint Maarten has come to its end, l say farewell with a heart full of gratitude.

Gratitude for the opportunity to have served my people and my island, and above all, gratitude to God for allowing me to take on this very challenging task, with dignity and integrity, with humility and determination, with faith and conviction, especially at a time as this.

When I was approached in 2015 to take on this role, l saw it as a great challenge that I could not resist.

A task that I knew I was well able to take on and execute to the fullest expectations of the people of Sint Maarten.

The title of Minister Plenipotentiary evokes a diplomatic language, with representation as its key meaning.

Being part of the Dutch Kingdom Council of Ministers, meant representing St. Maartens government and people during in these meetings.

During my tenure, l represented Sint Maarten throughout The Netherlands, particularly at events at which His Majesty, King Willem Alexander and Her Majesty Queen Maxima made an appearance.

I met often with Ambassadors from around the world, including those representing the Kingdom of the Netherlands in various countries and those representing their respective countries in The Netherlands.

I received other dignitaries, high-level civil servants, representatives of boards, Sint Maarteners and others, whether visiting from Sint Maarten or other countries at the Cabinet in The Hague.

Being Minister Plenipotentiary is therefore like being the Ambassador of St. Maarten in The Hague, with the St. Maarten House functioning more like the islands Embassy, where students and others are received, informed and assisted as best as possible.

My tenure involved representing or standing in for the Prime Minister and other ministers of the government of St. Maarten, in The Netherlands and other countries.

In these times of such incredible disaster and destruction which we experienced in the form of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, that have brought about untold hardship and suffering, political instability and uncertainty about the future to all our people, some may think saying goodbye should be easy, since I would be walking away from all the so-called doom and gloom.

But let me quickly point out here that it is in times of crisis and adversity that the true nature of a people is revealed.

We St. Maarteners, have been wired to rise up, to show our true character as a resilient people.

Helen Keller once said character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

It is of course not for me to even comment on how successful or not my tenure as Minister Plenipotentiary has been; time will tell.

For now, I leave with enough courage to say goodbye, with my head high and my chin up, confident that there will be enough good in this goodbye to take me to the next hello.

But, in all honesty, this is not really a goodbye; it is more a thank you to all those who have placed their confidence in me. I hope I have lived up to your expectations.

I am forever grateful to our former Prime Minister, the Honorable William Marlin for his trust, support and encouragement.

I wish him and his family Gods speed.

I wish to also thank my other colleagues of the Council of Ministers of Sint Maarten.

I saw first-hand your hard work and dedication to the people of Sint Maarten.

I truly appreciate how you as a team, showed dedication and commitment to the cause of St. Maarten long before the storms and up to this moment.

To my staff at the Cabinet of the Minister Plenipotentiary, l say thank you and I admonish you to continue your good work for Sint Maarten. Working with you was great.

To my colleagues from Council of Ministers in Netherlands, l wish to thank you for your well wishes.

During my tenure, there were 4 Ministers Plenipotentiary of Curacao and 3 Aruba representing in The Hague.

l wish to thank all them from the bottom of my heart. Although we were always outnumbered, we always stood by and supported each other.

To the people of Sint Maarten residing in The Netherlands; It was indeed my pleasure to also serve you.

Thanks for heeding the call to make more use of the services at the Cabinet of Sint Maarten a.k.a The Sint Maarten House.

I urge you to encourage others and let them also know what the Cabinet stands for, and they are welcome anytime to visit.

I cannot thank my family, friends and other well-wishers enough? Thank you for your encouragement, love and prayers. Thank you for being there for me 24/7. I hope I made you proud.

And of course, I cannot forget the media. I am grateful to all the members of the press for their cooperation and good work throughout my tenure.

To the people of St. Maarten, it has been for me a distinct honor and privilege to have served you to the best of my ability.

As Brooke Davis, would say: I say goodbye to this chapter of my life and I look forward to what comes next.

In closing, l want to also congratulate the incoming government of Sint Maarten, and wish them much strength and wisdom while executing the tasks before them, no matter how short or long their stay may be.

I wish each and every one of you a healthy 2018, as we all continue to play our role in rebuilding our country St. Maarten, to be a better and stronger place for all of us to live and thrive.

Together we will achieve this.

Long Live the people of Sint Maarten

I thank you.
Chairperson of Parliament, Members of Parliament

Prime-Minister, Ministers,

Prefete deleguee of Saint Martin and St. Barths

President of the Collectivity of Saint Martin

Distinguished Guests, Good Morning,

On November 2, 2017, a shift in the majority in Parliament took place creating the basis for the transfer of governing responsibility to a new team of Ministers. Today, almost two and half months later we have before us a council of ministers supported by the new majority in Parliament.

During the formation period for this interim cabinet, I consulted with various persons and named Mr. Franklin Meyers and subsequently Mrs. Sarah Wescot-Williams as formateur to form an interim government. You have, as a result, just witnessed the transfer of executive responsibility for the governance of our country to a new team of Ministers. The path to this transfer was not without challenges. To all who gave their input to the transition and formation process I hereby express my gratitude, also on behalf of the people of Sint Maarten. And in particular, I wish to thank Mr. Franklin Meyers for starting and Mrs. Sarah Wescot-Williams for completing the formation assignment as formateurs.

Having concluded the formation process it is important to emphasize that we are - as I stated in my New Years address - living at a pivotal moment in our nations history. Hurricane Irma and her aftermath have set our country back in no small way. And while we have made great strides to date we have quite some work to do. Quite some work to meet the urgent challenge of rebuilding Sint Maarten.

As we face this challenge together I advise that we hold on to the fundamental principles that underpins our constitution. Looking ahead it is therefore important that we are reminded of the principles outlined in the preamble of our constitution, which slightly reworded, states:

We, The people of Sint Maarten, are determined to work with each other; We believe in the principle of democracy, We believe in the rule of law; We believe in the entitlement of all individuals to the fundamental rights and freedoms; We wish to create a constitutional order based on an open and approachable government; And to record our objectives and convictions, We therefore agree that the provisions of the constitution shall have the force of law.

As such it provides an anchor and blueprint for individuals, households, corporations, public organizations, and government, to work together to rebuild Sint Maarten and improve the lives of our people.

Prime Minister, Ministers,

Today, two and a half months since the previous team of Ministers made their positions available you come before the people of Sint Maarten as a new team of ministers. A new team faced with the responsibility of, among others, furthering the recovery process in cooperation with the Netherlands, revisiting the budget for 2018, executing the agreement with the Netherlands on border control, implementing the law on the integrity chamber and executing the February 26th elections.

With respect to the furthering and planning of the recovery I encourage you to take steps to meet the urgent needs of our people in terms of, among others, employment and housing.

As you assume your mandate to govern this beautiful country, I trust that you, in keeping with your oath, will work to fortify our constitutional principles aimed at improving the well-being of our people.

Accepting the position of Minister through the taking of the oath today, is a solemn expression of your commitment to perform your duties with integrity. It is your pledge of allegiance to the King and the Kingdom Charter, it is your individual declaration to always uphold the Constitution of Sint Maarten and it is your solemn affirmation to always dedicate yourself to foster the wellbeing of the People of Sint Maarten. Through your oath, you have accepted the obligation to serve all the people of Sint Maarten. The fulfillment of this obligation must be based on the principles of democracy, on the rule of law, on respect for the fundamental rights and freedoms of all persons and anchored in our determination as a people to work together.

In that regard, there rests on you, individually as Ministers, and jointly as Council of Ministers a great responsibility. Your decisions will have lasting influences on the lives of the people of Sint Maarten. Thus, as you deliberate on taking action on the matters before you during your governing period, I wish you wisdom, individually and jointly, in the conduct of your responsibilities as you seek to meet your constitutional responsibility to the people of Sint Maarten.

With that in mind, I hereby congratulate the people of Sint Maarten with the installation of this new government and similarly congratulate each of you and your families with your appointments as Prime-Minister, Ministers and deputy Minister Plenipotentiary.

Thank you, God bless you and May God Bless Sint Maarten and protect its coast.
WILLEMSTAD, Curacao:--- With the swearing-in of Saul Castano Ortiz and Joel Felida on Tuesday 9 January 2018, the Curacao office of VanEps Kunneman VanDoorne has added two sworn attorneys to its team. Both junior associates have started working at the firms Corporate & Banking section.

Saul Castano Ortiz was born and raised in Colombia. At twenty years old he moved to the Netherlands, where he obtained master's degrees in both financial law and business law at Leiden University. He also did internships at several large law firms, including Baker McKenzie Amsterdam and Pels Rijcken & Droogleever Fortuijn. His choice to start his career as an attorney at law in Curacao is no coincidence: Here I can use and further develop both my Latin American roots and the knowledge and experience that I have gained during my years of study in the Netherlands. Im therefore very pleased that I have now been sworn in and that my career as an attorney at law has officially started.

Joel Felida is yu di Korsou and after obtaining master's degrees in both civil law and financial law he returned to his roots to work at VanEps Kunneman VanDoorne as an attorney at law. Commenting on the swearing-in ceremony, Joel said: Taking the oath was a special moment. This is what I have been working towards in recent years. From an early age I dreamed of becoming an attorney, preferably in Curacao. Im very happy that I have been able to make this dream come through so soon after completing my studies.

VKV Press Release
The Treaty of Cahuenga ended the fighting of the MexicanAmerican War in Alta California in 1847

Today is the 170th anniversary of the treaty of Cahuenga, which resulted in brief California independence and then US statehood the next year.

Pico Blvd is named after the last Spanish governor of California, Andres Pico. Like nearly all the Californios, became an American citizen with full legal and voting rights. Pico later became a State Assemblyman and then a State Senator representing Los Angeles in the California State Legislature.

The Treaty of Cahuenga, also called the "Capitulation of Cahuenga," ended the fighting of the MexicanAmerican War in Alta California in 1847. It was not a formal treaty between nations but an informal agreement between rival military forces in which the Californios gave up fighting. The treaty was drafted in English and Spanish by Jose Antonio Carrillo, approved by American Lieutenant-Colonel John C. Fremont and Mexican Governor Andres Pico on January 13, 1847 at Campo de Cahuenga in what is now Universal City, California.

The treaty called for the Californios to give up their artillery, and provided that all prisoners from both sides be immediately freed. Those Californios who promised not to again take up arms during the war, and to obey the laws and regulations of the United States, were allowed to peaceably return to their homes and ranchos. They were to be allowed the same rights and privileges as were allowed to citizens of the United States, and were not to be compelled to take an oath of allegiance until a treaty of peace was signed between the United States and Mexico, and were given the privilege of leaving the country if they wished to do so.

Under the later Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexico formally ceded Alta California and other territories to the United States, and the disputed border of Texas was fixed at the Rio Grande.
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No president likes it when advisers talk. But no other president has been as thin-skinned and overwrought in their reaction to those revelations as Trump. After publication of Wolff's book, Trump announced he would take a "strong" look at U.S. libel laws. What he would probably prefer to do, though, would be to put his critics on trial and ban the publication of their work, just as his friends in Ankara and Moscow do.

Thinking Like an Autocrat

Trump thinks like an autocrat -- he neither knows much nor cares much about the Constitution. Astoundingly, though, the Republican Party continues to stand behind him. Indeed, a bizarre wave of solidarity followed the publication of Wolff's book.

As recently as this summer, Senator Lindsey Graham could still be heard describing Trump as a "xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot." He has since become a full-fledged fan of the president. And his Senate colleague Bob Corker, who unleashed on Trump only a few months ago, decrying the president as "mentally unfit" for the job, smiled together with Trump last Monday as they boarded Air Force One.

The two flew to visit farmers in Tennessee -- an attempt by Trump to generate headlines and get ahead of the news cycle. As is often the case, he wasn't particularly adroit in his delivery. "Oh, are you happy you voted for me?" he asked. "You are so lucky that I gave you that privilege."

In recent days, Trump has been sending out contradictory messages. On the one hand, he's pleading for the wall to be built along the border to Mexico and he wants to deport 200,000 immigrants from El Salvador. On the other, however, he says he is open for compromises on issues like the "Dreamers," who came to the U.S. illegally as children.

Last Tuesday, he then invited Democrats and Republicans to the White House to negotiate the issue. Normally, those types of talks take place behind closed doors, but Trump invited the press to attend. A bizarre situation ensued in which the senators discussed the issue with the cameras running as Trump sat there with his arms crossed attempting to come across as a bipartisan leader.

That same day, he announced he would travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the meeting point for the global financial and political elite -- a gathering that represents the root of all evil for people like Steve Bannon. And on Wednesday, it appeared suddenly as if Trump might actually reconsider his plan to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Then, in a Thursday tweet, he appeared to want to limit the power of the intelligence services, only to reverse that a half-day later. Shortly after, he asked why the U.S. had to take in so many immigrants from "shithole" countries.

It's hard to tell these days what Trump wants and who he wants to be. A hardliner? A dealmaker who transcends the bickering among the parties? Or a softy who is liked by everyone?

It's likely that he doesn't have an answer to that question himself.

Impeachment More Unlikely Than Ever

But one thing is certain: At the moment at which it appears the president is most vulnerable, the idea of impeachment seems more unlikely than ever.

Despite the fact that Trump is disastrous for his country and the world, the fact that he is fulfilling many of their most heartfelt wishes has meant that Republicans lack the will to distance themselves from him. Trump supported tax reforms that would supposedly ease the burden on the middle class but are really the equivalent to writing a check worth billions to the wealthiest people in America. The U.S. economy is growing, and the Dow continues to break records. He has appointed officials who are hard at work dismantling environmental and climate protection measures -- moves celebrated by Republicans who view such regulations as unnecessary, and rolling them back can help them attract campaign donors. The fact that Trump's popularity ratings are terrible seems irrelevant.

If the Republicans were to oust Trump now, it's likely they would lose the mid-term elections this November. They would no longer be able to push through any major policy initiatives and their prospects for re-electing a Republican president in 2020 would be deeply imperiled. So, it's unlikely the party will move to trigger the 25th amendment. Besides, removing a president from office under that amendment requires the agreement of a majority of his cabinet or a vote in Congress, which also doesn't appear likely.

The Democrats themselves don't even appear to harbor such hopes. Even as the media spent days with blanket coverage of Wolff's book and Trump's outbursts over it, the Democrats showed odd restraint.

Former Obama foreign policy adviser Dan Restrepo argues this is the best strategy for dealing with populists. "The Democrats are focusing on things that really matter to people in the country," he says in a phone interview. "They don't participate in the daily political theater of Washington and that's the best solution, both strategically and tactically." In any case, he says the entire country has been aware for a year now that Donald Trump is no normal president.

But it's still too early to preclude the possibility that Trump will, at some point, be forced to leave office. Special counsel Robert Mueller, a former head of the FBI, wants to interrogate the president soon, but Trump has vehemently fought to keep that from happening. Mueller's investigation is primarily looking into whether Trump or his staff are guilty of collusion with the Russian government. Even if those allegations aren't proven, the investigation could still be dangerous for the president.

One suspicion is that Trump actively sought to intervene in the Russia investigation a year ago, with some believing he may be guilty of obstruction of justice. Were charges to be brought, it is unlikely Trump would survive politically. One of the pillars of the obstruction of justice suspicions is a television interview Trump gave last May in which he openly admitted he had fired FBI head James Comey because of the Russia scandal. Initially, he had claimed that he had only fired Comey based on the Justice Department's advice.

Mueller is also investigating possible money laundering deals by Trump and his family.

Ten years ago, Trump's son courted investors from Russia to secure project financing. And money did, in fact, pour in, but not always from reputable sources. In 2008, Trump also sold a mansion in Palm Beach for just under $100 million to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and owned one of the country's biggest potash businesses at the time. It also happens that Rybolovlev's name popped up in the "Panama Papers" in the context of offshore bank accounts.

Mueller assembled a team of money laundering experts in order to find out if Trump has made himself vulnerable to blackmail as a result of his ties to Russia. German-owned Deutsche Bank, whose clients include Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, is also the subject of the investigations.

The probes into the family's business affairs could damage the president's image and, as such, also the Trump brand given that their company lives largely from the sale of property, perfume and clothing bearing the Trump label. He could quickly lose any interest in the office he holds.

Already, Trump is spending more time in front of the three televisions in his bedroom than he used to. His work day often doesn't begin until 11 a.m. Before that, his private schedule tends to be filled with "executive time." The news website Axios has reported that those hours are usually spent watching talk shows, making phone calls and tweeting.

Things probably won't get any quieter in the coming months, either, given that further books are coming out soon. One of them is Comey's tell-all, "A Higher Loyalty," which is due out at the beginning of May. Washington is greedily awaiting the next scandal.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Still, isn't there a danger that if Trump scares away investors that they might instead shift their focus to other world markets like China, for example?

Murphy: The U.S. remains the largest market in the world. So, people still need to come here and invest in factories or headquarters if they want to sell cars or pharmaceuticals or whatever it might be. The members of the German business community who I speak with know that Donald Trump will be president for several years. I hope four and not eight. But they're making an investment decision that's going to last 30 to 50 years -- their horizon is much longer. That gives me a lot of optimism.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You ran a very successful campaign in the gubernatorial race in New Jersey. What's the secret for the Democrats to take back the House, the Senate and even the presidency?

Murphy: I think the key is to speak to the issues. If it's only personality-based, I think that's not a winning hand. It's about issues and values. What are we are going to do if you're displaced by globalization, if you've lost your job? What are we actually going to do for you? Where can we find common value? I think we've fallen to too many buzzwords.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What could your party do better?

Murphy: The Democratic Party always has a problem coming up with a bumper sticker. The Republicans say "Make America Great Again." The Democrats say: "Yeah. We're good with bumper stickers. The only problem is we need 12 of them."

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Can the Democrats beat the Republicans and Trump?

Murphy: I think we have a real shot at the House in this year's mid-term elections. Donald Trump is unpopular, and the Republicans are as well. And our base is motivated. Women in particular are motivated. Women are fired up, they are angry about the way Trump governs -- we saw it in our race. And communities of color are fired up. So if you're black, Latino, if you're South Asian, if you're an immigrant, if you're a recent immigrant of any type, you are angry and scared because of Trump. And it could well be that the moderate, reasonable Republican is also fed up with him. New Jersey is a state, by the way, with a lot of those folks, a reasonable Republican state. They could flip, or they may stay home.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Many thumbed their noses at the idea when it made headlines, but is the notion of making Oprah Winfrey the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 2020 really that silly?

Murphy: I don't think it's silly. She's a formidable talent. She's enormously successful. She's incredibly smart. She's very well known. I mean, she has almost universal name recognition in America; and, by the way, it's that one word. It's the one-name recognition. It's like Elvis. It's Oprah. We have a president who came from television. The notion that someone else who has had their career in media and broadcasting and now business more broadly -- the notion that someone like that might come up and be a legitimate candidate, that's no longer a novelty. That has happened.
By Michael Boyd, jr. STE. GENEVIEVE HERALD While Ste. Genevieve County residents voted no to Amendment 3, the rest of the Show-Me State said yes to legalize marijuana, passing the measure on Tuesday (Nov. 8), according to unofficial results from the 2022 midterm elections. Missouri now is one of the 21 states, along with Washington,
Swiss food and drink giant Nestle is selling its U.S. candy business to Italy's Ferrero for about $2.9 billion in cash. Ferrero will take over iconic chocolate brands Butterfinger and Crunch bars, as well as the sugary Nerds, SweeTarts and FunDip.

After a review of its portfolio last summer, Nestle hinted that it might sell its U.S. business, with its eye on higher-growth areas like pet care, coffee and infant nutrition.

In September, Nestle announced that it bought a majority stake in Blue Bottle Coffee, a high-end coffee company. Other Nestle brands include Purina, Gerber and Stouffer's.

Nestle, based in Switzerland, says its U.S. candy business accounts for about 3 percent of its U.S. division's sales.

The deal is expected to close at the end of the first quarter.
ST. LOUIS  On Jan. 16, 1919, the Prohibition amendment was passed, making St. Louis and all cities officially dry despite widespread flouting of the law. The last brave bartenders had shut their taps by 12:01 a.m. Jan. 17, 1920, the official start of constitutional Prohibition. Federal agents drove the streets and couldnt find any lawbreaking.

The Post-Dispatch noted dryly, Prohibition has had an erratic career in St. Louis. So it would remain, sometimes rattled by machine guns, for 13 long years.

History remembers the first day under the 18th Amendment, but Congress had imposed partial prohibition the previous summer. Prohibitionists, or drys, had seized upon saving grain and fuel for World War I, even though the war ended before they got their wish. Lower-alcohol beer (2.75 percent) flowed pending court challenges, but New Years Eve 1919 was more damp than wet  revelers had to bring their own hard stuff from dwindling household stocks.

The federal Volstead Act, the law intended to enforce the 18th Amendment, made it illegal even to carry a pocket flask outside ones own home. On Jan. 19, John Goheen, proprietor of a rooming house on South 10th Street, was caught on the sidewalk hauling two suitcases filled with whiskey bottles.

The case for Prohibition, long sought by well-intended reformers to spare families from drunken fathers, also had more than a tinge of scorn for cities, immigrants and Catholics. In places like St. Louis, that kind of thinking went nowhere.

Prohibition was a bonanza for local gangs like Egans Rats, Hogans and the Cuckoos. Moving up from safecracking and banditry, they littered the streets with each others bodies as they battled to satisfy the public thirst.

Prohibition did reduce cases of cirrhosis, but it also made a lawbreaker of anyone who wanted a bracer. Criminal gangs and ordinary citizens became clandestine brewers and distillers, with wildly varying results and lots of headlines.

On July 22, 1925, St. Louis officers nabbed 179 suspected moonshiners, including Jennie Buttee of 5115 Daggett Avenue. She told officers she hadnt a clue how a vat of 5,000 gallons of mash got into her basement.

Enforcement never stopped the flow. Five years later, agents raided a fashionable home at 3733 Pine Street, a site that produced 250 gallons a day.

Seen from a distance of eight decades, the tale is comical. But most mobsters were bad people, and some of their product was sufficiently awful to kill. Here are some of the more memorable tales from Prohibition St. Louis:

WHEN A TABLECLOTH IS A DRESS

The hot ticket for New Years Eve 1922 was the party at the new Chase Hotel, at Kingshighway and Lindell Boulevard. Management made the ritual warnings about obeying the law, but floor-length tablecloths made it easy to hide refreshments.

At 1:30 a.m., five officers accompanying Gus O. Nations, a dedicated teetotaler and St. Louis chief dry agent, strolled brashly into the hotels Palm Room without removing their hats. Officers checked beneath tables.

A woman screamed, claiming an agent had grabbed her gown instead. Her escort slugged the officer. It was instant pandemonium.

As the force retreated, detective Ed Sullivan accidently fired a shot into the floor, winging three dancers. Henry S. Priest, a former federal judge who attended the party, sued Nations on behalf of one of the wounded. Ten days later, Priest led the Missouri Association Against the Prohibition Amendment with a rally attended by 2,000 people.

Priest battled Prohibition until his death in 1930, three years before repeal.

OUR OF THE BARREL, THROUGH THE HOSE, DOWN THE ALLEY...

In 1910, when Tennessee went dry by state law, the Jack Daniel distillery moved to St. Louis. As national Prohibition took effect, the plant at 3960 Duncan Avenue, near Vandeventer and Forest Park avenues, held nearly 900 barrels of the famous whiskey.

The Volstead Act allowed the sale of intoxicants only as prescription medicine. Federal inspectors guarded the Jack Daniel warehouse, but its inventory was just too tempting.

In August 1923, well-connected crooks methodically siphoned 31,000 gallons through a hose to trucks waiting down the alley. They refilled the barrels with vinegar and water, leaving one untouched  all under the easily distracted eye of chief guard William Kinney, who had family links to the Egans Rats gang.

When a visiting inspector tasted vinegar, the notorious whiskey milking case was born. Two years later, in a federal trial in Indianapolis, 23 men were convicted in the scam, including several prominent St. Louisans.

Among them were former city Circuit Clerk Nat Goldstein and Arnold Hellmich, chief federal revenue agent in St. Louis and the man who had appointed Kinney. For their trip to prison at Leavenworth, Kan., they rented a private railroad car.

More than 4,000 admirers cheered them when the train backed into Union Station for a stop. Tom Foley, a local gambler and milking convict, scanned the crowd and said, We cant be so bad after all.

BOMBS AWAY

Charlie Birger grew up in St. Louis and led a gang in Southern Illinois. Their main rivals were hoods led by the Shelton brothers, country boys named Carl, Earl and Bernie.

Birgers hideout was the Shady Rest, a former tourist stop 10 miles east of Marion, Ill. On Nov. 12, 1926, Birger gangsters shot up the home of a brother of Joe Adams, mayor of West City, Ill., and a Shelton ally. The retaliation was creative.

The Sheltons quickly hired a barnstorming pilot, who took one of their men up in a Curtiss Jenny biplane for a bombing raid over Shady Rest. The bombardier tossed three homemade dynamite bombs, only one of which exploded to no strategic effect. Birger men sprayed the sky with submachine-gun fire, missing the plane.

One month later, Birger assassins cornered Adams. Birger was convicted in the murder and went to the gallows in Benton, Ill., on April 19, 1928. Shortly before his death, he told the Post-Dispatch, Ive shot men in my time, but I never shot one that didnt deserve it.

HAPPY DAYS A-COMING

Two weeks before Election Day in November 1932, Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke at a rally in the St. Louis Coliseum at Jefferson and Washington avenues, then the citys main auditorium. Sensing victory, more than 12,000 giddy Democrats jammed the arena and an additional 5,000 crowded the sidewalks.

They applauded Roosevelts ponderous 50-minute speech about farm policy and railroad debt, but roared when he called for restoring beer production.

We want beer! rose the chant.

On Nov. 8, four days before the election, President Herbert Hoover spoke at the Coliseum. St. Louis Republicans begged him to say a good word about alcohol, but he declined. Not that it mattered  with the Depression at its depths, Roosevelt won a 42-state landslide.

BEER IS BACK

Beer drinkers got their wish at 12:01 a.m. on April 7, 1933. A decidedly wet Congress had begun the effort to repeal Prohibition, but that would take months. Meanwhile, it finessed the definition of intoxicant to allow beer with 3.2 percent alcohol content.

Festive crowds gathered at the Anheuser-Busch and Falstaff breweries as midnight approached. Come and get it, shouted August A. Gussie Busch as truckloads moved through the crowds for deliveries to the lucky holders of federal permits to sell beer.

One was the Elks Club at 3619 Lindell Boulevard, where Mayor-elect Bernard Dickmann led the first round.

On Dec. 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment for repeal became part of the U.S. Constitution. Missouri legislators would dither a while more before striking the states own ban against the full drink trade.

Not that it mattered. When police arrested a liquor-store owner, city Circuit Attorney Harry Rosecan refused to prosecute, saying, This man has committed no crime.
FRANKLIN COUNTY  Police have arrested and charged a suspect with second-degree murder in the shooting death of a man here Friday.

Wesley Tatom, 24, of Salem, Mo., has been charged in connection with the death of Darrell L. Johnson.

Johnson, 46, was fatally shot about 9 p.m. Friday outside his camper trailer home in the 1200 block of Wardfield Road near Robertsville, police said.

A witness saw a small red car and a black truck leaving the area after the shooting, police said Saturday. A woman was inside the trailer.

Investigators learned that Tatom was at Johnson's home when an "altercation" occurred, during which Johnson was shot, police said in a news release Monday announcing Tatom's arrest. Police did not release more details.

Tatom was arrested in the 300 block of Morrison Avenue in Waterloo with the assistance of Illinois State Police, the Monroe County Sheriff's Department and Waterloo Police.

He was being held in the Franklin County Jail. His bail is set at $250,000.
ST. LOUIS  An attorney for the man whose secretly recorded conversation with his wife exposed Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens extramarital affair last week says his client made additional recordings as well, and that he has forwarded them to both the St. Louis circuit attorneys office and the FBI.

The attorney, Albert Watkins, didnt specify that the FBI requested the previously undisclosed recordings, but he said there was an expression of interest by the federal agency about them.

Watkins declined to comment on how many additional recordings between the then-spouses exist, or whether the additional recordings involved any discussion of Greitens.

Greitens last week acknowledged hed had an affair with the woman, his hair stylist, in 2015, as he was starting his run for governor. Greitens has forcefully denied a related allegation that the woman made to her husband: that Greitens took a nonconsensual photo of her while she was bound, blindfolded and partly undressed during a sexual encounter and that he threatened to publicize the photo if she exposed their affair.

The taking of nonconsensual photos of a person in a state of full or partial nudity is a Class A misdemeanor in Missouri, punishable by up to a year imprisonment. Some legal experts say Greitens alleged threat regarding the photo also could constitute blackmail or extortion.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner has said her office will investigate the allegations. A spokeswoman for Gardner, Susan Ryan, said she could not confirm that the office had received the recordings discussed by Watkins. The FBI has declined to confirm or deny whether it is investigating.

Greitens affair came to light last week, when the man released to the media an audio recording he made of a conversation with his then-wife in which she confessed to a sexual encounter with Greitens and made the allegation about the photo. The woman wasnt aware that the conversation was being recorded, though Watkins said the man told her about the recording later on the same day.

Watkins comment Tuesday marks the first public mention of additional audio recordings. Watkins said his client made them at the advice of a counselor to address problems the man was having processing information during conversations.

This is something that was done before the initial confession that was publicized last week, and subsequent to it, Watkins said. There was nothing nefarious about it.

He said in each case, the woman was made aware of the recordings either as they were being made or shortly after.

Missouri is a one-party consent state, meaning any person who is involved in a conversation has the legal right to record it, even if another party in the conversation isnt aware its being recorded.

The man and his wife divorced subsequent to her affair with Greitens. The Post-Dispatch has chosen not to publish either of their names because the woman hasnt consented to an interview.
JEFFERSON CITY  Republicans inside the capital city on Tuesday debated whether Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens should resign after revelations of his extramarital affair and related allegations of possible blackmail surfaced last week.

Five GOP lawmakers publicly called on Greitens to step aside or said the governor should consider doing so. Their statements came Tuesday, the first workday after the holiday weekend. Other Republicans said it was too early to call for his resignation or expressed hope that the distraction would not derail the partys legislative agenda.

House Speaker Todd Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, stayed silent on Tuesday as he entered and exited a GOP caucus meeting, declining to take questions from reporters.

The speaker has told us that everybody has to do what they think the right thing to do is, said Rep. Kathie Conway, the term-limited St. Charles Republican who said Greitens should consider resigning. The speaker would never ask us to toe a line, and I dont even know what his opinion is.

Greitens infidelity and the allegations of threats or blackmail have dominated media attention and hallway chatter this past week. KMOV (Channel 4) first reported last Wednesday night that Greitens had an extramarital affair as he prepared his run for governor; he has acknowledged the affair, but he denied related allegations that he took a compromising photo of the woman and threatened to release it if she ever spoke of their relations.

On Tuesday evening, Greitens posted another statement on social media, asking Missourians again for forgiveness.

Much has now been written about this, and many of the assertions made have not been truthful and have proven extremely hurtful to Sheena, as well as to me, Greitens wrote on Facebook. For us, the allegations that go so far beyond the facts have made this much more difficult. I made a mistake, I regret it, and Sheena and I have dealt with it between us.

House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty, D-Kansas City, said it was past time for Greitens to answer questions about the allegations directly.

Although the governors attorney says his client engaged in no wrongdoing, the people of Missouri need to hear that directly from the governor himself for it to have any credibility, she said. By canceling his scheduled appearances, Greitens only delays the public reckoning that must eventually take place. The longer the governor attempts to hide from this scandal, the more the denials of his surrogates ring false.

The four House members who said Greitens should either resign or consider doing so represent a small fraction of the 112-member GOP House caucus. Though Republican lawmakers interviewed have said they are concerned about the allegations, calling for the governor to resign was a move, at least on Tuesday, that the vast majority of Republicans were unwilling to make.

Our focus should be on doing the peoples work, said Rep. Phil Christofanelli, R-St. Peters, who said calls for Greitens to resign were premature.

State-paid attorney who asked about Greitens scandal raises questions A staff attorney paid by taxpayers probed a lawyer about allegations involving Greitens, recording reveals.

Adding yet another layer to the controversy, the Post-Dispatch reported Monday that at least one of Greitens taxpayer-paid employees was on an intelligence-gathering mission in the hours leading up to the television report. That generated ethical and legal questions about whether state-paid employees should work on an elected officials private business.

The Post-Dispatch report also appeared to factor into two GOP House members statements on Tuesday.

Last nights news of state employees being involved in attempting to control the scandal is further proof that this will not be going away anytime soon, said Rep. Nate Walker, R-Kirksville, who was one of Greitens early backers. It is my belief the governor should resign so that the state can move forward focusing on the issues that we all care about.

Rep. Marsha Haefner, R-south St. Louis County, mentioned that report and other controversies as reasons Greitens had to go. Attorney General Josh Hawley, a Republican, has already launched an investigation of the governor and his teams use of a text message-deleting app called Confide. Haefner also decried Greitens reliance on dark money contributions during his tenure.

I find no pleasure in saying this, Haefner said, but I believe Governor Greitens is no longer fit to hold Missouris highest office.

A fourth House Republican  term-limited Rep. Steve Cookson of Poplar Bluff  also issued a statement calling on Greitens to step aside.

Im calling for him to step down and resign as governor of the State of Missouri so that the work on the many issues he has expressed concern for can resume without these distractions, he said.

On the Senate floor, Sen. Rob Schaaf, R-St. Joseph, perhaps the most vocal Republican critic of Greitens, also said the governor should step down.

Once dreaming of the presidency, Greitens now strategizing for survival He could weather the affair revelation, observers say, but proof of blackmail would finish him.

Rep. Kevin Engler, R-Farmington, said the focus in the GOP remains on approving legislative priorities. He expected the House to approve a lobbyist gift restriction proposal this week and another proposal dealing with sex trafficking  despite the ongoing controversy.

We have to stay the course, he said after the GOP caucus meeting.

One notable Republican, Lt. Gov. Mike Parson, has stayed silent on the ongoing controversy. If Greitens left office, Parson would be sworn in to take his place.

On Tuesday, the House did give first-round approval to legislation that Republicans said would remove onerous regulations on training for hair braiders. Instead of 1,500 hours of training, said the sponsor, Rep. Shamed Dogan, R-Ballwin, hair braiders would only have to register with the state and take a self-test.

It gets the government out of peoples hair, Dogan said. Were trying to bring hair braiders out of the shadows and into the regular economy.

Post-Dispatch coverage of Greitens' affair scandal From Greitens' initial statement to calls for his resignation, read the Post-Dispatch coverage of the governor's affair scandal.

Outside of the Capitol, former Missouri Republican Party Chairman Ed Martin on Tuesday added his voice to those calling for Greitens resignation.

Lying to the people of Missouri, lying to all of us ... Hes not trustworthy ... At this point, theres just no way that Eric Greitens can continue, Martin, now a conservative commentator, said on his radio show on KXFN-AM 1380.

Former Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones, a Republican, implied on Twitter that the scandal was timed to derail the GOP effort at tax reform.

If you had any political sense ... you would question the bizarre timing as to when this scandal was dropped, he wrote.

Meanwhile, a White House official told the Post-Dispatch that Greitens last spoke with his former adviser Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pences chief of staff, in November. The official said there has been no contact between the two since news of the scandal broke last week.

Ayers is a close political associate of Greitens campaign director and current political adviser, Austin Chambers.

Chuck Raasch, Kevin McDermott and Sky Chadde, all of the Post-Dispatch, contributed to this report.
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MANAUS, Brazil  The warning from our guide made clear that this forest walk would be anything but a leisurely stroll.

Look before grabbing any branches because the ants bite. You will be in pain for 24 hours, said Jackson Edirley da Silva, wearing a bright yellow shirt and rubber boots. And watch where you step. You dont want to get bitten by a snake.

Our group, about a dozen tourists, got quiet.

Dont worry, I whispered to our sons, ages 6 and 7. We will be careful where we step.

My wife and I had flown with our kids from Rio de Janeiro to Manaus, a major jumping-off point for Brazils Amazon rain forest. From there, we took a boat for an hour ride up a tributary of the Rio Negro, or Black River, and then walked 15 minutes to an eco lodge in the middle of a forest.

Even at the edge of the forest, the sounds made a strong impression. Monkeys screeched, birds bellowed and bugs buzzed, a cacophony that felt both terrifying and calming. Ironically, we would learn that its rare to actually see most of the animals. You are in their house, and they know how to hide.

Our cabin was sparse but had some essentials: a small refrigerator for bottled water, mosquito screens on the windows and an air-conditioning unit that combated the oppressive humidity that would cling to us upon walking outside.

Despite its worldwide fame, not to mention increasing importance as climate change becomes a global issue, the Amazon is not visited in great numbers. Amazonas, Brazils largest and heavily forested state, which includes Manaus, was visited by just under 1.2 million foreign and Brazilian tourists in 2014, the most recent year for available statistics. By comparison, the Eiffel Tower in Paris gets roughly 7 million visitors a year.

For those who get here, its hard to imagine disappointment. Over the course of a week, we swam with freshwater dolphins, gawked at alligators wrestled from river banks by scrappy guides, fished for piranhas and stood in awe at the meeting of the Negro and Solimoes rivers (called the Amazon River in Manaus and eastward), where a difference in density and temperature means that for miles black and yellow waters flow side by side.

The food also has unique tastes. Massive tucunare fish get chopped into fillets that taste like chicken with an extra dose of zest, potato-like manioc roots are prepared with forest spices that most people have never heard of and acai berries are ubiquitous  the kids particularly enjoyed sucking on acai popsicles during the afternoon heat.

The Amazon basin, which spans several countries in South America and is nearly as large as the continental United States, has always been central to Brazilian identity, even if most Brazilians will never visit. Conspiracy theories periodically erupt about other countries alleged attempts to take the territory or plunder its myriad resources, and pressure from international organizations to stop deforestation often draws the ire of politicians.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, president between 2003 and 2010 and poll leader for next years race, once famously said: I dont want any gringo coming here asking us to let an Amazon dweller die of hunger under a tree.

Te Batista, a boat operator whom we hired two days to take us to several areas of the Rio Negro, told me tourists always ask him about conservation.

Foreigners are afraid about the future of the forest, said Batista, who added flatly that he was not. They worry that the cutting here will mean they die in their countries because of global warming.

At the heart of conservation discussions are indigenous tribes, who provide windows into life in the Amazon both before the arrival of Portuguese colonists in the 16th century and today. While there are still scores of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, most are at least partially connected to Brazilian society and live in ways that combine their traditions with aspects of modern-day life.

One day we visited a small village of about 100 people belonging to the Dessana tribe.

As they have for centuries, the women wore hay skirts and were topless. The men wore small woven cloths on their hips, though noticeably with tight black briefs underneath. They all had red face paint and many wore feathers on their heads and necklaces made with alligator and jaguar teeth. Recently caught fish cooked over a fire and a pottery bowl of large baked black ants were available to snack on.

Speaking limited Portuguese, a young man named Bohoka told me the tribe lived as they always had  in little huts without electricity, running water or cellphones  but with a few modern twists that included allowing tourists to visit.

Tourism allows us to maintain our way of life, said Bohoka, 24, who showed us necklaces and other handcrafts for sale.

The village was only about a 90-minute boat trip from Manaus but worlds away. The gritty port city of over 2 million people is an eclectic mix of a colonial architecture, urban sprawl and hustle from hardscrabble touts trying to eke out a living. It reached its splendor in the 19th century when growing global demand for rubber brought throngs to the area to cut and gather sap from rubber trees. A beautiful opera house built during that time, which today hosts several shows each year, is the citys main tourist attraction.

As I chatted with Bohoka, a small boat pulled up on the riverbank. About a dozen members of the tribe, all dressed in slacks and T-shirts, got off carrying plastic bags. They disappeared into their huts and remerged a few minutes later wearing traditional clothes.

Bohoka explained they had gone to the city, or Manaus, to buy sewing materials.

Why couldnt they just wear traditional clothing there? I asked, somewhat jokingly.
Tributes have been paid to a Moreton-in-Marsh flight instructor who died in a light aircraft crash in Overbury last week.

John Smith, 52, who worked at Aeros Flight Training, died in the crash on Monday 8 January along with a 24-year-old man from Kuwait, a student with the company.

Nick Dunn, managing director at Aeros Flight Training, said: This accident has shocked and saddened everyone in the company. John Smith, the senior instructor at our Coventry business was highly experienced. He was very popular with both his colleagues and his students - enthusiastic, a great communicator and always ready with one of his famous jokes.

"The student onboard had been training towards qualification as a commercial pilot, intending to join an airline in the near future.

"We send our most sincere sympathies to the family and friends of both pilots.

"The cause of this crash is unknown and is being investigated by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB)."
His comments refer to an article released by New Zealand Herald which declares the nations top ten beaches.

Popular Eastern Bay of Plenty beach, Ohope Beach, did not make the cut.

When I saw the 10 finalists, I just laughed, says Tony.

My first inclination was to ask the SIS to investigate possible Russian vote-tampering, but the Herald itself admitted that it had completely ignored popular opinion in determining which beaches people could vote for.

Dont get me wrong  the finalists are probably all great beaches  but when you ask for reader suggestions and then discard the beach that has five times more nominations than any other, your credibility is shot to pieces right from the start.

He says in a nationwide AA online poll in 2014, Ohope beach was adjudged New Zealands Most Loved Beach.

Most people would have a view on what makes a great beach, but rather than leave the decision to the public, the Herald appointed three experts to decide on the 10 beaches people could vote for.

In my view, thats farcical. Kiwis vote with their feet and they dont need a so-called expert panel to tell them what can or cant be considered the countrys best beach, he says.

We have people who have come to Ohope Beach for their summer holiday every year for 30 years and more.

They keep coming back because Ohope has everything  11kms of beautiful sand; safe family swimming; a great surf break; heaps of kai moana; fantastic wind-surfing and stand-up paddleboarding; excellent surfcasting; and great cafes and shopping, all within easy reach.

Added to that is the fact that we have the best climate in the North Island. NIWA records show we have more sunshine hours than any other northern destination, by a considerable margin, virtually every year, which means you can be sure that you will have the best possible opportunity to enjoy the beach while youre here.

"So with all due respect to the beaches people can vote for, the Herald has my early nomination for the most meaningless reader poll of 2018.

He says the Herald could partially redeem itself by introducing a popular choice category, to give people an unconstrained opportunity to vote for the countrys real best beach.
A big low out in the Tasman Sea is looking pretty significant but it is going to weaken and fall apart before it reaches New Zealand - due to a big blocking high to our east.

The low will unravel and dump areas of very heavy rain, but also lighter drizzle, says WeatherWatch.co.nz.

Winds will be blustery for a time and while not likely to be damaging for most it could make camping in a tent a bit uncomfortable for the next 48 hours.

"Theres also some risks of minor damage to crops due to strong winds - but again damage shouldnt be much," warns the weather organisation.

"Humidity and rain are probably the main factors to watch, with sub-tropical air combined with daytime heating to boost the rain-clouds further. Humid air flows like this can create low cloud, drizzle and sudden heavy downpours, especially northern facing areas."

Western and northern facing regions of both islands may have heavy downpours, especially on Thursday as the remnants of this low move in.

The low falls apart by Friday.

WeatherWatch.co.nz says a cooler change arrives in the Central Otago area on Thursday with a chance of rain and a 10 degree drop in daytime highs for Central Otago and a drop of over 13 degrees in Southland.

Theres also a chance of rain for Southland on Thursday - very welcome news to those dealing with near drought conditions."
Roger Boaden is a cofounder of ECREU, a France-based citizens group which is championing the rights of British citizens abroad with regard to Brexit negotiations. ECREU belongs to British in Europe (BiE)- the umbrella group set up by Jane Golding, a British lawyer living in Germany, of which Bremain in Spain is also a member.

For 30 years Roger worked for former UK prime ministers Ted Heath and then Margaret Thatcher as their election campaigns manager and was the Conservative Party European elections officer for the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979.

Despite saying that he is critical of some aspects of the EU, Roger considers himself European. He says he is of the generation who helped to reconcile differences with Germans following World War Two and spent time in Germany before the Berlin wall was built as well as while it was still standing.

Michel Barnier told us his 'door is always open'. We haven't been able to get a meeting with David Davis

The next round of negotiations are going to be crucial in terms of recognition of qualifications and the self-employed

He moved to France with his wife 15 years ago and is considering moving to Spain. However, with uncertainty over rights post Brexit, a move from one EU country to another looks set to be complicated by the British government's plans for EU citizens living in the UK having to apply for 'settled status.'

We first (and last) spoke shortly after the referendum when citizens' groups were starting to mobilise. What has happened since then?

ECREU, along with other groups like Bremain in Spain have joined forces and now belong to the umbrella group, British in Europe. I am on the BiE steering committee and we have managed to meet regularly with European politicians, including Michel Barnier, who told us that his door is always open. Unfortunately we haven't been able to get a meeting with David Davis and have only been able to speak to junior ministers and civil servants.

We have been told that our rights as UK citizens living in the EU will be protected post Brexit. Does this give us some sense of hope?

There has been some progress, yes, particularly in terms of health care and pensions for those who are already retired. But figures show that over 70 per cent of UK citizens living in the EU are still working and the next round of negotiations, on trade, are going to be crucial in terms of recognition of qualifications and those who are self-employed. There is still a great deal of uncertainty.

You mentioned that you and your wife are considering moving to Spain.

Yes, we're 50/50 over the decision. As EU citizens we currently enjoy freedom of movement and the right to live where we want in the EU. However, with the potential for bilateral agreements between the UK and individual governments after Brexit, because of the UK's 'settled status' programme, it could well be a lot more difficult to move from one EU country to another. We could become landlocked. We'd have the right to reside in the country we're already living in, but moving to another could be very complicated.

With just over a year to go until 'Brexit Day' what are BiE's priorities?

To keep campaigning. Now that the negotiations are moving to trade there is a danger that citizens' rights will be sidelined and we can't allow that to happen.
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A 49-year-old Marion woman died after she was struck by a vehicle in downtown Marion this morning.

According to the Marion Police Department, at about 6 a.m. officers were dispatched to a wreck at the intersection of Main and Commerce streets. Upon arrival, officers found that a commercial vehicle had struck a pedestrian.

Marion Fire-EMS transported Pauline Angela Evans, 49, of Cougar Lane, to Smyth County Community Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 6:28 a.m.

The MPD, the Smyth County Sheriffs deputies and the Virginia State Police are continuing to investigate the incident.

At this time, the MPD said no charges have been filed, pending completion of the investigation.
Anxiety could be an early sign of Alzheimer's disease, a new study has found.

The study indicated that there is a link between increased levels of amyloid beta and the worsening of anxiety symptoms. It supports the theory that neuropsychiatric symptoms could indicate the early development of Alzheimer's disease in older people.

A team of researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital conducted the study, in which data of about 300 older people were analyzed. The scientists observed that the proteins linked with Alzheimer's were built in the brains of the people and they were more prone to anxiety.

Alzheimer's Disease

It is estimated that over 5 million people in the United States have Alzheimer's disease, which is a memory and brain degeneration condition, and the figures are only going to increase as the population ages.

Scientists are still not sure about the exact reason behind the mental disease. However, what they do know is that beta-amyloid, which are chemically sticky protein clumps attached to neurons, are a symptom of the condition.

The clumps, referred to as plaques, are said to interrupt brain signals that lead to memory loss and cognitive functions in Alzheimer's patients.

Link Between Anxiety And Alzheimer's Disease

Earlier studies have suggested that depression and other mental health changes might be signs of Alzheimer's before the memory starts to deteriorate. The new study, however, indicates that anxiety is the most closely related symptom.

The research team hopes that further study will bring about more information so that anxiety could become an early indicator to start observing patients for risk factors and early treatment of the disease.

The researchers, who published their study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, made a comparison of self-reports on 30 depression symptoms, including those linked to anxiousness, to brain scan images that showed protein plaque clusters.

The team analyzed alterations in both types of data for a span of five years and more to find that as harmful proteins clogged the brain more, anxiety also increased sharply than any other symptoms of depression.

"This suggests that anxiety symptoms could be a manifestation of Alzheimer's disease prior to the onset of cognitive impairment," said Dr. Nancy Donovan, the lead author of the study. 'If further research substantiates anxiety as an early indicator, it would be important for not only identifying people early on with the disease, but also, treating it and potentially slowing or preventing the disease process early on."

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Surfers are three times more likely to get Escherichia coli bacteria in their stomachs than those who don't surf, a new study finds.

The bacteria are considered to be resistant to antibiotics, which means that they were once easily treatable but now aren't.

Stomachs Colonized By Bacteria

Researchers chose surfers as their main subjects in the study because they were known to ingest sea water 10 times more than swimmers and beachgoers.

They wanted to test whether or not surfers are more likely than others to get infected by bacteria from polluted water, and if those bacteria are antibiotic-resistant.

In the new study published on Jan. 14 in the journal Environment International, researchers from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom brought in 300 individuals and took fecal samples from them for analysis.

Nearly 50 percent of the participants were known as regular surfers who surfed around the coastline of the United Kingdom. The surfers' fecal samples were then compared with those of non-surfers.

According to the researchers, the comparison was made in order to check if the stomachs of the surfers contained E. coli that can develop while an antibiotic was present.

Cefotaxime As Antibiotic

The antibiotic of choice was cefotaxime. It's an important medication that is commonly used to treat bacterial infections such as joint infections, pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and gonorrhea.

The medication is usually given either by injecting it into a vein or muscle. It used to work well in fighting off the E. coli bacteria but some have picked up genes that allowed them to resist the treatment.

Results Of The Study

According to the results of the research, 9 percent or 13 out of the 143 surfers in the study got the antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their stomachs in comparison with only 3 percent or 4 out of the 130 non-surfers.

This means that the bacteria could continue to develop even when they were treated with cefotaxime, according to the researchers. Also, they discovered that those who surf on a regular basis are four times more likely to harbor bacteria, which carry genes that can move easily.

Antimicrobial Resistance

According to the World Health Organization, there are few antibiotics currently in the development that can address the serious and growing threat of Antimicrobial Resistance.

"Antimicrobial resistance has been globally recognised as one of the greatest health challenges of our time, and there is now an increasing focus on how resistance can be spread through our natural environments," said Dr. Anne Leonard, of the University of Exeter Medical School and leader of the study. "We urgently need to know more about how humans are exposed to these bacteria and how they colonise our guts."

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Just as technology manufacturers and users are still reeling from the threat of Spectre and Meltdown, a new bug is reportedly affecting Wi-Fi networks.

Previously, reports from various users claimed that Google's Home Max is the cause of wireless connectivity blackouts in some homes. Initial investigations note that the search company's smart speaker creates a problem with TP-link brand routers. Other users narrowed it down to a specific model, the Archer C7.

However updated complaints from more users likewise include other brands like Synology, Asus, Netgear, Synology, Linksys, and more. Those affected reported a temporary loss of internet connection with various other details.

Speculation Of Possible Causes

Google might have a better chance of pinpointing the exact cause of the Wi-Fi issue if it was limited to the Google Home Max. Yet, it seems that other products from the search firm also exhibit the same problems with user's wireless routers.

The Chromecast 4K and regular models have been reportedly observed to encounter the same issue with wireless connectivity between the connected routers. Both Linksys and TP-Link likewise independently notified its customers that the apparent cause of these interruptions is indeed Google Cast devices.

Additionally, a few individuals similarly suspect that the Android Oreo update for some smartphones replicates the same problem.

Research Results

Due to the bevy of complaints from their users, TP-Link had its network engineers figure out the likely cause for loss of connectivity. Product experts from the router company cited that Google Home Max and other similar devices are indeed at fault.

The engineers noted that the Google devices involved reportedly broadcast large amounts of packets within a short duration. In theory, the amount of data received by the router floods its memory, which ideally requires a reboot to resolve connectivity problem encountered.

Vendors Take Action

Until Google pushes out a fix for the Home Max and other devices, router manufacturers issued firmware patches of their own. TP-Link reportedly released a beta firmware to mitigate the wireless blackout issue caused by the aforementioned devices.

Some users confirm that the patch solves their issues, while others continue to experience the same symptoms.

Google's Response

A number of vendors have reached out to Google regarding their findings. However, the company has yet to acknowledge that the Wi-Fi problem stems from its end.

Last year, there were some reports regarding the connectivity issues encountered by Pixel 2 and Pixel users. It appears that the firm's flagship smartphones had trouble communicating with mesh routers.

Whatever the reasons, analysts are confident that Google will come up with a fix soon.

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The Google Arts & Culture app is suddenly trending as users discover a new feature that matches people with their look-alikes in the world of fine art.

The feature is powered by facial recognition, which is the same technology behind security features such as Apple's FaceID, OnePlus' Face Unlock, and Windows Hello.

Google Arts & Culture App Surges In Popularity

The Google Arts & Culture app, which is more than two years old, offers several features such as visual searches for famous art pieces and virtual museum tours. Despite its age, the free app surged to the top of the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store due to a new feature that was launched in mid-December.

The feature allows users to take a selfie, which Google's visual search technology then analyzes. The app then looks through its database to identify the piece of art that resembles the user's selfie the most. The app indicates the percentage of similarity between the selfie and the artwork, with results varying among users.

Social media is now starting to fill up with the matches that users get on the Google Arts & Culture app's new feature. While some results are impressive, such as the one posted by comedian Kumail Nanjiani, some are downright hilarious, such as the one that gave a 100 percent match to a bizarre piece of art.

Hey this one ain't so bad. pic.twitter.com/er0FxZNVO8  Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) January 13, 2018

WOW this Google Arts and Culture app that matches your selfie to art is so accurate it's scary!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/Peiky9Qil8  emkateultra (@emkateultra) January 15, 2018

The Google Arts & Culture app is available in the United States, except for Illinois and Texas. There is no word from Google on when the app will be introduced to these two states and to the rest of the world.

Here's How The App's Selfie Matching Feature Works

After downloading the app, users can scroll down to the portion with the title "Is your portrait in a museum?" After pressing "Get Started," the app launches the camera to allow the user to take a selfie. Users can take as many selfies as they want at different angles, which may result in different matches each time.

To enable the trending feature, Google utilizes facial recognition, which examines the physical features of faces to distinguish people from one another. The technology detects faces in images, identifies the unique characteristics, then compares it to information inside a database. In the case of the Google Arts & Culture app's new feature, this database includes more than 70,000 works of art contained in 1,200 museums and galleries across 70 countries.

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With the flu season in full swing, a Texas family found out the hard way that Tamiflu can have some serious side effects: their six-year-old daughter tried to jump out of a window.

While every drug comes with various potential side effects, which may or may not manifest, the effects Tamiflu had on their young daughter was beyond anything the family could have imagined.

Flu Medicine Has Terrible Side Effects

According to a new report from local CBS 11 (KTVT) in North Texas, a six-year-old girl with influenza experienced strong side effects after taking popular flu medicine Tamiflu. The girl started to hallucinate and ran away from school, then tried to jump out of a window.

The girl was in her bedroom on the second story and used a desk to climb onto the open window. When her mother entered the room, the girl was about to jump. Luckily, her mother managed to grab her in the nick of time and prevent a potential tragedy.

Tamiflu Side Effects Can Include Psychosis

The parents took the girl to the hospital, where they learned from a doctor that in very rare cases, Tamiflu side effects can include problems with the nervous system, including psychosis. Dr. Glenn Hardesty, an ER physician from the Texas Health Prosper, acknowledges that such side effects are extremely rare, but not impossible.

"Less than 1 percent is what's listed in the data sheet," says Hardesty. "I've been in practice 20 years, and I haven't seen that particular complication."

The doctor further highlights that any drug comes with potential side effects. The girl's father, meanwhile, notes that 16 hours of relieving the flu symptoms are not worth the potential side effects his daughter experienced.

The family from Allen, Texas, wanted to remain anonymous, but they reportedly plan to file a complaint with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to hopefully prompt a more detailed investigation into Tamiflu. In the meantime, they encourage any parents to think twice and do their homework before giving Tamiflu or other drugs to their children.

What Is Tamiflu?

Tamiflu, also known as oseltamivir, is a neuraminidase inhibitor that aims to inhibit the flu virus' rate of reproduction. When taken early on, the drug can ameliorate flu symptoms. Amid various warning and precautions, the FDA prospect for Tamiflu lists serious hypersensitivity or skin reactions, as well as neuropsychiatric events.

"Patients with influenza, including those receiving TAMIFLU, particularly pediatric patients, may be at an increased risk of confusion or abnormal behavior early in their illness," notes the FDA, advising people to keep an eye out for any signs of abnormal behavior.

Tamiflu Reported Incidents Include A Dozen Deaths

As pointed out in Forbes Magazine, this is not the first time that people, especially children, have experienced severe side effects from Tamiflu. There have been a number of other cases in which kids and teenagers had nightmares, hallucinated, jumped out of windows, or showed other signs of abnormal behavior.

Forbes further highlights that back in 2005, the FDA studied reports of more than a hundred cases in which Tamiflu caused confusion, delirium, hallucination, and other types of abnormal behavior. Moreover, 12 children in Japan reportedly died after taking Tamiflu.

Another case report, meanwhile, described how a 22-year-old man who took oseltamivir suffered from suicidal thoughts, mood swings, auditory hallucinations, insomnia, and memory deterioration.

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It's no secret that China is tremendously strict when it comes to third-party companies, especially ones from America such as Facebook and Google, entering its shore. Both those aforementioned tech firms haven't had much luck in that department  Facebook is still banned in the country as our Google services  but at least one of them has found a way inside.

Google Finds A Way Inside China, Again

After eight years of absence, Google Maps is officially returning to China, or at least a China-specific version of the software.

As Nikkei reports, Google has released an iteration of Maps that's specifically optimized for the country. It includes a website, plus an app for iPhone and several other Apple devices. Whether there's also an Android version remains unclear, though. Google could simply make that available as a direct download from its site, as it did with its Google Translate app in March 2017.

According to Initial impressions of the Maps app for China, it seems Google partnered with Alibaba-owned AutoNavi to integrate map data, likely because China's geographical data is restricted. Special authorization from the right people are needed in order to access it. As for the navigation part of the app, Google Maps launches a third-party app from the same company.

Google's China Inroads

The release of the app comes after Google joined an investment in Chinese livestreaming mobile game Chushou earlier this month, as the new company seeks new ways to enter China, where its search engine is prohibited.

Google pulled Maps from China back in 2010, along with many of its services because it refused to self-censor its search results to accommodate China's rules and regulations for the internet. Since then, much like most other third-party companies, it has maintained a very diminished presence in the country, which is the world's biggest smartphone market.

Google launched an artificial intelligence center in Beijing this past December, another successful inroad for Google in the country. It marked the first machine learning research facility in Asia amid the company's search for local AI talent.

Nikkei notes the China seems interested in developing AI. Google is a major player in that department  many of its services, in fact, are powered by machine learning and AI. It also boasts TensorFlow, a machine learning library already used by many professionals in the field.

To rationalize that Google widening its presence in the country will lead to re-enabling its search engine, there is quite a stretch, as the company still has many hurdles to go through to get to that point. China, for instance, is the biggest challenge here, or more specifically, its attitude toward a free and open internet.

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LG has no plans to unveil a flagship phone at the MWC 2018 as Korean media reports indicated release date of the rumored LG G7 will be delayed.

Instead of March, the G7 will debut April this year as reports came out that LG intends to rework the handset and start from scratch. Earlier reports have suggested LG wants to share the limelight with Samsung's Galaxy S9 at the Barcelona trade show. It appears now the South Korean device maker is in no rush to release its next flagship bet.

The marching order from the top is to start over, providing strong hints that LG's 2018 lineup of flagship models will be pushed back. This means potentially delayed arrival not only for the LG G7 but also for the follow up to the LG V30.

"The G7 smartphone team of the company's mobile communications business was told to halt recent work related to development of the newest phone, and to review the new product from scratch," a report from The Korea Herald said.

LG Bogged Down By Internal Troubles

The news came out following the statement issued by LG Electronics CEO Jo Seong-jin at the recently concluded CES 2018 that the company is rethinking its smartphone business. LG, according to Jo, will not engage in a slugfest with industry competitors, particularly with Samsung.

Starting this 2018, LG's business plan is to launch fresh handsets as it sees fit. There is no intention to outrace Samsung, which is confirmed to introduce the successor to the Galaxy S8 series. It looks like LG will only unpack the LG G7 once the build, specs, and feature details are exciting enough to disrupt the industry, which explains the "start over" order handed down by Jo.

Rumors, however, persist that Jo's decision pointed to an upcoming recalibration of LG's smartphone business, which is believed to be losing money. Korean media reports have shown that the division has been operating in deficits, and by the end of 2017, the losses amounted to hundreds of millions.

LG seems frustrated that none of the G- and V-series flagship models it brings to the market clicked with smartphone users so far. Speculations are rife the company is looking to rebrand its smartphone offerings, indicating that when the 2018 flagships are unboxed, they will be flashing new brand names.

Whatever the label will be, the LG G7, when it hits the market on April 2018, is said to be fired up by Qualcomm's eight-core Snapdragon 845 SoC with 6 GB of RAM. The handset will continue to stun with an even slimmer screen bezel with an aspect ratio of 18:9. Running the G7 show will be Android 8.0 Oreo right out of the box but layered by LG's in-house UI.

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In what could be a scene taken out of science fiction, scientists from China suggested that the answer to the space junk problem is to blast the debris with lasers.

The accumulation of space debris is a growing threat, and there have been many proposals from various space agencies on how the issue can be addressed. Will China's plan to use lasers neutralize the space junk risk?

China Proposes To Use Lasers To Clean Up Space Debris

In a paper titled "Impacts of orbital elements of space-based laser station on small scale space debris removal," researchers from China's Air Force Engineering University suggested using lasers to blast space junk into smaller pieces that are less harmful to the spacecraft and satellites in space.

There are about 20,000 trackable objects classified as space debris, which include used rocket stages, old satellites, and fragments from other man-made objects. In addition, according to a NASA estimate, there are over 100 million pieces of smaller debris that are smaller than 1 centimeter orbiting around the Earth.

According to a simulation by the Chinese team of researchers, installing a laser station in space will be an effective way to clean up the space junk.

However, there are concerns on China's involvement in such a plan. In addition to the fact that China is one of the worst polluters of space, governments are getting worried that the country is apparently working on space weapons. These weapons may be used not just to clean space junk but also to take out satellites and spacecraft.

Measures Against Space Junk

Early last year, a mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to clean up space junk failed. The agency was planning to use an electrodynamic tether to bring all the space debris into a lower orbit. However, the cargo spacecraft that was supposed to perform the mission fell to Earth after delivering supplies to the International Space Station.

Another proposed method for solving the space debris problem was to use a robotic gripper with adhesives that are inspired by geckos.

While space junk continues to be a threat, spacecraft such as the International Space Station need to implement protection measures. The ISS received a new tool in December known as the Space Debris Sensor that will not only shield it from space junk but also analyze the objects that hit it. While the protection is important, analyzing the space debris will provide more information that will hopefully help lessen the risk of collisions.

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Machines can read better than humans. An AI learning model developed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba has surpassed humans in a reading test with a score of 82.44.

Machine Outperforms Humans On A Reading Test

A deep neural network model developed by the Institute of Data Science of Technologies, the research arm of Alibaba, outdid human participants in the Stanford Question Answering Dataset or Squad.

Alibaba's AI learning model that can read from paragraphs to sentences to words was based on the Hierarchal Attention Network, making it very similar to the natural human language.

"This is the first time that a machine has outperformed humans on a such a test," said Si Lou, chief scientist of natural language at IDST. Human participants in the reading test scored 82.304 based on the January 5 tests.

A similar technology from Microsoft Research Asia scored 82.640, also beating the humans in Jan. 3 tests.

Alibaba's result was officially registered by Squad on Jan. 11, a day ahead of Microsoft's, technically making the Chinese company the first to beat human scores.

"These kinds of tests are certainly useful benchmarks for how far along the AI journey we may be," said Andrew Pickup, a spokesman for Microsoft. "However, the real benefit of AI is when it is used in harmony with humans."

Squad Reading Test

Stanford University AI experts developed the 100,000 questions test to measure the ability of machines to process a large amount of information and answer them with accuracy. The questions are generated based on hundreds of Wikipedia articles. That way, the AI model can only supply specific and precise answers.

Squad is regarded as the most comprehensive and authoritative machine-reading gauge. Tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and Samsung are also using it to test if the machine learning models they built can answer questions from the data set.

Squad developer Pranav Rajpurkar of the Stanford Machine Learning Program described Alibaba's feat in the reading test as "a strong start to 2018" in terms of AI development.

Answering Machine

Using the said neural network that can accurately answer questions that offer clear-cut answers, humans intervention and input can be lessened in answering queries related to customer service. The learning model can identify questions asked by customers and look for the most relevant answers from a set of prepared materials.

Alibaba tested this AI technology on chatbot Ali Xiaomi used by retailers on the company's virtual stores, Taobao and Tmall. A similar technology that is also based on the network was used as well to answer voluminous inbound queries from customers during the November 2017 Singles Day sale in China. Alibaba raked in $25 billion in the said online shopping festival.

Natural language processing technology was the most dominant form of AI in consumer technology products with virtual assistant and voice activation features previewed during the CES 2018.

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This new paradigm of Drone-based inspections is helping industries improve efficiency and quality of data acquisition while increasing safety and speed of delivery. Although a new and emerging technology, (which is still evolving), in early 2018, most companies are not aware of the possible benefits they can achieve using small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) to inspect their assets.

Present Challenges of Traditional Asset Inspections

The first thing is to realize there are several challenges with traditional asset inspection methods. Most often, the boss is aware of the high costs, risks and the long time it takes to carry out a traditional inspection. Despite having this knowledge, the organization will most likely be looking at ways to improve on the methods, but rarely looking at drones as an alternative.

Already, there are several industries that are using drones to inspect a wide range of assets, including aerial photography, surveying, deliveries, asset inspections and more. Others are just starting, while the rest have yet to make the decision. While companies using the drones can quickly and safely produce detailed and accurate inspection data, the ones relying on traditional methods will find it hard to do so over the same period. The scope of drone use case applications will vary from one company to the other, but the building industry, energy, insurance, real estate and others with similar requirements are using drones to carry out a wide range of inspections. There are several benefits to using drones to perform activities, such as asset inspections, which are traditionally risky, costly and time-consuming. In addition, it replaces the traditional methods that are likely to produce inaccurate data due to human error and other factors.

Compelling Details and Benefits of Drone Inspections vs. Traditional Methods

The development of drones in the last few years is changing, which is enhancing the inspection process by making it safer, inexpensive and less time-consuming. UAV technology has many benefits; here are 10 compelling reasons for considering drones as an alternative.

1. Drones minimize the obvious dangers and health risks

Drones enable easy and safe inspections of tall and complex structures, especially the inspections of facilities such as oil and gas refineries, flare stacks, and pipelines. They eliminates the need for workers to physically access hostile environments, where factors such as height, wind, waves, weather, and radiation can lead to accidents or health issues. Drones can easily access difficult-to-reach areas while eliminating the need for a human to go there using the risky mechanical tools.

2. Collection of in-depth and higher detail data

UAVs equipped with obstacle avoidance capabilities are able to navigate very close structures, allowing them to capture minute details. They can take high-resolution images or 4K video that clearly show cracks, damage, misplaced wires and other defects at elevations and angles that humans cannot. This allows for collection of more comprehensive data without exposing the inspection team to risks.

3. Quick deployment or launch

Licensed FAA remote pilots can launch a drone inspection within a very short time upon request. Since it only takes minutes to launch a drone-based inspection, UAVs are suitable for both regular and emergency scenarios. In addition, drones are fast and capable of completing an inspection in 5-20 minutes. As such, an insurance company, construction engineer, lending company or prospective home buyer can easily request an inspection and get results in less than one hour.

4. Flexibility to suit a majority of inspections

Drones have the ability of high or low altitude inspections and come in various sizes, providing a wide selection to suit a variety of inspection needs. In addition, the flexibility and ease of customizing with a diverse variety of tools allows them to be equipped with endless applications. This is very useful for building developers and rooftop inspections. Drones can take photos, capture video, take thermal images, transmit data, and other functions that enable them to collect and share information that would take days using conventional means.

5. Easily shareable data

With standard software and analytical tools, images and other information collected from a project site can be used to generate standard reports that are easily shared across different sectors. The information can be customized for different industries, making it easier for professionals in any industry to easily interpret and share relevant data.

6. Use Drones for marketing and advertising

Other than inspections for maintenance and other purposes, drones can provide outstanding video footage for marketing initiatives. In real estate, for instance, high-quality images and cinematography will give potential investors, whether buyers or tenants, a better view of properties they are considering.

7. Little to zero downtime for equipment and systems

Most manual inspections require shutting down equipment or systems to avoid damage or injuries to the inspection personnel. However, drones can safely inspect complex systems, such as wind turbines, radars, communication towers and other infrastructure, while they are operating. This means that inspection does not interfere with services or production.

8. Ability to inspect difficult to reach and hazardous areas

Drones are making it possible for professionals to easily collect aerial data in places where it would be logically impossible. It is less risky and safer to use drones in hostile environments for applications, such as radiation monitoring, inspecting high-voltage lines, and other installations that can cause injuries or health problems. Since most of these applications must be inspected while still in operation, a manual process would require more expensive equipment and protection gear.

9. Low insurance costs

Manual inspections are risky and require paying insurance for inspectors and workers before carrying out the tasks. Insurance requirements for drones are minimal and mission-based, hence with much lower costs. In addition, the risks of injury is reduced dramatically in a drone-based inspection.

10. Save time and money

Drones minimize the high cost and time required to erect ladders, access towers, swing stages, aerial lifts, and other heavy equipment. In addition, you do not have to hire or acquire ladders, heavy equipment and large pickup trucks for every inspection. Since the job takes less time, it means that you can inspect more assets in one day.

Edited by Erik Linask
Southern University owes The Advocate and WBRZ-TV more than $13,000 in attorney's fees and court costs over a public records lawsuit the news organizations filed in August, state Judge Tim Kelley ruled Tuesday.

The Advocate and WBRZ sued the Southern University board of supervisors after the university rejected public records requests for documents related to an investigation the Southern University Law Center opened into Elder Law Clinic Director Dorothy Jackson.

Jackson drafted a will in 2016 for an elderly woman named Helen Plummer, which Plummer's family disputed after she died in March 2017. Plummer's family specifically questioned why the will left Council on Aging Executive Director Tasha Clark-Amar in charge of her estate. Plummer was a Council on Aging client, and her family accused Clark-Amar and Jackson of taking advantage of the 95-year-old woman.

Southern Law panel recommends one-year suspension for professor involved in Helen Plummer controversy A group of Southern Law Center faculty members has proposed stiff penalties, including a year off work without pay, for Dorothy Jackson, a pro

Though Southern Law Center opened its own probe into Jackson, the university argued that it could not release the reports about Jackson because of her rights to privacy.

On the day of the trial in August, Jackson's attorney waived any privacy rights and said they wanted the reports from Southern to be made public. Southern then agreed to release them without a full trial, and the news organizations received the reports.

Though Kelley said at the time that The Advocate and WBRZ would receive attorney fees, Southern challenged the request for them. Attorneys W. Scott Keaty and Joshua McDiarmid, representing the news organizations, said their work on the case cost $12,075 plus $1,066 in court costs.

"At the time that these records were obtained, the taxpayers had been paying a law professor at Southern not to work for four months," Keaty said Tuesday in court, referencing Jackson being on leave from the Southern Law Center.

Jackson is still on leave and a faculty panel recently recommended that she receive a one-year suspension without pay, lose tenure and be demoted in rank.

Law Center Chancellor John Pierre will make a recommendation to Southern President Ray Belton on what disciplinary action he thinks is warranted.

Jackson's attorney has decried the faculty panel's recommended punishments as draconian and vowed to fight them, while Plummer's family has complained that they do not go far enough.

Helen Plummer's family fires back with lawsuit against Council on Aging, Southern, others Helen Plummer's daughter filed a lawsuit Friday alleging theft, fraud and negligence on the part of the East Baton Rouge Council on Aging, the

On Tuesday, Southern's attorney argued that the university was not wrong for the position it took in withholding the records.

"Had we chosen wrong, there's no way to unrelease the records," said Winston DeCuir, Jr.

DeCuir also questioned why the attorney's fees were so high given that media law is one of Keaty's specialties, saying it appeared that some of the bills were unnecessary.

Kelley said he could understand that Southern was in a difficult position trying to determine whether to release the records. But he said Keaty and McDiarmid's work on the case went far beyond filing the lawsuit, noting that they had to respond to Jackson's intervention in the case, prepare for a hearing, prepare for cross examination, research the legal issues involved and more.

+3 Louisiana Inspector General investigating BR Council on Aging director, board member The state Inspector General's office has issued at least five subpoenas in an investigation into the East Baton Rouge Council on Aging's execu

He said Keaty and McDiarmid were working in a tight time frame to prepare for a hearing, and that their bills reflect it.

Kelley also cited a state First Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from 2016 in the Aswell vs. Division of Administration case that said the production of records after a plaintiff filed a lawsuit for them meant that the plaintiff prevailed in the lawsuit.

He agreed to award full attorney's fees and court costs to The Advocate and WBRZ.
A key hearing in the cases of a Baton Rouge man charged with murder, kidnapping, cruelty to a juvenile and drug offenses in separate 2013 and 2015 incidents was postponed Tuesday until March 7.

Curtis King, 27, is set to stand trial April 2 on second-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping and drug counts in the May 2015 slaying of 24-year-old Taylor Latham and abduction of her then-2-year-old daughter.

The postponement of Tuesday's scheduled hearing, which was in part weather related, could cause King's trial to be pushed back.

King also is charged with second-degree cruelty to a juvenile and drug counts in the October 2013 death of his 6-month-old son. He will be tried separately on those charges.

Coroner's officials concluded Aiden King died primarily due to an inability to breathe in an oversized bed, but they said there wasn't enough evidence to determine whether the death was a homicide or an accident.

Prosecutors have alleged in court documents that King was "breaking down a large amount of marijuana" and left his son unattended behind closed doors in an adult bed.

Several motions in the cases have yet to be heard, including a prosecution request to introduce at King's murder, kidnapping and drug trial evidence that he also faces cruelty and drug counts in the death of his son.

+2 Prosecutor seeks to use 'other crimes' evidence at Baton Rouge man's murder, kidnapping trial When Curtis King goes on trial in the 2015 killing of a Baton Rouge woman and abduction of her then-2-year-old daughter, prosecutors want to i

That motion now will be heard March 7. King's court-appointed attorneys vehemently oppose it.

"The State's motion is nothing more than a backdoor attempt to introduce inadmissible character evidence to prove Curtis King committed the current pending charges," his attorneys contend in an opposition filed against it. "One would think that with more than 42 state witnesses there would be no need for such tactics."

East Baton Rouge Parish prosecutors allege in their motion that King's motivation for kidnapping Latham's daughter in 2015 was to conceal the woman's death and to avoid facing additional charges "for the death of yet another child."

A grand jury declined to indict King on a second-degree murder charge in the death of his son. Throughout his short life, the boy suffered rib fractures and significant burns after being placed in scalding bath water.

Another motion to be heard March 7 is a defense request that King be tried separately on the murder, kidnapping and drug counts in the 2015 case. His attorneys claim the "cumulative effect of the evidence involving numerous counts" will make it impossible for him to receive a fair trial.

+4 Baton Rouge man seeks separate trials on 2015 murder, kidnapping and drug charges A Baton Rouge man accused of killing a woman in 2015 and abducting her 2-year-old daughter says he doesn't think he can get a fair trial if on

Prosecutors oppose any severance of those counts, arguing that King's alleged acts "are of the same or similar character or connected together or constitute parts of a common scheme or plan."

Latham's body was found in a car outside her Louisiana Avenue home the evening of May 4, 2015, with a bullet wound to the head, but prosecutors allege King killed her between the evening of May 1, 2015, and the morning of May 2, 2015.

Authorities have said King had an on-and-off relationship with Latham. Court documents allege he sent several threatening text messages to her in the hours before her death.

King, according to prosecutors, kidnapped Latham's daughter May 3, 2015. He was arrested three days later.

+3 Documents allege Baton Rouge man sent threatening texts to ex-girlfriend shortly before her slaying A Baton Rouge man accused in the May slaying of a woman with whom he had an on-and-off relationship sent several threatening text messages to 

King told authorities he found Latham's daughter inside her house and took her with him to rescue her.

King's live-in girlfriend at the time dropped the girl off May 5, 2015, at a women's shelter on Scenic Highway. She was not prosecuted.
Baton Rouge police are attempting to identify this man, who they say robbed a Monterrey Boulevard bank at gunpoint on Tuesday morning.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott plans to travel to Louisiana this week to try to lure businesses from here to his state.

The so-called domestic trade mission was announced in a news release from Scotts office Tuesday, in which he took aim at Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, Louisiana's unemployment rate and the state's fiscal challenges. Scott, a Republican, has been Florida's governor since 2011. Edwards, a Democrat, took office in 2016.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott plots domestic trade mission to lure away Louisiana businesses Florida Gov. Rick Scott has revealed that he plans to travel to Louisiana this summer to tell business leaders here how Florida is making it 

While we are fighting to cut taxes and make it harder for politicians to raise taxes in Florida, Louisiana is doing the exact opposite. In fact, for nearly two years, Gov. John Bel Edwards has been continuously working to raise taxes instead of reaching a long-term solution for their states financial crisis," Scott said in the news release. "With no income tax, a low business tax and a business-friendly environment, Florida is the perfect location for Louisiana business owners and families who want to keep more of their hard-earned money."

Facing a massive budget shortfall when Edwards took office, state lawmakers temporarily raised Louisiana's sales tax in 2016. The temporary tax hike is set to expire on June 1, prompting a push for another special session to address the looming $1 billion "fiscal cliff." Edwards and legislative leaders have not yet reached an agreement on the best approach. He supports efforts to bring in additional revenue to cover the gap.

Scott's news release doesn't offer a timeline or provide details about which companies he plans to target, but on Twitter he said it will take place this week. A spokeswoman said details are still being finalized.

Governor, we've turned this state around, and we'll be happy to show you how we've done it. But do us all a favor, call this what it is - a fundraising stop on another one of your campaigns. Louisianans would appreciate the honesty. https://t.co/ZdESXwkz8J #lagov #lalege https://t.co/5egcTC1xZH  Gov John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) January 16, 2018

Edwards' deputy chief of staff Richard Carbo said Scott is playing politics and pointed out his connections to Edwards' Republican predecessor, Bobby Jindal. Several of Jindal's former top aides went to work for Scott.

"Were happy to have him visit Louisiana and see for himself all that Gov. Edwards has done to turn this state around - record low unemployment, higher wages, historic economic development announcements and stabilized funding for higher education," Carbo said. "However, Gov. Scott should call this what it is - a fundraising stop on his yet-to-be announced U.S. Senate campaign. Louisianans would appreciate the honesty and hope that hell take his political contributions and leave."

Edwards has recently touted the state's unemployment rate, which at 4.7 percent is higher than the national average but is the state's lowest percentage since 2008. He has also set out to highlight news that Virginia-based DXC Technology will open a New Orleans office that will eventually bring 2,000 tech jobs -- one of the largest economic development projects in the states history.

"Instead of fundraising, wed recommend (Scott) spend time with the first responders we willingly dispatched to Florida last hurricane season when his state needed assistance," Carbo said.

Scott had initially planned a similar effort in 2016, but his trip was postponed because of a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that left 49 people dead.

Louisiana isn't the only state that Scott has targeted. He's previously led similar missions to California and New York City.
FILE - In this Nov. 29, 2017 file photo, Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, speaks during a news conference in Newark, N.J. The Trump administration says it's offering a path for states that want to seek work requirements for Medicaid recipients, and that's a major policy shift toward low-income people. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez) ORG XMIT: WX102
LaToya Cantrell, the first woman elected mayor of New Orleans, gives her acceptance speech to supporters at the Jazz Market in New Orleans, La. Saturday, Nov. 18, 2017. The election occurred a few months before the citys 300th anniversary, and Cantrell will be sworn in May 2018 during the citys 300th year.
In 1983, Ella Brennan gathered some of the top names in the American food world in New Orleans for an event that helped shape the contours of 
Robert Jones, the man who fought successfully to free himself from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, alleging prosecutorial misconduct, filed a federal court suit against the Orleans Parish District Attorneys Office on Tuesday.

Jones, 44, spent 23 years behind bars for a trio of crimes in the French Quarter in 1992, included a kidnapping and rape, the killing of a British tourist and a robbery.

During his years behind bars, Jones and lawyers at the Innocence Project New Orleans uncovered evidence that police had believed it was another man, coincidentally named Lester Jones, who committed the crimes. Prosecutors repeatedly failed to turn over information that could have freed Robert Jones, his lawyers said.

Although the District Attorneys Office never conceded Robert Jones innocence, it dropped all three cases against him in January 2017, citing the difficulty of putting on complicated trials decades after the fact.

+2 Freed Angola lifer Robert Jones returns to Orleans courthouse, this time to help others Robert Jones stood outside an Orleans Parish criminal courtroom one day last month in a dark suit and an ID badge as he huddled with the famil

Now Robert Jones is taking aim at the prosecutors who for years fought against his release from prison. He is hoping to win financial damages.

The lawsuit may be the most serious civil challenge to the District Attorney's Office since a 2015 lawsuit from Reginald Adams, who was wrongly convicted of a 1979 murder. Cannizzaro's office agreed to settle that suit for $1.25 million last year.

Robert Jones was wrongfully convicted and served over 23 years in prison for crimes he did not commit, as a result of repeated violations of his constitutional rights by the Orleans Parish District Attorneys Office, Robert Jones lawyers said in the suit.

He is being represented by attorneys Mark Cunningham, Alan Vinegrad, Erin Monju and Nina Morrison.

The lawsuit names current District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro as well as the office's insurers as defendants.

"We have no comment. We have not yet been served with the action," said Ken Daley, a spokesman for the office.

Robert Jones lawsuit repeats many of the claims he made in his successful effort to clear his name in Criminal District Court. Many of those proceedings centered on an April 6, 1992 robbery, kidnapping and rape.

Authorities said that a woman walking with friends was approached by a man who forced her into a car with a gun, took her into a building in the Desire housing development and raped her.

Eight days later, Julie Stott, a British tourist in town with her boyfriend, was shot and killed during a botched robbery on Chartres Street. The fact that a foreign tourist was involved meant the headlines stretched from New Orleans to London.

After a Crimestoppers tip, Robert Jones was implicated in the kidnapping and rape in what his lawyers call a flawed lineup.

His attorneys point out that the victim did not mention her assailant having gold teeth in her initial interview, despite Robert Jones having a prominent row of metal in his mouth. This fact was never disclosed to his defense team before his trial, where the woman did claim that her attacker had gold teeth.

Prosecutors also failed to tell Robert Jones defense lawyers that the womans attacker told her he was taking her to his neck of the woods. Lester Jones, the other man implicated in the crime, lived in the Desire housing development. Robert Jones did not.

Prosecutors also had to solve a problem with their theory of the case before trial. The car used in the kidnapping and rape belonged to Lester Jones. He was also found in possession of the womans jewelry.

So prosecutors told the jury that Robert and Lester Jones were friends and that Lester had shared his car  a 1980 burgundy Oldsmobile Delta 88, with a distinctive white top  with the other Jones before the kidnapping.

Lester Jones first told police that he knew the other Jones. Days before the trial, however, he recanted that claim in a conversation with Assistant District Attorney Fred Menner. The prosecutor made a note of that conversation but never told defense attorneys about it.

After Robert Jones was convicted in 1996, the District Attorneys Office maintained for nearly two decades that Lester Jones had linked the two men. It was not until June 2015 that it informed Robert Jones about the memo, which supported a later recantation Lester Jones made in court.

In Robert Jones case, defense alleges 'pattern' of misconduct under former DA Harry Connick Celebrity attorney Barry Scheck argued Friday that prosecutors engaged in a "pattern or practice" of misconduct under former Orleans Parish Di

At a 2013 hearing a former NOPD detective also testified that he told prosecutors before the trial that he had found no evidence the two Joneses knew each other. Another detective testified that year that investigators had concluded before Robert Jones' trial that it was Lester Jones who committed the kidnapping and rape and a string of other crimes in the French Quarter.

Robert Jones argues that all of the information that pointed away from him should have been handed over to his defense under U.S. Supreme Court guidelines. But none of it was, which he argued led to his wrongful conviction.

The state 4th Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that Robert Jones was indeed the victim of prosecutors failure to turn over exculpatory information in the kidnapping.

Robert Jones may face one of his largest stumbling blocks in the other convictions that followed the initial case. On the same day that he was to be sentenced to life in the kidnapping and rape case, he pleaded guilty to the fatal shooting of Julie Stott and a separate robbery.

He said later that he was "a young boy, confused, scared and afraid, charged with a lot of crimes that I did not commit. ... I was devastated and destroyed."

Prosecutors vacated the guilty pleas at the same time that they dismissed his indictment for the kidnapping and rape in January 2017. Still, they could use the fact that he initially pleaded guilty in the case in their defense against his new lawsuit.

Robert Jones hopes to paint a larger picture of misconduct under former District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., misconduct which he says has continued in a different form under Cannizzaro.

Robert Jones' lawyers say failures to turn over exculpatory evidence were widespread under Connick. His office repeatedly lost cases on appeal on the basis of such violations. One analysis has concluded that Connick's office failed to turn over favorable information in at least 45 cases, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit also claims that attorneys working under Cannizzaro, who took office in 2009, compounded the office's errors by failing to search Robert Jones' case file for information that could have helped him. Those attorneys repeatedly told courts that Lester Jones had never recanted before a 2007 hearing, when in fact he had done so in 1996, the lawsuit states.

Cannizzaro has been on the receiving end of a lawsuit over Connicks reign before. Former death row inmate John Thompson won a $14 million judgment over prosecutors failure to turn over information in his case. But the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 snatched Thompsons money away, ruling that he had not shown a pattern of similar violations.

Robert Jones lawyers hope that the new suit will be the one to prove that misconduct was rife in Connicks days.
If you've got a big and burly mate your friends have lovingly nicknamed Shrek, he could be about to score the role of his life.

Canberra's Free-Rain Theatre Company is staging a musical adaptation of the beloved modern fairytale of the same name and is looking for a Canberra man to play the cranky ogre made internationally famous by Mike Myers in 2001.

Director of 'Shrek the Musical', Ylaria Rogers, is looking for a rowdy bunch of Canberrans to perform in the show in October. Credit:karleen minney

The animated movie Shrek was released by DreamWorks in 2001, and also featured the voices of Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy.

The Canberra Shrek will need "to have charisma" says Shrek the Musical director Ylaria Rogers, as well as the ability to nail a Scottish accent, and be known as a master farter and belcher.
Eight months after being thrown a lifeline of more than $210,000, children's newspaper Crinkling News is no more.

The newspaper's founders, Saffron Howden and Remi Bianchi, issued a statement on Tuesday night to its loyal readers, subscribers and supporters that the publication will need "a much bigger business, government or philanthropy to take all the amazing things we have done together and keep the momentum going".

"We made every cent stretch as far as it possibly could," they wrote.

"But we are very sorry to say we cannot keep publishing the newspaper with the resources we have."
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has talked up the Snowy 2.0 hydro storage project. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Current SA treasurer Tom Koutsantonis has raised several concerns with the NEG, arguing that it doesnt give a big enough boost to renewables, and would do nothing to break up the power of the big "gentailers", who generate and sell electricity. "To proceed, the NEG would require unanimous support at COAG, so this policy is either years away, or wont happen at all," Koutsantonis said. Expect a long-running pitched battle if Weatherill and Koutsantonis are still about, and perhaps even if theyre not. Australia's emissions will continue to rise in 2018. Credit:Jessica Shapiro JLS In the May budget the Turnbull government is going to have to decide what to do about the Emissions Reduction Fund, the centrepiece of former prime minister Tony Abbotts Direct Action policy, which replaced his predecessor Julia Gillards carbon price.

The fund, which lets companies bid for public money to implement emissions-reduction projects, started at $2.55 billion, and there is about $260 million left. Connected to these decisions are questions over whether and how the funds "safeguard mechanism", which is supposed to stop the system being gamed, will be modified. Among the many criticisms levelled at the governments 2017 climate policy review, released with little fanfare the week before Christmas, was the proposal to make the already flexible mechanism even more flexible, so as to "reduce the administrative and auditing costs" for businesses. The governments climate review also says that in 2018 it will start the process of developing a long-term emissions-reduction strategy, to be finalised by 2020. It has promised to "consult widely" with businesses, the community, states and territories, and other G20 nations. Time will tell exactly how wide this consultation turns out to be, although anything would be better than the Trump administrations systematic removal of the term "climate change" from federal websites. The climate review suggests that the Turnbull government will push for more international carbon trading. An unlikely alliance has formed against the idea, consisting of those who view carbon credits as buck-passing, as well as Tony Abbott, who thinks Australian money "shouldnt be going offshore into dodgy carbon farms in Equatorial Guinea and Kazakhstan".

His stance has already been branded as nonsensical by the business lobby  who, it must be said, stand to benefit significantly from carbon trading. On the diplomatic front, the United Nations will hold a "2018 Talanoa dialogue" process, featuring a series of meetings in which major economies will come under pressure to upgrade their climate commitments to meet the Paris target. As journalist Giles Parkinson notes, Australia had probably thought that they could get away with no climate target upgrades until around 2025. In October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release a report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees  the more ambitious of the Paris Agreements twin goals  and the emissions pathways we would need to follow to get there. Expect climate deniers to get their retaliation in first. The next UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (number 24 in a never-ending series) will be held in December in Katowice, in Polands coal heartland.

So, prediction is very difficult, but most of us like to indulge. Reneweconomy asked Frydenberg, his opposite number Mark Butler, and the Greens climate spokesperson Adam Bandt what they thought was coming up. Frydenberg talked up "innovative projects" like this summers demand response trial and Snowy 2.0. Butler gloomily forecasted more policy chaos and renewables-blaming, while Bandt was sunnier, predicting that 2018 will be "the year of energy storage" as the economics for commercial and household batteries begin to stack up. Bandt also thinks the public debate will heat up as extreme weather hits, and the national security implications become (more) obvious. Well, it will be fun to watch whether the Minerals Council pulls its horns in under the threat of BHP pulling out. Early signs would suggest not.
"Much has been written recently about Americanisms that should be left out of our language," writes Peter Miniutti of Ashbury. "Macquarie Dictionary has named its word of the year as 'milkshake duck'. To start with, it's two words. Get rid of it before this year's dictionary hits the printing press." Joy Cooksey of Harrington prefers to tread softly: "In reality, isn't 'milkshake duck' just a downy imposter?"

While Susan Bradley of Eltham doubts Bring us in Good Ale (C8) was the only drinking song to be "belted out" in the foundations of the Opera House at that time, she commends the "choice of song for Lithgow High School's impromptu recital at the nascent Sydney Opera House" and thinks that "Paul Robeson beat them to 'earliest performance' with his performance there for the construction workers in 1960."

Graham Lum of North Rocks informs us that: "A lone wallaby crossed the Harbour Bridge on Tuesday, followed closely by police. It was wandering across the road, so may have been drinking."

Speaking of Pawn Shops versus Porn Shops (C8), Brian Pyrmont of Frenchs Forest says his "ex-de-facto-brother-in-law (now, there's a tag that not everyone can hang on to someone) and I, after a few Bacardi and colas on his part and few schooners of the delectable nectar on my part would launch into the 1950s classic: 'There's a porn shop on a corner in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania ...' We never did bother to check out the actual lyrics, we just liked it as we heard it."

Recent items on "risque literature" (C8) reminded Chris Hunt of Sunshine Beach when he was studying Criminal Law. "The lecturer told us the volume in which to find a particularly salacious case that he was discussing. He said, 'I can't remember the page number, but if you hold the volume up a few feet and drop it, it will open at the case'! For those who want to see if this still works, the case is R -v- Williams, and it is to be found in the volume, 1923 Kings Bench".
Perhaps when we have a treaty with the owners of the land, get rid of the Queen, stop obeying the US and grow up we could have something worth bleating about. I, for one, say don't bother to change the Australia Day date, just cancel it. Marilyn Shepherd, Angaston Opt for January 1 As a descendant of persons arriving in New Holland officially on January 26, 1788, I feel uneasy that this day is celebrated. Most First Fleet passengers would have rather remained in Britain among family and friends.

For them this day signified a traumatic separation. I acknowledge the very negative significance of this day for Indigenous inhabitants also. Perhaps we should celebrate Australia Day on January 1, the date the colonies joined to form the nation. A holiday over January 1-2 celebrating the New Year and Federation is as easy to swallow as a beer and a snag  as it extends the Christmas holiday break. Richard J. Hogg, Curtin Let's mark transition January 26 should be renamed Australian Citizenship Day. Until 1949 Australia was populated by British subjects (native born or by naturalisation) and citizenship was not formally recognised. The Australia Citizenship Act of 1948 established citizenship, to take effect from January 26, 1949  Australia Day.

As there is no doubt that all Indigenous Australians were "native born" British subjects they, along the rest of us (including me as a three-year-old), underwent the same transition, on the same day. I think this wonderfully inclusive change in how we saw ourselves is far more worthy of celebration that the introduction of an odious penal regime into a land free of such barbarities (and I write as one who numbers a convict as a direct ancestor). Ian Foster, Nicholls Seeking a voice Kenneth Griffiths (Letters, January 15) recommends a "proper treaty" with official political representation for Indigenous Australia. A fine idea  if that was what Indigenous Australians want. At Uluru, however, after months of widespread consultation, they asked for a "voice" to parliament (not in it), backed by a constitutionally supported advisory body. But that was too hard for the government, arrogantly knocking it down without even the barest consideration. And since then?

Nothing from the Prime Minister, except to berate a young, articulate Indigenous woman on Q&A for even daring to raise the topic. Furthermore, all he did on that occasion, and very rudely, was to put up the same red-herring arguments that the "voice" would morph into a third level of parliament and that there were already Indigenous MPs. Kenneth is at least being constructive, which is more than be said for Turnbull and his government. Eric Hunter, Cook The deal with pensions I believe Michael McCarthy is a little confused if he believes millionaires are receiving the pension (Letters, January 13).

The pension is means tested and anyone with assets less than $816,000 is entitled to a part pension, or a full pension if assets are considerably less. Harry Stutchbury was referring to pensioners with homes worth millions of dollars. The family home is not a part of the assets test so it is quite reasonable that someone living in a million-dollar home could receive the pension. Nobody of pensionable age should have to leave the family home, no matter it's worth. Robyn Lewis, Raglan, NSW Evading slower drivers

William Gray of Bungendore (Letters, January 13) is upset that slow drivers are making him late for work. He suggests that they are not complying with the police advice "stick to the speed limit". For Mr Gray's information the "speed limit" is the maximum allowable speed for the section of road in question. Some drivers may drive a few kilometres per hour under the maximum speed limit because of the current road conditions (slippery, bad visibility etc.) or because they are driving within their own capabilities. If Mr Gray finds himself held up by drivers not going as fast as he wants to travel I suggest he leaves for work a little earlier. Mike Reddy, Curtin

Speaking out important D. Hurst (Letters, January 12) says it is unacceptable for individuals to make harmful accusations "without fear of retribution if they cannot be proved in court". Wow! What a great idea. That should silence all the kids complaining about sexual abuse from clergy and others. So they don't have photographs. Go home you wicked child! And then the grizzlin' females trying to make trouble for their hard-workin' bosses. The women offer sex out of appreciation. That's fair. He gave her a job.

This thinking could make the male great again. A lot of guilty people go free for lack of proof but it seems likely crime and assault would be far more prevalent if victims were scared of suffering retribution for complaining as well as suffering the humiliation and hurt of the offensive conduct. Warwick Davis, Isaacs One tough farmer Re: "My head wouldn't stay up", (January 16, p9) about the 73-year-old farmer who, after breaking his neck, rode home one-handed while holding his head straight by the hair. They sure don't make them like that any more  and I'm not talking about the motorbike.

P. Turner, Yass, NSW Statue's darkest hour We continue to be reminded by story or by film that during World War II England was saved undoubtedly by Sir Winston Churchill, one of the greatest orators who has ever lived. Several decades ago there was a beautiful, life-size bronze statue of Sir Winston Churchill on Northbourne Avenue. Where has it gone?

Who had the temerity to remove it? Please may we have the said statue replaced, once again, in a prominent position in Canberra. Heather J. Robinson, Hawker Hold to lease Marion Davidson has it right (Letters, January 13).

If the Curtin shops leaseholder isn't abiding by the lease conditions (including the lease purpose) then the government can probably terminate the lease and resume the land. The previous leaseholder (Jennings Industries) of my property at Bruce had three leases terminated in 1984 because they didn't commence and/or compete the house construction within the specified time. However, because the government made a minor technical issue regarding the warning notices, Jennings sought and gained some later redress. Leaseholders need to be aware of this possibility and comply with the lease conditions. Greg Dunstone, Bruce

Rally against visit President Trump's visit to Britain has been cancelled owing to widespread public opposition to the invitation extended by a pliant Tory Prime Minister. The President's explanation for the cancellation is (typically) untruthful. Sooner or later the question of a Trump visit to Australia will arise. It would be disrespectful to all women and Australians of colour, and contrary to the wishes of many others, for such a visit to occur. We need now to develop sufficient public and media opposition to a Trump visit to head off any such move by the Turnbull government. Chris Smith, Kingston

Profits of parking Congratulations to Westfield Woden for running a successful car park rather than a shopping facility. Early in the day the Neptune Street parking station is now nearly full with the vehicles of Woden office workers enjoying discounted day-long parking. Shoppers struggle to find a spot. With all the talk about the decline of Woden, one might think that the proprietors of Westfield Woden would adopt parking policies supportive of retailers rather than office workers who doubtless spend a lot less, if anything, in the shopping centre. A major department store which relies on the Neptune Street car park to allow direct access for much of its clientele ought surely to be concerned.

Jeffrey Benson, Curtin Not so post haste It has been a long tradition of mine that I send Christmas cards not only to elderly relatives but to our friends aswell. Last year I posted the cards seven to 10 days before Christmas, accepting some overseas cards may arrive late but might very well sneak in on time. Last week I received a text from a friend in Ireland and a friend in Sydney to say they had just received our Christmas cards some 16 and 17 days after Christmas. It is disappointing that some of our relatives and friends may think we had forgotten them at Christmas time.

Given increasing competition from other courier and mail companies how can Australia Post continue to deliver such poor service? Rebecca Scouller, Barton Cash flows slowly There is another factor against the go-ahead for new, private-sector, coal-fired power stations in addition to those mentioned in Peter Martin's excellent article ("Why coal's feeling the heat", January 11, p18). That is the financial impact on these power-generating companies of the major negative cash flows over the initial several years when building a new coal power station for a billion or two dollars and then waiting perhaps a while longer for it to start generating a consistent positive annual return on the funds employed. The private sector was very content to let state governments carry this negative cash flow (probably justified and offset by political rather than financial benefits) by building such infrastructure and then later buying the fully functional, cash-flow-positive plants from these governments (always) desperate for a pile of cash.

When it comes to the major investment for a new coal-fired generating station, the alternatives of gas and renewables (solar and wind) require much less capital investment, can greatly reduce that long initial period of negative cash flows and are thus much more preferable investments for the private sector. Similarly, only governments are likely to fund hydroelectric plants due to the cost and time for construction, and airports are another major item of infrastructure, subject to even higher capital costs, with probably lengthier negative cash flow consequences, which would scare off the private sector. Chris Barnes, Kambah Refrain from blame Recent articles on the seaplane crash on the Hawkesbury point out that some second-hand parts were used in the rebuilding of the aircraft.

Rebuilding a structure or a machine with second-hand parts is, in engineering, not new. Take, for example, the failure of the high girders of the Tay Bridge that collapsed into Tay Firth while a train was crossing it, with a great loss of life. The bridge was renewed with recovered girders but doubledup. Another example was the capsized ferry boat Rodney during the visit of the American Great White Fleet in Sydney Harbour. An estimated 200 passengers were drowned. The Rodney was salvaged and continued to serve as a Sydney ferry boat under a new name.

She was modified to prevent overloading. So we must not blame second-hand parts for the tragedy but await the coroner's report when all aspects of the crash are known. Allan Asquith, Fellow Inst. Of Engineers, Fellow Royal institution Naval Architects, Hackett To the point OVERPAYMENTS NOT ON

With social security overpayments topping $16 billion it's time to review this welfare racket. To repay the money recipients may have to get a job; yes, horror of horrors, a job. Putting breeding before employment should be discouraged. How can parents support children if they are not working? If employed, two children is plenty, not six children in areas where there is little employment, which will see that next generation on the dole as adults. Adrian Jackson, Middle Park, Vic PUSHING BUTTONS An employee pushed the wrong button. It could happen to anyone, eh Mr President?

John Passant, Kambah DOESN'T ADD UP The Raiders Club is appealing against the $120,000 fine over problem gambler Professor Brown. That's a bit strange. After all, it could pay the fine and still be $106,000 in front from the Professor's losses. Dallas Stow, O'Connor NOT SO SOCIAL

Dreadful events like the recent suicide due apparently to "cyber bullying" remind us of the poisonous influence of the "social media". Alan N. Cowan, Yarralumla SOLUTION NEEDED Minister Dutton's comments "if people haven't integrated, if they are not abiding by our laws, if they don't adhere to our culture, then they are not welcome here" draws criticism from John Richardson (Letters, January 10). What's your solution, John? Greg Cornwell, Yarralumla

OUT OF CHARACTER Parliament House wants to source water from Lake Burley Griffin. One must really consider if we want to maintain such a Green Government. Plebiscite anyone? Pat Kelly, Monash HOSPITAL STAFF TERRIFIC I spent two weeks in the Canberra Hospital. I would like to say a big thank you to all the wonderful people involved in my treatment. The ambulance, nurses, doctors and staff were all terrific.

Mrs W. Monica Tiffen, Lyons POT CALLS KETTLE ... So, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has called his successor as mayor of the City of London, Sadiq Khan, "a puffed-up pompous popinjay". Just the pot calling the kettle black yet again. John Richardson, Wallagoot TESTS FIRST SLOW TV

The Scandinavians are claiming they originated the latest television craze, slow TV. Of course, the cricket-playing nations know this is rubbish. Watching Test cricket with the sound off is the original and ultimate slow TV. Keith Croker, Kambah Email: letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au. Send from the message eld, not as an attached le. Fax: 6280 2282. Mail: Letters to the Editor, The Canberra Times, PO Box 7155, Canberra Mail Centre, ACT 2610.
Radic was also supported by editors like Michael Davie  the man who gave Philippa Hawker a cadetship because he said he could see she would make a first-rate arts journalist, and who used to delight in the story of the London critic who dismissed the idea he should have reported a fire in a theatre with: "I'm your theatre critic, not your newshound."

Radic was also the theatre critic of The Age at a time when the arts were revered and its coverage not endangered. He travelled extensively  quite apart from the couple of years he spent in London. He would say with pride that he had seen Paul Scofield, the greatest King Lear of his generation, in that role; that he had seen Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind in As You Like It, which has a comparable reputation in the comic repertoire.

He would also talk about the glories of Anthony Hopkins as a media tycoon in Hare's Pravda; the achievement of Ray Lawler with The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and the later plays that formed the Doll trilogy; and would mention that both Joan Collins and Maggie Smith were a bit long in the tooth when they respectively did Noel Coward's Private Lives.

There was something very Australian about Radic's sense of the world elsewhere, listing his exotic travels in theatre from Hamlet on the battlements of a castle in Dubrovnik to the path he trod to the Kabuki-za in Tokyo. "I've sat in the open under a full moon," he said, "and watched the Ramayana in the forecourt of the great temple of Prambanan in Java."

For all his personal modesty, Radic could be tough about standards. The man who had seen the great Shylock of Laurence Olivier said once that Australians were often not very good in Shakespeare: they either did too much or too little.
What does it take to be a model? A good walk? A steely gaze? Something a little different to the norm?

All of the above, and when it comes to trying out for the David Jones Autumn/Winter launch, looking good in a suit doesn't go astray either.

A nervous wait before the David Jones model castings. Credit:AAP

More than 150 hopefuls lined Bourke Street Mall on Tuesday morning for an outdoor open casting for the department store's new-season launch, to be held in Sydney next month.

And it wasn't just for show, assured Teneille Oakley, David Jones' womenswear buying manager, who was on a panel with ambassador Jessica Gomes, Aje designer Edwina Robinson and production stylist Kirsty Barber.
The history of the US civil rights movement is an interesting example, because, like so many progressive movements demanding systemic change, it was not linear. It was messy. The riots that followed immediately after Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968 are now part of history. But at the time, black Americans were warned they were taking things too far.

Despite the fact that the Civil Rights Act had been passed in 1964, it had not prevented several states from refusing service to blacks, or desegregation of schools, or indeed, lynching of black children. The law had failed black Americans time and again, but when they rioted, they were told, basically, that they had set back the movement.

Meryl Streep's portrayal of Katherine Graham in Steven Spielberg's The Post has drawn critical praise, largely because of its parallels to the present moment. But what's interesting is how many times Graham is warned by well meaning men  Washington Post board members, New York Times executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara included  that her decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, (now considered by history to be a matter of course and a shining example of Girl Power), was considered dangerous, and probably too much for a woman to handle.

Margaret Atwood has made a career out of feminist fiction. The Handmaid's Tale, ostensibly about the slavery of mainly white women, is arguably her most famous work. Indeed, Atwood would not have drawn so much ire from angry twitter women if she had not written it. But here's the thing. Wealth, and fame do funny things to a person. It may not happen immediately, but gradually, your concerns, and the concerns of your other wealthy, friends, take priority over those not in your immediate view. I'm speaking of course, about privilege, and how its effects are so granular sometimes to be almost imperceptible.

Perhaps Atwood has momentarily forgotten how less than 20 per cent of sexual assaults on campus are reported to police. Perhaps she has forgotten that the legal system in wealthy, western countries is almost uniformly skewed toward the accused, (to say nothing of how rape victims are treated).
Two people have died and 10 others are injured after a major crash involving seven vehicles on the Newell Highway near Dubbo on Tuesday.

Nine ambulances and three helicopters were called to the scene about 12.30pm, with reports multiple cars driving southbound had collided with two trucks.

A man and woman, both in their 20s, died at the scene, while others had to be cut free from the wreckages of their vehicles.

NSW Ambulance Superintendent Kathy Golledge said the crash scene was "absolute carnage".
A spate of fatal truck crashes has "disturbed" NSW Roads Minister Melinda Pavey after a 45 per cent increase in deaths last year.

Her comments followed three deadly collisions in two days, including one on the Newell Highway near Dubbo on Tuesday in which a B-Double truck collided with cars and another truck at a stop-go sign, killing two people.

"I'm just so concerned and disturbed about the level of accidents involving heavy vehicles in NSW at the moment," Ms Pavey told the ABC.

"We've had six heavy vehicles involved in accidents in the past 24 hours which are going to destroy lives, destroy families."
A 16-year-old girl has been charged with the theft of a luxury car in Brisbanes east on Sunday.

A 31-year-old woman was sitting in her 2010 black A5 Audi parked on Wambool Street at Bulimba when a group of people entered the car and attacked her on Sunday evening just before 10pm.

An Audi similar to the one stolen.

The woman managed to get out of the car before the group drove off with the vehicle.

She suffered swelling to her eye and was treated at the scene by paramedics.
Those who commit violent crimes while on bail or parole could serve longer sentences than murderers if the Coalition is elected in November, legal experts say.

Opposition Leader Matthew Guy announced on Tuesday that he would ban Victoria's judges from giving concurrent sentences to people who commit serious violent crimes while on bail or parole.

Opposition Leader Matthew Guy said he wasn't interested in academics' views about the policy. Credit:AAP

Mr Guy said the state's Sentencing Act would be amended to keep the "worst of the worst" in jail for longer.

The change would apply to 11 violent offences, including murder, rape, one-punch manslaughter, intentionally or recklessly causing serious injury, aggravated home invasion, car-jacking and armed robbery.
A man has been arrested at gunpoint by officers near the MCG after driving erratically then ramming a police vehicle in a chase on Tuesday afternoon.

Officers swarmed on the man just after 4pm following reports he was seen driving erratically in a black sedan near the intersection of Wellington Parade and Powlett Street in the CBD, Victoria Police said.

Witness Alexander Hipwell estimated at least 15 police vehicles swarmed the scene, including critical incident response units.

Mr Hipwell was sitting inside the Laurent Boulangerie Patisserie at Wellington Parade-Powlett Street intersection when he saw heavily armed officers drag a Caucasian man from a stationary black Toyota Aurion.
A good Samaritan who had his new ute stolen as he rescued a child from a busy road in Melbourne's west says he wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

Aaron's ute was stolen while he rescued a child from a busy Maidstone road. Credit:Simon Schluter

The 39-year-old father and tradesman, who asked to be known only as Aaron, had just picked up a takeaway curry and was looking forward to a rare night at home alone on Tuesday when he saw the child running down the road.

It was just after 7pm on a busy stretch of Rosamond Road in Maidstone.

The boy, 12 or 13 years old, was sprinting through the middle of streaming peak-hour traffic, cars swerving and slamming on brakes to avoid him.
Custodial staff at Banksia Hill Detention Centre have hit back at claims made by at least two juvenile detainees that their treatment at the facility constitutes human rights abuses.

Amnesty International became involved in an investigation into the boys' allegations following the release of letters citing prolonged periods in solitary confinement, obscene threats by guards and the refusal of meals, visits and showers.

Banksia Hill staff have denied allegations of mistreatment of detainees. Credit:Greg Henderson

The organisation called for the immediate closure of the Intensive Support Unit (ISU) - in which the boys have been housed - at WA's only prison for juvenile offenders.

Amnesty's Indigenous Rights Manager Tammy Solonec urged a "full and thorough independent investigation" by the state government following interviews with both detainees.
Special counsel Robert Mueller. Credit:J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE "We've been cooperating fully with these ongoing investigations and encourage the committees to work with us to find an appropriate accommodation in order to ensure Congress obtains information necessary to its legitimate interests," she said. Mueller's grand jury subpoena is the first known to have been used by his inquiry to seek information from a member of Trump's inner circle. The special counsel's office has used subpoenas before to seek information on Trump's associates and their possible ties to Russia or other foreign governments. US President Donald Trump sits with Attorney-General Jeff Sessions during the FBI National Academy graduation ceremony in last month. Credit:Evan Vucci The subpoena could be a negotiating tactic. Mueller is likely to allow Bannon to forgo the grand jury appearance if he agrees to instead be questioned by investigators in the less formal setting of the special counsel's offices about ties between Trump's associates and Russia and about the President's conduct in office, according to the person, who would not be named discussing the case. But it was not clear why Mueller treated Bannon differently than the dozen administration officials who were interviewed in the final months of last year and were never served with a subpoena.

The subpoena is a sign that Bannon is not personally the focus of the investigation. Justice Department rules allow prosecutors to subpoena the targets of investigations only in rare circumstances. Another copy of the book "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff is sold at Barbara's Books Store. Credit:Charles Rex Arbogast Mueller issued the subpoena after Bannon was quoted in a new book criticising Trump, saying that Donald Trump jnr's 2016 meeting with Russians was "treasonous" and predicting that the special counsel investigation would ultimately center on money laundering. After excerpts from the book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, were published this month, Trump derided Bannon publicly and threatened to sue him for defamation. Bannon was soon ousted as the executive chairman of the hard-right website Breitbart News. Some legal experts said the subpoena could be a sign that the investigation was intensifying, while others said it may simply have been a negotiating tactic to persuade Bannon to cooperate with the investigation. The experts also said it could be a signal to Bannon, who has tried to publicly patch up his falling-out with the president, that despite Trump's legal threats, Bannon must be completely forthcoming with investigators.

Prosecutors generally prefer to interview witnesses before a grand jury when they believe they have information that the witnesses do not know or when they think they might catch the witnesses in a lie. It is much easier for a witness to stop the questioning or sidestep questions in an interview than during grand jury testimony, which is transcribed, and witnesses are required to answer every question. "By forcing someone to testify through a subpoena, you are providing the witness with cover because they can say, 'I had no choice - I had to go in and testify about everything I knew,'" said Solomon Wisenberg, a prosecutor for the independent counsel that investigated Bill Clinton when he was president. Significant grand jury activity may undermine the case that White House officials have made for months: that they believe the inquiry is coming to an end and are convinced that the President will be cleared. Mueller has told Trump's lawyers that he will probably want to question the President before the investigation concludes, but no interview has been scheduled. Bannon has limited first-hand knowledge about two key issues within Mueller's purview - the President's firing of James Comey as FBI director, a decision made without Bannon present, and the drafting of a misleading statement about the subject of the June 2016 meeting with Russians, in which they promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton. But even Bannon's second-hand knowledge could be used to draw a contrast with statements from people with first-hand knowledge whom Mueller has already interviewed. And Bannon was directly involved in a number of other major moments, including the decision-making around the firing of Michael Flynn, the President's first national security adviser, who was dismissed after he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about phone calls with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

Bannon also helped run the transition after Chris Christie, the outgoing governor of New Jersey, was fired as head of that team. And Bannon was the chief executive of the Trump campaign in October 2016 when WikiLeaks began releasing thousands of stolen personal emails from the hacked account of Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. In "Fire and Fury," Bannon was quoted by the author, Michael Wolff, as suggesting that Donald Trump Jr.; the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner; and Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman at the time, were "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" for attending the meeting with Russians at Trump Tower. Bannon said that he believed there was "zero" chance that the younger Trump did not take them to meet his father, who has said he knew nothing about the meeting. "The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor - with no lawyers," Bannon said in the book. Trump erupted in anger after the excerpts were published, calling Bannon "Sloppy Steve" on Twitter and saying he had "cried when he got fired and begged for his job." "Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone," Trump wrote. "Too bad!"

Days after the excerpts were published, a statement was issued in Bannon's name in which he tried to back away from his assertions in the book. He said that his reference to treason was aimed at Manafort, not the President's son. Bannon did not apologise, however, and though he had approved the statement, an associate sent it to reporters without his knowledge. The President appeared to ease his anger toward Bannon at the end of last week. When asked in an interview with The Wall Street Journal whether his break with Bannon was "permanent," the President replied, "I don't know what the word 'permanent' means." People close to Bannon took the President's comments as a signal he was aware that his fired strategist would soon be contacted by investigators. Trump has a history of reaching out to people he has fired, including those under investigation, directly or indirectly, as he did with Flynn after he was dismissed and before he struck a plea deal with Mueller's investigators. Bannon has hired William Burck of the Washington office of the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan law firm to represent him in the defamation threats from Trump and the congressional inquiries. Burck also represents several current and former administration officials who have been interviewed as witnesses by Mueller's investigators. Among them are the White House counsel, Donald McGahn II, and the former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

Later in the week, the House Intelligence Commitee panel will hear from former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, who served as Trump's spokeswoman during his campaign after a tenure with the Trump Organisation real estate business, is also expected to be questioned by the committee this week, according to a congressional source. Democrats on the committee have accused Republicans of rushing to wrap up the probe to help give the president political cover, despite their requests to interview more witness. Republicans have denied the charge. Meanwhile, a federal judge has delayed setting a trial date for Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who faces charges stemming from a Mueller's probe. Defence lawyers said the government had not produced all the evidence it gathered and they needed more time to study it and file motions.

"We have limited resources," Manafort attorney Kevin Downing said. "We're not big law firms." The government had sought a May start to the trial. But Judge Amy Berman Jackson said at Tuesday's hearing in the US District Court for the District of Columbia that a trial for Manafort and his business partner Richard Gates might not start until October. She admonished Gates and his lawyers for violating a gag order that prohibited discussing the case with the press after journalists were invited to attend a December legal defence fundraiser. She also agreed to release Gates from home confinement a $US5 million bond. He has to abide by a curfew and wear an electronic monitoring device. Manafort remains in confinement. Downing claimed that the judge inadvertently set Manforte's bond at $US17 million, instead of the agreed upon $US10 million.
Lincoln Premium Poultry, the company directly involved with providing chickens for the Costco/Lincoln Premium Poultry processing facility, is in the final stages of securing farming families to handle its growing operation.

Having the proper numbers of farmers to sustain the processing facility, scheduled to open in June 2019, is vital. Its the behind the scenes work that ultimately leads to thousands of Costco Wholesale shoppers leaving with one  or several -- $4.99 rotisserie chickens in their shopping carts.

To sustain the growing operation, consisting of roughly 120 four-barn setups, a sizable number of farming families -- around 125 -- are needed to manage the operations. The investment for a family electing to go with a four-barn setup is around $2 million, said Jessica Kolterman, who handles external affairs for Lincoln Premium Poultry.

Currently, Kolterman said that approximately 80 farming families are going through the process of receiving conditional use permits enabling them to erect barns on their property. To be eligible for a permit, applicants must score at least 75 out of 100 points on the Nebraska Department of Agricultures Livestock Siting Assessment Matrix, and meet several other specifications through the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality.

In late September 2017, Hooper resident Colton Schafersman became the first Dodge County resident to receive approval from the Dodge County Board of Supervisors to erect four barns  three rooster and one hen  on his property.

While some may find it a bit surprising that Dodge County only has one farming family fully through the process, Kolterman said that this is simply how the process works. Barns will continually be built by need leading up to the processing facility's grand opening.

Schafersman, she said, will be dealing largely with pullet houses, where day-old chickens are purchased from Aviagen  the worlds leading poultry breeding company  and put into the pullet barns for 22 weeks.

Those are the babies that become the breeder for the breeder houses that will lay eggs for us, said Willow Holoubek, grower engagement manager for Lincoln Premium Poultry. Then after 22 weeks we catch them and we take those female and male chickens to the breeder-- or hen houses.

While in the hen houses, the chickens roam free due to the need for fertilized eggs, and these houses contain one flock per year.

They are in that house for 45 to 47 weeks, and their job is to lay the fertilized eggs, Holoubek said. So we gather fertilized eggs in that house and bring them to our on-site hatchery at our complex, hatch those eggs, and we get the crossbreds that are meant to be good at being a broiler chicken.

Following hatching, baby chicks are transported to broiler houses where they will develop for approximately 42-44 days. These chickens, weighing approximately 6  pounds, will then be transported to the processing facility where they will ultimately become rotisserie chickens.

Kolterman said approval for permits comes in waves, not one just directly after the other. Permit application is strategically planned so that certain barns will be ready for operation when needed.

Farmers building pullet barns, for instance, are going through the process of getting approved perhaps a little more quickly because they are the first link in the barn chain. The plan is to have barns fully built within the next two years, Kolterman said.

As we build up and ramp up our production schedule into 2019, the barns will come online as we need them, in the time frame that we need them, Kolterman said.   And the goal is to do it in a way that you dont have a bunch of barns sitting around empty. A farmer gets his everything checked off and then he gets his birds placed, so theres not this long gap where the farmer is paying interest on a building that doesnt have anything in it yet.

The growing operation spans throughout 13 Nebraska counties encompassing an approximately 60-mile radius. In Dodge County, six to eight farming families are committed to having poultry barns on their land, Kolterman said.

We are not ready to put them through the process yet because we are not to the point where we want to get their barns built yet, she said. With Colton, we were to that point because he is a pullet, I believe, and therefore his barn is going to be one of the first barns built, which is why he went through the process so early.

The majority of barns built will be broiler barns, she added.

Following the 2018 Corn Expo held Jan. 4 inside of the Christensen Field Main Arena, a growers meeting was held at the L.A. Fireproof Door where several farmers learned more about what a growing operation consists of.

It went really well, Holoubek said. We didnt have a huge number of people but I was able to garner three new growers from that meeting. So it was very successful.

Farmers still interested in learning more about what a growing operation would mean for themselves and their families are still encouraged to contact Lincoln Premium Poultry. Kolterman can be reached at 402-641-8471, and Holoubek can be reached at 402-936-4959.

At the end of the day, we have growers from all over the country who have expressed interest in coming to grow in Nebraska because the contract is so great, Kolterman said of the 15-year contract term. But we are committed to making sure that every single Nebraskan has that opportunity first, so that is why we are talking to anybody with any interest before we look at the list from outside the region.

The window, however, is closing quickly.

We truly are trying to set the goal of having all of our growers signed before spring planting, Holoubek said. So the opportunity is still alive, but its coming to a close, quite frankly, because we are on the tail end of it.
Laura Blankenship

Dec. 20, 1943Jan. 5, 2018

A note from Teddy Blankenship:

I lost my partner, Laura, Jan. 5, 2018, at Nye Legacy, Fremont.

Laura Jane Melia was born in Baltimore, Maryland, Dec. 20, 1943, to Leo Patrick Melia and Alice Isabelle Wimsett. Leo immigrated from Ireland, one of three brothers. One brother, Adrian, was killed during the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916. Laura loved her Irish roots and always ate European style as her father did. Marched in all the Baltimore and Omaha St. Pattys Day parades.

Laura graduated from Bon Secours School of Nursing as an RN and worked in the pulmonary unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She met me in Baltimore while I was attending my Union School. Laura and I were married in the old Baptist Church in Tekamah, May 5, 1973. Our first home was an apartment above Florence Rasmussens home. Laura made lifelong friends in Burt County.

We purchased 80 acres with an old farmhouse west of Tekamah on Highway 31. We made our home there and she enjoyed the country life. Hoeing beans and taking care of her animals with the help of her friends at the Red Barn and raising her special pets, King the pony, Homer the calf, Lady Jane the wolf and Smoki the husky. Laura was the one who ran the home and took care of business while I was away. She said there is good in everyone if you look hard enough. That was Laura.

Laura and I moved to north of Arlington, to a home of 17 acres. Lots of nature and she loved it. Laura made lifelong friends there as well.

Laura suffered a massive stroke Oct. 22, 2017. Laura fought a hard battle with the neurosurgery and ICU at UNMC, the rehab at Madonna Lincoln and rehab at Nye Legacy Fremont. Laura suffered another bad stroke Dec. 31, 2017, and passed away Jan. 5, 2018, at Nye Legacy.

I will always be thankful for those two-plus months I got to spend with my partner, together struggling to make her life full. Laura donated her body to the Anatomical Board of Nebraska for the students at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Creighton University Medical Center. No surprise, that was Laura.
The Sugar Tax: A Tax On Taste?

Steve Perez of Global Brands looks at how the incoming Sugar Tax could impact on consumers and producers alike

Steve Perez Global Brands

A major concern for the drinks sector in 2018 will, undoubtedly, be the impact of the sugar tax coming into force in April.

I think most would agree that the health issues surrounding sugar are important. But the new levy essentially amounts to a tax on taste.

It needlessly punishes drinks manufacturers  many of whom are UK-based small and medium-sized businesses. It makes it more difficult for them to meet consumer demand for new and natural flavours.

Its bad for customers, bad for businesses, and bad for the economy.

Whatever your view, the fact is the Sugar Tax is coming. Our soft drinks and mixers range, Franklin & Sons, is one of the many UK brands that will be affected. Weve had to put a lot of time and effort into how we can change the range without impacting the taste and our commitment to using natural flavours and ingredients that prove so popular with Franklins & Sons customers.

Thankfully for us, only a small number of Franklin & Sons products fall into the high tax band and 40 per cent of the range is completely exempt (containing less than five grams of sugar per 100ml). However, its still a shame that people who like one flavour of drink will have to pay more for this than say another flavour that contains less natural sugar. People are being penalised for their taste preference.

For the products set to be hit by the tax, we had to put a plan together. Our approach wasnt rooted in how to reduce exposure to the tax. Instead, we stayed true to our customers by putting taste first in whatever decision we made.

The whole Franklin & Sons range was developed to provide adults with a premium, natural flavour. We simply wouldnt switch to using artificial preservatives and sweeteners. Our customers dont want this.

In fact, our own market research has discovered that between forty and fifty per cent of drinkers are willing to pay more for a premium taste and natural flavours.

For us, losing the unique and natural flavour that customers expect poses a far greater risk than having to marginally raise prices in line with the tax.

Where we were able to reformulate without detracting from the taste profile of our drinks, we did. But we refused to make any changes that compromised the flavour. For us, and our customers, quality will always trump price.

Were sorry to fans of our Ginger Beer who may be paying a little bit more for the drink they love next year. But hopefully they will agree with us that the small increase is better than sacrificing the taste profile they expect from our product.

For many soft drinks brands there is a difficult balance to be struck between compromising taste through use of artificial sweeteners and avoiding a price increase that turns away customers.

The true impact for them, and the UK businesses that sell their products, might not become clear for some time. The same can be said for whether well see the sugar tax deliver its perceived health benefits.

16 January 2018
The Bush School of Government and Public Service will host former White House Director of Asian Affairs Victor Cha this week for a discussion on the future of U.S.-Asian alliances.

Cha served from 2004 to 2007 in the George W. Bush administration. He was responsible for relations with Japan, North and South Korea, Australia and New Zealand and also served as the president's top adviser on North Korean affairs.

The event, which will be Wednesday in the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center, will be sponsored by the Institute of International Affairs and feature Cha presenting a lecture: "Is the American Alliance System in Asia Becoming Obsolete?"

A reception will begin at 5 p.m., with the lecture set to begin at 5:30 p.m. For more information or to register for the free event, visit bush.tamu.edu/scowcroft/events/cha.
Classes at Texas A&M University will start on time Wednesday, campus officials announced Tuesday.

Blinn College announced early Wednesday that classes at all campuses would start at noon.

The Texas Department of Public Safety said all agency offices in the area would open to the public at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

The Navasota school district announced that schools will continue to be closed on Wednesday and that all extra-curricular activities are canceled.

The Iola school district posted on their website that due to a power outage in the area and on campuses that classes are canceled on Wednesday.

The Bryan school district will start school two hours late on Wednesday, school officials have announced. Harmony Science Academy in Bryan will also have a two-hour late start.

The Snook school district will start at 10 a.m. Wednesday. Buses will run two hours late.

The Bryan Adult Learning Center will be closed on Wednesday.

Central Church of Christ Mother's Day Out and Preschool will open at 10 a.m.

The College Station school district will start on time Wednesday.

In Bryan, officials said morning pre-K classed would be canceled. All bus pickups, school start times and employee arrival times will be two hours later than normal.

A recorded phone message to parents said the decision was made to allow students and teachers to arrive at school during the daylight.

In its announcement, the district said school officials reached the decision after driving area roads and consulting with local agencies and emergency management officials.

School campuses across the Brazos Valley were closed Tuesday as the area braced for a winter storm that brought icy conditions.
November 6, 1920 - January 12, 2018

Alice Virginia Wilson was born November 6, 1920 on a farm near Sunbury, in Delaware County, Ohio.

Her parents were Verne Wilson and Mary Grace King Wilson. Virginia grew up on a farm near Good Hope in Fayette County, Ohio.

She graduated from Wayne Township High School in Fayette County, and attended The Ohio State University in Columbus. Virginia married Lt. Robert B. Schwart, October 21, 1942 in Williams, Arizona. They were married for 64 years. After World War II, Bob and Virginia had three children, Robert B. Jr. (Bud), Marilyn Ann, and Joanne Lynn. From September 1953 to June 1959 the Schwart family lived in Columbus, OH.

While living in Columbus, Virginia was a homemaker and a nursery school teacher. In 1959, Bob, Virginia and family moved to Urbana, Illinois; Virginia remained in the Champaign Urbana Savoy area for nearly 50 years.

From Summer 1968 through Summer 1970, Bob and Virginia lived in Utter Pradesh, India. In 2009 Virginia moved to Bryan, Texas. In Urbana, she continued as a homemaker and a nursery school teacher. Later, she worked as a teacher's aide for the English Department at Urbana High school. Besides her family and cooking, Virginia enjoyed sewing and playing her electric organ.

In retirement, Bob and Virginia enjoyed ballroom dancing and travel. They had visited most of the United States, several Canadian provinces, and over 15 countries. They participated in several ballroom dancing travel tours including a ballroom dancing river cruise down the Danube River.

Virginia was preceded in death by her parents, her brother Vernon, her bother Laurin, her sister, Marilyn Mallow, her husband, Bob, her daughter Marilyn Ann, her daughter Joanne, and a daughter in law Nancy.

Virginia is survived by her son Robert Jr. (Bud), and daughter in law Sandra Lewellen, four grandchildren, and their spouses, nine great grandchildren, three step grandchildren, and their spouses, and six step great grandchildren. She is also survived by eight nephews and nieces, and their spouses, and numerous grand and great grand nephews and nieces.

A memorial service will be held Friday January 19, 2018, 2:30 PM in the chapel at Arbor Oaks Crestview MRC 2505 E. Villa Maria Rd., Bryan. Cremains will be interred in Wayne Township Cemetery (Good Hope), Washington Court House, OH.

In lieu of flowers memorials can be made to the charity of your choice, or Crestview Retirement Community Foundation, Bryan TX, First United Methodist Church, Bryan, TX, or Hospice Brazos Valley, Bryan, TX.

Express condolences at CallawayJones.com
Lets face facts: Our president holds racist views.

They hit the headlines again with reports, first in The Washington Post, that Donald Trump railed Thursday against immigrants from s---hole countries such as Haiti, El Salvador and in Africa and called for taking more people from Norway, which is nearly 90 percent white.

But those who have been paying attention already suspected the darkness in Trumps heart.

It should have been obvious from the despicable things he said about Mexican immigrants.

It should have been clear from his anti-Muslim rants.

It seeped through in his reaction to the deadly march in Charlottesville, Va., putting white supremacists on the same level as civil rights demonstrators.

And now its emerging again in the debate over Dreamers and Salvadorans who have been protected from deportation. Trump says he wants an $18 billion wall on the border with Mexico and an end to the visa lottery and chain migration.

His entire immigration policy seems to have the goal of reducing immigration from non-white countries and somehow boosting immigration from Europe. Trump says he wants to put America First in all matters. But this isnt the America that many of us cherish  the nation of immigrants, of the Statue of Liberty.

Advocacy groups for immigrants condemned what Trump reportedly said. [Editors note: The president denies he used the offensive term and some participants in the meeting say they did not hear him use it, although others say they did.] Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, tweeted that the presidents comments are further proof that his Make America Great Again agenda is really a Make America White Again agenda.

The White House issued a statement that didnt deny his slur, but defended his stand on immigration. Early Friday, Trump, himself, issued a denial in a series of tweets, though its difficult to take him at his word given his track record of lies. The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used, the president tweeted. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made  a big setback for DACA!

Later Friday, Trump signed the proclamation for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Reading from prepared remarks, he called the civil rights icon a great American hero who preached racial equality. He refused to answer questions about the uproar, including whether he was racist. To say the scene was jarring doesnt begin to capture how bizarre it was.

This is beyond the daily drama and craziness coming out of this White House, and is already hurting the U.S. around the world. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said Trumps vile comments only make the jobs of Americans stationed all over the world harder  soldiers, diplomats and businesses.

We all need to stop pretending that there are no consequences when the most powerful person in the world espouses racist views and gives a wink and a nod to the darkest elements in our society, Feinstein said in perhaps her toughest statement yet on Trump. If the president cant control himself and lead this country with the authority, dignity and leadership it requires, then he shouldnt be the president. Theres no room for racism in the Oval Office.

Yet the sad truth is that all this actually may solidify Trumps support among some in his base  the one-third of Americans who apparently will stand by him no matter what he does or says, no matter how outrageous or unfair or damaging.

For me, however, the conclusion is inescapable. Hes a stain on the presidency. Hes a demagogue. And he very well could be a full-on racist.

Its terrible. But it would be even worse if we ignore it.

Foon Rhee writes for the Sacramento Bee.
DAKOTA CITY | A South Sioux City mother was sentenced to nearly a year in jail Tuesday for keeping her children in a home littered with trash, rotten food and cockroaches.

District Judge Paul Vaughan sentenced Jennifer Corrin to 90 days jail on each of four counts of misdemeanor child abuse and ordered the sentences to be served consecutively, or one after another, for a total sentence of 360 days.

Corrin will be given credit for 187 days spent in custody since her arrest.

Corrin, 42, had pleaded no contest to the charges in November in Dakota County District Court. As part of a plea agreement, lawyers were left to argue whether Corrin be sentenced to 75 or 90 days on each charge.

Corrin was arrested in July after police responding to a call at her home in the 300 block of First Avenue found her and her five children, then ages 5 to 18, living in a home reeking of rotten food.

Police observed cockroaches on the walls, old food containers, rotten food, pizza crusts, dog feces, piles of dirty clothes and open bags of trash throughout the house.

Officers found only a few pieces of inedible food inside the refrigerator and three small bags of macaroni in a cabinet.

"No child deserves to be in that type of environment," Assistant Dakota County Attorney Samantha Hargrave said when asking Vaughan to sentence Corrin to consecutive 90-day jail terms.

Corrin's attorney, Louvontree Hunter, asked for 75-day sentences, to be served concurrently. He told Vaughan that Corrin had been cooperating with caseworkers prior to her arrest and she had just lost her food assistance card.

Her children also suffered from mental health issues and they had not been cooperating with keeping the house clean, but a change in medication has improved their conditions, Hunter said.

Corrin was convicted of two counts of child abuse in 2015 in a similar case in which her children were living in filthy conditions. She served more than seven months in prison after violating her probation.

Vaughan mentioned that conviction, and said it was ultimately Corrin's responsibility to clean the house.

"I'm really somewhat shocked on the condition of your home the date the police were called," Vaughan said in reference to photos taken inside the home.
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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The former Pac-Kit plant on Chestnut Street in South Norwalk has been acquired by a local developer who had previously sought to develop a mix of residential and commercial uses on the street.

An entity called SoNo Wharf has taken over the Pac-Kit building at 57 Chestnut Street along with two adjacent parcels. Developer Keith Brown of RBA Properties is listed as the managing member of SoNo Wharf, with Brown not responding immediately to a query from Hearst Connecticut Media. The properties were previously owned by Vernoy Properties, a Greenwich firm listing Roy Brown as its manager.

The Pac-Kit building at 57 Chestnut St. dates back to 1910, totaling more than 40,000 square feet of space and located in a designated enterprise zone that bestows tax incentives for manufacturers, distributors and other eligible businesses.

Pac-Kit Safety Equipment assembled first-aid kits at 57 Chestnut St., with a predecessor companys history having laid claim to a minor footnote of fame in supplying kits for polar and wilderness explorers of the early 20th century. Pac-Kit sales totaled $5.4 million in 2010, its final full year in business before its $3.4 million sale the following year to Fairfield-based Acme United, which itself makes first-aid kits for schools, offices and other workplaces.

Acme United shut down the Chestnut Street facility in 2015, exiting a lease and moving the work to Vancouver, Wash., at a cost of more than 30 local jobs. In 2016, the AMEC Carting waste disposal company proposed using the Pac-Kit property to store trucks and waste containers, with area residents protesting the proposal and the Norwalk Zoning Commission ultimately rejecting it.

RBA Properties and its construction affiliate Condon Brown Builders have a track record of both building and preservation in South Norwalk  and notably, in the same development. RBAs existing Haviland Gates town houses are nestled between historic homes that were preserved on Haviland Street, one of them having been relocated from South Main Street to make way for the construction of the citys police station.

Brown has previously sought to develop portions of Chestnut Street via a separate company called SoNo Metro in partnership with Bruce Beinfield of Beinfield Architecture.

South Norwalk has seen extensive residential development the past few years, with new projects including F.D. Richs SoNo Pearl on Washington Street; the SoNo 19 Day apartments from Spinnaker Real Estate Partners; and additional units to come via Trinity Financials Washington Village project currently under construction; F.D. Richs 123 Water Street apartments; and the SoNo/One apartments proposed by M.F. DiScala on Bates Court near the South Norwalk Transportation Center.

Robert Koch contributed to this report.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
WATERLOO | Waterloos police chief will be donating a kidney to a friend of a friend.

Just one, Chief Daniel Trelka said Tuesday.

The procedure is scheduled begin Wednesday at Froedtert Hospital in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, area.

Im a little nervous, but my mindset is there, said Trelka, who in the past has donated plasma.

The organ donation plan started awhile ago when a retired police officer from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where Trelka had been police chief before coming to Waterloo, fell ill and needed a replacement.

Trelka, 53, had worked with the officer and applied to be a donor, which involves a battery of tests.

During the process, the retired Sturgeon Bay officer got better and no longer needed a kidney. So Trelka said he decided to go ahead with the donation away way, after learning that a friend of a friend had the same need.

For a guy my age, Im in excellent health  I figured what the heck, Trelka said.

The procedure had originally been scheduled for around Christmas. Then it was pushed back to Jan. 9 and again postponed until Wednesday, Trelka said.

The operation and recovery are expected to take him out of action for about five weeks. Maj. Joe Leibold will be acting chief, and Trelka said he will keep with developments through email.
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NORWALK  State Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff invited members of Norwalks Haitian-American community to raise the Haitian flag outside his home Tuesday morning in solidarity against divisive talk about immigration from the White House.

Norwalk is our home, weve been here for a long time, said Guy Bocicaut, a Haitian-born real estate broker in Norwalk. Were proud to be part of the Norwalk community, but in short, the way I would summarize it is Haiti is our mother, the United States is our wife, and we do not believe in divorce. And no word from any president, from any politician, will turn us away from the United States, because we recognize the collective goodness, the collective good will of the American people, which is separate from any political party.

More News Haitian community fights back after Trumps comments

Bocicaut was among two-dozen people to gather outside Duffs home after controversial remarks were attributed to President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., last Thursday.

During a discussion about whether to protect immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African nations, Trump asked lawmakers, why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? according to a lawmaker quoted by The Washington Post.

The statement  since denied by Trump  has fueled debate abroad and in the U.S. about his stance toward non-white immigrants.

Ive been here since I was 10 years old  since 1970  and Ive never been threatened before like this, said Gerard Azor Jr., assistant chairman of the United Haitian-American American Society of Fairfield. Since this guy got in office has been unbelievable.

Duff and Norwalk Police Officer Max Sixto, who came to the U.S. from Haiti as a child, raised the Haitian flag alongside the American flag in the front yard of Duffs home on Toilsome Avenue.

We live in a very diverse community, one where we respect everybody, we respect everybodys culture, our differences and the similarities that we have, Duff said. Were all fortunate to live in a city like Norwalk and a state like Connecticut and a country like the United States of America. But we need to make sure that if somebody, or some country, we stand up shoulder to shoulder with each other and that we continue to work to break down any kind of barriers of racism, and basically continue to be one country.

Duff said he will fly the Haitian flag outside his home for the next week.

Haiti, a Caribbean island nation whose population now totals nearly 11 million people, mounted an anti-slavery insurrection and declared independence from French colonial rule in 1804. The Haitian flag, which carries a palm tree set against a red-and-blue background, symbolizes independence from France.

In 2010, the island suffered an earthquake that killed more than 100,000 people and sent others abroad, including to the U.S.

Connecticut has the seventh largest Haitian population in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Mayor Harry Rilling, state Rep. Christopher Perone, Common Council members Gregory Burnett Sr. and George Tsiranides, Norwalk Democratic Town Committee Chairman Edwin Camacho, Norwalk NAACP President Brenda Penn-Williams, Norwalk Federation of Teachers President Mary Yordon, Norwalk Human Relations Director Adam Bovilsky, and representatives of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Rep. Jim Himes offices also attended the flag-raising, which included the playing of a recording of the Haitian anthem.
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NORWALK  Trinity Financial, the Boston-based developer charged with rebuilding Washington Village, plans to begin the second phase of the project by early fall.

The Norwalk Common Council this month laid the financial foundation for the work by approving a tax abatement agreement similar to that in place for phase one.

We are very appreciative of the action the Common Council took  to approve the real estate tax agreement for Washington Village Phase Two, said Michael Lozano, senior project manager with Trinity Financial. This agreement is an important piece of the overall financing package for the second phase of the project that we are continuing to assemble.

The tax agreement is intended to attract financing for the project.

While many variables remain, construction on phase two will start this summer or early fall and wrap up in spring 2020 if all goes according to plan, Lozano said.

Phase two of the Washington Village Transformation Plan will build a new 85-unit building on the south side of Raymond Street, between Day and Water streets.

Norwalk Finance Director Robert Barron outlined the tax agreement terms in a memorandum provided to the council. The terms for the phase two agreement are the same as those approved last year for phase one: tax rates are calculated at $1,000 per unit in each apartment units first year, followed by 7.25 percent of the prior years Effective Gross Income in years 2-4, and 8.5 percent in the prior years Effective Gross Income in years 5-15.

I believe that the Washington Village Redevelopment project will be a great benefit to the city by replacing a distressed area with a new mixed income community, Barron wrote. The city is not collecting property tax on these properties currently so this contract, in whatever form you choose to approve it, will not only benefit the citys redevelopment goals, but will also increase the tax base.

The Norwalk Housing Authority is rebuilding Washington Village under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Developments Choice Neighborhoods Program. The goal of the program is to build high-quality, mixed-income housing, provide children and families with educational and other services, and to spur public and private investment. A $30 million federal grant is helping fuel the plan.

Trinity Financial and general contractor Dimeo Construction Co. broke ground on phase one  80 units in two new buildings at 13 and 20 Day St.  last January and expect to complete the units this spring.

Were looking forward to the opening of the first phase, said Norwalk Housing Authority Executive Director Curtis Law. Things are going well.

The larger Washington Village Transformation project calls for razing Washington Village and its 136 apartments and building 273 apartments in five new buildings. The new complex will be a mixture of workforce, public-housing and market-rate apartments.
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Tim Herbst hasnt always been a political foe of Stamfords Andrew McDonald, the governors chief justice pick.

When it looked as if Bridgeport might renege on the terms of a land swap with Trumbull to build the Fairchild Wheeler Multi-Magnet School, it was McDonald who helped settle an impasse between Herbst and his longtime adversary Bill Finch.

At the time in 2012, McDonald was Gov. Dannel P. Malloys general counsel, Finch was Bridgeports mayor and Herbst Trumbulls first selectman.

Finch balked at giving up 20 acres of land for a Trumbull greenway initiative that was home to a city parks department garage and office space.

I wanted to try to make the deal better for Bridgeport, Finch recalled Tuesday. Andrew said, A deals a deal and youve got to stick with it. 

Herbst publicly thanked the governors office for interceding in the border dispute at the time.

I want to thank Governor Malloy, Andrew McDonald and Christopher Drake of Governor Malloys Office, Graham Stevens from the Office of Policy and Management, officials from the (state) Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, as well as our town attorneys in finalizing the terms of this lease agreement, Herbst said. I am confident that the Trumbull Town Council will recognize the hard work and diligence of our state and local officials in completing this lease agreement.

That stands in stark contrast to Herbsts recent criticism of McDonalds judicial and legislative record, in which he called on the General Assembly to reject Malloys pick to lead the seven-member state Supreme Court.

Herbst, who is one of a dozen GOP gubernatorial hopefuls, said his prior praise of McDonald wasnt contradictory. He said that the parks department garage at the center of the dispute still hasnt been transferred to Trumbull, and that Finch and McDonald were in cahoots dating back to their time as state senators.

Shortly after I praised Justice McDonald for his involvement as legal counsel in the land transfer between Trumbull and Bridgeport  a decision that was unanimously blessed by the Connecticut General Assembly, Bill Finch reneged in bad faith, Herbst said. Justice McDonald reversed his position in favor of Mr. Finch as soon as his former Senate colleague was looking for a favor. This reversal happened as soon as politics entered the equation. This is illustrative and emblematic of the concerns I have raised. A person that is this political does not have the unbiased nature required to lead the states top court.

McDonald, who is poised to become the first openly gay chief justice in the nation if he is confirmed by the Legislature, declined to comment. Hes been an associate justice of the high court since 2013.

Finch, who was ousted by fellow Democrat Joe Ganim in the 2015 Democratic primary and is the new executive director of the Discovery Museum in Bridgeport, said McDonald was an honest broker in the land deal.

He is a man of utmost integrity, Finch said. I cant say that about everybody involved in the process. Thats the kind of person I would love to see running our state Supreme Court.

Herbst stood by his criticism of McDonald, saying that the justice also should have recused himself from ruling on the constitutionality of the states death penalty, a repeal that he advocated for when he was in the Senate.

twitter.com/gettinviggy; nvigdor@hearstmediact.com; 203-625-4436
MASON CITY | A Mason City man was arrested Monday after allegedly threatening a woman with a gun in an apartment.

Brandon Lee Hadacek, 27, is being held in Cerro Gordo County Jail without bond.

Mason City police were dispatched at 5:58 p.m. Monday to an apartment in the 1600 block of 10th Street Southeast for a report of a man threatening a woman with a handgun.

According to the criminal complaint, Hadacek was possession of a .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol and allegedly pointed it at the woman to intimidate her.

Officers made contact with the people in the apartment, the Mason City Police Department said in a news release. Court documents said that when an officer made contact with Hadacek at the front door, Hadacek allegedly attempted to discard the firearm from his waistband and drop the firearm behind the door.

Hadacek was arrested shortly after.

Mason City Fire medics assisted at the scene. The woman appeared to have no serious injuries, police say.

A search warrant was executed at at the apartment. Police say they found marijuana in Hadaceks bedroom as well as a glass pipe with white powder residue, multiple syringes and a glass bong filled with water and residue, court documents said.

Hadacek was charged with felony possession of a firearm by a felon and going armed with intent. He was also charged with misdemeanor false imprisonment, possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia.

No court date has been set.
STAMFORD  A judge has rejected a 54-year-old former South Norwalk restaurateurs pleas for a second chance.

Annie Gramson, the former owner of Sweet Lucy Lynns on North Main Street in Norwalk, was sentenced Tuesday to serve two years in jail for violating the probation for three misdemeanor convictions.

Gramson told Judge Gary White she tried to adhere to the rules of her probation.

I have tried to be cooperative and I have apologized for any earlier lack of compliance and I am asking the court to please consider giving me another chance as I have been nothing but compliant since I have been violated, she said.

Gramson was given a two-year suspended jail sentence after a jurys conviction for leaving her 4-year-old son sleeping in the car while she went shopping at the Ridgeway Shopping Center in 2013. The suspended sentence also included convictions for criminal mischief and disorderly conduct she picked up in Norwalk around the time her restaurant closed.

Gramson, who has a promoting prostitution and money laundering convictions from New York on her record, told White her 8-year old son needs his mother and she needs to keep working to provide a proper education for him.

I find it ironic that you ask me to prioritize the needs of your son. I would have thought you would be the one to prioritize the needs of your son, White said.

He said Gramson received a suspended sentence for her convictions and she was asked only to do a number of very simple things.

Because she was living in New York when she was convicted, Gramson was allowed to transfer the probation to New York. But White said Gramson got into a silly argument with the probation authorities and was kicked out of the New York program.

White said Gramson then refused to find housing in Connecticut in a timely manner. He said Gramson also refused to participate in drug evaluation before her probation was violated.

You said, Im going to jail because Im not cooperating. Thats what you said. I didnt say it, White said, before handing down the entire two-year suspended sentence.

jnickerson@stamfordadvocate.com
WILTON  Award-winning author Sujata Massey will visit Wilton Library on Wednesday to discuss her new book, The Widows of Malabar Hill. The talk will take place in the Brubeck Room from 7 to 8:30 p.m at 137 Old Ridgefield Road.

Inspired in part by the woman who made history as Indias first female attorney, The Widows of Malabar Hill is a richly wrought story of multicultural 1920s Bombay, as well as the debut of a sharp and promising new sleuth. Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her fathers law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a legal education from Oxford, Perveen has a tragic personal history that makes womens legal rights especially important to her.
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WILTON  The project to mend the accident-prone Grumman Hill Road intersection may be one of many casualties in the states battle to get its finances under control.

Claiming poverty and imploring the General Assembly to allocate needed money, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy slammed the brakes on $4.3 billion worth of planned transportation projects last week, including the $2.6-million renovation of the troublesome intersection in Wilton.

The announcement by Malloy and Connecticut Department of Transportation Commissioner James Redeker on Wednesday drew immediate response from Wilton officials and residents alike.

First Selectwoman Lynne Vanderslice encouraged the state legislature to develop a solution as soon as possible, calling the intersection project critical to Wilton's economic health. The Grumman Hill Road intersection is home to Wiltons largest employer, ASML, which leads to a high volume of traffic during peak commuting hours.

Transportation infrastructure improvements are critical if the state is to effectively address our need for more business activity and improve quality of life in Wilton. Residents and businesses in this area have waited too long for this project, said Vanderslice.

According to DOT data, there have been 65 accidents at the four-way intersection over the past three years. Most of the crashes (32) were rear-end collisions, which Scott Bushee, a DOT project manager for state highway projects, said likely resulted from the lack of a left-turn lane.

To alleviate the accidents, the DOT proposed widening the west side of Route 7, with sidewalks being installed on the east side of Route 7. The traffic signal for the intersection was also set to be replaced so as to better accommodate the proposed left-turn lanes.

In December, the DOT held an information session on the project in which dozens of residents voiced overwhelming support for the proposal. Resident Ross Tartell complained that he, like other neighbors, often send visitors the back-way home, which takes significantly longer, just so that they can avoid the troublesome intersection.

While the news from the state was a setback for like-minded neighbors, Tartell said he would wait and see what comes to transpire.

There are things that are in our control and there are things that are not. And so, the state will work its magic and then well know what we need to do. Until we know whats going to happen at the state level, I dont really want to make a statement in terms of an opinion. But, you know where I sit, I want that intersection fixed, Tartell said.

State Rep. Gail Lavielle, R-Wilton, said she was not surprised by Malloys action given that Redeker last fall predicted armageddon if the state didnt find money for transportation projects.

Im not surprised but Im certainly not happy, because transportation infrastructure is a fundamental priority for the state, said Lavielle, a member of the General Assemblys Transportation Committee. But you have to decide within that area what is most important, what is essential for safety and for keeping the systems that we already have operating.

State Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, also a member of the Transportation Committee, said sustaining momentum in infrastructure investment will prove difficult given Malloys announcement and Redekers plan to deal with the states cuts.

Everything he (Redeker) proposed sounds like very bad news, Steinberg said. We need to have a serious conversation (on the transportation committee) about the best choices given constrained resources. We need to continue to make these infrastructure investments. Its important to address Fairfield Countys infrastructure improvement needs because it remains the economic engine of the state. Fairfield Countys infrastructure needs are the states needs.

Steinberg said increased traffic and ailing infrastructure are making Fairfield County less attractive to potential residents. I wish my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would know how important it is to invest in infrastructure.

Hundreds of projects postponed

The cuts announced last Wednesday are across the board and impact communities across the state. They include postponing work to widen I-95 between Bridgeport and Greenwich to relieve congestion and adding lanes on I-84 in Danbury.

A $20 million project to construct a new Merritt 7 train station is off the table, along with plans to repave and make bridge and safety improvements to the Merritt Parkway.

Even routine highway maintenance and transportation aid to cities and towns is jeopardized. The state earlier in the week proposed raising Metro-North fees by 10 percent this year and cutting back on branch lines and other services.

It wont end, it will get worse unless the legislature does something, Malloy said.

The governor painted a grim picture of the state of transportation in Connecticut and the toll its taking in terms of jobs and economic development.

You cant get through Fairfield County to get to the rest of the state, Malloy said. From Greenwich to Bridgeport it can at times take two hours. Hartford to Stamford takes two and half hours now. The problems in Fairfield and New Haven counties, and the problems that will play out in Hartford and Waterbury, will cripple our economy. People are refusing to come to the state because they dont believe the state will do whats right for transportation.

Still, the governor refused to endorse highway tolls as a source of hundreds of millions of dollars in new annual revenue for the state. But he conceded the idea will come up during the legislative session that convenes next month.

In a pickle

The governors message drew mixed reviews, with some Democrats endorsing his message and Republicans casting blame on Malloy.

Governor Malloy continues to act as if the states transportation funding problems came out of nowhere, said Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven.

But this is not a surprise, Fasano said. Over the last four years alone Gov. Malloy and legislative Democrats took $164 million from the states special transportation fund to balance their budgets. Gov. Malloy then authorized a transportation spending plan he knew couldnt be supported by the fund.

Fasano added Malloy and the Democratic majority are trying to use the problem they created to force the legislature to approve new taxes and more burdens on commuters. That has been their game plan all along.

Malloy, who spoke before Fasano was asked for comment, anticipated the criticism from the GOP. They have given ridiculous plans, he said.

The state is in a pickle because it put itself in a pickle, Malloy said. When Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey were investing mightily in transportation, Connecticut was whistling by the cemetery.

Lock box

Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, said he favors creating an independent transportation authority that would concentrate on fixing the states roads and bridges. The authority would be able to sell bonds and install tolls if warranted.

It takes the politics out of it, Duff said. This goes back to decades of neglect on our transportation system.

Duff also favored a measure that will be before voters in November authorizing a constitutional lock box on transportation funds. That lock box would prevent lawmakers from raiding the Special Transportation Fund.

State Rep. Tony Guerrera, D-Rocky Hill and co-chairman of the legislatures Transportation Committee, said the cupboard is bare and urged his colleagues to fund transportation by authorizing highway tolls.

Without a dedicated, stable stream of revenue to the Special Transportation Fund, our infrastructure will continue to rot and decay, Guerrera said. We sit at the precipice of a transportation tragedy that can be avoided by investing in roads and bridges. We must act immediately in the 2018 legislative session and institute tolls or another revenue stream to avert the oncoming crisis.

State Sen. Toni Boucher, R-Wilton and a co-chairwoman of the Transportation Committee, took a different view.

We have put numerous solutions on the table and they ignore it, Boucher said. And they go back to toll and taxes and mileage taxes while they raid the Special Transportation Fund. He spent more money than the STF had.

Don Shubert, president Connecticut Construction Industries Association, said the transportation cutbacks announced Wednesday mean fewer jobs.

I know one contractor who is considering leaving the state, Shubert said. There is plenty of work surrounding us. A lot of Connecticut workers are down in the Tappan Zee bridge or up in Springfield. They wont come back unless there is long term work here. It will present some challenges for us.
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WILTON  In the last three decades, Arthur Lipner has made his mark in the music world as an internationally renowned percussionist and composer. Since he was 14 years old, he has performed in 25 countries, played on almost 50 albums and presented hundreds of workshops at universities and music schools worldwide.

And on Feb. 9, the Wilton musician will make his highly anticipated return to Weston High School for a jazz benefit concert, after graduating in 1976.

Lipner will be joined by several other alumni whove also pursued music careers.

Some of us that will be on stage have become quite successful in the business, Lipner said. And we want to share our excitement, that began at the high school and has moved through decades of our professional careers, with the community.

Lipner will also share the stage with Weston High Schools jazz ensemble, wind ensemble and chorus, as well as a few special guests. They will perform some of his original compositions, such as Mallet Fantasia, which he co-wrote with fellow Wilton musician Jens Wendelboe about a decade ago.

He is especially excited about this portion of the concert, as the arrangement has only been performed with a wind ensemble and choir one other time at the world premiere in Wisconsin, Lipner said.

Ive traveled a lot and do these types of concerts all over the world but rarely in my neck of the woods, he said.

The bulk of the program will consist of Lipner playing the vibraphones and marimba  instruments he has mastered and has helped include in jazz and popular music. Lipner will bring his own instruments to the concert, since they are still a bit of an anomaly today, he said.

What people can expect is a very unusually wide spread of styles on vibes and marimba, Lipner said. The context of styles are summarized by my experience since I left the high school land in my travels for my musical interests.

Overall, in addition to fundraising, Lipner hopes the concert will introduce the community to new, unique sounds as well as engage them in his artistic vision. This describes the motivation behind any of his performances and projects, such as the Wilton Steel Community Band, a music group inclusive of all ages and abilities that he started in 2010.

Stephen Blinder, a senior at Weston High School, met Lipner through the band when he joined during its first year. Having played with Lipner for years now, Blinder said the benefit jazz concert Feb. 9 is a night not to be missed.

I know the audience will not only be amazed by Lipners virtuosity but also his ability to make you feel at home and at peace through music, Blinder said.

To play with Arthur, whos gone on to be a jazz legend  thats something very special and unique for me, he added.

Tickets are $15 for general admission and $50 for VIP Meet and Greet group rates. Tickets at the door are $20. For advance tickets, call 203-291-1640 or visit whscompany.com. Online sales end two hours before showtime.

Talking Sticks, a documentary Lipner was involved in, will also be screened at the high school on Monday, Feb. 5.

skim@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2568; @stephaniehnkim
Events like the All-City Honor Band are rewarding for clinician Bill Kellett, who led the high school students throughout the day Monday at Grand Island Senior High.

Its enjoyable to just watch them in a days time get to know each other and then become better as an ensemble and be able to perform in the evening, Kellett said. Its just a rewarding experience.

About 70 students from Grand Islands four high schools took part in the All-City Honor Band. The day concluded with a concert at 7 p.m. Monday night.

All-City Honor Band is something of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day tradition in Grand Island. The annual event has been around since 2002. Many of the gatherings have taken place on the holiday in the middle of January, partly because clinicians are usually available that day.

The students prepared four pieces for the concert, one of which was about 10 minutes long.

At lunchtime, Sarah Sugita of Heartland Lutheran said it didnt seem like theyd been rehearsing for about an hour and a half. It feels like it goes by pretty quickly, said Sugita, who plays the flute.

Northwest senior Abby Campbell, who was taking part in her third Honor Band, says the performance at the end of the day is the best part.

The day brings together all these different people from all over the city, most of whom she doesnt know.

And then at the end of the day you come together and make this beautiful piece at the end, said Campbell, who plays alto sax.

The musicians had to rely on sight-reading on their first time through each piece.

Karleigh Mulinix, a GISH sophomore, expected Monday nights concert to be unique. Because Ive never done a concert where we just got the music today, or not that long ago, she said. Weve always been able to practice it for quite a while.

Mulinix plays clarinet. During the day, she felt the students improved their skills considerably. But youre also meeting new people, she said. Its a really good band experience.

About 23 of the students came from GISH. The other schools supplied around 15 students each.

Playing with a bigger group was a novelty for the students from the smaller schools.

It was nice getting to hear every single part, like the lower section especially  the bass section, Sugita said.

Thi Nguyen, a percussionist from Heartland Lutheran, enjoyed playing in a big auditorium with a lot of people. And as a percussionist, I have to stand most of the time. So its a little bit tiring, but it was fun, Nguyen said. And she liked the music.

With everyone coming together for the first time, it was important to work together, Nguyen said. If somebody messes up, its going to ruin the whole thing, she said. So everyone has to master the piece.

The best part of the day, Anne Pham said, was being able to meet other kids from other schools. Pham, a senior at Central Catholic, plays the flute.

Maddie Harding of Central Catholic said its been fun seeing all of us come together. Central Catholic has a small band, so being able to play with a big ensemble like this is pretty cool. She believes the concert is the best part of the day.

Campbell said that students dont have a chance very often to play with other musicians. So just being able to come in and meet new people and play with them is awesome.

Campbell knew some of the students from other schools. In middle school, she was part of Grand Island Public Schools. So coming back and playing with some of my old middle school friends is fun, Campbell said.

Central Catholic music teacher Brigit Baglien, who organized Mondays event, said its good for the kids to work with someone other than their regular teacher. Because you cannot learn everything from just one director. Baglien said. So having someone else work with you is a great opportunity.

Kellett, who lives in Fremont, said the day is not solely about performance. Its really about these students improving as players, said Kellett, who used to teach at Papillion-LaVista South.

For the students, the biggest challenge was endurance, Kellett said. With all of the rehearsing during the day, teachers had to careful not to tire students out so that theyd still perform well in the evening.
Members of the Grand Island Public School Board got to hear lots of good news at their regular meeting on Monday night at the Kneale Administration Building.

Rod Foley, principal at Walnut Middle School, shared with the board more about the Walnut family Christmas shopping event and how it went and of the schools Kindness Closet. Guidance Counselor Jeff Westerby helps organize the Christmas shopping event at Walnut, which helped about 250 students this year.

Westerby said the response with students is great, and the event helps empower the students. He said the community helps with the event. This year there were 22 community volunteers and 27 teachers that helped.

We partnered. And that is what makes this thrive now, Westerby said, adding that its a lot of work without many helping hands.

He said thousands of items were donated so students could shop for a list of people, have the things wrapped and they could then take them home to gift to their family. Westerby said that many of the extra items were made into care packages to send to Hurricane Harvey victims in Houston.

Westerby said staff holds a fundraiser among themselves so theyre able to take students in need Christmas shopping at Walmart. He said the students dont think of themselves, but they choose to use the money to shop for their families. The Christmas shopping event, he said, helps empower the students, no matter if theyd be financially stable to shop on their own or not.

Theyre learning the gift of giving and the art of giving, Westerby said.

Julie Schlachter, Walnuts social worker, talked about the Kindness Closet. The closet is a concept that the Grand Island Public Schools Foundation awarded a grant to Walnut for. It provides basic needs, such as hygiene and cleaning items, for students and families, no questions asked. Schlachter said they also provide some food, shoes, clothes and even alarm clocks. She said if a family is wondering how theyre going to provide supper that night, the closet can help with simple food items. She also said the alarm clocks are useful and available because many of the students parents work first-shift jobs, so the students are responsible for making it to school on time.

If we can take care of the very basic stuff for kids, theyre going to feel more empowered, Schlachter said, adding that students can then focus more on school.

Current board president Bonnie Hinkle and current board vice president Terry Brown were both re-elected in their respective positions for 2018.

Superintendent Tawana Grover also thanked the board for their service, as its soon School Board Recognition Week in Nebraska (Jan. 22-28).

Other items discussed at the meeting were the Standard Response Protocol for school safety, which was passed. There was also an update on the strategic plan and how Grand Island High School teachers are learning more about what it will be like teaching 90-minute lessons.
HASTINGS  If not for the work of Martin Luther King Jr., Jose Jimenez said he would not be where he is today.

Jimenez, a 2014 graduate of Hastings College, delivered a message during Hastings Colleges Monday service of remembrance and reflection at French Memorial Chapel. The event was a part of the colleges Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration.

Without the work of Dr. King, it is possible that I would not be able to stand here before you, armed with the knowledge and education that many of the professors here provided for me, Jimenez said. Those barriers remain for a lot of people. Thankfully for me, there werent any. For that, I am humbled.

Jimenezs path to living a life inspired by Kings legacy began in Puruandiro, Michoacan, Mexico, southwest of Mexico City. For the first eight years of his life, he said, he was surrounded by people who looked like him, spoke the same language as him, and had the same religion as he did.

However, Jimenezs sense of singularity changed when his father told him to pack up and head to El Norte  the United States.

My dad said, Start packing your stuff. I asked, Where are we going? Whats going on here? He said we were going to El Norte, Jimenez said. I thought, No way. El Norte was a magical land to all of us kids. It was a magical (place) where you can make money. It is a country and a world where you can drive the same way as the taxis drive.

Jimenez said his journey to El Norte led him and his family to a gated community in Long Beach, Calif. He said it felt like home there, but outside the gated community was a world filled with people who were much different than he was.

People said, Hi, how are you? I looked at them and wondered what was going on. I didnt know. I didnt speak the language, Jimenez said. Across the street was another gated community. The people there spoke a different language, their food was a little spicier, and my best friend lived there. I didnt care. I was still going over there. Even though my best friend and I spoke different languages, he looked like me. I thought, Here is another community where I fit in.

Jimenez said it was the city of Long Beach that introduced him to what King preached in his I Have a Dream speech. In elementary school, it didnt matter that other kids spoke a different language as him because they all had the same goal: being good to get an extra 10 minutes of recess.

As the years went by, Jimenez said he was further inspired by Kings teachings as he became a victim of institutional, overt racism.

There were simple, micro questions that are meant to be questions, but, in reality, they do not understand how it feels, he said. When people say, Its just a joke, lighten up. Why are you getting so upset? it is because, in the joke lies a core value that you dont see me for who I am. That is the core that Dr. King preached.

Jimenez also encouraged those in attendance to reflect on whether society has achieved Kings dream and what they can do to honor his legacy.

Brook McCurdy, a Hastings sophomore and a member of the Multicultural Student Union, helped plan Mondays Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. The unions goal was to capture Kings legacy.

We wanted to celebrate the fact he was a community leader, she said. Today we are calling upon a reflection of his life, his achievements and the achievements of other civil rights leaders. This is also a day to reflect on where we are now and what we need to do in the future. This is a day to inspire those leaders on our campus to go do more for their civil rights in the future.

McCurdy added it was her hope that Mondays celebration, as well as Jimenezs message, inspired Hastings College students to give back to the Hastings community.

I hope they can get out of this Dr. Kings legacy and the fact that he was a community leader, she said. That is where he got the backing for this movement. Jose talked about his community and how they inspired him to do other things. Since he is a community leader here in Hastings, not only on campus but in the city, we are hoping this inspires others to build that momentum within their own communities.

McCurdy added Hastings College students would have the opportunity to give back to the Hastings community Monday evening through the Food4Thought packing, where students could volunteer to pack meals to provide to Hastings Public Schools elementary students in need.

Following Monday afternoons prayer service, students went to different stops around Hastings as part of a community prayer walk.

Damen Heitmann, Hastings College chaplain, said this is the third year Hastings College has held a community prayer walk as part of its MLK Day events. The walk was altered to a prayer ride due to cold wind chills, with students being transported, by van, to seven different locations throughout Hastings.

We go to each place and say a prayer, Heitmann said. One of the stops is outside of Longfellow Elementary. We stop there and say a prayer. Longfellow just represents children everywhere. So we say a prayer for all children everywhere. We will stop outside of Mary Lanning Healthcare and say a prayer for the sick, dying and caregivers throughout the world.
MASON CITY | A former county software developer announced Monday he would be seeking the office of Cerro Gordo County auditor.

Riley Dirksen's announcement follows the upcoming departure of longtime auditor Ken Kline, who has accepted a position with the state.

Dirksen in a news release said he worked closely with Kline, the auditor's office, and the Iowa Secretary of States office to develop Precinct Atlas, a "national, award-winning election program."

He said he has been the program's lead programmer the last three years and believes his experience and knowledge of elections laws make him "the perfect candidate to continue the tradition of clean and fair elections in Cerro Gordo County."

Dirksen worked for the county from 2011 to 2017 as a PC support specialist and business analyst/software developer.

He resigned in 2017 to start his own software development and consulting company, but works with the county as an independent Precinct Atlas contractor.

Dirksen, who was appointed to the Iowa Pollbook Security Task Force in 2017, lives in Mason City with wife, Loni, and their 3-year-old son, Everett.

The Cerro Gordo County Supervisors have yet to appoint a replacement for Kline or call for a special election.

 Ashley Miller
Im not a big fan of words like destiny and fate. They seem like creative attempts to disown our decisions  as though we are mere victims of circumstances, powerless to effect change. I understand the allure of those words though and the idea they express because while the freedom of choice is what we have, the freedom from choice is often what we want.

These thoughts are appropriate to debate as the Grand Island community struggles to create a unified marketing plan to promote and maximize the use of the facilities that have been built in our community to promote economic development and take advantage of the revenue provided by both the lodging tax and the food and beverage tax.

The majority of Grand Island residents have concluded that the communitys future growth in the business of tourism is directly related to agriculture and the success that Fonner Park officials will have or not have with the marketing of the agricultural buildings that have been placed on the real estate that is owned and managed by Fonner Park.

Fonner Park officials are not the sole bearer of this important marketing responsibility. GILCA (Grand Island Livestock Complex Authority) consisting of the Chamber of Commerce, Nebraska State Fair, Hall County Visitors and Convention Bureau, as well as Fonner Park, must also assume ownership of this responsibility. A coordinated business and marketing plan to include the equine industry must be developed by both Fonner Park officials and GILCA to market the facilities that have been provided for the Grand Island community on the Fonner Park campus.

Fonner Park officials and GILCA must take on the responsibility as agents of change and recognize that time has long passed for this community to accept anything less. The freedom from choice not to accomplish this is not acceptable.

Marketing opportunities often dont announce themselves. You have to go out and find them  this is the fact that must be recognized and accepted  by all entities if they want to be true agents of change.

It is hard to see storm clouds on the horizon being, as we are, in the sunny climate of the recent successes that Grand Island has enjoyed. Its impossible to know how strong the storm will be. When the birds stop chirping, when the clouds start turning black, Grand Island will realize that without a coordinated business and marketing plan at the Fonner Park campus, their ability to compete in the business of tourism will be limited.

Limits begin when vision ends. The storm is coming  do we want to take a look  we may wish that we had taken the warning to heart.

Ray OConnor is a Grand Island developer and businessman. He lives at 611 Fleetwood Road.
Travelers using the Central Nebraska Regional Airport may have become a little spoiled over the years.

Parking was free, and for the most part, convenient. Service was reliable and the destinations of Dallas, Las Vegas and Mesa/Phoenix were popular. Ticket prices were fairly affordable.

All of that could be seen in the amazing growth of boardings at the airport. The airport boarded approximately 9,000 passengers in 2008. Last year, boardings were around 70,000.

In addition, a beautiful, spacious new terminal opened in April of 2016.

In essence, the Central Nebraska Regional Airport has had a great run in the past decade. And that should continue.

However, while the Central Nebraska Regional Airport continues to be a great place to fly from, travelers saw a major change there this week. The airport is now charging for parking.

The fees arent much  $3 a day for long term parking and $5 a day for the lot closer to the terminal, with the seventh day free. And those rates are considerably less than what is paid for parking at the Lincoln and Omaha airports.

The Hall County Airport Authority also had a good reason to seek the new source of revenue. The funds will be used to help maintain the airport, including the new terminal, without putting the burden on property taxes. So basically, the parking charge is a user fee that will help keep the airports property tax rate low.

Airport Executive Director Mike Olson said the airport has done a number of surveys over the years and found that 83 percent of the vehicles in the parking lot are from outside of Hall County. So those people using the airport who dont pay property taxes in Hall County will also now be helping to pay for the maintenance of the airport.

That is still a good deal for travelers and an even better deal for Hall County taxpayers.

There is always the risk that travelers will see that new parking fee and may decide to use a different airport. The CNRA will be losing one of its advantages.

However, we dont expect that to happen much, if at all. The Grand Island airport still offers a lot of convenience and time and money savings for people from this area and beyond. A small parking fee wont change that.

So the community should support the airports decision to go to paid parking. Its a sign of success, not desperation, and part of the evolution and growth of the airport. And airport officials have built a lot of trust with the community with smart moves and a forward-looking vision over the years.

So while no one likes to see a new fee, this one is more than justified and should help the Central Nebraska Regional Airport continue to be popular with travelers.
Gov. Bruce Rauner visited Edwardsville Tuesday afternoon to discuss economic growth in the Metro East.

After conversing with metro-east business owners and Edwardsville Mayor Hal Patton at the citys new public safety facility, Rauner said one of his primary goals as governor is to promote growth for small businesses.

The number one priority  the number one way we can increase the quality of life and the incomes for the families of Illinois is to grow more jobs, expand our economy. Almost half of all jobs in Illinois are with small businesses. Almost two-and-a-half million work for small businesses and so much of our economic growth and prosperity depends on small businesses, Rauner said.

Some of the Metro East business owners who voiced their concerns to Rauner included Lisa McQuade, of Donco Electrical Construction LLC; Mike Rathgeb, of Spencer Homes LLC and Scott Plocher, of Plocher Construction Co. Inc.

Patton said currently in Edwardsville, a property tax freeze is in place for two commerce centers and will be in effect for seven years.

"Edwardsville has been benefitted by a couple of enterprise zones  the Gateway Commerce and Lakeview Commerce is where we have property tax freezes in place for corporations that invest here in Edwardsville and in Illinois. It does work because we have been able to keep property taxes down in the city of Edwardsville," Patton said. "It's because of the economic development and growth that we have been able to prosper."

According to Patton, last year 16 businesses in the Gateway and Lakeview Commerce Centers paid over $5.1 million in property taxes to 14 different taxing bodies, including $726,000 to the city of Edwardsville. Patton said the property tax abatement occurs at 100 percent for the first seven years, 70 percent for year eight, 40 percent for year nine and 10 percent for year 10.

Rauner has been traveling the state from Chicago, Lincoln, Edwardsville and other areas to promote small business growth and trying to roll back small business regulations, cut red tape, correct the workers' compensation program and freeze local property taxes.

Rauner said with small business growth comes more jobs and an increased tax base.

When a small business grows and creates more jobs, it enables them to pay more money  higher wages to our hardworking families  and it increases our tax base and allows us to lower the tax burden on the rest of the state when the economy is growing fast, Rauner said. Its the key to our prosperity. Every challenge we face in Illinois can be overcome if we have faster economic growth.

Rauner added that small business regulations and property taxes are driving economic growth across the river to Missouri or to other bordering states.

The big challenges in Illinois are primarily around regulations and around taxes. We have too many regulationswe also have some of the highest property taxes in America, Rauner said. It has pushed many employers across the border to Missouri where the property taxes are much lower. Across the border to Indiana or Wisconsin where the property taxes are dramatically lower than Illinois. We need to bring down our property tax burden.

The governor also raised concerns of the workers compensation system and said currently in the state of Illinois, the compensation rate is considerably higher than surrounding states.

For an employee in Indiana, the workers comp costs about $3 per $100over in Missouri its $8 per $100 and in Illinois, $24 per $100 of payroll. Eight times more expensive here than Indiana; three times as expensive as Missouri. These are legitimate costs that push employers out that if we got the fraud and abuse out of our system and protect our workers that have honest and true work-related injuries, we can protect our employees better and grow our jobs so that we can have higher family incomes, Rauner said.

Looking ahead, Rauner said as election season nears, the metro-east area will continue to be a priority.

Im very committed to the metro-east area. This part of Illinois has wonderful people and great potential. This should be one of the fastest growing areas in Illinois and in America here with metro-east because of the transportation here, because of the people here, the location. But weve got to compete in metro-east here with Missouri. Missouri has cut their regulations, become more pro-business; theyre having more responsible budgets. Theyve made a lot of changes we need to make, Rauner said. Lets make the changes so we can compete and bring those jobs over from Missouri over into Illinois. Bring the jobs from Texas, Tennessee, Indiana  thats my mission.
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Linkedin EDITORIAL (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 08:04 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c13ea1d 1 Editorial La-Nyalla-Mattalitti,regional-elections,East-Java-gubernatorial-elections Free

The dramatic revelation by East Java gubernatorial aspirant La Nyalla Mattalitti of the alleged political dowry that cost him the coveted ticket last week was relatively unsurprising, except that he attacked Gerindra Party chairman Prabowo Subianto, billed as the strongest contender for incumbent President Joko Jokowi Widodo in the 2019 race.

Venting his anger, businessman La Nyalla told reporters that Prabowo had asked him for Rp 40 billion (US$2.8 million) to cover the needs of witnesses, who would have to attend more than 60,000 polling stations across East Java during the June 27 election. La Nyalla said he refused the demand, as he had already poured a lot of money into Gerindra, only to see Prabowo cancel his endorsement. Later, Gerindra opted to support the incumbent Deputy Governor Syaifulah Yusuf and his running mate Puti Guntur Soekarnoputri, the niece of Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri.

While one could question the timing of La Nyallas move, which came over three weeks after he found out he had lost his bid to stand in the gubernatorial election, there is no doubt about the existence of rampant transactional politics. Reality bites: money talks in the democratic process to select leaders who are supposed to fight for peoples welfare.

La Nyalla was only one of a few aspirants who disclosed the practice out of their disappointment with failing to secure the political support needed to join the race. Also last week, retired police officer Brig. Gen. (ret) Siswandi said the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) dropped its decision to nominate him as candidate for Cirebon mayor at the last minute after he refused to pay a dowry to the Islamic party, which has been building its image as an anticorruption force.

In 2007, former Jakarta military commander Maj. Gen. (ret) Slamet Kirbiyantoro demanded that the PDI-P return Rp 1.5 billion in cash that he had given as a lubricant for his nomination as the running mate of the partys gubernatorial candidate Fauzi Bowo.

All parties implicated naturally deny demanding money from candidates in exchange for their nomination, although some party officials admit that politics in Indonesia is costly. In his speech in East Java last July, Prabowo estimated that a gubernatorial candidate would need at least Rp 300 billion, which is why Gerindra has proposed revising the Regional Election Law to revive the indirect gubernatorial election by the provincial legislature.

That, however, will not solve the entrenched problem plaguing our electoral system. As General Elections Commission (KPU) member Pramono Ubaid Tanthowi wrote in this newspaper on Monday, transactional politics is widespread but difficult to prove. The claims of La Nyalla and others look set to go nowhere.

Since 2016, regional elections have been held simultaneously and this year, the government has multiplied financial assistance to political parties by nearly 10 times to Rp 1,000 per vote from previously Rp 108, to minimize money politics. But at the end of the day, public oversight, as Pramono has suggested, is key to ensuring the legitimacy of elections.
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Linkedin Miwa Suzuki (Agence France-Presse) Tokyo  Tue, January 16, 2018 08:07 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c13f731 2 Art & Culture Japan,sewers,art Free

Japan's sewerage industry has found a way to clean up its dirty and smelly image: elaborately designed and colourful manhole covers with 12,000 local varieties nationwide -- including, of course, a Hello Kitty design.

Appealing to a Japanese love of detail and "kawaii" ("cute"), bespoke manhole covers adorn the streets of 1,700 towns, cities and villages across Japan and have spawned a collection craze among so-called "manholers."

The designs represent an instant guide to a place as they feature its history, folklore, or speciality goods: a castle design for an ancient town, a bay bridge for a port and Mt Fuji for a city at the foot of Japan's iconic mountain.

As for Tama City, located in the western sprawl of greater Tokyo, locals are pinning their hopes on a more modern Japanese icon -- Hello Kitty -- to attract tourists, alongside the town's theme park showcasing much-loved children's character from the Sanrio company.

"We'd be happy if people come and take some time for a stroll in our town while looking for the Hello Kitty manholes," said Mikio Narashima, who heads the city's sewage system division, after the city installed the first of the 10 designed covers.

Read also: Artists leave Instagram to sell art with heart

'Treasure hunting for adults'

Veteran spotter Shoji Morimoto said his passion for covers was fuelled after noticing that the central city of Fukui sported two phoenixes on its manholes.

He later learned the imaginary birds were a symbol of the town's rise from a 1945 devastating US air raid and a deadly earthquake three years later.

"I sometimes do research on why the town has that particular design. I'm impressed whenever I find out it represents the town's history and culture," said Morimoto, who coined the word "manholer" for like-minded people.

Designed manholes cost more but appeal to a Japanese sense of detail, the 48-year-old Morimoto told AFP.

He has already visited all the designed manholes in his local area. "Now I have to travel far," he admits.

"It's treasure hunting for adults."

"Manholers" take pictures of the covers they visit, with the more obsessive taking rubbings.

For others, the interest lies more in "cover bonsai", plants growing on soil accumulated on and around covers.

More than 3,000 people attended a "manhole summit" in western Japan in November.

Read also: Millennials learn the art of 'pantun'

'Under the cover'

In this picture taken on November 24, 2017 Japanese employee Isamu Kamiya paints a manhole cover at a factory in Otawara, Tochigi prefecture. (AFP/Behrouz Mehri)

And manhole covers are not simply there to hide away dirty sewers, enthuses Tetsuro Sasabe, who is interested in covers for telecoms infrastructure.

"I'm interested in why the manhole is there, where it leads to -- I'd say I'm interested in what's under the manhole covers," he said.

He noted that there is a story even to plain covers -- such as finding the logos of now-defunct companies.

Given their size, the covers cannot easily be collected in the same way people hoard stamps and coins.

But to satisfy collectors' desire, the private-public GKP network designed to promote awareness on the importance of sewerage in society, has released 1.4 million cards of 293 different covers.

The cards are free but they can only be obtained through local offices, thus working as a tourist magnet.

They are numbered in chronological order and come with the manhole's exact GPS information for the convenience of manholers.

"We believe Japanese manholes are cultural products we can boast to the world," said Hideto Yamada, a GKP planning official.

And when a real cover does become available, demand is brisk.

The eastern city of Maebashi held a highly competitive lottery in October as its offer to sell 10 used manhole covers -- 40 kilogrammes of iron -- at 3,000 yen ($28) each was swamped with more than 190 bids.

Read also: Exhibition highlights art by Bali prison inmates

Non-slip

The history of decorating manhole covers in Japan dates back 40 years to a bid to improve the image of the sewerage system, according to GKP's Yamada.

Cover designs must have the same friction level no matter which direction humans or cars come from so that people do not slip over them.

This need for friction resulted in placing extra streaks of clouds, sea waves or tiny stars in the background, giving birth to "condensed designs," Yamada said.

Overall, there are some 15 million manholes in Japan, of which only a fraction have colourful designed covers, carefully hand-painted.

A plain cover costs some $600 but a colourful, designed one can be double that depending on the number of colours used and the level of detail used.

The craze has since spread online with abundant information on where to find the best manholes via the hashtag #manhotalk.

An extensive collection can be seen at Japan Society of Manhole Covers: http://sky.geocities.jp/usagigasi1f/.

Topics : Japan sewers art
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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Sydney, Australia  Tue, January 16, 2018 20:08 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c1608f9 2 Environment Great-Barrier-Reef,Australia,environment,conservation Free

Australia is calling on the world's top scientific minds to help save the Great Barrier Reef, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund research into protecting the world's largest living structure.

The UNESCO World Heritage-listed reef is reeling from significant coral bleaching due to warming sea temperatures linked to climate change.

The 2,300-kilometre (1,400-mile) site is also under pressure from farming runoff, development and predatory crown-of-thorns starfish, with experts warning it could be suffering irreparable damage.

On Tuesday, the Australian government announced a Aus$2.0 million (US$1.6 million) funding pot available to people with bright ideas on how to save the reef.

"The scale of the problem is big and big thinking is needed, but it's important to remember that solutions can come from anywhere," said Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg.

He said the money would be available to the world's "greatest scientific minds, industry and business leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs".

"Solutions could focus on anything from reducing the exposure of corals to physical stressors, to boosting coral regeneration rates by cultivating reef-building coral larvae that attract other important marine species," Frydenberg added.

Read also: Coral transplant raises Barrier Reef survival hopes

Up to Aus$250,000 is available for an initial feasibility stage, where researchers can test the technical and commercial viability of their proposals for up to six months.

More than one proposal is expected to be accepted at this stage, the government said.

A further Aus$1 million will then be made available to the best solutions at the proof of concept stage, where applicants develop and test their prototypes for up to 12 months.

Those that are successful will retain intellectual property rights and will be able to try to commercialise their innovation.

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee last year decided not to place the Barrier Reef on its list of sites "in danger" despite concern over the mass coral bleaching.

The 2017 bleaching marked the second-straight year that corals have been damaged by warming sea temperatures, an unprecedented occurrence that scientists said would give the invertebrate marine creatures insufficient time to fully recover.

Coral reefs make up less than one percent of Earth's marine environment, but are home to an estimated 25 percent of ocean life, acting as nurseries for many species of fish.
Dean Charles Snyder

April 29, 1930 - January 13, 2018

Dean Charles Snyder, 87, of Clear Lake, Iowa passed away peacefully surrounded by his family at home January 13, 2018.

This is the day that the Lord has made  Dean's motto was No Bad Days and he truly lived as such.

Celebration of Dean's life will be 10:30 A.M. Wednesday January 17, 2018 at the Clear Lake United Methodist Church, Clear Lake, Iowa with Rev. David Peterson officiating. Military honors will be provided by the Clear Lake V.F.W. Burial will be in the Clear Lake Cemetery, Clear Lake, Iowa. Visitation will be Tuesday from 4:00 P.M.  7:00 P.M. at the Clear Lake United Methodist Church, Clear Lake, Iowa. Family suggests memorials to Clear Lake United Methodist Church or St. Croix Hospice in lieu of flowers.

Dean was born on a farm north of Fertile to George and Ida (Hoffman) Snyder April 29, 1930. He attended school in Clear Lake, Iowa before enlisting in the United States Navy.

Dean began his work life following the service by helping his mother run a cafe along Highway 18. Dean started in construction building homes in Oregon with his father-in-law. He was married in 1954 to Joanne Hill, celebrating 63 years of marriage and 3 wonderful sons; Don, Dale and David. He started a construction company in Clear Lake in 1958. The boys grew up in the business and became partners with their father. Dean Snyder Construction has grown from a few employees to over 200 employees and has become one of the largest construction companies in the state. Dean always loved to go to the job sites and go to the office after retirement. He loved building construction toys etc. as a hobby.

He was truly a John Wayne fan, Iowa and Iowa State fan.

Dean Snyder remembered as Clear Lake legend who saved the Surf Ballroom CLEAR LAKE | Dean Snyder liked to tell a story about himself and his beloved wife, Joanne.

He served on the board of Trustees 8 years at the United Methodist Church where he was a member. Dean was involved for 23 years in the Boy Scout program as cub master and scout leader. He was awarded an honorary Eagle Award on his 80th birthday. He built Pinewood Derby tracks and cooked chili for Troop 30 Chili Soup Suppers. He loved attending his children's and grandchildren's sporting events. He loved to attend the girls softball games and was known as grandpa to many, and famous for his Bit O Honey' candy. He enjoyed hunting with his three sons and loved to hear the same stories from his great grandson, Evan.

In 1994 the Snyder Family purchased the Surf Ballroom and restored it to what it is today. Dean was known for his saying if she liked to fish I would have bought her a fishing pole, but she liked to dance so I bought the Surf'

Dean received the Warren Coleman Award from the Lions club, Citizen of the Year Award presented by the Rotary Club, and the family was Grand Marshall in the 4th of July parade.

Dean is survived by his wife of 63 years Joanne Snyder, Clear Lake, Iowa; three sons Don (Jane) Snyder, Ames, Iowa, Dale (Kathy) Snyder, Clear Lake, Iowa and David (Vickie) Snyder, Clear Lake, Iowa; 10 grandchildren Ashley (Aaron) Butcher, Ankeny, Iowa, Andrew (Desirae) Snyder, Ankeny, Iowa, Alexis Snyder, Clear Lake, Iowa, Andrea Carney, Clear Lake, Iowa, Chelsy (Erick) Anderson, Clear Lake, Iowa, Tiana (Chris) Culler, Clear Lake, Iowa, Alece (Tim) Hall, Elmhurst, Illinois, Aria (Tyler) Behne, Mason City, Iowa, Jace Snyder, Clear Lake, Iowa and Annie Snyder, Des Moines, Iowa; 14 great grandchildren Ethan Butcher, Evan Snyder, James Culler, Levi Culler, Hudson Carney, Finn Carney, Laken Carney, William Pritchard, Kathryn Pritchard, Claire Anderson, Evie Anderson, Baby Anderson due in April, Brayson Behne and Charlotte Hall; and many nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents and his brother, Dale. The family asks that friends join them at the Surf Ballroom to celebrate Dean's life immediately following the internment. Ward-Van Slyke Colonial Chapel, 101 N. 4th St., Clear Lake, Iowa, 641-357-2193. ColonialChapels.com
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 15:05 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c154f78 4 Art & Culture Poco-poco-dance,exhibition,Austria,Vienna,Ferien-Messe Free

The poco-poco dance from Manado, North Sulawesi, warmed the cool weather in Vienna, Austria, on Sunday afternoon at the 2018 Ferien-Messe Wien (Vienna Holiday Fair).

Said to be the biggest tourism exhibition in Austria, the event reportedly attracted more than 150,000 people from Jan. 11 to 14.

The Indonesian booth, which was officially opened by Indonesian Ambassador to Austria Darmansjah Djumala, highlighted the 10 "New Bali" destinations on Tuesday as its theme, according to Antara.

Read also: Hundreds of Indonesian artifacts on display in Belgium museum

The archipelago's participation in Ferien-Messe Wien was part of the annual program of the Indonesian Embassy in Vienna to bring more Austrian tourists to Indonesia. Various Indonesian art and cultural performances were showcased during the exhibition to attract visitors to the booth.

During the poco-poco dance, some visitors were seen joining the Indonesian people as well as the Austrian dance group Saman, which performed in front of the main stage.

Other than art and cultural performances, the Indonesian booth also hosted cooking demonstrations featuring chef Taufik Hidayat and Mufti, who cooked Indonesian signature dishes like sate (meat skewer), soto (aromatic soup) and nasi goreng (fried rice). (kes)

__________

Editor's note:

The first version of this article noted that the poco-poco dance originated from Maluku. It has been corrected to Manado, North Sulawesi.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 21:23 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c161095 1 City pak-ogah,Bekasi Free

Arguing that voluntary traffic attendants, popularly known as Pak Ogah, worsen traffic congestion, the Bekasi administration has planned to remove them from all main roads in the West Java city.

The police-made traffic plan cannot be implemented because of Pak Ogah, said Bekasi Transportation Agency head Yayan Yuliana on Tuesday, referring to volunteers who direct traffic at busy intersections.

Yayan said the police had come up with a traffic plan to reduce congestion on main roads in the city, citing a location in which vehicles made U-turns on Jl. Ahmad Yani and the street in front of Mitra Keluarga Hospital, West Bekasi, as areas that required traffic management.

However, Pak Ogah, he argued, would direct traffic that went against the rules of the road.

This will create congestion points, even though we already provide another U-turn, said Yayan.

Yayan noted that almost all main roads were attended by at least one voluntary traffic attendant.

The Bekasi administration was considering permanently planting a road barrier to enforce the traffic plan.

Yayan said he would cooperate with the Bekasi Police to resolve the situation.

We will still tolerate them if they operate on narrow streets, he said.

Bekasi Police chief Sr. Comr. Indarto said he welcomed the plan.

We will support the plan. Pak Ogah will also be dealt with accordingly if they are caught violating the regulations, he said. (gis)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 14:27 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c152bae 4 National customary-law,marriage Free

A young couple in Belapunranga village in Gowa regency, South Sulawesi, has been forced to marry in a traditional ceremony after being caught alone at a rambutan farm by local residents.



The couple, identified as Manai, 20, and Sugiani, 19, were married on Monday in the presence of a penghulu (Muslim wedding official), with village officials and police personnel of Parangloe subdistrict as witnesses.



The two were found to be alone on the Rambutan farm on Jan. 6 and had since become a target of intimidation by local residents. Afterwards, Sugiani's family confronted Manai's family, accusing the latter of violating the customary law called siri.

"This is a problem of siri [customary law]. If not handled properly, it will lead to a disaster because it is related to the dignity of a family," Belapunranga village head Jafar Daeng Talli said as reported by kompas.com on Tuesday.



Police officials subsequently stepped in to defuse tensions between the two families, who had nearly clashed with one another. Through the mediation assisted by police and village officials, the two families decided to wed Manai and Sugiani.



"We have a problem-solving program, which aims to create order in society through persuasive and early conflict-prevention approaches," Parangloe Police chief Adj. Comr. Abdul Majid said. (afr/rin)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 15:58 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c156725 4 Business LRT,BSD,Airport,Budi-Karya-Sumadi Free

Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi has said that the government is offering to investors a light rail transit (LRT) project, connecting Bumi Serpong Damai (BSD) and Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, both in Tangerang, Banten.

He said in Jakarta on Monday that the ministry had offered the RP 20 trillion (US$1.4 billion) project to investors in the Middle East, South Korea and China.

Many investors expressed their interest when I offered it in the Middle East, said Budi as quoted by tribunnews.com.

The increasing demand for transportation from BSD in South Tangerang to the airport had caused serious traffic congestion during peak hours, said the minister, adding that public transportation, including the LRT, would be a solution to the problem.

We need to reduce the traffic congestion along the roads toward Soekarno-Hatta Airport as otherwise, we may need three hours to reach the airport, Budi said, adding that the private company could apply to become an LRT operator.

However, he said that the government would still need to provide subsidies so that the fares would be affordable.

Currently, the government is constructing three LRT projects in Palembang, South Sumatra, in Jakarta inner city (LRT Jakarta) and the Greater Jakarta LRT. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Bandung, West Java  Tue, January 16, 2018 18:20 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c15cd44 1 Business drones,PTDI-aircraft-industry,TAI-Turkish-Aerospace-Industries Free

Aircraft company PT Dirgantara Indonesia (PTDI) is collaborating with Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) to produce unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are capable of flying at a maximum height of 40,000 feet.

TAI has lengthy experience in building high-altitude UAVs. So we will collaborate with them in the project, said PTDI president director Elfien Goentoro in Bandung on Monday.

TAI has developed UAVs or drones that are used by the Turkish Military and operated at a height of 20,000 feet. They are capable of being equipped with night vision and weapons systems.

Elfien said PTDI was currently developing a medium-altitude long-endurance UAV.

PTDI production director Arie Wibowo added that the government wanted to ensure that collaboration between PTDI and TAI in producing lightweight UAVs take place to reduce dependency on manufacturers in Western countries.

We need an experienced firm like TAI, a firm from a Muslim country with an advanced technology in the aviation industry, said Arie, adding that several other firms were only interested in direct selling, not technology transfer.

The UAV project is projected to be completed within one to three years, Arie said, adding that PTDI and TAI also planned to develop CN-235 and N219 planes, PTDIs two flagship products.

Meanwhile, TAI CEO and president Temel Kotil expressed hope that the collaboration would result in the production of high-quality UAVs, saying that PTDI had a reputation as a major player in the Asian aerospace industry. (jlm/bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 11:44 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c14b7bf 4 National Jokowi,Joko-Widodo,bicycle Free

President Joko Jokowi Widodo is known for his trademark habit of giving trivia quizzes and awarding bicycles to people who give correct answers during his visits to regions.

Residents, adults and schoolchildren alike are usually excited to get some interaction time with the President, often resulting in them getting new bicycles.

However, Jokowi could not hide his surprise in a recent event when a man, identified as Apdal, suddenly rejected the bicycle prize after giving the correct answer to Jokowis quiz related to the state ideology Pancasila.

Apdal, from Palembang, South Sumatra, was among the participants of the 12th National Meeting of Jamiyyah Ahlith Thariqah Al-Mutabarah An-Nahdliyyah (JATMAN), in Pekalongan, Central Java, on Monday.



After answering Jokowi's quiz correctly, Apdal was told by Jokowi to return to his seat.



"The prize, sir," Apdal suddenly asked the President, as quoted by kompas.com on Monday.



Jokowi subsequently promised to deliver a bicycle to his house, but Apdal reportedly refused.



"I don't want [the bicycle], Pak. I already have two [bicycles]," Apdal said.



"During my interactions with the people, this is the first time someone rejected [the bicycle]. So, what [do you want] as a reward? But I may not grant it," Jokowi said, which elicited laughter from the participants of the event.



"[Anything] that you will give sincerely, but not a bicycle," Apdal said.



Jokowi then asked Habib Luthfi bin Yahya, a notable ulema from Pekalongan, for a suggestion on the prize. The President later promised that the reward would be delivered to Apdal's house and told him to return to his seat.



Jokowi inaugurated the national meeting on Monday, during which he called on religious leaders to use their massive influence to promote unity in society. (afr)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 10:59 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c149182 1 City #fire,#BahariMuseum,#Jakarta Free

The Maritime Museum in Penjaringan, North Jakarta, was razed by fire on Tuesday morning at around 8:55 a.m, an official has said.

Within five minutes, North Jakarta firefighters, assisted by West Jakarta firefighters, arrived at the scene with 16 fire trucks.

We are still trying to extinguish the fire, said North Jakarta Fire and Rescue Agency head Satriadi, as quoted by kompas.com.

No casualties were reported, and workers and visitors in the museum were evacuated.

Meanwhile, museum head Husni Nizar said the fire had caused damage to the collection of miniature historical navigation equipment.

He added that the fire was first reported on the north side of the museum. (wnd)
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Linkedin Jennie Matthew (Agence France-Presse) Washington, United States  Tue, January 16, 2018 11:20 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c1499fd 2 World trump,White-House,Melania-Trump Free

Groomed to perfection yet rarely heard in public, Melania Trump is an enigma -- a first lady whose opinions, marriage and goals remain a mystery to millions of Americans.

She is without question a unique first lady: a former model who once posed nude in her husband's private jet; the first foreign-born wife of a US president in nearly 200 years; and the first for whom English is a second language.

A year after channeling Jacqueline Kennedy in powder blue Ralph Lauren at her husband's inauguration, Trump has yet to embrace a cause, as did Michelle Obama with her anti-obesity campaign or Laura Bush and her literacy program.

For months, she stayed in New York, refusing to move to the White House until her young son Barron -- of whom she is said to be fiercely protective -- finished the school year.

US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, with their son, Barron, arrive at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Jan. 15, 2018. (AFP/Nicholas Kamm)

She is infrequently seen in Washington and costing law enforcement tens of thousands of dollars a day in protection.

"She is still an enigma after a year," says Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University who has researched US first ladies.

"I don't think the American people feel that they know the real woman yet."

Her campaign-era pledge to fight against cyber-bullying has never come to light and saw her mercilessly criticized given her husband Donald's own reputation as something of a Twitter bully.

As the 47-year-old wife of a 71-year-old man known for past lewd remarks about women, and who divorced his two previous wives in a blaze of tabloid publicity, she is dogged by speculation that they lead largely separate lives.

'Air of mystery'

An explosive account about life in the White House alleged that she cried on election night and that even in Trump Tower, the couple spent "days at a time without contact."

"People are still trying to figure out the relationship between the president and the first lady, and I think those kind of questions feed into the air of mystery," said Jellison.

Unlike the Harvard-educated Obama, Trump makes few public speeches -- perhaps not surprising after her address at the Republican National Convention in 2016 exploded into a plagiarism row, and given that she has been lampooned for her strong Slovenian accent.

A devoted mother, her most direct communication is a carefully curated social media profile: photographs of herself impeccably groomed, often interacting with young children, or messages of comfort in times of national tragedy.

That could not be more different from the articulate, ever-present Obama, the Afghanistan-visiting Bush or the politically engaged, if unpopular, Hillary Clinton.

"To find a first lady as enigmatic as Melania Trump, we have to go back to the late '40s and early '50s," said Jellison. In particular, she cites Bess Truman, wife of Harry and first lady from 1945 to 1953.

But last week, Trump added three new people to her East Wing staff, including a director of policy who worked formerly in the National Security Council's Middle East Directorate and at Facebook.

"I am confident they will enhance my work on behalf of children everywhere, while helping me further expand my role," she said.

Her office says she intends to announce a signature initiative "in the coming months," with a focus on "the overall well-being of children."

"Mrs Trump continues to be focused on her roles as mother, wife and first lady... while remaining an independent woman who stays true to herself," said a spokeswoman.

'Like Diana'

She has accompanied her husband on tours to the Middle East and Asia, where she was photographed in dazzling clothes, many of them European, after several US designers refused to dress her in opposition to her husband's politics.

Her style may not be considered accessible but it has won admiration, despite back-biting over her decision to wear stilettos when heading to storm-ravaged Texas. She changed into sneakers before disembarking.

A Gallup poll in December said she was viewed favorably by 54 percent of Americans, up 17 points from January -- she is significantly more popular than her husband.

"She is doing an amazing job," enthuses Paolo Zampolli, a long-time friend who says he celebrated the New Year with the Trumps in Florida.

"The world did not make it easy for her," he said, insisting she is happy. "She wants to do a great job and she will."

Trump grew up in then communist-run Yugoslavia and is said to be fiercely private. Even in New York, she eschewed much of the high-profile charity endeavors and socializing beloved of other billionaire wives.

A billboard advertisment for the American Institute school in Zagreb featuring an image of the US First Lady Melania Trump with a caption that reads, (Agence France-Presse/Stringer)

No other first lady has not first been through the training of being an elected politician's wife at a lower level.

"The fact that she has not made huge mistakes in this arena is a huge accomplishment," says Jeanne Zaino, a political science professor at Iona College.

"Like Princess Diana, she may find her voice... she may surprise people."
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Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 16:27 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c1590d2 1 Politics Constitutional-Court,MK-justices,Arief-Hidayat Free

The Constitutional Courts (MK) ethics council has handed down a sanction and issued a verbal warning to Chief Justice Arief Hidayat in relation to allegations that he lobbied lawmakers of the House of Representatives to secure a second tenure at the court.

The council concluded that Arief violated the code of ethics for attending a meeting with lawmakers from House commission III overseeing legal affairs at a hotel in Jakarta without an official invitation, court spokesman Fajar Laksono said.



The council launched investigation involving a series of questioning sessions with Arief, activists and lawmakers. However, the council found no evidence that could prove Arief's alleged backroom deal with the lawmakers.



"There is no evidence that [Arief] conducted political lobbying of any kind related to his interests to secure reappointment," Fajar told a press conference on Tuesday.



"The ethics council concluded that Arief committed a light violation because the invitation was only made by phone [...] for MK justice, attending a meeting without an official invitation is an ethics violation," he added.



The council's investigation into Arief was launched following reports filed by a group of activists suggested there had been political bartering between Arief and the House over his reappointment and an ongoing judicial review on the House's inquiry rights.



The verbal warning announced on Tuesday was the second for Arief, following a similar sanction handed down by the council in 2016.



Arief previously violated the court's code of ethics by sending a memo to former junior attorney general for supervision Widyo Pramono. In the memo, which was written in 2015, Arief requested special treatment for his relative in Trenggalek regency, who was working as an attorney at the Trenggalek Prosecutors Office in East Java. (rin)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 17:15 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c15a32d 1 City murder,baby,Mother Free

The police have arrested a 21-year-old domestic worker, who allegedly murdered her own baby in the kitchen of a restaurant in Pondok Aren, South Tangerang, an official said on Tuesday.

The perpetrator allegedly committed violence against a minor, leading to its death, said Jakarta Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono as quoted by kompas.com.

Argo added that the incident occurred last Saturday, and that workers at the restaurant found the babys body in a trash can.

We therefore investigated the perpetrator, who allegedly murdered and dumped the baby, he said.

Based on the police investigation, the woman reportedly experienced contractions, gave birth in the restaurants kitchen and murdered the baby with a knife.

The suspect allegedly then put the body in a black plastic bag and dumped it in a trash can. A witness went to the kitchen, saw blood on the floor and thought the perpetrator was bleeding.

The restaurant owner then took the woman to the hospital, but the doctor said she had given birth and should undergo surgery. The next day, the police arrived at the hospital to arrest her.

We will conduct a DNA test to make sure the baby is hers, Argo added. (wnd)

Topics : murder baby Mother
ROCKFORD | Rockford Senior High Schools After-Prom Committee will be hosting a prom dress sale to benefit activities after the dance.

Dress drop-off begins at 8 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 27, at the school, 1460 210th St.

Long and short dresses will be accepted in clean, gently-used condition. They must be hung up, and bags are encouraged.

There is a non-refundable fee of $5 for each dress. The seller is responsible for setting the price, 20 percent of which goes to the Rockford After-Prom Committee.

The sale is 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. that day at the school, as well as noon to 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 28. Sellers are welcome to stay with their dress until it sells.

Dresses that dont sell can be picked up from 3 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Dresses that arent picked up become property of the Rockford After-Prom Committee.

The committee is not responsible for damage to dresses.

Questions? Call Teresa Stevens-Marth at 641-330-1207 or Donna Jones at 641-512-1465.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 18:34 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c15d88b 1 City Sandiaga-Uno,embezzlement,money-laundering Free

Jakarta Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno is scheduled to appear for questioning on Thursday following the issuance of a second summons by the Jakarta Police in connection to a land embezzlement and money laundering case.

Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono told kompas.com on Tuesday that Sandiaga would be questioned as a witness in the case.

According to the widely circulated summons, the investigators had increased the status of the case to investigation level.

Sandiagas business colleague, Andreas Tjahjadi, has been named a suspect in the case.

Sandiaga had skipped questioning on Oct. 11, 2017. At the time, his attorneys requested the postponement of the investigation until his inauguration as deputy governor.

As the police had reportedly not heard from Sandiaga since his inauguration, they issued another summons on Monday.

The case emerged during Sandiagas gubernatorial campaign in 2017 when a businessman named Joni Hidayat filed a police report against Sandiaga, alleging his involvement in embezzlement in connection to a land sale in South Tangerang, Banten, in 2012. (gis)
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Linkedin Catherine Marciano (Agence France-Presse) Santiago, Chile  Tue, January 16, 2018 08:50 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c14070e 2 World Pope-Francis,Nuclear,Latin-America,war Free

Pope Francis admitted Monday he was frightened by the prospect of an accidental nuclear apocalypse, as he began a weeklong visit to Chile and Peru to bolster a local Catholic Church riven by sex abuse scandals.

"I think we are at the very edge," the pope told reporters aboard his plane when asked about the threat of a nuclear war in the wake of a recent string of tests by North Korea and a false missile alert last week that sparked panic in the US state of Hawaii.

"I am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things," he said.

The pope landed in Santiago late Monday on his first visit to Chile since becoming pope, and his sixth to Latin America.

The 81-year-old Argentine pontiff will find a very different Chile to the one he first encountered as a student priest in the 1960s.

Socialist President Michelle Bachelet has presided over major change in the once deeply conservative country, decriminalizing abortion, recognizing civil unions for same-sex couples and introducing a bill to legalize gay marriage.

Preparations for the visit have been overshadowed by a recent report that almost 80 members of the Chilean clergy have been accused of the sexual abuse of minors since 2000, more than half of them convicted by a Vatican court.

Protests are expected over Francis's appointment of a bishop in the southern city of Ororno who is accused of covering up for Fernando Karadima, an influential priest whom the Vatican convicted of abusing children in 2011.

In a sign of growing exasperation at Church inaction, activists from several countries meeting in Santiago on Monday launched a new global organization, Ending Clerical Abuse (ECA).

The organization "seeks to stop child sexual abuse by the clergy," said one of its founders, Jose Andres Murillo.

The body aims to form a group of prosecutors "to bring to court these crimes against humanity," said Sara Oviedo, former vice president of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Protests planned

During his three days in Chile, Francis will meet with victims of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, while there are no formal plans to meet victims of pedophile priests.

Bachelet, who will meet Francis on Tuesday, has called on Chileans to welcome the pope, though a positive reception may not be universal.

On Friday, five Catholic Churches in the capital were attacked -- three with firebombs -- by what police said was an anarchist group. Demonstrations are planned by feminist and gay rights groups.

The highlight of the three-day visit will be an open-air mass in a Santiago park on Tuesday.

At another mass at the airport in Temuco, the capital of the impoverished southern Araucania region, Francis is expected to draw attention on Wednesday to state persecution of the indigenous Mapuche people and also meet members of the community.

The Mapuche -- some seven percent of the Chilean population -- inhabited a vast territory before the arrival of Spanish colonists in 1541, and have long protested the loss of ancestral lands.

During his visit to Chile, the pope will also meet representatives of the poor and young people, as well as visit a women's prison.

Authorities expect nearly a million Argentines, Bolivians and Peruvians to visit Chile to see the pope.

Francis sent "warm greetings" to his native Argentina in a telegram to President Mauricio Macri as he flew over the country on his approach to Santiago, though he made no mention of a much-awaited visit.

The former Archbishop of Buenos Aires has now visited all of Argentina's neighbors except Uruguay on official tours -- Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Paraguay. Elsewhere in Latin America, he also traveled to Colombia and Ecuador.

The absence has raised questions in the Vatican and in Argentina.

Many consider that Francis's homilies would be interpreted as carrying more political weight at home than may be acceptable, and -- particularly given the pope's defense of the poor -- may be seen as pointed political attacks against Macri's market-friendly austerity.

On Thursday, the pope will travel to Iquique in northern Chile, where he will preside over another open-air mass, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, before traveling on to Peru's capital Lima.

Peru is in the throes of a political crisis sparked by a controversial pardon for ex-president Alberto Fujimori, who was serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses, as well as another abuse scandal involving the clergy.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 13:37 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c150416 1 National Rappler,media,press-freedom,Philippines,Rodrigo-Duterte Free

Though the license of its parent company has been revoked by the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), news portal Rappler Indonesia will continue operations.

Rappler chief executive officer Maria Ressa told The Jakarta Post that the decision would have no impact on the Indonesian bureau.

Its business as usual. Well fight this all the way to the Supreme Court, she told the Post on Monday.

The SEC rescinded Rapplers operating license on Monday, claiming that the news site had violated foreign equity restrictions on Philippine media. Rappler, which has been one of President Rodrigo Dutertes most vocal critics, has denied the claims and plans to fight the decision.

However, SEC secretary Armando Pan has said the decision was not not final and executory and that Rappler could still operate pending appeal.

Indonesias Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) chairman Abdul Manan condemned the Philippines' revoking of the license of Rappler as an undemocratic move that restricts freedom of the press.

We stand in solidarity with our good friends at Rappler and Rappler Indonesia, he told the Post over the phone on Monday.

If they can still fight the decision, we urge them to take it to the courts, but if not, it should not stop their fighting spirit. There are other avenues, such as starting a new media company. (kmt)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 13:42 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c150957 1 City #SexualHarassment,#Depok,#viral Free

The Police have arrested a suspect in a sexual harassment case that occurred in Beji, Depok, after the incident was captured on a nearby CCTV camera.

The suspect is identified as IH, 29 years old, Depok Police chief of general crimes Comr. Putu Kholis Aryana told kompas.com on Tuesday.

The incident took place on Jl. Kuningan Datuk in Beji, Depok, on Jan. 11.

The victim, a woman in a hijab, was walking alone down a small street in the area when a man on a motorcycle approached her from behind. The man reached out and touched the woman, and then immediately sped up to flee the scene while the shocked woman yelled at him.

The incident was recorded by a nearby CCTV camera that belonged to a Mandiri Bank office. The footage was released on social media shortly after the incident and went viral.

Putu said the suspect, a private employee, was arrested around noon on Monday at his residence in Mekarsari, Cimanggis, Depok.

IH was facing charges of Article 281 of the Criminal Code on indecent acts that violate social norms, said Putu.

The article carries a maximum punishment of two years and eight months in prison. (gis)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16 2018

A typical Indonesian wedding can cost billions of rupiah to put together, with hundreds of guests and a series of traditional rituals.

However, Paulus Lando, 28, an office worker in Kuningan, South Jakarta, and his fiancee plan a modest wedding celebration in April this year.

We will have a little coffee party with lunch boxes for guests after exchanging vows in the church. Afterward we will have dinner with our core family in a restaurant, he said.

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Linkedin Novan Iman Santosa (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 17 2018

Having celebrated the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relations with Indonesia in 2017, Azerbaijan aims to further strengthen its ties with Indonesia by finalizing two agreements involving culture and sports.

The deputy chief of mission at the Azeri Embassy in Jakarta, Ruslan Nasibov, said the negotiations for the agreements were in their final process and he expected them to be signed this year.

With the agreement in the cultural sector, for example, we can send a cultural team to perform in Jakarta, he told journalists at a luncheon on Tuesday.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, January 17 2018

Deputy Jakarta Governor Sandiaga Uno is scheduled to appear for questioning on Thursday following the issuance of a second summons by the Jakarta Police in connection with a land-embezzlement and money-laundering case.

Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono told kompas.com on Tuesday that Sandiaga would be questioned as a witness in the case.

According to the widely circulated summons, the investigators have increased the status of the case to investigation level.

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Linkedin News Desk (Kyodo News) Osaka, Japan  Tue, January 16, 2018 07:01 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c13cd18 2 News Don-Quijote,ferris-wheel,osaka,Japan,destination,tourism,travel Free

Japanese discount retailer Don Quijote Co. unveiled Monday a renovated Ferris wheel which is expected to become a new tourist attraction in Osaka's popular Dotombori shopping district.

The Ferris wheel, which had stopped running due to a technical failure about 10 years ago, was shown to the media before the start of commercial operations on Friday.

The iconic wheel built on the outer wall of Don Quijote's Dotombori store is decorated with a giant image of Ebisu, the god of business prosperity, and is expected to be a lure for visitors to the area, which has become popular among foreign tourists in recent years.

Rides in the four-seat cabin take about 15 minutes.

Read also: Osaka is Japan's new tourist hot spot for Asian visitors

The Ferris wheel faces a river and visitors can also observe Japan's tallest skyscraper, Osaka's Abeno Harukas, at the highest point of the wheel about 77 meters above ground.

The company has repaired the rail and changed the interior design of the 32 cabins. Rides cost 600 yen ($5.4) and are available between 11 a.m. and 11 p.m. all year round except days with rough weather conditions.

More than 4,000 people applied for a chance offered to 200 groups to get on the Ferris wheel for a test run on Wednesday, according to the company.

Yasuyuki Sakamoto, chief of the company's western Japan sales promotion section, said, "By entertaining both foreign tourists and locals, we hope to contribute to the revitalization of the community."
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 13:02 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c14e96a 4 News Virgin-Galactic,Blue-Origin,SpaceX,richard-branson,jeff-bezos,Elon-Musk,space,space-tourism,travel,rocket,tourism Free

Virgin Galactic's successful glide test of its VSS Unity plane on Jan. 11 has been another step forward for the company in developing space tourism against competitor companies Blue Origin and SpaceX.

According to tempo.co, there are three companies currently competing to conduct commercial space exploration, namely Richard Branson-owned Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX, with the first two mainly focused on taking tourists to space.

Virgin CEO Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004. It later became known for its first SpaceShipTwo, which tragically crashed during a test flight in 2014, killing one pilot.

The company moved on to create a reusable craft, called VSS Unity, which has successfully completed its seventh glide test last week when it landed in Mojave Desert in California, United States.

"VSS Unity was released from mothership VMS Eve and dropped from 50,000 feet, reaching speed of Mach 0.9. That is around the maximum airspeed we can achieve before the rocket motor ignites," Branson wrote in a blog post on the Virgin website.

ICYMI VSS Unity completed her 7th glide flight test this morning. For more information on today's flight head to our website https://t.co/YoQTqUr0oK #SpaceShipTwo Getting #NMReady pic.twitter.com/DbGhJUeuEo  Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) January 12, 2018

More than 700 wealthy customers so far have booked spots worth US$250,000 per seat on one of the Virgin space journeys, with commercial flights planned for later this year. Celebrities such as Brad Pitt and Katy Perry are among those waiting for the journey to space.

Read also: Elon Musk wants to use rockets for global commercial travel

Blue Origin, meanwhile, is owned by world's wealthiest man and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Established in 2000, the company upholds a motto of Gradatim Ferociter, which is Latin for Step by step, ferociously. The company is currently developing a rocket-capsule combo that would take people and payloads on trips to suborbital space.

In December, Blue Origin successfully launched an uncrewed capsule on a New Shepard 2.0 carrier rocket, with the test flight taking place at the company's Corn Ranch spaceport in western Texas, US.

Like Musk, Bezos also wants to reuse rockets to drive down the cost of space travel. For the time being, however, Blue Origin is mostly interested in conducting suborbital flights for tourists.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk established SpaceX in 2002 and the company has been taking trips to space to deliver satellites and make resupply missions to the International Space Station for years.

SpaceX aims to bring down the cost of spaceflight by reusing rockets, since in the past, rockets have been discarded after just one launch.

In February last year, the company said it would fly two space tourists to the Moon sometime in 2018, which would make it its first mission with humans on board. SpaceX's ultimate goal is to travel to Mars. (liz/kes)
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Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, January 16, 2018 12:35 1767 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c14da18 1 News Streetizens,unicef,Youth,movement Free

Youth-led movement Streetizens is one of two organizations worldwide that were selected by UNICEF to receive the San Marino-Alexander Bodini Foundation Childrens Award. The funding award aims to support youth-based organizations in promoting children's rights.

Inspired by photoblog Humans of New York, Streetizens intends to break the stereotype of children who live in Jakarta's slums by using film and social media. It also aims to improve their living standards through education. Currently, Streetizens consists of around 60 students coming from four different schools in Jakarta, such as Sekolah Pelita Harapan, Jakarta Intercultural School, Bina Bangsa School and Springfield.

Streetizens philosophy is in line with what UNICEF stands for in Indonesia  equality, said Valerie Crab, innovation lead at UNICEF Indonesia, during Streetizens New Years Celebration on Saturday in North Jakarta. She later added that both organizations have the same vision to break the stigma and make the voices of the children heard. Moreover, the grant itself lasts for a year.

Some of the core members of Streetizens, Timothy Sam Wijaya (left), Sabrina Hartono (center) and Felicia Widjaya, talk about their organization. (JP/Ni Nyoman Wira)

Were really honored to be recognized by UNICEF; [it's] such a prestigious recognition, said Sabrina Hartono, one of the core members of Streetizens.

At the same time, they also partnered up for the U-Report initiative, which is UNICEFs social messaging tool that enables "U-Reporters" (users of the platform) to speak out about certain issues and participate in policy and decision-making processes. Some of the topics covered are job skills and how to handle epidemics. Prior to Streetizens, UNICEF has also worked with other student organizations for U-Report, such as AIESEC. The initiative is open for youngsters to join.

Founded in 2015, Streetizens has visited Tanah Abang in Central Jakarta, Pulo Gadung in East Jakarta and Muara Baru in North Jakarta. Several of the movement's weekly activities include teaching the children math and English. They also emphasize the importance of improving the childrens life skills and character development. Each session lasts for two hours, which includes an ice-breaker at the beginning and a closing session at the end.

Children should be at least 5 years old to join the activities. Actually, there are many younger children, but if they dont yet have the capability to understand the lesson that we hold [], they will be confused and they wont enjoy the activity, Sabrina explained, adding that they teach more than 160 children in total.

In the beginning, Streetizens used their private funding to continue the movement. They also actively joined school bazaars by selling food in a booth to raise funds.

A child that was invited to Streetizens' New Year's Celebration event at Wisma ADR in Penjaringan, North Jakarta, on Jan. 13 writes his wish for the new year on a piece of heart-shaped paper. (JP/Ni Nyoman Wira)

Timothy, another core member of Streetizens, said for now they would rather focus on Pulo Gadung and Muara Baru first. But then in coming years, if we have the resources to expand, we will definitely do that, Timothy said. They also will make a documentary series that will be uploaded to YouTube every three months starting from April.

Those who are interested in participating in the movement or starting their own Streetizens in their school can visit its website. (asw)

Topics : Streetizens unicef Youth movement
MASON CITY | Cerro Gordo County supervisors are leaning towards calling a special election to fill the position of county auditor Ken Kline.

They can only "lean" at this point because they are prohibited from taking formal action until Kline's position is vacant. Kline has resigned, effective Jan. 22, to become Iowa's deputy commissioner of elections.

The board can appoint someone who would fill the position until the next general election in November, or could call for a special election in which the winner would fill the remaining two years of Kline's term.

Supervisor Tim Latham said he won't be able to attend the next supervisors meeting when a decision is likely to be made.

He said he favors holding a special election. "So many people have expressed interest in the job. I think it's only fair we hold an election," said Latham.

Supervisor Chris Watts agreed. "Let's let the democratic process work," he said.

One person has already expressed interest. Riley Dirksen of Mason City announced Monday he will be a candidate if the supervisors choose to have an election.
The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected former New York State Assemblyman Sheldon Silvers request for an appeal. The decision means his retrial on federal corruption charges will likely go ahead as scheduled this coming spring.

In November of 2015, the former Lower East Side power broker was convicted on public corruption charges. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but remained free while the appeals process ran its course. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturned the conviction and sent the case back for retrial. The appeals court found fault with the trial judges jury instructions in the aftermath of a supreme court case that weakened federal prosecutors hand in corruption cases. Silver filed the appeal with the high court in an effort to prevent a new trial.

Silver, a life-long Lower East Side resident, represented Lower Manhattan in the state assembly for four decades and had served as speaker of the assembly for more than 20 years. He was removed from office as a result of the 2015 conviction.

The retrial is tentatively scheduled to begin April 16.
Chad Olsen and his Olsen Custom Farms harvesting team are no strangers to the John Deere combine.

For his Hendricks, Minnesota-based custom harvesting operation, these big green machines are the workhorses that enable crews to harvest 600,000 to 700,000 acres of crops each year for farm customers stretching from Texas to Watson, Sasketchewan.

Even with his 25 years in the business, Olsen had a quiet excitement about him as he climbed into the cab of a new John Deere combine last week as it moved along the manufacturing line at John Deere Harvester Works in East Moline.

It marked the first time the farmer/entrepreneur accepted the honors of starting his new combine as part of the plant's Gold Key Tour. "Usually I let the employees do it," Olsen said. "I can walk out of my shop anytime and start a combine."

But this particular visit to Harvester Works' Station 220  the Gold Key Tour stop where a customer conducts the machine's first set of systems checks  held special significance. This was the 500th John Deere combine Olsen has purchased.

As he tested the machine's operating systems, Olsen had an entourage of 28 family members and Olsen Farms employees standing below to witness the momentous occasion. Taking the controls, Olsen checked some 30 different systems of the machine with a John Deere employee's guidance  watching for updates on a flat screen television monitor outside the machine.

The process checked everything from the engine to its hydraulics, the separator, lights, monitors, and even the horn. The whole checklist would get inspected again later down the line by members of Deere's quality team.

Olsen's crowd, who he brought overnight by charter bus from Minnesota, snapped photographs as he marked the occasion. Among his guests were two of his five children, son Charlie and daughter Ellie, longtime employees and a group of employees from South Africa, who join the harvesting crew each year.

The 500th machine is part of an order of 13 combines and eight pieces of front-end equipment that Harvester is building for Olsen. By year's end, Olsen said he will purchase 34 new combines from John Deere.

"We don't grow our fleet until we have the jobs," Olsen said. With a total fleet of about 75 combines, he said the size of the fleet has been stabilizing over the past few years. "We're playing it safer because we don't know what the farm economy is going to do. We're trying to stay efficient."

The bus trip, which included a luncheon at John Deere World Headquarters in Moline, provided a good distraction and break for the Olsen Farms team before its heavy lifting kicks off again in April.

Among the employees was Travis Schrick, who was on his second Harvester tour with his employer of 11 years. A semi-truck driver, Schrick said his job is to pick up and deliver the team's combines to its different harvesting jobs across the United States and Canada. "We follow the harvest," he said, adding the combines begin shipping April 1. "By mid-May or June 1, they are cutting."

Crews will start with the small grain first and wrap up with the large grains harvests, he said. Crops include wheat, canola, mustard, barley, milo, corn, beans, sunflowers and field peas, Schrick added.

Production excitement

Inside the manufacturing plant, Olsen and his team's presence could be felt from the time they entered the Visitor Center doors to the applause of more than a dozen John Deere team members to the reaction of dozens of employees on the factory floor. As the two dozen visitors toured the plant on trams, production employees greeted the group with cheers, "thank yous," applause and an occasional thumbs up.

On one of the very first stops, one worker walked to the tram and asked "Which one of you guys is Chad?" and proceeded to walk over and shake his hand.

"You could feel the buildup of this all week long knowing this machine was coming," said Haley Franks, a Harvester Works production supervisor, or module leader. "We have a lot of people do the Gold Tour experience here, but this is the first time I've been part of a 500th customer."

Deere officials were hesitant to confirm Olsen to be the first 500th combine customer. Given all the attention showered on the Olsen team, it was nonetheless an occasion of note.

"It's just been a special experience," said Franks of Walnut, Illinois, a six-year Deere employee. "When you think of how much money Olsen Farms has spent with us and invested in us, that says a lot about our product."

Jane Freeburg, an assembler for the past 10 years, said a 500-combine customer helps validates the work she and her co-workers do every day. "What we try to do here is put out the best quality machine so the customers can do their best job at harvest."

Her co-worker, Kari Bormann, an 11-year employee, added that every customer who comes in for a Gold Key Tour "is a privilege to meet." "Every machine we make is sold and has a name. But to see a face with it is uplifting and gratifying."

Deere executive Doug Roberts, who is the director of Deere's global combine business, also was on hand at the plant for the milestone customer.

"That is some kind of loyalty that allows a customer to buy 500 combines. You can see how excited our employees are," he said.

That level of purchasing also takes a sophisticated business operation like Olsen's, Roberts said. "He runs 40 combines brand new every year and 40 from the year before for his rental business... "

In addition to custom farming, Olsen has his own farm operation in Minnesota and rents out equipment to other farmers.

'Stayed green'

For Olsen, his dedication to Deere runs deep. In fact, he said other companies have offered to bring their machines for his crews to try. "But we've stayed green."

"When we first started, we had no money, no financial backing and John Deere Financial took us on, so we've stuck with them," he said.

Olsen did not set out to do custom combining, but was led down the path after a devastating fire on Dec. 19, 1990, destroyed the then young farmer's dairy barn. With his head of 48 cattle and their calves killed, and 3,500 bales of hay and other contents destroyed, Olsen faced his $100,000 investment gone up in smoke, and at 22 years old, had to start over.

Olsen said the business, which now employs as many as 70 during peak harvest, began with him "and a worn-out combine" working for other neighboring farmers to make ends meet in 1993. Over the next decade, the operation grew to a fleet of 21 combines, 13 semis, four service trucks and four grain carts.

Today with a fleet of 75 to 80 combines, the team harvests  and custom plants, too  hundreds of thousands of acres across the United States and Canada. Beginning in spring, crews harvest small grains in the south and work north until October, or later, finishing up the Midwest's corn harvest.

"We'll do any size farm from a 300-acre farm to a 30,000-acre farm," he said. "My wife always reminds me we do small jobs as well as big jobs because it was the small guys that got us started. Every job makes a difference at the end of the year. They're all just as important. Size doesn't matter."
Happy Appreciate a Dragon Day! Dragons play a large role in many beloved stories and are always valued when reading a good fantasy. Here are 7 of the best fictional dragons to appreciate today.

Smaug from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

This evil, powerful, and fearsome dragon played a big role in The Hobbit with his duty to protect the treasure in the Lonely Mountain. Smaug is very isolated, never leaving the mountain and when something was stolen from him, he burnt down a whole town. He was finally killed when the gang from the Hobbit tries to take over the mountain.

Ruth from The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey

Ruth is a unique white dragon from the Pern novels and first appears in the novel The White Dragon. He has the unique ability travel forwards or backwards in time at will. Pern is a science fiction series filled with magic and wonder that follows the main characters, Lessa and Ruth.

Drogon, Rhaegal & Viserion from A Dance of Dragons by George R.R. Martin

These three dragons born were the Dothraki Sea and are seen throughout the series with Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen. The dragons and their riders play a pretty influential role in the series, with great power and influence.

Falkor from The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

This fuzzy, friendly, and abnormal dragon is one of the most beloved dragons from many people's childhoods, and originates from the classic book and film The Neverending Story. This Luck Dragon is a big part of the story, being very wise and optimistic, and can often be seen giving people advice when they are stuck in a quest.

Saphira from Eragon by Christopher Paolini

Saphira is the only mentioned female dragon in the books and plays a big role in them, in which she is bonded to Eragon Shadeslayer as her Dragon Rider. In this book they have to escape an evil group of men that have been searching for Saphira for years.

The Jabberwocky from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

This famous nonsense poem centers around a creature that can be most closely described as a dragon of sorts. In the poems it is describes using phrases such as fearsome, ferocious, and with jaws that bite, the claws that catch.

The Hungarian Horntail from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Although this dragon only plays a small part in one of the Harry Potter books, it did not leave a small impact. The Hungarian Horntail is one of the most dangerous dragons with black scales, yellow eyes, and spikes protruding from its body. During its part in the story, Harry Potter must take the Golden Egg that the dragon is so fiercely try to protect.
Signed to Irish label Rubyworks in 2016, the Irish two-piece have been making music together professionally since 2011. What started as two brothers busking on the streets of Dublin quickly grew to something of a sensation. Previously referred to as simply 'Harry & Alfie', they took on their double-barrelled surname and thus Hudson Taylor was born.

From Oasis to Haim, bands consisting of siblings are often a recipe for success and Hudson Taylor are no exception. Hot off the back of their lastest single, 'Feel It Again', Hudson Taylor are about to embark on an a UK & European tour. The National Student caught up with them ahead of this, to discuss all things new music.

When we're in the studio, we sometimes like to have an audience as if its a live performance, the brothers confessed - you can feed positively off their energy.

The element of live performance is what Hudson Taylor are drawn to over almost anything else that comes with pursuing music as a career. It's the most immediately creative and expressive part of what we do. It's beautifully spontaneous and no matter how well rehearsed you are you can never predict what an audience's energy might bring out of your performance.

Therefore, its hardly a surprise that the nearly 3 year gap between the release of their debut album, Singing for Strangers and now was spent touring.

"We spent 2015/16 playing tons of gigs and getting 'Singing for Strangers' out there and promoting it. When that started to naturally slow down we started writing new tunes and recording demos for the next album.

With an impending new album, 'Feel It Again' is the first promotional single to be taken from it. A glimpse of what to come, the single is a fusion of folk influence and old-school rocknroll. Upbeat, carefree and hideously infectious, its a welcome return for the brothers. "It feels so great to be releasing music again. We were sitting on some of these songs for a while so it's a real buzz injection to our sets to play them live and see people enjoying the new ones and singing back the old songs after all that time. We did not expect 'Feel It Again' to have been received so well - were humbled by the reaction to it and very grateful for all the support from home.

For Hudson Taylor, home' is Dublin, Ireland. Having formerly been signed to Polydor Records, the conclusion of the record deal saw a move to RubyWorks Records - based in Dublin.

Being signed to an Irish label means a lot. Since we started working with Rubyworks, weve been really well supported and well looked after. Its so lovely to be working with a small team, they acknowledge. It feels like a family.

However, had they not chosen to re-sign to another label, it wouldnt have been an issue - we would [have] just got on with playing gigs and recording music!"

Once work commenced with the label, the boys went out to the States to record album two with producer Ryan Hadlock. Best known for his work on The Lumineers self-titled debut and Vance Joys Dream Your Life Away, Hadlock seems a fitting choice for Hudson Taylor.

We listened to some great music while we were making this new album, say the band of their musical influences. Naturally, that inspire the sound. We were inspired by listening to some 70s Zeppelin and Rolling Stones for some of production of the songs. Of course we love vocal harmony too and often take influence from the masters: Crosby, Still and Nash, The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, The Everly Brothers, to name a few.

One of the big differences to this record is also Harry picking up an electric guitar. Its made a huge difference to the sound as a whole.

With a reworked, yet still classically Hudson Taylor sound, the next logical step is to share it with the world. Its been nearly 3 years since weve played a headline show in the UK, so it will be really nice to play there again. In particular, theyre looking forward to playing in London, a city theyve called home in the past. Theyre going global too - Weve always had a great time whenever weve visited of played in Berlin, which theyre set to do in February. A headline tour of America is one to cross of the bucket list for sure!"

2018 is set to be an exciting year for Hudson Taylor. As their fans impatiently wait for the second album this year, which were told will hopefully be released later this year, the duo are excited for whats to come.

Catch Hudson Taylor on their up coming tour here . Latest single 'Run With Me' is out now.

It's this passion for performance and drive for something which feels authentic that makes them so enamouring.
There are hundreds of news aggregators apps out there, and all of them promise to keep you updated on all of your interests and hobbies. However, not many of them are aimed exclusively at Millennials.

Designed specifically to let students and young people engage and interact with news, SQUID is a personalised news feed with many interests to choose from.

Created in Stockholm, Sweden, by Njuice AB, a media company and after a successful Beta period, SQUID launched officially in September 2017.

We want to help younger generations rediscover reading news as an entertaining, valuable and engaging daily activity, says Johan Othelius, CEO and Founder of SQUID.

The app makes relevant news easily available, offering several topics and letting users select and create their own personalised and picture-centric news feed. It gathers news from several online sources on the web and allows users to comment on them Snapchat style with writing on-screen and sharing them instantly with friends in social networks.

Another perk of SQUID is that when you click on an article, youre redirected to the original website on which the article was published. Its not yet a flawless experience, but its better than some apps that try to grab text from other websites with very poor results.

On a slightly negative note, its impossible not to notice the somewhat intrusive ads here and there at times, but many news apps have them, and theyre not particularly bad in SQUID.

At the moment, the app is available for free in UK, Italy, Spain, France, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Germany, Austria and Australia with an International version as well, allowing you to read the news in different countries and in the local languages and to take part of local and International news sources. SQUID told The National Student that more countries will be launched in the near future.

Squid is now officially available for download in the United Kingdom Google Play and App Store.
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The Healthy Downriver Community Team, a local collaborative, will present its annual free resource fair, Mending the Safety Net, from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. Jan. 26 at Wayne County Community College District-Downriver Campus, 21000 North Line Road, Taylor.

The event is an opportunity for nonprofit direct service providers to attend and/or have an exhibit table at no cost. The event is designed for family services workers; hospital and school social workers; nurses; case managers; any health, human services, education or early childhood professionals; or volunteers who assist families in need.

For exhibitor information and registration or general details about the event,contact Carol Meyers at carolm@theinfocenter.org.

Registration is not necessary to attend the event.

Mending the Safety Net is planned and presented by the Healthy Downriver Community Team, a local community collaborative, and hosted by Wayne County Community College District, Downriver Campus.
The Friends of Lincoln Park Farmers Market will hold their first board meeting of 2018 Jan. 20 at noon.

The meeting will be held at Park Restaurant, 1681 Fort Street, Lincoln Park. Newcomers are welcome.

We are especially interested in those community members that have an interest in fundraising, marketing, or community outreach, said Friends of Lincoln Park Farmers Market president Leslie Lynch-Wilson

The Lincoln Park Farmers Market has been a staple in the Lincoln Park community since 2007; bringing farmers, vendors, families and community members together each Sunday, June through October along with a late indoor November Holiday Market and occasional indoor winter markets. The market features vendors selling assorted locally grown produce and locally made specialty foods and crafts. The market is committed to supporting local farmers, specialty food and crafts vendors.

More information can be obtained on the by contacting Friends of Lincoln Park Farmers Market at 313-427-0443 or lpfm@inbox.com.

Friends of Lincoln Park Farmers Market, organizers of Lincoln Park Farmers Market and Holiday Market, is a 501c3 non-profit corporation.
LYLE, Minnesota | A crash between a semi and another vehicle Tuesday morning caused the semi to lose control and crash into the Lyle Public School, sending two students to the hospital and injuring two others outside the school.

A southbound car and semi collided in the intersection of Highway 218 and Pershing Avenue about 8:20 a.m., officials said. The semi collided with the rear of the car attempting to make a left-hand turn.

The semi then careened off Highway 218, crashing into the west wall of the high school art room. The entire cab entered the room where there were 12 students in class during the first period of the school day.

Lyle Superintendent Bryan Boysen said he could confirm that two students, neither of whom he identified, were taken by ambulance to Austin, and described their injuries as head injuries, but did not believe the injuries were serious.

A parent and a student, riding in the car struck by the semi, were also injured bringing the total to four.

Boysen said that he was alerted to incident when the schools fire alarm went off. He entered the hallway leading to the classroom where he saw smoke. Employees directed him to the classroom where the semi was completely embedded.

I entered the art classroom, walked in and saw a semi staring at me, Boysen said.

All students were evacuated and sent to Our Saviors Lutheran Church to be picked up by their parents. While at the church, students were checked out by a first responder as a precaution.

Even with the two students injured inside the building, both Boysen and Christianson said the accident could have been a lot worse.

The staff did a great job and  it makes you realize were family, Boysen said.

The good Lord was watching over us, Boysen went on to say. It could have been a lot worse.

Minnesota State Patrol Sgt. Troy Christianson said a reason the crash wasnt any worse was that the semi struck a load-bearing wall, preventing the semi from going further into the building.

School was canceled for the remainder of the day and Boysen said it would probably be canceled Wednesday as well as the school assesses damage.

We are already in the process of concealing and repairing it, Boysen said, adding that a contractor from Austin would be going over the damage Tuesday. Part of the concern, Boysen said, is the possibility of roof collapse due to the damage.

All students were evacuated and sent to Our Saviors Lutheran Church to be picked up by their parents. While at the church, students were checked out by a first responder as a precaution.

Gold Cross Ambulance, the Mower County Sheriffs Department, and the Minnesota State Patrol assisted at the scene. Counselors were available for students and staff if they needed to talk.

The semi driver has not been identified.

Lyle is located about 40 miles northeast of Mason City.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told senators Tuesday she "did not hear" President Donald Trump say the specific word "shithole" during a meeting with lawmakers last week that she attended.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, reminded Nielsen at a Senate Judiciary Hearing on Tuesday that she was "under oath" and asked if he used that word or a "substantially similar" one.

"I did not hear that word used, no sir," she said, before Leahy cut her off.

"That wasn't the question -- did he use anything similar to that describing certain countries?" he asked.

Nielsen dodged that question, saying the language was "tough."

"The conversation was very impassioned, I don't dispute that the President was using tough language, others in the room were also using tough language," Nielsen said.

Sens. Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham, a Democrat and Republican who were in the room, have confirmed to the press the reports that Trump said the words "shithole countries" to describe individuals from African nations and had disparaging remarks toward Haitians being part of an immigration deal -- all as part of a conversation about how the US accepts immigrants. Other lawmakers in the room, Republican Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue, have said they don't recall hearing that word used. Trump has denied using the word, though he has said the conversation was tough and has spoken privately with friends about the remark playing well with his base.

"Did he use what would be considered vulgar language referring to certain countries?" Leahy asked again.

"The President used tough language in general as did other congressman in the room, yes sir," Nielsen said.

The homeland security secretary is facing a grilling from senators in the wake of the President's remarks.

The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, opened her comments by warning Nielsen that she was not happy with what she was hearing out of her department thus far.

Feinstein referenced recent reports that Nielsen's department was continuing to consider a practice of separating children from parents when apprehended at the border -- a policy first suggested last year by then-Secretary John Kelly.

"Candidly, woman to woman, I can't believe that, and I hope you will clarify," Feinstein said. "Not only would such a systemic policy infringe on the constitutional rights of parents. It is also callous and stunningly un-American."

Feinstein added that a that pediatric group have said such a policy would have a negative impact on children.

"The America I know does not rip small children from their parents, and I can't imagine the fear that a small child would feel if this would happen," Feinstein said. "And for what? Because the child had no part in this."

Nielsen, in her answers, said the department has "not made any policy decisions" on the topic, though she noted there are reasons at times to separate children from who they arrive in the US with, especially if there is a suspicion they are being trafficked.

Feinstein also referenced the President's recent remarks about "shithole countries" in a meeting last week with fellow Judiciary member Sen. Dick Durbin and Nielsen, among other lawmakers.

"In light of the reports about the President's recent comments, I hope you're ready to specifically address one issue in particular and that's the termination of Temporary Protected Status known as TPS for Haitians," Feinstein said. "In light of the President's comments, I'm forced to question whether the decision to terminate protected status for Haitian nationals was in fact racially motivated. I hope not."

CNN's David Shortell contributed to this report.
Central Bank of Liberia

Is the debt of the Liberian government (i.e., Parent) to the Central Bank of Liberia (i.e., Subsidiary) authentic, legitimate and transparent debt? If yes, should it be excluded from the Current Assets of the Bank in determining the Banks liquidity since the Accounts Receivable is not redeemable within one year? I gave an answer to the latter question at the Governance Commission Seminar held on 12/15/17, and also stated that the Central Bank owes US $42,000 million.

Aside from the debt owed to the commercial banks, the Accounts Receivables between the Government and the Bank contributed to two separate problems not just for the Central Bank of Liberia but also for the Nation. In the first case, instead of using its profits that would have been earned from excess cash invested in portfolios held outside of the country, the Bank was compelled to use revenue of a government that is bankrupt to pay its operating expenses, thereby, reducing the countrys cash flow usually reserved to fight liquidity crisis. For instance, the Bank used government taxes to pay US $37 million and US $34 million as administrative expenses in 2016 and 2015 respectively. Also, the Bank paid US $750,000 and US $300,000 to the Banks five Board members in 2016 and 2015 respectively, according to page # 48 of the Bank 2016 Financial Statements.

The second problem of the Accounts Receivable is that by increasing the value of its Current Assets (i.e., Cash and Cash Equivalents), it deceived many stakeholders into believing that Liberias financial position was good for the country to borrow more money. Certainly, stakeholders, not only creditors, would have asked question about the Banks financial position if they saw that its total Current Liabilities exceeded its total Current Assets. On page # 36 of the Banks 2016 Financial Statement, the Bank included government debts as one of the items that is considered in calculating its assets held for managing liquidity risk. The Banks action is in violation of page # 98 of the International Monetary Funds Guidelines to calculate a countrys Net International Reserves Position, the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and International Financial Reporting System.

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and International Financial Reporting System advise preparers and users of financial statements to exclude long-term accounts receivable or questionable accounts receivable in calculating current assets or cash equivalents. The Guidelines of the International Monetary Fund state Loans (not readily available to meet a Balance of payment financing need) should not be included in the Reserves Data Template. Nonetheless, Bank Chief Executives, the International Monetary Fund, External Auditors, I guess, believe that the practice by the Bank to collect government revenue, which it used to finance Banks operations, does indicate or support the idea that the value of the accounts receivable is Cash Equivalents or Current Assets. However, the collection of interest income does not change the character of a long-term account receivable to the character of accounts receivables that could be redeem within one year. Also, the Bank might not have received any penny from the government if the Bank was not the custodian of all monies received by the Government and, or if the government had treated the Bank as any unsecured creditor. Many unsecured creditors do have cash flow problems because government is not liquidating its debts.

In any case, what did the government received in exchange of the account receivable? Or, what constitutes this questionable account receivable? Did an expert verify the accounts receivable since the business transaction is between two related parties? Did the Bank obtain collateral for the loan and advances? How does one address the presumption that arms-length transactions cannot be achieved in those situations where the parties are related or where one party can exercise substantial control over the other?

In 2016, I tried to get answer about authenticity of the debt owed by the government as well as the make up of Liberias Net International Exchange Reserves Position reported to be on the average of US $200 million from 2010 through 2015. I sent one letter to the International Monetary Fund through its head office in Liberia and another to the Banks External Audit Firm, Pricewaterhousecooper. I also sent copies of the two letters to the Chief Executive and Chairman of the Central Bank of Liberia. I had hoped that the schedule detailing the computation of Liberias Net International Exchange Reserves Position could disclose the increases and decreases of the Special Drawing Rights and Drawdowns. Special Drawing Right (SDR) is a privilege to borrow money, while Drawdown represents the amount borrowed from the IMF. For example, the IMF November 13, 2017 Report indicated that Liberias SDR was declining, but the Banks balance sheet of 2016 did not depict the decline in SDR.

Similarly, the Banks balance sheet indicated increases in the debt owed by government owed to the Bank, even though the Banks expenses exceeded revenue in 2016 and 2015 respectively. If the Bank did not get cash from its operations, how did it finance the increase in Accounts Receivable? The page # 48 of the Banks 2016 Financial Statements gives us a little picture about the make up of the debt the government owed to the Bank of Liberia. The US $32 million was a loan lent to the government of Liberia through its fiscal and depository agent, the Bank. In short, the amount is a loan from the IMF to the government of Liberia, but deposited with the Central Bank of Liberia, which is the custodian of governments monies, gold, securities, etc.

Further, where did the National Bank of Liberia, the former Bank of Liberia, get US $245,400,046.00 from to lend to the government of Liberia before 1999, when the country and the National Bank of Liberia had cash flow problem from December 25, 1989 through 2003? Page # 23 of the Banks 2007 Financial Statement stated that the government and the Bank re-entered into an agreement to re-structure its long-term obligation to the Bank. However, page # 15 of the Banks 2016 Financial Statement stated that after the netting of assets and liabilities of the former Bank, the National Bank, the net worth was LD 7.3 billion (i.e., US $66.9 million).

So, let us assume that the former National Bank used its profits and lent the US $245 million to the government, therefore the accounts receivable is valid. But the profit, some of the money the Bank used to lend money to its parent, is primarily sourced to governments revenue, a percentage of government revenue withheld. Therefore, since the accumulation of the Accounts Receivables is sourced to government revenue and, or government loan deposited with the Bank, the accounts receivables is not debt owed by the government.

What is your take? Please post your comments below:


Stories are powerful in shaping what we do every day, how we live, how we treat others. Beautiful, insightful stories of human potential, wisdom of living well, stories of other people in other lands having dreams and aspirations much like ours. Or stories that lead to falsehoods, hate, and violence. Enough people in Germany, for example, were captivated by a destructive story that Hitler told them, and they fell for it and were trapped in that story with horrible consequences for humanity.

There is a story that Iowans have been captivated by and trapped in which have not served us well. And the best way to snap out of them is for many of us to tell better stories.

I, as a transplanted immigrant, find it most astonishing. This story has been aggressively told over and over again by big corporations, polluting industries and those who speak for them who want to take all they can without accountability. Key messages of their story is that "government is bad," that government is a parasite to take your liberties away, that government is inefficient and wasteful, and that everyone on their own is most efficient and free. Rules to reduce or prevent harm to the community are "regulatory burden," another common slogan of this story.

What I find amazing is that we have allowed ourselves to forget the most prized ideal of our nation  self governance  and have fallen for the falsehood that organizing ourselves to serve ourselves is bad. We have allowed ourselves to take for granted that our properties, our neighborhoods and businesses are richer because of police and fire protection, law, order, public health, a system of fair courts and regulations, collectively self-governance.

I am totally baffled that we celebrate Honor Flights, our veterans, and get patriotic at sporting events, but then when Rep. Walt Rogers and colleagues plan to diminish and devalue public education in Iowa, we are silent. When we say we love this country, what exactly do we mean? Clearly not our public education.

And clearly not the critical services of public health professionals. As I write, Rep. Megan Jones has introduced HF 2017 to eliminate the Iowa Department of Public Health. We love our country but not the essential services Medicaid offers to the most vulnerable. The unspoken slogan of the profiteers of less-government-more-corporations as they cut our services is: It sucks to be you. You are not getting the respite or medical care you needed? Well, it sucks to be you.

This is an awful story we are trapped in, and it is urgent that we snap out of it.

We all need to tell more stories of governance by the people, rather than just accepting the stories that greedy private interests keep telling us. We need to tell stories of public schools, public libraries, public health, and public utility, and all other wonderful public things we have created to make a good life here. Our daily life and liberty are derivatives of self-governance. There is no liberty when the basic services you need to live are not there and your region is plundered by entities who do not want any limits imposed on them.
How to watch and what to know about Northern Iowa at South Dakota
A recent poll conducted by the Heartland Health Research Institute found that nearly one in five Iowans say they have had personal experience with medical errors in the past five years. While unintended consequences of medical care are unfortunate, the focus should not be on how many occur. Frankly, one is too many.

Iowa health care providers believe the focus should be on prevention, and building systems that reduce the opportunity for errors to even occur. Since 2005, the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative has been working with hospitals, physicians and communities to improve processes that reduce the unintended consequences of medical care.

Many factors contribute to the ultimate diagnosis and associated care plan for the patient. Hospitals are a particularly complex working environment that require detailed information and coordination between multiple parties. Unfortunately, in complex systems there are sometimes unintended consequences to the process.

Recognizing this, IHC has been partnering with the healthcare provider community to reduce chances for these events to occur. These efforts have demonstrated meaningful success. For example, since 2012 we have seen an 85 percent reduction in medication errors, 78 percent reduction in early elective deliveries, a 32 percent reduction in catheter associated urinary tract infections, and a 50 percent reduction in postoperative infections such as sepsis. And there is a lot of improvement on the horizon.

Numerous patient safety efforts are underway, such as addressing antimicrobial stewardship, falls prevention, and reduction of health care acquired infections. IHC is working with partners across the country in a national project that addresses diagnostic error. Finally, IHC is working with Iowa hospitals to reduce all-cause 30-day readmissions by 12 percent, reduce adverse drug events through medication safety and effectiveness initiatives, and addressing the national opioid epidemic with improved prescribing practices through IHCs Opioid Guardianship program.

Eliminating these unintended consequences of medical care is a team sport. It requires both the provider and the patient as active partners to be successful. Health care organizations are working collaboratively to engage patients and families in new ways to promote improved quality, patient safety and reduced cost.

One example is IHCs CANDOR program, a program specifically designed to facilitate open and honest communication between health care providers and their patients.

Conditions where people, technology and process intermingle often introduce unpredictable or unforeseen situations. But one medical error is too many. This work will continue to be a part of IHCs efforts to align and equip Iowa health care providers for continuous improvement and to raise the standard of care in Iowa.
The snowflakes at Iowa State University just didn't get it.

No, not the students. It was triggered administrators who poured taxpayer cash down the drain defending their campaign against free speech.

The State Appeal Board this week approved paying $150,000 in damages and almost $200,000 in attorney fees to a pair of students whose First Amendment rights were worth less to ISU administrators than public relations. In 2012, the students, Paul Gerlich and Erin Furleigh, ran the campus' pro-marijuana legalization group, NORML. All was well and good until the organization's shirts, featuring ISU's mascot and a pot leaf, got a little press.

Suddenly, the Governor's Office was asking questions. Suddenly, political speech was a problem because it didn't jibe with top elected officials.

Administration blocked the school-sanctioned group from re-ordering more T-shirts and leveled and rewrote ISU's trademark guidelines that specifically targeted ISU's NORML chapter.

A lot has been said about university students and their supposed inability to face ideas that upset them. On campuses across the country, throngs of students have railed against conservative speakers. Those protesters have every right to deride the concepts pitched by conservative columnists and Breitbart writers. But that right doesn't extend to shutting down speech with which they don't agree.

But, at ISU, the students weren't the oft-criticized "snowflakes." This instance doesn't fit the narrative of coddled millennials seeking sanctuary from every offense and emotional stress.

At ISU, then-President Steven Leath and his top lieutenants went seeking a safe space. And Iowa's taxpayers will now pay for the willingness of a few triggered administrators who roughshod over the U.S. Constitution for the sake of protecting the brand. A federal judge reached the same conclusion this past year.

Public opinion about marijuana has changed drastically since ISU's 2012 crackdown on NORML. A significant majority of Americans now oppose U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' crusade against state-level legalization programs, polls show. Support for medicinal marijuana programs also have strong support. And, increasingly, support is shifting for recreational legalization. Marijuana is among those rare issues that can transcend partisan politics. Budget hawk conservatives aren't keen on paying for the Drug War's costs, especially in the justice system. Liberals decry the disproportionate effect criminalizing marijuana has had on poor and minority communities.

The pro-pot movement was only in its infancy six years ago.

Even so, the T-shirts that so offended Iowa's elected and appointed class was very much a political one. NORML's message was, and continues to be, a legitimate matter of political discourse.

Even if it wasn't, though, ISU's targeted assault against NORML would stand as a stunning assault on free speech. Even the most vile speech -- what some call hate speech -- is protected, says a mountain of precedent.

Call us idealists, but universities must always be among society's most free institutions. They're places where beliefs are challenged. They're places where ideas are argued. They're places where concepts too often barred from a politically correct culture are probed, tested and analyzed. They're the ultimate home of free expression.

ISU officials, under political pressure, neglected their charge. Now, all Iowans will pay for that shameful weakness.
TORONTO, Jan. 15, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Black Lives Matter and Legal Counsel, Saron Gebresellassi, arrived at the Roxham Road and Lacolle Border crossings to offer legal support to Haitian migrants crossing the border to enter Canada. At the Border, the RCMP detained the group for over an hour captured on a video that has since gone viral.



The Trump administration is ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Haitian migrants by July 2019, forcing approximately 60,000 Haitian migrants to either flee or face deportation.

Migrants crossing the border badly need legal advice and representation, said Saron Gebresellassi, a lawyer who coordinated the delegation. Canadas legal system is difficult to navigate, even more so for migrants who are being detained in conditions that may also violate their Charter rights. The environment here is heavily militarized and needs to be monitored round-the-clock.

Over 16,000 people have crossed the border according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The situation Haitians are facing in Canada is devastating, said Pascale Diverlus, an activist from Black Lives Matter. Trudeau himself said refugees are welcome here but for Haitian children, parents and families their first moments in Canada are met with arrest instead of the welcoming environment they are hoping for.

The delegation is offering legal support in nine languages including English, French, American Sign Language, Creole and Spanish in anticipation of an anticipated influx of migrants who may also be seeking asylum in Canada after the recent announcement that the Trump administration is cancelling TPS designations for over 200,000 El Salvadorans.

Media Contact (French and English):

Saron Gebresellassi

Tel: (416) 854-6645

Email: saron@saronpc.com




The recent Q3 results of the Indian IT services companies namely TCS and Infosys indicate that there is likely to be better growth in the present Q4 quarter and the Q1 of the next FY 2018-19. Experts with whom THE WEEK spoke to feel that digital transformation and the slight improvement in the European and US market may drive some growth for the Indian IT services companies who are mainly dominated by these geographies for their revenue. As per reports TCS Q3 revenue improved 1.2 per cent to Rs 30,904 crore from the preceding quarter as its CEO Rajesh Gopinathan said that the firm delivered good results, especially in a seasonally weak quarter. On the other hand, Infosys had reported a 37.6 per cent sequential growth in net profit at Rs 5,129 crore for the December quarter and was higher than the estimates by some market analysts.

It seems that the overall European market is improving and seems that clients are making decisions and renewing their deals. I see growth in the BFSI (Banking Finance and Insurance) segment in Europe and the US. Earlier, many digital projects were proof of concept projects but those are turning into real projects. The recent US corporate tax rate cut will increase discretionary spending and is a positive trend in the US. Similarly, the Brexit days have settled down and clients are willing to spend. In retail, the brick and mortar stores are really turning into digital online stores in these geographies and that will result in new digital opportunity for the Indian IT services companies. Even in the energy segment, where companies such as Wipro have exposure, there has been some increase in spending due to the revival in the crude oil prices, Amit Chandra, IT analyst at Mumbai based HDFC Securities told THE WEEK. Chandra further feels that though there would be growth it would be gradual and the real picture would emerge only in the next couple of quarters.

Another expert Kris Lakshmikanth, CEO and founder of Head Hunters India Limited, feel that there has been growth in different economies which may become an opportunity for the Indian IT services companies. There has been a growth of 3 per cent in the US economy, 2.5 per cent in the European economy. In the near past there were times when the US economy was growing at just 1 per cent annually and the European economy at 1.2 per cent and in Japan, the growth was just 1 per cent. For instance, the Japanese government is forcing Japanese companies towards bringing digital transformation. So compared to the earlier times there has been gradual growth. However, the real growth will come in the digital space and that is the segment where the Indian IT services companies need to focus on. They should also not overlook Indian market which is also witnessing digital transformation and can bring them growth, said Lakshmikanth.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday assured to come to the rescue of industrialists and said she feels bad when businessmen are harassed by politicians.

Dont worry. I would protect you because I consider you as part of my family. I will not spare my party members as well, the chief minister said at the opening of the Bengal Global Business Summit which was attended by top industrial honchos Mukesh Ambani, Sajjan Jindal and Lakshmi Mittal among others.

Jindal, who recently turned his steel project in Bengals Shalboni into a cement factory, said he would like to spend Rs 10,000 crore in the state in the coming years.

Ambani said he had already spend Rs 15,000 crore in Jio and added that he would spend Rs 5,000 crore in the next few years in retail and petroleum industry in the state.

Negotiation is under way on Reliances investment in ailing Haldia Petrochemicals development corporation.

Mittal, however, did not make any promises although he praised the chief minister.

Mamata had gone to London and invited Mittal to come to Kolkata to attend the business meet. She also went to Mumbai to invite Ambani to attend the business meet. The chief minister, however, did not meet his brother, Anil Ambani.

Mamata asked the industrialists to invest in Bengal as the state has come up as the best industrialist friendly state in India in a government survey.

We are a power surplus state and there is a political stability in the state which is conducive for you to invest, said the chief minister.

She said all the hurdles before the investments would be done away with, but stayed away from talking about land acquisition which is the only roadblock in the state.

If she could guarantee the industrialists about land acquisition, West Bengal would have seen the biggest industrialisation in manufacturing sector, said a business head who was present at the meeting.

The meeting saw many foreign diplomats, foreign business consultants and business executives from 30 countries participating.
Unable to replace glitch-prone INSAAS rifles and carbines for over a decade, the ministry of defence on Tuesday decided to make the procurement of 72,400 assault rifles and 93,895 carbines for Indian Army at the cost of Rs 3,547 crore on 'fast-track' mode. The decision was taken by the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) headed by minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

The Army, which has been trying to replace indigenous INSAAS rifles and was targetting these assault riles and carbine by 2010-2011, will now be able to procure these two primary weapons of a soldier at much faster speed.

Army's efforts to provide modern weapons was taken a hit when the contract worth $750 million and $500 million respectively for assault rifles and carbines were junked in May 2015 because the rifles on offer by armament firms like Colt (US), Beretta (Italy), Ceska (Czech) and Israel Weapon Industries were not found cost-effective or suitable after extensive trials by the infantry directorate of the Indian Army. Army was targeting specifications of having interchangeable barrels capable of firing both 5.56mm and 7.62mm calibre bullets, but subsequently decided to go for 7.62mm calibre and issued fresh General Staff Quality Requirements (GSQR).

Army chief General Bipin Rawat during his annual press interaction on the occasion of Army Day on Friday had said that "Procurement of assault rifles got delayed due to change in GSQR. Now we will go for an assault rifle with 500m range with night vision capability.

Similarly, tender for 44,600 close quarter carbines (rifles) to be provided to the infantry units for combating terrorists in close fights, which was issued in 2010, was also cancelled in 2016 by then defence minister Manohar Parrikar. Carbine deal worth Rs 1,000 crore went off track after the then junior minister of defence Rao Inderjit Singh raised doubts whether the Army was trying to favour a particular vendor. Eventually, the MoD decided to cancel the process to start a fresh move.

Meanwhile, in order to encourage participation of private sector in defence design and production and to give a boost to Make in India programme, DAC also introduced significant changes in the Make II category of the Defence Procurement Procedure. Considering that no government funding is involved in Make II project, the DAC simplified the procedure to make it industry friendly, with minimal government control.

"The salient aspects of the revised procedure will now allow Ministry of Defence to accept suo-motu proposals from the industry and also allow start-ups to develop equipment for Indian Armed Forces. The minimum qualification criteria to participate in Make II projects have also been relaxed by removing conditions related to credit rating and reducing financial net worth criteria," ministry of defence said in a statement.
Army chief General Bipin Rawat decided to take a strong stand against both Pakistan and China, countries with which India has fought wars. On the occasion of 70th Army Day, General Rawat warned Pakistan for violating ceasefire agreement by saying "we (Indian army) will take even stronger steps against our enemies if we are compelled to do so."

Soon after his statement, Indian army killed seven Pakistani soldiers including a Major in a retaliatory action along the Line of Control in Janglote area opposite Mendhar sector. An army officer responded by saying that Pakistan troops have been aggressive and targeting Indian posts on the border since Saturday. "We responded strongly, resulting in seven fatal casualties and four injuries on Pakistans side across the LoC opposite Mendhar, said an officer.

The year 2017 witnessed over 800 instances of ceasefire violations by Pakistan, to which the Indian army responded strongly. "Both sides have enhanced the intensity and calibre of artillery, which led to maximum killings on both sides,"a senior army officer said while explaining the reason for killings on Pakistani side.

In 2017, 138 Pakistan soldiers were killed in retaliatory action by the Indian army on the LoC. However, in the same period, 28 Indian troops were martyred in the firing from Pakistani side.

Monday's army action was in retaliation to the killing of Lance Naik Yogesh Muralidhar Bhadane, 28, from Dhule district of Maharashtra, who was martyred in the firing from across the border in Sunderbani sector of Rajouri district on Saturday.

General Rawat, while addressing soldiers on Army Day said: Pakistans forces are helping infiltrators, if they provoke us further, we will take stronger action.

Army sources claimed that after the surgical strike and then killing of self-styled commander of terror outfit Hizbul MujahideenBurhan WaniPakistan army was desperate to mark its existence in the power corridor. So they decided to be aggressive on the border with artillery firing and repeated Border Action Team assaults on Indian troops.

Rawat also took on Pakistan's ally China by saying the the time had come for India to shift focus to its northern border. "The country was capable of handling Chinas assertiveness along the border," General Rawat told media on the occasion of Army Day's customary annual presser. He also said that India cannot allow its neighbours to drift away to China, amidst aggressive Chinese efforts to increase its influence in the region.

Beijing did not like the army chief's comment and reacted sharply. While stressing that in 2017, India-China relations witnessed some twists and turns, China's foreign minister spokesperson Lu Kang said, "Under such background, the unconstructive remarks by the Indian senior official (Gen Rawat) not only go against the consensus reached by the two heads of state but also do not conform to the efforts made by the two sides to improve and develop bilateral relations."

After the 78 days stand-off in Doklam plateau, both Indian and Chinese armies have been maintaining their presence in the area. In fact, in an unusual move, Chinese armies, for the first time during winter, have been maintaining their presence in the area and sitting at a distance of 30km from the faceoff site.

Defence officials maintained that after the Doklam incident, it has been observed that the Chinese have increased their road construction activities in the area. Chinese army is building up its infrastructure in the area by digging tunnels to avoid detection by satellite or drones and to transport its military assets.

While on the other hand, Indian side is also building its infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control. As per the operational requirement of the army, 530 roads of length 22,803km have been identified for construction/improvement by Border Roads Organisation (BRO).

During the last three years, formation cutting of 3,702km, surfacing of 6,296km, permanent works worth Rs 3,558 crores and major bridges of 6,088m length have been carried out.

73 roads have been identified as strategic Indo-China border roads (ICBR), out of which 61 ICBRs have been entrusted to the BRO with a length of 3,417.50 km which were planned to be completed by 2012. But as of now, only 27 roads of its length of nearly 922km have been completed while other 34 roads are under construction, the government stated in parliament.
PALGRAVE, Ontario, Jan. 15, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The DAREarts Foundation Annual General Meeting on January 9th, 2018 marked the 21st year of achievement by this growing, national, youth-serving charity. In 21 years, over 200,000 children have been empowered by DAREarts, either directly or through a young leader. The kids rise to the challenge of Discipline, Action, Responsibility and Excellence: the DARE values that form the framework of all DAREarts creative workshops and leave these kids with a life path.



DAREarts Chairman, Tarik Muzaffar, Managing Director & Global Head - Financial Institutions, Global Transaction Banking, TD Securities, reported that, for the fiscal year that ended July 31st, revenues of $1,021,073 increased 43% over the previous year, while expenses were kept to $846,830. This record support allowed the charity to build sustainability within its structure and programs. Click here for the F2017 annual report: http://www.darearts.com/annual_reports.shtml

The Chairman thanked the corporate, foundation, government and individual supporters plus directors, staff, teachers, artist-educators and 182 volunteers for their support that ranged from funding to giving personal time.

DAREarts national supporter is Northbridge Insurance. Its lead supporters are: Anne Livingston, Baton Rouge, Scotiabank, TD Bank Group, Bank of America Merrill Lynch plus the Province of Ontario government support through ONT150 - Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport and the Ontario Arts Council.

DAREarts Founder and President, Marilyn Field, detailed the charitys national impact - from Vancouver, Toronto, remote northern First Nations - Marten Falls, Webequie, Attawapisakat and Neskantaga - and Montreal to Halifax  where DAREarts reached a total 10,053 children in underserved communities.

Looking ahead, Mr. Muzaffar and Ms. Field noted that DAREarts will continue to build sustainable capacity as the charity works towards its goal of empowering another 50,000 children through a revenue goal of $5M by 2021.

Ms. Field shared her vision for DAREarts third decade, The collective voice of our youth from all cultures will be the legacy of DAREarts. More young people will connect across Canada as they define their purpose, mobilize their passions and speak up to ignite positive change.

BACKGROUND:

Canadas DAREarts is a national charity (#88691 7764 RR0002) that uses the arts to empower over 10,000 at-risk children annually with the confidence and courage to be leaders. DAREarts stands for Discipline, Action, Responsibility and Excellence. Recognized for its role in developing leadership in young people, DAREarts works with 9-19 year olds from schools in underserved communities, providing intensive arts education programs. Visit www.darearts.com for more information.

For more information, please contact:

Marilyn Field, MSM,

DAREarts Founder & President,

905-729-0097

mfield@darearts.com

F2017 annual report: http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/1487f908-7bc1-4f76-8416-8ee323971f4f
Tuesday appears to have been a bit better for the apex court and India's judiciary that exposed itself as a divided house at the highest level.

The Chief Justice of India Dipak Mishra held a long discussion with the four dissenting senior judges. A top source in the judiciary told a news channel that all issues were discussed, and commented that the ice has started melting. It was seen as a first round and positive sign in the direction of addressing issues raised by them. But it was inconclusive amid information that the talks will continue on Wednesday.

In an unprecedented January 12 press conference that was telecast live, Justice J. Chelameswar, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Madan B. Lokur and Justice Kurien Joseph had expressed their anguish at the functioning of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Dipak Mishra and flagged some concerns. Primary among them was the manner in which cases were assigned by the CJI who is the master of roster. And, these judges are in line right after the chief justice in seniority.

After what was a tumultous weekend, the four were back to work, but there was clear indication that the issue they raised had not been addressed. When the judges met informally at the Supreme Court lounge, the subject apparently was not raised by anyone as an uneasy calm prevailed. Even Advocate General K.K. Venugopal, who had remained optimistic over the weekend, was not quite sure that things will blow away easily.

The four judges had written a letter to the CJI, almost two months earlier. It became public after a fairly politicised case was assigned to Justice Arun Mishra, relatively junior to them and at number 10 in the judges' hierarchy at the apex court. The case pertained to the supposedly mysterious death of Judge Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in which BJP president Amit Shah was an accused. Shah was absolved of the crime by the judge who replaced Loya. Justice Arun Mishra got emotional and said he felt he had been targeted, and Chief Justice Mishra reached out to him.

When Chief Justice Dipak Mishra on Monday set up a five-judge Constitution bench under him to hear eight major cases, none of the four senior judges who held the press conference were part of it. When a delegation of the Bar Council of India and the Supreme Court Bar Association met the chief justice on Sunday, he held out hope that the crisis would blow over soon.

This Constitution bench set up now will begin hearing cases from January 18. But it remains to be seen whether the bench will be reconstituted, and more importantly, if any of the four senior judges, will now find a place on it.

Regardless of the course the crisis takes, it is clear that the Supreme Court that kept a watch on the nation is now being watched. How each case, particularly the sensitive ones with political ramifications, is decided will be watched. To that extent, it is safe to presume that the judges themselves will try to be like Ceasar's wifeabove suspicion.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Tuesday adjourned hearing in the crucial and contentious Judge Loya case for a week, and told the Maharashtra government to share all the documents, including the medical report of Judge Loya, with the petitionersjournalist Bandhuraj Sambhaji and political activist Tehseen Poonawala.

The other cases that are slated to be heard by the Constitution bench include Aadhaar, criminalisation of homosexuality, restriction of women's entry into the Sabarimala temple, restriction on entry of Parsi women into the fire temple on account of marrying outside the community, why women also should be punished under sections regarding adultery, and whether legislators facing criminal cases should be disqualified when charges are framed.
The twitter war that broke out over the Mahadayi controversy has turned ugly with the water resources ministers of Goa and Karnataka trading barbs and daring each other to brace up for a legal battle.

When the Mahadayi River Water Disputes Tribunal in Delhi begins its hearing on February 6, it will not only rake up the 30-year-old dispute between the two riparian states  Karnataka and Goabut also set the tone for the upcoming Karnataka assembly polls. The two national partiesthe ruling Congress and the BJP who are indulging in a blamegame, stand guilty of having done little to resolve the dispute.

Goa Water Resources Minister Vinod Palyekar, who belongs to the Goa Forward Party,one of the allies of the BJP government in Goahas accused Karnataka of having violated the court orders and built canals to divert water from Mahadayi river to Malaprabha river basin.

Last Saturday, Palyekar, who rushed to the Kalasa-Banduri project site, alleged that Karnataka was constructing a canal on a tributary of the Mahadayi river in violation of court orders. Karnataka is disrespecting a Supreme Court order by resuming work on a canal at Kankumbi, said the minister, adding that the Goa government had photographs to prove that Karnataka had violated the court orders.

Palyekar, who inspected the Kalasa project site at Kankumbi in Karnataka's Belagavi district, claimed that Karnatka had violated the court orders and called the people of the state harami, prompting a public outcry. After his statement made headlines and caused a huge uproar in the state, the minister retracted his statement, blaming reporters for misquoting him. The BJP leaders in Karnataka too joined in condemning Palyekar as the Karnataka Congress blamed the BJP for escalating the Mahadayi issue with false assurances.

It may be recalled that BJP state president B.S. Yeddyurappa, who was on Parivarthana Rally (election rally), had dashed to Delhi to hold talks with Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, after sensing the mood of the people in north Karnataka region over the Mahadayi controversy.

In a hasty move, Yeddyurappa read out Parrikar's letter of assurancein which the Goa CM agreed to consider Karnataka's plea for drinking waterto a huge gathering of Mahadayi agitators at Hubballi.

Soon after Yeddyurappa petitioned Parrikar, Palyekar tweeted saying Our @Goaforwardparty & my WRD depts stand remains unchanged on #Mhadei. We are committed to protect our mother #Mhadei & protect each drop of water. We are committed to protect Goem Goem Goemkarponn to take #GoaForward. Parrikar took a U-turn after his coalition parties in Goa objected to his goodwill gesture.

ALSO READ: Mahadayi stir creating quakes in poll-bound K'taka

On Tuesday, Palyekar again launched a tirade against his Karnataka counterpart M.B. Patil who refuted all allegations. WRD Minister @reachmbp says that they have not violated anything. Karnataka Govt have been habitual liars with regards to #Mahadayi issue. We will file contempt with photographic evidence, tweeted Palyekar, who also asserted that Goa would not part with Mahadayi water.

An angry Patil hit back tweetingWe don't have to learn how to protect our state's interest from you. We will not bend even if thousands like you take on us. Mahadayi is our right, not alms. Do not threaten us. We have done no wrong. Will get our rightful due.

A few hours later, Palyekar accused Karnataka of bribing its witnesses. Goa never paid for its witnesses. Our witnesses worked keeping in mind #GoemGoemkarGoemkarponn in #Mahadayi matter. Unlike Karnataka witness AK Gosain who had confessed in tribunal that he was paid 50k per day by Karnataka for being the witness & 5 lakhs to prepare report, tweeted Palyekar, who also posted two-page document allegedly pertaining to the Karnataka government availing the services of A.K. Gosain of IIT-Delhi to study the yield of Mahadayi and to depose before the tribunal as an expert witness.

The work of the Kalasa-Banduri canal has been stopped in August 2017, after the Karnataka government gave an undertaking to the tribunal to this effect, argued Patil, who blamed the Karnataka BJP and Yeddyurappa for escalating the issue by their hasty assurances.

READ MORE: Farmers in north Karnataka are up in arms over the unresolved Mahadayi water dispute

Incidentally, the ruling Congress too has been shying away from negotiations as the party has been backing Goa since May 2007. The then Congress president Sonia Gandhi, while addressing an election rally at Margao, had assured the people of Goa that her party would not allow diversion of the Mahadayi waters. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, who led an all-party delegation in 2015, has been insisting on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's intervention to end the deadlock, which people dub as a delay tactic.

On Tuesday, Goa filed a brief summary of argumentsrunning into 531 pagescontaining a report on the alleged violations by Karnataka. Goa has challenged Karnataka's proposal to build 12 dams on Mahadayi river to divert the water to Malaprabha reservoir through Kalasa-Banduri canals, citing ecological reasons and the possibility of water shortage for drinking, irrigation and industry. However, Karnataka too filed its argument justifying its demand for 36 tmc of water which includes the 7.56 tmc of water proposed to be diverted through the Kalasa-Banduri canals to quench the thirst of at least three districts  Gadag, Belagavi and Dharwad.

Goa is hopeful of getting a favourable verdict before August 2018, when the extended term of the tribunal ends. The Karnataka farmers have been demanding out-of-court resolution of the Mahadayi dispute, alleging the proceedings of the tribunal (constituted in 2010) are painfully slow. But with the ball again in the tribunal's court, the farmers, who are on agitation for more than two years now, are distraught. On Monday, the farmers launched a political partyJana Samanyara Paksha (translates to common man's party)to fight for their cause. The party with tractor as its symbol, has decided to field candidates in all 224 constituencies in the upcoming assembly poll.
Wracked by terrorism, extremism and sectarianism, Pakistan government on Tuesday issued a fatwa signed by over 1,800 Islamic scholars from different schools of thought against the use of violence, including suicide bombings, for religious purposes.

Titled as 'Paigham-e-Pakistan' (the message of Pakistan), the fatwa issued at a grand ceremony here was prepared under the supervision of Islamabad-based International Islamic University.

The decree came at a time when US President Donald Trump has asked Pakistan to act against terror groups on its soil and warned against providing safe havens to terrorists.

Addressing the ceremony, President Mamnoon Hussain said the launch of national narrative on counter-terrorism manifested that the whole nation was extremely serious on the issue.

"I believe that this decree, prepared in the light of true teachings of Islam, will transform their hearts and pave the way for their salvation in the hereinafter," he said, referring to militants and Islamic radicals.

In a statement, the government said the fatwa was part of national narrative on extremism and terrorism. It was endorsed by religious scholars, parliamentarians, intellectuals and policy makers.

The fatwa also declares armed struggle against the country, its government or armed forces "illegal".

It acknowledges that it is responsibility of the government to fully implement Islamic provisions of the Constitution, but it rejects use of force for it and says that taking up arms to achieve this purpose amounts to 'Fasaad-fil- Arz' or spreading willful violence on earth.

Quoting verses from holy Quran and Hadith, the fatwa says suicide is unacceptable in Islam and a grave sin. Supporting such (suicide) attacks has also been described as tantamount to supporting a collection of sins.

President Hussain said the decree would not only promote positive image of the Islamic teachings and Pakistani society in the world but would also help in overcoming the menace of extremism.

He said the roots of extremism and militancy lied in intolerance and in not appreciating different points of views, which fostered sectarianism by eliminating moderation.

He mentioned that renunciation of research, dogmatism and intolerance resulted in dreadful forms of sectarianism.

Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal said Pakistan is fulfilling its commitments in the war on terror but it is also for the international community to fulfill its obligations by listening to the voices emanating from Myanmar, Kashmir and Palestine.

In his remarks, Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif expressed the confidence that the national narrative against militancy will prove to be a turning point for the country.

"We have rejected all forms of terrorism and extremism," he asserted.

"The land of Pakistan at no time shall be allowed to be used for the propagation of any kind of terrorism," Asif said, adding that this included training and recruitment of terrorists, along with execution of terror activities in other countries "and other such ulterior motives".

PTI
Anantkumar Hegde | Arvind Jain

Among the row of houses on Lutyens Delhis Ferozeshah Road, one official bungalow has a distinct flag fluttering atop its gate, setting it apart from the rest. The flag with Lord Rams name painted several times has an image of Hanuman carrying the mountain of herbs. For those who know the bungalows occupant, the flag is a proclamation of not only his faith but also his politicsboth entwined with each other. Five-time BJP MP from Karnataka Anantkumar Hegde has been staying here for years, even after he became the Union minister of state for skill development and entrepreneurship last September.

In 1994, Hegde flagged off his political journey by defying a curfew to hoist the tricolour, along with other members of the Hindu Jagarana Vedike, at a disputed Idgah maidan in Hubli. That caught the RSSs eye, and in 1996, he contested the Lok Sabha elections on a BJP ticket from Uttara Kannada. Since then, there has been no looking back, except in 1999 when he lost to the Congresss Margaret Alva.

Knowing that nationalism and hindutva mean the same to him, not many were surprised when Hegde, during a function in his constituency last month, questioned the concept of secularism and said his government was here to change the Constitution. He has always courted controversies with his provocative statements, rarely showing regret. Only, this time he was part of the government. After opposition parties created a ruckus in Parliament, the 49-year-old leader apologised. My statement was misinterpreted, Hegde told THE WEEK. I always respected Dr B.R. Ambedkar. Even Atal Bihari Vajpayee used to call him rishi, mahatma [saint]. I also call him so. My statement was politically distorted.

But the apology has not diminished his stature within the BJP. Hegde has emerged as the hindutva face of the party in Karnatakawhich will go to the polls this Maywith many drawing parallels with Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Last October, he wrote to Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, saying he would not participate in the state celebrations of Tipu Sultan Jayanti as the Muslim ruler was a brutal killer, wretched fanatic and mass rapist. The Tae kwon do practitioner has done little to mask his aggression against Islamic fundamentalism. During a press conference in 2016, he said, As long as there is Islam, there will be no peace in the world.

In Karnataka, politics has been dictated by caste equations, and this election is no different. The numerically significant Lingayats have demanded to be categorised as a separate religious group. Though Lingayat leader B.S. Yeddyurappa has been declared the chief ministerial candidate, BJP leaders like Hegde and first-time MP Pratap Simha have been raising hindutva issues.

Hegdes politics, however, is rooted in the prominence of hindutva over the caste-based politics that has been threatening the BJP. Look at what happened in [the] Uttar Pradesh [elections], said Hegde, who also runs an NGO, Kadamba, that works for rural development. People rose above caste divisions to vote as one [for the BJP]. This is what we call Making India. Caste has been a recent construct. Is there any reference to caste in any vedas or puranas. It crept in late with outside influence.

When asked about the assertion of castes in BJP-ruled states, he said, When there is samudra manthan [churning in the sea as signified in Hindu religious texts], it is the poison that comes out first. Demons were the first ones to come out. Good things will come, too. Some intellectuals and secularists, he said, were trying to fan caste divisions, as evident in Gujarat and Maharashtra. Cultural nationalism is our identity, he asserted. We all are one.

Hegdes Uttara Kannada constituency is part of the coastal region, which has had a history of communal polarisation. In 2017, the region saw communal clashes following the killings of Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) activist Mohammed Ashraf Kalayi, RSS worker Sharath Madiwala and Bajrang Dal member Deepak Rao. The belt has 19 assembly seats across three districtsUttara Kannada, Udupi and Dakshina Kannadawhich includes Mangaluru and Bhatkal towns. In 2013, the BJP won only three seats, while the Congress cornered 13.

Despite the lack of a significant Brahmin population in Uttara Kannada, Hegde, a Brahmin, has been winning the seat by wooing the OBCs with his strong saffron pitch. A BJP leader said Hegdes stature had surely risen within the party and state after the surprise move by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah to make him minister. Though Hegde has the political heft to take on Siddaramaiah, the BJP would not like to dilute Yeddyurappas brand by promoting Hegde over him.

The Congress accused the BJP of playing good cop, bad cop, with Yeddyurappa presenting a moderate face and Hegde a hardliner image. The BJP strategy over the years has been to use the hindutva ideology to foment trouble in the state, said Rajya Sabha member M.V. Rajeev Gowda. The coastal region had rejected the BJP the last time. Now, they are trying to rake up sentiments again. With respect to Hegdes comment on changing the Constitution, Gowda said, Even during Vajpayees time, they had set up a committee to review the Constitution. The BJP wants a Hindu rashtra.

While Hegde has an eye on the coastal belt, his focus has been the skill development ministry. Seven skill development universities are being planned, he said. Also, after getting approval for creating a separate cadre of skill development services, the Union Public Service Commission has been asked to start recruitment. We also plan to open Indian Institute of Skills in all the states, said Hegde, who, when at leisure, listens to Indian classical music, reads books, does yoga, paints and writes poetry. Clarifying that job creation was never the ministrys aim but skill certification, he said, We are expanding our technological platform to include data on people who get certificates and take up jobs. After expansion, we will be able to track the jobs they have been employed with.

HEGDE-ROWS

DECEMBER 24, 2017

Anantkumar Hegde, on the Constitution: The Constitution needs to be changed from time to time and we have come for that.

FEBRUARY 28, 2016

On Islam, at a press conference: As long as there is Islam in this world, there will be terrorism.

JANUARY 2, 2016

Hegde, a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, assaulted doctors at a private hospital for allegedly not treating his mother.

2014

Alleged that Congress leader R.V. Deshpande had sheltered Indian Mujahideen terrorists in Bhatkal.

2010

Commissioned a documentary about himself, titled The Real Hindu, where one of his achievements is the ghar wapsi of 300 Christians.

1994

Dodged prohibitory orders and raised the national flag at the disputed Idgah Maidan in Hubli.
TORONTO, Jan. 15, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cordoba Minerals Corp. (TSXV:CDB) (OTCQX:CDBMF) (Cordoba or the Company) today announces the resignation of Mr. David Reading from its Board of Directors due to the recently increased demands of his other professional commitments. Mr. Reading has served as a Director of the Company since 2014.



The Board of Directors express their appreciation for Mr. Readings contributions to Cordoba Minerals, and wish him the best in his future endeavours.

About Cordoba Minerals

Cordoba Minerals Corp. is a Toronto-based mineral exploration company focused on the exploration and acquisition of copper and gold projects in Colombia. Cordoba is currently focused on its 100%-owned San Matias Copper-Gold Project, which includes the advanced-stage Alacran Deposit located in the Department of Cordoba. For further information, please visit www.cordobaminerals.com.

ON BEHALF OF THE COMPANY

Mario Stifano, President and CEO

Cordoba Minerals Corp.

For further information, please contact:

Evan Young, Director, Investor Relations

Email: eyoung@cordobamineralscorp.com

Phone: +1 (647) 808-2141

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Pasco County Sheriff(PASCO COUNTY, Fla.) -- A Florida man wanted for attempted murder thought he could evade authorities by leaping from his second-story balcony. He was wrong.



When Pasco County sheriff's officers knocked on his door, Rashad Walker allegedly exited through his rear sliding-glass door and jumped to the floor below, where he was greeted by deputies waiting to arrest him.



Walker was apprehended Jan. 12 in New Port Richey, Fla.



Bodycam video released by the sheriff's office shows several officers waiting on the lower level, whispering so as not to tip off their location.



Walker was booked on warrants from another county for second-degree attempted murder and aggravated battery with great bodily harm.



He remains at Pasco County jail. A court date hasn't been set, and the suspect hasn't yet entered a plea to the charges against him.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
English French

PRESS RELEASE - 01/16/2018

Wendel promotes three members of its investment team to Managing Director

Wendel today announced that three Senior Directors in Wendel's investment and development team - Stephanie Besnier, Stephane Heuze and Felicie Thion de la Chaume - have each been promoted to Managing Director.

Stephanie Besnier, who joined Wendel's investment team in 2007 as an Associate, has been promoted to Managing Director. In the last few years, Stephanie has been actively involved in Wendel's investments in Deutsch, IHS and Constantia Flexibles. She has also been a member of the Board of Bureau Veritas since 2016.

Stephanie, who is based in Paris, began her career at the French Ministry of Finance in 2003, working at the Treasury Department's international unit before serving at Agence des participations de l'Etat, the agency that manages the government's equity holdings, with responsibility for maritime and rail transport companies.

She is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique and an engineering graduate of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussees. She holds a master's degree (DEA) from the Paris School of Economics and a Corporate Director certificate from Institut Francais des Administrateurs (IFA).

Stephane Heuze, who joined Wendel in 2014 as an Investment Director, has been promoted to Managing Director. Based in Casablanca, he has been actively involved in Wendel's investments in Tsebo and PlaYce in Africa, as well as in the Constantia Flexibles transaction. Stephane is a member of the Boards of IHS, Tsebo and PlaYce.

Stephane began his career at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Paris, before serving at Goldman Sachs (PIA) in London for two years, working within the team responsible for managing equity, mezzanine and secondary debt funds. In 2009, he returned to BCG to help develop its presence in Africa and assisted in opening its Casablanca office.

He graduated from Ecole des Mines de Paris and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Felicie Thion de la Chaume, who joined Wendel in 2007 as an Associate in the Paris investment team, has been promoted to Managing Director. Based in London since 2016, Felicie relocated to the United Kingdom to help open Wendel's London office and focus on investment origination in Europe. Since joining Wendel, Felicie has taken part in the development of Stahl and in many transactions, including the sale of Deutsch and the investment in Saham Group. She is a member of the Board of Stahl.

Felicie began her career at Goldman Sachs in the firm's French M&A team from 2003 to 2006.

She is a graduate of ESCP Europe.

Agenda

03/22/2018

2017 full-year earnings/ Publication of NAV (pre-market release)

05/17/2018

2018 Shareholders' Meeting / Publication of NAV and trading update (before Shareholders' Meeting)

09/06/2018

H1 2018 earnings / Publication of NAV (pre-market release).

About Wendel

Wendel is one of Europe's leading listed investment firms. The Group invests in Europe, North America and Africa, in companies that are leaders in their field, such as Bureau Veritas, Saint-Gobain, Cromology, Stahl, IHS, Constantia Flexibles and Allied Universal. Wendel plays an active role as industry shareholder in these companies. It implements long-term development strategies, which involve boosting growth and margins of companies so as to enhance their leading market positions. Through Oranje-Nassau Developpement, which brings together opportunities for investment in growth, diversification and innovation, Wendel is also a shareholder of exceet in Germany, Mecatherm in France, Nippon Oil Pump in Japan, Saham Group, PlaYce and Tsebo in Africa, and CSP Technologies in the United States.

Wendel is listed on Eurolist by Euronext Paris.

Standard & Poor's ratings: Long-term: BBB-, stable outlook - Short-term: A-3 since July 7, 2014. Wendel is the Founding Sponsor of Centre Pompidou-Metz. In recognition of its long-term patronage of the arts, Wendel received the distinction of "Grand Mecene de la Culture" in 2012.



For more information:

Follow us on Twitter @WendelGroup
THE countrys fee-free higher education initiative, controversially introduced by President Jacob Zuma in the dying weeks of 2017, will plunge the country into a deeper financial crisis if it isnt adjusted one way or another.

Days after Zuma made his surprise announcement, Ramaphosa was elected president of South Africas ruling party, the African National Congress. He is set to become the countrys president when Zumas term expires if the ANC wins the countrys 2019 national elections.

Its now for Zumas successor Ramaphosa to do the tricky tampering. He will need to be politically and financially adept to manage this situation. He cant simply reverse a populist decision and he clearly wont be able to meet it fully without serious adjustments to the countrys finances.



Zumas plan seeks to provide fee-free tertiary education to students from households with a combined annual income of less than R350 000 with immediate effect. Estimations suggest that this covers 90 per cent of students in the higher education system.



This is certainly a noble idea. But Zumas rushed unilateral decision ignored all sensible views that it cant be done in the way he is proposing. Zuma ignored the National Treasury headed by Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba, whom he handpicked.

And he disregarded the views of the Heher Commission he appointed to look into the matter, which stated emphatically that South Africa cannot afford fee free education. The cost of this proposal could be disastrous for a country thats already burdened by significant debt considering that Zumas promise will cost the country between R15 billion and R50 billion per year.



The sovereign debt situation

Since the dawn of democracy, South Africa has become more reliant on sovereign bond issuance to support its budget. South Africas sovereign bonds are issued by the government through the South African Reserve Bank primarily to raise funds for large capital projects.

The government debt servicing costs for 2018 are estimated at R183 billion, which is forecasted to rise to R223 billion by 2021. This means government debt repayment is the fastest growing expenditure item of the budget. The implication is that in the next three years the government will be spending more money on repaying its debts than on key service delivery priorities such as social and economic development. Its therefore clear that the country cant afford to add another R15 billion to R50 billion to expenditure.

Available options



Funding for Zumas fee-free plan will either have to come from tax hikes (including an increase in the Value Added Tax rate), significant austerity, budget reallocations or additional borrowing. With an economy stuck at sub-optimal growth, facing more rating downgrades, and a significant tax shortfall in the near future, the Ramaphosa administration may face the political inconvenience of having to explain why Zumas education announcement has to be retracted, amended, or delayed.



Retracting or delaying the policy arent options because either would likely spark civil unrest. But populist policies such as these condone financial indiscipline at the expense of much needed fiscal consolidation. The consequences will be severely damaging to the countrys development for many years.



It is vital that the government tackles the escalating sovereign debt by drawing up a proper implementation strategy. This needs to be in line with austerity measures to allow fiscal consolidation to reduce the widening budget deficit.



It must do this in a way by balancing three things: economic growth, a smaller fiscal deficit and meeting increasing social demands. Instead of trying to raise funding for free higher education the government should rather consider disposing unessential state assets, reducing government debt guarantees to state owned companies, and clamping down on corruption and wasteful expenditure.



Fiscal cliff



If the fiscal situation continues to deteriorate, South Africa risks having its domestic bond ratings downgraded to sub-investment grade by all the three international credit rating agencies. This would be disastrous for the country, which has already been subject to downgrades on its foreign denominated debt.



Moodys is the only international rating agency that hasnt downgraded South Africa to junk status. If it does so to the countrys sovereign currency rating, the countrys sovereign bonds would be excluded from the Citigroups world government bond index. If this happens many foreign asset managers with investment grade mandates would dump the countrys domestic bonds. South Africas bond yields will shoot up, further escalating debt servicing costs. Similar circumstances have led countries such as Brazil, Cyprus, and Greece into vicious debt cycles.

Zuma may have lobbed a populist hot potato at the ANC elective conference. But its ordinary South Africans whose fingers will be burnt.
MBABANE  Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Health Dr Simon Zwane found his name jotted in a suicide note of a civil servant.



However, the civil servant failed in his attempt to end his life as family members managed to locate him, though he was found in a weak state after ingesting some substance believed to have been poisonous.



The civil servant addressed the note to Chief Police Information and Communications Officer Superintendent Khulani Mamba.

In the note, he informed Mamba that he was ending his life because of PS Zwane and another high ranking official also from the Health Ministry.



The letter stated that the PS and the official knew why he had decided to end his life.

He, however, did not elaborate in this regard.

In an interview, the PS confirmed knowledge of the note and that he knew the civil servant, who will not be named for now.

The PS said he once confronted the civil servant after getting reports that he was allegedly abusing a government vehicle.



Just like all the other drivers when they are reported, we speak to them. I talked to this particular one early last year. I am still waiting to get a report as to why he mentioned me in the suicide note, Zwane stated.

Some of his friends stated that it was a good thing that he did not end his life as he had children who still needed him.



The letter was found last week Friday and the civil servant was nowhere to be found as he disappeared after officials had confiscated the government vehicle which he was allegedly misusing.



Police were then informed of his disappearance and a search for him ensued as it had been suspected that he had killed himself.

He was later found near a forest at Luphohlo Dam after he called some of his relatives and the police and informed them of his whereabouts. He was in a weak condition as he had not eaten for all the days he went missing.



Superintendent Mamba stated that he heard of the note and that it had been addressed to him from the station commander and the desk officer at Mbabane Police Station.
MANZINI  Swazi hawkers came home empty-handed after being robbed thousands of Emalangeni by armed robbers in South Africa.



They also had their travel documents taken away from them during the brazen bus robbery in the neighbouring Republic.

The incident, which involved a total of 52 Swazi hawkers, including the bus driver and conductors, took place at Ultra City in South Africa on, at round 2am on Saturday.



A source close to the matter said the hawkers were travelling in Zulu Kaya Lami Bus Service and were en route to buy stock in Johannesburg when about five daring robbers, who were armed to the teeth pounced on them while they were inside the bus.

The source said the bus was parked at a filling station for the driver to take a rest before continuing with the journey.



He said the robbers jumped into the bus through the passenger door, waking up those in the front and in the process ordered them to surrender their belongings at gunpoint.



It was gathered that the robbers had already robbed a total of 12 hawkers and one of them lost a sum of E25 000 cash while others were carrying E15 000, E12 000, and E10 000. Some of them also lost their travel documents in the process.



Zulu Kaya Lami Bus Services Coordinator Mabhawodi Dlamini said luckily, before the robbers could rob many, a patrolling police car passed by and the robbers abandoned their mission and disappeared into the nearby overgrowth.

He said they then called the South African Police Service (SAPS) toll free line 10111 and reported the robbery.
PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OpsPanda, the leader in cloud-based Sales Resource Planning Software, today announced the Winter 2018 product release for its Sales Resource Planning and Analytics Solution. The new release includes feature updates that provide users with more data and control of their sales organizations.



We are very excited about all of the new product features in our Winter 2018 release; we are confident in the value these new features bring to all of our customers, particularly our Sales Costing feature, said Jon Kondo, Co-Founder and CEO of OpsPanda. A vital part of sales resource and capacity planning is ensuring you have visibility into the cost structure of your sales plan. Our new sales costing feature will provide a better understanding of and control over the financial impact of different sales plan scenarios, which will better align finance and sales. We are thrilled to start the new year with these product features, added Kondo.

Product highlights of OpsPandas Winter 2018 product update include:

Sales Costing gives users the ability to evaluate sales headcount costs against sales capacity. OpsPanda users can optimize sales plans by modeling different hiring scenarios to include base salary and variable compensation for each employee type. Additionally, users can determine expected payback on new hires, evaluate sales plan costs versus sales capacity, and assess contribution margin on ramped versus in-ramp reps.



gives users the ability to evaluate sales headcount costs against sales capacity. OpsPanda users can optimize sales plans by modeling different hiring scenarios to include base salary and variable compensation for each employee type. Additionally, users can determine expected payback on new hires, evaluate sales plan costs versus sales capacity, and assess contribution margin on ramped versus in-ramp reps. Email and in-app notifications help users keep their favorite plans up to date. OpsPanda summary emails report performance against plan and org status, while alerts notify you when headcount data or pipeline data seem out of date.



help users keep their favorite plans up to date. OpsPanda summary emails report performance against plan and org status, while alerts notify you when headcount data or pipeline data seem out of date. New sales performance reports provide rep performance and productivity metrics that help users reconcile plans and understand the health of their business.

The OpsPanda Winter 2018 product release is available now. For more information schedule a demo at www.opspanda.com

About OpsPanda

OpsPandas Sales Resource and Capacity Planning application helps sales leaders build detailed hiring and capacity plans, and analyze sales performance, and set achievable sales quotas to optimize their true sales capacity and reach booking targets. Based in Palo Alto, California, OpsPanda was founded in 2014 by sales and engineering veterans of the Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software industry.

For more information about OpsPanda, please visit www.opspanda.com.

Read the OpsPanda blog at: https://content.opspanda.com.

Follow OpsPanda on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/7597523.
DENVER, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ultra-low cost carriers (ULCCs) Frontier and Volaris announce a new codeshare agreement which will provide millions of people access to affordable fares between the U.S. and Mexico. This first-ever codeshare agreement between uniquely branded ULCCs will allow both carriers to sell tickets and connecting itineraries on the airlines combined networks.

This agreement will allow us to expand upon our mission to deliver low fares and enable more people to fly, said Barry Biffle, President and Chief Executive Officer of Frontier Airlines. Many customers traveling between the U.S. and Mexico are forced to pay high fares to fly, and this agreement will provide lower fares to a vast majority of the U.S. and Mexico population. As the leading ultra-low-cost carrier in Mexico, Volaris is an ideal partner with which to align and we look forward to work together to deliver low fares to millions of people.

Subject to regulatory approval by authorities in the United States and Mexico, the codeshare routes will be available for purchase this Spring., the codeshare routes will be available for purchase this Spring. This agreement will allow Frontier to place and sell tickets with its code (F9) on Volaris operated flights and for Volaris to place its code (Y4) on Frontier operated flights. Once the codeshare is in place passengers will enjoy a seamless low-fare travel experience traveling on Frontier and Volaris.

At Volaris we are thrilled to join Frontier Airlines as one of the first ULCC carriers to enter a codeshare agreement. We estimate that our partnership will add around 20 new destinations to our network and 80 new routes between both Mexico and the United States, said Enrique Beltranena, Chief Executive Officer of Volaris. Our goal is to unite families and friends on both sides of the border, and this new agreement with our partners at Frontier will allow us to expand the travel options for our audience while keeping fares low.

Beginning in Spring 2018, flights will be available directly through Frontier on the companys website flyfrontier.com, its mobile application and its call center. Flights will also be available through third party distributers including online travel agencies. Flights also will be available directly through Volaris website volaris.com and mobile application.

A natural fit between the carriers networks already exists with each serving more than 20 of the same markets. In addition, both carriers fly Airbus A320 aircraft. Frontier operates a fleet of 78 aircraft with 199 additional aircraft on order and Volaris operates a fleet of 71 with 128 additional aircraft on order.

About Frontier:

Frontier Airlines is committed to offering Low Fares Done Right to more than 80 destinations in the United States, Canada, Dominican Republic and Mexico on more than 320 daily flights. Headquartered in Denver, Frontiers hard-working aviation professionals pride themselves in delivering the companys signature Rocky Mountain hospitality to customers. Frontier Airlines is the proud recipient of the Federal Aviation Administrations 2016 Diamond Award for maintenance excellence and was recently named the industrys most fuel-efficient airline by The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) as a result of superior technology and operational efficiencies.

About Volaris:

*(Volaris or the Company) (NYSE: VLRS and BMV: VOLAR), is an ultra-low-cost carrier (ULCC), with point-to-point operations, serving Mexico, the United States and Central America. Volaris offers low base fares to build its market, providing quality service and extensive customer choice. Since beginning operations in March 2006, Volaris has increased its routes from five to more than 174 and its fleet from four to 71 aircraft. Volaris offers more than 327 daily flight segments on routes that connect 40 cities in Mexico and 28 cities in the United States and Central America with one of the youngest fleet in Americas. Volaris targets passengers who are visiting friends and relatives, cost-conscious business people and leisure travelers in Mexico and to select destinations in the United States and Central America. Volaris has received the ESR Award for Social Corporate Responsibility for eight consecutive years. For more information, please visit: www.volaris.com

MEDIA CONTACT:

Richard Oliver  Frontier Airlines

720-374-4560

richard.oliver@flyfrontier.com

VOLARIS MEDIA CONTACT

Investor Relations contact:

Andres Pliego & Andrea Gonzalez /

ir@volaris.com

+52 55 5261 6444

Media contact:

Ana Ambrosi

aambrosi@gcya.net

214-551-7583

Attachments:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/115a1c4c-2797-43ff-b34b-c93760683d70

Attachments:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3f4e6ff4-1b60-4adb-96fa-574ef4dec1bf
ALBANY  Voters' view of Gov. Andrew Cuomo is up as he and state lawmakers head into a tough budget season, a new poll shows.

A Siena College poll released Tuesday morning shows that 62 percent of voters statewide have a favorable view of the governor, up 10 points from a 52 percent favorability rating in November, Siena's last statewide poll. It's the first time he has cracked 60 percent since last May.

The outlook seems bright for Cuomo, who will seek a third term this year, though there are plenty of variables that could darken the picture. For one, he will unveil a state budget later on Tuesday that will deal with a multi-billion-dollar budget gap. And a series of high-profile corruption trials, including two involving former members of and people connected to his administration, begins this month and could run through June.

Still, Cuomo's numbers seem to make for a strong top of a Democratic ticket that will also include U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Comptroller Tom DiNapoli.

"Forty-two weeks out from Election Day, he looks as strong as can be," Siena College pollster Steven Greenberg said. But "we are 42 weeks from Election Day. What goes on at the national stage, what goes on internationally, what goes on with the economy, what goes on with trials, what goes on with legislatures and budgets and sessions, and what didn't we just mention that will be going on (could have an impact). There's so much time between now and Election Day that there's a reason that people, even talking heads and pundits, don't use January polls to predict elections."

In terms of governance, a plurality of voters (40 percent) say taxes should be Cuomo's top focus this year, while 38 percent say it should be health care and 33 percent say it should be education. A plurality (43 percent) say federal tax reform will worsen the state's economy. Fifty-six percent of Democrats believe it will worsen the economy, while a plurality of Republicans (43 percent) say it will improve the economy.

Read the complete crosstabs on the Capitol Confidential blog.

Majorities of voters support all eight of Cuomo's agenda items that Siena polled on, ranging from passing the Child Victims Act to eliminating cash bail for misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. That includes 58 percent support statewide for suing the federal government over the tax reform law signed late last year.

With all of that said, on the question of whether voters would re-elect Cuomo this November, 55 percent statewide say they would vote for the governor, while 36 percent say they would cast a ballot for an unnamed opponent. A plurality (49 percent) of upstate voters say they would prefer to vote for someone else, while majorities in New York City and its suburbs say they will vote for Cuomo.

Siena polled 824 voters statewide. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent.
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 John Carl D'Annibale Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Show More Show Less 3 of 3





ALBANY  Capital Region activists on Saturday will commemorate the one-year anniversary of the 2017 Women's March on Washington  and the sister marches it inspired across the United States and around the world  with march and rally.

The event will start off with a rally at West Capitol Park featuring musicians and guest speakers, including Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan, Congressman Paul Tonko, womens rights advocate Kathy Stevens, and Fabrizia Rodriguez, an attorney and advocate for the migrant community. The group will then proceed with a march.
Mark Tamayo wasn't expecting to have a feathery co-host for his 4 p.m. weather newscast Thursday afternoon.

It was a "typical afternoon" show segment, where the backdrop would be linked off to one of the station's live cameras around the bay. Tamayo says he's never quite sure which camera producers will stream from, but that day the view displayed a look at the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands.

And that's when a black bird's beak took over the show.

"I see the bird looking so curious and looking directly at the camera like it belonged there, and I guess it did," Tamayo recalls. "Obviously the bird had no idea it was on live news but it looked very confident and poised."

RELATED: A small bird managed to take over a Delta flight

Tamayo, not visibly stirred, stopped and stepped back. "Oh my gosh, look at this."

The anchor, Heather Holmes, was amused, and quipped, "He's totally checking out the camera, Mark."

Tamayo tells SFGATE that since he began on KTVU in 2002, a bird has only appeared on a live stream like this once before, last year.

"That gave me a little experience," Tamayo says. "On that one I really had no idea how to respond."

This time around, Tamayo was much less startled. He says he wanted to enjoy the moment and let the bird be the star of the show.

"I thought, gosh, do I click off this graphic really quick and speed up?" he says. "I let the bird have the whole scene. I couldn't click off it, so I actually said I may need more time."

Tamayo didn't seem to mind the bird choosing to stop near the camera  he can relate. Noting that that particular live view is his favorite because of its beautiful vista of San Francisco, he says, "I can't blame (the bird) for taking that spot."

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.


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In a school district that covers just three square miles, it's hard not to catch the occasional glimpse into a student's home life.

When a student shows up to school during a cold snap without a coat and in the same sweatshirt day after day, that's a sign they might be in need, said Thomas Reardon, superintendent of the tiny Wynantskill Union Free School District near Troy.

When a kid goes on a field trip and doesn't have spending money, when their parents can no longer afford the $25 fee attached to parent-teacher association programs, and when more families seem to be renting than buying homes  those are other signs, he said.

So Reardon wasn't exactly surprised to learn that, over a recent five-year span, the number of children in his district who qualified for free or reduced price lunch had grown considerably  from 18 percent in the 2012-13 school year to 29 percent last school year.

More Information Increasing need Capital Region school districts with the largest percentage point increases over the past five years in the number of children who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Lansingburgh+14 Duanesburg+12 Corinth+11 Wynantskill+11 Troy+10 South Glens Falls+9 Green Island+8 Hoosick Falls+8 Ballston Spa+8 Brunswick+8 Source: State Education Department See More Collapse

"One of our focal points this year was to examine our ever-changing demographics, and that was based on these sort of soft data  little signs that we were seeing more of a need in our community," he said.

Wynantskill isn't alone. In fact, most school districts in the Capital Region have seen increases in the number of students who qualify for free or discounted lunch  the likely result, officials say, of communities that are still struggling to recover from the recession and an improved process to identify families in need.

GROWING NUMBERS

Over the past five years, 32 out of 41 districts in the four-county region saw an increase in the number of children who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch  a key poverty indicator  according to a Times Union analysis of data reported to the state Education Department. Five districts, including Wynantskill, saw double-digit increases.

The Lansingburgh Central School District, also near Troy, had the largest increase in the region  its rate rose 14 points from 52 percent in the 2012-13 school year to 66 percent in the 2016-17 school year.

"I am not surprised," said Superintendent Cynthia DeDominick, who credited the increase to growing need in her community.

"We do have a higher number of children in foster care and the number of families who qualify for homeless status has increased exponentially in the past couple of years," she said.

Other districts, particularly those in rural areas and communities dominated by the so-called working poor, reported a similar increase in need.

IMPROVED IDENTIFICATION

But the increase can also be explained by improvements that have been made to the state's direct certification process, DeDominick said.

That process involves matching the names of children in the district with households in the district that receive certain social services, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Head Start and Medicaid, and automatically identifying them for free or reduced-price lunch.

The process was begun years ago to reduce paperwork and low participation rates caused by stigma, and over time has been refined to better capture the true number of needy families in a district, experts say.

New York, for example, is one of a growing number of states that now use Medicaid data to directly certify families for the lunch program, a change that occurred in the last several years and that likely explains the growth in numbers, said Jessica Pino-Goodspeed, a child nutrition program specialist with the nonprofit Hunger Solutions New York.

This past year, the state Education Department also eliminated some of the administrative burden on districts by centralizing much of the data used in the direct certification process, she said. Schools can now send a list of enrolled students to the state, and the state will match those names against their data sets. In the past, districts had to match the data themselves.

"In terms of data, direct certification is really rigorous and strong," Pino-Goodspeed said. "But it only looks at a subset of poverty, and it doesn't take into account areas like Long Island, where SNAP participation is particularly low."

FORGOTTEN FAMILIES

This is why so many districts still rely on families to apply for free or reduced price lunch, and many are still operating with pen-and-paper applications rather than online portals  a process that many believe is stigmatizing and decreases participation.

"I think it takes a lot of courage for families to hand that paperwork in," said Reardon. "I think there's still this stigma of, if you sign that form you're not doing something right as a parent."

Under federal law, a student is eligible for free school meals if their household income is at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level. For the current school year, that means a family of four must earn no more than $31,980 a year to qualify.

The income threshold is higher to qualify for reduced-price meals. Family income must be between 130 and 185 percent of the federal poverty level  a family of four, then, must have a household income of no more than $45,510 a year to qualify.

School officials and hunger experts say this cutoff is still too low and not representative of actual need in communities, citing a rise in the number of "working poor" families who make too much to qualify for free or discounted meals but still struggle to make ends meet.

"I think it's pathetically low," said Reardon. "It doesn't capture our families who maybe don't receive Medicaid or food stamps, but they're gonna make it work and the way they're gonna make it work is by keeping their heat at 55 or something else extreme."

EFFORTS TO HELP

In Corinth, a rural Saratoga County town in the Adirondack foothills, the local community has found creative ways to help families in need.

As the number of students who receive free or discounted meals in the district has grown to 50 percent over the past five years, district officials have seen a corresponding increase in local philanthropy.

This past year, Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs donated $520 worth of gift cards to families during the holidays and the Fredette Family Foundation agreed to fund school meals for any family that just missed the income cutoff for free or reduced-price lunch. The district also operates an on-site boutique complete with clothes, winter coats, gloves and toiletries at discounted prices.

"We're constantly raising money for our families in need," said Superintendent Mark Stratton. "It's a problem, and it's not just in Corinth."

Global efforts to combat student hunger and need across the state are underway, as well.

This month, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a five-point plan to reduce student hunger from kindergarten on up through higher education. The plan hunger experts are most excited by is an initiative that would require certain school districts to offer breakfast after the school day starts  a move they say could increase participation exponentially in school breakfast programs.

Most school breakfast programs are offered in the cafeteria before the start of the school day, meaning students who can't get a ride to school early miss out.

"Breakfast, believe it or not, plays a significant role in addressing student hunger," Pino-Goodspeed said. "So we really feel the governor's proposal can help a lot more children from going hungry in the mornings."

There are other policy areas that still need work, she said.

A federal provision that allows certain high-need school districts to adopt free meals for everyone is still going unused in eligible districts, she said. Pino-Goodspeed thinks this is because districts are unclear what will happen to their state aid if they no longer collect free and reduced-price lunch data, which is used to determine school aid each year.

"I think they're just hoping for clear guidance from the state," she said. "Universal free meals are one of the best ways to combat student hunger, so anything that can help should be explored."

Reforming the state's school aid formula could also help, officials say. District officials say they'd like to see data other than free and reduced-price lunch rates used to determine student need, since those rates don't capture the true need in communities.

State policymakers began exploring reforms to the school aid formula several years ago, but legislators have yet to make any changes.

bbump@timesunion.com  518-454-5387  @bethanybump
A Troy police sergeant will not face prosecution for the April 2016 fatal shooting of a DWI suspect, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Tuesday in a detailed report that contradicts the officer's version of events and criticizes the investigation conducted by the city police department.

The report chronicling Schneiderman's year-long investigation into the shooting death of Edson Thevenin, 37, highlighted the controversial decision by Rensselaer County District Attorney Joel E. Abelove to secretly grant immunity to Sgt. Randall French when the officer testified before a grand jury that cleared him of wrongdoing.

The report concluded that because of the immunity agreement, "criminal prosecution of Sgt. French for the shooting would be impossible" under state law regardless of the attorney general's findings.

In addition, poor evidence gathering and other factors prevented the attorney general's office from being able to "disprove that Sgt. French's use of deadly force was unjustified," the report said.

The attorney general's findings raised questions about why Troy police almost immediately accepted French's contention that he shot Thevenin eight times in self-defense as he was pinned against his police cruiser by Thevenin's sedan  even though forensic evidence appeared to contradict it.

The report said city police told two civilian witnesses immediately after the fatal shots to "get the f--- out of here" without interviewing them and never followed up with a third civilian witness who wanted to change his statement. The report also stated the department "seems to have completely overlooked, or at least greatly minimized" that a fourth witness  Troy police Capt. Matthew Montanino  could have been killed by French's gunfire.

The report said Troy police should have avoided "prejudging" and quickly announcing the results of their investigation, calling the department's probe "deficient and incomplete in several respects." The department failed to evaluate evidence it possessed, did not arrange for a comprehensive reconstruction of the incident, and never had ballistics tests done on the weapons carried by French and Montanino, who was not reported to have fired any shots, the report said. The department also showed "disregard for the Thevenin family" by initially telling them he died in a car accident.

"After learning from a TPD officer at the hospital that Mr. Thevenin had been shot, the family went  in a futile search for additional information  from the hospital to the incident scene to the police department to the morgue," the report said. "The family was provided with no TPD victim services information or even a TPD contact person. The family ultimately heard the TPD's account from the TPD press conference the day after the shooting, a press conference that Mr. Thevenin's mother tried to attend but to which she was denied access."

The family has filed a federal suit against the city.

The attorney general's office also examined Abelove's conduct in a separate grand jury convened by Schneiderman. It scrutinized the investigation of Thevenin's death and obtained a grand jury indictment of Abelove on charges of felony perjury and two misdemeanor counts of official misconduct. The indictment accuses the district attorney of withholding evidence from the initial grand jury that investigated the shooting.

Schneiderman's report clearly rankled Mayor Patrick Madden, who said in a statement: "The city of Troy continues to be unfairly involved in the jurisdictional dispute between the New York state attorney general's office and the Rensselaer County district attorney."

Madden said he fundamentally disagreed with its findings and that the report was flawed.

Madden said he is confident Troy police "operations and procedures remain consistent with best practices adhered to by law enforcement agencies across the state and nation."

"While we believe the factual inaccuracies and errors contained within the report unfairly put the Troy Police Department in a negative light, we will continue to fully cooperate with attorney general's office in their investigation and remain in communication to further discuss their findings," the mayor said.

Madden, however, did not explain what aspects of the report were inaccurate.

In a statement, Troy Police Capt. Dan DeWolf would only say that the department fully supports the mayor's statement.

Andrew Safranko, French's attorney, said the attorney general's special investigations and prosecutions unit, which issued the report, was formed to investigate the deaths of unarmed and innocent civilians.

"This is not the case here," Safranko said. "Clearly, Thevenin was not innocent as he was fleeing from a lawful police stop that would have led to at a minimum an aggravated DWI charge and ultimately the loss of his license based on his prior DWI history. DA's offices routinely utilize a motor vehicle as weapon when charging crimes.

"Randy French is a well-respected police officer ... and it is uncontroverted that his leg was pinned when he shot. A paid-for report cannot change that. Let me be clear  Sgt. French did nothing wrong," Safranko said. "The report concedes that even if Sgt. French was not pinned ... he was allowed to use self-defense and was justified in his actions."

Schneiderman's office hired Precision Simulations, a California-based forensic investigation firm, to reconstruct the shooting. The report said the firm examined, photographed and laser-scanned the incident scene, the vehicles involved and all evidence involved. That included photos taken the morning of the shooting, video footage, and interviews with police and civilian witnesses. Precision Simulations also employed forensic video and audio analysis and ballistic trajectory modeling.

Schneiderman's report described the sequence of events of the incident as follows:

On April 17, 2016 at 3:26 a.m., French stopped Thevenin's Honda Civic, suspecting him of drunken driving. Thevenin, whose blood-alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit, fled and crashed into a concrete barrier near the entrance to the Collar City Bridge.

French positioned his patrol car in front of Thevenin's vehicle. Montanino positioned his car directly behind Thevenin. Montanino got out of his car. Thevenin, trying to flee again, backed up and struck the front of Montanino's car. French stepped out of his car. In the moments that followed, French fired eight rounds through Thevenin's windshield, striking Thevenin, whose car moved forward, pinning French against his vehicle.

French said he was struck by Thevenin's car and his leg was pinned. He said he pushed both hands against the hood of Thevenin's car but could not free himself and realized the car was accelerating. He said he fired multiple times into the windshield to defend himself but because the car was moving he believed his first shots had no effect. He said he was pulled to the left and, while lying on the hood of Thevenin's car, fired more rounds to defend himself.

No other witnesses, including Montanino, corroborated French's account and one civilian witness specifically contradicted it. That witness said French began to fire simultaneously with Thevenin's car hitting Montanino's car and Thevenin's car did not move forward until all the shots were fired.

The witness told a Troy officer he wanted to change his statement and an officer told him he'd "grab it" for him the next day. But no officer followed up with him before Abelove presented the matter to the grand jury later that week. Two other civilian witnesses and Montanino said Thevenin's car started moving forward before French began firing. Those witnesses did not say the shooting was unjustified, but none said French was pinned when shooting began.

"You shouldn't have done that," officers heard one of the civilian witnesses say. "You didn't have to shoot."

Trajectory evidence found French fired from "multiple locations" and was not pinned. Two shots were fired toward the driver's seat through the front windshield and six shots were fired from the side of the vehicle, according to the report.

"In light of the witness testimony, the available physical evidence, and the (firm's) report, Sgt. French's account cannot be regarded as a reliable narrative of the immediate circumstances surrounding the shooting," the report states. "At the same time, after a proper investigation, the available evidence does not allow a firm conclusion as to whether Mr. Thevenin's car was still backing away from, stopped, or moving toward Sgt. French when he started firing."

The report said Troy police minimized the risk of death to Montanino, who was walking along the side of Thevenin's car when French fired his shots. It noted that police Chief John Tedesco later told a reporter, "the way that we're placing the scene (Montanino) was not directly ... in danger but you never know about an errant bullet."

The report concluded: "In fact, Capt. Montanino was not at risk of being struck by an errant bullet; he was at risk of being struck by a non-errant bullet."

By the time at least two of the civilian witnesses were interviewed by Schneiderman's office, the report said, the position of Troy police was publicly known. The report said one witness was actively hoping to join the department, "making it that much more fraught" to offer an opinion on French's actions that had been supported by the police chief.

"Had these witnesses been promptly identified and properly interviewed, it is possible that their accounts would have been more consistent with the sentiments they expressed at the time of the shooting," the report said.

rgavin@timesunion.com  518-434-2403  @RobertGavinTU
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ALBANY - City employees in the general services, water and parks and recreation departments are poised to receive long-desired raises.

The Common Council will vote on a new contract for some 240 Blue Collar Workers Union members employees in the three departments that would increase their pay by 2 percent retroactive to April 1, 2017 and another 1 percent for 2018, according to the councils agenda for Thursdays meeting.

The retroactive raises for 2017 will include a $60,064 increase in the city Water Department budget and $90,750 in the citys general budget. Raises for 2018 will increase the water budget $180,917 and the city budget $260,095, according to information provided by city officials.

The contract also provides 2 percent raises to blue collar workers in 2019.

But AFSCME Council 66 Local 1961 leaders arent publicly speaking yet because there are still some underlying issues with Mayor Kathy Sheehans administration.

There are a few concerns with employment practices with the administration in the city, said union spokesman Aaron Gallant. Union President Frank Coons would prefer not to comment on the contract itself.

Sheehan wasnt aware of the unions specific concerns but said Coons is aware of the mechanisms available to address matters.

Our operations team meets and has regular labor-management meetings, and thats the appropriate place to raise those issues, she said.

The unions contract expired at the end of 2013, and as the local mayoral election heated up in Albany, blue-collar workers came out in force protesting Sheehans pay increases for nonunion employees and demanded wage hikes. The union endorsed former Councilman Frank Commisso Jr. for the mayoral seat.

Sheehan said the city provided an offer in late 2016, but the union walked away from the table. The two parties finally reached an agreement in December 2017.

Im not sure why we werent able to reach a settlement more than a year ago with them, she said. I wanted nothing more than for our blue-collar workers to have this raise  they earned this raise and deserved this raise.

While the union contract agrees to wage freezes for 2014 through 2016, employees will see the incremental raises once the Common Council approves the transfer of the funds necessary to cover the raises and it's solidified by the Board of Estimate and Apportionment.

Sheehan said settling with the blue-collar workers was important, but the city has other unions it will be meeting at the table in the future. Albany firefighter and police contracts have expired, and city officials are back at the table with those employees, she said.

However, the city continues to face serious fiscal challenges, the mayor said. Officials will be holding their breaths Tuesday as Gov. Andrew Cuomo releases the states 2018-19 budget with hope of $12.5 million being slated for the capital city.

Were constantly looking for ways we can work with our unions to ensure they get the raises that theyve earned, Sheehan said. We are looking at how we can find cost savings opportunities.
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SARATOGA SPRINGS - For the hundreds of people who came out to the Saratoga Springs Public Library on Monday, Martin Luther King Day is not just another holiday. It's a Day of Service, the 13th annual one organized by MLK Saratoga where participants share their time and talent for the greater good.

In stations placed around the Dutcher Community Room, a circle of volunteers knitted hats and scarves for the Code Blue shelter. Others penned postcards to elected officials on issues of healthcare, immigration and climate change. But most of the room was taken up by The Mooncatcher Project, which makes washable, reusable menstrual pads to help girls from the poorest regions around the world stay in school once they get their period.

"Girls in places like Uganda, Kenya and Haiti don't go to school when they have their period," said Ellie von Wellsheim, founder of The Mooncatcher Project. "They fall behind and they drop out. They are married off by their families and start having children at a young age. We can end the cycle. For every year a girl remains in school, the more financially independent she will be."

For a project closer to home, there was the knitting brigade, which included Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner (D-Round Lake). She was knitting a scarf.

"This is the third year I've participated in the Day of Service," Woerner said. "Instead of treating Martin Luther King Day as another day off, it's an opportunity to give back. It's creating a space where people of all abilities can give back."

And that's the point, said organizer Dora Lee Stanley, a founding member of MLK Saratoga.

"We are attempting to inspire community service in everyone," Stanley said.

The library was not the only site. Volunteers were deployed to the Wesley Community Center to work with the elderly, Temple Sinai to make challah rolls for the volunteer luncheon and Rebuilding Together Saratoga to paint its new offices. There were also programs to create a collective mural and assemble shelter bags for children in Puerto Rico.

One of the volunteers, Marge Maxwell, greeted the nearly 200 participants, directing them to the various projects.

"It's important because it introduces people to a lot of these projects that are ongoing," Maxwell said. "It gives people an idea on the ways to give back all throughout the year."

John Harrigan of Saratoga Springs found a spot in the bustling room at the Postcards for Protestors. table. There, he wrote cards to New York Senators Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Congressman Paul Tonko (D-Amsterdam) and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-Willsboro). For each card, he chose a different issue  prescription drug costs, the tax plan and cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

"I'm not sure if the cards will be lost in the shuffle, but I think it's important to write," Harrigan said. "They all want to stay in power. They need to stand up and be declared."

Whether it's postcards or challah rolls, every contribution helps, said Woerner.

"My scarf might not be beautiful, but it will be warm," she said.
ALBANY  The nation's top court will not hear former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's corruption case, clearing the way for him to be retried on the charges.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied Silvers appeal for a review, which he filed over the summer after a mid-level federal court ordered a retrial.
ALBANY  Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been warning that the 2019 budget would be difficult and on Tuesday he delivered on that promise with a plan that keeps spending at a modest 2 percent to $168 billion, including federal funds.

"This is going to be the most challenging budget that we've had to do," Cuomo said during his executive budget presentation at the State Museum. He is faced with a $4.4 billion deficit but said his plan would reduce that significantly through cuts and spending caps.

One of the budget proposal's highlights is unclear as the state Department of Taxation and Finance is finalizing the details of a plan that would allow businesses to assume their employees' income taxes as a payroll tax. It's Cuomo's response to federal lawmakers for enacting tax reforms that he says have a disproportionate impact on big, blue states like New York.

While the federal tax reform caps state and local tax deductions for individuals at $10,000, payroll taxes remain deductible.

If a shift in state tax code occurs, employees could see lower gross wages to cover the cost to their employers. But employees should get the same or even higher take-home pay under the plan because they would no longer pay state income taxes, which would morph into the payroll tax.

Also in the works: a proposal that could allow people to make deductible "charitable donations" to their local school districts in lieu of school property taxes.

In his 40-minute presentation, Cuomo stressed that the plans are complicated, and it's not even clear if they are workable. "There's going to be no short answer," he said.

Still, Cuomo is not cutting state aid for core services. School aid is proposed to increase $769 million (3 percent) to $26.4 billion. Medicaid under the ''global cap," which adheres to a spending limit, would rise $593 million (3.2 percent) to $18.9 billion. Total Medicaid costs would increase by $1.7 billion (2.5 percent) to $70 billion.

Locally, Cuomo's initial proposal does not include $12.5 million requested by the city of Albany to plug its own budget gap.

"We thought that over time as part of (a state-funded budget restructuring) plan the reliance on the state number would decrease," state Budget Director Robert Mujica told reporters. "So we're still reviewing their ask."

Mayor Kathy Sheehan decried what she called a cut in aid for the city, which has wide swaths of state-owned tax-exempt land within its borders.

"This cut would have a devastating impact on public safety, youth programming, and the services Albany residents rely on," she said. "We are asking Gov. Cuomo to do what is right, stand with us, and correct this in his 30 day budget amendments."

To fund other aid increases and plug the budget gap, Cuomo wants to raise $1 billion in new revenue. His plans to do so range from a tax on opioid prescription drugs to tighter controls on items like cigars and vending machine revenues to a tax on e-cigarette vapor products. He also wants to broaden the existing internet sales tax to all items sold by vendors with $100 million or more in annual sales. That tax is currently levied only on large vendors with a presence in New York state.

Cuomo's plan also looks to bring in approximately $500 million from insurance provider conversions, when several large not-for-profit health care insurers sell themselves to for-profit firms. At the same time, the governor's plan calls for a tax on health insurance providers, who have just benefited from a large federal tax cut.

Staring down federal health care funding cuts, Cuomo wants a $1 billion health care contingency fund to deal with expected cuts to federal insurance subsidies through Child Health Insurance and Essential programs.

Spending on state agencies remains basically flat. No layoffs are planned and savings would come via attrition.

Wielding strong legislative power, Cuomo's budget includes a number of policy proposals that are wide-ranging. He wants to enact the Child Victim's Act to extend the statute of limitations for criminal and civil child sex abuse cases. He calls for passage of the DREAM Act to unlock college financial aid for children of undocumented immigrants. And he also wants a women's agenda package that includes the establishment of a uniform government sexual harassment policy and other statutory amendments to address harassment and assault from the Capitol to the corporate boardroom.

That women's agenda not only comes amid the national #MeToo movement, but it now will be negotiated as Senate Independent Democratic Conference Leader Jeff Klein, a Bronx Democrat who shares Senate majority coalition leadership with the GOP's John Flanagan, faces an allegation that he forcibly kissed a female staff member outside an Albany bar in 2015.

Klein vehemently denies the allegation, and confirmed Tuesday that the Joint Commission on Public Ethics will probe the incident, as he asked the commission to do. Klein did not call for JCOPE to investigate the matter until it became public.

Cuomo is proposing funding a special investigation unit within JCOPE to specifically tackle sexual misconduct claims.

Klein does not intend to step back from budget negotiations revolving around legislation to address sexual harassment and assault despite the charge against him. He called Cuomo's proposals "an important start."

"I think we have to strengthen our sexual harassment laws, and I intend to push to make that happen," Klein said.
MIAMI, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Progressive Care Inc. (OTCQB:RXMD), through its subsidiaries Smart Medical Alliance, Inc. and PharmCo, LLC, is a South Florida health services organization and provider of prescription pharmaceuticals, compounded medications, the sale of anti-retroviral medications, medication therapy management (MTM), the supply of prescription medications to long term care facilities, administration and practice management, utilization management, quality assurance, EHR Implementation, billing and coding, and health practice risk management, releases the following letter to Shareholders from the Company's Chief Executive Officer, S. Parikh Mars:

Dear Progressive Care Shareholders,

We begin 2018 with optimism and an unflappable sense of purpose and urgency. We have worked steadily to lay a solid foundation upon which we can grow and flourish through an ever-changing healthcare environment. The company remained focused on its vision for the future of healthcare and innovative approach to shape the pharmacy model. We worked throughout the year to prepare our facility and develop the processes that will lead the way in the pharmacy industry.

We also understand that you, our shareholders, have deservedly high expectations for achievement. To that end, we worked to elevate the status of Progressive Care to ensure that the investing public can look at the Company and rely on the information being presented. We thank you for the trust and support and we hope to continue to build on the momentum and deliver results we all can be proud of.

Significant Achievements

Toward the end of 2016, we had completed the build-out of the warehouse space and installed the Script Pro automation system. With necessary infrastructure and technology upgrades in place, the Company, through its subsidiary PharmCo, LLC, set out to achieve an ambitious set of goals. The beginning of the year saw quick implementation of new rules and regulations put in place by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Pharmacy Benefits Management (PBM) companies intended to lower healthcare costs by restricting networks to exclude independent pharmacies, lowering reimbursements, increasing direct and indirect remuneration fees (DIR), and transitioning to shared-risk models for healthcare provision. It was immediately unclear the fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which lead many companies to hold off investing in the acquisition of ACA customers.

However, these changes did not distract us from executing the initiatives that would allow us to control our own destiny. We began with opening a PharmCo Pharmacy Resource Center in Century Village of Pembroke Pines which is a community of over 15,000 retirement age residents. This kiosk became the site of our first software development project: a tele-pharmacy platform. Through MDFlow, the platform is designed to allow patients and health care providers the ability to communicate via live stream video conference directly with a pharmacy technician or pharmacist located at the North Miami Beach location. The development of the platform is on-going but the benefits to brand loyalty, efficiency, and customer service are already being recognized.

In the beginning of the year, the pharmacy secured a relationship with Community AIDS Network to provide 340B services and accelerated the growth of its 340B services to Empower U. These organizations provide necessary medical services to patients with infectious diseases and are instrumental in the education and prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS in South Florida. We have long supported the HIV/AIDS community and believe that participating in the 340B program is not only good for our bottom line but for the individuals and organizations affected by these life altering illnesses. During 2017 we billed more than $2.75 million worth prescriptions on behalf of these charitable organizations, generating over $100,000 in net revenues to the pharmacy. This is an over 500% increase in both respects over 2016. The gross billings of these prescriptions are not included in the over $20 million in net revenues announced for 2017, due to the structure of the 340B program and in accordance with GAAP.

In September, PharmCo faced the onslaught of Hurricane Irma. In the week leading up to the storm, we went through scrupulous measures to ensure that we delivered emergency medication supplies to every patient we could. We also provided resource support to our employees and local residents. After the storm passed, the pharmacy sustained no damage and was the first pharmacy in the area to open with full power and a fully stocked inventory. We worked with local officials to reach any patient in need. As hurricane season intensified, we worked to donate medicinal and wound care supplies to Haiti and Puerto Rico. We would like to thank our armed service members who make incredible sacrifices to help those most in need, which includes one of our own employees, who spent 3 months in Puerto Rico helping with recovery efforts.

The pharmacy throughout the year grew its year-over-year prescription count and net revenues, achieving over 21,000 prescriptions filled in October 2017, 225,000 prescriptions filled in 2017 and over $20 million in net revenues. PharmCo remains a 5 star pharmacy, leading the way in pharmacy and medication therapy management (MTM) performance. PharmCo also resumed adding non-resident state licenses which now includes 12 states in addition to Florida where the pharmacy can supply prescription medications.

Progressive Care as public entity experienced many notable achievements. During the first quarter of 2017 the Company released its 2016 audited financial statements, its first set since 2011. Soon after, we added 2 new independent board members with decades of capital markets and executive management experience. Mr. Jervis Hough and Mr. Oleg Firer have provided the company with valued guidance in navigating its future and have recommended key service providers that have helped the Companys presence in the investment community. With 2 independent board members and a majority independent audit committee in place, Progressive Care applied and received approval to uplist to OTCQB in December 2017.

2017 Key Highlights

Change of listing tier to OTCQB

Addition of Independent Board Members: Jervis Hough and Oleg Firer

Majority Independent Audit Committee

Completion of 2016 Audited Financial Statements

225,000 prescriptions filled

Over 21,000 prescriptions filled in a single month

Over $20 million in net revenues

Secured Community AIDS Network 340B contract.

Doubled monthly 340B revenues since December 2016

Raised over $2.75 million for 340B charitable organizations

Reached over 50 employees

Developed a tele-pharmacy platform in conjunction with software provider MDFlow

Licensed in the following states: Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Arizona, Massachusetts

5 star rating

Opened first PharmCo Pharmacy Resource Center

Celebrated PharmCo's 10 year anniversary

Outlook

2018 brings tremendous opportunity for Progressive Care. Over the last several years, we have worked to make sure that expertise in the healthcare industry flows throughout the organization from executive management to pharmacy technicians and customer service representatives. We began our own continuing education program for our employees so that they can help the company grow and excel with every customer interaction. We understand that healthcare models are changing across the board and with that comes the ability to seize upon the competitive advantages we have built. As the industry continues to evolve toward shared-risk, we know that providers will need the support of a reliable pharmacy to effectively manage the health of their patients. We have positioned the company to provide solutions to health providers from primary care to specialists to rehab facilities and surgical centers.

Our prowess with MTM, has garnered recognition from Outcomes, the leading MTM platform in the country. We believe that continuing the development of our MTM services and the presentation of our success story to physicians across Florida will allow us to achieve further sales growth and market penetration.

We expect to receive additional non-resident state licenses, which will enable us to expand our brand throughout the country. We continue to evaluate which states provide the best avenues for growth and development as we market our custom compounds and specialized services.

Lastly, we believe that the achievements over the past 2 years and the issuance of audited financial statements will improve our position when securing capital and executing on our M&A objectives. We have worked tirelessly to advance Progressive Care, its mission, and its performance so that it can be viewed by the investing public with the respect it deserves. We believe that we will deliver increases in shareholder value and financial results throughout 2018 by remaining focused and staying on leading edge of what it means to be a healthcare company.

The following are our strategic goals for 2018:

Achieve 25,000 prescriptions filled in a single month by December 2018

Increase annual overall sales to $22 million

Secure additional 340B contracts and long term care facility relationships

Further expansion into Palm Beach County

Achieve accreditation for non-sterile compounding

Achieve full enterprise profitability and earnings growth

Publish 2 nd year of audited financial statements and leverage these statements to secure new investment opportunities for mergers and acquisitions

year of audited financial statements and leverage these statements to secure new investment opportunities for mergers and acquisitions Opening more Pharmco Pharmacy Resource Centers in retirement and long term care communities.

Strengthening our tele-pharmacy platform

Closing Remarks

The strength of Progressive Care has always been in the hands of its employees and its shareholders. Without the loyalty and dedication of both, this Company would not be where it is today. We have thrived because of the unyielding support in the face of immense challenges and we know that we must never waver in our desire to always earn the trust that has been bestowed upon us. Thank you to all who believe in us and we look forward to delivering another phenomenal year.

Best regards,

S. Parikh Mars,

Chief Executive Officer

Progressive Care, Inc.

About Progressive Care

Progressive Care Inc. (OTCQB:RXMD), through its subsidiaries Smart Medical Alliance, Inc. and PharmCo, LLC, is a South Florida health services organization and provider of prescription pharmaceuticals, compounded medications, the sale of anti-retroviral medications, medication therapy management (MTM), the supply of prescription medications to long term care facilities, administration and practice management, utilization management, quality assurance, EHR Implementation, billing and coding, and health practice risk management.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward Looking Statements

Statements contained herein that are not based upon current or historical fact are forward-looking in nature and constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Such forward-looking statements reflect the Companys expectations about its future operating results, performance and opportunities that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. These statements include but are not limited to statements regarding the intended terms of the offering, closing of the offering and use of any proceeds from the offering. When used herein, the words anticipate, believe, estimate, upcoming, plan, target, intend and expect and similar expressions, as they relate to Progressive Care Inc., its subsidiaries, or its management, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to the Company and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause the Company's actual results, performance, prospects, and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, these forward-looking statements.
Banks Partner to Award $32K to Mississippi Delta Area Financial Literacy Program

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas (FHLB Dallas), Trustmark National Bank and State Bank and Trust will award $32,000 in Partnership Grant Program (PGP (News - Alert)) funds to Mississippi Community Financial Access Coalition (MCFAC) to help the organization continue to provide financial literacy programs to Delta-area individuals and families.

Local dignitaries and bank representatives will attend a check presentation at 11:00 a.m., Wednesday, January 17, 2018, at the E-City Center Building at Jackson State University at 1400 J.R. Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi. The media is encouraged to attend.

MCFAC will use the funds for organizational capacity building, hiring grant-writing consultants and market research studies.

The structure of the PGP allows FHLB Dallas member institutions like Trustmark National Bank and State Bank and Trust to make a contribution of $500 to $4,000 to a community-based organization (CBO), which FHLB Dallas will match at a 3:1 ratio.

For more information about the PGP, visit fhlb.com/pgp.







WHAT: Check Presentation WHEN: 11:00 a.m., Wednesday, January 17, 2018 WHO: Chris Richardson (News - Alert), Office of U.S. Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS) Steffani Jenkins, First Vice President, Director of Community Development, Trustmark National Bank Gloria Jean Gross, Vice President, Community Development Coordinator, Trustmark National Bank and MCFAC President Lauren Wilson, Community Development Officer/CRA Specialist, State Bank and Trust Rieko Wells, Vice President, Community Development Manager, State Bank and Trust Clifton Williams, Community Development Officer, Guaranty Bank and Trust Company and MCFAC Vice President William Brown, Financial Education Coordinator, MCFAC Latah Holloway, Program Director, MCFAC Bruce Hatton, Vice President, Affordable Housing Program Manager, FHLB Dallas Eric Haar, Vice President, Director of Government and Industry Relations, FHLB Dallas WHERE: Jackson State University E-City Center Building 1400 J.R. Lynch Street Jackson, Mississippi 39217

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116006398/en/
Block Party in Brooksville, Florida to Celebrate School Choice

Families, teachers, community members, City Council, and downtown business owners will celebrates school choice at Entirety K-12's annual Family Night Block Party in historic downtown Brooksville, beginning at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 24.

Natalie Kahler, city council member for Brooksville, will be speaking about the importance of school choice.

Main Street between Broad and Liberty will be closed to make room for vendors and food trucks, and students will perform the National School Choice Week dance.

Parking will be available across the street at the courthouse and other convenient locations within walking distance. Restaurants and food trucks will be open for dinner and snacks.

This event is planned to coincide with the history-making celebration of National School Choice Week 2018, which will feature more than 32,000 school choice events across all 50 states.

"Deepak Chopra stated, 'When you make a choice, you change the future.' hat better way to ensure the success of our children's future than to choose the direction of their academic path," said Bonnie Hamby, Administrator at Entirety. "We at Entirety are proud to be a part of the school choice program and recognize the importance of the decision our families make when selecting our school for their child's education. We participate and celebrate NSCW every year to acknowledge the freedom and opportunity our students enjoy when deciding to attend Entirety K-12."







For more information, contact Dr. Penny Bryson or Bonnie Hamby at (352) 583-4185 or [email protected]

As a nonpartisan, nonpolitical public awareness effort, National School Choice Week shines a positive spotlight on effective education options for students, families, and communities around the country.

For more information, visit www.schoolchoiceweek.com, or visit www.facebook.com/schoolchoiceweek.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005118/en/
Governor Burgum Proclaims Jan. 21-27 "North Dakota School Choice Week" and Joins Leaders Nationwide in Celebrating Opportunity in Education

National School Choice will take place Jan. 21-27 - and officially be North Dakota School Choice Week, thanks to a proclamation from Gov. Burgum.

More than 32,000 independently planned rallies, roundtable discussions, coffeehouse meetups, festivals, school fairs, and other events will take place around the country to raise awareness and spark conversations about school choice. More than 50 of those events will take place in North Dakota.

"We are proud to support parents in choosing the best educational option for their children during National School Choice Week," said Gov. Doug Burgum. "North Dakota is leading efforts to create the most innovative education system in the country. In a world where knowledge transfer can happen anytime, anywhere, and on any device, creating authentic, experiential learning opportunities to help students succeed in a global economy depends on our parents, teachers and educational institutions transforming to meet 21st century workforce nees."







"We are grateful that Gov. Burgum has issued this proclamation," said Andrew Campanella, president of National School Choice Week. "We hope North Dakotans take this opportunity to talk about the educational options parents have, or want to have, for their children. We're excited that North Dakota will be part of the celebration."

Held every January, National School Choice Week is an independent, nonpartisan, nonpolitical public awareness effort designed to shine a positive spotlight on effective education options for every child. Through thousands of independently planned events across the country, National School Choice Week raises public awareness of all types of educational choices available to children. These options include traditional public schools, public charter schools, public magnet schools, online learning, private schools, and homeschooling.

For more information, visit www.schoolchoiceweek.com, or visit www.facebook.com/schoolchoiceweek.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005355/en/
Governor Hickenlooper Proclaims Jan. 21-27 "Colorado School Choice Week;" Joins Leaders Nationwide in Celebrating Opportunity in Education

Jan. 21-27 is officially Colorado School Choice Week, thanks to a proclamation from Governor John Hickenlooper. Gov. Hickenlooper joins dozens of other governors and hundreds of city and county leaders nationwide in issuing similar proclamations.

Across Colorado, more than 550 events will raise awareness and spark conversations about the educational options parents have, or want to have, for their children during National School Choice Week, Jan. 21-27, 2018.

More than 32,000 independently planned events will take place nationwide. Events include rallies, roundtable discussions, coffeehouse meet-ups, festivals, school fairs, and more.

"A child's success is best achieved when their educational experience matches that of their personal learning style," said Governor John Hickenlooper. "As we celebrate School Choice Week, let's keep in mind that nothing is more important to a child's future than the educational opportunities efore them."







"Colorado parents, like parents everywhere, want choices for their kids' education," said Andrew Campanella, president of National School Choice Week. "We're excited that Colorado will officially be part of the celebration of opportunity in education."

Held every January, National School Choice Week is an independent, nonpartisan, nonpolitical public awareness effort designed to shine a positive spotlight on effective education options for every child. Through thousands of independently planned events across the country, National School Choice Week raises public awareness of all types of educational choices available to children. These options include traditional public schools, public charter schools, public magnet schools, online learning, private schools, and homeschooling.

For more information, visit www.schoolchoiceweek.com, or visit www.facebook.com/schoolchoiceweek.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005343/en/
[January 16, 2018] Governor Reynolds Proclaims Jan. 21-27 "Iowa School Choice Week"; Joins Leaders Nationwide in Celebrating Opportunity in Education

Jan. 21-27 will be Iowa School Choice Week, thanks to an official proclamation from Gov. Reynolds. More than a dozen other governors and more than 500 city and county leaders nationwide have issued similar proclamations celebration National School Choice Week. Iowans will celebrate opportunity in education at nearly 300 independently planned events, some of the more than 32,000 School Choice Week events that will be held nationwide. Events, which include rallies, roundtable discussions, coffeehouse meet-ups, festivals, and school fairs, aim to raise awareness and spark conversations about opportunity in education. "I am proud of Iowans' historic commitment to giving our students the best education possible," said Gov. Reynolds. "I believe that school choice has helped strengthen that commitment by offering Iowa families more options about where their children attend school. National School Choice Week celebrates the wide range of educational opportunities available, including public and nonpublic schools, charter schools, home schols and virtual academies."



"We are so excited that Gov. Reynolds has issued this proclamation," said Andrew Campanella, president of National School Choice Week. "We hope that parents will use this opportunity to discuss their children's schools and educational programs and make active choices for their children's schooling. We want every parent to be confident that their child is getting the best education possible." Held every January, National School Choice Week is an independent, nonpartisan, nonpolitical public awareness effort designed to shine a positive spotlight on effective education options for every child. Through thousands of independently planned events across the country, National School Choice Week raises public awareness of all types of educational choices available to children. These options include traditional public schools, public charter schools, public magnet schools, online learning, private schools, and homeschooling.

For more information, visit www.schoolchoiceweek.com, or visit www.facebook.com/schoolchoiceweek. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005359/en/

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Governor Walker Proclaims Jan. 21-27 "Wisconsin School Choice Week"; Joins Leaders Nationwide in Celebrating Opportunity in Education

Joining dozens of other governors and hundreds of city and county leaders nationwide, Gov. Scott Walker has officially proclaimed Jan. 21-27 School Choice Week in Wisconsin.

Wisconsonians have planned 563 events and activities for the week to celebrate educational opportunity and spark conversations about the options parents have, or want to have, for their children.

This year, more than 32,000 independently planned school choice events and activities will take place nationwide across all 50 states. Events include rallies, roundtable discussions, coffeehouse meet-ups, festivals, school fairs, and more.

"Wisconsin has been a pioneer in the school choice movement, and we applaud the Badger State for providing so many educational options for parents," said Andrew Campanella, president of National School Choice Week. "We're happy that Gov. Walker has issued this proclamation. e're excited to see such enthusiasm for educational opportunity in Wisconsin, and celebrate with parents in Wisconsin and across the country."







Held every January, National School Choice Week is an independent, nonpartisan, nonpolitical public awareness effort designed to shine a positive spotlight on effective education options for every child. Through thousands of independently planned events across the country, National School Choice Week raises public awareness of all types of educational choices available to children. These options include traditional public schools, public charter schools, public magnet schools, online learning, private schools, and homeschooling.

For more information, visit www.schoolchoiceweek.com, or visit www.facebook.com/schoolchoiceweek.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005929/en/
[January 16, 2018] Tyler Technologies to Provide Suite of Solutions to the Village of Wellington, Florida

Tyler Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: TYL) signed a software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) agreement with the village of Wellington, Florida, for Tyler's Munis enterprise resource planning (ERP) and EnerGov solutions. The agreement includes financial, human resources, and revenue management provided by Munis, as well as EnerGov's Licensing & Regulatory and Permitting & Land Management suites. The village was previously working across multiple, disparate systems, sometimes even using manual spreadsheets to track important data. The use of "shadow" systems to support its processes created inefficiencies within departments. After a thorough review, the village selected Tyler's Munis and EnerGov to provide a fully integrated solution with the required built-in functionality to replace and upgrade the current systems. Munis and EnerGov will also help improve data analysis, increase efficiency among users, and significantly reduce manual processes. "We're excited tobegin integrating these innovative software solutions that are evergreen, cloud-based, and mobile across multiple platforms into our day-to-day operations. Our goal is to improve our customer and vendor access with increased mobility and productivity for our staff. It's also another step towards becoming more efficient, accessible, transparent, and responsive to the needs of our residents," said Paul Schofield, village manager for Wellington.



"We look forward to working with Wellington to bring them a fully integrated solution to manage important documents and data," said Andy Teed, president of Tyler's Enterprise Group. "Combining two robust Tyler solutions - Munis and EnerGov - will not only advance the village's processes, but will also bring increased efficiency to its staff." The Village of Wellington is near West Palm Beach in southeast Florida, and has a population of almost 62,000.

About Tyler Technologies (News - Alert), Inc. Tyler Technologies (NYSE: TYL) is a leading provider of end-to-end information management solutions and services for local governments. Tyler partners with clients to empower the public sector - cities, counties, schools and other government entities - to become more efficient, more accessible and more responsive to the needs of their constituents. Tyler's client base includes more than 15,000 local government offices in all 50 states, Canada, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and other international locations. In 2017, Forbes ranked Tyler on its "Most Innovative Growth Companies" list, and it has also named Tyler one of "America's Best Small Companies" eight times. The company has been included six times on the Barron's 400 Index, a measure of the most promising companies in America. More information about Tyler Technologies, headquartered in Plano, Texas, can be found at www.tylertech.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005386/en/

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[January 15, 2018] Canadian Smartphone Company Utopya Innovations Inc. Announces Strategic Partnership with Global IT Consulting Firm Cycloides Inc.

TORONTO, Jan. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A perfect technological storm may be brewing in Canada, as emerging smartphone company Utopya Innovations Inc. (OTC: ANDI) announces a strategic partnership with IT consulting firm Cycloides Inc., also headquartered in Canada. The two companies are positioned to make waves across the Canadian tech landscape, and the rest of the world seems ready to dive in. Utopya Innovations Inc., the Canadian smartphone company that has the tech and investment community all abuzz, has been busy making a name for itself recently, as members of its executive team attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, last week. The team reportedly spent much of the week in meetings, and has remained tight-lipped about deal negotiations, but did make it clear to investors that at least one major announcement is expected in the coming weeks, pending approval from the company's lawyers. In the meantime, Utopya continues to demonstrate to shareholders that it means business, by announcing that it has engaged and begun working with Cycloides Inc., a widely-respected consulting firm in the software development and IT industry. In 2017 alone, Cycloides received the Research Award from the National Research Council of Canada,won numerous highly sought-after contracts from some of North America's largest firms, including two Fortune 500 companies, and opened their Global Delivery Centre in India's TechnoPark Trivandrum. The company was recognized as one of the Fastest Growing IT Companies in Canada, opened an office in New York, USA, and strengthened its presence in the Asia-Pacific Region by setting up Cycloides Innovations Pte Ltd, in Singapore.



Mike Starkweather, CEO of Utopya, commented on the partnership: "After an incredible week in Las Vegas, we are thrilled to formally announce our partnership with Cycloides Inc. Given our commitment to offering a unique software ecosystem on Utopya devices, we are very pleased with our decision to engage an IT consulting firm of this calibre. With the ability to leverage Cycloides' extensive software development and IT expertise, we are now more confident than ever before that Utopya will live up to its name, and much more. We're just getting started with plenty more to come, and the future is looking brighter and brighter everyday." Safe Harbor Act: This release includes forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involves risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, the impact of competitive products, the ability to meet customer demand, the ability to manage growth, acquisitions of technology, equipment, or human resources, the effect of economic business conditions, and the ability to attract and retain skilled personnel. The Company is not obligated to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this release.

Contact: [email protected] View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/canadian-smartphone-company-utopya-innovations-inc-announces-strategic-partnership-with-global-it-consulting-firm-cycloides-inc-300582871.html SOURCE Utopya Innovations Inc.

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[January 15, 2018] Yokogawa Electric: KBC Signs Consultancy Agreement for Integration of Oil Refineries in China's Shandong Province

Yokogawa Electric Corporation (News - Alert) (TOKYO: 6841) announces that its subsidiary, KBC Advanced Technologies, has signed a consultancy agreement with China Energy Engineering North Co., Ltd. for the integration of operations at six oil refineries in China's Shandong Province. These refineries are being acquired and will be operated by China State Energy Engineering Corp. Ltd. (SINOMEC), a state-owned company, and China Energy Engineering North Co., Ltd., a SINOMEC group company. There are many small-scale oil refineries in Shandong Province. To improve efficiency and better meet market needs, SINOMEC has decided to upgrade facilities and integrate operations at these six oil refineries, which are located in Guangrao County. KBC will provide consulting services to assist SINOMEC in meeting these objectives. The consulting services offered by KBC are as follows:

1. Conduct an integration study that will identify synergies for maximizing yield and profit.

2. Verify a plan to expand and diversify production. KBC provides software and consultancy services that help to improve efficiency and profitability in the oil and gas upstream (exploration and production) and downstream (refining) sectors. The company's services are held in high regard by customers around the world. The decision to award KBC this contract took into consideration the copany's detailed knowledge of the oil industry and Yokogawa's solid track record in China. Through its introduction of highly reliable control systems, products, and other advanced solutions, Yokogawa will help this customer achieve profitability, ensure safety, and protect the environment.



About Yokogawa Yokogawa's global network of 113 companies spans 60 countries. Founded in 1915, the US$3.5 billion company engages in cutting-edge research and innovation. Yokogawa is active in the industrial automation and control (IA), test and measurement, and aviation and other businesses segments. The IA segment plays a vital role in a wide range of industries including oil, chemicals, natural gas, power, iron and steel, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, and food. Targeting this segment, Yokogawa helps companies maximize their profits by offering a wide range of highly reliable products and working with the subsidiary KBC Advanced Technologies to provide premium solutions and services. For more information about Yokogawa, please visit www.yokogawa.com

About KBC KBC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yokogawa Electric Corporation. KBC is the leading technology-based consulting company to the process industries which creates and sustains value for clients by effectively converting their strategies into results through technical and commercial excellence under-pinned by engineering simulation and analytics. Thereafter KBC sustains performance through the implementation of winning operating models and best practices that are powered by cloud, manufacturing execution system (MES) and automation technologies. For more information, visit www.kbcat.com The names of companies, products, and brands in this text are registered trademarks or trademarks of the respective holders. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180115005246/en/

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LAS VEGAS, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Everi Holdings Inc. (NYSE:EVRI) (Everi or the Company), the casino gaming industrys single source provider of gaming products and payments solutions announced today the appointment of Harper Ko as Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer  General Counsel, effective immediately.

Ms. Ko, who has direct responsibility for all of Everis legal and regulatory compliance affairs, brings to the Company extensive expertise in the casino gaming industry with over 17 years of corporate legal and regulatory compliance experience on behalf of gaming equipment suppliers and casino operators. She most recently served as Deputy General Counsel, Gaming for Scientific Games Corporation, a $2.9 billion gaming and lottery equipment and services supplier. During her time in this position from November 2014  December 2017, Ms. Ko led a team of attorneys and related administrative staff with a wide responsibility for all commercial revenue matters within its global Gaming and Interactive business units. In her role as Deputy General Counsel, Gaming, Ms. Ko served as a strategic advisor to their Gaming unit executive management team for all commercial matters including material commercial transactions, customer and third-party matters, and regulatory compliance and litigation matters. She joined Scientific Games following its acquisition of Bally Gaming, Inc. in November 2014 where she served as Assistant General Counsel beginning in November 2007. Prior to that Ms. Ko was a Contract Attorney with Harrahs Operating Company and Associate Corporate Counsel for Aristocrat Technologies, Inc. Ms. Ko began her career in the gaming industry as Staff Counsel for WMS Gaming Inc. from May 2000 to August 2004.

Michael Rumbolz, President and Chief Executive Officer of Everi, commented, Harper brings to our executive team a deep knowledge and expertise of the gaming industrys unique regulatory and compliance issues as well as a significant track record of success in helping to foster commercial relationships with customers and vendors. Harper possesses the ideal skill set to help Everi shape strategies to address the industrys complex legal and regulatory environment. We are pleased to have attracted a general counsel with Harpers level of expertise, experience and accomplishments and we look forward to the benefit of her counsel and contributions.

Harper Ko commented on her appointment, I was attracted to Everi and the opportunities for continued growth in its Games and Payments segments as well as its commitment to integrity in its business practices. I look forward to working with Mike and the entire Everi team as we continue to execute on our strategic priorities.

Ms. Ko holds a J.D. from Chicago-Kent College of Law, and a B.S. in Psychology as a Natural Science from the University of Michigan. She is a Board Member at Project 150, a 501(c)3 non-profit charitable organization committed to helping over 2,500 students in 45 high schools across Las Vegas and a member of the Executive Leadership Committee for the Go Red for Women, American Heart Association. Ms. Ko previously served as an Officer (co-General Counsel, Vice President) of the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers, and was honored with the Rising Star Award by Great Women in Gaming.

About Everi

Everi is dedicated to providing video and mechanical reel gaming content and technology solutions, integrated gaming payments solutions and compliance and efficiency software to casino operators. Everi Games provides: (a) comprehensive content, electronic gaming units and systems for Native American and commercial casinos, including both Wide-Area Progressive systems and the award winning TournEvent slot tournament solution; and (b) the central determinant system for the video lottery terminals installed in the State of New York. Everi Payments provides: (a) access to cash at gaming facilities via Automated Teller Machine cash withdrawals, credit card cash access transactions, point of sale debit card transactions, and check verification and warranty services; (b) fully integrated gaming industry kiosks that provide cash access and related services; (c) products and services that improve credit decision making, automate cashier operations and enhance patron marketing activities for gaming establishments; (d) compliance, audit and data solutions; and (e) online payment processing solutions for gaming operators in states that offer intrastate, Internet-based gaming and lottery activities.

Contacts

Investor Relations

Richard Land, James Leahy

JCIR

212-835-8500 or evri@jcir.com
[January 15, 2018] Glance Appoints Media and ICO Expert David Drake as Advisor to Glance Coin Advisory Board

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 15, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Glance Technologies Inc. (CSE:GET:CN) (CSE:GET.WT) (OTCQB:GLNNF) (FKT:GJT) announces that it has appointed David Drake to the advisory board of Glance Coin Inc., its wholly owned subsidiary, which is developing its rewards based cryptocurrency, Glance Coin.

David Drake is the founder of LDJ Capital, a financially integrated family office with a global footprint and local presence in 12 countries; Victoria Partners, a 300 family office network based in London; and The Soho Loft Media Group. He has been a writer for Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Drake has extensive expertise in media, initial coin offerings and in the crowdfunding space. He is the co-author of the books Planet Entrepreneur and Crowdfunding and Other Animals. Im very excited to bring my extensive network and experience in ICOs, media and publicity to support the launch of Glance Coin, says David Drake, Glance Coin seeks to position itself as the future of crypto-based consumer spending by achieving mass adoption by consumers of its rewards based cryptocurrency, and I look forward to assisting it in that endeavour. LDJ Capital and its partners have acted as general partners and investors in fund-of-funds, realty funds, venture capital funds, seed funds, debt funds and hedge funds. Mr. Drake's investments and private equity advisory at LDJ Capital currently have more than 50 global directors and family office partners. David is a board advisor for several Initial Token Offerings. In the past 9 months the top 15 ICOs that David has been an advisor to have raised over 500,000,000. David is also the founder of The Soho Loft Media Group, a financial media company that set up the first crowdfunding meeting in history with the SEC and FINRA in April, 2002 to discuss crowdfunding laws of North America. The Soho Loft Media Group is a global financial media company with 3 divisions: THE SOHO LOFT CONFERENCES, which organizes up to 200+ investor-focused global summits, taks and events annually;







TIMES IMPACT PUBLICATIONS, which produces relevant content on investing and entrepreneurship that are published and syndicated in 100+ leading online publications and growing; and



VICTORIA GLOBAL Corporate Communications, which specializes in client Investor Relations, Public Relations, Branding and Social Media Marketing. As part of Mr. Drakes advisory appointment, services intended to be provided to Glance Coin through Mr. Drakes network include introductions to potential partners, social media consulting, profile preparation, media outreach, public relations coordination, social media syndication, conference invitations, roadshow support, board building, and advice on dynamic social engagement, mobile advertising, marketing to generation Z, influencer marketing, the role of virtual reality and augmented reality in social, video storytelling, digital content strategy, customer journey development, marketing automation and the art of storytelling. Born in Sweden and fluent in six languages, Mr. Drake has an MBA in Finance and an MA in International Law and Economics from George Washington University in DC where he was awarded the Wallenberg Scholarship for academic merit.

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 to www.glance.tech. For more information, contact: Christina Rao

Vice President, Investor Relations

(604) 723-7480

[email protected] 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 www.sedar.com.

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[January 15, 2018] Finastra establishes Future of Banking Center of Excellence in Hong Kong

HONG KONG, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Finastra, a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company, today announced the establishment of its Future of Banking Center of Excellence at Cyberport in Hong Kong. This strategic move is part of the worldwide program at Finastra to continue to build its innovation ecosystem and collaborate with strategic partners around the globe. Robert F. Smith, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, joined the team in Hong Kong for the announcement. Imad Abou Haidar, Managing Director, Asia Pacific at Finastra said, "This significant investment further demonstrates our commitment to supporting our customers in the Asia Pacific region. Our connected corporate banking platform and digital capabilities are second to none, and we are well placed to help banks build an evolutionary approach to change in line with customer demand. We'll be focusing on these areas to help banks make the leap towards a digital future. This is the first exclusive banking Center of Excellence of its kind at Cyberport which will provide an immersive lab environment dedicated to driving digitalization across the financial services industry." Hong Kong, being one of the major international financial centers in Asia, serves as the hub for the provision of financial services to global investors. Amidst technology-driven disruption and innovation in the financial services industry, banks are turning to technology solutions for end-to-end digital transformation to remain competitive. The Center of Excellence will facilitate this evolution, helping banks to overcome today's corporate and retail banking business challenges and will provide an environment for innovation. Finastra is also pleased to announce that global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company (McKinsey) will be the official Knowledge Partner to The Future of Banking Center of Excellence. In this capacity, McKinsey will provide its latest research and insights on business trends impacting the banking idustry. Chris Ip, Senior Partner, McKinsey, said, "We are pleased to contribute our ideas and insights to the Cyberport Fintech investor and industry community. Fifty percent of private equity investment activity is concentrated in the Greater China region, with technology being one of the top three categories. Our latest Global Annual Banking Review introduces 'ecosystems' as the new basis for competition in banking. This Center of Excellence will help the Fintech industry community in Hong Kong and Asia to immerse themselves in our latest thinking and experience first-hand what is possible with today's new banking technologies."



Cyberport in Hong Kong is an ideal location as it brings together the growing Fintech investors, start-ups and business community. It opens opportunities for Finastra to continue to collaborate with its customers, Fintechs, industry practitioners, and regulators to facilitate the adoption of technologies and solutions that will accelerate digitalization in banking. It is also a strong hub for Asia and the Belt and Road region. Dr. Lee George Lam, Chairman, Hong Kong Cyberport Management Company Limited, said, "We welcome Finastra and McKinsey to the Cyberport community, and firmly believe that the Center of Excellence will provide a strong platform for us to engage industry players. With over 250 Fintech companies already in the Cyberport ecosystem and a strong network of financial services partners that we work with for hackathons, talent development and innovation adoption, the Center of Excellence will further reinforce our strategic role as Asia's leading Fintech Hub and raise market awareness of the importance of Fintech in transforming Hong Kong's economy."

The Future of Banking Center of Excellence is expected to open in Q1 2018. It will support Finastra and its customers and prospects in the APAC region as it continues to drive the next wave of innovation in the financial services industry, alongside partners and other Fintechs. For further media information please contact: Caroline Duff

Senior PR Manager, Global, Finastra

T: +44 (0)20 3320 5892

E: [email protected]

www.finastra.com Catherine Lam

Senior PR Manager, APAC, Finastra

T: +65 6416 4032

E: [email protected]

www.finastra.com About Finastra Finastra unlocks the potential of people and businesses in finance, creating a platform for open innovation. Formed in 2017 by the combination of Misys and D+H, we provide the broadest portfolio of financial services software in the world today -- spanning retail banking, transaction banking, lending, and treasury and capital markets. Our solutions enable customers to deploy mission critical technology on premises or in the cloud. Our scale and geographical reach means that we can serve customers effectively, regardless of their size or geographic location -- from global financial institutions, to community banks and credit unions. Through our open, secure and reliable solutions, customers are empowered to accelerate growth, optimize cost, mitigate risk and continually evolve to meet the changing needs of their customers. 48 of the world's top 50 banks use Finastra technology.

Please visit www.finastra.com. Corporate headquarters One Kingdom Street

Paddington

London W2 6BL

United Kingdom

T +44 20 3320 5000 SOURCE Finastra

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[January 15, 2018] UiPath Set to Host Largest Gathering of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Experts in India

BENGALURU, India, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Two events will bring together hundreds of experts, leaders and IT professionals to discuss the future of RPA

Events to showcase India's leadership in the field of RPA, and explore how technology can drive India's future economy UiPath , the leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company, announces two events to be held at the Shangri-La Hotel, Bengaluru, India on January 17-18, 2018, that will bring together some of the leading experts and developers in robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), IT and business. #UiPathForward India takes place on January 17, 2018, and will host a day of panel discussions and debates on the future of RPA and the technology's potential impact on the Indian, and world, economy. The UiPath Developer Conference on January 18, 2018 will be one of the largest gatherings of its kind of developers and IT professionals in India, and will include a Hackathon, challenging some of India's brightest to develop innovative RPA solutions. (Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/562224/UiPath_Logo.jpg )

"India has been home to UiPath for many years and we are well-established here," says Daniel Dines, CEO and founder of UiPath. "UiPath provides RPA solutions for some of India's most dynamic companies, and many of our IT professionals are based here thanks to the deep pool of IT talent that India possesses. So, it makes sense to hold to events here back-to-back, and bring together some of the country's leading experts to interact, and discuss a technology that is rapidly changing the way evert business works."



#UiPathForward India Date: January 17, 2018

Time: 9.00am - 7.00pm

Location: Shangri-La Hotel, Bengaluru, India

For more information please visit #UiPathForward India #UiPathForward India is set to be one of the largest gatherings of experts and leaders in RPA in India. The day will feature nine speeches and discussions surrounding RPA, its application within business and its promise for the future. Speakers include Akila Vasudevan of IBM and Sumit Srivastav of PwC India who will discuss RPA's real-life application within Indian firms and the effect it has had on productivity and efficiency. Sarah Burnett of Everest Group will talk about what we can expect from the future of RPA, and the ground-breaking research currently taking place that seeks to implement RPA at greater scale than ever before

Experts and leaders from some of India's leading companies will be attending as delegates or speakers, including AXA, Prudential, IBM, PwC India, Oracle, Abbyy, Celonis, Enate, Everest, Accenture and Tech Mahindra. For agenda, please go online here. UiPath Developers Conference Date: January 18, 2018

Time: 9.00am - 7.00pm

Location: Shangri-La Hotel, Bengaluru, India

For more information please visit UiPath Developers Conference UiPath Developers Conference will bring together some of the top minds in RPA development and coding, enabling the developer community to discuss the technology behind RPA, overcoming future challenges and self-learning. The day will also feature a Awarding Ceremony for the winners of the Hackathon organized by the Indian UiPath developers' team prior to the conference. For agenda, please go online here. About UiPath Built for both business and IT, UiPath is the leading platform for Enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The company is at the forefront of the digital business revolution achieving over 500% yearly revenue growth since 2015. A global community exceeding 30,000 users and over 500 enterprise customers and government agencies use UiPath's Enterprise RPA platform to deploy attended and unattended software robots quickly and accurately resulting in better business outcomes, stronger security and compliance, and higher job satisfaction. Based in New York City, US, UiPath also maintains offices in Australia, France, India, Japan, Romania, and the United Kingdom with an employee base over 500 people. For more information, please access UiPath Website. (https://www.uipath.com)

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[January 16, 2018] Xoriant Opens New State-of-the-Art Delivery Center in Pune

MUMBAI, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Xoriant, a Silicon Valley based product engineering, software development and technology services firm that delivers innovative solutions for technology companies and enterprises, announced today the opening of a new state-of-the-art delivery center in Pune, India. (Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/449859/PRNE_Xoriant_Logo.jpg )

The facility will accommodate approximately 1,000 additional employees above the 1,250 people already employed by Xoriant in Pune. The company plans to leverage the expanded footprint to deliver services and solutions in core focus areas including Product Engineering, Cloud and Big Data & Analytics as well as in expanding focus areas including IoT and Digital. As a top technology hub, Pune has been an ideal location for Xoriant to grow its footprint in India. The city has developed a very healthy ecosystem for startups and other innovative businesses, and there is a substantial presence of IT companies and training institutes that ensure a high-quality knowledge base and an excellent IT talent pool. "As technology becomes an even more pervasive part of eery organization, demand for product engineering and technology services partners with next-generation technology expertise continues to grow, and Xoriant is excited to be contributing to the client needs for these technology solutions," said Arun Tendulkar, COO Xoriant.



The Pune facility has world-class infrastructure and in addition to the delivery center, it also has a dedicated training facility and innovation labs for innovating next-generation solutions. It is ISO 27001 certified for Information Security, with policies and procedures that include all legal, physical and technical controls. It has multiple secured access clusters for ODCs and is LEED certified, a reflection of Xoriant's commitment to environmental sustainability. Click here to see pictures of the new facility

The new Pune facility address is:

7th floor, IT-7 Building,

Qubix Business Park Pvt. Ltd. SEZ,

Phase - 1, Hinjewadi, Pune 411 057 About Xoriant Xoriant is a Silicon Valley based product engineering, software development and technology services firm with offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia. For both technology companies and enterprises, from startups to the Fortune 100, we leverage our expertise in emerging technologies and our high-performing teams to deliver innovative solutions that accelerate time to market and keep our clients competitive. Across all our technology focus areas - Product Engineering, DevOps, Cloud & Infrastructure, Security, Big Data & Analytics, Data Management & Governance, Digital and IoT - every solution we develop benefits from our product engineering pedigree. For 25 years and counting we have taken great pride in the long-lasting, deep relationships we have with our clients. Learn more at http://www.xoriant.com . Media Contact

U.S. Media Contact:

Amrita Joshi

[email protected]

Tel: +1-530-304-9026



India Media Contact:

Ritu Rungta

[email protected]

Tel: +91(22)3051-1000





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[January 16, 2018] Infortrend Launches Cloud-ready Network Video Recorder Solutions with Free IP Camera License Promotion

NEW TAIPEI CITY, Taiwan, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Infortrend Technology, Inc. (TWSE: 2495) today unveiled the new built-in Network Video Recorder (NVR) application for the GSe Pro family, including the rack-mount GSe Pro 3000/1000 and the desktop GSe Pro 200. A limited-time special offer for NVR solutions is also released, offering license of 8 IP cameras for free, and a 50% discount for additional add-on licenses. The special offer is valid from January 1 to March 31, 2018. For more information, please visit Infortrend's website. Integrating NAS, SAN, and Cloud in a unified storage system, the GSe Pro family offers cost-effective solutions with reliable features and intuitive controls to safeguard your workshop, office, or other environments, while providing smart surveillance and video management tools to protect your valuable asets. Integrating private and public cloud services such as Amazon S3, Windows Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and OpenStack, the GSe Pro family lets users leverage cloud for surveillance storage expansion, archive, backup, and video analysis. Up to 64 IP cameras from over 20 brands can be centrally managed and monitored on a single storage system with diverse functions such as Live View, Recording, Playback, and more, allowing the user to monitor anytime and anywhere via web browsers or desktop client software.



"Integration of surveillance and cloud is the trend of the future. We will keep on innovating NVR solutions and features that fulfill versatile needs for a wide range of enterprise customers, and assist them to easily build a powerful and reliable cloud-integrated surveillance system," said Thomas Kao, Senior Director of Product Planning at Infortrend. About Infortrend

Infortrend (TWSE: 2495) has been developing and manufacturing storage solutions since 1993. With a strong emphasis on in-house design, testing, and manufacturing, Infortrend storage delivers performance and scalability with the latest standards, user friendly data services, personal after-sales support, and unrivaled value. For more Information, please visit www.infortrend.com Infortrend and EonStor are trademarks or registered trademarks of Infortrend Technology, Inc., other trademarks property of their respective owners. Media Contact: Infortrend Europe Ltd.

Alex Young

Tel:+44-1256-305-220

E-mail: [email protected]

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[January 16, 2018] Daqo New Energy Appoints Mr. Longgen Zhang as Chief Executive Officer

CHONGQING, China, Jan. 16, 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 the appointment of Mr. Longgen Zhang as the chief executive officer and executive board member with immediate effect. Concurrently, Mr. Guangfu Xu, the Company's Chairman and founder, has stepped down from his position as the acting chief executive officer. Mr. Longgen Zhang has strong expertise across the global solar industry and financial markets. From 2008 to 2014, Mr. Zhang served as the chief financial officer of Jinko Solar (NYSE: JKS), a global leader in the solar industry that distributes solar products and sells solutions and services to a diversified international utility, commercial, and residential customers. Prior to that, Mr. Zhang served as a director and the chief financial officer of Xinyuan Real Estate (NYSE: XIN), from 2006 to 2008. Mr. Zhang served as the chief financial officer at Crystal Window and Door Systems, Ltd. in New York from 2002 to 2006. Currently, Mr. Zhang serves as a director of Jinko Solar and ZZ Capital International Limited (HKSE: 08295). Mr. Zhang received master's degrees in professional accounting and in business administration from West Texas A&M University and a bachelor's degree in economic management from Nanjing University in China. Mr. Zhang is a member of American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.



"We are very excited to welcome Longgen on board as our chief executive officer," commented Mr. Guangfu Xu, Chairman and founder of Daqo New Energy. "Mr. Zhang's extraordinary experience and deep knowledge of the global solar industry and financial markets will greatly benefit Daqo as we continue to focus on lowering costs and improving the quality of our polysilicon. I look forward to working closely with Longgen to strengthen and expand our position as the supplier of choice for high quality polysilicon." 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] View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/daqo-new-energy-appoints-mr-longgen-zhang-as-chief-executive-officer-300582958.html SOURCE Daqo New Energy Corp.

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[January 16, 2018] Japan's 16 Most Mesmerizing Destinations Introduced in a New Live-Action 360-Degree Video

Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO, London Office) released a 360-degree VR video "[360-degree VR] JAPAN - Where tradition meets the future" on 16 January 2018. The video visualizing the essence of Japan and its culture was created as part of "JAPAN - Where tradition meets the future", a large-scale inbound tourism promotion targeting 15 European countries, which started in 2016. With the concept of fusing together "tradition," "innovation," and "nature" which coexist in the diverse culture of Japan, the 360-degree VR video takes viewers on a virtual tour of Japan. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005057/en/ Japan National Tourism Organization's large-scale inbound tourism campaign "JAPAN - Where tradition meets the future" (Photo: Business Wire) As part of the promotion, there will be a social media prize competition to win a round-trip to Japan. Also, an AR digital signage display "Iteractive Vision" will be exhibited in five countries across Europe, allowing passersby to virtually try on traditional Japanese costumes such as kabuki, maiko, and samurai.



With the aim of Japan becoming more recognized and being chosen as a tourist destination, this promotion combines "traditional culture" with "innovative technology" to create contents that will appeal to the world, as stated in the promotion title "JAPAN - Where tradition meets the future." About the 2018 promotion for "JAPAN - Where tradition meets the future"

"JAPAN - Where tradition meets the future," is a highly acclaimed large-scale inbound tourism promotion by JNTO which began in 2016. The first video exceeded 13 million total views throughout the world, and has won silver and bronze in the Digital Craft division for SPIKES ASIA 2017, as well as being chosen as a finalist in three categories in ONE SHOW 2017. The 2018 promotion will provide interactive contents which will allow viewers to better understand Japan and its culture. 360-degree VR video "[360-degree VR] JAPAN - Where tradition meets the future" This 360-degree VR video shows the mesmerizing qualities of Japan condensed into a three minute video. This video creates a simulated experience of visiting Japan, introducing 16 carefully selected tourist destinations. These include the Tokyo Tower and Kyoto's Sagano Bamboo Forest, known as the Golden Route, and other popular tourist destinations. Passing through the torii gates of Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, viewers will find themselves in the bustle of Shibuya Scramble Crossing, as well as having a kabuki actor perform right before their eyes. The video also includes points of views not very common in 360-degree VR videos such as being at eye-level with a Prize Pikachu from the claw machine, Sushi on a conveyor-belt, and a parfait on top of a tray at KAWAII MONSTER CAFE HARAJUKU. Prize Competition Along with the video release, there will be a prize competition "WIN A TRIP TO JAPAN!" Participants are asked to watch the promotional video "[360-degree VR] JAPAN - Where tradition meets the future" on the JNTO official Facebook (News - Alert) page and post comments about their most memorable scenes. One winner from each of the five countries will be awarded a pair of round-trip air tickets to Japan.

*Viewers from France can also participate by following the JNTO Paris official Twitter (News - Alert) account and retweeting the "#visitjapan" tweet. Schedule: Wednesday, 17 January 2018 2:00PM - Friday, 2 March 2018 2:00PM (Japan Time)

Exhibition country: Spain, France, UK, Italy, Germany

Prize: Round-trip air ticket to Japan (one pair per country)

*For more information, please refer to the campaign website (http://visitjapan-europe.jnto.go.jp/en/campaign/). AR Digital Signage Display "Interactive Vision" From Thursday, 18 January 2018 - Wednesday, 28 February 2018, an AR Digital Signage Display "Interactive Vision" where passersby can virtually try on Japanese traditional costumes, will be exhibited in five countries across Europe. The countries where the signage display will be exhibited are Spain (Madrid), France (Paris), UK (London), Italy (Milan), and Germany (Munich, Frankfurt), at major stations, shopping malls, etc. for four - five days per country. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116005057/en/

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[January 16, 2018] Infosys Launches Infosys Business Assurance Store to Drive Productivity and Accelerate Business Agility

BENGALURU, India, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology and next-generation services, today announced the launch of the Infosys Business Assurance Store, a unique knowledge-based solution with a repository of more than 1 million test assets across various industry domains, technologies, products and packages. This solution enables clients to enhance productivity in test planning, aids continuous testing and minimizes dependency on subject matter experts. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130122/589162 )

The Infosys Business Assurance Store is built on the experience of the Infosys validation teams, and integrates with third-party solutions like HPE Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), MS SharePoint among others. The store helps clients drive greater operational efficiencies and accelerate business agility through improved test design. This solution uses machine learning tools for traceability, knowledge clustering and optimization. Clients can access the solution through the Infosys Quality Assurance Workbench, an artificial intelligence-based platform built for supporting all leading digital technologies such as Mobile, Internet of Things, and Cloud among others. Highlights Infosys' Business Assurance Store fast forwards the testing lifecycle across industry domains - such as financial services, retail, insurance, health care, life sciences, manufacturing, telecom, energy, utilities, services and others, using technologies such as Java, .Net, MDM, Mainframe, and Middleware

The solution covers industry leading products and packages like VisionPLUS, Global Pay Plus (GPP), Calypso, Murex, SAP modules, Oracle EBIS, Warehouse Management System (WMS), among many others, and will provide customers starter kits for specialized testing services like security, Internet of Things, big data, and other validation services

The solution also has numerous test cases on various regulations and compliances which will ensure extensive risk coverage and help customers adhereto different standards across geographies



Dominique Raviart , IT Services Practice Director, NelsonHall, said, "With Infosys Business Assurance Store, Infosys has invested in a systematic approach for creating a repository of test scenarios, across industries, and across application technology. This repository is part of Infosys' strategy to continue automating the full testing lifecycle, adding its own proprietary IP to complement commercial off the shelf solutions (COTS)." Ravi Kumar S, President and Deputy Chief Operating Officer, Infosys, said, "Testing has taken a paradigm shift from being an end-of-lifecycle activity to managing user experience in the digital landscape. This solution is about expediting testing and utilizing test cases, built through our years of experience in delivering agility to our customers' businesses. Infosys Business Assurance Store is an endeavor to bring in transformation and fuel automation in the testing space and this solution is testimony of our deep experience of over 15 years."

About Infosys Ltd. Infosys is a global leader in technology services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to create and execute strategies for their digital transformation. From engineering to application development, knowledge management and business process management, we help our clients find the right problems to solve, and to solve these effectively. Our team of 200,000+ innovators, across the globe, is differentiated by the imagination, knowledge and experience, across industries and technologies that we bring to every project we undertake. Visit http://www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise thrive in the digital age. Safe Harbor Certain statements in this press release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017. These filings are available at http://www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of the date of this press release. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law. SOURCE Infosys

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[January 16, 2018] Maropost Announces the End of Standard CRM-With the Launch of its Sales Cloud

TORONTO, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Maropost, the innovating force of Marketing and Sales Automation technology, unveiled its latest leap forward, with the global launch of its Sales Cloud platforma completely inclusive solution combining CRM, Commerce, Acquisition, Referral management, Sales Automation, and Service modules.

Maropost Sales Cloud is a solution, in the true sense of the word. Were tackling the problem of companies being forced to adopt several completely separate, costly solutions, with massive integration and IT issuesby taking an all-in-one approach, says Ross Andrew Paquette, CEO and Chairman of Maropost. Maropost Sales Cloud eliminates the need for organizations of every size, from SMB to Enterprise, to acquire multiple, disparate solutionswhich require complex API integrations to connect with CRM systemsfor the management their various business functions. We chose Maropost Sales Cloud and quickly coupled it with Maropost Marketing Cloud to eliminate the need for 18 different solutions in our Sales and Martech stack, says Ryan Deiss, DigitalMarketers CEO and Co-Founder. Merging to a single platform means two big things for us: more efficiency in managing our business and significant cost savings. Its a fact of the market that competition is fiercer than ever. Personalization is no longer an extra featureits now essential. You need to create a memorable customer experience, as defined by your customers, not you, comments Paquette.



Deiss comments further, Since we were managing our business on so many different solutions, we never really had a complete view of our customersand there is only so much you can do with integrations. By using both Maropost Sales and Marketing Clouds, we finally have complete visibility into every single customer interaction, allowing us to develop truly customized offerings. Bringing together several solutions within one platform, Maropost Sales Cloud ensures cohesive cross-channel data collection, to generate a complete 360-degree customer view. Unlike anything currently available in the industry, the platform's unparalleled insights create uniquely targeted customer experiences. With a flexible platform configuration, Maropost Sales Cloud evolves with customer feature and functionality needsso companies can scale without ever sacrificing personalization.

To learn more, visit www.maropost.com/maropost-sales-cloud. About Maropost

Maropost is a cloud-based revenue optimization suite that gives companies the ability to increase multi-channel customer engagement to maximize revenue. Through integrated marketing and sales automation, Maropost provides essential tools, strategic guidance and support needed to create more personalized customer experiences through a 360-degree business view  from marketing automation to CRM, commerce, and customer support. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Maropost is trusted by brands like New York Post, Golden State Warriors, Warby Parker, Shop.com and Mercedes-Benz. For more information, please contact:

Brandi Smith, VP Marketing

Maropost

1-888-438-3152 x333

[email protected]

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[January 16, 2018] Maropost Reveals the Next Evolution in Marketing Personalization

TORONTO, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Maropost, the innovating force of Marketing and Sales Automation technology, released its latest round of industry-leading developments. These additions will provide users with both access to actionable data and advanced application opportunities.

For years, Maropost Marketing Cloud has emphasized customer-first innovation during the development processcollaborating with clients to build based on their needs. This latest series of new features is part of the company's continuous efforts to create more value for clients. "The fact we're releasing updates is nothing new. We're always evolvinginnovation is an everyday process here," says Maropost CEO Ross Andrew Paquette. "Advancing our capabilities, adapting to customer needsthose are our top priorities." Among the many platform updates released today, some of the highlights include the behavior adaptable Acquisition Builder and artificial intelligence-driven Content and Product Recommendations. Maropost Marketing Cloud's new Acquisition Builder features an unprecedented level of adaptability, responding directly to site visitor behavior. The Acquiition Builder's forms and pop-ups allow marketers to customize when, where, and how to displayfor increased data collection and conversions.



Using Maropost's proprietary Da Vinci AI engine, Maropost Marketing Cloud users will now be able to tailor emails to individual subscribers. Based on web behavior and product purchase history, these Content and Product Recommendations capabilities create a new class of personalizationindividualization. Paquette continues, "These features are providing two of the most critical tools for marketers today: better data and the ability to leverage it. With content and product recommendations specifically, we're looking at a leap from personalized to individualized messaging."

As the company continues to add cutting edge features and functionality to Maropost Marketing Cloud, the level of personalization available to marketers is only expected to increase. Leading the industry trend of customized brand experiences, Maropost is expected to release more features leveraging adaptable data collection and artificial intelligence in the coming months of 2018. To learn more about Maropost Marketing Cloud, please visit www.maropost.com/maropost-marketing-cloud About Maropost Maropost is a cloud-based revenue optimization suite that gives companies the ability to increase multi-channel customer engagement to maximize revenue. Through integrated marketing and sales automation, Maropost provides essential tools, strategic guidance and support needed to create more personalized customer experiences through a 360-degree business view  from marketing automation to CRM, commerce, and customer support. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Maropost is trusted by brands like New York Post, Golden State Warriors, Warby Parker, Shop.com and Mercedes-Benz. For more information, please contact: Brandi Smith, VP Marketing

Maropost

1-888-438-3152 x333

[email protected]

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WOOSTER, Ohio, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wayne Savings Bancshares, Inc. (Wayne Savings or the Bank) (OTCQX: WAYN), the holding company parent of Wayne Savings Community Bank, today sent a letter to its stockholders concerning the nomination of a candidate to the Board of Directors of the Bank by Stilwell Activist Investments, L.P. and its affiliates.



Included below is the full text of the letter to Wayne Savings stockholders:

January 16, 2018

Dear Fellow Wayne Savings Shareholder:

We are proud of the growth Wayne Savings has experienced in 2017 and believe it has been a transformational year for the Company. Wayne Savings is well on its way to becoming a high-performing community bank. We wish to thank you for the confidence in us you showed during an eventful year. We hope you feel your support has been rewarded with Wayne Savings poised to drive long-term shareholder value in 2018 and beyond.

You may have read that the New York hedge fund which unsuccessfully attempted to place a representative on the Wayne Savings Bancshares, Inc. Board of Directors in 2017 has submitted another nominee to the Board in 2018. We believe the Stilwell Fund has initiated the proxy contest to satisfy its own limited agenda of forcing the sale of Wayne Savings. Our current Board members have been working toward a common goal of creating significant long-term shareholder value driven by consistent and profitable growth.

The following paragraphs highlight some of our successes in 2017:

Record Earnings and Improvement in ROE and ROA: Wayne Savings announced record earnings for the quarter ended September 30, 2017. Net income of $855,000 or $0.31 per common share for the quarter ended September 30, 2017 represented an annualized return on equity of 8.06% and an annualized return on assets of 0.77%. This is compared to $0.20 per share (55% growth) for the quarter ended September 30, 2016, ROE of 5.31% (275 basis point improvement) and ROA of 0.49% (28 basis point improvement). These results were achieved by reducing overhead expenses while continuing to grow loans. We are pleased the record earnings have confirmed our steady commitment to the strategic plan. The Board of Directors is committed to accelerating our efforts to deliver improved earnings and robust growth.

Returned Cash to Shareholders and Repurchased Stock: The Board of Directors believes in maximizing shareholder return through the pursuit of improved capital efficiency. Wayne Savings improved earnings in 2017 have enabled the Board to complete a stock repurchase program announced in 2016 and to increase our quarterly dividend. On December 6, 2017, the Board announced the repurchase of 75,995 shares (reducing share count by 2.7%) to complete the Companys stock repurchase program announced on September 22, 2016. On December 22, 2017, Wayne Savings also announced a quarterly cash dividend increase of $0.01 to $0.10 per share of the Companys common stock for the quarter ending December 31, 2017.

Hired an Accomplished CEO: The Company announced the hiring of James R. (Jay) VanSickle II as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company and the Bank on August 31, 2017. Jay brings an extensive knowledge of the banking industry and an impressive track record of successful execution and leadership. Jay is a former senior executive at National Bancshares Corporation (NBOH), and its wholly owned subsidiary, First National Bank headquartered in Orrville, Ohio. NBOHs ROE improved from 3.29% in 2006 to 11.92% in 2014 during Jays tenure as CFO. With the addition of a permanent CEO, the Wayne Savings management team has completed several initiatives in 2017 designed to improve operational efficiency and maximize long-term shareholder value.

Added an Institutional Shareholder Director: In December 2017 we added a new director who represents the perspective of the institutional investor community. Brian Hopkins of Ancora Advisors LLC brings a background in corporate finance, capital allocation, corporate governance and strategic decision-making that we believe will add value to the Board. A registered investment advisor with combined firm assets under administration exceeding $5 billion, Ancora is a 6.0% shareholder in Wayne and has invested in numerous community banks throughout its history. Representatives of Ancora have sat on six community bank boards in the past five years. Adding Mr. Hopkins and Ancoras bank expertise will help the Board with capital allocation strategy. This appointment demonstrates the Boards receptiveness to investors.

Completed a Savings & Loan to Commercial Bank Charter Conversion: Wayne Savings completed the conversion of the Bank from an Ohio-chartered savings and loan association to an Ohio-chartered commercial bank in September, 2017. The charter conversion allows the Bank to continue the implementation of its strategic plan by acquiring more commercial business relationships, facilitating the restructure of our loan portfolio into higher yielding, shorter duration assets. The charter change allows the Bank to continue the growth in commercial loans with increased earnings. Nonresidential real estate and commercial business loans increased from $131.0 million as of December 31, 2016 to $142.3 million as of September 30, 2017.

Securities Exchange Commission SEC Deregistration: Wayne Savings announced the termination of the registration of common stock with the SEC under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 on October 27, 2017. The decision to deregister our common stock was based on numerous factors, including six-figure annual cost savings which should be recognized in 2018.

Continued Stock Price Improvement: The Companys stock price has appreciated significantly since the Board announced on December 20, 2016 the appointment of an interim President and CEO and start of a search for a permanent successor. The stock price on the date of the announcement was $15.95 and has since appreciated over 12%. The stock price has closed at or above $18.00 per share on every trading day of 2018. The Board believes improved earnings, the common stock repurchase and the increase in the quarterly dividend has prompted this recent appreciation in stock price.

The current Board of Directors serves the interests of all shareholders and appreciates the confidence and support you have given. As always, we welcome input from all our shareholders. We believe Stilwells campaign to replace our qualified nominee could derail the significant progress weve made. We are excited about the opportunities in our market and will continue with our plan to transform Wayne Savings and create long-term value for all our shareholders. Your continued support of Wayne Savings Bancshares, Inc. is sincerely appreciated.

If you have any questions or would like us to contact you, please do not hesitate to reach out to our investor relations department at (330) 287-2857.

Sincerely, Peggy J. Schmitz David L. Lehman Chair, Board of Directors Board of Directors

Additional Information



In connection with its 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, Wayne Savings Bancshares, Inc. will file a proxy statement and other documents regarding the 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and will mail the definitive proxy statement and a proxy card to each shareholder of record entitled to vote at the 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

SHAREHOLDERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS FILED WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE. THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION.

Investors and security holders will be able to obtain the documents free of charge at the SECs website, www.sec.gov, from Wayne Savings at its website, http://ir.waynesavings.com, or by writing to Wayne Savings Bancshares, Inc., 151 North Market Street, Wooster, Ohio 44691, Attention: Investor Relations.

Participants in Solicitation

The Company and its directors and executive officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies in connection with the 2018 Annual Meeting. Information concerning the Companys participants is set forth in the proxy statement, dated March 27, 2017, for its 2017 Annual Meeting of Stockholders as filed with the SEC on Schedule 14A. Additional information regarding the interests of participants of the Company in the solicitation of proxies in respect of the 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and other relevant materials will be filed with the SEC when they become available.

Forward-Looking Statements

This letter contains forward-looking statements (as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995) that reflect managements current assumptions and estimates of future economic circumstances, industry conditions, Company performance and financial results. A variety of factors could cause the Companys actual results and experience to differ materially from the anticipated results, including, but not limited to the factors noted in this letter and in the Managements Discussion and Analysis in our most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, and quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2017. The forward-looking statements in this letter speak only as to the date of this release. Wayne Savings Bancshares, Inc. expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to such statements to reflect any change in its expectations upon which such statements are based.

About WAYN

Established in 1899, Wayne Savings Community Bank, the wholly owned subsidiary of Wayne Savings Bancshares, Inc., has eleven full-service banking locations in the communities of Wooster, Ashland, Millersburg, Rittman, Lodi, North Canton, and Creston, Ohio.

Contacts

Wayne Savings Bancshares, Inc.

James R. VanSickle

President and Chief Executive Officer

330-264-5767

or

Alliance Advisors, LLC

855-601-2251
[January 16, 2018] TechSee Survey Reveals Self-Service as the Preferred Method for Installing New Home Electronic Devices, but Complex Process is a Barrier for Many

TEL AVIV, Israel, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TechSee, a leading SoT ('Support of Things') company merging artificial intelligence and augmented reality to streamline technical support, today released the results of a wide-ranging survey exploring customer experiences and preferences for in-home electronics installation. The research revealed self-installation - the process that enables customers to install home electronic devices without the help of a technician or a contact center - was preferred by 71 percent of consumers. While 67 percent of consumers self-installed home electronics in the last 12 months, 30 percent had to abandon their efforts mid-process to contact customer support, costing consumer electronics and telecommunication companies additional time and money, with costly technician dispatches or no fault found refunds estimated at more than 16 billion USD each year. The survey further explored consumer sentiment toward new technical support guidance tools, including visual guidance and AI-powered virtual assistance. Key findings include: Self-installation was preferred over any other support model: 68 percent of consumers are willing to spend more than 15 minutes trying to self-install in order to avoid contacting a call center 70 percent would rather visit their dentist than fail at self-installation and wait for a technician

Complexity is a barrier o mass adoption of self-installation: 59 percent of respondents did not find the installation process easy Baby Boomers were the demographic that struggled the most with self-installation (87 percent)

71 percent of consumers preferred "visual guidance" - images, videos, and visual prompts over other any other methods such as user manuals or online forums

The majority of respondents preferred to receive instructions via their smartphones, and 28 percent already prefer receiving help via virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa



Eitan Cohen , CEO of TechSee. "TechSee empowers consumers to install and operate their devices without the need to call for assistance or read manuals. Technical guidance is simply teleported to their mobile device and visually augmented into their environment, creating a simple visual and interactive customer experience." The "Internet of Things" has become a buzzword for an increasingly networked world where everything from the garage door to the coffee machine is assigned an IP address. As the IoT matures, and the range and complexity of connected devices multiplies, there will be an increasing need for assistance with installations. In light of the inevitable shift to self-service, self-installation becomes a move necessary to enhance the customer experience and reduce costs.

For more information on the survey as well as related infographics, visit Techsee's website About TechSee: TechSee is global Leader in Visual Support technologies for the smart home. TechSee revolutionizes the customer support domain by providing the first intelligent visual support solution powered by artificial intelligence and augmented reality. TechSee empowers technical support teams across the globe to execute visually-interactive remote diagnoses and resolutions of problems. The company is building a massive database of interactions and resolutions to enable customers to experience rapid, fully automated, robotic visual resolution of technical issues via their smartphones. TechSee is headquartered in Tel Aviv with offices in New York and Madrid. Contact:

Liad Churchill

[email protected]

SOURCE TechSee

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[January 16, 2018] Marketo Expands with New Office in Denver

SAN MATEO, Calif., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Marketo, Inc., the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, today announced that it has officially opened its newest office location in Denver, Colo. This expansion has created 200 jobs in the Mile High City, with plans to grow the Denver team to 500 by the end of this year. Marketo celebrated the grand opening on Saturday, January 13, with Marketo CEO Steve Lucas and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper cutting a purple ribbon at the office in Denver City Center.



"We're ecstatic about our new Denver office, which helps us to meet the needs of Marketo's valued customers," said Teresa Grau, senior vice president, Human Resources. "As a top-ranked place to live and the home of a vibrant technology community, Denver has a great source of talent to strengthen Marketo's already exceptional global workforce."

Occupying 50,000 square feet on two floors in downtown Denver, the office is Marketo's fourth U.S. location and 12th worldwide. With employees across Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Sales, and many other departments, it serves as the Mountain-Time complement to Marketo's headquarters in San Mateo, Calif. Marketo was also recently listed as a 2017 Built In Colorado Top 100 Digital Company. For more information on Marketo and to view open positions in Denver, visit www.marketo.jobs. About Marketo

Marketo, Inc., offers the leading Engagement Platform that empowers marketers to create lasting relationships and grow revenue. Consistently recognized as the industry's innovation pioneer, Marketo is the trusted platform for thousands of CMOs thanks to its scalability, reliability, and openness. Marketo is headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with offices around the world, and serves as a strategic partner to large enterprise and fast-growing organizations across a wide variety of industries. To learn more about the Marketo Engagement Platform, LaunchPoint partner ecosystem, and the vast community that is the Marketing Nation, visit www.marketo.com. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/marketo-expands-with-new-office-in-denver-300582920.html SOURCE Marketo, Inc.

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[January 16, 2018] Zia Learning Releases New Blueprint for Building a Personalized Learning Program

CHICAGO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Zia Learning, a leading provider of professional development for teaching in the personalized classroom, today released the newest version of its Blueprint for Building a Personalized Learning Program. The blueprint, along with Zia Learning's Framework for Facilitated Personalized Learning, has been piloted and refined in selected districts and is now broadly available to the education market to support schools in implementing personalized learning. "Personalized learning is a pedagogy, not a product," said Robin Gonzales, the founder of Zia Learning. "It is critical that districts begin with a clear framework and implementation plan that takes into account the fundamental changes in teaching and learning in the personalized classroom. This includes teachers moving from direct instruction to a more facilitated approach, and students taking on a more autonomous role in the classroom." To help teachers develop a highly engaging learning environment that allows for individualized instruction and a deep application of knowledge, the blueprint codifies the role of teacher as facilitator in a user-friendly framework that breaks down the art of facilitation into four clear omains that guide teachers to:



Coach the mentoring aspects of teaching and supporting students' social-emotional learning; Direct the use of data, including analyzing and interpreting data as well as the development of personalized learning plans based on that information; Design the actual layout of the physical classroom as well as grouping for instruction; and Apply critical thinking skills and project-based learning options, and transfer knowledge into real-world contexts. Zia Learning is working to ensure that teachers are ready to make this shift in districts across the U.S., including Chicago Public Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools, and charter schools across the state of Ohio. "What I'm most excited about is to see the meaningful and measurable results of our work," Gonzales said. Newly released results demonstrate that schools who participated in Zia's programs saw increased student retention, increased pass rates, and increased teacher retention rates. "These are all gains that matter in terms of increasing student achievement," Gonzales added. "Students have individual needs, and technology empowers teachers to address them in ways we never could before. However, teachers and students are still at the heart of the learning environment, and we need to make certain they are prepared for this new approach. We are committed to preparing schools, teachers, and students to fully harness the potential of personalized learning."

You can learn more about Zia Learning and download a copy of the blueprint and framework at Zia Learning. About Zia Learning: Zia Learning is a leading provider of PD, consulting, and implementation services for personalized learning programs across the nation. They offer a full suite of online and blended PD options based on the iNACOL Standards for Teaching in a Blended and Personalized Classroom and the ISTE Teacher Standards. To learn more, please visit ZiaLearning.com. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/zia-learning-releases-new-blueprint-for-building-a-personalized-learning-program-300582798.html SOURCE Zia Learning

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[January 16, 2018] LECTRA: Lectra appoints Akihiko Tanaka as Managing Director of Lectra Japan

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Lectra appoints Akihiko Tanaka as Managing Director of Lectra Japan Akihiko Tanaka's role is to support Lectra's Japanese customers as they undergo the transformation towards Industry 4.0 Paris, January 16, 2018 - Lectra, the technological partner for companies using fabrics and leather, is pleased to announce the appointment of Akihiko Tanaka to the role of Managing Director, Lectra Japan. Based in Osaka, Akihiko Tanaka's role is to support Lectra's Japanese fashion & apparel and automotive customers as they undergo transformations related to Industry 4.0.



For over 30 years, Lectra has given prestigious names in the fashion industry in the archipelago and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) the means to meet their ambitions in global markets.



"Japan's automotive industry is one of the most important in the world: its ecosystem radiates internationally. I am proud to promote Lectra's solutions, designed to facilitate the co-ordination of all actors in the production chain, whether they are based in Japan, the ASEAN countries, Europe or North America," states Akihiko Tanaka. "Japan is also a land of fashion, which benefits from an active local market and also has a strong position on the world stage. Our solutions, rooted at the heart of our customers' transformation, enable them to respond rapidly to both the digitalization of their respective industries and to thir evolving relationships with consumers."







"Akihiko Tanaka's international experience, and his robust knowledge of technological professions, are a major asset to reinforce our value proposition," underlines Daniel Harari, Lectra Chairman and CEO. "The major challenge facing our Japanese customers is accelerating development cycles for their products within a fast-evolving automotive market and a fashion industry on a quest for greater agility."



Akihiko Tanaka has over 20 years of experience as a Sales Director in the automotive and electronic industries. From 1994 to 2000, he worked in France as Sales Director of Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic) in charge of commercializing automation equipment to the automotive and electronic industries, and then went back to Japan in early 2000. In 2001, he joined INCS, a consulting and engineering company, to develop the footprint of a 3D CAD offer, initially within Japanese markets, then elsewhere in Asia, and Europe. In 2005, Akihiko Tanaka joined Dassault Systemes where he successively held the roles of Business Developer for PLM solutions, then Sales and Marketing Director for the design solution 3D CATIA, and finally as Director, academic programs.

Akihiko Tanaka has a bachelor's degree in sociology from Hitotsubashi in Japan. He also followed the Concordia program delivered by ESCP Europe. About Lectra For companies that breathe life into our wardrobes, car interiors, furniture and more, Lectra is crafting the premium technologies that facilitate the digital transformation of their industry. Lectra's offer empowers brands and manufacturers from design to production, providing them with the market respect and peace of mind they deserve. Founded in 1973, today Lectra has 32 subsidiaries across the globe, serving customers in over 100 countries. With more than 1,600 employees, Lectra reported revenues of $288 million in 2016. Lectra is listed on Euronext (LSS). For more information, please visit www.lectra.com

Contact - Lectra Headquarters / Press Dept.: Nathalie Fournier-Christol

E-mail: [email protected]

Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 64 42 37 - Fax: +33 (0)1 53 64 43 40 Attachments: //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/8882226b-c42c-45fe-adcf-4138055f8c5c

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[January 16, 2018] DefinedCrowd releases smart data platform to market

SEATTLE, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DefinedCrowd Corp., a technology startup offering a smart data platform, released their product to market today. The company developed a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that allows data scientists to collect, enrich, and structure data for Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The smart data startup launches the public release version 1.0 of their product today



With a rapidly growing AI market, DefinedCrowd aims to fill the gap when it comes to accessing fast, scalable, high-quality training data. The startup offers a SaaS solution, where companies and data scientists can get high-quality datasets to train their AI and Machine Learning systems. In the platform, clients are able to create projects online from available templates with highly customizable settings. Once the project is launched, the user can monitor its progress in near real time, through quality and performance metrics. Users can also access their data through an API, which was released at the Web Summit in November, and connect DefinedCrowd platform with their machine learning infrastructure along the various data lifecycle phases, from model bootstrapping, to feedback loop data improvements and testing. This is a huge milestone for DefinedCrowd, says Founder and CEO Dr. Daniela Braga. It is the culmination of two years working on his solution, and we are really proud to release to the world our SaaS platform, with features designed to make data scientists lives easier, adds Dr. Braga.



With a strong specialization in Speech Technologies and Natural Language Processing, along with tools for computer vision, image recognition and other machine learning ecosystems, the company offers solutions to help build a multitude of human-to-computer (HTC) interaction models which can be applied to a number of segments such as Customer Service, Automotive, Energy, Fintech, Retail, Media, Healthcare to name a few. The startup also has their own skilled community, which has been building up around the recently launched brand Neevo by DefinedCrowd. Human input is critical to ensure accurate results in human-centric AI systems, tells CBDO Aya Zook. This is why it is so important to build a skilled and reliable community, which is the key to surpass quality thresholds, concludes Zook.

The smart data solution is available at www.definedcrowd.ai, where companies can start creating their projects online and getting their high-quality training datasets. To get started, contact DefinedCrowd via the homepage to request a demo and learn about the different annual subscription offers. About DefinedCrowd DefinedCrowd is an intelligent data platform for AI. It combines human-in-the-loop and machine learning capabilities to accelerate enterprise data training and modelling. Guided by experts in speech and natural language technologies, the DefinedCrowd platform leverages machine learning, data science and modern human-in-the-loop to enable enterprises to easily manage their global data collection and enrichment programs. DefinedCrowd offers include text, speech, image, video and multimodal data workflows, in 46 languages, with a community of 20,000 contributors in 53 countries, which help process an average of 10,000 units of data per day, per client, across 20+ clients. DefinedCrowd was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Learn more at www.definedcrowd.ai. Social Media

DefinedCrowd: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn Neevo: Facebook | Twitter A photo accompanying this announcement is available at //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/524113b7-b4fb-407a-9bcb-dd7bcc621150 Contacts [email protected]

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[January 16, 2018] Hornet Commissioned First Study From Nielsen To Determine Impact Of LGBTQ-Themed Advertising

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hornet, the world's premier gay social network, today released its first ever research with Nielsen around the efficacy of LGBTQ-themed branded advertising on the LGBTQ consumer. The custom study, which Hornet commissioned from Nielsen in 2017, examines advertising content across various industries including consumer packaged goods, hospitality, automotive and banking. "With this study, we hope to help brands improve their marketing and advertising as it relates to the LGBTQ community," said Sean Howell, President and Co-Founder of Hornet. "Our community is one of the most highly sought-after demographics, and creating campaigns that speak directly to this consumer with authentic and inclusive messaging is what distinguishes brands from general market advertising." In addition to better understanding the consumer impact of LGBTQ-themed ads, the study also specifically evaluates the effectiveness of a variety of ad creative from brands that feature messages of inclusion, equality and diversity. The effectivenes is compared against that of generic ad creative from the same brands that do not feature LGBTQ-targeted messaging. By using an online design, the study measures both advertising effectiveness and engagement. Key brand effectiveness measures brand recall, brand familiarity and affinity, purchase intent and recommendation intent and brand attributes.



Amongst its key findings: 60% of people exposed to LGBTQ-themed ads labeled them as "progressive and inclusive"

Purchase impact from LGBTQ-themed ads is 44% higher

75% of the LGBTQ-themed ads tested outperform generic ads in driving brand recall

Of those surveyed, 73% agreed they don't mind paying extra for a premium product or service For more information, please click here.

Hornet's free social network app available on iOS, Android, and the web. About Hornet Networks

Hornet is the world's premier gay social network. Founded in 2011 with the mission to build the digital home for the gay community, Hornet has grown to 25 million total users by utilizing cutting-edge technology for its dating platform and producing original editorial content to connect a community around common interests. Hornet provides a superior user experience and is number one in the key markets of France, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Taiwan, and is consistently expanding its sizable user base in the United States. For more information, please visit: http://gethornet.com.



Hornet, Where Guys Connect. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hornet-commissioned-first-study-from-nielsen-to-determine-impact-of-lgbtq-themed-advertising-300583392.html SOURCE Hornet

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[January 16, 2018] Lead, Reimagine, Reinvent - Driving a Culture of Genius for Business Success Will Captivate Attendees at HMG Strategy's Upcoming CIO Leadership Conference in Phoenix

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In today's fast-changing business landscape, a company's willingness and ability to disrupt its existing business model is the key to its future success  and survival. Because the CIO is at the center of the organization's digital transformation journey, he or she is uniquely positioned to deliver courageous leadership, meld emerging technologies with process redesign and changing work patterns, and partner with the C-suite and the board of directors to drive a culture of genius for business success. These overarching themes will capture the discussions at the upcoming 2018 Phoenix CIO Executive Leadership Summit, produced by HMG Strategy, to be held on February 8, 2018 at The DoubleTree Resort by Hilton Paradise Valley in Scottsdale, Arizona. "In this era of unprecedented disruption, visionary executive leadership is critical for identifying and acting on opportunities for business innovation," said Hunter Muller, HMG Strategy's President & CEO. "To help their companies to accomplish their objectives, CIOs and technology executives must act as the CEOs of technology to successfully guide the enterprise into the next era of digital transformation." The Phoenix CIO Executive Leadership Summit will kick-off with a distinguished executive panel featuring Steve Phillips, Chairman of the Board, Wick Communications and David Jarvis, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Honeywell, who will explore what it takes to lead, reimagine and reinvent the enterprise along with their roles in leading digital transformation strategies and opportunities for working with fellow members of the C-suite to ensure successful execution. Other compelling sessions will include an executive panel that will focus on best practices for balancing cyber security with agility and innovation; a panel of leading search executives who will examine the top attributes of effective technology executives; an executive panel that will share valuable approaches for providing a 360-degree omnichannel customer experience and strengthening share of wallet; a panel of technology executives that will explore emerging echnologies that are driving speed to market and opportunities to obtain a competitive advantage; and an executive panel featuring admired technology executives including Cynthia Nustad, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, HMS; Kevin Haskew, SVP & CIO, ON Semiconductor; and Jim Haskin, SVP & CIO, Aspect Software who will share experiences of how courageous leadership can create value and generate new waves of business growth in the modern enterprise.



Prominent speakers at the summit will include: Michael Guggemos , CIO, Insight Enterprises

, CIO, Insight Enterprises David Jarvis , Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Honeywell

, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Honeywell Steve Phillips , Chairman of the Board, Wick Communications

, Chairman of the Board, Wick Communications Morgan Reed , CIO, State of Arizona

, CIO, Caren Shiozaki , EVP & CIO, TMST, Inc.

, EVP & CIO, TMST, Inc. Michael Spandau, SVP Global IT & CIO, Fender Musical Instruments Platinum Partners for the Phoenix Summit include Neudesic and Nutanix. Gold Partners include Cylance, Rubrik, Technical & Business Consulting, LLC, and Zerto. Supporting Partners include Gemalto. The Digital Cybersecurity Partner of the Year includes SecurityScorecard. Strategic Partners include Egon Zehnder, Heidrick & Struggles, Korn Ferry, Russell Reynolds Associates, and Spencer Stuart. Alliance Partners include Amplify Partners, Glynn Capital, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia. Association Partners include Arizona Technology Council, the Arizona Chapter of the Society for Information Management (SIM), and Year Up Arizona.

To visit the Phoenix summit website and register for the event, click here. About HMG Strategy HMG Strategy is the world's largest independent and most trusted provider of executive networking events and thought leadership to support the 360-degree needs of technology leaders. Our regional CIO and CISO Executive Leadership Series, newsletters, authored books, and online Resource Center deliver proprietary research on leadership, innovation, transformation, and career ascent. The HMG Strategy global network consists of over 300,000 senior IT executives, industry experts and world-class thought leaders. HMG Strategy's exclusive CIO and CISO Executive Leadership Alliance (CELA) program provides top-tier technology executives with unparalleled peer-to-peer off-the-record straight talk to strengthen their decision-making capabilities and accelerate their career ascent. The CELA program is complemented by the CELA Executive Decision Support services (EDS) which connects enterprise technology executives with their contemporaries who are able to offer their expertise, practical experience, and insights in disciplines ranging from effective C-suite communication strategies to crafting successful 1-3-5-year technology roadmaps. Additionally, our partnerships with the world's leading search firms provide vital insights into the evolving roles of the CIO and CISO. The HMG Strategy CIO Executive Leadership Series offers a completely unique experience for IT executives to gain the latest insights and best practices for driving increased business value through the use of IT, and build invaluable relationships with peers and industry experts. The HMG Strategy CISO Executive Leadership Series is designed to provide information security leaders with the insights and best practices they need to tackle the most pressing cyber security challenges facing the enterprise today and going forward. For more information on joining the strongest executive leadership network and exploring our independent, forward-thinking thought leadership platform, please visit www.hmgstrategy.com. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lead-reimagine-reinvent--driving-a-culture-of-genius-for-business-success-will-captivate-attendees-at-hmg-strategys-upcoming-cio-leadership-conference-in-phoenix-300583384.html SOURCE HMG Strategy

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[January 16, 2018] BioAdvance Commits $3.2M to Life Sciences Companies in First Six Months of FY 2018

BioAdvance announced today that it has added six new companies to its portfolio and has made follow-on investments in five of its existing companies, including two investments previously announced. These investments represent a commitment of $3.2M to the success and growth of life science companies in the mid-Atlantic region. "Our goal is to invest more money into the region's rich innovation pipeline this fiscal year than in prior years, while maintaining our investment standards, and we achieved that goal in the first six months," said Barbara Schilberg, CEO of BioAdvance. "We continue to see an interesting diversity of early-stage opportunities leading to new investments--with more in the pipeline--plus we continue to support our current companies as they progress. We are pleased to continue our role as an active life sciences investor in the region." BioAdvance reached the mid-point of its fiscal year 2018 with the following new investments Curative Orthopaedics (West Chester, PA) ($50,000), which is developing non-invasive orthopaedic products to help ease nighttime back pain. https://www.curepedic.com/

Enzium (Philadelphia, PA) ($30,000), which is progressing assay development for the detection and quantification of direct-acting oral anticoagulant levels based upon protease activity. http://www.enziumlabs.com/

Group K Diagnostics (Philadelphia, PA) ($40,000), which is developing a novel point of care diagnostic device based on paper microfluidic technology. http://www.groupkdiagnostics.com/

Oncora Medical (Philadelphia, PA) ($400,000, as part of a $1.7M financing), which is developing a SaaS (News - Alert)-based product for radiation oncology that integrates all patient EMR/genetic/imaging information to create a personalized radiation treatment plan. https://oncoramedical.com/

Opsidio(Bryn Mawr, Pa) ($500,000, as part of a $750K closing), which is developing monoclonal antibodies to treat fibrotic diseases.

PeriRx (Broomall, PA) ($400,000), which is developing a saliva-based molecular technology to aid in the detection of lung cancer. http://perirx.com/

Pillo Health (New York, NY) ($500,000, as part of a $2.2M closing), which is developing an interactive home health care hub that includes medication dispensing. https://pillohealth.com/

Relmada Therapeutics (RLMD: New York, NY) ($370,000, as part of a $6.9M private placement), which is preparing to test its lead compound d-methadone in a Phase 2 study of major depressive disorder. https://www.relmada.com/

TalexMedical (Malvern, PA) ($500,000), which is manufacturing and commercializing InfantEar, a nonsurgical ear molding device invented by a CHOP physician, that corrects misshapen ears in newborns. https://www.infantears.com/

VenatoRx (Wayne, PA) ($250,000, as part of a $42M Series B round), which is developing novel anti-infective agents to treat drug resistant Gram-negative pathogens. http://www.venatorx.com/

WellSheet (Newark, NJ) ($150,000, as part of a $720,000 seed financing), which is developing a SaaS product that customizes EHR content, providing the physician with a one-sheet view of patient information. https://www.wellsheet.com/



Most recently, Dr. Jones was a Director with Broadview Ventures, where he shared responsibility for investment activities, from identifying and screening new ventures to developing and negotiating deal structures. He was the founder of Spordiff Therapeutics, which was developing a small molecule to prevent C. difficile infection, and CEO of Anchor Therapeutics, a venture-backed company developing a platform of lipidated peptides targeting intractable GPCR targets. Before that Dr. Jones held increasingly responsible positions as a general manager, business development professional and medical affairs officer with Devgen, BioRexis and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. He has served on numerous corporate Boards, as well as the Scientific Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center and the StrokeNet External Oversight Board at NINDS. Early in his career, Dr. Jones practiced internal medicine, most recently as Assistant Professor in the University of Pennsylvania health system. He earned his BA, MD and MBA degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.

BioAdvance is a $50M early stage life sciences fund, working with entrepreneurs in the mid-Atlantic region to build strong companies that have the potential to improve human health. Since making its first investments in 2003, BioAdvance has committed $37.6M in funding to 85 organizations developing over 85 products in the diagnostics, therapeutic, medtech, research tools and digital health sectors. BioAdvance portfolio companies have leveraged $2.65 billion in subsequent capital, including proceeds from twelve acquisitions. Eleven products have received FDA approval. For more information please visit www.bioadvance.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116006574/en/

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[January 16, 2018] Prezi Rated a Top 100 Software Vendor, According to G2 Crowd

CHICAGO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Prezi, the visual presentation platform that helps people connect more powerfully with their audiences and customers, announced it has been honored on G2 Crowd's Best Software Companies 2018 list, which recognizes the top 100 business software companies according to customer feedback, based on G2 Crowd's verified user reviews from 2017. Prezi ranked no. 32 on the list, and customer reviews can be viewed in full here. On G2 Crowd, business software users write detailed reviews on their experiences with the software tools they use professionally. In order to qualify and be eligible for Best Software Companies 2018-G2 Crowd, each company had to receive a minimum of 100 reviews across all of their products on G2 Crowd between January 7, 2017 and January 7, 2018. Companies were scored based on an algorithm using many of the same factors included in G2 Crowd's Grid, but weighted differently to reflect vendors' success over the past year. "We are excited to release this year's Best Software Companies list and recognize brands who are clearly providing a high-quality product for their customers," said Tim Handorf, co-founder and CEO of G2 Crowd. "We built G2 Crowd to empower users with the ability to transparently help one another find the software solutions that best fit their needs. This list recognizes he voice of those users, and they are telling us that these companies have designed great products that are meeting the needs of their customers."



"Our mission is to help people make better decisions by providing more effective tools for visual communication," said Jim Szafranski, chief operating officer at Prezi. "We're thrilled that G2 Crowd customer reviews reflect the results our customers have achieved with our product." Best Software Companies 2018 | G2 Crowd was also segmented into three lists for small-business, mid-market, and enterprise software companies. Prezi was featured as number 12 on the Best Mid-Market Software Companies 2018 | G2 Crowd. To be eligible for the Mid-Market segment, a company had to meet the above specifications and have an employee count of 51-1,000 employees.

About Prezi

Prezi is the presentation platform that helps you connect more powerfully with your audience and customers. Unlike slides, Prezi's single, interactive canvas encourages conversation and collaboration, making your overall presentation more engaging, persuasive, and memorable. Prezi's latest offering, Prezi Next, is a full-lifecycle presentation platform so everyone can easily create visually stunning presentations, deliver them in a more natural and conversational way, and analyze their effectiveness. Founded in 2009, and with offices in San Francisco, Budapest, and Riga. Prezi now fosters a community of over 85 million users and over 325 million Prezi presentations around the world. Its investors include Accel Partners, Spectrum Equity, and TED conferences. For more information, please visit www.prezi.com. About G2 Crowd, Inc.

G2 Crowd, the world's leading business solution review platform, leverages more than 325,000 user reviews to drive better purchasing decisions. Business professionals, buyers, investors, and analysts use the site to compare and select the best software and services based on peer reviews and synthesized social data. Every month, more than one million people visit G2 Crowd's site to gain unique insights. Co-founded by the founder and former executives of SaaS leaders like BigMachines (acquired by Oracle) and SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce) and backed by more than $45 million in capital, G2 Crowd aims to bring authenticity and transparency to the business marketplace. For more information, go to G2Crowd.com. Media Contact:

Brett Smith

Prezi

(415) 516-2564

[email protected] View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/prezi-rated-a-top-100-software-vendor-according-to-g2-crowd-300583439.html SOURCE Prezi

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[January 16, 2018] Revenue Enhancement and Administration Specialist GRS Rebrands as Avenu

Avenu changed its name from Government Revenue Solutions (GRS) to better reflect how the company enables cities, towns, and counties across the U.S. to enhance their fiscal posture. Avenu is a portfolio company of Mill Point Capital. Operating as Avenu Insights & Analytics (Avenu), the company identifies and recovers general fund revenue on behalf of cities and counties. Their limited resources prevent these local governments from collecting all the funds they're owed for permits, license fees, and taxes for sales and use, property, utility and franchise, and hotel and short-term rentals. These customers also use Avenu's administrative expertise to expedite payment via an automated system, and achieve better audit results because Avenu pinpoints improper or underreported revenue. Last year Avenu's legacy companies discovered and delivered $1.3 billion to local governments. According to Craig Adler, executive chairman of Avenu, "local governments operate in an environment with aging infrastructure, a new tax law that will decrease their revenue, underfunded pensions and other everyday obligations. They need every dollar of revenue to continue providing citizen services." CEO Paul Colangelo says the new brand signifies innovation that is citical for local governments.



"Avenu's technology evaluates large data sets, shows trends and clusters of opportunity to collect more revenue, and then provides the platform for businesses to pay and stay compliant. It's a level of standardization and sophistication expected by the 89,000 local governments across the U.S. and their constituents." The other leaders of GRS-Doug Jensen, Kennon Walthall, and Patrick Scott-will continue in their roles and are a key part of Avenu's strategy. One of Avenu's legacy companies, MuniServices, will continue to retain its legal structure.

About Avenu Avenu provides local governments with ways to achieve more predictable revenue that supports growth, fuels modernization and ensures compliance with mandated but underfunded programs. Avenu's revenue enhancement and administrative solutions find and recover license, permit and other fees that cities and counties struggle to collect. The insights and improved fiscal posture enables governments to deliver expected services and sustain a high quality of life for residents. www.avenuinsights.com About Mill Point Capital Mill Point Capital is a middle-market private equity firm focused on control-oriented investments in the business services and industrial sectors. The firm works with Executive Partners to leverage its investment professionals' experience while providing strategic and operational guidance designed to drive long-term value creation in its portfolio companies. Mill Point is based in New York, NY. For more information, please visit www.millpoint.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116006666/en/

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TORONTO, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Golden Leaf Holdings Ltd. (GLH or the Company) (CSE:GLH) (OTCQB:GLDFF), a leading cannabis oil solutions company built around recognized brands, today announced the appointment of Craig Eastwood as its new Chief Financial Officer, effective January 15, 2018. The Companys outgoing CFO, Eugene Hill, is stepping down to pursue other opportunities. In his role as Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Eastwood will lead Golden Leafs financial operations and be responsible for managing liquidity, balance sheet risk, and capital market transactions to ensure Golden Leaf remains well positioned to capitalize on growth opportunities. He will report directly to William Simpson, CEO.



Mr. Eastwood brings almost three decades of progressive financial leadership, which includes public company experience, to Golden Leaf Holdings. Most recently, Mr. Eastwood served as CFO at Powin Energy Corporation. Prior to that, Eastwood was the corporate controller at Erickson, a leading specialty aviation company. He has also held senior financial leadership positions with ESCO, Daimler Trucks, and Pharmaceutical Product Development. He started his career in public accounting with Deloitte, is a licensed CPA, and earned his accounting degree from the University of South Africa.

Mr. William Simpson, CEO of Golden Leaf, commented, Craig is a seasoned financial executive with the requisite experience needed at this exciting time in the evolution of our company, and I am pleased to welcome him to the Golden Leaf executive team. Craig has an impressive background and has demonstrated financial and strategic leadership in his previous roles, where he has led significantly larger companies through major business transformations. I am confident he will prove to be an invaluable asset as the Company executes on its growth strategy that is focused on expanding its product portfolio and its commercial footprint across Oregon as well as new markets including Nevada and Canada. I would like to thank Eugene Hill for his contributions to Golden Leaf and wish him all the best for his next endeavors.

Mr. Eastwood, Golden Leafs incoming CFO, commented, Golden Leafs brand portfolio, and operations that touch every stage in the cannabis lifecycle, uniquely position the Company to capitalize on the rapidly emerging growth opportunity in the legal cannabis market. It is clear to me that Golden Leaf Holdings has incredible brands, a committed team, and is a leader in its field. This is an exciting time in this dynamic industry and I am delighted to join the Company and help to scale the business and build value for shareholders.

To be added to the distribution list please email GLH@kcsa.com with GLH in the subject line.

About Golden Leaf Holdings

Golden Leaf Holdings Ltd., a Canadian company with operations in Portland, Oregon, is one of the largest cannabis oil and solution providers in North America, and a leading cannabis products company built around recognized brands. Golden Leaf Holdings cultivates, extracts and manufactures and distributes its products through its branded Chalice Farm retail dispensaries, as well as through third party dispensaries. Golden Leaf leverages a strong management team with cannabis and food industry experience to complement its expertise in extracting, refining and selling cannabis oil. Visit http://goldenleafholdings.com/ to learn more.

Investor Relations:

Steve Silver / Phil Carlson

GLH@kcsa.com

212-896-1220 / 212-896-1233

Media Relations:

Anne Donohoe / Anne Szustek

KCSA Strategic Communications

adonohoe@kcsa.com / aszustek@kcsa.com

212-896-1265 / 212-896-1210

Company:

William Simpson

Chief Executive Officer

Golden Leaf Holdings Ltd.

503-477-7626

William@chalicefarms.com
[January 16, 2018] Golden Leaf Holdings Appoints Craig Eastwood as Chief Financial Officer

TORONTO, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Golden Leaf Holdings Ltd. (GLH or the Company) (CSE:GLH) (OTCQB:GLDFF), a leading cannabis oil solutions company built around recognized brands, today announced the appointment of Craig Eastwood as its new Chief Financial Officer, effective January 15, 2018. The Companys outgoing CFO, Eugene Hill, is stepping down to pursue other opportunities. In his role as Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Eastwood will lead Golden Leafs financial operations and be responsible for managing liquidity, balance sheet risk, and capital market transactions to ensure Golden Leaf remains well positioned to capitalize on growth opportunities. He will report directly to William Simpson, CEO.

Mr. Eastwood brings almost three decades of progressive financial leadership, which includes public company experience, to Golden Leaf Holdings. Most recently, Mr. Eastwood served as CFO at Powin Energy Corporation. Prior to that, Eastwood was the corporate controller at Erickson, a leading specialty aviation company. He has also held senior financial leadership positions with ESCO, Daimler Trucks, and Pharmaceutical Product Development. He started his career in public accounting with Deloitte, is a licensed CPA, and earned his accounting degree from the University of South Africa. Mr. William Simpson, CEO of Golden Leaf, commented, Craig is a seasoned financial executive with the requisite experience needed at this exciting time in the evolution of our company, and I am pleased to welcome him to the Golden Leaf executive team. Craig has an impressive background and has demonstrated financial and strategi leadership in his previous roles, where he has led significantly larger companies through major business transformations. I am confident he will prove to be an invaluable asset as the Company executes on its growth strategy that is focused on expanding its product portfolio and its commercial footprint across Oregon as well as new markets including Nevada and Canada. I would like to thank Eugene Hill for his contributions to Golden Leaf and wish him all the best for his next endeavors.



Mr. Eastwood, Golden Leafs incoming CFO, commented, Golden Leafs brand portfolio, and operations that touch every stage in the cannabis lifecycle, uniquely position the Company to capitalize on the rapidly emerging growth opportunity in the legal cannabis market. It is clear to me that Golden Leaf Holdings has incredible brands, a committed team, and is a leader in its field. This is an exciting time in this dynamic industry and I am delighted to join the Company and help to scale the business and build value for shareholders. To be added to the distribution list please email [email protected] with GLH in the subject line.

About Golden Leaf Holdings Golden Leaf Holdings Ltd., a Canadian company with operations in Portland, Oregon, is one of the largest cannabis oil and solution providers in North America, and a leading cannabis products company built around recognized brands. Golden Leaf Holdings cultivates, extracts and manufactures and distributes its products through its branded Chalice Farm retail dispensaries, as well as through third party dispensaries. Golden Leaf leverages a strong management team with cannabis and food industry experience to complement its expertise in extracting, refining and selling cannabis oil. Visit http://goldenleafholdings.com/ to learn more. Investor Relations:

Steve Silver / Phil Carlson

[email protected]

212-896-1220 / 212-896-1233 Media Relations:

Anne Donohoe / Anne Szustek

KCSA Strategic Communications

[email protected] / [email protected]

212-896-1265 / 212-896-1210 Company:

William Simpson

Chief Executive Officer

Golden Leaf Holdings Ltd.

503-477-7626

[email protected]

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[January 16, 2018] CherryRoad Technologies Inc. Awarded NASPO ValuePoint Cloud Solutions Contract Agreement with the Commonwealth Of Virginia

MORRIS PLAINS, N.J., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CherryRoad Technologies Inc. today announced it has signed a NASPO ValuePoint Participating Addendum with the Commonwealth of Virginia, allowing the State to simplify their entire cloud procurement process. CherryRoad markets its cloud solutions and managed services to state and local governments through NASPO ValuePoint's Master Agreement awarded by the State of Utah. The Commonwealth of Virginia, which is the sixth State following in the footsteps of the States of Utah, South Dakota, Hawaii, Florida, and Nebraska to sign the Participating Addendum, can now access master agreements to work directly with CherryRoad to address their unique cloud solution needs. Cloud solutions provided by CherryRoad include Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)  which were developed specifically for state and local governments. "NASPO ValuePoint emphasizes best value from its contractors considering price, quality, reliability, and service while protecting States' best interests," said Larry Hymson, CherryRoad's Executive Vice President of Client Solutions. "The Commonwealth of Virginia is now positioned to achieve greater savings for its onstituents and leverage leading technology initiatives with flexibility and improved efficiency via cloud computing solutions."



NASPO ValuePoint is regarded as the nation's most significant public contract cooperative due to its unparalleled value for members as well as contractors, competitive pricing, and superior terms and conditions. NASPO ValuePoint Cloud Solutions Master Agreements are only awarded through a competitive RFP to a limited number of cloud solution providers whose offerings meet stringent security and data protection requirements. About CherryRoad Technologies Inc.

At CherryRoad, our clients entrust us with the success of their IT solutions, whether we're delivering on-premise ERP, cloud-based application management, business intelligence, process optimization, or change management consulting. Throughout our 30-year history we've successfully partnered with hundreds of public sector and commercial clients to modernize, optimize and manage their back-office functions. Headquartered in Morris Plains, N.J. with offices across the U.S., we've earned a solid reputation for combining technology, organizational, functional, and vertical market expertise into practical solutions that deliver results  on-time and on-budget. For more information, visit www.cherryroad.com

About NASPO Valuepoint

NASPO ValuePoint is a unified, nationally focused cooperative aggregating the demand of all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the organized US territories, their political subdivisions and other eligible entities spurring best value, innovation and competition in the marketplace. The NASPO ValuePoint Cooperative Purchasing Organization (formerly WSCA-NASPO) provides the highest standard of excellence in public cooperative contracting. By leveraging the leadership and expertise of all states with the purchasing power of their public entities, NASPO ValuePoint delivers best value, reliable, competitively sourced contracts. Since 1993 NASPO ValuePoint has been the cooperative purchasing arm of NASPO (the National Association of State Procurement Officials) encouraging, fostering and guiding the nation's most significant public contract cooperative. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cherryroad-technologies-inc-awarded-naspo-valuepoint-cloud-solutions-contract-agreement-with-the-commonwealth-of-virginia-300583527.html SOURCE CherryRoad Technologies Inc.

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[January 16, 2018] Schulte Roth & Zabel Presents Its 27th Annual Private Investment Funds Seminar

Schulte Roth & Zabel (SRZ) is hosting its 27th Annual Private Investment Funds Seminar today in New York. A pioneer in the alternative investment management industry, SRZ has advised private funds for nearly 50 years. Today's seminar features the firm's leading fund lawyers sharing their market knowledge on current trends and expectations for the private funds industry. In-depth panel discussions will cover regulatory developments, tax updates, permanent capital investment vehicles, cryptocurrencies and more. The event is by invitation only. "We are pleased to gather the industry's leading asset managers for our 27th Annual Private Investment Funds Seminar, at which we will explore the evolution of fund terms and strategies," commented Stephanie R. Breslow, SRZ partner and co-head of the Investment Management Group. "Tax reform and new EU regulations are impacting the private funds industry, as is the greater sophistication of the SEC (News - Alert) and the CFTC. At today's seminar, we will discuss some of the more complex regulatory and compliance issues facing fund managers," said Marc E. Elovitz, SRZ partner and chair of the Investment Management Regulatory & Compliance Group. "The panels will also cover the latest trends of interest to private funds, including the prospect of investing in litigation finance and digital assets, and the latest in activist investing," added Jason S. Kaplan, SRZ partner in the Investment Management Group. Paul N. Roth, SRZ founding partner and chair of the Investment Management Group, will provide welcoming remarks. During the main program, Ms. Breslow will sit down with guest speaker Nelson Peltz, chief executive officer and a founding partner of Trian Fund Management. SRZ is the dominant global law firm for shareholder activism, and the firm successfully represented Trian in its proxy contest securing the appointment of Mr. Peltz to the Board of Directors of Procter & Gamble, the largest company ever to be the subject of a proxy contest. During the seminar, Mr. Peltz will discuss his career and perspectives on shareholder engagement. "We are excited to present this distinguished group of speakers. They will offer timely intelligenc on the important developments impacting the private funds industry," commented Alan S. Waldenberg, chair of SRZ's Executive Committee.



Representing a wide range of practice areas, SRZ lawyers featured at the event include: Philippe Benedict, Stephanie R. Breslow, Brad L. Caswell, David M. Cohen, Aneliya S. Crawford, Brian T. Daly, Josh Dambacher, Harry S. Davis, Jennifer Dunn, David J. Efron, Marc E. Elovitz, David S. Griffel, William H. Gussman, Jr., Christine Harlow, Christopher Hilditch, Daniel F. Hunter, Jason S. Kaplan, David J. Karp, Eleazer Klein, Douglas I. Koff, Dan A. Kusnetz, Ian L. Levin, John J. Mahon, Anna Maleva-Otto, David K. Momborquette, Donald J. Mosher, David Nissenbaum, Omoz Osayimwese, Daniel V. Oshinsky, Jacob Preiserowicz, Julian Rainero, Seetha Ramachandran, Kurt F. Rosell, Paul N. Roth, Phyllis A. Schwartz, Craig Stein, Michael E. Swartz, Shlomo C. Twerski, Craig S. Warkol, Thomas R. Weinberger, Holly H. Weiss, Peter H. White, Ji Hye You, Boris Ziser and Elie Zolty. Specific topics covered at today's seminar include: Regulatory Compliance 2018; Permanent Capital Investment Vehicles; Investing in Litigation Finance; Running a Global Investment Firm; Enforcement; CLOs, Warehouse Facilities and Risk Retention Vehicles; Tax Considerations for 2018; Cryptocurrency, Alternative Data and Blockchain; Smart Contracts; Fund Economics; Regulatory Outlook; Trends in EU Regulation; and Shareholder Activism, among others.

SRZ is the market-leading law firm in the alternative investment management industry. The firm's lawyers provide advice on both U.S. and U.K. law to a wide variety of funds and managers located in the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the Middle East, Southern Africa, Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan) and Australia. Notably, SRZ is one of only a few law firms with a regulatory and compliance practice within its private funds practice. The firm's regulatory and compliance practice consists of leading lawyers with extensive experience, and many of whom have prior experience working at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or in U.S. Attorneys' offices. About Schulte Roth & Zabel Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP (www.srz.com) is a full-service law firm with offices in New York, Washington, D.C. and London. As one of the leading law firms serving the financial services industry, the firm regularly advises clients on corporate and transactional matters and provides counsel on regulatory, compliance, enforcement and investigative issues. The firm's practices include: bank regulatory; bankruptcy & creditors' rights litigation; blockchain technology & digital assets; broker-dealer regulatory & enforcement; business reorganization; complex commercial litigation; cybersecurity; distressed debt & claims trading; distressed investing; education law; employment & employee benefits; energy; environmental; finance; financial institutions; hedge funds; individual client services; insurance; intellectual property, sourcing & technology; investment management; litigation; litigation finance; mergers & acquisitions; PIPEs; private equity; real estate; real estate capital markets & REITs; real estate litigation; regulated funds; regulatory & compliance; securities & capital markets; securities enforcement; securities litigation; securitization; shareholder activism; structured finance & derivatives; tax; and white collar defense & government investigations. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116006505/en/

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[January 16, 2018] START & Sarah Cannon Partner to Advance Therapies for Patients with Cancer

South Texas Research Accelerated Therapeutics (START) and Sarah Cannon Research Institute announced today a new collaboration to complement and enhance their globally recognized phase I drug development programs. START and Sarah Cannon are each renowned leaders in the field of early phase oncology clinical trials, particularly first-in-human studies. Partnering on the scientific and operational elements of drug development will lead to even greater efficiencies in the enrollment, quality and excellence of their clinical research programs. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116006748/en/ START would also like to congratulate Amita Patnaik, MD, and Kyriakos Papadopoulos, MD, on their appointment as Co-Directors of Clinical Research. During their 10 years at START, Dr. Patnaik and Dr. Papadopoulos have earned the respect of the global drug development community, Pharma partners, as well as the highly-skilled staff at START. In addition, START is delighted that Drew Rasco, MD, has accepted the position of Associate Director of Clinical Research. Dr. Rasco's 7 years at START have been highlighted by numerous publications on investigational therapies. "START and Sarah Cannon share in a mission to advance therapies for patients facing cancer through cutting-edge research and clinical excellence," said Lon Smith, MD, President and CEO of South Texas Oncology and Hematology, PLLC (STOH) and Manager of START. "Under the leadership of Dr. Patnaik, Dr. Papadopoulos and Dr. Rasco, we look forward to further growing our clinical research initiatives in partnership with a global research network."



START represents a unique community-based research initiative that has enabled collaboration between cities across the world and has permitted access to novel cancer therapies by patients spanning three continents. In the past decade, START has enrolled more than 6,000 patients onto phase I clinical trials with more than 900 enrolled in 2017. Currently, START's strategic sites included in the collaboration are located in San Antonio, Texas, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Madrid, Spain, with additional sites planned in the future. START also has centers in Shanghai and Taipei. "By partnering with the trusted research experts at START, we will further advance our mission to bring the latest therapies through early phase clinical trials into the community," said Howard A. "Skip" Burris, III, MD, President of Clinical Operations and Chief Medical Officer at Sarah Cannon. "We look forward to the many advancements that will be made through this collaboration, transforming care through clinical research for cancer patients globally."

Sarah Cannon Research Institute is one of the world's leading clinical research organizations conducting community-based clinical trials throughout the United States and United Kingdom. Sarah Cannon has been a clinical trial leader in the majority of approved therapies over the last decade, enrolling more than 3,000 patients on trials each year and conducting more than 360 first-in-human studies. START and Sarah Cannon represent two of the largest community-based phase I oncology programs in the United States. The strategic partnership between these two centers of excellence will result in the acceleration of drug development both nationally and globally while increasing patient access to novel anticancer agents. About The START Center for Cancer Care The mission of the START Center for Cancer Care is to provide the highest-quality care for people with cancer and to help accelerate the development of new treatments in order to improve patients' quality of life and give them real hope against cancer. In pursuit of this mission, the START centers bring world-class care to patients in convenient locations throughout San Antonio, Texas, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Madrid, Spain, Shanghai, China, and Taipei, Taiwan. START has one of the world's largest and most active Phase I clinical trial programs, giving the START Center access to the most advanced anticancer drugs - access not available at many of the biggest regional cancer institutions. Over the years, START's researchers have helped bring many promising anticancer drugs to market. For more information, visit startthecure.com. About Sarah Cannon Research Institute Sarah Cannon Research Institute is the research arm of HCA Healthcare's global cancer institute, Sarah Cannon. Focused on advancing therapies for patients, it is one of the world's leading clinical research organizations conducting community-based clinical trials throughout the United States and United Kingdom. Sarah Cannon's network of strategic sites includes more than 275 physicians who engage in research. The organization has led more than 360 first-in-man clinical trials since its inception in 1993, and has been a clinical trial leader in the majority of approved cancer therapies over the last 10 years. Additionally, Sarah Cannon offers management, regulatory, and other research support services for drug development and industry sponsors as well as strategic investigator sites through its contract research organization (CRO), Sarah Cannon Development Innovations. For more information, visit sarahcannon.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180116006748/en/

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(All amounts expressed in US$ and short tons unless otherwise indicated)



After-Tax Net Present Value ("NPV") 8% of $2.0 billion 1 , a 57% Increase Relative to the 2017 PEA

Improved After-Tax Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 48% 1 vs 42% Previously

Rapid 1.6 Year After-Tax Payback on Higher Grades in Early Mine Plan 1; Four Payback Periods in First Five Years of Production

Impressive After-Tax Cash Flow of More Than $2.0B 1 Over First Five Years

946 Million Pounds of Average Annual Zinc Equivalent (ZnEq) Production in the First Five Years of Production 1 , Making Taylor One of the Worlds Top 5 ZnEq Producers

51% Increase in Average Annual Silver Production in Concentrate to 9.5 M Oz over First Five Years

World-Class M&I Resource Estimate of 101M Tons Grading 10.4% ZnEq, Up 39% from 2017 PEA, Inferred Resource of 44M Tons Grading 11.9% ZnEq, up 13%

Mine Life Increased By 10 Years to 29 Years

Further Resource Expansion Potential  9 Drill Rigs Dedicated to Expanding Taylor, Which Remains Open in Multiple Directions

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arizona Mining Inc. (TSX:AZ) (Arizona Mining or the Company) is pleased to announce a significantly enhanced, updated Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) and mineral resource estimate for its Taylor zinc-lead-silver sulfide deposit located on the 100%-owned Hermosa Project in Arizona. Based on the updated study, the Company continues to target first mineralized material-to-plant from a proposed 10,000 ton per day (tpd) operation in 2020.

As part of the PEA update, we completed an additional 71,000 metres of drilling in 2017 from March to November which led to a 39% increase in Measured and Indicated Mineral Resources, and essentially maintained the zinc equivalent grade. That tells us we have yet to identify the outer limits of the deposit  this is what excites me most about the project, said Jim Gowans, President & CEO. Additionally, the drilling identified more high-grade material that we were able to sequence into the initial 10 years of the mine plan, which had a favourable impact to our financial metrics. Detailed metallurgical studies are ongoing and will be included with the feasibility study, however we have seen some positive results to date, including a coarser grind size.

We remain well funded to execute our 2018 objectives. The next key milestones are to deliver the Feasibility Study for the Taylor Project by mid-year and begin the exploration decline by the third quarter.

Additional Details

In addition to significantly increasing the total amount of tons in the mine plan, drilling in 2017 has also helped boost silver to approximately 198 million recovered ounces (214 million contained ounces), an increase of 106%.

Silver grades for Measured and Indicated Mineral Resource tons have correspondingly increased by 24%, to 2.1 ounces per ton (opt).

Average annual silver production in concentrate in the first five years has risen 51% to 9.5 million ounces. Annual life of mine (LOM) production of silver in concentrate is up 35% to 6.8 million ounces.

Pre-production capex of $519 million, a 14% increase from the previous PEA, is principally due to the acceleration of spend relating to shaft development and the requirement for additional mining equipment to access the higher-grade Taylor Deeps mineralization in the early years of the mine life. Accessing this higher-grade material up-front in the mine plan provides a substantial benefit to overall project economics.

Life-of-mine sustaining capital is projected to be $725 million. The increase in sustaining capital is directly related to the increase in mineable resource and extended mine life.

Total site-level cash operating costs of $51/ton have increased by a modest 5% relative to the prior PEA principally to accommodate higher costs associated with smaller and more selective stope designs, partially offset by a decrease in estimated processing costs resulting from a coarser grind size (primary grind size is now 150 microns compared to 105 microns previously).

The updated economic analysis incorporates the impact of Public Law No. 115-97, the US Tax Reform which included a major decrease in federal corporate income taxes from 35% to 21%. The bill was signed into law by the President of the United States on December 22, 2017.

___________________________

1 Financial and operating metrics are based on long term zinc, lead and silver prices of $1.10 per pound, $1.00 per pound and $20 per ounce, respectively.



Note: The preliminary economic assessment is preliminary in nature, includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment will be realized. The basis for the preliminary economic assessment and any qualifications and assumptions are made by the qualified person as disclosed in this release.

Table 1. Financial and Operating Summary (all tons are short tons unless otherwise noted)

Financial Summary Jan 2018 Apr 2017 % Chg After-tax NPV (8%) $(000's) $1,979,101 $1,260,764 57 % After-tax IRR % 48% 42% 6 % Payback Years 1.6 1.7 6 % Pre-production Capex $(000's) $518,959 $457,170 14 % Sustaining Capex $(000's) $725,261 $500,196 45 % LOM Capex $(000's) $1,244,220 $957,366 30 % Operating Summary Mineable Resource m tons 96,671 60,846 59 % Mine Life years 29 19 53 % Zinc Equivalent Head grade % ZnEq 10.44 10.34 1 % Zinc Head grade % Zn 4.01 4.43 -9 % Lead Head grade % Pb 4.34 4.31 1 % Silver Head grade opt Ag 2.22 1.71 30 % LOM Avg. Annual Payable Zinc Production1 m lbs 211 224 -6 % LOM Avg. Annual Payable Lead Production1 m lbs 262 250 5 % LOM Avg. Annual Payable Silver Production1 m oz 5.6 4.3 30 % Zinc concentrate treatment charge (base) $/dmt2 210 210 0 % Zinc treatment charge (Mn penalty) $/dmt 13 13 0 % Lead concentrate treatment charge (base) $/dmt 190 190 0 % All concentrates transportation charge $/dmt 97 97 0 % Operating Costs per Ton Mining $/t $38.02 $35.35 8 % Processing $/t $10.54 $10.73 -2 % Site-G&A $/t $2.00 $2.00 0 % Total operating costs (mine, processing, G&A) $/t $50.56 $48.08 5 % C1 Zinc Co-Product Cost3 $/lb $0.49 $0.51 -4 % C1 Lead Co-Product Cost3 $/lb $0.37 $0.38 -3 % All-in Sustaining Cost (ZnEq)4 $/lb $0.61 $0.61 0 % 1. Average annual payable metal for Life of Mine. 2. Dry metric tonne. 3. Silver treated as a by-product. 4. Based on long-term prices of $1.10/lb zinc, $1.00/lb lead and $20/oz silver, respectively. ZnEq Formula: payable zinc production plus lead revenue divided by zinc price plus silver revenue divided by zinc price.

The updated PEA illustrates a world-class project, with all key financial metrics improved relative to the previous study, and will be one of the worlds largest zinc resources as well as a top 5 zinc equivalent producer. It is positioned as a unique asset with high margins, a multi-decade life, and low capital intensity, said Tom Whelan, Chief Financial Officer.



Figure 1. Taylor Updated PEA ZnEq Grade &Tonnage vs Select Globally Significant Primary Zn Assets is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/33aa8853-8364-4977-a1e7-fc17d2cbc833

Note: Mt. Isa not plotted (660 Mt @ 9.83% ZnEq) Note: All Amounts in Metric Tonnes. Conversion prices as per SNL on 15 Jan 2018; ZnEq calculated on in-situ value per SNL. Source: SNL Metals & Mining

Figure 2. Based on the PEA, Taylor Will Be One of the Worlds Top 5 Zinc Mines is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/05ec5175-790f-4045-8730-c4ab9227a7d7

Notes: 1. Assumes metal prices of US$1.10/lb Zn, US$1.00/lb Pb, US$20.00/oz Ag, $1,250/oz Au. 2. ZnEq production estimates from SNL Metals & Mining for 2018 and illustrated for mines wherein >50% of the value of combined metal production is sourced from zinc. Source: SNL Metals & Mining.

Mr. Whelan added: The high-grade nature of the resource will lead to over $2.0 billion of after-tax cashflows to be generated in just the first 5 years of the 29-year mine-life, with the project boasting a very quick 1.6-year payback. We believe these superior financial metrics position the project very well to obtain the optimal mix of required project funding from traditional lenders and/or other potential strategic third parties.



Figure 3. Annual and Cumulative After-Tax Cash Flows from Taylor Over First Five Years1 is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f52eb5c9-205d-42ad-8ff6-7f4dfe07687c

1. Cumulative after-tax cash flows begin after first production.

The project remains well positioned to benefit from the current strong and rising metal price environment, with a 20% increase in base metal pricing relative to the base case translating to a $2.7 billion NPV (refer to Table 2).

Table 2. Sensitivities to a 20% Change in Zinc and Lead Prices

After-Tax NPV 8% (000's) After-Tax IRR (%) Zinc Price (US$/lb) Zinc Price (US$/lb) Lead Price (US$/lb)







$ 0.88 $ 1.10 $ 1.32 Lead Price (US$/lb)







$ 0.88 $ 1.10 $ 1.32 $ 0.80 $ 1,249,304 $ 1,614,331 $ 1,978,019 $ 0.80 37.0 % 43.4 % 49.2 % $ 1.00 $ 1,615,413 $ 1,979,101 $ 2,342,339 $ 1.00 42.5 % 48.4 % 53.8 % $ 1.20 $ 1,980,148 $ 2,343,183 $ 2,706,086 $ 1.20 47.6 % 53.0 % 58.1 %



The Taylor project has globally significant contained silver of 214 million mineable ounces which places it among the worlds top primary silver companies, as shown in Figure 4. This does not include the nearly 200 million-ounce endowment in the Central oxide deposit.



Figure 4. Taylor Contained Silver in Total Silver Resources vs Reserves of Select Primary Silver Companies is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/318095f9-b8ee-4d12-9534-704e3e8cfcdf

Source: S&P Global SNL Metals and Mining Market Intelligence

Figure 5 illustrates that Arizona Mining will be a significant silver producer at an average of 9.5 million ounces of silver in concentrate in the first five years of production.

Figure 5. Significantly Enhanced Silver Production in Concentrate  First 10 Years of Mine Life is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/032c2ff4-d4c2-4a9c-ba7e-59d61ef3eb6b

Significant Upgrade to Taylor Resource

Exploration and infill drilling in 2017 has significantly upgraded and expanded the total resource. At a 4% zinc equivalent cut off, drilling has increased the total measured and indicated tons by 39% to 101 million tons grading 10.4 ZnEq and the inferred resource has grown by 13% to a total of 43.6 million tons grading 11.9% ZnEq.

The Mineral Resource is shown in Table 3 at a range of zinc equivalent cut-off grades. Tons were rounded to the nearest thousand. The resource is based on assay results from 161 drill holes totaling 592,190 feet (180,499 meters) of drilling. The updated Mineral Resource estimate and mine plan was prepared by AMC Mining Consultants (Canada) Ltd. (AMC) of Vancouver, B.C.

Table 3. Taylor Deposit Measured, Indicated and Inferred Resources1,2,3

Measured Indicated Cut-off ZnEq (%) Short Tons ZnEq (%) Pb (%) Zn (%) Ag (opt) Cut-off ZnEq (%) Short Tons ZnEq (%) Pb (%) Zn (%) Ag (opt) 25 568,000 30.3 13.0 12.7 4.9 25 3,974,000 31.9 12.8 13.1 6.4 20 1,098,000 26.5 11.2 11.4 4.2 20 8,232,000 27.0 10.8 10.9 5.5 15 2,141,000 22.0 9.2 9.4 3.6 15 16,111,000 22.2 9.0 8.9 4.5 10 4,827,000 16.6 6.9 7.0 2.8 10 32,981,000 17.1 7.0 6.8 3.5 6 10,047,000 11.9 5.0 5.0 2.0 6 61,282,000 12.8 5.3 5.1 2.6 5 12,355,000 10.7 4.5 4.5 1.8 5 72,394,000 11.6 4.8 4.6 2.4 4 15,208,000 9.6 4.0 4.0 1.6 4 85,750,000 10.5 4.3 4.2 2.2 3 18,910,000 8.4 3.5 3.5 1.4 3 101,120,000 9.5 3.9 3.7 2.0 2 23,031,000 7.3 3.1 3.1 1.3 2 118,650,000 8.4 3.5 3.3 1.8 1 26,499,000 6.6 2.7 2.8 1.1 1 135,116,000 7.6 3.1 3.0 1.6 Measured + Indicated Inferred Cut-off ZnEq (%) Short Tons ZnEq (%) Pb (%) Zn (%) Ag (opt) Cut-off ZnEq (%) Short Tons ZnEq (%) Pb (%) Zn (%) Ag (opt) 25 4,542,000 31.7 12.8 13.0 6.2 25 3,632,000 32.8 13.2 10.2 9.9 20 9,330,000 26.9 10.9 11.0 5.4 20 6,913,000 27.8 11.3 9.0 7.9 15 18,252,000 22.2 9.0 9.0 4.4 15 11,466,000 23.6 9.6 7.9 6.5 10 37,807,000 17.0 7.0 6.8 3.4 10 18,889,000 19.2 7.9 6.3 5.2 6 71,329,000 12.6 5.2 5.1 2.5 6 31,079,000 14.7 5.9 4.9 4.1 5 84,748,000 11.5 4.7 4.6 2.3 5 36,578,000 13.3 5.3 4.4 3.7 4 100,958,000 10.4 4.3 4.1 2.1 4 43,609,000 11.9 4.8 3.9 3.4 3 120,030,000 9.3 3.8 3.7 1.9 3 52,904,000 10.4 4.1 3.4 3.0 2 141,680,000 8.2 3.4 3.3 1.7 2 64,478,000 9.0 3.6 2.9 2.6 1 161,615,000 7.4 3.0 3.0 1.5 1 80,345,000 7.5 3.0 2.5 2.2 1. For a full list of drill holes included in the updated resource, please refer to www.arizonamining.com/projects/taylor-deposit/resources. 2. Mineral Resources are reported as of 30 November 2017. Stated at a cut-off grade of 4% ZnEq, and based on long-term prices, recovery and costs as follows: Prices of $1.00/lb for zinc, $0.95/lb for lead and $20.00/oz for silver; average processing recovery factors of 92% for zinc, 95% for lead, and 90% for silver; total operating costs are estimated to be $51/ton. 3. Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. There is no certainty that all or any part of mineral resources will be converted to Mineral Reserves. Inferred Mineral Resources are based on limited drilling which suggests the greatest uncertainty for a resource estimate and that geological continuity is only implied. Additional drilling will be required to verify geological and mineralization continuity and there is no certainty that all of the Inferred Resources will be converted to Measured and Indicated Resources. Quantity and grades are estimates and are rounded to reflect the fact that the resource estimate is an approximation.

Proposed Mine Plan  10,000 tpd Underground Operation

The updated PEA for the Taylor Sulfide Deposit is based on an underground mine plan with first mineralized material-to-plant beginning in 2020 and ramping up to 10,000 tpd in 2023. The zinc-lead-silver resource will be hoisted to the surface by a shaft and processed through a 10,000 tpd concentrator. The initial mine plan is based on 96.7 million tons of Measured, Indicated, and Inferred Resources grading 4.0% zinc, 4.3% lead and 2.2 opt silver.

Figure 6. Change in Zinc Equivalent Production and Grades Relative to Prior PEA  First 8 Years is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/62c943ea-28cf-4309-b35f-a5a01ae208f4

Processing of the zinc-lead-silver resource will be through a 10,000 tpd standard crushing and grinding circuit followed by froth flotation, concentrate thickening and filtration. The operation will produce two concentrates: a lead (galena) concentrate that will assay approximately 69% lead and approximately 1,100 g/t silver, and a zinc (sphalerite) concentrate that will assay approximately 56% zinc and approximately 350 grams per tonne (g/t) silver. Both concentrate specifications have been favorably reviewed by industry experts and potential offtake partners. Tailings or waste material from the mining and processing will be filtered to minimize water losses. Approximately 60% of the tailings will be mixed with cement and used as structural backfill in the underground operations, compared with an estimated 45% in the original PEA. The remaining tailings will be dry-stacked.



The major components of estimated pre-production capital of $519 million includes $126 million for the shaft, $98 million for the process plant, $90 million for site infrastructure, including backfill plant and tailings storage facility, $58 million for underground development, $64 million for contingency, and $44 million for mining equipment.

Opportunities and Exploration Potential

The Taylor deposit is not fully delineated and hence the current Mineral Resource estimate only represents a portion of the potential on Arizona Minings extensive land holdings. Exploration drilling continues on the Companys patented land with 9 drill rigs. Prominent targets for resource expansion and near-term exploration potential include:

Drilling in the Taylor Deeps Zone, which remains open in several directions, and continues to return high grade zinc, lead and silver over significant mineable thicknesses. Of particular interest in the zone are the extensions to the northwest and southeast where the zone appears to be much higher grade. Outlying targets identified by drilling, geophysics, alteration or a combination thereof remain a high priority in 2018 and are shown in Figure 7. These targets will become more of a focus now that the resource infill drilling has been essentially completed. As evidenced by the drill results highlighted in Figure 7, significant mineralized intersections of zinc-lead-silver have been intersected by several drill holes away from the existing resource and the mineralization remains open in multiple directions.



Figure 7. Exploration Targets is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/5770446b-9711-4329-ba24-943bc99b8135

Going Forward

In 2018, the Company is funded to complete the major items budgeted for the year. That work will include completing the tailings remediation work and constructing an active water treatment plant and underdrain collection pond, initiating an exploration decline into the Taylor Deposit and completing a Feasibility Study. Exploration drilling will continue through 2018 in order to increase our understanding of the deposit and determine its limits.

The Company expects to file a Technical Report in respect of the updated Resource and Preliminary Economic Assessment within 5 days from the date of this Press Release but certainly within 45 days.

Revisions for the updated PEA were compiled and approved by AMC.

Arizona Mining will host a conference call and webcast to discuss the results of the PEA at 5 pm Eastern time on January 16, 2018. Dial-in details are as follows:

Conference Call Dial In:

Canada/USA Toll Free: +1-800-319-4610

International Toll: +1-604-638-5340

The webcast and presentation materials will be available on Arizona Minings website at www.arizonamining.com. The conference call will be available for replay by phone at 1-855-669-9658 (U.S. and Canada toll free) and +1-412-317-0088 (international), access code 1968.

APPENDIX

Mineral Resource Estimation Results

The Mineral Resource has been stated in terms of Zinc Equivalent. The ZnEq formula and the underlying parameters used in its formulation are set out in Table 4. Although the grade of copper was estimated, it was not used as a component of the ZnEq formula because of its relatively low abundance and uncertain mineral processing route.

Table 4. Zinc Equivalent Parameters and Formula1

Metal Price (US$) Recovery (%) Lead 0.95/lb 95.0 Zinc 1.00/lb 92.0 Silver 20.00/oz 90.0 1. ZnEq=(((PB%/100)*0.95*2000*0.95)+((ZN%/100)*1*2000*0.92)+(AG_OPT*0.9*20))/((1*2000*0.92)/100)

Mineral Resource Estimation Parameters

The Taylor Deposit Mineral Resource update was carried out using both Ordinary Kriging (OK) and Inverse Distance Squared (ID) estimations. Tonnages and grades of lead, zinc and silver were estimated for six separate lithological domains. Sample data was composited to 10 feet in length for the Concha, Scherrer, Epitaph and Taylor Deeps domains. Drill core sample data that was used for estimation of the shallower Trench Vein System and the Sub-Taylor Deeps domains were composited to nominal five-foot lengths because of their comparatively narrow dimensions. The compositing process honored lithological domain boundaries. In all cases boundaries between domains were treated as hard, meaning that grades from adjacent domains were not used to influence the estimation of grades within a given domain.

Mineral Resources were classified as Measured, Indicated and Inferred. For a block to be classified as Measured, it was necessary that a minimum of sixteen (16) composites were located within 250 feet of the block centroid; for a block to be classified as Indicated, it was necessary that a minimum of eight (8) composites were located within 500 feet of the block centroid and for a block to be classified as Inferred, it was necessary that a minimum of two (2) composites be located within 750 feet of the block centroid or three (3) composites within 1,500 feet of the block centroid.

Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. There is no certainty that all or any part of Mineral Resources will be converted to Mineral Reserves. Inferred Mineral Resources are based on limited drilling which suggests the greatest uncertainty for a resource estimate and that geological continuity is only implied. Additional drilling will be required to verify geological and mineralization continuity and there is no certainty that all of the Inferred Mineral Resources will be converted to Measured and Indicated Mineral Resources. Quantity and grades are estimates and are rounded to reflect the fact that the Mineral Resource estimate is an approximation.

Qualified Persons

The results of the Arizona Mining Inc. drilling have been reviewed, verified and compiled by Donald R. Taylor, MSc., PG, Chief Operating Officer for Arizona Mining Inc., a qualified person (QP) as defined by National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101). Mr. Taylor has more than 25 years of mineral exploration and mining experience, and is a Registered Professional Geologist through the SME (registered member #4029597).

The QP for the Mineral Resource estimate is Dinara Nussipakynova, P.Geo, an employee of AMC. The Mineral Resource estimate has been prepared under the guidelines of National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101) for reporting of Mineral Resources.

The results of the metallurgical tests have been reviewed and compiled by Mr. Chris Kaye, President and Principal Process Engineer of Mine and Quarry Engineering Services Inc., a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101). Mr. Kaye has more than 35 years of mineral processing experience and is a Registered Member of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration; and a Fellow of the AusImm.

Assays and Quality Assurance/Quality Control

To ensure reliable sample results, the Company has a rigorous QA/QC program in place that monitors the chain-of-custody of samples and includes the insertion of blanks, duplicates, and certified reference standards at statistically derived intervals within each batch of samples. Core is photographed and split in half with one-half retained in a secured facility for verification purposes.

Sample preparation (crushing and pulverizing) has been performed at ALS Minerals Laboratories, an ISO/IEC accredited lab located in Tucson, Arizona. ALS Minerals Laboratories prepares a pulp of all samples and sends the pulps to their analytical laboratory in Vancouver, B.C. Canada for analysis. ALS analyzes the pulp sample by ICP following a 4-acid digestion (ME-ICP61 for 33 elements) including Cu (copper), Pb (lead), and Zn (zinc). All samples in which Cu (copper), Pb (lead), or Zn (zinc) are greater than 10,000 ppm are rerun using four acid digestion with an ICP  AES finish (Cu-OG62; Pb-OG62; and Zn-OG62) with the elements reported in percentage (%). Silver values are determined by ICP (ME-ICP61) with all samples with silver values greater than 100 ppm repeated using four acid digestion with an ICP-AES finish (Ag-OG62) calibrated for higher levels of silver contained. Any values over 1,500 ppm Ag trigger a fire assay with gravimetric finish analysis. Gold values are determined by a 30 gm fire assay with an ICP-AES finish (Au-ICP21).

About Arizona Mining

Arizona Mining Inc. (an augustagroup company) is a Canadian mineral exploration and development company focused on the exploration and development of its 100%-owned Hermosa Project located in Santa Cruz County, Arizona. The Taylor Deposit, a zinc-lead-silver carbonate replacement deposit, has a resource of 15.2 million tons in the Measured Mineral Resource category grading 4.0% zinc, 4.0% lead and 1.6 opt silver, or 9.6% ZnEq, plus 85.8 million tons in the Indicated Mineral Resource category grading 4.2% zinc, 4.3% lead and 2.2 opt silver, or 10.5% ZnEq, and 43.6 million tons of Inferred Mineral Resources grading 3.9% zinc, 4.8% lead and 3.4 opt silver or 11.9% ZnEq, all reported in accordance with NI 43-101 guidelines utilizing a 4% ZnEq cutoff grade. The Taylor and Taylor Deep Deposits remains open to the north, west and south over land controlled by the Company and will be aggressively drilled to test the limits of the resource. The Companys other project on the Hermosa property is the Central Deposit, a silver-manganese manto oxide project.

For additional information please contact:

Jerrold Annett

SVP, Corporate Development

Telephone: 416-366-5678 ext. 207

Email: jannett@arizonamining.com

Susan Muir

Vice-President, Investor Relations & Corporate Communications

Telephone: 416-366-5678 ext. 202

Email: smuir@arizonamining.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Certain information contained in this press release constitutes forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, are forward looking statements including statements with respect to the Companys intentions for its Hermosa Project in Arizona, USA including, without limitation, future drilling and other work on the Taylor Deposit. The Company would also like to caution the reader that the preliminary economic assessment ("PEA") on the Companys Taylor Deposit that supports the technical feasibility or economic viability of the Taylor Deposit, including the marketability of the concentrate, mining methods, costs, recoveries and any other technical aspects related to the Taylor Deposit, is preliminary in nature and there is no certainty that the PEA will be realized. Forward-looking statements are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as may, will, seek, anticipate, believe, plan, estimate, budget, schedule, forecast, project, expect, intend, or similar expressions.

The forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions which, while considered reasonable by Arizona Mining, are subject to risks and uncertainties. In addition to the assumptions herein, these assumptions include the assumptions described in Arizona Mining's management's discussion and analysis for the year ended December 31, 2016 ("MD&A"). Arizona Mining cautions readers that forward-looking statements involve and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements and forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results, performance or achievement. These risks, uncertainties and factors include general business, economic, competitive, political, regulatory and social uncertainties; actual results of exploration activities and economic evaluations; fluctuations in currency exchange rates; changes in project parameters; changes in costs, including labour, infrastructure, operating and production costs; future prices of zinc, lead, silver and other minerals; variations of mineral grade or recovery rates; operating or technical difficulties in connection with exploration, development or mining activities, including the failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; delays in completion of exploration, development or construction activities; changes in government legislation and regulation; the ability to maintain and renew existing licenses and permits or obtain required licenses and permits in a timely manner; the ability to obtain financing on acceptable terms in a timely manner; contests over title to properties; employee relations and shortages of skilled personnel and contractors; the speculative nature of, and the risks involved in, the exploration, development and mining business; and the factors discussed in the section entitled "Risks and Uncertainties" in the MD&A.

Although Arizona Mining has attempted to identify important risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual performance, achievements, actions, events, results or conditions to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by the forward-looking information, there may be other risks, uncertainties and other factors that cause performance, achievements, actions, events, results or conditions to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended. Unless otherwise indicated, forward-looking statements contained herein are as of the date hereof and Arizona Mining disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.

About Reserves and Resources

This press release uses the terms measured, indicated and inferred resources as a relative measure of the level of confidence in the resource estimate. Readers are cautioned that: (a) mineral resources are not economic mineral reserves; (b) the economic viability of resources that are not mineral reserves has not been demonstrated; and (c) it should not be assumed that further work on the stated resources will lead to mineral reserves that can be mined economically. In addition, inferred resources are considered too geologically speculative to have any economic considerations applied to them. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimates of inferred mineral resources may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies or economic studies except for certain preliminary economic assessments.


Both Patriot and MyDigitalSSD have begun shipping products based on Phison's PS5008-E8 controller. The new controller uses only two PCI Express lanes, which has made it in high demand for crypto currency mining. These products use fewer PCIe lanes, sell at lower prices, and are considered low-power storage devices. We often only consider power for use in notebooks, but the miners are looking for every advantage to find profitability.

This isn't another depressing mining story about demand issues like those driving GPU prices sky high. The supply side has held strong, and you can still find the MyDgitalSBX NVMe SSD in all four capacities at or below MSRP on the MyDigitalDiscount store. The series is part of the house brand for the companies that exist as a retail store as well as a brand. Coming under the SBX model name, MyDigitalSSD lists 128TB ($59.23), 256GB ($93.83), 512GB ($173.30) and 1TB ($318.71) as available (at the time of writing) with a five-year warranty.

Patriot Memory also has a store, and inside you will find the new Scorch M.2 Solid-State Drive with the Phison PS5008-E8. Patriot doesn't list a 1TB drive in this series but does show 128GB ($139.99), 256GB ($259.99), and 512GB ($339.99) models. We saw the new Scorch M.2 SSD at CES last week and were told the drive is shipping. The series is sold out on Patriot's store page. We found the series on B&H out of New York (opens in new tab) with a "coming soon" tag, and the prices were much better for the three models. We expect online prices to be closer to $80, $125, and $230 with Patriot's 3-year warranty.

PS5007-E7 SSDs - MLC's Last Stand



E7-based NVMe storage took 2017 by storm, offering users one last gasp of 2-bit per cell flash. Products from Corsair, MyDigtialSSD, Patriot, Zotac, and others took on the companies with NAND flash production capabilities and won with a superior product that sold for less than many others using 3-bit per cell flash.

We learned two weeks ago that Phison entered final production with the E7 controller. The E7 was purpose-built for use with Toshiba 15nm MLC flash that also entered end-of-life status.

For many users, the E7 SSDs offered the best balance of price and performance. The one area where the companies came up short was capacity. We've tested only one E7-based 1TB drive, and that was a special edition model only sold in China.

As the light dims on the E7 controller, Corsair has two new high-capacity SKUs that started shipping in near silence. The MP500 joins the Kingston KC1000 as the only M.2 1TB E7 sold in North America. The Kingston KC1000 960GB currently sells for $570.95 (opens in new tab) at Newegg, and the off-radar Corsair Force MP500 960GB sells for $575 (opens in new tab), also at Newegg. If 1TB is not enough flash storage for you, Corsair recently released an exotic version of the Neutron NX500 add-in card (review here). The last NX500 SKU to emerge features 1.6TB of user addressable space (opens in new tab) from a massive 2TB raw capacity. The drive sells for a jaw dropping $1,785, which $519 more than Samsung's 2TB 960 Pro M.2 SSD (opens in new tab) (review here).

Most sites don't list the number of products they have available, but we reached out to find the status of the final E7 drives. Some of the companies didn't have numbers on hand, but others told us that the supply is running thin. MyDigtialSSD went on the record to say it has only five BPX 128GB drives in stock. The popular 240GB and 480GB models are quickly moving, as well. Amazon has only 11 BPX 240GB and 7 BPX 480GB drives in stock.

3D TLC will be the dominate flash media in 2018, with QLC coming to market within months. There's still a chance to get a low-cost MLC SSD, but time is running out.
Apparently, some of our shift worker pals inform us that the news claimsRather than argue with the premise of this report, it's better just to celebrate the trend withAlso, the following might come in handy if/when they start making laundry pods available in BBQ flavor . . .- The Poison Control Centers hotline is 1-800-222-1222. You can call from anywhere in the state of Kansas and throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area. Available 24/7.Hopefully, more for the morning update . . .
"Mary Sanchez begins with a lie in her very first sentence of the title, and then proceeds to channel her inner hysterical hallucinatory hack to fabricate a narrative which supports her initial omission of fact. Can you discern already that this will be another instance whereby she throws a load of s--t against the wall in hopes that some of it sticks to her target?"

Yep, he's a racist all right. Now what are we going to do about it? The unrepentant racist who is our 45th president has never worn a Klansman's hood -- not that we know of, anyway. But, sadly, that's what it would take for far too many Americans to acknowledge that a bigot resides in the White House.

Scintillating insight here from a Kansas City Star columnist syndicated across the nation and possibly a reason why nobody reads newspapers anymore.A better take from a TKC reader . . .You decide . . .
OPPD spokesman John Lacy says they take this very seriously. "We don't think it's a joke, we don't think it's funny. So if we can get down to the person who actually made the phone call, we're looking at charges," Lacy says.

Kansas police: Report of shooting was latest "SWATting" hoax OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - Police in Kansas said they responded Monday morning to a report of a shooting at a home, only to discover the call was the latest instance of a hoax known as "SWATting," reports CBS affiliate KCTV. Overland Park officials said around 8:30 a.m.

After. . .
Essay: "I Really Did That Work: A brief survey of notable Christian Women in Science" by Lynn Billman
Homicide detectives are investigating after a woman's body was set on fire near a dumpster. Police say the victim, 27-year-old Lynette Williams of Grandview, MO, had trauma injuries and was burned. Her body was discovered about 9:30 p.m. Sunday in the 6700 block of East 119th Street.
"The Guv gets around and if he has already admitted to cuckolding some poor schmuck and risking his career with a hairdresser. We're all guessing that he's not very cautious in his other adventures. Another woman coming forward to speak about the Guv and his proclivities would pretty much destroy any credibility he has left and offer a more honest glimpse at his background . . ."

QUESTIONS REGARDING A MISSOURI "STATE-PAID" LAWYER INVESTIGATING THE ALLEGED BLACKMAIL VICTIM NOW CONFRONT THE CHEATER GUV!!!









Daily Mail: Embattled Missouri governor who is accused of assaulting and threatening to leak nude photos of his former mistress delays tax policy tour after admitting to the affair

Like it or not, Team Greitens seems as if it's just waiting around for the other shoe to drop . . .A quick fun note from our Democratic Party friends . . .Missouri Democratic Party leaders have enlisted the help of pals on the national level desperately seeking another lady to talk about Guv Greitens cheating.Here's the word:Meanwhile, as progressives desperately seek more #MeToo testimony . . . The current crisis is far from complete . . .Take a look at bigger things on the way amidDeveloping . . .
Homeless man to lose toes due to frostbite JOHNSON COUNTY, Kan. -- Frostbite is a very real threat. On Monday, doctors told Chris Culp, a 30-year-old man who is homeless, that he would lose some of his toes due to frostbite. Culp has a case of deep frostbite that affects all layers of the skin.

Reader suggested link and a glimpse at some of the finest Kansas City journalism capturing the appendages of po'folk soon to come falling off. Take a look:
Greece's steady and harmonious relations with its creditors are very critical for the recovery of its crisis stricken economy as well as the further promotion of its booming tourist industry

European Stability Mechanism (ESM) board member and funding chief Kalin Anev Janse on Friday repeated that still bailout-dependent Greece would have to continue reforms even after it exits the current - and third consecutive - memorandum next August.

In an interview carried by Reuters, Janse stressed that "... what is important is that they (Greece) continue down the reform path even after the ESM program ends later this year."

He also added that currently low yield levels for Greek state bonds are "justifiable".

Some people may fear that this will not happen, but I believe Greece will want to keep that positive message going," he was quoted as saying, while reminding that Greece is currently one of the few eurozone members with an annual fiscal surplus, along with advanced liberal and pro-business countries such as Germany and the Netherlands.

Conversely, the latest edition of Spiegel takes a more cautious view of current Greek developments, saying that although the country is headed for an exit from the bailout era, the leftist-rightist coalition government still lags behind in terms of carrying out reforms.

"Greece is greatly delaying the implementation of reforms that it has promised. According to reports ... out of the 110 'prior actions', which the government of Alexis Tsipras has committed to (implementing), only 51 are being approved. This shows from the third review of the ongoing program, which has been developed by the Commission, the ECB and the IMF... the rest of the prior actions are pending; Greek authorities have not implemented them, such as ones dealing with tax reform," the magazine article notes.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Source: naftemporiki.gr
The attendees at the first event in An Untold Tale: The Holocaust in Greece series. Photo by John Ackerman

MILWAUKEE, WI  Over 165 people attended the first session of An Untold Tale: The Holocaust in Greece series on Jan. 14 which began with the screening of the film Cloudy Sunday. It was the first screening of the film in Milwaukee and among the first screenings in the midwest United States.

The film will be screened again during the third session of the series on February 7 at Sts. Constantine & Helen Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwautos, WI.

The Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, along with the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, Annunciation Greek Orthodox Parish in Milwaukee, and Sts. Constantine & Helen Greek Orthodox Parish in Wauwautos, is extremely proud to host this educational series.

The screening took place at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, 6255 N. Santa Monica Blvd in Milwaukee. Cloudy Sunday (Ouzeri Tsitsanis) (Greece, 2015) is a Greek drama that tells the story of the forbidden love between Estrea, a young Jewish girl, and Yorgos  a Christian and the brother-in-law of the famed composer Vasilis Tsitanis  in 1942 Thessaloniki (Salonika).

Both young people are members of the Resistance. The film depicts the destruction of the Sephardic Jewish community of Salonika, whose Jewish population was 50,000 before the war, and 1,900 after. Shown in Greek with English subtitles, the film, won three Greek Academy Awards, is resplendent with Greek music, mostly composed by Tsitsanis. It was directed by Manousos Manousakis and stars Haris Fragoulis at Yorgos, Christina Hilla Fameli as Estrea, and Andreas Konstantinou as Vasilis Tsitsanis.

Instructors Dr. Amy Shapiro and Father John Ketchum of Annunciation Greek Orthodox Parish in Milwaukee discussed the history and the film with the audience in attendance at the event. All of the events in the series are free and open to the public. More information is available online at: www.holocaustcentermilwaukee.org/Greece or by phone: 414-967-8212.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Source: thenationalherald.com
Mashreq Bank, the UAEs oldest privately owned bank, celebrated its 50th anniversary in Bahrain in the attendance of key industry leaders, clients, and partners at the Gulf Hotel.

With 50 years of achievements, the bank is the regional leader when it comes to product and service innovation and customer service.

Mashreq Bank, originally called Bank of Oman, was formed by a decree from His Highness Shaikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum in 1966, and formally opened on May 1, 1967. With the strong encouragement of His Highness Shaikh Rashid, Mashreq Bank has reached many milestones since then.

Mashreqs presence in Bahrain started in 1981, in line with the strong relationship and cooperation between the GCC countries.

Mashreq started its operations in the Kingdom as an Offshore Banking Unit (currently Wholesale Branch) and then converted the license to a retail branch in 2005. The Central Bank has recently approved Mashreq Banks application for a Wholesale license, in addition to the existing Retail license. The bank has been a true partner to its clients in Bahrain and has supported the requirements of many clients in various sectors in the economy, it said.

Today, Mashreq ranks number 25 on the Forbes Top 100 Arab Companies 2016 list. The World Finance Banking Awards also named Mashreq the Best Digital Bank. It has also won the Gallup Great Workplace Award for the 4th year in a row, with only 37 companies worldwide winning the award.

To mark the 50 year anniversary, Mashreq launched a new vision to guide the next 50 years of the banks journey. Its vision is to be the regions most progressive bank, enabling innovative possibilities for its clients, colleagues and communities.

Commenting on the 50th anniversary, Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, Chief Executive Officer of Mashreq, said: We have achieved many milestones in the past 50 years, but today is truly exciting. The launch of our new vision will undeniably drive the bank forward. Looking ahead, our underlying strategy is to continue to digitize the bank, make customer experience seamless, personalized and omni-channel, and lead into the future where banking goes entirely branchless. With 85 per cent of retail customer transactions happening digitally, it is critical that we continue to develop new, innovative products and services that capitalize on this growing trend.

To deliver on this promise, we will continue to innovate. Innovation has been deeply embedded in the DNA of Mashreq throughout the last 50 years, and it will continue to be core to our strategy moving forward. Having introduced many products, first to the market which are now considered the industry standard  such as the credit card, ATM and mobile banking app  I know we will only continue to further develop the sector. Through innovation, strong financial performance, and high levels of customer service, we will find ways to make possible.

Mashreq Bahrain has participated in the financing of several landmark projects in the Kingdom, such as Bahrain Airport Expansion, Lead Arranger for Gulf Air, Arranger for ALBA syndication, and Bahrain Steel syndication.  TradeArabia News Service
More than 21,000 people visited the Festival City located at Bahrain Bay, one of the main events held during the fourth-edition of the Bahrain Festival Shop Bahrain.



The Festival City was launched last week by the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Zayed Bin Rashid Al Zayani, in the presence of the chief executive officer of the Bahrain Tourism and Exhibitions Authoirty, Shaikh Khaled bin Humood Al Khalifa.



Shop Bahrain aims to offer a fun-filled schedule of entertaining activities for the entire family and a chance to win valuable prizes. The 30-day celebration will run until February 10.



We are delighted to witness the success of Shop Bahrain during the first few days of its launch and we look forward to welcoming more visitors to attend the events held throughout the kingdom. The Festival City is one of the key events held during Shop Bahrain and aims to create a fun-filled environment for the entire family to enjoy, said Shaikh Khaled.



The Festival City is also in line with BTEAs strategy which aims to further develop the tourism industry in line with the Economic Vision 2030, he said.



The Festival City includes a number of family-oriented activities including a wide range of exciting activities, live performances, and carnival games, win valuable prizes, shop at the outdoor market, and indulge in delicious food. The Festival City also features a lineup of daily live performances including live musical bands for the visitors to enjoy.



The Festival City is held until January 27 and is open from 4:00pm until 10:00pm on the weekdays and from 4:00pm until 11:00pm on the weekends.



Shop Bahrain also launched the Taste Tour that brings together more than 40 participating restaurants. Participants will be able to sample dishes, and will have the opportunity to win a Nissan Patrol as part of the Taste Tour raffle draw.



Shop Bahrain will also include a fun-filled schedule of entertaining activities at the participating shopping malls and hotels. Shoppers will be enrolled in the Festivals loyalty system when purchasing directly from any participating outlet and partner allowing them to win a wide range of prizes including one of the 20 cars and over 80,000 instant valuable prizes.



Shoppers and visitors can learn more about "Shop Bahrain" through the website: www.shopbahrain.com or through the account @shopbahrain on the social networking channels Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. The Festival organizers have also launched a dedicated whatsapp channel on +973 33480480. - TradeArabia News Service
ON THE MOVE: Olivetree Grabs Duo; Deutsche Lands Strategist

Mark Costello has joined Olivetree Financial as an Executive Director and will be based in its New York office. Costello will be responsible for sales trading coverage of many N.Y. based hedge funds and long only clients, as well as assisting with sector specific trading responsibilities. He joins from Clarksons Platou, where he was a founding member of their Equity/Credit Sales and Trading Team. Prior to that, he held similar senior roles at both FBR Capital and Citi where he was Sector Head for the Energy, Metals and Mining Sectors.

If you have a new job or promotion to report, let me know at jdantona@marketsmedia.com

Also onboarding is Brian Rail as an Executive Director and in New York. Rail will be responsible for both sales trading coverage of many N.Y. based hedge funds and long only clients. He comes from Keybanc Capital Markets where he lead their TMT trading effort. Prior to that, he held similar senior roles at both Morgan Stanley and Citi.

Deutsche Bank has made its first big hire of the year by appointing Krisan Haria  a former senior trader at KCG Holdings with expertise in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence  as a synthetic strategist, based in London. Haria left KCG in September 2017, where he was responsible for running the client business side of trading. Haria is reportedly also a cryptocurrency, mining and ICO expert.

The chief executive of the London-based brokerage acquired by Cowen Group as part of its purchase of New York-headquartered Convergex Group has left just months after the deal completed. Philip Gough, who had been CEO of Convergex's London-based brokerage since January 2015, left the group towards the end of 2017, according to Companies House filings, ending another chapter in his more than 30 years in capital markets

J.P. Morgan has brought on board technologist Jim Adams. Adams has a Goldman Sachs pedigree and also spent time at Deutsche Bank, Joining as a Managing Director, Engineering and Architecture Services, he has 18 years of experience in investment banking. He will be based at J.P. Morgans New York office.

Commcise hired Melissa Umans as Director of Business Development in the New York ofice. In this newly created role, Umans will focus on growing existing relationships and expanding the Commcise presence in the US. Having previously worked at IHS Markit and Goldman Sachs, she brings significant expertise in Research Payment Account management, Commission Sharing Agreement aggregation, interaction management and broker evaluations.

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Robert J. Jackson Jr. and Hester M. Peirce were sworn into office as SEC Commissioners this morning by SEC Chairman Jay Clayton.

Mr. Jackson and Ms. Peirce were nominated to the SEC by President Donald Trump, and their nominations were confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Dec. 21. Both new commissioners participated in todays inaugural meeting of the SECs Fixed Income Market Structure Advisory Committee.

I look forward to working with Rob and Hester as we continue our focus on our vital mission and ensuring that our markets are working for the benefit of Main Street investors," Chairman Clayton said. It is clear to me they will bring energy, commitment, and dedication to our work and have our mission at the front of their minds.

Im honored to join Chairman Clayton and Commissioners Stein, Piwowar and Peirce in the SECs critical mission of ensuring that investors are protected, that our markets provide a level playing field for all Americans, and that entrepreneurs have access to the capital they need to create jobs," said Commissioner Jackson. The SEC boasts a talented and dedicated staff, and Ill do all I can to support their efforts to make sure our securities laws keep pace with our ever-changing markets.

It is such an honor to return to the SEC to work with my colleagues on the Commission and the staff for the benefit of investors and the American economy, said Commissioner Peirce.

Commissioner Jackson comes to the SEC from NYU School of Law, where he was a professor of law. He previously was professor of law and director of the Program on Corporate Law and Policy at Columbia Law School. He also has served as an adviser at the Treasury Department and in the Office of the Special Master for TARP Executive Compensation. Commissioner Jackson earned his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, a BS and MBA in Finance from Wharton, an MPP from Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government, and his JD from Harvard Law School.

Commissioner Peirce comes to the SEC from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University where she served as a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Financial Markets Working Group. She previously worked for U.S. Senator Richard Shelby on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and, prior to that, as counsel to then-SEC Commissioner Paul S. Atkins and as a Staff Attorney in the Division of Investment Management. Commissioner Peirce earned her BA in economics from Case Western Reserve University and her JD from Yale Law School.

Commissioner Jackson fills a term that expires on June 5, 2019, and Commissioner Peirce fills a term that expires on June 5, 2020.
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 15

Headquarters Western Command commemorated the 70th Army Day at Chandimandir today by paying homage to the soldiers who laid down their lives in the line of duty.

Army Day is observed each year to mark the taking over of the reins of the Indian Army by the first Indian Commander-in-Chief, Late Field Marshal KM Cariappa, who succeeded the last British Commander-in-Chief in India, General Francis Roy Butcher on this day in 1948.

In a solemn ceremony, Lt Gen GS Dhillon, Chief of Staff, Western Command, laid the wreath at the Veer Smriti war memorial on behalf of all ranks of the Command. Addressing the troops, he exhorted all ranks to strive for professional excellence and uphold the highest traditions of the Indian Army.

BJYM pays homage to martyrs

The Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) paid homage to the martyrs and saluted the soldiers on Army Day at Shastri Market in Sector 22.

On the occasion, Chandigarh party president Gaurav Goel said, A day is not enough to express our gratitude to our soldiers for guarding us 24 hours and 365 days. Joining the Army is not a profession, but a passion to be ready to sacrifice everything for the nation.
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 15

The District Consumer Forum has slapped a fine of Rs 15,000 on Maruti Suzuki. A Sector 49 resident had approached the forum that his Baleno car had started making a whistling sound after driving it for only 600 km. However, the car maker told the forum that there was no such sound and thus no deficiency on their part.

The complainant, Sushil Kumar Sharma, had bought the Baleno car on December 7, 2015 for around Rs 7.45 lakh. However, after having driven it for just 600 km, he observed that it started making a whistling sound. He informed the company about the same on January 1, 2016 when he took it for servicing. However, the mechanics failed to notice it. He again took the car to them on February 24, 2016.

In May, 2016 after multiple calls and sending WhatsApp messages to company engineer Aman Goyal, a part (damper mount) was installed, which had no relation with the problem and did not make any difference, claimed the complaint. Again, another damper mount was installed in the chassis which once again made no difference. Sharma informed about it to the company directly, who closed his complaint without taking action, he claimed. He also questioned them as to why the mounts were installed even though the problem was with the CVT.

The company told the forum that no abnormal noise was observed during road test and the consumer, who had no expertise in the matter, had assumed some manufacturing defect, which was non-existent. However, they still installed the damper mounts free of cost and delivered the car in perfect condition.

However, on November 21, 2017, Sharma told the forum that a major part i.e. CVT worth Rs 2.60 lakh had been replaced by the company. He added that now the dispute remained in respect of compensation and cost of litigation only.

The forum observed that the company was aware of the defect since the beginning but took approximately a year to fix it. Therefore, the act of the company forcing the complainant to indulge into unnecessary litigation proves deficiency in service and negligence on their part, which certainly caused mental and physical harassment to the complainant.

The forum thus asked the company to pay Rs 10,000 to the complainant as compensation for mental agony and harassment caused to him along with Rs 5,000 as cost of litigation.
Yogendra Yadav

Yogendra Yadav

LETS be clear about what the current crisis in the apex court is not. We know that this is not a storm in a teacup that was to go away by Monday morning. This is not a personal tussle among the top judges that has spilt over in the public domain. This is not a dispute about who should decide the case of Judge Loya or a few similar cases. This is not a technical dispute about the power to decide the roster in the Supreme Court. This is not just about a serious allegation of corruption that points to the apex of our judicial system. In fact, this is not a dispute internal to the institution of judiciary.

This is about an actor that has managed to stay invisible through this crisis: the Modi government. This is, above all, about the relationship between the judiciary and the executive. Specifically, this is about an attempt by the government of the day to secure a pliant judiciary through Bench fixing. In the run-up to the Emergency, Indira Gandhi had demanded and, indeed, almost achieved a committed judiciary. The Modi government now seeks to achieve the same objective through a compromised judiciary. The protest by the four judges represents perhaps the last significant hurdle that the Modi government faces in this project. And judiciary is one of the last hurdles that it faces in its drive for total control. That is why the current crisis in the apex court is about the future of Indian democracy.

Lets not be distracted by the loose gossip that accompanies any development of historic significance. Media and the Bar have seen intense speculation on the relationship among the top judges and their motivations. True, no action is entirely devoid of envy, ambition and pride. But the unprecedented action by the four judges, known for their integrity, goes beyond such small motives. None of them has anything to gain and almost everything to lose by doing what they did. Justice Gogoi runs the risk of losing his turn as the next CJI and the other three may lose on post-retirement sinecures. Besides, the press conference was too sudden (and clumsy) to have been orchestrated through a grand conspiracy. We have thus no reason to disbelieve that these judges were speaking the voice of their conscience. If they wanted to compromise, the CJI may not have gone ahead by excluding them again from the constitutional Bench.

Lets not get caught up in a limited procedural dispute about whether this was the right way to express their dissent. True, judges are supposed to speak through their judgments and not through the media. Their outburst has the potential of setting a bad precedent. The criticism by Justice Santosh Hegde and some other retired judges has a point. Perhaps the judges could have chosen another forum. What if the judges thought that the matter is so grave that it must be brought to public attention? At least that is what they seem to be suggesting when they spoke of discharging a debt to the nation. If that was the intent, we should be grateful that they chose the straightforward way of open, public expression instead of the dishonest route of planted stories and leaked letters. Debates about how to express dissent must not trump the point of what the dissent was about.

Lets not limit ourselves to the technical dispute about who decides the roster and how. There is no dispute that under the present arrangement, the Chief Justice of India is the master of roster. But surely, the CJI needs remember what the courts tell the babus every day: yes, you have the power, but you cannot use it arbitrarily. There are procedures, practices and precedents. No one is saying that all serious or sensitive cases be given only to senior judges. The objection is about a pattern, of late, in which some top or inconvenient judges have been systematically kept out of, or removed, from cases the government has stakes in. What makes the roster crucial is its political significance. The CJI exercises twin powers of listing a case and assigning it to any Bench. In our judicial system where the Supreme Court sits in small Benches of two or three, and where cases drag for decades, this power can make or mar a case. This is why the CJI is so crucial to the justice system. This is why the government of the day may wish to keep the CJI in good humour, or on a tight leash.

Therefore, lets not limit our gaze to only the case of Judge Loya. This is, no doubt, a crucial case and can implicate the second most powerful person in the country. The evidence in the public domain so far does indicate something fishy. It must be pursued to its logical conclusion. But it is equally clear that this case was no more than a trigger for the protest by the four dissenting judges. They were looking at a series of other cases in the recent past, which the Committee on Judicial Accountability and Reforms (CJAR) has meticulously documented. They must have been concerned about the cases that are to come up this year. In this year of the run-up to the general election, the ruling partys electoral strategy hinges on the outcome of some cases in the apex court, including the Ayodhya dispute. More than ever before, the government needs a friendly CJI.

Instead, lets pay more attention to the application for internal inquiry against the CJI moved by Prashant Bhushan on behalf of the CJAR this Monday. The petition makes a case for an internal inquiry in the matter concerning the grant of recognition to a medical college in UP. The Bench hearing this case in the Supreme Court was headed by the current CJI. The petition documents a disturbing pattern in which this dubious medical college got more than one favourable judgment from this Bench. It also provides details of findings of the CBIs preliminary investigation into this case. The evidence prima facie shows a middleman who was promising a favourable judgment from the Supreme Court. Most tellingly, this petition annexes transcripts of telephone conversations between the middleman and college owners. The middleman gives 500 per cent guarantee of a favourable judgment by the Captain in the temple in Delhi, provided prasad is given in advance. We do not know if this refers to CJI Dipak Misra, and whether the middleman was acting at his behest. But surely, this matter needs an independent and credible probe.

Lets consider a possibility: could it be that the government is holding this and more sensitive material against the current CJI, leaving him with little option but to acquiesce. Since there is no set procedure for an inquiry against the CJI, the CJAR has approached the five seniormost judges after the CJI and has requested a probe. What happens to this request could determine the future of the Supreme Court of India.

Lets keep an eye on the fate of the CJAR petition, but let's not just watch. Justice Chelameswar, Justice Gogoi, Justice Lokur and Justice Joseph have ensured that unlike their predecessors during the Emergency, they cannot be accused of selling their soul. But the onus of saving the judiciary and the constitutional order does not lie merely with the judges. In the last instance, it lies with all the citizens. Let the citizens be prepared to act in this battle for safeguarding democracy.

yogendra.yadav@gmail.com
THE optics of the six-day visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been heady. If the two Prime Ministers walked barefoot in the Mediterranean Sea near Haifa during Modis visit to Israel, there was the prolonged hug this time besides forced humour, a private dinner and the Taj visit. Even if Israel did not agree to mention Pakistan in the joint statement, the subtext of Netanyahus Mumbai leg will be the 2008 attacks, much to South Blocks pleasure. Once passed off as a Front Office for the US  Israel sold military hardware and surveillance equipment to India that the US could not because of export control laws or fear of upsetting Pakistan  the rather overdone bonhomie signals the desire of the two countries to strike out an independent path of their own.

By this time, the two PMs would have realised the honeymoon phase is over. The Indo-Israel relationship is beginning to encounter rough bumps and the complexities of geopolitics. Indias cancellation of a large defence deal and its abrupt restoration a day before Netanyahus arrival demands a few answers. India might not have the earlier latitude and comfort in conducting defence trade with Israel because of its expanding ties with China. Israel may have tried to offset that apprehension by offering a step-up in ties with India: initial approval for Indian energy companies to explore for oil and gas in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

The mutual glad-handing also obscures the political gulf between the two nations. The Indo-Israel joint statement did avoid a reference to the two-state solution which is anathema to the hardliner in Netanyahu. But the overhang of New Delhis vote opposing the US decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israels capital suggests that when it matters, India and Israel will find themselves on different sides of the fence. Notwithstanding the greater stress on older areas of collaborations, an overdose of bonhomie veils the fact that the two sides are still struggling to move away from a transactional arrangement to establishing the principles of a more durable relationship.
Tribune News Service

Faridabad, January 16

The police have failed to nab the four accused who reportedly gang-raped a 23-year-old woman in a moving vehicle on Saturday night. They are now in the process of releasing sketches of the suspects. As many as eight teams of the crime branch are on the job, said Rajesh Kumar, ACP (Crime).

He said officials were collecting details of any Scorpio sold recently in Gurugram, Mewat, Palwal, Mathura and Noida as the vehicle used in the crime had a temporary registration number. One of the suspects could be a resident of Mewat as the victim had told the police that she had heard two of the accused calling out to a person named Mewati after her earrings were snatched before being dropped at a petrol pump near Seekri village in the district. We are preparing the sketches of the suspects on the basis of information provided by the victim, said a spokesperson of the Police Department.

Meanwhile, the police have registered two more cases of rape. While two persons, including an auto-rickshaw driver, have been arrested for raping a 15-year-old girl on Friday night, another person has been booked for raping a married woman on the pretext of providing her job, on Sunday.

The incident took place in the parking lot of a shopping mall located in Sector 37. Admitting that the crime graph had gone up in the district, sources in the department revealed that the number of rape cases had swollen to 194 in 2017 from 145 in 2016. The number of such cases was 102 in 2014 and 117 in 2015, respectively. Loot and theft cases have also gone up by 62 per cent and 40 per cent, respectively.

Faced with 37 per cent shortage in the department, the district police are awaiting installation of more than 30,000 CCTV cameras from the budget allocated for the Smart City project, it is learnt.
Vishal Joshi

Tribune News Service

Jhansa (Kurukshetra), January 16

Family members of the 15-year-old Dalit girl, who was allegedly raped and murdered, have rejected the police theory that a youth of their village Jhansa could be the key conspirator in the crime.

The wailing mother told The Tribune, at her two-room residence here on Tuesday, that her 15-year-old daughter could have been victimised by a group of unknown persons.

She said the boy, who belongs to the Balmiki community, was also missing under mysterious circumstances since January 9 and that made the police point their finger at him.

The 18-year-old boy is suffering from various ailments. I do not buy the theory that a person with such a poor health could brutally rape and murder my daughter. Culprits are some other persons and the police must arrest them at the earliest, said the mother while showing a photo of the missing youth saved in her nephews mobile phone.

According to Namrata Gaur, a member of the Haryana Women Commission, the girl, whose body with mutilated private parts was found at Jind districts Budhakhera village last Friday, and the boy were in a relationship.

She had stated yesterday that both families had counselled the pair to concentrate on studies.

However, the girls family members today refrained from making any comment on the issue.

The mother and other close relatives claimed the deceased girl had never complained of being harassed by him or any other youth.

The family has been provided with two armed police personnel. We hope the police will complete the investigation in the case at the earliest. All we want is justice, said the mother.

Meanwhile, police sources said the call detail records secured from the mobile phone signal tower state that the boys cell phone was found active in Jhansa region till 10 pm on January 9.

After that, his phone was reportedly found switched off.

Two village youths claim to have seen the victim and the boy near Markanda river bridge at around 4 pm on January 9. Police teams are searching CCTV footage installed at the village for conclusive evidence, said a source.

Meanwhile, the police teams recorded statements of classmates of the deceased and teachers.

Police teams have detained more than six persons for questioning. Any clue on the boy is crucial for the case. It is more than a week and his whereabouts are still not known, said another source.




Sunit Dhawan

Tribune News Service

Rohtak, January 16

The Haryana State Women Commission wants the state government to enact a law to grant death penalty to the persons found guilty of raping girls below 15 years of age. The commission also advocates the imposition of liquor prohibition in the state in order to check the increasing cases of sexual and domestic assaults on girls/women.

This was stated by commission chairperson Pratibha Suman while talking to The Tribune on the sidelines of a district-level hearing by a commission Bench here today. Commission vice-chairperson Preeti Bhardwaj and members Suman Bedi and Indu Yadav were also present at the hearing.

It may be pertinent to mention here that it is for the first time that the State Women Commission has launched a drive to hold district-wise hearings to settle cases pertaining to crimes against women. The office of the commission is located in Panchkula and it is not possible for the victims of sexual/workplace harassment, domestic violence, dowry cases and property disputes to come all the way to Panchkula. Hence, we have decided to hold district-wise hearings across the state, the chairperson stated.

On being questioned about the rising cases of sexual crimes against women, she said lack of proper education and gender sensitivity among boys and men and silence adopted by girls and women upon beingharassed/teased/molested were the major contributing factors behind the trend.The Haryana Government should follow the example of Madhya Pradesh, which has decided to grant death penalty to those found guilty of raping girls below 12 years of age. We recommend to the state government to make a law for provision of death penalty to those found guilty of raping girls up to 15 years of age, said Pratibha.

She opined that the Haryana Government could also impose a ban upon the sale and consumption of liquor on Bihar pattern as a majority of persons accused of sexual/domestic assaults on women were alcoholics or drug addicts.

Asked about the laxity of the police in responding to cases of crimes against women, the chairperson asserted that the officials found guilty of laxity/dereliction of duty should be removed from their post.A certain time-frame should also be fixed for the disposal of matters pertaining to various crimes against women, she added.
Lalit Mohan

Tribune News Service

Dharamsala, January 16

Hoteliers of Dharamsala, who have lost their power and water connections following the High Court order, are now lobbying with the new BJP government to bail them out. A delegation of the hoteliers association met Minister for Town and Country Planning Sarween Chaudhary and Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur and submitted a memorandum of their demands.

As per the memorandum, the hoteliers have demanded that compounding of deviations in buildings under the municipal corporation should be increased from the present 10 to 40 per cent. At present, the commissioner of the Municipal Corporation Dharamsala has the power to compound deviations up to 10 per cent in the original maps passed by the authorities.

However, hoping that their deviations in buildings would be regularised under the policy adopted by the previous Congress government under which it had proposed to regularise deviations up to 100 per cent, a large numbers of hoteliers in Dharamsala had raised illegal constructions. The policy brought by the previous government has now been struck down by the high court. The hoteliers, who had raised illegal constructions, now have been left in the lurch. The hoteliers are now demanding that deviations up to 40 per cent should be regularised on the plea that if it was done, more than 90 per cent hotels would be saved from penal action.

The hoteliers are now demanding that floor area ratio (FAR) for the hotel industry should be increased from 150 per cent to 200 per cent and height of buildings should be allowed up to 25 metre against the present limit of 21 metre.

At present, FAR for the hotel industry was 1.5 and height of hotel buildings was restricted to 21 metre. This puts small plot owners at a disadvantage and they cannot realise full potential of their land, especially in commercial places, where cost of land was over Rs 1 crore per kanal.

The hoteliers also demanded that the development plan of Dharamsala should be redrawn and all buildings should be developed with retrospective affect. The demand was being made to rescue those who have raised buildings in core area of McLeodganj. The core area of Dharamsala has long been changed and it now has illegal hotels, shops and commercial buildings. Legal experts are of the view that buildings cannot be regularised by the government with retrospective affect.

The hoteliers are also demanding that they should be taken into confidence while drawing development plans under the Smart City scheme. They have also demanded that more parking places should be created in tourist places.

Interestingly, as per the Town and Country Planning rules every hotel has to have parking at the ground level. However, very few hotels in upper Dharamsala have parking places. The parking places have been converted into shops or commercial portions by the hoteliers.
Jammu, January 16

The working of J&K Bank, the states largest financial institution, has come under the scanner following its deteriorating financial health and recent shady recruitments, with legislators demanding accountability in its functioning.

The Opposition accused the government of ignoring meritorious candidates while selecting favourites for various posts in the bank.

However, Finance Minister Haseeb A Drabu appealed to the legislators in the Assembly not to discuss the bank in public domain and interfere in its functioning as it would have serious consequences on its growth.

He said the government would take up the issue of recent recruitments with the bank management and ask it to make it more transparent.

The health of J&K Bank is deteriorating. Last year, you (Drabu) had announced that you will take all measures to streamline its functioning and put it back on the track. Unfortunately, there is no accountability in the bank. The government should introspect on exactly what went wrong, said Usman Majeed, Congress legislator from Bandipora, during the discussion on the Budget today.

With you in command, the bank should not have been affected. The government must explain as what was the compulsion to make such large recruitments in the bank. You did not consider the meritorious candidates. This was expected from you. On Monday, there were allegations against someone in the House. I appeal to the government to disclose the names of all defaulters of the bank, Majeed said.

On Monday, CPM MLA from Kulgam MY Tarigami had also demanded a two-hour debate on the situation in J&K Bank.

The state government is the majority shareholder in the bank, which makes it accountable to the Assembly. Ironically, it remains unaccountable before the House of people, Tarigami had said.

He had said Drabu in the last Budget had infused Rs 500 crore into the bank on the pretext that its condition wasnt good. What has happened to the bank since then?, he had said.

Khanyar MLA Ali Mohammad Sagar, had also flagged the concern about the deteriorating financial health of the bank. Last year, you (Drabu) gave Rs 500 crore to J&K Bank but still it is being said that its non-performing assets are soaring, Sagar had said.  TNS
Jammu, January 16

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind and UN-designated terrorist, is not officially a terrorist in India.

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has made it clear that anyone involved in unlawful activities in the country couldnt be declared a terrorist. Hafiz Saeed is a wanted accused in the Mumbai terror attack case being investigated by the NIA, it said. This has been revealed by the MHA while replying to an application filed under the RTI Act by Rohit Choudhary, belonging to the Korotana Kalan area of Ranbir Singh Pura, Jammu. In his application filed on December 7, 2017, Choudhary had asked whether Hafiz Saeed had been declared a terrorist by India. He received the reply a few days ago. MHA Deputy Secretary SK Chhikara said, There is no provision for declaring an individual as a terrorist under the Indian legal system. However, action is taken against individuals if they are involved in terrorist acts.  TNS
Vikram Sharma

Tribune News Service

Jammu, January 16

National Conference (NC) and Congress leaders today boycotted proceedings of the Legislative Council on the second consecutive day to protest the marshalling out of senior NC leader Sajad Ahmed Kitchloo from the Upper House.

Amid sloganeering, they sat on a dharna, demanded an apology from Chairman Haji Inayat Ali and constitution of a House committee on power projects. By marshalling out a senior member, the Chairman has demeaned the credibility of the House. Every other day, House committees are constituted. He could have deferred the question but unruly behaviour with the member was uncalled for. We demand an apology from the Chairman, said Congress MLC Ghulam Nabi Monga. In the Question Hour, PDP MLC Firdous Ahmed Tak said since the presence of the Opposition in the House was the essence of democracy, they should be allowed to discuss the issue of power projects. The Chairman allowed a four-member committee comprising Naresh Gupta and Ghulam Nabi Monga from the Congress and Ali Mohammad Dar and Showakt Ganaie from the NC to talk to him on the issue. Though nothing is finalised, the Chairman has allowed a half-hour discussion on the issue and we are hopeful that a panel on power projects will be constituted, MLC Showkat Ganaie said.

NC seeks govt reply on Srinagar mans arrest

NC leaders and independent legislator Engineer Rasheed raised the issue of arrest of Srinagar resident Bilal Ahmed Kawa in the Legislative Assembly and sought a statement from the state government. Rasheed asked the government to explain why Kawa, against whom there is no case in the state, had been arrested by the Delhi Police in an 18-year-old case.
New Delhi, January 16

A Delhi court on Tuesday directed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to file its reply to a fresh bail plea of Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah in a 2007 money laundering case related to alleged terror financing, even as his wife claimed he was being "slow poisoned" in the prison.

Additional Sessions Judge Sidharth Sharma, who had in August last year denied bail to Shah over ongoing investigations, directed Enforcement Directorate's (ED) special public prosecutor NK Matta to file a reply to the fresh bail plea by February 26.

In his bail application, the accused told the court that investigation in the case has been completed since the agency has filed its charge sheet and there was no chance for Shah to hamper the probe.

Advocate MS Khan, appearing for Shah, told the court that no purpose will be served by keeping him in custody.

Shah, who appeared before the court through videoconference, also said he was lacking treatment inside the jail. "Trial is only going on because I am alive. If there is no Shah, there will be no trial," 62-year old Shah said.

Meanwhile, Shah's wife Bilquies Shah, also moved an application before the court through the defence lawyer and claimed that her husband was suffering from various ailments and was on regular medicine for last six years.

She alleged that Shah was facing difficulty in getting those medicines inside the jail and was now also suffering from sudden loss of consciousness.

"My husband had similar fainting attacks in Tihar Jail.

Repeated requests were made to the jail authorities but no steps were taken in this regard. This is a clear indication of slow poisoning of my husband by the jail authorities," she told the court in her application.

The court, meanwhile, initiated the trial and started recording the statement of the prosecution witnesses. It posted the matter for further hearing on February 26.

The court had on August 22 last year rejected Shah's bail plea after the ED said it was probing whether he had received money from countries such as Pakistan to promote terrorism in India.

On November 15, the court had framed charges for money laundering against Shah and alleged hawala dealer Mohammad Aslam Wani in the case. Both the accused pleaded not guilty and claimed trial.

The ED had on September 23 filed the charge sheet against Shah, accusing him being in touch with Pakistan-based terrorist Hafiz Saeed. It had also named Wani, who is in judicial custody along with Shah.

The court had taken cognisance of the over 700-page charge sheet that relied upon 19 witnesses.

The central probe agency, in the charge sheet filed under sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), had furnished Shah's statements where he had allegedly told the investigators that he has "no source of income of his own" and that he does "not file any Income Tax Return (ITR)." The probe agency had recorded the statement of 36-year old Wani where he allegedly said that he came to Delhi from Srinagar "at the directions of Shah" sometime in April, 2003 and that was the first time he had met him. Wani was arrested by the ED on August 6 from Srinagar.

The ED alleged that Wani was asked by Shah to "work for him (on a commission basis) in collecting hawala money from Delhi and deliver to him at Srinagar."

The case dates back to August 2005 in which the Delhi Police's Special Cell had earlier arrested Wani.

Wani had then claimed that he had given Rs 2.25 crore to Shah, following which the ED had registered a case under PMLA against the duo in 2007. He was arrested with Rs 63 lakh, allegedly received through 'hawala' channels from the Middle East, and a cache of ammunition, on August 26, 2005.

In 2010, a Delhi court had cleared Wani of terror funding charges in 2005 case but had convicted him under the Arms Act. PTI
Usha Albuquerque

The number of Indian students going abroad to study is growing at a pace much faster than ever before. Industry guesstimates suggest that 2.5 lakh-3 lakh students from India travel abroad every year to study, spending around Rs 45,000 crore or $7 billion on foreign education. This is nearly 60 per cent of the funds allotted to education in the Budget, according to a study by Assocham and TISS.

Nearly 85 per cent of internationally mobile Indian students head for five countries: the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Singapore, and while Germany is emerging strongly as a favoured destination, the number of Indian students studying in the UK has been flattening after major drops of around 23 per cent between 2012 and 2014. In fact, European countries are fast being added to thestudents go-to list.

The US and the UK still remain the most favoured destinations for a majority of students seeking to go abroad. But you may need to think twice before assuming you will get to stay on in the US to work. The Trump administrations stricter visa norms and proposed changes in the offing are likely to include limiting the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programme, which has so far allowed some international students to work in the US. Following the "Buy American and Hire American" Executive Order, which was rolled out earlier this year, there are proposals to limit or completely remove the Obama-era extension of the OPT for students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, which had provided students with 24 additional months over the 12 months already granted under the OPT. Such changes could make it more difficult for students, even those with expertise in STEM categories, to find jobs in the US. So if you plan to study in the US be prepared to return home, after that, even if you do get a job. International students with job offers from companies like Google, Apple and PwC have had their visa applications turned down.

Even in the UK there is limited scope for students to stay on after finishing studies as a result of tighter visa curbs and the closure of the post-study work visa in 2012. The rules for non-EU students moving from a student visa to a work visa, post-Brexit are now rather strict. Essentially youve got to have a graduate job, with a graduate salary of a minimum 20,800, with a licensed Home Office employer. A pretty tall order for a first job! However, recently a UK student visa pilot programme that allows students to stay on for six months after completion of studies has been extended to 23 universities in addition to the four in which it was originally introduced. This is likely to make it easier for students enrolled in these universities to stay on post study and look for jobs. So, though the UK has some of the top universities in the world, and the best education both in terms of quality and environment that money can buy, be prepared to return home after your degree.

So, if you are one of those looking at greener pastures, here is some useful information regarding study options, especially in Europe along with the cost entailed, the work visa possibilities and other useful information you may need before making that important decision.

SPAIN

Spain is the kind of place where you can enjoy both a good holiday as well as a good degree programme. There are 76 universities in Spain, offering a variety of courses, most of which are taught in Spanish, but there are also a number of courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level taught in English. Among the more popular among Indian students are courses in business, international business fashion, and design.

Fee factor: Course fees in public universities are some of the lowest in Europe ranging between Euro 750-2,100 a year for a bachelors degree, to Euro 900-3,300 for a masters and PhD. Private universities have higher tuition fees, but usually not exceeding Eur 18,000 a year for any degree programme, except for business degree which may over EUR 20,000 a year.

However, living costs in Spain are high, particularly if you wish to stay in bigcities like Madrid and Barcelona, where you would need around 1,300 EUR/month for all your monthly expenses. On the other hand, in cities like Valencia, Seville or Cadiz, you can enjoy cheaper living costs, around Eur 800 - 850 a month.

Work/visa options: Students from India will need to obtain a work permit from the Spanish Embassy/Consulate in the country as well as a residence Visa ( if your study programme is longer than 90 days.

It is possible to get an internship to work in Spain as a university student for which you should contact the Association of International Students for Economics and Commerce. If you have a student residence card, you are allowed to work up to 20 hours a week, as for many other countries, for the duration of your study in Spain as long as it does not interfere with your studies. You also need to speak and understand Spanish to obtain employment in most of the companies found within the country.

Some of the top employers in Spain taking on college students interns include Grupo Santander, a large group of international banks, Telfonica de Espana Spains telecom provider, El Corte ingles the largest department store chain in Spain, and Kimberly Clark a well-known supplier of many household products. Jobs are also available in sales, marketing, banking and auditing and many others.

So, in the final analysis, students looking to study and work abroad need to be clear about their goal and objectives. Define the field of work that interests you and then identify the country where you will get the maximum opportunities to study and possibly stay on for some valuable years of work.

Germany

Germany continues to be a favourite destination for Indian students, more so as public universities in Germany charge low or no tuition fees. Germany is also valued for courses in engineering and technology, an area of expertise often identified as German engineering excellence. Moreover, most German degrees are internationally recognised, with many universities available in English. Engineering, maths and computer science, and business are the more popular courses for Indian students.

Generally, students pursuing their degree at any authorised German Higher University, are given a Study Visa which can be further extended upon graduation to make it a work permit for 18 months, during which time a student can either work in any employment to support him/her and at the same time, or go for job hunting. For internship, the student has to apply for an Internship Visa for which you need to furnish the agreement between the student and the German company, and the company has to apply to the authorities on your behalf, to become eligible to work as an Intern in Germany. The internship Visa is variable depending on the length of it, but has an upper limit of 12 months. To obtain a job-seeker visa, you have to provide proof of adequate funding, to sustain yourself during your stay at Germany and also must have a degree equivalent to that of the German Degrees. The Job Seeker Visa duration is normally of 6 months duration. Germany is the most stable economy in Europe although the job market is feeling the pinch of a slow down, as is with most of Europe. Moreover, a knowledge of German is essential to work in Germany, and can go a long way for success while job hunting.

France

France is also becoming another popular study destination for Indian students, most of whom opt for post-graduation courses in business, science, economics and design.

Students who go to France for pursuing higher education can apply for a "Temporary Residency Authorisation" (termed ASP) or a Residency Permit to facilitate entry of International Talents into France, that allows them to stay after completion of their course for professional reasons. To be eligible for this permit you need to have completed a masters level degree, or a Professional Licence equivalent to a five-year studies course, must be able to provide enough financial support during their stay, the minimum being Eur 615 a month, or hold a work contract for more than three months. The Temporary Residency Authorisation (ASP) is normally issued for 12 months post-graduation.

However, after a recent bi-lateral student exchange programme signed by India and France, Indian students under the ASP are eligible for a 24-month post-study temporary residence visa instead of the 12-month tenure. Of course, you will need to be fluent in French if you want to benefit by the possibility of studying and working in France.
Lincoln University is teaming up with CPA Australia to produce New Zealands first professional accounting programme delivering a masters degree alongside a world recognised professional accounting qualification.

Lincoln Universitys Master of Professional Accounting (CPA) provides extensive academic support for candidates who are considering enrolling, or are currently enrolled, in CPA Australias Certified Practising Accountant (CPA) Programme. This is a 180-credit Taught Masters degree, achieved by completing nine 20 credit courses. Upon completion, students receive a Masters degree and will have finished the CPA Programme.

Entrants need to have the equivalent of a New Zealand Bachelors degree with a B average or better, CPA Australia Associate membership, and IELTS 6.5 (no individual band less than 6.0). Students do not need prior work experience to enroll in the programme.

Check out: http://www.lincoln.ac.nz
Pune, January 16

An Assistant Sub-Inspector of India Reserve Battalion (IRB), posted at the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) camp, allegedly shot dead three persons at Daund near Pune on Tuesday.

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Sanjay Baliram Shinde, the accused, was later arrested from Supa village near Shirur in the district.

Shinde opened fire at two places -- Nagar Mori and Borawake Nagar --- in Daund town this afternoon, killing three persons, police said.

"Initially police thought he was hiding in his house.

When a police inspector spoke to Shinde over phone, he, to mislead the cops, said he was going towards Solapur," said Vishwas Nangare-Patil, Inspector-General of Police, Kolhapur Range.

"However, his phone location nailed his lie as it showed movement towards Shirur. He was arrested at Supa and a 9 mm pistol and two magazines were seized from his possession," Nangare-Patil added.

Nangare-Patil said Shinde told the police officer over phone that he had a monetary dispute with one of the persons he shot.

"After killing two people at one spot, he left the spot and killed another person with whom he had some previous enmity," said Nangare-Patil.

However, Shinde's account of the events needs to verified, Nangare-Patil added.

The victims were identified as Amol Jadhav, Gopal Shinde and Prashant Pawar.

Another police official said that Shinde had two non-cognizable offences registered against him in the past.

Today morning, Shinde demanded money from one of the deceased, he said.

"When Shinde started pressurising him for the money, the latter slapped him. An angry Shinde, who had a pistol, fired at him. When another man tried to catch hold of Shinde, he too was shot," the police official said.

Shinde then left the place and shot the third man with whom he had previous enmity.

However, the sequence in which the three victims were shot was not yet clear.

Tension prevailed in Daund after the incident with people gathering outside Shinde's house.

"SRPF companies and additional force from Pune were summoned to control the situation," said a police official.

A senior SRPF official said that Shinde belongs to the India Reserve Battalion, Kolhapur, which is part of the SRPF.

"Due to unavailability of space in Kolhapur, some IRB companies are kept at SRPF Group 5 and Group 7 camps in Daund.

Shinde is under the administrative control of Commandant, SRPF 16 Kolhapur," said the officer.  PTI
Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 16

Amid claims and counter-claims about the crisis arising out of the judicial mutiny blowing over, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra on Tuesday reached out to the four rebel senior-most Supreme Court judges by inviting them for a meeting in his chamber.

The meeting, in which three other judges, including Justice AK Sikri, were also said to be present, remained inconclusive and they were likely to meet again on Wednesday, sources said.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The development comes after days of mediation by senior Bar leaders, including Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra and Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) president Vikas Singh, with the top five judges of the country who constitute the Supreme Court Collegium that appoints Supreme Court and high court judges.

In an unprecedented move, Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, MB Lokur and Kurian Joseph had on January 12 held a press conference at Justice Chelameswars residence and accused the CJI of arbitrarily allocating work to his colleagues.

The situation in the Supreme Court was not in order and many less than desirable things had taken place in the last few months, they had said, creating a storm of sorts in legal and political circles.

Even as the CJI attempted to break the ice, Bar leaders made contradictory claims regarding the crisis getting blown over. Attorney General KK Venugopal, who had on Monday said everything had been settled and that it was crisis a storm in a tea cup, changed his statement on Tuesday. I think it (crisis) has not been settled. Lets hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days, he said. He, however, denied having met any of the judges involved in the controversy.

SCBA president Vikas Singh also expressed hope that the crisis would be resolved by this weekend.

BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra, however, asserted there was absolutely no crisis now in the Supreme Court and normalcy would be restored soon. He wondered how a section of the media had been reporting that the crisis was still on. All judges were holding their courts and the work was going on normally in the Supreme Court, he said.

A seven-member delegation of the BCI has met at least 15 judges, including the CJI and the four rebel judges, in an attempt to broker peace between the two factions.

The story is now over, the BCI chairman had said on Monday. Terming the issues raised by the four senior-most judges as internal issues of the family, Mishra had said everything had been resolved internally and advised political leaders against politicising the issue.

On Monday judges had resumed work almost 10 minutes late, amid speculation over the next move of the four rebel judges and possible action by the CJI, who has refrained from making any public statement on the allegations. Before coming to their respective courtrooms on Monday, all judges had reportedly met over tea to sort out their differences.
New Delhi, January 16

The BJP-led government has done away with Haj subsidy for pilgrims from this year as part of its policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi today said Haj subsidy funds would be utilised for educational empowerment of the minority community, especially girls. This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement, he explained. Despite the withdrawal of subsidy, a record 1.75 lakh pilgrims, the highest ever since Independence, would undertake the annual pilgrimage to Mecca this year, he said.  TNS
Bijay Sankar Bora

Tribune News Service

Guwahati, January 16

Armed insurgents set fire to nine crude oil carrying tankers at Namsik area in Jagun near Assam-Arunachal Pradesh boundary at Tinsukia district of eastern Assam on Tuesday night.

The DG of Assam Police, Mukesh Sahay suspected hands of Naga rebel group NSCN-K in the incident.

Police quoting tanker drivers who stood witness to the incident, said a group of armed militants who looked like tribal waylaid the 10 tankers that were carrying oil from Kharsang oil field in Arunachal Pradesh at Namsik in Jagun and forced the drivers and helpers of the vehicles out at gun point and set fire to the tankers pouring petrol.

The insurgents warned that it was a consequence of plying tankers without paying tax and next time such tankers would be burnt along with the inmates.

The area is a stronghold of Naga rebel group NSCN-K and United Liberation Front of Assam (Independent).

The terror-struck drivers and helpers of the tankers have demanded heavy security escort through the route in future if they were to ply crude oil carrying tankers along it.
Shiv Kumar

Tribune News Service

Mumbai, January 16

Yug Tuli, one of the owners of Mojos Bistro restaurant located in Kamala Mills, surrendered before the police after returning to Mumbai from Amritsar. He was produced before the Bhoiwada magistrates court, which remanded him to police custody till January 20.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

I was in Amritsar waiting for anticipatory bail. I have come here to surrender after my bail plea was rejected, Tuli told reporters before surrendering at the NM Joshi Marg police station this morning.



Tuli, who is based in Nagpur, is one of the owners of Mojos Bistro. The other owner, Yug Pathak, son of former Director General of Police KK Pathak, has already surrendered to the police.



Police were looking for the owners of Mojos Bistro after a report from the Mumbai Fire Brigade said that the fire that killed 14 people at Kamala Mills on December 29 last year had started at the restaurant. Although all the victims were at the 1Above restaurant next

door, the fire had started from the hookahs served at Mojos Bistro, the fire brigade had said in its report.



The three owners of 1Above have already been arrested and are in police custody.



Tuli was on the run and was spotted at Hyderabad airport on Sunday, but have police the slip. Later the police said he was at Amritsar but had failed to nab him till he surrendered this morning.
Mumbai, January 16

Moshe Holtzberg, who lost his parents in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, arrived here on Tuesday for the first time since the tragedy struck the family over nine years ago and said he was happy to visit the city.

"Shalom...bahut khushi (I'm very happy)," said a shy Moshe, who arrived at the Mumbai airport shortly after 8 am.

The boy, who is now 11 years old, was accompanied by his grandfather Shimon Rosenberg, who said he will visit the Nariman House, where Moshe's parents were killed in the terror attack in November 2008, and pray there.

"I feel very happy to come to India, to Nariman House where I am going to pray. I will say hi to the people of India. I feel very good in this country," Rosenberg said.

Moshe was two years old when his parents  Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and Rivka  were killed during the siege at the Nariman House by 10 Pakistani terrorists in November 2008.

The Jewish couple ran a cultural and outreach centre for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement at the Nariman House in South Mumbai's Colaba area.

Moshe's Indian nanny Sandra Samuels had saved the child during the terror attack.

The terrorists carried out the attacks over three days in the city and killed 166 people.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met Moshe and his grandparents during a visit to Israel in July last year and told him that he could visit India anytime.

While meeting Modi, Moshe had said, "I remember our connection to Nariman House. I hope I will be able to visit Mumbai and when I get older, live there."

"Dear Mr Modi, I love you and the people in India," the boy had said.  PTI.
Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 16

The Supreme Court today directed the Maharashtra government to share within a week all documents relating to the death of CBI Special Judge BH Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case, with the petitioners seeking an independent probe into it.

Loya had died of cardiac arrest on December 1, 2014, in Nagpur where he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleagues daughter. He was handling the sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in which various police officers and BJP chief Amit Shah, who was later exonerated, were named.

It is a matter where they (petitioners) should know everything, said a Bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra, which is seized of two PILs seeking an independent probe into Loyas death. It adjourned the hearing in the case for a week.

The Bench, which also included Justice MM Shantanagoudar, passed the order after senior counsel Harish Salve, representing Maharashtra Government, handed over to the court a sealed cover containing the documents, including Loyas post-mortem report. As Salve submitted the documents were confidential and could not be shared in public and these cannot be given to petitioners, the Bench said the petitioners needed to see the documents.

The counsel for the petitioners  journalist BR Lone and Congress leader Tehseen Poonawalla  submitted they needed to look into the documents to assist the court. The petitioners, who described Loyas death as questionable, mysterious, assured the court of not making the documents public.

Terming Loyas death a serious matter, the Bench on Friday asked the Maharashtra government to spell out its stand by January 15. Loyas death has been hitting headlines since November 2017 after media reports quoting his sister raised questions about the circumstances surrounding his death and its alleged link to the Sohrabuddin case.

Manipur killings: Court asks why FIRs not filed
Suresh Dharur

Tribune News Service

Hyderabad, January 16

Even the gods were not spared of the effects of demonetisation. Tirumala temple in Andhra Pradesh, the worlds richest Hindu shrine, has recorded a fall in the revenues during 2017 due to the ban on high value currency notes.



The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), an autonomous body that manages the affairs of the popular hill shrine, attributed the decreased revenuesRs 50 crore as compared to the previous yearto the central governments 2016 decision to scrap bank notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000.



Hundi collections fell to Rs 995.89 crore in 2017 despite a rise in the footfall of pilgrims at Tirumalathe abode of Lord Venkateswara.

In March last year, the Reserve Bank of India had made it clear that it would not accept scrapped notes from the TTD after its deadline for exchanging banknotes. The TTD made a request to the central bank because devotees continued to deposit old banknotes in the Hundis even after they had become invalid.



"Last year Hundi earning was Rs 1,046.28 crore. This time it is Rs 50.39 crore less, due to demonetised notes that were deposited and are of no use. However, earning from 'Online Hundi' was recorded more than last year. This year, the TTD earned Rs 15.36 crore as compared to Rs 10.53 crore last year," the TTD Executive officer Anil Kumar Singhal said. The temple received Rs 26 crore worth banned notes in early part of 2017.



As per TTD records, the number of visitors in 2017 increased by about 7 lakh, from 2.60 crore recorded in 2016. But it did not get reflected in the cash flow.



The central government had given until March 31, 2017, to deposit the scrapped bills in banks. The TTD received most of the banned notes after the deadline.



For a few months after demonetisation, pilgrims continued to drop the banned currency in the hundi, which later turned out to be useless, Singhal said.



There was also a huge cash crunch across the country in the first few months of 2017 due to restrictions on cash withdrawals from banks and ATMs and that also contributed to the revenue fall, the temple authorities said.



The cash crunch might have also resulted in the drop in the hundi collections during the year, the temple official said.



However, the e-hundi earnings went up from Rs 10.53 crore in 2016 to Rs 15.36 crore in 2017.
Islamabad, January 16

Pakistan is examining a proposal for a DGMO-level meeting with India after a gap of four years to reduce tensions along the Line of Control and the Working Boundary through fresh confidence-building measures, a media report said on Tuesday.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The report comes a day after Pakistan said four of its soldiers died and five others injured in cross-border firing by Indian troops across the LoC. The Indian Army, however, said seven Pakistani soldiers were killed in its retaliatory firing.

A Pakistan defence ministry official in a meeting yesterday told the Senate defence committee that a "fresh proposal of DGMOs' (Director Generals of Military Operations) meeting is being considered," the Dawn reported.

The official also briefed the senators about the latest trends in Indian ceasefire violations, it said.

In November, a telephonic conversation between the two DGMOs took place following a request by the Pakistani side.

According to the report, one of the confidence-building measures being considered for the planned meeting of DGMOs is "calibre reduction" of the arms being used at the LoC.

Pakistan-India DGMOs have a frequent hotline contact, but they last met face-to-face four years ago at Wagah, a village which serves as a transit terminal between Lahore and Amritsar.

The December 24, 2013 Wagah meeting had taken place after a break of 14 years. That meeting too was held to discuss ways to ensure peace along the LoC and the Working Boundary.

Meanwhile, a resolution adopted by the Senate committee through consensus condemned Indian Army chief Gen Bipin Rawat's statement about "calling nuclear bluff of Pakistan" as "stupidity and provocative".

They termed it a "war-like" proclamation, the report said.  PTI
Ravi S. Singh

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 16

Senior Advocate Prashant Bhushan on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to institute an in-house judicial inquiry against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra against allegations of misconduct against the latter.

In a letter addressed to the four of Supreme Courts most senior judges days after they called a press conference accusing the CJI of arbitrarily allocating work to colleagues, Bhushan, convenor of Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms' (CJAR), said CJI Misra should have resigned over the allegations.

Among the allegations Bhushans NGO wants investigated against Misra is his handling of a controversial medical college scam in which CJI Misra himself is an interested party. Other cases include a controversial land allotment made to the CJI when he was a practising lawyer in Odisha. The allotment was later rescinded, allegedly over fraudulent information he had provided in his affidavit.

Bhushan claimed that there was enough prima facie evidence in the medical college scam case to establish that bribes were paid by the management to influence the case, although he made it clear that there was no clear evidence against CJI Misra.

The court did a number of flip-flops. First, it allowed the case to be withdrawn from it and allowed the Allahabad High Court to take it up. It later reversed the high court judgement and allowed a fresh plea, Bhushan said at the press conference.

He said the Central Bureau of Investigation had approached the CJI to allow a case to be registered against the high court judge who allegedly took a bribe of Rs 1 crore to give a judgement in favour of the college management.

When the Supreme Court set aside the high court order, he (the judge) was to return the bribe money, he said. The CBI then intercepted the conversations, and asked the CJI for permission to catch the judge red-handed, but was turned down.

He said that the case in the Supreme Court was later transferred from a Bench of senior senior judges already hearing the case, including Justice Chelameswar, to three-member Bench of junior judges.

He however said that CBI should not investigate the allegations because it could compromise independence of the judiciary.

The government could use the evidence to blackmail the court, he said, instead calling for an internal inquiry into the allegations.

He also said that the complaint had not been sent to the CJI because it would amount to conflict of interest.

The case relates to allegations of intended kickbacks to senior judicial functionaries over a medical college run by Prasad Education Trust. The central government had barred the college from admitting students because it did not comply with Medical Council of Indias requirements.



The trust appealed the central government's decision in Allahbad High Court and later the Supreme Court.

A retired judge of the Odisha High Court, IM Qudussi, is a suspect in the case and was arrested in September last year.
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 16

Punjab Power and Irrigation Minister Rana Gurjit Singh, in midst of a controversy after The Tribune exposed his backdoor attempts to bag sand mining contracts at an auction in May last year, has submitted his resignation to CM Capt Amarinder Singh, said sources.

Edit: Rana Gurjit must go

Rahul behind ouster, makes intent clear on corruption

The Tribune investigation trail

Rise and fall of Capts right-hand man

In the eye of sandstorm

Capt Amarinder told The Tribune the minister had sent his resignation on January 4 and that he would discuss the matter with AICC president Rahul Gandhi on January 18 and then decide.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The Tribune had highlighted how four employees of the minister had bagged mining contracts during the e-auction of 89 mining sites.

When my name appeared in the controversy last year, then too I had offered to quit on moral grounds. I have submitted my resignation to the CM as he was being targeted by the Opposition through me, said Rana Gurjit, who will continue to discharge his duties as minister till his resignation is accepted.

First The Tribune expose and then the ED summoning the ministers son, Rana Inder Partap Singh, for allegedly raising funds abroad for a family-owned company without the requisite permission from the RBI, the Punjab CM was under increasing pressure to act.

However, sources said the state leadership was in two minds on whether to accept the resignation at this juncture as it did not want Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader and Rana Gurjit bete noire Sukhpal Khaira to take credit for the ministers ouster. Briefed by the party Punjab affairs in-charge and the PPCC, the Congress high command had expressed its annoyance at the embarrassment caused to the party and its 10-month-old government in Punjab. Ever since The Tribune broke the scam, several MLAs and most Congress MPs had been building pressure on the CM to act against the minister. When the CM returned from Agra after a vacation, it was conveyed to Rana Gurjit that he would have to put in his papers. An indication in this regard was given by the CM to some of his Cabinet colleagues.

Contractor Gurinder Singh, arrested by the Vigilance Bureau in a Rs 1,000-crore irrigation scam, allegedly financed the auction bids by the ministers employees.

With SAD demanding Rana Gurjit be sacked for acquiring sand and gravel mining contracts through benami transactions in the names of his cook and office staff, a charge the minister has vehemently denied all along, the Amarinder government had set up Justice JS Narang Commission to probe allegations of impropriety against Rana Gurjit in the multi-crore mining auctions. The commission gave the minister a clean chit.

Looking back

The Tribune had on May 25, 2017, exposed how four employees of Irrigation Minister Rana Gurjit Singh had bagged mines. His cook Amit Bahadur got a mining site at Saidpur Khurd village in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar for Rs 26.51 cr, Kulwinder Pal Singh, a deputy general manager, got Mehadipur quarry for Rs 9.21 cr, Gurinder Singh got a quarry in Rampur Kalan village, Mohali, for Rs 4.11 cr and Balraj Singh bagged a contract at Bairsal village, Nawanshahr, for Rs 10.58 cr.
Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 16

The Defence Acquisition Council, the top decision making body of the Indian Ministry of Defence, on Tuesday okayed a Rs 3,547-crore project to acquire two separate types of rifles for the Indian Army.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The DAC, headed by Nirmala Sitharaman, okayed the procurement of 72,400 assault rifles for the infantry and another 93,895 carbines for close quarter encounters in built up areas  largely fighting insurgency.

The assault rifles will replace the Armys standard assault weapons. This will replace the existing INSAS (Indian Small Arms System) rifle, a 5.56 calibre, which was designed some three decades ago. The new rifle will be 7.62 calibre, meaning it can fire bigger ammunition.

The carbines are seen as replacement for the Russian made AK 47 assault rifles. These will weigh less than 3 kg and have the ability to fire at distances up to 200 metre.

Besides the numbers okayed today, the Army needs another 6 lakh assault rifles and the 3.25 lakh carbines.

The remaining quantity will be made in two tranches  25 per cent by the Ordnance Factory Board and the remaining by the Indian private industry.

The one developed in India will eventually be the standard issue for the forces and also the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs). This will mean some 15-18 lakh such rifles in all.

In June last year, the Army rejected the rifle made by the Ordnance Factory Board (OFB). The OFB made eight such pieces which were being tested by the Army. The OFB is not happy with the Armys decision and says the weapon did well in the trials.

A reliable weapon of an infantry or a paramilitary soldier is a good self-loading rifle that can fire with accuracy.

The DAC also made some changes in the policy for make in India procedure, this includes relaxation in norms to participate in prototype development.
Ahmedabad, January 16

Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) international president Pravin Togadia today said he left the VHP office yesterday and disappeared for some time because he apprehended a possible encounter killing by the police.

Togadia was admitted to a private hospital after being found lying unconscious in Shahibagh locality last night. He had remained missing for 10 hours. Today, he convened a press conference after doctors permitted him to speak.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Togadia (62) said, I have been feeling for some time that some forces were trying to suppress my voice because I was speaking for the implementation of the promises the BJP had made before coming to power.

He said he was also informed that the government had advised the police to revive very old cases against him. Asked which forces he suspected to be behind threats to him, Togadia said he would reveal the same at an appropriate time with conclusive evidence. He said he was performing pooja at the VHP office when someone barged into his room and told him that a Rajasthan Police team, assisted by the Gujarat Police, would soon reach there to pick him up and kill in an encounter.

Initially, he did not take the person seriously, but later he came to know that a Rajasthan Police had indeed landed in Ahmedabad with arrest warrants. He said he left the VHP office in an auto towards the residence of a non-VHP friend in Thaltej locality, informing the security guard posted outside the office that he would be back in 30 minutes. His suspicion about encounter killing strengthened when on his way to Thaltej he contacted the Rajasthan CM and the Home Minister and both told him that no police team had been sent for him with any arrest warrant. I switched off my phones so that my whereabouts could not be traced, he said. After reaching his friends place, he contacted his lawyer friends in Jaipur and was informed about the arrest warrants issued by the Ganganagar court. The lawyers advised him to appear in the court.

I decided to reach Jaipur and surrender in the court. I hired an auto for the airport to board a flight to Jaipur. I covered my face so that no one could recognise me, he said. While approaching Shahibagh, he felt uneasy and started sweating profusely. He told the auto driver to turn towards Bapunagar to visit a nursing home. Soon afterwards, I passed out and after hours I found myself in this hospital, he said.  OC
Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 16

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today called Islamic radicalisation a global threat that needs to be countered through strong political alliances.

He was delivering the keynote inaugural address at the third edition of The Raisina Dialogue  the flagship ideating event of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

"Our way of life is being challenged. Most notably, the quest for modernity, the quest for innovation is being challenged by radical Islam and its terrorist offshoots from a variety of corners, and this can upset the international system. I think that one of the ways to overcome such a challenge is to strengthen the relationship between our two great democracies," Netanyahu said.

With Prime Minister Modi seated in the audience in a special gesture, Netanyahu stressed that a tiny nation like Israel is a force to contend with globally. "The weak don't survive. The strong survive. You make peace with the strong. You make alliances with the strong," said Netanyahu underlining the importance of Israel's alliances with strong democracies such as the US, Canada.

Netanyahu laid out military, economic, political powers and values as the four pillars required for countries to strengthen. Citing the example of erstwhile Soviet Union he said that societies collapse despite highly educated minds if they do not have economic power and business friendly environment where innovation happens. "Prime Minister Modi and I were talking about how we educate our youth. In the case of Israel, there's one big education machine. It's called the Israeli Defense Force, and everyone comes in and we give training, we give technology, we give an assessment, an understanding of the main techniques of technology that are important for the future, also for civilian future," he remarked.

Delivering the vote of thanks later, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said Israel today is a reliable partner for India not just in defence and technology but also in agriculture and water management.

On Wednesday, Narendra Modi will join Sara and Benjamin Netanyahu as they travel from Ahmedabad Airport to Sabarmati Ashram where they will pay homage to Mahatma Gandhi. The leaders will inaugurate the iCreate Center at Deo Dholera Village in Ahmedabad, visit a Startup Exhibition and interact with innovators and Startup CEOs. They will also dedicate a mobile water desalination van to Suigam Taluka, of Banaskantha district, through a video link. The two Prime Ministers will then visit the Centre of Excellence for Vegetables at Vadrad in Sabarkantha district and inaugurate the Centre of Excellence for Date Palms at Kukama, Kutch District, through a video link. The two Prime Ministers will also interact with farmers after which Netanyahu will depart for Mumbai.

Gujarat roadshow today

Gujarat is set to roll out the red carpet for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he arrives in Ahmedabad on Wednesday along with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi

The two leaders will hold a roadshow, which will begin from the city airport and end at the Sabarmati Ashram, a journey of eight kilometres

Around 50 stages will be erected on the roadside along the stretch and people from different states will welcome Netanyahu

Jeep as Gift for Modi

The visiting Israeli Prime Minister will present his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi a special gift  the Gal-Mobile water desalination and purification jeep the two leaders rode on Israels Olga beach last year

It has reached Delhi and is on its way to Bhuj, sources said. There will be a live demonstration of desalination of sea water that the two PMs will witness through video conferencing from the iCreate centre on Janaury 17

Shalom Bahut Khush
Islamabad, January 16

The US has been trying to convince Pakistan that India is not a threat to it and Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan has said.

He said it is time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue with the US with everything on the table to remove all misunderstandings between Islamabad and Washington.

Reading out a policy statement on the governments foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly on Monday, he regretted that the US downplayed Indias aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported on Tuesday.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US.

Its time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table, the defence minister said.

Khan said Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

But the truism remains true. Both Indias capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan, he alleged.

Pakistan accuses India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against it, a charge India has dismissed.

Khan alleged that India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour, he claimed, adding that the unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government had reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace.

The minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan.

He said Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation Zarb-i-Azb and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

He urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001.

He also criticised the US for not pursuing internal reconciliation in Afghanistan, which had now become a safe haven for terrorists. PTI
Vishav Bharti

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 16

Rana Gurjit Singh, the richest candidate in last years Assembly elections with Rs 168-crore declared assets, belongs to a peasant family hailing from Bahar Majara village near Banga. In the 1950s, his family shifted to Bazpur (now in Uttarakhand), where he was born in 1956, and took thousands of acres on lease for farming. Bad in studies, Rana Gurjit was barely able to complete matriculation, said one of his close associates, who later parted ways with him.

He returned to Punjab in 1987, during the days of terrorism, and began buying land. First, he set up a paper mill near Kurali in Ropar, which was inaugurated by then Governor Siddhartha Shankar Ray. In the early 1990s, he started hobnobbing with Congress leaders. Then PPCC chief Beant Singh mediated to get him land at Buttar village in Amritsar district to set up a sugar mill, which played a key role in Ranas meteoric rise. Soon, he was contributing funds for Beant Singh, who became the Chief Minister in 1992. Later, he opened Rana Polycot Limited near Lalru (Patiala).

Beant Singhs assassination in 1995 was followed by Capt Amarinder Singhs appointment as the PPCC chief. The latters first test was the Adampur byelection in 1998. Rana Gurjit came forward as a major fund-raiser for the Congress candidate, who stunned the ruling Shiromani Akali Dals nominee by a margin of just six votes.

In 2002, Rana Gurjit got the party ticket from the Kapurthala Assembly seat, a Congress bastion. He declared Rs 20-crore assets in that election, which he won by about 10,000 votes. Two years later, he defeated SAD stalwart Naresh Gujral to bag the Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat.

Over the past decade or so, Rana Gurjit has established himself as Capt Amarinders right-hand man, standing by him despite the Assembly poll defeats of 2007 and 2012. He was the official incharge and main fund-raiser during the Amritsar Lok Sabha election in 2014, when Capt Amarinder humbled BJP heavyweight Arun Jaitley.

The Akalis wrested power from the Congress in 2007, but that didnt affect Rana Gurjits fortunes. From bailouts by the government to his profit-earning units receiving benefits in the form of one-time settlement schemes, he got it all.

During the Akali-BJP rule (2012-17), his son, Rana Inder Partap Singh, gave a presentation at a Cabinet meeting on deciding a bailout for sugar mills. It had perhaps never happened before that a businessman was allowed to enter the Cabinet meeting, a senior journalist said.

From distilleries to polycot, power generation to leather industry, business in South Africa to foodgrains, Rana Gurjit and his family have a finger in virtually every pie. In the latest affidavit submitted to the Election Commission, he claimed to have shares in 10 companies dealing in various businesses. However, he ended up burning his fingers in the mining trade, months after taking charge as Power and Irrigation Minister.
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 16

Following a series of investigative reports by The Tribune on sand mine auctions in Punjab, state Power and Irrigation Minister Rana Gurjit Singh has submitted his resignation to Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh. The Tribune had recently also reported that the Enforcement Directorate had issued summons to his son in connection with raising of funds abroad.

The exact date when Rana Gurjit submitted his resignation could not be confirmed. While the minister said he had put in the papers four days ago, Capt Amarinder Singh said he had received the resignation on January 4.

When my name appeared in the sand mining controversy, then too I had offered my resignation on moral grounds. On the same grounds, I have submitted my resignation to the CM, Rana said.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The Congress government, however, is yet to take a call on his resignation. A senior government official said the final decision would be taken after Capt Amarinder Singh met Congress president Rahul Gandhi. A meeting is scheduled for Thursday.

Also read: Punjab ministers cook is Rs 26-cr sand mine owner

Ministers cook is director of 3 companies too

Cooks company gave loan of Rs 50 lakh to Rana Gurjit

ED summons to Rana Gurjits son

Sources said that in the wake of the reports of Rana's son being summoned by the ED over alleged illegal fund-raising abroad and the Opposition taking up The Tribune's reports on the minister's suspected involvement in sand mining auctions, the CM had increasingly come under pressure to seek his resignation.

In an investigative report on May 25, 2017, The Tribune had highlighted how four employees of Irrigation Minister Rana Gurjit Singh had bagged mines. His cook Amit Bahadur got a mining site at Saidpur Khurd village in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar (Nawanshahr) for Rs 26.51 crore; Kulwinder Pal Singh, a deputy general manager, got Mehadipur quarry for Rs 9.21 crore; Gurinder Singh bagged a quarry in Rampur Kalan village in Mohali district for Rs, 4.11 crore; and Balraj Singh bagged a contract at Bairsal village in Nawanshahr for Rs 10.58 crore.

However, the minister had claimed that they were his former employees and left him just before the sand mine auctions.

Taking cognisance of the reports, Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh constituted a one-member judicial commission under Justice JS Narang to investigate the matter. However, the commission overlooked all the crucial evidence--like money trail, auction beneficiaries linked to the ministers other companies and ministers financial transactions with beneficiaries-- brought out by The Tribune in subsequent reports and gave a clean chit to the minister.

However, The Tribune brought fresh evidence on January 4 as to how one of his employees, Balraj Singh, who got mine at Bairsal village in Nawashahr for Rs 11 crore had given address of Ranas Sugar Mill at Butter Sivia in Amritsar while participating in mining auctions.

Amarinder says will discuss it with Rahul

Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh told The Tribune that Rana Gurjit had sent his resignation on January 4, adding that he would discuss it with Rahul Gandhi on January 18 and then take a call on it.

Amarinder Singh said he was also meeting party affairs incharge Asha Kumari and Harish Chaudhary in Delhi to discuss the mayors of three municipal corporations of Amritsar, Patiala and Jalandhar.

Sources close to the Chief Minister said expansion of the Punjab Cabinet would be done only after the Ludhiana MC elections.

Timeline

2017

May 19-20: E-auctions for 94 sand and gravel mines takes place

May 25: The Tribune breaks the story, Punjab ministers cook is Rs 26-cr sand mine owner. It highlights how bids of at least four employees of Rana Gurjit--cook Amit Bahadur, Kulwinder Pal Singh, Gurvinder Singh and Balraj--were accepted in sand mining auctions

May 29: Punjab CM orders judicial inquiry into charges against Rana Gurjit and forms one-member judicial commission of inquiry under Justice JS Narang (retd). But AAP questions Justice Narangs impartiality as his son represented the ministers family as a counsel

May 30: The Tribune breaks another story as to how cook Amit Bahadur and another employee Balraj Singh, who were beneficiaries in the sand mining auctions, were directors in three companies linked to Rana Gurjit. Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax department swing into action and seeks bank details of employees of the minister

June 15: The Tribune highlights how Rana Gurjit got Rs 25 crore loan from firms owned by cook Amit Bahadur; the Budget session of the Punjab Vidhan Sabha remains stormy over the issue; AAP and Lok Insaaf Party leaders suspended from the session

July 12: Government stalls allocation of sand mines to ministers employees

Aug 10: Justice Narang submits report to the CM giving clean chit to Rana Gurjit

2018

Jan 2: Bringing fresh evidence to public domain, The Tribune highlights that there were not just two mines, the firm that claimed to have financed Punjab ministers cook but they had bagged contracts for other mines too

Jan 4: Tribune highlights how Ranas employees Balraj Singh, who had successfully bid at Rs 9.11 crore for a sand mine at Bairsal village in Nawanshahr district, mentioned his residential address as Rana Sugar Mill located at Butter Siviya village in Amritsar district before mining wing. This mill is owned by Rana Gurjit Singhs family

Jan 6: Tribune highlights that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has summoned Ranas son Rana Inder Partap Singh in connection with raising of funds abroad to the tune of Rs 100 crore
Neena Sharma

Tribune News Service

Dehradun, January 16

MLAs and senior BJP leaders, who are awaiting allocation of posts in government boards, were left in the lurch today. At the end of the BJP state legislators and core group meeting here, they were instead sermonised on the virtue of patience and urged to channelise their energy for the ongoing fund collection drive.

The state BJP is to achieve the fund mobilisation target of Rs 25 crore set under the the Aajiwan Sahyog Nidhi by January 26. All MPs, MLAs, councillors, party supporters and workers have been given targets.

Unlike other state party units, the performance of the state BJP has been rather slow. Several first-time MLAs are finding it difficult to achieve their target.

I have been asked to achieve a target of Rs 40 lakh. It is a difficult task for me as I come from a humble background, said Desraj Karnwal, BJP MLA from Jhabrerra.

State BJP chief Ajay Bhatt admitted that the party has managed to collect only 10-20 per cent funds so far. We plan to hold another meeting of the core group by February 11, when the funds collected as part of the one-month drive will be revealed, he said.

He said this was the first time that the BJP in Uttarakhand had launched such a drive. If need be, we may extend the drive beyond January 26. We intend to maintain the funds through a bank account. The financial health of the party is not good here. The aim behind the fund drive is to ensure that the state and district units have sufficient funds to maintain their offices and bear their expenses, he said.

State in charge for the Uttarakhand Shayam Jaju could not attend the meeting due to prior engagements. Former Chief Minister BC Khanduri also could not make it to the meeting due to poor health.
Dehradun, January 16

Two teachers of Sherwood College in Uttarakhand have been sentenced to a year in jail after being found wanting in discharge of their duties during an excursion in which two students were killed after a tractor trolley they were travelling in overturned, an official said.

A group of 42 students had gone to an excursion to Sitawani in Nanital district in 2010. They were accompanied by two teachers, Ashish Dwivedi and Rohit Jalaal. The children were driven in a tractor trolley which overturned, killing two students and injuring seven others.

The parents of the two students, Anmol Bhatt (14) of Haldwani and Ibrahim Ansari (14) of Kanpur, had filed a case against the tractor's driver, Anand, and the two teachers.

Judicial Magistrate Manju Devi agreed with the prosecution that the teachers were callous and held them and the driver guilty, the official said.

IANS
Sydney, January 16

Australia is calling on the world's top scientific minds to help save the Great Barrier Reef, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund research into protecting the world's largest living structure.

The UNESCO World Heritage-listed reef is reeling from significant coral bleaching due to warming sea temperatures linked to climate change.

The 2,300-km site is also under pressure from farming runoff, development and predatory crown-of-thorns starfish, with experts warning it could be suffering irreparable damage.

Today, the Australian government announced a US$ 1.6 million funding pot available to people with bright ideas on how to save the reef.

"The scale of the problem is big and big thinking is needed, but it's important to remember that solutions can come from anywhere," said Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg.

He said the money would be available to the world's "greatest scientific minds, industry and business leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs".

"Solutions could focus on anything from reducing the exposure of corals to physical stressors, to boosting coral regeneration rates by cultivating reef-building coral larvae that attract other important marine species," Frydenberg added.

Up to 250,000 Australian dollars is available for an initial feasibility stage, where researchers can test the technical and commercial viability of their proposals for up to six months.

More than one proposal is expected to be accepted at this stage, the government said. A further 1 million Australian dollars will then be made available to the best solutions at the proof of concept stage, where applicants develop and test their prototypes for up to 12 months.

Those that are successful will retain intellectual property rights and will be able to try to commercialise their innovation.

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee last year decided not to place the Barrier Reef on its list of sites "in danger" despite concern over the mass coral bleaching.

The 2017 bleaching marked the second-straight year that corals have been damaged by warming sea temperatures, an unprecedented occurrence that scientists said would give the invertebrate marine creatures insufficient time to fully recover.

Coral reefs make up less than one per cent of Earth's marine environment, but are home to an estimated 25 per cent of ocean life, acting as nurseries for many species of fish.

AFP
New York: Hundreds of Haitian-Americans and others rallied in Times Square to denounce racism and remarks that President Trump is said to have made disparaging African countries and questioning further US acceptance of Haitian immigrants. Protesters carried signs with messages including peace, love, power, dream. AP

After Hawaii gaffe, Japan flashes false missile alert

Tokyo: Japans public broadcaster on Tuesday mistakenly flashed that North Korea appeared to have launched a missile, warning people to take cover before apologising for the error only minutes later. A news alert saying: It appears North Korea launched a missile... Evacuate inside buildings or underground: government was published by the NHK website and app at 6:55 pm local time. But after just five minutes, NHK admitted the alert was sent in error. Were very sorry, NHK said on its website, without explaining further. It comes just days after a false cellphone alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile terrified residents in Hawaii. AFP

Pope begs forgiveness from victims of child sex abuse

Santiago: Pope Francis begged for forgiveness on Tuesday for the irreparable damage done to children who were raped and molested by priests, opening his visit to Chile by diving head-first into a scandal that has greatly hurt the Catholic Church's credibility here and cast a cloud over his visit. Francis also faced controversy on another front: Overnight three more Catholic churches were torched, two in the Araucania region where Francis will visit on Wednesday. While not causing any injuries, the nine church firebombings in the past few days have marked an unprecedented level of protest against historys first Latin American Pope on his home turf. AP
Mesilla Valley Transportation, PAM Transport, and Ryder conducted initial road testing on Hyliions 6X4HE hybrid-electric axle. Photo: Hyliion

A start-up company has launched production of an add-on hybrid axle system designed to save fuel in long-haul Class 8 trucks.

Hyliion says its 6X4HE hybrid-electric axle system technology can deliver fuel savings, lower emissions, instant telematics and a better driver experience.

The company, which initially launched designing a hybrid axle product for trailers, showcased the new tractor axle at last falls American Trucking Associations Management Conference & Exhibition. At that point it was just coming off of initial testing on trucks run by Mesilla Valley Transportation, PAM Transport, and Ryder. Since then Hyliion has been working on fine-tuning the system, but it is already available for order.

Hyliion is bringing hybrid technology to the Class 8 trucking market, but were doing it in a very unique way, explained CEO Thomas Healy in an interview. You keep the existing diesel-engine truck that you own, and we add a hybrid electric assist to it to help reduce the amount of fuel you consume.

When the truck goes downhill or applies the brake or Jake Brake, the system uses regenerative braking to help capture some of the wasted energy and stores it in a battery pack mounted between the frame rails behind the cab.

When you go to climb a hill or accelerate, we can take that electric energy we have stored and apply it to our electric motor, which then applies torque and helps reduce the amount of fuel the vehicle uses, Healy said.

Hyliions 6X4HE system replaces a 6x2 trucks non-driven dead axle or is added to a 4x2 truck, turning either into a 6x4. Existing 6x4 tractors can be converted by removing one mechanically driven axle and replacing it with a Hyliion axle. The system includes a motorized axle, lithium-ion battery pack, and electronic controls. It adds about 800 pounds to the weight of the truck.

PAMs test unit was installed on a new Peterbilt 4x2 tractor, while MVT and Ryder converted in-service International and Freightliner 6x2 tractors, respectively. Systems operate autonomously with no driver involvement.

The axles hybrid action alone will save 15% in fuel, the company says, predicting fleets could see up to a total 30% fuel savings using the battery pack to run an auxiliary power unit during rest periods.

The system has a separate warranty that does not affect the manufacturers warranty, Healy said. We are offering a three-year warranty and the ability to extend it for another two years. Our warranty will cover the Hyliion components and will not affect the OEM/truck components.

The Hyliion system includes a motorized axle, lithium-ion battery pack, and electronic controls. Photo: Evan Lockridge

On the road

Initial fleet testing focused on driveability and system integration. Ron Knowles with Mesilla Valley Transportation has been in charge of the Hyliion project at the Texas-based company, a fleet known for its innovation in fuel efficiency.

At first I didnt know what to expect when I picked it up, he told HDT. I was expecting more of a kick like a Tesla car. Its a really gradual, easy transition. Sometimes you dont even think its actually powering, but at times you do, and you get out of the throttle and can feel it propelling you up the hill. When youre coming off the hill it goes into regenerative energy and starts collecting the energy back into the batteries, so it almost acts like an engine brake.

Kim Kasee, vice president of marketing for Hyliion, told HDT in a follow-up interview in late December that driver comments in testing so far praised the smooth ride. It felt like they were hauling a half load instead of a full load, she said.

Paul Pettit, vice president of maintenance for Arkansas-based PAM Transport, said the Hyliion technology could potentially be a game-changer.

I think the fuel savings is the thing everybodys chasing in the industry, he said. I think having this technology to be able to potentially save 30% on your fuel economy is second to none, and its an innovation that has not been done before.

However, when asked about the fuel economy, Knowles and Pettit both said testing thus far has not really focused on the efficiency numbers.

Pettit told HDT early last month that PAM was scheduled to receive an updated production version of the system on its truck mid-month. I think well be a little closer to what is anticipated for the fuel savings, he said. We werent really close as far as fuel savings proposed numbers with the [pre-production] test unit, because they were working out the kinks and making sure all the hardware was up to speed and ready to be used.

Were excited to really put it through its paces and see how its going to be best used in our fleets and what kind of numbers we can get utilizing it with our freight.

It adds about 800 pounds to the weight of the truck. Photo: Evan Lockridge

The brains of the system

Key to the performance of the Hyliion system is its computer brain. Kasee explained that the Hyliion controls are a passive listener on the vehicles CANBUS. So we can see what theyre doing, but we dont undo what theyre doing. 

The Hyliion 6X4HE, Kasee explained, looks at how much energy it has stored, and at the topology of the road in front of it, and determines how to take that energy and apply it for the best fuel savings.

If you have a road thats up and down and up and down with smaller inclinations and declinations, then its pretty simple how we drive the energy into the motor and create energy on the downhill side to replenish that. If its a steeper hill, like a mountain, it applies it a little bit differently to try to keep that engine in the sweet spot.

In fact, she said, on some steep inclines the system may not stay on during the entire incline. In order to be able to power up long mountainous grades, it would have required a larger battery that would reduce the available cargo payload too much. So its more of an assist than a pure power play.

Those electronic controls are still being fine-tuned. As with any algorithm-based product, the more data you have, the more performance you can eke out of the hardware. So whats really critical to us is that we keep growing that database so we can keep tuning how the system reacts to elevation changes and to what the tractors are doing.

Hyliion is running further tests with the updated production units on the first three trucks, and more fleets are going to participate, she said. In addition, Hyliion is putting the system on three new Peterbilt trucks it has purchased. It will lend them to fleets to try in their operations without having to retrofit one of their own trucks.

Pronounced HIGH-lee-on, Hyliion is a true start-up company, less than three years old, the brainchild of some mechanical engineers who wondered why there were hybrid cars but not hybrid big rigs. They werent from the trucking industry, but have drawn heavily on the expertise of fleets near the companys Pennsylvania headquarters. Healy sees being an outsider as an advantage rather than a drawback: Since we all come from different backgrounds, we bring technology used in other industries to the trucking industry in a very unique way.
Tulsas Future III, the third phase of a Tulsa Regional Chamber-led regional economic development plan, helped create 4,897 direct jobs in 2017, an increase of nearly 30 percent over 2016, the Chamber said Tuesday.

Since its inception in 2005, The Tulsas Future plan has provided support for the creation of more than 53,000 local jobs.

There has been a tremendous amount of collaboration, and Tulsa has really transformed itself in the timespan of Tulsas Future, Brien Thorstenberg, senior vice president of economic development for the chamber, said in a statement. In the same way, Tulsas Future has transformed from its first two phases.

Now two years into our third phase, Tulsas Future III focuses on more directly measurable goals and continues to exceed our benchmarks for economic growth. 2017 was no different.

Recent highlights of Tulsas Future support include assistance with DISH Networks expansion, which added 250 new jobs; Ingredions move to Oklahoma (60 jobs); and Greenheck Groups manufacturing campus (75 jobs).

The significance of pursuing primary jobs is that they create other jobs in the economy, Thorstenberg said. Tulsas Future supports Tulsa regional businesses directly and indirectly to add actual billions in labor income and billions more to the overall economy.

An analysis of the economic impact of Tulsas Future shows 4,897 quality jobs created last year, infusing an estimated $536.4 million of labor income into the regional economy in 2017.

These statistics solely represent jobs at companies with which we have actively worked and which are actually in our region, Thorstenberg said. They have all been possible through collaborative efforts with our regional partners, including municipalities, tribes, educational institutions and workforce organizations, among others. This collaborative approach has been an important component that sets us apart from the majority of cities competing for the same jobs.

Tulsas Future had a significant increase in requests for proposals in 2017, including 11 in October. The increase in RFPs suggests that economic development activity likely will remain strong this year.
A woman was fatally shot early Monday outside an east Tulsa convenience store, and a man was later arrested after being tracked to an apartment complex.

Police identified the dead woman as Ashley Tobey, 32, and the alleged gunman as Ty Rutledge, 23.

Tobey reportedly arrived in a car at a QuikTrip store at 10220 E. 31st St. about 4 a.m. for what police described as a passenger exchange.

What weve heard is somebody came out of the victims car and got into the suspects car, Tulsa Police Sgt. Dave Walker said. That exchange happened without incident.

At some point, Tobey exited her car and Rutledge exited the other car from a passenger seat with a shotgun, Walker said.

It was not immediately clear what precipitated the shooting. However, Walker said Tobey and Rutledge appeared to have exchanged words prior to the gunfire.

Rutledge shot Tobey at least once in the torso, Walker said. Investigators reported finding a shotgun shell at the scene.

Rutledge and at least one other person fled west on 31st Street, Walker said.

Police reportedly tracked down the car at an apartment complex in the 4700 block of South Darlington Avenue. While inspecting the vehicle, officers located Rutledge and found a shotgun nearby, investigators said.

The person who fled with Rutledge can assume we know who she is and where she may be located, Walker said.

Walker said there was another passenger in Tobeys vehicle at the time of the shooting.

A security guard arrived at the shooting scene before police and performed CPR on Tobey, Walker said. It was not clear where the guard worked.

Rutledge was arrested about three hours after the shooting and booked into the Tulsa Jail around noon. He is being held without bond on complaints of first-degree murder and possession of a sawed-off shotgun, according to jail records.

The shooting was the citys second homicide of 2018.

Anyone with information may contact Crime Stoppers by phone at 918-596-COPS (2677), online at p3tips.com/918 or through the Tulsa Tips app, which can be downloaded from the Google Play or iTunes stores.

The homicide tip line may also be reached at 918-798-8477 or emails sent to homicide@cityoftulsa.org.
The number of people sentenced to Oklahoma prisons in 2017 fell slightly, but the state remains second in the nation in overall incarceration and could be ranked first by the end of this year.

Oklahoma Department of Corrections data shows that on the last working day of 2017, a total of 28,153 inmates were in state prisons, halfway houses or in jails awaiting transfer to prisons. That's only a few hundred off from the 2010 Census population count for the city of Owasso.

The relatively small change, a less than 1 percent decline from the end of 2016, occurred in the face of nearly a half year of criminal justice reforms approved by voters in November 2016 and some measures passed in the Legislature in 2017.

Advocates of changes in laws to relieve overcrowded prisons have said the passage of State Questions 780 and 781, which took effect July 1, are not enough to turn the tide of heavy incarceration in the state and more reforms are needed.

Oklahoma could end up leading the nation in incarceration rates because Louisiana, which has the highest rate, passed new laws last year that are expected to decrease the number and rate of people imprisoned.

In a recent annual U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Oklahoma ranked first in female incarceration at the end of 2016, with 149 women sentenced to more than a year in prison per 100,000 female residents. The state was second in both male incarceration, with a rate of 1,207, and overall incarceration, with a rate of 673. That compared with Louisianas 760. The national per-capita rate was 450.

Unfortunately, none of this is a surprise, said Corrections Director Joe Allbaugh, He said he expects Oklahomas rate to become the highest because of Louisianas reforms and the limited results of criminal justice reform in our state.

The federal report said that from 2015 to 2016, Oklahomas number of inmates sentenced to at least a year in prison dropped by 5.8 percent, meaning 1,628 fewer sentenced inmates. The Corrections Department disputed the federal figures, saying the report left out inmates in jails awaiting transfer to prisons. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports on its website that it does include such inmates.

The Corrections Department acknowledges Oklahomas national rankings, which derive from the Bureau of Justice Statistics data. In a recent interview, Allbaugh pointed especially to the states incarceration of males, who comprise 88 percent of the prison population.

Were No. 2 in males right now, but were soon to claim the No. 1 spot in the male category, Allbaugh said.

The reforms in Louisiana are expected to reduce that states prison population by 10 percent in the next decade. Reforms include lower minimum sentences and greater eligibility for parole. The impact has already been seen in Louisiana, with the early release of about 1,900 nonviolent offenders in November.

Kevin Armstrong, president of OK Cure, a Tulsa-based criminal justice reform advocacy group, suggested Oklahoma look to Louisiana as an example of how to reduce the prison population, in particular sentence reductions.

Im tired of being the worst in the nation in this area and we want to move past that, he said.

In many ways, momentum has swung in that direction.

State Question 780, which passed with 58 percent of the vote in 2016, made simple possession of any drug and certain property crimes misdemeanors, with the goal of imprisoning fewer people. SQ 781, which won with 56 percent, is to use any savings from that reduction to fund mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs. Many business, civic and government leaders have advocated for criminal justice changes, saying too many non-violent offenders are behind bars and both the human and financial costs to the state are onerous.

It may be too early to assess the ultimate impact of the state questions on incarceration. But despite their passage, (incarceration) growth is expected to continue, costing the state over $1.9 billion in the next 10 years unless further changes are made, said a study by the Oklahoma Justice Reform Task Force, assembled by Gov. Mary Fallin.

Advocates for further changes in the system will be watching the upcoming legislative session. Last year, a slate of criminal justice reform bills largely failed to advance but are still in play, to be taken up when the Legislature convenes Feb. 5. Of the 12 bills that legislators considered, Fallin signed three into law. Eight bills failed to advance but remain alive.
Update: Broken Arrow Public Schools announced Monday night that classes will be held Tuesday. The story that appears in Tuesday's Tulsa World appears below:

Bitterly cold temperatures and wind chill values prompted officials to close Tulsa Public Schools on Tuesday after areas north and east of the city received up to 3 inches of snow on Monday.

After closely monitoring the forecasts for Tuesday  we have made the decision to close our schools due to the expected extreme temperatures and wind chill, the district said on its Facebook page.

Our decision-making is always guided by the best interests of our children, and this includes keeping them safe as they travel to and from school.

Many area schools also canceled Tuesday classes. Of the suburban schools, Sapulpa announced Monday evening that classes will not be held Tuesday. Broken Arrow was expected to announce whether classes would be held by 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, and Union and Owasso students were already scheduled to be off so teachers can attend professional development sessions Tuesday.

Additionally, Meals on Wheels of Metro Tulsa will not be delivering meals on Tuesday due to the cold.

Jenks Public Schools announced on its website that its Tuesday classes will be held and that buses will run as scheduled.

Tuesday is forecast to be sunny after a morning low of 4 degrees. The high is expected to be only about 19 degrees in Tulsa, forecasters said, with a low Wednesday morning of 2 degrees.

Wind chill values are forecast to be minus 3 to minus 13 degrees on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service in Tulsa.

Conditions are just going to be brutal, said Joe Sellers, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Tulsa.

Definitely limit any outdoor exposure. Layer up, he said.

Sellers said Tuesdays forecast is the coldest for the Tulsa area this year since Jan. 1 and the coldest since Jan. 6, 2014, when the low was -2.

Much of the state is under a wind chill advisory until noon Tuesday.

The Tulsa metro area was spared the slick and hazardous roads that came with snowfall in areas north and east of the city on Monday.

A weather-related crash involving two or three tractor-trailer rigs and a car shut down the eastbound lanes of the Will Rogers Turnpike east of Miami, Oklahoma, near the Missouri border, for several hours on Monday.

Traffic was backed up for miles following the crash, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol said.

Miami had 3 inches of snow on Monday, with other areas near the Kansas border and northeast of Tulsa receiving less, Sellers said.

The Oklahoma Department of Transportation said slick and hazardous driving conditions were reported on highways in Craig, Delaware, Nowata, Osage, Ottawa and Washington counties.

If travel is necessary in northeast Oklahoma  drivers are urged to use extreme caution, especially on bridges and overpasses, ODOT said.

Oklahoma Department of Transportation crews will continue plowing and applying salt and sand in impacted areas throughout (Monday) evening.

Temperatures will gradually warm throughout the week, with highs in the low 60s by Saturday, forecasters said.
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Charles and Catherine have been hosting Hussein, 19, from Ethiopia, since October 2016. Hussein said he had an extremely difficult journey fleeing his home, but hopes to move forward with his life in the UK.  UNHCR/Aubrey Wade

LONDON, United Kingdom - Great British Welcome, a series of photographs and texts portraying refugees and their hosts at home in Britain, will be on display at St Martin-the-Fields in London until mid March.

The collection helps demonstrate that even as the numbers displaced by war and persecution have surged, Europeans have shown compassion, hope and humanity by opening their homes to refugees, helping to bridge cultural divides and break down language barriers.

The show is the UK chapter of No Stranger Place, an exhibition of photographs and stories of refugees and hosts across Europe. It offers visitors a personal insight into their lives together. The series was developed by the photographer Aubrey Wade with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. It includes portraits from Germany, Sweden, France and Austria and will run from January 16 to March 16 in the Courtyard of St Martin-the-Fields, by Trafalgar Square, London.

The enduring impression this project has left on me is the way in which the lives of both the hosts and the refugees are positively enriched by the experience of living with each other, Wade said. It really is win-win.

The UK studies range from a young Muslim from Syria, staying with a Jewish family in Cambridge, to an elderly gentleman from Eritrea, who has found shelter and avoided homelessness in Birmingham.

The Goldhills welcomed Faraj, 21, into their Cambridge home. He fled war-torn Aleppo in 2012. He comes from a very orthodox Islamic background and then he comes to a very Jewish family, said Simon Goldhill, professor of Greek literature at Kings College, Cambridge University. He prays five times a day and then comes to synagogue with us and helps the rabbi. This is a testament to who Faraj is. He sees our differences, but never as an issue.

In Britain, the project received invaluable support from Refugees at Home, a charity connecting those with a spare room in their home with asylum-seekers and refugees who badly need accommodation.

There is a real sense of civic-mindedness and support for refugees at the grass roots level in Britain, said Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCRs UK Representative. Refugees at Home and the hosts it links to refugees are testament to that.

About Aubrey Wade

Aubrey Wade uses documentary photography to explore complex social issues, seeking visual approaches to storytelling that help audiences connect with his subjects and their experiences. He works internationally on long-term documentary projects, as well as with leading publications and NGOs. He is represented by Panos Pictures.

For Further Information Contact:
Social worker Emily Reynolds and her boyfriend Gijs Van Amelsvoort are hosting Areej from Sudan. The three spend time together watching movies and sharing meals.  UNHCR/Aubrey Wade

LONDON  Opening ones home  and life  to someone who has been forced to flee their own country is not a decision to be taken lightly. But, as a new photographic exhibition on refugee-hosting in Britain demonstrates, it can bring real benefits to both parties.

Offering a room to a refugee can help them find their feet and better integrate in their new country, a process that can prove alienating and confusing. And for those wanting to do their part for the refugee crisis, it is a tangible, meaningful and potentially life-changing gesture. Often, bonds are forged that stand the test of time.

The most lovely, surprising thing that happened is that we became friends, Emily Reynolds, 28, said of her experience in London hosting sassy Areej, a refugee who fled Sudan needing international protection.

This and other personal stories are captured in Great British Welcome, the British chapter of No Stranger Place, an exhibition of photographs and stories portraying refugees and their hosts at home across Europe. The series was developed by the photographer Aubrey Wade in partnership with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

"The lives of both the hosts and the refugees are positively enriched by the experience of living with each other.

Wade went to meet and photograph some of the British hosts, whose generosity of spirit is helping to transform the lives of those who have forced to flee, giving them the chance to start a new life in the UK.

The enduring impression this project has left on me is the way in which the lives of both the hosts and the refugees are positively enriched by the experience of living with each other, Wade said. It really is win-win.

The show will run for two months, from January 16 to March 16, in the Courtyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the parish church of Britains royal family and prime minister, located by Trafalgar Square, London.

The exhibition offers visitors a personal insight into hosts and refugees lives together.

One family, the Goldhills, have welcomed Faraj, 21, into their Cambridge home. He fled war-torn Aleppo in 2012.

He comes from a very orthodox Islamic background and then he comes to a very Jewish family, said Simon Goldhill, a professor of Greek literature at Kings College, Cambridge University. He prays five times a day and then comes to synagogue with us and helps the rabbi. This is a testament to who Faraj is. He sees our differences, but never as an issue.

Simons daughter Sarah, 27, said Faraj completely lifts me up out of my mundane day and grumpiness.

The collection helps show that even as the numbers displaced by war and persecution have surged, Europeans have shown compassion, hope and humanity by opening their homes to refugees, helping to bridge cultural divides and break down language barriers. The exhibition includes portraits from Germany, Sweden, France and Austria.

"Sometimes I think too much, get sad, and cant sleep. But generally I am happy now."

In Britain, the project received invaluable support from Refugees at Home, a charity connecting those with a spare room in their home with asylum-seekers and refugees who badly need accommodation.

There is a real sense of civic-mindedness and support for refugees at the grass roots level in Britain, said Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCRs UK Representative. Refugees at Home, and the hosts it links to refugees, are testament to that.

The exhibition also helps show that refugees are normal people with everyday issues.

One host, Catharine Elliott, has been hosting Hussein, 20, from Ethiopia, since October 2016, since her boys left home.

The difference between London-born and Ethiopia-born teenage boys is minimal. Teenage boys the world over are the same. They dont realize sheets need changing and that laundry doesnt walk away on its own, she said. You just have to train them in the nicest way.

Husseins journey to the UK was extremely difficult, but he has found a measure of stability.

I often wake up scared because when I escaped through Libya they were shooting people in front of me, he said. It was too much. Sometimes I think too much, get sad, and cant sleep. But generally I am happy now.
Roussel, who is from Syria and has found refuge in Switzerland, loves to dance.  UNHCR/Humans of Amsterdam and Fetching_Tigerss with some edits using a photo by Image Source Trading Ltd/Shutterstockcom

LAUSANNE, Switzerland  At first, 10-year-old Roussel did not believe her friends and cousins when they told her that her home in Syria had been destroyed. When she saw a photograph, she knew it was true.

I felt very sad and disappointed, she recalls.

However, even a devastating war at home and the desperate search for safety on another continent have not stopped Roussel from growing and dreaming.

Four years after she and her family fled home and found refuge in Switzerland, Roussel is busy dancing, singing, making friends, speaking French and learning to ski. She is so well-liked that she may soon become the new class president at school.

I want to become a top model."

I am not sure what a class president does but a lot of kids voted for me, she says in a new photography series called the Dream Diaries. That makes me really proud.

The Dream Diaries features 12 refugee and asylum-seeking children in Europe who reveal their hopes and dreams from the safety of their new homes.

The series was produced by photographer Debra Barraud, her colleague Benjamin Heertje, online graphic artist Annegien Schilling, film-maker Kris Pouw and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

Amid war and upheaval, Roussel often took refuge in her imagination. Switzerland, in offering her real safety, may help to make her dreams a reality.

I want to become a top model, says Roussel. I also really like to create things, to let my imagination work.

I am very happy to have my family with me."

More than half of the worlds refugees are children and many will spend their entire childhoods away from home. However, children are resilient and with help they can find ways to cope and look forward to the future.

When children flee their home countries they leave everything behind, except their hopes and dreams, says Barraud, whose Humans of Amsterdam photography project has more than 400,000 Facebook followers. Through the project, we saw the strength of these children and how, with the right support, they can achieve anything.

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 UNHCRs social media accounts.

Right now, the most important thing for Roussel is that her family are together.

I am very happy to have my family with me, she says. I am very grateful for their support, for the fact that they are here close to me when I'm sad. I really love them and thank them for that.

See more stories from The Dream Diaries
Mohamad Kashim (40) and his daughter Purmin (2) are among thousands of new Rohingya refugee arrivals crossing the border from Myanmar to Bangladesh near near Anjuman Para village.  UNHCR/Roger Arnold

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, notes yesterdays (15 January) meeting of the Joint Working Group on returns between the Governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar, in Naypiydaw, Myanmar. They reportedly discussed the implementation of their bilateral arrangement signed on 23 November 2017 on the return of refugees who have been arriving from Rakhine State in Myanmar into Bangladesh since 25 August. UNHCR underscores the importance of the dialogue between the two States at the core of which is the right of refugees to voluntarily return home. To ensure that the refugees are heard and their protection guaranteed in Bangladesh and on return in Myanmar, we are willing to be part of these discussions.

UNHCR understands that in yesterdays discussions, Bangladesh and Myanmar focused on the modalities for the return of refugees to Myanmar. In any refugee situation, UNHCR hopes that refugees will be able to return home when they themselves choose to. Before considering return to Myanmar, some Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have informed UNHCR staff that they would need to see positive developments in relation to their legal status and citizenship, the security situation in Rakhine State, and their ability to enjoy basic rights back home.

Major challenges have to be overcome. These include ensuring that refugees are informed about the situation in their areas of origin and potential return and consulted on their wishes; that their safety is ensured throughout - on departure, in transit and on return; and that the environment in the areas of return is conducive for safe and sustainable return.

In this context, we have observed that the Government of Myanmar has endorsed the recommendations of the Rakhine Advisory Commission (RAC) lead by Kofi Annan and reiterated its commitment in the bilateral Arrangement with the Government of Bangladesh. A comprehensive implementation of the Rakhine Advisory Commission recommendations is essential to ensure sustainable return. These stress the importance of ensuring peace and security for all communities in Rakhine State, reducing communal divisions, and achieving solutions for the legal and citizenship status of Muslim communities. We look to Myanmar to urgently implement these recommendations.

In Myanmar, UNHCR and our partners need urgent, unhindered access in Rakhine State, in order to assess the situation and provide support to those in need who are still in Rakhine and to help with rebuilding efforts. While a few agencies have regained limited access in the northern part of Rakhine State, UNHCR staff are not currently authorised to travel outside Maungdaw town.

Meanwhile humanitarian efforts continue in Bangladesh. Over the weekend, UNHCR and our partners started relocating more than 9,400 refugees who had been living in isolated border locations in Bangladesh, to Kutupalong refugee camp.

These refugees had initially chosen to stay near the border to remain close to their homes. Their isolated location also meant that they received little assistance and had no access to informal education or medical facilities. The nearest hospital for emergency cases was more than an hour away.

They agreed to move to Kutupalong refugee settlement where they could more easily access assistance and basic services.

In the last two days more than four hundred of these refugees have been taken by buses to Kutupalong camp where they underwent medical checks, and received hot meals, emergency relief items as well as shelter kits. They told UNHCR staff they were very happy to be in the camp with other members of their community, to get help and be able to sleep in peace. The relocation movements will continue over the next few weeks.

For more information on this topic, please contact:
Helena community members came together on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to learn and reflect, after white supremacists threatened to march in Whitefish a year ago.

The threatened armed march was meant to bring skinheads from California to protest a Jewish community member accused of hurting a business owned by the mother of Richard Spencer, a white nationalist leader.

But Eric Ward, a civil rights activist and executive director of the Western States Center who gave a lecture in Helena Monday night called Know Thy Enemy to Unite for Justice, said the display of anti-Semitism in Whitefish isnt something to take lightly.

Monday's event was organized by the Montana Human Rights Network in response to the threatened march in Whitefish and national events, such as the murder of a woman protesting a white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, this summer.

After a year of intense upheaval, including the murder of a civil rights activist at a White Nationalist march in Charlottesville ... this event is more timely than ever, Rachel Carroll Rivas, co-director of the Montana Human Rights Network, said.

Carroll Rivas said knowledge is crucial to help stop the march toward an even more segregated society.

Ward documented his first white nationalist rally in 1990. As executive director of the Western States Center, Ward works toward social, economic, racial and environmental justice in the region.

Ward reminded people of the entire civil rights movement that made Martin Luther King Jr.s work possible.

Thats what were celebrating today. That transformation, he said. Its not just one person that makes a difference. Its people standing up and coming together in communities that make a difference.

Ward explained the difference between white supremacists and a second movement that has emerged since the civil rights movement. Ward said white supremacists rebranded, calling themselves white nationalists with anti-Semitism at the center of its movement.

Theyre interested in creating something new, he said. The white nationalist movement is about ridding this country of Jews and people of color altogether. ... Its about creating a white-only ethnostate.

Ward said its crucial for people to not dismiss white nationalists mobilizing. He said they are not simply spreading hate. Instead, they are interested in seizing state power.

As disturbing and disruptive as the white nationalist movement can be in America, they dont come to our towns bringing racism and anti-Semitism. ... They simply organize the bigotry that already exists, Ward said. Our best defense against these movements is by addressing those disparities before they are exploited.

Its important to remember actions, like the two men who were murdered by a white nationalist on a light rail in Portland, Ward said. The men were trying to intervene when a white nationalist was harassing people of color. After the fact, white nationalists held a demonstration, calling it a free speech rally.

When a citizen asked a white nationalist why they would choose Portland, a city with a reputation as liberal and diverse, Ward said, the person was told the black population of Portland is shrinking. By driving away the black population through gentrification, Ward said, the white nationalist said the people of Portland were doing "what we could only dream about."

Ward said the story provides some answers about how people need to respond to this moment. He said people should understand white nationalism is a social movement, different from other forms of systemic discrimination.

Each calls for a set of different tactics and strategies, he said. But we cant ignore either.

He said it is important to understand that white nationalists benefit from the ability to build intimacy across lines of race, religion, gender and geography. Ward said its necessary to deal with the inequality happening.

We are the region that defeated white nationalists in the 90s, he said. We are the region that is likely going to defeat white nationalists again, but also across the nation. That is the job before us.

After the lecture, Ward was joined on stage by Helena Public Schools Board of Education trustee Sanjay Talwani, retired pastor David Andersen and Jenn Battles, an environmentalist in the community, to answer questions.

Andersen asked Ward what the West has to offer specifically.

Ward said he thinks the region understands complexity and is able to discern white nationalists arent monsters hiding under the bed, but are instead people in everyday life. He said instead of shunning white nationalists, the West tends to come up with other strategies that tend to be deeper and more long-lasting. He also said people in the West are more geographically isolated and have had to work harder to build coalitions.

The lecture was followed by a screening of the documentary Oklahoma: A Cautionary Tale of Hate in America. The film looks back at Timothy McVeigh, who was influenced by radical right ideas and ultimately committed a terrorist attack in 1995, detonating a truck bomb outside the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City. The makers of the documentary aim to remind people that with a virulent strain of anti-government anger still with us, the film is both a cautionary tale and an extremely timely warning.
Simon Goldhill, a professor at Cambridge University, his wife Shoshana, a lawyer, and their student daughter Sarah are hosting Syrian refugee Faraj.  UNHCR/Aubrey Wade

CAMBRIDGE, England  The Goldhills have always kept an open home, welcoming students and friends to stay. However, for the first time, the devout Jewish family is now hosting a refugee, a conservative young Muslim from Syria.

He comes from a very orthodox Islamic background and then he comes to a very Jewish family, said Simon Goldhill, 60, a professor of Greek literature at Kings College, Cambridge University.

He prays five times a day and then comes to synagogue with us and helps the rabbi. This is a testament to who Faraj is. He sees our differences, but never as an issue.

Faraj, 21, fled war-torn Aleppo in 2012 with his family. They went first to Egypt and, a few months later, Faraj travelled alone to Turkey, where he had friends and where he was able to work in a factory in Ankara for two years.

I am not a stranger here. I am finally free."

Barely making ends meet, he and a cousin left for Europe reached the United Kingdom in August 2015. He was granted refugee status three months later and started volunteering and cooking at a nearby church, where he made new friends.

One friend introduced him to an organization called Refugees At Home, which matches refugees with hosts, and in September 2016 he was welcomed by the Goldhills. Nervous at first, Faraj said his worries evaporated when he met Simon's wife, Shoshana.

This is my home, he said. I am not a stranger here. I am finally free. Here, I am the Faraj that I have always wanted to be."

UK: Jewish family open doors to Syrian refugee (Tiger Nest Films)

He enjoys cooking and is always bringing back new spices to experiment with. He is close to Shoshana and her daughter Sarah, 27, a medical student, who says she is thrilled to finally have a younger brother.

I am very protective of him, she said. We hang out a lot and he just fits in so easily with all my friends. Its impossible not to adore him.

He completely lifts me up out of my mundane day and grumpiness. He always sees the positive side of things. Not to mention I now probably eat three times my body weight each day of hummus.

His gentleness is a hard-earned gentleness."

Simon and Shoshana both speak of how open-minded and positive Faraj is despite his experiences.

Not too many people walk around Europe as a refugee and, I mean, he has every reason to feel the world has treated him badly, but is still so positive, open, gentle and optimistic, said Simon. His gentleness is a hard-earned gentleness.

Shoshana said he quickly became part of the family. On the one hand, I know he has a really tough core given what he has been through and how hes been on his own since he was 17, but there is a real innocence about him, she said. I worry when he goes out.

The Goldhills have told Faraj he can stay as long as he wants. He and the family are hoping he will continue his English-language education and go on to university. Faraj says he would like to become a psychologist.

This story is part of a series entitled No Stranger Place, which was developed and photographed by Aubrey Wade in partnership with UNHCR, profiling refugees and their hosts across Europe. More than a year after the drowning of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, thousands of people have come together to bridge cultural divides and language barriers, embracing compassion, hope and humanity  even as some European governments continue to build obstacles. Their generosity is an example to the world.
SC support for efforts to restore peace in Afghanistan

United Nations, Jan 16 (UNI) The United Nations Security Council, during a weekend mission to Afghanistan, reiterated its support for the Central Asian countrys efforts to restore peace, stability and progress.

Led by Kazakhstan, the delegation included representatives of the United States, Bolivia, Cote dIvoire, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Sweden, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and China.

Council members aimed to get a first-hand account of progress made by the Afghan National Unity Government, with the assistance of the international community, in addressing a wide range of interconnected challenges and to learn how the Security Council could further assist efforts on the ground.
Published: January 16, 2018

CEOs of Tampa General Hospital, Fitlife Foods and Tampa Electric to Speak at UTs Next Business Network Symposium Jan. 23

The leaders of Tampa General Hospital, Fitlife Foods and Tampa Electric are slated to speak at the next Business Network Symposium at The University of Tampa on Tuesday, Jan. 23. The event, which is free and open to the public, begins with a continental breakfast at 7:15 a.m. with the program running from 7:459 a.m. on the ninth floor of the Vaughn Center, 401 W. Kennedy Blvd.



John Couris joined Tampa General Hospital as president and CEO on Aug. 28, 2017. He previously served for seven years as CEO and president of Jupiter Medical Center, and spent 10 years at Bay Care Health System, where he was chief operating officer at Morton Plant Mease North Bay Hospital and vice president at Morton Plant Mease Health Care.



David Osterweil is founder and CEO of Tampa-based Fitlife Foods, the leader in omni-channel fresh, made-from-scratch prepared meals. Founded in 2011, the brand has grown to 15 locations and 200 team members, and also includes a robust e-commerce platform. It has become the largest exclusive independent retailer of fresh prepared meals in the Southeast.



Nancy Tower was appointed president and CEO of Tampa Electric on Dec. 1, 2017. In her previous role as chief development officer for Emera, she focused on mergers and acquisitions and the advancement of strategic growth projects. Tower played a lead role in the deal that brought TECO Energy into the Emera group of companies.



The Business Network Symposium is hosted by The University of Tampa Board of Fellows and the presenting sponsor is TD Bank, Americas Most Convenient Bank. Other sponsors include the Tampa Bay Business Journal and Sodexo Campus Services.



The Board of Fellows holds this networking event three times a year to allow businesses that are well known, changing or new to the Tampa Bay area the opportunity to share their accomplishments and plans with the business community. The final symposium in the 2017-2018 series is scheduled for April 24.



For more information or to RSVP, go to www.ut.edu/businesssymposium or contact Ashton Connell, director of stewardship and donor relations, at aconnell@ut.edu.
(Jan. 16, 2018, Updated 3:45pm) -- As the San Antonio and Hill Country areas begin to dry out from this weeks freezing precipitation, all UTSA campuses will delay opening until noon on Wednesday, Jan. 17. Classes, scheduled events and normal business operations will resume at that time at the Main, Downtown and Hemisfair Campuses.

Above freezing temperatures are expected by midday Wednesday. However, the UTSA community is urged to use good personal judgment in determining whether it is safe to drive to campus. Conditions may vary across the region.



Students should contact their professors and instructors directly to discuss any questions they have about class attendance and assignments. UTSA faculty should consult with their department chairs, and UTSA staff with their supervisors, if there are travel concerns.

In the event of any change in weather conditions that might affect the university's operations, information will be provided at:
Weston County Food Safety and Nutrition Educator Receives UW Extensions Highest Honor

Vicki Hayman

Whether handing out recipes and food samples at farmers markets; teaching menu planning and how to read a nutrition label; or team teaching food safety practices with the local health inspector, Vicki Hayman, Weston County nutrition and food safety educator for the northeast area of the state, engages with people to help them improve their lives.

Hayman was awarded the Jim DeBree Excellence in Extension Award -- University of Wyoming Extensions highest honor -- during extensions annual conference in Laramie last month.

As a member of extensions Healthy Eating Focus team, Hayman teaches food preparation skills; dining with diabetes and other chronic diseases; and the Real Food program, all with hands-on learning and resources to ensure healthy changes last after the end of class.

Vicki includes innovative approaches and multiple teaching styles to expand her audience and increase program impacts, says nominator Denise Smith, nutrition and food safety educator in Niobrara County.

Audiences can open a newspaper, turn on the radio or catch a podcast, blog or Pinterest post for new ideas and Haymans take on eating for health, fitness and enjoyment.

She prepares a biweekly column for the Weston County Gazette in Upton, The Sundance Times and The High Plains Sentinel in Wright. She submits a monthly column for The Newsletter Journal in Newcastle and articles for UW Extensions quarterly Backyards and Barnyards magazine for small-acreage landowners.

Publications and curricula co-developed or written by Hayman include Cooking It Up! Diabetes-Healthy Recipes Everyone Will Love, Cooking It Up! Friendly One-Pot Meals from Your Pressure Cooker, the Real Food curriculum, Calcium Science Investigation curriculum and the Wyoming 4-H Fabric and Fashion Manual.

Hayman promotes interaction and cooperation among agencies and organizations through a variety of roles, Smith says. These include adviser, coalition member, facilitator and liaison.

The Jim DeBree Award is named in honor of the retired Wyoming extension administrator and given to those who demonstrate a high level of professionalism, performance and leadership within their program areas and communities.

Hayman joined UW Extension in 1997 and is based in Newcastle.


Panchos Mexican Restaurant, located in Downtown Summerlin, will celebrate Valentines Day with a Tequila for Two margarita special available exclusively on Wednesday, Feb. 14 (Pictured: The Strawberry Kiss  Photo courtesy of Panchos Mexican Restaurant).

Singles and couples alike may enjoy the Tequila for Two margarita special, featuring the Strawberry Kiss margarita: a 40-ounce margarita for two, made with Sauza Blue Reposado tequila, triple sec, sweet and sour and strawberry syrup, priced at $23.95.

Modeled after a classic Mexican hacienda, Panchos romantic decor will set the date night mood with colorful Mexican tiles, stained glass windows, lush greenery and a bubbling, oversized fountain. In addition to a stunning setting, guests will be entertained by the musical stylings of pianist Grant Peacock from 5 until 8 p.m.
Firefighters rescue a man following the collapse of a building at the Paardenmarkt in Antwerp, after an explosion. (DIRK WAEM/BELGA/AFP)

Police said emergency services were in contact with three people who are conscious under the debris in addition to the five people who were hurt.

They added that up to 20 people could have been injured.

Police said the cause of the explosion was not related to terrorism while Belgian media said it was the result of a gas explosion.

The Paardenmarkt area in central Antwerp was completely closed off as emergency personnel continued rescue and other operations, police said in a statement.

Two other buildings were damaged in the explosion, police said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) recently released a review of the status of lynx, which were listed as Threatened on the Endangered Species list in 2000. Now, in the new world of Trumps fact-free, anti-science, war-on-wildlife administration, the FWS recommends removing lynx from Endangered Species Act protections completely, writing: Considering the available information, we found no reliable information that the current distribution and abundance of resident lynx in the contiguous United States are substantially reduced from historical conditions.

The agency does not even attempt to provide the public with an estimated current population number of how many lynx there are because the agency has no idea. The key phrase here is considering the available information, and the shocking truth is that the Fish and Wildlife Service has no idea how many lynx there are for one simple reason; the agency no longer monitors lynx populations! What the agency, if it was being truthful, should have written in their report is: Because we no longer monitor the population of lynx we have no evidence of how many lynx there are and therefore also have no evidence that lynx numbers are declining or increasing or doing anything at all. Also, because we have decided to ignore all of the historical records of lynx presence, we have no evidence of any change from historic conditions."

Montana has more lynx than any other state in the Lower 48. Yet, given that lynx can no longer be found in much of their historical western Montana habitats, and given that the number of lynx in Montana is known to be decreasing in areas such as the Seeley Lake area according to researchers who actually look for lynx, a fact-based, rational agency action would apply the conservation biology precautionary principle" and increase protections for lynx, not remove them completely.

In the world of real science, the last estimate of the number of lynx in Montana by Dr. John Squires, a Forest Service lynx scientist, was that there were about 300 lynx in Montana with the populations declining in most parts of the state. For example, until 2010 there was still a resident population of lynx in the Garnet Mountains northeast of Missoula. They had most likely been living there since the last Ice Age, but after the latest Forest Service logging projects, not a single lynx could be found there. Not one.

Seventeen years ago lynx trapping was outlawed due to the Endangered Species listing, but lynx numbers continued to decline because past and current logging has destroyed the dense mature and old growth forests upon which they rely for reproduction and survival. Lynx can also no longer be found in the Gallatin Range and lynx numbers are falling in the Seeley-Swan Valley, which is the largest lynx population in Montana.

What the FWS should have done to determine the historical conditions of lynx was ask Montanas Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks, which estimated there were 700 to 1,050 lynx throughout western Montana in 1994. With Montana lynx population estimates falling between 57 percent and 71 percent by 2017, the population decline is undeniable.

Additionally, as to habitat, the Fish and Wildlife Services own scientist, Megan Kosterman, found that 50 percent of each lynx home range must be mature, dense forest to provide optimal habitat for lynx to breed and raise kittens, and that no more than 15 percent of each lynx home range should be clear-cut. Not a single National Forest is complying with this recommendation, but somehow, in an Orwellian twist, FWS is arguing that Forest Service management plans are adequate for lynx.

The truth is that FWS is only arguing that lynx should be delisted because of a court deadline this week that required that FWS finally, after 17 years of delay, produce a recovery plan for lynx. Rather than produce the court-ordered recovery plan by the deadline, FWS simply filed a document arguing that lynx no longer need any protections under the Endangered Species Act, and therefore FWS does not need to produce a recovery plan. Thus, FWSs status review is simply a transparent attempt to evade the law by making a drastic, unsupported conclusion to delist. We urge you to contact FWS and demand that they revoke their delisting recommendation and produce the recovery plan that the law requires, and that this rare, elusive, imperiled species needs.

Mike Garrity is the executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
19 foreign investors have lined up to become a strategic investor of EVN Genco 3

According to EVN, as of January 15, the final date to submit applications for the auction, EVN received numerous applications to buy the whole 36 per cent stake of EVN Genco 3.

After the meeting between the leaders of EVN and representatives of seven foreign investors at the EVN office on January 9, the group organised a roadshow in Singapore on January 12 to introduce investment opportunities in EVN Genco 3. The event attracted the participation of 19 foreign investors, many of whom are large-scale groups in Asia as well as around the world, such as GS Energy Corporation, Siemens AG, GE Capital, among others.

The investors raised numerous questions related to the divestment schedule, the deposit volume, the selling price of the stake offered to strategic investors, and the plans to develop EVN Genco 3 after the equitisation.

Dinh Quang Tri, deputy general director of EVN, and Dinh Quoc Lam, general director of EVN Genco 3, answered all investors questions.

After the roadshow, a number of foreign investors expressed desire to become strategic investors of EVN Genco 3.

According to the equitisation plan approved by Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue, EVN will put 267 million shares, or 12.8 per cent of EVN Genco 3s charter capital, on sale at the IPO at the initial price of VND24,600 ($1.08) apiece.

The auction is expected to be organised on February 9. EVN expects to acquire VND6.59 trillion ($290.1 million) in proceeds.

After completing the IPO, EVN will offer 749.1 million shares, equalling 36 per cent of its charter capital, to strategic investors. Interested firms and individuals will have to show proof of solid financial potential and management capacity as well as good relations with large-scale foreign firms. Besides, they have to affirm to accompany Genco 3 for a long time and support the company to develop after the equitisation.

According to plan, EVN will hold 51 per cent of Genco 3 until the end of 2019. From 2020 onwards, EVN will consider decreasing its holdings in Genco 3 to below 50 per cent.
Catalonia's ousted regional president Carles Puigdemont (centre), flanked by 'Junts per Catalonia' - JUNTSXCAT (All for Catalonia) separatist party's member Elsa Artadi (left) and Mayor of Valls Albert Batet, holds his first post-election meeting on Jan 12, 2018. (JOHN THYS/AFP)

Speaking to party members in Madrid, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said Puigdemont had "to be physically present" in Catalonia to take office.

And if that didn't happen, he warned, the central government would maintain the direct rule imposed after Catalan leaders declared independence in October.

Puigdemont is the separatist camp's favoured candidate to lead Catalonia again after pro-independence parties won an absolute majority in regional elections on Dec 21.

But he is in self-imposed exile in Belgium and if he returns, he risks arrest on charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds for his role in the region's failed independence bid.

On Twitter, Puigdemont responded by pointing out to Rajoy that his conservative Popular Party had only "secured four lawmakers on December 21 and continues to govern Catalonia from Madrid."

By contrast, Puigdemont's Together for Catalonia list won 34 seats in the best result for a separatist grouping, with anti-independence party Ciudadanos taking 36.

Ciudadanos, however, does not have enough allies to get a majority while Together for Catalonia will likely join forces with the leftwing ERC, which got 32 seats, and the smaller CUP party, which took four, to get an absolute majority.

REMOTE CONTROL? UNLIKELY

To be elected regional president Puigdemont should, in theory, be present at the parliamentary session where the vote takes place, but he wants to appear by videolink or write a speech and have it read by someone else.

If that is allowed, he could then officially take office from Belgium and try to govern the region remotely.

But legal experts doubt this would be feasible, and even Puigdemont's allies - the leftwing ERC of his former vice-president Oriol Junqueras - are scratching their heads.

ERC spokesman Sergi Sabria said on Monday the parties were looking into all possible ways to have Puigdemont sworn in that wouldn't be branded illegal by the courts in order to end Madrid's direct control as soon as possible.

Madrid's direct rule has proven very unpopular in a region that had enjoyed considerable autonomy before its leaders attempted to break away from Spain.

In response, Rajoy seized control, sacked Catalonia's government, dissolved its parliament and called snap elections in December.

On Wednesday, the Catalan parliament holds its first session, and it has until Jan 31 to hold a debate on choosing a regional president.
The incident occurred at around 4:00 pm on January 14 in Dai Ha Commune, Kien Thuy District, Hai Phong City, according to Bui Duc Thao, chairman of the Peoples Committee in Kien Thuy.

A damaged pickup truck was abandoned following a fatal incident in the northern Vietnamese city of Hai Phong on January 14, 2018.

N.T.T.D. and C.T.N.Q., both 15 year-old ninth-grade students at a local middle school, were walking down Provincial Highway 603 when a pickup truck, whose license plate number is 15C - 263.52, struck them from behind.

Both victims were thrown to the side of the road and seriously injured, later succumbing to their wounds in hospital.

After striking the two schoolgirls, the pickup truck continued traveling toward Thuy Huong Commune, hitting a truck and a taxi before coming to a stop.

The driver quickly exited the vehicle and fled the scene on foot.

Severe damage was caused to the front end of the truck, to the taxi, as well as to the pickup itself.

The damaged taxi that was struck by the pickup truck in Hai Phong on January 14, 2018.

An investigation is underway by police in Hai Phong to determine the cause and a manhunt has been launched to capture the driver.

Local authorities have extended their condolences and offered support to the families of the deceased.
Vietnam's first LEED Silver certified office building kicked off construction

Tower 1, with a gross floor area of approximately 12,000 square metres over six floors, is expected to start operations from first quarter of 2019 and will comprise of office spaces with international-standard specifications and property management services.

Developed with the consultancy of Sydney-based PTW Architects (architecture), CPG Consultants (civil, structural and MEP), Colin K. Okashimo and Associates (landscaping), G-Energy Global (sustainability) and constructed by main contractor Coteccons, Tower 1 is the first LEED Silver certified office building in District 9, Ho Chi Minh City.

Leasing for Tower 1 is open. Target customers include companies in information technology, business process outsourcing and finance that are looking for expansion, relocation or consolidation, as well as companies looking for big floor plates to improve productivity and working environment, and companies supporting tenants in SHTP.

Koh Mui Kwang, general director of Ascendas Saigon Bund Company Limited, said, We are very excited to celebrate this significant milestone in the development of OneHub Saigon. A campus-style business park, OneHub Saigon will be a hub for everyone, creating spaces that encourage collaboration to facilitate the growth of enterprises and industries in Vietnam. Tenants at Tower 1 can look forward to a premium-quality business space solution that is customisable to their business needs, at a fraction of rental rates in the central business district (CBD).

Tower 1 is already open for leasing

Tran Quang Quan, deputy general director of CotecCons, said, We are glad to be part of this project, OneHub Saigonthe first integrated business park in Ho Chi Minh City. With our credibility, we commit to complete the project on time with high quality.

OneHub Saigon, a joint venture between Ascendas-Singbridge and Saigon Bund Capital Partners, aims to provide a seamless and vibrant work-live-play-learn environment for its tenants and the surrounding community.

The 12-hectare development will comprise of seven office towers, a mixed-use commercial block, work-office home-offices, an education centre, and recreational amenities built with sustainable features. It will also feature designated event spaces and social areas dedicated for networking and relaxation.

Together with well-known international corporations such as Samsung, Intel, Schneider, Sanofi and others located in SHTP, when completed, OneHub Saigon will play an integral role in supporting the business ecosystem.

OneHub Saigon is conveniently connected via Hanoi Highway and is within walking distance to the Metro Station, providing tenants with easy access to key locations such as Tan Son Nhat International Airport and the CBD.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas (centre) arrives for a meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah. (AFP/ABBAS MOMANI)

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories: Palestinian leaders voted on Monday (Jan 15) to call for the suspension of recognition of Israel in a move with potentially deep implications as they met in response to US President Donald Trump's declaration of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

While withdrawing the Palestine Liberation Organisation's recognition of Israel could spark international backlash, it was unclear whether the vote was binding.

A previous vote by the same Palestinian Central Council, a high-ranking arm of the PLO, in 2015 to suspend security coordination with Israel was never implemented. That vote was also reaffirmed on Monday.

However, even if the move goes no further, the vote was another expression of Palestinian fury over Trump's Jerusalem declaration and what they see as the White House's attack on their long bid for statehood.

On Sunday as he opened the meeting, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, who voted in favour of the suspension, called Trump's peace efforts the "slap of the century."

The vote ordered the Palestine Liberation Organisation to suspend its recognition of Israel until it "recognises the state of Palestine", cancels its annexation of east Jerusalem and stops settlement activity, a statement said.

The PLO is considered the official representative of the Palestinians internationally and formalised its recognition of Israel in 1993.

In a statement, the delegates also backed comments on Sunday by Abbas that the Oslo peace accords of the early 1990s, which form the basis of the Palestinians' relations with Israel, were "finished."

Abbas had said that Israel had ended the accords through its actions, referring to activities seen as eroding the possibility of a two-state solution such as persistent settlement building.

REMOVING THE 'MASK'?

There was no immediate Israeli reaction to the vote, but earlier on Monday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Abbas' comments had "torn off" his "mask" as a supposed moderate.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip and does not recognise Israel, appeared to welcome the vote but said in a statement that the "real test" would be "to implement it effectively on the ground and put in place the necessary mechanisms."

The rare meeting of the PCC was called after Trump's controversial December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Palestinians want the annexed eastern sector of the city as the capital of their future state, and Abbas has said Trump's stance means the United States can no longer be the mediator in peace talks with Israel.

The US president has sought to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table, with talks stalled since 2014.

Speaking late Sunday at the opening of the council, which brought together Palestinians from multiple political parties, Abbas told delegates: "We said 'no' to Trump, 'we will not accept your project'."

"The deal of the century is the slap of the century and we will not accept it," the 82-year-old leader added, referring to Trump's pledge to reach the "ultimate deal".

He instead called for an internationally mediated peace process.

THREAT TO CUT AID

The Palestinians' relations with the US leadership have deteriorated rapidly since Trump's election.

He came to power promising to lead the most pro-Israel administration in history, but also to pursue a peace deal.

His envoys, including senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, had been shuttling between the two sides in search of common ground.

But Trump also infuriated the Palestinians by refusing to commit to the idea of an independent Palestinian state, and recently threatened to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid.

The Jerusalem announcement prompted the Palestinians to freeze ties with the administration, and Abbas is expected to shun Vice President Mike Pence when he visits the region next week.

On Sunday night, Abbas slammed the US ambassadors to Israel and the United Nations, David Friedman and Nikki Haley, calling them a "disgrace".

Both Trump appointees have been strong supporters of Israel, with Friedman having backed Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

An indignant Abbas also said that Trump had accused them of refusing to engage in peace negotiations.

"May God demolish your house. When did we refuse?" he said, using a common Arabic curse.

He also said the Oslo accords that led to the creation of his Palestinian Authority and envisioned a final resolution to the conflict were in effect finished.

"I am saying that Oslo, there is no Oslo. Israel ended Oslo," Abbas said.

In response to Abbas's comments, the European Union said its position on the conflict remains "based on the Oslo accords".

"A negotiated two-state solution which fulfils the aspirations of both sides, Israel and Palestine, is the only realistic way of bringing the lasting peace and security that both Israelis and Palestinians deserve," European Commission spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic told reporters in Brussels.

France, which organised an international conference in support of the two-state solution a year ago, issued a similar reaction, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow "understands" Abbas's anger.

"For years they made concessions without receiving anything in return," Lavrov said at an annual press conference in Moscow.

"We constantly hear that the US is about to unveil an important deal that would satisfy all sides. We have not seen this kind of document."
ThaiBev has grand plans for Sabeco this year

This was announced by Koh Poh Tiong, chairman of F&Na member company of Thai Beverage Public Company Limited (ThaiBev)at Sabecos meeting to summarise the business results of 2017 and the development plan for 2018.

Being the large shareholder of Sabeco, we will support the corporation to become the leading brewer in Vietnam. We will take Sabecos products into F&Ns distribution system in Vietnam and other countries, and simultaneously increase Sabecos beer sales in Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, Tiong stated.

With its experience and success in beer production, ThaiBev is considered sufficiently armed to realise the above targets. Notably, Sabeco alone owns 26 manufacturing plants, 10 trading subsidiaries, and 37 branches with 1,200 first-tier beer distributors nationwide.

Meanwhile F&N, especially ThaiBev, is holding either large or controlling stakes in large-scale Vietnamese firms like Vinamilk, Metro Cash & Carry Vietnam, Phu Thais distribution system, as well as five-star Melia hotel.

In 2017, Sabeco reported beer consumption at 1.727 billion litres and an increase of 11 per cent in revenue. The corporations pre-tax profit was VND5.84 trillion ($257.2 million), coming from holding 40 per cent of the beer market. According to experts, in 2018, Sabeco only needs to rearrange its management board and governance methods towards transparency to acquire 1.5 times as much profit than it had in 2017.

Contrary to Sabecos positive business results and hefty targets, Hanoi Beer, Alcohol and Beverage Corporation (Habeco), reported bleak business in 2017. Notably, last year, Habeco only produced 675.7 million litres of beer with a pre-tax profit of VND952 billion ($41.9 million), decreases of 48.3 million litres and VND25.3 billion ($1.1 million) compared to 2016.

According to Nguyen Manh Hung, director of Habeco, the bad weather impacted the companys revenue and profit. Besides, the increasing presence of Habecos competitors like Heineken and Sabeco also contributed to decreasing market share and business performance.

This year, Habeco targets to produce 699.2 million litres of ber, up 4.3 per cent on-year, and to ear VND995 billion ($43.8 million) in pre-tax profit, up 0.3 per cent on-year.

Earlier on December 18, Vietnam Beverage (49 per cent controlled by ThaiBev), won an auction to acquire 343.6 million shares, equivalent to 53.5 per cent, of Sabeco at VND320,000 ($14.09) apiece.

This was the largest share sale in Vietnam to date and possibly the largest in Asia throughout the year.

Vietnam Beverage is wholly-owned by Vietnam F&B Alliance Investment JSC, which is in turn indirectly owned by Beer Co., Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company wholly-owned by ThaiBev.
A construction crane showing the branding of British construction company Carillion is photographed on a building site in central London on January 14, 2018, with the skyline of the British capital in the background including the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament. (Photo: AFP/Daniel Sorabji)

Carillion, which employs 43,000 staff worldwide including 19,500 in Britain, said that the government would nevertheless provide some funding to allow current state projects to continue, following crunch talks over the weekend.

"This is a very sad day for Carillion, for our colleagues, suppliers and customers that we have been proud to serve over many years," company chairman Philip Green said in a statement.

"Over recent months huge efforts have been made to restructure Carillion to deliver its sustainable future... In recent days however we have been unable to secure the funding to support our business plan and it is therefore with the deepest regret that we have arrived at this decision."

Carillion is a major UK government contractor involved in everything from schools to the multi-billion-pound High Speed Two (HS2) rail project.

But it has been struggling for some time and in July last year issued the first of several profit warnings.

Carillion on Monday said "it had no choice but to take steps to enter into compulsory liquidation with immediate effect".

It added: "An application was made to the High Court for a compulsory liquidation of Carillion before opening of business today and an order has been granted to appoint the Official Receiver as the liquidator of Carillion."

Despite the red flags, the government continued to award the company major public contracts, including on the flagship HS2 project, leading to criticism.

Andrew Adonis, who resigned as head of a government-backed infrastructure commission last month, said Sunday that the Carillion crisis raised "big questions" for transport minister Chris Grayling.

Meanwhile Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, called on the government not to bail out the group.

"Can't have privatisation of profit and nationalisation of losses," he tweeted.

Carillion has a wide range of public sector contracts, including providing support services for almost 900 schools and around 50,000 homes for military personnel.

The company, with operations also in Canada and the Middle East, had revenues of 5.2 billion (US$7.1 billion, 5.9 billion euros) last year.

In January, British watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority launched an investigation into its market updates.
The two Vietnamese fishermen arrive in southern coastal Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province on Monday.  VNA/VNS Photo oan Manh Duong

The fishermen, Huynh A Met from the southernmost Ca Mau Province, and Ly Chien, from Mekong Delta Soc Trang Province, were brought back to Viet Nam by a ship of the Maritime Search and Rescue Centre Zone 3.

They were rescued by the ship with the Bahamas flag, MG Neptune, en route to Vung Tau City in Viet Nams southern coastal province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau last Friday.

Met and Chien were among 13 Vietnamese sailors working onboard PAF 4583 of Malaysia, which sank in international waters near Singapore last Thursday.

Eight other Vietnamese sailors were rescued by the ship Asiatic Dawn en route to Malaysias Klang Port and one was rescued by the ship Nordlily on its way to Singapore. All the nine sailors are in a stable health condition, according to the Viet Nam Maritime Search and Rescue Coordination Centre (VIETNAMMRCC), which received notice from its Singaporean counterpart.

The VIETNAMMRCC has requested the Singaporean Centre to search for the two remaining fishermen who are still missing.

The centre said it had been able to contact a sailor named Toan, who was rescued by the Asiatic Dawn. According to Toan, the PAF 4583 vessel belongs to a Vietnamese named Nguyen Van Hau, who lives in Malaysia.
Investors on Saigon Securities Incs trading floor in Ha Noi. - VNS Photo Viet Thanh

The benchmark VN-Index on the HCM Stock Exchange rose 1.27 per cent to close at 1,063.47 points. It gained total 3.7 per cent last week.

The minor HNX-Index on the Ha Noi Stock Exchange added 1.06 per cent to end at 122.03 points after posting a weekly growth of 1.5 per cent at the end of Friday.

More than 359.8 million shares were traded on the two local exchanges, worth VND8.66 trillion (US$385.2 million).

These trading figures were down 11.3 per cent in volume and 6.5 per cent in value compared to the previous weeks average daily numbers.

Across the two local exchanges, there were 248 gaining stocks, 232 declining ones and 115 stocks ending flat.

Large-cap stocks performed well as the VN30 Index, which tracks the performance of the 30 largest shares by market capitalisation, advanced 1.21 per cent to 1,508.60 points with two-thirds of the 30 stocks advancing.

Gainers in the VN30 basket included insurer Bao Viet Holdings (BVH), Vietcombank (VCB), property developer Novaland (NVL), and steel producers Hoa Sen (HSG) and Hoa Phat (HPG). Those stocks jumped at least 3 per cent each.

Among other large-caps that recorded strong growth were petrol dealer Petrolimex (PLX) and budget carrier Vietjet (VJC) after the two stocks were about to be included into the VN30 basket by the HCM Stock Exchange from January 22 to July 20, 2018.

The rubber industry also posted strong growth on Monday as the industry index surged 6.6 per cent, data on vietstock.vn showed. The industry was led by Dong Phu Rubber JSC (DPR) and Phuoc Hoa Rubber JSC (PHR).

According to analysts, the market sentiment will be still dominated by investors expectations for good quarterly and yearly corporate earnings reports as well as firms forecasts for 2018.

Ngo Quoc Hung, analyst at Vietinbank Securities Company told online newspaper VnEconomy that such expectations would keep driving the market up in the short-term.

Corporate earnings reports for the past quarter and the whole year were forecast to be higher than expected, Hung said,,adding that earnings reports and business information were becoming more transparent to investors and investors had reacted positively to the market information.

Among the companies mentioned above, Vietinbank has estimated its pre-tax profit in 2017 would reach VND9.2 trillion, while Dong Phu Rubber JSC has reported its combined profit for the first 11 months of 2017 reached VND244 billion, twice the 2016 number.

However, Sai Gon-Ha Noi Securities Company said in its market daily report that selling pressure may get stronger in the next few sessions as the market trading condition was not quite positive enough given that there were many stocks suffering on the two local exchanges.

The brokerage firm forecast the VN-Index would encounter strong profit-taking pressure when it approached the range of 1,060-1,070 points on Tuesday.
DECATUR -- Robert Bob Rhodes. Age 98, of Red Bank, TN, went to be with the Lord on January 11, 2018. Bob was originally from Decatur, Illinois. He attended Decatur Schools, Tri-State University in Angola, IN, and Milliken University in Decatur, IL. Bob proudly served his country in the US Army Infantry during World War II in the European Theater of Operation. He was a Mechanical Engineer and became Head of the Engineering Department at Mueller Co. He was a member of Red Bank Methodist Church where he enjoyed singing in the choir and the Mens Chorus, and volunteering for various church activities. Bob also enjoyed traveling with his wife and doing genealogy research.
VizWiz

Data Viz Done Right
DECATUR  A Decatur woman is facing charges that she killed four kittens, three of them by throwing or bashing them against a wall, police said.

Elaina M. Chamblin, 25, pleaded not guilty to aggravated cruelty to animals, a Class 4 felony. Represented by attorney James Brinkoetter Jr., she is scheduled for a pretrial hearing in Macon County Circuit Court Feb. 26. She earlier appeared in court Jan. 9 for arraignment and waived her right to a preliminary hearing to see if she had a case to answer.

Chamblin's boyfriend and parents told police that she has had "violent mood swings" since she started injecting herself with testosterone as part of a gender transition, according to a sworn police affidavit.

The affidavit also said Chamblin told her boyfriend that she had killed a fourth kitten while sitting in a car and disposed of its body in November. Decatur police Officer Robert Murray said the other three kittens were killed between May and October.

Chamblins boyfriend said her attacks on the animals began in May when she took her first dose of testosterone prescribed by a Chicago clinic, according to the affidavit. He said he saw her throw the first kitten against a wall in the garage because she "got mad," and he saw her kill the others by bashing their heads against a wall. The boyfriend said he tried to stop her all three times, but wasn't sure what to do.

Chamblins parents said they were told the kittens died in accidents, Murray said. (They) admitted they had to bury three kittens which they were advised were either hit by a car or stepped on by one of their dogs, he wrote in the affidavit.

Chamblins parents said she never had any issues with being mean to animals before she started taking the medication.

Chamblin is free after posting $5,000 bail with the condition she has no contact with any animal.
Book lecture set in Marysville

The Wills Sainte Claire Auto Museum, located at 2408 Wills St. in Marysville, will host a lecture by Alan and Lynn Naldrett on their book Michigans C. Harold Wills: The Genius Behind the Model T and the Wills Sainte Claire Automobile at 7 p.m. Saturday. The Naldretts will discuss the book, what motivated them to write it, what they used for research and what they had to leave out. Books can be purchased from the museum to be autographed after the presentation. The cost, which includes the presentation and admission to the museum, is $5. Proceeds will benefit the museum. Reservations are required. For more information, call Terry Ernest at 810-987-2854.

Friends of the St. Clair River speaker series session set

Friends of the St. Clair River will host Reptiles & Amphibians of the Blue Water Area, a free presentation offered as part of its free educational speaker series, at 6 p.m. Jan. 24 at the St. Clair County Administration Building Auditorium, located at 200 Grand River Ave. in Port Huron. The 45-minute family friendly presentation will be led by Dave Dortman, a local naturalist. Dortman will discuss biology, identification and importance of native herpetofauna species. Participants will learn how to identify species and document findings into a publicly accessible database.

Sightings of amphibians and reptiles, collectively known as herpetofauna, or herps, are being documented in the Michigan Herp Atlas, the group said in a press release. This effort began in 2004 to collect data about Michigans amphibians and reptiles.

For more information, contact Friends Stewardship Director Kirsten Lyons at 810-294-4965 or stewardship@scriver.org or visit scriver.org.

Second hearing on Krispin Drain kayak launch set

A second public hearing to seek feedback on the proposed Krispin Drain park and kayak launch is set for 7 p.m. Jan 22 at the Harsens Island Lions Hall, located at 230 La Croix Road. The 9-acre park is expected to cost Clay Township $14,000, with grant funding from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and St. Clair County Parks and Recreation supplementing the townships contribution.

Community visioning meeting scheduled in Algonac

The city of Algonac is seeking feedback from the community on the citys priorities and direction for 2018 and beyond. Citizens are invited to attend a community visioning meeting at 6 p.m. Jan. 23 at the Algonac Lions Club, located at 1905 Mill St., to share their thoughts and concerns with city leaders.

Marine City Area Fire Authority looking for volunteers

The Marine City Area Fire Authority is seeking volunteers interested in serving the community as paid on-call firefighters. Training is provided by the fire authority at no cost to volunteers. To apply, call 810-765-8840 or fill out an application in person at the Marine City Fire Hall, located at 200 S. Parker St.

Clay Township to update audio-video equipment

After technical difficulties prevented Clay Township from posting video of the Dec. 19 board meeting, township officials are planning to upgrade the equipment they use to film and share meeting footage. The new system, which is expected to be in place by the boards Jan. 22 meeting, will ensure citizens who cannot meetings in person can access videos on the township supervisors YouTube channel. The new system also supports live streaming if the board decides to use the feature.

Service allows appointments, line holding at SOS

The MI-TIME Line service, which allows customers to use their phones or computers to make appointments or hold their place in line, is now available at the St. Clair County PLUS Secretary of State Office, located at 2887 Krafft Road in Port Huron, Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson recently announced.

The program sends text updates to notify customers of their estimated wait time and allows them to request more time if needed. Those who do not have a mobile phone can check in at a kiosk and get a printed ticket.

Customers who cant hop online to expresssos.com can now take advantage of the MI-TIME Line service at our Port Huron office, Johnson said in a press release. After you get in line, you can run other errands or wait from home or work until youre ready to be called up.

More than 5.9 million customers have used the service to complete a total of 10.8 million transactions since it launched in January 2014.

The 43 offices that will offer MI-TIME Line when the current 13-office expansion is complete total 56 percent of all branch transactions performed statewide.

In 2011, Johnson also launched expresssos.com to offer some of the departments most popular services online. Customers can use the websites Print-and-Go feature that allows them to print off a proof of purchase for tabs to carry until their tabs arrive in the mail.

More than 11.7 million transactions have been completed on the site.

For more information or to reserve a place in line at the St. Clair County PLUS Secretary of State Office, go to michigan.gov/mitimeline.

McLaren Port Huron presents free Savvy Seniors Series

McLaren Port Huron is presenting a free winter session of Savvy Seniors Series, an educational series meant to enhance the quality of life for all seniors, through March. The theme of the series is Life Resource Planning: Spend Wisely and Plan Successfully. Registration is required.

The first session, Budgeting 101, took place Jan. 16 and focused on budgeting and managing finances.

The second session, Estate and Long-Term Planning, is scheduled for 10 a.m. Feb. 16 in the 55 Plus Classroom of the McLaren Port Huron Jefferson Building, located at 1320 Washington Ave. in Port Huron. The Kelly Law Firm, Long-term Care Solutions and Duda Financial will teach attendants how to prepare for the future by planning ahead.

The third session, Vital Records Organization, will take place at 10 a.m. March 6 at Marwood Nursing & Rehab, located at 1300 Beard St. in Port Huron. Terri Closs from As You Wish Organizing LLC will teach attendants how to stay organized so important documents and paperwork are readily available.

The final session, Creating a Will that Works for You, will take place at 10 a.m. March 13 in the 55 Plus Classroom in the McLaren Port Huron Jefferson Building. Chuck Kelly and Kellen Elliot from the Kelly Law Firm will teach the basic steps of creating a will that works for the attendants and their loved ones.

For more information or to register, call HealthAccess at 1-800-228-1484 or visit mclaren.org/phevents.

 Colleen Kowalewski and Emily Pauling, The Voice
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DECATUR  The public alert false alarm that had people in Hawaii terrified of a nuclear missile attack is not likely to occur here, Macon County sheriff's Lt. Lt. Jim Root said.

Root, the coordinator of the Macon County Emergency Management Agency that oversees the emergency warning system for the county and Decatur, said it is tried and tested and works well.

We have had the tornado sirens go off once when they really werent supposed to but it was an electrical issue, said Root. That is the only instance I can think of in the eight years Ive been here.

The system uses a network of sirens to alert for tornadoes while vocal and visual notifications appear on radio and television. A phone alert system can also send out voice messages and emails to warn of public safety threats such as a chemical spill.

Root said siren and media alerts are automatic when a tornado warning comes directly from the National Weather Service because it is a trusted source of expert information.

Other alerts, however, have to pass up a chain of command involving himself or other senior officers who carefully vet alerts.

He said a tornado warning called in by a spotter who is not known to the emergency management agency, for example, will be carefully checked and verified before sirens are sounded.

Root said the system in Hawaii was tied into a federal phone protocol that Macon County doesnt use. He said that while it's difficult to understand how it could have happened, the 38 minutes it took to send out a corrective message was too long.

Concerns about North Korea's ability to launch a missile toward the United States have been growing, and recent tensions between that country and U.S. have rattled nerves. Terrified Hawaiians, along with many tourists from Central Illinois, told reporters they feared they were about to be incinerated in a nuclear attack after receiving the alert message on their smartphones.

I find the whole thing kind of hard to believe, Root said of the accidental message.

The Federal Communications Commission is looking into the Hawaiian mishap and said, so far, it appears a state employee punched the wrong button in the midst of a shift change safety drill.

The mistake has prompted a very real electoral emergency for Hawaiis governor, David Y. Ige, who has been attacked by critics as incompetent in the wake of the false alert.

Ige, who is gearing up for re-election this year, was also rebuked for taking five hours to stage a news conference where he apologized.
DECATUR  More than 50 people braved the slippery roads and below-zero wind chills Monday to march up Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in memory of the fallen civil rights leader and the movement he championed.

It was the 32nd year for the annual Freedom March, a Decatur tradition that has taken place in rain, snow and bitter cold. The march began downtown at the Decatur Civic Center and continued a mile north to Church of the Living God Temple 1, 1915 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

No matter the weather, the power of Kings legacy always draws a crowd.

It's a generational thing, said Cynthia Dennis, describing the impact of King and other civil rights leaders. Our parents told us about it and we tell our children about it, and they can tell their children about it.

Dennis and Patricia Tyus come to the event every year to remember the history and enjoy the traditional program at the end of the march. Especially for young people, the event is an important reminder of Kings work, they said.

I think it is a good community experience, said Kenneth Hentz, another dedicated marcher who has participated for the past three years, as well as a good experience for our youth to teach them about what he died for, which is justice and peace.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Kings assassination on April 4, 1968 in Memphis. He is widely remembered for his message of nonviolence and civil disobedience, and for his commanding, passionate speeches. In 1963, he famously electrified a crowd of 250,000 people in Washington, D.C., with his dream of black and white children playing together, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

Surveying the crowd in the church on Monday, Decatur Human Relations Commission Chairman Derrick Thaxton said the audience was a realization of Kings dream. The commission organized both the march and a sold-out luncheon at the Decatur Club on Saturday.

His intent was to have both white and black folks together, Thaxton said.

The march takes place on a street that was renamed for King 30 years ago this week. Decatur residents Jim Taylor and William Oliver came up with the idea to rename Broadway in the early 1980s, and they worked together for years to make it happen. The Decatur City Council voted 6-1 against the change in 1982; six years later, the council voted 6-1 in favor, and the street was officially named for King on Jan. 18, 1988.

Decatur Mayor Julie Moore Wolfe said the community has made progress toward equal rights in the past 50 years, though challenges remain.

The mayor cited the class of 10 new police recruits who were sworn in Jan. 4. Of them, four are minorities  one woman, one Hispanic and two African-American men.

We need more officers that look more like our community, Moore Wolfe said, to applause from the audience. Im very proud of this community. We come together to feed those who need to be fed.

We take care of our own. We are doing a good job, but we do have work to do.

Community leaders, clergy members and elected officials were among the audience members. Democratic state Rep. Sue Scherer of Decatur and Sen. Andy Manar of Bunker Hill both spoke, pledging to fight for fairness and equality for their constituents.

The Rev. Tyrell Cooper opened up the Church of the Living God Temple 1 to much thanks and praise from the city. Cooper said a religious service was appropriate because the church was the backbone of the movement for King.

The community should be encouraged to keep faith and continue striving for change, Cooper said.

Some days, things are just not right, he said. (We) cant get comfortable now.

In addition to organizing the annual events in honor of King, the Decatur Human Relations Commission plays a key role in protecting residents against discrimination, said Verzell Taylor, one of the volunteer commissioners.

Established and governed by city code, the commission handles complaints of discrimination on the basis of race, religion, age, gender and sexual orientation, among other factors.

Two city investigators look into all of the complaints and give residents options for moving forward, which could include a hearing in front of the commission.

If you have a complaint, youll know where to go, Taylor said.

There are two vacant positions on the nine-member commission. Anyone interested in applying to fill the vacancy should contact the city of Decatur at (217) 424-2700.

Keynote speaker H. Nichole Jelks, a Decatur minister, urged the audience Monday to remember the main ideals of the civil rights movement  equality, unification and change  and to keep alive both hope for peace and courage to take action.

Jelks described King as a man who followed God. He had faith that society would one day reach his dream of quality, even if he wasnt there to see it.

For wisdom and a path forward, she said, she looks to the last speech he ever gave. It was April 3, 1968, the night before he was shot to death on his balcony at the Lorraine Motel.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, King told the crowd at Mason Temple at the Church of God in Christ headquarters in Memphis. But I'm not concerned about that now.

I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain, King continued. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land.

I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.
LINCOLN  A new position to oversee the womens division within the Illinois Department of Corrections was signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Bruce Rauner, following a tour of the Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln.

We need to help these women get the help they need so that once they serve their time, they can be productive in society, Rauner said. Female prisoners are often different from male prisoners in the fact that they are often mothers and are the main caregiver in their home. Prison should not be a punishment, but instead, a place to reform and better themselves for their release.

Decatur Correctional Center, a minimum-security facility, is the state's other women's prison.

On the Logan prison tour, Rauner said he was encouraged by the amount of support the female inmates received and also encouraged by the new legislation, which is intended to provide more services. In addition to creating the post of chief administrator, the legislation also incorporates gender-responsive programming and addresses specific challenges that female offenders face.

Its time we adjust our strategies and find solutions that set women up for success when they leave prison, Rauner said. Many of these women are mothers. If we dont take steps to help put them on a better path, we will see their sons and daughters cycle through the prison system. We cant have that.

Rauner also said that many of the offenders were abused physically, emotionally and/or sexually prior to their incarceration and the new division will allow for more committed resources to help them.

Rauner was joined on the tour by Corrections Director John Baldwin, Logan Warden Glen Austin and former warden Maggie Burke, who helped write the legislation.

State Rep. Tim Butler, R-Springfield, joined Rauner for the signing of the new legislation. HB 3904, which passed the General Assembly last June, takes effect June 1.

The governor has said all along that he intends to improve our correctional facilities, and this legislation is a step in that direction, Butler said. This makes Illinois a leader on trauma-informed services specific to the female population in our correctional system. Other states are looking at us as a model on prison reform.

Offenders at the Logan said the bill was a positive step forward for those who are locked up.

"I am ecstatic," said Claudette Lowe, an inmate at Logan, who is from Decatur. "Some people come in here angry or shy or in need of mental health and what this will do, is provide more of those services that they need."

Rauner met with some of the offenders in a self-help class.

"We were told that there would be some media coming, but we didn't know until this morning that the governor was going to be here," she said. "It's exciting that he came, but more importantly, it's a positive step toward helping the women that are in here."

The Logan County facility opened in 1978 and can hold 2,284 inmates. Logan has 1,658 inmates. The Decatur facility, which opened in 2000, has about 615 inmates with a capacity of 792, according to the most recent information on the Corrections website .

The Logan facility was transitioned from a male to a female prison in 2013 in conjunction with the closure of the Dwight and Lincoln correctional centers.

That left us with a lot of issues with the training of staff, different populations who werent used to living with each other, and it was very difficult for us, Burke said. This will allow this facility to assist with the challenges these women face.

Baldwin said both offenders and staff will benefit from the new legislation.

We recognize that making change means investing in our staff and giving them the tools to keep them and those who are incarcerated safe, Baldwin said. Were teaching staff how to use their authority effectively, how to understand the needs of female offenders, and how to help the women restructure their thinking about challenging situations. Our staff had never received these types of training before 2015.

Rauner said he will continue to work on criminal justice reform and pointed to the services, such as the cosmetology program already established at Logan as a model.

We need to focus on training these offenders so that when they get out, they not only have the skills to get a good job, but a good-paying job as well, he said. The cosmetology program is a great example, but we want to add more such as welding and other programs.


As soon as the announcement of his surprise election was made public, and even before he had access to the White House, the immense majority of US and NATO media began screaming about the negligence and insanity of President Trump. Battle was joined between the media class and the new President, with each side accusing the other of propagating fake news.

Almost everywhere in the NATO countries  and only in these countries  political representatives began denouncing fake news. This was intended to reveal the supposed influence of Russian propaganda within the  Western democracies . The State which has been the most seriously impacted by this campaign is France, whose President Emmanuel Macron recently announced the drafting of a law specifically aimed at fighting these  attacks on democracy , but only during  an electoral period .

The fact that the English expression fake news is maintained in all the languages of the NATO countries attests to the Anglo-Saxon origin of the problem, when in fact the phrase designates a phenomenon as old as the world - false information.

At the origin of the campaign against  fake news  - NATO

In 2009, at the NATO summit in Strasbourg-Kehl, President Obama announced his intention of creating an Alliance  Strategic Communication  service [1]. It took six years to implement, using elements of the 77th Brigade of the British Land Army and the 361st Civil Affairs Brigade of the United States Land Army (based in Germany and Italy).

At first, their mission was to counter communications accusing the US deep state of having itself organised the attacks of 9/11, then those accusing the Anglo-Saxons of having planned the  Arab Springs  and the war against Syria  such communications were termed  conspiracy theories . However, the situation evolved rapidly in such a way as to convince the populations of the Alliance that Russia was continuing to apply propaganda from the Soviet era  and thus that NATO was still useful.

Finally, in April 2015, the European Union created a  Work Group for Strategic Communications  East  (East StratCom Task Force). Every week, this group addresses a report on Russian propaganda to thousands of journalists. For example, its last edition (dated 11 January 2018) accuses Sputnik of pretending that the Copenhagen zoo feeds its predators with abandoned household pets. Lord help us, the  democracies  are under attack ! Clearly, it is difficult for these specialists to find meaningful examples of Russian interference. In August of the same year, NATO inaugurated its  Centre for Strategic Communication  in Riga (Latvia). The following year, the US State Department created a Global Engagement Center which works on the same principles.

How Facebook, Hillary Clintons pet obsession, turned against her

In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at the instigation of Jared Cohen (leading member of the Policy Planning Staff ), persuaded herself that it was possible to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran by manipulating the social media. This theory did not have the desired affect. However, two years later, in 2011, the same Jared Cohen  since become the the CEO of Google Ideas  managed to mobilise the youth of Cairo. Although the  revolution  of Tahrir Square had not swayed the opinion of the Egyptian people, the myth of the extension of the American way of life via Facebook was born. As a result, the State Department sponsored a number of associations and assemblies to promote Facebook.

However, the US Presidential election of 2016 was a shock. An outsider, real estate promoter Donald Trump, eliminated all his rivals one by one, including Hillary Clinton, and was swept into the White House, having benefited from the advice of Facebook. For the first time, the dream of the Muse of professional politicians became reality, but worked against her. Overnight, Facebook was demonised by the dominant Press.

It became evident on this occasion that it is possible to artificially create crowd movements with the social media, but that after a few days, media users regain their senses. This is the constant fact for all systems of information manipulation  they are fleeting. The only form of lie which makes it possible to create long-term behaviour patterns supposes that one has forced the citizens into a form of minor engagement, in other words, that one has brainwashed them [2].

Indeed, Facebook understood this very well, creating its  Politics & Government Outreach Program  and handing it over to the care of Katie Harbath. It was intended to create collective emotions in favour of one client or another, but does not seek to organise lasting campaigns [3]. This is why President Macron proposes to legislate the social media only during electoral periods. He was himself elected thanks to a brief disorder created jointly by a weekly newspaper and Facebook against his rival Francois Fillon  an operation orchestrated by Jean-Pierre Jouyet [4]. Furthermore, Emmanuel Macrons fear that next time the social media may be used against him fits with NATOs desire to demonstrate the continuity of USSR-Russia propaganda. As an example of manipulation, Macron therefore cites an interview with Sputnik concerning his private life and the publishing of an allegation concerning a foreign bank account.

The Christopher Steele Report

During the US Presidential campaign, Hillary Clintons team ordered an inquiry on Donald Trump from an ex-agent of the British Secret Services, Christopher Steele. Ex-chief of MI6s  Russia House , he was known for his scandalous and always unverifiable allegations. After having accused Vladimir Putin, without proof, of having commanded the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko by Polonium 210, he accused him of having caught Donald Trump in a sex trap and blackmailing him. The Steele Report was then discretely handed to various journalists, politicians and master spies, and finally published [5].

This is the source of the hypothesis according to which, seeking to get his puppet elected and hamper the election of Hillary Clinton, the lord of the Kremlin had ordered  his  media to buy publicity on Facebook and spread lies about the ex-Secretary of State  a hypothesis which may be supported by a conversation between the Australian ambassador in London with one of Donald trumps advisors [6]. It doesnt matter that Russia Today and Sputnik only spent a total of a few thousand dollars for publicity which rarely concerned Mrs. Clinton, the US ruling class is persuaded that they turned back the popular tide in favour of the Democrat candidate and her 1.2 billion dollar campaign. In Washington, people persist in believing that technological inventions can be used to manipulate the human race.

It is no longer a question of noting that Donald Trump and his partisans ran their campaign on Facebook because the totality of the written and audiovisual Press was hostile to them, but pretending that Facebook was manipulated by Russia in order to prevent the election of the Muse of Washington.

The legal privilege of Google, Facebook and Twitter

By seeking to prove the interference of Moscow, the US Press underlined the exorbitant privilege enjoyed by Google, Facebook and Twitter  these three companies are not considered responsible for their content. From the point of view of US law, they are no more than transporters of information (common carrier).

The experiments carried out by Facebook, which demonstrated the possibility of creating collective emotions on one hand, and the legal non-responsibility of this company on the other, attest to an anomaly in the system.

Particularly since the privilege enjoyed by Google, Facebook and Twitter is clearly undue. Indeed, these three companies act in at least two different ways to modify the content they transport. First of all, they unilaterally censor certain messages, either via the direct intervention of their personnel, or mechanically, via hidden algorithms. Then they promote their vision of the truth to the detriment of other points of view (fact-checking).

For example, in 2012, Qatar ordered from Google Ideas, already directed by Jared Cohen, the creation of software which would make it possible to follow the progression of defections in the Syrian Arab Army. The point was to show that Syria was indeed a dictatorship, and that the people were beginning to revolt. But it very quickly became clear that this vision of affairs was false. The number of soldiers who defected never rose above 25,000 in an army of 450,000 men. This is why, after having promoted the software, Google discretely retired it.

Conversely, for seven years, Google promoted articles which relayed communiques from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHD). Day after day, they gave the exact count of the number of victims in both camps. Of course, these figures are imaginary - it is impossible for anyone to count them. Never, in a time of war, has a state been able to determine, on a daily basis, the number of soldiers killed in combat and the civilians killed behind the lines. And yet, in the United Kingdom, the SOHD claims to know what the people who live there, in Syria, cannot know.

Far from being just the common carriers, Google, Facebook and Twitter are the forgers of the information they transport, and as such, they ought to be counted legally responsible for their content.

The rules of the freedom of expression

Lets imagine that the efforts of NATO and those of President Macron against Russia in terms of audiovisual Internet traffic meet with failure. It is nonetheless necessary to enter these new medias into general law.

The principles which regulate the freedom of expression are only legitimate if they are identical for all citizens and for all media. This is not the case today. While the general law applies, there is no specific rule concerning denial or the right to reply for the messages on Internet and the social media.

As always in the history of information, the old medias attempt to sabotage the new. Thus I remember the violent editorial that the French daily Le Monde dedicated in 2002 to my work on the Internet concerning the responsibility for the attacks of 9/11. What shocked the newspaper just as much as my conclusions was that the Voltaire Network was free from the financial obligations of which it felt prisoner [7]. This is the same corporatist attitude that it demonstrates again, fifteen years later, with its service, Le Decodex. Rather than developing a critique of the articles or videos of the new medias, Le Monde proposes to note the reliability of its rival Internet sites. Of course, only the sites issued by their paper colleagues find grace in their eyes, all the others are judged less trustworthy.

To shore up the campaign against the social media, the Fondation Jean-Jaures (that is to say the foundation of the Socialist Party linked to the National Endowment for Democracy) has published an imaginary poll [8]. With a display of numbers, it aims to demonstrate that unsophisticated people - the working classes and the partisans of the National Front - are gullible. It claims that 79 % of French people believe in one conspiracy theory or another. As proof of their naivete, it points out that 9 % of them are convinced that the Earth is flat.

However, neither myself nor any of my French friends consulted by Internet have ever met any of our compatriots who believe that the Earth is flat. The figure is obviously invented and discredits the entire study. As it happens, although it is linked to the Socialist Party, the Fondation Jean-Jaures still has Gerard Collomb as its general secretary  Collomb has since become President Macrons Minister for the Interior. This same foundation had already published, two years ago, a study aimed at discrediting the political opponents of the system that it already qualified as  conspiracy theorists  [9].
Gibraltar at FITUR

The Gibraltar Tourist Board (GTB) will be participating in FITUR, the international tourism trade fair, celebrating its 38th staging in Madrid, Spain from January 17 to January 21, 2018.

FITUR is a global meeting point for tourism professionals. In 2017 9,893 exhibiting companies from 165 countries/regions, 135,858 trade participants, 107,213 consumers and 7,452 journalists took part.

Co-exhibiting with the GTB is the Bland Group International.

The stand and theme continues that launched at the WTM and in Gibraltar in November, concentrating on the Year of Culture campaign. The campaign will be presented to the members of the Spanish tourism trade press from Madrid at the Gibraltar stand on Thursday 18 January, so that the Spanish market is aware of this campaign.

Minister for Tourism, the Hon Gilbert Licudi QC will be at the trade fair for the presentation to the Spanish tourism press. Mr Licudi added: FITUR is an important global event and although we have chosen not to participate for a few years due to changing trends within the industry, Im pleased that we are making a return and in particular to present the Year of Culture campaign launched here and in London in November of last year. Many of our visitors come on day trips from Spain and FITUR gives us an opportunity of meeting and engaging with tour operators and other professionals in the tourist industry in order to continue to promote Gibraltar as a destination for their clients.
After a life-threatening car wreck, John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) has to give up drinking. Cue his offbeat support system: his girlfriend (Rooney Mara, also Phoenixs IRL girlfriend) and his zany sponsor in Call Me by Your Namelevel booty shorts (Jonah Hill). Gus Van Sant directs this true story of Callahans wreck and redemption, based on the memoir of the same name. Dont Worry, He Wont Get Far on Foot will premiere at this months Sundance Film Festival and open in theaters May 11.
Timothee Chalamet. Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Timothee Chalamet, after dodging questions about his choice to work with Woody Allen in the upcoming film A Rainy Day in New York, explained his silence on the subject on Instagram. The Call Me By Your Name breakout star says that he has avoided answering questions about working with Allen directly out of contractual obligations. However, he says, I dont want to profit from my work on the film, and to that end, I am going to donate my entire salary to three charities: TIMES UP, The LGBT Center in New York and RAINN. He added, I want to be worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the brave artists who are fighting for all people to be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.

Chalamets post comes shortly after several other actors expressed their regrets for working with the filmmaker. Dylan Farrow, Allens estranged adopted daughter, accused the director of sexually abusing her in the early 1990s while she was a child. Farrow maintained her allegations in a 2014 essay, and has criticized some members of the #TimesUp initiative for not taking her claims seriously.

Allen has denied the allegations.

Earlier in January, Chalamets Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig (who acted in To Rome With Love) told the New York Times, If I had known then what I know now, I would not have acted in the film. Mira Sorvino, who starred in Mighty Aphrodite, wrote an open letter to Farrow in which she wrote, I believe you!

Chalamet wrote in his Instagram post that his perspective on taking the Woody Allen role has changed in the past few months. He writes:

This year has changed the way I see and feel about so many things; it has been a thrilling and, at times, enlightening education. I have, to this point, chosen projects from the perspective of a young actor trying to walk in the footsteps of more seasoned actors I admire. But I am learning that a good role isnt the only criteria for accepting a jobthat has become much clearer to me in the past few months, having witnessed the birth of a powerful movement intent on ending injustice, inequality and above all, silence.

Read Chalamets full Instagram post below.
Dear Dr. Roach: I am a rather healthy 35-year-old female. I drink a lot of water daily -- approximately 5-6 liters, just because I feel the need to. My doctor does not seem concerned, as she says it may be normal for my body. I've been drinking these amounts for five to six years (I think it started during pregnancy). My family is concerned, as they say it is too much for the kidneys. I would truly appreciate your opinion. Also, I do not know whether any of this may be relevant, but I am not diabetic (but I am insulin-resistant); I do not use any medication; I am a smoker; I have gastritis; and I am slightly overweight.

-- A.N.

A: Five liters a day is more than most people need. However, it is well within the ability of the normal kidneys to handle, assuming you are getting enough of the electrolytes and minerals the body requires.

People taking diuretics, which affect the kidney's ability to regulate salt, can develop dangerously low sodium levels with excess water intake.

Kidney cancer

Dear Dr. Roach: In 2010, my husband had an abdominal/pelvic CT scan (for an unrelated reason), and they found a 14-mm mass in his lower right kidney. In 2017, a repeat scan showed that the mass was much larger, and he had the kidney removed. The pathology showed a 48-by-40-mm papillary kidney cancer, type 1. We were told that removing the kidney would be curative, and no other testing (scans) have been ordered. We have not been told of specific type or staging. I had breast cancer in the past (mastectomy and radiation) so am familiar with the process. Is renal cancer different? We just feel out of the loop and that we should have more information on this cancer. He has lost a lot of weight.

-- K.K.

A: Several kinds of cancers start in the kidney, but papillary kidney cell cancer is a less common type. Fortunately for you and your husband, type 1 generally are not as aggressive, and people with this kind of kidney cancer have a better prognosis than people with other types. It is completely obvious, at least in hindsight, that the 14-mm mass should not have gone so long without a follow-up.

Around the time of diagnosis, an evaluation is undertaken to look for evidence of spread, including a CT scan of the lungs. Kidney cancer also can go to the bone, so if he had any bone pain or elevated blood tests showing bone damage (called alkaline phosphatase), most experts would recommend a bone scan as well. If there is no spread, the five-year survival in people with this type of cancer is greater than 90 percent. No chemotherapy is indicated if there is no evidence of spread. I would recommend a visit with a medical oncologist, just to make sure his workup is complete.

The weight loss is concerning. It may indeed have been the tumor; cancers can make substances that cause people to lose weight. However, I personally wouldn't stop looking, especially if the weight loss continues.

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Dr. Roach Writes: A recent column on multiple myeloma noted that myeloma is uncommon in younger people. About 3.5 percent of myeloma cases occur in people under 45; however, that is still a lot of cases, and many physicians are unaware that this cancer can occur in young people. You can learn more about this cancer at myeloma.org.

* * *

Readers: The booklet on restless leg syndrome and nighttime cramps offers more tips. Readers can obtain a copy by writing: Dr. Roach, Book No. 306, 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.
Eliza Dushku. Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

Days after Eliza Dushku accused stunt coordinator Joel Kramer of sexual molestation on the set of 1994s True Lies when she was 12 years old, more women have accused Kramer of misconduct, reports Deadline. Laura Albert, a stuntwoman who worked under Kramer on Virus, told Deadline that her 15-year-old sisters friend, who was 16 at the time, had a sexual encounter with Kramer. Albert had invited the two girls, who were in the tenth grade, to go go-karting with the stunt cast in Wilmington, North Carolina. Unbeknownst to me, my boss, Joel Kramer, had lured the girls to go swimming at the pool in his hotel, Albert explained.

While in the pool, Albert claims that Kramer exposed his penis to her young sister, who promptly left. My sister ended up leaving and she left her friend there with Joel, Kramer said. Joel had sex with the 16-year-old girl. She was 16. He was 39. When Albert learned about the incident she called the Wilmington police who informed her the age of consent in North Carolina is 16.

Kramer did not dispute that the encounter happened, but he denied some of the details. Kramer claims the girls happened to be in the hotel pool while he was swimming laps and that Alberts sisters friend on her own came to my room as she was legal age. In his account the teenager was 17. He claims, I honestly did not know she was 17 .When I found out I was devastated. He adds, Yes, I absolutely almost made a huge mistake with the girl from the Wilmington shoot, as I said, I wont lie about it.

Another professional stuntwoman, who remained anonymous, claimed that Kramer assaulted her one night in the late 70s or early 80s. Though she did not work for Kramer, she says she met him at a gathering of people in the industry and wound up in his car after it was recommended that everyone carpool to another location. In his car the woman alleges that Kramer exposed himself and forced her to perform oral sex. She says that she remained silent about the misconduct out of fear for her career. If I were to report this to the stunt group, the police, or SAG, I would have no chance in a career as a stuntwoman, she said.

Kramer has denied the allegation. He told Deadline that it was a fabrication. He also referred to Dushkus accusations as outlandish, manipulated lies. He denied her allegations, saying, I never sexually molested her.

According to Deadline, Dushkus claims have been supported by her mother, brother, and former agent. Her True Lies co-star Jamie Lee Curtis wrote an essay about Dushkus allegations, applauding the younger actor for stepping forward.
I usually dont give much credit to the cast of Vanderpump Rules, a bottomless brunch for the criminally insane, but somehow the action of the show has dovetailed quite nicely with the great reckoning of the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements that have dominated pop-culture reporting, dinner conversations, and even awards-show red carpets. Im not saying that Brittany playing a message that Jax made talking shit about her is even remotely as bad as what the victims of sexual assault experienced, but everyones reactions to it are very much like what is happening in the culture right now.

First of all, Lala gets a hold of a recording of a conversation that Jax had with Faith after cheating on Brittany with her. Lala and Ariana then play that tape for Brittany while everyone is shithoused off of drunk gummies at Jax and Brittanys housewarming party. Were not allowed to hear the tape, but apparently Jax said that hes never going to marry Brittany, that he is no longer sexually attracted to her, and there is no way that hes ever going to have children with her. On top of dealing with the fact that hes cheating, this is way too much for Brittany.

She reacts by going into the party and trying to broadcast the recording on the speakers so that everyone can hear it. Yes, Brittany is taking her grievances public, just like so many women have. Jax freaks out because he knows his reputation will be further ruined and the guys run off to Tom and Katies apartment next door to talk about how what these gals are doing to them is totally unfair.

Lala, Stassi, Kristen, Scheana, and Ariana all huddle around Brittany to support her and listen to this tape so that they can convince Brittany that Jax is a piece of shit and she did nothing wrong. DJ James Kennedy, the one man who stays behind to try to defend Jax, is shouted out of the room until he skulks off to go be with the boys. I was so proud of these girls that they would band together like this and support Brittany. So much of this show is women tearing each other apart over the things that guys do to them, and it was nice to see them finally joining forces to confront the awful, cheating boogeyman that is Jax Taylor.

This, of course, threatens the other couples. Tom Sandoval freaks out at Ariana for even playing the tape for Brittany in the first place. Yes, I dont disagree with him that breaking this out when everyone is wasted is a bad idea, but thats not what happened at all. And thank God for Ariana shouting him down when he tries to tell her how she should have acted. I also love that Ariana called him obtuse. That is such a great insult. Its not only stupid, but also unfeeling and unthinking all at the same time. It also has a nice whiff of both high-school vocabulary lessons and geometry about it. You cant argue with obtuse. There is no angle you can take to fight against it. (See what I did there?!)

Even worse is when Jax comes back to their apartment the following morning and tries to blame Brittany for everything that happened. Hes mad at her because she said they would fix everything between them and she played that message for everyone. Say what, now? This overinflated dinosaur pool floatie cheated on her, talked shit about her on tape, and now hes trying to blame her for what happened to him? The only words out of his mouth should be, Im sorry. I do not deserve you. I went to Jared.

Brittany is right. She is the one who is hurt and wronged in this scenario and the fact that she didnt pull an Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale on all of his shit is completely unbelievable. Both Jax and Tom Sandoval tell their girlfriends to take responsibility for their actions. Oh no, nuh-uh. Hashtag Times Up. It is time for them to take responsibility for how shabbily they treat their respective partners, especially Jax, who has a history of this kind of behavior. As Ive said before, the only person Jax hates more than himself is every single woman on the planet.

Ugh, how could anyone want to date this guy? Later in the episode, Stassi says, When will women realize that Jax is not worth dating? Precisely! When?! Still, at the end of the episode, Brittany gets back together with him. Shes still with him now. All of the women on this show and even Lisa Vanderpump try to tell her that shes worth more, that she deserves better, and that Jax is never going to change. But she decides that, unlike her mother who has been married four times, she is going to stick with this. She is going to forgive him.

She goes about it the right way, setting boundaries for him. She tells him he has to start therapy and that hes never going to cheat on her again or shes going to leave. And even then, he says, It takes two to tango, it takes two to fight. Yeah, it does take two to fight, but theres a difference between the wronged lashing out at the one who has wronged her and two people treating each other shabbily. Brittany has done nothing shabby to Jax at all. Still, he says, I cheated, but what did she have to do to make me do that? What? So even his cheating is somehow Brittanys fault? God, this man is so disgusting that Id rather drink paint thinner out of Eric Trumps leopard-killing hat than be in the same room as him. I dont understand what is wrong with every one of these women who have dated him and had sex with him. It makes me want to set every member of my gender on fire and hurl the ashes into the sun.

The other strange thing about this whole saga is the provenance of the tape in the first place. Faith surreptitiously made it after she and Jax had sex. Why did she think she would need evidence of this? What even lead her to want to make this tape at all? Then she played it for James, which sort of makes sense because it does establish that she did in fact sleep with Jax. But then James stole her phone, sent the recording to himself, and then sent it to Lala. Thats how it got back to Brittany, through a litany of subterfuge and deceit that would give Richard Nixons ghost an erection lasting longer than four hours.

I know that reality shows are supposed to be the new soap operas, but this behavior is ridiculous. Its so insane that if Eileen Davidson got a Young and the Restless script with this string of events, even she would be like, This is too unbelievable, the audience wont buy it. I mean, what actual humans do these things?

Katie, Tom Schwartz, and Stassi realize this when they have to explain the situation to Patrick, Stassis boyfriend who seems like a reasonable person with a real job and aspirations and a very ill-advised man bun. They all sort of recoil that these are the schoolyard antics theyre subsumed with while this guy is trying to like, have a career and pay a mortgage and maybe sock some money away so that he can buy a log cabin somewhere in Palm Springs where he can store all of the angel wings hes bartered for at The Burn.

Tom, of course, felt the worst about all of this because he aspires to be just like Patrick, with a life, a real job, and some semblance of a future to think about when he squints into the sun atop Runyon Canyon after a mildly vigorous hike. After Patrick shook his head at these admissions, they all filtered out of the speakeasy where they had been enjoying some drinks behind the bookcase. Tom was next to Patrick and swung his arm around Patricks shoulder in a gesture of easy goodwill. Sorry about all the drama tonight, he said.

Aw, its nothing, man, Patrick said, pivoting toward Tom and turning that arm around his shoulder into a hug. I just think youre beautiful, man. There was a pause as Patrick moved his arms up and down Toms muscular back. Really beautiful, he whispered into Toms ear as his chin sunk into the top of Toms back.

Tom didnt know what to do. The hug was lasting a bit too long and he was frozen with desire. After about ten seconds, he fought through the paralyzing fuzz that was gnawing at his stomach and moved his hand down past the small of Patricks back and cupped his hand lightly on Patricks buttocks.

To Toms surprise, Patrick put his own hand on top of Toms and forced him to squeeze the hard, flexed glute. Shh, Patrick whispered. Not in front of the girls. And then he pulled away. The stubble from his chin latched into the stubble from Toms, creating the sort of static energy that could make even the most stable of zeppelins explode on contact.
New Braunfels, TX (78130)

Today

Cloudy with occasional showers overnight. Low 42F. Winds NE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Cloudy with occasional showers overnight. Low 42F. Winds NE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
Pharmaceutical giant Allergan will slash its workforce internationally by 1,000 and eliminate 400 unfilled positions as it adjusts to losing exclusive rights to Restasis, a dry-eye treatment made in Waco and its second-highest revenue generator behind only wrinkle concealer Botox.

But maneuvering by the company based in Dublin, Ireland, will not eliminate jobs at Wacos facility on Mars Drive, spokesman Mark Marmur said. The Waco plant was scheduled for a 322,000-square-foot, $200 million expansion that would increase employment by about 250 over several years.

To be clear, Allergan is not reducing workforce in Waco as a result of our restructuring plan announced on January 3, Marmur said via email. Waco is an important manufacturing site for Allergan with many highly skilled and valued colleagues on site. Production volumes for the year are strong, and we are celebrating 29 years in Waco in 2018.

Marmur said Allergan remains committed to its eye care business and to local operations.

We are investing significantly in Waco with new production lines, and these are scheduled to come online in 2018, he wrote.

Marmur said Allergan also hopes to produce newly formulated medications in Waco starting this year and next, but he declined to elaborate on the nature of those treatments.

Other products besides Restasis expected to see new or increased generic competition this year include Namenda XR, an Alzheimers treatment; Delzicol, for ulcerative colitis; Aczone, an acne drug; and Estrace, a hormone to treat menopause symptoms, according to a company press release.

Besides Restasis, the Waco facility produces Lumigan and Combigan, both of which are used in the treatment of glaucoma, as well as Refresh Plus and Refresh Tears, used to provide relief for dry and irritated eyes.

The Waco operation employs about 700 people, a number that had been scheduled to increase as Allergan proceeded with plans to nearly double the size of the facility.

It had predicted construction would start before the end of 2016, but progress apparently has been limited to site preparation.

Bobby Horner, who oversees the city of Wacos inspection services department, said last week the company has not submitted a detailed site plan or secured a building permit.

Im not really sure what the hold-up is, Horner said, noting Allergans announcement in spring 2016.

During a news conference attended by local and state elected officials, as well as local business leaders, Baylor University economist Tom Kelly released a report showing the companys planned $200 million expansion would give the Central Texas economy a $522 million jolt during the first year of construction, applying a multiplier that factors the impact of spending as it travels through the economy.

Once the expansion is complete, probably in 2020 or 2021, according to Kellys original estimates, operation of the expanded plant would have a $461 million annual impact on the area.

Marmur has declined to provide further details about the expansion or an updated timeline.

Allergan had hoped to protect Restasis from generic competition by transferring patents to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. But the move backfired when a federal judge struck it down, ending the companys hopes of protection from review by the U.S. patent office, according to online reports, including one by thestreet.com, an investment site.

Meanwhile, CEO Brent Saunders said Allergans eye care business, even without the exclusivity of Restasis, would generate about $2 billion in annual revenues, thestreet.com reported.

Staffing cuts reportedly will save the company between $300 million and $400 million, according to an Securities and Exchange Commission filing announcing the plan. The cuts will cost about $125 million upfront in severance packages and restructuring fees.

Kelly noted that a merger deal between Allergan and Pfizer was pending in mid-2016, when Allergan announced its grand plans for Waco. The two sides called off the $160 billion transaction amid criticism that Pfizer planned to move its headquarters from the U.S. to Ireland, a move that could have reduced the tax burden of the combined company.
Gagik Tsarukyan, perhaps the richest man in Armenia and a deputy in the parliament, told reporters today that they were guilty of spreading falsehoods and were carrying out third party instructions.

As a result, Tsarukyan argued, Armenia finds itself in its present situation.

The outburst followed a Hetq reporters inquiry as to why Tsarukyan rarely showed up for parliamentary sessions.

Let me say that I do not come to work infrequently. You must come and see, since the people obtain information from you, Tsarukyan responded, adding that 90% of MPs show up, register as present, and then leave an hour later.

Tsarukyan is engaged in work. Tsarukyan brought 70 deputies from the Council of Europe one month ago, and twenty went to Karabakh. I dont believe that any MP has worked more effectively, he said, referring to himself in the third person.

Despite his claims, the fact is that Tsarukyan was absent more times than any other deputy during the last parliamentary session.

Replying to a Hetq inquiry, the National Assembly Staff Office wrote that 121 of Tsarukyans 157 no-shows were considered acceptable.

Hetq asked Tsarukyan what documents had he presented to get so many absences deemed okay.

File a formal request and Ill show you. Dear girl, now, do you rate Tsarukyans work as positive or negative?

When told that the obligation of a deputy was to show up in the parliament, Tsarukyan said, I know who I am. Go find out who you are and what question youre posing.
The House Freedom Caucus styles itself as the principled champion of limited government and the rule of law. More often, its members are partisan gunslingers, attack dogs during President Barack Obamas administration and lap dogs for President Donald Trump.

Thats personified by the two leaders of this right-wing contingent of about three dozen House Republicans: Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina.

If negotiations fail this week to head off a government shutdown, Jordan and Meadows will be in the spotlight. They enjoy throwing grenades. Former House Speaker John Boehner called his fellow Ohioan, Jordan, a legislative terrorist. Theyll brush aside the Republican congressional leadership, but Trump could call them off.

Both men have embraced Trumps most extreme positions. Theyve demanded the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions for insufficient ardor in Trumps defense against the Justice Department probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Manufactured hysteria, theyve called it.

The Freedom Caucus leaders are a byproduct of a divide in the American conservative movement thats been widening for four decades. One side is embodied by Jack Kemp, who represented western New York in Congress during the 1970s and 1980s and served as U.S. housing secretary under President George H.W. Bush. His was a conservativism of openness, inclusion and the opportunity society. The other takes inspiration from former Sen. Jesse Helms, a 30-year North Carolina lawmaker until 2003 whose politics relied on stoking animosities and fear. Legislatively, the two camps voted similarly. But their messages and approach to politics were radically different, with one focused on hope and the other on resentment.

Jordan and Meadows fall into the Helms camp. (Neither responded to calls or emails seeking comment for this column.)

Their influence is mostly negative. A fellow Republican congressman, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, said the Freedom Caucus leaders can effectively undercut the House leadership but just cant get to yes.

They couldnt be more different personally. Meadows, a three-term congressman from the western corner of his state, is affable and outgoing. Jordan, a former wrestling champion, is wound tight, always confrontational in shirt sleeves.

Meadows played a leading role in driving Boehner into retirement. Today, Boehners successor, Speaker Paul Ryan, hears Freedom Caucus footsteps.

Jordan habitually exploits the oversight and investigative powers of the House to pursue phony scandals. Hes been especially bellicose about the examination of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the case of the four Americans killed by terrorists in 2012 at the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Congressional Republicans have held more hearings on Benghazi than on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when 2,996 people died.

At an all-day hearing to badger Clinton on Oct. 22, 2015, she turned the tables. When a yelling Jordan recycled some conspiracy theory, an amused-looking Clinton shot back: I wrote a whole chapter about this is my book, Hard Choices. Id be glad to send it to you, Congressman.

He was even more intense in accusing the Internal Revenue Service of illegally targeting conservative political groups. He led an effort to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who wasnt even at the agency when the alleged offenses took place. If hed succeeded, it would have been the first impeachment of an executive branch appointee since the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant.

It was all bogus. The Treasury Departments Inspector General concluded that IRS mistakes were bureaucratic, not political; liberal groups were targeted too.

As my Bloomberg View colleague Francis Wilkinson wrote in November, Koskinen left voluntarily on Nov. 9 with his impeccable integrity intact. Jordan has lacked the grace to apologize; he even criticized the National Academy of Public Administration for honoring Koskinens public service.

Meadows has a history of bigoted remarks. He was an enthusiastic backer of the malevolent far-right fantasy that Obama wasnt born in the U.S. He once suggested that somebody should send the Hawaii-born Democrat back home to Kenya. During a hearing on the Affordable Care Act, Meadows objected to mandating maternity coverage, noting, correctly, that it wasnt something he could utilize.

The Freedom Caucus sometimes does act on principle, opposing expanded government and big spending programs. But Jordan and Meadows both supported the Republican budget resolution that is paving the way for massive deficits.

Jordan and Meadows are the public face of the Freedom Caucus. If their aversion to compromise helps provoke a government shutdown, theres a good chance that theyll emerge as the face of all House Republicans.

With the GOP facing a tough struggle to retain control of the House in the November midterm elections, that would be good news for Democrats.
WAHOO  A wind chill advisory remains in effect for the area through noon on Tuesday.

Those that must work outside in the frigid conditions are being reminded to take necessary precautions and dress accordingly.

Dr. Sarah Grauman of Lake Wanahoo Medical Clinic in Wahoo said individuals who are exposed to severe wind chill and cold temperatures for long periods of time may be prone to frostbite.

Dr. Les Veskrna of Saunders Medical Center in Wahoo said that hypothermia is also a major risk to individuals who work outdoors.

Exposed skin such as the face, ears, nose, hands and feet are the most vulnerable, he added.

Grauman recommended dressing according to the weather.

Layering is key, she said.

If temperatures and wind chill are expected to be very low, Veskrna said outdoor workers should wear three layers of clothing. The first layer should be made of synthetic material.

You want something as a wick to draw sweat away from your body, Veskrna said.

The next layer should be made of fleece or wool to better insulate the body, while the third layer would be a lightweight, waterproof clothing item.

Veskrna said individuals should also protect their heads and faces by wearing headbands, hats, scarves or ski masks.

As much as 50 percent of your heat loss may occur from your head, Veskrna said.

Proper care for the feet is also important.

Veskrna recommened wearing thick thermal socks or putting on two pairs of socks to better absorb moisture and preserve heat.

Among those that have to be outdoors in the bitter cold are mail carriers.

Wahoo Post Office Postmaster Mark Fisher said slips, trips and falls due to icy walkways are a common hazard experienced by workers during this time.

Slow down, he said. Proceed with caution.

In snowy or icy conditions, Grauman said individuals should simply watch their steps carefully.

You just have to be careful where youre walking, she said.

In the end, she said it comes down to individuals educating themselves and being prepared.

Its just knowing what elements youre facing day-to-day, she said. Each day is a little different.
VALPARAISO  The Raymond Central Board of Education had reason to celebrate last week.

The district made the final payment on the 1998 bond issue that funded the building of Ceresco Elementary School and renovated Valparaiso Elementary.

The final payment of our elementary bond that was started 20 years ago, thereabouts, has been paid, said Board President Harriet Gould.

The board celebrated at this monthly meeting last week with a toast of sparkling grape juice and a cake decorated with the word paid written across it in all caps.

The bond was a contentious issue when it was introduced, narrowly pass with 17 votes.

After the board marked the completion of the bond, the finances and funding of education in the state came under discussion.

Superintendent Derrick Joel set before board members a resolution that would signal their approval of work undertaken by Nebraskans United for Property Tax Reform and Education. The coalition of homeowners, business owners, farmers and ranchers hopes to work with the Unicameral to find ways to reduce local property taxes while providing continued funding for school districts.

Theyre our advocates, theyre our support and they are working very hard to try to find a way to balance not only the state budget but make sure that education is getting the appropriate piece of the pie that we deserve, Joel said during his regular meeting report.

The group prioritizes the principle that a well-educated workforce boosts economic development while reducing poverty, according to its website. Nebraskans United argues that a dearth of state fund-ing for education leads to the state's property tax concerns, rather than school spending.

The group differs from a separate organization that is seeking a ballot issue re-garding property taxes, Joel said. Nebraskans United aims to work at a legislative level.

The group will look at modernizing TEOSA, the state funding mechanism, as well as finding other ways to generate revenue.

So if property tax relief happens, education doesnt take a hit, Joel said.

Making sure stakeholders understand the board is concerned about property tax relief is important, Gould said in support of approving the resolution.

My thought is that anything we can do to make our voice be heard with regard to property tax, we want to do that, she said. Our district is one that is certainly reliant heavily on the taxes from our patrons and community members. Were getting to the point where theres not too much more blood in the turnip that were trying to squeeze.

She compared current times to a similar climate in the 1980s when landowners were also faced with high taxes.

I think were at that point right now, she said, adding that the resolution will signal to the communi-ty that the board cares about property tax relief.

The resolution is just for school boards and has also been approved by Waverly, Wahoo, Norris, Cedar Bluff districts, among many others. Theres power in numbers, Joel said.

The board unanimously approved signing the resolution.

During his facilities report, Joel said an expert will be in attendance at the February meeting to give a presentation on possible options for Ceresco Elementarys ventilation concerns. Costs for that project range from $60,000 to $253,000.

The board approved bids to clean up and fix the junior-senior high schools sewage lagoon at a cost of about $47,000.
WAVERLY  Waverly Girl Scouts will join others across the state in selling Girl Scout cookies. The Girl Scout Cookie Program not only teaches girls essential entrepreneurial skills but also powers amazing leadership experiences.

Troops across Nebraska will kick off this season Feb. 2 with the return of Girl Scout Smores, the most popular new flavor in the history of the Girl Scout Cookie Program. Cookies fans help support the next generation of entrepreneurs and invest in their communities.

All across Nebraska, Girl Scouts are doing amazing things made possible by the sale of every package of Girl Scout Cookies, said Fran Marshall, Chief Executive Officer of Girl Scouts Spirit of Nebraska.

The Girl Scout Cookie Program allows each Girl Scout to discover her interests, take the lead in her community and change the world.

Thats because all of the net revenue, 100 percent of it, stays in Nebraska. Girls and their troops use their cookie proceeds for community service projects, leadership development, camping and outdoor experiences, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) programs, and more.

Plus for the second year, Girl Scouts Spirit of Nebraska is giving away a new car thanks to a generous partnership with Baxter Toyota LaVista. Cookie customers and the public can ask Girl Scouts for a secret code and enter it at a special link online for a chance to win the 2018 Girl Scout Cookie Car. The contest runs Feb. 2 to Mar. 9.

This years cookie line-up features Smores, Thin Mints, Caramel deLites, Peanut Butter Patties, Shortbread, Peanut Butter Sandwich, Thanks-a-Lot, Lemonades, all still $4 per package and gluten-free Trios at $5 per package. Cookies will be sold through Mar. 4.
Armenias National Assembly today unanimously passed a resolution recognizing and condemning the 2014 genocide of the Yezidi people in Iraq.

The resolution was introduced by MPs Rustam Makhmudyan, Vahram, Baghdasaryan and Armen Rustamyan.

The resolution calls on the international community to bring those responsible for the crime to justice and to take steps to prevent such human rights violations in the future.
The dialogue surrounding couples in which a homicide takes place often focuses on a history of domestic violence within the relationship, rather than the reasons the offender killed their partner. The importance of domestic violence notwithstanding, why do people sometimes kill the ones they love?

The latest figures show that of the 479 homicides committed in Australia between 2010 and 2012, 39 per cent (187 incidents) were classified as domestic. Of those, 58 per cent (109 incidents) were within an intimate relationship.

The influence of domestic violence notwithstanding, why do people sometimes kill the ones they love? Credit:Stocksy

There are numerous examples of intimate partner homicide where there is no evidence of previous domestic violence. So, why might a homicide occur in an otherwise seemingly non-violent relationship?

One of the authors (Belindas) recent study looked at 149 Australian homicides to determine who kills who and for what reason.
Barcelona: Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is threatening to prolong his government's direct rule over Catalonia if separatists try to allow Carles Puigdemont to run the region from exile.

Rajoy ousted Puidgemont and his government in October for leading Catalonia's drive to break from Spain and called new elections in hopes of a change of leadership.

A man hold a sign reading "We are republic. Freedom for the political prisoners" during a protest in support of the politicians imprisoned in front of the city hall in Badalona, Spain, on Monday. Credit:MANU FERNANDEZ

But the election in December did not yield the result Rajoy had hoped for, with separatist parties winning 47.5 per cent of the vote, which was sufficient to keep their parliamentary majority.

Puidgemont now appears poised to become Catalonia's leader once again, despite having fled to Belgium to avoid prosecution, possibly for sedition and rebellion.
On January 15, in Tehran, Armenian Ambassador to Iran Artashes Toumanyan met with Reza Ardakanian, Irans Minister of Energy and Co-president of the Armenia and Iran Intergovernmental Council.

The two are said to have discussed preparations for the next meeting of the intergovernmental council, as well as other energy issues, including the construction of wind turbines in Armenia a third high voltage transmission line, and the Meghri hydroelectric plant.
The WCO, with the support from the China Customs Cooperation Fund (CCF), conducted a Workshop on the SAFE Framework of Standards (SAFE Framework) and Authorized Economic Operator (AEO) Programme from 8 to 11 January 2018 in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

The main objective of the Workshop was to provide participants with the WCO perspective and improve their understanding of various tools for the enhanced implementation of the SAFE Framework and an AEO Programme. Over 40 participants from Customs, Cross-Border Regulatory Agencies (e.g., Commerce, Trade Control, Health, Standards, Plant Quarantine, IPR, Civil Aviation, port and airport authorities) and the private sector (e.g., Chamber of Commerce, airlines) attended the Workshop.

In her opening remarks, Mrs. P. S. M. Charles, Director General of Customs, highlighted the importance of the AEO Programme to secure supply chains and to guarantee facilitation of legitimate trade. She stressed the value of the Workshop in creating an environment for collaboration to improve engagements with stakeholders involved and thanked the WCO for organizing this timely Workshop.

The WCO experts presented various WCO instruments and tools relating to the SAFE Framework and AEO implementation and guided participants in developing and designing an AEO Programme in line with stakeholders needs and expectations in Sri Lanka. During the workshop, the WCO experts outlined the concepts of the SAFE Framework, AEO requirements and benefits, the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), Mutual Recognition tools, supported by case studies and good practices.

Facilitated by the experts, participants carried out a gap analysis with regard to Sri Lankas current implementation status of various Standards of the SAFE Framework and elaborated associated recommendations. A detailed comparison of the ongoing Compliance Trader Programme (Fast Track Documentation Process System  green channel cargo examination facility) and the SAFE AEO Programme was carried out.

In addition, the participants, with the support of experts, participated in practical exercises to come up with an Action Plan to implement an AEO Programme in Sri Lanka.

The participants actively participated in all the discussions and exercises and presented the next steps for the administration following the lessons learned from the workshop.

The WCO workshop proved highly useful in engaging the different stakeholders involved in the AEO Programme and identifying future challenges for the implementation of this project in a timely and effective manner. Being a diagnostic mission, the Workshop has laid down a broad framework and strong foundation for Sri Lankan Customs in terms of an effective implementation of the SAFE Framework and the launch of an AEO Programme, potentially through enhancement of their current compliance programme, in the near future.

The WCO is committed to providing all necessary support to Sri Lanka, as may be needed, moving forward.

For further information, please contact facilitation@wcoomd.org.
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In this Oct. 31, 2012, photo, French demonstrators and supporters of Palestinians hold a placard with the word "Boycott" during a demonstration in Paris, France. The BDS movement advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel in what its supporters say is a nonviolent way to promote the Palestinian struggle for independence.
Associate Editor John Nichols has been with The Capital Times since 1993 and has become one of Wisconsin's best-known progressive voices. He is the author of seven books on politics and the media and he also writes about electoral politics and public policy for The Nation magazine.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Jan. 16, 2018 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Jan. 16, 2018 | 01:51 PM | PADUCAH, KY

Authorities have arrested a man for breaking into a grocery store and stealing cash and other items.



The McCracken County Sheriff's Department says deputies responded shortly after 1 a.m. to a burglary alarm at the Reidland Food Giant. When the deputy arrived, he saw a man wearing a ski mask loading items and merchandise into a black trash bag from the store's front window.



The suspect, later identified as 52-year-old Richard Stockton Jr. fled towards the back of the grocery store. The deputy caught Stockton and apprehended him after a struggle in the snow.



Deputies said Stockton had a crow bar and hammers, both of which he used to get into the building and to break into an ATM. Stockton had $1,000 that had been stolen from the store, as well as power tools, cartons of cigarettes, and other items.



Stockton was on supervised released for felony charges in Christian County at the time of his arrest. He was taken to a local hospital for treatment of minor injuries he suffered during the struggle with the deputy, as well as an unrelated health condition. He's charged with 3rd degree burglary, theft, 1st degree criminal mischief, fleeing or evading police, resisting arrest, and possession of burglary tools.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Jan. 16, 2018 | 05:14 AM | MCCRACKEN COUNTY, KY

A Mayfield man is facing a robbery charge in McCracken County.

The McCracken County Sheriff's Office says at approximately 10:30 pm Monday, deputies received a complaint of an assault on College Avenue. Deputies say a man was assaulted at an apartment and his shoes and cell phone were stolen. According to police the victim sustained facial injuries and later received medical treatment at a local hospital.

Deputies found the suspect, 23-year-old Christopher Hill of Mayfield at the apartment where the assault happened. The victim's shoes and cell phone were also found there.

Hill was arrested and taken to the McCracken County Regional Jail on a charge of 1st degree robbery.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Jan. 16, 2018 | 12:18 PM | PADUCAH, KY





The Paducah Police Department has released city crime statistics for 2017.The department said in a press release that thefts increased from 993 in 2016 to 1,080. 126 of those were thefts from vehicles, which according to police were mostly left unlocked.Auto thefts reportedly went up from 76 to 95. Of those 95 reported thefts, 28 were classified as unauthorized use.Other than a man charged with murder after a fatal vehicle collision last January on Paducahs southside, there were no homicides last year.Reported rapes fell from 15 to 13; robberies were down from 33 to 26. Aggravated assault reports remained about the same: 51 in 2017, 52 in 2016. Reported burglaries rose from 152 to 168, and arsons remained the same at seven.Assaults, forgery, fraud, criminal mischief and sex offenses (other than rape), drug violations, offenses against family and children and all others were down 43, with 2,849 reported offenses in 2017.Paducah police officers received 52,275 calls for service in 2017. Of these, 2,357 resulted in an arrest. There were 132 juveniles charged with crimes. Officers served 1,209 warrants and 220 criminal summonses, compared to 1,179 and 215, respectively the prior year.Traffic accidents were down for the second year in a row. Officers investigated 1,737 vehicle collisions in 2017, down from 1,894 in 2016 and 1,904 in 2015. There were six fatal crashes in 2017. Officers issued 4,079 traffic citations.The Drug and Vice Enforcement Unit opened 226 cases  nearly 100 more than in 2016. They investigated 428 tips and collected 221.5 pounds of prescription medications for disposal through the departments semi-annual Drug Take-Back Day.
By The Associated Press Jan. 12, 2018 | 01:48 PM | FRANKFORT, KY

Kentucky has become the first state to win approval from the Trump administration to require many of its Medicaid recipients to work to receive coverage.

The Trump administration gave the approval Friday.



People between the ages of 19 and 64 must complete 80 hours per month of "community engagement" to keep their benefits. That includes getting a job, going to school, taking a job training course and community service.

Republican Gov. Matt Bevin says the plan will save state taxpayers more than $300 million over the next five years. He also estimates about 95,000 people will lose their Medicaid coverage either by not complying with the work and community engagement requirements, or by losing their eligibility because they make too much money.
An East Side phone store was robbed of $20,000 worth of cellphones and other products Friday night, but the suspects were found and arrested later on.

The armed robbery happened at about 7 p.m. at T-Mobile, One Dempsey Road, near the Milwaukee Street/Stoughton Road intersection, Madison police said.

Steven Gayden, 23, Aurora, Illinois, Angelo McKenzie, 23, Chicago, Doran Skanes, 23, South Bend, Indiana, and William Thomas, 22, no address given, were tentatively charged with armed robbery.

Three of the suspects were wearing masks and at least one had a handgun during the robbery.

Nobody was hurt.

"Officers were able to develop and locate a total of four suspects, as well as the vehicle they were in," the police report said. "The suspects were taken into custody south of Madison, near Highways N and H."
Hundreds of drivers in Madison didnt heed Mondays snow emergency, earning them a $60 parking ticket.

Madison police said 352 tickets were issued for not following alternate-side parking rules between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Those tickets total more than $21,000 in fines.

Most of the tickets were issued in the snow emergency zone Downtown and on the Isthmus. The zone normally allows for parking on both sides of a street in winter, but when an emergency is declared, parkers in the zone have to follow the same alternate-side rule as everyone else in the city.

The snow emergency continued through Tuesday night, meaning those who werent parked on the odd side of the street early Wednesday morning risked getting a ticket.

John Radovan of the Madison Police Department said no vehicles had to be towed during the first night of the snow emergency.

With snow continuing to fall after midnight Tuesday, Madison property owners were given another 24 hours to clear public sidewalks.

City code enforcement director George Hank said snow and ice on public walkways need to be removed or treated with salt or sand, or property owners face fines and a bill if city workers have to do the work.

If the snow had ended before midnight on Monday night, sidewalks would have had to have been cleared by noon Tuesday. With the flakes falling early Tuesday, the walks need to be cleared by noon on Wednesday.

Free sand for city residents is available at various locations in Madison. Find a location near your home at www.cityofmadison.com/sand.

The public sidewalk is the pavement between your yard and the terrace, the grassy area leading up to the curb.

The snow emergency declared in Madison on Monday stays in effect until 7 a.m. Wednesday.

About 150 city plows, sanders, salters and private contract units worked overnight to clear streets of the almost seven inches of snow that fell since Sunday night.
In the wake of a settlement last month with the owner of a chain of Madison-area convenience stores over the sale of so-called synthetic marijuana, the state Attorney Generals Office sent warnings Tuesday to other Dane County retailers about the consequences of selling the products.

In December, Farooq Shahzad, owner of Capitol Petro stores, agreed to pay nearly $1.3 million in civil forfeitures, assessments and costs as part of a consent judgment approved by a Dane County judge, settling a civil forfeiture case brought against him by the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

According to the judgment, Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn partially ruled in favor of the state Department of Justice in July, finding that Capitol Petro had violated state law by selling synthetic cannabinoids, sold variously as Spice and K2 or Kush, at its Madison stores.

The consent judgment, signed by Bailey-Rihn on Dec. 21, found Capitol Petro and Shahzad civilly liable for 16,444 violations of state law for selling the products.

The judgment bars Capitol Petro from selling the product in the future.

Shahzads attorney, Andrew Erlandson, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Capitol Petro has paid $100,000 of the judgment so far, according to court documents, and will make another payment of $1.15 million at a later date. The company also agreed to pay $33,000 for the cost of investigating the case.

According to court documents filed during the case, on June 25, 2015, Madison police executed search warrants at Capitol Petro locations at 2702 and 3505 E. Washington Ave., seizing nearly all of the stores Spice inventory. Shahzad was issued municipal ordinance citations.

On Aug. 15, 2016, Internal Revenue Service agents and officers from other agencies executed search warrants at six Capitol Petro locations, which was followed by testimony by some Capitol Petro employees before a federal grand jury. To date, no indictments have been issued, although Shahzads attorney noted in an October 2016 court filing that his client had received a letter from the U.S. Attorneys Office in Madison notifying him that he may be the target of a criminal investigation.

Maya Longfield, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorneys Office, said Tuesday that the office cannot comment on any pending investigation or matter thats been before a grand jury.

DATCP filed its forfeiture case against Shahzad and Capitol Petro on June 15, 2016.

Warnings issued

to other retailers

On Tuesday, Attorney General Brad Schimel sent a letter to 20 other convenience stores, tobacco shops and other retailers warning about the consequence of selling synthetic cannabinoids, according to a statement issued by DOJ.

(DOJ) will aggressively pursue action against businesses who choose to sell synthetic cannabinoids, states the letter, signed by Deputy Attorney General Paul Connell. The business and you may personally be subject to a substantial civil forfeiture from litigation pursued by this office, as well as criminal penalties from appropriate officials.

DOJ is not releasing a list of the businesses that were sent the letter enforcement because it is sensitive information that will be used to conduct additional follow up investigative work by local agencies, DOJ spokesman Johnny Koremenos said.

DOJ said that the products, sold sometimes as incense and potpourri, are unpredictable and dangerous, and while they contain compounds that are similar to the active chemical in marijuana, they have slightly different chemical compositions. The products are made in clandestine labs, DOJ said, using an ever-changing number of new chemical formulae. They can be highly addictive, and have been linked to harmful health effects, including death.

In court documents, DOJ cited the case of an Edgerton man, Ross C. Cotter-Brown, who struck and badly injured two Middleton girls in April 2016 while driving under the influence of the substance. In April, Cotter-Brown was sentenced to eight years in prison.

A former employee of Capitol Petro who gave deposition testimony in the civil forfeiture case, Lawrence R. Keehn, 53, of Madison, was charged in November with possession with intent to deliver synthetic cannabinoid, after police executed a search warrant at an apartment in July and found a large quantity of the products and $16,000 in cash. Keehn told police he sold the product because he saw how much his former employer made selling it, the complaint states.
Cochrane-Fountain City School Superintendent Tom Hiebert is back on the job after a 6-week paid administrative leave ordered by the school board.

Hiebert returned to work duties on Jan. 8 after the school board concluded an investigation into a complaint against Hiebert lodged by a school district employee.

The matter was evidently resolved and there was no disciplinary action taken against Hiebert based on the results of an independent inquiry by one or more lawyers.

The school board had a closed session meeting with attorneys on Jan. 3 to examine results of a completed investigation conducted by Weld Riley of Eau Claire, Wis., a firm hired by the school board to check out the complaint.

Nothing about the nature of the complaint or results of an investigation filed with the school board has been released publicly.

Four school board members questioned about the investigation said they were advised by legal counsel, Ruder Ware of Eau Claire, not to share information about the complaint or investigation.

We cannot discuss personnel matters, so nothing more to add, said Don Baloun, president of the C-FC School Board.

Hiebert was placed on paid administrative leave on Nov. 20 after the school board met in closed session to consider a complaint lodged by a district employee.

While there was speculation that the complaint was filed by a school teacher, school officials declined to confirm or deny if that was the case.

In a prior statement, Baloun said the board followed district policy and legal counsel guidelines in placing Hiebert on leave while conducting an independent investigation of the complaint.

Hiebert has been employed as C-FC district administrator for nine years. He intends to retire when his current contract expires on June 30, 2019.
As the state legislature gets closer to reconvening, Winona area lawmakers prepare to concentrate on taxes.

When the 2018 legislative session starts in February, adjusting to the federal governments recently passed tax changes will be a top priority.

Passed in December, changes in the federal tax code are estimated by Minnesota Department of Revenue researchers to grow tax collections in the state by nearly $850 million in the current two-year budget period if the federal changes are adopted with no change to Minnesotas policy.

Rep. Gene Pelowski, DFL-Winona, said working on tax conformity adjustments to the states tax policies so that the state wont lose money or raise taxes would be one of the first priorities for the House and Senate.

Those will be significant, Pelowski said. I anticipate there will be significant discussion.

A report by the Minnesota Department of Revenue shows that one of the larger changes, a 20 percent federal deduction for small business owners, could reduce state revenue by $963 million through fiscal year 2021.

The law would also repeal the ability to claim an exemption for the taxpayer, spouse and dependents and replace it with an increased child credit and new credits for the taxpayer, spouse and non-child dependents.

It also repeals most itemized deductions.

Greg Davids, R-Preston, chairs the House Tax Committee and agreed that tax conformity will be one of the first priorities for the legislative session.

Unlike the federal government, Minnesota is required to balance its budget.

Davids noted, however, that it will have to be preceded by Governor Mark Dayton signing the House and Senate budgets for the states operating expenses, which he vetoed at the end of the 2017 session in an attempt to force renegotiations on a number of items in the states tax bill.

Dayton had objected to items he termed excessive tax giveaways that would have included tax breaks for tobacco companies, estate tax exemptions for larger amounts of money and a freeze on the statewide property tax levy.

The first order of business is to get us in business, Davids said. He previously called the governors veto of the House and Senate budgets reprehensible and said Dayton was trying to eliminate a branch of government.

Following tax conformity  if the legislatures operating funds are passed and the process is not hung up on renegotiations with the governor  there is also a chance for another bonding bill to be passed.

Traditionally the bonding bills are done in even-numbered years, with only emergency funding done in off years.

The 2017 bonding bill was off cycle, and another in 2018 could address further needs as well as returning the state to a funding rhythm.

Last year the state passed a nearly $1 billion bonding bill and a $300 million transportation bill, along with $483 million in new education money and the $648 million tax bill.

Davids said they could continue that momentum.

In the recent bonding bill, large area projects included $25.3 million in funding for Winona State Universitys Education Village and $3.6 million to repair the Lanesboro Damn.

Im hoping we can come together on a strong bonding bill, Davids said. Im open to bonding requests, and Ive got some requests down here too.
A series of meetings Tuesday in Baraboo will decide whether Sauk County voters get a chance to weigh in on the issue of partisan gerrymandering in the spring election.

The Executive and Legislative Committee will meet at 4:30 p.m. to decide whether a proposed advisory referendum can be considered by the Sauk County Board later in the evening. Public comment will be allowed.

If the committee sends the proposal to the board, and the board approves it, the following question would appear on April 3 election ballots countywide: Should the Wisconsin legislature create a nonpartisan procedure for the preparation of legislative and congressional redistricting plans?

During a Jan. 8 meeting to discuss the referendum, all three committee members present expressed concerns and criticisms about it. None vocalized support for the proposal, and a motion to send it to the full board died for lack of a second.

However, the committee agreed to reconsider the matter Tuesday so its two other members  supervisors Wally Czuprynko, of Lake Delton, and William Hambrecht, of Prairie du Sac  can weigh in.

The countys chief legal counsel issued an opinion late in the day Friday disputing the legality of the proposal.

The opinion, written by Interim Sauk County Corporation Counsel Deb ORourke, centered on a state law that allows county boards to authorize referendums. It said the law allows advisory referendums on local issues only, not matters controlled by the state Legislature.

However, other counties have run advisory referendums on state issues. The Dane County Board authorized a 2014 referendum on gerrymandering in which more than 80 percent of voters said they favored the creation of nonpartisan methods for redistricting.

Dane County Assistant Corporation Counsel David Gault has said he disagrees with ORourkes opinion and believes the Sauk County Board can authorize an advisory referendum on anything it wants.

In an email Monday, Wisconsin Counties Association General Counsel Andrew Phillips said he does not dispute Gault's view. I have no reason to disagree with Mr. Gault  Ive known him for years and respect his opinions, Phillips said.

Phillips, who spoke with O'Rourke before she issued her opinion, said the circumstances of the proposal seem odd to him because the board already passed a resolution in September urging lawmakers to revamp redistricting procedures.

He said that although he does not see the proposed referendum as being unlawful, it just seems inconsistent with the purpose and language of the advisory referendum statute.

ORourke said her opinion is not binding on supervisors, meaning the board can approve the referendum if it wishes.

Supporters of the referendum, including its sponsor, Supervisor Peter Vedro, of Baraboo, say it's different from the boards September action. It would allow voters to send a direct message to lawmakers about the practice of rigging political maps in favor of one candidate or party.

What we passed was our resolution, and the ballot initiative gives our citizens a chance to express their views, said Supervisor Bill Wenzel of Prairie du Sac.

The most vocal opponents of the referendum on the committee  Board Chair Marty Krueger, of Reedsburg, and Supervisor Dennis Polivka, of Spring Green  have said they oppose gerrymandering. However, they see the referendum as a wedge issue that will anger state lawmakers.

Sauk County Clerk Becky Evert said Monday she has received 35 emails supporting the referendum, and four opposing it.

Also Tuesday, the board will decide whether the county should contract with a private firm that would finance solar energy systems at two government buildings.

Supporters of the proposal point to a consultants analysis that says the county stands to save more than $550,000 over a 25-year period. Opponents have questioned those figures, and said installing solar panels at a county-run nursing home in Reedsburg could impact future plans for that property.
Two Baraboo High School students are organizing a feast they cant attend.

Although theyll never get so much as a bite to eat, the co-presidents of the Interact Club are raising money and recruiting volunteers to serve 50,000 meals. Theyre working with Food for Kidz, a nonprofit that sends prepackaged meals to poor countries around the world.

BHS seniors Paige Goeckermann and Jenna Kothbauer hope to raise $10,000. That would buy 50,000 Food for Kidz meals. Upward of 240 volunteers will pack the food during a half-day event March 17.

Itll be a big community-building event, Goeckermann said.

The duo learned about Food for Kidz while attending a Rotary Club event in Stoughton in October 2016. They saw volunteers pack 150,000 meals as a disc jockey played lively music.

It was so much fun, Kothbauer said.

In April, they began planning to bring Food for Kidz to Baraboo. Itll be a milestone event for Interact, a Rotary affiliate that has grown from only a few members three years ago to 45 this year.

We thought we could make our mark, Goeckermann said.

Based in Minnesota, Food for Kidz sends meals to children in poverty-stricken and war-torn countries. It sends loads of sustainable food  a mixture of protein, rice, vegetables and seasonings  along with packing supplies and an adviser to help volunteers prepare them for distribution. All donations go toward packing, shipping and distributing food.

Goeckermann and Kothbauer are soliciting local business and clubs for donations and volunteers. Theyre also taking donations online through a GoFundMe drive.

They plan to bring in a DJ to make the packing event fun.

Its a way to bring the community together, Kothbauer said.

You will leave having a great feeling, Goeckermann said. It impacts so many people around the world, and it impacts so many people around the community.

The co-presidents are looking forward to supporting a good cause, and giving others a chance to catch the community service bug. This is our start, making a difference, Kothbauer said.
Beaver Dam City Council members saw a new vision of downtown Monday night as landscape architect and native son Matt Wieneke presented a video tour.

The presentation was part of a Downtown Redevelopment Plan presented by Mayor Becky Glewen to the council and a group of downtown investors and supporters.

Glewen and community members have been working with urban architect Zach Benedict, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, to plan downtowns future. According to Glewen, the overriding goal is to attract people to the community to meet the needs of the future. It is also part of a statewide initiative to fill the huge gap in talent needed to sustain industrial and community growth.

Glewen handed out packets of materials in which the writers highlighted the ways in which quality of place and community assets attract talent. She quoted Lou Glazer of Michigan Future, who wrote, Place matters. The quality of place is key to attracting the talent that is essential to successful enterprises and local economies.

And while economy has always been cited as the reason for why things are the way they are, Glewen believes that making things better will pay for itself. She suggested that Beaver Dam can be much more than it is by emphasizing the things it already has, and capitalizing on its existing assets. She added that packaging and marketing those assets makes a huge difference in how the city is perceived by those who may want to move here, to work here and to establish a business here.

We broke it down into what we had control over or might have control over in the future, and what things are moving and changing in the community, Glewen said. We talked about zones including the Front Street corridor, the Spring Street village, the river section, the riverfront arts district and possibly some downtown housing.

Priorities were established including the entrance to Front Street near Annabelles Ice Cream and South Spring Street. Phase two includes the riverfront and the Steinkraus property south of Ryan Cantafios Way between Madison Street and South Center Street. Projects would include beautifying planting areas, revitalizing buildings and enhancing the back sides of buildings facing the riverfront. Those rear facades are exposed following the demolition of buildings that straddled and/or obstructed the rivers flow. Seven years ago, those obstructions (including 11 buildings and culverts that concealed the river) were removed, revealing a view that had not been seen since the early 1900s.

In looking at some of these street corridors, we talked about facade improvement and street trees, Glewen said. We looked at lighting, ease of walking and crossing streets, and what a store looked like  before and what it could look like after.

Wieneke took it from there with a video tour showing improved and accessible green spaces, arched openings into the Spring Street Village and onto the Front Street area, water features, sculptures, a patio on the Rogers Cinema/city park property with a patio in the shape of a beavers tail and the body in the shape of a connecting mound, flower beds in green spaces and hanging banners and flower baskets from light poles.

Future sessions will help determine how to implement and fund the proposed improvements.
In light of recent events in which two leaders began bragging about the size of their buttons, it may be time to revisit options surrounding nuclear annihilation.

Despite the good intentions of our grade-school teachers, hiding under our desks will not protect us from anything but a wayward eraser flung by Bobby from the back of the room. The Sisters of St. Agnes were just following instructions given to them by their beloved President John F. Kennedy.

In 1961, he signed an executive order that stated a program shall include but not be limited to the development and execution of a fallout shelter program. It went on to add a chemical, biological and radiological warfare defense program, a warning system for military and civilians, an emergency assistance to state and local government in a post attack period.(tncms-asset)e0bce2d0-f88b-11e7-8996-00163ec2aa77[0](/tncms-asset)

There is a bit more to the whole executive order. The one that really tickles my funny bone is there will be traffic police and evacuation capabilities. Where in the world would we all be evacuated to? Or does Elon Musk have some plan to get the entire population of the U.S. into space where it is safe?

Our neighbors across the street in my village had a fallout shelter. I would come home from school telling about our monthly air raid drills and my friend Eileen assured me that her family of seven would be safe for a month in their basement.

When we would play down there sometimes, I was impressed with the supply of canned food and Band-Aids, blankets and board games. I did wonder about the absence of toilet and sink, and asked innocently about the possibility of the air not clearing in exactly 30 days. We didnt know about cannibalism at the time or the two of us might have speculated who would go first, as any reasonably morbid 10-year-old might.

Meanwhile, the rest of the neighborhood, lacking a 10-by-10 cordoned-off shelter to escape to, would be toast. Knowing now what we do about air quality, infrastructure and lasting effects of any kind of biological, chemical or radioactive attacks, the naivete of those shelter builders and our government in those days seems almost laughable, if it werent so serious.

Enough people are taking it seriously these days to make whole businesses out of pre-fab fallout shelters, survival capsules and high-strength, low-weight, thermal protection containers. There are many models to choose from and are billed to withstand tsunamis, fires, floods and, of course, nuclear attacks. Some can be had for as little as $7,000, many upward of $20,000.

Of course, for assured survival through the end of the world, there are whole communities being built underground. Before placing a down payment for such a property, developers will take you to one of the model sites  blindfolded, of course. Upon arrival, and with the removal of the blindfold, prospective buyers will find a shelter built for up to 135 people who would be safe and secure for a year.

Builders claim the shelters can withstand a 50-megaton nuclear blast, 450 mph winds, up to 10 days of surface fires at 1,250 degrees, magnitude-10 earthquakes, and three weeks beneath any flood. Wow. Noah only had one wooden ark for 40 days and 40 nights of rain and this company offers an air ventilation system that neutralizes any biological, chemical or nuclear attacks.

Promoter Robert Vincino likens the experience to living on a cruise ship. I have never lived on a cruise ship, but I can safely say, I dont think so.

Although there are seemingly endless choices to be made, I would rather never have to exercise the decision. In fact, maybe the choice should be made by reasonable leaders who dont threaten each other or all of us. Maybe Ill take my chances under my desk.
Communities impacted by the opioid epidemic may soon have hope of compensation in a new lawsuit against opioid manufacturers.

Juneau County has entered into a lawsuit with 12 other Wisconsin Counties. They are represented by the firms Crueger Dickinson and Simmons Hanly Conroy. The firms have experience in high-stakes litigation, consumer protection and mass tort actions. They also filed similar suits on behalf of 48 Wisconsin counties.

Opioid overdose in Wisconsin deaths rose by 645 percent over the last 16 years, from 111 deaths in 2000 to 827 deaths in 2016.

The defendants in the case are Purdue Pharma L.P.; Purdue Pharma, Inc.; The Purdue Frederick Company, Inc.; Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc.; Cephalon, Inc.; Johnson & Johnson; Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Endo Health Solutions, Inc.; Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Dr. Perry Fine; Dr. Scott Fishman; and Dr. Lynn Webster.

Juneau is accompanied in the suit by Brown, Crawford, Iron, Kewaunee, Outagamie, Ozaukee, Pepin, Portage, Racine, Richland and Winnebago Counties. The counties seek compensatory and punitive damages for the substantial costs they spend to combat the problems caused by addiction to the opioids manufactured by these companies.

Juneau County Board Chairman Alan Peterson said the county has been considering joining the lawsuit since about September. Peterson said he preferred counties file the lawsuit rather than states so they could directly receive compensation from a potential settlement or ruling.

When they get done, they expect all 72 counties will be in on it, Peterson said.

Juneau County Corporation Counsel David Lasker called the opioid epidemic an equal opportunity misery, saying it has affected communities regardless of income. Lasker said other similar cases are being currently litigated in other states.

According to the department of human services, hospital visits involving opioid acute poisoning (including overdose) increased from 25.3 to 52.0 per 100,000 between 2006 and 2014. Younger men are the most affected demographic.

Juneau County Health Officer Barb Theis said a full-time professional will likely be required to adequately fight the problem of drug addiction. We are writing for a drug free communities grant so we can have someone full-time, Theis said.

Families have been impacted as well as individuals. Director of Human Services Scott Ethun, said he has seen addiction in his area of work. Weve probably never had this many children in foster care or in placement, Ethun said. Ethun said staff report Seventy to 75 percent of those children were removed due to their parents having addiction issues the addiction is so strong for these people that their ability to parent is really compromised. Ethun believes addiction accounted for a smaller share of cases in the past.

The 81 page complaint has four main causes of action: deceptive trade practices, public nuisance, unjust enrichment, and intentional misrepresentation.

Lasker said the cause for deceptive trade practices is due to companies being having sucked in the public and the medical profession into believing that these substances are helpful and good for people. The cause for public nuisance gets at the fact that they have created this problem so that it is a problem for all of us in the community. Unjust enrichment is included because they have made themselves rich off the backs of people who are suffering. And intentional misrepresentation is included because it is alleged the companies are making claims about these things that they know are falls.

Opioid addiction has affected law enforcement as well. A lot of people in our jail are there because of addiction issues, Ethun said.

Some have drawn parallels between this lawsuit and the recent suit against tobacco companies which ended in a settlement. Lasker agrees with the assessment, but believes this case to be more egregious. There are many similarities, except I would say this is worse than tobacco in terms of impact on the public and the individuals who were victimized, Lasker said.

A court date has not been set for the case, but Lasker predicts the counties will prevail in some degree, if not completely.
With a redesigned recognition process allowing members of the community to vote, the Sauk Prairie Area Chamber of Commerce announced winners of six new awards, introduced the 2018 chamber president Mike Phillips, and outlined a vision for the coming year at its annual awards dinner and meeting.

Held Jan. 15 at the brand new Vintage Brewing Company, Tim Homar, 2017 chamber president talked about 2018 being a year of infinite possibilities  which served as the theme for the event.

We have to understand how to draw all generations back tour community and keep them here, Phillips said. The market analysis shows we are an aging community, with projections over the next 10 years that our aging population is only going to increase. How do we design the community for the next generations want to work, live and play right here.

Following Phillips vision for 2018, Sauk Prairie Chamber of Commerce Director Tywana German introduced the redesigned awards geared toward community involvement and new format for voting.

The reason the awards were changed is because we wanted more engagement from the general community, German said.

With more than 400 individuals voting on the five new award categories, McFarlanes Retail and Service Center took home the Service Counts award. The award recognizes a business or individual who demonstrates a friendly, positive attitude, and who instills and demonstrates an exemplary level of internal and external customer service, according to German.

This honor, I think might be a bit of a sympathy vote, because after 100 years  how many 100-year-olds do you know? said Dick McFarlane, vice president and owner of McFarlanes. The service really comes from our employees.

The Thrive Award  which is designed for a business that recognizes engagement within the community and instilling the importance of networking, volunteering, and continuous education among employees  went to Tools of Marketing, Inc. Peter Davidison, an employee of Tools of Marketing, accepted the award for owner Marietta Reuter.

My boss is certainly deserving of this award, Davidson said. As this award shows, the drive to help those around her also extends to her workplace. Davidson said staff are updated weekly about goings-on in the community and are encouraged to volunteer. (Marietta) not only talks the talk, but walks the walk, he said. With her abundance of energy and involvement in all manner of community projects  long range and short  she is a true inspiration.

Wollersheim Winery and Distillery received the Destination Maker award, with Philippe Coquard accepting. The Destination Maker award is for the business that recognizes the spirit or perseverance and creativity that improves the visitor experience and engages the community.

It is truly a privilege to be part of Sauk Prairie, Coquard said. I would like to invite all of you to come and discover in the bottom of a glass of whiskey  there are indefinite possibilities at the bottom of that glass.

Business of the Year award went to Ramaker and Associates, Inc., with Jamie Skowronski accepting for the business. The award is for a local business that has experienced significant growth, community engagement, employee retention and innovative business practices. Ramaker designed the new Vintage Brewing Company site in Sauk City.

Ramaker and Associates is 100 percent owned by employees, Skowronski said. Im standing here on their behalf.

Pam Ziegler of Ziegler Photography received the Volunteer of the Year award. The award recognizes a chamber member whose service and dedication have made significant contributions to chamber programs and operations.

I am honored to accept this award, Ziegler said. I look forward to 2018 and volunteering more and serving the chamber.

Alan Wildman, Prairie du Sac village administrator, presented the first ever Citizen of the Year award to Ron Lins, who received a standing ovation from the audience. Wildman said 28 nominees came from the community. He said the Citizen of the Year should be a resident whose service and dedication have made a significant contribution to the community.

On behalf of my municipal and school colleagues, I have the honor to congratulate Ronald Lins for the first Sauk Prairie Riverway Citizen of the Year award.

Im honored and grateful to be accepting this Citizen of the Year award, Lins said. It came as a real surprise to me. I was just sitting at home enjoying my retirement and then I was informed of this.

Lins recently retired after serving 30 years as the town of Prairie du Sac board chair, and a successful career in agriculture. He served on a variety of committees, such as Sauk Prairie Ambulance Commission, the Intergovermental Planning committee, the Comprehensive Planning committee, and the Great Sauk State Trail committee, among others.

Wrapping up the evening, German said Sauk Prairie is a community comprised of many talented and very supportive individuals, and its commitment to the business community has a lasting impact.

With your help, I know we can accomplish great things, German said. Sauk Prairie is growing. Great things are happening. But it doesnt happen by chance. When we take risk, great things can happen. There are no crazy ideas. Lets talk about it. Lets imagine it. Lets dream of what Sauk Prairie could be.
A former Dane County Sheriffs deputy has been accused by the president of his former union of stealing about $10,000 from fellow law enforcement officers  and the former deputys lawyer on Monday said his client has admitted to state authorities that he committed the crime.

Joel M. Wagner, 54, of Sun Prairie, was treasurer of the Dane County Deputy Sheriffs Association prior to retiring from the sheriffs office in early 2017. Questions first arose in 2016 about Wagners handling of union finances, according to union president John Cahill. Suspicion deepened due to Wagners resistance and evasiveness to efforts to increase the transparency of our finances, he said.

The union asked for an outside investigation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, which Cahill said proved Wagner stole the money. Tentative felony charges against Wagner have been recommended to Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozannes office, which will make a final charging decision after a review of the documents, Ozanne confirmed to the Wisconsin State Journal on Monday.

We are dismayed and disgusted to learn the extent to which Joel Wagner appears to have stolen from his fellow officers, Cahill said in a statement released Monday.

Wagners lawyer, Chris Van Wagner, on Monday told the State Journal that Wagner is remorseful and wants to pay back what he stole as soon as a final loss number is provided to him by the district attorneys office.

Van Wagner also said Wagner has never denied the crime.

When the state investigators approached him, (Wagner) cooperated with them, admitted wrongdoing and, through me, indicated he would take full responsibility and repay every dime that he had taken, Van Wagner said. Hes still prepared to do that today and were simply waiting for a number from the DA as to what that final payment is and hell make it within two weeks of getting the amount.

He is exceedingly remorseful and embarrassed and knows he let his fellow officers down, Van Wagner added.

Cahill and Van Wagner both said Wagners theft only extended to union members money, and not to taxpayer funds or charity operations of the union.

Since the investigation, Cahill said union leaders have made numerous changes to strengthen the unions internal accounting and bookkeeping to try to ensure no one can ever steal unnoticed from union funds again.

Jim Palmer, executive director for the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, said Monday that Wagners status as a former sheriffs deputy made his thievery that much more difficult for his former colleagues to take.

My sense is that this kind of situation, where you have someone essentially stealing from his fellow officers, is very rare, Palmer told the State Journal. And that makes it all the more reprehensible and outrageous.

Cahills statement reflected a sense of personal betrayal.

As law enforcement officers, the oath that we take to uphold the law is sacred, Cahill said. Given the risks we face together in doing our jobs to protect this community, our ability to trust one another is equally important. ... It appears clear that (Wagner) violated that oath and betrayed the trust we placed in him. The crimes alleged against him are extremely serious, and they mar the integrity and reputation of our dedicated officers who perform their law enforcement duties honorably.

The union has hired a new auditing firm dedicated to ensuring transparency of association funds, Cahill said, and the union also has sought and received help from Palmers association in updating its security practices.

Palmer said the Dane County deputy association was very active in the community and involved in providing a variety of services to its members.

It would appear that Wagner found a way to capitalize on that for his own personal gain, and all in a way that wasnt detected in their annual audits, Palmer said. I am confident that the (Dane County association) is committed to making sure that this can never happen again, and that Joel Wagner is held accountable for his actions.
Amid calls to act more quickly, Gov. Scott Walker now says he wants lawmakers to pass legislation this year to implement his plan to convert the states troubled youth prison into an adult facility and to build smaller facilities for young offenders around the state.

The push comes as Assembly Republicans are working on legislation that would remove the state Department of Corrections oversight of the states most serious juvenile offenders.

In a statement released early Tuesday, Walker said he plans to hire an architectural engineering firm next month to design five juvenile correctional facilities around the state as part of an effort to keep juvenile offenders closer to their homes. The current juvenile facility, the joint Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, would be converted to house adult offenders.

Walker originally said he would include the changes in his 2019-21 state budget, should he be re-elected in November. Proposing to do them sooner comes after repeated calls from several Democrats to shut down the youth prison in Irma sooner after years of allegations of inmate abuse there and unsafe working conditions for staff.

Were dedicated to improving long-term outcomes for both juveniles and our staff working at these facilities, Walker said. Both Republicans and Democrats collaborated on this plan and agreed it offers the best way forward. Together we can move this through the Legislature to improve juvenile corrections and treatment through transitioning to smaller, more regional corrections facilities and focusing on mental health and trauma-informed care.

Department of Corrections spokesman Tristan Cook said officials there would meet any timeline passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor to implement changes to juvenile corrections.

Assembly Republicans were also moving quickly to draft a bill aimed at putting local county government officials in charge of housing the most serious juvenile offenders in their areas  a task now carried out by the DOC.

Assembly Corrections Committee chairman Michael Schraa, R-Oshkosh, said the legislation he is drafting with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos would likely allow county governments to have a say in the type of juvenile correctional facility built in their areas.

I think the goal is to really have DOC out of it, and whether thats having (the Department of Children and Families) overseeing the program or what ... just so there is uniformity with regard to programming, but really handing it off to the counties, Schraa said. He said the legislation wouldnt preclude the state from building the facilities Walker has proposed.

I think that would definitely be an outcome that could happen  (have the state) spend money up front to build and then let the counties do their thing, he said, adding he is seeking support from Democrats and that Assembly Republicans may discuss the proposal Tuesday. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald did not respond to a request for comment on Walkers effort or the Assembly Republican proposal.

Kyle Christianson, a lobbyist for the Wisconsin Counties Association, said his members have been involved in initial meetings regarding counties playing a new role in juvenile justice and (are) in the process of discussing options with county officials and staff, but they have not been briefed on details of the proposals.

Counties would like to participate in the process surrounding the closure of Lincoln Hills, he said. Therefore, counties hope that the process for closing Lincoln Hills and the development of new, regional facilities is done thoughtfully, includes input from counties and takes into consideration the various needs of the juveniles served.

A spokeswoman for Walker did not respond to a request for comment on the Assembly Republicans idea. The DOCs Cook declined to comment.

After calling for the reorganization of juvenile corrections to be carried out before 2019, Democratic legislative leaders panned Walkers announcement and criticized him and Republicans for ignoring similar Democratic proposals.

The governors rapidly evolving stance on Lincoln Hills can be attributed directly to pressure put on the administration by legislative Democrats, Assembly Minority Leader Gordon Hintz, D-Oshkosh, said. The Legislature should not end this session without action. The Republicans are already six years late acknowledging this problem. This legislation should not be crafted behind closed doors.

Rep. Evan Goyke, D-Milwaukee, has proposed legislation that would accomplish similar goals to the plan Walker proposed on Jan. 4. He also has helped write legislation that would shift oversight of juvenile corrections to the Department of Children and Families. Goyke endorsed Walkers plan but called for a quicker implementation.

Goykes legislation came in response to allegations of inmate abuse that were reported to Walkers office as early as 2012. Those allegations have become the subject of a now three-year investigation headed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A number of federal lawsuits have been filed by current and former inmates against state Corrections officials since the investigation began, and prison guards have reported a number of incidents during which they were assaulted by inmates who they say feel emboldened by the scrutiny of staff.

Goyke in an interview said any legislation to overhaul oversight of juvenile corrections should preserve some state oversight to ensure juvenile offenders are placed in the facilities that best address their needs, even if theyre not close to home.

He also called for a hearing on his own bill and suggested plans sought by Assembly Republicans or other lawmakers could be discussed as amendments to his plan.Ive introduced a bill, the bill has bipartisan support (and) it mirrors in substantial form the governors plan, so lets have a hearing on it, Goyke said. If theres something thats disagreeable about that bill, lets do it through the legislative process rather than turning it into a partisan redraft.
The leaders of the state Senate and Assembly need to stop obsessing over the state Elections and Ethics commissions. Lawmakers have little to fear from these weak and subservient state agencies.

If that wasnt clear enough two years ago, when the Republican-run Legislature disbanded the strong, independent and nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, it certainly is now.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, have been calling for the resignations of the Elections and Ethics administrators in recent weeks  without offering any evidence of wrongdoing.

Apparently, guilt by association is a good enough reason for Fitzgerald and Vos to force Ethics Administrator Brian Bell and Elections chief Michael Haas out of their jobs. Fitzgerald and Vos are still mad that the old GAB participated in an investigation of millions of dollars in secret contributions to political groups favoring Republicans, and subsequently looked into whether state employees might be campaigning on taxpayer time.

But Bell and Haas, who previously worked for the GAB, had little if anything to do with those probes. They werent recommended for any discipline by Attorney General Brad Schimel, also a Republican, who investigated leaked records from the now-closed cases.

Moreover, Bell and Haas have earned votes of confidence from the bipartisan commissioners who serve as their bosses. Bell has even asked for a public hearing to clear his name  something top lawmakers have so far resisted. Presumably thats because lawmakers have no evidence of poor performance or unfairness.

Fitzgerald says hell hold a Senate vote Jan. 23 to reject Haas and Bells confirmations. The message Fitzgerald and Vos are sending to those who works for the Ethics and Elections commissions is clear: Dont cross or discomfort top lawmakers or your job will be at risk.

The old GAB didnt have to worry about intimidation as it strived to encourage clean and honest government at the Statehouse. The GAB was controlled by retired judges who were insulated as much as possible from partisan influence. The old GAB could launch and pay for investigations without the blessing of lawmakers.

The new and timid Elections and Ethics commissions are controlled by an equal number of GOP and Democratic appointees, meaning either political party can stop just about anything the commissions might want to do. The loss of the independent GAB was a blow to good government in Wisconsin, removing a deterrent to corruption.

Nonetheless, moving forward, the Ethics and Elections commissions still are responsible for tracking lobbyists and overseeing elections. And with the Russian government targeting Wisconsins voter registration system last election, these agencies need experienced administrators on the job for elections this fall.

The full Senate should tell Fitzgerald and Vos to leave Bell and Haas alone so their agencies can function with some consistency and less fear.
Safe ride programs all over the state have saved lives and are a major factor in the 50 percent drop in the number of alcohol-related deaths from vehicle crashes in Wisconsin, from 326 in 2004 to 162 in 2014, according to the Department of Transportation.

Sauk Prairies Bar Buddies, a similar program, has evolved: Where it once offered free rides home to individuals, it has expanded to provide rides from home to bar, bar to bar or party to party, up to a 10-mile radius for a fee. The service can also be booked for private events, like weddings. With Baraboo and Lodi-based Bar Buddies as well, riders can be connected with other surrounding communities to ensure a safe ride home outside of the 10-mile radius with a connection fee.

We work on getting people home safely or wherever they are staying, said Heather Ceaser, program coordinator for Bar Buddies. Thats how it started.

Getting his customers home safely is foremost in Travis Zemans mind. Owner of The Gym Bar and Grill, 833 Water St., Zeman recognizes the importance of the service.

The Sauk Prairie area doesnt offer Uber and its taxi service doesnt run after 6 p.m., Zeman said. There is an hour gap between when the taxi shuts down and Bar Buddies starts up. When we hear people saying they cant find an Uber driver, we tell them about Bar Buddies.

Diane Zeman, manager at the Press Box, 809 Water St., Sauk City, said she thinks the Bar Buddies service is great. I do think it helps, she said. I hope they continue doing it and I hope they keep funding it.

Zeman said the program is something her generation didnt have. Its awesome when I get here in the morning and I see cars in the parking lot, Diane Zeman said. It means people chose a safer way.

Bar Buddies receives grant funding from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and is reimbursed when it picks up a rider from a Tavern League member. It is otherwise dependent on the fares it receives, donations and fundraisers.

In the past, Bar Buddies has held a variety of raffles and last year began holding a bowling tournament to raise funds. The 8-Pin Tap Bowling Tournament will be held again February 23 at the Riviera Bowl.

We did it last year for the first time and it was pretty successful, Ceaser said. Last year we raised about $1,700. Basically we appreciate anything we can get.

The program costs $90,000 annually to operate, which is higher than other area Bar Buddies because Sauk Prairie pays its drivers.

The Sauk Prairie program is also unique in that it only gets 50 percent of a drivers tips, while other Bar Buddies get 100 percent.

Bars and other local entities do what they can to help. Travis Zeman is holding a Queen of Hearts raffle at the Gym. Money earned through the sale of raffle tickets is combined and a weekly drawing is held. If an individual draws a queen of hearts, they get half the money and Bar Buddies gets the other half. The pot is up to $2,000 currently.

Bar Buddies currently operates Wednesday and Thursdays from 7 p.m.-2:30 a.m. and Friday and Saturday from 7 p.m.-3 a.m. It could change. Ceaser announced Bar Buddies is consistently losing money on Wednesday and Thursday nights. In December, it lost $300. It is seeking feedback from stakeholders on possibly cutting Wednesday service completely, remove Wednesday nights seasonally through the winter or keep Wednesday but look for sponsorship.

Sauk Prairie Police Chief Jerry Strunz said the department noticed a near 50 percent reduction in drunken driving arrests in the community during the early years of the program. Even though that number has increased slightly, Strunz said he still feels the service is important.
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Tim Burns will be the special guest at the Democratic Party of Sauk County meeting at 7 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 18, at the Baraboo Civic Center. The meeting is free and open to the public.

Feb. 20 is an important primary election day, but one that many people may not know about. On that day there will be three candidates competing to appear on the April 3 ballot for Wisconsin Supreme Court. They are vying to fill a seat being vacated by Justice Michael Gableman, said Judy Spring, First Vice Chair/Elections, Democratic Party of Sauk County.

With a 5  2 conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, we feel there is a real need for the public to be active in the February primary and April election, said Spring. Although the state Supreme Court race is supposedly non-partisan, that clearly has not been the case for the past few years. People need to know that their failure to vote in these important elections has had dire consequences at both the national and state levels. At the January 18 meeting the public will be able to evaluate this candidates ability to be fair and impartial, protecting justice for all, not just the wealthy and the well-connected, said Spring.

Burns is one of America's leading attorneys in standing up to large insurance companies. He has been hired by major clients in three dozen states and ten foreign countries to handle their most sensitive issues. He has chaired the American Bar Association's committee on Fair and Impartial Courts, and serves on the national board of the American Constitution Society, an organization that focuses on constitutional issues.

Tim Burns and his wife Pam, have chosen Middleton to raise their family. Married for over 20 years, they have three children.
Merely remembering and celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. isnt enough, a speaker told those at Madisons annual observance honoring the civil rights leader at the state Capitol Monday.

To advance the ideals King espoused, people must continue to live them and fight for them, said Muhibb Dyer, the keynote speaker at the longest-running state tribute to King in the nation, now in its 38th year. He said thats especially important because disparities are still so wide and young African-American children  including those in Wisconsin  still dont have the same opportunities as their white peers.

Fifty years after the demise of the great Dr. King, (they are) still not afforded the rights of (their) white counterparts, said Dyer, a Milwaukee native and co-founder of the Flood the Hood with Dreams organization and the I Will Not Die Young campaign.

Hundreds gathered Monday afternoon in the Capitol rotunda with community and religious leaders and politicians to listen to music and speeches that dealt with the legacy of Kings achievements. The large crowd meant many were forced to peer over shoulders or sit on staircases with less-than-ideal views of the event.

The celebration, which falls on the federal holiday that marks Kings birthday, comes nearly 50 years after he was assassinated. King, who pushed a divided nation to extend civil rights protections to the poor and people of color through speeches, marches and boycotts, would have been 89 on Monday.

The theme of this years event was Do You Remember?

If Dr. King was here today ... he would be happy that he has a holiday  a national holiday, Dyer said. But him, being a man that was given the purpose of challenging our consciousness, he may say, It is easy to celebrate the life of a dead man (but) much more difficult to live by the principles he espoused.

The celebration also briefly touched on the current political climate. Dyer said if King were alive today, he would question whether strides were being made in closing gaps between races and between the rich and poor.

If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were here today he would ask, Are you a bridge-builder, or are you about building fences? he said. Are we just trying to paint states red or blue, or are we working together?

But while Dyer said there is work to be done to bridge divides among Americans, most in the audience ended the state Capitol event by locking arms and singing We Shall Overcome together.

There is much to overcome, but together we shall, said Jonathan Overby, the events host. There are ... some things that happened that we didnt intend as a nation ... but theres also been an awakening, largely by women and girls whove had the courage to say me too; but they also say no more. Let us sing together that we can be a better nation.
I have learned the hard way not to put my personal life on the Internet. But suffice it to say that, God willing, things should be pretty much back to norm...

5 weeks ago
Century-old botany records may hold key to monarch butterfly survival

Big data botany: An adult monarch butterfly rests on blooming milkweed. Jack Boyle, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Environmental Science and Policy at William & Mary, has been using the web to mine millions of century-old botany records to track abundance patterns of American milkweed and chart impact on monarch butterflies. Photo by R. A. Nonenmacher

In the field: Jack Boyle examines a whistling-thorn acacia in the Kenyan savanna. The plants swollen thorns host a colony of ants that defend the tree. Photo courtesy Jack Boyle Photo - of - Hide Caption

Naturalists records dating back more than 100 years may be instrumental in determining the fate of the monarch butterfly in the 21st century.

Jack Boyle, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Environmental Science and Policy at William & Mary, has been using the web to mine millions of century-old botany records to track abundance patterns of milkweed in America.

His hope is to solve the puzzle of how innovations in agriculture have affected the natural habitat for monarch butterflies. Using recently digitized herbaria records to get a picture of the past, Boyle aims to predict what the future may look like for milkweed.

The source of these records are these old timey field taxonomists, who were going out and collecting specimens and then sitting in a museum and labeling them, Boyle said. Probably, with most of these collections, no one even dreamed that this sort of research was possible.

Common milkweed -- or Asclepias syriaca -- is best known for its symbiotic relationship with the monarch. The plant serves as the insects primary breeding habitat. The butterflies lay eggs on milkweed, they hatch on milkweed, eat milkweed leaves and spend the next two stages of their lives on milkweed.

Historically, milkweed has made its home in corn and soy fields, growing just between the rows or on the edges of farmland.

That's the disturbed environment that milkweed really likes, Boyle said.

The decline in family farms in favor of industrial agriculture has dramatically changed the habitat for milkweed, Boyle says. One of the largest contributors to loss of milkweed in America has been the advent of genetically modified organisms (or GMOs) and mega crops that were designed to resist herbicides, he says.

Based on research over the last decade or two, we've grown concerned that milkweed is declining because of the use of herbicides on herbicide-resistant crops, Boyle said. We started spraying all these fields with herbicides. The crops were fine, but it killed all the milkweed. Since milkweed is the main host plant for monarchs, this might affect how many monarch butterflies there are. So indirectly, these herbicide-resistant crops are connected to a decline in butterflies.

Over the past century, changes in American agriculture have led to a fundamental shift in the nations landscape. Crops have been engineered to resist pests and withstand weed-killing chemicals. The country has seen rapid growth in average farm size, accompanied by an equally rapid decline in the number of farms. Since 1900, the number of American farms has fallen by 63 percent, while the average farm size has risen 67 percent, according to a report by the USDA.

For scientists like Boyle, innovations in farming lead to larger questions. Specifically, what do changes in the natural world mean for milkweed and the monarch butterfly? Boyle has spent the better part of the past year studying milkweed with W&M biologists Harmony Dalgleish and Joshua Puzey.

The results so far look grim. Boyle says hes found what looks like a big boom in milkweed up through 1950, but the population has been declining ever since. According to the USDA, the rapid development of inexpensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides began in the mid-1940s. Today, use of chemicals in agriculture is widespread -- as crops have been genetically engineered to withstand their effects.

Meanwhile, monarch butterfly populations have declined at an alarming rate. In the past 20 years, scientists estimate the iconic butterflies may have lost more than 165 million acres of habitat, which is roughly an area the size of Texas  including nearly a third of their summer breeding grounds.

The butterfly's dramatic decline has been driven in large part by the widespread planting of genetically engineered crops, read a 2017 report by the Center for Biological Diversity. The dramatic surge in the use of Roundup and other herbicides...has virtually wiped out milkweed plants in the Midwest's corn and soybean fields.

While Boyle agrees that herbicides have played a major role in reducing milkweed populations, his research points to other factors that may be just as important. In particular, the shift from small farms to large-scale cash crops.

During the period when milkweed was increasing, there was an increase in the amount of farmland being used across the United States, Boyle said. That factor is pretty important when it comes to understanding how many milkweeds there are now -- and, in turn, how many monarchs we might expect if humans werent busy taking all of these once prairies and turning them into big monocultures.

GMOs allow farmers to expand agriculture onto land where it never would have survived before,

Boyle says. While industrial farming in the U.S. has primarily relied on the consolidation of small farms, other parts of the world are using GMOs to grow crops in entirely new climates. For example, Mozambique planted its first confined GMO field trial for drought resistant corn in February 2017.

While that may be considered a bad thing, at least from a strictly conservation standpoint, it brings in a whole bunch of other questions, Boyle said. Like, how do you weigh keeping people from starving versus species and habitat conservation?

These are just the type of ethical questions Boyle plans to pose to undergraduate students in a new course this spring titled Promises and Perils of Biotechnology for Conservation.

In the case of GMOs, a lot of what we're going to be talking about are the actual impacts of GMOs on agriculture, Boyle said. How they have changed agricultural practices and how it has affected the wild landscapes that are nearby -- or arent existing anymore because now they are crops.

Other topics he plans to touch on are de-extinction, such as the ethics of bringing back the wooly mammoth, and planned termination, such as altering the genes of malaria-carrying mosquitoes to spur their extinction.

The question of what we value is pretty important, Boyle said. A lot of people would say that species have an intrinsic value of their own. If that's the case, then that's a pretty high cost in driving a species extinct. It would have to do a lot of good before you're even considering doing some of these sorts of things.




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TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our livesIf we remember those times and placeswhere people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we dont have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

--Howard Zinn



I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.

--Martin Luther King Jr.

True religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the heart does love and reverence God the Creator, and learns to exercise true justice and goodness...I found no narrowness respecting sects and opinions, but believed that sincere, upright-hearted people, in every society, who truly love God, were accepted of him.

--John Woolman



Love each other as I have loved you.. I call you friends because I have made known to you everything I heard from my Father.

--Jesus in John 15: 12-15



...Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.



You have answered right, said Jesus, do this and life is yours...



Who is my neighbor?



Jesus replied with the Parable of the Good Samaritan [heretic, outsider, enemy].

--from Luke 10:27-37

Religion has been emphatically embodied, not in speculative theories, but in practical righteousness, in active virtues, in reverence to God, in benevolence to man- the latter being the only sure test of the former.

--Thomas M'Clintock



...It is safer to approach God through the Holy Spirit than through the door of theology. We can identify the Holy Spirit whenever it makes its presence felt. Whenever we see someone who is loving, compassionate, mindful, caring, and understanding, we know that the Holy Spirit is there.

--Thich Nhat Hanh


Hundreds of local fishermen gathered for the winter fishing season on the frozen Dalinor Lake in Hexigten Banner of Chifeng on Jan 13, both boosting the local fishery industry and attracting tourism.

Dalinor Lake, one fishery for the Inner Mongolia marine market, annually supplies tons of fresh fishes for the region, alongside other provinces in China.

The winter fishing festival on Dalinor Lake commenced with an assortment of activities for tourists and local residents, including a sacrificial ceremony, auction for the heaviest fish, horse sledge rides, and snowmobiling.

Fishes hanged up to display to tourists at the winter fishing festival on ice-covered Dalinor Lake, Hexigten Banner, eastern Inner Mongolia autonomous region on Jan 13. [Photo/Xinhua]
Regulator checks Rostov 4 ahead of start-up

16 January 2018

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Russian regulator Rostechnadzor has started its inspection of unit 4 of the Rostov nuclear power plant ahead of its launch this year. The regulator is checking documentation on the tests carried out when the unit reached criticality and minimum controlled power last month, Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom said today.

The four VVER-1000 units at Rostov (Image: Rosatom)

Rostechnadzor's approval is needed before the unit can be connected to the national grid, Andrey Gorbunov, chief engineer of Rostov NPP, said in the company statement.

The physical start-up phase was started on 6 December, with the loading of nuclear fuel into the reactor. Within five days, all 163 fuel assemblies had been installed and on 29 December the unit was brought to the minimal controlled power level. Start-up of the reactor is expected "in the near future", Rosatom said.

The Rostov plant is located on the banks of the Tsimlyansk reservoir, nearly 14 km (8 miles) from the city of Volgodonsk. Four 1000 MWe VVER pressurized water reactors have been planned at the Rostov site since the early 1980s. Construction of units 1 and 2 began promptly, but progress faltered. Units 1 and 2 eventually entered commercial operation in March 2001 and October 2010, respectively. Unit 3 was connected to the grid in December 2014.

The launch of unit 4, another VVER-1000 reactor, will "ensure sustainable electricity supply to the entire southern region of Russia", Rosatom said. The Rostov region will thus become one of the 'top ten' regions in the country in terms of nuclear power generation, it added. Currently, the plant meets about half of power demand in the region.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
Steam generators installed at second Belarus unit

16 January 2018

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All four steam generators have been installed at unit 2 of the nuclear power plant under construction in Ostrovets in Belarus, the plant owner, Belarus NPP, announced today. The large items of equipment have been placed in their designated positions inside the reactor building, it said.

One of the four steam generators being lifted into place at second Belarus unit

(Image: Belarus NPP)

Each 330-tonne steam generator was lifted onto the ramp extension and moved on rails via the equipment airlock into the reactor building, news agency BelTA said. Then a polar crane placed the steam generators into position.

The Belarusian nuclear power plant is being built using the Russian VVER-1200 AES-2006 design. The first unit is scheduled for commissioning next year, with the second unit to be brought online in 2020.

The Ostrovets plant - the first nuclear power plant to be built in Belarus - consists of two VVER-1200 type reactors to give 2340 MWe net capacity on line.

An intergovernmental agreement between Russia and Belarus specifically on cooperation in the construction of a nuclear power plant in Belarus was signed in March 2011.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

Related topics
A man who wanted to avoid paying extra for overweight luggage decided to wear many layers of clothes.

However, this move backfired when the man was not allowed to board a British Airways flight and was arrested when he questioned staff members and recorded the encounter.

Ryan Carney Williams, who goes by the name Ryan Hawaii on Twitter, said that he was traveling from Iceland to his home in London, England.

He was at the Keflavik International Airport dressed in eight pairs of pants and ten shirts.

He was allowed to check in his luggage but he was soon told that he was not allowed to fly due to the excessive amount of clothes.

Ryan posted videos of the incident to Twitter. He slammed the airline for racial profiling.

Airline employees asked him to stop recording before calling security. Williams was arrested after being rude to staff members.

Williams said that he was polite during the incident. After giving police his side of the story, Williams was allowed to walk free.

Williams then booked a flight with EasyJet for the next day but things didnt go well for him.

He went through check-in and security without incident but once he arrived at the flight gate, Williams was told that he wasnat allowed to board because of the incident that took place the previous day.

And AGAIN! Refused from 2 flights in 2 days for no valid reason. EasyJet and British Airways thanks guys wonderful service, Williams wrote on Twitter.

Both airlines refunded him the money for his tickets.

Williams finally made it home on a Norwegian airline.
A school teacher stabbed her husband because he refused to have sex with her.

According to police in Uganda, 24-year-old Harriet Nambi stabbed her husband, 25-year-old Musa Batera, to death for denying her sex.

Joseph Kihamba, the chairman of the Kaliro district, said that Nambi will face a murder charge for intentionally killing her husband.

Nambi gave birth to a healthy baby via Cesarean section just two months before killing her husband.

Hasifa Babirye told police that Nambi, who is her neighbor, confided in her, saying that she was frustrated by the fact that her husband did not want to have sex with her.

She told me that her husband was denying her sex but she needed it, Babirye said. I asked her to wait since she just had a C-section, but she was obsessed, the neighbor added.

Babirye said that she advised Nambi to be patient with her husband, who has two other wives, but she did not take the advice.

When her husband, a former representative of their community, returned home and denied her sex again, she stabbed him to death.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sent the World Socialist Web Site an important statement warning of government and corporate efforts to curtail the democratic exchange of information. He has requested that it be read during the WSWS Webinar, Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship.

The video live stream will feature a discussion between WSWS Chairman David North and journalist Chris Hedges. It will be streamed live by video on Tuesday, January 16, at 7:00 pm EST at wsws.org/endcensorship.

Assange has spent the past five and a half years trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, facing the prospect of arrest and extradition to the US if he leaves. He was recently granted citizenship by the government of Ecuador. Assange has been persecuted for WikiLeaks role in exposing US government war crimes.

The discussion between North and Hedges will explore the political context of the efforts to censor the Internet and abolish net neutrality, examine the pretexts used to justify the suppression of free speech (i.e., fake news), and discuss political strategies to defend democratic rights.

Hedges and North will also field questions from on-line listeners, which can be submitted at wsws.org/endcensorship and at facebook.com/wsws.org.
The US Congress resumes work Tuesday with only four days to avert a partial shutdown of the federal government. Funding authorization for all federal agencies has been extended to the night of Friday, January 19 under a continuing resolution passed by Congress last month.

Congressional Republicans, who control both the House of Representatives and the Senate, have said they expect another short-term continuing resolution to be passed before the Friday deadline, but it is not at all certain that this will take place. Backroom talks between the top Republican and Democratic leadersHouse Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumerhave been continuing, although there have been no public talks between the congressional leaders and the Trump White House for more than a week.

There are deep divisions in the Republican caucus, particularly in the House, and any continuing resolution will require significant Democratic Party support to pass in both the House and the Senate, where the Republicans have a narrow 51-49 majority and lack the 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said another month-long continuing resolution was needed because there was not enough time to deal with all of the issues that now surround the budget legislation. McCarthy reportedly told a closed-door meeting of the Republican caucus that it would take until the end of the month to reach a bipartisan agreement on the key issues, including spending, immigration, disaster relief and health care.

One step involves raising caps on spending for the military and for domestic social problems, set in a series of bipartisan deals during the Obama administration, most recently in 2015. The Trump administration has proposed a major increase in military spending, to more than $700 billion annually. The Democrats are not opposed to the additional funding for the Pentagon, but demand an equivalent boost in spending for domestic social programs.

A faction of the House Republican caucus, including the entire Republican membership of the House Armed Services Committee, is opposed to any further continuing resolution for military spending, because the one-month duration makes it impossible for the Pentagon to award lucrative long-term contracts, particularly for the huge sums required to buy new warplanes, warships, tanks, artillery and other heavy equipment. They want to pass a full-year appropriation for the Pentagon rather than a short-term fix.

Their opposition gives the Democrats leverage in the negotiations, since Ryan would require substantial Democratic support to pass a continuing resolution over the opposition of 40-50 Republicans, given that he has only a 23-seat majority in the House.

Some Democrats, for their part, are threatening to oppose any continuing resolution that does not contain full funding for the Childrens Health Insurance Program, whose authorization expired last October 1, as well as disaster aid for Puerto Rico and restoration of DACA protection for 700,000 young immigrants brought here without documents by their parents.

Ryan has insisted that DACA should be kept separate from the continuing resolution, and that Congress should pass stand-alone legislation before the March 6 deadline set by Trump when he rescinded the executive order by Obama that established the program. Meanwhile, the talks on that issue have been overshadowed by the international uproar over Trumps racist diatribe against immigrants from shithole countries like Haiti and Africa.

There is an enormous degree of posturing by the Democrats, who fully support the military budget and American military aggression around the world, while favoring a foreign policy that targets Syria and Russia for immediate military confrontation ahead of Trumps preferred targets, Iran and North Korea.

The Democrats have effusively proclaimed their support for so-called Dreamers, the young immigrants temporarily protected under DACA, although the Obama administration carried out more deportations during its eight years in office than all previous US administrations combined. The Democrats are also prepared to provide tens of billions for increased border security, provided only that the resulting combination of fencing, drones, sensors and Border Patrol police is not called a wall.

In what amounts to a political stunt, Representative Al Green of Texas, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, has announced he will force a vote this week on impeachment of President Trump, this time for his racist comments about Haitian and African immigrants. A previous impeachment resolution from Green attracted the support of only 58 members of the Democratic caucus, with 126 Democrats and 264 Republicans opposed, when it came to a vote last month.

In the event that Congress fails to pass a continuing resolution by Friday midnight, sections of the federal government deemed inessentialmany domestic services, national parks, federal buildingswill shut down, with only skeleton crews in place. The core functions of the capitalist state, particularly the military and intelligence agencies, will continue operating without interruption, but most workers will receive no paychecks until a subsequent congressional action authorizes the funds.
Carillion, Britains second largest building company and a major government contractor, went into liquidation Monday.

The jobs and pensions of 20,000 workers it employed in the UK (and a further 23,000 internationally) are at risk, along with those of tens of thousands of subcontractors and small businesses. With its significant involvement in the public sector, key projects have been placed in jeopardy.

Carillion was responsible for delivering 32,000 school meals daily, managing nearly 9,000 school buildings, and providing services for 11,800 hospital beds, 200 operating theatres and 50 prisons.

Its construction arm was responsible for building maintenance at the spy centre, GCHQ, and the British militarys Permanent Joint Headquarters. Key building projects include the 1.4 billion contract (along with partners Kier Group and Eiffage) on the HS2 high-speed rail project, the largest infrastructure contract in Europe, the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route and the new Royal Liverpool University Hospital.

Carillion entered liquidation after emergency talks with the government over the weekend failed. Its lenders include 18 banks, which were being coordinated by Barclays, Santander, Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC, and 14 pensions funds, of which 13 are in the UK.

The banks had refused to provide 300 million of new funding to the firm without the back-up of taxpayers cash. In a repeat of the too big to fail mantra of 2008, when the financial institutions were bailed out to the tune of almost 1 trillion, Carillions lenders argued the firm was too integral to the public sector to be allowed to fold. They not only sought taxpayer guarantees for the companys debt, but also to offload pension liabilities onto the state-run Pension Protection Fund.

The companys shares had crashed by 94 percent, as its market capitalisation collapsed from 2 billion to just 61 million. With a 650 million pension deficit (estimated to actually be in excess of 800 million) and 586.5 million debt (in 2016), the firm was worthless.

The government decided that it was too politically risky to be seen directly stumping up the guarantees demanded by the banksespecially given that the company secretly took measures to protect 4 million bonuses of executives prior to details of the financial crisis breaking.

According to the Daily Mail, pay policy wording was changed earlier last year to make it more difficult for executives to lose their bonuses in the event of a financial crisis. This was after Carillion issued a profit warning in July, the first of three, writing down 375 million on three public-private finance partnerships in the UK, and 470 million overseas.

This led to shares falling by 39 percent and chief executive Richard Howson quitting his post. Howson, who remained with Carillion as chief operating officer, made 1.9 million in cash and share bonuses during his eight-year tenure and took 245,000 bonus in cash and shares and a 346,000 long-term incentive award in 2016.

Then finance chief Richard Adam received 2.6 million in additional cash and shares during his 11-year tenure, and a 140,000 bonus and long-term incentive awards of 278,000, before quitting in December 2016.

There are reports of banks shifting Carillion off their balance sheets over the last months in anticipation of its inevitable folding. Workers, however, were left in the dark, and jobs, pensions and essential social provisions hang in the balance.

The government indicated that some of the 450 public sector contracts held by Carillion might be taken in-house, while other subcontractors were expected to take over projects. With many of them facing unpaid bills, it remains to be seen how this will work.

Some 28,000 members of Carillions pension schemes have been told they must rely on the dwindling government Pension Protection Funda subvention for companies to avoid their responsibilities. Those not yet retired will lose at least 10 percent.

The impact was underscored by Defence Minister Gavin Williamson telling Parliament Monday that an emergency Cobra meetingconvened at times of national crisiswould be held to discuss Carillion. This was denied by Downing Street.

Carillions fragile state had been known in ruling circles for months. It kept going so long only because the government continued to pump taxpayers funds into it, despite the risk. Just one week after Carillion posted its first profit warning on July 10, the Conservative government awarded it two major contactsthe 1.4 billion HS2 joint venture and a 158 million contract to manage catering and accommodation facilities at more than 230 military facilities.

When it posted its second profit warning on September 29, announcing a half-year loss of 1.15 billion, Carillion was rewarded on November 6, with a 62 million contract from Network Rail. Just 11 days afterwards, when the firm issued its third profit warning, it was handed a 12 million school building contract from the Education and Skills Funding Agency.

At the start of this month, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced it was investigating the timeliness and content of Carillions statements from December 7, 2016 to July 10, 2017.

Political calculations account for the decision to keep handing Carillion money. The company is the embodiment of the privatisation agenda carried out by successive Tory and Labour governments through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Public-Partner Partnership schemes.

Through such means governments have effectively handed public funds over to private corporations, their lenders, shareholders and CEOs to run essential social provision, on astronomical rates of return. Britain also exported such schemes abroad, to countries such as Canada, India and Eastern Europe.

According to The People Vs PFI website, companies like Carillion effectively functioned as shop fronts for the big banks, who use PFI as an infrastructure financing mechanism to dump billions of pounds of debt and toxic hedging instruments on the British Taxpayer, who ultimately underwrite the PFI deals.

It estimates that such deals have incurred a minimum liability for public funds of 240 billion over the next 40 years. PFI/PPP contracts can return an extreme profit margin, in some cases as much as 70 percent per annum. While public funds are locked into financing private infrastructure projects at grotesque levels of interest, the corporations themselves are risk free.

Earlier this month, the government handed Richard Bransons Virgin Trains East Coast (Vtec) nearly 2 billion by allowing it to get out of its contract three years early. In the case of Carillion, its subsidiary Clinicenta was paid 53 million in 2013 by the government to escape its contract to run a National Health Service Treatment Centre in Stevenage, after clinical failings that included three patient deaths. This was just two years after NHS London paid it 8 million to terminate a similar contract due to an inquiry into avoidable deaths.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Four Seasons Health Care, which provides for 17,000 elderly and vulnerable people, is in trouble. Owned by US investment firm H/2 Capital Partners and private equity group Terra Firma, Four Seasons took over from Southern Cross Healthcare when it collapsed in 2011.

There was huge public shock and anger after the Grenfell Tower inferno, which killed 71 people. In addition to the lack of any safety provision for its working class residents, there was a complete absence of any centralised assistance for the victimsmany of who remain in temporary accommodation.

The catastrophe that has developed in the NHS in recent weeks shows that Grenfell was not a localised tragedy. The NHS has cancelled non-emergency operations due to a severe funding shortage, in which PFI contracts have played a major role.

Carillions collapse underscores the extent to which Britains ruling elite has looted and pillaged vital social assets in pursuit of the selfish concerns of their super-rich paymasters.
The victory of the pro-Jeremy Corbyn slate in elections to Labours National Executive Committee (NEC) confirms the leftward turn in the party membership and in the working class.

The Labour leaders much expanded support base among the partys membership, which has trebled to almost 600,000, was the reason for the creation of three new posts to the NEC, to be decided by a membership ballot. All three posts were won by candidates backed by Momentum, the campaign group backing Corbyns leadership, led by Jon Lansman. He now has a significant majority on the 39-member NEC, which he has essentially controlled since last Junes general election.

Lansman is joined on the NEC by Yasmine Dar and Rachel Garnham, who all secured more than 62,000 votes and a combined total of almost 200,000. The comedian Eddie Izzard was the closest contender in a slate supported by the anti-Corbyn Labour First and the Blairite think-tank, Progress, with just 39,000 votes.

This latest victory makes the position of former opponents of Corbyn, such as Deputy leader Tom Watson, yet more precariouscoming in the aftermath of last Junes gains in the snap general election called by Prime Minister Theresa May. Corbyn is now in control of his cabinet and, following various reshuffles, has a majority of the party membership and now on the NEC. His last cabinet reshuffle this month appointed no new frontbenchers at all out of 13 appointments to what Corbyn proclaimed to be a government in waiting, given the desperate crisis of the May government.

The NEC victory was met with warnings of a purge of moderates from the party. Attention is focused on a review of party democracy led by Katy Clark, the former MP who lost her seat in 2015. Among the changes being considered is a proposal for whether MPs should face mandatory reselection by party members and affiliated trade union branches.

A pro-Corbyn NEC vote still depends on the backing of the major trade unions. At least two major unions, Unison and the GMB, may oppose the change on the NEC, precipitating a possible conflict that neither Corbyn nor Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell would want.

For this reason, the hopes of the right to curb the lefts influence has focused on the possibility of a change in the leadership of Britains biggest union, Unite. The union has three seats on the NEC and is led by Len McCluskey. It acts as the locus for other pro-Corbyn unions, such as the Communication Workers Union. However, last years re-election of the Unite General Secretary is under statutory investigation at the request of right-wing runner-up Gerard Coyne, who alleged malpractice in June 2017 to an independent certification officer.

Nevertheless, Corbyns continued ascendency led to warnings of the danger of the right-wing losing a civil warsummed up in Rupert Murdochs the Sun, describing yesterdays result as threatening to take Labour back to the socialist 1970s.

Writing in the Observer December 2, former deputy Labour leader Roy Hattersley,= opposed any accommodation to Corbyns leadership. Citing a small number of deselection bids, he warned that unless Real Labour challenges far-left subversion, democratic socialism could die a slow death.

On December 29, the BBC ran an in-depth feature, The local battles being fought within Labour, that reads like a transcript of Hattersleys worst nightmare. We are in dark times for moderate Labour. I do worry and I do believe that the Labour Party as Ive known it in my life is probably finished, states Nora Mulready, a Labour activist in Haringey.

However, others on the right are calculating that Corbyn has no stomach for internal warfare despite his statement that the review underway will open up our party from top to bottom.

Warning against panic, Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Observer January 7 insisting that there are limits to Corbyns long march through the institutions.

Most Labour councillors are not Corbynites. The partys most prominent mayorsAndy Burnham in Manchester and Sadiq Khan in Londonare not Corbynites. The majority of Labour MPs are not Corbynite, he stressed.

Momentum has become an influential force, but it is not so potent as it is sometimes portrayed and has not made inroads outside of London, he adds. With Labour only slightly ahead of the Tories, Any Labour MP who is told that he or she will not be allowed to stand for the party at the next election could always carry on sitting in parliament in the meantime, using the platform to say exactly what they think about Corbyn Labour. Or a deselected MP could resign and fight a by-election which they might win if they were popular locally

Even now, sections of the right-wing are more concerned with shaping the political agenda of a Corbyn government than a head-on confrontationabove all committing the party to a second referendum reversing Brexit to provide an alternative political leadership to Mays unravelling government. On Monday, the EUs chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, met key EU-backing MPs, including Labours Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie and Stephen Doughty.

Corbyn wants to maintain Labours support among workers who voted for Brexit, until there is a clear majority for a shift. But there is every possibility that Corbyn will shift the partys position in line with the demands of key sections of big business and the City of London. He is at present walking a fine line, telling ITVs Peston on Sunday that Labour is not supporting or calling for a second referendum on the UKs EU membership but refusing to rule out doing so after a meaningful vote by parliament on the final deal struck. Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry said that if 90 percent of people were calling for another vote, it would present a challenge for all of us who are democrats.

The leader of the TSSA union, Manuel Cortes, wrote in the Daily Mirror yesterday arguing that Corbyns remarks rightly exposed as a fallacy the idea that we can leave the EU and remain a member of the Single Market (SM) So, staying within the EU is now looking like the simplest route to maintaining that access. And electing Jeremy Corbyn our Prime Minister remains our greatest hope of staying within the EU in a reformed relationship with it.

What Corbyn cannot finesse, in securing his overarching goal of party unity, is any refusal to oppose the savage cuts being imposed by Labour councils up and down the country.

In every major urban conurbation, right-wing Labour councils are criticised by the partys left as they impose the savage cuts demanded by the government. In the last month alone, Wirral Council has committed to impose cuts to address a 61 million shortfall. In Lancashire, the Labour group is imposing 11 million in cuts to balance the books. In Birmingham, 150 carers for the elderly out of workforce of 350 face the sack.

Now that Corbyn is so clearly in control, any failure to take a stand against the right will expose before millions of workers the real character of his leadershipa means of suppressing a mobilisation of the working class, rather than leading one.

The latest indication of Corbyns readiness to appease the right was provided by the resignation of one of his leading supporters, Chris Williamson, from the shadow cabinet, after he called for a doubling of council tax on well-off homes to offset the crisis facing local government. He was gone within days, with the Guardian noting, Labours leadership team are keen to avoid providing political ammunition to the Tories, particularly on economic issues, where the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, wants to exert discipline on tax and spending pledges.
Workers in Greece struck Monday against the Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) government and protests erupted in Athens in the evening, as Syriza rammed a 1,300-page multi-bill of European Union austerity measures through the Greek parliament. The conservative New Democracy, the social-democratic Democratic Alignment, the nationalist Union of Centrists and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn voted against the bill in parliament.

Shipping and public transport in Athens were almost entirely halted, amid mass opposition to fresh EU attacks on basic social and democratic rights, including the right to strike. Athens subway, bus and tramway workers and air traffic controllers all took strike action. Schools were closed and hospitals operated on skeleton staffs as doctors joined the strike. Tens of thousands of people marched in two separate trade union protests in the capital.

Clashes erupted between protesters and riot police in Athens after the Greek parliament, led by Syriza deputies, voted 154 to 141 to approve the multi-bill, which slashes family welfare payments, facilitates foreclosures and includes draconian limitations on the right to strike.

Protesters threw Molotov cocktails, pieces of cement and stones, while police retaliated with tear gas and stun grenades.

The eruption of workers struggles against Syrizas attack on the right to strike and the relentless assault on living standards mounted by the EU since the 2008 Wall Street crash marks a new stage in the international class struggle. It explodes the political lie, which the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) has consistently fought, that Syriza is a left-wing or socialist organization. It is a right-wing party, hostile to the workers.

It betrayed its election promises to end EU austerity and now plans to use antidemocratic methods to muzzle workers opposition.

This will have far-reaching implications well beyond the borders of Greece, as growing sections of the working class across Europe move into struggle against plans for mass layoffs and attacks on wages and social spending.

Similar petty-bourgeois populist and anti-Marxist parties across Europe that backed Syrizas electionfrom Podemos in Spain to the Left Party in Germany, the New Anti-capitalist Party and Jean-Luc Melenchons organization in France, and the Socialist Workers Party in Britainalso stand exposed as enemies of the workers. The growing conflict between the working class and these forces, which pass for the left of the European political establishment and are closely linked to the trade unions, will have explosive and ultimately revolutionary consequences.

These events are exposing before millions of workers the increasingly threadbare parliamentary-democratic facade of the EU and the European national governments, which function as a dictatorship of the financial aristocracy to oppress the working class.

The Syriza deputies in the Greek parliament simply rubber-stamped the multi-bill, which was no doubt drafted by the EU and the major banks, without even bothering to read it. As Greeces right-wing daily Kathimerini wrote, with some embarrassment, hundreds of pages of draft legislation had to be debated over just a few days, and there are legitimate doubts about whether deputies will fully comprehend what they are voting for.

It was widely reported and Syriza knew very well that the multi-bill contains drastic attacks, opposed by the people of Greece and Europe, on basic social and democratic rights. It includes provisions for electronic auctions of foreclosed homes, aimed at keeping residents and neighbors from physically blocking foreclosures; deep cuts to family benefits; and measures designed to block strike action, such as requiring 50 percent of all union members (as opposed to 50 percent of all union members present at a strike vote) to support strike action before it can be taken.

Reuters noted that this is a measure Greeces creditors hope would limit the frequency of strikes and improve productivity, that is, increase the exploitation of the workers.

Speaking in the parliament yesterday, Syriza leader and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras tried to deny the socially counterrevolutionary character of this agenda. He pledged that this austerity package would be the last raft of cuts dictated by the EU to the Greek people under the terms of successive EU austerity memoranda. Hailing the end of a long and difficult cycle, Tsipras said, We are one step before the end of the program and the final end of the memoranda. He added, In the summer, we will...leave behind a tough, unfair and harmful period.

Denying that the multi-bill aims effectively to scrap the right to strike, which is protected in Greeces constitution, Tsipras continued: Its a shameless lie [to claim] that this government is enforcing demands by creditors and industrialists to deregulate the labor market. The right to strike is a sacred conquest of the working class.

The shameless liar here is Tsipras. His promises in parliament are as worthless as were his election promises to end EU austerity when he came to power three years ago this month. As he spoke in parliament, top EU officials were announcing that they would keep demanding draconian austerity measures in Greece even after the formal end of the EU bailout of the country.

If there is further debt relief after the end of the program, then it is sensible to reach a further agreement, Thomas Wieser, an associate of former German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble and outgoing head of the European Working Group (EWG), told Kathimerini. This implies that the EU will demand additional devastating social cuts should Greece seek to declare bankruptcy or restructure its unviable 323 billion sovereign debt or again ask the EU for help in servicing its loans.

Syrizas multi-bill is part of an assault on the right to strike and other legal rights carried out over a protracted period by the bourgeoisie across Europe. This includes Britains antiunion laws, the imposition of minimum service requirements banning public-sector strikes in large parts of Western Europe, and Frances state of emergency and labor law, which allow for the banning of protests and the imposition of sub-minimum wage salaries.

The protests in Greece are bound up with rising working-class militancy throughout Europewith German metalworkers and British rail workers taking strike action, growing strike activity in Spain, growing social anger at the French governments anti-worker agenda, and strikes by workers in Romania and other Eastern European countries. Faced with the escalation of the class struggle, the capitalist class is moving to tear up basic democratic rights.

The Syriza government is a fundamental strategic experience of the international working class as it goes into a period of resurgent class struggle. Struggles cannot proceed under the political and organizational control of the trade union bureaucracy and pseudo-left parties that, as the experience of Syriza abundantly shows, are hostile to the working class. The way forward is through the establishment of organizations of struggle independent of the trade unions that work to coordinate working-class resistance on a European and international scale.

Faced with the treachery and bankruptcy of Syriza, the working class urgently needs its own revolutionary political leadership, fighting for a socialist and internationalist perspective. This means the construction in Greece and every country of sections of the ICFIthe Trotskyist movement, which alone opposed Syriza from the standpoint of the international working class and warned of the treacherous role it would play before it came to power.
Last week, comic book writer and publisher Stan Lee became the latest target of the #MeToo witch-hunt sweeping Hollywood after allegations that he repeatedly groped and harassed nurses caring for him at his Los Angeles home. Lee is 95 years old.

He is the former head of Marvel comics, where he currently serves as chairman emeritus. He is the co-creator of superheroes the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. Inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995, Lee received a National Medal of Arts in 2008.

Born in New York City in 1922, Lee was deeply influenced by his familys experience during the Great Depression. Parents Celia and Jack Lieber, newly arrived Romanian Jewish immigrants, worked in the garment industry but were thrown out of work when the Depression hit, and life was a constant struggle. These difficulties, and his early voracious readingTwain, Dickens, Verne, H.G. Wells, Poe and Shakespeareinformed the infectious warmth, inventiveness and sense of community that attracted generations of readers.

Marvels comics dealt with bigotry and drug use, the civil rights movement, prisoners rights, student protests and the Vietnam War, themes previously regarded as off-limits. Lee believed superheroes should be human, with the same foibles, flaws and problems as regular people. During the early 1970s, he challenged censorship by the United States Comics Code Authority, which was later forced to relax its heavy-handed control.

The accusations against Lee, based on a single anonymous source, were published by Britains Daily Mail on January 9. He is said to have asked for oral sex in the shower, walked around naked and wanted to be pleasured in the bedroom, the Mail reported.

It is not clear that any of these alleged activities are legally actionable. No police complaint has been made and no lawsuit filed, but last year the female owner of the nursing company, who had cared for Lee on occasion, threatened to go public with allegations against the Marvel creator, who is worth an estimated $50 million. Lees lawyer Tom Lallas issued a cease-and-desist letter against the woman on December 20, in which he described claims that his client had sexually harassed nurses as defamatory.

In a subsequent statement sent to the Daily Mail, Lallas said the womans accusations against his client amounted to a crude shakedown operation: Mr. Lee categorically denies these false and despicable allegations and he fully intends to fight to protect his stellar good name and impeccable character.

We are not aware of anyone filing a civil action, or reporting these issues to the police, which for any genuine claim would be the more appropriate way for it to be handled. Instead, Mr. Lee has received demands to pay money and threats that if he does not do so, the accuser will go to the media. Mr Lee will not be extorted or blackmailed, and will pay no money to anyone because he has done absolutely nothing wrong.

On January 11, the Daily Mail followed up with further allegations, this time from a Chicago masseuse who attended his hotel suite last April. She alleges that Lee groped her, demanding sex and then masturbating in her presence. Lees lawyers hit back, saying their client categorically denies the allegations, and pointing to further opportunistic efforts to extort cash.

While Lee is the latest victim of the #MeToo and #TimesUp moments, the accusations against him have quickly backfired, with his many fans voicing their disgust and anger over the trampling of fundamental democratic principles, including the presumption of innocence. In thousands of social media posts, tweets, memes, videos and discussion threads posted over the past week, one sees the democratic and humane sentiments of ordinary people asserting themselves.

So let me get this straight, wrote one Twitter user #StanLee has no accusers through 94 years of his life, about 70 of those being an icon, and he finally becomes a sexual deviant at age 95? ... Im sorry, but gimme a break.

These women accusing #StanLee tried to blackmail him first and never went to the police. wrote another Twitter user, Im thinking this story is pure bullshit by women trying to take advantage of the current social climate for a quick buck.

A graphic artist tweeted: The Stan Lee accusations are where the #MeToo movement hits critical mass. There MUST be due process. We cant blindly assume truth in every accusation. Wheres the burden of proof? Otherwise its anarchy.

Care workers pointed to the fact that sexual disinhibition is common among elderly patients: As someone who works with the geriatric community, wrote Mini, there are expected behavioural changes such as being sexually inappropriate that comes with dementia and other related illnesses and it is not controllable #StanLee #ProtecttheElderly.

Another wrote: This behaviour should absolutely come as no surprise to ANYONE in the health care community. His behaviour is predictable and should be expected at the advanced age of 95. The professionalism of the nurses making these allegations is what is lacking.

Many objected to the inherent cruelty of the accusations against Lee, who lost his wife of 69 years to a sudden stroke just six months ago: Heres a question, if Stan Lee dies due to stress from these accusations without evidence, who is to blame? asked one incensed fan.

Significantly, the accusations against Lee have not been pursued so far by major US news outlets. Senior editors and media proprietors perhaps sense that the McCarthyite rampage they instigated four months ago with the attack on Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and many others is now on shakier ground.

Even if the accusations against Lee were true (and there is no evidence to suggest this is the case), the spectacle of a nursing company persecuting an elderly patient for sexually explicit acting out is obscene. Behaviour of the sort alleged, from a 95-year-old patient, should be met with care and understandingand, heaven forbid, a little humour.

If sexual disinhibition by elderly patients were to be criminalised, then every nursing home and aged care facility worldwide would face a nightmarish Handmaids Tale scenario, with vulnerable patients denounced as deviants and ostracised by the new guardians of puritan morality. The company hired to look after Lee owed him a legal and professional duty of care, which it appears to have shamelessly breached.

Lee is now being cared for by a new nursing company, Vitale Nursing Inc. Its spokesperson Julie Wozniak said Lee is polite, kind and respectful. It has been a privilege to care for him.

Of course, those who have been happy to embrace the #MeToo juggernaut and repeat every accusation against a prominent celebrity, actor, director, etc., as good coin have been quick to denounce Lee, with one insisting he should be subject to trial by the media even if the accusations are untrue!

On Inverse.com, James Grebey writes: Lees supporters claimed that the allegations either didnt happen or were much ado about nothing because hes 95 years old. I cannot believe I have to say this, but being old is not a get out of sexual harassment allegations free card. This is bigger than Stan Lee, and its frankly bigger than the question of whether or not the allegations are true.
Ever since its adoption as a US federal holiday more than 30 years ago, Martin Luther King Day has been the occasion for hypocritical declamations by the ruling class and its media representatives. The birth date of the leader of the mass civil rights movement in the American South, who was both promoted and persecuted by the American state while he was alive, is used for banal and dishonest affirmations of American democracy and diversity.

After his death, King was turned into an icon. His persecution by the FBI and the likely involvement of the state in his assassination are ignored in the official ceremonies. This is all for the purpose of covering up the fact that the social equality fought for by millions of workers during the period of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s has not been achieved and will not be achieved under the capitalist system.

This year, the anniversary observances of Kings birth are more hypocritical than ever before, given that the head of state in the US is an open racist who cultivates the support of white supremacists. This took on a grotesque character in the White House ceremony last Friday, as Donald Trump signed a proclamation of MLK Day only one day after his tirades against shithole countries such as Haiti and African nations, along with his expression of a preference for immigrants from Norway.

After remarks in the White House from Trumps Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, an ultra-right African-American official who opposes public housing and assistance to the poor, and a nauseating statement from a nephew of the slain civil rights leader, came the spectacle of Trump himself stealing out of the room as reporters shouted, Are you a racist, Mr. President?

The media commentaries on Trumps behavior, as well as those in the pseudo-left and left-liberal press, focus on Trump in a vacuum, as if his racist remarks have little if any significance beyond the putrid mind of this billionaire con man. Virtually none of the supposed opponents of Trump bother to ask, let alone answer, the question of where he comes from and what he represents.

Trump is the product of decades of economic decline and political reaction. It is impossible to conceive of this bigot in the White House without the nearly 50 years of social counterrevolution, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, that led up to his Electoral College victory in 2016. Trump embodies the decay of the American oligarchy, of which he is a part.

It is necessary to take an objective look at the state of US society and the legacy of the civil rights movement in light of the Trump presidency. This is all the more important in light of the fact that April 4 will mark the 50th anniversary of Kings assassination in Memphis. The half-century provides ample evidence from which to draw some conclusions. The aftermath of Kings death constitutes an indictment of American capitalism, of the Democratic Party, and of the epigones of King in what has come to be called the civil rights establishment. A sober evaluation of the civil rights movement and the role of King is also in order.

The economic and political crisis of US capitalism was already coming to the surface in the period leading up to Kings assassination. Even in the heyday of the post-World War II economic boom, when Lyndon Johnson was presiding over the War on Poverty and signing the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, American capitalism had no solution to the persistence of poverty and inequality. This was vividly displayed by the rebellions that convulsed cities across the US in the mid-to-late 1960s, alongside the growing movement against the war in Vietnam. These upheavals exposed the breakdown of the post-war order and marked the beginning of the end of US global supremacy.

It was this economic and social crisis, not the personality of any individual politician, that dictated the shift in ruling class policy from reformism to reaction. While Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have come to symbolize the shift in the US and Europe, it began earlier, with the election of Nixon and his so-called Southern strategy, to maintain divisions within the working class and build up the states of the former Confederacy as a continued bulwark of reaction. The presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter, who pioneered deregulation and fought bitter battles with American coal miners and other sections of the working class, laid the basis for Reagans decade of union-busting and onslaught on social programs.

The US ruling class licked its wounds from the defeat in Vietnam and stepped up a counteroffensive against the working class in the US and internationally. A crucial component of this counteroffensive was the integration of a small layer of black politicians, including veterans of the civil rights movement, into the political establishment, first on the local level and then nationally. The program of affirmative action, first enunciated under Nixon, was expanded, championed above all by the Democrats, with the aim not of providing genuine equality and opportunity for all, but of providing a niche in the elite for a small section of African-Americans, while pitting blacks against whites for a dwindling number of jobs, college admission placements, and the like. Identity politics was adopted as the reactionary substitute for the struggle for genuine equality.

Fifty years after the death of Martin Luther King, the verdict could not be clearer. American capitalism has shown its true colors. It has produced record levels of inequality, the destruction of good-paying jobs and an erosion in living standards unprecedented since the Great Depression, along with the build-up of a police state, massive government spying and police violence, and a government of, by and for the financial oligarchy.

While popular attitudes reveal significant advances toward racial equalityas indicated in popular culture and in the rates of racial intermarriagethe escalating assault on the poorest sections of the working class is translated into intractable housing and school segregation and gross disparities in wages, health, life expectancy, and in such consequences of poverty as mass incarceration, for blacks and other minorities. While every poll regularly shows the growth in support for equality and opposition to racism, especially among the younger generation, gains such as those made in voting rights are under relentless attack.

These last 50 years have also thrown into stark relief the failure of the national reformism, even of the most left-wing variety, as espoused by Martin Luther King. The civil rights leader took courageous steps in the last years before his brutal slaying. Exactly one year before the assassination, he denounced the war in Vietnam, in a speech that called forth bitter hostility from the Johnson administration and from the great majority of Kings civil rights colleagues as well. In the months before he died, in a very limited but significant step, King declared that the civil rights reforms revealed that the overriding issue confronting the US was poverty, and he launched the Poor Peoples Campaign to unite blacks and whites facing common economic hardship.

King refused to break from the Democratic Party, however. He insisted on the fight for social reform within capitalism. He remained within the framework of religious pacifism, speaking for a section of the liberal middle class and in opposition to the building of a revolutionary leadership based on the working class. This class weakness paved the way for the collapse, after his death, of the movement he led. The reactionary role played today by every leading spokesperson of what is fraudulently called black America cannot be fully understood apart from this important component of Kings legacy and career.

The socialist alternative is the only basis for defending all the gains of the working class over the past century and more. These include the democratic rights gained in the long and bitter struggle against Jim Crow segregation. The Trump presidency has already ushered in a period of social opposition and mass struggle, against the danger of war, reaction and the fascistic appeals regularly made from the White House. A new period of class struggle is opening up in the United States and around the world, triggered by record inequality and the inevitable crash of the current global speculative financial bubble.

The advocates of identity politics come forward at precisely this moment to prescribe the same poison of the capitalist status quo that produced Trump in the first place. In their defense of capitalism, they work to whip up and deepen divisions within the working class, a policy that serves the most reactionary aims. The lesson of the civil rights struggles and their tragic aftermath requires an opposite perspective: the need to unite every section of the working classAfrican-American, white, Hispanic, Asian and immigrantin the struggle for socialism and internationalism.
President Pedro Pablo Kuczynskis (PPK) humanitarian pardon of former President Alberto Fujimori, who had been serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity has unleashed a wave of demonstrations.

According to a poll, 78 percent of Peruvians believe that the pardon, which came only three days after Kuczynski survived a Congressional impeachment vote, was the result of a corrupt political deal. Their opinion is bolstered by revelations that on December 11just four days before Congress by large majority called for the impeachment voteFujimori submitted his request for pardon and on December 24, Kuczynski granted it.

During the last week, multiple demonstrations were held against the pardon throughout the country, with as many as 40,000 joining a march in Lima.

In the provinces, the reaction has been similar. One of the most significant marches took place in Ayacuchothe epicenter of the dirty war waged during the 1980s and 1990s against the Maoist guerrilla organization Shining Path. Ayacuchanos, including members of the National Association of Relatives of Perus Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared, marched carrying signs reading: Peru does not forget, Fujimori never again, Down with the pardon! Fujimori must return to prison, and With impunity there is no dialogue or reconstruction.

In Cusco, more than 5,000 protesters marched. The demonstrators doused an effigy of PPK dressed as Uncle Sam (the icon of US imperialism) with gasoline and set it ablaze, along with a giant mockup of the Peruvian constitution. The march was organized by the construction guild and the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP).

In Puno, protesters shouted: Urgent, urgent, new elections! Urgent, urgent, new president!

In Moquegua, hundreds of citizens marched through the streets in rejection of the ex-dictators pardon. They asked for Kuczynskis resignation and new general elections. Several workers organizations participated, among them, the CGTP, Sutep, Suter, the Civil Construction Workers Union and others.

In Tacna, around a thousand people formed a Unitary Command of Struggle and marched in the center of the city. Ten labor and human rights organizations supported the mobilization. The protesters called for Kuczynskis resignation. They mocked the name the government gave the year 2018 (Year of Reconciliation), an obvious reference to the illegal pardoning.

In the Amazon city of Iquitos, several guilds, student groups and the so-called apus of different native communities participated in the March against the Fujimorist coup.

Meanwhile, the CGTP has called a national march for January 21 on the demand for new elections. The aim of the trade union federation is to channel the growing popular anger over government corruption, the Fujimori pardon and the continuing growth of social inequity back into the framework of bourgeois politics.

Some 5,000 supporters of Fujimori and his party (Fuerza Popular)which is led by his daughter Keikoheld one march supporting the pardon on January 12 in the Campo de Marte park in downtown Lima. They labeled it a March for Peace and Reconciliation and marched through several streets of downtown Lima. Fujimoris son and Keikos brother Kenjiwho was reportedly the main behind-the-scenes promoter of the pardonled the pro-pardon march. Thirty buses were used to bring people into the capital for the pro-pardon march.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is set to meet on February 2 in Costa Rica on the Fujimori pardon, having denied a request by the ex-presidents attorney to appear on his behalf. The main point under discussion will be whether President Kuczynski is complying with the sentences on human rights violations meted out against Fujimori for his role in the massacres carried out in Barrios Altos and La Cantuta in the early 1990s. A pronouncement from the commission is expected one week after it meets in Costa Rica.

The pardon has unleashed an internal crisis within Fuerza Popular (FP), the party that upholds fujimorismo and that has an absolute majority in the nations congress. It is known that Keiko, Albertos daughter, fears being charged for having received money for her electoral campaign from the Brazilian mega-builder Odebrecht, involved in the sprawling Lava Jato corruption scandal that has implicated politicians throughout the continent in multi-billion-dollar bribery schemes. She also fears that her fathers release will undermine her almost absolute control over the FP.

Her brother Kenji sought his fathers freedom because he himself has presidential aspirations. His opposition to his sister has led to two suspensions from the Fujimorist bloc, one of 60 days and the second, still in force, of 120 days. A third censure would lead to the expulsion of Kenji from the party.

Having survived impeachment, PPK has announced a new cabinet under the leadership of Prime Minister Mercedes Araoz. Referred to by the president as a cabinet of reconciliation, it includes nine ministerial changes. Among the new ministers are two members of the APRA party, both of whom have been expelled from the party.

The ministerial changes were necessary due to mass resignations of ministers and presidential advisors in protest over the pardon. Others refused to serve in the cabinet, an indication of diminishing support for Kuczynski among even his own circle of technocrats and entrepreneurs.

For her part, the representative of the bourgeois left, Veronika Mendoza, made statements revealing her overriding commitment to maintaining national stability in which she spoke of defending the fatherland.

The crisis of the Kuczynski is part of a deepening crisis of bourgeois rule in Peru that is increasingly threatening to undermine the countrys political-economic outlook for 2018, creating conditions for a resurgence of class struggle.
The IG Metall trade union is currently holding votes at all German ThyssenKrupp locations on a contract it negotiated with ThyssenKrupp shortly before Christmas. The contract will implement the merger of Germanys largest steel producer with Indias Tata Steel. The goal of the merger is the implementation of cost-cutting rationalisation measures and mass layoffs in Germany and Britain.

The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) calls on the approximately 27,000 steelworkers at eight German locations to oppose the contract and vote it down. A No vote must be made the prelude to the formation of action committees in all steel plants and the organisation of joint methods of struggle with British steelworkers for a principled defence of all jobs.

IG Metall initially intended to keep the contract secret. The union planned to hold the vote without releasing any details on it. Only following protests from the workforce did the union provide the workers with access to the agreement.

Leading trade union officials, like deputy chair of ThyssenKrupps supervisory board and IG Metall secretary Markus Grolms, spoke out, telling the Rheinische Post that job security now prevails for a long time. The central works council chair at Thyssen Krupp, Gunther Back, grandiosely declared that jobs and locations would be guaranteed for nine years, and effectively for ten years due to redundancy protection.

A closer inspection of the contract makes clear that this is not the case. IG Metall has explicitly agreed to personnel adjustmentsi.e., layoffs.

Paragraph 8 of the agreement states, The parties agree that personnel adjustments required during the course of this contract will be carried out in a socially acceptable manner. Only compulsory redundancies would not be issued until September 30, 2026.

Officially, there have been no compulsory redundancies at ThyssenKrupp for decades. Nonetheless, thousands of jobs have been eliminated.

The formulation preventing compulsory redundancies is the formula used by IG Metall and its works council members to organise layoffs in the steel industry and other major industries. This was already the case 30 years ago at the Krupp facility in Duisburg-Rheinhausen, at Opels Bochum plant in 2014 and one year later at the neighbouring plant belonging to Finnish steelmaker Outokumpu (previously ThyssenKrupp).

The elimination of 4,000 jobs by ThyssenKrupp in the course of the merger, 2,000 at Thyssen and 2,000 at Tata, will not be prevented by the contract, but planned and carried out under its provisions. The contract even explicitly permits another wave of layoffs.

In paragraph 9, safeguarding locations, IG Metall provides the company with the option, regardless of the safeguarding of locations, of subjecting individual plants and/or divisions to a change of operation, with socially acceptable solutions according to section 111 FF of the Industrial Relations Law. The paragraphs referred to involve the devising of social plans, which involve the unions in organising the transition of the workers into unemployment.

The fate of the workers at the Duisburg-Huttenheim heavy plate steel plant, the hot-rolled steel plant 3 in Bochum, and the coil-coating plant 3 in Kreuztal-Eichen has already been sealed. Their viability will be reviewed until 30.9.2020 to determine whether there is a possibility of continuing. The result has obviously already been determined, because location protection for these three facilities expires at the end of 2021.

The annual investments of 400 million promised by Thyssen, which has been praised by IG Metall and works council officials, is not aimed at protecting jobs, but seamlessly eliminating them, and will be used to cover the expected cost of social plans. Paragraph 10, Investment planning, therefore confirms that investment is planned at the plants that can be closed at the end of 2021 to ensure that the minimum term of employment security can be fulfilled. The financial plans, which give more details about these proposals, are listed in an appendix, which has been withheld from the workers by the union.

In its leaflet summarising the contents of the contract and recommending its acceptance, IG Metall asserts that regardless of the ending of production at the three facilities in Duisburg, Bochum and Kreuztal, these locations will remain open until September 2026. This has no basis in the contract.

As in previous cases, IG Metall is already organising the demolition crewi.e., a few steelworkers who will dismantle the plant. The primary goal with this is to ensure that the jobs of works councillors at these sites are preserved, unlike those of most workers.

In fact, a large part of the contract is concerned with posts for union and works council officials. Paragraph 3 proposes the formation of a European works council, paragraph 4 deals with the retention of company co-management, paragraph 6 the maintenance of the ThyssenKrupp works council, and paragraph 7 the company plant agreements.

Paragraph 5 proposes the establishment of an employee executive committee (EEC). This body will consist of six managers from the new joint venture and six trade union representatives, three from Tata and three from ThyssenKrupp (two works councillors and an IG Metall official): This body shall meet three times a year for a strategic dialogue.

The decisive consideration for the IG Metall and works council officials was the retention of German co-management rights and thus their own privileges, within the new company. Having contractually regulated this, they now want to enforce the contract and organise mass layoffs.

The rejection of the contract must thus be made the prelude to a rebellion against the trade union and the works council mafia. It is necessary to break out of the straitjacket of IG Metall and its works councils. The right to a job is an elementary right that cannot be sacrificed to the profit interests of the company, its investors, board members and lackeys in the trade unions.

The rejection of the contract and the struggle to defend all jobs at ThyssenKrupp Steel and Tata is part of growing opposition in the factories and the return of the class struggle in many countries. Two weeks ago, Ford workers in Romania struck against a contract through which the company-controlled trade union had sought to impose massive concessions.

In France, workers are resisting the labour market reforms of the Macron government, which will have even worse consequences than Germanys Agenda 2010 and are backed by the unions. Mass protests have developed since the beginning of the year in Iran and Tunisia, and tens of thousands are striking in Greece to protest the austerity policies and attack on the right to strike by the Syriza government.

The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei calls on steelworkers to set a marker with a No vote and seize the initiative to develop a broad political mobilisation. To this end, the struggle against planned layoffs in the steel industry must be connected with the current contract fight of close to 4 million workers in the metal and electronics industries.

The expansion of the current warning strikes must be turned into a political movement against the German government and the plans to form a new grand coalition in Berlin. The parties have been negotiating for months behind the backs of the population on the formation of a new government, which will carry out a sharp shift to the right in foreign and domestic policy.

IG Metall sees its role as maintaining control over the radicalisation of workers in the factories and suppressing it. The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei therefore calls on steelworkers and workers in the metal and electronics industries to take the conduct of the struggle into their own hands. This requires the construction of new organisations of struggle, action committees controlled by the workers themselves. These committees must fight for the broadest political mobilisation of the working class in Germany, Europe and internationally.

The defence of wages, jobs and social achievements requires an international perspective. In their war on the working class, the transnational corporations and banks pursue an international strategy. Workers must also develop an international strategy for the class struggle in order to defend their interests. The action committees must establish ties with workers throughout Germany, Europe and globally to support each others struggles.

The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei is ready to support any serious initiative to expand the strikes and develop them internationally.
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - A casino company said Monday it never had a problem with the shuttle boat that burst into flames off Florida's Gulf Coast, leading to the death of a female passenger.

Tropical Breeze Casino spokeswoman Beth Fifer said the company does not know what caused Sunday's huge blaze, which gutted the 12-year-old shuttle boat and forced about 50 passengers to jump into chilly waters off Port Richey.

"We are deeply saddened for the loss of our passenger, the 14 injured and anyone else who was affected by this tragedy," Fifer said.

Regional Medical Center Bayonet Point spokesman Kurt Conover said Monday that the passenger arrived at the hospital's emergency room at 10 p.m. Sunday and died shortly afterward. He said she had apparently gone home after the fire but became ill.

The Tampa Bay Times reports that the Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner's Office identified the woman as Carrie Dempsey, 42, of Lutz, Florida. Her cause of death has not been released.

Conover said eight other passengers were treated at the hospital and released.

Authorities originally said no injuries were life-threatening.

Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Michael De Nyse said investigators will determine the cause of the fire and examine the history of the boat and Tropical Breeze Casino.

Helicopter video taken by WTSP-TV early Monday shows the boat was burned down to its hull, with only an American flag on its bow uncharred.

The shuttle boat regularly carried people back and forth from the Tropical Breeze's offshore casino, about a 45-minute ride into international waters. There, passengers would play games such as black jack, which is illegal at non-Indian casinos in Florida, and roulette, which is illegal statewide.

The shuttle boat caught fire about 4 p.m. Sunday, quickly engulfing the boat close to shore near residential neighborhoods. Officials said the boat was headed out to the casino ship at the time.

Port Richey Police Chief Gerard DeCanio said the shuttle boat experienced engine problems after leaving the dock at Port Richey, a suburban community about 35 miles (55 kilometers) northwest of Tampa. But as the vessel turned back, flames kicked up and people began jumping overboard into shallow water, according to witness accounts.

Larry Santangelo, 57, said he had just driven into his neighborhood when he saw smoke and fire and thought a house - possibly his own - was ablaze. But then he realized it was the boat just about 100 yards (90 meters) offshore.

He told the Tampa Bay Times that he then saw people wandering about confused, wet and cold, after they reached land. One woman collapsed upon reaching shore and vomited, he said.

Santangelo said he took about 30 of the passengers into his garage to warm up and recover.

"It was so windy and they were soaking wet," said Santangelo. He worried that some might suffer from hypothermia.

It wasn't immediately clear what caused the fire, which sent a huge plume of dark black smoke wafting over sunny skies on an unusually chilly winter day in the Tampa Bay region.

"It looked pretty dramatic because the shuttle boat burned really fast," DeCanio told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Another witness told the Tampa Bay Times the shuttle boat passes regularly by his family's home, carrying patrons to and from a casino ship offshore. But he knew something was wrong when he saw smoke and heard shouts and screams.

"They didn't have much time to decide whether or not to jump," said Bakr Jandali, 19, who was with his home nearby. "The fire was moving fast. It was a hard jump."

Jandali said passengers had to jump about 12 feet (3 meters) from the boat and wade through waist-deep water to shore. There, residents gave them aid.

"All of us, my family and the neighbors, brought them towels and water," Jandali said. "They were so cold."

News footage at the site showed bedraggled survivors cloaked in blankets trying to warm themselves afterward.

The boat was identified in newspaper reports as the Island Lady, a 72-foot wooden-hulled vessel which Fifer said had been inspected by the Coast Guard.

"If we had any type of idea that there was a problem, we wouldn't have left the dock," the cruise spokeswoman told the Tampa Bay Times. "There was no inkling that there were any problems with that vessel whatsoever."

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - A man found guilty in a crash that killed three Florida State University students in 2015 has been sentenced to 60 years in prison.

Stanley Jaboin was sentenced on Tuesday after trial started at 3 p.m.

Jaboin was found guilty by a jury last month in connection to a fatal accident on September 6th, 2015 at the intersection of West Pensacola Street and White Drive. Police say he was driving nearly 100 miles an hour just before he crashed into a vehicle with three FSU students inside.

Kevin Boos died at the scene and Vincenzo Libio and Morgan Carr died at the hospital.

Jaboin's blood alcohol level was .237 at the time of the crash as well. He was convicted of three counts of DUI manslaughter, failure to render and leaving the scene of a crash involving death.

The lead prosecutor in this case says he's been working with the three victims' families, who plan to be present for the sentencing.

The driver of the car carrying the three FSU students pleaded guilty to a DUI charge in June 2016. Nikolas Bonilla was sentenced to 10 days in jail and one year of probation.
First Brazilian tannery awarded CSCB certificate

Brazil

Located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazilian tanner Fuga Couros is the first to receive the Brazilian Leather Certification of Sustainability (CSCB).

Fuga Couros had first applied to participate in the CSCB scheme in mid-2015 in order to keep itself up-to-date and to improve its processes. Achieving the certificate means the tannery has focussed on developing activities covering different elements including: sustainability management, economic. environmental and social responsibility. The norms that determine these criteria were accredited by the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT) and the auditing processes for the certification was carried out by Brazils Inmetro, an independent body which is part of the IAF (International Accreditation Forum) and ILAC (International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation) framework.

Fuga Couros processes more than 200,000 hides per month. The CSCB is supported by the Centre for the Brazilian Tanning Industry (CICB).
VALDOSTA, Ga. (WTXL) - The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday has given thousands of employees and children the day off, but community members in Valdosta are remembering that it's a day dedicated to service.

Hundreds of people filled the seats of the Mathis Auditorium Monday to pay tribute to a man who believed in equality for all.

Dozens of speakers relayed his message through dance, song and words of encouragement.

Fourth grader Keaton Williams says today is a celebration.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 00:52:44|Editor: Lifang

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German Chancellor and leader of German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Angela Merkel (C) shakes hands with leader of German Social Democratic Party (SPD) Martin Schulz (R) after a joint press conference at the headquarters of SPD, in Berlin, Germany, on Jan. 12, 2018. (Xinhua/Shan Yuqi)

BERLIN, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Infighting amongst the German Social Democrats (SPD) following the conclusion of preliminary talks with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) has raised questions over the viability of another German "grand coalition" on Monday.

Both the CDU and CSU leadership have recommended finalizing negotiations over the formation of a new German government on the basis of recently-agreed and widely-publicized legislative compromises between the three prospective coalition partners.

By contrast, SPD leader Martin Schulz must still obtain an approval from his party base to join what would become Chancellor Angela Merkel's (CDU) fourth ruling cabinet at a specially-convened conference next week.

According to Kevin Kuehnert, head of the SPD youth organization, the outcome of the vote at the conference is far from clear in light of remaining resistance within the party against a re-launch of the grand coalition.

"I would not place any bets at the moment," Kuehnert told Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

The SPD youth organization leader added that beyond the party leadership, the formation of a government with the CDU and CSU was still an "extremely controversial" subject for members. Kuehnert complained that the 61-page joint policy paper produced during preliminary coalition talks lacked "an idea, a narrative."

Schulz had himself originally vowed to return his party to the opposition benches if the SPD lost federal elections back in September. Despite slumping to a historically low voter share of 20.5 percent,the SPD leader was subsequently persuaded by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to reverse his stance after the collapse of "Jamaica" coalition talks.

The SPD's youth organization in particular has vocally criticized this u-turn and warned that another five years as junior partner under Merkel would further diminish the party's future electoral fortunes.

Speaking to the public broadcaster SWR, Johanna Uekermann, member of the SPD leadership committee, also expressed her continued scepticism towards joining a grand coalition and argued the CDU-CSU should have offered more concessions in negotiations.

Whilst advocating for the formation of another government with the CDU and CSU in principle, several senior SPD figures called for amendments to the current joint policy proposals. SPD Vice-President Ralf Stegner told Bild newspaper that these could only form the "basis of coalition negotiations."

"People pretend as if everything has already been negotiated, but this is completely untrue," Stegner said.

Nevertheless, the CDU and CSU were unwilling on Monday to entertain the possibility of changes to the agreed legislative outline.

The compromises reached so far were "difficult for us as well, not just the SPD," CDU-CSU parliamentary faction leader Volker Kauder told the Bild. Kauder urged the SPD not to backtrack on proposals which had already been publicly-presented as reflecting a cross-party consensus and to instead focus on communicating its significant achievements during the recently-concluded talks.

CSU leader Horst Seehofer said he could "not imagine" there would be any "substantial changes" to the outcome of preliminary coalition negotiations. Seehofer's view was echoed by CSU secretary general Andreas Scheuer who emphasized that his party was "loyal to the contract" which already existed.

SPD parliamentary faction leader Andrea Nahles joined senior CDU and CSU figures on Monday in attacking members of her party who continued to resist a grand coalition. Accusing critics of purposefully talking down the deal reached between the SPD, CDU and CSU on Deutschlandfunk radio, Nahles expressed confidence that a majority of party members would ultimately vote in favor of joining a new government cabinet.

"Given that we received 20.5 percent of the vote, we negotiated very successfully," Nahles argued.

According to Nahles, those who voiced opposition to a grand coalition would have done so regardless of the concrete result of preliminary talks. Schulz and Nahles will address the influential SPD party base in North-Rhine Westphalia on Monday night in a bid to win their crucial support to conclude coalition negotiations.

In the meantime, a poll published on Monday by public broadcaster RTL found that a majority (56 percent) of SPD members are in favor of re-launching the grand coalition in spite of internal quarrelling over the issue.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 03:48:27|Editor: yan

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MAPUTO, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Terrorists who attacked the Mocimboa da Praia district in the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado have extended their reach of mob activities to the district of Palma, killing seven people and burning houses.

In an interview with Xinhua, Angelina Tayobo of the Environmental Association of Cabo Delgado (AMA), a local non-governmental organization based in that province, said the attack began from Saturday night to Sunday dawn.

"They attacked a community from the administrative post of Ulumbe, Palma district and killed seven people and burned down houses," she said.

Angelina Tayobo said since last October her organization has been moving from one community to another due to the attacks which first had happened in Mocimboa da Praia and now were extending.

"At the moment we were working in Lalane, Palma district. But now we have to leave again," she said.

According to her, AMA was not the only organization that has been affected by the terrorist attacks.

"The recent attack was in an area that is likely to compromise some organizations, because it is an area where Anadarko, an American petroleum company has built resettlement houses due to the field of oil exploration they are working on," said Tayobo.

She added that at first the mob only killed police officers, but now they attack civilians and rape women or kidnap them, and posted movement flags in communities where they attacked.

"They use various weapons, sticks, machetes and guns, and they do horrible things, they are violent, we cannot hide it or get around of this," she said.

The source also revealed that in the same violent incursion on Saturday night, the terrorists entered the house of the head of the post office, but luckily no one was at home.

"It seems they have a tendency to move out from the areas where the police took control, so the attacks are now unpredictable, it can happen at any place," said the same source.

On October 5 in 2017, a group of about 30 armed fundamentalists launched simultaneous attacks against three police stations in Mocimboa da Praia, which later was classified by the police as terrorism.

The Police of the Republic of Mozambique has not yet announced on what happened in the Saturday attack, but information indicates that they have been looking into the situation.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 04:53:51|Editor: Lifang

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ATHENS, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The Greek parliament approved on Monday a new austerity and reform package expected to clear the way for the disbursement of the next bailout tranche in the coming weeks.

The 1,500-page omnibus bill was approved with the backing of 154 for and 141 lawmakers voted against. A total of 295 lawmakers participated in the vote.

Addressing the plenary before the vote, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said that Greece moved one step closer towards exiting the bailouts and the eight-year debt crisis.

"A long and difficult cycle closes. Essentially, this concludes the legislative part of the prior actions needed for the conclusion of the third review and everybody is aware that with the conclusion of the third review, we are one step before the end of the program and the final end of the memoranda," he told MPs.

"The difficulties are now behind us. Ahead of us there is a great effort to heal the wounds of the crisis. Ahead of us is a big wager, what we have described as the wager of the fair growth," he added.

The bill foresees among others new cuts on family benefits and restrictions regarding the declaration of strikes.

It also foresees the launch of e-auctions for foreclosed properties as of Feb. 21 as part of efforts to reduce the burden on non-performing loans on Greek banks under the terms of the third Greek bailout which ends in the summer.

Responding to the criticism of opposition parties and labor unions which staged a new round of strikes and protests on Monday, the Greek premier said that there was much disinformation and misunderstanding.

The reform will make the benefits system fairer, he pledged.

Under the new law, first-level labor unions will need the absolute majority of at least 50 percent of active members who pay dues before declaring a strike in the future. Currently, the percentage stands at only one third of union members.

The frequency of strikes, in particular in the past eight years, obstructs the recovery of the ailing economy, the bill's proponents said.

"The approval of the bill is expected to remove lingering uncertainties and further strengthen Greece's outlook for a stronger recovery in 2018," the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises said in a report released on Monday.

Main opposition conservative New Democracy party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis doubted the exit from the crisis was near.

"Nothing is over in August. The supervision (of Greek economy by international creditors) will continue. This is the truth. It is obvious that you will assume more obligations using as an alibi the debt relief," Mitsotakis added.

MP Theodora Megalooikonomou, who had been elected with the Centrists Union and turned independent in 2017, voted in favor of the bill and asked to join the parliamentary group of the radical left SYRIZA party.

Tsipras accepted the request and now SYRIZA has 145 seats in parliament, while the Independent Greeks party, the junior partner, has nine seats.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 07:04:24|Editor: Lifang

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A bridge under construction collapses in Meta Department, central Colombia, Jan. 15, 2018. At least 10 people were killed on Monday in the accident. (Xinhua/Santiago Molina/COLPRENSA)

BOGOTA, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- At least 10 people were killed on Monday when a bridge under construction in central Colombia collapsed.

Another two people were missing and four others were injured when the structure fell along a tract of a highway that links the capital Bogota with the nearby city of Villavicencio, officials said.

Jorge Diaz, director of Civil Defense for the department of Meta, said the victims were construction workers who fell from a height of approximately 280 meters. Some 20 workers were on the bridge at the time of the accident.

"Ten people are dead. Nine died at the site of the accident and one was taken to a hospital, where he died," Diaz told local media.

Video footage posted to the Caracol News website showed what appeared to be half of the bridge still standing, while the other half had plummeted into the gully below.

The bridge was just 20 meters away from completion, a Caracol News anchor said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 07:54:29|Editor: Lifang

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BOGOTA, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Colombian Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas on Monday said security forces have captured 22 members of the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group since a bilateral ceasefire expired at midnight last Tuesday.

Hostilities between the government and rebels resumed immediately after the ceasefire ended, despite ongoing peace talks being held in Quito, Ecuador, to put an end to the five decades of fighting.

According to Villegas, among the captured was Jose Gregorio Torres, alias "Walter," the alleged leader of the ELN's central front, which operates in the departments of northwest Antioquia and west-central Tolima.

Villegas said it was the most "important" arrest since 2008.

"The response of the public forces will continue to be firm, with increasing operations against the guerrillas, especially since the ceasefire ended between the two sides," said the minister, adding "more than 20 terrorist actions have been prevented thanks to the deployment of troops and police throughout the country."

After rebels blasted several oil pipelines the morning after the ceasefire expired, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos recalled the head government negotiator, Gustavo Bell, for consultations in Bogota about what the next step should be.

The ELN, meanwhile, issued a statement via Twitter, saying the attacks "should not alter the course of the talks to achieve a political resolution to the conflict."

Last year, the ELN agreed to dialogue with the government after Colombia's largest guerrilla group, the FARC, successfully negotiated a peace deal with Santos' administration that led to their renouncing armed conflict and joining politics.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg (not seen) at the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on Jan. 10, 2018. U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Washington could "conceivably" re-enter into the global Paris climate agreement, from which he announced the withdrawal last year. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

by Bruce Westbrook

HOUSTON, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- President Donald Trump's move for the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas drilling in U.S. continental waters in decades is met with resistance by coastal states officials and a mix of skepticism and hope by energy industry analysts.

The proposal, announced earlier this month, would open nearly all U.S. coastal waters from the Atlantic to the Arctic oceans to energy development. For several decades, such waters have had federal protections due to environmental concerns.

The Trump administration asserted that such renewed offshore drilling will help achieve "energy independence."

But some said that's unlikely even if renewed offshore drilling transpires, given the facts that oil is less than 70 U.S. dollars per barrel and shale oil reserves are abundant.

KEY TO ENERGY INDEPENDENCE?

Trump's offshore drilling plan would open up 90 percent of U.S. offshore reserves to development by private companies, with 47 drilling leases proposed. Among them, 19 sales would be off the Alaska coast, 12 in the Gulf of Mexico, nine in the Atlantic and seven in the Pacific, all but one of them off California's coast.

Sean Hennigan, managing director of Houston-based Hercules Offshore West Africa, which provides drilling services to oil and gas producers, saw the proposal as a positive step for energy independence, "which is a long-term game."

Since the lead time for offshore drilling "is significant, there will be no immediate impact" from Trump's proposal, he said. "But we're going to need oil for multi-generations to come, and it's better to get that domestically than internationally from an energy independence standpoint."

He added that "people have more incentive to produce oil and gas from shale formations than offshore drilling. Shale oil and gas is abundant and generally less expensive to produce, and it's quicker to get your payback, while an offshore well may take a decade or longer to produce."

That's why he considered the Trump proposal's impact on America's energy independence to be "more of a medium-term" thing. Trump's opening up coastal waterways might take 10 to 20 years to make an impact on the oil and gas industry.

But at the same time, Hennigan said though the industry can meet demands now via shale production, "if there was a drop in production in the Middle East or South America, there would be sorrow in the future if you don't do it now (launch domestic offshore drilling). You won't know you need it till you need it, and you wouldn't be able to respond quickly enough then."

That's why he saw "increasing our access to domestic resources" via renewed offshore drilling as a "safety net if something goes wrong internationally."

DOMASTICALLY POLITICAL ISSUE?

Dubbed the Draft Five Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program, the offshore drilling plan is not final.

Jon Taylor, professor of political science and director for Master of Public Policy and Administration Program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, America's energy capital, saw the proposal as more a matter of domestic politics than energy independence.

He said there is "no guarantee that any actual offshore drilling will take place" during the proposal's five-year period of 2019-2024. "I think this will have less of an impact than Trump thinks."

With shale reserves available and oil prices low, "oil companies are going to be reticent to sink massive investments into offshore drilling," he said. And even if there is strong interest, "the impact of expanding domestic offshore drilling and oil production would likely be several years from now rather than immediate."

Trump's government also claimed that allowing offshore drilling would provide billions of dollars to fund conservation of coastlines, public lands and parks -- the same areas which environmentalists say would be most vulnerable to an oil spill accident when offshore drilling goes badly.

While energy industry groups have embraced the proposal, Democratic governors of Virginia, North Carolina, Delaware, New York, California, Oregon and Washington oppose offshore drilling in waters along their coasts, as do Republican governors of Maryland, New Jersey and Florida.

Several of those states benefit from multi-billion-dollar beach tourism industries along what are now environmentally protected waters.

In addition, a coalition of over 60 environmental groups is against the proposal, which it claims would cause severe harm to public health, the environment and marine life.

In a statement signed by leaders of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and other environmental groups, the coalition railed against U.S. coastal waters being "sold off to multinational oil companies."

The coalition called Trump's offshore drilling proposal a "shameful giveaway" to the gas and oil industries.

Trump's offshore drilling plan isn't his only recent move toward a more aggressive energy posture. The administration also recently vowed to rewrite or eliminate many restrictions on offshore oil and gas drilling which had been instituted after a far worse oil spill: the notorious Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig explosion, fire and spill which occurred in 2010.

That disaster off the coast of Louisiana, or 400 km southeast of Houston, killed 11 oil rig workers and spilled 215 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling beaches all the way to Florida. It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Potential environmental disasters are a chief concern of several Republican and Democratic governors of coastal states along U.S. continental-shelf waters. They note that the Deepwater Horizon accident continues to have harmful effects on Gulf of Mexico coastal areas, which are still in a recovery mode more than seven years after the accident.
Photo taken on Jan. 11, 2018 shows Chery's ARRIZO 5 self-driving vehicle installed with Baidu Apollo Pilot 2.0 at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the United States. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

DETROIT, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Automakers from around the world shared plans at ongoing North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) to produce autonomous vehicles for the U.S. market within the next five years.

The first autonomous vehicle to the market is expected to come from General Motors (GM), which is ready to mass-produce a self-driving car in 2019. The Cruise AV will have no steering wheel, gas or brake pedals, or manual driving controls of any kind.

A petition GM filed with the Department of Transportation states the Cruise AV "will comply with federal safety laws" and requests a waiver for laws that cannot be met because they are "human-driver-based-requirements."

Although the Cruise AV has no interior driving controls, customers will still be able to end the ride in case of emergency by making a stop request, allowing the vehicle to pull off to the side of the road at the first safe opportunity, GM says.

BMW plans to release a Level 3 self-driving car in 2021 as well as a Level 5 self-driving car.

Level 3 means the vehicle can handle basic driving tasks but will still require driver intervention, while Level 5 means complete vehicle autonomy, with no driver required.

Partnering with BMW to progress driverless technology is Fiat Chrysler (FCA), contributing engineering and expertise to the alliance. "In order to advance autonomous driving technology, it is vital to form partnerships among automakers, technology providers and suppliers," FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne said in a press release.

Also with plans for autonomous vehicles in 2021 is Ford Motor Company, which plans to use autonomous vehicles for ridesharing and delivery. Ford Smart Mobility plans to lead in autonomy, connectivity, mobility, customer experience, and analytics. The vehicle will have no steering wheel and no gas or brake pedals.

Committing to expand research in advanced algorithms, 3D mapping, radar technology, and camera sensors, Ford's vehicle will be a Level 4 capable-vehicle, a high-automation level that can drive without any human intervention.

Ford has an autonomous vehicle created in partnership with Dominoes, a pizza delivery company. The vehicle began testing last summer in the Michigan city of Ann Arbor.

"We've been working on autonomous vehicles since 2005, 2006 for the DARPA challenges," Wayne Williams, an autonomous vehicle engineer at Ford told Xinhua. "That was Ford's first foray into AVs. The testing for delivery is brand new. That started last summer."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 08:09:31|Editor: Lifang

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VANCOUVER, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- An innocent teenager is clinging to life after getting caught in the crossfire of a brazen shooting here on Saturday night, Vancouver Police said on Monday afternoon at a press conference.

The shooting marks the first homicide in Vancouver in 2018 and has captured the hearts and attention of Vancouverites not used to blatant and apparent gang-related violence involving innocent victims.

A 23-year-old Vancouver resident involved directly in the shooting died of his injuries in hospital, Vancouver Police said.

Investigators believe that 23-year-old Kevin Whiteside exchanged gun fire with at least one other yet-unknown person during the shooting along a section of East Broadway in Vancouver's Mount Pleasant neighborhood - a busy thoroughfare, but also an area packed with pedestrians, cafes, shops and restaurants.

Tragically, police say the innocent 15-year-old boy was injured in the shooting as he rode in passing car. On Monday, the young resident of the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam remained on life support.

The 15-year-old was not expected to survive, said Vancouver Police Department Chief Constable Adam Palmer.

Palmer said Whiteside was known to police.

"This is the type of call I absolutely dread and I am incredibly saddened and heartbroken," Palmer said. "It is rare in Vancouver for an innocent victim to be caught up in this type of violence and this investigation remains a priority for us. We are pulling all available resources together."

Palmer insisted at the press conference that Vancouver remains a safe city. It has been roughly 14 years since a gang-related shooting here has killed an innocent bystander, according to the Vancouver Sun newspaper.

The police chief said the VPD has at least 50 officers investigating this shooting, and is committed to solving this case.

Investigators believe that there are still people who may have witnessed this shooting and have yet to call the police.

A 30-year-old bystander was also injured in the ordeal and was treated and released.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 08:19:33|Editor: Lifang

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ISLAMABAD, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- At least five security personnel were killed and six others injured in a gun attack in Pakistan's southwest province of Balochistan on Monday evening, local media reported.

According to the reports, some unknown gunmen opened fire at a vehicle carrying security personnel in Shapok area of Turbat, a district in Balochistan.

Following the ambush, the driver could not keep control over the vehicle and it overturned and skidded off the road.

The injured were rushed to the hospital in Turbat city. However, there are no reports about their condition yet.

Security forces have cordoned off the area and started a search operation to arrest the attackers.

No group claimed the attack yet.

Ethnic violence has claimed thousands of lives in the province. Militants belonging to nationalist groups have been killing and kidnapping government officials and pro-government elders in the province.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 08:24:34|Editor: Lifang

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SALTA, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Peugeot will appeal against a 10-minute penalty handed to Dakar Rally leader Carlos Sainz for "potentially dangerous" driving, the French car manufacturer said on Monday.

Dakar's disciplinary committee ruled that the 55-year-old Spaniard was at fault after an alleged collision with Dutch quad rider Kees Koolen.

"The truth is that Carlos did not hit the quad, because it was not damaged and also finished 10th in the two stages since," Peugeot team boss Bruno Famin said.

"In addition, if the organizers believe there was bad behaviour on Carlos' part, the penalty should be a monetary one. We are going to say that we are going to appeal the decision in the next hour."

Sainz, who won the race in 2010, still leads Qatari Nasser Al-Attiyah by almost 57 minutes with six days remaining.

Monday's 242km stage from Tupiza in Bolivia to the northern Argentine city of Salta was cancelled due to bad weather.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 10:09:56|Editor: Lu Hui

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Aerial photo taken aboard surveillance plane of the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) shows the oil spill on the water surface around the sunken Iranian tanker Sanchi in the East China Sea, Jan. 15, 2018. The SOA said in a statement that several oil slicks were found near the site where the vessel sank and they were much bigger than the previous day. The tanker Sanchi, carrying 136,000 tonnes of light crude oil from Iran, collided with the CF Crystal, a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter, about 300 km east of the Yangtze River estuary on Jan. 6. (Xinhua/Liu Shiping)

BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday extended to his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif condolences over the death of all the 30 Iranian sailors aboard an oil tanker that earlier collided with another vessel and sank off China's east coast.

In a message to Zarif, Wang expressed deep condolences over the death of the Iranian sailors aboard the tanker Sanchi as well as his sympathy toward their families.

Wang said China had done its utmost in the search and rescue operations carried out in close cooperation with Iran, and that it will maintain coordinations with Iran in follow-up work.

The death of the Iranian sailors was announced days after the Panama-registered tanker and the Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter CF Crystal collided in waters about 300 km east of the Yangtze River estuary on Jan. 6.

The tanker, carrying 136,000 tons of gas condensates and other oils, caught fire after the collision. It sank on Sunday after burning for eight days.

Three bodies have been recovered of the missing 32 crew members aboard Sanchi, which included two Bangladeshis.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 10:14:57|Editor: Lifang

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CARACAS, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The Venezuelan government announced Monday it succeeded in dismantling the "terrorist group" behind attacks on government buildings, including the Supreme Court of Justice.

The group was led by former police officer Oscar Perez who clashed with public security forces in Junquito, a mountainous community in northern Miranda state, along with an undetermined number of group members who were heavily armed, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

"Our troops were attacked while we were negotiating the surrender of the terrorist cell .... They resisted, they were killed and five criminals were captured," the statement said.

In Monday's operation, two police officers were killed and five officials were injured in the exchange of gunfire. It was not clear whether Perez was killed or captured in the deadly gunbattle with government forces.

Since early in the day, the country's social networks were abuzz with posts from both sides, including government backers and Perez, as events unfolded.

Perez, 36, had posted that he was "negotiating with officials (and) prosecutors."

Perez gained notoriety after he and his group stole a police helicopter from an air base in Caracas and used it to shoot on and lob explosives at the court building and the Interior Ministry in late June.

In mid-December, Perez and his men stole weapons from a military storehouse in San Pedro de los Altos, Miranda state.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 10:14:58|Editor: Lifang

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- A federal court on Monday denied an appeal of the Brazilian government that called for lifting a ban on Cristiane Brasil as the country's labor minister.

Brasil was a lawmaker before she was appointed as the labor minister earlier this month. However, she was accused of delaying payments to her driver and was therefore banned by a federal judge from taking her new post scheduled on Jan. 9.

The office of the Attorney General, which made the appeal, has yet to make any comments.

Brasil was elected as a lawmaker in 2015, following three terms as a city councilor in Rio de Janeiro.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 10:20:01|Editor: Lifang

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YANGON, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar and Laos have reached three memorandums of understanding on bilateral cooperation in three sectors, Myanmar News Agency reported Tuesday.

The cooperation in three sectors are electric power, science and technology, and anti-corruption.

The signing on late Monday was witnessed by Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and visiting Lao Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith.

Sisoulith, who arrived Nay Pyi Taw earlier on Monday on his official visit to Myanmar, had discussions with Myanmar President U Htin Kyaw on matters related to enhancing bilateral friendship and cooperation, regional and international peace and security, cooperation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), economic cooperation and development of the social sector.

Sisoulith also met with Aung San Suu Kyi separately and discussed on promoting bilateral relations and cooperation, boosting trade and investment, tourism and transportation, education and electric power and energy sectors as well as anti-human trafficking and anti-drug abuse in the border regions.

Sisoulith is another Lao high-level leader visiting Myanmar over one year after Lao President Bounnhang Vorachitch last came to the country in August 2016.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 10:55:08|Editor: Xiang Bo

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by Michael Strong

DETROIT, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Guangzhou Automobile Group Motor Co., Ltd. (GAC) from China roared into the North American International Auto Show that is being held here and announced it plans to begin selling vehicles in the United States at the end of 2019.

If the company achieves its self-imposed deadline, the automaker headquartered in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, will become the first Chinese company ever to sell the first Chinese-branded vehicles in the United States.

The company established a plan in 2016 to sell vehicles in America, then set plans in motion to make it a reality. To ensure it could develop a vehicle for the U.S. market now and in the future, GAC established an R&D center last April in Silicon Valley. The site works on the development of intelligent vehicle systems, driverless cars and other new energy vehicle technologies.

GAC plans to open a second R&D center in Detroit or the surrounding suburbs in the first half of this year to concentrate on more conventional development activities as well as a design studio that will be based in Los Angeles.

The Chinese automaker, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary earlier this year, plans to establish a sales company and attend the National Auto Dealers Association's annual show in March to see if it can recruit potential dealers, to establish a sales network in the United States.

Additionally, the company has a very powerful ally in China: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA). GAC is FCA's joint-venture partner in China. Officials said they have built up a lot of trust with the Auburn Hills, Michigan-based company and believe the automaker will act as a "mentor" during the growth process.

FCA Chief Sergio Marchionne, speaking at a separate event here in Detroit, supported the assertion saying that they have a strong partnership. "They are already ... a very good partner" in China, he continued. "Without them, we could not have gone as far as we have in China."

Besides China, GAC sells vehicles in 14 other countries and that experience led its executives to believe they are ready to make the move to the U.S. market.

Aside from the cultural acceptance of a vehicle produced and exported from China to the United States, which has been mitigated to some extent by the sale of the Buick Envision and Volvo's entire line-up, there are other hurdles to surmount.

"The U.S. has a mature legal system," said Feng Xingya, president of GAC Group and chairman of GAC Motor. "It is the most challenging (legal system) in the world."

Feng and other executives told a press conference that GAC has been studying and preparing for the legal hurdles it will face not just in meeting the country's stringent safety standards, but also ensuring that it conforms to the franchise sale structure, which has laws which vary from state to state.

Feng also noted the company has learned the lessons from Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi and others which failed initially as they attempted to sell vehicles in the United States.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 11:00:09|Editor: Lifang

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TRIPOLI, Jan.16 (Xinhua) -- Libyan Coast Guards on Monday rescued 360 illegal immigrants off Libya's western coast, according to a Coast Guards official.

"Patrol members received a distress call off the coast of Garrabulli city, some 60 km east of the capital Tripoli. Upon arrival, we found a boat with dozens of immigrants on board, and all of them were rescued," Coast Guards Patrol Commander Nasser Al-Gammudi told Xinhua.

"Following the completion of the first operation, we received a new call about two boats off the coast of Zuwara, 120 km west of Tripoli. Upon arrival, they (the immigrants) were rescued without any deaths," Al-Gammudi added.

The rescued migrants were of Arab and African nationalities. They were taken to the Tripoli naval base and transferred to reception centers of the anti-illegal immigration department.

Libya has become a preferred departure point for illegal immigrants hoping to cross the Mediterranean into Europe due to insecurity and chaos in the North African country following the 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 11:05:09|Editor: Lifang

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RAMALLAH, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The Central Council of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) on Monday recommended suspending the recognition of Israel.

The council, which convened in the West Bank city of Ramallah for two days, issued a final statement recommending the PLO and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas suspend the recognition of the state of Israel until Israel recognizes the independent state of Palestine on 1967 borders and calls off the decisions to annex east Jerusalem.

Salim al-Za'noun, speaker of the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PLO, read the statement, which rejected U.S. President Donald Trump's declaration of recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of his country's embassy to the city.

"The immediate goal is the independent state of Palestine, which requires moving from the status of authority and self-rule to the status of the sovereignty of the state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital on the 1967 borders," said the statement.

Trump announced the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of his country's embassy to it on Dec. 6, having sparked the anger of the Palestinians and Arabs as well as heated international reactions.

The Palestinians want to have the eastern part of Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, while Israel insists that a unified Jerusalem, including its eastern part which it occupied in 1967, is its eternal capital.

Jerusalem is one of the final status issues for Palestinian-Israeli negotiations which have been stalled since 2014 after nine months of U.S.-sponsored talks without progress to resolve the decades-old conflict.

The Palestinian statement said the U.S. decision "makes it lose its eligibility as a mediator and sponsor of the peace process, and will be a partner in this process only after the cancellation of President Trump's decision on Jerusalem."

The statement stressed the "rejection of any proposals or ideas for transitional solutions or interim stages, including the so-called state with temporary borders and the refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state."

The statement called for holding the Palestinian National Council no later than the end of 2018 to "achieve political partnership within the framework of the PLO, the sole representative of the Palestinian people."

The council also called for the formation of a unity government "to strengthen the political partnership and unity of the Palestinian political system."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 11:10:10|Editor: Yurou

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Photo taken on Jan. 16, 2018 shows a view of the M'etiga international airport in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. A medical source confirmed on Monday that an earlier attack at the international airport in the Libyan capital of Tripoli killed 20 people and injured 69, including civilians. (Xinhua/Hamza Turkia)

TRIPOLI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- A medical source confirmed on Monday that an earlier attack at the international airport in the Libyan capital of Tripoli have killed 20 and injured 69, including civilians.

Abduddayem Al-Rabri, director of Tripoli field hospital, told Xinhua that the injuries of the clashes at M'etiga international airport are of varying degrees.

Earlier, Rabri called on all Libyan doctors and medical assistants to help treat the injured.

The Special Deterrent Force that is in charge of the airport's security said an armed group attacked the airport with heavy weapons on Monday morning.

"The criminal militia known as Bashir al-Baqarah and all the criminals wanted by the Deterrent Force attacked the international airport after escaping (from jail) and joining the militia," said the Special Deterrent Force.

The force confirmed that the current situation is under full control.

Head of the Civil Aviation Authority Nasr-Addin Shayeb al-Ain said the airport had been temporarily closed for security reasons.

"The closure of the airport was because of the ongoing clashes. We are waiting for the clashes to stop and for the airport to be secure again to resume air traffic," al-Ain told Xinhua, pointing out that flights have been temporarily transferred to the airport of Misurata city, some 250 km east of Tripoli.

The UN-backed government issued a statement condemning the attack, saying it "threatened the lives of travelers, nearby residents and the safety of air traffic."

"This attack aimed at freeing the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaida and other terrorists from the detention center supervised by the Interior Ministry's Special Deterrence Force," said the statement.

"Those acts not only attempted to free terrorists, but also attempted to hinder the peaceful political transition in the country, and also obstruct local and international efforts to achieve stability in our country," said the statement.

The international airport of Tripoli witnessed frequent clashes and armed attacks.

Monday's attack is the most violent one the airport has witnessed so far, as gunmen attacked the air hub and also a prison inside it, where hundreds of terrorists have been detained over the past few years.

Libya has been suffering insecurity and chaos since the regime of former leader Muammar Gaddafi's was toppled in 2011. The country is plagued with political division and escalating violence.

Terrorism has become a major threat to the security situation of Libya. The IS terrorists continue to plan or carry out car bombs and suicide attacks in the North African country.

Last week, two IS terrorists were arrested as they placed a car bomb near the industrial district of central Tripoli but failed to detonate it.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 11:15:12|Editor: Xiang Bo

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SANTIAGO, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- A long-term vision should guide participants at the upcoming second ministerial meeting under the framework of China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) Forum, according to Chile's ex-ambassador to China Fernando Reyes Matta.

The China-CELAC Forum will offer an opportunity to plan cooperation, not just in the short term, but also for the coming years, Reyes Matta told Xinhua in a recent interview. Chile will host the Jan. 21-22 gathering between China and Latin America's largest bloc.

"I think we have a common expectation for the second ministerial meeting: to do things better, do them more practically, with better political vision and, above all, with the awareness that we are doing them not just for two or three years, but for a longer relationship," said Reyes Matta.

China's global perspective and the confidence it inspires in its partners justify its taking a long-term approach, he said.

"China is inviting us to have an outlook in longer term," said the senior diplomat.

The former ambassador, who is also one of Chile's most prominent experts on China, stressed the significance of the upcoming meeting to Latin America's future.

"I would say the existence of the forum is essential, especially given the role China is playing today in the world, in Latin America, in the global reordering," he said.

He believes Latin America needs to expand its presence in the Chinese market, including strengthening regional integration in the efforts.

The region "needs to learn to speak with one voice with continent countries like China, big countries that are decisive. The region cannot continue to speak only bilaterally with China. It must also discover what its common agenda is," said Reyes Matta.

"It is still unclear how Latin America will learn to speak as a whole with China," he said.

The past three years since January 2015 when the first ministerial meeting under the China-CELAC Forum was held in Beijing have seen positive developments in biregional trade and other areas, he said.

In the meantime, China's interest in the region has boosted the Latin American integration, he added.

"China has played a great role in advancing the Latin American integration a little further, though it's clear that Latin American countries have different social, political and economic projects," said the expert.

"There were some things that were very enthusiastically put in place three years ago that, given the reality of relationships in the region, the lack of integration in Latin America, have made them tough to apply or carry out in a constant or positive way," he added.

Reyes Matta reckons that currently, global warming and the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda for 2030 provide a fertile ground for cooperation between China and the Latin America.

This would make it "possible to find an agenda of concrete measures ... from the China-CELAC meeting," he said, presuming cooperation in such sectors as infrastructure, agroindustry and energy.

"I believe a plan of action that is going to result (from the meeting) is going to contain many more things that can be carried out in a multilateral fashion, while others will be precisely bilateral," said Reyes Matta.

One multilateral project set to benefit all parties, improving Latin American ties with China, is the Belt and Road Initiative China proposed to promote global development, he said.

"When you join four routes: maritime, overland, aerial and digital, you would discover that there are many possibilities for interaction between Latin America and China," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 11:55:18|Editor: Lifang

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VIENTIANE, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Laos and Myanmar are mulling an electricity agreement to empower Laos' development needs, local daily Vientiane Times quoted a senior Lao official as saying on Tuesday.

Office Head of the Lao Ministry of Energy and Mines, Daovong Phonekeo, told Vientiane Times that the two sides will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) this week, which will allow Myanmar authorities to initiate a feasibility study.

"Myanmar wants to purchase about 100-200 MW, but that will depend on the results of their feasibility study," Daovong said.

"At present it's not clear when we will start selling electricity under this program and at what price we will sell it."

Daovong said Laos would supply electricity to Myanmar through its northern power grids. "If everything progresses as planned, we expect to start selling electricity to Myanmar by the end of this year or the beginning of next year."

Laos currently sells only 4-5 MW to Myanmar, which is a very small amount, and the two nations aim to increase it in the near future.

According to a report from Myanmar media on Saturday, Myanmar has adopted a National Electrification Plan under which it is planned that power will be available nationwide by 2030.

Laos has a huge potential in hydropower, which can further drive economic growth. The country currently has 46 power plants with an installed capacity of 6,757 MW generating about 35,608 GWh of electricity annually, said the Vientiane Times on Tuesday.

According to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, Laos is expected to generate 10,000 MW of electricity by 2020 and this will rise further to 20,000 MW by 2030, which will be far exceeding domestic demand.

Currently most of Laos' electricity is sold to Thailand.

In September, Laos signed a tripartite electricity-trading agreement with Thailand and Malaysia to sell 100 MW of electricity to Malaysia using Thailand's power transmission network. The delivery will begin on August 1, 2018.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 12:30:26|Editor: Lifang

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HOUSTON, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Governor of Texas Greg Abbott on Monday ordered the State Operations Center (SOC) to elevate its readiness level for coping with the expected weather conditions.

The readiness level will raise from Level 4 (Normal Conditions) to Level 3 (Increased Readiness) as winter weather and cold temperatures are expected to impact much of the southern U.S. state during the next few days.

Additionally, the governor has made available any state resources needed to assist in dealing with the potential impacts of the upcoming weather conditions. Abbott also encouraged Texans to monitor changing weather conditions and heed warnings from local authorities.

"The winter weather system sweeping across our state will bring low temperatures and freezing precipitation to many communities, which could create life-threatening situations," said Abbott.

"I urge all Texans to exercise extreme caution in these hazardous conditions. Additionally, the State of Texas will provide any and all state resources necessary to help protect our residents during this weather event," he added.

According to weather forecasts, many parts of Texas expect wintry precipitation this week. Schools in the Houston area will mostly be closed Tuesday. Texans are urged to avoid unnecessary travels when sleet, freezing rain or snow is predicted.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 13:05:32|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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HANOI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Vietnamese Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs has proposed raising retirement ages from the current 60 to 62 for men, and from 55 to 60 for women from 2021.

Increasing retirement ages will ensure the balance of the timeframe, the social insurance employees' payment, and the retirement or survivor pensions, the ministry said on Tuesday, citing calculations by the International Labor Organization that retirement and survivor funds will face overspending from 2023 in Vietnam.

To ensure the funds' sustainable operation without raising retirement ages, either employees and employers will have to pay bigger social insurance or employees will receive smaller retirement pensions.

However, lifting rates of social insurance employees' and employers' payments will increase financial burden for them and decrease business competitiveness, while slashing retirement benefits will negatively affect pensioners' life, said the ministry.

Draft amendments to the Labor Code, including proposed hike in retirement ages, are scheduled to be submitted to Vietnam's National Assembly, the country's top legislature, in 2019.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 13:10:33|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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by Julia Pierrpont III

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Thousands of cheering spectators lined the streets of South Central region of Los Angeles in the U.S. state of California on Monday morning as observances of Martin Luther King Day kicked off with a host of community celebrations, concerts, and parades.

This predominately African American neighborhood of Los Angeles welcomed all races and colors Monday at the 33rd annual Kingdom Day Parade along Martin Luther King Boulevard, the nation's largest and oldest Martin Luther King Day celebration.

The celebratory mood ran high, as neighbors, families and friends, dressed in all the colors of spring, came out to enjoy up-beat high school bands, colorful floats, synchronized flag and baton-twirlers in spangled outfits, and snazzy, "pimped up" show cars.

The theme of this year's celebration was, "When they go low, we go high," a comment on how to be big enough to rise above division and discord.

Adrian Dove, president of the Kingdom Day Parade, who once worked with Martin Luther King Jr., told Xinhua that he and many others have taken up King's message of "equality for all, that we fight for with love."

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti urged "This isn't about marking history, we have to make history ... by protecting our immigrants and standing up against racism..."

California State Treasurer, John Chiang, who will be the first Chinese-American to run for governor in the hotly-contested, upcoming California gubernatorial race, told Xinhua "Martin Luther King was one of my childhood heroes. We were the first Chinese family in my neighborhood and we faced discrimination. But, his vision included me, you and everyone else."

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and political activist who led the American civil rights movement for racial equality in the 1960s.

Inspired by Mahatma Ghandi, King promoted non-violent protests as a way to achieve racial equality in the United States, urging African-American citizens not to "seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred."

Assassinated in his prime in 1968 while preparing to occupy Washington D.C. as part of a nationwide Poor People's Campaign protest against the plight of the poor and disadvantaged, King enlightened the entire nation to move to redress imbalances in racial equality and opportunity.

King has inspired celebrities and political activists of all races to continue the struggle for racial equality in America. Monday, many celebrities and officials spoke out or shared their words.

Country music star Tim McGraw's tweeted quote said "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Former U.S. President Barack Obama urged "Dr. King was 26 when the Montgomery bus boycott began. He started small, rallying others who believed their efforts mattered, pressing on through challenges and doubts to change our world for the better. A permanent inspiration for the rest of us to keep pushing towards justice."

And another former U.S. President Bill Clinton added "50 years after Dr. King's last birthday, it's up to all of us to keep his Dream of a Beloved Community alive: don't demean and belittle, inspire and empower; don't isolate and abuse, embrace and serve." Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 13:15:34|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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HOUSTON, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- A unit of Shell Oil Company announced Monday that it has signed an agreement to acquire nearly half of Silicon Ranch Corporation, a solar developer based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Shell will pay between 193 million and 217 million U.S. dollars if the deals meet regulatory approval, and Shell will also be able to increase its ownership of the company after 2021. Initially, Shell hopes to acquire 43.83 percent of Silicon Ranch.

"Partnering with Silicon Ranch Corporation progresses our New Energies strategy and provides our U.S. customers with additional solar renewable options," said Marc van Gerven, Shell vice president of solar. "With this entry into the fast-growing solar sector, Shell is able to leverage its expertise as one of the top three wholesale power sellers in the U.S., while expanding its global new energies footprint."

This investment is part of Shell's New Energies power portfolio, which prioritizes low carbon generation and storage. Shell's interest in Silicon Ranch includes an existing portfolio of approximately 880 megawatts of projects in operation or contracted.

Silicon Ranch Corporation, a developer, owner, and operator of solar energy plants in the United States, has a project and development funnel portfolio of approximately 1.9 gigawatts of capacity.

Shell Oil Company is the United States-based wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, a multinational "oil major" of Anglo-Dutch origins, which is amongst the largest oil companies in the world. Its U.S. headquarters are in Houston, Texas.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 14:00:45|Editor: Mengjie

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A screen capture from the Twitter account of U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard shows a missile warning for Hawaii, the United States. on January 13, 2018. (Xinhua)

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. state of Alaska said Monday that it will not commit the same error by Hawaii, a U.S. pacific state, which sent a missile attack alert in error last Saturday that caused huge panic among the pubic.

Alaska has a more reliable system to warn residents of an incoming nuclear or other long-range missile attack, Alaska's Anchorage Daily News quoted officials of the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans' Affairs, as well as the state's Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management as saying.

Mike Sutton, director of Alaska Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said the state emergency operations center is staffed during the normal workday, while an on-call duty officer is equipped with a cellphone and laptop around the clock.

The center would alert television and radio stations and also send text messages to cellphones across Alaska in the event of a missile attack, he said.

Laurie Hummel, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, said Alaska residents would not receive an alert of a missile attack in error because Alaska's system has built-in checks which Hawaii is lacking.

She said Hawaii's system was too simple and it requires a second employee to sign off on a real alert.

"We don't have a simple button that you would hit, and it could be the wrong button," said Sutton, echoing Hummel's comment on Hawaii's alarming system.

"We have to manually create the message, type in a password, click multiple buttons and then, before you transmit, the system is going to ask the operator to type 'yes' before you are allowed to actually proceed," explained Hummel.

Last Saturday, an employee in Hawaii mistakenly sent an alert of a missile attack that went to cellphones all over the islands and caused fear and despair among the public before it was cancelled 38 minutes later.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 14:05:47|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Up to 21 militants of the hardliner Islamic State (IS) group were killed after the security forces aircrafts pounded the insurgents' hideouts in Achin and Shirzad districts of Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province on Monday night, spokesman for provincial government Attaullah Khogiani said Tuesday.

The air raids conducted on tipoff also destroyed the insurgent's weapon caches, according to the official.

Two local commanders of IS group identified Usman and Abas are also among those killed during the sorties.

IS group has yet to make comment on the report.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 14:15:50|Editor: Lu Hui

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, on Tuesday discussed bilateral trade and the situation on the Korean Peninsula via phone.

The China-U.S. relations maintained overall stability and achieved significant progress in 2017, said Xi.

Keeping bilateral ties on a track of healthy and stable development is in the interests of both countries and both peoples, and conforms to the common aspiration of the international community, the Chinese president said.

The two sides need to maintain high-level and various levels of interactions, bring the four high-level dialogue mechanisms between them into full play, and hold the second round of dialogues at a proper time, Xi said.

As economic and trade cooperation brings tangible benefits to both peoples, the two countries should adopt constructive measures to properly settle economic and trade issues of mutual concern by opening up the market to each other and "making the cake of cooperation bigger," Xi added.

The Chinese president also called for advancing the cooperation between the two militaries, in law-enforcement, drug control, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and cooperation on local levels, as well as close communication and coordination on major international and regional issues.

The two sides need to meet each other halfway, respect each other, focus on cooperation, deal with sensitive issues in a constructive way, respect each other's core interests and major concerns, and maintain the momentum of sound and steady development of China-U.S. relations, he said.

Trump said that the U.S. side attaches great importance to its relations with China as well as to the U.S.-China cooperation, and that it is willing to work with the Chinese side to enhance bilateral exchanges at all levels, expand pragmatic cooperation, and properly handle problems in bilateral trade so as to achieve even greater results in bilateral relations.

Regarding the situation on the Korean Peninsula, Xi said that there are some positive changes and related parties should work jointly to keep up the hard-won momentum for the easing of the situation on the Korean Peninsula and create conditions for the resumption of talks.

Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and safeguarding peace and stability in the region accord with the common interests of all sides, said Xi, adding that it is vital for the international community to stay united over the issue.

China is ready to continue its joint efforts with the United States and other members of the international community to achieve progress that would finally lead to a proper resolution of the issue, said Xi.

In response, Trump said the U.S. side values China's significant role in resolving the Korean Peninsula issue and is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China over the issue.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 14:25:52|Editor: Lifang

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CHANGCHUN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Volkswagen Group China registered strong sales in the domestic market in 2017, the company announced Tuesday.

The company, along with two joint ventures -- SAIC Volkswagen and FAW-Volkswagen -- delivered nearly 3.18 million automobiles to the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong last year, up 5.9 percent year on year.

The sales of SUVs topped 400,000 last year, the company said.

According Dr. Stephan Wollenstein, CEO of Volkswagen China Passenger Cars Brand, the company is planning to launch four new SUV models to meet strong demand this year in the Chinese market and plans to introduce 10 new SUV models by 2020.

Volkswagen is the largest automotive manufacturing company in Europe, with 12 vehicle brands, including Audi, Lamborghini and Bentley, delivered to more than 150 countries and regions worldwide.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 14:40:55|Editor: Lifang

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CHONGQING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- A double-deck railroad bridge will soon open to traffic in southwest China's Chongqing municipality, according to the China Railway Corporation.

The bridge is 5.3 km long and includes a 920-meter section that stretches over the Yangtze, China's longest river. It is part of the Chongqing-Guiyang high-speed railway line, set to begin operations at the end of this month.

After more than five years of construction, the 345-km Chongqing-Guiyang railway, with speeds up to 200 kph, will cut the average travel time between Chongqing and Guiyang, capital of southwest China's Guizhou Province, to around two hours from the current 10 hours.

China has the world's longest high-speed rail network. The country is expected to have 38,000 km of high-speed rail tracks by 2025, according to the China Railway Corporation.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 15:16:01|Editor: Chengcheng

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JAKARTA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The government of Indonesia has asked investors from Saudi Arabia to park their funds in the sector of transport, tourism and infrastructure as connectivity of the two nations grows, a minister said here Tuesday.

Indonesian Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said cooperation of the two nations needs to be intensified, particularly in connectivity of the two nations.

The minister revealed that currently the number of Indonesian people travelling to Saudi Arabia has been expanding rapidly.

"Many our citizens travel to Saudi Arabia that leads the number of flight to there rise, so this gives opportunity to investors from Saudi Arabia to invest, have holiday and stay in Indonesia," he said in a statement.

Minister Budi said currently the government expands four tourism destinations beyond Bali Island, namely Lake Toba in North Sumatra province, Yogyakarta province, Mandalika tourism destination in Lokmbok Island, and Labuan Bajo in Flores.

"If they want to invest there, they will certainly get significant return and this will boost connectivity," he added.

The Indonesian government has unveiled a series of reforms to boost investment environment in the country.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 15:16:01|Editor: Chengcheng

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VANCOUVER, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Top diplomats of Canada and the United States will co-host an official dinner here Monday welcoming foreign ministers and senior officials representing 20 nations that fought alongside the United States during the 1950-53 Korean War.

They will gather for a meeting intended to discuss the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, according to Canada's Department of Global Affairs.

Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland and her U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, announced in December that they will jointly host the meeting on Jan. 16.

The Vancouver meeting is scheduled for Tuesday and will discuss measures to exert maximum diplomatic as well as economic pressures on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) so as to force it to end its nuclear and missile programs.

Canadian Minister of National Defense Harjit Singh Sajjan and United States Secretary of Defense James Mattis will also attend the one-day meeting.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that would not help because it didn't include key parties involved in the issue and could harm joint efforts to improve the situation on the Korean peninsula. China and Russia, two parties in the suspended six-party talks on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, won't attend the meeting.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 15:26:04|Editor: Chengcheng

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NEW DELHI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Indian government's chief legal advisor and its primary lawyer in the country's top court, Attorney General K.K. Venugopal, Tuesday said the issue between Chief Justice of India (CJI) and four dissenting judges of the Supreme Court was yet to be resolved.

"Yes, I think it has not been settled. Let's hope things will be fully settled within two to three days," Venugopal told media.

On Monday, media quoted him as saying "everything has been settled" in the higher judiciary and "everything is under control."

The statement has also put a question mark on the claims of Bar Council of India (BCI) that Monday said the issues raised by four sitting judges of the country's top court have been resolved and the apex court was functioning normally.

"We did not want any political party to take advantage of the situation," Manan Kumar Mishra, chairman BCI, said during a press conference on Monday. "It was an internal issue which has now been resolved and all court rooms in the apex court are functioning normally."

BCI is a statutory body that regulates the legal practice and legal education in India.

Last week, in an unprecedented move four sitting judges of India's Supreme Court - Justice Chelameswar, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Madan Lokur and Justice Kurien Joseph called a press conference and said apex court was not in order and many things less than desirable have happened in the past few months.

The issue highlighted the differences in India's highest judicial forum and final court.

A local newspaper - The Hindu on Tuesday quoting sources close to rebel Supreme Court judges termed the reports of conciliation as "deliberate misinformation."

"A source close to the four judges said there have been no attempts so far to resolve the issue raised by the four judges," the newspaper said.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has announced the composition of a five-judge constitution bench headed by CJI Justice Dipak Misra to hear crucial cases.

None of the four judges has been included in the bench.

One of the dissenting judges Justice Ranjan Gogoi told media the difference with the Chief Justice arose over the assignment of the cases.

Supreme Court of India is the highest judicial forum and final court of appeal under the Indian constitution. It is the highest constitutional court, with the power of constitutional review. The court consists of 25 judges including the CJI.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 15:36:05|Editor: Chengcheng

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SEOUL, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's exports of information and communications technology (ICT) products hit a record yearly high last year due to strong demand for chips and display panels, a government report showed on Tuesday.

Exports in the ICT sector reached 197.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, the biggest ever recorded by the South Korean economy, according to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.

Imports in the sector amounted to 102.1 billion dollars, sending the ICT trade surplus to 95.5 billion dollars in 2017.

Semiconductor shipment surged 60.2 percent over the year to 99.68 billon dollars last year, with those for display panels growing 7.8 percent to 30.29 billion dollars.

Export for computer and peripherals advanced 10 percent to 9.64 billion dollars, but mobile phone shipment dipped 28.8 percent to 19.04 billion dollars as local manufacturers increased production in overseas factories.

By country, the ICT product export to China gained 22.2 percent to hit a new high of 104.39 billion dollars. Those to Vietnam jumped 60.2 percent, with the ICT shipment to the United States rising 3.7 percent to 18.16 billion dollars.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 15:41:06|Editor: Chengcheng

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by Evan Duggan

VANCOUVER, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Canada's case against the United States at the World Trade Organization (WTO) aims to show that it won't be bullied at the trade table and the case could proceed if Washington terminates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a Canadian trade expert said Monday.

While trade tensions between the two nations appear to be ratcheting up, Canadians shouldn't panic over this latest development, said Michael Manjuris, chair of global management studies at Ryerson University.

Last month, the Canadian government launched a wide-ranging 32-page complaint to the WTO, accusing the United States of imposing unfair anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties against Canadian products.

"We want to fight (those actions) directly," Manjuris told Xinhua in an interview.

In its complaint, Canada said the United States broke the WTO Agreement on Anti-Dumping, the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes.

This isn't the first such case against the United States brought to the WTO by Canada, Manjuris said.

"We've done this five times at least," he said. "I think even six for the softwood lumber industry, and every single time at the WTO level we've won."

He said similar, successful complaints have also been raised by Canada at the NAFTA arbitration level. "Again, five times we've gone and we've won," he said.

In the official complaint, Canada cited nearly 200 examples of what it framed as inappropriate duties and tariffs, including those the United States has applied against other trading partners, including India, Brazil and the European Union.

Canada says it has been falsely accused of dumping softwood, newsprint and Bombardier's C Series commercial jets into the United States and this complaint aims to rebuke those punitive import duties with facts, Manjuris said.

Ultimately, Canada wants to use this complaint to show the United States that it won't be bullied at the trade table amid the NAFTA renegotiations, Manjuris said.

Canada raised the stakes in its December complaint, highlighting U.S. trade missteps against other countries. The United States is not just taking these actions against Canada, he said.

"They're doing it to China, they're doing it against South Korea and Japan. That's more concerning," he added.

In a statement last week, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer called Canada's case an ill-advised attack on the U.S. trade remedies system, saying the complaint could lower U.S. confidence that Canada is committed to mutual beneficial trade.

"Canada is acting against its own workers' and businesses' interests. Even if Canada succeeded on these groundless claims, other countries would primarily benefit, not Canada," he said.

Washington has 60 days to try to settle the complaint or Canada could request an adjudication by the WTO.

Despite the rhetoric that has laced this dispute, Canada and the United States remain friends, Manjuris said. "I don't think that the United States and Canada (have) ever not been friends ... I think right now however, the seriousness of NAFTA and modernizing a free trade agreement means there's going to be some pretty hard-core negotiation."

The relationship is likely strained, but is likely not headed for disaster, said Manjuris, adding that he expects a solution to be reached before the WTO is forced to weigh in.

But if U.S. President Donald Trump indeed cancels NAFTA as he has threatened, then Canada would likely push forward with the WTO case, noted the expert.

"We're serious about it, but we would also use it in terms of leverage to get the negotiations back on the table in what I would call a more reasonable approach," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 15:56:13|Editor: Chengcheng

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RIYADH, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Saudi Foreign Ministry condemned on Tuesday Qatar's interception of two United Arab Emirates (UAE) civilian planes, Saudi Press Agency reported.

The incident happened on Monday afternoon when Qatari fighter planes intercepted two UAE civilian planes bound for Bahrain's capital Manama.

The action constitutes a threat to the safety of civil aviation and violates relevant international laws and conventions, it said.

In June last year, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt severed ties with Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism and interference in their affairs. Doha has repeatedly denied all the charges.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 16:06:16|Editor: Yamei

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File photo: Jin Liqun (C, back), president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), attends a press conference in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 17, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Xin)

by Xinhua writer Liu Hongxia

BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will never be a rival to other multilateral development banks (MDBs), according to AIIB President Jin Liqun, adding that the doors are always open to, among others, the United States and Japan.

EXTRAORDINARY FIRST TWO YEARS

Tuesday marks the second anniversary of the AIIB. Two years on, the organization has impressed the world with a long list of achievements, as its members increased from 57 to 84, and its projects scattered in 12 countries, involving over 20 billion U.S. dollars from both the public and private sector.

Moreover, the AIIB has received top credit ratings from three major international rating agencies, Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch, in what analysts have called a "miracle."

"I told my colleagues that the AAA credit ratings are not like a doctorate degree that is permanent. If we don't do our job well, the AAAs could be taken away anytime," Jin told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview

The 68-year-old man said the AIIB had realized some goals previously set and made some unexpected progress.

"The international community is increasingly confident in the AIIB," he said. "China, as the initiator of the organization, kept its promises that the AIIB will abide firmly by international rules, and will not be subject to any political interference."

Jin thanked other MDBs such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for their support before and after the AIIB was founded.

Fourteen projects out of AIIB's total 24 projects were co-financed with the World Bank and the ADB.

"The AIIB is a great partner to work with, and is an important contributor to ending extreme poverty and supporting sustainable development by means of its mandate to finance sustainable infrastructure." Bert Hofman, World Bank director for China, Korea and Mongolia, told Xinhua.

Ben Bingham, country director of ADB PRC resident mission, said, "We look forward to strengthening our cooperation even further for the benefit of the Asia Pacific region."

"AIIB has never been, and will not be, a rival to other MDBs, rather, we would like to further cooperate with them." Jin said.

ZERO TOLERANCE ON CORRUPTION

Calling the AIIB a "start-up," Jin said that "to work out a series of mechanisms that really works is one of the priorities."

He said the bank had learned a lot from other MDBs. "But we are not going to clone the World Bank or replicate the ADB, which were founded decades ago." he said, adding that the AIIB had worked out a mechanism with its own characteristics.

The AIIB slogan, "Lean, Clean, Green" is the foundation of its organization.

"No tolerance will be shown on corruption," Jin said, noting that the AIIB had very strict anti-corruption rules in terms of recruitment and promotion.

"The reason that we established such a strict anti-corruption mechanism is to let every employee work whole-heartedly to serve our member countries without doing anything to harm the reputation of AIIB," Jin said.

U.S., JAPAN ARE WELCOME FOR COOPERATION

When talking about if the United States and Japan would join the AIIB, Jin said that the doors were always open no matter if they joined or not.

"We have sent out invitation with sincerity, but it ultimately depends on themselves to consider their entries, and we will not intervene," Jin said.

Jin said that even if the two countries currently did not join the AIIB, their enterprises were welcome to invest in AIIB projects.

The AIIB has already conducted cooperation with the United States and Japan, including hiring U.S. rating agencies and U.S. and Japanese employees.

"We are confident of tackling any challenges, and I believe the AIIB will make greater achievements," Jin said.

Related:

Facts & Figures: AIIB's two-year journey

BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Two years have passed since the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) started operation, and the steady expansion of membership represents a vote of confidence in the new multilateral bank by the international community.
Iran's military destroyer Damavand crashed at Caspian Sea port due to strong winds and sea storm. (AFP Photo)

TEHRAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Iran's military destroyer Damavand crashed into wave breakers at a port in the Caspian Sea and two of its crew members are missing, Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.

A search operation is underway to find the two servicemen missing in the accident that happened on January 10, the report quoted army spokesperson General Shahin Taqikhani as saying.

Strong winds and a sea storm led to the crash, said Taqikhani.

Contrary to the initial reports about minor damages to the destroyer, the assessment teams have found out that the vessel has suffered serious damages and needs a complete overhaul, he said.

On Wednesday, Damavand destroyer crashed into wave breakers when it was docking at port in Iran's northern province of Gilan in stormy weather.

The 100-meter-long destroyer that weighs more than 1,300 tons officially joined the Navy's northern fleet in the Caspian Sea in March 2015.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) unveiled the world's largest reserve of desalinated water. (AFP Photo)

ABU DHABI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The United Arab Emirates (UAE) unveiled Monday the world's largest reserve of desalinated water.

The system was secured in a network of 315 recovery wells lying up to 80 meters below the UAE's Liwa Desert.

The wells of the reserve are fed by one of UAE's longest water pipeline networks which deliver the water from Shuweihat desalination plant at a rate of 32,000 cubic meters per day over 27 months, said Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA) and the Environment Agency (EAD).

The project was undertaken as a collaborative venture between EAD, ADWEA and its subsidiary About Abu Dhabi Transmission and Despatch Company (TRANSCO).

Saif Saleh Al-Seairi, acting director general of ADWEA, said in a statement that the reserve is a safe network to provide water and is now regarded as one of the most advanced models in the region.

The entire project results from collaboration between multiple stakeholders.

It is an exemplary case study of inter-governmental cooperation based on the principles of eco-friendly and sustainable development, said Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, secretary general of EAD.

The project aims at promoting Abu Dhabi's water security and resilience through the recharge of ground water aquifers with high-quality desalinated water, which cannot be stored above ground due to contamination.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 17:31:48|Editor: Yamei

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, on Tuesday discussed bilateral trade and the situation on the Korean Peninsula by phone.

The phone call came amid strengthening of efforts to keep China-U.S. trade relations right on track and at a time when tensions on the Korean Peninsula have shown signs of easing.

CHINA-U.S. TRADE

China-U.S. relations maintained overall stability and achieved significant progress in 2017, said Xi in the phone call.

Keeping bilateral ties on a track of healthy and stable development is in the interests of both countries and both peoples, and conforms to the common aspiration of the international community, the Chinese president said.

The two sides need to maintain high-level and various levels of interactions, bring the four high-level dialogue mechanisms between them into full play, and hold the second round of dialogues at a proper time, Xi said.

As economic and trade cooperation brings tangible benefits to both peoples, the two countries should adopt constructive measures to properly settle economic and trade issues of mutual concern by opening up the market to each other and "making the cake of cooperation bigger," Xi added.

The Chinese president also called for advancing cooperation between the two militaries, and in law-enforcement, drug control, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and cooperation at local levels, as well as close communication and coordination on major international and regional issues.

The two sides need to meet each other halfway, respect each other, focus on cooperation, deal with sensitive issues in a constructive way, respect each other's core interests and major concerns, and maintain the momentum of sound and steady development of China-U.S. relations, he said.

Trump said that the U.S. side attaches great importance to its relations with China as well as to the U.S.-China cooperation, and that it is willing to work with the Chinese side to enhance bilateral exchanges at all levels, expand pragmatic cooperation, and properly handle problems in bilateral trade so as to achieve even greater results in bilateral relations.

KOREAN PENINSULA ISSUE

In response to Trump's request for comments on the development of the situation on the Korean Peninsula, Xi told him that China was "ready to join the U.S. for proper settlement of the nuclear issue."

Xi said that there are some positive changes and related parties should work jointly to keep up the hard-won momentum for the easing of the situation on the Korean Peninsula and create conditions for the resumption of talks.

Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and safeguarding peace and stability in the region accord with the common interests of all sides, said Xi, adding that it is vital for the international community to stay united over the issue.

China is ready to continue its joint efforts with the United States and other members of the international community to achieve progress that would finally lead to a proper resolution of the issue, said Xi.

In response, Trump said the U.S. side values China's significant role in resolving the Korean Peninsula issue and is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China over the issue.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have shown signs of easing as senior officials from Pyongyang and Seoul met face-to-face on the borders earlier this month in what was their first direct talks in more than two years.

During the dialogue held at the South Korean side of the Panmunjom demilitarized zone, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) said it will send athletes to the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, in February.

The two Koreas held a working-level meeting Monday and discussed details concerning the arrangement for Pyongyang's state art troupe that will be dispatched to perform at the Olympics. The DPRK also proposed further talks at Panmunjom on Wednesday on logistics for its participating athletes, according to media reports.

The international community welcomed the diplomatic thaw between the pair shown in their frequent consultations and is eager to see if the rapprochement will last beyond the sporting event. Pyongyang and Seoul are technically still at war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended with a truce instead of a peace treaty.
Buses are ready to be exported at the Lianyungang Port in Lianyungang City, east China's Jiangsu Province, Jan. 2, 2018. More than 500 buses at the Lianyungang Port were ready to be exported to Africa. (Xinhua/Wang Jianmin)

HONG KONG, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- China, a key trading partner for over 100 countries, has become a hub of global supply chains, a senior official of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said here on Monday.

"The Chinese success story is deeply intertwined with the fortunes of the world economy," IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton said, adding that as a trading nation, China is a key partner for over 100 countries, which represent more than 80 percent of global GDP.

"It's the hub of global supply chains, a magnet for commodity exports, and an important source of final demand," Lipton said in a speech at the opening ceremony of the 11th Asian Financial Forum held in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

He said that China alone is providing one-third of the global growth, and is outweighing other countries in areas of digital commerce, Fintech, robotics and artificial intelligence.

He also pointed out that Chinese investors and creditors are "playing an increasingly important role in the development in infrastructure finance," and China's foreign direct investments are "growing in size and importance, bringing positive benefits to other developing countries."

In terms of China's global role, the IMF official said that China has been a voice in the debate over trade and economic contribution, and a supporter for globalization. "It's safe to predict that Beijing's role in international institutions will continue to expand in coming years."

"China's constructive role in global institutions like the IMF is critical to our ability to adapt to the changing global economic situation," he said. "We greatly value China's leadership, and look forward to continued collaboration."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 17:46:52|Editor: Yamei

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MAIMANA, Afghanistan, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Five civilians were killed and 45 others wounded in an insurgent's mortar shelling on a local bazaar in Afghanistan's northern province of Faryab on Tuesday, local police said.

The incident occurred roughly at 10:00 a.m. local time as insurgents fired three rounds of mortars against Khwaja Sabz Posh district's bazaar, provincial police spokesman Karim Youresh told Xinhua.

The wounded were shifted to the district hospital and the number of casualties was likely to increase as some of the wounded were said in critical condition, he said, adding that among those wounded were children and women.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet, but Taliban militants and Islamic State (IS) fighters have presence in parts of Faryab.

The province has been the scene of heavy clashes between security forces and militants over the past months.

More than 2,640 civilians were killed and over 5,370 others injured in conflict-related incidents in the first nine months of 2017, according to figures released by the United Nations mission in the country.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 17:51:55|Editor: Yamei

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NAIROBI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan institutions of higher learning and state-funded research bodies will channel investments toward programs aimed at strengthening bio-security measures in the country, officials said Monday.

At a forum held to discuss the role of universities in strengthening bio-security measures, policymakers and scholars said robust financing for research, capacity building and public awareness is key to strengthening Kenya's capacity to respond to attacks by rogue entities using biological weapons.

Roy Mugiira, director of technical services at the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation, said public universities should explore innovative ways to strengthen bio-security amid threats linked to unregulated movements of biological and chemical toxins.

"Kenya is a signatory to the United Nations Security Council resolution that prohibits use of biological toxins that could pose a threat to global peace," Mugiira said.

Mabel Imbuga, vice chancellor of the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, said that with Kenya and other African countries being at risk of biological toxins, there was need to invest in deterrent measures.

"The threat of weapons of mass destruction including biological weapons is real and universities must contribute to government efforts in raising the awareness on bio-security," Imbuga said.
Syrian government is wary of U.S. move to form a new rebel army in northern Syria aiming to fragment the country. (Reuters Photo)

DAMASCUS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian government is concerned that the latest U.S. move to form a new army in northern Syria aims to fragment the country.

On Sunday, reports cited the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition as saying that the U.S. is working to form a 30,000-strong border security force, which will be under the command of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurds, Arabs, and Assyrians supported by the U.S. in northern Syria.

The force will be deployed in northeastern Syria along the border with both Turkey and Iraq, a move that came after the SDF captured the northern city of Raqqa from the Islamic State (IS). Raqqa was the de facto capital of the terror group.

The SDF also captured other areas from IS in the northern countryside of Deir al-Zour late last year to consolidate its positions near the Iraqi border.

The situation in northern Syria and the growing influence of the Kurdish militias have raised the ire of the Syrian government, which has for long accused Washington of playing a destructive role in Syria.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry slammed the decision on Monday, saying the U.S. bid to form an armed militia in northern Syria is "a flagrant violation of Syria's sovereignty."

The U.S. declaration "constitutes a flagrant aggression on the unity and sovereignty of Syria and a violation of the international law," the ministry said, vowing Syrian government's resolve to end the U.S. presence in the war-torn country.

"The U.S. action comes in the framework of its destructive policy in the region to fragment the countries and spur tensions to hinder any solution to the crisis," the ministry charged.

Meanwhile, the ministry warned that it will regard any Syrian citizen taking part in this U.S.-backed militia as a "traitor" and will be dealt with accordingly.

The ministry denounced the new U.S. move as a "renewed conspiracy" that will be defeated by the Syrian army, which will end any form of the presence of the U.S. and its tools in Syria.

Meanwhile, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad told the pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV that his country is determined to preserve Syria's unity, while slamming the U.S. tactics for damaging global stability.

Russia, Syrian government's main international ally, also expressed fears that the U.S. is "pursuing a policy to cut Syria into several pieces."

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday that the U.S. does not intend to preserve Syria's sovereignty, accusing Washington of seeking to create a Kurdish-controlled entity along the Turkish and Iraqi border zones.

"The U.S. actions that we have been observing indicate that the U.S. does not want to keep Syria as a state in its current borders ... The U.S. wants to help the Syrian Democratic Forces to set up some border security zones," Lavrov said.

For its part, Turkey, the main backer of the opposition group and staunch opposer to the Kurdish forces in Syria, also slammed the U.S. decision as Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the U.S. of forming a "terror army."

"Our mission is to strangle it before it's even born," Erdogan said of the border force.

Erdogan's government has for long opposed the growing influence of the Kurdish forces along its border in northern Syria, fearing that any separatist move could inspire Turkey's 14 million Kurds.

Now, the U.S.-backed fighters, the Russia-backed Syrian forces, and the Turkey-backed rebels are racing to achieve territorial gains in northeastern Syria following the near defeat of IS.

The SDF fights IS in the northern countryside of Deir al-Zour, while the Syrian army is fighting the Turkey-backed rebels in the northern province of Idlib.

The Turkey-backed rebels are trying to foil the advance of the Syrian army while bracing to fight against the Kurdish groups as well.

So the U.S. decision further flames the situation in northern Syria rather than helping to resolve the conflict.

Also Monday, Kurdish activists said the U.S. has provided the SDF in the Afreen region in northern Syria with anti-aircraft missiles.

A report by the War Media, the media wing of the Syrian army, said the U.S. has stipulated that Kurds should only use these weapons in case of an attack on Afreen area, which is regarded as target of an imminent Turkish military campaign.

The U.S. has been carrying out military operations in Syria since 2014, under the name of fighting against the IS militants.

The SDF captured Raqqa late last year, and the Syrian army captured the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, another IS bastion almost in the same time.

However, the Syrian government said Raqqa is still occupied by the U.S. and its fighters on the ground, refusing to acknowledge its liberation from IS.

Mekdad charged in a recent interview that the Kurdish groups in Syria were the new form of IS, in another escalation between both sides.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 18:01:57|Editor: Yamei

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ABU DHABI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- China has played an important role in supporting the future energy mix strategy of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the UAE Minister of Energy and Industry Suhail Al-Mazrouei said Tuesday.

"China is an important country for us, in relation to the manufacturing of solar panels and reducing the overall costs of solar energy and the overall cost of renewable energy," Al-Mazrouei told Xinhua on the sidelines of the ongoing 11th World Future Energy Summit in the capital Abu Dhabi, which will run through Thursday.

According to the minister, the UAE, a major oil supplier with 99 percent of domestic energy needs based on oil and gas, aims to increase the share of clean energy from near zero three years ago to 50 percent by 2050.

Of the 50 percent clean energy share, 44 percent shall be based on renewable energy, and six percent will be nuclear energy.

"A 44 percent renewable energy share means 44 Giga Watt of renewable energy, primarily solar," said Al-Mazrouei.

"Our relationship with China and the business opportunities that we have seen have showed that the potential is even higher," he noted.

Trinasolar, a major solar firm headquartered in China's eastern province of Jiangsu, has provided equipment to the UAE green project "Dubai Sustainable City," which consists of 500 residential villas grouped into five clusters and a 170-room hotel with 40,000 solar panels, according to Trinasolar's website.

In September last year, UAE Vice President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum ordered the construction of the world's biggest single-site Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) project.

The Dubai government awarded the 14.2 billion dirhams' worth of (3.86 billion U.S. dollars) contract to a consortium of China's Shanghai Electric and Saudi Arabia's ACWA, UAE state news agency WAM reported.

Earlier in the day, Al-Mazrouei pinned hopes on the large project in his keynote speech at the summit.

"Prices for CSP are still a bit more expensive than gas, but I think in the future it will be a competitive source to gas," he said.

China remained as the UAE's top trade partner in 2016, WAM reported citing statistics from the UAE Ministry of Economy.

The China-UAE trade totalled 520.6 billion dirhams (141.74 billion U.S. dollars) from 2014 to 2016, while about 300,000 Chinese live in the UAE, and over 4,000 Chinese businesses operate in the Gulf Arab state.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 18:01:57|Editor: Yamei

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BERLIN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- At least 47 people, including children, were injured in a school bus crash involving several vehicles Tuesday morning in the southern German town of Eberbach, according to local media.

In the accident, the bus got off the road and collided with several cars before crashing head-on into a house wall, the Focus Online reported.

A spokesman of the police in Eberbach, the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, said that 37 people were slightly injured and 10 others were in serious conditions.

Every morning, the bus picks up students from the surrounding communities and sends them to Eberbach, which is located in the Rhine-Neckar district on the border with Hesse, east of Mannheim.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 18:22:00|Editor: Yamei

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TEHRAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said Tuesday that Palestine remains as the most important issue for the Islamic world, Press TV reported.

After the collapse of the Islamic State (IS) terror group in Iraq and Syria, the issue of Palestine has regained its importance for the Muslims, Rouhani said in the opening ceremony of the 13th Session of the Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Iran's capital Tehran.

The current instability and insecurity gripping the region stem from continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, he was quoted as saying.

Rouhani urged the Islamic states to unite for the creation of a "calm region and peaceful foreign relations," adding that Iran views no country as its "competitor" in the region.

"Some countries, however, are following the wrong path and seek to widen the rifts among Muslim nations under the U.S. and Israel's influence," Rouhani said.

Rouhani criticized some Muslim states for what called their dependence on foreign powers, saying "the experiences of modern history teach us that these powers solely think about their own interests."

Iran believes it could even engage in negotiations and cooperation with the countries with which it has differences of opinion based on mutual respect, he added.

The ongoing Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting, which will last until Wednesday, is attended by parliament speakers, deputy parliament speakers, and parliamentary delegations from 44 countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 18:27:01|Editor: Chengcheng

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CAIRO, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Inas abdel-Dayem was appointed the Egyptian new minister of culture as part of a limited cabinet reshuffle including four new ministers on Sunday.

The reshuffle included the appointment of ministers for local development, tourism, culture and public enterprise.

Abdel-Dayem, 58-year-old flute player and chairperson of Cairo Opera House, replaced Helmy El-Namnam, as a culture minister.

She was graduated from the flute department of the Cairo Conservatory in 1984, and earned her PhD from the Ecole Normal de Musique in Paris in 1990.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 18:32:02|Editor: Chengcheng

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MOGADISHU, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Several Al-Shabaab militants were killed on Tuesday in heavy fighting between Somali National Army and the militant group near Baidoa town, southwest Somalia, officials said.

Security Minister of Southwest State in Somalia Hassan Hussein Mohamed told Xinhua by phone that the militants' attempt to capture two areas was thwarted.

"The terrorists attacked SNA and Southwest State forces' bases in Daynuney and Gof-gudud, north and east of Baidoa town, but their attempt to capture the two areas were foiled," Mohamed said.

Mohamed said several militants were killed and others wounded during the early morning fighting.

"There are no casualties on our side and we remain at our bases while continuing operations against terrorists in the region now," Mohamed added.

Other sources said at least five militants were killed in the attack on Daynuney, while one government soldier was injured in Gof-gudud.

Both bases locate in the Bay region of Somalia. Residents also confirmed the militants launched simultaneous attacks on the two regional military bases.

Residents said the militants briefly seized Gof-gudud Burey before regional forces retook it, noting that troops at Daynuney held their positions, repulsing attack.

Al-Shabaab militants claimed to have captured Daynuney location, about 25 km east of Baidoa town, and Gof-gudud location, about 30 km north of Baidoa.

Some residents in Baidoa told Xinhua the militants briefly captured the two locations and later looted materials and medicines at a police station and a hospital in Gof-gudud.

The latest assault by security forces came amid increased attacks by the Al-Qaida-allied militant group, which is targeting government and African Union bases in Somalia.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 18:37:03|Editor: Chengcheng

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WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Donald Trump administration's large-scale hike in the defense budget, calling it a pillar of the U.S. president's "Make America Great Again" vision, indicates the United States is readying a bigger money chest for defense under Trump but the question is whether it is feasible.

"American might is second to none and we're getting bigger and better and stronger every day," Trump declared in the hangar bay of aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford on July 22, 2017, as thousands cheered.

"Wherever this vessel cuts through the horizon, our allies will rest easy and our enemies will shake with fear because everyone will know that America is coming, and America is coming strong," Trump said when the carrier, one of the most powerful hardware items to be added to the U.S. military's arsenal, was commissioned.

Six months after assuming office, Trump paid a second visit to the vessel, where he touted the ship's power, taunted America's enemies, and promised full backing for a stronger military.

It was no empty talk. The United States already had the world's most powerful military, and now, with Trump's blessings, Congress has approved a whopping 700 billion-U.S.-dollar defense budget in fiscal year 2018, a 100-billion-dollar increase from 2017.

Though the approved figure has surpassed a cap of 549 billion dollars imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act and may be blocked, it's clear that Congress is preparing a bigger money chest for defense under Trump.

Each of the military branches will be sharing the bonus.

For the army, the money means 17,000 more recruits in 2018, and there are financial incentives to retain those already in service.

For the navy, the extra cash can help Washington get closer to its goal of expanding the number of its fleets from 270 to 355 in the next few decades.

For the air force, the bigger check can go a long way in procuring stealth fighter aircraft, the F-35s, whose unit price sank below 100 million dollars in 2017 for the first time.

The National Security Strategy, released in December, outlines the government's military and foreign policies.

According to the document, the United States will keep combating extremist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, prepare for possible conflicts with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea over its development of nuclear weapons, and keep up the pressure on Iran, with whom Washington's relationship became increasingly adversarial in the past year.

Trump's actions follow his campaign promise in 2016 to prioritize military build-up. But unlike many of his other initiatives, beefing up the military has, by and large, won the support of lawmakers across the aisle. Republicans in both the House and Senate allowed more budget than the White House's demand.

Trump's arguments for more defense spendings were in part supported by government reports which said some units, such as the navy's Seventh Fleet, are suffering from insufficient training and rest.

A report released by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, says there are holes in the military that need to be patched in order for the United States to be able to simultaneously engage in two regional conflicts.

The Pentagon is due to release the National Defense Strategy, the Ballistic Missile Defense Review, as well as the Nuclear Posture Review in the coming weeks.

Despite charging ahead with his ambitious blueprint, Trump is also encountering tough headwinds. Skeptics have pointed out that with the proposed steep tax cut, it would be difficult to allocate enough money for the military's lavish purchasing list.

"If all Trump wanted was a big defense increase, he could have had it, but he also wanted tax cuts, entitlement reform and infrastructure investment. Something had to give, and usually in peacetime what gives is military spending," Loren Thompson, a defense consultant, told Politico.com.

Military top brass such as Navy Secretary Richard Spencer have also expressed concern.

"At the end of the day, this is all about math. You don't want to raise taxes. You don't want to cut benefits, and we want to grow the military. It is literally impossible. The math says you can't do it," Spencer told Politico.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 18:57:06|Editor: Chengcheng

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YANGON, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- At least one person was killed, one injured and four others went missing in a collision involving a cargo ship and a fishing vessel in Pauktaw township, Myanmar's western Rakhine state, said a release of the Home Affairs Ministry Tuesday.

A cargo ship named "Thawara Myita," en route from Yangon to Sittwe, collided with a fishing vessel anchored in the sea on Monday at 03:00 p.m. local time.

Fishing vessel helmsman died on the spot as the vessel capsized.

Out of 13 people on board the two vessels, seven have been rescued and further search and rescue operations for the missing are underway by local authorities.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 19:12:12|Editor: Chengcheng

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Trucks carrying goods arrive at Kerem Shalom crossing in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, on Jan. 16, 2018. The Israeli authorities announced Tuesday it has reopened a key commercial crossing with the Gaza Strip after destroying a tunnel underneath the crossing. (Xinhua/Khaled Omar)

GAZA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Israeli authorities announced Tuesday it has reopened a key commercial crossing with the Gaza Strip after destroying a tunnel underneath the crossing.

The Palestinian committee for the entry of the goods into Gaza said in an emailed statement that the entry of food and commercial trucks and the pumping fuel through the Kerem Shalom crossing resumed Tuesday morning.

Israel military said it had destroyed a cross-border attack tunnel that ran from Gaza into Israel and Egypt, which was dug by Hamas.

Israel has adopted a single commercial crossing with Gaza since 2012 after four crossings with the Strip have been closed and Erez crossing for humanitarian personnel into Israel.
Iran's President Rouhani says the Palestine issue remains top priority of the Islamc world. (Reuters Photo)

TEHRAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said Tuesday that Palestine remains as the most important issue for the Islamic world, Press TV reported.

After the collapse of the Islamic State (IS) terror group in Iraq and Syria, the issue of Palestine has regained its importance for the Muslims, Rouhani said in the opening ceremony of the 13th Session of the Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Iran's capital Tehran.

The current instability and insecurity gripping the region stem from continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, he was quoted as saying.

Rouhani urged the Islamic states to unite for the creation of a "calm region and peaceful foreign relations," adding that Iran views no country as its "competitor" in the region.

"Some countries, however, are following the wrong path and seek to widen the rifts among Muslim nations under the U.S. and Israel's influence," Rouhani said.

Rouhani criticized some Muslim states for what called their dependence on foreign powers, saying "the experiences of modern history teach us that these powers solely think about their own interests."

Iran believes it could even engage in negotiations and cooperation with the countries with which it has differences of opinion based on mutual respect, he added.

The ongoing Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting, which will last until Wednesday, is attended by parliament speakers, deputy parliament speakers, and parliamentary delegations from 44 countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 19:32:16|Editor: Chengcheng

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TEHRAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Foreign Ministry denounced the U.S. plan to set up an army force near Syria's border with Turkey and Iraq as a "blatant interference" in Syria's domestic affairs, Press TV reported Tuesday.

The U.S. plan is a "clear example" of interference in Syria's internal affairs, which complicates the crisis and leads to instability, Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said.

Qasemi urged Washington to reverse what he called "destructive" policies in the Middle East.

Turkey has also slammed the U.S. decision to establish a new border army with the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) in order to secure Turkish and Iraqi borders with Syria.

The U.S.-led coalition issued a written statement on Sunday and confirmed it would set up a 30,000-strong new border security force with the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 19:32:17|Editor: Yamei

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MADRID, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- FC Barcelona have confirmed that Ousmane Dembele has suffered a further injury problem and will be out of action for between three weeks and a month.

Dembele had only recently returned to the side on January 4th after three and a half months out with a leg injury which had required an operation in Finland.

The new injury is a torn muscle in his left thigh, which he suffered while playing as a substitute in the second half of Sunday's 4-2 win away to Real Sociedad.

The club confirms that if his new recovery goes to plan the Frenchman should be fit for the first leg of the Champions League tie which sees Barcelona play English Champions, Chelsea.

However, he will miss at least three Liga Santander games, the quarter-finals of the King's Cup against local rivals, Espanyol and the semi-finals if Barca are able to beat their local rivals.

Barca also have a further injury worry for Wednesday's Cup tie as midfielder Andres Iniesta is struggling with a minor problem in his right calf. Iniesta was on the bench at the weekend, but didn't get into the action or even warm up as Barca came back from 2-0 down to eventually triumph 4-2.

Meanwhile recent signing Phillipe Coutinho is two weeks away from making his debut after his big-money arrival from Liverpool. The Brazilian has a hamstring problem and won't play before the start of February.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 19:32:18|Editor: Chengcheng

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TOKYO, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said Tuesday that a new land-based missile defense system that the government here plans to introduce is "purely" for defensive purposes.

Japan's increased defense spending, specifically the introduction of the Lockheed Martin Corp.-developed system into Japan, along with the U.S. military's pivot to Asia, has raised concern over regional peace and stability.

Onodera made the remarks at a press briefing while responding to concerns raised by Russia a day earlier suggesting, along with other concerned countries, that the U.S. developed system could be easily retrofitted to become an offensive weapon.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 19:42:20|Editor: Zhou Xin

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese research ship Kexue will conduct research from January to February in waters under the Philippines jurisdiction, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Tuesday.

According to media reports, the Philippine presidential palace announced that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte had decided to allow China to conduct research with the University of the Philippines in the Benham Rise, which sits off the country's east coast.

China welcomes the Philippine side to join in the research, said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang.

Lu said China will work with the Philippines on maritime cooperation and create good atmosphere for development of bilateral ties.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 19:42:21|Editor: Chengcheng

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MANILA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Philippines placed Albay province under a state of calamity on Tuesday as glowing red lava continues to creep down the slopes of Mayon volcano.

The volcano, located approximately 300 km southeast of Manila, has been spewing ash into the skies since last Saturday afternoon, prompting the government to evacuate the people around the danger zone

In light of ongoing volcanic and seismic activity, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) has raised the alert level to 3, warning that the areas around the volcano are "currently in a relatively high level of unrest as magma is at the crater and hazardous eruption is possible within weeks or even days."

Governor of the province Al Francis Bichara said the provincial board on Tuesday approved his request to declare a state of calamity, thus allowing the local government to fully mobilize all agencies and resources to respond to emergencies.

In an interview with ABS-CBN News Channel, Bichara said there are now about 25,000 evacuees in the province from 25 affected villages.

"We have to support the operation and we need to feed the evacuees so we need to use the calamity fund," he said, adding that the local government can only have access to the calamity fund if the province is under a state of calamity.

He said the province is bracing for more expenses as the number of evacuees will increases in the coming days.

Moreover, Bichara said the local government needs to keep the people away from the danger zone.

Phivolcs said it observed quiet lava effusion from a new summit lava dome, lava flow down and lava collapse events during the past 24 hours.

Moreover, it said it recorded a total of nine tremors "four of which accompanied short-duration lava fountaining," and 75 lava collapse events that triggered rockfalls.

The institute warned people anew "to be vigilant and desist from entering the 6-km radius permanent danger zone and the 7-km extended danger zone on the southern flanks (of the volcano) due to the danger of rockfalls, landslides, and sudden explosions or dome collapse that may generate hazardous volcanic flows."

Mayon Volcano is on the southern tip of the Philippine main island of Luzon. It is a popular tourist destination in the Bicol region. It is famed for its near-perfect cone but has a long history of deadly eruptions. It has erupted 51 times during the last 400 years.

In an eruption in 1814, more than 1,200 people were killed and three towns were buried under mud and rock.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 19:47:22|Editor: Chengcheng

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ADEN, Yemen, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Saudi-led warplanes fired missiles at a farm on Tuesday in the western port city of Hodeidah, killing eight civilians, a security official told Xinhua.

"The Saudi-led warplanes mistakenly attacked an agricultural area in the Houthi-controlled province of Hodeidah, leaving about eight civilians killed inside their farm," the local security source said on condition of anonymity.

The pre-dawn airstrikes also targeted nearby locations controlled by Houthi forces, killing and injuring an unknown number of militants, the source added.

Forces loyal to Yemen's internationally-backed government, supported by the Saudi-led coalition, captured key districts from the Houthi group along the country's western port.

Many civilians, however, were killed either by Saudi-led air bombardment or by random shelling launched by fighters on the ground.

Hundreds of families started fleeing from the war-torn areas in western Yemen part and arrived in the government-controlled southern provinces.

Last week, Yemen's Houthi rebels warned of cutting off the Red Sea shipping line if the Saudi-led coalition forces keep advancing toward the strategic port city of Hodeidah.

The threat was made by al-Sammad, the chief of the Houthi governing body, known as the Supreme Political Council, during his meeting with visiting UN deputy envoy Maeen Sharim in the Houthi-held capital Sanaa.

Yemen's internationally-backed government, allied with the Saudi-led Arab military coalition, has been battling Iran-backed Shiite Houthi rebels over the control of the country for about three years.

The coalition began a military air campaign in March 2015 to roll back Houthi gains and restore 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 invaded 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 has displaced around three million others.

The impoverished Arab country is also suffering the world's largest cholera epidemic since last April, with about 5,000 cases reported every day.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 19:47:23|Editor: Chengcheng

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BUCHAREST, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will no longer go to meet his Romanian counterpart on Tuesday, as originally set in his visit's agenda, amid a political crisis that toppled the head of government.

A delegation headed by Kotaro Nogami, deputy director of the Japanese Prime Minister's cabinet, the head of the economic mission, will go to the Romanian government instead, to meet Deputy Prime Minister Paul Stanescu, according to a statement of the cabinet.

Romanian Prime Minister Mihai Tudose resigned on late Monday after the ruling Social Democratic Party had decided to withdraw the political support for him.

Abe is expected to visit the Romanian presidential palace later in the day.

The discussion agenda includes "the stage and outlooks on strengthening the very good relations of the Renewed Partnership between Romania and Japan, in terms of politics, economy, culture, security and people-to-people relations", the Presidential Administration said in a statement.

Meanwhile, topics will also be tackled such as Japan's cooperation with the EU and cooperation in tackling the Korean Peninsula issue.

Abe arrived in Bucharest on Monday for the first visit to Romania of a Japanese prime minister in the history.

Abe left Tokyo on Friday for a diplomatic tour in Central and Eastern Europe, including three Balkan countries -- Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 19:52:24|Editor: Chengcheng

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BUCHAREST, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Romanian President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday appointed incumbent Defence Minister Mihai Fifor as acting Prime Minister following the earlier resignation of the head of government.

Iohannis announced that he accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Mihai Tudose and will convene on Wednesday consultations with the parliamentary political parties for the formation of a new government.

Fifor, 47, was sworn in office for Economy Minister in June 2017 and in September, was nominated for Defence Minister and currently performs as such.

Under the Constitution, the head of state shall appoint another member of the government as acting Prime Minister, tasked with fulfilling the relevant responsibilities until a new government is formed within a maximum of 45 days.

Tudose had to resign after the leadership of the ruling Social Democratic Party decided to withdraw the political support for him late Monday.

The conflict between the prime minister and the ruling party chairman Liviu Dragnea has been well known recently.
Up: An aerial view of the Mongolian capital city of Ulan Bator April 6, 2012. (REUTERS)

Down: This photo taken on May 17, 2017 shows a general view of the northern half of Seoul. (AFP)

UlAN BATOR, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Leaders of Mongolia and South Korea on Monday agreed to make more efforts to strengthen bilateral relations between the two countries, the Mongolian government press office said.

Mongolian Prime Minister Ukhnaa Hurelsukh and South Korean President Moon Jae-in reached the consensus during their talks at the South Korean presidential office Cheong Wa Dae.

During the talks, the two sides also agreed to make joint efforts to peacefully resolve the nuclear issue in the Korean Peninsula and establish peace there.

Hurelsukh is on an official visit to South Korea from Jan. 15 to 17 at an invitation of his South Korean counterpart Lee Nak-yeon. This is Khurelsukh's first overseas trip since he took office in last October.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:07:26|Editor: Zhou Xin

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Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang, also member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, speaks at a meeting for heads of the united front work departments across the country, in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 16, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- A senior Chinese official Tuesday urged the united front to thoroughly study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and the spirit of the 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress.

Vice Premier Wang Yang made the remarks at a meeting in Beijing for heads of the united front work departments across the country.

Wang, also member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, stressed that studying and implementing the spirit of the CPC congress was the core task of united front work.

Wang asked officials to combine the study of the Party congress spirit with the new concepts, thoughts and strategies of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, on the united front work since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012.

"The study should also be combined with the new requirements on the united front work in the new era and its real work," Wang said.

"The result of the study should be turned into high political consciousness, scientific thoughts and approaches, and strong motivation for work," he said.

Wang also asked officials of the united front to improve their abilities in investigation and research and exert themselves to resolve the major theoretical and practical issues of the united front.

He said the united front had made "historic achievements" since the Party congress in 2012, including "important contributions to the historic transformations of the causes of the Party and the country."

You Quan, head of the United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee, said at the meeting that Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era should be used to arm officials of the united front, lead its members and guide its work.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:22:29|Editor: Zhou Xin

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Two years have passed since the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) started operation, and the steady expansion of membership represents a vote of confidence in the new multilateral bank by the international community.

Since its launch in January 2016, AIIB's approved membership has risen from 57 to 84, expanding its reach within Asia and across the world.

Headquartered in Beijing and with authorized capital of 100 billion U.S. dollars, AIIB is a multilateral development bank focused on infrastructure investment, with a mission to improve social and economic outcomes in Asia and beyond.

As it starts its third year of operation, officials from the bank promised to further expand membership and strengthen its role in the international financial community.

Following are some of the milestones and achievements in the AIIB's past two years of operation.

-- On Jan. 16, 2016, representatives of the 57 founding countries of the AIIB gathered in Beijing for the opening ceremony in Diaoyutai State Guesthouse.

With joint efforts by all members, the AIIB aims to become a lean, clean and green development bank for the 21st century.

-- In June 2016, the bank approved its first four loans, totaling 509 million U.S. dollars, to fund power, housing and transportation projects in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Tajikistan.

-- In September 2016, a groundbreaking ceremony for the permanent headquarters of the AIIB was held in Beijing.

The headquarters will be located in the north of Beijing, between the Olympic Forest Park and the iconic Bird's Nest Stadium, with construction expected to be completed by the end of 2019.

-- In March 2017, the AIIB board of governors approved 13 applications to join the bank, the first time the bank has welcomed new prospective members since its inception, bringing the bank's total membership to 70.

-- In May 2017, the AIIB Board of Governors adopted resolutions approving seven applications to join the bank, bringing its total approved membership to 77.

-- In June 2017, the AIIB approved three applications at its second annual meeting of governors, bringing its total approved membership to 80.

-- In 2017, the AIIB received three top-notch ratings from the global credit rating agencies S&P Global Ratings, Moody's and Fitch in recognition of the bank's strong capital base and stable outlook.

-- In December 2017, the AIIB approved its first loan in China for a natural gas project.

The 250-million-U.S. dollar loan will fund a project to connect 216,750 households in approximately 510 villages to the natural gas distribution network.

In the two years the AIIB has been operating, it has invested in 24 projects in 12 countries, with loans exceeding 4.2 billion U.S. dollars.

-- In December 2017, the AIIB Board of Governors approved 4 applications to join the bank, bringing its total approved membership to 84.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:27:31|Editor: Zhou Xin

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The public misdemeanors of several Chinese teachers, ranging from blocking a high-speed train to engaging in a public fist fight, have sparked an online debate on teachers ethics.

Last week a woman surnamed Luo, in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, was fined 2,000 yuan (around 300 U.S. dollars) for "obstructing the operation of a train service."

The district educational bureau Luyang district removed her from her teaching post and ordered a legal and ethical education campaign for teachers in the district.

Luo's behavior caused public outcry after the local railway police released the video of her blocking a high-speed train with her body on Jan. 5.

Luo said she tried to delay the train to wait for her husband, who had her and her daughter's identification documents, without which it would be impossible to travel to their destination. Luo issued an apology through popular video-sharing website Pear Video.

Another teacher in Shanghai, surnamed Miao, also became the target of divided public opinion. In 2015, Miao had a fist-fight with a nurse. The argument has since been settled, but Miao struggles to escape from the shadow of her public disgrace.

In 2016, netizens questioned her eligibility when she applied for a residential permit in Shanghai. She dropped the application for unspecified personal reasons.

Last Friday, netizens attacked when she was named as a candidate for a high professorship certificate by the Minhang education bureau.

The bureau insisted Miao was academically qualified, and there was no ethical violations in her application. Her school and several colleagues supported her and said she was a responsible teacher at school and cares about poor students, often giving them help after class.

Miao told Xinhua that she had not expected her fight with the nurse to bring such a big impact on her life.

"From the bottom of my heart, I accept public criticism and have done everything it needs to make up for my mistake. But there is so much false information about me being 'professional doctor wrecker' and that I have 'back doors to facilitate my career,'" she said. "There are online attacks to my school and my students. To be frank, the harm to me is so much that it is almost unbearable."

Luo and Miao's incidents have caused different public response as they are out-of-classroom errors and not enough to qualify as severe ethical offences.

According to a regulation on the professionalism of middle and elementary school teachers issued by China's Ministry of Education, teachers should be punished if they deliberately fail to protect students in emergency situations, cheat, abuse students, commit sexual harassment and treat students unequally.

A regulation on professional ethics for high-school teachers lists seven behaviors as red lines that can not be crossed -- harming the national interest, going against Party lines, plagiarism, graft of academic fund, moonlighting that hurts normal teaching practice, cheating, demanding gifts from students or their parents, and sexual harassment.

Last week, Chen Xiaowu, a professor at the well-known Beihang University was fired from his faculty post after a former female student accused him of sexual harassment on social media. The university also revoked his teaching certificate.

Misconduct like Chen's leaves no room for public sympathy, but sentiment toward Luo and Miao has been mixed.

Some netizens said that the teachers should have higher ethical standards than ordinary people, and those who were unethical should be in no position to teach.

"People who easily lose their temper are more likely to abuse their students. Then they will be excused again by an easy apology?" said Sina Weibo user.

But others contend that punishment should be meted out that is suitable to the offence, and that draconian punishment should not be used for minor ethical offences.

"When the mistakes of these individuals are laid bare before the public, public opinion became so strong that it buries their reasonable defence," said commentator Yu Yongjie in the China Youth Daily.

Yu and others have warned against the spreading hatred and advocate forgiveness and constructive online supervision

Some netizens have said there should be a time limit for mistakes.

"If a child committed some mischief such as blocking a neighbor's chimney, will he still be subject to punishment when he is a dying old man?" said one Weibo user.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:27:31|Editor: Chengcheng

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ISLAMABAD, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Senior Pakistani religious scholars from different schools of thought on Tuesday issued a unanimous religious decree rejecting extremist ideology and extremism in all its form or manifestations.

The "Fatwa," or decree in English, signed by eminent religious scholars and heads of major religious schools across Pakistan, was issued at a gathering at the President House in Islamabad in the presence of President Mamnoon Hussain, diplomats, teachers, ministers and lawmakers.

"We unanimously reject extremist ideology and extremism in all its form or manifestations. Wherever exists, this is an evil ideology, therefore, shall be dealt with as a religious obligation through all means available i.e. ideological, kinetic and non-kinetic," the decree said.

The decree strongly supported the military operations initiatives against terrorists to strengthen the security and stability in Pakistan.

The scholars, representing all schools of thought, unanimously declared that suicide attacks are forbidden in the light of Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:32:32|Editor: Chengcheng

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BUCHAREST, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Romania's ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD) decided Tuesday to put forward the name of European lawmaker Viorica Dancila as the party's nominee for prime minister, one day after prime minister Mihai Tudose was forced to step down.

The nomination was voted on by the ruling party's national executive committee.

The proposal is to be endorsed by the junior ruling Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (ALDE) and then submitted to President Klaus Iohannis.

Dancila, 54, became a member of the PSD in 1996. In 2014, she was elected as deputy in the European Parliament for a second term on the PSD lists.

Before entering politics, she was an engineer with the then National Oil Company Petrom SA and prior to that a teacher at a secondary school.

Tudose was forced to resign after the leadership of the ruling Social Democratic Party decided to withdraw its political support for him late Monday.

The conflict between Tudose and party chairman Liviu Dragnea has become well known of late, and Tudose's request for the resignation of the country's interior minister resulted in a showdown between the two.

Interior Minister Carmen Dan, considered a close ally of Dragnea, refused to resign after being accused by the prime minister of lying.

Tudose, who took office in June 2017, is the second head of government of the Social Democrats which won the parliamentary elections at the end of 2016. His predecessor Sorin Grindeanu lost power in a no- confidence vote brought by his own ruling party due to a conflict with the party leader.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:32:32|Editor: Yamei

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Chinese Ambassador to Jordan Pan Weifang (L) shakes hands with Haitham Misto, chief commissioner of the Civil Aviation Regulatory Commission in Jordan, in Amman, Jordan, on Jan. 15, 2018. Jordan and China signed a deal on Monday for cooperation in the field of aviation services. Haitham Misto, chief commissioner of the Civil Aviation Regulatory Commission in Jordan, said the initial draft of the agreement was signed in 1992, highlighting the importance of the deal for increased cooperation between the two countries. (Xinhua/Lin Xiaowei)

AMMAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Jordan and China signed a deal on Monday for cooperation in the field of aviation services.



Haitham Misto, chief commissioner of the Civil Aviation Regulatory Commission in Jordan, said the initial draft of the agreement was signed in 1992, highlighting the importance of the deal for increased cooperation between the two countries.

The deal entails the regulation of aviation services between the two countries and gives the right for aviation companies to operate 21 flights per week for passengers and air freight instead of 7 flights per week, Misto added.

The agreement, he said, prevents double taxation and overlap on other taxes and fees.

Chinese Ambassador to Jordan Pan Weifang said the ties between the two countries are witnessing rapid growth in various fields of economy, culture, health and tourism.

In August 2016, A delegation from Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) visited Jordan and signed a draft agreement with Jordan during the visit.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:37:33|Editor: Chengcheng

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BERLIN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The term "alternative facts" has been chosen as the "un-word" or "worst word" ("Unwort" in German) of 2017 by an independent jury on Tuesday.

Jury chair and linguistics professor Nina Janich defined "alternative facts" as a "concealing and misleading expression for the attempt to use false claim as legitimate devices in public discourse."

The term was initially coined by Kellyane Conway, senior advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, when she described the White House's incorrect statement that Trump's inauguration in Washington was attended by the largest ever audience in U.S. history as "alternative facts" during a subsequent television interview.

Ever since the term had become a "synonym and symbol of worrying tendencies in the public use of language, especially in social media" in Germany, Janich explained.

The German un-word has been selected on an annual basis since 1991 and is widely-publicized throughout the country.

The rules of the competition stipulate that a jury must choose a recent term from public communication which conflicts with "principles of human dignity" or "principles of democracy." In 2017, more than 684 "un-words" were proposed to the linguistic jury in total.

The German "un-word of the year" stands in contrast to the "word of the year" which is selected by the Wiesbaden-based German Language Society (GfdS) as having had the strongest influence on public discussion during the past 12 months.

In 2017, the word of the year was "Jamaika Aus" (literally "end of Jamaica"), to describe the failure of "Jamaica" coalition negotiations between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU), Free Democratic Party (FDP) and Greens (Gruene).
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:42:34|Editor: Chengcheng

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KIEV, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Kiev may resume trade with the areas controlled by pro-independence insurgents in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, local media reported Tuesday, citing a senior Ukrainian parliament's official.

Ukrainian parliament deputy speaker Oksana Syroyid told local "5 TV-channel" that the draft law on Donbas re-integration, which is due to be put on vote in the parliament later in the day, includes a provision on trade resumption.

If the law is finally adopted, the Ukrainian army would supervise trade between the government-controlled and the non-government-controlled areas, Syroyid said.

The law on Donbas re-integration is aimed at returning the conflict-hit region to Kiev's sovereignty through peaceful means. The final text of the law has not been made public yet.

Trade suspension between the government-controlled and the non-government-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine started in March 2017 in the wake of transport blockades of Donbas, the economic damage of which was estimated at 1.8 billion U.S. dollars by the Ukrainian central bank.

Ukraine launched a military operation in Donbas in April 2014 after armed groups seized cities and towns in the region and declared independence. The confrontation has claimed more than 10,000 lives and left about 24,000 people injured.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:42:35|Editor: Zhou Xin

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ABU DHABI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- China's ICONIQ Motors is promoting its latest electric vehicle (EV) model "SEVEN" in the ongoing Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, the Tianjin-based firm said in an e-mailed statement on Tuesday.

ICONIQ has signed a memorandum of understanding with Abu Dhabi Motors, one of the biggest retailers of premium passenger cars in the Middle East, to establish a distribution partnership in the Middle East.

The new model branded as "Smart Passenger Vehicle" has a "futuristic design" and it is based on an "intelligent, connected vehicle platform," ICONIQ said.

The Chinese producer also said it is currently co-developing its new "L5" autonomous driving concept with Masdar City, the Abu Dhabi-government controlled clean-tech city.

"Our plan is to deliver a first L5 vehicle fleet for the Dubai World Expo in October 2020 and we aim to go into mass production at the end of 2023 when infrastructure and regulations are likely to be ready for fully autonomous vehicles," said Bruno Lambert, the chief executive officer of ICONIQ Motors.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:47:37|Editor: Zhou Xin

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- China's welfare lottery sales topped 217 billion yuan (33 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017, an increase of 5.1 percent year on year.

The lottery raised more than 62 billion yuan for public welfare funds last year, according to a statement by the welfare lottery distribution and management center.

The center is administered by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, which has been authorized to raise welfare funds through lottery sales since 1987.

From 1987 to 2017, welfare lottery sales totaled more than 1.8 trillion yuan, raising 537 billion yuan in public welfare funds, figures from the center show.

According to current rules, half of the welfare proceeds go to the state coffer, and these funds are mainly used to supplement social security and special aid projects. The other half support social welfare and charities managed by local governments.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 20:52:39|Editor: Chengcheng

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HARARE, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa has said Zimbabwe does not have the capacity to facilitate its citizens based outside the country to vote while in their countries of residence.

State-run news agency New Ziana reported Tuesday that Mnangagwa had on Monday told the Zimbabwean community in Namibia that the country did not have funds to allow voting to take place outside its borders.

"We do not have the logistics now or the capacity," Mnangagwa told the audience during a question and answer session.

He said Zimbabweans in the diaspora had not been denied their right to vote as those who were "serious" could come back home to register under the on-going voter registration and vote when the time came.

Mnangagwa had made a one-day visit to Namibia to discuss with his counterpart Hage Geingob on the recent political changes in Zimbabwe, following similar visits to South Africa and Angola and ahead of several others in the Southern African Development Community.

Many Zimbabweans in the diaspora have been urging the government to allow them to vote while in their countries of domicile but the government has argued that it had funding constraints.

The country will go for elections most likely in the second half of 2018 with many people hoping that some electoral reforms will be implemented to ensure that they are more credible than in the past.

Mnangagwa said observers would be invited from the region, the continent as well as the international community to monitor the polls.

"Above that, every country that has an embassy in Zimbabwe is allowed five people to observe the elections," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:02:42|Editor: Chengcheng

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COLOMBO, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Sri Lankan Navy on Tuesday arrested 16 Indian fishermen for poaching illegally in the island's northern seas, Sri Lankan navy media unit said in a statement.

Four fishing trawlers belonging to the Indian fishermen were also taken into custody.

The fishermen were apprehended in the seas northwest of Delft Island and northeast of the Kachchativu Island, in Sri Lanka's north, by Fast Attack Craft attached to the Northern Naval Command of Sri Lanka.

The apprehended have been handed over to the Assistant Director of Fisheries in Jaffna for onward legal action.

The Sri Lankan government has repeatedly warned that Indian fishermen trespassing into Sri Lankan waters to fish illegally will be arrested and their boats will be taken into custody.

Sri Lanka and Indian fishermen often face arrests when they enter each other's territorial waters illegally with both countries attempting to find a lasting solution to the fishing dispute.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:02:44|Editor: Chengcheng

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BERLIN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Germany has witnessed a further decline in the number of new asylum seekers recorded in 2017, figures published on Tuesday by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere and the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) show.

According to Bamf, 187,000 individuals applied for asylum during the past 12 months. This figure marked a significant reduction compared to 280,000 asylum seekers in 2016 and 890,000 asylum seekers at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015. Meanwhile, the number of deportations fell to 26,000 in 2017 from 28,000 in 2016.

De Maiziere praised Bamf for its work, telling press that the situation was "under control". The minister highlighted a substantial decline in the number of outstanding cases, as well as a reduction in the duration of application processes.

As already held true in 2016, the largest number of asylum seekers who arrived in Germany last year came from Syria (47,434). Syrian nationals were then followed by Iraqis (21,043), Afghanis (12,346) and Eritreans (9,524). Around 8,000 Turkish nationals also applied for asylum in Germany in 2017.

Despite the fall in asylum seekers identified by the Interior Ministry and Bamf, the Federal Statistical Office also released data on Tuesday which showed that Germany's population had grown to its largest-ever size since the beginning of measurements in 1989.

As a consequence of high immigration since 2015, the number of inhabitants rose to a total of 82.8 million by the end of 2017. The German population thus grew by around 300,000 individuals last year, after witnessing increases of 346,000 individuals in 2016 and 978,000 individuals in 2015.

The Wiesbaden-based government statisticians noted that this development was largely due to the fact that more people emigrated to Germany than left the country during the period under observation.

Given the country's demographic structure, the Federal Statistical Office, however, expects population growth to slow again in the coming years.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:12:46|Editor: Chengcheng

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PARIS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- A salmonella contamination affair has put food safety in the lime light in France and raised questions over how to avoid another health scare wave.

Thirty-five infants, who had consumed infant milk products manufactured by Lactalis' factory in Craon in northwest France, have been confirmed with salmonella infection. Lactalis is a family-owned dairy group based in Laval in west of France.

French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire on Monday admitted that "there was abnormal failure."

He said consumer safety was "not negotiable." "We have to take time to make the diagnosis with all the concerned actors."

The country's consumer protection agency the DGCCRF on Dec. 10 ordered the suspension of the sale and export of several baby food products made at the Lactalis Craon plant.

"All these elements led ... to consider that the measures taken by the company were not likely to control the risk of contamination of products intended for young children's feeding," the agency said.

In an interview with a local newspaper, Lactalis chief executive Emmanuel Besnier rejected critics of the contamination's mismanagement.

"We have never ignored the risk of salmonellosis. Recall is a maximum precaution. Our job is to put healthy products on the market ... But we consider that there were no failures on our part on the procedures," Besnier told the weekly Le Journal de Dimanche.

He also proposed to pay damages to the families of 35 infected babies.

Quentin Guillemain, the president of the victims' families association, said, "families want the truth. They are not waiting for compensations but that such a scandal is not renewed."

The food safety affair worsened after France's retailers including Carrefour, Auchan and Leclerc admitted they sold the products recalled in December.

On Tuesday, Le Maire is scheduled to meet the National Consumer Council to discuss ways to improve withdrawal and recall procedures.

The salmonella agona bacteria is dangerous for young and elderly people and can provoke severe diarrhoea, stomach cramps and vomiting.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:12:47|Editor: Zhou Xin

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SHANGHAI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- People all over China are racking their brains to recall high school knowledge, as online live streaming apps woo users with stunning cash prizes in quiz shows.

Mobile apps offer prizes between 100,000 yuan (15,500 U.S. dollars) and 5 million yuan for a live streaming quiz of 12 questions. Participants who give all the correct answers split the jackpot.

In a show, a host, often a household celebrity, presents questions, waiting until participants give their answers. Each online contestant has 10 seconds to answer a question, with each show taking around 30 minutes.

The questions derive from a wide range of topics such as traditional Chinese poems, basic mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology.

Live-streamed quiz shows came under spotlight after Wang Sicong, online celebrity and son of Wanda Group chairman Wang Jianlin, announced a prize on a quiz app called Chongdingdahui, translated as "race to the top," on Jan. 3. Other apps Huajiao and Xigua quickly followed suit.

To attract new users, the apps offer "reborn cards" to newcomers and those who invited newcomers to join. A reborn card enables a contestant who gives a wrong answer to have an extra chance to continue the quiz.

Shanghai-based Xiao Yi was invited by one of his former classmates to attend the quiz on the Huajiao app.

"We have formed a WeChat group composed of straight-A students from our former class to pool our wisdom for the answers during the show," he said.

The app has attracted 300 million participants since Jan. 5, and the number of users surged by 20 percent, according to the company, which organized multiple quizzes each day.

Li Jining, a 35-year-old media worker based in Beijing, said she would wait for the quiz as long as she had time after work.

"It was not only the prize that was attractive, but also the thrill that I still could remember what I learned back at high school 20 years ago," she said, adding she was awarded 22 yuan in total for being among winners twice.

The shows have attracted sponsors, bringing in tens of millions of advertising fees to the apps.

"On the Internet, it is all about fighting for the user's time. Hardly any product can keep users attention for 30 minutes like the quiz did. It has expanded possibility for profit," said Yu Dan, a founder of Huajiao.

Huang Bin, a technical director for quiz competition with China's Internet giant Tencent, said since the instant popularity of quiz shows this year, more than 10 companies in online education, news, games and other sectors, had added live-quiz buttons to their apps.

While Internet users are becoming crazy for quiz shows, the apps have tried to make themselves known for "unintentional errors" during the quiz.

On Sunday, Beijing Internet watchdog ordered Huajiao to conduct a thorough inspection on its content as Taiwan and Hong Kong were listed as countries in one of its quiz questions. The app has issued a statement of apology.

Other apps also apologized for their own errors, such as mistaking the obvious origin of the Chinese hamburger (roujiamo) for Jiangsu Province -- it is actually Shaanxi Province. It later compensated users with extra reborn cards.

Chen Liteng, an assistant analyst with China e-commerce research center, said online streaming apps had won many users with the quizzes, but the way of luring users with big cash prizes and celebrities as hosts was not sustainable.

"The mode is perhaps only a short-term thing," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:17:50|Editor: Chengcheng

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COLOMBO, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka's cabinet on Tuesday unanimously decided to withdraw two gazette notifications which would enable women to buy alcohol and work in shops selling or manufacturing alcohol beverages, and extending the business hours of liquor shops across the island, a minister said.

Minister of Ports and Shipping, Mahinda Samarasinghe said the decision was reached when the cabinet met for its weekly meeting.

The decision comes after President Maithripala Sirisena said last week that he would call for a reversal of the two gazette notifications issued by the Finance Ministry.

The President said he had only found out about the move from the newspapers.

Sri Lankan Finance Ministry last week lifted the ban on selling alcohol to women and prohibiting women from working in places where alcohol is manufactured or sold, for the first time in nearly 60 years.

The Finance Ministry later also announced that it would also allow liquor shops to stay open for business till 11 o'clock in the evening. Currently all liquor establishments in the island have to close at 10 p.m..
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:22:54|Editor: Chengcheng

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KAMPALA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Ugandan military on Tuesday condemned the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels attack on the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) that left three soldiers dead.

Ugandan military spokesperson Richard Karemire told Xinhua that the Monday ADF attack on FARDC's Muzambay base in North Kivu Province is a desperate attempt to survive after Uganda People's Defense Forces (UPDF) attacks and ongoing ground offensive by Congolese troops.

At least three FARDC soldiers were reportedly killed and five others wounded while repelling the ADF attack.

"The reported attacks by the ADF on friendly forces will not deter the regional efforts to wipe them," said Karemire.

"UPDF will continue coordinating with FARDC in its operations against these enemies of peace," he said.

The ADF attack came barely two days after the Congolese army had on Saturday announced an offensive against the rebel group, accused of killing 14 Tanzanian Blue Helmets and five FARDC soldiers, serving under the UN mission, last month.

ADF, which was originally based in western Uganda before fleeing to eastern DRC, has been accused of increased killings and massacres of troops and civilians, rape and abduction over the past three months in eastern DRC, according to Congolese authorities.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:22:56|Editor: Zhou Xin

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Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang (Photo source:fmprc.gov.cn)

BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- China on Tuesday again voiced opposition to a gathering in Vancouver of foreign ministers from 20 countries on security and stability on the Korean Peninsula.

Canada and the United States will co-host the meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, will discuss measures to exert maximum diplomatic as well as economic pressures on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to force it to end its nuclear and missile programs.

"Since this meeting does not have legitimacy or representativeness, China has opposed the meeting from the very beginning," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a routine press briefing. "While countries are committed to finding a proper solution for the peaceful settlement of the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, some parties hold such a meeting in the name of the so-called United Nations command during the Cold War era. We do not know what the purpose of convening such a meeting is."

He said that without participation of some of the most important direct parties to the nuclear issue, the Vancouver meeting had no legitimacy and was not representative.

The meeting, in which China's foreign minister will not participate, comes as the DPRK and the ROK have resumed talks after Pyongyang decided to join the PyeongChang Winter Olympics next month.
(FILES) This file photograph taken on September 16, 2013, shows the new bombardier aircraft CSeries landing in Mirabel, Quebec. (AFP photo)

TEHRAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Canadian planemaker Bombardier is ready to finance 80 percent of Iran's order to buy 10 commercial aircrafts, Financial Tribune daily reported on Tuesday.

Bombardier has obtained the license from the U.S. Treasury's Office for Foreign Assets Control to sell 10 brand-new CRJ-900 NextGen regional jets to Iran and is ready to finance 80 percent of the order, the CEO and Chairman of Qeshm Investment and Development Company told the daily.

"The remaining 20 percent would be funded by Iran's Qeshm Free Area," Reza Baqerinejad said without providing further details about the total value of the contract.

The planemaker has submitted a draft contract to Iran's Qeshm Free Area Organization for the review, Baqerinejad said, adding that his company will review the draft to finalize the deal.

The final contract will be officially unveiled within a month, Baqerinejad was quoted as saying.

Deliveries are expected to begin ten months after the deal is unveiled, Baqerinejad said. "Bombardier is expected to deliver two planes every three months," he added.

The contract marks Bombardier's first foray into the Iranian market as no Iranian airline has ever operated planes manufactured by the Canadian company.

The order is part of the Iran's Qeshm Free Area Organization plan to launch a new airline called Fly Qeshm to promote tourism in the southern Qeshm Island.

Boeing, Airbus and ATR have been given the go-ahead with their contracts with Iran Air. The flag carrier has so far received 11 planes, 3 Airbus jets in addition to 8 ATR turboprops.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:53:03|Editor: Lifang

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Visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (3rd R) meets with his Sao Tome and Principe counterpart Urbino Botelho (2nd L, front) in Sao Tome, capital of Sao Tome and Principe, Jan. 15, 2018. (Xinhua/Qiao Benxiao)

SAO TOME, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said here on Monday that China is willing to promote all-round cooperation with Sao Tome and Principe and strengthen communications to safeguard the two countries' common interests.

Wang made the remarks while holding talks with his Sao Tome and Principe counterpart Urbino Botelho.

China advocates that all countries, big or small, be on an equal footing, Wang said, adding that China supports Sao Tome and Principe in exploring a development path that suits its own conditions.

He expressed the hope that the government and all walks of life of the African country would firmly adhere to the one-China principle, which serves as the prerequisite of the resumption of diplomatic ties between China and Sao Tome and Principe and the political foundation for development of the two countries' ties.

During the official visit to China by Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada in April, the two countries agreed to establish a comprehensive cooperative partnership, Wang said.

When meeting with Trovoada, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed forging the relationship as a fine example of cooperation between big and small countries as well as South-South cooperation, setting the direction and goals for the two countries' ties.

Noting the remarkable development cooperation and exchange, Wang said restoring diplomatic ties with China was the absolutely right decision made by Sao Tome and Principe as it has brought tangible benefits to the two peoples, especially to the people of Sao Tome and Principe.

China will work with Sao Tome and Principe to continuously enhance political mutual trust, push forward comprehensive cooperation in various fields and actively promote people-to-people exchanges between the two nations, Wang said.

He also pledged to offer support as needed in Sao Tome and Principe in order to help the country's growth and development.

Sao Tome and Principe, as a new member of the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation, is welcomed to participate in the event to be held in Beijing this year, Wang said.

On his part, Botelho welcomed Wang's visit, which came on the one-year anniversary of the resumption of diplomatic relations between Sao Tome and Principe and China.

Noting that resuming diplomatic ties with China was the right decision by the government of Sao Tome and Principe, the minister said his country will stick to its unwavering support for the one-China policy.

Botelho said cooperation in various areas between the two countries has achieved satisfactory results in the past year, expressing the "earnest hope" that the two countries will maintain momentum in bilateral relations, deepen political mutual trust, and strive for more tangible achievements in bilateral cooperation.

Chinese companies, the minister said, are welcome to help improve the African nation's infrastructure and engage more in cooperation involving key areas such as agriculture and fishery.

Sao Tome and Principe is willing to actively participate in the Belt and Road Initiative, Botelho said, adding that the country will give full support to China in hosting a summit on China-Africa cooperation scheduled later this year in Beijing.

Sao Tome and Principe is the last leg of Wang's African and first new year trip from Jan. 12 to 16. Before heading to the country, Wang paid official visits to Rwanda, Angola and Gabon.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:53:03|Editor: Chengcheng

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TEHRAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Senior officials from the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) and Turkey met in Iran's capital Tehran to discuss new ways of developing banking relations between the two neighboring states, Financial Tribune daily reported on Tuesday.

In the meeting, Ahmad Araqchi, CBI's deputy for foreign exchange affairs, and Murat Uysal, vice governor of the Central Bank of Turkey, called for expanding economic and trade ties for facilitating banking relations.

"The currency swap agreement (signed last year between Iran and Turkey) is one of the measures of the central banks of both countries to increase cooperation and is expected to be implemented soon as the infrastructures are set in place," Araqchi said.

On Oct. 20, Iran and Turkey's central banks announced that both neighbors had signed a currency swap agreement for conducting bilateral trade in local currencies.

Based on the agreement, the two banks allocated a credit of five billion Turkish lira (1.32 billion U.S. dollars) and its equivalent in Iranian rial to their respective agent banks, namely Bank Melli Iran and Ziraat Bank, to be used as letters of credit with a repayment period of one year for both countries' traders.

The currency swap agreement is aimed at reducing costs for both countries' traders, as they will no longer need to use intermediate currencies since the specified agent banks are allowed to finance bilateral trading via international payment tools such as letters of credit and remittances in their local currency.

Iran and Turkey further aim to connect their bank cards in a move that will allow their citizens to benefit from mutual electronic banking services and facilitate tourism.

"The implementation of the currency swap agreement with Iran is an important part of Turkey's plan to expand strategic ties between the two nations," vice governor of the Central Bank of Turkey said in Tehran meeting.

Besides, Huseyin Aydin, CEO of Turkish Ziraat Bank who also heads Turkey's association of state-owned lenders, said at the meeting that his bank welcomes enhanced ties with its Iranian counterparts.

"While a number of Iranian banks have opened accounts with Ziraat, similar negotiations are underway with other banks. Ziraat Bank's account with Bank Melli Iran has also been opened," he said.

Besides, Osman Arslan, chief executive of Turkish Halkbank, sought to outline the current policies of the lender under his months-old leadership, and vowed that as before, the bank will "play its own role in expanding banking ties with Iranian banks."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:58:04|Editor: Zhou Xin

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TAIPEI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Taiwan has seized a mainland ship and seven crew members for allegedly "crossing the line" in waters near Penghu County in southwest Taiwan.

Taiwan's maritime patrol authority told Xinhua Tuesday that the seven crew members were being held for further investigation in Penghu. Their condition was described as normal.

The ship, used for refueling fishing boats, came from Dongdian Port on the mainland, and was caught "crossing the line" on Monday morning, according to Taiwan's maritime patrol authority.

The investigation is still underway, and the crew members may be punished with fines.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 21:58:04|Editor: Chengcheng

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BELGRADE, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was shot dead in North part of City of Mitrovica Tuesday.

Shyqeri Syla from Mitrovica's prosecutor office confirmed that the victim, found in front of his SDP party headquarters, was killed by an unidentified perpetrator from a moving car, while local police stated they found a burned car that was perhaps used by the attacker.

The news of the assassination instantly shook Serbia that considers Kosovo and Metohija as its autonomous province, not recognizing the unilaterally-declared independence in 2008.

"This is a terrorist act, and we will deal with it as such, meaning that the prosecution for organized crime will be in charge and will start a separate investigation," Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic revealed after an urgent meeting of the National Security Council, adding that Serbia will undertake all measures to find perpetrators.

Ivanovic began his political career in representing Kosovo Serbs in 1999. He was the State Secretary of the Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija in the Government of Serbia from 2008 to 2012.

In 2009, he formed SDP. In 2017, he ran for the local elections in Kosovo with his party but lost, and became a part of the current ruling coalition.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:08:07|Editor: Chengcheng

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DHAKA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh and Myanmar have reached consensus to complete the process of returning hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who had fled to Bangladesh preferably within two years.

The First Meeting of the Joint Working Group (JWG) on the return of the displaced Rohingyas from Myanmar's Rakhine State, was held on January 15-16 in Nay Pyi Taw.

Bangladeshi Foreign Secretary Md. Shahidul Haque led the Bangladesh delegation while Permanent Secretary Myint Thu led the Myanmar side.

Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a statement received here on Tuesday said the two sides, in atmosphere of cordiality discussed and finalized the text of the Physical Arrangement which will facilitate return of Rohingays from Bangladesh, guided by the earlier understanding and principles signed "Arrangement on return of displaced person from Rakhine State" and the Terms of Reference (TOR) of the JWG.

"The Physical Arrangement stipulates that the repatriation would be completed preferably within 02 (two) years from the commencement of repatriation. Verification and return will be based on considering the family as a unit."

According to the statement, the meeting also finalized the "Form" for verification. "Modalities for repatriation of orphans and children born out of unwarranted incidence have been incorporated in the said Arrangement."

Under the Physical Arrangement, it said, Bangladesh would establish five transit camps from which returnees would be received initially in two reception centers on Myanmar side.

"Myanmar would shelter the returnees in a temporary accommodation at the Hla Pho Khung and expeditiously rebuild the houses for the returnees to move in there. Myanmar would consider resettling the people staying at the zero line on a priority basis."

Bangladesh Foreign Ministry said Myanmar has reiterated its commitment to stop outflow of Myanmar residents to Bangladesh.

"Both countries agreed to form two Technical Working Group, one on verification and the other on return. The Physical Arrangement has included modalities of the relevant aspects of the return."

Myanmar and Bangladesh in December last year formed the JWG for the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees.

Some 650,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh since Aug. 25 last year following fresh violence in Myanmar's western Rakhine state.

Experts here lauded China's efforts to help resolve the Rohingya issue, as well as China's offer of relief materials for the Rohingya people.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:13:08|Editor: Chengcheng

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RABAT, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Morocco's Casablanca appeal court has sentenced a man to capital punishment over the assassination of a Moroccan lawmaker, official MAP news agency reported on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, three other convicts were given jail terms from 20 years to life imprisonment, the report said.

The main defendant, Hicham Al Mouchtari, who is an elected member of a local municipal councilor and is charged with "intentional and premeditated murder and hiding a person that he knew had committed a crime, is sentenced to death," the same source pointed out.

Last March, the 53-year-old Abdellatif Merdas, a politician with the liberal Constitutional Union party, was gunned down near his home in the economic city of Casablanca.

The trial revealed an affair between the main convict and the victim's widow and family disputes.

The court sentenced the victim's widow to life imprisonment, and nephew of the municipal councilor to 30 years in prison, the source noted.

The court also sentenced the fourth convict known as "soothsayer," to 20 years in jail.

Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Morocco, but the North African kingdom has stopped applying it since 1993.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:18:11|Editor: Yurou

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during the Justice and Development Party's parliamentary group meeting in Ankara, Turkey, Jan. 16, 2018. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday that Turkish military operation against Kurdish militia forces in Syria would be conducted with Syrian opposition groups. (Xinhua/Mustafa Kaya)

ANKARA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday that Turkish military operation against Kurdish militia forces in Syria would be conducted with Syrian opposition groups.

Addressing his Justice and Development Party's parliamentary group meeting in Ankara, Erdogan reiterated Turkey's readiness to conduct operation against Kurdish militia forces in northern Syria.

"In a short span of time, we will destroy all terror nests, one by one, in Syria, starting from Afrin and Mambij regions," he said.

Asked if Syrian oppositions would be involved, he gave a positive response.

"Of course they will. This fight is made for them. We are helping our brothers there so that they can protect their own territories," Erdogan said.

Recently, Turkish has repeatedly slammed the United States over its plans to form a 30,000-strong border forces based on the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), dominated by the People's Protection Units (YPG).

Turkey sees the YPG as the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Ankara considers as a terrorist group, while the U.S. supports the YPG as its ally on the ground in combating the Islamic State in Syria.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:23:12|Editor: Chengcheng

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MOSCOW, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- New U.S. sanctions against Moscow's alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election will affect their short and long term relations, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman said Tuesday.

It is too early to say how many people in Russia will be affected by the sanctions to be set from Jan. 29, said Huntsman.

"We'll have to see, what comes of the work ... knowing, that it will impact the short term of our relationship, but also the longer term of our relationship," Huntsman was quoted as saying by TASS news agency.

On Aug. 2, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act into law, which imposed new curbs on Russia, Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Under the law, the U.S. administration should present to the Congress a Specially Designated Nationals list of senior officials and business people close to the authorities by Jan. 29.

U.S. citizens and companies will be forbidden to cooperate with persons on the list, who will thus be deprived of access to the U.S. financial system.

It is not yet clear if the list is going to be made public.

Russia's Kommersant newspaper recently quoted unnamed sources in Washington as saying that the list may include more than 50 people and up to 300 of their family members.

Prior to the adoption of the new sanctions, U.S. Democratic senators released a 200-page report call for more consideration of a Russian threat as a destabilizing factor.

The United States and their allies have imposed sanctions against a number of Russian officials and companies over Crimea and the Ukrainian conflict.
The world faces the prospect of more tension with China over trade, security and human rights after Xi Jinping awarded himself another five-year term as leader of the ruling Communist Party and called for self-reliance in technology, a stronger military and protection of core interests abroad. At a party congress, Xi gave no sign of plans to change the "zero-COVID strategy that has frustrated Chinas public and disrupted business and trade. He called for faster military development and announced no change in policies that strain relations with Washington and Asian neighbors. Xi is tightening control at home and trying to use Chinas economic heft to increase its influence abroad.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:28:14|Editor: Yurou

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Meritxell Relano, UNICEF representative in Yemen, speaks during a press conference at the UNICEF office in Sanaa, Yemen, on Jan. 16, 2018. More than 3 million children have been born in Yemen since conflict escalated in March 2015, and they've since faced violence, displacement, disease, poverty, under-nutrition not to mention lack of access to water, health care and education, according to a UNICEF report released Tuesday. (Xinhua/Mohammed Mohammed)

GENEVA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- More than three million children have been born in Yemen since conflict escalated in March 2015, and they've since faced violence, displacement, disease, poverty, under-nutrition not to mention lack of access to water, health care and education, according to a UNICEF report released Tuesday.

"An entire generation of children in Yemen is growing up knowing nothing but violence. Children in Yemen are suffering the devastating consequences of a war that is not of their making," said Meritxell Relano, UNICEF representative in Yemen.

"Malnutrition and disease are rampant as basic services collapse. Those who survive are likely to carry the physical and psychological scars of conflict for the rest of their lives," she added.

The organization's report reveals that more than 5,000 children have been killed or injured in the violence, an estimated 1.8 million children are acutely malnourished, including nearly 400,000 who are fighting for their lives. Suspected cholera and acute watery diarrhea have affected over one million people, with children under five years old accounting for a quarter of all cases.

Even before the conflict escalated in 2015, Yemen was the poorest country in the Middle East and among the poorest in the world, having suffered decades of conflict, under-development and economic decline.

The report thus calls on all parties to the conflict and the global community to prioritize the protection of children in Yemen.

This means, according to UNICEF, immediately reaching a peaceful political solution and putting an end to the violence, abiding by international humanitarian law to protect children unconditionally during conflict, and providing sustainable and unconditional access to assistance to every child in need in Yemen.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:28:15|Editor: yan

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TEHRAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Lebanese Parliament speaker urged on Tuesday all Islamic countries to relocate their embassies to Jerusalem, IRAN DAILY reported.

"I urge all Islamic countries to relocate their embassies to the holy city of Al Quds (Jerusalem) and boycott Israeli goods," Nabih Berri said at the 13th session of the Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Iran's capital Tehran.

Since U.S. President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a number of Palestinians protesting the declaration have been killed and thousands more arrested, Berri was quoted as saying.

"So, I insist that we as Arab and Muslim nations should take a retrospective measure against such an shameful decision," he noted.

"The U.S. plan to relocate its embassy has caused a great challenge for us as it is a decision contradicting all the conventions of the United Nations," Berri said.

Last December, Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and instructed the State Department to begin the process of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city.

Iran's Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the U.S. decision, saying Washington's recognition was a "blatant violation of international resolutions."
A fighter of Ukrainian volunteers Donbas battalion practices shooting during military drills not far southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, on April 1, 2015. (AFP PHOTO)

KIEV, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Kiev may resume trade with the areas controlled by pro-independence insurgents in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, local media reported Tuesday, citing a senior Ukrainian parliament's official.

Ukrainian parliament deputy speaker Oksana Syroyid told local "5 TV-channel" that the draft law on Donbas re-integration, which is due to be put on vote in the parliament later in the day, includes a provision on trade resumption.

If the law is finally adopted, the Ukrainian army would supervise trade between the government-controlled and the non-government-controlled areas, Syroyid said.

The law on Donbas re-integration is aimed at returning the conflict-hit region to Kiev's sovereignty through peaceful means. The final text of the law has not been made public yet.

Trade suspension between the government-controlled and the non-government-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine started in March 2017 in the wake of transport blockades of Donbas, the economic damage of which was estimated at 1.8 billion U.S. dollars by the Ukrainian central bank.

Ukraine launched a military operation in Donbas in April 2014 after armed groups seized cities and towns in the region and declared independence. The confrontation has claimed more than 10,000 lives and left about 24,000 people injured.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:38:17|Editor: Lu Hui

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Aerial photo taken aboard surveillance plane of the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) shows the oil spill on the water surface around the sunken Iranian tanker Sanchi in the East China Sea, Jan. 15, 2018. The SOA said in a statement that several oil slicks were found near the site where the vessel sank and they were much bigger than the previous day. The tanker Sanchi, carrying 136,000 tonnes of light crude oil from Iran, collided with the CF Crystal, a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter, about 300 km east of the Yangtze River estuary on Jan. 6. (Xinhua/Liu Shiping)

BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- China disputed claims Tuesday about inadequate efforts to save the crew of tanker Sanchi, saying they are "untrue and irresponsible."

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said at a daily press briefing that China mobilized nine vessels on the day the accident happened and there had been more than 13 rescue vessels at the scene from the second day.

Rescue forces from Shanghai and Jiangsu worked with Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the rescue operations, said Lu.

An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Monday that it is "not true" to say that China had not made adequate efforts when faced with such a complex accident and that China had provided the utmost cooperation to Iran during the process.

"The remarks from the Iranian side shows that claims of an inadequate rescue are untrue and irresponsible," said Lu.

The Panama-registered oil tanker Sanchi, carrying 136,000 tonnes of light crude oil from Iran, collided with the CF Crystal, a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter, about 300 kilometers east of the Yangtze estuary on Jan. 6. Thirty-two crew members of the tanker, 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis, were lost.

The entire ship sank Sunday afternoon. No burning was seen on sea surface from a marine surveillance plane at about 1 p.m. Monday and the oil spill could be easily seen from the air.

Lu said China welcomes Iran to join in the investigation of the accident, and will facilitate visas for the families of the crew.

Related:

Chinese FM extends condolences over death of 30 Iranian sailors
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:48:21|Editor: Lu Hui

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European Council President Donald Tusk arrives at EU headquarters prior to an EU Summit in Brussels, Belgium, Dec. 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Ye Pingfan)

STRASBOURG, France, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Despite "sufficient progress", European Council President Donald Tusk told European lawmakers in Strasbourg on Tuesday that the most difficult part of the process was still to come.

"The hardest work is still ahead of us, and time is limited," Tusk said in his report to members of European Parliament (MEPs) on the outcomes of the December 2017 European Summit.

"We must maintain the unity of the EU27 in every scenario, and personally I have no doubt that we will," he said.

"If the UK government sticks to its decision to leave, Brexit will become a reality -- with all its negative consequences -- in March next year. Unless there is a change of heart among our British friends," Tusk told lawmakers.

"What we need today is more clarity on the UK's vision," the European Council President said. "Once we have that, the leaders will meet and decide on the way the EU sees its future relationship with the UK as a third country."

Tusk appeared to offer hope to anti-Brexit campaigners, concluding his remarks by referencing the ability for a democracy to change its mind. "We, here on the continent, haven't had a change of heart. Our hearts are still open to you," he said.

Tusk repeated his stance later with a tweet.

Also addressing MEPs in the same debate, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker echoed his European Council colleague, saying "Mr. Tusk said our door remains open, and I hope that will be heard clearly in London."

The discussion in Strasbourg, part of the European Parliament's January 2018 plenary session, came on the heels of a new round of Brexit negotiations launching on Monday evening.

European media have reported that leaked draft guidelines given to the EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, include tough new stances on European citizens' rights, and continued EU regulations during the called-for transition period after March 2019, when Britain would become a third country.

Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament's representative on Brexit issues, told MEPs on Tuesday morning that "We are coming to the most difficult part of this negotiation".

"We need rock solid guarantees" on citizens' rights, he said and later tweeted.

Verhofstadt also insisted that throughout the duration of the transition period, Britain would be required to observe EU law entirely, and that any procedure for the residency of European citizens could only begin at the conclusion of the transition period.

This appears to support leaks that the EU is demanding that any European citizen who moves to Britain before 2020 be given permanent residency rights.

"The European Parliament won't allow cherry-picking in the Brexit transition. All EU legislation, all EU policies will continue to apply. The only exception is that Britain will no longer be represented in the institutions that decide on legislation and policies," Verhofstadt said.

One of the most difficult issues embedded in the transition period relates to migration, with the EU reportedly demanding that its "freedom of movement" principle continue to apply during the transition period, which would block Britain from immediately introducing strict new controls on new arrivals to Britain.

Manfred Weber, leader of the European People's Party group, warned that his political family would not support a final Brexit deal if the conditions were not good enough, indicating that his party also felt that difficult work remained in the negotiations.

"My message to London is please stop complaining, please deliver," Weber said.

Britain evoked Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union in March of 2017, triggering a two-year negotiation period for a divorce from the bloc. Talks are limited by law to two years, with Britain scheduled to become a third country on March 29 of 2019.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:48:22|Editor: yan

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The State Oceanic Administration (SOA) on Tuesday criticized north China's Hebei Province for failing to properly approve and supervise land reclamation and implement national policy.

An SOA inspection team found a number of issues concerning land reclamation in Hebei during an inspection in August and September, said an SOA press release.

The province has made slow progress in restoring the environment along its coast, the statement said, adding that it had only finished three out of the 21 restoration projects with funding from the central government from 2012 to 2016. Only 26.5 percent of the funding required from local governments was actually allocated.

The provincial government was also found to have violated state regulations by setting the reserve of natural coastline at 20 percent instead of the 35 percent approved by the State Council, the statement said.

A total of 31 projects were approved against the red line of marine ecological protection in 2017 and 17 projects involving use of the sea were approved when they had not obtained required preview reports and sea reclamation quota.

A large amount of reclaimed land remain deserted, the statement said. Since 2002, about 30,000 hectares of sea was transformed into land in Hebei but only 32 percent of that was actually developed.

Out of 18,424 hectares of aquaculture, only 27 percent had obtained the right to use the sea area, said the statement.

Local administrative committees were also found to have used financial allocations to help businesses pay fines for illegal activities in reclamation or return the fines by other means.

The province also failed to protect nature reserves. Tourism, aquaculture and shipbuilding had all been allowed in a national nature reserve in Changli County.

The marine environment is degraded, with red tides and green tides. Quality of water flowing into the sea does has not reached the national standard for a long time, the statement said.

The provincial government was told to submit a plan for rectification within 30 work days and report on progress in six months.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:48:23|Editor: yan

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XINING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Authorities in northwest China's Qinghai Province have organized a large clean-up operation after 107 yak drowned in an icy river.

Ice suddenly broke when 180 yak were passing over a river in Gande County on Jan. 10. As a result, 107 of the yak fell into the icy river and drowned.

"We heard cracking sounds and the surface broke. We were very upset," said Tsora, one of the herders. The mass drowning caused direct economic losses of 642,000 yuan (about 99,400 U.S. dollars).

To reduce the losses, a operation was organized the next day with participation of more than 300 people. Machinery including an excavator, was dispatched to the scene from the provincial capital of Xining.

Thirty-five drowned yaks were pulled out of the river and were bought by local residents. The local government has offered compensation to the herders' households.

With a population of 36,000, Gande is a poverty-stricken county.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 22:53:26|Editor: yan

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BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Jan.16 (Xinhua) -- Bruneians interested in hi-tech contract farming will be provided with a hectare of land as a start-up, said a senior official.

"What's more, farmers won't have to worry about a sales market," Hirman bin Haji Abu, the Head of Crop Industry Division at Brunei's Department of Agriculture and Agrifood, Ministry of Primary Resources and Tourism, was quoted as saying by local media on Tuesday.

He said local farmers are given the assurance that a local company will purchase their products.

"Aside from that, youths will need to have the passion, knowledge and resources, before venturing into this field," he said.

During a four-day program, the department assists the participants in terms of technical and fertilizing methods, while appointed companies will provide them with training by guest experts from abroad.

Among the young participants is Syasya, from the Pengiran Anak Puteri Hajah Masna Secondary School, who told local media that the programme has exposed her to an entirely new approach to farming.

"The use of modern technology should increase crop production and provide a lucrative source of revenue for youths," she said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:08:31|Editor: Lifang

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Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli presides over a work conference on the Belt and Road Initiative in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 16, 2018. Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee also attended the meeting. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)

BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli called for more efforts in building the Belt and Road Tuesday.

Addressing a conference on the initiative, Zhang said China should continue to push pilot projects under the initiative to connect infrastructure and policy.

Trade and investment cooperation should be improved and new growth drivers found for the common development along the Belt and Road, he said.

China needs better financial products and services for the initiative, he said.

People-to-people exchanges should provide public support for the Belt and Road, he said.

China should also strengthen environmental protection to ensure green development.

Wang Huning, member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, also attended the meeting.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:08:32|Editor: Lifang

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- A leading Chinese science-technology institution announced Tuesday that it was going to establish a deep-space lab in Luxembourg.

The lab will focus on the coordinated design and analysis of deep-space probes, as well as the development of key technologies in exploring and utilizing space resources in the solar system, according to a press release from the National Space Science Center (NSSC) with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A memorandum of the cooperation was signed by the NSSC and the Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy Tuesday.

The memorandum also made arrangements on the operation of the lab and intellectual property rights.

Luxembourg launched a government initiative in 2016 to support the utilization of space resources.
CHARLESTON -- Many animals may be able to take the area's snowfall and dipping temperatures in stride, but local officials are still concerned.

Julie Deters, Coles County Animal Shelter manager, said it is highly dependent on the animal, but many are adaptable even to this uncomfortable weather.

Strays especially learn tricks to defeat the cold winds and snowy days. Speaking of cats, Deters said they usually can and will find houses, car wheels and engines, and other shelters to nestle under or in as a respite from the cold.

Cats are very self-sufficient, Deters. They can hide just about anywhere.

Stray dogs are less self-reliant, but still find windbreaks in the area to avoid the weather.

However, no animal, particularly an inside cat or dog, is immune to the cold and the dangers it presents.

Anytime it is below zero, the dogs need to be inside. The cats need to be inside someplace, Deters said.

Deters said animals should have been inside during the cold fronts that have bombarded the area such as the cold-air temperatures today.

No human, no animal, nothing should be outside in that, she said referring to the single-digit temperatures.

A general rule of thumb is if it is cold for you, it is cold for them, Deters said. That should be kept in mind when leaving out house cats and dogs, she noted. Dog houses, especially those with heat lamps, serve as good insulators during this particularly bitter weather, should the dog need to be outside.

The animal shelter staff did not see any cold-related injuries or deaths this season so far, however, they were called out for numerous condition calls, where a local resident alerts animal control to potential health risks to an animal. Responding to some of these calls, Deters said they might see a dog in an outdoor kennel with food that froze or other similar problems.

Deters said if this harsh weather lingers, she will continue to worry about those animals that do not have homes. She added that people who are seeing animals outside that might be at risk of cold-related injuries should call animal control at 217-345-4112.

Livestock are better equipped for the weather even if temperatures drop into the single digits. David Shupe, a Toledo farmer who owns approximately 30 head of cattle, said they don't mind the cold much.

As long as it is dry, cold doesn't seem to affect them like it does some animals like hogs, he said. Cattle would probably suffer more in the mud. If it warms up enough here that it thaws out and we get a bunch of rain and it gets muddy, that is when my cattle suffer more.

Even without the mud, rapidly fluctuating temperatures can be jarring for the cattle, he said. It noticeably bothers them.

There is still a lot of work that goes into protecting them from the cold when it does come in. This work includes keeping them well hydrated, which is an undertaking in itself.

He said moving water from one place to another without it freezing becomes a challenge in sub-zero temperatures, especially at the frequency they need it. Cattle go through more water in this weather as they attempt to stay warm.

But also he has to throw out straw bales that the cattle then spread and cover themselves with. He noted that cattle farmers with cows outside like his try to also move cattle into low lying areas or beside trees as a windbreak.

Other livestock like hogs are often in enclosures, many of which are heated, so it is less of an issue, Shupe added.
File Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks aboard the pre-commissioned U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford in Newport News, Virginia, the United States, March 2, 2017. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Donald Trump administration's large-scale hike in the defense budget, calling it a pillar of the U.S. president's "Make America Great Again" vision, indicates the United States is readying a bigger money chest for defense under Trump but the question is whether it is feasible.

"American might is second to none and we're getting bigger and better and stronger every day," Trump declared in the hangar bay of aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford on July 22, 2017, as thousands cheered.

"Wherever this vessel cuts through the horizon, our allies will rest easy and our enemies will shake with fear because everyone will know that America is coming, and America is coming strong," Trump said when the carrier, one of the most powerful hardware items to be added to the U.S. military's arsenal, was commissioned.

Six months after assuming office, Trump paid a second visit to the vessel, where he touted the ship's power, taunted America's enemies, and promised full backing for a stronger military.

It was no empty talk. The United States already had the world's most powerful military, and now, with Trump's blessings, Congress has approved a whopping 700 billion-U.S.-dollar defense budget in fiscal year 2018, a 100-billion-dollar increase from 2017.

Though the approved figure has surpassed a cap of 549 billion dollars imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act and may be blocked, it's clear that Congress is preparing a bigger money chest for defense under Trump.

Each of the military branches will be sharing the bonus.

For the army, the money means 17,000 more recruits in 2018, and there are financial incentives to retain those already in service.

For the navy, the extra cash can help Washington get closer to its goal of expanding the number of its fleets from 270 to 355 in the next few decades.

For the air force, the bigger check can go a long way in procuring stealth fighter aircraft, the F-35s, whose unit price sank below 100 million dollars in 2017 for the first time.

The National Security Strategy, released in December, outlines the government's military and foreign policies.

According to the document, the United States will keep combating extremist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, prepare for possible conflicts with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea over its development of nuclear weapons, and keep up the pressure on Iran, with whom Washington's relationship became increasingly adversarial in the past year.

Trump's actions follow his campaign promise in 2016 to prioritize military build-up. But unlike many of his other initiatives, beefing up the military has, by and large, won the support of lawmakers across the aisle. Republicans in both the House and Senate allowed more budget than the White House's demand.

Trump's arguments for more defense spendings were in part supported by government reports which said some units, such as the navy's Seventh Fleet, are suffering from insufficient training and rest.

A report released by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, says there are holes in the military that need to be patched in order for the United States to be able to simultaneously engage in two regional conflicts.

The Pentagon is due to release the National Defense Strategy, the Ballistic Missile Defense Review, as well as the Nuclear Posture Review in the coming weeks.

Despite charging ahead with his ambitious blueprint, Trump is also encountering tough headwinds. Skeptics have pointed out that with the proposed steep tax cut, it would be difficult to allocate enough money for the military's lavish purchasing list.

"If all Trump wanted was a big defense increase, he could have had it, but he also wanted tax cuts, entitlement reform and infrastructure investment. Something had to give, and usually in peacetime what gives is military spending," Loren Thompson, a defense consultant, told Politico.com.

Military top brass such as Navy Secretary Richard Spencer have also expressed concern.

"At the end of the day, this is all about math. You don't want to raise taxes. You don't want to cut benefits, and we want to grow the military. It is literally impossible. The math says you can't do it," Spencer told Politico.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:28:44|Editor: yan

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Education will continue its zero-tolerance policy for any behavior that harms students or violates teacher ethics.

Xu Mei, the ministry's spokeswoman, made the remarks Tuesday in response to a sexual harassment allegation at Beihang University.

A professor at Beihang University has been removed from his post after a former female student accused him of sexual harassment on social media.

The university announced on its Sina Weibo account last week that Chen Xiaowu was stripped of his post as executive vice president of the university's Graduate School. His teaching certificate was also canceled.

Xu said that the ministry will deal with any and all of sexual harassment cases reported in other universities and colleges.

The ministry will also work with other departments to establish a mechanism to prevent such behavior, according to Xu.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:38:48|Editor: yan

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The State Oceanic Administration (SOA) on Tuesday told the government of east China's Fujian Province that it was concerned about the lack of control over pollution near its shore.

According to a recent SOA inspection group, there are a total of 2,678 outlets across the province that discharge pollution from inland to the sea, 799 of which discharge sewage from the animal husbandry industry.

Some sewage treatment plants were even built inside a wetland nature reserve, while the outlets of some other plants failed to meet the requirements of Fujian's marine function zoning.

Of 262 permitted land reclamation projects, 61 did not implement tracking supervision over the environment.

The group also criticized the Fujian government for its lack of supervision of marine reserves, as problems existed including illicit businesses on beaches, occupation of sea areas and establishment of docks without permission.

Ineffective control of the sources of floating waste at sea, and illicit exploitation of uninhabited islets were also among the environmental problems.

Moreover, the SOA has criticized the provincial government for other issues such as inadequate implementation of the country's policies on land reclamation, non-standard approvals of land reclamation programs and weak law enforcement and monitoring.

The Fujian government was thus told to submit a plan for rectification within 30 working days and report on progress in six months.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:38:48|Editor: yan

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RABAT, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Morocco's trade deficit increased 2.6 percent in 2017 compared with a year before, reaching a total of 20.53 billion U.S. dollars, according to data released by the foreign exchange regulator on Tuesday.

The rise in the deficit was driven by a hike in imports by 6.3 percent to more than 47 billion dollars from 44.23 dollars in 2016, according to exchange regulator statistics.

The hike was due to 27.3-percent increase in energy bills, 3.8-percent rise in equipment imports, 5.1-percent increase in industrial goods, the same source pointed out.

Total exports rose 9.3 percent year on year, but stood at only 26.5 billion dollars, pushed by the rise of 11.1 percent in phosphate exports, and 7.6 percent in agriculture exports, the exchange regulator said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:43:50|Editor: yan

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TAIYUAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Siemens PLM Software Company will build an "Industry 4.0" intelligent manufacturing innovation center in Taiyuan, capital of north China's Shanxi Province.

A cooperative agreement has been signed between Siemens, Shanxi Transformation and Comprehensive Reform Demonstration Zone and a local smart data company.

According to the plan, Siemens will provide research and development for Chinese manufacturers through the innovation center as Shanxi pushes forward digitalization of its companies.

Last year, Siemens said it would work with the Chinese government authorities and research institutions on a new robotics center. The company currently employs around 4,500 scientists and engineers in China.

Robotics and the automatization of industry are areas which the government is heavily promoting under the framework of its "Made in China 2025" initiative.

German industry is seen as a potential partner in this context.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:48:54|Editor: Lu Hui

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg (not seen) at the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on Jan. 10, 2018. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

ADDIS ABABA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) of the African Union on Tuesday issued a statement against U.S. President Trump's "shithole" remarks.

The council said it received with utter shock the news of the uncouth words used by Trump in reference to African people and people of African descent.

"We note that this language is wrong and does not reflect the stature of the President of the United States," the council said, adding "In Africa we do deeply respect elders and the language that elders use should be respectful and one that befits the position that they hold. The President of the United States is an elder and should always remember and act as one."

The council has called upon all citizen groups, religious organizations, academics and civic actors to condemn the language.

"Citizens across the world should be respected for what they are and referred to in appropriate and respectful language. To continue to propagate racism through language in the world is to fuel other types of violent behaviors that we see around the world.

"We ask that the U.S. President seriously considers withdrawing this statement and issue a public apology to all Africans and people of African descent in the world," the statement read.

The council noted that the president should "remember that the social, economic and cultural contributions of Africans in the United States is one of the highest. The United States has a big number of professional Africans who cannot fit the description that he used."

One of the Agenda 2063 Aspirations developed by African people and leaders is: An Africa with a strong cultural identity, common heritage, shared values and ethics, it said.

ECOSOCC as an organ that promotes and popularizes the Agenda 2063 strives to build an Africa and world that is ethical and value-based, and we call upon the U.S. President to embrace this aspiration, said the statement.

"ECOSOCC joins the rest of the world to condemn the language of the President of the United States of America.

"We therefore call for the President of the United States to restrain himself and ensure that he espouses the values that the United States people have been known for," the statement read.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:48:55|Editor: Lifang

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Yu Zhengsheng, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), meets with President of the Senate of Gabon Lucie Milebou, in Beijing, capital of China, Jan. 16, 2018. (Xinhua/Zhang Duo)

BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese top political advisor Yu Zhengsheng and President of the Senate of Gabon Lucie Milebou held talks Tuesday.

"China and Gabon should support each other on issues relating to our core interests and major concerns to consolidate the political foundation of bilateral ties," said Yu, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

The 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China held in October stressed China will forge stronger solidarity and cooperation with other developing countries, which will bring new opportunities for China-Gabon partnership and the development of Africa, Yu said.

China will help Gabon to new development and welcomes Gabon's participation in the the summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to be held in China later this year, Yu said.

Yu called for more exchanges between the CPPCC and Gabon's Senate on national governance, economic development, improvement of people's well-being and maintenance of stability and ethnic unity.

Milebou said Gabon attaches importance to its relations with China and Gabonese Senate will increase friendly exchanges with the CPPCC.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:48:55|Editor: yan

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TEHRAN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said here Tuesday that Jerusalem is "definitely" the capital of Palestine.

The U.S. move to call Al-Quds (Jerusalem) the capital of Israel will fail eventually and "they won't be able to implement this (decision)," Khamenei said at the 13th session of the Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Iran's capital Tehran.

He said the governments who help the United States and Israel are "traitors to Islam and Muslims," mentioning Saudi Arabia.

He added that the cause of Palestine is the foremost issue of the Muslims.

The cause of "Palestine is an important issue of Islamic world and should not be forgotten," he was quoted as saying by semi-official ISNA news agency.

The resistance against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has achieved advancements so far and "I believe that it will bear fruits," he said.

Khamenei also urged unity and solidarity among Islamic countries.

Last December, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and instructed the State Department to begin the process of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city.

Iran's Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the U.S. decision, saying Washington's recognition was a "blatant violation of international resolutions."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:59:02|Editor: Lifang

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BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Senior Party members at the rank of military corps and above will be overseen by full-time inspection teams, said a military regulation made public Tuesday.

Regular inspection teams will supervise Party committees of the Central Military Commission, the army, navy, air force, rocket force, and strategic support troops of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) as well as the armed police, according to the regulation, which took effect Monday.

The document regulates principles, powers and duties of inspection teams and their staff and protocols they should follow.

Inspection teams are expected to expose flaws and weakness concerning Party leadership, management of Party organizations, and implementation of disciplines within the armed forces, said the military source.

The regulation also includes articles on how military inspectors should exercise their duty according to Party rules and how they should be held accountable.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-16 23:59:04|Editor: yan

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CAIRO, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's non-oil exports increased by 9 percent to exceed 21 billion U.S. dollars in 2017 compared to 19.3 billion in 2016, an official report said on Tuesday.

According to the report of the General Organization of Export and Import Control (GOEIC), Egypt's exports of construction material got the lion's share as it reached about 5.1 billion dollars in 2017, marking a 3-percent rise.

"The exports of chemicals and fertilizers increased by 32 percent to hit 4.4 billion dollars in 2017," said the GOEIC report.

It noted that the country's exports of foodstuff reached 2.8 billion, engineering and electronic products 2.6 billion and agricultural crops 2.2 billion.

However, exports of medical industries products declined by about 8 percent, furniture by 11 percent, handmade products 12 percent and leather material and products by 9 percent. None of them exceeded half a billion dollar in exports in 2017.

Egypt has been suffering economic slowdown over the past few years of political instability and relevant security challenges.

The country hopes to increase production and exportation and to revive tourism as ways to boost its economy, side by side with a strict three-year economic reform plan, which started in late 2016, that is based on austerity measures, fuel and energy subsidy cuts and tax hikes.

Including full local currency floatation, Egypt's reform plan has been encouraged by a 12-billion-dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund, half of which has already been delivered to the most populous Arab country.
MATTOON (JG-TC) -- Rural King recently donated $460,000 to support Sarah Bush Lincolns new Heart Center, which will offer a full range of cardiovascular services.

Rural King reported in a press release that the new Heart Center will consolidate cardiac services, including the addition of a second cardiac cath lab, 15 exam rooms for the cardiac and pulmonary clinic, rehab gym, stress testing, echo cardiography, pulmonary function testing, EKG, and nuclear medicine. The second floor will house 20 additional private medical surgical rooms.

We are very grateful to Rural King and the Melvin, Speer and Banks families for the extremely generous gift to our new Heart Center, said Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Foundation Director Amy Card in a press release. Donations like this make such a huge impact on the health of our community members by helping us provide the most contemporary facilities in which to receive care.

"The Rural King family has supported us for many years, and we are thankful to have such a generous company who cares so much about the people in our community. We are forever grateful.

Since opening its doors in Mattoon in 1960, Rural King has grown from two associates in one location to a national company with more than 7,000 associates in more than 100 stores in 12 states. Mattoon-based Rural King reported that its the largest and fastest growing privately owned farm and home store in America.

While focusing on expansion, Rural King reported that it continues to give back to the Coles County community and that its associates are a part of service organizations and volunteer hundreds of hours each year. For example, Rural King associates partnered with the One Stop Community Christmas program to help provide more than 2,400 children from families in financial need with Christmas gifts.

Rural King also hosts tours for hundreds of Coles County school students during National Manufacturing Day, and provides resources and support for a new generation of entrepreneurs in the countys Class E entrepreneur class. Rural King's executives have volunteered time to help teach the CHOICES curriculum in schools as part of a program designed to empower students to increase their career and life opportunities.

In addition, Rural King has partnered with Eastern Illinois University and Lake Land College to hire interns and recent graduates. Rural King also has made donations to the Sarah Bush Lincoln Regional Cancer Center, local 4H groups and the Mattoon Area Family YMCA. Rural King will be the host of the YMCA's May Merriment fundraiser this year.

More than 40 local Rural King associates volunteered to help Rural King associates in Florida with personal needs after last year's hurricane, as well, and quickly restored the day-to-day store operations to serve the community needs.

One of our values at Rural King is to 'Be of Service' to our associates and customers, and that always extends to the communities in which we live. It is important to us to be a good community partner and a good employer in all 111 of the communities we serve. said Rural King Chief Executive Officer Alex Melvin in the press release.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 00:09:07|Editor: yan

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LISBON, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The municipal council of Batalha in central Portugal announced on Tuesday that it had established a 25,000-euro fund for community centers to fireproof their premises.

According to the Portuguese Lusa News Agency, the fund was available to all cultural associations in the region and can be used to buy fire extinguishers, train members in fire safety procedures and improve building security.

The initiative comes as a response to Saturday's fire at the Cultural, Recreational and Humanitarian Association building in Vila Nova da Rainha, a village 250 km north of Lisbon. The fire killed 8 and left 32 injured, 18 of them in a critical condition.

The fire broke out when a ceiling collapsed. It has now been confirmed that the heat from a wood-burning stove caused the roof panel behind a false ceiling to spontaneously combust. The ceiling then exploded, releasing deadly flames and toxic fumes.

The roof panel was clad in polyurethane, a material that is highly flammable when left exposed. Public and private institutions throughout Portugal are being encouraged to check the safety of their cladding.

Community centers like the one in Vila Nova da Rainha tend to be run by volunteers. They have limited budgets and rarely upgrade their premises. The Vila Nova da Rainha building was last renovated in 1992.

Councilors in Batalha, a district halfway between Lisbon and Vila Nova da Rainha, have recognized the need to intervene. Other district councils are likely to follow suit.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a joint press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg (not seen) at the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on Jan. 10, 2018. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

ADDIS ABABA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) of the African Union on Tuesday issued a statement against U.S. President Trump's "shithole" remarks.

The council said it received with utter shock the news of the uncouth words used by Trump in reference to African people and people of African descent.

"We note that this language is wrong and does not reflect the stature of the President of the United States," the council said, adding "In Africa we do deeply respect elders and the language that elders use should be respectful and one that befits the position that they hold. The President of the United States is an elder and should always remember and act as one."

The council has called upon all citizen groups, religious organizations, academics and civic actors to condemn the language.

"Citizens across the world should be respected for what they are and referred to in appropriate and respectful language. To continue to propagate racism through language in the world is to fuel other types of violent behaviors that we see around the world.

"We ask that the U.S. President seriously considers withdrawing this statement and issue a public apology to all Africans and people of African descent in the world," the statement read.

The council noted that the president should "remember that the social, economic and cultural contributions of Africans in the United States is one of the highest. The United States has a big number of professional Africans who cannot fit the description that he used."

One of the Agenda 2063 Aspirations developed by African people and leaders is: An Africa with a strong cultural identity, common heritage, shared values and ethics, it said.

ECOSOCC as an organ that promotes and popularizes the Agenda 2063 strives to build an Africa and world that is ethical and value-based, and we call upon the U.S. President to embrace this aspiration, said the statement.

"ECOSOCC joins the rest of the world to condemn the language of the President of the United States of America.

"We therefore call for the President of the United States to restrain himself and ensure that he espouses the values that the United States people have been known for," the statement read.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 00:14:08|Editor: yan

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JUBA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan's food security situation will worsen this year compared to the previous year unless food is procured and distributed to millions of people in urgent need in hard-to-reach areas before the rainy season, the World Food Program (WFP) said on Tuesday.

WFP Deputy Country Director Simon Cammelbeek told journalists the UN agency needs to urgently procure and distribute food by air drops to six million people in hard-to-reach areas classified as food insecure in 2018 before the coming of the rainy season.

"The food security situation is not good and the indication we get is that the harvest last year (2017) was less than the year before," he revealed in Juba.

South Sudan in December last year launched humanitarian appeal estimated at 1.72 billion U.S. dollars.

A report released by the Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC) last year said an earlier-than-normal start of the lean season will result in an estimated 5.1 million people (48 percent of the total population) being classified as severely food insecure in January-March 2018.

"It's very important that we also take this opportunity in the current month to procure food and distribute food to those areas which will not be reachable during the rainy season. So as much as we have to wait for the final (IPC) assessment the indications are clear it (food situation) is worse than last year," Cammelbeek said.

Violence continues unabated in the world's youngest nation despite repeated stern warning of consequences to the warring parties by the international community and regional East African leaders after several cease-fire violations.

Cammelbeek also disclosed that the humanitarian needs continue to worsen in the country where donors have been supportive of WFP and other partners' efforts, noting that additional resources are urgently required to help mount an effective and timely response to tackle hunger.

He added that the planting season begins in February and they will liaise with the government on how to extend support to farmers.

"Whereas famine conditions were averted in 2017 thanks in part to the extensive and large scale response by WFP and partners, some 6 million people are unable to meet their daily food needs already in January this year. We must do everything in our power and work jointly to ensure food and nutritional assistance for all," he said.

South Sudan descended into violence in December 2013 after political dispute between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy turned rebel chief Machar led to split within the SPLA, leaving soldiers to fight alongside ethnic lines.

The 2015 peace agreement to end the conflict was weakened after outbreak of renewed fighting in July 2016 caused the SPLA-in opposition rebel leader Machar to flee the capital.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 00:19:09|Editor: Yurou

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NICOSIA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Cyprus, Greece and Jordan have laid the foundations for a tripartite partnership and strategic regional cooperation, the leaders of the three countries said in a statement on Tuesday.

Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades hosted King Abdullah II to talks in Nicosia that led to the signing of bilateral and tripartite agreements in several sectors.

It was the first summit of the three countries, in line with similar summits Cyprus and Greece had with Egypt, Israel and Lebanon.

The summit "sets the foundation for strategic and regional partnership for political, economic and social benefits for all three countries", Anastasiades told a joint press conference at the end of the talks.

The three eastern Mediterranean neighbors signed a declaration for cooperation in the fields of security, peace, and prosperity aimed at promoting cooperation in both the public and private sectors.

"We have expressed our commitment to lay the groundwork for the strengthening of the cooperation between our three countries in many areas of common interest," the joint declaration said.

Such cooperation included the fight against terrorism and measures to cope with the influx of refugees, as well as dealing with the root causes of the problem.

King Abdullah said the summit marked the launch of "what we hope will develop into a fruitful trilateral partnership" with benefits to the wider area.

He said their respective countries were oases of stability in an otherwise volatile region. "It is no secret that we live in a very tough neighborhood, but it also provides challenges and opportunities that must be capitalized on," he added.

Greek Prime Minister Tsipras said the partnership should be based on strong foundations to face joint challenges, such as the refugee problem.

He added that Jordan needed to be further assisted by the European Union (EU) as it is currently hosting 1.5 million refugees in the wake of the crisis in Syria.

Greece itself is also home to tens of thousands of refugees from Syria, while Cyprus is hosting several hundreds of people who fled fighting in the country.

Agreements signed provide for cooperation in the sectors of renewable sources of energy, tourism, education and the protection of cultural property.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 00:19:09|Editor: yan

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CHENGDU, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Sky Train, a type of suspension railway system involving the use of lithium-battery powered trains, is being developed for commercial use, according to its manufacturer in southwest China's Sichuan Province.

Zhongtang Sky Railway Group, based in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, developed the trains with state-run firms in 2016.

Over 18,000 kilometers of tests have been carried out, said Tang Tong, chairman of the company.

According to Tang, his company is compiling technical standards and working toward commercial use in the future.

On Monday, a delegation from Cambodia visited Chengdu. Seang Bunleang, a member of the delegation, said they hoped that the new mode of transport could be brought to Phenom Penh, the Cambodian capital.

Tang said he is working with Cambodian partners on exporting the suspension rail system. Business people from other countries including the United States and Italy have also showed great interest or intent of cooperation in the project.

Sky Train, which is operated five meters above the ground, can run at speeds up to 65 kilometers per hour. It is considered as a good option of transport capable of helping address traffic jam and pollution at scenic areas.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 00:19:09|Editor: yan

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CAIRO, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian army arrested on Tuesday three suspected terrorists while they were watching the troops movements in the central part of North Sinai province northeastern Cairo, the Egyptian military spokesman said in a statement.

"The forces of the Third Field Army also managed to detect and destroy an explosive device prepared to target the forces in Central Sinai," military spokesman Tamer al-Refaay said in the statement.

He noted that the military raid also destroyed a number of terrorist hideouts containing fuel and provision.

On Saturday, Egypt started the implementation of a partial curfew in North Sinai, along with a renewed nationwide state of emergency, for three months each.

Bordering Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip, North Sinai has been the center of terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers following the military removal of former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013 in response to mass protests against his 12-month reign and his now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group.

The attacks later extended to reach several other provinces including the capital Cairo and started to target the Coptic minority via church bombings.

Most of the attacks were claimed by the so-called Wilayat Sinai (Sinai state or province), a Sinai-based group affiliated with the Islamic State (IS) regional terrorist group.

Terrorism in Egypt did not stop at targeting security men and Copts, as a terrorist operation last month against a mosque in North Sinai's Arish city killed at least 310 Muslim worshippers and injured over 120 others, marking the deadliest terror attack and the first against a Muslim mosque in Egypt's modern history.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the mosque attack.

President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi ordered the army's chief of staff in late November 2017 to restore security and stability in the restive part of the Sinai Peninsula within three months.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian security forces have killed hundreds of terrorists and arrested thousands of suspects during the country's anti-terror war declared by Sisi, the army chief then, following Morsi's ouster.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 00:24:10|Editor: yan

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MADRID, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- A collection of around 300 prehistoric caves in southern Spain have been placed on a list of the 12 monuments which were most under threat in a list drawn up by Europa Nostra and the European Investment Bank Institute as part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage.

The caves in the province of Cadiz are in a pre-selected list, which will eventually be reduced to seven for inclusion of the Seven Most Endangered program.

In press release released on Tuesday, Europa Nostra considers that the caves contain "an exceptional set of Prehistoric Rock-Art Sites developed in an extended period of time of about 20,000 years."

The monument consists of "approximately 300 caves and shelters, within which are paintings and engravings of animals and human figures and symbols of diverse styles, the majority belonging to Iberian Schematic art".

The caves are on the endangered list because of factors such as "biological deterioration, structural damage, misuse and acts of vandalism", with the organization lamenting that "misuse and acts of vandalism have done more damage to these caves than natural processes have in thousands of years."

Some of the caves have been used as rubbish dumping grounds, while some prehistoric paintings have been scratched or had graffiti painted over them. Camp fires in some caves have also caused smoke damage to the ancient art.

This damage "has motivated several organizations and individuals to raise awareness of the serious threats to this important heritage site to the local regional and national authorities".

Unfortunately, Europa Nostra explains, that so far authorities in the region have taken only "minor action... to alleviate the threats".
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 00:29:11|Editor: yan

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KUWAIT CITY, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Kuwait will host the ministerial meeting of the U.S.-led International Coalition against the Islamic State (IS) on Feb. 13, Kuwaiti Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Al-Jarallah said Tuesday.

The meeting is part of efforts to fight against terrorism, he said.

Applauding the coalition for the tangible progress it has made in Iraq and Syria, he stressed that more cooperation is needed to ensure peace and security in the world.

He also hoped that this significant meeting would be fruitful.

The U.S.-led international coalition against IS includes U.S. military forces and personnel from over 30 countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 00:34:14|Editor: yan

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NAIROBI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Kenya said on Tuesday that it has started a process to set up one strong financial institution that will merge functions of several organizations that currently run parallel and sometimes perform overlapping roles.

Head of Public Service Joseph Kinyua said in a statement issued in Nairobi that he has issued a circular to the affected agencies informing them of the decisions to be implemented in the interim period.

According to Kinyua, institutions that will be merged to form the mega development finance institution include the Kenya Industrial Estates, Development Bank of Kenya, Industrial Development Bank of Kenya, Uwezo Fund, Youth Enterprise Development Fund and Women Enterprise Development Fund.

"This move is in line with the parastatal reforms that were recommended by the president's taskforce on parastatal reforms in 2013," said Kinyua.

He said the move is aimed at increasing efficiency, resolving overlaps and better utilizing resources to achieve economies of scale.

According to the plan, the new agency will become a one-stop shop for loans from the government ranging from industrial development loans to loans for a specific cadre of people such as women and the youth.

Kinyua said the government established an inter-agency taskforce to review the legal regulatory and institutional framework involved in the process in order to make the merger and transition seamless.

The taskforce has already issued interim orders while it completes its work.

Kinyua informed the agencies that have been identified for the merger that they should put on hold any actions relating to restructuring, recruitment of new staff (including CEOs), filling of vacancies in boards and the review of terms of services for all staff.

"Any filling of vacancies in the Boards as well as of CEOs across all identified State Corporations/Funds should only be done after necessary consultations with the Head of Public Service to ensure consistency with recommended reforms," he said.

Transfer of staff to and from the identified agencies has also been frozen. The circular also stops the disposal, transfer, lease or new acquisition of assets.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 00:44:15|Editor: yan

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ABUJA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Five people, including two suspected fighters of the terror group Boko Haram, were killed early Tuesday in an attack near Nigeria's northeastern town of Madagali, a local official said.

Local government chief Yusuf Mohammed told reporters the suspected terrorists attacked Pallam Village near Madagali, killing a local security man, a shop owner and another man who tried to escape in the dawn attack which lasted about an hour.

But soldiers and local hunters who chased the terrorists were able to shoot down two of them, Mohammed said.

Madagali is one of the frequently attacked major towns in the northeastern state of Adamawa by Boko Haram.

The spokesman for the police in Adamawa Othman Abubakar said the security agency was in pursuit of the other suspected terrorists responsible for the attack.

Boko Haram is blamed for the death of over 20,000 people and displacement of millions of local people since 2009.
State Sen. Bob Krist of Omaha introduced legislation on Tuesday to require due process for the taking of private property for private oil pipeline construction in Nebraska rather than any use of eminent domain.

The bill (LB1017) also would require periodic payments to landowners for the use of their land, along with a decommissioning plan that provides for removal of the pipeline at the end of its useful life and restoration of property to its original state.

Periodic payments represent a leasing process rather than an easement arrangement.

LB1017 would require any applicant to post a construction and performance bond of at least $100 million.

"This is a discussion we need to have," Krist said

Nebraska Legislature: Proposals we've highlighted so far A look at some of the Nebraska legislation that has made headlines so far in 2018.

The new requirements, which Krist said have "the support of the Sierra Club and other folks," would have a direct impact on the process that TransCanada would need to navigate if it moves ahead with plans to construct the proposed Keystone XL pipeline through the state.

The proposal states that both the Nebraska State Constitution and the U.S. Constitution provide that "private property cannot be taken without due process and that such taking must be for a public use with just compensation."

Last November, the Nebraska Public Service Commission approved TransCanada's controversial pipeline, but not the route through Nebraska the company wanted to follow.

Instead, the commission approved an alternative route.

TransCanada has been contacting landowners along the new route without yet making a public decision as to whether it wants to proceed with construction of the oil pipeline through Nebraska.

The Nebraska project would connect a pipeline that begins in Alberta to an existing pipeline that extends to the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Nigerian and Chinese representatives attend a groundbreaking ceremony to start the construction of a sub-sea pipeline installation for Dangote Oil Refining Company Limited in Lagos, Nigeria's economic hub, on Jan. 13, 2018 (Xinhua/Zhang Baoping)

LAGOS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Two leading Chinese companies have held a groundbreaking ceremony to start the construction of a sub-sea pipeline installation for Dangote Oil Refining Company Limited in Lagos, Nigeria's economic hub.

Top officials of the Nigerian Dangote's Group, Xie Xianju, Deputy General Manager of China Harbor Engineering Co (Nigeria) and Zhang Qing, General Manager of China's Offshore Oil Engineering Company (COOEC) attended the ceremony on Friday, near the Lekki Free Trade Zone (LFTZ).

The pipeline project is part of Dangote's 17 billion U.S. dollars gas pipeline, fertilizer, petrochemicals and refinery projects.

The work-scope includes transportation and installation of nine sub-sea pipelines with a total length of 100 kilometers in water depths of up to 40 meters. Of the pipelines, six are 24-inch diameter and three are 48-inch.

The Chinese contractors will also install five single point mooring systems, a catenary anchor leg mooring buoy weighing 240 tonnes and pipeline end manifold carrying a total weight of 220 tonnes for a shuttle tanker that imports crude for the refinery.

Xie said the quality of the work to be done at the site would be of the highest international standard, adding that the company's imprimatur of unrivaled excellence would be brought to bear in the project.

Sumil Katawia of the Dangote's Group, said the desire to have the best installations informed the decision to work with a reputable, world class firm like COOEC and China Harbor.

Dangote Refinery currently under construction would save Nigeria 12 billion U.S. dollars annual import substitution, create 4,000 direct jobs and crash prices of petroleum products.

The project would add value to the economy as it would also create 145,000 indirect jobs.

The refinery would lower the prices of petroleum products in Nigeria and save some costs on importation, when completed.

The refinery will have the capacity to refine 650,000 barrels of crude oil per day while the petrochemical plant will produce 780 KTPA Polypropylene, 500 KTPA of Polyethylene while the fertilizer project will produce 3.0 million metric tonnes per annum of Urea.

The 650,000-barrels-per-day refinery will come on stream by September 2019, according to officials of the company.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 01:04:18|Editor: yan

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RIGA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Hackers struck Latvia's national health system early Tuesday afternoon, disabling the recently-launched e-health portal and the national health service's website, representatives of the Latvian health ministry informed.

"We are quite sure that this was a malicious attack from outside. Apparently, it was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, intended to make the system inaccessible," said Varis Teivans, the deputy head of Latvian IT security incident response service Cert.lv, on public radio.

Although the cyber attack did not involve attempts to compromise personal data or steal information, the expert said the impact was massive enough to disrupt the system.

As soon as the cyber attack was detected, the e-health system was shut down to prevent the hackers from harming basic data, applications, or users. Access to the system was restored later in the afternoon, Latvian Health Ministry State Secretary Aivars Lapins told reporters.

Lapins said the Latvian health system was hit simultaneously from several foreign countries or servers seemingly located in foreign countries.

The health ministry's representatives could neither confirm nor deny that the cyber attack was organized outside Latvia.

On Tuesday morning, Member of Parliament Aija Barca told public media that attempts to disrupt the e-health system had also been detected on Jan. 11, but Prime Minster Maris Kucinskis later denied the reports.

Since its launch at the end of last year, the e-health system has been beleaguered by various issues. Physicians, pharmacists and IT experts have criticized it as extremely slow and seriously flawed.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 01:14:19|Editor: yan

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CAPE TOWN, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- South Africa's Parliament on Tuesday hailed an ongoing process to serve a summon on the Indian Gupta family and freeze its assets to the tune of 1.6 billion rand (about 130 million U.S. dollars).

This came after the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU) started the process to serve a summon on the Guptas and freeze its assets.

This process should continue "without fear or favor", said Mathole Motshekga, Chairperson of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Justice and Correctional Services.

The AFU applied for three separate orders at the High Court in Pretoria as well as the High Court in Bloemfontein last month, and the ex parte applications seeking orders to freeze the Guptas' assets have been granted.

The applications were brought in terms of the Prevention of Organized Crime Act, which allows assets of defendants in criminal cases, or people who have yet to be criminally charged to be preserved pending the outcome of their prosecution. After they have been successfully prosecuted, the assets are then permanently forfeited to the state.

Investigators have assured that no stone will be left unturned to ensure that criminals are stopped in their tracks and that they do not benefit from the proceeds of such criminal activities, Motshekga said.

"Criminals must know that the law will deal with them in all respects in the harshest possible way. Nobody is above the law," said Motshekga.

At least 14 people and two companies have been identified in the case involving the controversial Gupta family.

The Gupta-linked Trillian company and international consultancy giant McKinsey reportedly were sommoned on Tuesday by the AFU, which is under the National Prosecution Authority (NPA).

The Guptas are being investigated for its alleged collaboration with President Jacob Zuma and a number of senior government officials in looting the state coffers, through the awarding of lucrative contracts with state-owned enterprises to Gupta-linked families, known as state capture.

Both the Guptas and Zuma have denied the accusation.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 01:34:22|Editor: yan

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UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday asked for efforts to disentangle the mess in the Middle East, warning of the danger of escalation in the region.

"The situation in the broader Middle East has become a Gordian knot. With so many inter-related flashpoints, the risk of an escalatory cycle is real," Guterres told an informal meeting of the UN General Assembly in presentation of his priorities for 2018.

He called for a return to negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. "There is no alternative to a two-state solution. Recent signals of diminishing support for this undermine moderates and empower radicals. There is no plan-B."

He asked for efforts to preserve Lebanon's sovereignty and stability, and strengthen state institutions.

In war-torn Yemen, he said, it is time for the parties to enter into meaningful peace negotiations beyond efforts to ease the dramatic humanitarian catastrophe.

For the Gulf region, he urged parties to seize all opportunities to establish and strengthen platforms for regional dialogue, avoid escalations and allow for political solutions to emerge.

In Syria, the United Nations will continue its engagement toward genuine, representative and direct intra-Syrian negotiations in Geneva, leading to a political settlement of the conflict, said Guterres.

He also reiterated support for efforts to ensure Iraq's territorial integrity, pursue inclusive governance and ease sectarian tensions.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 01:34:22|Editor: yan

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ALGIERS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Algeria on Tuesday marked the fifth anniversary of a terrorist attack that targeted one of the country's biggest gas plants and killed 40 people.

The natural gas plant of Tiguentourine region, in the southernmost province of Ilizi, near the border with Libya, was attacked by a terrorist group affiliated to al-Qaeda on January 16, 2013.

The terrorists took control of the plant and held hundreds of workers from various nationalities as hostages. The terrorist attack left 40 hostages dead.

The plant is run in partnership between Algerian energy giant Sonatrach, British Petroleum (BP) and Statoil, and produced between 22 and 23 million cubic meters of natural gas per day.

Algeria's economy depends on oil industry, as investments in the energy sector hit 90 billion U.S. dollars in the period 2015-2019.

Although Algerian authorities have taken all the necessary measures to reinforce the security around and inside Tiguentourine plant, and in other sensitive facilities, the terrorist threat is still present, according to local observers.

Algeria faces ongoing terrorist threats as it is located in a region plagued by unprecedented security and political instability.

Tens of thousands of the country's troops are deployed on eastern and southern border to thwart potential intrusion of militants and arms, amid instability reigning in Mali and civil war hitting Libya.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 01:59:25|Editor: yan

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UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday that he will attend the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in the Republic of Korea.

"I am also encouraged by the decision of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to participate in the upcoming Winter Olympics in the Republic of Korea. I will be there myself in the opening ceremony, " the UN chief said at an informal meeting of the UN General Assembly to hear his briefing about the priorities for 2018.

"We need to build on these small signs of hope, and expand diplomatic efforts to achieve the peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in the context of regional security," he said.

"I welcome the reopening of inter-Korean communication channels, especially military-to-military. This is critical to lower the risk of miscalculation or misunderstanding and to reduce tensions," the Secretary-General added.

The UN chief noted that one of his priorities for 2018 is to achieve the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula "without sleepwalking our way into calamity."

He also said that he welcomed "the firm decisions the Security Council has taken in response to nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."

"They must be fully implemented," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 02:04:27|Editor: yan

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ADDIS ABABA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopia has rehabilitated 86,000 people displaced by conflict between Oromia and Somali regional states, an Ethiopian official said on Tuesday.

Speaking to journalists, Negeri Lencho, Minister of Ethiopia Government Communications Affairs Office (GCAO), said the displaced were rehabilitated with the help of federal and regional government organs.

He further said a total of around 40 million U.S. dollars has been collected from state and private entities to rehabilitate the displaced.

"Federal and regional government officials are jointly working to calm the conflict and bring perpetrators to justice," said Lencho.

Oromia and Somali regional states have been locked in a dispute over the delineation of their common boundary for almost two decades.

A referendum in October 2004 was supposed to demarcate the boundary, but its implementation has been stalled with both sides accusing each other of non-compliance with the referendum results.

Fierce clashes along the Oromia-Somali boundary since September has escalated into ethnic violence, leaving scores of people dead and hundreds of thousands displaced.

The unrest is fueling fears about security in Ethiopia, east Africa's biggest economy.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 02:09:27|Editor: yan

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ADDIS ABABA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The African Union (AU) has congratulated Bience Gawanas of Namibia, on her nomination to serve as the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Adviser on Africa.

The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, on Tuesday announced the appointment of Gawanas as Special Adviser on Africa, and she will succeed Maged Abdelaziz of Egypt.

The Chairperson of the AU Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, and his Deputy, Kwesi Quartey, together with the entire AU family have extended warmest congratulations to Gawanas on her nomination to serve at her position, according to an AU statement.

"I wish to warmly congratulate our sister Bience Gawanas for being appointed to this important position to which she brings her formidable continental experience as a former Commissioner of Social Affairs and as a legal scholar and an advocate for social justice and equity in her native Namibia," said Faki.

"Africa will be well served and we look forward to working with Ms Gawanas and the rest of the United Nations family to further our common agenda for Africa," he added.

Gawanas is currently Special Adviser to Namibia's Minister of Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare, and prior to this, she was Special Adviser to the Minister of Health and Social Services.

A champion of women's health and rights in Africa, she has been commended for her role in initiating far-reaching campaigns, such as the continental Campaign on Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa (CARMMA), recalled a UN statement released in connection with her appointment.

Gawanas has served as Commissioner for AU Social Affairs, whereby she was responsible for advocacy, as well as the harmonization and coordination of regional and continental policies and programs promoting social development.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 02:14:28|Editor: yan

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ADDIS ABABA, Jan. 16(Xinhua) -- Ethiopia's national flag carrier Ethiopian Airlines (ET) announced on Tuesday it had finalized shareholders agreement with the Zambian government to relaunch Zambia Airways.

Zambia has had no national airline since 1994, when its airline, Zambia Airways, was liquidated.

Tewolde Gebremariam, CEO of ET, said the launching of Zambia Airways will enable the travelling public in Zambia and the Southern African region to enjoy greater connectivity options.

He further said the agreement will facilitate the flow of investment, trade and tourism, and contribute to the socioeconomic growth of the country and the region.

ET expects the airline to initially serve national and regional destinations before embarking on international flights.

The expected budget for the first year is estimated at about 30 million U.S. dollars and the airline is expected to start operations this year.

The Government of Zambia will be the majority shareholder with 55 percent and ET will have 45 percent stakes in the airline.

Ethiopian Airlines currently operates and manages Malawi Airlines in southern Africa and ASKY airlines in western Africa.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 02:19:29|Editor: Yurou

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Founder and Chief Executive of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Klaus Schwab gestures at a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Jan. 16, 2018. Some 70 heads of state and government and 38 heads of international organizations will debate "creating a shared future in a fractured world" -- the theme of this year's World Economic Forum in Davos from Jan. 23 to Jan. 26. (Xinhua/Xu Jinquan)

GENEVA, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Founder and chief executive of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Klaus Schwab on Tuesday said after decades of prosperity, the global social contract is endangered.

Acknowledging an "unprecedented" global interest in the 48th WEF in Davos, Schwab said some 70 heads of state and government and 38 heads of international organizations would debate "creating a shared future in a fractured world" -- the theme of this year's forum from Jan. 23-26.

"Governments, business and civil society can't alone address the multifold challenges we have on the global agenda. We need collaboration," said Schwab.

"In my opening speech I will call for a qualitative easing," said Schwab, noting that at the time of the financial crisis ten years ago he said it would be followed by an economic crisis and then a "social crisis."

"We are moving out of the financial and economic crisis, but we are stuck in the social crisis," he added.

This year Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will open the forum, while U.S. President Donald Trump will close it, according to organizers.

Borge Brende, the president of the WEF, said, "The world is faced with some real systemic changes. In a multi-polar world the regions are important. Challenges can only be dealt with in a collaborative and multi-stakeholder way."

The forum will have 400 sessions with 3,000 participants and 12 Nobel laureates coming.
As the 2018 election cycle approaches, saturating airwaves and stuffing mailboxes with campaign advertisements, a Nebraska state senator is pushing for greater transparency and accountability for candidate-specific materials.

Introduced by Sen. Sue Crawford of Bellevue, LB839 reworks a bill she introduced last year requiring additional reporting by individuals and organizations buying ads and sending mailers that name specific candidates.

It would require any person who buys more than $250 of campaign commercials, flyers or other electioneering communication materials in the 60 days leading up to an election to report to the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission.

Details regarding who paid for the advertisement or mailer, how much was paid, how it was distributed and the subject targeted by it would be included in the report.

I think its an important issue for us to continue to refine and examine and push, Crawford said.

Last year, the Bellevue senator introduced a similar measure that would have required organizations purchasing campaign materials to disclose the name, address, occupation, employer, and principal place of business of each person who contributed.

That drew opposition from organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, who said the bill would have chilled the free speech of Nebraskans who wished to donate to political causes without fear of reprisal. The bill did not advance out of committee.

But Crawford took that debate from the Legislatures Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee and revised the bill, removing the requirements for organizations to report details about their donors.

The bill attempts to address key concerns the committee members raised, she said, So its my hope they will recognize that and recognize this as an important issue in terms of making sure our election laws are ones that encourage transparency and fair elections.

The call to pull back the curtain a little further on campaign spending began after three incumbent state senators were targeted by advertising campaigns originating beyond Nebraskas borders in 2016.

Former state Sens. Les Seiler of Hastings, Al Davis of Hyannis and Jerry Johnson of Wahoo said so-called dark money campaign materials lied about their voting records and distorted their activities within the Legislature.

For example, one ad stated Seiler had not been present for 75 percent of the hearings for the Judiciary Committee, the committee he chaired, when in fact he had missed only one meeting.

Jack Gould of Common Cause Nebraska said ads targeting Republican senators who had voted to override vetoes cast by Gov. Pete Ricketts were just the latest examples of why more transparency is necessary in the states campaign spending.

I think most of the public is sick and tired of the attack ads and the lies, Gould said. We pride ourselves on being a democracy, but if we allow people to run money through nonprofits and attack candidates without identifying themselves, we run the risk of becoming a plutocracy.

The concern is that wealthy people can run money through these kinds of groups without any accountability, tell lies, attack people and then win in the end by destroying things they dont particularly like, Gould added.

Americans for Prosperity said Crawfords latest bill continues to infringe upon free speech rights of organizations to communicate with the public regarding public policy and the issue positions of elected officials.

It is imperative in a representative democracy that the free exercise of political speech should not be infringed, said Brad Stevens, the regional director. LB839 is broadly written in a way that would not only ensnare organizations but also private individuals from freely expressing their opinions.

Crawford said the difference in this bill is that it does not require individuals who donate to organizations to be identified  only the organizations or individuals who purchase campaign ads targeting specific senators.

LB839 will go back before the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee for a hearing, although no date has been set.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 02:29:31|Editor: yan

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UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday emphasized the role of women in addressing today's global challenges and therefore the importance of empowerment of women and girls.

"Women's meaningful participation in peace and security has been proven to make peace more sustainable. Women's equal participation in the labor force and equal pay would unlock trillions of dollars for our economies," Guterres told an informal meeting of the UN General Assembly while presenting his priorities for 2018.

To achieve such gains, however, greater action is needed, he said.

Guterres asked to empower women and girls. "Power is the heart of the matter."

He noted that he had launched a roadmap for achieving gender parity at all levels of the United Nations and that the goal had been met in the 44 UN senior management sections.

Guterres asked for efforts to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse against women, noting that the United Nations' first ever Victims' Rights Advocate is in place, working closely with member states and across the United Nations system.

Some 82 member states are part of a voluntary compact to prevent these crimes and respond swiftly to allegations. Fifty-eight world leaders have committed themselves to a circle of leadership of the voluntary compact, he noted.

Guterres highlighted the importance of preventing and addressing sexual harassment. "I reiterate my personal commitment to eliminating sexual harassment from our organization."

"My zero-tolerance approach was recently reaffirmed in a joint letter with staff unions to all our personnel. I have also set up a task force to review UN policies and capacities to investigate, to ensure accountability, and to look at the support and protection offered to those affected. We are working on more detailed measures to simplify the procedures for reporting harassment and to raise awareness of this very serious issue throughout our organization."
A picture taken on May 5, 2017 shows the leading Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic during an interview for the AFP in his office in north Mitrovica. (AFP Photo)

MOSCOW, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Russian Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the assassination of Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic on Tuesday.

"This form of political point-scoring is fraught with an increase in an atmosphere of terror and a relapse of the interethnic conflict in the region," it said in a statement.

The ministry called on all international organizations to take comprehensive measures to prevent possible incidents in Kosovo.

Moscow expects relevant departments to conduct a thorough investigation of the murder and identify the perpetrators who will bear the punishment they deserve, the statement said.

Ivanovic, 64, one of the leaders of Serbs living in Kosovo, was shot dead in the city of Mitrovica earlier in the day.

The news of the assassination instantly shook Serbia, which considers Kosovo as its autonomous province and does not recognize its independence unilaterally declared in 2008.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic convened an urgent meeting of the National Security Council and said that his country will take all measures to find the killers.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 02:54:40|Editor: Yurou

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ROME, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Austria won't make any unilateral decisions to offer double passports to German-speaking Italians, ANSA news agency reported Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano as saying Tuesday.

The minister's remarks came after he met in Rome with his Austrian counterpart, Karin Kneissl. The meeting was called after the newly elected government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz sparked tensions with Italy last December, when it suggested it would offer double passports to German-speaking residents of the northern Italian province of Alto Adige, which borders on Austria.

The proposal sparked alarm in Italy over what is being seen as an attempt to sow division in the ethnically diverse province.

Kneissl told reporters that offering Austrian citizenship to German-speaking Italians "is part of the Austrian government's package", but that any such measure would be taken "while taking all parties into account" and that it would require "a long juridical process".

On Monday, Alfano reiterated that Italy's position remains "the historic one", i.e., full recognition of a 1946 agreement concerning Alto Adige.

The 1946 accord "underlies Alto Adige's autonomous status, which is a universally appreciated example of peaceful coexistence and economic development between different language groups," Alfano said.

The bilateral agreement signed in the wake of World War II guaranteed equal rights to German speakers living in the Italian border province, which had been invaded by the Nazis and which had been subjected to strict "Italianization" policies under the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, with Germans forbidden to speak their language and being forced to change their names to Italian names.

Kurz, aged just 31, leads the conservative Austrian People's Party and is governing in coalition with the far-right, anti-immigrant and eurosceptic Freedom Party.

The new young chancellor in December sought to downplay the tensions, saying the double passport plan would only be implemented "in close cooperation with Italy and the Rome government", ANSA cited Kurz as saying.

He reportedly added that the double passport proposal was made based on requests from provincial authorities in Alto Adige, which is also known by its German name, South Tyrol.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 02:59:42|Editor: yan

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ROME, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Italian wines as well as design products will be showcased together at the next Design Shanghai trade fair in a "collective house" curated by architect Mauro Felice, the Italian foreign ministry said in a statement.

The next edition of what has become the leading Asian design fair takes place March 14-17 at the Shanghai Exhibition Center.

The Italy house will showcase leading interior design and furniture brands from the Mediterranean country, according to the Italian foreign ministry.

A special place will be reserved for wine, with a Vinitaly Lounge and a preview night dedicated exclusively to Italy's wines.

"The blend of two distinctive Italian elements such as design and wine will create the right perception of our national brand," said Giovanni Mantovani, the director-general of Veronafiere SpA, a trade fair organizer specializing in the promotion of Italian products.

"The Chinese market is still a 'promised land' for Italy," Mantovani said, adding that Italian wines hold only a 5.7 percent share of that market.

As far as the design sector, sales in China of Italian furniture and other design products have risen 50 percent over the past five years, and the sector is expected to expand by another 20 percent in the coming decade, according to Italian Ambassador to Beijing Ettore Francesco Sequi.

In the first ten months of 2017, total Italian exports to China exceeded the overall number for 2016 at over 11 billion euros (13.5 billion U.S. dollars), according to Italy's ISTAT statistics agency.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 03:09:46|Editor: yan

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MOSCOW, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Russia's largest airline Aeroflot will not resume direct flights to Cairo until the end of February, its CEO Vitaly Saveliev said Tuesday.

A security protocol between Russian and Egyptian authorities needs to be signed before tickets go on sale, Saveliev told local media, saying that Aeroflot may reopen the air route at the end of February if all documents are ready.

Egypt aims to resume Moscow-Cairo direct air service on Feb. 1 following more than two years of suspension due to a plane crash.

On Oct. 31, 2015, a Russian airplane bound for St. Petersburg crashed over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula shortly after taking off from the Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh. All 224 people on board were killed.

Moscow said that the airliner was hit by a terrorist bomb attack and suspended all direct flights between the two countries.

Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to resume direct flights to Cairo after Egypt stepped up security measures.

The first flight will likely be launched in February, Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov said in Moscow last month following a meeting with visiting Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 03:29:51|Editor: yan

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KIGALI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Rwandan President Paul Kagame said on Tuesday Rwanda will be more focused on African integration than ever before as it is expected to take over the rotating chair of the African Union (AU).

"We look forward to working closely with our brothers and sisters across the continent to make progress," Kagame said at a annual luncheon with envoys accredited to Rwanda in Kigali, the capital.

He said this will enable Africans to do business with each other, invest and partner with the rest of the world.

Kagame pointed to Rwanda's new visa on arrival policy as one of the initiatives to foster integration. Rwanda has opened its border to visitors from every nation in the world who are now eligible for visas on arrival, he said.

Meanwhile, he pointed out that opening up will require the country to be more vigilant and to establish systems that are efficient and effective so that nothing undesirable takes advantage of it.

Kagame, who leads the AU institutional reforms process, also said the institutional and financial reforms of AU is on track.

In 2016, African leaders decided that Institutional Reforms of AU were urgent and necessary given the role the AU is expected to play in driving and achieving Africa's Agenda 2063 vision of inclusive economic growth and development.

The reforms aim to transform Africa's continental organization and accelerate, reinforce and ensure service delivery to the African citizenry, with a special emphasis on pan-African values of unity, solidarity, freedom and equality.

"The changes being implemented are critical for Africa's future. One of the outcomes of the reform will be stronger, more productive partnerships between Africa and other continents," said the president at the luncheon.

He also wished the diplomats success in their work in Rwanda.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 03:44:55|Editor: yan

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KIEV, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Ukrainian Health Ministry on Tuesday reported an outbreak of measles disease in all but four Ukrainian regions.

A total of 1,285 Ukrainians, including 856 children, have been diagnosed with measles since the start of this year, the ministry said in a statement.

A five-year-old child has died of complications caused by measles in the southern Odessa region, the ministry said.

The highest number of measles cases was registered in three regions in western Ukraine.

The health authorities blamed the low level of immunization for the outbreak of the disease.

Last year, there were 4,782 cases of measles in Ukraine, including five deaths caused by the disease.
The Metrojet's Airbus A-321 with registration number EI-ETJ that crashed in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, is seen in this picture taken in Antalya, Turkey September 17, 2015. (Reuters Photo)

MOSCOW, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Russia's largest airline Aeroflot will not resume direct flights to Cairo until the end of February, its CEO Vitaly Saveliev said Tuesday.

A security protocol between Russian and Egyptian authorities needs to be signed before tickets go on sale, Saveliev told local media, saying that Aeroflot may reopen the air route at the end of February if all documents are ready.

Egypt aims to resume Moscow-Cairo direct air service on Feb. 1 following more than two years of suspension due to a plane crash.

On Oct. 31, 2015, a Russian airplane bound for St. Petersburg crashed over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula shortly after taking off from the Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh. All 224 people on board were killed.

Moscow said that the airliner was hit by a terrorist bomb attack and suspended all direct flights between the two countries.

Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to resume direct flights to Cairo after Egypt stepped up security measures.

The first flight will likely be launched in February, Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov said in Moscow last month following a meeting with visiting Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 04:30:05|Editor: Lu Hui

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DAMASCUS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The Turkish army is beefing up military presence amid high-security alert near the Syrian border Tuesday evening, just as Ankara is bracing to attack a Kurdish-held region in northern Syria, pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV reported.

Reinforcements of the Turkish forces kept arriving at a Turkish border region near the Kurdish-held Afrin region in the northern province of Aleppo, said the report.

It added that high-security alert was noticed on the Turkish side of the border near the Kurdish-controlled Ayn al-Arab, or Kobane, in another part of the northern countryside of Aleppo.

The military tension comes hours after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the military campaign against the Kurdish forces in Afrin will be supported by Turkey-backed Syrian rebels, according to the report.

The Turkish president also vowed to eliminate a 30,000-strong security forces which are being currently formed by the United States in Kurdish-held areas in northeastern Syria.

Erdogan branded the new U.S.-backed army as a "terrorist army," the latest escalation of tension with Washington over the thorny Kurdish issue in Syria.

Erdogan's government has for long opposed the growing influence of the Kurds in northern Syria, fearing any separatist sentiment could inspire Turkey's 14 million Kurds.

The Turkish leader also vowed to eliminate the Kurdish threat in northern Syria through an anticipated military campaign in Afrin.

In his speech Tuesday, Erdogan urged NATO to take a stand on U.S.-backed Syrian border forces, which would be created from the Kurdish-dominated People's Protection Units (YPG), which is regarded as a terror group by Turkey.

"I would like to call upon NATO ..., you have to take actions against the ones who threaten the border security of your allies," he said.

On Sunday, reports cited the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition as saying that the U.S. is working to form a 30,000-strong border security force, which will be under the command of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurds, Arabs, and Assyrians supported by the U.S. in northern Syria.

The force will be deployed in northeastern Syria along the border with both Turkey and Iraq, a move that was met with vehement condemnation from the Syrian government and its Russian ally, as well as Turkey.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry slammed the decision on Monday, saying the U.S. bid to form an armed militia in northern Syria is "a flagrant violation of Syria's sovereignty."

The U.S. declaration "constitutes a flagrant aggression on the unity and sovereignty of Syria and a violation of the international law," the ministry said, vowing Syrian government's resolve to end the U.S. presence in the war-torn country.

Russia, Syrian government's main international ally, expressed fears that the United States is "pursuing a policy to cut Syria into several pieces."

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday that the United States does not intend to preserve Syria's sovereignty, accusing Washington of seeking to create a Kurdish-controlled entity along the Turkish and Iraqi border zones.
File Photo: Flowers and U.S.flags are placed on a plate on which the names of 9/11 victims were inscribed around the South Pool at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York, the United States, on Sept. 11, 2017. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Three quarters of all those convicted of international terrorism or related offense in the United States since 2001 were foreign born, a government report found Tuesday.

"This report is a clear reminder of why we cannot continue to rely on immigration policy based on pre-9/11 thinking that leaves us woefully vulnerable to foreign-born terrorists," Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said.

The report, jointly released by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice (DOJ), also indicated that law enforcement removed 1716 aliens with national security concerns from the United States from 2001 to 2016, and has identified 2554 people on the terrorist watch list who were traveling to the United States.

Of the 549 individuals convicted of terrorism related crimes between 2001 and 2016, 254 were not U.S. citizens and 148 were foreign born U.S. citizens, the report said.

The findings of the report supported U.S. President Donald Trump's position that current immigration policy is undermining national security, according the the DOJ and the White House.

"This report reveals an indisputable sobering reality - our immigration system has undermined our national security and public safety," said Attorney General Sessions.

The report was conducted on the orders of Trump, who in one of his first executive orders requested U.S. law enforcement to step up border control in order to enhance national security.
Uber can pinpoint exactly where drivers need to pick up passengers. Facebook knows when users travel to new cities and what places their friends have visited there. Google can tell drivers where they're headed and how long their journey will take before they even put the car in gear.

But in 2018, even the smartest of smartphones needs help telling a 911 center the caller's location.

Four of every five 911 calls made in Nebraska are on cellphones, and finding where an emergency is happening remains a vital priority, according to public safety officials.

"(It's) not nearly as precise as people are led to believe from movies," Lincoln Public Safety Director Tom Casady said. "And not nearly as precise as theyre led to believe from the apps that they use every day on their phone."

This technological disconnect has consequences.

The family of a woman who died of an asthma attack filed claims against the City of Omaha and Douglas County last fall, accusing the 911 center of failing to locate her when she called for help last May.

The woman repeatedly gave the county's 911 center the wrong address, and dispatchers took an hour to pinpoint her exact Benson neighborhood address after finally calling her cellphone provider and asking for subscriber information, the Omaha World-Herald reported.

Public safety officials say the bridge for this gap is coming, as Nebraska and other states fundamentally transform the 50-year-old 911 system built for landline telephones to one capable of sending texts and photos.

"It will move that direction, but not at the speed of light, Casady said.

Since 911's adoption in 1968, governments have made tweaks to address location issues.

In the mid-2000s, Lancaster County installed blue-and-white reflective address signs at the entrances to rural driveways to help emergency responders find the right place.

Other neighboring counties followed suit, though the signs weren't always popular with residents.

The current method for routing cellphone calls to 911 centers emerged following telecommunications changes in the late 1990s, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

When a 911 call is placed on a cellphone, the call taker is informed which cellphone tower the call was routed from and its general location, Casady said. Only as the call goes on do call takers have the ability to triangulate the caller's location, a process that gives the call taker an approximate location with a confidence level up to 300 meters.

By contrast, a landline call to 911 automatically delivers subscriber address information to the 911 center, he said.

Cellphone calls to 911 in urban areas often pose the biggest trouble because of the imprecise call-locating resources available, Casady said.

Wireless calling to 911 centers has triggered plans to adopt a new system, referred to as Next Generation 911, said Ryan Wineteer of Aurora-based Hamilton Telecommunications.

Currently, the technology in 911 centers is incapable of receiving the detailed GPS data cellphone users can see when they open their mobile map applications, Casady said.

But efforts are underway to build the infrastructure for a Next Generation 911 system in Nebraska, said state 911 director Dave Sankey.

That system will be based on a Voice over Internet Protocol system, or Internet Calling.

The Nebraska Public Service Commission will create a statewide network where emergency calls are properly identified and routed to the closest 911 center. That network will allow for the transmission of more information than the current system, which is based on copper telephone wires, Sankey said.

Cell towers will still relay calls, but they will pass through the network to the 911 centers, which will remain locally controlled and operated, he said.

State Sen. Curt Friesen of Henderson has introduced a bill (LB993) that would create an advisory group of experts on the issue for the Public Service Commission.

That group would make recommendations on the system before the commission put out bids, which Sankey said could come as early as next fall.

His staff has already begun working on stitching together accurate GIS maps of city and county boundaries, law enforcement jurisdictions, fire districts, streets and home addresses to ensure 911 centers can identify and dispatch the right services to the right place, Sankey said.

"Were going to have to develop those GIS maps so there aren't any gaps or slivers, so that when somebody calls theyre not in one of those gray areas (where) the system cant identify where the caller is calling from, he said.

This system would provide significantly more accurate geographic coordinates for wireless callers, Sankey said.

Nebraska is in the middle of the pack nationally in building the 911 system of the future, Sankey said. Kansas and Iowa are a little farther along in the process, he said.

Until it arrives, 911 call takers will be reliant on callers relaying location information as best they can.

"Youd be surprised how often people dont know where theyre at, said Casady, adding that sometimes addresses are misheard or misidentified.

He remembers being impressed by the information cellphone calls provided when routing information debuted in 911 centers. Now the goal is precise information.

"The world has changed, and weve all changed with the current technology," Casady said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 05:50:21|Editor: yan

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KHARTOUM, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Sudan and Ethiopia on Tuesday agreed to deploy a joint force to secure their joint border and prevent any hostile activities against the two countries.

A conference on development of border relations between Sudan's Blue Nile State and Benishangul-Gumuz Region of Ethiopia concluded sessions Tuesday in Damazin, the capital city of Blue Nile State.

"The two sides agreed to secure the border ... to pave way for the work of other joint committees," Hussein Yassin Hamad, Blue Nile State Governor, said in a statement.

He further reiterated Sudan's commitment to protect peace and secure the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) near the Sudanese border.

Governor of Benishangul-Gumuz Region, Al-Shazali Hassan, for his part, vowed to prevent any activity hostile to Sudan.

"We will fight any manifestations of smuggling of goods and weapons across the borders," he said.

"We have agreed on deployment of joint forces between the Blue Nile State and the Benishangul-Gumuz Region as well as a civil administration conference between the two countries, particularly in border areas," he added.

Ethiopia is building the GERD in Benishangul-Gumuz Region near the Sudanese border, some 900 km northwest of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

The GERD, extending on an area of 1,800 square km, is scheduled to be completed in three years at a cost of around 4.7 billion U.S. dollars.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 05:55:22|Editor: yan

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RABAT, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Morocco attracted nearly 2.57 billion U.S. dollars of foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2017, up 12 percent from a year earlier, the foreign exchange regulator said Tuesday.

In 2016, FDI in Morocco declined 29 percent to 2.3 billion dollars after reaching 3.2 billion dollars in 2015, according to the United Nations Conference for Trade and Investment (UNCTAD).

Still, Morocco overtook its neighboring Maghreb nations including Algeria with FDI of 1.5 billion dollars, Tunisia, 958 million dollars, and Libya, 493 million dollars, UNCTAD statistics show.

In addition, tourism revenues in Morocco increased 5.4 percent to 5.7 billion dollars last year, while remittances from 4.5 million Moroccan expatriates rose 4.5 percent to nearly 7 billion dollars.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 06:00:23|Editor: yan

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UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Tuesday that the world has gone in reverse as peace remains elusive.

"I took office last year calling for us to make 2017 a year for peace. One year later, we must recognize that peace remains elusive," Guterres told an informal meeting at which he presented his priorities for 2018. "In fundamental ways, the world has gone in reverse."

Conflicts have deepened and new dangers have emerged; global anxieties about nuclear weapons are the highest since the Cold War; climate change is moving faster; inequalities are growing, he said. "We see horrific violations of human rights. Nationalism, racism and xenophobia are on the rise."

Those are all indications that the world needs greater unity and courage -- unity and courage to meet today's most urgent needs, to ease the fears of the people and set the world on track toward a better future, he said.

He listed 12 priorities for 2018, including globalization that benefits all, fight against climate change and terrorism, migration, and de-nuclearization. He highlighted one cross-cutting imperative: the empowerment of women.

The UN chief appealed for promotion of a true "new deal" for globalization that is fair for all.

"Poverty and inequality are not unavoidable, nor is the unequal distribution of the benefits of globalization," he said. "It's not by chance if eight individuals possess as much wealth as half the poorest population in the world."

The secretary-general called for enhanced ambition on climate action. He warned that commitments to the Paris Agreement on climate change are not enough to achieve the goal of limiting global temperature rise in this century below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, or even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In 2016, carbon dioxide emissions rebounded for the first time in three years, and the past five years were the hottest on record, he noted.

Guterres asked member states to take the advantage of human mobility, saying migration is a positive phenomenon that helps promote economic growth, reduce inequalities, and address demographic challenges.

The adoption of a global compact on migration is one of the priorities of the United Nations in 2018, he said.

Guterres emphasized the role of women in addressing today's global challenges and therefore the importance of empowerment of women and girls.

"Women's meaningful participation in peace and security has been proven to make peace more sustainable. Women's equal participation in the labor force and equal pay would unlock trillions of dollars for our economies," he said.

To achieve such gains, however, greater action is needed, particularly the empowerment of women and girls. "Power is the heart of the matter."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 06:25:30|Editor: yan

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PARIS, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- France registered 17 percent more asylum requests in 2017 compared to a year earlier, figures released by the interior ministry on Tuesday showed.

Last year, 100,412 people asked for refuge in France with lion share of the demands coming from Albania, followed by Afghanistan, Syria, Haiti and Sudan, according to the ministry's report.

Among all the registered claims, 36 percent was part of the Dublin Procedures. The mechanism set the principle that the first EU country a migrant or refugee entered was the one responsible for processing the asylum request.

If the person moved to another one, it be returned to the country of entry.

Facing "strong migration pressure," French President Emmanuel Macron earlier on Tuesday pledged "a new policy" based on "humanism, unconditional welcome and respect of asylum right."

"To everyone we must guarantee a dignified and human welcome. To all we must give a quick answer and a real chance to integrate," he stressed.

He proposed slashing the time to treat asylum requests to six months from 18. In addition, he offered additional 20,000 shelters for refugees and to take in a further 4,000 asylum seekers in 2018.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 06:30:30|Editor: yan

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MINSK, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- "Belarus is a peaceful European country acting as a donor of security and a platform for the regulation of a number of conflicts in the region," Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said Tuesday.

Receiving credentials of foreign ambassadors, Lukashenko said Belarusian proposals regarding various models of integration, joint actions against modern challenges and threats have more and more supporters among other states and international organizations.

The Belarusian leader said that the economy is always the foundation of stability, the guarantor of sovereignty and independence of any country. He stressed they had managed to overcome negative trends in the economy in 2017.

The president said Belarus has made important decisions to stimulate business and investment, entrepreneurship and innovative activities as well as has developed clear-cut rules for business.

"Nuclear energy and biotechnology are vigorously developing in Belarus. Unprecedented legal conditions for the IT industry have been created. Belarusian doctors provide high-quality services in neurosurgery, cardiology, oncology, transplantation and rehabilitation," he said.

This provides additional opportunities for strengthening ties with countries around the world, he said.

The Belarusian president received credentials of the ambassadors of Georgia, Egypt, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Columbia, Cuba, Malaysia, Malta, Nigeria, Tajikistan, Croatia.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 06:30:30|Editor: yan

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ABU DHABI, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- The participants of the ongoing 11th World Future Energy Summit showed that despite the global spread of solar powers, electric cars and waste management solutions, there is still room for innovation.

The summit, which runs through Thursday, expects over 30,000 professional visitors from across the globe, including manufacturers of renewable energy and clean tech products.

China's IT Electronics Eleventh Design and Research Institute Scientific and Technological Engineering Corporation Limited, which participates in the summit for the first time, showcases its photovoltaic (PV) Tree System.

"We developed an artificial tree out of plastic with solar panels on it," said Sun Zhong, the association dean of the company.

"The PV tree system consists of the PV power generation system and a bionic tree system. We have 30 branches across China and we want now to export the system to the world," he added.

Earlier in the day, the UAE Minister of Energy and Industry Suhail Al-Mazrouei hailed China as an important country regarding to the manufacturing of solar panels and cost reduction of solar energy and renewable energy.

According to the Abu Dhabi-based International Renewable Energy Agency, prices for PV modules have fallen by 81 percent since 2009.

The minister said the UAE, a major oil supplier with 99 percent of domestic energy needs based on oil and gas, aims to increase the share of clean energy from a near zero three years ago to 50 percent by 2050.

At the Japanese pavilion in the Abu Dhabi exhibition center, Mirai Inc. showcases its cleaning robot "which cleans solar panels autonomously and without using water."

Tomohiro Shimazaki, the firm's researcher of the robot development department, said "we started sales and we hope to find customers in the UAE."

Mirai claims that the cleaning effect of the robots is equal to manual cleaning and its Type 2 robot system can liberate 2,160 square meters of solar surface per hour from dust.

The UAE capital Abu Dhabi is home of Shams solar power station, one of the world's biggest solar power plants.

The UAE is also keen on developing its own clean tech solutions, instead of importing them.

On Monday, Abu Dhabi's government-controlled green energy entity Masdar unveiled its fully electrically powered "Eco-Bus," which was built by Masdar and UAE's Hailfat Industry.

The e-bus, with its lightweight aluminum body and rear batteries, will survive better in the high outdoor temperature in the summer months.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 06:35:31|Editor: yan

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JERUSALEM, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Israel is open to Chinese companies and expects more cooperation with Chinese firms in the field of transport infrastructure, said the Israeli Minister of Transport Yisrael Katz on Tuesday.

Israel has already signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with China and it is going very well, he told Xinhua at the scene for the test run of the Israeli first fast rail line, which links Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

In July 2012 when Katz visited China, the MoU was signed between China and Israel for the bilateral cooperation in the field of transportation infrastructure.

Katz said he has travelled on the high-speed train from Beijing to Tianjin and he was deeply impressed. Israel welcomes more Chinese companies to cooperate with Israeli partners in the sea, railways, the light rails and the sky afterwards, he added.

So far, Chinese companies have been involved in the construction of the projects such as the Tel Aviv light rail and Ashdod new port. When the Tel Aviv light rail project is put into operation, it is expected that the "Made in China" carriages will also run on the light rail.

Sources from the Ministry of Transport of Israel, the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv fast rail link via Ben Gurion airport will begin formal operation at the end of March this year. The trains will travel up to 160 km per hour and complete the 56 km journey between the two cities in 28 minutes.

Katz said about 4 to 5 million passengers are expected to take the fast trains per year at the beginning and then the number will go up, while the vehicle traffic for the roads between the cities are expected to go down by 10 percent.

The fast rail line project will cost around New Israeli Shekel 7 billion (about 2 billion U.S. dollars) when it is completed, according to reports of Israeli local media.

Reports said that only one track will be used with trains running every half an hour in each direction in the first experimental stage. When both tracks operate, there will be trains in each direction every 20 minutes in the second stage. In the future, the link will be able to operate six trains per hour in each direction at peak times.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 06:35:31|Editor: yan

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ROME, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Italian authorities warned a new model of pistol no larger than a credit card might be put on sale in Italy, according to Italian media on Tuesday.

The weapon was about 8.57 cm in length, 5.4 cm in height, and 1.27 cm thick, Ansa news agency reported citing a police report.

The warning came from the Interior Ministry's department of public security, which confirmed to Xinhua the circular was issued to all police headquarters on Dec. 9.

The notice urged police forces to keep an eye on the possible sales of the weapon in the country, and "to supply information on its possible movements or seizures."

So far, there were no signs the small weapon has been sold in Italy, the public security department told Xinhua. "The weapon is a single-shot .22 long handgun... and, when folded, it has a size similar to a credit card or a thin wallet," the circular warned.

"Due to its specific features, the foldable pistol does not look like a weapon, and can be carried around with absolute discretion," it also stated.

The public security department further warned that inscriptions such as name, calibre, and producer could "easily be erased or covered in order to disguise it as a small electronic device."

Such characteristics, and the fact that it could easily pass through security and anti-terrorism checks, put law enforcement authorities on alert.

A pistol of such size is indeed being produced by at least a U.S. firm, and distributed on the U.S. and other markets in 2017, according to the company's website.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 06:40:33|Editor: yan

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ROME, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Some 1,400 migrants and refugees were rescued in the last 24 hours in the central Mediterranean Sea, the Italian coast guard said on Tuesday.

At least two bodies were also found during the rescue operations, which involved two vessels from Italy's coast guard and finance police, a ship from the European Union (EU) naval mission EUNAVFOR MED and some non-profit groups.

The rescued people were sailing on board of seven inflatable rubber boats, one barge, and three smaller crafts, the coast guard said in a statement.

Overall, 11 missions were needed to find and bring to safety the migrants. It was not immediately clear to which ports in southern Italy they would be brought.

Since last year, and especially after a controversial agreement with Libyan authorities and militias, Italy has witnessed a sharp decrease in the number of arrivals by sea.

From Jan. 1 to Jan. 16, some 974 migrants and refugees reached the Italian coasts, compared to 2,393 registered in the same period of 2017, according to latest statistics by the interior ministry.

Overall, Italy received 119,247 migrants and refugees last year, and over 181,400 in 2016, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-01-17 06:55:35|Editor: yan

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QUITO, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Ecuador's former President, Rafael Correa, is officially leaving the ruling PAIS Alliance group on Tuesday, after a serious rift with his successor, Lenin Moreno, over the latter's policies.

Correa's departure was announced by lawmaker Gabriela Rivadeneira, former president of the National Assembly and a close ally to Correa.

Rivadeneira tweeted that Correa would present his departure from the PAIS Alliance to the office of the National Electoral Council in the central province of Los Rios.

Correa founded the PAIS Alliance in 2006 and led it to power to implement his political project, dubbed the "Citizen Revolution," focused on taking care of the poorest members of society.

Correa's decision, taken while he visits Ecuador, came a day after a court ratified President Moreno as the president of the PAIS Alliance.

Correa, who is currently living in Belgium, his wife's country of birth, has announced his intention to create a new political movement.
Said Al Barumi is following in the footsteps of his father, an engineer at a petroleum company in Oman, a Middle Eastern country on the Arabian Peninsula at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

The 25th-largest oil-producing country in the world, Oman, which is roughly 10 percent larger in geographic size than Nebraska, needs engineers who understand the inner workings of the rigs bobbing above the desert sands.

But Al Barumis path to become a mechanical engineer is dramatically different than that of his father. A junior at the University of Nebraska-Lincolns College of Engineering, Al Barumi is the first in his family to seek a college degree in the United States.

I love my life here, said Al Barumi, 22. Ive become more independent, Im socializing more, the people on campus are friendly and helpful. This feels like home. If Im going to graduate and go back home, an engineering degree is the best way to go.

Al Barumi is among a growing community of Omanis at NU, which now make up the third-largest population of international students enrolled across the university system.

Only China and India  traditional anchors for international students in Nebraska, as well as the U.S. at large  enrolled more students at NU this year, said Steven Duke, the university's assistant vice president for global strategy and international initiatives.

Last semester, there were 319 Omani students, roughly two-thirds of them male, enrolled across the university system, including 192 at UNL. That outpaces the numbers of students from Vietnam (142), Rwanda (112), Iran (95), South Korea (85) and Mexico (70).

Another 99 Omani students are enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Omaha this year, Duke said, while 25 mostly freshmen and sophomores are studying at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

NU leaders reached out to the Omani sultanate earlier this decade to partner on projects centered on water, agriculture and education. Around the same time as the so-called "Omani spring" in 2011, Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said began offering tuition subsidies for the country's best students to attend U.S. universities.

The sultan also agreed to provide students with funds to pay for a year of English language immersion, Duke said.

The blossoming relationship is evident in the data. No Omani students were reported in UNL's 2011 census, but by 2012, 14 students were enrolled in Lincoln.

By 2013, there were 58 Omani students at UNL. Over the next three years, that number grew to 85, then 142 and finally 173 at the beginning of the 2016-17 school year, UNL reported.

Duke said the Omani students view an American education, particularly at NU, as a privilege.

They have gone through a very competitive process in Oman to apply for this scholarship, so there is a lot of pressure to do well and go back to help build their country," he said.

Abdulmajeed Al Naabi, 21, a sophomore chemical engineering major who like Al Barumi wants to work in Omans oil and gas industry, said UNL has made him a better English speaker while also allowing him to work toward his career goals.

Where once the difference between his Arabic and English was as far as the earth and the moon, Al Naabi said he was able to get a job working in his dormitorys convenience store as a cashier. Getting outside of his comfort zone helped him bridge the language gap, meet new people, and begin to feel more at home in Lincoln.

Al Naabi has also worked to help mentor other students at UNL while also participating in Omani Night, an event put on by Omani students to show off their countrys culture and cuisine to Lincoln.

This is a good place to live, its a good place to study, he said. Its not expensive, its safe and there are solid educational offerings.

Duke said like Al Barumi and Al Naabi, most of the Omani students enrolled at NU are pursuing engineering degrees. Others are pursuing degrees in business, computer science, or geology and earth science  practical experiences in order to land steady jobs back home. The scholarship does not require them to return to their home country.

Musallam Mohammed Said Almashali is something of an outlier.

The UNO student is majoring in international studies  a passion he developed as a boy listening to family and friends discuss and argue politics and international news, despite his engineer fathers efforts to get him to follow suit.

I thought a lot about that, and finally, I found each person should do what he or she loves, he said. When you do something you love, you will succeed and inspire people.

Almashali said he hopes to one day return to Oman, which borders Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, as a policy analyst or adviser. He said he believes the skills hes learning in Nebraska will put him in a unique position to find employment.

Each of the three Omani students are the first in their families to attend college in the U.S., but each of them said they are also passing on word to friends and family back home about the state with roughly half the population as their home country.

At a college fair in the capital city of Muscat last year, Duke said NU recruiters spoke to more than 2,000 interested Omani students over a three-day period. Other American universities attracted only a trickle of students during that time, he added.

We were easily the most important American university there in terms of the number of students who wanted to speak with us, he said. Nebraska has brand recognition in Oman.
YAKIMA, Wash -- Its been nearly 50 years since the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed on a motel balcony in Memphis.
Jeff Parsons reaches out to his mother, Ann-Marie, at a hearing in Olympia. Her daughter Carrie was killed in the Las Vegas massacre. (Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)
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Lincoln Public Schools canceled Tuesday classes because of brutally cold weather. UNL didn't.

The National Weather Service expects temperatures in the city to max out around 10 degrees this afternoon, with a wind chill still below zero. But it could be 50 by Friday, meaning the temperature outside might feel a full 65 to 70 degrees warmer three days from now.

Almost all of Nebraska, including Lincoln, is under a wind-chill advisory through noon, and northern Nebraska is under a wind chill warning.

Lincoln's overnight low was minus 1. In Alliance, the actual temperature dipped to minus 21.

While many K-12 schools canceled classes, including those in Lincoln and Omaha, universities did not.

That led to a dichotomy of reactions on Twitter, where students lobbied furiously last week for a snow day, only for LPS to issue its surprise cold day this week instead. Students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, however, were left out in the cold (metaphorically speaking).

"Keeping students safe is our No. 1 priority," LPS superintendent Steve Joel said Monday night. "We are always prudent when considering valuable instructional time in our schools, but we are concerned about dangerous wind chills on Tuesday."

LPS student reactions

Nice make up call  Broc Homeyer (@b7_homey) January 16, 2018

Guys I took a shower, was outside grabbing something out of my car for 30sec, and my hair was frozen. Shoutout to @LPSorg for understanding how cold it is and calling off school.  gemma seevers (@gemma_fonzi) January 16, 2018

UNL student reactions

Editor's note: Several students posted screengrabs of maps showing their walks to class, but we'll respect their privacy by not reposting them here.

You asked for Frost, and you got it. Now you're complaining? pic.twitter.com/pe35QUwKTK  Harrison Popp (@Harrison_Popp) January 16, 2018
LB829 is the number assigned to my, Sen. Steve Erdmans, property tax relief bill. LB829 will allow tax payers to get a 50 percent credit or refund on that portion of their property tax bill which goes to fund public education when they file their Nebraska state income taxes. For most taxpayers, LB829 will result in a 30 percent reduction in their property taxes.

LB829 is necessary because property taxes in Nebraska have been running out of control. According to the Department of Numbers, Nebraskas real median household income remained stagnant near $57,000 between the years of 2005-2016. However, the per capita property tax burden rose from $1,150 in 2004 to $1,550 in 2011. Thats a difference of $400 or 25 percent within a time span of only seven years while household incomes remained steady. This year the median property tax bill in Nebraska is $2,164.

In recent years rural areas of our State have been hit particularly hard. For example, I live in Morrill County and according to the Nebraska Department of Property Assessment and Taxation the total amount of property taxes levied in Morrill County in 2006 was $7,390,027, but by 2016 that number had climbed to $17,569,558. Thats an average increase of more than $1 million per year in a county with only 5,042 residents, according to the 2010 Census. So, property taxes have been rising at an alarming rate while median household incomes have remained stagnant.

Recently, an editorial appeared in the Omaha World Herald challenging the constitutionality of LB829. The editorial criticized my bill by claiming that the Nebraska Constitution gives no authority to the Legislature to commute taxes or release taxpayers from their duty to pay taxes. But, this criticism of LB829 is wrong.

The proposition that the legislature lacks the authority to release taxpayers from their duty to pay taxes ignores what LB829 actually says. LB829 does not release taxpayers from paying their property taxes; all taxpayers will pay their property taxes the same as before. What LB829 does, however, is offer a credit or a refund to taxpayers on a portion of their property taxes which goes to fund public education. So, I welcome my opposition to challenge my bill in court.

The legislature has the power to change the way people get taxed. If the assertion made by these editors of the Omaha World Herald was ever deemed to be true, then wouldnt the TIF laws all be declared unconstitutional? Furthermore, if this criticism of my bill was ever sustained by the courts, then there would be no recourse for the Legislature to ever get rid of a bad tax.

Contrary to the editorial, I believe the Legislature has the authority to correct these kinds of wrongs. I also believe that the citizens of our state form our states Second Legislative House. As our states Second Legislative House, the citizens have the right to decide for themselves how they should get taxed through a provision made in the Nebraska State Constitution known as the citizen led initiative. This year you will have the opportunity to sign our petition to put this measure on the November ballot.

The editorial in the Omaha World Herald went on to challenge LB829 again, but this time it did so on the grounds of violating the Constitutions equal protection and due process provisions. The editorial criticized LB829 because only those who file a Nebraska state income tax return would be able to benefit from the income tax credit or refund offered by the bill. But this criticism, too, is wrong.

This second criticism lodged against LB829 ignores the fact that all laws discriminate to some degree. For instance, speed limit laws discriminate against speeders as well as against those who dont own automobiles. Just as our speed limit laws do not obligate the state to provide motorists with vehicles, so also my tax relief bill is not obligated to provide property tax relief for those who do not file a Nebraska state income tax return.

The truth about the 14th Amendment is that the Equal Protection Clause simply requires lawmakers to provide a good reason or a rationale for the law being proposed. Consequently, the justification I am proposing for LB829 is that property taxes have been rising at a much faster pace than average household incomes. The burden of continuously rising property taxes has now become unbearable for far too many property owners, and I believe that is ample justification for the legislature to pass my bill.
I recently attended a market update meeting hosted by a Nebraska bank featuring Steve Knuth, CEO of AgWest who started off the meeting by addressing the piles of corn that heaped up over the 2017 harvest all across the Midwest, We are just setting on a mountain of corn. . . . No one is worried about running out of the stuff.

One farmer from the audience directed some of the over-production problems to ag input companies, Our price of corn keeps going down (in the market) and bushels per acre are going up with all the things they are developing with seed corn . . . And, the research of these companies is worldwide.

Knuth understood this global conundrum and said while global demand is on the rise so is worldwide production, World soybean demand is up 133 percent in the past 20 years. World corn demand has doubled in the past 20 years. Corn to ethanol is at 100 to 110 million bushels per week with 38 percent of this years corn crop destined to ethanol. However, worldwide production capacity has outpaced demand in recent years. From 2000 to 2016, corn global acreage is up 32 percent with global yield per acre up 30 percent. Soybeans global acreage is up 69 percent with global yield per acre up 24 percent.

Acreage plus technology equals overcapacity, Knuth noted. U.S. corn bushels at 2.4 billion is the largest in 20-plus years. . . . We are now at a 17.2 percent stocks-to-use on corn. . . . Last time it was 17 percent stocks-to-use was 12 years ago when the average annual price of corn was below $2 a bushel. The corn weekly continuation is at the $3 to $4.50 range until something changes. . . I believe the $3 futures price is a real potential risk number.

Sharing numbers he sourced from Cargill, Knuth added that a shocking 80 percent of the grain gets sold in the bottom third of the U.S. market each year. At the end of the presentation, Knuth said, Global over-capacity continues to be a problem and the market seems to only be offering one decent opportunity a year.

I write about new perspectives in agriculture because I have grown weary reporting about the above scenario since I began covering farm issues more than a decade ago. There is the above scenario and the constant attempt to squeeze into a very small window of opportunity on a very limited spreadsheet of options or there are other ways to look at diversifying the farm and ranch portfolio. Some producers are going to extreme measures, such as completely looking at ways to farm without the bank. Others are adding more livestock back to the farm, growing new specialty crops and creating direct-market opportunities. Still others are looking at their practices and implementing new ways to reduce inputs while regenerating soils.

I do not make light of how tough things look. But, in times of pressure, I pray for more creativity in how we define our purpose in life. We can all get stuck in a rut. My main passion is to help farmers and ranchers see they have a right to control their own destiny. That destiny may look entirely different if we are going to break out of the scenario above. There are some agriculturists changing like wildfire. I do not position stories about these people changing to create jealousy or division. I share them to spark inspiration. The world is changing and the same old story isnt going to be the same anymore. Since global corporations, politicians and a host of other institutions and factors we cannot control dont step onto our farms and ranches every day, we should consider what we have the ability to rein back under our own control. We can do this. We have the right to do this  if its your farm, you have the freedom to farm it. Take that freedom back through what you purchase and what you dream the purpose of that farm and ranch is for your family.

You may decide your farm and ranch should look entirely different tomorrow than it does today and thats okay. There has to be a more innovative, entrepreneurial way than one decent market opportunity a year. The nation deserves better than being sold off to multinational interests. If we rethink some of the current system, farmers and ranchers can be price makers, not takers. You deserve better.
YORK  Lieutenant Governor Mike Foley visited York as part of a statewide media tour in which he and Governor Pete Ricketts are promoting tax reform and cutting spending while revenues are down.

The governors theme has always been Grow Nebraska, Foley said while in York. He is focused on economic development and recognizes that workforce is challenging and that tax reform has to happen. There will be no tax increases and spending cuts will have to be made.

Foley reiterated highlights of the governors State of the State address, including that the states unemployment rate is very low  at about 3 percent  and there was a population growth to 1.9 million people.

He outlined the governors successes found through trade missions which resulted in large business projects in the state (and the addition of jobs) and that government operations have been greatly streamlined through the cut of 2,000 government jobs.

And yes, there are budget shortfalls and tax relief continues to be a priority because thats what we constantly and consistently hear throughout the state. Real tax relief has to happen.

Foley explained that the governor is proposing a spending cut of 2 percent  across the board  for this fiscal year, to be followed by a 4 percent cut in the next fiscal year.

However, he wants K-12 education, corrections and child welfare programs to not be affected by cuts with some increased spending suggested for all three.

These three would be spared from cuts, with corrections receiving an additional $6 million for an expansion at the prison in Lincoln and $35 million to go to child welfare programs, Foley said.

He explained that the states growing issue with methamphetamine use has affected both the correctional and child welfare systems.

We are seeing more children being taken into custody due to the methamphetamine issues with their parents and they become wards of the state, Foley said. More spending has to take place in this area and with corrections, and we have to find solutions to this growing problem in Nebraska.

When it comes to the prison expansion, the proposed budget would include the money for adding a 100-bed unit which would house minimum custody beds in an effort to allow individuals to transition through the system and ultimately to the community. This would be an ongoing effort to focus on reentry, rehabilitation and preparation of individuals to be ready for parole when they are eligible. And it is recognized that to effectively manage the population, capacity also has to be expanded.

Going back to tax reform, Foley repeated Ricketts mantra that cutting and reforming taxes is key to growing Nebraska. The proposed Property Tax Cuts and Opportunity Act would restructure existing property tax credits providing a new refundable credit on state taxes. The bill would provide a permanent reduction in the states individual and corporate income tax rates.

The current tax rate for individuals is 6.84 percent and the corporate rate is 7.81 percent. Under this proposal, Foley said, top income rates would lower over the next two years to 6.69 percent for all income earned over $100,000 in 2020. The corporate rate (paid on income of more than $100,000) would drop from 7.81 percent to 6.75 percent in 2019 and then to 6.69 percent in 2020.

Foley said all Nebraskans need to keep more of their hard-earned money and tax relief would also attract more people to live and do business in Nebraska.

And that leads to the discussion about the states very low unemployment rate  which is a success yet a challenge when it comes to finding enough qualified people to fill the jobs that are already available as well as those that could be created.

It is being proposed that $10 million over a 2-year span be committed to bolster state workforce development programming.

This entire legislation session will revolve around the budget, state spending and tax relief, Lt. Governor Foley said. The governors budget plan brings balance and all of this can be achieved.
The tobacco industry lies. And finally, they have to do something about it.

Starting in November, Big Tobacco had to shell out their own big bucks to buy ads in select newspapers nationwide and on prime time national television telling the truth about the dangers of their products.

They didnt do it out of the goodness of their hearts. In fact, they fought it for more than a decade after a judge found they mounted a coordinated, well-financed, sophisticated public relations campaign to attack and distort the scientific evidence demonstrating the relationship between smoking and disease, claiming that the link between the two was still an open question.

Thats a quote from Judge Gladys Kesslers findings from USA v. Philip Morris, when she found the tobacco companies had violated civil racketeering laws and defrauded the American people, 11 years ago.

Now, after wrangling over wording for a decade, finally the ads are running. We can see them here in Nebraska every week over the next year on prime time television. They are plain and jarring. The language is clear. You wont mistake them for a sales pitch.

These ads are an important step forward to undo the damage this deceitful, manipulative industry has caused nationwide and right here at home.

Each year in Nebraska, 900 kids become new daily smokers, and 2,500 Nebraskans die from smoking. Smoking is the No. 1 cause of preventable death and is attributed to 27 percent of all cancer deaths annually in the state. Annual health care costs associated with smoking add up to $795 million each year, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Yet, the industry continues to spend an estimated $58.8 million here in Nebraska marketing these deadly products and continues to fight every piece of legislation they know will effectively reduce tobacco use, save the state money and save lives.

We have to undo damage the tobacco industry has done. We cant save those who died or spare their families that pain, but we can help Nebraskans quit or, better yet, never start using tobacco at all.

By significantly increasing taxes on cigarettes, cigars, little cigars, smokeless tobacco and all other tobacco products, lawmakers can work to undo the decades of death and deceit by saving lives, reducing health care costs and generating much-needed revenue to help fund tobacco control programs and unmet health care needs. Evidence clearly shows that raising tobacco prices through regular and significant tax rate increases encourages people who use tobacco to quit or cut down and prevents kids from ever using the deadly product.

Heres where you come in. My organization and others like it are challenging Nebraska lawmakers to raise the tobacco tax by $1.50 per pack of cigarettes and raise the tax on other tobacco products to an equivalent amount. We need the public to understand why and to talk to our lawmakers about supporting this idea.

The ads tobacco companies are running are an important victory for public health, but the reality is the industry continues to deceive and manipulate the American people in order to bring in more lifelong customers. Keeping tobacco cheap attracts young, new customers and makes it difficult for those already addicted to quit. Thats why they try to stop any attempt to significantly increase tobacco taxes. We should expect them to mount a vigorous defense against this proposal.

Dont believe the industrys lies about their products or the impact these proven public health policies will have. These corrective statements show theyre certainly not an industry with a history of telling Americans the truth. The research shows: increasing the tobacco tax saves lives, reduces health care costs and produces revenue for the state.

Our children shouldnt be the replacement smokers Big Tobacco has admittedly depended on. Lets protect our kids by raising the tobacco tax.
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- The report of the fact-finding mission to Schengen hopefuls Romania and Bulgaria, which will be presented on Wednesday in Brussels, is "highly positive" for Romania, government sources said on Tuesday, adding that the Netherlands did not send experts on ground that this assessment mission "was not

- Education is the foundation of the development of democratic societies, the essential premise for the modernization and evolution of nations towards an increasingly prosperous standard of living, President Klaus Iohannis said on Wednesday, in his message sent by the State Councilor Catalina Galer

- President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday welcomed visiting Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, with military honours. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help your friends know

- The Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) admitted, on Wednesday, the referral of President Klaus Iohannis in connection with the law allowing administrative-territorial units to purchase agricultural land outside the city in a simplified procedure, CCR officials stated for AGERPRES. Fii la

- President Klaus Iohannis participated on Tuesday in a videoconference with European Council President Charles Michel and a group of European leaders as a preparation stage for the meetings to take place on Thursday and Friday in Prague. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste

- President Klaus Iohannis said, on Tuesday, that the UN Human Rights system must be strengthened and indicated that Romania submitted its candidacy for a seat in the Human Rights Council, for the 2023-2025 tenure. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook

- President Klaus Iohannis will lead the Romanian delegation that will participate in the high-level segment of the 77th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, on Tuesday and Wednesday, in New York, the Presidential Administration informs. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri.

- Parliament will be illuminated, on Tuesday and Wednesday, in the colors of the Ukrainian flag - blue and yellow, to mark the National Flag Day and the Independence Day celebrated by the neighboring country, the Chamber of Deputies informed. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste
Stiri pe aceeasi tema

- President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday welcomed, at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, the ambassador of the Kingdom of Spain in Bucharest, Jose Antonio Hernandez Perez-Solorzano, who presented his letters of credence, with the two high officials reconfirming on the same occasion both parties' commitment

- President Klaus Iohannis will be participating on Tuesday in an international conference on Romanian female lawmakers and the promotion of gender equality as a national commitment (RO-GENC) organised by the Romanian Senate, where he will address the opening of the event together with President of

- The Prime Minister of the Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, on a working visit to our country, arrived on Wednesday afternoon at the Getica National Combined Training Center in Cincu, central Brasov County, being accompanied by President Klaus Iohannis. Fii la curent

- Education is the foundation of the development of democratic societies, the essential premise for the modernization and evolution of nations towards an increasingly prosperous standard of living, President Klaus Iohannis said on Wednesday, in his message sent by the State Councilor Catalina Galer

- President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday welcomed visiting Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, with military honours. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help your friends know

- President Klaus Iohannis and visiting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Wednesday will call on the Getica National Joint Training Centre at Cincu, Brasov County. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help your friends

- The Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) postponed for Wednesday, October 26, the debates on President Klaus Iohannis' notification on the Aquaculture Law. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help your friends know

- President Klaus Iohannis will lead the Romanian delegation that will participate in the high-level segment of the 77th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, on Tuesday and Wednesday, in New York, the Presidential Administration informs. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri.
Stiri pe aceeasi tema

- President Klaus Iohannis will participate, November 7-8, in the Climate Implementation Summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, as part of the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27), the Presidential Administration reported on Friday, told Agerpres.

- President Klaus Iohannis has convened the meeting of the Supreme Council for the Country's Defense (CSAT), which will take place on Tuesday, starting at 14:00, at the Cotroceni Palace, a release by the Presidential Administration from 11 October reads, told Agerpres. Fii la curent cu cele

- Salome Zourabichvili, the President of Georgia, will be received, on Tuesday, at the Cotroceni Palace by the President Klaus Iohannis, on the occasion of her official visit to Romania. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro 

- Salome Zourabichvili, the President of Georgia, will be received on Tuesday at the Cotroceni Palace by President Klaus Iohannis, on the occasion of her official visit to Romania. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri. Urmareste stiripesurse.ro pe Facebook stiripesurse.ro  Help

- President Klaus Iohannis will lead the Romanian delegation that will participate in the high-level segment of the 77th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, on Tuesday and Wednesday, in New York, the Presidential Administration informs. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri.

- President Klaus Iohannis signed, on Tuesday, the Condolence Book opened in memory of Queen Elizabeth II at the residence of the ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Romania, the Presidential Administration announced. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri.

- President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday will sign the condolence book opened in memory of Queen Elizabeth II at the residence of the ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to Romania, the Presidential Administration announced. Fii la curent cu cele mai noi stiri.

- The Bookfest Fair in Chisinau is an expression of the common cultural and linguistic space, a materialization of the European aspirations of the Romanians on both sides of the Prut River, President Klaus Iohannis said on Wednesday in the message sent on the occasion of the opening of the 5th edition
ISLAMABAD: More than 1,800 Pakistani Muslim clerics have issued an Islamic directive, or fatwa, forbidding suicide bombings, in a book unveiled by the government on Tuesday.

For years, the South Asian nation has been plagued by violence by Islamist militants, who often use suicide bombers and preach that their struggle is a holy war to impose Islamic rule.

Suicide attacks are frequently condemned as fanatical and immoral, especially when civilians are killed, but insurgents view the tactic as their most effective weapon.

Seeking to curb "terrorism" that has resulted in tens of thousands of casualties since the early 2000s, the clerics declared suicide bombings to be forbidden, or "haraam".

"This fatwa provides a strong base for the stability of a moderate Islamic society," Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain wrote in the book, prepared by the state-run International Islamic University and released at an official ceremony.

"We can seek guidance from this fatwa for building a national narrative in order to curb extremism, in keeping with the golden principles of Islam."

Foreign and domestic critics of Pakistan`s government and military accuse them of cozying up to radical groups for political and military purposes and say the state has turned a blind eye to hate preachers in mosques for too long.

The fatwa was ratified by a number of prominent clerics who are outspoken critics of liberalism and the West, and are seen as controversial for preaching sectarianism or supporting the Afghan Taliban.

One of the clerics who signed, Muhammad Ahmed Ludhianvi, is the face of a banned sectarian organisation, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamat (ASWJ), and has been placed on a Pakistani legislative list of individuals with suspected links to "terrorism".

The ASWJ figurehead, Aurangzeb Farooqi, attended the signing ceremony.

Another signatory, Hamid-ul-Haq, is the son of a cleric widely regarded as the "Father of the Afghan Taliban" after many prominent militants, including Taliban founder Mullah Mohammed Omar, were found to have graduated from his seminary in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Pakistani officials deny frequent U.S. allegations about collaborating with militant Islamist proxies in Afghanistan and India, and say vast gains have been made over the past decade against militant outfits such as the Pakistani Taliban.

But privately they also warn any moves against some popular hardline groups based in Pakistan would take a long time and need to be undertaken carefully.

Similar anti-suicide bombing fatwas appear to have yielded scant results in the Middle East, where the practice is used by Islamic State and other militant groups.

The Pakistani scholars, who declared that "no individual or group has the authority to declare and wage jihad (holy war)", said suicide bombings violate key Islamic teachings and, as such, were forbidden.
Gaya: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday asserted that his government was committed to providing basic amenities such as toilet, power connection and safe drinking water to every household and added that the top priority would be given to those places with a higher concentration of SCs and STs.

Besides, the government would also ensure that every locality in the state had "pucca" (metallic) roads and a drainage system, he said.

The JD(U) chief made it clear that while all households and localities would be provided with these facilities, the "top priority" would be accorded to those areas that had a higher population of members of scheduled caste (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) communities.

He was addressing a public meeting at a village in the Tekari block of the district, where he launched the fifth phase of his statewide "Vikas Samiksha Yatra" (tour to review the progress of the development plans on the ground).

At the meeting, Kumar also inaugurated and laid foundation stones for 225 schemes, worth Rs 506 crore.

He also cautioned the people against the "mischief- mongers, who may try to provoke you by saying -- look, other localities are getting the benefits, while yours is left out".

The chief minister's statement came in the backdrop of a January 12 incident at Buxar, where stones were hurled at his cavalcade reportedly by a group of Dalits who wanted to draw his attention towards the lack of amenities in their localities.

The ruling JD(U)-BJP combine in the state has charged the RJD with "using the Dalits" to cause disruptions at Kumar's function, while the opposition party has criticised the government for arresting people in connection with the incident, "instead of listening to the Dalits' grievances".

"Providing these amenities is a part of our 'Saat Nishchay' (seven resolves) programme. It was a daunting task which no big, centralised scheme could achieve.

"Hence, we involved the panchayats and urban local bodies and asked them to target two-three wards under their jurisdiction in a year, with the localities having a greater population of SCs and STs being accorded the top priority", the chief minister said.

"This way, we will cover every nook and corner of the state in four years. But this can not be ensured if I remain in Patna. Hence, I embark on such tours and will continue to do so," he said in an oblique reference to the RJD leaders.

It maybe recalled that former deputy chief minister and current Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly Tejashwi Yadav had belittled Kumar's frequent yatras.

Reiterating his government's commitment to ensuring development with justice and introducing social reforms, "without which the fruits of progress cannot reach all", Kumar exhorted the people to wholeheartedly take part in a statewide human chain to be formed on January 21.

The proposed human chain, meant to send across a message against dowry and child marriage, will be formed exactly a year after a similar initiative at the instance of the chief minister to affirm the state's commitment to the ban on sale and consumption of alcohol.
Mumbai: Padmaavat, a Sanjay Leela Bhansali directorial which was slated to hit theatres on December 1 last year will now release on January 25. The makers of the film, which has been in the eye of storm ever since it went on floors, issued a statement to announce the new release date a few days back.

The makers have clarified time and again that the film does not contain any objectionable scene. But Karni Sena is not convinced and has demanded a complete ban on the film.

Padmaavat was initially titled Padmavati. The makers agreed to incorporate the changes suggested by the Central Board of Film Certification. Five modifications were suggested and the film has been integrated accordingly.

The film stars Deepika Padukone (as Rani Padmavati), Shahid Kapoor (as Maharawal Ratan Singh) and Ranveer Singh (as Alauddin Khilji).

Padmaavat is way behind its actual release schedule but fans of the film are still eagerly looking forward to it. However, moviegoers in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Haryana will not be able to experience the visually captivating extravaganza as the film has been banned in these states.

As the film is just about 10 days away from its release, heres taking a look at the things to look forward to, from cinemas perspective:

Sanjay Leela Bhansalis work of art

Bhansali, who is known for creating a spectacle on celluloid by presenting a larger-than-life mise en scene, will now get a chance to display his work and narrate a tale based on Sufi poet Makik Muhammed Jayasis 1540 Awadhi poem  Padmavat which happens to be a piece of fiction. Bhansalis frame compositions look like paintings in motion. So we can expect another visually captivating piece of art of celluloid.

Deepika  Shahid  Ranveer: A lethal combination

The film has three big names on board. Since her Bollywood debut in 2007, Deepika has emerged as one of the most talented actors of the present time. With films like Cocktail, Piku and Bajirao Mastani to her credit, Deepika has proved she is here to play a very long innings.

Kaminey, Haider and Udta Punjab proved Shahid is an actor par excellence. He has mastered the art of getting into the skin of the character he essays on screen. Be it acting or dancing, Shahid has excelled as performer.

From Bittu, a boy-next-door in Band Baajaa Baarat to the invincible Maratha Peshwa in Bajirao Mastani, Ranveers cinematic journey has been nothing short of a beautiful dream. He has now become producers hot favourite, all thanks to his intriguing acting prowess.

And with the trio in Padmaavat, we can certainly expect jaw-dropping performances.

Melodious treat

Padmaavat may not have too many songs, but the couple of tracks that were unveiled by the makers have been a treat to the ears.
New Delhi: Superstar Salman Khan has some meaty roles to look forward to. The hunk of an actor is currently busy shooting for Race 3 which has him step into the shoes of Saif Ali Khan, who played the lead in first two parts of the franchise.

Salman will be again joining forces with Tiger Zinda Hai helmer Ali Abbas Zafar in Bharat. The film was announced a few days back when Sallu Bhai's brother-in-law Atul Agnihotri shared a picture on Twitter.

Now, the latest on Bharat will surprise you. According to DNA, the film captures the journey of the central character played by Salman from age of 18 to 70 and reportedly the actor will go back to his Maine Pyar Kiya days.

Filmmaker Ali Abbas Zafar told DNA, We have just locked the script. The idea is to make Salman look the way he appeared in Maine Pyar Kiya  from the time he began his career to now. But we will know how much we can achieve only after our complete research is done.

We are in talks with the prosthetics and VFX team of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. They had worked on the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Fan, too, adds Ali.

He further added, Hes such a good-looking man. He will work a little harder, as I keep pushing him to lose more weight and look younger. He can reduce weight and look 10 years younger within four weeks.

Bharat is scheduled to hit the screens on Eid 2019. The hunt for the leading lady is on and it will be interesting to see how bags the role opposite the Khan of all seasons.
CHENNAI: Three spectators of Jallikattu or bull taming sport were killed and several injured at different places in Tamil Nadu when bulls attacked them, according to reports reaching here.

In a village in Sivaganga district -- around 500 km from here -- two persons were killed when a bull attacked them on being released. Around 50 persons were injured in the attack.

Similarly, in a Jallikattu in Trichy district, around 350 km from here, one spectator was killed and several were injured in a bull`s attack.

Meanwhile, at Alanganallur in Madurai district, Jallikattu was jointly flagged off by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami and Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam.

Around 1,000 bulls and over 1,200 bull tamers participated in the event.

Jallikattu is Tamil Nadu`s traditional sport which is part of Pongal festivities.

The rules of the sport say that a bull tamer will be awarded a prize if he hangs on to the hump of the animal for a certain period of time.

The winning bull tamers and the owners of untamed bulls would be awarded prizes like cash, consumer durables, two wheelers and others.

This year, two cars has been added to the prize list for the Allanganallur event.

After mass protests last year against banning the sport, Jallikattu was held following the passing of an ordinance amending the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.

The first Jallikattu event of this year was held in Madurai on January 14.
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 FMCG products.

Patanjali is organising a function in New Delhi on Tuesday and representatives of all the online companies are expected to attend it along with founder Ramdev and its MD Acharya Balkrishna.

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.

These partnerships with e-tailers will be in addition to its own portal patanjaliayurved.net, where the company is selling its products online.

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.

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.

With PTI Inputs
Reema Parashar

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is all set to travel to Switzerland to participate in the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. The PM will leave for Davos on January 22 for a two-day visit.

At the WEF summit Modi will deliver the keynote address at the plenary session on January 23.

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.

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.

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.

PM Modi is expected to showcase the government's latest reform push that includes the historic roll out of Goods and Services Tax (GST), Make in India, Skill India, Invest india to attract investors.

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.

Presidents of 60 countries and over 350 international leaders will participate in the forum.

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.

Modi is also expected to meet Swiss President Alain Berset and hold extensive talks on bilateral, regional and international issues. Both are also expected to discuss ways to deepen bilateral cooperation.

The Indian counterpart is expected to hold bilateral talks with representatives of 11 countries while the Modi cabinet is likely to address 25 sessions at the session.
Transparency is a hallmark of the Nebraska Legislature, one too often taken for granted.

Every bill is entitled to a committee hearing. With only one legislative chamber, Nebraska has no conference committee between House and Senate, meaning every amendment and change to a bill is introduced and voted on in public.

Despite the states proud history of open government, one critical vote  for committee leadership positions  continues to be held by secret ballot. Those votes must remain secret.

Yes, this may seem a like a paradox. The Journal Star editorial board has long advocated for government to conduct as much business as possible in the public eye as a matter of accountability.

But secret ballots for leadership preserve another integral trait of the Legislature: its officially nonpartisan composition. Publicizing these ballots would reintroduce a form of a chilling effect thats been absent from the capital, at least in this particular arena, since 1973.

Senators must be allowed to vote their consciences freely when choosing their leaders from among their ranks. Without the overt party pressures that come into play in a partisan legislature, Nebraskas lawmakers can vote for the best person for the particular job, rather than being held to the party line.

The system allows a veteran lawmaker whose political beliefs defy the majority of the Legislature to win a chairmanship. Like anything within politics, its imperfect. Just last year, three freshman senators won committee chair positions on their first day in the capitol, before theyd ever introduced or voted on a bill.

Only one such position, chairman of the select Committee on Committees, was open in 2018. Omaha Sen. Robert Hilkemann won the seat on the sessions first day, edging out Hastings Sen. Steve Halloran by a 25-24 margin.

Days later, as the adoption of this legislative sessions permanent rules were being finalized, Bancroft Sen. Lydia Brasch moved  then quickly withdrew  a request for open voting to fill leadership positions. Her action, though, sparked an always robust debate among senators.

In most partisan state legislatures, committee leadership decisions are made in closed rooms, too. Most states committee chairs are selected from within the caucus of the majority party, meaning only some, but not all, of the body has a say in these important positions.

That structure also allows such positions to be used as a powerful prize for those who most faithfully adhere to party doctrine  or a punishment for those who dont.

In our view, Nebraska does it far better  and more democratically  without public tallies.

By enlisting all 49 senators, political affiliations aside, and permitting them to vote their consciences rather than party lines, secret ballots remain best for the Nebraska Legislature as it chooses its leaders.
MUMBAI: Nine years after his parents were shot by terrorists in the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, Moshe Holtzberg, more famously known as Baby Moshe, is back in town.

His parents, Gabi and Rivka Holtzberg were killed in Chabad House, during the 2008 terror attacks. Barely two years old then, Moshe was saved by his nanny Sandra Samuel.

She had reportedly grabbed him from the spot and fled outside.

Moshe is travelling with his grandparents to India. "It's a very special day. Thank God that Moshe could come again. Mumbai is a lot safer now," Moshe's grandfather Rabbi Holztberg Nachman said.

Moshe will be returning to Nariman House - his home then - and one of the sites that terrorists chose for bloodbath.

Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, Director of Chabad-run Jewish center at Nariman House had said that Moshe will be accompanying Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 18 for the inauguration of a memorial project dedicated to those killed in the 26/11 carnage.

Kozlovsky said, "We are very excited about this upcoming visit of Moshe Holtzberg with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We are heartened to see him here again in the Nariman House, the very place where his life was miraculously saved by his nanny, Sandra Samuel."

A part of the memorial will have a special area designed to remember the parents of Moshe Holtzberg. "We are very excited about this programme. This visit for Moshe is very emotional and sensitive as he lost his parents here. We will need the cooperation of the media and we will provide a press release at the end", he added.

Moshe was only two when terrorists killed his parents at Mumbai`s Jewish house. Then 'Baby Moshe' had become a face of the innocent victims of ruthless terrorism.

His parents had moved to Mumbai seven years before the attack to work at the Chabad House. After the attack, Moshe's maternal grandparents took him to Afula, a city in Israel for his safety and comfort.
A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to fight the menace of terror, the latter is slated to visit Taj Mahal in Agra on Tuesday.

During his visit to Agra, Netanyahu will be welcomed by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath at Kheria airbase.

Netanyahu is slated to arrive at Kheria airbase in Agra at around 11.15 am, and is expected to leave back for the national capital at 3.15 pm.

#Visuals from Agra ahead of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visit to Taj Mahal today #NetanyahuInIndia pic.twitter.com/BCUcCGwBSG  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 16, 2018

Following his arrival in Delhi, the Israeli Prime Minister will inaugurate the third edition of Raisina Dialogue at Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi. The event will be attended by Prime Minister Modi and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.

The theme of the Raisina Dialogue this year is 'Managing Disruptive Transitions: Ideas, Institutions & Idioms', and the three-day event will witness addresses by chiefs of Army chief General Bipin Rawat and Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lamba.

Ministerial delegations from many countries like Australia, Russia, Singapore, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Mauritius and Poland will also attend the event.

On Monday, Modi and Netanyahu said that they would take India-Israel ties to greater heights through mutual opportunities, even as the two leaders vowed to fight terrorism.

Addressing the India-Israel Business Summit, PM Modi had said, "I have always had a deep regard for Israel and its people. There is a new energy and purpose that has invigorated our ties over the last few years. It will help take our cooperation to greater heights. We stand on the cusp of a new chapter in India-Israel relations driven by our people and mutual opportunities for the betterment of lives".

The two countries signed nine Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) in various sectors, including cybersecurity, energy and medicine. Netanyahu, who is on a six-day visit to India also received a ceremonial reception at the Rashtrapati Bhawan.
JAIPUR: A day after he went 'missing' and was found in an unconscious state, Vishwa Hindu Parishad international working president Pravin Togadia moved to tears in front of the cameras claiming that efforts are on to silence his voice.

In a press conference on Tuesday, he claimed that he fled from his office after he got reports that a plan was being hatched to kill him in an encounter. "I am being targeted for a decade-old case. Rajasthan Police team came to arrest me. Someone told me a plan was being made to kill me in an encounter," he said.

"There have been attempts to throttle my voice, silence me. Ram Mandir, a law on cow slaughter and welfare schemes for farmers are the issues that I have spoken about. These are attempts to silence my voice," he said.

When asked who was planning to attack him, he refrained from blaming anyone and said that he will openly talk about the names with evidence.

Doctors have said that the condition of VHP leader is now stable. However, Togadia categorically stated that he will not leave the hospital until his health improves.

The VHP leader, a Z-plus category protectee, went "missing" on Monday morning after stepping out of the VHP headquarters in Paldi area of the city when a contingent of Rajasthan Police came to arrest him in an old case.

Togadia, who suffered from low blood sugar levels, was found in an unconscious state in Shahibaug area and was taken to Chandramani Hospital located in the same area.

Sola police station officials said a team of Rajasthan Police visited him to execute an arrest warrant against Togadia under Section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), but could not find him at his residence.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked BJP leader Ajay Agrawal to explain his locus in filing an appeal in the politically-sensitive Rs 64 crore Bofors pay-offs case.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra noted that the CBI has not filed any appeal in the apex court challenging the May 31, 2005 Delhi High Court judgement and asked the petitioner to explain his locus in the case.

"We expect the petitioner to argue the matter on the next date of hearing and argue the parameters on grant of leaves," the bench also comprising justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said.

The matter will be now heard on February 2.

Justice R S Sodhi of Delhi High Court, since retired, had on May 31, 2005 quashed all charges against the three Hinduja brothers -- Srichand, Gopichand and Prakashchand -- and the Bofors company, castigating the CBI for its handling of the case, saying it had cost the exchequer about Rs 250 crore.

Agrawal, who had contested the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 from Rai Bareli against the then Congress president Sonia Gandhi, has filed an appeal in the apex court against the 2005 verdict of the high court.

Before the 2005 verdict of Justice Sodhi, another judge of the Delhi High Court, retired Justice J D Kapoor, had on February 4, 2004 exonerated late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in the case and directed the framing of charge of forgery under section 465 of the IPC against Bofors company.

The Rs 1,437-crore deal between India and Swedish arms manufacturer AB Bofors for the supply of 400 155mm Howitzer guns for the Indian Army was entered into on March 24, 1986.

Swedish Radio on April 16, 1987, had claimed that the company had paid bribes to top Indian politicians and defence personnel.

The CBI on January 22, 1990 had registered the FIR for alleged offences of criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery under the Indian Penal Code and other sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act against Martin Ardbo, the then president of AB Bofors, alleged middleman Win Chadda and the Hinduja brothers.

It had alleged that certain public servants and private persons in India and abroad had entered into a criminal conspiracy between 1982 and 1987 in pursuance of which the offences of bribery, corruption, cheating and forgery were committed.

The first charge sheet in the case was filed on October 22, 1999, against Chadda, Ottavio Quattrocchi, the then defence secretary S K Bhatnagar, Ardbo and the Bofors company. A supplementary charge sheet was filed against the Hinduja brothers on October 9, 2000.

A special CBI court in Delhi on March 4, 2011, had discharged Quattrocchi from the case saying the country could not afford to spend hard-earned money on his extradition which had already cost Rs 250 crore.

Quattrocchi, who fled from here on July 29-30, 1993, never appeared before any court in India to face prosecution. He passed away on July 13, 2013. The other accused persons who died are Bhatnagar, Chadda and Ardbo.
In a major development by the government, the Haj subsidy for thousands of Muslims who go on Haj pilgrimage each year was scrapped on Wednesday. With the announcement, the Haj pilgrims will no longer be able to avail facilities like airfare subsidy as well as assistance to Muslim pilgrims for domestic travel to reach specially designed Haj departure airport terminals, meal, medical care and lodging assistance provided by the government.

A record number of 1.75 lakh Muslims will undertake the pilgrimage this year from India, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said, adding the government had spent over Rs 250 crore last year on subsidising the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Saudi Arabia. The decision is in line with a 2012 Supreme Court order, asking the government to do away with the subsidy, which had long been sought by the BJP.

Soon after the announcement, reactions started pouring on the micro-blogging site. Here, we bring to you some of the posts:

@asadowaisi: "#Haj Subsidy this year it is 200 crore & it would have been phased out by 2022 as per Supreme Court order,since 2006 I have been demanding that should be removed & used for Muslim girls education upliftment"

#Haj Subsidy this year it is 200 crore & it would have been phased out by 2022 as per Supreme Court order,since 2006 I have been demanding that should be removed & used for Muslim girls education upliftment  Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) January 16, 2018

@bukharishujaat: "Withdrawing the #Hajj subsidy is a welcome decision by the government. It should have been done away with long ago. No need for subsidy to perform a personal obligation."

Withdrawing the #Hajj subsidy is a welcome decision by the government. It should have been done away with long ago. No need for subsidy to perform a personal obligation.  Shujaat Bukhari (@bukharishujaat) January 16, 2018

@shahid_siddiqui: I have been demanding end to Haj subsidy for a long time. Welcome move. IndianMuslims need no subsidy but demand their rights as equal citizens of Democratic India.

I have been demanding end to Haj subsidy for a long time. Welcome move.

IndianMuslims need no subsidy but demand their rights as equal citizens of Democratic India. https://t.co/NMEGBIgECW  shahid siddiqui (@shahid_siddiqui) January 16, 2018

@irenaakbar: Dear BJP, kindly do not empower us by removing Haj subsidy. Dear Congress, kindly recall that we never asked you to appease us with Haj subsidy. Dear both, kindly leave us alone, and focus on development. Sincerely, Indian Muslim

Dear BJP, kindly do not empower us by removing Haj subsidy. Dear Congress, kindly recall that we never asked you to appease us with Haj subsidy. Dear both, kindly leave us alone, and focus on development. Sincerely, Indian Muslim  Irena Akbar (@irenaakbar) January 16, 2018

@syedmohammedd: Have spoken to a lot of people in the past couple of hours. Most of them have said that scrapping the subsidy is a good thing, The issue of open tenders is being spoken about. Also, that haj is mandatory on only those who can afford to make the pilgrimage. #Hajj #HajSubsidy

Have spoken to a lot of people in the past couple of hours. Most of them have said that scrapping the subsidy is a good thing, The issue of open tenders is being spoken about. Also, that haj is mandatory on only those who can afford to make the pilgrimage. #Hajj #HajSubsidy  Syed Mohammed  (@syedmohammedd) January 16, 2018

A large number of people, including politicians from different parties, agree on one thing, that international open tenders be called to fly pilgrims. Subsidy helped Air India more than anybody else. #Hajj#HajSubsidy #Haj  Syed Mohammed  (@syedmohammedd) January 16, 2018

@Jehangir_Inayat: Hajj subsidy for Indian pilgrims = Rs 650 crore. Subsidy per pilgrim Rs 43k. Return airfare for Hajj flight (ex-Delhi by @airindiain) = Rs 73k. Ticket cost by Saudi airlines = Rs 28K.Difference in fare= Rs 45k. That's where subsidy went all these years @naqvimukhtar

Hajj subsidy for Indian pilgrims = Rs 650 crore. Subsidy per pilgrim Rs 43k.

Return airfare for Hajj flight (ex-Delhi by @airindiain) = Rs 73k. Ticket cost by Saudi airlines = Rs 28K. Difference in fare= Rs 45k. That's where subsidy went all these years @naqvimukhtar  Inayat Jehangir (@Jehangir_Inayat) January 16, 2018

@listenshahid: Withdrawal of #Haj subsidy is a welcome step. Subsidy defeats the purpose of Pilgrimage.

Let's use it on education.

Withdrawal of #Haj subsidy is a welcome step. Subsidy defeats the purpose of Pilgrimage.

Let's use it on education.  Shahid Choudhary (@listenshahid) January 16, 2018

@chetan_bhagat: No more #Hajj subsidy. Wasnt much, but was religion specific appeasement. Brave but welcome and historic move.

No more #Hajj subsidy. Wasnt much, but was religion specific appeasement. Brave but welcome and historic move. January 16, 2018

@vagishasoni: Hardly any Govt has withdrawn any kind of subsidy lately, NDA Govt withdrawing Haj Subsidy is a positive step in the spirit of true Secularism. Kudos to @narendramodi

Hardly any Govt has withdrawn any kind of subsidy lately, NDA Govt withdrawing Haj Subsidy is a positive step in the spirit of true Secularism. Kudos to @narendramodi  Vagisha (@vagishasoni) January 16, 2018

@tanzysiddiqui: Well its good they have ended #hajj subsidy. Hopefully they will use the money on right direction

Well its good they have ended #hajj subsidy

Hopefully they will use the money on right direction January 16, 2018

@RohithDxo: The money spent on this is going to be spent on education and women of minority community! Which is good.
.New Delhi: The threat of radical Islam and its terrorist offshoots can 'upset' the international system, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

At the same time, he batted for stronger ties between India and Israel to overcome the challenge.

Addressing the inaugural session of the 'Raisina Dialogue' in the national capital, Netanyahu hailed India as Israel's "natural friend and partner".

He said closer ties between democracies was essential to secure the common future of humanity at a time "our way of life and the quest for modernity and innovation" are being challenged.

"Most notably the quest for modernity, the quest for innovation is being challenged by radical Islam and its terrorist offshoots from a variety of corners and this can upset the international system. One of the ways to overcome such a challenge is to strengthen the relation between our two great democracies. The alliances of democracies is important to secure our common future," Netanyahu said, addressing the inaugural session of the three-day geopolitical conference.

.@netanyahu: I believe the secret to Israel and Indias successes are the same thing; a combination of traditional values and innovation. What also binds us together, is the most important of all, that we have a special relationship with commitment to democracy. #Raisina2018  ORF (@orfonline) January 16, 2018

PM: The quest for modernity & innovation is being challenged by radical Islam and its terrorist offshoots, and this can upset the international system. One of the ways to overcome this is to strengthen the relationship between our two great democracieshttps://t.co/unt8hbxJ4X  PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) January 16, 2018

Prime Minister Netanyahu at @raisinadialogue:

"Thank you for this unbelievably moving visit and thank you for the opportunity also to address the challenges that face the future and how together we can work to achieve prosperity, security and peace."https://t.co/qoTmk80kPu pic.twitter.com/UWXGdbN3Ww  PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) January 16, 2018

Netanyahu began his 16-minute speech by identifying military strength, economic prowess and political power as the prerequisites for the development of a nation, factors which he said were behind the Jewish nation's rise from the "ashes".

"The weak don't survive, the strong survive. You make peace, alliances with the strong. You are able to maintain peace by being strong," he said.

Netanyahu, who arrived in New Delhi on a six-day visit on January 14, 2018, said PM Modi's July 2017 visit to Israel "broke ground". "You were the first leader of India to come to Israel in 3,000 years. It will not take long for your next visit, I know that," he said.

Netanyahu further said he found "astounding" the fact that under PM Modi, India has climbed nearly 42 spots in the ease of doing business rankings even as he stressed on the need to cut red tape to encourage businesses.

He said a government can both facilitate and block economic growth. Growth is possible when there is a free market, which facilitates innovation by business entities, the Israeli PM said.

Netanyahu added that to defend a nation, one needs a strong military, which in turn requires a lot of money. The money, he said, comes from a strong economy.

"Defence costs a great deal of money. The money comes from the second source of power, economic power... The third power is political power, which means the ability to make political alliances and relationships with many other countries," he said.

(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi: The threat of radical Islam and its terrorist offshoots can "upset" the international system, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

At the same time, addressing the inaugural session of the 'Raisina Dialogue', he hailed India as Israel's "natural friend and partner".

Following are his top quotes:

- "Most notably the quest for modernity, the quest for innovation is being challenged by radical Islam and its terrorist offshoots from a variety of corners and this can upset the international system. One of the ways to overcome such a challenge is to strengthen the relationship between our two great democracies. The alliances of democracies is important to secure our common future."

- "The weak don't survive, the strong survive. You make peace, alliances with the strong. You are able to maintain peace by being strong."

- "We have a special relationship. We are naturally sympathetic to India. When I was walking the streets of Agra, somebody said we are so happy that you are friends with our prime minister. He said we are friends."

- Netanyahu said he found "astounding" the fact that under PM Narendra Modi, India has climbed nearly 42 spots in the ease of doing business rankings even as he stressed on the need to cut red tape to encourage businesses.

- He said a government can both facilitate and block economic growth. Growth is possible when there is a free market, which facilitates innovation by business entities, he said.

- Netanyahu also said to defend a nation, one needs a strong military, which in turn requires a lot of money. The money, he said, comes from a strong economy.

- "Defence costs a great deal of money. The money comes from the second source of power, economic power... The third power is political power, which means the ability to make political alliances and relationships with many other countries."

(With PTI inputs)
Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) leader Hardik Patel and Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani seem to be continuing their offensive against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. The two leaders from Gujarat have announced that they will hold a joint rally in Mumbai on January 26.

The rally gains more political significance as leaders of two opposition parties are also expected to take part. Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar and Left leader Sitaram Yechury are also expected to attend the rally.

It is expected that the Mumbai police will not give permission to the opposition leaders to hold the massive rally in the Maharashtra capital.

Mevani has been at loggerheads with the Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP government in Maharashtra since Bhima Koregaon violence during a Dalit rally in the area earlier in January.

A public meeting of Mevani, along with JNU leader Umar Khalid, in Mumbai on January 4 was cancelled by the police citing security reasons. Several students were also detained or forcibly removed from the venue of the event.

However, Mevani later held a Yuva Hunkaar rally in the national capital despite no permission from Delhi Police for the same. Addressing the rally, Mevani had accused the BJP government of not paying heed to the real issues - corruption, poverty and unemployment.

"The way corruption, poverty, unemployment and the real issues are being swept under the carpet and ghar wapasi, love jihad and cows are being given space, we stand against that," Mevani said.
There seems to be no end to the rift between judges of Supreme Court. Four days after four senior judges of the top court brought the rift out in open, Attorney General K K Venugopal on Tuesday said that the judicial crisis seems to be not resolved.

According to the Attorney General, the issue between the judges is likely to be settled in next two to three days. "We are in the process of resolving the issue. It would be resolved shortly," he added.

Supreme Court Bar Association president Vikas Singh also said that the crisis is likely to be resolved by the end of this week.

This adds fuel to speculation over the rift not ending with Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra not including the four rebel judges in the five-judge constitution bench, which is slated to hear range of crucial cases.

The five-judge Constitution Bench, headed by CJI Misra, consists of Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan. CJI Misra gave a miss to four senior most judges  Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, M B Lokur and Kurian Joseph.

The bench will commence the hearing on a range of crucial matters from Wednesday, January 17. It will listen to top cases including the validity of the Aadhaar Act, 2013 judgement re-criminalising gay sex between consenting adults, entry of women in Kerala's Sabarimala temple and many more crucial matters.

From October 10, 2017, the same set of five judges heard important cases including the power tussle between the Centre and the Delhi government over administrative jurisdiction and a matter relating to passive euthanasia.

In an unprecedented press conference on January 12, four senior-most judges of the top court claimed that cases are being assigned selectively and allocated to benches of preference.

"We have tried to convince Chief Justice that certain things are not in order and remedial measures are needed. Unfortunately, our efforts failed," said Justice Chelameswar. "Democracy cannot survive in this or in any country if these remedial measures are not put in place.

They also raised questions over listing of PILs concerning Loya's death.
The Enforcement Directorate on Tuesday summoned another son-in-law of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav. The RJD supremos son-in-law, Rahul Yadav, has been summoned by the agency on allegations of giving a loan of Rs one crore to former Bihar chief minister Rabri Devi.

This comes in connection with EDs probe into alleged money laundering by Lalus daughter Misa Bharti and others.

Rahul Yadav, husband of Lalu Prasad's fourth daughter Ragini, has now been issued summons to depose before the investigating officer of the case later this week, said PTI.

The agency has already questioned Shailesh Kumar, Lalu Prasad's other son-in-law and husband of his daughter Misa Bharti, in this case many times in the past.

The case pertains to alleged money laundering of funds by a firm-- Ms Mishail Packers and Printers Pvt Ltd-- and is said to be linked to Misa and Shailesh.

The ED is probing the case under criminal sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Lalu is currently in Birsa Munda jail in Ranchi following conviction in a fodder scam case. On January 6, the RJD chief was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail by a special CBI court in Ranchi.

The court convicted Lalu Prasad and 15 others on December 23 in the case relating to the multi-million-rupee scam.

The CBI court had acquitted another former Bihar Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra and five others in the case, relating to fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 84.5 lakh from the Deoghar district treasury between 1990 and 1994 in then undivided Bihar.

(With PTI Inputs)
Lumpkin, organizer of the original local commemoration 15 years ago, said that with the divided political climate in the country today, this years event will give Racine residents the chance to take an inside look at their own community and its future. It is my hope that we use this years occasion as an opportunity to bring our community closer together, he said.
The Maharashtra government has submitted a report on the death of Judge BH Loya in a sealed envelope to the Supreme Court. According to sources in the Maharashtra Home Ministry, the report has ruled out foulplay in the death of the CBI special court judge, who was presiding over a case against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah.

Sources said that the medical report submitted in the top court relies broadly upon four medical reports  histopathology, electrocardiography, post-mortem and medico-legal reports.

The report also makes special mention of statements by the doctors who performed several tests and post-mortem. It also lists the statements of relatives who signed on the report. Apart from these, the report contains statements of ambulance owner, ambulance driver, police constable who accompanied the body to Latur and some of relatives and family friends.

Details of investigation carried out by Sadar police station in Nagpur, which registered the accidental death report, has also been incorporated in the government report.

According to the post-mortem report, furnished by Nagpur Government Medical College, the cause of the death was coronary artery insufficiency. It also says that there was no evidence of any injuries on the body. Also, there was no fracture to the skull, said the report.

A report by Meditrina Hospital, where Loya passed away, says that the patient could not be revived despite all resuscitative measures.

An ECG report from Nagpurs Dande hospital has also been included in the government report. It talks about an abnormal spike in electrocardiogram.

The report further quotes Nagpur Police as saying that none of the findings suggests any suspicion over his death.

The Maharashtra government is likely to share the report with the petitioners.

Meanwhile, hearing a plea of the petitioners seeking an independent probe in the case, the Supreme Court on Tuesday told the Maharashtra government that all documents should be shared with everyone.

The SC direction comes after the Maharashtra government on Tuesday submitted documents related to the death of Judge Loya in a sealed cover before the court. Maharashtra government has told the apex court that barring certain confidential reports placed by them, the petitioners can access all other documents related to the case.

Without fixing any specific date, the top court has listed the matter for hearing after a week.

CBI court judge Loya was presiding over the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.
DHOLPUR: The Rajput Karni Sena is in no mood to relent on its stand seeking a ban on the release of Sanjay Leela Bhansali directed Padmaavat. The Rajput outfit on Tuesday said that it will not allow the movie to be released across the country.

"We want nothing less than a nation-wide ban on the movie," Karni Sena chief Lokendra Singh Kalvi said.

He added that he is urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief ministers of all states to understand the feelings of the community.

The movie was mired in controversy after various Rajput groups, including Rajput Karni Sena, raised their objections towards the content of the film.

During the certification process of the film, Bhansali appeared before a parliamentary panel where he said that the film is an adaptation of Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi's "Padmavat".

Featuring Deepika Padukone as Rani Padmavati, Shahid Kapoor as Maharawal Ratan Singh and Ranveer Singh as Alauddin Khilji, the film was given a U/A certificate from CBFC recently.

The board had asked the producers to change the title, along with four other modifications.

Rajput Karni Sena had also raised objection to an apparent dream sequence between Deepika and Ranveer, but in the latest advertisement, the makers have clarified there is no such scene in the lavishly-mounted period drama.

"The film does not have and never had a dream sequence between Alauddin Khilji and Rani Padmavati," the advertisement stated.

The makers reiterated Bhansali's statement and said that the film is an "ode to the famed valour and legacy and courage of Rajputs and portrays Rani Padmavati with utmost respect and does not tarnish her repute or misrepresent her character in any manner."

In the advertisement that makers thanked the Government authorities, the CBFC, film fraternity and the fans for their constant support.

"'Padmaavat' is a film that every Indian will be proud of," they added.

Despite the censor clearance, the film has been banned in Gujarat and Rajasthan.
New Delhi: Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan on Tuesday said he had filed a complaint against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra in the medical college scam case and requested five senior most apex court Judges, including the four rebel Judges, to hold an in-house inquiry into the matter.



As a convenor of Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms, Bhushan demanded in-house inquiry against Justice Misra saying that "the CJI has apparently committed several acts of serious misconduct that should be inquired into by a committee of three/five Judges of this court".



Bhushan levelled four charges against the Chief Justice in his complaint addressed to Justices J. Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B. Lokur and Kurian Joseph -- who held a presser last week complaining against the CJI - and Justice AK Sikri.



"The facts and circumstances relating to the Prasad Education Trust case show prima facie evidence suggesting that CJI Misra may have been involved in the conspiracy of paying illegal gratification in the case, which at least warrants a thorough investigation," Bhushan said.



In his complaint, Bhushan also mentioned tapped conversations purportedly between IM Quddusi, a retired Judge of the Orissa High Court arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation and later granted bail, Biswanath Agarwala, a middleman, and BP Yadav of the Prasad Education Trust, the institution which was barred by the Medical Council of India from admitting medical students and subsequently appealed before the Allahabad High Court and Supreme Court.



The complaint also questioned Justice Misra's denial of permission to the CBI to register a case against Justice Narayan Shukla of the Allahabad High Court in the Prasad Education Trust matter.



Bhushan's second charge against Justice Misra dealt with the "alleged misuse of his administrative powers by ignoring the clear principle of conflict of interest and proceeding with hearing of a petition for an independent inquiry by a former CJI into the irregularities in the Prasad Education Trust matter".



After hearing the petition himself, Justice Misra nullified the order of another bench of Justice Chelameswar who had ordered the matter to be listed before five senior Judges of the Supreme Court. The CJI constituted a three-Judge bench to hear the petition which later dismissed the plea filed by the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms.



Bhushan alleged that Justice Misra "conducted a serious act of forgery by ante-dating an administrative order dated November 6, 2017".



The Supreme Court advocate also alleged that "Justice Misra as lawyer acquired land for a fodder farm in Odisha by furnishing a false affidavit". Later, the land deal was cancelled by a local Magistrate in 1985 but Justice Misra surrendered the land in 2012 after he was elevated to the Supreme Court.



The 24-page complaint read: "The abovementioned matters have tarnished the reputation of the court and have brought the judiciary into disrepute. It is a matter which needs to be swiftly dealt with."



"The inquiry must be swiftly done so that the reputation of the judiciary is not damaged further and its integrity and independence remains intact."


Islamabad: The United States has been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat to it, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan has said.

Reading out a policy statement on the government's foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly on Monday, he had regretted that the US downplayed India's aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, as per Dawn report.

The minister had said that the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US.

"It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," Khan had said.

He had also said that Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," Khan had alleged.

"India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour," he had claimed, and had added that the unrelentingly 'hostile' and 'anti-Pakistan stance' taken by the current Indian government had reduced drastically space for any advocacy of peace, PTI reported.

The minister had further said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan.

He had said that Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation 'Zarb-i-Azb' and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

At the same time, Khan had urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001.

Meanwhile, seven Pakistani soldiers were killed on Monday in retaliatory firing by the Indian Army after a ceasefire violation in Jammu and Kashmir where an infiltration bid was also foiled with the elimination of five militants of Pakistan-based JeM, Army officers had said.

The Army action had come on a day when Gen Bipin Rawat had sent a stern messsage to Pakistan, saying it may escalate its offensive against terror groups and carry out the 'other action' if forced by the neighbouring country.

In his address to Army personnel in Delhi to mark the Army Day, the Army chief had said that Pakistan Army is continuously trying to help terrorists sneak into India along the Line of Control (LoC) in J&K.

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi/Gandhinagar: Hours after Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Pravin Togadia went missing, he was found at Ahmedabads Chandramani Hospital on Monday.

The VHP International Acting president was admitted after a drop in blood sugar levels. His condition is stable now.

Togadia, who enjoys Z-Plus security, was last seen hailing an auto and leaving the VHP office on Monday morning. He was untraceable since then.

Following his missing reports, VHP cadres created ruckus after on streets in Ahmedabad.

The issue forced the VHP leadership to appeal to its workers and sympathisers to remain calm. "All the office-bearers and workers of VHP are worried about the disappearance of Praveenbhai Togadia. We got to know through media reports that both Rajasthan and Gujarat Police have denied arresting him. Then this matter becomes more critical," VHP general secretary Champat Rai said in a statement in New Delhi.

VHP activists alleged that Togadia was missing and that he had been taken away by Rajasthan Police.
New Delhi: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts in improving the ease of doing business in the country. He also said that he believed in India and its potential.

Inaugurating the third edition of the geo-political conference, 'Raisina Dialogue', in the national capital, he said, "The weak don't survive, the strong survive, you make alliances with the strong, you are able to maintain peace by being strong. So, therefore the first requirement from our the time of our first PM was to achieve minimal strength required to assure existence."

He added, "I was astounded to know that PM Modi has moved India in the scale of ease of doing business 42 places in three years. If you want to be an economic power, you must reduce and simplify taxes and must cut bureaucracy. The main job of both India and Israel is to cut this bureaucracy so the firms can go on with their business of doing business."

"We've achieved a transition to a more liberal economy and we are committed to this path. The future belongs to those who innovate. We are doing it and India is doing it," the Israeli PM further said.

"I believe the secret to Israel and Indias successes are the same thing, a combination of traditional values and innovation. What also binds us together, is the most important of all, that we have a special relationship with a commitment to democracy," he said.

On Indo-Israel ties, Netanyahu said, "The alliance of democracies is important to secure our common future, I believe possibilities are endless. In this visit, we have discussed how we can strengthen our two nations in civilian, security and in every area. Your (PM Modi) visit to Israel broke ground, you were the first leader of India to come to Israel in 3000 years, hope it will not take long for your next visit. I want to tell you that we believe in India as you believe in Israel."

We believe in India said @IsraeliPM Benjamin Netanyahu while speaking at the Raisina Dialogue today in New Delhi. PM @narendramodi and EAM @sushmaswaraj were present at the event. #ShalomNamaste pic.twitter.com/n1OmxgSkCE  Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) January 16, 2018

.@netanyahu: Our way of life is being challenged by radical Islam and extremists from a variety of sources. One of the ways to overcome such a challenge is to strengthen this relationship between two great democracies, in every area. #Raisina2018  ORF (@orfonline) January 16, 2018

'Raisina Dialogue' is jointly organised by the Ministry of External Affairs and Observer Research Foundation (ORF). The theme of the dialogue this year is 'Managing Disruptive Transitions: Ideas, Institutions and Idioms'.

Earlier, on Monday, speaking at India-Israel Business Summit Netanyahu had stressed on the importance of technology in sectors like agriculture and water management. He had also talked about increasing cooperation in the health sector as well as startups.

In pics: Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu, wife visit Taj Mahal, pose for shutterbugs

Both leaders had launched the maiden call for joint R&D projects under the 'India-Israel Industrial R&D and Technological Innovation Fund (I4F)'.

The 'I4Fund Call for Proposal' was announced with the joint launch of the website and the unveiling of the brochure by the two Prime Ministers.

India and Israel will make a contribution of USD 4 million each for the Fund annually, for five years.

Netanyahu's visit to India is only the second one by an Israeli PM and comes after a gap of 15 years. Former PM Ariel Sharon visited India in 2003.

(With Agency inputs)
NEW DELHI: In a shocking footage, once again shaming Karnataka's capital city Bengaluru, a group of drunken men is seen stopping a couple and assaulting them brutally.

In a CCTV footage, two young men from the north-east are seen being roughed up and punched by a group of men in Bengaluru on New Year's Eve on December 31, 2017. The video has gone viral on the social media.

The 27-second video shows a group partying in a lane at the city's posh Indira Nagar area when three persons, including a woman, arrive on a motorbike. The bike gently brushes past one of the revellers without causing any visible harm to him. But suddenly, some of the other revellers pounce on the two men, repeatedly hitting them on their faces. The woman, who accompanied the two men on the motorbike, got off the bike and reportedly tried to stop the group. Her efforts, however, go in vain.

As per Bengaluru Police Commissioner T Suneel Kumar, the woman on the bike, however, was not attacked physically by the revellers. However, contrary to the Bengaluru top cop's statement, one of the victims later claimed that woman, who had accompanied them, was her sister and that she too was slapped by the revellers.

Following a complaint, the police arrested two of the assaulters whereas three more men continue to be on the run. One of the arrested, identified as Ambreesh has a criminal record. Notably, according to police, they made the arrests after watching the video on the social media and that the bikers (who were attacked) did not report the incident to the police.

The previous year, Bengaluru's New Year celebration was clouded by outrage after many women were molested and harassed by a big mob that went on the rampage in the city's MB Road and Brigade Road, where people had gathered for celebrations. The police had then denied there was any molestation.


MUMBAI: Yug Tuli, the co-owner of Mojo's Bistro pub, has been arrested by Mumbai Police in the Kamala mills fire case.

The police have already arrested Yug Pathak, the other owner of Mojo's Bistro.

Last week, a sessions court in Mumbai rejected the anticipatory bail application of Yug Tuli.

Seeking pre-arrest bail, Tuli's lawyer contended the owners of Mojo's Bistro could not be blamed for the Kamala Mills tragedy. The fire had started from the adjoining 1 Above pub, he further argued.

However, the prosecution said that a report of the Mumbai Fire Brigade, as well as eyewitnesses reports, said the fire had started at Mojo's Bistro. The fire department said the blaze possibly started at Mojo's Bistro due to the flying charcoal embers of a hookah.

A massive fire had broken out at Kamla Mills Compound in the Lower Parel locality of Mumbai on December 29 killing 14 people and injuring 30.

Mojo's owners were booked under sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 338 (causing grievous hurt by act endangering life and personal safety of others) and other relevant provisions of the Indian Penal Code.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) Commissioner is expected to submit an inquiry report in the case to the Maharashtra government by January 19.

Meanwhile, the three owners of '1 Above' pub who were arrested by the Mumbai Police earlier were remanded to police custody till January 17.
Mumbai: Thousands of people took to the streets in the wee hours of Sunday morning to enthusiastically participate in the Zee Business BSE Bull Run. Celebrating India's vibrant economy with a six-kilometre run, close to 10,000 people joined eminent personalities in a 6:30 am start.

While Bollywood actor and fitness enthusiast Vidyut Jammwal shared running tips and motivated participants, there were a number of other well-known personalities here as well.

"Zee Business BSE Bull Run is a celebration of India's vibrant economy which is about to take a giant leap. It is a pioneering initiative by Zee Business & BSE to engage the common man and retail investors with Indias growth story. Every year this celebration of India Inc before the budget sets the tone for our massive Budget Campaign. This year due to thumping response the event had to be moved to MMRDA Grounds from traditional venue of Dalal Street which speaks volumes about its brand equity and the excitement it brings to our audiences, said Mihir Bhatt, Deputy Editor of ZEE Business.

Mumbai is known for its economic and financial growth and the people behind it were also actively involved in the run. S Ravi, Chairman, BSE, spoke to ZEE Business and said, "Healthy India and healthy economy are two most important aspects of our nation and both will be in action today. Healthy India, healthy index and healthy BSE that is the way it is."

"Indian economy is growing in a healthy fashion but sometimes we tend to ignore our personal health, especially the folks in financial markets who are glued to computer screens day in and day out resulting in several health concerns, so must be careful about our health too," said Ashish Chauhan, MD & CEO, BSE.

In the male category, Devendra Singh emerged at Numero Uno position clocking a time of 15 minutes and 50 seconds. Devender Singh, an Indian Army jawan, narrowly missed the top position and took the second spot with a time of 15 minutes and 54 seconds, while Shailesh Gangoda secured the third spot with a time of 16.01 minutes.

In the female category, Geeta Rathode emerged victorious clocking a time of 22.28 minutes, while Savita Yadav took the second spot with 23.22 minutes and Manisha finished third with a time of 28.03 minutes.
New Delhi: Legendary Sarod player Pandit Buddhadev Dasgupta breathed his last on January 15, 2018, at his residence in south Kolkata. The 84-year-old Sarod maestro reportedly suffered a cardiac arrest.

The noted musician was born in 1933 at his maternal home in Bhagalpur, Bihar. He learnt sarod under the tutelage of Pt Radhikamohan Moitra. His father, Prafulla Mohan Dasgupta, was a district magistrate and a music aficionado. He was conferred Sangeet Mahasamman and Bangabibhusan in 2015.

Extending her condolences on the great loss, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said his death has created a void in the field of classical music. She tweeted: "My heartfelt condolences to his family and disciples.

Padma Vibhushan Pandit Buddhadeb Dasgupta is no more. A great loss for the world of classical music. Rest in Peace. Condolences to his family  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) January 15, 2018

Some of the eminent artists expressed their grief over the news of Pandit Buddhadev Dasgupta's demise.

Debasish Roy Chowdhury- I started to work with Buddhadev Kaku (uncle) since 1990. He was the pioneer to create 'Bandish' on Tagore's songs. I performed with Him in Delhi, Varanasi, Patna and USA. He was the student of Pt Radhika Mohan Moitra. He had a great sense of humour and was a father figure to me.

Bickram Ghosh- Buddha Jethu (uncle) was just like an elder brother of my father. I've heard his music from childhood and I've also performed with Him. In fact, He took the initiative for my debut concert in 1979. It's a great loss for the Gharana, he belonged.

Rashid Khan- I'm very sad (he was almost crying). He came to my home before 2 months and blessed my son. He was truly an educated person...Big loss for Musical world

Tejendra Majumdar- Great Loss...with his demise India Music World lost a Guru. I'm a great fan of Him from early days

PTI quoted a family member of the Padma Bhushan awardee who revealed that the maestro had been suffering from respiratory problems for the past few days. He is survived by wife and two sons.

(With PTI inputs)
YORKVILLE  A Racine County Sheriffs deputy, along with two bystanders, are being credited with saving the lives of a Union Grove couple on Sunday morning after they were hit by a suspect vehicle fleeing law enforcement.

Cheryl L. Coopman, 47, and Jeffery J. Coopman, 53, were transported to Froedert Memorial Hospital in Wauwatosa on Sunday after being struck at 10:40 a.m. by a vehicle in the Festival Foods parking lot, 5740 Washington Ave., Mount Pleasant.

During a press conference on Monday afternoon at the Racine County Patrol Station, 14116 Washington Ave., in Yorkville, Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said the Coopmans were in critical but stable condition.

The vehicle, driven by 17-year-old Isaiah Degroot of Racine, was fleeing a traffic stop by the sheriffs deputy at the time of the crash, Schmaling said.

The deputy attempted to stop the Toyota Sequoia the suspect was driving after she noticed suspicious behavior, then discovered the license plate wasnt registered to the vehicle. Law enforcement later learned that the vehicle had been stolen from Milwaukee County. The deputy followed the Toyota into the Kohls parking lot, 5500 Washington Ave.

As soon as she turned her lights on, the vehicle accelerated at a high rate of speed, Schmaling said.

Degroot traveled only about 500 yards before crashing.

Within seconds, my deputy reports, the vehicle lost control at a high rate of speed, striking two innocent citizens before coming to a rest up against a pole, Schmaling said.

The suspect then fled west on foot. He was soon apprehended by Mount Pleasant Police Department officers and sheriffs deputies about a half-mile away in the 600 block of Emmertsen Road.

While the suspect was fleeing, the deputy and bystanders were working to save the lives of the pedestrians.

They had some serious, serious injuries, Schmaling said. These injuries, I believe, would have been catastrophic had there not been immediate medical attention applied.

The deputy rendered first aid to the victims, applying a tourniquet to two parts of one of the victims bodies.

There was blood loss, a significant amount, Schmaling said.

A Festival Foods employee supplied his belt to help stop the bleeding and another bystander gave a bungee cord.

The tourniquet is what I believe is responsible for the saving of one of the individuals lives, Schmaling said.

One of the Coopmans was flown by Flight for Life from the scene to Froedtert. The other victim was taken by ground ambulance to Ascension All Saints Hospital and later transferred to Froedtert.

Schmaling said he couldnt comment on the victims specific injuries, but at one point he called them life-altering.

Our entire community, on behalf of the Racine Sheriffs Office, all of us are thankful and prayerful that they have a speedy recovery, he said.

The suspect

At the time of the crash Degroot, of the 2000 block of Hickory Grove Avenue, was out on bond for felony charges of discharging a firearm from a vehicle (driver) and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety as a party to a crime. These charges were in connection to a shooting that took place on Oct. 30 in the 1600 block of Albert Street in Racine.

According to a Nov. 2 Journal Times report, Degroot reportedly followed another vehicle after cutting it off, became confrontational with the driver, then shot at the vehicle as the victim drove away. No one was injured in the incident.

According to online court records, Degroot posted a $2,500 bond for those charges on Nov. 13.

Mount Pleasant Police have referred the following charges in connection to Sundays hit-and-and-run incident to the Racine County District Attorneys Office for consideration: Fleeing and eluding, hit and run causing great bodily harm, hit and run causing injury, operating a motor vehicle without owner consent, receiving stolen property, first degree reckless endangering of safety, possession of marijuana with intent to deliver, obstructing an officer and nine counts of bail jumping. Degroot is expected to make his initial appearance on Tuesday, Jan. 16, in Racine County Circuit Court.

There was also allegedly marijuana and a stolen gun in the vehicle at the time of the crash.

I am hoping that our judge and our circuit court do the right thing and keep this individual in the Racine County Jail, behind bars where he belongs, Schmaling said.

The passenger

The passenger in the Sequoia at the time of the incident, another male about the same age as the suspect, did not flee the scene. Schmaling said the second individual is cooperating with law enforcement.

Mount Pleasant Police, the Sheriffs Office and the Wisconsin State Patrol all are involved in the ongoing investigation.

At the end of the day, we have a suspect who failed to comply with law a enforcement officers traffic stop and made a decision to speed and cause the near-demise of two of our innocent citizens, Schmaling said.
Chandigarh: Congress leader Rana Gurjit Singh has resigned from the post of state Power and Irrigation Minister on Monday.

Singh, accused of benefiting from sand mining auction row, resigned after orders from Congress high command.

Sources said party chief Rahul Gandhi asked him to resign after the corruption charges put Congress in the backfoot in the state.

The resignation comes in the wake of the reports of Rana being summoned by the Enforcement Directorate over alleged involvement in the sand mining auction scam.

In May 2017, Singh's associates, including cook Amit Bahadur, won several sand mine bids worth crores.

He is also under the scanner after a company floated by the minister in his cook's name borrowed Rs 5 crore from a contractor accused in a multi-crore scam in Singhs's own department.
New Delhi: Every new dinosaur fossil discovery is a stamp establishing the fact that the prehistoric creatures once roamed the Earth.

While there have been many fossil discoveries, each dating back millions of years, the latest one appears to be quite colourful.

Fossils of a tiny bird-like dinosaur from China has been discovered by scientists, that sport flashy rainbow feathers and a bony crest on its snout that it used to attract mates.

The dinosaur named Caihong juji was subjected to the first in-depth study by the researchers.

"Iridescent colouration is well known to be linked to sexual selection and signalling, and we report its earliest evidence in dinosaurs," said Julia Clarke, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

"The dinosaur may have a cute nickname in English, Rainbow, but it has serious scientific implications," said Clarke.

Aside from making Jurassic ecosystems of 161 million years ago more colourful, the dinosaur is interesting because it has features that are both ancient and modern, said Xing Xu, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The bony crest is a feature usually seen in dinosaurs from earlier eras, while its neck feathers show evidence of microscopic wide, flat, pigment-containing packages, or melanosomes, that may represent the first known occurrence of iridescence similar to that found in a variety of hummingbird species living today.

"There are crests associated with sexual selection previously known only in earlier dinosaurs, and yet there is also a bird mechanism of signalling or display appearing for the first time," said Clarke.

Caihong is also the earliest known dinosaur with asymmetrical feathers, the feather type found on the wingtips of modern birds that helps control flight.

However, unlike birds today, Caihong's asymmetrical feathers were on its tail, not its wings - a finding that suggests that early birds may have had a different steering or flight style.

"The tail feathers are asymmetrical but wing feathers are not, a bizarre feature previously unknown among dinosaurs including birds," said Xu.

"This suggests that controlling flight might have first evolved with tail feathers during some kind of aerial locomotion," he said.

The slab of rock from China's Hebei Province where the dinosaur was discovered by a farmer in 2014 contained a nearly complete skeleton surrounded by impressions made by feathers. The impressions preserved the shape of the melanosomes.

Researchers compared the melanosome impressions to melanosomes found in living birds and found that they most closely resembled those in the iridescent, rainbow feathers of hummingbirds.

Caihong is part of a group of small, bird-like dinosaurs that lived in China during the Jurassic, but it stands out even among its closest relatives, Xu said.

While the other dinosaurs have bird-like, triangular skulls and long forearm bones in comparison to birds today, Caihong had a long and narrow skull, and unlike many of these other dinosaurs, its short forelimbs show proportions more akin to modern birds.

(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi: The enigmatic universe harbours countless secrets within it, compelling scientists to put in every effort to delve deeper in order to extract information about its existence and consequent evolution.

The universe is also home to numerous super-massive black holes, which emanate incredibly bright and luminous distant points of light called Quasars.

Using the spatial distribution of these quasars, researchers have recently managed to detect the structuring of the universe for the first time.

The big announcement was made on Monday by the National Astronomical Observations (NAOC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The work was conducted by the international group of eBOSS, the biggest ongoing spectroscopic survey in the world, which discovered redshift distortions signals when observing the spatial distribution of quasars that are 6.8 to 10.5 billion light years from Earth.

Redshift distortion refers to a special three-dimensional cluster mode formed by stars under the effect of gravitational potential, and is considered one of the most important probes in researching gravitation on the cosmological level due to its direct correlation with gravitation.

The signals discovered this time were generated during the time when the universe was only one third or half the size of today, according to a report published by the eBOSS group on the finding.

The discovery is significant for future research in cutting-edge cosmological subjects such as dark energy and the essence of gravitation.

Launched in 2014, eBOSS has attracted research institutes from a number of countries, including the NAOC.

(With IANS inputs)
Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has broken a 16-year-old myth by spending a night at the Agra Circuit House -- a place not chosen by any state Chief Minister for the last 16 years, officials said on Tuesday.



The monk-turned-politician also broke a 29-year-old myth by visiting Noida last year.



The last Chief Minister to have stayed in the Agra Circuit Couse, a government accommodation, was Rajnath Singh who was here 16 years back.



Coincidentally, he lost his chair after the visit and none of his successors dared to stay there since.



Neither Mulayam Singh Yadav, nor Mayawati and not even Akhilesh Yadav mustered the courage to stay at the circuit house for fear of losing power and stayed at plush five-star properties whenever in the Taj city.

Adityanath stayed at suite number 1 at the circuit house and when he was asked about the jinx, he reportedly smiled and scoffed at it.



He has in the past said that he does not believe in myths.



Prime minister Narendra Modi also lauded the chief minister last month for not believing in myths.



Adityanath is in Agra to receive the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sarah as visited Taj Mahal on Tuesday.
Lucknow: The Yogi Adityanath government has decided to seek a clarification from the Uttar Pradesh Haj Committee over the re-painting of its office boundary wall which had been given a saffron coat, a state minister said.

UP's minister of state for Muslim Waqf and Haj, Mohsin Raza, has directed his department's principal secretary to get a clarification from the secretary of UP Haj Committee.

"The boundary wall of the Haj Committee of UP was given a saffron coat as per the directives of the secretary of Haj Committee of UP. A day later, the colour of the boundary wall was changed. Under which circumstances this was done is not clear.

"A number of queries came from the media following the change of colour from saffron to another shade. Hence a seven -point notice seeking clarification from the secretary Haj Committee of UP has been issued," Raza said today.

According to the minister, a clarification has been sought as to what are the rules under which the maintenance and painting work of Haj Committee office is done.

Another point on which clarity has been sought is on whose orders was the boundary wall was painted for the first time.

"When a saffron coat was already given, then under which circumstances there was a need to change the colour, and on whose orders was the colour changed?" Mohsin has asked in his notice.

Another query raised by the minister is "who is responsible for the second coat of paint, and who will bear the cost for the second coat of paint," according to the notice.

The minister also sought details of the tender floated in this regard and the companies involved.

He also sought to know that why did the secretary Haj Committee of UP issue a press release (and on whose orders).

"Whether any written orders were issued to the contractor? According to the press release, action was to be initiated against the contractor. Hence, what action has been initiated against the contractor," Raza asked in the notice.

The UP minister also sought to know that on which date did the secretary of Haj Committee of UP inspect the spot (Haj Committee office).
NEW DELHI: The Uttar Pradesh government on Wednesday removed Haj Committee Secretary RP Singh from his position over the Haj office wall controversy.

On January 13, the state Haj Minister Mohsin Raja issued a notice to RP Singh seeking clarification on the incident of Lucknow's Haj House painted saffron. On Wednesday, the Yogi Adityanath government too sought a clarification from the UP Haj Committee over the re-painting of its office boundary wall which had been given a saffron coat.

"The boundary wall of the Haj Committee of UP was given a saffron coat as per the directives of the secretary of Haj Committee of UP. A day later, the colour of the boundary wall was changed. Under which circumstances this was done is not clear. A number of queries came from the media following the change of colour from saffron to another shade. Hence a seven-point notice seeking clarification from the secretary Haj Committee of UP has been issued," Raza said today.

According to the minister, a clarification has been sought as to what are the rules under which the maintenance and painting work of Haj Committee office is done. Another point on which clarity has been sought is on whose orders was the boundary wall was painted for the first time.

"When a saffron coat was already given, then under which circumstances there was a need to change the colour, and on whose orders was the colour changed?" Mohsin has asked in his notice. Another query raised by the minister is "who is responsible for the second coat of paint, and who will bear the cost for the second coat of paint," according to the notice.

The minister also sought details of the tender floated in this regard and the companies involved. He also sought to know that why did the secretary Haj Committee of UP issue a press release. "Whether any written orders were issued to the contractor? According to the press release, action was to be initiated against the contractor. Hence, what action has been initiated against the contractor," Raza asked in the notice.

The UP minister also sought to know that on which date did the secretary of Haj Committee of UP inspect the spot (Haj Committee office).

The Haj House in Lucknow, used by Muslims as a transit place on their way to pilgrimage in Mecca, was on January 5 was given a saffron coat. The move triggered opposition from various political parties and Darul Uloom. A day later, RP Singh blamed the contractor for the incident. Following this, the boundary wall of Haj House, which was earlier painted saffron, was repainted to its original colour, a day later.

Lucknow: Boundary wall of Haj samiti office which was painted saffron yesterday has been repainted to original colour. Haj Samiti Secretary RP Singh has blamed the contractor for the incident pic.twitter.com/67pdCNCjF7  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 6, 2018

"There was laxity by the contractor in the painting and maintenance work of the UP Haj Committee office. On inspecting the boundary wall of the office, it was found that there has been laxity, and a dark shade of paint has been used contrary to the instructions issued," Singh said.
A California couple has been arrested on charges of torture after authorities on Monday said their 13 malnourished children were held captive in their home, with some shackled to beds in the dark.

Authorities said they were alerted after a 17-year-old girl managed to escape the house on Sunday and call police using a cellphone she found.

She was so emaciated that officers said they originally thought she was just 10 years old.

The 13 victims at the house in Perris, California ranged in age from two to 29, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said in a statement.

"Further investigation revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, but the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner," the statement said.

"Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29. The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty."

The sheriff`s office said "the victims were provided with food and beverages after they claimed to be starving".

The parents, 57-year-old David Allen Turpin and 49-year-old Louise Anna Turpin, were booked on torture and child endangerment charges with bail set at $9 million. The Spanish-style stucco house where the victims were allegedly held is located in a middle-class neighborhood of Perris, a small city some 70 miles (110 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles.

The home boasted three cars as well as a van with tinted windows. One of the cars, a blue compact, had a child`s seat in the back.

There are indications that the children were allowed outside the house in recent years.

A Facebook page under the name of David-Louise Turpin includes pictures of the couple attending various marriage or exchange of vows ceremonies from 2011 to 2016 with their children present.

In the latest set, uploaded in April-July 2016, Louise Turpin wears a long white wedding gown while her husband is dressed in a suit.

An Elvis Presley impersonator holds a microphone and poses with the couple and children in a scene reminiscent of a Las Vegas wedding.

Nine girls, all with long dark hair, wear matching fuchsia dresses with white tights, while a baby girl is dressed in a bright pink dress.

Three boys, their dark hair in bowl cuts like David Turpin, are dressed in suits with red ties.

An April 2016 photograph shows the same smiling children and the couple wearing jeans and red t-shirts that read "Thing 1," "Thing 2," "Thing 3" and so on -- a take on the mischievous siblings in the popular Dr Seuss book "The Cat in the Hat."

Some of the children look gaunt, but not obviously so.

In another September 2015 photograph, Louise Turpin holds a baby wearing a t-shirt reading "Mommy loves me."

Neighbor Jamelia Adams, 39, expressed shock.

"It`s just really, really sad. There`s places that kids can go if you don`t want your kids, if you can`t take care of them, and here`s a beautiful neighborhood, brand new housing track, newer cars in the yard, and here`s some kids from 29 to two that was just held captive and malnourished and filthy. It`s just heartbreaking," Adams told AFP.

Another neighbor, Julio Reyes, 38, said: "We`ve seen a couple of teenagers maybe last year mowing the lawn, and you know they put some Christmas decorations. Never really thought anything of any sort would happen like that."

US media reported that the parents had previously filed for bankruptcy.

David Turpin is registered in state records as head of a private school, but its address matches that of the Turpins` home.

The school opened in March 2011 and only has six students according to the latest state education department data.

The Los Angeles Times said the couple had lived at the Perris house since 2010, after a move from Texas, adding they went bankrupt twice.

According to court papers when they filed for bankruptcy in 2011, the couple said they accrued between $100,000 and $500,000 in debt opening the school, The New York Times said.

The paper said the same year David Turpin was working as an engineer for defense contractor Northrop Grumman, earning $140,000 a year, while his wife was listed as a homemaker.

The case recalls previous kidnapping horrors that have made global headlines in recent years.

Ariel Castro abducted three young women he repeatedly raped for a decade at his Cleveland home. He was arrested in May 2013 after one of his victims escaped.

Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped as an 11-year-old and repeatedly raped over 18 years by convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido in California. She was rescued in August 2009.

Austria has seen two high profile kidnaps -- Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned and raped over a period of 24 years by her father Josef while Natascha Kampusch was held for eight years by Wolfgang Priklopil before her 2006 escape.
Berlin: At least 48 people were injured, 10 of them seriously, when a school bus in Germany crashed into a wall Tuesday, police said.

The accident, whose cause was not immediately clear, occurred at about 7:00 am (0600 GMT) en route to a school in the southwestern town of Eberbach.

"The fully occupied school bus drove for reasons that were not immediately clear at full speed into several other vehicles and then into the wall of an electronics shop," police said in a statement.

Forty-three of those hurt were children and a total of 10 victims suffered grave injuries. The driver was slightly hurt, a police spokesman told DPA news agency.

Three rescue helicopters helped rush victims to local hospitals while first responders and ambulances were dispatched to treat the more lightly injured at the scene, the police statement said.

The site of the accident was cleared of traffic as investigators began work to determine the cause of the crash.
Police in the Pakistani province of Punjab are set to start the process of vetting and issuing security clearances to any locals who would work with Chinese nationals on CPEC projects. The unusual move of security vetting locals instead of foreign citizens comes a month after a Chinese engineer went missing from a power plant site in the region.

Police will soon begin the process of collecting wide ranging details on all Pakistani staff working on CPEC projects in Punjab province. The government has also demanded that the security vetting for new staff members be done before they actually begin working alongside the Chinese.

"Complete particulars of Pakistani workers, including their home addresses as well as character and other activities, will be checked by the security officials to ensure that they had no links with any proscribed organisation or had not been involved in any criminal case in the past," a senior police official told Dawn newspaper.

The push for the security clearance drive began after a Chinese engineer working on the Karot hydropower project in Kahuta, near Islamabad, had gone missing on December 20. He has not been found yet.

What is probably cause for alarm is that the disappearance has not happened in insurgency-hit Balochistan, but in what is considered the stable Punjabi heartland of Pakistan.

The security clearance for local workers comes as costs and concerns grow over the safety of Chinese workers on CPEC projects. The challenge has continued to grow, even as local protests have erupted over the employment of Chinese nationals instead of local labour on the CPEC projects.

A grand scheme that has for long been sold to the Pakistani people as a magic wand solution for their development, CPEC is increasingly being questioned by politicians and media. The questions that are being raised against CPEC within Pakistan range from doubts over financial viability, the country's ability to repay the debts, the secrecy surrounding the projects and the apparent use of Chinese workers instead of local labour.
Karachi: At least six security personnel have been killed in terror attacks in Pakistan's troubled Balochistan province.

This morning, a police constable was gunned down in Quetta following an attack yesterday in Turbat when militants shot dead five Frontier Corps (FC) personnel.

The policeman identified as Naseer Ahmed was on his way to work when two unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle fired at him and sped away.

Last evening, a convoy of paramilitary FC came under attack in the mountainous region of Shapok in Kech district, 50 kilometres from Turbat town.

Five FC personnel were killed while six others were injured, officials said.

Since the start of the year, militants and separatists have stepped up their attacks on security personnel and installations in Balochistan.

The attacks started on January 1 when militants carried out twin assaults on a security checkpost in Chaman injuring three security personnel.

The next day, six FC officials were injured in a bomb blast near the suburbs of Quetta.

Last week, five policemen were killed when a suicide bomber rammed his motorcycle into a police truck in Quetta while two civilians also died in the attack.
KENOSHA  It was just going to be a casual get-together.

It was anything but that.

Little did GeorgAnn Stinson-Dockery of Racine know that when she met with a friend for lunch just over a decade ago, it would have such a profound effect on her life.

We were talking and she showed me the infant mortality rates in the United States and Wisconsin, Stinson-Dockery said. When I found out we  Wisconsin  were among the highest for infant mortality, I couldnt believe it.

That made an impact on me when I saw those numbers. I never expected anything like that at all. My involvement (in infant mortality) just blossomed from there.

For her service and dedication, Stinson-Dockery was among three individuals bestowed with a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award at Gateway Technical Colleges annual King Day celebration, held this year at the Gateway campus in Kenosha.

Also, receiving Humanitarian Awards were Arnetta Griffin, the owner of the Kenosha-based nonprofit agency Gods Kitchen, which helps feed and clothe the homeless; and Michael Graveley, the Kenosha County district attorney who has focused on treating gun violence as a public health epidemic.

Interest intensifies

Stinson-Dockerys interest in infant mortality became more and more intense, especially after having a personal meeting with Katherine Hall-Trujillo, the founder of Birthing Project USA, a nonprofit that provides support to pregnant and parenting teens and women.

Hall-Trijillo had flown from California to Racine to meet with Stinson-Dockery and they hit it off immediately, both having similar thoughts and concerns about infant mortality.

Since then, Stinson-Dockery said Hall-Trijullo gave her blessing to start up a Birthing Project USA chapter in the Racine-Kenosha area and she ran with it.

Stinson-Dockery, 38, has put her heart and soul into designing and implanting a community-driven, non-medical grassroots intervention program to address the disparity of infant mortality in the area.

Grateful for honor

Stinson-Dockery said she was grateful for the humanitarian award, an award she received in front of a crowd of approximately 500.

I am very excited about receiving this, Stinson-Dockery said. You dont do this to seek any kind of recognition, though. When you do stuff like this, its not about recognition. Its about making progress ... Im very humbled.

The fact she was honored on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday made it even more special. Stinson-Dockery learned at an early age about the iconic civil rights leader who was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn.

Stinson-Dockery said her father, George Stinson, the former president of the Racine chapter of the NAACP, and her mother, Betty, who was also an active participant in local civil issues, frequently told her of Kings deeds.

I admired Dr. King because he was selfless, said Stinson-Dockery, who attended The Prairie School and Case High School before attending North Carolina Central University. He was a man who had a vision.

He was an advocate and he was able to pull community groups together. And thats what I feel were doing here (with Birthing Project USA).

A labor of love

Stinson-Dockery said about 23 women  all volunteers  are involved with the Racine-Kenosha Birthing USA Project. She added further chapters are now being established in Milwaukee and Madison.

Stinson-Dockery said her work is a labor of love.

This is really my passion, Stinson-Dockery said. Knowing that if we have a healthy community, well have a healthy country.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., who attended the Gateway ceremony, applauded the works of all three Humanitarian Award winners, adding, GeorgAnn Stinson-Dockery reminds us all of the power of volunteerism.

In addition to the Humanitarian Award winners, 60 students from area grade schools and high schools were recipients of the Peace Mentor Award. Those included the following students from Racine: Chloe Kostas of Horlick High School; Reagan Conner of the REAL School; Riley Matson and Victor Palomares of Fratt Elementary; Kadarie Clements and Gabrielle Pagliaro of McKinley Middle School; Jermaine Jones and Mubeen Yusuf of Mitchell Middle School; and Adrian Melendez and Yareni Cruz of Johnson Elementary School.
District of Columbia: Former top White House aide Steve Bannon appeared Tuesday at the House Intelligence Committee to testify behind closed doors in its sensitive probe into the Trump campaign`s links to Russia.

It is the first time Bannon has testified in the probe of whether campaign associates of the president colluded with Russia in its bid to influence the 2016 US elections.

It was not likely to be Bannon`s last such testimony: the New York Times reported Tuesday that Bannon has been subpoenaed by Robert Mueller, the Justice Department special counsel investigating the same issue.

That made Bannon the first person from President Donald Trump`s inner circle to receive a grand jury subpoena from Mueller in the probe, which is also looking at whether Trump has tried to obstruct the investigation.

The testimony of Trump's estranged political strategist could be explosive: he had a front-row seat as chief executive of the 2016 election campaign in its final months, and as a top policy advisor in the first seven months of the administration.

An incendiary book released last week, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," by Michael Wolff, quoted him as saying that a pre-election meeting involving Trump`s eldest son Donald Jr. and a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer was "treasonous."

Wolff, who painted a picture of an erratic and poorly informed president, was given substantial access to the White House during Trump`s first year by Bannon.

A hard-line nationalist who sought to shake up US domestic and foreign policy, Bannon, 64, was forced out as Trump`s chief strategist in August.

His actions since then -- most notably supporting the failed Senate campaign of Alabama Republican Roy Moore, but also his comments in the Wolff book -- have left him increasingly isolated in conservative circles.

Last week he stepped down from Breitbart News, which he had helped make a powerful conservative force, and he lost the support of the Mercer family, wealthy conservative power brokers.

Underscoring the break, Trump said Bannon had "lost his mind" and branded him "Sloppy Steve" via Twitter.
NEW DELHI: A top American official on Wednesday asked Pakistan to take action against the Haqqani network and other terrorist groups present within its territory, the US embassy said.

Alice Wells, the US Department of State's Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, visited Islamabad this week and met officials of the Foreign Office. "Wells urged the government of Pakistan to address the continuing presence of the Haqqani network and other terrorist groups within its territory," the embassy said in a statement.

The Haqqani network, blamed for several deadly attacks against Indian interests in Afghanistan including the 2008 bombing of the Indian mission in Kabul that killed 58 people, has also carried out a number of kidnappings and attacks against US interests in Afghanistan. In her meetings with Pakistani officials, Ambassador Wells underlined that the US seeks to move toward a new relationship with Pakistan "based on our mutual interest in realizing a stable and prosperous region." She also acknowledged Pakistan's "considerable sacrifices" in fighting terrorism.

Wells also emphasized that the US South Asia strategy represents an opportunity to work together for the establishment of a stable, peaceful Afghanistan, the defeat of ISIS in South Asia, and the elimination of terrorist groups that threaten both Pakistan and the United States.

The statement from the US embassy comes days after the Trump administration suspended about USD 2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan over its failure to rein in militant groups.

In a strongest indication yet on the US cutting off aid to Pakistan, President Donald Trump said Washington had 'foolishly' provided Pakistan $33 billion in 15 years to fight terror, but "they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools".

"They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!," Trump tweeted on Monday.

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, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more! January 1, 2018

On August 22, 2017, too, while unveiling the long-awaited strategy for Afghanistan, Trump had hit out at Pakistan for sheltering terrorists. Washington will no longer tolerate Pakistan and Taliban for offering protection to extremists, he had said. Accusing Pakistan of offering safe haven to `agents of chaos`, Trump had said that the country has much to lose by continuing to harbour criminals and terrorists." "Pakistan has much to gain from partnering with our effort in Afghanistan," he had added.

The US President had again singled out Pakistan for criticism when he had announced his national security strategy in December 2017. "We make massive payments every year to Pakistan. They have to help," he had said.
Islamabad: The US has been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat to it and Islamabad should change its strategic stance towards New Delhi, Defence Minister Khurram Dastagir Khan has said.

He also said that it is time for a courteous yet "ruthlessly candid dialogue" with the US "with everything on the table" to remove all misunderstandings between Islamabad and Washington.

Reading out a policy statement on the government's foreign policy contours and the security situation in Pakistan in the National Assembly yesterday, he regretted that the US downplayed India's aggressive posturing along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary, the Dawn reported today.

The minister said the perception of India was one of the foundational divergences between Pakistan and the US.

"It's time for a courteous yet ruthlessly candid dialogue between Pakistan and the US with everything on the table," the defence minister said.

Khan said that Washington had been trying to convince Pakistan that India was not a threat and, therefore, Islamabad should change its strategic stance.

"But the truism remains true. Both India's capacity and intents are today hostile towards Pakistan," he alleged.

Pakistan accuses India of using Afghan soil for carrying out hostile activities against it, a charge India has dismissed.

Khan alleged that "India has amassed men, material and garrisons along the border with Pakistan" and said that 2017 was the deadliest year in terms of LoC violations by India and the killings of civilians.

"India today is a highly militarised and an increasingly belligerent neighbour," he claimed, adding that the unrelentingly hostile and anti-Pakistan stance taken by the current Indian government has reduced drastically the space for any advocacy of peace.

The minister said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat as the US was not winning (the war on terror) in Afghanistan.

He said Pakistan had cleared the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and Balochistan under the Operation 'Zarb-i-Azb' and there were no safe havens for terrorists in the country.

He urged the US to recognise the sacrifices Pakistan and its people had made in the war on terror since 2001.

He also criticised the US for not pursuing internal reconciliation in Afghanistan, which had now become a safe haven for terrorists.
Beijing: Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday held telephone talks with his US counterpart Donald Trump to resume a suspended dialogue programme aimed at improving bilateral economic ties, amid tensions over their huge trade imbalance.

The phone call between the two leaders came as the Trump administration threatened tough action against China including punitive tariffs, sanctions and even a trade war.

Tensions have escalated between Beijing and Washington in recent months, with China last Friday reporting a record USD 275.8 billion trade surplus with the US, contrary to Trump?s goal to narrow the US trade deficit with China, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.

The two leaders discussed bilateral trade and the situation on the Korean Peninsula, especially the talks between the South and North Koreas to bring down the tensions, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told media here.

They believe that this relationship is quite important, Lu said.

The two sides need to maintain high-level contacts, bring the four high-level dialogue mechanisms between them into full play, and hold the second round of dialogues at a proper time, Xi told Trump, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The phone call came amid strengthening of efforts to keep China-US trade relations right on track and at a time when tensions on the Korean Peninsula have shown signs of easing as senior officials from Pyongyang and Seoul met face-to-face on the borders earlier this month in what was their first direct talks in more than two years.

The economies of China and US are large and the differences between the two countries inevitable and natural, Lu quoted President Xi as saying.

The two countries should in a constructive way enlarge the pie of cooperation and properly settle the difference in economic relations and trade, he said.

As economic and trade cooperation brings tangible benefits to both peoples, the two countries should adopt constructive measures to properly settle economic and trade issues of mutual concern by opening up the market to each other and "making the cake of cooperation bigger," Xi added.

Xi also called for advancing cooperation between the two militaries, and in law-enforcement, drug control, cultural and people-to-people exchanges and cooperation at local levels, as well as close communication and coordination on major international and regional issues.

He said China welcomes the "positive signs" in the Korean Peninsula as the South and North Koreas began talks to ease tensions.

Trump said he attaches great importance to China which plays important role in Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, the Xinhua report said.

Trump said the US side attaches great importance to its relations with China as well as to the US-China cooperation.

The US is willing to work with the Chinese side to enhance bilateral exchanges at all levels, expand pragmatic cooperation, and properly handle problems in bilateral trade so as to achieve even greater results in bilateral relations, Xinhua quoted Trump as saying.
Enjoy the first large-scale museum exhibition dedicated to tramp art since 1975. More than 150 examples of tramp art, concentrating on works from the United States, with additional international examples.

For Immediate Release: October 24, 2016 (Santa Fe, NM) The Museum of International Folk Art presents No Idle Hands: The Myths & Meanings of Tramp Art, the first large-scale museum exhibition dedicated to tramp art since 1975. The exhibition will present more than 150 examples of tramp art, concentrating on works from the United States, with additional examples from France, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Canada, Mexico and Brazil to demonstrate the far reach this art form has had. Additionally, the show will analyze and dismantle the myths and misperceptions about tramp art, particularly as they relate to assumptions related to class, quality, and the anonymity of the makers.

Tramp art describes a particular type of chip-carved woodwork that was practiced in Europe and the United States between the 1870s and 1940s, making use of discarded cigar boxes or crates that were then notch-carved along the edges and layered. Objects made were primarily boxes and frames, but other household objects such as small private altars, crosses, medicine cabinets, wall pockets, clock cases, plant stands, and even furniture can be found.

"Tramp art's place in art history has been troublesome. It has had detractorspeople who regard it as 'the ugly duckling' of folk artbut also numerous champions," said Laura Addison, Curator of North American & European Folk Art at the Museum of International Folk Art, and the show's curator. "This exhibition will erase any doubts about the quality and craftsmanship of the work and situate tramp art as a practice at the crossroads of cultural transformation at the turn of the 20th century," she said. Addison also pointed out that by juxtaposing historic pieces with those by contemporary artists working in the tramp art style, the exhibition frames this art form as an ongoing tradition that continues to capture the public's imaginationmyths and all.

"The ingenious objects in the Tramp Art exhibition use recycled or repurposed wood, and highlight a moment in time a century ago when artisans, many of them immigrants to the US, created a new variety of folk art," said Khristaan D. Villela, Director of the Museum of International Folk Art. "They are a testament to the ability of untrained artists to produce objects of immense beauty and complexity," he said.

For many years, tramp art was believed to have been made by itinerants and hobos, thus its name. It has been demonstrated, however, that this belief, first put in print by Frances Lichten in a 1959 Pennsylvania Folklife article, is erroneous. Nonetheless, the name "tramp art" has remained the only terminology used for this practice, and the paucity of scholarly studies to dispel the mistaken notions about tramp art have allowed the myths to persist.

Whittling objects such as wood chains and ball-in-cage whimsies was a common pastime, including among railriding "hobos," and some examples of tramp art were likely by the hand of itinerant laborers or artisans. However, this style of carving was more commonly the practice of family men and blue-collar factory workers making functional domestic objects or gifts for the women in their lives. Efforts have been made in recent years to identify makers by name and unearth their biographies; these personal narratives illustrate a very different story of the makers of tramp art. As these makers and their stories come to light, it has become obvious that home and family are central to an understanding of the practice of tramp art.

No Idle Hands will present tramp art objects according to four primary areas: Introduction/historical context, home & nation, frames & boxes and devotional objects. Works in the exhibition will come from the Museum of International Folk Art permanent collection as well as loans from a number of private and museum collections across the country. An exhibition publication will accompany the exhibition, with essays by Laura Addison, Curator of North American & European Folk Art, Museum of International Folk Art; Leslie Umberger, a curator in the area of folk art and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and Eric Zafran, a retired curator of European art, most recently at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

The Museum of International Folk Art Museum Shop is located in the museum at 706 Camino Lejo (Museum Hill just off Old Santa Fe Trail). 505-982-5186.

MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART

The Museum of International Folk Art is a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

The Museum of International Folk Art's mission is "to enrich the human spirit by connecting people with the arts, traditions and cultures of the world." Founded in 1953 by Florence Dibell Bartlett, the museum holds the world's largest international folk art collection of more than 150,000 objects from six continents and over 150 nations.

The museum's collections represent a broad range of global artists whose artistic expressions make Santa Fe an international crossroads of culture. For many visitors, fascination with folk art begins upon seeing the whimsical toys and traditional objects within the Girard Collection. For others, the international textiles, ceramics, carvings and other cultural treasures in the Neutrogena Collection provide the allure. The museum's historic and contemporary Latino and Hispano folk art collections, spanning the Spanish Colonial period to modern-day New Mexico, reflect how artists respond to their time and place in ways both delightful and sobering. In 2010, the museum opened the Mark Naylor and Dale Gunn Gallery of Conscience, where exhibitions encourage visitors to exchange ideas on complex issues of human rights and social justice.

Over 90,000 national and international visitors visit the Museum International Folk Art every year. Through folk art, the museum encourages all to find a common ground upon which to craft better lives for all.

Museum exhibitions and programs are supported by donors to the Museum of New Mexico Foundation and its Director's Leadership Fund, Exhibitions Development Fund, and Fund for Museum Education, as well as by the International Folk Art Foundation, also established by museum founder Florence Dibell Bartlett.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. The ministry of emergency situations informs that on January 16, as of 09:00, some roads are difficult to pass in Armenia.

The ministry told Armenpress that the Vardenyats Pass and Sotk-Karvachar highway are difficult to pass.

Sisian-Kapan highway is partly covered with clear ice.

The ministry urges the drivers to use winter tires.

The Stepantsminda-Lars highway is open for all types of vehicles.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. The Yerevan Municipality cooperates with more than 50 cities across the world and is a member of 10 international and regional organizations by creating a comprehensive framework and implementing joint programs.

The first cooperation protocol has been signed with the Italian city of Carrara on September 12, 1973.

Davit Gevorgyan  head of the foreign relations department at the Yerevan Municipality, told Armenpress that the geography includes almost all continents. Among the partners are both big and small cities.

We have cooperation of different activity with each city. Of course, we do not have a deep, comprehensive partnership with all 50 cities. We have very deep program cooperation with some of them, quite good ties with others, contacts both at the bilateral level and within the frames of the international organizations. We have a more comprehensive cooperation with the Russian cities of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Rostov-on-Don. Among the European cities I want to mention Paris, Lyon and Marseille. We also have quite a successful cooperation with our neighboring cities  Tbilisi, Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz and etc. We have cooperation programs with Montreal, San Paulo. As you can see, the geography is quite wide, Davit Gevorgyan said.

He said, in general, Yerevans international cooperation is aimed at increasing its recognition, spreading information about the city and advertising it. Of course, issues are also being discussed over attracting possible investments. In addition, an exchange of experience is also being carried out.

As for the upcoming new agreements, Davit Gevorgyan said the update of agreements or preparation of new ones is a constant process. At the moment we have agreements with nearly 7 cities that are at the development stage. We have concluded a new agreement with Minsk, the cooperation agreement with the Chinese city of Qingdao is at the development stage. These agreements are mainly signed during the official visits, he said.

Since 2018 is a jubilee year for Yerevan, a lot of guests from partner cities are expected. Davit Gevorgyan said its still early to talk about the exact number of guests, but they are convinced that a number of foreign delegations will visit Yerevan this year.

This year the events are focused on the capital, but Yerevan days are also possible in other cities.

At the moment the preparation works dedicated to Yerevans 2800 anniversary are at the final stage. The program will be announced after its finalization. I think they will launch in May-June and will continue also in autumn. In other words, there will be events within the frames of jubilee over the course of the year, he said.










YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. The second session of the Parliaments four-day sitting has kicked off on January 16, reports Armenpress.

At the beginning of the session issues discussed during the previous session will be put up to voting.

During the January 15 session the lawmakers debated about a dozen legislative initiatives, including the draft statement on recognizing and condemning the genocide against the Yazidi people by the terrorist groups in Iraq.

The parliament also discussed the draft on creating single transportation network in provinces.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. Despite not seeing substantial changes in the negotiation process over the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Russian political scientist Stanislav Tarasov considers 2017 positive in a sense that no escalation of the conflict happened and the April of 2016 was not repeated. According to him, in 2017 the negotiation process was moving forward with a quite difficulty: what is necessary to the sides at this stage is the new negotiation format.

Yes, during this time a number of new conditions, some mutual concession options were proposed, but, in any case, the main subject that is talked about during the negotiations is the implementation of the Vienna and St. Petersburg agreements, the political scientist told Armenpress, once again stressing that Stepanakerts involvement in the negotiation process is desirable.

Even if an agreement is signed over the implementation of these agreements, it would be impossible to implement them without Stepanakerts involvement both at the technical and other levels. The OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, as mediators, conduct diplomacy between Baku and Yerevan and they also visit Stepanakert, in other words, if we pass from the diplomatic language to an ordinary one, it means that they actually recognize Stepanakert as a party to the conflict, and they should also hold negotiations with it, he said.

According to the Russian political scientist, president Ilham Aliyev, in connection with the upcoming presidential elections in Azerbaijan, wants to keep the positions of the negotiator and not to cross the red line. Thats why the political scientist doesnt predict serious escalation of the situation in the future.

The ongoing internal political processes in Azerbaijan are not so easy. The West doesnt welcome the idea of forever leader as it wants to see a concrete democratic process, Stanislav Tarasov said, once again stating that the negotiations should be held at relatively stable situation.

Its impossible to hold negotiations and open fire at the same time: this is not normal, he said.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbaev arrived in the United States on an official visit, the Kazakh presidential office said, TASS reports.

The head of state arrived in Washington, the statement says. During the visit the Kazakh President will meet with US President Donald Trump, as well as other officials and business representatives.

On January 18 the UN Security Council members will hold debates on Non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. confidence-building measures chaired by the Kazakh President.
NJ Moves To Make Gun

Buyback Events MANDATORY

By Tony Oliva. January 4th, 2018

New Jersey is one of those states that never met a pointless and ineffective gun control policy it didn't like. In recent years it was kept in check by the otherwise beach going blowhard, Chris Christie, but even he seemed to think that gun buyback programs were actually worth doing.

But as is often the case, give an inch to rights infringers and they will want to put the bill of rights into the shredder.

In the waning hours of Christie's tenure the gun control loving pit of vipers that is the NJ Assembly and Senate are seeking control of gun buybacks on the state level, taking it away from the state attorney general's discretion.

Not only are they seeking control of it, they are seeking to make gun buybacks MANDATORY.

The bill (S1154/A2374) requires nine buyback programs a year, has already been passed 52-17-5 by the Assembly and is scheduled for a Senate budget committee vote Thursday. It could then be passed Monday, the last day of the two-year legislative session. The nine buybacks would be broken down to three in each section of New Jersey; North, Central and South. .......

It's difficult to manage with only polite comment any discussion about anything to do with 'gun control' in NJ - expletives would seem a better choice. Things are already bad enough but stand by for some extras - not only a 'bump stock' ban but a scheme to mandate gun 'buybacks'. As we repeatedly point out, no one can buy back what was never theirs and, do they really expect criminal's guns to come flooding in?

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YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. Head of Tsarukyan faction Gagik Tsarukyan doesnt rule out that their party will support the ruling Republican partys candidate for the President of Armenia, reports Armenpress.

Asked whether they will support the RPA candidate for the president, Gagik Tsarukyan told reporters that everything is possible. I must say that everything is possible, depending on who will be the candidate. Today we dont know who is their candidate, he said.

Gagik Tsarukyan added that based on the election results the people gave a full right to the RPA to nominate their candidate for the President and elect without them and Yelk faction. If our people gave the Republican party a full opportunity to nominate and elect, what else to talk about?, Gagik Tsarukyan said.

Asked whether their party will form a coalition with the ruling party, Gagik Tsarukyan said: We didnt have a discussion and a talk on this issue.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. Member of Parliament of Turkey from the Peoples Democratic Party Osman Baydemir has lost 1/3rd of his salary for saying the word Kurdistan in the parliament, T24 reports.

After changes in the rules of procedure of the parliament, more than 3 thousand USD was fined from Baydemir.

The changes impose punishment for MPs who will insult the common past and history of the Turkish people. Using the term Armenian Genocide is also included among the banned terms.

The law also plans temporarily banning MPs from sessions.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. On January 16, as of 01:15, soldier of Artsakhs Defense Army Harutyun V. Khachatryan, born in 1998, received fatal gunshot wound in one of the military units, the Artsakh defense ministry told Armenpress.

The details of the incident are still unknown.

Investigation is underway.

The Artsakh defense ministry shares the grief of the loss and expresses its support to the family, relatives and co-servicemen of the soldier.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. On January 16, in accordance with the arrangement reached with the authorities of the Republic of Artsakh, the OSCE Mission conducted a planned monitoring of the ceasefire regime on the border of Artsakh and Azerbaijan, on the Akna-Hindarkh road section, the Artsakh foreign ministry told Armenpress.

From the positions of the Defense Army of the Republic of Artsakh, the monitoring was conducted by Field Assistant to the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office (CiO) Mihail Olaru (Moldova) and staff member of the Office of the CiO Personal Representative Martin Schuster (Germany).

From the opposite side of the border, the monitoring was conducted by Field Assistant to the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Ghenadie Petrica.

The monitoring passed in accordance with the agreed schedule.

From the Artsakh side, the monitoring mission was accompanied by representatives of the ministries of foreign affairs and defense.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. The State Commission for the Protection of Economic Competition (SCPEC) has not yet recorded abuses in the commodity markets of social significance that have leading economic entities, reports Armenpress.

SCPEC chairman Artak Shaboyan told reporters that after the Armenian Presidents task they have further toughened the control, expanded the visual field, carry out detailed calculations, also regarding the international experience. At the moment we havent recorded cases of abuse, but we will not be limited to this and will keep the same pace of control in the future to prevent cases of abuse, he said.

As for the study of flour and wheat market, the SCPEC chairman said at the moment the works are underway, they have applied to the economic entities and wait for the data. We are thoroughly studying the whole chain, starting from the import of wheat, flour reprocessing up to baking, the official said. He added that 67 economic entities conduct an import in the field of flour.

President Serzh Sargsyan chaired a consultation January 10 to discuss the price increase of separate products in the country and the salutations of possible mitigation of those increases.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. A number of commemorative events will be held throughout Turkey on the 11th anniversary of Armenian-Turkish editor-in-chief of Agos Hrant Dinks death.

Just like every year, a vigil will be held outside Dinks office, the place where he was shot dead in Istanbul, Agos reports.

A conference titled Hrant Dink, human rights and freedom of the speech will be held in the citys Bogazici University, where French Marxist scholar Etienne Balibar will deliver a speech January 17.

The famous DurDe organization will organize a discusson on the same day in the Cezayir Hall in Istanbul. Speeches will be made by Dink murder case attorney Hakan Bakirjroglu, former MP Ufuk Uras, writer Umit Kivanc and activist Yildiz Onen.

Commemorative events are expected to be held worldwide.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. Major international scientific conference will be held in Yerevan on February 23 dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Artsakh movement.

Ashot Melkonyan, director of the History Institute at the National Academy of Sciences, told a press conference in Armenpress that a lot of renowned international specialists from different countries, scientific institutions will attend the conference. In addition, the conference will also be attended by famous media figures.

We emphasize that the Artsakh movement was not only a movement for the right to self-determination, it was also a national liberation struggle that logically led to Armenias independence. We most importantly would like to hear the words of our international partners, foreign specialists about the Artsakh movement, Ashot Melkonyan said.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. The prices of petrol and diesel fuel in Armenia and Georgia are almost the same, but the pricing mechanisms are different, Artak Shaboyan  chairman of the State Commission for the Protection of Economic Competition (SCPEC), told reporters, reports Armenpress.

Our studies show that the prices of petrol and diesel fuel in Armenia and Georgia are almost the same, but we need to take into account that there are pricing differences in these two countries. The petrol is imported to Armenia via Georgia through railway. The calculations show that the transportation costs greatly affect the petrol cost price, Artak Shaboyan said. He stated that the geography of countries of import is also different. If Armenia conducts import mainly from Russia, Romania and Bulgaria, Georgia imports from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.

Commenting on the change in price of petrol and diesel fuel in Armenia during 2017, in particular, on the increase of these prices, the official said this was conditioned by the increase in import prices.

This year as well a price increase in these commodity markets was recorded due to changes in tax rates.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. Armenia has been included in the UN Honour Roll 2018 for paying regular budget assessments in full and on time, the foreign ministry told Armenpress.

In January 2018 Armenia transferred 145,843.00 USD to the UN regular budget, as a regular budget assessment of member states.

The Honour Roll includes those member states that have paid their regular budget assessments in full within the 30 day due period specified in Financial Regulation.

As of January 10, 2018, only 7 out of 193 UN member states have been included in the Honour Roll.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. The Lori Berd, the medieval fortress in Armenias Lori province, is one of the most significant monuments of the Bronze and Iron Ages. It includes more than 1 and a half millennia of consecutive periods, starting from the early stages of the middle Bronze Age up to the decline of the Kingdom of Van.

The unique findings which were discovered during excavations of the site are important for studying not only the history of Armenia and Southern Caucasus, but also Middle East.

Senior researcher Julietta Karapetyan from the Armenian History Museum told ARMENPRESS that the silver cup stands out from the valuable findings of Lori Berd.

The cup has a chariot displayed on it, with two persons depicted on it, she said. One of the depicted people is probably the king.

Karapetyan says the scenario is known from the sculpture art of ancient Eastern times  Urartu and Assyrian times. The depicted people wear uniforms and weapons typical to the Urartians.

The cups ornament is similar to ancient Eastern types by its theme and images, with the presence of Urartian and Assyrian elements, she said.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif discussed the Syrian settlement and the situation around the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear program during a phone conversation on January 16, the Russian foreign ministry said, TASS reports.

The sides exchanged views on a number of vital international issues, in particular the Syrian settlement in the context of holding the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in Sochi and also the situation around the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear program, the ministry said.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. The Republican Party of Armenia will nominate a person who has things to say and to do as a candidate for the post of president, Vice Speaker of the Parliament Eduard Sharmazanov said.

President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan has said that it will be more convincing that a presidential candidate would have great political support from both the ruling and opposition forces. We believe that the ruling power has the opportunity to present a candidate to the public and the political forces, for whom a positive agreement can exist, he said.

He didnt rule out that discussions over a candidate can begin during the upcoming session of the partys executive body. We will present the candidate within the time period under the law, he said.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. A group of Syrian-Armenian students gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Armenia to hand over a letter of gratitude to the Russian Federation for the continuous support aimed at liberating the country during the years of war and assisting its people, reports Armenpress.

The organizers of the initiative were the Syrian Student Union in Armenia and the International Humanitarian Development NGO.

Head of the Syrian Student Union in Armenia Julia Pampalyan said almost all students who arrived in Armenia from Syria participate in the campaign.

I am from the city of Aleppo. I have arrived in Armenia in 2012. I study at the Yerevan State Medical University. I left Syria because it was dangerous there. Terrorist movements started, they were everywhere, even entered universities, churches, they attacked everywhere. My relatives now are in Syria, we had 3 young losses, now everything is destroyed there. We express our gratitude both to Russia and Armenia since Armenia also provided aid by sending food, she said.

Nasri Nasri also arrived in Armenia in 2012. The relatives are now in Syria.

Three years ago when I returned back, the situation was bad, but this summer I also visited there, the situation greatly improved. This year I graduate and will return to my relatives, the student said.

The head of the Union handed over the letter of gratitude to the advisor of the Russian Ambassador who promised to give the letter to the Ambassador and said Russia will continue providing assistance now more focusing on the humanitarian direction.

The most important thing is the revival of that country which is not an easy task. We think that we all, including by the assistance of Armenia, will be able to address this difficult task, the advisor said.
YEREVAN, 16 JANUARY, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 16 January, USD exchange rate down by 0.20 drams to 483.01 drams. EUR exchange rate down by 1.55 drams to 590.82 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate down by 0.01 drams to 8.56 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 1.15 drams to 664.86 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price up by 184.81 drams to 20797.39 drams. Silver price up by 3.07 drams to 269.04 drams. Platinum price up by 164.45 drams to 15560.19 drams.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. The delegation led by the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Armenia, Colonel-General Movses Hakobyan participated in North Atlantic Alliance Military Committee Conference on the level of Chiefs of General Staff on January 16 in Brussels.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Defense Ministry of Armenia, 2 sessions were held during the conference, including in the format of the countries participating in Resolute Support in Afghanistan.

Security and stability issues in the southern neighborhood of Europe, as well as challenges and ways to withstand them were discussed.

The session in the format of Resolute Support was aimed at presenting the current issues of the coalition operations, discussion of problematic issues and development of common positions.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. The Yazda organization and victim of the acts of the Islamic State terrorist organization and UNODC Goodwill Ambassador for dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking Nadia Murad have welcomed the adoption of the resolution recognizing the genocide of the Yazidi people by the National Assembly of Armenia.

The recognition of the Yazidi Genocide by the Armenian parliament today is a historic moment for the entire Yazidi community worldwide and for victims of this genocide. We welcome this important step especially as it comes from a country which, in recent history, has suffered greatly from genocide, reads the statement posted in the official website of the Yazda organization.

I am touched by todays decision and I would like to express my gratitude to the people of Armenia and their representatives in Parliament . Acknowledgment of the Genocide means a lot to me and all the victims of genocide. ARMENPRESS reports Nadia Murad said.

The Yazidi genocide is the latest capital crime of our century, the world should recognize this crime and accept the fact it happened, not only recognize it, but take the steps to stop it and adopt mechanisms to ensure it will not be repeated in the future said Murad Ismael, Yazda Executive Director.

Yazda and Nadia Murad expressed their gratitude to the Standing Committee on Foreign Relation, to MP Rustam Makhmudyan (a Yazidi ), leader of the RPA fraction Vahram Baghdasaryan, ,leader of the ARF fraction Armen Rustamyan and the Tsarukyan and Yelk fractions.

The parliament of Armenia recognized on January 16 the actions of the Islamic State against the Yazidi people in 2014 in the territory of Iraq as genocide. 91 MPs voted in favor of the resolution, 1 MP abstained.
YEREVAN, JANUARY 16, ARMENPRESS. Following the solemn ceremony of handing Order of Homeland to National Hero of Armenia Hovhannes Chekijyan, President Sargsyan had a meeting with some of the intellectuals that attended the ceremony around a tea table.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Armenian Presidents Office, at the beginning of the meeting noting that during the past years he periodically held meetings with intellectuals, President Serzh Sargsyan once again underlined the role and the mission of the intellectuals in the life of the country and offered to have an open and sincere discussion about Armenia and its future, particularly, under the light of the new governance system as a result of the Constitutional changes. Serzh Sargsyan expected to hear the positions, suggestions, as well as concerns and assessments of the intellectuals on the reality in the country.

The participants of the meeting highlighted such meetings and discussions, talked about their visions of Armenias future, issues of public concern, including education of the youth, the huge role of the state to educate good citizens, preservation of the purity of the Armenian language and a number of other issues.

The President also answered the questions of the intellectuals that referred to the security of the country and foreign policy. The participants of the meeting asked President Sargsyan, as a person who has run very important positions for years and has passed through the hardships of the war, what criteria the next president of the Republic should meet.

Presenting his vision on the next president of the Republic of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan noted that the person to assume that post should be someone who has passed a serious path, has reputation inside the country and abroad, and can properly present Armenia in other countries, meaning to fulfill his representative functions. According to Serzh Sargsyan, the next president should know foreign languages, have broad connections in both Diaspora and Armenia, enjoy high reputation, and what is most important, be an impartial individual who has never been in politics and has never been a member of any political party.
PHILADELPHIAAs the long battle to invalidate the federal recordkeeping and labeling laws, 18 U.S.C. 2257 and 2257A, continues, it's beginning to look as though First Amendment attorney J. Michael Murray, who represents the 12 remaining plaintiffs (including Free Speech Coalition) who filed the lawsuit, may be on the verge of a major win.

When we last left the 2257 battle, U.S. District Judge Michael M. Baylson had held a hearing on the issues raised by the Third Circuit's reconsideration of the plaintiffs' appeal, which itself was based on two recent Supreme Court decisions. A report on that hearing can be found here.

Of importance here is that the Third Circuit ordered Judge Baylson to re-analyze the evidence from the 2013 trial of the case under the standard of "strict scrutiny," whereas before the Third Circuit's most recent consideration, the trial court had been operating under the lower standard of "intermediate scrutiny."

After the conclusion of the hearing before Judge Baylson on September 28, 2017, the judge asked Murray to speak with his clientsmost notably the industry trade organization Free Speech Coalitionand ask them to come up with a "standard practice" that commercial adult producers could agree to regarding checking the IDs of performers before they would appear in explicit content, and for retention of such ID documents. Murray did so, and that document, which was prepared by Free Speech Coalition with input from a variety of industry leaders and professional sources, was submitted to the judge in late October. That document can be read here.

At that same time, Judge Baylson agreed to the request from Deputy U.S. Attorney Kathryn Wyer that she be allowed to consult with her superiors regarding whether they wanted to put on more evidence as to whether the 2257 laws meet the standards for "strict scrutiny." But although the judge gave Wyer four weeks from the date of the hearing to get back to him with an answer, at the government's request, he extended that reply date to January 5 of this yearand at the same time denied its request that the plaintiffs answer additional written "interrogatories"questions that the government would have submitted to various of the plaintiffs seeking more information about their practices and legal theories.

Now, with all of the requested paperwork having been filed with the court, it will be up to Judge Baylson to rule whether to affirm the legality of the 2257 laws, to strike them downor some combination of the two, much as, during the September hearing, he had struck down the portion of the law that allowed for warrantless records searches of adult businesses. There is no deadline by which the judge must issue his ruling.

But if one thing is clear from the filings the government made on January 5, there is very little argument to be made for the continued application of 2257 and 2257A to commercial adult producers.

To understand why requires a bit of background. Under the "strict scrutiny" standard, the government is required to show that the two 2257 statutes are justified by a "compelling governmental interest" in the goal the laws are intended to accomplishpreventing minors from appearing in sexually explicit contentand that the laws as they currently exist are the "least restrictive means" to accomplish that goal. It must also show that the laws are "narrowly tailored" enough to accomplish the goal without being so broad as to draw in material that could not possibly relate to that goal.

On that last point, the government has essentially thrown in the towel, at least as to content that uses only performers 30 years old or older.

"[O]ut of all the alternatives proposed by Plaintiffs, the only one that deserves serious consideration by the Court is the suggestion that the Statutes and Regulations should apply only when a Plaintiff uses a performer under age 30," the government admits in its Memorandum in Support of its Proposed Judgment. "There is no question, and Defendant does not contest, that the Governments interest in the Statutes age verification scheme is strongest when the requirements are applied to depictions of performers that could, going by appearance alone, be minors, and the record has already established that the appropriate cut-off age for this purpose is 30 years old."

Translation: Since no one is going to mistake Cherie DeVille, Alexis Fawx, Nina Hartley nor the dozens of other "mature" actresses as being minors, there's no sense in keeping age-identifying documents on them.

However, what the government is proposing is still far more restrictive than it might appear to be. For example, even if a feature is advertised as being MILF-oriented, experience has shown that such features often include younger-looking males and femalesand their inclusion would require, under whatever is left of the 2257 law, that identification documents be kept for the entire cast anyway.

And that "older than 30" standard is the only one the government is willing to give ground on.

"Here, this Court should not put minors needlessly at risk by invalidating the Statutes in their entirety, when the Statutes can be validly applied to the production of millions of images depicting the sexual activity of young-looking individuals," the Memorandum goes on to say. "No broader relief, such as complete invalidation, is necessary or appropriate here.

"In arguing that the Statutes fail strict scrutiny because there are less restrictive alternativesincluding the alternative of simply doing away with age verification requirements altogether, or (along much the same lines) trusting producers to check ages of their own accordPlaintiffs rely heavily on the notion that the Statutes target a 'non-existent' problem because, they maintain, the 'adult industry' does not want to produce child pornography," the Memorandum later continues. "The premise underlying this argument is that the world of the so-called adult industry, which produces sexually-explicit videos and photographs that are openly advertised and published on the Internet, is far removed from child pornography, which Plaintiffs suggest is found almost exclusively on peer to peer networks, or otherwise hidden in inaccessible corners of the Internet."

To anyone familiar with the "so-called adult industry" (which of course is the actual adult industry that all of the plaintiffs are familiar with and most work in), the argument the government dismisses above is in fact self-evidently true. Commercial adult producers aren't stupid. They are well aware that child pornography laws exist, and that if they were to use an underage performer in one of their productions, whether that production is a DVD sold in stores or a web scene seen by millions of website subscribers, they would be putting themselves at risk for a federal prison sentence of at least five years, and possibly 10 or 20. Considering that plenty of young-looking adult performers are available for hire, and that it would be the height of stupidity for the producer to advertise that he/she had used an underage performer, there is simply no advantage to using oneeven if the producer's own moral philosophy didn't prevent their use.

"According to those who investigate and prosecute child pornography, the reality is otherwise," the government goes on to claim. "Millions of apparent child pornography images are found online by members of the public as well as electronic service providers and reported each year to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children ('NCMEC'), which acts as the nations clearinghouse for information about the sexual exploitation of children."

What the government leaves out, of course, is what Murray stated at that last hearing: After noting that there had been only nine prosecutions involving 2257 during the entire almost 30-year existence of the law, "none of them had been of a commercial producer."

The rest of the government's argument for the preservation of 2257 is that there are a lot of young-looking performers out there, that a lot of pornone-third, by the government's analysisis advertised as featuring "teens," and that "There is no wall separating these two endeavors, or those who are involved in them. To the contrary, they coexist and intermingle on the Internet, and feed the same 'appetite for viewing' youthful-looking individuals engaged in sexual conduct that this Court previously recognized."

Left out of that "analysis" is the fact that at that same hearing, "Murray responded [to the judge] by stating that none of the plaintiffs (including all members of FSC) would use an underage performer because they are 'totally against' doing so, and that FSC even offered a reward to anyone giving information leading to the conviction of anyone who did use an underage performer. He also noted that the penalties for violating 2257 don't hold a candle to the penalties for creating child pornography."

Perhaps the government's best argument is that, as stated in the Memorandum, "The record also refutes the notion that there is any such thing as a monolithic 'adult industry'... The various self-policing regimes that Plaintiffs proposeincluding the options of eliminating the Statutes altogether, removing the criminal penalties (thus making compliance entirely voluntary), or purporting to rely on the new 'industry standards' that Plaintiff FSC composed only a few months agowould leave the door wide open to circumvention by those who might claim to be part of an adult industry but instead use publicly-accessible platforms to sexually exploit children, allowing for even greater blurring of the lines between child pornography and the market demand for youthful-looking adult pornography."

Just one problem there: As AVN reported after the September hearing, "As the hearing drew to a close, Judge Baylson asked if the parties could agree that the operative definition for a 'commercial producer' of adult content would be one who sells or trades the material, and both sides agreed with that. The judge then suggested that he might rule that 2257 did not apply to 'commercial producers,' which he believed would solve a lot of problems."

Such a ruling would, of course, be an enormous boon to the "commercial" adult industry, while the law would continue to exist for those who "use publicly-accessible platforms to sexually exploit children."

The government further argues that 2257 came into existence to "close a loophole" in the child pornography laws, but as AVN pointed out as early as 2005, 2257 does nothing of the sort.

"Criminal child pornography charges are less likely to be brought when it is difficult to determine that a sexually-explicit image depicts a child rather than an adult," the government claimsbut as the 2005 article points out, 2257 does nothing to help such prosecutions. All it requires is that the producer look at the performer's ID and keep a copy of itbut in the case of all of the underage performers who have snuck into adult industry productions, the IDs they presented were either excellent counterfeits, or actual government IDs borrowed from some adult who looked enough like the minor that the minor could use the ID to pass for an adult! Moreover, 2257 doesn'tin fact, can'trequire that the producer be expert enough in forensics to be able to tell a good-looking counterfeit ID from a real one; the law only requires that the producer keep a copy of the "ID." Such an ID would be useless in helping identify an alleged child in an adult production, nor would an ID borrowed from an adult.

Perhaps recognizing the uselessness of attempting to use 2257 records to identify minors, the Memorandum falls back on the idea that the 2257 laws simply "deter and prevent the use of minors in the production of sexually explicit images." [Emphasis in original] They don't; child pornography laws dobut the Memorandum proceeds to discuss how such bogus ID documents would somehow help investigators identify minors in explicit productions.

The entire second half of the Memorandum is devoted to the argument that the judge should invalidate the 2257 laws only as to performers over 30 years old, but as should be clear, 2257 is a useless tool in preventing commercial adult producers from using underage performerswhom they have every incentive not to use in the first place.

The government's Memorandum in Support of its Proposed Judgment can be read here.

What will happen from this point forward is, frankly, anyone's guess. Judge Baylson has given indicationsmost recently at the September hearingthat he is disposed to keep some part(s) of 2257 alive, and if he believes even part of the adult industry's arguments, he will rule that 2257 need only apply to non-commercial producers of explicit content. It also appears that the Memorandum and affidavits that the government produced in response to its own request to provide further evidence to bolster its case fall far short of being convincing, being mainly a retread of what it's argued before, save for the admission that it's stupid to apply 2257 to those over 30. But again, depending on how vested Judge Baylson is in retaining any part of the 2257 laws, a decision to strike the entire law, at least as it applies to the commercial adult industry, is far from a sure thing.
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.
Committee Democrats grill Republicans over details of legislation that's not yet available

Couples therapy might be dissolving into irreconcilable differences after Thursday's bumpy initial meeting of the Joint Select Committee on Judicial Reform and Redistricting.During more than three hours of presentations and questioning, Democrats and Republicans often seemed to talk past one another, unlike the more collegial atmosphere in meetings of a special Senate committee on judicial reform. Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, D-Wake, said the Senate committee's meetings were "tantamount to couples' therapy" while studying the issues, in contrast to Thursday's testy atmosphere.Sen. Dan Bishop, R-Mecklenburg, a committee co-chairman, acknowledged deep differences between the two parties but indicated Democrats may be unable to thwart Republican efforts.Bishop told Carolina Journal after the meeting.Bishop also noted the mood swing.he said.The committee took no action.It was formed to study appointing rather than electing judges, and House-passed judicial maps to correct outdated districts with huge population disparities.Bishop told CJ.Other lawmakers had their doubts. Sen. Floyd McKissick, D-Durham, and Rep. John Blust, R-Guilford, said voters would not approve a constitutional amendment taking away their right to elect judges.Republicans saw the joint committee meeting as a chance to bring members up to speed on House Bill 717 - a measure redrawing obsolete judicial maps and appropriating $9 million for additional judicial staff and resources. They wanted to share information about the work done to date on four possible methods of judicial merit selection.Democrats instead sought answers to questions about H.B. 717's racial impacts, and whether the map changes would pass a constitutional challenge. They asked whether the judicial appointment system championed by Senate Republicans would let the GOP manipulate the process to its political advantage.Their line of questioning echoed many of the complaints in successful lawsuits against state legislative and congressional redistricting.Bishop and fellow co-chairman Rep. David Lewis, R-Harnett, both cautioned Democrats that most of the details would be hammered out in future committee meetings.Rep. Robert Reives, D-Lee, wanted to know if the judicial maps drawn by Rep. Justin Burr, R-Stanly, a committee co-chairman, had to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Staff said yes, which Senate Minority Leader Dan Blue, D-Wake, and others had confirmed in the Senate committee.Rep. Duane Hall, D-Wake, suggested Burr's redistricting plan would put 60 percent of minority judges in the same districts, forcing them to run against one another. Burr disputed that number, saying he did not use judges' addresses when drawing the maps.Burr said crafting new judicial districts after the 2020 census, as Blue recommended, would mean voters, especially in heavily minority urban areas, would vote in unconstitutional districts with wildly disparate populations for at least two, and possibly three election cycles.Burr noted federal courts have urged the state to fix unconstitutional legislative and congressional districts immediately rather than waiting for the next census.Sen. Paul Newton, R-Cabarrus, outlined four judicial selection models the committee will consider, including keeping the current system.Under the plan getting the most traction, the public would nominate candidates. An appointed committee would recommend qualified candidates to the General Assembly. Lawmakers then would submit at least three finalists to the governor for appointment. A retention election with a term limit would follow.House Minority Leader Darren Jackson, D-Wake, was concerned there is nothing in the appointment committee process to ensure a bipartisan slate of nominees is submitted to the General Assembly.Jackson and Sen. Joel Ford, D-Mecklenburg, noted the process would not guarantee a diverse pool of nominees based on race, sex, religion, or geographic region.
One would allow small shops to locate in areas currently zoned only for offices and industrial operations. This absolutely makes sense if you want it to be easier for people to walk from work to lunch and back again, as is the current trend.

One would change a section of code that "has the unintended consequence of de-incentivizing parking decks in favor of less desirable surface parking."

Another would increase height restrictions on buildings, but only if a special permit is issued.

Wilmington's Planning Commission is scheduled to vote on changes to the city's zoning ordinances on January 29th. The proposed changes should be welcomed.They also reveal one of the major problems with zoning.The planning commission will be voting on 11 individual changes, and they're mostly minor amendments to details of the existing code.And so it goes. This is the problem with zoning. Our cities look different than they did 30 years ago. They even look different than they did five years ago. New employers come into town and change commuting patterns. Or a business that's been around for decades closes up leaving land that would be perfect for new housing. Or Uber emerges and changes the way people think about getting from one place to another.None of that is predictable and so, with the best will in the world, planners can't anticipate what the needs and desires of a community will be a year or two or ten from now.I commend Wilmington and any city that updates its code to make planning and zoning better meet the needs of the local community. But maybe we should consider the restrictions we put in place to begin with. The fewer zoning restrictions cities have in place, and the lighter the touch of those that are used, the less city councils will have to make these sorts of amendments, the fewer unintended consequences will arise, and the more creatively property owners will be able to use their property.
With a looming budget Continuing Resolution Unratified, in the bicameral U.S. Senate, and government's shutdown imminent: Who is at fault if the Federal Government is shut down? The Republicans in congress. The Democrats in congress. Everything is President Trump's fault. 70 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



poll#102

Now that the Russia Collusion scandal has most completely boomeranged on core Democrats, the Democrat Media, and the Deep State, who have promoted this scandal for over one year: Should congress and Jeff Sessions's DOJ investigate the DNC, the Clintons, and, notably, the FBI /Obama DOJ with the same fervor that they have hounded all things connected to Candidate, then President Donald Trump? Yes, it is a necessity that we discover all that is corrupt, and stains the government of this land. No, investigate only everything connected to Donald Trump, as a candidate and then president. I generally don't pay attention to most things except what is normally pop culture. 165 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



Will core Democrats shut down the government over their absolute, slavish devotion to a principle tenet, Open Borders, of their Liberal /Socialist religion Their Liberal /Socialist religion, like rampant Bureaucracy, has but one massive motive - sustainability; voters for their self-serving usurpation of the Republic, and its laws.Core Democrats, Liberals /Socialists all, need their voters chronically on the ignorant side, and who could be more vacuous than poor illegal immigrants, who will not know the language, don't know our history, and some, maybe most, really could not care in the least on both issues, and may may never truly care. They're just trying to survive now, but what happens when core Democrats award citizenship as an unfair trade for their illegal status?Unfortunately, these poorest of people will latch onto whomever aids them in their desire to escape the "Hellholes" of their oppressive existence, and if core Democrats help them break United States Law to escape those countries that "Disturb'n'" Dick Durbin quotes, allegedly, others as "Shitholes", they will coalesce around core Democrats ... at least until they get smarter, and some will. Not all will remain as stupid as most core Democrat, Liberals /Socialists all, as core Democrats need to sustain their political religion - the destruction of the Republic for the benefit of their ideology.I reiterate, watch to see if core Democrats shut down the government, and, furthermore, watch to see how the unprincipled Democrat Media deals with it. The Democrat Media's level of commitment to this Open Borders tenet of the core Democrats' religious ideology will speak volumes as to how far these Propagandists will tread to preserve their secular sustainability.
Japan has the reputation of being highly efficient, and here is another example of why. When a supermarket in the city of Gamagori realized on Monday that one out of five sold packages of fugu (or pufferfish) was contaminated, city officials didn't mess around. They immediately shouted a recall over a loudspeaker system normally used for catastrophic emergencies such as earthquakes, blasting the product warning to residents in the city loud and clear.

Two packages were quickly returned, while two others are still unaccounted for.

In the US, if contaminated food requires a product recall, there's a long and winding path of protocol that must occur. First you have to contact the FDA and submit all kinds of product info, the product code id number, manufacturer info, and a string of other data connected to the product, and then you must craft a press release and finally send it out to the public via the media and social media. By then who knows how many people might puking into their toilet, or worse.

After the scare, the store told officials it will no longer be carrying fugu, a fish known for its highly toxic organs that only a skilled, certified chef is allowed to handle to make sure it is safely served.

Via NBC

Image: Chris 71/Wikipedia
Sen. Lindsey Graham had some interesting things to say to reporters outside a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today. "How does it end?" he asks, referring to the current immigration fight in Congress and possible government shutdown this Friday. "Does it end with the government shutting down? We should all be kicked out if that happens."

The Republican Senator from South Carolina went on to say, "We can not do this with people in charge of the White House who have an irrational view on how to fix immigration."

Earlier in the video he describes trump as two different presidents, the one he saw early Thursday who was in the right mindset, and then by noon the president that must've been influenced by his staff. "Something happened between 10:00 and 12:00 I don't think the president was well-served by his staff."

Here's the full video:
Joey Eschrich from ASU's Center for Science and Imagination writes, "To celebrate the official 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (previously) on January 1, 2018, we've launched Frankenstein200, a free, interactive, multiplatform experience for kids. Developed in partnership with the award-winning transmedia studio No Mimes Media (cofounded by the hyper-talented Maureen McHugh), with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Frankenstein200 is a digital narrative paired with hands-on activities happening in January and February at museums and science centers across the United States."

"The experience invites audiences to participate in science activities and thought experiments sponsored by the high-tech Laboratory for Innovation and Fantastical Exploration (L.I.F.E.), founded by Victoria "Tori" Frankenstein. As participants move deeper into the narrative, they grapple with increasingly complex ideas and confront shocking discoveries.

"Frankenstein200 features performances by actors Rose Abdoo (Gilmore Girls), Nikki SooHoo (The Lovely Bones), and Jeremy Howard (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). It was produced with advisement from the Arizona Science Center, the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the J. Craig Venter Institute, the Keats-Shelley Association of America, the New York Public Library, the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Rosenbach Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Museum of Science, Boston."

Frankenstein 200
GOP senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, who were in the room when Trump disparaged African countries, told everyone who would listen that Trump didn't say "shithole." Cotton also made a point to shame Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) for claiming that Trump said the word.

Now we learn that Cotton and Perdue were using the slimiest of loopholes. They heard Trump say "shithouse," which allowed them to call everyone else in the room a liar for saying Trump said "shithouse."

From The Washington Post:

Three White House officials said Perdue and Cotton told the White House that they heard "shithouse" rather than "shithole," allowing them to deny the president's comments on television over the weekend. The two men initially said publicly that they could not recall what the president said. Not only did these two repeatedly lie, but Cotton also impugned the integrity of Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who told the truth. Asked whether the accusation that Trump spoke the offending words or the sentiment was phony, Cotton lied, "Yes." He went on to say, "Senator Durbin has misrepresented what happened in White House meetings before, and he was corrected by Obama administration officials by it." Honorable men would resign after such a remarkable revelation of their crummy character; neither Cotton nor Perdue will. We still await the appearance of a single staffer of either who would quit in protest.

The conservative pundits are probably already writing about how "shithouse" is so, so different than "shithole," and how dare Democrats put words in the president's mouth.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Calls for security sector reforms may have begun to bear fruits with the coming in of the New Dispensation after Operation Restore Legacy, Renewal Democrats of Zimbabwe (RDZ) leader, Elton Mangoma, said.According to NewZimbabwe.com, Mangoma said, "The first thing that the new ZDF boss, Valerio Sibanda, did was to call his soldiers back to the barracks and announce the end of Operation Restore Legacy," said Mangoma in an interview."I am also told that he (Sibanda) refused to send his soldiers to the country's borders and monitor the importation of basic commodities which has seen prices rising 100% in the last three months."Mangoma added, "This shows that Sibanda is a professional soldier whose track record has not been tarnished by being involved in partisan politics and we hope he will not change to serve the interests of Zanu-PF like his predecessor Chiwenga."Who will forget Chihuri's public announcement that he supports Mugabe and Zanu-PF and how he dealt with cases involving opposition supporters in favour of ruling party supporters who were perpetrators of violence?"
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

Zanu PF activists in Mutare South have threatened violence on villagers if they vote against the ruling party in this year's election.Zimbabwe Peace Project reported in its latest report that a political meeting was held at Berzeley Bridge, in Mutare South."It is alleged that the meeting left most in fear as a result of the threats which were uttered at the meeting for people to vote for Zanu PF in the 2018 polls or face consequences. Gift Makoni of Nyachityu village ward 10 was one of the victims. Berzeley Bridge is in Mutare South under Chief Marange who also was allegedly not recognized by the guest speaker and Mutare West legislator Christopher Mushohwe," said ZPP."The villagers at the meeting were allegedly threatened and told that Mutare West was never going to hold any Zanu PF primary elections for the 2018 House of Assembly candidate as Mushohwe was not supposed to be contested. Makoni the victim was present at the meeting on behalf of his brother who is Nyachityu head."ZPP said the targeted audience of the meeting were the Zanu PF executive, headmen, kraal heads, churches and Chief Marange who were told to list names of opposition supporters.
1 killed, 13 injured as tractor carrying Indian pilgrims overturns in Nawalparasi

A person died and 13 others were injured when a tractor carrying Indian pilgrims met with an accident at Tribenidham in Nawalparasi district on Tuesday.
Opinion / Columnist

Change is part of life, we are told but there are some things that are as constant and fixed as the Northern Star! Zanu PF's commitment to the idea that its alone is the party that must rule Zimbabwe come rain come sunshine, is one such unchangeable fixture of in Zimbabwe politics.Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF thugs wanted post independent Zimbabwe to be a one-party, Zanu PF, state. (Unknown to his naive fellow comrades, Mugabe wanted a one-man, Mugabe, dictatorship for life. He added "to be succeeded by wife Grace", in the last five years.) When Mugabe and his Zanu PF delegates realised the British were going to impose a multi-party constitution on Zimbabwe during the Lancaster House talks in 1979, they found this totally unacceptable, they walked out. It was a phone call from President Samora Machel of Mozambique warning them that if they walked away, they will not be allowed to wage their gorilla war from his country. They signed on to the multi-party constitution but determined to impose a one-party state at the next opportune moment.The quarrel with Dr Joshua Nkomo and his PF Zapu, Mugabe and Zanu PF's big obstacle to their one-party state ambition, just a few years after independence was the opportune moment Mugabe had been waiting for. Mugabe's response to the dissident threat posed by military elements in PF Zapu was aimed at not just crashing the rebel elements but at crashing PF Zapu itself. In the end Dr Nkomo was forced to sign the 1987 unity accord with Mugabe in which PF Zapu was to seize to exist as a party and join Zanu PF and Mugabe was named in the accord as the First Secretary and leader of the unified party.Zanu PF has ruthlessly crashed any opposition parties that have emerged since 1987 under the pretext they were a threat to the nation's new found unity and peace. Mugabe had got what he wanted, a de facto one-party dictatorship. He has systematically undermined the country's democratic institution turning them into Zanu PF departments in all but name, all committed to no-regime-change mantra.It is true that Mugabe was passionately interested in seeing Zimbabwe prosper; his drive to have Zimbabweans educated and his ruckus "Gutsva ruzhinji!" (mass prosperity!) call were all heartfelt. None of his economic ambition came to much, as we can see with the country in to total economic meltdown with 72.3% living on US$1.00 or less a day. The contrast between the filthy poor majority and the filthy rich Zanu PF ruling elite few is shocking.VP Constantino Chiwenga, just one of the ruling elite, who until the November coup was the ZDF commander, has an impressive asset portfolio comprising properties, farms, companies, lives in mansion, a fleet of cars, 40 gold watches, etc., etc. Mugabe himself has 14 farms, lives in a US$4 billion mansion, has been going to Singapore for health needs as often as 12 times a year @ US$3 million plus a trip. There reports he has offered to return US$ 5 billion, small change, new found generosity since his forced resignation in November.Gutsva ruzhinji was doom to fail because it was subordinate to Mugabe's first and only true love absolute power. To ensure unwavering loyalty to him Mugabe devised a patronage system in which he rewarded loyalty to him and his iron grip on power at all cost. He promoted simpletons whom he gave fancy titles but never gave them any real power and authority to do anything in case they should outperform him. It is little wonder his reign has been characterized by the gross mismanagement and rampant corruption. The national economy collapse under this criminal waste of human and material resources and so did gutsva ruzhinji.Mugabe has kept Emmerson Mnangagwa close to him throughout his 37 years as Zimbabwe's top dog because of the latter's ruthless determination to ensure Zanu PF remains in power at all cost. Early in his rule Mugabe establish the Joint Operation Command (JOC), the shadowy Junta comprising the top brass in the security services headed by Mugabe himself and assisted by Mnangagwa, the enforce. It was Tendai Biti, then Minister of Finance in the GNU, who described JOC as a parallel government complete with its own funding that governed the country. He was right!JOC made all the important decision which parliament rubber stamped and implemented. The discovery of diamonds in Marange gave the Junta its very own resource of wealth to finance the ruling elite's extravagant lifestyles and bankroll Zanu PF's expensive vote rigging schemes and thuggery that have kept the party in power."Zanu PF ichatonga! Igotonga! Imi muchingo hukura! Muchi hukura!" (Zanu PF will rule! And rule! Whilst the opposition bark! And bark!) Was the first thing Emmerson Mnangagwa told the Zanu PF faithful on his return from the short exile in November last year after Mugabe was toppled in the coup.The coup plotters dubbed the coup "Operation Restore Legacy"; they all knew exactly what that legacy is  that Zimbabwe is a one-party state and they, as the divinely appointed leaders of the party, are they only people who will rule the country come rain come hell brimstone. Mnangagwa, who was to be given Mugabe's crown, stood up to assure them all that this was his life time mission from which he will never ever wave one bit.President Mnangagwa has already shown that he has a lot more economic common sense than his predecessor, Robert Mugabe, and will go a long way to bring about some economic recovery. Like Mugabe's ruckus gutsva ruzhinji, Mnangagwa's economic recovery is also doomed to fail because it too is hostage to the cursed Zanu PF legacy.Since his swearing in President Mnangagwa has had to dish out patronage jobs to his fellow coup plotters and promote many of the JOC members out of the shadowy Junta into formal political office. Their succession in everyday politics has been agreed. VP Chiwenga is to take over from President Mnangagwa, for example. Whatever President Mnangagwa says or does to revive the economy it must NOT compromise in any way the Zanu PF legacy.President Mnangagwa knows that Zimbabwe's economic recovery will never happen until the country bites the bullet and end its lawlessness, implement the democratic reforms and hold its first free, fair and credible elections. Zanu PF's iron grip on power is totally dependent on the party resisting all pressure to implement reforms and hold free elections. Mnangagwa's response has been to make all the right noises on holding free elections whilst doing absolutely nothing to undermine the legacy!"When we go to the elections you should not fight," twittered President Mnangagwa. "When people support their parties it's their choice. We should work for the people and not be selfish."There should be justice and national reconciliation because we cannot progress when communities are in conflict. God bless Zimbabwe"This was Mnangagwa's reply to EU EU ambassador to Zimbabwe, Philippe van Damme's, twitter. "If really what he (Rugeje) said, needs public condemnation by @zanu_pfleadership! Intimidation incompatible with commitment 2free& fair elections."The ambassador was commenting on the story that Zanu PF's Political Commissar, retired Lt. General Engelbert Rugeje had reminded people in Masvingo that the violence of 2008 would return if they did not vote for Zanu PF. Zanu PF had launched Operation "Mavhotera papi!" (Whom did you vote for!) to push the people for rejecting Mugabe in the earlier vote.The nation witnessed its worst cases of politically motived wanton violence that left over 500 dead and hundreds of thousands beaten and raped. Rugeje headed the thuggery in Masvingo Province and it was for that reason President Mnangagwa appointed him commissar. Rugeje is only doing his job just like everyone else in the true spirit of securing the Zanu PF legacy at all cost.As far as President Mnangagwa is concerned EU ambassador is just another manifestation of the opposition barking for democratic reforms. Vacha huruka! Zanu PF ichigotonga!"ED, you sure know how to pickle!" must have been the twitter from #FirstLadyspotit , impressed by her husband's endless Machiavellian political intrigues, shenanigans and machismo!Enough of all this ED double talk! You, Mr President, have talked and twittered about free, fair and credible elections and yet have continue to pursue your Zanu PF legacy, Zanu PF must rule regardless of the democratic wishes of the people. Many of us have barked about implementing the democratic reforms and you have ignored us with you usual self-assured and insufferable arrogance. Enough is enough.The issue of free, fair and credible elections is the one issue holding back the nation's economic recovery today as it is the root cause why the country is in this economic mess in the first place. The issue must be settled this year, 2018, once and once for all.If Zanu PF does not implement all the democratic reforms, all means ALL, to guarantee free, fair and credible elections this year then the elections must be declared null and void. The country must then appoint a body to implement the reforms and hold the country's first free, fair and credible democratic elections.The right to free and meaningful say in the governance of the country is not a privilege to be given some and denied others. Zanu PF leaders led from the front in the struggle for independence, the nation will always be grateful to all who contributed in this struggle, but what the nation will not accept is for the nation to be held to ransom be the very people claiming to be its liberators.Zanu PF's ethos of one party state is at odds with the one-man-one-vote rallying call that everyone had subscribed to and cherished throughout the struggle for independence. Zanu PF's no-regime-change has allowed the few ruling elite to amass wealth and live in luxury at the expense of the overwhelming majority who have wallowed is abject poverty and despair.The madness of greed and inhuman indifference to fellow Zimbabweans' suffering and deaths must stop. Change in Zimbabwe is long overdue, real change and not the swapping of one dictator for another we saw after the November coup. You, President Mnangagwa, and your fellow Zanu PF thugs can accept orderly change or violent revolutionary change; either way change is coming of that you can be certain!
Online Learning

Purdue Names New Online University

Purdue's New U, the online institution formed from the university's acquisition of Kaplan University, is now going to be called "Purdue University Global." The formal name will go into effect in late February, when the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), the regional accreditor for Purdue University, is expected to approve the Kaplan purchase. That process began last April, when the Indiana institution announced it was acquiring the for-profit online entity to extend its reach to non-traditional students.

HLC isn't the only official body to weigh in on the deal. The Indiana Commission for Higher Education approved the purchase in August; the U.S. Department of Education also approved the acquisition, as long as the new name included the word "Purdue."

Purdue President Mitch Daniels discusses the new public university. (Photo: Purdue University file photo/John Underwood)

Purdue officials said they tested out the new name with faculty, staff, students, alumni and other stakeholders at both schools. The challenge, said Purdue President Mitch Daniels in a press release, is that typically Purdue's campuses are named after the physical locations where classes are held. In the case of the new institution, "Purdue University Global can be accessed from anywhere in the world, at any time." Yet the new name "proved appealing and meaningful to our various stakeholders  most importantly prospective students."

Kaplan's Concord Law School and Open College will become Concord Law School at Purdue University Global and Open College at Purdue University Global. Also, the home campus for Kaplan is currently in Iowa. For the new institution, the home campus will be in Indianapolis.

Betty Vandenbosch, president of Kaplan University, will become chancellor of Purdue U Global, which will operate almost entirely online. The transfer is expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2018.
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Bangkok, January 16, 2018The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commissions order yesterday to revoke the registration of news website Rappler represents a clear and immediate danger to press freedom in the Philippines, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission said Rappler violated Philippine constitutional restrictions on mass media ownership, which require that media properties be locally owned and operated, by receiving funding from Omidyar Network, a U.S.-based philanthropic investment firm, news reports said.

Rappler denies that the funds confer ownership or control, and maintains the company is 100% Filipino-owned, the reports said.

Solicitor General Jose Calida today commended the SECs decision and said that his office would determine if Rappler could be held criminally liable under the Anti-Dummy Law, which bars foreign management or control in nationalized sectors including media. Violations under the law carry possible 15-year prison terms, reports said.

Rappler, which has received backlash for its critical coverage of President Rodrigo Duterte, said it would continue to operate while fighting the order in court, according to news reports.

We call on authorities to reverse the politicized decision to revoke Rapplers operating license and to desist from all legal threats and harassment against its journalists and executives, said Shawn Crispin, CPJs senior Southeast Asia representative. This effort to close one of the countrys most respected independent news publications represents a grave affront to Philippine press freedom.

The sites chief executive and editor, Maria Ressa, indicated her intent to appeal the SECs decision, which she told reporters was handed down without due process.

Rappler has 15 days to appeal the decision at the Court of Appeals, according to news reports citing SEC spokesperson Armand Pan. The spokesperson also said that Rappler may continue to operate while pursuing legal remedies and that the decision to revoke is not yet final or executory, according to news reports.

The Department of Justices solicitor general initially ordered the investigation in December 2016, and the SEC then created a special panel to pursue the case beginning on July 8, 2017, the reports said.

The SECs decision was handed down on January 11 and published yesterday on its website, according to reports.

Duterte said today that the SECs decision was not political, according to news reports. We never had the hand and I dont give a shit if you continue or not continue with your network, reports quoted him saying in reference to Rappler.

Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque Jr. said today that Duterte was displeased with unfair accusations that the SEC ruling was part of a government move to undermine journalists rights and press freedom, the reports said.

Rappler faced heavy government harassment, including over its critical coverage of Dutertes lethal drug war, before the SECs revocation order, according to news reports. Duterte threatened to investigate Rapplers ownership during his State of the Nation Address to Congress last July 25, the reports said.

Rappler journalists have also faced heavy online harassment, including over social media, by pro-government supporters who have criticized their coverage of the drug war and other topics as biased against Duterte, Gemma Bagayaua-Mendoza, a Rappler editor, told CPJ.
India, Sri Lanka sign four agreements for collaboration in ICT sector

Published: January 16, 2018

India and Sri Lanka signed four agreements for collaboration in Information and communication technology (ICT) sector between both countries.

The MoU for cooperation was signed by Union minister for Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad with his Sri Lankan counterpart in Colombo.

Key Facts

The agreements were signed for collaboration in ICT sector and setting up of e-office system and connecting of National Knowledge network (NKN) for collaboration among universities and academics. With this, Sri Lanka became first country to be connected to NKN through Gigabyte (GB) optical fibre network. This will connect NKN to Lanka education & research network (LEARN) through which universities on both sides can share best practices and research ideas. National Informatics centre (NIC) has set up a model E-office system for Sri Lanka.

National Knowledge Network (NKN)

NKN is a state-of-the-art multi-gigabit pan-Indian resource-sharing network aimed at digitally connecting all national universities, colleges and research establishments to create country-wide virtual classrooms. This project was launched in 2010 for period of 10 years. Currently, it is component of umbrella Digital India programme.

Objectives of NKN: It aims to connect universities, research institutions, libraries, laboratories, healthcare and agricultural institutions across country with high bandwidth (multi-gigabit)/low latency internet connection so that they can share the knowledge, information and data. Its core idea is to bring together all stakeholders from science, technology, higher education, healthcare, agriculture and governance to a common platform.

Mandate of NKN

Establish high-speed backbone connectivity which will enable knowledge and information sharing.

Enable collaborative research, development and Innovation

Facilitate an ultra-high speed backbone for e-Governance

Link to Global Networks to collaborate with research communities across the globe.

Facilitate advanced distance education in specialized fields such as engineering, science, medicine etc.

Facilitate integration of different sectorial networks in field of health, education, research, commerce and governance.

Month: Current Affairs - January, 2018

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Bajhang reeling under shortage of medicines

All health facilities in Bajhang are reeling under an acute shortage of essential medicines for a long time.
Rent control policies have come back in vogue for some cities grappling with higher housing rents and people worried they will not be able to live in growing, prospering cities. Perhaps no city in the country encapsulates the concerns about housing affordability and availability more clearly than San Francisco, where the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is more than $3,000. A new paper analyzes the effects of rent control expansion in the city and finds that it reduced rental housing supply, causing a city wide-rent increase.

People are understandably worried about the cost of living, of which rent is often a major share. They are concerned that they will be unable to afford to live in dynamic, thriving cities. However, rent control cannot make affordable housing available. In many cases, rent control policies lead to outcomes that are diametrically opposed to their intended results.

In their new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Stanford University researchers Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian analyzed variations in the assignment of rent control due to the effects of a 1994 San Francisco ballot initiative. Multifamily housing built prior to 1980 was subject to the initiatives rent control protections, while multifamily housing built after that was not.

Using panel data with address-level migration decisions and housing characteristics for almost all adults living in the city during the period, the authors used renters in small multifamily housing built after the 1980 cutoff as the control group, and the corresponding group in units built before the cutoff as the treatment group.

Unsurprisingly, the beneficiaries of rent control, tenants already in those affected units, were between 10 to 20 percent more likely to remain in their 1994 address relative to the control group. The economic benefit to people living in these rent-controlled apartments averaged between $2,300 and $6,600 per person per year.

At the same time, evidence suggests that landlords had an incentive to remove tenants, particularly in areas where overall rents appreciated the most. Landlords could do this by offering tenants monetary compensation or by moving into the property themselves. Under the provisions of Californias Ellis Act, landlords could also evict tenants if they were planning to remove the property from the rental market, by converting them to condos, for example. Rent-controlled buildings were almost 10 percent more likely to convert to a condo or Tenancy in Common than those in the control group.

Overall, affected landlords reduced their supply of available rental housing by 15 percent, and the number of renters living in affected buildings fell by 20 percent. These changes led to a city-wide rent increase of 5 percent. The higher rents have a present discounted cost of almost $3 billion for tenants, with 42 percent borne by future residents.

While some incumbents benefited from the rent control policy, future San Francisco residents had to bear much of the costs, and rent control reduced housing supply and increased rent in the longer term. The authors suggest that the substitution away from housing subject to rent control, and towards owner-occupied housing or new construction, likely fueled the gentrification of San Francisco, and that rent control policies have increased income inequality in the city overall.

Paul Krugman, not one generally opposed to the policies pursued by supporters of the Democratic Party, wrote back in 2000 in the New York Times that the analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial.

The consensus is nothing new, as a 1992 poll from the American Economic Association found 93 percent of respondents agreed with the statement a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing. More recently, a question from the IGM Forum from the Booth School of Business asked economists whether rent control policies have had a positive effect on the amount and quality of broadly affordable housing: 81 percent disagreed, while only 2 percent agreed.

Unfortunately, the long-standing consensus among economists, these most recent findings, and previous studies revealing the ineffectiveness of rent control policies have done little to quell the appetite for them throughout the country.

As the authors point out, state lawmakers in Illinois, Oregon, and California are considering the repeal of laws that limit the extent to which cities can institute rent control policies. In smaller cities such as Glendale, California and Portland, Main referenda that would increase the scope of rent control policies have been put on the ballot.

Policymakers in cities facing higher housing and rental costs are searching not for potential solutions, but for populist measures that will get them reelected. As the most recent study finds in the case of San Francisco, rent control policies can impose significant costs on future residents by reducing the supply of rental housing and increasing rents. Politicians considering the creation or expansion of rent control policies should look elsewhere for answers.

Charles Hughes is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @CharlesHHughes.

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Artur Mas reacting to the court decision in the Palau case. Josep Ramon Torne (ACN)

On Monday, a court found the now-defunct Catalan party Convergencia Democratica de Catalunya (CDC) guilty of taking illegal commissions in exchange for awarding public works contracts while it was in power, and sentenced it to pay 6.6 million.

This is the first time that the justice system has confirmed there was illegal financing by CDC, which was Catalonias dominant party for decades. But the shadow of corruption had followed CDC for years: in 2005, former Catalan premier Pasqual Maragall popularized the term three percent, alluding to the amount of the kickbacks that CDC was believed to be taking in exchange for the contracts.

Convergencia ran in 12 elections by cheating

Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau

The Audiencia de Barcelona found that these bribes took place over at least one decade, from 1999 to 2009.

In July 2016, the party was refounded as the Catalan Democratic Party, then renamed itself again, becoming the Catalan European Democratic Party (PDeCAT). This is the party of ousted premier Carles Puigdemont, who is currently living in self-imposed exile in Brussels, and of his predecessor Artur Mas, under whose tenure the independence process took off.

The conviction, which follows an eight-and-a-half-year investigation into wrongdoing at Palau de la Musica, a landmark concert hall in Barcelona, places a new hurdle in the way of Puigdemonts plans to get himself sworn in remotely as the new Catalan premier.

Carles Puigdemont is trying to get himself sworn in remotely as the new premier. Reuters

If the Supreme Court confirms the Barcelona provincial courts decision, the party will struggle financially to pay the 6.6 million, which represents the kickbacks paid by construction firm Ferrovial to secure the contracts. The money was disguised as donations to the Palau, then channeled to CDC. Two former Palau managers have been sentenced to prison over the case.

Looking the other way

The PDeCATs reaction to the ruling illustrates its attempts to distance itself from the high-profile corruption case  just one of several scandals to affect CDC in its later years. In fact, the PDeCAT is saying that the conviction has nothing to do with the party, but with Convergencia Democratica de Catalunya, a political group that has already taken on all political responsibility, it said in a release.

The matter is prior to 2010, adds the statement in an attempt to protect former premier Artur Mas, who had been president of CDC and became the first president of PDeCAT following the refoundation. Catalonia held regional elections in 2010, which Artur Mas won with CDC at a time when it was still part of the Convergence and Union (CiU) federation.

Mas, who has been facing his own legal battles over the informal independence referendum of November 9, 2014, gave up the PDeCAT presidency on January 9 of this year, but expressly denied that this was a pre-emptive move ahead of an adverse court decision in the Palau case.

Following the Audiencia de Barcelonas ruling, Mas said in a release that he was not expecting such a harsh decision, and that CDC has already paid a very high price by dissolving in 2016.

PDeCAT leaders should consider what kind of legacy they want to inherit from CDC

CDC does, in fact, still exist as a legal entity. When the ruling becomes final, a new debate will emerge over whether PDeCAT must be held accountable for part of the 6.6 million payment.

In any case, the news comes at a particularly bad time for relations between PDeCAT and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC). In the wake of the snap election of December 21, which yielded a parliamentary majority for separatist parties, PDeCAT and ERC are trying to hammer out a deal to get a separatist premier sworn in.

The spokesman for ERC, Sergi Sabra said after the ruling that whoever has to accept responsibilities should do so, and warned that his own party will not look the other way. Sabria also noted that his own party has not been involved in a single corruption case in its entire 87-year history. He underscored the need to banish from politics all behavior tied to corruption.

Cross-party criticism

There was also criticism from CUP, the small, far-left group whose support during the last political term was crucial to push the secessionist agenda forward. Eulalia Reguant, a CUP councilor at Barcelona City Council and former regional deputy, said that PDeCAT leaders should consider what kind of legacy they want to inherit from CDC: Is it the legacy of 4%?, she asked, alluding to the fee that was paid in kickbacks for contracts.

When Artur Mas narrowly won a re-election in September 2015, he failed to secure enough support to get himself reinstated, and CUP, whose 10 seats gave it the role of kingmaker, demanded a different premier on the grounds that Mas name was too closely associated with corruption. The new leader who filled his shoes was Carles Puigdemont, who had been mayor of Girona until then.

Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau said that the ruling confirms Convergencia ran in 12 elections by cheating, with extra money it secured through the network, alluding to the Palau scheme.

Ciudadanos official Carina Mejias said the ruling proves that Convergencia was a criminal organization whose goal was to fleece Catalans to benefit certain individuals. Ciudadanos won the most votes and the most seats at the December 21 election, but not enough for a majority.

The Catalan Socialists (PSC) said Mas and Puigdemont must provide explanations and stop hiding their heads in the sand, while the Spanish justice minister, Rafael Catala, said the courts decision confirms that in Spain, everyone has to obey the law.

English version by Susana Urra.
Puigdemont in a video conference. Massimiliano Minocri

A new report by the parliamentary counsel at the Catalan regional assembly states that the Catalan premier cannot be invested remotely, dampening the hopes of Carles Puigdemont, who has been pushing to be sworn in from Belgium.

The appointment of a premier must be direct and personal

Puigdemont fled to Brussels in late October following a unilateral declaration of independence to avoid facing charges of sedition, rebellion and misuse of public funds. At the snap regional election of December 21, Puigdemonts pro-independence Junts per Catalunya won the second-highest number of seats and votes  behind the unionist party Ciudadanos  and he is now seeking to form a majority government with the support of pro-independence parties Republican Catalan Left (ERC) and CUP.

But the new document, written by eight lawyers, says a premier cannot be sworn in unless he is physically present in the chamber. The appointment of a premier must be direct and personal, otherwise it does not meet statutory or regulatory norms, according to the report. While Puigdemonts party supports a remote appointment, the ERC had said it would leave the decision in the hands of the lawyers.

The report explains that the swearing-in process is not simply a question of verifying or confirming a candidate as premier, but rather to foster dialogue between the candidate and the deputies, so that the ensuing debate over their program can muster up the necessary support for them to be invested and retain confidence.

A vote can only be delegated if a deputy is on maternity or paternity leave, sick or permanently incapacitated

The text rejects the argument from Puigdemonts supporters that this process can take place remotely or that another deputy could stand in place for the real candidate by reading out a statement. In the report, the parliamentary counsel avoid the semantic debate over what in front of means in a regulatory phrase that says candidates must defend their programs in front of the chamber. Instead they argue that respect for the basic rules of the parliamentary process makes it imperative not only that the protagonists attend the debate in person, but also that there be spoken, direct argumentation and the guarantee of immediacy so that everyone may see, feel and understand the debate in person.

Other deputies

The report, however, does not address whether the other absent deputies may delegate their vote if they cannot be present in the chamber. This decision, says the counsel, should be made by a transitional board of officers known as the Mesa de Edad (literally, board of the elders). Three deputies  Oriol Junqueras, Joaquim Forn and Jordi Sanchez  are currently in pre-trial detention in connection with the rebellion probe, while four more are in Brussels with Puigdemont. The lawyers indicate that under Article 93 of parliamentary bylaws a vote can only be delegated if the deputy is on maternity or paternity leave, sick or permanently incapacitated  conditions which are not met by the Catalan deputies.

The lawyers, however, support the right to political participation of the affected deputies and the preservation of the parliamentary numbers," referring to the outcome of the December 21 election, which gave 37 seats to the pro-unity Ciudadanos, 34 to Junts per Catalunya, 32 to ERC, 17 to the Catalan Socialists (PSC), eight to the unaligned Catalunya en Comu-Podemos, four to the far-left CUP and three to the Popular Party.

Rajoy admits mistakes On Monday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy admitted that his Popular Party (PP) has made mistakes in Catalonia, but said they were right to implement emergency powers under Article 155 of the Constitution to halt the illegal independence drive in the region. We, as a party, have made mistakes; we admit it and we will have to learn from them, said Rajoy at a meeting of the national board of officials. The response to this situation, as headed by the government, was good for Spain although it might not have been good for the PP. Rajoy underscored that secessionists have dropped their plans for unilateral independence, and warned that the government will resort to the Constitutional Court if ousted Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont attempts to get himself sworn in remotely from Brussels, where he is living in self-imposed exile after fleeing to escape the Spanish justice system. He is wanted in Spain in connection with a criminal investigation into rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds during the independence drive. If Puigdemont is sworn in remotely, Article 155 will remain in place, prolonging the central governments takeover of Catalan self-government, said Rajoy.

English version by Melissa Kitson and Susana Urra.
To what extent can art be rewritten to address current issues? Florences Maggio Musicale theater decided to see for itself by putting on Leo Muscatos adaptation of Bizets Carmen in which, instead of being stabbed to death, the heroine snatches the gun from her tormentor Don Jose and kills him.

The idea, according to the theaters management, was to address the rampant violence against women, which in Italy results in one murder every three days  a phenomenon known as femicide. But in a country where opera is akin to religion, manipulating the end of this classic has prompted a tsunami of controversy and outrage.

Theater should be about condemnation, culture should be reinterpreted to address the present Dario Nardella

Last century, all kinds of experiments were carried out in a bid to help the opera survive. Directors such as Peter Sellars transported classic operas to the modern world at the start of the 1980s, starting with Mozarts Don Giovanni, whose main character injected heroin on stage at the Monadnock Music Festival in Manchester in 1980.

Since then, adaptations of the classics has become mainstream fodder for modern theater. Muscato has set his Carmen in a Romani gypsy camp in 1980s Italy, with Don Jose cast as a riot policeman. But it was the ending, not this, that earned Muscato boos from the audience, threats on social media and even the incomprehension of good friends.

His critics point to this age of political correctness, when violence against women has been given added resonance by the exposure of certain powerful figures in the film industry. Yet this correctness can sometimes crudely disguise the uncomfortable and violent events that take place in great works of art.

One woman is murdered every three days in Italy

The revision of 24 of Shakespeares plays by Thomas Bowdler in 1807 has been hauled up as an example. Among other changes, this meant that Hamlets Ophelia died accidentally instead of committing suicide. The critics also point to the incident when a petition bearing 8,700 signatures tried to persuade the MET to take down Therese Dreaming, a Balthus painting of a 13-year-old girl with her leg raised to reveal her underwear.

The New York gallery refused to bow to the pressure, and the Italian press expressed withering concern that the Florence theater had not acted similarly. Perhaps we should make a version of Moby Dick where the whale doesnt die and is simply put to sleep? came a taunt from La Repubblica. In France, home to Bizet and Merimee, the ending has also caused a stir.

We no longer have the cultural and intellectual freedom to be prepared to be surprised Leo Muscato

But Muscato does have supporters, among them the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella  who is also a violinist, president of the theater in question and an avid opera fan. I appreciate his choice because he did it with a particular goal, Nardella told EL PAIS. And that is to reflect a very serious issue in Italy, namely violence against women. There has been heated debate and much criticism, some of which I dont understand. Its not an ideological issue about changing an opera or its denouement. Theater should be about condemnation, culture should be reinterpreted to address the present. The great culture of the past is also valid. It doesnt mean changing the past. Im not a fool who is considering rewriting art. The message conveyed by the choice of this director is social and cultural  to call attention to an issue as serious as femicide.

Muscato, on the other hand, appears worn out by the controversy. It has caused an excessive, exaggerated fuss, he said in a telephone conversation. The six performances, seating an audience of 1,600 each night, are now sold out and the theater would like to extend its run. But the publics derision, which has turned on the failure of the gun to go off at the premiere, has become unbearable.

The only reason I agree to bring a classic to the stage is to trigger debate and stir emotions, adds Muscato, who refuses to be labeled as politically correct. I was not seeking to shock. I never mentioned femicide but Im glad its been seen that way. It worries me that we no longer have the cultural and intellectual freedom to be prepared to be surprised. They cant burn me at the stake without seeing the whole opera.

Ironically, those who would like to do so are out of luck, as there are no tickets left.

English version by Heather Galloway.
Reports received by Radio Farda from Tehran indicate that families of four university students arrested recently are deeply worried about their loved ones.

People close to Ehsan Mohammadi, Soheil Aghazadeh, Leila Hosseinzadeh and Ehsan Darvish in interviews with Radio Farda that families are extremely concerned because they have received no news from or about the detainees.

One student activist, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Radio farad that the death of other detainees in custody has heightened concerns about the four students.

Ehsan Mohammadi and Leila Hosseinzadeh were arrested on January 1, and Soheil Aghazadeh and Sina Darvish were taken into custody on January 4.

During the same period 100 other students were also arrested, some of whom have been released on bail. According to Farid Moussavi, a member of parliament, these arrests were part of preventive measures, at the height of antigovernment protests in Iran.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi and Nassrin Sotoodeh, both human rights lawyers have said that there are no laws in Iran, which would permit preventive arrests.

A person close to Ms. Hosseinzadeh told Radio Farda that the anthropology student is not in Tehrans notorious Evin prison and it is not clear who arrested her.

The person, who did not want to be identified, also told Radio Farda that the family believes Tehran University officials have not seriously pursued Ms. Hosseinzadehs case and ask the university to take up the issue with intelligence agencies.

Iranian law says that all detainees are allowed to meet with their family members and friends in person or have correspondence with them. Despite this, families of hundreds of recent detainees have no information about their loved ones.

ILNA quoted a member of parliament that on Tuesday two letters were prepared asking President Hassan Rouhani and the head of Irans Judiciary to quickly free all detainees, especially female students.

According to this report, 40 reformist MPs from Parliaments Omid (Hope) faction have signed the letters.

Other MPs have also spoken out about the detainees and have voiced their concerns, especially as two deaths in custody have been officially confirmed and there are reports of up to three more deaths.

A student activist told Radio Farda that many students had received warnings prior to recent protests not to voice radical demands. Student activists had intensified their criticisms of government economic policies and were also demanding from the authorities to respect for their collective rights.

More than 30 student associations around the country issued a statement on January 14, demanding the release of detained students. They accused the authorities of taking advantage of recent protests to arrests dozens in order to silence the voice of students.

At the same time, more than 1,500 students of the Tehran University of Medical Sciences also signed a statement condemning the detentions.
Hardline clerics at the Qom Seminary have lashed out at Irans President Hassan Rouhani for allegedly saying in a January 8 address that Muslim saints can be criticized.

Rouhani has responded to the allegation, which could be perceived as an insult to Muslim saints, believed to be beyond criticism.

In his reply to clerics letter Rouhani said that his political rivals have distorted the remarks he had made in a meeting with the officials of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance.

Hardline clerics have further strictly advised Rouhani to avoid discussing ideological issues instead of trying to solve the nations financial problems.

The clerics letter quotes Rouhani as saying in remarks also available on his official website that followers of the prophet and the imams criticized them in some instances.

Rouhanis office replied that he meant people could criticize Islamic government officials, and not the saints.

Tasnim news agency, on Sunday characterized Rouhanis reply as a sort of backtracking from his position.

Releasing a video of Rouhani making the remarks, Tasnim insisted that a review of what Rouhani had said showed that clerics did not get it wrong.

Iranian officials routinely backtrack from their controversial positions when they face pressure or damning accusations by political rivals. President Rouhani is no exception.

Since the start of Rouhanis second term as President, hardliners have redoubled their efforts to undermine his authority by questioning his expertise in Islamic ideology and his administrations capability to solve the financial and economic problems Iranians face.

Meanwhile, hardline clerics know that questioning Rouhanis Islamic ideological credentials would reduce his chance of taking over as Iran Supreme Leader once Ayatollah Khamenei is no longer around.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

Trend:

The OSCE monitoring held along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops on Jan. 16 passed without incidents, said Azerbaijans Defense Ministry.

The monitoring was held under the mandate of the OSCE chairperson-in-office personal representative along the line of contact near Sarijali village in Azerbaijans Aghdam district, according to the message.

On the Azerbaijani side, the monitoring was held by Ghenadie Petrica and Simon Tiller, who are field assistants of the OSCE chairperson-in-office personal representative.

On the Azerbaijani territories occupied and controlled by Armenian armed forces, the monitoring was held by Mikhail Olaru and Martin Schuster, who are field assistants of the OSCE chairperson-in-office personal representative.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Delay in naming guvs may affect NA election: EC

With the government delaying crucial decisions, the Election Commission has said it might need to reschedule the National Assembly polls if the provincial chiefs are not appointed within a couple of days.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

Trend:

Tajik Foreign Minister Sirodjidin Aslov has received credentials of newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Azerbaijan Hasan Mammadzade, the Tajik Foreign Ministry said.

Following the ceremony of presenting credentials, Aslov and Mammadzade discussed the state and prospects of the two countries' bilateral relations in the political, trade-economic and cultural-humanitarian spheres and exchanged views on the issues of the international agenda.
Details added (first version posted on 14:51)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

Trend:

President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has received a delegation led by Chairman of Foreign Relations Committee of Turkeys Grand National Assembly Volkan Bozkir.

Head of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey Volkan Bozkir extended greetings of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to President Ilham Aliyev.

Volkan Bozkir noted that he is in Baku to attend a meeting organized in partnership with the Committee for International Relations and Inter-Parliamentary Ties of Azerbaijans Parliament.

Recalling the fact that a few days later Azerbaijan will commemorate the anniversary of the bloody events of 20 January, the Turkish parliamentarian pointed out that the year 2018 will feature a number of landmark events too.

He noted that the year will solemnly mark a number of events, including the centenary of the foundation of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, centenary of Bakus liberation from the Armenian occupation by the Caucasus Islamic Army, as well as the 25th anniversary of Turkey's becoming the first state to recognize Azerbaijan as an independent state after it restored its independence.

President Ilham Aliyev said that he made three visits to Turkey over the past year, and hailed the importance of visits to Azerbaijan by the Turkish president, prime minister, as well as various ministers and MPs. Ilham Aliyev underlined the constantly strengthening friendship and cooperation between the two countries, saying that Azerbaijan and Turkey have always enjoyed close cooperation and mutual support within international organizations.

The head of state expressed his confidence that head of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey Volkan Bozkirs visit to Baku will be successful and that the inter-parliamentary relations will further strengthen Azerbaijan-Turkey unity and cooperation.

President Ilham Aliyev expressed his confidence that the current year will be rich with landmark events in the history of Azerbaijan, saying Azerbaijan and Turkey will continue to implement large projects.

President Ilham Aliyev thanked for the greetings of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and asked the head of the committee to extend his greetings to the Turkish president.

Then they posed for photographs.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

Trend:

Azerbaijan is interested in the French government's increasing the number of its scholarships, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov said in a meeting with Frederique Vidal, French minister of higher education, research and innovation, during a visit to France, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said Jan. 16.

During the meeting, the ministers expressed satisfaction with the development of bilateral relations in all spheres of cooperation, including education.

Mammadyarov noted that cooperation between Azerbaijan and France in education is based on historic and symbolic roots, and added that about 50 Azerbaijani students got education at various universities of France during the existence of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, the 100th anniversary of which is celebrated in 2018.

He added that students from Azerbaijan were trained in various universities, such as Paris University, Nancy University, Lyon University, Toulouse High Tech School, and Nancy High School of Carpet Weaving in shipbuilding, medicine, physics, chemistry and geology.

The ministers also emphasized the importance of continuation of successful experience on language and culture training. In this regard, the addition of the Azerbaijani language into the curricula of the French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, the opening of the Baku French Lyceum, and the expansion of the French language teaching in Azerbaijan were highly appreciated.

The ministers noted the establishment and operation of the Azerbaijani-French University as a successful example of cooperation in education between Azerbaijan and France.

Mammadyarov emphasized that one of the directions of education cooperation between the two countries is the granting of scholarships to the Azerbaijani citizens by the French government.

Vidal noted that in 2017, 50 scholarships were granted to Azerbaijan and that student exchange within the ERASMUS program was successfully continued.

Ministers also discussed the cooperation between the French University of Strasbourg and the Azerbaijan University of Languages, mutual research of archives, which are rich with documents on the activities of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in France, as well as diplomatic, cultural and other documents relating to France in Azerbaijan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

Trend:

Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov invited UNESCO to join the process of monitoring cultural monuments in the territories occupied by Armenia, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a message on Jan.16.

This invitation was announced today at the headquarters of UNESCO during the meeting of the minister with the head of the organization, Audrey Azoulay.

Azerbaijan is sensitive to the issue of preserving the country's cultural heritage. Armenia deliberately destroys cultural monuments in the occupied Azerbaijani territories", Mammadyarov said, noting that the OSCE monitoring mission confirms these facts.

The sides underlined the role of UNESCO in the prevention of contemporary threats, as well as threats in international relations. In this regard, the Foreign Minister, noting UNESCO's importance for Azerbaijan, brought to the attention an exceptional role of UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva in strengthening cooperation between the organization and Azerbaijan.

Azoulay noted that she considers UNESCO's cooperation with Azerbaijan important in the field of intercultural dialogue and stressed the importance of continuing joint activities in this field in the future.

During the meeting, Elmar Mammadyarov invited the Director General of UNESCO to visit Azerbaijan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Nigar Guliyeva  Trend:

Uzbekistan plans to introduce a visa-free regime for five countries, Head of the State Committee for Tourism Aziz Abdukhakimov said during a press briefing.

He said that the country is doing a lot to simplify the visa regime.

"We are considering the introduction of a visa-free regime for five major countries, in addition to the three countries from where we expect the largest inflows of pilgrims," he said.

Abdukhakimov added that Uzbekistan also plans to simplify the visa regime with 40 more countries.

All these measures will be formalized in a new document, which is expected to be developed in the near future.

In addition, according to Abdukhakimov, in the coming months, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan intend to lift visa restrictions. The agreement on this is planned to be signed during the upcoming visit of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to Dushanbe.

Uzbekistan welcomed over 2.5 million tourists in 2017, which is an increase by 24 percent compared to 2016.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Nigar Guliyeva  Trend:

Uzbekistan and Ukraine plan to resume direct flights by the end of 2018, Head of the State Committee for Tourism Aziz Abdukhakimov said during a press briefing.

Abdukhakimov said that Uzbekistan plans to resume air communication with Ukraine in 2018 and flights will be carried out to Kiev.

The aviation authorities had already agreed, but the flights themselves were postponed a little, he said. Abdukhakimov added that the President gave a number of instructions for the development of the tourism industry, including, among other things, air communication with Ukraine.

He noted that the Uzbek envoy in Ukraine is fruitfully working in this direction.

Flag carrier airlines of Ukraine and Uzbekistan may resume direct flights between Kiev and Tashkent by the spring of 2018, said earlier Ukrainian Ambassador to Uzbekistan Yuri Savchenko.

At the initial stage, it is planned that each of the airline companies will carry out two flights a week, according to the ambassador.

Several years ago, direct flights between the two countries were operated by the Ukraine International Airlines PJSC and the Uzbekistan Airways OJSC.

However, controversial issues related to the distribution of passenger seats and airline tickets led to the cancellation of direct flights, and this turned out to be major inconvenience for citizens of both countries.

Passengers from Ukraine and Uzbekistan had to use services of other airlines offering transit routes.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Ali Mustafayev  Trend:

The National Fund of Kazakhstan received millions of dollars in 2017 as a result of sales of more than a hundred state-owned facilities, the Minister of Finance of Kazakhstan Bakhyt Sultanov said at a government meeting, Kazakh media outlets reported.

In 2017, 190 state objects worth 108 billion tenge were privatized. The president of Kazakhstan previously repeatedly instructed that all finances received from privatization should be sent to the National Fund of the country.

The minister of finance confirmed that all the money received from sales of state facilities was sent to the National Fund of Kazakhstan.

"In January we will transfer 5 billion tenge more to the National Fund, the relevant decision and resolution have already been adopted. However, there are still some problems with the national holding companies, working with the Ministry of Economy," said Sultanov.

The minister also stressed that the number of active investors in the sector increased by 12 percent in previous year. In addition, the competitiveness at relevant auctions also increased.

(Exchange rate for 16.01.2018: $1  329 tenge)
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Nigar Guliyeva  Trend:

President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Suma Chakrabarti will inaugurate EBRD-Turkey Donor Fund.

He will pay a two-day visit to Turkey on Jan.18-19 and launch the Fund as the country becomes a benefactor to the EBRD, in addition to being a founding shareholder and the Banks largest country of operations by investment volume.

As a donor Turkey, through the Undersecretariat of Treasury, will co-finance socially important EBRD-led projects which help boost economic growth and improve peoples lives.

During his visit, Chakrabarti will meet the countrys leadership to take stock of the Banks robust contribution to the Turkish economy and discuss the reforms needed to help the country realise its full economic potential.

The programme also includes meetings with the top management of Turkeys largest conglomerates and the EBRDs strong partners, Koc and Sabanc holdings, and the biggest private lender Isbank.

In addition, Chakrabarti will address the general assembly of the leading Turkish business association TUSIAD to reinforce how innovation, economic inclusion and green practices can make Turkeys economy more competitive.

The EBRD is a major investor in the country. To date, the Bank has invested 10 billion in various sectors of the Turkish economy with almost all investments in the private sector.

The Bank focuses on investment in sustainable energy, improving infrastructure, strengthening the competitiveness of the private sector, including of small firms, deepening local capital and local currency markets, while promoting greater job and training opportunities for women, youth and people in remote areas.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Government of Turkey is preparing new incentive measures to support people who purchase real estate for the first time, a source in the Cabinet of Ministers told Trend Jan. 16.

Earlier, in order to support Turkish citizens, the government developed a package of incentive measures, within which the state provided citizens with a gratuitous amount of 15,000 liras for the purchase of real estate.

However, the proposed method was not attractive for Turkish citizens, the source said.

It is expected that after the new incentive measures are developed, the gratuitous amount will be increased to 20,000 liras.

(3.7661 liras = $1 on Jan. 16)
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Jan. 16

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov signed a decree on establishment of a working commission to coordinate the implementation of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project, the Turkmen Dovlet Habarlary state news agency reported Jan. 16.

The document was signed in order to improve the efficiency of implementation of projects of TAPI gas pipeline, as well as transport corridors and energy bridges along the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan route, and coordinate work.

Turkmenistan started to construct its TAPI section in December 2015. The foundation laying ceremony for the Afghan section of the TAPI gas pipeline is planned to be held in the second half of February 2018.

Earlier, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Japanese government expressed their interest in financing TAPI.

The Islamic Development Bank has already allocated a loan worth $700 million for Turkmenistan to construct its TAPI section.
Deuba urged to dissolve NC panels formed against charter

Senior Nepali Congress leader Ram Chandra Poudel on Monday urged party President and Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba to dissolve the Parliamentary Board and the Central Executive Committee formed against the spirit of the party charter.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan.16

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

The joint venture of Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR and US KBR Engineering Company - SOCAR-KBR Limited Liability Company (SKLLC) has been awarded two contracts for the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) block of oil and gas fields in the Azerbaijan sector of the Caspian Sea, said a message from KBR.

The joint venture has been awarded two separate Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) contracts for a new Production, Drilling, Quarters (PDQ) platform  the Azeri Central East (ACE) platform  to be located in the ACG field.

The contracts, which were awarded by the Azerbaijan International Oil Company, cover the provision of FEED services for the new platform, along with associated brownfield tie-ins to other existing platforms in the ACG field, and a separate contract for the subsea services FEED, according to the message.

Following previous awards to other regional and international clients, these contracts mark the 4th and 5th awards to the joint venture, SOCAR-KBR Limited Liability Company (SOCAR-KBR), since its inception in mid-2015.

"Through the Azerbaijani engineering company, SOCAR-KBR we are partnering KBR's proven tools, systems, and procedures and our project track record in the Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia (AGT) region with SOCAR's operation knowledge and experience in the oil and gas sector," said Jay Ibrahim, President, EMEA. "KBR has been working in the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey (AGT) region since 1993 which gives us unrivalled experience and knowledge of existing on and offshore greenfield and brownfield assets. During that time, KBR has completed over 25 million man-hours of work with zero lost time incidents."

"These projects will be led by the Caspian engineering team in London with maximum local execution support from the Baku office where local engineers are delivering various projects under the SOCAR-KBR umbrella," Ibrahim continued. "We are proud that currently more than 75% of our Baku based SOCAR-KBR team are Azerbaijani engineers."

The value of the contract was booked into the backlog of unfilled orders for KBR's Engineering & Construction business segment in Q4 of 2017.

A contract for developing the ACG field was signed in 1994. A ceremony to sign a new contract on development of the ACG block of oil and gas fields was held in Baku Sept. 14, 2017.

The new ACG participating interests are as follows: BP - 30.37 percent; AzACG (SOCAR) - 25 percent; Chevron - 9.57 percent; INPEX - 9.31 percent; Statoil - 7.27 percent; ExxonMobil - 6.79 percent; TP - 5.73 percent; ITOCHU - 3.65 percent; ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) - 2.31 percent.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Headline changed, details added (first version posted on 15:13)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

A representative office of Saudi Arabias state oil company Saudi Aramco will be opened in Azerbaijan soon, said Minister of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources of Saudi Arabia Khalid Al-Falih.

He made the remarks at a meeting with Azerbaijans Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov, who is on an official visit to the country.

Shahbazov also met with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

King Al Saud expressed satisfaction with sincere relations with President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and asked the minister to convey his greetings.

The level of relations between Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia, which are based on centuries-old historical and cultural roots, were highly appreciated during the meeting.

It was noted that a strong ground has been created for cooperation in all spheres.

The parties expressed interest in expanding cooperation in all areas, including in the energy sector.

The Azerbaijani minister also met with CEO of Saudi Aramco Amin Nasser.

The meetings participants discussed the possibility of implementing joint projects in third countries by Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR and Saudi Aramco.

Moreover, Minister Shahbazov visited a number of infrastructure facilities, oil fields of Saudi Arabia and held several meetings.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Huseyn Veliyev  Trend:

The Health Informatization Center under the Ministry of Healthcare of Azerbaijan has announced a tender on three lots to attract IT support services, says a message posted on the website of the State Service for Antimonopoly Policy and Consumers Rights Protection of the Ministry of Economy.

The cost of participation in the tender is 300 Azerbaijani manats.

Bids, backed by a bank guarantee of two percent of the bid amount, must be submitted until 16:00 (UTC+4), Feb. 23, 2018.

The tender will be held at 16:00 on Feb. 26, 2018 at: 1A, Mirgasimov Street, Baku, Azerbaijan.

For more details please call: (+99412) 596-11-39.

Contact person: Ramil Ismayilov

(1.7001 AZN = 1 USD on Jan. 16)
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

Trend:

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev hs arrived in Washington D.C., the Akorda press service reports.

During his official visit to the United States, Nazarbayev is scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump, as well as the country's official and business circles.

While in the U.S., the Head of State will also take part in the United Nations Security Council Meeting.
Iran and Kyrgyzstan intend to establish bilateral relations in a number of industries. To implement this goal, the parties signed a long-term cooperation agreement with the plan for the next 10 years, Kabar reports.

Ambassador of Iran to the Kyrgyz Republic Ali Mojtaba Ruzbehani during a meeting with journalists on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries said that in the first place this agreement provides for the development of economic relations and the increase in trade turnover between the parties.

"We signed a long-term agreement on 10-year cooperation, which provides for the development of bilateral relations in all areas. But the main emphasis is on the development of trade and economic relations. We have a great will to implement it, and we are optimistic," the ambassador said.

He also pointed out that Kyrgyzstan has great potential in tourism, and the diplomatic mission of Iran will carry out all sorts of activities to attract tourists from among its compatriots.

"Kyrgyzstan has a great potential in the sphere of tourism, and we will be able to attract our compatriots to your fertile land. You have a great future in this direction. Iran also has its own opportunities in terms of medical and other types of tourism, which may also interest Kyrgyz people to visit our country," the ambassador added.

He stressed that, they are making every effort to activate this industry, as evidenced by the measures taken to launch direct flights between Iran and Kyrgyzstan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

Trend:

The agreement on the abolition of the visa regime between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan is planned to be signed during Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyevs forthcoming visit to Dushanbe this year, chairman of the Uzbek State Committee for Tourism Development Aziz Abdukhakimov told journalists, Sputnik Tajikistan agency reported Jan. 16.

Abdukhakimov has not disclosed the date of Mirziyoyevs visit to Tajikistan, stressing that this will happen soon.

"I think that the abolition of the visa regime is a very serious decision, which has a great interest for Tajik people," Abdukhakimov said.

Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have had their disagreements through the years. Tajikistan often accused the neighboring country of blocking railroads and roads. Uzbekistan also opposed the construction of the Rogun hydroelectric power plant in Tajikistan, which, according to the Uzbek authorities, is a threat to the entire agricultural sector of the region.

The countries introduced a visa regime in 2001.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Jan. 16

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov sent a letter of condolences to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in connection with the Iranian oil tanker sunk in the East China Sea, which resulted in numerous casualties.

Berdimuhamedov conveyed the words of deep empathy and support to the relatives and friends of the victims.

An oil tanker burning in the East China Sea has sunk a week after it collided with another vessel, according to Chinese state media.

The Panama-registered Sanchi tanker sank Sunday after an explosion rocked it and sent flames shooting up, CCTV reported.

The Sanchi was carrying 136,000 tons - around 1 million barrels - of oil from Iran to South Korea when it collided with the Hong Kong-registered CF Crystal freighter in the East China Sea on Jan. 7.

Chinese maritime authorities launched a search-and-rescue operation for 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshi crew aboard the Sanchi.

Three bodies were recovered over the week and just hours before the Sanchi's sinking Sunday. Iran announced that all the ship's crew members were presumed dead, according to Iranian state media.
Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Jan. 16

By Mammad Dashdemirov  Trend:

A delegation of the World Bank (WB) will visit Tashkent on Jan. 18, the Uzbek Foreign Ministry told Trend Jan. 16.

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev will receive the delegation.

The delegation will be headed by Kristalina Georgieva, Chief Executive Officer of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and International Development Association, as part of the World Bank Group.

The program of the visit envisages negotiations in the government and Senate of the Oliy Majlis (Uzbek parliament), during which the prospects for enhancing cooperation between Uzbekistan and the World Bank will be discussed.
Tehran, Iran, Jan. 16

By Kamyar Eghbal  Trend:

Monetary and Banking Research Institute of Iran is studying the possibility of using cryptocurrencies in the country as per the Central Banks request, a senior official told Trend.

Ali Divandari, the head of Monetary and Banking Research Institute of Iran, has said that the research seeks to answer the question that how the blockchain technology could be employed for issuing cryptocurrency in Iran.

Confirming that the cryptocurrencies have made their way to the Iranian market, he added that there is a group of Iranian buyers who have expressed interest in the digital assets.

Divandari added that his institution is currently studying ways for using cryptocurrency in the Iranian market from two aspects - first the possibility to issue such currencies, and the second the technical capabilities.

The outcome of the studies will be disclosed during a banking conference in Tehran on Jan. 22-23.

Divandari believes that the cryptocurrencies run certain risks and there is a lack of serious supervision on them.

Mostly those who are interested in the risk and high-return investments have been involved in trading the cryptocurrencies, he stated.

Saying that the cryptocurrencies have a small share in the international economy, the official added that Iranian traders have demonstrated a high interest in the digital assets.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Irans president Hassan Rouhani said that no country can settle its domestic problems via sending troops to other countries.

Rouhani made the remarks while addressing 13th Parliamentary Union of Organization of Islamic Cooperation Conference in Tehran on Jan. 16, the state-run IRINN TV reported.

Rouhani said that no country can develop while waging war outside its borders and bombing and killing neighbors, which is an indirect reference to Irans regional rival Saudi Arabia.

Relations between Tehran and Riyadh have been strained over the past years after their conflicting views on regional developments, particularly on Yemen and Syria, became more noticeable.

Rouhani further underlined that Islamic countries are not rivals to Iran.

He said that the Islamic world faces with numerous challenges including underdevelopment and poverty and called them to unite and solve their problems.

The Iranian president added that the Islamic countries must avoid dependence on foreign powers.

Elsewhere in his remarks Rouhani slammed the recent US decision on recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, adding that the Islamic countries will make every effort to help establish the Palestinian state.
Large cardamom farmers demand dev board

Large cardamom farmers have demanded that the government set up an independent large cardamom development board for addressing problems of the farmers and capitalising on the untapped business potential.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Khalid Kazimov  Trend:

Iranian Foreign Ministry has criticized a plan by the US-led coalition to set up a new 'border force' in Syria.

The spokesperson of Foreign Ministry of Iran, Bahram Qasemi, has described the announcement on creating the new border force in Syria as an obvious intervention in the domestic issues of the Arab country which would worsen the crisis there, local media outlets reported.

Bahram Qasemi added that the US 'border plan' would fan the flames of war and cause destabilization in Syria.

He further urged the US to pull out its forces form Syria and allow the people of the country to decide their own fate.

Reuters earlier reported that the US-led coalition is working with its Syrian militia allies to set up a new border force of 30,000 personnel.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Khalid Kazimov  Trend:

An Iranian minister has rejected rumors suggesting that the US had targeted the sunken Iranian oil tanker en route to South Korea.

Iran's Minister of Labor, Ali Rabiei, who was appointed by President Rouhani as the head of the committee to follow-up the Sanchi case (Sanchi oil tanker fire), has described the rumors as sheer lie, IRNA news agency reported.

Earlier an Iranian news website published a report suggesting that the US had fired a missile at the oil tanker claiming that the vessel was heading to North Korea.

According to Ali Rabiei, South Korea has confirmed that the cargo of the ship belonged to South Korea.

The Iranian oil tanker burning in the East China Sea sank a week after it collided with another vessel.

Tanker was carrying around 1 million barrels of ultra-light crude from Iran to South Korea when it collided with the Hong Kong-registered CF Crystal freighter in the East China Sea on January 7.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Turkey does not conceal its intention to launch military operations in Syrias Afrin city against Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Syrian wing of PKK (YPG), which are provided with arms by the US. The reason is to ensure the countrys security.

Earlier, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the beginning of military operations in Afrin is a matter of time.

Turkey ambiguously perceives the issue of launching new military operations in Syria. Turkeys opposition Republican People's Party calls on the countrys government to refrain from the expected operations in Afrin.

The opposition explains this by saying that military operations in Afrin against PYD and YPG may exacerbate the situation inside Turkey, as this may intensify the activity of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorist group.

Almost 90 percent of the Syrian-Turkish border is controlled by PYD and YPG and only a small part is controlled by the Free Syrian Army. It was freed from the terrorists of the Islamic State (IS) within the Euphrates Shield operation in August 2016.

So why does Turkey intend to launch military operations at the western borders?

Firstly, Turkeys Hatay and Kilis provinces are periodically subject to rocket fire from Afrin. In general, over the past year Turkeys territory has been fired from Afrin by more than 10 times.

Secondly, Afrin is isolated from other Syrias territories, controlled by PYD and YPG. Syrias government troops are in southern Afrin, the opposing Free Syrian Army - in south-western and north-eastern Afrin. Such deployment of forces and isolation of Afrin make this city more vulnerable.

Of course, provision of PYD and YPG with arms by the US may split Syria and this harms the interests of not only Syrian government, but also Russia, Turkey and Iran.

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has recently said that the US intention to help create border security zones in Syria testifies that Washington does not want to keep the country intact.

There is another question. Will Iran and Russia support Turkey in military operations in Afrin?

Despite that Syrias split is not in the interests of Iran and Russia, Moscow and Tehran will not render military support to Ankara in Afrin. Lebanese Hezbollah, which previously actively supported the Syrian army against the opposition and the IS terrorists, will not open a new front against PYD and YPG. The Free Syrian Army will be the only ally of Turkey against PYD and YPG.

The military operations in Afrin may start from three directions, first of all, from Turkeys territory, as well as from north-eastern and south-western Syria, where the forces of the Free Syrian Army are deployed. Turkish military experts also do not rule out that in case of successful military operations in Afrin, the Syrian authorities may open a corridor for PYD and YPG troops to retreat to eastern Syria.

The timing of the expected military operations in Afrin is still unknown, but Turkey is sure that Afrin will become a battlefield of the US and Turkey.

---

Rufiz Hafizoglu is the head of Trend Agency's Arabic news service, follow him on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

Trend:

The European Union promised to allocate 200 million euros for Armenia to shut down the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant, Russias Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily newspaper reported Jan. 16.

The newspaper said Brussels also proposed to replace the nuclear power plant with an alternative, developing green energy, which has been promoted in Armenia for a long time by both Americans and Europeans.

Construction of the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant started in 1970. The plant was closed after devastating earthquake in Spitak in 1988 but in 1995, despite international protests, the plant was restarted. Moreover, the second reactor was launched.

Ecologists and scholars from the whole region think seismic activity in the area turns operation of the Metsamor plant into an extremely dangerous undertaking.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan.16

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

The General Secretariat of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) strongly condemned the terrorist crime that targeted innocent civilians in the center of the capital city of Baghdad, killing several people and wounding many more, said a message from OIC.

OIC Secretary General Yousef Al-Othaimeen extended condolences to the bereaved families of the innocent victims who lost their lives during this sinful act of terror, expressing his wishes for speedy recovery to the wounded, said the message.

Further, he reaffirmed that the OIC continues to work together with the government of Iraq and all political parties to secure national reconciliation, through the Baghdad Conference for National Reconciliation.

Al-Othaimeen reiterated the organizations firm stance condemning terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.

At least 25 people were killed and 63 wounded in a twin suicide bombing in central Baghdad on Jan.15.

The attack targeted Aviation Square, a commercial area of Baghdad, the interior ministry said in a statement.
At least two Venezuelan police officers were killed and several others injured during an operation to catch ex-police officer Oscar Perez who is accused of hijacking a helicopter and attacking two government buildings in June 2017, Sputnik reported, citing local media.

Earlier in the day, Perez said he was negotiating the terms of surrender after he had been surrounded in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas.

According to the statement of the Venezuelan Interior Ministry aired by a national television channel, Perez and his accomplices opened fire killing two police officers and injuring five others.

Media reports claim that five members of the group were detained and others were killed with no information on the fate of Perez.

On June 28, 2017, a group of security force officers headed by Perez hijacked a helicopter and assailed the Venezuelan Supreme Court in Caracas, opening fire and dropping several hand grenades, and also attacking the nearby Justice Ministry. After declaring the start of their fight against the government, the attackers disappeared. The government labeled the attack as an act of terror.
At least 10 people were killed on Monday when a bridge under construction collapsed in central Colombia, Xinhua reported.

Another two people were missing and four others injured when the structure fell along a tract of the highway that links the capital Bogota with the nearby city of Villavicencio, officials said.
The Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) has been deployed to rescue 93 tourists stranded on Tioman island for several days following bad weather and rough seas, The Straits Times reported.

A total of 54 foreign tourists and 39 local tourists have been stranded on the island off the east coast of Johor since Jan 11.

Tioman assemblyman Mohd Johari Hussain said Navy ship KD Terengganu is expected to arrive on the island at 10pm on Monday (Jan 15).

"Tomorrow morning (Jan 16) at 7.30am, we can start transferring people from the marina," he told The Star.

Datuk Seri Mohd Johari said seven local people will also be allowed to board the ship as they had urgent matters to attend to on the mainland.

The annual northeast monsoon season means heavy rain and stormy seas for Tioman island from October to March every year.

Mr Mohd Johari said when the monsoon season starts, the government constantly reminds people of the situation and the risk that they may face on the island.

"During this period, fewer tourists will visit the island due to the weather but there are those who take the risk to go to Tioman with the hope that they would be able to board the ferry when the weather improves," he said.

He said this time, ferry services remained inoperable for a longer period and as such, tourists and locals were unable to leave the island.
The public broadcaster NHK issued an on-air apology after it mistakenly sent the alert to its website and to users of its app on Tuesday, Sputnik reported.

The message received by mobile phone users at 6.55pm local time said: "NHK news alert. North Korea appears to have launched a missile. The government urges people to take shelter inside buildings or underground."

The error was corrected within minutes and the NHK spokesman said they're investigating what caused the mistake.

Tensions remain high on the Korean peninsula after North staged a serious of nuclear and missile tests in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

This comes just days after a similar incident in Hawaii when an employee mistakenly sent a ballistic missile alert that caused panic across the US state.

Residents received a warning to seek immediate shelter sending panic across Hawaii.

To make matters worse officials took 38 minutes to correct the false alarm.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Monday criticized the recently announced plan of the U.S. to form a so-called border army led by the terrorist PKK/PYD group in Syria, Anadolu reported.

Speaking to journalists in Canada's Vancouver city, Cavusoglu said: "The U.S. must clarify which side it is on, whether it chooses to be with its allies or terror groups?"

His remarks came following an announcement made by the U.S.-led international coalition against Daesh on Sunday that it would establish a 30,000-strong new border security force with the SDF -- the U.S.-backed group, largely controlled and manned by the PKK/PYD terrorist organization in Syria.

The Turkish foreign minister warned: "We will take our own measures [against terror groups]. Regardless of who backs them; whether it is the U.S. or other countries, it doesn't matter to us."

About a possible Afrin operation in Syria, he said Turkey will fight against the PYD terrorists in Syria just like it did against the PKK.
Madhes allies likely to share top posts 50:50

The Rastriya Janata Party-Nepal has proposed a 50:50 power-sharing and candidacy allocation arrangement with ally the Sanghiya Samajbadi Forum-Nepal for forming the government in Province 2 and for the National Assembly elections, respectively. The two parties had contested the federal parliament and provincial assembly elections by forming an alliance.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

The Turkish opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP) calls on the government to refrain from the expected operations in the Syrian city of Afrin, the Turkish media outlets reported Jan. 16.

The opposition explains this by saying that military operations in Afrin against Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Syrian wing of PKK (YPG) can exacerbate the situation inside Turkey, as this may entail the activation of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorist group.

Meanwhile, CHP strongly condemned the US position on PYD and YPG.

Earlier, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the conduct of new military operations of the Turkish Armed Forces in Syrias Afrin against PYD and YPG is a matter of time.

He also noted that the US is creating an army of terrorists from PYD and YPG forces in Syria on the border with Turkey.

According to Erdogan, the target of this terrorist army is, of course, Turkey.

The Turkish president added that the US disgraced itself by supporting PYD and YPG.

Turkey has been moving military equipment to its border with Syria since June 21. Military equipment is being deployed in Turkeys south-central province of Kilis, which borders Syrian territories controlled by YPG and PYD.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 16

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Military operations in Syrias Afrin city against Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) will begin very soon, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, the countrys media reported Jan. 16.

Turkish Armed Forces will completely destroy PYD and YPG, Erdogan said.

He also noted that no one can prevent Turkey from starting these operations.

Earlier, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said the US is openly supporting the YPG and the PYD terrorist groups in Syria. He said the actions of the US dont correspond to the spirit of ally relations with Turkey. He noted that Turkey will take all necessary steps against provocative actions of the US.

On Jan. 14, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement that cooperation of the US with PYD and YPG contradicts Washingtons commitments and statements made earlier, and threatens the national security of Turkey.

We condemn this erroneous decision and we would like to remind once again that Turkey reserves the right to eliminate any kind of threat, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
KYODO NEWS - Jan 15, 2018 - 16:13 | Arts, Feature, All

Opportunities for blind or visually impaired people in Japan to appreciate art are on the rise thanks to the increased use of audio descriptions, tactile methods and simple human dialogue.

Whether a person is disabled or not, conversations among patrons and staff at museums across the country are helping art lovers gain a deeper understanding of the multitude of opinions concerning the works on display.

Last September around 20 people, including some with visual and hearing disabilities, gathered at the National Art Center in Tokyo's Roppongi district, where a Southeast Asian art exhibition was being held.

A participant with full sight described a painting that created a "pastoral impression" despite including a depiction of a bombing. The leader of the group, who is blind, then asked "Which parts make you feel this way?"

"It's the houses on stilts and animals," the person answered. The painter is "probably expressing the daily life of war mixed with a feeling of serenity."

A man in his 30s, who listened to the conversation with his eyes shut, said, "I was able to get an image with the words of others and found it possible to appreciate art without relying on my eyesight."

"Listening to other people's opinions helped me deepen my appreciation," added a woman in her 20s.

The event was organized by a nonprofit organization that has held more than 100 similar programs since 2012 in cooperation with art museums across Japan.

"We would like to provide opportunities for blind people to know other people's feelings through dialogues instead of giving one-sided explanations to them," said Kenta Hayashi, head of the NPO.

But it is also important that the blind and those with low vision interpret pieces for themselves and not solely rely on explanations from museum staff, experts argue.

Mori Art Museum, also located in Roppongi, has held some 40 events to help the blind appreciate art, attracting around 500 participants, since 2003. In 2016, the museum incorporated audio descriptions for people with and without visual impairments.

When an event is held, staff will meet participants at nearby train stations and ascertain the degree of their disabilities to customize appropriate programs.

Participants exchange their thoughts and impressions about three or four pieces of art. Staff members then explain the pieces in detail so that participants can deepen their understanding while enjoying conversations.

Artists also participated in a program in mid-October last year, sharing their own explanations of the pieces they created.

A female participant, who has a congenital form of blindness, said, "I had nothing to do with art because I was born blind, but I could relate and enjoy the pieces by touching them."

Sumika Takashima, a staff member at the Mori museum, said, "We will cooperate with artists to offer programs that enable many people to enjoy art in their daily life."

Outside of Japan, there are several innovative ways in which art is becoming accessible to the visually impaired community.

3D printing of art, especially famous pieces, allows blind people and those with low vision to experience iconic works through touch. Other methods include incorporating Braille into visual art, extra-textured paintings, and tactile art and tactile tours customized for the blind.
EPA Awards $2.1 Million to Protect, Restore California Wetlands and Streams

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded more than $2.1 million in grants to protect and restore wetlands and streams across California.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded more than $2.1 million in grants to protect and restore wetlands and streams across California. The support of these aquatic resources can help improve water quality, fish and wildlife habitat, flood protection, and recreational opportunities.

EPAs San Francisco Bay Water Quality Improvement Fund will give Napa County $822,000 for restoration work along the Napa River and to help with the development of restoration designs for an additional 36 acres of riparian forest, 8 acres of freshwater wetlands, and 6,800 linear feet of streambank. The project is part of Napa Countys broader effort to restore 14 miles of the Napa River and improve flood protection and steelhead trout habitat and will use 91,000 native plants to revegetate and enhance 11 acres of riparian forest and 5 acres of freshwater wetlands.

The following projects were also awarded wetland program development grants by the EPA:

Southern California Coastal Water Research Project received a combined $670,403 for two projects. The first project will develop, refine, and validate tools to better assess ephemeral stream conditions in California and Arizona. The second project will develop a method for quickly assessing biologic community composition and conditions in streams and wetlands using genetic information in water samples, which can improve the ability to measure restoration success across aquatic habitats.

Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy received $300,000 for an evaluation of wetlands in the Delta and Suisun Marsh. The results will enable assessments of regional and statewide change in the abundance, diversity, and condition of wetlands due to land use.

California State Coastal Conservancy received $275,000 to assess salt marsh vulnerability to sea-level rise and the impacts of marsh retreat on carbon sequestration (long-term storage) in Humboldt Bay. This information will be used to manage water quality and wetlands in the estuary, and to support development of a long-term program for the beneficial reuse of dredging sediments.

Sonoma County received $91,601 to develop mapping methods to more accurately identify the location of streams and adjacent conservation areas. This will allow the county to refine zoning maps used in regulations protecting riparian corridors.

Healthy wetlands and streams are key to the vitality of California communities and its economy, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said. These projects help to better understand and protect these important resources.
DG vs. TJX: Which Stock Is the Better Value Option?

Founded in 1971, Pacific Investment Management Company, LLC or PIMCO is an internationally acclaimed investment management firm. The company provides a wide range of financial services in 11 countries with the help of more than 2,200 employees. PIMCO had around $1.69 trillion assets under management as of Sep 30, 2017.

PIMCO offers a broad lineup of investment solutions to its clients that encompass the entire gamut of equities, bonds, currencies, real estates, alternative investments and risk management. Though the firm manages an array of mutual funds, it is best known for those based on fixed income.

Below we share with you three top-ranked PIMCO mutual funds. Each has earned a Zacks Mutual Fund Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and is expected to outperform its peers in the future. Investors can click here to see the complete list of PIMCO funds.

PIMCO Municipal Bond A PMLAX seeks a high level of income free from federal income tax as well as preservation of capital. PMLAX invests a bulk of its assets in debt securities whose interest is exempted from federal income tax like muni bonds. The fund may also invest around one-fifth of its assets in money market instruments and U.S. government securities. PIMCO Municipal Bond A has one-year annualized returns of 5.7%.

David Hammer has been the fund manager of PMLAX since 2015.

PIMCO StocksPLUS Small A PCKAX invests in fixed income securities related to the Russell 2000 Index, including bonds and other derivatives, in order to derive higher returns than the index. PCKAX invests in securities from public as well as private sectors issued globally. The fund focuses on fixed income instruments that are actively managed by PIMCO. The one-year annualized return for PIMCO StocksPLUS A is 19.7%.

As of September 2017, PCKAX held 521 issues, with 29.94% of its assets invested in RU20INTR TRS EQUITY 3ML-24 *BULLET* BPS.

PIMCO High Yield Spectrum Fund D PHSDX seeks maximization of returns. PHSDX invests a bulk of its assets in a portfolio of junk bonds or high-yield securities. These debt securities include convertibles, forwards or derivatives that are rated below investment grade by Moody's, or equivalently by the S&P or Fitch. PIMCO High Yield Spectrum Fund D has returned 7.2% in a years time.

Story continues

PHSDX has an expense ratio of 0.95% compared with the category average of 1.02%.

To view the Zacks Rank and past performance of all PIMCO mutual funds, investors can click here to see the complete list of funds.

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NC summons CWC meeting for Thursday

Nepali Congress (NC) has summoned the meeting of its Central Working Committee (CWC) for Thursday.
At least five Democratic Representatives will boycott President Trumps State of the Union address on Jan. 30.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) became the fifth Democrat to say she would skip the State of the Union, citing all the racism coming from the White House.

ANNOUNCEMENT: With all the racism coming from the White House, I will NOT be attending @realDonaldTrump's State of the Union.



Instead, we'll focus on the State of OUR Union, our opposition to his agenda, and we will lift up a progressive and inclusive vision of our country. pic.twitter.com/dcAWMIkZZV  Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) January 15, 2018

Jayapal joins her Democratic colleagues John Lewis (Ga.), Frederica Wilson (Fla.), Earl Blumenauer (Ore.), and Maxine Waters (Calif.) in boycotting the speech. Some of the lawmakers who wont attend will instead host an alternative State of the Union  a meeting to talk about our opposition to these racist policies that are being put out of the White House and to make sure we put out our own aggressive vision of what our America looks like as we take it back, according to Jayapal.

Rep. John Lewis cited President Trumps comments about Haiti and African countries in his announcement that he would not attend the speech. Rep. Maxine Waters was more blunt, asking Why would I take my time to go and sit and listen to a liar? Rep. Frederica Wilson made headlines last year when she criticised President Trump for remarks he made during a call to the widow of a fallen soldier.

Some female members of Congress who will attend the State of the Union have signaled their intent to wear black as a statement against sexual harassment. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said members of the Democratic Womens Working Group were encouraging lawmakers of all parties and genders to participate, but the protest is likely to be seen as a direct critique of President Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct.
FILE PHOTO - An Air India Airbus A320neo plane takes off in Colomiers near Toulouse, France, December 13, 2017. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau

(Reuters) - India will split state-run carrier Air India [AIN.UL] into four separate companies and offer at least 51 percent in each of them as part of a divestment plan proposed by the government, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

The debt-laden airline would be divided into core airline business, regional arm, ground handling and engineering operations, the report added.

The core airline business comprising Air India and Air India Express, the low-cost overseas arm, will be offered as one company, and the process will be completed by the end of 2018, Bloomberg reported, quoting Junior Aviation Minister Jayant Sinha. https://bloom.bg/2DxrCWF

Last week, India had cleared a proposal to allow foreign investors to own up to 49 percent in the carrier.

Air India could not be immediately contacted for comments.

(Reporting By Arnab Paul in Bengaluru; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu)
All of the major cryptocurrencies were deep in the red Tuesday morning.

Bitcoin plunged by 15% on Tuesday morning, and all of the major cryptocurrencies were also in the red. That decline came on the heels of a 17% drop in the price of bitcoin last week; the digital currency is now trading below $12,000 for the first time since early December.

Here's a rundown of Tuesday's price action in the five largest cryptocurrencies, and a look at what could be to blame for their drops.

Businessman looking at financial charts in frustration.

Image Source: Getty Images.

Today's cryptocurrency prices: Jan. 16, 2018

Here's a look at the five largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, and how much each has changed over the past 24 hours.

Cryptocurrency Name (Code) Price in U.S. Dollars Today's Change Bitcoin (BTC) $11,946.00 (14.9%) Ethereum (ETH) $1,115.00 (15.6%) Ripple (XRP) $1.36 (24.3%) Bitcoin Cash (BCH) $2,005.70 (18%) Cardano (ADA) $0.65 (22.1%)

Data Source: www.investing.com. Prices and daily changes as of 10:45am EST on 1/16/18, and prices are rounded to the nearest cent where appropriate.

As you can see, it's not just bitcoin: The rest of the top five cryptocurrencies are being crushed even harder. In fact, the overall value of the cryptocurrency market has dropped by more than $100 billion since last week.

The reason for the plunge? Fears of a crackdown of cryptocurrency trading in major international markets, and lower trading volumes in key cryptocurrency markets.

Worries about crackdowns in South Korea and China

Last week, it was reported that South Korea is considering a bill that would ban cryptocurrency trading in the country. That would be a major blow to the asset class, as South Korea is one of the most active cryptocurrency markets.

Fears seemed to subside in the days following the news. First, it was reported that a ban was just one option being considered, and then we learned that even if such a bill were to be introduced and passed, it could take months or even years before a ban could go into effect.

Story continues

Well, comments from South Korean Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon have renewed these fears. Speaking on a radio program, Dong-yeon said that "the shutdown on virtual currency exchanges is still one of the options."

Furthermore, China's crackdown on cryptocurrencies appears to be escalating. Authorities are planning to block access to cryptocurrency platforms that allow centralized trading, and Chinese regulators are planning to target people and businesses that provide services related to centralized cryptocurrency trading.

Trading volumes are down

According to CryptoCompare.com, U.S. bitcoin trading accounted for 40% of the global total. This is because in key international markets, the trading volume has plunged. Generally, Japan is the most active cryptocurrency market, and South Korea is No. 3. On Tuesday morning, the combined volume from the two nations made up less than 30% of the total.

Cryptocurrencies are a speculative asset class, and they require lots of investor interest to help keep their prices high. If that interest has waned in key markets, it would certainly put downward pressure on their values.

Related:



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A new bill aims to bar U.S. government agencies from using Huawei huawei and ZTE ztcof products amid concerns that the companies could share sensitive national security and corporate intellectual property data with the Chinese government.

The Defending U.S. Government Communications Act, was introduced by Representative Mike Conaway last week, the Verge reports.

Chinese commercial technology is a vehicle for the Chinese government to spy on United States federal agencies, posing a severe national security threat, Conaway said in a statement posted to his official website. Using Chinese-made telecommunications products would be inviting Chinese surveillance into all aspects of our lives.

The companies alleged ties to Chinese intelligence agencies were the subject of a 2012 House Intelligence Committee report, which concluded that U.S. government systems, particularly sensitive systems, should not include Huawei or ZTE equipment, including in component parts.

For more on tech in China, watch Fortunes video:

The bill is the latest broadside against Huawei, whose planned partnership with AT&T t collapsed last week after lawmakers raised security questions with the Federal Trade Commission, Reuters reported.
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
Bitcoin steady, ethereum dips in quiet trade

Investing.com - The price of digital currency bitcoin was steady on Monday as it levelled off following last weeks steep declines, while rival ethereum edged lower having hit record highs on Saturday.

Bitcoin was trading at $13,749 by 05:36 AM ET (10:36 AM GMT) on the Bitfinex exchange.

Bitcoins market capitalization stood at around $233 billion.

Ethereum, the worlds second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, was last at $1,319.10 on the Bitfinex exchange after peaking at $1,423.20 on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Ripple's XRP token was trading at $1.8 on the Poloinex exchange.

Cryptocurrency prices plunged in a broad based selloff last Thursday following reports that South Korea may be preparing to ban all virtual currency trading in the country.

South Koreas justice minister said the government was preparing a bill to ban trading of virtual currencies on domestic exchanges. The country is one is one of the largest markets for major coins like bitcoin and ethereum.

Cryptocurrency trading in South Korea is highly speculative and digital currencies are often traded at a premium, meaning that they are priced significantly higher in the country's exchanges than elsewhere in the world.

The South Korean government said on Monday that its plans to ban virtual coin exchanges had not yet been finalized as government agencies were still in talks to decide how to regulate the market.

South Koreas unease over cryptocurrency trading follows drastic moves taken by China, which shuttered cryptocurrency exchanges last year and is now trying to shut operations that produce bitcoin, a process known as mining.

Elsewhere, the head of Singapore's central bank said on Monday he hoped the technologies underpinning cryptocurrencies such as blockchain would not be undermined by an eventual crash in the digital currency market.

"I do hope when the fever has gone away, when the crash has happened, it will not undermine the much deeper, and more meaningful technology associated with digital currencies and blockchain," said Ravi Menon, the managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

Story continues

Singapore has been positioning itself as a hub for fintech - or financial technology - but has urged "extreme caution" about trading in cryptocurrencies.

Related Articles

Singapore central bank head hopes cryptocurrency tech will survive 'crash'

South Korea says planned ban on cryptocurrency market not yet finalized

Bitcoin, Ripple Lower, Ethereum Eases from Record Highs
Nursing staff halt services across country

Nurses all over the nation staged protest on Tuesday demanding better pay scales and an end to exploitation of labour.
Bitcoin, ethereum, ripple and other virtual currencies are falling today on a new bit of cryptocurrency news.

Cryptocurrency News: Why Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple Are Plunging Today

Source: Shutterstock

Recent reports claim that China is preparing to crackdown on on bitcoin and its various rivals. Chinas central bank has specifically called for a ban on individuals and businesses getting involved with virtual currencies and offering services for them. This cryptocurrency news is likely behind the sudden fall in value for bitcoin, ethereum and ripple.

Following the release of this cryptocurrency news, bitcoins value dropped to roughly $11,000. This had the virtual currency losing roughly 18% of its value and its a far cry from the almost $20,000 it was trading for back in December.

InvestorPlace - Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips

Ethereum, the virtual currency with the second-highest value, also saw its value drop as much as 23% following the release of the cryptocurrency news. Ripple also lost as much as a third of its value on concerns about a crackdown, reports Reuters.

Governments preparing to crackdown on virtual currencies have been in the news quite a bit recently. This includes a recent report that South Korea was considering a full ban on bitcoin and its rivals. However, the government walked that statement back and said it may only look to regulate cryptocurrency.

The U.S. government has also been warnings investors about the dangers of bitcoins and its rivals. The SEC has been warning investors about the lack in insurance for virtual currencies and the highly-volatile market. The SEC also notes it can ban the trading of companies that appear to be Initial Coin Offerings scams.

More From InvestorPlace

As of this writing, William White did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

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The post Cryptocurrency News: Why Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple Are Plunging Today appeared first on InvestorPlace.
COPENHAGEN, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Danish police said on Monday they have charged 1,004 children and young people for sharing video clips of two 15-year-olds having sex, following a tip-off from Facebook.

They said it could constitute distribution of child pornography even though the age of consent in Denmark is 15.

The two video clips were shared through Facebook's Messenger chat-platform in the autumn and the company advised the U.S. authorities about it, as it is obliged to.

The tip-off was then passed on to Denmark via Interpol.

Most of the young people charged have only shared the videos a few times whereas as some have shared them several hundred times, police said. LIF (Reporting by Teis Jensen, editing by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen/Jeremy Gaunt)
Facebook is trying to fix its fake news problem that gained prominence after the 2016 US presidential election. But its far from actually winning the battle, as the fake news phenomenon continues to be a worldwide problem. A new report highlights one of Facebooks new efforts meant to remove news posts that might include fake entries from users News Feeds. It turns out that the new program isnt working well at all, and it might actually make it easier than it used to be to spread fake news.

Don't Miss: Todays top deals: $30 Crock-Pot, $15 Bluetooth headphones, Dyson vacuum, Nest Thermostat, more

In a new report, The New York Times details Facebooks Explore feature that was introduced last fall in six countries. The Explore program should offer readers only news, whereas the News Feed would be populated by posts from friends and family. The Explore program should not be confused with a similar program Facebook announced earlier this week, which will result in less news hitting the News Feed in favor of content from friends.

The problem with the pilot program is that it still propagates fake news, and the best example comes from Slovakia, one of the countries included in the trial. Heres The NYTs account of the story:

A bogus news story [] claimed that a Muslim man had thanked a good Samaritan for returning his lost wallet, and had warned the Samaritan of a terrorist attack that was planned at a Christmas market. The fabricated story circulated so widely that the local police issued a statement saying it wasnt true. But when the police went to issue the warning on Facebook, they found that the message  unlike the fake news story they meant to combat  could no longer appear on News Feed because it came from an official account.

Thats hilarious, but also quite sad. Imagine all the people who believed it and never had access to the polices report on the matter. The program is also live in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Serbia where similar fake news problems exist.

Story continues

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Trending Right Now:

See the original version of this article on BGR.com
By Alexandria Sage and Nick Carey DETROIT (Reuters) - Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV's (FCA) has no intention of breaking up the company or selling individual brands to China or other parties, the company's chief executive said on Monday, adding that the group was counting on its coveted Jeep brand to drive future profits. "We're not going to break up anything," Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne said at a news conference at the Detroit auto show. "We have no intention of breaking it up and giving anything to the Chinese." Marchionne said the Jeep sport utility vehicle brand could help FCA double its net profit. FCA's portfolio also includes luxury Maseratis, sporty Alfa Romeos and tiny Fiats. FCA's share price has jumped more than 30 percent this year on a bullish outlook for the auto sector, Jeep growth expectations and speculation that Marchionne's final year at the helm could prompt strategic deals such as spin-offs, technology alliances and disposals. The popularity of the Jeep brand, which is targeting sales of 2 million vehicles this year, has prompted talk it could be spun off from the group, as happened with tractor maker CNH Industrial and supercar group Ferrari , or sold off. Rumors have resurfaced that Guangzhou Automobile Group Co Ltd <601238.SS> might be interested in snapping up part of FCA. Marchionne said on Monday that while GAC has partnered to deliver Jeeps to the Chinese market and FCA is talking to the Chinese automaker about helping it enter the U.S. market "none of these things are designed to impact on the independence of FCA." FCA has often been the subject of merger speculation, especially after its unsuccessful 2015 attempt to tie up with larger U.S. rival General Motors Co . Its share price jumped to record highs in August after reports of interest from China's Great Wall Motor Co <601633.SS> and South Korea's Hyundai Motor Co <005380.KS>. Marchionne said while both Jeep and truck brand Ram are strong enough to exist on their own, "we need to talk about... what will be left behind." Marchionne said he has recommended to the company's board that the automaker spin off Magneti Marelli, a maker of components for lighting, engines, electronics, suspension and exhausts, to shareholders by the end of 2018. Marchionne confirmed FCA's targets for 2017 and for 2018, including a plan to erase all debt and generate up to 5 billion euros ($6.14 billion) in net cash. Asked about the possibility of paying dividends, Marchionne said the markets had changed and "it makes more sense to buy back shares than pay a dividend." The 65-year-old executive is due to step down in early 2019, and a successor will be appointed from within FCA. Finance chief Richard Palmer, European head Alfredo Altavilla and Jeep boss Mike Manley have often been cited as possible candidates, according to sources close to the company. Marchionne said there are other possible candidates who are not in the media spotlight. FCA announced last week it will shift production of Ram heavy-duty pickup trucks from Mexico to Michigan in 2020, a move that lowers the risk to the automaker's profit should President Donald Trump pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. "I think weve done the right thing by the American market, by the U.S. consumer," Marchionne said, "... and I think weve addressed Mexican concerns" about production with plans to repurpose the company's Saltillo, Mexico, plant to build commercial vehicles for sale globally. He said the U.S. tax code overhaul passed in December would provide a $1 billion boost to the company in 2018, noting that the overhaul "was to make sure the economy got a boost... develop a sense of confidence about the future, and that's exactly what we as an automaker in the U.S. were waiting to hear." A number of major automakers plan vast investments in developing electric vehicles. Ford Motor Co said on Sunday it plans to invest $11 billion and have 40 hybrid and fully electric vehicles in its model lineup by 2022. Marchionne said electric vehicles will eventually form a large part of vehicle lineups, "but it's a lot further off than people think" in part because they are not profitable for automakers. "I dont know of a guy, or a person or a entity or economic organization that is making money out of selling electric vehicles unless youre selling them at the very high end, which is rare," he said. (Additional reporting by Agnieszka Flak and Stefano Rebaudo in Milan; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Leslie Adler)
Over 3,000 applicants get nod for SKorea jobs

The final screenings of Nepali applicants for South Korean jobs has started, with more than 3,000 being approved under the Employment Permit System (EPS) for 2018, the Department of Foreign Employment (DoFE) has said.
DETROIT  Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) has no intention of breaking up the company or selling individual brands to China or other parties, the company's chief executive said on Monday at the Detroit Auto Show, adding that the group was counting on its coveted Jeep brand to drive future profits.

"We're not going to break up anything," Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne said at a news conference at the Detroit Auto Show. "We have no intention of breaking it up and giving anything to the Chinese."

Marchionne said the Jeep sport utility vehicle brand could help FCA double its net profit. FCA's portfolio also includes luxury Maseratis, sporty Alfa Romeos and tiny Fiats.

FCA's share price has jumped more than 30 percent this year on a bullish outlook for the auto sector, Jeep growth expectations and speculation that Marchionne's final year at the helm could prompt strategic deals such as spinoffs, technology alliances and disposals.

The popularity of the Jeep brand, which is targeting sales of 2 million vehicles this year, has prompted talk it could be spun off from the group, as happened with tractor maker CNH Industrial and supercar group Ferrari, or sold off.

Rumors have resurfaced that Guangzhou Automobile Group might be interested in snapping up part of FCA. Marchionne said on Monday that while GAC has partnered to deliver Jeeps to the Chinese market and FCA is talking to the Chinese automaker about helping it enter the U.S. market, "none of these things are designed to impact on the independence of FCA."

FCA has often been the subject of merger speculation, especially after its unsuccessful 2015 attempt to tie up with larger U.S. rival General Motors. Its share price jumped to record highs in August after reports of interest from China's Great Wall Motor Co and South Korea's Hyundai.

Marchionne said while both Jeep and truck brand Ram are strong enough to exist on their own, "we need to talk about ... what will be left behind."

Story continues

Marchionne said he has recommended to the company's board that the automaker spin off Magneti Marelli, a maker of components for lighting, engines, electronics, suspension and exhausts, to shareholders by the end of 2018.

Marchionne confirmed FCA's targets for 2017 and for 2018, including a plan to erase all debt and generate up to 5 billion euros ($6.14 billion) in net cash.

Asked about the possibility of paying dividends, Marchionne said the markets had changed and "it makes more sense to buy back shares than pay a dividend."

The 65-year-old executive is due to step down in early 2019, and a successor will be appointed from within FCA.

Finance chief Richard Palmer, European head Alfredo Altavilla and Jeep boss Mike Manley have often been cited as possible candidates, according to sources close to the company.

Marchionne said there are other possible candidates who are not in the media spotlight.

FCA announced last week it will shift production of Ram heavy-duty pickup trucks from Mexico to Michigan in 2020, a move that lowers the risk to the automaker's profit should President Donald Trump pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"I think we've done the right thing by the American market, by the U.S. consumer," Marchionne said. "And I think we've addressed Mexican concerns" about production with plans to repurpose the company's Saltillo, Mexico, plant to build commercial vehicles for sale globally.

He said the U.S. tax code overhaul passed in December would provide a $1 billion boost to the company in 2018, noting that the overhaul "was to make sure the economy got a boost ... develop a sense of confidence about the future, and that's exactly what we as an automaker in the U.S. were waiting to hear."

A number of major automakers plan vast investments in developing electric vehicles. Ford said on Sunday it plans to invest $11 billion and have 40 hybrid and fully electric vehicles in its model lineup by 2022.

Marchionne said electric vehicles will eventually form a large part of vehicle lineups, "but it's a lot further off than people think" in part because they are not profitable for automakers.

"I don't know of a guy, or a person or an entity or economic organization that is making money out of selling electric vehicles unless you're selling them at the very high end, which is rare," he said.

($1 = 0.8149 euro)

Reporting by Alexandria Sage and Nick Carey



Related Video:

Fiat Chrysler CEO: No plans to sell brands to Chinese originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 15 Jan 2018 16:15:00 EST.
Fiat Chrysler is concerned consumers could be left exposed to price hikes as a result of NAFTA negotiations.

Fiat Chrysler (FCA-IT) is concerned consumers could be left exposed to price hikes as a result of NAFTA negotiations.

Speaking on the sidelines of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Fiat Chrysler's Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne told CNBC on Monday: "The consumer, in the absence of a realignment of production facilities, will pay a price. It is not insignificant."

Last week, Fiat Chrysler announced the company would shift production of heavy-duty pickup trucks from Mexico to the U.S. by 2020. That decision should go some way to alleviating some of U.S. President Donald Trump 's concerns about the dislocation of production capacity out of the country, Marchionne said.

The move should also reduce the risk those same trucks would be hit with a 25 percent tariff if talks over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were to unravel.

The Trump administration has threatened to withdraw from NAFTA, which is heavily utilized by automakers with production and supply chains spread across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Fiat Chrysler's CEO said it is more expensive for automakers to manufacture heavy-duty vehicles in the U.S. rather than Mexico.

Fiat will not 'break up' company

While speaking at the North American International Auto Show on Monday, Marchionne also sought to cool speculation that Fiat Chrysler could sell-off individual brands within the group.

Last year, several Chinese companies were thought to be interested in acquiring the iconic Jeep brand  a major driver of sales for Fiat Chrysler. The interest from Beijing followed comments from Marchionne in which he indicated consolidation may be necessary within the auto industry.

"The answer is no we're not going to break up anything We have no intention of breaking it up and giving it to the Chinese," he said.
Fiat Chrysler (Milan Stock Exchange: FCA-IT) is concerned consumers could be left exposed to price hikes as a result of NAFTA negotiations. Speaking on the sidelines of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Fiat Chrysler's Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne told CNBC on Monday: "The consumer, in the absence of a realignment of production facilities, will pay a price. It is not insignificant." Last week, Fiat Chrysler announced the company would shift production of heavy-duty pickup trucks from Mexico to the U.S. by 2020. That decision should go some way to alleviating some of U.S. President Donald Trump 's concerns about the dislocation of production capacity out of the country, Marchionne said. The move should also reduce the risk those same trucks would be hit with a 25 percent tariff if talks over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were to unravel. The Trump administration has threatened to withdraw from NAFTA, which is heavily utilized by automakers with production and supply chains spread across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Fiat Chrysler's CEO said it is more expensive for automakers to manufacture heavy-duty vehicles in the U.S. rather than Mexico. Fiat will not 'break up' companyWhile speaking at the North American International Auto Show on Monday, Marchionne also sought to cool speculation that Fiat Chrysler could sell-off individual brands within the group.Last year, several Chinese companies were thought to be interested in acquiring the iconic Jeep brand  a major driver of sales for Fiat Chrysler. The interest from Beijing followed comments from Marchionne in which he indicated consolidation may be necessary within the auto industry."The answer is no we're not going to break up anything We have no intention of breaking it up and giving it to the Chinese," he said. Fiat Chrysler (Milan Stock Exchange: FCA-IT) is concerned consumers could be left exposed to price hikes as a result of NAFTA negotiations. Speaking on the sidelines of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Fiat Chrysler's Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne told CNBC on Monday: "The consumer, in the absence of a realignment of production facilities, will pay a price. It is not insignificant." Last week, Fiat Chrysler announced the company would shift production of heavy-duty pickup trucks from Mexico to the U.S. by 2020. That decision should go some way to alleviating some of U.S. President Donald Trump 's concerns about the dislocation of production capacity out of the country, Marchionne said. The move should also reduce the risk those same trucks would be hit with a 25 percent tariff if talks over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were to unravel. The Trump administration has threatened to withdraw from NAFTA, which is heavily utilized by automakers with production and supply chains spread across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Fiat Chrysler's CEO said it is more expensive for automakers to manufacture heavy-duty vehicles in the U.S. rather than Mexico. Fiat will not 'break up' company While speaking at the North American International Auto Show on Monday, Marchionne also sought to cool speculation that Fiat Chrysler could sell-off individual brands within the group. Last year, several Chinese companies were thought to be interested in acquiring the iconic Jeep brand  a major driver of sales for Fiat Chrysler. The interest from Beijing followed comments from Marchionne in which he indicated consolidation may be necessary within the auto industry. "The answer is no we're not going to break up anything We have no intention of breaking it up and giving it to the Chinese," he said.



More From CNBC


Detroit (AFP) - Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Fiat Chrysler (FCA), swatted down speculation Monday that he might sell the group's popular Jeep brand and forecasted a future strategic plan by June in anticipation of his retirement.

"We're not going to break up anything," Marchionne said during a question and answer session with reporters at the Detroit auto show. He also offered a firm "no," when asked if he might sell Jeep.

Wall Street has speculated that FCA might sell off or spin off some units, while also exploring alliances. The speculation sent the company's stock to a record high last week.

The retiring CEO also predicted that a new strategic plan would be announced by the end of June and followed with an announcement of who will be his successor.

Marchionne offered a spoiler: the next CEO would come from the ranks of the current C Suite.

"My successor is going to come out from those ranks," he said, adding that with only men currently occupying those positions, "it's going to be a male that will succeed me."

The company has been engaged in getting its financial house in order and paying down debts by 2018, he said, and will next present a new strategic plan by June 1. That date is the anniversary of Marchionne taking the helm at Fiat.

The outspoken CEO valued the recently passed US tax cuts as being worth approximately $1 billion for FCA. He said the cuts ensured an economic boost and offered more confidence in the future.

"That's exactly what we, as an auto maker in the United States, were waiting to hear. I think it facilitated a number of decisions that needed to be done."

Marchionne credited the cuts with his decision to move production of the company's popular Ram pickup back to the US. It had been sent to Mexico almost a decade ago.

"I think it should have never left. It belonged to this country," Marchionne said.
By Anthony Esposito and Joseph White

SILAO, Mexico/DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Co's <GM.N> assembly plant in Silao, a city in Mexico's automotive heartland, cranked out more than 400,000 highly profitable, large pickup trucks last year, and is critical to the launch of a new generation of Chevrolet Silverado trucks later this year.

Now, GM's Silao factory, and the profit it generates, are at risk.

If U.S. President Donald Trump follows up on threats to dump the North American Free Trade Agreement, pickup trucks built at Silao and shipped to the United States could be hit with a 25 percent tariff, known in the auto industry as the "chicken tax."

The truck tariff's origins go back to a 1960s trade spat between the United States and Germany over exports of U.S.-grown chickens. It protected profit for Detroit's automakers long after its origins faded from memory. Now, the chicken tax could ruffle the feathers of GM's pickup-truck profitability. It could also potentially jeopardize thousands of jobs on both sides of the border and billions of dollars in investment for automakers.

GM in recent weeks inaugurated a new production line for a 10-speed transmission in the central Mexican city of Silao, and late last year began hiring 600 new staff there, sources said, effectively doubling down on one of the most lucrative offshore production categories for U.S. auto companies.

People familiar with GM's plans told Reuters the company will shift production of a small number of heavy-duty versions of the next-generation Silverado and Sierra to a plant in Flint, Michigan.

GM Chief Executive Mary Barra did not directly answer when asked on Saturday if the company is considering pulling pickup truck production out of Mexico. "We're going to continue to work constructively to get a modernized NAFTA agreement," she said.

Last week, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV <FCAU.N> <FCHA.MI> said it will move production of heavy-duty Ram pickups out of Mexico to Michigan by 2020.

Story continues

At an event on Saturday to promote the 2019 Silverado, GM executives said Mexico is an important part of the automaker's manufacturing "footprint" in North America.

"The truck we build in Mexico, the engines come from the U.S.," GM North America chief Alan Batey told reporters. "Everything is interlinked."

A FAILED NAFTA IS A LOSE-LOSE

NAFTA has helped transform Guanajuato state, where Silao is located, since the trade pact was signed in 1994 with some $18 billion in investments in the auto sector. Silao's industrial park bustles with workers at the dozens of sparkling new offices of automakers, suppliers and service providers from an array of countries, including Japan, Germany, the United States and Mexico.

Nearly 200,000 direct and indirect jobs depend on the automotive sector in Guanajuato. An estimated 46 percent of Mexico's pickup trucks are produced in the region.

GM's Silao manufacturing complex is part of a web of factories owned by GM and its suppliers that stretches across Canada, the United States and Mexico. It is one of three main assembly plants for the next generation of GM's large pickups and sport utility vehicles, including plants in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Flint, Michigan.

Engines for trucks made in Silao come from GM factories in Flint; Spring Hill, Tennessee; and Tonawanda, New York. U.S. factories supply fuel systems and other components. In total, GM said it has more than 5,000 employees in U.S. plants with jobs tied to production in Silao.

In North America, GM's operations are primarily in the United States. It has four manufacturing plants in Mexico, and 40 in the United States.

The automaker's plans to build the next generation of Silverado pickups and related components in Mexico are too far along to reverse course in the near term without losing money, experts and company officials said.

GM's global purchasing chief, Steve Kiefer, told Reuters that suppliers for the pickup truck program have also made investments based on production that crosses the U.S-Mexico border.

"The installed capacity is such that it would be prohibitive to make huge changes to this," Kiefer said.

U.S., Canadian and Mexican officials are scheduled to meet in Montreal from Jan. 23 to 28 for the sixth and penultimate round of talks to update NAFTA.

"Surely the (NAFTA) negotiations will be positive. We don't believe this will lead to a destructive situation because it would be a lose-lose," said Alfredo Arzola, head of Guanajuato's automotive cluster.

During the first 10 months of 2017 GM, Fiat Chrysler, Nissan Motor Co Ltd <7201.T> and Toyota Motor Corp <7203.T> exported nearly 700,000 pickup trucks from Mexico, mostly to the United States, according to data from the Mexican Auto Industry Association (AMIA).

GM executives emphasized that 80 percent of the pickups it sells in the United States are U.S.-made.

FLEXIBLE

In the event of a NAFTA collapse carmakers could eventually switch out production of pickup trucks to the United States and bring compact car and sport utility vehicle production to Mexico, experts and industry officials said.

"GM has certain flexibility ... to go back and only produce SUVs like the Suburban," said a Mexican official.

Under that scenario Mexican exports of SUVs to the United States would avoid the steep chicken tax and would be subject to a tariff of only 2.5 percent, barring an agreement to a different levy.

Fiat Chrysler said it will use the Mexican plant that now builds pickups to assemble a commercial vehicle aimed at global markets, taking advantage of Mexican free trade deals.

(Reporting by Anthony Esposito in Silao and Joe White in Detroit; Additional reporting by Dave Graham in Mexico City; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
(Recasts with Google statement denying it has made any changes to its mapping services in China)

BEIJING, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google said on Tuesday it has made "no changes" to its mapping platform in China, denying an earlier media report that claimed it was re-launching the function in China, where many of its services are blocked.

Japan's Nikkei reported earlier that Google had set up a China-specific version of the Google Maps website for the first time in eight years and introduced a map application for Chinese iPhones for the first time. (http://s.nikkei.com/2DcmYjU)

Google, however, stated that the Google Maps browser has been available in China for many years while there is no Maps application offered in the country.

"There have been no changes to Google Maps in China. Maps has been accessible on desktop for years, but does not have an official presence in Android or iOS app stores in China," Google Spokesman Taj Meadows said in comments sent to Reuters.

A Chinese version of Google Maps was accessible on Tuesday on mobile and desktop browsers with certain functions available, but Reuters was unable to find a Google Maps app available in Chinese app stores.

Nikkei reported users could find an app, but if they tried to use features like navigation they were automatically transferred to an app from AutoNavi, a mapping company owned by China's Alibaba Group Holding.

AutoNavi did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for a comment.

Google has tried to re-enter the China market, where its main search platform is blocked along with its popular video platform YouTube, limiting its access to China's internet users.

Google joined an investment in Chinese live-stream mobile game platform Chushou earlier this month after ramping up an artificial intelligence (AI) push last year, including launching an AI lab in December and hosting a match of the board game Go between its AI project Alpha Go and Chinese Go champion Ke Jie.

Last month, Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai spoke at a high-profile tech event in China organised by the Cyberspace Administration of China, which oversees internet censorship.

A full Google Maps app has not been available in China since the company pulled many of its services in 2010 after refusing to self-censor its search results. Since then, it has maintained a limited presence in the world's top smartphone market. (Reporting by Cate Cadell in BEIJING and John Benny in BENGALURU; Writing by Adam Jourdan; Editing by Bill Trott and Christian Schmollinger)
By Tim Hepher PARIS (Reuters) - The sales chief of European planemaker Airbus predicted Iran would take delivery of dozens of European jets it has ordered under a nuclear sanctions deal with major powers, but warned the transactions could take longer to complete than planned. U.S. President Donald Trump, who has strongly criticized the 2015 deal to lift a raft of sanctions in return for restrictions on Iran's nuclear activities, urged European allies on Friday to help fix "disastrous flaws" in the pact or face a U.S. exit. European planemaker Airbus and its U.S. rival Boeing have agreed to sell a combined total of 180 jets to renew the aging fleet of state carrier IranAir, but depend on U.S. support for the deal because of the number of U.S. parts in all their jets. "I think those deals will get fulfilled, maybe not on the original schedule," Airbus sales chief John Leahy told Reuters in an interview, referring to the company's agreement to sell 100 planes to IranAir. "We have to arrange financing; they have to understand about making pre-delivery payments," he added. So far IranAir has taken delivery of three Airbus jets and a handful of turboprops built by its Franco-Italian affiliate ATR. Bankers say further business with Iran has been held up by the reluctance of Western financial institutions to deal with Tehran because of concerns that the nuclear deal could unravel or that they could fall foul of ongoing U.S. financial controls. Posting the vast majority of the 100 sales to Iran as firm orders allowed Airbus to beat Boeing in their annual race for new business in 2016. Airbus again won more orders in 2017. UNCERTAINTY Airbus has secured a batch of export licenses from the U.S. Treasury that expire around the start of the next decade, meaning it would need renewed permission to complete its planned deliveries to Iran, which are scheduled to stretch beyond 2020. The number of deliveries covered by those existing licenses would shrink if schedules were delayed, industry sources say. Diplomats say the process of obtaining or renewing licenses has become slower amid uncertainty over U.S. policy on Iran. Leahy, who is due to retire later this month, indicated Airbus would be cautious about building jets for Iran without receiving deposit payments. Industry sources say Boeing has also held off building jets until it receives downpayments. "You have got to make pre-delivery payments where aircraft get into production, so we are doing it on perhaps a lower basis than we thought, but we still believe that it will work out," Leahy said. Industry sources say Iran has been forced by the lack of financing to pay cash via its central bank for the airplanes it has received already, and deals may be worked out allowing these payments to double as deposits for future aircraft deliveries. Airbus declined to comment on Trump's latest declaration on Iran, but said it "continues to work with IranAir and the Iranian authorities on the execution of the purchase agreement signed last year in full compliance with the (nuclear deal) and other regulations". Boeing, which has sold 80 planes to IranAir and committed to sell 30 more to another Iranian airline, Aseman Airlines, said it continued to follow the U.S. government's lead. So far it has not included any of the Iranian sales in the way it accounts for unfilled orders. "We are aware of last Friday's announcement and we are reviewing it to determine any impact it may have on our interactions with Iran's commercial airlines," a spokesman said. "As the government provides us details and guidance, we will adjust our activities if required." (Additional reporting by Alexander Cornwell; Editing by Gareth Jones)
The U.S. cautioned President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner that a close friend, Rupert Murdoch's former wife Wendi Deng Murdoch, could be using her ties to Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump to aid the Chinese government, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Counterintelligence officials also warned the Chinese-American businesswoman may have been lobbying for a construction project in Washington, D.C. , that was funded by the Chinese government, the Journal reported. A spokesman for Wendi Deng Murdoch told the Journal that the businesswoman "has no knowledge of any FBI concerns or other intelligence agency concerns relating to her or her associations." The report follows attacks by the president over the Journal's reporting about his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un . Trump ripped into the publication for reporting "fake news." Read the complete Wall Street Journal report on the Jared Kushner warning here.

Watch: Ivanka Trump goes sightseeing with Wendi Murdoch



More From CNBC


WASHINGTON, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev said on Tuesday the country has reached agreements with several U.S. companies worth $7.5 billion, including contracts to supply passenger planes and locomotives to the Central Asian country.

"The contracts will be about purchasing additional Boeing planes ... and assembling 900 new General Electric locomotives in Kazakhstan," Nazarbayev said following a meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House.

Nazarbayev said some of the contracts, which will be unveiled later on Tuesday, also included investments in the agricultural sector. (Reporting by Ayesha Rascoe; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
Panel blames operational errors

Operational errors by officials of Super Gas Udyog and ill-trained firefighters led to the massive explosion at the gas plant at Sukhachaina, Birgunj which claimed the lives of three firefighters last month, a fact-finding committee said in its report. The panel has ruled out technical errors.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018

What to watch today

Earnings season heats up as traders and investors return from a long, three-day weekend. Citigroup (C), UnitedHealth (UNH), and CSX (CSX) are among the big names announcing Q4 financial results. Any comments on the impact of tax reform will be of particular interest.

The economic calendar is pretty quiet. The Empire State Manufacturing Index is scheduled to be released at 8:30 a.m. ET, and economists are look for growth in this measure of regional activity.

Top news

Spotifys IPO is about to disrupt Wall Street: Spotify AB upended the world of music with its popular streaming service. Now it is threatening to do the same to Wall Street. Banks working on Spotifys unusual public share listing stand to collect a fraction of the fees underwriters typically charge in big IPOs, in a blow to the already beleaguered stock-selling business. [The Wall Street Journal]

Bitcoin slides on crackdown fears; crypto rivals also plunge: Bitcoin (BTC-USD) tumbled 18% on Tuesday to a four-week trough close to $11,000, after reports that a ban on trading of cryptocurrencies in South Korea was still an option drove fears of a wider regulatory crackdown. Bitcoins slide triggered a massive selloff across the broader cryptocurrency market. [Reuters]

SoftBank considers IPO for Japan wireless unit: SoftBank Group Corp. said on Monday it was considering listing its Japanese wireless business  a move that could reportedly raise $18 billion and would accelerate the conglomerates transformation into one of the worlds biggest tech investors. A spin-off  potentially the biggest IPO by a Japanese company in nearly two decades  would give the unit more autonomy and help investors value the business as well as its parent which has myriad holdings across the tech industry. [Reuters]

US Treasurys list of Putin oligarchs jolts Russias elite class: The U.S. Treasury Department is finishing its first official list of oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putins government, setting off a flurry of moves by wealthy Russians to shield their fortunes and reputations. Some people who think theyre likely to land on the list have stress-tested the potential impact on their investments, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Others are liquidating holdings, according to their U.S. advisers. [Bloomberg]

Story continues

For more of the latest news, go to Yahoo Finance

Ford shows off their GT sports car at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) on January 15, 2018 in Detroit, Michigan. The show is open to the public from January 20-28. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Yahoo Finance Originals

The buzz in Detroit: Who will buy Tesla?

The Trump tax cuts arent helping CenturyLink workers

Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant duke it out at CES 2018

Very high level of confidence Russia used Kaspersky software for devastating NSA leaks

AMD CEO: Our processors are more affordable than Intels



Like what you just read? Get the Morning Brief sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET. And feel free to share it with a friend!

The Morning Brief provides a quick rundown on what to watch in the markets, top news stories, and the best of Yahoo Finance Originals.
Several of the world's most popular cryptocurrencies--including bitcoin and ether--are on the rise today, just days after concerns about new regulations in Asia dragged down the entire crypto market. Nevertheless, Monday's biggest winners are poised to be two lesser-known altcoins: NEO and Bitcoin Gold.

Several of the worlds most popular cryptocurrenciesincluding bitcoin and etherare on the rise today, just days after concerns about new regulations in Asia dragged down the entire crypto market. Nevertheless, Mondays biggest winners are poised to be two lesser-known altcoins: NEO and Bitcoin Gold.

According to CoinMarketCap.com, NEO has added more than 20% over the past 24 hours. The so-called Chinese Ethereum is now the eighth-largest cryptocurrency in terms of total market capitalization. Meanwhile, Bitcoin Gold, a hard fork of the original bitcoin, has gained roughly 16% in that same timeframe.

NEO remains an extremely popular option in Asia and has remained strong amid concerns over a cryptocurrency trading ban in South Korea. The altcoin has proved to be more stable option than some of its competitors, which has attracted new developers.

In fact, the NEO community is gearing up for its first major developers conference in the United States. The two-day event is scheduled to take place in San Francisco at the end of January. Attendees will discuss the benefits of the NEO Smart Economy and recap the progress made at similar events in Amsterdam and Shanghai.

On the other hand, Bitcoin Golds surge appears to be a bit less calculated. The crypto is a popular hard fork of bitcoin, but it offers very little solutions in terms of unique features or mass merchant adoption. For reference, a hard fork in the cryptocurrency world refers to a change in the rules of the blockchain infrastructure that is not recognized as valid by the older software.

Bitcoin Gold was launched in October and is one of several large forks of bitcoin. The altcoin is the fifteenth-largest cryptocurrency based on market cap, while Bitcoin Cash, another major bitcoin hard-fork, sits at fourth on the market cap list.

The explosion of NEO and Bitcoin Cash comes on the back of a broader recovery in the cryptocurrency market. Last week, many traders were scared off by South Korean Justice Minister Park Sang-kis statement that the Asian nation was preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency exchanges. This week, the market appears more optimistic that South Korea will not issue an outright ban.

Story continues

The proposed shutdown of exchanges that the justice minister recently mentioned is one of the measures suggested by the justice ministry to curb speculation. A government-wide decision will be made in the future after sufficient consultation and coordination of opinions, the countrys Office for Government Policy Coordination said in a statement to South Korean publication Yonhap.

Want more analysis from this author? Make sure to follow @Ryan_McQueeney on Twitter!

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U.S. West Texas Intermediate and internationally-favored Brent crude oil futures are hovering near levels not seen since 2014 early Tuesday. Prices are being underpinned by OPEC-led production cuts and strong demand due to strong growth in the global economy.

At 0800 GMT, March WTI crude oil futures are trading $64.38, down $0.37 or -0.57%. April Brent crude oil is at $69.51, down $0.29 or -0.42%.

Daily March West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil

Providing some support today is a report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. They are bullish on crude oil because of the faster-than-expecting tightening in the global oil market due to three factors: improving cyclical conditions, cold winter weather, and higher than expected OPEC compliance.

We now see a deficit of 430,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2018 compared to 100,000 bpd prior, and thus see Brent crude oil prices averaging $64 per barrel in 2018 compared to $56 prior. Our WTI projection also moves up from $52 per barrel to $60 per barrel for the same reasons, the bank said.

Additionally, Morgan Stanley has also turned bullish on the market. They said oil markets were 0.5 million bpd undersupplied in 2017, adding that 2018 would still see a 200,000 bpd deficit.

Morgan Stanley also said it expected Brent to rise to around $75 per barrel by the third quarter of this year.

Daily March Brent Crude

Forecast

The hedge funds have been driving prices higher for the right reasons. The OPEC-led production cuts have been propping up prices since it started to withhold output in January last year. These cuts are expected to last until the end of December 2018.

Healthy demand is another reason for the surge in prices. Economic growth is one reason for the jump in demand. A weakening dollar is another contributing factor to the rise in prices.

One fundamental that could slow down the rally or begin to encourage profit-taking is expectations of increased U.S. production. Instead of hitting 10 million barrels per day this month, as widely expected, U.S. production fell from 9.8 million bpd in December to 9.5 million bpd currently. Despite this news, most analysts still expect U.S. production to break through 10 million bpd soon.

Story continues

The strong fundamentals have helped build the support base. Aggressive hedge fund buyers have been feeding off this news to fuel the upside momentum. Therefore, I have to conclude that the current rally will continue until the hedge funds stop buying.

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

More From FXEMPIRE:
Few movie cars are as instantly recognizable as the 1968 Ford Mustang that Steve McQueen drove in "Bullitt." That Highland Green car known now simply as the Bullitt Mustang took on a 1969 Dodge Charger on the streets of San Francisco in one of the greatest car chases captured on film. For decades, the original car was thought to be lost. That wasn't entirely the case. It's simply been kept out of the public's eye. Now it returns to the spotlight, finally taking its rightful place next to its successor, the new 475-horsepower 2019 Ford Mustang Bullitt.



After filming wrapped on "Bullitt," Warner Bros. sold two cars off, one to a private buyer and another to a salvage yard. The salvage car was beaten and bruised thanks to a number of jumps and stunts during filming. While that one was eventually found in Baja California, the other Mustang has been quietly resting in a private collection for nearly 40 years. After the owner, Robert Kiernan, passed away in 2014, his son Sean contacted Ford to let the company know the whereabouts of the car.



%Slideshow-820982%



According to Hagerty, McQueen attempted several times to purchase the car from Kiernan, even offering to find a similar replacement. Kiernan refused. The car was apparently driven by Kiernan's wife, a teacher at a school in New Jersey. The car's clutch went out in 1980, and it was moved to a garage for a very extended stay. At the time, it had 65,000 miles on the odometer. The car followed the Kiernan family to Ohio, Kentucky and eventually to Nashville, Tennessee.



Looking at the photos, it's obvious that the car has been parked for a while. The brightwork is pockmarked with rust spots, and the paint is flat and faded, though apparently some of that was intentionally done to give it the same flavor as McQueen's character in the film, Lt. Frank Bullitt. All of the age is made even more apparent when parked next to the new 2019 Ford Mustang Bullitt.



Kiernan doesn't have plans to sell the car, but the right offer may be too hard to pass up. Hagerty estimates the car might be worth more than $4 million at auction, comparing it to James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 ($4.1 million) and the original Batmobile ($4.6 million). Either way, it's good to know that the car wasn't crushed or sold for scrap. A car like this deserves to live.



Related Video:



Original Bullitt Mustang found, takes its place alongside 2019 Bullitt originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 14 Jan 2018 18:30:00 EST.
Japanese exchange Coincheck has confirmed that about $533 million-worth of cryptocurrency has been stolen from its digital wallets.

A senior official at the People's Bank of China is reportedly calling for a wider ban on services related to cryptocurrency trading in the country.

Pan Gongsheng, vice governor of the central bank, said, to prevent market risk, the government would apply more strict regulation to end all cryptocurrency trading-related activities and services. The news comes via a Reuters report today, citing an internal memo reviewed by the news agency.

While it's not yet clear whether the reported memo will become immediate policy, the news indicates the continuing severe stance taken by China's top regulators towards curbing cryptocurrency speculation and lowering perceived financial risk in the country.

According to the report, Pan said in the memo that a wider ban should extend to services and activities including individual or institutional market-makers, centralized trading platforms, guarantors, or settlement providers like online cryptocurrency wallets.

Back in early September, Chinese regulators banned initial coin offerings (ICOs) in the country and also subsequently required domestic exchanges to suspend crypto-to-fiat currency order-book trading services.

Following the restrictions, major exchanges in China have shifted business focus to over-the-counter (OTC) and overseas crypto-to-crypto trading  services that are currently still available for residents in China.

The report indicates that Pan is now seeking collaboration from both central and local authorities to investigate and subsequently block any domestic or foreign platforms that allow investors in China to participate in cryptocurrency trading.

People's Bank of China image via Shutterstock



Related Stories
Police arrest absconding Indian in connection to 33kg gold smuggling case

Central Investigation Bureau of Nepal Police has made public an accused of the 33 kg gold smuggling case on Tuesday. The accused on the run was arrested from Kathmandu on December 10, last year.
FILE PHOTO: A Bitcoin logo is seen on a cryptocurrency ATM in Santa Monica, California, U.S., January 4, 2018. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea said on Monday that its plans to ban virtual coin exchanges had not yet been finalized as government agencies were still in talks to decide how to regulate the market.

"The plan to ban cryptocurrency exchanges, recently mentioned by the nation's justice minister, is one measure in talks to curb speculative investments, which the government will carry on with enough discussion for before finalizing the decision," an official at the Office for Government Policy Coordination told a news conference.

On Jan. 11, Justice Minister Park Sang-ki said the government was preparing a bill to ban trading of the virtual currency on domestic exchanges.

(Reporting by Cynthia Kim; Editing by Richard Borsuk)
The SpaceX Falcon Heavy is one step closer to liftoff.

On Tuesday afternoon, the company will test fire the engines on its newest rocket at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, according to news reports. The test was originally scheduled for last Thursday, but was delayed first to Friday, then to Monday, and now to Tuesday for unspecified reasons. Visible vapors around the rocket and launch pad last week indicated the rocket had been fueled up.

SpaceX did not immediately return Fortunes request for comment on the planned test and last weeks delays.

According to SpaceX, the Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket in operation. It has more than 5 million pounds of thrust, equivalent to 18 747 aircraft. With 27 engines and three cores to get the rocket off the ground, it is capable of carrying more than 140,000 pounds of cargo to low-Earth orbit. The cores are designed to be re-used, making the rocket much more cost effective.

This rocket has been in the works for a while, with its first test flight originally scheduled for 2013. SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the companys initial hopes for the technology were too high. Its been trying to manage expectations for its launch since July, when he said he only hoped the test launch wouldnt cause launch pad damage.

Still, Musk drew attention to the launch with the announcement that the cargo of the initial launch would be his own Tesla Roadster, playing David Bowies Space Oddity on repeat as it heads towards Mars.
- By Sydnee Gatewood





The T Rowe Price Equity Income Fund (Trades, Portfolio) disclosed its fourth-quarter portfolio this week, listing four new positions.





According to the fund's fact sheet, portfolio manager John Linehan uses bottom-up research to identify stocks with above-average dividend yields in order to achieve high dividend income and long-term capital growth. The fund's current portfolio of 105 holdings is largely composed of stocks in the financial services sector.

According to GuruFocus data, the fund outperformed the S&P 500 in 2016 with a return of 19.28%.

The fund's new positions are CVS Health Corp. (CVS), Franklin Resources Inc. (BEN), L Brands Inc. (LB) and Stericycle Inc. (SRCL).

CVS Health

The fund invested in 960,000 shares of CVS for an average price of $72.64 per share, giving it 0.32% portfolio space.

The Rhode Island-based drugstore chain has a market cap of $80.45 billion; its shares were trading around $79.41 on Tuesday with a price-earnings (P/E) ratio of 16.44, a price-book (P/B) ratio of 2.31 and a price-sales (P/S) ratio of 0.45.

The Peter Lynch chart below suggests the stock is trading close to its fair value.

GuruFocus ranked CVS's financial strength 6 of 10 and its profitability and growth 8 of 10. The company's trailing dividend yield and forward dividend yield are both 2.54%. The dividend payout ratio is 40%.

Barrow, Hanley, Mewhinney & Strauss is CVS Health's largest shareholder among the gurus with 1.6% of outstanding shares. Other guru shareholders include Pioneer Investments (Trades, Portfolio), PRIMECAP Management (Trades, Portfolio), Larry Robbins (Trades, Portfolio) and Charles de Vaulx (Trades, Portfolio).

Franklin Resources

T Rowe Price purchased a 1.29 million-share stake in Franklin Resources for an average price of $43.31 per share, expanding the portfolio 0.26%.

Story continues

The California-based asset management company has a market cap of $25.27 billion; its shares were trading around $45.7 on Tuesday with a P/E ratio of 15.23, a P/B ratio of 2.01 and a P/S ratio of 3.99.

According to the Peter Lynch chart below, the stock is trading near its fair value.

1516116252114.png

GuruFocus ranked Franklin Resources financial strength 8 of 10 and its profitability and growth 5 of 10. The company's trailing dividend yield is 1.86% and its forward dividend yield is 2.07%. The payout ratio is 27%.

Of the gurus invested in Franklin Resources, Richard Pzena (Trades, Portfolio) has the largest holding with 1.87% of outstanding shares. David Abrams (Trades, Portfolio), Diamond Hill Capital (Trades, Portfolio), Mason Hawkins (Trades, Portfolio), Jim Simons (Trades, Portfolio), Michael Price (Trades, Portfolio) and several other gurus also own the stock.

L Brands

The fund purchased 920,000 shares of L Brands for an average price of $49.89 per share. The trade had an impact of 0.26% on the portfolio.

The Ohio-based retailer, which owns Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, has a market cap of $14.14 billion; its shares were trading around $50.09 on Tuesday with a P/E ratio of 15.27 and a P/S ratio of 1.18.

Based on the Peter Lynch chart below, the stock appears to be trading close to its fair value.

1516118247900.png

GuruFocus ranked L Brands' financial strength 4 of 10 and its profitability and growth 8 of 10. The company's trailing dividend yield and forward dividend yield are both 4.83%. The payout ratio is 73%.

With 6.85% of outstanding shares, Primecap is L Brands' largest guru shareholder. Other guru investors include Joel Greenblatt (Trades, Portfolio), Ray Dalio (Trades, Portfolio), Lee Ainslie (Trades, Portfolio) and Murray Stahl (Trades, Portfolio).

Stericycle

The fund's smallest new purchase of the quarter was 750,000 shares of Stericycle, paying an average price of $67.91 per share. The position was given 0.24% portfolio space.

The Illinois-based waste management company has a market cap of $6.13 billion; its shares were trading around $71.79 on Tuesday with a forward P/E ratio of 15.92, a P/B ratio of 2.19 and a P/S ratio of 1.70.

According to the Peter Lynch chart below, the stock is overpriced as it is trading above its fair value.

1516119439301.png

GuruFocus ranked Stericycle's financial strength 4 of 10 and its profitability and growth 7 of 10. The company does not pay a dividend.

With this transaction, the fund became Stericycle's largest guru shareholder with 1.88% of its outstanding shares. Simons, Tom Gayner (Trades, Portfolio), Robert Olstein (Trades, Portfolio), Greenblatt, Steven Cohen (Trades, Portfolio), Paul Tudor Jones (Trades, Portfolio), Mario Gabelli (Trades, Portfolio), George Soros (Trades, Portfolio) and Prem Watsa (Trades, Portfolio) are also shareholders.

Other trades

The fund also added to many of its other holdings during the quarter, including TransCanada Corp. (TRP), Kimberly-Clark Corp. (KMB), Philip Morris International Inc. (PM), Chubb Ltd. (CB) and Brighthouse Financial Inc. (BHF).

Disclosure: I do not own any stocks mentioned.

This article first appeared on GuruFocus.






- By James Li





Archibald Ciganer, portfolio manager of the T Rowe Price Japan Fund, disclosed four new buys during fourth-quarter 2017: Shimano Inc. (TSE:7309), SG Holdings Co. Ltd. (TSE:9143), Zojirushi Corp. (TSE:7965) and ARUHI Corp. (TSE:7198).

Shimano

Ciganer invested in 57,000 shares of Shimano at an average price of 15,330 Japanese yen per share. With this transaction, the fund manager expanded his portfolio 1.09%.





Shimano primarily manufactures bicycle components, including freewheels, gears, derailments and brakes. Even though the company trades above its median price-sales value, Shimano still has high profitability, driven by expanding operating margins and above-average Greenblatt return on capital. Shimano's operating margin and Greenblatt return on capital both outperform 80% of global leisure companies.

Shimano also has strong financial strength: the company has robust interest coverage of 364.01 and a solid Altman Z-score of 18.83.

SG Holdings

Ciganer invested in 362,200 shares of SG Holdings at an average price of 2144.15 yen per share. The fund manager boosted his portfolio 1% with this transaction.

256968561.png

SG Holdings provides logistics oriented solutions to real estate, human resource and other businesses. The company started trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Dec. 13, 2017, at around 1,906 yen per share.

Zojirushi

Ciganer invested in 403,400 shares of Zojirushi at an average price of 1038.69 yen per share. With this transaction, the fund manager increased his portfolio 0.56%.

1516118863430.png

Zojirushi markets various household and cooking appliances. According to the company website, Zojirushi has developed "a wide range of thermal mugs and bottles" through vacuum-insulated technology. The company's profitability ranks 7 out of 10: as the company has expanding operating margins and return on invested capital, Zojirushi has good economic moat.

Story continues

1717475909.png

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ARUHI

Ciganer invested in 171,500 shares of ARUHI at an average price of 1293.83 yen per share. With this transaction, the fund manager increased his portfolio 0.27%.

1925322003.png

ARUHI is a specialty finance company engaged in the provision and brokerage of home loans, insurance agencies and bank agencies.

See also

GuruFocus tracks a wide variety of Chinese and Japanese funds, including the Matthews China Fund (Trades, Portfolio), the Matthews Japan Fund (Trades, Portfolio) and the Hennessy Japan Fund (Trades, Portfolio). You can view global trades in gurus' portfolios by subscribing to one of our non-U.S. regions.

Disclosure: I do not have positions in the stocks mentioned.

This article first appeared on GuruFocus.






The first year of the Trump administration has seen increased democratic decline around the world, according to Freedom House.

In its Freedom in the World 2018 report, the independent watchdog found that democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades in 2017, citing the United States withdrawal from its historic role as a champion and an exemplar of democracy as one of the causes.

As the role of the United States as an advocate for democracy around the globe has weakened, authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China have gained global influence and increased repression at home. Overall, the report found that 71 countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties while only 35 registered gains.

This is not the first year the organization has observed democratic decline around the world. In fact, 2017 was the 12th consecutive year of the trend. Democracy in the United States has been declining over the last seven years, but this years report noted an accelerated decline in 2017, which they attributed to Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Trump administrations violations of ethical standards, and a lack of transparency.
The protectionist stance of U.S. President Donald Trump is one of the "biggest" risks in 2018, an analyst told CNBC on Tuesday morning. "I think in 2018 one the biggest risks we face is the Trump administration moving from rhetoric into real policy, a real protectionist policy," Patrick Armstrong, chief information officer at Plurimi Investment Managers told CNBC."I don't think it's clear they are going to move in that way but it's definitely a risk," he noted. Armstrong's comments come after U.S. lawmakers told the wireless carrier AT&T to put an end to its commercial ties with the Chinese phone maker Huawei , Reuters reported Tuesday citing sources. The same report added that the U.S. is against Huawei raising its market participation in the U.S. due to security concerns. U.S. authorities have also prevented some deals between Chinese and American firms, citing national security concerns, including the blocking of MoneyGram's sale to Chinese payments firm Ant Financial. The U.S. has taken a more protectionist approach since President Trump took office, citing international partners as a reason for its trade deficit. Data released last week showed that China's surplus with the U.S. hit a record high in 2017 of $275.81 billion. The previous record surplus took place in 2015, hitting $260.8 billion. President Trump, who takes an "America First" approach when it comes to trade and foreign policy, has criticized China for running a surplus against many international partners. It has also blamed Beijing for keeping its currency undervalue on purpose. However, according to Miranda Carr, China macro strategist at Haitong, the U.S. is running out of arguments."Every time they (the U.S.) try to attack China on something like, say the currency, they say 'well your currency, you've kept it undervalue,' then they (China) will go, 'well it's rising now,' so that cuts that argument off," Carr told CNBC."Then with steel, the fact that (Chinese) exports have gone down 30 percent that cuts that argument off; so they (the U.S.) are now struggling. If you look at how the negotiations go, then they are now moving to aluminum, which is still a problem, but of course China is cutting back on aluminum production, cutting back on exports, so therefore it's taking some of those pressures away.""If the U.S. keeps attacking China on certain areas then China goes 'well we've sorted it now, you don't need to take those actions.'"President Trump is due to receive the results of two inquiries by the U.S. Commerce department on steel and aluminum shipments, which could ultimately prompt the president to issue sanctions against China. The protectionist stance of U.S. President Donald Trump is one of the "biggest" risks in 2018, an analyst told CNBC on Tuesday morning. "I think in 2018 one the biggest risks we face is the Trump administration moving from rhetoric into real policy, a real protectionist policy," Patrick Armstrong, chief information officer at Plurimi Investment Managers told CNBC. "I don't think it's clear they are going to move in that way but it's definitely a risk," he noted. Armstrong's comments come after U.S. lawmakers told the wireless carrier AT&T to put an end to its commercial ties with the Chinese phone maker Huawei , Reuters reported Tuesday citing sources. The same report added that the U.S. is against Huawei raising its market participation in the U.S. due to security concerns. U.S. authorities have also prevented some deals between Chinese and American firms, citing national security concerns, including the blocking of MoneyGram's sale to Chinese payments firm Ant Financial. The U.S. has taken a more protectionist approach since President Trump took office, citing international partners as a reason for its trade deficit. Data released last week showed that China's surplus with the U.S. hit a record high in 2017 of $275.81 billion. The previous record surplus took place in 2015, hitting $260.8 billion. President Trump, who takes an "America First" approach when it comes to trade and foreign policy, has criticized China for running a surplus against many international partners. It has also blamed Beijing for keeping its currency undervalue on purpose. However, according to Miranda Carr, China macro strategist at Haitong, the U.S. is running out of arguments. "Every time they (the U.S.) try to attack China on something like, say the currency, they say 'well your currency, you've kept it undervalue,' then they (China) will go, 'well it's rising now,' so that cuts that argument off," Carr told CNBC. "Then with steel, the fact that (Chinese) exports have gone down 30 percent that cuts that argument off; so they (the U.S.) are now struggling. If you look at how the negotiations go, then they are now moving to aluminum, which is still a problem, but of course China is cutting back on aluminum production, cutting back on exports, so therefore it's taking some of those pressures away." "If the U.S. keeps attacking China on certain areas then China goes 'well we've sorted it now, you don't need to take those actions.'" President Trump is due to receive the results of two inquiries by the U.S. Commerce department on steel and aluminum shipments, which could ultimately prompt the president to issue sanctions against China.



More From CNBC


AT&T recently revealed that it wouldn't carry Huawei smartphones, despite rumors that it would be the first US carrier to do so, raising suspicions that politics played a part in its decision. Now, Reuters is also reporting that US lawmakers did indeed pressure AT&T to drop its plans to carry handsets from the Chinese company. Furthermore, Senators and House members are also pressuring AT&T to end its collaboration with Huawei on standards for its next-generation 5G network.

The government is telling companies that dealing with Huawei, China Mobile and other firms could harm their ability to procure government contracts. "The next wave of wireless communication has enormous economic and national security implications," said Michael Wessel of a US-China security review commission. "China's participation in setting the standards and selling the equipment raises many national security issues that demand strict and prompt attention."

To back that up, Congress has proposed a bill that would bar any government agency from working with Huawei over spying concerns. It claims that, according to the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies, Huawei has shared sensitive information with China, and that Chinese security agencies can access private US business communications via Huawei tech.

China's participation in setting the standards and selling the equipment raises many national security issues that demand strict and prompt attention.

Huawei has long protested that its equipment contains no backdoors that could threaten US communications infrastructure, however. It told Reuters that its equipment is used by 45 of the world's top 50 carriers, and that security for its clients is paramount. China also counter-accused US companies like Cisco of providing potentially insecure switches and other equipment.

The Huawei issue drew the attention of the Chinese foreign ministry, which said that "we hope that China and the United States can work hard together to maintain the healthy and stable development of trade and business ties." With the exception of ZTE, notable Chinese companies like Xiaomi and Huawei don't sell handsets through US carriers at the moment, whereas Apple's iPhones and other devices are sold by China Telecom, China Unicom and other carriers. In fact, the iPhone 7 Plus was the second-best-selling smartphone in China behind the Oppo R9S. Huawei once built a couple of MyTouch phones for T-Mobile, but the relationship soured after two Huawei employees were caught stealing robotic parts from T-Mobile's lab.

Apple recently built its iCloud data centers in China in order to comply with laws, raising concerns about the security of data from users in other nations. CEO Tim Cook admitted as much, but said the message was simply a "mistake."

Update: This article has been corrected to reflect that ZTE is still selling handsets through US carriers.
Value investing is easily one of the most popular ways to find great stocks in any market environment. After all, who wouldnt want to find stocks that are either flying under the radar and are compelling buys, or offer up tantalizing discounts when compared to fair value?



One way to find these companies is by looking at several key metrics and financial ratios, many of which are crucial in the value stock selection process. Lets put Southwest Airlines Co. LUV stock into this equation and find out if it is a good choice for value-oriented investors right now, or if investors subscribing to this methodology should look elsewhere for top picks:



PE Ratio



A key metric that value investors always look at is the Price to Earnings Ratio, or PE for short. This shows us how much investors are willing to pay for each dollar of earnings in a given stock, and is easily one of the most popular financial ratios in the world. The best use of the PE ratio is to compare the stocks current PE ratio with: a) where this ratio has been in the past; b) how it compares to the average for the industry/sector; and c) how it compares to the market as a whole.



On this front, Southwest Airlines has a trailing twelve months PE ratio of 18.8, as you can see in the chart below:

This level actually compares pretty favorably with the market at large, as the PE for the S&P 500 compares in at about 22.3. If we focus on the stocks long-term PE trend, the current level puts Southwest Airlines current PE ratio slightly above its midpoint (which is 17.1) over the past five years.

Further, the stocks PE also compares favorably with the sectors trailing twelve months PE ratio, which stands at 20.4. At the very least, this indicates that the stock is relatively undervalued right now, compared to its peers.

We should also point out that Southwest Airlines has a forward PE ratio (price relative to this years earnings) of just 13.8, so it is fair to say that a slightly more value-oriented path may be ahead for Southwest Airlines stock in the near term too.



P/S Ratio



Another key metric to note is the Price/Sales ratio. This approach compares a given stocks price to its total sales, where a lower reading is generally considered better. Some people like this metric more than other value-focused ones because it looks at sales, something that is far harder to manipulate with accounting tricks than earnings.



Right now, Southwest Airlines has a P/S ratio of about 1.9. This is substantially lower than the S&P 500 average, which comes in at 3.5 right now. Also, as we can see in the chart below, this is marginally below the highs for this stock in particular over the past few years.

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If anything, Southwest Airlines is towards the higher end of its range in the time period from a P/S metric, which suggests that the companys stock price has already appreciated to some degree, relative to its sales.



Broad Value Outlook



In aggregate, Southwest Airlines currently has a Value Style Score of A, putting it into the top 20% of all stocks we cover from this look. This makes LUV a solid choice for value investors, and some of its other key metrics make this pretty clear too.



For example, the PEG ratio for Southwest Airlines is just 1.4, a level that is slightly lower than the industry average of 1.8. The PEG ratio is a modified PE ratio that takes into account the stocks earnings growth rate. Clearly, LUV is a solid choice on the value front from multiple angles.



What About the Stock Overall?



Though Southwest Airlines might be a good choice for value investors, there are plenty of other factors to consider before investing in this name. In particular, it is worth noting that the company has a Growth grade of B and a Momentum score of A. This gives LUV a VGM scoreor its overarching fundamental gradeof A. (You can read more about the Zacks Style Scores here >> )

Meanwhile, the companys recent earnings estimates have been disappointing. The current quarter has seen nine estimates go lower in the past sixty days, compared to none higher, while the full-year 2017 estimate has seen eight downward and one upward revisions in the same time period.



This has had a noticeable impact on the consensus estimate, as the current quarter consensus estimate has fallen about 9.5% in the past two months, while the full-year 2017 estimate has declined 1.4%. You can see the consensus estimate trend and recent price action for the stock in the chart below:

Southwest Airlines Company Price and Consensus

Southwest Airlines Company Price and Consensus | Southwest Airlines Company Quote

This somewhat bearish trend is why the stock has just a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) and why we are looking for in-line performance from the company in the near term.



Bottom Line



Southwest Airlines is an inspired choice for value investors, as it is hard to beat its incredible lineup of statistics on this front. Moreover, a decent industry rank (top 37% out of more than 250 industries) further supports the growth potential of the stock. However, with a Zacks Rank #3, it is hard to get too excited about this company overall. In fact, over the past one year, the sector has clearly underperformed the broader market, as you can see below:

So, value investors might want to wait for estimates and analyst sentiment to turn favorable in this name first, but once that happen, this stock could be a compelling pick.

Wall Streets Next Amazon

Zacks EVP Kevin Matras believes this familiar stock has only just begun its climb to become one of the greatest investments of all time. Its a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in pure genius.

Click for details >>



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Post journalist attacked by sand smugglers in Gorkha

A group of five assailants, who are allegedly involved in illegal sand extraction in the Marsyangdi river, attacked journalist Sudip Kaini, Gorkha district correspondent of The Kathmandu Post, at Anbu Khaireni on Monday.
Billionaire Warren Buffett considers the late civil rights activist and icon Martin Luther King Jr. to be a source of great inspiration. In fact, Buffett and his late wife Susie saw King give a speech in Iowa just one day before beginning his 19th jail sentence for his involvement in the civil rights movement and six months before his assassination in 1968. In October 1967, King visited Grinnell College to deliver a convocation address for a fundraising event linked with other well-known names of the time, including musician Louis Armstrong and author Ralph Ellison, as detailed in Alice Schroeder's book, " The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. " Before a crowd of 5,000 people, the Nobel Peace prize-winner shared a speech titled, " Remaining Awake During a Revolution ." "I remember that speech that Martin Luther King gave. That was one of the most inspiring speeches I've ever heard. Took me right out of my seat," Buffett said in the HBO documentary "Becoming Warren Buffett ." "In that speech, he talked about 'truth forever on the scaffold, long forever on the throne, but that scaffold sways the future.' Well, he was going to be dead in six months, but that scaffold did sway the future," Buffett added.In that portion of the speech, King quoted 19th-century American poet James Russell Lowell's poem "The Present Crisis," which suggests that truth and righteousness always prevail. In their 30s, Buffett and Susie were supporters of Omaha's nonviolent activists in the midst of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. Buffett attended local events around the city with Susie. As Time magazine reported in 2012, Buffett's interest in King and the civil rights movement "was the first time there had been space in Warren's life for anything outside of moneymaking and it was Susie's doing." "When the children were growing up, I was very involved in civil rights. I was immersed in it and I think that's what made Warren a democrat. He would go with me to hear speakers," Susie said in "Becoming Warren Buffett."Although Buffett grew up with a Republican congressman for a father and even served as the University of Pennsylvania's Young Republicans Club president, Susie helped shift his perspective.One of Buffett's best friends Carol Loomis, a renowned financial reporter, also said in "Becoming Warren Buffett" that "Susie led Warren toward changing his political views," adding that "she was the catalyst." "He believed the way she (Susan) believed in social justice and civil rights," Buffett's daughter Susie Buffett told USA Today . In the midst of what Schroeder said was the "greatest wave of riots, lootings and burnings since the Civil War," Susie worked with local organizations and friends to aid the fight for equality. For example, she pressured the YMCA and the boards of other organizations to equally distribute among their branches in poorer areas.She helped send black kids to summer camp through the United Methodist Community Center, which was run by an African-American friend of hers and set up an interracial dialogue group for high school students in the area. She also reportedly helped numerous black community members buy houses in white neighborhoods."My wife was more active than I was, but I was 100 percent with her mentally, I was just working a little more on my own investments," Buffett said in "Becoming Warren Buffett."Buffett and Susie attended the Grinnell convocation by invitation of Joe Rosenfield, an alumnus of the private school who developed a special relationship with the Buffetts. While Rosenfield sought to grow the college's endowment fund, he became friends with the couple after sitting together and learning more about each other's shared political views and interests.There, another part of King's speech resonated with Buffett, according to Schroeder."It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless," King said."With that great voice of his, he just rumbled that out, and then went on and used that as a theme," Buffett commented in "The Snowball."After King's speech at Grinnell, Buffett felt "a sense of urgency to do something more for civil rights too," Schroeder wrote."My politics became more overt after my dad died," Buffett said in "Becoming Warren Buffet." "You know, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote 'All men are created equal' and then when they wrote the Constitution, they all of a sudden decided: No, it was just three-fifths of a person if you were black. I mean that struck me as kind of crazy." Buffett worked with his friend Rosenfield to grow the college's endowment to help students with financial need and continue to serve on the Grinnell College Board of Trustees for years afterward, a spokesperson for Grinnell College tells CNBC Make It . The speech also inspired him to fight the anti-Semitism of older members of his family and his community. Jews couldn't join local country clubs for years, the Omaha World-Herald reported , until Buffett joined the all-Jewish Highland Country Club. This pressured Omaha Club to accept his Jewish friend as a member. Buffett and Susie were among the first non-Jews to join an all-Jewish country club in Omaha and thus encouraged other clubs there to permit Jewish members, The New York Times later reported . "Civil rights changed my views," Buffett said in "Becoming Warren Buffett."King would have been 89 years old today, just a year and a half older than Buffett. Like this story? Like CNBC Make It on Facebook . Don't miss:The incredible rags-to-riches rise of self-made billionaire Oprah WinfreyWarren Buffett says this 'ultimate partnership' will determine your happiness and successVideo produced by AndreaKramar Billionaire Warren Buffett considers the late civil rights activist and icon Martin Luther King Jr. to be a source of great inspiration. In fact, Buffett and his late wife Susie saw King give a speech in Iowa just one day before beginning his 19th jail sentence for his involvement in the civil rights movement and six months before his assassination in 1968. In October 1967, King visited Grinnell College to deliver a convocation address for a fundraising event linked with other well-known names of the time, including musician Louis Armstrong and author Ralph Ellison, as detailed in Alice Schroeder's book, " The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. " Before a crowd of 5,000 people, the Nobel Peace prize-winner shared a speech titled, " Remaining Awake During a Revolution ." "I remember that speech that Martin Luther King gave. That was one of the most inspiring speeches I've ever heard. Took me right out of my seat," Buffett said in the HBO documentary "Becoming Warren Buffett ." "In that speech, he talked about 'truth forever on the scaffold, long forever on the throne, but that scaffold sways the future.' Well, he was going to be dead in six months, but that scaffold did sway the future," Buffett added. In that portion of the speech, King quoted 19th-century American poet James Russell Lowell's poem "The Present Crisis," which suggests that truth and righteousness always prevail. In their 30s, Buffett and Susie were supporters of Omaha's nonviolent activists in the midst of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. Buffett attended local events around the city with Susie. As Time magazine reported in 2012, Buffett's interest in King and the civil rights movement "was the first time there had been space in Warren's life for anything outside of moneymaking and it was Susie's doing." "When the children were growing up, I was very involved in civil rights. I was immersed in it and I think that's what made Warren a democrat. He would go with me to hear speakers," Susie said in "Becoming Warren Buffett." Although Buffett grew up with a Republican congressman for a father and even served as the University of Pennsylvania's Young Republicans Club president, Susie helped shift his perspective. One of Buffett's best friends Carol Loomis, a renowned financial reporter, also said in "Becoming Warren Buffett" that "Susie led Warren toward changing his political views," adding that "she was the catalyst." "He believed the way she (Susan) believed in social justice and civil rights," Buffett's daughter Susie Buffett told USA Today . In the midst of what Schroeder said was the "greatest wave of riots, lootings and burnings since the Civil War," Susie worked with local organizations and friends to aid the fight for equality. For example, she pressured the YMCA and the boards of other organizations to equally distribute among their branches in poorer areas. She helped send black kids to summer camp through the United Methodist Community Center, which was run by an African-American friend of hers and set up an interracial dialogue group for high school students in the area. She also reportedly helped numerous black community members buy houses in white neighborhoods. "My wife was more active than I was, but I was 100 percent with her mentally, I was just working a little more on my own investments," Buffett said in "Becoming Warren Buffett." Buffett and Susie attended the Grinnell convocation by invitation of Joe Rosenfield, an alumnus of the private school who developed a special relationship with the Buffetts. While Rosenfield sought to grow the college's endowment fund, he became friends with the couple after sitting together and learning more about each other's shared political views and interests. There, another part of King's speech resonated with Buffett, according to Schroeder. "It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless," King said. "With that great voice of his, he just rumbled that out, and then went on and used that as a theme," Buffett commented in "The Snowball." After King's speech at Grinnell, Buffett felt "a sense of urgency to do something more for civil rights too," Schroeder wrote. "My politics became more overt after my dad died," Buffett said in "Becoming Warren Buffet." "You know, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote 'All men are created equal' and then when they wrote the Constitution, they all of a sudden decided: No, it was just three-fifths of a person if you were black. I mean that struck me as kind of crazy." Buffett worked with his friend Rosenfield to grow the college's endowment to help students with financial need and continue to serve on the Grinnell College Board of Trustees for years afterward, a spokesperson for Grinnell College tells CNBC Make It . The speech also inspired him to fight the anti-Semitism of older members of his family and his community. Jews couldn't join local country clubs for years, the Omaha World-Herald reported , until Buffett joined the all-Jewish Highland Country Club. This pressured Omaha Club to accept his Jewish friend as a member. Buffett and Susie were among the first non-Jews to join an all-Jewish country club in Omaha and thus encouraged other clubs there to permit Jewish members, The New York Times later reported . "Civil rights changed my views," Buffett said in "Becoming Warren Buffett." King would have been 89 years old today, just a year and a half older than Buffett. Like this story? Like CNBC Make It on Facebook . Don't miss: The incredible rags-to-riches rise of self-made billionaire Oprah Winfrey Warren Buffett says this 'ultimate partnership' will determine your happiness and success Video produced by Andrea Kramar



More From CNBC


Democracy is "under assault and retreating" around the world, with the United States "abdicating" its traditional role as a champion of democratic ideals in the past year while Russia and China "increase repression at home" and "export their malign influence" abroad, Freedom House says.

The Washington-based nongovernmental group presented those findings in a report on the global erosion of political rights and civil liberties, Freedom In The World 2018, that it released on January 16.

"Democracy is facing its most serious crisis in decades," Freedom House President Michael Abramowitz said. "Democracy's basic tenets -- including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law -- are under siege around the world.

The report says 2017 was the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom, with 71 countries "suffering net declines in political rights and civil liberties."

"A major development of 2017 was the retreat of the United States as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy," the report says.

Freedom House, a political freedom and human rights advocacy group that is funded by the U.S. government, says it has "tracked a slow decline in political rights and civil liberties in the United States for the past seven years."

But it says that "the decline accelerated in 2017, owing to evidence of Russian interferences in the 2016 elections, violations of basic ethical standards" by President Donald Trumps administration, and "a reduction in government transparency."

The report says that "the press and the judiciary have remained resilient in the face of unprecedented attacks from President Trump."

But it warns that those institutions ultimately could be weakened by Trump's attacks, "with serious implications for the health of U.S. democracy and America's place in the world."

Abramowitz said, "the core institutions of American democracy are being battered by an administration that has treated the countrys traditional checks and balances with disdain."

Exporting Autocracy

Meanwhile, Freedom House says, "autocratic regimes" in Russia and China have "taken advantage of the retreat of leading democracies" and are "acting beyond their borders to squelch open debate, pursue dissidents, and compromise rules-based institutions."

Abramowitz says the Trump administration's "sharp break from the political consensus of the last 70 years" has cast aside democracy as the "animating force behind American foreign policy."

He said Trump's "hastening withdrawal" from the historical U.S. commitment to supporting democracies abroad has made "the challenge posed by authoritarian regimes all the more powerful and threatening."

The report says Russian President Vladimir Putin's government has "demonstrated the increasing sophistication and reach of modern authoritarian regimes" by "organizing disinformation campaigns during elections in European democracies" and cultivating ties with "xenophobic political parties across the continent," threatening its closest neighbors, and serving as "an alternative source of military aid for Middle Eastern dictatorships."

"The central goal of these efforts was to disrupt democratic states and fracture the institutions that bind them together."

'Worst Of The Worst'

Elsewhere in RFE/RL's broadcast region, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were singled out among the 12 "worst of the worst counties" for political freedom and civil liberties.

The report says Uzbekistan's new government has "prompted cautious optimism" as a new administration formed after the death of longtime autocratic ruler Islam Karimov ended some forms of forced labor and granted "new if limited space" for civil society.

But it says Uzbekistan deserves "special scrutiny."

"Lasting change in one of the worlds most repressive political systems will require sustained international attention as well as support for independent voices in the country's media and civil society," the report says.

Countries To Watch

In Serbia, Freedom House concludes that the tolerance of European Union leaders toward President Aleksandar Vucic's "authoritarian tendencies allowed him to further sideline the opposition and undermine what remains of the country's independent media."

Georgia, Afghanistan, and Macedonia are also named as "countries to watch in 2018" that may experience important developments deserving "special scrutiny."

It says opposition alliances are "crystallizing ahead of Afghanistan's long-overdue parliamentary elections, but preparations for the polls have been lacking, and it is uncertain whether they will be held as planned in 2018."

In Tbilisi, the report says, "the ruling Georgian Dream party recently pushed through constitutional amendments in Georgia that -- combined with the financial backing of its reclusive billionaire patron, [former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili] -- will make an effective challenge by the fractured opposition in future elections even more unlikely, potentially cementing the party's control for years to come."

In Skopje, Freedom House says Macedonia's "democratically elected, ethnically inclusive government" of Prime Minister Zoran Zaev is "seeking to root out corruption and other systemic abuses that grew worse under its scandal-plagued predecessor."
Pakistani authorities say at least five members of the country's security forces were killed and several others wounded in an ambush in the southwestern province of Balochistan.

The January 15 attack took place in the town of Turbat, about 1,000 kilometers south of the provincial capital, Quetta, officials said.

A local administration official was quoted as saying that suspected terrorists opened fire at the convoy of security forces.

One of the vehicles reportedly turned over after the attack, killing five personnel.

No one immediately claimed responsibility.

Resource-rich Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, has been plagued by sectarian violence, Islamist militant attacks, and a separatist insurgency that has led to thousands of casualties since 2004.

Late on January 9, at least four police officers and two civilians were killed in a bomb blast that hit a police truck in Quetta.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, in which 17 people were wounded.

Based on reporting by AP and Dawn
WASHINGTON -- Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbaev thanked U.S. President Donald Trump for Washingtons support of his countrys territorial integrity, as the two leaders met for talks expected to focus on regional security, economic issues, and bilateral relations.

In brief comments to reporters on January 16 before a scheduled luncheon, Nazarbaev also congratulated Trump on his first year in office.

"Kazakhstan appreciates America's support for our independence and territorial integrity," he said, speaking through a translator.

Nazarbaev did not elaborate on the remarks, but the Central Asian nation has been uneasy about Russias policies toward former Soviet states like Kazakhstan ever since Moscow seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and stoked an insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

Predominantly populated by ethnic Kazakhs, Kazakhstan has a sizable ethnic Russian population, estimated at around 20 percent, much of it concentrated in northern parts of Kazakhstan along its winding border with Russia.

Ahead of the meeting, the White House said the two were expected to discuss the deteriorating security situation in nearby Afghanistan.

Russia, Syria Talks

The Kazakh state news agency Kazinform said Trump and Nazarbaev would also be discussing relations with Russia and the war in Syria, along with trade issues.

"From a political perspective, we cooperate on solutions and promotion of regional and global security. The meeting will focus on the situation in Afghanistan, the Syrian conflict, and relations with Russia," Sanat Kushkumbaev, deputy director of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, which advises the president, was quoted as saying.

Kazakhstan is also currently holding the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council.

On January 14, Kazakh Ambassador Kairat Umarov headed a UN delegation that met in Kabul with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.

That delegation also included the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, and diplomats from China, Russia, and Britain.

Nazarbaev's press service said he would attend a meeting of the UN Security Council on January 18 to preside over talks focusing on nuclear nonproliferation.

After a January 9 meeting with U.S. Ambassador George Krol in Astana, the Kazakh president said he was seeking to build on the "amicable relationship" that Kazakhstan and the United States have established in the past 26 years.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, TASS, and Interfax


German English

Sika has acquired a majority stake in Index Construction Systems and Products, a leading manufacturer of roofing and waterproofing systems headquartered close to Verona, Italy. The company generates annual sales of CHF 115 million. By acquiring Index, Sika will extend its product range and significantly strengthen its position in the Italian market.

Index is a well-established, family-owned company with a highly regarded brand and a loyal customer base. Its product portfolio consists of technologically advanced bituminous membranes for roofing and waterproofing, products for thermal and acoustic insulation, as well as waterproofing and repair mortars. The company mainly serves customers in Italy, but also in more than 100 other countries worldwide. Index was established in 1978 by Luigi Carlon, who has owned and run the company since then. To ensure a smooth transition, he will keep a minority stake and continue to contribute to the management of the company as the Chairman of the Board of Index.

Thanks to the acquisition Sika can profit from Index's know-how and expertise in bitumen technologies when further developing its business in Southern Europe and North Africa. By combining both companies' products, Sika will become a full-range supplier offering all available technologies in the roofing and waterproofing market. Furthermore, access to the broad sales network of Index will provide significant cross-selling opportunities.

Luigi Carlon, founder of Index: "I am very proud to have found in Sika a partner who will support the growth of Index. Together we will advance our market position as the Italian market leader for roofing systems, and further develop our business. Thanks to the worldwide presence of Sika, I am especially glad that Index can continue to grow and in the future bring even more innovative products to our customers."

Paul Schuler, CEO of Sika: "We are delighted to welcome the Index employees into the Sika team and look forward to expanding our joint business operations. Index is a proven industry leader and together we will hold a strong number one position in the Italian roofing market. On account of its high research and development competence, and expandable production capacity, Sika will establish the new site as its Southern European production hub for bituminous systems, with potential to also serve the Middle East and Africa."

CONTACT

Dominik Slappnig

Corporate Communications &

Investor Relations

+41 58 436 68 21

slappnig.dominik@ch.sika.com

SIKA CORPORATE PROFILE

Sika is a specialty chemicals company with a leading position in the development and production of systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing and protecting in the building sector and automotive industry. Sika has subsidiaries in 100 countries around the world and manufactures in over 200 factories. Its more than 18,000 employees generated annual sales of CHF 6.25 billion in 2017.

The media release can be downloaded from the following link:
orange

A ruined structure found at Aqaba, Jordan, was probably a church as indicated in its eastward orientation and by its overall plan, as well as

A ruined structure

was probably

as indicated in its eastward orientation and by its overall plan, as well as

A ruined structure

once probably being

was indicated by its eastward orientation, overall plan, and

Indicating that a ruined structure

was probably

were its eastward orientation and overall plan, but also the

A ruined structure

was probably

as indicates its eastward orientation and overall plan, as well as the

That a ruined structure

was probably

is indicated by its eastward orientation and overall plan, as well as by the

1. How they begin: A ruined structure / Indicating that a ruined structure / That a ruined structure ( Meaning )

2. was probably vs. once probably being ( Verb Tense & Meaning )

3. How the end ( Hint: Parallelism & Idioms! )

I know it may be tempting to start with #1 or #2 on the list. However, none of them will eliminate 2-3 options right off the bat, so let's save them for later if we need them. Instead, let's start with #3 on our list: Idioms & Parallelism.

A ruined structure found at Aqaba, Jordan, was probably a church as indicated in its eastward orientation and by its overall plan, as well as artifacts , such as glass-oil lamp fragments, found at the site.

X as well as Y

We need to make sure that both X and Y in this idiom are worded using parallel structure.

its eastward orientation and by its overall plan

artifacts

NOT PARALLEL

OK

(This option doesn't use the "as well as" idiom, so let's save it for later.)

its eastward orientation and overall plan

the artifacts

NOT PARALLEL

(This is also incorrect because it uses the phrase "but also," which needs another negative phrase such as "not only" or "not just" to go with it! We can also rule this out because it doesn't follow idiomatic formatting.)

its eastward orientation and overall plan

the artifacts

NOT PARALLEL

by its eastward orientation and overall plan

by the artifacts

PARALLEL/OK

We can eliminate options A, C, & D because they don't use parallelism for the "X as well as Y" idiom structure.

A ruined structure

was indicated by

INCORRECT

That a ruined structure

was probably a church

indicated by

CORRECT

There you have it - option E is the correct choice!

Hello Everyone!Let's tackle this question, one thing at a time, and narrow it down to the right answer quickly! First, here is the original question with the major differences highlighted inartifacts, such as glass-oil lamp fragments, found at the site.(A)found at Aqaba, Jordan,a church,(B)found at Aqaba, Jordan,a church,(C)found at Aqaba, Jordan,a church(D)found at Aqaba, Jordan,a church,(E)found at Aqaba, Jordan,a churchThere are a few things we can focus on here:If we look at the entire sentence, we can quickly spot the idiom we need to focus on:The idiom we're using here is:To help make this easier to spot, we'll go ahead and add the word "artifacts" to the end of each option. Here's how each one works out:(A) A ruined structure found at Aqaba, Jordan, was probably a church, as indicated in, as well as-->(B) A ruined structure found at Aqaba, Jordan, once probably being a church, was indicated by its eastward orientation, overall plan, and artifacts -->(C) Indicating that a ruined structure found at Aqaba, Jordan, was probably a church were, but also-->(D) A ruined structure found at Aqaba, Jordan, was probably a church, as indicates, as well as-->(E) That a ruined structure found at Aqaba, Jordan, was probably a church is indicated, as well as-->Now that we have this narrowed down to only 2 options, let's take a closer look at each one to determine which is the best choice:(B)found at Aqaba, Jordan, once probably being a church,its eastward orientation, overall plan, andThis isbecause it changes the intended meaning of the sentence. This sentence is trying to say that the structure was indicated by something, which doesn't make sense. The indication is that the structure used to be a church. The eastward orientation, overall plan, and artifacts aren't how we know it's a ruined structure - it's how we know that structure likely used to be a church.(E)found at Aqaba, Jordan,isits eastward orientation and overall plan, as well as by theThis is! It's the only option that uses parallel structure with the "X as well as Y" idiom. It also has a clear meaning - the ruined structure was probably a church, and then it lists the evidence to back up that indication.Don't study for the GMAT. Train for it._________________
Patronus wrote:

Art historian: Successful forgeries tend to be those most recently painted. While such a phenomenon may sound counterintuitive, a forger is able to exploit current modes of aesthetics to create paintings that appeal to the eye of his or her contemporaries. This very quality, however, is what makes those paintings seem amateurish to subsequent generations. As a result, a majority of forgeries is identified as such roughly twenty-five years after their creation.



Which of the following is an assumption upon which the argument rests?



A) A generation consists of exactly twenty-five years.

B) Computer analysis, which does not rely on currentaesthetic trends, can often determine with a high degree of accuracy the legitimacy of a painting.

C) What is deemed aesthetically pleasing does not change in the course of twenty-five years.

D) A piece of art determined to be a forgery does not, after a period of twenty-five years, become valued for its own intrinsic merits.

E) Those who expose the majority of paintings as forgeries are guided by aesthetic considerations.



Please can someone explain the conclusion first of all, and then why is OA correct? Thankyou.

A piece of art determined to be a forgery

I donot mind KUDOS..

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.



I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.-Mohammad Ali Signature Read More

Conclusion- As a result , a majority of forgeries is identified as such roughly twenty-five years after their creation.Basically the argument's conclusion states that the paintings seem amateurish to subsequent generations and hence ,majority of these paintings are easily identifiable as forgeries.A) A generation consists of exactly twenty-five years.The argument states that the paintings seem amateurish to subsequent generations and it does not matter whether a generation last 25 years or more.B) Computer analysis, which does not rely on current aesthetic trends, can often determine with a high degree of accuracy the legitimacy of a painting.Out of scope. There may be other ways to determine whether a painting is amateurish. Besides, the aesthetic 'part' is what is being discussed and any other quality being discussed is out of scope.C) What is deemed aesthetically pleasing does not change in the course of twenty-five years.Looks good! But is not correct. What is deemed aesthetic may change and hence the painting may seem even more amateurish. When we negate this option, it does not weaken the conclusion.D)does not, after a period of twenty-five years, become valued for its own intrinsic merits.As long as the painting is determined to be a forgery who cares.E) Those who expose the majority of paintings as forgeries are guided by aesthetic considerations.This is exactly what is unstated. The paintings seem amateurish to subsequent generations because they seem unaesthetic or amateurish to those who expose paintings as forgeries.If this option is NOT TRUE then , then the conclusion is weakened.You can also think this as CAUSE AND EFFECT.( Use of the words -As a Result - is made in the conclusion...)Cause- Paintings seem amateurishEffect- Makes forgeries identifiable.E states the Cause and Effect.If majority of paintings can not be identified using aesthetics then it means that there is some other quality or method used to identify the forgeries._________________
TBI Holding for slashing capacity

TBI Holding, which holds the survey licence for the Tamakoshi 3 Hydropower Project, has planned to revise downwards its installed capacity from 650 MW to 305 MW.
Dhaka, Jan 16 (IBNS): Bangladesh on Tuesday announced that it will complete the process of sending hundreds of Rohingya Muslims to Myanmar within the next two years.

The decision the taken after meeting the neighbours.

The Rohingya Muslims, in large numbers, had fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh last year.

"The bilateral repatriation plan, which Myanmar said would begin next Tuesday, was greeted with some skepticism from NGOs, who said it did not adequately address questions of safety, livelihoods and permanent resettlement," The Daily Star reported.

A statement by the Bangladesh foreign ministry as posted by the newspaper said the return effort envisages considering the family as a unit, with Myanmar providing temporary shelter for those returning before rebuilding houses for them.

Bangladesh would set up five transit camps to send Rohingyas to two reception centers on the Myanmar side of the border, the statement said on the issue.

Myanmar has reiterated its commitment to stop (the) outflow of Myanmar residents to Bangladesh, read the statement.

Meanwhile, as part of an intensified response to the current diphtheria outbreak, United Nations agencies are working to vaccinate more than 475,000 children in Rohingya refugee camps, temporary settlements and surrounding areas in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar.

All efforts are being made to stop further spread of diphtheria. The vaccination of children in the Rohingya camps and nearby areas demonstrates the health sector's commitment to protecting people, particularly children, against deadly diseases, said Bardan Jung Rana, ai Representative to Bangladesh of the World Health Organization (WHO).

UN estimates show that some 655,000 people have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh since August 2017.

Diphtheria is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium which primarily infects the throat and upper airways, and produces a toxin affecting other organs. The diphtheria toxin causes a membrane of dead tissue to build up over the throat and tonsils, making breathing and swallowing difficult. The disease is spread through direct physical contact or from breathing in the aerosolized secretions from coughs or sneezes of infected individuals.

Between 8 November 2017 and 11 January 2018, as many as 31 deaths and 3,954 suspected cases of diphtheria have been reported from Cox's Bazar. Nearly 10,594 contacts of these suspected cases have been put on diphtheria preventive medication.

WHO, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and other health partners are working with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to establish fixed locations for immunization in the Rohingya camps to continue to provide life-saving vaccines to children, in line with Bangladesh's childhood immunization programme.

Nearly 150,000 children aged six weeks to seven years received pentavalent vaccine (that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, haemophilus influenza type b and hepatitis B), and nearly 166,000 children aged 7 to 17 years were given tetanus and diphtheria (Td) vaccine, during a three-week vaccination campaign that ended on 31 December.

Two more rounds of vaccination with a diphtheria-containing vaccine, at intervals of one month, are planned to fully protect the children in camps and surrounding areas.

Children are particularly vulnerable to diphtheria. Volunteers are making door-to-door visits in the Rohingya settlements to ensure all children receive vaccination, said the UNICEF Country Representative Edouard Beigbeder.

The massive influx within a very short time has heavily affected basic services in the settlement areas. They have no choice but to live in a very congested environment, which is impacting their health and quality of life, he added.

To limit the spread of diphtheria to communities living near the Rohingya camps and settlements, nearly 160,000 children in 499 schools of Teknaf and Ukhiya sub-districts are also being vaccinated.

This initiative began on 1 January. Vaccination was initiated on a day when children attend school in large numbers to avail themselves of free books provided by the government at the start of the academic year.

WHO has released $1.5 million from its Contingency Fund for Emergencies to scale up the response to diphtheria among the Rohingya population in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, over the next six months.

The funds are being used to support immunization; provide essential medicines and supplies; improve capacities for laboratory testing, case management and contract tracing; and engage with communities.

Photo: UNHCR/Andrew McConnell
New York, Jan 16 (JEN)Amid continuing violence in Afghanistan, the United Nations and the humanitarian community has appealed for $430 million to provide assistance to some 2.8 million people across the country who have been affected by conflict and natural disasters as well as families returning home after years in Iran and Pakistan.

In many parts of Afghanistan, violence continues unabated and people need support more than ever, said Toby Lanzer, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Afghanistan, underlining the needs in the country.

On Monday I call on international donors to stand by 2.8 million people whose lives have been ruined by conflict or natural disaster, and to help people returning to Afghanistan from neighbouring countries.

According to a news release issued by the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the plan includes activities of more than 150 national and international humanitarian organizations as well as the UN to deliver assistance to families and communities in need.

There are however, substantial challenges, including difficult access conditions as well as increasing violence against aid workers. Last year, armed clashes were the highest in a decade and civilian casualties remained near record levels.

In addition to more than two million people directly affected by the conflict including almost half a million displaced, 2017 also saw about 500,000 Afghans returning to their homes after seeking refuge in Iran, Pakistan or other countries.

The 2018 Humanitarian Response Plan focuses only on providing life-saving emergency assistance such as food and shelter, medical treatment and nutrition interventions for malnourished child to people caught up in current or very recent disasters.

Besides the 2.8 million people the plan is designed for, another 8.7 million people are estimated to live with high level of needs as a result of long-standing and unresolved issues such as lack of jobs and livelihoods, long-term displacement, an underfunded healthcare system or the effects of climate change.

Humanitarian emergency assistance cannot provide a solution for such chronic needs, like land for housing or jobs and vocational training to lift them out of poverty and fragility, read the news release, underlining the need to improve the underlying conditions.

Photo: UNAMA
The United States has hoped for regime change in Iran too and there are signs that it is a real possibility for the near future.

In 1979, the majority of the people wanted the Islamic Republic as their government, giving legitimacy to the current regime. Now, almost four decades the people want regime change after too many years of suppression.

The people of Iran are defenceless and can no longer afford to be met with silence vis-a-vis the United States. However, some experts are saying that this should be the US approach because anything else will weaken the reformist position. But they are not listening to the people of Iran who say that the reformists and hardliners are one and the same.

Those who call on the United States to remain silent say that it will hamper any chance of democratic change. Yet if we look back on past events, we will see that the opposite happens. There have been two so called reformist presidents in the past ten years  Mohammad Khatami and current president Rouhani. Khatami became president after the EU recalled their ambassadors, making his appointment the only way out of isolation for Iran. He hypocritically made a positive impression on the West. A similar situation happened later, thus the appointment of Rouhani.

When Rouhani took office, some people falsely hoped that there would be a change in the country. Only that never happened. But the West hung on to the idea of moderation and remained silent.

What will it take for the international community to see that reformist and moderate are just labels with no substance? Anyone can call themselves a moderate, but it is only true if the actions match the name.

The people of Iran are subject to cruel and unfair crackdowns and it is the responsibility of the international community to speak out against this. The United States and the West place great importance on democracy, freedom and human rights and it must be something that is upheld for everyone  even those far away.

Furthermore, Iran is such a threat  not just to the Middle East, but to the world as a whole  that putting an end to its rule of terror will be good for everyone. President Trump can see this and has warned the Iranian regime that the United States is watching. He said that he will provide the people of Iran with the support that is needed when the time is right. Heres to hoping the West follows suit.
Larijani is one of the most powerful politicians in Iran. He is the head of the Islamic Republics judiciary, and a close advisor to, and an ally of, Irans Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist, and expert on Iran and US foreign policy, writes in his article for the Arab News, The Iranian regime has threatened a severe response to the US sanctions. While these kinds of threats by the Iranian generals are political posturing and boasting, the regime will most likely ratchet up its asymmetric warfare in the region. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) will likely increase its financial, military, intelligence and advisory support to those militias and terrorist groups in the region that have as their mission inflicting damage on US and Arab nations national security interests and scuttling their foreign policy.

Iranian leaders and their state-owned media have downplayed Trumps sanctions in an attempt to project power to their fundamentalist base and proxies. Still,

it is important to point out that Trumps decision on the nuclear deal, as well as the new sanctions, are a political blow and a warning to the leaders of the Iranian regime.

According to Dr. Rafizadeh, the sanctions imposed on Larijani are a victory for human rights defenders and the Iranian people. The people are empowered to pursue their demands for justice, rule of law, democracy, and to bring those who have committed human rights violations closer to justice. As well, the sanctions on the IRGCs cyber unit are also a step towards establishing a larger program to promote peace and stability by combating the regimes attempts in hacking other governmental systems and organizations.

White Houses decision to set an ultimatum to fix the nuclear deal is a political blow and a warning to Tehran, which has used the JCPOA to heighten its interventionist and expansionist policies in the Arab world, writes Dr. Majid Rafizadeh.

The White House is sending a message that the Iranian regime will not only be monitored for its nuclear defiance, development, research and proliferation, but it will also be closely watched for human rights violations.

At the international level, Trumps re-certification for the last time, gives the administration a stronger platform to persuade the UK, France and Germany to fix the nuclear agreement or to pull out of it. At the domestic level, the White House allows the US Congress additional time to either work on legislation that would address the loopholes of the nuclear deal, or increase the presidents leverage with other members of the JCPOA enabling him to pressure the other JCPOA members into fixing some of the inadequacies of the nuclear deal.

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh writes, Iran must also be required to adhere to the spirit of the nuclear deal, as it is continuously heightening interventionist and expansionist policies in the Arab world and violating human rights inside Iran and abroad. The nuclear deal has empowered the IRGC and its militias in the region due to the sanctions relief. This has further radicalized, militarized and destabilized the region. Iran continues to escalate its antagonistic policy towards other Arab nations, the US and other Western nations.

While the Iranian regime downplays US sanctions, Trumps final waiver builds a robust plan to counter the Iranian regimes destructive behavior and hegemonic ambitions in the region.
Once again facing a test, Iranian media outlets are being evaluated for their credibility and their readiness to cover internal crises, regarding their coverage of the recent protests against the government in Iran. Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper surveilled Iranian journalists about the Iranian media performance in covering the protests and published an article about what they found.

In a phone call, Reza Moini, the head of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Iran/Afghanistan desk, told Asharq Al-Awsat that the coverage of the protests in Iran was influenced by Irans policy of internationalizing censorship. Moini stated, We are facing two realities. We dont have free independent internal channels to report news. Some international channels that provide a Persian service represent a more independent source.

RSF has previously published data on this topic, and based on it, Moini stated that there are attempts to seize these channels. Asharq Al-Awsat reports that he noted that the Iranian regime is threatening journalists working with them, and tempting others. If I were to give an example about attempts to control foreign media, I would compare news published by Reuters and AFP, he said. Moini pointed out that AFP has an office in Tehran and is being pressured.

Any journalist who goes to Iran faces double pressures if he has a dual nationality, according to Moini, who claims that journalists with a single nationality are faced with files against the channel or newspaper for which he works.

Moini says he believes that the regime suffers from paradoxical positions towards the media and restrictions made on the Internet. He says that while it gains money from the Internet, at the same time it imposes restrictions on citizens freedoms.

The 2017 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders reflects a world in which attacks on the media have become commonplace. This is especially true in the Middle East, which has ongoing wars in Yemen as well as Syria, and continues to be the worlds most difficult and dangerous region for journalists.
TU, IoM not on the same page over dean

After the controversial ruling of Supreme Court to reinstate Dr Sashi Sharma as the dean, the Tribhuvan University and its Institute of Medicine have conflicting views on who will lead the organisation.


Turkeys president has called on the countrys defense allies to take a stance against an American plan for a Kurdish-led border security force in Syria.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, should oppose such a force.

The United States and its partners want to establish the security force to control the border area between Syria, Iraq and Turkey.

The move is part of the United States-led effort against the Islamic State group often called IS.

Syrian Kurdish militia are to lead the new security force, which is expected to reach 30,000 members in the next few years.

Turkey strongly opposes a Kurdish-led militia

However, Turkey has been threatening to launch a military offensive in Syria against Kurdish militia there. Turkey considers them to be terrorists because of their ties to outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey.

On Monday, Erdogan accused the United States of creating a terror army in Syria, along the border with Turkey. He said Turkey would destroy this army before its even born.

Erdogan addressed members of his ruling party on Tuesday. During his speech, he said: Hey NATO! You are obliged to make a stance against those who harass and violate the borders of your members.

Both Turkey and the U.S. are NATO members.

NATO called Turkey a highly valued ally and said the alliance was committed to Turkeys defense. However, it said that the matter was an issue for the anti-IS coalition led by the U.S.

Ties between Turkey and the United States have worsened over U.S. support of the Kurdish militia.

Turkey says the Kurdish Peoples Defense Units, or YPG, is a major threat to its security. But the U.S. has relied on Kurdish militia with ties to the YPG to defeat the Islamic State terror group.

The U.S. also has said the new Kurdish-led security force is important to prevent the return of the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.

Russia, a major force in the area, opposed the U.S. plan for a border security force. It said the force could lead to the splitting up of Syria.

The Syrian government called the U.S. plan an attack on Syrian sovereignty. It promised to win back control of the whole country and remove any form of US-backed Syrian Kurdish force.

Erdogan said on Tuesday that Turkey is planning an attack on the Kurdish-controlled area of Afrin in northern Syria. Turkey has already moved more troops to its border and fired artillery at the city in recent weeks. The Turkish president added that Turkey would conduct the operation in Afrin with Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces.

Erdogan was asked if he planned to discuss the Kurdish-led border force with U.S. President Donald Trump. But, he said he had no plans to call the U.S. leader.

The state-operated Anadolu Agency reported Erdogans comments. He said, We discussed the issue before. He said he would get back to me. I wont call him as long as he does not get back to me.

Im Jonathan Evans.

Hai Do adapted this story for Learning English based on AP news and other reports. Mario Ritter was the editor.

Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

take a stance idiom to state a position on some issue of importance

obliged adj. required to do something

harass v. to make repeated attacks against an enemy

rely v. to depend on, to need for support

sovereignty n. to be independent and have the right to govern oneself
CNH Industrial N.V. designs, produces, markets, sells, and finances agricultural and construction equipment, trucks, commercial vehicles, buses, and specialty vehicles in North America, Europe, South America, and internationally. It operates through five segments: Agriculture, Construction, Commercial and Specialty Vehicles, Powertrain, and Financial. The Agriculture segment provides farm machinery and implements that include two-and four-wheel drive tractors, crawler tractors, combines, cotton pickers, grape and sugar cane harvesters, hay and forage equipment, planting and seeding equipment, soil preparation and cultivation implements, and material handling equipment under the New Holland Agriculture, Case IH, STEYR, Miller, Kongskilde, Overum, K-Line, and JF brands. The Construction segment offers excavators, crawler dozers, graders, wheel and backhoe loaders, and skid steer and compact track loaders under the CASE Construction and New Holland Construction brands. The Commercial and Specialty Vehicles segment provides light, medium, and heavy vehicles for the transportation and distribution of goods under the IVECO brand; commuter buses and city-buses under the IVECO BUS and Heuliez Bus brands; quarry and mining equipment under the IVECO ASTRA brand; firefighting vehicles under the Magirus brand; and vehicles for civil defense and peace-keeping missions under the Iveco Defence Vehicles brand. The Powertrain segment offers engines, transmission systems, and axles for on- and off-road applications, as well as for marine and power generation under the FPT Industrial brand. The Financial Services segment provides and administers retail financing to customers for the purchase or lease of new and used industrial equipment or vehicles, and other equipment; wholesale financing, which primarily consists of floor plan financing; and trade receivables factoring services. The company was founded in 1842 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.
Banco Santander (Brasil) S.A., together with its subsidiaries, provides various banking products and services to individuals, small and medium enterprises, and corporate customers in Brazil and internationally. The company operates in two segments, Commercial Banking and Global Wholesale Banking. It offers deposits and other bank funding instruments; debit and credit cards; digital prepaid solutions; payment platform; loyalty programs; employee benefit vouchers; payroll loans; digital lending and online debt renegotiation services; mortgages; home equity financing products; consumer credit; and local loans, commercial and trade finance, guarantees, structured loans, and cash management and funding solutions, as well as on-lending transfer services. It also provides funding and financial advisory services related to projects, origination and distribution of fixed-income securities in the debt capital markets, financing of acquisitions and syndicated loans, other structured financing arrangements, and subordinated debt and energy efficiency transactions; advisory services for mergers and acquisitions, and equity capital markets transactions; and stock brokerage and advisory, equity, and equity research services. In addition, the company structures and offers foreign exchange, derivative, and investment products for institutional investors, and corporate and retail customers; and provides market making services. Further, it offers instant payment services; range of products and services focused on the agribusiness sector; microfinance services; and online automotive listing and digital car insurance solutions, as well as digital trading platform. Additionally, it provides its financial services and products to its customers through multichannel distribution network comprising branches, mini-branches, ATMs, call centers, Internet banking, and mobile banking. Banco Santander (Brasil) S.A. was incorporated in 1985 and is headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Telecom Argentina S.A., together with its subsidiaries, provides telecommunications services in Argentina and internationally. The company offers telephone services, including local, domestic, and international long-distance telephone services, as well as public telephone services; and other related supplementary services, such as call waiting, call forwarding, conference calls, caller ID, voice mail, itemized billing, and maintenance services. It also provides interconnection services, such as traffic and interconnection resource, dedicated Internet access, video signals transportation in standard and high definitions, audio and video streaming, dedicated links, backhaul links for mobile operators, data center hosting/housing services, dedicated links, layer 2 and layer 3 transport networks, video links, value-added services, and other services. In addition, the company offers mobile telecommunications services, including voice communications, high-speed mobile Internet content and applications download, online streaming, and other services; and sells mobile communication devices, such as handsets, Modems MiFi and wingles, and smart watches under the Personal brand. Further, it provides internet connectivity products, including virtual private network services, traditional Internet protocol links, and other products; data services; and programming and other cable television services. The company was formerly known as Cablevision S.A. and changed its name to Telecom Argentina S.A. in January 2018. Telecom Argentina S.A. was founded in 1979 and is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Shakya is the founder CEO of beed, an international management consulting and advisory firm. He is the author of Unleashing Nepal and Unleashing The Vajra.
An exiled Qatari ruling family member once promoted by Saudi Arabia amid its ongoing dispute with Doha appeared in an online video yesterday [Macau time] claiming hes being held against his will in the United Arab Emirates, an allegation denied by Abu Dhabi.

The video of Sheikh Abdullah bin Ali Al Thani, a little-known ruling family member until the boycott of Qatar by four Arab nations, offered new fuel to the monthslong stalemated crisis. It immediately recalled the bizarre, now-reversed resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri while on a trip Riyadh, a Nov. 4 decision that was widely perceived as Saudi-orchestrated at the time.

The UAEs state-run WAM news agency later said Sheikh Abdullah had freely left the country at his request.

The video, immediately aired by Doha-based news network Al-Jazeera, shows Sheikh Abdullah saying he was invited to Abu Dhabi as a guest of Sheikh Mohammed. Sheikh Abdullah appears to refer to Abu Dhabis powerful crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who enjoys strong ties to Saudi Arabias rulers.

I am a guest of Sheikh Mohammed but it is not hosting now, it is now an imprisonment, Sheikh Abdullah says. They told me not to leave and I am afraid something will happen to me and they blame Qatar.

He adds: I just wanted to let you know that Qatar is innocent in this and I am being hosted by Sheikh Mohammed and anything that happens to me after this is under his responsibility.

The UAE, one of four countries boycotting Qatar, denied the claim. Authorities pointed to a series of tweets by Ali Rashid al-Nuaimi, who heads Abu Dhabis Hedayah counter- extremism center. Al-Nuaimi said that Sheikh Abdullah had asked to move to the Emirates for his safety.

A trusted source confirmed to me that Sheikh Abdullah bin Ali Al Thani is free to leave the UAE for any destination he chooses and he can leave whenever he likes, al-Nuaimi wrote on Twitter, without elaborating.

The report on the WAM news agency said Sheikh Abdullah was free in his movements while in the UAE.

He expressed his desire to leave the country where all procedures were facilitated without any interference, WAM said. It did not say where the sheik went.

Doha promised to closely observe the situation, though it acknowledges it is limited by the boycott, Qatar Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Lolwa al-Khater said.

We have observed in the past similar behavior by the blockading nations where rights of individuals and officials alike are violated in total contravention of international norms, conventions and laws with no clear purpose or valid reasoning, she said in a statement.

Sheikh Abdullahs grandfather, father and brother were rulers of Qatar until a palace coup ousted his branch of the ruling family in 1972. His last position in government was as head of the equestrian and camel racing federation decades ago.

Since the crisis, Sheikh Abdullah has held high-profile visits with Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Those meetings came as Riydah allowed Qataris pilgrims over the border in August for hajj, a pilgrimage required of every able-bodied Muslim once in their lives.

Saudis then began suggesting Sheikh Abdullah should rule Qatar as an emir in exile, while Saudi-funded television networks provided him coverage. A quickly created Twitter account in his name amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. However, the last tweet on the account came in October and Sheikh Abdullah has not been publicly seen for some time.

Sheikh Abdullah is one of several Qataris exiles to emerge amid the diplomatic crisis, which began June 5 with Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE cutting off Dohas land, sea and air routes over its alleged support of extremists and close ties to Iran. Qatar has long denied funding extremists and recently restored full diplomatic relations with Iran, with whom it shares a massive offshore natural gas field that made the country and its 250,000-odd citizens extremely wealthy.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have cultivated even-closer ties in recent years. Emirati troops are deeply involved in the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Sheikh Mohammed of Abu Dhabi is believed to have a close relationship with Saudi Arabias Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The two countries announced plans of forming a tighter relationship in December, helping torpedo an already troubled meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

The U.S., which has some 10,000 troops stationed at Qatars sprawling al-Udeid Air Base as part of its campaign against the Islamic State group and the war in Afghanistan, has sought to end the crisis. Its military has halted some regional exercises to put pressure on the GCC, which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to resolve the crisis. However, President Donald Trump in the meantime made comments seemingly supporting the Arab nations efforts at isolating Qatar, complicating those efforts.

A Trump-prompted call in September between Qatars ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and the Saudi crown prince that offered a chance at negotiations also broke down in mutual recriminations. Jon Gambrell, Dubai, AP
Arthouse Cinematheque Passion is currently presenting Macaus first film festival of modern American films, showcasing 10 revered multicultural productions from the past few years.

The films have been selected on the basis of their multicultural themes, with women and ethnic minorities taking center stage or playing critical roles in many of the films, breaking the mold of white male dominance, according to organizers.

The United States has played a significant role in world cinema since the beginning of the twentieth century, Rita Wong, chief executive officer of Cinematheque Passion, told the Times yesterday. Even though Hollywoods perennial economic machine has overshadowed its artistic development, American films outside the studio system have continued to mature and impress on the international stage.

Wong added that new American cinema, with the inclusion of the countrys diverse but underrepresented ethnic makeup, is breaking into a space full of possibilities that [] showcases the many folds of Americas vibrant culture.

The films have all received international praise and many of them are festival award recipients. They include the celebrated Sundance hit Columbus; coming-of-age comedy Dope; the first Iranian vampire Western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; Certain Women, which won the best film award in the London Film Festival 2016; and Get Out, Americas highest-grossing debut feature based on an original screenplay.

In addition to the screenings, Cinematheque Passion invited Derek Lam, a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong to present a seminar exploring modern American cinema culture.

The festival, which is titled New American Cinema: Cinema of Possibilities, began on Saturday and will run until January 28. It is curated by Francisco Lo, a Macau local who has lived in the United States for several years as the co-founder of Film Monitor, an independent film review journal based in Houston. DB
Nearly 15,000 people have fled from villages around the Philippines most active volcano as lava flowed down its crater yesterday in a gentle eruption that scientists warned could turn explosive.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology increased the alert level for Mount Mayon late Sunday to three on a scale of five, indicating an increased prospect of a hazardous eruption within weeks or even days.

Lava flowed at least half a kilometer down a gulley from the crater yesterday morning and ash clouds appeared mid-slope as lava fragments rolled down, said Renato Solidum, who heads the volcano institute. It was hard to track down the lava flow given the thick clouds shrouding the volcano.

Molten rocks and lava at Mayons crater lit the night sky Sunday in a reddish-orange glow despite the thick cloud cover, leaving spectators awed but sending thousands of residents into evacuation shelters.

Disaster-response officials said more than 14,700 people have been moved from high- risk areas in three cities and four towns in an ongoing evacuation. People in the danger area have put up huge white crosses in the past in their neighborhoods, hoping to protect their lives and homes.

There are some who still resist but if we reach alert level four, well really be obligated to resort to forced evacuation, Cedric Daep, an Albay emergency official, told The Associated Press. Level four signifies the volcano could erupt violently within days.

Mayon lies in coconut-growing Albay province about 340 kilometers southeast of Manila.

Three steam-explosions since Saturday have spewed ash into nearby villages and may have breached solidified lava plugging the crater and caused lava to start gushing out, Solidum said.

With its near-perfect cone, Mayon is popular with climbers and tourists but has erupted about 50 times in the last 500 years, sometimes violently.

In 2013, an ash eruption killed five climbers, including three Germans, who had ventured near the summit despite warnings of possible danger.

Experts fear a major eruption could trigger pyroclastic flows  superheated gas and volcanic debris that race down the slopes at high speeds, incinerating or vaporizing everything in their path. More extensive explosions of ash could drift toward nearby towns and cities, including Legazpi city, the provincial capital, about nine 15 kilometers away.

The bulletin sent Sunday night said a hazardous eruption was possible within weeks or even days. It said the glow in the crater signified the growth of a new lava dome and that the evacuation zone should be enforced due to the dangers of falling rocks, landslides or a collapse of the dome.

Airplanes have been warned not to fly close to the volcano.

Mayons first recorded eruption was in 1616. The most destructive in 1814 killed 1,200 people and buried the town of Cagsawa in volcanic mud. The belfry of a Cagsawa church juts out of the ground in a reminder of Mayons deadly fury and has become a tourist attraction. AP
During Sundays Macao Forum, many residents expressed their disagreement with the governments decision to place ashtrays within the 10-meter radius of bus areas in which smoking is prohibited.

Some of the residents who voiced their opinions suggested the government should clearly define the area in which smoking is prohibited around bus stops because it is not always clearly delineated.

These same residents noted that the grey line used by the government to mark the boundary is often imperceptible.

The residents expressed the hope that the related government authority reconsider whether it is appropriate to place ashtrays next to bus areas because the ashtrays might encourage people gathering next to them, which in turn increases second- hand smoke.

These residents argued that the prohibited area alone does not actually stop people standing within it from breathing in second-hand smoke.

The Chief of the Tobacco Control and Prevention Office, Tang Chi Ho, said that his office received several complaints about the grey line being unclear.

According to Tang, the authority is considering to gradually change the color of these lines into white, which they believe will be more clearly distinguishable.

The citys new tobacco control law came into effect from the first day of the new year.

Tang informed that, between January 1 and 12, his office prosecuted 180 smokers, which represents a 21 percent decrease compared to the same period last year.
A series of swindles over the weekend added to the high incidence of crimes involving scams in Macau, this time hitting tourists and residents alike.

Several cases were presented yesterday at a Judiciary Police (PJ) press conference, among them two involving fraudulent currency exchange schemes, a recurrent scam in the past few months.

In the first case, a 43-year-old resident of mainland China is suspected of having swindled another man also from China.

The case reached the PJ through the force hotline, 993, on January 10 after the victim tried to exchange money with the suspect.

The deal involved an exchange of RMB168,400 for HKD200,000 but after the remittance made by the victim to an account in the mainland, the suspect fled the scene without exchanging the promised HKD.

On the following day, the PJ managed to locate and intercept the suspect who denied the accusations and refused to reply to any of the PJs questions. However, the police force said it found sufficient evidence in the possession of the suspect leading them to conclude that the swindle had occurred. The suspect was sent to the Public Prosecutions Office for further proceedings.

In the second case, the PJ received a complaint from a 23-year-old man from mainland China that accused three other men of theft.

The victim claimed to have approached one of the men and offered to exchange for him a total of HKD100,000. The man accepted and told the victim to proceed to a certain room in a Cotai hotel, which he did. Arriving at the room, the victim told the PJ that two other men were waiting to assault him as soon as he entered, kicking, pushing and threatening him with knives.

Fearing for his life, the victim said that he did not resist nor prevent the attackers from taking his bag and its contents, which included personal documents, a mobile phone and HKD51,000 in cash.

The victim then had his wrists, ankles and mouth bound with duct tape to prevent him from seeking assistance. Over the course of the next hour, the victim was able to release himself, escape from the room and seek help from an on-duty police officer stationed in the vicinity of the hotels casino.

The police say they are also questioning the victim in regards to the fact that he was carrying significantly less money in his possession than what he had offered the attackers.

In a separate case a 29-year- old male local resident reported a swindle that started with a phone call from an unknown person who claimed to know the victim and asked him to save the scammers new phone number.

Several days later, the victim received a call from the scammer who claimed to be in custody in China after he had been arrested in an anti-prostitution case. The swindler requested RMB6,000 be wired to him to post the bail, then another RMB6,000 for the bail of his friend, and finally an additional RMB10,000 with the justification that the prostitute were underage.

When the victim tried to redial the number, he was informed that it had been disconnected, leading him to present the complaint to the PJ.
President Donald Trump is defending himself anew against accusations that he is racist, this time after recent disparaging comments about Haiti and African nations.

No, No. Im not a racist, Trump said yesterday [Macau time], after reporters asked him to respond to those who think he is. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed. That I can tell you.

Trump also denied making the statements attributed to him, but avoided the details of what he did or did not say.

Did you see what various senators in the room said about my comments? he asked, referring to lawmakers who were meeting with him in the Oval Office last week when Trump is said to have made the comments. They werent made.

Trump stands accused of using shithole to describe African countries during an immigration meeting with a bipartisan group of six senators. The president, in the meeting, also questioned the need to admit more Haitians to the U.S., according to people who were briefed on the conversation but were not authorized to describe the meeting publicly.

Trump said in the meeting that he would prefer immigrants from countries like Norway instead.

The White House has not denied that Trump said shithole though Trump has already pushed back on some depictions of the meeting.

A confidant of Trumps told The Associated Press that the president spent Thursday evening calling friends and outside advisers to judge their reaction to his remarks. Trump wasnt apologetic and denied he was racist, instead blaming the media for distorting his meaning, said the confidant, who wasnt authorized to disclose a private conversation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the only Democrat at Thursdays meeting, said Trump had indeed said what he was reported to have said. Durbin said the remarks were vile, hate-filled and clearly racial in their content. He said Trump used the most vulgar term more than once.

Trump commented as Durbin was presenting details of a compromise immigration plan that included providing USD1.6 billion for a first installment of the presidents long-sought border wall. AP
MYANMAR-BANGLADESH The two countries have agreed that they will try to complete the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled from violence in Myanmar within two years, Bangladeshs Foreign Ministry said yesterday.

INDONESIA Authorities are struggling to contain a months-long outbreak of measles in easternmost Papua province that has killed dozens of children.

PHILIPPINES Glowing-red lava spurted in a fountain and flowed down the Philippines most active volcano yesterday in a stunning display of its fury that has sent more than 34,000 villagers fleeing to safety and prompted police to set up checkpoints to stop tourists from getting too close.

SRI LANKAs president has ordered the reinstatement of ban on women buying alcohol and being employed in places where the drinks are produced and sold.

PAKISTAN A Pakistani health official says a special anti-polio drive has been launched in the countrys eastern Punjab province.

SOUTH SUDAN Sixteen people have been killed, including three children, since South Sudans cease-fire started less than a month ago, say international monitors.

CYPRUS president says the fight against extremism necessitates even closer cooperation with Greece and Jordan. Nicos Anastasiades was speaking yesterday during talks that were billed as the cornerstone of a new partnership.

ROMANIAs president yesterday appointed the defense minister as interim prime minister after Premier Mihai Tudose unexpectedly resigned.

KOSOVO Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj has called for a meeting of the countrys National Security Council following the killing of Oliver Ivanovic, leader of an ethnic Serb political party, as he entered his party offices in the northern city of Mitrovica.

FRANCE President Emmanuel Macron traveled yesterday to the epicenter of Frances migrant crisis, the northern port of Calais, to lay out a new approach to immigration: help for those who want to stay, expulsion for those using France as a transit point and sanctions for any poor behavior by security forces.

CHILE Pope Francis begged for forgiveness yesterday for the irreparable damage done to children who were raped and molested by priests, opening his visit to Chile by diving head-first into a scandal that has greatly hurt the Catholic Churchs credibility here and cast a cloud over his visit.
Some 1,000 villages in Morocco were supplied with green energy at the completion of a project jointly carried out by the Abu Dhabi-headquartered Masdar and the Moroccan Office National de lElectricite et de lEau Potable (ONEE).

The initiative, named Morocco Solar Home System (SHS), has provided off-grid solar power to 19,438 households in the North African kingdom.

Each home has been fitted with 290-watt solar panels as well as batteries with a three-year life span.

The installed systems also include LED lamps as well as a 165-litre refrigerator.

Each homeowner will contribute a small monthly fee for the technologys upkeep.

Through the project, the North African country, which has stood out as a leading renewable energy advocate on the African continent and around the world, will be able to provide energy to 99 per cent of its rural communities, acting director-general of ONEE Abderrahim El Hafidi noted.

These remote, off-grid communities are often faced with challenging conditions in energy access, but this initiative is providing over 95,000 people with electricity through customized renewable energy solutions, Hafidi said.

The completion of the SHS project was announced Sunday on the sidelines of the 8th session of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) held in Abu Dhabi Jan.12-14.

The session, attended by over 1,000 government and corporate officials from 150 countries, discussed opportunities and challenges in the renewable energy sector.

Morocco plans to bring the share of renewable energy in overall electricity production to 42% by 2020 and 52% by 2030. It has earmarked a global $30 billion budget to that effect.

The UAE on its part decided to increase its target for the contribution of renewable energy to the national energy mix from 24 per cent to 27 per cent by 2021. The UAE Energy Plan 2050 aims to bring up the proportion of clean energy to 50 per cent.
Credit: University of Oregon

In 15 public middle schools in rural Oregon, UO education researcher Mark Van Ryzin is testing an old approach proven to enhance learning to see if it can be adapted to head off behavioral problems. It appears to be working.

Early results, emerging in a series of papers, indicate that after one year, seventh-grade students in seven test schools are less likely to seek out deviant peer affiliation and drink alcohol, or even show a willingness to try it, when compared to their counterparts at eight control schools. The data also indicate a reduction in bullying behavior, stress, emotional problems and tobacco use, as well as an increase in peer relations.

Middle schools in the Lane, Southern Oregon and High Desert education service districts are participating, said Van Ryzin, a lecturer in the Department of Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership and a research scientist at the Eugene-based Oregon Research Institute.

The research is being done in middle schools because that's where peer influences begin to increase student vulnerability to undesired behaviors, he said. The project involved 1,460 students, who were 52 percent male and 76 percent white. Rural schools were chosen, Van Ryzin said, because they often lack resources.

After one year in the project, Brad Eaton, principal of Scenic Middle School in Central Point, is pleased.

"The data on our school showed a large impact on students feeling more connected to the school and the people in it, which is exciting to me as a building leader," Eaton said. "For teachers, this provided additional engagement and active participation strategies that were supported by research on student achievement. For students, it allowed them to create interpersonal connections with others outside their normal peer group."

The intervention uses cooperative learning, an academically inspired approach developed in the 1960s by David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson of the University of Minnesota. It was originally designed to promote cooperation in a way that taps individual efforts to achieve group learning goals.

As a graduate student at Minnesota, Van Ryzin took courses from David Johnson and wondered if cooperative learning, which had already been found to boost student academic engagement and achievement, could also address the negative peer processes that are at the root of a number of student behavioral problems.

"Cooperative learning isn't new," he said. "It's been around for a long time. If it isn't implemented well, however, it won't work, and in fact it could be a negative experience for students. Our approach is going back to core principals of cooperative learning, providing teachers with the tools to do it correctly within an existing curriculum and without following a cookbook-like mentality."

The Johnsons, who head the Cooperative Learning Institute in Minnesota, have helped in Van Ryzin's training sessions for teachers, using the book "Cooperation in the Classroom" as their guidebook. Training sessions for the project's first year, 201617, were done in three half-day sessions with additional videoconference check-ins and access to resources to implement the program.

Teachers randomly place students in small groups to tackle short-term projects. Each student gets a specific task to contribute as part of a group's solution. The approach emphasizes individual accountability, face-to-face interactions and the development of collaborative skills. It promotes positive social interactions that reduce alienation and counters situations in which some students feel left out of the selection process or where one student does all the work.

"The idea is to build interconnected social networks that are free of cliques, without boundaries, without exclusion, without conflicts," Van Ryzin said.

Preliminary findings, based on data from the first year of a still-ongoing study funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, are beginning to land in journal articles. One paper was published in mid-December, another was accepted for publication and a third is under review.

Initial data analysis focused on alcohol use because seventh-graders are at the cusp of increasing exposure and experimentation, which raises the risk of educational problems, substance abuse problems, brain impairments, diseases and diminished work capacity.

In a paper in the December issue of the journal Child Development, the researchers reported on the effects of cooperative learning on engagement with deviant peers and the use of and willingness to try alcohol.

"The goal is to improve the social climate of the school by essentially giving students the opportunity to make new friends outside of their existing social groups," wrote Van Ryzin and co-author Cary J. Roseth of Michigan State University.

A second study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Educational Psychology, will detail their preliminary findings showing a reduction of bullying, victimization, stress and emotional problems in the same middle schools. In a third paper, appearing soon, Van Ryzin and Roseth will report additional details on cooperative learning's impacts on peer influences related to alcohol and tobacco use.

The current project is in its second year. Van Ryzin is recruiting schools for a larger, second phase that likely will include some high schools.

"We'd like to look at things like teen dating violence and sexual harassment in high school," he said. "At some point, I'd like to explore this approach at the university level, especially with teachers in freshmen introductory classes."

Van Ryzin, a native of Wisconsin, moved to Eugene in 2009 to join UO College of Education faculty members doing research at the Oregon Social Learning Center. In 2012, he moved to the Oregon Research Institute. He joined the UO in 2013.

More information: Mark J. Van Ryzin et al. Enlisting Peer Cooperation in the Service of Alcohol Use Prevention in Middle School, Child Development (2017). Journal information: Child Development Mark J. Van Ryzin et al. Enlisting Peer Cooperation in the Service of Alcohol Use Prevention in Middle School,(2017). DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12981
Molecular simulation of afatinib (magenta) bound to EGFR19del (gray), with a single water molecule (red sphere) mediating interactions (dotted line) between the drug and the protein. Other mutation-prone amino acids within the drug-binding pocket are individually colored. Credit: A*STAR Bioinformatics Institute

A single molecule of water is the reason certain mutations are more responsive to a 'targeted' cancer therapy, according to molecular-scale simulations carried out at the A*STAR Bioinformatics Institute.

Targeted therapies that take down tumors by selectively interfering with the defective proteins that promote their survival and growth have revolutionized cancer therapy. For example, the drug afatanib is a targeted agent given to lung cancer patients with certain mutations in the gene encoding the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). Recent clinical studies suggest that afatanib may confer survival benefit specifically in patients with the EGFR19del mutation rather than in patients with a different mutation, known as EGFRL858R, when compared with patients receiving only standard chemotherapy.

Daniel Shao-Weng Tan, a clinical oncologist from A*STAR's Genome Institute of Singapore and the National Cancer Center of Singapore, who participated in these trials in Singapore, was confounded by this disparity, so he consulted scientist Chandra Verma at the Bioinformatics Institute to rationalize their findings. Verma and Srinivasaraghavan Kannan, a specialist in molecular modeling at the Bioinformatics Institute, teamed up with Tan to identify differences in the structure and dynamic behavior of these two mutant proteins that might explain the distinct response profiles.

It turns out that the critical difference was a mere molecule of water. Afatanib binds to a pocket on EGFR that is missing five amino acids in the EGFR19del mutant. Molecular dynamics simulations carried out at the Bioinformatics Institute and the National Supercomputing Centre, Singapore, showed that this deletion creates a more physically constrained structure, which can snugly accommodate both afatanib and a single water molecule in a very stable arrangement. In contrast, the mutant EGFRL858R, also found to characterize lung cancer, contains just a single amino acid substitution, and is predicted to hold two water molecules in its pocket. However, these are in a weaker and relatively less stable arrangement, resulting in weakened interactions with afatanib that likely reduce the drug's affinity and hence effectiveness.

"Our hypothesis is based on understanding the physics of the system and could offer a compelling rationale for the clinical observations with afatanib," says Kannan. Intriguingly, he and Verma were also able to home in on other binding pocket mutations (single nucleotide polymorphisms, or 'SNPs') that occur alongside EGFR19del that might likewise influence the efficacy of afatanib.

The researchers are now examining whether these predictions hold in real-life experiments and see this as a promising general strategy for predicting patient response to targeted treatments. "We are trying to develop a robust pipeline to examine the structural effects of mutations on drug interactions," Kannan says. "This will be a very valuable approach to complement our engagement with the national precision medicine efforts."

More information: Srinivasaraghavan Kannan et al. Hydration effects on the efficacy of the Epidermal growth factor receptor kinase inhibitor afatinib, Scientific Reports (2017). Journal information: Scientific Reports Srinivasaraghavan Kannan et al. Hydration effects on the efficacy of the Epidermal growth factor receptor kinase inhibitor afatinib,(2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-01491-z
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Americans are more passionate toward their romantic partners than Japanese people are because Americans live in social environments in which people have greater freedom to choose and replace their partners, a team of Japanese researchers suggest.

Previous research comparing passion in romantic relationships on an international scale found that people in North America are more passionate than East Asians, such as the Japanese and Chinese. But this phenomenon is apparently inconsistent with the conventional theory that East Asians are characterized by collectivism and interdependence and that North Americans are more individualistic and independent.

Although monogamy is common in contemporary society, long-term romantic relationships are faced with a commitment problem  the conflict between maintaining a relationship with a certain partner and looking for an attractive alternative.

The Japanese research team led by Ph.D. student Junko Yamada and Professor Masaki Yuki of Hokkaido University hypothesized that Americans living in a society with high relational mobility (in which people have greater freedom to choose and replace their partners) are constantly exposed to the risk and anxiety of being cheated on or losing their partner to a rival. It also assumed that passion will induce strategic behavior to lavish attention and affection on their partner, while proactively ignoring potential partners to reassure their current partner. On the other hand, in Japan, where relationships tend to be more stable and hard to change (low relational mobility), people have less risk and anxiety of being cheated on or being rejected, making passionate behavior less relevant, according to the hypothesis.

The researchers surveyed 154 heterosexual Americans (78 men and 76 women) and 103 heterosexual Japanese people (65 men and 38 women) recruited through online crowdsourcing marketplaces. They responded to a questionnaire designed to measure their perceptions of the level of romantic relational mobility of people around them and the intensity of passion they felt toward their current partner. All participants were asked how likely they would be to adopt various commitment behaviors when forming a relationship with a specific mate.

The results statistically showed Americans are more passionate toward their partners than the Japanese are, which can be explained by the relational mobility of the society they live in. The study also found that the more passionate a person was, the more likely they were to approach a partner and lavish affection on nobody but the partner while voluntarily abandoning relationships with other members of the opposite sex. Thus the study demonstrated the difference between the two groups from the viewpoint of adaptive behavior.

The findings are highly relevant to research on the evolutionary science of interpersonal human emotions. "For humans, it is imperative to win and keep a good mating partner, which is a basic adaptive issue. Our study showed the importance of considering socio-ecological factors when studying human mating behavior. Also, it suggested you should be more passionate and give your partner special attention when they have more freedom to choose," says Masaki Yuki. "However, further studies involving other nationalities and cultural backgrounds should be conducted before generalizing our results," he added.

More information: Junko Yamada et al. Passion, Relational Mobility, and Proof of Commitment: A Comparative SocioEcological Analysis of an Adaptive Emotion in a Sexual Market, Evolutionary Psychology (2017). Journal information: Evolutionary Psychology Junko Yamada et al. Passion, Relational Mobility, and Proof of Commitment: A Comparative SocioEcological Analysis of an Adaptive Emotion in a Sexual Market,(2017). DOI: 10.1177/1474704917746056
When a house is better sealed, the quality of ventilation becomes more critical. Credit: Mile Atanasov/Shutterstock

We often talk about healthy living and quality of life but have you considered the quality of the air you breathe? Most of us spend up to 90% of our time indoors, according to many surveys. Add up the time you spend at home, in the office and on transport, and you will see how close this figure is for yourself.

The study of indoor air quality did not achieve any public prominence until the 1970s. This was brought on by the "Oil Shock" that rapidly pushed energy prices to unprecedented highs. The response from building managers in the United States and elsewhere was to reduce the fresh air entering a building and recirculate as much as possible to retain heat in winter and keep out heat in summer.

Sick building syndrome

These changes were made with minimal understanding of the effects on indoor air quality. Suddenly a new phenomenon emerged, "sick building syndrome".

The first indicator was that high levels of carbon dioxide (the most common of the bio-effluents) emitted by the occupants invoked a physiological response that made the air feel "hot and stuffy".

The second was a build-up of moisture, leading to condensation, particularly where that condensation occurred within wall cavities. This allowed mould to flourish unseen and undetected, until it made its presence felt by outbreaks of eye, nose, throat and skin irritations and eventually the smell from the emitted chemicals.

Mould can have harmful effects before it becomes this obvious. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Volatile organic compounds

Unfortunately, the irritation and smell were generally attributed to chemical exposure and not to biological origins. This led to a four-decade-long obsession with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and the emission of these chemicals into the indoor air. This was in part understandable because VOCs were also the main focus of environmental protection agencies at that time.

Apart from particularly aggressive chemicals like formaldehyde, emitted from resins in particle board and laminates, and the nitrogen dioxides from gas-fired cookers and heaters, most other VOCs have never been convincingly linked to health effects.

This is hardly surprising when you compare the occupational exposure limits for the same chemicals with their concentration in indoor air. The levels for safe workplace exposure are often 1,000 times higher. So why would we expect any effect in the home or office?

But headlines like "Is your carpet killing you?" are much sexier than "Please remember to open a window occasionally".

Semi-volatile organic compounds

In the mid-2000s attention switched to semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) as a result of the endocrine disruptor debate. Previously no-one had considered them in indoor air quality because it couldn't be envisaged how a compound with such a low volatility could be inhaled in any significant quantities.

Poor ventilation can lead to a harmful build-up of nitrogen dioxide from gas-fired cookers and heaters. Credit: Lukas Coch/AAP

It has now been shown that dust settling on materials containing SVOCs (vinyl flooring and the like) absorbs the chemicals then is resuspended in the air, for us to inhale or ingest. The Bornehag study linked phthlates (chemicals widely used in plastics) absorbed on particulate matter to asthma.

The most ubiquitous SVOCs are the phthlate plasticisers. Laboratory and environmental studies in animals have provided strong indications that endocrine disruption is taking place. Human evidence is lacking at this stage. But human studies of other effects have shown stronger evidence.

A study in Bulgaria by Scandinavian researchers showed increasing rates of childhood asthma correlated to rising use of phthlates in the home. Given that most homes did not contain vinyl flooring or seat covering this was at first confusing. But interviews with the households showed a big increase in use of a particular cleaning product that contained phthlate, presumably to rejuvenate vinyl surfaces.

You can open a window, but what if it's worse outside?

Our traditional way to improve poor indoor air quality is to increase ventilation to purge the contaminants. This works well for volatile organic chemicals and bio-effluents like CO 2 and odours, and also works well in suppressing the SVOC-laden dust.

But what do you do when the outside air quality is worse than the inside air? This had long been a problem in inner-city areas before the era of environmental legislation. Later, with the rise of the use of diesel engines for motor vehicles, a new category of pollution has emerged  ultra-fine particle (UFP) pollution. Other sources are bushfire smoke from activities such as land clearing in South East Asia and bushfire mitigation activities in southern Australia and grass pollens, which can result in "thunderstorm asthma".

In these cases the pollution is coming indoors from outside, as opposed to the traditional indoor air quality problem of pollution being inside and trying to get it out.

While the technology exists to reduce ultra-fine particles coming indoors, it is expensive and not well known. We should be developing this technology as a required standard for buildings like hospitals, because this is where asthma suffers seek shelter and treatment during such events.

My mantra has always been that I can fix any indoor air quality problem with enough clean, fresh air. This is still true, but that clean air is getting harder to find.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Credit: Creative Commons

What is the economic value of medical research? A new study from Brunel University London and King's College London suggests we now know the answer  for every 1 invested, society benefits by 25p per year, every year, forever.

The figure is the culmination of a decade-long series of 'What's it Worth?' studies  backed by a consortium of high-profile funders including the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the Academy of Medical Sciences  which set out to understand the economic return of public and charity-funded medical research.

The final paper in the series, published in the journal Health Research Policy and Systems, investigated the return on investment from musculoskeletal disease research, and supported the findings of similar studies into cancer and cardiovascular research.

Emeritus Professor Martin Buxton, former Director of Brunel's Health Economics Research Group (HERG) who led the research, said: "It has always been easy to identify specific examples of impact  the selective good news stories that show the value of a particular piece of research  but we know that inevitably other research in the same area may have been much less successful.

"The studies we have done address the important question as to whether there is an economic return on the totality of research spending in a broad area. And for the three areas of medical research that we have studied, that clearly is the case."

It's hoped that better understanding of the economic impact of research investment will help provide accountability, secure future funding, and demonstrate how research translates into real-world health improvements.

Dr. Ian Viney, Director of Evaluation at the Medical Research Council, said: "When tough decisions have to be made about where to invest public funds for the best economic return and benefit to the nation, it's vital to have robust research showing the positive returns from medical research  both through improved health and from wider private sector investment.

"UK medical research is skilfully coordinated across the country by public and charitable funding agencies, working closely with excellent research organisations. This study highlights how decisions to back excellent research can deliver significant benefits for society and how these benefits can be quantified."

How the figure was calculated

The headline stat, that every 1 invested sees a return of 25p per year, forever, was reached by combining two strands of figures  the net monetary value of improved public health and quality of life, and the extent to which public research stimulates private investment in the commercialisation of new products and research.

"First, we calculated the average investment in UK musculoskeletal research between 1978 and 1997, and then worked with experts in the field to identify research-based treatments, their use in the NHS, and the health gain linked to these treatments  measured in Quality Adjusted Life Years or QALY," said Prof Buxton.

"Valuing each QALY at 25,000 allowed the team to calculate the value of the health improvements resulting from the treatments. The team then subtracted the cost to the NHS of delivering these treatments, giving us the net health gain."

The team then determined the proportion of relevant research that was attributed to the UK, and measured the time lag between the initial research investment and its impact on clinical practice  a figure that currently stands at 16 years for musculoskeletal research.

"Combining all these factors resulted in the estimate that every 1 invested in UK musculoskeletal research has delivered a rate of return equivalent to 7p every year, forever," said Prof Buxton.

The second strand determined the musculoskeletal research's wider benefit to society by quantifying how much private investment was stimulated by public and charity funding.

"Previous research estimates that every 1 invested in UK medical research in the past has delivered a rate of return equivalent to 15p and 18p per year, forever, for the wider benefits to the economy," said Prof Buxton.

"Adding these two elements together gives an overall estimate that every 1 invested in UK musculoskeletal research delivers a return equivalent to between 22p and 25p every year, forever  a figure in line with our research into cancer and cardiovascular disease."

More information: Matthew Glover et al, Estimating the returns to United Kingdom publicly funded musculoskeletal disease research in terms of net value of improved health outcomes, Health Research Policy and Systems (2018). Matthew Glover et al, Estimating the returns to United Kingdom publicly funded musculoskeletal disease research in terms of net value of improved health outcomes,(2018). DOI: 10.1186/s12961-017-0276-7 An explainer document into the research series "Medical Research: What's it worth?" can be downloaded from Wellcome

wellcome.ac.uk/sites/default/f  arch-januar-2018.pdf
A*STAR researchers have provided strong evidence, using patient tumor grafts, that metformin, a common diabetes drug, might help fight colorectal cancer in humans.

Metformin's potential as a tumor-suppressing agent, to prevent the growth of breast, colon, lung and prostate cancers, has been demonstrated in pre-clinical studies. However, the experimental models used in these studies do not accurately recreate the natural manifestations of the disease, and require toxic levels of metformin to demonstrate beneficial effects.

Min-Han Tan and a group of researchers from A*STAR's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), the Biological Resource Centre, and the Genome Institute of Singapore, with collaborators from hospitals across Singapore, have now tested metformin's cancer-fighting abilities on a model of colorectal cancer that is more representative of how the disease appears in humans.

The team took samples of cancer tissue from two patients and implanted them in mice, then assessed how the tumors responded to metformin as well as 5-fluorouracil, the current front-line treatment for colorectal cancer.

They found that metformin inhibited tumor growth by at least 50 per cent after 24 days and, when combined with 5-fluorouracil, inhibited the tumor grafts from one patient by 85 per cent. The experiments used concentrations of metformin equivalent to that used to treat diabetes in humans.

In previous studies, scientists typically injected cancer cells into host animals rather than transplanting tissue directly. In these models, high glucose, insulin, and growth factor levels are needed to establish cell cultures for injection. Tan's group suspects that this artificial environment meant previous studies needed higher levels of metformin to stunt tumor growth as, in this study, they were able to demonstrate response using therapeutic doses of the drug: "We tested a wide range of concentrations down to the physiological," says Tan. "It was important to show that there was a response at that level, as many studies have not documented that."

The IBN-led collaboration discovered that metformin enacted its therapeutic benefits by activating a cellular pathway implicated in the inhibition of cancer, and by reducing cancer cell oxygen consumption. Using next-generation genetic sequencing, the team also provided evidence that direct patient tissue grafts in mice retain the genetic, molecular, and tissue features of the original tumormaking them ideal platforms to study colorectal cancer and its treatment.

It's believed that this is the first investigation into metformin and colorectal cancer using patient tumor grafts. Tan says that future studies could shed light on metformin's relevance as a therapeutic agent for cancer: "Our study shows that metformin has a possible activity against colorectal cancer, using gold-standard materials, and provides a mechanism to explain this. Further clinical trials are now needed."

More information: Nur-Afidah Mohamed Suhaimi et al. Metformin Inhibits Cellular Proliferation and Bioenergetics in Colorectal Cancer PatientDerived Xenografts, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics (2017). Journal information: Molecular Cancer Therapeutics Nur-Afidah Mohamed Suhaimi et al. Metformin Inhibits Cellular Proliferation and Bioenergetics in Colorectal Cancer PatientDerived Xenografts,(2017). DOI: 10.1158/1535-7163.MCT-16-0793
When the scientists asked the pianists to play a harmonically unexpected chord within a standard chord progression, the jazz pianists' brains started to replan the actions faster than those of the classical pianists. This was measured by EEG (electroencephalography) sensors on the back of the head, which detected the brain signals in the related brain regions responsible for action planning. Credit: MPI CBS

Keith Jarret, world-famous jazz pianist, once answered in an interview when asked if he would ever be interested in doing a concert where he would play both jazz and classical music: "No, that's hilarious. [...] It's like a chosen practically impossible thing [...] It's [because of] the circuitry. Your system demands different circuitry for either of those two things." Where non-specialists tend to think that it should not be too challenging for a professional musician to switch between styles of music, such as jazz and classical, it is actually not as easy as one would assume, even for people with decades of experience.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig demonstrated that there could be a neuroscientific explanation for this phenomenon: They observed that while playing the piano, different processes occur in jazz and classical pianists' brains, even when performing the same piece.

"The reason could be due to the different demands these two styles pose on the musiciansbe it to skilfully interpret a classical piece or to creatively improvise in jazz. Thereby, different procedures may have established in their brains while playing the piano which makes switching between the styles more difficult", says Daniela Sammler, neuroscientist at MPI CBS and leader of the current study about the different brain activities in jazz and classical pianists.

One crucial distinction between the two groups of musicians is the way in which they plan movements while playing the piano. Regardless of the style, pianists, in principle, first have to know what they are going to playmeaning the keys they have to pressand, subsequently, how to playmeaning the fingers they should use. It is the weighting of both planning steps, which is influenced by the genre of the music.

In the study all pianists got to see a hand on a screen which played a sequence of chords on a piano scattered with mistakes in harmonies and fingering. The professional pianists had to imitate this hand and react accordingly to the irregularities while their brain signals were registered with EEG sensors on the head. Credit: MPI CBS

According to this, classical pianists focus their playing on the second step, the "How". For them it is about playing pieces perfectly regarding their technique and adding personal expression. Therefore, the choice of fingering is crucial. Jazz pianists, on the other hand, concentrate on the "What". They are always prepared to improvise and adapt their playing to create unexpected harmonies.

"Indeed, in the jazz pianists we found neural evidence for this flexibility in planning harmonies when playing the piano", states Roberta Bianco, first author of the study. "When we asked them to play a harmonically unexpected chord within a standard chord progression, their brains started to replan the actions faster than classical pianists. Accordingly, they were better able to react and continue their performance." Interestingly, the classical pianists performed better than the others when it came to following unusual fingering. In these cases their brains showed stronger awareness of the fingering, and consequently they made fewer errors while imitating the chord sequence.

The scientists investigated these relations in 30 professional pianists; half of them were specialized in jazz for at least two years, the other half were classically trained. All pianists got to see a hand on a screen which played a sequence of chords on a piano scattered with mistakes in harmonies and fingering. The professional pianists had to imitate this hand and react accordingly to the irregularities while their brain signals were registered with EEG (Electroencephalography) sensors on the head. To ensure that there were no other disturbing signals, for instance acoustic sound, the whole experiment was carried out in silence using a muted piano.

"Through this study, we unravelled how precisely the brain adapts to the demands of our surrounding environment", says Sammler. It also makes clear that it is not sufficient to just focus on one genre of music if we want to fully understand what happens in the brain when we perform musicas it was done so far by just investigating Western classical music. "To obtain a bigger picture, we have to search for the smallest common denominator of several genres", Sammler explains. "Similar to research in language: To recognise the universal mechanisms of processing language we also cannot limit our research to German."

More information: R. Bianco et al, Musical genre-dependent behavioural and EEG signatures of action planning. A comparison between classical and jazz pianists, NeuroImage (2017). Journal information: NeuroImage R. Bianco et al, Musical genre-dependent behavioural and EEG signatures of action planning. A comparison between classical and jazz pianists,(2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.058
(HealthDay)The death rate in the United States isn't decreasing as it has in years past, and some experts blame the opioid epidemic. But a new study suggests America's increasing girth is what's really behind the slowdown.

Excess weight led to nearly 200,000 excess deaths in 2011. And overall, those extra pounds reduced life expectancy by almost one year at age 40, researchers determined.

"Rising levels of body mass index [BMI] have prevented the United States from enjoying the full benefits of factors working to improve mortality," wrote study author Samuel Preston and his colleagues. Preston is a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Body mass index is a rough estimate of a person's body fat based on height and weight measurements.

Heart disease deaths had declined consistently for nearly 40 years. These declines have slowed or stopped altogether, according to the researchers. Rates of decline in cancer deaths have also slowed, they said.

At the same time, rates of obesity have been rising in the United States. From 1976 to 1980, 15 percent of Americans were obese. By 2014, 38 percent of Americans were classified as obese, the researchers said in background notes.

Dr. Mitchell Rosen, chief of obesity surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said obesity is linked to mortality in several ways.

"Obesity is the biggest cause of type 2 diabetes, and it promotes all of the risk factors that cause heart disease, such as high blood pressure and cholesterol," said Rosen, who wasn't involved with the study.

"Obesity also promotes sleep apnea, which is a leading cause of sudden death and motor vehicle accidents," he added. "Obesity affects every organ system in the body." It's also linked to a number of cancers.

To get a better idea of obesity's impact on death rates, Preston and his colleagues gathered data from a national health survey from 1988 through 2010. The survey included more than 25,000 Americans between 40 and 84 years old. The researchers also looked at related death data through 2011.

Using a statistical model, the researchers assessed how much of the slowing death rate trend could be explained by rising body mass index.

They found that in 2011 America's increase in BMI reduced life expectancy by 0.9 years by age 40almost 11 months. The statistical model also estimated that 186,000 excess deaths occurred that year due to rising BMI in the United States.

Dr. Rekha Kumar is an endocrinologist with New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center's Comprehensive Weight Control Center in New York City.

Kumar said many experts believe an increase in "deaths of despair"such as opioid overdoses or suicideshas slowed improvements in death rates.

"Opioids are definitely lowering life expectancy in younger people. But my feeling was that obesity was a contributor overall," said Kumar, who was not part of the study.

Kumar said these findings suggest the need for physicians and policymakers to deal with obesity from a public health perspective.

"The last time we saw a dip in life expectancy was with HIV/AIDS, and we reacted to that crisis and developed new drugs," she said.

"But there's an extreme bias with obesity because it's considered a behavioral condition, and insurers and Medicare and Medicaid are slow to provide coverage for obesity treatments," Kumar added. "We only see coverage for obesity medications about 30 percent of the time."

Kumar said it's important to understand that losing weight is "more complicated than 'eat less, exercise more.'"

She recommended seeing a doctor who specializes in weight management who can help you successfully shed pounds and keep them off.

Rosen agreed that there's no easy answer for losing weight. "Obesity may be tougher to treat than cigarette smoking," he said.

"The best strategy is not to gain weight when you're young," he said. But if you do have excess weight to take off, he added, you need to change what you're eating.

The study is in the Jan. 15 issue of PNAS.

Copyright  2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) have a significantly increased rate of arterial and venous thrombosis, with the highest rates occurring at and shortly after diagnosis. The findings of a population-based cohort study are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

MPNs are diseases in which the bone marrow makes too many red blood cells, platelets, or excess fibrous or scar tissue in the bone marrow. Patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms are reported to be at increased risk for thrombotic events.

Using a national database in Sweden, researchers from Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, assessed risk for arterial and venous thrombosis in 9,429 patients with MPNs compared with 35,820 matched control participants from 1987 to 2009, with follow-up to 2010. The data showed that the rate of thrombotic events was significantly elevated for patients across all age groups with MPNs of all subtypes. The 5-year cumulative incidence of thrombosis in patients with MPNs showed an initial rapid increase around the time of diagnosis, followed by gentler increases during follow-up.

According to an accompanying editorial from authors at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, these findings shed new light on the magnitude of thrombosis risk in patients with MPNs. The authors suggest that care of patients with MPNs should include aggressive treatment of traditional risk factors to reduce risk for arterial and venous thrombosis, regardless of age; as well as antiplatelet/anticoagulant medication and disease-specific treatment when indicated.
Reduced federal funding for pediatric physician-scientists is a concern highlighted in a new study co-authored by Misty Good, MD, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. As a neonatologist, Good both treats patients and researches dangerous newborn infections. Her research technician, Maddie Mara, (left) assists Good in the lab. Credit: Matt Miller/Washington University

For young physician-scientists, obtaining research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) can be a springboard to significant contributions to medicine and further professional opportunities. A lack of funding, meanwhile, can stall possible discoveries and short-circuit the careers of young scientists.

Previous research has noted declines in NIH funding for physician-scientists in general, including pediatric physician-scientists. One study noted a decline in the rate of NIH awards to pediatric departments from 23 percent to 16 percent during a recent 10-year span.

Now, a new, multicenter study that included Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that most NIH grants awarded to researchers in pediatrics during the past five years have been limited to physicians in senior positions at a small number of institutions. The findings indicate an overall downward trend in funding for pediatric research, particularly among early-career physician-scientists.

The study is published Jan. 16 in JAMA Pediatrics.

Although the NIH offers myriad research project grants, the study primarily focused on R01 grants. This is the NIH's most established funding source, and receiving one is considered a professional milestone, important for continued research, promotion and tenure. The researchers did not examine funding given by private groups and foundations.

"Novel scientific investigations, including those funded by the NIH as new R01s, are necessary to advance the field of pediatrics," said Misty Good, MD, the study's first author and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Washington University.

"A lack of funding also may prevent the discovery of potential treatments and preventive strategies for patients," added Good, a neonatologist who treats patients at St. Louis Children's Hospital and runs a research lab focused on necrotizing enterocolitis, a deadly gastrointestinal disease in newborns.

The study's researchers culled NIH databases for information on pediatric R01 grants given to scientists at medical institutions and hospitals from 2012 to 2017. They found 2,471 individual pediatric R01 grants awarded to 1,593 scientists. Of those, 907 (57 percent) were to pediatric scientists with medical degrees, often referred to as physician-scientists.

Among the new study's findings:

More than half of the pediatric R01 awards to physician-scientists526 (58 percent)went to senior-level physician-scientists.

Fifteen institutions accounted for more than half1,561 (63 percent)of the pediatric R01s awarded over the five-year period.

Hematology-oncology topped the list of pediatric specialties for physician-scientists receiving the most R01 grants: 146 awardees (16 percent). The second- and third-highest specialties were, respectively, general academic pediatrics and infectious diseases, at 109 (12 percent) and 93 (10 percent).

The majority of R01 physician-scientist awardees were male, had achieved full professor status, and many held senior leadership positions such as chief, chair or dean.

"The paucity of awards for junior scientists raises concern about the ability to motivate and develop young trainees to become pediatric physician-scientists," said senior author James Wynn, MD, of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Researchers from the University of Iowa also contributed to the study.

"We hope that this study sheds light on the pediatric physician-scientist work force and continues to reinforce the need to provide programs and additional support for early-stage investigators," Good said.
Matthew Miller, senior author of the paper, an assistant professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University, and senior researcher with its Michael G. DeGroote Institute of Infectious Disease Research. Credit: McMaster University

While past exposure to influenza A viruses often builds immunity to similar, and sometimes different, strains of the virus, Canadian researchers are calling for more attention to exceptions to that rule.

New data analysis suggests that people born at the time of the 1957 H2N2 or Asian Flu pandemic were at a higher risk of dying during the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic as well as the resurgent H1N1 outbreak in 2013-2014. And it is not the first time this has happened.

Results of the study by researchers of McMaster University and the Universite de Montreal were published today in mBio, published by the American Society for Microbiology.

"Reported situations in which previous influenza virus exposures have enhanced susceptibility are rare and poorly understood," said Matthew Miller, senior author of the paper, an assistant professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University, and senior researcher with its Michael G. DeGroote Institute of Infectious Disease Research.

"This study's results have important implications for pandemic risk assessment and should inform laboratory studies aimed at uncovering what's responsible for this effect."

The influenza A virus continues to pose one of the most pressing threats to global public health due to its tendency to cause a pandemic. Over the last 100 years alone, at least five such pandemics have occurred, including the 1918 H1N1 Spanish Flu, the 1957 H2N2 Asian Flu, the 1968 H3N2 "Hong Kong Flu", the 1977 Russian Flu and the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu.

Miller and the teams from both universities reviewed monthly mortality and influenza circulation data from October 1997 to July 2014 in the United States and Mexico. They identified peaks in excess mortality during the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic and during the resurgent 2013-2014 H1N1 outbreak among people born in 1952.

The results align with at least two previous influenza A virus pandemics, in 1918 and 1968, when there were higher death rates among those born during previous pandemic years in 1890 and 1918, respectively.

"We suggest the phenomenon of 1918 is not unique," Miller said. "We believe that exposure to pandemic influenza early in life is a risk factor for mortality during subsequent cross-strain pandemics."

Miller suggested further research is needed so appropriate vaccines may be developed.

"We believe there is an important piece missing in this puzzle that has been overlooked in most investigations on pandemic influenza," he said.

"Our research highlights the urgent need to develop more broadly-protective 'universal' influenza virus vaccines - capable of providing protection against both seasonal and pandemic influenza strains."
(HealthDay)It's thought to have killed between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population, but the Black Death plague may not have been spread by flea-infested rats, Norwegian scientists report.

Between its first devastating outbreak in the 14th century, and finally fading away by the 1800s, the plague caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium sent millions of Europeans to early graves.

Scientists have long thought that the bacteriumwhich is transmitted by the bite of fleaswas spread directly to humans by the flea-ridden rats that lived in people's homes.

"When we hear or read of the plague, one of the first associations that comes to mind is rodents, and the role of overpopulation of rats in the transmission of the infection," said Dr. Sunil Sood, an infectious disease expert not involved with the study.

But the new research, based on European death statistics for nine plague outbreaks spanning five centuries, suggests the much-maligned rat may not be to blame.

Instead, "human ectoparasites"meaning fleas residing on people, not rats may have been the primary sources for spreading the illness, including the devastating Black Death of 1346 to 1353.

The new research is "ultimately challenging the assumption that plague in Europe was predominantly spread by rats," concluded Nils Stenseth, of the University of Oslo in Norway, and colleagues.

"As the authors point out, historical and archeological records do not support the presence of large rat populations at the time [of the Black Death]," said Sood, who heads pediatrics at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore, N.Y.

"It has long been hypothesized that there is another way that plague can spread between humansthat human fleas [such as Pulex irritans] and [body] lice can cause epidemics by biting humans serially, even if rats are not present in large numbers," he explained.

Still, Sood said, there's one "drawback" in the new study's logic: Where did the human fleas and lice contract Yersinia pestis to begin with?

"Even human fleas and lice would need to pick up Yersinia pestis from a rodent or other mammalian reservoir," he explained. "So it would be a mistake to conclude that rodents have nothing to do with the life-cycle of plague bacteria."

Sood noted that plague remains a concern, so the research has modern-day implications.

Based on the research, "it is easy to see, for example, how crowded conditions in a refugee settlement could result in spread of vector-borne infections such as plague," Sood said.

The study was published online Jan. 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Copyright  2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Credit: Centre for Genomic Regulation

Scientists read the code of lifethe genomeas a sequence of letters, but now researchers have also started exploring its three-dimensional organisation. In a paper published in Nature Genetics, an interdisciplinary research team of scientists from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain, shows that the three-dimensional organisation of the genome plays a key role in gene expression and consequently in determining cell fate.

It all began with the 4-D Genome project, an ambitious and innovative research initiative aimed at understanding how the spatial organisation of the genome contributes to decisions made by cells. What scientists wanted to find out was whether genome architecture plays an active function or whether it is a mere side effect of the genome's activity. The model that the 4-D Genome team used was cell reprogramming, a process that allows the scientists to revert white blood cells back to a state of pluripotency in which they can differentiate into any other cell type. Proteins that control gene activity (known as transcription factors) play a key role in this process, which the 4-D Genome team studied in great detail, assessing how they induce changes in gene expression, modifications of chromatin (the structure around which DNA is wrapped), and changes in the 3-D organisation of the genome.

Understanding how stem cells are formed and how they can convert into different cell types is a major challenge in modern biology. It has been known since the 1950s that all specialized cells in the body contain the same genome. So what then distinguishes one cell type from another? The answer is that different cells read the information contained in different parts of the genome. The machinery required to achieve this selective information recall resides primarily in so called transcription factors, molecules that switch genes on or off. Many other molecules are also involved in this process, including epigenetic regulators that help to densely pack the genome into the nucleus of a cell, or locally unpack it to allow gene expression. The scientists used a reprogramming method discovered by CRG senior researcher Thomas Graf and his team. With this precision tool in hand, they were able to study the dynamics of genome organization by comparing the changes in genome architecture and transcription at different times during reprogramming.

"We expected that transcription factors would first switch on certain genes, which then afterwards may force a re-organisation of the 3-D structure of the chromosome. Surprisingly, what we found is that in a large proportion of the genome, the transcription factors were actually promoting this re-organisation before the genes were switched on," explains Ralph Stadhouders, co-first author of the paper together with computational biologist Enrique Vidal.

"Our paper shows that transcription factors may play a completely new role in cell reprogramming. They do not only switch genes on and off, but also promote the architectural changes necessary to modify gene expression," says Thomas Graf, senior CRG group leader and lead investigator of this study. "It may have relevant implications for researchers worldwide studying gene regulation in general since we know now that the large-scale organization of the genome cannot be ignored. It also raises new questions about how these large changes can be brought about: possibly new mechanisms, perhaps even new machineries that are necessary to change certain areas of the genome," says Graf.

The findings, reported in Nature Genetics, indicate that genome architecture has important informational value for controlling gene expression during cell reprogramming, and is thus required for the specialized functions of a cell. "We are only scratching the surface of what could be critical, as-yet unrecognized mechanisms by which cells regulate gene expression," says co-principal investigator Marc A. Marti-Renom. "The new discovery might also be fundamental for development and for some development-related diseases and cancer," he concludes.

More information: Ralph Stadhouders et al. Transcription factors orchestrate dynamic interplay between genome topology and gene regulation during cell reprogramming, Nature Genetics (2018). Journal information: Nature Genetics Ralph Stadhouders et al. Transcription factors orchestrate dynamic interplay between genome topology and gene regulation during cell reprogramming,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41588-017-0030-7

Provided by Centre for Genomic Regulation
Researchers at the St. Antonius Hospital Utrecht/Nieuwegein and the University of Twente have developed software to better predict the risk of blood leaking around a patient's aortic stent. Last week, Richte Schuurmann, a Technical Physician, was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Twente for his research on this topic.

Each year, approximately 2700 people in the Netherlands undergo surgery for an aneurysm (dilation) in their abdominal aorta. These procedures usually involve inserting a stent into the aorta, using a minimally invasive surgical procedure. The purpose of this endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) procedure is to reduce the pressure on the aneurysm. A number of studies have shown that, within five years, approximately five percent of these patients experience leakage around the stent. This can cause renewed pressure on the aneurysm which, in the worst case scenario, could then rupture. If this were to happen it could have very serious consequences, possibly even resulting in the patient's death.

Researchers at the St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein and the University of Twente have developed and patented a new approach. Based on existing CT scans, this method is better at predicting the risk that a patient's aortic stent will leak.

How the stent works

The stent inserted into the aorta is shaped like a pair of trousers. At the top, it is anchored to the aorta by barbs. At the bottom, the stent's 'trouser legs' are inserted into the left and right iliac arteries. Ideally, the top of the stent should be located as close as possible to the lower renal artery. This maximizes the area of contact between the stent and the non-dilated section of aorta, creating the best possible connection. The top of the stent should preferably be located about 15 millimetres above the aneurysm. One month after surgery (and, often, once again a year after), the patient has a CT scan to check for any leakage, to see whether the aneurysm has shrunk, and to confirm that the stent is still in the right position. Dr. Schuurmann explains that "this is necessary because the human heart beats at least 30 million times a year, which means that the stent is exposed to considerable forces."

Based on CT images alone, it is currently difficult to predict which patients will be at increased risk of leakage. "However," Richte Schuurmann says, "at the moment we are only using a small part of the information contained in these images." To remedy this situation, the researchers developed software to accurately determine the coordinates (position) of the stent, the aneurysm and the arteries. This enables you to clearly visualize the total area of stent that is physically anchored to the arteries. It also shows whether the stent has been fitted 'snugly enough' into the aorta.

The results to date have been very encouraging. However, according to Dr. Schuurmann, more research is needed before this software can be routinely used in healthcare. For instance, the system has not yet been used "predictively." As a result, he is calling for extensive follow-up studies, involving data from an even larger group of patients.
The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN or Chinese Navy) commissioned its 26th Type 054A Frigate (Jiangkai II-class) "Rizhao" (hull number 598). The Commissioning ceremony took place on January 12, 2018 at Lushunkou naval base (Liaoning province). The frigate joins the PLAN North Sea Fleet. The previous Type 054A Frigate, 25th in the class, was commissioned in July last year.

The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN or Chinese Navy) commissioned its 26th Type 054A Frigate (Jiangkai II-class) "Rizhao" (hull number 598). The Commissioning ceremony took place on January 12, 2018 at Lushunkou naval base (Liaoning province). The frigate joins the PLAN North Sea Fleet. The previous Type 054A Frigate, 25th in the class, was commissioned in July last year.

Commissioning ceremony for Type 054A Frigate "Rizhao". PLAN picture.

There are now four Type 054A Frigates in the 10th destrpyer flottila of the PLAN North Sea Fleet: 576 Daqing (commissioned in 2015), 579 Handan (2015), 539 Wuhu (2017) and now 598 Rizhao (2018). However, two more frigates are still lacking for the unit to be considered complete: The new organization calls for six frigates and six destroyers in a fleet of destroyers, which corresponds to an expansion of around 50% compared to the previous format.



Type 054A Frigate

Based on the Type 054 Frigates, the Type 054A incorporates a larger number of more-advanced indigenous systems. The first of class entered service with the PLAN in January 2008.

Type 054A Frigates are fitted with 32 VLS (Vertical Launch System) cells for HQ-16 surface to air missiles, 8x YJ-83 (export designation C-803) anti-ship missiles, a H/PJ-26 76mm main gun, two H/PJ12 seven-barreled 30mm CIWS guns (for frigates 1 to 16 in the series) or H/PJ11 eleven-barreled 30mm CIWS for new vessels starting with Huanggang (hull number 577) the seventeenth ship of the class. Two triple YU-7 torpedo launchers and YU-8 anti-submarine rocket launchers are fitted for ASW warfare.

Commissioning ceremony for Type 054A Frigate "Rizhao". PLAN picture.

Rizhao was launched on April 1, 2017 at the Huangpu shipyard in Guangzhou. This first line surface combatant is the 13th frigate of the class built in this shipyard and the 26th in service for the Chinese Navy, which started introducing this new class of versatile frigate 10 years ago in January 2008.

The Rizhao frigate is 134.1 meters long, 31 meters high and displaces 4 270 tons full load. The vessel has a range of over 4,000 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 18 knots.

Note that the frigate entered service 104 days ahead compared the average observed on the 25 previous vessels. It is expected that there will be two more Type 054A frigates commissioning this year, with Anyang by the end of April and the Xianning by October.

The Type 054A is, pending the arrival of its successor Type 054B electric propulsion, the best anti-submarine warfare platform of the Chinese Navy. It is equipped with a complete suite dedicated to this function, including a hull sonar, a towed variable depth sonar, an acoustic control system, submarine communication and of course torpedoes.



With information and pictures from our colleagues at Eastpendulum
Russias Defense Ministry and the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC) have come to an agreement that the Northern Shipyard in St. Petersburg in northwest Russia will start the construction of landing helicopter docks in 2020, a source in Russias defense industry told TASS.

Russias Defense Ministry and the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC) have come to an agreement that the Northern Shipyard in St. Petersburg in northwest Russia will start the construction of landing helicopter docks in 2020, a source in Russias defense industry told TASS.

Priboy LHD scale model showcased by Krylov during Army 2016 exhibition.



"The Defense Ministry and the United Shipbuilding Corporation have come to an agreement that the Northern Shipyard will build landing helicopter docks and Leader-class destroyers," the source said.



"The shipyard is currently carrying out large-scale work to reconstruct its manufacturing facilities. It is also erecting a shop to build ships of the type," the source added.



"The shipyard is planned to build two landing helicopter docks and then launch the construction of the destroyers. An R&D work on the landing helicopter docks will begin in 2018. The construction of the lead ship is expected to begin in 2020 and it will be delivered to the Navy in 2024," the source said.



"The construction of the first and the sole serial-produced landing helicopter dock is planned to begin in 2022 and the ship is expected to be delivered to the customer in 2026," the source added.

TASS does not have any official confirmation of this information.

Priboy LHD scale model showcased by Krylov during Army 2016 exhibition.



Earlier, another source told TASS that the landing helicopter docks would have a CODAG power plant.



According to the source, Kamov Ka-52K (NATO reporting name: Hokum-B) helicopters will form the mainstay of the ships air wing, the source added.



The delivery of the helicopters and the ships will be synchronized. The ships will carry Ka-27 (Helix), Ka-29 (Helix-B) and Ka-31 helicopters as well.



Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov said earlier that the first landing helicopter dock would be built approximately by 2022.

Earlier, another source told TASS that the landing helicopter docks would have a CODAG power plant.

According to the source, Kamov Ka-52K (NATO reporting name: Hokum-B) helicopters will form the mainstay of the ships air wing, the source added.

The delivery of the helicopters and the ships will be synchronized. The ships will carry Ka-27 (Helix), Ka-29 (Helix-B) and Ka-31 helicopters as well.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov said earlier that the first landing helicopter dock would be built approximately by 2022.

 Copyright 2018 TASS. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Comment by Navy Recognition: About the Priboy LHD



Russian Krylov State Research Center has developed the Priboy LHD on its own initiative. It is significantly different from the Mistral landing helicopter dock designed by DCNS. Priboy is intended for seaborne movement of troops and military equipment and landing on beaches during amphibious operation in conjunction with other naval forces. It can support projection of soldiers and hardware, take part in offensive mining actions and mount sonar beacons of suspended array surveillance systems.

The Priboy ship has a displacement of 23,000 tones, a length of 200 meters, a width of 34 meters, a designed draught of 7.5 meters, a full speed of 20 knots, a cruising speed of 14 knots, an endurance of 6,000 miles and a cruising capacity of 30 days.

The ship can withstand storms of force 6-7 on the Beaufort scale (strong breeze/near gale).

The helicopter carrier is planned to be equipped with a gas-turbine main propulsion plant. The ships crew totals about 400. The vessel can transport 500-900 marines, about 50 infantry fighting vehicles and up to 10 tanks.

Up to 12 military transport and search and rescue helicopters can be based on the Priboy ship. It can also carry six landing boats with a cargo-carrying capacity of 45 tons and six assault boats on davits.

The Priboy's armament suite includes two anti-air gun-missile combat modules, two close-in weapon systems and one 76mm naval gun.
On January 13 and 14, the Brazilian Navy (Marinha do Brasil) and the company Itaguai Construcoes Navais (ICN) transferred the first of three sections of the S40 "Riachuelo" submarine to the final assembly line, on Madeira Island, in the Itaguai Naval Complex. S40 Riachuelo is Brazil's first Scorpene type submarine of the Submarine Development Program (PROgrama de SUBmarinos PROSUB) .

On January 13 and 14, the Brazilian Navy (Marinha do Brasil) and the company Itaguai Construcoes Navais (ICN) transferred the first of three sections of the S40 "Riachuelo" submarine to the final assembly line, on Madeira Island, in the Itaguai Naval Complex. S40 Riachuelo is Brazil's first Scorpene type submarine of the Submarine Development Program (PROgrama de SUBmarinos PROSUB) .

S40 Submarine entry into the Main Hall of the construction site. Brazilian Navy picture

The five-kilometer journey was completed in 11 hours, starting at the Steel Structures Manufacturing Unit (UFEM), which is also located in Itaguai, Rio de Janeiro (RJ). The logistics operation required a months planning and included the withdrawal of stretches of the electricity grid. On day 14, the most complex stage of the operation occurred, with occasional traffic interruptions, to give passage to the 320-wheeled special vehicle that transported the 619 tons of the three sections, with 39.86 meters of length and 12.30 meters in height.



The two remaining sections of the Riachuelo, weighing 487 tonnes and measuring 30 meters, will soon be transferred separately to the Construction Shipyard, where the submarine will enter final assembly, with the aim of being launched into the sea in the second half of 2018.

S40 Submarine entry into the Main Hall of the construction site. Brazilian Navy picture

The PROSUB program calls for three more conventional units (Humaita S41, Tonelero S42 and Ango Stura S43) and the first Brazilian submarine with nuclear propulsion (SSN). French company Naval Group covers the design, production, and technology transfer required for four Scorpene-class conventional submarines, and the design assistance and production of the non-nuclear part of the SSN.



In service date for S40 is set for 2020 (three years later than planned).



The Scorpene-class was also selected by the navies of Chile, Malaysia and India. The Chilean Scorpene-class O'Higgins and Carrera were completed in 2005 and 2006, respectively. In 2009, the Royal Malaysian Navy commissioned Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Abdul Razak. The Indian Navy commissioned Kalvari in 2017.




It also does not reflect the views of the Firm of which the Author is working for.





Since the inception of this blog, the Author has avoided writing views and opinions of his clients or views and opinions which third parties has paid him to write.





The Author has maintained editorial independence since Day One.





Any individual or group affected by the opinions and views of the Author can write the author thru mangubat.patricio@gmail.com.

Opinions and views expressed in this blog are personal views of the Author and does not involve organisations and companies being serviced by the Author as part of his profession as a Strategic Communications professional.
Canan Kaftancoglu, who has been elected as head of the Istanbul Province Chapter of main parliamentary opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP) of Turkey, has been targeted by the pro-government media.

Turkish pro-government media and representatives of the authorities have launched a smear campaign against Kaftancoglu, in the press and on social media.

One of the main accusations made against her is that she recognized Armenian Genocide, by means of Twitter, on April 24, 2012, the anniversary day of this tragedy.

Today in history: Armenian Genocide started, Canan Kaftancoglu had tweeted on that day. We commemorate our murdered Armenian citizens, at 19:15 at Taksim [Square in Istanbul].
YEREVAN.  The next talk between the Armenian and the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministers Edward Nalbandian and Elmar Mammadyarov, and which is expected in the second half of January, will not make considerable progress in the process to settle the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Russian and Western analysts have told 168 Zham (Hour) newspaper of Armenia.

In all likelihood, the meeting will not end with any breakthrough; there are no prerequisites for breakthrough. The foreign minister of Armenia uses desperate words, whereas the Azerbaijani side does not change its bellicose rhetoric. If the [OSCE Minsk Group] mediators can reach agreement on the introduction of mechanisms [to investigate border incidents], it will be the biggest achievement this year, said the American diplomat Paul Goble.

In Russian political scientist Alexander Skakovs view, Russia and the US currently are not intensively engaged in the Karabakh conflict; and that is why the conflict is not resolved and casualties are recorded at the border.

British analyst Neil MacFarlane, for his part, finds that the Karabakh conflict is a conflict that cannot be resolved, or breakthrough is achieved, with one ministerial meeting, in the case when the arrangements reached during the [Armenia-Azerbaijan] presidential meetings are disregarded, wrote 168 Zham.
Philippine President, Canadian PM have sock battle at APEC summit

World's 3rd richest man is considering opening family office in Dubai or New York

Global energy industry is at turning point

Lagarde says ECB may have to slow growth to control inflation

Orban: Europe is drawn into war

Australia prefers US nuclear submarines despite French criticism

Terrorist group detained in Iran

Dodon released from house arrest in Moldova

Soldier who carelessly kills colleague arrested in Armenia

Armenian Defense Ministry denies reports on shooting at Azerbaijani positions

Criminal case opened over injury of Armenian soldier

Tehran denies Washington's statement about supplying explosives to Yemen

Foreign Ministry: Azerbaijani President keeps threatening Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenian population

Kamala Harris says US is committed to Asia for the long term

Iranian authorities impose sanctions on French carmakers

Armenian Security Council Secretary and Indian PM's Advisor discuss security cooperation

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

Prosecutor General's Office: Azerbaijan makes every effort to terrorize peaceful population of Artsakh

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

Turkey expects to start work on the gas hub in early 2023

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

Armenian CC President and Ambassador of Poland discuss cooperation issues

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

Pope reiterates Vatican's readiness to mediate between Moscow, Kyiv

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

Indian drunk man wrapps python around his neck and almost dies from strangulation

Finland to spend 139 million euros on building border fence with Russia

Politico: Ukraine warned allies it may not recover from new Russian attacks on energy systems

Singapore to not take sides in geopolitical conflicts

Boris Johnson paid 276,000 to speak to US insurers

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
A meeting of the foreign ministers will take place over North Korea on January 16 in Vancouver.

The meeting is organized by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his Canadian counterpart Christia Freeland, AP reported.

Representatives of 20 countries will participate in the meeting. The meeting in Vancouver is designed to intensify the campaign of maximum pressure on Pyongyang, which Washington defends to not let North Korea proceeds in developing weapons. The participants will discuss cooperation over sanctions, the prevention of arms proliferation and diplomatic efforts.

The meeting is attended by foreign ministers and high-ranking diplomats of countries that sent troops or humanitarian aid to the UN command that supported South Korea in the struggle against the North and its allies during the Korean War of 1950-53.

China and Russia were not invited.
A vehicle went off road in Armenias capital city of Yerevan and fell to the Getar River, on Tuesday at around 5:30am.

The driver, R. Galstyan, died, whereas the passenger, A. Ter-Grigoryan, suffered injuries and was hospitalized.

The Investigative Committee of Armenia has launched an investigation into this road accident.

The young man who was killed in the crash is Robert Galstyan, the son of Stepan Galstyan, Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Armenia.
YEREVAN.  Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) Chairman, National Assembly Tsarukyan Faction head, and tycoon Gagik Tsarukyan has not ruled out the possibility of their supporting the presidential candidate which the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) will nominate.

But Tsarukyan on Tuesday told reporters in Parliament that this will depend on who the candidate will be.

If today our people have given the full right to the Republicans to choose without us [the Tsarukyan Faction] and without [the opposition NA] Way Out [Faction], what is the talk about? he added.

He stressed, however, that the PAP has not discussed whether to form a coalition with the RPA.

And speaking about the actions of the Armenian government, Gagik Tsarukyan highlighted that they do not have individual problems with Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan, and that they just draw conclusions based on the present-day situation.
STEPANAKERT.  The OSCE Mission conducted a planned monitoring of the ceasefire regime on the border of Artsakh and Azerbaijan, on the Akna-Hindarkh road section on Tuesday in accordance with the arrangement reached with the authorities of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh Republic).

From the positions of the Defense Army of the Republic of Artsakh, the monitoring was conducted by Field Assistant to the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office (CiO) Mihail Olaru (Moldova) and staff member of the Office of the CiO Personal Representative Martin Schuster (Germany).

From the opposite side of the border, the monitoring was conducted by Field Assistant to the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Ghenadie Petrica.

The monitoring passed in accordance with the agreed schedule.

From the Artsakh side, the monitoring mission was accompanied by representatives of the Republic of Artsakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defense.
Armenia Police officers have found and detained Iranian citizen Reza O. (born in 1983) near a building in capital city Yerevan, on Monday at 11:50pm.

Reza O. was being searched by Iranian law enforcers ever since December 27, 2016, under the Iranian Islamic Penal Code article on computer crimes, and for committing a crime under the article of the Iranian law on intensifying the penalty of those charged with deception, corruption, and extortion.

Reza . has been taken to a Yerevan Police detention hall.

The General Prosecutors Office and the INTERPOL National Central Bureau of Armenia have been informed about his being found.
Armenia will sign Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, head of Council of Europes Violence against Women Division Bridget O'loughlin said.

Armenia will sign the convention on January 18, she told reporters.

The Convention obliges the governments which have ratified it to take specific steps to counter all forms of violence against women: from stalking and sexual harassment to domestic violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation.

The convention boosts measures of prevention and protection and should lead to an increase in the investigation, prosecution and conviction of perpetrators of violence, in each county where the treaty is ratified.
China called the Vancouver international meeting on North Korea "illegal", as major players like Beijing and Moscow were not present, AFP reported.

The absence of Russia and China from the two days of talks in Vancouver, which began on Monday, shows the holes in Washington's bid to form a unified global front against North Korea's nuclear threat.

"The most important relevant parties of the Korean peninsula issue haven't taken part in the meeting so I don't think the meeting is legal or representative," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular briefing.

Lu denounced the "Cold War mentality" of "relevant parties" -- without naming nations.

China, which is North Korea's main economic and diplomatic ally, has criticised the Vancouver talks and called for sanctions discussions to remain within the United Nations framework.
YEREVAN.- Armenian Defence Minister Vigen Sargsyan received on Tuesday Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the USA to Armenia Richard Mills.

During the meeting, the sides summed up the results of the Armenian-US bilateral cooperation of 2017 in the sphere of defense and outlined the main directions of cooperation in 2018.

Armenian Defence Minister briefly presented the directions, which will be included in the 7-year program of Armed Forces modernization and over which it is expected to develop cooperation with the US.

In turn, Richard Mills stressed the readiness of the US Department of Defense to continue the cooperation with the Armenian Defence Ministry. An agreement was reached in order to hold Armenian-US bilateral defense consultations in Yerevan in 2018, during which the overall vision of further cooperation will be agreed.

Issues related to regional security were also discussed during the meeting.
The delegation led by the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Armenia, Colonel-General Movses Hakobyan participated in North Atlantic Alliance Military Committee Conference on the level of Chiefs of General Staff on Tuesday in Brussels.

According to the press service of the Defense Ministry of Armenia, 2 sessions were held during the conference, including in the format of the countries participating in Resolute Support in Afghanistan.

Security and stability issues in the southern neighborhood of Europe, as well as challenges and ways to withstand them were discussed.

The session in the format of Resolute Support was aimed at presenting the current issues of the coalition operations, discussion of problematic issues and development of common positions.
YEREVAN.- The next president should know foreign languages, have broad connections in both Diaspora and Armenia, enjoy high reputation, and what is most important, be an impartial individual who has never been in politics and has never been a member of any political party, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan noted following the solemn ceremony of handing Order of Homeland to National Hero of Armenia Hovhannes Chekijyan. President Sargsyan had a meeting with some of the intellectuals that attended the ceremony around a tea table, the press service of the Armenian Presidents Office reported.

At the beginning of the meeting noting that during the past years he periodically held meetings with intellectuals, President Serzh Sargsyan once again underlined the role and the mission of the intellectuals in the life of the country and offered to have an open and sincere discussion about Armenia and its future, particularly, under the light of the new governance system as a result of the Constitutional changes. Serzh Sargsyan expected to hear the positions, suggestions, as well as concerns and assessments of the intellectuals on the reality in the country.

The participants of the meeting highlighted such meetings and discussions, talked about their visions of Armenias future, issues of public concern, including education of the youth, the huge role of the state to educate good citizens, preservation of the purity of the Armenian language and a number of other issues.

The President also answered the questions of the intellectuals that referred to the security of the country and foreign policy. The participants of the meeting asked President Sargsyan, as a person who has run very important positions for years and has passed through the hardships of the war, what criteria the next president of the Republic should meet.

Presenting his vision on the next president of the Republic of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan noted that the person to assume that post should be someone who has passed a serious path, has reputation inside the country and abroad, and can properly present Armenia in other countries, meaning to fulfill his representative functions.
KABC(LOS ANGELES) -- Authorities in Southern California are searching for a suspect in the mysterious killing of three people over the weekend.



On Saturday afternoon, police responded to a home in Palmdale after a family member asked them to check on his family, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office said.



Inside the home were the three victims: Richard Gardner II, 78; his wife, Pepper Gardner, 56; and Richard Gardner III, 52, the sheriff's office said. The Los Angeles Times reported the males victims were father and son.



"It appears the victims suffered some trauma to their bodies, but the exact cause of death will be determined by the coroner," the sheriff's office said. The Los Angeles County Coroner's office said the sheriff's department has placed a security hold on releasing information from the coroner.



No suspects have not been identified, the sheriff's office said, adding that anyone with information is urged to call the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Homicide Bureau at 323-890-5500.



Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Do her fans (or anyone's fans) care enough about their chart status to buy multiple copies of their album?!?! Why???????

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Just wanna say thank you to all the fans who donated to our @camilabuyout. With 2,000$ raised we have almost 200 albums purchased all thanks to YOU GUYS. we did it together. Thank you to everyone who came to our NYC #camila buyout also! Let's do this guys. #1 is in reach. Stream! pic.twitter.com/5hJXjS7ZJd  Anthony Schembari (@AntSchembari) January 14, 2018





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jfc, this is ridiculous

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lmaooo lordt



imagine putting this kind of fundraising effort into a good cause

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also i hope they bought them all at once so it only counts for one sale

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they want her to break 100K and for her to beat 5H and be seen on the level of an Ariana or a Taylor. it's all about bragging rights and they definitely care enough to buy six extra copies for $3.50

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This newfangled stan behavior of buying multiple albums so your fave can do good numbers is so weird. Back in the day albums went to #1 bc they were good or popular

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the first time i head about this buying multiple copies thing was when nsync released no string attached, back in the paleozoic era

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lol! no wonder they couldnt keep it on the shelves

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so few people do this it has like zero impact on the charts tbh

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This is pretty normal in Japan. There are multiple versions released; first press/version A/version B/normal edition with the specific aim of boosting sales. It's how AKB maintained their million streak for so long.

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I saw a post on twitter about a kpop stan buying 30,000 copies of one album 

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that's dumb cause her album would do impressive numbers (for a pop debut) regardless.



i still don't get the hype though.

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I won't even listen to it for free.

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I am here for the gif, it makes me lol every time

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her label and team has been spending all the money in the world to make sure shes a thing. ive never seen someone first album get so much promotion and money behind it. the album sales better compensate the budget they gave her



but at the end of the day, shell never be it lmao

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She worked with very expensive people too, like Pharrell and Sia. The amount of money the label has put out for a debut album is insane.

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did someone say big mac?

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ad

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I hate it when dudes wear neckties even though they ain't got no necks. The orange fuck probably only wears clip-ons because he never worked out how to tie a real one.

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when I opened spotify (premium) earlier I got my first ever pop up to check out an artist- it was her lol

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me too... i deleted the app

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screaming

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What do people do with these extra albums



Edited at 2018-01-16 01:46 am (UTC)

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Probably give them away. My friend was one of these multiple CD buyers, only hers was for Demi Lovato. She ended up giving me one of them as a bday present, and I was like...eh thanks lol.

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lmao this is me with Demi as well. I have five copies of TMYLM and the vinyl. I don't even own a vinyl player.

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I wonder what they do with all of those.



I remember someone did this for the Katy Perry album before Witness and donated the excess to a kid's hospital.



I hope they don't do that here, this album might kill those children.

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try to pass them off to friends/family i'd guess

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I thought they returned them after the billboard chart comes out...

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Wasnt a fan of this album. Sounded very generic. Into It is sort of ok tho

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I was confused by the link so I went to go check and its a makeup kit thing + the album but you have the option to buy the album or kit only lool

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I never understood the need to buy multiple albums to help someone chart. Especially when they're already successful and rich as fuck. The most I'll do is purchase one and stream. There's always new ways artists/their fans try to cheat the system, damn.

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The album came on shuffle last night and there's a song she sings Spanish in? I couldn't stop laughing.

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It's not as bad as I would have thought, but she obviously looks better blonde.



I am so sick of my hair, I don't know what the fuck to do with it. I haven't dyed it in like 10 years at least and wasn't trying to dye again til it starts getting super gray, but idk.

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It's a really flat brunette, like box haircolor

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What do you use on your hair? And what is your concern?

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It's just thin, flat, plain brown hair that looks greasy way faster than it should. Right now I am using Verb Volume Shampoo and Conditioner, and at first they seemed to be working pretty well but now my hair is back to its usual shenanigans. I know I should probably do the no shampoo thing to see if that helps, but it's daunting.

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It's not as bad as I would have thought, but she obviously looks better blonde



That's not Blake Lively.

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ew

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I used to dye my hair occasionally when I was younger, but I don't see the point anymore. I'm fine with my natural colour, the price is ridiculous, and it just destroys your hair.

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I feel the same. I just stopped dying it one day and never looked back.

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:( my hair's my natural dark brown with quite a bit of gray.



i follow guy tang on IG and he does such amazing work. wish i could do those colors to my hair but my hair is so dark it would take way too many processes to get it light enough....and i learned my lesson the hard way 2 years ago. sigh.

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Just get some bond enforcer and a good toner, dialight preferred, and lighten your heart out. Also, a good mask.

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Guy tang is the BEST!

I wish he would make his hair dyes for non cosmetic professionals

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Amazon babe,just use the matching developer.

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My hair is purple and I should grow up tbh

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No keep it purple

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My hair has been a crayola color for most of my adult life. I'm 34. They'll cremate me with crayola hair. It's currently a teal to purple ombre and I love it.

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don't grow up purple hair is better than bitter adulthood

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just make sure ur clothes are grown up and you'll be good

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I've always been ashamed of my body and not able to match colours other than black and lighter black so yeah tbh I'm good I'm slick

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mine is also purple and idgaf about made up social cues

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Nah. Being an adult with wild colored hair means you're probably already settled into a job that won't care. But being 17 with wild hair and trying to even get a job at a grocery store is dicey. Mine is currently pale pink but it makes me "memorable" in a good way (so that when I go to the bank or to get coffee or to the doctor they already know they know me) and because I'm an adult, it's obviously not just trying to be rebellious. Basically other adults wish they could get away with it so keep on with it and make them jealous.

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I hope when she goes back to blonde it fries the fuck out of her hair 

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trying out for Mommy Dearest 2

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dont fuck w me fellas!

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Watch. She'll do it and Faye will suddenly be all excited to talk about her experience. Watch. She'll do it and Faye will suddenly be all excited to talk about her experience.

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She gets an inexplicable amount of roles for someone who isn't a very good actress.



I just realized that her blonde hair is really what makes her stand out from other actresses and got her the "stunning" label she's had since Gossip Girl came out. With dark hair she blends into the background. There's nothing unique or exciting about her face. She's just another pretty woman.



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lol I remember ages ago, I think it was when Allison Williams went blonde and she called men simple for suddenly being interested when a woman goes blonde, there was a thread about blondes vs brunettes and someone said "brunettes have stunning faces. blond is for the weak."

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I'm a blonde and I remember this! I was SHOOK, tbh

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lol she is so plain without that long blonde hair hope she gives her surgeon and colorist 10% of her earnings like she would a manager

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lmfao

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omg

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I don't even think she's plain she's flat out ugly imo...I never got the hype

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ive been coloring my hair red since I was 17 but now that my hair is growing in silver (at 25!) ive been thinking about going natural or just dying my hair silver and letting my roots do their thing.

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i want to try silver so badly but i don't think it would look right with my skintone

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My hair is boring right now because I can't afford to get anything other than my roots done. I spent so long slowly lightening my almost black hair too. I miss my magenta balayage. I want to do something more like this next.

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I just had a dark emerald green in September!!! I LOVEDDDDDD it but the upkeep was horrendous - even with color sealing shampoo and conditioner and sealant, it faded to teal after about three weeks ://////

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I'm so over dyeing my hair. I look best with my natural hair colour anyway.

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The brown doesn't look as bad on her as I was expecting.



I decided to grow out my dyed hair about 2-3 years ago. Now the dyed hair is gone and I wanna dye it again... lol

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I have medium brown hair with natural blonde and light brown highlights. Growing up I was not a fan of my hair color because I look so different from my sisters. Ive grown to really appreciate my hair color for its uniqueness, especially since my shade is not very common for black people. I have never colored my hair and dont really have the desire because I would just choose a shade of brown that is already apart of my hair.

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I started letting my natural dark hair grow out from blonde, and I have sooooo much grey it's shocking. Its a different texture altogether and makes me look tired and my hair dirty TBH. I'm hoping I can take care of it through highlighting and still be brunette because going back to blonde is too much work. That's my current struggle, and I'm just putting it in buns all the time cause it's horrifying me lol

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good for ha. ha racist ass old enough now and it seems like she got all the crazy out of her system. he looks slow af in the face but i bet the dick good so hopefully she pops out some kids and fucks off to convict island

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my god!

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This will never not be funny!!! 

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good lord

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My God...wtf was she going through?!

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THIS is a Miranda comment if I've EVER seen one LOLOL

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congrats, I guess.

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I'm sure it will last forever. I'm sure it will last forever.

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lol where is this gif from?

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iconique

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Hey Toby, FUCK OFF.

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mte

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Well it could. Haven't they been together for like 10 years or something? They broke up and apparently that made them realize they couldn't live without each other lol.

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I honestly assumed theyve been married for months. But cute for them I guess.

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congrats to them!

I hope they last

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La da di da di

We just got married

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they're a fascinating couple to /me but i truly wonder if "sweet, down to earth girl" miley is just another phase she's trying on. also liam really did wait on her to get all that experimental shit out of the way lmao like i really can't believe they're back together tbh

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She is "sweet and down to earth" to white people.

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i love her on the voice but i hate her in nearly every other circumstance. she could stand to have an IRL editor lmao

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Does Liam having any movies coming up? Or was Hunger Games it for him?

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he wasn't expecting Independence Day to flop that much. it was supposed to be his new thing. but it was that mess.



he is in a movie with rebel wilson, I remember pics of them filming.

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He's in Pacific Rim 2.

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good for them...

live long and prosper..

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Lol he got back as soon as hunger games fame died out.

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The whole family seems weird, with the sis-in-law trying to copp mileys style n all.

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This.



I hate them.



I actually liked crazy Miley and genuinely believed that mess was who she really was, the fact she toned it down for a man makes her pathetic in my book. Never fooled by this bitch again!

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He's just such a weird choice for her but this will def keep his name in the press.

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Right lol

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yes but the one time i reported it and got that fan upset was the real time

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yes lmao i came in the post just to make this comment.

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Right? Who cares at this point?

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i'm the same age as miley and lately i can't decide if i'm jealous of people who've had someone in their life that they've loved for so long and have decided they want to spend the rest of their lives with, or if i'm thankful i'm not limiting my growth by tying myself down to someone i've known since i was basically a kid.



anyways, i hope he treats her well now.

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the latter, trust me

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Definitely the latter. I spent all of my teens and the first half of my twenties single, and I'm positive I'm the better for it. I was lonely as hell a lot of the time, but it allowed me to grow in a way I know I would not have it I'd been in a long-term relationship.

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I mean, considering people who get married later in life are more likely to actually stay together with their partner, I feel like the latter would be better, generally speaking.

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I hope its the latter, I'm a little older than her, but I'm still trying to figure things out~ in what *I* really want.... let alone be married & have kids.. Practically, everyone I went to high school with is married and has kids and I'm just like... whyyy??? \_()_/



I just don't get the rush, but then there is a lot of pressure from society so its like you can't win??? idk.



Edited at 2018-01-16 05:54 am (UTC)

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I'm in my early 20s and I used to be sad that I didn't have anyone in my life and never even had a romantic relationship. Not anymore though. I don't think I would be able to handle all the stress. Besides, I have too many personal problems.



When I see people around my age having kids and stuff, it stresses me out. No idea how they do it. And I definitely don't want their life.

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Relationships give me a ton of anxiety

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Both? I guess. I'd really like someone in my corner who I don't have to spend months opening up to because they were there for all the really awkward years but at the same time, I'm glad I've been able to do the things I've done and had the freedom to do what I wanted without having a two-body problem.



Sometimes, I look at my cousins who married young and now have kids and I wonder if they limited their careers or they ended up in certain situations because they didn't have the benefit of being a few steps up the ladder career wise and having some real cash behind them. That's not to say they don't seem happy, of course, or that work wrinkles won't iron themselves out later but urgh, well I'm glad I did what I did and that's enough.

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the latter, for sure

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The latter, I was in a relationship from 22 to 28ish and while I don't regret it, I wish it had ended sooner. I feel like I spent all of my good years with him instead of dating/getting to know other people.

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Im 25 and everyone I went to high school with or at least most of the age married or/and hace kids. I definitely feel the pressure and Im not sure about marriage yet even if Ive been in a 3 years relationship but every persons life goes at a different phase. Im trying to do my things at my own time.

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So who is she going to be when they break up?

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Her chaning her image and then shitting on the image she changed from will never not be funny to me. Like sis, you was with the appropriation when it was getting you coin and you got bored like you always do and try another image on.

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hell hath no fury like a white liberal male called racist



You've lost you mind over a movie opinion that diverges from yours. What a strange spectacle. lmfaoooooo the irony

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It weirds me out when white people use a certain form of language when disagreeing with black people.

Ex. "Nah dawg" when it doesn't seem to match any previous forms he used





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That struck me as well.

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I cringed when I read that

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Ugh right?

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mfte

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its so demoralizing when yts Black it up for ya and ignorant af

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omg I HATE THAT. I notice it ALL the time - I've seen women do it with gay men as well. Like what are you doing and please speak the way you normally do.

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I find it super telling how quick some white people are to slip into slang they never use EXCEPT when talking down to a Black person.

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yep, dude exposed himself

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i def think it's deliberate because i do the some thing with douchey guys and say "k bro" a lot when they piss me off.

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Yeah, that was really bad.

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Yeah no, I notice that white ppl feel like they have the license to do that in convos if it serves the purpose of condescension.

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yup

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Yuuuuup! Transparent as fuck.

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ALSO Ryan Adams is giving me flashbacks to East Coast liberal (idk where he's really from) dogwhistle language.....

This whole exchange:

Nowhere does the piece even imply that AAFCA speaks for all black critics or all black people. Good lord, what a simpleminded, aggressively chip-your-shoulder thing to suggest.



I mean. Accusing him of having a chip on his shoulder, the way he says this man is "screeching" about racism.

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Oh, no. I was looking forward to seeing this. What happens that has people upset? Spoil me. /don't want to support it now

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Basically the movie is about a violent racist cop being redeemed in the end. Ive never seen it and have no desire to, but thats the basic plot.

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lol he isn't redeemed. And in the end he doesn't even know if he is onto the right guy who committed a crime, but decides to start a road trip to hunt him down regardless. So still a shit, racist human being throughout the whole movie.



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is he redeemed though? i didnt see him as redeemed at all

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Maybe you should watch it before commenting on it

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he's not redeemed at all but go off i guess

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Like everyone said he's not redeemed but also that's not the basic plot at all. His story is a part of Angela's story. If you want an opinion on a film you gotta see it, sorry.

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I didn't get that from the film. You do start to feel sorry for him but he isn't really redeemed. From my view the film was about how grief destroys people and how, once someone goes passed a certain point, they stop respecting the law.

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Just watch it and form your own opinion tbh

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Mte, i was looking forward to it but felt apprehensive after reading reviews :/ I ended up liking it a lot tbh, i appreciated what it said about anger, vengeance, justice and cause & effect (it reminded me of a greek tragedy in some ways).



But that's just one way of reading the film, whereas looking at it in the light of BLM and race and racism in America, it definitely didn't deliver. If you're establishing a character as a racist asshole in the beginning of the movie, it's strange to not address it at all later while specifically taking the time to paint him in shades of gray. I wouldn't say he's redeemed at all - i take issue with ppl calling it a redemption arc, both and the protagonist are clearly shown as morally gray in the end - but it's callous to leave out that aspect of his history, especially in today's socio-political climate.



One critic pointed out that it might've been a deliberate choice on the director's part because he isn't from the USA and lacks the cultural knowledge/sensitivity for a more nuanced discussion of racism in that context. which is possible, but it wouldn't have been so hard to get consultants or to at least flesh out the 3 poc roles/have more black characters...he handled the topic pretty ineptly as it was

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It's not as bad as the comments make it out to be. I went into the movie expecting a lot worse.

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I don't think it's as bad as people are making it out to be, but it's definitely frustrating and tone deaf. Most of the characters are pretty bad people to be honest, and none of them really face any sort of consequences for being horrible. The theme of grief that runs through the entire film tempers it a lot, but I still think a more satisfying ending, for me at least, would have been for most if not all of the mains to actually have to face what they were doing and understand why it was destructive, rather than the more 'grief makes people do weird things' way it's framed as.



Because of this I can't really disagree when people say it's racist, sexist, homophobic - these are all things specifically addressed in the movie - but played off as simply a way of life, and not in a nuanced way at all. You need to kind of remove it from modern day society in a way, because it's not reflective of what's going on right now at all, and that can be really frustrating. Someone here called it set in a fantasy land that's not the US, and that's about right. I'm not American, and I could very much tell the writer/director wasn't American either.



That being said, the racist cop isn't redeemed (he faces consequences that feel inadequate for an openly racist cop, but that's far from being redeemed), and it's absolutely not a blue lives matter movie, which I also saw some people saying.



It's a movie about horrible people trying to work through grief, and I found myself both connecting with it and thinking that the second half especially could have been written to make much better points than were ultimately made.



Edited at 2018-01-16 12:44 pm (UTC)

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One review said she uses the n-word. Like...whyyy?

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You can just kind of tell it was written by a tone deaf white liberal who's not terribly familiar with American racial politics.



I disagree with all the people who say that Sam Rockwell's racist cop character isn't given a redemption arc. Are you meant to think that he's a perfect angel by the end of the story? No. But in context of the movie's black-and-grey morality (most of the characters are at least mildly awful, and intentionally so) his arc is clearly about him moving past his insecurities in order to become a somewhat more selfless person/a lighter shade of grey. (Though granted, I interpreted the ending to indicate that he + Frances McDormand's character weren't actually going to go through with their vigilante plans.)



It might have worked better if his character was just generically short-tempered/impulsive/insecure, but they play up the racist angle and it's just awkward? He reads a letter from Woody Harrelson's (recently deceased) chief cop character telling him "oh, being a good cop is about being compassionate and I know you're not actually terrible" and that's more-or-less enough for him to magically stop being racist. IDK. It just feels like it's in the script because McDonagh knows it's a stereotypical "bad cop" quality and it gets resolved a little too neatly.

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it pretty deliberately frames racism and police overreach as simply a mark of a nuanced character with ~problems, and not an actual character defect, and very annoyed that people here are saying this is about grief making you terrible, and not a perfectly understandable expression of grief (one that frankly makes sense even from a systemic point of view) being responded to police intimidation (or reasonably seeming police intimidation) and it's escalation from there. like the worst part of it from me is the framing that the police and ordinary citizens have an equal about of power, and framing the main characters antagonism toward each from that view. That's just bloody fucking stupid, and that's probably where people are getting blue lives matter from it.



Maybe I'm also tired of seeing black people getting hurt because of white people conflict, and the conflicting white people feeling allied in the end, because the black people were just props in their white bullshit.

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the biggest problem this movie has is that it came out when it did, so people are projecting narratives on it that aren't there.



everyone in the movie is terrible. they all say stupid shit. it's Missouri, and having been there, that's not a stretch to hear cops talk like that. The only cop in the movie that we could call a hero is the black cop. Woody's character is a dick, and Sam's is a racist with a hair temper who off screen beat a black kid. When Woody dies he leaves Sam a letter saying be better. So Sam thinks he's found the killer, and tries to get the evidence. but it's not a redemption of him since he decides being better is a road trip to off someone.



Everyone in this movie is terrible. And idk why we have to have movies where people everyone has to be nice and perfect. The movie isn't about a racist cop either fwiw, it's about a woman whose daughter was murdered and she's drowning in grief and guilt. she isn't the most likable either. she's got a lot of anger and no place to put it. no healthy place anyway. But for such a "racist" movie, it's interesting that the most intelligent cop is black, the best friend who tries to give Frances moral support and does give her a job, is black. (and yes, screwed with by the racist cop) and the guy who saves her billboards is black, and the one thing they all agree on is cops suck. we're not supposed to like or root for Sam's character, whose not on screen for more than maybe 20 minutes of the movie. It does challenge you in asking if identifying with why people do what they do, should give them a pass. but people who see Sam's character as redeemed, i think it speaks more to the person saying that than what's on screen.



I think McDonaugh has done better work, but he doesn't write about people who are likable. I didn't even like this movie, though it has great performances, and the reception it's getting, from people who've never seen it, is baffling to me.

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It was a very good character performance film.



The story was simple but its basically how a small town will turn against you when you disparage their beloved sheriff (woody harellson).



Sam is another supporting character thats racist (but all the cops are as there are barely any local black folks and its one of their many character flaws).



Its not exploitative though and its in their words but no physical violence



Its more of a black comedy.



Mudbound was the hard film to watch for me though.



To add: Im black and have my BA in film.

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Most of the criticism talks about the casual racism in the movie. Which I get and understand how tone-deaf it is considering the stuff that's happening but casual racism does exist in the real world.

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Always and forevermore Team Ira.

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If you have to scream and cry about being called I racist, then...

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MTE. i didn't read the original piece so idek who's 'right', but the guy's overall tone is condescending af. like, the other guy didn't even call *him* racist, but the piece; just deal with the fact that ppl sometimes disagree and move along ffs.

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mte

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He does this exact thing on their Awards Daily blog. They have a comments section and he's always monitoring/censoring it, arguing with people who don't worship all the actors/actresses/directors he worships. He runs that like his little kingdom and thinks he can get away with it on Twitter as well, but he just looks like a fool.

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Yes this.

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Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in Hello! Your entry got to top-25 of the most popular entries in LiveJournal!Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in FAQ

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If this Ryan Adams person had a valid point he wouldn't need to be so condescending. Get out of here with this "You're a smart guy, Ira" bullshit

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this is a great point

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The Ryan piece of shit is a prime example why poc never totally trust yt ppl

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Ryan Adams follows me on Twitter and I do not follow him. The day I got his follow notification I lmao. I can't stand him and I feel like he follows me to see if I'm going to say something awful about him, lol. He's also an immature, thin-skinned hysteric who blocks anyone who disagrees with him.



He blocked Ira for awhile day before yesterday before unblocking him. He and Sasha both think they know it all about film and are constantly condescending and obnoxious. Glorified bloggers who have risen above their station.

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Yeah, he really came off as thin skinned and prone to blocking people. Lol, why does he follow you?

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My twitter is mostly a film twitter, but I have no idea why he started following me. I didn't mention him or Sasha, I don't follow either of them but see them retweeted on my TL. He's such a drama queen. I looked at their comments section on Awards Daily last night and he had already deleted one comment and banned that user, something he does with anyone who disagrees with him.



He claims he doesn't do that and that he only deletes "unfair" comments, but he's transparently unable to take criticism, which is amusing, considering he thinks he's a critic. He and Sasha both love to paint themselves as victims when they're the ones who start all the shit.

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lol can't wait for it to be a topic on Ira's liberal podcast

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Lol, that was hilarious since he just started that podcast. I sort of hope it does come up though

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3bb was



- racist

- sexist

- dated

- in a fantasy world that isn't america



also, if a loud sound goes off, horses will react. sorry you're clueless, martin mcdonagh. bye!

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Ira "We can stan Swiss Chalet now again since he has done the bare minunum after receiving tons of bad press" Madison III? What a sexist, misogynist, rape culture-steeped piece of shit was that tweet?

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What do Ira's faults have to do with his ability to call out racism against black people, as a black man?

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mte

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Nothing. But since it's a time-honored ONTD tradition to talk about what the people in the post have done or not done in the past, regardless of what the post is about, I thought it was okay to talk about Ira Madison.

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ugh my post lol

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same lmao

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bless lmao

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selena is certified trash for going ahead with it despite warnings, now even potential apology isn't going to resonate with ppl but her mom is manipulative af for throwing her under the bus bc she's ad about her relationship lol . it's gong 2 make em even more estranged

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All of this.

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lmao she's 100% right on this, but idk how i feel abt her mother airing out their personal dirty laundry tbh. kinda tacky, i'd be sf mad at my parents if they pulled a stunt like this lol

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Has she ever done anything like this before? Selena must be on drugs with Bieber for her to be going off like this.

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hasn't she also been talking to the public/media abt her disapproval re: her relationship with bieber & how they're not exactly getting along lately either? it's nagl in any family imo, but even more so when it comes to ppl who already have little to no privacy, when those closest to them also air out their personal issues. idgaf abt selena, but smth like this would most def make me trust the person even less if it happened to me.

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her mom is shit, this proves it

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Yeah this is messy, family members of celebs getting involved on social media is nagl

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Messy mother even messier daughter.

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Damn I just submitted this lmao.



Her fans are something else. Shes old enough to fucking know better. Same goes for Swiss Chalet. Stop treating people in their 20s as if theyre still 10.



Edited at 2018-01-16 12:56 pm (UTC)

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Why does everyone call him Swiss? I feel like I missed it lol is it just a Swiss cheese/white guy joke?

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swiss chalet is a chain rotisserie chicken restaurant lol

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Non american names r hilarious

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don't worry it's not funny it's something that kind of sounds like his name but doesn't actually qualify as a joke

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Is Swiss Chalet supposed to be Bieber? I will not stand for this Swiss Chalet slander.

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Some of her fans are hysterically ignorant. I glanced at the replies to that tweet above and many of them are like, "who's Woody Allen?" and "What did Woody do that's wrong?" They literally have no clue. They also took the opportunity to bash Demi Lovato, who has nothing to do with any of this. rme

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Damn Mandy drag your own daughter and exclude yourself from this narrative lmao

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I love this gif

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oldie but goodie

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I just want to slap some tap across Momoa's mouth and ride him until my pussy chafes.



Edited at 2018-01-16 03:10 pm (UTC)

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this is perfect use of gif (like hall of gif-fame good)

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lol mteeeeeee!!



Lol I love this gif!!!

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This whole comment is me rn.

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Damn, Selena had so much promise at one point (pre Bieber).

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lol when tho

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lol mte

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promise of what?

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That's not true if this is what's happened.

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I think I'm starting to stan Mandy



Selena remains a mess

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Mandy is a mess too

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yeah true....but she didn't work with woody allen haha

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LMFAPOOOOO OMG

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Wow. She might be right, but to publicly air shit like this? Not cool

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Selena deserves to get dragged for a lot of her life decisions, but DAMN I would be pissed if it was my fuckin' mom of all people trying to expose me like that tbh.



They must really be on the outs, because I probs wouldn't talk to my parents for months over something like this.

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but she deserves to be thrown under a bus if thats how they want to victimize their fave

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Holy shit Kendall looks so different

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Her old nose!!

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WHoa

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holy mother of plastic surgery



Edited at 2018-01-16 01:28 pm (UTC)

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she was so pretty.

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Her old nose, her old chin, her old jaw, etc.

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She looks a lot like Khloe here. That nose job was subtle #goals

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mte

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Khloe looks so much like the jenners to me

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holy shit I had no idea she even had a nose job lol

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Edited at 2018-01-16 02:08 pm (UTC) Her nose job clean af

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She was prettier here than she is now

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Jesus, I can hardly recognize her!

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Kendall's old face is what made me truly believe that Robert Kardashian is Khloe's father.

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rip her old face

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wow, i forgot she and khloe actually looked a like at one point???

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if she were my daughter i would disown her.

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Damn, my mom has thrown us under the bus before, but like for scratching another car when she did it or blamed us for eating the last ice cream bar but shed never do anything like this lmaoooooooooooooooooo

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LMAO I can't

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LOL

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lmao

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loooool

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I loved Blair's style. Especially in paris. I really like the first time we see Blair (I think the first time..) when she's wearing that black lace dress. and I loved her sweet sixteen dress.and early on when she wore jeans (so not blair) but she looked great in them. I could go on and on I just loved Blair's style most of the time



Serena's style was overrated

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I absolutely LOVED this look on her. Her whole vibe/styling in the first season was perfect to me

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ugh I loved this. the perfect introduction to her character.

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I never realized how thin her eyebrows looked in that scene

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yaaas i loved this

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yess I loved this

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My favorite Blair look has got to be that beige mini dress, patterned panty hose and brown bolero. It's an iconic look for Blair



However, her wedding dress to that Monegasque Prince was her worst. No fucking way Blair would wear a basic strapless Vera Wang dress with loose hair to her wedding to a Prince. They should've decked her out in full Elie Saab or something

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When I say decked out in full Elie Saab, I meant a dress along the likes of what GD Stephanie of Luxembourg wore.



Chuck can choke

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[ Spoiler (click to open) ]



I stopped watching mid-season 4 but I've seen that wedding dress you're talking about and yeah the hair is the most atrocious, not-Blair look EVER. Do you mean this? IT IS SO ICONIC.I stopped watching mid-season 4 but I've seen that wedding dress you're talking about and yeah the hair is the most atrocious, not-Blair look EVER.

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The Monaco wedding was so budget it was hilarious.

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Not only the dress but the hair!!!! I was traumatized.

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I didn't think much of the wedding dress at the wedding but I remember thinking she looked gorgeous running through the airport with her hair loose lmao.

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That Oscar de la Renta dress is probably my favorite piece that was ever worn on the show.



Serena had the majority of my closet envy tho.

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I used to be so mad that GG basically just turned Jenny into Taylor Momsen's real life persona....but then considering what happened in later seasons that shit was mild.



Also, I loved Blair's slighty preppy style the best. She always looked so cute

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I'm in the minority but I LOVED crazy Jenny in season 3 lol she was so entertaining.

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Everything about Blair was better, including her style. Serena peaked with her outfit in the opening scene of the pilot

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I loved this outfit.

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lmao I still remember my disappointment when the pilot hyped up Serena and finally showed her

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yes i loved this outfit! shame everything else she wore was so bleh

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blair's headbands were everything

that is all

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I remember girls in school started wearing headbands because they were inspired by the show

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I was one such girl lol. I had a collection of them and had one for every outfit. I was the worst.

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i bought headbands because of her too (although i never wore them). lol i still have them.

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God, I loooooved the ridiculous outfits on this show so much.



Blair's looks were great because they were buttoned up but still cute, and I loved the headbands. I always appreciated the looks she could pull off more than Serena's because Blake's height makes her look good in a ton of things, it's almost unfair.



That being said, I remember loving Serena's White Party look.

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I feel like GG retrospectives like this are trying to convince us that Blake Lively deserves to have a career but all they do is make me miss Leighton

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Don't @ me for posting this! I did this for LEIGHTON.

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Leighton was my fave



also I guess in real life they are over people pointing it out it but I love that Blair Waldorf ended up with Seth Cohen, it's just too perfect

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SO PERFECT I'M CRYING

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same, I love it. some weird inter-universe crossover retribution for Blair not ending up with Dan.

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Its so perfect!! 

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my two favorite tv characters of all time <3

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Blake Lively wears clothes very well..I'll give her that.

I watched Gossip Girl in its entirety, but I barely remember a lot of character/storylines. Does it hold up in a rewatch?

\_()_/

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Lmao for real

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eh, it was fine for what it was, but also understandably forgettable

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i unironically love S1 tbh. everything else though no

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The first season is rewatchable but the rest is garbage. The last season was ridiculous.

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It does hold up! I've rewatched it a bunch of times. I think the only thing that seems dates is the fact that they all have flip phones haha

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i liked the first two seasons but then it started to go downhill.

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Honestly I'm watching it now because I have the flu and Blair's schemes and reactions to stuff make it 100% worth it.

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rewatching it knowing who is Gossip Girl honestly makes the whole thing both hilarious and horrible

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what happened to leighton meester

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She was on a network comedy last year, but it was cancelled. :/

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She got married to ADAM FUCKING BRODY forming the most precious celeb couple of all time whose relationship I am more invested in than my own damn PARENTS.

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I remember when she dated Carter a.k.a. Sebastian Stan irl and Blake was dating Penn



Edited at 2018-01-16 08:09 pm (UTC)

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he seems like a douche tbh



also not to be that person! but adam and penn legit look the same. sis has such a type!

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she's working on another album i hope

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the school uniforms were always my fave

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Ughhhh she's so beautiful and I loved her season 1 dark hair

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yeah it was a mistake giving her lighter and lighter hair, she needed the dark hair to be a foil to Serena!

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Omg...the brown dress.  Where did she wear that? Was that also for school...?

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I still to this day want that red headband

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Blake Lively has a nice bod. I always preffered Serena's style over Blair's. Blair was a little too uppity and uptight for me.

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yeah, but irl i liked a lil combo

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I watched it for the first time last year but stopped right in the middle of season 3. The only thing that kept me going was for the fashion (my dream is to be rich in NYC for the aesthetic~) and Sebastian Stan.

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that's about where i stopped too. i still genuinely think season 1 was good, but after that they couldn't keep up the combo of grounded characterization with ott drama, and it was just trash.

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Blair's Marchesa prom dress is such a McQueen rip-off



the show had a lot of Marchesa in general

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I was a fan of the books as a teen, so I kind of always wished they would do the pixie cut on Blair that they did in the books (knowing that they would NEVER.) TBH I can't imagine Leighton with that hair but I can still dream!

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hmm I think she could have pulled off a short audrey hepburn kind of look. I could see Blair thinking it was elegant.

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She's gorgeous so she probably could. I remember in the books they were constantly saying that Blair's pixie haircut was very Audrey Hepburn-esque. I wish they had been more adventurous with hair instead of the long blowouts on everyone

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Do you need a little help getting your life together? I mean you're here, so probably! Here are 6 books on facing fear, being creative, not giving a f*ck about the stuff that doesn't matter, forming simple habits that are easy to do (and easy not to do, unfortunately), and getting rid of all the physical crap that has made you it's bitch. Soon you'll be #adulting like a pro! Included is a celebrity author and some celebrity recommendations.The mega-talented creator of Greys Anatomy and Scandal and executive producer of How to Get Away With Murder chronicles how saying YES for one year changed her lifeand how it can change yours, too.With three hit shows on television and three children at home, the uber-talented Shonda Rhimes had lots of good reasons to say NO when an unexpected invitation arrived. Hollywood party? No. Speaking engagement? No. Media appearances? No.And there was the side-benefit of saying No for an introvert like Shonda: nothing new to fear.Then Shondas sister laid down a challenge: just for one year, try to say YES to the unexpected invitations that come your way. Shonda reluctantly agreedand the result was nothing short of transformative. In Year of Yes, Shonda Rhimes chronicles the powerful impact saying yes had on every aspect of her lifeand how we can all change our lives with one little word. Yes.Readers of all ages and walks of life have drawn inspiration and empowerment from Elizabeth Gilberts books for years. Now this beloved author digs deep into her own generative process to share her wisdom and unique perspective about creativity. With profound empathy and radiant generosity, she offers potent insights into the mysterious nature of inspiration. She asks us to embrace our curiosity and let go of needless suffering. She shows us how to tackle what we most love, and how to face down what we most fear. She discusses the attitudes, approaches, and habits we need in order to live our most creative lives. Balancing between soulful spirituality and cheerful pragmatism, Gilbert encourages us to uncover the strange jewels that are hidden within each of us. Whether we are looking to write a book, make art, find new ways to address challenges in our work, embark on a dream long deferred, or simply infuse our everyday lives with more mindfulness and passion, Big Magic cracks open a world of wonder and joy.For decades, weve been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. "F**k positivity," Mark Manson says. "Lets be honest, shit is f**ked and we have to live with it." In his wildly popular Internet blog, Manson doesnt sugarcoat or equivocate. He tells it like it isa dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k is his antidote to the coddling, lets-all-feel-good mindset that has infected American society and spoiled a generation, rewarding them with gold medals just for showing up.Manson makes the argument, backed both by academic research and well-timed poop jokes, that improving our lives hinges not on our ability to turn lemons into lemonade, but on learning to stomach lemons better. Human beings are flawed and limited"not everybody can be extraordinary, there are winners and losers in society, and some of it is not fair or your fault." Manson advises us to get to know our limitations and accept them. Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties, once we stop running and avoiding and start confronting painful truths, we can begin to find the courage, perseverance, honesty, responsibility, curiosity, and forgiveness we seek.Jen Sincero, cuts through the din of the self-help genre with her own verbal meat cleaver in You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life. In this refreshingly blunt how-to guide, Sincero, serves up 27 bite-sized chapters full of hilariously inspiring stories, life-changing insights, easy exercises and the occasional swear word.Via chapters such as "Your Brain is Your Bitch," "Fear is for Suckers" and "My Subconscious Made Me Do It," Sincero takes you on a wild joy ride to your own transformation, helping you create the money, relationships, career and general all around awesomeness you so desire. And should you be one of those people who would rather take a bullet than get busted with a self-help book in your hands, fear not. Sincero, a former skeptic herself, delivers the goods minus the New-Age cheese, giving even the snarkiest of poo-pooers exactly what they need to get out of their ruts and start kicking some ass.By the end of You Are a Badass, you will understand why you are how you are, how to love what you can't change, how to change what you don't love, and how to start living the kind of life you used to be jealous of.The Slight Edge is a way of thinking, a way of processing information that enables you to make the daily choices that will lead you to the success and happiness you desire. Learn why some people make dream after dream come true, while others just continue dreaming and spend their lives building dreams for someone else. Its not just another self-help motivation tool of methods you must learn in order to travel the path to success. It shows you how to create powerful results from the simple daily activities of your life, by using tools that are already within you.Maybe you dont need to own all this stuff. After a casual conversation with his neighbor on Memorial Day 2008, Joshua Becker realized he needed a change. He was spending far too much time organizing possessions, cleaning up messes, and looking for more to buy.So Joshua and his wife decided to remove the nonessential possessions from their home and life. Eventually, they sold, donated, or discarded over 60 percent of what they owned. In exchange, they found a life of more freedom, more contentment, more generosity, and more opportunity to pursue the things that mattered most.The More of Less delivers an empowering plan for living more by owning less. With practical suggestions and encouragement to personalize your own minimalist style, Joshua Becker shows you why minimizing possessions is the best way to maximize life.Sources: 1
Dolphins Bay Phuket was established on Nov.2015, with the member of five intelligent bottlenosedolphins and two playful seals. With our very well taken care to those marine mammals, in 2017 Alisa, the youngest dolphins female has surprised us of her gestation.



Thai childrens day 13th January 2018 , time that we were looking forward for has come, Alisa has given a birth at 12.45 am. the new baby dolphins was born to see new world.

Dolphins Bay Phuket proudly to invite you to congratulated to proud mama Alisa together at Dolphins Bay Phuket.
A young rockcod swims in Antarctica. Credit: Rob Robbins/US Antarctic Program

Some Antarctic fish living in the planet's coldest waters are able to cope with the stress of rising carbon dioxide levels the ocean. They can even tolerate slightly warmer waters. But they can't deal with both stressors at the same time, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

The study, published recently in the journal Global Change Biology, of emerald rockcod is the first to show that Antarctic fishes may make tradeoffs in their physiology and behavior to cope with ocean acidification and warming waters.

(The research is described in a web feature, "The Last Stop," at the UC Davis Science & Climate website.)

"In dealing with climate stress, these fish are really bad multi-taskers," said senior author Anne Todgham, an associate professor with the UC Davis Department of Animal Science. "They seem quite capable of coping with increases in CO 2 , and they can compensate for some warming. But they can't deal with both stressors at the same time. That's a problem because those things happen togetheryou don't get CO 2 dissolving in the ocean independent of warming."

Tradeoffs

Antarctic fishes live in water that is typically about -1.9C (28.6F). At their field site in Antarctica, the authors exposed emerald rockcod to two temperatures: -1 degree Celsius (30F) and 2 degrees Celsius (36F). The latter is the threshold for global warming that the Paris Agreement targets to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. They also exposed the fish to treatments of three different levels of CO 2 ranging from ambient to elevated projected levels.

Emerald rockcod in Antarctica can handle some increases in temperature and carbon dioxide levels, but not both at the same time. With climate change, you rarely have one climate stressor without the other. Credit: Rob Robbins/US Antarctic Program

Increased CO 2 levels by themselves had little impact on the fish. After a couple of weeks, heart, ventilation and metabolic rates increased with warming. Their behavior also changed with warming. The fish swam less and preferred dark zones, which suggests they were attempting to conserve energy. Then after 28 days, juvenile rockcod were able to compensate for the warming temperatures. However, this temperature compensation only happened in the absence of rising CO 2 .

No colder places to go

While some species are beginning to shift to cooler places to escape warming habitats, polar fish have no colder places to go. They have to cope by using their existing physiology, which the study shows is limited.

Emerald rockcod help form the basis of the Antarctic food web, supporting an ecosystem of species such as Emperor penguins and seals.

"The Antarctic has contributed very little to the production of greenhouse gases, and yet it's one of the places on the planet receiving the most impact," Todgham said. "I feel we have responsibility to care about the spaces that are so fragile. If we can provide reservoirs of areas that are less stressful to plants and animals through protecting natural places, we can buy ourselves some time to deal with things like climate change that will take a long time to get in line."
Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille last week visited a drilling site at an aquifer at Mitchells Plain, about 25km from the city. April 21 is the feared 'Day Zero' for enforced water rationing

As Cape Town suffers its worst drought in a century, residents were warned by the mayor on Tuesday that they face losing piped water to their homes by April 21.

If rains do not materialise and drastic consumption reductions are not achieved by "Day Zero", the city's people face the prospect of queueing at standpipes for daily rations of 25 litres (9.2 US gallons) of water.

The city, which attracts millions of tourists every year, has enforced strict waste controls including splash bans at municipal pools and hauling homeowners using more than a 87-litre daily limit before the courts.

In the past week, just 39 percent of Capetonians used less than that amount.

"Cape Town's average daily collective consumption is still too high. It has increased to 618 million litres per day' up from 578 million litres per day (since the first week of January)'" said mayor Patricia de Lille.

Every day that consumption exceeds 500 million litres, so-called "Day Zero"the last day of normal water supplydraws closer.

"Dam levels have dipped to 28.7 percent this past week," she told local media as she announced that "Day Zero" would happen one day earlier than previously forecast. It was previously predicted for April 22.

"The city has ramped-up pressure management to drive down consumptionaiming to stretch our water supply past the winter rainy season."

Earlier this year, the city published a name-and-shame list of the worst water offenders in Cape Town, and it says it is issuing fines for the heaviest water users.

But officials themselves have faced criticism for failing to implement usage restrictions sooner, and have been accused of ignoring warnings by experts in the years before the drought.

City workers are now seeking to use groundwater from three local aquifers, recycle waste water and step up production at three desalination plants.

Some Capetonians have taken to collecting their own water at a natural spring outside a brewery in the city.

Many are convinced that with dam levels so low, the quality of tap water has declineda rumour that the city has been battling for months.

Strong summer rains saw much of southern Africa recover from a drought induced by the El Nino weather phenomenon.

But Mediterranean-like Cape Town receives most of its rain in the southern hemisphere's winterand scientists warn there is no guarantee of a good rainy season.

 2018 AFP
Philippe Lamberts and Ska Keller, who head the Greens bloc in the European Parliament, display a placard against pulse fishing which involves dragging electrically-charged lines just above the seabed to shock low-lying marine life into trawling nets

The European Parliament called Tuesday for a ban on electric pulse fishing in the European Union, defying Brussels which wants the experimental practice in the North Sea done on a larger scale.

The parliament, the EU's only directly-elected body, will now try to strike a compromise with the European Commission, the bloc's executive, and the European Council, which groups the 28 member states.

MEPs voted by 402 members to 232 in favour of the ban, while 40 abstained.

"It is a wonderful victory against a terribly harmful kind of fishing," said Yannick Jadot, a French member of the Greens party, who took part in the campaign against the practice.

Pulse fishing involves dragging electrically-charged lines just above the seafloor that shock marine life up from low-lying positions into trawling nets.

EU rules allow member states to equip up to five percent of their fleets with electrodes, and the method has been adopted in particular by Dutch vessels fishing for sole.

The European Commission wants to maintain the southern part of the North Sea as the venue for pulse fishing but to remove the five-percent limit.

Karmenu Vella, the commissioner for fisheries, argued that pulse fishing is safer for the environment than beam trawling as it reduces carbon emissions and does less damage to the seabed.

Beam trawling involves a large net attached to a heavy metal beam of up to 12 metres in length which is dragged across the seabed, ploughing it up.

Rebecca Hubbard, director for the activist group Our Fish, praised the vote as a "huge win" for European seas, low-impact fishing and the public.

 2018 AFP
A new article published in Capital Markets Law Journal argues that consumers and banks could benefit from the creation of a quick and inexpensive financial services tribunal, modeled on the Employment Tribunals, to resolve substantial disputes between banks and small and medium sized companies.

The paper argues currently the English High Court is very successful at resolving wholesale financial markets disputes. The Financial Ombudsman's Service is good at resolving consumer's low-value financial disputes. But there is a large gap in the mid-market area, where disputes between financial institution and small and medium enterprises fall.

The paper argues that the gap could be filled by a specialist financial services tribunal, modeled on the Employment Tribunals. At low cost these platforms have successful leveraged the high-value English Bench and Bar to supply quality dispute resolution and law creation to the markets they serve

The article maintains that financial institutions in England could make money through this reform because international demand for credit supplied from England would increase due to increased business from mainland Europe (dispute resolution is cheaper in the rest of Europe and businesses may currently be avoiding English financial services due to high dispute resolution cost). The paper also maintains that the financial services industry would save money by increased efficiency that will come from the tribunal providing definitive interpretations of regulations that regulators do not currently produce. Definitive rulings of the tribunal on the meaning of regulations could reduce cost of compliance and remove the barrier such costs create to innovation and growth.

Small and medium sized enterprises have been vocal in their push for a fairer means of redress for consumers from banks for alleged violations regarding the selling of complex financial products. The paper appeals directly to the banks to support a specialist, quick and inexpensive financial services tribunal to resolve substantial disputes between banks and their customers, modeled on the Employment Tribunals.

Employment Tribunals, the public bodies in England and Wales and Scotland with jurisdiction to hear many kinds of disputes between employers and employees, were created due the Industrial Training Act 1964. The paper argues that those tribunals, the first forum where women could bring sex discrimination claims, moved employment culture on from common law notions of 'master and servant' - still the language of labor markets in the 1960s - to the culture we know today; Financial Services Tribunals could have the same positive effect on banking culture.

Parliament is scheduled to debate these proposals on January 18.

"The financial services industry is not so foolish to think that everyone is going to love it all the time," said the paper's author, Richard Samuel. "But thankfully it is sensitive to the danger of alienating the support of small and medium sized businesses, a key political constituency on which the policies necessary for the industry's success depend. The cost of losing trust amongst its natural support would be high indeed. Is this an element of the cost-benefit analysis that the industry should perform when considering the merits of offering small businesses access to justice through a common law tribunal? It is for the industry to decide."

More information: Richard Samuel, The FCA has now listened: Banks, it is in your interests to listen too, Capital Markets Law Journal (2017). DOI: 10.1093/cmlj/kmx043
Credit: Shutterstock

Due to its distinctive properties graphene has been held out as a game-changing material for a range of industries and applications. The Graphene Flagship initiative was set up as Europe's biggest ever multi-stakeholder research initiative, to quite literally shape the future of the technology.

The 10-year Graphene Flagship, partly EU-funded, was set up to exploit the technological potential of graphene and related layered materials for future applications. Research members of the initiative recently conducted two experiments to assess, for the first time, the viability of graphene for space applications. The experiments, in collaboration with the European Space Agency and other partners, tested the material under zero-gravity conditions specifically for light propulsion and also for thermal management applications, with very encouraging results.

Is space graphene's new frontier?

Graphene's unique thermal, light, strength and weight properties make it an ideal candidate to improve the performance of aerospace and satellite applications. In a series of experiments conducted at the end of last year, Graphene Flagship researchers looked specifically at possible use of the material for the improvement of space propulsion, as well as thermal management systems and loop heat pipes.

For the solar sail experiments, a team of graduate students from Delft Technical University, Netherlands took advantage of Germany's 146 metre ZARM Drop Tower microgravity conditions (down to one millionth of the Earth's gravitational force) to investigate the use of graphene for light sails. The team designed free-floating graphene membranes which were then exposed to radiation pressure from lasers, to see how they reacted and indicate how much thrust could be generated. The team repeated the experiment over five trials to overcome initial technical difficulties. Almost 10 seconds of weightlessness was achieved by catapulting a capsule containing the experiment upwards and downwards in a vacuum.

The second experiment explored how heat transfer in loop heat pipes (cooling systems used extensively in satellites) could be made more efficient, with increased lifetime and autonomy, using graphene. The metallic wicks in the pipe, used to transfer heat into a fluid to cool the system, had their usual porous metal coatings replaced with two types of graphene-related materials. These were then tested for increased thermal conductivity during two parabolic microgravity and hypergravity ESA flights. During each 3-hour flight, the specially modified plane undertook 30 parabolic ascents, achieving around 25 seconds of weightlessness in each parabola.

The results of both experiments demonstrate the versatility of graphene and the researchers involved are now further investigating the influence of radiation pressure on graphene light sails as well as developing commercially available graphene-based heat pipes.

The future lies with innovative people, as well as products

Produced from a carbon layer only one-atom thick, as a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice graphene is both light and strong (said to be about 200 times stronger than steel). Additionally, it has excellent electrical, mechanical, thermal and optical properties, as well as being nearly transparent. These characteristics make it an extremely interesting material for scientists and engineers pursuing the development of a wide range of faster, thinner, stronger and more flexible products.

To explore graphene's potential to revolutionise multiple industries, generating economic growth and new employment, the 10-year Graphene Flagship is designed to represent the entire value chain from materials, to components and systems. A consortium of academic and industry experts from around 150 partners, across 23 countries, coordinate and run its various research strands. The European Commission contributes directly through funding, along with research results from EU-funded projects such as GRAPHENECORE 1.

Over time, project results will progress efforts towards specific applications for development. Additionally, the research initiative's mission is to provide training and cutting-edge research opportunities for students and young researchers.

Provided by CORDIS
Credit: City University London

America's attempts to navigate challenges to its global leadership are hampered by a foreign policy mindset that is "Eurocentric, elitist and resistant to change", according to a new paper from a City, University of London academic.

Published in the Chatham House journal International Affairs, the paper also argues the United States' efforts to remain the dominant international power are causing political turmoil at home because the approach creates more and more inequality.

Professor Inderjeet Parmar says America is having problems managing its rivalry with China and other emerging powers because the US-led world order's founding values, established after the Second World War, are not compatible with a diverse network of international powers.

He concludes that the US-led liberal international order - a set of rules, organisations and values that dominate global economics and politics - was rooted in core principles that are "subliminally racialised, elitist and imperial".

To investigate the issue, Professor Parmar analysed literature describing US involvement in South Korea between 1945 and 1953, including in the Korean War, and compared this with US foreign policy towards China since the late 1970s.

He said: "The principal goal of the US-led liberal world order is to preserve American interests by incorporating wealthy and powerful individuals and elite groups from other nations into the system.

"Since 1945, the United States has done this with a combination of force, as in the Korean War, and socialisation, like its promotion of US values in China.

"China is too strong to be engineered to American tastes and because US foreign policy is not flexible enough to incorporate diverse powers, China will continue to challenge the USA's leading global position.

"Yet, the elite alliances between US and Chinese groups - at state and parastate levels - are not geared to serving the interests of the broad mass of either Americans or Chinese, suggesting further political instability.

"With public discontent in the United States beginning to become clear, we should expect domestic and international political crises to deepen."

Domestic turmoil

Professor Parmar argues the US-led world order allowed certain sections of American society to become richer until the 1970s, after which the global strategy and its domestic political settlement began to unravel as manufacturing moved overseas or jobs disappeared due to automation.

The City academic points to the election of President Donald Trump, support for Bernie Sanders' left-wing anti-establishment campaign and movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as examples of growing political anxiety and the virtual collapse of political elite legitimacy.

A new theory about US power

Professor Parmar challenges the political theory known as liberal internationalism. He says it describes how the US became the world's dominant power, but argues the theory adds legitimacy to an unequal system.

Instead, he proposes a revised version of the early twentieth-century theory "ultra-imperialism", which says elites in different countries form alliances to create stability, prevent conflict and benefit the ruling classes.

"The US approach aims to develop market-orientated societies and attract elites from other nations by showing the economic benefits of integration with the US-led world order, but it does not aim to create genuine change for the masses," he said.

As an example, Professor Parmar explains the US rebuilt modern South Korea after the Second World War, through domestic political violence and the Korean War, by fostering a ruling elite that was friendly with the US.

In addition, the US has developed a "carefully crafted" relationship with China, which has willingly adopted US economic practices and become more embedded in the "global market and the US-rules based system".

Professor Parmar says over the past 40 years there has been an increasing number of American foundations, think tanks and university branches opening in China, promoting western economics and values like limited government, civil society, and the rule of law.

"Supporters of the US-led order assume domestic and international political crises are resolvable within the current system but I argue this is not the case," he said.

"The system was founded to promote the ideals of a ruling minority and was not designed to prevent inequality associated with class, race and gender."

The article, titled The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?, was published in a special edition of International Affairs, co-edited by John Ikenberry (Princeton University), Professor Inderjeet Parmar (City) and Professor Doug Stokes (University of Exeter).

More information: Inderjeet Parmar. The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?, International Affairs (2018). DOI: 10.1093/ia/iix240
A schematic illustration of hybrid perovskite photoconductivity visible region detector with high speed and high stability. The gas-solid reaction in replace of the traditional solution methods provides a non-solvent environment during the reaction process, constructs a high crystallization and a full coverage film to increase the light capture and transportation, as well as enhance a good stability in the humidity condition, leading to a high response performance for the photodetector. Credit: Dr. Guoqing Tong

A recent paper published in Nano showed the gas-solid reaction method provides a full coverage of the perovskite film and avoids damage from the organic solvent, which is beneficial for light capture and electrons transportation, resulting in a faster response time and stability for perovskite photodetectors.

Pervoskite materials have long been considered candidates in the semiconductor manufacturing due to their characteristics of high light absorption, carrier mobility and wider light spectrum. They are widely applied in solar cells, light-emitted devices and photodetectors. However, the organic solvent in the traditional solution method will damage the perovskite film and form unstable phases during the synthesis process, which makes the perovskite film decompose quickly in wet conditions, limiting the practical application of perovskite devices. Considering the significant influence of the solvent, a team of researchers from Dongchang college of Liaocheng University and Hefei University of Technology proposed a new gas-solid process to fabricate the perovskite film. This non-solvent approach provides high crystallization and full coverage film in lower vacuum and low temperature systems.

The researchers investigated the morphology, light absorption and the crystal phases of the perovskite film at the different annealing temperature after gas-reaction to obtain the high-quality perovskite film. The devices exhibited high responsivity and detectivity of 5.87AW-1 and 1012 Jones. The response time of the device is estimated to be 248 s/207 s, which is faster than most previous reports via the solution method. Remarkably, the responsivity and detectivity are estimated to be 0.26 AW-1, 2.131010 Jones after lasting exposure in air (25oC, RH~40%) for up to two months. This improvement of the stability of the devices demonstrates that the well-controlled vapor deposition method allows a thorough removal of the residual solvents (i.e. DMF, DMSO et. al) and thus effectively promotes a high-quality crystallization of perovskite grains, reducing the metastable phases among the thin films.

This work was financed by Science and Technology Plan Project of Shandong Higher Education Institutions, NSFC and Open Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Pulsed Power Laser Technology of China.

More information: Baoliang Mi et al, Hybrid Perovskite Photoconductivity Visible Region Detector with High Speed and Stability, Nano (2017). DOI: 10.1142/S1793292017501508
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A team of researchers with the University of Oslo has found evidence that suggests human fleas and lice, not rodents, were behind the spread of the plague that killed millions of people over the course of several centuries. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group reports using mathematical models from mortality records to demonstrate how the plague would have spread under different scenarios and what they found by doing so.

Most adults today remember reading in school about the Black Death, which killed approximately 25 million people back in the 1300s, and most also remember being taught that rodents, mostly rats, spread it around. The plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was able to move between victims through various vectors. And until recently, it was believed that fleas that lived on rats jumped from their hosts that died from the plague onto humans, infecting them. But in recent years, that theory has begun to lose credibility because it could not account for how quickly the plague spread, or why there were no reports of mass deaths of rats from the same disease. In this new effort, the researchers looked at an alternative theory that suggests fleas and lice that lived on humans were behind the spread of the disease.

The team started by amassing data from mortality records regarding the spread of several outbreaks that occurred in Europe between the 14th and 19th centuries (one of which was the Black Death). They then created a mathematical model that could be used to demonstrate how each of the outbreaks spread. They ran the model under three different scenarios: in which the outbreak was due to rats, airborne transmission, or to human fleas and lice. The researchers found that the scenario in which the outbreak was linked to human fleas and lice offered the best match to what actually occurred. Neither of the other vectors, they found, could cause the disease to spread as quickly as it did. They also note that human fleas and lice were very common in people during the period under study due to infrequent bathing.

More information: Katharine R. Dean el al., "Human ectoparasites and the spread of plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic," PNAS (2018). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1715640115 Abstract

Plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, can spread through human populations by multiple transmission pathways. Today, most human plague cases are bubonic, caused by spillover of infected fleas from rodent epizootics, or pneumonic, caused by inhalation of infectious droplets. However, little is known about the historical spread of plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic (1419th centuries), including the Black Death, which led to high mortality and recurrent epidemics for hundreds of years. Several studies have suggested that human ectoparasite vectors, such as human fleas (Pulex irritans) or body lice (Pediculus humanus humanus), caused the rapidly spreading epidemics. Here, we describe a compartmental model for plague transmission by a human ectoparasite vector. Using Bayesian inference, we found that this model fits mortality curves from nine outbreaks in Europe better than models for pneumonic or rodent transmission. Our results support that human ectoparasites were primary vectors for plague during the Second Pandemic, including the Black Death (13461353), ultimately challenging the assumption that plague in Europe was predominantly spread by rats. Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

 2018 Phys.org
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Historically, the help provided by grandmothers has increased grandchild survival during times of high child mortality. However, there have been signs that in many populations, the impact of maternal grandmothers and paternal grandmothers on their grandchildren has been different. A recent study conducted at the University of Turku, Finland, shows that X-chromosome relatedness between grandmothers and their grandchildren did not affect grandchild survival in 18th- and 19th-century Finland.

Biological kin selection means that organisms may be more willing to help others in relation to how many genes they share. For example, unselfish behaviour can sometimes be explained by kin selection: In animals, the larger the degree of relatedness, the more likely they may be to help.

In the study conducted as part of the dissertation of Simon Chapman from the University of Turku, a hypothesis was tested according to which the genetic inheritance of grandmothers' X-chromosome affects the level of help they provide to their grandchildren.

"Since sons inherit their only X-chromosome from their mother, and daughters from both of their parents, paternal and maternal grandmother's degree of relatedness with their grandchildren through the X-chromosome is different. Granddaughters are a little more related and grandsons a little less related to their paternal grandmother than other grandchildren. However, the difference is very small, as granddaughters share on average 27 percent and grandsons 23 percent of their genes with their paternal grandmother. Maternal grandmother's relatedness with their granddaughters and grandsons is 25 percent," says Chapman.

If grandmothers were to help their grandchildren in relation to their degree of relatedness, it should be visible in the differences in grandchildren mortality. Chapman tested this hypothesis in his study by comparing children's survival using data collected in the 18th and 19th century Finland. During that time, child mortality was high and grandmothers are known to have helped their grandchildren survive through the dangerous infancy period.

Chapman compared child mortality during the first five years of life, depending on sex and whether the child's paternal or maternal grandmother was present. The study did not produce enough support for the hypothesis that the small differences in grandmothers' relatedness through X-chromosome would have had an impact on grandchild survival in Finland during the 18th and 19th century.

The study published in the Biology Letters journal is part of a research project on human evolutionary biology led by Academy Professor Virpi Lummaa.

More information: Simon N. Chapman et al. Limited support for the X-linked grandmother hypothesis in pre-industrial Finland, Biology Letters (2018). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0651 Journal information: Biology Letters
Internet use may decrease the likelihood of a person affiliating with a religious tradition or believing that only one religion is true, according to a Baylor University study.

That may be because Internet use encourages religious "tinkering," said Baylor sociologist and researcher Paul K. McClure.

"Tinkering means that people feel they're no longer beholden to institutions or religious dogma," he said. "Today, perhaps in part because many of us spend so much time online, we're more likely to understand our religious participation as free agents who can tinker with a plurality of religious ideaseven different, conflicting religionsbefore we decide how we want to live."

For example, while many Millennials have been influenced by their Baby Boomer parents when it comes to religion, the Internet exposes them to a broader array of religious traditions and beliefs and may encourage them to adjust their views or experiment with their beliefs, perhaps adopting a less exclusive view of religion, McClure said.

His study"Tinkering with Technology and Religion in the Digital Age"is published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

The study also examined television viewing and found that it was linked to religion, but in a different waylower religious attendance and other religious activities that take time. But McClure noted that lower religious attendance of TV viewers may be because some are ill, injured, immobile or older and incapable of taking part, and some may simply watch television to pass the time.

In 2010, when this survey was first conducted, people were spending more time on average watching television, but that has changed today as more people are spending time online or on their smartphones instead, McClure said.

"Both TV and the Internet require time, and the more time we spend using these technologies, the less time we have to participate in religious activities or with more traditional communities," he said.

In his research, McClure analyzed used data from Wave III of Baylor Religion Survey, a survey of 1,714 adults nationwide ages 18 and older. Gallup Organization administered the surveys, with a variety of questions, in fall 2010.

In the data analyzed by McClure, participants were asked:

How often they took part in religious activities, among them religious attendance, church socials, religious education programs, choir practice, Bible study, prayer groups and witnessing/sharing faith.

How much they agreed on a scale of 1 to 4 with the statements "All of the religions in the world are equally true" and "All around the world, no matter what religion they call themselves, people worship the same God."

How many hours a day they spent surfing the Internet and how many hours they spent watching TV.

What religious group(s) they were affiliated with, including a category of "none."

The analysis also took into account such variables as age, race, gender, education, place of residence and political party. While those factors had varying impact on religious beliefs, despite the differences, "the more time one spends on the Internet, the greater the odds are that that person will not be affiliated with a religion," McClure said.

While the Internet is nearly 26 years old, 87 percent of American adults use it, compared with before 1995, when fewer than 15 percent were online, according to a 2014 report by the Pew Forum Internet Project.

Sociologists debate how Internet use affects people.

"Some see it as a tool to improve our lives; others see it as a new kind of sociocultural reality," McClure said.

Scholars point out that the Internet may corral people into like-minded groups, similar to how Google customizes search results and advertisements based on prior search history. Additionally, many congregationssome 90 percent, according to previous researchuse email and websites for outreach, and more than a third have both an Internet and Facebook presence.

Other scholars have found that when people choose ways to communicate, some often choose a less intimate waysuch as texting rather than talking.

McClure noted that sociological research about the impact of the Internet is difficult for scholars because its swift changes make it a moving target.

"In the past decade, social networking sites have mushroomed, chat rooms have waned, and television and web browsing have begun to merge into one another as live streaming services have become more popular," McClure said.

His study has limitations, such as measuring only the amount of time people spent on the Internet, not what they were doing online, McClure said. But the research may benefit scholars seeking to understand how technologies shape religious views.

"Whether through social media or the sheer proliferation of competing truth-claims online, the Internet is the perfect breeding ground for new 'life-worlds' that chip away at one's certainty," McClure said.
A prototype of the innovative smart windows for controlled shading and solar thermal energy harvesting is presented by PhD student Benjamin Heiz from the research group of Lothar Wondraczek. Credit: Jan-Peter Kasper/FSU Jena

Climate protection and the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions have been on top of global development agendas. Accordingly, research and development projects have been conducted on national and international levels, which aim for the improvement of the CO2-footprint in diverse processes. Apart from particularly energy-intensive sectors of the industry, the building sector in particular is among the biggest CO2-emitters: From residential homes, manufacturing facilities and storage depots to big commercial buildings, about 40 percent of the energy consumption within the EU are due to the heating, cooling, air conditioning and lighting of buildings.

Considering next-generation smart windows and facade devices, one aspect of this problem is addressed in the research project Large-Area Fluidic Windows (LaWin) which has been coordinated at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, since 2015. A new type of such smart windows was now presented in the upcoming issue of 'Advanced Sustainable Systems'. In their paper 'Large-Area Smart Window with Tunable Shading and Solar-Thermal Harvesting Ability Based on Remote Switching of a Magneto-Active Liquid' the Jena materials researchers introduce prototypes of a window that changes its light permeability at the touch of a button, and, at the same time, can be used for solar-thermal energy harvesting.

Liquids in windows and facades

"Our project's key feature is the use of liquids in windows and facades, for example, as heat carriers or to enable additional functions," explains Lothar Wondraczek, the project's coordinator. "To this end we develop new glass materials, into which large-area channel structures are integrated. These are used for circulating functional fluids."

In latest prototypes, the liquid is loaded with the nanoscale magnetic iron particles. These can be extracted from the liquid with the help of a magnet. Vice versa, they can be re-suspended by simply switching-off the magnet. "Depending on the number of the iron particles in the liquid, the liquid itself takes on different shades of grey, or it will even turn completely black," Wondraczek explains. "Then, it becomes possible to automatically adjust the incidence of light, or to harvest solar heat which can then be put to further use within the building." The efficiency in terms of heat gain per area is comparable with that of state-of-the-art solar thermal facilities. But unlike those, the present system can be readily integrated in a vertical facade. Switching between on and off  the release or capture of particles  happens in a separate tank. An electrical connection at the windows is not necessary.

Indoor air conditioning, tunable shading and harvesting of solar heat

"The greatest advantage of large-scale fluidic windows is that they can substitute air conditioning systems, daylight regulation systems and for instance warm water processing," stresses Wondraczek, who holds the chair of Glass Chemistry at the University of Jena. Developing cost-effective large-size window glass modules is key. On the one hand the glass elements need to include the channels, on the other hand they maintain their performance over the whole lifespan of the building. Finally, they have to provide the ability for integration with standard window manufacture technologies in frames of double or triple glazings. With the present prototypes which were manufactured on a scale of around 200 square meters, the research consortium demonstrated that those requirements can be fulfilled.

Over the period of 2015-2017, the project received a grant of 5.9 million Euros from the European Union within the framework of the Horizon-2020-Programme for Industrial Leadership. A further 2.2 million Euro have been added by eleven industry partners who have been members of the consortium. After the end of the first funding period, commercialisation of first applications is planned for this year.

More information: Benjamin P. V. Heiz et al. A Large-Area Smart Window with Tunable Shading and Solar-Thermal Harvesting Ability Based on Remote Switching of a Magneto-Active Liquid, Advanced Sustainable Systems (2017). DOI: 10.1002/adsu.201700140
ProtoDUNE core installation team with the first arrival from Daresbury. Professor Touramanis is 3rd from left. Credit: University of Liverpool

Liverpool physicists are celebrating after a vital component of the global neutrino experiment  the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)  which they have helped construct has been delivered to CERN for testing.

The DUNE experiment is a flagship international experiment which will study the differences between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos in a bid to understand how the Universe came to be made up only of matter. Fermilab, the largest US particle physics national laboratory, near Chicago, is the host laboratory of DUNE.

Liverpool physicists are part of the UK team that has completed their first prototype Anode Plane Assembly (APA), the largest and most crucial component of the DUNE detector, to be used in the protoDUNE detector at CERN.

The APA was built at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Daresbury Laboratory and is the first such device made in the UK. Two more APAs will be built at Daresbury by next summer for the protoDUNE experiment at CEEN, and 150 APAs will be produced over a two to three year period for the actual DUNE experiment and delivered for installation one-mile underground at the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility's (LBNF) Far Site in a former gold mine in South Dakota, USA.

The APA is a large rectangular steel frame covered with approximately 4000 wires that are used to read the electric charge signals from the liquid-Argon detector. At 2.3m by 6.3m it is roughly as large as five full-size pool tables led side-by-side.

Professor Christos Touramanis, leader of the University's DUNE team and of the protoDUNE experiment said: "DUNE is a game changer in the international neutrino programme. Today we are celebrating an exciting major milestone for Liverpool and the UK participation to the DUNE project.

"Liverpool has been a founding member of DUNE and our leadership in the prototyping programme for the key instruments is an important step towards the great scientific discoveries that we expect to come from this programme."

The first APA began the journey to CERN by road on 12 January 2018 and arrived in Geneva today (16 January 2018) where it was received by members of the protoDUNE experiment. The protoDUNE international experiment at CERN is assembling and will operate from summer 2018 the largest and final prototype for the DUNE underground liquid Argon detector. ProtoDUNE is led jointly by Professor Christos Touramanis of Liverpool University, and a Fermilab scientist.

DUNE is an international collaboration with a membership of over 1,000 scientists and engineers from 30 countries. They will use their detectors to study the intense neutrino and antineutrino beams produced by the LBNF facility at Fermilab at their production point and after they travel 800 miles through the earth to the South Dakota facility.
Entatic state model complexes optimize the energies of starting and final configuration to enable fast reaction rates (illustrated by the hilly ground). The work demonstrates that the entatic state principle can be used to tune the photochemistry of copper complexes. Credit: RWTH Aachen, Sonja Herres-Pawlis

What enables electrons to be transferred swiftly, for example during photosynthesis? An interdisciplinary team of researchers has worked out the details of how important bioinorganic electron transfer systems operate. Using a combination of very different, time-resolved measurement methods at DESY's X-ray source PETRA III and other facilities, the scientists were able to show that so-called pre-distorted states can speed up photochemical reactions or make them possible in the first place. The group headed by Sonja Herres-Pawlis from the RWTH Aachen University Michael Rubhausen from the University of Hamburg and Wolfgang Zinth from Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, is presenting its findings in the journal Nature Chemistry.

The scientists had studied the pre-distorted, "entatic" state using a model system. An entatic state is the term used by chemists to refer to the configuration of a molecule in which the normal arrangement of the atoms is modified by external binding partners such that the energy threshold for the desired reaction is lowered, resulting in a higher speed of reaction. One example of this is the metalloprotein plastocyanin, which has a copper atom at its centre and is responsible for important steps in the transfer of electrons during photosynthesis. Depending on its oxidation state, the copper atom either prefers a planar configuration, in which all the surrounding atoms are arranged in the same plane (planar geometry), or a tetrahedral arrangement of the neighbouring ligands. However the binding partner in the protein forces the copper atom to adopt a sort of intermediate arrangement. This highly distorted tetrahedron allows a very rapid shift between the two oxidation states of the copper atom.

"Pre-distorted states like this play an important role in many biochemical processes," explains Rubhausen, who works at the Centre for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) in Hamburg, a cooperation between DESY, the University of Hamburg and the Max Planck Society. "The principle of the entatic state helps the electron transfer reactions that occur everywhere in nature and also in human beings, for example when we breathe or a plant photosynthesises," adds Herres-Pawlis.

Biologically relevant, pre-distorted states always involve a metal atom. The scientists examined a model system consisting of a copper complex with specially tailored molecules bound to it, so-called ligands. Using a wide range of observation methods as well as theoretical calculations, the scientists showed that the ligands used did indeed put the copper complex into a pre-distorted (entatic) state and were then able to observe the details of the reaction that occurred when light was absorbed.

The combination of time-dependent UV, infra-red, X-ray and visual fluorescence spectroscopy produces a detailed picture of the dynamics of the structural changes on a timescale of pico- to nanoseconds (trillionths to billionths of a second). "We are now able for the first time to understand how pre-distorted states favour charge transfer," explains Rubhausen. "Also, our studies demonstrate that pre-distorted states are important for photochemical reactions, in other words for certain biochemical processes which are triggered by light," explains Herres-Pawlis.

The study shows in detail how the process proceeds: from the initial state (copper in an oxidation state of +1) an electron is transferred from the copper to one of the ligands, by optical excitation. Within femtoseconds (trillionths of a second) the excited state created decays into another, still excited state, known as the S1 state. In this configuration, the geometry is slightly relaxed.

Shortly afterwards, the electron undergoes a change in spin. The spin of an electron is comparable to the direction in which a top rotates. Although one of the electrons has so far remained on the ligand, this electron and its corresponding partner on the copper were spin-coupled. The spin of the electron on the ligand now reverses, and this very rapid transition to the so-called triplet state, within just about two picoseconds, removes the spin coupling. This T1 state exists for 120 picoseconds and drops back into the original state again after once again reversing its spin. All the time constants are distinctly shorter compared with other copper complexes. "A complete understanding of all the processes taking place has only become possible through the unique combination of different methods of study," emphasises Zinth.

The detailed analysis of the reaction principle not only improves our understanding of natural processes. It can also help to customise new bioinorganic complexes that imitate nature but whose range of reactions extend beyond those of natural molecules. These complexes could also accelerate or make possible chemical reactions associated with electron transfers in other areas, too.

More information: B. Dicke et al. Transferring the entatic-state principle to copper photochemistry, Nature Chemistry (2018). DOI: 10.1038/nchem.2916 Journal information: Nature Chemistry
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Shale gas is one of least sustainable options for producing electricity, according to new research from The University of Manchester.

Taking into account a range of sustainability aspects and assuming that they are all equally important, the research found that shale gas overall ranks seventh out of nine electricity options. The study also found that:

Shale gas ranks between the fourth and eighth relative to other electricity options

To become the most sustainable option, large improvements would be needed

This includes a 329-fold reduction in environmental impacts and a 16-fold increase in employment

An electricity mix with less rather than more shale gas is more sustainable

The major study, which is the first of its kind, considered environmental, economic and social sustainability of shale gas in the UK and compared it to other electricity generating options. These were coal, nuclear, natural gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), solar photovoltaics (PV), wind, hydro and biomass.

The study, published in Science of The Total Environment, compared shale gas and the other electricity options against 18 sustainability indicators. Of these, 11 were environmental, three economic and four social. Examples of the indicators considered include climate change impacts, environmental pollution, costs of electricity, creation of jobs and public perceptions.

The Government believes shale gas has the potential to provide the UK with greater energy security, growth and jobs. And it is "encouraging safe and environmentally sound exploration to determine this potential".

But the researchers found that for shale gas to be considered as sustainable as the best options, such as wind and solar PV, huge improvements would be needed.

This includes a 329-fold reduction in environmental impacts and 16 times higher employment in the sector.

The environmental and social sustainability of shale gas would also need to improve by up to a 100 times for it to compete with domestic natural gas and imported LNG.

Prof. Adisa Azapagic, from the School of Chemical Engineering & Analytical Science, says: 'Many countries are considering exploitation of shale gas but its overall sustainability is disputed. Previous studies focused mainly on environmental aspects of shale gas, largely in the US, with scant information on socio-economic aspects.

'To address this knowledge gap our research, for the first time, looks not only at the environmental impacts but the economic and social aspects of shale gas as well. This enables us to evaluate its overall sustainability rather than focusing on single issues, such as water pollution, traffic and noise, which have dominated the debate on shale gas so far.'

Whilst the current Government and industry are keen to develop shale gas, Scotland has banned fracking and in the rest of the UK there is strong opposition. This comes from numerous stakeholders, including non-governmental organisations (NGOs), local residents and activists across the country.

The impacts on the environment from fracking are the main argument against the exploitation of shale gas. But its supporters highlight improved national energy security and economic development as key benefits.

Prof. Azapagic, Professor of Sustainable Chemical Engineering, added: 'The results of this study clearly show that, assuming equal importance of the environmental, economic and social aspects, shale gas ranks seventh out of the nine electricity options, which means most other options for electricity generation are more sustainable.

'The results also suggest that any future electricity mix would be more sustainable with a lower rather than a higher share of shale gas.'

The research team say these results can now help inform UK policy makers, industry, NGOs and consumers. They will also be of interest to other countries considering exploitation of shale gas.

More information: Jasmin Cooper et al. Sustainability of UK shale gas in comparison with other electricity options: Current situation and future scenarios, Science of The Total Environment (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.11.140 Journal information: Science of the Total Environment
Scientists have unearthed photographs taken in countries including China during third plague pandemic, which killed 12 million people between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. Credit: Centre for the Study of World Christianity, University of Edinburgh/ reference number GB 237 CSWC47/LS8/45

New portraits of the evolution of some of history's deadliest pandemics have been created through analysis of thousands of skeletons and new collections of historical photographsand the results could indicate how similar diseases may evolve in the future.

Genetic material from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and the plague leave fossil traces of themselves in human teeth, and scientists have used this fact to identify fatal diseases from the past 5 000 years in mass graves and archaeological excavations all over the world.

Professor Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany, used molecular fossil records to build a genetic profile of Yersinia pestis  the organism behind the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 14th century. Beginning in 2013 and funded through the APGREID project, Prof. Krause's team obtained skeletons from as far afield as Africa, Asia and the Americas, as well as Europe.

After isolating remnants of bacteria from the skeletal remains, the team pieced together the bugs' evolutionary histories  demonstrating how the bacteria have changed over the centuries. They were astounded to find that they could trace Yersinia pestis back to the late stone age, and watch it emerge in two major events in European history  first as the Justinian Plague, which afflicted the eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century, and then as the Black Death in the 14th century.

Mutation rates

The team then went on to isolate other pathogens. 'It's quite incredible how many bacterial strains we have been able to reconstruct from the past,' said Prof. Krause. 'It is very exciting. We have reconstructed first plague, then leprosy, tuberculosis, Helicobacter pylori, Salmonella enterica and we are working currently on syphilis.'

They have been able to calculate each disease's mutation rate. The faster this is, the more rapidly the bug can potentially adapt to the environment around it. Leprosy, for example, turns out to have mutated only 20 times in the last thousand years, putting it at low risk of the type of changes which would make it more infectious or antibiotic resistant.

Tuberculosis, on the other hand, has mutated about 200 times in the same period  much faster than was previously thought.

'Before this, people just inferred the past from modern-day genomes but all those papers have been wrong by at least a factor of 10,' said Prof. Krause.

Extracting the DNA posed several challenges. The soil in which bodies are laid to rest leaches thousands of different microbes into skeletons  so that over 99 % of the DNA extracted from an ancient skeleton doesn't come from that human at all. Most of the remaining 1 % is the human's own DNA  only a tiny fraction of it is from that human's personal tribe of microbes  including disease-causing bacteria. As a result, Prof. Krause and his team were searching for DNA that formed only about a thousandth part of the genetic material they extracted.

Algorithms

The team transformed the laborious process of pinpointing the right DNA by inventing algorithms which take advantage of the increased computing power that has become available in recent years.

'If you take DNA from an ancient skeleton and then you want to know, for every DNA fragment, what organism it comes from  that usually would have taken half a year or so per sample,' said Prof. Krause.

The big advantage of his team's new algorithm  known as MALT  is speed. It can examine one billion DNA fragments in 24 hours and identify which organism each one comes from.

In China, migrant workers were seen as carriers of disease and this is reflected in photographic documentation of the plague. Credit: Centre for the Study of World Christianity, University of Edinburgh/ reference number GB 237 CSWC47/LS8/43

The team included pathologists who examined the skeletons for physical legacies of the diseases they endured  often left as markings on the bone. Combining the approaches, they were able to reconstruct the entire genome of Yersinia pestis for the first time from ancient skeletons, as well as its modulations over time.

'We can see various steps where the new genes come in and the virulence of the bacterium changes,' said Prof. Krause.

They could see, for example, the moment where a mutation emerged that allowed the bug to colonise fleas  and thus become a far more deadly threat to humans.

The scientists now believe they can predict how, and how quickly, the bacteria will change in the future  helping us understand what threat they will pose to humans and how quickly they may develop antibiotic resistance.

Cultural obsessions

Another portrait of Yersinia pestis is emerging from a team that has been scouring the world for photographs of the outbreak of the third plague pandemic  the wave that killed 12 million people across the world between the mid-19th and mid-20th century.

In the 1850s, photography was a recent invention, so this was the first time that an epidemic was photographed  and telegraphed  across the globe, according to Dr. Christos Lynteris, a medical anthropologist at St Andrews and Cambridge universities, UK, who leads the VR3PP project.

Dr. Lynteris has uncovered and digitised a treasure trove of images from locations ranging from Alabama, US, to northeast China. They include a collection from so-called Fort Plague  an island fort near St. Petersburg, Russia, that was converted into a giant plague laboratory and named Fort Alexander, after a Russian prince.

The photographs reveal much about attitudes to the disease amongst different nationalities  and amongst the photographers who took the pictures.

Many countries created plague commissions that travelled and photographed outbreaks in ways that reflected their theories about the disease. A series of Chinese photographs, for example, consists mostly of bird's-eye views of slums and images of dark, claustrophobic alleyways. Chinese migrant workers  or coolies  were seen as carriers of disease, and the slums they lived in were thought to be a source of infection. The research team believed that urban planning was the key to combatting plague, and that slums should be burned, says Dr. Lynteris.

'There is no single corpse in the Chinese album,' he said.

A Russian team of the time, in contrast, which believed that replacing burials with cremation was the key, produced images of horrific corpses and of failed attempts to burn bodies on the frozen steppes.

A further collection from the San Francisco public health office consisted entirely of photos of the inside and outside of every house in Chinatown  a plague hotspot  to understand what might make them conducive to rats.

Photography brought new ideas on health and science to the public imagination, for example the concept of zoonosis  the transmission of disease from animals to humans. It also encouraged international cooperation on world health. The cultural obsessions of the photographers, who were often colonial, has also emerged. For example, exotic practices such as burials were disproportionately photographed and may have distorted understanding of how the plague was spread, says Dr. Lynteris.
Uber is capping drivers' daily working hours in Britain

US ride-hailing app Uber on Tuesday said it would cap the number of hours its drivers can work in Britain from next week in a bid to increase safety after heavy criticism of its business practices.

The new policy means that drivers must take an uninterrupted six-hour break after 10 hours, and will not be able to log on to the app during that time.

The company had already been messaging drivers who were working too long to switch off its app.

"We believe this is an industry first and are not aware of any other private hire operator in the UK that has introduced such a limit," Uber said in a statement.

"It's another example of how Uber uses technology to help enhance driver and passenger safety," Andrew Byrne, Uber's head of policy, was quoted as saying.

Uber is currently appealing against the withdrawal of its licence in London over the way in which the company reports serious criminal offences and obtains criminal record checks for its drivers.

Uber can continue to operate in London pending the appeal, which is set to be heard later this year.

Uber is also appealing against an employment court ruling that would give its drivers the right to paid holidays and the national minimum wage.

Uber has around 40,000 drivers in London and 50,000 in Britain as a whole.

Labour MP Rachel Reeves, head of the British parliament's business committee, welcomed the news.

"We received evidence of Uber drivers being logged into the Uber app for more than 60 hours per week so we welcome the introduction of limits to driver hours.

"We look forward to seeing how this will work in practice and hope other companies will quickly follow suit," she said.

But James Farrar, head of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, said drivers were tired "because they are not earning enough".

"If Uber forces drivers to work less without paying more it is just going to depress hourly earnings even further below the minimum wage and push drivers to the brink," he said.

 2018 AFP
Melting sea ice is forming characteristic puddles on its surface. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

In the winter of 2015/16, something happened that had never before been seen on this scale: at the end of December, temperatures rose above zero degrees Celsius for several days in parts of the Arctic. Temperatures of up to eight degrees were registered north of Svalbard. Temperatures this high have not been recorded in the winter half of the year since the beginning of systematic measurements at the end of the 1970s. As a result of this unusual warmth, the sea ice began to melt.

"We heard about this from the media," says Heini Wernli, Professor of Atmospheric Dynamics at ETH Zurich. The news aroused his scientific curiosity, and a team led by his then doctoral student Hanin Binder investigated the issue. In November 2017, they published their analysis of this exceptional event in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

In it, the researchers show how these unusual temperatures arose: three different air currents met over the North Sea between Scotland and southern Norway, carrying warm air northwards at high speed as though on a "highway." (see illustration)

One air current originated in the Sahara and brought near-surface warm air with it. To begin with, temperature of this air was about 20 degrees Celsius. While it cooled off on its way to the Arctic, it was still above zero when it arrived. "It's extremely rare for warm, near-surface subtropical air to be transported as far as the Arctic," says Binder.

The second air current originated in the Arctic itself, a fact that astonished the scientists. To begin with, this air was very cold. However, the air mass  which also lay close to the ground  moved towards the south along a curved path and, while above the Atlantic, was warmed significantly by the heatflux from the ocean before joining the subtropical air current.

The third warm air current started as a cold air mass in the upper troposphere, from an altitude above 5 kilometres. These air masses were carried from west to east and descended in a stationary high-pressure area over Scandinavia. Compression thereby warmed the originally cold air, before it entered the "highway to the Arctic."

Warm air highway into the Arctic. Credit: Sandro Bosch / ETH Zurich

Poleward warm air transport

This highway of air currents was made possible by a particular constellation of pressure systems over northern Europe. During the period in question, intense low-pressure systems developed over Iceland while an extremely stable high-pressure area formed over Scandinavia. This created a kind of funnel above the North Sea, between Scotland and southern Norway, which channelled the various air currents and steered them northwards to the Arctic.

This highway lasted approximately a week. The pressure systems then decayed and the Arctic returned to its typical frozen winter state. However, the warm period sufficed to reduce the thickness of the sea ice in parts of the Arctic by 30 centimetres  during a period in which ice usually becomes thicker and more widespread.

"These weather conditions and their effect on the sea ice were really exceptional," says Binder. The researchers were not able to identify a direct link to global warming. "We only carried out an analysis of a single event; we didn't research the long-term climate aspects" emphasises Binder.

High-pressure systems cause sea ice to melt

However, the melting of Arctic sea ice during summer is a different story. The long-term trend is clear: the minimum extent and thickness of the sea ice in late summer has been shrinking continually since the end of the 1970s. Sea ice melted particularly severely in 2007 and 2012  a fact which climate researchers have thus far been unable to fully explain. Along with Lukas Papritz from the University of Bergen, Wernli investigated the causes of these outliers. Their study has just been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Arctic sea ice on 26 August 2012: Never before since satellite surveillance began, the extent of the ice was as small as it was on that date. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

According to their research, the severe melting in the aforementioned years was caused by stable high-pressure systems that formed repeatedly throughout the summer months. Under these cloud-free weather conditions, the high level of direct sunlight  the sun shines 24 hours a day at this time of year  particularly intensified the melting of the sea ice.

Areas of low pressure "inject" air masses into the Arctic

These high-pressure systems developed through an influx of air from temperate latitudes. Low-pressure systems in the North Atlantic and North Pacific areas, for example, "inject" air masses into the Arctic at a height of about eight kilometres. This raised the height of the tropopause, the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, in the region of the "injections." As a result, surface air pressure below rose and a high-pressure system was established. While it dissipated again around ten days later, an unusually high amount of sea ice melted in the interim, and the remaining ice thinned.

The climate scientists' investigation demonstrated that in the summers of 2007 and 2012, during which these high-pressure situations occurred particularly frequently, they led to cloud-free conditions every third day. The high level of solar radiation intensified and accelerated the melting of the sea ice. "The level of solar radiation is the main factor in the melting of the ice in summer. Unlike with the winter anomaly, the "injected" air at about 8 kilometre altitude from the south is not warm  with minus 60 degrees it's ice-cold," says Wernli. "The air temperature therefore has very little effect on the ice." Furthermore, the northward transport of warm, humid air masses at the edge of the high-pressure systems reduces (heat) emission, which further intensifies melting.

Their analysis has allowed the researchers to understand the meteorological processes leading to significant variations in summertime ice melt for the first time. "Our results underline the fundamental role that weather systems in temperate latitudes play in episodes of particularly intense ice melt in the Arctic," says the ETH professor.

More information: Hanin Binder et al. Exceptional Air Mass Transport and Dynamical Drivers of an Extreme Wintertime Arctic Warm Event, Geophysical Research Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1002/2017GL075841 Heini Wernli et al. Role of polar anticyclones and mid-latitude cyclones for Arctic summertime sea-ice melting, Nature Geoscience (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-017-0041-0 Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters , Nature Geoscience
Spotted seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus), caught off the coast of North Carolina. Credit: Tim Ellis

Cold winter weather can play a key role in what you're allowed to fish for next spring. That point was driven home when low temperatures in early January led North Carolina to temporarily bar fishing for spotted seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus), one of the most popular targets for recreational anglers.

Stories about isolated fish kills, or "cold stuns," of spotted seatrout due to cold temperatures date back more than 100 years. But no one knew just how important these cold stuns could be until 2017  when NC State researchers published new findings on population impacts.

"We had a lot of anecdotes about spotted seatrout, but in order to make good fishery management decisions, you need quantifiable, scientific data," says Tim Ellis, an ecosystems analyst for the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership who did research on cold stuns and spotted seatrout while a Ph.D. student at NC State.

Ellis, in collaboration with Joe Hightower and Jeff Buckel of NC State, collected data on the spotted seatrout fisheries in North Carolina and Virginia from 2008 through 2014  work that ultimately led to three publications in 2017 and 2018 that address the impact low temperatures can have on the species. And that impact can be significant.

"The full extent of this month's cold stun is not yet known, but conditions seemed comparable to what we saw in 2010  and that year's cold temperatures led to around 95 percent mortality in spotted seatrout populations in North Carolina and Virginia," Ellis says.

That's a big deal, because spotted seatrout are one of the most sought-after species by recreational anglers in North Carolina  and throughout the southeastern U.S.

"In terms of dollars and cents, the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries estimates that the recreational fishery for spotted seatrout in North Carolina alone, had a total economic impact of more than $54 million in 2016," Ellis says.

The importance of this fishery, and the NC State findings, are likely why the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries announced Jan. 5 that it was barring commercial and recreational fishing of spotted seatrout in North Carolina waters until June 15  after the species has passed its peak spawning season.

Most spotted seatrout overwinter in shallow, estuarine waters, where water temperatures are strongly affected by the air temperature. That makes the species particularly susceptible to cold snaps like those we saw in the first weeks of 2018.

"In mild winters, spotted seatrout populations can thrive in North Carolina waters," Ellis says. "But high mortality during cold winters means it could take a while for the fishery to rebound. The fishery is being closed in North Carolina to protect the remaining spawners, in hopes that this will help the species bounce back more quickly."

"Until Tim decided to take a look, nobody knew how important cold temperatures could be for spotted seatrout at the population level," Buckel says.

"Ultimately, our research is making a difference," Ellis says. "We gave fishery managers key information they needed to make informed decisions about how to respond to cold-stun events."

The three relevant papers are "Relating cold tolerance to winterkill for spotted seatrout at its northern latitudinal limits," published February 2017 in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology; "Winter severity influences spotted seatrout mortality in a southeast US estuarine system," published February 2017 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series; and "Relative importance of fishing and natural mortality for spotted seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus) estimated from a tag-return model and corroborated with survey data," published in January 2018 by the journal Fisheries Research.
The year 2023 may seem like a long way off, but it will be here before you know it. If youre starting to think about 

Read more
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Microsoft Extends Patent Protections to Azure Stack Users

Microsoft this week announced an extension of its intellectual property (IP) indemnification program in a bid to cover users of its Azure Stack appliances, in addition to Azure cloud customers.

Microsoft first debuted its Azure IP Advantage program in February 2017, touting it as an indemnification program for users of Azure services. Through the program, Microsoft provides assurances to Azure customers that they have some defense against getting sued for infringing the software patents of third parties.

The assurance comes in the form of a pool of 10,000 Microsoft patents used for defensive purposes in court cases. If a customer gets sued for IP infringement, Microsoft promises to give the customer one of its patents for countersuing purposes. Microsoft may also take up the legal fight on behalf of the customer under this program.

Now the Azure IP Advantage program covers Azure Stack, an appliance certified by Microsoft's hardware partners that lets organizations run Azure services in their own datacenters, instead of having to use Microsoft's public cloud infrastructure.

Here's how Microsoft characterized the indemnity support for Azure Stack, which adds protections for open source software use:

With Azure IP Advantage, Azure Stack services receive uncapped indemnification from Microsoft, including for the open source software powering these services. Eligible customers can also access a defensive portfolio of 10,000 Microsoft patents to defend their SaaS application in Azure Stack. This portfolio has been ranked among the top 3 cloud patent portfolios worldwide. They can also rely on a royalty free springing license to protect them in the unlikely event Microsoft transfers a patent to a non-practicing entity.

The "springing license" reference means that the patents that Microsoft may transfer to other companies under this program can't be used to make IP claims against other Azure customers.

In other Azure Stack news, Microsoft warned earlier this month that all Azure Stack systems are subject to "speculative execution"-type attacks associated with Intel, AMD and ARM processors (Security Advisory ADV180002). The attacks could result in information disclosure, such as the showing of password or encryption key information.

Operating system and firmware updates are needed in Azure Stack systems to ward off these speculative execution threats, called "Meltdown" and "Spectre" by researchers. Microsoft recommends applying the Azure Stack 1712 update to Azure Stack systems, although the update has some "known issues." Firmware updates, available from OEMs, are also needed after the Azure Stack 1712 update has been applied.
For the past decade, Slate has had a specific place for its coverage of womens issues. What started as a blog, XX Factor, turned into a standalone website, DoubleX, and then eventually came back to Slate proper as the DoubleX section. Now were changing all thatsaying goodbye to DoubleX, distributing its coverage across the magazine, and launching an exciting new lifestyle section, Human Interest (more on that here). But we didnt want to make this change without marking the essential contribution DoubleX has made to Slate, and to the broader conversation around gender, over the years. To that end, Slate editor in chief Julia Turner recently sat down with the founding editors of DoubleXEmily Bazelon, now a writer for the New York Times Magazine; Meghan ORourke, author, most recently, of the poetry collection Sun in Days; and Hanna Rosin, co-host of NPRs Invisibiliato talk about the scary early days, how they managed to come up with a name no one likes, whether ladyblogs have broadened or stifled the conversation, and whats changed since they first got together and said, Lets try this, and lets try it together. Below is an edited excerpt of that chat. Listen to the entire thing using the player below.

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Julia Turner: Its so fun to have you three in a virtual studio together. Weve gathered for an Irish wake of sorts. We have just announced here at Slate that we are closing DoubleX the section, which began as a Slate blog, XX Factor, during Hillary Clintons first campaign for the presidency, then launched as a standalone site before taking its place on Slate proper. It has fostered some of the best work Slate has ever published and some of the sharpest voices over the past decade. Among them, Amanda Hess, Christina Cauterucci, and Ruth Graham.

In a moment, when matters of gender are vital to our coverage of news, politics, culture, and technology and when theres a hunger for family and lifestyle coverage for and by readers of all genders, weve decided to pull up stakes on an idea of the editorial section that carves out womanhood as a particular focus. Well continue to cover matters pertaining to gender in our new section and across the magazine, and well feature parenting and lifestyle issues in a new section called Human Interest intended for readers of any gender. The DoubleX podcast, which Hanna still hosts, will continue as an audio outpost of smart and lively conversation among women that you three helped cultivate nearly a decade ago.

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Im enlisting you today to help give DoubleX the loving send-off it deserves and also to convene a classic DoubleX-style conversation about where women stand today. Its been an eventful couple of years and months and even weeks on that front, but lets start with the history. Meghan, tell us a little bit about the origins of DoubleX?

Meghan ORourke: Im so interested, Hanna and Emily, to see if we all remember this in the same way, but in anticipation of our conversation, Ive been nostalgically over my hot chocolate thinking about those original days, and my memory of it is that we started XX Factor, the blog, and the idea germinated for it during one of our Slate retreats. It was the lead-up to the 2008 election, and as I remember, Emily, we were talking about how so much of the political coverage at Slate and the world was written by men, and here we have this strong female primary candidate, Hillary Clinton, and it seemed odd to us that the coverage was being written almost exclusively by men. We started talking about creating a space where women would write about the election.

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In my recollection, I think one thing I said at the time is: I would love to write about politics, but Im not a policy nerd or a politics nerd either, and I dont feel Im as informed as some people who are career political writers, but I have so many thoughts and feelings about whats happening in the election right now. Hillary crying, the backlash to that, all of those things that were  I dont know if that had already taken place, but were in the air. To me, the space of the XX Factor was really exciting because I think I felt comfortable writing. It was like a way of dipping my toe into the water.

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What I remember, and Im curious if you remember this, is that from the very beginning, it was not designed as a space for women to read. It was designed as a space for everyonemen includedto read, but where the voices were primarily womens, with a focus on issues that might be of particular concern to women but really were of concern to everybody. That was what was really exciting about it in those early, early days to me.

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Emily Bazelon: Yeah, I do remember it similarly, and I also remember feeling like it was a collective enterprise. And I think that it had this feeling of thinking out loud and of processing all of these things that had never really come up in a presidential election before, because Hillary Clinton was the candidate. I remember being hungry for conversation among women, and, Meghan, I remember worrying a little bit about how since we were all responding to each other constantly, I wasnt even sure how readable how it would be. Now, were so used to that from social media, but this was really pre-Twitter.

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ORourke: Right. It was very threaded. That was to me the really exciting thing about itthat it was a place, as youre saying, of conversation, collaboration, and being able to talk in a different mode or register, which was one of thinking out loud and combatively sometimes thinking out loud, but thinking out loud.

Hanna Rosin: I definitely remember we didnt know how to write. Its not that we didnt know what to write or what we thought about things, but we didnt know what tone to strike. There was like a hesitant, Am I allowed to mention the children? Am I allowed to write from a personal perspective? Because Slate has an established tone, were like, Well, are we supposed to be like Our Bodies, Ourselves here? We werent sure. Are we supposed to address each other by name? Am I supposed to say, Well, Dahlia, I disagree because blah, blah, blah, blah. Are we supposed to be very skeptical, or is it supposed to have a sisterhood feel? It was very hesitant at first.

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ORourke: But it kind of quickly found, I think, a freewheeling energy. I remember the delight of just getting into it and being able to think alongside all of you and what a pleasure and surprise that was to me, because I had been writing for a long time, and I thought of myself as a very comfortable writer. Someone who really had no problems putting my opinions out there, but there was something different about this, and I wonder if thats true for you.

I think I felt emboldened to take some kinds of risks that I wouldnt have taken otherwise to be more uncertainand Slate especially in that day and age, it was the contrarian certaintyto be more uncertain in a way that was productive, it felt like to me at the time, and I wonder if you felt that.

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I definitely remember we didnt know how to write. Its not that we didnt know what to write or what we thought about things, but we didnt know what tone to strike.  Hanna Rosin

Rosin: I totally get that feeling youre describing, and the safety was in the collective. I have it a little bit now because Im working in radio, so you work collectively on things. Its much more of a collaboration, and the way blogs were done then, like if you think of Andrew Sullivans blog, it would be him trying things out. Blogs were for trying things out in conversation with an audience, and I think we did a similar thing, but we were trying things out on each other. It was just a little safer to do it that way rather than to throw it out into the world and get the bites back. We did it in our space. Now, of course, people were reading. People were eavesdropping on this conversation, but it didnt actually feel that way when you tried out an idea. I felt like I was trying it out with you guys.

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Turner: Well, one other thing it allowed for was this real range of views. I think just as we saw in this past election, there were a range of perspectives on Hillary, and you guys were able to surface both the excitement of having a serious female candidate and the disappointment that that serious female candidate was the complicated wife of a complicated former president. It allowed the section to not have a party line of any kind, which I think is maybe more of a problem on todays internet than on the internet of 2008, which was a little bit more of an exploratory place. Even for the internet of that age, I feel like the range of views batted around was part of what made it so exciting to read.

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Bazelon: Were we also making it safe for each other to focus on gender and womens issues without feeling like we were hurting [our careers]? Right?

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ORourke: Yeah. Totally.

Bazelon: I remember myself feeling uncertain about how much I could  What percentage of my writing output should be about those issues before I risk ghettoizing myself. I think the fact that we were all holding hands and doing it together made it easier, and obviously we were doing it at a time where this was happening elsewhere on the internet. Jezebel was up and running in particular, and there were places like Feministing that were either already there or on the way. The feminist blogosphere was becoming a player in the world, and we were trying to be a part of that, but also do something distinct.

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Rosin: Although I have to say I was never totally comfortable with it, and the reason I knew that is because when the three of us would sit down and do interviews with other people about, Why do you want to start a ladyblog? What is this for? What does this mean? I felt like I could never exactly articulate or answer that question well.

ORourke: Yeah. For me, there was a real distinction between XX Factor and the launch of DoubleX. I never had that hesitation about XX Factor. I felt like it was very clear to me why it existed. It was because there was this paucity of women writing about politics. It also allowed us, as youre saying, Emily, to focus our pieces in a slightly different way or to pitch pieces that we might not have  It also was fun to write in the blog form. It would let us play with tone and voice, thats part of that safety Im talking about. Then when we made this shift to DoubleX, I think it raised a different set of questions, which started to get into the questions about: If we have a whole magazine thats around womens issues, but were writing in some places about things that we would expect everyone to want to read about, why is it a separate entity? That raised questions for me in a way that XX Factor being hosted in Slate didnt. And, you know, some of those answers were external to us. They were Slate wanted to branch out and this was this going enterprise and Jezebel and Feministing and all these places were doing really well.

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It was on the one hand, from a business perspective, a natural step and almost a natural step editorially but maybe not quite. I think I shared your hesitations and questions about: How do we make DoubleX work as an entity separate from Slate?

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Bazelon: Then, the three of us edited that separate site, which was still connected to Slate and a lot of the content.

Rosin: Wait. Can we just say how weird it was that the three of us chose to do it?

ORourke: I think thats the best part.

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Turner: Wait. Wait. I want to ask you about this. How did it come to be that you guys were a trio of consensus-based co-editors? It does feel almost like a cliche of, OK, and then the three women are going to collaborate more. Theyre going to do away with all hierarchy and structure, and then 

Bazelon: It was a feminist utopia. We moved to a cabin in the woods.

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ORourke: Our bodies, ourselves. We did do some waxing of one another.

Bazelon: We had babies together, too. Hanna had a baby, actually. That was true, but I dont think either of us really helped with that.

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Rosin: No, but it wasnt a feminist utopia, because they essentially took one salary and split it into three. We were just being idiots.

ORourke: What? As I recall, the idea for DoubleX the magazine also came about at a Slate retreat, and Jacob Weisberg kind of posed it to us, maybe.

Bazelon: Yeah, it was Jacobs idea.

Im having flashbacks to 2008 or 2009, when I kept being like, Its not a womens magazine.  Meghan ORourke

ORourke: It was Jacobs idea, and I had transitioned from editing the Slate culture section to writing. I was pretty interested in mostly writing. I know I didnt want to do a full-time editing job. I think Jacob was like, Would you want to do it with Emily and Hanna? I was like, Actually, that sounds amazing, because in a way, I dont know, I was more interested in the conversation than in having to run something on my own at that point.

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Turner: I mean, that was part of what made the voice of it so distinct in that standalone iteration again, was that it really centered this sophisticated conversation among smart, interesting brains figuring it all out together. Seeing what you guys made of the notion of a womens magazine was, again, completely thrilling as a reader and a project.

ORourke: Im having flashbacks to 2008 or 2009, when I kept being like, Its not a womens magazine.

Rosin: Right.

ORourke: I remember I said to Jacoband then this was a big part of the conversation we all had, and I found myself returning to it over and overas it started to take shape and some of the business pressures are to make it look more and more like a conventional womens magazine. To me, what I had said was, I dont want to run a womens magazine.

I want to help run a magazine thats by women for everybody. I think we spent a long time trying to come up with a tagline that would include men. Do you guys remember this?

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Rosin: I totally remember that.

Bazelon: The naming and logo problems were  man, that was really hard. DoubleX as our name was a sort of act of desperation. We thought we were choosing something incredibly straightforward, which of course in retrospect seems like it left out a lot of people who decided to transition to becoming female and dont have two X chromosomes. Oops.

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Turner: Yeah, I mean I think it would be hard to imagine, I mean first of all, just the visibility of trans issues make the name no longer seem as inclusive as it once did.

ORourke: I dont think anyone ever liked the name.

The naming and logo problems were  man, that was really hard. DoubleX as our name was a sort of act of desperation.  Emily Bazelon

Rosin: No, we tried to come up with a new name.

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ORourke: I think it was a compromise in which it was always the choice that some people were OK with.

Rosin: I wish I could remember what our alternate names were. I was trying to remember that the other day.

ORourke: Ruffian.

Bazelon: Moxie.

Rosin: Moxie? Jeez, thats a terrible name.

ORourke: I wanted to name it after the female racehorse who didnt let any male in front of her.

Bazelon: Oh right, I remember that. Maybe that would be great.

ORourke: I loved her. Someday my magazine will exist.

Bazelon: Thats great, Meghan. You go start the Ruffian. Ill read the Ruffian.

Turner: Its true that, yes, DoubleX has had some aesthetic qualms around it, but was a little bit difficult from a business perspective to sell because the two Xs made some people think it was a porn site, and then now turns out

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ORourke: We didnt even think about that until

Turner: And now it turns out to potentially also be transphobic.

Bazelon: Terrific.

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Turner: The other thing that I think is striking is that if we were to be launching a standalone site by women in 2018, we wouldnt have it done by three white women. Im curious how you guys thought about race at the time.

ORourke: We thought about it in terms of writers. We definitely were, I think as I recall, thinking about that in terms of looking for writers of different backgrounds, color, et cetera, ethnicity.

Rosin: I think youre right. We never would have done it the same way. I think that about the podcast, too. Its just not an interesting way to do something now when were much more aware of it.

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Bazelon: Also, it limited the range of opinions, and writings, and views, and perspectives in a way that wasthe site was poorer for it. I think youre right that we did try to look for contributors.

ORourke: You know, that strikes me as being true even of the blog, because Obama was also a primary candidate, and I dont think we had a lot of discussion about race on XX Factor.

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Turner: Yeah, it was a way of kind of focusing on one of the lenses and not one of the others.

ORourke: Not one of the others.

Turner: I mean, I think theres just a continuing tension here, and we feel this in the change were making at Slate now, too, which is when you create a space either to focus on matters pertaining to gender or that particularly facilitates different contributions from women writers, you do amplify those voices and issues. You create the hole that you have to fill with stuff about women, stuff about stuff by women. Im aware in making this change at Slate that well certainly be losing that pull and pressure to do that work. Then theres the flip side of what does it mean to have these live in a separate place and be kind of apart. Im curious to hear you guys talk about that.

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Bazelon: I think we all felt a little nervous about the standalone aspect of it. It was exciting. It was fun to have our own project, and we were proud of it, but I think all of us just in this conversation have expressed a kind of philosophical set of hesitations about being off in our own space as women. I dont think we ever totally reconciled our feelings about that, so it was like we were producing content we were happy about, but the package for it was less important. And I remember feeling basically pretty relieved when we folded the separate site back into Slate.

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ORourke: Its interesting that it wasnt any of our ideas to turn XX Factor into its own site. That was not what we would have come up with necessarily on our own, even though it was so galvanizing and fun and just kind of wonderful to think about having a space to curate.

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I think when you use the word package, that was a really crucial one, Emily. I remember one thing we came up against very quickly was we had this vision of a magazine that was by women and for women to read, but also for men. The sort of odd hybrid that didnt really exist in the world, and we kept thinking about magazines like Esquire and GQ in their heyday as these kind of literary powerhouses that were seen by everybody as excellent magazines.

Yes, theyre tailored toward men, but theyre for everybody in some way.

I think we were trying to do that and we just kept running into advertisers befuddlement, as I recall. It was almost impossible to create that space, which was to me as an editor shocking because one of the things thats so interesting about editing online and certainly online in the early 2000s was how much possibility there was, how much novelty, how much room there was to define things and make spaces. Yet you say youre doing something run by women, written by women, and it has to look like this. Its a pink triangle, or its pink ribbon. It has to be that, you have to have some column about makeup, you have to have a fashion column, you have to have these things that I think we were resisting and then also trying to figure out how to do really well.

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I mean, fashion, I was totally into having something about fashion, but I just remember the kind of, We have to get the makeup advertising, and we have to get this, and it was so not what DoubleX was really about. I remember that being a huge problem.

Rosin: I remember it differently, which is that the constraint had more to do with speed and time than it did with advertisers. I personally was actually really excited about the idea of taking a womens magazine and doing things like fashion differently. I actually loved the idea that you could take any topic that was traditionally covered by womens magazines and not necessarily decimate it, which was how Jezebel did it, which was cool and interesting, but just do something different with it.

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In my memory, it was more like things had to be done quickly. There wasnt a lot of time. We were all doing other things. We write as women. Not all of the time, but we see the world as women, we write about issues that concern women. We all do that, but the pressure to produce it all the time, kind of a mill of womens writing, thats to me when then it becomes almost parodic. Then youre just like, the filter on every bit of news is like, Whats the womens angle? What about this persons hair? What does this candidate look like? What about the candidates wife? Then you start to move into formula and parody when you have to do it consistently over and over again all the time.

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ORourke: Yeah, and you get to a really important aspect of your question, Julia, which is that I think to be the best kind of writer and to produce the best kind of writing, we cant be putting on the same lens all the time. I do think thats one of the constraints to go back to your word, that something like a specially demarcated womens section does create. I think you see this with womens magazines. I mean, one of the big questions people ask all the time is, Why are womens magazines not better? Sometimes they have actually quite a lot of good writing and reporting, but theres something about that, the relentlessness of the lensI think thats right, Hannathat its a bit parodic in the end or certainly constraining.

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The pressure to produce it all the time, kind of a mill of womens writing, thats to me when then it becomes almost parodic.  Hanna Rosin

Bazelon: Is that true of any lens? One of the reasons I ask thisI was at a meeting last year about trying to increase the number of women who win particular kinds of serious book awards. As part of the conversation, one of the women writers who was there said in a really dismissive way that people who come up through the feminist blogosphere are very limited and that its just not a way to really excel as a writer. I actually thought that was wrong. I could think of 10 examples of people who are doing excellent work at the top of the field and whove really taken this on as a specialty.

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ORourke: I mean, thats a really good point because Im thinking now of Rebecca Traister, who I think is such a fabulous cultural political critic in all ways, and she does have a lens of thinking about women, thinking about feminism. Maybe what I would re-say is: When we put on lenses, we risk that rigidity, we risk narrowing ourselves in that I think it takes a lot, and shes a wonderful example of someone who theres so much flexibility and capaciousness in how she reads situations, its almost like shes a reader of the human condition who happens to write about women.

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Turner: I want to ask you guys: How do you think the rise of ladybloggingfor lack of a less condescending and crappy termwomens sites and spaces online have changed the conversation around gender in the last 10 years? Do you think its helped broaden it? Do you think its stifled it? Do you think its deepened it? Do you think its made it more central in other conversations? What do you think the overall impact has been?

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Rosin: I think I would say boththat it in some ways has absolutely broadened the conversation. Our eyes are on you, were watching, nothing will slip through, you cant get away with things. Its legitimized big beats and deep reporting about womens issues. I think ladyblogs get a lot of credit for that. But then, and we may be passing out of this moment, the kind of whoosh of ladyblogs created a sense that there were only certain things you could say. There was a moment where you felt like you couldnt say something different than what the ladyblogs had deemed that you could say. I think that moment might be past, but there was that moment.

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ORourke: I wonder, because in some ways it feels like that moment is more with us again. I mean, one of the primary issues women face is unconscious bias. I mean just the way that women are not taken as serious, the way that womens testimony is dismissed as weve seen in the kind of rise of the #MeToo movement, the decades and decades of silencing of women who actually spoke and were silenced. Their testimonies were not taken seriously. I think the really important work that the blogs did was to create a space that demanded to be taken seriously. They did really important work to push back against unconscious bias, both internalized unconscious bias and the unconscious bias coming to us from the world around. [But] when you have a moment or you have sets of voices or you have these kinds of conversations, is there a risk of a kind of consensus settling in and sort of staidness?

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Bazelon: Orthodoxy.

ORourke: Orthodoxy, yeah. I mean, I remember writing a piece in my column about gender issues about men who didnt want to watch their wives give birth. I tried to argue that this was OK.

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Bazelon: At your peril, I bet.

ORourke: Oh my God. Katha Pollitt was so mad at me. But anyways I thought, Well, lets really take this question seriously. Lets not assume that those guys are evil guys. Lets think about whats really at stake here in terms of sexuality and domesticity. I actually think trying to look at questions in that kind of open-endedness is really interesting, and I do think sometimes we lose the ability to do that.

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Turner: The internet more broadly has just become a less hospitable place for uncertainty, ambiguity, or lets try this idea on for size-ism. Its just ayou really have to gird up if youre going to approach writing in that mode on the internet these days.

ORourke: Can I ask a question? Im so curious what you allJulia includedthink. Julia, you were talking about where we are thats different from our name, how that wouldnt work now, and just the way that we dont want to in some sense corral womens issues into a separate place. My question for all of you that Im really curious about is: Do you think were in a substantially different place? Do you thinkits 10 years lateris it better? Are women writers better positioned? Are we going to see a flood of female editors running magazines? Is this a moment of actual change and difference?

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Bazelon: Hanna, this is teed up for you, the author of The End of Men.

ORourke: Yes, exactly.

Rosin: Oh my God, Im really thinking about this. Literally, it was flashing in my head, yes, no, yes, no. I mean, yes, I do think things have changed. I dont think theyve utterly revolutionized and transformed, but yes. There are conversations and ways of talking in the public sphere that were very prevalent 10 years ago that would be totally unacceptable today. Monica Lewinsky is one example. Theres a lot of surfacing of unconscious bias that still has to happen, but a kind of open sexism, an open casual sexism, not by sexists, but just kind of in the mainstream. I think thats less acceptable. Thats one good thing you get by a policing of people.

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Bazelon: And mens level of fear has risen. I think there are things to be said by that. Well, I mean, one thing that I think about a lot: I now have two teenage boys. They are very aware that if a girl were to accuse them, God forbid, of some nonconsensual something, that that would be terrible trouble for them. Its true about their friends. These high school boys have this awareness of risk and of self-preservation about sex that is totally different from the high school boys of my era. I feel grateful for that.

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Rosin: Susan Faludi would say that the rise in power wouldthere would be a kind of backlash brewing underneath that, underneath that fear.

Bazelon: Yes, and theres some evidence in support of that. As women rise higher, men use the tools they still have to bring them down. That is something to watch out for, but it is still the case that at least in the world my boys are growing up in, they have a sense of the damage to women, of the potential damage to themselves, which I think is a healthy kind of awareness.

Turner: And do they experience thatI mean, as someone whos got two boys who are much younger and not yet facing these questionsas some woeful and undue burden?

Bazelon: Theyre not budding mens rights activists, as far as I can tell. They seem to be taking it in stride, and I think that they also feel some sense of justice about it, which  and I dont mean to create them as ideal in some way. They have plenty of unconscious bias that theyre carrying around, but I just think their set of assumptions about these issues is totally different from the boys I grew up with in high school and in college.

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Rosin: But you dont want them to land at fear. Where you want them to land is almost like theory of mind, understanding. All the apologies say, Oh, now I understand how I made these women feel. That was a stock line in a lot of the harassment apologies. And women read that and are incredulous, but there is something in that, its like, now I see how the woman are experiencing that. It leads to some kind of connection.

Bazelon: Right, but also some shared perception of risk. Sex can be risky. Women have had to absorb all of that for the most part. To have young men also thinking about risk, that seems like a fine division of labor to me.

Turner: Just to go back to your question, Meghan, in the last 10 years it feels to me like were both higher and lower than we were. The extremes have gone in both directions. I feel like theres an increasing awareness of the subjective experience of women around sex and power. Theres a set of things that just wont fly anymore that shouldnt have flown, and its great that they dont. I hope that remains true, but I woke up the morning after the election just obliterated.

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ORourke: Gutted.

Turner: Feeling like, Oh, I didnt get it. The notion that she could have lost to that guy, and yes shes a flawed person, and yes we can go back and fight about her, blah, blah, blah, Robby Mook stipulated et cetera, whatever. Some piece of that is justtheres a lot of people who dont want to give that amount of clout to a woman. Having my eyes open to that also feels in some ways like the devil responds to the Weinstein stuff, which is on the one hand, how amazing that the subjective experience of women is now being more likely to be listened to, more likely to gain results, more likely to set new goals and to try to create change. On the other hand, the sheer pervasiveness of abject behavior and treatment across industry after industry, sector after sector, only some of which are able to be pursued through the lens of journalism. Theres only certain kinds of industries where people are famous enough or the harm pervasive enough that reporting is the tool that can right it. It feels like my sense of what the lows are is also bigger than it ever was. I worry a little bit that those two wobbling extremes will just collapse back into a mushy middle rather than tending toward progress.

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Rosin: Why wouldnt you experience this moment as a kind of excavation of that? You just experience this as an exposure of what is as opposed to an excavation?

Turner: No, I think its for the good. I think its to the good. I mean, yes, we knew it was there, but I feel like I dont think I knew the extent to  I find myself surprised by just the sheer scale of it. Maybe thats naive, and I certainly think its good. I just worry about Hannas question about potential for backlash, about whether we can really take this moment and achieve some sort of catharsis through it and find ourselves in a better place for women or whether the backlash will be more pernicious.

ORourke: I think for the foreseeable future, we are going to be swinging between these pendulums of advance and opening and retraction and retreat. Obama to Trump, the 1970s to the backlash of the 1980s, as Susan Faludi chronicles in her book, Backlash. It does seem to me that there are these kinds of openings that happen that do shift the culture in a meaningful way, and were in one of them now. Will there be some kind of backlash retreat? Yeah.

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One way of thinking about it, too, is that to me, and I wonder whether you all think this, I keep thinking the #MeToo moment wouldnt have happened without Trump. In some way, its this upwelling of the nationalor part of the nationalconsciousness that is so shocked that this serial sexual harasser and otherwise problematic human being is the president of the United States. Maybe thats what led Jodi Kantor to double down on that story. Maybe thats what led women to say, Im going to tell my story with Weinstein for the first time. And I think theres just this really complicated vortex of energies pulling back and forth.

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Turner: OK, a couple last questions for you guys. What headline would you hope to read by or about womankind in the next year?

Rosin: The obvious one is: A women runs for president, and it runs differently. Thats the obvious one.

ORourke: Not Ivanka Trump.

Bazelon: That would be different. I dont think thats what Hanna had in mind.

Rosin: Another obvious one  I had the same thought about the high money places, the big money places. The places that have so far stayed out of reach of the sexual harassment thing.

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ORourke: I guess in some way the headline I want to see is, Women Get to Do Their Work. Thats the headline

Bazelon: Thats a great one, Meghan.

ORourke: Thats whats really at stake here, is that were not able to do the things we want and are capable of doing still.

Bazelon: Do you all want a woman to challenge Trump for the presidency? I mean, I think the fantasy is a Wonder Woman fantasy of that person winning, but Ive talked to a lot of people lately, male and female, who have said that the best person to challenge Trump is not a woman. I have been wrestling with that question.

Turner: Ive totally been wrestling with that question, too. I was going to ask you guys that as well.

Rosin: You mean, because it will set up a culture war, and if the woman loses 

Turner: Im afraid, and I dont want Trump to be president anymore. Im tempted to conclude from the last year that a man should run, because a man would be more likely to win. I dont want that to be my conclusion, and I dont like that that is an instinct I have, but it is absolutely an instinct I have.

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Rosin: Why do you think that, Julia? A lot of the energy, I mean, I think entirely this sexual harassment, the way its exploded has to do with Trump. Its the one gift that history will remember Trump giving this country. I wonder if thats just an energy to tap into.

ORourke: It depends on the woman, right? I share the once bitten, twice shy feeling.

Turner: Twice bitten, thrice shy.

ORourke: Whatever. Yeah, 400 times bitten.

Turner: On the other hand, men have been running for so long that you cant draw any conclusions, so thats the problem in and of itself.

ORourke: I mean, and you know I think its a little bit like being a gender traitor, not in The Handmaids Tale sense, to say, Lets go for the safe option of having a man. It really depends on the candidate. I mean, I feel with this election that so much is at stake. In another election I might, between two roughly equal candidates, maybe the man is a little bit stronger as a candidate, I might have gone for the woman. Maybe in this election in that situation I would feel like the best possible candidate has to be our candidate because he cannot win again.

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Rosin: There arent a million options.

Bazelon: Thats right, thats right.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean there are a couple of great candidates. There are a couple.

Bazelon: I do think its important to remember that one of the reasons, or maybe the reason, Hillary Clinton had trouble parrying Trump on issues of sexual abuse and misconduct was her history with Bill Clinton. Theres no other person for whom Steve Bannon could have trotted out these female accusers who in fact had not gotten their due and really changed that dynamic. I guess thats the once bitten, twice shy part that we should be careful not to pay too much attention to. You would want a woman to be an effective responder.

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Rosin: You know the thing you said about why XX Factor was useful, you sort of hesitated, there were certain things you didnt want to express, and then theres kind of a legitimized space for you to express them, parts of yourself that you hadnt really realized were there and wanted to speak? I feel like the sexual harassment stuff has done that for a lot of women. A lot of women who felt hesitant about certain things, lets say hesitant about running for office, hesitant about sharing a story, hesitant about doing a lot of things. This showed up in the public sphere because theres a way in which women werent sure how to be when they were running for office, how subjective to be, how woman-ish to be. I feel like that eases now. Maybe you get a woman of a different generation whos just more at ease running, for whom its just more natural to be out there speaking like a woman, speaking from a subjective place, whatever it is. I think that helps a lot.

Turner: This has been a wonderful DoubleX-y, XX Factor-y conversation. Thank you guys all so much for joining me to reminisce about XX Factor and DoubleX and for all of the conversations that youve fostered on Slate over time.
This piece was originally published in Slate on April 15, 2002.

My main ambition when my wife went into labor was to be sober. Three years ago, when our first child was born, Id been rushing to finish a book. Id suspected, rightly, that it would be impossible to reconcile book production with new fatherhood. To finish the manuscript before the baby arrived Id taken to drinking several cups of coffee after dinner and working right through the night. Id quit around 4 in the morning, then knock myself out with cheap wine.

When Tabithas water broke Id just thrown back a third glass of unsentimental Chardonnay. Id wound up driving her to the hospital at 5 miles per hour and then, somewhat dramatically, passing out on her delivery room bed. Id woken up just in time to witness the birth of my first child (Quinn Tallulah Lewis) but had made, I fear, a poor impression. For the past two years and 11 months I have been on the wrong end of a story called How My Husband Was Loaded When My Baby Was Born. I promised myself Id do better this time. It was my last chance.

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Your wife goes into labor; you go into waiting.

Last Monday evening, just before cocktail hour, Tabitha said she felt funny. An hour later we were in triage; an hour after that we were walking up and down the hospital halls to accelerate her labor to the point where it generated the respect of the women who doled out delivery rooms. I knew this hospital, from hazy experience. I recalled dimly the secret kitchen stocked with grape juice and the crushed ice and the strawberry popsicles. I remembered vaguely how to finagle a private recovery room. I was the college graduate who had partied his way through school and was now returning on alumni day, hoping his classmates had forgotten what hed been like. The one thing I knew for sure was that when they asked you if you wanted to get back in your car and endure labor in the intimacy of your own home, or take the hospital room now, you took the hospital room now. Having done this, I settled into the chair beside Tabithas bed and watched nurses string nine separate tubes and wires from her body to various machines: narcotics drip, penicillin drip, thermometers, blood pressure gauges, gas masks to deliver pure oxygen, heart monitors for baby and mother, and God knows what else.

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And then  nothing. For the next 10 hours we sat around with expectant looks, like extras in a World War II-movie battle scene waiting for the Japanese finally to come charging through the jungle. From the point of view of the woman labor is well named; from the point of view of the man it really should be called waiting. Your wife goes into labor; you go into waiting.

A woman in labor needs to believe, however much evidence she has to the contrary, that the man in waiting beside her bed is directing every ounce of his concern toward her. This is of course impossible; and so the trick for the man in waiting is to disguise his private interests.

He learns to camouflage trips to the john as grape juice fetching missions. When he is hungry he waits until his wife dozes off, then nips furtively down to the hospital vending machine for his supper of Ring Dings and Nacho Cheese Doritos. At some point in his private ordeal one of the hospital staff will turn to him and ask, sweetly, And how is Dad doing? He must understand that no one actually cares how Dad is doing. His fatigue, his worries, his tedium, his disappointment at the contents of hospital vending machinesthese are better unmentioned. Above all, he must know that if his mask of perfect selflessness slips for even a moment he will be nabbed.

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Would a little food taste good to you right now?

I dont think so. (Muffled, through oxygen mask.)

Because they have these Ring Dings in the vending machine. The kind with the vanilla icing.

The fixed accusing stare. Youre incredible. Pause. A weary tone. If you want something to eat, just go get something to eat.

At great and tedious length, 14 hours after labor began, the baby made its dash for the exit. Then it stopped. The doctor on call poked and prodded a bit, then took off her gloves and stared.

Then another doctor appeared, Tabithas doctor, conveniently just back from vacation. Tabithas doctor is maybe the least likely obstetrician in Berkeley, California. He doesnt believe, for example, in the sanctity of his patients whims. He has no time for superstition; he is unapologetic about his belief in the power of modern science; he believes that the best way to endure childbirth is not out in the woods surrounded by hooting midwives but in a hospital bed, numb from the waist down. He is, in short, my kind of guy. Maybe my favorite thing about him is the way he dismisses ignorant fears with such contempt that they simply vanish. When he is around Tabitha feels, rightly, that she is in more capable hands than her own. This, for her, counts as an unusual experience.

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Tabithas doctor collected information from the doctor on call, in the way doctors do. They spoke for maybe two minutes, in English as intelligible as their handwriting. At some point I remembered that it was my job to know what was going on.

Whats up? I asked.

The baby wants to come out face first, said the doctor on call.

And thats not good?

It wont fit, said Tabithas doctor. He let that unpleasant thought hang in the air.

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We cant get a grip on it to turn it around, said the doctor on call.

Without ever uttering the phrase C-section the two doctors conveyed the idea of it well enough. As Tabithas doctor leaned in to see what he could do, I leaned over Tabitha and, drawing upon my years of selling bonds for Salomon Brothers, tried to persuade her of all the advantages to having her stomach cut open. She pretended to nod and agree but tears welled in her eyes. The doctors, to their credit, noticed her distress; and, to their even greater credit, they responded to it. Before I knew how it happened Tabithas doctor brandished a large pair of suction cups, one over each hand.

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Im going to try to pull this baby out, he said, in a different tone. He was no longer a doctor. He was a deep sea fisherman. One of those guys who sat on the back of big motor boats hauling in schools of giant tuna with one hand while drinking beer with the other.

Tabithas head popped off the pillow. If it puts the baby at any risk Id rather have the C-section, she said.

Tabitha, no shit. The doctor shook his head and pretended to say to me what he wanted to say to himself. I love the way her mind works. Just what I want to do, put the baby at risk.

Ten minutes later, by some miracle I still do not understand, he was hauling a baby girl into the world. I knew from experience that the little involuntary sob of joy I made as my eyes met Tabithas was a fleeting sensation. I also knew that other, less understandable emotions would soon follow.
Unless you live in the Gambia or East Timor, chances are you are less free today than you were a year ago. That, at least, is the takeaway of Freedom Houses just-released, annual Freedom in the World Report.

The star of the report is the United States, which lost three points on Freedom Houses 100-point scale during President Trumps first year in office, with the organization citing growing evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, conflicts of interest and ethical violations by the new administration and the presidents family, and a reduction in government transparency. With a score of 86, the U.S. is still firmly in the Free categorycountries are designated Free, Partly Free, or Not Freebut a three point decline in one year is highly unusual for an established democracy, and the Land of the Free now ranks lower than France, Germany, and Britain.

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Americas not alone: It was a rough year all around, with democratic setbacks outnumbering gains for the 12th year running. Some of the worst declines were in countries considered democratization success stories until recently. Turkey declined from Partly Free to Not Free following a controversial constitutional referendum that concentrated power in the hands of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had thousands of his opponents purged and arrested. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people fled a campaign of rape, mutilation, and slaughter in Myanmar, executed with support, or at least acquiescence, of Nobel Prizewinning democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Tunisia, still considered the lone remaining success story of the Arab Spring and the only Arab country rated Free, saw a major downgrade due to the continued postponement of regional elections and tightening government control of the media. And right-wing populists continued to undermine democratic institutions in Hungary and Poland, casting doubt on democracys future in these countries a quarter-century after the end of communism.

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Freedom House counterintuitively downgraded Zimbabwe after the overthrow of longtime dictator Robert Mugabe, noting that it was military pressure from within his own inner circle that forced him from power. These concerns are justified, and the countrys political future is still very much in doubt, though in fairness to Zimbabwe, its hard to see how Mugabes brutal rule could have ended otherwise.

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The report also faults usual suspects Russia and China for increasing authoritarianism at home and meddling in the affairs of other countries abroad. Despite the optimistic hopes of some who see Saudi Arabias rising crown prince as a liberalizing reformer and advocate for womens rights, Freedom House is not impressed, noting that his nascent social and economic changes were accompanied by hundreds of arbitrary arrests and aggressive moves against potential rivals, and he showed no inclination to open the political system.

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There were a couple of bright spots. East Timor, one of the worlds newest countries, was upgraded to Free after this years elections. The Gambia gained an incredible 21 points and jumped from Not Free to Partly Free after the surprising electoral defeat of longtime strongman Yahya Jammeh at the end of 2016. But theres a cautionary tale here too: Jammeh didnt give up power voluntarily. He left office only as a result of overwhelming pressure from the Gambias neighbors.

Freedom House has been warning of a democratic recession for years now, and when I wrote about the groups report back in 2014, I noted that some experts were skeptical of the notion, given that most of the biggest drops in scores tended to happen in countries that werent free to begin with. Given the trends were now seeing in recent and even more established democracies, though, the groups warnings over the past 12 years now look less alarmist.
Last week, President Trump, during a meeting with a group of lawmakers on immigration, questioned why the U.S. allows immigrants from shithole countries, by which he apparently meant African nations and Haiti. After the report of Trumps characterization of those countries surfaced, the White House didnt deny the president used the word. Thursday evening Trump reportedly was even on the phone gloating about the coverage to friends and allies. The following day Trump muddied the waters by issuing and kinda sorta denial. Soon, the line shifted with the Republican senators and the president saying his remarks were misrepresented.

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Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting. Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 15, 2018

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So what did the people in the room and beyond have to say about what President Trumps remarks? The Thursday meeting was attended by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and David Perdue (R-Ga.), along with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.).

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Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois:

Sen. Dick Durbin, who was in yesterday's Oval Office meeting, says Pres. Trump "said these hateful things, and he said them repeatedly." https://t.co/gAgWtgbumb pic.twitter.com/tRdxdaKxRy  ABC News (@ABC) January 12, 2018

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said he confronted Trump during the meeting about the presidents derogatory comments. Fellow South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott said the reports on Trumps comments aligned with what Sen. Graham told him personally (via the Post and Courier).

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Following comments by the president, I said my piece directly to him yesterday, Graham said in a statement. The president and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel, he added. Ive always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals.

My colleague (Sen. Graham) spoke up and made a direct comment on what the president said, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said. For him to confront the president as he did, literally sitting next to him, took extraordinary political courage and I respect him for it.

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Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue and Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton:

We do not recall the President saying these comments specifically but what he did call out was the imbalance in our current immigration system, which does not protect American workers and our national interest, [the senators] said in a statement.

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In Washington to not recall something these days is basically another way of saying yeah, that thing happened but I dont want to say it. Over the weekend, both Perdue and Cotton stepped up their still equivocating defense of the president.

Sen. Perdue: Im telling you he did not use that word, George, and Im telling you its a gross misrepresentation, Perdue told moderator George Stephanopoulos on ABCs This Week.

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Sen. Cotton: I didnt hear it, and I was sitting no further away from Donald Trump than Dick Durbin was, [Sen.] Cotton said on CBSs Face the Nation.

Sidenote on Sens. Perdue and Cottons responses:

White House official told me tonight there is debate internally on whether Trump said "shithole" or "shithouse." Perdue and Cotton seem to have heard latter, this person said, and are using to deny.  Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) January 15, 2018

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The President and Republican senators disputing that he said "shithole" is semantics. They are not denying that he expressed that sentiment about African countries, about Haitians, about Norway. Regardless of the specific wording he used, it does not change the attitude.  Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 15, 2018

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Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen went on Fox News Sunday with a slight variation of the I do not recall non-denial denial. (via CNN)

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Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said on Fox News Sunday that she did not recall Trump saying that exact phrase. It was an impassioned conversation, Nielsen said when pressed. I dont recall that specific phrase being used. Thats all I can say about that.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Miami Republican, attended the meeting, but has refused to confirm or deny Trumps verbiage. (via WPLG Miami)

This is a president that said things differently than clearly I would say them, Diaz-Balart told Local 10s Glenna Milberg Monday. I will not comment on what may or may not have been said  I will not be in a position to solve this problem. Im the only person from South Florida that has a seat at this table, Diaz-Balart said. I am going to use it not to criticize, not to point fingers, but to stop the imminent deportation of 800,000 young people.

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Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan:

I read those comments later last night, the first thing that came to my mind was very unfortunate, unhelpful, the Wisconsin Republican said at WisPolitics Luncheon in Milwaukee.

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Ohio Governor and former Presidential Candidate John Kasich:

America was built on the backs of immigrants from around the globe. We must honor that history, not reject it. It starts with respectful rhetoric and signing bipartisan DACA legislation.  John Kasich (@JohnKasich) January 11, 2018

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Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch:

HATCH: I look forward to getting a more detailed explanation regarding the Presidents comments. Part of what makes America so special is that we welcome the best and brightest in the world, regardless of their country of origin. #utpol  Senator Hatch Office (@senorrinhatch) January 11, 2018

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney:

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The poverty of an aspiring immigrants nation of origin is as irrelevant as their race. The sentiment attributed to POTUS is inconsistent w/ Americas history and antithetical to American values. May our memory of Dr. King buoy our hope for unity, greatness, & charity for all.  Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) January 15, 2018

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Robert Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia, who were both in the meeting, have yet to issue public statements on the contents of Thursdays meeting.
Adult film star Alana Evans appeared to confirm an earlier report that Donald Trump had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels shortly after Melania Trump gave birth to the commander in chiefs youngest son, Barron, in March 2006. Evans told the Daily Beast that she received several phone calls from Daniels, who was a friend, while she was in a room with Trump.

Stormy calls me four or five times, by the last two phone calls shes with Donald [Trump] and I can hear him, and hes talking through the phone to me saying, Oh come on Alana, lets have some fun! Lets have some fun! Come to the party, were waiting for you, Evans said.

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Evans did not take her friend up on the offer but then talked to Daniels the next day. She tells me, All Im going to say is: I ended up with Donald in his hotel room. Picture him chasing me around his hotel room in his tighty-whities. I was like, Oh I really didnt need to hear that! Then she said he offered her keys to his condos in Florida, and I was like, Wow guess you had a good night, and that was the last we ever spoke of it, Evans said.

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The Daily Beast published its story shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported that a lawyer for Trump helped arrange a $130,000 payment to Daniels that was essentially hush money so she would not talk about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump. The Daily Beast reports that it had been in protracted talks with Daniels about an interview after it got confirmation from three sources that she had been involved with Trump. She ultimately backed out on Nov. 3, just five days before the 2016 election.

The Trump lawyer who allegedly arranged the payment, Michael Cohen, denied there was ever a sexual relationship between Trump and Daniels but didnt address the alleged payment. These rumors have circulated time and again since 2011. President Trump once again vehemently denies any such occurrence as has Ms. Daniels, Cohen said in a statement. The lawyer also handed over a letter to the media, which appeared to be signed by Daniels, denying that she ever had sexual relations with Trump. Rumors that I have received hush money from Donald Trump are completely false, she wrote.
The erroneous missile threat alert sent to thousands of Americans phones in Hawaii on Saturday probably would have been dismissed as an obvious mistake if received just months ago. In the current climate, however, with the president only recently comparing the size of his nuclear button with that of North Koreas leader, the imminent danger of war feels terribly real. Across Hawaii, people sought shelter and searched the internet for tips on how to survive nuclear attacks as they waited 38 agonizing minutes for Hawaiis Emergency Management Agency to issue a correction. President Trump said nothing to assuage fears following the alert, and the tension caused by his bluster toward North Korea has now been felt viscerally by millions of Americans as experts warn of a growing risk of unintended nuclear war with North Korea.

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These anxieties are reasonable, especially considering that Trump officials are still considering the use of limited military strikes against North Korean missile sites. Even as Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urge caution and restraint toward North Korea, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has reportedly argued vocally that military options need to be considered to give North Korea a bloody nose and thereby prevent further belligerence. This argument was reinforced just last week by a provocative article in Foreign Policy, in which author Edward Luttwak claimed that the Air Force would be able to effectively eliminate North Koreas nuclear facilities through a limited number of strikes. Even if such strikes were successful, however, a military confrontation on the Korean peninsula would likely spill over into a broader conflictfor which American society has not measured the costs.

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In response to the escalating prospect of war, Pentagon leaders have begun to conduct necessary contingency planning for initial military action. A recent report by the New York Times outlined the extensive training already taking place, including mobilization and infiltration exercises by the 82nd Airborne Division and U.S. special operations forces, designed to simulate a foreign invasion. At the same time, reserve soldiers across the country will reportedly execute training to prepare for the potential of an emergency mobilization overseas.

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As U.S. service members train for a potential ground war against North Korea, many policy analysts avoid vital questions about the repercussions of an expansive conflict. Experts and research institutions like the Congressional Research Service have been quick to point out the massive potential toll of North Korean retaliatory strikes, including for the many U.S. citizens immediately at riskand the scale of a broader war would be devastating. And as Obama defense official Colin Kahl argues, the notion that a war, once initiated, can be kept from spiraling out control is a dangerous fantasy.

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Even if a conflict with North Korea was limited to conventional warfare, war in Korea could have substantial effects for the average Americanespecially from the shock to the U.S. economy. The most severe consequences of war, however, would be felt by military and veteran communities across the United States. My time as an Army officer and as a researcher in the policy community has made me acutely aware of the unique struggles of these groups. In the Army, I served with soldiers and their families who persevered through five or six deployments over 16 years of war and often managed to reintegrate back home only to be ordered to prepare for their next mission overseas. Now as a policy researcher, I have explored in depth with my colleagues how isolated these communities have become from society, and how vulnerable to additional strain they would be in a major conflict.

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By relying increasingly on this warrior caste to fill their ranks, the military is asking a smaller and less representative slice of Americans to bear the burden of war. When the military attempted to meet its targets at the height of the Iraq War without widely expanding its recruiting pool, it ran into some serious challenges. The need for people in the wake of a Korean war could likewise lead to a personnel crisis, requiring much more commitment from the American public. So far, Pentagon officials have shown no urgency to brace for large-scale mobilization beyond the service members already assigned to our reserve forces. War is undoubtedly the worst outcome for the standoff with North Korea, but initiating military action without effectively preparing the American people to share these costs would be even more disastrous.

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Most immediately, even conventional combat in Korea would result in casualty levels not suffered since the Vietnam War and upend the U.S. military force structure abroad. A 2012 study by the Nautilus Institute estimated that North Korean artillery pieces on the demilitarized zone could inflict some 64,000 fatalities in Seoul on the first day of war, including many of the roughly 154,000 American civilians and 28,000 U.S. service members living there. Additionally, the need for troops and resources in Korea would radically reorient the American military presence in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and could imperil the U.S. strategic position in the western Pacific. These shifts would also further exacerbate an emerging dilemma of military readiness: Training and maintenance are already suffering under Pentagon budget controls and the demanding pace of deployment cycles.

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After fighting in Korea ends, the lasting toll of war would linger for decades in the veteran community. As evidenced by the enduring effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the long term medical costs of these conflicts often match or even exceed the initial military expenditures. The Costs of War study at Brown University noted that future medical and disability costs for the current wars will total between $600 billion and $1 trillion. The already burdened VA health system, now endeavoring to modernize and meet its existing challenges, would be completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of casualties from a Korean war.

North Koreas November launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile opened a dangerous new chapter in relations with the rogue regime, by apparently putting most of the United States in range of a potential attack. By eschewing deterrence, with McMaster declaring last year that denuclearization was the only acceptable objective for the United States, the administration is reacting to this development by setting the country on a nearly inescapable path to war with North Korea.

Statements last year by defense leaders, including Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Secretary Mattis, indicate they recognize the enormous costs of such a war. Without presenting the long-term human and financial investments needed to take the country to war, however, they obscure the real dangers of a conflict from a society that is still disconnected from that reality. By edging closer to a military confrontation in North Korea without engaging with these realities, the administration is writing a check that the American people are not prepared to cash.
This article is part of a weeklong series on President Trumps first year in office.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard University who had the fun idea of releasing a new, unfortunately relevant book, How Democracies Die. (For those who find the title too sanguine, Die is written in such large letters on the cover that you have to open the book to see who wrote it.) Inside, you will find a depressingly thorough accounting of the ways in which democracy has withered at various times in various countries over the past 100 years. Much of the book focuses on things like norms breached and then disappeared; concerted attacks from anti-democratic forces on crucial institutions; and the rise of political partisanship.

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Levitsky and Ziblatt are not entirely pessimistic, because they believe there are things that can be done to rescue democracies on the brink. (See below.) But they leave readers in no doubt that they should be worried about the state of American democracy. I spoke by phone with Levitsky and Ziblatt recently. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed whether you need a well-thought-out plan to be a strongman, what America still has going for it, and why the Mueller investigation might be a stress test that American democracy cannot pass.

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Isaac Chotiner: Was there some aspect of Trumps campaign, or the early months of his presidency, that made you want to write this book?

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Daniel Ziblatt: Thats really the period in which we decided to write the book, during the campaign. We kind of had this eerie feeling we had seen this movie before, with accusations that Hillary is treasonous, or aggressive violence, or later on in the campaign this ambiguity of whether or not hed accept the results of the election, and this was stuff we had seen before in the political systems that we studied. We could draw on our knowledge of other countries and other places and times to try to understand what was happening.

Steven Levitsky: Those are three things, I think it is fair to say, we never expected to see in a U.S. presidential election.

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What historical examples about those three things led you to then write a book called How Democracies Die?

Ziblatt: I studied Spain in the 1930s before the Spanish Civil War erupted. The two main political factions on the right and the left both regarded each other as enemies of the state. In speeches the left would say the groups on the right were really fascist and wanted to undermine the state and those on the right said the same thing about the left. This kind of spiraling rhetoric preceded the Democratic breakdown in Spain. Similar kind of thing in Germany in the late 1920s.

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As you researched the book, did you get more or less concerned about what you were seeing in the U.S.?

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Levitsky: I think more concerned about some things and less concerned about other things. Ill give you one example. I am, even relative to when we wrote the book, shocked and surprised by the degree to which the Republican Party is willing to go along with Trumps shenanigans. We had expected, and I would have expected a year ago, much greater Republican resistance to Trump. The fact that there is almost none and any Republican who is taking Trump on has basically been defeated, that makes me more worried.

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Right, I think over the past year some things have gone better than expectedthings having to do with incompetence, having to do with the resilience of certain institutionsbut the one that does feel the most terrifying to me is what you said about the GOP just going along with him.

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Levitsky: Thats right. I think the courts have largely done their jobs; I think we mostly expected that. But Trumps weakness and Trumps political weakness, his lack of popularity, and his sheer incompetence have obviously benefited democracy. No question about it.

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Ziblatt: I agree with Steve on the Republican abdications, which have made me more worried and surprised. But on the other side of the ledger, I would say one thing that has given me hope, and I think Steve as well, is a kind of robustness  some sense of robustness in civil society measured by the legal profession, measured by the journalists and media, and they have been incredible. So in this sense, these are the kinds of institutions that have risen to the occasion.

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I think we all agree Trump has very authoritarian instincts. At the same time, I think its pretty clear that he is not consciously thinking, Oh I want to establish some sort of authoritarian system and this is my plan for doing so and I hope that in 2020 I am a dictator and elections are canceled. I could be wrong, but I really dont think he or the people around him are thinking in those terms. And that does offer me a ray of hope. Im wondering if you guys agree, but then Im also wondering if you think that maybe thats irrelevantthat people who become strongmen, they dont necessarily start out with that plan, but by weakening institutions, thats where we end up. And maybe there are historical examples one way or the other.

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Really confrontational efforts to impeach Trump are going to reinforce the kind of norm erosion weve been suffering from since the 1990s.  Steven Levitsky

Levitsky: Its less dangerous that Trump doesnt have an authoritarian plan than if he did, and there are some autocrats that come to power with a plan. But there are also historically many autocrats that dont come to power with a plan. Maybe the most obvious case to me is Alberto Fujimori in Peru. He was a political outsider, a political novice, who was elected with an anti-establishment populist rhetoric. He continued that rhetoric in office, certainly didnt have a blueprint but picked fights with the judiciary, picked fights with Congress, picked fights with the media, and you had this spiraling effect in which he said scary things and the courts and Congress upped the ante and were very antagonistic toward him. And eventually, it spiraled out of control to the point where he called out the tanks.

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Now, Trump is not going to be able to call out the tanks. But its a case in which you sort of get unanticipated effects of a novice coming to power with very antagonistic discourse that scares the establishment. The establishment then pushes back. The president then feels deceived and pushes back even further. Again, Trump is not going to be able to call out the tanks, but several years of conflict between presidents and different elements of the establishment could easily weaken our democratic institutions to the point where somebody with a plan can do more damage next time.

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What things do you guys have your eyes on the most, going forward? Is it the 2018 elections? The 2020 elections? The resilience of certain institutions?

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Ziblatt: I think the 2018 elections are crucial and the Democrats need to do well in order to conserve some kind of check. I think the second point is what lessons the Republicans draw from the electoral success of the Democrats. Do the Republicans then realize they need to separate themselves finally with Trump? Because even if Democrats sweep the House and the Senate, any need to kind of impeach Trump unilaterally without Republican support is going to be damaging for American democracy in the long run. So in some ways I think it is really critical to continue to focus on the Republicans and to hope and expect that the Republicans at some point, once they see the electoral cost of continuing to align themselves so closely with Trump, will then break with him.

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Levitsky: I think there are two things that we are keeping our eye on, one is more short term and one is more long term. One is defeating Trump and the other is shoring up our democracy, and the two are related, but they are not completely related. Obviously, 2018 and 2020 are critical for curbing and ultimately defeating the Trump administration, removing from power a government that is not fully committed to democratic practices. That is incredibly important. But, one of the things that we found in the book and that we believe very strongly, is that the problem facing American democracy, problems of norm erosions and intense polarization, predated Trump and are very likely to persist after Trump. In fact, the way that we remove Trump is going to have an impact on the quality of our democracy going forward. Really confrontational efforts to impeach him are going, as Daniel pointed out, to reinforce the kind of norm erosion weve been suffering from since the 1990s.

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So we are keeping an eye obviously on Trump, but we are also keeping an eye on the underlying polarization that is beginning to rip our institutions apart. And I think, getting back to what Daniel said, the future of the Republican Party is critical. The Republicans have to eventually become a party that represents more than small-town white Christians. It has to be a party that can represent a more diverse sector of American society. And until thats the case, we are likely to have our parties be polarized along racial and religious lines, and that is trouble.

How do you think about the Russia investigation in this context? I think the investigation has served as a kind of lifeline for people who want to see Trump not be the president, but its also caused me to have two distinct varieties of fear. The first is that Mueller will say that Trump committed some very bad crime and Congress will do nothing about it, which I think in terms of a norm erosion would be extremely worrying. And the second is that the investigation will not go anywhere conclusive involving Trump, and Democrats will impeach him anyway when they get into office, which I think could also have a bad effect, although not as bad as the first option.

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Levitsky: I think youre right. There are many ways in which this can end up being problematic in terms of our democratic norms. I think the best-case scenario, which isnt that likely, is a Nixon-like scenario in which Mueller comes up with something pretty overwhelming and a big enough faction of the Republican Party defects so that you get bipartisan consensus behind impeachment and we end up with a sort of norm reinforcing outcome. That doesnt seem highly likely for the reasons that you say. If there is a partisan division in the reaction to the Mueller findings, which seems fairly likely given the level of partisan polarization, it will probably make things worse.

[The investigation] provides Washington, it provides us, with a viable means to remove Trump and thats double-edged, right? If Trump is in dangereither because hes unfit for office or because hes an authoritarianthats potentially a good thing. But any kind of irregular removal of a president before his term is a shock to the systemsomething that is a fundamentally destabilizing event.

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Ziblatt: One way to think about impeachment is that it may become necessary, but if its regarded as simply a partisan tool, its just the next turn in the kind of death spiral of polarization where each side accuses the other side of exploiting maximum advantage. So thats why we have to be very cautious.

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Levitsky: Right, if a large enough faction of the Republican Party thinks, Fuck you, and interprets the impeachment of Trump as a coup, were in serious trouble.

Is there any democracy that you would have ranked as highly as you ranked the United States as a democracy in 2016, whatever ranking that is, thats fallen victim to authoritarianism in your case studies?

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Levitsky: No, there are actually very, very few established democracies, democracies that have been fully democratic and that have been around for, say, 20 or more years, very few of them in the history of the world have collapsed. Uruguay is one, Chile is another, Venezuela is a third, maybe Hungary depending on how you interpret it these days. But none have been as stable or as democratic as the United States.

Hey! A cause for hope.

Levitsky: In our book, we are not making the argument that democracy is in imminent danger. All were saying is that if youd asked us five years ago or 10 years ago we probably would have laughed off the question, and now we think there is a risk that is worth concerning ourselves with.

Ziblatt: I would just add to that, one of the strongest findings in social science is the level of GDP per capita and its correlations with democratic stability. Given the U.S.s national wealth, the probability of democracy collapsing [is] very, very low. But that again, thats based on the record of the past 50 years so who knows? Using the past as record, though, we should feel some sense of security.

Using the past as record, we wouldnt have elected an authoritarian television star.

Levitsky: Right, there is a sense among many different observers, many different scholars, that we are skating onto some new territory.
The Trump administrations efforts to argue that its OK that the president said our immigration policy should favor Norway over the shithole countries in Africa reached new, absurd heights in Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsens Tuesday appearance at a Senate hearing. First Nielsen, who was in attendance at the legendary shithole meeting between legislators and White House officials, pretended that she didnt know for sure whether Norway is a mostly white place:

[silence]

- @SenatorLeahy: Norway is a predominantly white country, isn't it?

- @SecNielsen Umm.. I.. eh.. I actually do not know that, sir, but I imagine that is the case. pic.twitter.com/OwRFWY0hrw  David Mack (@davidmackau) January 16, 2018

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(She imagines correctly; Norways population is 83 percent ethnic Norwegian.)

Then Nielsen suggested that Trump only contrasted Africa with Norwaya notoriously socialism-friendly nation in which 20 percent of the population is on welfare!because Norwegians have such a dogged, self-reliant work ethic:

Sen. Durbin: What did the president say specifically about immigrants from Norway? Sec. Nielsen: I heard him repeating what he had heard in a meeting beforethat they are industrious, that they are a hardworking country, they dont have much crime there, they dont have much debt.

As Twitter user @hilzoy pointed out, Norwegians actually average about 28 hours of work per week, which makes the country one of the least industrious in the available data. Step it up, Norway!
Writing nonstop about the Constitution and the Mode of Electing the President, in the Federalist Papers No. 68, Alexander Hamilton warned about the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.

The Hamilton 68 dashboard has taken up that charge. It tracks Twitter accounts affiliated with the Russian government, including many bots. For example, in December 2017, 16 percent of the articles promoted by Kremlin-affiliated Twitter handles discredited the FBI and the Mueller investigation or some element of the American deep state. This is consistent with a 2017 report by the New York Times, which found that on Election Day in 2016, organized armies of Twitterbots sent out identical messages within seconds or minutes of each other in alphabetical order, promoting material and information from the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails. As the article notes:

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[O]ne such list cited leaks from Anonymous Poland in more than 1,700 tweets. Snippets of them provide a sample of the sequence: @edanur01 #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:54 @efekinoks #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:54 @elyashayk #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:54 @emrecanbalc #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:55 @emrullahtac #WarAgainstDemocrats 17:55

Journalists and researchers have spent a great deal of time sifting through the returns and data (or ashes, depending on your perspective) of the 2016 presidential election, looking for lessons to take into elections this year and in 2020. As the Times report and Hamilton 68 suggest, one of the major revelations has been the extent to which autonomous bots created content on social media, particularly Russia-created bots that flooded Twitter and Facebook leading up to Election Day. The degree to which they (and their cousin, fake news stories) influenced the election is unknown, but the intent to do so appears all but certain.

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In the wake of these revelations, some writers have alleged that tweets from bots are not speech but speech ricochets that represent a form of technology that can be weaponized. To protect democracy, these critics argue, we need to silence the bots.

This debate is part of a larger conversation. As we have more regular interaction with speech from autonomous devices and artificial intelligence like Amazons Alexa, more people are beginning to wonder if the First Amendment is (or should be) so broad that it protects human and nonhuman speakers alike. It might sound a bit ridiculous. But how we make space for robot and bot speech will be a fundamental issue in 21st-century discourse. Of course, the First Amendment doesnt apply to private companies like Facebook and Twitter, which can ban autonomous accounts in their user agreements. But it is still unclear what local, state, and federal governments can do to autonomous speech from A.I.-enabled bots.

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Those who call Twitterbots weaponized technology openly compare them to situations where speech was lawfully prohibitedthe conviction of labor leader Eugene Debs for using his speeches to obstruct the draft, the prohibition of words and phrases that incite an immediate breach of the peace, etc. To the best of my knowledge, there have not yet been any serious bills proposed at the federal or state level that attempt to ban speech from bots or other types of A.I. However, given the history of unconstitutional attempts to limit or control speech in the United Statesincluding prohibiting hate speech, permitting courts to shut down newspapers viewed as malicious, scandalous and defamatory, and criminalizing the distribution of anonymous pamphletsit seems inevitable that there will, at some point in the not-too-distant future, be governmental efforts to ban A.I. speech. (A.I. speech refers to any speech created autonomously by a machine or program without direct human supervision or control. Experts and engineers in the field may object to describing some Twitterbots as A.I., but the broad definition is appropriate here.)

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So what should we do when the question inevitably comes up? There is one clear answer.

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When considering this question, there are essentially four different models of governing A.I. free speech:

1. Speech produced by A.I. is not protected by the First Amendment. Under this model, the federal government and states can regulate and prohibit speech from A.I. however they want, with none of the constitutional limits that have historically applied to speech produced by human beings. This philosophy could be used as a blunt defense against foreign bots created to interfere with American elections.

However, there are a few issues with this approach. The first is enforceability. Twitter has hundreds of millions of accounts, and Facebook has billions. Is it logistically possible for them to effectively police all of those accounts and terminate the ones operated by autonomous bots? Typically, the companies only respond to user complaints. What would the penalty be? Would there be fines for each autonomous account discovered by law enforcement?

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Furthermore, the First Amendment isnt just about the speaker. As professor Tim Wu from Columbia Law School (and a former Future Tense fellow) has noted, the primary concern of the First Amendment is the listeners and viewers, not the broadcasters. This interpretation of the First Amendment would hurt real people who find bot content interesting or worthwhile. The First Amendment is intended to preserve a marketplace of ideas in which all opinions are able to come forward and be considered, with the best ones winning in the long run. Prohibiting any ideaseven autonomously created onesis contrary to that purpose.

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2. A.I. is only capable of producing speech based on code from a human programmer. Therefore, speech from A.I. is merely another form of human speech. This is a more nuanced approach and arguably ensures that listeners and viewers receive all available opinions and ideas. However, the model doesnt accurately capture whats already happening with technology. Although you wouldnt necessarily know it from the Mueller-bashing, #MAGA-promoting Russian bots, A.I.s have already begun creating speech that embarrasses and causes problems for code writers.

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Take, for instance, Tay, the A.I. system created by Microsofts technology and research and Bing teams that operated a Twitter account very briefly in 2016. Tay was intended to tweet as a normal teenage girl and learn from the Twitter accounts that interacted with it. Unfortunately, based on those interactions, Tay became racist and anti-Semitic, forcing Microsoft to deactivate the account less than 24 hours after first going online.

That was hardly the intent of the programmers.

Similarly, in 2015, Amsterdam police questioned the programmer behind a Twitterbot that autonomously tweeted I seriously want to kill people at a fashion event in the city. The bot was programmed to create comprehensible sentences based on random chunks of the creators actual Twitter feed. Although the programmer explained this to the police, apologized, and deleted the bot, he also claimed he didnt know who is/should be held responsible (if anyone).

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If we are going to create a model for addressing speech from bots and other A.I.

under the First Amendment, we need to make sure that the model accurately reflects whats really happening with those technologies.

3. Speech produced by A.I. is only protected by the First Amendment when that speech represents the speech of its human programmer. Otherwise, speech from A.I. is not protected. This may seem like a reasonable way to address the problems with model No. 2. The problem, though, is that it relies on a fundamental questionIs this speech representative of what the programmer would say?that is frequently impossible to answer. As the 2016 election illustrated, Twitterbots are frequently anonymous. How can a regulatory agency, state government, or court determine what an anonymous programmer thought? And in many cases, as with A.I. personal assistants, there isnt a single programmerthere are many. Is Alexas speech only protected when it reflects Amazons publicly available statements? Do we have to compare her statements to the notes taken at Amazons board meetings? This model could make regulating A.I. speech unmanageable.

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So if we shouldnt think that A.I. speech is unprotected by the First Amendment, and we shouldnt consider A.I. speech as just the speech of its programmers, and we cant distinguish A.I. speech that reflects its programmers opinions from A.I. speech that doesnt, what are we left with? The right policy choice:

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4. Speech produced by A.I. is protected by the First Amendment. This leaves us with the final and most compelling model for applying the First Amendment to speech produced by A.I. and robots: a literal reading. The actual text of the First Amendment suggests this is the correct model to apply to machine speech, as the text simply states that the government shall make no law  abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. Nothing there specifically suggests freedom of speech is limited to people. Under this interpretation, all the constitutional speech protections that humans enjoy in the United States would also apply to A.I., robots, and Twitterbots, whether they are Russian intruders or Microsoft mistakes.

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Companies that produce A.I. personal assistants appear ready to support this model. In 2017, when police sought access to a murder suspects Echo, Amazon filed a motion in the murder trial that seemed to assert Alexa has First Amendment rights. (It was couched in language that referred to Amazons First Amendment-protected speech but referred specifically to Alexas decision about the information Alexa chooses to include in its response, suggesting that Alexas First Amendment rights were at stake as well.) A court didnt get a chance to weigh in, because the company dropped the assertion when the defendant agreed to provide the information the police sought. Admittedly, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. have a vested interest in this position, but that doesnt make it intrinsically wrong. On top of that, this model is the easiest to enforce: Do unto bots as you would do unto you.

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This conclusion is bound to rub some people the wrong way. But the First Amendment is among Americas greatest strengths, both in terms of substantive protections offered here and in advertising our values abroad. Autonomous speech from A.I. like bots may make the freedom of speech a more difficult value to defend, but if we dont stick to our values when they are tested, they arent values. Theyre hobbies.

The goal shouldnt be, then, to lean on private companies or government to eliminate Twitterbots. The focus instead should be on educating people so they are less susceptible to them. Human beings have shown an ability to become savvy media consumers when given the chance and tools. After Masaccios Holy Trinity, people got used to realistic paintings. After The Blair Witch Project, people got used to found-footage movies. We can get used to Russia bots and identify the signal through the noise.

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Autonomous tweets from bots are not the only expression at issue. A.I. programs and robots like Googles Project Magenta, the music-generation A.I. programs created by David Cope, Jukedecks autonomous music-composition service, and Harold Cohens AARON create art and music without human control. A.I.-based programs like Automated Insights Wordsmith analyze large data sets and convert them into natural language narratives, easy to read as a report from the Associated Press, which uses Automated Insights A.I. to write certain stories about a number of sectors, including about the financial industry. Although there is a general consensus that A.I.-generated art and narrative is currently good in small chunks, but lacks any sort of long-term narrative arc, its not hard to see that developing in the not-too-distant future. What if A.I. creates a series of paintings that offend a state legislature or produces an expose that reveals a presidents questionable financial status after analyzing publicly available documents? Can the A.I. be prohibited from publishing and broadcasting those?

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By permitting the government to ban lawful speech, even A.I. speech, we eliminate a potentially useful voice. That useful bot could provide us with information to defend ourselves from a parking ticket, estimates for Uber fares, new horror stories, instant nostalgia, or just laughter, as in the case of the delightful (though recently silent) DeepDrumpf. The First Amendment protects the speaker, but more importantly it protects the rest of us, who are guaranteed the right to determine whether the speaker is right, wrong, or badly programmed. We are owed that right regardless of who is doing the speaking. As discourse unfolds in this century, that should be the underlying principaljust as it has been in this country for centuries.
One of the oldest maps of the Slovak National Library shows only Europe, part of Asia and the northern coast of Africa.

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The Literary Museum of the Slovak National Library (SNK) in Martin showed a collection of maps and graphic representations of Europe and Slovakia from the 15th to 18th century.

The exhibition shows the development of the world and regions, how the borders of states changed and how humans started travelling further and further, discovering all the continents one by one, said Katarina Stefanides Mazariova, spokesperson of SNK, as quoted by the TASR newswire.

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The map is not only a graphic art piece but also a record of other information about our ancestors. Besides geographical information, period scenes, locations of armies, destiny of rulers, and scenes from the Bible, together with drawings of humans, animals and plants can be seen on the map, said director of SNK Katarina Kristofova, as cited by TASR.

Development of map production arrived after the invention of book printing in 1455, according to the SNK spokesperson.

Cartographers did not have to redraw maps manually anymore. The discovery of America in 1492 was also a reason to remake the maps, explained the SNK spokesperson, adding that the oldest cartographic objects of SNK property are from the years 1472 and 1493.

The Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel published by Anton Koberger sr. in Nuremberg in 1493 displays the world in the same way as the ancient scholar Ptolemy, recounted Stefanides Mazariova.

He saw the world only as Europe, part of Asia and the northern coast of Africa, said the SNK spokesperson for TASR.

Maps and plans were highly common in everyday life by the 18th century.

They were part of apprenticeship certificates, diplomas and documents from towns, said the spokesperson for TASR.

From this era, SNK owns maps created by Slovaks such as Pavol Kray, Samuel Mikovini, Andreas Erik Fritsch, Samuel Krieger and founder of Hungarian Scientific Geographic Statistics Jan Matej Korabinsky. They were mainly representations of upper-Hungarian (Slovak) cities and regions that were part of Slovak Matej Bels work (one of the most significant European scientists of the 18th century and founder of modern geography in the Hungarian kingdom), said Stefanides Mazariova.

The exhibition lasts until April 14.
The state of disrepair of the historical building of the Slovak National Theatre has threatened operation.

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The historical building of the Slovak National Theatre (SND) in Hviezdoslavovo Square in Bratislava needs vast and complex reconstruction  both from the outside and inside. The situation is so critical that some performances had to be cancelled and the schedule for the current season has been threatened. Thus, the state wants to find resources to secure at least the most pressing repairs. The cabinet discussed the issue mid-December, the TASR newswire wrote.

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The SND historical building was built in 1886 and is a cultural monument. Although it is one of the dominant landmarks of Bratislava, its last reconstruction took place between 1968 and 1972.

The SND building back in 1945. (Source: TASR)

Since then, only partial repairs concerning technology have been made to save the building and keep it operational, as well as to remove equipment in a state of serious disrepair (heating, air conditioning, emergency lighting, stage equipment, sound and light equipment), a ministerial document reads.

Currently, repairs of the rooms and main technology equipment must be made so that operation  as well as safety of both employees and visitors  is secured.

Cabinet supports culture financially

The cabinet decided to put 980,000 aside from the state budget for the most necessary repairs of the historical building of the national theatre and tasked Finance Minister Peter Kazimir with working out how to finance the rest of the repairs in the first months of 2018.

In the cultural sphere, this year the state also plans to financially support the Danubiana Museum of Modern Art in Cunovo, close to Bratislava. However, the finance minister has yet to find ways of financing it, TASR wrote.
The ruling coalition, which turned down the oppositions proposal to grant amnesty on distrainment orders where debtors are tax offices, social insurer and health insurers, has now opened this issue based on its own proposal.

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Representatives of the ruling coalition  Smer, the Slovak National Party (SNS) and Most-Hid gathered at the Government Office January 15; but SNS leader and Speaker of Parliament Andrej Danko was absent due to illness.

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The changes, which should allow debt relief, were prepared by Justice Minister Lucia Zitnanska (Most-Hid). Danko told Slovak media over the weekend that specific measures would be discussed not only within the coalition but also with the opposition parties. He added that talks would be held with representatives of the social insurer Socialna Poistovna, Financial Administration (the tax office) and health insurance companies. The SNS leader noted, as quoted by the TASR newswire, that he supports a general pardon by Socialna Poistovna.

The coalition spoke about the distrainment amnesty beginning last May. Zitnanska drew attention to the 3.7 million distrainment proceedings currently handled by the courts. She pointed out that some people are undergoing dozens of small distrainment processes preventing them from living normally.

The opposition Sme Rodina (We Are Family) movement failed to push through a distrainment amnesty in the past. The party proposed that after paying back their debts, people would be forgiven interest charges for late payment and the administrator of the claim would file a motion preventing enforced collection. But Parliament rejected the bill in May.

Coalition partners object

The Coalition Council has not completed the issue yet, Justice Ministry spokesman Peter Bubla informed TASR. SNS first deputy chairman Jaroslav Paska said that the partners may come up with objections.

At the Coalition Council today (January 15), the minister presented a concept to the coalition partners, Bubla said. The coalition partners will study it and will return to it at the end of January. When we definitively agree on this proposal, well be happy to present individual measures in detail.

Paska confirmed for TASR that some matters relating to the distrainment amnesty are still unresolved. SNS would like to focus on certain deadlines within the proposals for changes, he added. For example, he thinks that it would be good to deal mainly with older distrainment processes in particular and not those that appeared a few months ago.

SNS Danko said for the media that when the coalition rejected the opposition proposal in May, it was mostly due to these unresolved aspects and the low expertise of the draft solution.

Even Prime Minister Robert Fico thinks that the amnesty need not be applied to everyone affected by enforced collection procedures. A mechanism for handling people who have come under the amnesty should be found as well.

Minister Zitnanska raised the topic of proving the origin of the property of public officials, Paska added. The coalition discussed whether proving the origin of property could be resolved in some other way than now. Fico indicated options relating to tax laws. The PM conceded last year that a new constitutional law on proving the origin of property could be adopted.
The government proxy slammed Interior Minister Robert Kalinak for the draft law on repressing criminality in Roma settlements, for populist discrimination and preferring repression to prevention.

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The Government Proxy for Roma Communities, Abel Ravasz (junior coalition party Most-Hid), objected to the intention of Interior Minister Robert Kalinak (ruling Smer party) to push through the law on repressing criminality in Roma settlements.

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Until now, Ravasz office has not been part of the preparations of this bill, the proxy said, as quoted by the Sme daily. I reject laws that divide criminals based on their ethnic minority, although this is a popular and appealing communication shortcut, he commented. The proxy also criticised the draft for preferring repression to prevention and he warned that it may even limit human rights.

The draft bill is based on three pillars: bigger competences for police, more police stations in critical locations, mostly in southern and eastern Slovakia, and civic patrols (composed of locals), financed from the budget of the Interior Ministry, the Pravda daily wrote on January 12.

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Read also: Centre for Roma Rights sues Slovak interior minister over discrimination Read more

There will also be some educative and preventive activities, like centres for children to learn, gainhygiene habits, etc., and wood-processing workshops to train people from marginalised communities to work on a regular basis, according to ministry.

The preventive measures are still more scarce than the oppressive ones, Ravasz opposes.

Justice minister and president also critical

Each law should be prepared to apply for all citizens, not just for a specific settlement or ethnic group, Justice Minister Lucia Zitnanska reacted on social networks, as quoted by Pravda. Tension in society is fanned easily with various populist shortcuts and proposals, but it is very hard to calm down, he commented on the new measures against the bothersome criminality presented by Kalinak on January 11 in a Roma settlement in Krompachy.

The proxy for Roma met with President Andrej Kiska on January 15. They discussed the issue and after the meeting, Kiska appreciated Ravasz efforts of implementing systemic solutions aimed at educating the young generation of Roma, removing illegal settlements and work at the community level. On the other hand, he critically evaluated, as quoted by the SITA newswire, the endeavour for repression against Roma, without real determination of tackling the issue and understanding criminality as a result of life in poor conditions, poverty and without education. Kiska summed up that he expected constructive measures aimed, for example, at enabling necessary education for Roma and offering them opportunities beneficial to them and the whole country.

The President also invited representatives of the office of Government Proxy for Roma Communities to the debate on Roma and their inclusion in society, organised by him on January 25 in Presov. This is the first in a series of activities that should point to the importance of solving this issue.
Brexit itself should not impact the position of Slovaks in the UK, an interim agreement between the European Union and Great Britain suggests.

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Tens of thousands of Slovaks who live and work in Great Britain for a longer time  five years at least  do not have to fear Brexit, the Sme daily wrote on January 16.

Unlike some rumoured fears, they will not be forced to leave the UK, nor will they lose social benefits. At the beginning of December 2017, the European Union signed a preliminary agreement with the UK stipulating that people coming from EU members states (i.e. also from Slovakia) will have the same guaranteed rights after Brexit like now. The current decision on accepting degrees and qualifications  e.g. from doctors and architects  will be respected as well.

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This agreement implies that those who have been living officially in Great Britain for five or more years will have basically the same rights as Britons. Slovaks (and other EU nationals) who live there for a shorter time  or who will even arrive in the UK before Brexit is completed  will gain the status of applicants, and after five years, they will also have the same rights, according to Sme.

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Although Slovakia makes no precise statistics, there are an estimated 60,000 to 90,000 Slovaks living in the UK now.

The ultimate form of the Slovaks stay in Britain will be concluded only with the signature of the overall and final agreement on the UK leaving the Union, Sme summed up.
Solar is driving growth in renewable energy, says a new report.

A Chinese boom in solar panel installation last year helped drive global investment in renewable clean energy technology to record levels, a new study showed Tuesday.

After a dip in 2016, overall global investment in the sector rose 3.0 percent to a total $333.5 billion, offsetting falls in Japan, Germany and Britain, according to the Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) study.

That was the second best annual showing to date after $360.3 billion in 2015.

"The 2017 total is all the more remarkable when you consider that capital costs for the leading technology - solar - continue to fall sharply," said BNEF chief executive Jon Moore.

Solar investment came in at $160.8 billion in 2017, a rise of 18 percent despite per megawatt capital costs falling by around a quarter, with China accounting for around half the overall total at $86.5 billionup 24 percent, the study said.

"China installed about 20 GW more solar capacity in 2017 than we forecast," said Justin Wu, BNEF head of the Asia-Pacific region, as the Chinese notably showed off the world's first photovoltaic expressway.

Investment in wind power slipped back 12 percent last year, however, to $107.2 billion after a strong rise in 2016.

Solar and wind power remain far out in front in terms of renewable energy forms ahead of the likes of biomass, geothermal and small scale hydroelectricity which each attracted less than $5 billion last year.

Well behind China, the United States landed investments of $56.9 billiona rise even so of 1.0 percent despite an unfavourable political climate with President Donald Trump sceptical of climate change and withdrawing his country from the Paris climate agreement.

The study highlighted what it termed Washington's "less friendly tone towards renewables."

A handful of countries saw investments more than double, including Sweden to $4 billion and Australia to $9 billion.

Egypt saw a 495 percent increase to $2.6 billion while investment in the United Arab Emirates enjoyed a dizzying 23-fold rise to $2.2 billion.

Europe saw a notable decline in renewables investment to $57.4 billion, the fall-off hitting 26 percent in Germany and 56 percent for the United Kingdom on energy policy changes

Japan saw a 16 percent drop, while India was down 20 percent to $11 billion.

BNEF estimated last year saw a record 160 gigawatts of renewable power installed, not counting hydroelectricity, comprising 98 GW of solar and 56 GW of wind power.

Energy-smart technology, such as smart meters and energy storage, is also making headway, BNEF noted.

 2018 AFP
Events

3D Printing Conference for Educators Heading to Atlanta this Fall

Educators interested in 3D printing will have a venue in October to learn more about how to use it in K-12 and higher education. The second annual Construct3D conference and exposition will be taking place at Georgia Tech in Atlanta Oct. 5-8.

The emphasis will be on professional development to help faculty, staff and students learn new skills and promote the adoption and use of 3D printing in the classroom. Last year's event held more than 100 talks and workshops, as well as a vendor area where companies could demonstrate their design and digital fabrication products and services. Keynotes were delivered by representatives from MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, Duke University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and Maker Media, which hosts maker faires around the world.

The event was co-founded by three people: Duke Digital Media Engineer Chip Bobbert has developed one of the largest 3D printing-focused makerspaces in higher ed. Ultimaker education community strategist Lizabeth Arum has long worked with 3D printer companies and researchers to explore the needs of teachers who want to use the technology in their classrooms. Matt Griffin, director of community for Ultimaker, recently finished a massive, open, online course for Coursera on 3D printing hardware.

While staff from Ultimaker co-founded the event, the Construct3D team has committed to making the event company-agnostic, promising to speak to "all of the approaches to desktop 3D printing and digital fabrication equipment, software and materials in use by educators."

"As digital fabrication continues to develop as an integral aspect to all levels of education, we are thrilled to host the upcoming Construct3D conference," said Amit Jariwala, director of Design & Innovation for the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. "Our goal is to leave attendees feeling inspired to bring new 3D printing skills to their schools and programs, and ultimately shape the next generation of creators and innovators."

Registration, including a scholarship application process, will open in April on the Construct3D site.
Numerous Uber and Grab drivers in Hanoi besieged the separate offices of the ride-hailing apps on Monday to protest against their commission policies, apparently inspired by victory claimed by their peers in Ho Chi Minh City after a walkout last week.

Around 100 Uber drivers flocked to the app operators Hanoi office in Ba Dinh Strict around noon and demanded to talk to a representative.

One striking driver told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that Uber currently charges them 29.5 percent of the revenue earned from their rides.

According to the man, the commission ratio is too high and causes difficulty for those who borrowed loans to buy cars in order to drive for Uber.

The commission ratio used to be 15 percent for Uber drivers, before it went up to 20 percent and culminated at 25 percent.

The U.S.-based app additionally insisted that drivers ought to have an additional 4.5 percent deducted as personal income tax, sending the commission ratio to a whopping amount of 29.5 percent.

We also have no idea whether the tax deduction would be refunded if it turns out our total monthly income is below the threshold to pay personal income tax, the Uber driver told Tuoi Tre.

He added that all drivers merely wanted to have open talks with the companys representatives but they would not cooperate.

Local police officers were deployed to the scene in order to ensure security and eventually requested the striking drivers to leave.

The police supervise the scene. Photo: Tuoi Tre

By 2:30 pm, most of the drivers had left the scene, with only some staying to represent them in the dialogue with Uber representatives 30 minutes later.

During the talks, a driver named Hang, speaking on her coworkers behalf, demanded that Uber make it clear how the commission ratio is calculated, and suggested hiking the basic fares.

Hang said that the fares that Uber currently charges passengers are too low and only cause drivers to incur losses, given the complicated traffic in Hanoi, with many streets frequently suffering from gridlock and some roads even banning entry of Uber cars.

Hang added that Uber should not block drivers accounts based merely on feedback from passengers.

The company should talk to drivers to address the complaint from both sides, she said.

Ride-hailing apps usually apply low fares to attract customers and will enact disciplinary actions on drivers who receive negative feedback, made via the apps, from passengers. Drivers have no voice in those decisions.

A car is driven to the Uber office during a strike in Hanoi on January 15, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Following these complaints, an Uber Vietnam spokesperson asserted that drivers play a crucial role in the companys business, adding that the firm will work directly with them in order to address their concerns and find the best possible solutions for them.

Some drivers told Tuoi Tre that they will hire lawyers to protect their rights and represent their interests in the upcoming dialogues with Uber.

Simultaneously, the taxi-like GrabCar and motorbike taxi GrabBike drivers also went on strike at the Hanoi office of Grab Vietnam in Cau Giay District on Monday morning, asking for a lower commission ratio.

Grab drivers in the capital currently have to split 20 percent of their revenue per ride with the company and want to cut it to 15 percent.

The walkout blocked traffic on Duy Tan Street for a couple of hours. The crowd of striking drivers parted around 11:00 am, when some of they were invited to meet Grab representatives.

On January 1, Grab Vietnam increased the commission ratio from 20 percent to 23.6 percent, explaining that the additional 3.6 percent was personal income tax deduction on the drivers behalf.

The decision angered GrabBike drivers in Ho Chi Minh City, who staged a protest on January 10, pressuring Grab Vietnam to withdraw the decision three days later.

Even when the commission ratio had been reverted to 20 percent, GrabBike drivers in Hanoi believed it should be cut further to 15 percent.

Many drivers besiege the Grab office during a strike in Hanoi on January 15, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Uber and Grab both began operating in Vietnam in 2014, launching in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City before expanding to other regions.

While the apps have won customers over with low fares, both companies experienced struggles in their relationships with their drivers, whom they recently referred to as partners.'

Drivers for both apps complain that the dirt cheap fares set by the companies make the business less profitable, adding that they also have to cover other expenses, such as mobile phone and 3G data plans, and vehicle maintenance.
Two Vietnamese high school students have been honored in a national innovation contest for creating a pair of smart glasses for visually impaired people.

Tu Uyen and Thu Tuyet from Bui Thi Xuan High School, in the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong, have won first prize at the Social Innovation (SOIN) Challenge 2017 for their prototypie pair of smart glasses for the blind.

Launched in mid-September last year, the SOIN event attracted inventions from across Vietnam.

The competition was split into two categories: for adults (SOIN Unlimited) and for high school students (SOIN Junior).

The high school category results were announced on January 13.

Uyen and Tuyets glasses integrate both GPS and smartphone technology, and passed two rounds of judging, called Conversing with Investors and Conversing with Costumers, whereby all candidates answered questions relating to their inventions.

The second prize was shared by a group of students named Mr. HANDY from Lao Cai Province, in northwestern Vietnam, who created an app that provides nutritional menus for children under five, and WAVE, a group of students from Hanoi, who created an app that facilitates interaction between teachers, students and parents.

The third prize was awarded to three ideas, one which involves a wrist band able to warn parents of potential accidents and emotional instability in autistic children; a youth center where children are stimulated to be creative via the production of models and handmade items; and finally to an idea centered on the conversion of organic waste into biofertilizers.

The high-school section of SOIN Challenge 2017, jointly organized by Wellspring International Bilingual School and the not-for-profit Center for Social Initiatives Promotion, aimed to find inventions and ideas that deal with pressing social and environmental issues in Vietnam.

The ultimate purpose, however, was to sharpen students awareness of their community, and their sense of social responsibility, Le Tue Minh, the Wellsprings director, was quoted by VietNamNet as saying.

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The imposing stone villa in Da Lat that King Bao Dai, Vietnams last monarch, gifted to one of his concubines is a lasting reminder of the regal romance.

>> Untold stories of Da Lat  P1: Nguyen Dynastys trusted retainer

Apart from Queen Nam Phuong, his official wife, King Bao Dai (1913-1997), the 13th and last king of the Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945), had several concubines and lovers.

Nguyen Dynasty is also the countrys last monarchy reign.

Da Lat is an appealing resort town and the capital of Lam Dong Province in the Central Highlands.

A singular paramour

Following his abdication in August 1945, Bao Dai was sent back to Vietnam by the French government in April 1949.

After receiving the news about Bao Dais return to Vietnam and stay in Da Lat in 1949, Phan Van Giao, governor of the central region, picked him up at the towns Lien Khuong Airport and introduced a young woman named Le Thi Phi Anh to him.

Anh, 12 years younger than Bao Dai, was the youngest of an opulent, well-educated family who owned many villas in Hue City, the countrys then capital.

Her uncle was Le Quang Thiet, a son-in-law of King Thanh Thai (1879 1954), the 10th Nguyen King.

According to Nguyen Dac Xuan, a veteran expert in Hue culture, Anh was a great beauty with glowing complexion, a high nose bridge and glittery eyes.

Her attractiveness actually outshined Bao Dais three other concubines, Xuan added.

In one of his lowest moments, the former monarch instantly fell for Anh.

Following their love-making session, Bao Dai somehow gave Anh a generous sum in return for her service.

As one of Anhs relatives later revealed, the lady slapped him in his face for offending her.

To Bao Dais astonishment, Anh explained she yearned to become the emperors concubine, not a prostitute.

The former king was not enraged but adored his mistress more dearly.

Anh bore Bao Dai a daughter and a son, researcher Xuan added.

Their daughter, Nguyen Phuoc Phuong Minh, was born in 1950 and passed away in the U.S. in 2012.

Their son, Nguyen Phuoc Bao An, was born in 1951 in Da Lat.

After 1975, Anh spent her final years in loneliness in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City now, and passed away in 1986 at the age of 61.

The stone villa at the moment when Bao Dai purchased it and gifted it to Anh.

The unique stone villa

Bao Dai purchased a stone villa, tucked away on Rene Robin Street (Quang Trung Street, Ward 9 now) in Da Lat City in 1950 as a gift to his beloved Anh.

The mansion, known as Phi Anh Villa, was built by French architects in 1928 and adopted Spanish architecture, according to the Da Lat Housing Management Center.

Unlike other villas, the edifice is located on a medium-size area and built mostly from dressed stones.

It has spacious corridors and large doors designed as arches that allow draughts to breeze through the rooms.

Statues of dancing women and 12 double-sided reliefs were displayed around the edifice, including four featuring stylized lotuses and heads of two uncommon birds.

Several oil portraits of Bao Dai and Anh occupied prominent positions around the mansion.

Dang Nguyen Van Tich, director of the Da Lat Housing Management Center, revealed that around 30 families were allowed to live at Phi Anh Villa after 1975.

The improper use and overloading as more than 100 people crammed into the space, which was designed for a single family, left the building in dilapidation.

An investor later relocated the households at their own expense and hired experts who helped restore the villa to its original state.

The edifice was brought back to life after being handed over to investors for tourism services.

Following several ownership transferral instances, the villa now contains Phu Dong Restaurant, owned by Nguyen Trong Phuong, an entrepreneur from Hanoi.

Phuong made it a point to keep the mansions original architectural traits intact, particularly its shape and construction material that made it unique.

He confessed that he had taken a close look at many age-old villas in Da Lat before deciding to purchase Phi Anh Villa.

The romance between former monarch Bao Dai and Phi Anh, his concubine, was a decisive factor in my purchase, he affirmed.

He recalled when he took the mansion over, he sensed pervasive cold air.

The villa is only alive with warmth from its inhabitants. I realized then the villa could not be closed for a single day, Phuong noted, implying the enduring memory of Bao Dai and his royal mistress has made Phi Anh Villa stand out from hundreds of others in Da Lat.

During his lifetime, architect Nguyen Van Lap, former chair of the Lam Dong Architecture Association, observed Phi Anh Villa was prominent among approximately 170 century-old villas across Da Lat.

Regarding uniqueness, Phi Anh Villa, despite its considerably smaller size, is considered on a par with the resort towns four hallmark French-influenced structures, namely Da Lat Rail Station, Con Ga (Rooster) Church, Pedagogical College of Da Lat (previously Grand Lycee Yersin) and Da Lat Map Enterprise (known as the National Geographical Department prior to 1975).

In his recent paper, researcher Nguyen Hong Tran disclosed that after Bao Dai was ousted by Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem (1901  1963) in 1955, his concubine Phi Anh and their two children had nowhere to seek shelter and were driven out even by her own relatives.

The mother and her children were constantly on the move and lived in rented houses.

Anh had no choice but to remarry to have her burden relieved.

Bao Dai and Anhs children also led miserable lives just as their mother did.

A well-preserved relief displayed inside Phi Anh Villa in Da Lat. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Caring for lovers Just like with Phi Anh, former king Bao Dai always cared for his royal concubines and mistresses when they moved with him to Da Lat City. He gave Bui Mong Diep, another of his concubines, a stately villa on Graffeuille Street, near the Hung Vuong and Hoang Hoa Tham junction in Ward 10 now. Furthermore, he took Jenny Woong, also known as Hoang Tieu Lan or Tran Ny, his attractive Chinese paramour, to Da Lat and bought her a luxury villa nestled at No. 3, Babey Street (Nguyen Du Street today). Bao Dai, whose real name is Nguyen Phuc Vinh Thuy, was enthroned in 1926. He then returned to France to resume his studies and did not officially begin his reign until 1932. The king handed over his reigns sword of power and seal to a Vietnamese revolutionary delegation at 1:00 pm on August 30, 1945. After several more political activities following his abdication, at 40, he started living in exile in France until passing away in Paris in 1997.

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The administration of Quang Ngai Province in central Vietnam has faced opposition after it agreed in principle to the surveying of a large area within a local marine reserve for the construction of a resort.

The surveys are to be carried out by Vietnam Infrastructure Investment & Development Joint Stock Company (VIID) on Quang Ngais Ly Son Island to complete dossiers for the companys proposal to invest into a local resort project.

The planned resort would encompass an area of around 70 hectares within the Ly Son Marine Reserve and the Binh Chau Global Geopark, the latter of which is being filed for recognition by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

According to Nguyen Anh Tuan, deputy director of VIIDs Quang Ngai office, 80 percent of the project would float on the waters surface, with only one block of villas built on land next to an existing residential area.

There are currently two construction options, he said, the first being to build the floating structures using light-weight composite materials and securing them in place with anchors.

The second option is to use concrete columns as a foundation for the floating villas, each requiring between six and eight such columns buried deep in the ocean bed.

In both options, the main structure floats on the surface, doing no harm to the geological platform of the area and requiring no land reclamation, Tuan said.

I have nothing to say to those who insist that putting a few concrete columns into the ocean would threaten conservation efforts. Whats the point of conservation without development? Should we all just live on rafts like our ancestors? he said.

However, not everyone has bought Tuans line of reasoning, with experts weighing in to criticize the resort projects threat to protected waters.

According to Dr. Vu The Long, an expert from the Vietnam Institute of Archeology, a development of over 70 hectares would pose an environmental risk to a small island like Ly Son.

Spanning less than 1,000 hectares off the coast of Quang Ngai, Ly Son is known for hosting one of the most well-protected natural ecosystems among Vietnams islands, and has only recently developed its own tourism industry.

The construction of the resort would be too much of a risk to the underwater coral reefs and volcanic geological layers, Long explained.

Meanwhile, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vu Cao Minh from Vietnams Bureau of Geology claimed that UNESCO would soon recognize the coastal area in Ly Sons Binh Chau Commune as a global geopark, after which every project in the area would require approval from the Vietnamese prime minister.

My advice is to maintain Ly Son until then and refrain from any invasive activity on the island, Minh said.

Tourists come to Ly Son for its natural heritage, not because there are five-star amenities on the island or because it is a shopping paradise, said Dr. Tran Van Tan, president of the Vietnam Institute of Geosciences and Mineral Resources.

What needs to be done is to conserve the natural environment and ecosystem. Thats what sustainable development really is, he stressed.

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Though the drugs are available commercially, they are too expensive for financially disadvantaged patients to afford without some form of sponsorship.

In Vietnam, nearly 82 percent of the population is covered by a state-run health insurance program in which the government shares the cost of medical treatments with the patient, according to statistics made available last April by Vietnam Social Security.

A sponsorship program offered by the Swiss-based Novartis Pharma Services AG provides insured Vietnamese cancer patients with free access to two cancer-treating drugs; Glivec 100mg and Tasigna 200mg.

The pharmaceutical company sponsors 100 percent of the cost of the drugs for patients who have been insured for less than 36 months.

For patients who have been insured for 36 months or more, their insurance covers 40 percent of the cost, while Novartis takes care of the remaining 60 percent.

The sponsorship was previously set to be available from January 1, 2015 until December 31, 2019 at seven leading cancer-treatment hospitals throughout Vietnam.

Cancer patients at the Hospital of Oncology in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Tuoi Tre

However, supply of the drugs has already been exhausted in some locations and is quickly running out at others.

Hundreds of patients diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia at the Hospital of Blood Transfusion and Hematology in Ho Chi Minh City (BTH) are now counting their days after the hospital ran out of the sponsored drugs at the beginning of this year.

Without the sponsorship, many patients will have no choice but to give up their treatment, as the cost of the medication will amount to nearly VND100 million [US$4,400] a day, one reader told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

B., a 39-year-old leukemia patient from Ho Chi Minh City who is receiving treatment at BTH, said his course of Glivec had been reduced from three tablets a day to two pills a day recently due to the shortage.

I have to buy the drug at the market price of VND3.5 million [$155] for ten tablets while waiting for the sponsored drugs, B. said.

If this situation continues, I wont be able to survive for much longer, he added.

Thousands of cancer patients at the seven hospitals rely on the sponsored drugs to fight their diseases, and many could be forced to give up their treatments entirely.

A woman buys medicine at a pharmacy inside the Hospital of Oncology in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The red tape that kills

The shortage of both Glivec and Tasigna has been attributed to a recent government decree that mandates a range of additional papers and certificates for the drugs to be cleared before import into Vietnam.

The decree, which took effect on July 7, 2017, elaborated on the implementation of an earlier Law on Pharmacy.

According to the decree, applications for the import of medicine, even for humanitarian purposes, must include a quality profile of the drug as specified in the ASEAN Common Technical Dossier (ACTD).

However, in a letter sent by the Ho Chi Minh City office of Novartis to a number of Ministry of Health officials and hospitals on July 25, 2017, the company stressed that the ACTD-standard profile would need to include classified information regarding the formula and production of the drug.

Such information, Novartis wrote in its letter, could only be submitted directly to the Ministry of Health for evaluation and not to a third party such as a partnered hospital or the importer of the drug.

[The decree] requires Novartis to hand these documents to a third party to complete their application for import licensing, which goes against our companys principles on confidentiality and is an unprecedented requirement for programs that we sponsor, the company stressed.

Nearly half a year has passed since Novartis sent its letter to the relevant authorities, during which time thousands of cancer patients have waited for their life-saving drugs to become readily available again.

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Vietnamese authorities have proposed raising the countrys national retirement age to 62 for men and 60 for women by 2021.

The Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs has suggested the increase as a long-term measure to balance the countrys pension fund.

A new retirement age is proposed at 62 for men and 60 for women. Currently those numbers are 60 for men and 55 for women.

The proposal will not be submitted to the lawmaking National Assembly until their meeting in May 2019 and, if approved, will take effect on January 1, 2021.

The labor ministry believes that the new regulation is necessary in order to maintain balance in the nations pension fund, claiming that it will become imbalanced if current policies on retirement age are maintained.

The ministry quoted recent findings by the International Labor Organization (ILO), which revealed that Vietnams superannuation fund will begin running out in 2023, and that the national budget will need to be mobilized in order to pay pensioners by 2034.

The findings also indicated that the average period for which Vietnamese men and women receive pension is 16.6 years and 23 and a half years, respectively.

The proposal to raise the retirement age has faced opposition from workers as many laborers refuse to extend their careers.

Others have claimed that the new retirement age is inappropriate for manual laborers, public servants and government officials.

The labor ministry also mentioned different approaches to balancing the pension fund, including hiking the amount of contribution paid by laborers during their working years, or reducing pension rates.

However, according to the ministry, both of these solutions would bring about financial hardship for both laborers and pensioners, and are thus not considered viable measures.

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A Vietnamese traffic policeman was taken into custody on Monday for allegedly shooting a man dead earlier this month.

The prime suspect, Nguyen Tan Phuoc, 41, lieutenant at the Traffic Police Department in Dong Nai Province, was captured in the evening, and is temporarily imprisoned, in accordance with a decision by the local Peoples Procuracy.

Preliminary investigation results revealed that he killed the 30-year-old Bui Viet Hai, born in Hai Phong, northern Vietnam, with a revolver on the evening of January 6 in a rented accommodation located in Bien Hoa, the provincial capital of Dong Nai, where the latter was staying.

Are you Hai? Phuoc asked his victim after arriving at his room, as shown in police documents.

Yes, I am. Who are you? Hai answered, just before Phuoc pulled the trigger and shot him.

Hai was rushed to the hospital with the trace of a bullet running through the head from the left temple. He died later.

The shooting incident occurred after a woman with whom Phuoc had a love affair called him on his phone, saying that her 19-year-old daughter had been coaxed by Hai into taking drugs, spending time in clubs and leaving her mothers house without her permission.

The origin of the weapon used is under investigation, for it is not the type that traffic police are supposed to carry.

Another man involved in the case is Tran Tuan Sinh, also in Bien Hoa, who had pointed out Hais location to Phuoc, according to VietNamNet.

A police hunt for him has been urgently launched.

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Latest reporting on Craig McLachlan is now reaching new levels of absurdity.

A Courier Mail story today references an interview given to Gold Coasts Ocean Road Magazine just before the allegations surfaced.

Craig McLachlan interview reveals flirty past before assault allegations the article is headlined.

In the interview, McLachlan revealed that as a skinny teenager, he joined a gymnastics squad to try to muscle up.

One day, I was showing off in front of girls and did a double somersault while keeping my eyes on them and not on what I was doing, he said.

I landed badly and brutally broke my foot as a result. I couldnt train for weeks.

Thats it.

Its a story you could rip from any gym, swimming pool or sporting field, from any generation. Yet its enough to qualify as a flirty past in the current hysterical climate.

Other reports recently have included McLachlan flirting at a suntanning salon (which does not strike me as abuse of power over a co-worker), and one item quoted an actor who chose not to audition for Rocky Horror based on rumours they had heard (thus not a co-worker, again).

The original allegations by actors Christie Whelan Brown, Erika Heynatz, and Angela Scundi were substantial and deserve appropriate investigation by employers and police.

But subsequent reporting has descended into something of a feeding frenzy around McLachlans marquee name, which undermines legitimate concerns and alleged workplace harassment.

In Hollywood this week actor Aziz Ansari was forced to address claims about a date last year, when a photographer claimed their sex was non-consensual. Date rape -assuming this extends to such- has been a genuine issue, especially in US campuses, for decades and remains so. It is customarily addressed via police charges or university authorities before news reportage, except in the current climate.

When the New York Times went large with Harvey Weinstein allegations they were comprehensive. Nobody is doubting the power of the pen and level of investigation in a watershed industry moment. In Australia the Don Burke allegations were similarly thorough, despite his continued denials. One solitary report on Geoffrey Rush, however, is headed for the courts.

But if a skinny teenager trying to impress girls in the 70s and 80s is evidence of a flirty past then frankly we are all doomed and all guilty.
Wil Anderson presents a 3 part special The Best of Fresh Blood from this week, showcasing new comedy talent.

Fresh Blood is an ABC initiative to uncover emerging comedy writers, directors and performers.

Twenty chosen comedy teams have created 3 x 5 minute sketches. Original and laugh out loud, from animated ibis to kung fu crime fighters, the variety and talent showcased in these short comedy sketches will impress.

The sketches featured in the special include; Collective Noun, Mars 500, The Leftovers, Tiger Cops, Too Pretty to be Witty, Unsynced, Freudian Nip, The Big Day, Woes, Headswapsies, The Angus Project, Bin Chickens, Lets Break Em Up and Why Are You Like This.

All sketches are available to binge watch on ABC Comedy on iview.

Sketches featured in episode one;

Mars 500: follows six astronauts pretending to travel to Mars in a fake space shuttle in Australias red centre. Their task is to answer a simple but important scientific question: can six people live in a tiny space shuttle for the time it takes to fly to Mars and back without killing each other? Inspired by real world events, Mars 500 tells the story of a ridiculous yet noble journey to nowhere, and the idiots who signed up for it.Producer/Director/Writer Lewis Hobba.

Tiger Cops: Two mismatched cops Inspector Tiger (Maria Tran) and Detective Wombat (Steven Oliver) are on a mission to take down a Hong Kong crime lord, The White Ghost.Producer Maria Tran, Director/Writer Adrian Castro.

The Leftovers: Already world-weary in their early twenties, Pippa and Helena are a couple of young people struggling not to constantly embarrass themselves. Based on the experiences of its two stars and creators, Leftovers finds the satirical in the mundane lives of young people. Producer Mark Ruse, Director Andrew Mills, Writers Pippa Mills, Helena Ruse, Andrew Mills.

Too Pretty to be Witty: A pop song about a basic bitch, a movie trailer starring Hollywoods most

stereotypical cast, and a dating game show for the career-driven independent woman. In Too Pretty To Be Witty, Fiona Gillman plays three different types of women, satirising the generalisations created for them by modern media and society. Producer/ Director Petra Lovrencic, Producer/Writer Fiona Gillman.

9:30pm Thursday on ABC Comedy and continues Jan 25, Feb 1.
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

View Results
New documentaries on Jimmy Barnes, cult group The Family, homelessness, Aussie history and wildlife are amongst new projects funded by Screen Australia.

In total $850,000 was allocated through the Producer program and $2.66 million through the Commissioned program for 12 projects. They will screen on ABC, SBS, TEN, Seven, the BBC and PBS in the US.

Projects supported through Documentary Producer include:

ABC iview series Gun Ringer about Indigenous Ringer Jeff Harrower, who does one of the most dangerous jobs on earth  feral bull catching in regional Northern Territory. Emerging NT producer Tom Lawrence created the original concept and has teamed up with highly experienced Bondi Rescue producers Ben Davies and Ash Davies for the series.

ABC Arts one-off special Death Art from Ruby Girl Productions, about one womans journey to explore what it means to use a dead body in artworks. Produced by Julia Peters (Becoming Superhuman), and written and directed by Sascha Ettinger Epstein (The Pink House).

ABC iview series The Horrors from Mashup Pictures, which will examine common themes of Australian life by reinterpreting real-life situations where things have gone horribly wrong. The production reunites the creative team behind Housemates  producer/director Rob Innes, producer/writer Scott Brennan and executive producer Mish Armstrong.

CJZs feature Working Class Boy based on Jimmy Barnes best-selling book of the same name, about the early years of Australias biggest rock star from his childhood in Glasgow to life in the forlorn immigrant suburbs of Adelaide. Produced by Toni Malone (Pauline Hanson: Please Explain!), executive produced by Andrew Farrell (Marry Me Marry My Family) and Michael Cordell (Vitamania), and directed and co-produced by Mark Joffe (Love Child). The film will be released theatrically by Universal Pictures, followed by a broadcast on Channel Seven.

The six projects supported through Documentary Commissioned are:

Stranger Than Fiction Films Australia in Colour for SBS, produced in association with Arrow Media. The four-part series will take a look at pivotal moments in our nations history from 1900  1970, using cutting-edge technology to colourise black and white archival footage. Decade by decade the story of Australia, its people and culture will be given new life and shown in vibrant colour for the first time. Produced by Jo-anne McGowan (David Stratton: A Cinematic Life), executive produced by Jennifer Peedom (Sherpa) and Nick Metcalfe (America in Colour) from Arrow Media, the series will be written/directed by Alec Morgan (Hunt Angels) and Lisa Matthews (Australia  The Story of Us).

A second season of SBSs thought-provoking series Filthy Rich & Homeless from award-winning production house Blackfella Films. Produced by Darren Dale and Jacob Hickey, who is also credited as writer, the second season will follow the format of the first and recruit five new high-profile Australians to trade in their privileged lives and discover what life is like for the nations homeless.

Artemis Medias My Family Secret also for SBS, a three-part series helping regular Australians scrutinise the silences from both their familys and our countrys past. Produced by Claire Forster (Australian Story) and Robin Eastwood (Miss Lebanon), executive produced by Celia Tait (Who Do You Think You Are) and directed by Steve Peddie (Secrets of Our Cities).

Northern Pictures The Magical Land of Oz from writer/director Tosca Looby (Outback) and executive producers Sue Clothier (Whiteley), Karina Holden (Blue), Caroline Hawkins (Meerkat Manor) and Clare Birks (Animal Mums). This wildlife series will explore the unique exotic creatures of Australia that have evolved in a country shaped by a distinctive climate and years of isolation, and is set to air on the ABC in Australia, BBC2 in the UK and PBS in the US.

Big Stories Cos The Cult of the Family commissioned by the ABC, a three-part investigation into the rise and fallout of an insidious cult led by the charismatic Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The series reunites the same team from the 2017 feature The Family which premiered at MIFF  producer Anna Grieve (Croker Island Exodus) and writer/director Rosie Jones.

Screentimes The Secret Life of Four Year Olds, revealing the secret world of four year olds at a pivotal age of their development. Capturing the ups and downs, tears and laughter of a group of young children, executive producers Jennifer Collins (Todd Sampsons Life on the Line), Emily Griggs (The Chefs Line), and Basia Bonkowski (Married At First Sight) will produce this illuminating series for Network Ten.
The leader of Brazil's Workers Party argued in an interview that former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is anything but radical and does not pose a threat to Brazilian financial stability.

Brazilian senator Gleisi Hoffman told Bloomberg News that Lula is working on a second "letter to Brazilian people" (as he did in 2002) to reassure the markets about his commitment to fiscal responsibility.

"Lula could be considered anything, except a radical. Everyone won under Lula, including the financial sector," the senator said.

Although the former trade unionist leads opinion polls for this years presidential elections, his criminal conviction could bar him from running, with the ex president scheduled to stand trial on 24 January on charges of money laundering and corruption.

Hoffman admitted that the party made mistakes during its 13 years in power, but argued that the financial crisis that sank the country into recession from 2014-2016 was triggered by a loss of tax revenue and not excessive public spending.

Nonetheless, as Silvana Batini, the Public Federal Ministrys prosecutor explained, Lula might still be able to run for president even if he is convicted to nine years of prison, by appealing to the Supreme Court which might grant him enough time to campaign.

Hoffman said that Da Silvas trial is a continuation of the democratic break that started in 2016, claiming it would be phase three of the coup detat launched against the democratic system.

"The judiciary does not just want to stop Lula from running, it wants to block part of Brazilian society from voting," she said.

"What right do they have to do that?"
Spain is expected to replace the US as the worlds second most popular tourist destination after France, according to data from the Madrid-based UN World Tourism Organization.

Head of the UN World Tourism Organization Zurab Pololikashvili said on Monday that Spain enjoyed 82m visitors last year and is expected to take the second spot, although definitive figures will only be published in the spring.

The country broke its own records for a fifth straight year in 2017, with a 8.9% rise year-on-year in the number of visitors.

Tourist spending in Spain also set a new record in 2017, climbing 12.4% from the year before, with the 18m Britons who visited Spanish shores the biggest contingent by nationality.

Tourism in Spain has also benefited from the boom in renting flats to tourists through platforms like Airbnb, although this has sparked protests from some locals, who complain of a fall in the number of long-term rentals and higher rent prices.

The boom in the sector was also stoking interest in M&A in the space. On Wednesday, NH Hotels rejected a takeover offer from rival Barcelo, a transaction that would have created the largest hotel chain in the country.

Polikashvili did not provide any details regarding the US, nor did he explain how Spain had managed to take second place despite the Barcelona terror attacks or the Catalan drive for independence, both of which might have been expected to adversely impact one of the countrys most visited regions.

Nonetheless, France was still odds-on to retain the top spot in 2017, contributing the most to an annualised 8% gain in the number of visitors to Europe.

In 2016, Spain hosted 75.3m tourists, close on the heels of the 75.6m welcomed by the US, although France remained world leader by a wide margin, with 82.6m visitors.

The US suffered a hit in its international tourism during the first five months of Donald Trump's presidency, according to the US International Trade Administration, with tourism falling 5% in the first quarter and 3% in the second.
London stocks were set to open a little weaker on Friday with little in the way of corporate or macroeconomic news to drive markets and volumes likely to be low amid the summer lull.

The FTSE 100 was expected to open eight points lower than Thursdays close at 6,861.

Atif Latif, director of trading at Guardian Stockbrokers, said: We expect a period of consolidation in the coming sessions before a significant move lower and have seen downward protection being added.

With the continual drop in the pound that is seeing no respite, the common theme for FTSE companies will now be M&A. Overseas cash rich funds and private equity houses will be looking at potential buyout targets on valuations that are now 20/30% cheaper.

On the data front, UK public sector net borrowing figures are due at 0930 BST. Societe Generale expects the PSNB ex-banking will move from a deficit to a surplus of 2.4bn in July.

This weeks data will be for July which is a key payment month for corporation and other taxes. As the OBR points out, this is the most forward-looking component of receipts and we think it could suffer from Brexit uncertainty.

Moreover, the year-to-date performance of the budget deficit relative to the pace of improvement implied by the OBRs full fiscal year forecast has been disappointing, a trend that we expect to continue.

Corporate news was thin on the ground on Friday.

Hammerson said developments towards achieving a secondary listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) are at an advanced stage

The listing is expected to take place on 1 September after receiving approval from the Financial Surveillance Department of the South African Reserve Bank. Hammerson is now awaiting formal approval from the JSE.

Elsewhere, Faroe Petroleum applied to the LSE for 1,033,949 new ordinary shares of 10p each in respect of the vesting of employee share awards under its corporate incentive plan.

Admission was expected to become effective on 23 August. Faroe held no shares in treasury, the company said in a statement.

Healthy and safety group PHSC has raised 350,000 before expenses through a share placement.

The company, which provides health, safety, hygiene and environmental consultancy services, said the placement was in response to investor demand. The group placed 1,590,909 new ordinary shares of 10p each with new investors at a price of 22p per share.

The placing shares represent 10.8% of the enlarged issued ordinary shares of the company. PHSC will use the funds for additional working capital, including for ongoing expenditure relating to recent acquisitions.
Fallout from the collapse into compulsory insolvency of construction giant Carillion continued on Tuesday, with 1bn of unpaid bills jolting suppliers, banks needing to write off most of the 1.6bn debt pile and employees under private sector contracts going jobless the following day.

Business secretary Greg Clark called for a "fast-track" investigation by the Insolvency Service into the conduct of Carillions directors, past and present, and pushed for the Financial Reporting Council to probe the preparation of the company's accounts and the actions of auditor KPMG.

"In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors. Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously."

Earlier, Chancellor Philip Hammond told Parliament on Tuesday that he was not aware of any credit exposure for the government and said the Treasury has provided a line of credit to the official receiver for provision of public services, which can be recovered from other government departments that have contracted for services.

A witness statement filed at the High Court by Carillion's interim chief executive Keith Cochrane revealed the expected recovery for creditors in the liquidation is 0.8p to 6.6p in the pound. At the time of going into liquidation, the statement showed the company had 2.2bn of financial liabilities, including 1.3bn of bank debt and the defined benefit pension deficit of 587m.

Cochrane, Sky News reported, said RBS tightened the terms of its funding three days before the liquidators were called in, representing "unilateral action which in the company's view undermined the group's efforts to conserve cash".

The group's cash preservation in the last 19 years had seen it pay out more than 726.64m to shareholders since its demerger from Tarmac, according to calculations from Reuters.

Attention should be spent on the corporate governance of the company, agreed analyst Michael Hewson of CMC Markets, particularly why directors and shareholders was felt it was prudent to allow the payment of a dividend at a time when the pension deficit more than doubled to 663m at the end of 2016 from 317m in 2015.

While long term debt remained fairly steady at between 508m in 2012 to 592m in 2016, the amount of short term debt started to rise quite sharply from 263m over the same period to 760m in 2016.

"This it turns out was as a result of the company accessing a government scheme called the 'Early Payment Facility' in order to pay its suppliers on time as cash flow dried up due to some contractual disputes on a number of its contracts," Hewson said. "This meant that rather than Carillion owing its suppliers its banks paid the suppliers and acted as a bridge for the slowdown in cash flow."

CONTRACT COMPLICATIONS, BANK LOSSES

Although on Monday the government guaranteed payments for all Carillion employees working on public sector contracts, workers under contracts to private sector firms would be given until Wednesday for Carillion's client companies to decide what to do with the contracts and employees.

Meanwhile, construction work on Carillion's private finance initiative contracts, including Midland Metropolitan Hospital, has being dogged by complications. The Times reported that the future of the company's PFI contracts would be led by banks rather than the official receiver, with the National Audit Office expected to publish a "damning" report into PFI schemes on Thursday.

Further listed companies came out on Tuesday to reveal how they would be affected by the collapse of the UK's second largest construction group, including public private partnership investor John Laing Infrastructure Fun, sub-contractor Van Elle and lighting and sprinklers specialist Premier Technical, following announcements from Speedy Hire, Balfour Beatty and Galliford Try a day earlier.

Banks that had lent to Carillion were also expected to face losses running into hundreds of millions of pounds, analysts said. The 13 lenders were led by Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and Santander, with an estimated exposure of 1.6bn debt exposure. Analysts also calculated that there are up to 30,000 suppliers and subcontractor businesses owed around 1bn in unpaid costs from Carillion.

Trade unions called for the government to set up a task force to protect workers and to conduct a risk assessment of other firms that could be exposed to collapse.

TUC General Secretary Frances OGrady said: We urgently need a national task force involving unions to safeguard jobs, services, and pensions. Workers cant be left at the back of the queue. Each and every worker at Carillion needs to know where they stand. They have bills and mortgages to pay, and deserve certainty on their future.

And we have to ensure that there arent more Carillions on the horizon," she added. "That means an immediate risk assessment of all large outsourcing firms with government contracts. Public services are already under pressure, and cant take another hit like this.

SUBCONTRACTOR VAN ELLE EXPOSED

Van Elle said that it has carried out regular work for Carillion as a specialist lead sub-contractor, principally in respect of rail improvement and maintenance work where Network Rail is the end customer, with outstanding debt and work-in-progress exposure of roughly 1.6m.

"The group will engage with Carillion and its advisers (including the Official Receiver) to determine the status of outstanding payments, but shareholders should note that, in the event that Van Elle is unable to recover any monies owed, there would be an adverse financial impact on the group."

Furthermore, Van Elle's order book included 2.5m of expected work from Carillion for the remainder of the current financial year and beyond, though management felt was too early to say what the result will be.

John Laing Infrastructure Fund said it had nine operational public private partnership projects where Carillion is the provider of facilities management services, four of which are schools projects, four are emergency services projects and one road project. The value of these projects is approximately 8.5% of the total portfolio value and approximately 9.6% of the net asset value as of 30 June last year.

Using contingency plans put in place last year, JLIF is seeking to appoint alternative FM providers on all of the nine projects to replace Carillion, which is expected can be achieved with minimal service disruption and minimal additional cost.

JLIF said it has no projects currently in construction where Carillion are the contractors but owns one project where Carillion are still liable for any construction defects found on the project, with the construction period having completed over 10 years ago. A recently completed routine defects survey has not highlighted any significant areas of concern.

Niche specialist services company Premier Technical Services Group said expected impacts from the liquidation of Carillion, of which the firm undertook an estimated 800,000 worth of work for per year, would be "minimal", with the work to be taken on by existing Premier clients.

The firm had an outstanding net debt of 300,000 due from Carillion which had been fully accounted for in its 2017 balance sheet.
A lawyer has been acquitted on charges he made up thousands of false clients to sue oil giant BP for damages caused by the April 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Under a 2012 settlement BP agreed to compensate businesses and individuals affected by the disaster. Mikal Watts had allegedly sought to take advantage of the compensation programme. Reuters reported that Watts, from Texas, was found not guilty by a federal court in Mississippi on Thursday.

His brother David Watts and Wynter Lee, who both worked for Mikal Watts law firm, were also acquitted, as well as Hector Eloy Guerra and Thi Hoang Abbie Nguyen.

However, Gregory Warren and Thi Houng Kirsty Le were prosecuted.

The defendants were accused of submitting claims on behalf of over 40,000 people who were found to have false or stolen personal information, or had not agreed to be represented by Watts San Antonio law firm.

In one case, an alleged victim called Lucy Lu, who was said to be deckhand on a commercial vessel in the area, was actually a dog.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico resulted from an explosion in Transoceans Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which was working under contract for BP in the Macondo prospect in April 2011. It was the worst offshore oil and environmental disaster in US history as 11 people were killed and over 3m barrels of oil was spilled affecting shorelines of several states for about three months. BPs final bill for the oil spill reportedly came to $61.6bn.

Shares in BP were up 0.16% to 436.25p at 0913 BST.
A novel tuberculosis pathogen, Mycobacterium mungi, closely related to human TB, infects and kills banded mongooses through a surprising route  olfactory communication. Now, a detailed investigation published in the journal Veterinary Pathology provides a window into how this deadly disease moves between mongooses and within the mongoose host.



The team, led by Kathleen Alexander, a professor of wildlife conservation in Virginia Techs College of Natural Resources and Environment, identified a unique pathological presentation for this tuberculosis pathogen.

Infected anal gland secretions are sniffed or used to mark other mongooses, allowing this tuberculosis pathogen to invade the mongoose host through breaks in the skin or nose. This is the first case of a pathogen being transmitted through olfactory communication networks.

Mongooses use anal gland secretions to communicate essential information to each other that is fundamental to the survival of their social group, said Alexander. Our findings highlight the amazing ability of a pathogen to evolve and exploit the behavior of a species to increase transmission, and this has critical implications to our understanding of TB."

From 1999 to 2017, Alexander and her team examined 62 mongooses infected with tuberculosis and found that the most infected areas of the body were the lymph nodes, spleen, and anal glands.

Given the character and distribution of lesions, we think that the pathogen spreads through the blood, the lymphatic system, or both upon entering the mongoose host, said Claire Sanderson, a research associate in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment.

By using histopathology, the researchers were able to look for microscopic evidence of tuberculosis lesions in formalin-fixed tissues and organs from banded mongooses in their long-term study site.

"This large-scale investigation provides a clear picture of how this unique tuberculosis pathogen infects and kills the mongoose host," said co-author Mark C. Williams of the University of Pretoria, Onderstepoort, South Africa.

"Tuberculosis generally infects a susceptible host through a pulmonary or oral transmission route. But this pathogen has a unique pathological presentation arising from its environmental transmission route," said co-author Mitchell Palmer, of the Bacterial Diseases of Livestock Research Unit, National Animal Disease Center, Ames, Iowa.

Banded mongooses live in close-knit groups and sleep in small underground dens, circumstances ideal for aerosol transmission of tuberculosis organisms and yet, lesions with this pathogen were only found in the lung of banded mongooses in late stages of the disease, if at all, said Alexander, who is also affiliated with Virginia Techs Fralin Life Science Institute.



Infection by the M. mungi pathogen threatens the survival of smaller mongoose troops. Alexanders team has recently sequenced the M. mungi genome  the only known tuberculosis species not to be successfully cultured in vitro. By comparing the genome of M. mungi to other M. tuberculosis complex pathogens, Alexander and her team hope to find clues as to how this pathogen evolved such a unique transmission and pathological presentations.

This organism is very closely related to human TB but can be transmitted through the environment. This provides an exciting opportunity to understand TB organisms and their potential for change, providing critical insight possibly into the biology of human TB pathogens, said Alexander.

Mongoose are a territorial species and would have limited contact with members of another troop, limiting pathogen spread. Transmission of the pathogen through olfactory secretions circumvents this barrier, allowing M. mungi to spread through the population. The first recorded M. mungi outbreak in mongoose populations in northeastern Botswana and northwest Zimbabwe occurred in 1999 and was reported in Mbio.

"This discovery changes the manner in which we must think about sociality, olfactory communication, and infectious disease spread," said Alexander.

Other members of the research team include Peter N. Laver, of the University of Capetown, South Africa; Carly Kanipe, of Iowa State College of Veterinary Medicine; Michelle Larsen, of the Department of Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and Suelee Robbe-Austerman, of the Diagnostic Bacteriology Laboratory, National Veterinary Services Laboratories, Ames, Iowa.

The work was supported by both the Morris Animal Foundation and the National Science Foundation as part of the joint National Science FoundationNational Institutes of HealthU.S. Department of Agriculture Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program.

Alexander, a wildlife veterinarian and co-founder of the Center for Conservation of African Resources: Animals, Communities, and Land Use (CARACAL) in Botswana, directs her research program at exploring and understanding the factors that influence the emergence and persistence of novel and re-emerging diseases at the human-wildlife-environment interface.
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The chief executive of the Region called the press to clarify the situation. Rumours of attacks on schools in the South West blew across the parts of the Region yesterday morning sending some pupils and students fleeing from school premises in Meme and Fako Divisions.

Such areas affected by the stampede included Kumba, Limbe, Muyuka and Buea. In the face of the stampede, the South West Regional Governor, Bernard Okalia Bilai, issued a communique in the afternoon of yesterday (15 January, 2018) urging parents, pupils, students, teachers, business community and the entire population to stay calm against manipulations by unknown persons. He called on the population to avoid panic caused by intoxication aimed at manipulating public opinion and creating an atmosphere of insecurity around educational establishments. The Governor further reassured the public that the administration with the collaboration of Defence and Security forces is, like in the past, taking all necessary measures to ensure the protection of pupils, students, teachers and school infrastructures. The Governor expressed his conviction of the positive collaboration of school administrators, parents, teachers and local opinion leaders to stand up as one person to refuse to remain victims of unhealthy manipulation and intoxication. In the same vein, the killing of a military man even though as passenger aboard a public transport vehicle on the highway at Kwakwa village in Mbonge Sub-Division in Meme Division last Saturday contributed to fuel the rumour of attack on schools. Governor Okalia Bilai accompanied by General Melingui Nouma Donatien who is Commander of 21st Motorised Infantry Brigade based in Buea, spoke to the press yesterday afternoon in his Office to dispel stories of attacks on schools. The rumour had triggered parents to rush to collect their children from schools. In the case of Buea, schools like Bilingual Grammar School Molyko refused to open their gates to parents who crowded the gate. The school authorities and the administration advised the parents to wait until school closes normally at 3pm. Security forces formed a ring around the school to prevent intruders from penetrating into the campus with the pretext as parents to create havoc. The school closed normally at 3pm and the students went home without any major incident reported yesterday.

Nkeze MBONWOH
BALTIMORE  A statue paid for with pennies contributed by Baltimore school children more than a century ago was found sprayed with red paint Monday morning.

Jennifer Arndt Robinson, executive director of Friends of Patterson Park, said the bronze statue of children holding a scroll to commemorate the writing of The Star-Spangled Banner had been damaged by paint. The words Racist Anthem were sprayed on a sidewalk near the statue.

We were notified early this morning of the incident, said Robinson. We are working with appropriate city officials to make sure it is addressed as quickly as possible.

Robinson said a canon near the statue also was hit by paint.

A spray paint can was recovered at the site and is being handed over to the Baltimore Police, she said.

While we recognize the issue of freedom of expression, there has to be more appropriate ways to have that conversation, Robinson said.

Reginald Moore, city parks director, called the damage unfortunate.

The 1914 statue, the work of sculptor J. Maxwell Miller, shows two schoolchildren holding a scroll that reads: To commemorate the centennial of the writing of the Star-Spangled Banner, the pupils of the public schools of Baltimore have erected this memorial upon Hampstead Hill where in September, 1814, the citizen soldiers of Maryland stood ready to sacrifice their lives in defense of their homes and their country.

The statue in Patterson Park isnt the first to be vandalized in recent months. Among other incidents, a monument in Bolton Hill to Francis Scott Key  who wrote the poem that would later become the national anthem  was splashed with red paint in September. There, too, the words Racist Anthem were written in paint.

And in August, a monument to Christopher Columbus in Herring Run Park was smashed. A video posted to YouTube showed a man striking the base of the monument with a sledgehammer. Another person held a sign that said Racism, tear it down.
HARTFORD, Conn.  An Army veteran says an MRI revealed that a surgeon had left a scalpel in his abdomen four years earlier.

Glenford Turner, 61, of Bridgeport, went to the West Haven VA with abdominal pain last April when the surprising discovery was made, according to his lawyer. Turner required surgery to remove the scalpel, and last week filed suit against the Veterans Administration.

X-rays revealed the presence of an abandoned scalpel inside Mr. Turners body. Doctors confirmed that is was the scalpel knife used during Turners radical prostatectomy  performed four years earlier at the West Haven VA, attorney Joel Faxon of New Haven said in a statement Monday announcing the lawsuit.

Administrators at the VA Connecticut Healthcares West Haven campus could not be reached Monday, which was a federal holiday.

In the lawsuit, Turner says he underwent a robotic-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy at the West Haven VA on Aug. 30, 2013. He returned to the VA hospital on March 29, 2017, for an MRI after complaining of dizziness and long-term abdominal pain, Faxon said.

The imaging study was abruptly halted when Mr. Turner began to experience severe, worsened abdominal pain, and subsequent X-rays revealed the scalpel, Faxon said.

The instrument was removed in an operation in April 2017.

Faxon described the incident as an incomprehensible level of incompetence. The suit seeks unspecified compensatory damages, and claims Turner suffered pain, additional surgery, hospitalization, prolonged rehabilitation, medical expenses and lost work time.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the allegations egregious and said hes asking the VA for a detailed explanation of what happened.
A recently filed lawsuit says a popular hot springs spa in Truth or Consequences allowed a 57-year-old man to drown in a spring-fed hot tub.

The suit claims that the June 2016 death of Mark Burrows was the fourth death at the La Paloma Hotsprings and Spa in a five-year span.

Spa owner Meleasa Malzhan, named in the suit along with owner Daniel Wilkerson, declined to comment on the lawsuit. The companys website says the facility offers clients a soak in hot spring-fed tubs that range in temperature from 98 to 116 degrees for $7 for a half hour.

The lawsuit, filed Jan. 9 in 7th Judicial District Court in Truth or Consequences, claims that any soaking unit with water above 104 degrees violates national and state safety regulations, though the suit notes one cannot turn down the temperature on a natural hot spring.

Such hot water can make users drowsy and possibly pass out, a possible explanation for what happened to Burrows, according to the lawsuit.

Since the room he was in does not have windows, no spa employee was able to notice he was in distress, the suit says. After he failed to emerge from the room at the appointed time, the spa attendant gave a 10-minute courtesy period before checking on him.

When the attendant did check on him, she found him unresponsive in the water, but she was unable to fully pull him out of the water as she waited for emergency responders, according to the suit.

The suit says the spa was negligent in its preparedness for such an emergency.

Customers who soak in a tub sign a release of any right to sue the spa, even in the event of death or negligence from the spa.

Parrish Collins, attorney for Burrows estate, said he hopes the lawsuit brings attention to the seriousness of what is going on. There have been a number of incidents at the same facility, and thats concerning.

Burrows niece, Aimee Hittinger, said Friday that her uncle had lived in Truth of Consequences for about five years, managing some real estate and filling his time with hiking and traveling, including frequent trips to visit his elderly parents in Washington State.

He was in perfect condition, excellent health, she said. Which is why this is so unfortunate.
Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  New Mexico lawmakers will embark on a 30-day legislative session today with a new anti-harassment policy in place that will  for the first time  require an outside expert to be involved in reviewing complaints against sitting legislators.

After more than two hours of debate, top-ranking lawmakers voted 15-0 on Monday in favor of adopting the new policy, which took effect immediately.

Renewed recent scrutiny of sexual misconduct in New Mexico and around the nation prompted the move to revise the policy, which was last updated in 2008.

It will be a vast improvement over what we have now  and hopefully will lead to a culture of mutual respect, said Senate Majority Whip Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, one of eight lawmakers tasked with recommending changes to the old policy.

Although there was no opposition to the new policy, several legislators questioned how it would work and whether individuals who experience sexual harassment in and around the Roundhouse would be any more willing to file complaints.

Rep. Jim Dines, R-Albuquerque, another member of the legislative working group, called the final product the result of lengthy discussions.

Not everyone got what they wanted  maybe that makes it a good consensus, he said during Mondays meeting of the Legislative Council at the state Capitol.

Under the new policy, any sexual harassment complaint filed against a sitting legislator would be considered by three top-ranking legislators  including lawmakers from both political parties  and the outside expert. If any one of the four individuals thought the complaint merited further investigation within a five-day review period, it would be sent to an internal ethics panel for additional scrutiny.

The Legislative Council Service would likely pick the outside expert, and agency Director Raul Burciaga said Monday that he would likely keep a list on file of several attorneys with experience in harassment and discrimination issues who might be available at any given time.

Complaints would not be made public unless the internal subcommittee, working with outside counsel, found probable cause to recommend disciplinary action.

Meanwhile, in addition to weighing changes to the Legislatures harassment policy for the first time in a decade, New Mexico lawmakers also underwent mandatory sexual harassment training on Monday for the first time since 2004.

The training, conducted by Massachusetts-based attorney and consultant Ed Mitnick, went over appropriate and inappropriate interactions and scenarios.

Among other things, Mitnick cautioned lawmakers to refrain from telling edgy jokes, especially those with racial or sexual undertones.

If you can run a state, you should know the boundaries of appropriate personal behavior, he said.

The training featured some lighthearted moments, such as when Sen. William Sharer, R-Farmington, who has Scottish ancestry, asked about comments he might receive when he wears a kilt to the Capitol.

The serious issue of sexual harassment at the Roundhouse came under renewed scrutiny last fall, after a slew of sexual misconduct allegations levied against politicians, media figures and entertainment executives sparked a national movement.

Locally, female lobbyists and legislators have described the Roundhouse as a minefield of inappropriate comments, unwanted touching, leering looks and sexual propositions.

Among other claims, longtime Roundhouse lobbyist Vanessa Alarid recently went public with claims that former state Rep. Thomas Garcia, D-Ocate, wanted sex in exchange for a yes vote on a high-profile 2009 bill she was lobbying for.

Garcia has denied the allegations.

The 30-day session begins today at noon. Gov. Susana Martinez will deliver her final State of the State address shortly after the session opens.
SANTA FE  Democratic Sen. Mimi Stewart of Albuquerque will have a new role when the legislative session opens today.

After nearly 24 years in the Legislature, shes now in a leadership role  having won election Monday as majority whip, a position that will put her at the center of strategy sessions, vote counting and other behind-the-scenes work.

Stewart succeeds Sen. Michael Padilla, who was stripped of his title last month after decade-old allegations of sexual harassment resurfaced. Padilla, who represents part of the South Valley, remains a member of the Senate, and he has repeatedly denied the allegations, which stem from his tenure as a city supervisor.

Stewart, a retired teacher, said she would embrace her role as a worker bee who helps run the Senate floor and explains legislation to the public. Her experience as a lawmaker in both the House and the Senate, she said, would be an asset.

I can do lots of different things at the same time, Stewart said. I used to tell my students Ive got eyes in the back of my head. Im able to juggle things, and I like the work.

The leadership shake-up came on the eve of a 30-day session that will be dedicated largely to budget matters, although Republican Gov. Susana Martinez has said she will make anti-crime legislation a priority, too.

Democrats hold a 26-16 majority in the Senate, though senators dont vote along party lines quite as much as members of the House.

Stewart said she didnt anticipate doing any arm-twisting in her new role.

Stewarts election came during a private caucus meeting at the Roundhouse late Monday.

She was part of an eight-member group of legislators who helped rewrite the Legislatures anti-harassment policy this month as a wave of sexual harassment allegations hit capitols across the country. She was also recognized last year as New Mexicos most effective legislator, according to an analysis by a Washington, D.C., firm that examined the passage of substantive bills.

Stewart has also clashed with Martinez on education policy. The governor called Stewart a liberal elitist last year after the senator told a national conference, We dont know how to teach kids from poverty.

Stewart, in turn, accused the governor of her taking her comments out of context, arguing that she never suggested impoverished students cant learn, only that teachers need more help learning how to reach them.
Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

Bernalillo County Sheriff Manuel Gonzales has indicated he is open to an examination of his departments use of force and pursuit policies by an outside group with an eye for possible changes.

Sheriff Manuel Gonzales told county commissioners last month that the BCSO is reviewing its policies internally and hes also looking at outside firms to do an independent policy audit.

Sheriff Gonzales has told the commission that he is going to engage an outside expert to review all BCSO policies and procedures, said Commissioner Maggie Hart Stebbins, a Democrat. The commission will ask for a timeline for when that can be completed.

Such a review would come at a time when some of the sheriffs offices policies  such as those setting standards for on-body cameras, pursuits and use of force  have been questioned and criticized in recent lawsuits filed against the county.

Several community advocacy groups also have raised concerns about those practices in the wake of a spate of deputy shootings in 2017. Some groups have compared a stretch of BCSO shootings in 2017  deputies fired their weapons nine times in less than five months  to a streak of Albuquerque police shootings that ultimately led to a Department of Justice investigation. The Albuquerque Police Department remains in the midst of a years-long reform effort.

Though expressing openness to a review, Gonzales maintained his department has some of the best policies in the state.

Although we may think that, were still willing to look at ourselves and do an examination of our use of force policies and our pursuit policies just to ensure were making good decisions every day, he said.

News of a possible audit appeared to be well received by county commissioners of both parties.

Commissioner Wayne Johnson, a Republican, said that although all law enforcement agencies have room for improvement, the sheriff should be credited for not rushing to implement new policies, such as lapel cameras, without thoroughly analyzing the issues.

Sheriffs deputies dont wear cameras, but Albuquerque police officers do.

Commissioner Debbie OMalley, a Democrat, said that although she welcomed the outside review, she thinks its time for the department to start using more dashboard cameras. She said she plans to find funding for cameras.

Gonzales declined through a spokesman to do an interview about the policy review, and he slightly walked back his statements before the commission.

It would be premature to provide an interview at this time. As of now, command staff is in the planning stages of identifying a national independent auditor to possibly review current department policies, Deputy Felicia Maggard, a spokeswoman for the sheriffs office, said in an email. Once a decision has been made and if an audit is conducted, we may revisit your request for an interview.

Andres Valdez, the executive director of Vecinos United, a group that advocates for civil rights and other issues, said members of the group recently met with the sheriff to discuss particular policies. He said his group wants the sheriffs office to use on-body cameras and have a civilian oversight group, similar to what APD has.

Valdez said the meeting was positive and the sheriff seemed receptive to having a dialogue with the group.

Other community groups, including the ACLU and the League of United Latin American Citizens have raised concerns about some of the sheriffs office policies.

While some community groups have compared the BCSO increase in police shootings to that of APD, Luis Robles, an attorney who has defended many deputies and police officers involved in shootings, said the numbers dont tell the entire story.

APD had issues with shooting people with mental illnesses. BCSO has not done that.  You can bring out the number of APD shootings, but really what the concern was was Hey, these folks have mental illnesses,  Robles said. You cant say that about BCSO. The people who are involved in the shootings, the suspects, are straight up criminals.

Recent lawsuits have called out sheriffs office policies and blamed the policies for leading to deaths.

A lawsuit brought by the family of Fidencio Duran said the sheriffs offices use-of-force and lapel camera policies contributed to Durans death.

Duran, 88, was shot so many times with pepper balls during an encounter with sheriffs deputies that he died days later, according to a lawsuit filed in connection with the shooting. The lawsuit settled last year for an amount that the plaintiffs agreed not to disclose, attorney Joe Kennedy said.

Duran was walking around his South Valley neighborhood with a knife when he encountered sheriffs deputies, who unleashed volleys of pepper balls and sicced a police dog on him. His death was ruled a homicide.

Bernalillo Countys unconstitutional use-of-force policy killed Fidencio Duran, Kennedy wrote in an amended complaint filed on behalf of Durans family.

Kennedy pointed out in the lawsuit that the countys policies dont make deputies take into consideration the seriousness of the crime the suspect is believed to have committed and whether there is an immediate threat to others. He said because of those factors, the policy is unconstitutional.

The sheriffs office use-of-force policy statement is 78 words and advises deputies to act in good faith in the exercise of force.

On the other hand, the same policy statement for Albuquerque police is 274 words and says that officers may only use force that is objectively reasonable, based on a totality of the circumstances the officer is confronted with, to effect an arrest or protect the safety of the officer or another person.

The statement also says that Albuquerque police officers will not only follow the legal standard, but also, where feasible  use the minimum amount of force necessary.

Last month, Albuquerque attorney Sam Bregman filed a lawsuit against the county on behalf of the girlfriend of Martin Jim, who was shot by BCSO Deputy Joshua Mora on Nov. 17.

Jim was a passenger in a suspected stolen car whose driver led deputies on a high-speed chase before Jim and the driver were shot and killed.

Bregman said both the sheriffs office pursuit policies and the policy that doesnt require deputies to wear cameras were contributing factors in Jims death. He said not requiring sheriffs deputies to wear cameras has created a culture of excessive force.
LAS CRUCES  Southern New Mexico lawmakers begin the legislative session focused on shared priorities including infrastructure, education and economic development needs in the rapidly growing region.

Everybody is trying to get their budget request in. We swept so many funds out of projects, out of counties and cities last year, said Majority Whip Rep. Doreen Gallegos, D-Las Cruces.

The Dona Ana County Legislative Coalition is one way the region is amplifying its voice in Santa Fe. The coalition includes the county, city of Las Cruces, business and education leaders in the region.

Part of the reason we brought the coalition together is to have a stronger voice, said Bill Connor, chairman of the Dona Ana County Legislative Coalition.

In an upbeat video, the coalition touts the accomplishments of southern New Mexico and urges state lawmakers who seek the greatest return to invest in a region that already leads the state in high school graduation rates, exports and job creation.

The video highlights Spaceport America, the Santa Teresa border crossing, White Sands Missile Range and the West Mesa Industrial Park.

But southern New Mexico also struggles to fund basic infrastructure.

Little areas like Vado, Berino and Anthony dont get what they need, said Gallegos. Fixing those roads. Making sure people have access to clean water.

Storm water control is one of the priorities for Rep. Nathan Small, D-Las Cruces.

Were looking at introducing legislation to better plan and develop infrastructure, said Small.

He also wants to grow the economy in southern New Mexico by focusing on clean renewable energy, value added agriculture and border trade with Santa Teresa.

With the past two years of deep budget cuts behind them, southern New Mexico lawmakers like Sen. William Soules, D-Las Cruces, are hopeful they can accomplish more this session including possible raises for teachers.

Its hard to feel anything but better than the last few years when things were dire, said Soules.
WASHINGTON  President Trump, it has long been observed, has a propensity to agree with the last thing he hears.

Certainly he has core convictions  Hillary is crooked, there was no collusion, he is very successful and brilliant  but beyond that he has shown himself to be swayed with remarkable ease: He said he was rethinking his position on Obamacare after a post-election talk with President Obama, revised his views on NATO after speaking with Europeans, softened his views on China after a chin-wag with the Chinese, shifted on NAFTA after talking with the Mexicans and switched his budget views after hearing from Chuck and Nancy.

This raises the tantalizing prospect that Trump could be a better president if he were not surrounded by the likes of Stephen Miller, as well as the alarming possibility that he could be even worse if the last voice he heard before making a decision were that of, say, Vladimir Putin, or Alex Jones  who boasts that Trump repeats his conspiracy theories word for word.

But this all depends on what is going on in Trumps head when he repeats the last words he hears: Is he actually internalizing the views, or is he merely echoing? Is he a chameleon or a parrot?

Now we know. Last weeks extraordinary session in the Cabinet Room with a bicameral, bipartisan group of lawmakers, and an impulsive decision by Trump to let journalists film 55 minutes of his meeting, gave the world a glimpse of Trumps agree-with-the-last-speaker tendency weve heard described.

Clearly, Trump is merely echoing, not embracing, the words he hears. No mind could possibly assimilate as many diametrically opposed ideas as Trumps appeared to in those 55 minutes.

Watching that session was as exciting as watching Chinas Olympic pingpong team  and the president was the ball. Trump  remarkably unideological and undisciplined  pinged from one lawmakers argument to anothers, agreeing heartily with virtually all, no matter how at odds they were with each other.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told Trump that DACA legislation to protect immigrant Dreamers had to be done in a matter of days  literally of days, referring to this Fridays budget deadline.

Trump replied, I agree with that, Dick. I very much agree with that.

A few minutes later, Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., took exactly the opposite view, suggesting that DACA action could wait until March and that instead there had to be an immediate Pentagon budget increase: Those who need us right now before the Jan. 19 deadline is our military.

Trump replied, I think a lot of people would agree with that. We need our military.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., paddled Trump back the other way, saying more military spending would have to be accompanied by similar hikes for domestic programs such as infrastructure.

Trump replied, I think we can do a great infrastructure bill.

This was fun!

Minutes after Hoyer invoked the phrase comprehensive immigration reform  a phrase hard-liners see as code for amnesty  Trump was using the phrase, too.

When you talk about comprehensive immigration reform, Trump said, after Sen. Lindsey Graham, a GOP maverick, had also floated the idea, which is where I would like to get to eventually  if we do the right bill here, we are not very far away.

Anybody can play this game.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., both said border security and a solution to chain migration  a conservative priority  must be included in the DACA bill. Trump readily agreed.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., proposed the opposite, a clean DACA bill  that is, without border security or chain migration measures  before taking up a comprehensive overhaul, and Trump said, I would like to do that.

McCarthy, alarmed, swatted Trump back in the other direction. He reiterated that the DACA bill should include border security and chain migration.

Trump agreed with this, too. And the lottery, he added, tossing in another conservative priority about making immigration merit-based.

Back and forth Trump bounced.

One moment he was saying,Without the wall, we cannot have border security. The next he was assuring Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, that there are large areas where you dont need a wall.

Trump called it a success. Were all very much on a similar page, he concluded.

Perhaps he didnt care that, in his reflexive echoing of each speaker, he had contradicted himself repeatedly. More likely he didnt even notice.

Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter, @Milbank. E-mail: danamilbank@washpost.com. Copyright, Washington Post Writers Group.
PHILADELPHIA (TNS)  Joann Clark and her daughter, Jessica, have been gingerly navigating the limbo between life and death as

they discuss what will happen to Jessica after Joann is gone.

Joann, 69, is not dying. But chronic obstructive pulmonary disease keeps her

tethered to an oxygen tank 24 hours a day, and she has had three emergency hospitalizations in the past few years. She and Jessica, 35, who has Down syndrome and is also legally blind, know whats coming, sooner than later.

Jessica says her moms first hospitalization was a terrifying wake-up call from the future. I basically had a meltdown, says Jessica, an only child, who lives with her mother in Glen Mills. I was crying and scared and nervous. I already lost my dad  Jim Clark, who died suddenly in 2009  and I didnt want to lose my mom, too.

The Clarks surviving biological family is tiny, including only a aunt in her late 70s and three cousins busy raising kids in already full houses. Joann and Jessica dont think it would make sense for Jessica to squeeze in with them after Joann is gone.

So theyve been mulling other options.

Were both sad

They have talked about Jessica staying put in their present home, which has three bedrooms, and inviting two girlfriends, who also have Down syndrome, to live with her. Relatives of all three would oversee operations and perhaps arrange for a kind of house mother to stay with the young women overnight, in case of an emergency. Their

day activities would then be supervised by their current state-paid caregivers.

Or maybe Jessica would live with a family friend they love very much. The Clarks have had preliminary, hopeful discussions with the friend, but they are taking it slowly. Their conversations are tender and painful, requiring everyone to imagine a world without Joann.

She and Joann are sitting in their cozy kitchen on this chilly weeknight, and Joann reaches across the table and holds her daughters hand.

It breaks my heart when I hear her praying and I hate that Jess has got to live this way, worrying about this every night, says Joann. I dont understand the powers that be and why things would be this way. I guess theres a reason for everything, but I dont know what it could be.

Jessica leans her head on her moms soft arm.

I guess you could say were both sad, she says.

Conversations like these play out every day in the homes of aging parents who know that their days of caring for their intellectually and developmentally disabled adult children are numbered. After decades of fiercely advocating for their childrens every need  from education to employment and housing and caretaking  parents must devise a plan for their childrens well-being after they themselves are no longer here.

Along the way, emotions can range from sadness to relief, worry to optimism, denial to acceptance as parents, children, siblings, and extended family contemplate what life might be like under a new arrangement.

The Clarks conversations these days might be difficult, but at least theyre having them. Thats not always the case for parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities, says Maureen Cronin.

They just cant get themselves to a place of really thinking it through and getting a plan together, says Cronin, executive director of the Arc of Pennsylvania, the state chapter of The Arc, the national advocacy organization for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Parents cant imagine a world without their child  but they also cant imagine how their vulnerable son or daughter will survive without them.

Thats why, she says, its common for many parents to say, I want to die one day after my disabled child dies.

It sounds horrible, but those feelings are absolutely real, says Cronin, whose own son, who had cerebral palsy, died at age 4. Since the moment a parent learns a son or daughter is disabled, theyre thinking about what will happen to that child after theyre gone.
My critics are providing me much material of late for this column and my weekly radio show (Saturdays, 6:00 ET, AFR). Most recently, a family therapist in Kentucky pleads with the Lexington Herald-Leader to stop running my column, citing my dangerous belief that ADHD and other childhood behavior problems are not mental illnesses.

Ac cording to Susan Bell, I have not learned anything new in (my) nearly 50 years of advising parents. Furthermore, she says, other mental health professionals share her opinion of me. Shes right about that, but wrong otherwise.

To begin with, I have learned a great deal over the past fifty years, not the least of which is that psychiatric/psychological diagnoses are not tangible realities; rather, they are constructs. Cancer is a verifiable reality. A physician who diagnoses lung cancer can provide concrete proof  e.g. a biopsy  to support his verdict. But a mental health professional who diagnoses a child with, say, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder can provide no such verification. If asked to prove that the child has something, said professional will claim that the symptoms  short attention span, impulsivity, and so on  constitute the proof. That is equivalent to saying that a productive cough is proof of lung cancer and that said cough is all the evidence one needs to begin chemotherapy.

An illness is a biological condition of one sort or another. No research has ever proven that any childhood behavior problem is inherited or caused by faulty biology. Nonetheless, parents of children diagnosed with ADHD and other behavior disorders are often told that their kids have inherited biochemical imbalances. Is genetic testing done to verify heritability? Have the genes been identified? No, and no.

The same is true concerning the assertion that the chemicals in these kids central nervous systems are out of balance. No physical testing is done to support this claim, and no researcher has ever quantified said imbalance.

A growing number of medical and mental health professionals, researchers and practitioners alike, are coming to the same conclusion: to wit, the only verifiable aspect of these diagnoses are the defining behaviors. No one has found any underlying physical processes that would account for them. Ms. Bell then accuses me of asserting that the behaviors in question are caused by parents who are guilty of spoiling their children. Bell would do well to read my book, The Diseasing of Americas Children, written with a well-known behavioral and developmental pediatrician. I say no such thing.

The problem is not parents, albeit only they can solve these problems, one household at a time. To do so, they must unplug from professional parenting advice (and yes, Im aware of the irony of a professional parenting pundit giving such counsel) and restore common sense, high expectations, and firm discipline to their child rearing. As researchers are discovering (belatedly), emotional resilience is more essential to a life well-led than high self-esteem, straight As and a plethora of trophies.

In the 1960s, American parents began looking to mental health professionals for child-rearing advice. Since then, an exponential per-capita increase in child mental health professionals has matched a dramatic deterioration in child mental health. No new therapy or drug has stopped this downward trend. The fact that I connect these dots is understandably unsettling to a lot of people in my field.

John Rosemonds website at www.johnrosemond.com; readers may send him email at questions@rosemond.com; due to the volume of mail, not every question will be answered.
SANTIAGO, Chile  Pope Francis met on Tuesday with survivors of priests who sexually abused them, wept with them and apologized for the irreparable damage they suffered, his spokesman said.

The pontiff also acknowledged the pain of priests who have been held collectively responsible for the crimes of a few, Vatican spokesman Greg Burke told reporters at the end of the day.

Francis dove head-first into Chiles sex abuse scandal on his first full day in Santiago that came amid unprecedented opposition to his visit: Three more churches were torched overnight, including one burned to the ground in the southern Araucania region where Francis celebrates Mass on Wednesday. Police used tear gas and water cannons to break up an anti-pope protest outside Francis big open-air Mass in the capital, Santiago.

Despite the incidents, huge numbers of Chileans turned out to see the pope, including an estimated 400,000 for his Mass, and he brought some inmates to tears with an emotional visit to a womens prison.

But his meeting with abuse survivors and comments in his first speech of the day were what many Chileans, incensed by years of abuse scandal and cover-up, were waiting for.

Burke said Francis met with a small group of abuse victims after lunch, listening to their stories and praying with them. The spokesman gave no details, other than to say the pope listened to them, prayed with them and wept with them.

Earlier in the day, Francis told Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, lawmakers, judges and other authorities that he felt bound to express my pain and shame that some of Chiles clergy had sexually abused children in their care.

I am one with my brother bishops, for it is right to ask forgiveness and make every effort to support the victims, even as we commit ourselves to ensuring that such things do not happen again, the pope said.

Francis did not refer by name to Chiles most notorious pedophile priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, who in 2011 was barred from all pastoral duties and sanctioned by the Vatican to a lifetime of penance and prayer for sexually molesting minors. Nor did he refer to the fact that the emeritus archbishop of Santiago, a top papal adviser, has acknowledged he knew of complaints against Karadima but didnt remove him from ministry.

Karadima had been a politically connected, charismatic and powerful priest who ministered to a wealthy Santiago community and produced dozens of priestly vocations and five bishops. Victims went public with their accusations in 2010 after complaining for years to church authorities that Karadima had kissed and fondled them when they were teenagers.

While the cover-up continued to roil the church, many Chileans are still furious over Francis subsequent decision in 2015 to appoint a Karadima protege as bishop of the southern city of Osorno. Bishop Juan Barros has denied knowing about Karadimas abuse but many Chileans dont believe him, and his appointment has badly split the diocese.

Francis referred again to the scandal later in the day, but this time his words were directed at the hundreds of priests gathered in Santiagos cathedral who have seen their influence and moral authority plummet as a result of the Karadima case and cover-up.

Francis told them that the scandal had not only caused pain in the victims, but in the broader church community and among anyone who wears a clerical collar.

He said he knew the pain of priests and nuns who after working so hard, have seen the harm that has led to suspicion and questioning; in some or many of you this has been a source of doubt, fear or lack of confidence. He said some priests had even been insulted in the subway or walking on the street, and that by wearing clerical attire they had paid a heavy price. But he urged them to press on.

It was similar to the message that Francis delivered to American bishops in 2015  one that infuriated sex abuse survivors who accused the pope of drawing a moral equivalency between the lifelong trauma endured by people who were raped as children, and the pain of clergymen who were now looked upon with suspicion.

Sex abuse is Pope Francis weakest spot in terms of his credibility, said Massimo Faggioli, a Vatican expert and theology professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia. It is surprising that the pope and his entourage dont understand that they need to be more forthcoming on this issue.

Anne Barrett Doyle of the online abuse database, BishopAccountability.org, praised Francis for opening his visit with the apology, but said Chileans expect him to take action against complicit church leaders.

This is a crucial opportunity for Francis. With luck, he will not make the mistake of his brother bishops in underestimating the savviness and moral outrage of the Chilean people, said Barrett Doyle, who last week released research showing nearly 80 Chilean priests have been credibly accused or convicted of abuse.

The Karadima scandal and long cover-up has caused a crisis for the church in Chile, with a recent Latinbarometro survey saying the case was responsible for a significant drop in the number of Chileans who call themselves Catholic, as well as a fall in confidence in the church as an institution.

That distrust extends to Francis, who is making his first visit as pope to the country of 17 million people. The Argentine pope is nearly a native son, having studied in Chile during his Jesuit novitiate and he knows the country well. But Chileans gave him the lowest approval rating among the 18 Latin American nations in the survey.

People are leaving the church because they dont find a protective space there, said Juan Carlos Claret, spokesman for a group of church members in Osorno that has opposed Barros appointment as bishop. The pastors are eating the flock.

For his part, Barros, who concelebrated Tuesdays open-air Mass with Francis and other bishops, repeated his assertion that he knew nothing of Karadimas crimes.

Many lies have been made about me, he said.

At a protest near the site of the Santiago Mass, police fired tear gas and water cannons before detaining several dozen demonstrators, according to an Associated Press photographer at the scene. Protesters carried signs with messages reading Burn, pope! and We dont care about the pope!

Other groups also called for demonstrations against the pontiff.

Victor Hugo Robles, an activist in Chiles lesbian and gay community, said the Vatican tries to paint an image of the pope as being close to the people, particularly those with the most needs.

We are the ones who need help, said Robles. Gay people, people living with AIDS. When it comes to those things, the church has an attitude of intolerance, of disgust.

Still, many were excited to see the pope and expressed appreciation for his apology for sex abuse.

When people make a mistake its necessary that they ask for forgiveness, said Monica Reyes, a nursing assistant who attended the popes speech at the presidential palace.

The pope will try to inject new energy into the church during his visit, which includes sessions with migrants, members of Chiles Mapuche indigenous group and victims of the 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

___

Associated Press writers Eva Vergara and Patricia Luna and AP video journalist Paul Byrne contributed to this report.
SHATI REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip  Mahmoud al-Qouqa cant imagine life without the three sacks of flour, cooking oil and other staples he receives from the United Nations every three months.

Living with 25 relatives in a crowded home in this teeming Gaza Strip slum, the meager rations provided by UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugee families, are the last thing keeping his family afloat in the territory hard hit by years of poverty and conflict. But that could be in danger as the United States, UNRWAs biggest donor, threatens to curtail funding.

It will be like a disaster and no one can predict what the reaction will be, al-Qouqa said.

Across the Middle East, millions of people who depend on UNRWA are bracing for the worst. The expected cut could also add instability to struggling host countries already coping with spillover from other regional crises.

UNRWA was established in the wake of the 1948 Mideast war surrounding Israels creation. An estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in the fighting.

In the absence of a solution for these refugees, the U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWAs mandate, the original refugee camps have turned into concrete slums and more than 5 million refugees and their descendants now rely on the agency for services including education, health care and food. The largest populations are in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon.

Seen by the Palestinians and most of the international community as providing a valuable safety net, UNRWA is viewed far differently by Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accuses the agency of perpetuating the conflict by helping promote an unrealistic dream that these people have the right of return to long-lost properties in what is now Israel.

UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution, he told foreign journalists last week. Noting that the Palestinians are the only group served by a specific refugee agency, he said UNRWA should be abolished and its responsibilities taken over by the main U.N. refugee agency.

Some in Israel have even tougher criticism, accusing UNRWA of teaching hatred of Israel in its classrooms and tolerating or assisting Hamas militants in Gaza.

Blaming the Palestinians for lack of progress in Mideast peace efforts, President Donald Trump has threatened to cut American assistance to the Palestinians. UNRWA would be the first to be affected.

The U.S. provides about $355 million a year to UNRWA, roughly one-third of its budget.

U.S. officials in Washington said this week the administration is preparing to withhold tens of millions of dollars from the years first contribution, cutting a planned $125 million installment by half or perhaps entirely. The decision could come as early as Tuesday.

Matthias Schmale, UNRWAs director in Gaza, said Washington has not informed the agency of any changes. However, we are worried because of the statements  in the media and the fact that the money hasnt arrived yet, he said.

Schmale dismissed the Israeli criticisms, saying that individuals who spread incitement or aid militants are isolated cases and promptly punished. And he said Netanyahus criticism should be directed at the U.N. General Assembly, which sets UNRWAs mandate, not the agency itself.

Any cut in U.S. aid could ripple across the region with potentially unintended consequences.

Gaza may be the most challenging of all of UNRWAs operating areas. Two-thirds of Gazas 2 million people qualify for services, and its role is amplified given the poor state of the economy, which has been hit hard by three wars with Israel and an Israeli-Egyptian blockade since the Hamas militant group seized power over a decade ago. Unemployment is 43 percent and the poverty rate is 38 percent, according to the official Palestinian statistics office.

Nowhere else are we the biggest service provider for the population of the entire territory, Schmale said. He said UNRWA provides food assistance to 1 million Gazans, calling it an expression of collective shame for the international community.

With more than 12,500 teachers, nurses and other staff, UNRWA is Gazas largest non-governmental employer. It is also involved in postwar reconstruction projects.

The dire situation in Gaza is evident inside al-Qouqas home, which is so cramped the family has made sleeping spaces with wood boards and fabric. Two male family members are unemployed. Two others are Hamas civil servants and get paid only intermittently by the cash-strapped movement.

At 72, al-Qouqa is worried about his grandchildren. If UNRWA provides them with bread, they can remain patient. But if it was cut, what will they become? They will become thieves, criminals and a burden on society, he said. Many believe Hamas, which administers schools and social services in Gaza, will step in to fill the void.

Jordan, a crucial ally in the U.S.-led battle against Islamic militants, is home to the largest number of Palestinian refugees and their descendants  with nearly 2.2 million people eligible for UNRWA services. This has turned the U.N. agency into a major contributor to social welfare services in the country, which also hosts hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by war.

U.S. aid cuts could heighten the threat of instability in Jordan, which is grappling with a worsening economy hurt by the spillover from conflict in neighboring Syria and Iraq. More than one-third of Jordans young people are without jobs, turning them into potential targets for recruitment by extremists.

Most of the Palestinians eligible for UNRWA services in Jordan hold Jordanian citizenship, and some argue that this has ended their refugee status. But most maintain that UNRWA services are vital to propping up an important ally.

UNRWAs services are also vital in Lebanon, where Palestinians are prohibited from working in skilled professions and owning property.

Lebanon is the least-welcoming Arab country to Palestinian refugees, because it does not want Palestinians to settle and because it does not want the refugees to upset the countrys delicate sectarian balance. Camps in several cities are ringed by concrete barriers and Lebanese security forces use checkpoints to control who enters and leaves. A recent census found 175,000 Palestinian refugees or their descendants living in the country.

The civil war in Syria has made many Palestinians refugees twice over. Some 32,000 Palestinians who were living in Syria fled to Lebanon, according to UNRWA. In Syria, Palestinians enjoyed the right to own property and to work in all professions. They are not entitled to the same in Lebanon.

Balkees Hameed, 33, arrived in 2013 with her husband, two children and in-laws from Damascus, where their apartment was damaged by rocket fire. The family depends on UNRWA assistance to rent a one-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building in Bourj al-Barajneh, a Beirut camp. Her husband wipes tables at a restaurant outside the camp. Hameed, like all Palestinians, was painfully aware of the rumors coming out of Washington.

We are already defeated and now they want to oppress us some more? she asked.

While more than 5 million Syrian refugees worldwide are entitled to assistance from the U.N.s general refugee relief agency, Palestinians are barred from it under the logic that UNRWA serves them. But UNRWA in Lebanon is chronically underfunded, and the wave of Palestinians arriving from Syria has strained its finances even further.

What UNRWA provides is not even a quarter of what a Palestinian refugee needs, said Ramy Mansour, 34, who fled to Lebanon from the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus in 2013. Take everything and return us to our homes. We dont want any assistance or anything, just return us to our country.

___

Associated Press writers Karin Laub in Amman, Jordan, and Philip Issa in Beirut contributed to this report.
FARMINGTON, N.M.  Students at Navajo Preparatory School researching the lasting impacts of the 2015 Gold King Mine spill have won $10,000 for their work.

The Farmington Daily Times reports seven sophomores and juniors in a gifted-and-talented program at the school entered the Lexus Eco Challenge with a project that involved testing green onion roots for iron and zine after they had been submerged into the Animas River. The work won them $8,000 in scholarships, and $2,000 for school equipment.

They now are competing in a second phase of the competition.

More than two years ago, the EPA accidently released 3 million gallons of mustard-colored water from southwestern Colorados Gold King Mine into the Animas River. The spill tainted water in three states, as well as the Navajo Nation.

___

Information from: The Daily Times, http://www.daily-times.com
SANTA FE  With the bang of a gavel, state House and Senate leaders opened this years 30-day session of the Legislature a few minutes after noon.

Its the last regular session of Gov. Susana Martinezs tenure, and she will be the center of attention today  when she delivers her eighth and final State of the State address.

Martinez is expected to focus on economic competition, education and crime-related issues in her speech. A two-term Republican, Martinez is barred from seeking re-election to a third term later this year.

As usual, the Roundhouse is filled with state and local elected officials, including Albuquerques new Mayor Tim Keller, a Democrat and former state senator himself.

Members of the state Senate will head over to the House of Representatives in a few minutes, and all 112 legislators will sit together to listen to Martinezs speech.

Its a 30-day session, and settling on a $6.3 billion operating budget will be a top priority. The rebound of oil and gas, among other sectors of the economy, is expected to provide lawmakers with a bit more flexibility this session, after years of belt-tightening that exhausted New Mexicos financial reserves.

Martinez, a former prosecutor, has said she will also add public safety and crime to the agenda.

Legislative sessions in even-numbered years last 30 days, and theyre dedicated to budget and revenue measures, bills vetoed in the previous session and constitutional amendments.

The governor has authority to add other topics to the agenda.

In odd-numbered years, the sessions last 60 days and lawmakers are free to introduce any proposal they want.
Two people in separate vehicles died after a chain collision on Interstate 25 near Romeroville, south of Las Vegas, N.M., Monday evening.

The New Mexico State Police said 20 vehicles, including three semi trucks, were involved in crashes that took place about 5:30 p.m. A news release says I-25 was icy at the time amid rapidly dropping temperatures.

This series of collisions began when a vehicle traveling northbound slid off the roadway and struck the median divider, said the State Police statement. A semi-tractor-trailer attempted to avoid the crash and, in doing so, became jack-knifed in the roadway.

Multiple vehicles, including a second semi-tractor-trailer, following behind the first semi were unable to avoid the collision and crashed, causing further pile-up.

A third semi-tractor-trailer crashed into the pile-up, as well as multiple passenger cars behind it. A total of 20 vehicles were involved in collisions with varying extents of damage. Multiple people were transported for injuries and two individuals in separate vehicles sustained fatal injuries in the crash.

The interstate was closed for hours while officers and medical personnel responded and worked the scene.

The names of the two people who died were released until the next of kin have been notified.
Albuquerque continues to rise in the ranks when it comes in the film and TV industry.

MovieMaker released its annual list tracking the best places to live and work as a filmmaker.

The city rose two spots to hold the No. 6 position in the big cities category.

It follows Atlanta, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City.

Albuquerque has made the list since 2007, rising to the top spot in 2010. In 2013, it fell to No. 11.

MovieMaker pointed out that New Mexicos generous 25-30 percent refundable tax credit with no minimum spend helps make the state a Southwest stronghold.

The list ranks the cities based on a citys film activity in the past 12 months (number of productions, shoot durations, economic activity generated), film infrastructure in place (number of film schools and visual effects houses, film commissions and other non-profits, film festivals, screening venues, prominent locals), and broader criteria such as population size, ease of transportation, local and state tax credits (a big one, of course), and architectural and geographical distinctiveness.

The magazine also mentions ABQ Trolley Co., which offers open-air trolley tours of famous Breaking Bad locations at $65 a pop, is just one local business still benefiting from a smash TV hit that chose Albuquerque over Los Angeles.

The next big deal production could be the Margot Robbie-starring 1930s gangster saga Dreamland, which filmed in Albuquerque in fall and was expected to employ approximately 100 New Mexico crew members, 18 New Mexicans in principal roles, and 225 New Mexico extras, according to the New Mexico Film Office.

In 2017, there were more than 20 film and TV productions filmed in Albuquerque. Many of those shared locations with other parts of the state, according to the Albuquerque Film Office.

Ann Lerner, director of the Albuquerque Film Office, attributes the inflow of production to a concerted effort at cutting red tape and one-stop film permitting.

The state also offers a unique Film Crew Advancement Program, which gives productions a 50 percent reimbursement of a crew members wages when this on-the-job training advances their skill set, she says.

Like so much of the Southwest, Albuquerque is particularly proud of its long, storied history.

Lerner points out that Thomas Edisons company came to Isleta Pueblo, a tribal community 13 miles south of ABQ, in 1897 to shoot 50 seconds of footage of Native American children filing out of a one-room schoolhouse.

The citys 40-year-old mayor, Tim Keller, whom Lerner describes as extremely film friendly talks up not only the citys crew base and good-paying jobs on offer, but also the communitys diversity, exquisite scenery and 310 days of sunshine, painting a picture of work-life balance that prospective newcomers should appreciate.

Top 10 big cities

1. Atlanta

2. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

3. Los Angeles

4. Chicago

5. New York City

6. Albuquerque

7. Boston

8. Toronto, Ontario

9. Austin, Texas

10. Montreal, Quebec

Source: MovieMaker
Roosevelt County Deputies opened fire on a man Monday morning in Portales, NM, leaving him hospitalized, according to a spokesman for New Mexico State Police.

Officer Carl Christiansen said 48-year-old James McFarlin was transported to two separate hospitals for treatment after deputies shot him around noon. He did not give McFarlins current condition.

He said Roosevelt County Sheriffs Office deputies responded to a call of a man trying to flip a car using a tractor at Cottonwood Place.

Christiansen said deputies found McFarlin behind the wheel of a front-end loader.

McFarlin refused to stop for deputies, he said, plowing through three fences before reaching an open field, at 18th and Kilgore, where there was a confrontation and deputies shot McFarlin.

Christiansen, who couldnt be reached for further comment, did not say if McFarlin was armed or threatened deputies, how many deputies fired or what led them to open fire.

Afterwards McFarlin was taken to Roosevelt General Hospital for emergency treatment, he said, before being transferred again to University Medical Center in Lubbock for further treatment.

Christiansen said State Police are investigating the shooting and the identities of the deputies involved will not be released until they are interviewed.
Global market intelligence, research, and advisory company BIS Research released its latest report, Global Anti Money Laundering (AML) Software Market  Analysis and Forecast (2017-2023), projecting that the sector would reach a size of USD 1.4 billion by 2023. This growth is expected to be driven by the increased need to monitor suspicious transactions and regulatory compliance with international regulatory bodies. The report indicates a massive increase in suspicious transactions in India, even as the number of such transactions nearly quadrupled between FY 2016-17

In its study of India, the report finds that policy measures like demonetisation and enhanced surveillance from tax authorities have led to a massive increase in Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs), which have increased from a little over 20,000 in FY 2011 to over a 100,000 in FY 2016, and reached nearly 500,000 in FY 2017. BIS Research estimates that this number will hit 1,046,283 in FY 2018, adding greater emphasis for the need to enhance compliance with established Anti Money Laundering norms in the country. The Report further projects that increased awareness and the more proactive attitude within the government and reporting entities such as banks and other financial institutions against suspicious funding movements will be a key factor in driving the growth of the Anti Money Laundering software market in India.

Commenting on the release of the new report, Satendra Kumar, Principal Consultant, BIS Research, said, Increasing penetration of anti-money laundering software in cryptocurrency market, adoption of AML in the emerging economies, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in AML and KYC are the major factors which are expected to create lucrative opportunities for the market in the next five years. The market is filled with advancements in anti-money laundering systems in order to promote digital currency activities. India has taken giant strides in the last few years to combat money laundering, driven by technology adoption and a more positive policy environment. Following the trail of deposits into bank accounts would require automated monitoring due to the massive number and volume of these transactions. This will drive greater usage of Anti Money Laundering softwares and technology in India and abroad.

Drawing upon a meticulous compilation of research on more than 50 major players in the Anti-Money Laundering Software industry, and insights from key opinion leaders and industry experts, the market report provides a detailed analysis of the recent trends influencing the market. Along with a comprehensive study of the future trends and developments, the report includes a competitive analysis of the leading players in the industry, through a corporate overview, financials, financial summary and SWOT analysis. The increased need for automated transaction monitoring systems, the continous improvement in anti-money laundering software, and the integration of Big Data analytics all paint a rosy picture for the global anti-money laundering software market. The report contains a geographical analysis that covers all major regions of the globe, providing key figures and an analysis of policy environments to create a comprehensive picture of the local and global landscape for the sector.

Report link: https://bisresearch.com/ industry-report/global-anti-mo ney-laundering-software-market -2023.html
Managing data more effectively is a key priority for brands in 2018, according to WARC, the global marketing intelligence service, following a survey with 600 plus marketing and advertising professionals around the world for its Toolkit 2018 report.

Brands will need to take a more disciplined, proactive approach to data management. The upcoming European Unions General Data Protection (GDPR), which comes into effect on 25 May 2018, is likely to have a profound impact on the ways in which businesses store and use consumer data. Under GDPR, any company  no matter where they are based or headquartered  holding information about European Union citizens will be subject to strict new legislation around the use of personal data.

Ominously, the Toolkit 2018 survey reveals an industry largely unprepared for the new ways of working under GDPR. At a global level, only a small minority of respondents  22% of brands and 18% of agencies  say they are ready for the change.

Ardi Kolah, Executive Fellow and Programme Director, GDPR Transition Programme, Henley Business School, advises: Take a step back, and think what this is really about: this is about reputation, not regulation. Its about doing the right thing. This is all about protecting reputation.

In addition to the new regulations coming into force, there is a broader push by brands to take control of their many data sources to improve customer experience and introduce new marketing approaches.

For example, data will be key to delivering the mass one-to-one marketing, which will fuel the next wave of digital growth, according to Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gambles Chief Brand Officer. He comments: Looking ahead, this new transition to one-to-one marketing is going to be a big shift. It will move into data management, and we need to think through what are the data standards and what are the ways we operate.

Verity Gill, Digital Director, Ebiquity, added: "Until now the challenge with big data has been simply coping with its sheer volume. However, now that we are getting to grips with building storage and manipulation capabilities, our attention in 2018 will definitely turn to making data work harder for us. Perhaps 2018 will be the year of 'Data Effectiveness'.

Other key findings from WARCs Toolkit survey show that:

55% of brands and 59% of agencies will be prioritising an increased focus on drawing insights from big data

In Europe, only 25% of the Toolkit 2018 survey respondents agree they are ready for GDPR. For the rest of the world, only 12% say they are ready, despite the fact that all companies with EU consumers will be affected

Taking control of customer data is one of five key brand concern in the year ahead, outlined in Toolkit 2018, which also includes a guide to best practice, potential pitfalls and video interviews with industry leaders to help overcome the challenges.
Erika Marble visits the gravesite of Edward Martin III, her fiance and father of her two children, in Littleton, N.H. The 28-year old died Nov. 30, 2014, from an overdose of the opioid Fentanyl.
January 16, 2018

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to destroy all terror nests in Syria today, as he kept up his verbal attacks against the United States over its continuing support for the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG).

Speaking before members of his ruling Justice and Development Party, Erdogan asserted, In a short span of time, we will destroy all terror nests, one by one, in Syria, starting from Afrin and Manbij.

The volley of threats followed a night of shelling by Turkish forces and their Free Syrian Army allies targeting Afrin, the Kurdish-majority enclave on the Turkish border that is under YPG control.

A local resident contacted via WhatsApp told Al-Monitor on condition that they not be identified that shells began landing at 8 p.m. Syrian local time and continued unabated till 3 a.m. Some, the resident claimed, fell within close proximity of a nearby Russian military camp. The noise was infernal and civilians are terrified, said the resident, who lives 8 kilometers (5 miles) south of the Turkish border. But nobody was killed and save for a few shattered windows there was hardly any damage.

Turkey has repeatedly threatened to attack Afrin and Manbij, an Arab-majority town that lies further east and is also under YPG control. But so far its actions have been limited to sporadic artillery strikes initiated from the Turkish side of the border and from within the Euphrates Shield zone run by Turkey and its rebel allies.

The general consensus is that Turkey cannot launch any substantive military operations against the YPG in Afrin without Russias consent.

This is because Russian forces patrol the skies over the region and are present on the ground. Similarly, targeting Manbij could trigger a confrontation with hundreds of US special forces deployed in the YPG-controlled areas, which extend from Manbij all the way to Iraq.

Could this burst of warmongering be different? How many more times can Erdogan pledge to crush the YPG and do nothing without denting his credibility? Omer Taspinar is a Middle East expert at the National War College and fellow at the Brookings Institution. He told Al-Monitor, The feeling, increasingly even within traditionally cautious Turkish Foreign Ministry circles, is that Turkeys prestige is on the line. And that an operation is feasible. Russia may well consent to a limited and clearly defined Turkish foray, he argued, as it did when Turkish troops seized control of Jarablus in August 2016.

The challenge for Moscow remains how to not jeopardize its relations with the YPG and President Bashar al-Assad, who are viscerally opposed to Turkeys presence in Syria. The United States is also squeezed because the YPG has made it clear that any Turkish attack on Afrin will be seen as a test of the coalitions solidarity with the Syrian Kurds.

Either way, Erdogan seems bent on taking action and although Turkeys Syria policy looks like a giant failure, that is not to say that it doesnt retain considerable influence, if only to be disruptive, by virtue of its 900-kilometer (560-mile) border with Syria.

Speaking at a factory launch on Monday, Erdogan took direct aim at the United States. Lower your flags over the terrorist [YPG] bases so that we are not forced to hand them over to you ourselves, so that we are not forced to bury those who stand by the terrorists in the ground, he warned. The Turkish Armed Forces will settle the Afrin and Manbij affairs in the shortest possible time. The offensive can begin any second.

Erdogans latest bout of ire appears to have been triggered in part by the US-led coalitions announcement that it has begun training a new Syrian border security force that will include YPG fighters. Half of the 30,000-strong terror army in Erdogans parlance will be comprised of the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the rest will come from fresh recruits. According to media reports they will be deployed along Syrias borders with Iraq and Turkey, to, among other things, prevent the Islamic State (IS) from moving back to or fleeing from Syria.

Coalition sources insist the force will help ensure the stability of our partners Turkey and Iraq and that some of the SDF will be focused on maintaining security of those borders pending a longer-term settlement of the civil war in Syria. But in Turkeys eyes the continued honing of the YPGs skills is further proof that the United States was lying about its relationship with the group when it claimed it was temporary, transactional and tactical and would end after the fall of Raqqa.

Russia also signaled its unhappiness with the border force, saying that it is a sign that Washington doesnt want to preserve the territorial integrity of Syria. The Assad government called it a blatant encroachment upon the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Syria.

The YPG is part of a broader constellation of armed Kurdish groups, notably the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), that continue to wage war against Turkish security forces. Hence Ankaras frustration  and fear  that at some point the YPG will melt back into the PKK and direct its weapons and training from the coalition against Turkey.

Turkey has so far swallowed the US partnership with the YPG  albeit kicking and screaming  on the assumption that it would end once IS was vanquished and that the United States would not embark on any form of nation-building that would cement the Kurds territorial and political gains. But recent statements from top US officials suggest the United States is reviewing its options as reported in detail by Al-Monitors Bryant Harris.

Sam Heller is a Beirut-based Syria analyst and a fellow at the Century Foundation. He told Al-Monitor, Theres been a running debate inside the US government over Americas role in Syria, post-Islamic State. One camp within the government has been convinced that a continued presence in the northeast gives America leverage it can use towards a national political solution and change in Syrias political center up to and including the departure of President Bashar al-Assad  that is regime change. This camp apparently won out.

However, Heller noted, This is not how America previously represented its mission in Syria and its a reversal thats going to meet with an unhappy reaction from the Syrian regime and its allies, Russia and Iran. And to the extent that it signals a long-term US commitment to and some form of political recognition of the YPG or YPG-dominated entities, it seems like its going to upset Turkey too.

That is something of an understatement.

James Jeffrey is a former US ambassador to Iraq and Turkey and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He too believes Erdogan may well follow through on his threats to attack Afrin this time because he is so terribly frustrated over the whole Syria/YPG mess. Jeffrey told Al-Monitor relations between the NATO allies had deteriorated to the point where the US military has decided no matter what it does or doesnt do it will be attacked by Turkey verbally and diplomatically, and Turks will maneuver dangerously on the ground. Yet while the US military feels nothing they can do will appease Turkey, they are also convinced that nothing they do will be blocked by Turkey, so Turkey has been largely ignored. Such reasoning has borne the sort of complacency Jeffrey noted, whereby the US military believes that Turkey will not act seriously against US activities. I fear this is absolutely wrong.

Should Turkey finally take the plunge, it is likely to face tough resistance from the YPG and retaliatory attacks from the PKK at home. In a research note circulated to subscribers, Teneo Intelligence, a risk consultancy, predicted, "Far from intimidating Washington into withdrawing its support for the [YPG], an invasion of Afrin would be more likely to lead to the US continuing and even increasing its support."

Back in Syria, the YPG says it's ready for the Turks and their allies. Sipan Hemo, the top commander of the YPG, told the pro-Kurdish Firat News Agency in an interview, The battle will be historical and [mark] the end.  Freeing the region from Erdogan  is our fate.
January 16, 2018

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate cleric, has entered a new phase in his confrontation with hard-line clergymen over a number of issues after the recent unrest across the country.

On Jan. 13, Tehran Friday prayer leader Kazem Sedighi, a hard-liner, reacted to the protests, saying, The nations gathering [against the unrest] turned into a sea and cleaned the rubbish. This description of the protesters as rubbish led to a series of criticisms from moderate and Reformist figures and consequently the president.

A number of people protested in the streets; whoever protests is dirt and dust or cows or calves or rubbish? Why do you speak like this? Why do you insult and treat society rudely? Rouhani said in a direct reference to Sedighi on Jan. 14.

The Iranian president added, You should speak accurately. Our nation is a big nation. There was a protest and it ended.

Of note, following his disputed re-election in 2009, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provoked protesters by dismissing those who alleged vote fraud as "dirt and dust."

Meanwhile, Rouhani has come under attack for his remarks that no one is above criticism, not even the 12th Shiite imam, the Mahdi. Twelver Shiite Islam holds that the Mahdi is in a state referred to as the "greater occultation" and is waiting to reappear to rule the world.

In a speech believed to have been influenced by the protests across Iran, Rouhani sought not to dismiss the protesters, saying Jan. 8, Everyone should be criticized and there is no exception [to this principle]. All the officials in the country can be criticized. No one in the country is infallible. If one day the Hidden Imam [Mahdi] reappears, then we can criticize [him] too.  The Prophet [Muhammad] allowed [others] to criticize him. We dont have anyone above the prophet in history.

Following these remarks, hard-line clerics said that criticizing Shiite imams, who are deemed infallible, would in effect mean that they are not in fact infallible. Rouhanis defenders, however, said the president was trying to say that people can question imams in order to get an answer, just as the president and other officials in Iran can be questioned. Moderate Ayatollah Mohsen Gharavian said Jan. 15, The goal of Mr. Rouhani in his recent remarks involving the critique of the infallible imams wasnt equivalent to rejecting them, but rather meant the possibility of questioning them.

In marked contrast, the influential Society of Seminary Teachers of Qom, headed by powerful cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, issued a statement Jan. 14 saying the rejection of Muhammad and the imams infallibility "is in explicit opposition to Islam and the Shiite faith.  We strongly recommend that some officials refrain from entering issues related to [peoples] beliefs in their speeches.

Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, considered to be the spiritual father of the hard-liners  including conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi, who lost to Rouhani in the 2017 presidential election  tweeted Jan. 15, They are saying that people can criticize the infallible imams.  They said this not in [a distant country] but in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Now, with the presence of such [figures on the public stage], how much more should the Hidden Imam [Mahdi] suffer?

Other hard-line and conservative clerics have joined the attacks on Rouhani. Mohsen Araki, a hard-line cleric, said Jan. 14, Apparently, you have forgotten what you studied [at the seminary] when you were young. It is better now for you to focus on politics. When you dont have the necessary knowledge, it is better to leave peoples beliefs alone.

Following the ruckus over his remarks, the presidents office issued a statement Jan. 15 saying he never said the Shiite imams must be criticized.
January 16, 2018

Reuven K., who is about 30 years old, is an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic man who lives in Betar Illit, one of Israels most prominent ultra-Orthodox localities. Reuven studies in a yeshiva, a Jewish school for Talmudic learning, but works half of each day as a wholesale merchant selling religious ritual supplies. His wife, Bracha, works as a bookkeeper in a governmental institution.

Many of Reuven and Brachas contemporaries are already raising five, six or even 10 children. Reuven and Bracha have only three  two girls and a boy. Work is important to them not only because they have to make a living. As Reuven said, even though they are not a large family (in ultra-Orthodox terms), their three children fill their home and their hearts.

Dont you feel different from your friends in the yeshiva? The neighbors? I asked. Reuven, who asked that his full name not be divulged, answered, Im not the only one anymore. About a third of my yeshiva friends have two to three children, and many others havent even married yet. Its no longer so strange or different.

At 3.1 children per woman, the fertility rate in Israel is the highest among the developed nations, much of it due to Israels ultra-Orthodox population. According to the Yearbook of Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel 2017, the ultra-Orthodox growth rate leads in Israel with 6.9 children per woman. The average in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries is only 1.6. The ultra-Orthodox community follows the religious commandment of be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28), as well as other Jewish traditions and culture. Add to the mix modern medicine, including fertility treatments, and we understand why Israels fertility numbers have skyrocketed to more than four times the average of developed nations.

And yet, analysis of the yearbooks data shows us that the fertility rate of ultra-Orthodox women has been dropping moderately but consistently. In 2004, there were almost 7.5 children per women. A host of additional statistics in the publication clearly show where the ultra-Orthodox population is heading: integration in the general Israeli public. The proportion of unmarried men in ultra-Orthodox society rose from 11% in 2004 to 13% in 2017. The rate of married ultra-Orthodox youths in the 20-24 age bracket fell from 61% in 2004 to only 44% in 2017.

The ultra-Orthodox population today numbers more than 1 million souls, versus 750,000 in 2009. Its growth rate is currently 4.4%, in contrast to the yearly growth of the general population at slightly less than 2%. We can predict that the fertility rate among the ultra-Orthodox will continue to fall in the coming years as well, due to the rise in the percentage of bachelors, the rise in the age of marriage, modernization processes and increasing influence of Western culture. In addition, quite a number of youths in ultra-Orthodox families are distancing themselves from the pious ultra-Orthodox lifestyle.

Fewer youths are learning in ultra-Orthodox institutions, as more parents are sending their children  mainly their daughters  to schools outside the community. Girls are encouraged to take courses that will help them enter the labor market in fields such as mathematics and English, while the boys study in yeshivot. The rate of ultra-Orthodox girls who took graduation exams jumped from 23% in 2009 to 51% in 2015.

The number of ultra-Orthodox people who work, especially the women, is rising. The increasing employment rates among men leveled off only in the last year, when the stipends given to yeshiva students rose and additional funds were directed to the yeshivas by the demand of the ultra-Orthodox members of the coalition.

In the last seven years, the number of ultra-Orthodox students studying in universities rose by 147%. Most of them are women.

Ultra-Orthodox women have been undergoing several connected social changes, such as falling fertility rates, a rise in the age of marriage, sharp improvements in education, increased participation in the labor market and increased contact with general Israeli society. Women are bringing the outside world  information, innovations  into the ultra-Orthodox family, while strengthening their position in the family unit. It is a slow process. In some of the ultra-Orthodox communities, the community heads impose limitations on women working, such as forbidding women to work outside the home or outside the specific locality. Several companies have built production facilities and projects in the ultra-Orthodox localities to overcome this obstacle, but they still pay ultra-Orthodox women less than other women. And they arent the only ones: According to the Yearbook of Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel, the average salary of ultra-Orthodox women (about 6,000 shekels or about $1,700 a month) was 32% less than the average salary of a woman in Israel.

In a Knesset committee discussion in August 2016, ultra-Orthodox Knesset member Yakov Asher said that the reason for this disparity is that the women want to preserve the ultra-Orthodox way of life. Perhaps this is the main stumbling block facing ultra-Orthodox women: The community expects them to support their husbands who study in yeshiva, while simultaneously raising the children and coping with numerous religious restrictions.

Speaking at a 2012 legal convention, Moshe Gafni, the ultra-Orthodox chairman of the Knesset's Financial Committee, said, The contemporary ultra-Orthodox woman is more precocious and intelligent than the ultra-Orthodox man. It was his response to a question regarding the exclusion of women in ultra-Orthodox society. Coming from the mouth of one of the two most senior ultra-Orthodox Israeli politicians, who are careful not to be too encouraging of women to work, the comment is very significant.
January 15, 2018

New Year's celebrations this year were hardly a joyful occasion for the nearly 1,000 Yazidis who are living in the refugee camp of the Disaster and Emergency Affairs Department (AFAD) in Midyat, near Mardin in southeastern Turkey. Their wish for the new year: that the Yazidi women and children, who have been kidnapped by Islamic State (IS) fighters, come back alive.

The Yazidis, who speak Kurdish and most of whom live in northern Iraq, have faced genocide in the past, including during the Ottoman Empire. Considered heretical devil worshipping by many Muslims, Yazidism dates back to the 12th century and integrates some Islamic beliefs with elements of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion, and Mithraism, a mystery religion originating in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Isolated geographically and accustomed to discrimination, the Yazidis are a closed community that struggles to keep its traditions alive. When IS forces captured Sinjar in 2014, many Yazidis were forced to escape to Turkey or Europe.

Those living in the AFAD camp try to preserve their heritage. The cornerstone of their culture is Cejna Roji Ezi, or Feast of Ezi, where they celebrate the birth of Ezi, one of the names of God. The Yazidis celebrate this tradition by fasting between sunrise and sunset during three days for three weeks. Their fast in the first week is for the sun; the second week is for relatives, dead or alive; and the third week is for God. The fasting ceremony ends with a large meal with guests on the Friday afternoon of the third week.

The Cejna Roja Ezi ceremony in the last month of 2017 was no different at the AFAD camp.

Ali Atalan, a pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) deputy from Batman, who is also Yazidi, came to see the Yazidis in the camp. Accompanied by a Yazidi delegation, his aim was to celebrate the meal together. Yet the camp authorities did not allow him access into the camp, with no explanation given, he told Al-Monitor. The two Yazidi groups, one outside the fence and one inside, simply greeted each other from a distance.

It was a very touching moment, Atalan said. Yazidis have a different interpretation of religion as they have a deep attachment to the land and to nature and they celebrate their feasts in nature. Families come together; they wear their folkloric clothing and play games. The circumstances in the camp hardly make their lifestyle possible.

Atalan noted that the Yazidis in the camp had been through genocide and that they have to be treated well, particularly on important holidays that they should be allowed to celebrate with others.

When Atalan could not celebrate the feast in the camp, he went to his own village, Bacin, which in Turkish is called Guven, literally meaning "trust." It is a village with only two residents left: his father Abuzet and his mother Zero. It is just the three of us in the family, he said.

Atalan said that his mother's wish is for the new year to witness the return of the Yazidi women and children who are in the hands of IS. He added, I hope that the Yazidis can create an autonomous administration in Sinjar, with their own governing structures and economy. This would be the Renaissance for the Yazidis. My hope is that the Yazidis and the Yazidi culture will continue to survive.

The Turkish government, which celebrates the feasts of most religious minorities, issued no celebratory message for Cejna Roja Ezi. However, another Yazidi deputy from the HDP, Feleknas Uca, extended a goodwill message from the rostrum in the Turkish parliament, saying, I hope that the Yazidi women and children in the hands of IS will return."

She added a prayer in the Yazidi language: I came before God and saw beauty and happiness. Everything starts with unity.
The Messenger app is presently too cluttered and will be streamlined to a significant degree over the course of this year, Facebooks Vice President of Messaging Products David Marcus said Tuesday as part of a larger communication meant to outline the companys instant messaging goals in 2018. The 44-year-old suggested the current state of the app is a result of the firms efforts to ennoble the overall user experience which resulted in numerous new functionalities being introduced in the last two years, not all of which ended up finding a significant audience. Such failed features are now set to be removed from Messenger as part of Facebooks ambition to invest in massively simplifying the worlds most popular IM service.

Should the companys attempt to streamline Messenger be successful, it may directly prompt more Messenger Lite users to return to the platform after abandoning it in favor of a less capable but also much more straightforward solution, though one thats primarily aimed at developing countries and people who dont have access to a stable or high-speed mobile service. The Menlo Park, California-based social media giant is also planning to double down on its efforts to support real-time communication through Messenger, according to Mr. Marcus. Voice and video calls are hence set to be a large focus of the app in the next 12 months as the firm continues pushing its app as the ultimate mobile communications tool. Despite its plans to remove needless features from certain aspects of Messenger, Facebook will also be adding many new ones over the course of this year, with its executive specifically highlighting group chats as one function of the app thats set to be improved going forward.

Messenger will also receive new functionalities and advancements related to multimedia sharing in 2018, with Facebook also seeking to develop new ways for people to communicate with companies via instant messages, which it claims many prefer over calling customer support representatives. Mr. Marcus also expects more brands of all sizes to continue embracing Messenger as a marketing platform this year and signaled the companys willingness to collaborate with them in their efforts to do so. Facebook is still facing some backlash from investors after its decision to aggressively overhaul the News Feed and purge it from brand-issued posts in favor of photos and status messages from their friends, with its stock still trading at under $180, i.e. approximately four percent down compared to its previously stable rate.
Several Pixel and Pixel 2 owners began noticing that Google Feed no longer displays a search bar. Normally on the stock Pixel Launcher, users can access their news feeds by swiping to the right from the home screen. The feed will be displayed with relevant news articles and at the top of that list, users can also tap a search bar to explore the web through Googles popular engine. That feature, however, seems to be disappearing from a number of Pixel smartphones. Instead, many people have seen the full Google logo stationed in the area where the search bar used to reside. The logo changes its text color from the classic red, blue, green, and yellow to pure white regardless of whether the dark of light mode is used. At the moment, there doesnt appear to be any location or version dictating which devices exhibit the altered Google Feed. As far as we can tell, the variance turns out to be conducted using a type of A/B testing on various Google Pixel and Pixel 2 devices.

The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL launched with quite a number of ways to access Googles search assistant. One of the most commonly advertised ways to accomplish this is through the Ok Google or Hey Google phrase, which is quickly becoming more popular. The second unique option allows owners to squeeze for your Assistant, by literally squeezing the sides of their smartphone to immediately launch the smart assistant from any page. Like with all modern versions of Android, users can also tap and hold the home button to launch the assistant. Finally, from any home page, the Pixel Launcher on Android 8.0 Oreo displays a static Google search bar. Tapping this button will instantly bring up the keyboard and allow you to enter either a query or else use most of Google Assistants other features, like typing in a command to create a reminder.

The Google Feed underwent several redesigns, updates, and experiments in 2017. Some of the changes brought by the Alphabet company to Pixel Launcher-enabled devices were temporal, and many became permanent. It is unclear whether Google intends to roll out the removal of the search bar to all Pixel Launcher phones or if the company intends to gather more feedback before making a sweeping decision. It makes sense for Google to streamline its software experience and make the Google Logo more prominent across its many platforms. Perhaps the tech giant will end up keeping the search bar at the top of the page, or maybe users will need to find an alternative way to search for new content when viewing Google Feed.
The Made By Google online store officially began selling wall mounts for the Google Home Mini, as well as individual or bundled items for Nest Secure. Spotted on its website today, Googles branded hardware is accompanied by a couple of new options. First, the Google Home Mini can now be neatly attached to a wall, instead of sitting on a shelf with a custom mount made by Incipio. A Google Home Mini snaps into the mount, and one can either use the included adhesive strip or metal screws to affix the smart speaker to a wall. Other options enable an owner to adhere the speaker to a ceiling or a piece of furniture for maximum space-saving. One also reduces the likelihood of tripping over a cord. Paired with a good cable management solution, and this device should offer some great peace of mind. The Google Home Mini Mount is available for $15, and is available for purchase immediately.

Another new addition to Googles online store comes in the form of Nest Secure products. Google acquired Nest Labs in 2014, and has since been working closely to unite the two platforms in various ways. Nest is known for its Internet of Things (IoT) thermostats and security cameras, but the Palo Alto company recently created a new set of devices for the technologically savvy: smart home alarms. Nest Secure introduces a number of internet-enabled devices to help keep your residence safe. Along with indoor and outdoor security cameras, Nest Labs launched a few new devices. Nest Connect is a signal boosting device to ensure adequate network coverage for your Nest Guard, available for $69. Nest Detect acts as a smart signal to notify account holders of opened or closed windows and doors, and can be purchased for $59. And finally, Nest Tags attach to a keyring or wallet to travel with you. Tapping them to the hub will activate or deactivate an alarm system for easy convenience on the fly. You can buy the tags individually at $25 or get the whole bundle for $500.

Google acquired Nest a few years ago, and the partnership continues to grow. With its ever-growing list of smart-home devices like Chromecast, Google Home, and Google WiFi, a close integration with Nests featured products is quickly becoming necessity. Nest devices support an increasing number of voice commands by the Google Assistant, and more are continually being announced. Speculation is that Google may absorb Nest in the future to bolster the smaller companys profits, and also to expand its own brand name to compete with Amazons Alexa-enabled devices. Googles addition of the aforementioned smart-home products certainly appears to support such conclusions.
Chinese phone maker Meizu said Tuesday its 2018 plans are largely focused on Android flagships as part of a wider effort to reinvent its brand. In pursuit of the same goal, the Zhuhai, Guangdong-based original equipment manufacturer is seeking to create a new design language which will help its handsets stand out from the competition and position themselves as not just premium but also unique offerings.

Meizus flagship ambitions will see the Chinese company collaborate with Qualcomm and Samsung a lot closer than it did in previous years, the firm revealed. In practice, the phone maker will be primarily looking to strengthen its ties with the two tech giants on the chipset front as it will require a larger number of ultra-premium silicon if it intends to ramp up its high-end handset production. The company is hence expected to be among major adopters of the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomms most powerful system-on-chip to date announced last month. Besides Qualcomms premium offering, other chips from the San Diego, California-based semiconductor manufacturer will also be featured in Meizus 2018 smartphones in much larger volumes than they were previously, according to the company. Samsungs foundry business played a large part in Qualcomms last two high-end chips which were manufactured using the South Korean tech giants 10nm FinFET process. While the chaebol rarely sells its chips to third parties due to licensing issues, a number of Meizu-made devices meant to be released in the next 12 months may ship with Exynos-branded silicon, with the M6S being one of them.

Meizus first high-profile offering in 2018 will be the Meizu 15 Plus that should start retailing in its home country by spring, the company suggested. The handset still doesnt have a firm launch date attached to it but has already been the subject of numerous leaks in recent months, with previous rumors suggesting the device will pack a mid-range SoC in the form of the Snapdragon 650. Its currently unclear when Meizu may debut its new product aesthetic that its been teasing for a while now but has yet to detail in any capacity. The OEM is still expected to continue focusing on relatively bezel-free phones with 18:9 displays over the course of this year.
The Moto E5 fingerprint sensor shows on the back in a newly leaked image, sitting in the same location where the Motorola batwing logo is on current and past Moto series devices. In addition to the Moto E5s fingerprint sensor being on the back instead of on the front of the device, the phone has a metal frame and what looks like a unibody design which could mean that the device has a fully metal body as well and not just the metal frame.

The Moto E5 in the image comes in a Gold color, which has been a common color for devices the last couple of years. Motorola has also used Gold for other past devices like the Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus. This is reportedly the first leaked image of the Moto E5 to have surfaced on the web, so theres no indication of whether or not Motorola will launch the device in any other colors. That said, Motorola hasnt released just one color for its series of phones for a while, so chances are there will be other color options like black, silver, or dark gray just to name a few possible examples.

Although there hasnt been much detail about the Moto E5 yet, there have been a few rumors about the phone thus far. According to past rumors Motorola has plans to launch the phone in a Play and Plus version, which might mean there will be three different models of the phone, labeled as the Moto E5, the Moto E5 Plus, and the Moto E5 Play. In regards to the rest of the design, the phone has the larger rear-facing camera module setup with an LED flash, and it appears Motorola has implemented an LED flash for the front-facing camera as well. Not much is known or rumored yet about the specs of the Moto E5 but there are a few key details about the specs that have been mentioned along with this leaked image. For example, the phone is rumored to come with a micro USB port instead of a USB Type-C port, and its also rumored to come powered by a MediaTek processor, and a 3.5mm audio port that would be located on the top part of the frame.
The Samsung Galaxy On7 Prime, which is expected to launch soon as an Amazon exclusive in India, has now surfaced on the GFXBench database, confirming its specifications before the official release. Amazon India has been teasing the upcoming Samsung smartphone since December 2017, touting an imminent debut without actually mentioning a specific launch date. The Galaxy On7 Prime 2018 will come as a mid-range offering and, based on reports, it could go on sale on January 17. Since Amazon India had already listed the smartphone with plenty of details, the new GFXBench specs sheet simply confirms what was already known about the device.

The new Galaxy On7 Prime 2018 will feature a 5.5-inch full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) display, and pack a 64-bit octa-core Samsung Exynos 7870 processor under the hood. GFXBench lists the version with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of native storage space, but the Galaxy On7 Prime is also expected to come in a higher configuration with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. Other specs include a 13-megapixel main camera with LED flash, autofocus, HDR, and face detection, and a 13-megapixel front camera. The benchmark listing further notes that the Galaxy On7 Prime will come with Android 7.1.1 Nougat on board out of the box, with Samsungs proprietary UI on top.

Previous information, meanwhile, revealed that the Galaxy On7 Prime will have dual-SIM support, a 3,300mAh non-removable battery, a physical home button that also serves as a fingerprint scanner, a 3.5mm headphone jack, 4G LTE connectivity, and Bluetooth 4.2. Samsungs branding will be visible on the back of the device, as well as on the front, right above the display. This handset will probably be quite affordable in India. The handset does not come with thin bezels like higher-end Samsung smartphones, as the Samsung India product listing confirms it. For a budget mid-ranger, however, the handset seems pretty solid. No official pricing details are available at this point, but recent reports have indicated that the Galaxy On7 Prime may retail for roughly Rs. 15,000 ($234) when it launches in India. If the smartphone will indeed make its debut on January 17, more information will become available shortly, straight from the source.
A customer service representative of smartphone manufacturer Samsung stated in a conversation with a member of the XDA Developers forums that the Galaxy S6 will soon receive Android 8.0 Oreo. The representative also mentioned that the software upgrade to Android Oreo will roll out until the end of February, noting how there is still no information regarding the official date of the release. The representative further added that the South Korea-based tech giant will soon clarify which specific models will receive Android Oreo. The screenshots seen in the gallery below were provided by the source to back their claims.

While it is important to take the statements of customer service representatives with a grain of salt, this is not the first time that a Samsung official claimed that the tech firm will release an Android Oreo update for the Galaxy S6 lineup. Back in November, another customer service representative said the same, even though they didnt elaborate on the matter. In addition, an industry insider from China recently leaked the supposed list of Samsung-made devices that will receive Android Oreo. Aside from the Galaxy S6, the leak claimed the Galaxy S6 Edge and the Galaxy S6 Edge Plus will also receive the same operating system upgrade.

If the claims are accurate, theyre signaling the first occasion on which a Samsung flagship handset has received three major operating system upgrades during its lifespan. Usually, the device maker implements a standard 24-month support period for many of its smartphone offerings. The Galaxy S6 was launched back in 2015 with Android 5.0.2 Lollipop pre-installed, although it was later upgraded to Android 6.0 Marshmallow in early 2016. Early last year, Samsung released another update that upgraded the handsets operating system to Android 7.0 Nougat. If the Galaxy S6 does receive Android Oreo, users of the device will be able to take advantage of features like the Picture-in-Picture mode, improved app data usage management, and notification dots. The Picture-in-Picture mode allows users to view two applications simultaneously by showing one app in a smaller window on top of another one. The notification dots, on the other hand, alert the user about applications that have notifications waiting for them directly on the home screen.
Multi-national tech giant and majority owner of Sprint Corp., Softbank Group Corp is reportedly considering taking its Japanese wireless business  Softbank Corp  public. While the company has not yet confirmed that it will do so for certain, sources say the company hopes to sell off around 30-percent of itself for around $18 billion  effectively representing the largest initial public offering in around 20 years for the region. The company would use the funding gained through the sale to re-invest in itself via further buy-ins with technology companies around the world. The move wouldnt necessarily be a break in Softbanks usual operating procedures, as it already invests itself heavily into various international tech companies. However, according to reports, it would afford the group with the funds to place itself as one of the top technologies investors in the world.

In fact, according to one professor at Michigans Ross School of Business, Erik Gordon, the move is effectively a way to gain disposable funds without incurring any debt or dampening the companys equity. Moreover, it would be smart for the company to conduct its first public offering at the percentage it is reportedly looking to sell since it leaves the majority of control in its own hands rather than in the hands of those investors. Beyond that, although Japanese rules ordinarily would require that 35-percent of the company is put up for the initial offering, the company may be able to get away with a smaller share due to its intention to sell internationally.

As to the immediate impacts on the company, even though no final decision has been made in the matter, the companys shares shot up to finish at around 3 percent higher than when the news broke. Thats good news for investors in Softbank Group, whose current market capitalization rests at around $92 billion. With further consideration for the companys stake in Alibaba valued at approximately $140 billion and other investments, coupled with a reported debt of only $100 billion at the end of September, the company already stands strong in the market. Bearing that in mind, if Softbank Group does take itself public, the move would definitely give the company the freedom to explore investments in other areas of technology.
The Vivo X20 Plus UD has been certified by Chinas telecommunications regulator TENAA, implying it will soon go on sale in the Far Eastern country. A device believed to be the Vivo X20 Plus UD was showcased by Vivo at CES 2018 and is the first smartphone to feature a fingerprint scanner beneath its display. The smartphones TENAA listing doesnt reveal anything about the device other than the fact that its likely to succeed the Vivo X20 Plus smartphone that was announced in China last year.

The Vivo X20 Plus UD is expected to come with specifications similar to those of the Vivo X20 Plus, including a 6.43-inch AMOLED display with a 1,080 x 2,160 (FHD+) resolution, Qualcomms Snapdragon 660 SoC, and 4GB of RAM. The storage configuration might change, though, as the Vivo X20 Plus UD is expected to come with an internal storage capacity of 128GB, compared to the Vivo X20 Plus and its 64GB of internal storage. The battery capacity will also be smaller at 3,080mAh, but other rumored specifications remain the same. On the rear, it will feature a dual-camera setup consisting of a 12-megapixel primary camera and 5-megapixel secondary module, while a 12-megapixel sensor will handle selfie photography on the front, according to recent reports.

The Vivo X20 Plus UD is expected to ship with a price tag of approximately 3,698 yuan ($574) and may be available in Black, Gold, Black Gold, and Pink Gold color variants. The UD in the devices moniker is most likely an acronym of the term under display and hence references the location of its fingerprint reader. This type of fingerprint technology for smartphones has been in the works for a long time now but is only expected to be commercialized later this year. Besides Vivo, Samsung and Apple are both reportedly pushing hard to implement in-screen fingerprint readers into their upcoming smartphones meant to be released in 2018. Theres currently no word on when the Vivo X20 Plus UD might be released but the appearance of its TENAA certificate suggests that might in the coming weeks, even though it remains to be seen whether the smartphone eventually makes its way outside of China.
ZUK is essentially Lenovos subsidiary which did not release a smartphone for quite some now, and ZUKs CEO, Chang Cheng, has just released a new image on its official Weibo (Chinese social network). If you take a look at the provided image above, you will be able to see an upcoming Lenovo-branded smartphone, which we do not know anything about at this point, save for the details that have been shared on this image, read on.

As you can see, this phone will be made out of metal and glass, while its back side will be curved. ZUK did not exactly release a smartphone for quite some time now, and even some rumors surfaced last year stating that the company may shut down entirely. Back in July last year, ZUK actually teased the arrival of the ZUK Z3, so the phone that Mr. Cheng teased is probably the ZUK Z3, a direct successor to the ZUK Z2 which arrived back in May 2016. Now, the companys ZUK Z lineup of devices always aims to give consumers high-end specs at affordable price tags, at least that was the case thus far, so chances are that the ZUK Z3 will also ship with high-end specs, at least to a certain degree. The ZUK Z2 Pro shipped out with the Snapdragon 821 back in mid-2016, so it is possible that the ZUK Z3 arrives with either the Snapdragon 835 or Snapdragon 845 SoC, while the device will include 4GB or 6GB of RAM, though do keep in mind were only guessing at this point, as the companys CEO did not leave any hints regarding the phones spec sheet.

The phone that Mr. Cheng teased comes with Lenovos branding, does that mean that the ZUK Z3 may arrive carrying a different name, will it be called the Lenovo ZUK Z3 maybe? There are so many questions that need to be answered, and well have to wait until the company actually releases the device, as its possible quite a few things changed since ZUK released its last smartphone back in 2016, so everything is possible at this point. We still do not know when will the teased smartphone arrive, but chances are well see it out in the market in a couple of months.

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A new initiative aims to drive world-leading innovations in the legal technology sector from its Asia Pacific base.The Singapore Academy of Law has launched its Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP) with a launch cocktail party attended by more than 180 people from the legal, technology, government, academic and business communities last week.FLIP will run for 5 years and will promote the adoption and development of new legal technologies including artificial intelligence.Among its key aims is to assist law firms to integrate baseline technology into their processes and to help shape the business model for the future law firm.FLIP has a legal innovation lab in Singapore and will also open its legal tech accelerator programme this April.Teams from Norton Rose Fulbright and Clifford Chance are among those advising the parties in an Australian first.Australian-Chinese developer, owner and operator of renewable power generation assets Maoneng Australia (Maoneng) has entered into a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and on related agreements with Origin, who is providing firming and other services to UNSW.Maoneng was advised by Clifford Chance with a team led by head of renewable energy Asia Pacific Philip Sealey."UNSW has set the goal to achieve carbon neutrality for energy use by 2020. We are delighted to have supported Maoneng in its collaboration with UNSW and Origin to develop an energy procurement solution to meet the university's needs," said Sealey.Norton Rose Fulbright advised UNSW with a team led by global head of energy Simon Rose, along with senior consultant Kelly Davies and Jacqueline Fetchet.The university sector is a key focus for Norton Rose Fulbright. UNSW has helped develop a model which we believe can be replicated throughout Australia and help universities and other users meet their sustainability goals and achieve a lower all-in power price, said Currie.Origin Energy was advised by Hive Legal and Energy Action provided energy market analysis and advice to UNSW. Pinsent Masons has been awarded 10 Years Plus Caring Company status by the Hong Kong Council of Social Service.The firm has been recognised for its long-standing support of the community, employees and environment."The Caring Company Scheme is in its 16th year in Hong Kong and for Pinsent Masons to be part of this scheme for a decade is a fantastic achievement, said Vincent Connor, Pinsent Masons' Head of Hong Kong Office. It is an honour to be recognised, particularly in the year of our 35th anniversary of working in Hong Kong, as a Caring Company by the Hong Kong Council of Social Service . We hope to give back even more to our community in the years to come.
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A Melbourne-based corporate law specialist firm advised in Australias largest home-grown e-commerce transaction.



Clarendon Lawyers acted for longstanding client Lux Group on its deal with Catch Group that has resulted in the creation of a separate, pure-play travel, shopping, and local e-commerce businesses. The transaction was settled for an undisclosed sum.



Lux Group acquired Catch Groups luxury travel businesses BonVoyage and Scoopon Travel. Lux Group sold its designer-brand products businesses, including Brands Exclusive and TheHome, to Catch Group.



Both groups have also entered into a joint venture via the merge of both their local experience businesses, which include brands like Cudo, LivingSocial, DEALS.com.au, and New Zealand-based TreatMe.



The complex transaction transforms businesses, allowing Lux Group to establish a focused and scaled travel e-commerce business with more than $300m in annual turnover. The business will offer its products across Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, led by the flagship brand Luxury Escapes.



Directors Nick Manuell and Rob Feiner led the Clarendons team. They were assisted by senior associate Adam Laidlaw, lawyer Zhong Wu, and graduates Stephen Dyason and Rachel Morris.



Clarendons has been working with Lux Group since its purchase of Cudo in 2013. The firm has advised the group on all of its other M&A transactions since. Manuell said that the new business is more than capable of matching it with the global giants.



Intrinsic partners and SBA Law acted for Catch Group. Macquarie Bank was Lux Groups corporate adviser.





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King & Wood Mallesons ( KWM ) has become the first law firm in Australia to offer a virtual law internship.The program has received overwhelming interest from students. In just two weeks, the program has attracted about 1,000 enrolments from 42 universities.Participants can choose to finish all of the programs five modules, which focus on Asia experience, disputes, innovation, pro bono, and transactional.KWM partners and lawyers feature in briefing videos of the program, which asks participants to complete tasks such as drafting documents, communicating with clients, understanding smart contracts, working with community partners, and analysing and advising on corporate legal matters.The program was jointly developed by the firm and Inside Sherpa, an Australian start-up founded by KWM alumni Thomas Brunskill and Pasha Rayan, the former head of acquisitions at Freelancer.com.KWM is leading the future of graduate recruitment in law  no other firm in Australia is doing this or anything similar yet. We are providing a realistic and accessible opportunity for students to learn what it is like working at one of the worlds leading international law firms, and build skills required to excel as a commercial lawyer, said Berkeley Cox, KWMs chief executive partner.The program provides a true insight into life at a top tier firm  it does not shy away from the sometimes challenging, complex and interesting tasks our grads undertake each day, he said.
Lawyer organisations, including Australias peak body for the profession, are standing up after Peter Dutton stepped up his criticism of Labors appointments to the judiciary in Victoria.The federal home affairs minister started the year saying that Victorians were puzzled about the jokes of sentences being handed down, which he says have hindered the states ability to tackle street crime. He blamed political correctness thats taken hold for the soft sentences.Last week, Dutton told 3AW radio in Melbourne that part of the solution to the street crime problem is to ensure appointments to the magistrates court are people who will impose sentences and provide some deterrence to repeat offenders.If youre appointing civil libertarians to the magistrates court over a long period of time, then you will get soft sentences, Dutton said.Last year, Dutton said that it was un-Australian for members of the legal profession to be representing asylum seekers pro bono. The comment also got rebukes from the legal profession, which said it was proud of lawyers who do this work and that there is nothing more Australian than upholding the rule of law The Law Institute of Victoria (LIV) was first to voice its alarm over political attacks against Victorian judges, magistrates, and the legal profession.Without specifically naming Dutton, the LIV said that the attacks are totally inappropriate and without foundation.There is no place for political attacks on the judiciary and undermining the independence of our judges and magistrates. The community can have absolute trust in the judiciary and the legal profession in Victoria, it said.In a later statement published by the body which identified the attack came from Dutton, Justice Robert Beech-Jones, the president of the Judicial Conference of Australia, said that generalising is not reasonable.The appropriate policing and legislative response to concerns over these issues are matters for those governments, but personalised attacks on judges and magistrates as opposed to individual decisions is unfair and unwarranted, Beech-Jones said. It is unfair in that the judges and magistrates in question cannot respond and undermines the capacity of the judiciary to apply the law impartially.Over the weekend, the Australian Bar Association (ABA) said that it is very concerned about the recent political attacks on the Victorian judiciary.Attacks on judicial officers undermine democracy and the rule of law and erode public confidence in the courts, said Noel Huntley SC, ABA president. The reputation of the judiciary of Victoria for integrity and independence is both entirely justified and vital to the maintenance of the rule of law. Whilst this abuse is not a threat to that integrity or independence due to the quality of the judges, it is improper that a federal minister would engage in it.The ABA said that the countrys democracy relies on mutual respect between the executive and judicial branches of government.Courts should be free from unfounded political criticism, the ABA said.The Law Council of Australia , the nations top lawyer body, said that ensuring the rule of law is respected and maintained is vital to the strength of the countrys legal system.Morry Bailes, Law Council president, said the recent political attacks on the Victorian judiciary are not useful.The Law Council shares the views of the Law Institute of Victoria. There is no place for political attacks on the judiciary undermining the independence of judges and magistrates, Bailes said. It is understood that in our free society, informed comment on judicial decisions is part of normal discourse, but politicised criticism undermines the foundations of the democratic system which must be closely guarded by all, especially those in government.He added that judges and magistrates are experts in the law. To ensure the separation of powers, they must be allowed to perform their duty without interference and unwarranted criticism, he said.The Law Society also hoped that all Australians understand the value of an independent judiciary and the importance of upholding the rule of law in legal decision making.
A UK barrister whos a martial arts expert has been appointed as an immigration judge in London.Siew Ying Loke will commence as an immigration judge of the first-tier tribunal at the Immigration and Asylum Chamber on 14 May.The UK judiciarys announcement, however, did not disclose that Loke is a sixth-degree black belt in Tang Sou Dao Ren Yi Wu Kwan, a discipline founded by her father, MK Loke. When not advising the Attorney-Generals Office on criminal and public law matters, the 37-year-old lawyer teaches the martial art.The martial art combines the sophistication of ancient Chinese Shaolin tradition with modern teaching methods, the martial arts organisation says. The practical self-defence system will teach followers to evade more powerful opponents but strike back at will and snap back with powerful blocks and strike to attackers vulnerable points with close- or long-range techniques, among other things.Loke said in her profile that she began training at a very young age.I dont really remember much about my early lessons, except I probably wasnt a model student. I recall being given press-ups and bunny hops regularly. My father had to constantly tell me to keep still and to keep quiet even more, she said.
IIHS

If the AMC Pacery lived on to this day, we'd imagine that it might look a little bit like this Korean contraption. Which is not to say the Veloster is bad, just that it doesn't mind standing out.We think the all-new Veloster looks way better than the outgoing model. The huge grille seems like it's been imported from a Genesis, while the interior also has a touch of luxury.While MINI ditched the asymmetrical design on the current generation Clubman, the Veloster still features two doors in the right, making it a little bit easier to squeeze into the back seats. Despite being based on an all-new platform, the coup' is still small and not really designed for carrying people.At least in America, the base engine is now a 2-liter with 147 horsepower, replacing the 1.6-liter. Stepping up to the Veloster Turbo brings the same 1.6 with forced induction as in the Elantra Sport. Packing 201 horsepower, this should deliver sufficient pace and can be combined with a 6-speed manual or automatic. The Turbo model has a revised steering rack for better feel than the normal Veloster.Marking the debut of the Hyundai N performance brand in America, the Veloster N is seen by everybody as a rival to the Ford Focus ST, thanks to its 275 horsepower 2-liter turbo engine. The suspension, steering, and brakes were all engineered at the Nurburgring. We think it looks the business in light blue with those massive exhaust pipes!Auto emergency braking should make the 2019 Veloster a hit with the. However, buyers are sure to be more interested in the new head-up display, 8-inch navigation, Android Auto and Apple Carplay.
The new DB11 will share its modular platform and its twin-turbo 5.2-liter V12 with the Vanquish. Nevertheless, you can expect a hefty difference between the two, since the Vanquish faces uber-stiff competition. For one thing, the upcoming Aston will be more of a Ferrari 812 Superfast rival than a competitor for the 2018 Bentley Continental GT.As such, the said twelve-cylinder motor should allow the driver of the new model to produce at least 820 horses. And you can be certain that the mill will come with a devilish soundtrack, even though its TT nature means it won't have an easy time rivaling the naturally aspirated V12 of the Fezza.Nevertheless, the Aston will be recommended by its looks - while not all aficionados agree with Ferrari's currently styling trends, the Vanquish won't leave any room for less-than-positive comments, as is the case with the DB11 and the Vanquish.For one thing, all the camo covering the spied prototype can't conceal the visual might of the machine and we're expecting nothing less than a rolling sculpture.As for the cabin, the new era the automotive producer has entered finally means that the interior won't be a drawback, so you can expect an exquisite treatment on all fronts. After all, we're talking about a proposal that demonstrates what the Brits are capable of when no limits are imposed in the process of forging a Grand Tourer.We should get to meet the 2019 Vanquish in the second half of the year, which means we can expect the prototype sightings to intensify.
Discovery Aviation has started production of a new version of the XL-2, a two-seat trainer first FAA-certified in 2004, the company announced last week. The IFR-certified XL-2 features a Garmin G500 dual-screen flight display, as well as DME, ADF and an option to add an autopilot. The XL-2 runs an IOF-240 engine from Teledyne Continental, with FADEC, burning 4.5 gallons per hour. The fuselage is formed from carbon fiber, with a welded steel chassis. Discovery, based in Melbourne, Florida, acquired the rights to the XL-2 from Liberty Aerospace in 2014. To date, 135 of the airplanes have been built, according to the company.

The XL-2 flies at 125 knots for up to 500 miles, the company says. The cabin is four feet wide, and panoramic windows provide 270 degrees of visibility. The company says it has an order for three aircraft from a current XL-2 operator in Seoul, South Korea. The business plan calls for production to ramp up this year, with full production capacity by the end of the year.
Several dozen drivers of minibuses in Yerevan went on strike on Tuesday to protest against a sizable increase in fuel prices that has cut their incomes.

The prices of gasoline, diesel fuel and liquefied natural gas, which is used by virtually all buses and minibuses in Armenia, went up on January 1 following the entry into force of higher excise duties on fuel set by a new national Tax Code. The gas price rise was particularly sharp, exceeding 16 percent.

Yerevans public transport system is dominated by minibuses belonging to private firms. Drivers working for them collect fares and pay their employees fixed amounts of money on a daily basis.

Despite the price hike, the minibus fares set by the municipal administration remained unchanged at 100 drams (21 U.S. cents) per ride, translating into less revenue for the already underpaid drivers.

Let them cut the gas price so that we can keep working, said one of the protesting drivers that gathered on a street.

If you go to work but earn nothing will you turn up for work the next day? complained another driver.

Senior municipality officials met the protesters and urged them to end the strike. Alik Gevorgian, an aide to Yerevan Mayor Taron Markarian, said while the municipality cannot cut the fuel price it will try to get the minibus firms to ensure that the drivers do not end up earning less.

We will sort out all issues with your operators in an organized way, said Gevorgian. Everything will be fine.

The drivers responded to these assurances with skepticism. Still, they agreed to end the strike shortly afterwards, while warning of more such protests if their demands are not met.

The municipality has pledged to embark by the end of this year on a radical overhaul of the citys outdated transport system. The battered and overcrowded minibuses are to be replaced by a centralized transport network consisting only of large and medium-sized buses. Deputy Mayor Vahe Nikoyan said in August that the municipal authorities hope to attract a foreign investor that would run the network.
16 January 2018 09:50 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Over the past 24 hours, Armenias armed forces have 124 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said on January 16.

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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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
16 January 2018 10:31 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

During the parliamentary session, the members of Armenias Yelk opposition faction called on people to take to the streets, protest against the rise in prices and force the authorities to amend the Tax Code, the Armenian media reported on January 15.

The MPs accused the ruling party of actions that led to the current situation in the country.

Speaker of the Armenian Parliament Ara Babloyan announced that parliamentary hearings on the price hike will be held on January 23.

MP Edmon Marukyan said that the hearings do not make sense, it is necessary to rapidly amend the Tax Code.

"We urge people to take to the streets because the parliamentary platform has already exhausted itself," Marukyan added.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
16 January 2018 16:11 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

Azerbaijan's low-cost air carrier Buta Airways launched direct flight from the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku to Bulgarian Sofia on January 16.

Baku-Sofia flights of Buta Airways will serve as a basis for the development of tourism, business and relations between Azerbaijan and Bulgaria, Director of Buta Airways Jamil Manizade said at a press conference dedicated to the first such flight in Sofia.

Manizade expressed gratitude to the colleagues at the Sofia airport, Bulgarias Civil Aviation Administration, representatives of the ground handling company who helped to implement this project as soon as possible.

Civil aviation and todays event made the capitals of Azerbaijan and Bulgaria closer. We are very pleased that Buta Airways served as the bridge between the two countries that united, and in the future will serve as an excellent basis for the development of tourism, business and relations between the two states, he said.

Addressing the press conference, Bulgarian Minister of Transport, Information Technologies and Communications Ivaylo Moskovski noted that Azerbaijan and Bulgaria will be able to implement a number of important tourism projects through the launch of a direct flight.

The first flight, which was carried out from Baku to Sofia, was the result of many efforts, aimed at developing relations between the countries, made over the years.

In the end, we achieved the goal that was set in 2015. This result was achieved due to the efforts and will of both sides - the Bulgarian government, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov with the active participation of the President of Bulgaria, as well as the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, Moskovski stressed.

He noted that due to the direct airline, countries can count on developing contacts between business circles.

In terms of tourism, Baku and Azerbaijan offer a number of interesting opportunities. The same applies to the opportunities of Azerbaijani tourists in our country. I am sure that we can realize a number of important projects through the development of these ties between our countries. I believe that the flight from Baku to Sofia can become a symbol of the development and deepening of tourist ties between our countries and provide an opportunity for a number of new projects, the minister said.

Azerbaijans Ambassador to Bulgaria Nargiz Gurbanova noted that Buta Airways is the first low-cost non-EU company to fly to Bulgaria.

I am convinced that this line will make Azerbaijan and Bulgaria even closer and will strengthen the position of our countries as effective connecting centers for travel, she said.

The opening of the new Baku-Sofia air route will further contribute to the development of tourism, Bulgarian Minister of Tourism Nikolina Angelova believes.

She explained that more than 3,000 Azerbaijani tourists visit Bulgaria annually and expressed hope that this figure will increase due to the first direct line.

Prime Minister of Azerbaijan Artur Rasizade and Prime Minister of Bulgaria Boyko Borissov took part in the ceremony of sending off the first flight.

An agreement on opening of direct flights between Baku and Sophia was reached during negotiations of Presidents of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Bulgaria Rumen Radev.

The minimum fare on route Baku-Sophia, as well as in other routes of airline, will be 29 euros (one way). The flights will be carried out once a week on Tuesdays.

The sale of tickets is open on the official website www.butaairways.az. Being a low-cost airline, the minimum fare Buta Airways will offer additional services such as carriage of baggage, hand luggage, hot meals onboard, check-in at the airport, and seat selection in the airplane on a paid basis.

Buta Airways is the first low-cost airline in Azerbaijan, a structural unit of the CJSC Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL). It was founded in December 2016. The Airlines fleet consists of modern Embraer aircrafts. The Airline is based in Baku, at the Heydar Aliyev International Airport.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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16 January 2018 18:33 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

London-based fashion house Gyunel Couture will showcase its Spring/Summer 2018 collection in Paris on January 24.

Founded by designer and artist Gyunel Rustamova, the runway will feature her designs to the city that hosted her first Couture collection for the sixth time, The European Azerbaijan Society reported.

Initially an artist, her work takes its inspiration from her Azerbaijani roots and many diverse cultures, combined with influences from art, history and contemporary culture.

With Its mission and continuous quest for elevating craftsmanship, glamour and reverie, Gyunel Couture has set the standard for a new era within luxury Couture.

Founded by Creative Director Gyunel, Gyunel Couture caters to the worlds most elite couture clients, offering an unparalleled, by appointment-only personal service at the brands luxury VIP Knightsbridge showroom just opposite Harrods.

A firm favourite on both the runway and red carpet, Gyunel has established a notable celebrity following, with high-profile names such as Natalie Portman, Cara Delevingne, Sharon Stone and Olivia Palermo who have attended Gyunels shows, with supermodels such as Erin OConnor, Yasmin Le Bon, and Coco Rocha walking in them. Fans of the brand include Izabel Goulart, Eva Longoria, Nina Agdal and Princess Al Said, who have all beautifully graced Gyunel Couture.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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15 January 2018 17:30 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Bulgarias Prime Minister Boyko Borissov has arrived in Baku on a working visit, said a message on the official Facebook page of the prime minister.

During the two-day visit, Borissov will attend the opening of a direct flight between Baku and Sofia.

The delegation headed by Bulgarias prime minister includes Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova, Economy Minister Emil Karanikolov, Minister of Agriculture, Food and Forestry Rumen Porodzanov, Transport, Information Technology and Communications Minister Ivaylo Moskovski.

Azerbaijan and Bulgaria have great potential for developing energy cooperation. Azerbaijani gas can be delivered to Bulgaria via the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB).

IGB will allow Bulgaria receive Azerbaijani gas, in particular, the gas produced from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz 2 gas and condensate field. IGB is expected to be connected to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) which will deliver the Shah Deniz gas to the European markets.



Initial capacity of IGB will be 3 billion cubic meters of gas. The projects cost is estimated at around 240 million euros.

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16 January 2018 09:10 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Azerbaijan and Bulgaria have very close and friendly relations, said Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev.

He made the remarks at an expanded meeting with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov in Baku on January 15.

"Azerbaijan and Bulgaria have established very close and friendly relations, which are also strengthened by our efforts. Today we have already discussed many important issues of bilateral interaction in the political and energy spheres. I congratulated the prime minister on the chairmanship of Bulgaria at the European Union. This is a great success of your country, a great responsibility. I am confident that you will cope with this important task with honor," said Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev.

The president further stressed that today the delegations will discuss important issues in politics, economy and energy.

"We have very much in common; the main thing that unites us is friendly relations between our peoples and friendly relations between the leaders of our countries. I am very glad that 2018 begins with the visit of our friend," the head of state said.

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16 January 2018 10:04 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

The Southern Gas Corridor project will be a next contribution to the energy security of Europe, said Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev, while making press statements with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov in Baku on January 15.

"Today we broadly discussed various aspects of our relations. We have reiterated that Bulgaria and Azerbaijan, as two friendly countries, will continue to cooperate successfully. In the economic sphere, we must try to increase the trade turnover between our countries. Presently, it is not at the proper level," Ilham Aliyev said.

He said that corresponding instructions are given so that concrete steps are taken in a short period of time to increase the turnover between the two countries.

"I believe that there are good opportunities for mutual investment and we will also work in this direction," said President Aliyev.

He stressed that the main topic of the talks was related to energy.

"As you know, we are partners in this sphere. Azerbaijan and Bulgaria together with other countries ensure the implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor. Azerbaijan has rich gas reserves. "

"Currently, Azerbaijani oil provides energy security of many European countries. In the near future, Azerbaijani gas will have the same function. The Southern Gas Corridor is being successfully implemented, and the Shah Deniz-2 project has been realized by 99 percent. Shah Deniz-2 is the main resource base for the Southern Gas Corridor. Furthermore, the TANAP project is scheduled to complete this year. This project has been implemented by 90 percent. Thus all the works run in accordance with the schedule. This grandiose project is being successfully implemented. After the implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor project, the issues of European energy security will be built on a stronger basis. We are glad that Azerbaijan is contributing to this matter," President Aliyev said.

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16 January 2018 10:05 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

The availability of direct transport link between Azerbaijan and Bulgaria will promote tourism development, said Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, while making press statements with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev in Baku on January 15.

The Prime Minister said that Bulgaria is exporting to Azerbaijan goods in the fields of agriculture and economy.

"We hope that we can expand these opportunities. If Azerbaijani gas is supplied to Bulgaria, then we can balance this commodity exchange. All these investments, availability of direct transport - given that we can arrive in Baku in three hours will allow us to develop the economy and tourism, and enable Azerbaijani tourists to come to Bulgaria's mountain and sea resorts. Bulgarian tourists are keenly interested in your ancient land. This is useful for both countries, said Borissov.

Of course, during a conversation with our colleagues in Brussels, there was a tendency to boycott the holding of the European Games in a Muslim country. Someone tried to disrupt this event. We know that. Of course, we had another position on that. I would not say that this is a separate policy. Simplification of the visa regime may also contribute to the expansion of our relations. Taking on a responsibility, I have discussed with my EU counterparts the visa facilitation with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. I think we can work in this direction comfortably. I can try to do that. But it also depends on my main colleagues in the European Union, the PM stressed.

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16 January 2018 10:50 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

The location of 76 internationally wanted persons and 39 persons wanted by member countries of Interpol was established in Azerbaijan in 2017 with the assistance of the organizations National Central Bureau, Azerbaijani Interior Minister Ramil Usubov said.

He made the remarks at an expanded meeting of the Interior Ministry on Jan. 15, dedicated to the results of fighting crime, protecting public order and ensuring public safety in 2017 and upcoming tasks.

Usubov said that, in general, the indicator of the search activity was 71.4 percent.

The minister noted that the fight against organized crime was conducted purposefully in 2017, and 1,028 criminal groups which committed 2,698 crimes were neutralized.

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16 January 2018 10:28 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov will pay a working visit to France on January 17-18, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a message on January 15.



According to the message, during the visit, Mammadyarov will have meetings with his French counterpart and other officials, as well as with the UNESCO leadership.

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16 January 2018 11:12 (UTC+04:00)

NATOs Supreme Allied Commander Europe Curtis Scaparrotti has hailed Azerbaijans contribution to the Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan as he met with the acting head of Azerbaijan's mission in NATO Gaya Mammadov.

Scaparrotti appreciated Azerbaijans progress achieved in partnership with NATO, Azertag reported.He said NATO commends President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev for his decision to send additional troops to Resolute Support operation in Afghanistan.

Mammadov highlighted defense reforms carried out in Azerbaijan and measures taken to ensure mutual operational coordination with NATO, as well as the situation in the region.

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16 January 2018 14:02 (UTC+04:00)

By Aygul Salmanova

The Institute of Geography of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan and Azerkosmos OJSC signed a protocol of intentions to conduct aerospace monitoring using modern technologies.

Pursuant to the protocol, relevant work will be carried out to determine the existing boundaries of forest areas and refine their boundaries based on remote observation data, the distribution of the main tree species (beech, hornbeam and oak) and to identify and monitor areas where changes occur as a result of natural and anthropogenic influences.

The protocol was signed by the director of the Institute of Geography, academician Ramiz Mammadov and deputy chairman of the Azerkosmos OJSC Rovshan Rustamov.

Azercosmos, the first satellite operator in the Caucasus, is now managing a fixed telecommunication satellite Azerspace-1 and a low-orbit satellite AzerSky.

Azersky low orbit satellite was launched last June in the framework of strategic cooperation between Azerbaijan and France in the space industry, and was transferred to the control of Azerbaijan. The satellite is able to conduct a daily shoot of portions of the surface of the Earth of six million square kilometers. The resolution of the images is 1.5 meters.

Azersky has a broad range of applications including defense and security, emergency response, exploration of natural resources, maritime surveillance, sea faring, environmental protection, urban planning, cartography, agriculture, and tourism.

The launch of the second stationary satellite is planned for 2018, after which a second low-orbit satellite is expected to be placed in orbit. In total, in the coming years, Azerbaijan will hold four satellites.

The second remote sensing satellite will have an ultra-high resolution and will be used for photographing the terrain in emergencies, in agriculture, to address environmental issues, mapping and others.

Azerbaijan, the largest country in the Caucasus region with its strategic geopolitical location, is located at the crossroads of several civilizations over the centuries. Due to its diverse climate, the country is home to rich and diverse fauna and flora.

Additionally, the country is home to a great variety of landscapes so that about the half of Azerbaijans land mass consists of mountain ridges and plateaus risen up to 4002,200 meters.

The rest of the countrys territory consists of plains and lowlands. The Greater Caucasus mountains protect it from direct cold air masses coming from the north, leading to the formation of subtropical climate on most foothills and plains of the country.

In order to conserve and improve countrys forest resources and strengthen the functions of forests, National Forestry Program (NFP) of Azerbaijan has been prepared for a 15 year period that covers the years from 2015 up to 2030 with preparation works starting in 2012 and been completed at the end of 2013.

The Government also provided with technical assistance for the preparation of the National Forestry Programme (NFP) through the project, Support to Development of National Forestry Program and Forestry Legislation mplemented in 2012- 2013.

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16 January 2018 13:36 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

World oil prices in the course of trading on Tuesday morning demonstrate multidirectional dynamics, while remaining near the highs in three years.

Brent crude futures dipped 0.4 percent, to $69.96 per barrel from the previous days close. But traders said Brent was well supported overall around $70 a barrel.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at $64.47 a barrel, up 0.3 percent from their last settlement. WTI hit a December-2014 peak of $64.89 a barrel in early trading, RIA Novosti reported.

Prices for black gold are supported with the reduction of raw materials production within the framework of the OPEC + agreement, analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch believe.

This agreement coincided with a significant demand for oil and economic growth, which contributed to an increase in prices for black gold by 13 percent since early December 2017, the Reuters news agency quotes.

Meanwhile, the next Joint OPEC-Non-OPEC Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) meeting to be held in Oman on January 21. The meeting is planned to discuss possible ways of reaching the OPEC + agreement.

Azerbaijan will not be represented at the Joint JMMC meeting, Azertac reported.

The JMMC includes member states of OPEC and non-OPEC members. The committee`s meeting usually takes place once in every two months to monitor how effectively member countries are complying with agreed production cuts. The Committee includes Venezuela, Kuwait, Algeria, Oman, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Secretary General of OPEC.

In November 2016, the OPEC summit was held in Vienna, where OPEC members reached an agreement on reducing oil output by 1.2 million barrels per day. In December 2016 was a meeting of oil producers outside the OPEC. The meeting ended with signing an agreement to reduce oil production by a total of 558,000 barrels per day starting from January 2017.

OPEC and its partners decided to extend its production cuts till the end of 2018 in Vienna on November 30, as the oil cartel and its allies step up their attempt to end a three-year supply glut that has savaged crude prices and the global energy industry.

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16 January 2018 16:24 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR plans to make investments in rehabilitation of old and amortized pipelines in Georgia in 2018, head of SOCAR Energy Georgia Mahir Mammadov told Trend.

He pointed out that in December 2017, SOCAR Georgia Gas successfully completed the fulfillment of its investment commitments to Georgian government for construction of new gas distribution networks.

"Nevertheless, in 2018, we plan to make some investments in rehabilitation of old, amortized pipelines and construction of commercially attractive distribution networks," added Mammadov.

SOCAR manages its gas distribution networks in various regions of Georgia through SOCAR Georgia Gas company.

SOCAR exports gas to Georgia from Azerbaijani fields which are developed by the company without participation of foreign firms. Moreover, Georgia annually receives Azerbaijani gas produced at Shah Deniz field with participation of SOCAR and foreign companies.

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16 January 2018 17:37 (UTC+04:00)

By Sara Israfilbayova

A representative office of Saudi Arabias state oil company Saudi Aramco will be opened in Azerbaijan soon.

Minister of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources of Saudi Arabia Khalid Al-Falih made the remarks at a meeting with Azerbaijans Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov, who is on an official visit to the country.

Shahbazov also met with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

The level of relations between Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia, which are based on centuries-old historical and cultural roots, were highly appreciated during the meeting.

It was noted that a strong ground has been created for cooperation in all spheres and the parties expressed interest in expanding cooperation in all areas, including in the energy sector.

Further, the Azerbaijani minister met with CEO of Saudi Aramco Amin Nasser.

The meetings participants discussed the possibility of implementing joint projects in third countries by Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR and Saudi Aramco.

Moreover, Minister Shahbazov visited a number of infrastructure facilities, oil fields of Saudi Arabia and held several meetings.

Saudi Aramco is the state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia and a fully integrated, global petroleum and chemicals enterprise. Over the past 80 years it has become a world leader in hydrocarbons exploration, production, refining, distribution and marketing.

Diplomatic relations between the Republic of Azerbaijan and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was established on February 24, 1992. Saudi Arabia was one of the first countries to recognize the independence of Azerbaijan in 1991.

Over the past years, there were numerous visits to different areas of both countries. In recent years, economic relations with the increased interest in investment strengthened and expanded. Delegation of businessmen and managers of large Saudi Arabians companies repeatedly have visited Azerbaijan.

So far, 14 agreements have been signed between Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia. In the near future, eight new agreements are expected to be sign. In this regard, there is no doubt that bilateral political, economic and cultural relations will continue to develop.

The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia for January-June of 2017 amounted to $6.05 million, increased by 25.9 percent, as compared to the same period of 2016, according to the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan.

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16 January 2018 11:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

A delegation of the World Bank (WB) will visit Tashkent on Jan. 18, the Uzbek Foreign Ministry told Trend on January 16.

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev will receive the delegation.

The delegation will be headed by Kristalina Georgieva, Chief Executive Officer of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and International Development Association, as part of the World Bank Group.

The program of the visit envisages negotiations in the government and Senate of the Oliy Majlis (Uzbek parliament), during which the prospects for enhancing cooperation between Uzbekistan and the World Bank will be discussed.

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16 January 2018 10:20 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Turkey condemns the terrorist attack in Baghdad, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a message on January 15.

"Turkey is in solidarity with Iraq in the fight against terrorism," the message said.

Meanwhile, around 100 people were injured as a result of a double suicide attack in the center of Baghdad Jan. 15.

No terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet.

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16 January 2018 10:42 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev and President of the USA Donald Trump will meet on January 16 in the White House, amid Nazarbayevs visit to the United States.

Being the first visit by a Central Asian president to the White House during President Donald Trumps presidency, Nazarbayevs meeting allows him to position Kazakhstan as a, if not the key player in the region in Mr. Trumps mind, political analyst, senior fellow at Singapores Nanyang Technological University James M. Dorsey told Trend.

With strains between the United States and Pakistan heightened, Central Asias potential as a US logistics hub for Afghanistan increases, he said.

He added that Central Asia is also significant in terms of Indian-Chinese rivalry and the USs increasingly close relationship with India.

Touching upon the reaction of Kazakhstans closest partner Russia, which currently remains in difficult relations with the USA, Dorsey added that this is a visit that Russia will no doubt monitor closely.

The two presidents are expected to discuss ways to strengthen and enhance strategic partnership on regional security issues and economic cooperation, as well as touch upon Kazakhstan's leadership on several international challenges during its presidency of the UN Security Council.

The press service of the President of Kazakhstan announced that Nursultan Nazarbayev will pay a three-day official visit to the U.S. on January 16-18.

Apart from meeting his American colleague, President Nazarbayev will also participate in the UN Security Council session.

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16 January 2018 11:55 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project initiated by the energy-rich Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan which strives to expand its gas export routes has shown some progress recently.

The project's development became a hot topic for discussion during the visit of Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov to Islamabad.

During his meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Pakistan once again reconfirmed its interest in early completion of energy projects with Turkmenistan. Abbasi also appreciated the progress made on TAPI project.

The Turkmen foreign minister was accompanied by Energy Minister Charymyrat Purchekov, State Minister of Turkmengaz Myrat Archayev and CEO of TAPI Pipeline Company Limited Muhammetmyrat Amanov.

Meredov informed the prime minister on the current status of TAPI gas pipeline and other energy projects including proposals for electricity transmission line and fiber optic connectivity.

He invited Pakistani companies to participate in the tenders floated by Turkmenistan for TAPI.

Meanwhile, Turkmenistan has set up a working commission to coordinate the implementation of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project (TAPI), the state agency reported on January 15.

The commission is created in order to increase the effectiveness of the implementation of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline projects, transport corridors and energy bridges along the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan route, as well as coordination of the relevant activities.

In the second half of February 2018, the ceremony of laying the Afghan section of the pipeline, the fiber-optic communication line along the same route, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan power transmission line and the commissioning of the Serhetabat-Turgundi railroad.

Earlier, Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov invited the heads of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the ceremony of laying the Afghan section of TAPI.

The construction of the Turkmen section of the TAPI was launched in December 2015. The total length of the pipeline is 1,814 kilometers, including 214 kilometers in the territory of Turkmenistan, 774 kilometers in Afghanistan, 826 kilometers of Pakistan to the settlement of Fazilka on the border with India. The project's preliminary cost is estimated at $10 billion.

Currently, the Turkmen section of the gas pipeline is being laid in line with the schedule. Completion of the construction of this site is planned for the end of 2018.

The pipeline will run from Galkynysh  the largest gas field in Turkmenistan  through the Afghan cities of Herat and Kandahar, and finally reach the Fazilka settlement located near the India-Pakistan border.

For the construction of the TAPI gas pipeline, a consortium - TAPI Pipeline Company Limited - was established and the state concern Turkmengaz was elected as the leader.

The main problems for the projects implementation largely considered to be financing and security issues as the pipeline is to pass through the territory of Afghanistan.

Earlier, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Japanese government expressed their interest in financing TAPI.

The Islamic Development Bank has already allocated a loan worth $700 million for Turkmenistan to construct its TAPI section.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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16 January 2018 13:24 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

Large-scale regional project in the power industry which is set to link Central and South Asia -- CASA-1000 -- has entered construction phase by signing EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) contracts for over 550 kilometers of high voltage direct current transmission line in Afghanistan.

The Afghan section of transmission line begins in Sherkhan Bandar border with Tajikistan and ends at Torkham border checkpoint with Pakistan, the press service of CASA-1000 reported.

The construction of the Afghan section of the regional power transmission line will be carried out by two Indian companies - KEC International Limited and Kalpa-Taru Power Transmission Limited, according to the message.

The agreements on the construction of the Afghan section between the National Energy Company Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat and the above mentioned contractors were signed in Kabul last December in the presence of the country's leadership, as well as representatives of the World Bank and the responsible persons of the countries participating in the CASA-1000 project  Tajikistan and Pakistan.

Lot-1 of the project was signed with KPTL for a total value of $76.9 million. Lot-2 and Lot-3 were signed with KEC for separate values of $85.43 million, and $72.83 million respectively, the press service said.

The total length of the high-voltage transmission line amounts to 765 kilometers while the length of the line inside Afghanistan is 563 kilometers.

There are an estimated 600 villages, 23 districts and seven provinces along the corridor of the line [in Afghanistan]. The provinces along the corridor of the line are Kondoz, Baghlan, Panjsher, Kapisa, Kabul, Laghman and Nangarhar, the press service informed.

It is stressed that communities that exist along the corridor of the line will benefit from the Community Support Program of the Project.

The total value of the project transmission lines in Afghanistan is $235.16 million which is funded by a World Bank Grant. The total cost of CASA-1000 regional project is estimated at $1.2 billion, according to the message.

CASA-1000 is an interregional electricity transmission project in Central and South Asia to connect four countries - Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It is presupposed that the project will create opportunities for the export of electricity surplus in summer period from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to Pakistan through Afghanistan.

Implementation of this project will result in peace and stability in Afghanistan and the region. This project will bring prosperity to the nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The regional CASA-1000 project will not only have economic benefits for Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it will also have a positive impact on the security situation and political stability in these countries.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have the worlds most abundant clean hydropower resources. Both countries have the surplus of electricity during the summer due to water cascading from the mountain ranges, while Afghanistan and Pakistan face chronic electricity shortages and cannot keep pace with demand for it.

The project initially also included transfer of electricity to Afghanistan, however the country abandoned its share of electricity due to dearth of demand, hence Pakistan will receive 1,300 megawatts of electricity.

Groundbreaking for the project took place on May 12, 2016 in Tajikistan in a ceremony attended by the Kyrgyz, Tajik, and Pakistani Prime Ministers. CASA-1000 project will cost more than $1 billion and is expected to be completed by 2020.

Such international financial institution as the World Bank (WB), the European Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), as well as the UK government and others act as investors in the project.

In particular, for the implementation of the Tajik section of the project, the World Bank will allocate $45 million the IDB - $70 million, and the EBRD - $110 million.

Economy analysts are not very hopeful about the implementation of the project due to lack of cooperation between the countries involved. The experts note the insecurity in Afghanistan as another hurdle for the electricity transmission project.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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16 January 2018 13:51 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend

Turkey shouldnt delay the start of military operations against terrorists of Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) in the city of Afrin in the north of Syria, said Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Turkish opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Turkish media reported Jan. 16.

Bahceli said the main target of the PYD and YPG terrorists is to exert pressure on Turkey, as well as dismember Syria.

He noted that Turkey has the right to ensure security of its borders.

Earlier, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the start of new military operations of the Turkish Armed Forces in Syrias Afrin against PYD and YPG is a matter of time.

He also noted that the US is creating an army of terrorists from PYD and YPG forces in Syria on the border with Turkey.

According to Erdogan, the target of this terrorist army is, of course, Turkey. The Turkish president added that the US disgraced itself by supporting PYD and YPG.

Turkey has been moving military equipment to its border with Syria since June 21. Military equipment is being deployed in Turkeys south-central province of Kilis, which borders Syrian territories controlled by YPG and PYD.

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16 January 2018 15:37 (UTC+04:00)

By Kamila Aliyeva

The Uzbek government abandoned the practice of accepting annual investment programs, according to Deputy Prime Minister Sukhrob Kholmuradov.

He noted that the annual investment programs proved to be ineffective.

In addition, many enterprises from the investment lists, receiving benefits and preferences under these programs, turned out to be unprofitable as a result, according to the official.

To date, our investment strategy has been similar to patching holes on a broken road. Starting from this year, we decided to refuse this practice. It is necessary to build a new road from scratch, and not try to fix what has become worthless, he brought this analogy, explaining the reset of the strategy for attracting investments.

So, for the new 2018, Uzbekistan did not accept the traditional investment program. According to the deputy premier, the industries and regions are tasked to develop a ten-year investment attraction strategy. At the same time, forecasted demographic indicators and unique growth points for each region or industry should be taken into account.

Later, long-term plans for the development of industries and regions will make it possible to compile short-term three-year programs. It is planned to start operating according them in 2019.

While the regions and industries are developing their strategy, the government will continue to improve the legal field, seeking to make it more attractive for a foreign investor. The main step in this direction will be the adoption of the Investment Code.

The Code not only protects the rights of foreign investors, but also regulates the use of such instruments as investment visas, investment courts, as well as rules for participation in international arbitration proceedings.

Three-year investment programs will be financed by a new structure, which is not yet established. It will become a single investment fund, which will accumulate budgetary funds and investments of other investors. The purpose of the fund is to control the costs released in accordance with the approved three-year programs.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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Here are six updates on ASC management companies from the past week.

Toronto, Canada-based Medical Facilities Corp., and Leawood, Kan.-based NueHealth formed MFC Nueterra Holding Co., acquiring seven ASCs from Brentwood, Tenn.-based Meridian Surgical Partners for $46.5 million in the process.

Surgery Partners' value fell 24.61 percent throughout 2017, however the company expects to report total year end revenues between $1.30 billion and $1.33 billion.

Tampa, Fla.-based Physician Partners of America will open its 11th pain clinic in Wellington, Fla.

Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare's Executive Chairman and CEO Ron Rittenmeyer announced the company would lay off 2,000 employees and divest more than $1 billion in assets in an attempt to improve its financial performance.

Surgical Care Affiliates' Blue Ridge Day Surgery Center in Raleigh, N.C., filed for $816,000 in equity financing for an undisclosed purpose.

Healthcare technology company Allscripts signed a definitive agreement to acquire Practice Fusion and merge the company into its existing payer and life sciences business.
Moreno Valley, Calif.-based Riverside University Health System anticipates breaking ground on a 200,000-square-foot ambulatory care campus with an outpatient surgery center, also in Moreno Valley, this spring, The Press-Enterprise reports.

Here's what you should know:

1. The health system is projecting a boom of outpatient surgery activity and is hoping to capitalize on it through the new center.

2. The health system's newly appointed chief surgeon, Raul Coimbra, MD, will work with other department leaders to increase both inpatient and outpatient surgical volume.

3. In addition to the surgical center, the center will also offer pharmaceutical services and medical office space.

4. The care center will allow the health system to transition services from Riverside University Health System  Medical Center, also in Moreno Valley, into the new office building, freeing space in the hospital.
Collier County, Fla., deputies arrested a man after he brought a firearm to Physicians Regional Hospital in Naples, Fla., and assaulted a security guard, according to a Naples Daily News report.

The 48-year-old Naples man brought a friend who had sustained a leg injury to Physicians Regional at approximately 3 a.m. Sunday, according to a Collier County Sheriff's Office report.

The report said the man became verbally aggressive after hospital staff informed him the emergency room was full. After a hospital security guard responded, the man reportedly pushed and "chest bumped" the security guard when he was asked to leave. The guard noticed the man had a gun and that his hand was on its grip.

The guard and another employee who helped the guard bring the man to the ground were able to take the gun away from the man.

The man was charged with battery on the security of a hospital's emergency department and introduction of an unlawful article into a hospital.
Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems has been on a hospital divestiture spree for the past year, and the company will continue selling off hospitals in 2018.

To improve its finances and reduce its heavy debt load, CHS put a turnaround plan into place in 2016. As part of the initiative, the company announced in early 2017 it intended to sell off 30 hospitals. CHS completed its 30-hospital divestiture plan Nov. 1.

With the help of proceeds from the hospital sales, CHS brought down its long-term debt load to $13.9 billion in the third quarter of 2017 from $14.8 billion in the same period of 2016. To further reduce its debt, CHS plans to sell another group of hospitals with combined revenue of $2 billion.

In a presentation to investors at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco Jan. 10, CHS Chairman and CEO Wayne Smith discussed the hospital divestiture spree and how the company's strategy has changed in recent years. CHS previously focused on mergers and acquisitions for growth, and the company owned more than 200 hospitals at one point. However, the company is now focused on improving operations at a much smaller number of facilities.

CHS currently owns, operates or leases 127 hospitals in 22 states. Mr. Smith is not sure how many hospitals the company will own after the divestiture plan is completed, but the goal is to have "theoretically around 100 hospitals that are in significantly improved markets that have sustainability," he said at the conference.

CHS ended the third quarter of 2017 with a net loss of $110 million on revenues of $3.67 billion. That's compared to the same period of 2016, when the company recorded a net loss of $79 million on revenues of $4.38 billion.

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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. CHS aims to shed at least 20 more hospitals to reduce debt load

Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems has been on a hospital divestiture spree for the past year, and the company will continue selling off hospitals in 2018.

2. Providence St. Joseph CEO offers deeper analysis of 2018 predictions: Talks tech, genomics, policy and more

Rod Hochman, MD, president and CEO of for Renton, Wash.-based Providence St. Joseph Health, recently shared his top predictions for healthcare in 2018. Dr. Hochman took the time to speak with Becker's Hospital Review and dive deeper into the specifics of some of his forecasts, including the continued market entrance of technology startups, the increased importance of genomics and what roles executives must take in influencing public policy.

3. Nashville mayor delays closure of safety-net hospital

Nashville (Tenn.) Mayor Megan Barry is delaying decisions on the fate of Nashville General Hospital, a city-owned safety-net hospital, until the end of 2018, according to The Tennessean.

4. 8 latest healthcare industry lawsuits

From a federal judge seeking quick resolution of more than 200 opioids lawsuits to a physician imposter sentenced to prison, here are the latest healthcare industry lawsuits making headlines.

5. UnitedHealthcare aims to help consumers navigate benefits with new digital offerings

UnitedHealthcare members enrolled in employer-sponsored health plans have new digital health resources at their disposal this year.
Grays Harbor Community Hospital in Aberdeen, Wash., laid off 21 employees Friday due to subcontracting billing services.

The hospital said via news release it is subcontracting with Cottonwood Heights, Utah-based AVEC Health Solutions for billing services, effective Jan. 12. As a result, the hospital cut 21 positions.

The move aims to improve billing timing and accuracy, as well as cash flow.

"Hospital billing is a vital part of the financial success of an organization," Tom Jensen, CEO of Grays Harbor Community Hospital, said in a statement. "We find ourselves at the point where we need to bring in a more specialized service to effectively attend to our patients' billing concerns."

He said other rural hospitals have also brought in outside professionals for billing services due to the intensive labor involved, and the hospital's move "is in the best interest of our patients."

According to the hospital, affected employees will be paid for the next nine weeks and will also receive tenure-based severance.

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Responding to natural disasters, implementing EHR systems & more: 9 CEOs share their greatest accomplishments in 2017

House Democrats press committee to question Azar on drug prices, ACA
Rod Hochman, MD, president and CEO of for Renton, Wash.-based Providence St. Joseph Health, recently shared his top predictions for healthcare in 2018. Dr. Hochman took the time to speak with Becker's Hospital Review and dive deeper into the specifics of some of his forecasts, including the continued market entrance of technology startups, the increased importance of genomics and what roles executives must take in influencing public policy.

Note: Responses have been edited lightly for length and style.

Question: You say the entrance of startups into healthcare is good for patients, but how do you view it as a provider? Do you feel threatened?

RH: If you don't believe technology startups are the future of healthcare, you're blind. It's the same process that's happened in other industries. A lot of folks in retail were in absolute denial about technology, and now consumer empowerment has taken hold and completely shaken them up. Today, we think nothing of purchasing clothing or even food online, but somehow in healthcare there's always the mentality of, "We're too complicated, we won't be affected by this." This digital revolution is an inevitable force we're seeing everywhere, and healthcare isn't immune to that.

For us, the question becomes who do you partner with? You partner with people on the technology side that understand how to interact with consumers and understand the technology that makes it easier to help consumers connect with your services. We have partnered with Amazon, and our CFO came to us from Microsoft. It's important to partner with people who understand how to create a consumer interface and how consumers want to act in a digital environment. A key with the digital side is expanding from being just involved in acute healthcare to encompass the whole health portfolio. We've struggled on the provider side with how we will get ourselves into the health portfolio, so an increased technological presence is not only a defensive maneuver but also gets us more involved with the consumer.

If you look at Nordstrom, they want to be your retailer for life. We want to be people's health partner for life. So if you consider that concept, how many different ways can we touch a patient and their family? You want to be their go-to source that gets things done, and one of the areas we've missed is the retail side of healthcare.

Q: What are some of the technological capabilities you are most excited about?

RH: We think we can really expand the base by which we take care of primary care patients. Whether that's telehealth visits or home visits, we want to explore the whole spectrum of how we think about primary care. I've been a physician for 40 years, and the traditional model is not going to cut it in the future. The more ways people can access primary care beyond the traditional model, the more revenue streams you have other than a doctor in an office. These technologies not only expand the revenue stream, but also really improve consumer satisfaction.

Q: What steps have you taken to leverage DNA and genomics?

RH: Lee Hood, MD, PhD, our chief scientific officer, has won a National Medal of Science and could honestly be in the running for a Nobel Prize based on the work he's done around gene sequencing. At our Institute for Systems Biology, we look at scientific wellness, which is about how you unlock the secrets of the genome and biome not only to prevent sickness, but to keep ourselves well. That's a really interesting and different way to approach the issue.

What Dr. Hood represents is a conversation between genomics, biologic data and computing power, and those three things together are changing healthcare. In the past, we couldn't crunch data at the rate we had to, but machine learning and increased computing power is what's really going to unlocks the power of DNA. If you think about genomics in terms of silos, you're going to miss something. You always have to consider how it fits in with population health and consumerism.

Q: You emphasize the importance of workforce development. How does Providence St. Joseph's tackle that issue?

RH: One thing that's unique about us is our partner university, Providence College in Great Falls, Mont. We've used it as a learning laboratory to produce the workforce we need for healthcare 2.0, including data scientists, nurse practitioners and other non-traditional clinicians. We've created a virtual university for our whole health system and integrated it with our needs for today and the future. To pipeline your workforce needs with a degree-granting institution is pretty special, especially because we value these non-physician roles so highly and need them just as much as any physician.

Q: You say one of the most important tasks for healthcare leaders in 2018 is to reaffirm the importance of Medicare and Medicaid for providers and patients alike. What steps can executives take to do this?

RH: I think as a leader you have to get your head in there and get engaged. You have to do whatever you can to get the message out. Congress respects hearing from CEOs, but they really like hearing from their constituents. We were able to stir up momentum among our patients and frontline workers, and had really great grassroots efforts in Montana and Alaska that helped influence policy. We are getting a little smarter about how we mobilize grassroots efforts, and actually created an online tool that helps communities send letters to their members of Congress.

Personally, I was up at 4 a.m. speaking on NPR, just doing whatever it takes to reach the public. You can't underestimate how important that is, and you need to make sure you're communicating every day.
Contrary to statements he's made over the past month, Speaker Paul Ryan said Friday Congress will not attempt to tackle entitlement reforms in 2018, according to The Hill.

Though Mr. Ryan previously Republicans would be "hosed" if they did not attempt to reform Medicare and other entitlements this year, he posited a different opinion during a campaign event in Wisconsin Friday.

"I don't see us tackling it this year," Mr. Ryan said, according to The Hill. "You're going to have to find bipartisan consensus to fix these thorny, long-term problems, and we don't have that right now."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said since December he would not attempt to pursue entitlement reform because Democratic lawmakers would never support it.
Two state legislators introduced bipartisan legislation in the Ohio House of Representatives Jan. 11 to prevent Brentwood, Tenn.-based Quorum Health, the 38-hospital spinoff of Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems, from closing Massillon, Ohio-based Affinity Medical Center.

State Reps. Thomas E. West, D-Canton, and Kirk Schuring, R-Canton, crafted House Bill 462 to prevent Quorum Health from permanently closing the hospital, which officials expect to occur Feb. 4.

Under the bill, all for-profit hospitals in Stark County must fulfill certain closure conditions before shuttering a facility. The conditions include the hospital's owner providing proof of the hospital's financial hardship; making three attempts to sell the facility; and creating a plan to transfer all hospital patients and employees to another facility within 15 miles.

The bill also requires a minimum nine-month transition period between public announcement of the hospital's closure and final closure.

"Creating a set of conditions that must be met for closure will force a real conversation about whether everything possible has been done to save Affinity," said Mr. West. "The passion our community feels about this is clear in the outcry that the closure announcement caused. Since then, we have seen a whirlwind of rallies, meetings and action from leaders throughout Stark County to save the hospital, and I believe that this movement will only grow stronger."

The bill comes one day after two U.S. Senators from Ohio wrote a letter to leaders of Quorum Health and Affinity Medical Center to abstain from closing the hospital.
White House Physician Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, MD, said Friday President Donald Trump's first physical, which took place the same day, went "exceptionally well," The New York Times reports.

President Trump received his first official medical exam last week at Bethesda, Md.-based Walter Reed National Military Medical Center since taking office roughly one year ago.

"The president's physical exam today at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center went exceptionally well. The president is in excellent health," Dr. Jackson said.

The statement did not include basic information about President Trump's health, such as his weight, blood pressure or cholesterol levels, and did not indicate which medical tests were performed during the exam, the report states. However, Dr. Jackson is expected to brief reporters on the president's health during a news conference Tuesday, ABC News reports.

When President Trump was a presidential candidate in December 2015, his personal physician, Harold Bornstein, MD, who is affiliated with New York City-based Lenox Hill Hospital, released a four-paragraph letter stating President Trump "will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency," according to The New York Times.

Dr. Bornstein wrote in the letter a "complete medical examination" of the then-candidate indicated "only positive results," the report states. The letter did not disclose many specifics at the time.

Editor's note: This is a continuing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
A handful of Chicago-area hospitals have begun investing in infrastructure to keep their chronically homeless patients off the street. But the move represents more than just lowering inpatient costs at participating facilities, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Chicago-based University of Illinois Health Hospitals & Clinics, in partnership with the nonprofit Center for Housing and Heath, created the Better Health Through Housing initiative to provide homeless patients with stable housing. Officials said doing so costs less for UI Health in the long run because it leaves the institution's chronically ill homeless patients less susceptible to illness and violence, among other factors that may affect their health, according to the report.

"The solution is cheaper than the problem," Stephen Brown, director of preventive emergency medicine at UI Health, told the Chicago Tribune. However, the driving motive behind the program is health equity, he added. "If someone came in with cancer, we would do extraordinary things to keep them alive. The irony is that if someone with a dangerous condition like homelessness comes in, we dismiss them," Mr. Brown said.

The housing for each patient in the program is funded primarily through grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. However, UI Health pays $1,000 per month for each patient in the program to cover support services, such as the hiring of a case manager. The amount is far less than the at least $3,000 per day bill to care for chronically homeless patients in the emergency room. Results from the pilot program indicate the average monthly cost to provide healthcare for each patient dropped 18 percent, from $5,879 to $4,785, the report states.

Last week, UI Health announced it will extend a pilot program, launched in 2015, and commit an additional $250,000 to place 25 more chronically homeless patients into permanent homes.

Several other Chicago hospital systems in the area have begun discussing similar programs. Mr. Brown said institutions such as Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the University of Chicago Medicine have both expressed interest, while Swedish Covenant Hospital and Rush University Medical Center have launched, or plan to launch, programs this year, the report states.

To read the Chicago Tribune report in full, click here.
Numerous healthcare organizations recently shut down medical units and services to shore up finances, focus on more in-demand services or improve patient care lapses.

Here are five hospitals and health systems that have closed units or ceased medical services temporarily or permanently in the past month, as reported by Becker's Hospital Review, beginning with the most recent.

1. Kansas community hospital to close home health agency; public health officials voice concern

Hiawatha (Kansas) Community Hospital announced it will close its Home Health Agency by April 30, immediately sparking concern from Kansas public health officials.

2. UPMC Pinnacle to close walk-in clinic

Harrisburg, Pa.-based UPMC Pinnacle closed its walk-in center Express Lemoyne (Pa.), Jan. 13.

3. Alaska community hospital stops labor and delivery services earlier than expected

Due to staffing issues, Sitka (Alaska) Community Hospital ended labor and delivery services Jan. 5, which is three months earlier than originally planned.

4. Care New England hospital turns into outpatient center Jan. 1

Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket, R.I., part of Providence, R.I.-based Care New England, closed its emergency department Jan. 1 and will "no longer function as a hospital."

5. Carolinas Hospital System-Marion to cease delivery services

Mullins, S.C.-based Carolinas Hospital System-Marion will stop providing labor and delivery services in March.
Marquis Who's Who recognized Andrew E. Sloan, MD, for his neurosurgery career, according to The Daily Telescope.

Here are seven highlights:

1. Dr. Sloan was on the front lines of developing brain tumor immunotherapy as well as Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy.

2. He researches brain tumors, convection-enhanced delivery, gamma knife and cyberknife stereotactic radiosurgery, image-guided neurosurgery, neurosurgery, skull-base surgery, stereotactic surgery and tumor vaccines.

3. Dr. Sloan is a professor and vice chair of neurological surgery at Cleveland-based Case Western Reserve University.

4. He also founded a company for brain tumor surgery simulations.

5. Dr. Sloan was a former president of the Ohio State Neurological Society.

6. He competed a neurosurgery fellowship at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

7. Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes award those based on "position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility and prominence in a field," The Daily Telescope reports.
Former Long Beach, Calif.-based Pacific Hospital owner Michael D. Drobot, was found guilty of healthcare fraud, as reported by the United States Attorney's Office Central District of California.

Here are five things to know:

1. As owner of Pacific Hospital, Mr. Drobot concocted a plan to pay physicians illegal kickbacks to refer workers' compensation patients to the hospital for spine surgeries.

2. The Department of Justice report noted Mr. Drobot offered a $15,000 kickback for a lumbar fusion surgery and a $10,000 kickback for a cervical fusion surgery, and bribed physicians to perform spine surgery at his hospital.

3. The 15-year scheme amounted to $500 million in fraudulent bills and $40 million in illegal kickbacks.

4. Mr. Drobot paid most of the kickbacks through medical device sales for state workers' compensation patients undergoing spine surgery. A California "pass-through" law, which is now repealed, let hospitals bill workers' compensation payers the total implanted device cost for spine surgeries. He owned the company, International Implants, and would add $250 to every device his company sold to Pacific Hospital. Under the "pass-through" law, California had to pay the total cost of devices.

5. Mr. Drobot will serve a five-year and three-month federal prison sentence for conspiracy and paying illegal kickbacks.
The Northern Ireland Housing Executive has appealed for the help of other private sector firms during an emergency meeting as the collapse of Carillion puts hundreds of jobs here at risk.

Northern Ireland workers face the threat of "large scale redundancy" after staff working for infrastructure giant Carillion were sent home yesterday, after it entered liquidation - six months after it issued a profits warning.

It has three major contracts with the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), worth around 35m a year, for maintenance.

Last night, the NIHE warned that "there may be some disruption to routine services in forthcoming days".

Carillion employs approximately 500 staff here, with around 230 working for the NIHE. Across the UK, around 20,000 employees now face an uncertain future.

Unite said, following a meeting with staff, that members were "instructed to go home" when they came to work.

It's understood the NIHE called in a series of other maintenance firms to an emergency meeting yesterday - asking whether they could take on some of the contracts being dealt with by Carillion.

A spokesman for the Housing Executive said: "We are currently seeking clarification on the position of Carillion in light of the announcement this morning.

"We are currently meeting with all our response and heating contractors to put in place contingency arrangements should these be required."

Asked why it took Carillion on with fresh contracts at the end of last year, despite a profits warning in July, it said it "met all financial thresholds and criteria and the Housing Executive had no reason to exclude them from the procurement process or awarding of contracts".

Yesterday, Unite's regional secretary Jackie Pollock said: "Unfortunately, our members have reported that when employees presented for work this morning they were instructed to go home.

"Agency workers were told that they should return to their employment agency for further instructions and those who drove vehicles were instructed to remove all personal possessions and return them.

"It is clear that despite those assurances from the Housing Executive we are facing the threat of large scale redundancy."

Talks were held throughout the weekend between Government ministers and company officials in a bid to keep Carillion in business, but they broke up on Sunday evening without a deal.

Earlier this month the Belfast Telegraph revealed the firm was trying to sell off tens of millions of pounds in Northern Ireland Housing Executive contracts along with the rest of its business across Ireland.

PwC, which is handling the liquidation of Carillion, said: "Unless told otherwise, all employees, agents and sub-contractors are being asked to continue to work as normal and they will be paid for the work they do during the liquidations."

Aside from NIHE contracts, it also employs workers with Power NI and the Ministry of Defence.

Carillion had been struggling under 900m of debt and a 587m pension deficit.

It's also the contractor behind the HS2 rail link in England.

According to the GMB union, workers will "continue to be paid staff until the end of January and they will be working closely with us on the future".

Micheal Mulholland of the GMB union wants the workers to be transferred to other firms, through Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) regulations (TUPE).

That's where workers and potentially any other liabilities are transferred to a new employer, which takes on the work.

And Unite is now demanding that Carillion workers on NIHE contracts are employed directly by the social housing body.

"The direct labour organisation (DLO) already provides social housing maintenance services in some parts of Northern Ireland and on three previous occasions when contractors went into liquidation in the past, the approach of taking workers back into the DLO has worked well," the union said.

Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday afternoon, Cabinet Office minister David Lidington said the taxpayer would not be called upon to bail the firm out.

Documents seen by this newspaper showed the company had prepared a deal for companies to take on all the current Housing Executive contracts. The work, worth around 35m each year, could be valued at more than 400m if some deals are extended as far as 2042.

Consultancy firm EY as part of its 'Project Lion' approached suitable businesses to take on the contracts in Northern Ireland.
Call centre and outsourcing firm Firstsource says it will avoid job cuts after as it's revealed the firm is moving out of its Belfast city centre base.

It's understood staff at the Indian-owned firm's base at Oyster House are now being offered the chance to move to other roles, including working on accounts for Sky customers in the Republic of Ireland.

Many of the Belfast staff are currently working on Sky contracts in the UK.

The firm confirmed that its lease of Oyster House at the corner of Wellington Place and Upper Queen Street, will come to an end from February 2018.

That follows plans to refurbish the building by developer Gareth Graham.

A spokesman said: "I can confirm that Firstsource's lease of Oyster House in Belfast has been terminated, with effect from February 25, 2018 to allow for the redevelopment of the site by the landlord.

"It is not expected that Firstsource's departure from Oyster House will result in any job losses and we are working closely with our employees currently located at Oyster House to find suitable alternatives, including working from other Firstsource sites in Belfast and home working." It's understood around 200 employees currently work at the city centre base.

However, it's not clear whether all of those staff will be offered alternative work elsewhere with the company.

At the start of 2017, it was revealed Firstsource was cutting up to 90 jobs in Belfast.

The firm, which provides outsourcing for companies including Sky, employs around 1,500 people in Northern Ireland.

In February last year, Firstsource said it had reached a new 10-year customer service deal with the satellite broadcaster.

Firstsource employs over 27,000 employees worldwide, across 44 centres.

More than 1,500 of its global workforce are based in Northern Ireland.

A spokesman for the company at the time said:

"Firstsource is fully committed to the Northern Ireland marketplace and is continuing to invest in the region.

"As part of our long-standing relationship with Sky, we have been working with them to maximise the customer experience we provide through our service operation in Belfast.

"As a result, we are reducing the scale of operations in our Oyster House centre and this will likely impact around 90 employees."

The company had said it will try to "redeploy" affected staff to other centres.

The bulk of the firm's Northern Ireland workforce is based in Londonderry, with around 950 workers. Its current home, Oyster House, is being redeveloped as part of a 20m investment.

Gareth Graham's Merchant Square project will see Oyster House in Belfast undergo a series of renovations and extensions. It was given the go ahead by planners in August.

The first phase of the scheme was granted planning permission at the end of 2016, for the refurbishment and extension of Oyster House and Royston House, on the corner of Wellington Place and Upper Queen Street.

The proposal will add an extra 2,115 sq metres of office space.

Merchant Square will help transform a "significant part of Wellington Place, and upon completion will provide retail and office space totalling in excess of 250,000 sq ft", according to developers.

The revamp is expected to be completed by 2019.
PACEMAKER BELFAST 19/05/98 Unionist leader David Trimble, SDLP leader John Hume and Bono and U2 pictured together on stage at the Waterfront hall in Belfast this evening for a concert to promote a YES vote in the referendum on Friday PHOTO PAUL FAITH

PACEMAKER BELFAST 19/05/98 Unionist leader David Trimble, SDLP leader John Hume and Bono and U2 pictured together on stage at the Waterfront hall in Belfast this evening for a concert to promote a YES vote in the referendum on Friday

Bono, lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, sings early in the first of five sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden in New York, Friday, Oct. 7, 2005. The band is on the third leg of their Vertigo 2005 Tour, which kicked off six months ago on the West Coast of the U.S.

PACEMAKER PRESS INTL BELFAST 24/7/09. Bono on stage tonight at Croke Park as the Irish supergroup played their homecoming gig in front of 80,000 fans. Picture Charles McQuillan/Pacemaker.

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured GV of the stage and crowd. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured GV of the stage and crowd. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured L-R The Edge, Larry Mullen, Bono, Adam Clayton. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

U2 at Croke Park - Dublin...Adam Clayton (left) and The Edge from U2 playing at Croke Park in Dublin. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday July 24, 2008. Photo credit should read: Julien Behal/PA Wire ...A

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured lead singer Bono. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured GV of the stage and crowd. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

U2 Play their final 360 concert at Croke Park...Larry Mullen - U2 U2 Play their final 360 concert at Croke Park supported by The Script, Dublin, Ireland - 27.07.09. VIPIRELAND.COM

McBurney/U2 Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured lead singer Bono. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Monday 27th July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

U2 Play their final 360 concert at Croke Park...Bono - U2 U2 Play their final 360 concert at Croke Park supported by The Script, Dublin, Ireland - 27.07.09. VIPIRELAND.COM

McBurney/U2 Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured lead singer Bono. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Monday 27th July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured The Edge. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Monday 27th July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured lead singer Bono. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Monday 27th July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured Adam Clayton. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured lead singer Bono. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured GV of the stage and crowd. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured lead singer Bono. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured GV of the crowd. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured lead singer Bono. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

Bono, lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, sings early in the first of five sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden in New York, Friday, Oct. 7, 2005. The band is on the third leg of their Vertigo 2005 Tour, which kicked off six months ago on the West Coast of the U.S.

Bono (right) leans on guitarist The Edge as U2 perform their second song 'I Will Follow' at Croke Park stadium

U2's singer Bono on stage during the second Irish date of their Vertigo Tour at Croke Park Stadium, Dublin Saturday June 25, 2005.

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured GV of the stage and crowd. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured GV of the stage and crowd. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured L-R The Edge, Larry Mullen, Bono, Adam Clayton. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured lead singer Bono. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

U2 at Croke Park - Dublin...Adam Clayton (left) and The Edge from U2 playing at Croke Park in Dublin. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday July 24, 2008. Photo credit should read: Julien Behal/PA Wire ...A

McBurney/U2 - Strictly Sunday Life Use Only Thousands of fans travelled down to see Irish super group U2 perform live at Croke Park, Dublin for the 1st night of 3 for their the U2, "360 (degree)" world tour. Pictured GV of the stage and crowd. Location: Croke Park, Dublin Picture date Friday 24rd July 2009 Pictures by Liam McBurney  Copyright Liam McBurney NO PRINTS Liam McBurney liammcburney@gmail.com +44 7837 68 57 67

U2 Play their final 360 concert at Croke Park...Larry Mullen - U2 U2 Play their final 360 concert at Croke Park supported by The Script, Dublin, Ireland - 27.07.09. VIPIRELAND.COM

U2 at Croke Park - Dublin...The Edge (left) and Bono from U2 play at Croke Park in Dublin. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday July 24, 2008. Photo credit should read: Julien Behal/PA Wire ...A

Increased security at the SSE Arena in Belfast for the U2 concert. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. (Photo by Kevin Scott)

PACEMAKER BELFAST 18/11/2015 U2 in concert this evening at the SSE Arena in Belfast. Security was ramped up this evening in Belfast in the wake of last weeks terrorist attacks in Paris. Photo Tremaine Gregg/Pacemaker Press

PACEMAKER BELFAST 18/11/2015 U2 in concert this evening at the SSE Arena in Belfast. Security was ramped up this evening in Belfast in the wake of last weeks terrorist attacks in Paris. Photo Tremaine Gregg/Pacemaker Press

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Bono performing with U2 at the first of the band's sold-out homecoming gigs at the SSE Arena in Belfast. PA

Bono performing with U2 at the first of the band's sold-out homecoming gigs at the SSE Arena in Belfast. PA

Bono performing with U2 at the first of the band's sold-out homecoming gigs at the SSE Arena in Belfast. PA

(Left to right) Larry Mullen Jr, The Edge, Bono and Adam Clayton of U2 performing at the first of the band's sold-out homecoming gigs at the SSE Arena in Belfast. PA

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

(Left to right) Larry Mullen Jr, The Edge, Bono and Adam Clayton of U2 performing at the first of the band's sold-out homecoming gigs at the SSE Arena in Belfast. PA

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

PACEMAKER BELFAST 18/11/2015 U2 in concert this evening at the SSE Arena in Belfast. Security was ramped up this evening in Belfast in the wake of last weeks terrorist attacks in Paris. Photo Tremaine Gregg/Pacemaker Press

PACEMAKER BELFAST 18/11/2015 U2 in concert this evening at the SSE Arena in Belfast. Security was ramped up this evening in Belfast in the wake of last weeks terrorist attacks in Paris. Photo Tremaine Gregg/Pacemaker Press

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

PACEMAKER BELFAST 18/11/2015 U2 in concert this evening at the SSE Arena in Belfast. Security was ramped up this evening in Belfast in the wake of last weeks terrorist attacks in Paris. Photo Tremaine Gregg/Pacemaker Press

Picture - Kevin Scott Belfast , UK - NOVEMBER 18, U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

U2 perform at Belfast's SSE Arena for the first time in almost a decade. Its also their first concert since cancelling their Paris gig following the tragic events that have unfolded , Northern Ireland on November 18 (Photo by Kevin Scott )

Irish rockers U2 have confirmed they are to play Belfast as part of their Experience and Innocence tour this year.

On Tuesday morning the band confirmed they would be playing Manchester and London, Dublin and Belfast.

The date and venue, however, have yet to be confirmed. Tickets go on sale on January 26.

The Band last played the city in November 2015 for their Innocence and Experience tour, their first appearance in two decades. That tour was named the number one concert of 2015 by the New York Times.

The tour kicks off in the US on May 2. Dates for Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands have already been confirmed for the European leg.

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Victoria Beckham has revealed her fun side  and her dance moves  in the new issue of Vogue Spain.

The fashion designer and former Spice Girl said she had so much fun dancing on set while modelling for the shoot as she shared the images on Instagram with her 18.4 million followers.

Beckham, 43, first revealed the front cover, on which she sits on a table wearing nothing but a flesh-coloured body suit.

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Along with the picture, she wrote: Thank you @voguespain! Had so much fun dancing on set and loved working with @boo_george_studio and @sarafernandezcastro_.

She added: This shoot is so different from anything Ive ever done.

Another of the pictures from inside the magazine, which were photographed by Boo George and styled by Sara Fernandez, saw Beckham wearing just a pair of briefs with a jumper, and heels.

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She joked along with the snap: When all you need is a pair of heels!

Beckham wore her own designs for the shoot, including a red midi-dress from her spring/summer 2018 collection that costs 2,250.

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She also returned to her pop music roots as she gave her fans a behind the scenes glimpse at the photoshoot, in which she danced in front of the camera to get the perfect pose.

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Beckham was quoted by the magazine as saying: I have grown up in public since I was 19, my days of worrying about what people think have been left behind.
If you're sick of wearing glasses or contact lenses, the only other option to achieve clear vision is laser eye surgery - a procedure now thought to account for around 75% of UK surgical procedures.

Such operations, which are also known as refractive surgery or laser vision correction (LVC), correct eye problems such as short sight, long sight and astigmatism, using a laser to reshape the front of the eye, which improves the ability to focus.

It's an increasingly popular option for people with sight problems and the Royal College of Ophthalmologists (RCOphth) says more than 100,000 refractive surgery procedures are performed every year in the UK.

However, surgery to correct the need for glasses or contact lenses isn't currently available on the NHS and it also isn't covered by private health insurance.

Private clinics charge from 595 up to 2,175 per eye, depending on the type of procedure, so it's a big investment that needs very careful, well-informed consideration before you decide to take the plunge.

Who is laser surgery suitable for?

Most people aged over 18 can have laser surgery, as long as they've had a stable spectacle prescription for at least two years. Short sight typically stabilises by late teens or early 20s.

Mr Bruce Allan, a consultant ophthalmic surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, says: "Laser eye surgery has been very widely used for the correction of short sight and astigmatism for over 20 years - we perform about 3,000 procedures a year at Moorfields, and over 16 million people worldwide have had LVC.

"Modern laser systems are also very effective at correcting long sight, which tends to affect people more in mid-life, and LVC for older patients is increasingly popular."

He says around 99% of people in a large recent study published in the Review of Ophthalmology said that they were satisfied with the result of their laser treatment, and for the small minority of patients with a poor outcome, revision treatment is normally effective.

You're most likely to be suitable for laser eye surgery if your glasses prescription is in the range of:

Up to -10.00D of myopia or short sight

Up to +4.00D of hyperopia or long sight

Up to 6.00D of astigmatism.

Patients may not be suitable for LVC if they have other eye conditions including cataracts, or problems with their eye surface. It also isn't recommended for correcting reading prescriptions either, as these prescriptions change as you get older.

Other surgical options

Allan explains implant-based techniques may be more suitable for some patients.

Lens implantation techniques have two main categories: refractive lens exchange (RLE), which is identical to cataract surgery where the natural lens is replaced with a lens implant, and phakic intraocular lenses (PIOLs), where artificial lenses are implanted in front of the natural lens without replacing it. This is often used in younger patients where the spectacle prescription is outside the normal range for laser eye surgery.

How do you choose a clinic?

The Royal College of Ophthalmologists (RCOphth) advises potential patients to think carefully before having refractive surgery. The RCOphth has a helpful checklist on its website (rcophth.ac.uk) that you can use in the consultation with the refractive surgeon.

Patients are advised to choose a surgeon on the General Medical Council's specialist register in ophthalmology (gmc-uk.org), or who has the Cert LRS qualification, which can be checked via the Royal College of Ophthalmologists.

Also, make sure the hospital or clinic is regulated with the relevant regulator for the area of the UK it's based in.

The clinic should be clear from the start about the total cost of the procedure. This normally includes follow-up visits and treatment for any resulting problems. Additional laser treatments to fine-tune the visual result, for two years after surgery, are normally included in the cost.

What happens during the surgery?

The treatment is usually carried out on both eyes during the same visit and takes a around 30 minutes, although the laser is applied for only a minute or two. All procedures use anaesthetic drops for comfort, and a spring clip is used to hold the eyelids apart.

Patients will be asked to look up at a target light during the treatment to help keep the eye in the right position, and lasers are then used to remove a lens-shaped piece of tissue to reshape the cornea beneath. While the three available treatments involve slightly different methods, all have similar results.

Patients can go home on the same day as surgery, with antibiotic and anti-inflammatory drops to help the eyes heal.

Risks and side-effects

Permanent loss of vision is rare after LVC and the main risk is that further surgery may be needed for optimum results - up to one in 10 patients require some form of additional surgery.

In the early period after surgery, patients may see glare, halos, starbursts and ghost images, but such problems usually resolve within a few months.

There may also be intermittent blurring, temporary red blotches on the eyes, and dry eye symptoms, which can be treated with artificial tears, and should get better within a few months.

What results can you expect?

More than 95% of patients are satisfied with the outcome of surgery, and many describe it as life-changing.

Although glasses may still be needed for some activities after treatment, particularly for reading in older patients, Allan says: "A reasonable expectation is to have vision at the same level as you get in soft contact lenses, but without having to wear them.

"Another way of putting it is that you should see at least as well as a normal non-spectacle wearer."
Brittany Ferries 'Connemara' will sail from Cork to Santander (artist's impression).

The first direct ferry route from Ireland to Spain will be launched at the end of April, it has been announced.

Brittany Ferries will operate two direct return sailings every week from Cork to Santander in Northern Spain.

Tickets for the crossings will be available from the end of January. The route will operate until November.

The crossing will take approximately 26 hours, with departures from Cork on Wednesdays and Fridays.

A new ship will be chartered to serve the route, carrying around 500 passengers with space for 195 cars.

Expand Close Cork to Santander map (Courtesy of Brittany Ferries) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Cork to Santander map (Courtesy of Brittany Ferries)

This is a significant move for Brittany Ferries, offering haulage companies a direct route to Spain and passengers a far greater range of holiday options from Cork, said Hugh Bruton, general manager Brittany Ferries Ireland.

As a destination so-called green Spain promises visitors a wealth of opportunities. It hosts sweeping sandy beaches, snow covered mountains just an hour from the port, fabulous food and offers visitors a welcome as warm as the Spanish will receive when they join us in Ireland.
A police custody officer was bitten by a man who had earlier been caught being disorderly on a Christmas night out with fishing friends, a Co Londonderry court has been told.

Gary David Edwards (37), whose address was given as Dunluce Court, Bushmills, admitted charges of disorderly behaviour and assaulting the officer.

A prosecutor told Coleraine Magistrates Court yesterday that police had received a report of a man being abusive in Bushmills. When they went to the scene they found the defendant's hand was bleeding.

The prosecutor said a crowd gathered and the defendant called police "black b******s" and also made reference to "east Belfast UVF" during the incident at 10.20pm last December 1.

The court was told that when taken to a police station the defendant bit a custody officer on the leg.

A defence lawyer said his client had been "high intoxicated" and didn't remember much of the night out. He said Edwards had been "drinking with fishing friends at a Christmas 'do'".

The lawyer said the defendant had consumed spirits and had subsequently apologised to the custody officer and had apologised to ambulance staff.

District Judge Peter King said, fortunately, "no lasting damage" was caused by the bite.

Imposing a three month prison term, suspended for two years, the judge told Edwards: "If you can't celebrate Christmas without being arrested, then maybe you should look at your drink consumption."
Divers emerge from the water after finding the body of a missing workman who was working on a brige near Gweedore

A man in his 60s from Co Fermanagh has died after falling into a river in Gweedore, Co Donegal.

A spokesman for the Irish Health and Safety Authority said the man had been carrying out work to upgrade a bridge at the time of his fall.

He has been named locally as Ian Smith and it is understood he was working for Deane Public Works Ltd, a firm based in Enniskillen.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, SDLP councillor for Fermanagh and Omagh District Council John Coyle said the deceased man was from the town of Ederney in his constituency.

"There is just a sense of shock at the loss of a man, and in a close knit community like Ederney it's a big shock," he said. "My deepest condolences go to the family at this tragic time."

UUP councillor Diana Armstrong said: "Obviously we would want to convey our sympathy to the man's family.

"Someone has gone out to do their work and they haven't returned home."

Independent councillor Micheal Cholm Mac Giolla Easbuig, who represents the constituency in Donegal where the fall happened, said earlier that he had passed the area where work was being carried out on the bridge.

"I don't really know what to say to be honest with you, it is just shockingly sad," he said.

"A man gets up in the morning to go to work and he doesn't get to come home to his community."

Mr Mac Giolla Easbuig said he planned to propose a minute's silence for the man at a meeting of Donegal County Council today.

Emergency services were first alerted to the incident on the River Clady when a member of the public called the Malin Head Coast Guard shortly after 11am yesterday morning.

This triggered a multi-agency response, involving members of the Coast Guard, gardai, the Fire Service, members of mountain rescue, and local divers.

The man's body was recovered by divers around 200 yards downstream shortly after 2.30pm.

His body has been taken to Letterkenny University Hospital to allow a post-mortem to be carried out.

A full investigation into the incident will be carried out by the Health and Safety Authority.
Tanks on the streets of N Ireland during Operation Motorman (PA)

Revealing the identity of a retired Army major during the inquest of an IRA man shot by soldiers would hamper his ability to holiday in Ireland, a coroner has heard.

The former company commander with the Royal Scots regiment is due to give evidence at next months inquest for Seamus Bradley, who was killed in disputed circumstances in Londonderry in 1972.

At a preliminary hearing in Belfast Coroners Court, a lawyer for the Ministry of Defence urged the coroner to grant anonymity to the major and an ex-Army medical officer  citing concerns for their safety in the context of the ongoing threat posed by dissident republicans.

They were the latest of a number of anonymity applications heard by coroner Judge Kinney.

MoD barrister Mark Robinson said the ex-company commander grew up in Northern Ireland, and during the Troubles his Armagh home was targeted in a fire bomb attack.

He said he had been forced to sell an estate left to him by his parents due to fears for his safety.

He is concerned as a result of giving evidence that he will be associated with the allegations in this case and can be easily traced, said Mr Robinson.

The lawyer added: He holidays in Northern Ireland and the South and the witness is concerned it could curtail his ability to move freely around the island.

Mr Bradley, 19, was killed by soldiers during Operation Motorman  an Army attempt to gain control of republican areas in Belfast and Derry that had previously been considered no-go zones for the security forces.

The Army claimed the teenager was shot while he was in a tree and suffered additional injuries as he fell.

His family have alleged he was killed later, claiming he was taken away in an Army Saracen vehicle and alleging he sustained fatal injuries while being subjected to interrogation.

Mr Robinson said the inquest was set to examine allegations of murder, torture and child abuse and the major was concerned that revealing his identity would pose a clear risk to his safety.

A barrister representing the Bradley family argued against the MoD application.

David Heraghty QC said the major was a senior military officer in 1972 and had no direct involvement in the events on the ground in Derry that led to Mr Bradleys death.

Mr Heraghty said the witness did not have a high profile, so there would be no publicity or prior knowledge around any future trips to the island.

He could continue to do so in the future without any particular concerns arising, said the lawyer.

Mr Robinson also pressed the case for the ex-medical officers name to be withheld.

He fears participation in the inquest will bring him to the attention of dissident republicans and someone may wish to cause him or his family harm as a result, he said.

The barrister said the witness had re-trained as a GP after leaving the services, so could be very easily traced if his name was released.

Mr Heraghty questioned the grounds for the witnesss concerns, highlighting that he was not involved in the killing in any shape or form, with his role confined to certifying Mr Bradleys death in the back of the Saracen.

Judge Kinney said he would consider the anonymity applications and give a decision before the scheduled inquest start date on February 5.
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

Colin Worton, whose brother Kenneth was one of those killed

The brother of one of the men killed in the Kingsmill massacre has said Sinn Fein should now end its glorification of terrorism.

Colin Worton's brother Kenneth (24) was one of the 10 Protestants gunned down in cold blood after their work minibus was ambushed by the IRA.

He told the Belfast Telegraph that he would like to see more sincerity from Sinn Fein in the wake of Barry McElduff's resignation as MP.

"In the first instance, the resignation is to be welcomed, but not to be gloated over because we are just glad that he went," he said.

"It should have been earlier rather than later, but I still don't believe in his apology and still believe what Barry McElduff said is only the tip of the iceberg.

"I still believe a lot of people within Sinn Fein and their supporters hang on to these thoughts and images."

Mr Worton also revealed that he had not known that his elderly mother had been on the receiving end of prank phone calls about Kingsmill bread.

"The FAIR (Families Acting for Innocent Relatives) office got a few, and my mother only told us a few days ago that she was getting them," he said.

"We have to move on, there should be no place in society for any glorification of terrorism.

"Sinn Fein and paramilitaries on the unionist side have a right to remember their dead, as they call it.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close 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 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 Kimgsmill massacre aftermath Walter Chapman John McConville Kenneth Worton Reginald Chapman Robert Walker Robert Freeburn James McWhirter Joseph Lemmon John Bryans Robert Chambers The funeral service for five victims of the Kingsmills massacre at the Presbyterian church grounds in Bessbrook Alan Black was shot 18 times but survived the Kingsmills massacre Alan Black in hospital after the IRA shot him and killed 10 of his colleagues at Kingsmills Photopress Belfast 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 A man lays a wreath at the Kingsmill memorial in South Armagh (PA) PA Wire/PA Images People attend a roadside service marking the 42nd anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre (Brian Lawless/PA) Karen Armstrong holds a photograph of her brother John McConville, who was killed in the Kingsmill attack Sisters Cathy Michale, Colleen McKenna and Eileen Reavey unveil the monument to commemorate their brothers in Whitecross, Armagh Newraypics.com 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 Kevin Scott / Presseye / Facebook

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Whatsapp 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

"But it should be in a closed room with no media. They shouldn't be parading up and down streets remembering people that have carried out murder and terrorist offences."

Mr Worton said if Sinn Fein really wanted to make amends to victims "what they could start doing is to get away from glorifying terrorism".

"Until we start seeing that then, me personally, I don't believe them," he said.

"I believe Barry McElduff is only one of many of the same mindset. Until all that changes, I don't see any point in meeting them.

"I want to see actions - actions speak louder than words."

Mr Worton also called for those responsible for Kingsmill to come forward and do their time.

"If they were man enough to do the crime, then they should be man enough to do whatever time is handed down to them," he said.

"I have to appreciate that it is only going to be two years. I don't agree with it, but that is all that is going to happen to them.

"But at least it would be something. And any apology would have to be heartfelt. I haven't really seen it to date."

May Quinn, whose brother Bobby Walker (46) was among those killed, echoed Mr Worton's view that Mr McElduff should have stepped down sooner.

"I think resigning was the only thing he could do," she said.

"There is nothing he could do to right a hurt like that, it was too vicious.

"He should never have done it - to mock the dead just beggars belief."

Meanwhile, victims campaigner William Frazer, who has worked with the Kingsmill families over many years, said he welcomed Mr McElduff's resignation "as a recognition of his guilt".

"I am however disappointed that he didn't take the opportunity to do so sooner, he could have saved the families a week of great hurt and unnecessary media attention," he said.

"Undoubtedly the mask slipped, Barry McElduff was exposed, and as was the level of public outrage he was left with no option. The public wanted him to resign. I am glad he has now done so.

"I wish to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the families, their strength, dignity and determination in stark contrast to many of the vile Twitter trolls and so-called prank callers.

"Let this be a lesson, there is no hiding place for sectarianism or glorification of terrorist atrocities.

"Sinn Fein must now take this opportunity to apologise on behalf of the republican movement, recognising the pain and suffering caused throughout Northern Ireland by the actions of the IRA.

"Things were moving in the right direction with John O'Dowd's comments on BBC's The View. It now seems SF are willing to sacrifice one MP rather than apologise for the actions of the IRA."
An uncle and his nephew admitted dumping the carcass of a dead dog in a field in Draperstown to make it look as if the dog had been legally shot for sheep-worrying

An uncle and his nephew admitted dumping the carcass of a dead dog in a field in Draperstown to make it look as if the dog had been legally shot for sheep- worrying.

Brian McEldowney (56) from Five Mile Straight in Draperstown pleaded guilty to shooting Buster, a four year-old border collie cross beagle.

He also admitted entering as a trespasser the byre in which he shot the dog and possessing a shotgun with intent to endanger life.

His 37-year-old nephew Gerald McEldowney, a hill farmer from Cloane Road in Draperstown, admitted removing the destroyed dog to impede the apprehension of his uncle Brian.

Both men are to be sentenced at the Crown Court in Londonderry on Thursday.

A Public Prosecution Service barrister told Judge Philip Babington yesterday that the dog belonged to neighbours of Gerald McEldowney.

Its owners, the McGuigan family, described Buster as "a great family pet, and a lovely dog".

The defendants believed the dog had been responsible for a number of sheep worrying incidents on Gerald McEldowney's farm.

On the evening of March 31, 2016, the dog got loose from its owner's farmyard and ran into Gerald McEldowney's adjoining field.

It returned 10 minutes later followed by an angry Brian McEldowney who drove into the farmyard on a quad shouting "where is the dog" before he hit it on the head with a stick.

The dog's owner, Attracta McGuigan, put Buster into a byre before going to collect her son from work.

She left her two daughters, one of them aged 15, in the house.

Shortly after Mrs McGuigan had left, the 15 year-old daughter saw the two defendants and a third man in the farmyard outside her home.

"The defendant Brian McEldowney was seen by her carrying a shotgun," the prosecutor told the court.

"He opened the byre door and he went in and the daughter heard two bangs. She came running out of the house and saw the third man hosing blood away from the byre.

"She saw Gerald McEldowney tying a blue rope around the dog's legs and then pulling the dog by its legs. The dog was then lifted by him over a gate and put into a field as if to make the shooting of the dog legal for sheep-worrying."

Three days later the dog's carcass was thrown into a second field by Brian McEldowney, again to make it look as if it had been legally shot for sheep worrying.

The carcass was recovered by the police following a complaint from the McGuigan family and a post mortem examination stated it had died from a gunshot wound to the neck.

Defence barristers told Judge Babington the uncle and nephew both apologised to the McGuigan family for their actions.

They said the defendants believed the dog was responsible for sheep worrying on Gerald McEldowney's hill farm, thereby putting him under financial pressure.

The barristers said the defendants and the McGuigan family lived cheek by jowl in the countryside and the McEldowney's were mindful of the immediate and long-term trauma they had caused to the McGuigans.

Judge Babington released the defendants on continuing bail and said he would sentence them on Thursday.
The light aircraft following the crash at Castlewellan Forest Park last year

The light aircraft following the crash at Castlewellan Forest Park last year

A newly-qualified pilot has blamed his inexperience for a crash landing into trees in Castlewellan which wrecked his aircraft but from which he and his passenger miraculously escaped unhurt.

The crash happened after the 56-year-old pilot, who had only gained his pilot's licence a month earlier, misinterpreted the advice an instructor had given him before he took off from Kernan microlight site near Tandragee, Co Armagh, on May 29 last year.

The man and his female co-pilot had a lucky escape when they walked away from their aircraft after it crashed into Castlewellan Forest Park.

Pictures of the crash showed the plane's wing caught in a tree while the body of the light aircraft came to a stop on the ground.

The instructor had advised him, in view of a low cloud base to "stay in the local area", according to a newly published Air Accident Investigation Branch report into the incident.

Instead, though, he flew round the south of the Mourne Mountains, and during his return flight via Newcastle encountered rising ground, lowering cloud and reduced visibility in the area of Castlewellan.

The report stated: "He decided that his best course of action was to land in a field."

It also said that he knew the tiny Ikarus C42 microlight - reg G FLYM - could be landed in a short distance and if he could not take off after landing he was prepared to use a trailer to get it back to the airfield.

However, the report added: "He could not see a field and instead he carried out an emergency landing into trees on the top of a hill.

"The aircraft sustained significant damage but he and his passenger were uninjured."

It stated the pilot later told crash investigators he was caught out by the rising terrain and lowering cloud, and that this was due to his inexperience.

It added: "When the instructor advised him to stay in the local area, he interpreted this area to include up to Newry which was 13km south of Kernan.

"He did not think he was doing anything risky by going beyond this distance because when he reached Newry the cloudbase was still above 1,000ft."

But the report said: "The instructor who advised the pilot before the flight probably wanted him to stay within a few miles of the airfield due to the low cloudbase.

"However, the pilot considered that it was safe to fly further than this as long as the cloudbase remained above 1,000ft.

"He had probably not realised that he was heading towards terrain that was as high as 750ft on his return leg from Newry.

"It is noted that, even when travelling at a typical C42 cruise speed of 85 knots, the 'situation ahead' can change rapidly and low cloud can hide the tops of hills."

At the time, eyewitnesses told the Belfast Telegraph they saw the low-flying plane disappear into the fog before hearing it crash near the hilltop.

The two people onboard were able to escape from the wreckage before police and emergency services arrived.

They were treated at the scene for their injuries.

It's understood that they suffered cuts and bruises and were badly shaken.
Mairtin O Muilleoir should follow Barry McElduff and stand down from his senior Sinn Fein position, Jim Allister has said.

Mr McElduff finally resigned as West Tyrone MP yesterday after he caused outrage by posing with a Kingsmill-branded loaf on his head on the 42nd anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre on January 5.

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More than 38,500 people had signed an online petition calling on Mr McElduff to quit.

South Belfast MLA Mr O Muilleoir had retweeted the offending video, although he later apologised and retracted the retweet.

TUV leader Mr Allister welcomed Mr McElduff's resignation, but said Sinn Fein had been backed into a corner - and needed to go a step further by sacking former finance minister Mr O Muilleoir as well.

He said: "The harrowing but dignified comments of victims, especially those of the sole survivor of the massacre, Alan Black, have forced this.

"The potential for electoral damage to Sinn Fein, particularly south of the border, was clear.

"Sinn Fein thought that this would blow over but victims ensured that was impossible. Now, in an attempt at damage limitation McElduff has been pushed."

Mr Allister said following Mr McElduff's decision, it was only right for Mr O Muilleoir to resign as an Assembly member too.

"Though McElduff has belatedly done the right thing, what about Mairtin O Muilleoir who thought it appropriate to approvingly retweet the video?" he asked.

"If it is right for McElduff to resign - and it is - then let sincerity, not expediency, be demonstrated by O'Muilleoir following suit."

Mr O Muilleoir apologised for his part in the stunt last week, saying he saw Mr McElduff's tweet as being wholly apolitical and retweeted it on that basis.

The party said yesterday it had accepted Mr O Muilleoir's explanation, and felt no other action was needed.

Mr McElduff's decision followed a week of bitter recrimination which saw the West Tyrone MP widely condemned for his video stunt. He had been accused of mocking the Kingsmill massacre victims on the anniversary of the IRA murders of the 10 Protestant workmen in south Armagh.

Mr McElduff said: "Had I been conscious of the connection to the terrible atrocity at Kingsmill I would certainly not have posted that tweet.

"I genuinely did not make that connection, not for a second did I make that connection in my mind."

DUP leader Arlene Foster said it was time for Sinn Fein "to learn the lessons from these dark events and to deal with the fact that it, and many of its individual members, continue to publicly glorify the murderous deeds of the past".

Meanwhile, at a Sinn Fein press conference at its Falls Road headquarters, only selected broadcasters and the Press Association were permitted to question the party's northern leader, Michelle O'Neill.

The party had extended an invitation to "all media" to attend the meeting outside.

Ms O'Neill, flanked by party faithful including West Belfast MP Paul Maskey and Irish Senator Niall O Donnghaile, explained that Mr McElduff had taken the decision because of the "unintended hurt" caused to all those affected by the atrocity.

"Barry recognises that this controversy and his continuing role in public office is compounded by the stress caused to the families and victims of Kingsmill," she said. "And he again offers his profound apologies for the unintended hurt that has been caused to both the Kingsmill families but also the wider victims community."

Asked about Mr O Muilleoir's future in the party, she said: "I spoke with Mairtin and he needs to consider his social media use, he needs to be more responsible in his social media use and that is the matter dealt with."

Yesterday's resignation means there will be a by-election in West Tyrone, where last year Mr McElduff secured more than 50% of the vote.
Post-mortem examinations on the bodies of two best friends who died in a house in Belfast at the weekend have proven inconclusive, police have said.

The PSNI are now awaiting the results of toxicology reports in relation to the deaths of mother-of-three Kelly Watters (42) and Stuart Robinson (31).

They were found dead in Klondyke Street in the Shankill area on Saturday night.

Police are investigating the deaths, which are not being treated as suspicious.

Community sources had previously claimed that drugs may have been a factor in the tragedy.

Yesterday, friends and family took to social media to express their condolences to the grieving families.

Councillor Jolene Bunting stated: "My thoughts are with Kelly and Stuart's family at this sad time. May God comfort them in the hardest of times."

Friend Leah McAuley said: "Lost the most generous friend Kelly Watters and her best friend Stuart Robinson.

"Still can't believe it has happened, you will sorely be missed by the people who love you so much. RIP may the angels be with you."

Constance Steele Broome added: "RIP my lovely friend Kelly Watters, beautiful inside and out."

Mr Robinson's former neighbour Karen May described him online as "a young gentleman gone too soon".

She wrote: "I will never forget you. Only a few weeks ago we texted Happy New Year.

"I heard the police were at your door, unbeknown to me you both were gone."

In a death notice for Ms Watters, her mother Pauline posted that she "deeply regretted" her daughter's loss, as did Kelly's sons Glenn, Gary and Kaden.

She added: "Words could never express our sorrow.

"Peace, perfect peace my beautiful daughter."

A funeral service will be held for Ms Watters at her home on Snugville Street at 12.15pm on Saturday, followed by cremation at 1.30pm at Roselawn Cemetery.

Details of Mr Robinson's funeral had not been made public at the time of going to press.

Posting on social media on Sunday, Pastor Jack McKee of Belfast's New Life City Church described the deaths as "heartbreaking" and said that the church community had prayed for the families.

He stated: "We prayed for everyone in our community who are being seduced and destroyed by drugs.

"May we not only show compassion towards families that have lost loved ones in this manner, but may we also have the boldness to rise up as a united community to end this death trade in our midst."
Two people were taken to hospital following a serious three-vehicle road traffic collision on Ballycastle's Moyarget Road on Saturday evening

Two people were taken to hospital following a serious three-vehicle road traffic collision on Ballycastle's Moyarget Road on Saturday evening.

The Northern Ireland Air Ambulance airlifted one person to the Royal Victoria Hospital, where they are believed to be in a serious condition. Another person was taken by ambulance to the Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, but their condition is not thought to be life-threatening.

Sinn Fein Councillor Cara McShane said her "thoughts and prayers are with those involved and their families".

A Northern Trust spokesperson confirmed that one person had been taken to the Causeway Hospital after the incident. No further updates were available at the time of going to press. A condition report on the person who was airlifted to the Royal Victoria Hospital was not available at the time of going to press.

The Moyarget Road was closed in both directions in the wake of the crash, with diversions in place at the junctions of Magheramore Road and Islandarragh Road.
Snow lies on Tan Hill in North Yorkshire, as others parts of the country are bracing themselves for wintry showers. Steve Parsons/PA Wire

Cars drive through snow on the A26 in Ballymena, Co Antrim, as blizzard conditions are set to sweep in, bringing "a real taste of winter to the whole of the UK". Niall Carson/PA Wire

A dog walker in the snow in Ballymena, Co Antrim, as blizzard conditions are set to sweep in, bringing "a real taste of winter to the whole of the UK". Niall Carson/PA Wire

Snow covers a road sign in Greenloaning, near Stirling, as blizzard conditions are set to bring "a real taste of winter to the whole of the UK". Andrew Milligan/PA Wire

Sheep in the snow in Ballymena, Co Antrim, as blizzard conditions are set to sweep in, bringing "a real taste of winter to the whole of the UK". Niall Carson/PA Wire

Snow on the outskirts of Armoy in Northern Ireland. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

Snow on the outskirts of Armoy in Northern Ireland. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

Drivers battle through the snow on the outskirts of Armoy in Northern Ireland. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

A farmer battles through the snow on the outskirts of Armoy in Northern Ireland. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

Walkers threw the Snow on the Outskirts of Armoy in Northern Ireland, as snow fall hits across the country with more expected. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

This is a view from my window in Rathfriland, the Mournes at the far back left of the picture. Submitted by Lucy Barry - January 2017

Loving the snow are my pups Murphy, Lexi and Dexter. Submitted by Kathy Mackin-Jackson, from Armagh. Jan 2017.

Loving the snow are my pups Murphy, Lexi and Dexter. Submitted by Kathy Mackin-Jackson, from Armagh. Jan 2017.

Snow begins to fall on the Stormont Estate in east Belfast. Picture by Jonathan Porter/Press Eye

Snow begins to fall on the Stormont Estate in east Belfast. Picture by Jonathan Porter/Press Eye

Snow begins to fall on the Stormont Estate in east Belfast. Picture by Jonathan Porter/Press Eye

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Snow falls in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Snow falls in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Young Boys play in the snow in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Salting the foot patch as Snow falls in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Snow time in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Snow falls in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

People make their way to work as snow falls over Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly

People make their way to work as snow falls over Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly

Snow has fallen over Belfast. Tourists have their pictures taken in the snow at Clarendon dock Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly

People make their way to work as snow falls over Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly

People make their way to work as snow falls over Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Eoin Donnelly plays football in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Walking the dogs in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Children Ruben and Zara McGlinchey , Nathan McCann and Shea McLaughlin enjoying the snow in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 A dog enjoying the snow in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press Belfast 08-12-2017: Heavy snow showers overnight have led to disruption across parts of Northern Ireland. Dozens of schools have been closed due to the wintery conditions. The snowfall means an unexpected day off for some young people. Police are advising road users to use extreme caution on the roads. Patrick Morgan pictured enjoying the snow. Picture By: Arthur Allison/Pacemaker.

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Children Ruben and Zara McGlinchey enjoying the snow in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press Belfast 08-12-2017: Heavy snow showers overnight have led to disruption across parts of Northern Ireland. Dozens of schools have been closed due to the wintery conditions. The snowfall means an unexpected day off for some young people. Police are advising road users to use extreme caution on the roads. Patrick Morgan pictured enjoying the snow. Picture By: Arthur Allison/Pacemaker.

Pacemaker Press Belfast 08-12-2017: Heavy snow showers overnight have led to disruption across parts of Northern Ireland. Dozens of schools have been closed due to the wintery conditions. The snowfall means an unexpected day off for some young people. Police are advising road users to use extreme caution on the roads. Snow in North Belfast. Picture By: Arthur Allison/Pacemaker.

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Battling threw the snow on Divis Mountain in Co Antrim , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Children Ruben and Zara McGlinchey , Nathan McCann and Shea McLaughlin enjoying the snow in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

General views of Snow in Belfast on December 8th 2017 (Photo by Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Battling threw the snow on Divis Mountain in Co Antrim , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 A Snow Man on Divis Mountain in Co Antrim , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press Belfast 08-12-2017: Heavy snow showers overnight have led to disruption across parts of Northern Ireland. Dozens of schools have been closed due to the wintery conditions. The snowfall means an unexpected day off for some young people. Police are advising road users to use extreme caution on the roads. Paul and Ollie Forbes pictured enjoying the snow. Picture By: Arthur Allison/Pacemaker.

General views of Snow in Belfast on December 8th 2017 (Photo by Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 A Snow Man on Divis Mountain in Co Antrim , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 A dog enjoying the snow in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Children Ruben and Zara McGlinchey , Nathan McCann and Shea McLaughlin enjoying the snow in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press Belfast 08-12-2017: Heavy snow showers overnight have led to disruption across parts of Northern Ireland. Dozens of schools have been closed due to the wintery conditions. The snowfall means an unexpected day off for some young people. Police are advising road users to use extreme caution on the roads. Anne Curley pictured enjoying the snow. Picture By: Arthur Allison/Pacemaker.

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 A dog enjoying the snow in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 10th December 2017 Four-year-old Noah Adams enjoys the snow at Stormont in east Belfast as it continues to lie across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 10th December 2017 A view of Stormont from the Castlereigh Hills outside Belfast as snow continues to lie across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 10th December 2017 A view of Stormont from the Castlereigh Hills outside Belfast as snow continues to lie across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 10th December 2017 Faith Adams(4) and Gracie Worth(7) enjoy the snow at Stormont in east Belfast as it continues to lie across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 10th December 2017 Four-year-old Noah Adams enjoys the snow at Stormont in east Belfast as it continues to lie across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 10th December 2017 Snow continues to lie across Northern Ireland as this robin red breast is pictured in the Fourwinds area outside Belfast. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 10th December 2017 Children enjoy the snow at Stormont in east Belfast as it continues to lie across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 10th December 2017 A man walks his dog in Fourwinds outside Belfast as snow continues to lie across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

10/12/17 PACEMAKER PRESS People make the best of the snow in the grounds of Stormont. Brian Buckley with his two children Finn and Jenna take their sled out. PICTURE MATT BOHILL PACEMAKER PRESS

10/12/17 PACEMAKER PRESS People make the best of the snow in the grounds of Stormont. PICTURE MATT BOHILL PACEMAKER PRESS

10/12/17 PACEMAKER PRESS People make the best of the snow in the grounds of Stormont. PICTURE MATT BOHILL PACEMAKER PRESS

10/12/17 PACEMAKER PRESS People make the best of the snow in the grounds of Stormont. PICTURE MATT BOHILL PACEMAKER PRESS

10/12/17 PACEMAKER PRESS People make the best of the snow in the grounds of Stormont. PICTURE MATT BOHILL PACEMAKER PRESS

PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 9/12/2017: Teal-Bella Alexander from Bangor has fun in the snow at the Enchanted Winter Garden which opened on Saturday in Antrim's Castle Gardens. The annual Christmas event is now in it's fifth season. Enchanted Winter Garden is running to 20 December in Antrim Castle Gardens, Antrim. For event information and tickets visit www.enchantedwintergarden.com PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON

PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 9/12/2017: Sarah and Ethan Gillespie from Limavady have fun in the snow at the Enchanted Winter Garden which opened on Saturday in Antrim's Castle Gardens. The annual Christmas event is now in it's fifth season. Enchanted Winter Garden is running to 20 December in Antrim Castle Gardens, Antrim. For event information and tickets visit www.enchantedwintergarden.com PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON

PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 9/12/2017: Ella and Bobby McMullan from Aghalee have fun in the snow at the Enchanted Winter Garden which opened on Saturday in Antrim's Castle Gardens. The annual Christmas event is now in it's fifth season. Enchanted Winter Garden is running to 20 December in Antrim Castle Gardens, Antrim. For event information and tickets visit www.enchantedwintergarden.com PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON

Presseye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 9th December 2017 Children enjoy the recent snow fall at Stormont in east Belfast. Jack (5) sledges down the hill at parliament buildings. Mandatory Credit Matt Mackey / Presseye.com

Presseye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 9th December 2017 Children enjoy the recent snow fall at Stormont in east Belfast. Jack (5) sledges down the hill at parliament buildings. Mandatory Credit Matt Mackey / Presseye.com

Presseye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 9th December 2017 Children enjoy the recent snow fall at Stormont in east Belfast. Mia (10) pictured at parliament buildings. Mandatory Credit Matt Mackey / Presseye.com

Presseye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 9th December 2017 Children enjoy the recent snow fall at Stormont in east Belfast. Mia (10) pictured at parliament buildings. Mandatory Credit Matt Mackey / Presseye.com

Presseye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 9th December 2017 Children enjoy the recent snow fall at Stormont in east Belfast. Jack (5) along with his sister Mia (10) and friend Rachel (11) pictured at parliament buildings. Mandatory Credit Matt Mackey / Presseye.com

Presseye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 9th December 2017 Children enjoy the recent snow fall at Stormont in east Belfast. Jack (5) sledges down the hill at parliament buildings. Mandatory Credit Matt Mackey / Presseye.com

Snow in Ballymena, Co Antrim, as blizzard conditions are set to sweep in, bringing "a real taste of winter to the whole of the UK". Niall Carson/PA Wire

Snow covers a fence in Greenloaning, near Stirling, as blizzard conditions are set to bring "a real taste of winter to the whole of the UK". Andrew Milligan/PA Wire

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Snow time in Crumlin , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Pacemaker Press 08/12/2017 Battling threw the snow on Divis Mountain in Co Antrim , as heavy snow falls across Northern Ireland on Friday morning, leaving difficult driving conditions for motorists and some schools closed. Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker

Walkers trudge through the Snow on the Outskirts of Armoy in Northern Ireland. Photo Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Press

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 16th January 2018 Vehicles on the M1 outside Belfast as the Met Office upgrades its warning for snow and ice from yellow to amber across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

16/1/2018 A rear wheel drive BMW cant make its way through the icy roads in Lisburn. Mandatory Credit  Stephen Hamilton

16/1/2018 Horses pictured at Divis mountain in Belfast during a fall of snow. Mandatory Credit  Stephen Hamilton

16/1/2018 Peter Wachs pictured at Divis mountain in Belfast during a heavy fall of snow with dogs Muppet and Lulu Mandatory Credit  Stephen Hamilton

Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 16th January 2018 Vehicles on the M1 outside Belfast as the Met Office upgrades its warning for snow and ice from yellow to amber across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

Peter Wachs from Belfast out with dog Muppet at Divis Mountain. Mandatory Credit  Stephen Hamilton

Heavy snow has caused widespread travel disruption in Northern Ireland, with bus and rail services affected and some roads closed.

Horses as Snow falls near Divis on the outskirts of West Belfast in Co Antrim on Tuesday , as heavy snow falls across the country. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker

General view of a Transit van which skidded off the road on the Hannahstown hill. Mandatory Credit  Stephen Hamilton

Rush hour traffic on the Ballygowan Road in east Belfast after snow fell across Northern Ireland overnight. - 17th January 2018

Vehicles on the M1 outside Belfast. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

General views of Snow in Belfast on December 8th 2017 (Photo by Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph)

Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 10th December 2017 A view of Belfast from the Castlereigh Hills as snow continues to lie across Northern Ireland. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com

Northern Ireland is braced for snow, sleet and hail, with other parts of the UK bracing themselves for ice and high winds as the week progresses.

A yellow weather warning for snow and ice is in place here until Wednesday evening, covering Northern Ireland, most of Scotland and the far north of England.

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Snowfalls of up to 20cms are expected on higher ground, with deposits of up to 8cms likely in more populated areas.

Hail, lightning and blizzard conditions are also possible in certain areas, forecasters warn.

Travel delays are possible and there is a chance of power cuts throughout the duration of the weather warning.

The Department for Infrastructure said that around 300 staff and 130 gritters will be busy salting roads with 12 specialist snow blowers also available.

Met office forecaster John Wylie said: "The wintry spell will see snow showers blowing strong with very cold west and north west wind.

"It could give quite a few centimetres of settling snow in places through the course of the day and some drifting on higher ground.

"There will be cold temperatures barely above freezing during the course of the day and falling a few degrees below freezing during the night.

"It looks as though on Wednesday some of that snow could begin to thaw out but wet and windy weather will spread across the area through Wednesday night and Thursday morning and potentially stormy conditions, but that's open for questioning.

"This is really normal mid-winter weather."

Sara Venning, NI Water's chief executive, warned householders to avoid frozen pipes by taking precautions.

She said: "Insulating your pipework is an essential action to protect your water supply and that of your neighbours."
Women hold less than one-third of the highest paid jobs at BBC Northern Ireland, it has emerged.

The disclosure comes as the organisation finds itself under continuing pressure to address wage inequality.

A Freedom of Information request showed that of the 10 staff in the top salary bands  SM1&2 for senior management  seven are men and three are women.

In the next band, where salaries range from 40,000 to 70,000  29 full-time equivalent positions are held by men and 12 by women.

In both cases, it is a lower proportion than the 41% across the BBC as a whole.

The figures were obtained by the Irish News.

The figures also revealed that women are under-represented in various levels and pay bands compared to the BBC overall.

The Irish News found that out of the 700 people employed by BBC NI, 44% are women, which is below the BBCs overall average of 48% and is lower than any other region in the UK.

A BBC NI spokesman told the newspaper: BBC Northern Ireland will play its part in helping the wider BBC achieve its targets.

Details of the broadcasters gender pay gap sparked major criticism last year after the BBC revealed salaries of stars earning more than 150,000.

Most recently the BBCs China editor Carrie Gracie resigned claiming unlawful pay discrimination. She made the decision after she learned male international editors are paid at least 50% more than women doing the same job.

Up to 200 women have filed pay complaints since the publication of staff salaries was made public last year.

Veteran NI presenter Wendy Austin was among 40 high-profile journalists who signed a letter sent to BBC director general Tony Hall last summer.

She also joined numerous other BBC NI colleagues during a campaign on equal pay day in November.

The head of BBC NI director Peter Johnston earns a salary of 146,000.

The figures come after broadcaster and presenter Libby Purves said the gender pay gap exists because men are being vain and greedy.

The former presenter of BBC Radio 4s Midweek said that the director general (DG) should not be afraid of a talent drain in seeking to end pay disparity.

Writing in the Radio Times, she said: Some complain that the pay gap exists because women dont negotiate. I would say that its more about men being vain and greedy.

With few exceptions (mainly in the shiny-floor-and-spangles world, inhabited by, for example, Claudia Winkleman) its men who drive pay to insane levels.

Its men, not women, who flick their carefully tended hair and purr, like a LOreal ad, Because Im worth it!.

Ms Purves said she accepts the BBC has a problem with inherited contracts but called for Lord Tony Hall to spend a week reading the BBCs payroll and noting the gender inequality.

The DG could then weigh the importance of the top earners and tell their agents that their next contract will shrink, because the BBC must budget carefully and equably, she added.

If they threatened to go, the DG could gently say, If you must. But remember how much of your ratings depends on our Rolls-Royce production values and international reach. Well build another you.

Branding the BBCs wounds from the pay gap self-harm, she said she believes there are many highly-paid employees, including Today presenter John Humphrys, who would do their job for lower pay.
Brittany Ferries announces a new route between Ireland and Spain (Chris Ison/PA)

Ireland and Spain are to be linked by a direct ferry service for the first time.

The sailings will enable firms to bypass the UK when transporting freight between the two countries, which could be particularly useful after Brexit.

There are fears that the UKs ports could suffer from severe customs queues after it withdraws from the European Union in March next year.

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Brittany Ferries will operate two return sailings a week from Cork to Santander in northern Spain from the end of April.

Port of Cork commercial manager captain Michael McCarthy said: The option for freight carriers to bypass the UK land bridge will be seen as very attractive, as Brexit uncertainty continues.

We have no doubt that both exporters and importers will make this a viable service.

Brittany Ferries will charter a ship named Connemara which has capacity for 500 passengers and 195 cars.

The vessel will also deliver an additional weekly return service from Cork to Roscoff in France.

Chief executive Christophe Mathieu said: Green Spain promises visitors a wealth of opportunities, whether they travel with us from the UK or Ireland.

However, this new route will also present more options to freight companies operating throughout Ireland, Spain, Portugal and southern France.

New figures show that the ferry industry is investing more than 1 billion in improvements in the next four years.

Trade body Discover Ferries says the money is being spent on new ships and modernising ports and facilities.
Age finally caught up with the Lynx helicopter as the aircraft embarked on a farewell tour, marking a last salute to the British Army before bowing out of service.

With a distinguished career spanning nearly 40 years, the Lynx entered into service in 1978 and since then, as the Armys longest serving helicopter, has been used for a variety of tasks.

To mark its decommissioning from service on January 31, on Tuesday the Army Air Corps flew four of the last remaining Lynx helicopters from RAF Odiham in Hampshire on a commemorative tour.

Commanding Officer of 657 Squadron, Major James Peycke, told the Press Association that bidding farewell to the iconic machine is a huge moment for everyone who has flown the Lynx over the years.

It is hugely emotional saying goodbye to the Lynx after six years of flying, and it carves out a big chunk of your heart, he said.

Describing the aircraft as hugely manoeuvrable, Maj Peycke said there is never a dull day when you are flying one.

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The four Mk9 Lynx lifted off to thunder around the UKs skies, taking in sites and locations including Yeovil, Middle Wallop and Upavon, before also flying in formation, led by a Chinook helicopter, along the length of the River Thames in central London.

Speaking before they departed, Maj Peycke, who was flying in the lead Lynx, said they would have liked to include more locations on the tour but were restricted by winter daylight hours.

When pressed on how he will feel as the wheels touch down for one of the final times at RAF Odiham, he said it would be an incredibly emotional moment.

Not only does it mark the out-of-service date for the Lynx, the 75th anniversary of the squadron (657) which was formed in 1943, but also the closure of the squadron (in May) and the end of my tour as an officer commanding, so it will be an incredibly emotional moment, particularly as we come back in  Im probably going to have a lump in my throat, he added.

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Described as a primary battlefield utility helicopter, over the decades the Lynx has also destroyed tanks, evacuated the wounded, gathered intelligence, and provided humanitarian support.

It has been deployed on operations across the world, including the jungles of South East Asia and Central America, the sub-zero Arctic, the Middle East, and has supported troops on active service in Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone.

Staff Sergeant Nathan Sharples, one of the pilots flying the lead Lynx, when asked if the helicopter being decommissioned is a loss, said it is not, that things need to progress, and it is now time for the old girl to retire.

She has served us proud throughout the years, added the 34-year-old, who has only ever flown the Lynx.

The Lynx is set to be replaced within the British Army by the Wildcat, which has more powerful engines and can operate at a higher altitude.

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Air Trooper Toby Tibbitts, a ground crew specialist, who has been in the military for two-and-a-half years, said this is his first and only squadron so far, and seeing the Lynx go is a sad day but a proud one.

Quizzed about his favourite moment involving the helicopter, he said fast roping out of a Lynx over a desert was a pretty special experience and one he will not forget.

He said the replacement Wildcat seems like a good aircraft, and that, with the positive trials and exercises, plus upgraded avionics and engines, the future is looking bright.

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The Lynx was also used by the Royal Navy, whose helicopters went out of service in March last year after more than 41 years of operations.

As a workhorse of the military over the years, the Lynx, which carries three crew plus six troops with full kit, has also been involved in a number of tragedies during its years of service.
Donald Trump holds hands with Prime Minister Theresa May during her visit to Washington DC last year (PA/Stefan Rousseau)

Labours attempts to stop Donald Trump visiting Britain are extremely odd as the countrys relationship with the United States is crucial, Boris Johnson has said.

The Foreign Secretary, who is attending a two day summit on North Korea in Vancouver, highlighted the controversial US presidents visits to France, Germany and Japan as he insisted he would visit in due course and called for a grown up conversation.

Mr Trump has cancelled a proposed visit to open the new US embassy in London, claiming the move to a new building represented a bad deal.

However, reports have suggested he called off his trip because he felt he had not been shown enough love by the British Government.

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Mr Johnson has already criticised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, arguing they were risking the UKs relationship with the US.

And before his visit to Canada, he told the Guardian: For Jeremy Corbyn to say that this relationship doesnt matter, is I think insanity, and irresponsible. And to try to banish the president of the United States from visiting the UK when hes had trips to France, to Germany, to Japan, to China, is, I think, for the Labour Party extremely odd.

Its a crucial relationship, and its a very positive relationship.

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On the prospect of a visit from Mr Trump, Mr Johnson said: I think that we will have a visit in due course.

And he told protesters to understand that America, for better or worse, in our lifetimes, has incarnated values of liberty and fairness and freedom around the world, and it still does.

Asked whether Mr Trump represents those values, he said: Let us have a grown-up conversation with our American friends about the things we want to do together.

Expand Close Time taken for the UK to invite a new US president for a state visit. (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook

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Mrs May controversially extended the offer of a state visit, officially on behalf of the Queen, when she became the first world leader to meet Mr Trump in the White House following his inauguration last year.

Since then, however, the president has indicated he does not want to take up the invitation if he is going to face mass demonstrations and it had been expected he could make a low-key working visit rather than a trip which involved all the trappings of a state occasion.
Police are hunting a man who walked out of a court building (Clara Molden/PA)

A prisoner is on the run after walking out of a court building before he could be sentenced, police said.

Jordan Gilbert, 24, left Boston Magistrates Court on Tuesday afternoon despite having been remanded in custody over a driving offence, Lincolnshire Police said.

Gilbert, of Willoughby Road in Boston, has not been seen since walking out of the legal centre at 2.30pm.

Police said he had been remanded in custody following a disqualified from driving offence and walked out of the courts foyer.

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Superintendent Phil Vickers said: We anticipate that he will be looking for someone to help him and possibly provide a bed for the night.

Id like to make it clear that assisting an offender is in itself an offence and wed be looking to investigate anyone providing assistance to him.
Weather warnings for snow and ice are in place across much of the UK (Danny Lawson / PA)

Forecasters are predicting a calm before the storm as the UK gets set for travel disruption from snow, ice and strong winds.

A yellow warning for snow and ice has been in place across much of Scotland and Northern Ireland since Monday, however the Met Office has issued one for northern England and Wales throughout Tuesday.

Hail, lightning and blizzard conditions are also possible in certain areas, forecasters warn, however spells of sunshine are expected to be frequent.

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Travel delays are possible and there is a chance of power cuts throughout the duration of the day.

A Met Office spokesman told the Press Association: You could sum up the whole week by saying it will be cold with strong winds and periods of sunshine.

Any kind of weather you want we have got it  apart from heat.

Theres going to be an awful lot of sun showers, which we werent seeing last week.

This week there will be a lot more changing. Wednesday will be the calm before the storm.

Before this low pressure system comes through, theres a lull of winds and a bit of a reduction showers.

Wednesday night we will see an intensification of winds and very windy weather.

High grounds in western Scotland are likely to see 10cm to 20cm (four inches to eight inches) of snow building up, while there may also be more than 15cm (six inches) over the hills of Northern Ireland.

Two to eight centimetres will be more typical across lower levels.

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Hail and lightning is expected particularly across western Scotland, with potential for disruption to power supplies from lightning strikes.

Strong winds bring the potential for temporary blizzard conditions and drifting of lying snow, mainly over high ground.

This warning is to remain in place until Wednesday at 6pm.

Meanwhile, northern England and Wales could see two to six centimetres accumulate in places, especially above 100 metres.

On lower levels, there is likely to be a slushy cover of one or two centimetres.

The warning is in force between 4am on Tuesday and 11am on Wednesday.

After the snow and ice of Tuesday, Wednesday evening is expected to bring winds of up to 80mph (127kph) in places and a danger to life from flying debris.
South Africa has summoned the United States' senior diplomat in the capital Pretoria over President Donald Trump's recent disparaging comments about African nations and Haiti.

Mr Trump has been accused of describing African nations as "s***hole countries" during a meeting with US senators.

The US leader has denied making the statements, as well as dismissing accusations that he is racist.

South Africa's foreign ministry said in a statement that it would call on the US Charge d'Affaires to provide an opportunity "to explain the statement that African countries constitute 's***holes' from where migrants into the United States are undesirable".
Hundreds of flights have been cancelled in Texas, where frigid temperatures have left runways and roads dangerously icy.

The US National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for the Houston area and is warning mariners of gale-force winds along the Texas coast. Sleet and freezing rain are forecast for parts of the state.

Flights into Houston, San Antonio and elsewhere have been cancelled. Houston is enduring minus 6C, while San Antonio stands at minus 1C.

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Police in Austin said highways in the state capital are iced over and several counties opened emergency operation centres to co-ordinate emergency response.

The cold front also brought snow to parts of North Texas, where the wind chill pushed temperatures lower still.

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In Mississippi, ice coated roads and bridges in 36 of the states 82 counties, the Mississippi Department of Transport said.

Road crews were working to put salt and other materials on roadways, mainly in the northern and central parts of the state.

Mississippi authorities advised people to limit travel only to emergencies.

Some of the heaviest snow in Mississippi was expected in the states Delta region, where up to 3in is possible.

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Meanwhile, snow fell across much of Kentucky and Tennessee, leading to multiple school closures and multiple road crashes.

The Kentucky Transportation Department said several accidents closed a 10-mile section of the Interestate 24 road in western Kentucky and blocked southbound lanes of Interestate 65 in the south-central part of the state.

The forecast in Kentucky predicted up to 3in of snow for sections of central and eastern Kentucky.

In Tennessee, forecasters have warned there could be up to 6in of snow in the central part of the state and 1-3in and 1in in the western and eastern regions.

Overnight, temperatures are expected to turn bitterly cold, with sub-zero wind chills.
Eight months after Theresa May secured a wafer thin parliamentary majority thanks to the DUP, nobody would have guessed that the first Westminster by-election would be in Northern Ireland.

The decision of voters in West Tyrone surely won't affect the arithmetic in the House of Commons, but the coming by-election will still be fascinating.

Barry McElduff won the seat effortlessly last June. He polled 51% of the vote, up 7% on Pat Doherty's 2015 performance.

Despite the controversy of the past 10 days, it's impossible to see Sinn Fein not retaining the seat.

The outgoing MP was known as a very hard worker in the constituency, where his party has a strong machine. There appears to be no bad blood between McElduff and Sinn Fein over his departure, with no local splits looming that would damage the party.

Considerable interest will centre on who Sinn Fein chooses to replace him. Local republicans told the Belfast Telegraph they believe it is unlikely to be any of the party's three sitting MLAs - Michaela Boyle, Declan McAleer or Catherine Kelly.

"They are well established in their own areas but none of them have a profile across the entire constituency," a source said.

He believed that 28-year-old Grace McDermott from Castlederg - who unsuccessfully contested the 2016 Assembly election for the party - could be its Westminster candidate.

"It would be a big leap for her, yet we've seen with Elisha McCallion in Derry that a relative unknown can rise through the ranks very quickly," he said.

But it's unclear whether Ms McDermott, who has a young baby, would want the role.

Another name circulating is former Tyrone All-Ireland winning captain Peter Canavan. A big name like his would be ideal for Sinn Fein in the current circumstances. However, the GAA legend was previously linked to a Stormont candidacy and nothing materialised.

The Ulster Unionists are very keen on a unity candidate - most likely either a victim or a victim's relative - to run against Sinn Fein. Party sources said conditions were ideal to run a "non-partisan candidate" to highlight victims' issues.

However, other parties are less keen. The DUP's Thomas Buchanan was runner-up to Mr McElduff in June, but he was still more than 10,000 votes behind in a constituency where Sinn Fein have an absolute majority.

The DUP could run either Mr Buchanan or Omagh councillor Errol Thompson. Suggestions yesterday that the SDLP could stand Mark Durkan are erroneous. The former Foyle MP wants a chance to win back his old seat next time round.

The SDLP candidate is likely to be high-profile MLA Daniel McCrossan. He was yesterday highly critical of how Michelle O'Neill had handled the Kingsmill video situation, saying it totally contradicted her party's "campaign for equality, respect and integrity".

If he secures the nomination, he's likely to focus on Sinn Fein's abstentionism and the importance of having a strong local anti-Brexit voice in the Commons.

In terms of the Stormont talks, McElduff's resignation makes a deal marginally more likely. While he remained in place, the DUP would have struggled to sell an agreement to its base.

In terms of Sinn Fein's commitment to reaching a compromise, much hinges on whether Gerry Adams wants to leave the stage next month against a backdrop of stalemate at Stormont, or the establishment of a new executive.
Those who greeted with glee the announcement by President Trump that he is cancelling his forthcoming visit to Britain have done the UK a disservice, however virtuous they probably consider themselves to be.

The Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, was among the first to metaphorically throw his hat in the air when he heard this news.

Within a few hours, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had denounced Khan as "a puffed-up pompous popinjay".

Johnson might equally have applied these epithets to the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, who announced in the House some months ago that Trump, if he made a state visit here, would not be allowed to address both Houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall. Quite an insult.

Not only should the Speaker, however obliquely, not express personal opinions, but he had failed to consult the House of Lords.

What these two - and many others - should realise is that Trump, however vain, self-obsessed bullying and ludicrous he may be, was voted into the White House by the people of Britain's greatest ally.

The simple rule is that you have to talk to these people, whether you like them or not. Trump's excuse for cancelling is that he does not want to open the new US embassy, because he believes his predecessor Obama sold the one just vacated for peanuts.

However, it is likely he was deterred by the icy coldness of those people who denounced his visit.

Yet, Britain has cheerfully - and quite properly - invited far worse people over here.

They include, in 1973, President Mobutu of Zaire, a homicidal dictator who embezzled up to 12bn; in 1978, Romania's brutal, communist head of state, Nicolae Ceausescu, who was later executed by a firing squad; and, in 1994, the abominable president Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Two years ago, it was President Xi Jinping of China - the ruler of a one-party state, where dissidents are jailed, torture is normal and citizens are spied on.

There was no particular opposition by these visits by these monsters - compared with whom Trump is positively mild. At least Downing Street has come out, hoping that Trump, despite the malcontents, will visit Britain.

It is his right and our duty that he should come here - and be welcomed.

The condition of Ukip is not exactly anything to be admired. The party has had four leaders within the space of a year, which is not exactly a mark of stability.

The latest incumbent, Henry Bolton, said to be out of his depth, is being urged to quit after his much younger new girlfriend made racial slurs (for which she has since apologised) against Prince Harry's fiancee, Meghan Markle.

And what is more, the former leader, Nigel Farage, has flip-flopped over whether or not he wants a second referendum on Brexit.

I never thought I would say this, but Ukip seem to be in an even more shambolic state than are the Conservative Party at the moment - and that's saying something.

I used to think David Cameron was seriously over-the-top when he once described Ukip as a bunch of fruitcakes, among other epithets.

I am now beginning to think that he was then not only right, but may well have seriously understated the case.

Winston Churchill is the subject of a new film, acclaimed by one and all, including his grandson, Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames.

He recalls that during one fiery moment, Churchill's fearless wife, Clementine, hurled a bowl of spinach at the great man. There is still the mark on the wall at Chartwell to remind people of that event.

Flinging crockery about is not unknown in the political world. Jane Clark, the hard-done-by wife of the late philandering Tory MP, Alan Clark, used to get so exasperated by his behaviour that she hurled cups and saucers about - "but always into the sink; much easier to clear up afterwards," she said.

I was once sitting in the Press Gallery cafeteria when I was struck on the back of the head by a cup which had come hurtling through the air, followed shortly by the flying saucer.

It appears that a volatile political reporter was so angry at the way one newspaper had treated his story that he decided to smash up the tea service.

How bonkers is this? People are paying 12,000 to hear David Cameron make a speech in China.

I suppose Cameron can make a fairly good run of the mill speech when he tries, but I would say a reasonable price is about a fiver.

These people, splashing their money about, would have done far better to have bought a ticket to London a few years ago and listened to him ad nauseam for days on end for no further outlay.

And how do they quantify whether they got their money's worth after such a ludicrous pay-out?

Perhaps a few nibbles were thrown in, as well.
Edmund Hourican, managing director of Holiday World, which is being held at the Titanic Exhibition Centre

A new direct air link from Dublin to Hong Kong will be of "enormous" importance to Northern Ireland tourism and business, a travel expert has said.

Edmund Hourican, managing director of the Holiday World Show, which kicks off in Belfast this weekend, said he believes the new flights with Cathay Pacific will be filled with around 30% of travellers from Northern Ireland.

This year's Holiday World will see more than 20,000 visitors descend on the Titanic Exhibition Centre. It runs from this Friday, January 19 to Sunday, January 21.

"I think the way this industry works, we are event managers. One of the areas we specialise in is travel and tourism," he said.

"It's hard to believe that from the island of Ireland, that last summer there were 200 flights a week between Belfast and Dublin to the US. That's to 15 airports."

The carriers include Aer Lingus, Norwegian, along with US airlines such as Delta and United.

And as a result, Northern Ireland holidaymakers can visit New York City, New York state, Atlantic City, Las Vegas, as well as the southern states.

"Each year, we look at where can we prospect for new business. Nearly everyone coming to the show wants to know what is going on, the new exciting travel products in 2018, as well as traditional products.

"However, if they look east, it is interesting what is happening. There are 53 flights a week from the island of Ireland.

"(The airlines) are flying in to major hubs in the Middle East, and onwards to practically every country in Asia and Australia.

"It has been a gradual change over the last number of years.

"Qatar entered the market last year. They are flying twice a week to the Middle East.

"However, when you look at the other elements... in the hold of most of those airlines, there is about 15 tonnes of freight."

He said aside from just carrying passengers, the links are "supporting our exports industry, as well as leisure travel".

"The whole country is benefiting from these exports out of Ireland.

"Peking - they can get fresh fish (from Ireland) in four days."

And he said the big news this year will be the start of a new direct flight from Dublin to Hong Kong, which begins in June with Cathay Pacific.

"It is enormous. I would expect at least 30% travelling on that flight would be from Northern Ireland, for business and leisure."

This year's Holiday World will feature approximately 350 exhibitors. And Mr Hourican said this year will be the busiest in around a decade.

"It has been gradually coming back since we moved to the Titanic Exhibition Centre.

"There are another few areas that are worth looking at. The whole cruising area. Cruising is enormous out of Northern Ireland. We have the top 10 cruise companies with Oasis Travel."

"This is our 26th consecutive year in Belfast, and our third in the Titanic Exhibition Centre."

His firm also runs similar events in Dublin and Shannon, but Mr Hourican said: "I look forward to Belfast more than any other show.

"The city has become alive, and it's very stimulating. All the contractors we use in Belfast are outstanding. It makes life for us extremely enjoyable. The Titanic Exhibition Centre and management there are terrific and so supportive."

Speaking about growth in the travel sector here, he said: "Another one with huge development is camping abroad in France and Spain.

"Irish Ferries have a new ship out of Dublin going to France. Once there is access there, that sector of the industry is growing rapidly in Ireland.

"The other aspect of Ireland is the love affair with Spain."

He said last year, there were around 2.5 million trips by Irish holidaymakers to Spain.

And speaking about the "home holiday" sector, he said: "We thought something might happen with Brexit.

"We have 14 out of the 26 counties (in the Republic) exhibiting in Belfast this year. That's more than normal.

"They are extremely confident so far, and that will continue. I have no doubts about that, and into the UK as well.

"The product in Northern Ireland is excellent and the way the Northern Ireland people and businesses promote their tourism is outstanding."
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By Julie Carle

Growing up in Illinois, Geneva Hodgson '10 loved watching and drawing cartoons, but didn't know anyone who created cartoons. Because she didn't know a path that would take her to a cartoon career, she opted to study art education instead.

At Bowling Green State University, she received a strong foundation in art, general education, art education, art history and studio. But when she realized an art education career was not for her, some School of Art faculty members convinced her to find her own way into the cartoon industry.

Today, she is a storyboard artist at Cartoon Network, and deeply involved in the production of the new series "OK, K.O. Let's Be Heroes."

A self-confessed TV junkie, Hodgson spent hours watching "Ren and Stimpy," "Rocko's Modern Life" and "The Simpsons," and dreamed of being an animator.

"I always loved cartoons and loved drawing," Hodgson said. "I remember lining up My Little Pony toys and drawing them. I was fascinated when I realized I couldn't see all of their legs from a side angle, or how Mickey Mouse's glove connected around his arm.

"Somewhere along the way though, I lost confidence about pursuing that as a career," she admitted.

Her last semester of school is when Charlie Kanwischer, her landscape drawing professor at the time, Katerina Ruedi Ray, then school of art director, and Dominic Catalano, former faculty member, encouraged her to follow her heart.

"Charlie taught landscape painting, but he allowed me to integrate Looney Toons-inspired ideas into my work," Hodgson said. "I was really fortunate to have teachers who encouraged me to go off the beaten path and to get what I wanted out of my education."

After she graduated, she was hired as an intern at Ohio Art thanks to the support of an alumna who previously had interned there. She also worked a second job that she got thanks to Kanwischer's connections.

"I knew I would need about $10,000 to move to California," Hodgson said. "That is what I was obsessed with."

She worked hard, continued to make her own comics and drawings that she posted online and talked to others who were making interesting work online.

By the time she earned enough money for the move, she was well connected and able to pick up freelance jobs. She collaborated on an indie video game, helping to create the concept, write, and design characters.

"That opened up possibilities to me," she said, "but even though it's very satisfying and fun, I know my main love is cartoons.

"It's a really hard job because you need a million different skills, and most of them require that you understand the cartoon world."

"I'm a huge nerd, a perfectionist and a fast learner," she said about her early success at Cartoon Network. Before "OK K.O." she worked on Cartoon Network's Teen Titans.

"I'm not the best draftsman, but I can draw and know it looks cute and fun. I also have a sense of humor, which is important in cartoons. "

She also has proved she is comfortable taking risks, which is important to be able to "throw yourself out there," pitching ideas and jokes, she said.

As a storyboard artist for the Cartoon Network series, there is a lot of writing involved, as well as sketching what happens, creating dialogue and drawing rough versions of poses.

"There are a lot of creative decisions to make," she said.

The show revolves around K.O., a young wannabe hero who lives in a world populated by superheroes, who fight robots from a despicable factory called Boxmore.

The artistic team for "OK K.O." includes seven other storyboarders, who work in sub teams for different episodes. Each episode takes a long time from start to finish, including outlines, dialogues, rough drafts and cleaning up before sending on to animators. "Animation is an incredibly collaborative process," she said.

"The show is kind of crazy, with episodes that are off the wall, really funny but some are more story-focused." Calling it a "truly cartoony show," Hodgson said that the design of the characters is intentionally fluid. From scene to scene or shot to shot, the characters can look different; you can always see the human hand" in the characters.

Thus far, the show has received positive responses. "I'm very proud of the work we've done," Hodgson said.


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
In The Chambray Set Who doesn't look good in a chambray outfit? And, when it is none other than the ultimate dapper Sidharth Malhotra himself, well, nothing can stop him from slaying. He has won our hearts in this set of Chambray suit, giving many men goals to mix denim into their formals.

Keeping It Patrially Chambray While the chambray suit was totally exceptional, Sid tried to keep it regular with a chambray shirt and maroon pants for a magazine photo shoot. The colour coordination of the shirt and pants was amazing and the actor slayed here too.

Floral-ing With Alia Alia and Sid are supposedly dating and they are always one of the most stylish duos in Bollywood. This look is from a shoot for Vogue India where the couple posed in their coolest beachwear looks. Sid was again killing it, this time in a bright floral shirt from AllSaints, which he wore with beige trousers from Z Zegna, sunglasses from Dolce & Gabbana and beases evil-eye bracelets from Wrap. Alia was slaying it too in a blue lace beach dress from Heidi Klein and Jimmy Choo shoes.

Suit-Ing It Well Sidharth won the HT Most Stylish (Youth Icon) Award in the year 2016 and we too found him to be the deservant one becasue of his amazing suited style book. He was wearing a white tuxedo suit, making it even more vibrant with a black and red skinny tie. He posed with Alia Bhatt who too looked quite impressive.

Slaying With The Tuxedo For GQ India's February 2014 edition, Sidharth Malhotra had turned on his dapper avatar, again slaying it in a set of tuxedo suit. The three-piece tuxedo suit made the actor look too hot to handle and he paired it with a navy blue shirt and metallic tie.

Touring It In Style This image is from Sid's New Zealand tour and there too he did not leave any stones unturned to look this hot. He was wearing a yellow blazer over a white tee and trousers. The block printed scarf and white sneakers were additions to make him look even more hotter.

On The Ramp In Style This look was the best of Sidharth's from the ramp and we found it really enthralling to find Sid looking this super cool in a traditional outfit. He walked the ramp as the celebrity showstopper for Manish Malhotra and totally killed the royal blue kurta with dhoti style.

For Movie Promotions For the propmotions of of Kapoor and Sons, Sidharth had donned some really cool style books. This one was our favourite of the lot, where he was adorably twinning with Alia, his co-star in the movie. The batik printed blazer was looking really good with his white formals.

Casual-ing For Hi Blitz Whatever Sid wears, he makes it a style benchmark and here with his casuals too, he was setting some amazing style goals for men. In the casuals, with a peach, blue and white combination, he stunned us completely. The black sneakers were an additional USP to the look. With this look, he posed for Hi Blitz magazine's July 2015 edition.

Revealing Style Goals With UCB At an event by United Colours of Bennetton, Sid spoke a lot about fashion and his personal style statement. He was carrying this super-cool summery casuals for the launch of UCB's summer collection of the year. He killed it, didn't he?
The Kailash Backdrop It had been a year since Kailash Sen had moved to the plush CR Park area of Delhi. His only son, Anoop had bought a 1RK flat here. It'd been over a decade that Anoop had moved to the US with his wife and daughter and felt that it was easy for him to reach out to his father if the later shifted to Delhi.

Emotions Involved Being forced to relocate out of his 4000 sqft bungalow at Dumdum, Mr. Sen often felt claustrophobic in this 500 sqft third-floor apartment. Moreover, he did not know anyone around. The familiar feel, the evening adda' was what he missed the most.

The Lonely Girl Sunaina was born and brought up in a well-to-do North Indian family settled in Kolkata. However, she grew up unloved. Her parents wanted a male child. Due to some complications during her birth, her mother was not able to conceive a child again. All this led to her parents hating her. Thus, when she finally graduated as a doctor, her first goal was to save up enough money to be able to afford the down payment for a bungalow in some posh area of the city.

Dreams Realized After eight years of working in one of the most reputed nursing homes of the city, a year ago, Sunaina was finally able to afford a plush 4000 sqft bungalow. She felt that life will be all happy and gay when she will finally shift to her dream home. However, that was far from being true. An eerie loneliness would haunt her every night. The well-educated Dr. Sunaina Pathak was not one to be let down by things like this and she merely ignored all of it.

A Bridge Between The Two One fine morning, as Sunaina was getting ready for work, the calling bell rang. She rushed her way down the antique stairs to fetch it. There was a government official with a notice which stated that Land tax had not been payed for the last nine years and if the same was not cleared within a month, it would lead to stringent action against her. Now she had bought the place merely a year ago from some Mr. Anoop Sen. Sunaina thanked the official and as soon as he left the place, she dialed up Anoop's number. The cell was switched off. She then looked up some documents with the aim of finding his current address. It landed her with 13/5 C.R. Park, New Delhi'. Left without an option (the tax amount including penalty came to a whooping Rs. 1.2 lakh), Sunaina booked a round trip to Delhi for the next weekend.

The Shock It is in this way, that one late Saturday evening Sunaina ended up in the doorstep of 1/5 C.R. Park. She had expected the gentleman from whom she had brought the bungalow to be at the door; at the maximum it could have been his wife. Thus, she was pretty much taken aback to see a 60-something man open the door for her. The young cardiac surgeon soon gained her composure and told the man her story. She even showed him the property papers and the tax due papers. It was Mr. Sen's turn to be shocked. How could his son dupe him to sell off his beloved ancestral house!

The Departure The gentleman that he was, Mr. Sen gave Sunaina a cheque. Soon Sunaina left the place. After all, she was scheduled to catch a flight in a couple of hours. However, there was something about this man that struck. At many levels she connected with his loneliness. Thus, soon after returning to Kolkata, she started calling him on a regular basis. Soon phone calls gave way to video calls on Skype and the two of them became closer to each other than they have been with anyone else in a long time.

The Birthday Sunaina was an independent young girl and maybe that is why birthdays weren't a big deal to her. She was used to spending them alone. Thus, when she found Mr. Kailash Sen at her doorstep on her birthday morning, it was the best gift that she could have asked for. He was scheduled to stay with her for two days before boarding the return flight. Those two days, Sunaina ended up creating more memories than she had done all her life.

The Union It was the night before Mr. Sen was due to leave the place that Sunaina made up her mind. She walked straight to the former and confessed her feelings for him. She went on to tell him how much his love and affection meant to her and how that was the very thing that she had craved for since childhood. By the end of the conversation, teary eyed Mr. Sen and a sobbing Dr. Sunaina hugged each other.
In a glass conference room in midtown Manhattan, a few dozen employees from Beacon Health Inc.are taking turns asking each other an incredibly awkward question: "Are you having thoughts of suicide?" There's a right way to ask and a wrong way, and they're here to learn the difference.

The exercise is just one component of an eight-hour course in "mental first aid," a relatively new kind of training that, like first aid or CPR, is designed to give ordinary people tools to help someone in need. And as with first aid and CPR, companies have begun to see the value in having employees who have the skills to say something, if they see something.

"The course covers the signs and symptoms of anxiety, depression and other common mental health disorders that people might observe among their coworkers." Credit:Stocksy

About 40 employers have trained more than 1,300 people over the last two years, according to the National Council for Behavioral Health, which first imported the program from here Australia in 2008 and adapted it for Americans.

This year, it plans to train 6,000 workers through company-sponsored courses. Aetna Inc., George Washington University, real estate developer Lendlease Group and the health-care technology companies Cerner Corp. and Netsmart Technologies have all sponsored workshops for their employees.
The BP servo in Duffy up in flames on January 18, 2003. Credit:Andrew Campbell "We had water overflowing the gutters of the house we'd prepared the home so well," Mr McNamara said. With his Rural Fire Service crew in tow, Mr McNamara faced down the incoming ember attack. Rural firefighter Rhianna Sneesby from Tuncurry mops up a grass fire just after dawn near Holt on Sunday, January 19, 2003. Credit:Lannon Harley "The valley itself was engulfed in this all consuming firestorm. Dust was burning," Mr McNamara said.

"I remember being pelted by kangaroo pellets, you know dried poo, and they were alight, they burning. It was like a scene out of hell, it was incredible." Firefighters catch up on some rest in a bus shelter in Hindmarsh Drive in Duffy on Monday, January 20, 2003. Credit:Richard Briggs Nature is quite remarkable. Fire has shaped and molded this landscape for millennia and it will continue to shape and mould this landscape. There's a lot to be taken from nature and its resilience and its recovery from fire and I think that's true for us as a community too. Brett McNamara, ACT Parks and Conservation manager As embers rained down, Mr McNamara's face cloth caught alight. He still has a scar on his nose from the burns. "I can remember peeling off the face cloth and honestly thinking I was going to die. If it wasn't for the fire gear I was wearing, you and I would not be having this conversation, it's simple as that," Mr McNamara said.

Paul McMahon cleans up after the firestorm ripped tiles from the roof, destroying the interior of his Chapman home on January 20, 2003. Credit:Richard Briggs The firefighters took shelter inside Mr McNamara's home, unable to withstand the onslaught of the embers. Mr McNamara stood at the kitchen window, watching the inferno bear down on them. The Stromlo Hill Observatory on January 20 2003. Credit:Sean Davey SAD "I can remember it so well, touching the glass of the kitchen window and seeing these flames outside the window licking the glass as if they wanted to come in," he said.

"All of a sudden it just exploded and the fire and the flames just came in. Still to this day I've got a recollection of going past Gemma's bedroom and her bed was alight. She had these little toys on her bed, and these flames were dancing on her doona and that's when we knew it was time to get out of the house." The Armour brothers Mick and Warren sits on their roof on Fairlight street in Dunlop awaiting news of approaching fires during a state of high alert on January 21, 2003. Credit:Lannon Harley The corrugated iron roof peeled off "like a banana" and the house groaned "as if it was dying", Mr McNamara said. They managed to escape the burning home and sat in the blackened bush, watching all of the McNamara family's worldly possessions go up in smoke. A thank you to those who risked their lives graced the intersection of Belconnen Way and Southern Cross drive in Higgins on Tuesday, January 21. Credit:Lannon Harley

There was grief, but also relief when Mr McNamara realised everyone had gotten safely out of the home. "I'm eternally grateful for that. Fifteen years later, you rebuild things, you get new possessions but those guys that were with me, we'll go and have a beer on Thursday and tell a few war stories," Mr McNamara said. The Stromlo settlement, and the outskirts of Duffy after the fire on January 28, 2003. Credit:Graham Tidy Mr McNamara still fights fires, but does so with his charred face cloth folded neatly in his firefighting jacket pocket. He watched another family stand in the ashes of their home a few years ago while fighting fires in the Blue Mountains. He was able to tell them with certainty that they would be OK.

Jane and Owen Kenyon, at their destroyed Duffy home on January 28, 2003. Credit:Martin Jones "Nature is quite remarkable. Fire has shaped and molded this landscape for millennia and it will continue to shape and mould this landscape. There's a lot to be taken from nature and its resilience and its recovery from fire and I think that's true for us as a community too," Mr McNamara said. On Thursday, he'll spend a quiet moment at the ACT Bushfire Memorial in Stromlo Forest Park, thinking of those who didn't survive the firestorm - Duffy residents Alison Tener, 38; Doug Fraser, 60; and Peter Brooke, 73; and Stromlo resident Dorothy "Dolly" McGrath, 76. A residents watches the approaching red smoke from fires at Tharwa on January 18, 2003. Credit:Lannon Harley He will also hike up Mount Franklin or Mount Gingera to reflect on how the landscape and people of Canberra have regenerated since the fire.
Calls for the nations largest council to shift Australia Day celebrations have been thoroughly rejected, even as the Labor opposition endorsed a change to the national date.

Brisbane City Council opposition leader Peter Cumming, making his public position on the controversial date known for what he said was the first time, diverged from federal Labor leader Bill Shortens opposition to moving the national day.

Brisbane City Council will carry on Australia Day celebrations on January 26 as normal. Credit:Jessica Shapiro

A handful of councils nationwide, including Darebin and Yarra in Melbourne and Fremantle in Western Australia, have scrapped Australia Day celebrations and shifted citizenship ceremonies to other dates, provoking the ire of the federal government.

Cr Cumming said he would be happy with a a national agreement to shift the date away from January 26, the anniversary of the First Fleet's arrival in Sydney Cove.
A former Gold Coast cafe manager has been penalised $27,000 for exploiting staff members to see what he could get away with.

Steven Chung was ordered to pay $27,200 in the Federal Circuit Court after he admitted to underpaying 12 Oliver Brown cafe employees at Surfers Paradise.

Employees at the Gold Coast cafe were underpaid over the period of nine months in 2015. Credit:Glenn Hunt

The employees were all on visas, including a working holiday visa, 457 skilled worker visas and a partner visa, and were collectively underpaid $24,575 between January and September 2015.

Mr Chung was found to have been involved in the underpayments from July 11, when he began as manager at the chocolate cafe outlet.
A woman once described as "the next Pauline Hanson" could snatch another Senate seat for One Nation  restoring Senator Hanson's bloc of four  if the High Court heeds the party's call to disqualify Jacqui Lambie's replacement.

One Nation anti-Muslim campaigner Kate McCulloch could be the big winner from the section 44 fiasco that eliminated Ms Lambie and now threatens the No.2 on her Tasmanian Senate ticket, Steve Martin.

Kate McCulloch has been described as "the next Pauline Hanson" - and could soon seize a Senate seat. Credit:Ben Rushton

Despite winning only 141 first preference votes at the 2016 election, Ms McCulloch is considered the frontrunner to replace Ms Lambie if the court agrees that Mr Martin has an "office of profit under the crown" because he serves as a councillor and mayor in Devonport.

As One Nation defector Fraser Anning officially confirmed he was leaving the party to sit as an independent, lawyers for Ms McCulloch were fighting to win back a spot for One Nation.
People with disabilities fear being left behind on the station platform due to the design of Queensland Rail's new trains.

The New Generation Rollingstock was due to be operational in mid-2016, but delivery was halted due to myriad issues - including the toilets being too small for wheelchairs - before the first of the trains entered service in December.

There are now five New Generation Rollingstock trains on the tracks, with an application for exemption from discrimination laws around the design of the toilets yet to be decided by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

QR and the Department of Transport and Main Roads applied to the Australian Human Rights Commission for a temporary exemption to discrimination laws while it completed works to change the toilet layout to make the NGR trains comply with disability standards.

But in a submission to the AHRC, the Queensland Rail Accessibility Reference Group said an exemption would prolong discrimination.
Latest News How are Australians coping financially? More than a third experienced hardship in last quarter, says NAB

Almost 50% of Australians have lost motivation to save or invest Survey also shows majority think inflation can't be controlled

Online mortgage broker Lendi is gearing up to take a bigger slice of the mortgage broking pie with fresh capital raised last month.Lendi told Australian Broker that it completed a $25m capital-raising exercise last month and that it was oversubscribed. The exercise was supported by some of Lendi's existing shareholders, large investors, and a number of blue-chip Australian institutions.The company is looking to win a bigger share of the market after accounting for about 1% of the mortgage broking business in 2017, the Australian Financial Review reported yesterday (16 Jan).The finance start-up behind Lendi raised $6m in a capital-raising exercise in 2014 and secured $3.1 million from high net worth investors.Founders and employees own 40% of Lendi, with other investors holding the rest of its shares. Its big shareholder names include Macquarie Bank, investment manager Bailador, and home loan provider Pepper Group. It also has high-net-worth investors in its list.Lendi struck a deal with Domain Group last year to launch a joint broking venture. Called Domain Loan Finder, the venture offers a digital solution for Australians looking to secure a home loan. Domain owns 60% of the unit, with Lendi's parent company, Auscred Pty Ltd, holding the remaining 40%.Lendi began operations in 2013 as an online and phone-based broking business. It compares more than 1,600 products from over 30 lenders.
Irish airline Ryanair said on Monday it had contacted the Austrian administrator of insolvent holiday airline Niki to express its interest in buying some of its assets.

Niki's German administrator said earlier on Monday he still wanted to sell the leisure carrier to Aer Lingus parent IAG , despite a battle between Austria and Germany over where insolvency proceedings should be handled.

Former Formula 1 world champion Niki Lauda has also re-emerged as a potential bidder for Niki ahead of a Jan. 19 deadline for fresh offers the Austrian court has set. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
It was announced this week that Irish award-winning Deloitte FinTech Company of the Year, Global Shares, has officialy opened its new Hong Kong office. The office was opened by Mr. Michael D'Arcy, Irelands Minister of State at the Department of Finance with special responsibility for Financial Services.



Global Shares is a global provider of equity compensation software solutions. The new Hong Kong office is the company's first base in Asia, bringing to 10 the total number of Global Shares' offices around the world including New York, Dublin, Cork, London, Edinburgh, Lisbon & Munich.



Global Shares new Asia-based team of three staff members will grow to ten staff within the next six months. The expansion comes on the back of significant growth in Global Shares client base since the launch of its software platform in 2015, increasing from 150 to 250 clients from 25 countries with participants in over 100 countries worldwide.

During this time, Global Shares has signed contracts with 8 FTSE 100 companies and its client listing includes GSK, Skanska, Sage, UniCredit, Generali, Cargill, Noble Group, Giosis PTE Ltd and others.



Speaking at the announcement in Hong Kong today, Irish Minister of State for Financial Services Michael DArcy TD, said: "Global Shares is a great example of Enterprise Irelands policy of strategic investment, and todays announcement illustrates how an Irish company can compete and succeed on the global stage. It is wonderful to see the continued progress Global Shares is making and I look forward to watching closely as its exciting story unfolds."



Source: www.businesssworld.ie
Britain said on Tuesday it would fast track an investigation into the collapse of outsourcer Carillion and broaden the scope of inquiry to its former and most recent directors.

Business Minister Greg Clark said: "It is important we quickly get the full picture of the events which caused Carillion to enter liquidation, which is why I have asked the Insolvency Service to fast-track and broaden the scope of the Official Receiver's investigation.

"In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors. Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously."

He said he had also asked the Financial Reporting Council to examine the preparation of Carillion's accounts past and present, as well as the company's auditors. Carillion was responsible for providing millions of pounds of public services. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
China likely installed more than 50 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2017, marking an enormous increase over the nearly 35 gigawatts added the previous year. Photo: Visual China

China is likely to have significantly raised its installed solar power capacity in 2017, thanks to the increased use of efficient technology and the popularization of distributed power generation, according to a prominent academic.

Chairman of the China Renewable Energy Society, Shi Dinghuan, said Monday that, barring any surprises, China likely installed more than 50 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2017. This marks an enormous increase from Chinas new installation of nearly 35 gigawatts in 2016. Shi was speaking at the annual China Photovoltaic Industry Conference, held in Suzhou, a city just west of Shanghai.

Chinas National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has already calculated that newly added installed solar capacity in the January-November period was 48.4 gigawatts, but has not yet released an official figure for the entire year.

The countrys total installed capacity was 125.8 gigawatts as of the end of November 2017, up 67% from November 2016, according to the NBS figures released earlier. Total installed solar capacity globally was 303 gigawatts in 2016, according to the International Energy Agency. China accounted for nearly half the 75 gigawatts added worldwide that year.

In addition to the large increase in capacity, Chinas solar power plants also passed a milestone in energy generation over the past year, Shi said. They generated more than 100 billion kilowatt-hours for the first time in 2017. According to NBS figures, solar power generation from January to November 2017 reached 106.9 billion kilowatt-hours, up 72% year-on-year. However, solar power still accounts for only 1.86% of the total power generated in China.

The recent increase in solar power capacity and production is mostly due to newer technology, such as high-efficiency monocrystalline panels, Shi said. Additionally, distributed solar power generators, as opposed to traditional large solar farms, are boosting the sectors size.

Chinas central government plans to implement a pilot distributed-power trading program across the country to further encourage the use of solar and wind power, and to push companies to generate more power with their existing capacities.

But the plan has faced setbacks, including a lack of coordination between regional and central governments.

Shi cautioned Monday that the growth of distributed power generation could face quality problems, due in part to poor standardization.

Contact reporter Teng Jing Xuan (jingxuanteng@caixin.com)
A one-way trip from Hong Kong to the Shenzhen Futian Railway Station will cost HK$80 ($10.23), despite a 2009 estimate that a ticket to Shenzhen on the the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link would cost HK$45 to HK$48. Photo: Visual China

Hong Kongs transport authority has announced the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link fare prices, which are significantly higher than the special administrative region predicted in 2009.

Frank Chan, Hong Kongs secretary for transport and housing, said that a one-way trip from Hong Kong to the Shenzhen Futian Railway Station will cost HK$80 ($10.23), while trips to Shenzhen North, Dongguan, and Guangzhou will cost HK$90, HK$210, and HK$260 respectively. Chan provided the prices to reporters after a meeting with China Railway officials in Beijing on Monday.

Hong Kongs Transport and Housing Bureau estimated in 2009 that the prices would be HK$45 to HK$48 for a ticket to Shenzhen, and HK$180 for a trip to Guangzhou. A regular express-train journey from Hong Kongs Hung Hom station, in the southern Kowloon Peninsula, to Guangzhou costs HK$210.

The 140-kilometer (87-mile) Express Rail Link, which the Hong Kong government says will reinforce Hong Kong as the southern gateway of the mainland, is expected to cut traveling time between central Hong Kong and its nearest mainland neighbor, Shenzhen, to 14 minutes. It currently takes at least 50 minutes to travel from Hong Kongs Austin Station, near the site of the future West Kowloon high-speed rail terminus, to the Shenzhen Futian border checkpoint.

Hong Kongs government expects the rail link to be complete by the third quarter of 2018. Up to 114 high-speed trains are expected to leave Hong Kong for the mainland each day during the peak season, Chan said on Monday.

Part of a broader push to integrate the Pearl River Delta Region, the rail link will also see mainland law enforcement officials stationed in central Hong Kong for the first time, under the co-location plan to combine Hong Kong and mainland checkpoints at West Kowloon station.

The area in the station occupied by mainland immigration officials will be subject to mainland laws, according to a document published in December by the National Peoples Congress, Chinas parliament. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam and mainland officials say the co-location system will make cross-border journeys more convenient for passengers, who wont have to disembark the train at the border, which they are currently required to do.

Hong Kong signed an agreement to participate in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area development plan in July, on the 20th anniversary of the former British colonys return to China. An immense bridge linking Hong Kong and Macau with Zhuhai in Guangdong province is currently under construction, and is expected to open in 2018 after years of budget overruns and delays.

Contact reporter Teng Jing Xuan (jingxuanteng@caixin.com)
Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.

Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.

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Step 1

Log on to the official website sbi.co.in

Step 2

Go to the careers tab or log on directly to SBI Careers website. Click on the tab that reads Recruitment for Specialist Cadre Posts

Step 3

The list of recruitment will be displayed on the screen. Click

Recruitment of Specialist Cadre Officers in State Bank of India (26 Posts)(Apply Online from 16-01-2018 to 04-02-2018) link

Step 4

Click the Apply Online option that appears below

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You will be directed to the IBPS website. Click the Click here for new registration button on the top right corner
Even if you made two seemingly contradictory New Years resolutions this year  save money and travel more  dont worry about it too much. It is possible to achieve both without resorting to a weeklong vacation at the Holiday Inn thats five miles from your house.

Picking a vacation spot can be daunting. Now that travel agents are less popular and more travelers choose to embark on DIY vacations using nothing but travel websites as their guide, theres less direction overall about where to go when you want to save some money. Plus, the costs of flights and lodging are constantly changing, so one budget-friendly spot you heard about last year may have become cost prohibitive as it gained popularity.

Never fear! This list can help you find the best low-cost yet exciting travel destination you never knew you should visit in 2018.

1. Canada

Have dreams of noshing on a croissant while visiting the Eiffel Tower? Thats great, but Paris usually comes with a steep price tag. Take the budget route when you opt to get your French fix right here in North America.

Montreal is a beautiful city thats immersed in French culture and architecture. You can get there cheaply (maybe even by car or bus) and as a bonus, the people are said to be less snobby. In fact, most are bilingual and signs are written in French and English, so youll be able to get around easier. Also, the U.S. dollar has a strong exchange rate right now in Canada. Tres bien!

Next: The perfect place to visit Europe on the cheap.



2. Spain

If your fantasies of visiting Europe have taken a backseat to your budget constraints, it may be time to give Barcelona a second look. This ancient city offers some of the best museums and architecture in the world, plus plenty of sandy beaches if lounging around listening to crashing waves is more your speed.

Forbes reported that flight prices to Barcelona are down 20% for the first half of 2018 as compared to the same time last year. Go ahead, book your trip now and thank yourself later.

Next: This is the best alternative to pricey tourist traps in Thailand.



3. Malaysia

While all your friends are booking trips to trendy Thailand, save a little money and still enjoy an unparalleled exotic experience in neighboring Malaysia.

Said to have some of the best street food and night markets in the world, Malaysia is the ultimate undiscovered paradise that combines beaches, cities, nature, history, and culture for a shockingly low cost. One travel deal finder reveals that you can get five-star accommodations for a mere $15 per night and that $10 will feed you for a day.

Next: Island dreams are made of these.



4. Curacao

No list of travel destinations is complete without at least one Caribbean island. When you think of a stereotypical vacation with palm trees, white sand, and clear water, Curacao is the exact type of place to fulfill those island aspirations.

Luckily, Curacao survived the 2017 hurricane season unharmed. With hotel prices down 11% this year, youll spend a little less on lodging. Dont miss out on some of the best snorkeling and diving in the Caribbean and be sure to check out the quaint charm of downtown Willemstad while youre there.

Next: Get here before everyone else figures out how cheap it is.



5. Bolivia

Get by in the stunning South American city of La Paz for less than $30 per day. This up-and-coming destination has plenty of boutique hotels and coffee shops to cater to tourists, but since so many travelers havent figured it out yet, the prices havent caught up with the value. Better hurry up and book your trip  by next year, it may not be so affordable.

Next: Youll find some of the most beautiful scenery in the world here.



6. Nepal

Ever dreamed of climbing Everest?

You dont have to attempt to reach the summit of the world to enjoy the stunning natural beauty of Nepal. This alternative to tourist-packed China and India has plenty of temples, mountain views, and culture to explore, but all for way less money. Three-star hotels may cost as little as $10 per night and three meals per day cost even less than that.

Next: Castles, palaces, and stunning coastlines  enough said.



7. Estonia

It wont be long before everyone figures out that Estonia is worth visiting and prices start to rise. As senior editor Jessica Biseto at TravelPirate told Readers Digest, Castles, palaces, and a beautiful coastline await visitors to this small Baltic country. Accommodations start at about $40 per night for a three-star hotel and meals for one day will run visitors about $18. Tourists should take advantage of the free walking tours and check museums as there are frequently free admission days throughout the year.

Next: Rumors may have kept you away from here, but thats a mistake.



8. Haiti

Forget everything you think you know about Haiti. Following a devastating earthquake in 2010, the country faced millions of dollars of worth of damage. For years after, Haiti was plagued by poverty and violence.

But theyve spent a lot of that time rebuilding and trying to rebound in order to become worthy of their Pearl of the Caribbean title. This small nation, located on the same island landmass as the Dominican Republic, offers the same palm trees, white sand beaches, and crystal-blue water for a fraction of the price. Check out the city of Port Salut as a beautiful and inexpensive way to get your island vacation fix.

Next: This African nation is very affordable.



9. Namibia

Lots of people want to visit Africa, but more popular tourist destinations can get pricey. Namibia offers that very African experience  complete with adventure and unspoiled views  but for less money than youd spend in more popular areas. Check out this West African destination and dont skip out on the amazing sand dune tours.

Next: Eat the best foods for less than $10 per day when you visit this place.



10. Peru

Photos of Machu Picchu may leave you mentally planning a Peruvian vacation  but can you afford it? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Peru is an excellent destination for anyone traveling on a tight budget. Delicious food, ocean views, mountains, canyons, and rushing rivers are enough to satisfy all your Instagram followers. But the most exciting part is you can eat well for less than $10 a day.

Next: Go here to tour ancient castles.



11. Albania

The nice thing about Europe is that the small size and close proximity of countries makes it easy to visit multiple places during one trip. Across the border from Greece and practically a stones throw from Italy, Albania is a great destination for anyone looking to take a European tour on the cheap.

Home to many castles, jaw-dropping coastlines, and the Albanian Alps, this under-the-radar country is great for shoestring travelers, Biseto told RD. Three-star accommodations start from $17 per night, hearty meals will set you back just a few dollars, and affordable public transportation options are readily available.

Next: The marketplaces here are legendary.



12. Morocco

Colorful, exotic, and exciting, Morocco has all the makings of an unforgettable vacation that doesnt have to cost an arm and a leg. You can freely splurge on gourmet foods and hammams without shelling out too much of your spending money. Just dont forget to bring home one-of-a-kind souvenirs from Moroccos famous squares and marketplaces.

Next: The weather is perfect, and the hotels are cheap.



13. Sri Lanka

Three-star hotels for as little as $13 per night and a full day of meals for less than $9  its all possible in the tiny island country of Sri Lanka. With pleasantly warm weather and jaw-dropping scenery, its a better option for budget travelers than Thailand or India, but offers plenty to do and see.

Next: Honeymooners, take note: this romantic spot is cheaper than so many others.



14. Portugal

If youve been seeking a romantic getaway that doesnt cost too much money, your search is officially over. Portugal offers everything a pair of lovers could want from a vacation.

Filled with fantastic and cheap food, wine, attractions and accommodations, the Azores islands are our top choice for budget destination in 2018, Biseto told RD. Off the coast of Africa in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, these islands are great for nature lovers and couples looking for romantic getaways, these gorgeous islands offer visitors impeccable views, unspoiled beaches, and coastal towns. Three-star hotels start from $63 per night and a nice meal in a restaurant will set you back about $8.

Next: This underrated country is a European gem.



15. Poland

Lonely Planet reports that Poland is one of Europes most under-visited gems. View stunning coastal scenery in the north, seek out the bison, climb mountains, and enjoy reasonably priced beer and food. Lodging wont set you back too much, and if you have the time, the rest of Europe is only a train ride away.

Read more: Popular Vacations Destination That Are Overrated

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Eighty-seven-year-old Forrest Fenn hid a treasure worth millions in the Rocky Mountains. He has provided all the clues he can, and now you just need to break the code. Pay close attention to all this article has to say; it may provide you with a little help on your journey toward millions. Theres even a poem from Fenn at the end with nine clues in it to help you on your journey. All that being so, pursue this treasure at your own peril. Some people have perished on their journey to discover Fenns hidden fortune.

1. First off: Who is Forrest Fenn?

In 1988, Fenn was diagnosed with terminal cancer. During that time, he reflected on his life and came up with the idea of a treasure hunt before he died. Miraculously, he was able to beat cancer. But, the idea of creating that treasure hunt never left him. So, this former Air Force-pilot-turned-antiquities dealer finally put together a chest full of riches, and gave nine clues as to where the buried treasure might be.

Next: Take a peek at whats in the chest.

2. If youve ever imagined a treasure chest, this would be close to it

Fenns treasure chest is made of cast bronze. It contains 265 gold coins, hundreds of gold nuggets, precious stones, quartz crystals, and cast gold pieces. The value of the chest is estimated to be anywhere from $1 million to $5 million. However, the consensus seems to be that it is around $2 million.

Next: There are a lot of people hunting for this treasure.

3. Hundreds of thousands of people are already looking

The prize has been around for eight years now, and no one has been able to find the buried gold. There are endless forums online to search through. Plenty of these would-be treasure hunters have shared notes on the clues theyve gathered. Fenn estimates that there are somewhere around 350,000 people who are looking, or have looked, for the treasure. Some have come within hundreds of feet of the treasure and not known it, says Fenn. But, some have paid with their lives.

Next: This endeavor can be dangerous.

4. A few people have died or gone missing

More than a year ago, 54-year-old Randy Bilyeu went missing while searching for Fenns treasure. His body wasnt discovered until eight months after his initial disappearance. In June 2017, a pastor by the name of Paris Wallace died in the New Mexico wilderness looking for the treasure, as well. Another man, Eric Ashby, also went missing and is presumed dead.

The tragic deaths of these men have led the New Mexico state police chief, Pete Kassetas, to ask Fenn to call the treasure hunt off. Fenn has repeatedly reminded people that he was 80 years old when he hid his the chest. Suffice it to say, youre not going to have to do anything extreme or dangerous to get to the treasure.

Next: After this long, could the whole thing be a hoax?

5. Is there really any hidden gold at all?

Forrest Fenn receives emails almost daily saying the entire thing is a hoax. Fenn was accused of making the whole treasure hunt up by the ex-wife of Randy Bilyeu. She wants him to call the whole thing off before more people get hurt. According to her, the hoax is just a way for Fenn to get attention.

Fenn stands by his claim that the treasure is still out there.

Next: If you think the treasure is real, heres where to start.

6. The treasure is Rocky Mountain high

In Fenns book, The Thrill Of The Chase, he shares a poem that he has written himself. In that poem lies nine clues that lead to the bounty. There is also a map that shows the area in which the treasure lies. Its the entire span of the Rocky Mountains, from Montana all the way down to New Mexico.

A lot of people have thought that the treasure is hidden somewhere in New Mexico, because Fenn lives in Sante Fe. But that could very well be a red herring meant to distract you.

Next: Want to take a stab at the poem and see if you can crack the code?

7. Fenns mysterious poem

On the Old Sante Fe Trading Companys webpage, there is a whole host of useful clues concerning the treasure, and the poem that will allegedly lead you right to it. If you follow this link to the website, the poem will be on the right-hand side of the page and youll be able to get some useful tools to help you try and solve the mystery. Happy hunting, everyone!

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Things to Do in Pueblo this week: The holiday fanfare has arrived
Evangelicals in Bolivia say they are deeply worried about Bolivias new Penal Code, which could sentence evangelicals to up to 12 years in prison.

Christians are concerned the Penal Code, which Bolivian President Evo Morales is expected to approve, could lead to a ban on evangelism and state abuse against Christians.

The law warns against anyone who "recruits, transports, deprives of freedom or hosts people with the aim of recruiting them to take part in armed conflicts or religious or worship organizations. Those found guilty could face between five to 12 years in prison.

The National Association of Evangelicals in Bolivia has launched a National Emergency Commission that will analyze the impact of the new law.

"We express our most resolute rejection of the inclusion of our ministerial activities in the list of possible conducts that go against the law," reads a statement by the group.

"The legislator forgets that the evangelical Christian churches in Bolivia are religious organizations recognized by the Bolivian state, and, therefore, legal entities."

Many have already protested the new law at a march on Jan. 16 and evangelical churches in the country have scheduled a day of prayer and fasting for Jan. 21.

Bolivia is predominantly Roman Catholic, according to the Christian Post. Evangelicals and Pentecostals are about 8 percent of the population, which Protestant Christians make up about 8 percent.

Photo courtesy: Thinkstock/PeterHermesFurian

Publication date: January 16, 2018
A Christian group is suing the University of Iowa for shutting them down after they refused to allow a gay student to hold a position of leadership within the organization.

FoxNews.com reports that the group, called the Business Leaders in Christ, meets weekly for Bible study and focuses its efforts on service projects. Its goal is to teach students how to continually keep Christ first in the fast-paced business world.

The conflict first began when a now-former member of the group, Marcus Miller, who identifies as gay, was rejected when he applied to serve as the groups vice president. Although the group allows anyone to attend, it reserves positions of leadership for those willing to affirm its statement of belief, which says that they embrace, not reject, their God-given sex, and that "Every other sexual relationship beyond this is outside of God's design and is not in keeping with God's original plan for humanity.

Because the group would not allow him to be in a position of leadership, Miller filed a complaint with University of Iowa faculty, which spiraled into the current lawsuit between Business Leaders in Christ and the University.

The Christian groups attorney, Eric Baxter from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, stated, "Every organization to exist has to be able to select leaders who embrace its mission. You would never ask an environmental group to have a climate denier as their leader. It's the same thing here."

Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

Publication date: January 16, 2018
The Kenosha Unified School Board recently voted to settle a lawsuit brought by a recent transgender graduate who had sued the district for alleged acts of discrimination. The plaintiff, Ash Whitaker, and his attorneys will receive $800,000 as part of the settlement, with $650,000 of the total going to attorneys fees.

Whitaker, who identifies as a man, claims that the district monitored their restroom use and alleged that the district planned to force transgender students to wear green armbands. Whitaker also says they were forced to stay in a hotel room by themselves on a school trip rather than being allowed to stay in the room with other boys.

The boards 5-2 vote came after a protracted court battle that they contended could cost them as much as $3 or $4 million were they to proceed with the case. U.S. District Court Judge Pamela Pepper issued an injunction which allowed Whitaker to use male restrooms at Tremper High School. In May, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction, leading the district to file a petition with the Supreme Court. The estimated costs of following that petition through to the end proved to be cost-prohibitive for the district. In the current settlement, they will pay a $25,000 deductible to their insurance company who will pay the remainder of the amount owed to Whitaker and his attorneys.

The district wanted the Supreme Court to settle the issues in the case since it was the first time an appeals court had applied sex discrimination to transgender students. In addition, the board denies Whitakers claims that they monitored restroom use or planned to make transgender students wear green armbands.

Board member Gary Kunich voted against the settlement and worried that the settlement opens the district up for future legal action. This opens us up to additional lawsuits and additional costs and I realize we have two issues. We have the civil rights argument on one side and the privacy rights on the other. I want the Supreme Court to settle this once and for all, not just for our district, but for other districts.

Whitaker, who graduated last year and is a biomedical engineering major at Wisconsin-Madison, will be allowed to use the mens room when visiting Tremper High School in the future.

Photo courtesy: Thinkstock/nito100

PUblication date: January 16, 2018
Does Christianity Produce Agnostics? Ricky Gervais described himself as an "agnostic atheist."

While discussing religion with Stephen Colbert on the "Late Show," Ricky Gervais described himself as an "agnostic atheist." Gervais said, "No one knows if there's a God, so technically, everyone's agnostic. We don't know. An agnostic atheist is someone who doesn't know if there's a God or not, as no one does."

And from Gervais's point of view, such a statement makes perfect sense. After all, one would expect a self-proclaimed agnostic atheist to assume that even Christians don't know for a fact that God exists, right?

In reality, you can know for sure that God is real by entering into a personal relationship with the Lord. I addressed this vital issue in a previous article entitled, "Can Faith Lead to Abiding Certainty?"

Christian certainty is based upon biblical history, God's promises, empirical evidence, and divine revelation. These four pillars provide a foundation for faith that is unshakable, as I explained here: "Does Christianity Stand on Faith or Evidence?"

In order for Ricky Gervais or anyone who shares his beliefs to embrace Christianity, an honest evaluation and acceptance of the pertinent facts is required. For example, one could come to recognize the rock solid historical evidence for the Christian faith and discover that "The Mathematical Proof for Christianity Is Irrefutable."

Another helpful approach would be to consider what I call "40 Questions to Determine the True Religion." In doing so, a person could come to see the uniqueness of Christianity in light of every other religion on the planet.

But in order to experience the new birth, one must bring his sin to the cross and get intellectually honest about the message of Christ's resurrection. (see "The Messiah's Critics Couldn't Produce His Body.")

Once you start to evaluate the evidence with an open mind, you will likely run into a major roadblock within your own soul. Namely, your moral resistance to Jesus and your personal aversion to God's claim on your life. This aspect of man's nature is spelled out in the article, "Moral Resistance Resides Deeper than Intellectual Reasoning."

And this helps to explain why Ricky Gervais believes that Christians are agnostic. After all, he has not yet been personally persuaded by biblical history, God's promises, empirical evidence, and divine revelation. And so in Ricky's thinking, a Christian cannot know for sure that God exists. The fact of the matter is that Christians definitely know Christ as their Savior, and many believers experience an abiding certainty that God is real and heaven is their eternal home.

Meanwhile, atheists and agnostics commonly end up "Rejecting Jesus for All the Wrong Reasons." And this is why divine revelation is so critical. After all, "the man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1 Cor. 2:14)

The Holy Spirit uses the Law to convict people of their sin and their need for the Savior. (see "How the Law Leads People to Christ.") Spiritual conversion is a miracle performed by the Holy Spirit (John 3:6) who works in man's heart through both the Law and the Gospel.

Thankfully, you don't have to twist God's arm for Him to love you. A key question for you, however, is this: Do you want to meet God? The Lord's grace is available to you today, and "God Would Love You to Know Him."

Ricky Gervais openly admits he does not know whether or not God exists. On the flip side, there are multitudes of Christians who are certain of God's existence and of Christ's love for them.

Agnostic atheists. Convinced Christians. Skeptical seekers.

At the end of the day, labels only communicate so much. What matters most is that you come to understand and embrace the purpose of Christ's death for you on the cross. And in order to base your faith on facts, you will need to wrap your mind around the salvation history of Scripture.

As you dig into the miraculous details of Christianity, don't forget to examine the empirical evidence for Christ's resurrection as well as the hundreds of messianic prophecies fulfilled by Jesus. Ultimately, you will need divine revelation from the Holy Spirit. Unless God speaks to you through His Word, you won't "get it." And you will likely assume that everyone else is flying by the seat of their pants just like you, regardless of their claim to know that God is real.

No matter where you find yourself today, there is only one approach that results in having your sins forgiven and your name written in "Heaven's Reservation Book." The apostle John put it this way: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life." (1 John 5:13)

The only place Christians are "agnostic" is in the minds of atheists and agnostics, when they assume that their own personal uncertainty about God translates to uncertainty in the hearts of believers. Such a flawed perspective seems plausible to a person until he is converted by the power of the Holy Spirit, or until he finds himself standing before the Lord on Judgment Day.

"For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ." (2 Cor. 5:10) Believer, unbeliever, agnostic, atheist, you name it. Everyone will get their appointment in God's courtroom. (see "Christianity Is Judicial and Set in Stone.")

One reason Christianity doesn't produce agnostics is because "the author and perfecter of our faith" (Hebrews 12:2) is not some mystical unknowable deity. Jesus Christ truly is the Son of God and the Savior of all who personally know Him. Jesus said, "I know my sheep and my sheep know me." (John 10:14)

Agnostics, on the other hand, do not know Christ. A step of faith is needed in order to move from the natural realm of agnosticism into the supernatural realm of Christianity. And until a person enters this realm, it's only natural to assume that no one really knows for sure whether or not God exists. Just ask Ricky Gervais.
Our World Has Become More and More Spiritually Confused Clarity and conviction are necessary components to any Christian school. Developing a sure foundation for faith is paramount!

American-born Canadian author and noted novelist, humorist and columnists Linwood Barclay said, "Once you come up with a premise, you have to work out how it all happened. It's a bit like coming up with a spectacular roof design first. Before you can get it up there, you need to build a solid foundation and supporting structure."

If only Christian school organizers would use this statement as an institutional building model things might be radically different! Some might ask, "Why!" The organizers, board and faculty are all Christians. They might even break into song: "Christ is made the sure foundation, Christ the head and cornerstone, chosen of the Lord, and precious, binding all the church in one, Holy Zion's help forever and her confidence alone."

Indeed, I'm sure all would have no problem saying, "Amen" or "I believe!" I don't doubt this group's faith in Christ or their zeal, but their thought process and understanding of Christian education is that with which I have a problem. Zig Ziglar, the late American author, salesman, and motivation speaker brings a bit more clarity, "The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty." All of these are biblical virtues and need to be woven into the very fabric of a Christian education.

On a late spring day in 1970 I was interviewed for a teaching position at the Stony Brook (New York) School. Part of the process was lunch at the Three Village Inn with Dr. D. Bruce Lockerbie. At first sight my wife Pat and I were put at ease seeing this bearded scholar with somewhat longer hair approaching. Put at ease because my hair length had become a problem at some interviews. Hey, we had just exited the 60s and now in the 70s.

Bruce in his book Who Educates Your Child? (1980, page 47) makes clear exactly what Christian education is. "So, for a Christian 'to educate' means to teach whole persons a wholly as possibleintellectually, physically, emotionally, and spiritually." "...any education worth the name begins with the First Commandment in Judeo-Christian teaching: 'Love the Lord God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.' (Luke 10:27)"

Barclay, Ziglar, and Lockerbie have provided us with good advice for a "sure founda-tion" being built! Now it is our responsibility to see that we do this right. This means knowing, understanding, and being fully committed to the "mission" of our school. Cultural pressures are great, the desire to be accepted is strong, and the encouragement to compromise unrelenting.

During the early 1990s I began exploring and networking toward establishing a Christian school in Manhattan, the C. S. Lewis School. I met with hundreds of individuals capable of making large donations and those capable of sending their children to such an institution. Most were somewhat ignorant of what a Christian education actually looked like and weren't sure they wanted to opt out of the prestigious "New York City Preparatory School Culture." How sad this was!

Along the way a number of people joined this effort believing that a Christian university preparatory school was needed in Manhattan. Some became board members and others simply continued to inquiry of progress and offer suggestions. The one negative which developed was a desire to establish this school quickly and the board thought that the better part of wisdom was to thoroughly prepare for what for sure would be a highly competitive marketplace. And touting a "Christian" academic institution could not open to poor reviews.

As a result of this development a small group left to establish their own Christian school, a school which has waffled about for many years now, but never has made a significant contribution to either Christian education or the Christian community in Manhattan. Actually this school has fallen in line with the overwhelming number of Christian schools which are academically light and financially underfunded. What a disappointment!

Clarity and conviction are necessary components to any Christian school! Our world has become more and more spiritually confused. Developing a sure foundation for faith is paramount! No manner of skimping or quick start shortcuts can be used to replace solid planning. Time is needed to do it right!

Serious thought must be given to establish: "Institutional Foundations" and "Student Foundations." The author of Winnie the Pooh A. A. Milne said, "Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up." Good advice!

This is part one of a three-part series: A Sure Foundation.

Robert F. Davis has 40 years of experience providing counsel for educational and not-for-profit institutions. He previously served as vice president for Advancement at Bryan College in Tennessee and consulting vice president for Advancement and Alumni Affairs at Liberty University in Virginia.
Paying the Price: Death Threats Against FCC Chairman Are Unprecedented and Must Stop In the last decade, conservatives have paid the price for their convictions with their careers, businesses, life savings and security. If anyone misses real neutrality, it's us.

When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rolled back President Barack Obama's "net neutrality" policy, Chairman Ajit Pai told reporters, "It's not going to kill democracy."

But could it kill him?

Federal officials are certainly concerned, now that a flood of death threats has reached a level most insiders say they've never seen. This is "routine for presidents and vice presidents," sources say, "but highly unusual for heads of government agencies like the FCC." For the 44-year-old chief, the risks of the job were clear from his earliest days at the FCC. He tells horrifying stories about his house being surrounded by protestors, some lurking under his windows with signs of his children's names.

"My kids are five and three," he told the Wall Street Journal in 2014. "It's not pleasant."

Now, the dangers to Pai and his family are so serious that the FCC head was forced to back out of a speech at one of the most important tech events of the year, the Consumer Electronics Show.

"Basically, if these threats are credible, you need armored vehiclesand I mean pluralnot to mention area sweeps, aerial support, and Secret Service directly manning the commissioner at all times," said a security expert familiar with the situation.

"There's not the budget for staffing the Consumer Electronics Show from threats of that level," he went on, explaining that Pai's "detail is ill-equipped to protect against snipers, attackers, bombs, gas attacks, vehicular blockades, and other assassination attempts."

Of course, the question on everyone's minds is: Who cares this much about net neutrality?

Most people don't even know what the FCC stands for, let alone who heads it. If it weren't for Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction or Bono's fleeting expletive, half the country probably wouldn't know the agency existed.

As for net neutrality (which is about as misnamed as "marriage equality"), the issue has never been the stuff of mainstream political passion. It didn't even get a passing mention in the presidential debates.

So what is it about this issue that's leading an army of the far left to threaten an innocent man's life?

Like most things, the crusade against Pai began in the dark shadows of Obama's favorite radicals.

"The tech left, funded largely by George Soros, decided to champion under the banner of a benign-sounding 'net neutrality' campaign and seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grab the moral high ground in their determination to allow the giant edge providers to censor the internet to suit their ideological preferencesridding the internet of conservative and libertarian content," Roger Stone explains in an eye-opening column for the Daily Caller.

Obama added the idea to his toolshed of unconstitutional crackdowns, all but demanding the FCC implement the policy in 2015.

As then-Commissioner Pai vented,

"Why is the FCC turning its back on internet freedom? Is it because we now have evidence that the internet is not open? No. Is it because we have discovered some problem with our prior interpretation of the law? No. We are flip-flopping for one reason and one reason alone. President Obama told us to do so."

Essentially, Stone explains, the FCC "legalized censorship, allowing Soros-funded groups to run rampant spreading the most violent messages possible, while at the same time aggressively censoring Donald Trump supporters and patriotic Americans who desire only to make their country great again."

The very opposite, he points out, of neutrality. Or, conservatives might add, the FCC's mission.

For Pai, things only got worse. HBO host John Oliver kicked off a campaign called "Go FCC Yourself," determined to gin up outrage (and worse) against the FCC chair. Liberals blocked the Pais' driveway, while others savaged him on the FCC site, unloading on Pai as a "dirty, sneaky Indian."

The rampage got so out of control that Oliver had to call on his own flock to tone down the threats. They didn't.

The Pai doorbell rang every half hour "with pizza deliveries that they had not ordered," Commentary Magazine's Noah Rothman explained in his column about Pai's tormentors. His neighborhood was plastered with fliers of Pai and his vitals, like something out of the FBI's Most Wanted.

"Is this really the world you want Annabelle and Alexander to inherit," read a hand-made sign affixed to a lamppost outside Pais' residence in November, making a point to emphasize the names of Pai's two children. "They will come to know the truth: Dad murdered democracy in cold blood," read another.

The harassment of Pai and his family is a national outrage that should be a headline in every news outlet in Americaespecially considering the irony of the left's position. These fanatics are attacking Pai on the same internet they're complaining isn't neutral. Only a liberal could keep a straight face.

For the rest of society, it's just another example of the left's ruthless and relentless intolerance. An intolerance, sadly, that too many in the media ignoreif not embrace.

As Pai said on "Washington Watch" in November, this culture of cruelty must stop.

"I cannot say in strong enough terms how much I reject this notion that people who are passionate about an issue ... should go after public officials personally and their familiesparticularly the families. In my case, it's been extremely unpleasant, to say the least, to have to think about these things and worry about them.

Even today, there are criminal charges filed against a man who called up Congressman [John] Katko in upstate New York and said, 'If you don't vote for net neutrality, I will kill you and your family...' There's no place in civilized society for that."

Disagreements used to be an opportunity for debate. Now, we don't even pretend to look for consensus.

In this post-civil world, some Americans have simply lost the desire for common courtesyand excusing the bad behavior of an enlightened few as "justice" or "reasonable resistance" doesn't help.

In the last decade, conservatives have paid the price for their convictions with their careers, businesses, life savings and security. If anyone misses real neutrality, it's us.

This was originally published at the Tony Perkins' Washington Update.

Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council.
The Untold Story of Global Human TraffickingForgotten Victims Christian victims of human trafficking and violence seldom merit a mention in the hype and hoopla.

With much fanfare and publicity, January is declared as Human Trafficking Prevention month, flush with hip hashtag campaigns, slick YouTube videos and modern marketing materials. Missing from all the global human rights seminars, celebrity public service announcements, blue ribbon campaigns and Hollywood events is any mention of the hideous growing global human trafficking and persecution of Christians around the world. Christian victims of human trafficking and violence seldom merit a mention in the hype and hoopla.

Yet the recently released and highly touted annual World Watch List 2018 generated by Open Doors USA powerfully and demonstrably highlights the global persecution of Christians. The World Watch List is an annual report that ranks the top 50 countries where Christians are persecuted for their faith.

The 2018 Open Doors report reveals shocking and disturbing data about the rise in abduction and rape of Christian women around the world. According to the report, 3,066 Christians were killed in 2017; 1,252 were abducted; and 1,020 were raped or sexually harassed. These growing, brutal and verifiable statistics demonstrate the increased threat to Christians around the world. Abduction and rape are the weapons human traffickers deploy against helpless Christian women.

Criminal traffickers target Christian women and girls for the crime of living their Christian religion.

Professing the Christian faith is often a death sentence around the world. Has the world conveniently forgotten the April 2014 crisis where nearly 300 Nigerian Chibok Christian school girls were abducted, raped and killed by the Islamic Boko Haram terrorists? The world stood by helpless while their violent abduction and kidnapping enfolded at the hands of Islamic terrorists.

The #Bringbackourgirls campaign faded into oblivion as the Christian school girls endured unimaginable torture and brutality. They were taken deep into the Sambisa Forest to Boko Haram's stronghold, where these young Christian schoolgirls were offered a choice: join the Islamic militants or become their sex slaves. Since 2011, Boko Haram has killed nearly 54,000 people in its deadly rage. These innocent Christian girls were subjected to forced Islamic conversion, forced marriages, rape, servitude and, for some, death.

The untold tale of Christians identified, targeted and abducted for their faith remains a missing chapter in the global human trafficking scenario. This reality is growing, and with the increased radicalization of Islam dominating countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, Islamic traffickers terrorizing Christians doesn't fit the liberal secular scenario.

The Open Doors researchers warn that this dangerous trend is promulgated by "Islamic oppression. It is one of the most widely recognized sources of persecution for Christians in the world todayand it continues to spreadaiming to bring many parts of the world under Sharia law. The movement, which often results in Islamic militancy and persecution of Christians, is expanding in Asia (Philippines, Bangladesh, Indonesia) and Africa (Egypt, Nigeria, Somalia)."

The World Report details the underlying cause for this huge uptick in persecution of Christians:

"Persecution comes from the government and radical Muslims and is systematic and reminiscent of ethnic cleansing. Historically, Islam is deeply embedded in these governments and societies, and the government strictly implements the policy of one religion, one culture and one language." Hence, Christianity is targeted for eradication and extinction.

Country after country is described in the following terms that make Christians an endangered species: "Much of the Christian persecution in (Pakistan) comes from radical Islamic groups that flourish under the favor of political parties, the army and the government. These radical Islamic groups run thousands of Islamic education centers where youth are taught and encouraged to persecute religious minorities like Christians."

Media outlets and news headlines rarely cover the daily persecution of Christians. The media seldom identifies or describes the real culprit of this systematic cleansing of Christian minorities as radical Islam embedded in the culture of Sharia law. Islamic militants and their criminal organizations foster a reign of terror against Christian minorities. Eradicating Christianity is their goal, and any violent and brutal means are justified. The report boldly proclaims that "Islamic oppression fuels persecution in 8 of the top 10 countries."

William Wilberforce, the great British leader of the slave abolitionist movement, wisely observed that "you may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know."

We can no longer bury our head in the sand and ignore the reality of Christian persecution at the hands of Islamic trafficking terrorists.

Elizabeth Yore is an international child advocate attorney with expertise in human trafficking, child exploitation, missing children and female genital mutilation, and has worked for Oprah Winfrey as her child advocate. Yore was formerly the General Counsel at the National Center for Missing and Abducted Children
'Days of Our Lives' spoilers: Jen Lilley on Theresa's return and 'Brave' pairing

Fans will not be seeing Theresa Donovan on "Days of Our Lives" again until this summer, but Jen Lilley, who portrays the character, gave a little tease to at least relieve everyone from the long wait.

As recalled, things were going smoothly for her before she left Salem. She and Brady (Eric Martsolf) were set to tie the knot while raising their little boy, Tate. Things went awry, though, when Mateo (Andoni Gracia) came back to her life with a threat to her family. To keep the boys safe, she eventually agreed to the drug lord's demands and flew to Mexico.

After that agonizing separation, Theresa is finally coming back, but Brady may not welcome her with open arms. Not only did she break his heart, her return comes at a time when the man appears to be getting closer with Eve (Kassie DePaiva) as well. While many fans do not like the idea of the two as a couple, Lilley teases Brady and Eve's unlikely pairing, also known as "Brave," is just going to make her return more powerful and exciting.

Speaking to Soap Hub, the actress said: "Ron said that's why he put them together because [he was hoping] I would come back to the show." It remains to be seen how things pan out for Eve and Brady, but as far as working with them is concerned, Lilley has nothing but praises for her fellow actors.

"Kassie [DePaiva, Eve] and Eric are two of my favorite people on the planet and are also, dare I say it, even better co-stars," the actress admitted. "They are powerhouse performers. When I act with them it's so easy for me to cry. I stayed in touch with them while I was not on the show. We're friends both on and off set."

"Days of Our Lives" airs weekdays at 1 p.m. on NBC.
Dylan Farrow news: Expresses gratitude toward Oprah Winfrey and MeToo campaign

Dylan Farrow, adopted daughter of American actor and filmmaker Woody Allen, showed his gratitude toward Oprah Winfrey and Shonda Rhimes on social media, thanking them for their movement toward empowering women in a CBS segment titled "CBS Sunday Morning." The segment allowed prominent figures in Hollywood to sit down together to discuss progressive ways for women to approach the issue of harassment in the workplace through the "Time's Up" campaign.

In the tweet that Farrow posted, she thanked the women who were part of the special segment by recognizing that Winfrey and the rest of the ensemble tackled some of the most difficult issues that women, who are victims of sexual abuse and harassment, face in this day and age. The discussion at one point focused on a tweet from Farrow, wherein she asked if "time was truly up" for her father.

This is in line with the accusations she made against Allen four years ago, accusing him of committing sexual abuse toward her. Kennedy responded to Winfrey's inquiries by stating that "time is up for silence," meaning that women should not be afraid to come forward when they do not feel they are safe in any type of situation.

The segment was shot in Pasadena, California, just after the Golden Globes Awards ceremony where Winfrey gave her moving speech after receiving the Cecil B. DeMille award. The CBS segment also had other successful Hollywood personalities in the gathering, such as Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon, Kathleen Kennedy and America Ferrara, just to name a few.

Although most of the United States believe Farrow's claims from four years ago, one of Farrow's brothers, Moses, has publicly revealed that Allen did not sexually abuse his children. In fact, Moses stated that Allen's wife, Mia Farrow, was the one who engaged in sexually abusive acts toward Moses. An account from a book titled "From Start to Finish" by Eric Lax detailed the abuse that Moses received from his adopted mother when he was just a little boy.
George Clooney to return to TV with 'Catch 22' mini-series

Multi-Golden Globes winner George Clooney is making his television comeback for the adaptation of "Catch-22."

The mini-series, which will star and be directed and executive produced by Clooney, will be his first venture into TV after he starred as Doug Ross in the 15-year medical drama "ER," which aired from 1994 to 2009.

The six-part limited series from Paramount Television and Anonymous Content has just landed a deal with Hulu, just days after the subscription network surpassed 17 million subscribers.

"Catch-22" is based on the 1961 satirical novel from Joseph Heller. It follows Yossarian, a U.S. Air Force bombardier located in Italy. He is trying to complete his service requirements so he could finally go home.

The novel was critically acclaimed for its interesting plot, where airmen deemed mentally unfit to fly are not obligated to do so. But as soon as they request to stop flying, they are deemed sane enough to fly.

Clooney will play the role of Colonel Cathcart, the series' de-facto antagonist. According to The Hollywood Reporter, his paycheck for each of the six episodes is at $1 million.

Hulu's new chief content officer Joel Stillerman shared why the company fought very hard to get the series, after many outlets showed interest since it was taken out in December.

"Catch-22 is a rare story that has withstood the test of time, not only as a literary masterpiece, but as a story that still resonates in today's political and social conversation," he said in an official statement. "These are exactly the types of stories we want to be programming at Hulu, and we couldn't be happier to partner with George Clooney, Paramount TV and this phenomenal group of creative."

"Catch-22" was previously adapted for a film directed by Mike Nichols in 1970. It starred Alan Arkin as Yossarian and Martin Balsam as Cathcart.
Islamists vow to 'kill more Copts' in Egypt

Islamist militants in Egypt have vowed to 'kill more Copts' after shooting dead a 27-year-old Christian because he had a cross on his wrist.

Bassem Herz Attalhah, also known as Haythem Shehata, was on his way home from work in El-Arish, capital of North Sinai governorate, on Saturday evening when he was attacked by three armed militants, according to the persecution news site World Watch Monitor.

After the killing Bassem's close friend called his mobile only to find it answered by the attackers. 'The terrorists answered me and said they belong to State of Sinai and promised to kill more Copts before they put down the phone,' he told WWM.

The militants confronted Bassem when he was with his brother Osama and neighbour Mohamed. Both of them escaped but Bassem was shot because he had a cross tattooed on his wrist.

Describing the incident to the persecution watchdog, Osama said: 'We thought they were policemen because they weren't masked... They were wearing black jackets.'

He added: 'They approached us and asked Bassem to show them the wrist of his right hand, and when they saw the tattoo of the cross, they asked him: "Are you Christian?" Bassem answered "Yes, I am Christian", and repeated that again in a loud voice.'

Osama escaped because his own tattoo was on the top of his hand and hidden when the militants asked to see his wrists.

'They fired two shots on the ground close to my legs and asked me to leave,' he said. 'And then they shot Bassem in the head. I could not believe what happened to my brother. He fell on the ground in front of me and I was unable to do anything.'

He added: 'We lost a person dear to our hearts. My brother Bassem was a very good and kind man. He had a strong relationship with God. He was always reading in the Bible, praying and going to the church. He was loved by all people.'

It comes after Egypt was named as one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a Christian after an 'unprecedented' rise in persecution, according to another persecution charity Open Doors.

More than 200 people were driven from their homes and 128 killed in the last year as hardline Islamist extremists, pushed out of Syria and Iraq, have fled to Turkey and Egypt bringing a sharp rise in violence and aggression towards Christians there.
Leonardo DiCaprio news: To participate in Quentin Tarantino Manson film

American actor and Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio is set to take part in Quentin Tarantino's next movie -- which will revolve around the story of one of America's most infamous serial killerrs, Charles Manson. The upcoming project will be the second time that Tarantino and DiCaprio work together, after the blockbuster hit "Django Unchained." The Charles Manson project will be Tarantino's ninth film.

As reported by Deadline, it is clear that DiCaprio will not be taking on the challenging role of the mass murderer. Instead, he will be playing an actor whose career may be waning due to aging. Both DiCaprio and Tarantino have been quiet about any details of the project, and fans will have to wait patiently for more details. The story is set during 1969 in Los Angeles, around the time the Manson murders took place.

The movie will be executed in Tarantino fashion, which means that it is safe to assume that the film will not be presenting the events in chronological order.

Additionally, another A-lister was secured by the renowned director -- he successfully convinced Australian actress Margot Robbie to play Manson's victim, actress Sharon Tate. Tarantino is currently aiming to release the movie during the 50th anniversary of Tate's death, which would make the film much more meaningful. On top of that, Manson already died a few months ago at the age of 83, which could make the film more relevant.

Sony is responsible as to why the project is successfully under way as of now by outbidding other big-named studios since it put its faith in Tarantino to make a potentially great film, despite the sensitive subject matter. The film is bringing people together once more, with the reunion of DiCaprio and Robbie, as well as reports indicating that Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt have been expressing their interests in being a part of the project.

Cruise and Pitt have not worked with one another since the 1994 film "Interview with the Vampire."
Unequal pay is an affront to God  here's a way you can help your female colleagues

The respected BBC journalist Carrie Gracie's resignation as the broadcaster's China Editor has re-lit the firestorm about unequal pay between men and women. Gracie stood down after she discovered she was being paid tens of thousands less than men doing the same job, and accused the corporation of 'unlawful pay discrimination'.

The BBC  which was forced to publish how much its leading presenters and journalists were paid last summer  is facing a crisis, with hundreds of female employees joining a movement demanding salary parity.

And the statistics suggest the BBC is far from alone. The average hourly wage earned by women was 10.7 per cent less than that of men, according to figures from hundreds of firms published earlier this month. Some of that will be down to women doing different jobs, but it's clear that across the UK plenty of companies are getting away with paying their female employees less than male colleagues in the same roles.

Let's not beat around the bush  this is an affront to God. While wage parity might not crop up often in the Bible, it's clear that God is deeply concerned with justice at work and is angered by those who do not treat their workers fairly.

'The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favour with him,' Proverbs 11:1 tells us. We hear the same thing in Deuteronomy 25: God 'detests' those who 'deal dishonestly'.

And in the New Testament James is scathingly furious about wealthy landowners and bosses who con their poorer workers out of a fair wage: 'Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.'

So what, you are probably saying. What has this got to do with me  I don't set my female colleague's wages, I am not able to ensure equal pay for equal work.

We can only overturn this form of injustice with a healthy dose of sunlight. Gracie was only able to launch her claim for fair pay, and then resign with aplomb when it was denied, because the BBC was made to publish its stars' salaries, proving for the first time what women have suspected for years.

Maybe the women who work in your office are being cheated out of money and paid less than the men. But if they are, they can only challenge it if they know about it. So here's one thing every man reading this can do, regardless of your situation: you can offer to tell your female colleagues what you are paid.

This is awkward, no doubt. We in Britain are allergic to talking about how much we make. Normally I'm all for a bit of quiet discretion when it comes to money, but in this instance, our prudishness about pay could be colluding in injustice. It's quite possible your employer is doing what's right  but we can only find out by overcoming our embarrassment and talking about how much we earn.

And to show I'm not all talk and no trousers, I've done this myself. Inspired by the BBC farrago, and this tweet, I recently (privately, by email) offered to share how much I was paid with all the women in my team. Yes, it was a little awkward, but honestly, it's not the end of the world.

As someone once said, all it takes for evil to prevail, is for good men to do nothing. And all it could take to empower our friends and colleagues to stand up to wage injustice is to do something very small  tell them the truth about what we are paid. In this instance, as in so many others, Jesus was spot on: 'Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'

Tim Wyatt is a freelance journalist specialising in faith and religion.
Western Europe's transgender policy is a 'tragedy', says Russian Orthodox spokesman

Western Europe's gender policy is 'an enormous tragedy and next generations will see its repercussions', according to the Russian Orthodox Church's spokesman on foreign affairs.

Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) of Volokolamsk, the head of the Moscow patriarchate's department for external Church relations, made the comments on the Rossiya'24 television channel on Saturday, according to the website tass.com.

He said: 'The decisions taken in many European countries nowadays are enforced by the same ideology which has already destroyed many families, the ideology which claims that an individual can choose gender, that even in their childhood a person can define who will be their partners in the future  same-sex or not.

'All sex reassignment surgeries are based on lies and deceit,' he added. 'The lies are introduced through ideology, which in its turn comes through school education. It is an enormous tragedy of contemporary Western Europe and the entire contemporary Western world. Perhaps, only next generations will understand the scope of the tragedy.'

Metropolitan Hilarion continued: 'It means a human being's external characteristics are possible to be alternated. So let's suppose a man will look like a woman. However, such a man cannot have a baby and will never become a real woman.'

He said that the Church 'will always come forward against these lies and deceit', adding: 'What is a mental disorder, what could be corrected and cured, is presented as a norm and people are forced to disfigure themselves. There are many cases when people come to senses. When they have undergone toughest operations, reassigning gender or changing skin colour. Afterwards, they realise they have been merely deceived but nothing can be repaired.'

Transgender people are legally allowed to changed their gender in Russia, but frequently face discrimination and hostility. The conservative Russian Orthodox Church has steadfastly condemned both transgender procedures and homosexuality.
What is Jerusalem syndrome?

A Christian tourist from Northern Ireland is missing in the Israeli desert, having left a trail of pages from the Bible behind him, with search teams believing that he may have been suffering from delusions known as 'Jerusalem syndrome'.

So, what is Jerusalem syndrome?

Let's face it: Jerusalem, with its political place as the divided city at the heart of the world's most intractable conflict, and its role as the Holy City for the three monotheistic religions, can be a maddening place to stay, let alone live.

But sadly, for some its maddening nature is literal, as those with either no history of mental illness get swept up delusionally by the atmosphere of the ancient souks, and those with a history of psychological problems have them exacerbated by their trip, with some troubled people making it their mission to visit in the first place.

Those suffering from psychosis are often misunderstood as dangerous to others, but it should be emphasised that the vast majority of sufferers of Jerusalem syndrome are harmless, though they experience some very strange ideas.

Sufferers tend to come to believe they are prophets or other figures from the Bible. I myself have seen a man dressed in white with a beard and long hair, a makeshift 'robe' that appeared to be made from a bed-sheet and a large Bible attend multiple services across denominations at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before dawn, who local experts clearly believed was suffering from Jerusalem syndrome. He did no one any harm, but he probably ended up in the city's asylum.

There are one or two anecdotal and unverified reports that patients at the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre on the outskirts of Jerusalem are occasionally treated with some harshness, and that they are frequently thrown out of the country after attending. But this may be untrue.

What is known is that psychiatrists describe the manifestation of the delusions as highly theatrical and public. Sufferers will indeed often rip hotel bed sheets into makeshift togas, deliver impromptu sermons in front of holy sites and go wailing through the souks.

'Their appearance is very dramatic and they use Jerusalem as a stage and deliberately go there to play out their act  an act that they entirely believe to be true,' said Dr Moshe Kalian, the former district psychiatrist of Jerusalem and a leading authority on the syndrome, reported in the Telegraph.

Past stories, recounted by the Telegraph, include an Irish schoolteacher who came to a Jerusalem hospital convinced she was about to give birth to the baby Jesus when in fact she was not even pregnant; a Canadian tourist who believed he was the biblical strongman Sampson and tried to tear stone blocks out of the Wailing Wall; and an Austrian man who got upset in his hotel kitchen when staff refused to prepare the Last Supper for him.

The syndrome, which has afflicted mainly Christians and some Jews but no Muslims to date, intriguingly, apparently goes back a long way. Cases have been recorded since the Middle Ages, and Simon Sebag Montefiore refers throughout his well-received 'biography' of Jerusalem to the syndrome, 'a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion' that over the centuries has affected kings and emperors as well as humble pilgrims.

As J E Hanauer, a British traveller and Anglican vicar, wrote in around 1870: 'It is an odd fact that many Americans who arrive at Jerusalem are either lunatics or lose their mind thereafter.'

The majority of the hundred or so who are hospitalised each year reportedly have suffered mental health problems in their own countries and came to Jerusalem on what they saw as a mission from God.

However, in a 2000 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, academics claimed to have identified and described a specific syndrome which emerges in tourists with no previous psychiatric history.

This is the most contentious point of debate among scholars of Jerusalem syndrome, what one group of doctors has called Type III cases: people with no history of mental illness who become overwhelmed by the city's religiosity and  temporarily  lose their minds.

'The third type of Jerusalem syndrome is perhaps the most fascinating,' wrote psychiatrists from Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre. They recorded 42 cases of people who arrived in Jerusalem as ordinary tourists, then suffered severe psychotic episodes while there, and later recovered totally after leaving the Holy Land. Tellingly, of the 42 individuals, 40 were from what doctors described as 'ultra-religious' Protestant families.

Type I Jerusalem syndrome is imposed on a previous psychotic illness, and Type II is known to be superimposed on and complicated by idiosyncratic ideas. Of this version of the 'illness', Wikipedia, always to be taken with a pinch of salt, states: 'This does not necessarily take the form of mental illness and may simply be a culturally anomalous obsession with the significance of Jerusalem, either as an individual, or as part of a small religious group with idiosyncratic spiritual beliefs.'

Which, finally, brings us to the important question: where does religious experience end and delusion begin? I myself have had several special moments in the Holy City, and at the Holy Sepulchre, sometimes at what others would regard as strange times of the day, like the early hours of the morning, with just a few nuns around. Madness? Who knows? But what is true is that Jerusalem is a beautiful, wondrous and sometimes literally maddening place.
Police arrested a Texas teacher who is accused of giving minors alcohol during a New Year's Eve party as well as her son after he was accused of sexually assaulting a guest.

Wylie East High School teacher Kristi Crawford, 46, is charged with furnishing alcohol to minors while her son Jacob Crawford, 17, faces charges of sexual assault of a child, according to the Dallas Morning News. The pair were arrested Wednesday and posted bond Thursday and were released from the Collin County Detention Center, the newspaper reports.
President Trumps latest obloquycalling a number of countries shitholes and asking why we are expected to accept their immigrantsis offensive for all the reasons youve probably heard: its insulting, racially divisive, callous, and so on. The United States has welcomed immigrants from various shithole countries for much of its history. Those schleppers worked, sweated, and saved, started businesses, paid taxes, and asked God to bless America.

If only that was all there was to it. As is so often case in this presidents administration, noxious wording is distracting from a serious public-policy debate. The truth is that an hourglass, low-mobility, big-government economy presents a new set of questions about immigration policy. Todays immigrants face a different economic reality from their predecessors.

During the mass migration that took place in the period between 1850 and 1930, more than 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Many were uneducated and unskilled people from countries that were largely shitholes. Immigrants from nineteenth-century Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Austro-Hungarian, Greece, even the now-flush Scandinavian countries, were escaping poor, stagnant places where the future promised more of the same.

Poverty and lack of skills didnt stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of iton the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920. New technologies and a swelling population also meant more jobs for construction and transportation workers. The preWorld War II industrial economy, sociologists Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlman have written, offered a range of blue collar opportunities for immigrants and their children.

Todays unskilled immigrants are not so lucky. Automation and offshoring to Third World countries have seriously eroded the number of blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing positions plummeted from 19.4 million in 1979 to 11.5 million in 2010, even as immigrants were adding millions to the population of job seekers. In 1970, blue-collar jobs were 31.2 percent of total nonfarm employment. By 2016, their share had fallen to 13.6 percent of total employment. Todays immigrants are more likely to be hotel workers, agricultural hands, bussers, janitors, and hospital orderlies. They may be earning more than they could have in their home countries, but their wagesassuming they work full-timeare enough only to keep them a notch or two above the poverty line in the United States. Adding to their troubles is frequently a lack of benefits, unreliable hours, and little chance for moving up the income ladder.

Which takes us to the other crucial shift in immigrant America. In the Ellis Island era, the country took in the tired and poor, but it did notit could not, in those hard-knock timesoffer them more than a chance to manage on their own. Private charitable organizations, mostly religious, sometimes kept greenhorns from starving or living on the streets, but there was no Department of Health and Human Services, no state and city welfare offices, no food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, no Department of Education with Title I funds to augment local school budgets, no ESL classes or special education for immigrant children. According to a 2016 National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than native-born families with children.

Immigration absolutists respond to concerns like these by pointing out that the United States needs low-skilled workers to fill positions Americans wont do; someone has to pick the grapes and empty the bedpans. They also might say twenty-first-century Americans will not and should not accept the sort of deprivation pre-safety net immigrants had to endure. True enough. But Americans are also dreamers. Immigration was part of the nations identity not because Americans loved living next to foreignersfew human beings door because immigration is a foundational principle of the nation, but because the rapidly growing American economy had a need for unskilled workers, and offered them an opportunity for advancement.

And theres the rub. Postindustrial economies create a far more challenging path to upward mobility than the manufacturing economy. Unlike during the later industrial era, when even high school dropouts could get decent employment, education is now the most likely route to middle-class comfort and relative stability. Though as a group the number of foreign-born kids graduating college has grown faster than native-born, the children of low-skilled immigrants, particularly Latinos, are struggling. Instead of climbing the income ladder, they are slipping down. Between the second and third generation, Hispanic high school dropout rates go up and college attendance declines. Canada, Australia, and several other countries have introduced a points system giving preference to skilled immigrants precisely to avoid this scenario.

The U.S. may want to welcome low-skilled workers to do the jobs Americans wont do and to help them in the early years of assimilation. But the prospect of a multi-generational proletariat class, hovering near the poverty line and dependent on government help, is probably not what most Americans had in mind.

Photo by alejandrophotography/iStock
In the old world, stories were transmitted from one to many. Storytelling organisations with the facilities to do this would put together stories and supply them to the many. We curated what stories everyone heard, and as authorities, we were largely trusted.

In 2018, stories are created by the many and shared with even more  many create, many curate, and there are many stories. We trust authorities less, we crave authenticity and we want to hear stories directly from the mouths of those who own them.
Charities have criticised international development secretary Penny Mordaunt over her pledges on international development which include to not invest when others should be putting their hands in their pockets.

Mordaunt, who was appointed secretary of state for international development in November 2017 following Priti Patels resignation, made five pledges to the British people on international development in an article in the Telegraph.

She wrote: As far as Im concerned, taxpayers money spent well wont cut it. To address their concerns we must show that their money cannot be better spent.

Her pledges include a bold new Brexit-ready proposition to boost trade and investment with developing countries and promote sustainable economic development and job creation.

She said that the decisions of what countries invest in will influence aid spend. She said: I want the governments of developing countries to take responsibility for investing in healthcare or education. If it chooses not to, that will inform our decisions.

Mentioning the International Citizen Service as an example, she also states that: We will create more such opportunities with every part of Whitehall, to deliver for the worlds poor while supporting our domestic agenda.

Mordaunt said that they will cut funding to organisations that do not deliver on targets we set, and that some that do not are on notice.

The poor and vulnerable shouldnt pay for their governments failures

Oxfam, World Vision and the One Campaign have responded to Mordaunts pledges.

Oxfams head of advocacy, Katy Chakrabortty, said that the Mordaunt would have to "tread a fine line to ensure that poor people do not lose the help they desperately need".

Britains dedication to helping the worlds poorest people is seen time and time again, from our support to Rohingya people who have fled to Bangladesh to escape violence, to those facing severe hunger in countries like South Sudan. The development secretary is right to be proud of these commitments.

"Penny Mordaunt is right that governments around the world have a responsibility to invest in their own healthcare and education, and aid certainly shouldn't be used to give the private sector a free ride. But she will need to tread a fine line to ensure that poor people do not lose the help they desperately need.

"Beating poverty for good is truly in Britain's national interest. Regardless of Brexit, that should remain aid's primary purpose."

Gavin Crowden, World Vision UKs head of policy, advocacy and campaigns, said: The UK government needs to be careful of relying solely on the trade your way out of poverty mind-set. Its clearly an important part of the development puzzle  but its not the only piece.

Britain should be proud of its commitment to foreign aid, and the International development secretary is right to champion transparency and to advocate for governments to fulfil their duty to their citizens. However, aid must always reach the most poor and vulnerable wherever they are  and they should not be made to pay for their governments failures.

Romilly Greenhill, UK director of the ONE Campaign, said Penny Mordaunt is right to say that countries should invest in health and education and indeed thats what many of them are doing.

But the evidence suggests that even if they increase tax collection and prioritise the social sectors, there is still a large funding gap that needs to be filled by aid from the UK and others.

Kate Osamor, Labours shadow international development secretary, was reported in the Independent to have said: When the British public get behind aid, they do so because it's the right thing to do - not because it's expedient.

Frankly, the Tories' idea that we should stop using aid to reduce poverty and use it only for short-sighted national interest is an insult to the generosity and intelligence of the millions of British people who donate their time and money each year to make the world fairer.
Homelessness charity Shelter has confirmed it is set to receive the entire estate of Lady Lucan, possibly worth millions of pounds, following her death in September.

A spokeswoman for the charity said the proceeds from Lady Lucans estate will go towards the charitys work fighting bad housing and homelessness, although she refused to confirm how much money had been donated to the charity.

She said: At a time when over 300,000 people in Britain are without a home, we are incredibly grateful for the support we receive. The proceeds from Lady Lucans estate will help Shelter to continue fighting bad housing and homelessness.

Veronica, the Dowager Countess of Lucan, was found dead at her home in Westminster in September last year. Numerous publications reported the 80-year-old had taken her own life after a false self-diagnosis of Parkinsons disease.

Lady Lucan was married to John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, who disappeared in 1974 after allegedly murdering Sandra Rivett, the couples nanny, and severely beating his wife. In 1975, an inquest jury declared Lord Lucan guilty of Rivets murder.

The couple had three children, Frances, Camilla and George, now the eight Earl of Lucan. The Guardian reports however that Lady Lucan had severed relations with her family in the 1980s, and continued to decline contact with them right up until her death.

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, Camilla Bingham confirmed that Lady Lucan had left her estate to the homeless [sic] charity Shelter. The three children also gave a joint statement to the newspaper, saying they remembered their mother lovingly and with admiration.

While Shelter have refused to say how much Lucans estate is worth, the Mail on Sunday reported that the Belgravia townhouse in which she was found dead is worth 2.9m.

The MoS also reported that an auction will take place in Oxfordshire next month where Lady Lucans possessions will be sold. Among the items are expected to include a large oil portrait of her husband and a personalised top hat.
The RSPB has closed its pension scheme to future accruals, having closed it some time ago to new members, its accounts show.

According to accounts filed for the period to March 2017, the scheme has a deficit of 90m  approximately eight months income for the charity. This is one of the highest deficits among major charities.

The scheme, which closed in March last year, was a defined benefit scheme, where the charity guarantees a certain income to retirees.

The charity will continue to pay into a defined contribution scheme, in which it makes payments but does not guarantee a certain level of income.

The pension liability continues to fluctuate, the charity said. In 2015 it stood at 86m and despite a fall in 2016 it has increased to 90m in 2017. This is largely driven by factors outside our control.

On 31 March 2017, the defined benefit pension scheme was closed and staff were transferred to a defined contribution scheme. This should help to reduce future risk and the volatility of pension liabilities.

The charity has guaranteed that if it cannot meet its obligations under the scheme, it will transfer land worth 57m to the pension scheme.

Record income and membership

The RSPB has also reported record levels of income and membership.

The wildlife charity said it had topped 140m of income, including 6.7m of investment gains, up from 137.4m the previous year. Without those investment gains, income was down slightly.

Membership rose from 1.19 million people to 1.22 million.

The charity said that despite a record year, it faced challenges for the future. It said that leaving the EU would make it harder to raise money, as would the implementation of GDPR.

The charity said it had decided to communicate with all members in the future only if they had explicitly opted in.
The Philippiness third-largest online news site, Rappler, had its certificate of incorporation revoked by the countrys Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a ruling handed down on Monday.

The troubling news follows a series of attacks by Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte on media outlets that have published critical reports about his governments extrajudicial killings of drug suspectsdescribed by one critic (who has now been jailed) as murder with impunity.

ICYMI: A potentially seismic change comes to Facebook

Along with broadcaster ABS-CBN and national newspaper the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Rappler has been a vocal critic of Dutertes regime. In October 2016, it published a series of articles questioning the governments role in spreading hate-filled propaganda aimed at silencing dissent.

But in March, Duterte began attacking ABS-CBN and the Inquirer, the two largest news outlets in the country. In April, he vowed to block the renewal of ABS-CBNs franchise. Three months later, the Inquirer was sold to a Filipino billionaire Duterte describes as a fast friend.

After Duterte attacked Rappler in his July State of the Nation address, Rappler CEO Maria Ressa spoke at an Australian journalism conference in August, telling the audience, The greatest challenge to journalism is what happens when youre the one attacked and truth is contested.

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CJR spoke with Ressa following her talk, but was unable to get in touch with her after this latest news. We can see the writing on the wall, she said at the time. I hope Im wrong, but Ive already begun to feel it at Rappler.

SEC decision was fast-tracked, according to Rappler CEO

Mondays SEC ruling accuses Rappler of using a deceptive scheme to violate the countrys laws against foreign ownership of mass media entities after it accepted $1 million in funding from Omidyar Networka charitable foundation and impact investment firm established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. (The Omidyar Network has also sponsored CJR.)

Rappler disputes the finding, stating that in 2015 the SEC accepted documents outlining Omidyar Networks investment in Rappler via Philippine Depositary Receipts (PDRs), which allow foreign entities to hold equity in media organizations without owning shares or controlling the day-to-day operations of the company.

ICYMI: Headlines editors should be very proud of

A presidential spokesperson said the government had nothing to do with the SEC decision, but Ressa said that statement is untrue. Commenting via Twitter, she said the decision didnt follow due process, and was fast-tracked and political in nature.

This decision didnt follow due process. Fast-tracked, it is political in nature. The severe penalties remind you of the context in PH today. It cannot be seen in a vacuum. https://t.co/EDPnNS9whs  Maria Ressa (@mariaressa) January 16, 2018

Rappler is appealing the decisiondue to take effect 15 days after the ruling was handed downand will continue to operate while it does so. In an interview with CNN Philippines, Ressa said she is willing to take this battle all the way:

Let me just point out that we are not against the government. The role of journalists in a democracy is to help government come up with the right decisions. Although it is publicly questioned and could be seen as criticism by thin-skinned people, in the end thats our role.I think that this a war of attrition and whats publicly stated is not what is privately going on behind the scenes. But thats what we journalists dowe will shine the light.

Rappler CEO @mariaressa on Palace saying the govt had nothing to do in SEC decision: Its not true. Thats not what we have heard | #TheSource https://t.co/sDo55hwVGt pic.twitter.com/3u3ni5EQKf  CNN Philippines (@cnnphilippines) January 16, 2018

Activists have condemned the decision. The moves by the Philippines authorities to shut down Rappler is an alarming attempt to silence independent journalism, said James Gomez, Amnesty Internationals Director of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The government must immediately reverse this decision and end all efforts to stifle free press in the country.

This is a huge blow to #PressFreedom, using a technicality to go after @OmidyarNetwork & other funders of @mariaressa & @rapplerdotcom. There is a 15-day window to appeal, so worth journalists & global media organizations speaking up to put pressure on Philippines authorities. https://t.co/na4WLZEKDv  Raju Narisetti (@raju) January 15, 2018

The news vs. the government propaganda machine

Rappler was founded in 2012 and grew quicklyup to 300 percent year on year. Relying heavily on social media for its traffic, its growth was helped by the fact that Filipinos spend more time on social media than in any other country, according to the Digital in 2017 Global Overview report.

Its the same as Trump, said Ressa. If youre not with them, youre against them.

While the social-news model worked for Rappler, Ressa told CJR in August, it also worked for President Duterte, who was the first political candidate to really harness social media in the Philippines to win.

In its October 2016 propaganda series, Rappler exposed a network of pro-government bots and sock-puppet accounts that posted fake news designed to sway public opinion in favor of Dutertes drug war. For example, a photograph supposedly depicting a 9-year-old Filipino rape and murder victim, which was spread by Dutertes campaign spokesman, was actually taken in Brazil.

After publishing the propaganda series, Ressa herself became a target of the propaganda machine she had exposed, receiving an average of 90 hate messages an houra pace that continued for a month.

Mob mentality and aggression toward the media has been de rigueur in the Philippines since Duterte swept to power on a populist tide in May 2016. The spread of disinformation on social networks is thought to have played a role in Dutertes success.

Its the same as Trump, said Ressa. If youre not with them, youre against them.

Jail for Dutertes detractors

Ressa has seen what happens to Dutertes detractors. Rappler documented Dutertes campaign against Senator Leila de Lima, a former chairperson of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights and former Secretary of the Department of Justice.

De Lima was a vocal critic of Duterte and urged Congress to investigate the extrajudicial killings. She was targeted with trolling attacks on social media and accused of having an affair with her driver, who was alleged to have collected drug money for her.

In February 2017, de Lima was arrested on drug charges and has spent the past year in prison. Amnesty International has condemned the arrest as politically motivated and called for all charges to be dropped.

This is all meant to create a chilling effectand its succeeded, said Ressa. It is meant to create acceptance for the war on drugs and the thousands of people who have been killed. It is meant to silence anyone who questions it.

ICYMI: A man of God in the Philippines is helping document a bloody war on drugs

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Shelley Hepworth , formerly a CJR Delacorte Fellow, is Technology Editor at The Conversation in Australia. Follow her on Twitter @shelleymiranda.
The other day, President Trump delivered an unexpected outburst about changing the nations libel laws. This is what he said:

Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace, and do not represent American values or American fairness. So were going to take a strong look at that. We want fairness. You cant say things that are false, knowingly false, and be able to smile as money pours into your bank account  I think what the American people want to see is fairness.

Lets try to unpack this statement. What steps is he going to take?

First things first. Were going to take a strong look at [the fact that] our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace.

ICYMI: The real reason why journalists love to hate the new Trump book

Trump doesnt seem to know, here, that libel laws are a state issue, and that he, as the head of the federal executive branch, doesnt have much say in the matter. The federal government is involved only to the extent that the Supreme Court has laid down guidelines putting limits on state laws when they do not pass constitutional muster.

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There is no federal libel law, period, observes Floyd Abrams, one of the nations foremost authorities on the issue. All American libel law is state law. Each state can adopt whatever libel law it wants, as long as it comports with the US and state constitutions.

And thehe pauses to laughmusings of President Trump about doing something about libel runs into that first, and then of course, runs into the First Amendment because of the ruling in New York Times against Sullivan, which is really what upsets him. (More on that in a moment.)

What about the presidents contention that authors can say things that are false, knowingly false, and be able to smile as money pours into your bank account?

The specific issue Trump was complaining about here is actually at the very heart of libel law.

Abrams was making reference to The New York Times vs. Sullivan (1964), the Supreme Courts most important ruling on libel.

ICYMI: Trump might be in serious trouble for his NBC tweets

In Sullivan, the court said the press must be able to make mistakes and not be unduly punished for them. However, the court also said that a public figure could win a libel judgment if the material published was falsein cases where the entity publishing it knew it wasnt true, and published anyway.

One would think the president would know something about libel laws before he started tweeting about them.

He was either asserting something he knew wasnt true 

 or recklessly making assertions about something without checking whether it was true.

One could make the argument that he was essentially libeling the nations libel laws.

But he said this doesnt represent the nations values.

The Sullivan case has an appropriately confused history. It wasnt about a news story. It was based on an advertisement that was published in the Times. The ad was calling for donations to the Civil Rights Movement, and it cited an unprecedented wave of terror directed against black students in Montgomery, Alabama.

(The full image is here.)

This ad was not a perfect poster child for the First Amendment. A number of details it stated were factually inaccurate, and the man who brought suit wasnt even named in the ad. Lester Sullivan was a town commissioner of Montgomery at the time, with authority over the police. He contended that the word police referred to him. The Alabama courts awarded him $500,000, a large sum in the 60s. (Abrams says this was part of a pattern of large libel judgments in the South designed to punish reporting on Civil Rights battles.) The Times appealed to the US Supreme Court.

ICYMI: A potentially seismic change comes to Facebook

The unanimous decision was written by Justice William Brennan. Brennan noted a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.

In other words, according to the Supreme Court, libel laws do contribute to American values.

But Trump has also said he thinks the British system is better. Its easier to sue for libel in the UK.

It is certainly true that the British do not share American values when it comes to free speech; the British do not have a First Amendment.

But the framers of the Constitution were familiar with British Common Law, which included libel protections and probably did not intend it to displace them.

Heres one argument James Madison made for the First Amendment. He pointed out that Britains government was based on royal powerkings who could as a matter of definition do no wrong. See if you can catch the rather dry irony in this polysyllabic observation:

The nature of governments elective, limited, and responsible, in all their branches, may well be supposed to require a greater freedom of animadversion than might be tolerated by the genius of such a government as that of Great Britain.

Animad-what?

Its a fancy word for tough commentary, or for getting someones attention. Madison is saying this: Hey, if youre ruled by a king, who needs free speech? Doesnt matter anywayand what a great system you guys have over there! But a republic needs an informed citizenry, and you dont want information being cut off in any way, and particularly not cut off by the government.

Abrams notes that loose contemporary British libel laws make publishing in the UK more perilous. They also created a condition where politicians almost have to sue.

One of the realities in the US [is that] its very unusual for public officials to bring libel suits, Abrams said. Its the norm in England. There, the press says, If you dont bring a libel suit, it must be so. The absence of a libel suit is taken in English society as a concession of truth.

Thats never been the case here. More recently, it has provided a sort of excuse-slash-explanation for politicians. They say, I cant sue because American libel law makes it so tough to win.

What about appointing Supreme Court justices who will take a tougher line on libel?

That might take some time. The trouble is that the conservative judges Trump is likely to nominate are hardline on the First Amendment.

This has been a very, very pro-First Amendment court in my view, says Abramsmore of a First Amendment court than it may ever have been in American history. In the last few decades, the conservatives on court have adopted a very broad reading of the First Amendment.

So theres nothing Trump can do about libel?

Well, theres one thing. Trump libels people more than most. He said for many months that Barack Obamas birth certificate was false, contrary to all evidence. He repeated it even when told it wasnt true, and, when he did finally withdraw the accusation, he did so incompletely and grudgingly. Thats an example of a half-hearted retractionsomething thats been often used as foundation for a libel judgment.

Trump also said the Obama administration had wiretapped his campaign. As the now head of government, he can easily find out if thats true. But he chooses not to, and he has recently repeated the claim. Thats evidence of recklessness.

In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Trump accused an FBI agent of treason for criticizing him before he was elected, in private text messages.

So Trump could improve the libel climate in the country simply by libeling others less frequently.

ICYMI: Headlines editors should be very proud of

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Bill Wyman is the former arts editor of NPR and Salon.com. Follow him @hitsville.
The town of West, Texas, and several other plaintiffs have reached settlements and partial settlements of claims stemming from a deadly explosion in the central Texas town.

On April 13, 2013, a blaze heated up 30 tons of ammonium nitrate. Investigators dont know for sure what detonated the fertilizer, which can also be used as an explosive. The blast carved a crater 10 feet deep and damaged nearby schools. Twelve of the 15 who died were first responders; more than 300 people were injured.

A government study found that while 54 percent of the people who went to the hospital after the explosion had been within 1,000 feet of the blast, many who sought medical help had been farther away.

The fire involved a 12,000 square foot wood frame seed and fertilizer building at the West Fertilizer Plant, known as the Bulk Processing Plant, which had no fire resistance rating. The Uniform Fire Code wasnt published until 1971 after the buildings construction sometime in the 1960s.

When the safety board investigated, it pointed to a lack of regulations about siting of facilities that store and distribute ammonium-nitrate fertilizer and said regulations addressing issues such as buffer zones or barricades, the severity of the casualties and damage experienced in West could have been significantly reduced.

Waco-based state District Judge Jim Meyer canceled a trial set to begin today. The settlements are the latest among more than 200 claims filed in the aftermath of the West Fertilizer Co. blast that killed 15 people and left dozens injured. As the fire raged, the buildings roof collapsed and an explosion rocked the city of approximately 2800 people. The blast killed 10 firefighters and five civilians. Several firefighters suffered serious injuries.

Destroyed buildings included three schools, a West EMS building, a nursing home, an apartment complex and several single family homes. Three West Volunteer Fire Department fire trucks were also destroyed by the fire and explosion.

Insured losses as a result of the fire and explosion were estimated to be $100 million.

Plaintiffs spokesman and Waco attorney Steve Harrison tells the Waco Tribune-Herald the city and a nursing home reached settlements with CF Industries but have unresolved claims against the other major defendant in the case, El Dorado Chemical Co.

Harrison says settlement terms are confidential.

Defendants either manufactured or sold fertilizer that caught fire and exploded. Theyve denied any wrongdoing.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The former owner of Pacific Hospital in Long Beach was sentenced to federal prison on Friday for running a giant workers compensation fraud scheme.

Michael Drobot, 73, was sentenced Friday to 63 months in prison and fined $500,000.

Earlier this week, he was ordered to forfeit $10 million to the government and to liquidate assets that include real estate along with a 1965 Aston Martin, a 1958 Porsche and a 1971 Mercedes Benz.

Prosecutors said that for at least 15 years, Drobot paid more than $40 million to dozens of doctors, chiropractors and other medical professionals in return for referring thousands of patients to his hospital for spinal surgeries. Some of the patients lived hundreds of miles from the hospital.

He, along with seven others were charged in relation to the governments ongoing investigation into kickbacks for patient referrals and fraudulent bills for spinal surgeries performed at Pacific Hospital in Long Beach. The scheme involved tens of millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks to dozens of doctors, chiropractors and others. As part of the scheme, members of the conspiracy typically paid a kickback of $15,000 for each lumbar fusion surgery and $10,000 for each cervical fusion surgery.

As a result of the illegal payments, thousands of patients were referred to Pacific Hospital, where they underwent spinal surgeries that led to more than $600 million in fraudulent bills being submitted during the last eight years of the scheme alone. Insurers paid the hospital more than $226 million for the surgeries performed as a result of illegal kickbacks. The bills included the cost of medical hardware implanted into patients that were sold by Drobots own company. He exploited a now-repealed California law that permitted hospitals to pass the full cost of medical devices implanted in spinal surgeries to workers compensation insurers, prosecutors said.

Many of the fraudulent claims were paid by the California workers compensation system and the federal government through the Federal Workers Compensation System.

A former state senator, Ronald Calderon, is serving a federal prison sentence for accepting bribes, including some from Drobot in exchange for making efforts to preserve the law.

Drobot pleaded guilty in 2014 to conspiracy and paying illegal kickbacks.

U.S. District Judge Josephine L. Staton, who sentenced Drobot, said he introduced greed into the doctor-patient relationship.

Seven other people, including Drobots son Michael, also have pleaded guilty in connection with the scheme and await sentencing.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
It's not difficult to see that the financial services industry is broken.

When I got my start in finance, I knew that most Americans held a negative view of the industry. I felt it, too. I used to say that my job was, in short, "to help banks make more money." I never liked that idea. I'd rather the industry make money for people rather than off people.

Banking, investing, lending, insurance  it all seems to project an aura of questionable trust. And unfortunately, the industry's trajectory doesn't seem to be turning around anytime soon.

It's time for financial services firms to make a pledge to do well by the customers. In fact, this should be a collective New Year's resolution.

We've all read far too many headlines about financial companies betraying customers' trust. The most heinous in recent memory was perhaps Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. A recent example is the Wells Fargo situation, where accounts were created on behalf of customers, without authorization.

Mistakes of negligence don't help, either. The fact that hackers were able to penetrate Equifax  one of the three bureaus entrusted with maintaining consumer credit reports  causes consumers to question whether they can trust the financial industry with their privacy  and whether their money is safe.

When compared to the energy sector, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, and technology, financial services is the least trusted industry in consumers' eyes, according to Edelman's 2017 consumer trust survey. There's a reason for this: Financial service companies today are still not focused on serving customers first and foremost.

More from Investor Toolkit:

Why some fear is good for investors

Advisors turn to life coaches and counselors

Retirees leave $100B in Social Security benefits on table

Wells Fargo's recent bout of chaos is a clear example of not putting customers first. After Wells Fargo executives provided little transparency into what caused so many accounts to be opened without customer approval, ex-employees attributed many of the problems to a cutthroat culture where a customer's best interest was never the focus.

As one longtime investor said in a Vanity Fair article about Wells Fargo, "People want to trust their banks, and Wells has brought mistrust to the table."

Wells Fargo's disregard for customers' desires destroys the idea that banks are stewards of people's money, and instead inserts the notion that financial service companies are motivated exclusively by profits.

When people look at the disruption caused by fintech companies in the financial industry, they often attribute the change to technology's role in attracting customers. They look at flashy online signup experiences, and they think that's why customers flock to fintech firms.

Having built Betterment, I can tell you that technology is not the sole reason why fintech companies have disrupted the financial industry. Technology has simply been our way of solving for customers' problems and becoming focused on how they live their financial lives.
The first commercial flight of the Qantas Boeing 787 Dreamliner on December 15, 2017.

Australia's Qantas Airways said on Tuesday it had amended its website to no longer refer to Taiwan and Hong Kong as countries, rather than Chinese territories, after China issued a warning to foreign airlines last week.

China has stepped up efforts to police how foreign businesses refer to parts of China, or territories claimed by Beijing, including Taiwan and Hong Kong - even if only in pull-down menus on websites.

"Due to an oversight, some Chinese territories were incorrectly listed as countries on parts of our website. We are correcting this error," said Qantas in an emailed statement.

China's civil aviation authority told foreign airlines to check their websites and make any needed changes, but the campaign goes beyond just airlines.

China last week suspended Marriott International's Chinese website for a week to punish the world's biggest hotel chain for listing Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as separate countries in a customer questionnaire.

A Qantas spokeswoman did not immediately respond to questions as to whether the airline expected a similar action by the Chinese authorities.

Public apologies from Delta Air Lines, Zara and Medtronic for similar offences have so far satisfied China, which has grown increasingly sensitive to issues of sovereignty.

Qantas is the first Australian company to respond to Beijing's heightened vigilance, though all firms exporting everything from iron ore to baby formula should be taking heed.

China, which is easily Australia's biggest trading partner, bought A$93 billion ($73.98 billion) worth of Australian goods and services last year.

Hong Kong and Macau are former European colonies that are now part of China but run largely autonomously. China annexed Tibet in 1950, although Beijing has long claimed the Himalayan region has been an indivisible part of China throughout history.

Taiwan is China's most sensitive territorial issue. The ruling Communist Party considers the self-ruled, democratic island a wayward province and refuses to renounce the threat of force to bring it into the fold.
China is increasingly facing resistance within countries where it's trying to invest, according to a top official at the country's sovereign wealth fund.

China Investment Corporation (CIC) will probably gain investment opportunities thanks to an ongoing global economic recovery, but it is also "facing more difficulties and challenges" related to "protectionism," Tu Guangshao, vice chairman and president of CIC, told CNBC on the sidelines of the Asian Financial Forum.

"As CIC and China make more foreign investments, we're seeing the rise of protectionism in some countries and regions, be it the U.S. or Europe. They're making some protectionist moves, some specifically targeting China," Tu told CNBC in Mandarin.

Those comments echoed remarks from Beijing after U.S. regulators blocked a planned merger between Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial and MoneyGram , a U.S. money transfer company. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States halted the deal on national security concerns.
Chinese companies have moved beyond copying others' technologies as the world's second-largest economy now leads the way in many areas, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

"Even today, there is still a lot of thinking and belief that China is a copycat, which is not true," said Raymund Chao, PwC's chairman for Asia Pacific and Greater China.

China is helping to pave the way in many sectors, including financial technology, drones, artificial intelligence and mobile payments, Chao told CNBC on Monday from the sidelines of the Asia Financial Forum.

Beijing has unleashed a slew of plans in recent years to take China into its new phase of growth and those developments are driving a "new way of growth" in the economy, he added.

Even traditional sectors are upgrading their manufacturing and creating "a lot" of innovation, Chao said.
Starbucks is placing an even bigger bet on one of its fastest growing products: cold brew coffee.

The Seattle-based cafe chain will partner with Joyride Coffee Distributors to bring draft cold brew coffee to Starbucks' foodservice accounts at hospitals, bookstores, college and university campuses and offices.

Joyride, which was founded in 2011 by brothers David, Noah and Adam Belanich, creates and delivers non-alcoholic beverage kegs to commercial locations in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Boston.

In this deal with Starbucks, Joyride will make the cold brew using Starbucks' beans and package it into its kegs, which ensure the quality and freshness of the coffee, and deliver the kegs to the company's foodservice accounts. The company did not disclose the financial details of this deal with Starbucks.

"Cold brew coffee is not a fad," CEO David Belanich told CNBC. "And Starbucks is actually forward looking enough to see that and seize on it in a big way without compromising their quality and standards."

Cold brew is one of the fastest growing products on Starbucks' menu, the coffee company said during its fourth-quarter earnings conference call in November. The premium coffee beverage can cost as much as 20 percent more than Starbucks' regular iced coffee and features a bolder, richer flavor that is less acidic.

The coffee giant sells two types of cold brew in its cafes, regular and nitro. Nitro cold brew is cold brew coffee that has been infused with nitrogen to give it a more velvety texture.

While regular cold brew is available nationwide, nitro cold brew is available in about 1,500 stores. This is because nitro cold brew is poured from a tap, which can take up quite a bit of space in a cafe, especially if it wasn't built to contain a keg.

When Starbucks first added nitro to its menu in 2015, sales in the cafes that offered it jumped 25 percent, according to Forbes.

That's why expanding to these new locations is so important.

This is, perhaps, why the company said late last year that it expected cold coffee beverages to grow to nearly half of its beverage revenue in the next five years. At the time, Starbucks forecast that by 2021 nearly 50 percent of its beverage mix would be in cold, up from 35 percent in 2013.

Starbucks' partnership with Joyride isn't just about the cold brew product, but the kegs. Joyride uses its kegs to package tea, kombucha and seltzer. As Starbucks continues to grow its cold beverage product line, having a platform to dispense it can only be a boon for the company.
Japan's Navy Takanami class destroyers along the strait near Changi Naval Base in Singapore on May 15, 2017.

Japan is examining how to evacuate its roughly 60,000 citizens from South Korea in the event of a crisis that closes airports, with military ships being used as shuttles, a Japanese newspaper reported on Tuesday.

North Korea's pursuit of its military and nuclear programs in defiance of U.N. Security Council and other sanctions escalated tensions on the Korean Peninsula in 2017, which have only eased in recent weeks.

Working on the scenario of a crisis that shuts South Korean airports, the Japanese government has begun to look into plans for evacuations through the southern port city of Busan, the Yomiuri daily said, quoting multiple government sources.

Japanese and U.S. military vessels would take Japanese and U.S. citizens from Busan to Japan's Tsushima island, roughly 50 km (30 miles) from Busan, before ferrying them to the southernmost main island of Kyushu a day or so later.

Government officials have already visited Tsushima to inspect hotels and other potential lodging facilities, as well as planning for stocks of food and water, the paper added.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference on Tuesday that the government is always considering various scenarios and making plans for its citizens' safety, but declined to give details, citing security concerns.

"It's a totally natural duty as a nation to use every means at our disposal for the protection and evacuation of our citizens if they should face danger abroad," he added.
Beginning Monday, Seoul officials waived public transport fees during commuter hours as the daily average density of ultra-fine dust remained above 50 micrograms per cubic meter  a level that's widely considered harmful. Authorities have also limited car use for public employees, closed 360 parking lots and reduced construction work on government-funded projects.

Those policies were first introduced last year when Seoul's air quality index exceeded 179 micrograms per cubic meter of fine dust, the highest level among global metropolitan cities after New Delhi in India. Experts say the country's use of coal and diesel has resulted in increasing air pollution, exacerbated by smog from China.

The latest anti-pollution operations will likely stay in place for several days but aren't expected to negatively impact private company operations, Miha Hribernik, senior Asia analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, said in a note.

Asia's fourth-largest economy is the eighth-worst performing country in Verisk Maplecroft's 2018 Air Quality Index. India and Bangladesh took first and second place, respectively.
Andrey Rudakov | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Big investment banks are raising their price targets for oil  or warning they may soon need to  as crude futures hit levels not seen since the early days of a slump in December 2014. Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley both upped their forecasts for crude prices this week, while Goldman Sachs said the risks of prices overshooting its current targets are mounting. related investing news Oil sinks on recession fears, but we're using the decline to add to a high-yielding energy stock , the international benchmark for oil prices, rose to $70.37 on Monday, while reached $64.89 on Tuesday, both hitting more than three-year highs. The banks says the long-oversupplied oil market is tightening up more quickly than expected as global economic growth fuels demand and output cuts by OPEC, Russia and several other producers eat into the world's crude stockpiles. The 14-member OPEC cartel has also boasted better adherence to output limits than in the past, according to analysts. On Tuesday, Merrill Lynch analysts said they now expect the oil market to be undersupplied by about 430,000 barrels a day in 2018, up from their prior forecast for a 100,000-barrel-per-day deficit. The bank now sees Brent averaging $64 a barrel in 2018, versus an earlier estimate for $56 a barrel. Merrill also raised its outlook for U.S. crude to $60 a barrel from $52.

watch now

"In short, inventories are coming down faster than we expected and OPEC is succeeding at rebalancing the oil market," wrote Francisco Blanch, head of global commodities and derivatives research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Goldman Sachs is not ready to raise its $62 target on Brent and $57.50 forecast for U.S. crude in 2018, but says there's a growing risk that global inventories will fall too quickly and push up prices. U.S. drillers are likely to start pumping more oil after a sharp rally in prices since December, Goldman analysts say. But the bank believes there will be a lag in the price response, which could allow prices to keep running up. Meanwhile, global oil stockpiles in developed countries could actually fall below the five-year average  the level OPEC is targeting  as inventories approach normal levels, oil demand potentially outstrips Goldman's estimate and OPEC possibly cuts output too deeply. "First, the lagged reporting of inventory data and OPEC's own inertia create risks that the group exits the cuts well after inventories have normalized," wrote a team led by Jeffrey Currie, Goldman's global head of commodities research. "Second, we continue to believe that OPEC's 5-year average inventory target is too aggressive." OPEC, Russia and other producers have agreed to keep 1.8 million barrels a day off the market through the end of the year. Several oil ministers have said it's too early to discuss an exit strategy for the deal. Currie and his colleagues also say that "oil inventories should be adjusted for demand levels to correct for a steadily growing oil market."

watch now
Bitcoin could hit $100,000 in 2018, an analyst who correctly predicted the cryptocurrency's rally at the start of last year told CNBC on Tuesday.

Kay Van-Petersen, an analyst at Saxo Bank, added that other rival digital coins could also outperform.

Van-Petersen forecast in December 2016 that bitcoin would reach $2,000 in 2017. At the time, bitcoin was trading below $900, according to CoinDesk, a website that tracks the price of digital currencies on a number of different exchanges.

Bitcoin blew past the $2,000 figure in May.

Van-Petersen said Tuesday that bitcoin could hit between $50,000 and $100,000 in 2018.

"First off, you could argue we have had a proper correction in bitcoin, it has had a 50 percent pull back at one point, which is healthy. But we have still not seen the full effect of the futures contracts," Van-Petersen said.

The CME and Cboe both launched bitcoin futures trading contracts last year. The move was seen as a way to get more institutional investors involved in the cryptocurrency market and legitimize it. But trading got off to a light start. Van-Petersen said that more institutions will get on board over time, but it won't happen quickly.

To reach $100,000, bitcoin would need to rally over 635 percent from Tuesday's highest price of $13,601.43, according to CoinDesk. Previously, Van-Petersen said that $100,000 could take ten years to hit.

Also, bitcoin has been trading sideways since the start of the year. But the Saxo Bank analyst said that bitcoin tends to trade around a certain level then "re-rates".

"I wouldn't be surprised if it's something we are seeing. It's kind of building a foundation, then will re-rate a bit higher."

Bitcoin and other coins, including ethereum and ripple , saw a big sell-off on Tuesday, however.

Still, Van-Petersen said that ethereum is likely to outperform bitcoin this year.

"Ethereum came after bitcoin, it has a more unified leadership than bitcoin," he said. "They seem to be a bit further along the way in regards to forming the solution to scaling issues. And you can see transactions on their side eclipses transactions across other cryptos."
Former Wells Fargo Chairman and CEO Dick Kovacevich told CNBC on Tuesday that he believes bitcoin is a scam.

"I think it's a pyramid scheme. It makes no sense. I'm just surprised it isn't even lower," he said on

Kovacevich joins a growing list of bankers who have denounced the crytopcurrency craze.

Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase , recently backpedaled a bit on his earlier criticisms on bitcoin.

In September, Dimon called bitcoin a fraud.

In a Fox Business interview last week, he said he regrets making that comment, but added he's "not interested that much in the subject at all."

Kovacevich does not see bitcoin as an outright fraud.

"There's no fraudulent thing going on. It's just a pyramid scheme," he said. "You're betting that somebody is going to buy it. And some people have been right."

"The fundamentals make no sense," he contended.

Bitcoin tumbled to a six-week low early Tuesday, falling below $12,000 for the first time since Dec. 5, according to CoinDesk, before paring some of those losses.

Comments from South Korea's finance minister renewed concerns about a crackdown in one of the largest markets for digital currency trading.

Despite cold water from the likes of Kovacevich and Dimon, bitcoin bulls such as Saxo Bank crypto analyst Kay Van-Petersen see amazing upside. Van-Petersen predicts $100,000 this year.
It may be a watershed moment on Wall Street, one that raises all sorts of questions about the very nature of capitalism. "It will be a lightning rod for sure for major institutions investing other people's money," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management and an expert on corporate leadership. "It is huge for an institutional investor to take this position across its portfolio.'' He said he's seen "nothing like it.''

"Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose," he wrote in a draft of the letter that was shared with me. "To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society."

Mr. Fink has the clout to make this kind of demand: His firm manages more than $6 trillion in investments through 401(k) plans, exchange-traded funds and mutual funds, making it the largest investor in the world, and he has an outsize influence on whether directors are voted on and off boards.

Laurence D. Fink , founder and chief executive of the investment firm BlackRock , is going to inform business leaders that their companies need to do more than make profits  they need to contribute to society as well if they want to receive the support of BlackRock.

On Tuesday, the chief executives of the world's largest public companies will be receiving a letter from one of the most influential investors in the world. And what it says is likely to cause a firestorm in the corner offices of companies everywhere and a debate over social responsibility that stretches from Wall Street to Washington.

In a candid assessment of what's happening in the business world  and perhaps taking a veiled shot at Washington at the same time  Mr. Fink wrote that he is seeing "many governments failing to prepare for the future, on issues ranging from retirement and infrastructure to automation and worker retraining." He added, "As a result, society increasingly is turning to the private sector and asking that companies respond to broader societal challenges."

It is a refrain that we're hearing more and more from various pockets of the business community, and in fact last year company leaders found themselves taking stands on issues like immigration policy, race relations, gay rights and more.

But for the world's largest investor to say it aloud  and declare that he plans to hold companies accountable  is a bracing example of the evolution of corporate America. Mr. Fink says he is adding staff to help monitor how companies respond; only time will tell whether BlackRock truly uses his firm's heft to influence new social initiatives.

Part of Mr. Fink's argument rests on the changing mood of the country regarding social responsibility. He contends that if a company doesn't engage with the community and have a sense of purpose "it will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders."

Companies often talk about contributing to society  sometimes breathlessly  but it is typically written off as a marketing gimmick aimed at raising profits or appeasing regulators.

Mr. Fink's declaration is different because his constituency in this case is the business community itself. It pits him, to some degree, against many of the companies that he's invested in, which hold the view that their only duty is to produce profits for their shareholders, an argument long espoused by economists like Milton Friedman.

"What does it mean to say that 'business' has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities," Friedman wrote, almost rhetorically, back in 1970 in this very newspaper. "Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades."

Until recently, companies like BlackRock have traditionally been passive investors and have done little to pressure the leaders of companies they invested in; in fact they were known for rubber stamping management's plans. It was active investors who sought to hold companies accountable  either by agitating for change or by selling their shares to express their displeasure.

Indeed, Mr. Fink has in the past denounced "activist" shareholders as too focused on the short term. "If you asked me if activism harms job creation, the answer is yes," he told me back in 2014. Now he is changing his stripes.

Over the past two years, for example, BlackRock quietly became a thorn in the side of Exxon . In 2016, the firm withheld support from two directors as a protest against Exxon's "non-engagement" policy, which barred independent board members from meeting with shareholders like Mr. Fink. Then, in 2017, BlackRock supported a shareholder proposal to enhance the company's disclosures on climate, in part because Exxon's policy prevented the firm from getting a full understanding of its long-term strategy and risk exposure.

The climate disclosure proposal ultimately passed, and just last month Exxon agreed to publish climate impact reports. Perhaps even more notably, Exxon also changed its policy of non-engagement, and now permits meetings between shareholders and independent directors.

BlackRock has even begun siding with activist investors themselves, something it hasn't publicized. One of its funds voted in favor of the activist Nelson Peltz last year in his proxy fight with Procter & Gamble . It also voted in favor of Bill Ackman against ADP . BlackRock voted in favor of activist-led proposals in 19 percent of proxy fights last year and that number is likely to rise.

In a surprising twist, even activist investors are taking up social causes. Jana Partners and Calstrs, the huge California retirement system that manages the pensions of the state's public schoolteachers, wrote a letter to Apple last week demanding that it focus more on the detrimental effects its products may have on children.

The chief executive of Whole Foods, John Mackey, once referred to Jana as "greedy bastards" when the firm was attacking him. But here was Jana espousing the importance of issues like public health, human capital management and environmental protection, and saying that "companies pursuing business practices that make short-term sense may be undermining their own long-term viability."

"In the case of Apple," Jana wrote, "we believe the long-term health of its youngest customers and the health of society, our economy, and the company itself, are inextricably linked." (Side note: It isn't clear why Jana went after Apple, considering that it has better tools to manage the use of its products by children than anyone else in the industry; but the general idea of technology companies paying more attention to children's health is a good one.)

Mr. Fink makes a point in his letter that the recent corporate tax cut could bring out the kind of activist investors he once denounced. "Tax changes will embolden those activists with a short-term focus to demand answers on the use of increased cash flows," he said, "and companies who have not already developed and explained their plans will find it difficult to defend against these campaigns."

Despite Mr. Fink's insistence that companies benefit society, it's worth noting he's not playing down the importance of profits and, while it's a subtle point, he believes that having social purpose is inextricably linked to a company's ability to maintain its profits.

On that score, Mr. Fink and Friedman aren't that far apart. "It may well be in the long-run interest of a corporation that is a major employer in a small community to devote resources to providing amenities to that community or to improving its government," Friedman wrote in 1970, adding that this approach may make it easier to attract desirable employees along with "other worthwhile effects."

But he also added a dollop of reality to the debate. Noting "widespread aversion" to things like capitalism, profits and the "soulless corporation," he wrote that social responsibility is "one way for a corporation to generate goodwill as a byproduct of expenditures that are entirely justified in its own self-interest."
Media report from 160 Muir Woods Road in Perris, California, from where authorities rescued 13 malnourished children reportedly held captive by their parents, on January 15, 2018.

A California couple has been charged with torture after police rescued their 13 malnourished children from a home where some of them had been chained to beds, and neighbors on Monday described the family as shut-ins who shunned social contact.

Police made the discovery after a 17-year-old girl escaped the house in Perris, about 70 miles (113 km) east of Los Angeles, and used a cellular phone she had found in the house to call them, the Riverside County Sheriff's Office said on Monday.

"Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults," police said in a statement. "The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty."

The children ranged in age from 2 to 29, police said.

The girl, who officers had initially thought was about 10 years old, contacted police on Sunday after escaping the one-story house. The parents, David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were arrested and each charged with nine counts of torture and 10 counts of child endangerment. They were ordered held on $9 million bail each.

Neighbors said the Turpins and their children rarely emerged from their unkempt home in the new built development of closely spaced single-family houses.

Wendy Martinez, a 41-year-old housewife, said her only contact with the Turpins came as she passed the house at night in October. Four children were installing sod in the yard while the mother watched from the door, and none responded when Martinez said hello.

"They were very, like, afraid," she said of the children. "Like they had never seen people before."

Police said six of the couple's children were minors, while the other seven were over 18.

The siblings told officers that they were starving and police did not give the parents' motive for holding the children captive.

A Facebook page that appeared to have been created by the parents showed the couple dressed in wedding clothes, surrounded by 10 girls in matching purple plaid dresses and three male children in suits.

California state records list David Turpin as the principal of the Sandcastle Day School, with its address at the Turpin house.

Records show the Turpins filed for bankruptcy in 2011. Nancy Trahan, who works in the Temecula, California, law office that handled the bankruptcy, said the couple were friendly and spoke highly of their children.

"They seemed like very nice people," she said by telephone.

The Turpins are due in court on Thursday.
Natural Cycles, a contraceptive app that became certified in the EU as a form of birth control, has been hit with a complaint after being blamed for causing 37 unwanted pregnancies, reports Swedish publication SVT. Sodersjukhuset hospital in Stockholm reported the app to Swedish regulator MPA (the Medical Product Agency), after 37 women visited the hospital for an abortion after becoming pregnant while using Natural Cycles.

More from The Verge:

What kind of emoji do you need to talk about climate change?

One man ruptured his throat by trying to hold back a sneeze

Fox has renewed Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos for a second season

The app uses an algorithm and measures factors like temperature to determine the period when a woman may be fertile. It's a popular alternative to hormonal contraceptives like the pill because it lacks side effects. In a statement to The Verge, Natural Cycles said it hasn't received any information from Sodersjukhuset hospital, but are in touch with the MPA about each individual case. The company has also initiated an internal investigation with their clinical department, and said:

"No contraception is 100% effective, and unwanted pregnancies is an unfortunate risk with any contraception. Natural Cycles has a Pearl Index of 7, which means it is 93% effective at typical use, which we also communicate. At first sight, the numbers mentioned in the media are not surprising given the popularity of the app and in line with our efficacy rates. As our user base increases, so will the amount of unintended pregnancies coming from Natural Cycles app users, which is an inevitable reality."

The app currently has 700,000 users worldwide. A midwife at SOS, Carina Montin, told SVTthat the hospital was reporting Natural Cycles to the MPA because of the unwanted pregnancies it helped cause. The app is designed for users aged 18 years and over, and Natural Cycles says younger users should consider another form of contraception
As automakers and enthusiasts from across the globe meet in Detroit this week for the North American International Auto Show, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) will be in the spotlight. In an era of climate change concerns, BEVs have become a symbol of innovation, promising to disrupt the automotive industry. Yet hidden in plain sight are some of the most disruptive technologies the industry has ever seen; and they happen to be new and improved internal combustion engines.

Ironically, as countries announce plans to phase out gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles in favor of BEVs, new fuels and engine designs are making ICEs greener than ever, and far more efficient. In fact, in many of the world's largest markets, on a cradle-to-grave basis, the most efficient ICE has a significantly lower carbon footprint than a BEV  mainly due to the carbon intensity of the electrical power grid and the environmental impact of battery manufacturing.

Over the past century, internal combustion engines have harnessed the unparalleled energy density of hydrocarbons, transforming our world and powering our economies to ever-greater heights. Today's hydrocarbons (whether fossil or renewable based) meet 99 percent of the world's transport needs.

As BEVs overcome cost and infrastructure challenges over the next 10 years, they are set to increase their market share in specific segments of the light-duty vehicle market. Yet forecasts by the Energy Information Administration and the International Energy Agency predict that combustion engines will still account for more than 90 percent of global transport energy demand by mid-century. The anticipated growth of the global population to 9 billion, and the expected doubling of the world economy will continue to drive demand for affordable ICE-powered vehicles.

With combustion engines factoring in the transport equation for decades  and ICE remaining the dominant power source for the foreseeable future  they must be part of any sensible climate strategy. Improving the ICE remains the most cost-effective and timely means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector  and those improvements can yield dramatic results.

Take gasoline compression ignition (GCI), which boosts engine efficiency while reducing NOx and soot pollutants simultaneously. GCI uses market gasoline for diesel-like efficiencies in a cost-effective manner  with even greater potential using future fuels. At Saudi Aramco, we have demonstrated that GCI can boost fuel economy by 30 percent. Innovative automakers like Mazda with their upcoming SkyActivX engine are leading the way for gasoline compression ignition, with others expected to follow.

Some of the most exciting developments are radically new engine designs which save fuel and reduce emissions, like the Achates Power opposed-piston engine. The engine, which utilizes two pistons per cylinder working in opposite reciprocating motion, has the potential to achieve efficiencies exceeding those of diesel and gasoline engines by 30 and 50 percent, respectively.

Electrification can complement ICE to achieve the highest vehicle efficiency, bringing together the strengths of both technologies. Hybrids have demonstrated that ICEs, when paired with batteries, can run at peak efficiency.

In addition to making engines more efficient, we can trap emissions before they are released into the atmosphere. Saudi Aramco has already demonstrated the on-board capture and storage of 30 percent of the tail-pipe CO2 from a Toyota Camry.

Combining CO2 capture with ever more-affordable renewable energy, and using proven synthetic fuel technologies, carbon-neutral combustion is already within reach.

The global community faces a great challenge: reducing greenhouse gases and improving local air quality while simultaneously meeting the world's growing energy needs. Addressing this challenge requires policies that promote a range of technologies, as those that attempt to pick winners are frequently counter-productive. We must employ a balanced approach, using all available technologies, if we're to achieve our energy and climate goals. Neither the BEV nor the ICE is the perfect solution in all scenarios; both are needed for a sustainable and affordable mobility future.

Ahmad Al Khowaiter is chief technology officer of Saudi Aramco, the world's top exporter of crude oil and natural gas liquids and a fully integrated, global petroleum and chemicals enterprise. To learn more about the company and its participation in the North American International Auto Show, follow us on Twitter @Saudi_Aramco and visit http://www.saudiaramco.com/en/home/news-media/news/NAIAS-2018.html
Buying into initial coin offerings (ICOs) can lead to the total loss of an investment, said the head of a top European regulator.

ICOs bear similarities to initial public offerings for a stock, but in an IPO, the investor usually has a stake in the company, whereas coin sales differ widely in terms of acquired rights. That's been a primary criticism of ICOs, but differences in regulation are also important factors for investors to consider, according to Steven Maijoor, the chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority.

"You don't have the regular protection that regulated investments offer, and can lose all of your investments," Maijoor said Tuesday. "As a European securities market authority, we have warned, in November, about the so-called ICOs because while ICOs in principle can give you services in return for the coin that you buy, or a share in the revenue, this happens in a very unregulated space."
European stocks eked out gains by Tuesday's close, however a downturn in commodities weighed on sentiment, despite positive trading from markets overseas.

European markets



The pan-European STOXX 600 ended trade slightly higher, up 0.13 percent provisionally, off its session highs. The majority of sectors closed in the black. The U.K.'s FTSE 100 fell 0.17 percent, while the French CAC 40 managed to hold onto its gains, closing up 0.08 percent. Germany's DAX rose 0.35 percent. Overseas, the Dow Jones industrial average broke above 26,000 for the first time at the start of the U.S. trading day, with the session continuing to post strong gains at Europe's close.

Earnings dominate, yet miners slip 1.4%

When it comes to European industries, commodities were under the greatest pressure Tuesday. Oil stocks fell 0.92 percent as a sector, on the back of weakness seen in crude prices. Despite Brent crude falling over 1 percent, prices continued to hover around $69.35 at Europe's close, a level not seen since 2014. U.S. crude traded just below the $64 per barrel mark. Meanwhile, London-listed miners BHP Billiton , Anglo American and Antofagasta all tumbled 1.5 percent or more, amid a slump in metals prices  particularly copper and nickel. Rio Tinto slipped 3 percent after HSBC downgraded its stock recommendation to a "hold" from a "buy". In the previous session, the mining giant said it would look to lift 2018 iron ore shipments by 10 million tons after it reported a 1 percent rise in 2017 shipments. The drop in U.K. miners dragged the FTSE lower. Germany's DAX, however, received a boost in trade on the back of strong performance in the autos sector. BMW rose over 3 percent after news emerged that parking solutions provider Parkmobile had announced a recapitalization of its business and investment by BMW Group. Czech automobile manufacturer Skoda saw its global deliveries tick up 6.6 percent to a record 1.2 million vehicles in 2017. Its parent company Volkswagen jumped 2.28 percent.

watch now

Looking at individual stocks, Hugo Boss was a top performer, rising 3.73 percent amid stronger-than-anticipated corporate earnings. The German fashion house returned to profit in the final three months of 2017 after a series of profit warnings. Danish jewelry manufacturer Pandora announced that it aims to double its new product launches by 2022, to regain recent weak growth and lack of innovation, Reuters reported. Shares popped 4.72 percent by the close. On the opposite end of Europe's benchmarks, Capita tumbled over 6 percent after M&G Prudential announced that it would be moving the administration of its life and pensions contracts to a different supplier. Chocolatier Lindt & Spruengli saw its group sales rise to 4.09 billion Swiss francs in 2017, although the company did see weaker results in the U.S. Shares fell almost 2.5 percent.

Bitcoin falls below $12,000
President Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon will meet behind closed doors on Tuesday with a U.S. House of Representatives committee that is probing whether Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

The interview with the House Intelligence Committee comes after Bannon's public falling out with the president over comments Bannon made to author Michael Wolff for his new book "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House."

In the book, Bannon is quoted as describing a June 2016 meeting between Trump associates, including the president's son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a Russian lawyer, as "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."

The meeting came after Donald Trump Jr. was told in an email that the Russian government had dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, to which he replied: "I love it."

Bannon, a champion of Trump's "America First" agenda, was fired by the White House in August and returned to the right-wing news website Breitbart News. He continued to speak with Trump and tried to promote the president's agenda.

But Trump accused Bannon of having "lost his mind" when news of his comments to Wolff surfaced earlier this month. Six days later, Bannon stepped down from his post as executive chairman at Breitbart News.

Bannon is the latest high-profile figure to testify before the House committee as part of its ongoing investigation into allegations that Russia interfered in the U.S. election.

Russia has denied meddling in the election and Trump has denied there was any collusion between his campaign and Moscow.

Later in the week, the panel will hear from former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. In an interview with WABC-AM radio broadcast on Sunday, Lewandowski said he expects the closed-door meeting to take place either Wednesday or Thursday.

"I would be happy to come in and sit down. I have nothing to hide," he told the radio station. "I didn't collude or cooperate or coordinate with any Russian, Russian agency, Russian government or anybody else to try and impact this election."

Democrats on the committee have accused Republicans of rushing to wrap up the probe to help give the president political cover, despite their requests to interview more witness. Republicans have denied the charge.
Facebook's latest algorithm change may not be as detrimental to publishers and companies as everybody thinks.

Facebook's old NewsFeed algorithm, which was set in place in spring 2016, highlighted content and conversations among family and friends. However, this new tweak will place value on "meaningful social interactions." Rather than spelling doom for publishers as many have suggested, this could actually mean more traffic to groups and official Pages from publishers and businesses, Facebook vice president of NewsFeed Adam Mosseri said in an interview with Stratechery.

"So if you and I had a back and forth conversation on a post from a Page, that would actually count as a meaningful social interaction," Mosseri said. "So it's more about the interactions between people and less about just the consumption of content from friends."

The takeaway for publishers: The world isn't necessarily ending. Publisher posts that don't get any meaningful engagement won't appear as prominently in the News Feed. But posts that people actually comment and share could be favored more highly.

Mosseri says Facebook changed its algorithm not to fight "fake news," but because the company was noticing more Page posts and videos being posted overall. It needed to make sure this flood of content wasn't drowning out social interactions that Facebook was built upon. So the company is going to favor material that is shared and commented upon.

The owners of Facebook Pages were especially posting more content because they received financial benefits when people clicked on their content.

Video has also boomed on the platform, especially in India. Carrier wars caused the price of data to go down, so time spent watching video grew much faster than overall time on Facebook, Mosseri said.

"Video by nature is very passive," Mosseri said. "So while you're watching a video on Facebook you don't tend to comment a lot, like a lot, or talk with your friends a lot, or read articles for that matter."

Facebook has acknowledged the adjustments may lower engagement time on platform in the short term. Video watch time is also going down, which is driving the drop in time spent on the Facebook platform Mosseri added.

However the company believes the NewsFeed shift will allow people to have more valuable and relevant conversations on the platform which will improve "well-being," Mosseri said. Shorter video watch time will also free up users to read more stories and comment.

"So we hope that the time spent on Facebook, though overall it will go down, is time well-spent or time better spent," Mosseri said.
Leading U.K. supermarket Iceland, which specializes in frozen food, has made a commitment to eliminate plastic packaging from its own brand products by the end of 2023.



In an announcement Tuesday, the retailer said it had already removed disposable plastic straws from its own label range. It added that its new food ranges would use paper-based food trays instead of plastic ones.



Richard Walker, Iceland's managing director, said that the world had "woken up to the scourge of plastics." Walker added that the onus was on retailers to take a stand and "deliver meaningful change."



"There really is no excuse any more for excessive packaging that creates needless waste and damages our environment," he said. "The technologies and practicalities to create less environmentally harmful alternatives exist, and so Iceland is putting a stake in the ground."

Greenpeace Executive Director John Sauven described Iceland's commitment to go plastic free within five years as bold. "It's now up to other retailers and food producers to respond to that challenge," he added. "The tidal wave of plastic pollution will only start to recede when they turn off the tap."



Iceland is not the only business looking to tackle the issue of packaging. Sandwich and coffee shop Pret A Manger now offers a 50 pence (69 cents) discount on hot drinks for customers who bring in a reusable cup.
Google is planning to build three underwater cables in 2019 to help expand its cloud business to new regions as it battles rivals Microsoft and Amazon .



The subsea cables will run across different routes. The first will go from Los Angeles to Chile, the second will connect the U.S. to Denmark and Ireland, and the third will be from Hong Kong to Guam.

Alphabet-owned Google said it will open its Netherlands and Montreal regions in the first quarter of 2018, followed by L.A., Finland and Hong Kong.

The cables will be completed in 2019.

"Together, these investments further improve our network  the world's largest  which by some accounts delivers 25 percent of worldwide internet traffic," Ben Treynor Sloss, vice president of Google's cloud platform, said in a blog post on Tuesday.

The Curie cable, named after famous scientist Marie Curie, from Chile to L.A. will allow Google to serve cloud customers across Latin America.

Havfrue, the cable running from the U.S. to Denmark and Ireland, will boost capacity for North Atlantic customers. It is being developed in partnership with Facebook and will be built by TE SubCom.

The Hong Kong-Guam cable system will help Google reach customers in Australia and the Pacific region.

Building all of these cables will help Google deliver cloud services with a better experience. It means if servers in one region have a problem, then it can still service customers in those areas without taking a hit to performance.

Google now has direct investment in 11 cables, including those planned or under construction.

The U.S. search giant sees cloud as a promising new area and has been trying to aggressively expand the business to catch up to rivals Amazon and Microsoft.
The tech industry's viewpoint was summarized over the weekend by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Gurley, who pointed out on Twitter that the "MRI industry," meaning medical imaging, still lives on "sneaker net and faxes." He was surprised that the files couldn't be shared online, as they are "not even that large."

Gurley went on to blame HIPAA for this issue, which is often referred to in the industry as a failure of health data interoperability.

There are many things wrong with this thesis.

First, before HIPAA, there were no laws in place to ensure that consumers could access their own health information at all. We have rights to access this information because of, and not despite, HIPAA.

Second, lawmakers took on this issue in a big way with legislation passed in 2009 known as the HITECH Act. That provided incentives, followed by penalties, that were designed to modernize health care by pushing clinics and hospitals to adopt digital, and not paper-based, medical records.

That effort didn't work out as regulators hoped. Millions of Americans today, including Gurley, are still finding that their medical records can't be efficiently shared between doctors. And all that is leading to potentially fatal medical errors and a ton of waste.

But privacy rules aren't to blame.

So what is? First, look at competing vendors, such as Cerner and privately held Epic Systems, who sold proprietary software that isn't designed to talk to competing systems (although these companies are now making more of an effort to open up). Many of these vendors developed tools that prioritized billing over providing patient care.

But some blame should also go to the hospitals that acquired these systems, which support their own bottom line. Many are still wedded to the "fee-for-service" model of care, which rewards them for pricey tests and procedures, rather than for outcomes. These fee-for-service hospitals are fighting to retain patients, rather than providing them with easy access to health information that they could theoretically take to a different health system with more affordable prices or better quality care.

As Bob Kocher, a health-focused investor and one of the key architects of the Affordable Care Act put it, "They [some hospitals] have not wanted features that make it easier to share information."

The shift to a new kind of health care, which rewards hospitals based on patients getting better, will most likely result in the kind of changes we're looking for. Taking away privacy protections will not.
A 1939 Mercedes-Benz 770K Grosser Offener Tourenwagen built for and used by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Worldwide Auctioneers

A "super Mercedes" parade car built for and used by Adolf Hitler during World War II is to be sold at auction on Wednesday. The Nazi dictator's Mercedes-Benz 770 Grosser Offener Tourenwagen, which the U.S. Army seized after the war, is one of just three in private hands. Only five models remain in existence. The German car is described by Worldwide Auctioneers, which will be selling it in Scottsdale, Arizona, as "the most historically significant automobile ever offered for public sale." No official estimate has been given but Worldwide Auctioneers noted that its 2004 sale, as part of a wider package of Mercedes vehicles, marked the single most-valuable private transaction in the classic car world at the time. The auctioneer said 10 percent of Wednesday's sale price will be donated to funding education about the Holocaust.

This Mercedes-Benz 770 Grosser Offener Tourenwagen was a product of design requirements laid down by Hitler and his primary chauffer, SS Officer Erich Kempka. Worldwide Auctioneers

According to supporting documentation, the car was a product of design requirements laid down by Hitler and his primary chauffer, SS officer Erich Kempka. Kempka asked Mercedes engineers to ensure maximum protection for Hitler, even allowing for the fact that the car was an open tourer. Built-in security measures applied to the vehicle included 30-millimeter bullet-resistant laminated glass for the fixed windscreen and detachable side panels. Armor plating protected the body sides and undercarriage while a further panel at the rear could be raised or lowered depending upon threat level. Documents suggest the car was first used publically in October 1939 as part of a large motorcade delivering Hitler to the Old Reich Chancellery in Berlin in front of international media. It was also used for a state visit by Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in June 1940. Just one month later, Hitler used it for a victory parade after the Nazis' swift defeat of France. Further outings were made with Hitler in the car after German victories over Yugoslavia and Greece.

A rear view of Hitler's Super Mercedes parade car Worldwide Auctioneers
"Kazakhstan is a country where there's no open political system," said Paul Stronski, former director for Russia and Central Asia on the U.S. National Security Council under President Barack Obama. "You have accusations of torture, and very bad clampdowns on independent religious thought."

Nazarbayev is known as an autocrat, who uses sham elections to extend his nearly three decades in power. In 2015, for instance, he was "re-elected" with nearly 98 percent of the vote. Nazarbayev is also fabulously wealthy in a country where per capita GDP is just over $8,000 a year. In 2013, he reportedly paid rapper Kanye West $3 million to perform at his grandson's wedding.

But Nazarbayev is not like most of the world leaders who visit the White House.

President Donald Trump hosted the president of Kazakhstan on Tuesday at the White House, where the official agenda included Afghanistan and nuclear nonproliferation. Seen on TV, President Nursultan Nazarbayev looked like any other visiting world leader, standing a few feet away from Trump at a lectern, his country's flag behind him.

And then there's the corruption: By some estimates, around a quarter of Kazakhstan's GDP flowed out of the country during the first decade after the fall of the Soviet Union. Top Kazakh businessmen have been accused of bribery and money laundering around the world.

So why, then, did the White House roll out the red carpet for the leader of a government that rejects many of the United States' founding principles?

"Central Asia is the back-door shipping channel to Afghanistan," said Stronski. "When we have problems with Pakistan, we need other supply routes. So a country like Kazakhstan becomes much more important strategically."

The U.S.-Pakistan relationship is currently in free fall, following an announcement by the State Department earlier this month that the U.S. would suspend approximately $1 billion in annual security aid to Pakistan, citing the country's failure to crack down on terror cells within its borders.

The break with Pakistan is a key part of Trump's South Asia strategy, which the president said Tuesday was "working far more rapidly than anybody would understand."

Another reason for hosting Nazarbayev, Stronski said, was in recognition of his "long history and laudable record" of supporting nuclear nonproliferation.

"The Russians tested nuclear weapons there," Stronski said, "so it's a very personal issue for the nation. But it's also something that gets Nazarbayev into meetings with top leaders who might otherwise avoid meeting with him."

Trump on Tuesday called Kazakhstan "a valued partner in our efforts to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons ... and prevent the North Korean regime from threatening the world with nuclear devastation."

Kazakhstan also has a close relationship with Russia, Stronski said, although the alliance has been strained ever since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. "They're in the unenviable position of trying to act as a mediator between the United States and Russia," he said.

At the Trump White House, which is embroiled in a special counsel investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, Nazarbayev's efforts could prove even more complicated. Trump did not mention Russia on Tuesday.

Nor did the president specifically mention human rights or "rule of law" in his statements Tuesday. When CNBC asked the White House whether the issues came up in private meetings, an aide highlighted a line in a briefing paper put out after the meeting, which said the U.S. and Kazakhstan would fight terrorism "while respecting the rule of law and human rights."

Still, Stronski said he could not imagine that Trump's most recent predecessors would have been advised to host the Kazakh leader. "If President Obama or [George W.] Bush were talking about doing a meeting with Nazarbayev, we'd probably be asking, 'Do you really want to sit down with someone from a country with this human rights record and level of corruption?'"

Today, just one private company accounts for 4 percent of the country's economy: Eurasia Resources Group, which is owned by billionaires with ties to Moscow. And in October 2017, the Bank of New York froze 40 percent of the assets of Kazakhstan's sovereign wealth fund, part of a legal dispute over alleged government corruption.

For Trump, whose sprawling real estate company has come under scrutiny for potential money laundering, Kazakh corruption issues hit very close to home. According to Bloomberg News, millions of dollars from a Kazakh mineral company flowed into a development company that partnered with Trump to build the Trump SoHo hotel and condominiums in New York.

Asked by reporters on Tuesday whether there was any Kazakh money in the Trump Tower Soho project, Trump looked up, surprised. "No idea. Really no idea," he said.

Yet in a region dominated by autocracies and rampant with organized crime, Kazakhstan is better than most, said Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University, and an expert in Russia and Eastern Europe.

"Kazakhstan has high levels of corruption, like every country in Central Asia," she said. "But the political elite is not as interwoven with organized crime there as it is in Russia or Azerbaijan. It's more of a kleptocracy than an organized crime state."

Stronski agreed. "Of all the leaders in Central Asia, if we're going to have a White House meeting and photo op, it makes sense for senior leaders to do this with Kazakhstan," he said.
President Donald Trump is not inclined to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, CNBC senior contributor Larry Kudlow said Tuesday, citing White House sources.

Instead, the president is inclined to renegotiate the pact between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, "difficult as that's going to be," Kudlow said.

Still, Kudlow, who has been concerned about Trump possibly walking away from NAFTA, cautioned that "this is subject to daily change."

Trump has repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the trade agreement unless there are major changes to make it, in his eyes, a fairer deal for the U.S.

Last week, Reuters reported that Canada is increasingly convinced that Trump will pull out of NAFTA. Trump then told The Wall Street Journal that he will leave his decision on a deal "a little bit flexible" because of the presidential election in Mexico this year.

Kudlow said the U.S. doesn't want to play into the Mexican election, which could make things "far worse."

He also suspects the Trump administration knows that leaving NAFTA will knock the stock market down.

"There's a potential blow up in the stock market if we leave NAFTA. We're talking agriculture. We're talking car parts. We're talking trucking, transportation, energy," he said.
French President Emmanuel Macron gestures during a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, 2016, when he was French finance minister. FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

French President Emmanuel Macron is set to speak at this month's World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, with analysts saying the popular new leader will be Europe's man to watch there. Macron is expected to give a speech to world leaders and business people gathered in the Alpine resort on January 24. It is likely that he will promote a pro-European agenda of greater integration and reform while extolling the benefits of free trade.

The man to watch

Antonio Barroso, managing director and deputy director of research at Teneo Intelligence, told CNBC that Macron was "absolutely" the man to watch at the Forum, although President Donald Trump is poised to be the headline act. "Last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping was the star, but certainly everyone will be looking at Macron this year as a key leader in the West," Barroso said. "While Chancellor Merkel in Germany is constrained by the political situation in the country, Macron is definitely stepping up as the stable face of Europe." "He can also show the face of Europe that lots of leaders in the region want to project," he said, adding that Macron was a pro-business representative for the region at a time of economic recovery and stability after years of crisis. Noting that the theme at Davos this year is "creating a shared future in a fractured world," Barroso said that Macron "embodies" this motto and was both a promoter of globalization and openness while wary of the need to ensure global trade was reciprocal, a point emphasized during his recent trade trip to China.

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

"He promotes openness and globalization while trying to protect people from, and limit, the negative consequences of it," Barroso said. "Davos is all about globalization and if there's a champion of globalization in the West, then it's Macron. He advocates openness but he's also worried about third countries outside the European Union (EU) taking advantage of the region's openness and he's keen to stress the need for reciprocity in trade relations, as we've seen from his comments in China (during the trade mission in January)," Barroso said.

Opportunity to shine

This year will be Macron's first speech at Davos as president since his election last May. Having fended off competition from far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, Macron's election manifesto and presidency so far have been characterized by a pro-business approach to reform and a renewed push for euro zone reform and closer integration. Jonathan Fenby, managing director of European political research at TS Lombard, told CNBC that Macron, as the man who defeated Le Pen, preventing a far-right government in France, would be welcome with the Davos crowd.

"Macron should go down well at Davos. As a reformist who turned back the Le Pen populist wave and promises to re-shape French politics  and a winner to date. He is just what the WEF attendees will welcome," Fenby said. "He strikes a high profile abroad and agrees to disagree with Trump. In general, one can say that there is a feeling in France which would be shared by Davos crowd that he is the last hope for structural change. He is greatly helped by the divisions and incoherence of the opposition but still has to school some of his parliamentary followers in the exercise of power, at which he seems to be doing quite well."

Home and away
Qualcomm is likely to make aggressive moves to keep shareholders happy in the next two quarters while the company faces a possible hostile takeover attempt from Broadcom , research firm Nomura said Tuesday.

The firm upgraded Qualcomm to a buy rating and raised its target price to $75 from $58.

"We believe Qualcomm leadership is very smart, but over the last several years, the San Diego-based management team at times has been unassertive and complacent," Nomura wrote in a note. "Though now with Broadcom's hostile takeover attempt analogous to a 'gun to the head,' we expect the company to more aggressively focus on driving shareholder value in order to remain a standalone franchise."

Broadcom in November made an unsolicited offer for the rival chipmaker. Qualcomm rejected the $103 billion deal, saying it devalued the company.

In December Broadcom nominated its first slate of replacement board members who were later rejected by Qualcomm, setting the stage for a bitter proxy battle.

Nomura said a Broadcom bid is "the most attractive long-term option for Qualcomm shareholders" but predicted several short-term bumps including a strong earnings report and the closure of the NXP Semiconductors deal.

Qualcomm rose 2 percent in morning trading Tuesday.

Disclaimer
A contractor moves roofing material on a home under construction at the Toll Brothers Cantera at Gale Ranch housing development in San Ramon, Calif. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The stalemate in Washington over an immigration deal could rattle the labor force in key sectors of the economy, prompting several big-name companies to provide legal support to affected employees. The restaurant and construction industries would be hardest hit by the expiration of the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which provides protected status to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. It covers about 700,000 immigrants, although roughly double that number are estimated to be eligible for the program.

watch now

Nearly 19 percent of working DACA recipients hold jobs in food service, according to an analysis by the advocacy group New American Economy. The construction sector employs another 10 percent. Together, they account for about 240,000 people. Other industries with significant numbers of immigrants eligible for DACA are health care and landscaping, as well academia, which each employ about 2 percent of workers. "DACA makes business sense because it brings young, well-educated talent out of the shadows and into the mainstream workforce," said Jeremy Robbins, executive director of New American Economy.

In addition, several companies have offered legal assistance to employees attempting to navigate an uncertain period. The Trump administration began winding down DACA in October, and the program is slated to expire March 5. However, a California court issued an injunction last week halting that process. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Tuesday that her department is complying with that order, although the Justice Department announced later in the day that it will appeal the injunction directly to the Supreme Court. "It defies both law and common sense for DACA  an entirely discretionary non-enforcement policy that was implemented unilaterally by the last administration after Congress rejected similar legislative proposals and courts invalidated the similar DAPA policy  to somehow be mandated nationwide by a single district court in San Francisco," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. AT&T has created an internal website to address employee questions. It is also providing legal aid up to $400 to evaluate affected workers' status and alternative paths to staying in the United States, according to an internal Jan. 10 memo provided to CNBC. The company also pledged to cover up to $50,000 each in legal fees for workers whose status has expired and are facing deportation. "We're standing with you through this process," the memo reads. "Thank you for all you do for AT&T."

watch now

Microsoft has also publicly promised financial aid to the 45 DACA recipients working at the company. Microsoft has said it will provide and pay for legal counsel for any employees who lose protected status and face deportation, calling the program an "economic imperative and humanitarian necessity."



"At Microsoft, we value every one of our employees and it pains us to know that many of our coworkers are experiencing great frustration and anxiety," the company's chief legal counsel, Brad Smith, wrote in a blog post last week. "Like so many others, immigration has played a vital role in our company's success." New American Economy estimates that more than 70 percent of the 25 largest companies in the U.S. employ DACA recipients and that DACA recipients contribute about $3 billion in tax revenue. Last week, industry groups representing chain restaurants, retail stores and construction companies joined an open letter signed by more than 100 CEOs warning of an "impending crisis" if lawmakers do not act soon. "We are thankful for the generations of immigrant families who've brought the best of their traditions and cultures to our family table and provide a vital role in the restaurant industry," Shannon Meade, director of labor and workforce policy at the National Restaurant Association, said in a separate statement to CNBC. "As the country's second-largest private sector employer, we support strong border security and a permanent fix for the DACA program, and urge the Administration and Congress to work on a bipartisan effort to address these issues." Businesses had been hoping for a solution by the end of this week to allow time to implement any changes. But those talks have fallen apart, however, amid tension between both parties and the White House over allegations that President Donald Trump used incendiary and vulgar language to describe immigrants from Africa and other countries. During a public conversation with a DACA recipient on Tuesday, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, said that a compromise was unlikely by Friday. "Not this week, no," he told her. "But it will soon, before the deadline."  NBC News contributed to this report.

WATCH: Bezos donates $33 million to fund scholarships for 'Dreamers'
BlackRock 's Larry Fink and other CEOs are "extraordinarily hypocritical" to push companies for more social responsibility, billionaire investor Sam Zell told CNBC on Tuesday.

The New York Times reported Fink will tell business leaders in a letter on Tuesday that their companies need to do more than just make profits. Companies need to contribute to society as well if they want to receive support, Fink argues in a draft letter obtained by the Times.

Fink's BlackRock manages more than $6 trillion in investments through 401(k) plans, exchange-traded funds and mutual funds.

Fink and seven partners founded BlackRock in the late 1980s, and the firm has grown to the largest asset manager in the world.

"They talk about the fact that they're in effect going to do exactly what market does," said Zell, the founder and chairman of property specialist Equity Group Investments. "And then they put up public policy statements that suggest that they're going to advocate the market doing things other than what happens every day."

"Either they're a passive fund that follows the market or they're a leader that's setting the tone," Zell said in an interview on "Squawk Box," adding BlackRock can't have it both ways.

Zell questioned whether America is ready to have BlackRock "in charge of the NYSE," saying "I didn't know Larry Fink had been made God."

Zell made his fortune in the real estate business over a decadeslong career. He describes himself as a social liberal and a fiscal conservative. He's also an active philanthropist with a focus on entrepreneurial education.

He chairs five NYSE-listed companies, including three real estate investment trusts.

BlackRock did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
Singapore was recently ranked second on the Economist Intelligence Unit's Safe Cities Index for 2017, coming in just behind Tokyo.

In 2016, the island nation's police reported 135 total days without any crimes including snatch-theft, house break-ins and robbery. That low crime rate means many small businesses enjoy little concern about shoplifting.

In fact, as CNBC recently observed, many local businesses take few precautions when closing shop at night.

For instance, in the ground floor lobby of a mixed-use building in the downtown business district, many shops don't have windows, locks  or even doors.

A Starbucks located in Raffles Place, one of Singapore's busiest underground train stations has no formal doors. Rather, a small rope indicates when the store is closed, and merchandise is all still displayed and within an arm's length of commuters.

But of course, surveillance is highly prevalent in the city-state, which boasts about 5.5 million people.

Last year, Singapore's police force announced an initiative, PolCam 2.0, in which it will roll out tens of thousands of additional surveillance cameras. In it's first initiative in 2012, the Police installed more than 62,000 cameras.
This fall, two friends had an idea: Monitor Southwest Airlines ' fares and alert travelers when prices fell. Southwest sued them.

Pavel Yurevich, an engineer, and his friend Chase Roberts, a coder, launched SWMonkey.com in November. For a $3 fee, they sent travelers an email when fares or mileage requirements dropped on Southwest's website, so they could rebook at the lower fare. Southwest allows travelers to rebook at a lower price, and then holds the difference for future travel.

"I thought other people would benefit from the service," Yurevich told CNBC, adding that he was surprised by the lawsuit because of Southwest's "Transfarency" advertising slogan and general consumer-friendly image. The start-up monitored the fares manually at first but then set up an algorithm to track the price changes, Yurevich said.

Following cease-and-desist letters from the airline, Yurevich and Roberts ended their service in late November. They said they made $45 before they shut it down, but they have kept the website online, including details on how the service worked and two blog posts about the dispute.

Southwest in early January sued the startup and its founders in U.S. District Court in Dallas. In the six-count suit the airline alleges the pair broke Southwest website's terms and conditions by taking fare data off the site, broke trademark laws, and violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing Southwest's "computers without authorization or in excess of authorized access."
WASHINGTON  Congress has until Friday to reach an agreement on a thicket of thorny issues, and the talks don't appear to be going very smoothly right now.

That means President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are hurtling toward a government shutdown, with funding set to run out at midnight on Jan. 19.

Here's a look at the four key obstacles lawmakers face in their efforts to forge a deal by Friday.

Spending caps

Lawmakers are currently faced with tight budget caps, agreed to in 2011, that limit how much they can spend for the rest of fiscal year 2018 and beyond.

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Both Republicans and Democrats want to lift those caps  GOP leaders want a big boost for defense; Democrats say any defense increase should be paired with an equal hike for domestic programs.

House and Senate leaders have been negotiating for weeks over how much to increase the caps and how to divide the pot between defense and domestic spending. They insist the talks are going well, while offering no details.

"We think the solution is in sight," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters on Thursday.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., offered a similarly rosy assessment. But he noted that once they have settled on a top-line number, lawmakers on the appropriations committees in the House and Senate will need time to craft a spending bill that sets specific funding levels for every government agency and program.

In other words, Congress will almost certainly have to pass another short-term measure before Jan. 19 to buy themselves more time. Whether such a stop-gap funding bill could pass is unclear; opposition to a short-term deal is bubbling up from conservatives and liberals alike.

The Dreamers

The partisan debate over how to deal with the Dreamers  the 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children  grew more acrimonious last week after President Trump allegedly called Haiti, El Salvador, and other African nations "s__hole countries" and suggested the U.S. should instead encourage more immigration from Norway, a predominately white country.
Car companies may have a hard time bringing as much manufacturing back to the United States as the Trump administration would like, said Fiat-Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne.



Current NAFTA rules require just over 60 percent of a vehicle's manufacturing to be done in the United States, Mexico and Canada to avoid tariffs. The Trump administration has said it wants to raise that to 85 percent and wants 50 percent of that to come from the United States.

The next big battle for carmakers will be making sure those percentages are reasonable as the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement heats up, Marchionne told CNBC at the North American International Auto Show on Tuesday.

Fiat-Chrysler said in early January it would shift some production of its Ram Heavy Duty truck from Saltillo, Mexico, to Detroit in 2020, adding back 2,500 jobs. But the company may still have to produce some components in Mexico, he said on Tuesday.

"There is a limit to what I think can be economically produced in this country, and I sincerely hope this administration understands this," Marchionne told CNBC.

It is unclear how much a change in NAFTA would affect U.S. consumers, he said.

"Tax reform is going to compensate some of the cost differential in building the car here as opposed to building it in Mexico," he said, "so we feel comfortable that we have now found the economic framework within which to get this done."
President Donald Trump accused Democrats on Tuesday of seeking a government shutdown, as Congress scrambles to fund the government ahead of a Friday deadline.

Top Democrats have signaled they will not support a spending bill unless they also reach a deal to shield hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation. Talks on an immigration plan  which would include new border security funding to appease Republicans  hit a snag following Trump's tense meeting with bipartisan senators last week.

Congress now has four days including Tuesday to pass a spending bill  with or without the Democrats  to yet again avoid a government shutdown at the last minute. Lawmakers most recently reached a short-term funding deal in late December to keep the government open for less than a month.

Republicans control both chambers of Congress, but Trump has repeatedly argued that Democrats should take the blame if a shutdown happens.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he wants to keep funding and immigration bills separate.

In a tweet Tuesday, Trump claimed that "Democrats want to shut down the Government over Amnesty for all and Border Security." He added that "we need a merit based system of immigration" and "no more dangerous" visa lottery.

Trump tweet

In a bill, Democrats want legal protection for nearly 800,000 young immigrants who were protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump ended in September with a delay that expires in March. They have not publicly sought "amnesty for all" as characterized by Trump.

Trump and GOP negotiators in Congress have sought funding for additional border security measures and limits on family immigration, among other measures, in a deal. Trump rejected a deal brought to him by bipartisan Senate negotiators on Thursday.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.  one of those negotiators  told reporters on Tuesday that "we did everything [Trump] asked" in the bipartisan proposal presented to him on Thursday.
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White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders briefs reporters on Tuesday.

White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson is also expected to talk about the results of the 71-year-old president's physical on Friday. The White House has attempted to rebut concerns about the president's intelligence and fitness for office raised in a book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," released earlier this month.
Once again, President Donald Trump's opponents and his constant critics in the news media are calling him a racist. It's been the go-to response to him from Democrats and even several Republicans who have thought this is a foolproof weapon against him since he first announced his candidacy for president in 2015.

How's that working out for them?

The fact is the charge of racism doesn't work very well on Trump. But folks keep trying it anyway.

It still seems to be the strategy right now in the battle over the budget and the special DACA protections for the children of illegal immigrants. That's how it's playing out after Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin accused Trump of making the now-infamous "s---hole" comment about Haiti and African countries last week. Frantic depictions of those comments as definitive proof of Trump's racism have dominated the news cycle ever since.

The goal now seems to be to use this racism-branding tactic in order to shame Trump into bending to the Democrats' will. On Monday, Durbin revealed he's pursuing that shaming strategy, telling the Chicago Sun-Times that, "if President Trump is not a racist, he can prove it" by making a deal on the DACA legislation.

Good luck with that.

The reason the shaming strategy is a long shot this time and has failed in the past is because it's nearly impossible to shame or even scare Trump at all. It's even harder to shame him into doing anything.

Look at the president's tweets and public statements every time he is criticized. Does he ever sound or act like a guy who even considers contrition? Donald Trump is a man who almost never chooses to stay above the fray no matter who is attacking him and how they do it. This was his well-documented behavior before he was a candidate, when he was a candidate, and even as president.

The shaming game has its own special hall of shame when it comes to its ineffectiveness. The highlights are:

It not only failed to get then-candidate Trump to stop talking about Mexican illegal immigration after his first speech as a candidate, the issue became the hallmark of his campaign.

Calling Trump anti-Muslim because of his immigration ban on several predominantly Muslim countries produced only the slightest tweaks to the policy and no real backing down. Legal challenges to the ban have only enraged and hardened Trump's resolve even more as they continue to be upheld by the Supreme Court.

Even when racism isn't a factor, shaming Trump doesn't work. The many critics of the GOP tax reform bill found that out the hard way when he continued to push for the bill and eventually got it across the finish line. That was despite the constant depiction of the bill by its opponents as a shameful boon to the rich. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers even said 10,000 people will die per year in America because of the tax bill. That didn't deter the president at all.

So, predictably, Trump is responding the opposite way to this latest shaming attempt. He's now toggling back and forth between taking a harder line on immigration policy and insisting he's no racist in his public comments and tweets.

That's a far cry from Trump's statement before the "s---hole" controversy when he said he'd sign any DACA compromise bipartisan congressional leaders came up with.

If the Democrats really are concerned about protecting the so-called "Dreamer" immigrants, there's really no excuse for them to be surprised by what's occurred over the last few days. Now, the chances are much greater that the Democrats will have to move to shut down the government when the budget deadline passes on Friday. Worse for them, their bargaining position on behalf of the DACA recipients is weakened now that the focus on the vulgar comments in a closed door meeting has flipped the president from compliant to defiant.

Government shutdowns are a tricky matter. Politicians usually run for the hills at the mere chance that they may be blamed for a shutdown. That's a good thing for people who like government compromise because shutdowns are always the result of a failed budget vote and it takes a 60 votes in the Senate to pass a budget.

With that in mind, congressional Republicans began placing a bet that the Democrats wouldn't want to be seen as causing a shutdown over the DACA issue last year. They were right to the point that the Democrats did agree to push off the matter for a month with a temporary spending bill.

But now, the Democrats are close to proudly promising to shut the government down over this issue. Yes, polls frequently show clear majorities of Americans support allowing "Dreamers" to stay in the U.S. provided they meet certain requirements. But there are also polls that show just as many voters support tougher immigration laws. And most damning of all for Democrats, the overall immigration issue actually remains a relatively low priority for most voters. A Morning Consult/Politico poll released just two months ago showed that only 29 percent of respondents thought extending the DACA protections should be a priority for Congress.

But based on the uproar over Trump's comments alone, the Democrats are willing to play with government shutdown fire.

So America's political scene is dominated by two enduring spectacles at the moment. First, we have a president who says politically incorrect and vulgar things with regularity and has no shame or remorse about it. Second, we have the Democratic Party and most of Trump's opponents clinging to and doubling down on a demonstrably failed strategy.

It's not clear who "wins" in this remarkable exchange. But we do know that the losers are millions of Americans who rely on a functioning government, clear immigration status, and politicians with some grip on reality.

Commentary by Jake Novak, CNBC.com senior columnist. Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.
North Korean soldiers stare at South Korean soldiers at the truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas on November 27, 2017. AFP | Getty Images

A meeting of states that backed South Korea in the Korean war will look at ways to better implement sanctions to push North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons, officials said, even as the North and South explore detente ahead of next month's Winter Olympics. Foreign ministers and senior officials from 20 nations will hold a full-day meeting in Vancouver on Tuesday, hosted by the United States and Canada, looking to increase diplomatic and financial pressure on North Korea to give up development of nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States, a program that has raised fears of a new war. Canadian and U.S. officials say the meeting will discuss ways to ensure implementation of wide-ranging U.N. sanctions, including steps agreed last month to further limit Pyongyang's access to refined petroleum products, crude oil and industrial goods. Brian Hook, the U.S. State Department's director of policy planning, said last week that participants, including U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, would probe how to boost maritime security around North Korea and options to interdict ships carrying prohibited goods in violation of sanctions. The Vancouver meeting primarily groups nations that assisted South Korea in the 1950-53 Korean War, as well as South Korea and Japan. China and Russia, which backed the North in the war but have since agreed to U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang, will not be attending. South Korea and the United States are technically still at war with the North because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with a truce, not a peace treaty.

Tensions easing?

The meeting was announced after North Korea tested its biggest ever intercontinental ballistic missile in late November, but now comes amid signs that tensions on the Korean peninsula are easing, at least temporarily. North and South Korea held formal talks this month for the first time in two years and Pyongyang said it would send athletes across the border to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics to be held in South Korea next month. China, North Korea's main ally and principal trading partner, has backed successive rounds of U.N. sanctions, but has also urged dialogue to solve the crisis. It has reacted angrily to the Vancouver meeting as an example of "Cold War" thinking. China's state media said Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump, stressed that a hard-earned alleviation of tensions must continue. "Maintaining international unity on the issue is extremely important," Xi said. China was ready to work with the United States to resolve the issue in an appropriate way, state broadcaster CCTV quoted the Chinese leader as saying. China's special envoy for North Korea Kong Xuanyou, speaking in an interview with Phoenix Television on Monday, urged the United States to seize the opportunity to seek direct talks with North Korea. China's state-run Global Times newspaper said the Vancouver meeting reflected Washington's desire to "highlight its dominant role in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue and cripple the clout of China and Russia." "But the meeting will likely accomplish little," it said in an editorial. Diplomats say China's absence will limit what can be achieved, while North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has shown no sign of being willing to bow to pressure to give up weapons he sees as vital to his survival.

Sanctions 'gaps'
Netflix is out with the next installment of its unintended financial education series.

Last year it was "Ozark," where Jason Bateman played a crooked financial advisor who shreds the fiduciary rule that says you must protect your clients' interests faster than the New England Patriots' secondary.

Available now on the video streaming service is "The Polka King," a fictionalized comedy about the nonfiction story of a Polish immigrant, Jan Lewan, who gained some fame as the "Polka King" of Pennsylvania coal country in the '90s. Played by comedian-actor Jack Black, Lewan just wants to be loved and live the American dream.

Unfortunately, living the dream takes money, a lot more than Lewan can muster playing weddings and other small-time gigs with his polka band, as well as manning a gift shop with his wife (played by Jenny Slate) in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

So, Lewan stumbles on another idea.

When an elderly couple, enthralled by Lewan's upbeat and kitschy polka shows, wander into his shop, he entices them to invest in "Jan Lewan" enterprises. He tosses a thin pamphlet across his desk and tells his would-be investors to think it over.

They, of course, fall for his charms and while grumbling how they've been mistreated by stockbrokers and Wall Street, fork over their money. You can see how this will end.

To make sure you don't fall prey to the same type of con, consider these lessons:
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
We decided to launch the Moggcast, which debuts today on this site, because readers would listen to it  a statement of the obvious, of course, but perhaps a necessary one. However, it was a close call, because Rees-Mogg writes as clearly as he speaks, and we might almost as well have offered him a column. He wrote for us recently making the case for lifting the cap on places for Catholics at new faith schools.

His reasons in a nutshell were: the cap is discriminatory, because although on paper applies to denominations, in practice it affects Catholic schools most, since pupils of other faiths and none want to attend them, which is not always the case elsewhere and which presents them with a particular problem. This is that canon law bars the opening of new Catholic schools in such circumstances, because they would be forced to turn Catholic pupils away and, therefore, no new Catholic schools are openingwhich also has the effect of preventing non-Catholic pupils from obtaining places at such schools, as the total number of Catholic school places rises.

And this they wish to do. 83 per cent of Catholic secondary schools are rated by Ofsted as good or outstanding. 39 per cent more pupils in primary schools are from the poorest backgrounds compared to the national average. As Rees-Mogg wrote, this means that a real chance is given to the most disadvantaged at the start of their academic life, which is widely recognised as one of the major factors in a persons future prosperity and broader life chances. Finally, the Conservative Manifesto made an unambiguous commitment to replace the unfair and ineffective inclusivity rules that prevent the establishment of new Roman Catholic schools.

However, Damian Hinds has a minor and major issue to address as he rightly mulls how and when to honour that commitment. The minor issue is that he himself is a Catholic  though evidently a liberal one, since he voted for same-sex marriage  which will cause brickbats to be hurled his way. He is longstanding champion of lifting the cap and doubtless wont mind too much. The major issue returns us to why the ban was introduced in the first place. One reason was a secularist-flavoured hostility to faith schools, held by Liberal Democrat Ministers who, some Conservatives claim, were the driving force for the ban when it was introduced by the Coalition.

There was also an elephant in the classroom. The ban in effect also prevented new Muslim schools from opening, perhaps in significant numbers. This has been extremely convenient for the Government. The hostility to Islamist extremism spills over into voter antipathy to Islamic schools. So by curtailing the opening of new Muslim state schools Ministers were saving themselves an electoral headache. But the significance of the Trojan Horse plot was precisely that took place in non-faith schools  mostly ordinary academies, which contained large numbers of Muslim pupils for local demographic reasons.

There are only 30 or so Muslim schools in the state sector, and a mass of unregulated independent ones. There is a strong case for bringing such schools into the sector, where they could be regularly inspected and regulated, rather than letting them run unscrutinised outside. (There are echoes here of the nineteenth-century debate about Maynooth College.) But any such move would cause the red tops to go nuts. The elephant is not only in the classroom but squatting on the new Education Secretarys in-tray.
01/15/2018

Photo (c) bdspn - Getty Images Californias Proposition 64 did more than legalize recreational weed. The voter-approved measure also stipulated that researchers combat stoned driving by finding marijuanas equivalent to the breathalyser with a grant from California Highway Patrol.

Responsible for those studies is a team of psychiatrists at the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research (CMCR), a publicly-funded lab established twenty years ago for the sole purpose of studying weed.

The CMRC exists thanks to another state law. California voters in 1996 decided to allow access to medical marijuana under the Compassionate Use Act. But because there was a lack of evidence available from the FDA about marijuanas medical benefits, lawmakers several years later established a program to oversee high-quality research into the therapeutic effects of marijuana at the states University of California campuses.

Since then, CMCR has investigated the potential pain-relieving effects of cannabis for patients suffering from HIV, diabetes, and other health problems. The lab says that their research has shown a significant improvement in the symptoms of interest, often in participants who did not achieve relief from traditional treatment.

But the scientific community has a long way to go before it can catch up to the numerous health claims that companies that market cannabis products are making. Dr. Joseph H. Atkinson, one of the psychiatrists who runs the CMRC, recently spoke to ConsumerAffairs about the challenges of studying cannabis as a medicine.

CBD oil access limited

For people who want to explore the medical benefits of cannabis without getting stoned, the compound called cannabidiol hemp oil, or CBD oil, is often advertised as a so-called miracle cure.

Because it is derived from hemp, CBD does not contain THC, the compound that gets marijuana smokers high. Companies selling CBD products tout various health claims with the added bonus of not making consumers intoxicated.

lts astonishing. CBD has gotten a lot of press, some of it well-deserved, Atkinson says.

Theres just one major problem. "There is virtually no research on the health benefits of CBD, Atkinson says. The research gap isnt due to to a lack of interest, though.

Federal laws mandate that all marijuana used for research come directly from the federal government, specifically the National Institute on Drug Abuse drug supply program. CBD currently isnt available in the program, so thats an obvious impediment to research, Atkinson says.

If it were, he says that studies exploring the tolerability and side effects of CBD in healthy patients would be a good first step.

Weaker potencies in federally-approved strains

The cannabis that is offered from the feds has its own problems. Psychiatrist Sue Sisley, who is studying the potential of marijuana to treat vets with PTSD, last year posted a photograph online showing the stark differences in government weed vs. what consumers may be accustomed to.

It doesnt resemble cannabis. It doesnt smell like cannabis, she told PBS last year.

Atkinson says the major issue is that consumers may now be purchasing marijuana with THC content as high as 20 percent. But the weed supplied by the feds isnt higher than 8 percent potency, he estimates.

It would be helpful to have these potencies in, say, the 12 to 20 percent range, he says. When and if that occurs is an unknown,

Long waits

Because the Drug Enforcement Agency still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the same category as other illegal substances like heroin, researchers have to jump through many hoops to study it.

"It's not a very attractive area to go into, honestly, if you're an investigator, Atkinson says.

In fact, its much easier to study synthetic marijuana. Researchers at the CMCR, for instance, are currently studying the synthetic THC compound dronabinol and comparing its effects against inhaled cannabis for stimulating the appetites of patients suffering from HIV and cancer.

Had researchers simply wanted to compare dronabinol to a placebo, the study would have been easy. Three synthetic marijuana compounds, including dronabinol, are already approved by the FDA, meaning that all the researchers need to study it is a license to prescribe it.

Clearing regulatory hurdles

But the inhaled cannabis aspect of the study is where all the regulatory hurdles come into play. Anytime a researcher wants to study cannabis, they must obtain approval from the FDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Waiting on their approval adds about a year and a half to the research process. "Not many people are going to put up with those kind of delays, especially in the publish or perish world of academic research, Atkinson says. Thats despite a growing interest in using cannabis to treat chronic pain, opioid addictions, and anxiety, among other common health problems.

"I think all those topics would be favorably received by review panels, Atkinson says, so I dont think its an issue of there being a lack of targets, or necessarily, a lack of interest in the institutes that support research. Its just that the administrative apparatus is so burdensome, that research is delayed.

So why study cannabis at all in that case? For his own work, Atkinson puts what he describes as the administrative annoyances aside because he is interested in the science. Though, he adds dryly, I don't know that I knew that it was going to take a year and a half for each protocol to get approved.
The MSC Seaside has lots and lots of new features that will entertain our guests. A seven-day cruise may not be enough, said Roberto Fusaro, president of MSC Cruises USA.

The company has spent money, time and a lot of effort to lay the foundation in North America ahead of the Seaside, which arrived in Miami in late December.

A dedicated product team now works out of South Florida in tandem with MSCs headquarters in Geneva, managing the Seasides hotel, food and beverage and crew recruitment, along with other areas.

It allows us to tweak the product for American needs, Fusaro told Cruise Industry News.

An expanded terminal was opened, Terminal F, at PortMiami, with a significantly expanded waiting area, and a VIP area for Yacht Club guests.

Everything is geared toward offering a fantastic product, not only on the ship, but before people get to the ship, Fusaro said.

That will all lead to what is most key: generating demand for MSCs year-round ship in the North American market, and potential plans for much more down the road.

The ship is fantastic, beautiful, and what we are doing is conveying that message, Fusaro said.

The marketing drive is also helping to export passengers to MSC ships in Europe.

We have a significant number of Americans cruising on the new Meraviglia. The advanced bookings from the U.S. for that ship in Northern Europe (summer 2018) are doing very well, he continued. The Seaview is also launching in the Med this summer and that is getting a lot of bookings from the U.S.

Excerpt from Cruise Industry News Quarterly Magazine: Winter 2017/2018
The Carnival Triumph will operate a new itinerary schedule in 2019-2020, Carnival said, with a wide variety of four- to 14-day departures from New York, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Norfolk, Va.

Were delighted to offer this unique schedule on Carnival Triumph which will operate an array of cruise durations and varied itineraries departing from three convenient homeports along the East Coast, said Christine Duffy, president of Carnival Cruise Line. With such an array of cruise choices vacationers have the opportunity to enjoy short, valued-packed getaways to tropical destinations to longer length departures visiting spectacular ports of call, she added.

From New York, the ship will offer itineraries ranging from four- to 14-days between summer and fall 2019.

Five four-day long weekend Bermuda cruises depart May 23, June 20, July 18, Aug. 15 and Sept. 12, 2019, and offer guests a full day to experience the island while a six-day Bermuda cruise departs Sept. 16, 2019, and spends two full days at the island. An eight-day cruise departing June 24, 2019 offers two full days in Bermuda, as well as a stop in Grand Turk.

Three seven-day cruises will also be offered, departing Sept. 22 and 29 and Oct. 6, 2019 and featuring day-long calls in throughout New England and Canada.

Carnival Triumphs schedule from New York also includes two eight-day Caribbean itineraries: one featuring Grand Turk, San Juan and Amber Cove (Dominican Republic) with departure dates of July 2, 10 and 30, Aug. 7 and 27, Sept. 4, 2019, the other visiting San Juan, St. Thomas and Grand Turk and departing July 22 and Aug. 19, 2019.

Theres also a 10-day eastern Caribbean itinerary departing June 10, 2019, calling at San Juan, Tortola, St. Maarten, St. Thomas and Grand Turk, as well as a 14-day Carnival Journeys cruise that departs May 27, 2019, and includes the opportunity to visit the Panama Canal during a call in Colon (Panama), as well as visits to Grand Turk, Grand Cayman, Limon (Costa Rica), and Half Moon Cay.

The Carnival Triumph will also offer a series of four- and five-day cruises from Fort Lauderdale in April 2019 and, following its summer schedule of cruises from New York, will also operate these itineraries from November 2019 through April 2020. The four-day voyages depart Thursdays and visit Nassau and the private Bahamian destinations of Half Moon Cay or Princess Cays. Five-day sailings departing Saturdays call at Grand Turk, Nassau and Half Moon Cay or Princess Cays, while five-day voyages departing Mondays feature Ocho Rios and Grand Cayman.

The Carnival Triumphs schedule will also include five- and six-day Bahamas voyages departing from Norfolks Half Moone Cruise Center, according to Carnival.

Two five-day voyages will depart May 12 and 17, 2019 calling at Nassau and Freeport while six-day cruises depart May 6, and October 14 and 20, 2019, visiting Half Moon Cay, Nassau and Freeport.
Given the insidious nature of advanced threats, its almost a certainty that every organization of any size will eventually be hacked or compromised, regardless of what or how many cybersecurity defenses are in place. In response, the somewhat new concept of threat hunting is becoming an increasingly important part of cybersecurity defenses.

But true threat hunters are rare, even compared with the shortage of other IT workers and cybersecurity personnel. Threat hunters are trained to look at a variety of factors within a network from traffic and DNS records to SIEM reports and almost everything else. The best hunters examine that data to come up with hunches about things that dont quite feel right. They then set out to track down and uncover threats within their network that may have eluded other analysts and security programs.

We have reviewed quite a few threat hunting programs in the past. However, almost all of them were designed as tools to help threat hunters do their jobs. The problem with that is that it requires organizations to have threat hunters in the first place. Otherwise, its like handing a sleek new rifle to someone who has never shot a gun before, and sending them off into the woods with the expectation that they will bring back dinner.

The Mantix4 platform (named after the apex predator of the insect kingdom the praying mantis) seeks to solve the people problem. While the program provides robust threat hunting tools for use by clients, the company also employs a team of experts to hunt on their behalf. It takes threat hunting into the software as a service (SaaS) realm.

Mantix4 was originally designed for the Canadian governments Department of Public Safety, which is the equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security in the United States. In Canada, Mantix4 helps to defend networks sitting in ten sectors considered critical infrastructure, rooting out threats that might bypass more traditional protection.

The system is deployed as two components. The first part is comprised of observer sensors that sit at critical points within a protected network, either alongside routers or at network gateways, though they can be deployed almost anywhere depending on the need. The sensors are lightweight enough to be housed inside a virtual machine, or within a network server with additional bandwidth. However, because the observer sensors process and record a lot of traffic, the best deployment is probably going to be as a small appliance that hosts nothing else, something the company provides. The sensors can be set to work inline, or to passively sniff network traffic.

The second part is the analytics server, the brains of the system, to which the observer sensors report. It is hosted in a secure datacenter run by Mantix4 so that it can be kept constantly updated with the latest features and patches, and to ensure that it has enough power to process whatever data the sensors are sending it. In most cases, Mantix4 is up and running in less than a day. Government agencies or especially cautious organizations can opt to instead host the analytics server themselves, but would need to give Mantix4 access to it to take advantage of SaaS threat hunting, and to keep the server up to date with the latest program updates and patches.

Most deployments of Mantix4 only require one or two observer sensors. Our test environment had a single sensor. Mantix4 officials said that their largest deployment has about 20 sensors, deployed for a group with a widely distributed workforce in quite a few geographically dispersed locations. Pricing for Mantix4 is a monthly subscription fee that is based on the number of employees at an organization, plus a nominal fee for each sensor.

The testing for Mantix4 involved using the tools for threat hunting as a user would, as well as observing the 20-person threat hunting team at the company uncover threats as they would for the service. Users get both options with each deployment. They can access the threat data anytime through a web portal, and each client gets about an hour of guaranteed threat hunting on their behalf every day. Some clients also opt to sponsor more threat hunting time.

The main interface for Mantix4 is extremely visual. At the topmost level, users get a real-time picture of all inbound and outgoing traffic across their network overlaid on a globe and map that shows geographical information. It looks a bit like a Star Wars blaster fight with all the packets zooming past. When you drill down, the less visual, but still highly interactive, important data is accessible.

John Breeden II/IDG At the topmost level, the Mantix4 console can show all incoming and outgoing connections in real time, providing a quick view of any suspicious network activity.

Mantix4 makes it extremely easy for threat hunters to create hunches about suspect network activity. Right clicking on any type of data brings up new options for filtering. You can keep working with the filters until you uncover something suspect. We quickly zeroed in on a two-way conversation that had taken place between a local client and an unnamed server in China. The communication was taking place on a very high port up in the 400s that was likely unused for anything else. Although the interaction was extremely brief, and not enough to trigger other installed security programs, it didnt look right.

John Breeden II/IDG Files can be separated and sorted by almost any aspect, from their paths to their payloads and file types.

Using the graphical interface, we were able to inspect all aspects of the suspicious behavior, even catching events that were seemingly unrelated, at least at first. We first investigated the user in question, but found no indication of other suspect activity. Then we searched for other network clients that were communicating with the nameless server in China, but also came up empty. Finally, we looked for any communications taking place at that high-numbered port. Here, more events came into focus, as other little bursts of communications were revealed across the network on that same port. They were going to other nameless servers, but all of them were within China.

That information fostered more investigation and revealed a hole in network defenses that was being exploited, and how that feat was being accomplished. Likely, this was the setup phase for a larger campaign, or a configuration of exfiltration points for a future attack.

John Breeden II/IDG While not directly related to security, Mantix4 can collect a lot of network traffic information such as who is using up the most bandwidth and where outgoing files are headed. This could supplement a threat hunting investigation, but might also have value on its own.

Armed with this information, users could plug the hole and take steps to prevent similar types of attacks or pre-attacks from the same adversary. Had the Mantix4 internal teams found this exploit first, a report would have been generated for the client. Reports are highly detailed and show exactly how a hidden attack is taking place, possible targets and recommendations on how to fix the issue.

John Breeden II/IDG Threat hunters at Mantix4 can piece together threat indicators and put the information into a cohesive story type format that shows local IT teams how and why a previously hidden threat is circumventing their normal cybersecurity defenses.

As part of their SaaS offering, the staff at Mantix4 can walk clients through threat reports, demonstrating how the program was used to uncover specific incidents. Over time, this can help a clients IT team learn how to conduct threat hunting on their own using the software tools, while always keeping the SaaS hunting in place as a reliable and expert backup.

John Breeden II/IDG This is a sample of part of a threat report delivered by Mantix4 to a client in PDF format.

Whether used as the primary threat hunting activity on a network, or as a backup for local hunters, having critical threat hunting offered as a service really sets the Mantix4 offering apart from most others. Mantix4 works great as tool to aid local threat hunters, but also as a way to offload or offset that increasingly important security function to trained hunters who know how to bag the most dangerous, hidden threats  ones that may already be roaming around inside a supposedly secure network.
While Connecticut has seen the departure big-name companies like General Electric, Westport-based Terex Corp. is staying put  for the foreseeable future  with the help of state funding.

Terexs lease at the Nyala Farms complex in Westport was soon to expire in 2017. According to Senior Vice President Eric Cohen, executives were considering their options as they looked to the future. While a possible exit was on the table, the Fortune 500 company ultimately chose to keep its corporate headquarters in southwestern Connecticut.

There were a lot of factors that went into (staying in) Connecticut, he said. The primary one is this is where we were, this is where our people were, and to move that, which we did consider, thats a big undertaking.

Terex was one of 13 businesses statewide to receive a portion of almost $57 million in funding approved by the State Bond Commission in November to assist with expansion and relocation efforts with the goal of helping the states ailing job market.

While Terex is staying put, the states economic woes and recent developments in tax reform could create challenges. The funding is contingent on job retention and creation which may be a tougher task following the passage of the new tax law.

We have a 10-year lease now, which may be, potentially, slightly shorter depending on certain options and rights that we have and the landlord has, and we will continue to monitor the situation, Cohen said. Where that takes us long-term in Connecticut will really depend a lot on what happens with the state and how it reacts both to its current fiscal situation as well as to the change in the tax law.

Cohen said executives are still looking at how it will ultimately affect the companys operations, especially regarding the deduction of state and local taxes.

It does put pressure on being able to retain and bring new jobs to Connecticut because most of our operations and many of the people we find come from different areas and different parts of the country, many of which are no-state and local-tax states, Cohen said. Attracting them to come to our local headquarters is certainly going to be more challenging today than it was a while back.

Terex received a $1 million grant for capital improvements to its headquarters, which requires the company to retain 140 local employees over the next four years. The business stands to see an additional $500,000 in funding if it can create 30 new jobs over the same period.

The grant was included in a $5.5 million capital improvement plan that Terex used to renew its lease and take on more space in the same building. A portion of the funding went toward technology upgrades.

Terex manufactures cranes and other heavy equipment for construction and other industries and employs more than 20,000 people in 50 countries. A merger was in the works several years ago between Terex and Finland-based company Konecranes before it was called off early in 2016.

The international company has been the based in Westport for more than 20 years. Westport First Selectman Jim Marpe said funding for Terex was a win not only for the company, but for the town.

I frequently refer to them as one of the important companies in part because theyre a Fortune 500 company and were honored to have a company of their quality and their stature located in Westport, Marpe said, adding that a Terex exodus would have been a blow to the town and regions image.

It would send a negative signal to other organizations regarding whether or not they might want to locate their headquarters or other operations in southwestern Connecticut, he said.

jordan.grice@hearstmediact.com; Twitter: @JordanEGrice
BRIDGEPORT  The town of Fairfield has agreed to pay $2.1 million to the family of a Brazilian house cleaner who suffered a brain injury when her bicycle tire got caught in a road grate.

As a result of her injury, 34-year-old Rubia Rodriguez cannot speak or walk and must be cared for by her family, said her lawyer, Jonathan Perkins.

They will now have the funds to support their daughter, he said.

The settlement was reached as the civil case was about to be presented to a jury in state Superior Court here.

Lawyers for the town did not immediately return calls and emails for comment.

On Sept. 7, 2015, the then 31-year-old Rodriguez was riding a bicycle on Morehouse Road with her boyfriend, according to the lawsuit. Rodriguez, who was not wearing a helmet, was riding down a hill near the entrance to Lake Mohegan when the front tire of her bicycle became trapped in a catch basin grate causing her to fly over the handlebars and land on her head on the street.

Perkins said Rodriguez was taken to St. Vincents Medical Center suffering from a traumatic brain injury. He said she spent six months in the hospital before her family, who could no longer afford her treatment here, had her flown back to her native Brazil.

She is going to be bedridden for the rest of her life, Perkins said.

The bars in the grate Rodriguez hit are six inches apart; Perkins said the state Department of Transportation had recommended that all municipalities replace them with grates that have bars four inches apart to avoid similar incidents.

But many municipalities have been slow to replace these grates, including Fairfield, Perkins said.

In court filings, the towns lawyers argued there were no witnesses or evidence Rodriguezs bicycle wheel hit the grate.
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You dont have to be a voodoo economics guru to follow the money trail between Bob Stefanowski and Art Laffer.

Laffer, an adviser to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, endorsed Stefanowskis 26-page plan for resuscitating Connecticuts economy, the centerpiece of Stefanowskis mostly self-funded candidacy for governor.

The inventor of the Laffer Curve, an economic model so famous it was mentioned in Ferris Buellers Day Off, even did a string of appearances with Stefanowski to promote the economic blueprint.

It turns out that Stefanowski paid Laffers Nashville-based consulting firm $75,000, campaign filings with the state Elections Enforcement Commission show.

Of that total, $50,000 was for its work on Stefanowskis plan, which includes Laffers name at the top and calls for the state income, the corporate income and business entity taxes to be phased out, as well as the elimination of the gift and estate taxes. The document further recommends the privatization of the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

Appearance fees at $5,000 a pop for five events in December accounted for the rest of Laffers tab.

Stefanowski said the plan, which took Laffer and two full-time assistants several months to prepare, is worth every penny.

Art and I have been dear friends for years and he was one of the first people I called when I decided to run for governor, said Stefanowski, a one-time UBS and General Electric executive. Art immediately offered his endorsement and help putting together a plan. The law requires that Dr. Laffers firm charge for his work.

Not so Sweet Home Alabama

Roy Moore is probably the last person a political operative would want as reference in Connecticut, let alone Alabama.

But campaign filings by Greenwich hedge fund mogul-turned-gubernatorial candidate David Stemerman show that the Republican paid $67,553 to an Alexandria, Va., consulting firm that was allied with Moore in Alabamas special election for U.S. Senate.

Precision Campaign Group is the same outfit that was hired by A Time for Choosing, a super PAC that was created to help Moore in the nationally-watched contest.

Despite multiple allegations against him of sexual misconduct involving minors, a defiant Moore stayed in the race and lost in December to Doug Jones, who became the first Democrat in 25 years elected to the Senate by Alabamans.

Republicans stung by Moores loss immediately engaged in finger-pointing, including Jordan Gehrke, one of the political consulting firms principals.

There is blood in the water now, and more conservative candidates who are hostile to the establishment are primed to step forward, Gehrke wrote in a memo published on the website Medium. Republicans now have a choice: 2018 will either be a successful year with the GOP focused on picking up Democratic seats and passing a conservative agenda, or it will be a bloody Civil War with (Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell at the center, desperately clinging to power, forcing incumbent Senators to walk the plank out of loyalty to him.

A request for comment was left with Stemermans campaign.

Candidate drops over $2K on floral arrangements

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Alas, Dave Walker has the answer. His gubernatorial campaign spent $2,415 on flowers from August to December, all from the same florist, election filings show. The former U.S. comptroller general under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush bought 32 bouquets from Hansens Flower Shop in Fairfield during the second half of 2017.

When people host fundraisers for us at their homes, we send them flowers as a thank you, the Bridgeport Republican said. We just think thats a nice thing to do for people who open up their homes.

From foster dogs to celebrities

Traditionally, those vying for Connecticuts top office are the publicity hounds.

But for Republican lieutenant governor candidate Ann Brookes, a pair of rescue dogs fostered by her have grabbed all the spotlight  and she wouldnt have it any other way.

Meet Tyler and Teddy. One is a 20-week-old chihuahua and Shih Tzu mix who was abandoned by its owner at a Texas kill shelter. The other is a poodle mix who escaped the flood waters of Hurricane Harvey in Texas. Their stories of survival have brought the pair national attention, highlighted by starring roles in the Puppy Bowl XIV and Puppy Bowl Presents: The Dog Bowl on Animal Planet. The competition of four-legged friends will air Feb. 3-4, Super Bowl weekend.

He did a lot of media interviews. I had to translate, Brookes said jokingly of Teddy. People really enjoy these stories. Theyre heartwarming.

Both rescue dogs have found adoptive families, according to Brookes, a tax attorney from Westbrook. Tyler was just five months old when Brookes fostered him in October. It wasnt until a DNA swab test was done that Brooks knew his breed.

To our surprise, we thought he was a Havanese mix, but hes got a lot of chihuahua and no Havanese, she said.

While Tyler hasnt accompanied Brooks on the campaign trail, she did bring him to political events during last falls municipal elections.

It was much easier to take a puppy with me than (him) stay home and eat the furniture, she said.

http://twitter.com/gettinviggy; nvigdor@hearstmediact.com; 203-625-4436
Staff at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London grew tired of whiffing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who reportedly does not attend to his own personal hygiene.

Its that lack of cleanliness, among other things, that fueled Ecuadors recent attempts to end his five-year standoff at the Knightsbridge embassy, the International Business Times reported.

It seems he doesnt wash properly, a well-placed source told the news outlet, noting the issue has prompted repeated complaints from staff at the embassy.

Assange reportedly complained of noise from a loading bay near his hideout, which resulted in a female restroom being converted into a bedroom for him. The move left Assange sharing a single restroom with embassy staff.

And its not the first time people around him have complained of Assanges questionable hygiene practices.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 1 of 3 Frank Augstein/Associated Press Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire/MBR Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Julian ate everything with his hands, and he always wiped his fingers on his pants. I have never seen pants as greasy as his in my whole life, one of his closest aides, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, told the Times.

Jeremie Zimmermann, a friend and former colleague, wrote in 2012 that unless the people around him force him to shower, he might not change his clothes for days.

The WikiLeaks founder was made an Ecuadoran citizen last month, the nations foreign minister revealed Thursday, in a bid to resolve the diplomatic impasse created by Assanges presence.

Earlier last week, the British Foreign Office revealed it dismissed requests from Ecuador for the Australia native to be made an accredited diplomat. Ecuador officials hoped it would allow for Assange to leave the embassy  and Britain  without arrest.

Assange fled to the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning on rape and sexual assault allegations and was granted asylum there. The case in Sweden was dropped after prosecutors questioned him at the embassy. Assange could still be arrested for skipping bail and faces jail time should he leave the embassy.

U.S. officials told the Times that arresting Assange remains a priority, though they did not confirm whether the government would request his extradition should he be arrested in Britain. Assange previously said U.S. authorities already have prepared an indictment and made plans to extradite him for espionage after WikiLeaks disclosed hundreds of classified military documents.

Jessica Schladebeck is a New York Daily News writer.
Here's where to find deer on public hunting grounds in Pennsylvania
Canadian Dollar Rate Talking Points:

USD/CAD Price Forecast : CAD looking to strengthen below 1.2350/90 on BoC

Bank of Canada rate hike expectations close to 90%. Failure to hike could bring volatility

Sentiment Highlight : Retail selling overtakes longs, bias bullish

The Canadian Dollar rate looks ripe for further strengthening as traders prepare for the Bank of Canada to hike rates with 85% probability per Bloomberg data ahead of the meeting. The Canadian Dollar rate could also strengthen should BoC Governor Poloz share a confident view that could further result in front-end Canadian Treasury selling that has been correlated to CAD strength.

A risk that traders should watch for would be a hawkish hold where the BoC fails to hike but encourages the markets to look for a rate hike at an upcoming meeting. Given the pricing in of a rate hike per overnight index swaps, a failure to hike now would like see USD/CAD test resistance at prior resistance near 1.26, which also is where the 100-DMA stands.

Another background data-point that traders should be aware of is the positioning data from the CFTC Commitment of Traders (CoT) report that showed institutions added to their CAD long exposure. The net CAD long is barely positive meaning an aggressive unwind or betting on significant CAD weakness does not appear to be a smart bet as institutions do not have an extended position that theyd need to unwind.

Unlock our Q1 forecast to learn what will drive trends for the US Dollar at the 2018 open!

USD/CAD Chart: Looking Heavy below Key Resistance

Chart created by Tyler Yell, CMT. Tweet @ForexYell for comments, questions

Major resistance on USD/CAD currently stands at 1.2904, where markets delivered a triple top pattern over Q4 2017. When looking at a triple-top, the breakdown through the bottom of the channel begins to act as a polarity point.

Learn about Triple Tops and Bottoms here from DailyFX

The next key level of resistance will be the support point at the bottom of the triple-top range. The bottom of the range is at 1.2665 to the opening range high of 2018 at 1.2590. This 75-pip range includes a large variety of significant technical points that includes the 38.2% retracement of the December to January 5 range.

Downside targets through the weeks end would be the triple-top target at 1.23335, which is the 100% expansion lower of the triple-top range with an extended downside target at 1.21522, the 1.618% expansion of the same range.

Valuable Insight from IG Client Positioning for USD/CAD: Retail selling overtakes longs, bias bullish

We typically take a contrarian view to crowd sentiment, and the fact traders are net-short suggests USDCAD prices may continue to rise. Traders are further net-short than yesterday and last week, and the combination of current sentiment and recent changes gives us a stronger USDCAD-bullish contrarian trading bias.

---

Written by Tyler Yell, CMT, Currency Analyst & Trading Instructor for DailyFX.com

To receive Tyler's analysis directly via email, please SIGN UP HERE

Contact and discuss markets with Tyler on Twitter: @ForexYell
The new film from the celebrated American filmmaker Steven Spielberg, The Post takes us back to the early 1970s when the journalists from The New York Times and The Washington Post shook the world by publishing the classified Pentagon Papers, exposing the lies of the Richard Nixon-led US government regarding the countrys prolonged involvement in the Vietnam War.

The Post has already been chosen by the National Board of Review as the best film of 2017. It has been praised particularly for its immaculate period detail and its critique of the functioning of the Nixon administration. Some also see The Post as Spielbergs response to Donald Trumps presidency and how it bears resemblance to Nixons.

Cinema can, of course, serve as a great eye-opener.

Media is often described as the fourth pillar of democracy with the legislative, executive and judiciary constituting the first three pillars. Now, something unprecedented happened recently in India when four senior judges of the Supreme Court held a press conference to address what they described as a crisis in the judiciary, raising several questions about the conduct of the chief justice of India, Dipak Mishra. Such is the gravity of the issue that it has become a part of the national discourse. The entire episode, among other things, unpins the importance of media for the functioning of democracy. That not only the ordinary citizen but also the members of the judiciary look upon the media as a powerful instrument for ensuring transparency in the working of the democratic machinery.

Today, the freedom of press all around the world is being threatened by certain invisible forces with vested interests. The US may be the oldest democracy in the world but the press freedom in the country has never been as threatened as it is today. Now, it is well documented that immediately after coming to power, Trump banned several leading broadcasters and newspapers from the White House briefings.

Interestingly, Nixon too had tried to put restrictions on the press during the Pentagon Papers leak as well as the Watergate scandal that followed it.

Nixon too had tried to put restrictions on the press during the Pentagon Papers leak.

American filmmaker Alan J Pakulas 1976 film All the Presidents Men is probably the best film about the Watergate scandal that led to Nixons resignation. Perhaps, it is also the best film ever made about investigative journalism. And it is certainly a film that would have inspired Spielberg to make The Post.

Steven Spielberg is undoubtedly the worlds most commercially successful filmmaker of all time. But his filmmaking career goes much beyond the dozen or so blockbusters that he has made. For he has also made historically and politically relevant films like The Color Purple, Schindlers List, Amistad, and Lincoln. But, in many ways, The Post is the 71-year-old filmmakers most important film till date. And it really couldnt have come at a better time.

The Post is riding on the back of two remarkable performers, the three-time Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep and the two-time Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks. Certainly Spielberg couldnt have cast better actors than Streep and Hanks to play the parts of the then publisher and executive editor of The Washington Post  Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee, respectively. Their remarkable acting talents notwithstanding, Streep and Hanks are two of the most well-respected personalities in the US and both have been equally vocal in their stand against the Trump regimes attempts to curb the freedom of press.

Who can forget Streeps diatribe against Trump at the 74th Golden Globe Awards for the US presidents shameless mockery of a disabled reporter? Disrespect invites disrespect; violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose, she had famously said. Hanks, too, has been overtly critical of the Trump administrations policies against the US press.

In a recent interview, the actor told CNN, As an American, it concerns me, because its monkeying around with our Constitution, while questioning the manner in which the Trump administration has been singling out the press.

Stand by the truth. #ThePost is in theaters this Christmas. pic.twitter.com/XBNCkUSPCi  The Post (@ThePostMovie) December 17, 2017

With their performances, Streep and Hanks ensure that Spielberg's slow-burning thriller serves as the best film made on the power and ethics of journalistic reporting in the recent times, along with Tom McCarthys 2015 film Spotlight, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 88th Academy Awards.

One of the major problems that news organisations all across the globe are facing is that of funding, which often tends to trigger other problems like staff shortage. But despite the odds, the media has continued to play the role of an able watchdog. Now, over the last couple of years, India has witnessed several attacks on journalists, including the cold-blooded murder of Gauri Lankesh in September last year. India is currently ranked at 136th among 180 countries in the world as per the World Press Freedom Index. Clearly, such a low rank doesnt look very appealing for the worlds largest democracy. It is for this reason we need to grow more aware about the need for freedom of press in our country.

And cinema can, of course, serve as a great eye-opener. Just as a character says in Richard Attenboroughs 1992 film Chaplin, To my way of thinking, motion pictures are potentially the most influential form of communication ever invented.
At the heart of the student movement in Assam in the early 1980s was the move to get Bengali Muslim immigrants out of the state and delete their names from the states electoral rolls. At the time, BJP leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Jaswant Singh and LK Advani paid regular visits to Assam to support the students demand. The RSS, too, seeing the anti-Muslim mood in the state, began working quietly behind the scenes to spread its ideology.

The All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the BJP were on the same page owing to the fear that Assams demographic pattern could change because of the illegal influx of Bangladeshi Muslims, turning it into Indias second Muslim majority state (after Kashmir). Second, the Congress party kept winning elections because illegal immigrants voted the party into power.

Simply put, Bangladeshis were on the electoral rolls and formed the Congress vote bank. Not much has changed in the decades since.

In 1985, a settlement was negotiated between student leaders and the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government, and the former launched their regional party, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP).

Simply put, Bangladeshis were on the electoral rolls and formed the Congress vote bank. Not much has changed in the decades since. Photo: Reuters

Today, the BJP and the AGP often use the same language.

The Assam Accord, laid down that all those who entered the state after March 25, 1971, are foreigners, and must be identified and deported back to Bangladesh. Those settled in Assam before that date would be considered Indian citizens.

Detecting and deporting so called foreigners is a tough ask. The AGP, which came to power on the pledge of relieving Assam of Bangladeshis, realised how difficult the exercise was.

The National Register of Citizens (NRC), on the face of it is an excellent idea for border areas and would help in assuaging the anxiety of the local Assamese worried about the influx of migrants. It was not introduced by the BJP. The decision to form a register of Indian citizens of Assam was taken in 1951 after the first Census. However, not much was done. It was revived again in 2014, with the idea of upgrading the NRC. The first draft of the register was published on December 31, 2017 on the instruction of the Supreme Court. There are many anomalies in the first draft which, government officials have time and again stressed, can be corrected.

What is needed, however, is proof that a citizens ancestors names were in the 1951 census, or in the electoral rolls, or land papers. All this was very well for the educated, even though many among them were running from pillar to post to get their long lost documents. However, for the poor and illiterate, these problems are often insurmountable. Many have no papers, neither are their names on voter lists nor are their forefathers registered.

While some of them may genuinely be foreign nationals, many genuine citizens, too, may not possess any documentary evidence to prove their citizenship. Harrowing tales are coming in every day of genuine Bengali speaking Muslims being targeted as foreign nationals. With the prevalent anti-immigrant mood in the state, officials are quick to band every Bengali-speaking Muslim as a Bangladeshi, provided the citizen does not possess the necessary documents.

The BJPs support for the NRC is natural. No political party can object to illegal foreigners being sent out of the state. But for the BJP/RSS it is also part of their ideology; their belief that Muslims reproduce fast and should be stopped. If they are in Assam, the minorities will be thrown out.

Everyone knows how the system can discriminate against Muslims, and this is bound to happen. More stories of hapless Bengali Muslims will surface as cross verification by the officials of the NRC continues.

The fact is, the numbers of illegal entrants are not conclusive. The fact is, since the Assam agitation largescale migration from Bangladesh has not been easy. During the 1971 India-Pakistan war, refugees poured into the northeastern states of India and many stayed back in the country after Bangladesh was created. Hindus, especially, did not return. While the Assamese claim that immigration is continuing unabated, others say that if new settlers are spotted in a district, they are basically those moving from one part of the state to the other.

During British rule, the colonisers got hardworking Bengali Muslims into the Brahmaputra valley to clear Assams malarial swamps and turn them into fertile agricultural land. The valley has been converted into a rich rice bowl for the country. Much of the problem in the past was that the land holdings of indigenous Assamese were gradually reduced as more and more Bengali Muslims bought agricultural land in rural areas. Land is at the heart of the immigrant issue in Assam and it was also a plank on which the student movement got overwhelming support from both rural and urban areas. Essentially, assamese resentment against Bangladeshi Muslims stems from shrinking land holdings.

While the BJP has happily gone along with the AGP over Bengali Muslim immigrants, their views do not coincide on Hindu Bengalis.Anti-Bengali Hindu sentiment, too, is rampant in Assam. This is because Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that Bengali Hindu refugees from Bangladesh would always find a home in India. Some of them will also have to be accommodated in Assam.

Before the anti-immigrant agitation took the state by storm, clashes in Assam were mainly between the local Assamese and the Bengali-speaking settlers. Just after Independence, the Bengali-speaking population of the state, because of taking to an English education much earlier than citizens of other states of British India, held the majority of state and central government jobs.

At the time, this led to attacks on members of the community. While the numbers of Bengalis in Assam government rolls have hugely reduced, the animosity continues.

It was PMs announcement that gave it a fresh spurt.

The NRC and its aftermath will take a toll on Indias cordial relations with Bangladesh. Dhaka, under Shiekh Hasina, has been an exemplary friend to India. At the end of the process of upgrading the NRC, what happens to those branded as foreigners, who must be repatriated? Dhakas position is that there is no illegal influx of Bangladeshis into India  that it will accept only those who New Delhi can prove are illegal immigrants.

So, what happens to these people? Will they become like the stateless Rohingyas of Myanmar who nobody wants to touch?
The Buckle, Inc. operates as a retailer of casual apparel, footwear, and accessories for young men and women in the United States. It markets a selection of brand name casual apparel, including denims, other casual bottoms, tops, sportswear, outerwear, accessories, and footwear, as well as private label merchandise primarily comprising BKE, Buckle Black, Salvage, Red by BKE, Daytrip, Gimmicks, Gilded Intent, FITZ + EDDI, Willow & Root, Outpost Makers, Departwest, Reclaim, BKE Vintage, Nova Industries, J.B. Holt, and Veece. The company also provides services, such as hemming, gift-packaging, layaways, guest loyalty program, the Buckle private label credit card, and personalized stylist services, as well as special order system that allows stores to obtain requested merchandise from other company stores or its online order fulfillment center. As of March 11, 2022, it operated 440 retail stores in 42 states under the Buckle and The Buckle names. The Buckle, Inc. also sells its products through its website, buckle.com. The company was formerly known as Mills Clothing, Inc. and changed its name to The Buckle, Inc. in April 1991. The Buckle, Inc. was incorporated in 1948 and is headquartered in Kearney, Nebraska.
Campbell Soup Company, together with its subsidiaries, manufactures and markets food and beverage products in the United States and internationally. The company operates through Meals & Beverages and Snacks segments. The Meals & Beverages segment engages in the retail and foodservice businesses in the United States and Canada. This segment provides Campbell's condensed and ready-to-serve soups; Swanson broth and stocks; Pacific Foods broth, soups, and non-dairy beverages; Prego pasta sauces; Pace Mexican sauces; Campbell's gravies, pasta, beans, and dinner sauces; Swanson canned poultry; V8 juices and beverages; Campbell's tomato juice; and snacking products in foodservice in Canada. The Snacks segment retails Pepperidge Farm cookies, crackers, fresh bakery, and frozen products; Milano cookies and Goldfish crackers; and Snyder's of Hanover pretzels, Lance sandwich crackers, Cape Cod and Kettle Brand potato chips, Late July snacks, Snack Factory pretzel crisps, Pop Secret popcorn, Emerald nuts, and other snacking products. This segment is also involved in the retail business in Latin America. It sells its products through retail food chains, mass discounters and merchandisers, club stores, convenience stores, drug stores, and dollar stores, as well as e-commerce and other retail, commercial, and non-commercial establishments, and independent contractor distributors. The company was founded in 1869 and is headquartered in Camden, New Jersey.
Motorola Solutions, Inc. provides mission critical communications and analytics in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and internationally. The company operates in two segments, Products and Systems Integration, and Software and Services. The Products and Systems Integration segment offers a portfolio of infrastructure, devices, accessories, and video security devices and infrastructure, as well as the implementation, and integration of systems, devices, software, and applications for government, public safety, and commercial customers who operate private communications networks and video security solutions, as well as manage a mobile workforce. Its land mobile radio communications and video security and access control devices include two-way portable and vehicle-mounted radios, fixed and mobile video cameras, and accessories; radio network core and central processing software, base stations, consoles, and repeaters; and video analytics, network video management hardware and software, and access control solutions. The Software and Services segment provides repair, technical support, and hardware maintenance services. This segment also offers monitoring, software updates, and cybersecurity services; and public safety and enterprise command center software, unified communications applications, and video software solutions through on-premise and as a service. It serves government, public safety, and commercial customers. The company was formerly known as Motorola, Inc. and changed its name to Motorola Solutions, Inc. in January 2011. Motorola Solutions, Inc. was founded in 1928 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Telefonica Brasil S.A., together with its subsidiaries, provides mobile and fixed telecommunications services to residential and corporate customers in Brazil. Its fixed line services portfolio includes local, domestic long-distance, and international long-distance calls; and mobile portfolio comprises voice and broadband internet access through 3G, 4G, 4.5G, and 5G as well as mobile value-added services and wireless roaming services. The company also offers data services, including broadband and mobile data services. In addition, it provides pay TV services through direct to home satellite technology, IPTV, and cable, as well as pay-per-view and video on demand services; network services, such as rental of facilities; other services comprising internet access, private network connectivity, computer equipment leasing, extended service, caller identification, voice mail, cellular blocker, and others; wholesale services, including interconnection services to users of other network providers; and digital services, such as entertainment, cloud, and security and financial services. Further, the company offers multimedia communication services, which include audio, data, voice and other sounds, images, texts, and other information, as well as sells devices, such as smartphones, broadband USB modems, and other devices. Additionally, it provides telecommunications solutions and IT support to various industries, such as retail, manufacturing, services, financial institutions, government, etc. It markets and sells its solutions through own stores, dealers, retail and distribution channels, door-to-door sales, and outbound tele sales. The company was formerly known as Telecomunicacoes de Sao Paulo S.A. - TELESP and changed its name to Telefonica Brasil S.A. in October 2011. The company was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Pampa Energia S.A., an integrated power company, engages in the generation and transmission of electricity in Argentina. The company operates through Electricity Generation, Oil and Gas, Petrochemicals, and Holding and Other Business segments. It generates electricity through combined thermal generation plants, open-cycle gas turbines, and hydroelectric power generation systems, as well as through a wind farm. The company has an installed electricity generation capacity of approximately 4,970 megawatts; and 21,414 kilometers of high voltage electricity transmission network in Argentina. It is also involved in the exploration and production of oil and gas. In addition, the company offers petrochemicals, such as styrene, synthetic rubber, and polystyrene. As of December 31, 2020, it had approximately 12.625 thousands of barrels of oil and LNG, as well as 24.537 millions of cubic meters of natural gas; owned a refinery with an installed capacity of approximately 25.8 thousand barrels per day; and operated a network of 92 gas stations. The company was formerly known as Pampa Holding S.A. and changed its name to Pampa Energia S.A. in September 2008. Pampa Energia S.A. was incorporated in 1945 and is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
PNM Resources, Inc., through its subsidiaries, provides electricity and electric services in the United States. It operates through Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) and Texas-New Mexico Power Company (TNMP) segments. The PNM segment engages in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity. The segment generates electricity using coal, natural gas and oil, nuclear fuel, solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources. As of December 31, 2021, this segment had owned or leased facilities with a total net generation capacity of 2,168 megawatts; and owned 3,426 miles of electric transmission lines, 5,751 miles of distribution overhead lines, 5,765 miles of underground distribution lines, and 250 substations. The segment also owns and leases communication, office and other equipment, office space, vehicles, and real estate. The TNMP segment provides regulated transmission and distribution services. As of December 31, 2021, the segment owned 983 miles of overhead electric transmission lines, 7,297 miles of overhead distribution lines, 1,408 miles of underground distribution lines, and 113 substations. The segment also owns and leases vehicles, service facilities, and office locations throughout its service territory. The company serves approximately 806,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers and end-users of electricity in New Mexico and Texas. PNM Resources, Inc. was incorporated in 1882 and is headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
SAP SE, together with its subsidiaries, operates as an enterprise application software company worldwide. The company operates through three segments: Applications, Technology & Support; Qualtrics; and Services. It offers SAP S/4HANA, an ERP suite with intelligent technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics; SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management provides cloud-based solutions, such as a human resources management system for core HR and payroll, talent management, employee experience management, and people analytics; and intelligent spend management solutions, including products branded under the SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, and SAP Fieldglass names. The company also provides SAP customer experience solutions; SAP Business Technology platform that enables customers and partners to extend and customize SAP applications in a cloud-native way; and SAP Business Network that enable companies to extend their ecosystem, react to supply chain disruptions, discover new trading partners, and find new opportunities. In addition, it offers business process intelligence solutions aim to help customers analyze their operations, understand their process bottlenecks, and improve their business process landscape; Experience solutions; SAP's industry cloud provides modular solutions addressing industry-specific functions; and SAP's ecosystem build, sell, service, and run SAP solutions and technology, as well as sustainable business solutions, services, and partnerships solutions. SAP SE was founded in 1972 and is headquartered in Walldorf, Germany.
FLEETCOR Technologies, Inc. provides digital payment solutions for businesses to control purchases and make payments. It offers corporate payments solutions, such as accounts payable automation; Virtual Card, which provides a single-use card number for a specific amount usable within a defined timeframe; Cross-Border that is used by its customers to pay international vendors, foreign office and personnel expenses, capital expenditures, and profit repatriation and dividends; and purchasing cards and travel and entertainment cards for its customers to analyze and manage their corporate spending. The company also provides employee expense management solutions, including fuel solutions to businesses and government entities that operate vehicle fleets, as well as to oil and leasing companies, and fuel marketers; lodging solutions to businesses that have employees who travel overnight for work purposes, as well as to airlines and cruise lines to accommodate traveling crews and stranded passengers; and electronic toll payments solutions to businesses and consumers in the form of radio frequency identification tags affixed to vehicles' windshields. In addition, it offers gift card program management and processing services in plastic and digital forms that include card design, production and packaging, delivery and fulfillment, card and account management, transaction processing, promotion development and management, website design and hosting, program analytics, and card distribution channel management. Further, it provides other products consisting of payroll cards, vehicle maintenance service solution, long-haul transportation solution, prepaid food vouchers or cards, and prepaid transportation cards and vouchers. The company serves business, merchant, consumer, and payment network customers in North America, Brazil, and Internationally. The company was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides commercial banking, leasing, securities, consumer finance, and other services in Japan, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania. It operates through four segments: Wholesale Business Unit, Retail Business Unit, Global Business Unit, and Global Markets Business Unit. The Wholesale Business Unit segment offers financing, investment management, risk hedging, and settlement services, as well as financial solutions related to mergers and acquisition, and other advisory services primarily for large, mid, and small-sized corporate clients; various leasing services, including equipment, and operating and leveraged leasing; and digital services, such as robotic process automation and electronic contract services. The Retail Business Unit segment offers wealth management, settlement, consumer finance, and housing loan products and services, as well as business and asset succession services to high-net-worth customers. The Global Business Unit segment offers loans, deposits, clearing services, trade finance, project finance, loan syndication, derivatives, and cash management services; underwriting services; and leasing services related to the construction machinery, transportation equipment, industrial machinery, medical equipment, and aircraft leasing. The Global Markets Business Unit segment offers solutions through foreign exchange products, derivatives, bonds, stocks, and other marketable financial products. It also undertakes asset liability management operations. The company also offers credit card, internet banking, system development and engineering, data processing, management consulting and economic research, and investment advisory and investment trust management services. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Inc. was incorporated in 2002 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.
The following companies are subsidiares of Illinois Tool Works: A V Co 1 Limited, A V Co 2 Limited, A V Co 3 Limited, ACCU-LUBE Manufacturing GmbH - Schmiermittel und -gerate -, AIP/BI Holdings Inc., Accessories Marketing Holding Corp., Advanced Molding Company Inc., Allen France SAS, Alpine Engineered Products, Alpine Systems Corporation, Anaerobicos S.r.l., AppliChem GmbH, Avery Berkel France, Avery India Limited, Avery Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Avery Weigh Tronix, Avery Weigh-Tronix Finance Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix International Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix LLC, Avery Weigh-Tronix Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix Properties Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix Suzhou Weighing Technology Co. Ltd., Azon Limited, B.C. Immo, Beijing Miller Electric Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Berkel Ireland Limited, Berrington UK, Brapenta Eletronica Ltda., Brooks Instrument B.V., Brooks Instrument GmbH, Brooks Instrument KFT, Brooks Instrument Korea Ltd., Brooks Instrument LLC, Brooks Instrument Shanghai Co. Ltd, Buell Industries Inc., CCI Realty Company, CFC Europe GmbH, CS Australia Pty Limited, CS Mexico Holding Company S DE RL DE CV, Calvia Spolka z Ograniczona Odpowiedzialnosci, Capital Ventures Australasia S.a r.l, Capmax Logistica S.A. de C.V., Celeste Industries Corporation, Coeur, Coeur Asia Limited, Coeur Holding Company, Coeur Inc., Coeur Shanghai Medical Appliance Trading Co. Ltd, Compagnie Hobart, Compagnie de Materiel et d'Equipements Techniques-Comet, Constructions Isothermiques Bontami C.I.B., Crane Carrier Company, Denison Mayes Group Limited, Despatch Industries, Diagraph Corporation Sdn. Bhd, Diagraph ITW Mexico S. de R.L. De C.V., Diagraph Mexico S.A. DE C.V., Dongguan Ark-Les Electric Components Co. Ltd., Dongguan CK Branding Co. Ltd., Duo Fast de Espana S.A.U., Duo-Fast Korea Co. Ltd., Duo-Fast LLC, E.C.S. d.o.o., E2M Production B.V.., E2M Technologies B.V.., E2M Technologies Inc.., ECS Cable Protection Sp. Zoo, ELRO Grosskuchen GmbH, ELRO Holding AG, ELRO-WERKE AG, Elro Group, Eltex-Elektrostatik-Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, Envases Multipac S.A. de C.V., Eurotec Srl, Exhibit 21, FEG Investments L.L.C., Filtertek De Mexico Holding Inc., Filtertek De Mexico S.A. de C.V., Filtertek SAS, GC Financement SA, Gamko B.V., Gun Hwa Platech Taicang Co. Ltd., HOBART Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, Hartness International, Hobart Andina S.A.S., Hobart Belgium B.V., Hobart Brothers International Chile Limitada, Hobart Brothers LLC, Hobart Dayton Mexicana S. de R.L. de C.V., Hobart Food Equipment Co. Ltd., Hobart International Singapore Pte. Ltd., Hobart Japan K.K., Hobart Korea LLC, Hobart LLC, Hobart Nederland B.V., Hobart Sales & Service Inc., Hobart Scandinavia ApS, Hobart Techniek B.V., Horis, ILC Investments Holdings Inc., ITW AEP LLC, ITW AOC LLC, ITW Aircraft Investments Inc., ITW Ampang Industries Philippines Inc., ITW Appliance Components EOOD, ITW Appliance Components S.A. de C.V., ITW Appliance Components S.r.l.a, ITW Appliance Components d.o.o., ITW Australia Holdings Pty Ltd, ITW Australia Property Holdings Pty Ltd., ITW Australia Pty Ltd, ITW Automotive Components Chongqing Co. Ltd., ITW Automotive Components Langfang Co. Ltd., ITW Automotive Japan K.K., ITW Automotive Korea LLC, ITW Automotive Parts Shanghai Co. Ltd, ITW Automotive Products GmbH, ITW Automotive Products Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Bailly Comte, ITW Befestigungssysteme GmbH, ITW Belgium B.V., ITW Brazilian Nominee L.L.C., ITW Building Components Group Inc., ITW CER, ITW CP Distribution Center Holland BV, ITW CS UK Ltd., ITW Canada Inc., ITW Celeste Inc., ITW Chemical Products Ltda, ITW Chemical Products Scandinavia ApS, ITW China Investment Company Limited, ITW Colombia S.A.S., ITW Construction Products AB, ITW Construction Products AS, ITW Construction Products ApS, ITW Construction Products CZ s.r.o., ITW Construction Products Italy Srl, ITW Construction Products OU, ITW Construction Products OY, ITW Construction Products Shanghai Co. Ltd., ITW Construction Products Singapore Pte. Ltd., ITW Construction Services Manila Inc., ITW Contamination Control B.V., ITW Contamination Control Wujiang Co. Ltd., ITW Covid Security Group Inc., ITW DS Investments Inc., ITW DelFast do Brasil Ltda., ITW Denmark ApS, ITW Deutschland GmbH, ITW Diagraph GmbH, ITW Dynatec, ITW Dynatec Adhesive Equipment Suzhou Co. Ltd., ITW Dynatec GmbH, ITW Dynatec Kabushiki Kaisha, ITW EAE B.V., ITW EAE Mexico S de RL de CV, ITW EF&C France SAS, ITW EF&C Selb GmbH, ITW EU Holdings Ltd., ITW Electronic Business Asia Co. Limited, ITW Electronic Components/Products Shanghai Co. Ltd., ITW Electronics Suzhou Co. Ltd., ITW Epsilon Sarl, ITW Espana S.L., ITW European Finance Co. Ltd., ITW European Finance II Co. Ltd., ITW European Finance III Co. Ltd., ITW FEG Hong Kong Limited, ITW FEG do Brasil Industria e Comercio Ltda., ITW Fastener Products GmbH, ITW Fluids and Hygiene Solutions Ltda., ITW Food Equipment Group LLC, ITW GH LLC, ITW GSE ApS, ITW GSE Inc., ITW Gamma Sarl, ITW German Management LLC, ITW Global Investments Holdings LLC, ITW Global Investments Holdings Y Compania Sociedad en Comandita por Acciones, ITW Global Investments Inc., ITW Global Tire Repair Europe GmbH, ITW Global Tire Repair Inc., ITW Global Tire Repair Japan K.K., ITW Graphics Asia Limited, ITW Graphics Thailand Ltd., ITW Great Britain Investment & Licensing Holding Company, ITW Group France Luxembourg S.ar.l., ITW HLP Thailand Co. Ltd., ITW Holding Quimica B.C. S.L. Sole Shareholder Company, ITW Holdings Australia L.P., ITW Holdings I Limited, ITW Holdings II Limited, ITW Holdings III Limited, ITW Holdings IV Limited, ITW Holdings IX Limited, ITW Holdings Inc., ITW Holdings V Limited, ITW Holdings VI Limited, ITW Holdings VII Limited, ITW Holdings VIII Limited, ITW Holdings X Limited, ITW Holdings XI Limited, ITW ILC Holdings I Inc., ITW IPG Investments LLC, ITW Imaden Industria e Comercio Ltda., ITW India Private Limited, ITW International Holdings LLC, ITW Invest Holding GmbH, ITW Ireland Holdings Unlimited Company, ITW Ireland Unlimited Company, ITW Italy Holding Srl, ITW Japan Ltd., ITW Korea LLC, ITW LLC & Co. KG, ITW Limited, ITW Lys Fusion S.r.l., ITW Materials Technology Shanghai Co. Ltd., ITW Meritex Sdn. Bhd., ITW Metal Fasteners S.L., ITW Mexico Holding Company S. De R.L. de C.V., ITW Mexico Holdings LLC, ITW Morlock GmbH, ITW Mortgage Investments II Inc., ITW Mortgage Investments III Inc., ITW Mortgage Investments IV Inc., ITW Netherlands Administration BV, ITW Netherlands Beta B.V., ITW Netherlands Finance Alpha BV, ITW New Universal LLC, ITW New Zealand, ITW Ningbo Components & Fastenings Systems Co. Ltd., ITW Novadan Sp. Z.o.o., ITW PPF Brasil Adesivos Ltda., ITW Packaging Technology China Co. Ltd., ITW Participations S.a r.l., ITW Pension Funds Trustee Company, ITW Performance Polymers & Fluids Japan Co. Ltd., ITW Performance Polymers & Fluids Korea Limited, ITW Performance Polymers & Fluids OOO, ITW Performance Polymers ApS, ITW Performance Polymers Wujiang Co. Ltd., ITW Performance Polymers and Fluids Group FZE, ITW Peru S.A.C., ITW Poly Mex S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Polymers Sealants North America Inc., ITW Pronovia s.r.o., ITW Pte. Ltd., ITW Qufu Automotive Cooling Systems Co. Ltd., ITW Real Estate Germany GmbH, ITW Residuals III L.L.C., ITW Residuals IV L.L.C., ITW Rivex, ITW SMPI, ITW SPG Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Simco-Ion Shenzhen Co. Ltd., ITW Slovakia s.r.o., ITW Spain Holdings S.L., ITW Specialty Film LLC, ITW Specialty Films France, ITW Specialty Materials Suzhou Co. Ltd., ITW Sverige AB, ITW Sweden Holding AB, ITW Test & Measurement Equipment Shanghai Co. Ltd, ITW Test & Measurement GmbH, ITW Test and Measurement Italia Srl, ITW Test and Measurement Services Industry and Trade Ltd., ITW Texwipe Philippines Inc., ITW Thermal Films Shanghai Co. Ltd., ITW UK, ITW UK Finance Beta Limited, ITW UK Finance Delta Limited, ITW UK Finance Gamma Limited, ITW UK Finance Limited, ITW UK Finance Zeta Ltd., ITW UK II Limited, ITW Universal II LLC, ITW Welding, ITW Welding AB, ITW Welding GmbH, ITW Welding Products B.V., ITW Welding Products Group FZE, ITW Welding Products Group S. DE R.L. De C.V., ITW Welding Products Italy Srl, ITW Welding Products Limited Liability Company, ITW Welding Produtos Para Solgdagem Ltda., ITW Welding Singapore Pte. Ltd., ITW de France, ITW do Brasil Industrial e Comercial Ltda., Illinois Tool Works Chile Limitada, Illinois Tool Works ITW Nederland B.V., Illinois Tool Works Inc., Impar Comercio E Representacoes Ltda., Industrie Plastic Elsasser GmbH, Inmobiliaria Cit. S.A. de C.F., Innova Temperlite Servicios S.A. de C.V., Innovacion y Transformacion Automotriz S.A. de C.V., Instron Brasil Equipamentos Cientificos Ltda., Instron Foreign Sales Corp. Limited, Instron France S.A.S., Instron GmbH, Instron Japan Company Ltd., Instron Korea LLC, Instron Shanghai Ltd., Instron Thailand Limited, International Leasing Company LLC, Isolenge - ITW Sistemas de Isolamento Termico Ltda., Itw Spraytec, KCPL Mauritius Holdings, Kester, Kleinmann GmbH, Krafft S.L., Loma Systems, Loma Systems BV, Loma Systems Canada Inc., Loma Systems sro, Lombard Pressings Limited, Lumex Inc., Lys Fusion Poland Sp. z.o.o., M&C Specialties Co., MAGNAFLUX GmbH, MEHB Holdings Limited, MGHG Property LLC, MTS 2 LLC., MTS 3 LLC., MTS China Holdings LLC, MTS Europe Holdings LLC, MTS Holdings France S.a.r.l., MTS Japan Ltd.., MTS Korea Inc.., MTS Systems China Co. Ltd., MTS Systems Corporation, MTS Systems Danmark ApS., MTS Systems Europe B.V., MTS Systems Finance C.V.., MTS Systems Germany GmbH, MTS Systems Holding B.V.., MTS Systems Hong Kong Incorporated, MTS Systems Limited, MTS Systems Norden Aktiebolag, MTS Systems S.r.l, MTS Systems., MTS Systems.., MTS Sytems Do Brazil, MTS Testing Solutions India Private Limited., MTS Testing Systems Canada Ltd., Manufacturing Avancee S.A., Meritex Technology Suzhou Co. Ltd., Meurer Verpackungssysteme GmbH, Miller Electric Mfg. LLC, Miller Insurance Ltd., NDT Holding LLC, NOVADAN APS, North Star Imaging Inc., Nova Chimica S.r.l., Orbitalum Tools GmbH, PENTA-91 OOO, PR. A. I. Srl, PT ITW Construction Products Indonesia, Pacific Concept Industries Limited Enping, Panreac Quimica S.L., Paslode Fasteners Shanghai Co. Ltd., Peerless Machinery Corp., Polyrey, Premark FEG L.L.C., Premark HII Holdings LLC, Premark International, Premark International LLC, Prolex Sociedad Anonima, QSA Global Inc., Quimica Industrial Mediterranea S.L., R&D Engineering A/S., R&D Prague s.r.o., R&D Steel ApS., R&D Test Systems A/S., R&D Tools and Structures A/S., RDGDK Engineering Private Limited, Ramset Fasteners Hong Kong Ltd., Rapid Cook LLC, Refrigeration France, S.E.E. Sistemas Industria E Comercio Ltda., ST Mexico Holdings LLC, Sealant Systems International Inc., Sentinel Asia Yuhan Hoesa, Shanghai ITW Plastic & Metal Co. Ltd, Simco Japan Inc., Simco Nederland B.V., Societe de Prospection et dInventions Techniques  SPIT, Speedline Holdings I Inc., Speedline Holdings I LLC, Speedline Technologies GmbH, Speedline Technologies Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Speedline Technologies Mexico Services S. de R.L. de C.V., Stokvis Celix Portugal Unipessoal LDA, Stokvis Danmark ApS, Stokvis Holdings S.A.R.L., Stokvis Promi s.r.o, Stokvis Prostick Tapes Private Limited, Stokvis Tapes B.V., Stokvis Tapes Benelux B.V., Stokvis Tapes Deutschland GmbH, Stokvis Tapes France, Stokvis Tapes Hong Kong Co. Limited, Stokvis Tapes Italia s.r.l., Stokvis Tapes Limited, Stokvis Tapes Limited Liability Company, Stokvis Tapes Norge AS, Stokvis Tapes Oy, Stokvis Tapes Polska Sp Z.O.O., Stokvis Tapes Shanghai Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes Sverige AB, Stokvis Tapes Taiwan Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes Tianjin Co. Ltd., Stolvis Holdings II S.A.R.L., Subsidiaries, Technopack Industria Comercio Consultoria e Representacoes Ltda., Teknek China Limited, Teknek Japan Limited, Teksaleco Ltd., The Miller Group Ltd, Thirode Grandes Cuisines Poligny, Tien Tai Electrode Co. Ltd., Tien Tai Electrode Kunshan Co. Ltd., Unichemicals Industria e Comercio Ltda., VR-Leasing Sarita GmbH & Co. Immobilien KG, VS European Holdco BV, Valeron Strength Films B.V., Veneta Decalcogomme S.r.l., Versachem Chile S.A., Vesta, Vesta Global Limited, Vesta Guangzhou Catering Equipment Co. Ltd, Viltronics Soltec, Vitronics Soltec B.V., Wachs Canada Ltd., Wachs Subsea LLC, Weigh-Tronix Canada ULC, Weigh-Tronix UK Limited, Wilsonart International Holdings LLC, Wynn Oil South Africa Pty Ltd., Wynn's Automotive France, Wynn's Belgium BVBA, Wynn's Italia Srl, Wynn's Mekuba India Pvt Ltd, and Zip-Pak International B.V..

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Ag Growth International Inc., together with its subsidiaries, manufactures and distributes grain and rice handling, storage, and conditioning equipment in Canada, the United States, and internationally. The company offers storage equipment comprising grain and bolted bins, hopper bins, smooth wall bins, temporary storage equipment, unloads and sweeps, water tanks, fuel tanks; and conditioning equipment, such as mixed flow dryers, fans and heaters, aerations, airaugers, aeration floors, vents and exhausters, stirrings, and accessories. It also provides portable handling equipment, such as portable augers, conveyors, grain vacs, post pounders, seed treaters, and accessories; and permanent handling equipment, including bucket elevators, chain and belt conveyors, enclosed belt conveyors, distributors, feed handling equipment, screw feeders and conveyors, and spouts and connections. In addition, the company offers towers, catwalks, ladders, all-steel buildings, flat storage buildings; batch blenders, bulk scales, declining weight blenders, vertical blenders, micro-dosing systems, mixers, milling equipment; and controllers, hazard monitoring equipment, monitoring and automation equipment, sampling solutions. Further, it provides cleaning and destoners, rice milling and processing equipment, bin unloads, blending and control systems, Liquid and dry fertilizer blending and conveying equipment, turnkey design and build construction solutions for seed and fertilizer facilities, and farm management software. The company markets its products under the AGI, Airlanco, Batco, Brownie, CMC, Compass, Danmare, Ezee-dry, Frame, Grain Guard, Grainmaxx, Hi Roller, Hutchinson, Improtech, Junge, Keho, Mayrath, Milltec, MMS, Neco, PTM, REM, Sabe, Sentinel, Storm, Suretrack, Tramco, Twister, Westeel, Westfield, Wheatheart, and Yargus brand names. It provides its equipment for agricultural commodities. The company was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada.
Citigroup Inc. is one of the worlds largest financial institutions. It is the 13th largest bank globally by assets and 8th by market cap with operations in consumer and institutional banking. In the US, Citigroup is the 3rd largest bank by assets and one of the Big Four deemed systemically important and too big to fail.

Citigroup Inc. was founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York. The bank was run by Samuel Osgood who led the company with success for many years, even throughout the War of 1812. The bank was later renamed the National City Bank of New York in 1865 and by 1895 is the largest bank in the US. In 1913 it was the first contributor to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a few years later it began to expand into overseas territories.

The bank became the First National City Bank of New York after another merger in 1955 and then later, the New York part was dropped off as part of the 150th-anniversary celebration. By 1974 the company is known as Citicorp which is still the operational branch of the business and a global banking powerhouse. A merger with Travelers insurance group in 1998 resulted in the name Citigroup but the joint venture did not last. By 2002 Travelers was publicly traded once again but Citigroup retained the new name.

Today, the company is headquartered in New York, New York but boasts more than 200 million customer accounts in 160 countries worldwide. As of mid-2022, it operated 2,649 branches in the United States, Mexico, and Asia. The company reports nearly 725 branches in the US and 1499 in Mexico with the rest scattered throughout its territory. Total annual revenue topped $75 billion in 2022.

Citigroup is a diversified financial services holding company that owns Citicorp among other assets. The companys mission is to serve as a trusted partner providing responsible financial solutions to its clients. Citigroup provides financial products and services to consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions. The company operates in two segments, Global Consumer Banking (GCB) and Institutional Clients Group (ICG).

The GCB segment offers traditional banking services including deposit and saving accounts, credit cards, personal loans, home loans, and investment services. This segment operates through local branches and digital means. The ICG segment offers wholesale banking products and services to corporate, institutional, public sector, and high-net-worth clients.
Black Hills Corporation, through its subsidiaries, operates as an electric and natural gas utility company in the United States. It operates in two segments, Electric Utilities and Gas Utilities. The Electric Utilities segment generates, transmits, and distributes electricity to approximately 218,000 electric utility customers in Colorado, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming; and owns and operates 1,481.5 megawatts of generation capacity and 8,892 miles of electric transmission and distribution lines. The Gas Utilities segment distributes natural gas to approximately 1,094,000 natural gas utility customers in Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming; owns and operates 4,732 miles of intrastate gas transmission pipelines; 41,644 miles of gas distribution mains and service lines; six natural gas storage sites; and approximately 50,000 horsepower of compression and 515 miles of gathering lines. The company also constructs and maintains gas infrastructure facilities for gas transportation customers; and provides appliance repair services to residential utility customers, as well as electrical system construction services to large industrial customers. In addition, it produces electric power through wind, natural gas, and coal-fired generating plants; and coal at its coal mine located near Gillette, Wyoming. The company was incorporated in 1941 and is headquartered in Rapid City, South Dakota.
CACI International Inc, together with its subsidiaries, provides expertise and technology to enterprise and mission customers in support of national security missions and government modernization/transformation in the intelligence, defense, and federal civilian sectors. It operates in two segments, Domestic Operations and International Operations. The Domestic Operations segment offers information solutions and services to the U.S. federal government agencies and commercial enterprises in the areas, such as digital solutions, C4ISR, cyber and space, engineering services, enterprise IT, and mission support. The International Operations segment provides a range of IT services, proprietary data, and software products to the commercial and government customers in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and internationally. The company designs, implements, protects, and manages secure enterprise IT solutions. It also offers software-defined, full-spectrum cyber, electronic warfare, and counter-unmanned aircraft system solutions; and platform integration and modernization and sustainment, as well as system engineering, naval architecture, training and simulation, and logistics engineering. In addition, the company provides enterprise cloud solutions for classified and unclassified networks; and intelligence support that ensures continuous advances in collection, analysis, and dissemination to optimize decision-making. CACI International Inc was founded in 1962 and is headquartered in Reston, Virginia.
Coeur Mining, Inc. explores for precious metals in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The company primarily explores for gold, silver, zinc, and lead properties. It holds 100% interests in the Palmarejo gold and silver mine covering an area of approximately 67,296 net acres located in the State of Chihuahua in Northern Mexico; the Rochester silver and gold mine that covers an area of approximately 43,441net acres situated in northwestern Nevada; the Kensington gold mine comprising 3,972 net acres located to the north of Juneau, Alaska; the Wharf gold mine covering an area of approximately 3,243 net acres situated in the northern Black Hills of western South Dakota; and the Silvertip silver-zinc-lead mine comprising 97,298 net acres located in northern British Columbia, Canada. In addition, the company owns interests in the Crown and Sterling projects located in southern Nevada; and the La Preciosa project located in Mexico. Further, it markets and sells its concentrates to third-party customers, smelters, under off-take agreements. The company was formerly known as Coeur d'Alene Mines Corporation and changed its name to Coeur Mining, Inc. in May 2013.Coeur Mining, Inc. was incorporated in 1928 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Customers Bancorp, Inc. operates as the bank holding company for Customers Bank. Customers Bancorp, Inc. was founded in 1997 as New Century Bank which operated 5 branches in Southern Pennsylvania. The companys lending portfolio, which was primarily residential mortgage loans, led to the bank's eventual rebranding and hiring of Jay Sidhu as chairman and chief executive officer. The bank changed to a Bank Holding Company after it made a few strategic acquisitions and it now operates 12 full-service branches across 10 states and provides financial services to individuals, and small, and medium-sized businesses. The bank was a troubled asset worth $250 million when Mr. Sidhu took over and now it is worth upwards of $20 billion.

Customers Bancorp, Inc is a super-community bank operating in multiple states across the US. The companys assets topped $20.3 billion in mid-2022 which put it on par with many of the US regional banks. The company sets itself apart by offering dedicated personal service to all its clients and by operating as a digital-first business. This means a single point of contact to help with any needs that may arise and full-service digital banking for all client needs.

Customers Bancorp offers traditional deposit products, including checking, savings, MMDA, and other deposit accounts as well as a full range of loans. Loan products include but are not limited to commercial warehouse loans, loans for multi-family construction, commercial real estate, small business loans, equipment financing, residential mortgages, and consumer lines of credit.

The company also offers traditional and business banking activities including mobile, internet, wire transfers, electronic bill payment, safe deposit boxes, remote capture, courier, payment processing services, and cash management.

Among the many services offered by Customers Bancorp are digital assets. The company supports a wide range of cryptocurrency-related services for individuals and businesses and even uses its own token. The token is used to power instant B2B payments across the TassatPay blockchain network. The companys native token is CBIT (Customers Bancorp Instant Token).

Customers Bancorp is headquartered in West Reading, Pennsylvania, and operates 12 full-service branches, as well as production and administrative offices in several counties in southeastern Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Illinois, Florida, and North Carolina.
Cullen/Frost Bankers, Inc. operates as the bank holding company for Frost Bank that offers commercial and consumer banking services in Texas. It operates in two segments, Banking and Frost Wealth Advisors. The company offers commercial banking services to corporations and other business clients, including financing for industrial and commercial properties, interim construction related to industrial and commercial properties, equipment, inventories and accounts receivables, and acquisitions; commercial leasing; and treasury management services. It also provides consumer banking services, such as checking accounts, savings programs, automated-teller machines (ATMs), overdraft facilities, installment and real estate loans, home equity loans and lines of credit, drive-in and night deposit services, safe deposit facilities, and brokerage services. In addition, the company offers international banking services comprising deposits, loans, letters of credit, foreign collections, funds, and foreign exchange services. Further, it acts as a correspondent for approximately 171 financial institutions; offers trust, investment, agency, and custodial services for individual and corporate clients; provides capital market services that include sales and trading, new issue underwriting, money market trading, advisory, and securities safekeeping and clearance; and supports international business activities. Additionally, the company offers insurance and securities brokerage services; and holds securities for investment purposes, as well as investment management services to Frost-managed mutual funds, institutions, and individuals. It operates approximately 157 financial centers and 1,650 ATMs. The company serves energy, manufacturing, services, construction, retail, telecommunications, healthcare, military, and transportation industries. Cullen/Frost Bankers, Inc. was founded in 1868 and is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas.
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.
Halliburton Company provides products and services to the energy industry worldwide. It operates in two segments, Completion and Production, and Drilling and Evaluation. The Completion and Production segment offers production enhancement services that include stimulation and sand control services; cementing services, such as well bonding and casing, and casing equipment; completion tools that offer downhole solutions and services, including well completion products and services, intelligent well completions, and service tools, as well as liner hanger, sand control, and multilateral systems; production solutions comprising coiled tubing, hydraulic workover units, downhole tools, and pumping and nitrogen services; and pipeline and process services, such as pre-commissioning, commissioning, maintenance, and decommissioning. This segment also provides electrical submersible pumps, as well as artificial lift services. The Drilling and Evaluation segment offers drilling fluid systems, performance additives, completion fluids, solids control, specialized testing equipment, and waste management services; oilfield completion, production, and downstream water and process treatment chemicals and services; drilling systems and services; wireline and perforating services consists of open-hole logging, and cased-hole and slickline; and drill bits and services comprising roller cone rock bits, fixed cutter bits, hole enlargement, and related downhole tools and services, as well as coring equipment and services. This segment also provides cloud based digital services and artificial intelligence solutions on an open architecture for subsurface insights, integrated well construction, and reservoir and production management; testing and subsea services, such as acquisition and analysis of reservoir information and optimization solutions; and project management and integrated asset management services. Halliburton Company was founded in 1919 and is based in Houston, Texas.
Humana Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as a health and well-being company in the United States. It operates through three segments: Retail, Group and Specialty, and Healthcare Services. The company offers medical and supplemental benefit plans to individuals. It also has a contract with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to administer the Limited Income Newly Eligible Transition prescription drug plan program; and contracts with various states to provide Medicaid, dual eligible, and long-term support services benefits. In addition, the company provides commercial fully insured medical and specialty health insurance benefits comprising dental, vision, and other supplemental health benefits; and administrative services only products to individuals and employer groups, as well as military services, such as TRICARE T2017 East Region contract. Further, it offers pharmacy solutions, provider services, and home solutions services, such as home health and other services to its health plan members, as well as to third parties. As of December 31, 2021, the company had approximately 17 million members in medical benefit plans, as well as approximately 5 million members in specialty products. Humana Inc. was founded in 1961 and is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky.
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 PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. operates as a diversified financial services company in the United States. The company's Retail Banking segment offers checking, savings, and money market accounts, as well as certificates of deposit; residential mortgages, home equity loans and lines of credit, auto loans, credit cards, education loans, and personal and small business loans and lines of credit; and brokerage, insurance, and investment and cash management services. This segment serves consumer and small business customers through a network of branches, ATMs, call centers, and online and mobile banking channels. Its Corporate & Institutional Banking segment provides secured and unsecured loans, letters of credit, and equipment leases; cash and investment management services, receivables and disbursement management services, funds transfer services, international payment services, and access to online/mobile information management and reporting; foreign exchange, derivatives, fixed income, securities underwriting, loan syndications, and mergers and acquisitions and equity capital markets advisory related services; and commercial loan servicing and technology solutions. It serves mid-sized and large corporations, and government and not-for-profit entities. The company's Asset Management Group segment offers investment and retirement planning, customized investment management, credit and cash management solutions, and trust management and administration services for high net worth and ultra high net worth individuals, and their families; and multi-generational family planning services for ultra high net worth individuals and their families. It also provides outsourced chief investment officer, custody, private real estate, cash and fixed income client solutions, and fiduciary retirement advisory services for institutional clients. The company has 2,591 branches and 9,502 ATMs. The company was founded in 1852 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The following companies are subsidiares of HCA Healthcare: 2490 Church LLC, 360 Community Alliance LLC, 4600 Waters Avenue Professional Building Condominium Association Inc., 52 Alderley Road LLP, AC Med LLC, ACH Inc., ADC Surgicenter LLC, AOGN LLC, AOSC Sports Medicine Inc., AR Holding 1 LLC, AR Holding 10 LLC, AR Holding 11 LLC, AR Holding 12 LLC, AR Holding 13 LLC, AR Holding 14 LLC, AR Holding 15 LLC, AR Holding 16 LLC, AR Holding 17 LLC, AR Holding 18 LLC, AR Holding 19 LLC, AR Holding 2 LLC, AR Holding 20 LLC, AR Holding 21 LLC, AR Holding 22 LLC, AR Holding 23 LLC, AR Holding 24 LLC, AR Holding 25 LLC, AR Holding 26 LLC, AR Holding 27 LLC, AR Holding 28 LLC, AR Holding 29 LLC, AR Holding 30 LLC, AR Holding 31 LLC, AR Holding 4 LLC, AR Holding 5 LLC, AR Holding 6 LLC, AR Holding 7 LLC, AR Holding 8 LLC, AR Holding 9 LLC, ASD Shared Services LLC, Acadiana Care Center Inc., Acadiana Practice Management Inc., Acadiana Regional Pharmacy Inc., Access 2 Health Care Physicians LLC, Access Health Care Physicians LLC, Access Management Co. LLC, Ace Leasing II LLC, Acute Kids Urgent Care of Medical City Childrens Hospital PLLC, Acworth Immediate Care LLC, Administrative Physicians of North Texas PLLC, Advanced Bundle Convener LLC, Advanced Plastic Surgery Center of Terre Haute LLC, Advanced Practice Providers of Gulf Coast PLLC, Alaska Regional Medical Group LLC, Albany Family Practice LLC, Aligned Business Consortium Group L.P., All About Staffing (India) Ltd., All About Staffing Inc., All About Staffing Philippines Inc., Alleghany General and Bariatric Services LLC, Alleghany Hospitalists LLC, Alleghany Primary Care Inc., Alleghany Specialists LLC, Alliance Surgicare LLC, Alpine Surgicenter LLC, Alta Internal Medicine LLC, Alternaco LLC, Altitude Mid Level Providers LLC, Ambulatory Endoscopy Clinic of Dallas Ltd., Ambulatory Endoscopy Holdco LLC, Ambulatory Laser Associates GP, Ambulatory Services Management Corporation of Chesterfield County Inc., Ambulatory Surgery Center Group Ltd., American Medicorp Development Co., Anchorage Surgicenter LLC, AppleCare/Memorial Immediate Care Joint Venture LLC, Appledore Medical Group II Inc., Appledore Medical Group Inc., Appomattox Imaging LLC, Arapahoe Surgicenter LLC, Arlington Diagnostic South Inc., Arlington Neurosurgeons PLLC, Arlington Primary Care PLLC, Arlington Primary Medicine PLLC, Arlington Surgery Center L.P., Arlington Surgicare LLC, Arthritis Specialists of Nashville Inc., Ashburn ASC LLC, Ashburn Imaging LLC, Athens Community Hospital Inc., Atlanta Healthcare Management L.P., Atlanta Home Care L.P., Atlanta Market GP Inc., Atlanta Outpatient Surgery Center Inc., Atlanta Surgery Center Ltd., Atlantis Surgicare LLC, Atrium Surgery Center L.P., Atrium Surgicare LLC, Augusta CyberKnife LLC, Augusta Inpatient Services LLC, Augusta Management Services LLC, Augusta Multispecialty Services LLC, Augusta Primary Care Services LLC, Augusta Specialty Hospitalists LLC, Augusta Urgent Care Services LLC, Aurora Endoscopy Surgicenter LLC, Austin GI Surgicenter LLC, Austin Heart Cardiology MSO LLC, Austin Medical Center Inc., Austin Physicians Management LLC, Austin Urogynecology PLLC, Aventura Cancer Center Manager LLC, Aventura Comprehensive Cancer Research Group of Florida Inc., Aventura Healthcare Specialists LLC, Aventura Neurosurgery LLC, BAMI Property LLC, Backlogs Limited, Bailey Square Ambulatory Surgical Center Ltd., Bailey Square Outpatient Surgical Center Inc., Bannerman Family Care LLC, Barrow Medical Center CT Services Ltd., Basic American Medical Inc., Basil Street Practice Limited, Bay Area Healthcare Group Ltd., Bay Area Surgical Center Investors Ltd., Bay Area Surgicare Center Inc., Bay Area Surgicenter LLC, Bay Hospital Inc., Bayonet Point Surgery Center Ltd., Bayshore Family Practitioners PLLC, Bayshore Multi-Specialty Group PLLC, Bayshore Occupational and Family Medicine PLLC, Bayshore Partner LLC, Bayshore Radiation Oncology Services PLLC, Bayshore Surgery Center Ltd., Bayside Ambulatory Center LLC, Bedford-Northeast Community Hospital Inc., Behavioral Health Sciences of West Florida LLC, Behavioral Health Wellness Center LLC, Bellaire Imaging Inc., Belleair Surgery Center Ltd., Belton Family Practice Clinic LLC, Big Cypress Medical Center Inc., Blacksburg Family Care LLC, Blossoms Healthcare LLP, Blue Ridge-TKC LLC, Bone & Joint Specialists Physician Group LLC, Bonita Bay Surgery Center Inc., Bonita Bay Surgery Center Ltd., Bountiful Surgery Center LLC, Boynton Beach EFL Imaging Center LLC, Bradenton Cardiology Physician Network LLC, Bradenton Outpatient Services LLC, Brandon Imaging Manager LLC, Brandon Regional Cancer Center LLC, Brentwood ASC LLC, Brigham City Community Hospital Inc., Brigham City Community Hospital Physician Services LLC, Brigham City Health Plan Inc., Brighton Surgicenter LLC, Brookwood Medical Center of Gulfport Inc., Broward Cardiovascular Surgeons LLC, Broward Healthcare System Inc., Broward Neurosurgeons LLC, Brownsville Specialists of Texas PLLC, Brownsville Surgery PLLC, Brownsville Surgical Specialists PLLC, Brownsville Surgicenter LLC, Brownsville-Valley Regional Medical Center Inc., Buford Road Imaging L.L.C., Byron Family Practice LLC, C. Medrano M.D. PLLC, C/HCA Capital Inc., C/HCA Development Inc., C/HCA Inc., CAREOS Surgicenter LLC, CC Clinic PLLC, CCBH Psychiatric Hospitalists LLC, CCH-GP Inc., CFC Investments Inc., CH Systems, CHC Finance Co., CHC Holdings Inc., CHC Management Ltd., CHC Payroll Agent Inc., CHC Payroll Company, CHC Realty Company, CHC Venture Co., CHC-El Paso Corp., CHC-Miami Corp., CHCA Bayshore L.P., CHCA Clear Lake L.P., CHCA Conroe L.P., CHCA Mainland L.P., CHCA Pearland L.P., CHCA West Houston L.P., CHCA Womans Hospital L.P., CHCK Inc., CJW Infectious Disease LLC, CJW Wound Healing Center LLC, CLASC Manager LLC, COL-NAMC Holdings Inc., COSCORP LLC, CP Surgery Center LLC, CPS TN Processor 1 Inc., CRMC-M LLC, CUC PLLC, CVMC Property LLC, Calder Immediate Care PLLC, California Imaging Center Manager LLC, California Urgent Care LLC, Calloway Creek Surgery Center L.P., Calloway Creek Surgicare LLC, Cancer Centers of North Florida LLC, Cancer Services of Aventura LLC, Capital Anesthesia Services LLC, Capital Area Cardiology, Capital Area CareNow Physician Associates, Capital Area Multispecialty Providers, Capital Area Neurosurgeons, Capital Area Occupational Medicine PLLC, Capital Area Primary Care PLLC, Capital Area Primary Care Providers, Capital Area Providers, Capital Area Specialists PLLC, Capital Area Specialty Providers, Capital Area Surgeons PLLC, Capital Division - CCA Inc., Capital Division Inc., Capital Network Services Inc., Capital Professional Billing LLC, Capital Regional Healthcare LLC, Capital Regional Heart Associates LLC, Capital Regional Psychiatry Associates LLC, Cardiac Surgical Associates LLC, Cardio Vascular Surgeons of North Texas PLLC, Cardiology Associates Medical Group LLC, Cardiology Clinic of San Antonio PLLC, Cardiology Specialists of North Texas PLLC, Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgeons of Texas PLLC, Care for Women LLC, CareNow, CareOne Home Health Services Inc., CarePartners HHA Holdings LLLP, CarePartners HHA LLLP, CarePartners Rehabilitation Hospital LLLP, CareSpot Professional Services of Middle Tennessee LLC, CareSpot of Brentwood (210 Franklin Road) LLC, CareSpot of Cool Springs (100 International Drive) LLC, CareSpot of Donelson (2372 Lebanon Road) LLC, CareSpot of Hendersonville (280 Indian Lake Boulevard) LLC, CareSpot of Hermitage (5225 Old Hickory Boulevard) LLC, CareSpot of Lebanon (1705 West Main Street) LLC, CareSpot of Mt. Juliet (S. Mt. Juliet Road) LLC, CareSpot of Murfreesboro (1340 Broad Street) LLC, CareSpot of Nashville (2001 Glen Echo Road) LLC, CareSpot of Nashville (West End Avenue) LLC, Career Staffing USA Inc., Carlin Springs Urgent Care LLC, Carolina Forest Imaging Manager LLC, Carolina Regional Surgery Center Inc., Carolina Regional Surgery Center Ltd., Cartersville Medical Center LLC, Cartersville Occupational Medicine Center LLC, Cartersville Physician Practice I LLC, Catalog360 Limited, Cedar Creek Medical Group LLC, Cedars International Cardiology Consultants LLC, Cedars Medical Center Hospitalists LLC, Centennial Cardiovascular Consultants LLC, Centennial CyberKnife Center LLC, Centennial CyberKnife Manager LLC, Centennial Heart LLC, Centennial Hospitalists LLC, Centennial Neuroscience LLC, Centennial Psychiatric Associates LLC, Centennial Surgery Center L.P., Centennial Surgical Associates LLC, Centennial Surgical Clinic LLC, Centennial Womens Group LLC, Center for Advanced Diagnostics LLC, Center for Advanced Imaging LLC, Center for Digestive Diseases LLC, Center for Occupational Medicine LLC, Centerpoint Cardiology Services LLC, Centerpoint Clinic of Blue Springs LLC, Centerpoint Hospital Based Physicians LLC, Centerpoint Medical Center of Independence LLC, Centerpoint Medical Specialists LLC, Centerpoint Orthopedics LLC, Centerpoint Physicians Group LLC, Centerpoint Womens Services LLC, Central Florida Cardiology Interpretations LLC, Central Florida Division Practice Inc., Central Florida Health Services LLC, Central Florida Imaging Services LLC, Central Florida Management Services LLC, Central Florida Obstetrics & Gynecology Associates LLC, Central Florida Physician Network LLC, Central Florida Regional Hospital Inc., Central Health Holding Company Inc., Central Pasco LLC, Central San Antonio Surgical Center Investors Ltd., Central Shared Services LLC, Central Tennessee Hospital Corporation, Central Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Physicians PLLC, Centrum Surgery Center Ltd., Charleston CareNow Urgent Care LLC, Chatsworth Hospital Corp., Chattanooga ASC Acquisition Inc., Chattanooga Diagnostic Associates LLC, Chattanooga Healthcare Network L.P., Chattanooga Healthcare Network Partner Inc., Chelsea Outpatient Centre LLP, Chesterfield Imaging LLC, Chicago Grant Hospital Inc., Childrens Multi-Specialty Group LLC, Chino Community Hospital Corporation Inc., Chippenham & Johnston-Willis Hospitals Inc., Chippenham & Johnston-Willis Sports Medicine LLC, Chippenham Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Chippenham Pediatric Specialists LLC, Chiswick Outpatient Centre LLP, Christiansburg Family Medicine LLC, Christiansburg Internal Medicine LLC, Christina Cano-Gonzalez M.D. PLLC, Chugach PT Inc., Church Street Partners, Citrus Memorial Hospital Inc., Citrus Memorial Property Management Inc., Citrus Primary Care Inc., Citrus Specialty Group Inc., Citrus Surgicenter LLC, City of San Antonio H2U Employee Health and Wellness Center PLLC, Clarksville Surgicenter LLC, Clear Creek Surgery Center LLC, Clear Lake Cardiac Catheterization Center L.P., Clear Lake Cardiac GP LLC, Clear Lake Family Physicians PLLC, Clear Lake Medical Tower Owners Association Inc., Clear Lake Merger LLC, Clear Lake Multi-Specialty Group PLLC, Clear Lake Regional Medical Center Inc., Clear Lake Regional Partner LLC, Clear Lake Surgicare Ltd., ClinicServ LLC, Clinical Education Shared Services LLC, Clinishare Inc., Coastal Bend Hospital CT Services Ltd., Coastal Bend Hospital Inc., Coastal Carolina Home Care Inc., Coastal Carolina Multispecialty Associates LLC, Coastal Carolina Primary Care LLC, Coastal Healthcare Services Inc., Coastal Imaging Center L.P., Coastal Imaging Center of Gulfport Inc., Coastal Inpatient Physicians LLC, Coliseum Health Group Inc., Coliseum Health Group LLC, Coliseum Medical Center LLC, Coliseum Park Hospital Inc., Coliseum Primary Care Services LLC, Coliseum Primary Healthcare - Macon LLC, Coliseum Primary Healthcare - Riverside LLC, Coliseum Professional Associates LLC, Coliseum Same Day Surgery Center L.P., Coliseum Surgery Center L.L.C., College Park Ancillary LLC, College Park Endoscopy Center LLC, College Park Radiology LLC, Colleton Ambulatory Care LLC, Colleton Diagnostic Center LLC, Colleton Medical Anesthesia LLC, Colleton Medical Hospitalists LLC, Colleton Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery LLC, Collier County Home Health Agency Inc., Collin County Diagnostic Associates PLLC, Colorado Health Systems Inc., Columbia ASC Management L.P., Columbia Ambulatory Surgery Division Inc., Columbia Arlington Healthcare System L.L.C., Columbia Bay Area Realty Ltd., Columbia Behavioral Health Ltd., Columbia Behavioral Healthcare Inc., Columbia Behavioral Healthcare of South Florida Inc., Columbia Call Center Inc., Columbia Central Florida Division Inc., Columbia Central Group Inc., Columbia Champions Treatment Center Inc., Columbia Chicago Division Inc., Columbia Coliseum Same Day Surgery Center Inc., Columbia Development of Florida Inc., Columbia Doctors Hospital of Tulsa Inc., Columbia Eye and Specialty Surgery Center Ltd., Columbia Florida Group Inc., Columbia GP of Mesquite Inc., Columbia Good Samaritan Health System Limited Partnership, Columbia Greater Houston Division Healthcare Network Inc., Columbia Health System of Arkansas Inc., Columbia Healthcare System of Louisiana Inc., Columbia Healthcare of Central Virginia Inc., Columbia Hospital Corporation at the Medical Center, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Arlington, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Bay Area, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Central Miami, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Corpus Christi, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Fort Worth, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Houston, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Kendall, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Massachusetts Inc., Columbia Hospital Corporation of Miami, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Miami Beach, Columbia Hospital Corporation of North Miami Beach, Columbia Hospital Corporation of South Broward, Columbia Hospital Corporation of South Dade, Columbia Hospital Corporation of South Florida, Columbia Hospital Corporation of South Miami, Columbia Hospital Corporation of Tamarac, Columbia Hospital Corporation of West Houston, Columbia Hospital Corporation-Delaware, Columbia Hospital Corporation-SMM, Columbia Hospital at Medical City Dallas Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Hospital-El Paso Ltd., Columbia Integrated Health Systems Inc., Columbia Jacksonville Healthcare System Inc., Columbia LaGrange Hospital LLC, Columbia Lake Worth Surgical Center Limited Partnership, Columbia Medical Arts Hospital Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Medical Center Dallas Southwest Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Medical Center at Lancaster Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Medical Center of Arlington Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Medical Center of Denton Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Medical Center of Las Colinas Inc., Columbia Medical Center of Lewisville Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Medical Center of McKinney Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Medical Center of Plano Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Medical Group - Centennial Inc., Columbia Medical Group - Daystar Inc., Columbia Medical Group - Parkridge Inc., Columbia Medical Group - Southern Hills Inc., Columbia Medical Group - Southwest Virginia Inc., Columbia Medical Group - The Frist Clinic Inc., Columbia Midtown Joint Venture, Columbia North Alaska Healthcare Inc., Columbia North Central Florida Health System Limited Partnership, Columbia North Florida Regional Medical Center Limited Partnership, Columbia North Hills Hospital Subsidiary L.P., Columbia North Texas Healthcare System L.P., Columbia North Texas Subsidiary GP LLC, Columbia North Texas Surgery Center Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Northwest Medical Center Inc., Columbia Northwest Medical Center Partners Ltd., Columbia Ocala Regional Medical Center Physician Group Inc., Columbia Ogden Medical Center Inc., Columbia Oklahoma Division Inc., Columbia Palm Beach GP LLC, Columbia Palm Beach Healthcare System Limited Partnership, Columbia Park Healthcare System Inc., Columbia Park Medical Center Inc., Columbia Parkersburg Healthcare System LLC, Columbia Pentagon City Hospital L.L.C., Columbia Physician Services - Florida Group Inc., Columbia Plaza Medical Center of Fort Worth Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Primary Care LLC, Columbia Psychiatric Management Co., Columbia Resource Network Inc., Columbia Rio Grande Healthcare L.P., Columbia Riverside Inc., Columbia South Texas Division Inc., Columbia Specialty Hospital of Dallas Subsidiary L.P., Columbia Specialty Hospitals Inc., Columbia Surgery Group Inc., Columbia Surgicare of Augusta Ltd., Columbia Tampa Bay Division Inc., Columbia Valley Healthcare System L.P., Columbia West Bank Hospital Inc., Columbia Westbank Healthcare L.P., Columbia-CSA/HS Greater Canton Area Healthcare System L.P., Columbia-CSA/HS Greater Cleveland Area Healthcare System L.P., Columbia-Georgia PT Inc., Columbia-Osceola Imaging Center Inc., Columbia-Quantum Inc., Columbia-SDH Holdings Inc., Columbia/Alleghany Regional Hospital Incorporated, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation of Central Texas, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation of Northern Ohio, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation of South Carolina, Columbia/HCA Heartcare of Corpus Christi Inc., Columbia/HCA International Group Inc., Columbia/HCA John Randolph Inc., Columbia/HCA Middle East Management Company, Columbia/HCA Physician Hospital Organization Medical Center Hospital, Columbia/HCA San Clemente Inc., Columbia/HCA of Baton Rouge Inc., Columbia/HCA of Houston Inc., Columbia/HCA of New Orleans Inc., Columbia/HCA of North Texas Inc., Columbine Psychiatric Center Inc., Columbus Cardiology Inc., Columbus Cath Lab Inc., Columbus Cath Lab LLC, Columbus Doctors Hospital Inc., Commonwealth Perinatal Services LLC, Commonwealth Specialists of Kentucky LLC, Community Hospital Family Practice LLC, Comprehensive Radiation Oncology LLC, Comprehensive Radiology Management Services Ltd., Concept EFL Imaging Center LLC, Concept West EFL Imaging Center LLC, Congenital Heart Surgery Center PLLC, Conroe Hospital Corporation, Conroe Montgomery Physicians Group PLLC, Conroe Orthopedic Specialists PLLC, Conroe Partner LLC, Conroe Specialists of Texas PLLC, Continental Division I Inc., Coral Springs Surgi-Center Ltd., CoralStone Management Inc., Corpus Christi Healthcare Group Ltd., Corpus Christi Heart Clinic PLLC, Corpus Christi Primary Care Associates PLLC, Corpus Christi Psychiatric Specialists PLLC, Corpus Christi Radiation Oncology PLLC, Corpus Christi Surgery Center L.P., Corpus Christi Surgery Ltd., Corpus Christi Surgicenter LLC, Corpus Surgicare Inc., Countryside Surgery Center Ltd., Crewe Outpatient Imaging LLC, Cumberland Medical Center Inc., Cy-Fair Medical Center Hospital LLC, DFW Physicians Group PLLC, DOMC Property LLC, DS Real Estate Holdings LLC, Daleville Imaging L.P., Daleville Imaging Manager LLC, Dallas CardioThoracic Surgery Consultants PLLC, Dallas Cardiology Specialists PLLC, Dallas Hand Surgery Center PLLC, Dallas Medical Specialists PLLC, Dallas Neuro-Stroke Affiliates PLLC, Dallas Pediatric Neurosurgery Specialists PLLC, Dallas/Ft. Worth Physician LLC, Davie Medical Center LLC, Daytona Medical Center Inc., Dean 4641 LLC, Deep Purple Investments LLC, Del Sol Bariatric Clinic PLLC, Delray EFL Imaging Center LLC, Denton Cancer Center PLLC, Denton County Hospitalist Program PLLC, Denton Pediatric Physicians PLLC, Denton Regional Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Denver Clinic Surgicenter LLC, Denver Mid-Town Surgery Center Ltd., Denver Surgicenter LLC, Derry ASC Inc., Diagnostic Breast Center Inc., Diagnostic Mammography Services G.P., Diagnostic Services G.P., Dickson Surgery Center L.P., Doctors Bay Area Physician Hospital Organization, Doctors Hospital (Conroe) Inc., Doctors Hospital Columbus GA-Joint Venture, Doctors Hospital Surgery Center L.P., Doctors Hospital of Augusta LLC, Doctors Hospital of Augusta Neurology LLC, Doctors Osteopathic Medical Center Inc., Doctors Same Day Surgery Center Inc., Doctors Same Day Surgery Center Ltd., Doctors-I Inc., Doctors-II Inc., Doctors-III Inc., Doctors-IV Inc., Doctors-IX Inc., Doctors-V Inc., Doctors-VI Inc., Doctors-VII Inc., Doctors-VIII Inc., Doctors-X Inc., Doctors Memorial Hospital of Spartanburg Limited Partnership, Dominion Hospital Physicians Group LLC, Dublin Community Hospital LLC, Dublin Heart Specialists LLC, Dublin Multispecialty LLC, Dura Medical Inc., E.P. Physical Therapy Centers Inc., EASTSIDE URGENT CARE LLC, EHCA Diagnostics LLC, EHCA Eastside Occupational Medicine Center LLC, EHCA LLC, EHCA Metropolitan LLC, EHCA Parkway LLC, EHCA Peachtree LLC, EHCA West Paces LLC, EIRMC Hospitalist Services LLC, EMMC LLC, EP Health LLC, EP Holdco LLC, EPIC Development Inc., EPIC Diagnostic Centers Inc., EPIC Healthcare Management Company, EPIC Properties Inc., EPIC Surgery Centers Inc., EPSC L.P., East Falls Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery LLC, East Falls Family Medicine LLC, East Falls Plastic Surgery LLC, East Florida - DMC Inc., East Florida Behavioral Health Network LLC, East Florida Cardiology Network LLC, East Florida CareNow Urgent Care LLC, East Florida Division Inc., East Florida Emergency Physician Group LLC, East Florida Healthcare LLC, East Florida Hospitalists LLC, East Florida Imaging Holdings LLC, East Florida Primary Care LLC, East Houston Primary Care PLLC, East Houston Specialists PLLC, East Layton Internal Medicine LLC, East Orthopedics PLLC, East Pointe Hospital Inc., Eastern Idaho Brachytherapy Equipment LLC, Eastern Idaho Brachytherapy Equipment Manager LLC, Eastern Idaho Care Partners ACO LLC, Eastern Idaho Care Partners Holdings LLC, Eastern Idaho Care Partners LLC, Eastern Idaho Health Services Inc., Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center Inpatient Services LLC, Eastside Behavioral Health Associates LLC, Eastside General Surgery LLC, Eastside Heart and Vascular LLC, Eastside Medical Center LLC, Eastside Surgery Center LLC, Edmond General Surgery LLC, Edmond Hospitalists LLC, Edmond Physician Hospital Organization Inc., Edward White Hospital Inc., El Paso CareNow Urgent Care PLLC, El Paso Healthcare Provider Network, El Paso Healthcare System Ltd., El Paso Healthcare System Physician Services LLC, El Paso Nurses Unlimited Inc., El Paso Primary Care PLLC, El Paso Surgery Centers L.P., El Paso Surgicenter Inc., Eldridge Family Practitioners PLLC, Elite Family Health of Plano PLLC, Elite OB-GYN Services of El Paso PLLC, Elite Orthopaedics of El Paso PLLC, Elite Orthopaedics of Irving PLLC, Elite Orthopaedics of Plano PLLC, Elstree Outpatient Centre LLP, Emergency Physicians at Wesley Medical Center LLC, Emergency Providers Group LLC, Emergency Psychiatric Medicine PLLC, Encino Hospital Corporation Inc., Endocrinology Associates of Lees Summit LLC, Endoscopy Surgicare of Plano LLC, Endoscopy of Plano L.P., Englewood Community Hospital Auxiliary Inc., Englewood Community Hospital Inc., Envision Stakes LLC, Eye Care Surgicare Ltd. a Missouri limited partnership, FHAL LLC, FMH Health Services LLC, Fairfax Surgical Center L.P., Fairview Medical Services LLC, Fairview Park GP LLC, Fairview Park Limited Partnership, Fairview Partner LLC, Family Care Partners LLC, Family Care of E. Jackson County LLC, Family First Medicine in Brownsville PLLC, Family Health Medical Group of Overland Park LLC, Family Health Specialists of Lees Summit LLC, Family Medicine of Blacksburg LLC, Family Practice at Forest Hill LLC, Family Practice at Retreat LLC, Family Practitioners of Montgomery PLLC, Family Practitioners of Pearland PLLC, Fannin MOB LLC, Fannin MOB Property Management LLC, Far West Division Inc., Fawcett Memorial Hospital Inc., Florida Care Partners LLC, Florida Care Partners Orlando LLC, Florida Home Health Services-Private Care Inc., Florida Outpatient Surgery Center Ltd., Flower Mound Surgery Center Ltd., Focus Hand Surgicenter LLC, Foot & Ankle Specialty Services LLC, Forest Park Surgery Pavilion Inc., Forest Park Surgery Pavilion L.P., Fort Bend Hospital Inc., Fort Chiswell Family Practice LLC, Fort Myers Market Inc., Fort Pierce Immediate Care Center Inc., Fort Pierce Orthopaedics LLC, Fort Pierce Surgery Center Ltd., Fort Walton Beach Medical Center Inc., Fort Worth Investments Inc., Forward Pathology Solutions LLC, Four Rivers Medical Center PHO Inc., Frankfort Hospital Inc., Frankfort Wound Care LLC, Freeport Family Medicine LLC, Fremont Womens Health LLC, Frisco Surgicare LLC, Frisco Warren Parkway 91 Inc., Frist Clinic Express LLC, Ft. Pierce Surgicare LLC, Ft. Walton Beach Anesthesia Services LLC, G. Rowe M.D. PLLC, G. Schnider M.D. PLLC, G. Voorhees M.D. PLLC, G.P. Martin Fletcher & Associates LLC, GA PHYSICIAN SERVICES LLC, GA Urgentcare Holding LLC, GHC-Galen Health Care LLC, GI Associates of Denton PLLC, GI Associates of Lewisville PLLC, GME Services of Osceola LLC, GPCH-GP Inc., GYN-Oncology of Southwest Virginia LLC, Gainesville GYN Oncology of North Florida Regional Medical Center LLC, Gainesville Physicians LLC, GalTex LLC, Galen (Kansas) Merger LLC, Galen BH Inc., Galen Center for Professional Development Inc., Galen College of Nursing, Galen Diagnostic Multicenter Ltd., Galen GOK LLC, Galen Global Finance Inc., Galen Health Institutes Inc., Galen Health Partners Limited, Galen Holdco LLC, Galen Hospital Alaska Inc., Galen Hospital of Baytown Inc., Galen Hospital-Pembroke Pines Inc., Galen International Holdings Inc., Galen KY LLC, Galen MCS LLC, Galen MRMC LLC, Galen Medical Corporation, Galen NMC LLC, Galen NSH LLC, Galen Property LLC, Galen SOM LLC, Galen SSH LLC, Galen Virginia Hospital Corporation, Galen of Aurora Inc., Galen of Florida Inc., Galen of Illinois Inc., Galen of Kentucky Inc., Galen of Mississippi Inc., Galen of Virginia Inc., Galen of West Virginia Inc., Galen-Soch Inc., Galencare Inc., Galendeco Inc., Galichia Anesthesia Services LLC, Galichia Emergency Physicians LLC, Garden Park Community Hospital Limited Partnership, Garden Park Hospitalist Program LLC, Garden Park Investments L.P., Garden Park Physician Group - Specialty Care LLC, Garden Park Physician Group Inc., Gardens EFL Imaging Center LLC, Gastroenterology Specialists of Middle Tennessee LLC, General Hospitals of Galen Inc., General Medical Clinics Limited, General Surgeons of Houston PLLC, General Surgeons of North Richland Hills PLLC, General Surgeons of Pasadena PLLC, General and Cardiovascular Surgeons of Conroe PLLC, Generations Family Practice Inc., GenoSpace LLC, Georgia Health Holdings Inc., Georgia L.P., Georgia Psychiatric Company Inc., Glemm SA, Good Samaritan Hospital L.P., Good Samaritan Hospital LLC, Good Samaritan Surgery Center L.P., Goppert-Trinity Family Care LLC, Grace Family Practice LLC, Gramercy Eye Surgicenter LLC, Gramercy Surgery Center Ltd., Grand Strand Regional Medical Center LLC, Grand Strand Senior Health Center LLC, Grand Strand Specialty Associates LLC, Grand Strand Surgical Specialists LLC, Grandview Health Care Clinic LLC, Grant Center Hospital of Ocala Inc., Grayson Primary Care LLC, Greater Gwinnett Internal Medicine Associates LLC, Greater Gwinnett Physician Corporation, Greater Houston Preferred Provider Option Inc., Greater Tampa Bay Physician Network LLC, Greater Tampa Bay Physician Specialists LLC, Greater Tampa Bay Physicians - Pinellas LLC, Green Oaks Hospital Subsidiary L.P., Greenview Hospital Inc., Greenview PrimeCare LLC, Greenview Specialty Associates LLC, Gulf Coast Division Inc., Gulf Coast Electrophysiology Associates PLLC, Gulf Coast Inpatient Specialists LLC, Gulf Coast Medical Center Primary Care LLC, Gulf Coast Medical Ventures Inc., Gulf Coast Multispecialty Services LLC, Gulf Coast Physician Administrators Inc., Gulf Coast Provider Network Inc., Gwinnett Community Hospital Inc., Gynecology Specialists of Utah LLC, H2U Wellness Centers - Del Sol Medical Center PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers - Las Palmas Medical Center PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers - Medical City Dallas PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers - St. Davids Medical Center PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers LLC, H2U Wellness Centers  Clear Lake Regional Medical Center PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers  Conroe ISD PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers  Conroe Regional Medical Center PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers  Corpus Christi PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers  El Paso PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers  PISD PLLC, H2U Wellness Centers  San Benito CISD PLLC, HBP Lone Star Inc., HCA - IT&S Field Operations Inc., HCA - IT&S Inventory Management Inc., HCA - IT&S PBS Field Operations Inc., HCA - IT&S TN Field Operations Inc., HCA - Information Technology & Services Inc., HCA - Raleigh Community Hospital Inc., HCA - Viera ALF LLC, HCA - WHS Progressive LLC, HCA - WHS Services LLC, HCA ASD Financial Operations LLC, HCA ASD Sales Services LLC, HCA American Finance LLC, HCA Carenow Limited, HCA Central Group Inc., HCA Central/West Texas Physicians Management LLC, HCA Chattanooga Market Inc., HCA Development Company Inc., HCA Eastern Group Inc., HCA Global Capital LLP, HCA Gulf Coast GME PLLC, HCA Health Services of California Inc., HCA Health Services of Florida Inc., HCA Health Services of Georgia Inc., HCA Health Services of Louisiana Inc., HCA Health Services of Miami Inc., HCA Health Services of Midwest Inc., HCA Health Services of New Hampshire Inc., HCA Health Services of Tennessee Inc., HCA Health Services of Texas Inc., HCA Health Services of Virginia Inc., HCA Health Services of West Virginia Inc., HCA Healthcare Mission Fund LLC, HCA Healthcare UK Limited, HCA Holdco LLC, HCA Human Resources LLC, HCA Imaging Services of North Florida Inc., HCA Inc., HCA International Holdings Limited, HCA International Limited, HCA LewisGale Regional Cancer Centers Clinical Co-Management Company LLC, HCA Long Term Health Services of Miami Inc., HCA Luxembourg 1 Sarl, HCA Luxembourg 2 Sarl, HCA Luxembourg Equities Sarl, HCA Luxembourg Finance Limited, HCA Luxembourg Investments Sarl, HCA Management Services L.P., HCA Medical City Limited, HCA Medical Services Inc., HCA Midwest Comprehensive Care Inc., HCA Outpatient Clinic Services of Miami Inc., HCA Outpatient Imaging Services Group Inc., HCA Patient Safety Organization LLC, HCA Pearland GP Inc., HCA Physician Services Inc., HCA Plano Imaging Inc., HCA Property GP LLC, HCA Psychiatric Company, HCA Purchasing Limited, HCA Realty Inc., HCA Richmond Cardiac Clinical Co-Management Company LLC, HCA SF LLC, HCA SFB 1 LLC, HCA Sarasota Orthopedic and Spine Clinical Co-Management Company LLC, HCA Squared LLC, HCA Staffing Limited, HCA Swiss Capital 1 LLP, HCA Swiss Capital 2 LLP, HCA Switzerland Finance GmbH, HCA Switzerland Holding GmbH, HCA Switzerland Limited, HCA UK Capital Limited, HCA UK Holdings Limited, HCA UK Investments Limited, HCA UK Limited, HCA UK Services Limited, HCA Wesley Rehabilitation Hospital Inc., HCA Western Group Inc., HCA-Access Healthcare Holdings LLC, HCA-Access Healthcare Partner Inc., HCA-California Urgent Care Holdings LLC, HCA-EMS Holdings LLC, HCA-EmCare Holdings LLC, HCA-Georgia Urgent Care Holdings LLC, HCA-HBPS Holdings LLC, HCA-HealthONE LLC, HCA-Solis Holdings Inc., HCA-Solis Mammography Service Holdings of Continental LLC, HCA-Solis Mammography Service Holdings of Gulf Coast LLC, HCA-Solis Mammography Service Holdings of North Texas LLC, HCA-Solis Mammography Service Holdings of TriStar LLC, HCA-Solis Mammography Services LLC, HCA-Solis Master LLC, HCA-Urgent Care Holdings LLC, HCAPS Anesthesia Manager LLC, HCAPS Conroe Affiliation Inc., HCOL Inc., HD&S Corp. Successor Inc., HDH Thoracic Surgeons LLC, HHBY Holdings LLC, HHNC LLC, HICCH-SCL LLC, HM Acquisition LLC, HM OMCOS LLC, HMMG 1226 LLC, HPG Energy L.P., HPG Enterprises LLC, HPG GP LLC, HPG Solutions LLC, HSS Holdco LLC, HSS Systems LLC, HSS Virginia L.P., HTI Gulf Coast Inc., HTI Health Services of North Carolina Inc., HTI Hospital Holdings Inc., HTI MOB LLC, HTI MSO LLC, HTI Memorial Hospital Corporation, HTI Physician Services of Utah Inc., HWCA PLLC, Hamilton Memorial Hospital Inc., Hamsard 3160 Limited, Harley Street Clinic @ The Groves LLP, Hathor Chelsea Ltd., Healdsburg General Hospital Inc., Health Care Indemnity Inc., Health Insight Capital LLC, Health International Billing Partners Limited, Health Midwest Medical Group Inc., Health Midwest Office Facilities Corporation, Health Midwest Ventures Group Inc., Health Partners of Kansas Inc., Health Service Partners Inc., Health Services (Delaware) Inc., Health Services Merger Inc., Health to You LLC, HealthCoast Physician Group LLC, HealthONE Aurora Investment LLC, HealthONE Care Partners LLC, HealthONE CareNow Urgent Care LLC, HealthONE Clear Creek LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Bariatric Medicine LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Behavioral Health LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Cancer Care LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Cancer Specialties LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Cardiovascular LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Medical Specialties LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Neurosciences LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Obstetrics and Gynecology LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Occupational Medicine LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Oncology Hematology LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Orthopedic Specialists LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Otolaryngology Specialists LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Pediatric Cardiovascular Surgery LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Pediatric Specialties LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Primary Care LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Spine Specialists LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Spine Surgeons LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Surgery Neurological LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Surgical Specialties LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Transplant Services LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Womens Services LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services - Youth Rehabilitation LLC, HealthONE Clinic Services LLC, HealthONE High Street Primary Care Center LLC, HealthONE IRL Pathology Services LLC, HealthONE Institutes for Clinical Research LLC, HealthONE Lowry LLC, HealthONE Radiation Therapy at Red Rocks LLC, HealthONE Radiation Therapy at Thornton LLC, HealthONE Ridge View Endoscopy Center LLC, HealthONE Surgicare of Ridge View LLC, HealthONE Urologic LLC, HealthONE at Breckenridge LLC, HealthONE of Denver Inc., HealthOne Heart Care LLC, HealthOne Lincoln Investment LLC, HealthOne Westside Investment LLC, HealthTrust Europe Company Limited, HealthTrust Europe LLP, HealthTrust Locums Inc., HealthTrust Workforce Solutions LLC, Healthcare Oklahoma Inc., Healthcare Purchasing Alliance LLC, Healthcare Sales National Management Services Group LLC, Healthcare Technology Assessment Corporation, Healthco LLC, Healthnet of Kentucky LLC, Healthserv Acquisition LLC, Healthtrust Inc. - The Hospital Company, Healthtrust MOB Tennessee LLC, Healthtrust Purchasing Group L.P., Healthtrust Utah Management Services Inc., Healthy State Inc., Heart Specialist of North Texas PLLC, Heart of America ASC LLC, Heart of America Surgicenter LLC, Heartcare of Texas Ltd., Hearthstone Home Health Inc., Heartland Womens Group at Wesley LLC, Heathrow Imaging LLC, Heathrow Internal Medicine LLC, Hendersonville Hospital Corporation, Hendersonville Hospitalist Services Inc., Hendersonville OB/GYN LLC, Hendersonville ODC LLC, Hendersonville Primary Care LLC, Henrico Doctors Hospital - Forest Campus Property LLC, Henrico Doctors Neurology Associates LLC, Henrico Doctors OB GYN Specialists LLC, Henrico Surgical Specialists LLC, Heritage Family Care LLC, Heritage Hospital Inc., Heritage Medical Care LLC, Hermitage Primary Care LLC, Hidalgo County Family Practitioners PLLC, Hidden Lakes Health Center PLLC, Highlands Regional Medical Center, Hip & Joint Specialists of North Texas PLLC, Homecare North Inc., Hometrust Management Services Inc., Horizon Orthopedics LLC, Horizon Surgical LLC, Hospital Corp. LLC, Hospital Corporation of America, Hospital Corporation of Lake Worth, Hospital Corporation of Tennessee, Hospital Corporation of Utah, Hospital Development Properties Inc., Hospital Partners Merger LLC, Hospital Realty Corporation, Hospital-Based CRNA Services Inc., Hospitalists at Centennial Medical Center LLC, Hospitalists at Fairview Park LLC, Hospitalists at Greenview Regional Hospital LLC, Hospitalists at Horizon Medical Center LLC, Hospitalists at Parkridge LLC, Hospitalists at StoneCrest LLC, Hospitalists at Wesley Medical Center LLC, Hospitalists of the Wabash Valley LLC, Houston - PPH LLC, Houston CareNow Urgent Care PLLC, Houston Healthcare Holdings Inc., Houston NW Manager LLC, Houston Northwest Concessions L.L.C., Houston Northwest Operating Company L.L.C., Houston Northwest Surgical Partners Inc., Houston Obstetrics and Gynecology for Women PLLC, Houston Pediatric Specialty Group PLLC, Houston Urologic Surgicenter LLC, Houston Womans Hospital Partner LLC, ICU Associates of West Houston PLLC, IMX Holdings LLC, IRL Pathology Services MidAmerica LLC, Idaho Behavioral Health Services LLC, Idaho Physician Services Inc., Illinois Psychiatric Hospital Company Inc., Imaging Realty LLC, Imaging Services of Appomattox LLC, Imaging Services of Jacksonville LLC, Imaging Services of Louisiana LLC, Imaging Services of Louisiana Manager LLC, Imaging Services of Orlando LLC, Imaging Services of Richmond LLC, Imaging Services of Roanoke LLC, Imaging Services of West Boynton LLC, InVivoLink Inc., Independence Neurosurgery Services LLC, Independence Regional Medical Group LLC, Independence Surgicare Inc., Indian Path Hospital Inc., Indianapolis Hospital Partner LLC, Institute for Womens Health and Body LLC, Institute of Advanced ENT Surgery LLC, Integrated Regional Lab LLC, Integrated Regional Laboratories LLP, Integrated Regional Laboratories Pathology Services LLC, Intensive Care Consortium Inc., Internal Medicine Associates of Huntsville PLLC, Internal Medicine Associates of Southern Hills LLC, Internal Medicine of Blacksburg LLC, Internal Medicine of Pasadena PLLC, Internist Associates of Houston PLLC, Isleworth Partners Inc., J. M. Garcia M.D. PLLC, JCSH LLC, JDGC Management LLC, JFK Internal Medicine Faculty Practice LLC, JFK Medical Center Limited Partnership, JPM AA Housing LLC, Jackson County Medical Group LLC, Jackson County Pulmonary Medical Group LLC, Jacksonville CareNow Urgent Care LLC, Jacksonville Multispecialty Services LLC, Jacksonville Surgery Center Ltd., James River Internists LLC, John Randolph Family Practice LLC, John Randolph OB/GYN LLC, John Randolph Surgeons LLC, Johnson County Neurology LLC, Johnson County Surgery Center L.P., Johnson County Surgicenter L.L.C., Jordan Family Health L.L.C., Jupiter EFL Imaging Center LLC, KC Pain ASC LLC, KC Surgicare LLC, KPH-Consolidation Inc., Kansas CareNow Urgent Care LLC, Kansas City Cardiac Arrhythmia Research LLC, Kansas City Gastroenterology & Hepatology Physicians Group LLC, Kansas City Neurology Associates LLC, Kansas City Pulmonology Practice LLC, Kansas City Surgery Center Properties LLC, Kansas City Vascular & General Surgery Group LLC, Kansas City Womens Clinic Group LLC, Kansas Healthserv LLC, Kansas Pulmonary and Sleep Specialists LLC, Kansas Trauma and Critical Care Specialists LLC, Kathy L. Summers M.D. PLLC, Kendall Healthcare Group Ltd., Kendall Regional Medical Center LLC, Kendall Regional Urgent Care LLC, Kennedale Primary Care PLLC, Kingwood Multi-Specialty Group PLLC, Kingwood Surgery Center LLC, Kingwood Surgicenter LLC, Kissimmee Surgicare Ltd., Kyle Primary Care PLLC, L E Corporation, LAD Imaging LLC, LGMC Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, LOC @ The Christie LLP, LOC @ The London Bridge Hospital LLP, LOC Partnership LLP, LPN TeleBehavioral Health PLLC, Lafayette OB Hospitalists LLC, Lafayette Urogynecology & Urology Center LLC, Lake City Imaging LLC, Lake City Regional Medical Group LLC, Lake Forest Family Health PLLC, Lakeside Radiology LLC, Lakeside Womens Services LLC, Lakeview Cardiology Specialists LLC, Lakeview Hospital Physician Services LLC, Lakeview Internal Medicine LLC, Lakeview Medical Center LLC, Lakeview Regional Medical Center Inpatient Services LLC, Lakeview Regional Physician Group LLC, Lakeview Urology & General Surgery LLC, Lakewood Surgicare Inc., Laredo Medco LLC, Largo Medical Center Inc., Largo Physician Group LLC, Las Colinas Primary Care PLLC, Las Colinas Surgery Center Ltd., Las Encinas Hospital, Las Palmas Del Sol Cardiology PLLC, Las Palmas Del Sol Internal Medicine PLLC, Las Palmas Del Sol Urgent Care PLLC, Las Vegas ASC LLC, Las Vegas Surgicare Inc., Las Vegas Surgicare Ltd. a Nevada Limited Partnership, Lawnwood Cardiovascular Surgery LLC, Lawnwood Healthcare Specialists LLC, Lawnwood Medical Center Inc., Layton Family Practice LLC, Leaders in Oncology Care Limited, Leadership Healthcare Holdings II L.P. L.L.P., Leadership Healthcare Holdings L.P. L.L.P., Lees Summit Family Care LLC, Leslie Cohan M.D. PLLC, Lewis-Gale Hospital Incorporated, Lewis-Gale Medical Center LLC, Lewis-Gale Physicians LLC, Lewisville Primary Care PLLC, Lewisville Surgicare LLC, Lincoln Surgery Center LLC, Live Oak Immediate Care Center LLC, London Oncology Clinic LLP, London Pathology Limited, London Radiography & Radiotherapy Services Limited, Lone Peak Hospital Inc., Lone Star Intensivists at Gulf Coast PLLC, Lonestar Provider Network, Longview Regional Physician Hospital Organization Inc., Lorain County Surgery Center Ltd., Los Gatos Surgical Center a California Limited Partnership, Los Robles Regional Medical Center, Los Robles Regional Medical Center MOB LLC, Los Robles SurgiCenter LLC, Loudoun Surgery Center LLC, Louisiana Psychiatric Company Inc., Loveland Surgicenter LLC, Low Country Health Services Inc. of the Southeast, Lowry Surgicenter LLC, M. Jamshidi D.O. PLLC, MCA Investment Company, MCA-CTMC Holdings LLC, MEC Endoscopy LLC, MFA G.P. LLC, MFM Fact PLLC, MGH Medical Inc., MH Anesthesiology Physicians LLC, MH Angel Medical Center LLLP, MH Asheville Specialty Hospital LLC, MH Blue Ridge Medical Center LLLP, MH Eckerd Living Center LLLP, MH Highlands-Cashiers Medical Center LLLP, MH Hospital Holdings Inc., MH Hospital Manager LLC, MH Master Holdings LLLP, MH Master LLC, MH McDowell Imaging LLLP, MH Mission Hospital LLLP, MH Mission Hospital McDowell LLLP, MH Mission Imaging LLLP, MH Physician Services LLC, MH Transylvania Imaging LLLP, MH Transylvania Regional Hospital LLLP, MHS Partnership Holdings JSC Inc., MHS Partnership Holdings SDS Inc., MHS SC Partner L.L.C., MHS Surgery Centers L.P., MMC Sleep Lab Management LLC, MOSC Sports Medicine Inc., MOVCO Inc., MP Management LLC, MRT&C Inc., MSL Acquisition LLC, MVH Professional Services LLC, Macon Healthcare LLC, Macon Northside Health Group LLC, Macon Northside Hospital LLC, Macon Psychiatric Hospitalists LLC, Madison Behavioral Health LLC, Mainland Family Medicine PLLC, Mainland Multi-Specialty Group PLLC, Mainland Primary Care Physicians PLLC, Management Services Holdings Inc., Manatee Surgicare Ltd., Marietta Outpatient Medical Building Inc., Marietta Outpatient Surgery Ltd., Marietta Surgical Center Inc., Marion Community Hospital Inc., Mark Gottesman M.D. PLLC, Martin Fletcher & Associates L.P., Martin Fletcher Associates Holdings Inc., Mary Alice Cowan M.D. PLLC, Maternal Fetal Medicine Specialists of Corpus Christi PLLC, Maternal Fetal Services of Utah LLC, Maury County Behavioral Health LLC, Mayhill Cancer Center LLC, McAllen Comprehensive Upper Extremity Center PLLC, McKinney Surgeons PLLC, Mechanicsville Imaging LLC, Mecklenburg Surgical Land Development Ltd., Med City Dallas Outpatient Surgery Center L.P., Med Corp. Inc., Med Group - Southern Hills Hospitalists LLC, Med-Center Hosp./Houston Inc., Med-Point of New Hampshire Inc., Medi Flight of Oklahoma LLC, MediCredit Inc., MediPurchase Inc., MediStone Healthcare Ventures Inc., MediVision Inc., MediVision of Mecklenburg County Inc., MediVision of Tampa Inc., Medical Arts Hospital of Texarkana Inc., Medical Associates of Ocala LLC, Medical Care America Colorado LLC, Medical Care America LLC, Medical Care Financial Services Corp., Medical Care Real Estate Finance Inc., Medical Care Surgery Center Inc., Medical Center - West Inc., Medical Center Imaging Inc., Medical Center Surgery Associates L.P., Medical Center of Baton Rouge Inc., Medical Center of Plano Partner LLC, Medical Center of Port St. Lucie Inc., Medical Center of Santa Rosa Inc., Medical Center of Southwest Florida LLC, Medical Centers of Oklahoma LLC, Medical City Dallas Hospital Inc., Medical City Dallas Partner LLC, Medical City Dallas Primary Care PLLC, Medical City Frisco, Medical City OB-GYN PLLC, Medical City Pediatrics PLLC, Medical City Specialty Surgicenter of Dallas LLC, Medical City Surgery Center of Alliance LLC, Medical City Surgery Center of Frisco LLC, Medical City Surgery Center of Lewisville LLC, Medical City Transplant PLLC, Medical Corporation of America, Medical Group - Dickson Inc., Medical Group - Southern Hills of Brentwood LLC, Medical Group - Southern Hills of Nolensville LLC, Medical Group - StoneCrest FP Inc., Medical Group - StoneCrest Inc., Medical Group - Stonecrest Pulmonology LLC, Medical Group - Summit Inc., Medical Imaging Inc., Medical Imaging of Colorado LLC, Medical Office Buildings of Kansas LLC, Medical Oncology Associates LLC, Medical Partners of North Florida LLC, Medical Plaza Ambulatory Surgery Center Associates L.P., Medical Specialties Inc., Memorial Family Practice Associates LLC, Memorial Health Primary Care at St. Johns Bluff LLC, Memorial Healthcare Group Inc., Memorial Neurosurgery Group LLC, Memorial Satilla Specialists LLC, Memorial University Medical Center, Menorah Medical Group LLC, Menorah Urgent Care LLC, Mercy ASC LLC, Metairie Primary Care Associates LLC, Methodist Ambulatory Surgery Center of Boerne LLC, Methodist Ambulatory Surgery Center of Landmark LLC, Methodist Cardiology Physicians, Methodist CareNow Physician Associates, Methodist CareNow Urgent Care PLLC, Methodist Healthcare System of San Antonio Ltd. L.L.P., Methodist Inpatient Management Group, Methodist Medical Center ASC L.P., Methodist Physician Alliance, Methodist Physician Practice Services LLC, Methodist Physician Practices PLLC, Metroplex Surgicenters Inc., Metropolitan Multispecialty Physicians Group Inc., Miami Beach EFL Imaging Center LLC, Miami Beach Healthcare Group Ltd., Miami Dade Surgical Specialists LLC, Miami Lakes Surgery Center Ltd., Miami-Dade Cardiology Consultants LLC, Michael Mann M.D. PLLC, Mid-America Surgery Center LLC, Mid-America Surgery Institute LLC, Mid-Cities Surgi-Center Inc., Mid-Continent Health Services Inc., MidAmerica Division Inc., MidAmerica Oncology LLC, Middle Georgia Hospital LLC, Middle Georgia Urgent Care Services LLC, Middle Tennessee Neurology LLC, Midtown Diagnostics LLC, Midwest Cardiology Specialists LLC, Midwest Cardiovascular & Thoracic Surgery LLC, Midwest Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgeons of Kansas LLC, Midwest Division - ACH LLC, Midwest Division - CMC LLC, Midwest Division - LRHC LLC, Midwest Division - LSH LLC, Midwest Division - MCI LLC, Midwest Division - MMC LLC, Midwest Division - OPRMC LLC, Midwest Division - RBH LLC, Midwest Division - RMC LLC, Midwest Division Spine Care LLC, Midwest Doctors Group LLC, Midwest Heart & Vascular Specialists LLC, Midwest Holdings Inc., Midwest Infectious Disease Specialists LLC, Midwest Medicine Associates LLC, Midwest Metropolitan Physicians Group LLC, Midwest Oncology Associates LLC, Midwest Trauma Services LLC, Midwest Womens Healthcare Specialists LLC, Mikrod Services Inc., Mill Creek Outpatient Services LLC, Millenium Health Care of Oklahoma Inc., Mission Bay Memorial Hospital Inc., Mission Community Anesthesiology Specialists LLC, Mission Employer Solutions LLC, Mission Health, Mission Health Partners Inc., Missouri Healthcare System L.P., Mobile Corps. Inc., Mobile Heartbeat, Mobile Heartbeat LLC, Montgomery Cancer Center LLC, Montgomery Hospitalists LLC, Montgomery Regional Hospital Inc., Montgomery Surgery Associates LLC, Mountain Division - CVH LLC, Mountain Division Inc., Mountain View Hospital Inc., Mountain View MRI Associates Ltd., Mountain West Surgery Center LLC, MountainStar Behavioral Health LLC, MountainStar Brigham General Surgery LLC, MountainStar Canyon Surgical Clinic LLC, MountainStar Cardiology Ogden Regional LLC, MountainStar Cardiology St. Marks LLC, MountainStar Intensivist Services LLC, MountainStar Medical Group - Cache Valley LLC, MountainStar Medical Group - Ogden Regional Medical Center LLC, MountainStar Medical Group - St. Marks Hospital LLC, MountainStar Medical Group Neurosurgery-St. Marks LLC, MountainStar Medical Group Timpanogos Primary Care LLC, MountainStar Medical Group Timpanogos Specialty Care LLC, MountainStar Specialty Services LLC, MountainStar Urgent Care LLC, MountainView GME Primary Care LLC, Mountainstar Brigham OBGYN LLC, Mountainstar Cardiovascular Services LLC, Mountainstar Ogden Pediatrics LLC, Movement Disorders of North Texas PLLC, Mt. Ogden Utah Surgical Center LLC, NPAS Inc., NPAS Solutions LLC, NT Urgent Care PLLC, NTGP LLC, NTMC Management Company, NTMC Venture Inc., NTX Pathology Program PLLC, Nashville Psychiatric Company Inc., Nashville Shared Services General Partnership, Nashville Surgicenter LLC, Natchez Medical Associates LLC, Natchez Surgery Center LLC, National Association of Senior Friends, National Contact Center Management Group LLC, National Patient Account Services Inc., National Transfer Center Management Services LLC, Navarro Memorial Hospital Inc., NeighborMD Management LLC, Network MS of Florida Inc., Network Management Services Inc., Neuro Affiliates Company, Neuro-Hospitalist of Clear Lake PLLC, NeuroHospitalist of McAllen PLLC, Neurological Eye Specialists of North Texas PLLC, Neurological Specialists PLLC, Neurological Specialists of McKinney PLLC, Neurology Associates of Hendersonville LLC, Neurology Associates of Kansas LLC, Neurosurgery Atlanta LLC, Neurosurgery of Kingwood PLLC, Neurosurgical Associates of North Texas PLLC, Neurosurgical Specialists of El Paso PLLC, Neurosurgical Specialists of North Texas PLLC, Nevada Surgery Center of Southern Hills L.P., Nevada Surgicare of Southern Hills LLC, Nevada Urgent Care Holdings Inc., New Iberia Healthcare LLC, New Iberia Holdings Inc., New Port Richey Hospital Inc., New Port Richey Surgery Center Ltd., New Rose Holding Company Inc., Niceville Family Practice LLC, North Augusta Imaging Management LLC, North Augusta Imaging Services LLC, North Augusta Rehab Health Center LLC, North Austin Plastic Surgery Associates PLLC, North Austin Surgery Center L.P., North Brandon Imaging LLC, North Central Florida Health System Inc., North Central Methodist ASC L.P., North Charleston Diagnostic Imaging Center LLC, North Florida Cancer Center Lake City LLC, North Florida Cancer Center Live Oak LLC, North Florida Cancer Center Tallahassee LLC, North Florida Division I Inc., North Florida Division Practice Inc., North Florida GI Center GP Inc., North Florida GI Center Ltd., North Florida Immediate Care Center Inc., North Florida Neurosurgery LLC, North Florida Outpatient Imaging Center Ltd., North Florida Physician Services Inc., North Florida Physicians LLC, North Florida Radiation Oncology LLC, North Florida Regional Company Care LLC, North Florida Regional Freestanding Surgery Center L.P., North Florida Regional Investments Inc., North Florida Regional Medical Center Inc., North Florida Regional Psychiatry LLC, North Florida Regional Trauma LLC, North Florida Rehab Investments LLC, North Florida Surgical Associates LLC, North Georgia Primary Care Group LLC, North Hills Cardiac Catheterization Center L.P., North Hills Catheterization Lab LLC, North Hills Orthopaedic Surgeons PLLC, North Hills Surgicare L.P., North Houston - TRMC LLC, North Miami Beach Surgery Center Limited Partnership, North Miami Beach Surgical Center LLC, North Palm Beach County Surgery Center LLC, North River Physician Network LLC, North Shore Specialists of Texas PLLC, North Suburban Spine Center L.P., North Tampa Imaging LLC, North Texas - MCA LLC, North Texas Cardiology PLLC, North Texas Craniofacial Fellowship Program PLLC, North Texas Division Inc., North Texas General L.P., North Texas Geriatrics PLLC, North Texas Heart Surgery Center PLLC, North Texas Internal Medicine Specialists PLLC, North Texas Medical Center Inc., North Texas Neuro Stroke OP PLLC, North Texas Pulmonary Critical Care PLLC, North Texas Sports and Orthopedics Center PLLC, North Texas Stroke Center PLLC, North Texas of Hope PLLC, North Transfer Center LLC, Northeast Florida Cancer Services LLC, Northeast Methodist Surgicare Ltd., Northeast PHO Inc., Northern Utah Healthcare Corporation, Northern Utah Healthcare Imaging Holdco LLC, Northern Utah Imaging LLC, Northern Virginia CareNow Urgent Care LLC, Northern Virginia Community Hospital LLC, Northern Virginia Hospital Corporation, Northern Virginia Surgicenter LLC, Northlake Medical Center LLC, Northlake Physician Practice Network Inc., Northlake Surgical Center L.P., Northlake Surgicare Inc., Northside MRI Inc., Northwest Fla. Home Health Agency Inc., Northwest Florida Healthcare Systems Inc., Northwest Florida Multispecialty Physicians LLC, Northwest Florida Primary Care LLC, Northwest Medical Center Inc., Notami (Opelousas) Inc., Notami Hospitals LLC, Notami Hospitals of Florida Inc., Notami Hospitals of Louisiana Inc., Notami Hospitals of Missouri Inc., Notami LLC, Notco LLC, Nuclear Diagnosis Inc., OB Hospitalists of Womans Hospital PLLC, OB/GYN of Brownsville PLLC, OB/Gyn Associates of Denton PLLC, OBS Diagnostic and Treatment Centre LLP, ODP Holdings LLC, ODP Manager LLC, ODP Properties LLC, OHH Imaging Services LLC, OPRMC-HBP LLC, Oak Hill Acquisition Inc., Oak Hill Family Care LLC, Oak Hill Hospitalists LLC, Oakwood Surgery Center Ltd. LLP, Ocala Health Company Care LLC, Ocala Health Imaging Services LLC, Ocala Health Primary Care LLC, Ocala Health Surgical Group LLC, Ocala Health Trauma LLC, Ocala Regional Outpatient Services Inc., Ocala Stereotactic Radiosurgery LLC, Ocala Stereotactic Radiosurgery Partner LLC, Occupational Health Services of PRH LLC, Occupational and Family Medicine of South Texas, Ogden Imaging LLC, Ogden Internal Medicine & Urology LLC, Ogden Regional Health Plan Inc., Ogden Regional Medical Center Professional Billing LLC, Ogden Senior Center LLC, Ogden Tomotherapy LLC, Ogden Tomotherapy Manager LLC, Okaloosa Hospital Inc., Okeechobee Hospital Inc., Oklahoma Holding Company LLC, Oklahoma Outpatient Surgery Limited Partnership, Oklahoma Physicians - Medical Specialties LLC, Oklahoma Physicians - Obstetrics and Gynecology LLC, Oklahoma Physicians - Primary Care LLC, Oklahoma Physicians - Surgical Specialties LLC, Oklahoma Surgicare Inc., Old Fort Village LLC, On-Site Primary Care PLLC, Oncology Services of Corpus Christi LLC, Oncology Services of Corpus Christi Manager LLC, OneSourceMed Inc., Online Pathology Services Limited, Orange County Healthcare LLC, Orange Park Hospitalists LLC, Orange Park Medical Center Inc., Orlando CareNow Urgent Care LLC, Orlando Outpatient Surgical Center Inc., Orlando Outpatient Surgical Center Ltd., Orlando Surgicare Ltd., Orthopaedic Specialty Associates L.P., Orthopaedic Sports Specialty Associates Inc., Orthopedic Hospital Ltd., Orthopedics Specialists LLC, Osceola Neurological Associates LLC, Osceola Physician Network LLC, Osceola Regional Hospital Inc., Osceola Regional Hospitalists LLC, Osceola Surgical Associates LLC, Outpatient Cardiovascular Center of Central Florida LLC, Outpatient GP LLC, Outpatient Services - LAD LLC, Outpatient Services Holdings Inc., Outpatient Surgical Services Ltd., Outpatient Womens and Childrens Surgery Center Ltd., Overland Park Cardiovascular Inc., Overland Park Medical Specialists LLC, Overland Park Orthopedics LLC, Overland Park Surgical Specialties LLC, Oviedo Medical Center LLC, Ozarks Medical Services Inc., P&L Associates, P/SL Hyperbaric Partnership, PET CT LLP, PMM Inc., POH Holdings LLC, PSG Delegated Services LLC, PTS Solutions LLC, Pacific Partners Management Services Inc., Palm Beach EFL Imaging Center LLC, Palm Beach General Surgery LLC, Palm Beach Healthcare System Inc., Palm Beach Hospitalists Program LLC, Palmer Medical Center LLC, Palms West Gastroenterology LLC, Palms West Hospital Limited Partnership, Palms West Surgery Center Ltd., Paragon Physicians Hospital Organization of South Texas Inc., Paragon SDS Inc., Paragon Surgery Centers of Texas Inc., Paragon WSC Inc., Paragon of Texas Health Properties Inc., Parallon Business Solutions LLC, Parallon Enterprises LLC, Parallon Health Information Solutions LLC, Parallon Holdings LLC, Parallon Payroll Solutions LLC, Parallon Physician Services LLC, Parallon Revenue Cycle Services Inc., Park Central Surgical Center Ltd., Park Ridge Surgery Center LLC, Park South Imaging Center Ltd., Park View Insurance Company, Parkersburg SJ Holdings Inc., Parkland Hospitalists Program LLC, Parkland Oncology LLC, Parkland Physician Services Inc., Parkridge East Specialty Associates LLC, Parkridge Hospitalists Inc., Parkridge Medical Associates LLC, Parkridge Medical Center Inc., Parkridge Professionals Inc., Parkside Surgery Center Inc., Parkway Cardiac Center Ltd., Parkway Hospital Inc., Parkway Surgery Services Ltd., Parthenon Insurance Company Limited, Pasadena Bayshore Hospital Inc., PatientKeeper, PatientKeeper Inc., Patients First Neurology LLC, Pavilion 2 Condominium Property LLC, Pavilion 2 Medical Office Building Condominium Association Inc., Pavilion Surgicenter LLC, Peach State Anesthesia Partners LLC, Pearland Institute for Womens Health PLLC, Pearland Partner LLC, Pediatric Anesthesia Consultants of San Antonio PLLC, Pediatric Cardiac Intensivists of North Texas PLLC, Pediatric Critical Care of Clear Lake PLLC, Pediatric Hospitalists of Conroe PLLC, Pediatric Intensivist Group LLC, Pediatric Intensivists of El Paso PLLC, Pediatric Intensivists of North Texas PLLC, Pediatric Specialists of Clear Lake PLLC, Pediatric Specialty Clinic LLC, Pediatric Surgicare Inc., Pediatrics of Greater Houston PLLC, Pensacola Primary Care Inc., Physician Associates of Corporate Woods LLC, Physicians Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Physicians West Surgicenter LLC, Pinellas Medical LLC, Pinnacle Physician Network LLC, Pioneer Medical LLC, Plains Healthcare System Inc., Plano Ambulatory Surgery Associates L.P., Plano Heart Institute L.P., Plano Heart Management LLC, Plano Surgery Center - GP LLC, Plano Surgery Center Real Estate LLC, Plano Surgicenter Real Estate Manager LLC, Plano Urology PLLC, Plantation General Hospital L.P., Plaza Medical Specialists PLLC, Plaza Primary Care PLLC, Plaza Transplant Center PLLC, Podiatry of Clear Lake PLLC, Poinciana Medical Center Inc., Port St. Lucie Surgery Center Ltd., Portland Primary Care LLC, Portsmouth Regional Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Portsmouth Surgicenter LLC, Preferred Hospitals Inc., Preferred Works WC LLC, Premier ASC LLC, Premier Medical Management Ltd., Primary Care Medical Associates Inc., Primary Care Plano PLLC, Primary Care Services of Orlando LLC, Primary Care South PLLC, Primary Care West PLLC, Primary Care of West End LLC, Primary Health Asset Holdings Ltd., Primary Health Group Inc., Primary Health Inc., Primary Health Network of South Texas, Primary Health Physicians PLLC, Primary Medical Management Inc., Proaxis Therapy HealthOne LLC, Provident Professional Building Condominium Association Inc., Psychiatry Services of Osceola LLC, Pulaski Community Hospital Inc., Pulaski Urology LLC, Pulmonary Renal Intensivist Group LLC, Putnam Community Medical Center of North Florida LLC, Putnam Hospital Inc., Putnam Radiation Oncology LLC, Putnam Radiation Oncology Manager LLC, Putnam Surgical Group LLC, Quantum/Bellaire Imaging Ltd., Quick Care Centers LLC, Quivira Internal Medicine Inc., RCH LLC, RMC - Pulmonary LLC, RMC Transplant Physicians LLC, RMCA Professionals Mgmt LLC, ROi CPS LLC, Radford Family Medicine LLC, Radiation Oncology Center of Thornton LLC, Radiation Oncology Manager LLC, Raleigh Community Medical Office Building Ltd., Rapides After Hours Clinic L.L.C., Rapides Healthcare System L.L.C., Rapides Regional Physician Group LLC, Rapides Regional Physician Group Primary Care LLC, Rapides Regional Physician Group Specialty Care LLC, Rapides Surgery Center LLC, Raulerson GYN LLC, Raulerson Gastroenterology LLC, Raulerson Primary Care LLC, Raymore Medical Group LLC, Red Rock Holdco LLC, Red Rock at Smoke Ranch LLC, Red Rocks Surgery Center LLC, Redmond Anesthesia Services LLC, Redmond Hospital Services LLC, Redmond Neurosurgery LLC, Redmond Park Health Services Inc., Redmond Park Hospital LLC, Redmond Physician Practice Company, Redmond Specialty Services LLC, Regional Hospital Healthcare Partners LLC, Research Cardiology Associates LLC, Research Family Physicians LLC, Research Internal Medicine LLC, Research Neurology Associates LLC, Research Neuroscience Institute LLC, Resource Optimization & Innovation L.L.C., Reston Hospital Center LLC, Reston Hospitalists LLC, Reston Surgery Center L.P., Retreat Cardiology LLC, Retreat Hospital LLC, Retreat Internal Medicine LLC, Retreat Surgical Associates LLC, Rhodes Limited-Liability Company, Richmond Imaging Employer Corp., Richmond Multi-Specialty LLC, Richmond Pediatric Surgeons LLC, Ridgeline Surgicenter LLC, Rim Building Partners L.P., Rio Grande Healthcare MSO Inc., Rio Grande NP Inc., Rio Grande Regional Hospital Inc., Rio Grande Valley Cardiology PLLC, Rio Grande Valley CareNow Urgent Care PLLC, Rio Grande Valley Urology PLLC, Riverside CyberKnife Manager LLC, Riverside Healthcare System L.P., Riverside Holdings Inc., Riverside Hospital Inc., Riverside Imaging LLC, Riverwalk ASC LLC, Roanoke Imaging LLC, Roanoke Neurosurgery LLC, Roanoke Surgery Center L.P., Roanoke Valley Gynecology LLC, Robotic Radiosurgery LLP, Rocky Mountain Pediatric Hematology Oncology LLC, Rocky Mountain Surgery Center LLC, Rome Imaging Center Limited Partnership, Roodlane Medical Limited, Rose Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Rose Health Partners LLC, Rose Medical Plaza Ltd., Rose POB Inc., Rosewood Medical Center Inc., Rosewood Professional Building Ltd., Round Rock Hospital Inc., Round Rock Trauma Surgeons PLLC, Royal Oaks Surgery Center L.P., S.A. Medical Center Inc., SAPN LLC, SCRI Global Services Limited, SCRI Holdings LLC, SCRI Scientifics LLC, SJMC LLC, SSHR Holdco LLC, SSJ St. Petersburg Holdings Inc., STPN Manager LLC, SWMC Inc., Sahara Outpatient Surgery Center Ltd., Salem Hospitalists LLC, Salem Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Salt Lake City Surgicare Inc., Samaritan LLC, San Antonio Division Inc., San Antonio Regional Hospital Inc., San Antonio Surgicenter LLC, San Bernardino Imaging LLC, San Joaquin Surgical Center Inc., San Jose Healthcare System LP, San Jose Hospital L.P., San Jose LLC, San Jose Medical Center LLC, San Jose Pathology Outreach LLC, San Marcos ASC LLC, San Marcos Surgicenter LLC, Sante Fe Family Practitioners PLLC, Sarah Cannon Development Innovations LLC, Sarah Cannon Research Institute LLC, Sarah Cannon Research Institute UK Limited, Sarasota Doctors Hospital Inc., Savannah Behavioral Health Associates LLC, Savannah Health Network LLC, Savannah Health Services LLC, Savannah Inpatient Services LLC, Savannah Multispecialty Associates LLC, Savannah Pediatric Care LLC, Savannah Primary Care Associates LLC, Sebring Health Services LLC, Selma Medical Center Hospital Inc., Senior Health Associates LLC, Short Pump Imaging LLC, Silicon Valley Health Holdings LLC, Silicon Valley Surgery Center L.P., Silicon Valley Surgicenter LLC, Sky Ridge Spine Manager LLC, Sky Ridge Surgery Center L.P., Skyline Medical Group LLC, Skyline Neuroscience Associates LLC, Skyline Rehab Associates LLC, Skyline Specialty Associates LLC, Smith Laboratories Inc., Solis Mammography at Bayshore Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at Clear Lake Regional Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at Conroe Regional Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at Denton Regional Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at HCA Houston Tomball LLC, Solis Mammography at Kingwood Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at Las Colinas Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at Medical Center Alliance LLC, Solis Mammography at Medical Center Arlington LLC, Solis Mammography at Medical Center of Lewisville LLC, Solis Mammography at Medical Center of McKinney LLC, Solis Mammography at Medical Center of Plano LLC, Solis Mammography at Medical City Dallas LLC, Solis Mammography at Pearland Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at Rose Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at Skyline Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at StoneCrest Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at West Houston Medical Center LLC, Solis Mammography at Womans Hospital of Texas LLC, Solis Mammography of Cedar Hill LLC, Solis Mammography of CyFair LLC, Solis Mammography of Dallas LLC, Solis Mammography of Flower Mound LLC, Solis Mammography of Frisco LLC, Solis Mammography of Garland LLC, Solis Mammography of Grand Prairie LLC, Solis Mammography of Houston NW LLC, Solis Mammography of Katy LLC, Solis Mammography of Louetta/249 LLC, Solis Mammography of Mainland LLC, Solis Mammography of Mansfield LLC, Solis Mammography of Mesquite LLC, Solis Mammography of Montgomery LLC, Solis Mammography of North Cypress LLC, Solis Mammography of North Loop LLC, Solis Mammography of Sugar Land LLC, Solis Mammography of West Plano LLC, Solis Mammography of Womans Place LLC, South Atlantic Division Inc., South Austin Surgery Center Ltd., South Austin Surgical Management LLC, South Austin Surgicenter LLC, South Brandon Imaging LLC, South Florida Division Practice Inc., South Texas Surgicare Inc., South Transfer Center LLC, South Valley Hospital L.P., Southeast Georgia Health Services LLC, Southern Hills Medical Center LLC, Southern Hills Neurology Consultants LLC, Southern Kentucky Medicine Associates LLC, Southern Kentucky Surgicenter LLC, Southern Texas Physicians Network, Southpoint LLC, Southtown Womens Clinic LLC, Southwest Florida Health System Inc., Southwest Florida Regional Medical Center Inc., Southwest Medical Center Family Practice LLC, Southwest Medical Center Multi-Specialty Group LLC, Southwest Medical Center Surgical Group LLC, Southwest Medpro Ltd., Southwest Surgical Clinic Inc., Southwest Virginia Orthopedics and Spine LLC, Spalding Rehabilitation L.L.C., Specialists in Obstetrics and Gynecology PLLC, Specialty Associates of West Houston PLLC, Specialty Physicians of Northern Virginia LLC, Specialty Surgicare of Las Vegas LP, Spotsylvania Condominium Property LLC, Spotsylvania Medical Center Inc., Spotsylvania Multi-Specialty Group LLC, Spotsylvania Regional Surgery Center LLC, Spring Branch Family Practitioners PLLC, Spring Branch Medical Center Inc., Spring Hill Hospital Inc., Spring Hill Imaging LLC, Spring Hill Physicians LLC, Springview KY LLC, Spruce Pine Healthcare LLC, St. Davids Austin Area ASC LLC, St. Davids Cardiology PLLC, St. Davids CareNow Urgent Care PLLC, St. Davids Healthcare Partnership L.P. LLP, St. Davids Heart & Vascular PLLC, St. Davids Neurology PLLC, St. Davids OB Hospitalist PLLC, St. Davids Ortho Neuro and Rehab PLLC, St. Davids Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation PLLC, St. Davids Quality Alliance LLC, St. Davids Specialized Womens Services PLLC, St. Davids Trauma Surgeons PLLC, St. Lucie Hospitalists LLC, St. Lucie Medical Center Hyperbarics LLC, St. Lucie Medical Center Walk-In Clinic LLC, St. Lucie Medical Specialists LLC, St. Lucie West Primary Care LLC, St. Marks Ambulatory Surgery Associates L.P., St. Marks Gynecology Oncology Care LLC, St. Marks Investments Inc., St. Marks Physician Billing LLC, St. Marks Professional Services LLC, St. Marks South Jordan Family Practice LLC, St. Martins Healthcare Limited, St. Martins Ltd., St. Martins Medical Services Limited, St. Petersburg General Surgery LLC, Stafford Imaging LLC, Statland Medical Group LLC, Steamboat Springs Surgicenter LLC, Sterling Primary Care Associates LLC, Stiles Road Imaging LLC, StoneCrest Surgery Center LLC, StoneSprings Medical Office Building Property LLC, StoneSprings Surgicenter LLC, Stonecrest Medical Group - Family Practice of Murfreesboro LLC, Stonecrest Medical Group - SC Murfreesboro Family Practice LLC, Stones River Hospital LLC, Suburban Medical Center at Hoffman Estates Inc., Sugar Land Surgery Center Anesthesia LLC, Sugar Land Surgery Center Ltd., Sullins Surgical Center Inc., Summit Convenient Care at Lebanon LLC, Summit General Partner Inc., Summit Heart LLC, Summit Outpatient Diagnostic Center LLC, Summit Research Solutions LLC, Summit Surgery Center L.P., Summit Surgical Associates LLC, Summit Walk-in Clinic LLC, Sun Bay Medical Office Building Inc., Sun City Hospital Inc., Sun City Imaging LLC, Sun Towers/Vista Hills Holding Co., Sun-Med LLC, Sunrise Flamingo Holdings LLC, Sunrise Flamingo Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center LLC, Sunrise Mountainview Hospital Inc., Sunrise Mountainview Multi-Specialty Clinics LLC, Sunrise Outpatient Services Inc., Sunrise Physician Services LLC, Sunrise Trauma Services LLC, Surgery Associates of NTX PLLC, Surgery Center of Atlantis LLC, Surgery Center of Aventura Ltd., Surgery Center of Bay Area Houston LLC, Surgery Center of Greenview L.P., Surgery Center of Independence L.P., Surgery Center of Overland Park L.P., Surgery Center of Port Charlotte Ltd., Surgery Center of Rome L.P., Surgery Center of the Rockies LLC, Surgical Associates of Southwest Virginia LLC, Surgical Care Medical Group LLC, Surgical Center of Irving Inc., Surgical Facility of West Houston L.P., Surgical Park Center Ltd., Surgical Specialists of Clear Lake PLLC, Surgical Specialists of Conroe PLLC, Surgical Specialists of Corpus Christi PLLC, Surgicare America - Winter Park Inc., Surgicare Merger Company of Louisiana, Surgicare Outpatient Center of Baton Rouge Inc., Surgicare Outpatient Center of Jackson Inc., Surgicare of ADC LLC, Surgicare of AGI LLC, Surgicare of Alpine LLC, Surgicare of Altamonte Springs Inc., Surgicare of Anchorage LLC, Surgicare of Arapahoe LLC, Surgicare of Arlington LLC, Surgicare of Ashburn LLC, Surgicare of Augusta Inc., Surgicare of Aurora Endoscopy LLC, Surgicare of Aventura LLC, Surgicare of Bay Area Endoscopy LLC, Surgicare of Bay Area LLC, Surgicare of Bayonet Point Inc., Surgicare of Bayside LLC, Surgicare of Bountiful LLC, Surgicare of Brandon Inc., Surgicare of Brentwood LLC, Surgicare of Brighton LLC, Surgicare of Brooksville LLC, Surgicare of Brownsville LLC, Surgicare of Buckhead LLC, Surgicare of CAREOS LLC, Surgicare of Central Florida Inc., Surgicare of Central Park Surgery Center LLC, Surgicare of Central San Antonio Inc., Surgicare of Chattanooga LLC, Surgicare of Chippenham LLC, Surgicare of Citrus LLC, Surgicare of Clarksville LLC, Surgicare of Corpus Christi LLC, Surgicare of Countryside Inc., Surgicare of Dallas Specialty LLC, Surgicare of Denton Inc., Surgicare of Denver Clinic LLC, Surgicare of Denver LLC, Surgicare of Denver Mid-Town Inc., Surgicare of Dickson LLC, Surgicare of Eastside LLC, Surgicare of Evans Inc., Surgicare of Fairfax Inc., Surgicare of Florida Inc., Surgicare of Flower Mound Inc., Surgicare of Focus Hand LLC, Surgicare of Fort Worth Co-GP LLC, Surgicare of Fort Worth Inc., Surgicare of Ft. Pierce Inc., Surgicare of Good Samaritan LLC, Surgicare of Gramercy Inc., Surgicare of Greenview Inc., Surgicare of Hanover Inc., Surgicare of Houston Kingwood LLC, Surgicare of Houston LLC, Surgicare of Houston Womens Inc., Surgicare of Indianapolis Inc., Surgicare of Kansas City LLC, Surgicare of Kingwood LLC, Surgicare of Kissimmee Inc., Surgicare of Lakeview Inc., Surgicare of Las Vegas Inc., Surgicare of Laurel Grove LLC, Surgicare of Lorain County Inc., Surgicare of Los Gatos Inc., Surgicare of Los Robles LLC, Surgicare of Loveland LLC, Surgicare of Madison Inc., Surgicare of Manatee Inc., Surgicare of McKinney Inc., Surgicare of Medical City Dallas LLC, Surgicare of Memorial Endoscopy LLC, Surgicare of Merritt Island Inc., Surgicare of Miami Lakes LLC, Surgicare of Mountain West LLC, Surgicare of Mt. Ogden LLC, Surgicare of Nashville LLC, Surgicare of Natchez LLC, Surgicare of Newport Richey Inc., Surgicare of North Austin LLC, Surgicare of North San Antonio Inc., Surgicare of Northeast San Antonio Inc., Surgicare of Orange Park II LLC, Surgicare of Orange Park Inc., Surgicare of Orange Park Ltd., Surgicare of Orlando Inc., Surgicare of Overland Park LLC, Surgicare of Palms West LLC, Surgicare of Park Ridge LLC, Surgicare of Pasadena Inc., Surgicare of Pavilion LLC, Surgicare of Physicians West El Paso LLC, Surgicare of Pinellas Inc., Surgicare of Plano Inc., Surgicare of Plantation Inc., Surgicare of Port Charlotte LLC, Surgicare of Port St. Lucie Inc., Surgicare of Portsmouth LLC, Surgicare of Premier Orthopaedic LLC, Surgicare of Reston Inc., Surgicare of Ridgeline LLC, Surgicare of Riverside LLC, Surgicare of Riverwalk LLC, Surgicare of Roanoke LLC, Surgicare of Rome Inc., Surgicare of Rose LLC, Surgicare of Round Rock Inc., Surgicare of Royal Oaks LLC, Surgicare of Silicon Valley LLC, Surgicare of Sky Ridge LLC, Surgicare of Sky Ridge Womens Center LLC, Surgicare of South Austin Inc., Surgicare of Southeast Denver Inc., Surgicare of Southern Hills Inc., Surgicare of Southern Kentucky LLC, Surgicare of Southwest Houston LLC, Surgicare of Spotsylvania LLC, Surgicare of St. Andrews Inc., Surgicare of St. Andrews Ltd., Surgicare of St. Davids Austin LLC, Surgicare of Steamboat Springs LLC, Surgicare of StoneCrest LLC, Surgicare of StoneSprings LLC, Surgicare of Stuart Inc., Surgicare of Sugar Land Inc., Surgicare of Swedish LLC, Surgicare of Tallahassee Inc., Surgicare of Terre Haute LLC, Surgicare of Thornton LLC, Surgicare of Travis Center Inc., Surgicare of Tulsa Inc., Surgicare of Utah LLC, Surgicare of Wasatch Front LLC, Surgicare of West Hills Inc., Surgicare of Westlake Inc., Surgicare of Wichita Inc., Surgicare of Wichita LLC, Surgicare of Willis LLC, Surgicare of Wilson County LLC, Surgicare of Winchester LLC, Surgicenter of East Jefferson Inc., Surgicenter of Johnson County Ltd. a Kansas limited partnership, Surgicenter of Kansas City L.L.C., Surgico LLC, Swedish MOB Acquisition Inc., Swedish MOB I Ltd., Swedish MOB II Inc., Swedish MOB III Inc., Swedish MOB IV Inc., Swedish MOB LLC, Swedish Medpro Inc., TBHI Outpatient Services LLC, TCMC Madison-Portland Inc., THN Physicians Association Inc., TUHC Anesthesiology Group LLC, TUHC Hospitalist Group LLC, TUHC Physician Group LLC, TUHC Primary Care and Pediatrics Group LLC, TUHC Radiology Group LLC, Tallahassee Community Network Inc., Tallahassee Medical Center Inc., Tallahassee Orthopaedic Surgery Partners Ltd., Tampa Bay Health System Inc., Tampa Surgi-Centre Inc., Tarrant County Surgery Center L.P., Tchefuncte Cardiology Associates - Lakeview LLC, Teays Valley Health Services LLC, Telehealth Physician Services LLC, Tennessee Healthcare Management Inc., Tennessee Valley Outpatient Diagnostic Center LLC, Terre Haute Hospital GP Inc., Terre Haute Hospital Holdings Inc., Terre Haute MOB L.P., Terre Haute Obstetrics and Gynecology LLC, Terre Haute Regional Hospital L.P., Texas CareNow Physician Associates, Texas HSS LLC, Texas Institute of Medicine and Surgery, Texas Psychiatric Company Inc., The Austin Diagnostic Clinic PLLC, The Cancer Care Center of North Florida LLC, The Cardiovascular Partnership for Quality LLC, The Charter Cypress Behavioral Health System L.L.C., The Christie Clinic LLP, The Glynne Medical Practice Limited, The Harley Street Cancer Clinic Limited, The London Breast Institute UK Ltd, The Medical Group of Kansas City LLC, The Neurohealth Sciences Center LLC, The Physicians Clinic Limited, The Prostate Centre Limited, The Rankin Foundation, The Regional Health System of Acadiana LLC, The Wasatch Endoscopy Center Ltd., The West Texas Division of Columbia Inc., Timpanogos Pain Specialists LLC, Timpanogos Regional Medical Services Inc., Total Imaging - Hudson LLC, Total Imaging - North St. Petersburg LLC, Total Imaging - Parsons LLC, Town Plaza Family Practice LLC, Travel Medicine and Infections LLC, Travis Surgery Center L.P., Tri Cities Health Services Corp., Tri-City Multi-Specialty LLC, Tri-County Community Hospital Inc., Tri-County Surgical Specialists LLC, TriStar Bone Marrow Transplant LLC, TriStar Cardiovascular Surgery LLC, TriStar Family Care LLC, TriStar Gynecology Oncology LLC, TriStar Health System Inc., TriStar Joint Replacement Institute LLC, TriStar Maury Behavioral Healthcare LLC, TriStar Medical Group - Centennial Primary Care LLC, TriStar Medical Group - Legacy Health LLC, TriStar Medical Network LLC, TriStar OB/GYN LLC, TriStar Orthopedics LLC, TriStar Physicians LLC, TriStar Radiation Oncology LLC, Trident Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Trident Behavioral Health Services LLC, Trident Eye Surgery Center L.P., Trident Medical Center LLC, Trident Medical Services Inc., Trident Neonatology Services LLC, Tulane Clinic LLC, Tulane Professionals Management L.L.C., Tuscan Imaging Center at Las Colinas LLC, U.S. Collections Inc., Ultra Imaging Management Services LLC, Ultra Imaging of Tampa LLC, University Healthcare Specialists LLC, University Healthcare System L.C., University Hospital Ltd., Uptown Primary Care Associates LLC, Urgent Care Enterprise LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Ann & Simmons LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Cactus & Southern Highlands LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Charleston & Decatur LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Charleston/Sloan LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Craig & Clayton LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Craig & Decatur LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Durango & Cheyenne LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Durango & Flamingo LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Eastern & Horizon Ridge LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Rainbow/Mardon LLC, Urgent Care Extra - Warm Springs & Green Valley LLC, Urgent Care Extra Silverado & Maryland LLC, Urgent Care Extra-Tropicana & Jones LLC, Urgent Care Nevada LLC, Urological Specialists of Arlington PLLC, Urology Associates (London) Limited, Urology Center of North Georgia LLC, Urology Services of El Paso PLLC, Urology Specialists Devonshire LLP, Urology Specialists London LLP, Urology Specialists of Kingwood PLLC, Urology Specialists of Richmond LLC, Urology Surgery Center of Colorado LLC, Utah CareNow Urgent Care LLC, Utah Imaging GP LLC, Utah Medco LLC, Utah Surgery Center L.P., VH Holdco Inc., VH Holdings Inc., VHSC Plantation LLC, VIP Inc., Valify, Valify Inc., Value Health Holdings Inc., Value Health Management Inc., Vascular and Endovascular Specialists LLC, Venture Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Venture Medical Management LLC, Village Oaks Medical Center Inc., Virginia Care Partners ACO LLC, Virginia Gynecologic Oncology LLC, Virginia Hematology & Oncology Associates Inc., Virginia Hospitalists Inc., Virginia Psychiatric Company Inc., Virginia Quality Care Partners LLC, Vision Consulting Group LLC, Vision Holdings LLC, W & C Hospital Inc., WCP Properties LLC, WHG Medical LLC, WHMC Inc., WJHC LLC, Walterboro Community Hospital Inc., Warren County Ambulance Service LLC, Wasatch Front Surgery Center LLC, Washington Holdco LLC, Waterway Primary Care LLC, Weatherford Health Services LLC, Weatherford Mammography JV LLC, Weatherford Regional Medical Center, Welbeck Street Diagnostic Centre LLP, Wellington Diagnostic Services LLP, Wesley Cath Lab LLC, Wesley Manager LLC, Wesley Medical Center LLC, Wesley Physician Services LLC, Wesley Physicians - Anesthesiologist LLC, Wesley Physicians - Cardiovascular LLC, Wesley Physicians - Medical Specialties LLC, Wesley Physicians - Obstetrics and Gynecology LLC, Wesley Physicians - Primary Care LLC, Wesley Select Network LLC, Wesley Urgent Care LLC, West Boynton Beach Open Imaging Center LLC, West Creek Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, West Creek Medical Center Inc., West Florida - MHT LLC, West Florida - PPH LLC, West Florida Behavioral Health Inc., West Florida Cardiology Network LLC, West Florida Cardiology Physicians LLC, West Florida CareNow Urgent Care LLC, West Florida Division Inc., West Florida Gulf Coast Primary Care LLC, West Florida HealthWorks LLC, West Florida Imaging Services LLC, West Florida Internal Medicine LLC, West Florida PET Services LLC, West Florida Physician Network LLC, West Florida Professional Billing LLC, West Florida Regional Medical Center Inc., West Florida Specialty Physicians LLC, West Florida Trauma Network LLC, West Florida Urgent Care Network LLC, West Hills Hospital, West Hills Surgical Center Ltd., West Houston ASC Inc., West Houston Healthcare Group Ltd., West Houston Internal Specialists PLLC, West Houston LLC, West Houston Medical PLLC, West Houston Outpatient Medical Facility Inc., West Houston Surgicare Inc., West Jacksonville Medical Center Inc., West Jordan Hospital Corporation, West LPN Fort Worth Oncology PLLC, West LPN Inc., West Los Angeles Physicians Hospital Inc., West McKinney Imaging Services LLC, West Paces Services Inc., West Park Surgery Center L.P., West Valley Imaging LLC, West Valley Medical Center Inc., West Valley Medical Group LLC, West Valley Medical Group Specialty Services LLC, West Valley Therapy Services LLC, Westbury Hospital Inc., Western Plains Capital Inc., Westlake Surgicare L.P., Westminster Community Hospital, Westside Surgery Center Ltd., Wichita CareNow Urgent Care LLC, Wildwood Medical Center Inc., Willis Surgicenter LLC, Wilson County Outpatient Surgery Center L.P., Womans Health Group PLLC, Womans Hospital Merger LLC, Womans Hospital of Texas Incorporated, Women Practitioners of Houston PLLC, Women Specialists of Bayshore PLLC, Women Specialists of Clear Lake PLLC, Women Specialists of Mainland PLLC, Womens & Childrens Center LLC, Womens & Childrens Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Center LLC, Womens & Childrens Pulmonology Clinic LLC, Womens Center at Brookside LLC, Womens Health Center of Central Florida LLC, Womens Health Center of SWVA LLC, Womens Hospital Indianapolis GP Inc., Womens Hospital Indianapolis L.P., Womens Link Specialty Obstetrical Referral Clinic PLLC, Womens Multi-Specialty Group LLC, Womens Surgical Specialists of Texas PLLC, Womens and Childrens Professional Management L.L.C., Womens and Childrens Specialists LLC, hInsight-Airstrip Holdings LLC, hInsight-BMA Holdings LLC, hInsight-Customer Care Holdings LLC, hInsight-Digital Reasoning Holdings LLC, hInsight-Healthbox Holdings LLC, hInsight-I2 Holdings LLC, hInsight-InVivoLink Holdings LLC, hInsight-LS Holdings LLC, hInsight-Loyale Healthcare Holdings LLC, hInsight-Mobile Heartbeat Holdings LLC, hInsight-NX LLC, hInsight-PWS I Holdings LLC, hInsight-Procured Holdings LLC, and hInsight-VAI Holdings LLC.

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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.
Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. designs, engineers, manufactures, and markets commercial aerostructures worldwide. It operates through three segments: Commercial, Defense & Space, and Aftermarket. The Commercial segment offers forward, mid, and rear fuselage sections and systems, struts/pylons, nacelles, and related engine structural components; and wings and wing components, including flight control surfaces, as well as other structural parts. This segment primarily serves the aircraft original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) or engine OEMs of large commercial aircraft and/or business/regional jet programs. The Defense & Space segment provides fuselage, strut, nacelle, and wing aerostructures primarily for U.S. Government defense programs, including Boeing P-8, C40, and KC-46 Tanker. This segment also engages in the fabrication, bonding, assembly, testing, tooling, processing, engineering analysis, and training on fixed wing aircraft aerostructures, missiles, and hypersonics works, such as solid rocket motor throats, nozzles, re-entry vehicle thermal protections systems, forward cockpit and cabin, and fuselage work on rotorcraft aerostructures. The Aftermarket segment offers spare parts and MRO services, repairs for flight control surfaces and nacelles, radome repairs, rotable assets, engineering services, advanced composite repairs, and other repair and overhaul services. Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. has a strategic partnership with Sierra Space to enhance access to commercial space economy of the future. The company was formerly known as Mid-Western Aircraft Systems Holdings, Inc. Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. was founded in 1927 and is headquartered in Wichita, Kansas.
Royal Bank of Canada operates as a diversified financial service company worldwide. The company's Personal & Commercial Banking segment offers checking and savings accounts, home equity financing, personal lending, private banking, indirect lending, including auto financing, mutual funds and self-directed brokerage accounts, guaranteed investment certificates, credit cards, and payment products and solutions; and lending, leasing, deposit, investment, foreign exchange, cash management, auto dealer financing, trade products, and services to small and medium-sized commercial businesses. This segment offers financial products and services through branches, automated teller machines, and mobile sales network. Its Wealth Management segment provides a suite of advice-based solutions and strategies to high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, and institutional clients. The company's Insurance segment offers life, health, home, auto, travel, wealth, annuities, and reinsurance advice and solutions; and business insurance services to individual, business, and group clients through its advice centers, RBC insurance stores, and mobile advisors; digital, mobile, and social platforms; independent brokers; and travel partners. Its Investor & Treasury Services segment provides asset servicing, custody, payments, and treasury services to financial and other investors; and fund and investment administration, shareholder, private capital, performance measurement and compliance monitoring, distribution, transaction banking, cash and liquidity management, foreign exchange, and global securities finance services. The company's Capital Markets segment offers corporate and investment banking, as well as equity and debt origination, distribution, advisory services, sale, and trading services for corporations, institutional investors, asset managers, private equity firms, and governments. The company was founded in 1864 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.
Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA provides dialysis care and related dialysis care services in Germany, North America, and internationally. It offers dialysis treatment and related laboratory and diagnostic services through a network of outpatient dialysis clinics; materials, training, and patient support services comprising clinical monitoring, follow-up assistance, and arranging for delivery of the supplies to the patient's residence; and dialysis services under contract to hospitals in the United States for the hospitalized end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients and for patients suffering from acute kidney failure. The company also develops, manufactures, and distributes dialysis products, including polysulfone dialyzers, hemodialysis machines, peritoneal dialysis cyclers, peritoneal dialysis solutions, hemodialysis concentrates, solutions and granulates, bloodlines, renal pharmaceuticals, and systems for water treatment; and non-dialysis products, such as acute cardiopulmonary and apheresis products. In addition, it develops, acquires, and in-licenses renal pharmaceuticals; offers renal medications and supplies to patients at homes or to dialysis clinics; and provides vascular, cardiovascular, endovascular specialty, vascular care ambulatory surgery center, and physician nephrology and cardiology services. The company sells its products to dialysis clinics, hospitals, and specialized treatment clinics directly, as well as through local sales forces, independent distributors, dealers, and sales agents. As of February 23, 2022, it operated 4,171 outpatient dialysis clinics in approximately 150 countries. Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA was incorporated in 1996 and is headquartered in Bad Homburg, Germany.
In late November, members of the Dalhousie Science Society (DSS) fed 230 letters into the campus mailbox. The letters were written by students in support of Canada's Fundamental Science Review (dubbed "The Naylor report" after its lead author) and were addressed to MP Andy Fillmore and the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science.



Tora Oliphant, a Microbiology & Immunology and Sociology student, helped organize the campaign because she recognized the importance of ensuring access to research funding for new and diverse perspectives. The Support the Report campaign included a panel discussion and a letter-writing initiative. We really wanted the letters, Tora explains. They express the student voice and demonstrate this isnt just a concern for established researchers but also for us, the future scientists.



The campaign was a collaboration between the DSS and the Dalhousie Arts & Social Sciences Society thanks, in part, to Toras involvement  her combined honours in Sociology and Microbiology & Immunology meant she had connections in both faculties. I knew the concern went beyond the Faculty of Science and that humanities researchers would also have important things to say about the findings of the report.



A journey of discovery



Tora hadnt planned to study both science and the humanities when she first decided to move across the country for university. She had registered at Dal but then a family friend mentioned the Foundation Year Programme at University of Kings College, Dalhousies neighbour and academic partner. It was the first of many shifts in the direction of Toras academic path.

The program set me up to be more open with my thinking. I had been pretty rigidly science, science, science until that point. It gave me a better sense of how society shapes us.



When Tora returned to the sciences, it was with the intention of working toward a career in medicine. I really enjoy working with people and I thought medicine would incorporate my love of working with people with my love of science.



She chose Microbiology & Immunology as her major because she saw it as, a focused way to study science that still allows you to learn all sorts of broader things like genetics, the immune system and evolution  all the foundations.



Part of the way through her degree, Tora realized she had questions about the world that werent being covered in the lab. I looked around and found that Sociology had a lot to say about the world in a way that wasnt really answered by science learning. So, I added a minor in Sociology. That soon turned into a major and now shes pursuing a combined honours degree in the two subjects.



Putting it all together



Her advice to others considering combined honours is to get invested in both majors  dont pick a primary subject. Its okay to love them both even if they are quite different.





Tora says coming to Sociology with a science mindset was a great advantage. Micro set me up to be analytic and to think about how I would test things that I want to explore. That's been especially helpful when doing the research for my honours project.



While a future in medicine isnt completely off the table, Toras education in sociology and her experience with the Support the Report campaign have shown her theres more than one way to achieve her goals.



I have developed quite a serious interest in politics and Ive realized a lot of the issues I wanted to address through medicine  social determinants of health: the structures that set people up to be ill and how that impacts their lives  can be tackled in ways outside of medicine. I have so many more options.


With a major chunk of the 'new middle class' falling in the above Rs 10 lakh per annum income group, the proposed move will be a windfall for them. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: In a move that is bound to bring cheer to the middle and upper class, the government may slash the highest slab in income tax from 30 per cent to 25 per cent in the forthcoming Union Budget.

Thirty per cent income tax is applicable to those having income of more than Rs 10 lakh per annum.

The move, which according to highly-placed sources is being seriously considered by the Centre, seems to be aimed at widening the base of direct tax, quite similar to how the indirect tax net has increased with the introduction of Goods and Service Tax (GST). The government is concerned that in a nation of over 125 crore people, on an average just three crore people file their returns. In fact, in the 2014-15 assessment year, only 25 lakh taxpayers had declared their annual income of over Rs 10 lakh (which is a measly 8 per cent of the total taxpayers).

Sources privy to details informed this newspaper that while the 30 per cent tax slab could be reduced to 25 per cent, the possibility of introduction of a new tax slab could not be ruled out as this would help in increasing direct tax collections.

With a major chunk of the new middle class falling in the above Rs 10 lakh per annum income group, the proposed move will be a windfall for them.

The proposal for reducing the highest income tax slab, sources said, has been discussed by the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) with finance ministry and Niti Aayog officials.

In 2016-17, direct tax collections were Rs 8.47 lakh crore, while provisional figures of net direct tax collections up to September 2017 for the current financial year (2017-18) stood at Rs 3.86 lakh crore. Major direct tax components are income tax, wealth tax, corporate tax and securities transaction tax, among others.

If the proposed move is introduced in the forthcoming Union Budget then direct tax collections could get a major boost in the forthcoming financial year.

As of now there is no income tax on the income group of Rs 0 to Rs 2,50,000 per annum, while the income tax levied on the Rs 2,50,001 to Rs 5,00,000 per annum income group is 5 per cent.

On the income group of Rs 5,00,001 to Rs 10,00,000, the tax levied is 20 per cent, while it is 30 per cent on those having income of Rs 10 lakh and above.
Union finance minister Arun Jaitley with S. Gurumurthy, editor or Tamil magazine Thuglak and G. Viswanathan, founder and chancellor of VIT among others at the Thuglak anniversary function at Chennai on Sunday. (Photo: DC)

Chennai: Lauding Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his bold decision on enforcing the demonetisation, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has asserted that the initiatives like the demonetisation and GST have saved the country.

The tax payer base, tax collection and digitization of the economy were expanding, as a result, he added.

He said only the Prime Minister has the courage to take such bold decisions. By taking such decisions, the BJP has saved the country.. the tax payer base, tax collections and digitisation of the economy are expanding, thanks to a slew of measures taken by the Central government headed by Mr Modi, the finance minister said while speaking at the 48th annual readers' meet of Tamil magazine Thuglaq here on Sunday evening.

Due to efforts like demonetisation and introduction of GST and other measures, tax evasion has reduced. Steps to eradicate black money and the demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes was one of the difficult decisions taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said. Claiming that honest tax payer was forced to pay higher taxes due to tax evaders, Mr Jaitley said once the tax payer base expands, the tax rate would come down.

Tax evaders, he said, have now understood that evasion cannot be done. He also said that a decision on holding simultaneous polls to Parliament and Assembly in all states would be taken soon.
New Delhi: Denying that it is politicising the issue of Judge B.H. Loyas death, the Congress on Monday demanded a court-monitored inquiry into it, saying the matter relates to a vital organ of Indian democracy.

Nobody is suggesting that the Congress party will be appointing a commission of inquiry. The whole argument that the party is politicising the matter is false. We as a responsible stakeholder of Indian democracy, as a party are asking for an inquiry. The country wants a court-monitored independent inquiry, said Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

My comments have nothing to do with the so-called Supreme Court imbroglio. I think every citizen in this country and every political party is independently entitled to ask for a fair and comprehensive inquiry into his death.

Singhvi also said: If a matter impinges on a vital organ of Indian democracy, then the demand for an inquiry is a demand by responsible stakeholders, and is not dependent on whether a family member wants it or not. This comes a day after Loyas son Anuj said his family had no suspicions now regarding the death.

The Congress leader read out Anuj Loyas statements made two years ago at the time of his death and the statements of the judges father and two sisters raising suspicion over his death. This whole argument that there is a politicisation is false, he said. Singhvi said an independent, time-bound probe is necessary to bring out the truth in the case and the contradicting statements made by Loyas family two years ago and now are also reasons enough for it.
According to a statement issued by the VHP in Delhi, Togadia (62), who suffered from low blood sugar levels, was found in an unconscious state in Shahibaug.(Photo: NDTV screengrab)

Ahmedabad: Hours after being "untraceable" from Ahmedabad on Monday morning, VHP international working president Pravin Togadia was found in an unconscious state in Shahibaug area of the city on Monday night and was rushed to a hospital.

The VHP leader, a Z Plus category protectee, went "missing" after stepping out of the VHP headquarters in Paldi area of the city when a contingent of Rajasthan Police came to arrest him in an old case.

According to a statement issued by the VHP in Delhi, Togadia (62), who suffered from low blood sugar levels, was found in an unconscious state in Shahibaug and was taken to Chandramani Hospital located in the same area.

Gujarat VHP general secretary Ranchod Bharward said that Togadia was traced, but didn't disclose where he was found.

"Togadia was brought to the hospital by someone in the 108 ambulance service. He was in an unconscious state," said Dr Rupkumar Agrawal at the hospital.

He said Togadia became unconscious as his sugar level had dipped, but was stable now.

"He is stable now. He was unconscious as his sugar level had dipped...he is stable now," Dr Agrawal said.

Shahibaug is around 12 kms away from the Paldi office of the VHP.

The city police formed four teams to locate the Hindutva leader after he went "missing" from the VHP office Monday morning.

VHP spokesperson Jay Shah said, "Togadia was brought to the hospital by somebody in an 108 ambulance."

As the word spread, hundreds of VHP workers rushed to the hospital.

The VHP had earlier claimed Togadia was detained by the Rajasthan Police in connection with the case, but the latter denied this.

The mystery over Togadia's disappearance had deepened, with a senior police officer maintaining that neither the local Sola police nor the Rajasthan Police arrested him.

Sola police station officials said a team of Rajasthan Police visited them on Monday to execute an arrest warrant against Togadia under section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the IPC, but could not find him at his residence.

According to a senior Crime Branch officer, Togadia, a resident of Thaltej area in the city, boarded an auto-rickshaw from the VHP headquarters in Paldi area Monday morning and has been untraceable since.

Addressing a press conference on Monday evening, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) J K Bhatt said neither the Sola police nor the Gangapur police in Rajasthan have arrested Togadia.

"The Rajasthan Police went to Togadia's residence in Thaltej area with the Sola Police to execute an arrest warrant (at around 10:45 AM) this morning. But, Togadia was not found there. However, VHP workers thought that he was arrested, which is not true," Bhatt told reporters.

The officer said Togadia was present at the VHP state headquarters in Paldi area of the city since Sunday night.

He left the office in an auto-rickshaw with a "bearded man" at around 10:45 AM today, said Bhatt.

"An SRP (State Reserve Police) jawan, who was deployed outside the VHP office, told us that Togadia and a bearded man called an auto-rickshaw and left the office at around 10:45 AM. Before leaving, Togadia told the security staff the he will be back within 30 minutes. We have formed four teams to trace him," the JCP said.

Earlier in the day, VHP spokesperson Jay Shah claimed that Togadia was detained by the Rajasthan Police in an old case.

Rajasthan Police had denied having detained or arrested Togadia.

"Togadia was not at all arrested by our team. As per my information, the police team of Gangapur (in Rajasthan) is returning without executing the arrest warrant, as he (Togadia) was not found in Ahmedabad. It is a rumour that Togadia is in our custody which is not true at all," said Inspector General of Police, Bharatpur range, Alok Kumar Vashishtha had said.

Gangapur town is in Sawai Madhopur district of Rajasthan and falls under the jurisdiction of Bharatpur range of the state police.

At around 4 PM, a group of 40 workers of the VHP laid a siege to Sola police station and shouted slogans for the "release" of their working president.

Later, another group of VHP workers blocked the busy Sarkhej-Gandhinagar highway, but police broke up the protest.

Similar protests were held in Paldi area here and in Surat city during evening.

In Paldi, VHP workers had blocked roads and damaged some buses.

The situation was brought under control after police rushed to the spot.
Hyderabad: Talking about progressive investment policies and sector-specific industrial parks being set up in Telangana, IT minister K.T. Rama Rao invited South Korean industry leaders to set up shop and collaborate in various fields with the youngest state of India.

The minister, along with Mr G. Vivek, advisor to the state government, and Mr Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, IT and Industries departments are on a two-day tour to South Korea. The delegation met with Mr Nam Geunho, EVP, Hyundai Corporation, in Seoul where he explained the various investment opportunities in Telangana and gave an overview of the TS-iPASS single-window clearance initiative for investors.

In a meeting with Mr Choi Dong Jin, Executive Director, and representatives from Korean Mobile Internet Business Association (MOIBA), the Minister invited them to attend the World IT Congress being held in Hyderabad.

Two agreements were signed by the Government of Telangana  one with MOIBA and the second one with JCCIA. Both agreements aim to collaborate in AVCGI, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Internet of Things and the Electronics manufacturing sector.

The Minister explained the states Digital Telangana initiative and how it is planning to connect every home with the FiberGrid network. The Minister invited Korean AVCGI companies to invest in the Game Tower.

Mr.Rao met Mr Kihuk Sung, Chairman, Youngone Corporation, at Seoul. Young One Corporation, which manufactures popular The North Face brand garments, announced USD 300 million investments in Kakatiya Textile Park.

The delegation held a series of meetings in Daegue Metropolitan City which is also known as Textile City and is home to several textile, fashion and high-tech industries. The Minister spoke about the upcoming Kakatiya Mega Textile Park at Warangal.

The Minister said, Telangana, with all its advantages, is an ideal destination for textile manufacturing companies.

He invited the Daegu Automotive Industry representatives to visit Telangana state and evaluate investment opportunities and chances of collaboration in textiles, futuristic automobiles and IT.
Chennai: If only Rajini and BJP align, the future of Tamil Nadu will surely change for the better. That was S. Gurumurthy, editor or Tamil magazine Thuglak and the man widely considered as the chanakya, the political strategist, who had maneuvered the post-Jayalalithaa AIADMK events culminating in the merger of the OPS-EPS factions and restoration of stability in the rocking boat of the ruling party.

The packed Music Academy auditorium burst into applause at the Tughlak anniversary on Sunday when Gurumurthy declared, Rajini has a bright future in Tamil Nadu politics. Keeping away from both the Dravidian parties constitutes the soul of his spiritual politics.

And then the Thuglak editor said something sharper challenging the political relevance of the Dravidian majors. He insisted that the DMK and the AIADMK would never be able to attract the youth in future and that power now remains only in the hands of Rajini.

For a man credited with close rapport with the BJP leadership as well as the Prime Minister's Office, Gurumurthy is unlikely to sing in thin air about an issue as serious as the political future of a party he is widely seen as saving from disintegration after the demise of its charismatic chief. True, he has already made known his disappointment and disenchantment with the AIADMK when he triggered a war or words by dubbing its leaders as 'impotent' as rebel TTV Dhinakaran could win hands down in the RK Nagar bye-election.

Fisheries minister D. Jayakumar had led the assault against Gurumurthy for his 'impotent' tag and now again he was the first to launch a broadside for this prediction of great days for Tamil Nadu if only Rajini and BJP team up. The BJP would never be able to make a mark in the Dravidian land and as for Rajini, he would make no impact on the TN voter even if he aligns with the BJP. People here will vote only for Amma's party, insisted the AIADMK senior, adding, Gurumurthy is no messenger of God to predict TN will go Rajini way.

Such sparring apart, the words of Gurumurthy as well as the statement from state BJP president Dr Tamilisai Sounderarajan that Rajini and the BJP are on the same page in opposing corruption, could mean that the behind-the-scenes operators could be working hard on getting the superstar to soon announce his political launch and thereafter formalise the ties with the saffron party.

This has been in the air for quite some time now. There is a strong possibility of Rajini aligning with the BJP and a sanitised AIADMK cleansed of its corrupt elements when the state goes to polls next. That will be a winning team, said a saffron senior, requesting anonymity.

Many AIADMK seniors still believe that Rajinikanth will not get into politics. He will be saying things to excite his fans and trigger business for his two movies in the making. He will not come into politics, insists co-operation minister Sellur K. Raju.
PSLV-C40 is a highly sophisticated surveillance tool to keep an eye on Indian borders and will help the government track progress of infrastructure projects.

India launched its 100th satellite as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks to project the country as a global low-cost provider of services in space.

A total of 31 small satellites were launched into space on Friday. More than half of the micro and nano satellites were for the United States, and the remaining for India, Canada, Finland, France, South Korea and the United Kingdom.

The launch of the 100th satellite by ISRO signifies both its glorious achievements and also the bright future of Indias space programme, Modi said on Twitter.

Indias space programme has a budget of around $4 billion and Modis government hopes the latest launches will improve its prospects of winning a larger share of the more than $300 billion global space industry.

Modis government has been promoting a domestic space programme as a demonstration of low-cost technology and last February launched 104 satellites in a single mission, most of them for foreign customers.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) used its workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C40), part of an advanced remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2 series or eye in the sky, for the launch from Sriharikota in southern Andhra Pradesh.

The rocket weighs about 1,323 kgs, said a senior official at state-run ISRO. India will use its latest satellites for better border surveillance and obtaining high-resolution images of the earth.

PSLV-C40 is a highly sophisticated surveillance tool to keep an eye on Indian borders and will help the government track progress of infrastructure projects, said Pallava Bagla, a science writer and co-author of Reaching for the Stars: Indias Journey to Mars.

Two scientists at ISRO said images collected by the satellites will be used by the Indian security agencies to track military activities in neighbouring Pakistan, China, Bangladesh Sri Lanka and Nepal.

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New Delhi: A rocket landed on the Indian Embassy premises in Kabul, causing minor damage to a structure, but all the mission staff were safe, the external affairs ministry said on Monday night.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said there was no fire and no casualties were reported in the incident.

A rocket landed on the premises of our embassy in Kabul a while ago causing minor damage to a structure at the rear side of the embassy compound, he tweeted.

He also said that Indias charge d affaires there had informed that all the embassy employees were safe.

It was not clear whether the target of the attack was the Indian embassy, which is located in the high-security diplomatic zone of the Afghanistan capital.
Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua here, US Acting Assistant Secretary of State Alice Wells said as an immediate neighbour and important country of the region, Pakistans support is critical to the success of the US strategy for Afghanistan.

Islamabad: Amid a war of words, Pakistan and the United States on Monday agreed to work to further the shared objectives of stabilising Afghanistan.

In a meeting with Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua here, US Acting Assistant Secretary of State Alice Wells said as an immediate neighbour and important country of the region, Pakistans support is critical to the success of the US strategy for Afghanistan. The visiting US envoy underlined the need for strengthening intelligence cooperation between the two sides to improve coordination in counter-terrorism efforts. Ambassador Wells also acknowledged Pakistans efforts in eradicating terrorism.

Tehmina Janjua underscored that Pakistan-US relationship need to move forward under an environment of mutual trust and respect.
The moment Sanjay Leela Bhansali announced that his next film after Bajirao Mastani is going to be Padmavati, based on an epic poem Padmavat by sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi, different religious, caste groups along with fringe political outfits decided to protest against the film and do everything in their power to stall the film's release.





Padmavati was scheduled for a worldwide release on 1st December 2017 but it was postponed after the protests against the film took a nasty turn and Rajput outfit Karni Sena along with other groups threatened to burn down cinema halls and even placed bounties on the head of the film's director Sanjay Leela Bhansali and its stars Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh.





A few days back the news came that the film is going to be released on 25th January with a new title Padmaavat. A number of Rajput outfits are still threatening of serious consequences if the film releases and a few Rajput women have even threatened to immolate themselves. Seeing the ugly political turn the film's release has taken, a number of states are banning Padmaavat and giving in demands of the Rajput community which forms a sizeable vote bank.





Here are all the states in India where Padmavati is banned:

Madhya Pradesh: MP was the first state to ban Sanjay Leela Bhansali's directorial and Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan called Padmavati a Rashtramata.

Gujarat: The Gujarat government has also banned Padmaavat even after the film obtained a clearance from CBFC. The government has banned the film in public interest and to maintain law and order situation in the state.





Uttar Pradesh: CM Yogi Adityanath also banned the film and blamed the film's director for hurting the sentiments of the Rajput community.

Rajasthan: The state has banned the release of the film even after the film has obtained a clearance from CBFC as the BJP government doesn't want to be on the wrong side of the Rajput community as the state goes to polls soon.





Bihar: The Nitish Kumar government ban has also imposed the ban on Padmaavat and the film won't release on 25th January. The government wants all the involved parties to reach an amicable solution.





Apart from these states, Punjab, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Goa and Himachal Pradesh remain undecided while Mamta Banerjee has said that the film will release in West Bengal.
The Donegal man who was killed in a two-vehicle road traffic collision on Friday is to be laid to rest tomorrow.

William Wilson, from Fr Arnold Terrace Manorcunningham, died in the collision early on Friday morning when the tractor he was driving collided with a car.

The collision occurred at about 6.55am on the Lifford to Letterkenny road at Drumoghill, about four miles from Letterkenny.

The 68 year old died at the scene. The driver of the car was injured and taken to Letterkenny University Hospital.

Mr Wilson was described locally as one of the Lagan Valleys true characters.

He had been a participant in recent years in charity tractor runs.Members of his local tractor run posted a tribute following his death. They said he had enjoyed a new lease of life by taking part in the tractor runs.

Willie, as he was known locally, was chuffed having got himself a Massey Ferguson 135 to take part in the events. They said he enjoyed nothing more than to do his bit in helping raise money for worthy causes by taking part in various charity tractor runs throughout Donegal. He spent days between them tidying up his tractor so that he could help the less fortunate.

Local councillor Paul Canning said there was sadness locally at the death.

When a person loses their life like that it has a big impact on the village, he said. And hopefully the person who was injured will make a full recovery.

Mr Wilson is the first person to die on the county's roads this year.

Removal will take place on Tuesday from The Eternal Light Chapel of Rest, Mountain Top, Letterkenny at 1pm going to Ray Presbyterian Church, Manorcunningham for the funeral service at 2pm .

Mr Wilson will be laid to rest in the adjoining graveyard.
Tributes have been paid to the man who died after falling into a river from a bridge he was working on in Gaoth Dobhair yesterday.

Ian Smith from Kesh, Co. Fermanagh, who was aged in his 60s, was carrying out work on the Gaoth Dobhair Station Bridge at Coisclady when he fell into the water at around 11am.

Mr Smith was working for a Northern Ireland-based company which was carrying out works for Transport Infrastructure Ireland.

A search operation involving divers, gardai, ambulance and fire personnel as well the Coast Guard Rescue 118 helicopter was launched.

His body was recovered from the river Clady about 200 metres from where he fell at around 3pm by divers.

The Health and Safety Authority sent investigators to the scene yesterday afternoon and an investigation was continuing today.

Fermanagh and South Tyrone MLA, Rosemary Barton, also from Kesh, knew Mr Smith and described him as a "quiet man".

He was a very quiet, unassuming and hard-working man who was from a well-known family in the Kesh area, who had been working with a local contractor for a long number of years.

"Speaking with him at a function over Christmas, he was very much looking forward to the new year and the building of the new hall at Dromard near Kesh which he had a great interest in. In fact, on Saturday he was involved in voluntary preparation work for this new build. Most of all, however, my heartfelt sympathy goes to his immediate family of two brothers, sister-in-laws, nieces and nephews where he will be greatly missed.

Canon Henry Blair, the rector of Ardess Parish Church, said Mr Smith's family is "distraught".

"Ian was well liked in the area. He was very quiet, he kept himself to himself and liked being a part of the community. I don't think his death has really sunk in yet. Everyone is very saddened by the suddenness of this tragedy, he said.

A minute's silence held at todays meeting of Donegal County Councils Glenties Municipal District today.

Cllr Micheal Cholm Mac Giolla Esbuig said it was exceptionally sad for his family, colleagues and the community. He said it was very sad for everyone involved.

Mr Smith is survived by his two brothers, Ashley and Richard.
The Donegal Democrat has been informed of the following deaths:

- Terence Murray, Trusk Road, Ballybofey and formerly of Strabane.

- Willie John McDaid, 43 Crana View, Buncrana

- Jamsie Boyle, Cullion Road, Letterkenny

-Thomas Joseph Mc Goldrick, Lettershambo, Cloghan

- Hugh Kelly, Boat Gap, Rossnowlagh

- Mary Montaque formerly Cassidy (nee McCabe), 11 Rockfield park, Belleek, Co Fermanagh

- Bobby Toland., Kildrum Lower, Carrigans

Terence Murray, Trusk Road, Ballybofey and formerly of Strabane

The death has occurred at Letterkenny University Hospital, of Terence Murray, Trusk Road, Ballybofey and formerly of Strabane.

His remains will repose at his home on Tuesday January 16th from 6pm until rosary at 10pm and on Wednesday January 17th from 11 am until rosary at 10pm.

Funeral leaving his home on Thursday, January 18th at 10.30 am for Requiem mass at 11 am in the Church of Mary Immaculate, Stranorlar, with interment afterwards at St.Marys Churchyard, Melmount, Strabane.

Donations in lieu of flowers, if so desired, to the friends of Letterkenny University Hospital,or the Donegal Hospice, c/o any family member.

Family time on the morning of the funeral, please.

Willie John McDaid, 43 Crana View, Buncrana

The death has occurred of Willie John McDaid, 43 Crana View, Buncrana, Donegal

Reposing at his residence until removal on Thursday, January 18th, at 10.30am to St. Marys Church, Cockhill for 11am.

Requiem Mass with burial afterwards in the adjoining cemetery. Family time from 11pm until 11am and on Thursday morning, please. Family flowers only, donations in lieu, if desired, to Buncrana Nursing Unit Patients Comfort Fund.

Jamsie Boyle, Cullion Road, Letterkenny

The death has occurred of Jamsie Boyle, Cullion Road, Letterkenny.

Reposing at his residence. Requiem Mass in the Church of the Irish Martyrs, Letterkenny at 11am tomorrow, Wednesday, 17th January, with burial afterwards in New Leck Cemetery.

Thomas Joseph Mc Goldrick, Lettershambo, Cloghan

The death has taken place of Thomas Joseph in The Brentwood Manor Nursing Home, Convoy.

His remains will repose in The Oratory in The Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Glenfin, on Tuesday, from 5pm to 7 pm.

Funeral Mass at 10am on Wednesday with cremation afterwards in Lakelands Crematorium, Cavan.

Hugh Kelly, Boat Gap, Rossnowlagh



The death has occurred at Sligo University Hospital of Hugh Kelly, Boat Gap, Rossnowlagh

Cremation private. Memorial service at 12 noon on Wednesday, January 17th in St. Brigids Church, Ballintra. Burial of remains will follow in the family plot. House private please .

Mary Montaque formerly Cassidy (nee McCabe), 11 Rockfield park, Belleek, Co Fermanagh

The death has occurred of Mary Montaque formerly Cassidy (nee McCabe), 11 Rockfield park, Belleek, Co Fermanagh. Peacefully at the South West Acute Hospital in Enniskillen. Reposing at the family home today Tuesday from 11am until 10pm and on Wednesday from 11am until Rosary at 10pm . Mass of the resurrection in Saint Patricks Church, Belleek on Thursday morning at 11am followed by interment in the adjoining cemetery. Family flowers. Donations in lieu if so desired to the Marie Curie Nurses c/o Patsy McCauley funeral Director. Family Time on Thursday Morning Please.

Bobby Toland, Kildrum Lower, Carrigans
Donegal Action for Cancer Care (DACC) has welcomed the success of the North West Cancer Care centre at Altnagelvin hospital in Derry during its first year of operation.

To the end of November last year, fifty nine patients from Donegal with prostate and breast cancer received radiotherapy at the unit.

Patients from Derry, Strabane, Limavady and Donegal all use the services at the unit in Derry.

Around 500 cancer patients from across the region have used the services in Altnagelvin in its first year.

Around 95 per cent of the patients were outpatients who returned home following their treatment at the hospital.

The 66m centre opened in November, 2016, with an international team of experts at the helm and some of the most advanced technology for treating cancer available anywhere in the world.



One year

The new North West Cancer Care facility marked one year of treating radiotherapy patients on November 30th, 2017 with over 200 staff now basesd at the facility.

Male patients with prostate cancer were the first to receive radiotherapy there, followed by breast cancer patients in March, 2017.

There is a 25 year agreement in place that provides radiotherapy treatment for Donegal patients in Derry.

Spokesperson for DACC, Betty Holmes said: The fact that cancer patients no longer have to make that very long journey to Galway and Dublin is welcome.

Ms. Holmes said that when patients can avail of radiotherapy treatment in neighbouring Derry rather than in Dublin or Galway they will not have to spend as much time away from their loved ones as the journey time is greatly decreased.

Cancer patients being able to go to Altnagelvin Hospital for their radiotherapy makes a major difference, she said.

Ms. Holmes urged all those who have had surgery in Dublin or Galway to ask about having their radiotherapy treatment in Altnagelvin.

Feedback from patients and their families to DACC has been excellent.

It is very important that patients and their families know that when their radiotherapy is being discussed with the team at the hospital they are attending for their surgery that the patients and families can ask to have their treatment at the cancer centre at Altnagelvin.

This message really needs to get out to Donegal cancer patients, Ms. Holmes said adding that it was extremely important that people remember this.

DACC continue to work in the best interest of Donegal cancer patients.

DACC will be in existence 13 years this April.

All members are voluntary and unpaid.
Commuters from Dundalk were left disappointed by the overcrowding on the 8am train from Dundalk to Connolly station this morning.



One annoyed train passenger on Twitter says: @IrishRail the 8am train from dundalk to connolly is a carriage short again this morning leaving everyone at Dundalk and Drogheda standing. Why is this? #irishrail #irishfail.



There was also overcrowding on an Enterprise train heading to Dublin, with no seats being left after Newry. Another dismayed train passenger tweeted: No seats again this morning after Newry. Dundalk passengers having to stand for over an hour. Short one carriage - is this going to be a reoccurring event?.



Enterprise Trains official Twitter account responded to the complaint with: This is not what we want either. I am very sorry for the inconvenience ^JC.



Another Twitter user pointed out potential health and safety issues associated with overcrowding on a busy train: Unsafe conditions on Enterprise to Dublin again today due to another morning of reduced capacity. People spilling boiling cups of tea on each other due to sporadic movements caused by train speed and absence of seating or standing room. Access to toilets impossible. @IrishRail.



The passenger then went on to compare the overcrowding situation to a dystopian episode of Black Mirror and asked Irish Rail to direct them to the official complaint service.



Irish Rail replied with apologies, the train is designed to safely accommodate standing, although we do appreciate it's not the most comfortable, you can submit complaints/feedback through the following link.



In another frustrated tweet, a regular commuter says: Dundalk and Newry have barely a skeleton service. The trains are slow, viciously overcrowded and the fares way higher than the leap zone.
MENTAL health education aimed at secondary school pupils could benefit 5th and 6th class pupils, according to Louth County Councillor and Dundalk teacher Maria Doyle.

The CBS Primary School teacher made the suggestion after a presentation given by two Comhairle na nOg representatives at a Louth County Council meeting held in Dundalk on Monday, January 15.

Aoife Byrne and Jordan (Chucky) McKenna distributed a booklet to councillors at the meeting called 'Breathe' which aims to raise awareness about mental health amongst teenagers.

I used to work in an American company where employees did breathing and stretching exercises every day as part of the daily routine, said Cllr Maria Doyle.

I asked Aoife and Jordan where Comhairle na nOg is planning to distribute the booklet and they said to secondary schools.

Comhairle na nOg is hoping to distribute 10,000 copies in different secondary schools around Co Louth.

The youth organisation is also planning to host a series of workshops in secondary schools in the year ahead.

I asked if they had considered distributing the booklet to primary schools because it might be of interest to 5th and 6th Class pupils.

I think mental heatlth education should be taught in schools. It's something that would be very beneficial to pupils.

Cllr John McGahon added that mental health issues can arise in teenagers due to social media. He also warned teenagers using the social media platform SnapChat to be aware of the potential dangers caused by the SnapChat map.

People forget that it's turned on and don't realise that the 200 contacts in your phone can see where you are at all times if they are within a 200m radius, he said.

It's a very digital age we are living in. Social media is growing and we are only coming to terms with it now.

Cllr Marianne Butler added: Cllr McGahon's point on social media is very relevant. We are just recognising that there are a lot of negative aspects to it.
NEARLY 4m in rates owed by bad debtors has been written off by Louth County Council (LCC) as at December 31, 2017, according to the local authority's Monthly Management Report.

Cllr Anne Campbell noted that while 3,963,738 has been written off in rates, just 30,180 has been written off for rents.

I'm struck by the difference. Ordinary people will be struck by the difference in write-offs for rates versus rents, she said.

The figures contained in the Monthly Management report are debtor balances for collection rates at December 31, 2017. The figures are set to change when year-end accruals and claims are posted.

When the annual financial statements are completed, they are due to be presented to LCC.

LCC Chief Executive Joan Martin said: Instead of writing off 100 per cent for vacant properties we now write-off 50 per cent. It's largely for vacant properties.

We are not making additional concessions, we are making less concessions whether it's retail or commercial.

Cllr Mark Dearey said: In 2014, Louth County Council wrote off 45 per cent of its rates. It was the highest write-off in the country.

Donegal had the second highest write-off rate in 2014 at 25 per cent. LCC was 25 per cent ahead of Donegal.

Meanwhile, Cllr Frank Godfrey called for a fairer system of local property tax rates to be introduced, especially for elderly people living on their own.

Ms Martin said: Property tax is not new or additional income. The old local government fund collected 25m between the two towns of Dundalk and Drogheda and the county.

It's a different way of collecting money and less money is collected through the property tax than the local government fund.

The money that's collected is just part of the general income. It goes across the budget. It's part of the money that balances the budget.

We have over the last number of years increased the bad debt and there is a requirement for bad debt write-offs. It's a considerable amount of money to write-off. It's money we could do with.
A row between a father and his two Dundalk-based sons over the sale of shares in a timber company was heard by the Commercial Court.

The case was brought to the court by 84-year-old retired businessman Sean McCaughey, who has an address in Gran Canaria. McCaughey has a 70% shareholding in IJM Timber Engineering Ltd. The company, which has 250 employees, has a registered address in Larlurcan, Co Monaghan and is also based in Dundalk.

His sons Peter McCaughey and Martin McCaughey have addresses in Hackballscross, Dundalk and Dundalk respectively.

The Irish Times reported that Mr Justice Brian McGovern agreed to admit the case to the list of the fast-track court. However, he advised the main shareholders in the McCaughey family to consider mediation.

Sean McCaugheys court action was taken against the company, his sons Peter and Martin, and a director of IJM, Gregory McKenna with an address in Emyvale, Co Monaghan.

The Irish Times also reported that Mr McCaughey said the court case was the result of unsuccessful negotiations between him and his sons regarding the sale of his majority shareholding in the timber company.

The Irish Times also reported: his (Sean McCaughey) refusal to consent to the acquisition of his shares at what he claims was an undervalued price brought about a progressive deterioration in his relationship with his sons.

Mr McCaughey also told the Commercial Court that he was generally happy with the idea of his shares being sold. However, he said he later thought that the sum, approx. 1.4 million was too low.

Mr McCaughey also told the court he was unsatisfied with resolutions passed at an EGM last year which he claimed would further dilute his shareholding in the company.

The case is due to come back before the court next week.
Community-owned fiber-to-home broadband networks generally charge less for entry-level service than private providers, according to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, which released its findings last week.

Despite lower teaser rates private providers offer during the first year of service, publicly-owned fiber-to-the-home networks in 23 of 27 communities examined offered lower-priced service when averaged over four years, researchers working on Berkmans Responsive Communities project found.

In the 23 communities, prices for the lowest-cost program that met the federal definition of broadband  minimum speeds of 25 Mbps for downloads and 3 Mbps for uploads  were between 2.9 percent and 50 percent less than the lowest-cost such service offered by a private provider in the market.

In the four cases where a private provider offered lower pricing, its service cost between 6.9 percent and 30.5 percent less.

Difficult Data Collection

In total, the researchers collected advertised prices for fiber-to-home plans for 40 community-owned providers, but only 27 met the studys criteria: 25/3 download/upload; at least one private competitor offering broadband in their market; and data available for comparison purposes.

Data collection for the study was challenging, the researchers noted. They explained that the Federal Communications Commission does not disseminate pricing data or track broadband availability by address.

Additionally, service offerings follow no standard speed tiers or definitions, such as the specifics of video or phone service bundles, the researchers pointed out.

We focused on comparing entry-level broadband plans in part because of these complexities, they wrote.

Better Competition

Because of data availability problems, many public policy questions remain unstudied.

If comprehensive data were available, wed be able to study many important public interest topics, including the relationship between cost and consumer broadband adoption, the precise effects of competition, and how pricing strategies play out across different demographic groups, observed David Talbot, leader of Berkmans Responsive Communities project and a coauthor of the research report.

Nevertheless, communities can reap real benefits from a municipal broadband network.

For example, its a way for a community to get what it wants when it cant get it from an incumbent provider.

There are many times when incumbents are not willing to provide the broadband service a community needs and wants, explained Heather Burnett Gold, CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association.

However, by and large, most communities dont want to get into the telecommunications business, she told the E-Commerce Times, so they look for outside operators to partner with them.

Net Neutrality Hedge

In general, well-run municipal systems  including ones where a private provider offers service over a publicly owned fiber network  tend to provide benefits that are the natural result of competition in the marketplace, Berkmans Talbot told the E-Commerce Times.

Among them are the potential for lower prices and better service from all players in that market, he said. In addition, the existence of locally run systems allows for local governance, and this can include locally set rules around data privacy and Net neutrality.

With the FCC repealing the Obama administrations Net neutrality rules, municipal broadband networks could play a role in keeping private broadband providers on the straight and neutral path.

Municipal broadband is the last defense for cities to ensure they have an open Internet, said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute on Local Self Reliance.

Its not a substitute for good federal policy, but for a city that needs to ensure that it has open Internet access, I think it makes a lot of sense to build a municipal network and keep it neutral, he told the E-Commerce Times.

If the big players violate Net neutrality, it will be good for municipalities with their own networks, Mitchell added, because it will make more people want to subscribe to the municipal network.

The Power of Three

However, the big draw for consumers to municipal networks is pricing.

Municipal broadband introduces competition  not only competition, but a special kind of competition.

Price competition is different when you have three providers, and typically municipal broadband is the third provider in the market, Mitchell pointed out. That leads to a more of a competitive dynamic than when all you have is DSL and cable. 

Whats more, some municipalities have taken a very aggressive stance on pricing. In Fort Collins, Colorado, for example, the city plans to offer gigabit upload and download service for US$70 a month.

Right now, its $300 for a comparable service from our incumbents, said the citys mayor, Wade Troxell.

Theres no way that the incumbents can offer gigabit symmetric service, he told the E-Commerce Times, because right now theyre milking their coaxial cable, which is copper, and were going to provide fiber.
By Andy Rowell

As the U.S. shale industry comes under increasing scrutiny for its environmental and health impact, it has emerged that the U.S. has approved fracking offshore leading to billions of gallons of wastewater to be dumped at sea.

The Center for Biological Diversity has released federal documents that reveal that officials approved more than 1,200 offshore fracks in 630 different wells in the four years from 2010 to 2014 in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf of Mexico has already been suffering from decades of conventional oil and gas drilling as well as the aftermath of the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010, when millions of gallons of oil were spilt.

The newly released documents reveal that fracking occurred off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with no public involvement and with no site-specific tests undertaken beforehand.

In so doing, the industry was also allowed to dump a staggering 76 billion gallons of waste fluid into the sea in 2014 alone.

There is real reason to be worried by this dumping. Over the last 18 months there has been growing concern about fracking chemicals contained within fracking wastewater.

Just over a year ago, the UK-based CHEM Trust issued a report and briefing paper on how toxic chemicals from fracking could affect wildlife and people.

The report identified specific examples of hazardous materials used in fracking, including chemicals associated with leukemia in humans and toxic to sperm production in males.

The trust warned it is particularly concerned about the use of hormone-disrupting chemicals commonly known as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs).

And then last October new research found that fracking chemicals are linked with a decreased sperm count in adulthood. Finally, in April this year, a new scientific study found high levels of 16 endocrine disruptors in samples taken near a fracking site.

And now it seems fracking wastewater has been dumped at sea without anyones knowledge or oversight. Fracking has largely been in a shroud of secrecy, Miyoko Sakashita, the oceans director at Center for Biological Diversity, said, before adding It is a dangerous activity that has no place in our oceans or the Gulf of Mexico.

According to Sakashita, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, (EPA) didnt really know what chemicalsand still doesnt know what chemicalsare being discharged into the Gulf of Mexico, which is a damning verdict on the U.S. regulator. When I first called EPA  they basically responded to me that they dont keep track of [wastewater dumping] and they dont know, Sakashita said.

The Obama administration is essentially letting oil companies frack at will in Gulf ecosystems and dump billions of gallons of oil waste into coastal waters, adds Kristen Monsell, a Center for Biological Diversity attorney. Every offshore frack increases the risk to wildlife and coastal communities, yet federal officials have been just rubber-stamping this toxic practice in the Gulf of Mexico for years.

The lawyer added that the U.S. government hasnt really studied it before, they havent studied the impact of the chemicals that these companies are allowed to dump directly into the ocean including critical habitat and fracking-endangered species.
Politicians from coastal states around the country continue to call for their states to be exempt from the Trump administrations proposed expansion of offshore drilling following its politically-tinged decision last week to remove Florida from the plan.

The Interior Department said last week that Secretary Ryan Zinke had spoken with seven coastal governors opposed to drilling, including the governors of North and South Carolina, Rhode Island, Delaware and Washington. Oregon Gov. Kate Browns office told press Zinke would consider removing the state from the plan following their call, while California Gov. Jerry Browns office reports that Zinke promised to travel to the state to further discuss the offshore leases.

Opposition to the plan is creating strange political bedfellows in several states: outgoing Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his incoming replacement, Democrat Phil Murphy, sent a letter with Democrat Senators Cory Booker and Bob Menendez asking Zinke to withdraw New Jersey from the plan, while Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) is finding common ground with some Republican congressmen as well as local business leaders in his state in voicing opposition to the plan.

As reported by The Hill:

Interior is obligated by law to consult with governors, congressional delegations and coastal communities as it crafts its plan.

All Pacific and Atlantic governors have expressed outright opposition or concerns about drilling off their states shores, except Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R).

In a letter to Zinke, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that offshore drilling poses an unacceptable threat to New Yorks environment and economy, the New York Post reported.

It introduces the unprecedented risk of extremely hazardous oil spills, contributes to the acceleration of climate change, and conflicts with New Yorks ambitious agenda to develop offshore wind energy, the governor said.

With this plan, the federal government is trampling on the interests of New Yorkers and threatening the future well-being of our state.

For a deeper dive:

Zinke: The Hill. OR: AP. CA: Politico Pro. NJ: CNN, SNJ Today. VA: WTVF, Daily Press, WAVY, ABC13. Gov. opposition: New York Post. Commentary: Times of Trenton editorial, NJ Star-Ledger editorial

For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for daily Hot News.
The Peruvian government announced it will establish a new and enormous national park in the Amazon.

Yaguas National Park, located in the northern region of Loreto, consists of 2,147,166 acres of rainforest, a vast river system and is home to more than 3,000 species of plants, 500 species of birds and 160 species of mammals, including giant otters, woolly monkeys, Amazonian river dolphins and manatees. The park also features 550 fish speciesone of the richest fish faunas in the world.

The designation, approved after a Ministry Council meeting last week, is intended to conserve the regions precious biodiversity and protect the sacred lands of the indigenous communities that live around Yaguas.

The new park will not only maintain a natural sanctuary, which is home to unique species in the world, but also generate opportunities for indigenous families, Prime Minister Mercedes Araoz said.

According to a report from the website Latam, the Peruvian government can expect to gain about 23 million soles ($7,148,630) over a period of 20 years thanks to the creation of the national park and the benefits that the conservation of its biodiversity will bring to the communities located around the park. The preservation of species for subsistence hunting alone would save the communities more than $5.2 million, the report said.

The area has faced increased pressures from illegal logging and mining interests over the past two decades. Many indigenous communities of Yaguas have voiced concern by these threats and have thus cheered the creation of the national park.

The mountain of our ancestors has to be a national park because it is a sacred place, explained Eriberto Jimenez Hilorio, president of the Indigenous Federation of the Border Communities of Putumayo.



The Andes Amazon Fund

The benefits are for everyone, for the future of everyone, for the country, and for the world, added Liz Chicaje Churay, the president of the Federation of the Native Communities of Ampiyacu.

The Andes Amazon Fund will donate $1 million dollars towards establishing the park and providing social development opportunities for the indigenous communities.

As a Peruvian conservationist, I am proud that with the creation of Yaguas National Park, Peru continues on the path of creating one of the most amazing park systems in the world, Andes Amazon Fund program director Enrique Ortiz said. This park is as large as Yellowstone National Park and probably 10 times as diverse.
Editors Note: This Commentary is part of a special report exploring game-changing trends and innovations that have the potential to shake up the schoolhouse. Read the full report: 10 Big Ideas in Education .

A schools master scheduleas anyone whos worked in a K-12 building knowsdictates much more than just bell times. Its the framework for everything that happens in a school, such as determining which students get which courses, how paraprofessionals are assigned, and whether teachers have time to collaborate and with whom.

Crafting the master schedulea job that generally falls to the principal or assistant principalis a Herculean task. The final product has to account for union rules, district initiatives, graduation requirements, individualized education plans, and physical spaces available. Putting it together takes timemany months. And once the school year begins, even the slightest change to the master schedule can send ripple effects, reaching all students and staff members.

Adam Pisoni isnt exactly a natural fit for fixing how schools approach the master schedule. His success as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur has nothing to do with his own schooling. In fact, he dropped out of high school in 11th grade and to this day does not hold a high school diploma or a higher education degree. In 2008, he co-founded a technology companyYammer, a social network for businesses and within four years sold it to Microsoft for about $1.2 billion .

Instead of sitting on a beach somewhere, he turned his sights to education, with the goal of reducing inequities that make it easier for some students to succeed than others.

About Adam Pisoni Adam Pisoni is the founder & CEO of Abl Schools. Based in San Francisco, he co-founded the communication software company Yammer in 2008, which Microsoft bought for $1.2 billion in 2012.

Im a middle-class white guy with two educated parents, Pisoni says, I think about people [with fewer advantages] for whom education fails them. They have a longer road. He believes the master schedule is the key to that kind of change.

Pisonis new company, Abl , which launched in 2015, has 17 employees and has raised $12 million in venture-capital funding. The group is currently piloting its computer-based platform, which lets school-based personnel input and shift the schedule quickly, highlighting conflicts and imbalances as they go, in a dozen schools. The program will cost $3 to $7 per student, and Pisoni is aiming to have it in about 30 schools, mainly in California, New York, and Texas, by the end of this summer. Education Week spoke with Pisoni about why hes targeting the master schedule and how he hopes doing so will level the playing field for students.

You refer to yourself as an educational outsider. Why do you think the insiders should listen to you?

I spent a year talking to people across educationteachers, principals, assistant principals, district leaders, philanthropists, ed-tech founders, investors, researchers, policymakershundreds of people.

I began asking, what is it that will accelerate traditional schools moving in new directions? What is it that prevents them from doing so? How do we lower the risk, cost, complexity, and friction of doing so? It was about understanding what holds traditional schools back.

So much of it kept coming back to the master schedule. This is the blueprint of the school. Some people call it a moral document because if you want to understand who gets what, which programs we are prioritizing, what students and teachers we are prioritizingyou look at the master schedule.

By the time a student is sitting in a particular course or classroom, a lot of decisions have been made that determine that students opportunities.

What does creating the master schedule generally look like in schools?

School leaders are spending hundreds of hours on the master schedulesix to nine months [from about winter break to the end of the summer]. Its here where policies, programs, and resources come together. Its a giant Jenga game.

Typically, the way people are trained to do master scheduling because its so complex is to start with students who have the most constrained schedulesand those tend to be the honors students.

If you start there, you end up having the fewest options for students who need the most help. You can end up in these situations where none of your English-language learners [has] electives. Or what you see a lot in California is students have classes every period, but they dont have the courses they need to go to college.

Most of this process is done on whiteboards, on magnet boards, with stickies. It begs for a data-rich solution but its mostly done in a data-poor way. Youre making decisions but you cant see the consequences of those decisions before its too late.

If this is such a big deal, why arent more people focused on making it easier?

I cant tell you how many times I explain this problem to people, and they cant understand it. I talk to education researchers whove never heard of the master schedule. I talk to funders with a lot of experience in education and Im telling them theres a problem in every single school today that needs addressing, and youve never heard of it. And they get mad at me, because what does that say about them?

The way I ended up getting money is I said, Dont take my word. Call any principal in the countryit doesnt matter where. Just mention the master schedule, and ask them about it, and theyll talk to you for an hour.

So youve created a platform that gathers information on staff availability and individual student needs and requests and helps people see in real-time the effects of making changes to the schedule. Explain why this is helpful for schools.

We help school leaders express their priorities through the master schedule.

If they want to increase teacher collaboration or increase special education inclusion, well help them do that and see the trade-off theyre making.

We focus heavily on equity. Were giving visibility into which students are getting what.

We saw a school where we were analyzing course requests, and it happened to be that all the boys in the grade were taking math and science, and all the girls were taking humanities. No one intended to do that, but the school didnt know about it, either. The classes were going to be gender imbalanced. [We] make that visible.

During the process of scheduling, you change a lot of what students requested. Thats a big thing, too. Whos getting what they asked for? Who is being pushed to take rigorous courses and who isnt? Who is getting senior teachers and junior teachers?

Is this all computer-based, or is there a human on your end helping?

Even though it sounds like this is an automated computer process, its not very automated. Thats on purpose. We do have algorithms that aid the scheduler; they help you figure out how to put the puzzle together. But at the end of the day, its about a series of trade-offs.

Its not like you hit a button. Theres a fair amount of hand-scheduling. Its a very interactive process.

Theres a lot of skepticism about education fixes coming from the business world. What makes your company, and idea, different?

A lot of Silicon Valley education companies are approaching schools with the idea that schools are doing something wrong and they have the solution. Were focusing on traditional schools and saying, You know your goals, your students. Your school may be a wealthy suburban school thats trying to figure out how to get kids in more honors classes, and another school may be dealing with mental health and violence and attendance, and they have really different goals. We want to help you achieve your goals.

Our primary user and contact is the principal, which is also pretty unique. Its not the teacher. So much focus is being put on teachers and classrooms, and were leaving a lot untouched out there, unfixed. Theres just as much work to do outside the classroom as there is inside it.
All but three states this year will be in full legislative swing by the end of this month, and education policy will be at the top of several governors agendaswith election-year politics and the Every Student Succeeds Act hovering in the background as they go about their business.

More than three-fourths of state lawmakers nationwide are up for election this year, along with 36 governorships. And last year already had proved a hyperactive one for school officials and lobbyists with an interest in education issues, mostly as a result of the looming deadline for accountability plans under ESSA, which gives state legislators great leeway in crafting testing, school ranking, and school turnaround policies.

This year, states such as Kansas and Washington return to the challenge of formulating new ways to distribute money to schools, prompted by court rulings in some cases. States including Oklahoma and Wyoming also will be struggling to overcome big budget deficits, which could put pressure on education funding.

Debates over school accountability systems could flare up again, as U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team continue to review and sign off on state ESSA plans.

Legislators in states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin took issue with the plans their state education departments turned in to the federal government and asked DeVos to reject them or threatened to introduce legislation to defang the plans before they could go into effect. Lobbyists in California and Florida are using recent feedback from DeVos as fuel to push those states legislatures to rewrite their accountability systems.

School Report Cards

State education departments this spring also are drafting new report cards to better display how schools stack up on ESSA accountability systems. That process has proved to be especially contentious. Many state legislatures decided last year to switch from letter-grade-style report cards to dashboard-style report cards, which display several indicators.

In recent months, debates over the look and technicalities of school report cards have flared up between state superintendents, state boards, and legislatures in Alabama, California, Michigan, and Ohio.

Ohios school-report-card letter grades have become increasingly questionable, inconsistent, difficult to understand, frustrating for educators, and confusing for parents, Rep. Mike Duffey, a Republican, said in a memo to his House colleagues. He plans to propose legislation that would scrap the state departments current report-card design and get rid of state letter grades for schools.

A large number of statesat least sevenlast year set up commissions to study new ways to distribute money among their schools. Those studies are past due in some cases.

States where revenue is heavily dependent on commodity prices, such as Alaska and Oklahoma, are looking for ways to cut school funding.

Meanwhile, Kansas and Washington are under court deadlines to come up with new funding formulas.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican who could soon leave the state to work for President Donald Trump, tasked his legislature with coming up with $600 million but gave few clues as to where to find that money. He later said he expects the money to come from revenue growth.

Kansans expect to see students in every school in our state thrive and achieve, particularly our students who the court cited as being inadequately served under our current funding, said Brownback in his state-of-the-state speech last week.

Election-Year Tensions

In a year when so many legislators are up for election, some legislative observers say its not likely that they will attempt to propose especially controversial legislation or do something voters will remember when walking into the voting booth.

But with DeVos placing school choice on the radar of so many voters, many Democrats plan to exploit moderate conservative voters hostility toward charter schools and vouchers. That could affect how GOP legislators treat the issue during this years session. Already, in Tennessee, Rep. Harry Brooks, a Republican who has been a leading voucher advocate in the state, has said he and his colleagues wont pursue voucher legislation this year and instead will focus on boosting teacher pay and school technology.

Severe teacher shortages in many states also have led to calls both from teachers unions and from school accountability hawks for legislators to rethink their approaches to teacher certification, evaluations, and pay, with a mind toward making it easier to go into the profession. In states ESSA plans, departments have been tasked with defining ineffective teacher, setting off a debate in states such as California and Minnesota over what that should mean. Several states plans were criticized for having insufficient definitions, and legislatures could end up weighing in.
The chief economist of the world bank, in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, said that recently, World bank has changed its calculating and ranking measures in the process of presenting a list of countries in the index of ease of doing business.

He, further adds that the changed structure is misleading and not fair since it does not treat each country equal. Statements like these make people wonder where they should put their trust, which is becoming a lost entity nowadays. The world bank has released a statement after the interview saying the index prepared by the world bank is based on the hard facts and not on imaginary quantities.

World bank never favours any country and treats everyone equal. The aim is to provide an accurate and true picture of the situation which can help countries improve upon their weakness resulting from different segments. The chief economist did not mention any list of countries who might have been beneficiary of the flawed calculation but mentioned the name of Chile, which has seen its ranking improve drastically in the latest ease of doing business report presented.

Many other countries have also seen their positions improve in the ease of doing business, but nothing can be said about anyone in particular till the data is presented. While all the claims have been refuted by the World Bank, but it does offer enough reasons to worry about the structure behind the presentation of the Global index of ease of doing business.

The index comprises the list of countries who are working very hard on improving the business and investment scenario in their country. Providing business what they need to produce growth and jobs, is the primary aim of the countries who seem to top the index.

The World Bank

While the list announces some of the names of the countries who are always favourite on the list but nothing suspicious can be said about them. Cheif economist Paul Romer said that they will redo the rankings as some countries positions do not reflect the actual position in the rankings.

The list is prepared to attract investment in a country. The list has been topped by the Newzeland, while Singapore and Denmark come at the second and third respectively. It will be likely to see how the rankings change once the methodologies are changed or varied. While India has also improved its ranking this year, the ranking is based on a variety of factors, such as getting electricity, getting credit, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency.

Each category is awarded a finite point according to the data collected by the World Bank. The overall score is calculated based on the total scores of various categories. This report and like many other reports is periodically produced by the many other agencies of the UNO. We hope to see a better system and clarification from the organization which is trusted and respected worldwide.
Cognition is the ability to think and make decisions. Medication-free treatments that maintain cognitive health as we age are attracting the attention of medical experts. Maintaining the ability to think clearly and make decisions is crucial to older adults' well-being and vitality.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a condition that affects people who are in the early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's disease. People with MCI may have mild memory loss or other difficulties completing tasks that involve cognitive abilities. MCI may eventually develop into dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Depression and anxiety also can accompany MCI. Having these conditions can increase the risk of mental decline as people age.

A new, first-of-its-kind study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society by scientists from research centers in Montreal and Quebec City, Canada. They designed a study to learn whether cognitive training, a medication-free treatment, could improve MCI. Studies show that activities that stimulate your brain, such as cognitive training, can protect against a decline in your mental abilities. Even older adults who have MCI can still learn and use new mental skills.

For their study, researchers recruited 145 older adults around the age of 72 from Canadian memory clinics. The participants had been diagnosed with MCI, and were assigned to one of three groups. Each group included four or five participants, and met for eight weekly sessions for 120 minutes.

The three groups were:

Cognitive training group. Members of this group participated in the MEMO program (MEMO stands for a French phrase that translates to "training method for optimal memory"). They received special training to improve their memory and attention span.

Psycho-social group. Participants in this group were encouraged to improve their general well-being. They learned to focus on the positive aspects of their lives and find ways to increase positive situations.

Control group. Participants had no contact with researchers and didn't follow a program.

During the time the training sessions took place, 128 of the participants completed the project. After six months, 104 completed all the sessions they were assigned.

People in the MEMO group increased their memory scores by 35 to 40 percent, said Sylvie Belleville, PhD, a senior author of the study. "Most importantly, they maintained their scores over a six-month period."

What's more, the improvement was the largest for older adults with "delayed recall." This means memory for words measured just 10 minutes after people have studied them. Because delayed memory is one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease, this was a key finding.

Those who participated in the MEMO group said they used the training they learned in their daily lives. The training gave them different ways to remember things. For example, they learned to use visual images to remember names of new people, and to use associations to remember shopping lists. These lessons allowed them to continue maintaining their memory improvements after the study ended.

The people in the psycho-social group and the control group didn't experience memory benefits or improvement in their mood.

###

This summary is from "MEMO+: efficacy, durability and impact of cognitive training and psychosocial intervention in MCI". It appears online ahead of print in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The study authors are Sylvie Belleville, PhD; Carol Hudon, PhD; Nathalie Bier, PhD; Catherine Brodeur, MD; Brigitte Gilbert, PhD; Sebastien Grenier, PhD; Marie-Christine Ouellet, PhD; Chantal Viscogliosi, PhD; and Serge Gauthier, MD.

About the Health in Aging Foundation

This research summary was developed as a public education tool by the Health in Aging Foundation. The Foundation is a national non-profit established in 1999 by the American Geriatrics Society to bring the knowledge and expertise of geriatrics healthcare professionals to the public. We are committed to ensuring that people are empowered to advocate for high-quality care by providing them with trustworthy information and reliable resources. Last year, we reached nearly 1 million people with our resources through HealthinAging.org. We also help nurture current and future geriatrics leaders by supporting opportunities to attend educational events and increase exposure to principles of excellence on caring for older adults. For more information or to support the Foundation's work, visit http://www.HealthinAgingFoundation.org.

About the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society

Included in more than 9,000 library collections around the world, the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) highlights emerging insights on principles of aging, approaches to older patients, geriatric syndromes, geriatric psychiatry, and geriatric diseases and disorders. First published in 1953, JAGS is now one of the oldest and most impactful publications on gerontology and geriatrics, according to ISI Journal Citation Reports. Visit wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/JGS for more details.

About the American Geriatrics Society

Founded in 1942, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) is a nationwide, not-for-profit society of geriatrics healthcare professionals that has--for 75 years--worked to improve the health, independence, and quality of life of older people. Its nearly 6,000 members include geriatricians, geriatric nurses, social workers, family practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, and internists. The Society provides leadership to healthcare professionals, policymakers, and the public by implementing and advocating for programs in patient care, research, professional and public education, and public policy. For more information, visit AmericanGeriatrics.org.
Washington, DC - Jan. 16, 2018 - To characterize the genes of newly identified bacteria, microbiologists often introduce mutations within the bacteria using mobile DNA segments called transposons to study the impact of these mutations.

However, the trial and error process to identify a functional transposon system for a new bacterium can be lengthy.

Now, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California have developed a method to speed up the process.

In work published this week in mSystems, an open access journal from the American Society for Microbiology, the investigators described a method to study hundreds or thousands of different transposon systems in parallel against a target bacterium. Within what the investigators term "magic pools," the individual DNA vectors used to deliver the transposons contained different combinations of genetic material and antibiotic resistance markers. To enable the tracking of all of these different transposon vectors in parallel, the authors added a unique DNA barcode to each vector, such that they could be identified using DNA sequencing, a laboratory tool to determine the order of building blocks within DNA segments. After introducing mutations to a new bacterium with the magic pool, DNA sequencing of the barcode can be used to identify the vector design that is effective for making transposon mutants. Because all DNA "parts" are archived, it is straightforward to reconstruct the effective vector design.

The team used this magic pools method to construct large libraries of transposon mutants in five bacteria, including three from the phylum Bacteroidetes.

"Instead of testing one genetic method at a time and having it fail, we wanted to test hundreds or thousands of different genetic variants at the same time," said senior study author Adam M. Deutschbauer, Ph.D., a research scientist with the laboratory. "It's like if you had a lot of knobs you could turn to get something to work. We just turn all the knobs in multiple ways and ask, 'What was the best way of turning all of those knobs?' "

The methodology could be used to speed up understanding of novel microorganisms obtained from the human gut or the environment, like in soil, Deutschbauer said. The general strategy could also be used to accelerate the development of non-transposon-based genetic systems, such as CRISPR/Cas genome editing or plasmid-based overexpression, in microorganisms.

During their experiments, Deutschbauer and colleagues built four magic pools using the transposons Tn5 or mariner as well as markers for the antibiotics kanamycin or erythromycin. They tested two kanamycin magic pools against three environmental bacteria isolated from groundwater samples collected from a metal-contaminated site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and two erythromycin magic pools against three bacteria from the Bacteroidetes family. For five of these bacteria, they generated genome-wide libraries of transposon mutants and measured the importance of nearly all genes for growth under laboratory conditions.

"There is so much about biology that we don't understand, that in my view it's advantageous just to try a lot of things in parallel and see what works, especially if the approach of testing things in parallel is very much streamlined," Deutschbauer said. "For the diversity of microorganisms we're going to study in the future, methods of trial and error to develop new molecular genetic methodologies are going to be too slow and time-consuming. We need ways to accelerate the development of new genetic tools for nonmodel organisms."

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For data describing the magic pools, the full mutant libraries, and the mutant fitness assays, as well as source code, see http://genomics.lbl.gov/supplemental/magicpools.

This material by ENIGMA (Ecosystems and Networks Integrated with Genes and Molecular Assemblies), a scientific focus area program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological & Environmental Research.

The American Society for Microbiology is the largest single life science society, composed of more than 50,000 scientists and health professionals. ASM's mission is to promote and advance the microbial sciences.

ASM advances the microbial sciences through conferences, publications, certifications and educational opportunities. It enhances laboratory capacity around the globe through training and resources. It provides a network for scientists in academia, industry and clinical settings. Additionally, ASM promotes a deeper understanding of the microbial sciences to diverse audiences.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab study exotic material's properties, which could make possible a new form of data storage

Scientists used spiraling X-rays at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to observe, for the first time, a property that gives handedness to swirling electric patterns - dubbed polar vortices - in a synthetically layered material.

This property, also known as chirality, potentially opens up a new way to store data by controlling the left- or right-handedness in the material's array in much the same way magnetic materials are manipulated to store data as ones or zeros in a computer's memory.

Researchers said the behavior also could be explored for coupling to magnetic or optical (light-based) devices, which could allow better control via electrical switching.

Chirality is present in many forms and at many scales, from the spiral-staircase design of our own DNA to the spin and drift of spiral galaxies; it can even determine whether a molecule acts as a medicine or a poison in our bodies.

A molecular compound known as d-glucose, for example, which is an essential ingredient for human life as a form of sugar, exhibits right-handedness. Its left-handed counterpart, l-glucose, though, is not useful in human biology.

"Chirality hadnt been seen before in this electric structure," said Elke Arenholz, a senior staff scientist at Berkeley Labs Advanced Light Source (ALS), which is home to the X-rays that were key to the study. The study was published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The experiments can distinguish between left-handed chirality and right-handed chirality in the samples' vortices. "This offers new opportunities for fundamentally new science, with the potential to open up applications," she said.

"Imagine that one could convert a right-handed form of a molecule to its left-handed form by applying an electric field, or artificially engineer a material with a particular chirality," said Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and associate laboratory director of the Lab's Energy Technologies Area, who co-led the latest study.

Ramesh, who is also a professor of materials science and physics at UC Berkeley, custom-made the novel materials at UC Berkeley.

Padraic Shafer, a research scientist at the ALS and the lead author of the study, worked with Arenholz to carry out the X-ray experiments that revealed the chirality of the material.

The samples included a layer of lead titanate (PbTiO3) and a layer of strontium titanate (SrTiO3) sandwiched together in an alternating pattern to form a material known as a superlattice. The materials have also been studied for their tunable electrical properties that make them candidates for components in precise sensors and for other uses.

Neither of the two compounds show any handedness by themselves, but when they were combined into the precisely layered superlattice, they developed the swirling vortex structures that exhibited chirality.

"Chirality may have additional functionality," Shafer said, when compared to devices that use magnetic fields to rearrange the magnetic structure of the material.

The electronic patterns in the material that were studied at the ALS were first revealed using a powerful electron microscope at Berkeley Lab's National Center for Electron Microscopy, a part of the Lab's Molecular Foundry, though it took a specialized X-ray technique to identify their chirality.

"The X-ray measurements had to be performed in extreme geometries that can't be done by most experimental equipment," Shafer said, using a technique known as resonant soft X-ray diffraction that probes periodic nanometer-scale details in their electronic structure and properties.

Spiraling forms of X-rays, known as circularly polarized X-rays, allowed researchers to measure both left-handed and right-handed chirality in the samples.

Arenholz, who is also a faculty member of the UC Berkeley Department of Materials Science & Engineering, added, "It took a lot of time to understand the results, and a lot of modeling and discussions." Theorists at the University of Cantabria in Spain and their network of computational experts performed calculations of the vortex structures that aided in the interpretation of the X-ray data.

The same science team is pursuing studies of other types and combinations of materials to test the effects on chirality and other properties.

"There is a wide class of materials that could be substituted," Shafer said, "and there is the hope that the layers could be replaced with even higher functionality materials."

Researchers also plan to test whether there are new ways to control the chirality in these layered materials, such as by combining materials that have electrically switchable properties with those that exhibit magnetically switchable properties.

"Since we know so much about magnetic structures," Arenholz said, "we could think of using this well-known connection with magnetism to implement this newly discovered property into devices."

###

The Advanced Light Source and the Molecular Foundry are both DOE Office of Science User Facilities.

Also participating in the research were scientists from the UC Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona, the University of the Basque Country, and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, the Luxembourg National Research Fund, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world's most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab's scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel Prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. For more, visit http://www.lbl.gov.

DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
Study is first to use drones to count sea turtles in waters near nesting habitat

DURHAM, N.C. -- Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs during mass-nesting events at Ostional National Wildlife Refuge on Costa Rica's Pacific coast, making it one of the most important nesting beaches in the world.

Now aerial drones are giving scientists deeper insights into just how important the beach and its nearshore waters are.

Using a fixed-wing drone to conduct aerial surveys of olive ridley sea turtles in waters off Ostional during four days in August 2015, scientists from Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) estimate turtle densities there may reach as high as 2,086 animals per square kilometer during peak nesting season.

"These are extraordinary numbers, much higher than any of us anticipated," said Seth Sykora-Bodie, a PhD student at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, who co-led the study with Vanessa Bezy, a PhD candidate at UNC-CH.

"Our findings confirm drones can be used as a powerful tool to study sea turtle abundance at sea, and reveal incredible densities of turtles in Ostional's nearshore habitat," said Bezy. "The development of this methodology provides vital new insights for future conservation and research."

Equipping the drone with a high-resolution digital camera with near-infrared vision and flying it just 90 meters above the ocean expanded the field of view and significantly increased image clarity, allowing the researchers to detect many turtles swimming just below the water's surface. Observers relying only on visual sightings made from boats could easily miss these submerged animals because of their angle of view and the clarity of the water, Sykora-Bodie said.

The researchers published their peer-reviewed paper Dec. 18 in Scientific Reports. It is the first study to use unmanned aerial systems (UAS), or drones, to estimate the abundance of sea turtle populations.

Traditionally, scientists have collected this type of abundance data using mark-and-recapture studies, in-water surveys, and censuses of turtles observed on nesting beaches. These methods can be costly and time-consuming, incur potential risks to both the observers and the animals, and increase the likelihood that turtles may be missed or double-counted.

The new pilot study shows that using camera-equipped drones provides a safe, cost-effective and scientifically robust alternative.

"Because of the clarity of the images we can collect, and the greater flexibility we have in where, when and how we collect them, this approach provides us with better data for understanding population status and trends, which can then be used to inform management decisions and develop conservation measures tailored to individual populations, locations and time frames," Sykora-Bodie said.

Olive ridleys are classified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. One of the chief threats they face is being accidentally caught and killed by hooks and other fishing gear used by longline and trawl fisheries.

To conduct the newly published study, researchers from Duke's Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Labflew an eBee senseFly fixed-wing drone equipped with a near-infrared camera over a three-kilometer stretch of nearshore water twice daily -- morning and evening -- on four consecutive days during a mass-nesting event, or arribada, in August 2015. By analyzing the captured images, they identified 684 confirmed turtle sightings and 409 probable sightings.

Using methods that scientists regularly employ for estimating the population abundance of marine species based on surface sightings in traditional surveys, Sykora-Bodie and his colleagues then calculated a low-end daily estimate of up to 1,299 turtles per square kilometer in the surveyed area, and a high-end estimate of up to 2,086 turtles. Long-term surveys, coupled with further research on olive ridleys' dive profile -- how deep they dive, and how long they remain under water -- will be needed to refine these estimates.

###

Sykora-Bodie and Bezy's co-authors on the new study were Kenneth J. Lohmann, the Charles P. Postelle Jr. Distinguished Professor of biology at UNC-CH; David W. Johnston, associate professor of the practice of marine conservation ecology at Duke; and Everette Newton, a Ph.D. student in Johnston's lab.

Funding came from a National Science Foundation grant (#IOS-1456923) to Lohmann, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to Bezy. The Ostional National Wildlife Refuge and the Costa Rican Ministry of Environment provided logistical support and permits.

CITATION: "Quantifying Nearshore Sea Turtle Densities: Applications of Unmanned Aerial Systems for Populations Assessments," Seth T. Sykora-Bodie, Vanessa Bezy, David W. Johnston, Everette Newton and Kenneth J. Lohmann. Scientific Reports, Dec. 18, 2017. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-17719-x
Scientists from Brazil, China and Italy have reached a model to map out the phases in which silica (SiO2) transforms into coesite, by analyzing how the inelastic scattering of light among molecules changes according to pressure variation.

Coesite is a polymorph of silica that only forms under extremely high pressure - 10,000 times more on average than normal atmospheric pressure. The presence of this rock at a site indicates either that material has pushed up through Earth's crust from the mantle (a silicate rocky shell between the crust and the core with an average thickness of 2,886 km and depths ranging from 30 km to almost 3,000 km below the crust) or that a celestial body (a comet, meteor or meteorite) fell there. Coesite can also be created by a nuclear explosion.

The mechanism whereby silica (SiO2) is transformed into coesite, which was poorly understood by the scientific community, has now been elucidated by atomistic computer simulation in a study conducted by researchers affiliated with the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in Brazil; the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei, China; and the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.

The article "Multiple pathways in pressure-induced phase transition of coesite", written by the international cooperative, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Coesite is silicon dioxide. Its chemical composition is the same as that of quartz. The difference is that high pressure destructures the crystal lattice characteristic of quartz and compresses the silicon and oxygen atoms into an amorphous system. The result is high-density glass. Once the pressure has surpassed a certain threshold, the amorphization process becomes irreversible and the material can no longer return to a crystalline configuration," said Caetano Rodrigues Miranda, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo's Physics Institute (IF-USP) and lead author of the article.

The aims of the study include obtaining what can be called "the best possible glass". There is a technological application horizon due to specific properties relating to thermal conductivity, among others, but for now, the main interest is to use the research findings as markers of high-pressure scenarios, as already noted. "Coesite is the characteristic 'signature' of these scenarios," said Miranda, who also performs research under the Thematic Project "Interfaces in materials: electronic, magnetic, structural and transport properties", supported by the Sao Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP.

In the study, the researchers resolved divergences that existed with regard to the transformation of coesite into other phases (a high-pressure octahedral phase, coesite-II and coesite-III) and arrived at a model consistent with the observational data. They also described the molecular mechanisms associated with these transformations. "It would be very difficult to reproduce in the lab the high-pressure conditions found in Earth's mantle," Miranda said. "We used a computer simulation, describing the interactions among atoms as realistically as possible, and mapping, step by step, the transformations resulting from pressure changes."

The best way to follow this evolution is via the Raman effect, observed experimentally in 1928 by Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970).

The Raman effect relates to the inelastic scattering of light by matter. When a sample is excited by a laser pulse, most of the photons are scattered elastically, i.e., at the same frequency as the incident photons, by the molecules or atoms in the material. However, a small portion of the photons scatters inelastically, generally at a lower frequency. Analysis of this inelastic scattering by means of Raman spectroscopy determines the composition and structure of the material. "You could say it provides the material's fingerprint," Miranda said.

In the case in question, the researchers performed molecular dynamics simulations of the Raman spectrum for the different structures of coesite under various pressures. In this manner, they obtained correlations between the structure of the material and the external pressure, mapping step by step the multiple paths in the transformation of coesite until it was completely amorphized, or those in the crystalline phases of silica under high pressure.

"Each structure displays a very characteristic pattern in the Raman spectrum," Miranda said. "As the structure changes owing to pressure variation, this pattern also changes. And this enables us to know which structures are present and how they are transformed under pressure. A comparison with experimental results validates the model adopted.

"Bond lengths and angles, as well as atomic vibrational modes, are variables supplied by the procedure. Although it's an amorphous structure and has a much less regular configuration than quartz, for example, which is crystalline, coesite has a characteristic fingerprint in Raman spectroscopy.

"In a crystal, the distances between lattice atoms and the angles made by the segments bonding the different atoms are always the same. This produces a clearly defined peak in the spectrogram. As the material amorphizes, the peak changes into an elongated plateau."

An interesting study performed by Miranda in parallel consisted of the "sonification" of the spectral data collected. In this case "sonification" entailed converting the high frequencies characteristic of light into low frequencies typical of sound. "Sonification allows you to use hearing instead of sight to analyze data. From the scientific perspective, the advantage of this procedure is that when you hear sounds, you can identify small variations or more complex data more precisely. They're easier to hear than to see. In addition, there's an advantage from the artistic standpoint: music can be composed using the sound fragments obtained. So a bridge can be built between science and art," Miranda said (click link to hear audio: http://www.fapesp.br/audio/audio.wav).

The discovery of coesite in the Chicxulub Crater under the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico was significant evidence that this geological formation resulted from the impact of a comet or large asteroid.

The circular crater with a diameter of more than 180 km buried deep below the surface of the peninsula was discovered in the late 1970s by Antonio Camargo (Mexico) and Glen Penfield (United States), geophysicists who were prospecting for oil. In 1990, Penfield obtained samples of rock formed under high pressure that suggested it was an impact feature.

In 2016, scientists drilled hundreds of meters below the ocean floor into the peak ring of the crater, obtaining samples of coesite and other rocks, and all but closing the debate by supplying robust evidence that it was indeed an impact crater.

The impact that produced the crater was two million times more powerful than the largest nuclear device ever tested, a 58-megaton hydrogen bomb known as Tsar Bomba, detonated by the Soviet Union in 1961.

The date of the impact, estimated at slightly less than 66 million years ago, converges with the hypothesis that worldwide climate disruption in this period caused a mass extinction event in which 75% of plant and animal species on Earth suddenly became extinct, including all non-avian dinosaurs. The impact would have caused a megatsunami and a colossal shock wave, followed by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wildfires and other phenomena on a global scale, including a cloud of dust and aerosols covering the entire planet for over a decade.

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About Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)

The Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. For more information: http://www.fapesp.br/en.
Jan. 16, 2018: Global Fishing Watch has entered into a new data-sharing partnership with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to improve understanding of the activity of fishing vessels in Indonesian waters. Through the partnership, Global Fishing Watch and NOAA are matching Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data from the Indonesian government with NOAA's satellite based Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which reveals the locations of brightly lit vessels at night. The idea is to identify fishing vessels that are not picked up by other monitoring systems and to test and refine the use of VIIRS for identifying and distinguishing different types of fishing vessels.

By cross matching VMS from Indonesia with VIIRS, the team found that roughly 80 percent of VIIRS detections could not be correlated to a vessel broadcasting VMS. The vast majority of these vessels are likely to be fishing vessels using bright lights to attract fish. While a small number may be other types of vessels, most ships do not use lights bright enough for detection. This work indicates that the addition of VIIRS data can greatly enhance transparency in commercial fishing in Indonesia.

The team believes most of the VIIRS detections are from fishing vessels not required to carry VMS because they are under the 30 gross ton (GT) threshold established by the government of Indonesia. It is also possible that some vessels detected only by VIIRS meet the size requirement but have switched off their VMS or have a faulty device. Another possibility is that VIIRS is detecting foreign boats that are not carrying VMS because they are poaching from Indonesian waters.

"I'm excited for this opportunity to see the dark fleet," said David Kroodsma, Global Fishing Watch Research Program Director. The dark fleet being a common term used to describe vessels that don't show up in vessel monitoring systems and therefore are said to operate in the dark. "NOAA's VIIRS data shows us vessels we can't see by any other means and helps us to gain a more complete picture of fishing activity."

Global Fishing Watch detects nearly all large fishing vessels in Indonesian waters by combining Indonesia's VMS data and publicly broadcast AIS data which is required on vessels exceeding 300 GT. Global Fishing Watch can even tell when vessels turn off their monitoring devices. But the system is unable to see vessels when they are not broadcasting either AIS or VMS. Incorporating VIIRS, which represents a completely new source of data, into the Global Fishing Watch database and, eventually, the public mapping platform, will reveal the activity of even more of the world's commercial fishing fleet.

To cross match VMS and VIIRS, NOAA's Earth Observation Group developed an orbital model that predicts the probable location of each VMS-broadcasting vessel at the time of the VIIRS data collection. The model checks the predicted location against the actual VIIRS detections to define matches. Prior to the partnership with Global Fishing Watch, NOAA had access to two months of Indonesia VMS data, which they used to develop their cross-matching algorithm.

The partnership with Global Fishing Watch has provided three years-worth of Indonesian VMS data, which NOAA has now matched to its VIIRS vessel detections. In addition, the partnership has provided NOAA with valuable information on vessel gear types and identification numbers in the VMS records.

This new data is enabling NOAA to calculate the frequency of VIIRS boat detections for the different fishing gear types and to work towards a calibration for estimating wattage from the VIIRS detected radiance. "When I saw what Global Fishing Watch could provide in the data, I said, Wow, that could really help us a lot, because we don't have access to this information in any other way," said Chris Elvidge, NOAA's Earth Observation Group Lead. His team is creating an atlas of fishing grounds for Indonesia using the three years of VMS provided by Global Fishing Watch and multiple years of VIIRS data.

Global Fishing Watch is able to provide the VMS data because of its partnership with Indonesia, which began publicly sharing their VMS through the Global Fishing Watch platform in June 2017. They are the first nation to take such bold steps toward transparency, and Peru has recently signed an MOU to do the same.

Now that Global Fishing Watch has access to the VIIRS boat detection data they can vastly expand the number of fishing boat records reported in the public database. In addition, it would be possible to cross match VMS or AIS data with VIIRS boat detections to identify "dark vessels" which may be fishing illegally. The combined data sources could also be analyzed to detect clusters of fishing boats straddling international boundaries, or fishing in Marine Protected Areas.

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BOSTON (Jan. 16, 2018)--Data collected during a long-term health study provides additional evidence for a link between increased risk of cancer in individuals with advanced gum disease, according to a new collaborative study led by epidemiologists Dominique Michaud at Tufts University School of Medicine and Elizabeth Platz of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Kimmel Cancer Center.

The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, used data from comprehensive dental exams performed on 7,466 participants from Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, and North Carolina, as part of their participation in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study who were then followed from the late 1990s until 2012. During the follow-up period, 1,648 new cancer cases were diagnosed.

The research team found a 24 percent increase in the risk of developing cancer among participants with severe periodontitis, compared to those with mild to no periodontitis at baseline. Among patients who had no teeth-- which can be a sign of severe periodontitis -- the increase in risk was 28 percent. The highest risk was observed in cases of lung cancer, followed by colorectal cancer.

When the researchers did sub-group analyses, they found that participants with severe periodontal disease had more than double the risk of developing lung cancer, compared with no/mild periodontitis. An 80 percent increase in risk of colon cancer observed for participants who were edentulous at baseline, which is consistent with prior findings, and among never smokers, a two-fold higher risk was noted for participants with severe periodontitis, compared to those who had no/mild periodontitis.

"This is the largest study addressing the association of gum disease and cancer risk using dental examinations to measure gum disease prior to cancer diagnosis," said first and corresponding author Dominique Michaud, Sc.D., professor of public health and community medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. "Additional research is needed to evaluate if periodontal disease prevention and treatment could help alleviate the incidence of cancer and reduce the number of deaths due to certain types of cancer."

Michaud noted that the findings were particularly interesting in light of research, including a recent study in Science, which determined that colorectal cancer tissues contain bacteria that are present in the mouth, including bacteria that have been associated with periodontal disease.

The researchers also uncovered a small increase in the risk of pancreatic cancer in patients with severe periodontitis. Although not significant statistically, the association has been seen in other similar studies, including a number of studies led by Michaud of Tufts.

The research team accounted for the impact of smoking among the participants, since people who smoke are more likely to get periodontal disease, and smoking raises the risk of lung and colon cancers.

"When we looked at data for the people who had never smoked, we also found evidence that having severe periodontal disease was related to an increased risk of lung cancer and colorectal cancer," said Elizabeth Platz, Sc.D., deputy chair of the department of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

The ARIC data were especially useful to study because unlike most previous research linking gum disease and cancer risk, periodontitis cases were determined from dental examinations performed as part of the ARIC study rather than participants' self-reports of the disease. The dental exams provided detailed measurements of the depth of the pocket between the gum and tooth in several locations in the mouth. The ARIC data include both Caucasian and African-American participants.

The researchers found no links between increased risk of breast, prostate or blood/lymphatic cancer and periodontitis. The link between periodontitis and increased cancer risk was weaker or not apparent in African-American participants from the ARIC study, except in cases of lung and colorectal cancer. "Additional research is needed to understand cancer-site specific and racial differences in findings," wrote the authors. The researchers caution that the study was limited in size for subgroup analyses, and less common cancers. The findings, however, suggest the need for further study.

Michaud and Platz said the study also points to the importance of expanding dental insurance to more individuals. "Knowing more about the risks that come about with periodontal disease might give more support to having dental insurance in the way that we should be offering health insurance to everyone," Platz said.

Advanced gum disease, also called periodontitis, is caused by bacterial infection that damages the soft tissue and bone that support the teeth. Previous research has shown a link between periodontitis and increased cancer risk, although the mechanism connecting the two diseases is still uncertain.

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Additional authors on the study are are Jiayun Lu, John Barber, and Corinne Joshu from Johns Hopkins; Alexandra Peacock-Villada from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine; Anna Prizment from the University of Minnesota; and James Beck and Steven Offenbacher of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

This work was supported by awards from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (R01CA166150, P30CA006973 and U01CA164975). The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study, ARIC, was supported by awards from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services (HHSN268201700001I, HHSN268201700003I, HHSN268201700005I, HHSN268201700004I, HHSN268201700002I). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Michaud, D.S., Lu, J., Peacock-Villada, A.Y., Barber, J.R., Joshu, C.E., Prizment, A.E., Beck, J.D., Offenbacher, S., Platz, E.A. Periodontal disease assessed using clinical dental measurements and cancer risk in the ARIC study. Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI). Published online Jan. 12, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djx278

Written by Johns Hopkins and Tufts.

About Tufts University School of Medicine

Tufts University School of Medicine is an international leader in medical and population health education and advanced research. Tufts University School of Medicine emphasizes rigorous fundamentals in a dynamic learning environment to educate physicians, scientists, and public health professionals to become leaders in their fields. The School of Medicine is renowned for excellence in education in general medicine, the biomedical sciences, and public health, as well as for research at the cellular, molecular, and population health level. The School of Medicine is affiliated with six major teaching hospitals and more than 30 health care facilities. Tufts University School of Medicine undertakes research that is consistently rated among the highest in the nation for its effect on the advancement of medical and prevention science.
PHILADELPHIA -- A rare glimpse into the prior authorization requirements implemented by public and private insurance providers across the country has found substantial administrative burden for a new class of medications for patients with high cholesterol that places them at high risk for heart attack or stroke, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. So-called proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) inhibitors are self-injected medications approved for individuals with a genetic condition called familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) and those with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) who have high cholesterol despite receiving traditional statin medications and other treatments. Results of the study are published today in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

"As innovative yet often expensive new drugs come on the market to treat serious and/or chronic medical conditions, insurers have turned to policies aimed at ensuring appropriate use in order to manage costs," said the study's lead author Jalpa A. Doshi, PhD, a professor of General Internal Medicine. "Prior authorization - which requires a prescriber to demonstrate that a prescription is medically necessary for the patient before it is approved by the insurer - has been used for many years and is a fairly common strategy, but we found that the burden of the requirements for PCSK9 inhibitors were so high that they raise real concerns about access barriers."

The researchers analyzed data from a proprietary database containing information on prior authorization policies covering more than 275 million Americans, or more than 95 percent of those with prescription coverage. The data, which spanned 3,872 plans in the commercial, health insurance exchange, Medicare, and Medicaid segments, showed that between 82 and 97 percent of Americans were enrolled in the plans implementing prior authorization for PCSK9 inhibitors. Many required health care providers to submit actual medical records rather than simply answer questions on a form, which is more common, and to provide documentation on patient histories that may not be available if a patient has switched doctors over time.

"Of particular concern was that patients with FH, where the need for PCSK9 inhibitors is more straightforward, faced the same cumbersome requirements as did patients with ASCVD," said Michael Parmacek, MD, chair of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

In addition, insurance companies often required confirmation of the FH diagnosis through genetic testing, which is not a standard test in clinical practice and typically not covered by insurance. This could place additional financial burden on patients, beyond the substantial out-of-pocket costs many would face when filling a PCSK9 inhibitor prescription.

To place these findings in context, the researchers compared prior authorization criteria for PCSK9 inhibitors to those for two other medications that would be prescribed by the same types of physicians and that shared other key characteristics (such as being more expensive than alternate treatment options). They found that prior authorization requirements for PCSK9 inhibitors were substantially more burdensome than those for the comparator drugs, involving three to 11 times the number of required items to be filled out on the prior authorization form and more frequent demand to justify responses to individual items with medical record submissions.

Prior studies have found very high rejection rates for PCSK9 inhibitor authorization requests, and the new study may shed light on some contributing factors.

"More paperwork means more risk of errors or omissions, and the forms weren't consistent across insurance plans, so it's also juggling multiple sets of requirements and appeals when initial requests are rejected. This places particular burden on physicians in smaller practices without dedicated staff or resources to assist and could take time away from patient care. It raises the question of whether patients seen by physicians with greater administrative capacity, rather than those with the greatest medical need, are more likely to receive approval," Doshi said.

Approved in 2015, data on long-term outcomes and cost-effectiveness for PCSK9 inhibitors is still accumulating.

"It remains to be seen how payers will respond to additional evidence, and whether they will modify the prior authorization requirements," said Daniel Rader, MD, chair of Genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine. "While the concerns over the budget impact of prescribing PCSK9 inhibitors are certainly valid, there ultimately needs to be a balance between appropriate pre-approval requirements and ensuring those most in need have access to treatment."

###

Additional Penn authors on this study include Justin Puckett, BA. This study was supported by Regeneron and Sanofi.

Editor's Note: Doshi has served as a consultant for Sanofi.

Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $7.8 billion enterprise.

The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 20 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $405 million awarded in the 2017 fiscal year.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center -- which are recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report -- Chester County Hospital; Lancaster General Health; Penn Medicine Princeton Health; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, a leading provider of highly skilled and compassionate behavioral healthcare.

Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2017, Penn Medicine provided more than $500 million to benefit our community.
Massive banks of genetic information are being harnessed to shed new light on modifiable health risks that underlie common diseases.

University of Queensland researchers have pioneered a method to integrate data from multiple large-scale studies to assess risk factors such as body mass index (BMI) and cholesterol levels, and their association with diseases including type two diabetes and heart disease.

Professor Jian Yang, from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience and Queensland Brain Institute, said the new method was more powerful than earlier techniques and enabled scientists to identify risk associations that were difficult to detect in smaller samples.

"Identifying new risk factors provides an avenue to look at diseases from a different angle," Professor Yang said.

"For example, LDL-cholesterol is known to be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, but we were surprised to see that it actually lowers your risk of type two diabetes.

"Discoveries like this could have significant implications for medical research, the pharmaceutical industry and public health policy."

The study looked at seven known health risk factors and more than 30 common diseases, in genetic data from more than 400,000 people.

Professor Yang said the method identified 45 potentially causal associations between health risk factors and diseases.

"Some of these associations - such as the link between BMI and type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease - have already been confirmed in randomised controlled trials, which validates our methods," Professor Yang said.

"Others identified in this study provide candidates for prioritisation in future trials, and fundamental knowledge to understand the biology of the diseases.

"For example, we identified a highly significant risk effect of HDL-cholesterol on age-related macular degeneration."

Professor Yang said the method was particularly valuable where clinical trials to investigate associations would be impractical or even unethical.

"Years of education is one trait we looked at in the study, and it had a protective effect against most diseases, particularly for Alzheimer's and coronary artery disease - but it is something that needs to be carefully investigated in the future," Professor Yang said.

###

The paper is published in Nature Communications and was supported by organisations including the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Sylvia and Charles Viertel Charitable Foundation.

Media:

Professor Jian Yang

jian.yang@imb.uq.edu.au

Kim Lyell

61-427-53064

k.lyell@uq.edu.au
For anyone who has accidentally injured themselves, Dr. Zachary Campbell not only sympathizes, he's developing new ways to blunt pain.

"If you have ever hit yourself with a hammer, afterward, even a light touch can be painful for days or even weeks," said Campbell, who researches pain on the molecular level at The University of Texas at Dallas. "While many of us may not be coordinated enough to avoid an accident, my goal is to disrupt the inception and persistence of pain memories."

Campbell directs the Laboratory of RNA Control and recently published a study in the journal Nature Communications in close collaboration with Dr. Ted Price, an associate professor from the Pain Neurobiology Research Group, and Dr. Michael Burton, a new assistant professor from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences who conducted postdoctoral work at UT Dallas.

This work describes a new method of reducing pain-associated behaviors with RNA-based medicine, creating a new class of decoy molecules that prevent the onset of pain.

"Even simple memories are nothing short of extraordinary," Campbell said. "To promote healing, our nervous system catalogs our sensory experiences and, under normal circumstances, eventually forgets. Defects in this process can result in chronic pain -- a root cause of enormous suffering." Reducing Behavioral Response to Pain

The need for research in this field is easy to understand.

"Pain is a pervasive and devastating problem," Campbell said. "It's the most prominent reason why Americans seek medical attention. Poorly treated pain causes enormous human suffering, as well as a tremendous burden on medical care systems and our society."

Campbell's team took the approach of blocking the creation of the proteins that set pain in motion. After an injury, instructions provided by the genome -- the full set of genetic instructions present in each cell -- are translated to create pain-signaling proteins. Those instructions are encoded in molecules called messenger RNA, or mRNA. The decoy Campbell's team constructed interrupts the pain-protein synthesis process that mRNA facilitates, reducing signs of inflammation and impairing pain behaviors.

"When you have an injury, certain molecules are made rapidly," said Campbell, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. "With this Achilles' heel in mind, we set out to sabotage the normal series of events that produce pain at the site of an injury. In essence, we eliminate the potential for a pathological pain state to emerge."

The RNA mimic that Campbell's team designed was injected at the site of an injury in experiments on mice, and showed the ability to reduce behavioral response to pain.

"We're manipulating one step of protein synthesis," Campbell said. "Our results indicate that local treatment with the decoy can prevent pain and inflammation brought about by a tissue injury." Overcoming a Molecular Challenge

One huge hurdle in creating such an RNA-based compound was overcoming the rapid metabolism of these molecules.

"Molecules that degrade quickly in cells are not great drug candidates. The stability of our compounds is an order of magnitude greater than unmodified RNA." Campbell said.

Campbell explained that specialized nerve cells called nociceptors communicate with your brain in response to thermal, chemical and mechanical stimuli.

"Imagine touching a hot stovetop, walking into a wall or getting a paper cut," he said. "Part of the cellular origin that causes subsequent pain is initiated by nociceptors, but the molecular mechanisms behind these persistent changes are poorly understood. Our study developed a targeted inhibitor that both shed light on these processes and reduced pain sensitization following an injury."

Campbell emphasized the importance of treating pain at the site of an injury; a major problem with drugs that interact with the central nervous system is that they also can affect the reward center of the brain.

"The ongoing opioid crisis highlights the need for pain treatments that don't create addictions," he said. "Hopefully, this is a step in that direction."

Campbell credits the role of team-based science for the discovery.

"This work was made possible through a tight collaboration between my lab and that of Dr. Price," Campbell said. "These experiments would not have been possible without Ted's tremendous support, dedication and broadly insightful character. Ted is an eminent scholar at the interface of translational control and pain. His deep expertise in pain mechanisms permeates the manuscript.

"I feel incredibly fortunate to benefit from outstanding collaborators here at UT Dallas, which has emerged as a key player on the national stage of pain research," said Campbell, who arrived at the University in 2015.

This study was supported by a $2 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study RNA-binding proteins in peripheral neurons. Price and Dr. Joseph Pancrazio, a professor in the Department of Bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, are collaborators on the grant.

Campbell believes this effort proposes a new method of treating a broad range of medical issues.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to create a chemically stabilized mimic to competitively inhibit RNA to disrupt RNA-protein interactions," he said. "Our approach suggests that targeting those interactions may provide a new source of pharmacological agents. This proof of concept allows us to open a whole new area of science by virtue of the route that we're attacking it."

###

Other authors of the Nature Communications paper are: lead author and National Council on Science and Technology-supported postdoctoral scholar Dr. Paulino Barragan-Iglesias, a scientist in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences; staff scientist Tzu-Fang Lou; postdoctoral scholar Dr. Salim Megat; and Vandita D. Bhat, a doctoral student in biological sciences.
January 16, 2018 - As for other types of medical care, surgery appears to be prone to a significant "weekend effect"-- with higher odds of death when surgery is performed during or one or two days before the weekend, suggests a report in the February issue of Medical Care, published by Wolters Kluwer.

"Postoperative mortality rises as the day of the week of elective surgery approaches the weekend, and is higher after admission for urgent/emergent surgery on the weekend compared to weekdays," according to the study by Stephen Smith, MD, MSc, and colleagues of University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The findings include higher odds of death after operations scheduled for Thursdays or Fridays, possibly reflecting increased complications when the early recovery period falls on the weekend.

Weekends May Affect Outcomes of Surgical Care

The researchers performed a comprehensive analysis of research on the link between weekend surgical care and postoperative mortality. The analysis included 10 previous studies of elective (scheduled) surgery including approximately 6.7 million patients.

Elective operations usually aren't scheduled on the weekend. But patients undergoing surgery later in the week might still be at increased risk because the early postoperative period--a time of known vulnerability to complications--occurs on the weekend.

On meta-analysis of pooled data, postoperative mortality increased gradually as the day of surgery approached the weekend. The difference became significant for elective surgery performed on Thursday or Friday: the odds of death were 12 percent higher for Thursday operations and 24 percent higher for Friday operations, compared to operations performed on Monday.

Analysis of urgent/emergent surgery included 19 studies totaling more than 1.4 million patients. The odds of postoperative mortality were 27 percent higher for patients admitted to the hospital on Saturday or Sunday, compared to those hospitalized on a weekday.

Studies from various medical disciplines have reported an increased risk of poor outcomes with healthcare provided on the weekends. "This phenomenon has become known as the 'weekend effect' and has been speculated to result from decreased staffing and resource availability, leading to shortfalls in care and poor outcomes," Dr. Smith and coauthors write.

Their study is the largest and most comprehensive synthesis of evidence on whether a similar weekend effect influences the risks and outcomes of surgery. The results suggest a significant increase in the odds of postoperative death for patients who undergo elective surgery late in the week or urgent/emergent surgery on the weekends.

The researchers emphasize some important limitations of their study--especially the fact that it can't reach any conclusions about the underlying cause of the increase in mortality with surgery or early recovery over the weekend. Dr. Smith and colleagues conclude, "Future studies should focus on clarifying the contributing factors to poor outcomes and developing strategies to potentially improve safety and mitigate adverse events associated with weekend surgical care."

###

Click here to read "Weekend Surgical Care and Postoperative Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Cohort Studies."

DOI: 10.1097/MLR.0000000000000860

About Medical Care

Rated as one of the top ten journals in health care administration, Medical Care is devoted to all aspects of the administration and delivery of health care. This scholarly journal publishes original, peer-reviewed papers documenting the most current developments in the rapidly changing field of health care. Medical Care provides timely reports on the findings of original investigations into issues related to the research, planning, organization, financing, provision, and evaluation of health services. In addition, numerous special supplementary issues that focus on specialized topics are produced with each volume. Medical Care is the official journal of the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association

About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer N.V. (AEX: WKL) is a global leader in information services and solutions for professionals in the health, tax and accounting, risk and compliance, finance and legal sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services.

Wolters Kluwer reported 2016 annual revenues of 4.3 billion. The company, headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands, serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries and employs 19,000 people worldwide.

Wolters Kluwer Health is a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry. For more information about our products and the organization, visit http://www.wolterskluwer.com/, follow @WKHealth or @Wolters_Kluwer on Twitter, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, or follow WoltersKluwerComms on YouTube.

For more information about Wolters Kluwer's solutions and organization, visit http://www.wolterskluwer.com, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
An energy revolution is being predicted for the UK over the next decade, as farmers and landowners look to invest in energy storage technology.

Renewable energy storage systems, which include batteries and thermal storage systems, run from very small units to power plant and grid-scale technologies.

They aim to enable electricity to be released into the system when it is needed, rather than only when solar collectors or wind turbines are functioning.

According to James Court, Head of Policy at the Renewable Energy Association, around 2.5GW of subsidy-free solar and energy storage projects are set to be deployed in the UK over the next two years.

If a farmer has already invested in renewable technologies, energy storage would add extra value to their onsite generation, he says.

Historically, one of the drawbacks of renewable energy such as solar and wind, has been its production variability.

However, battery technology could help to overcome these peaks and troughs.

Mr Court adds: It also opens up a range of future diversification opportunities, such as the prospect of hosting charging stations on-farm for electric vehicles.

Flexible market

He adds that the UK is likely to see a much more flexible energy market in the months ahead.

Time of Use tariffs are currently under consultation, but will allow farms to use electricity when its cheapest to do so, with the right control system in place, he says.

Developments in lithium ion batteries have also reduced the size and cost of the technology. Leading to more feasible behind the meter domestic storage and commercial-scale systems, which support existing grid infrastructure for wind and solar farms, he says.

Its been a busy year for energy storage on a policy framework level, which can be seen in the latest Government targets, he says.

The UK is currently one of the best places in the world for advancing this technology, and I believe that farmers will continue to be at the forefront of these developments.

Energy Now Expo will begin on 7 to 8 February at the Telford International Centre, an event dedicated to the growth of renewables within agricultural and rural communities.
The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) is aiming to restructure its operations to deliver savings in excess of 750,000, with redundancies to be expected.

The levy-board will restructure its exports, trade and consumer marketing teams to ensure it is fit for the future.

The proposals will transition to a more streamlined approach for its consumer marketing campaigns, relationships with retailers and an export team ready to seize post-Brexit opportunities.

The plans for change are driven by the need to have resource and capacity in the high-growth international export markets and the importance of changing consumer demand at home.

Changing consumer trends and the need to be current and relevant in communication and marketing work also helped shape the approach.

There is also an ambition to deliver more activity based on partnership working to get the most value and reach for monies invested.

Christine Watts, AHDBs Chief Officer for Communications and Market Development, said the levy-board's export and marketing work is an "important investment" to farmers, totalling around 16 million per year.

We need to invest this money in the most efficient and effective way and, in a post-Brexit world, we need to be structured to deliver where we can make the most positive impact, she said.

AHDB has a clear, strategic priority of helping the industry understand what consumers will trust and buy. Our marketing work must be relevant to the consumer and delivered in a way that reaches them effectively, with investment in talented people to deliver digital, online and social media campaigns.

Reinvest

AHDB is aiming for the restructure to deliver savings in excess of 750,000 over two years, which it is intended to reinvest.

The restructure will be completed by April 2018. The proposals will also focus on export work, with staff dedicated to building markets in the EU, Middle East/Africa and Asia Pacific countries.

Ms Watts added: The proposed restructure is likely to see a small number of redundancies but will also offer new opportunities. These include, among others, the creation of a new Head of Domestic Marketing role charged with delivering a single overarching consumer marketing offering for all of AHDBs sectors.

There will also be new roles in our digital and international events teams to proactively promote products at home and abroad.

In addition, there will be new heads of export roles for the red meat sector based on high growth markets like Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East/Africa and, longer term, the Americas.

We recognise that change is always difficult but we are committed to delivering a world-class service for our farmers, growers and industry. By making some tough decisions, as we have already done in the recent past, we will have an export, trade and marketing team which is flexible, closely aligned and working to a common agenda.

The proposal for new AHDB exports roles in the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific reflects a drive from the industry to open up new markets for British products outside the EU.
West Wales, North, West and Central Scotland and Cornwall have been predicted to be high risk areas for liver fluke this winter.

Due to higher than average rainfall experienced in 2017, National Animal Disease Information Service (NADIS) have warned that these areas are at high risk of the parasitic disease.

As there are localised variations of the outbreak, it is advised that farmers contact their vets for further information on the risks posed in their area to decide what tests they will need to carry out in order to investigate their own individual farms.

The effects of a liver fluke infection in farm animals can be substantial. These effects can be particularly seen at this time of year as they include higher barren rates as a result of infection in the autumn as well as poor retention of lambs during gestation.

Most farmers will be scanning this time of year and therefore poor scanning percentages should be further investigated with their vets.

It is also possible that pregnant ewes could experience lambing difficulties, reduced colostrum quality and loss of body condition.

James Ruggeri, Industry Development Executive at Hybu Cig Cymru (Meat Promotion Wales) advises on what action can be taken by farmers to tackle the issue.

Liver fluke poses a big concern for farmers. As the summer of 2017 was one of the wettest on record, this inevitably results in an influx of liver fluke during the winter months, Mr Ruggeri explained.

In order to combat the infection, it is vital that farmers ensure that the correct product is used. However, farmers must be aware that there are cases of resistance to certain products and it is essential, in order to avoid getting caught out, that they seek professional advice.
The Agricultural Wages Board for Northern Ireland has announced proposed increases to the minimum wage rates for agricultural workers.

Following a meeting on 12 January, the Board proposes to increase existing minimum rates for agricultural workers for grades 2 to 6 by 3.5% from 1 April 2018.

In addition, the accommodation offset will rise to a maximum of 37 per week.

The minimum rate, applicable for the first 40 weeks cumulative employment, will raise to 6.88 per hour.

Grade 2 - Standard worker will raise to 7.42 per hour; Grade 3 - Lead worker will raise to 8.16 per hour; Grade 4 - Craft Grade will raise to 8.76 per hour; Grade 5 - Supervisory Grade will raise to 9.26 per hour and Grade 6 - Farm Management Grade will raise to 10.04 per hour.

The Board will meet again on 9 March to consider any objections to the proposals and may make an Order to give effect to the new rates and other amendments which would come into operation on 1 April 2018.

The Agricultural Wages Board was established in 1977 and meets each year to consider changes to the rates of pay and related conditions for agricultural workers.
A walker attacked a Lake District farmer for being asked to wait whilst he moved his sheep, a court has heard.

Carlisle Crown Court has heard how 28-year-old Karl Page, who is a former Royal Marine, was told to wait by farmer Robin Taylforth as the sheep were being moved.

But Mr Page then punched Mr Taylforth once in the face, which left him with facial fractures. The incident happened near Patterdale, Ullswater on May 21 last year.

The assault happened moments before Mr Page had a row with his girlfriend.

The court heard how Mr Taylforth was herding a number of sheep which had strayed on to an open pasture back to his farm.

The farmer needed surgery after receiving three eye socket fractures and a displaced fracture to his left cheekbone due to the assault.

He said he was left feeling "apprehensive" when people passed through his farm.

The court also heard how Mr Page has accepted that in "hindsight he had done completely the wrong thing," admitted causing grievous bodily harm.

Mr Page was ordered by Carlisle Crown Court on Friday (12 January) to pay Mr Taylforth 2000 compensation. He has also received an eight-month jail term suspended for two years.
The Welsh red meat industry will be disadvantaged after Brexit but the dairy and horticultural sectors may benefit, according to new analysis.

The latest report from the Public Policy Institute for Wales highlights the challenges and opportunities for agriculture and rural areas in Wales that could result from Brexit.

The reports author, Professor Janet Dwyer, argues that the most likely changes in trading conditions will leave Welsh agriculture in a disadvantaged position compared to its main trading competitors.

Sheep and beef farmers could be in a particularly disadvantaged position after Brexit. A decline in the economic viability of sheep production is likely, according to the report.

"Any situation with tariffs on sheepmeat would mean much higher costs of access to the current main market for producers of lamb, which is Wales largest agricultural export by volume and value," Professor Dwyer explained.

"If prices to EU consumers rose by anything from 5% to 40%, reduced demand could (significantly) depress UK lamb prices and render a significant number of farm businesses in Wales even less financially viable and unable to cover their costs of production from agricultural income"

Benefit

However, the report says dairy, horticultural, mixed and other farm types may be best placed to benefit from changes after Brexit.

It said: "Because the UK dairy market is under-supplied and imports become less attractive with currency devaluation, they should see some positive impacts in milk prices, although the price of concentrates  many composed of imported proteins  will also rise, in parallel.

"The more extensive farm systems in Wales with low input reliance should see some short-term financial gains. While these sectors may see reduced investment, dairy, horticulture and other more niche sectors could identify opportunities for growth based upon food sector incentives to source more products and/or raw materials domestically."

The report concluded that the industry should expect reduced levels of UK public funding for agriculture once it leaves the European Union, and following a likely 3-year transition period; i.e. after 2022.

"North and West Wales are likely to face stronger negative impacts than South and East Wales," the report added.

"There may be environmental consequences of Brexit. Supporting farmers to manage land or to move it into other sectors will be important, as well as ensuring adequate funding for natural resource management in Wales."
Retailers to blame for ongoing egg shortages, NFU Scotland says
The Name Is...

Any guesses? Well, it was a 1976 Telugu film called Bhakta Kannappa!

Is It A Co-incidence?

Not many know that Prabhas too has some interesting facts which makes him one of the respected superstars of the nation. Fascinatingly the classic Bhakta Kannapa is based on a life of a Shiva Devotee. And the actor in real life is a Shiva Bhakt.

The actor played the character of a huge Shiva Bhakt in his last release Baahubali. Even one of the characters which he played in the film was named Shiva.

His scene of carrying a Shivling in Baahubali: The Beginning became one of the most loved scenes. There were many idols made on the same pose across the nation.

Baahubali Was A Life-Changing Experience

"Without that film, people wouldn't have recognised me across the country. I have done good Tamil films, too, but after Bahubali, people across cultures and languages started recognising me, including the overseas audience. SS Rajamouli (director) knew that he was making something big, given the budget and scale of both the films, but the response that we got was beyond expectation," the actor was quoted as saying to Bombay Times.

The Actor Had Earlier Turned Down The Film

In a GQ interview Prabhas revealed that when SS Rajamouli approached him for a double role in Baahubali, the actor's first instinct was to turn down the offer.

"After four films continuously flop, you think, Something is definitely wrong with me. You have to think before doing a film," he was quoted as saying.

However, the filmmaker wasn't one to give up easily. He persisted and took the film's script, which then was only 30 to 40 pages long, to Prabhas repeatedly before the actor finally gave in and the rest is history!

Bollywood Dreams

Recently while talking to a leading daily, Prabhas confirmed that a Bollywood debut is up next on the cards after he wraps up Saaho. He was quoted as saying, "I watch a lot of Hindi films; I live in Hyderabad, where 60 per cent of the people speak in Hindi. I am getting good offers from Bollywood; I had okayed a script three years ago. It is a love story that I will do post Saaho."

We Are In Awe Of His Down-To-Earth Nature

"I hope that I never let stardom get to my head. I always have my childhood friends around me; some of them are my producers, too, and for them, it doesn't matter if I am doing films. They just feel happy for me. I have grown up with them, so they don't see me as a star. I have the best people around me, so if I let success go to my head, they will be the first to put a hammer to my head," the actor was quoted as saying in an interview.
Bitcoin's meteoric rise has been the #1 financial news story of the past year. It's gone crazy:

This is all the more impressive given how difficult it is to purchase and store Bitcoin -- at least, relative to buying stocks or bonds or CDs or most traditional financial products.

While it's tough to look at that chart and not think this is a speculative mania, there is something about Bitcoin that's captured the public's imagination -- whether it's the varied potential applications of the underlying blockchain technology, the idea of Bitcoin as "digital gold," or the promise of a currency immune to central banker meddling. Or maybe it's simply a textbook bubble, luring in speculators hoping to get rich. (More likely, it's some combination of the above.)

One thing that's been hard to avoid of late is the many dire Bitcoin proclamations coming from regulators and central bankers from around the world.

It's surprising because in our experience, these folks normally speak cautiously. Bitcoin has caused them to lose all timidity.

So for anyone thinking of buying Bitcoin in 2018, we set out to compile as many of these investor warnings as we could in one place. Here they are in their own words, with links to the original source:

United Kingdom

From the BBC:

Andrew Bailey, head of the Financial Conduct Authority, told the BBC that neither central banks nor the government stood behind the "currency" and therefore it was not a secure investment. Buying Bitcoin, he said, was similar to gamblingand had the same level of risk. "It's not a currency, it's actually not regulated in its Bitcoin form," Mr. Bailey told me in an interview for Newsnight. "It's a very volatile commodity in terms of its pricing. If you look at what has happened this year, I would caution people. We know relatively little about what informs the price of Bitcoin. It's an odd commodity as well, as the supply is fixed. If you want to invest in Bitcoin be prepared to lose your moneythat would be my serious warning." [emphasis added]

Singapore

From the Straits Times:

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has issued a strong warning to would-be [Bitcoin] investors to act with "extreme caution" and understand the significant risks of choosing to invest in cryptocurrencies. "MAS is concerned that members of the public may be attracted to invest in cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, due to the recent escalation in their prices," it said in an advisory issued Tuesday (Dec. 19). Cryptocurrencies are not legal tender, warned MAS. "They are not issued by any government and are not backed by any asset or issuer," it said, noting that the recent surge in the prices of cryptocurrencies is driven by speculation. "The risk of a sharp reduction in prices is high. Investors in cryptocurrencies should be aware that they run the risk of losing all their capital." [emphasis added]

Australia

From a speech by Australian Central Bank governor Philip Lowe:

In reality, these currencies are not being commonly used for everyday payments and, as things currently stand, it is hard to see that changing. The value of Bitcoin is very volatile, the number of payments that can currently be handled is very low, there are governance problems, the transaction cost involved in making a payment with Bitcoin is very high and the estimates of the electricity used in the process of mining the coins are staggering. When thought of purely as a payment instrument, it seems more likely to be attractive to those who want to make transactions in the black or illegal economy, rather than everyday transactions. So the current fascination with these currencies feels more like a speculative mania than it has to do with their use as an efficient and convenient form of electronic payment. [emphasis added]

Germany

From the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

"These are highly speculative transactions with the possibility of total loss," said the head of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bafin), Felix Hufeld to the Bild newspaper. In the wake of the Bitcoin boom, there will be "excesses that produce bitter losers," warned Hufeld. Therefore, every Bitcoin investor must act with "the utmost caution" and know that "in the worst case, he can lose all his money." [emphasis added]

From Handelsblatt:

With Bitcoin's price recently skyrocketing, the Bundesbank warns savers against investments in the digital currency. "In our view, Bitcoin is not a suitable medium as a store of value. That's shown in even a quick glance at the wild fluctuations in its price," said Bundesbank board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele to the Welt am Sonntag. Bitcoin is "a speculative object" whose value is changing rapidly.

Russia

From Bloomberg:

"China doesn't recognize cryptocurrency as payment and forbids ICOs," Bank of Russia Deputy Governor Dmitry Skobelkin told reporters Thursday, after meeting with Chinese central bank officials earlier in the week. "Our views are absolutely similar. In our view it's a sort of a financial pyramid that may collapse at any moment." [emphasis added]

From Reuters:

Central Bank First Deputy Governor Sergei Shvetsov told a conference in Moscow that the [crypto-currencies] were "dubious" and investors needed to be protected. "We cannot stand apart. We cannot give direct and easy access to such dubious instruments for retail (investors)," Shvetsov said.

Austria

From Trending-Topics:

[Bitcoin] comes with legal risks and is also not a currency. "It is a betting chip for gambling and is seen by central banks as a matter of concern," said [Austrian Central Bank Governor Ewald Nowotny] in a report by the APA. [emphasis added]

From Reuters:

"Bitcoin lacks the one thing that makes a good currency, namely stability," [Ewald Nowotny] told Austrian daily Kleine Zeitung in an interview published on Wednesday. "Bitcoin is an object of speculation," he said.

China

The People's Bank of China warned about cryptocurrencies and ICOs:

There are multiple risks in coin offering fundraising and trading, including risk of false asset, risk of operation failure, risk of speculation, and etc. The investors shall take investment risks on their own and be cautious of frauds and scams.

But also deemed it flat-out illegal:

Financing through coin offerings refer to financing bodies raising virtual currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum from investors through illegal sales and circulation of crypto currency or tokens. Such offerings, in essence, are unauthorized and illegal public fundraising and are suspected of involving in criminal activities such as illegal selling of tokens, illegal issuance of securities, illegal fundraising, financial fraud and pyramid schemes ... From the date of release of this Notice, fundraising through coin offering shall be banned immediately. Any individuals or organizations that have completed fundraising through coin offering shall make arrangements to return the funds raised, and to ensure that the legitimate rights and interests of the investors are protected and the risks involved are properly managed. [emphasis added]

And in December, PBOC governor Pan Gongsheng doubled down on the need for that move, according to a quote in Yicai Global:

If we didn't shut bitcoin exchanges and crack down on initial coin offerings (ICOs) a few months ago, and if more than 80% of the world's bitcoin transactions and financing activities were still taking place China, which was the case back in January, what would it be like today? It's scary to think about.

South Korea

From Fortune:

South Korea's central bank chief on Wednesday warned of 'irrational exuberance' in trading of virtual coins, which have risen dramatically in value this year amid frenzied speculation. "Looking at recent frenzy over virtual currencies worldwide, I worry whether there is some dose of irrational exuberance there," Bank of Korea Governor Lee Ju-yeol said over a year-end event with reporters on Wednesday night.

India

Last February, the Reserve Bank of India issued this warning:

Attention of members of public is drawn to the Press Release issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on December 24, 2013, cautioning users, holders and traders of Virtual Currencies (VCs) including Bitcoins regarding the potential economic, financial, operational, legal, customer protection and security related risks associated in dealing with such VCs.

Which echoed a previous warning that included:

There is no underlying or backing of any asset for VCs. As such, their value seems to be a matter of speculation. Huge volatility in the value of VCs has been noticed in the recent past. Thus, the users are exposed to potential losses on account of such volatility in value.

And more recently, The Times of India reported a step-up in tone at the RBI:

"There is a real and heightened risk of investment bubble of the type seen in Ponzi schemes, which can result in sudden and prolonged crash exposing investors, especially retail consumers losing their hard-earned money," the statement said. "Consumers need to be alert and extremely cautious as to avoid getting trapped in such Ponzi schemes," it added. [emphasis added]

New Zealand

From Bloomberg:

"It looks remarkably like a bubble forming to me," Reserve Bank of New Zealand Acting Governor Grant Spencer said in interview with TVNZ broadcast on Sunday. "Over the centuries we've seen bubbles, and this appears to be a bit of a classic case. With a bubble, you never know how far it's going to go before it comes down."

Denmark

From Reuters:

"You should stay away (from bitcoin). It is deadly," central bank head Lars Rohde said in an interview with state broadcaster DR published online on Monday. ... Rohde said that if people decide to ignore his warnings, they should realize that they are pretty much on their own. "It is not a regulated market. It is not the responsibility of the authorities. It is the responsibility of the individual," said Rohde. [emphasis added]

Will they all be proven wrong?

There is certainly a cynical interpretation of these strongly worded warnings from regulators and central bankers around the world:

Of course they hate Bitcoin -- Bitcoin is aimed at putting them out of a job!

That's fair enough.

There are three facts worth bearing in mind, though.

First, the experts we've cited are experienced financial minds from many different countries with many different incentives and many different stakeholders. Plainly, all of them are cautioning against "investing" in Bitcoin.

Second, the price of Bitcoin has exploded in a way that is atypical for sustainable, long-term investments, and appears more similar to the price action of a bubble.

Third, supposed experts have talked down the potential around new technologies that later proved invaluable. But these successful technologies still tended to go through a classic "hype cycle," in which they hit a "peak of inflated expectations" before more quietly proving out their value later on.

We're not going to conclude by making our own prediction on Bitcoin's fate. But what do feel fairly certain about is this: If you're considering buying Bitcoin for "investment" purposes today, tread very carefully, and maybe go get some Dramamine. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
When you think about mining, things like gold, coal, copper, and iron ore come to mind. Oil is usually looked at as a distinctly different business. However, there are a number of miners that have reached into the oil space, with varied results. The poster child for ill-advised oil investments is Freeport-McMoRan Inc. (FCX -0.06%), but there's also BHP Billiton Limited's (BHP 0.24%) U.S. shale movements to monitor.

However, every miner approaches oil differently, which is why you should also watch Teck Resources Ltd (TECK -0.18%) and streaming company Franco-Nevada Corp (FNV 2.13%), where the oil outcomes look like they might be more positive.

That was a bad call

In 2013 copper and gold miner Freeport-McMoRan bought two oil and natural gas companies. The idea was to diversify the business into a sector that was performing relatively well during a broader commodity downturn. The company funded the move with debt, increasing long-term debt from roughly $3.5 billion before the acquisitions to around $20 billion when they were completed. And then, in mid-2014, oil prices tumbled and turned the energy investments into heavy drags on performance.

Freeport has since extracted itself from the oil business and refocused on its core mining operations. Meanwhile, a dispute with Indonesia over Freeport's ownership of the giant Grasberg mine has taken center stage -- presenting a whole new problem for the miner, since Grasberg contains about 30% of its copper reserves and all of its gold reserves.

But investors are continuing to pay for the ill-advised oil foray, as long-term debt is still over three times higher than it was before the acquisitions. As 2018 progresses, you'll want to watch what happens with Grasberg, but don't lose sight of the lingering debt impact left over from Freeport's oil investment. That oil debt is still a notable constraint to worry about.

Giant diversified miner BHP Billiton, meanwhile, isn't exactly new to the oil business, with energy assets spread across the globe. However, it got caught up in the U.S. shale boom, spending around $20 billion to buy U.S. onshore assets in 2011. When oil prices crumbled, that spending quickly turned into a problem. The company wrote down those assets by over $7 billion in 2016.

Activist investor Elliott Management has been pushing for changes in BHP's oil portfolio, with BHP initially resisting the investor's efforts. In 2017, however, BHP materially changed its tune and said it would look to sell its U.S. shale assets, hoping to dispose of them within two years. BHP is a large and financially stable miner, so this mistep isn't a huge deal, but dealing with dissident shareholders and a big asset sale is distracting. Now that there's a direction, watch for progress on the sales front in 2018. It will, in the end, be a good thing for the company to put this saga behind it.

Not every oil bet is a bad one

On the other side of the oil equation is Canadian coal, copper, and zinc miner Teck Resources. The company owns roughly 20% of the Fort Hills Canadian oil sands mine. Teck and partners Suncor Energy and Total decided to move ahead with the Fort Hills project in 2013, just before oil prices began their tumble. It was touch and go for a bit, with investors concerned that Teck wouldn't be able to fund its share of the construction costs.

However, Teck stuck it out, and the Fort Hills project is expected to reach full production capacity by the end of 2018. That means that each quarter of the year should see an increasing benefit from oil sales. Better yet, this is basically a new line of business for Teck, and will materially increase the miner's diversification. The best part, however, is that oil sands are mined, not drilled. So Teck isn't venturing into a radically new line of business.

And while some view oil sands as an expensive energy source, that's only partly true. Oil sands projects cost a lot of money to build, but are relatively cheap to operate after that point. So the big costs are already in the past, and Teck is now set to benefit from an oil asset with an expected 50 year reserve life. Keep an eye on Teck's results in 2018 to see just how beneficial Fort Hills ends up being.

The last company up is Franco-Nevada, which isn't really a miner -- it's a streaming and royalty company. That means it provides miners cash up front for the right to buy things like silver and gold at reduced rates in the future. The streaming model works best when miners are struggling because that's when they are desperate for cash and most likely to ink new deals with companies like Franco-Nevada. Franco-Nevada is happy to take advantage of the opportunity, of course.

However, with oil prices at relatively low levels in recent years, Franco-Nevada saw an opportunity to step into the energy space. Like miners, oil and gas companies were happy to have the cash. Franco-Nevada now gets around 7% of its top line from energy assets, with the expectation that this will as much as double over the next couple of years.

What I like about Franco-Nevada's energy play is that it hasn't changed anything about its business approach, it's simply exchanging cash for an interest in the production of a commodity. You'll want to watch the growth here to make sure the streaming company's energy bet plays out as expected.

A lot of energy in the mining patch

You may not have expected so much oil and gas news out of the mining sector, but there it is. At this point I think there's too much uncertainty surrounding Freeport for most investors, and I'd avoid that company. I don't have much of an opinion on BHP except that the oil moves it's making today are clearly a distraction that will be nice to see end. I am, however, fond of Teck and Franco-Nevada. Though neither is particularly cheap today, their oil investments look like winners to me.
Pixel art has a certain timeless look, but that doesn't mean the tools and methods for creating it are trapped in 1993.

UK-based developer Cardboard Sword is developing The Siege and the Sandfox, a 2D stealth-based platformer in Unreal Engine 4 using Paper2D, and they've been posting a series of development diaries introducing other would-be developers to using these tools to make their own games.

One of the chief technical differences distinguishing The Siege and the Sandfox is their use of hand-painted normal-mapped tilesets and sprites, allowing them to use 3D lighting methods in their otherwise fairly conventionally-design 2D pixel art game.

Keith Duke-Cox, one of the art directors at Cardboard Sword, recently took the time to speak with Gamasutra about how they arrived on this particular technique, and why it works in their gameand how you can adopt these techniques for use in your own 2D games.

Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Adding a sense of depth

What advantages does using normal mapping offer over traditional, flat lighting in a 2D game?

Keith Duke-Cox: Art direction is all about individual style and the objective of the delivery. We wanted our art to be rich, deep, and really lift off the page. The normals help us achieve that, giving a sense of shape and solidity to our world and the things within it.

This example image, originally posted by Keith Duke-Cox on Twitter in August 2017, is a striking example of this technique.

[For example,] the use of normals provides threats with a more tangible feel when danger is imminent. Light now reacts more correctly to the surfaces it hits, whereas without the normals it has a very flat sheet of paper look.

Used correctly, normal maps can add a sense of depth and weight to objects in a scene, in a way that flat 2D bitmaps can't quite match.

Our use of normal mapping is mostly for visual benefit, rather than as a functional gameplay choice. We want the player to feel more immersed in the environment, so that the parkour has a sense of depth and physicality, rather than that paper cut-out feeling some pixel games can have. If youre going for bright simple colors, or a more true retro look, then flat lighting works well.

What initially attracted you to this method of using normals for lighting in 2D? Where did you learn about it, or first see it done well?

Applying normals to 2D artwork was a natural extension from their use in 3D, though obviously it wasnt possible on the older systems that inspire the aesthetic. Were certainly not the first studio to use them in modern pixel art titles, but the results vary.

We were initially put off using the effect, as many examples weve seen had a habit of destroying the charm and aesthetic that pixel art has, giving it too much of a shiny metallic look. Our first attempt at hand painting normals on pixel art led to a very detailed normalas thats what its main purpose is in 3D artbut as each tile in our game is only 32x32 pixels, theres not a lot of pixels to sell the surface information and so the end result was just a noisy mess.

When we saw Motion Twins Gwenael Masses art on Dead Cells, we saw normalled pixel art done very well and decided to have a second try at it. This time, [we used] the normal map not for small surface detail such as you might in 3D art, but to use the normal map to sculpt the large obvious shapes of the pixel art instead.

Sculpting shapes with normal maps

Can you briefly walk me through your process of developing an asset, particularly how it differs from how you'd otherwise make a similar simple 2D bitmap asset?

Generally, pixel art is drawn with a master light direction in mind. In our case, this master light is top down with a right side bias for most sprites and foreground tiles, with background tiles having a more generic light from the camera to simulate dark rooms and not distract the player from the foreground.

This meant that when it came to draw the normals for the sprites and tiles, the shape, surface detail and materials were already decided. We actually found this approach to work really well. It meant that the shapes and details we had to mimic in the normal were already very obvious and clear.

Dependent on the nature of the sprite being normalled, we use a mix of painting normal angle colors from a normal map dome (basically a sphere which acts as a palette of all the possible angles you can paint a tangent normal map with) and painting in the individual RGB grayscale channels, with other applications such as NDo, Crazybump or AwesomeBump helping on some shapes, and blending multiple parts of normals together correctly.

We use Nvidias TextureTools for Photoshop to correct/normalize vectors after finishing painting the normalmap.

What are the advantages of hand-drawing normal maps this way, over using off-the-shelf tools like Sprite DLight?

When we started looking into how to make normals for a 2D object with no high poly model, we did come across applications with functionality to do this to some degree.

We researched and looked at some tutorials to see how they went about normal map creation, but found that they either make guesstimations based on the color value of pixels, which results in generally inaccurate or completely incorrect results or have the user input multiple grayscale images to simulate light from different directions, essentially building the normal map channels yourself.

A program cant really know what a given pixel in a piece of arts height and angle are, especially a pixel art game where colours are very limited and the same colour is used to represent multiple depths and angles across an object. We must add though that weve not actually used any of these programs, weve just seen their intended use.

Two common methods used for faster automated normal map generation are Grayscale Conversion and Shape Recognition. We did some mockups with all three and decided that the hand painted method definitely gets the best results.

Grayscale Conversion and Shape Recognition can produce better effects than those shown here, but even with more time and effort invested, [they] would still not be as accurate or produce as good a result as hand drawn.

Using normal maps in your own 2D games

What advice can you offer other devs who want to follow in your footsteps?

Doing hand painted 2D normals accurately was no small task. For all of the foreground and background tilesets, its taken about 3 man-months. So be prepared to sink the time in to get the best results.

Quickly made normals on 2D art, especially pixel art, generally look poor. The one button routes can often result in substandard assets that look weaker than the unlit pixel art when rendered in-game. Do some tests on a small game area (a small sample of foreground, background, props and characters), and find what best suits your game and your art style.

[On the other hand], the cost of adding normals to our world, render-wise, is very cheap. We have two 2k normal maps for practically the entire game world. They dont use much memory and the few extra textures to perform the normal render pass wont impact draw calls too much. Lights are dynamically lit only, they dont dynamically shadow at all in our game, so they are very cheap too.

If you don't currently understand how tangent space normals work or what they represent, then some brief research will help you paint so much more easily.

You had to adapt your existing assets to take advantage of this method, rather than implementing it from day one. Do you have any advice for anyone else retrofitting normal maps to their existing sprite art?

If we had to do this again, wed probably approach it the same way: do the diffuse art first and then do the normals afterwards using the diffuse as a reference.

We may have drawn things a little differently in some places. There are problems in pixel art where one pixel can represent a nail or stud sticking out, for example, but that same pixel on the normal map can only represent one angle, so we may have chosen to draw some things a little more chunkily to give us more pixels to relay angles of images.

If you go any smaller in pixel resolution than we did on our tilesets (32x32) then you may find yourself too constricted by size. The limited resolution you have with a 16x16 or 8x8 tile probably wont let you get any real shape or volume out of the process, unless the entire tile is one large detail, such as a slab of rock or concrete.

Especially in pixel art, clean gradient curves dont look as good as chiseled hard angled surfaces. So if your art style will allow it, hed suggest going more for angles than gradients on your normal surfaces. For example if you had a barrel, make each plank that constructs it have its own angle and make the barrel appear more octagonal than curved.

Do you have any advice for developers who want to apply these techniques outside of the Unreal ecosystem? For example, in Unity or Gamemaker.

Check your normal map orientation before you start. The approach for painting your normals wont change from engine to engine, just what each color channel of the map represents.

Generally only the Y axis (green channel) gets switched about dependent on engine and creation method. Unreal uses DirectX left-handed coordinate-based Y- normals, but Unity uses OpenGL right handed coordinate based Y+ normals (we believe), so its green channel would have to be flipped from what weve drawn.

However, if you have done it the wrong way most of the time a simple inversion of the green channel is all thats needed. You will know if you have messed up a channel as the image will light inversely to what you expected.
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Governement to launch Aadhaar-based mobile application for army personnel News oi -Samden Sherpa The Indian Army will launch a new online grievance redressal system which will be based on Aadhaar number.

The Indian Army will launch a new online grievance redressal system which will be based on Aadhaar number, Army chief General Bipin Rawat said on Monday. "A new Aadhaar-based mobile application is being developed, through which every soldier will be able to post his grievances online, and it would be addressed as soon as possible," the Army chief said at the 70th Army Day parade.

The Chief has also stated that the app will have other useful information for the soldiers. The app will be launched soon as per the details provided. He also said that the Army Welfare Education Society has approved a plan for two residential schools with a capacity of 2,000 students.

One of the two schools will be near Mamun Military Station in Pathankot. A law college will also be started near Pune by the Army.

The Army chief last week said the Army is working on evolving a better system for providing aid to the children of martyrs and those disabled in action after the government put a Rs 10,000 cap on the monthly fund.

An order dated September 13 by the Department of Ex-Servicemen Welfare of the Defence Ministry said the fee for tuition and hostel expenses for children of martyrs would be capped at Rs 10,000 per month, as per the recommendations under the 7th Pay Commission. The order came into effect from July 1.

It was last year that the government had created a web-based Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) for all its Ministries, including the Ministry of Defence. This development followed multiple instances of servicemen using social media to complain about the problems they face.

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CPGRAMS provided online access to all citizens, including jawans and other Armed Forces personnel, to report their grievances to the Ministry of Defence. The system further allowed the Ministry to monitor the grievances and ensure their time-bound redressal by the organizations concerned.

In any case, this is a new development, and hopefully, the Indian army will benefit from this new initiative.

Meanwhile, Aadhaar has been gaining a lot of momentum in the past few months and Government has been introducing a lot of new services based on the system. However, there is also an ongoing debate about the privacy issues with Aadhaar data which we have witnessed in the last couple of days.

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Samsung Galaxy S6 to get Android Oreo in February News oi -Chandrika A couple of months ago, we came across another report that suggested the same.

Samsung has been working for quite a while on the much-awaited Android 8.0 Oreo update for some of its flagship phones. The Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus have already received the beta version of the update and they are likely to be the first Samsung phones to get the Oreo treatment. The South Korean tech giant has also confirmed that the Galaxy S7 duo will be updated to Android Oreo. Well, now we have just been informed that three-year-old Samsung Galaxy S6 might get the taste of Oreo as well.

According to Samsung's technical support, Galaxy S6's last major Android OS update could be Oreo. This information came to light after a Reddit user who spoke to him, shared screenshots. The company rep also says that the Samsung Galaxy S6 will be upgraded to Android Oreo by February, likely around the same time the Galaxy S8/S8 Plus will also receive the update.

Having said all that, the news seems to be good to true, especially considering the fact that none of the newer Samsung phones have received the update. So we are kind of skeptical about the news. It is very unlikely for Android phone makers to support devices that are as old as three years. Google is the only the company which is known to keep their old models updated. So keeping everything in mind, we better wait until we get a confirmation from Samsung itself.

Samsung Galaxy A8+ First Impressions

In any case, there are hardly 15 days till February, so will soon get to know whether or not it was just a false alarm. If you recall, in November 2017, another Reddit user was also told by a Samsung representative that the Galaxy S6 would be updated to Android 8.0 Oreo. He also posted a couple of screenshots which can be considered as evidence.

On the screenshots posted by him, all three representatives of Samsung are consistent with this information. So there is a slight chance that the smartphone gets the Oreo update. It goes without saying that if this information eventually turns out to be legit, no one would be happier than a Samsung Galaxy S6 owner.

Via

Best Mobiles in India
Samsung Galaxy S9, S9 Plus battery details leaked; no upgrades over predecessors News oi -Chandrika Both Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus are expected to retain the same battery capacity that we saw on last year's flagships.

As we approach February, Samsung fans are eagerly waiting for the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. The flagship smartphones are confirmed to get launched at the MWC 2018 in February. While they are yet to get officially announced, the rumor mill has already revealed some of their key specifications. Just a few days before, a retail box of the alleged Samsung Galaxy S9 was leaked, giving away many details of the device.

Now, a certification website has revealed an important piece of information regarding the battery capacities of the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. Apparently, in the battery department, the smartphones will not have any upgrades over their predecessor. According to the listing on Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL), the Galaxy S9 will feature a 3,000mAh battery, while the Galaxy S9 Plus will house a 3,500mAh battery under the hood.

First spotted by Slashleaks, the model numbers of the smartphones match with ones that appeared on the FCC listing recently. Other than the battery capacities, the Brazilian certification site specifies no other information regarding the phones.

As far as other specs are concerned, the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus are said to be powered by either the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor or the newly launched Samsung Exynos 9810 processor depending on the region.

Samsung Galaxy A8+ First Impressions

As stated earlier, the retail box leak had also revealed many specifications of the Samsung Galaxy S9. It will sport a 5.8-inch Super AMOLED display delivering QHD+ resolution. It goes without saying that the smartphone will feature the company's signature Infinity Display with the aspect ratio of 18:9. There will be minimal bezels on the device.

For the memory part, the smartphone is likely to retain the same 4GB RAM and 64GB internal storage combination. Speaking of the cameras, the Galaxy S9 will be equipped with a single rear camera with a12-megapixel sensor enabled with OIS. Referred to as "Super Speed dual-pixel" camera, it will be capable of taking images faster. The rear camera will have variable aperture.

Samsung Galaxy S9's camera will have a maximum aperture size of f/1.5, allowing users to take excellent quality images in low light conditions. However, the camera will switch to f/2.4 when there is sufficient light. The front camera of the smartphone will be of 8-megapixel with autofocus.

Best Mobiles in India
NATO Secretary General welcomes deepening cooperation with Sweden

NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

14 Jan. 2018

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed Swedens important contributions to the Alliance at the Folk och Forsvar Security Conference in Salen on Sunday (14 January 2018). In a keynote speech, the Secretary General outlined NATOs adaptation to a challenging security environment. He stressed the importance of the close cooperation with Nordic partners like Sweden helps to strengthen security in the region.

During his visit, the Secretary General held talks with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven. He praised Swedens commitment to international security, including its participation in NATO missions in Afghanistan and Kosovo, and its regular contributions to NATO exercises. The two leaders discussed opportunities for strengthening information exchanges on hybrid warfare, stepping up joint training and exercises, and sharing situational awareness.

Mr. Stoltenberg also met with Swedens Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom and Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist. On Monday, the Secretary General will visit the Nordic Centre for Gender in Military Operations and meet with the Speaker of the Parliament, Mr. Urban Ahlin.

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USS Wasp Arrives in Sasebo to Join Forward Deployed Naval Forces

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS180113-01

Release Date: 1/13/2018 7:41:00 PM

By Commander, Amphibious Force 7th Fleet Public Affairs

SASEBO, Japan (NNS) -- Amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD 1) arrived to Sasebo, Japan on Jan. 14, completing a 28,400-mile journey from Norfolk, Va. that began in late August.

Wasp, which has undergone significant upgrades to be able to land and launch the U.S. Marine Corp's F-35B Joint Strike Fighter, will replace USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) as the forward-deployed amphibious assault ship in 7th Fleet.

The force structure change has been long-planned as part of a Department of Defense effort to position the most advanced and capable assets forward in support of partners and allies.

Wasp's arrival to Sasebo comes after nearly two months of humanitarian relief efforts following two major hurricanes in the Caribbean and more than two months transiting across the Atlantic and into the Pacific.

"The arrival of USS Wasp represents an increase in military capability and a commitment to our partners and allies for security and stability in the region," said Capt. Colby Howard, Wasp Commanding Officer. "Paired with the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter, we remain ready to execute the full range of military operations from crisis response to disaster relief."

Wasp departed Norfolk Aug. 30 and was diverted a few days later to the Caribbean to assist the U.S. Virgin Islands and Dominica in the wake of Hurricane Irma. The amphibious assault ship then provided assistance to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm regarded as the worst natural disaster in the history of the American commonwealth island.

In support of relief efforts, Wasp aircraft flew 108 missions on the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico totaling 385 hours of flight time moving 1,129 total passengers along with 26,720 pounds of equipment and 1,718,200 pounds of various logistical support items, including 328,100 pounds of food and water.

"It's an exciting time to be in the Navy, and an exciting time for Wasp and her crew, given the wide variety of missions we have the opportunity to support," said Wasp Command Master Chief Gregory Carlson. "Over the last 18 months, this crew has not only performing their daily duties in an exemplary manner, but grown as individuals and well-represented the U.S. as ambassadors as we have served across the globe. While I'm proud of what they have accomplished, I'm also very proud of who they've become as a crew."

Wasp and other amphibious ships assigned under Expeditionary Strike Group 7, the Navy's only forward-deployed expeditionary strike group, directly partner with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit as the Pacific's on-call crisis response force. The F-35B is scheduled to embark on Wasp when the amphibious assault ship and MEU deploy in 2018 for regularly scheduled regional patrol.

Bonhomme Richard has been forward-deployed to Sasebo, Japan since April 2012 and will relocate to San Diego following a regularly scheduled patrol.

Commissioned in July 1989, Wasp has served on numerous deployments throughout the world, including a 6-month deployment to the Middle East in 2016.

Seventh Fleet, which celebrates its 75th year in 2018, spans more than 124 million square kilometers, stretching from the International Date Line to the India/Pakistan border and from the Kuril Islands in the North to the Antarctic in the South. Seventh Fleet's area of operation encompasses 36 maritime countries and 50 percent of the world's population with between 5070 U.S. ships and submarines, 140 aircraft and approximately 20,000 Sailors in the 7th Fleet.

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Palestine president says Trump's efforts slap of the century

Iran Press TV

Sun Jan 14, 2018 10:23PM

Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas has said that US President Donald Trump's so-called Middle East peace efforts are the "slap of the century" after his recognition of Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel's capital.

"The deal of the century is the slap of the century and we will not accept it," said Abbas referring to Trump's vow to reach the "ultimate deal."

Speaking at a Sunday meeting of Palestinian officials held over how to deal with Trump's al-Quds move, Abbas added that the Tel Aviv regime had "ended" the 1990s Oslo peace accords of the 1990s with its actions.

"We said 'no' to Trump, 'we will not accept your project'," he added.

The Oslo Accords were signed between the Israeli regime and the PLO during the early-mid 1990s to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to guarantee the Palestinians right of self determination.

The PA, which has limited governance over the occupied West Bank, was established following the Oslo Accords.

Last month, Trump announced that Washington would recognize Jerusalem al-Quds as the capital of Israel and would relocate the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the occupied city.

Abbas also branded the US ambassadors to the UN and to Israel, Nikki Haley and David Friedman, a "disgrace."

"US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman is a settler who is opposed to the term occupation. He is an offensive human being, and I will not agree to meet with him anywhere. They requested that I meet him and I refused, not in Jerusalem, not in Amman, not in Washington. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley too, she threatens to hit people who hurt Israel with the heel of her shoe, and we'll respond in the same way," he said.

He also stressed that Palestinians will continue with their demand that Britain apologize over the Balfur declaration which led to the formation of the Israeli regime.

We continue to demand an apology from the British for the Balfour Declaration, and we will continue to demand their recognition of a Palestinian state, said Abbas.

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In Colombia, UN chief meets with ex-combatants, expressing hope for future and peace process

14 January 2018  On the second day of an official visit to Colombia, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday expressed hopes for the future and for the peace process in the South American country.

I am extremely happy to see the enthusiasm and commitment of the authorities, of the communities, and of the ex-combatants to the process of peace building in Colombia, Mr. Guterres said in a statement to the press from Mesetas, Meta, where he visited a territorial area for the training and reintegration of former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) combatants.

I had the opportunity to visit a FARC camp and to see the ex-combatants build their future and develop new activities  activities of peace  with great enthusiasm, he said.

Mr. Guterres said that the communities also believe that it is possible for this region to achieve not only peace, but also prosperity and good living conditions for all its inhabitants and that the Colombian Government will play a key role in providing the security, administration, healthcare system and infrastructures they need, and in helping the local farmers get better access to the market.

What we see here is an extraordinary transformation, and it gives me great hope for the future and for the peace process in Colombia, he stressed, reaffirming the UN's full support and solidarity with the Colombian people in this historic moment of their lives.

The purpose of Mr. Guterres' visit to Colombia is to take stock of achievements that followed a peace agreement between the Government and the FARC in November 2016, which ended 50 years of conflict.

The UN chief also seeks to reinvigorate the implementation of the peace deal, including the process of reintegrating former rebel combatants into society, and ensure that Colombians are committed to stay the course.

His visit also comes ahead of legislative elections in March and presidential elections in May, and at a time when a temporary ceasefire agreement between the Government and another rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), has just expired.

Deep concern about violent events involving ELN

Back in the capital, Bogota, the UN chief spoke to reporters before wrapping up his two-day visit and expressed his concern about the violent events that took place following the expiration of a temporary ceasefire between the Government and the ELN.

On 10 January, Mr. Guterres' Special Representative for Colombia, Jean Arnault, told the UN Security Council that attacks against oil pipelines by the ELN just resumed.

Convinced of the importance of the negotiations between the Government of Colombia and the National Liberation Army (ELN) for the peace of Colombia and the progress of its population, I express my deep concern in the face of the violent events of recent days and a possible escalation of confrontations to the detriment of the political process and the situation of the communities in the areas affected by the conflict, he said.

Rapid progress must be made in compliance with the new agenda items agreed upon between the government and the ELN, he said, calling for the cessation of armed actions and the resumption of a serious and constructive dialogue with a view to meeting as soon as possible the expectations generated by the commitment of the parties to reach a solution to their conflict through political means.

In that regard, he recalled the wish publicly expressed last week by the UN Security Council that the parties resume their efforts to agree on a renewal and strengthening of the ceasefire.

I instructed my Special Representative in Colombia to take all necessary actions to facilitate the return of the parties to the table, and reaffirm the commitment of the United Nations with a just solution to the conflict between the parties for the benefit of the entire society, he said.

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Spain to impose direct rule on Catalonia if Puigdemont tries to govern from Brussels

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 03:28PM

The Spanish government has threatened to re-impose direct rule on Catalonia if the former regional leader Carles Puigdemont tries to govern from exile in Brussels.

Speaking at the headquarters of his center-right Peoples Party in the capital Madrid on Monday, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, said the former Catalan leader had "to be physically present" in Catalonia to assume office, and if that did not happen, the central government would keep control of the autonomous region.

"It's absurd that someone aspires to be president of the Catalan regional government being a fugitive and in Brussels. It's not an issue of law or politics, it's a case of common sense," Rajoy said.

"In order to take possession, he has to do so physically because possession cannot be taken from Brussels. And, if he doesn't do so, Article 155 will continue to be in force, not because I say so but because the Senate decided that Article 155 will be in force until the new president takes possession after the Catalan elections," he added.

Article 155 of Spains constitution allows Madrid to suspend Catalonias political autonomy.

Puigdemont and his ex-cabinet members fled to Belgium in October last year after his government was fired following a unilateral declaration of independence, which was rejected by Madrid as illegal.

The former Catalan leader, facing arrest and likely imprisonment if he returns home, was charged with sedition, rebellion, and misuse of public funds for his role in the region's independence referendum.

After the declaration of independence, Rajoy seized control of Catalonia, dissolved its parliament and called for snap elections to be held on December 21, aiming to marginalize the secessionist camp that favored a split of the wealthy northeastern region from Spain.

Pro-independence parties won 70 of the 135 seats in the Catalan parliament in those elections, giving secessionist lawmakers a slim majority over the pro-unity camp.

Puigdemonts supporters argue that voters have elected him and he should be able to rule from Brussels given the current circumstances.

During a meeting of the Catalan parliament last week, the secessionist government suggested that Puigdemont could be sworn into office via video-link or by proxy, but the Spanish government in Madrid vetoed the proposal.

The new Catalan parliament is to hold its maiden session on January 17.

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Yemeni snipers kill three Saudi troopers in retaliatory attacks

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 03:23PM

Yemeni army soldiers, backed by fighters from allied Popular Committees, have shot dead three Saudi soldiers in the kingdoms southwestern border region of Jizan, in retaliation for the Riyadh regimes military campaign against the crisis-hit country.

Yemeni forces shot and killed the soldiers in al-Ghawi village as well as al-Dokhan and Qaem Zubaid military bases in the region, located 967 kilometers southwest of the capital Riyadh, on Monday afternoon, Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported.

Later in the day, eight civilians lost their lives and five others sustained injuries when Saudi military aircraft struck their vehicle as it was travelling along a road in the Ahem area of Yemen's northwestern province of Hajjah.

Saudi warplanes also carried out an aerial attack against a residential area in the al-Dhaher district of Yemen's mountainous northwestern province of Sa'ada.

There were, however, no immediate reports on possible casualties and the extent of damage caused.

Elsewhere in the Haydan district of the same Yemeni province, Saudi fighter jets launched two airstrikes, with no immediate reports of casualties available.

At least 13,600 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabias 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 a deadly cholera epidemic across Yemen.

According to the World Health Organizations latest count, the cholera outbreak has killed 2,167 people since the end of April and is suspected to have infected 841,906.

On November 26, the United Nations childrens 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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Pakistani army says Indian fire kills 4 soldiers in Kashmir

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 09:12AM

Pakistan says Indian forces have killed four of its troops in cross-border fire targeting the Islamabad-administered part of disputed Kashmir.

In a statement on Monday, the Pakistani military said its soldiers were doing maintenance on communication lines in the border village of Kotli when they came under the fire earlier in the day.

The statement added that those fired at were on the Pakistani side of the border at the time of the incident.

Retaliatory fire from the Pakistani forces, it said, killed three Indian forces.

Earlier, the Indian army said it had killed at least five suspected militants, who crossed into the Indian-controlled part of the disputed Himalayan region and engaged in a gunfight with New Delhis forces.

Col. Rajesh Kalia, an Indian army spokesman, said the gunbattle began early Monday when soldiers intercepted heavily armed militants along the highly militarized de facto border.

The Muslim-majority Kashmir region is divided between Pakistan and India, but claimed by both in its entirety. The neighbors have fought three wars over control of the Himalayan region since the countries partition in 1947.

New Delhi regularly accuses Pakistan of arming and training militants and allowing them across the restive frontier in an attempt to launch attacks on Indian forces.

Islamabad, however, strongly denies the allegation and accuses India of committing war crimes in Kashmir and exporting terror to Pakistan.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir, where most people demand that the region be united either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.

Most people on the New Delhi-administered side support pro-independence militants while also holding street protests against Indian control.

Despite a ceasefire agreement that was reached in November 2003, sporadic skirmishes continue in the region.

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Palestinian Central Council calls on PLO to end recognition of Israel

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 09:56PM

The Palestinian Central Council has called on Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to suspend recognition of Israel in response to US President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem al-Quds as the Tel Aviv regime's capital.

On Monday, the council voted in favor of ordering the PLO to halt its recognition of Israel until it officially recognizes the state of Palestine, suspends its annexation of east Jerusalem and halts its settlement activities.

It is still unclear if the council's, which is a high-ranking part of the PLO, vote is binding.

The announcement was made after Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas said that US President Donald Trump's so-called Middle East peace efforts are the "slap of the century" after his al-Quds move.

Last month, Trump announced that Washington would recognize Jerusalem al-Quds as the capital of Israel and would relocate the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the occupied city.

The entire Jerusalem al-Quds is currently under Israels control, while the regime also claims the citys eastern part, which hosts the third holiest Muslim site.

The city has been designated as occupied under international law since the 1967 Arab War, which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.

Trump had vowed during his presidential campaign that he would relocate the US embassy in order to court pro-Israel voters.

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Tunisia says over 900 arrested in anti-austerity protests

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 07:02PM

Tunisian authorities have announced the apprehension of more than 900 people following demonstrations against austerity measures imposed by the government.

Tunisias Interior Ministry spokesman Khlifa Chibani said on Monday that "a total of 937 people are in custody" after acts of violence, theft or vandalism.

Chibani added that 41 people aged between 13 and 19 had been detained a day earlier, as the North African country marked the anniversary of the 2011 uprising that gave birth to the Arab Spring that touched off a chain of uprisings across many Arab nations.

The authorities said that 105 members of the Tunisian security forces had sustained injuries and one protester lost his life in a week of clashes fueled by unemployment, corruption and austerity measures in the 2018 budget.

The Tunisian government proposed a range of socioeconomic reforms to parliament on Sunday, but people across the country continue to hold rallies.

Tunisia has been the scene of protests against hikes in value-added tax and social contributions introduced at the beginning of the year to reduce the countrys annual deficit and satisfy international lenders.

In recent years, demonstrations have been held in the month of January, which marks the anniversary of the 2011 revolution that toppled dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

The 2011 uprising and two major militant attacks in Tunisia in 2015 harmed foreign investment and tourism, which accounts for eight percent of the countrys economic activity.

The North African country has been hailed for its relatively smooth democratic transition since the revolution, but it is still experiencing economic and political turbulence.

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Somalia's Shabab militants forcing civilians to hand over children: HRW

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 06:22PM

Human Rights Watch has warned that the Somalia-based Takfiri terrorist group of al-Shabab is forcing civilians to hand over their young children for indoctrination and military training.

The international rights organization made the revelation in a statement on Monday, saying the terrorist group had launched an aggressive campaign to recruit children since mid-2017, with threats of retaliation against communities who refused to cooperate.

Since late September 2017, the al-Qaeda-linked militant group has ordered elders, teachers in religious schools, and communities in rural areas to provide hundreds of children as young as 8 or face attack, according to the statement.

The recruitment was reportedly taking place in three districts in Somalias southern Bay region, which is largely under the control of the terrorist outfit.

"Al-Shabab's ruthless recruitment campaign is taking rural children from their parents so they can serve this militant armed group," said Laetitia Bader, senior Africa researcher at HRW. To escape that cruel fate, many children have fled school or their homes.

The New York-based rights organization also revealed that the terrorist group had opened large religious schools in Bay region since 2015, bringing in young children and pressuring teachers to teach the al-Shabab curriculum and avoid "foreign teachings.

HRW quoted village elders near Baidoa in southwestern Somalia as saying that al-Shabab militants had ordered them in September to hand over dozens of children between the ages of nine and 15.

"They said we needed to support their fight. They spoke to us in a very threatening manner. They also said they wanted the keys to our boreholes. They kept us for three days. We said we needed to consult with our community. They gave us 10 days," the rights watchdog quoted one resident as saying.

The community refused to hand over the children, and has since received threatening calls, including death threats, according to HRW.

The UN Security Councils Somalia Eritrea Monitoring Group (SEMG) reported that al-Shabab had detained 45 elders in the region back in June, after they had refused to provide them with 150 children. The SEMG also found that 300 children had been abducted from the area since that period and forced to educate at al-Shabab schools.

Al-Shababs campaign only adds to the horrors of Somalias long conflict, both for the children and their families, Bader noted. The group should immediately stop abducting children and release all children in their ranks. The Somali government should ensure these children are not sent into harms way.

Somalia has been the scene of deadly clashes between government forces and al-Shabab militants since 2006.

The Takfiri militant group was forced out of the capital by African Union troops in 2011, but still controls parts of the countryside and carries out attacks against government, military, and civilian targets in Mogadishu and regional towns.

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EU: Serbia, Montenegro 'Could Join In 2025'

Rikard Jozwiak January 15, 2018

BRUSSELS -- Montenegro and Serbia should be ready for EU membership in 2025 and Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia should be well-advanced on their path to EU accession by then, according to a draft of the European Commission's Western Balkans strategy seen by RFE/RL.

The strategy, which is expected to be made public on February 6, is part of an EU effort to breathe new life into the accession process for the six Western Balkan countries that remain outside the bloc.

The draft seen by RFE/RL states that "the Western Balkan partners now have a historic window of opportunity" and that "for the first time their accession perspective has a best-case framework" -- but adds that the timeline set out in the paper is realistic only if there is "strong political will, delivery of real reforms, and lasting solutions to disputes with neighbors."

The timeline is "ambitious and is meant to be an incentive," it says.

According to the document, 2019 will be a crucial year.

Albania and Macedonia should start EU accession negotiations by the end of 2019, provided that Tirana has implemented judicial reform and Skopje has resolved a bitter name dispute with Greece that has dogged the country since it gained independence from the collapsing Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the document says.

Greek and Macedonian negotiators will meet in New York on January 17 and leaders of both countries -- as well as the UN envoy dealing with the matter, Matthew Nimetz -- have said there is a window of opportunity to resolve the issue in 2018.

At the end of 2019, EU member states should also be in a position to grant EU candidate-country status to Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to draft.

It says that Serbia and Kosovo "will need at the latest by this stage to have achieved comprehensive normalization of relations, which should open the way for further substantial progress by Kosovo on the path to European integration."

The EU-sponsored dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina started in 2011 and has so far produced agreements in areas such as freedom of movement, justice, and the status of the Serbian minority in Kosovo -- as well as enabling Serbia to start EU accession talks and Brussels to sign an Association Agreement with Kosovo.

In a nod to fractious relationships between many of the counties in the region, the document states that "the EU cannot and will not import bilateral disputes. This is why all Western Balkans partners concerned must resolve such disputes as a matter of urgency ahead of their future accession to the European Union."

It also underlines that "as a matter of principle, the front-runners on the EU path have a strategic interest in being advocates, not spoilers, of the aspirations of their neighbors."

By 2023, the strategy says, EU member states should be in a position to agree to closing EU accession negotiations with Serbia and Montenegro, and Bosnia should open accession talks the same year. EU accession treaties with Serbia and Montenegro should be ratified by all EU member states two years later, allowing for membership by the end of 2025.

The timeline is "indicative only," the document states, saying that "countries can move faster but may also move slower."

EU diplomats with whom RFE/RL has spoken under the condition of anonymity have said they believe that many EU member states, particularly France and Germany, will find the time frame too ambitious and would prefer if no dates were mentioned.

The strategy might be discussed by EU heads of state and government already at their next summit in Brussels, in March, and is certain to be discussed during the EU-Western Balkans summit in Sofia on May 17.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/eu-western-balkans -strategy-bosnia-kosovo-macedonia- montenegro-serbia/28976883.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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Doha Denies UAE Charge That Qatari Fighters Intercepted Emirati Plane

Sputnik News

13:22 15.01.2018(updated 14:13 15.01.2018) Get short URL

The United Arab Emirates on Monday said that a Qatari aircraft intercepted in international airspace a commercial liner that was heading to Bahrain.

Aif Al Thani, a Qatari government spokesman, denied the UAE's claim on Twitter, calling it "completely untrue." He promised a detailed statement would come later Monday.

Earlier in the day, UAE's state-run news agency WAM has cited the UAE General Authority of Civil Aviation as saying that jet intecepted civil liner.

"Qatari fighter jets intercept an Emirati civilian aircraft during a routine flight to Manama in a flagrant threat to civil aviation safety and in a clear violation of international law," the UAE General Authority of Civil Aviation said.

According to the state-run news agency WAM, Qatar has filed two complaints with the United Nations about Emirati military aircraft allegedly violating its international airspace. The UAE called Doha actions "a flagrant violation of international agreements" and stated that they would "take all necessary legislative measures to ensure the safety of air traffic."

There are four UAE airlines that operate flights to nearby Bahrain  Emirates, Etihad, flydubai and Air Arabia.

In the summer of 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt declared a break in diplomatic relations with Qatar, accusing Doha of supporting terrorism and interfering in their internal affairs. This was followed by economic sanctions and the transport blockade of the emirate. Countries closed their airspace to Qatari planes.

 Sputnik

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Afghanistan Unable to Field Army for 6 Months Without US Assistance - President

Sputnik News

09:08 15.01.2018Get short URL

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Afghan army will be unable to operate even for six months without US support, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said.

"We will not be able to support our army for six months without US support, and US capabilities  Because we don't have the money," Ghani told CBS News on Sunday, when asked whether the Afghan government would collapse if the US army left the country.

The Afghan president noted that 21 terrorist organizations were operating in his country.

Afghanistan is currently suffering from an unstable political, social and security issues due to the activity of the Taliban terrorist group and the Islamic State terrorist organization, both outlawed in Russia.

 Sputnik

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US Fighter Aircraft Arrive in Estonia to Take Part in Drills

Sputnik News

06:20 15.01.2018Get short URL

TALLINN (Sputnik) - Twelve F-16 fighting aircraft of the US State of Ohio Air National Guard arrived in Estonia on Sunday in order to take part in the multinational military exercise, the Estonian Defense Forces Headquarters said in a statement.

The fighter aircraft of the 112th Fighter Squadron took off from Ohio's Toledo Air National Guard Base and landed at the Amari Air Base located southwest of the Estonian capital of Tallinn.

"One of the goals of the forthcoming drills is to hone the skills of large-scale air operations' conduction. The military drills will be assisted by air observers from Belgium," Col. Riivo Valge, chief of staff of the Estonian Air Force and acting commander, said.

The military drills will last until mid-March. The manoeuvres will be carried out in special training areas intended for these purposes on the islands in western Estonia at a height not less than 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles).

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced earlier, that the alliance would maintain an increased military presence in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe "as long as necessary," claiming that the alleged Russian threat was the main reason for the move.

 Sputnik

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Update: air strikes against Daesh

The RAF are continuing to take the fight to Daesh in Iraq and Syria.

15 January 2018

Summary

Monday 8 January  a Reaper conducted four attacks on terrorists in eastern Syria whilst supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces, whilst Typhoons demolished a Daesh command post.

Tuesday 9 January  a Reaper struck two groups of terrorists in eastern Syria.

Wednesday 10 January  a Reaper hit three terrorist targets in eastern Syria, whilst Tornados destroyed an armed truck.

Thursday 11 January  a Reaper attacked four terrorist targets in eastern Syria, including a Daesh drone operator.

Friday 12 January  a Reaper struck a Daesh-held building and a terrorist on a motorcycle, both in eastern Syria.

Saturday 13 January  a Reaper delivered five attacks on terrorist targets in eastern Syria.

Sunday 14 January  a Reaper eliminated a Daesh drone operator.

Detail

Operations by the Syrian Democratic Forces to clear Daesh from the Euphrates valley in eastern Syria have continued to receive extensive support from Royal Air Force aircraft flying reconnaissance and close air support missions. A Reaper tracked terrorists manoeuvring to the north-east of Abu Kamal on Monday 8 January, and conducted four successful attacks, with three Hellfire missiles and a GBU-12 guided bomb, against extremists on foot and a Daesh pair moving at high speed on a motorcycle across the desert. Two Typhoon FGR4s were also active over the area on the same day, and they used Paveway IV guided bombs to demolish a building which had been identified as a terrorist command post.

Reaper operations over the Euphrates valley continued on Tuesday 9 January, when one of our aircraft spotted a group of armed terrorists on a rooftop north-east of Hajin, observing Syrian Democratic Forces positions through binoculars. A Hellfire missile successfully struck the group, and a second missile was later used to eliminate another Daesh group who had taken up position within a building. The following day, another Reaper worked closely with coalition surveillance aircraft and fast jets in a series of strikes in support of the SDF advance. Our aircraft supported coalition air attacks on a Daesh-held building and a mortar position, and conducted three attacks with its own Hellfire missiles, destroying an armed truck parked under cover of a vehicle shelter, and hitting two groups of terrorists on foot. A flight of Tornado GR4s also took part in this operation, and targeted an armed truck positioned within a compound; the use of a Brimstone missile allowed the vehicle to be destroyed without posing a risk to nearby buildings.

On Thursday 11 January, a Reaper again patrolled north of Abu Kamal, the crew using the aircrafts long endurance and sophisticated surveillance sensors to provide overwatch for the SDF on the ground. Three groups of terrorists were successfully attacked with Hellfires, and a fourth missile was employed to kill a Daesh extremist spotted on a rooftop, controlling a small drone of the type used by the terrorists to attempt to spot opponents and conduct harassing attacks with improvised weaponry. Another Reaper continued support to the SDF in this area on Friday 12 January, and its crew conducted attacks with Hellfire missiles on a Daesh-held building and a terrorist moving at speed on a motorcycle.

A Reaper worked very closely with another coalition armed reconnaissance aircraft on Saturday 13 January, again to the north of Abu Kamal. Our aircraft spotted a second terrorist drone team launching a quadcopter from a rooftop, and kept close watch on them whilst the coalition aircraft manoeuvred into a suitable firing position from which it successfully attacked the drone team. The Reaper supported a further two successful attacks by its coalition companion, and also delivered five attacks with four Hellfire missiles and one GBU-12 guided bomb. These weapons struck four buildings and a defensive berm, from which fire had been directed by extremists at the Syrian Democratic Forces. On Sunday 14 January, a Reaper spotted the third terrorist drone team identified during the week; on this occasion, the extremists attempted to conceal themselves in a building, but could be seen controlling the drone from the top-floor window. A Hellfire was directed accurately through the window.

UK contribution to the fight against Daesh



Map of UK forces committed to Operation Shader

Campaign against Daesh



Map of Daesh losses and gains in Iraq and Syria since September 2014

Previous update

Friday 1 December: A Reaper worked very closely with two flights of coalition aircraft, some fifteen miles north-west of Abu Kamal. The Reaper supported seven attacks by the coalition jets against several groups of terrorists, an armed truck and a Daesh-held building, and conducted three attacks with its own Hellfire missiles, which killed a number of extremists spotted both in defensive positions and in the open.

Sunday 3 December: Another Reaper provided similar assistance to the Syrian Democratic Forces. Our aircraft provided surveillance support to a successful coalition air attack, then used a Hellfire missile to eliminate a group of terrorists who had taken up position in a building to the north-east of Abu Hammam.

Saturday 9 December: Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced that Iraqi forces had successfully restored control over the entire border with Syria. Coalition aircraft continue to be on hand to support the Iraqi security forces against any isolated pockets of Daesh extremists that might be found, and two RAF Tornado GR4s carried out such a mission on Saturday night. A coalition surveillance aircraft had identified a dispersed group of terrorists in a remote area of countryside some 40 miles north-west of Tikrit, and the Tornados were tasked with their destruction. Two Paveway IV guided bombs were used, along with a Brimstone missile which destroyed the terrorists nearby truck.

Sunday 10 December: A Reaper provided further support to the Syrian Democratic Forces in eastern Syria. Our aircraft tracked various groups of terrorists which allowed them to be struck by a series of attacks by coalition fast jets, and conducted one attack using its own Hellfire weaponry.

Tuesday 12 December: A Reaper identified a small group of Daesh extremists firing on the SDF. The Reapers crew kept very close watch on a number of civilians, including women and children, who were evacuating the village, and waited until they were clear of the area before conducting a successful attack on the terrorists with a Hellfire missile.

Friday 15 December: Another Reaper flew a similar mission in the area. It spotted several terrorists occupying a compound and hit them with a Hellfire missile. A second group of terrorists then attempted to take up firing positions in the same compound, and were also struck with a Hellfire. Later in the day, the Reapers crew tracked a group of men acting suspiciously around a area of trees, and close observation identified a truck, carrying a mortar, camouflaged under the trees. The Reaper was able to pinpoint the position for coalition jets which delivered an accurate attack which destroyed the vehicle and mortar.

Sunday 17 December: A pair of Typhoon FGR4s also provided support to the SDF in the Euphrates valley, near Abu Hardub. A coalition surveillance aircraft observed a number of extremists taking up position in a building, and the Typhoons subsequently destroyed the target with a single Paveway IV guided bomb.

Saturday 23 December: A Reaper remotely piloted aircraft worked closely with coalition jets near Abu Hammam. The Reapers crew provided surveillance support to a coalition air strike on a Daesh-occupied building, then tracked a small group of terrorists as they attempted to seek shelter in an outbuilding nearby. Having checked the area carefully for any signs of civilians who might be placed at risk, the Reapers crew then conducted a successful attack with a Hellfire missile, which destroyed the outbuilding and its occupants.

Thursday 28 December: Tornado GR4s, flying from RAF Akrotiri and, as ever, supported by a Voyager air refuelling tanker, flew an armed reconnaissance mission over the Euphrates. Their attention was directed to a Daesh defensive position, consisting of two buildings surrounded by earthworks, at a remote spot north-east of Abu Kamal, close to the border with Iraq. Our aircraft demolished both of the buildings with a pair of Paveway IVs.

Friday 29 December: Two flights of Tornados flew close air support for the Syrian Democratic Forces the following day, despite difficult weather conditions; one flight employed a Paveway IV to destroy a building from which fire was being directed at close range against the SDF, whilst the second pair of Tornados engaged through cloud a group of terrorists engaged in street fighting; a Paveway removed the threat to the SDF.

Saturday 6 January: Two Typhoons conducted a night attack on an isolated building some seven miles north-east of Abu Kamal, used as accommodation by Daesh extremists, including local commanders. A pair of Paveway IVs destroyed the target.

Sunday 7 January: A Reaper once again worked with coalition fast jets over the Euphrates, in support of the SDF. The Reaper observed a group of terrorists assembling under a tree, around twenty miles south-east of Mayadin, allowing a prompt and effective strike by another coalition aircraft, then delivered a further attack using one of its own Hellfire missiles. Following the defeat of Daesh in Iraq, coalition aircraft have remained on-call to support the Iraqi security forces as necessary to prevent any attempts by the terrorists to mount further operations in the country, and on Sunday a Typhoon flight was tasked to deal with a group of extremists who had been tracked to a cave some twelve miles north-east of Bayji. A direct hit was achieved with a Paveway IV, killing several terrorists in and around the cave entrance.

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In strife-torn Afghanistan, people need support 'more than ever' says senior UN aid official

15 January 2018  Amid continuing violence in Afghanistan, the United Nations and the humanitarian community has appealed for $430 million to provide assistance to some 2.8 million people across the country who have been affected by conflict and natural disasters as well as families returning home after years in Iran and Pakistan.

In many parts of Afghanistan, violence continues unabated and people need support more than ever, said Toby Lanzer, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Afghanistan, underlining the needs in the country.

Today I call on international donors to stand by 2.8 million people whose lives have been ruined by conflict or natural disaster, and to help people returning to Afghanistan from neighbouring countries.

According to a news release issued by the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the plan includes activities of more than 150 national and international humanitarian organizations as well as the UN to deliver assistance to families and communities in need.

There are however, substantial challenges, including difficult access conditions as well as increasing violence against aid workers. Last year, armed clashes were the highest in a decade and civilian casualties remained near record levels.

In addition to more than two million people directly affected by the conflict including almost half a million displaced, 2017 also saw about 500,000 Afghans returning to their homes after seeking refuge in Iran, Pakistan or other countries.

The 2018 Humanitarian Response Plan focuses only on providing life-saving emergency assistance such as food and shelter, medical treatment and nutrition interventions for malnourished child to people caught up in current or very recent disasters.

Besides the 2.8 million people the plan is designed for, another 8.7 million people are estimated to live with high level of needs as a result of long-standing and unresolved issues such as lack of jobs and livelihoods, long-term displacement, an underfunded healthcare system or the effects of climate change.

Humanitarian emergency assistance cannot provide a solution for such chronic needs, like land for housing or jobs and vocational training to lift them out of poverty and fragility, read the news release, underlining the need to improve the underlying conditions.

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Amid Concerns, Afghan Forces Ready to Hand Over Security Responsibilities to Rural Communities

By Mohammad Habibzada January 15, 2018

Afghan forces are planning to hand over the security responsibilities to the local forces of the rural communities, they have recently captured from Taliban and IS militants, in eastern Nangarhar a province that borders Pakistan.

Nangarhar provincial officials said hundreds of local men, armed by Afghan National Directorate of Security, are ready to fight against IS in Khogyani district where joint Afghan security forces recently ended a 15-day long anti-IS operation.

"For the time we have 300 men ready to protect their villages [against IS militants] and if the situation requires, we will arm more people to fight," said Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesperson for the governor of Nangarhar.

According to the Afghan officials, the total number of such forces in Nangarhar province is close to 1000.

"We have 500 local forces in Pachir Agam district, 300 in Khogyani district and another 100 in Kot district," said Hayat Khan, Chief of Nangarhar Coordination Center of Uprising Local Forces.

Afghan officials claim the force in Pachir Agam district is effectively providing security to the district and to the Tora Bora area, once the stronghold of slain Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Some local residents have expressed support for a joint Afghan security forces operation in Khogyani district where fighting between the Taliban and IS militants caused hundreds of families to flee.

"We ask the government to build more security posts. We do not want IS and the Taliban to come back here and fight. Fighting made us leave our houses in this cold season of the year. Locals have the ability to protect their communities," a local resident identified only as Azizullah, told VOA.

Afghan officials also said that hundreds of these local men had military training and are currently providing security under the local police force. The Afghan government is arming them with weapons and have them on payroll.

Concerns Over Instability

Experts have been expressing fear that these forces may cause more insecurity.

Wadeer Safi, a professor at Kabul University, claimed that there are reports about the these forces joining local police in armed robbery.

"In some districts the so-called local police and upraising force, especially when they are stationed far from districts centers, have turned into 'robbers', using their weapons to plunder and kidnap girls," Safi said. "I have not seen any positive effect of these forces in terms of providing security in the country.

Ahmad Shah Wardak, a military expert, agrees with the ineffectiveness of the local forces. He believes they need to be centralized and controlled by the Afghan government. "The Afghan government needs to develop a proper strategy in terms of how to support, train and arm those locals who are frustrated from [Taliban and IS] brutalities, and recognize those warlords, especially in northern Afghanistan, who under the name of local uprisings commit crimes, including rape and plunder."

In a report published in July 2017, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission documented a number of abusive and criminal actions committed by local uprising forces in northern Afghanistan. They asked the Afghan government to take legal measures to prevent the arbitrary actions of irresponsible armed forces who violate international human rights.

In a recent incident in the Achin district of eastern Nangarhar province, a man belonging to local uprising forces opened fire on U.S. military forces. A NATO statement confirmed that during the shootout one U.S. Army service member was wounded. However, Afghan local authorities said that two U.S. soldiers were killed and another wounded. Afghan officials also confirmed the death of two local uprising force commanders and one local Afghan interpreter in the shootout.

Afghan defense officials have said that Afghan local forces would be transitioned or dissolved within the ranks of Afghan National Army and police. However, experts say that while the government has made some strides, overall it failed to train and merge them in Afghan National Army or Police ranks.

Zia UrRahman Hasrat in Nangarhar contributed to this report

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UN Security Council Makes Lightening Visit to Afghanistan

By Margaret Besheer January 15, 2018

The U.N. Security Council has made a lightening visit to Afghanistan, where diplomats met with the National Unity Government and had a first-hand look at the situation in the country.

The 15-member council visited Kabul from January 13-15. It was the first time council diplomats have traveled to the country since 2010.

"The visit was an opportunity to reiterate the Security Council's support for the government and people of Afghanistan and their efforts to restore peace, stability and progress to the country," said Kazakhstan Ambassador Kairat Umarov, who is president of the council this month and led the delegation.

Afghanistan has been working to rebuild after decades of occupation, internal strife and conflict. In 2002, the U.N. Security Council authorized a political missionknown as UNAMA -- at the request of the nascent government which had taken back the country from Taliban militants.

Council members, including U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley, met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah and other senior Afghan officials. The diplomats also engaged with members of parliament, women's groups, civil society and representatives from political parties. Discussions focused on the political, security, socio-economic and human rights situation.

"We got a great briefing on the status of women empowerment in Afghanistan during the U.N. Security Council visit," tweeted Ambassador Karel van Oosterom of the Netherlands. The Dutch will oversee the Afghanistan portfolio on the Security Council this year.

Council members reiterated their support for the government's reform initiatives, in particular to counter corruption and accelerate regional cooperation, according to a statement from UNAMA. Diplomats also expressed concern about the security situation, specifically the presence of al-Qaida, Taliban and Islamic State-Khorasan Province-affiliated fighters, and called for greater international and regional security cooperation.

Afghanistan is due to hold parliamentary elections later this year and presidential polls in 2019. Representatives of the Independent Election Commission and the Electoral Complaints Commission briefed the delegation on the preparations.

The Security Council will hold a high-level debate on the situation in Afghanistan this Friday. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to brief members and Kazakhstan's foreign minister, Kairat Abdrakhmanov, will chair the session.

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India, Pakistan Clash Again in Disputed Territory

By Ayesha Tanzeem January 15, 2018

India and Pakistan exchanged gunfire Monday in the disputed Kashmir region, killing several soldiers on both sides. Each side blamed the other starting the altercation, giving its own figures for the number of dead.

India claimed its troops killed seven Pakistani soldiers, while one Indian soldier died. Pakistan said four of its soldiers died in Indian firing, while its forces killed three in retaliatory fire.

India accuses Pakistan of sending militants across the border to carry out terrorist activities on its soil. Pakistan, on the other hand, accuses India of grave human rights violations in the part of Kashmir under Indian control, which has long faced a separatist movement.

Clashes along the 745 kilometer line of control that divides Kashmir have become an almost common occurrence during the past couple of years.

The two sides signed a cease-fire agreement in 2003 that led to a period of relative calm between the two nuclear armed neighbors, after they fought a limited war in Kashmir in 1999. They two sides also fought for Kashmir in 1947 and 1965.

In July 2016, anti-India protests broke out in Indian controlled Kashmir after young separatist leader Burhan Wani was killed by Indian forces. Human rights organizations accused India of a heavy-handed response that killed dozens of people and maimed thousands of others.

Last week, Indian army chief General Bipin Rawat said Pakistans nuclear weapons may not deter the Indian army from entering its territory.

If we will have to really confront the Pakistanis, and a task is given to us, we are not going to say we cannot cross the border because they have nuclear weapons. We will have to call their nuclear bluff, Rawat said.

Pakistans foreign minister Khwaja Asif called this statement irresponsible and an invitation for nuclear encounter.

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Report: Al-Shabab Conscripting Children Young as 8

By Harun Maruf January 15, 2018

A new report says Somalia's al-Shabab militants are forcing rural communities to hand over children as young as 8 years old for indoctrination and military training.

Human Rights Watch says al-Shabab conscripts the children by subjecting elders and religious school teachers to beatings, abductions and intimidation tactics. The group's campaign has focused on the Bay region in southwestern Somalia, where communities were already ravaged by droughts and years of conflict, according to the report from the international rights group.

The campaign was first reported by VOA's Somali service in September.

"These are communities which have already been hit by drought, very poor, struggling to survive," said Laetitia Bader, a senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch who interviewed families affected by the campaign, which began in late September 2017.

Bader says in some incidents, al-Shabab militants have taken children directly from school classrooms. In others, the group took local elders hostage and refused to release them until a village agreed to hand over a certain number of kids.

In one incident, al-Shabab fighters beat a teacher after he refused to hand over his students. One teacher said that when he was hit by the militants, students started crying and tried to run out of the classroom but the militants were on hand to punish them. "They caned a 7-year-old boy who tried to escape," the teacher told HRW.

HRW says hundreds of children have been affected. In one village alone, al-Shabab abducted at least 50 boys and girls from two schools near Burhakaba town and took them to Bulo Fulay where the militant group runs schools and a major training facility.

Back in September, Bay region Governor Ali Wardhere Doyow said clans and elders should resist al-Shabab. "Reject, don't let them take away your children. Fight it off," he said. But al-Shabab dominates the Bay region, leaving government officials with little means to stop the conscription.

The campaign has prompted hundreds of children to flee areas controlled by Al-Shabab. "A community's only option to protect their children from recruitment was to send them into government controlled towns, often on their own, just to see if they can get a bit more protection in those towns," Bader says.

This is hardly the first time al-Shabab has been accused of recruiting children. "We have seen in the past very young children sent to the front line, some children as young as 9 years old, very much being used as a cannon fodder ...right at front lines during the fighting in Mogadishu 2010 and 2011 and more recently the large scale offensive in Puntland in 2016," Bader said.

Al-Shabab's longer term plan, Bader says, is to train at least some of them as fighters.

"What appears to be part of this campaign is to get these children to go to al-Shabab-managed, controlled madrassas, to put them through their educational system," she said, adding, "In some cases there is a link children growing in these schools and then being sent to military training. Research also showed children received a mixture of indoctrination and basic military training."

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Palestinian Central Council 'Freezes' Recognition of Israel

Sputnik News

01:19 16.01.2018(updated 03:14 16.01.2018) Get short URL

RAMALLAH (Sputnik) - The Palestinian Central Council (PCC), one of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) governing institutions, has decided not to recognize the state of Israel until it recognizes the Palestinian state, Nabil Shaath, the foreign affairs adviser of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Sputnik.

"The Palestinian Central Council has decided to freeze the recognition of Israel by the [Palestinian] state until [Israel] recognizes Palestine as a state Palestine will freeze the Oslo accords, the provisions of which are not implemented by Israel, including about the coordination in the sphere of security," Shaath said Monday.

The official added that the PLO criticized the decision of US President Donald Trump to relocate the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and considered the US move as unacceptable.

On Sunday, Abbas said at the PCC session that the Israeli policy of construction of settlements at the West Bank had resulted made an end of the 1993 Oslo accords. The agreements provide the founding principles of the self-government arrangements on the Palestinian territories and mark the start of a peace process aimed at fulfilling the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

Mahmoud Abbas also said that Palestine did not recognize the United States as a mediator in the settlement of the conflict with Israel. The move was made against the backdrop of the recent decision of US President Donald Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

Meanwhile, the PCC voted in support of the actions aimed at holding the international conference that would contribute to the creation of the Palestinian state and to the end of the conflict with Israel.

"To work with the Arabic, Islamic, European nations, as well as with Russia and China on holding the international peace conference in order to end the occupation [of Palestinian territories by Israel], to create the independent Palestinian state with the capital in Jerusalem and to solve the problem of refugees," the statement adopted by the PCC on Monday said, as broadcast by the local television.

The statement added that the PCC rejected the decision of Trump and would undermine its implementation.

Palestinians seek diplomatic recognition for their independent state on the territories of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which is partially occupied by Israel, and the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government refuses to recognize Palestine as an independent political and diplomatic entity, and builds settlements on the occupied areas, despite objections from the United Nations.

The PLO, which unites major Palestinian groups apart from the Islamist ones, represents the Palestinians on the global stage and supervises the peace process in talks with Israel.

 Sputnik

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DPRK urges South Korean media to stop "messing up" inter-Korean talks

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 15:06, January 15, 2018

PYONGYANG, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Monday urged some South Korean media to stop "messing up" the on-going inter-Korean talks, as the two sides are holding the second round of talks at the truce village of Panmunjom.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted an official of the Central Committee of the Journalists Union of Korea as saying that the conservative media in South Korea are misleading public opinion to "chill" the atmosphere for improved north-south ties.

The KCNA quoted Kim Cho Guk, department director of the DPRK journalists' union, as saying that southern conservative media have descried the DPRK's proposal to the north-south dialogue as "double-dealing tactics" and have asked Seoul to be vigilant against Pyongyang's attempt to drive a wedge in its ties with Washington.

He also accused these media of calling the DPRK's planned dispatch of cheerleaders and artists to the PyeongChang Winter Olympics as "using the event as promotional ground" to "evade sanctions."

These acts could turn "peace Olympics" into "confrontation Olympics" if these media "get on the nerves of the dialogue partner (DPRK)" and "write brush at will," he warned.

The DPRK and South Korea are holding their second meeting within one week on Monday in Panmunjom, discussing the dispatch of artists to the PyeongChang Winter Olympics to be held next month.

One week ago, the two sides held their first high-level talks in two years, reaching a number of agreements including cooperation in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and taking measures to ease military tension on the Korean Peninsula.

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Lavrov: Russia trying to implement Iran deal

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Moscow, Jan 15, IRNA -- Russia is trying to implement Iran nuclear deal completely, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.

Hotspot of tensions exists and different regions like the Middles East, Africa and Ukraine are still tensioned, Lavrov said in a press conference on Russia's 2017 diplomacy.

'US President Donald Trumps recent claims to sink Iran deal officially known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) brought no stability,' added Lavrov.

US tends to disregard the demands of the international community by imposing its will on other countries, he said.

The approaches adopted by US are mostly suspicious and unfair, Lavarov noted.

Their concerns include issues ranging from developing missile defense system to sanctioning other countries, he said.

He went on to say that Russia together with Iran and Turkey is after paving the way for holding Sochi meeting.

Attempts are underway for fighting terrorism, he said referring to success in solving Syria issues.

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Moscow will not back US attempt to change Iran nuclear deal: Lavrov

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:15AM

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has stressed that Moscow will not back US attempts to change the 2015 nuclear deal struck between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries.

"We will not support what the United States is trying to do, changing the wording of the agreement, incorporating things that will be absolutely unacceptable for Iran," Lavrov said at a news conference in Moscow on Monday.

His remarks come a few days after US President Donald Trump extended sanctions waivers on Iran to give Washington and its European allies a chance to fix the terrible flaws of the nuclear agreement.

"I have outlined two possible paths forward: either fix the deals disastrous flaws, or the United States will withdraw," Trump said last week.

In his remarks, Lavrov emphasized his countrys determination to work to preserve the existing nuclear agreement with Iran.

Russia's top diplomat also warned that the breakdown of the deal could be detrimental to dialogue with North Korea.

"If the deal is put aside and Iran is told, 'you keep up with your obligations or we will impose sanctions again', then you have to put North Korea in its place," Lavrov said.

"They are being promised that sanctions will be lifted if they give up their nuclear program. They will give it up, but no one will lift the sanctions against Pyongyang," he added.

The agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was reached between Iran and six world powers -- the US, the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany -- in July, 2015. The deal puts limitations on parts of Irans peaceful nuclear program in exchange for removing all nuclear-related sanctions.

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IAEA access to military sites not part of JCPOA: Nuclear spokesman

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 02:31AM

The spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) has stressed that his country will never permit the inspection of Iranian military sites.

Behrouz Kamalvandi made the remarks on Sunday, in response to US threats over scraping Iran's nuclear deal or inspection of the sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

"No one in Iran will permit the IAEA access to military sites, such access is not part of the nuclear deal, the additional protocol or its safeguard agreement," Kamalvandi stressed.

The AEOI spokesman went on to note that no nuclear activities are being carried out in his country's military sites, while reiterating Tehran's stance that the countrys defensive capabilities are non-negotiable.

He also noted that Iran is in complete compliance with the IAEA, a fact which has on multiple occasions been confirmed by the agency.

On Friday, US President Donald Trump extended waivers of economic sanctions on Iran for another 120 days but said he was doing so for the last time.

Trump said he wanted Congress to pass a bill requiring timely, sufficient, and immediate inspections at all sites by inspectors of IAEA, and the indefinite extension of limits on Irans uranium enrichment and other nuclear activities.

Following Trump's announcement, Irans Foreign Ministry announced that the country will commit to no obligation beyond those it has already agreed to under the international nuclear deal.

Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council  the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China  plus Germany signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on July 14, 2015 and started implementing it on January 16, 2016.

Under the JCPOA, Iran undertook to put limits on its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of nuclear-related sanctions imposed against Tehran.

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Lavrov: Trump Trying To Undermine Iran Deal

RFE/RL January 15, 2018

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused U.S. President Donald Trump of trying to undermine the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, saying Trumps statements could lead to the cancellation of the deal.

Speaking on January 15 at a news conference to recap Russian diplomatic activity over the past year, Lavrov said Trumps latest statements were "aimed to disrupt the 2015 accord on Irans nuclear program and did not add to optimism and stability.

"We will not support what the United States is trying to do, changing the wording of the agreement, incorporating things that will be absolutely unacceptable for Iran," Lavrov said.

Unfortunately, our American colleagues still want to operate exclusively on the basis of diktat and ultimatums, he said, repeating an accusation Russian officials frequently make.

They do not want to listen to the viewpoints of other centers of world policy and, therefore, they essentially do not want to accept the realities of the forming multipolar world," Lavrov, foreign minister since 2004, said at the annual news conference.

As in the past, he singled out the United States for criticism on several issues and sought to portray Russia as a constructive power that is seeking to strengthen stability and resolve conflicts in the face of what he cast as Western recalcitrance.

The United States and others charge that Russia has damaged regional and global stability with actions including its military interference in Ukraine, its backing for the Syrian government in that country's war, and its alleged meddling in elections in the West.

The nuclear accord  signed by Tehran and the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China -- is aimed at assuring that Iran does not build nuclear weapons.

Under the deal, Tehran has agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions against Iran.

But Trump says the United States will pull out of the deal unless the European signatories fix what he called terrible flaws in the agreement.

Trump on January 12 said he would extend sanctions relief to Iran under the deal, leaving the accord intact for now. But he wants the pact strengthened with a separate agreement within 120 days.

Tehran insists its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes and has rejected the notion of any modification of the 2015 accord.

The other signatories to the pact have urged the United States to continue to adhere to the current agreement.

Lavrov said that if changes are made or an additional agreement imposed, Tehran will not feel obliged to adhere to the deal.

He also said that the deal's collapse would make it more difficult to resolve the confrontation between North Korea and world powers over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons and missile programs.

Among the changes Trump is demanding is that Iran allow more timely inspections of sites requested by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the elimination of so-called sunset clauses, under which some of the restrictions on Irans nuclear program expire over time.

In addition, Trump demanded that the deal should state that Iran's nuclear effort and its missile programs are inseparable.

U.S. and other officials have complained that Iran's ballistic-missile program can easily be converted for nuclear use.

Iranian President Hassan Rohani said on January 14 that Trump and his administration have failed to undermine the nuclear accord, "despite his repeated efforts."

Rohani praised the nuclear accord as "a long-lasting victory for Iran.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Merhat Sharipzhan, Reuters, AP, AFP, TASS, Interfax, and IRNA

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-lavrov-iran- nuclear-deal-trump/28975972.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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Tehran Reiterates 'Access to Military Sites is Not Part of Nuclear Deal'

Sputnik News

14:05 15.01.2018(updated 18:15 15.01.2018) Get short URL

Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, has confirmed Tehran's adherence to the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

"No one in Iran will permit the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] access to military sites, such access is not part of the nuclear deal, the additional protocol or its safeguard agreement," Spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Behrouz Kamalvandi said, adding that Tehran is in complete compliance with the IAEA.

His remarks came a few days after US President Donald Trump warned that Washington will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal unless the EU fails to fix the agreement's "disastrous flaws." He said that both parties in the US Congress must work together to produce a bill demanding "that Iran allow immediate inspections at all sites" requested by IAEA officials.

He said that he would allow for the anti-Iranian sanctions to be suspended for another 120 days while his country negotiates a fix with Europe for the Iran nuclear deal.

On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated Moscow's adherence to the Iran nuclear deal, adding that Moscow will not back the US moves to include terms unacceptable for Tehran into the deal.

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron underscored his country's commitment to the agreement, something that was also supported by top diplomats of Germany, China and Britain as well as EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.

As for the US, Trump said in October that his administration had decided not to certify that Iran was in compliance with the accord, in what was criticized by Tehran. The Trump administration actually remains the only side which is displeased with the Iran nuclear agreement.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, was signed in 2015 by Iran and the 5+1 group, including China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany.

The JCPOA stipulates that Iran will significantly restrict its uranium-enrichment activities in exchange for scrapping nuclear-related sanctions against Tehran.

 Sputnik

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Russia Does Not Support Trump Push to Alter Iran Nuclear Deal

By VOA News January 15, 2018

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that Russia does not support U.S. President Donald Trump's calls to renegotiate the international agreement limiting Iran's nuclear program.

Trump said Friday he was waiving for the last time sanctions the U.S. agreed to lift under the 2015 deal, and that Congress and European partners had 120 days to come up with ways to fix what he called "disastrous flaws" in the agreement.

Lavrov said Monday if Trump does go through with his threat to withdraw from the deal if no changes are made there would be unthinkable consequences with Iran sure to consider itself no longer bound by the agreement's requirements.

The United States, Russia, Britain, China, France and Germany partnered in long, difficult negotiations with Iran in order to make sure the Iranian nuclear program is not being used to develop nuclear weapons. Iran has insisted its nuclear work was solely peaceful, and in exchange for limiting its uranium enrichment, among other concessions, it won relief from economic sanctions that badly hurt its economy.

Lavrov also cautioned against altering the agreement in light of the current international focus on North Korea and its tests of nuclear material and ballistic missiles, questioning what incentive North Korean leaders would have to agree to a similar deal if promised sanctions relief ends up not being reality.

Trump has criticized the Iran deal as giving up too much, while leaving too much of Iran's nuclear program in place. The United States has also said Iran's ballistic missile tests go against the spirit of the agreement.

Under the text of the nuclear deal, ballistic missile tests are not expressly prohibited. But the document was endorsed by the U.N. Security Council in a resolution that further says Iran is "called upon" not to undertake any ballistic missile related activity.

Trump wants a new version of the nuclear deal to cover the ballistic missile tests.

Iran insists it has the right to conduct its missile program and has accused the United States of working to undermine the nuclear deal.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in August the U.S. is not a "good partner."

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Baghdad Suicide Attack Kills 16 or More, Wounds 65  Interior Ministry

Sputnik News

09:11 15.01.2018(updated 10:17 15.01.2018) Get short URL

The death toll of two explosions in the Iraqi capital Baghdad has risen to 26 people, reports Al Arabiya TV. Earlier it was reported that only six had died and that there were more than 20 victims.

"Twenty-six people were killed in the center of Baghdad as a result of a double terrorist attack," the TV channel reported on Twitter, which added that the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber.

The circumstances of the incident are still being investigated.

According to Iraqi interior ministry, the death toll could rise as more bodies were being recovered from the site.

In late November, two suicide bombers launched an attack in a Baghdad district that claimed the lives of 17 people and left 28 wounded.

 Sputnik

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UN condemns twin suicide attacks in Baghdad

15 January 2018  Strongly condemning two terrorist attacks in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has underscored the Organizations support for the country in its fight against terrorism.

In a statement attributable to his spokesperson, Secretary-General Guterres reiterated that the UN will continue to stand by the Government and people of Iraq in their efforts to fight terrorism and rebuild their country.

According to media reports, at least 35 individuals were killed and another 90 injured when suicide bombers detonated two explosives in a busy square in the city during the morning rush hour.

Earlier today, Jan Kubis, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq and the head of the UN Assistance Mission in the country (UNAMI) also denounced the attack and said that despite a defeat on the battlefield, terrorist groups continue to pose a threat, in particular to ordinary citizens.

I urge greater vigilance by the authorities and unity among the Iraqi people to thwart the aims of terrorists like Daesh [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL] who seek to derail the countrys recovery after a long conflict, said Mr. Kubis in a tweet by UNAMI.

Both the Secretary-General and his Special Representative for Iraq expressed their sympathies to the families of the victims and wished those injured a speedy recovery to those injured.

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Rapid Fire Trials Condemn Suspected IS Militants to Hang

By Heather Murdock January 15, 2018

In a small courthouse north of Mosul, Mohammad Dawd, 27, sits on the floor in the hall facing a wall, like other prisoners.

The hands of some of the prisoners are bound, but Dawd's are not. One man prays. Mosul was once the Islamic State militants' most prized stronghold in Iraq, and now more than 4,000 suspects are being tried for terrorism here.

Human rights groups have criticized Iraqi courts for hastily trying masses of detainees under broad laws that often carry the death penalty. But officials here say with thousands of people in custody and limited resources they are doing their best to swiftly punish the guilty and release the innocent.

IS lost nearly all of its self-described "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria, but attacks continue and tens of thousands of suspected militants remain at large in an area that was very recently a war zone, says Chief Judge Ra'ad Hamid Hussein at the court.

"We face too many challenges to name," Hussein says. "Sometimes the suspects even give fake names."

A typical case

Dawd's trial, one of four that day, takes less than 30 minutes and judges say the quick proceedings follow months of investigations. Dawd, like many other prisoners, claims he was tortured during the investigation and forced to confess to crimes he did not commit.

"The investigator threatened to kill me," he tells a panel of three judges in black robes.

Neither Dawd nor his lawyer offers any other defense. He is accused of fighting in Ramadi and Mosul for IS, with a salary equivalent to $225 (266,000 Iraqi dinar) per month. Dawd's head drops to his chest as the judge reads the confession and asks Dawd to respond.

"Why would the investigative judge make up so many details if he didn't know you?" asks Judge Jamal Dawd Sinjari.

The confession is again entered into the record and Dawd's lawyer asks for his client to be released for lack of evidence. The courtroom is cleared.

The sentence

Compared to most of the gaunt-looking prisoners sitting and facing the walls, Dawd appears strong and fit. His sweatshirt bulges out of his dirty yellow prison jumper.

After a 10-minute wait, a guard ushers Dawd, his lawyer and a few spectators back into the room where a judge reads the sentence. "I sentence you to be hanged until you are dead," he says.

If Dawd is shocked or scared, the emotion does not register on his face. He is the second that day to be sentenced to die. The other condemned man also appeared calm on hearing his sentence earlier in the day.

"Many of them have seen a lot of fighting," Judge Sinjari later says. "Their hearts are dead and they know what they are going to hear."

The judge explains that an automatic appeal of Dawd's case will be sent to Baghdad for review by 30 judges and the sentence may be upheld, cancelled, or reduced to 10 or 15 years in prison under Iraqi counterterrorism laws. A guard quickly escorts Dawd out of the courtroom.

Condemned for membership

The United Nations has condemned the application of the death penalty in Iraq in general. Following mass executions of convicted militants this fall it said, "The Iraqi justice system as a whole is too flawed to allow for any executions."

Human Rights Watch says because Iraqi terrorism laws can condemn suspects for IS membership alone, the trials threaten to overly punish non-violent offenders.

At the courthouse, Judge Sinjari defends the law, saying, "Their leader told all members to fight when Iraqi forces closed in on them. So if they had sworn loyalty, they fought."

This distinction is made clearer as more suspects are brought in.Mohammad Hani, 29, a tall and lanky former medical student, is accused of fixing computers for IS militants. He doesn't claim his confession was forced.

"The militants brought their computers to my shop; I fixed three of them," Hani says. "I couldn't say no to them. A month later, I closed the shop. They broke in, took most of the things and blew it up."

At the sentencing, the judge agrees. "Since you had a computer shop before IS, we have no evidence you were a member. It is your right to go free," Judge Sinjari says.

Two days later, another man receives a 15-year prison sentence for being a traffic cop under IS. Because the man was not in that job beforehand, judges say his new position and his confession show he was an IS member.

"You can appeal the case in 30 days," adds Sinjari, as the defendant, appearing stunned, tries to interrupt with protests.A guard steps in and quietly escorts him out of the room.

"Most sworn IS members fought with IS, even if that wasn't their man job," Sinjari says.

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Kazakh President To Meet Trump, Discuss Afghanistan, Russia

RFE/RL January 15, 2018

WASHINGTON -- U.S. President Donald Trump will meet with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev on January 16 to discuss regional security, economic issues, and bilateral relations, the White House says.

The White House said the two leaders will discuss "several international challenges," including Afghanistan, that are expected to affect Kazakhstan's term as president of the United Nations Security Council.

Kazakh state news agency Kazinform said Trump and Nazarbaev will also discuss relations with Russia and the war in Syria, along with trade issues, during their talks.

The U.S. is a major trade and investment partner of Kazakhstan, said Sanat Kushkumbaev, the deputy director of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, which advises the Kazakh president.

From a political perspective, we cooperate on solutions and promotion of regional and global security. The meeting will focus on the situation in Afghanistan, the Syrian conflict, and relations with Russia, Kazinform quoted Kushkumbaev as saying.

Afghanistan is likely to be high on the agenda during Kazakhstans Security Council presidency.

Kazakh Ambassador Kairat Umarov, who took over the rotating one-month presidency of the council on New Years Day, said on January 11 that council members are considering a visit to Afghanistan to get a better understanding of the war-torn country's prospects and needs.

"We think it's important for Security Council members to get the update of the situation from the ground," Umarov said.

He did not give any date for the visit, which he said would be the first to Afghanistan by the full council in seven years.

After a January 9 meeting with U.S. Ambassador George Krol in Astana, the Kazakh president said he was seeking to build on the "amicable relationship" the two countries have established in the past 26 years.

He said he hoped to further cooperate with Washington in the fight against terrorism and in strengthening nuclear nonproliferation and expanding trade and investment, news agencies reported.

"About 500 companies with U.S. participation are working in Kazakhstan, and more than 140 of them are joint ventures. They are manufacturing goods and exporting their products to other countries," he said ahead of his three-day trip to the United States.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and Interfax

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/kazakhstan-nazarbaev -trump-united-nations-afghanistan -russia-/28975679.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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Clashes close Libyan capital's main intl. airport , kill 10

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 02:00PM

Fierce clashes in the Libyan capital Tripoli have forced the closure of the citys only functioning international airport as reports suggest at least 10 have been killed in the armed confrontation between rival militant groups.

Authorities suspended all flights at Mitiga airport until further notice on Monday as heavy gunfire and artillery could be heard from Tripolis central neighborhoods.

A Health Ministry official said a nearby hospital had received the bodies of at least nine militants. There were also reports in local media about injuries among 28 others.

The clashes reportedly came after a militant group based in Tripolis Tajoura neighborhood launched attacks on rival Special Deterrence Force (Rada), a powerful outfit which controls the airport and has kept militants from Tajoura in a prison next to Mitiga.

Mitiga is a military air base that has been Tripolis main airport since the citys international airport became out of service due to destruction it suffered in fighting over the past years.

Sources close to Rada released images from streets surrounding the airport showing pick-up trucks mounted with guns and a tank.

Rada was among the militia groups that decided recently to align with Libyas internationally-recognized government in a bid to consolidate its control over areas in Tripoli. However, the capital city remains largely divided between rival militants seven years after the fall and death of strongman Muammar Gaddafi.

The United Nations-backed government of Libya has yet to exert its control over much of the oil-rich North African country as a rival administration in the east and its powerful army continue to challenge Tripolis rule as they rely on support from some of Libyas neighbors and certain rich Arab states.

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Libyan GNA Declares State of Emergency in Tripoli Over Clashes Near Airport

Sputnik News

22:13 15.01.2018Get short URL

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The Presidential Council of the Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) declared a state of emergency in the country's capital of Tripoli on Monday over the deadly clashes at the Mitiga International Airport, according to the GNA's statement.

Earlier in the day, the clashes between the Special Deterrence Force and a militant group based in Tajoura neighborhood erupted near the Mitiga airport in Tripoli, claiming the lives of at least 11 people and injuring over 20, according to media reports.

"We announce the state of emergency in Tripoli until the security personnel manage to end the clashes that are terrifying the residents around the Mitiga airport, " the statement read, as quoted by the Libyan Express media outlet.

Following the incident, the flights to and from Tripoli were halted and redirected to the International Misurata airport in the city of Misrata, according to the media outlet.

Libya has been in turmoil since the 2011 civil war that resulted in the overturn of countrys longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi. The eastern part of the crisis-torn state is governed by its parliament, with headquarters in the city of Tobruk. The parliament is backed by the Libyan National Army headed by Gen. Khalifa Haftar, which is engaged in struggle against militants. At the same time, the UN-backed GNA, headed by Fayez Sarraj, operates in the country's west and is headquartered in Tripoli.

 Sputnik

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Myanmar, Bangladesh hold talks on Rohingya repatriation

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:58AM

Officials from Myanmar and Bangladesh have met to settle issues over the repatriation of Rohingya Muslim refugees, who have fled a state-sponsored crackdown campaign in Rakhine State.

Officials from the two countries met in Naypyidaw on Monday over the repatriation deal that was signed last November, Bangladeshi officials familiar with the talks told AFP.

Under the deal, Myanmar vowed to repatriate the Muslim refugees, who have taken refuge in Bangladesh since the military launched a crackdown against the Muslim community in October 2016.

It does not cover an estimated 200,000 Rohingya refugees, who were living in Bangladesh prior to October 2016.

According to the repatriation deal, Myanmar would restore normalcy in Northern Rakhine (State) and to encourage those who had left Myanmar to return voluntarily and safely to their own households or to a safe and secure place nearest to it of their choice.

Most Rohingya refugees, however, say they will not return to Myanmar, where their villages in the State of Rakhine have been torched, according to AFP.

Myanmar government troops have been committing killings, making arbitrary arrests, and carrying out arson attacks in Muslim villages in Rakhine.

The UN says nearly 655,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled the western state to Bangladesh since the bloody violence erupted last August.

The Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for generations but are denied citizenship, and branded illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

The UN has described a 1.1 million-strong Muslim community as the most persecuted minority in the world.

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At Least 5 Dead After Paramilitary Convoy Ambushed in Pakistan

By Ayaz Gul January 15, 2018

A paramilitary convoy has come under a rocket attack in Pakistans southwestern Baluchistan province, leaving at least five people dead and six others wounded, according to local officials and hospital sources.

The ambush occurred Monday in Turbat, a remote volatile district in Baluchistan.

The insurgent Baloch Liberation Front (BLF), which is fighting for an independent Baluchistan, claimed it was behind the attack on the convoy.

The newly-elected provincial chief minister, Abdul Qudus Bizenjo, condemned the violence, saying terrorists are conducting such activities to undermine development in his improvised province.

Baluchistan is at the center of billions of dollars in investment that China is undertaking in Pakistan to build rail, road and communication networks and power plants.

An estimated $62 billion investment under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC, will link the two countries through a new trade route.

The corridor will give Chinas landlocked western regions access to international markets through Pakistans Arabian Sea port of Gwadar, which is located in Baluchistan. However, militant attacks in the province pose security challenges to CPEC.

Pakistani authorities have trained and deployed thousands of troops along the CPEC route to ensure protection of the massive project and Chinese nationals working on them.

Pakistan alleges rival India is supporting and funding the militants to try to subvert the Chinese investment.

New Delhi denies the charges, although it openly opposes CPEC, saying it passes through the disputed Kashmir territory, which both India and Pakistan claim in its entirely.

Islamabad dismisses Indias objections over CPEC.

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Anti-US Cleric Released on Bail in Pakistan

By Shahnaz Nafees January 15, 2018

Pakistani authorities on Monday released anti-U.S. and pro-Taliban cleric Maulana Sufi Muhammad after eight years in prison. He was facing sedition charges and was allegedly involved in attacks on police stations.

While some in the country do not view Muhammad's release as a good sign, others support the move.

"He is a 93-year-old person. He is seriously sick, almost paralyzed and could not be treated inside the jail," Latif Afridi, a lawyer and an expert of legal affairs, told VOA. "The Pakistani courts have the power to release the sick and people who are so old on bail."

Muhammad is considered one of the many controversial clerics in Pakistan. He gathered around 10,000 armed militants in 2001 in Pakistan's tribal regions to fight against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan. He also led the pro-Sharia movement in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in the early 1990s and again in the 2000s, which ended with violence and a crackdown on his supporters in different parts of the province.

Afridi argued that while Muhammad has been in prison for a long time, no case could be proven against him in court and, therefore, he was fairly released.

But Peshawar-based human rights activist Mehsood Alam, in an interview with VOA, criticized the decision.

"The release of Sufi Muhammad by Peshawar High Court was a newsworthy development, but in a country where the chief of Jamaat ud Dawa [JUD] could be released and mainstreamed, why Sufi Muhammad could not be released," Alam said.

JUD is a U.N. and U.S.-designated terror group. Its chief, Hafiz Saeed, the alleged mastermind of 2008 Mumbai attacks, was released by Pakistani authorities on court orders last year.

Maulana Sufi Muhammad is the father-in-law of Pakistan's most wanted Taliban leader Mullah Fazlullah. Pakistan accuses Mullah Fazlullah of masterminding terrorist activities inside Pakistan from across the border in Afghanistan. Mullah Fazlullah's group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has accepted responsibility for scores of terrorist attacks in Pakistan, including the killing of Pakistani major general Sanaullah Niazi.

It is not yet known whether the aged cleric has influence on his militant son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah.

Pakistani media reports say that Maulana Sufi Muhammad has been moved to an unknown location after his release.

Rising tensions

The development comes amid rising U.S.-Pakistani tensions following President Donald Trump's accusations that Pakistan was harboring militants and is withholding American aid to Islamabad.

Washington accuses Pakistan of turning a blind eye to militants. Pakistan denies the charge. In his first tweet of 2018, Trump said that the United States had "foolishly" given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid in the last 15 years and had gotten nothing in return but "lies & deceit."

Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, accused the Trump administration of ignoring the sacrifices made by Pakistan in the war on terror.

The claim is unfair, Chaudhry told The Associated Press.

"We have been the victim of terrorist attacks and how can we tolerate the presence of militants on our soil," he said.

Ties between Islamabad and Washington could be further strained by the release of Muhammad, who in 2001 issued an edict, or fatwa, for holy war against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press.

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Turkish army to nip US-backed 'terror army' in northern Syria: Erdogan

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 01:43PM

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned the United States over its support for the creation of a 30,000-strong terror army on the countrys southern borders with Syria, vowing to crush the force before it was even set up.

America has acknowledged it is in the process of forming a terror army on our border. It is our duty to nip this terror army in the bud, Erdogan said on Monday.

He added, Trust in Turkey if we are your strategic allies. If soldiers are needed in Raqqah or Manbij, we can send one or two brigades. Act with Turkey. What you are doing is wrong; you'll disgrace yourselves in front of your strategic partner.

The Turkish president also warned US officials that the new force, which would be comprised of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militants, would eventually betray them.

These 30,000 terrorists will be the first to point their weapons at American soldiers, when they run into trouble. It's up to the US to decide if it wants a future with these murderers. Nevertheless, we won't allow anything to put our national security at risk, Erdogan pointed out.

He stressed that the Turkish army is ready at any moment to launch an operation against the YPG in Syria.

The Turkish Armed Forces will take care of issues in Afrin and Manbij. The preparations are complete. The operation could start any moment, Erdogan warned, adding that the military operation will continue until not a single terrorist is left at Turkish borders.

Turkeys opposition warns against Afrin offensive

Meanwhile, Turkeys main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), has called on the government to make its decisions discreetly ahead of a possible operation in the northwestern Syrian town of Afrin.

We should see it carefully, and then take a discreet decision. We should make a distinction between the incidents over there [in Afrin] and the domestic issues. This is a sensitive matter for the nation, CHP Deputy Chairman Ozturk Yilmaz stated.

Yilmaz also slammed US plans to form a Kurdish-led border force.

The US role in the region is not constructive, but destructive, he said.

Turkey, Russia, Syria blast new US-backed Syria force

Moreover, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag stated on Monday that the United States is building a terrorist army under the guise of the Syrian Border Security force.

Bozdag also tweeted that Washington is playing with fire.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also said the new force is a sign Washington doesn't want to preserve the territorial integrity of Syria.

Lavrov said the nascent border force is not helping calm the situation and suggested it would only increase tensions.

Additionally, the Syrian government censured the US-backed Kurdish border security force, calling it a blatant encroachment upon the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Syria and a violation of international law.

Ankara views the YPG as the Syrian branch of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has been fighting for an autonomous region inside Turkey since 1984.

Erdogan has repeatedly said that Afrin should be cleared of terrorists, and demanded the deployment of Turkish troops there during a speech back in November 2016.

This is while US officials consider the YPG as the most effective fighting force against Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in northern Syria, and have substantially increased their weaponry and technology support to the militant group.

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Syria vows to end US presence; Russia, Turkey warn over 'border force' plan

Iran Press TV

Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:34AM

Damascus says it is determined to end US military presence after Washington declared plans to build a 30,000-member "border force" in the Arab country that Russia says could lead to Syrias partition.

Syrias Foreign Ministry on Monday slammed the plan as a "blatant assault" on its sovereignty.

State television cited an official source in the ministry as saying that the Syrian army is resolved to end any form of US presence in the country.

The US, purportedly fighting the Daesh terrorist group, is planning to build the so-called "Border Security Force" on the Syrian territory held by the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which is dominated by Kurdish militants.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Washingtons decision to form a zone held by US-backed militants could lead to the division of the Arab country.

"The announcement that this zone will be controlled by the US-backed groups - by the force up to 30,000 people - this is a very serious issue, which causes concerns that a course was set for the partition of Syria," Lavrov said at an annual news conference.

The US, he said, is helping those who are seeking to topple the government of Syria rather than trying to resolve the Syrian crisis.

"We don't see the efforts to help resolve the conflict as soon as possible, but rather to help those who would like to make practical steps to change the government in Syrian Arab Republic," Lavrov added.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri terrorist groups that are wreaking havoc in the country.

Moscow vows to react to US border force

Lavrov's remarks came a day after Chairman of the Defense Committee of Russias State Duma Vladimir Shamanov vowed to take measures in reaction to Washingtons decision to deploy the so-called "Border Security Force".

Shamanov said the US plan "stands in direct confrontation" with Russia's interests. "We and our colleagues will certainly undertake certain measures on stabilization of the situation in Syria," he said.

Turkey says US 'playing with fire'

The US move has also angered Ankara with Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag saying on Monday that Washington is "playing with fire".

Turkey is already angry over strong US support for Kurdish forces in Syria. Ankara views SDF and its affiliates as the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been fighting Turkey since 1984.

The US launched its military campaign in Syria in 2014 under the pretext of fighting Daesh terrorists. Syria and Russia as well as other regional countries have cast doubt on the United States' true intentions, saying American troops have mostly tried to hamper government operations against Takfiri terrorists and harmed the country's infrastructure.

Syria calls the "coalition" led by the US an illegal occupation force which has entered the country without its permission or a UN mandate. It also views Washington's SDF allies as traitors.

Foreign Minister Lavrov last month said the presence of American troops in Syria was unlawful, urging them to completely leave the Syrian soil.

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Russia, Turkey Slam Plan For Kurdish-Led 'Terror Army' On Syrian Border

RFE/RL January 15, 2018

Russia and Turkey have criticized the United States for helping an allied Kurdish-led militia set up a 30,000-strong border security force in Syria.

"The United States has now acknowledged that it is setting up a terror army along our country's borders," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on January 15.

"What falls on us is to strangle this terror army before it is ever born," he added.

Syria's government called the creation of the border force "a blatant attack on the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and unity of Syria, and a flagrant violation of international law."

Russia, which has given President Bashar al-Assad's government crucial support throughout Syria's civil war, warned it could lead to the "break-up of a large territory along the border with Turkey and Iraq."

"This is a very serious issue that raises concerns that a path toward the partition of Syria has been taken," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

The U.S.-led coalition fighting the extremist group Islamic State (IS) said that its goal was to create a border security force with about 30,000 personnel "over the next several years."

The force is to be deployed at the borders of the area controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) -- an alliance of Arab and Kurdish militias dominated by the Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara considers to be a terrorist group.

The coalition said that about 230 individuals were currently undergoing training in the force's inaugural class.

About half of the force will be SDF veterans, it said.

Backed by the U.S.-led coalition's air strikes, advisers, and weapons, the SDF has ousted IS militants from swaths of northern and eastern Syria.

Its members now control territory bordering Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, and Syrian government forces to the west.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, dpa, and the BBC

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-turkey-slam-kurdish- border-force-syria/28976762.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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Erdogan Vows to 'Strangle' Syrian Border Force Formed by US

Sputnik News

14:30 15.01.2018(updated 15:07 15.01.2018) Get short URL

ANKARA (Sputnik) - Since the US confirmed training new force in northern Syria, tensions with Turkey have been running high, with Ankara accusing Washington of building a "terrorist army."

"The United States is now creating a terrorist army near our borders that threatens the security of Turkey. Our task is to strangle this army until it is born. If the United States wants to establish cooperation with these savage creatures, it is their business. But we will not allow this," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

The president noted that the Turkish army would continue shelling the SDF positions in Syria's northern Afrin district.

"Our Armed Forces will hopefully solve the problem in Afrin in the near future, the operation may begin there at any moment," Erdogan added.

Erdogan's latest statement comes after earlier on Monday he said that the United States were forming a "terrorist army" under the disguise of so-called Border Security Force (BSF) on the Syrian territory controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia, and threatened to eliminate these troops.

Ankara's anger was provoked by the article published in the Defense Post on Saturday, in which the spokesman of the US-led coalition fighting against Daesh said that the coalition was engaged in a training of a 30,000-strong force on the territory within Syria currently controlled by the SDF to maintain security in controlled area along the Syrian border.

The coalition's representative clarified that a half of the planned force will consist of retrained SDF fighters, an alliance of militias in Syria dominated by the Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Units), which Ankara regards as a terrorist group associated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), banned in the country. Turkey has repeatedly accused Washington of arming Syrian Kurdish groups, which listed as terrorist organizations by Ankara.

 Sputnik

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US 'Playing With Fire' by Building 'Terrorist Army' in Syria - Turkish Deputy PM

Sputnik News

11:56 15.01.2018(updated 12:48 15.01.2018) Get short URL

The plans of the US-led coalition to form new "Border Defense Force" have sparked angry reaction from Turkey as Ankara has repeatedly accused the US of arming some of Syrian Kurds, which the Turkish side regards as terrorist groups.

The US is creating a "terrorist army" under the guise of border security forces in northern Syria, Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Monday.

"This is not the fight against Daesh and terrorism, but their support," Bozdag wrote on his Twitter page.

Ankara's resentment was prompted by the article published on the Defense Post news website on Saturday, in which the spokesman of the US-led coalition fighting against Daesh said that the coalition was engaged in training of a 30,000-strong force on the Syrian territory currently controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to maintain security in controlled area along the Syrian border.

According to the coalition, the half of the planned force will be retrained SDF fighters, an alliance of militias in Syria dominated by the Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Units), which Ankara regards as a terrorist group associated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), banned in the country.

On Sunday, a Turkish senior official told Reuters that it was reason why the US charge d'affaires was summoned in Ankara on Wednesday, as relations between Washington and Ankara remain strained due to US military support for the Kurdish YPG units.

 Sputnik

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Syria Considers US Plan on Creating Border Security Force 'Blatant Aggression'

Sputnik News

11:53 15.01.2018(updated 12:39 15.01.2018) Get short URL

The Syrian Foreign Ministry has slammed Washington's intention to form a 30,000-strong force inside the country with the proclaimed goal of maintaining security along its borders. The Syrian Army is poised to put an end to any form of US presence in the country, a Syrian foreign ministry source said, according to state TV.

Syria has condemned Washington's announcement of the formation of an armed militia in the northeast of the country, and regards this move a blatant aggression on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria and a flagrant violation of international law, the foreign ministry said, as quoted by SANA.

Col. Thomas Veale, public affairs officer of the US-led coalition fighting against Daesh, said in an interview with The Defense Post news outlet that the coalition, supported by the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Force (SDF), was working to establish a 30,000-strong force to maintain security along Syria's borders. The statement prompted Ankara's threats to launch an offensive in Kurdish-controlled Afrin in the country's north to purge terror from Turkey's southern borders.

The United States-led international coalition has been operating in Syria since 2014, conducting airstrikes and establishing military bases without either UN endorsement or with Damascus' agreement. Syria has repeatedly spoken against the coalition's unauthorized presence as aggression against its integrity and statehood. The coalition's actions have led to civilian casualties.

 Sputnik

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Ankara Retaliates With Artillery Fire at Afrin After Kurdish YPG Missile Attacks

Sputnik News

14:16 15.01.2018Get short URL

Turkey's President Erdogan vowed Sunday to "purge terrorism" from the country's southern borders, adding that he plans to launch an assault against Peoples' Protection Units (YPG) in Syria's Kurdish Afrin enclave "in the coming days."

Turkish armed forces have shelled YPG units' strongholds in the city of Afrin in response to rocket fire from northern Syria, Turkeys state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Monday.

According to the media, on Sunday night, YPG militias fired a large number of missiles targeting settlements in the bordering to Turkey Syrian region of Azaz controlled by the opposition Free Syrian Army. The assaults caused material damage, but there were no reports of casualties. Ankara's forces, which were deployed in northern Syria after the completion of its anti-terrorist Operation Euphrates Shield, conducted punitive strikes at YPG targets in Afrin.

Turkey has been shelling the Afrin district of Aleppo targeting the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) for three days in a row, with the Turkish army sending military equipment to the country's border with Syria under strict security measures. The latest attack comes amid Ankara's statement that it plans to carry out a military operation in the northwestern Syrian regions of Manbij and Afrin controlled by Kurdish militia forces.

Ankara considers the YPG militia to be a terrorist organization since it is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), banned in the country. Previously, Ankara had repeatedly condemned Washington for military support of supporting and supplying arms to Syrian Kurds, however, Erdogan expressed hope that the US would not "take sides with" the YPG militias during the upcoming operation in Afrin.

 Sputnik

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Total of 24 Armored Vehicles Reportedly Deployed by Turkey Along Syrian Border

Sputnik News

21:33 15.01.2018Get short URL

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Turkish armed forces have deployed over 20 armored vehicles along the Syrian border on Monday afternoon, local media reported.

The Anadolu Agency reported, citing an unnamed military source, that 24 armored vehicles, with military jammers "for reinforcement reasons," had entered Southern Turkeys Hatay province.

On Saturday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey might launch an operation in Syrias Afrin and Manbij, controlled by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which is considered by Ankara a terrorist organization associated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), banned in the country. Within recent weeks Turkey has repeatedly shelled the areas and even sent military equipment including tanks to the border with Syria.

The media outlet also linked the move to Erdogans pledge to continue "purging terrorism from our southern borders" in an operation in Afrin, which is supposed to follow the countrys seven-month Euphrates Shield operation.

According to the agencys correspondent on the ground, "intense smoke" was coming from Nesreyieh region in Afrin.

On Saturday, in the Defense Posts article, the spokesman of the US-led coalition fighting against the Islamic State terrorist group (outlawed in Russia and the United States) said that the coalition was engaged in training a 30,000-strong border security force on the Syrian territory controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia.

Earlier on Monday, Erdogan strongly criticized the US plans, threatening to eliminate these troops and begin the operation in Afrin "at any moment."

 Sputnik

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Turkey Threatens Military Action Against Syrian Kurds Allied With US

By Dorian Jones January 15, 2018

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is warning of an imminent attack on a U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia.

"We have finished our preparations. The operation can start any time," Erdogan declared to supporters at a rally Monday.

Turkish forces are massed along the border with Syria's Idlib enclave, which is controlled by the YPG, a Kurdish militia Ankara accuses of being linked to an insurgency in Turkey.

Erdogan has repeatedly warned the YPG presence in Idlib would be ended. As the Turkish military continues to build up its forces in the region, its artillery bombarded the enclave during the weekend. There also reports reports of special forces carrying out cross-border operations against YPG targets.

The latest escalation in tensions was triggered by Washington's announcement it is working with the YPG to create a border force.

"America has acknowledged it is in the process of creating a terror army on our border," Erdogan said Monday, "What we have to do is nip this terror army in the bud."

Washington views the YPG as a key ally in Syria in the war against the Islamic State and has armed the group despite Ankara's objections. The dispute has severely strained relations between the NATO allies.

Turkey at odds with Russia

But the YPG is also supported by Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov issued a carefully-worded warning to Ankara over its latest threats.

"As for the situation in Afrin [enclave] and Syria overall ... We are seeking full compliance with the cease-fire agreements," he said during news conference Monday.

Russia and Turkey, along with Iran, have been working together in Syria in what has been dubbed the "Astana process."

Lavrov reserved his strongest criticism for Washington, attacking its decision to create a border force with the YPG.

"The U.S. unilateral, ultimatum-like project, aimed at establishing an army in Syria, may create problems in relations between Turkey and [the] Kurds," the minister said.

Moscow has been seeking to exploit Ankara's growing dispute with Washington as Turkey deepens its ties with Russia. But the balancing act could face its greatest test over Ankara's threat to attack Afrin with Russian military units in the enclave. The units were deployed last year to de-escalate tensions between the militia and Turkish forces.

Military limits

Meanwhile, analysts warn the Turkish army could be overstretched. "The Turkish army is in Iraq. in Syria it is in two different places, said Haldun Solmazturk, a former brigadier and veteran of cross-border operations who now heads the Ankara based 21st century Turkey Institute.

"It is like a bomb," he added. "The Turkish army is sitting on a bomb."

Any operation in Idlib could be further complicated. The Turkish air force would need Moscow's permission to enter Syrian airspace due to the presence of Russian anti-aircraft missiles.

Moscow allowed Ankara to carry out limited airstrikes last year when its forces entered Syria to remove IS militants on its border. But doubt remains whether Russia would be accommodating again.

"Americans will never abandon Syrian Kurds, nor will Russia, which is supportive of the Syrian Kurds within a certain status, no doubt," claimed analyst Solmazturk. "They are simply too important in the region to both sides. The YPG control around one-fifth of Syrian territory."

Moscow, much to Ankara's discomfort, has been pushing for the presence of the militia or its political wing, the YPD, in an ongoing peace process to resolve the Syrian civil war.

"When we see Syria we notice that there are differences of opinion, which carry the seeds of problems," said political columnist Semih Idiz of Al Monitor website. "Turkey is not all that easy [about] the way Russia is trying steer the Syrian situation."

Ankara fears marginalization

Last week, Ankara summoned the Russian ambassador to protest Moscow's failure to reign in Damascus' ongoing military operation against rebels forces in Idlib. Analysts warn there is a growing concern in Ankara it could be marginalized by Washington and Moscow.

"Ankara seems to have no role anymore in the remaining episodes in this drama of Syria, so squeezed out is the right way to put it," claimed former Senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen who served widely in region.

Analysts suggest Ankara's latest threat against the Syrian Kurdish militia in Afrin could be a move to remind the United States and Russia it remains a powerful player, given its large army and long border with Syria.

Such a robust stance also plays well domestically. Columnist Idiz said Erdogan has a receptive audience at home, but his stance "may backfire because Turkey, more or less, has angered [the United States] on a whole number of levels."

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ZTE Axon M launches in China this Saturday, Europe by the end of the quarter

The foldable ZTE Axon M launched on AT&T first, that was in November. Today, ZTE held a ceremony at the 258m tall Olympic Tower in Beijing to announce that the M will be available in China very soon  January 20.

Locals will be able to snag a unit online from MyZTE.com and JD.com. Offline, China Telecom stores will be carrying the dual-screened device.

Later this quarter (January-March), the ZTE Axon M will come to Europe as well. It will be available on Vodafone, TIM and other leading carriers. More names should be named (prices too) as we get closer to the launch.

This phone earned ZTE a CES 2018 Innovation Award and the company wants to build more foldable phones.




Haiti - Security : Start of operations of the new Border Police





The 118 agents of the first Promotion of the Border Police "PoliFront" a new Specialized Unit of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23106-haiti-security-graduation-of-the-1st-promotion-of-the-border-police.html have joined their Headquarter in the department of North-East at Morne Casse (Commune of Fort-Liberte) where they will share with the Departmental Unit of Maintenance of Order (UDMO), the former military base of the blue helmets of the Minustah. This new unit will be deployed at the official border crossing points and will intervene in the border communes of Ouanaminthe, Capotille, Ferrier and Mont-Organized.



At the ceremony marking the beginning of operations of the PoliFront, Divisional Commissioner Marc Justin, Director of this new police unit is convinced that his unit will put an end to human trafficking, drugs, weapons and smuggling of any kind and declared "Vakans la sou fwontye a fini ! [...] It is time for the order to reign [...] It is time for each country to take its responsibilities," deploring the complicity between the Dominican and Haitian criminals, he urged the agents of the PoliFront not to let corrupt by those they will fight.



Recall that the objectives of the PoliFront are: to monitor and secure the border - prevent and respond to transnational crime - collaborate with customs and immigration - support government agencies - Support the administrative police and cooperate with the Dominican police if necessary.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23116-haiti-security-the-united-states-supports-the-new-border-police.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23106-haiti-security-graduation-of-the-1st-promotion-of-the-border-police.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23026-haiti-news-zapping.html



TB/ HaitiLibre


















By Lily Lee | Published on 2018/01/15 | Source

A member of the popular boy group "Shinhwa" and an actor Kim Dong-wan released his plead to the persistent fans who've been visiting his home and waiting for his attention right outside of his private property.

Advertisement

These fans are called 'Sasaeng fans'. These so-called fans are famous for their obsessive love towards their favorite star to the point of dangerous methods. Sasaeng fans will not respect the star's privacy and invade their personal life. Stalking is a serious crime, but these fans will not stop at any cost.

"Shinhwa" is one of the legendary 1st generation boy groups in the K-pop world because of their popularity and because they are the longest lasting group with their 20 years of history without any changes in their members. Debuted in 1998, Kim Dong-wan's been loved as the member of "Shinhwa" as well as an actor. He has gotten used to the sasaeng fans in his career but lately, his sasaeng fans have been causing a lot of trouble for his neighbors and himself. To stop such damage, Kim Dong-wan pleaded the fans to stop their visits to his home through his agency, CI ENT. Below is the statement released:

"Greetings from CI ENT.

Recently, there's been a lot of both native and foreign fans visiting the home of our agency's artist, Kim Dong-wan.

Such action led from the love and care of the fans for the artist and we were understanding at first. However, there's been many complaints from the neighbors with the noise level and such.

Since the area is not a city, but a country side, it is dangerous for you to leave the food related trash on the street. Such action lead to attracting the wild boars to the town and it will be highly dangerous for the neighborhood as well.

We are more than grateful for your constant love and care you have for our artist. However, as stated above, there are concerns regarding safety issues and Kim Dong-wan is receiving the complaints first-hand from it. As the situations gets worsen, we are pleading for you to stop visiting Kim Dong-wan's home.

If we receive such complaints again, we will have to confirm the fans who continue to visit his home and ban those fans from attending the future events such as the fan meetings and open broadcasts of the artist.

We hope you continue to love Kim Dong-wan in his various activities this year.

Thank you".

By: Lily Lee
Published on 2018/01/16 | Source

Added episodes 7 and 8 captures for the Korean drama "Bad Guys : Vile City" (2017)

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Directed by Han Dong-hwa

Written by Han Jeong-hoon

Network : OCN

With Park Joong-hoon, Joo Jin-mo, Yang Ik-june, Kim Mu-yeol, Ji Soo, Song Young-chang,...

16 episodes - Sat, Sun 22:20

Also known as "Bad Guys: City of Evil"

Synopsis

A drama about a team of detectives who round up a team of bad guys to catch even worse ones.

Broadcast starting date in Korea : 2017/12/16

More
ormer manager of the Oliver Brown chocolate cafe outlet on the Gold Coast has been penalised $27,200 for exploiting overseas workers and seeing what he could get away with.The Fair Work Ombudsman brought the case against Steven Chung before the Federal Circuit Court for underpaying 12 employees between January and September 2015.Seven of the employees were overseas workers, including five Koreans. Four were on 417 working holiday visas and others were on a 457 skilled worker visa, 444 special category visa and a partner visa.Among the 12 were four juniors: two 18-year-olds, one aged 19 and one aged 20.The workers performed tasks such as washing dishes, taking orders and making drinks and desserts.They were underpaid by a total of $24,575. Chung was involved in underpayments from 11 July, when he assumed the manager role.He discriminated against a number of the employees, on, it would seem, the basis either of coming from a non-English speaking background, having a visa or their youth, said Judge Salvatore Vasta.There doesnt appear to be any other explanation as to why there were some rates given to some people and other rates to others, except when one looks at the personal and cultural background of the workers.Vasta observed that a worker on a visa who came from a non-English speaking background was underpaid more than a person who is a permanent resident of this country from an English-speaking background.Chung used different low flat rates that resulted in workers variously being underpaid the minimum rates for ordinary hours, casual loadings, and penalty rates for weekend, public holiday, late night and early morning work they were entitled to under the Restaurant Industry Award 2010.The rate of underpayment, extrapolated over the course of a year, would have resulted in underpayments in the order of $80,000, the judge said.The workers were back-paid in full late last year.Chung also did not provide pay slips to the workers, an extremely serious breach of an employers obligations. It also showed a level of discrimination by Mr Chung as to whom he gave pay slips and to whom he did not, said the judge.Fair Work Ombudsman inspectors discovered the underpayments when they conducted an audit after a worker made underpayment allegations.Fair Work Ombudsman Natalie James said the targeting of vulnerable workers with low discount flat rates was a particularly concerning feature of the case.James said that while migrant workers made up 6 per cent of the workforce, they were involved in 18 per cent of the workplace disputes that the Fair Work Ombudsman assisted with in the last financial year.James added that employers should be aware that the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Vulnerable Workers) Act 2017 has now come into effect, increasing maximum penalties for conduct including deliberate exploitation of workers.The new law means there will be a higher scale of penalties (up to 10 times the current amount) for a new category of serious contraventions of prescribed workplace laws.These changes have been introduced to address exploitation of vulnerable workers - as illustrated in the 7-Eleven wage scandal - by also holding those higher up the supply chain responsible, according to Rigby Cooke Lawyers partner and workplace relations specialist Simone Caylock.From 27 October 2017, the law placed a new onus on franchisors and parent companies to demonstrate they have taken reasonable steps to prevent a franchisee or subsidiary from contravening the FWA, said Caylock.Failure to prove so could potentially lead to a civil proceeding and those fines of up to $630,000 per breach.
ney train employees will go on strike for 24 hours from midnight Monday January 29.



The Rail, Tram and Bus Union announced the strike this afternoon after negotiations with rail management fell through.



Rail workers are not happy about the current enterprise agreement and have voted to take industrial action as they continue to fight for a 6% pay rise over four years and improved working conditions.



However, the government has a public sector wage cap of 2.5% and has not been open to change.

NSW union secretary Alex Claassens said theyre disappointed its had to come to this, but management and the NSW government havent left us with any other options.



The terrible way management and the NSW government are willing to treat its hard-working employees has been laid bare for everyone to see lately, said Claassens.



All workers are asking for are fair working conditions and wages in return for the work they do.



The NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance said they will agree to a pay rise for train drivers in accordance with the wages policy that applies to teachers, nurses, police, bus drivers and other public sector workers.


Progressive Women celebrate year of activism

Progressive Women of Henderson County gather at Sanctuary Brewing Co.

About 50 people celebrated a year of progressive activism in Henderson County on Monday night at Sanctuary Brewing Co.

The Progressive Women of Hendersonville started after Abby Robertson organized transportation for five busloads of women in Western North Carolina to travel to Washington for the Womens March, the largest protest in U. S. history.

Members celebrated achievements of the past year and plans for the upcoming year. In the past year the group has hosted a weekly postcard event at Sanctuary Brewing, where progressives can meet and write state, local and federal officials and candidates about issues that concern them. Lisa McDonald, co-owner of Sanctuary, was one of the founding members of PWH.

Organizers Katt Nevel (left) and Abby Robertson spoke about organization's 2017 achievements and 2018 plans.The group has also sponsored educational, art and activist events in the 12 months since the 2017 Women's March. Some of the events include hosting an art show that was funded by Advocates For the Arts (about 100 artists participated), an educational program on the countys Opioid Crisis, and screening of documentaries on Gerrymandering, Climate Change, Equal Rights for Women and Gender Issues. PWH has supported a variety of local programs including Dignity Period that provides feminine products for marginalized females in the county through the school system and homeless shelters and the Henderson County Housing Assistance Women for the Win Program.

Also during the celebration Dr. Marie Germain, organizer of the 2017 Asheville Women's March, outlined progressive accomplishments in the past year and looked ahead to the mid-term elections via YouTube video from Philadelphia, where she is assisting the organization of the 2018 Women's March.

Goals discussed at the celebration include electing progressive candidates, getting younger people involved in progressive actions and advocating for Better Angels that seeks to find common ground between conservatives and liberals. Postcard writing sessions on issues such as protecting DACA immigrants, healthcare for everyone, climate change and equal rights are 4 to 6 p.m. Friday at Sanctuary Brewing on First Avenue East. For information visit pwhendo.org.
A man who poured boiling water over his partner's back in front of their four children has been given a two-year suspended jail sentence.

At the time of the incident, Karl Harrison was living with his girlfriend and their children, aged between seven months and eight years, in a city centre hostel after they were made homeless.

Harrison (27) pleaded guilty to assault causing harm to his partner at his address in Townhouse B&B, Lower Gardiner Street, Dublin 1, last April 1.

Gda Elise Moran told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court yesterday that the couple had been drinking vodka on the evening of the day in question and had been arguing.

The family were living in "cramped conditions" in a small room, the court heard.

The victim told Gda Moran that Harrison grabbed a kettle of boiling water during an argument.

Provoked

She said she turned her back as she feared he was going to throw it at her, but instead he poured the boiling contents of the kettle over her back before fleeing the room.

After Harrison was taken into custody, he told gardai that his partner had "verbally provoked" him. He denied pouring the water on her back, but said he threw the kettle into the air and water landed on her.

When shown pictures of his partner's burnt back, he agreed it looked "disgraceful" and he said there was no excuse.

Marie Torrens, defending, said her client was "horrified and ashamed" and "realises he shouldn't have done this". She said the couple were still together and had since been rehoused.

Judge Martin Nolan said it was a "despicable" and "cowardly act", but it did not merit jail.

"I must take into account they are still living together and caring for their children," he said.
Dessie O'Hare is charged over an alleged incident in 2015

Republican Dessie O'Hare has taken up bail as he faces charges of threatening to kill, violent disorder, assault and false imprisonment.

O'Hare (61), of Slaterock Road, Newtownhamilton, Newry, appeared before Judge Alan Mitchell at Dublin District Court yesterday.

The charges all relate to an alleged incident at Rathcoole, Saggart, on June 9, 2015.

O'Hare was charged last week and remanded in custody with consent to bail in his own bond of 100 and a 20,000 independent surety.

At yesterday's hearing, Judge Mitchell noted from defence solicitor Ciaran Mulholland that O'Hare has taken up bail.

Family

He has been charged with threatening to kill or cause serious harm and false imprisonment of a man, as well as falsely imprisoning two members of the same family, a male and a female, at a house at The Towers, Garter Lane, Saggart, on the same date.

He was further charged with engaging in violent disorder and assault causing harm to another named male at the same location.

Gda Insp Columbanus O'Malley asked for an adjournment to allow time for a book of evidence to be completed and said he expected it to be ready in four weeks' time.

He also said the adjournment was to see if the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) will be granted a certificate for trial in the Special Criminal Court.

Judge Mitchell said that because the accused lived in the North and had to travel to Dublin for hearings, it would suit to put the case back for five weeks.

He said it would give the State extra time to finish the book of evidence and to see whether the case will be sent forward to the non-jury Special Criminal Court or remain in the ordinary courts.

The case resumes at the district court on February 19.

Mr O'Hare has not yet indicated how he will plead.
Simon Harris has offered his condolences to the family of Dublin teenager Sean Hughes, who died after suffering flu-like symptoms.

Speaking ahead of the schoolboy's funeral today, the Health Minister said that while he had no information on the sudden death of the 15-year-old from Finglas, the family should know the nation held them in their thoughts.

"Our hearts go out to the family," Mr Harris told the Herald.

"I think the heart of everybody in the country would go out to that family."

Sean, who attended Colaiste Eoin School in Finglas, was a renowned rapper within his community.

His funeral will take place today at St Canice's Church, Finglas village, at 10am, and his remains will then be removed for burial at Glasnevin.

On Sunday, Sean's mother Karen told the Herald how rapidly flu-like symptoms had emerged before his death.

She had taken Sean to the GP on Wednesday morning, but by Thursday night he was seriously ill. Sean died on Friday morning in Temple Street Children's Hospital.

"We were sitting downstairs watching Netflix at around 11.50pm. Sean was talking to me and next he wasn't talking and I knew straight away something was wrong," Karen said.

"They got him into hospital at around 12.30am, but Sean died at 6.30am. I'll never forget it."

The country is in the grip of what is expected to be the worst flu crisis in a quarter-of-a-century, with 20,000 patients attending GPs across the country, while hundreds have been admitted to hospital.

Vulnerable

This week is expected to see a peak in numbers contracting flu, but Mr Harris said 109,000 more people were vaccinated this year compared with last year.

"We saw a significant increase in healthcare workers being vaccinated," he said.

"But still there are nowhere near enough being vaccinated, and these are people working with vulnerable people."

Mr Harris said medical advice suggesting that flu could peak this week presented a "challenging position".

"There are too many people on hospital trolleys today, but we have an improvement on last week and the week before, so I want to thank everyone in the health service," he said.

The minister said he was concerned about children's services during the flu season.

"One of the issues in our children's hospitals is the lack of isolation facilities," he said.

"We have hospitals that are excellent, but the infrastructure needs to be upgraded. That is why we are now building a new state-of-the-art national children's hospital.

"We are investing nearly a billion euro of taxpayers' money in it, and the reason I make that point is because it will provide every child with their own room and en suite, which will mean when a flu surge comes it's much easier to isolate a child with a flu.

"At the moment, clinicians are having to make very difficult decisions, and sometimes it means a child spending longer in an emergency department - something we'd never want to happen."
'"We are not all built the same way," said Trinity College immunologist Seamus Martin.' (stock photo)

Around 50 children have died from flu in the past five years, including some who were healthy and had no previous risk factors.

The Health Service Executive (HSE) confirmed that up to 10 victims under the age of 16 die each year from winter flu.

The highest risk of complications is to children who have pre-existing conditions that make them vulnerable, such as asthma and heart disease.

Nine years ago, during the Europe-wide swine flu pandemic, there was a particularly high death rate among the young as children who had no previous health difficulties were killed by the virus.

"We are not all built the same way," said Trinity College immunologist Seamus Martin.

"There is natural variation in our resistance. Certain flu strains may be able to breach the immune defences of otherwise healthy people."

Prof Sam McConkey, a consultant in infectious diseases at Beaumont Hospital, said that if a patient gets pneumonia on top of flu, it can be a major worry.

"A patient can get the flu first and then bacterial double pneumonia," he said.

"That can lead to failure of the lungs and death. Sometimes they can go blue and fluid builds up in the lungs.

Severe

"You need to be in hospital and intensive care at that stage."

He added that this year some of the sickest patients with flu have low oxygen in their blood.

They are given anti-viral medication and after a day or two are well enough to go home.

The impact on patients this winter has not been as severe as during the swine flu pandemic of 2009.

The flu outbreak this year in Ireland has been "moderate to severe".

So far, hospitalisations have been highest among the over-65s and babies less than a year old.

Premature babies can also be at high risk from the flu.

Prof Joe Keane, a respiratory consultant at St James's Hospital, said the flu causes a patient's immune system to be suppressed.

"It interferes with the person's normal ability to fight bacteria," he said.

"They suspend your immunity against bacteria.

"So an ordinary bacteria with which you would normally deal quite easily becomes a life-threatening infection.

"You start off with what appears to be a transient viral infection, but what that does is destroy the lining of the lung which ordinarily prevents the bacteria from taking root in your lungs.

"The consequence of that is a person who is immuno suppressed with bacterial pneumonia and that is a bad combination."

However, Prof Keane said that dying from flu was a very rare event.

"That is why we are keen on vaccination," he added.

Meanwhile, there was little respite for the country's A&E departments yesterday as 506 patients waited on trolleys for a bed.

A lack of beds has forced 73 children to languish in emergency departments in the past two weeks.

The young patients have endured hours on trolleys in Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin, the National Children's Hospital, Tallaght, and the Children's University Hospital, Temple Street.

The figures were released by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), which launched its new trolley watch for children's hospitals.
Hosting a free Thanksgiving dinner? Let your neighbors know

Is your organization hosting a free community Thanksgiving dinner? Let us know and we'll include it in a story.
Radisson Blu, the iconic hotel brand driven by innovation and design, is proud to announce the opening of its third hotel in Nigeria, and its second hotel in the country's largest city, Lagos. Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group now has a portfolio of 85 hotels, and over 17,800 rooms in operation and under development in Africa.

The hotel is centrally located in Ikeja, the capital of the Lagos State - home to many corporate headquarters, government offices and large manufacturers. It is situated next to Mobolaji Bank Anthony Highway, a main highway linking Ikeja with the rest of Lagos. The location of Radisson Blu Hotel Lagos Ikeja is also just a few kilometers away from Murtala Muhammed International Airport, and close to the suburb's cultural and tourist attractions.

The 155-room Radisson Blu Hotel Lagos Ikeja offers a choice of contemporary standard and business-class rooms, as well as a range of ultra-stylish one, two and three-bedroom loft suites. All rooms carry a fresh and modern design, with free high-speed wireless Internet.

The hotel has an extensive food and drinks offering. Guests can enjoy the all-day dining restaurant, serving international and local cuisine, or dining at the steak house restaurant that will calm any carnivorous craving. For a relaxing drink, guests have a choice between the stylish lobby cafe, a bar, the business class lounge or the pool terrace.

The hotel has impressive meeting and events facilities encompassing an area of 2,047m2- including a ballroom, an expansive conference room capable of hosting over 400 guests, and six meeting rooms with an adjoining business center. All meeting rooms are equipped with modern meeting technology and break-out areas.

Hotel website
Hotels are fighting hard for customers and currently a lot of that effort goes into getting their marketing in front of guests' eyeballs and winning the booking. However, the one period hotels have the guest completely to themselves is during the stay itself. Here, technology, both at the customers fingertips and behind the scenes, is now capable of making a real difference and winning over the customer's loyalty says EyeforTravel's new free report, The Future of In-Stay Technology.

Principally this technology is about putting the hotels services' at the guest's fingertips. These range from apps that can allow the guest to immediately receive answers to their questions any time of the day or night and book any on-site or arrange of external experiences. Tablets that can control an entire room's features, such as lights, temperature, curtains, the TV and more. Smartphones that come with the room so that the guest can be connected to services whenever they need. These technologies are putting the hotel's capabilities back in front of the guest whilst making their stay a more convenient and comfortable experience.

Furthermore, these technologies not only help hotels serve guests better and improve their ratings, they present enormous upsell opportunities that can help restore those all-important margins. If a hotel has managed to get a device with its app into the hands of a consumer, then they can use this to send them push notifications about key services. Chatbots and smart speakers can take user requests and once a hotel has gathered enough data, use this to make recommendations based on similar requests and customer profiles. Smarter in-room devices can put the hotel back into position as the local expert again and allow them to monetise local experiences, tours and activities.

Critically these technologies are also all gathering data around every guest interaction and many are capable of categorising and using this data in an automated manner. "Whilst I often hear complaints in the hospitality industry that the big online players have a data advantage that they can't compete with  and to some extent that is true  this is finally a chance for hotels to turn the tables," says Alex Hadwick, Head of Research for EyeforTravel. "Detailed guest preferences are a valuable thing and not only are you elevating the customer experience, your reinforcing that your hotel is delivering the service, not the intermediary. Smart tech in the hotel is a better way of gathering, storing and utilising key information that an OTA doesn't have."

Data gathered can not only be used as mentioned above for providing guests with services but also behind the scenes to improve staff performance. Connected technologies provide alerts on guest requests, enabling service to be immediate. They also provide transparency between the guest and property, and with back of house operations. Departments know what is being worked on, when and when it is complete and from a single source, heling to eliminate confusion. From a property-wide perspective, Internet of Things (IoT) devices can help with scheduling the regular maintenance of and other engineering works through notification of flaws, or simply let the hotel know when the guest is outside of their room through door entry monitoring, making service seamless and more efficient.

According to Pablo Rodriguez, Marketing Manager at Stay, smarter communications between guest and hotel, such as through a chatbot, "Eliminates mundane tasks, allowing the staff members to focus on valuable actions that cannot be automated."

"These days everyone is so familiar with messaging as a means to communicate. Hotels are finding it easier to deal with five customers directly in their rooms via chat channels, instead of having five customers standing behind a reception counter," explains Hammad Hussain, Managing Director of UK and Ireland, Tink Labs.

All of these innovations are adding up to a smarter, more responsive hotel that can take the fight back to the online environment and re-establish the relationship between guest and their stay.

To download The Future of In-Stay Technology report for free, click here.

About Reuters Events

Reuters Events is a community where the worlds top online travel brands  from hotels to airlines, online travel agents, cruise, car hire firms and more  come to meet to drive forward growth and innovation in the industry.

We know that working in the turbulent online travel industry is as exciting as it is challenging. In this constantly evolving market place, we appreciate that keeping up with the pace of change can be tough, not to mention time consuming. You need the right information, contacts and strategic insight to succeed.

Established in 1997, by Tim Gunstone, we offer a diverse product portfolio including industry analysis, insights, research, webinars, reports and conferences to suit the needs of our clients.

Our clients read as a whos who of online travel. From major hotel brands to new startups, we help our 80,000 strong customer base make better decisions, build better brands, close the most lucrative deals and ultimately sell more of their product. After all, increasing travel brand profit margins in the cutthroat travel industry is the name of the game!

No other online travel intelligence provider has been charting the growth of online travel as long as we have. We were here at the inception of online travel and we know the industry inside out. Whats more, were a small, friendly team. Forget impersonal hierarchies, we like to get to know our customers and work towards their exact needs.

Meredith Pistulka

View source
Radisson Blu Hotel Timisoara to Open 2020 in Romania

The Rezidor Hotel Group announced the signing of the Radisson Blu Hotel, Timisoara. This takes the group's portfolio in Romania to four hotels. Radisson Blu and Mulberry Development will create an international upper upscale hotel in Timisoara, the main social, economic and cultural hub in western Romania  and the European Capital of Culture for 2021.

Elie Younes, Executive Vice President & Chief Development Officer of Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, said: "We are pleased to continue boosting our presence in Romania, and strengthening our South-Eastern Europe development in secondary cities. We appreciate the local business fundamentals and thank our respected partner, Mulberry Development, for its commitment. Timisoara is a very attractive destination for us; it has significant development potential, and there are major investments with attractive new concepts."

To be built, the Radisson Blu Hotel, Timisoara is expected to be completed in 2020  and will feature 160 rooms, a signature restaurant and bar concept, 1,000m2 of meeting space (including a ballroom), and a 24/7 fitness center. The property will be an integral part of the ambitious development of the most important combined real estate project in the ISHO neighborhood of Timisoara.

The hotel will be located within walking distance of the old town, which retains much of the ornate 19th Century architecture from when the city was a key part of the Hapsburg Empire.

"Timisoara is more and more visible across Europe, and our city becomes more attractive considering both business and tourism sectors. We are very glad that such important private investments will be made in our city, and that we will host such a distinguished hotel operated in the professional manner you would expect of a top international brand," remarked Nicolae Robu, Mayor of Timisoara.

"The rise of a new business hub around the concept, promoted by ISHO, represents a good opportunity for significant new investments in the city. I am confident that, together, we will manage to build a distinguished hotel that will very soon become a reference for our region, and will have a role in the development of the city  including the amenities offered, both as accommodation units and the new conference center that is so needed in Timisoara", emphasizes Ovidiu Sandor, developer of ISHO neighborhood.

Mulberry Development was assisted during the negotiations by the leading law firm Wolf Theiss, Austria, and by the consultants of PFK Hotelexperts from Vienna.

The Radisson Blu Hotel, Timisoara will be managed and operated by The Rezidor Hotel Group.
Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH in collaboration with Fillmore Capital Partners and Fillmore Hospitality, announced the opening of the new Cambria Hotel Nashville.

The 255-room Cambria Hotel Nashville features Music City-inspired design elements throughout the property including a professional quality performance space where guests and locals can enjoy live performances, a rooftop pool deck with an indoor-outdoor bar, and more than 5,000 square feet of multi-function meeting space. The Cambria Hotel Nashville will also soon be opening NashHouse, where patrons can enjoy a contemporary menu comprised of area specialties, signature cocktails, and a selection of local craft beers.

The upscale property is conveniently located at 8th Avenue and McGavock Street in Nashville's popular South of Broadway (SoBro) neighborhood, and a short distance from many of Nashville's top attractions, such as the Music City Center, Bridgestone Arena, Nissan Stadium and Historic Broad Street. The property is also near several national and regional corporations, including Nissan North America, Bridgestone Americas, Inc., HCA Holdings, Randstad, and Electrolux.

"The opening of the Cambria Hotel Nashville is another significant milestone for Cambria as we rapidly expand in key markets across the country. This property truly represents the best of the brand with its prime location in the epicenter of everything the city has to offer, great upscale amenities, and uniquely local design characteristics  all of which make it the perfect option for the modern traveler," said Janis Cannon, senior vice president, upscale brands at Choice Hotels. "Time after time, Fillmore Hospitality has been the ideal developer to help bring the Cambria brand to now five major U.S. cities. This property is an excellent example of our continued collaboration."

Fillmore Hospitality provides a full spectrum of real-estate management services to hotels and resorts throughout North America. In tandem with Choice, Fillmore has opened five Cambria hotels, including New Orleans, Los Angeles  LAX, Chicago Magnificent Mile, and Southlake  Dallas-Fort Worth.

"The Cambria Hotel brand has built a great reputation among travelers and developers, and we're ecstatic to bring another great property to an iconic city like Nashville. Opening our fifth Cambria hotel with Choice is a testament to the strength of our collaboration," said Ron Silva, Fillmore Capital Partners president and CEO. "Nashville attracts millions of leisure and business travelers each year, and we look forward to welcoming guests to this one-of-a-kind upscale property in the heart of all of the action."
10 Killer Hotel Website Conversion Hacks

Hotel website conversion is key to any direct booking strategy.

This article originally appeared on Tambourine.

Theres a good chance youre killing the conversion rate of your hotel website.

Right now, potential guests are bouncing off your hotel website as you read this.

What good are your brilliant marketing strategies if you cant hold onto the customers attention once they get there?

Your hotel product is not to blame.

Most likely, there are holes that need to be taken care of on your hotel website.

Make these fixes and watch your conversions increase.

Hack 1: Use Dynamic Personalization

Too many hotel websites use sliding graphics to showcase different messages, amenities and promotions. If the first screen isnt right for the visitor maybe the next one will be!

Unfortunately, it turns out that sliders kill conversion rates. Instead, we recommend using simple dynamic personalization to deliver the right message/promo to each visitor.

An example of dynamic personalization welcoming past direct bookers with their previous date search.

For example:

 By using campaign tracking codes to identify various inbound traffic sources, you can customize the messaging of your homepage to be more relevant to your visitors. For example, if you are promoting an in-state resident sale, you can dynamically set your home page to detect website visitors from your state and display that promo first.

 You can prevent abandonment to OTAs by dynamically showing gated/loyalty rates (see example above) to users who are automatically identified as consumers who have used your direct booking engine.

 When a guest from London visits your website and moves into the booking engine, your website can automatically pass the users location and localize room rates in the booking engine to the guests native currency (i.e. instead of charging $100 USD for a room, you could charge 100 British Pounds, which is worth $1.32).

Hack 2: Keep Offers Consistent

Using promos across all your digital channels to drive traffic is nothing new, but if you dont keep the offer consistent throughout the purchase journey, you are causing dissonance and inhibiting your direct hotel website conversion rate.

This is especially critical when guests expect to see the promo they clicked on reflected in the pricing inside your hotel booking engine. If an offer disappears during the booking engine conversion process, visitors can lose confidence in their purchase and abandon their checkout.

Heres a great example from Couples Resorts showing a 7th Night Free promo on their Specials page, then carried forward all the way through into the booking environment:

The jump between your website to your booking engine is a dangerous place. If the transition isnt seamless, its notorious for causing people to ditch their reservations. One thing to blame for the abandoned reservations: Mismatched online experiences.

The best booking engines are the ones that go unnoticed by the guest. If you transfer guests to a booking engine with a different design, different colors, different fonts than that of the website, it will cause guests to feel uneasy about moving forward. Even the smallest of differences can be jarring to the customer and will slowly chip away at the trust that you worked so hard to establish. So, keep things consistent to boost both customer trust and conversion rates.

Hack 3: Keep Messaging Consistent

Sure, setting rates and keeping content consistent across the vast array of digital channels can get overwhelming. But maintaining STORY parity is vital to your hotels bottom line.

Smart hotel marketers also know that their USP (unique selling proposition) has to be consistent across all brand touchpoints and channels. If consumers see your property described as urban chic in one place and a traditional business hotel in another dissonance occurs, causing erosion and attrition.

People are often distracted and impatient when theyre shopping for travel online. Theyre eager to find information that gives them confidence in their purchase decisions. In the early days of the web, researchers at the Xerox PARC laboratory in Palo Alto defined this as information scent.

According to the conversion gurus at Unbounce, people follow visual and information clues that help them find what theyre looking for. If they lose the scent, theyll abandon the trail. If the information scent is strong, theyll keep going. The question is: How consistent is the information your hotel provides across all your digital channels?

Hack 4: Offer Live Chat

Smart customer service can give you a serious bump in bookings. A recent study found that 62 percent of online customers are more likely to make a purchase if you offer live customer support.

Lets be real:

Most of the people who visit your website will have questions. Dont assume they will read every word on your website to find the answer. They want answers now. And offering them instant responses and open dialogue will make them more confident in booking. Online chat is even more important within your booking environment itself. Up to 98 percent of guests looking for availability on a hotel website will end up NOT BOOKING. Invest a few dollars a month in online chat to reduce attrition and guide your most valuable prospects to booking.

Hack 5: Fix Your Clunky Checkout

The faster a guest can get through the booking process, the higher your conversions. A long and complicated booking process can derail all of your efforts to get the guest across the finish line. Studies show that 28 percent of customers abandon their online purchases because they were frustrated with the long checkout. So, simplify, simplify, simplify. Take out irrelevant steps, mandatory sign-ups and upsell pages. Reduce the number of room types. Pare down as much as you can.

Also, sometimes the simple reason shoppers dont complete a purchase is that their preferred credit card wasnt accepted in your booking engine. Smart hotels offer multiple payment options, going beyond Amex, Visa and Mastercard to include as many forms of payment as possible, including third-party online payment services like PayPal. Some even take it a step further like Couples Resorts, who offer a loveaway payment plan.

Also, dont forget to mention security clearly on your checkout page, otherwise you run a serious risk of abandonment. Customers need to feel confident that their payments will be handled securely. A statement of secure payment (or security badges) reassures your customers and could be the difference between a new guest and a lost sale.

Hack 6: Be Very Picky About Photography

Dont shrug off hotel photography as simply pretty pictures. They carry far more influence than that: They convey your experience with a single glance. A study by Cornell University School of Hotel Administration and Penn States School of Hospitality Management found that travelers thoroughly inspect photography to see if your room rates match your experience. And, that photography has the potential to change a guests mind. So skip the old, dated, blurry photos and kill the cheesy stock images. Invest in a legit, professional hotel photographer with a compelling portfolio of previous work at similar properties.

Hack 7: Harvest Social Proof

Modern travelers, especially millennial and affluent guests, are highly driven by user-generated content. In fact, a recent marketing study found that UGC is 20 percent more influential than any other type of marketing when driving purchases among millennial shoppers. Leveraging your guests own images (especially images from Instagram) in your marketing materials not only shows authenticity, it brilliantly demonstrates social proof.

Also, potential guests turn to sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, Facebook and OTAs to research what others are saying about your property. Our advice: Beat them to it. Select and showcase some of your best reviews directly on your hotel homepage to amp up conversions. Scour through guest feedback for the most poignant reviews, skip those that are too generic or lack-luster. The idea is to add credibility with authentic guest feedback, as well as build excitement about whats in store.

Hack 8: Automate Your Best Rate Guarantee

Having a Best Rate Guarantee badge on your website is no longer enough. Instead, smart hotel marketers now show 3rd party rates alongside their own direct rates, so that customers arent tempted to leave and compare prices on other sites. Widgets like TripTease make it easy for hoteliers to show rates form third parties and (shameless plug) our very own booking engine takes the concept a step further by auto-matching third-party rates when direct rates are showing higher than third parties.

Booking engines, like Tambourines, can now auto-display third-party rates and auto-correct direct rates when they are out of parity.

Hack 9: Speed Things Up!

Attention spans online are at an all-time low.

If you want to turn lookers into bookers, every second counts. The ramifications of a slow hotel website are swift, and often permanent as well. About 25 percent of visitors will abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load. Almost 50 percent will abandon if the site takes more than 10 seconds to load. Worse, once they leave, they will likely never come back. Todays consumers expect immediacy online, so this is essential to your conversion rate.

Hack 10: Be Mobile-Friendly

Mobile bookings are up. According to eMarketer, by 2021, half of all digital travel sales will be made from smartphones or tablets. So, why arent your mobile bookings climbing, too? Its not enough for your website to just come up on a smartphone or tablet. Or, to merely offer a mobile version of your hotel website. Your hotels mobile experience has to match the expectations and habits of todays consumers on-the-go. So, streamline the booking funnel. Design for one-hand navigation. Allow for alternate payments. Then, watch your mobile bookings rise.

About Tambourine

Tambourine uses technology and creativity to increase revenue for hotels and destinations worldwide. The firm, now in its 33rd year, is located in New York City and Fort Lauderdale. Please visit: www.Tambourine.com
Danica Patrick and Aaron Rodgers have been romantically linked for a few weeks now, ever since the two were spotted out to dinner together with a group of people. Today, Danica confirmed the rumors, telling the AP point blank, Yes, Aaron and I are dating.

Patrick told the Associated Press that the two first met at The ESPYS in 2012. Although she is a Chicago Bears fan, she says she told Rodgers that shed always root for him as a player. She recently told the AP, Now I am probably going to cheer for the whole team. Take out the word probably. Now Im going to cheer for the whole team.

The 35-old race car driver ended a five-year relationship with fellow race car driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. back in November. Rodgers, 34, split from actress Olivia Munn last year as well after a three-year relationship.

Rodgers, who missed nine games this season due to a broken collarbone, described the challenges that come with dating another celebrity in an article published by ESPN the Magazine last August.

When you are living out a relationship in the public eye, its definitely  its difficult, Rodgers said. It has some extra constraints, because you have other opinions about your relationship, how it affects your work and, you know, just some inappropriate connections.

Danica Patrick plans to finish her racing career career by competing at next months Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500 in late May, a farewell shes calling The Danica Double.

Danica x Rodgers
The Heritage Council has today issued a call for funding applications under its Community Heritage Grant Scheme.

To mark the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 (EYCH), this years scheme focuses on the theme Make a Connection, encouraging communities throughout Ireland to build heritage connections that will last beyond 2018.

Not-for-profit voluntary and community groups, and heritage-related non-governmental organisations may apply for funding of up to 75 per cent of the total project expenditure to a maximum of 8,000. The total funding allocation to the scheme is 750,000.

Commenting on the call for applications, Chairman of the Heritage Council, Mr Michael Parsons said: We expect to fund about 150 creative, engaging projects that provide a way for the public to learn about and manage our natural and cultural heritage, to build up local heritage networks and to engage new audiences by telling heritage stories in innovative ways.

Our cultural heritage belongs to everyone and the European Year of Cultural Heritage highlights the importance of contributing to the protection, enhancement and promotion of our heritage to transmit it to future generations.

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"By funding initiatives such as local heritage audits, wildlife surveys, conservation works, seminars, and demonstrations, for example, we hope to build a legacy of increased engagement and better connected audiences that will resonate beyond 2018.

The scheme is open for applications until Friday, 9 February. Funding applications must be submitted via the Heritage Councils online grants system. Successful applicants will be informed in late-April.

For more information about the Community Heritage Grant Scheme 2018 visit http://www.heritagecouncil.ie/eych-community-heritage-grant-scheme-2018
Over the past few years, many employees have increased their efforts to support staff wellbeing and encourage work life balance  however, one new survey suggests theres still a long way to go.



According to the New Zealand Diversity Survey, some 66 per cent of employers said work-life balance was an issue in their organisation, 62 per cent said stress was a challenge and 50 per cent said they had concerns about the mental health of employees or colleagues.



Unfortunately, the issue is nothing new and workplace wellness has been consistently identified as the single most important diversity issue for businesses since the survey was initiated in 2013.



However, Bev Cassidy-Mackenzie  chief executive of Diversity Works New Zealand  says its not all doom and gloom. In fact, the most recent survey shows organisations across the country are taking meaningful steps to address the problem.



One example of this is flexible work practices, which are becoming the norm, not the exception, in many of the organisations we work with, she says.



The survey revealed that 76 per cent of organisations offer flexible work times, 64 per cent have part-time roles or roles with reduced hours, 62 per cent allow team members to work remotely and 59 per cent offer staff family-friendly working arrangements.



Lion, winner of the Work Life Balance category at last years Diversity Awards NZ, is one of the companies reaping the benefits of a flexible culture.



The firms LionFlex initiative encourages leaders to start with a yes when it comes to flexible work and employee requests are only denied when there is a solid business reason to do so.



That has been the single most important thing that weve done in our flex journey because its totally changed the conversation and its changed the mind-set of our leaders towards flex, said Robin Davies, director of people and culture at the beverage giant.



Starting with a yes, unless there is a significant business reason not to, is a whole lot different than starting from a no, unless theres a reason to make it work, she explains.



Now, the company has banished any stigma and destroyed the perception that flexible working arrangements are only for parents  around 42 per cent of its people now work flexibly.



GHD is another New Zealand business which is rejecting one-size fits all strategies  now, the company allows its people to complete their required hours anytime between 6.30am and 7pm.



Other benefits include the option to buy an extra two weeks leave a year, work remotely or work part-time, opting for fewer days or shorter hours.



Businesses are realising that a happier, healthier workforce means employees are more engaged, more productive, and better able to cope with the fast pace of change organisations require, says Cassidy-Mackenzie. Ultimately this has a positive effect on profitability.






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Montreal and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 15 January 2018  At a recent bilateral meeting with its Chancellor, Mr. Miguel Octavio Vargas Maldonado, the President of the ICAO Council, Dr. Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu, encouraged the Dominican Republic to pursue its strategic and exemplary focus on aviation as a lever for national socio-economic growth, and to enhance its contributions to global momentum on sustainable aviation development.

The meeting took place during Dr. Alius mission to the Dominican Republic last week and was attended by the Permanent Representative of the Dominican Republic to ICAO, Ambassador Carlos A. Veras, and ICAOs Regional Director for the North American, Central American and Caribbean Region, Mr. Melvin Cintron.

In his meeting with Mr. Vargas Maldonado, Dr. Aliu underscored that these achievements were made possible by the support given by highest levels of the Dominican government to the efforts undertaken by the Dominican Institute of Civil Aviation (IDAC) and its Director General, Dr. Alejandro Herrera Rodriguez.

Dr. Aliu further highlighted another aspect of the Dominican Republics model approach to aviation in a meeting with the Vice-President of the Senate of the Dominican Republic, Mr. Dionis Sanchez, and members of the National Congress, where he highlighted the importance of legislative bodies to air transport systems in terms of the provision of the legal mechanisms enabling sustainable air connectivity. These points were also reiterated in meetings with Mr. Herrera Rodriguez and with the President of the Civil Aviation Board, Mr. Luis Ernesto Camilo.

The Dominican Republic has achieved tremendous progress in terms of its compliance with ICAOs Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs), with audits showing it is now a world leader in this area. It has further committed to supporting its neighbours, notably by acting as a Champion State for ICAOs No Country Left Behind (NCLB) initiative.

Compliance with ICAO SARPs enables States to access the international civil aviation network and unlock the socio-economic developmental benefits of air services. The NCLB initiative is designed to ensure that all States have an opportunity to achieve this compliance and connectivity.

Dr. Aliu was also able to visit the Dominican Aeronautical Complex, where he met all the senior directors, the Area Control Centre and the Superior Academy of Aeronautical Sciences (ASCA). This included a visit to a solar farm that provides approximately 50% of the energy for these facilities, illustrating and symbolizing the Dominican Republics commitment to the sustainable development of its aviation sector.

Resources for Editors



About ICAO



A specialized agency of the United Nations, ICAO was created in 1944 to promote the safe and orderly development of international civil aviation throughout the world. It sets standards and regulations necessary for aviation safety, security, efficiency, capacity and environmental protection, amongst many other priorities. The Organization serves as the forum for cooperation in all fields of civil aviation among its 192 Member States.



ICAO's North American, Central American and Caribbean Regional Office

ICAO's No Country Left Behind initiative



Contacts



Anthony Philbin

Chief, Communications

aphilbin@icao.int

+1 514-954-8220

+1 438-402-8886 (mobile)

Twitter: @ICAO



William Raillant-Clark

Communications Officer

wraillantclark@icao.int

+1 514-954-6705

+1 514-409-0705 (mobile)

Twitter: @wraillantclark

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/raillantclark/




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
Watch: Dog Clears Way for Herd of Cattle in Snow Storm, Internet Can't Contain Emotions
The Taoiseach has admitted that the ongoing hospital trolley crisis is not defensible.

Leo Varadkar said that more than 400 sick patients were waiting for a hospital bed on Tuesday morning and he insisted that the Government was doing all it could to alleviate the problem.

He said that plans to increase bed capacity were ongoing and that the health minister will present his review to the cabinet within the next few days.

It is not defensible. If this was simply a matter of political will and not finance we would have resolved this a long time ago, Mr Varadkar said during leaders questions in the Dail.

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The Fine Gael leader added that an additional 2,500 new inpatient beds are needed by 2031.

He warned however that the problem will not be resolved by increased resources alone.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin accused the Government of a lack of planning, lack of urgency and inertia.

Three years ago you as minister for health said you were sick to death of the problem and would resolve it once and for all. That plan never materialised. The situation has become much worse, added Mr Martin.

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The Taoiseach hit back, saying: You were a member of the government in 2006 that declared this a national emergency and you were in government for another five years after that and that was 11 years ago.

He added: A decision was taken in 2007 to start reducing our hospital stock. From 2007 onwards the number of acute hospital beds was reduced every year. I took the decision to reverse that.

Mr Varadkar said he does not want any citizen to face the indignity or clinical risk that comes with long stays on hospital trolleys.

As a doctor who worked for seven years in the health service, as a former minister for health and someone who has elderly relatives  this is something the Government is doing everything we can to alleviate both short-term and long-term issues.

Sinn Feins Gerry Adams described the bed crisis as a damning indictment of the Governments health policy.
The Irish premier has warned the UK Government there can be no back-sliding over the Brexit agreement on Northern Ireland.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the Irish Government will continue to advance and defend Irelands interests and seek to mitigate the negative effects of Brexit for the country.

Referring to the last-minute deal UK Prime Minister Theresa May struck with the EU in December Mr Varadkar said: There can be no back-sliding.

During Brexit negotiations in December the UK Government agreed that any future deal must protect North-South co-operation in Ireland and hold to the UKs guarantee of avoiding a hard border on the island.

The agreement also said that no new regulatory barriers would be allowed between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and Northern Irelands businesses would continue to have unfettered access to the UK internal market.

Speaking in the Dail on Tuesday Mr Varadkar said: It will be important to remain vigilant to ensure that commitments entered into in December are delivered in full.

However, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin warned that the agreement does not mean the absence of a border on the island of Ireland.

I am very concerned about the basic contradiction within the agreement about the introduction of no economic divisions on this island, he said.

Mr Martin added: The final text repeats the assertion of the UK Government from very early about its intentions to avoid new barriers.

This is contradicted by its new statement that all parts of the UK will be treated exactly the same. What is being discussed is a differently managed border. Not the absence of a border.

The opposition leader hit out at Mrs Mays administration saying it was ridiculous it took 18 months for the UK Government to recognise the reality that it no longer had the ability to intimidate the European Union by threatening a barrage of tabloid headlines and a possible veto.

Earlier the Taoiseach said contingency planning is continuing for all possible scenarios during the Brexit transition period.

Mr Varadkar said: The House can be assured that, as we have done up to now, in the negotiations, the Government will continue to advance and defend Irelands interests and to seek to mitigate the negative effects of Brexit for the country and exploit any opportunities.
From left to right, Sean Underwood, 25, Patrick O'Connor, 27, Tommy Browne, 28, and Eoin O'Farrell, 26, in Antigua's English Harbour (Ben Duffy/PA)

Four friends have become the fastest quartet from the Irish Republic to row across the Atlantic ocean.

There was a typically patriotic welcome for team Relentless as they pulled into English Harbour in Antigua  32 days, 22 hours and four minutes after they pulled out of La Gomera in the Canary Islands.

There were emotional scenes at the finish line as family and friends flew over from Ireland to welcome the foursome, waving Irish flags and playing the popular standard Irelands Call.

The four  Sean Underwood, 25, Eoin OFarrell, 26 and Patrick OConnor, 27, all from Cork, and Dubliner Tommy Browne, 28  battled 40ft waves, sores, and storms as they took on the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, dubbed the worlds toughest rowing race.

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They were the sixth team of more than 20 to cross the finish line, one place behind Irish rivals Home To Portrush.

Mr Underwood said: It feels a bit surreal at the moment, its been so long coming.

To actually arrive now on solid ground  it doesnt feel so solid, were kind of swaying around the place  it feels great to be here, absolutely amazing.

The group had to battle with chronic hallucinations brought on by sleep deprivation.

Mr OConnor said: Weve had a lot of dark days out there.

My family came up with a book with messages from my friends and family on each day.

It was one of those things Id leave until it was the roughest point in the day and then Id read it.

When somebody mentions theyre inspired by you and they know youll get through to the end, you start doing it for them and you dont want to let them down.

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You get quite emotional about it  you come out of your cabin, you nearly have your tears, and you talk to the boys, and you get on the oars and give it 110%.

Without the support weve had from people here and back home, theres no way we would have made it, so thank you.

The quartet are raising funds for Cork University Hospital.
The re-introduction of border controls with Britain due to Brexit will not adversely impact Dublin Port, its CEO has insisted.

"Over the next two months, we will finalise our plans for the required reintroduction of border controls on trade with Britain and I am confident that the controls required will not significantly hinder the movement of goods or people through Dublin Port," said Eamonn O'Reilly, CEO of the Dublin Port Company, the semi-state body that operates the facility.

He conceded that Brexit will bring "uncertainties and challenges" to the port's business, but that investments by the port company and its customers "is underpinned by a shared confidence in the future".

Earlier this month, Irish Continental Group, which owns and operates the Irish Ferries brand, said it has placed an order for a new 165m ferry that will sail between Dublin and Holyhead. The vessel will be the world's largest in terms of vehicle capacity and will be delivered in 2020.

Passenger numbers on ferries using Dublin Port rose for a second year in a row during 2017, with the figure up 1.8pc to 1.84 million.

The number of cruise ships arriving at Dublin Port was 127, with the number of visitors breaching the 210,000 mark for the first time. That visitor number was up 32pc in 2016.

Cargo volumes through Dublin Port during 2017 also hit record levels for the third year in a row, rising 4.3pc to 36.4m gross tonnes.

Since 2013, volumes at the port - the biggest on the island - have jumped 30.1pc.

Imports through the port rose 3.9pc to 21.5m gross tonnes last year, while exports were 4.9pc higher at 14.9m tonnes.

"Growth of 4.3pc in 2017 confirms that the longstanding trend of compounding annual growth in Dublin Port is back," said Mr O'Reilly.

"Every year from 1993 to 2007 was a record year in Dublin Port," he added. "In the past three years we have seen this pattern re-emerge, with 2017 the third year in a row for record growth."

He said that cargo volumes are expected to increase by 5pc at Dublin Port this year, driven by domestic demand, population growth, and a strong economy.

Mr O'Reilly said those factors would drive cargo volumes up "for the foreseeable future".

Dublin Port is currently engaged in a major capital project to expand facilities.

It invested 75m in port infrastructure last year, and will spend an additional 132m this year.

"Thereafter, investment plans will need to accelerate to ensure that Dublin has sufficient port capacity for the years ahead," it noted yesterday.

Imports of new trade vehicles fell 4.6pc, reflecting the significant increase in the number of used cars being brought into Ireland from the UK.
Farmers have been again warned of the dangers of slurry gas to both themselves and livestock.

It comes as a farmer in Roscommon found eight cattle, valued at up to 14,000 dead on his property in a suspected slurry gas incident.
The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar drew on his 'funny' name and farming relations when addressing the IFA AGM in Dublin today, and said that as a champion for the self-employed and people who get up early in the morning and nobody gets up earlier than the Irish farmer.

"You might not know it, but the IFA has a long and distinguished history of welcoming people with a funny name who trained to be medical doctors at Trinity, such as me!" he told the crowd, referring to the very first IFA President Juan Greene.



Next up were his relations - he has one uncle in tillage and another in dairying, while summer visits to west Waterford, he said, left him in no confusion about the ups and downs of life on the farm.



The Taoiseach told the collected audience that agriculture is the heartbeat of rural Ireland, and farmers are the lifeblood with a recovered economy, thanks to the sacrifices farmers made and the policies we implemented.
The Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has run up a legal bill of almost 2m as a result of the Schrems/Facebook data case.

In May 2016, Commissioner Helen Dixon commenced the legal action that is now heading for Europe following a ruling by the High Court last October.

The Court of Justice of the EU (ECJ) is to now determine the validity or otherwise of European Commission decisions approving EU-US data transfer channels used by Facebook and others.

Facebook and the US Government had opposed the Irish Data Protection Commissioner's application for a referral.

Commissioner Dixon sought a referral after reaching a draft view that Austrian lawyer Mr Schrems had raised "well-founded" objections over the transfer of his personal data to the US.

Now, figures released in response to a Freedom of Information request show that the case has cost the DPC some 1.928m for legal and related expert fees in the past two years.

The figures show that 1.28m has been paid out over 2016 and 2017 to Dublin legal firm Philip Lee solicitors, which is acting for the DPC in the case.

The DPC FOI unit state that "these fees include third-party costs/fees to be disbursed by Philip Lee solicitors in respect of matters including expert witnesses and other third party costs relating to these proceedings. A breakdown of the figures show that last year, the firm received 808,865 and this followed a 2016 payout of 478,860.

Senior counsels Michael Collins and Brian Murray led the State legal team in the long-running case and over 2016 and 2017, Mr Murray was paid 253,774 and Mr Collins received 207,962.

In addition, Catherine Donnelly BL received 179,303 in counsel fees.

The DPC's total spend on legal costs between January 1 and December 12 last year amounted to 1.62m with the Schrems case accounting for 1.3m of that total.

As a number of social media giants and tech companies have headquarters here, the DPC has become involved in high-profile court cases concerning data protection.

As a result, its costs are increasing at a rapid rate and in response, the DPC is to receive 11.67m from Government this year

This compares to an allocation of 7.52m in 2017 and 4.74m in 2016.
Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe is prepared to strengthen legislation to pursue bankers who illegally took trackers off customers.

Mr Donohoe told the Oireachtas Finance Committee that a collective failing by the banks was behind the tracker mortgage rip-off.

But he cannot prejudge a Central Bank investigation into whether this was an accident or otherwise.

The minister was responding to Sinn Feins Pearse Doherty who said the 1bn tracker scandal was theft and bankers should pay the consequences.

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Bankers are getting away with it, getting away with the biggest theft in the history of this State.

Mr Donohoe said he had asked the Central Bank previously if it had sufficient powers and he was told it had.

However, he noted the Central Bank had recently said it needed greater powers, when the regulator was responding to a Law Reform Commission report. The minister was prepared to legislate if stronger powers were called for by the Central Bank.

And in response to Mr Doherty, the minister said there are currently no public interest directors on the boards of any of the banks the State has a stake in.

Mr Donohoe said there was a tension between their duty to the companies whose boards they sat on and the expectations of the public and Oireachtas.

Government-appointed directors would be appointed on the boards of AIB, Bank of Ireland and Permanent TSB.

Former TDs or ministers would not be put forward, but the roles would have to be approved by the European Central Banks Single Supervisory Mechanism.
Premier Foods, which is home to a number of household brands including Batchelors and Mr Kipling, saw its group sales increase by 4pc to 261.4m (294m) in the three months to 30 December.

In the first three quarters of the financial year, sales grew by 2.6pc to 614.8m, compared to the same period in 2016, according to a trading update from the company.

The groups strategic partnerships with Japanese food company Nissin and Cadbury-owner Mondelez, as well as a robust performance of the UK food market contributed to the sales growth.

In addition, the company sold a record 220 million mince pies in 2017.

"Our international business produced another excellent quarter and our partnerships with Nissin and Mondelez continue to deliver strong performances, demonstrating their strategic benefits to us," Gavin Darby, CEO of Premier Foods, said.

"With our leading category positions and commitment to product innovation, our expectations for progress this year remain unchanged."

Non-branded sales grew strongly in the three month period, up 17pc year-on-year.

The companys Batchelors portfolio delivered its fourth successive quarter of sales growth, reflecting the continued benefits of the Nissin strategic partnership, Premier Foods said.

Batchelors Super Noodles in a pot, which is manufactured by Nissin, has now delivered over 5m in sales since its launch last year.

Sales and volumes of Bisto and Oxo both grew in the three month period, benefitting from media advertising.

Meanwhile international sales increased by over a quarter during the three months, reflecting continued strong progress in Australia, the launch of Mr Kipling and Cadbury cake in New Zealand, and a number of new customer listings for Sharwood's in Europe and the US.

While Cadbury cake sales continued to grow strongly in international markets, sales were lower in the UK during the three months, following some short term capacity constraints.

Yesterday Premier Foods announced that discussions on the sale of its Batchelors portfolio had not gone beyond an "exploratory stage".

Responding to speculation over the weekend concerning a possible 200m (225m) sale of its Batchelors brand to Nissin, the company said that its board had made no changes to the company's strategy since its last strategic update, which was delivered with its preliminary results in May last year.
London-listed United Oil & Gas has entered into a farm-out agreement with Corallian, a private UK oil and gas exploration company, to acquire an initial 10pc interest from Corallian in three licences held by a joint venture between Corallian and Corfe Energy offshore and onshore in the southern UK.

Under the agreement United will pay 13.33pc, or just under 1m (1.1m), of the costs associated with the Colter well, which is planned for mid-2018.

These licences are located next to the largest onshore oil field in Europe, Wytch Farm, which has produced in excess of 450 million barrels of oil.

In addition, an option has been granted, which expires at the end of March, under which United can exercise a right to purchase an additional 10pc interest in these licences on the same terms as the initial farmed interest.

Additionally, United and Corallian have established an Area of Mutual Interest (AMI) for the area, enabling the partnership to identify and target further opportunities within the same play.

"We are very pleased to announce this deal and AMI agreement with Corallian. The Colter prospect is the same play that has been so productive at Wytch Farm, and joins our existing licence at Waddocks Cross, PL090, in the United portfolio," Brian Larkin, CEO of United Oil & Gas, said.

"This, our second cluster of UK licences and fourth in total, gives Uniteds shareholders access to a near-term, drill-ready target in a highly prospective region. We look forward to drilling of the well in mid-2018."

Mr Larkin went on to say that the company continued to evaluate further acquisitions and farm-in opportunities in order to grow the companys portfolio and deliver value for its shareholders.

In November, United announced that it had farmed into the Tullow Jamaica operated Walton-Morant licence located offshore Jamaica.
Live Nation and MCD have today confirmed dates for the European leg of U2s eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE tour.

They will kick off their schedule in the US at the BOK Centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 2.

The European tour will begin in Berlin on August 31 and will take in a string of European dates, including Cologne, Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Milan, Manchester and London.

In addition, special home shows are being planned for Dublin and Belfast, details of which will be announced as soon as they are finalised.

It's rumoured that the 3Arena is on the cards for the Dublin leg of the tour.

Unlike their last tour, The Joshua Tree, in which they played to huge stadium audiences around the world, including Croke Park's 82,000 fans, this time they have pared things back.

A follow-up to Songs Of Innocence, was released on December 1 and features 13 new songs, including the second single Get Out Of Your Own Way, which is out now.

The first single from the collection, You're The Best Thing About Me, written about Bono's wife Ali Hewson, was released to critical acclaim in September. Bono recently said that the album was influenced by Irish poet and writer Brendan Kennelly's advice, to "write as if you're dead".

Recorded in Dublin, London and LA, the result is a series of songs in the form of letters to people and places close to Bono's heart.

Tickets for the U2 eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE European Tour will go on sale beginning Friday, January 26 and there will be a public ticket limit of four tickets per person.

U2.com subscribers will have the first opportunity to purchase tickets beginning Thursday, January 18 at 10am and running through Saturday January 20 at 5pm.
A meeting between Pope Francis and clerical abuse survivor, Marie Collins, must be on the papal agenda when the Pope visits Ireland next August, a Catholic lobby group has said.

We Are Church Ireland (WACI), a lobby group seeking to liberalise some of Catholicisms structures and sexual teachings, said a personal meeting with Collins would show the Popes appreciation of her valuable work on the Vaticans Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

Marie Collins resigned from the Commission on March 1 2017, after three years, in protest over a lack of funding and resources, inadequate support staff, and the Curias cultural resistance towards progress on issues such as bishops accountability for mishandling abuse allegations.

Criticisms have been made of the Pope and the Curia over the plight of the Commission which appears to have been allowed to lapse since before Christmas, with no new commission members announced.

Spokesman for WACI, Brendan Butler, also criticised the lack of any formal meeting between the Pontiff and Marie Collins during the time she served on the Commission. He said Mrs Collins, who was abused by a Dublin priest in the 1960s, had only received a handshake from the Pope.

Responding to the call by WACI, Marie Collins, criticised the fact that the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors is in abeyance describing the situation as a disgrace.

Speaking to Independent.ie, she said the Commissions second term should have begun immediately.

She hit out at the Vatican over the fact that the appointment of new members for this second term had not been announced nor had the names of those first term members being retained for a second term.

The administrative office in the Vatican continues but with no members appointed, and no official explanation as to why not, those who care for the future of the Commission are left in the dark.

If I was to meet with the Pope I would ask him why he has allowed this situation to come about, she stated, but added that she herself was not personally requesting a meeting with the Pontiff.

She clarified that she met the Pope on three separate occasions over the time she served on the Pontifical Commission.

I met the Holy Father on three occasions, each time it was a handshake and an exchange of greetings after attending one of his masses. There was no formal meeting between the two.

Two other Irish survivors did meet Pope Francis in July 2015 and while Marie Collins sat in on one meetings between the Pope and the survivor, she was there as moral support to the victim and so she was not in a position to speak to the Pope, she said.

However, she revealed that she communicated with the Pope by letter in 2016 to which he responded personally.

We are Church Ireland has written to Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin and the Papal Nuncio requesting a meeting between the Pope and Marie Collins but so far, the only response they have received has been and acknowledgement of their letter from the Papal Nuncio.
Drug dealers have "blood on their hands" after a mum-of-three and her best friend died in Belfast at the weekend, it has been claimed.

It is understood drugs were a factor in the deaths of Kelly Watters (43) and Stuart Robinson (31).

Their bodies were found in a house on Klondyke Street in the Shankill on Saturday night.

Police are investigating the deaths, which are not being treated as suspicious at this time, and post-mortems will take place.

Last night a shocked neighbour who had known Mr Robinson since childhood said that he and Kelly had been "best friends" and were "inseparable".

"This has been absolutely devastating," she said.

"Stuart was a lovely person - he was quiet and he was getting over the death of his dad Frankie, who passed away of a lung condition a few months ago.

"He didn't seem himself after his dad passed away, although he was a bubbly person and quite set in his ways.

"He has two brothers and two sisters and he grew up in this area.

"I have known him since he was at primary school, and he went on to study at Belfast Boys' Model School.

"I couldn't believe it when I heard he had passed away.

"The first thing I knew about it was when I saw his cousin and Kelly's cousin crying outside the house, and they said they had died.

"I saw one of Kelly's sons at the house after it happened - it will be very hard for all three of them now.

"If it had been a party house you might have expected something like that, but it wasn't like that at all.

"I have heard that drugs might have been involved in the deaths, and if so that's really scary. There are a lot of young kids around here."

Another resident, who has lived on the street for nearly a decade, said she would "never have dreamed" that such an incident could have happened in the quiet neighbourhood.

"When I saw the police officers and the forensic officers coming out in white suits I knew that there had been deaths, and I couldn't believe it," she said.

"It's very sad for Stuart's mummy to have lost her son. She will take this very hard... and for Kelly's children to lose their mummy."

She added: "They only buried Stuart's dad about six months ago, and he was in his 50s." A third neighbour said he had witnessed police rushing to the scene on Saturday evening.

"I saw two peelers get out of a car and run past, then they went into the house," he said.

"The Robinsons are a nice family and they didn't deserve this, especially so soon after Stuart's dad died."

Pastor Jack McKee of New Life City Church expressed his condolences to the families and friends of the two.

Posting on social media, he urged the local community to "rise up" in order to "end this death trade in our midst".

He stated: "Heartbreaking time at New Life City Church this morning as we shared the news of the sudden death of Kelly Watters, daughter of our very own Stevie Watters, and also of the death of her friend Stuart Robinson.

"We prayed for Stevie and for both families. We prayed for everyone in our community who is being seduced and destroyed by drugs.

"We prayed also for drug dealers that the Spirit of God will give them a glimpse of eternity in Hell, in the hope it would turn them away from their death trade.

"May we not only show compassion towards families that have lost loved ones in this manner, but may we also have the boldness to rise up as a united community to end this death trade in our midst.

"We at New Life City Church are bold enough to believe we can help make this happen, and will do what we can to end this scourge."

Steven Pollock (38), a co-ordinator for Greater Shankill Action for Community Transformation (ACT), slammed the influx of drugs into the area.

He claimed that residents hooked on drugs were having illegal prescription and synthetic drugs delivered to their doors in "discreet packages".

"It's a bad situation on the Shankill with the drugs," he said.

"People are dicing with death, it is a real cocktail of death that they are taking.

"They don't even have to go outside their doors; it's posted to them, making it easier for addicts to access.

"You have synthetic substances shipped from manufacturers across Europe and China.

"A lot of prescription drugs are also bought online.

"It makes me despair as a community worker, and it angers you."

He claimed that the "dogs on the street" were aware of the identities of drug dealers in the area, but said that there had been a "lack of action" and "urgency" by the police.

"I would urge people to report drug dealing to the police, or to speak to us and we will report it on their behalf. But a lot of people have said that they did report it and the police didn't take action," he said.

"There doesn't seem to be an urgency on the police's part.

"The dogs in the street know who the dealers are.

"The drug dealers have blood on their hands - they know what they are doing and they don't care. They are just after the pound signs."

He said that it had become "nearly normal for people to go out and have a few drinks and a couple of lines of cocaine".

"Even harder drugs like cocaine seem to be viewed more as recreational drugs these days," he added.

Mr Pollock accused the Department for Communities of standing in the way of ACT's plans to use the former Forum for Action on Substance Abuse (FASA) building in the Shankill for its drugs prevention work, claiming that "lives could have been saved" if it had been granted permission sooner.

He said that the FASA building was sold at auction to a private buyer in November 2016, and that his group has an agreement with the new owner to host three anti-drugs groups there.

However, he claimed that the Department for Communities had prevented its efforts, citing "legal reasons".

He continued: "We have secured funding to move into the FASA building and turn it into a community hub.

"We are looking to tackle substance abuse and drugs rehabilitation and to bring in three different substance abuse support groups.

"These deaths again highlight the demand which exists in the Shankill area for these services.

"How many lives could have been saved if this had been in place?

"People are screaming for help."

The Department for Communities said that it had provided grant funding to FASA to purchase the building in the Shankill on the condition that a covenant be applied restricting its use to services addressing drug and alcohol misuse. "The purpose of this covenant was to protect the public funding invested in the project," the department said.

"The new owner of the property purchased it with this covenant in place.

"The owner has proposed uses for the property that impact on the terms of the covenant and the department is currently seeking legal advice which will inform our response to the plans for the use of the building.

"We expect that the department will be in a position to make a response in the near future and we will contact all the interested parties and advise them accordingly."

Chief Inspector Stephen Burns said that police in Belfast were "fully committed to dealing with the issue of drugs across the district".

He added: "The efforts of local police, supported by colleagues in Serious and Organised Crime Branch, are all contributing towards keeping the community in the area safe and drugs being taken off the street.

"Police will continue to disrupt and arrest drugs dealers involved in the sale and supply of drugs, bring individuals before the courts and work with communities and partner agencies to reduce the threat of harmful and illegal activity.

"I would ask everyone for their support and co-operation in tackling this problem through the criminal justice system.

"If you see or know of anyone who is dealing drugs in your local area, contact your local police on 101, or call 999 in an emergency.

"Alternatively, information can also be provided to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111, which is 100% anonymous and gives people the power to speak up and stop crime.

"Our advice is very simple - do not take illegal drugs; do not take prescription medication that has not been prescribed for you and do not mix either with alcohol.

"The consequences of ignoring this advice can be life-threatening.

"If you know of anyone who is dealing in illegal drugs, please contact police immediately.

"I do not want officers calling with families of loved ones to deliver the heartbreaking news that someone is seriously ill, or has died, as a result of drug or substance abuse.

"Drugs bring misery to individuals, families and communities.

"The consumption and mixing of illegal drugs can be a lottery of death."
A man whose wife died during surgery for an ectopic pregnancy at the National Maternity Hospital (NMH), Dublin has settled his High Court action.

Malak Thawley was 34, a teacher and a US citizen who was expecting her first baby with her husband, Alan, when she died at the Holles Street hospital on May 8, 2016.

Alan Thawleys counsel told the court last week what happened was a cascade of negligence and it was one negligent act after another. Liam Reidy SC said the doctor who carried out the surgery was an inexperienced junior surgeon and was not supervised.

Counsel told the court how inept the entire process at the hospital was illustrated in the fact that when they decided to cool Mrs Thawleys brain with ice, two doctors were sent across the road to a pub to get ice as there was none in the hospital.

When the case came back before the court on Tuesday, Mr Justice Anthony Barr was told it was settled and could be struck out.

Mr Reidy said it had been settled for compensatory damages only and aggravated or exemplary damages were not involved.

No other details of the settlement were given to the court.

Final orders will be made in the case next week.

Outside court, Alan Thawley said after a long and difficult process, he had been able to bring these proceedings to a satisfactory conclusion.

"There is no compensation that could replace the profound loss of my wife's untimely and needless death.

"The proceedings were brought forth to expose the cascade of negligence demonstrated by the hospital.

"I will continue to work with the Health Minister and his ministerial inquiry to ensure that I am the last person in Irish history who has to suffer what I have suffered and continue to suffer, he said.

Mr Thawley (31) Brusna Cottages, Blackrock, Dublin had sued the NMH over the death of his wife, who was originally from Dallas claiming she suffered a laceration to the surface of her aorta and there was complete mismanagement of the major vascular injury.

It was also claimed there was a failure to have vascular clamps available on site at the hospital for emergencies and a failure to have a red phone installed in theatre for use in emergencies.

It was further claimed her life was unacceptable endangered during the operative procedure and her death occurred as a result of the injury inflicted upon her and the complete mismanagement of the injury afterwards.

Mr Thawley had also sued for nervous shock and claims his whole life and happiness with his late wife together with his plans and dreams for their future have been annihilated.

Liability was not at issue in the case was before the court for assessment of damages only.

The NMH apologised in court last week for the events which led to the death of Mrs Thawley.
The first gardai to arrive at the scene of the Regency Hotel gangland attack were met by a hostile crowd when they tried to find out what had happened and were told where to go by an injured man, who had been shot in the stomach.

The Special Criminal Court heard gardai were given no information when they spoke to the wounded man and the crowd outside the hotel was quite irate.

The weapons allegedly used in the attack were shown to the court today as exhibits in trial of Patrick Hutch Jnr.

A pathologists report concluded that the murdered man, David Byrne was killed rapidly if not instantaneously by six gunshots.

Mr Hutch (25), from Champion's Avenue, in the north inner city, is pleading not guilty to murdering Mr Byrne and possession of three assault rifles.

Mr Byrne (33), from Crumlin, was shot dead by gunmen dressed as gardai who stormed the hotel along with a man wearing a blonde womans wig and another in a flat cap.

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Prosecutors claim Mr Hutch was identified as the man dressed as a woman.

They do not allege the accused shot Mr Byrne but that he participated in the February 5, 2016 raid and shared intent to commit the crimes.

Garda Sergeant Noel Nolan said he was called to the hotel in Whitehall at 2.35pm in relation to an incident that was developing there. He met a large group of people and there were mixed emotions - people were very agitated, he said.

People were gathered at the Centra shop beside the hotel and he tried to get the names of those present.

He noticed a man who had blood coming from his abdomen and was standing on a grass verge .

I asked him what had occurred and we were told where to go and given no information, Sgt Nolan said.

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The man kept walking around and Sgt Nolan subsequently discovered who he was.

He heard a conversation about the reception area and went there and saw the deceased up against the reception desk.

There was a lot of confusion and he had difficulty ascertaining the name of the deceased, he told Sean Gillane SC, prosecuting.

He then went and viewed CCTV footage of what had happened.

Garda Finbarr Fleming told Mr Gillane he made his way over to a large group of people outside who were quite irate and upset and he tried to ascertain what happened.

The crowd were hostile towards me, he said.

He saw an individual who had an injury to his lower abdomen and it was quite clear he had been shot. The group of people was quite hostile as he tried to ascertain information.

Garda Fleming then saw a man who was slumped on the ground in the reception area and noticed another man who was injured but still alive.

The results of Deputy State Pathologist Dr Michael Curtis post mortem examination were read out to the court by Mr Gillane.

He said Mr Byrne had suffered catastrophic injuries from six gunshot wounds. The first entered his head above the right eyebrow, travelling down and stopping at the collar bone.

The second entry wound was to the right side of the face and the bullet went down and lodged in the chest.

The third bullet entered the anterior abdomen through Mr Byrnes waistband, tracking up into his abdomen, piercing internal organs, including the liver, which was pulverised and exiting at the scapula. This bullet was found loose in his clothing.

The last three bullets transfixed the right hand and both thighs.

This man died as a result of six gunshot wounds from a high velocity weapon, the report concluded.

The injuries sustained would have proved rapidly if not instantaneously fatal.

A toxicology report showed Mr Byrne had diazepam, codeine, pseudoephedrine paracetomol and cannabis in his system.

Mr Byrnes father James remained in court throughout the evidence, while his mother Sadie stepped outside before the pathologists report was read out.

Garda Inspector Michael Mulligan, who was a sergeant at the time, said he was off duty when he he got a missed call from the Regencys general manager at 2.37pm. He called and had a conversation with him about what was developing there, then had a similar missed call followed by a conversation with owner James McGettigan.

He called Santry Garda Station and he himself went to the hotel at 4pm. He noted the body of Mr Byrne was still in situ at the time.

On May 18, 2016 he arrested Mr Hutch at Ballymun Garda Station for murder and was present when he was charged.

Insp Mulligan was present when Mr Hutch was charged and he later gave evidence of arrest, charge and caution when he was brought to the Criminal Courts of Justice later that day

Detective Garda Padraig Boyce gave evidence that he received briefing that resulted in a Vauxhall Insignia being stopped while it was travelling at Tuiterath in Co Meath on March 4, 2016. The driver was arrested and three AK47s were found partially concealed in the boot, along with three magazine clips.

Detective Garda David OLeary of the ballistics section said after he arrived, the remains of the deceased were under a scene of crime tent and were examined by Dr Michael Curtis before being placed in a body bag and removed.

He noted eight discharged cartridges in the lobby and another on the access ramp. He saw a number of strike marks, and recovered a number of projectiles that had lodged in the reception counter, and another which had penetrated the counter and lodged in a filing cabinet.

More cartridges were found in the function room where the weigh in had taken place, inlcuding on the stage.

He confirmed that bullet cases from the scene had been discharged from three Romanian, Chinese and Yugoslavian assault rifles that had been seized by gardai in an investgation in Co Meath.

Another Detective Garda David OLeary, from the scenes of crime unit said one of the guns recovered in Co Meath was under a rug and the other two were wrapped in shirts inside a sack.

Wearing blue latex surgical gloves, he held each AK47 up in court to show the three judges before they were logged as exhibits.

The trial continues before Judge Tony Hunt, Ann Ryan and Patricia Ryan.
A devoted wife and mother was killed while trying to pull her pet dog from the path of an oncoming train, an inquest was told on Monday.

Bridget McHale (70), Knockshanvalley, Straide, Foxford, was hunched over her beloved 'Prince" when she was struck by the Manulla to Ballina passenger train on April I last.

"Prince" had stubbornly lain down on the tracks at the Knockshanvalley level crossing and was refusing to budge despite the entreaties and urgings of its owner.

Train driver, Jonathan Hopkins gave a detailed statement to gardai which was read into evidence Monday at the inquest in Castlebar into Mrs McHale's death conducted by the Coroner for Mayo, Patrick O'Connor.

Mr Hopkins blew his hooter when he saw the dog on the crossing.

He explained in his statement: "When I blew the hooter the dog moved away from the train onto the tracks and lay down.

"At this point the woman walked down the side of the track towards the dog.

The driver said he was blowing the hooter continuously to warn the woman and had the brakes in the emergency position.

"The woman was reaching in over the rail to try and get the dog off but then she moved onto the middle of the tracks completely and hunched over the dog.

"At this point the train was more or less on the crossing. Shortly afterwards the train struck the woman and came to a stop a short distance up the line."

Mrs McHale died immediately at the scene from extensive injuries. 'Prince' also died instantly in the impact.

James McHale, the grieving husband of the deceased, did not attend today's hearing.

But, in a statement to gardai which was read to the inquest, he sadly recalled that on the night before the tragedy they had been social dancing in Swinford and enjoyed "a great night".

The morning of the accident she had been "in great spirits" and had read the papers together and worked on a crossword before she took "Prince" for a walk at 10.30am.

Bridget would walk Prince every day at least twice daily and and always on the same route, Mr McHale added.

There were 18 passengers on the train when the accident occurred. None witnessed the impact and none were injured.

After an inquest jury had returned a verdict of accidental death, the Coroner, Mr O'Connor sympathised with the McHale family on their 'heartbreaking" loss.

It was a sad case of a woman giving up her life for her dog, he commented.

He said the reaction of Mrs McHale in trying to save her dog was the normal reaction of a kind person when a beloved pet was in danger.

The circumstances of the death, were extremely sad for James McHale, who had been married to Bridget for 51 years, and his family.

The coroner also expressed his sympathy to the train driver, Jonathan Hopkins, and other Irish Rail personnel on duty

Inspector Gary Walsh, on behalf of An Garda Siochana, Aidan Hope, foreman of the inquest jury, and Ward McEllin, solicitor, representing Irish Rail, joined in the expressions of sympathy.
A judge has discharged the jury in the second retrial of a Cavan childminder accused of causing serious harm to a baby because of a legal issue.

Sandra Higgins (36), of The Beeches, Drumgola Wood, Cavan town, Co Cavan denies a charge of intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to the baby at her home on March 28 2012 .

On Monday morning, Judge Cormac Quinn empaneled a jury to hear the trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. It was scheduled to last two weeks.

On Monday afternoon a legal issue arose before the trial opened in evidence. Judge Quinn sent the jury home to deal with the issue. On Tuesday morning he told the jury that unfortunately the legal issue now means that the trial is not ready to proceed.

He discharged the jury and remanded Ms Higgins on continuing bail. He set a new trial for June 11 next.

Earlier Judge Quinn said that it is alleged that the defendant assaulted the ten-month-old baby. He said that it will be alleged that on March 28, 2012 the baby presented at hospital with non-accidental injuries.

He told the jurors that the case had gone to trial on two other occasions. He said these trials were accompanied by publicity and that in order to serve as a jury for this trial, it was crucial that jurors felt they would not be affected by anything they had seen or heard in the media.

The court heard that the trial is expected to hear evidence from a number of civilian and garda witnesses from Co Cavan. The defence may also call an paediatrician from Wales to give evidence.
A protester who was tackled by the Canadian Ambassador at a 1916 commemoration ceremony in Dublin has avoided a jail sentence and a criminal record.

Brian Murphy had publicly apologised in his bid to have his recorded conviction for a public order offence overturned.

Last year the Circuit Court hearing district court appeals had held that he could be given he Probation Act if he donated 900 to charity and apologised to the Garda who arrested him.

The case resumed on Tuesday when Judge Martina Baxter noted that Mr Murphy had complied and affirming the order she applied the Probation Act.

Youth club manager Murphy (48) of Newcastle Manor, Newcastle, Co Dublin interrupted a televised 1916 commemoration service for members of the British army, held at Grangegorman military cemetery on May 26, 2016.

Murphy, whose great great grandfather had served in the British military was buried in the cemetery, was an invited guest at the commemoration. His paternal grandfather had fought in Bolands Mills in the 1916 Rising and was a republican who entered politics and later became a TD.

The 1916 event at Grangegorman military cemetery was attended by about 30 people including the then Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan as well as the British ambassador Dominick Chilcott and members of Irish and British armed forces and relatives of the deceased.

Mr Vickers, a former Canadian House of Commons sergeant-at-arms, who was appointed as the Ambassador of Canada to Ireland in January 2015, was also present.

He was hailed a hero two after he shot Islamist gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau who had killed a soldier at the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa in October 2014.

Father-of-five Murphy was found guilty following a district court trial in 2016 on a Public Order Act charge of engaging in threatening and abusive behaviour. He had pleaded not guilty but was convicted and received a two-month sentence which was suspended for one year.

However, he launched an appeal in the Circuit Court which came before Judge James ODonohue last July who rejected defence arguments about right to protest or that the accused had not caused a breach of the peace.

Garda John Cahill told the appeal hearing he saw Brian Murphy stand up in the seated area and go into the courtyard He unbuttoned his jacket and brandished a T-shirt saying Justice for the Craigavon Two, a reference to republican prisoners and a campaign that they have been wrongfully imprisoned.

The appeal heard he said Free the Craigavon Two, this is an insult, this is an insult. A speaker at the ceremony was momentarily interrupted.

The judge heard how Canadian ambassador Kevin Vickers wrestled and subdued Mr Murphy before bringing him over to gardai on duty at the event. Gda Cahill agreed with the defence that after making his protest Murphy was very co-operative. He was handcuffed and taken to Blanchardstown Garda station.

Garda Cahill also agreed with Murphys barrister Jane MacGowan that the comment he made was the height of it and he had not made any obscene gestures to the graves.

However, he said he believed it was Murphys intention to stop the ceremony and what he did was insulting to people.

In evidence, Murphy told the court that he had applied to the Department of Foreign Affairs to go the event which he found objectionable. He said he stood up and was intent on leaving and went to an open area in front of the seated guests. He said his first words were this is an insult, we fought for Irish freedom and he was grabbed by his lapels.

He agreed that he mentioned the Craigavon Two case. He said it was not his intention to insult the people there. He said, the ambassador intervened and it became a much bigger thing than was expected.

Judge ODonohue asked him why he had not set out his objections in writing. Murphy replied that there was no particular reason. He denied that he had deluded the authorities to get into the event and said that he did not give them any false facts.

Judge ODonohue rejected the appeal but allowed him the chance to avoid a recorded conviction or a sentence.

Pleading for leniency the defence barrister asked the court to note her client has worked as a youth club manager for 14 years, he has no prior criminal convictions and was law abiding. He accepted that insult could have been taken, the court was told.

The appeal had heard he was involved with a republican prisoners association and brought family members on prison visits. Testimonials from councillor Paul Hogan and TD Brid Smith were furnished to the court. Murphy told the court he apologises to anyone who was insulted.
A stillborn baby died due to the toxic effects of cocaine, an inquest has heard.

Baby James was born at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin on May 25 2016. His mother was a known drug user who was on a methadone programme for heroin addiction.

Paramedics responded to a call for an ambulance shortly before her son was stillborn in hospital, Dublin Coroners Court heard.

The woman walked out to the gate of her home to meet the ambulance upon its arrival at 8.33pm, paramedic Stephen ONeill said.

She met us at the gate when we pulled up. All her vital signs were normal so we proceeded to hospital, he said.

Baby James was stillborn at the Rotunda at 9.11pm.

In her autopsy, pathologist Dr Emma Doyle described the baby as normally formed but small for 39 weeks gestation. She noted an acute hypoxic ischemic event that deprived the baby of oxygen and said this may have happened in the days before birth. The cause of death was a brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation to the brain, due to reduced placental blood flow due to the toxic effects of cocaine.

A toxicology report conducted on the babys remains found evidence of cocaine, methadone and a variety of benzodiazepines, Dr Doyle told the inquest.

The pathologist said that in her opinion the lack of blood supply to the baby was caused either by a redirection of the blood supply from the placenta to elsewhere in the mothers body or due to the direct effect of cocaine on the foetus. Dr Doyle said there was no range reference for the effects of cocaine on the foetus but said toxicology findings indicated high levels of cocaine had been consumed by the mother.

There is evidence of levels that can cause death in adults, Dr Doyle said.

Cocaine alters the placental function by diverting blood flow away from the placenta, the pathologist told the inquest.

It is my understanding that this was not the first occasion shed come in (to the hospital) with cocaine in her urine, Dr Doyle said.

Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane returned a narrative verdict outlining the sequence of events surrounding the babys death, including the date and cause of death.

The coroner extended her sympathies to the family, who were not present in court but had been made aware the inquest was taking place.
UP to 400 people die each year due to hospital emergency department overcrowding, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin has told the Dail.

Mr Martin  himself a former Health Minister  said the record levels of overcrowding at hospital emergency departments was a damning indictment of Irish society.

Mr Martin said over-crowding levels across Britain were deemed shocking yet they were far less than what was happening in Ireland. He said that a four-hour emergency hospital wait in England was deemed shocking  but it would be a big improvement on matters in Ireland.

"Taoiseach, three years ago, you as Minister as Health said you were sick to death of this problem and that you would solve it, the Fianna Fail leader said. He further accused the Government of being totally unprepared for this current winter crisis.

The Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, agreed that hospital emergency department over-crowding was totally unacceptable.

I do not want any patient to face the indignity or clinical risk that is associated with waiting on hospital trollies. Government is working to address the challenges we face in this area, Mr Varadkar replied.

The Taoiseach said the Government was now working on plans to provide extra hospital beds. But he said that changes in work practices were also required to reduce the numbers of people waiting on trolleys.

Mr Varadkar also said that two out of three people going to hospital emergency departments either got a bed within nine hours  or else were discharged and returned home.
The mother of two young boys who were killed by their father has described the shock at finding an email which indicated a plan to take the lives of each of the family-of-four.

Kathleen Chada's husband Sanjeev murdered their sons Eoghan (10) and Ruairi (5) on July 29, 2013.

Sanjeev killed the boys at at Skehanagh Lower in Ballintubber, Co Mayo and their bodies were found in the boot of Chadas car, which he subsequently crashed near Westport.

Speaking to RTE's Radio One's Today with Sean O'Rourke, Kathleen today described how she discovered an email from Sanjeev in her son's email inbox.

The couple had created an email account for both their children when they were born to which they would send photos and memories.

Kathleen said she was looking through the inbox about a month after her sons' deaths, when she saw the letter from her husband which had been written a year and a half previous.

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"About a month after losing the boys I was looking through some emails... in Eoghan's there was an email and it was effectively a suicide note in which he had planned to take the four of us," Kathleen said.

"And that would have been written about a year and a half before he took the boys, and a year before he was found out [Sanjeev had embezzled 60,000 from a community centre to pay debts for his online trading].

"I've had four years of seeing a psychologist to try and understand how someone can hide that, how can someone hide something like that.

"As I say I lived with him, I slept next to him every night. And these were the thoughts that were going through his mind."

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Kathleen said she would have considered Sanjeev to be "one of the most honest people I had ever known."

"He had a good standing in the community, he was very involved in the centre with the local GAA.

"[When I found out about the embezzlement] I was in shock, but we talked about it.

"He disappeared that first day for a couple of hours, I was in contact with him on the phone, but I did worry that he had gone.

"I was cross, angry, upset, humiliated, a range of emotions.

"I don't think he ever explained [the boy's deaths].

"It turns out he had a gambling problem, hidden in the open with the stocks and shares he was trading.

"There was nothing to indicate there was a problem, our own personal finance weren't affected, I didn't see anything.

"I suppose the last thing I would have ever thought is that he would harm me or the boys.

"As much as it is a counter-indication that he did love them, I don't doubt that he loved them.

"His actions didn't show that, but he did."

"I think it was shame. In his mind, he did not want Eoghan and Ruairi to know his true self, to lose that standing," she said.

"It doesn't seem good enough to say it was shame, I actually think it was as simple as that."

"I have had no contact with him. The only time I saw him in the last four and a half years was in court as I walked past him on the day of the trial.

"He said 'sorry' and they're the only words we've exchanged."

Kathleen is now involved in SAVE - Sentencing And Victim Equality - with a group of families who have been affected by murder.

"We would love others affected in this way to get in touch and come on board," she said.

"We're not rushing anything but we want some changes to sentencing.

"In my case, if the judge had been in a position to say 'serve the minimum of', it would just make life easier for me right now.

"I know after 10 years he can apply for parole. I don't know if he will or not, but in another five years I have to get my head around that possibility.

"The parole board doesn't engage with the victims directly, they say the will endeavour to take account of the positions of any victims, but they don't have to do that.

"My fear is I will bump into him, from the beginning I thought that's a possibility, and I'll meet him at the grave."

She continued; "In Ireland life is between 14 and 17 years, I know life sentences continue because you're out on licence, not all life sentences are served in prisons. But I can't get early release from my sentence."

"[Things] do get more bearable because they have to, but I still have unbearable times, there are still times, and I'm open about the fact, that I wish I was not here, I don't consider myself to be suicidal, but many times I just wish I wasn't here.

"My name is still Kathleen Chada. Eoghan and Ruairi were Chada so that's why I hang onto that."
A young student's very own rap lyrics were read to mourners at his funeral this morning.

Thousands of people turned out to pay their respects to fifteen-year-old Sean Hughes from Finglas, Co Dublin, this morning.

The teenager died suddenly on Friday, January 12 after developing a bad cough.

Fr Richard Hyland paid tribute to the much-loved teenager this morning at St Canices Church, Finglas Village, quoting the music fan's very own rap lyrics.

"For all who knew and loved Sean we know how much Rap meant to him. In listening to his songs the real personality of Sean shines through," Fr Hyland said.

"He tells us; Like the sun in the sky, I am going to shine bright. That was Sean. He brought fun, he brought life into the lives of others.

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"He sang; 'Listen to me, cos I am sincere.

"What he sang, he really meant it.

"For example: 'Education and dedication, non-discrimination that is how we change a nation. He loved his school and he loved his friends."

Fr Hyland continued his homily, saying that family and friends meant most to Sean.

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"He was one of those generous people who got the deepest satisfaction when he was caring for others," Fr Hyland said.

"I know that for many of you here this morning, your hearts are breaking. The loss of a son, a brother, a grandson a best friends. The price we pay for Sean's goodness and love are the tears we shed.

"To close one's heart is to begin to die. To open ones heart is to begin to live. To give ones heart is to live forever. Sean gave his heart.

"I would like to finish with Sean's own words:

"'On my honour you can rely, I am never, never going to say goodbye. On my honour you can rely. I am never, never going to say goodbye. Some friends are forever."

Sean's heartbroken mum Karen spoke to Independent.ie at the weekend, and said his death was "so sudden".

The distraught mum said that Sean was "larger than life" and was very popular among his peers.

"He was only 15 but he was wise beyond his years. He had so much love and respect for everyone. We are so overwhelmed by all the love and support that his friends and family have shown to us.

"We always knew that Sean was popular but it was so unbelievable to see hundreds of his friends lined up to see him over the weekend. Sean's friends were as important to him as his family and it is so lovely that they are all coming out to pay tribute to him."

Karen said that the family had just spent a wonderful Christmas together, but never would have thought that it would be their last Christmas all together.

"It was really lovely and nice. Sean still has so many presents in his room. He was such a wonderful person."

Tributes have poured in for the budding rapper, who was known by friends as Lil Red.

The I <3 Finglas Facebook page said that Finglas lost a "legend".

"Finglas has lost a legend. Our thoughts and prayers are with all young Sean Hughes family and large circle friends. Sean was very popular with everyone who knew him, great talent and amazing personality. Sean may you rest in peace young man. Keep rapping in the sky with the angels."
The mother of a Dublin student Leo Carolan, who was murdered last year, has told Claire Byrne that she is still struggling with the loss.

Caroline Carolan, along with Leo's brother Alex, were on RTE's Claire Byrne Live this evening in the aftermath of the sentencing of Charles Cleary to life in prison last Friday for the murder of their son Leo.

Speaking to Claire Byrne, Alex said: "Coming up to it I didnt feel like it would change much, but we did feel a sense of relief after he was sentenced to know that he was captured and that he will go away for a very long time. We do feel a little bit of relief from it but still not enough, to say the least."

Cleary pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to the murder of Leo Carolan (25) at the flat on the South Circular Road on October 4, 2016 and to the attempted murder of Swiss student Ludovic Thomas (now 26) on the same occasion.

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Leo Carolan was killed after he came to the aid of Thomas, and his mother Caroline wanted that to be remembered.

"Yes, he did die saving his friend," Caroline said. "And he lived like that all his life, and all his friends could tell you and everyone who knew him could tell you that he was always there if someone needed something or needed help or needed food or a place to stay."

She went on to describe her son as a "very nice soul".

"He was one of the most caring people," she said. "Gentle, generous, very generous. Always considerate, non-judgemental, he didnt like hearing someone criticise someone else, he would always say 'but you dont know that person, you dont know what theyre going through, you dont know,' so he was just a very nice person, a very nice soul."

Caroline Carolan also said that whil she felt justice had been done, it was still hard to deal with the death of her son.

"Its difficult still every day," she told Claire Byrne. "We feel somehow justice has been done, but at the same time, I dont know how to define justice any more, you know, he will never come back, so thats the hardest part to deal with.
Samaritans Ireland have launched a major recruitment campaign as they look to add to their more than 1,800 active volunteers across the country.

Established in Ireland in 1962, there are now 20 Samaritans branches across the country with over 1,800 active volunteers on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Samaritans are best known for the vital support given to callers on its 24-hour telephone service, but volunteers are also on hand to offer support by SMS, email, face-to-face in communities, through written correspondence and in prisons.

Listeners of all ages and walks of life are among those who dedicate three hours a week to those most in need.

Some overnight shifts are also required.

John, a beekeeper, has been a volunteer with Samaritans for over 30 years.

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He said: Ive got far more from it than Ive ever given. It has been enriching in so many aspects of life. Listening, which seemingly is nothing, means so much to so many. Its enriching to find so many people from all walks of life working within the movement.

Brigid, an ex-nurse, is five years volunteering with Samaritans.

She said: I'm continuously overawed by the honesty, openness and courage of the callers. I've learned so much from them, and feel humbled to be trusted by them. I found the training excellent and by adhering to the guidelines it becomes easier to take calls and not to give advice but to LISTEN. I've become an active listener, which is so important in life. I've also learned patience and living in the present. The importance and power of listening can never be underestimated.

Claire, a mountain runner, began volunteering just a year ago.

She said: The training is intense and long but leaves you ready to start listening and hopefully help someone who at that time needs to talk. Samaritans is a unique listening service in that we don't give advice, we listen and do so for as long as the caller needs to talk. The power of this can only be fully appreciated when you start your journey in the Ops room taking calls and answering texts and emails.

I have learnt so many new skills and will continue to do so as a Samaritan. Once you finish your training that is just the start of your journey.

As well as supporting people emotionally, Samaritans volunteers undertake outreach in the community, fundraise, and take on administrative roles, all of which are vital to ensure that the service remains available round the clock, every day of the year. Trained listeners also give face-to-face support in branches, as well as festivals and events.

Regional Director for Samaritans Ireland, Cindy OShea, urged people to consider becoming a Samaritans volunteer.

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She said: Every six seconds someone in distress contacts Samaritans. We offer round-the-clock emotional support to anyone who is struggling to cope with whatever life has thrown at them. We give them a safe place to talk in the knowledge they wont be judged, but will be listened too.

As the new year begins, consider making a difference to someones life by volunteering with Samaritans. There are a wide range of roles which ensure the running of the service 24/7, from administrative support to fundraising. Please contact your local branch to find out more.

To find out more about becoming a volunteer with Samaritans Ireland visit www.samaritans.ie/volunteer, call 1890 200 091 or contact your local branch for more details on information nights.
Ministers Simon Coveney and Paschal Donohoe are among those set for St Patrick's Day trips Photo: Damien Eagers

The St Patricks Day exodus will see ministers travel to 35 countries in one of the largest overseas offensives ever, Independent.ie can reveal.

Tanaiste Simon Coveney and Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe are among the big names to land long haul flights.

Mr Coveney, who is also Foreign Affairs Ministers, will travel to China and Hong Kong, while Mr Donohoe is off to Argentina.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar will make the traditional trip to the United States for a meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House.

Rural Affairs Minister Michael Ring, Diaspora Minister Ciaran Cannon, Equality Minister David Stanton and Tourism Minister Brendan Griffin will also visit various parts of the US.

Ministers were told of their destinations at todays Cabinet meeting by Mr Coveneys whose department is in charge of the project.

Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan is travelling to Australia, as is Minister for Older People Jim Daly.

For the second year in a row Independent Alliance Minister Shane Ross is to stay at home.

Other high-fliers include Denis Naughten (Canada), Eoghan Murphy (Korea and Japan), Joe McHugh (Brazil) and Mary Mitchell OConnor (UAE and Oman).

A source told Independent.ie the programme will be called Promote Ireland.

The visits have a strong focus on Brexit with many senior ministers at major European capitals, they said.

Government Chief Whip Joe McHugh will travel to Brazil, Minister of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan, will visit Norway and Sweden while Minister for Health Simon Harris is set to travel to the Netherlands and Belgium.

Announcing the St. Patricks Day Promote Ireland programme for 2018, the Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Simon Coveney TD, said:

The St. Patricks Day period provides a unique opportunity to promote Ireland on the international stage, and to renew the strong bonds between Ireland, the global Irish abroad, and our partners around the world.

This year, the Taoiseach, Tanaiste, Ministers and Ministers of State, and Chief Whip will undertake comprehensive programmes across countries in Europe, the Americas, the Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, in a truly global celebration of Ireland. The Ceann Comhairle and Cathaoirleach of the Seanad will also participate in this years Promoting Ireland programme.

St. Patricks Day provides Ireland with an unparalleled opportunity to promote our political and economic interests abroad, as well as access to key political and business contacts in leading markets around world.

This years St. Patricks Day programme will serve as a platform to launch the Global Footprint initiative as announced by the Taoiseach last August. This will include high-level goals to double Irelands influence and impact to 2025 in terms of promoting our values and our interests, including our economic interests. The initiative will reinforce Irelands economic progress, and promote Ireland as a leading centre of science and technology, R&D and international financial services, creativity, a competitive location for sourcing goods and investing, and an attractive destination for tourism and study. It will also emphasise Irelands ambitious approach to international relations, and role as a global citizen.

St. Patricks Day will likewise be an opportunity to reinforce key messages on Brexit, Northern Ireland, Irelands campaign to become a member of the UN Security Council in 2021-22and the Irish economy. Outreach by Ministers during this years programme will help build strategic alliances in the context of Phase II of Brexit and, looking forward, a post-Brexit European Union.

We look forward once again in 2018 to the greening of iconic international landmarks around the globe in celebration of Irelands National Day, as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening Initiative. 
Health Minister Simon Harris' team came out on top at the cooking contest

IT sounds more Hells Kitchen than Masterchef.

Fine Gael ministers, TDs and senators were invited by the party hierarchy to 'dinner with a twist' last night.

And Independent.ie can reveal that the 'twist' was that the group, including Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, had to cook for themselves.

After a five hour meeting to discuss Fine Gaels approach to a referendum on repealing the Eighth, the parliamentary party decamped en masse to Cooks Academy on South William Street in Dublin city centre.

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The politicians were divided into teams and tasked with cooking dinner from scratch. And while some were hesitant to start with, sources insist everybody got involved.

"The idea was to keep morale up after what was a very constructive but tough debate," said a source.

Chefs from the academy passed judgement on the various meals produced  with a team including Health Minister Simon Harris coming out on top.

The minister, who is in charge of the Governments approach to the Repeal referendum, was paired with junior ministers Patrick ODonovan and Brendan Griffin, as well as senators Jerry Buttimer, Gabriel McFadden and Martin Conway.

It is not known what Mr Varadkar or Tanaiste Simon Coveney served but one participant described the competition as "intense".

"There was some suspicion that Harris was given the award because hes the minister over all the bodies that look after food safety and regulations for restaurants," joked one TD.

The team building exercise came on the eve of the Dails return from its Christmas break.

TDs are back in Leinster House today for the new term that will be heavily focused on whether to change abortion laws.
We are often told that too much alcohol is bad for us. While the liver can cope with drinking a small amount of alcohol at any given time, drinking too quickly or drinking too much over a short period of time can result in the liver struggling to process it. Most of us are familiar with the idea of giving up alcohol for Lent. More recently the concept of a 'Dry January' has gained prominence when we give up alcohol for the month in an attempt to make up for the excesses of the Christmas period.

It's a concept gaining popularity with the medical profession which has warned that Ireland is in the grip of an alcohol epidemic. According to a report by the World Health Organisation in 2014, 39pc of Irish people are heavy drinkers which is defined as having more than 35 units (three and a half bottles of wine) a week for women, or more than 50 units a week for men. Drinking more than six standard drinks on any one occasion is regarded as binge drinking.

The recommended maximum levels of alcohol intake are 11 units a week for a woman or 17 units a week for a man (1 unit is equivalent to a half pint of beer, one pub measure of spirits, or one small glass (125mls) of wine).

Alcohol effects on the liver

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The hangover is the most obvious warning sign that one has consumed excessive alcohol as alcohol acts as a diuretic resulting in dehydration causing the hangover headache. But it is important to keep in mind that alcohol can have varying effects. When alcohol reaches the liver, it produces a toxic enzyme called acetaldehyde which can damage liver cells causing permanent scarring (liver disease). Depending on your age, gender, mental health, drug use and medical conditions, regular and heavy drinking over time, can affect the way alcohol is metabolised within the body, which can lead to alcoholic liver disease. If you continue to drink excessively, either through binge drinking or by having multiple drinks on a daily basis, the consequences include destruction of liver cells, a build-up of fat deposits in your liver (fatty liver disease), or liver inflammation (alcoholic hepatitis), permanent scarring (cirrhosis) or even liver cancer.

Alcohol effects on other areas of the body

Exceeding limits is easily done - for example, a large glass of wine can equal a third of a bottle - and drinking at this level can leave you with more than just a hangover. Not only is alcohol high in calories, contributing to weight gain, but heavy drinking contributes to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and increases blood sugar levels through insulin resistance, increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes. In addition, other tissues such as the stomach lining are injured causing gastritis or peptic ulcer disease, or inflammation to the pancreas (pancreatitis).

Recent evidence published in the scientific journal Addiction in 2017 reported a link between alcohol consumption and cancers of the oropharynx (mouth), larynx (throat), oesophagus, liver, colon, rectum and breast, and concluded that there is more than simply a link or statistical association between alcohol and cancer that could be explained by something else. Growing evidence suggests that alcohol is also likely to cause skin, prostate and pancreatic cancer. However, communication of these findings beyond the medical and scientific community has been poor. A recent Cancer Research UK study found that when people were shown a list of different cancers, only one in five knew that breast cancer could be caused by drinking, compared to four out of five people who knew that alcohol could cause liver cancer.

Prof Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, caused a stir last year by warning women that drinking alcohol could cause breast cancer. She told a parliamentary hearing: "Do as I do when I reach for my glass of wine. Think: do I want the glass of wine or do I want to raise my own risk of breast cancer? I take a decision each time I have a glass."

But can a Dry January really reverse the impact of alcohol and reduce the risk of developing life-threatening illnesses and disease? Research from University College London and the Royal Free Hospital in London suggests the answer to that question is a definite yes. A total of 102 relatively healthy men and women in their forties who took part in the Dry January campaign in the UK for four weeks saw benefits in liver function, blood pressure and cholesterol levels and were also at lower risk of developing diabetes and liver disease. Those who took part in the month of abstinence lost as much as 6lbs in weight and reported improvements in concentration and sleeping. This is not surprising as regular drinkers often have impaired sleep because they are more likely to snore or wake more frequently during the night as a consequence of their poor breathing, leading to poorer concentration during the day.

The female patients had been drinking an average of 29 units of alcohol a week, equivalent to more than four units a day, while the male patients were typically drinking more than 31 units, both above UK government guideline levels. After four weeks, their "liver stiffness" scores (Fibroscan test) - an indication of liver damage and scarring - had reduced by 12.5pc, and insulin resistance - a measurement of diabetes risk - had reduced by 28pc.

This important study shows the benefit from a month's abstinence from alcohol. What is unknown, however, is how durable those benefits are and whether the benefits are sustained over time and if the benefits accrued would be greater if the abstinence period was extended from one month to two or three months. The fact that the liver has a unique ability to repair and regenerate is well established. Liver specialists have observed for several years the significant benefits of weight loss on liver inflammation and liver scarring (fibrosis) in patients with fatty liver disease due to type 2 diabetes or obesity. Several scientific studies have reported that 7-10pc loss in body weight in patients with proven non-alcohol fatty liver disease is associated with up to 90pc reduction in liver inflammation and more than 50pc improvement in liver scarring. In Ireland, approximately 43pc of Irish over 50 year olds are overweight (BMI25 kg/m2), with a further 36pc classified as obese (BMI  30 kg/m2); just 21pc have a normal BMI.

Detection and treatment for liver disease

In December 2016, in response to the growing incidence of liver damage, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK recommended non-invasive liver scans such as fibroscan assessments for women drinking more than 35 units per week and men who drink more than 50 units per week. Fibroscan testing is a non-invasive ultrasound-based technology which measures liver stiffness and is correlated with liver fibrosis (scarring). From the patient's perspective, the procedure is painless, quick and easy to repeat over time. Unfortunately, many people with liver disease do not show symptoms and early detection of liver disease is critically important to both prevent and halt the damage that drinking too much alcohol can do. If it is tackled at an early stage, simple lifestyle changes can be enough for the liver to recover. A Dry January campaign may be the first step!

 Professor Suzanne Norris is a consultant hepatologist/gastroenterologist at Beacon Consultants Clinic beaconhospital.ie She operates the Liver Wellness clinic. For more on alcohol-related liver disease and top tips for a healthy liver, visit liverwellness.ie/ald
Giving up alcohol for January can have both a positive and negative effect on your body, an expert has shared.

With the first two weeks of the New Year now behind us, many people are currently midway through their commitment to Dry January.

While there are obvious benefits associated with avoiding alcohol, such as a reduced risk of developing cancer and liver disease later in life, Dry January can also have a surprising detrimental impact on your body.

Dr Preethi Daniel from the London Doctors Clinic has explained what happens to your body during Dry January after the indulgence of the Christmas period.

For the first few days of the month, you may have experienced an inability to sleep soundly and some slight dehydration.

This could be a sign that your body is going through withdrawal from alcohol dependency.

Additional extreme symptoms of this may include restlessness, tremors, nausea, sweating and anxiety.

However, theres no doubt that reducing your alcohol intake or avoiding alcohol altogether can do a whole lot of good for your overall wellbeing.

Having enjoyed many a glass of bubbly over Christmas and New Years, your liver could be in need of a few weeks rest.

Your liver generally needs around four to six weeks of recovery following a heavy bout of drinking, so giving Dry January a go could be an ideal way of keeping your health in check.

Youll also notice your sleeping pattern improve in the long run.

After a few days of restless sleep at the beginning of Dry January, by day seven youll likely have found yourself sleeping far more peacefully.

This means that youll also start waking up with far more energy the next morning, ready to take on the day.

Another aspect of your body thats affected by your alcohol consumption is your appearance.

As the days go by in 2018, your skin will appear more radiant and your eyes will look brighter.

This is because the majority of the calories entering your body will come from food as opposed to alcohol, thus increasing your vitamin intake.

Last but not least, giving up alcohol will give your immune system the boost it needs to stave off the pesky common cold thats going around.

Of course, completing Dry January is far easier said than done.

With that in mind, Dr Daniel has also provided some tips for participating in the alcohol-free month as healthily as possible.

Make sure that youre drinking lots of fluids to keep your body hydrated, drinking a glass of water before bed to ensure that you feel refreshed in the morning.

Eating regular, nutritious meals will help keep your cravings at bay, as will drinking alternative drinks such as lemon-infused beverages.
Brittany Ferries has announced what it says is the first ever direct ferry link between Ireland and Spain, with tickets for sale by the end of January.

The company will operate two direct return sailings weekly from Cork to Santander in Northern Spain, it says, from the end of April to November of this year.

A new ship will be chartered to serve the route, based on the economie model it already runs on services from the UK to France and Spain.

It will offer "a comfortable, no-frills service with a distinctly Spanish theme".

Crossings will take approximately 26 hours, with departures from Cork on Wednesdays and Fridays. Lead-in prices have yet to be announced.

The 'Connemara' will carry around 500 passengers with space for 195 cars, and the company expects a 50/50 split between passengers and freight carried.

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120 cabins on the ship will feature beds for up to four passengers, and some will be pet-friendly. There will also be a small shop, cafe-bar and passenger lounges.

The ship will also deliver an additional weekly return sailing from Cork to Roscoff, a route that started 40 years ago, on St. Patrick's Day in 1978.

This is a significant move for Brittany Ferries, offering haulage companies a direct route to Spain and passengers a far greater range of holiday options from Cork, said Hugh Bruton, general manager with Brittany Ferries Ireland.

Promoted: See the latest Irish Ferries offers and deals on Independent Discounts

Santander is a short drive from Bilbao and San Sebastian, offering motorists willing to undertake the long journey a direct drop-off in 'green Spain'.

Until now, travellers wishing to take their car or a ferry to Spain had to travel via the UK or France. In 2014, LD Lines launched a connection from Rosslare to Spain (Gijon) via a 'landbridge' service in St Nazaire, but this ran only for a brief period.

The option for freight carriers to bypass the UK land bridge will be seen as very attractive, as Brexit uncertainty continues," added Captain Michael McCarthy, Commercial Manager at the Port of Cork, which welcomed the service.

The news comes as Irish Ferries prepares to take delivery of a new, 144 million cruise ferry for its Dublin-France service, the W.B. Yeats.

It, together with Brittany's new investment in the Cork-Roscoff route, will provide a big injection of capacity to France in 2018.

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The email inviting Fine Gael TDs and senators to "a dinner with a twist" was an attempt by the party hierarchy to keep everyone united in the face of a debate that has the potential to divide Ireland.

The idea of holding a cookery night after a parliamentary party meeting centred on abortion raised some eyebrows - but isn't necessarily a bad thing.

We are facing into months of arguments over whether the Eighth Amendment should be repealed and, if so, what should replace it.

The mood at the Fine Gael meeting was generally respectful, which is interesting because there's a widespread expectation that things will get somewhat heated when the topic hits the floor of the Dail tomorrow.

When Enda Kenny set up the Citizens' Assembly, few people believed we'd ever get to this point so quickly. The process was a fudge, created in order to be seen to do something while actually kicking the can down the road.

In October 2016, he addressed the inaugural meeting of the Assembly in Dublin Castle, telling the members they could have a profound effect on "how we live our individual lives and our national life in the Republic in the years to come".

The assumption was the Assembly would recommend limited constitutional change that could see terminations permitted in cases of rape, fatal foetal abnormalities and when a mother's life is at risk. Few predicted it would propose abortion on demand.

Its findings were sent on to an Oireachtas committee that initially struggled to find members from the main parties. It's understandable why people were shy about getting involved.

Those who did sign up faced intense lobbying from pro-life and pro-choice campaigners. Some of the online attacks can only be described as disgusting. But the members persevered.

It's now becoming clear that a key moment during the hearings was the appearance of the Citizens' Assembly chair Ms Justice Mary Laffoy.

She expressed concern about the lack of consideration given by the Assembly to the frequency of Irish women taking abortion pills as an alternative to travelling abroad.

While Ms Justice Laffoy strenuously defended the process and the democratic outcome, she said she was concerned the Assembly didn't cover "sufficiently" the use of abortion pills.

Most of the messaging coming from those who have 'taken a journey' on this issue now centres around tablets bought online.

Hildegarde Naughton told yesterday's Fine Gael meeting the argument around pills helped changed her view.

She explained that 1,800 women are taking pills in Ireland every year without medical supervision.

"You can get it through your letter box through An Post on a daily basis," she said afterwards.

Of course, others like Louth TD Peter Fitzpatrick, who also sat on the Oireachtas committee, will not be convinced that the time of liberalisation is upon us. And that's fine too.

Fine Gael is split on the issue. Fianna Fail is split. And despite a party dictate, privately it seems Sinn Fein also has divided views.

One Fine Gael minister said: "We went into the meeting expecting people to disagree. In some ways it suits Fine Gael, and Fianna Fail, to have a range of opinions because our voters have a range of opinions."

There's a significant amount of truth in that - but only if the calm atmosphere they boast about behind closed doors can prevail in public.
By Damali Mukhaye

The former Forum for Democratic Change president Maj.Gen Mugisha Muntu today takes his age limit consultation meetings to Fort Portal town.

Muntu launched his campaign in Hoima town yesterday under the theme; Country Before Self, to create a new wave for political change, a move the party leadership disowned yesterday because he did not officially inform them.

He also tells KFM that he is consulting Ugandans about their views following constitutional amendments that removed the presidential age limit to guide his next course of action.

While speaking at the first meeting in Hoima yesterday, Muntu said that those who desire real change must build a new culture of politics for this country with institutions that check leaders rather than depend on their goodwill.
A man taking photographs gets caught by crashing waves at High Rock in Portmarnock, Dublin. Photo: Brian Lawless/PA

Experts are warning people to follow infection-control practices - and said "washing of hands is more important than putting on a second pair of socks" in the cold weather.

The warning comes as the country braces itself for wintry showers and snow over the next two days.

Forecasters predict a sub-zero winter storm which will send gales and polar showers across Ireland from today, with high risks of flooding on Atlantic coasts.

Met Eireann's status yellow warning will be valid from 6am on Tuesday until 3am on Wednesday.

A status yellow wind warning has also been issued for Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Clare, Cork, Kerry and Limerick.

It will remain in place until 3am on Wednesday.

Here's the Rain & Snow forecast for the next 36 hours from the Met Eireann high resolution model - Harmonie - until Wednesday afternoon.

Rain = blue to red

Snow = white

The latest Warning updates are here:https://t.co/X6NncUghZ9#snow #sneachta pic.twitter.com/cQgftlepPZ  Met Eireann (@MetEireann) January 16, 2018

"Very cold today with widespread wintry showers, some heavy & risk of thunder," Met Eireann's latest update reads.

"Accumulations of snow are likely, especially over the northern half of the country & over high ground elsewhere. Winds will reach gale force in the west with some severe gusts & very high seas. 1 to 5C."

Some of the country's leading health consultants are warning people of the need to follow infection-control practices, the Irish Independent reports.

Prof Sam McConkey, consultant in infectious diseases at Beaumont Hospital, and Prof Joe Keane, a respiratory consultant in St James's Hospital, are asking people to wash their hands and dispose of tissues.

Very cold today with widespread wintry showers, some heavy & risk of thunder. Accumulations of snow are likely, especially over the northern half of the country & over high ground elsewhere. Winds will reach gale force in the west with some severe gusts & very high seas. 1 to 5C pic.twitter.com/hQYzO9LYwU  Met Eireann (@MetEireann) January 16, 2018

Prof Keane said: "Washing of hands is more important than putting on a second pair of socks."

Meanwhile, Liz Walsh - forecaster for Met Eireann - told the Irish Independent that the weather warnings will be updated regularly.

"The weather has proven to be a very mobile situation.

"A combination of winter showers, hail and thunder will often result in very strong down drafts and collective wind gusts.

"These can be damaging and we're really keeping an eye on how it evolves," she said.

Ms Walsh added that there's a risk of snow in all parts of the country from today.

"There's a risk almost everywhere for snow, but it will accumulate in Connacht and Ulster. It will possibly progress further south [this evening].

"It's touch and go for Dublin, but I think we will see sleety showers and gusty winds, but it won't be anything as bad as what is expected on the Atlantic seaboard."

Temperatures are due to rise on Wednesday, before they plummet again.

Meanwhile, the UK is currently bracing for very strong winds amid fears it could strengthen into a weather bomb named Storm Fionn.

A spokesperson for Met Eireann said it did not yet know if it was anything to worry about.

"[Storm Fionn] is something we're actively considering. However, it's still too early to predict," they said. "We have enough on our plates at the moment with the current weather.

"We'll probably issue an update on it later."
Ireland is starting to feel the effects of Storm Fionn and snow and high winds have hit many parts of the country this evening.

Four separate weather warnings are still in place as Storm Fionn becomes the latest winter storm to batter Ireland.

It was predicted that the sub-zero winter storm would send gales and polar showers across Ireland this afternoon and now reports and images from across the country show that to be the case.

Update : Status yellow warning for wind For Leinster, Cavan, Monaghan, Roscommon, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford.

See details here https://t.co/9BeK3UcAwO pic.twitter.com/MHkMxxLS1O  Met Eireann (@MetEireann) January 16, 2018

Status orange warning for wind For Donegal, Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Sligo, Clare, Cork and Kerry-Storm Fionn

See details here https://t.co/9BeK3UcAwO pic.twitter.com/6llP4iYeZP  Met Eireann (@MetEireann) January 16, 2018

Earlier, Met Eireann reported that their weather station in Mace Head in Galway recorded gusts of 66kmh at 8pm this evening.

Sherkin Island reported gusts of 63kmh at 8pm.

Fastnet Lighthouse is reporting gusts of 76 knots, or 140kmh, at 10.14pm.

Just before midnight, Mace Head reported gusts of 137kmh, Shannon Airport recorded 117kmh, as did Sherkin Island.

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Snow has also been recorded in most of the northern half of the country, with Ulster hit with heavy snow during the day while Dublin was hit with heavy flurries of snow this evening.

Very cold today with widespread wintry showers, some heavy & risk of thunder. Accumulations of snow are likely, especially over the northern half of the country & over high ground elsewhere. Winds will reach gale force in the west with some severe gusts & very high seas. 1 to 5C pic.twitter.com/hQYzO9LYwU  Met Eireann (@MetEireann) January 16, 2018

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Sligo County Council are reporting that an accident has occurred on the N4 this evening.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Snow scenes at Stepaside Dublin this evening Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos Snow scenes at Stepaside Dublin this evening Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos Snow scenes at Stepaside Dublin this evening Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos Snow scenes at Stepaside Dublin this evening Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos Snow scenes at Stepaside Dublin this evening Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos Snow scenes at Stepaside Dublin this evening Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos Snow scenes at Stepaside Dublin this evening Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos / Facebook

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The conditions have also caused power outages around the country and ESB Networks are saying that customers in Cavan and Monaghan will not have power restored until 5pm tomorrow due to the conditions.

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Met Eireann's latest update, issued just before 11 warned of widespread and heavy wintry showers tonight, with accumulations of snow likely, especially in the northern half of the country.

These showers are expected to ease by the morning but winds will remain strong and gusty. Temperatures will be between -1C and 3C.

The polar weather which will continue overnight, with high risks of flooding on Atlantic coasts. However, the UK is expected to bear the brunt of the predicted weather bomb Storm Fionn.

Met Eireann have issued a Status Orange wind warning for counties Donegal, Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Sligo, Clare, Cork and Kerry.

The Atlantic coastal counties can expect winds speeds of up to 80km/h and gusts of up to 120km/h.

Winds will be strongest near the coasts and there is also a risk of flooding.

The warning came into place at 3.00pm on Tuesday and will remain in effect until 3am on Wednesday morning.

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"This evening and for a time tonight, Storm Fionn will bring very strong westerly winds to Atlantic coastal counties," the warning reads.

The weather crew have also issued three Status Yellow warnings, including a wind warning and a snow-ice warning.

The wind warning is for all counties in Leinster, and Cavan, Monaghan, Roscommon, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford.

"Today and tonight, westerly winds will reach mean wind speeds of up to 55 and 65km/h, with gusts of up to 110km/h," a spokesperson said.

The warning is ongoing and will remain in place until 3am Wednesday morning.

Read More

Meanwhile, a snow-ice warning put in place for Ireland will remain in place until 9am on Wednesday.

Further snow showers are to hit the country throughout the evening and snow of up to 3cm is expected most especially in Ulster, Connacht and north Leinster, according to Met Eireann.

The warning was updated at 3.00pm on Tuesday afternoon and will remain in place until 9.00am on Wednesday.

According to a roundup of weather reports from a number of Met Eireann stations around the country earlier today snow showers were recorded at Dublin Airport, Ballyhaise, Co Cavan and Knock Airport.

A number of schools across Northern Ireland were closed as a result of the snow and a section of M1 motorway was reduced to one lane during the Tuesday evening rush hour due to the snowfall.

Dublin Fire Brigade and the RSA have urged people to take caution on the roads as icy conditions take hold.

A further status yellow wind warning has been issued for Munster, Leinster and Galway ahead of heavy winds on Wednesday evening.

The winds will occur from evening time until early on Thursday, bringing high seas along the Atlantic and a risk of coastal flooding.

Meanwhile, there has been treacherous conditions across Northern Ireland on Tuesday as snow hit. Roads became impassable and the Ambulance Service reported 10 crashes by 10.30am.

The weather warning for the province has been upgraded to amber.

In Donegal, severe weather conditions are causing widespread traffic disruption and even resulted in lightning damaging a 45-metre blade on a wind-turbine.

People awoke to snowfall in many places in the county but roads were passable.

However, further heavy falls of sleet and snow left many roads in a dangerous condition.

Donegal County Council issued a plea to motorists to slow down.

"Donegal County Council is urging all members of the public to exercise caution, to take extra care on the roads and to allow extra time for journeys," said a spokesman.

The council's road gritting crews were out again from 4pm gritting all the main routes in the county with a view to keeping the roads passable.

The spokesman added "We are appealing to all motorists to take extra care and even if a road is treated it does not guarantee that the road is ice free so extreme care should be taken. Gritting crews will be out again tomorrow morning."

A number of minor accidents were reported across the county including Creeslough and Ramelton.

Lightning struck a windfarm on the Inishowen Peninsula on Monday evening at around 6pm causing severe damage to a 45 metre long blade on a wind turbine.

The incident took place at the windfarm on Crockbrack Hill, Meanletterbale, Inishowen leaving the nacelle of turbine T1 has been left badly damaged.

Finally, Met Eireann have also issued a Status Yellow weather advisory for Donegal, Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Sligo, Clare, Cork, Kerry and Limerick and warned of coastal flooding.

The warning reads; "High or very high seas are going to affect the Atlantic seaboard over the next few days, leading to an increased risk of coastal flooding."

The country is now bracing itself for wintry showers and snow over the next two days.

Temperatures are due to rise on Wednesday, before they plummet again.
Venezuelan authorities killed five militants and arrested five others during a shootout with a rogue helicopter pilot who bombed the government last year.

Oscar Perez, the leader of the militant cell who portrays himself as a James Bond-type figure on social media, appeared with a bloody face in nearly a dozen dramatic Instagram videos early yesterday. He claimed he was surrounded by authorities shooting at him with grenade launchers.

Expand Close Tactical police swarm towards the location of a gunfight with Oscar Perez / Facebook

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Whatsapp Tactical police swarm towards the location of a gunfight with Oscar Perez

State TV said two police officers were gunned down in the clashes but there is no word on the fate of Perez.

A former police pilot, Perez is wanted for using a stolen helicopter to lob grenades and shoot at government buildings in June as well as for breaking into a National Guard unit in December to steal weapons.

President Nicolas Maduro's leftist government has described him as a "fanatic, extremist terrorist" and a manhunt has been under way for months. Some Maduro critics have questioned whether Perez's attacks were staged in cahoots with the government to justify a further crackdown on the opposition.

Authorities finally tracked Perez down in the poor hillside neighbourhood of El Junquito yesterday.

"We're wounded... they're killing us!" said Perez in one video, seemingly wearing a bulletproof vest as he crouched in what appeared to be a small house. Gunshots were heard in the background.

"Venezuela, don't lose hope... Now only you have power so that we can all be free," he said in an earlier video, staring into the camera and telling his children he loves them and hopes to see them again. A witness in the area later saw an ambulance speed by and said gunshots were no longer heard.

Members of Maduro's government scoffed at Perez.

"What a coward now that he's caught like a rat!" tweeted Prisons Minister Iris Varela. "Where is the courage he had to attack military units, kill and injure officials and steal weapons?"

Perez, who also has been an action film star and portrays himself as a James Bond or Rambo-like figure on social media, has added surreal twists to Venezuela's long-running political drama.

He rose to fame in June after allegedly hijacking a police helicopter, flying over Caracas' centre and firing shots at and lobbing grenades on the Interior Ministry and the Supreme Court.

Perez claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was to fight what he said was a tyrannical government.
Japanese public broadcaster NHK issued a false alarm about a North Korean missile launch on Tuesday, just days after a similar gaffe caused panic in Hawaii.

The broadcaster managed to correct the error within minutes but it's not immediately clear what triggered the mistake.

We are still checking, an NHK spokesman said.

NHKs 6.55 p.m. alert said: North Korea appears to have launched a missile... The government urges people to take shelter inside buildings or underground.

The same alert was sent to mobile phone users of NHKs online news distribution service.

In five minutes, the broadcaster put out another message correcting itself.

Regional tension soared after North Korea in September conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test and in November said it had successfully tested a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach all of the U.S. mainland. It regularly threatens to destroy Japan and the United States.

There were no immediate reports of panic or other disruption following the Japanese report.

Human error and a lack of fail-safe measures during a civil defense warning drill led to the false missile alert that stirred panic across Hawaii, a state emergency management agency spokesman said.

Elaborating on the origins of Saturdays false alarm, which went uncorrected for nearly 40 minutes, spokesman Richard Rapoza said the employee who mistakenly sent the missile alert had been temporarily reassigned to other duties.
One of the incidents involved an Emirates plane

Bahrain has released radar footage which it said showed Qatari fighter jets passing by two Emirati commercial airliners on their way to the island nation.

The two alleged fly-bys have triggered a new dispute between the Gulf nations amid the diplomatic crisis gripping Qatar.

The incidents could further escalate tensions between Qatar and four Arab nations which have been boycotting it for months, among them the United Arab Emirates, home to the worlds busiest international airport.

They also could affect long-haul airline travel, as the regions carriers are a crucial link between the East and West.

Emirati officials described the fly-bys as the fighter jets intercepting their civilian aircraft.

Qatari authorities denied their jets intercepted the aircraft and have dismissed footage as unauthenticated videos.

The UAEs allegations follow two complaints by Qatar to the United Nations about Emirati military aircraft allegedly violating its international airspace amid the diplomatic crisis. The UAE denies those allegations.

Bahrain state television aired radar footage which it described as showing Emirates flight No EK837 from Dubai flying toward Bahrain International Airport at 10,400ft.

Two other radar signals described by the broadcaster as Qatari fighter jets flew at around 8,500ft in front of the Emirates flight. The radar screen briefly flashes orange text, likely a collision warning.

It is not clear from the footage at what distance the fighter jets allegedly passed the Emirates flight, but Bahrain previously described the distance as being about two miles.

The broadcaster also aired footage of an aeronautical chart it said showed a Qatari fighter jet flying across the flight path of a just-passed Etihad airliner, both at 8,000ft. It identified the flight as ETD23B, which corresponds to Flight No EY371, a direct Abu Dhabi-Bahrain flight which took off on Monday morning.

Both Dubai-based Emirates and Abu Dhabi-based Etihad have declined to comment. Both flights flew in international waters just north of the tip of Qatar, a peninsular nation that juts into the Persian Gulf, before landing in nearby Bahrain.

Saif al-Suwaidi, the director-general of the UAEs civil aviation division, told state media that crew and passengers on board the flights saw the military aircraft.

The incidents constituted a clear and explicit threat to the lives of innocent civilians, he said.

Qatars government communication office dismissed the Bahrain state television report as part of a smear campaign against it by the UAE.

Qatars stock exchange dropped some 2.5% in trading on Monday, one of its biggest jolts since the crisis began.

Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE cut off Qatars land, sea and air routes on June 5 over its alleged support for extremists and its close ties with Iran.

Qatar has long denied funding extremists. It recently restored full diplomatic relations with Iran, with which it shares a massive offshore natural gas field that makes the country and its 250,000 citizens extremely wealthy.

The crisis has hurt Qatar Airways, Dohas long-haul carrier which competes with Emirates and Etihad.
Bitcoin has fallen in value (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

The value of Bitcoin tumbled to below $12,000 as the prospect of a regulatory crackdown saw investors take fright from the cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin was trading 12% lower at $11,933 on Tuesday, according to Coindesk, a dramatic fall from its December highs of nearly $20,000.

However, it remains significantly higher than its $900 position recorded in January 2017.

Analysts put the fall down to regulatory concerns in South Korea, China and Europe.

Neil Wilson, senior market analyst at ETX Capital, said: Bitcoin faces a regulatory crunch sooner or later and increasingly we see signs of this starting to bite following South Koreas tentative plans to ban trading on cryptocurrencies and Chinas move to shutter mines.

Latest developments suggest more regulatory pressures.

China is said to be targeting websites and mobile apps that offer exchange-like services, in a bid to block access to platforms that deliver centralised trading on cryptocurrencies.

In addition to developments in China, South Korean finance minister Kim Dong-yeon reiterated on Tuesday that the government is actively considering an outright ban on crypto trading.

Germanys Bundesbank has also called for global regulation of Bitcoin, while Frances finance minister wants tougher rules for cryptocurrencies.

Only last week, US billionaire Warren Buffett ruled out a foray into cryptocurrencies, warning that the Bitcoin boom will come to a bad ending.

The chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway has joined the chorus of voices criticising the digital currency, which endured a rollercoaster ride at the tail end of 2017.

His comments came just a day after JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said he regretted calling Bitcoin a fraud.

The Wall Street boss was one of the most high-profile critics of the digital currency, saying he would fire employees trading the digital currency.
Unions have warned that the clock is ticking for thousands of workers caught up in the collapse of construction giant Carillion amid fears of redundancies in the coming days.

Firms working for Carillion on private sector contracts will only have Government support until Wednesday, Cabinet Office minister David Lidington has said.

The Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) warned ministers not to duck and dive over the pay and jobs of workers in private firms as well as in the public sector.

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Leaders of the TUC, Unite and GMB met Business Secretary Greg Clark on Tuesday evening and warned him that workers should not be left to carry the can.

GMB general secretary Tim Roache said: The clock is ticking for Carillions 8,500 private sector workers, and the Government must now offer them reassurance and financial guarantees.

No worker should go hungry, default on a bill or miss a rent or mortgage payment because of a crisis they did not cause.

Mr Clark has written to the Insolvency Service and the Official Receiver asking that the statutory investigation into the conduct of Carillions directors is fast-tracked and extended.

This means the Official Receivers investigation will consider whether those who are, or were previously directors of the company may have caused detriment to those owed money, including workers and businesses affected.

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The minister has also written to the chairman of the Financial Reporting Council, Sir Win Bischoff, and asked it to investigate the preparation of Carillions accounts past and present, as well as the companys auditors.

Mr Clark said: It is important we quickly get the full picture of the events which caused Carillion to enter liquidation, which is why I have asked the Insolvency Service to fast-track and broaden the scope of the Official Receivers investigation.

In particular, I have asked that the investigation looks not only at the conduct of the directors at the point of its insolvency, but also of any individuals who were previously directors. Any evidence of misconduct will be taken very seriously.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Carillions collapse was a watershed moment that should bring an end to rip-off privatisation of public services.

He said former Carillion directors should have to pay back any bonuses they have received.

Well the bonuses should come back. When there are people who are sub-contractors or small firms that are contracted into Carillion that are not getting paid, workers being made redundant at 48 hours notice, and less in some cases, the directors, for all the bonuses they have had, should pay them back.

Salaries that are still being paid to the top ranks should be halted, according to the Labour leader.

They should not be paid anything at the present time because they have run the company in such a way that all these jobs are at risk, he said.

So many of our public services are at risk  school meals services, hospital cleaning services, maintenance contracts, Army housing, are all at risk because of the way this company has been run.

RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: We have been told that only Carillion workers on what the Government defines as public sector contracts will be guaranteed their wages.

Clearly, anyone working in the rail sector is providing a service to the public and we are calling on the Government to confirm that there will be no dispute over this point and that our members will continue to be paid with their functions taken directly in-house.

There should be no equivocation from the Government and no attempt to duck and dive around this issue.

All of the Carillion rail works on the various contracts can be brought in-house easily and that is what we expect to happen with jobs and services protected.

TUC general secretary Frances OGrady called for a national taskforce involving unions to safeguard jobs, services and pensions.

Workers cant be left at the back of the queue. Each and every worker at Carillion needs to know where they stand. They have bills and mortgages to pay, and deserve certainty on their future.

Carillion has public sector or public-private partnership contracts worth 1.7 billion, including providing school dinners, cleaning and catering at NHS hospitals, construction work on rail projects such as HS2 and maintaining 50,000 Army base homes for the Ministry of Defence.

But its shares price has plunged more than 70% in the past six months after a string of profit warnings, and breached its financial rules.

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The group, which employs around 20,000 British workers, has been struggling under 900 million of debt and a 587 million pension deficit.

Anger is growing over bumper payouts received by Carillions former chief executive Richard Howson.

He pocketed 1.5 million in salary, bonuses and pension payments during 2016 and, as part of his departure deal, Carillion agreed to keep paying him a 660,000 salary and 28,000 benefits until October.
Donald Trump should be fit to serve his full term, his doctor has said (Manuel Balce/AP)

President Donald Trump has a very strong and a very probable possibility of completing his presidency with no medical issues, his doctor has said.

Mr Trumps overall health is excellent and he did exceedingly well on cognitive screening, the medic added.

White House and Navy Doctor Ronny Jackson gave details on Tuesday following Mr Trumps first physical last Friday at the Walter Reed military hospital.

Dr Jackson reported that the 6ft 3in president weighed in at 239lb, 3lb heavier than he was in September 2016.

Mr Trumps blood pressure was 122 over 74, and his total cholesterol was 223, which is higher than recommended.

Mr Trump was 70 when he took office, making him the oldest person ever elected to the nations highest office.

Dr Jackson said Mr Trump is healthy and should remain so for the remainder of his presidency.
By Damali Mukhaye & Ritah Kemigisa

Makerere University Ceremonies Committee has resolved to allow graduands during this 68th graduation to access the ceremony grounds with mobile phones.

Over the years as a security measure, the university has always banned graduands from accessing the freedom square with phones.

The head of security at the university Enock Abaine says this is to ease communication between the graduands, parents and the drivers who have no access to the venue and to also reduce congestion at check points.

Abaine however says other gadgets like cameras and bottled water are not allowed at the graduation venue.

Meanwhile, police has assured parents and graduands attending the graduation of maximum security.

According to the police spokesperson Emilian Kayima, the Kampala metropolitan police commander has deployed adequately both within and outside the university premises to ensure the safety of all people attending the four-day event.

The Vice Chancellor Prof Barnabus Nawangwe says over 14,000 students will graduate in various disciplines; the largest number in the history of Makerere University.

Those graduating today include students from the college of agriculture and environmental sciences, natural sciences and education as well as external studies.

The university will also award South African anti-apartheid champion and ex-wife to former President Nelson Mandela Winnie Mandela with an Honorary Doctorate of Laws for her contribution towards the fight and eventual elimination of apartheid in South Africa.

The ceremony will be crowned by the president Yoweri Museveni as chief guest on Friday.
A bus sits in the facade of a building in Eberbach near Mannheim, southern Germany, Tuesday, Jan 16, 2018. Several students inside the school bus have been injured. (Rene Priebe/dpa via AP)

Firefighters work beside a bus sitting in the facade of a building in Eberbach near Mannheim, southern Germany, Tuesday, Jan 16, 2018. Several students inside the school bus have been injured. (Rene Priebe/dpa via AP)

Firefighters stand beside a school bus which crashed into a house wall in Eierbach near Mannheim, southern Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018. Several students have been injured. (Rene Priebe/dpa via AP)

Police in southern Germany said 21 children were injured when a school bus crashed into a house.

Mannheim police spokesman Christoph Kunkel said on Tuesday that three helicopters helped take the pupils, including six with serious injuries, to hospital for treatment.

Expand Close Firefighters work beside a bus sitting in the facade of a building in Eberbach near Mannheim, southern Germany, Tuesday, Jan 16, 2018. Several students inside the school bus have been injured. (Rene Priebe/dpa via AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Firefighters work beside a bus sitting in the facade of a building in Eberbach near Mannheim, southern Germany, Tuesday, Jan 16, 2018. Several students inside the school bus have been injured. (Rene Priebe/dpa via AP)

He said the accident happened in the town of Eberbach, about 30 miles (50km) east of Mannheim, just after 7am.

He said the cause of the crash was not immediately clear but that officers are interviewing the driver of the bus.

Expand Close A bus sits in the facade of a building in Eberbach near Mannheim, southern Germany, Tuesday, Jan 16, 2018. Several students inside the school bus have been injured. (Rene Priebe/dpa via AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp A bus sits in the facade of a building in Eberbach near Mannheim, southern Germany, Tuesday, Jan 16, 2018. Several students inside the school bus have been injured. (Rene Priebe/dpa via AP)

The bus was full at the time of the accident but police did not have information on how many children were on board.

Mr Kunkel said a wide area around the accident scene has been cordoned off while the incident is investigated.
Dagorn had cashed a cheque from Mr Filippone for 23,000, a "gift", she claimed, to help her open a jewellery shop. Photo: AFP/Getty

A French woman dubbed the 'Black Widow' for allegedly wooing and then poisoning old men to pocket their money stood trial for murder yesterday in the Riviera town of Nice.

Patricia Dagorn (57) was accused of ensnaring elderly men via dating agencies, while posing as a gems expert. Two men were found dead in 2011 on the Cote d'Azur, two others survived, but had been drugged.

Dagorn is already in prison for theft, fraud and sequestration involving an elderly victim in France in 2012.

She has now been charged with the murder of Michel Kneffel, with whom she had been living at a residential hotel in Nice, and whose body was discovered in July 2011. Police there found vials of Valium and documents of a string of men in her belongings, including bank accounts and identity cards.

She is also accused of murdering Francesco Filippone (85), whose decomposing body was found in his bath at his home near Cannes in February 2011. Dagorn had cashed a cheque from Mr Filippone for 23,000, a "gift", she claimed, to help her open a jewellery shop.

Two other men who she is accused of poisoning will testify in court this week.

Dagorn's lawyers say she denies all charges. When first accused, one lawyer described her as a "fragile" woman who "feels better with elderly people". ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Mr Bolton went on TV yesterday to announce he was dumping his 25-year-old girlfriend after just a month because of racist comments she had made about Prince Harry's fiancee Meghan Markle. Photo: Getty

The wife of Ukip leader Henry Bolton has twisted the knife, refusing to have him back and questioning his "inexplicably poor" judgment over his affair with a "racist" party activist.

Tatiana Smurova-Bolton said her husband's future as leader should be decided by the party but offered him no support.

Mr Bolton deserted his wife and their two young children at Christmas after meeting Jo Marney, a model and Ukip member who is almost 30 years his junior.

Mr Bolton went on TV yesterday to announce he was dumping his 25-year-old girlfriend after just a month because of racist comments she had made about Prince Harry's fiancee Meghan Markle.

But his future as Ukip leader now hangs in the balance while his marriage to Ms Smurova-Bolton is also over.

Ms Smurova-Bolton said: "Regarding his political standing, all I can say is that his judgment over this woman was inexplicably poor but I will leave it to his party to decide about his political future."

She added: "Whether I would have him back, there is very little ground for contemplating such a possibility, certainly at the moment. I am still deeply hurt, he has not apologised for what he has done and how he treated us, his family.

"Whilst he did leave this woman, he has done so based on her racist comments which had a direct impact on his political future and not because he realised the terrible mistake he has done towards me and our little ones.

"Instead he speaks of his intent to 'continue supporting her and her family as all this was devastating for them'. Yet the devastation caused by his actions towards his real family was left unnoticed."

Ms Smurova-Bolton (42), who works in Austria, said she was 'relieved' that the affair had ended - should that be Mr Bolton's 'honest intent' - because "I was extremely worried for my children if in the future they would be spending time with their father in this woman's presence".

Ms Marney, she added, had made a series of "shocking comments... on a whole range of subjects", not just Ms Markle's ethnicity.

Some of the offensive comments made by Ms Marney - including remarks on Grenfell Tower victims - were posted on Facebook while others were contained in texts made public over the past two days.

It has emerged Mr Bolton warned one man who held compromising messages from Ms Marney "you are playing with fire" in an apparent attempt to prevent them being made public. Mr Bolton told the man to "pack it in", said "you are so far out of our depth here" and even threatened legal action.

A Ukip spokesman confirmed Mr Bolton had sent the messages but insisted: "Mr Bolton was trying to defend Ms Marney from harassment."

Mr Bolton, a former British army officer, said on television his relationship with Ms Marney was "obviously quite incompatible" with his position as party leader and the "romantic element" is over. However he said he would continue to support Ms Marney, who he said had been left "distraught". ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Peter Madsen was rescued before his submarine sank. Photo: Getty Images

Danish inventor Peter Madsen has been charged with murdering Swedish journalist Kim Wall during a trip on his private submarine.

Prosecutors alleged Madsen either cut Ms Wall's throat or strangled her, describing the case as "very unusual and extremely gross".

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Madsen is charged with murder as well as indecent handling of a corpse for disposing of Ms Wall's body.

The inventor claims the journalist died accidentally inside the submarine while he was on deck during the excursion in August. However, he has admitted throwing her body parts into the sea.

The start of the trial has been set for March 8. A verdict is expected on April 25.
Mr Macron shakes hands with Ahmed Adam, from Sudan, during his visit to a migrant centre (AP)

French president Emmanuel Macron has said he wants to negotiate with the UK over better police co-operation to handle migrants in the French port of Calais  and is also seeking more money from Britain to help develop the city.

Mr Macron is visiting the northern city, where many migrants attempt to sneak across the Channel.

In a speech to security forces in the city, Mr Macron also said he wants the UK to take in more unaccompanied minors.

Mr Macron is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Theresa May in Sandhurst on Thursday.

He said France is doing everything to prevent migrants from illegally entering the UK, insisting: Calais is not a back door to England.

Expand Close Emmanuel Macron laughs during his visit to a migrant centre in Croisilles, northern France (AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Emmanuel Macron laughs during his visit to a migrant centre in Croisilles, northern France (AP)

The city is the closest point between France and Britain, with two cross-Channel transport systems, the Eurotunnel and ferries.

Mr Macron also addressed allegations of police brutality against migrants in Calais, saying sanctions will be applied in cases of abuse.

He urged French police forces to be exemplary when dealing with the hundreds of migrants staying in and around the city.

Mr Macron said: I cannot let the idea spread that some police forces use physical violence, confiscate personal belongings, wake up people in the middle of the night and use tear gas on water points when meals are distributed.

If true, such behaviour will be sanctioned, he said, adding that any false allegations against police will be investigated.

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Some local associations helping migrants have accused police of sometimes being violent with migrants.

Mr Macron added that the French state is going to handle food distribution for migrants in the same way that it is already providing health care.

In a speech, the French president thanked non-governmental associations for all their help to take care of migrants who are staying in the region.

At the same time, he warned associations against trying to encourage people to stay out of migrant centres.

Mr Macron suggested some associations lie to migrants by telling them police are waiting at the centres.

This lie  works against our efficiency, he said.

Some migrants stay out of the centres because they do not want to apply for asylum in France, instead trying to cross the border to Britain.
Members of the news media are parked outside the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Members of the news media stand outside the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Members of the news media sit parked outside the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Neighbors stand and watch news crews outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Neighbors stand and watch news crews outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

The home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louis Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louis Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

The home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

A van sits parked on the driveway of the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

David Allen Turpin (57) and 49-year old Louise Anna Turpin arrested on torture and child endangerment charges

Thirteen siblings have been rescued by police after a number of them were found chained to beds in "foul-smelling surroundings".

A 17-year-old girl called police after escaping from her family's California home where she and her 12 brothers and sisters were locked up, some so malnourished officers at first believed all were children even though seven are adults.

Expand Close A van sits parked on the driveway of the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake / Facebook

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Whatsapp A van sits parked on the driveway of the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

The girl, who was so small officers initially believed she was only 10, called 911 and was met by police who interviewed her and then went to the family home in Perris, about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

They found several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

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Whatsapp Neighbors stand and watch news crews outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

The children, ages two to 29, "appeared to be malnourished and very dirty," according to officers who arrested the parents.

David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, each were held on 9 million dollar (7.34 million) bail and could face charges including torture and child endangerment.

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Whatsapp Members of the news media sit parked outside the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

It was not immediately known if they had lawyers.

Neighbours said they were stunned by the arrests. Andrew Santillan, who lives around the corner, heard about the case from a friend.

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Whatsapp Neighbors stand and watch news crews outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

"I had no idea this was going on," he told the Press-Enterprise of Riverside. "I didn't know there were kids in the house."

Other neighbours described the family as intensely private.

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A few years ago, Robert Perkins said he and his mother saw a few family members constructing a Nativity scene in the Turpins' front yard. Mr Perkins said he complimented them on it.

"They didn't say a word," he said.

The Turpins filed for bankruptcy in 2011, stating in court documents they owed between 100,000 dollars (81,540) and 500,000 dollars (407,700), The New York Times reported.

At that time, Mr Turpin worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman and earned 140,000 dollars (114,000) annually and his wife was a homemaker, records showed.

Their bankruptcy lawyer, Ivan Trahan, told the Times he never met the children but the couple "spoke about them highly."

"We remember them as a very nice couple," Mr Trahan said, adding that Louise Turpin told him the family loved Disneyland and visited often.
Donald Trump's unpredictability makes him more dangerous than Richard Nixon, according to the former White House attorney who helped in the Watergate cover-up, before co-operating with investigators against the only president to resign from office.

John Dean said the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller into the current administration could end up being more damaging to the US than the scandal that brought down Nixon in 1974.

Mr Dean's central role in the cover-up that brought down a president gives him a unique insight into the pressure mounting on the White House and parallels that span the decades.

He said that the Richard Nixon he knew was "an authoritarian personality", just like Mr Trump appeared to be. However, there were important differences, mainly that Mr Nixon understood the presidency better.

"They're very different in their perception of the president's authority," he said. "Trump is more dangerous because he doesn't know what he's doing. The danger is he could do anything.

"If Mueller wants him, Trump could just say, 'Come and get me, I have the Defence Department surrounding the White House.' Then you've got a real problem."

In 'Fire and Fury', author Michael Wolff's recently published expose of the Trump White House, Mr Trump was said to be a "John Dean freak", comparing him with James Comey, whom Mr Trump fired as head of the FBI.

"Comey was a rat," said Mr Trump, according to the book. He then added: "John Dean. John Dean. Do you know what John Dean did to Nixon?"

Mr Dean, now 79, said he was pleased to be the focus of Mr Trump's ire.

He said: "It means that maybe somebody's reminding him that everything he's doing may be worse than Watergate, that maybe he's thinking about it."

Mr Nixon was competent but dishonest, while Mr Trump appeared to be incompetent and dishonest, he added.

Interference

The Mueller probe is looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mr Dean said there were similarities in that Watergate began with a break-in at the HQ of the Democratic National Committee, while 'Russiagate' started with a hack of the DNC's computers. In both cases, a special counsel was brought in and there were signs of a White House cover-up.

It was surprising how little the current administration appeared to have learned from the past in terms of how to handle a special counsel investigation.

"There are lots of echoes of Watergate," said Mr Dean. Just as Nixon's White House bungled the cover-up, so too Mr Trump should not have fired Mr Comey from the FBI.

"The firing of Comey by Trump was a terrific blunder, about as ham-handed as you can get, and not dissimilar from Nixon asking the CIA to block the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in," he said.

Mr Dean added that current White House aides would be under intense pressure to co-operate with Mr Mueller.

"They've signed non-disclosure agreements but if they're in front of a grand jury and they lie - or they lie to the FBI - we've already seen what happens with Michael Flynn," he said referring to the former national security adviser who was fired last year and has since pleaded guilty to making false statements.

Mr Dean, who after Watergate became an investment banker and author in Los Angeles, said Mr Trump should not expect an end to the Mueller investigation soon.

It was more than two years from the Watergate burglary in June 1972 to Mr Nixon's resignation in August 1974.

"Today, with social media, it's everywhere and it seems to be going faster," he said. "But the investigation may not be. You can only investigate at a certain speed. People can only talk [to Mr Mueller] at a certain speed." ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Members of the news media are parked outside the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Members of the news media stand outside the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Members of the news media sit parked outside the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Neighbors stand and watch news crews outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Neighbors stand and watch news crews outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

The home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louis Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louis Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

The home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

A van sits parked on the driveway of the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

David Allen Turpin (57) and 49-year old Louise Anna Turpin arrested on torture and child endangerment charges

The parents of 13 adults and children that were discovered emaciated in a "foul-smelling" California home were "very protective of their children", according to family members.

David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, were each held on 9 million dollar (7.34 million) bail and could face charges including torture and child endangerment after the shocking discovery of their family.

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The thirteen siblings were rescued by police after a number of them were found chained to beds in "foul-smelling surroundings".

Now, David Turpins parents, James and Betty Turpin of West Virginia, have spoken to ABC News and said they were "surprised and shocked" at the allegations.

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Whatsapp Neighbors stand and watch news crews outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

They said their grandchildren are home-schooled, and that they had not seen their son and daughter-in-law in four or five years.

They said the parents were "very protective of their children" and were a "respectable family".

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Whatsapp Members of the news media sit parked outside the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

James and Betty Turpin said they last saw their son and daughter-in-law when they visited them in California some four to five years ago. They said they have kept in touch with them by phone since.

The couple told ABC News "God called on them [David and Louise]" to have as many children as they did.

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Whatsapp Neighbors stand and watch news crews outside the home of David Allen and Louise Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

The children in the home were undergoing "very strict homeschooling" and would memorise long passages of the bible.

Some of the children's goals were to memorise the bible in its entirety, according to the couple.

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Whatsapp News crews gather outside the home of David Allen and Louis Anna Turpin in Perris, California, U.S., January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

The grandparents said they thought the children "looked thin" the last time they saw them, but that they seemed like a "happy family".

Discovery

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Whatsapp A van sits parked on the driveway of the home of David Allen Turpin and Louise Ann Turpin in Perris, California, U.S. January 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

The discovery was made after a 17-year-old girl called police after escaping from her family's California home where she and her 12 brothers and sisters were locked up, some so malnourished officers at first believed all were children even though seven are adults.

The girl, who was so small officers initially believed she was only 10, called 911 and was met by police who interviewed her and then went to the family home in Perris, about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

They found several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

The children, ages two to 29, "appeared to be malnourished and very dirty," according to officers who arrested the parents.

Neighbours said they were stunned by the arrests. Andrew Santillan, who lives around the corner, heard about the case from a friend.

"I had no idea this was going on," he told the Press-Enterprise of Riverside. "I didn't know there were kids in the house."

Other neighbours described the family as intensely private.

A few years ago, Robert Perkins said he and his mother saw a few family members constructing a Nativity scene in the Turpins' front yard. Mr Perkins said he complimented them on it.

"They didn't say a word," he said.

The Turpins filed for bankruptcy in 2011, stating in court documents they owed between 100,000 dollars (81,540) and 500,000 dollars (407,700), The New York Times reported.

At that time, Mr Turpin worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman and earned 140,000 dollars (114,000) annually and his wife was a homemaker, records showed.

Their bankruptcy lawyer, Ivan Trahan, told the Times he never met the children but the couple "spoke about them highly."

"We remember them as a very nice couple," Mr Trahan said, adding that Louise Turpin told him the family loved Disneyland and visited often.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon's downfall came after the publication of Fire And Fury (AP)

Former White House senior adviser Steve Bannon has arrived for his appearance before the US House Intelligence Committee in Washington as part of its probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The interview follows Mr Bannons spectacular fall from power after being quoted in a book as saying US president Donald Trumps son and others engaged in treasonous behaviour for taking a meeting with Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign.

In Michael Wolffs book, Fire And Fury, Mr Bannon accuses Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of essentially betraying the nation by meeting with a group of Russian lawyers and lobbyists who they believed were ready to offer dirt on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

More recently, Mr Bannon has said he was not referring to Mr Trump Jr, but rather to Mr Manafort. Mr Wolff stands by his account.

After the books release, Mr Trump quickly disavowed Sloppy Steve Bannon and argued extensively there was no evidence of collusion between his presidential campaign and operatives tied to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

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Mr Bannon apologised a few days later, but was stripped of his job leading the pro-Trump news site Breitbart News. He had largely avoided the scrutiny of congressional investigators, who instead focused much of their energy on trying to secure interviews with top witnesses like Mr Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

But Mr Bannon played a critical role in the campaign, the presidential transition and the White House  all during times now under scrutiny from congressional investigators looking for possible evidence of a connection between Mr Trumps operations and Russia.

The former strategist recently retained the same lawyer being used by former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House general counsel Don McGahn.

The House Intelligence Committee is speeding towards a conclusion of its interviews in the Russia investigation.

The final result could be marred by partisan infighting, raising the probability that Republicans on the panel will issue one set of findings while the Democrats will release their own.
Hundreds of flights have been cancelled in Texas, where frigid temperatures have left runways and roads dangerously icy.

The US National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for the Houston area and is warning mariners of gale-force winds along the Texas coast. Sleet and freezing rain are forecast for parts of the state.

Flights into Houston, San Antonio and elsewhere have been cancelled. Houston is enduring minus 6C, while San Antonio stands at minus 1C.

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Whatsapp Mike Falsetto cleans the ice from his windshield in South Bend, Indiana (AP)

Police in Austin said highways in the state capital are iced over and several counties opened emergency operation centres to co-ordinate emergency response.

The cold front also brought snow to parts of North Texas, where the wind chill pushed temperatures lower still.

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In Mississippi, ice coated roads and bridges in 36 of the states 82 counties, the Mississippi Department of Transport said.

Road crews were working to put salt and other materials on roadways, mainly in the northern and central parts of the state.

Mississippi authorities advised people to limit travel only to emergencies.

Some of the heaviest snow in Mississippi was expected in the states Delta region, where up to 3in is possible.

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Whatsapp Traffic travels eastbound on Interstate 24 near Paducah, Kentucky (AP)

Meanwhile, snow fell across much of Kentucky and Tennessee, leading to multiple school closures and multiple road crashes.

The Kentucky Transportation Department said several accidents closed a 10-mile section of the Interestate 24 road in western Kentucky and blocked southbound lanes of Interestate 65 in the south-central part of the state.

The forecast in Kentucky predicted up to 3in of snow for sections of central and eastern Kentucky.

In Tennessee, forecasters have warned there could be up to 6in of snow in the central part of the state and 1-3in and 1in in the western and eastern regions.

Overnight, temperatures are expected to turn bitterly cold, with sub-zero wind chills.
Yesterday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could barely contain his rage. A country we call an ally is insisting on forming a terror army on our borders, he said in a speech in Ankara Photo: AP

Turkey yesterday warned the US it was "playing with fire" over plans to set up a 30,000-strong force to police its border with Syria, saying it had tanks ready at the frontier.

The US announced plans on Sunday for a "border security force" - made up of Kurdish and Arab fighters - to prevent a resurgence by Isil. It will be tasked with securing Syria's northern border with Turkey and its eastern border with Iraq in areas that are under the fighters' control.

Ankara has repeatedly warned Washington over its support for the Syrian Kurdish People's Defence Units (YPG), which it sees as a terrorist group.

Yesterday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could barely contain his rage. "A country we call an ally is insisting on forming a terror army on our borders," he said in a speech in Ankara.

"What can that terror army target but Turkey? Our mission is to strangle it before it's even born.

"Don't stand between us and this herd of murderers. Otherwise, we won't be responsible for the unwanted incidents that may arise."

Turkey has been threatening to launch a new military operation against the main Syrian Kurdish militia, known as the People's Defence Units, or YPG, in the Kurdish-held Afrin enclave in northern Syria.

The YPG is the backbone of a Syrian force that drove Isil from much of northern and eastern Syria with the help of US-led airstrikes.

Russia has also warned that the nascent US force threatens to fuel tensions around Afrin.

The US-led coalition says the new force, expected to reach 30,000 in the next several years, is a key element of its strategy in Syria to prevent the resurgence of the Isil group in Syria.

"A strong border security force will prohibit [Isil] freedom of movement and deny the transportation of illicit materials," the coalition said. "This will enable the Syrian people to establish effective local, representative governance and reclaim their land."

The core of the force is to be made up of fighters from the existing Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the coalition's ally in the fight against Isil.

Some 230 cadets have already been recruited to the new border force.

The force is expected to be deployed along the borders of the SDF-held areas and Iraq and Turkey.

Turkey sent troops into Syria in 2016 to prevent Syrian Kurdish fighters from forming a contiguous entity along its border.

It has also supported rival Syrian rebels and independently fought to drive Isil from parts of Syria.
President Donald Trump and his son Barron board Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport (AP)

As the fallout continues over US president Donald Trumps use of a vulgar term to describe African countries during immigration talks, aides to the president are locked in an internal debate over which version of the word the president used.

Mr Trump was said to have uttered shithole during last Thursdays conversation with senators in the Oval Office, a version backed up by Democrat Dick Durbin and some Republicans.

When Mr Durbin was challenged about his version of what term Mr Trump used, the Illinois senator said: I stand by every word I said about what was said.

There is internal debate in the West Wing over whether Mr Trump said shithole or shithouse.

One person who attended the meeting told aides they heard the latter expletive, while others recalled the president saying the more widely reported shithole.

Expand Close Donald Trump with first lady Melania Trump at the White House (AP) / Facebook

Twitter

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Whatsapp Donald Trump with first lady Melania Trump at the White House (AP)

One insider believes the discrepancy may be why some Republican senators are denying having heard the president say shithole.

Mr Trump has not clarified to aides what he said, but told reporters on Sunday night in Florida that comments attributed to him werent made.

The White House has not denied that Mr Trump used a vulgar term, and indicated on Tuesday that no apology would be forthcoming.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said: The president hasnt said he didnt use strong language.

This is an important issue, hes passionate about it, hes not going to apologise for trying to fix our immigration system.

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The debate continued as Washington was gripped with uncertainty over whether the government would shut down at midnight on Friday, when temporary government funding is set to run out, in the absence of a deal on immigration and other matters.

The path to a deal seems even more complicated after last weeks coarse Oval Office conversation, and Mr Trump has accused Mr Durbin of undermining the trust necessary to reach an agreement.

Without explicitly denying using the vulgarity, Mr Trump lashed out at Mr Durbin, who said the president uttered it several times during the meeting.

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Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting, Mr Trump tweeted Monday, using a nickname to needle the Illinois senator.

Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military.

He was referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, which protects young people who came to the US as children and are living here illegally.

Mr Trump announced last year that he will end the Obama-era DACA program unless legislators come up with a solution by March. Members of Congress from both parties are trying to strike a deal Mr Trump would support to extend that protection.
Kolkata, Jan 16 (IBNS) As Bengal gears up for the fourth edition of Bengal Global Business Summit 2018 (BGBS2018) many heads of foreign consulates including China, Italy, Germany and Netherlands would be attending the big event.

Some of them have announced teams of business delegates from their respective countries would also be in Kolkata for the two day (Jan 16 and 17) big ticket event to scout for business opportunities.

Dr Toni Atanasovski, the Ambassador of The Republic of Macedonia, a small Balkan nation with one-fourth the population of Kolkata, would also be attending the BGBS 2018 with an objective to forge business and cultural ties with Bengal.

Republic of Macedonia and India have a very special cultural link through St Teresa of Kolkata or Mother Teresa who was born in Skopje, the capital city of the Republic of Macedonia.

According to a World Bank report for the Year 2017, Macedonia has been ranked the 10th best country in the world in terms of Ease of Doing Business.

Macedonia had, in September 2017, opened its Honorary Consul office in Kolkata by appointing industrialist Namit Bajoria as the Honorary Consul in Kolkata.

While ties between India and Macedonia go back to the ancient times, in recent times there has been a sense of shared heritage between the two countries with the canonisation of Mother Teresa. Kolkata and Skopje are like soul mates, said Dr Atanasovski, Ambassador of Republic of Macedonia in India, in a free-wheeling talk with India Blooms News Service.

Macedonia is likely to approach the Bengal government with a proposal to declare Skopje and Kolkata as twin cities. Mother Teresa was born in Skopje and later chose Calcutta as her home. Republic of Macedonia is looking beyond cultural ties to forge business, trade and tourism with India and Bengal, said Namit Bajoria, Honorary Consul, Republic of Macedonia in Kolkata.

Highlighting some of the common factors between Kolkata and Skopje, Bajoria said that Skopje is a beautiful city which underwent a major beautification drive similar to the one which is currently undertaken by the state government in Kolkata.

I am here to have an understanding of the business opportunities and advantages Bengal has to offer to foreign investors. There is always the scope of joint ventures which I look forward to. Macedonia also has a robust policy for investing in trade and business through which one can tap the European Union market, Dr Atanasovski said.

Macedonia also has some very beautiful and scenic tourist spots like Ohrid and Ohrid Lake declared as Cultural and Natural World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. These spots offer ideal locales for shooting films.

Macedonia is currently building one of the largest cathedrals in Skopje dedicated to Mother Teresa, informed Dr Toni Atanasovski.

Bajoria said: We would look forward to taking a cultural and business delegation from Kolkata to Skopje for the inauguration programme."

Namit Bajoria had donated a statue of Mother Teresa which was installed at the Archbishops House in Kolkata in 2016
Kolkata, Jan 16 (IBNS): After a poor show in the last year, West Bengal Chief Minister is eyeing on to host a successful Bengal Global Business Summit 2017 starting from Tuesday in Kolkata.

The Summit will take place between Jan 16-17.

Unlike the last year's summit, the fourth BGBS will host eminent businessmen like L N Mittal, Mukesh Ambani, Sajjan Jindal.

Banerjee, during her UK visit last year, invited Mittal and got his confirmation. She had also invited Ambani by visiting his residence in Mumbai.

Jindal, whose cement factory was inaugurated in the state on Monday, is already in the state.

JSW Cement, producer of PSC cement in India and part of US$ 12 billion JSW Group, on Monday announced the inauguration of its 2.4 MTPA manufacturing unit at Salboni in West Bengal.

Though Union minister Nitin Gadkari was scheduled to attend the summit, he has cancelled his visit to the state post clashes between West Bengal ruling party Trinamool and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) few days ago.



Image: twitter.com/MamataOfficial
New Delhi, Jan 16 (IBNS): Given the scale of the Indian economy and the relevance of cutting-edge Israeli technologies, even sky is not the limit for what both countries may achieve together, said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, highlighting the India-Israel business summit.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu too appreciated PM Modi's faith in Israel and said, "I arrived in India with the biggest delegation of business leaders that has ever joined an Israeli PM on an official visit. The goal: to deepen the economic ties between India and Israel."

Excerpts from the PM Modi's speech at the India-Israel Business Summit which took place on Monday:

"I welcome Prime Minister Netanyahu and members of the Israeli Delegation on behalf of all my countrymen. It is an added pleasure to be with the CEOs of both countries. Prime Minister Netanyahu and I have just completed a fruitful interaction with Indian and Israeli business leaders through the bilateral CEOs Forum. I have high hopes from this interaction and partnership of CEOs, which started last year.

I have always had a deep regard for Israel and its people. I visited Israel in 2006 as Chief Minister of Gujarat. Again last year in July, I visited Israel, the first such visit from India.

It was a very special visit. I experienced at close quarters the remarkable spirit of innovation, enterprise and perseverance that drives Israel. There is new energy and purpose that has in-vigorated our ties over the last few years. It will help take our cooperation to greater heights. We stand on the cusp of a bright new chapter in India-Israel relations driven by our people and the mutual opportunities for betterment of their lives.

The role of business and industry is crucial in the transformation of our ties. It is your combined efforts that will add real value to our interaction and produce concrete successes. Given the scale of the Indian economy and the relevance of cutting-edge Israeli technologies for us, even sky is not the limit for what we may achieve together!

I am delighted that today we have launched the maiden call for joint R&D projects under the India-Israel Industrial R&D and Technological Innovation Fund (i4F) which was announced during my visit to Israel last July. This Fund, to be utilized over a period of 5 years, is a welcome opportunity to combine the talent pool of the two countries in pursuit of path-breaking technological solutions that can be commercially exploited.

I strongly encourage enterprises in both countries to utilize this platform. Equally exciting is the pick up in science and technology exchanges through joint R&D projects such as in areas like "Data Analytics and "Cyber Space security.

I am happy to note that the India-Israel Innovation and Technology Conclave is going to be held in India in July 2018. I hope this Conclave will spur co--development of new technologies. In fact, the ground-work for this will be started from iCREATE day after tomorrow. We are both going to Gujarat to inaugurate this campus, which is being developed as a leading innovation hub.

I am taking Prime Minister Netanyahu to rural areas of Gujarat because the real power of technology and innovation lies in the benefit it brings to the common man. Israel is universally known as the Start-up nation with a unique eco-system for innovation and incubation.

The credit for this goes to the Israeli entrepreneurs. You have made Israel a strong, stable and innovative economy. You have made a country of 8 million people, shine as a global power-house of technology.

Whether it is Water Tech; or Agri-Tech; whether it is food production, its processing or conservation; Israel has been a shining example with new breakthru and advances. Whether it is physical or virtual security; whether it is on land, water or space; your technology has won admiration. In fact, hailing from a water deficient state in India, I have particularly admired Israels water efficiency.

In India, we have been taking steady steps over three years at both macro as well as micro-level, to make a difference. Our motto is: Reform, Perform and Transform.

The results are two-fold. On the one hand, our procedures, processes and systems are getting aligned with the best in the world. Secondly, we are able to maintain the pace of faster growth.

In spite of deep structural reforms, we are among the fastest growing major economies. FDI inflows are at an all-time high, with 40% rise. Tremendous work is being done to skill and employ the youth. 65% of our population is below 35 years of age and is hungry for technology-enabled growth.

This is our greatest opportunity as well as challenge. For this purpose, we have started the Start-up India campaign. There is vast potential for India-Israel partnership in this area. The India-Israel Innovation Bridge will act as a link between the Start-ups of the two sides. I have been saying that Indian Industries, start-ups and the academic institutions must collaborate with their Israeli counterparts to access the huge reservoir of knowledge.

India has size and scale.

Israel has sharpness and edge.

There would be many ideas and technologies that can be useful for or can be commercially scaled up in India.

Today, we have emerged as one of the largest manufacturing nations. But we are not done yet. We are positioning India as a global manufacturing hub leveraging the energy of our youth.

The Make in India initiative is designed to help achieve this. Through these initiatives, combined with the new eco-system of a formal economy and a unified tax regime, we are trying to create a NEW INDIA.

We are particularly keen to develop India into a knowledge-based, skill-supported and technology-driven society. A grand beginning has already been made through Digital India and Skill India. To enable this transformation, in the last few years, my Government has undertaken substantial reforms.

We have resolved a number of regulatory and policy issues facing the businesses and companies. We have worked sincerely on ease of doing business in India.

The results are there to see:

In the last three years, India has moved up 42 places in the index of Ease of Doing Business of World Bank;

We have moved up 21 places on the Global Innovation Index of WIPO in two years.

We have also moved up 32 places in last two years in the Global Competitive-

ness Index of the World Economic Forum - the highest for any country;

We moved 19 places on the Logistics Performance Index of 2016 of World Bank ;

We are among the top 10 FDI destinations listed by UNCTAD But we will not stop.

We want to do more and do better.

To enable entry of capital and technology, most of the sectors including defence, have been opened for FDI. More than 90 percent of the FDI approvals have been put on automatic route.

We are now among the most open economies. Just a few days ago, we have allowed 100% automatic route FDI in single brand retail and construction development. We also opened up our national carrier, Air India, to foreign investors.

Every day we are making it easier to do business in India. In taxation, we have carried out a number of historic reforms. The path breaking GST reform has been introduced successfully and smoothly.

It is by far the biggest business and economic reform India has ever done. With introduction of GST and of Financial Technologies and digital transactions, we have really moved towards a modern tax regime, which is also transparent, stable and predictable.

Several Israeli companies have joined hands with Indian companies for Making in India. Many others, especially those with advanced water technologies and agri techniques, defence and security systems, and pharma knowledge have a foot-hold in India. Similarly, Indian companies have significant presence in several sectors in Israel like IT, Irrigation and Pharma.

Diamond remains a strong link in our trade. There are more business joint ventures today than before. However, this is just the beginning. Our trade with Israel has grown to more than 5 billion dollars.

But this is still well below the real potential. We must attain the full potential of our ties. This is not only a diplomatic imperative but also an economic one. I welcome your suggestions on how to unlock our combined potential. The spirit of innovation, adaptation and problem solving is inherent in both countries.

Just to give you an example:

Imagine the environmental and economic gains if we can collaborate to save wastage and if we can add value in our fruits, vegetables and horticulture! Similar is the case with water.

We have situations of plenty as well as scarcity of water. We have situations of food being thrown away even as there are many who go hungry.

Indias development agenda is huge. It presents a vast economic opportunity for Israeli companies. I invite more and more Israeli people, businesses and companies to come and work in India.

Along with the Government and people, the business community of India too is keen to join hands. I wish your companies and ventures all success. I assure you of my support and that of my Government wherever it is required. And I thank Prime Minister Netanyahu for his continuous support in fast-tracking India-Israel trade and economic collaboration. I am confident many successes lie ahead for our partnership."



Image: PIB
Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Snow showers this evening. Breaks in the overcast later. Low 17F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of snow 40%..

Tonight

Snow showers this evening. Breaks in the overcast later. Low 17F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of snow 40%.
Kolkata, Jan 16 (IBNS): Giving positive news, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) chairman Mukesh Ambani on Tuesday said his company will invest Rs. 5,000 crore in West Bengal.

He said the investments will be made in the telecom and petro-retail businesses.

Appreciating West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at the Bengal Global Business Summit here, Ambani said: "West Bengal is becoming Best Bengal!."

He said Banerjee has created a 'friendly climate' in the state.

Speaking on investment, Ambani promised: "We are committing to invest another Rs. 5,000 crore in Jio and the entire digital eco-system, retail and retro-retail in the next few years."

West Bengal Chief Minister is eyeing on to host a successful Bengal Global Business Summit 2017 starting from Tuesday in Kolkata.

The Summit will take place between Jan 16-17.

The fourth BGBS is hosting eminent businessmen like L N Mittal, Mukesh Ambani, Sajjan Jindal.

Banerjee, during her UK visit last year, invited Mittal and got his confirmation.

She had also invited Ambani by visiting his residence in Mumbai.

Jindal, whose cement factory was inaugurated in the state on Monday, is already in the state.

JSW Cement, producer of PSC cement in India and part of US$ 12 billion JSW Group, on Monday announced the inauguration of its 2.4 MTPA manufacturing unit at Salboni in West Bengal.

Banerjee tweeted: "9 partner countries, 32 countries with big delegations, more than 4000 participants, we look forward to #BGBS2018 with lots of optimism. My best wishes to all. #BengalMeansBusiness."

9 partner countries, 32 countries with big delegations, more than 4000 participants, we look forward to #BGBS2018 with lots of optimism. My best wishes to all. #BengalMeansBusiness pic.twitter.com/UTKH8NNtC8  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) January 16, 2018

Image: Mamata Banerjee Twitter page


Mumbai, Jan 16 (IBNS): Land Rover has introduced the Model Year 2018 Range Rover Evoque Landmark Edition in India to commemorate six 'successful' years of the SUV.

The Landmark Edition is priced at a 50.20 Lakh.

It is powered by the 132 kW 2.0 l Ingenium diesel powertrain.

Rohit Suri, President & Managing Director, Jaguar Land Rover India Ltd. (JLRIL), said: The Range Rover Evoque has brought Range Rover luxury and refinement to new customers around the world and in India. Its critically acclaimed design, desirability and all-terrain capability has been further enhanced with the Model Year 2018 Range Rover Landmark Edition and we are happy to offer it to our discerning customers. With its striking looks and updated feature set, we are confident that the Range Rover Evoque fan base will grow even further.
As cancer spreads relentlessly across India, with 15 lakh new cancer cases every year according to the National Cancer Registry, computer-assisted surgery will help in fighting it aggressively and effectively.



Robotic Surgeries, where a robot assists the surgeon, scores over conventional surgery by minimising blood loss, dramatically reducing post-operative recovery time, and bringing precision in executing the procedure, thus saving healthy tissue from damage.

With multi-disciplinary robotic surgery proving its efficacy in India in the last 7 years, a few sessions by trained robotic gynaecologists will highlight how computer-assisted surgeries are able to vanquish various forms of cancers, particularly in the medical disciplines of Gynaecology.



Gynaecologists in India are now increasingly using robotic surgery for ovarian cancer, cervical cancer and endometrial cancer. In addition it is used for groin node dissection for cancer of the vulva.



A 3-dimensional high definition vision system and 10 times magnification gives the surgeons to work with tiny wristed instruments that bend and rotate far greater than the human hand enabling superior outcomes, quick recovery and much shorter hospital stays, says Gopal Chakravarthy, CEO, Vattikuti Technologies.

A da Vinci surgical robot brings in human wrist-like movement with its instruments and offers a 10 times enlarged 3-dimensional view. And that is exactly what a tour of a da Vinci surgical robot across India will demonstrate. Surgeons in the State capital will get a first-hand look at how a surgical robot works and understand the situations in which its benefits unfold.



Dr. SP Somashekhar, Consultant Surgical, Gynec-Onco & Robotic Surgeon, Manipal Hospitals, Bengaluru will perform a live Gynaecology procedure and will subsequently lead a discussion on 'da Vinci Robotic Surgery in Gynaecology.

Robotic surgeries are used in both benign and malignant gynaecological conditions. It is especially useful in difficult surgeries that requires great precision and expertise, says Dr Sabhyata Gupta, Director Gynaecology of Medanta The Medicity.



According to Dr Gupta, robotic surgery is being used in procedures such as myomectomy (surgical removal of fibroids), difficult hysterectomies (removal of uterus), clearance of endometriosis (a painful tissue disorder of the uterus) and repair of the vesico vaginal fistula (an abnormal opening), which are all benign conditions.

Robotic Surgerys biggest benefit in cancer surgeries is better patient outcomes. Patients undergoing robotic surgery also report reduced pain and faster return to normal functions thus causing minimal disruption in a womans day to day activities, said Dr Rooma Sinha, Gynaecologist, Laparoscopic and Robotic Surgeon, Urogynaecologist, at Apollo Health City in Hyderabad.



Robotic surgery is minimally invasive, and has a much greater precision which make it a preferred surgical technique in early stage gynaecological cases like endometrial, cervical and ovarian cancers. It facilitates quick recovery, minimal blood loss, and almost no blood transfusion.



In my experience, it leads to better results even among patients with co-morbidities like obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. We are able to avoid complications caused by long incisions associated with open surgery such as wound infection, hernias, and cut hospital stays down to 1 - 1 days in most cases, says Dr Rama Joshi, Gynae Oncologist & Robotic Surgeon at New Delhi NCR.



While breast cancer and cervical cancer are the two most prevalent forms of female cancer, ovarian cancer and endometrial cancer are claiming a lot of lives as well. It is estimated that one in two women diagnosed with breast cancer in India dies early, while every 8 minutes one woman dies of cervical cancer. Just imagine, in 2016, nearly 70,000 Indians died of cervical cancer  the second most common cancer among women, accounting for 23 per cent of all cases. Breast cancer, according to the National Cancer Registry, is the most common cancer in women in India, with 27 per cent of all cases.



However, with the advent of robotic surgery, there are stories of hope now emerging in womens fight against cancer.



Vattikuti Technologies, Vattikuti Foundation and Intuitive Surgical Inc. have an ambitious plan to spread the use of Robotic surgery in India. Vattikuti Technologies has partnered with scores of hospitals in India since 2011 in drawing a roadmap for success of the robotic program as well as supporting training of surgeons. So far, the number of da Vinci Surgical robots in India stands at nearly 60 installations, manned by 360 trained robotic surgeons in 20 cities.



To address the scarcity of trained surgeons and the cost of computer assisted procedures and equipment Vattikuti Technologies and Intuitive Surgical Inc. USA and Vattikuti Foundation is showcase the technology by mounting the surgical robot on a mobile vehicle to simulate an operation theatre setting as it educates doctors and surgeons about the benefits.



Vattikuti Technologies and Surgical Robot makers Intuitive Surgical Inc., USA will offer hospitals the da Vinci Robot along with instruments required for the next three years at a special price point.

The 4-armed Roving Robot will help surgeons in smaller towns experience the capabilities of a da Vinci Surgical Robot in removing affected tissue while retaining healthy tissue, adds Chakravarthy.

The da Vinci surgical system enables surgeons to operate minimally invasively through a few small incisions while controlling the robotic instruments from a nearby console. It allows surgeons to operate with enhanced vision and precision.
Kabul, Jan 16 (IBNS): A rocket landed in the premises of Indian Embassy in Kabul on Monday evening, officials said.

However, no one was hurt in the incident.

Indian officials said the rocket caused minor damage to a structure at rear side of the Embassy compound.

MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted: "A rocket landed in the premises of our Embassy in Kabul a while ago causing minor damage to a structure at rear side of the Embassy compound. No fire or casualties. Our Charge d' Affaires informs that all Embassy employees are safe."

A rocket landed in the premises of our Embassy in Kabul a while ago causing minor damage to a structure at rear side of the Embassy compound. No fire or casualties. Our Charge d' Affaires informs that all Embassy employees are safe.  Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) January 15, 2018

Meanwhile, a shopkeeper in the area, on the condition of anonymity, told Pajhwok Afghan News the blast occurred after a rocket landed in the heavily fortified Wazir Akbar Khan area.

The incident reportedly occurred at around 8 pm.
Barmer, Jan 16 (IBNS): Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he is looking forward to his visit to Rajasthan on Tuesday.

He will attend a programme to mark the commencement of work for the Rajasthan Refinery at Pachpadra.

He will address a public meeting in Barmer.

"Looking forward to visiting Rajasthan tomorrow. Will attend a programme to mark the commencement of work for the Rajasthan Refinery at Pachpadra, in Barmer and will also address a public meeting," Modi tweeted.

Looking forward to visiting Rajasthan tomorrow. Will attend a programme to mark the commencement of work for the Rajasthan Refinery at Pachpadra, in Barmer and will also address a public meeting.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 15, 2018

He said refinery will help Rajasthan and its youth.

"The Rajasthan refinery will be the first in the state, which is blessed with immense oil and gas reserves. This refinery will benefit Rajasthan, especially the industrious youth of the state," he said.

The Rajasthan refinery will be the first in the state, which is blessed with immense oil and gas reserves. This refinery will benefit Rajasthan, especially the industrious youth of the state.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 15, 2018




Ahmedabad, Jan 16 (IBNS): Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Pravin Togadia, who went missing since Monday morning, has been found at an Ahmedabad hospital in an unconscious state, media reports said.

Togadia was found at Chandramani Hospital in Ahmedabad's Shahibug area, report said.

Hospital director, Roop Kumar Agarwal, told TOI: "He is recovering from hypoglycemia. He is slowly regaining consciousness, but he is not coherent enough to give a statement."

Though the VHP said its leader was detained by the Rajasthan police on a case, a senior police officer denied such a claim.

A senior Crime Branch Officer told TOI that Togadia took an auto-rickshaw from Thaltej area, where he resides, to VHP headquarters in Paldi area on Monday morning but went missing since then.

He was last seen with a bearded man, report said.

On Monday evening, several VHP workers shouted slogans outside Sola police station demanding an immediate track of Togadia, following which the city police had formed four teams to locate the leader.

Togadia, 62, is the international working President of Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
Mumbai, Jan 16 (IBNS): The state government in Tamil Nadu seems in favour of holding the traditional bull taming festival or Jallikattu, according to media reports on Tuesday.

Although, on Monday, a 19-year-old spectator was gored to death at Madurai, Chief Minister E Palaniswami and his deputy O Panneerselvam were seen attending an event that offered brand new cars as gifts for the best performers, media reports said on Tuesday.

Two gleaming cars splashed with stickers of the ruling AIADMK and former chief minister J Jayalalithaa were displayed on a platform near the Jallikattu arena, which was crammed with scores of AIADMK leaders, reported NDTV.

Revenue Minister R B Udhayakumar was seen handing out gold coins to the winners, reports said.

The Supreme Court banned Jallikattu in 2014 after activists said it constituted extreme animal cruelty.

Last year, after massive protests, Tamil Nadu enacted a law to bypass the top court's verdict.

It is a traditional sport that involves taming a bull. The bull is released into a crowd of people and the participants try to hold on to its hump or horns.

The event is celebrated on Mattu Pongal, which is the third day of the popular harvest festival.
New Delhi, Jan 16 (IBNS) : In the first sign of communication after a virtual rebellion in the top judiciary, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra on Tuesday met with the four dissenting judges even as the Supreme Court announced composition of a five-judge Constitution bench for hearing several important cases, excluding the quartet, media reports said.

According to reports, the CJI met Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph in the afternoon and is likely to meet them once again on Wednesday.

The meeting continued for about 15 minutes.

It was not immediately known what issues were discussed in the meeting between the Justices.

The meeting was called by CJI Misra himself.

In an unprecedented event, the four senior judges had on Friday held a press conference, alleging that the goings-in in the Supreme Court were not in order and that the CJI was assigning most of the important cases to certain judges, ignoring seniority. Their allegations had a rocking effect in the judiciary as well as in other strata of society, evoking various reactions.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Tuesday announced formation of a five-member constitution bench that remains the same as the previous one that had heard matters related to Aadhaar and none of the four senior judges, who had publicly criticised the CJI, is on it.

Headed by Chief Justice Misra, the bench has Justice AK Sikri, Justice AM Khanwilkar, Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice Ashok Bhushan as other members.

The bench will hear eight crucial cases, including Aadhaar, the validity of Section 377 of Indian Penal Code which criminalises homosexuality, the validity of adultery law under the IPC, entry of women into Kerala's Sabarimala temple and other cases.

Earlier in the day, Attorney general KK Venugopal said that the judicial crisis hasnt been resolved.

His statement comes contradictory a day after he told the media that the rift between four senior Supreme Court judges and the Chief Justice of India had been settled.

The four judges took up their respective business on the first working day of the top court, a week after they publicly criticised the CJI.
New Delhi, Jan 16 (IBNS) : In a significant move, the Government on Tuesday abolished subsidy for Haj pilgrims.

Announcing this, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the decision is in line with the Governments agenda to empower minorities without appeasement.

Naqvi said that for the first time in independent India, 1.75 lakh pilgrims will go to Haj without a subsidy. Last year 1.25 lakh pilgrims from India went to Haj.

The decision to abolish Haj subsidy comes day after Government allowed Muslim women, above the age of 45, to go on haj without male guardian, in a group of at least four.

The Union Minister said the Government will save Rs 700 crore by stopping the subsidy. The funds would be used for the education of minorities, particularly girls, he added.

The Ministry of Minority Affairs had, last year, constituted a six-member committee to review the existing Haj policy, including subsidy issue in the light of a 2012 Supreme Court order on gradually reducing and abolishing subsidy given to pilgrims by 2022.

The committee suggested that women above 45 years be allowed to perform Haj without a Mehram (a male relative by blood) in a group of four or more.

Also, it recommended that coupons for Adahi (sacrifice of animals) be made compulsory for all the pilgrims and the quota of Mehram be increased from the present 200 to 500, he said.

The committee also suggested that the number of embarkation points (EPs) be reduced from 21 to nine and those should be at Delhi, Lucknow, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Kochi. It also recommended that suitable Haj houses be built at these EPs, Naqvi said.


Ahmedabad, , Jan 16 (IBNS) : Patidar leader Hardik Patel and Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia met Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) international working president Pravin Togadia in hospital on Tuesday after the latter alleged that there was a plan to kill him in an encounter.

Togadia, who went briefly missing on Monday before being found unconscious in Ahmedabad's Sahibuag area, later alleged that some people were trying to stifle his voice and that he was not allowed to speak on issues like Ram Temple, farmers and cow slaughter.

"I don't agree with Togadia on a number of issues, but on this topic, we are as one. Everybody knows the conspiracy being run under Amitbhai and Narendrabhai. It's a known secret that the RSS is against Pravin Togadia," Patel told media after the meeting the VHP leader on Tuesday.

Togadia earlier on Tuesday called a media conference and alleged that people were trying to prevent him from speaking about the Ram temple and the cow slaughter law. He claimed attempts are being made to frame him in fake cases and said that someone might be trying to get him killed in a fake encounter. He also claimed Rajasthan police came to arrest him yesterday in a decades-old case.

"I am being targeted for a decades-old case, there is an attempt to suppress my voice. Rajasthan Police team came to arrest me. Someone told me plan was being made to kill me in an encounter," Togadia claimed.

Image: Wikimedia Commons


AUBURN  A Waterloo man has been arrested in connection with a Jan. 7 robbery at Marcos Pizza, 293 N. Duesenberg Drive, Auburn.

Nicholas Jordan, 29, of the 2200 block of C.R. 19, was arrested Jan. 9 at 9 p.m. by the Auburn Police Department on charges of robbery resulting in bodily injury, a Level 3 felony, and theft, a Level 6 felony.

An affidavit of probable cause for Jordans arrest says Marcos Pizza employees reported a man, later identified as Jordan, entered the business and demanded the cash drawer be opened. A police report last week said the robbery occurred at 8:56 p.m.

One of the employees told police Jordan grabbed her left arm and applied pressure, causing immediate pain.

The cash register was opened and Jordan removed the money, which later was determined to be $300.45, the affidavit said.

Jordan ordered the employees to get down as he left the business and threatened them, telling them, if they didnt want any trouble not to report it for a half-hour to police, the affidavit says.

During the investigation, video footage was collected and the area was canvassed to collect information. Police spoke to a representative at the Hoosier Stop and Go Gas Station in the 1200 block of East 7th Street. The person described a man entering the business and requesting two packs of cigarettes. The man said he did not have money to pay for the cigarettes and left his Indiana identification, saying he would return to pay, according to the affidavit.

The identification showed it belonged to Nicholas Jordan, the affidavit says. Video footage from Hoosier Stop and Go showed Jordan wearing the same clothing that was worn by the man who robbed Marcos Pizza, the affidavit said.

Police spoke to Jordans wife, who told them Jordan left their home on Jan. 7 around 8 p.m. to get cigarettes and returned home a short time later. She was shown video from Marcos Pizza and Hoosier Stop and Go and identified Jordan as being the person at both locations. She also identified a vehicle in the video as belonging to her, according to the affidavit.

Police interviewed Jordan, and he admitted going to Hoosier Stop and Go and leaving his identification in lieu of paying for the cigarettes, the affidavit says.

Jordan told police he intended to pay for the cigarettes when he needed his identification and not until then. He denied he was involved in the robbery at Marcos Pizza, even after being given the facts of the crime, the affidavit says.

The clothes Jordan was wearing when he was taken into custody were consistent with the clothing worn during the robbery, the court document said. Police also found a black sweatshirt, a two-tone blue stocking hat and gloves in an outside trash container at Jordans residence. A Marcos Pizza employee identified the hat and sweatshirt as the ones possibly worn by Jordan, the affidavit says.

While reviewing Jordans criminal history, police found Jordan had a prior conviction for conversion in 2008 in Allen County, the affidavit says.
new Delhi, Jan 16 (IBNS): Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday addressed at the 3rd annual Raisina Dialogue and said both India and Israel share the strength of 'cultural power'.

"Apart from military, economic and political powers, India and Israel have a 4th power as cultural power," he said.

Speaking on economy, he said: "If you want to have economic power you must reduce taxes."

Netanyahu appreciated Narendra Modi and said he was astounded to see the Indian PM has moved India on the scale of ease of doing business

He said: "PM Modi and I were talking about it, how we educate our youths. I was astounded to see PM Modi has moved India on the scale of ease of doing business."

Netanyahu said the future will belong to those who will 'innovate'.

The Israel PM is on a six-day visit to India.

He arrived in India on Sunday.

Earlier in the ay, the Israeli PM went to Taj Mahal with his wife Sara.
Guwahati, Jan 16 (IBNS): At least 9 oil tankers were set ablaze by an armed militant group of banned outfit NSCN-K and ULFA (I) in Upper Assams Tinsukia district along with Arunachal Pradesh border on Tuesday evening.

According to the reports, the incident was took place at Namsik area near Namphai Reserve Forest in Jagun in the Upper Assam district around 532 km from Guwahati at around 4-55 pm.

The oil tankers laden with oil and natural gas were coming from Kharsang in Arunachal Pradesh heading towards Digboi.

Following the incident, troops of Assam police and Assam Rifles had rushed to the area and launched massive operation against the militants.

Tinsukia district SP Mugdha Jyoti Mahanta said that, suspected militants of NSCN-K and ULFA (I) had torched the oil tankers.

Meanwhile, Assam DGP Mukesh Sahay said that, security has been beefed up across the state ahead of Republic Day celebration.



(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
Patna, Jan 16 (TheBiharPost/IBNS): The Patna High Court in a significant move on Tuesday ordered that the schoolchildren cant be compelled to participate in the state governments human chain programme against dowry and child marriage scheduled to be held on Jan 21.

Hearing a petition filed by a NGO, the court said the children cant join the human chain programme without obtaining the permission of their guardians.

The court also said children abstaining from the human chain programme should not be victimized in any way.

The order came after an NGO filed a petition in the Patna High Court challenging the validity of state governments human chain programme against dowry and child marriage.

In the petition filed by the Nagrik Adhikar Manch, the petitioner said the education department has issued an order asking for participation of all school children except those enrolled between standard One and Five in the human chain programme.

The complainant said all the schoolchildren and teachers have been asked to compulsorily join the human chain programme of the state government on January 21 despite the severe cold conditions prevailing across the state.

How can the little children be forced out of their homes in this bone chilling cold and participate in the human chain programme? asked the petitioner.

He said the children have not been provided either books or warm clothes to study but are being forced to join the human chain.

http://thebiharpost.com
B igg Boss famed Nora Fatehi , who is returning to Hindi films after four years, will be seen pairing with actor Sanjay Suri in Samir Soni directorial film 'My Birthday Song'. IBNS/TWF correspondent Souvik Ghosh interacts with the Indo-Canadian model-dancer-actress exclusively during the film's promotion in Kolkata

You are returning to Hindi cinema after four years. What made you wait for so long?

I was waiting for the right script and did a quite of commercial stuff. I also took part in films like Baahubali, Rocky Handsome. I enjoyed being a part of some music videos and also explored the space of television. I really liked the script of 'My Birthday Song', so went on to work along with this film. I am not really keen to do just any film, for me it is important to do hit works-be it commercially hit songs or shows-as long as it is hit or working well. For me, working in hit projects is most important.

What was your first thought after getting the offer to be part of 'My Birthday Song'.

At first I did research on Sanjay Suri (actor-producer) and Samir Soni (director), I found that both are respected actors. After that, I didn't think twice.



How was your working experience with Sanjay and Samir?

It was a very fulfilling experience. It went very natural. They (Sanjay and Samir) are friends and it was a very small family. So I was like a stranger to the family but both of them accepted me very well and gave a lot of confidence.

In what kind of a role the viewers will see you in 'My Birthday Song'?

My character's name is Sandy. She is the female lead in the film who comes to Rajiv Kaul's (played by actor Sanjay Suri) 40th birthday party and sparks a series of events. So Sandy is a very independent, confident, mysterious lady but there is a sense of vulnerability with her character.

You have worked in few regional films (Telugu, Malayalam films) in last four years. Are you looking to be a part of Bengali film industry?

I don't know but I will have to speak Bengali (smiles). May be, if I know (learn), I would love to.

You have been a dancer, tried modeling, acted in films and also a face on television. Which work you would like to continue after this?

I definitely enjoy acting. So that would be my long term plan I think for sure.



(Images by Avishek Mitra/IBNS)




New York, Jan 16 (JEN): International organizations, policy experts, statisticians and civil society came together on Monday at a United Nations-supported forum in Paris to answer the global call for more accurate and timely information on migration flows and examine how improved data collection can feed into better policymaking.

Organized jointly by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the first International Forum on Migration Statistics will also explore innovations in data collection and strengthening capacity in developing countries to produce and improve migration statistics.

It is important that we speak on Monday about the fundamental need for better migration data, said William Lacy Swing, the Director-General of the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), at the Forum.

We also need urgently, however, to engage a dialogue on a Global Action Plan  a plan to ensure the availability to policymakers and others comprehensive national, regional and global data and statistical analysis of trends in migration  a phenomenon as old as humankind and, on Monday, one of the defining phenomena of our time.

Running through Tuesday, the Forum will explore improvements the production and use of migration data and overcoming challenges in the sector, as well as also delve deep into specific themes.

Also on the agenda is a specific plenary session is devoted to exploring how public opinions on migration and migrants are formed, and how these can change by facing well-communicated facts.

Other topics include use Big Data for migration, as well as building the capacity for emerging economies and developing countries to produce migration statistics.

According to IOM, the Forum aims to become a bi-annual event for producers and users of migration-related data to share their views, identify gaps and highlight needs for training and capacity building.

Policies concerning migration must be grounded in data

In a related statement, Swing also underscored that accurate and complete migration data is critical for sound policies concerning it.

We are finding that without access to reliable, comprehensive and global data, managing migration policy becomes a game of blind mans bluff, he stressed. in a recent statement, underscoring the importance of data for sound policies.

However, he added, despite efforts by Governments and the international community, significant gaps in migration data remain globally.

National population censuses  traditionally the main source of data on migration  are infrequent and cannot therefore provide timely information. Furthermore, migrants, especially those on irregular status, often are absent from household surveys, or are hard to track through administrative data sources.

In the statement, Swing noted the that the volume of data available on Monday is larger than at any point in human history. While there are incredible possibilities of the use of this so called Big Data  data generated, often inadvertently, by users on digital devices, web-platforms or other smart sources  there are also significant challenges, in particular those over privacy, ethical and human rights given the way they are generated or collected.

Concerns over the use of Big Data for any purpose, including research, need to be identified and adequately addressed by policy-makers, for instance through the creation of a regulatory system setting out conditions and limits to access to and use of certain kinds of data, suggested Swing.

Photo: IOM
New York, Jan 16 (JEN): Strongly condemning two terrorist attacks in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has underscored the Organizations support for the country in its fight against terrorism.

In a statement attributable to his spokesperson, Secretary-General Guterres reiterated that the UN will continue to stand by the Government and people of Iraq in their efforts to fight terrorism and rebuild their country.

According to media reports, at least 35 individuals were killed and another 90 injured when suicide bombers detonated two explosives in a busy square in the city during the morning rush hour.

Earlier on Monday, Jan Kubis, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq and the head of the UN Assistance Mission in the country (UNAMI) also denounced the attack and said that despite a defeat on the battlefield, terrorist groups continue to pose a threat, in particular to ordinary citizens.

I urge greater vigilance by the authorities and unity among the Iraqi people to thwart the aims of terrorists like Daesh [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL] who seek to derail the countrys recovery after a long conflict, said Kubis in a tweet by UNAMI.

Both the Secretary-General and his Special Representative for Iraq expressed their sympathies to the families of the victims and wished those injured a speedy recovery to those injured.

UN Photo/Mark Garten (file)


New York, Jan 16 (JEN): The United Nations Security Council, during a weekend mission to Afghanistan, reiterated its support for the Central Asian countrys efforts to restore peace, stability and progress.

Council members aimed to get a first-hand account of progress made by the Afghan National Unity Government, with the assistance of the international community, in addressing a wide range of interconnected challenges and to learn how the Security Council could further assist efforts on the ground.

According to the UN Department of Political Affairs (DPA), despite assurances of continued international assistance for its security and development needs, Afghanistan remains a country undergoing conflict, which threatens the sustainability of its achievements.

DPA says peace negotiations between the Afghan Government and armed opposition groups are the only alternative for ending the conflict and the region and the broader international community have a stake and a role to play to help to create the conditions for peace.

The Councils visit, from 13 to 15 January, was the first one since 2010 and came ahead of the Kabul Process meeting, scheduled for February 2018, where the Government is expected to present its plans for a more structured peace and security process, coordinated with the wider region.

In the capital, Kabul, the delegation held meetings with senior officials, including Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.

The delegation also met with the leadership of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Resolute Support Mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

According to a note issued by UNAMA, discussions during the visit focused on the political, security, socio-economic and human rights situation in the country, with all parties underlining the importance of an inclusive Afghan-led and -owned peace process for long-term stability and prosperity in Afghanistan.

Council members also reiterated their support for the Governments reform initiatives, particularly to counter corruption and accelerate regional cooperation.

They expressed concerns about the security environment in Afghanistan, including the presence of Al-Qaeda, Taliban and ISIL-Khorasan Province-affiliated fighters, as well as about the nexus of terrorism and organized crime. All parties reiterated the need for greater international and regional security cooperation.

The delegation was briefed on the preparations for the upcoming parliamentary and district council elections in 2018. Council members underscored the importance of continued progress on electoral reforms and towards the holding of free and fair, as well as timely, credible and inclusive parliamentary and presidential elections in 2018 and 2019, respectively. They reiterated the need to increase womens participation in the election.

Need for regional and integrated security and development approach

Council members emphasized the need to adopt a regional and integrated security and development approach, which Kazakhstan is proposing as the path to sustainable development, durable peace and stability in the region.

Discussions in Kabul stressed the need to view Afghanistan not as a threat to security in the region but as an important partner. It is critical to integrate the economies of Afghanistan and neighbouring countries, including Central Asian States, through enhanced interaction and connectivity, by implementing regional infrastructure, trade, investment, transit and transportation projects.

Afghan authorities expressed hope for the rapid implementation of those projects.

Led by Kazakhstan, the delegation included representatives of the United States, Bolivia, Cote dIvoire, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Sweden, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and China.

Kazakhstan, the first Central Asian country elected to the Security Council, holds the bodys presidency in January 2018.

Photo UNAMA/Fardin Waezi
Kasur, Jan 16 (IBNS): Police have arrested a person, who resembles the Kasur minor rape and murder suspect, media reports said on Tuesday.

The arrested man reportedly resembled the suspect who was seen in the CCTV footage with Zainab.

Police have arrested a man resembling the suspect seen in the CCTV footage with Zainab, the seven-year-old girl who was brutally raped and murdered in Kasur last week, sources told Geo News on Monday.

Sources, however, told Geo News that the DNA of the arrested man does not match with samples found from the victim's body.

According to sources, police have cast doubts over the statement recorded by the arrested man and will now carry out a polygraph test to ascertain veracity of his statement, the news channel further reported.

Body of the minor was found in a trash pile on Jan 9.

The police had earlier released a CCTV footage showing the suspected person in the rape and murder of minor girl Zainab in Kasur area of Pakistan, media reports said.

The minor is suspected to have been abducted after she left her house in Road Kot area to visit her maternal aunts residence located a few minutes away for religious lessons on Jan 4.

Her body was discovered from a trash pile on Jan 9.

As per Dawn News report, in the footage, a bearded man bearing a resemblance to her abductor can be seen walking through the street where Zainab's house is situated. The man is seen wearing a dark coloured cap, what seems to be grey shalwar kameez and a brown jacket.

The police , however, had clarified and said that the person, who could be seen in the footage is just a 'person of interest'.

Kasur witnessed protest after body of Zainab was found in a garbage heap.

Politicians from different political parties have condemned the incident.
California, Jan 16 (IBNS): Police arrested a couple after it was discovered that 13 people had been held captive in their California home in filthy conditions, officials said on Tuesday.

Some of the captives were even shackled to beds with chains and padlocks, officials said.

In a statement issued by the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, the victims were aged between 2 and 29.

"Early Sunday morning on January 14, 2018, a 17-year old juvenile escaped from her residence situated in the 100 Block of Muir Woods Road, Perris and managed to call 911 from a cellular device she found inside the house. The teenager claimed her 12 brothers and sisters were being held captive inside the residence by her parents and further claimed some of her siblings were bound with chains and padlocks," read the statement.

It said: "When Police Officers from the Perris Police Department and Deputies from the Riverside County Sheriffs Department met with the juvenile, she appeared to be only 10 years old and slightly emaciated. After a brief interview with the female, they contacted 57-year old David Allen Turpin and 49-year old Louise Anna Turpin at the residence where the teenager escaped."

Further investigation revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, but the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner.

Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that 7 of them were actually adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29. The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty. Perris Station Detectives were dispatched to the residence for further investigation.

"All 13 victims, ranging from the age of 2 to 29, were transported to the Perris Station and interviewed. Both parents were detained and transported to the station for further investigation," read the statement.

The six children were eventually transported to the Riverside University Hospital System (RUHS) for medical examinations and admitted for treatment.

The seven adult children were transported to Corona Regional Medical Center for an examination and admitted for medical treatment.

Both parents were interviewed in this matter and subsequently transported to the Robert Presley Detention Center (RPDC).

They were booked for violations of California Penal Code Section 206Torture and Section 273a(A)Child Endangerment. Bail was set at $9,000,000.00 each.

Image: Riverside County Sheriff's Department website
Washington, Jan 16 (IBNS): US President Donald Trump said on Monday that without trust, he'll not be able to finalise the DACA deal, which has prompted commentators to think if he's giving up on 2012 program that was formed through executive order by former President Barack Obama, giving legal protection to minors who came to the US illegally, from immediate deportation.

"Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting," his post on Twitter read. "Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military."

DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that gives legal protection to the young immigrants, who are known as 'Dreamers'. Dreamers were able to request consideration of deferred action for a period of two years, which is subject to renewal.

Nearly 800,000 undocumented youth benefit from the programme.

Requirement for DACA status:

Aged under 31 on June 15, 2012

Came to the U.S. before turning 16

Continuously lived in the country since June 15, 2007

Have a high school diploma

Recipients could not have a criminal record

Dick Durbin, a Democrat Senator, was the first to condemn Trump for his racial rant during a White House Meeting last week.

According to the lawmaker, the US President used the term 'shithole' while referring to immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African nations.

Trump has however pleaded not guilty. Asked if his comments were racists, he told reporters on Sunday that he's the least racist person they are likely to have interviewed.

Durbin has stood by his claim. "I know what happened. I stand behind every word that I said," he told reporters on Monday.

"In terms of that meeting, I'm focused on one thing  not that meeting  but on making sure that those who are being protected by DACA ... have a future in America. I'm focused on that full time."

Earlier, he had accused the President of using hate-filled, vile and racist language.
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There are some people who can go to any extent to get Indian food and by that we mean get it delivered on a chartered plane!

unsplash

A British expat living in France, who was quite obviously, head over heels for Indian curry, got the food delivered to him, in a freaking chartered flight, all the way from England!

The Akash Restaurant from Hampshire, UK, flew their chicken phall curry all the way to France in a chartered private plane, reports BBC.

The 500-mile journey for pilot James Emery, an expat living in Bordeaux, France, and his friends, took place this Saturday.

Their order included a total of 89 meals, 70 side dishes, 75 portions of rice, 100 poppadoms and 10 servings of mango chutney from their favourite Indian restaurant, reports Sky News.

On their Facebook page, The Akash Restaurant documented this crazy feat.

James Emery said to Sky News, I would complain about the bland and uninspiring version of Indian food we get in France.

The Akash Restaurant does not charge for delivery if the order is over 12 pounds and this time also they did not charge for the order as told by Faz Ahmed from the Akash Restaurant.

Now that's what we call love.
The heinous rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl in Pakistan exposed how vulnerable children in our society are. The incidents sparked off outrage in public leading to massive protests, not just in Pakistan but other parts of the world too.

The same sentiment was echoed in India when the reports of four horrific gang rapes and murders in 24 hours came to light from the state of Haryana.

Social media unanimously sought #JusticeforZainab and in India, public outrage over the dismal state of law and order and vulnerability of women made headlines.

In the wake of such ghastly incidents of gangrapes and murders of children, the two countries, that are just divided by borders, have united to speak up about rampant sexual abuse.

Three Pakistani celebrities have become the first women in the conservative nations history to publicly reveal that they were sexually abused as children, amid a national furore over the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl.

I was 4 the first time I was abused sexually. I was in college when it blew out of proportion.

People tell me not to talk to respect my families honour. Is my families honour packed in my body? I am a proud,strong,loving survivor. No shame on me or my kids. Only pride 4 being me  Nadia Jamil (@NJLahori) January 13, 2018

I was 8 and buried the memory so deep, it only came out and began haunting me 8 years later at 16 https://t.co/cfbUWd2PYv  Eman Amjad Khan (@nam_e_man) January 13, 2018

I was sexually abused by our cook at age 6. My parents took action but everyone remained silent as if it was my shame. At 34 I realised how it had impacted my life.the only shame is keeping SILENT #ChildAbuse #shame #NoMoreChildAbuse #MeToo #JusticeForZainab #HowToStopChildAbuse  Frieha Altaf (@FriehaAltaf) January 14, 2018

#childabuse #saynotochildabuse #metoo The Maulvi who came to teach me the Quran abused me sexually .I froze in fear day after day .

Share in support of children subjected to the sick acts ..by so called custodians of our religion  Maheen Khan (@Maheenkhanpk) January 14, 2018

I've always encouraged my boys to speak to me whatever bothers them. They have complaint about their qari sahab, who obviously were told to leave. Once had a male care taker for them, who said 'I luv u' to them, they replied 'we hate u'. They told me, the same day he was fired.  Asma (@AsmaZhk) January 13, 2018

I was sexually abused at the age of 12 by my cousin at Eid, after he had come back from namaz. I was groped when I was 8 years old by a stranger. I was asked to keep quiet too. But today I speak about it. More power to us.  Hira Shah Uzair (@erumasgh) January 13, 2018

I was touched inappropriately and made to do the same in my early teen by a middle aged man in an empty swimming pool. The feeling was alienating at the time, confusing to be precise but gradually it left a void. A void that sucks my self-esteem every now and then.  MasterShifu (@BiryaniSenpai) January 13, 2018

Indians are joining in too, sharing their side of the story and supporting the survivors.

@NJLahori you have a brave heart woman.. salute. Though i personally don't kno u but i respect u. With loads of brotherly love from #India...!  Prithvi Raj. N (@Iam_PRNK) January 13, 2018

No matter if u from India or Pakistan we shud hv to stand together against rape bz there is many girls who harass or raped everyday nd we don't know about them we can't bring back zainab but atlest we can save many zainab from rape.my heart goes to her family#JusticeforZainab pic.twitter.com/yimF8y0LxP  Lu Cky (@shukla_lucky) January 11, 2018

There is not a single day that we don't hear a news of RAPE.

Be it India or Pakistan.

Yeh cheekhen Parliament ka mudda kyun nahi banti @PMOIndia  Shailja Sharma (@msshailjasharma) January 15, 2018

Child sexual abuse is a serious concern in every part of the world. Pakistan lacks women-friendly courts, meaning very few come forward. India faces a similar issue with little done to make the situation better.
While there are many in our country who are trying to impose conservative, regressive thoughts on the youths, the youngsters are also answering back with their progressive activities.

Pune's youngsters are among the progressive ones who have formed a WhatsApp group to protect women from a disturbing experience of being tested for their virginity. The group, called Stop the V Ritual. This group has been formed to spread awareness against the practice of determining the virginity of a bride on the wedding night, which can be without the consent of the bride and a traumatic experience.

The youngsters have filed a complaint with the police officials, claiming that the custom is against the constitution and illegal. According to the custom, prevalent in Kanjarbhat community, the village panchayat spreads a white-bed sheet on the first wedding night of a couple; if the sheet is found stained with red colour, then the woman passes the test otherwise the same is accused of having a physical relationship prior to her marriage, reported ANI.

"We had shared some material on Triple Talaq and Right to Privacy on Facebook. Like-minded people from our community (Kanjarbhat) gave a positive response. So we came together to protest against this atrocity," said Vivek Tamaichekar, founder of the group and masters student at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai. "This is against article 14 and article 21 of the constitution," Tamaichekar added.
Schools in the town of Oymyakon in Russia's Sakha Republic remained open on Thursday even as the temperature dropped to -50 degrees Celsius.

Interestingly, the schools in town call off the classes only when the temperature falls to -52 degrees. On November 23, the mercury level in the city was two degrees short of the required limit to kick off the emergency measures, reported BBC.com.

gettyimages

"This morning it was -50, all children are studying," the village administration announced.

However, the nearby city of Yakutsk was comparatively less stringent when it came to shutting down schools due to harsh weather.

The heads of Yakutsk general educational institutions has prescribed closure of city's schools at -45 degrees for students of classes 1 to 5, -48 degrees for students of classes 1-8, and -50 degrees for students of classes 1-12.

gettyimages

The Siberian region is known for its harsh winter climate. Also called the Pole of Cold, Oymyakon holds the title of one of the coldest permanently inhabited places on the planet.

In the city of Yakutsk, situated 30 kilometres south of Oymyakon, -50C is considered too cold for school children. Pupils there only get the day off if temperatures fall to a comparatively balmy -45 Celsius, reports BBC.

The average winter temperature in the town is -50 degrees. In 1924, the town recorded its coldest day when the temperature fell to a frigid -71.2 degrees.
Watch out cryptograbbers, its all coming crashing down right now. The biggest cryptocurrencies in the world are floundering, thanks to recent uncertainty in the market

Bitcoin has fallen by about 15 percent in the past 24 hours, a massive drop to its current level of $11,813, or Rs 7,88,273. However, its not the only one facing a backslide.

The other two major Bitcoin rivals are also looking at grim charts right now. Ethereum is down about 21 percent at $1,046, and Ripple is also at $1.3, down 29 percent.

While Bitcoin was doing well in 2017, peaking at an all time high of $19,600, it did slip 22 percent across four days in December, followed by another 40 percent drop over five days, though it eventually did recover most of its value. Its not particularly clear why this latest slide into the cheap seats is happening, but some experts believe it may be a reaction to the recent crackdown.

A lot of countries have been alarmed by the immense recent popularity of cryptocurrencies, and have been trying to set up precautionary measures. Decembers crash was when the South Korean government began considering a crackdown on cryptocurrency, worried by its volatility.

reuters

This latest drop may be because China could be taking further steps, despite having already banned cryptocurrency exchanges last year. Bloomberg reported just yesterday that China is pulling up other online and app-based groups that seem to offer trading services like cryptocurrency exchanges.

Whether or not Bitcoin can weather the current fall depends on if any other governments begin taking steps to limit the cryptocurrency. But if they all begin to take seriously the worries of a virtual currencys volatility, this might be a bad time for investors.
Dollar Gains on Higher T-note Yields Barchart - 12 minutes ago The dollar index (DXY00 ) on Friday rose by +0.22% on the +6 bp rise in the 10-year T-note yield to 2.83%, which added to Thursdays rise of +8 bp and improved the dollars interest rate differentials.... DXY00 : 106.969s (+0.26%) ^EURUSD : 1.03240 (-0.38%) ^USDJPY : 140.381 (+0.14%) GCZ22 : 1,754.4s (-0.49%) SIZ22 : 20.997s (+0.10%)

Grain Spreads: KC Wheat Walsh Trading - 1 hour ago Key Support Levels Tested in Wheat

Nat-Gas Falls Back on Weather Forecasts Barchart - 1 hour ago Dec Nymex natural gas (NGZ22 ) on Friday closed down -0.066 (-1.04%). Dec nat-gas Friday fell back on some long liquidation pressure after the sharp overall rally of +8.3% seen on Monday through Thursday.... NGF23 : 6.716s (-0.42%)

Shootin' the Bull about Cattle on Feed Swift Trading Company - 1 hour ago In my opinion, futures traders added $3.00 to $4.00 premium by weeks end on most contract months. I am neither bullish or bearish on cattle. Here is why. Seemingly, the production side of the industry...

Cattle Commentary Walsh Trading - 1 hour ago Cattle markets were higher again today before the Cattle on Feed report came out at 2pm central. In my opinion, cattle markets may be putting in a top in the market as volume continues to decline in the...

Crude Oil Continues Lower on Demand Worries Barchart - Fri Nov 18, 2:29PM CST Dec WTI crude oil (CLZ22 ) on Friday closed down -1.56 (-1.91%), and Dec RBOB gasoline (RBZ22 ) closed -3.39 (-1.38%). Dec crude oil Friday fell -1.91%, adding to Thursday's sharp drop of -4.16%. Crude... CLF23 : 80.11s (-1.58%) RBF23 : 2.3510s (-1.94%)

Sugar Prices Rally on Asian Supply Concerns Barchart - Fri Nov 18, 1:56PM CST March NY world sugar #11 (SBH23 ) on Friday closed up +0.32 (+1.62%), and March London white sugar #5 (SWH23 ) closed up +9.90 (+1.86%). Sugar prices rallied Friday on continued concern about Asian sugar... SBH23 : 20.05s (+1.62%) SWH23 : 543.30s (+1.86%)

Coffee Prices Fall on Demand Worries Barchart - Fri Nov 18, 1:48PM CST December arabica coffee (KCZ22 ) on Friday closed down -1.40 (-0.92%), and Jan ICE robusta coffee (RMF23 ) closed down -7 (-0.39%). Arabica coffee prices on Friday closed lower, barely managing to stay... KCH23 : 155.10s (-0.80%) RMF23 : 1,811s (-0.39%) ^USDBRL : 5.38179 (-0.74%)
Partnership in time for launch of new training and administrative facility
The tasks affect all areas of our country's life, where the elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are required, the megatrend of which is comprehensive digitalization. This also applies to the public administration system to improve its efficiency and take into account the interests of society.





Thus, in the framework of the eighth task of the Address-2018 "Effective Public Administration", the President instructs, "state bodies must use modern digital technologies to take into account the remarks and proposals of citizens in real time and provide prompt response."





Today, in many countries of the world, with the development of new information technologies and social media, virtualization and digitalization of the public space, including political, is taking place.





For example, in the social network of Mark Zuckerberg there are more than 1.6 billion users. If Facebook was a country, it would become the most populous in the world, overtaking China. According to experts' forecasts, by 2030, the number of users of this network will amount to 5 billion people.





Such a rapid development of virtual communications presents great opportunities and potential risks. Therefore, in the era of digitalization, it is very important for countries to develop modern approaches in the field of state communication policy, gradually moving away from the less effective mechanisms of the propaganda machine to interactive models of communication involving the broad masses of the population in socio-political processes. By the way, the collective monograph, published by our Institute of Eurasian Integration in 2017  "Communicative Policy of the Republic of Kazakhstan: Current State and Prospects" is devoted to this topic.





The described trends are also reflected in the decline of the popularity of traditional institutions of civil society. The online participation of political actors is gradually coming to the foreground. Therefore, the existing new technologies allow any citizen to be online 24/7 and openly express their opinion. The so-called electronic democracy is gaining popularity. Today, almost every third story in TV news or information agency tapes refers to information from an official account in the social network of a political, public figure or other network activists.





Some experts in this regard note that the Kazakhstani segment of social networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter is becoming more politicized. However, I note that the politicization of social networks does not at all mean their complete domination in the political space of our country.





For example, a study conducted in 2017 by the IEI shows that television remains the absolute leader in terms of demand from information sources. According to our data, at least 60% of our population turn in search of news about events in the country and the world, first of all, to television.





The Internet, in spite of the fact that it has already pressed the other media and came out on the second place in popularity, is claimed to a lesser extent  it was called the main source of information on current events by 18.3% of the polled Kazakhstanis.





Only 4.8% of the polled Kazakhstanis apply to social media as a key information source. Therefore, considering such an indicator, it is not true to say that today social networks fully reflect the moods of all Kazakhstanis. For instance, on Facebook, (precisely there the political and civil position of Internet users has been expressed most of all for a number of years), only 15.3% of Kazakhstanis over the age of 18 are registered. Most often, our fellow citizens have accounts in such social networks as VKontakte (32.9%) and Odnoklassniki (18.5%). Whereas almost 42% of the respondents from Kazakhstan noted that they are not registered in social networks at all.





This suggests that quite a significant part of the population is not immersed in the mainstream, which excites social media. For example, only 2.7% of the surveyed residents of the country called Facebook as the main source of information about what is happening in Kazakhstan and abroad.





Scientists from one of the US think tanks (Pew Research Center) share a similar estimate. Several years ago, they analyzed the Twitter microblogging platform and came to the conclusion that it is impossible to generalize the reaction of people in social networks to public opinion in general, without the additional context.





Nevertheless, considering this fact, it would be erroneous to deny the role of social media in the formation of political and public dialogue in our country. Despite the fact that the segment represented in social networks does not reflect the views of most citizens of the country, in my opinion, in Kazakhstan, political and civic activity in social networks has the development potential.





The tendencies are that the popular voices, reinforced by means of electronic communication, will become more and more political. Obviously, this is a new and long-term political trend.





In this regard, the proactive position of state bodies and our public administration in general in the issue of digitizing their communication channels to take into account the opinions and proposals of citizens in real time and a rapid response is an important factor for the development of Kazakhstan's political system and the solution of our long-term goal of entering into the thirty most developed countries in the world ".








Transport and logistics insurer NTI has stepped up as a major sponsor of the Burrumbuttock Hay Runners for the second consecutive year, backing the initiative's 13th Hay Run  Cunnamulla.Founded in 2014, the Burrumbuttock Hay Runners assist drought-stricken farmers across regional New South Wales and Queensland to access essential resources, through the help of members of the transport and farming industries.Its an opportunity for NTI to give back to hardworking Australians who dedicate their lives to sustaining agriculture in our unforgiving climate, and support the volunteers who donate their time and resources, said NTI CEO Tony Clark.The event will be held on Jan. 25-27 from Darlington Point, NSW to Cunnamulla, QLD. This will mark the hay run's 13th convoy in just four years, each averaging some 200 trucks to distribute multi-million-dollar hauls of hay.
With a little over a year left before the UK officially says goodbye to the European Union, its no surprise that the thought of what Brexit could bring is becoming more and more worrisome for British firms.Citing the UK portion of the Allianz Risk Barometer 2018, Reuters said the risk of legislative and regulatory changes  which includes Brexit and other similar woes  is now the second biggest concern for risk managers in the UK. Compared to last years global survey, that particular risk rose three spots and is now ranked next to the biggest worry for businesses in the country - cyber.Companies must gear up to cope with the risk of sudden political and legal shocks, such as the lack of clarity over UK Plcs future relationship with the European Union, said UK chief executive of Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty Brian Kirwan, as quoted by the report.Insurance undertakings, for instance, have been told to consider all Brexit eventualities and allot sufficient and timely preparation for whats to come. National supervisory authorities, on the other hand, have been urged to take appropriate action to ensure readiness.Globally, the survey of over 1,900 risk experts from 80 countries showed business interruption as the most significant concern. Every year the Allianz Risk Barometer identifies the major risks for companies for the next 12 months and beyond.
Two main drivers behind the deal are revealed
A couple from Pennsylvania is suing a Merchantville, NJ-based non-profit, alleging that the organization did not honor an agreement related to a previous donation.Berwyn locals Christopher and Carol Garavente claimed in the suit that their $250,000 donation was made to the non-profit then known as Friends of LArche New Jersey with the condition that their son Louis could live in the home once he reached the age of 21. While the organization later utilized the funds to purchase a house, the agreement was seemingly forgotten.According to the lawsuit filed last month in US District Court, the non-profit evaluated the Garaventes son in 2011, determining that  due to his severe disabilities  he was eligible to apply for residency after he turned 21. That same year, the couple made their donation, with the expressed intent that the money be used to purchase a house where their son could later live.The couple was notified sometime in late 2012 that LArche had rebranded itself as VINE Community, and thus was the new beneficiary of their donation. The organization had also purchased a home around this time with the funds and started renovating the location.When Louis finally turned 21 on May 01, 2015, the Garaventes were notified by VINE representatives that the non-profit did not know about the donations conditions. The non-profit also allegedly refused to allow Louis to move into the house it had purchased along West Maple Avenue - the couple was notified that there was no room available for their son.Due to the refusal, the Garaventes claim in their suit that they were forced to make alternative living arrangements for their son, which meant selling their Morris County home and relocating to Pennsylvania.Courier Post reported that the couple wants their donation returned, with interest. The Garaventes are also seeking recompense for legal costs and damages.
Fraud in the U.K. rose to 2.1 billion pounds ($2.9 billion), the most in 15 years, as the police commander in charge of fighting the crime said the amount of evidence was setting back investigations.

The value of finance and insurance fraud rose more than tripled to 900 million pounds in the past year, according to a report by accounting firm BDO, which analyzed fraud reports of 50,000 pounds and above. BDO attributed at least part of the increase to higher numbers being reported due to greater confidence in police work.

However, David Clark, the police officer who heads the U.K.s anti-fraud response, last week told lawmakers that an overload of documentary evidence was setting investigations back.

There is a problem of large volumes of data faced by investigators and prosecutors, said Jessica Parker, a lawyer at Corker Binning in London. The problem is pervasive and will only be resolved by resources and transparency starting at the very outset of an investigation right through to trial.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Fraud
A stand-off between Britain and the European Union over the future of Londons vast financial services industry is shaping up as one of the key Brexit battlegrounds of this year.

EU trade negotiator Michel Barnier has said there will be no special deal for one of Britains most important industries, delivering a blow to hopes of a trade agreement that maintains current flows of staff and services.

But British government officials believe the EU will change its mind partly because European countries risk damaging their own economies if they are cut off from its markets.

Financial services, which account for about 12 percent of Britains economic output and pay more tax than any other industry, potentially has a lot to lose from the end of unfettered access to the EU market of 440 million people after Brexit.

Below are some scenarios for financial services access to the EU after Brexit:

EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA

Dubbed the Norway option, if Britain joined the European Economic Area it would have access to the EU single market in return for accepting free movement of EU citizens, and contributing to the blocs budget, but with no say over the EU rules it must implement.

Joining Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein in the EEA is not seen as a viable option for Britain given the government has ruled out accepting free movement of EU citizens, continuing contributions to the EU budget and applying EU rules it might not agree with in future.

CANADA

Canada took several years to negotiate its CETA free trade deal with the EU and it only has a minimal section on financial services. If a Canadian financial firm wants to do business in the EU it must set up a presence inside the bloc and comply with EU regulations.

The chapter on financial services says the EU and Canada must treat each others sectors equally, but a prudential carve-out allows each side to protect consumers and financial services providers, and maintain financial stability.

In light of CETAs overall ambition, it is unlikely that its impact on the financial services sector in Canada and the European Union will be significant, at least in the short and medium term, Patrick Leblond of the Centre for International Governance Innovation said.

But the EU is under pressure not to offer the Britain more favorable terms than it already has with countries such as Canada because under the terms of their deals with the EU, they will see their trade relationship upgraded in line with any terms offered to Britain.

EQUIVALENCE

The EU allows access to foreign financial firms if it deems their home rules to be equivalent or as robust as the blocs own regulation. This designation is solely in the gift of the EU and can be withdrawn at a months notice.

Not all aspects of financial services are covered, and the EU has proposed a law to make the equivalence test tougher for investment banks.

The City of London financial district says equivalence as applied by the EU is unworkable over the long term for a financial center of Britains size as it would make it a rule taker of EU regulation.

People are quite hardline about not having equivalence as the final state, the Citys EU envoy, Jeremy Browne, has said.

Barnier has said the EU could treat some UK financial rules as being equivalent, but there wont be broad access, meaning it cannot be used to replicate the passporting to EU markets that banks in Britain now enjoy.

BESPOKE DEAL

Like the British government, the City wants a free trade deal with the EU that grants access to each others financial markets based on broad acceptance of each others rules.

Brexit minister David Davis has said Britain could negotiate such a bespoke deal with the EU that would extend to services.

Well probably start with the best of Canada, and the best of Japan and the best of South Korea and then add to that the bit thats missing, which is the services. He added: Canada plus plus plus would be one way of putting it.

The aim would be to replicate as much as possible current EU passporting.

The City says a bespoke deal would be more equal than the one way street of the equivalence regime, with a mechanism for managing divergences in rules that may emerge as time goes by.

Weve been pushing the idea of Canada plus, said one senior banker. Weve been told its Canada dry for the financial services industry.

A trade deal in financial services on this scale has never been done before and could take years to agree  the City acknowledges it would be on unoccupied ground somewhere between EEA membership and Canadas trade deal.

The EU would be cautious about giving Britain preferential access without free movement of EU citizens in the UK. The bloc could also annoy the United States, Switzerland and Asian countries.

Barnier said Britains financial services cannot benefit from a passport in the single market nor from a system of generalized equivalence of standards.

WTO

Many banks are working on a worst case scenario of having to fall back on World Trade Organization (WTO) rules for trade with the EU which would rely on a system of tariffs policed by the body that does not adequately cover financial services.

Under a hard Brexit, Britain would have to set tariffs on its goods and services, a process that could take years to complete. The General Agreement on Trade in Services, or GATS, is the WTO agreement governing trade in services.

Trade in financial services on the basis of GATS would mean the loss of the current form of cross-border passporting. There is no presumed right of market access in GATS but Most Favoured Nation (MFN) treatment obligation prohibits discrimination between like services and service suppliers from WTO members.

That means Britains right to export financial services into the EU risks being downgraded to match countries such as India or China, in order to keep within WTO rules. Similar restrictions would arise on EU financial services sold to Britain.

(Additional reporting by Tom Miles in Geneva; editing by Edmund Blair and David Evans)

Topics Legislation Europe Canada Uk
Deutsche Bank and digital insurance broker Friendsurance have formed a partnership designed to make it simpler and more transparent and convenient for clients to arrange for their insurance needs.

To drive this, Deutsche Bank said it will integrate Friendsurances digital products  derived from 170 German insurers  into the banks online banking portal.

Starting mid-2018, bank clients will be able to use the insurance manager function to manage insurance policies and take out new ones quickly and securely, said Deutsche Bank in a statement.

Deutsche Bank and Friendsurance expect clients will increasingly turn to digital brokers for their insurance needs in the coming years.

The companies noted that premiums for property and casualty insurance totaled 66 billion ($80.8 billion) in Germany in 2016 with 27 percent of those premiums negotiated by insurance brokers.

We aim to become our clients main digital bank. Many of them want a reliable platform where they can efficiently manage all their financial needs and where they can get products that go beyond what traditional banking services offer, said Markus Pertlwieser, chief digital officer private & commercial clients at Deutsche Bank.

Digitalization is creating the technological framework to make this possible, he added. The insurance manager function is a logical addition to our digital offering and we have found the right partner in Friendsurance.

This cooperation helps us to raise client satisfaction levels and inspire greater loyalty from our bank customers. And we are opening up to new, internet-savvy target groups, explained Tim Kunde, managing partner and co-founder of Friendsurance.

Using the digital insurance manager function, clients will be able to see all their insurance policies along with details such as notice periods, coverage and a claims history, said Deutsche Bank, noting that clients also will be able to manage their insurance policies online, to compare policies and conditions and, if necessary, change insurer or take out a new policy.

In the event of a claim, quick help is at hand from the insurance manager function. However, in addition to the digital offering, clients can call a hotline manned by insurance experts.

Friendsurance, which offers products from every insurer in the German market, serves more than 100,000 clients and aims to offer its clients a home for their insurance products.

When selecting a policy, the determining factor is that Friendsurance applies the same criteria that leading consumer protection groups do. As a result, the insurance manager function will not just come up with the cheapest insurance policies but the most suited to each individual clients needs and situation.

Source: Deutsche Bank/Friendsurance

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Agencies
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether the Securities and Exchange Commissions in-house judges were appointed in violation of the Constitution, agreeing to hear a case that could upend administrative hearing systems across the federal government.

The move came at the request of the Trump administration, which switched sides in November and told the justices it would no longer defend the SECs system.

The dispute could affect more than 100 cases currently at the SEC, along with a dozen that are on appeal in the federal courts. It also could have ramifications for other government agencies, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which have similar systems for appointing their administrative law judges.

The justices will hear an appeal from Raymond Lucia, who was fined $300,000 and barred from working as an investment adviser after an SEC judge found he misled prospective clients. Lucia contends the SEC judges are officers, and not mere employees, meaning the Constitution requires them to be appointed by the president, a department head or a court.

Lucias lawyer, Mark Perry, says the constitutional requirement ensures that important formalities are observed  including a commission vote and the administration of an oath of office  before people wield federal authority.

Those steps are required and observed precisely so that the public, the agency and the officer himself or herself knows and understands who is an officer and what office that person holds, Perry said in an interview.

The Trump administration told the court that the judge who handled Lucias case did not conform to the Constitutions requirements. The SECs judges are selected by the chief judge and approved by the commissions personnel office, U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said in court papers.

Federal appeals courts are divided on the issue. The Washington-based court in Lucias case said the SECs judges dont qualify as officers because their decisions dont become final until the commission itself takes action, either by reviewing the ruling or by explicitly declining to intervene.

The initial decision becomes final when, and only when, the commission issues the finality order, and not before then, Judge Judith Rogers wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel. Thus, the commission must affirmatively act  by issuing the order  in every case.

The Trump administrations shift in position means the Supreme Court probably will appoint an outside lawyer to defend the lower court ruling.

The SECs top lawyers didnt sign the Trump administration brief, suggesting they dont support the new position.

The day after the brief was filed, the SEC issued an order that ratified the appointment of its five judges and told them to review each of their pending cases. Although the commission said the moves would resolve any problems under the appointments clause, thats likely to be disputed. Lucias lawyers called the order substantively defective.

Critics say the SEC fares much better before its own judges than it does in federal court. In a court filing supporting Lucia, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the commission has a home court advantage in administrative proceedings.

The case is Lucia v. SEC, 17-130.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics USA Legislation Tech
A U.S. appeals court said a shareholder lawsuit accusing Goldman Sachs Group Inc. of fraudulently claiming to put client interests before its own when creating risky subprime securities before the financial crisis, including a collateralized debt obligation known as Abacus, cannot proceed as a class action.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said on Friday a lower court judge imposed too high a burden on the Wall Street bank to show that its alleged conflicts of interest and misleading statements had no impact on its stock price.

While the 3-0 decision permits shareholders to again seek class certification, it may now be easier for Goldman to convince U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty, who had certified a class action in September 2015, not to let the plaintiffs sue as a group.

Thomas Dubbs, a lawyer for the shareholders, said he was confident a class action would again be certified. Goldman had no immediate comment.

Shareholders from February 2007 to June 2010 claimed to lose more than $13 billion because Goldman had in regulatory filings and public comments overstated its ability to manage conflicts.

They said Goldman did this while concealing short positions that the bank or hedge fund manager John Paulson made in four subprime mortgage CDOs: Abacus 2007 AC-1, Anderson Mezzanine Funding 2007-1, Hudson Mezzanine Funding 2006-1, and Timberwolf.

Shareholders sued after news about federal enforcement activity hurt Goldmans stock, including when the Securities and Exchange Commission brought civil fraud charges in April 2010 against Goldman and vice president Fabrice Tourre over Abacus.

In certifying a class action, Crotty had said Goldman failed to conclusively sever th link between its statements and its stock price.

But in Fridays decision, Circuit Judge Richard Wesley, citing a more recent ruling involving Barclays Plc, said Goldman had only to show it more likely than not that its alleged misrepresentations did not affect the stock.

Wesley also said Crotty should have let Goldman present evidence of 34 dates prior to 2010 when news reports of its alleged conflicts did not hurt its stock price.

Absent any impact, shareholder claims could completely collapse, Wesley said.

The SEC has estimated that Paulson made about $1 billion by betting against Abacus.

Goldman settled with the SEC for $550 million in July 2010, without admitting wrongdoing. A federal jury found Tourre liable in August 2013, and a judge later ordered him to pay more than $856,000, including a fine.

The case is Arkansas Teachers Retirement System et al v Goldman Sachs Group Inc et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 16-250. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Tom Brown)

Topics Lawsuits USA
Capitol Indemnity Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of CapSpecialty Inc., said it has acquired the renewal rights to Rockhill Insurance Groups excess and surplus environmental insurance book of business.

Rockhill is a member of the State Auto Insurance Group, which has been looking to exit the excess and surplus lines business. CapSpecialty is a subsidiary of Alleghany Corp.

CapSpecialty, through its specialty carrier, Capitol Specialty Insurance Corp., will begin quoting all new business submissions made to Rockhill as well as renewals sometime in the first quarter of 2018, according to the announcement.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

In 2016, State Auto stopped writing program business and realigned its excess and surplus lines unit, Rockhill. Last year State Auto CEO Mike LaRocco said the company decided to exit the excess and surplus business completely. The move is part of State Autos continuing turnaround effort following disappointing results in 2015. State Auto acquired Rockhill in 2009 to enter the excess and surplus lines business.

LaRocco has been stressing a digital transformation at State Auto, according to a report by Carrier Management in which he said the E&S business was not a good strategic fit with State Autos core products of home, auto, personal umbrella, and on the commercial side, commercial auto, BOP, commercial umbrella, middle-market commercial, workers compensation and farm and ranch business.

We really had to evaluate, if we stayed in specialty, what type of investment would we need to make in those businesses? They are very very different businessesprimarily, wholesale distribution. Its a different technology [and] a different commitment financially, LaRocco told Carrier Management.

Stephen Sills, CEO of CapSpecialty, said that adding Rockhills environmental book to CapSpecialtys existing environmental book will further strengthen his companys presence in this segment for small to mid-sized businesses.

Sills said CapSpecialty will be keeping Rockhill employees currently working on this book.

CapSpecialty is committed to offering our wholesale brokers and insured customers access to strong environmental coverage, and Rockhills appetite, products and focus on small to mid-sized business are all well aligned with those of CapSpecialty, said Tony Anzalone, head of Specialty Casualty at CapSpecialty.

Keefe, Bruyette & Woods served as financial advisor to State Auto in the transaction.

In addition to Capitol Indemnity Corp. and Capitol Specialty Insurance Corp., CapSpecialtys affiliates include Platte River Insurance Co.

In addition to CapSpecialty, holding company Alleghanys property/casualty subsidiaries include Transatlantic Holdings and RSUI Group. Last year Alleghany sold Pacific Compensation Insurance Co., an underwriter of workers compensation insurance primarily in California, to CopperPoint Mutual Insurance Co. for $150 million.

Related:

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Auto Excess Surplus Pollution
The former executive director of the State Police Commission is suing, claiming she was retaliated against for challenging Louisiana State Police brass and calling attention to a string of illegal campaign contributions made by commission members.

Cathy Derbonne, who served as the commissions chief administrator for eight years, said she had no choice but to resign at the height of the scandal last year after commissioners threatened to humiliate her at a public meeting, the Advocate reported.

The commission acts as a civil service board for state police, hearing complaints from rank-and-file troopers and deciding disciplinary appeals. It has been embroiled in a series of controversies over the past two years resulting in significant turnover on its board.

The lawsuit, filed in state district court in Baton Rouge, seeks back pay and benefits for loss of earning capacity, humiliation and embarrassment, severe emotional distress and mental anguish.

It alleges Derbonne faced mounting pressure to step down after she called for an investigation into a series of improper political contributions made by three commission members who ultimately resigned.

Derbonne also said she fell out of favor with the Louisiana State Troopers Association after that organization was accused of using a straw donor to give thousands of dollars to seven political candidates and the House Democratic Campaign Committee  improper donations that have drawn the attention of federal investigators.

Derbonne reported the troopers political activities to Gov. John Bel Edwards and his executive counsel, as well as to the Louisiana Board of Ethics. She also hired an outside attorney, Taylor Townsend, a former state lawmaker from Natchitoches, to investigate the claims.

The lawsuit alleges the former chairman of the commission, Trooper T.J. Doss, accused Derbonne of violating commission rules and policy, adding she had lost her mind.

It says that Doss was assigned to state police headquarters with the purpose of closely monitoring and observing (Derbonnes) daily routine.

Shortly before she stepped down, Derbonne said she received an anonymous letter warning of an emerging plot to remove her from office. The lawsuit claims she was harassed and constructively discharged in reprisal for her efforts to draw attention to wrongdoing on the commission.

I didnt want to resign, she told The Advocate, but I didnt want to be tainted either.

The commissions new executive director, Jason Hannaman, did not immediately return a call seeking comment on the lawsuit.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Louisiana Law Enforcement
The Texas Department of Insurance  Division of Workers Compensation (TDI-DWC) is accepting comments through Feb. 20 on a compounded drug rule that was first proposed in June 2017.

On June 16, 2017, DWC announced an informal draft rule to require that compounded drugs be preauthorized. The rule was drafted at the request of the legislature after a DWC study found that the cost of compounded drugs doubled from 2010-2014, and the average cost per prescription had risen to $829 in 2016.

The numbers were concerning because compounded drugs arent recommended as first line medications in treatment guidelines for injured employees, the DWC said.

Concerns about compounded drugs arent unique to the Texas workers compensation system. In 2014, the Employee Retirement System of Texas began requiring preauthorization for all compounded drugs costing $300 or more. The change reduced ERS expenditures on those drugs from $35.7 million in Fiscal Year 2014 to $1.2 million in Fiscal Year 2015. In January, ERS tightened the requirements even more, requiring preauthorization for compounded drugs costing more than $50.

A May 2017 report by DWCs Research and Evaluation group found that:

The number of compounded drugs increased from 18,020 prescriptions in 2010 to 26,380 in 2014.

The total cost of compounded drugs increased from $6 million in 2010 to $12 million in 2014.

The average cost per compounded drug prescription increased from $356 in 2010 to $829 in 2016.

Almost a third of compounded drug prescriptions were to treat back injuries.

Source: TDI-DWC

Related:

Topics Texas Workers' Compensation Drugs
James A. Jones saw enough cars stranded along the icy highway to know it was time to pull over as a winter storm blasted parts of Tennessee and Kentucky with sleet, freezing rain and snow Friday.

Jones counted 25 cars stuck by the road as he drove from Memphis to McMinnville, Tennessee, about 280 miles (450 kilometers) away. He decided not to risk it any longer and took a break in the West Tennessee town of Parkers Crossroads.

Its rough riding, he said. If you was in the wrecker business, youd be making some money today.

The winter storm, which began with an icy mix before turning to snow, forced schools and businesses to close in Tennessee and Kentucky. Ice that coated broad swaths of the South snarled traffic.

Throughout the day, highway patrol troopers and road crews dealt with multiple crashes involving trucks and cars along Interstate 40 between Memphis and Nashville.

Heavy snow made visibility difficult and a mixture of snow, ice and sand used to dry out the roads became a slushy mess and made for hazardous driving. Accidents on the busy interstate led to long lines of parked vehicles as drivers waited for crews to clear the highway.

Memphis police responded to more than 100 crashes. In Mississippi, a tractor-trailer overturned after crashing on icy Interstate 55, causing traffic delays.

In Tennessee, Kim Ruehl and Mercedes Volk waited out the storm at a fast-food restaurant in Parkers Crossroads with their 3-year-old daughter, Quinn, who snacked on a cheeseburger and milk.

They were heading from Asheville, North Carolina, to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to research a book. They stayed overnight in Nashville and were hoping to drive west through the storm in their Mini Cooper. They pulled off Interstate 40 because of the dangerous driving conditions.

The windshield wipers froze and the road just got real bad, Ruehl said.

They werent expecting such bad conditions, but they left early from Nashville anyway.

An hour into our drive, I was like, we should have stayed in Nashville, Volk said.

In Kentucky, truck stop employee Paige Harville said traffic was much lighter than usual early Friday along Interstate 24 at Paducah.

Theres not much of it, she said. Like nothing.

In nearby Mayfield in western Kentucky, postal workers arrived at work to find their delivery vehicles iced over. They had to de-ice the trucks before they could unlock them. Letter carrier Corey Asher was ready for treacherous conditions as he started his route.

The snow covers up the sleet and ice, so where you think you might have solid footing you may not, he said. So your steps have to be choppy today. You have to be real diligent about where you walk, and use hand rails.

Winter storm warnings were posted for the western halves of Tennessee and Kentucky as unseasonably warm weather in recent days gave way to winter conditions.

In western Kentucky, roads were covered with layers of ice. On top of that was about three tenths of an inch of sleet, said National Weather Service meteorologist Robin Smith.

Dont go out unless you absolutely have to, Smith warned.

Winds up to 35 mph (56 kph) further complicated driving. By early afternoon, much of western Kentucky had 1-3 inches (3-8 centimeters) of snow. Parts of West Tennessee had 3-4 inches (8-10 centimeters).

Meanwhile, forecasters predicted 2-5 inches (5-12 centimeters) of snow in the Louisville and Lexington areas of Kentucky as temperatures dropped.

In West Virginia, floodwaters were blamed for the death of a woman who police say was driving in high water when she lost control and went into a creek. Her body was recovered from the sunken car.

Many school districts in Kentucky and Tennessee called off classes Friday. Several colleges and universities in both states also canceled classes, including at Vanderbilt University, Murray State University and Western Kentucky University.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam closed state offices Friday in West and Middle Tennessee because of the winter weather. And Kentucky House and Senate leaders to call off Fridays legislative session.

___

Schreiner reported from Louisville, Kentucky. Associated Press writers Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama; Kelly P. Kissel in Little Rock, Arkansas; and Rebecca Reynolds Yonker in Louisville, Kentucky; contributed to this report.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Windstorm Education Tennessee Kentucky
At the end of a heartbreaking week that saw deadly mudslides kill at least 20, residents of Montecito gathered to grieve, pay tribute to victims and commit to rebuilding their cherished community on the Southern California coast.

Mourners lit prayer candles and left flowers as a makeshift memorial for the victims after shedding tears, hugs and prayers during the vigil over the weekend outside the Santa Barbara County courthouse.

I dont know about you, but Im scared of Mother Nature right now, Santa Barbara Mayor Cathy Murillo told the attendees at the vigil.

Bethany Harris, who lives in Santa Barbara, brought her two young sons to the vigil because she wanted to make sure they understood the impact the devastating storm has had on the community, she said.

We all know someone who has been affected by this, she said. We will heal together.

Before a moment of silence, Santa Barbara County Supervisor Das Williams read out the names of each of the 20 victims.

Tonight, we need to mourn, he said. Our community is going through something it has never gone through.

Those at the vigil included the family of 30-year-old Pinit Sutthithepa, whose body was discovered Saturday afternoon. His 2-year-old daughter, Lydia, remained missing. His 6-year-old son, Peerawat, nicknamed Pasta, and his 79-year-old father-in-law, Richard Loring Taylor, also were killed in the mudslides. Family members said they were too distraught to speak.

This family is one of several that lost multiple family members, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said. And we know that the suffering of those who knew and loved all of the victims is immense.

The list of those still missing in the mudslides has shrunk to four.

In the disaster area, firefighters went door to door on Sunday to check the structural stability of the houses damaged by a powerful rainstorm that preceded the mudslides and scoured whats left of toppled homes and mangled cars as they searched for the missing.

Search and rescue operations ended Sunday and authorities transitioned to a search and recovery phase, Brown said. The move allows officials to release resources that are no longer needed and allow search operations to slow to a safer pace, he said.

The storm sent flash floods cascading through mountain slopes that were burned bare by a huge wildfire in December. Workers used backhoes, jackhammers and chain saws to clear away masses of mud, boulders and toppled trees.

Crews have made it a priority to clear out debris basins and creek canals before another rainstorm. Long-range forecasts gave the crews about a week before the next chance of rain _ and potential new mudslides _ although the precipitation was expected to be disorganized and light. Another system was possible two days later.

The mudslides on Jan. 9 ravaged the tony community, destroying at least 65 homes and damaging more than 460 others, officials said. They also forced the indefinite shutdown of U.S. 101, the only major freeway between Santa Barbara and points east.

The rest of the communitys infrastructure also was damaged. Some streets were cracked in half, and authorities closed bridges and overpasses because they were unstable. Amtrak said it was adding rail cars to each of its five daily roundtrip trains between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to accommodate commuters grappling with the ongoing closure of U.S. 101.

But despite the damage in the neighborhood, Montecito residents still have hope their community will recover.

Theyre exhausted but they find ways to try to live life as normally as they can, Williams said.

Related:

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Topics California USA
The former owner of Pacific Hospital in Long Beach was sentenced to federal prison on Friday for running a $600 million workers compensation fraud scheme.

Michael Drobot, 73, was sentenced Friday to 63 months in prison and fined $500,000.

Earlier this week, he was ordered to forfeit $10 million to the government and to liquidate assets that include real estate along with a 1965 Aston Martin, a 1958 Porsche and a 1971 Mercedes Benz.

Prosecutors said that for at least 15 years, Drobot paid more than $40 million to dozens of doctors, chiropractors and other medical professionals in return for referring thousands of patients to his hospital for spinal surgeries.

Some of the patients lived hundreds of miles from the hospital.

Drobot filed some $600 million in bills for the surgeries with state and federal workers compensation insurance systems. The bills included the cost of medical hardware implanted into patients that were sold by Drobots own company.

He exploited a now-repealed California law that permitted hospitals to pass the full cost of medical devices implanted in spinal surgeries to workers compensation insurers, prosecutors said.

A former state senator, Ronald Calderon, is serving a federal prison sentence for accepting bribes, including some from Drobot in exchange for making efforts to preserve the law.

Drobot pleaded guilty in 2014 to conspiracy and paying illegal kickbacks.

U.S. District Judge Josephine L. Staton, who sentenced Drobot, said he introduced greed into the doctor-patient relationship.

Seven other people, including Drobots son Michael, also have pleaded guilty in connection with the scheme and await sentencing.

Related:

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Topics California Workers' Compensation
What Is Tangible Common Equity (TCE)?

Tangible common equity (TCE) is a measure of a company's physical capital, which is used to evaluate a financial institution's ability to deal with potential losses. It is often used when analyzing financial firms that do not normally have a relatively large amount of tangible assets.

Tangible common equity is calculated by subtracting intangible assets (including goodwill) and preferred equity from the company's book value.

Key Takeaways Tangible common equity (TCE) is a measure of a company's physical capital, which is used to evaluate a financial institution's ability to deal with potential losses.

Measuring a company's TCE is particularly useful for evaluating companies that have large amounts of preferred stock, such as U.S. banks that received federal bailout money in the 2008 financial crisis.

The TCE ratio (TCE divided by tangible assets) is a measure of capital adequacy at a bank. This ratio measures a firm's tangible common equity in terms of the firm's tangible assets.

Understanding Tangible Common Equity

Companies own both tangible (physical) and intangible assets. A building is tangible, for instance, while a patent is intangible. The same can be said about a firm's equity. Financial companies are most often evaluated using TCE.

Measuring a company's TCE is particularly useful for evaluating companies that have large amounts of preferred stock, such as U.S. banks that received federal bailout money in the 2008 financial crisis. In exchange for bailout funds, those banks issued large amounts of preferred stock to the federal government. A bank can boost TCE by converting preferred shares to common shares.

Using tangible common equity can also be used to calculate a capital adequacy ratio as one way of evaluating a bank's solvency and is considered a conservative measure of its stability.

TCE is not required by GAAP or bank regulations and is typically used internally as one of many capital adequacy indicators.

Special Considerations

The TCE ratio (TCE divided by tangible assets) is a measure of capital adequacy at a bank. The TCE ratio measures a firm's tangible common equity in terms of the firm's tangible assets. It can be used to estimate a bank's sustainable losses before shareholder equity is wiped out.

Depending on the firm's circumstances, patents might be excluded from intangible assets for the purposes of this equation since they, at times, can have a liquidation value.

Another way to evaluate a bank's solvency is to look at its tier 1 capital, which consists of common shares, preferred shares, retained earnings, and deferred tax assets. Banks and regulators track tier 1 capital levels to assess the stability of a bank.

Notably, lower risk assets held by a bank, such as U.S. Treasury notes, carry more safety than low-grade securities. Regulators do not require regular submissions of tier 1 capital levels, but they come into play when the Federal Reserve conducts stress tests on banks.

Example of Tangible Common Equity

Say that XYZ Bank had for the fiscal year 2021 a book value of $273.8 billion. Its goodwill was $69.01 billion, intangible assets $2.2 billion, and preferred stock $24 billion. Thus, XYZ Bank's tangible common equity at the end of 2021 was $178.59 billion ($273.8 billion - $69.01 billion - $2.2 billion - $24 billion).

Many banks break out tangible common equity in the supplemental documents on their financial statements.

What Does Tangible Common Equity Measure? Tangible common equity is an estimation of the liquidation value of a firm, or what might be left over for distribution to shareholders if the firm were liquidated.

What Is the Tangible Common Equity Ratio Used For? The tangible common equity ratio (TCE divided by tangible assets) can be used as a measure of leverage. High ratio values indicate less leverage and a larger amount of tangible equity compared to tangible assets.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist and leading expert on Iran and US foreign policy, writes in his article for Arab News, Some onlookers were shocked by the much bolder slogans of this uprising than the one in 2009. Indeed, the outrage over economic hardships and wealth disparities escalated into calls for the expulsion of President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as for the dismantling of the system of clerical rule.

The regime blames the unrest on everything except its own incompetence and disregard for the interests of the Iranian public, says Dr. Rafizadeh, who adds, Khamenei identified the leading Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), as a main contributor, doing his best to conceal its popular appeal by describing it as part of a triangle of enemies that had planned, financed and carried out the latest uprising. He also identified Americans and Zionists as the masterminds behind protesters call for regime change.

Dr. Rafizadeh criticizes Khameneis claims that Arab adversaries put up cash, while the opposition acted as foot soldiers, and cites the lack of evidence of such a conspiracy. He says that Khamenei was attempting to underplay the significance of domestic support for regime change  but this effort did not diminish the admission that the MEK provided many of the activists for a protest movement that spread across nearly the entire country.

Since its establishment in 1979, the Iranian regime has resorted to blaming foreign enemies for its domestic problems and the populations dissatisfaction with it, Dr. Rafizadeh writes. This is a tactic that Iranian authorities use to suppress domestic opposition  blaming foreign powers allows the regime to avoid taking responsibility.

The secretary of Irans clerical Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, said that the uprising resulted from a relatively small faction of committed opponents, who deceived a much larger population of demonstrators to endorse the cause.

However, tens of thousands of people took to the streets and joined chants of death to the dictator. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh writes, People do not express support for regime change in their home country on a whim. He concludes that if the opposition was a leading voice in the uprising, it must be a leading voice for the Iranian people in general.

Therefore, however inadvertently, Khamenei admitted that there is a substantial threat to the regimes future. Independent analysts have underscored this threat, and say a violent crackdown on the uprising will only engender more protests. This is especially certain, if no serious measures are undertaken to address the peoples economic, political, and social demands.

The regime acknowledged that some 3,700 people have been arrested. The judiciary warned that death sentences may await those deemed responsible. But, these actions will most likely not uproot the oppositions deep integration into Iranian society.

The world should thus expect to see another surge of protests, and with the opposition still in place as a major organizational force, it stands to reason that the demands will continue to escalate, writes Dr. Majid Rafizadeh.
UK suppliers to Carillion are desperately trying to figure out the impact of its failure on a vast network of businesses that had contracts with the indebted construction services company, according to the head of an industry lobby.

Carillion outsourced everything, said Rudi Klein, chief executive of the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group, whose members include steel-working firms, electricians, and plumbers.

It was a management company, it wasnt a construction company or an infrastructure company, he said. Carillion, which obtained London court approval for liquidation, provided management services, and sometimes not very well. Its payment performance to its suppliers was appalling, Mr Klein said.

Carillions portfolio of contracts span the UKs public infrastructure, from building projects at schools and hospitals to telecom cables, railways and nuclear decommissioning.

These involved hundreds of small and medium-sized companies, presaging a messy winding up of the Wolverhampton-based company.

It has also sparked a political outcry about the role of the private sector in public contracts.

It marks one of the biggest British corporate failures in recent years after costly contract delays and a slump in new business left it swamped by debt and pensions liabilities of around 1.5bn (1.68bn).

The demise of the 200-year-old business poses a headache for Theresa Mays government, which had employed Carillion to work on 450 projects including the building and maintenance of hospitals, prisons, defence sites and a high-speed rail line.

Carillions announcement has also roiled shares in supplier Speedy Hire, which rents equipment.

The shares fell up to 12%, the most since September 2015. Balfour Beatty, which has a joint venture with Carillion, said it is expecting a cash impact of 35m to 45m.

Construction is the most outsourced sector in the UK and Carillions failure raises the question of whether the current model of state contracting is fit-for-purpose, Klein said.

The mind boggles. There are other approaches to procurement. This is simply not on anymore, Mr Klein said.

The business group is trying to assess the extent of its members exposure and seeking government proposals on what will happen to those owed money.

Some projects could be ring-fenced so that their suppliers would be paid, he said.

Bloomberg and Reuters
Dunnes Stores won the battle to secure the largest share of an increased 2.63bn that grocery shoppers spent in supermarkets over Christmas, seeing off a strong challenge from a resurgent Tesco, writes Eamon Quinn.

The festive spending spree covering the 12 weeks of Christmas to the end of December is key for grocers because it accounts for an outsized 25% of all spending in grocery stores during the year.

And new figures from international research firm Kantar Worldpanel Ireland show that a 3.6% increase in festive spending in supermarkets helped lift sales in 2017 to 10.49bn.

That amount includes home groceries only, while goods bought for on-the-go consumption are not included, the researcher said.

The top rankings in the Irish supermarket charts are closely bunched between three rivals and are separated by small fractions only. But even a small gain in market share can translate into many millions of euro in additional sales for a supermarket.

Following the surge in the value of the euro against sterling and because so many grocery products are shipped across the Irish Sea from Britain, the Irish supermarket wars last year were also influenced by falling prices of some grocery items.

Some experts have, however, questioned whether prices here should have fallen more steeply, given that value of sterling has plunged by over 15% since the UK voted to exit the EU in June 2016.

According to the Kantar figures, prices across a basket of 30,000 grocery items fell by 0.1% in the Christmas period from the previous festive period.

Dunnes was the No 1 supermarket this Christmas, securing a share of 23% of the 2.63bn in take-home grocery spend over the period. Building its share strongly to 22.8%, Tesco posted its strongest growth spurt for almost seven years, according to Kantar.

SuperValu was in third, with a share of 22.4%. The Kantar figures also show that discounter Lidl had a good Christmas, possibly at the expense of its direct rival Aldi.

Lidl had a share of 10.4%, climbing above Aldi, which underperformed growth in the market with a share of 10.3%.

The so-called multiples accounted for almost 89% of all supermarket sales over Christmas, with other outlets winning a share of just over 11%. Online grocers increased sales strongly, Kantar said. Overall, households spent an average of 1,532 over Christmas on groceries, said Kantar director David Berry, with staple items such as fruit and poultry, as well as wine, posting increases.
A proposal by the Holmen Area Fire District fire chief to form a partnership with the La Crosse Fire Department was met with mixed opinions by town of Holland board members last week.

The idea was first brought to the Holmen Area Fire Department Association Board in December by fire chief Paul Menches, at which point the board approved having Menches pursue efforts to create a fleet maintenance agreement with the LAFD, as they have a full-time maintenance program.

The two departments may now also discuss ways to develop better cooperation on ways to reduce costs associated with duplicated services. The HAFD oversees fire services for the village of Holmen, as well as the towns of Onalaska and Holmen. Two representatives from each municipality serve on the fire board.

We gave the OK to talk to the city of La Crosse to see if something would work for maintenance, basically, and (fire department personnel) were going to look at other things that we might be able to share, said board member Jerome Pedretti, who also serves on the HAFD board.

Board member Bob Stupi spoke in favor of a regionalization effort, pointing out that it would help when there is personnel and equipment shortages, and it could also help keep down vehicle costs.

I think expanding the regionalization discussion could be a win-win for everybody, because if you need a big ladder truck, you certainly dont need one in La Crosse, one in Onalaska, one in Holmen, Stupi said.

Pedretti agreed, saying that there are very infrequent needs for ladder trucks.

We could stay with the smaller trucks and save a lot of money, Pedretti said.

However, he added that a regionalized fire department may be a more expensive route for Holland because of some of the control that they would lose.

We lose control and our budgets could get strained pretty quickly, Pedretti said. Or it could go the other way.

But as far as the current plan goes, Menches said the fire district will look at what theyre currently spending annually on fleet maintenance, and compare it to what it would cost to have the LCFD provide the same services.

Part of this service would include loaning us a vehicle to replace the vehicle we are having serviced, if needed, Menches said. Once the costs are identified and compared, they will be presented back to the board with a recommendation for board approval.

He said the fire district will also look at what it would cost to have the LCFD conduct annual equipment testing costs, as those tests are currently outsourced.
Two former directors of the company which operated Dublins landmark Clerys store were actively misled into believing the business would continue as a going concern after its sale on June 12, 2015, the High Court has been told, writes Ann OLoughlin.

Instead, the business was wound up hours later with the loss of more than 400 jobs.

Mr Justice Robert Haughton has directed the joint liquidators of OCS Operations Ltd to discover documents concerning seven meetings held by one of the liquidators, Eamonn Richardson of accountancy firm KPMG, with the new owner or their representatives in a period of six weeks before the Clerys sale and winding up.



Clerys was sold to Natrium, a vehicle of Dublin based investment firm, D2 Private, and KPMG acted as financial adviser to D2 Private when Natrium purchased the OCS companies which owned and operated Clerys, the court was told.

Yesterday the judge agreed with Michael Cush SC, for the two directors, the documents sought were necessary and relevant to their defence to the liquidators application for disqualification orders against them over their conduct of the affairs of OCS Operations Ltd, which operated Clerys for some years before its sale.

The disqualification application, under the Companies Act, will be heard on a later date. The directors - Rafael Klotz and Macolm MacLennan MacAulay - are professional directors and Mr Cush had said any disqualification or restriction order made against them here would have significant consequences for them.

Both directors deny unfitness or that they acted in breach of their duties as directors and say they acted honestly and responsibly in the conduct of the companys affairs.

Mr MacLennan MacAulay, with an address in Cheshire, England, is Chief Operating Officer Europe of US based Gordon Brothers, owner of the OCS group. He was a non-executive director of OCS Operations from August 2012. Mr Klotz, with an address in Connecticut, US, was a non-executive director for six months before the sale.

The judge noted their core defence to disqualification is the true cause of the companys insolvency was not their actions but a "pre-planned strategy" on the part of its new owners, of which the directors claim they had no prior knowledge, to have it wound up. They claim they got assurances from the purchaser the company would continue as a going concern.

They claim the liquidation of Clerys must have been discussed at meetings in May and June 2015 and they are entitled to any documents concerning those meetings.

The joint liquidators - Mr Richardson and Kieran Wallace, both partners in KPMG - had opposed the discovery application on grounds the documents sought were not relevant or necessary to the courts assessment of the central issue - the directors conduct of the companys affairs.

James Doherty SC, for the liquidators, said the claims against the directors include they allowed substantial monies due to concessionaires operating in Clerys to be used as working capital and some 770,000 was owed to concessionaires. The liquidators also claim the company was loss-making for some time, its lease for the Clerys premises had expired, it was reliant on financial support from the OCS group to continue trading and was unlikely to be able to pay sums due to concessionaires on June 15, 2015. The liquidators were also hampered by the absence of board minutes in the six months before liquidation, he said.

The liquidators also disputed claims by the directors of conflict of interest and lack of impartiality in their presentation, in the discovery application, of information concerning the Clerys sale.

Mr Cush argued the liquidators had accepted the claims of Natrium/D2 Private that the decision to wind up Clerys was taken on June 12, 2015, the same day as the sale, when the directors believed the decision must have been made before then.

In his discovery ruling, the judge said the directors were not entitled to raise issues concerning the presentation of the liquidators application and he would refuse discovery on that ground. However, he was permitting discovery on the basis the documents sought were relevant to the core defence to the disqualification application.

Bearing in mind disqualification has been characterised as a "draconian" penalty, he said some of the matters canvassed in discovery may have a bearing on any penalty imposed, duration of any disqualification period and the courts consideration of the alternative remedy of restriction.
Update 5.20pm: A woman who claims she was raped on Jason Derulos tour bus denies making it up to cover her embarrassment for engaging in sexual activity.

Two men have denied raping her and falsely imprisoning her on the bus following a VIP aftershow party in Cork city in June 2014.

In her direct evidence today, the complainant, who was 19 at the time of the alleged offences, claimed a man on board Jason Derulos tour bus forced her into an upstairs bunk bed and raped her.

She told the jury a second man raped her afterwards, and a third said he was next before she managed to get off the bus and raise the alarm.

She claims it happened after a VIP party for Mr. Derulo and his crew following a gig in the city.

The American musician is not facing any charges.

Defence barrister Sean Guerin put it to her that she engaged in sexual activity and then tried to put together an account to explain what happened in order to cover her embarrassment and shame.

She strongly denied that was the case and insisted she repeatedly asked them to stop.

Her cross-examination will resume tomorrow.

Earlier: Court is told Cork VIP party rape accused admits having sex but insists it was consensual

A court has heard a man accused of raping a 19-year-old woman following a Jason Derulo concert in Cork does not accept there was no consent to sex.

He is one of two men who are on trial for the alleged rape and false imprisonment of the woman following a VIP party in Cork in June 2014.

The court heard today how Jason Derulo and his crew attended a VIP party at the Savoy nightclub in Cork city after playing Live at the Marquee in June 2014.

The complainant, who was 19 at the time, was also there.

Later, she said she was invited on to Mr. Derulos tour bus by a member of his crew.

While onboard, she said one of the accused put his hand inside her jumpsuit without asking if he could do so.

The bus stopped a short time later, but she said this man wouldnt let her off and brought her upstairs by her arm where she claims he pushed her onto a small bunk bed and raped her.

She claims a second accused man from Mr Derulos crew raped her afterwards.

She told the jury she was crying. She said she was terrified and asked them to stop.

After her direct evidence, Sean Guerin, whos representing one of the accused, told the court his client accepted they had sex that night but said he didnt accept it was without consent and insists no one else took part.

- Digital desk
Bertha Looneys name is not found on the roll call of American civil rights martyrs and activists who helped bring about change in a society relentlessly clinging to white supremacy, and segregation in Americas Deep South. Yet, in her own modest way, she was a trail blazer.

We meet inside the National Civil Rights Museum that incorporates the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King JR was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee 50 years ago, on April 4, 1968. I have a dream, Dr King famously said. The leader of the Civil Rights Movements dream was that all individuals, regardless of who they were, or where they were from, would be given the unalienable rights of life, equality, liberty, dignity, and the pursuit of happiness.

Imagine what it must have been like to be Bertha Looney back in 1958, then a teenage high school graduate with top grades, and eligible to study at a State University reluctantly forced by law to de-segregate and admit the first black students that same semester.

My mothers white employers showered me with congratulatory gifts after seeing my photo in the newspaper, they naturally assumed I would go to a black university. When it transpired Id be going to their daughters college they wanted to fire my mother; you see it was impossible for Madams daughter to share the same classroom as the black maids girl.

Worse was to come. Bertha, a smartly dressed septuagenarian who taught English for over 50 years, tells how she and seven other African American students arrived on campus with armed guards for protection. Trail blazers in their community, Bertha and her fellow students were handed down the Deans restrictions as soon as they passed through the college gates.

We would be seated in class by 7.55am and we had to be off campus by noon to avoid any out of class contact with white students; visits to the restaurant or library, physical education or any occasions of interracial mingling was forbidden. Was she frightened? Oh lord, yes. I remember the relief of leaving that hostile environment and returning to civilisation at noon. Later her fear centred on the dread of failing exams and being put out of school, defeating the whole purpose of being there.

Experiences like Bertha Looneys abound to this day and interested travellers can hear the sad and shocking stories and also those of courage and resilience. Theres always a Blues venue and session to enjoy and lighten the load down here too. Blues legends like Charley Patton, BB King, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters are among those celebrated forever along Mississippis Blues Trail. Memphis has the King of them all  Elvis  the Arcade restaurant where he slipped in the backdoor for breakfast of peanut butter and banana sandwiches  the highlight a short drive from town Graceland, the ultimate shrine to his memory flanked by a mall crammed with merchandising.

Touching the surface of civil rights tourism, during a recent week long inspirational journey from Tennessee to Mississippi, I am shocked by the shortcomings of my own knowledge about atrocities of white supremacists and the long bloody battle for civil rights in the US. My generation learnt nothing in history classes about Jim Crow State and local laws enforcing racial segregation and tolerating and inciting horrific violence against African Americans.

For decades since the passing of the Civil Rights Act (a high density of suburban housing and social life remains segregated throughout the South) tourism in some Southern states conveniently papered over an ugly brutal past. Much of 300 years of slavery, the collapse of secession, the Confederacy and rise of the

unspeakably evil

Klu Klux Klan was airbrushed.

Safe topics like country music, the magic of the Blues, hearty southern comfort food, the legacy of The King (Elvis), of Rock N Roll, were highlighted.

Now two outstanding new museums in the States capital, Jackson, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the Museum of Mississippi History focus attention on the past unafraid to confront the truth. Mississippi Freedom Trail Markers highlight the achievements of martyrs such as Medgar Evers, outspoken activist for voter registration and social justice.

Medgar was assassinated by a white supremacist Klansman in the driveway of his home  today a historic house museum  in a suburb of Jackson and it took 31 years and two trials with hung juries to convict his killer. Visitors hear how Medgar his wife Myrlie and their three young children slept on mattresses to be out of range of shooters firing through their custom built high windows.

During the Freedom Summer 1964 registering black voters became the pivotal goal in the Civil Rights movement, marked by protests and violent white supremacist attacks and police reprisals throughout the South. Medgar Evers vowed: Theres something out here that Ive got to do for my kids, and Im not going to stop until Ive done it, haunting words inscribed on a wall of the powerful Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

Harriet Tubman, a Civil War era abolitionist, who helped many hundreds of enslaved people escape across the Mason-Dixon line to the North, an extraordinary figure of the past, was a name new to me on our journey.

The Deep South produced many more heroic African American women whose courage and bravery shaped the fight for equality and empowerment.

We hear of Harriet at Slave Haven on a wall covered in advertisements for slave auctions. A reward of $40,00 was put on her head. This small museum tells you unspeakable things about slavery and cruelty with a cellar that sheltered runaway slaves in the slave market district of Memphis near the banks of the Mississippi.

On a grey December day we stop in Ruleville heart of the Mississippi delta, its flatness broken by scatterings of dilapidated shotgun shacks and Cotton Gins. Tiny puffballs of cotton speckle fields that seem to stretch forever across the sombre winter landscape. A day later these fields are blanketed in white following an unusual flurry of snow.

An inscription on Fannie Lou Hamers statue at Ruleville reads: Im never sure when I leave home whether Ill make it back or not. But if I fall, Ill fall five feet and four inches forward for freedom and Im not backing off it! For most of her life a share cropper (but a small step up from slavery) she was the first woman inducted on the Statewide Mississipi Freedom Trail to mark her brave relentless fight for the vote and equal rights.

Tennessee and Mississippi are rich in music, much of it closely woven into a past of crossroads juke joints where the share croppers gathered to sing the blues, dance and drink.

Beale Streets blues venues, legendary recording studios like Stax, mecca for Soul music, now a museum and Sun Studio where the King Elvis Presley and greats like BB King, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and others were discovered draw millions of music fans to Memphis. Its a short drive down the legendary Blues Highway 61 to another fantastic music themed attraction, the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, Mississippi.

The Memphis Smithsonian Rock N Soul museum is outstanding. The executive director, John Doyle, is proud of his Irish heritage with people who emigrated from Dublin and Cork in the early 19th century. Here in the south we often say Blues and Country music had a baby, and the baby was Rock N Roll, the most international, culture-changing musical genre of all time, he said.

Blues originated from the music slaves sang in unison while working in songs infused with lyrics about either celebration (freedom) or hardship.

Both of these emotions fed right into the emerging Civil Rights struggles, both are joined; the Blues became an anthem of the American Civil Rights movement and white rebellious young American teenagers migrated toward this music that spoke of freedom and hardship; Rock N Roll was born out of this rebelliousness.

O

n the eve of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King the talk again is of civil rights, its achievements, Dr Kings legacy. Questions about whether his killing was carried out by James Earl Ray singlehandedly or as part of an officially sanctioned plot will re-surface. What would he make of the Trump presidency and far right rhetoric, were he still alive, people will ask.

A towering slab of white marble  the statue of Martin Luther King himself  a memorial deliberately half- finished stands on Independence Ave, Washington DC inscribed with a line from his I have a Dream speech from 1963. Last summer, I stood there reading Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. The sculpture has been left unfinished, our guide that day pointed out to show the struggle goes on.

Why Go: Some of Americas most important civil rights history and sites are in Tennessee-Mississippi, including the National Civil Rights museum at Lorraine Motel (www.civilrightsmuseum.org).

Memphis is home of the Blues on neon lit Beale Street, legendary Stax museum, Smithsonian Rock N Soul museum (www.memphisrocknsoul.org) where you catch free shuttles to Graceland and Sun Studio where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and BB King first recorded.

In Jackson dont miss the new Civil Rights and History museums (www.mscivilrights.org)

Getting there: Isabel travelled to Memphis via Newark from Dublin with United Airlines. Cheapest Economy return fares from 970. (www.united.com). See also www.bon-voyage.co.uk who offer fly drive 8 night itineraries from 1873 staying at top hotels such as the luxury Peabody Hotel Memphis and Westin in Jackson, included in accommodation. Ireland based US specialists; American Holidays (www.americanholidays.com); Tour America (www.touramerica.ie ); Sunway (www.sunway.ie) and Platinum Travel (www.platinumtravel.ie) who specialise in all things Deep South USA  all offer good value deals, including flights from Ireland car hire and accommodation. Further information see www.deep-south-usa.com www.memphistravel.com and www.visitmississippi.org
Asia Myanmar Says Temporary Camp Will House 30,000 Rohingya Targeted for Repatriation

Rohingya refugees sit on a makeshift boat as they get interrogated by the Border Guard Bangladesh after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, at Shah Porir Dwip near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh November 9, 2017. / Navesh Chitrakar / Reuters

YANGON  Myanmar is building a camp to temporarily house 30,000 Rohingya Muslims targeted for repatriation after fleeing violence in Rakhine State, state media reported on Monday, as Myanmar and Bangladesh met to discuss how to implement a repatriation deal.

More than 650,000 Rohingya have headed across the border to Bangladesh after a sweeping Myanmar Army counteroffensive in response to Rohingya militant attacks on Aug. 25.

The crackdown has been described by the United States and UN as ethnic cleansing, which Myanmar rejects.

Officials from Myanmar and Bangladesh met on Monday to discuss a repatriation deal signed on Nov. 23. The meeting in Myanmars capital, Naypyitaw, is the first for a joint working group set up to hammer out the details of the agreement.

The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper said a camp in Hla Po Khaung in northern Rakhine will be a temporary transition camp for people who are to be accepted systematically for repatriation.

The 124-acre Hla Po Khaung will accommodate about 30,000 people in its 625 buildings, the newspaper said, adding that some 100 buildings will be completed by the end of January.

Aung Tun Thet, chief coordinator of Myanmars Union Enterprises for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development, told Reuters that the camp in Hla Po Khaung will be a transition place for Rohingya refugees before they are repatriated to their place of origin or the nearest settlement to their place of origin.

We will try to accept all of those who are coming back to Myanmar, he said, adding that to verify returnees residency, they will be sent to assessment camps in Taungpyoletwei or Ngakhuya before they are moved to the Hla Po Khaung camp.

Soe Aung, permanent secretary of Myanmars Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, said returnees will spend at least one or two months in Hla Po Khaung before their new homes are built.

It is unclear, however, how many returnees would qualify for citizenship in Myanmar. The authorities have said Rohingya Muslims could apply for citizenship if they can show their forebears lived in Myanmar. But the latest deal  like the one in 1992  does not guarantee citizenship.

Myanmar government officials have said the 1992-1993 repatriation deal, which followed a previous spasm of violence in Myanmar, would accept those who could present identity documents issued to the Rohingya by governments in the past.

Buddhist-majority Myanmar has for years denied Rohingya citizenship, freedom of movement and access to basic services such as healthcare and education. They are considered illegal immigrants from mainly Muslim Bangladesh.

Bangladesh officials have said it was unclear when the first refugees could actually return as the two countries need to work out how to jointly verify the identities of returnees.

United Nations agencies and human rights watchers have voiced skepticism about the resettlement plans and demanded a more transparent process to safeguard the Rohingyas voluntary return.
Burma Myanmar Says Over 1,200 Refugees to Return from Bangladesh Next Week

Workers erect shelters at temporary refugee camp in Nga Khu Ya village, in northern Rakhine States Maungdaw Township, earlier this month. / Min Aung Khaing / The Irrawaddy

YANGON  The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday announced that more than 1,200 refugees in Bangladesh are set to return to Myanmar next week, the first batch to be repatriated since a military crackdown in Rakhine State drove hundred of thousands of mostly Rohingya out of the country.

It announced the news in a statement at the end of a two-day meeting of a joint working group of government officials from both countries. The statement says Bangladesh will establish five transit camps along its border with Myanmar for the returnees.

The working group also signed off on physical arrangements, referring to the transportation and shelter to be provided the refugees making the journey home.

It working group has reviewed and approved repatriation applications from 750 Rohingya and 508 Hindus. Authorities will transport the refugees across the border both by river and over land to a reception center in northern Maungdaws Nga Khu Ya village.

The statement says Myanmar will set up its own transit camp in Hla Phoe Khaung village, also in northern Maungdaw, to receive returnees five days per week. Bangladesh has agreed to provide a list of returnees in advance to help Myanmar review their backgrounds.

Myanmar has also provided Bangladeshs border guard force with the names of more than 1,000 suspected members of the militant Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and asked for their extradition in line with the 1980 Agreement on Border Arrangements and Cooperation. The working group officials also discussed the possibility of further ARSA attacks, which could undermine the repatriation process.

More than 650,000 Rohingya fled northern Rakhine in the wake of a sweeping counteroffensive Myanmar armys launched in response to ARSAs attack on police and military outposts in the area in late August.

The UN has called the militarys response a textbook example of ethnic cleansing and repeatedly urged Myanmars authorities to allow a fact-finding mission to visit the area. Myanmars military has denied the allegation, and the government has refused to accept the mission. The government has also refused to let UN human rights envoy Yanghee Lee back into the country, claiming she was not impartial.
Burma NLD Cabinet Begins Reshuffle

U Han Zaw, construction minister appointee. / U Ko Ko / Facebook

The first of the Union governments cabinet reshuffle this year came on Monday, following regional and state minister resignations earlier this month.

On Tuesday, President U Htin Kyaw proposed U Han Zaw as the minister of construction at the Union Parliament and lawmakers will have to accept or reject the proposal within a week.

U Han Zaw, 72, a professional engineer, was a central executive committee member of the Myanmar Engineering Council (MEC), a Union-level regulatory and statutory authority, formed in 2014. From 2014-17, he was chairman of the committee of accreditation and scrutinizing of company quality, under the MEC.

He served as the president of the Myanmar Engineering Society from 2008-10. Prior to that, he was the managing director of the Ministry of Construction under the military regime.

U Win Naing, a chairman of the Naypyitaw chapter of the Myanmar Engineering Society, told The Irrawaddy that the presidential appointee U Han Zaw was best suited to the ministerial position, as he is an honest and respectable man in engineering society.

He is a good man and the position fits him, commented U Win Naing.

After 22 months in power to date, the NLD administration currently runs 23 ministries with 21 ministers and 15 deputy ministers. It now awaits the approval of the new Ministry of Construction appointee.

A Presidential Order on Monday stated that U Win Khaing, the Union minister for Construction, and for Electricity and Energy, was transferred to take responsibility solely for the Ministry of Electricity and Energy.

On the same day, the president appointed former journalist U Aung Hla Tun as a deputy minister of information.

Nine of the governments 23 ministries do not have a deputy minister, while the Ministry of Planning and Finance hosts two.

The National League for Democracy-led cabinet started with 19 ministers for 21 ministries in the beginning of its administration in order to reduce government expenditure . It had only one deputy minister, for the Ministry of Defense. There were 96 ministers and deputy ministers for a total of 36 ministries under former President Thein Seins administration.

In May 2016, the State Counselor Offices was created and then there were 20 ministers for 22 ministerial institutions. At that time, there were eight deputy ministers: Commerce, the State Counselors Office, Border Affairs, Finance and Planning, Foreign Affairs, Home Affairs, the Presidents Office, and Transport and Communication.

The last extension of the cabinet happened in November 2017, when the NLD created the Ministry of the Office of the Union Government.
Guest Column Myanmars Van Gogh Taken Too Soon, Leaves Legacy of Indomitable Beauty

San Zaw Htway at his home studio in 2014. / The Irrawaddy

While San Zaw Htway was in Insein prison, serving a 36-year sentence, he would gather the inedible, raw grains that were mixed in with his daily bowl of rice and throw them a few yards in order to feed the sparrows that gathered along a prison fence. At first, he had to throw the grains down three flights of stairs, but he disliked having the little birds so far away. He threw the grains closer and closer. By the end of the third week, the sparrows learned to hop inside the area directly in front of his cell. The following day, he was forced to part with his new friends when he was transferred to another prison. It was such a pity! I felt so sad to leave them behind, he recounted to me last August at his home in Taung Dagon, a suburb of Yangon.

In Taunggyi prison, he similarly befriended a small owl. A gecko with a missing front leg became a daily companion. I would put down a little ball of rice, he would eat it and then looked up at me, he laughed. The gecko stayed in his cell for several months until, one day, a worker from the prison stepped on it.

Oh, my friend died! I could not sleep that night!

As with most of the stories he would tell me, there was almost always a lesson at the end of it. When one has encountered loss like thisone has to keep renewing hope again and again to find happiness, he told me. San Zaw Htways loved ones will have to renew their own sense of hope and learn to find happiness again, after losing the beloved artist, activist, teacher, poet and former political prisoner to cancer in the early morning hours of December 31st, 2017.

San Zaw Htway was born on June 30, 1974, in Ye Township, Mon State. The youngest of six siblings and partly of Mon, Dawei, and Burmese descent, his parents separated when he was an infant and his mother left her six children in the care of their grandmother while she went to work in Yangon, selling blankets. He saw Yangon for the first time as a child when he attended his eldest sisters wedding. At that time, the way from our village was still difficult. If you travelled by highway, you got robbed, he said. People only travelled by water. It lasted two nights and three days to ride a boat on the ocean to get to the town of Ye.

When he returned to Yangon, this time to live, San Zaw Htway was an adolescent. He eventually enrolled at the University of Yangon. His time as a university student was short-lived. Like many other creative and idealistic souls, he found kindred spirits among the network of democracy activists. In 1999 someone he thought was a fellow dissident turned out to be an informant. He was arrested and sentenced to 36 years in prison.

For all the darkness that prison life brought, it never extinguished San Zaw Htways inner light. Ironically, it delivered him to a form of sublimation that he had not yet discovered as a young boy growing up in a small village, nor at the university, which had been decimated and dismantled by the junta after they re-seized power in a violent coup in 1988. He found a mentor in an older prisoner who taught him art. Thereafter, he began exchanging food with the guards in order to obtain scissors and glue. They allowed him to rummage through the prisons garbage. He salvaged scraps of plastic and foil and transformed them into mesmerizing works of art, saturated with color, revealing landscapes he had no access to in prison but that offered a window into his mind and soul.

San Zaw Htways inner world of color, light and passion became accessible to the outside world when he was finally released in 2012. By then he had created dozens of collages. His imaginings are distinctly Burmese  houses on stilts, pagodas dotting a fertile mountainside  yet the emotions they convey are universal. Perhaps his most moving depictions are his scenes of nature, which resemble brushstrokes from afar and channel the works of other artists whose works he had likely never seen before entering prison. The natural environment depicted in San Zaw Htways collages transports one into a dream where Hiroshiges mountains, fields, and seas exist underneath what feels like a Chagellian sky.

While there are elements in his collages that resemble the renderings of artists from distant cultures, the intensity of his color palette and the emotions it induces is most similar to the works of Vincent van Gogh. Like van Gogh, who was committed to an asylum before he created some of his most well-known works, San Zaw Htway labored to produce his art while he had no access to the outside world. In Mountain in the Sea, an iridescent sea of turquoise, streaked by yellow rays of light that spiral outward from a partially hidden sun, engulfs a gleaming stretch of land and a magnificent green mountain, overtaken by streaks of red and gold. One imagines him conjuring the colors and light from his childhood in Dawei  perhaps his first journey into the Gulf of Martaban.

San Zaw Htway often paid homage to the democracy movement through his art. A longtime supporter of Aung San Suu Kyi, he used gold foil to render portraits of her, both in prison and after his release. He remained an admirer of her up until his death. To her critics, he had this message: Shes doing as much as she can, as much as she can do. She tries to go over the limit too. So, I respect that. I admire it and am satisfied. We, ourselves, will have to live likewise, individually, he told me in 2017.

[Those who criticize] are not taking into consideration the perspective of the people who need to change the whole thing here. So, people who are criticizing now, they dont keep these ideas in mind: How could what I am fixing, on my own, help others? How can we collaborate? he said. Everyone has that opportunity. If you do not [help] and just utter profanities without doing anything, your life will not become better. The country will not become better either.

A survivor of torture, San Zaw Htway directed compassion toward his perpetrators. He described to me how one of his first political acts after regaining his freedom was to advocate for the release of a fellow prisoner who had conspired with the wardens to harm him. He knew that forgiveness did not mean an erasure of past actions. His many artistic performances, regularly enacted in public spaces, were meant to jolt the publics consciousness and to give testimony to injustice.

Known as Nyi Htway to close friends and family, San Zaw Htway spent what little he earned and most of his free time helping others. When a friend took ill last year, he nursed him back to health, taking it upon himself to do his daily cooking and spoon-feeding him when he refused to eat. A wise, gentle soul, San Zaw Htway also had a stubborn willfulness, an inner strength that allowed him to remain idealistic in the face of unthinkable brutality and oppression. Friends also remember him as a fun mate, always happy to be a co-conspirator and accessory to a good time.

After his release from prison, San Zaw Htway used the collage methods he innovated to teach art to Kachin refugees, orphans infected with HIV, and underprivileged youth in Yangon. Before he passed away, we were collaborating on a series of childrens books about the democracy movement and jointly developing educational programs for children of former political prisoners. In 2014, while I was helping him write his fellowship application to qualify for the Artraker Award, he wrote to me that he thought his art gave testimony to the fact that torture and oppression can break a mans body but cannot take away the spirit within.

While his spirit endured, his body finally surrendered. San Zaw Htway was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer in early November. The cancer was a result of infections acquired during his time in prison. His family, beset by decades of hardship that began when he was first imprisoned, struggled to find adequate medical treatment for him. With no reparations yet for former political prisoners, few programs to help them, and little sympathy for them from the international community, his friends resorted to auctioning his art in order to fund his cancer treatment.

San Zaw Htway spent his life bridging disparate worlds. Through his art, he brought his inner world of childhood memories and unbroken idealism to an external world of suffering and injustice. He moved effortlessly between children with HIV, Kachin refugees, underprivileged urban youth and former political prisoners because he understood that the deep chasm thought to exist between the suffering of democracy activists and of other communities in Myanmar is illusory. After his death, his family and close friends, including myself, are left wondering how we can realize the ideals  and dreams  we shared with him.

In the days before he finally succumbed to cancer, I thought often about how San Zaw Htway had given me so much beauty, shared so much of his light with me, and how I had returned so little. I know one of the best ways I can repay his gifts to me is to try to bridge that illusory chasm and do what I can to place his suffering not in a bounded space, but under a broader canopy where hope can be continually renewed and true beauty can remain as it was for San Zaw Htway  indomitable.

Seinenu Thein-Lemelson, Ph.D., is a Burmese-American psychological anthropologist. She is currently a visiting scholar in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and the founder of the Institute for Democratic Education and Leadership (IDEAL). Her private collection of San Zaw Htways art will be displayed this year in Yangon in order to honor his life. Please contact her at [email protected] to set up appointments for viewing.
Tuesday, Jan 16th, 2018 (10:08 am) - Score 2,078

The Assembly Member for Ceredigion in Wales, Elin Jones, has accused Openreach (BT) of walking away from rural communities in her county after the operator left a roll-out of fibre broadband (FTTC/P) technology unfinished in the village of Oakford and possibly other locations.

Ms Jones told the BBC / S4C show Newyddion 9 (skip to 21:00) that the operator had brought the fibre infrastructure into the middle of the village and yet it hasnt made the final links into properties. BT has left the job unfinished. Now that the funding from the public purse has come to an end BT has walked away. BT should not be doing that. They have promised in writing that people would be linked into the superfast infrastructure.

Pictures from the area and comments from local residents reveal that the operator has, in some cases, simply left their fibre optic cable(s) hanging from local telegraph poles in an unfinished state.

A Spokesman for Openreach said: Since the start of the Superfast Cymru we have always been clear that the programme would not reach every premises, and some areas that were in the original plan have unfortunately dropped out because of the time and the complexity involved in reaching them. We understand the frustration of Derwen Gam [Oakford] residents who currently cannot access fibre broadband but the Welsh Government is already planning the next stage of extending the reach of fast, reliable broadband even further across Wales.

Unfortunately we have seen quite a few communities drop out of state aid supported fibre broadband rollouts across the UK, which can occur for various reasons. For example, engineer surveys may reveal that the work is likely to be significantly more complicated or time consuming (costly) than previously estimated, such as due to blocked or difficult to access cable ducts and problems with access to power or permissions (traffic / planning). On the flip side we have also seen some areas being added back into the programme after previously being excluded, so its sometimes a two-way street.

Furthermore its worth remembering that the Welsh Governments (WG) current Superfast Cymru contract with Openreach doesnt aim to deliver universal coverage of superfast broadband (30Mbps+) across Wales. Instead it aimed to make fibre broadband (FTTC/P) services available to around 95% of the country (690,000 premises) by the end of December 2017.

At present 30Mbps+ capable networks are only available to an estimated 93-94% of premises in Wales (here) and invariably this will still leave some communities out in the cold, forced to either wait even longer or to find their own solutions. Openreach is also understood to have faced some difficult challenges in deploying FTTP out to rural parts of the country (here), many of which relate to wayleave disputes with land owners.

The good news is that the WG are developing a new project to reach every property with 30Mbps+ broadband by 2020 (here), which is currently in the process of trying to find supplier(s) who can deliver it. This could be rather difficult since tackling the final few % of rural premises is disproportionately expensive and 80m might not be enough to achieve their ambition (even after match funding), at least not solely via fixed lines.
The South Korean Government's attempts to regulate the use of cryptocurrencies has led to mounting support for a petition seeking to stop the efforts at curbing use of such currencies.

The petition has attracted nearly 200,000 signatures which means it would mean the government has to respond to it, perhaps through an investigation.

The Wall Street Journal reported that on Monday, the government had issued its strongest warning to date about using bitcoin for trade, saying: Cryptocurrency is not a legally recognised currency."

The government said it would make a final decision after "sufficient consultation and co-ordination of opinions", according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap.

"The proposed shutdown of exchanges that the justice minister recently mentioned is one of the measures suggested by the justice ministry to curb speculation," the Office for Government Policy Co-ordination said in a statement.

"A government-wide decision will be made in the future after sufficient consultation and coordination of opinions."

The petition was launched last month by an unnamed person and credited the increase in the value of cryptocurrencies with an increase in hope among the people who could now contemplate finding relief from economic distress.

Last year, youth unemployment reach 9.9% and dissatisfaction among young people played a role in electing Moon Jae-in as president in May 2017.

In 2017, South Korea became a major bitcoin trader with 4.5% of all global transactions using the won. This made it the fourth most widely used currency for trading bitcoin, after the US dollar, the yen and the euro.
Swinburne University of Technology has announced that it is using SUSE Enterprise Storage for its rapidly increasing storage needs.

SUSE Enterprise Storage is built on the open source Ceph project and deploys object storage across a single, distributed, computer cluster made up of industry standard hardware.

Larry Morris, senior product manager at the Germany-based SUSE Linux, and the main developer behind the technology, told iTWire in an interview last year that some use cases included disk-based back-up where the software-defined storage solution was used to store the back-up data.

Other use cases were storage for large files such as medical images or video surveillance data; archival data that has not been accessed in a while and is migrated from primary storage systems; and on-premise cloud storage using a SUSE Enterprise Storage Amazon S3-compliant interface.

SUSE announced the development of its enterprise storage product back in 2014. At that time, MorrisiTWire: "We will do to the storage industry the same thing that Linux has done to UNIX."

At Swinburne, the IT department has been pushed to provide for the ever-increasing storage demands without spending too much.

Given that, a statement from the university said it used SUSE's product "to underpin a high-performing, ultra-scalable and secure storage infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of traditional enterprise storage, helping support ground-breaking research".

Swinburne is a public university with a reputation for preparing graduates for life in the working world, as well as for its research in science and technology.

SUSE Enterprise Storage helps IT be a better partner to research teams. We can deliver rapid, reliable storage, and guarantee the security and integrity of the data we store, said Simon Naughton, director of infrastructure and operations at Swinburne.

With SUSE Enterprise Storage, we have built a very high-performing and scalable storage landscape at approximately half the cost of traditional storage systems.

David Liubinas, territory manager for SUSE ANZ, said: Were excited to be working with Swinburne to help the organisation scale by providing a reliable infrastructure at an affordable and consistent price point.

Organisations are looking to create an agile storage infrastructure that can respond to growing business demands, increase operational efficiency and reduce costs. SUSE Enterprise Storage is helping Swinburne to achieve that.
Lenovo has found a backdoor in two of its switches that could give an attacker access to the switch management interface and allow settings to be changed, expose traffic and also effect a partial or complete denial of service.

The company said it removed the backdoor which had been discovered in the RackSwitch and BladeCenter switches.

"An authentication bypass mechanism known as 'HP Backdoor' was discovered during a Lenovo security audit in the Telnet and Serial Console management interfaces, as well as the SSH and Web management interfaces under certain limited and unlikely conditions," it said.

"This bypass mechanism can be accessed when performing local authentication under specific circumstances using credentials that are unique to each switch. If exploited, admin-level access to the switch is granted."

The backdoor was present in the enterprise network operating system or ENOS that powers some Lenovo switches.

An audit of the source code changes showed that the backdoor was added in 2004 when ENOS was owned by Nortel's Blade Server Switch Business Unit, at the request of a BSSBU OEM customer.

Nortel spun off BSSBU in 2006 to form BLADE Network Technologies which was purchased by IBM in 2010, and, subsequently, Lenovo in 2014.

"Lenovo has provided relevant source code to a third-party security partner to enable independent investigation of the mechanism," the company added.
Western Australian law firm Jackson McDonald has selected AI technology from Singapore-based security firm Darktrace to defend its critical data, including confidential case work, litigation strategies and sensitive client information.

According to Darktrace, the legal sector is a prime target for cyber criminals looking to monetise valuable IP, such as case work and litigation strategies, and sensitive customer information.

Additionally, Darktrace says cyber breaches can be particularly costly for law firms, due to mounting pressures from regulators and the high rate of customer attrition following a breach.

Darktrace has enabled us to take our cyber security to a level we presumed unattainable, said Asfar Sadewa, head of IT, Jackson McDonald.

By building an evolving understanding of our unique pattern of life, Darktraces Enterprise Immune System can detect emerging threats without the need for rules. With its machine learning in action, we can defend our network 24/7 and address unfolding threats before they cause harm.

Sadewa says Jackson McDonald deployed Darktraces technology to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, including the quiet, stealthy threats and novel attacks that other tools miss.

Powered by machine learning and AI algorithms, Darktrace mimics the self-learning intelligence of the human immune system to identify and fight back against attacks in progress. The self-learning technology learns the "pattern of life" for every user, device and network, to establish a sense of "self" for the health of an organisation. It uses this baseline to detect and autonomously respond to emerging threats within the network in real time.

The increasing digitisation of intellectual property requires law firms to achieve advanced security without jeopardising the technological flexibility that modern workplaces require, said Sanjay Aurora, managing director APAC, Darktrace.

Armed with Darktraces proven machine learning technology, Jackson McDonald is primed to detect and remediate even the most sophisticated threats that legacy tools miss.
University of NSW students have been earning cryptocurrency for shopping with retailers, restaurants and cafes in a world-first" trial.

Sydney start-up LoyaltyX has been working with UNSW on the trial, with backing from the NSW Governments Boosting Business Innovation Programme, which has seen 170 staff and students rewarded with the cryptocurrency "ether  the main rival to Bitcoin  for making their day-to-day purchases.

LoyaltyX says more than a dozen on-campus retailers, including well-known retailers IGA and Boost, and a range of local eateries, participated in the trial which saw 83% of participants changing their spending in order to earn more cryptocurrency.

NSW Deputy Premier and Minister for Skills and Small Business John Barilaro said the research project  the results of which are now in  was supported with a $14,996 TechVoucher grant from the NSW Governments Boosting Business Innovation Programme.

The Boosting Business Innovation Programme is providing $18 million to the states 11 universities  including $1.5 million to UNSW  and the CSIRO to work with businesses to support innovation.

The Boost program brings business and research brains together in one place to develop new ideas and opportunities, including through Techvoucher supported research projects.

LoyaltyX chief executive Philip Shelper said participants in the UNSW trial earned a digital stamp for each purchase, with 10 stamps converting to $10 worth of ether.

The research results have been extremely positive with students excited by being rewarded with cryptocurrency that can grow in value, providing a major opportunity to re-invent loyalty programmes, he said.

Ether is a floating currency, and over the course of the trial participants saw their Ether balance increase in value by 30 per cent. Those that chose to keep their Ether rather than cash it in have seen a gain of over 450%. Cryptocurrencies could provide the first major advancement in loyalty program design since frequent flyer programs were launched in the early 80s.
The federal government has dismissed recommendations that it should mandate fibre-to-the-curb for the remainder of the national broadband network rollout.

The government rejected recommendations of an NBN Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee that more fibre, and less copper, be rolled out to complete the project.

The governments decision has drawn a strong response from the Labor Partys Shadow Communications Minister Michelle Rowland who described it as incredibly disappointing.

This was an opportunity to find some middle ground, she said.

The response to the Committee makes it clear that (Prime Minister) Malcolm Turnbull is not interested in solutions, he simply wants to sit back and watch the experience of consumers and the competitiveness of our digital economy languish under his second-rate copper NBN.

The committee had recommended, among other recommendations, that the remaining rollout of the mix of technology be primarily replaced with fibre-to-the-curb or fibre to the premises.

The government was highly critical of the committees report and made it clear it was sticking with its own multi-mix technology strategy which will now be implemented for the remainder of the NBN rollout.

"The government is disappointed that after considering 191 submissions, holding 15 public hearings, receiving testimony from 179 witnesses, and undertaking three site visits, the committee's majority report and recommendations indicates a failure to understand the fundamentals of the NBN," the government said in its response.

"The prominence given in the majority report of the committee to the stories of dissatisfied consumers distorts the perception of the success of the NBN."

As reported by iTWire on Sunday, according to telecommunications analyst Paul Budde a write-down of the NBN is now firmly on the cards after the competition watchdog joined the chorus supporting it.

Budde said in a blog that since Turnbull had not introduced essential structural changes after the 2016 election, it had become obvious that the value of the network would have to be cut by half.

While the government did not welcome this reality, many others, including the ACCC, had now joined the call for a write-down," Budde said.

With the completion of the rollout of the NBN scheduled for 2020. Budde said it was important to complete it and leave the network in the best possible condition  and also complete connections to the 400,000+ that were in the too-hard basket.
Maersk and IBM today announced a joint venture to deploy a blockchain-based electronic shipping system that will digitize supply chains and track international cargo in real time.

The new platform could save the global shipping industry billions of dollars a year by replacing the current EDI- and paper-based system, which can leave containers in receiving yards for weeks, according to the companies.

Blockchain will enable a single view via a virtual dashboard of all goods and shipping information for all parties involved, from manufacturers and shippers to port authorities and government agencies.

As an immutable, distributed ledger, blockchain technology will also improve security, according to Michael White, former president of Maersk Line in North America and CEO of the new company.

"With blockchain, the improvement in security is significant with the double encryption," White said. "And one of the advantages of blockchain is the immutable record and trust people can have in it. If anything changes in a document..., it's immediately apparent to all."

Blockchain's native immutability as a distributed ledger will also create an automatic audit trail for regulators, something with which the industry has struggled.

Along with paper legal documents, much of the international shipping industry's information has been transmitted via electronic data interchange (EDI)  a 60-year-old technology. But once shipping manifests move to API-based technology on the new platform, shippers and everybody else in the supply chain will have more timely information and improved visibility, White said.

The blockchain technology will employ smart contracts or self-executing workflows determined by the goods being shipped and the authorization they require while in transport.

"The key point is how do you eliminate or minimize delays and how can you shorten the time people are waiting for information or documentation for cargo to move efficiently," White said.

For example, a large export commodity such as avocados shipping from Mombasa, Kenya to the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands can take as long as 34 days, two weeks of which involve port authorities awaiting shipping information and government document approval.

"The [shipping] documents as they're created have to go from one customs or regulatory agency to another, often by courier on a motorbike. Once they're signed off on, they're put on a courier pouch, sent to destination where the broker presents it to Dutch customs who then has to validate if it's a bonafide, original certificate..., and then, ultimately, it's cleared and delivered," White said.

[ To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page. ]

White cited one avocado shipment that involved 30 port and government officials, and 200 pieces of communications among 100 people. "You can imagine if any one of those documents are delayed, if there are questions around validity, then the shipment will be held up," he added.

While international shipping is a $4 trillion-a-year industry, and 80% of of the goods are carried on ocean vessels, much of the logistics involved in creating cargo manifests, tracking shipments and even getting sign-offs from customs and other port authorities remains a paper process.

Maersk A new blockchain based, distributed electronic ledger could save the shipping industry billions of dollars a year by replacing a current EDI and paper-based system for tracking cargo and attaining approval from customs and port authorities.

As the cost and size of the world's trading ecosystems continue to grow more complex, the cost of the required trade documentation to process and administer goods shipped globally is expected to reach one-fifth of the actual physical transportation costs.

According to The World Economic Forum, by reducing barriers within the international supply chain through transparent, electronic communications, global trade could increase by nearly 15%, boosting economies and creating jobs.

Over the past 18 months, Denmark-based Maersk has been piloting the blockchain platform with various customers, including DuPont, Dow Chemical, Tetra Pak, Port Houston, Rotterdam Port Community System Portbase, the Customs Administration of the Netherlands and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Maersk and IBM's new company must still get regulatory approval, at which time its name will be announced. But the partners expect the new electronic shipping platform to be generally availability in the next three to six months, according to White

The platform was built on IBM's blockchain technology, which is provided through its cloud service. IBM's blockchain is based on the open-source Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 specification created by the Linux Foundation.

"It had to be based on open standards...and a vendor-neutral platform so all other shipping lines using it could be on equal footing," said Ramesh Gopinath, vice president of Blockchain Solutions at IBM. "That's also the reason it's a separate company from Maersk and IBM."

IBM and Maersk have employed other cloud-based open source technologies on the shipping platform, including artificial intelligence, IoT and analytics in order to help companies move and track goods digitally across internal borders. Manufacturers, shipping lines, freight forwarders, port and terminal operators, shippers and customs authorities will all be able to access to the platform's virtual dashboard on a permissioned basis.

To date, 18% of Maersk's global containerized volume has already been entered into the blockchain application, a figure that will increase over time, according to Ramesh Gopinath, vice president of Blockchain Solutions at IBM.

"Port terminals are very interested to try to get information further upstream to understand what shipments are coming in order to determine berth availability and yard congestion to enable the cargo to move more fluidly," Gopinath said.

Unlike bitcoin, which is based on an open blockchain where all participants can see ever data entry, IBM and Maersk's application will be centrally administered or "permissioned." Each participant in the blockchain will have their authority to access data limited by their individual needs, Gopinath said.

With their joint venture, IBM and Maersk will be able to commercialize and scale the electronic shipping service to a broader group of global corporations, many of whom have already expressed interest in the capabilities and are exploring ways to use the new platform. Those companies include Procter and Gamble, which is looking to streamline the complex supply chains it operates; and freight forwarder and logistics firm Agility Logistics, which hopes to provide improved customer services, including customs clearance brokerage.

When initially launched this year, the first two capabilities of the electronic platform will be the digitization of the global supply chain and paperless trade, enabling users to securely submit, validate and approve documents across international or organizational boundaries.

Blockchain-based smart contracts will ensure all required approvals are in place, helping speed up approvals and reducing mistakes.

Upon regulatory clearance, solutions from the joint venture are expected to become available within six months, at which time White said he expects goods manufacturers, shippers, ports and other third parties to participate in adding new capabilities such as invoice dispute resolution.

"There are a lot of track and trade products out there, but they're inconsistent and there are gaps in the information. The need for real-time access to events and documentation is critical," White said. "Having an immutable, shared audit trail is important, but the bigger value is getting access to the information and the documentation when it's needed to prevent cargo from being delayed."
The 15th annual Wisconsin Governors Business Plan Contest will accept entries online for the 2018 competition through 5 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31.

The contest is designed to encourage entrepreneurs in the startup stage of tech-based businesses in Wisconsin. It links up-and-coming entrepreneurs with a statewide network of community resources, expert advice, management talent and possible sources of capital.

It also leads to valuable public and media exposure for the top business plans and helps spur economic growth in the state. Two winning BPC plans from recent graduates have gone on to appear of ABC-TVs Shark Tank, including Hyde Sportswear.

Finalists will share in more than $100,000 in cash and service prizes. There is no cost to enter.

For their initial entries, contestants will submit a 250-word (or 2,000-character) idea abstract online at www.govsbizplancontest.com. Thats where contestants will also find business plan templates and other information, such as the Entrepreneurs Toolkit. The toolkit provides business startup information and assistance, networking contacts and technical resources.

Contestants who advance to subsequent contest rounds will expand their plan in stages. More than 70 judges drawn from the finance, sales, marketing, research and technology sectors across Wisconsin will score the entries and provide feedback on submissions.

To get started, contestants will need to create a simple account at www.govsbizplancontest.com. All entries are submitted through the website. Contestants use their account to gain access to mentors throughout the process, as well as review the judges comments and feedback.

Wisconsin residents 18 years old and older are eligible, as are teams from Wisconsin-based businesses and organizations. Businesses or teams from outside the state are also eligible to compete if they demonstrate intent to base their business in Wisconsin. Entrepreneurs may also enter multiple ideas, though each idea must be separate and distinct.

Companies or individuals that have raised less than $25,000 in private equity for their plans in a current form are eligible to enter. Generally speaking, private equity refers to angel and venture capital.

As with past contests, the 2018 competition will take place in stages.

In Phase 1, which is open until 5 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31, the contest will accept idea abstracts on the website. Entries should be roughly 250 words (or no more than 2,000 characters, including spaces) and will be graded by the pool of BPC judges. The top 50 idea abstracts will advance to Phase 2.

In Phase 2, which runs from Feb. 19 to 5 p.m. March 12, the top 50 idea abstracts will submit an executive summary. The top 20 executive summaries will advance to Phase 3. A mentored boot camp for contestants will be held in early March.

In Phase 3, which runs from April 2 to 5 p.m. April 23, the top 20 executive summaries will prepare full business plans. Judges will review the plans and pick three finalists from each of the four categories to advance to the final presentation round. Mentored practice sessions will be offered to the top 12 in late May.

The top 12, or Diligent Dozen, will square off with oral presentations during the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Conference on June 5 at Union South in Madison.

Past finalists have launched companies that have raised more than $200 million in angel, venture, grants and venture debt over time  all while creating jobs and economic value for Wisconsin. The contests major sponsors include the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
Felony charges are pending against six people after La Crosse police seized stolen electronics and $57,000 worth of drugs at a house near a North Side school Friday, according to the department.

The agencys Emergency Response Team searched 1018 Gillette St., across the street from Northside Elementary, after an investigation into burglaries in the campus housing area.

Several people in the basement tried to escape after breaking a window but were stopped by an officer and his K9.

Inside the house, police found stolen televisions, video gaming systems, computers and other electronics, plus a loaded handgun, $7,450 cash, 336 grams of Ecstasy, 137 grams of cocaine, 37 grams of crack cocaine, 26 grams of marijuana, 10 grams of heroin and 3 grams of fentanyl, police stated.

Jerrad Simms, 32, of Harvey, Ill.; Debrian Hayes, 22, of La Crosse; Jesse Stringer, 30, of La Crosse; Lennell Davis Jr., 28, of Chicago; and Gwenee Lawson, 30, of La Crosse all face charges of possession with intent to deliver Ecstasy, THC, heroin and cocaine when they return to La Crosse County Circuit Court on Thursday.

Simms, Hayes, Stringer and Davis also face charges of possession with intent to deliver a schedule II narcotic and possession of drug paraphernalia, and Stringer faces added charges of felon in possession of a firearm by a felon and receiving stolen property.

DaiTwon Cowson, 20, of Toledo, Ohio, faces charges of burglary, fraudulent use of a credit card and receiving stolen property.

Hayes, Stringer and Davis are jailed on cash bonds; the others were issued signature bonds.
While the event happens deep in rural parts of Berkeley County, it is no less important. It started over two decades ago by a woman once paralyzed from a tumor on her spine. She later beat back the disability enough to walk and get back to work and life. Read moreAnnual Kids Day is back on in Berkeley County
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TeleSur |  

Widespread destruction from the U.S-backed Saudi airstrikes has displaced over a million people in the region.

A U.N. report on human rights abuses has accused Saudi Arabias coalition airstrikes for causing extensive damage in Yemen. Since the beginning of the war in 2015, at least 10,000 people have been killed in the region.

According to information obtained by Al Jazeera, a U.N. panel investigated 10 airstrikes in 2017 that killed 157 people. It found that the targets included migrant boats, a vehicle, a night market, five residential buildings, a motel and government buildings.

This is a report to the U.N. Security Council that has not been made public, but Ive been allowed to read a copy. Its very hard hitting and very critical of all of the parties in the war in Yemen, Al Jazeera diplomatic editor James Bays said.

The report talks about beatings, electrocutions, constrained suspension, and it talks about something called the cage which is confinement in a cage in the sunlight and the denial of medical treatment.

The panel requested Saudi authorities to comment over their rationale behind these attacks, but has received no response, Al Jazeera reported.

The report also pointed towards the role played by Houthi rebels in Yemens conflict.

On Dec. 19, Yemen marked 1,000 days of Saudi-led war. Johan Mooij, CAREs Country Director in Yemen, described the situation as appalling. He added that millions of Yemenis are facing multiple crises of war, hunger, disease outbreaks and recent blockades on fuel and commercial imports.

The same month, the Pentagon admitted to multiple ground operations in Yemen that have led to civilian deaths, leaving the region even more volatile.

U.S. forces have conducted multiple ground operations and more than 120 strikes in 2017, U.S. Central Command, Centcom, in Tampa, Florida, said in a statement.

Widespread destruction from the U.S-backed Saudi airstrikes has displaced over a million people in the region. A severe cholera outbreak in the area has also claimed lives of at least 2,119 people, according to the Red Cross. Another eight million are on the verge of starvation.

Every day, parents are carrying their malnourished children to hospital because they havent eaten in days, and families are watching as loved ones die needlessly from treatable illnesses because they do not have access to medical care, International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt said in a statement.

Since the Saudi-led war which started in 2015, the U.S. and U.K. has supplied nearly US$5 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia.

Via



Related video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera: Yemen ?? : More than two million displaced since conflict began
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By Mark Trahant | ( TrahantReports.com ) |  

The Trump administration, and its allies in Congress, are fighting a losing war. They continue to press forward for the development of oil, gas, coal, when the rest of the world understands the implication of that folly. Global warming is the most pressing issue for our time. Period.

The thing is governments really have two choices when it comes to managing the impact on its peoples from global warming: Spend money on trying to reduce the problem; or spend money on cleaning up the catastrophes.

The Trump administration is on the hook for the catastrophe. A report released Monday by The National Centers for Environmental Information pegged the total cost this year at $1.5 trillion, including estimates for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. (And that doesnt even begin to count the human toll, lost lives, lost jobs, lost opportunity.)

I witnessed first hand the impact of Hurricane Maria on the island of Dominica last month. We keep hearing stories about the power grid being down (similar to Puerto Rico) and you think, why? Its been months. Why arent the lights on? Then you see nearly every electrical pole on the island sideways. The entire grid needs to be rebuilt (or better, rethought) and thats decades of infrastructure. So the figure of $1.5 trillion is far short of what will be needed. Nearly every electrical line, every other house, the damage was so widespread its impossible to overstate. And thats just one island. Multiple the effect across the region. The planet.

Even the United States.

The Centers for Environmental Information says there were sixteen weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the country last year. These events included one drought, two flooding events, one severe freeze, eight severe storms, three cyclones, and one extraordinary wildfire. These events as the center defines them resulted in 362 deaths.

Turns out 2017 was a record-breaking year. In total, the U.S. was impacted by 16 separate billion-dollar disaster events tying 2011 for the record number of billion-dollar disasters for an entire calendar year, the report said. In fact, 2017 arguably has more events than 2011 given that our analysis traditionally counts all U.S. billion-dollar wildfires, as regional-scale, seasonal events, not as multiple isolated events.More notable than the high frequency of these events is the cumulative cost, which exceeds $300 billion in 2017  a new U.S. annual record.

A similar report was published by the Government Accountability Office including a recommendation that Executive Office of the President identify significant climate risks and craft appropriate federal responses.

But instead of trying to reduce the impact  and the costs of weather-related catastrophe  the Trump administration continues on course for new development of oil and gas. The Interior Department announced new rules that, if enacted, will open up nearly all of the United States coastal waters to more oil and gas development beginning next year.

By proposing to open up nearly the entire OCS for potential oil and gas exploration, the United States can advance the goal of moving from aspiring for energy independence to attaining energy dominance, said Vincent DeVito, Counselor for Energy Policy at Interior in the news release. This decision could bring unprecedented access to Americas extensive offshore oil and gas resources and allows us to better compete with other oil-rich nations.

Or as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke put it: The important thing is we strike the right balance to protect our coasts and people while still powering America and achieving American Energy Dominance.

Dominance is such a funny word. How can any nation be dominant in the face of hurricanes that are ever more powerful and destructive? How does energy dominance work when tens of thousands of Americans will have to move because their homes are no longer there because of fire or storms? What happens if that number grows into the hundreds of thousands? Millions? How can we afford to spend trillions of dollars rebuilding what we have now?

A group of elders on the Bering Sea immediately condemned the Interior Departments offshore drilling plan. We told them that in person last October and again in writing, that there were 76 tribes in these regions opposed to this, said the statement from the elders. The draft plan implies that Bering Sea communities were generally supportive of some oil and gas activity. This is not accurate and there is no evidence of this from Bering Sea communities. For decades, our people have opposed oil and gas activity and we continue to oppose it today. The northern Bering Sea is a very fragile ecosystem. The marine mammals that we rely on use it as their highway and they follow specific migration routes. That is how we know when and where to find them. The noise and vibration associated with drilling will interfere with their sonar and disrupt their migrations. Then we the coastal people will lose our primary food source.

There is a connection between developing oil and gas and paying the high costs to clean up after a storm. One side of the ledger goes to a few; the oil and gas industry. The folks who bought and paid for this administration.

The other side of the ledger is the rest of us. The taxpayers who will foot the bill for this continued folly.

And on the Bering Sea? The folks who live there are one storm away from a tragedy. As the elders put it: Our people and our way of life are being exposed to danger and we do not understand why.

Mark Trahant is the Charles R. Johnson Endowed Professor of Journalism at the University of North Dakota. He is an independent journalist and a member of The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. On Twitter @TrahantReports

Reprinted with permission from Mark Trahant / TrahantReports.com #IndigenousNewsWire #NativeVote18

Trahant Reports is on iTunes or Soundcloud. Download here.

WION: Gravitas: The cost of climate change
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Middle East Monitor |  

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Tuesday a new US-backed, 30,000-strong force inside Syria constituted a breach of international law and Syrian sovereignty, joining Syria, Turkey and Russia in a vehement rebuke of the plan.

On Sunday, the US-led coalition said it was working with its Syrian militia allies, the mainly Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to set up a force that would operate along the borders with Turkey and Iraq, as well as within Syria.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad responded by vowing to crush the new force and drive US troops from Syria. Strong Syria ally Russia called the plans a plot to dismember Syria and place part of it under US control, and Turkey described the force as a terror army.

The new plan that the Americans have in mind for Syria is a violation of international laws and a plot against sovereignty and security of Syria and region, Rouhani was quoted by state media as saying during a meeting with the speaker of the Syrian parliament Hammouda Youssef Sabbagh.

Sabbagh was in Tehran for a conference of parliamentary speakers.

Iran supports Assad in the nearly seven-year civil war against rebel forces and Islamic State militants, sending weapons and soldiers.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said earlier on Tuesday that the planned US-backed force inside Syria would fan the flames of war and raise tensions.

The US announcement of a new border force in Syria is an obvious interference in the internal affairs of this country, Qasemi was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA.

Qasemi urged all US forces to leave Syria immediately.

The United States is at the head of an international coalition using air strikes and special forces troops to aid fighters on the ground battling Islamic State militants in Syria since 2014. It has about 2,000 troops on the ground in Syria.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif discussed the conflict in Syria in a phone conversation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

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Al Jazeera English: Syria ??: Kurdish civilians fear threat of Turkey ?? offensive
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

The US announcement that it would form a 30,000 strong policing force in northeast Syria from the YPG leftist Kurdish militia has provoked unprecedently strong words from Turkey, and signs of an unusual convergence of Syrian and Turkish foreign policy objectives. In the cross-hairs are 2,000 US special operations troops embedded with the YPG. The US strategic goal is to block Iranian transfers of men and materiel to Syria and Lebanon via Iraq. In other words, this is another of Donald Trumps walls. It is meant to please US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia, who lost the Syrian war to Iran and Russia but who want to salvage some strategic goals.

The problem is that this US policy is unpopular not only in Iran, Syria and Lebanon but also in Moscow and Ankara. Let me telegraph that I am afraid that the 2,000 US spec ops troops in northeast Syria are in the same peril that US Marines in Beirut were in in 1983. The radical Islamic Amal group drove a truck bomb into the Marines barracks in Beirut in that year, killing hundreds and provoking Ronald Reagan to withdraw from Lebanon (redeploy offshore were Reagans words). Al-Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden later suggested that this withdrawal convinced him that a strike on the US could push it back out of the Middle East. As good as the Kurdish militiamen are, they cant stop ISIL remnants or other covert terrorist operations from striking in their territory.

Turkey sees the Syrian Kurds as an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrilla group, which both Turkey and the US list as terrorists. The US does not agree.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who has become increasingly strident and erratic in the past few years, said that the Turkish army was now prepared to intervene in Syria against the new Kurdish border force:

The operation may start any time. Operations into other regions will come after . . . America has acknowledged it is in the process of creating a terror army on our border. What we have to do is nip this terror army in the bud Saying that Turkeys allies should not dare help what he termed terrorists in Syria, he declared, We wont be responsible for the consequences.

Russia and Syria also condemned the move, alleging that the US is attempting to partition Syria. Any policy helping Kurds move toward more autonomy alarms Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, all of which have significant Kurdish populations they fear could become secessionist. The likelihood is that the Iraqi government also objects, though it isnt being as vocal as Erdogan and the others. Prime Minister al-Abadi sent Iraqi troops into Kirkuk Province last fall to reassert Baghdads authority over the area, also claimed by the now-defeated Kurdistan Regional Government, a superprovince of Iraq itself.

Jordans al-Rai (Opinion) newspaper noted that unusual convergence of interests here between Turkey and Syria, both of which feel threatened by Kurdish subnationalism on their territories.

The US military used the Syrian Kurds as ground troops in the fight against ISIL in eastern Syria once it became a serious security concern to Iraq and France from 2014, even though former Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that the US ignored ISIL 2011-2014 because Washington hoped it would weaken the Baath Party state of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. When Obama and then Secretary of Defense Ash Carter decided to target ISIL in 2014 and after, they could not get allies such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia to change the policy of benign neglect the way the Americans did. Since Obama was reluctant to commit infantry, the only way to defeat ISIL in Syrias eastern Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces was to deploy the eager Syrian Kurdish forces against them. After this campaign proved successful, however, the incoming Trump administration decided to repurpose the US-Kurdish alliance to an attempt to block Iranian logistics.

The Peoples Protection Units or YPG are the paramilitary of the Democratic Union Party that dominates Syrian Kurdish politics. They were under Communist influence during the Cold War but from the 1990s and moved toward a form of Left anarchism (though their critics say that their co-ops are actually quite heavy-handed and limit personal freedoms, as well as being racist toward Arabs). There are about 2 million Syrian Kurds, some ten percent of the population, located primarily in the northeast of the country in three geographical cantons, Jazira, Kobane and Afrin. The Kurds, with US air support, managed to kick ISIL out of Kobane and unite it with the Jazira in the northeast. But Afrin is separated from Kobane by a string of Arab towns and villages and by a covert Turkish troop presence. The Kurds would like to unite all three cantons into what they call Rojava. At the least, they want Rojava to have a Quebec-like status as a province of a federal Syrian state with special privileges. Maximalists want independence for it. Turkey is determined to block the extension of Rojava to Afrin and wants to roll back YPG presence in Manbij in northern Syria, which they took from ISIL.

The Syrian Baath Party that came to power in the 1960s is so fanatically Arab nationalist (i.e. racist) that it took citizenship away from large numbers of Syrian Kurds. Not sure what they expected but Kurdish secessionism.

The US special ops forces and the YPG now face a similar difficulty to that of ISIL itself in 2014. None of the regional actors wanted its rise and they combined to destroy it.

-

Related video:

Al Jazeera English: Is Donald Trump playing with fire by backing Kurds in Syria ??? | Inside Story
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Brandon Jordan | (Waging Nonviolence) |  

As Washington state senators prepared for the first legislative session of 2018 at the capitol building in Olympia yesterday, their traditional welcome ceremony was disrupted by at least a hundred activists from across the state, who had made their way into the balconies. From there, to the dismay of their elected officials, they delivered a loud message for all in attendance: We have a climate crisis. You need to act now!

The demonstration was part of an effort organizers are calling Climate Countdown, a campaign pressuring Democrats to pass and implement legislation that reduces carbon emissions. With a Democratic majority in both legislative chambers, organizers from a handful of organizations, from local 350.org chapters to indigenous groups, believe this is the perfect  and perhaps the only  opportunity to act.

Since 2013, passing any form of climate-related legislation in Washington was difficult at best. Republicans held a majority in the state Senate and used this advantage to block proposals, such as a cap-and-trade system, from Democrats. Gov. Jay Inslee, considered the greenest governor in America by the League of Conservation Voters, often felt frustrated by Republican opposition to his climate plans.

Yet, on Nov. 8, Democrats succeeded in regaining control of the state Senate with a slim 49-48 majority. Alec Connon, an activist with 350 Seattle, said this victory led to activists discussing a potential plan to ensure lawmakers took responsibility without using Republicans as an excuse.

Its about time that the rhetoric weve seen from climate leaders in Washington state [translate into] actual meaningful policy, Connon said.

As part of the campaign, residents are putting forward two demands to lawmakers. First, they want officials to follow a climate test, which are guidelines that determine a projects approval if it harms the climate. This would reject all fossil fuel proposals.

Second, activists want lawmakers to pass a bill that ensures the state switches to 100 percent renewable energy by 2028. All sectors under the governments jurisdiction would move toward using alternative fuels.

The window to do this is short, as Washington lawmakers will only meet for 60 days this session. As 350 Seattle communications coordinator Emily Johnston explained, every minute is precious. She referred to scientists who warned world leaders last June that we have only three years to reduce greenhouse gases to a point where the Paris climate agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius is still attainable.

We know what happens beyond that, she said. [Climate] acceleration and the disasters we are starting to see become unstoppable.

Johnston referred the federal governments refusal to deal with climate change as a major reason for not only Washington, but also other states to focus on the environment.

If the entire West Coast were to develop laws that were very aggressive on climate then that would have a [massive] impact because the economies of Washington and California are huge, she said.

Connon used Montgomery County, the largest county in Maryland, as an example of what Washington state could do. Last month, officials there passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency and aimed to reduce the countys greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2027, and ultimately 100 percent eight years after that.

The example set by Montgomery County is a commendable example and one we hope Washington state will follow, Connon said.

Washington does have commitments by law to reduce its greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020. But Olympic Climate Action member Melanie Greer said Washington will fail to meet that deadline barring a significant policy change.

I want to see real legislation that matches what scientists say has to be done, as well as demonstrable action  so that the state moves in the right direction, Greer said.

After the activists in the balconies finished their chant, they were ordered to leave by security guards. Having made their voices heard, they are now planning the next steps of the campaign to ensure officials make climate action a top priority this legislative session.

The clock is ticking, Connon said. We, as a society and as a whole, have to respond to the climate crisis.

Via Waging Nonviolence

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KUOW Public Radio: What would a climate-friendly Seattle actually look like?
A Sparta man charged with running a large-scale marijuana trafficking operation over a three-year span pleaded not guilty Tuesday to a felony drug charge.

Corydon Drake, 38, pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit manufacture or delivery of more than 10,000 grams of THC during his preliminary hearing in La Crosse County Circuit Court. He remains free on a $10,000 cash bond.

A man who came forward in October because he feared for his life told authorities he stored large amounts of marijuana for Drake in his basement until someone stole 20 to 30 pounds of the drug worth $43,890 from his house in late September, according to the criminal complaint.

In the first four months of last year, he said, he received hundreds of pounds of pot from Drake, who he estimated trafficked in 500 pounds total from Colorado during the period in which he worked for him, the complaint stated.

At least three times, he deposited drug profits into Drakes bank account and twice drove $30,000 to Colorado, where he said Drake owns three homes with basement marijuana growing operations.

On Nov. 6, Drake ordered the man to pick up drug proceeds from Cazzie Marnach, 38, of Onalaska. Under police surveillance, Marnach gave him $38,422.29, according to the complaint.

Investigators the next day followed the man to one of Drakes houses in Brighton, Colo., where he gave Drake the cash, the complaint stated.

Authorities on Jan. 3 searched a garage rented by Marnach at 1412 Caledonia St., where they found 26 pounds of marijuana and hash wax and $8,000.

Marnach stood mute Jan. 11 to conspiracy to commit delivery of more than 10,000 grams of THC in his third marijuana delivery case. In a 1998 case, he was placed on probation and later sent to prison when it was revoked. He also was placed on probation in a 2010 case.

In May 2016, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport Police intercepted a UPS package containing four pounds of marijuana and 80 small containers of hash wax shipped from Oregon to West Salem.

Detectives delivered the box to Amy Kneesel at 111 N. Mill St. Kneesel told authorities that Drake once before mailed marijuana to her house from a dispensary.

Flight records place Drake in Oregon at the time the package was shipped, and Drake is on surveillance video at a UPS store sending the box, Tom Johnson, investigative coordinator for the West Central Metropolitan Enforcement Group, testified Tuesday.
Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCwire) - Canarc Resource Corp. (TSX: CCM, OTC-BB: CRCUF, Frankfurt: CAN) is pleased to report results from the final four holes of its seven-hole drilling program completed in late 2017 at its Fondaway Canyon Project in Nevada. Assays for the first three holes were released on December 5, 2017. All holes in the drill program intersected gold mineralization.

Drilling Highlights Include:

24.4 meters (m) grading 1.80 grams per tonne (gpt) Au including 6.35 gpt Au over 0.9 m, 5.58 gpt Au over 1.6 m and 6.96 gpt Au over 1.3 m in hole FC17-4.

12.8 m grading 3.48 gpt Au including 5.97 gpt Au over 6.1 m (contains 13.50 gpt Au over 0.6 m) in hole FC17-5

8.3 m grading 2.83 gpt Au including 5.91 gpt Au over 3.7 m in hole FC17-4

5.2 m grading 2.06 gpt Au including 5.99 gpt Au over 1.2 m in hole FC17-7

4.0 m grading 4.19 gpt Au including 13.40 gpt Au over 0.9m in hole FC17-5

True widths of mineralization are estimated to be >90% of reported core lengths in hole FC17-4, 55% for FC17-5, 65-77% for FC17-6, and 65% for FC17-7; true width estimates are preliminary and subject to the results of further 3D modeling. Full results are presented in Table 1.

Catalin Kilofliski, CEO of Canarc, stated: "The results of our last four holes continue to provide encouragement for Fondaway Canyon. Mineralization in the three areas tested by these holes has been significantly extended to depth and along strike. For example, FC17-5 has extended high-grade (>3 gpt Au) mineralization about 100 m along strike within a broad northeast-striking mineralized corridor that contains FC17-4 400 m to the northeast. This corridor is open to the southwest and has not been tested to depth over much of its strike length of at least 700 m. We were also successful in extending high-grade mineralization to depth in the South Mouth area with hole FC17-7. Our 3D analysis and geological review is on-going and will assist in developing an exploration action plan and next steps for 2018. 

The Phase 1, seven-hole, 2,534 m drill program tested five widely-spaced target areas along 2.3 km of the 3.8 km-long gold system (Figure 1). Additional figures showing the drilling results are available on the Companys website at: www.canarc.net. Table 1 lists the composites for holes FC17-4, 5, 6 and 7.

The broad zones of mineralization intersected in the drilling program extend mineralized zones to depth and along strike and, together with previous exploration results, define bulk tonnage mineralization that may be amenable to open pit mining. Previous efforts in the district focused on the underground mining potential of the district by exploring narrow high-grade zones.

HOLE FC17-4

FC17-4 (450.3 m, N0oE/-55o) tested the northeast-striking Half Moon (Stibnite area) quartz-vein stock-work and shear zone system and extends mineralization about 70 m down-dip from previous drilling. The 24.4 m zone grading 1.80 gpt with high-grade (>3 gpt Au) intervals is about 80 m down-dip of 4.18 gpt over 19.2 m intersected in hole 02FC-5. Deeper high-grade zones in FC17-4, such as the 5.91 gpt Au over 3.7 m, are 60 m down dip of 49.2 m grading 1.71 gpt that includes 12.31 g/t over 1.8 m and 5.40 g/t over 8.8 m in hole 02FC-1. Mineralization occurs in quartz-vein stockworks in sulfidic siltstone accompanied by arsenopyrite and local stibnite. In the area of FC17-4, mineralization occurs within a moderately southeast-dipping wedge that is about 180 m thick and has been traced down dip for about 300 m. Along with the Colorado area discussed in the December 5, 2018, news release (holes FC17-2 and 3), the Half Moon - Stibnite area contains gold mineralization that may be amenable to Open Pit mining.

HOLE FC17-5

FC17-5 (359.4 m, S3oW/-60o) tested the South Pit area. High-grade mineralization was intersected in two zones. The upper zone, with 2.71 gpt over 3.7 and 2.28 gpt over 3.5 m lies about 200 m below the small South Pit. It likely represents the down-dip extension of steep mineralization exposed in the pit. However, the stronger, lower zone in the hole may represent the southwestward extension of the northeast-striking Half Moon mineralized corridor intersected in FC17-4 about 400 m to the northeast. This is a significant finding and greatly expands the potential of this northeast mineralized corridor, as it has been poorly tested southwest of FC17-4. Intersections in this lower zone are essentially open below the end of the hole at 359.4 m and include 4.19 gpt Au over 4.0 m with 13.40 gpt over 0.9 m, 3.37 gpt over 4.0 m, and 3.48 gpt over 12.8 m with 13.50 gpt over 0.6 m.

HOLE FC17-6

FC17-6 (370.6 m, N11oE/-50o) tested the eastern part of the South Mouth area, where shallow open-pit mining was completed by Tenneco Minerals in 1989. Gold at South Mouth occurs within east-striking, steep shear-type veins and in broader disseminated zones along a swarm of mafic dikes. Low-grade mineralization was intersected in the upper parts of the hole and in the bottom 6.1 m (1.29 gpt Au), with mineralization open at depth. Although no high grade gold (>3 gpt) was intersected in the hole, the lowest zone, about 250 m below surface, may mark the western extension of the east-west trending Mid Realm structural zone, which contains surface rock-chip samples to 4.6 gpt Au and has been poorly drill tested.

HOLE FC17-7

FC17-7 (187.5 m, N14oE/-50o) tested the western part of the South Mouth area adjacent to the range-front fault. The hole was designed to cross below a west-northwest striking mineralized vein-stockwork zone mined shallowly by Tenneco. The mineralized zone is at least 35 m wide and includes post-mining rock-chip samples reaching 4.32 g/t Au over 2 m. FC17-7 was unfortunately abandoned prior to its target depth of 365 m due to drilling difficulties caused by broken ground within a fault zone. The hole reached the south edge of the mineralized zone about 100 m below surface. An interval of stockwork quartz veins at the bottom of the hole assayed 2.06 gpt Au over 5.2 m containing 5.99 gpt over 1.2 m. The veining is adjacent to altered mafic dikes and marks the south margin of the mineralized zone. Although successful in extending high-grade mineralization 100 m below surface, FC17-7 did not completely test the target.

Table 1. Gold Composites for Core Holes FC17-4, 5 6 and 7

Hole Gold ppm From (ft) To (ft) Interval (ft) From (m) To (m) Interval (m) Comment FC17-4 0.420 217.0 258.0 41.0 66.1 78.6 12.5 Half Moon - Stibnite Target 2.924 297.0 299.0 2.0 90.5 91.1 0.6 1.006 362.0 367.0 5.0 110.3 111.9 1.5 1.419 392.1 400.0 7.9 119.5 121.9 2.4 6.370 525.5 527.3 1.8 160.2 160.7 0.5 0.804 629.8 638.8 9.0 192.0 194.7 2.7 1.364 742.0 777.0 35.0 226.2 236.8 10.7 0.600 802.0 838.5 36.5 244.4 255.6 11.1 1.800 879.0 959.0 80.0 267.9 292.3 24.4 including 6.354 881.0 884.0 3.0 268.5 269.4 0.9 and including 5.578 906.0 911.2 5.2 276.1 277.7 1.6 and including 6.957 936.8 941.0 4.2 285.5 286.8 1.3 2.910 1026.0 1036.3 10.3 312.7 315.9 3.1 including 4.438 1034.0 1036.3 2.3 315.2 315.9 0.7 2.828 1080.0 1107.2 27.2 329.2 337.5 8.3 including 5.908 1095.0 1107.2 12.2 333.8 337.5 3.7 0.287 1227.0 1235.5 8.5 374.0 376.6 2.6 3.344 1302.0 1314.0 12.0 396.8 400.5 3.7 including 6.817 1307.0 1311.5 4.5 398.4 399.7 1.4 0.858 1328.2 1362.0 33.8 404.8 415.1 10.3 including 3.440 1344.0 1348.0 4.0 409.7 410.9 1.2 2.385 1461.0 1475.5 14.5 445.3 449.7 4.4 including 6.786 1466.5 1469.0 2.5 447.0 447.8 0.8 FC17-5 0.769 377.0 384.5 7.5 114.9 117.2 2.3 South Pit Target 1.060 580.0 585.0 5.0 176.8 178.3 1.5 2.713 674.0 686.0 12.0 205.4 209.1 3.7 including 5.191 676.0 681.0 5.0 206.0 207.6 1.5 2.285 705.5 717.1 11.6 215.0 218.6 3.5 including 5.450 708.5 712.5 4.0 216.0 217.2 1.2 1.376 735.0 744.0 9.0 224.0 226.8 2.7 4.186 1052.0 1065.0 13.0 320.6 324.6 4.0 including 13.400 1052.0 1055.0 3.0 320.6 321.6 0.9 3.371 1097.0 1110.0 13.0 334.4 338.3 4.0 including 4.576 1097.0 1105.0 8.0 334.4 336.8 2.4 3.479 1133.0 1175.0 42.0 345.3 358.1 12.8 including 5.971 1140.0 1160.0 20.0 347.5 353.6 6.1 Includes 13.50 gpt over 0.6 m and including 3.137 1171.0 1175.0 4.0 356.9 358.1 1.2 FC17-6 0.455 317.0 335.0 18.0 96.6 102.1 5.5 South Mouth Target 1.432 427.5 430.0 2.5 130.3 131.1 0.8 0.689 464.5 497.0 32.5 141.6 151.5 9.9 0.625 534.0 561.5 27.5 162.8 171.1 8.4 0.423 910.0 923.5 13.5 277.4 281.5 4.1 1.109 997.0 1002.0 5.0 303.9 305.4 1.5 1.294 1196.0 1216.0 20.0 364.5 370.6 6.1 Bottoms in mineralization FC17-7 0.467 25.0 33.8 8.8 7.6 10.3 2.7 South Mouth Target 2.061 531.0 548.0 17.0 161.8 167.0 5.2 5.990 536.0 540.0 4.0 163.4 164.6 1.2 Hole failed to reach targeted length

*Composites calculated at 0.25 gpt cut over at least 2 consecutive samples or 1 gpt over 1 sample; 3 gpt cut in bold is used for higher-grade and internal (included, italics) zones; assays by Bureau Veritas Minerals (Inspectorate America Corporation) by 30g fire assay with AAS finish, with gravimetric analysis for values exceeding 10 gpt Au;

Figure 1. Fondaway Canyon district showing



Qualified Person:

Dr. Jacob Margolis is a qualified person, as defined by National Instrument 43-101, and has approved the technical information in this news release. Dr. Margolis is engaged as a consultant to Canarc Resource Corp as Vice President of Exploration.

The Company employs a rigorous QAQC protocol, including insertion of control samples at a rate of 1 per 100 feet of core, or approximately 1 per 22 samples. Control samples include a blank and four gold standards at various grades. Samples were processed by Bureau Veritas Minerals, an ISO-certified lab that meets the requirements of ISO/IEC 17025:2005 and ISO 9001:2015, and employs its own QAQC procedures, including duplicate analyses of core pulps and rejects and insertion of its own standards and blanks. No significant discrepancies were found in the assay results to date.

About Fondaway Canyon

The Fondaway Canyon project consists of 136 leased unpatented mining claims covering 2,220 acres in Churchill County, Nevada, 70 kms northeast of Fallon. A NI-43-101 technical report, completed in April, 2017, prior to the drilling reported here, and available on SEDAR, reported an indicated resource of 2.05 million tonnes grading 6.18 gpt containing 409,000 ounces of gold and an inferred resource of 3.20 million tonnes 6.40 gpt gold containing 660,000 ounces of gold. This estimate does not include all mineralized areas in the project, such as the Pack Rat area tested by hole FC17-1. The project contains a gold-bearing shear-zone system that is at least 3.8 km long and up to 1 km wide.

CANARC RESOURCE CORP.

About Canarc Resource Corp. - Canarc is a growth-oriented, gold exploration and mining Company listed on the TSX (CCM) and the OTC-BB (CRCUF). The Company creates shareholder value by acquiring, exploring and developing pre-production stage gold mines or properties in the Americas.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nevada Exploration Inc. (NGE or the Company) (TSX-V:NGE) (OTCQB:NVDEF) is pleased to report that the results of the Companys Scorpion drill program have confirmed that the hydrothermal system that was active at Kelly Creek is gold-bearing over larger areas than previously known, with discrete zones of enriched gold in groundwater anchored to at least two clusters of >0.1 g/t gold in bedrock covering areas consistent in size with the geochemical footprints of the nearest major gold deposits, Lone Tree (5 Moz) and Marigold (8 Mozs). When combined with the results of earlier drilling, NGEs updated geologic model suggests that the gold-bearing hydrothermal system at Kelly Creek is likely the extension of the system responsible for Lone Tree and Marigold, and is of a size to support major additional mineralization.

Summarizing the results, Wade Hodges, CEO: We have specifically built an exploration program to look for large gold deposits. Being the first to open-up Nevadas covered basins to systematic gold exploration, we are not looking for one to two million ounce deposits, we are on the hunt for five to ten million ounce deposits, and bigger. Big deposits are the product of big mineralized systems, which create big footprints, and so that is what we are exploring for. With our Scorpion drilling results at Kelly Creek, along with an improved geologic model supported by historic drilling and a comprehensive package of geophysics, we have successfully established that the mineral system weve identified at Kelly Creek was pregnant (gold-bearing) over a significant area, and that the system had active fluid pathways that both intersected and affected large volumes of favourable host rock at a scale consistent with what you see at Nevadas largest gold deposits.

We have found exactly what we are looking for: a big mineralized gold system with a big footprint. Our results at Kelly Creek combine all the critical components necessary to source a world-class gold deposit. Just as importantly, the 3D groundwater results have defined discrete, parallel zones of gold enrichment that cut through this otherwise large system, giving us clear and focused targets to test for the final variable: are there places where the pregnant fluids and the suitable host rock units and deposition conditions came together to result in higher-grade mineralization? Answering this question will be the specific goal of our next round of deeper drilling at the Project.

This is what systematic exploration looks like, and this is how big deposits are found. We are sticking to our plan, and we are excited by the results  especially as Kelly Creek is just the first of three projects were advancing using the same workflow.

Scorpion Drilling Results

The favourable geologic setting (host units and structural controls) associated with the adjacent Lone Tree and Marigold deposits project northwards to the Kelly Creek Project area, beneath relatively shallow cover. Earlier drilling and groundwater sampling had confirmed that this relatively shallow, prospective structural and bedrock setting was also associated with enriched gold in groundwater, alluvium, and bedrock. The Scorpion drilling program was designed to collect 3D groundwater, alluvium, and top of bedrock samples across this prospective covered bedrock area, with the objective of constraining the target by vectoring into areas of gold mineralization in bedrock that are large enough to be associated with the footprint of a world-class gold deposit.

The Scorpion program consisted of 61 holes totalling 5,864 m of drilling, with an average hole depth of 95 m. Of the 61 holes, 41 holes encountered bedrock, at an average depth of 84 m, which allowed for widespread bedrock mapping and sampling. From the 61 holes, 552 water samples were collected, on average every 10 m downhole, providing important 3D geochemistry across the project, especially in areas of deeper bedrock where the Scorpion could not sample bedrock directly.

The results have established that the lateral extent of the gold-in-groundwater footprint at Kelly Creek is of a comparable size, and perhaps larger, than that seen at Lone Tree, consistent with the presence of a large, robust, mineralized system. Zones of enriched gold in groundwater form focused, parallel NNW-trending lineaments (also reflected more broadly in arsenic and antimony in groundwater) bounded by the primary N-S structural fabric that runs parallel to Lone Tree and north from Marigold. These linear zones of enrichment that cut through this large favourable system are consistent with the geometry of mineralization hosted within secondary zones of structural extension (Riedel-style shears), marking potential conduits of enhanced vertical hydrothermal fluid flow that are known to provide important ore-controls at many large deposits in Nevada (including Lone Tree).

The results of the Scorpion bedrock sampling combined with the bedrock samples from earlier drilling together define two clusters of >0.1 g/t gold in bedrock, covering areas at least 700 m x 300 m and 1,000 m x 600 m respectively, associated with the discrete lineaments of increased gold-in-groundwater enrichment, which provide new strong evidence that the hydrothermal system at Kelly Creek is mineralized over a larger area than previously known.

Establishing the Critical Components for a Major Gold Deposit

By combining the latest Scorpion drill results with the results of earlier deeper core drilling and the geophysical structural interpretation (based on the combined gravity, air magnetic, seismic, and CSAMT datasets), NGE has updated the geologic model at Kelly Creek to test for the critical components known to support gold mineralization at a scale of 5 to 10 million ounces in this part of Nevada (i.e. Carlin-type gold deposits). Based on the combined exploration datasets, NGE is pleased to report that:

The primary and secondary structural fabric seen in the geophysics, core drilling, and hydrogeochemistry, plus the thick sections of alteration and geochemistry seen in the drilling, support the presence of major reactivated high-angle structural conduits associated with a hydrothermal system of a size necessary to support the formation of a major mineralized system;



Veining and structural damage seen in the core drilling confirm that the permeability of the units proximal to the favorable structural conduits has been improved over large areas and is well-suited to support gold deposition;



Thick and wide-spread intervals of hydrothermal alteration, oxidation, decalcification, and carbon remobilization confirm a large hydrothermal system was active at Kelly Creek, and mark the style of alteration and mineralization associated with Carlin-type gold deposits, which together are indicative of a favorable mineralizing environment;



The geochemical footprint seen across the project, which includes large areas of gold mineralization in bedrock, is consistent in terms of the size and geochemical package with the footprints associated with many of Nevadas large mineral systems, which confirms: (i) that the systems hydrothermal fluids were pregnant; (ii) that the pregnant fluids were present across large areas of the system; and (iii) that the pregnant fluids could potentially source economic gold mineralization where provided with favourable depositional conditions, namely suitably-permeable iron-rich host rocks; and



Thick sections of bedrock units known to support mineralization nearby at Lone Tree and Marigold were encountered by all of the widespread and deeper core drill holes, which confirm that favourable, iron-rich, and suitably permeable host rocks are present across the entire project area and at depth.

NGE believes that these results confirm that all the critical components needed to host a world-class 5 - 10 Moz deposit are present at the Kelly Creek Project, and that the combined dataset suggest the gold-bearing hydrothermal system at Kelly Creek is likely the extension of the system responsible for the adjacent Lone Tree (5 Moz) and Marigold (8 Mozs) deposits, with the potential to support significant additional mineralization.

Next Phase of Work

The next phase of work at Kelly Creek will consist of deeper drilling to test for areas where gold-bearing hydrothermal fluids were able to exploit favourable structural and permeability conditions to impregnate favourable iron-rich host rocks (all of which are now known to exist) at the scale required to source a major deposit. This deeper drilling will target the discrete lineaments of enriched gold in groundwater defined by the 3D Scorpion program suggestive of possible Riedel shear structures that could provide the confluence of critical components needed to host higher-grade mineralization. By integrating 3D geochemistry with conventional project-scale geology, the results highlight how NGE is using a combination of low-cost drilling and hydrogeochemistry (groundwater chemistry) to provide an otherwise missing crosshair to focus and advance this large, blind, gold-bearing system with clear next-stage drill targets.

Breakfast with Wade Hodges and Other Upcoming Vancouver Events

NGE is pleased to invite its stakeholders to visit with its management at several upcoming events in Vancouver to discuss the results of our ongoing programs and exciting results at Kelly Creek and South Grass Valley:

Metals Investor Forum - Friday, January 19th and Saturday, January 20th

Rosewood Georgia Hotel

Presentation Time: 14:20-14:30 on Saturday, January 20, 2018

REGISTRATION REQUIRED: Click Here

Breakfast with Wade Hodges: The ABCs of Finding Big Gold Deposits - Sunday, January 21st

2018 Vancouver Resource Investment Conference

Vancouver Convention Centre West

BREAKFAST: 7:30 to 8:30

RSVP for Breakfast to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED FOR EVENT: Click Here

2018 Vancouver Resource Investment Conference - Sunday, January 21st and Monday, January 22nd

Vancouver Convention Centre West

BOOTH: 719

REGISTRATION REQUIRED FOR EVENT: Click Here

FULL AGENDA: Click Here

About Nevada Exploration Inc.

NGE is an exploration company focused on gold in Nevada. NGE is led by an experienced management team that has been involved with the discovery of more than 30 million ounces of gold in Nevada. NGEs team has spent the last decade integrating the use of hydrogeochemistry with conventional exploration tools to develop a Nevada-specific regional-scale geochemistry exploration program. With innovative technology, NGE has completed the worlds largest groundwater sampling program for gold exploration, collecting more than 5,500 samples to evaluate Nevadas covered basins for new gold exploration targets. To advance follow-up targets, NGE has overcome the high drilling costs that have previously prohibited the wide-spread use of drilling as a prospecting tool by developing its Scorpion drill rig, a small-footprint, truck-mounted small-diameter RC drill rig specifically tailored to the drilling conditions in Nevadas basins (analogous to RAB drilling in other parts of the world).

By integrating hydrogeochemistry and early-stage low-cost drilling with conventional exploration methods, NGE is generating and advancing a portfolio of gold exploration projects in Nevada. NGE and its exploration partners have now drilled more than 18,000 metres on targets defined by its exploration program, and at several projects have discovered new large hydrothermal systems, with spatial extents covering several square kilometres, defined by system-appropriate alteration in bedrock over significant drill intervals (>300 m) containing widespread low-level gold (>0.1 g/t) and supporting trace-element lithogeochemistry consistent with the geologic and geochemical footprints of Nevadas large gold deposits. These are the types of footprints that are associated with multi-million-ounce gold deposits in Nevada, and with these results NGE believes that it has demonstrated the validity of its integrated exploration program to discover and advance new high-quality gold targets in otherwise blind settings. By overcoming the challenges and radically reducing the costs of exploring in Nevadas covered basins, NGE is taking meaningful steps to open this important new search space up for district-scale exploration.
(All amounts expressed in US$ and short tons unless otherwise indicated)

After-Tax Net Present Value ("NPV") 8% of $2.0 billion 1 , a 57% Increase Relative to the 2017 PEA

of $2.0 billion , a 57% Increase Relative to the 2017 PEA Improved After-Tax Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 48% 1 vs 42% Previously

vs 42% Previously Rapid 1.6 Year After-Tax Payback on Higher Grades in Early Mine Plan 1; Four Payback Periods in First Five Years of Production

Four Payback Periods in First Five Years of Production Impressive After-Tax Cash Flow of More Than $2.0B 1 Over First Five Years

Over First Five Years 946 Million Pounds of Average Annual Zinc Equivalent (ZnEq) Production in the First Five Years of Production 1 , Making Taylor One of the Worlds Top 5 ZnEq Producers

, Making Taylor One of the Worlds Top 5 ZnEq Producers 51% Increase in Average Annual Silver Production in Concentrate to 9.5 M Oz over First Five Years

World-Class M&I Resource Estimate of 101M Tons Grading 10.4% ZnEq, Up 39% from 2017 PEA, Inferred Resource of 44M Tons Grading 11.9% ZnEq, up 13%

Mine Life Increased By 10 Years to 29 Years

Further Resource Expansion Potential  9 Drill Rigs Dedicated to Expanding Taylor, Which Remains Open in Multiple Directions

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arizona Mining Inc. (TSX:AZ) (Arizona Mining or the Company) is pleased to announce a significantly enhanced, updated Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) and mineral resource estimate for its Taylor zinc-lead-silver sulfide deposit located on the 100%-owned Hermosa Project in Arizona. Based on the updated study, the Company continues to target first mineralized material-to-plant from a proposed 10,000 ton per day (tpd) operation in 2020.

As part of the PEA update, we completed an additional 71,000 metres of drilling in 2017 from March to November which led to a 39% increase in Measured and Indicated Mineral Resources, and essentially maintained the zinc equivalent grade. That tells us we have yet to identify the outer limits of the deposit  this is what excites me most about the project, said Jim Gowans, President & CEO. Additionally, the drilling identified more high-grade material that we were able to sequence into the initial 10 years of the mine plan, which had a favourable impact to our financial metrics. Detailed metallurgical studies are ongoing and will be included with the feasibility study, however we have seen some positive results to date, including a coarser grind size.

We remain well funded to execute our 2018 objectives. The next key milestones are to deliver the Feasibility Study for the Taylor Project by mid-year and begin the exploration decline by the third quarter.

Additional Details

In addition to significantly increasing the total amount of tons in the mine plan, drilling in 2017 has also helped boost silver to approximately 198 million recovered ounces (214 million contained ounces), an increase of 106%.

Silver grades for Measured and Indicated Mineral Resource tons have correspondingly increased by 24%, to 2.1 ounces per ton (opt).

Average annual silver production in concentrate in the first five years has risen 51% to 9.5 million ounces. Annual life of mine (LOM) production of silver in concentrate is up 35% to 6.8 million ounces.

Pre-production capex of $519 million, a 14% increase from the previous PEA, is principally due to the acceleration of spend relating to shaft development and the requirement for additional mining equipment to access the higher-grade Taylor Deeps mineralization in the early years of the mine life. Accessing this higher-grade material up-front in the mine plan provides a substantial benefit to overall project economics.

Life-of-mine sustaining capital is projected to be $725 million. The increase in sustaining capital is directly related to the increase in mineable resource and extended mine life.

Total site-level cash operating costs of $51/ton have increased by a modest 5% relative to the prior PEA principally to accommodate higher costs associated with smaller and more selective stope designs, partially offset by a decrease in estimated processing costs resulting from a coarser grind size (primary grind size is now 150 microns compared to 105 microns previously).

The updated economic analysis incorporates the impact of Public Law No. 115-97, the US Tax Reform which included a major decrease in federal corporate income taxes from 35% to 21%. The bill was signed into law by the President of the United States on December 22, 2017.

___________________________

1 Financial and operating metrics are based on long term zinc, lead and silver prices of $1.10 per pound, $1.00 per pound and $20 per ounce, respectively.

Note: The preliminary economic assessment is preliminary in nature, includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment will be realized. The basis for the preliminary economic assessment and any qualifications and assumptions are made by the qualified person as disclosed in this release.

Table 1. Financial and Operating Summary (all tons are short tons unless otherwise noted)

Financial Summary Jan 2018 Apr 2017 % Chg After-tax NPV (8%) $(000's) $1,979,101 $1,260,764 57% After-tax IRR % 48% 42% 6% Payback Years 1.6 1.7 6% Pre-production Capex $(000's) $518,959 $457,170 14% Sustaining Capex $(000's) $725,261 $500,196 45% LOM Capex $(000's) $1,244,220 $957,366 30% Operating Summary Mineable Resource m tons 96,671 60,846 59% Mine Life years 29 19 53% Zinc Equivalent Head grade % ZnEq 10.44 10.34 1% Zinc Head grade % Zn 4.01 4.43 -9% Lead Head grade % Pb 4.34 4.31 1% Silver Head grade opt Ag 2.22 1.71 30% LOM Avg. Annual Payable Zinc Production1 m lbs 211 224 -6% LOM Avg. Annual Payable Lead Production1 m lbs 262 250 5% LOM Avg. Annual Payable Silver Production1 m oz 5.6 4.3 30% Zinc concentrate treatment charge (base) $/dmt2 210 210 0% Zinc treatment charge (Mn penalty) $/dmt 13 13 0% Lead concentrate treatment charge (base) $/dmt 190 190 0% All concentrates transportation charge $/dmt 97 97 0% Operating Costs per Ton Mining $/t $38.02 $35.35 8% Processing $/t $10.54 $10.73 -2% Site-G&A $/t $2.00 $2.00 0% Total operating costs (mine, processing, G&A) $/t $50.56 $48.08 5% C1 Zinc Co-Product Cost3 $/lb $0.49 $0.51 -4% C1 Lead Co-Product Cost3 $/lb $0.37 $0.38 -3% All-in Sustaining Cost (ZnEq)4 $/lb $0.61 $0.61 0%

1. Average annual payable metal for Life of Mine.

2. Dry metric tonne.

3. Silver treated as a by-product.

4. Based on long-term prices of $1.10/lb zinc, $1.00/lb lead and $20/oz silver, respectively. ZnEq Formula: payable zinc production plus lead revenue divided by zinc price plus silver revenue divided by zinc price.

-

The updated PEA illustrates a world-class project, with all key financial metrics improved relative to the previous study, and will be one of the worlds largest zinc resources as well as a top 5 zinc equivalent producer. It is positioned as a unique asset with high margins, a multi-decade life, and low capital intensity, said Tom Whelan, Chief Financial Officer.

Figure 1. Taylor Updated PEA ZnEq Grade &Tonnage vs Select Globally Significant Primary Zn Assets



Note: Mt. Isa not plotted (660 Mt @ 9.83% ZnEq) Note: All Amounts in Metric Tonnes. Conversion prices as per SNL on 15 Jan 2018; ZnEq calculated on in-situ value per SNL. Source: SNL Metals & Mining

Figure 2. Based on the PEA, Taylor Will Be One of the Worlds Top 5 Zinc Mines





Notes: 1. Assumes metal prices of US$1.10/lb Zn, US$1.00/lb Pb, US$20.00/oz Ag, $1,250/oz Au. 2. ZnEq production estimates from SNL Metals & Mining for 2018 and illustrated for mines wherein >50% of the value of combined metal production is sourced from zinc. Source: SNL Metals & Mining.

Mr. Whelan added: The high-grade nature of the resource will lead to over $2.0 billion of after-tax cashflows to be generated in just the first 5 years of the 29-year mine-life, with the project boasting a very quick 1.6-year payback. We believe these superior financial metrics position the project very well to obtain the optimal mix of required project funding from traditional lenders and/or other potential strategic third parties.

Figure 3. Annual and Cumulative After-Tax Cash Flows from Taylor Over First Five Years1





1. Cumulative after-tax cash flows begin after first production.

The project remains well positioned to benefit from the current strong and rising metal price environment, with a 20% increase in base metal pricing relative to the base case translating to a $2.7 billion NPV (refer to Table 2).

Table 2. Sensitivities to a 20% Change in Zinc and Lead Prices

After-Tax NPV 8% (000's) After-Tax IRR (%) Zinc Price (US$/lb) Zinc Price (US$/lb) Lead Price (US$/lb) $0.88 $1.10 $1.32 Lead Price (US$/lb) $0.88 $1.10 $1.32 $0.80 $1,249,304 $1,614,331 $1,978,019 $0.80 37.0% 43.4% 49.2% $1.00 $1,615,413 $1,979,101 $2,342,339 $1.00 42.5% 48.4% 53.8% $1.20 $1,980,148 $2,343,183 $2,706,086 $1.20 47.6% 53.0% 58.1%

The Taylor project has globally significant contained silver of 214 million mineable ounces which places it among the worlds top primary silver companies, as shown in Figure 4. This does not include the nearly 200 million-ounce endowment in the Central oxide deposit.

Figure 4. Taylor Contained Silver in Total Silver Resources vs Reserves of Select Primary Silver Companies



Source: S&P Global SNL Metals and Mining Market Intelligence

Figure 5 illustrates that Arizona Mining will be a significant silver producer at an average of 9.5 million ounces of silver in concentrate in the first five years of production.

Figure 5. Significantly Enhanced Silver Production in Concentrate  First 10 Years of Mine Life



Significant Upgrade to Taylor Resource

Exploration and infill drilling in 2017 has significantly upgraded and expanded the total resource. At a 4% zinc equivalent cut off, drilling has increased the total measured and indicated tons by 39% to 101 million tons grading 10.4 ZnEq and the inferred resource has grown by 13% to a total of 43.6 million tons grading 11.9% ZnEq.

The Mineral Resource is shown in Table 3 at a range of zinc equivalent cut-off grades. Tons were rounded to the nearest thousand. The resource is based on assay results from 161 drill holes totaling 592,190 feet (180,499 meters) of drilling. The updated Mineral Resource estimate and mine plan was prepared by AMC Mining Consultants (Canada) Ltd. (AMC) of Vancouver, B.C.

Table 3. Taylor Deposit Measured, Indicated and Inferred Resources1,2,3

Measured Indicated Cut-off ZnEq (%) Short Tons ZnEq (%) Pb (%) Zn (%) Ag (opt) Cut-off ZnEq (%) Short Tons ZnEq (%) Pb (%) Zn (%) Ag (opt) 25 568,000 30.3 13.0 12.7 4.9 25 3,974,000 31.9 12.8 13.1 6.4 20 1,098,000 26.5 11.2 11.4 4.2 20 8,232,000 27.0 10.8 10.9 5.5 15 2,141,000 22.0 9.2 9.4 3.6 15 16,111,000 22.2 9.0 8.9 4.5 10 4,827,000 16.6 6.9 7.0 2.8 10 32,981,000 17.1 7.0 6.8 3.5 6 10,047,000 11.9 5.0 5.0 2.0 6 61,282,000 12.8 5.3 5.1 2.6 5 12,355,000 10.7 4.5 4.5 1.8 5 72,394,000 11.6 4.8 4.6 2.4 4 15,208,000 9.6 4.0 4.0 1.6 4 85,750,000 10.5 4.3 4.2 2.2 3 18,910,000 8.4 3.5 3.5 1.4 3 101,120,000 9.5 3.9 3.7 2.0 2 23,031,000 7.3 3.1 3.1 1.3 2 118,650,000 8.4 3.5 3.3 1.8 1 26,499,000 6.6 2.7 2.8 1.1 1 135,116,000 7.6 3.1 3.0 1.6 Measured + Indicated Inferred Cut-off ZnEq (%) Short Tons ZnEq (%) Pb (%) Zn (%) Ag (opt) Cut-off ZnEq (%) Short Tons ZnEq (%) Pb (%) Zn (%) Ag (opt) 25 4,542,000 31.7 12.8 13.0 6.2 25 3,632,000 32.8 13.2 10.2 9.9 20 9,330,000 26.9 10.9 11.0 5.4 20 6,913,000 27.8 11.3 9.0 7.9 15 18,252,000 22.2 9.0 9.0 4.4 15 11,466,000 23.6 9.6 7.9 6.5 10 37,807,000 17.0 7.0 6.8 3.4 10 18,889,000 19.2 7.9 6.3 5.2 6 71,329,000 12.6 5.2 5.1 2.5 6 31,079,000 14.7 5.9 4.9 4.1 5 84,748,000 11.5 4.7 4.6 2.3 5 36,578,000 13.3 5.3 4.4 3.7 4 100,958,000 10.4 4.3 4.1 2.1 4 43,609,000 11.9 4.8 3.9 3.4 3 120,030,000 9.3 3.8 3.7 1.9 3 52,904,000 10.4 4.1 3.4 3.0 2 141,680,000 8.2 3.4 3.3 1.7 2 64,478,000 9.0 3.6 2.9 2.6 1 161,615,000 7.4 3.0 3.0 1.5 1 80,345,000 7.5 3.0 2.5 2.2

1. For a full list of drill holes included in the updated resource, please refer to www.arizonamining.com/projects/taylor-deposit/resources.

2. Mineral Resources are reported as of 30 November 2017. Stated at a cut-off grade of 4% ZnEq, and based on long-term prices, recovery and costs as follows: Prices of $1.00/lb for zinc, $0.95/lb for lead and $20.00/oz for silver; average processing recovery factors of 92% for zinc, 95% for lead, and 90% for silver; total operating costs are estimated to be $51/ton.

3. Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. There is no certainty that all or any part of mineral resources will be converted to Mineral Reserves. Inferred Mineral Resources are based on limited drilling which suggests the greatest uncertainty for a resource estimate and that geological continuity is only implied. Additional drilling will be required to verify geological and mineralization continuity and there is no certainty that all of the Inferred Resources will be converted to Measured and Indicated Resources. Quantity and grades are estimates and are rounded to reflect the fact that the resource estimate is an approximation.

Proposed Mine Plan  10,000 tpd Underground Operation

The updated PEA for the Taylor Sulfide Deposit is based on an underground mine plan with first mineralized material-to-plant beginning in 2020 and ramping up to 10,000 tpd in 2023. The zinc-lead-silver resource will be hoisted to the surface by a shaft and processed through a 10,000 tpd concentrator. The initial mine plan is based on 96.7 million tons of Measured, Indicated, and Inferred Resources grading 4.0% zinc, 4.3% lead and 2.2 opt silver.

Figure 6. Change in Zinc Equivalent Production and Grades Relative to Prior PEA  First 8 Years



Processing of the zinc-lead-silver resource will be through a 10,000 tpd standard crushing and grinding circuit followed by froth flotation, concentrate thickening and filtration. The operation will produce two concentrates: a lead (galena) concentrate that will assay approximately 69% lead and approximately 1,100 g/t silver, and a zinc (sphalerite) concentrate that will assay approximately 56% zinc and approximately 350 grams per tonne (g/t) silver. Both concentrate specifications have been favorably reviewed by industry experts and potential offtake partners. Tailings or waste material from the mining and processing will be filtered to minimize water losses. Approximately 60% of the tailings will be mixed with cement and used as structural backfill in the underground operations, compared with an estimated 45% in the original PEA. The remaining tailings will be dry-stacked.

The major components of estimated pre-production capital of $519 million includes $126 million for the shaft, $98 million for the process plant, $90 million for site infrastructure, including backfill plant and tailings storage facility, $58 million for underground development, $64 million for contingency, and $44 million for mining equipment.

Opportunities and Exploration Potential

The Taylor deposit is not fully delineated and hence the current Mineral Resource estimate only represents a portion of the potential on Arizona Minings extensive land holdings. Exploration drilling continues on the Companys patented land with 9 drill rigs. Prominent targets for resource expansion and near-term exploration potential include:

Drilling in the Taylor Deeps Zone, which remains open in several directions, and continues to return high grade zinc, lead and silver over significant mineable thicknesses. Of particular interest in the zone are the extensions to the northwest and southeast where the zone appears to be much higher grade. Outlying targets identified by drilling, geophysics, alteration or a combination thereof remain a high priority in 2018 and are shown in Figure 7. These targets will become more of a focus now that the resource infill drilling has been essentially completed. As evidenced by the drill results highlighted in Figure 7, significant mineralized intersections of zinc-lead-silver have been intersected by several drill holes away from the existing resource and the mineralization remains open in multiple directions.

Figure 7. Exploration Targets





Going Forward

In 2018, the Company is funded to complete the major items budgeted for the year. That work will include completing the tailings remediation work and constructing an active water treatment plant and underdrain collection pond, initiating an exploration decline into the Taylor Deposit and completing a Feasibility Study. Exploration drilling will continue through 2018 in order to increase our understanding of the deposit and determine its limits.

The Company expects to file a Technical Report in respect of the updated Resource and Preliminary Economic Assessment within 5 days from the date of this Press Release but certainly within 45 days.

Revisions for the updated PEA were compiled and approved by AMC.

Arizona Mining will host a conference call and webcast to discuss the results of the PEA at 5 pm Eastern time on January 16, 2018. Dial-in details are as follows:

Conference Call Dial In:

Canada/USA Toll Free: +1-800-319-4610

International Toll: +1-604-638-5340

The webcast and presentation materials will be available on Arizona Minings website at www.arizonamining.com. The conference call will be available for replay by phone at 1-855-669-9658 (U.S. and Canada toll free) and +1-412-317-0088 (international), access code 1968.

APPENDIX

Mineral Resource Estimation Results

The Mineral Resource has been stated in terms of Zinc Equivalent. The ZnEq formula and the underlying parameters used in its formulation are set out in Table 4. Although the grade of copper was estimated, it was not used as a component of the ZnEq formula because of its relatively low abundance and uncertain mineral processing route.

Table 4. Zinc Equivalent Parameters and Formula1

Metal Price (US$) Recovery (%) Lead 0.95/lb 95.0 Zinc 1.00/lb 92.0 Silver 20.00/oz 90.0 1. ZnEq=(((PB%/100)*0.95*2000*0.95)+((ZN%/100)*1*2000*0.92)+(AG_OPT*0.9*20))/((1*2000*0.92)/100)

Mineral Resource Estimation Parameters

The Taylor Deposit Mineral Resource update was carried out using both Ordinary Kriging (OK) and Inverse Distance Squared (ID) estimations. Tonnages and grades of lead, zinc and silver were estimated for six separate lithological domains. Sample data was composited to 10 feet in length for the Concha, Scherrer, Epitaph and Taylor Deeps domains. Drill core sample data that was used for estimation of the shallower Trench Vein System and the Sub-Taylor Deeps domains were composited to nominal five-foot lengths because of their comparatively narrow dimensions. The compositing process honored lithological domain boundaries. In all cases boundaries between domains were treated as hard, meaning that grades from adjacent domains were not used to influence the estimation of grades within a given domain.

Mineral Resources were classified as Measured, Indicated and Inferred. For a block to be classified as Measured, it was necessary that a minimum of sixteen (16) composites were located within 250 feet of the block centroid; for a block to be classified as Indicated, it was necessary that a minimum of eight (8) composites were located within 500 feet of the block centroid and for a block to be classified as Inferred, it was necessary that a minimum of two (2) composites be located within 750 feet of the block centroid or three (3) composites within 1,500 feet of the block centroid.

Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. There is no certainty that all or any part of Mineral Resources will be converted to Mineral Reserves. Inferred Mineral Resources are based on limited drilling which suggests the greatest uncertainty for a resource estimate and that geological continuity is only implied. Additional drilling will be required to verify geological and mineralization continuity and there is no certainty that all of the Inferred Mineral Resources will be converted to Measured and Indicated Mineral Resources. Quantity and grades are estimates and are rounded to reflect the fact that the Mineral Resource estimate is an approximation.

Qualified Persons

The results of the Arizona Mining Inc. drilling have been reviewed, verified and compiled by Donald R. Taylor, MSc., PG, Chief Operating Officer for Arizona Mining Inc., a qualified person (QP) as defined by National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101). Mr. Taylor has more than 25 years of mineral exploration and mining experience, and is a Registered Professional Geologist through the SME (registered member #4029597).

The QP for the Mineral Resource estimate is Dinara Nussipakynova, P.Geo, an employee of AMC. The Mineral Resource estimate has been prepared under the guidelines of National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101) for reporting of Mineral Resources.

The results of the metallurgical tests have been reviewed and compiled by Mr. Chris Kaye, President and Principal Process Engineer of Mine and Quarry Engineering Services Inc., a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101). Mr. Kaye has more than 35 years of mineral processing experience and is a Registered Member of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration; and a Fellow of the AusImm.

Assays and Quality Assurance/Quality Control

To ensure reliable sample results, the Company has a rigorous QA/QC program in place that monitors the chain-of-custody of samples and includes the insertion of blanks, duplicates, and certified reference standards at statistically derived intervals within each batch of samples. Core is photographed and split in half with one-half retained in a secured facility for verification purposes.

Sample preparation (crushing and pulverizing) has been performed at ALS Minerals Laboratories, an ISO/IEC accredited lab located in Tucson, Arizona. ALS Minerals Laboratories prepares a pulp of all samples and sends the pulps to their analytical laboratory in Vancouver, B.C. Canada for analysis. ALS analyzes the pulp sample by ICP following a 4-acid digestion (ME-ICP61 for 33 elements) including Cu (copper), Pb (lead), and Zn (zinc). All samples in which Cu (copper), Pb (lead), or Zn (zinc) are greater than 10,000 ppm are rerun using four acid digestion with an ICP  AES finish (Cu-OG62; Pb-OG62; and Zn-OG62) with the elements reported in percentage (%). Silver values are determined by ICP (ME-ICP61) with all samples with silver values greater than 100 ppm repeated using four acid digestion with an ICP-AES finish (Ag-OG62) calibrated for higher levels of silver contained. Any values over 1,500 ppm Ag trigger a fire assay with gravimetric finish analysis. Gold values are determined by a 30 gm fire assay with an ICP-AES finish (Au-ICP21).

About Arizona Mining

Arizona Mining Inc. (an augustagroup company) is a Canadian mineral exploration and development company focused on the exploration and development of its 100%-owned Hermosa Project located in Santa Cruz County, Arizona. The Taylor Deposit, a zinc-lead-silver carbonate replacement deposit, has a resource of 15.2 million tons in the Measured Mineral Resource category grading 4.0% zinc, 4.0% lead and 1.6 opt silver, or 9.6% ZnEq, plus 85.8 million tons in the Indicated Mineral Resource category grading 4.2% zinc, 4.3% lead and 2.2 opt silver, or 10.5% ZnEq, and 43.6 million tons of Inferred Mineral Resources grading 3.9% zinc, 4.8% lead and 3.4 opt silver or 11.9% ZnEq, all reported in accordance with NI 43-101 guidelines utilizing a 4% ZnEq cutoff grade. The Taylor and Taylor Deep Deposits remains open to the north, west and south over land controlled by the Company and will be aggressively drilled to test the limits of the resource. The Companys other project on the Hermosa property is the Central Deposit, a silver-manganese manto oxide project.
VANCOUVER, Jan. 16, 2018 /CNW/ - GoldMining Inc. (the "Company" or "GoldMining") (TSX-V: GOLD; OTCQX: GLDLF) is pleased to announce the results of a National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") mineral resource estimate for its Crucero Gold Project (the "Crucero Project" or the "Project") located in the Department of Puno, southeastern Peru. The estimate includes an indicated resource of 30,653,000 tonnes grading 1.0 g/t gold (1.0 Moz) and an inferred resource of 35,779,000 tonnes grading 1.0 g/t gold (1.1 Moz) at a 0.4 g/t gold cut-off.

Highlights:

The Crucero NI 43-101 resource estimate includes an indicated resource of 1.0 Moz gold (30,653,000 tonnes at an average grade of 1.0 g/t gold) and an inferred resource of 1.1 Moz gold (35,779,000 tonnes at an average grade of 1.0 g/t gold) at a 0.4 g/t gold cut-off (See Tables 1 and 2 for details); and

This resource estimate increases GoldMining's global measured and indicated resource to 9.5 Moz gold (12.4 Moz gold equivalent) and inferred resource to 11.7 Moz gold (14.2 Moz gold equivalent) across all of its projects resulting in a 13% increase in the indicated category and an 11% increase in the inferred category (see Table 4 for details).

Amir Adnani, Chairman of GoldMining, commented: "We are pleased to announce the resource estimate for our Crucero Project, which represents another milestone in the execution of our long-term growth strategy. In 2017, we worked towards furthering this strategy by successfully completing three acquisitions  the Crucero, La Mina and Yellowknife Gold Projects. Our plan in 2018 is to continue this strategy and build upon our vision of maximizing gold leverage for our shareholders."

Garnet Dawson, CEO of GoldMining, commented: "We are pleased to report this conceptual pit constrained resource estimate for the A1 deposit, one of several targets identified by geochemistry and geophysics on the Crucero Project by previous owners. Future exploration programs will look to expand the existing resource at the A1 deposit, test several of the nearby targets and complete additional metallurgical testwork."

The Project

The Crucero Project occurs within the Puno Orogenic Belt, which is host to orogenic gold deposits and associated extensive alluvial deposits in eastern Peru and Bolivia. The Project is road accessible by paved road from Juliaca to the town of Crucero, approximately 150 km to the northeast, with the remaining 50 km to the site by gravel road. High-power electrical lines pass within 8 km of the property.

The Project is comprised of three mining and five exploration concessions with an aggregate area of 4,600 hectares. The three mining concessions are held indirectly by a subsidiary of GoldMining through a 30-year assignment from a third party running until 2038 and are subject to certain net smelter return royalties of 1 to 5%, based on monthly gold prices.

The A1 deposit, as currently defined by trenching and drilling, strikes northwest and dips vertically to steeply to the northeast. The deposit is approximately 750 m long by 100 m in width and has been traced to a vertical depth of 400 m, but most of the drilling is confined to within 250 m of surface. The deposit is open at depth and along strike to the northwest and southeast. The structurally controlled gold mineralization is associated with sulphide veins hosted within strongly deformed metasedimentary rocks.

Historic exploration programs have focused on the A1 deposit, however geophysical and geochemical surveys have identified additional targets for follow-up exploration.

Crucero Resource Estimate

GoldMining engaged Global Mineral Resource Services to prepare an independent NI 43-101 technical report for the Crucero Project, including an updated pit constrained resource estimate for the A1 deposit. The indicated and inferred resource estimates, which have an effective date of December 20, 2017, are shown in Tables 1 and 2, respectively. Assumptions used for the pit modelling are shown in Table 3. A gold cut-off grade of 0.40 g/t was utilized based on similar types of mineralization found at other near surface deposits in the world and is highlighted in the tables below.

Table 1: NI 43-101 indicated resource estimate for the A1 deposit.

Gold Cut-off Tonnage Grade Contained Metal (g/t) (Mt) Gold (g/t) Gold (Moz) 2.0 876,000 2.3 64,000 1.0 13,504,000 1.4 606,000 0.8 19,617,000 1.2 783,000 0.6 25,378,000 1.1 912,000 0.4 30,653,000 1.0 993,000 0.2 33,019,000 1.0 1,013,000 0.0 33,341,000 0.9 1,013,000

Table 2: NI 43-101 inferred resource estimate for the A1 deposit.

Gold Cut-off Tonnage Grade Contained Metal (g/t) (Mt) Gold (g/t) Gold (Moz) 2.0 827,000 2.4 63,000 1.0 14,265,000 1.4 656,000 0.8 21,662,000 1.3 874,000 0.6 28,958,000 1.1 1,038,000 0.4 35,779,000 1.0 1,147,000 0.2 38,706,000 0.9 1,173,000 0.0 39,479,000 0.9 1,174,000

Table 3: Assumptions utilized to establish the conceptual pit for the purposes of the above resource estimate.

Parameter Value Unit Gold Price 1,500 US$/oz Mine Operating Cost (Mineralization and Waste) 1.65 US$/t milled Process Operating Cost 16.00 US$/t milled Overall Pit Slope 47 Degrees

The A1 deposit was modelled on a series of cross-sections and level plans from which a three-dimensional wireframe model was constructed for the mineralized zone at an approximate grade boundary of 0.1 g/t gold. Diamond drill holes (72) totaling approximately 23,000 metres and eleven trenches totaling approximately 3,285 metres were used to define the model (Figs. 1 and 2). High-grade gold values were capped at 17 g/t gold with 19 assays falling above this value. Assay sample lengths were composited at 2.5 metres within the domain. Variography was used to model the grade continuity and to determine the search ellipse orientations and dimensions for interpolation. Ordinary kriging was used to estimate gold into blocks measuring 10 x 10 x 10 metres in dimension. Average bulk density of 2.85 g/cm3 was used to convert block model volumes to tonnages.

Validation of the model was completed by comparison of the block model and drill hole grades by visual inspections in section and plan across the deposit.

Figure 1: Plan Map showing A1 deposit drill holes, trenching (rock channel samples) and projection of mineralized solid.

Figure 2: Cross-section through the A1 Zone showing drill hole grade, block grades and conceptual pit outline.

Quality Control  Quality Assurance Program

The above resource estimate was based on drilling and trenching programs completed by previous operators. The drill programs incorporated control samples including blanks, duplicates and standards as part of their Quality Control  Quality Assurance Program. The control samples from the drill programs have been reviewed and verified by the Qualified Persons (as defined herein) and the assay results were deemed suitable for resource estimation. No information is available regarding the Quality Assurance  Quality Control Program from the trench sampling carried out between 1996 and 2003, however these samples represent only a small percentage (approx. 4%) of the overall assay database used in the resource estimate. The Qualified Persons (as defined herein) are of the opinion that the inclusion of these samples would not have a material effect on the reliability of the overall estimate.

Qualified Person

The resource estimate disclosed herein on the Crucero Project was prepared for GoldMining by Mr. Greg Z. Mosher, B.Sc., M.Sc., P.Geo., of Global Mineral Resource Services (the "Qualified Person"). Mr. Mosher is recognized as a qualified person as defined in NI 43-101, is independent of the Company and has reviewed and approved the disclosure regarding the resource estimate for the Crucero Project disclosed herein.

A technical report respecting the above resource estimate will be filed under the Company's profile on SEDAR in due course. There is no new material scientific or technical information respecting the Crucero Project since the effective date of the resource estimate.

Paulo Pereira, President of GoldMining Inc. has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release. Mr. Pereira holds a Bachelors degree in Geology from Universidade do Amazonas in Brazil, is a Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101 and is a member of the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario.

Cautionary Note

Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of the mineral deposits in the "measured", "indicated" and "inferred" categories will ever be converted into mineral reserves with demonstrated economic viability or that inferred mineral resources will be converted to the measured and/or indicated categories through further drilling. In addition, the estimation of inferred resources involves far greater uncertainty as to their existence and economic viability than the estimation of other categories of resources. Under Canadian rules, estimates of Inferred Mineral Resources may not form the basis of pre-feasibility or feasibility studies.

About GoldMining Inc.

GoldMining is a public mineral exploration company focused on the acquisition and development of gold assets in the Americas. Through its disciplined acquisition strategy, GoldMining now controls a diversified portfolio of resource-stage gold and gold-copper projects in Canada, U.S.A., Brazil, Colombia and Peru. Additionally, GoldMining owns a 75% interest in the Rea Uranium Project, located in the Western Athabasca Basin of Alberta, Canada.

Table 4: GoldMining's Global Estimated Measured, Indicated and Inferred Resource Statement1,2,3.

Deposit Cut-off4 (g/t) Tonnage (Mt) Grade Contained Metal Gold (g/t) Silver (g/t) Copper (%) Gold Eq (g/t) Gold (Moz) Silver (Moz) Copper (Mlbs) Gold Eq (Moz) Measured Resources Titiribi5 0.3 51.60 0.49 - 0.17 0.78 0.820 - 195.1 1.290 Indicated Resources Titiribi5 0.3 234.20 0.51 - 0.09 0.65 3.820 - 459.3 4.930 Sao Jorge6 0.3 14.42 1.54 - - 1.54 0.715 - - 0.715 Cachoeira7 0.35 17.47 1.23 - - 1.23 0.692 - - 0.692 Whistler8 0.3 110.28 0.50 1.76 0.14 0.79 1.765 6.130 343.1 2.797 La Mina9 0.25 28.17 0.74 1.77 0.24 1.12 0.667 1.607 150.2 1.013 Crucero12 0.4 30.65 1.00 - - 1.00 0.993 - - 0.993 435.19 0.62 0.55 0.10 0.79 8.651 7.737 952.7 11.080 Measured and Indicated Resources Total 486.79 0.61 0.49 0.11 0.79 9.471 7.737 1,147.8 12.370 Inferred Resources Titiribi5 0.3 207.90 0.49 - 0.02 0.51 3.260 - 77.9 3.440 Sao Jorge6 0.3 28.19 1.14 - - 1.14 1.035 - - 1.035 Cachoeira7 0.35 15.67 1.07 - - 1.07 0.538 - - 0.538 Whistler8 0.3/0.6 311.26 0.47 2.26 0.11 0.68 4.626 22.617 713.5 6.731 La Mina9 0.25 12.39 0.65 1.75 0.27 1.07 0.260 0.697 73.3 0.427 Boa Vista10 0.5 8.47 1.23 - - 1.23 0.336 - - 0.336 Surubim11 0.3 19.44 0.81 - - 0.81 0.503 - - 0.503 Crucero12 0.4 35.78 1.00 - - 1.00 1.147 - - 1.147 Total 639.10 0.57 1.13 0.06 0.69 11.705 23.311 794.5 14.157

Table 4 Notes: 1. Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. There is no certainty that all or any part of the mineral resources will be converted into mineral reserves. The estimate of mineral resources may be materially affected by environmental permitting, legal, title, taxation, sociopolitical, marketing or other relevant issues. 2. The above global resource estimate table is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to represent the viability of any project on a standalone or global basis. The exploration and development of each project, project geology and the assumptions and other factors underlying each estimate, are not uniform and will vary from project to project. Please refer to the technical report for each respective project, as referenced herein, for detailed information respecting each individual project. 3. All quantities are rounded to the appropriate number of significant figures; consequently, sums may not add up due to rounding. 4. Gold cut-off for all projects except for Whistler, which is gold equivalent cut-off. 5. Notes for Titiribi: Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the Titiribi Project Department of Antioquia, Colombia" prepared by Joseph A. Cantor and Robert E. Cameron of Behre Dolbear & Company (USA), Inc., with an effective date of September 14, 2016, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. Gold equivalent estimated for the Titiribi deposit assumes metal prices of US$1,300/oz gold and US$2.90/lb copper and recoveries of 83% for gold and 90% for copper. 6. Notesfor Sao Jorge: Based on technical report titled "Technical Report and Resource Estimate on the Sao Jorge Gold Project, Para State, Brazil" prepared by Porfirio Rodriguez and Leonardo de Moraes of Coffey Mining Pty Ltd. ("Coffey"), with an effective date of November 22, 2013, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. 7. Notes for Cachoeira: Based on technical report titled "Technical Report and Resource Estimate on the Cachoeira Property, Para State, Brazil" prepared by Gregory Z. Mosher, P.Geo. of Tetratech, Inc. with an effective date of April 17, 2013 and amended and re-stated October 2, 2013, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. 8. Notes for Whistler: Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the Whistler Project" prepared by Gary Giroux of Giroux Consultants Inc., with an effective date of March 24, 2016, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. The Whistler Project is comprised of three deposits: Whistler, Raintree West and Island Mountain. Gold equivalent estimated for the Whistler deposit assumes metal prices of US$990/oz gold, US$15.40/oz silver and US$2.91/lb copper and recoveries of 75% for gold and silver and 85% for copper. Gold equivalent estimated for the Raintree West deposit assumes metal prices of US$1,250/oz gold, US$16.50/oz silver and US$2.10/lb copper and recoveries of 75% for gold, 85% for copper and 75% for silver. Gold equivalent estimated for the Island Mountain deposit assumes metal prices of US$1,250/oz gold, US$16.50/oz silver and US$2.10/lb copper and recoveries of 75% for gold, 85% for copper and 25% for silver (recovered in copper concentrate). A gold equivalent cut-off of 0.3 g/t was highlighted in the estimate as a possible open pit cut-off (Whistler, Raintree-shallow and Island Mountain), and a gold equivalent cut-off of 0.6 g/t was highlighted in the estimate as a possible underground cut-off (Raintree-deep). 9. Notes for La Mina: Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the La Mina Project" prepared by Scott E. Wilson, C.P.G. of Metals Mining Consultants, Inc. ("MMC") with an effective date of October 24, 2016, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. Gold equivalent estimated for the La Mina project assumes metal prices of US$1,275/oz gold, US$17.75/oz for silver and US$2.75/lb for copper and recoveries of 93% for gold and 90% for copper. 10. Notes for Boa Vista: Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the Boa Vista Project and Resource Estimate on the VG1 Prospect, Tapajos Area, Para State, Northern Brazil" prepared by Jim Cuttle, Gary Giroux and Michael Schmulian, with an effective date of November 22, 2013, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. 11. Notes for Surubim: Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the Rio Novo Gold Project and Resource Estimate on the Jau Prospect, Tapajos Area, Para State, Northern Brazil" ("Surubim Project") prepared by Jim Cuttle and Gary Giroux, with an effective date of November 22, 2013, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. 12. Notes for Crucero: Pit constrained resource estimate based on US$1,500/oz gold, mining cost of US$1.60/t, processing cost of US$16.00/t and pit slope of 47 degrees. A technical report documenting the Crucero resource estimate, amongst other items, will be filed in due course and will be available at www.sedar.com under GoldMining's SEDAR profile.

The above global estimated resource statement is provided for information purposes only. Investors should refer to the underlying technical reports referenced above for project-specific factors relating to each resource estimate.
Kansas State University honored for commitment to diversity



Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018



MANHATTAN  Kansas State University has received the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity, or HEED, award for the fourth consecutive year from INSIGHT into Diversity magazine.

The HEED award is the only national recognition available for colleges and universities demonstrating an outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion. Kansas State University is one of 80 universities or colleges to receive the distinction for 2017 and the only higher education institution in Kansas to receive the honor. Recipients were recognized in a recent issue of the magazine.



"This award underscores the university's commitment to the continual progress of our diversity and inclusion efforts," said April Mason, provost and senior vice president. "It is an honor to have our intentional and collaborative diversity efforts across the university recognized."



Schools are evaluated on all areas of diversity, including gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, veterans, people with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ community.



Project IMPACT is Kansas State University's flagship recruitment and retention program for multicultural students. Additionally, the university offers numerous student academic success programs such as McNair Scholars and Developing Scholars, as well as support services and diversity programs and events for the entire university community.

Kansas State University's commitment to diversity continues to grow and strengthen. The university recently hired Bryan Samuel as its first chief diversity and inclusion officer, a cabinet-level position. Adrian Rodriguez also has joined the university in the new position of associate vice president for student life for diversity and multicultural student affairs. The university has launched KSUnite. This call to action to reaffirm who K-Staters are, what we value and what we stand for as a university kicked off with a rally and facilitated conversations on Nov. 14, 2017. Ideas generated from these conversations will help guide the university community forward.






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Newborns born in 29 other countries of the world have life expectancies exceeding 80 years; yet, an infant born in the U.S. in 2016 is expected to live only 78.6 years according to recently released statistics. While death rates fell for 7 of the 10 biggest killers, such as cancer and heart disease, they climbed for the under-65 crowd. The irrefutable culprit is the unrelenting opioid epidemic.

Last year, life expectancy declined for the first time since 1993. The last two-year decline was in 1962 and 1963, more than a half-century ago. I predicted (accurately) it would decline again this year unless there was a dramatic change in the primary care physician workforce. We are dying at a younger age today than two years ago two months earlier to be exact. It might not sound monumental, but life expectancy is the king of noteworthy health statistics, making it quite significant in the grand scheme.

In the past, epidemics by definition were temporary; the narcotic epidemic will be anything but transient; there is no foreseeable end for the scourge of opioid addiction sweeping the nation. The solution to this dilemma is no different than it was last year, we must correct the primary care physician shortage. Time is of the essence. The last three-year decline occurred in 1912-1914 as a result of the Spanish flu. Unfortunately, life expectancy will continue to decline until the nation makes comprehensive changes.

One in five Americans live in a primary care shortage area; the ratio of the population to primary care providers is greater than 2,000 to 1, when it should be closer to 1,000 to 1. I am a third-generation primary care physician, with a unique historical perspective on how medical practice has changed since my grandfather made house calls back in 1940. My practice is currently located in a shortage area and the difference in volume compared to 16 years ago when I first hung a shingle, is extraordinary. Only 37 percent of doctors serve in primary care, yet 56 percent of the office visits are completed by that particular group of physicians. In my grandfathers time, primary care physicians made up 70 to 80 percent of the physician workforce.

Adding one primary care physician per 10,000 population, reduces mortality by 5.3 percent, avoiding 127,617 deaths annually. As an added bonus, primary care has a high rate of return on lives saved per dollar invested.

Some health care policy experts believe the answer to the primary care physician shortage is to encourage physician extenders, such as nurse practitioners or physician assistants, to practice independently, a role for which their education was not originally intended. The misguided belief that the comprehensive education of a physician can be condensed into less than five years is preposterous.

The number of opioid prescriptions written in this country has doubled from 109 million in 1998 to over 200 million by 2011. As one example, studies show mid-level providers have markedly different prescribing practices when compared to their physician counterparts, a visit-by-visit comparison showed PAs prescribe narcotics 19.5 percent, NPs 12.4 percent, and physicians at 10.9 percent of visits overall. The differences between NPs and physicians prescribing practices were most dramatic in rural areas, where the primary care physician shortage is most palpable. In the 2014 Drug Trend Report, NPs and PAs wrote 15.8 percent more opioid prescriptions for injured workers in 2013 than physicians.

Mid-level providers deliver high-quality care in their role as physician extenders, however, if practicing independently right out of school, their fewer years of education reveal significant variations. Mid-levels report their patients are more satisfied when compared to patients with primary care physicians. Ironically, it is a well-established fact that the happier and more satisfied the patient, the more likely they are to die.

Life expectancy number will worsen in direct proportion to the primary care shortage. No one needs a crystal ball to predict the number and frequency of narcotics prescriptions will continue to increase nationwide when financial incentives emphasize the satisfied patient over one that is alive. A recent Huffington Post article lamented the fact the Canadian government ignored primary care physicians who predicted the impending physician shortage. Its precisely the front-line health care workers that know where the flaws and inefficiencies are. Its time for governments to connect with them  to help fix the problems in health care. Primary care physicians in the U.S. have been relegated to the back room. As a result, people are dying younger than before.

One year ago, I asked whether declining life expectancy was just the tip of the iceberg, suggesting we should turn our attention to the dwindling supply of primary care physicians. What will it take for those in charge sit up and pay attention? How low will life expectancy have to go?

Niran S. Al-Agba is a pediatrician who blogs at MommyDoc.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
The Irish Thoroughbred Marketing's Irish Stallion Trail featured a whole host of Kilkenny Studs on January 12 and 13 when over 20 stallion farms opened their doors.

The top stallions in the world were on show during the initiative, which was open to both racing insiders and the general public.

Ballylinch Stud in Thomastown is steeped in history, being the old home of top-class racehorse The Tetrarch. Its now home to one of the best European sires in Lope De Vega.

Darren Hassett went to see behind the walls of the stud which attracted hundreds across the two open days last weekend. His full report on the experience will be in tomorrow's Kilkenny People.

Other Kilkenny farms that took part included Michael Shefflins Annshoon Stud in Mullinavat which stands four stallions.

The Kinsella familys Knockhouse Stud in Kilmacow is home to five stallions, including top-class Epsom Derby winner Workforce and three-time Group 1 winner Notnowcato.

And lastly, Whytemount Stud in Kells is run by Ronnie ONeill, who manages three stallions.

They include top-class performer Salutino and Affinisea, who is related to proven stallion and Irish Derby winner Soldier Of Fortune.

For more, pick up this week's Kilkenny People.
Bethany Lutheran Homes and Inclusa Inc. have reached an agreement ensuring that the 66 Inclusa members who had been facing eviction March 3 can remain in Bethany Lutheran facilities, according to a joint statement they issued Tuesday.

Inclusa had raised the specter of evictions in a letter to its members early this month after it and Bethany Lutheran disagreed on Inclusas plan to reduce the rates it would cover, based on lower Family Care reimbursements.

The fact that Inclusa members will be able to stay in their Bethany Lutheran Homes is a comfort to the residents, said Frank Mauss of La Crosse, whose mother-in-law, Lee Wilcox, moved from California about 18 months ago to Bethany on Cass to be close to him and his wife, Sharon Lukert.

Shes very much relieved she doesnt have to be worried about moving, after being settled in, Mauss said. There just werent other places to move.

Bethany Lutheran CEO Todd Wilson said, We are pleased that our contract with Inclusa will remain intact with a desire for our relationship to grow stronger as a result of our recent negotiations.

Meeting the health care needs of an aging population, while navigating through a complex system of different payment methodologies and continuously changing regulatory compliance measures, creates a unique set of challenges for everyone throughout the entire health care spectrum, Wilson said in the joint release.

Inclusa and Bethany Lutheran Homes are contractually connected to support Family Care, a long-term care program in Wisconsin that offers support and services to seniors with complex health-care needs and adults with disabilities.

In partnership since the Family Care pilot program was established in La Crosse County in the early 2000s, both organizations have a shared commitment to serving the community and its residents, the statement said.

Mark Hilliker, CEO of Stevens Point-based Inclusa, said, Our No. 1 priority is to honor and support those we serve, followed closely by our partnership with the providers who uphold that support.

Continued collaboration with Bethany Lutheran Homes allows us to maintain those priorities, and we are grateful for the opportunity to honor what it means to be home for the residents of Bethany Lutheran Homes, he said.

Bethany Lutheran, which serves 600 people in its facilities in La Crosse, Onalaska and Holmen, is one of Wisconsins largest long-term care providers, with a range of care and services for the elderly. Its services include skilled nursing, short-term rehabilitation, transitional care, memory care, assisted living, independent living and mobile meals.

Inclusa manages long-term care services and support for more than 15,500 Family Care members in its 51-county service region in Wisconsin. It was formed a year ago in the merger of Community Care Connections of Wisconsin, Western Wisconsin Cares and ContinuUs.
As Labour retreats to 1970s protectionism, Gareth Morgan points out the consequences:

If foreigners cant use New Zealand dollars to buy New Zealand assets why would they be willing to hold New Zealand dollars?  Foreigners who sell us the imports we covet dont really want to be paid in our quaint currency. So a pass-the- parcel process occurs until some foreigner is found who will either extend us credit (by holding our Reserve Banks IOUs) or buys one of our assets, thus giving us the foreign currency to buy those imports we crave.

So what happens when you try and stop foreign investment?

Ban foreigners from buying our assets, though, and there certainly will be a sharp shock to the system. If foreigners cant use New Zealand dollars to buy New Zealand assets why would they be willing to hold New Zealand dollars? Those dollars would become like debentures in just another New Zealand finance company, in quick time worth much less than their face value  in effect the kiwi would cease to have any asset backing. It would fall and that would deter further lending from overseas.  A prohibition of land and business sales to foreigners would be one solution  it would drive down the currency and scare off foreign lenders and investors. Argentina is currently banning greater exports of its beef despite huge international prices, simply because they want to eat it themselves and at cheap prices. I cant imagine how that might do anything but damage the supply of Argentine beef but it shows these sorts of whacky interventions are not unheard of. Ban land sales to foreigners but expect lower incomes as a result.

Lower incomes and even lower purchasing power as a falling dollar will push up the prices of many goods.

I have a financial interest in a dairy farm and processing factory in Brazil. For that economy such foreign investment brings growth and jobs  and milk it would otherwise have to import. It sees also a technology transfer from New Zealand to another country  the real worth after all in our dairy industry lies in the decades of intellectual capital, productivity and technology that we have been silly enough to roll up into our per hectare land price. The benefit to New Zealand from that activity is significant as well  an inflow of profits we wouldnt otherwise have. If instead Id invested in dairying in New Zealand I would simply have pushed land prices up and, Im reasonably sure, have made less money. So its being argued by the xenophobes that a win-win for New Zealand and Brazil is worse than if Id spent my money developing a farm up the slopes of the Southern Alps. Get real. Foreign investment is how countries develop.

Remember that every transaction needs a willing seller and a willing buyer. If you ban sellers from being able to sell to the highest bidder, you are reducing the value of farms to their current farmers. The PM has also pointed out that this may push the value of the farm below the equity in it  ie banks will be more likely to bankrupt struggling farmers under Labours policy.

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Mark Wilson/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon arrived on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning for a closed door meeting with the House Intelligence Committee.



Bannon is expected to face questions about the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.



This meeting comes after Bannon resigned as executive chairman of Breitbart News following the release of Michael Wolffs tell-all Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. The book, which includes harsh comments from Bannon on the controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and a Russian lawyer, renewed questions about Trumps campaign activity.



Bannon, who joined the Trump campaign in August of 2016, brandished the Trump Tower meeting as "treasonous," according to Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.



Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
A newly released memo projects the public cost for a planned Foxconn manufacturing project near Racine could near $4.5 billion  nearly 50 percent more than the $3 billion cost initially cited by the projects chief proponent at the state Capitol, Gov. Scott Walker.

The figures were compiled by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau in a memo requested  and released Tuesday  by Assembly Minority Leader Gordon Hintz, D-Oshkosh. The individual cost figures are not new but had not previously been compiled in a single document.

They reflect costs to state government, mostly through tax credits for Foxconn over a 15-year period. They also include costs to local governments near the proposed site of the Foxconn campus, in eastern Racine County.

The breakdown of public costs from the project, according to the memo, is as follows:

State tax credits, $2.85 billion

Local government incentives, $764 million

U.S. Interstate 94 North-South project, $408 million

Utility costs, $140 million

State sales tax exemption, $139 million

Road improvements, $134 million

Worker training, $20 million

Local government grants, $15 million

Walker and Republican lawmakers who helped him pass the incentive package for Foxconn say it will give the states economy a transformative boost. The Taiwanese company says it plans a $10 billion liquid-crystal display manufacturing plant that could employ as many as 13,000 people.

Walkers office noted the public incentives are tied to job creation and investment, and the local government incentives will be repaid by the taxes Foxconn generates.

Walker said in a tweet Tuesday that once upon a time, Democrats claimed to be for good-paying, family-supporting jobs.

Now they seem to find new ways to attack them, Walker said.

Hintz said the figures validate Democratic lawmakers predictions that the cost of the project to the public would exceed the $3 billion amount originally cited by Walker and his state jobs agency, Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.

That money is not going to be available for higher education, is not going to be available for K-12 education, is not going to be available for infrastructure, Hintz said.

At least one of the figures cited in the memo might have been incurred without the Foxconn project: the I-94 North South project. That project had been on the short list of projects in line for state funding prior to the Foxconn announcement. After the announcement, lawmakers expedited it and included funding for it in the Foxconn legislation.

The memo makes clear that some costs associated with Foxconn should not be viewed as a state revenue loss because it is highly unlikely that Foxconn would locate in the state without the incentives. That includes the $139 million state sales tax break for materials used to build the company campus.

The local government incentives are tax incremental financing, or TIF, incentives to fund the costs of public improvements associated with the Foxconn development, according to the memo. They are structured to be repaid with payments connected to the increased property value generated by the new development.

The utility costs, to build an electricity transmission line to power the Foxconn campus, are to be absorbed by American Transmission Company, not state or local governments. The memo says its impact on individual rate-payers is not expected to be significant.
FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Panamanian Rail Project To Extend Silk Road to Central America and Beyond

Jan. 12, 2018 (EIRNS)Details are emerging on the ambitious proposed high-speed train from Panama City to the Costa Rican border, and the enormous potential it represents for the extension of the New Silk Road and World Land-Bridge.

There is intensifying diplomatic activity, with delegations going to, and coming from, Chinathe next group of Chinese experts is scheduled to arrive in Panama in the next 12 days, according to President Juan Carlos Varela, Telemetro network reported Jan. 7. In late December, a Panamanian delegation returned from China, where it toured CSR Corp., which will build the railroad, and delegation members were stunned by the scope of the plan which was presented to them as part of the New Silk Road.

The idea is to build two sets of double-tracked rail linesone for passengers, which will only go as far as the city of David, and the other for freight, which will go 50 km further to Paso Canoas on the Costa Rican border. From there, Chinas idea is clearly to extend it all the way through Costa Rica and the rest of Central America to Mexico, and use it to vastly increase regional shipping of cargo to and from China (whose ships through the Panama Canal reportedly now return only 40% full). They expect that this sharp rise in regional trade will require expanding both the Colon and Panama City ports (at either end of the Canal), airports, and other major infrastructure.
A "homeless traveller" in Roscrea described by a judge as "not a very clever criminal", has been sent to jail.

The criminal had agreed to stay away from a man whose home he has repeatedly broken into, but has had a 12 month suspended sentence activated after being found hiding behind a cardboard box in the same injured party's storage room last April.

Christopher McCarthy (29), of no fixed abode but with an address at Ashbury, Roscrea, Co Tipperary, was described as a homeless traveller and one of 18 children with a long standing alcohol problem and 133 previous convictions.

He had pleaded guilty at Nenagh Circuit Criminal Court to criminal damage and obstruction of a garda at the home of a Mr Cole, Grove Villas in Roscrea and was jailed for five years. He had broken into the same injured party's home on two previous occasions in May 2013.

McCarthy successfully appealed his sentence in June 2016 and was accordingly given a three year sentence with the final 12 months suspended on condition he behave, stay away from the injured party as well as Green Street, Grove Street and the Crescent in Roscrea. He had undertaken to be so bound.

However, McCarthy had his 12 month suspended sentence activated in full last Monday January 15 2018, after entering the same injured party's home last April where he was found hiding behind a cardboard box by Gardai.

The original sentencing judge noted that it was McCarthy's first time in the Circuit Court for sentence and that he was not a very clever criminal. He also noted that McCarthy was on lock up for 23 hours a day while in custody on remand, that he was genuine in his contrition and genuine in having some kind of insight into the suffering he had caused to the injured party Mr. Cole.

The sentencing judge was mindful of what the gardai had said about McCarthy namely, that he was somebody who caused the gardai no trouble except when he was drinking. The prosecuting garda had given evidence to the effect that McCarthy had a very difficult background and wrongly believed that he was still welcome at his family home. However there was no room for him there.

Activating his suspended sentence last Monday, Mr Justice George Birmingham said it was absolutely clear that the chance that had been given to McCarthy had not been taken. He said McCarthy's breach of the conditions was egregious involving the same injured party and entry into the same dwelling.

Mr Justice Birmingham, who sat with Mr Justice John Edwards and Mr Justice John Hedigan, said the Court of Appeal was left with no option but to activate McCarthy's suspended sentence and activate it in full.

It was backdated to October 20, the date on which an eight month District Court sentence for trespass, the triggering offence, expired.

Massey Ferguson tractor stolen in Laois
Make-a-Wish Ireland is appealing for 25 volunteers in Laois to help out on Wish Day fundraising day to help raise funds that can help make the dreams of children with serious illness.

Volunteers will be asked asked to give just a few hours of their time to sell wristbands, on Friday, March 9 in their local supermarket or shopping centre in order to raise much-needed funds for the charity.

Last year, in Laois alone, the charity made wishes come true for five local children living with life-threatening illnesses such as cancer, cystic fibrosis and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.



Research shows children who have wishes granted are more likely to build the physical and emotional strength they need to fight a serious illness. This improves their quality of life and produces better health outcomes.* Make-A-Wish does not receive any government funding and is solely dependent on the generosity of the general public to continue granting wishes to children with life-threatening illnesses in Ireland.

Keira Lynam (5) from Laois is living with cystic fibrosis and recently had her wish granted when she got to have lunch with her favourite princesses at Disneyland Resort Paris.

Her mum, Louise said Keira had a great time.

Keira and all of us had an amazing time in Disneyland... She was so amazed that her face was lighting up the whole time!

According to Make-A-Wish Ireland, children's wishes can range from being a princess for the day or meeting their hero, to going on a once-in-a-lifetime family holiday. Wherever possible, the childs family is invited to share in the wish experience, creating lasting memories for all the family, the wider local community and all of those involved in granting the wish.

Make-A-Wish Ireland CEO is Susan ODwyer.

Children with life-threatening illnesses need your help today. Your precious gift of time this Wish Day will enable us to make wishes come true for seriously ill children when they most need strength, hope and joy. We have granted almost 2,200 wishes for Irish children which would not be possible without the support of the Irish public.

"A few hours from the people of Laois on Friday 9th March to help raise valuable funds will make wishes come true for more children in your community, she said.

All of the proceeds raised from the sale of the 2 bands supports wish granting for children living with life-threatening illnesses.

To sign up to volunteer visit www.makeawish.ie/wishday or contact Daragh on (01) 2052011 / daragh@makeawish.ie
A Mountmellick woman who has helped to raise thousands for charities in the past now wants to raise and donate money for a defibrillator in her community.

Janet Stewart is holding a fundraiser this February to mark the ten year anniversary since she suffered a heart attack.

Janet wants to raise money at the fundraiser to give to a Mountmellick group in need of a defibrillator.

If there is a group, club or community of people in Mountmellick that does not already have a defibrillator, Janet would like you to get in touch with her so she can raise these funds for you.

Ideally, janet would like a defibrillator to be at an accessible location in the town where it can be used quickly at any time it might be needed.

There are already a number of defibrillators in the town but they are not accessible out of hours. We need one that is accessible to everyone at all times.

I understand there is the issue of vandalism but it would be nice if we could have one you can open immediately and is accessible to everybody.

It is my 10th anniversary the logical thing to do is give back to the town, Janet told Leinster Express.

The Mountmellick woman has already secured the support of McElwees Pharmacy which has agreed to get in the defibrillator at cost price when the money is raised.

The fundraiser will be held in Turleys pub in Mountmellick on February 17 and will have a Valentines theme to tie in with the theme of heart health.

On the night Janet will have music, a raffle and donation buckets and she is asking the people of Mountmellick and surrounding areas to come together for a fun night out.

Janet wants to give the gift of a defibrillator back to the community she loves.

My husband and I have been living here all our married lives and we want to give back to the community, Mountmellick is a great town, she said.

Last year, Janet along with The Mad Hatters group in Abbeyleix raised over 16,000 for the Irish Cancer Society, The Bone Marrow for Leukaemia Trust and The Ben and Jake Connolly Trust.

If you would like to help Janet, if you have any ideas about where the defibrillator could go in order to be easily accessible to the community or if you have any other thoughts on how to help this fundraiser please leave comments under this post on the Leinster Express Facebook page, tweet @Laoisnews, email news@leinsterexpress.ie.

Defibrillation is a treatment for life-threatening cardiac dysrhythmias, specifically ventricular fibrillation and non-perfusing ventricular tachycardia.

A defibrillator delivers a dose of electric current to the heart. This depolarizes a large amount of the heart muscle, ending the dysrhythmia. Subsequently, the body's natural pacemaker in the sinoatrial node of the heart is able to re-establish normal sinus rhythm.

Laois hotel staff saved Tipperary man's life using defibrillator for the first time.

Read more: The Ben and Jake Connolly Trust donate over 1,000 to Mountmellick flood victims.

Fresh Film Festival: Is Ireland's Young Filmmaker of the year from Laois?
An exciting plan has been revealed to the community of Raheen for a new village hub for young and old, with the majority of the money already received in a grant.

St Fintan's National School is a historic building in the centre of Raheen, left mostly idle since the new school Tobar an Leinn opened in 2004. Raheen Community Development plan to restore it as a community centre.

Chairperson Trudy Carmody sees huge potential, and thanked Fr Michael Kelly PP for his support on the project.

It would be lovely for activities, classes and clubs, like dancing, cooking, parties, computers, crafts, for all ages, children to teens to the elderly. One classroom will become an office with hotdesks as income. The objective is to bring social and business life back to the village, and to develop the skills of the community with classes taught by local qualified individuals, she said.

The restoration cost is expected to be 120,000. The committee is well on the way, because they were successful in applying for Town & Village Renewal Funding, to the tune of 87,662 for Raheen "Middle School House" project - Phase One.

The 80 percent grant requires the remaining 20 percen, 21,844, to be found locally in an equal mix of cash and work or materials.

It is a fabulous old three classroom building, the roof is sound but it needs structural repairs including upgrading heating, plumbing and electricity, she said.

Last Saturday Raheen Community Development held a community information night in Eamon AChnoic, to gather local expertise and ideas. Email them to get involved at raheencommunitydevelopment@gmail.com

A fundraising guided tour of the Rock of Dunamaise will be held on January 28 at 2pm, led by Experiencing Laois. Adults 5, children free. All welcome.

Iceland supermarket is coming to Laois
A Kildare developer has been granted permission by the High Court to challenge a decision of the Minister for Housing to direct a change to a local area plan for Celbridge in Kildare.

Longport Developments, which involves well known businessman, Damien Donegan, wants to build on a nine-hectare site at Crodaun, to the north of the town, near the M4 entrance.

It is arguing that the the Minister was wrong in directing the zoning for its land be amended from residential to open space/amenity.

The Ministerial direction, issued under the Planning and Development Act 2000, also required Kildare County Council to delete a strategic open space zoning for an area of land at Donaghcumper and insert a "town centre" zoning instead. Both amendments apply to the Celbridge local plan 2017-23.

The Minister said the change to the draft local plan, which was made by county councillors against the advice of the Council's chief executive, was not consistent with 2007 guidelines for development plans and was in breach of the Planning and Development Act 2000.

The regulations require there must be a sequential approach to zoning for new houses where lands spatially closest to the town core and public transport facilities are prioritised, the Minister told the Council.

The Crodaun zoning effectively doubled the amount of housing land in this area, the Minister said.

The Minister also said the Council had ignored or not taken sufficient account of submissions he (the Minister) made early last year following the publication of the local plan.

On Monday, senior counsel for Longport, said argued the Minister was incorrect in saying the Council had ignored his submissions. They would also be arguing, among other things, the Minister should have given reasons for why he believed an open space zoning was appropriate for the Crodaun lands.

Mr Justice Seamus Noonan granted leave to bring judicial proceedings against the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, and against the Minister for State at that department, along with Kildare County Council and the State.

The judge also gave leave for the proceedings to be served on the owners of the Donaghcrumper lands, Devondale Ltd, after counsel said they could be affected by the matter.

The application has been adjourned until March.

The Longport decision will be welcomed by groups opposed to the Ministers. A number of parties, including Cllr Anthony Larkin, have taken advice on the taking a case against the Minister but the cost of that has been seen as prohibitive.
On Thursday the 18th of January, the Northwest Coalition to Repeal The 8th is hosting a public meeting: 'Time To Repeal' at The Glasshouse Hotel, Sligo at 7:30pm

The coalition consists of community activists, NGOs, Trade Unions and political representatives who have united with a shared vision to repeal the eight amendment.

The speakers on the night will be Susan McKay & Ailbhe Smyth. Susan Mckay is well known in Ireland and abroad as an award-winning journalist and writer, as well as a broadcaster and documentary maker.

Ailbhe Smyth is Convenor of Coalition to Repeal the 8th Amendment. Ailbhe is also an academic, feminist and lesbian activist. She was a founding director of the Women's Education, Resource and Research Centre (WERRC),

With a referendum due to take place in 2018, the coalition is now calling on those who are interested in campaigning for a repeal of the eight amendment to attend the open meeting.

For those interested in getting involved, but who cannot attend please email: NorthWestRepealThe8th@gmail.com or send a message via Facebook or Twitter at: @NorthWestCoalitionToRepeal
A man who appeared before Longford District Court last week charged under the Road Traffic Act was disqualified from driving for six years and sentenced to six months in prison which the judge suspended following a full hearing into the matter.

Sean Munnelly, 15 Scramogue Manor, Strokestown, Co Roscommon appeared before Judge Seamus Hughes charged with having no insurance at Dublin Street, Longford on November 13, 2016.

He was also further charged with driving without insurance and having no driving licence at Cloonfiugh, Killashee, Co Longford on February 23, 2017.

Outlining the evidence to the court, Garda Denise Dockery said that on November 13, 2016 she received a complaint in relation to two males sitting in a car and drinking along Longford towns Dublin Street.

Garda Dockery said she went to the area and after observing the two males in the car, approached them and spoke to them.

There was no tax disc and there was also an invalid insurance disc, she added, before pointing to the fact that the males informed her that Mr Munnelly was the driver of the vehicle.

The two males were associates of Mr Munnellys and he then came on the scene; when I spoke to him, he admitted being the owner of the vehicle.

I demanded production of his driving licence and insurance - the driving licence was produced, but the insurance he produced wasnt valid for the car.

The insurance disc on the car was from a previous vehicle he was the owner of and that vehicle had been seized by gardai.

Meanwhile, the court heard that when Garda Dockery examined the car in more detail on the day, she discovered a bald tyre on the front of the vehicle.

Mr Munnelly had the keys of the car in his possession and he handed them over to me, the Garda said.

In his direct evidence to the court, Mr Munnelly said that he had been in the pub drinking when his friends called him to come to Dublin Street.

I had been in town from the night before; I owned the car but I had only recently bought it, he added.

I had no insurance on the car.

The defendant then made reference to the charges brought against him on February 23, 2017.

I had been involved in an accident that night; the insurance company sent out the documents that were needed, as far as I know, Mr Munnelly told Judge Hughes, before adding that he had recently moved back in with his mother.

I own my own house - I got compensation from an accident and I bought the house, but I have it rented out now.

The court then heard that the defendant had 53 previous convictions.

In mitigation, the defendants solicitor Frank Gearty said his client had a serious alcohol problem.

He went to get treatment, didnt set his affairs in order before doing so, and there was a bench warrant in existence when he came out of treatment, Mr Gearty added before pointing out that his client was not the driver of the car on the day Garda Dockery spoke to him on Dublin Street.

He is now disqualified from driving for two years since June and is continuing with treatment in Cuan Mhuire from next week.

Meanwhile, Mr Gearty went on to say that his client had worked very hard in the past, despite his alcohol difficulties.

I would ask you to consider not sending him to prison today - he needs a chance to go to Cuan Mhuire and get himself sorted out.

During his ruling on the matter Judge Hughes said that while he acknowledged the defendant had problems, if he was ever caught driving again, the Judge would send him to prison.

The defendant was subsequently disqualified from driving for six years; fined 500 on two of charges before the court; fined 250 for driving without a driving licence, and sentenced to six months in prison which the Judge suspended for three years.

Dont be caught driving again, Judge Hughes told the defendant before bringing matters to a conclusion.
The Access Centre at NUI Galway will launch a number of new QQI/FET/FETAC places for the academic year 2018/2019 on Thursday, 25 January, offering 170 full-time undergraduate places available for QQI/FET/FETAC applicants, a significant 66% increase from the previous academic year.

The Access Centre continues to meet an important social demand to increase participation in third level education amongst disadvantaged and under-represented groups. As part of its Strategic Plan, Vision 2020, NUI Galway is committed to increasing the number of non-traditional students entering full-time undergraduate study to 24%.

In addition to the 170 full-time undergraduate places available for QQI/FET/FETAC applicants, there will also be additional places allocated on existing undergraduate programmes such as: an increase from 12 to 30 places on the undenominated Science programme (GY301); an increase of 20 to 30 places on the Bachelor of Arts (GY101) programme, as well as places on a number of new undergraduate programmes.

The Access Centre was established and designed to address the issue of equality of access to third level, to promote equity of access to lifelong learning opportunities and to respond to issues of rural (and to a lesser extent, urban) social exclusion across Irelands border, Midlands and Western region. The Centre aims to provide learning opportunities for those who could benefit from university education, which will enable them to fulfil their individual aspirations.

Imelda Byrne, Head of Access Programmes at NUI Galway, said: The Access Centre contributes to the development of the wider community by providing a number of alternative pathways for disadvantaged or under-represented groups to progress to full-time undergraduate study. These include Access Programmes delivered in the region through innovative alliances with other educational institutes such as those formed through the West/ North-West Cluster, Mature student entry route, Higher Education Access Route (HEAR), Disability Access Route to Education (DARE), QQI/FET/FETAC Pathways and a range of measures with the primary and second level sector to assist in overcoming barriers.

New QQI/FET/FETAC opportunities for the academic year 2018/2019 include pathways to the following degree programmes: BA Public and Social Policy; BA History; BA with English and Media Studies; BA Childrens Studies; BA with Film Studies; BA with Journalism; BA in Film and Digital Media; Business Information Systems; Corporate Law; Civil Law; Biomedical Science; Environmental Science; Financial Mathematics and Economics; BSc Marine Science; BSc Earth and Ocean Sciences; BSc Physics; BSc Biopharmaceutical Chemistry; BSc Mathematical Science; BSc Biotechnology; BSc Financial Mathematics and Economics and Gaeilge agus Leann an Aistriuchain.

For the academic year 2017/2018, there were 60 full-time undergraduate places available for QQI/FET/FETAC applicants. In September 2017, there were over 150 full-time students registered at NUI Galway across all of its degree programmes who came through the QQI/FET/FETAC entry route.

The launch of this element of the 2018/2019 undergraduate Access Programmes will take place at 11am on Thursday, 25 January at Galway Technical Institute, Fr Griffin Road, Galway.

For further information regarding courses or for applications, email access@nuigalway.ie or visit http://www.nuigalway.ie/ accesscentre/.
Apr 29, 2021, 3 AM

Although the U.S. Postal Service did not respond to a Dec. 29, 2017, tweet from President Donald Trump disparaging a delivery deal between the USPS and retail giant Amazon, it did answer a very similar criticism from another source.

Washington Postal Scene by Bill McAllister

When Marvin T. Runyon was United States postmaster general, he banned his public relations spokesman from saying no comment to queries from the news media.

That tradition died when Runyon, whose wife was a public relations executive, left office in 1998.

It was nowhere more apparent than on Dec. 29, 2017, when Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan and her spokesmen left unanswered charges President Donald Trump made on Twitter about the U.S. Postal Services package delivery contract with retailing giant Amazon.

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Despite the reluctance of the USPS to tangle with one of the presidents tweets, there was no reluctance by one of the agencys top public relations officials to challenge a lesser-known critic who also questioned the USPS package business.

Ross Marchand, director of policy at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, made his allegations in a Jan. 2 op-ed column for The Hill, a Washington, D.C., newspaper that typically focuses on Congress.

In it, Marchand claimed the biggest and ugliest secret lies below the surface in the rampant postal cronyism that disproportionately benefits e-commerce giants such as Amazon.

Like Trump, Marchand claims Amazon is paying the Postal Service too little for package delivery services.

It was a misinformed and misleading rant complained David Partenheimer, the agencys public relations manager, in a Jan. 5 response.

Although it was not intended as a response to the president, Partenheimers comments to The Hill easily could be taken to be what the Postal Service also could have said to Trumps demand that the USPS sharply increase its prices for Amazons parcels.

Some of our competitors in the package delivery space would dearly love for the Postal Service to aggressively raise our rates higher than the marketplace can bear, wrote Partenheimer.

That would help the competitors so they could either charge more themselves or syphon away postal customers, he added.

The spokesman continued to praise the Postal Services pricing policies, saying they were created to give reliable, universally available and affordable delivery options to postal customers.

These strategies are applied fairly and reasonably and reflect the needs of the public and the marketplace, Partenheimer said.

To suggest otherwise is a detriment to the reader and the consumer, he concluded.

That, perhaps, is a bit more pointed than Postmaster General Brennan wants to be with the president. But it was a strong defense of what has been one of the few bright parts of the Postal Services revenue streams.

Brennan has long said that packages are a key element in the agencys efforts to deal with the erosion of first-class mail volume.

Letters, long the mainstay of USPS revenues, continue to decline. Parcels are seen as a way to save the organization.

Thats a lesson that Brennan hopes the president  and Marchand  can understand.
Jan 15, 2018, 2 PM

An illustration of Jerseys first official flag, adopted in 1979 and officially hoisted in 1981, is shown on the left. The unofficial flag used before then is pictured on the right.

A second souvenir sheet in Jerseys Popular Culture: The 1960s issue includes six stamps se-tenant (side-by-side). These stamps also were produced separately in sheets of 10.

Close-up of one of the Jersey flags shown on the souvenir sheet stamp.

By Dingguo Dai

The wrong flag is pictured on a recent souvenir sheet from Jersey.

Jersey Post issued this souvenir sheet Jan. 26 as part of a stamp set looking at the popular culture of the 1960s (Linns, Jan. 22, page 34).

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Malcolm English, an award-winning designer, created the illustration for the souvenir sheet. In announcing the Popular Culture: The 1960s set, Jersey Post described Englishs artwork as a playful interpretation of Jerseys main shopping area, incorporating King Street and Queen Street. Bright, clashing colours, typical of 1960s decor are prominent, with lively hues of red, orange, purple and pink decorating the shop-fronts.

The sheet contains a single 2 stamp showing a perfume shop, wool shop and drapers (a dealer in cloth). A Jersey flag is hanging from the second story of the perfume shop. The same flag can be seen in the selvage on the right side of the sheet above the grocery.

When I carefully examined these flags, I realized that they were wrong.

Shown on the left is the nearby illustration is Jerseys current flag. It features a diagonal red cross, called a saltire, and the badge of Jersey on a white field. The badge shows the three leopards of Normandy on a red shield, topped by a Plantagenet crown.

This flag was adopted June, 12, 1979; proclaimed by Queen Elizabeth II Dec. 10, 1980, for use in the Bailiwick of Jersey as the islands flag; and officially hoisted April 7, 1981.

The current flag is the first to be adopted officially. Unofficially, a plain red saltire had been used since at least the 1830s until April 6, 1981. It is pictured on the right.

Because this souvenir sheet was issued to recall pop culture of the 1960s, a flag not adopted until 1979 and not officially hoisted until 1981, should not be pictured.

I sent an email to Melanie Gouzinis, the head of philately for Jersey Post, telling her that the Jersey flags shown on the souvenir sheet were incorrect. Gouzinis replied, You are as observant as always!

She also explained that the illustrations for the souvenir sheet was not intended to be 100-percent factually correct and called it an artistic interpretation.

Malcolm English also designed the 63-penny Music stamp in the set. This stamp was pictured in the aforementioned article in the Jan. 22 Linns.

The five other stamps feature illustrations by Oscar Wilson, 49p Language; Billy Hilson, 73p Fashion; Bob Venables, 79p Events; Debbie Powell, 90p Food; and Aurelie Guillerey, 1.07 Leisure.

These six stamps were issued separately in sheets of 10 and in a single souvenir sheet with a time line at the bottom. The stamps are se-tenant (side-by-side) in this souvenir sheet.

Hat-Trick Design Ltd. designed the stamps and souvenir sheets. Joh. Enschede printed them by offset lithography.
Over the past five decades, standard computer processors have gotten increasingly faster. In recent years, however, the limits to that technology have become clear: Chip components can only get so small, and be packed only so closely together, before they overlap or short-circuit. If companies are to continue building ever-faster computers, something will need to change.

One key hope for the future of increasingly fast computing is my own field, quantum physics. Quantum computers are expected to be much faster than anything the information age has developed so far. But my recent research has revealed that quantum computers will have limits of their own  and has suggested ways to figure out what those limits are.

The limits of understanding

To physicists, we humans live in what is called the "classical" world. Most people just call it "the world," and have come to understand physics intuitively: Throwing a ball sends it up and then back down in a predictable arc, for instance.

Even in more complex situations, people tend to have an unconscious understanding of how things work. Most people largely grasp that a car works by burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine (or extracting stored electricity from a battery), to produce energy that is transferred through gears and axles to turn tires, which push against the road to move the car forward.

Under the laws of classical physics, there are theoretical limits to these processes. But they are unrealistically high: For instance, we know that a car can never go faster than the speed of light. And no matter how much fuel is on the planet, or how much roadway or how strong the construction methods, no car will get close to going even 10 percent of the speed of light.

People never really encounter the actual physical limits of the world, but they exist, and with proper research, physicists can identify them. Until recently, though, scholars only had a rather vague idea that quantum physics had limits too, but didn't know how to figure out how they might apply in the real world.

Heisenberg's uncertainty

Physicists trace the history of quantum theory back to 1927, when German physicist Werner Heisenberg showed that the classical methods did not work for very small objects, those roughly the size of individual atoms. When someone throws a ball, for instance, it's easy to determine exactly where the ball is, and how fast it's moving.

But as Heisenberg showed, that's not true for atoms and subatomic particles. Instead, an observer can see either where it is or how fast it's moving  but not both at the exact same time. This is an uncomfortable realization: Even from the moment Heisenberg explained his idea, Albert Einstein (among others) was uneasy with it. It is important to realize that this "quantum uncertainty" is not a shortcoming of measurement equipment or engineering, but rather how our brains work. We have evolved to be so used to how the "classical world" works that the actual physical mechanisms of the "quantum world" are simply beyond our ability to fully grasp.

Entering the quantum world

If an object in the quantum world travels from one location to another, researchers can't measure exactly when it has left nor when it will arrive. The limits of physics impose a tiny delay on detecting it. So no matter how quickly the movement actually happens, it won't be detected until slightly later. (The lengths of time here are incredibly tiny  quadrillionths of a second  but add up over trillions of computer calculations.)

That delay effectively slows down the potential speed of a quantum computation  it imposes what we call the "quantum speed limit."

Over the last few years, research, to which my group has contributed significantly, has shown how this quantum speed limit is determined under different conditions, such as using different types of materials in different magnetic and electric fields. For each of these situations, the quantum speed limit is a little higher or a little lower.

To everyone's big surprise, we even found that sometimes unexpected factors can help speed things up, at times, in counterintuitive ways.

To understand this situation, it might be useful to imagine a particle moving through water: The particle displaces water molecules as it moves. And after the particle has moved on, the water molecules quickly flow back where they were, leaving no trace behind of the particle's passage.

Now imagine that same particle traveling through honey. Honey has a higher viscosity than water  it's thicker and flows more slowly  so the honey particles will take longer to move back after the particle moves on. But in the quantum world, the returning flow of honey can build up pressure that propels the quantum particle forward. This extra acceleration can make a quantum particle's speed limit different from what an observer might otherwise expect.

Designing quantum computers

As researchers understand more about this quantum speed limit, it will affect how quantum computer processors are designed. Just as engineers figured out how to shrink the size of transistors and pack them more closely together on a classical computer chip, they'll need some clever innovation to build the fastest possible quantum systems, operating as close as possible to the ultimate speed limit.

There's a lot for researchers like me to explore. It's not clear whether the quantum speed limit is so high it's unattainable  like the car that will never even get close to the speed of light. And we don't fully understand how unexpected elements in the environment  like the honey in the example  can help to speed up quantum processes. As technologies based on quantum physics become more common, we'll need to find out more about where the limits of quantum physics are, and how to engineer systems that take the best advantage of what we know.

Sebastian Deffner, Assistant Professor of Physics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Researchers who analyzed the density of particles called muons found an empty space (shown in this illustration) more than 98 feet (30 meters) long right above the grand gallery of the Great Pyramid  a passageway that leads to what may be the chamber of the pharaoh Khufu.

Using cosmic particles called muons, and possibly tiny robots, scientists hope to figure out what created two mysterious voids inside the Great Pyramid.

Possibilities range from a new burial chamber to a sealed-off construction passage.

Built by the pharaoh Khufu (whose reign started around 2551 B.C.), the Great Pyramid of Giza stands 455 feet (138 meters) tall and was the tallest human-made structure in the world until the Lincoln Cathedral was completed in England in the 14th century.

Scientists with the Scan Pyramids project reportedthe discovery of two previously unknown voids in the Great Pyramid in an article published in November 2017 in the journal Nature. The larger of the two voids is at least 98 feet (30 m) long and is located above a giant passageway known as the grand gallery that leads to Khufu's burial chamber. The smaller void is located behind the north face of the pyramid and consists of a corridor whose length is unclear. Muon detectors and thermal imaging were used to make these discoveries. [In Photos: Looking Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza]

Here, the north face of the Great Pyramid of Giza. (Image credit: ScanPyramids mission)

Next phase

Scientists plan to conduct more muon testing in the Great Pyramid; and they are developing robots that may be able to enter the smaller void and peer inside using a high-resolution camera.

Currently, the scientists know little more about the larger void than its length. "There is a big difference if the [larger] void is horizontal or if it is inclined," said Mehdi Tayoubi, the president and co-founder of the Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute, one of the institutions involved with the Scan Pyramids project. If the larger void is inclined, for instance, it could be a large passageway like the grand gallery, Tayoubi explained. On the other hand, if the void is horizontal, then it could consist of one or more chambers. Additionally, it's possible that the smaller void, which scientists already know consists of a corridor, could have linked up to the larger void in ancient times, Tayoubi said. [Photos: Amazing Discoveries at Egypt's Giza Pyramids]

To gather this information, the researchers will set up muon detectors in spots in the Great Pyramid that have yet to be investigated, including a series of so-called relieving chambers, which are located near the larger void. The relieving chambers are located above the king's chamber  a chamber that holds a sarcophagus that many archaeologists believe was used to bury Khufu. These chambers may have been constructed to take pressure off the ceiling of the king's chamber, preventing the ceiling from collapsing (hence, their name).

Robot research

While the new muon tests are being carried out, another team, led by Jean-Baptiste Mouret, a senior researcher at Inria, the French National Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, is constructing two robots that may be able to peer inside the smaller void.

Mouret said that the team would drill a hole about 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) across and then insert the little robots through it and into the void.

Scientists envision using a tiny, flying robot, or blimp, to explore the Great Pyramid. The robot-blimp would be inserted through a drilled hole and then would be inflated once inside the pyramid's smaller void. After taking pictures, the flying robot would deflate and travel back through the hole. (Image credit: Inria)

"First, we want to send a 'scout robot,' which is basically a pan-tilt camera with a lot of lights fitted in a tube-like robot," Mouret told Live Science. "The goal is to survey what is on the other side of the wall and get high-resolution pictures."

Mouret continued, "If there is something promising, then we will extract the scout robot and insert the exploration robot. For this robot, we are currently designing a flying blimp that is folded for the insertion and inflated remotely in the [the smaller void]." The blimp would allow the robot to fly around the smaller void and take pictures. The flying robot wouldn't have to navigate stairs or rocks and could move faster and take pictures from more points of view than a ground-traveling robot could, Mouret said.

They have a working prototype of both the scout and blimp robots. "However, we are still working on designing a reliable deployment and folding mechanism to deploy the blimp," Mouret said.

When the robot reaches the void, it would inflate a blimp to fly around and take pictures inside the Great Pyramid. (Image credit: Inria)

Before those robots can begin exploring, scientists need to gather more precise information on the dimensions and location of the smaller void, Mouret said, explaining that only then will the team know where to drill a hole. "Our hope is that our robots will be ready by the time the Scan Pyramids team figures out exactly where we need to drill," Mouret said.

The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities will also need to give final approval for the robots. The hole that needs to be drilled would damage the pyramid slightly.

"We are working hard to have a robot that is reliable as possible and as little damaging as possible; and we hope that we will be able to convince the Ministry of Antiquities that this is the most appropriate technology for the next step. In the meantime, we might deploy our robots in other places," such as heritage and industrial buildings, Mouret said.

Tayoubi emphasized that robot exploration is not the immediate goal of the Scan Pyramids project, but rather something that may be considered in the future.

Public outreach

Muon testing and analysis is a slow process and will take at least a year before the Scan Pyramids team has new results, Tayoubi said. In addition to their research, the scientists are working with documentary makers to create "Secrets of the Dead: Scanning the Pyramids." That will premiere Jan. 24, 2018, at 10 p.m. local time on PBS and can be viewed online starting Jan. 25 on PBS's website and PBS's apps.

Additional videos and information that help the public understand the team's research can also be seen on the Scan Pyramids website and a video showing how the robots may explore the smaller void can be seen on YouTube.

Original article on Live Science.
The SR-71 Blackbird spy plane may be back and faster than ever.

Or maybe not. Ambiguous wording at an aerospace-conference presentation last week suggested that the SR-72, a successor to the infamous Cold War spy plane, might already be in production, but neither the military nor the plane's possible maker, Lockheed Martin Corp., is talking.

Bloomberg reported that Lockheed Vice President Jack O'Banion projected an artist's conception of the hypersonic SR-72 during a talk at the annual SciTech Forum of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Florida on Jan. 8. Standing by the image of the sleek gray aircraft, O'Banion reportedly spoke about recent advances in computing and design and then said, "Without the digital transformation, the aircraft you see there could not have been made." [Supersonic! The 11 Fastest Military Airplanes]

The wording implies that the aircraft has, in fact, been made, as does O'Banion's later comments, also in the present tense.

"We couldn't have made the engine itself  it would have melted down into slag if we had tried to produce it five years ago," O'Banion said, according to Bloomberg. "But now, we can digitally print that engine with an incredibly sophisticated cooling system integral into the material of the engine itself, and have that engine survive for multiple firings for routine operation."

Both the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin declined to confirm the existence of a real hypersonic (more than 5 times the speed of sound) spy plane to Bloomberg. Outside defense experts told the news outlet that the plane could be anywhere in the development process, from the digital design phase to the prototype phase.

The SR-71 Blackbird was a speedy, stealthy spy plane specifically designed to absorb, rather than reflect, radar signals and, hence, remain relatively hidden. Though it's more than 107 feet (33 meters) long, the plane appeared on radar as an object somewhere between the size of a bird and a human, according to Lockheed Martin's history of the plane.

The Blackbird was made from titanium so that it would have the strength to withstand the heat generated while flying at above Mach 3 (2,045 mph or 3,300 km/h), or three times the speed of sound. Developers painted the plane black to dissipate some of the heat, lending the aircraft its "Blackbird" moniker, according to Lockheed Martin. The two-seat SR-71 first flew on Dec. 22, 1964. It was retired in 1990, retaining the record of fastest manned aircraft ever made. According to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the final flight of the Blackbird now displayed at its hangar in Chantilly, Virginia, set a speed record: The plane flew from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in 64 minutes and 20 seconds.

The future of hypersonic travel

Lockheed Martin's interest in developing hypersonic "scramjets"  which use oxygen from the environment rather than a tank for combustion in the engine  is no secret, according to Bloomberg. However, the engineering challenges are steep.

Jets like the purported SR-72 could enable the Air Force to make ultrafast bombing runs into enemy airspace without being detected, defense analyst Richard Aboulafia told Bloomberg. Lockheed Martin engineers said in 2013 that they hoped to develop an SR-72 that could fly at Mach 6 (4,603 mph or 7,407 km/h) by 2030.

Secrecy and rumors are the norm in the development of new stealth aircraft. According to a Central Intelligence Agency history of the development of the SR-71, the government tried very hard to keep the development of the original Blackbird classified, but a former U.S. Navy admiral named John B. Pearson said he figured out that Lockheed was up to something by 1961, just three years after the project started. A newspaper in Fort Worth, Texas, also reported the possibility of a new faster-than-sound airplane in 1963.

Editor's Note: This article was updated to indicate that the SR-71 was not hypersonic, but instead could fly at three times the speed of sound.

Original article on Live Science.
Tech & Science, Local News, Politics

By Long Island News & PR Published: January 16 2018

AG Schneiderman Leads Coalition of 22 Attorneys General in Filing Petition for Review, Formally Commencing Lawsuit.

New York, NY - January 16, 2017 - Today, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman led a coalition of 22 Attorneys General in filing a multistate lawsuit to block the Federal Communications Commissions illegal rollback of net neutrality. The coalition filed a petition for review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, formally commencing the lawsuit against the FCC and the federal government.

An open internet  and the free exchange of ideas it allows  is critical to our democratic process, said Attorney General Schneiderman. The repeal of net neutrality would turn internet service providers into gatekeepers  allowing them to put profits over consumers while controlling what we see, what we do, and what we say online. This would be a disaster for New York consumers and businesses, and for everyone who cares about a free and open internet. Thats why Im proud to lead this broad coalition of 22 Attorneys General in filing suit to stop the FCCs illegal rollback of net neutrality.

Click here to read the petition . The lawsuit is led by Attorney General Schneiderman, and filed by the Attorneys General of New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

The repeal of net neutrality would have dire consequences for consumers and businesses in New York and across the country that rely on a free and open internet  allowing internet service providers to block certain content, charge consumers more to access certain sites, and throttle or slow the quality of content from content providers that dont pay more.
Local News, Crime, Politics

By Long Island News & PR Published: January 16 2018

Cuomo: "How is it that we have a system in which punishment is imposed before one is found guilty?"

Albany, NY - January 16, 2017 - The New York Times published an op-ed by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today on New York's commitment to bringing real fairness to the state's criminal justice system through a progressive, comprehensive multi-pronged plan.

The text of the op-ed is available below and can be viewed online here

The fundamental tenet of criminal law in the United States is that all those accused of a crime in this country are presumed innocent unless proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That fundamental principle is not limited to American law; it was also part of Roman law, Islamic law and English common law. This bedrock safeguard has been ratified on more than one occasion by the Supreme Court and is codified in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And yet, despite the centrality of this protection, in New York City jails, where 86 percent of the population is black or Hispanic, 75 percent of inmates have not been convicted of a crime. They are simply incarcerated awaiting trial.

A similar story exists in jails across the state, where 60 percent of the incarcerated are being detained pretrial.

How is this possible? How is it that we have a system in which punishment is imposed before one is found guilty?

It begins with the inadequacies of our bail system.

Most people who are arrested in New York are released on their own recognizance. But others, including many who are charged with nonviolent crimes, are required to obtain bail to avoid pretrial detention. The problem is that many people lack the cash to make bail.

As a result, our jails are filled with people who have yet to be proved guilty of any crime, and the system today has devolved into one with two tiers: If you can make bail, you are set free; if you are too poor to make bail, you are punished.

This would be shameful enough if the interval between the bail proceeding and trial were a short one. Instead, the length of time between arraignment and trial can stretch into months and even years. The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees defendants a "speedy" trial, but no one can look at the operations of our court system and conclude that speediness is anyone's priority.

Take the tragic case of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old African-American with no criminal record who was arrested in 2010 for allegedly stealing a backpack and spent three years at Rikers Island waiting for his day in court. Ultimately charges were dismissed, but the damage was done; his abuse while jailed was so traumatic that Mr. Browder determined taking his life was the only way to stop his continuing pain.

One such incident is intolerable, and it opened our eyes to the urgent need for real reform because we simply cannot risk another. A criminal justice system that ignores its cornerstone principle to the detriment of anyone  whether they are white, black, Latino, rich or poor  delegitimizes it. And we cannot allow this to persist.

This year, I am sending a bill to the State Legislature that will close the gap between what our criminal justice system says and what it does.

The bill will reform our bail system so that anyone facing misdemeanor or nonviolent felony charges should be released without bail. Those who pose a current danger to a person or persons or pose a risk of flight can still be held in detention, with due process, but no longer will people go to jail for the crime of being poor.

In addition to bail reform, we also need discovery reform. New York is one of only 10 states where prosecutors are not required to share with a defendant's lawyers basic evidence, including police reports and witness statements, until just before the trial. Expanding discovery will ensure that attorneys have the tools necessary to adequately represent their clients.

We will also propose changing procedures and scheduling to move cases faster so that we no longer have people sitting in jail for years waiting to be heard. Backlogs often cause attorneys to request postponements and delays, frequently without the approval of their clients. We propose that any waiver to a speedy trial be put in writing and signed by the defendant.

These changes will build on the reforms enacted during my tenure as governor. Last year, we raised the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18, affecting thousands of young people who will have a brighter future. We passed video interrogation and photo array reforms, important changes that protect the integrity of the investigative process. We ended the Rockefeller-era drug sentencing rules that took discretion away from our judges and filled our prisons with nonviolent offenders, and we closed 24 prisons and juvenile detention centers, eliminating prison beds and reducing by more than 5,000 the number of men and women behind bars.

Perhaps most significantly, New York became the first and only state to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate, and if necessary prosecute, police-involved killings of unarmed civilians.

But some improvement is not enough. Our tolerance for any continuing injustice is repugnant to our position as a progressive government and flies in the face of the great leaders who took on the fight in the days before us.

African-Americans, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once observed, "have proceeded from the premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective." Speaking in the late 1960s, he added that most whites in America "proceed from the premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement."

This year, we bring more perfect justice to New York. Every accused is innocent until proved guilty.
by Fern Siegel , January 15, 2018

NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises has launched a new division, Telemundo Global Studios, led by Marcos Santana as president. He reports to Cesar Conde, NBCU International Group/ Telemundo Enterprises chairman.

For now, no new hires are anticipated with the consolidation, per a Telemundo spokesperson.

Rather than just an administrative convenience, the new structure, which unites Telemundo Studios, Telemundo International Studios and Telemundo International, capitalizes on the companys momentum, she added.

Each unit targets specific audiences with its own content. At the end of 2017, Telemundo was the No. 1 Spanish broadcaster in prime time, per Nielsen.

Conde stated that Santanas decades of experience in content development, production and distribution would be an asset as the company expanded its content.

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Previously, Santana was president of Telemundo International and president of Telemundo International Studios. He joined NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises in 2007, when Telemundo completed the purchase of Tepuy International Corp., where Santana was president and CEO.

Telemundo's "El Senor de los Cielos" season 5, "Sin Senos Si Hay Paraiso" Season 2 and "Senora Acero, La Coyote" Season 4 ranked as the top three regularly scheduled Spanish-language broadcast programs season-to-date among adults 18-49.

The company also reports more than 94 million fans and followers across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, up 28% year-over-year.

Telemundo International is the worlds second-largest distributor of Spanish-language content, reaching more than 120 countries, per the network.
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, January 15, 2018

Amazon, Netflix and a group of major Hollywood studios are pressing a federal judge to reject TickBox's arguments that its streaming video device is legitimate.

"TickBox promotes and distributes TickBox TV for infringing use, and its customers use TickBox TV in precisely the manner that TickBox intends: to access infringing streams from unauthorized third-party sources," the content companies argue in papers submitted Friday to U.S. District Court Judge Michael Fitzgerald in the Central District of California.

The content owners make the argument as part of an attempt to convince Fitzgerald to issue an injunction prohibiting TickBox from continuing to distribute its device.

Amazon, Netflix and the other companies sued TickBox last October, arguing that the company's device -- powered by Kodi's open-source software -- encourages copyright infringement. The content companies alleged that TickBox uses add-ons that "scour the Internet" for pirated shows and then enables consumers to watch the programs.

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Amazon and the others also argue that TickBox's user interface and advertising encourage infringement. When the lawsuit was filed, TickBox said on its website that its service will let users stop "wasting money with online streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime."

TickBox's interface also allegedly used to direct customers to add-ons that offered infringing content.

TickBox argued in papers filed with Fitzgerald that it isn't responsible for add-ons created by third parties that stream pirated videos. The company also recently revised some of the marketing language on its site, and made changes to its user interface.

But Amazon, Netflix and the others say they are entitled to an injunction despite TickBox's recent changes.

"TickBox cannot sweep aside its prior flagrant conduct," the companies argue. They add that even with the recent changes, TickBox's users can still access the "illicit add-ons" that the company allegedly displayed in the past. "The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that TickBox intentionally induces its customers to access unauthorized streams made by third-party sources," the content owners argue.

Fitzgerald is expected to hear arguments from both sides on January 29.
by Aaron Baar , January 16, 2018

FileMaker, an Apple subsidiary that provides custom app development software, is so powerful it can make a root vegetable farm successful, even when said farm staffed by notoriously unmotivated workers.

In a new campaign beginning this week, the company tells the story of how a farm achieved success through an app developed via FileMaker. Though the story is based in reality, the fictional farm portrayed in the campaign is run by characters played by Kate Flannery, Leslie David Baker and Paul Lieberstein (better known as Meredith, Stanley and Toby from The Office).

We knew we wanted it to be something recognizable because we knew using them would give a bit of trust with a new audience, Aram Rappaport, founder at agency Boathouse, says of the casting. The familiar faces in a new environment would [encourage] people to want to know more.

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The video depicts a news reporter investigating the farms success. As she interviews the workers, she uncovers most of the success is due to the farms app, which helps manage the worker load, categorize the characteristics of the vegetables (i.e., Funny Beet or Crabby Rutabaga), and manage delivery. By the end of the video, the players are surprised to learn that their little farm is worth millions. (And the reporter has missed that the rest of the farms staff seems to be all clones of one worker.)

FileMaker is not just one thing. Its a platform that gives you the keys to the kingdom of your business, Rappaport tells Marketing Daily. Once people learn about this and use it, they're a repeat customer for life.

The campaign comes at a fortuitous time, as there has been speculation that NBC is looking to re-boot its former hit with some of the original cast. That speculation, however, had no bearing on the campaign, Rappaport says. (Its also worth noting that Rainn Wilson, whose character, Dwight, had a beet farm on the side, does not appear in the campaign.)

We have no idea if these actors are gong to be a part of that, and we hadnt aligned with that, Rappaport says. Its certainly exciting from a pop culture standpoint; its nice to know weve tapped into something.

The video will appear in social networks and on business media sites to appeal to business executives. In addition to the video, there is a dedicated microsite exploring the ins and outs of the farm. The entire campaign (which also prominently displays FileMakers connection to Apple) is a departure for the company as it moves from a less tactical approach to one of brand building, says Ann Monroe, vice president of worldwide marketing at FileMaker.

We wanted to start a national conversation about FileMaker, Monroe says. We want to reach problem solvers throughout their day, and we want to connect with them.
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, January 16, 2018

Streaming video distributor FilmOn is asking California's highest court to revive a lawsuit alleging that DoubleVerify provided false reports to advertisers.

DoubleVerify, an online monitoring company, "provided at least one of FilmOn's former clients with a confidential report that falsely accused FilmOn of displaying 'adult content' and unauthorized copyrighted work on its websites," FilmOn writes in papers submitted Tuesday to the California Supreme Court. "Those false and misleading statements caused FilmOn to lose advertising business."

DoubleVerify CEO Wayne Gattinella previously said the company stood by reports concluding that FilmOn was a copyright infringement site.

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The battle between the companies dates to 2014, when FilmOn initially sued DoubleVerify for libel. DoubleVerify -- which sells reports about publishers to agencies and advertisers -- successfully fought the suit by arguing that its reports were covered by California's anti-SLAPP (strategic litigation against public participation) law, which protects people's right to discuss matters of public interest. A trial judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2015; last year, an appellate court upheld the dismissal.

FilmOn is now asking California's highest court to rule that the state anti-SLAPP law doesn't apply to DoubleVerify's "confidential commercial reports."

FilmOn argues that DoubleVerify's reports "do not contribute to any public debate" because they are only sent to private customers. (FilmOn says it learned from a former client about DoubleVerify's reports in late 2013.)

"This Court should hold that the identity of the speaker, the identity of the audience, and the intended purpose of the speech are all important considerations in determining whether speech is protected by the anti-SLAPP statute," FilmOn argues in its new papers.

One reason why the lower courts sided with DoubleVerify was that questions about copyright infringement and adult content online have garnered a great deal of attention. When FilmOn initially sued, the company was fighting several copyright lawsuits by TV broadcasters. Those cases, which were settled last year, centered on FilmOn's prior streaming platform, which reportedly used antennas to capture and transmit programs. The Supreme Court said in June 2014 that a similar system, operated by the defunct Aereo, infringed copyright.
Almost a few months ago, at a famous paparazzi-haunt in Mumbai, Akshay Kumar was clicked in a damn turtleneck. Few months later, and during his promotions for 'Padman' as well, he was found wearing another variant of the neck-bearing wonder. Once again, paired with the globally-recognised investment: well-cut trousers. But while the world was witness a whirlpool of turtlenecks on Mr. Funnybones, little did we realise, that the actor had started to grow a certain fancy for the F/W neckline. Sporadic appearances became 'frequent', day outings turned to red-carpet events and in no time, the Steve Jobs staple had made a name for itself in the actor's closet.

But even in the year 2018, Kumar hasn't looked back. In the past very week, the F/W equivalent of a S/S T-shirt was spotted on the actor twice...

 Viral Bhayani

 Viral Bhayani

Kumar's trick of wearing the turtleneck in life, is to go head-to-toe monotone or pit a solid neutral against another. But while that's his way of sporting the piece, even for men of every walk of life, the way to pair it isn't any different. Even without crores in our accounts, this is exactly how one needs to pair it anyway. Plus, from big-box stores to small-box retail outlets, every single brand in the country is stocking on the piece right now.

But how do you pair it and what are the various combos? Let's make life easy for you.

1. Turtleneck + Jeans/Trousers

 ZARA

It's simpleneither we nor you have the time to think of layering too much. Especially, when it's not way too cold outside or you're simply headed to an indoor event (that involves a heater). In that case, we'd suggest you go the loner route and wear the piece alone.

2. Turtleneck With A Suit

 IAMNKHL

Agreed, when it comes to formal settings, the options could be less; you don't want to ignore corporate traditions, you see. But as seen above, there's a way of taking the suit into a bar (post work), without the hassle of looking too formal at work. Simply replace your dress shirt with a solid-coloured turtleneck and see the magic unfold.

3. Turtleneck With Long Coats

 I AM GALA

Lucky for men who dig french fries daily, there's a way of hiding that big, gigantic belly. The over-coat will do exactly that for you, by making the body appear longer (and linear). Plus, since the turtleneck will give you a more linear appearance, looks like this a double whammy for you.
So how long did you stick to your New Year resolution? is a common question we hear during this time of the year and it hurts, doesn't it? Most people have given up on making them altogether. The rest don't stick with them for too long because they've been led to believe that failure is inevitable. This is unfortunate because the idea of a New Year's resolution, albeit shrouded in pessimism, is a positive one wherein we recognize the need for self-improvement. Instead, the fault lies in our approach and the solution lies in Kaizen. Kaizen, which is Japanese for change for better.

 Thinkstock/Getty Images

What Is Kaizen?

Kaizen is a Japanese business philosophy that promotes continual improvement as the mindset to achieve long-term goals. It is accurately captured in the following saying by Lao Tzu, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. It encourages the practitioner to take small steps in the right direction every day, regardless of the magnitude of the task at hand.

Taking small, slow steps may sound like an impractical, lazy or wasteful method but how many times have you paid for a gym membership, only to abandon it in a couple of weeks? A gym membership is a huge commitment  a big step  and gym owners are not even thankful when they receive your unwise charitable donation. Instead, Kaizen advocates that you start going for a 10-minute brisk walk every day for a couple of weeks and then start gradually adding a portion of salad to your meals and then, once you've trained your brain to be a bit more disciplined, you purchase the gym membership. This gradual build-up to a steady program is the exact opposite of the usual pattern.

 Thinkstock/Getty Images

Getting Better At Getting Better

Clearly, this is not the way to build a six pack in six days because the essence of Kaizen is that setting goals like six pack in six days is a bad idea. Kaizen is more of a mindset, less of a productivity tool. It's not result-based, it's process-based. For example, it will not help if you just hit deadlines. Trust me, I've tried and the MensXP editor wasn't very happy about it! Nevertheless, it can be used to review the process of working towards hitting a deadline so that next time, I can make a small positive change to my writing process and improve. When practicing Kaizen, it's never about the final result because there's always room for improvement regardless of success or failure. Kaizen is a journey, not a destination. In fact, Kaizen advocates for continuously upgrading your destination as you get better.

Why Does It Work?

Based on evolution, we have three brains although Bollywood makes a strong case for us having none. These are the cortex, the mammalian brain and the reptilian brain. The cortex is the part that makes humans unique  civilization, music, creativity, all reside in the cortex. The mammalian mid-brain has the amygdala which controls the fight-or-flight response. When faced with an imminent threat, the body is prepared to act reflexively which leads the thinking part  the cortex  to slow down or shut down altogether since the ability to do calculus is not a priority when being chased by a tiger! The problem is that the amygdala gets activated whenever we deviate from routine. For the amygdala, safety comes first even when I'm sitting comfortably in my chair, imagining about taking over the world or any other obscenely big step.

 Pexels

Fear is the immediate response to anything new and it's a normal part of our lives. Yes, it's normal, embrace it. When we decide to take a big step, the amygdala comes into play, thus restricting access to our cortex. Small steps are a way to bypass the amygdala so that one can harness the complete powers of their cortex. Thus, Kaizen encourages taking steps that are so small that they're painless to follow through. This changes the focus from the staggering task at hand (say, learning how to play the guitar) to just being a little better than your previous self (Let's learn how to play the first 4 notes of the DDLJ tune.).

The Toyota Way

A classic example of Kaizen in action is The Toyota Production System. Any worker in Toyota's manufacturing units can stop the assembly line to fix a minor defect. This goes against the conventional idea of mass manufacturing which translates to, never stop the line, we'll fix errors at the end of the line.

Taiichi Ohno, a manager influenced by the idea of small, continual improvement, noticed that fixing errors at the end was a time-consuming, expensive process. He trained his workers in Kaizen. They were trained to identify small problems and carry out small actions that could fix the problem then and there. As a result, contrary to conventional manufacturing and management wisdom, Toyota's production soared.

 Reuters

They took it one step further when they opened up the suggestions box to everyone. While doing their job, anyone who took the effort to ask small questions, like What if there's an Excel function that does exactly what I'm doing by hand?, could put in suggestions for the upper management to review. The good ones were rewarded appropriately. This practice gave every worker the incentive to find Kaizen opportunities at every stage of the production pipeline and it worked. Today, Toyota prides itself on being a reliable, good quality, affordable brand and they consider Kaizen to be instrumental in their success.

You Can Do It

It's important to note that Kaizen and innovation (a radical change, by definition, i.e. a big step) are not mutually exclusive. The emphasis is on continual improvement and more often than not, it's easier to make a miniscule change than it is to innovate. Even right now, imagine you're asked to innovate, and then imagine that you're asked to make the smallest improvement in your routine. Irrespective of the actual work, doesn't the latter have a soothing effect on your brain unlike the former that feels like a tough, elaborate 'Roadies' task? Kaizen is all about ease of adoption. It'll guide you to move at a slower, relaxed pace to achieve lasting change. In his book 'One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way', Dr. Robert Maurer says, If you hit a wall of resistance, try scaling back the size of your steps. (...) The essence of Kaizen is an optimistic belief in our potential for continuous improvement.

 Thinkstock/Getty Images

Conclusion

There's the age-old debate between hard work and talent. Talent is inherent skill (like being good at guessing the meanings of words from the context in which they're used) and hard work requires rigor (like completing a book with several tough words in it). For the bigger goals in life, talent tends to fall short and hard work needs to be done over a long period of time, the results of which come even later. Hard work always trumps talent but people rely on the latter because performing consistent hard work for weeks without seeing the desired results is a scary proposition. The process is plagued with questions like, What if I never make it? Should I have listened to my parents and stuck to a regular job? In such dire circumstances, the Kaizen philosophy is like a friendly pat on the back telling you, There's always light at the end of the tunnel. Eventually, these small improvements will add up. They surely will! Don't be intimidated by the horizon, just look down and put one foot in front of the other. You can do it.

References: One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer, PhD
If I had my way, Id split all of my time between pow-wowing with friends and inspirational speakers at conferences and summits and having marvelous outdoor adventures.

But thats not reality. Instead, reality is laundry, dishes, a day job, helping my kids, squeezing in time to play in between those things and wishing I had five minutes for a phone call, forget traveling to a conference. Can anyone else testify?

Reality is what the genius military spouses at InDependent were dealing with when they realized that as much as they wanted to, they were never going to be able to pull off an in-person conference focused on wellness, self care and the military life hacks we all desperately need.

And so they decided to try something different.

They decided to make it a virtual, podcast based conference.

Enter the third annual Military Spouse Wellness Summit, running this year from March 5 to 11 and hosted by our favorite Military.com marriage columnist and fantastic podcaster, Corie Weathers.

Last year Corie ushered listeners through really impactful interviews focused on relationships with experts including Dr. John Townsend, well known for his work on boundaries, and Dr. Michael Sytsma, known for his sex therapy counseling. I listen to a lot of podcasts  and these ones still stick with me more than a year later.

This year the 10 speaker line-up has a more holistic wellness approach. Im particularly excited to hear their interview with Gretchen Rubin, author of the New York Times best seller The Happiness Project and the newer book The Four Tendencies (which I just loved). Other interviews include Military.coms Paycheck Chronicles Kate Horrell and mindfulness guru Rohan Gunatillak.

Since starting over 3,000 spouses have joined the summit from the comfort of their own homes (under a cozy blanket and while holding wine  or  like me, while folding laundry).

Best news yet: attending can be free through the basic ticket option. That allows you to listen to the podcasts as they are released the week of the summit.

But a VIP paid ticket, which runs $39.50 through the end of January before bumping up to $79, is the better deal in my view.

That gives you the ability to access all of the interviews beyond the week of the summit. It also brings you on to the VIP-only Facebook group where you can join summit-related workout classes, participate in a daily virtual cooking demonstration and be entered to win a series of great prices, including a trip to the Chris Kyle Frog Foundtion Empowered Spouses Retreat.

(Ive attended one  trust me on this: you want to go).

You can go here to register. I chose the VIP option. If you do that, too, Ill see you in the summit Facebook group soon.
"Alpha Six is down," was the word passed from Marine to Marine. "Alpha Seven is up."

In Marine-speak, that meant that Capt. Gordon Batcheller was hit and out of action.

Gunnery Sgt. John Canley was now commander of Alpha Co., 1st Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division, in the early stages of the Battle of Hue City.

Batcheller, who would survive, had yelled out to Canley to take charge just before he was evacuated.

From Jan. 31 to Feb. 6, 1968, Canley led outnumbered Alpha 1/1 in the vicious, house-to-house fighting to retake South Vietnam's third-largest city from the combined forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the National Liberation Front (Viet-Cong) during Tet, the first day of the lunar New Year.

"The Battle of Hue would be the bloodiest of the Vietnam War, and a turning point not just in that conflict, but in American history," author Mark Bowden wrote in the foreword to his book published last year: "Hue 1968, a Turning Point in the American War in Vietnam" [Altantic Monthly Press.]

Canley, now 80 and living in Oxnard, California, was awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest award for valor, for his actions in Hue.

Last week, Congress passed a bill to waive the five-year time limit on recommendations for the Medal of Honor and sent it to President Donald Trump to upgrade Canley's Navy Cross.

The bill (H.R. 4641) authorized Trump "to award the Medal of Honor to John L. Canley for acts of valor during the Vietnam War while a member of the Marine Corps."

In a letter last month to Rep. Julia Brownley, D-California, chief sponsor of the move to award the MoH to Canley, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said he would support the recommendation once the time limit was waived.

"After giving careful consideration to the nomination, I agree that then-Gunnery Sergeant Canley's actions merit the award of the Medal of Honor," Mattis said.

In a phone interview, Bowden said Canley was the one who got away from him in his extensive research for the book.

"He did not agree to be interviewed," he said, although "I made repeated efforts to talk to him" after hearing of Canley's actions in the battle from other Marines.

'Intense Admiration'

"It was just intense admiration" expressed by those who served with him for his courage, for the example he set, and for his devotion to them and the mission, said Bowden, also the author of "Black Hawk Down" on the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia.

Bowden's conclusion: "What a self-effacing guy. I think that's all it is. None of these guys" who stand out in combat "want to be seen as promoting themselves."

Canley himself suggested as much in a statement to Brownley after passage of the bill recommending the MoH. If he had inspired Marines, they also had inspired him, Canley said.

"The credit for this award really should go to all the young Marines in Vietnam who inspired me every day. Most of them didn't receive any recognition, but they were the foundation of every battle in the Vietnam War," Canley said.

Along the walls of the Hall of Heroes at the Pentagon, the names are listed of those who have received the nation's highest award for valor. Their citations show that sometimes the MoH is awarded for a single selfless act, sometimes for a series of actions.

In the case of Canley, who retired as a sergeant major after 28 years of service, the argument could be made that he rates the medal for an entire "above and beyond" career.

The Marines who were with him in Hue spoke in awe of him; the Marines who served with him stateside were effusive in their gratitude for his mentoring and guidance.

In Hue, there was 21-year-old Sgt. Alfredo "Freddy" Gonzalez, a "Tejano" from Edinburg, Texas, who was on his second tour in Vietnam and led 3rd Platoon of Alpha 1/1.

He called Canley "the toughest bastard in the outfit," according to John W. Flores, author of "Marine Sergeant Freddy Gonzalez, Vietnam War Hero" (McFarland & Co., Inc.).

Gonzalez, who had joined with Canley in charging and wiping out machine-gun positions and was himself referred to as a "one-man army," was posthumously awarded the MoH for his heroism in Hue.

In Bowden's book and in statements to Brownley, the surviving Marines of Alpha 1/1 made clear that both Gonzalez and Canley led from the front.

'A Marine's Marine'

In a statement to Brownley, Paul Patterson recalled an incident in which "one man in front of our position was hit and we were being kept down by incoming fire."

"As the lieutenant was calling in fire support, Gunny [Canley] directed fire on the enemy, then -- at risk to himself -- he got up and ran to the injured man, picked him up, and carried him to safety, all the time while taking fire," Patterson said.

Canley "was a man who inspired men. He was a Marine's Marine," Patterson said.

Canley carried out several wounded men under fire during the battle, and Pvt. Pat Fraleigh may have been the one referred to by Patterson.

Bowden wrote that Canley, already wounded in the face by shrapnel, ran to the fallen Fraleigh, carried him back and began packing his wounds. Then he noticed that Fraleigh seemed to have stopped breathing. "Goodbye Marine," Canley said.

He wrapped Fraleigh in a poncho, picked him up again and placed him on a truck that was carrying the dead from the firefight back to an aid station.

Canley stood beside the truck and calmly began to get his bearings. He was going back to his command and the fight. Navy Corpsman Michael Ker screamed at him: "Gunny get down, you're going to get hit!"

Canley replied: "By the time I get down, I'll already be hit. So I may as well stand up here and see what the hell is going on."

Maybe it was the jarring of the truck ride, maybe something else, but Fraleigh began breathing again back at the aid station and somebody noticed.

In a statement to Brownley, Fraleigh said, "I spent nine months in St. Albans hospital, required numerous surgeries and am disabled, but I would have died if [Canley] had not risked his life for mine."

"This was not the first time I saw Gunny Canley act heroically," he added.

In previous battles at the Marine firebase at Con Thien, "he not only carried Marines to safety, but also exposed himself to enemy fire. He was always leading and attacking the enemy and always standing up and encouraging us," Fraleigh said.

Pfc. John Ligato told Bowden that again and again he had watched in disbelief and awe at the things Canley did on the battlefield.

Ligato saw Canley rescue Fraleigh -- just "calmly drape him on his shoulders and carry him to safety. How could anyone do these things?"

He later saw Canley and Gonzalez team up to rescue two platoons that were pinned down at an intersection.

"An enemy machine gun was in a bunker on the right side of the road, which gave it complete command of the intersection," Bowden wrote. "Two platoons were trapped in a gully, unable to move."

Ligato was among those pinned down. "Rounds hit the water around him and sent up sprays. He flattened himself farther into the mud," Bowden wrote, "but at the same time he saw something extraordinary.

"Canley and Gonzalez were creeping toward the machine gun. It seemed impossible for them not to be hit."

Ligato said that both Canley and Gonzalez "seemed immune to fear."

"When Gonzalez and Canley were close enough to the machine gun, they called for suppressing fire and then stood and hurled grenades," Bowden wrote.

"At the blast, they charged, firing their rifles on automatic, silencing the gun. Ligato would deeply admire both men for the rest of his life," he wrote.

In Hue, under enemy fire, "Gunnery Sergeant Canley rushed across the fire-swept terrain and carried several wounded Marines to safety," according to his Navy Cross citation.

Canley took command of Alpha 1/1 and, although "sustaining shrapnel wounds during this period, he nonetheless established a base of fire which subsequently allowed the company to break through the enemy strongpoint."

On Feb. 4, 1968, "despite fierce enemy resistance," Canley managed to get into the top floor of a building held by the enemy. He then "dropped a large satchel charge into the position, personally accounting for numerous enemy killed, and forcing the others to vacate the building," the citation said.

The battle raged on. Canley went into action again on Feb. 6 as the company took more casualties in an assault on another enemy-held building.

"Gunnery Sergeant Canley lent words of encouragement to his men and exhorted them to greater efforts as they drove the enemy from its fortified emplacement," the citation reads. "Although wounded once again during this action, on two occasions he leaped a wall in full view of the enemy, picked up casualties, and carried them to covered positions."

"By his dynamic leadership, courage, and selfless dedication, Gunnery Sergeant Canley contributed greatly to the accomplishment of his company's mission and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service," the citation states.

Canley served several tours in Vietnam from 1965 to 1970.

In the phone interview, Bowden expressed some of Ligato's wonderment at the uncommon individuals such as Canley who return again and again to battle, even after being wounded, much like those currently serving multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. "How could anyone do these things?" he said.

"I think it's part of the initial commitment," Bowden said. "Some take it more seriously than others. It's part of the commitment to be a professional.

"As terrifying as it is, some of these guys feel that's why they're there. They feel that the experience they have is valuable, that it can help save others' lives," he said.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
After a year in which the Coast Guard made a record number of maritime drug interdictions and sent unprecedented numbers of drug smugglers to the United States to stand trial, the service is considering the possibility of investing in a platform that would do nothing but hold detainees until they can be transported to the mainland.

Last November, The New York Times published an investigative story decrying the conditions under which suspected smugglers are held aboard Coast Guard vessels, sometimes for weeks or months at a time.

It quoted a former Coast Guard attorney who called the ships "floating Guantanamos" and detailed conditions that are often cramped and sometimes frigid aboard the service's cutters.

For the record, the commandant of the Coast Guard, Adm. Paul Zukunft, has little sympathy to spare for these detainees.

"We can't lose sight of the fact that these individuals who were detained, they're peddling poison. They are responsible for 64,000 deaths in the U.S.," Zukunft told Military.com during an exclusive interview in December. "These aren't just down-on-their-luck fishermen; they have a choice. You can either fish, or you can be a criminal."

The Times story was told sympathetically from the perspective of one of these detainees, who described scant meals and fear due to being separated from family. Zukunft called it slanted and without an appreciation for the conditions under which the Coast Guard crews themselves work and live below decks.

The Hamilton class of high-endurance cutters has been in service since 1965, and still has four ships in active service.

"Go below deck and look at where my crew is berthing," Zukunft said. "The living conditions in any prison system in the United States [are] better than the berthing areas in my 52-year-old ships. We are operating out of prisons."

While detainees were in the open air above deck, Zukunft said temperate climates in and around the U.S. Southern Command area of operations mitigate some of the hardship of exposure to the elements.

But while Zukunft said he isn't too concerned about the conditions these suspected smugglers have to contend with, he has other reasons for wanting to get out of the floating jail business.

"We're spending about a third of our ship time right now moving these detainees from one ship to another to provide them the best creature comforts at sea until we can land them in Panama, which is the only country right now that will accept detainees for further transport back to the United States," he said.

There's just one other option available to Coast Guard cutters: to transit through the Panama Canal and reach Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In light of these challenging logistics, which contribute to the length of time detainees can spend on a Coast Guard vessel, Zukunft said the service is exploring the possibility of leasing a dedicated commercial vessel that would do nothing but hold suspects until they can be transferred to the United States.

The ship might actually be leased through the Department of Defense or SouthCom. It might be something like a commercial offshore supply vessel -- a platform abundantly available given limited offshore drilling activity.

While it would be a civilian ship, Zukunft said it would be staffed with Coast Guard law enforcement augmentees to supervise the detained population.

Though not the primary goal, he added that one outcome of acquiring such a vessel might be improved conditions for prisoners.

"That might have better accommodations than we have on ships with flight decks and helicopter hangars to at least get people out of the elements," Zukunft said.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.
An organization of physicians who oppose cruelty to animals is asking for an investigation of two incidents in recent years in which Marines allegedly conducted "live tissue" medical training on animals without proper authorization, saying it's time for the military to do away with this form of training entirely.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a non-profit advocacy organization founded in 1985, sent a letter to the Medical Inspector General of the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and the Inspector General of Naval Surface Force Pacific Fleet on Jan. 11, asking that the oversight authorities investigate with an eye to finding alternatives.

According to email exchanges obtained by a Freedom of Information Act Request and reviewed by Military.com, the training in question took place during the 2016 iteration of the amphibious exercise Dawn Blitz.

Members of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit used two pigs to conduct live tissue training (LTT), which involves intentionally wounding or even dismembering the animals in order to practice administering medical aid. The pigs were then flown to the amphibious transport dock USS Somerset. One died en route to the ship.

The emails, which include those from the Navy surgeons for I Marine Expeditionary Force and Naval Surface Force Pacific Fleet, detail concern about whether the shipboard training was approved via proper channels, particularly because LTT is so high profile by nature.

"Apparently, [LTT was conducted] on at least two of our ships without my knowledge and without [Navy Bureau of Medicine] approval," the force surgeon for SurfPac wrote in an email. "... I am told a report is done to Congress each year on use of LTT due to its high visibility and sensitivity and this will need to be reported as an unauthorized LTT."

Emails reveal LTT was conducted under similar conditions during Dawn Blitz the previous year.

In a letter signed by Dr. John Pippin, director of academic affairs for The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the group calls for investigation of the alleged unauthorized training.

But Pippin told Military.com the group's real concern is the continued use of LTT in any capacity.

The letter mentioned the existence of hyper-realistic "cut suits" that can be worn by a human actor and made to simulate a wide range of wounds and injuries, and other simulation aids that can offer realism in combat trauma training.

"There are better ways to do this now, and that has not permeated certain elements, including elements of the Department of Defense," Pippin said. "Our impetus for doing this is to improve combat trauma training [using] non-animal or human-relevant methods."

A spokesman for SurfPac, Doug Sayers, told Military.com that the letter had been received and an initial review of its contents was underway.

Like the rest of the military, the Marine Corps has been moving away from live tissue training in recent years.

LTT has been prohibited aboard Marine Corps Installations since 2014, said Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Christopher Harrison. However, he said, units can still work with vendors who meet military and Navy requirements to conduct LTT at off-base locations.

Those requirements, he said, include regular accreditation from the Association for the Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care.

"Any LTT event has stringent requirements to be conducted, including approval from BUMED (as the Component Animal Use Oversight Office for the Navy and Marine Corps) and the presence of experienced veterinary staff to support and monitor the animals to prevent them from experiencing pain or distress," he said.

Officials with I MEF said the command is currently making investments into quality alternatives to LTT.

Lt. Col. Christopher Perrine, director of communication strategy and operations for I MEF, said a casualty care simulation working group had been created in January 2017, with a simulation training program launched in October 2017.

There's now a monthly five-day training course, he said, that uses "organic, high-fidelity" simulators to test competency in casualty care.

"The MEF has purchased two dozen combat simulators at a cost of $1.2 million," Perrine said in a statement. "The training is hyper-realistic, and priority goes to those who are scheduled to deploy."

Once considered a necessity for realistic triage training, use of live animals has fallen dramatically out of favor with the military in the last five years, due in large part to Pentagon reforms.

In 2017, the Coast Guard announced it was suspending its use of the training, a practice commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft called "abhorrent."

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.
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. faces new military and political challenges in Syria and Iraq despite the successes in both countries against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

In Syria, the Pentagon's purported plan to give a new mission to the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which have decimated ISIS in eastern Syria, brought condemnation from Russia, Turkey, Iran and the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

In Iraq, a double suicide bombing in Baghdad that killed at least 38 on Monday underlined the task ahead for the U.S. train, advise and assist mission in preventing the remnants of ISIS from morphing into a hit-and-run terror group that could still attract foreign fighters.

"We anticipate this will take some time," Marine Brig. Gen. James Glynn said of assisting the Iraqi Security Forces in the effort to "root out and destroy the remaining ISIS fighters."

In a video briefing from Baghdad to the Pentagon, Glynn, the deputy commanding general of Special Operations Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (SOJTF-OIR), said ISIS fighters still in Iraq maintain a "cellular structure" and the mission now is "not to allow those elements to form into a network."

Although Iraq Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has declared the defeat of ISIS as a combat force in his country, Glynn said he would not describe continuing operations against the group as "counterinsurgency," saying it is "too early to make that kind of assessment. It's just too soon."

Glynn gave no indication the U.S. will consider withdrawing its more than 5,000 troops from Iraq anytime soon. "We must not lose sight of the fact that much work remains," he said.

He was less forthcoming on the new threats and counter-threats coming out of Turkey, Iran and Russia over a reported U.S. plan to create a 30,000-strong security force along the Turkish border from elements of the SDF in Syria's ongoing civil war.

The Kurdish YPG, or People's Protection Units, is the dominant force in the SDF and is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey.

Glynn essentially declined comment on the reported plan. "Border security in the region remains an objective," he said but remained focused on Iraq. "Political comments and changes are not in my lane or area of expertise."

However, another U.S. military spokesman appeared to back away from the border security plan -- at least in the region around the city of Afrin near the Turkish border.

In a statement to Turkey's Anadolu news agency, Army Col. Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq and Syria, said the U.S. had no intention of aiding any partnered force in Syria's northern Afrin region.

"The coalition's mission has not changed: to defeat ISIS in designated areas of Iraq and Syria and set conditions for follow-on operations to increase regional stability," he said.

"We are not operating in Afrin. We are supporting our partners in defeating remaining ISIS pockets along the Middle Euphrates River Valley, specifically in areas north of Abu Kamal, on the eastern side of the Euphrates River," Dillon said.

In an earlier statement that riled Turkey, Iran and Russia, Dillon had said of the SDF, "More Kurds will serve in the areas in northern Syria. More Arabs will serve in areas along the Euphrates River Valley and along the border with Iraq to the south."

In a fiery speech Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, "A country we call an ally [the U.S.] is insisting on forming a terror army on our borders.

"What can that terror army target but Turkey? Our mission is to strangle it before it's even born," he said.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
The commander of Naval Surface Forces is stepping down from his post just weeks ahead of his planned retirement, following a reported recommendation that he be relieved.

"Today, I have informed the chief of naval operations that this Thursday I will step aside earlier than previously planned as the commander, Naval Surface Forces, and commander, Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet," Adm. Tom Rowden wrote in a statement provided to Military.com. "This was a difficult decision to make, but I make it with the best interest of the Surface Warfare community and the Navy in mind."

Rowden continued that the post is in good hands with his designated successor, Rear Adm. Richard Brown.

"In this job, I've spent three-and-a-half years traveling around the world spending time with our Surface Force and the men and women who bring life, energy and purpose to our ships," he said. "I've loved this job and the people I've worked with. It has been the highest honor to serve our Nation and the Navy for more than 40 years."

Rowden had planned an early retirement in the wake of two tragic ship collisions last summer that left 17 sailors dead.

Related content:

Investigations into each collision found a variety of watchstanding, control and communication errors were to blame, and a number of flag officers have also been relieved for failing to prevent the disasters.

A consolidated disposition authority, headed by Adm. James Caldwell, head of naval reactors, was appointed in November to oversee and recommend additional prospective disciplinary actions, which could include reliefs, nonjudicial punishment, and court-martial. Caldwell has yet to announce these recommendations.

Citing anonymous sources, Defense News reported that Caldwell had recommended Rowden be relieved in light of the collisions. Rowden had previously announced his intent to retire early and was set to hand off his post to Brown in coming weeks.

A spokesman for Rowden, Cmdr. John Perkins, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Rowden's reported resignation.

"I want to tell you that the Surface Force will be in good hands," Rowden told an audience at the Surface Navy Association's annual symposium near Washington, D.C., last week. "Rich is a friend and he is a superb and talented officer ... please give him every bit of the support that you've given me."

Rowden said he believed Navy leadership would "move out smartly" to implement recommendations from a comprehensive review commissioned immediately after the second collision, that of the destroyer USS John S. McCain, in August.

"I am confident that the work will go on, and from these terrible tragedies, we will see a continued renaissance in surface warfare in the future," he said.

The two collisions have taken their toll on the Navy's flag and senior officer community.

The commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, Adm. Scott Swift, also announced his intent to retire following the disasters.

The first admiral to be relieved was Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet.

His successor, Vice Adm. Phil Sawyer, would go on to relieve Rear Adm. Charles Williams, commander of the Navy's Task Force 70.

The leadership teams of the McCain and the destroyer USS Fitzgerald, the other ship involved in a collision, were also removed from their posts, as was Capt. Jeffrey Bennett, commander of Destroyer Squadron 15, home to both ships.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.
An internal Pentagon memo from last March that instructed military commands to lay off detailed descriptions of military needs caused consternation not only within the press corps but also among congressional leaders.

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee told reporters Tuesday that he and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have had several conversations on the topic of transparency with the press and public, and he continued a "back-and-forth" with the Pentagon over the issue.

"There are two legitimate concerns," Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican, said during a briefing in Washington, D.C. "One concern that he is focused on is, you don't want to tell your adversaries your problems. The concern that I tend to focus on is how do we fix our problems. And there's a natural tension about how much you can say publicly."

The March 2 memo, sent by Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, passed along Mattis' warning to avoid "telegraphing readiness shortfalls" to adversaries, explaining that doing so "invites miscalculation."

Davis continued that elected leaders were already aware of the needs of the military.

"They don't need news stories to remind them," he wrote. "Help is on the way."

When inviting press to ships or units, he said, strength must always be projected.

A similar memo from Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, sent March 1, warned service officials to avoid talking about operational capabilities in specifics.

Now more than ever, it is important that public communication about our forces, their operations, and their capabilities, even at the unclassified level, makes it easier for potential adversaries to gain an advantage," he wrote. "Scrutinize information and protect it."

Some leaders have already spoken out publicly about the move to limit information flow out of the military.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Marine veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee, told an audience at the Surface Navy Association's annual symposium near Washington, D.C., last week that the Navys lack of information sharing could damage efforts to build back strength.

"If the bias is toward silence to prevent adversaries from finding out about unique capabilities or potential weaknesses -- guess what, there will never be a public constituency for acquiring or mitigating them," Gallagher wrote in prepared remarks, according to Defense News. "And, oh by the way, our adversaries probably have a decent idea of what we're up to anyways."

Richardson told reporters at the same event that the aim of his memo wasn't to stop talking [but] be careful what we talk about."

Thornberry said Mattis has been clear that lawmakers should be fully briefed in classified sessions. But for him, the issue of communication with the public goes beyond acquisition strategy.

"You can't hide the fact that we had 17 sailors die, or how many Marines in the aircraft that exploded," he said, referring to two tragic ship collisions last summer and a July 10 KC-130 crash that left 16 dead.

"And I think that those families need to know that we are going to fix those problems. ... We'll kind of have this back-and-forth that will continue, but I'm on the side that we need to talk more about these issues."

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.
A U.S. Navy veteran is suing the VA hospital that he said misdiagnosed his stomach pains as cocaine addiction and discharged him without treatment.

Eric Walker, 47, filed a lawsuit against Dorn Veterans Hospital in Columbia, S.C., alleging that the hospital switched his urine sample with another patient's in May 2015. Walker claimed that the move lead to his misdiagnosis as a cocaine addict, The State reported.

Dorn's staff had told him "his stomach pains were a direct result of ingesting multiple illegal drugs, in particular, excessive cocaine," according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit said he was offered pamphlets on treating substance abuse and sent home.

Walker's condition worsened, and days later a neighbor brought him to Lexington Medical Center where he was properly diagnosed and "rushed to emergency surgery for gall stones and disease of the gall bladder and pancreas," his attorney Todd Lyle told The State.

He is recovered and now seeks unspecified damages for his medical bills and for pain and suffering.

Walker joined the Navy in 1989 and served four years, including a six-month tour in the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Desert Shield in the first Iraq War, The State reported.

The U.S. Attorney's office in Columbia likely will represent Dorn and the Veterans Administration. It declined comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The U.S. Air Force is deploying six B-52H Stratofortress bombers and approximately 300 airmen from Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, to Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, in coming days for the continuous bomber presence mission in the Pacific.

The service announced Tuesday that the long-range bombers will replace B-1B Lancers from the 37th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron, Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, by the end of the month.

The move marks a significant shift to bring back the B-52H, which held on to the CBP mission from 2006 to 2016, putting a nuclear-capable bomber in theater at a time when relations between the U.S. and North Korea are largely unpredictable.

Additionally, the swap comes as the B-1B bomber aircrews anticipate returning to the Middle East in coming months and have been training for the evolving battlespace in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, according to officials at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas.

Related content:

Military.com sat down with leaders from Air Force Global Strike Command's 7th Bomb Wing -- responsible for producing combat-ready aircrews in the service's only formal B-1B training unit -- during a trip to the base last month, and took a ride Dec. 19 in a Lancer over training ranges in New Mexico.

B-1Bs from Ellsworth are likely to be the first back in rotation in the Middle East, according to Lt. Col. Dominic "Beaver" Ross, director of operations for the 337th Test and Evaluations Squadron. The B-1s from Dyess would swap in a few months later.

The non-nuclear-capable B-1s, known as the "Bone," left the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility in early 2016, and were replaced by Stratofortress bombers at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, that April.

The B-1B, which made its first flight in 1984, has been the face of deterrence in the U.S. Pacific Command's area of responsibility for the last 18 months, marking the first time the B-1B has been housed at Andersen since 2006.

Officials at Dyess said the B-1 made strides during its deployment to the Pacific, reassuring allies and acting as a deterrent against North Korea even if it no longer is a nuclear-capable platform.

"The feedback we receive from the bases and combatant commands we support is very positive in the sense that these Global Strike platforms, at the end of the day, there's a deterrent value, certainly our allies see the assurance value, and that we are ready strike. That's essentially, that's what we do," Col. Brandon Parker, 7th Bomb Wing commander, said during a roundtable interview Dec. 18.

"Basically, you're showing that you're there," added Lt. Col. Christopher Wachter, director of operations for the 345th Bomb Squadron at Dyess.

During a show of force -- which the supersonic B-1s conducted on multiple occasions with South Korea and Japan's air forces, carrying out simulated air-to-ground bomb drops in recent months -- "you're showing that, 'Yes, I have the capability, if national authority says so, to release weapons,' " Wachter said.

"You're reminding a potential adversary that their actions will have second- and third-order effects. You're assuring your allies that we're with them ... We're there to be hopeful in order to uphold those values of freedom. And if it's by a show of force, [we're] saying, 'We're here and we don't like your bellicose attitude, we don't like that you're firing missiles across one of our friends sovereign territories,' then that's what we'll do," Wachter said.

When deploying the bomber fleet to any theater, "It's a big deal," Parker said.

"Whether it's a B-2 [Spirit,] B-52 or B-1, there's still just great value when you send these planes abroad," he said.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.
Have you ever been drawn to nature? Have you had an urge to sit by the sea, hike in the woods or just stand barefoot in the...
This article by Bianca Strzalkowski originally appeared on the Military Officers Association of America (MOAA) website.

The topic of military spouse unemployment continues to trend, as a recent report reveals a jobless rate of nearly four times that of adult women in the U.S.

The 2017 findings, published by Hiring Our Heroes (HoH), caught the attention of the current White House. Ivanka Trump, advisor to President Donald Trump, and Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, joined roughly 300 attendees at the "Keeping a Career on the Move" Military Spouse Symposium at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina Oct. 3.

The event, a partnership of the MOAA Military Family Initiative and HoH, was "designed specifically for military spouses planning to enter or reenter the workforce or those looking to take the next step in their professional career." The venue showcased the top-tier challenges spouses face -- including frequent moves and availability of jobs at duty locations -- when trying to maintain a career while married to a service member.

Part of the agenda included the panel "Real Spouses: Real Stories," which allowed the audience to learn about the ups and downs from spouses who eventually found a formula to land a successful career. In each of the examples, joblessness emerged as an issue that sees no rank and affects new and seasoned military spouses alike.

When You Finally Get a Dream Job

Jennifer Korn, special assistant to the president and deputy director for the office of public liaison, knows a little bit about what it takes to grow a career as a military wife. Her husband served 21 years in the Marine Corps across several duty stations. At many points during his service, his location assignment proved to be an obstacle to her chosen field within politics. She shared with the audience that the couple had to make the decision to live geographically apart after she was hired with President George W. Bush's administration.

She said the topic of unemployment and underemployment of spouses is a key priority for the current administration, especially after learning of the double-digit jobless rate of 16 percent. Korn hopes by sharing her personal story that spouses will recognize their own resiliency to push past the challenges.

"There's always going to be ups and downs in your career, and when your spouse moves -- and you need to move with him -- that is an added challenge," Korn said. "So, what you need to do, what I always tell people, is you can be ... down on it, but I say, embrace the terror. Then, you need to dust yourself off, put that resume together, [and] go out and start networking with as many people as you can. A door will open, you have to be persistent and just make sure you make good use of the resources around you."

Find tips for cultivating a network at your new duty station in "Networking in a New Place."

When Your Career Field Requires a License

Some careers offer an added benefit of existing in most places. Nursing, teaching and law are a few examples. Yet, they too are not PCS-proof. If they require a license or certification, reciprocity becomes a problem because states have varying standards -- a topic Alicia Hedelund knows all too well.

The Marine Corps wife recently moved back to the U.S. after living in South Korea. Her husband serves as commanding general of II Marine Expeditionary Force, and she spoke about having an established career prior to getting married.

"I am an attorney," she said. "I was working as an attorney when I met my Marine and he whisked me off to Yuma, Ariz. I took another bar exam, swore it would be my last."

She then found herself taking bar exams in several different locations, a process that requires time and money. Hedelund now is licensed in three states but no longer working in her field. Instead, she volunteers with her unit's family readiness program.

Read more about military spouse license portability, including resources and tips for a smooth career transition.

When You Create Your own Job

Entrepreneur Lakesha Cole, owner of She Swank Too Marketplace in Jacksonville, N.C., opened her business after trying to maintain a traditional career throughout continuous moves. The mom of three, who is married to an enlisted Marine, explained that one of her biggest challenges through her husband's constant relocations was trying to reinvent herself and stay marketable. Instead, she decided to take her skill sets and employ herself.

(Many military spouses, like Cole, are turning to entrepreneurship. Read about five ways entrepreneurship differs from outside employment and tips for adapting in "Making the Leap From Employee to Entrepreneur.")

"I was intrigued by the business side of retail," Cole said. "I just couldn't get enough of learning all things business. I later developed a passion for children's apparel after becoming a mom and decided to marry the two."

She says opportunities can present themselves unexpectedly, so spouses should remain open-minded.

"Don't be afraid to experiment and try new things," she said. "You may not always find the dream job with the dream salary. I tried everything, from being a writer to working in government and mental health. Experimenting allowed me to gain new skills and earn an income while I figured out what I really wanted to do."

Military life has plenty of unknowns, but some constants likely are guaranteed. There will be moves, there will be times of separation and there might be orders to lackluster locations.

Many resources are available to military spouses, so take advantage of them. This list of military-spouse-specific career resources is a great place to start.

Learn more about the MOAA Military Family Initiative's Military Spouse Professional Development Program and stay up-to-date on upcoming spouse career events and information at www.moaa.org/spousesymposium.

Keep Up with the Ins and Outs of Military Life

For the latest military news and tips on military family benefits and more, subscribe to Military.com and have the information you need delivered directly to your inbox.
Entertainer and socialite Zodwa Wabantu, who became known for dancing without underwear, has been criticised by President Jacob Zuma.

Zuma rebuked her for her dress sense and encouraging young women to use sexuality to get what they want. Zodwa, 32, of Soweto had attended a New Years party in Nutting House, Nelspruit.

While on stage, she allegedly revealed to her audience she made R35 000 for dancing and encouraged women to use sexual favours to enjoy a better life.

Revellers recorded her moves and message, which went viral on social media.

However, Zuma was unimpressed by Wabantus sexual suggestions and utterances.

He spoke to ANC spokesperson Zizi Kodwa, who called Zodwas manager, DJ Tira, to convey the presidents objections.

DJ Tira announced on Twitter that he had received a call from Kodwa, who told him the president wanted him to reprimand Zodwa for her sexually loaded utterances.

I honestly dont have a problem with the way Zodwa dresses."

Thats the image she prefers to portray and her fans love that about her."

What I cant tolerate are the messages shes directing to young women, said DJ Tira.

But DJ Tira said he was not prepared to ask her to change her image because thats the reason she has become a drawcard at events.

Kodwa confirmed that the president told him to handle Zodwas behaviour.

As the spokesperson, I take orders from the president to the public, and vice versa."

Zuma was not happy with the way Zodwa dressed and disapproved of her recent message that went viral on social media."

I guess it all comes down to how she makes a living. What the president fails to understand is that her messages to the public is Zodwas way of increasing her popularity."

We hope her manager puts a stop to her behaviour, said Kodwa.

Zodwa, a single parent of a 13-year-old son, said she worked in a call centre as a debt collector in Johannesburg previously, but didnt enjoy that. She left her job and moved to Durban.Im ugly, but Im confident about my body. After all, Im not married, so I dont answer to any man besides my manager (DJ Tira).

My son and I are living a stable life from the money I make from stage appearances. As a result I built a brand new house in Nelspruit."

Society even judged me on my poor English but I dont care because I make more money than those who have degrees and are better speakers of English, said Zodwa.

According to her shes not dating anyone at the moment because theres no time for romance in her life, and no man would understand the life she led.

The event organiser, known as DJ Zoe, said she invited Zodwa because people from Nelspruit are fond of her, and she will continue to invite her to upcoming events.

I honestly cant say much about the video, but I can say its what Zodwas image is all about, said DJ Zoe.

A week ago Zodwa retaliated to comedian Celeste Ntulis interview at Power FM that she was famous for taking off her panties in public.

Ntulis argument was why arent South Africans celebrating normal working women and she said she was disgusted by the way she promotes her brand.
Tamale Fashion Show

16.01.2018 LISTEN

The biggest fashion event ever to hit Tamale metropolis, dubbed the [Tamale fashion week] is slated to come of on Friday 9th February to Saturday the 10th of February, 2018. The event will be hosted at Picorna Hotel.

The theme for the maiden edition; Vintage Meets Culture will have a blend of both traditional and modern fashion apparel. This event will bring together over twenty fashion designers, models with requisite skills, hair stylists, makeups artists, photographers from all over Ghana.

Tamale fashion week (#TFW2018) aims to promote made in Ghana goods and the Ghanaian culture by showcasing innovative and breath taking designs and crafts.

#TFW2018 will be the platform for upcoming designers to showcase their craftsmanship, as well as already established designers to dazzle us with latest innovation.

The rundown for #TFW2018 features; An educative seminar on fashion, A makeup demonstration with the renowned makeup artist, Marcel of Golden Touch and Beauty Center. An exhibition of creative designs and crafts for sales. Then finally, a fashion show to be rocked by models with requisite skills who will be strutting the runway by showcasing the various collections of participating designers.

The flagship fashion show will see breathtaking musical performances, cultural dance and a creme-de-la-creme red-carpet session to celebrate fashion designers and fashionists.

Northern Television (NTV) and Suhupielli FM are the official #TWF2018 media partners. Various bloggers like Savannah lifestyle, Debonair Afrik and many more would keep their fingers on the keyboard to trend #Tamale Fashion Week as well as various radio stations in the Tamale metropolis will promote this flagship event as well.

The event is under the auspices of Rayaz Agency; the first modeling agency in Tamale and Phyll Quahsey; and emerging designer from KNUST based in Accra.

Sponsors for the event are; Picorna Hotel, Golden Touch Beauty Center, Creative photography, captured images.

Source: Nubian-Entertainment
Northern Ghana

16.01.2018 LISTEN

The Ghana Music Industry is one of the biggest industries on the African Continent which for several decades has being very vibrant in producing artistes/musicians that get a global attention.

Undisputedly, the Northern Region is not different when it comes to producing talented musicians who also contribute to the growth of the music industry in Ghana.

Ghana360news.com presents to you the 2017 Northern Ghana Top 10 Artistes who worked hard to contribute to the recognition of the Ghanaian Showbiz.

2017 Top 10 Northern Artistes.

10. Wizchild

Wizchild is one of the best upcoming artistes who have worked tirelessly in 2016 to prove how ready he was to join the competition in the Northern Music industry. He raps and sings. He is young, vibrant, versatile and very talented. Wizchild blends Hausa, Twi, Dagbani and English in his music. He made his biggest appearance in 2016 during Maccasios Music Video Premiere at Radach Hall and Conference Centre. In 2017, he officially signed and joined the Do More Talk Less (DMTL) music group. He shined more after the group released their debut song DMTL and has since been accepted by music lovers. He released 3 hit songs Adaha, Zagsati and Mama in 2017. Astonishingly, the upcoming singer/rapper who just all of the sudden appeared in the northern music performed at TV3 @ 50, Miss Ghana, Whatsapp TV Bash and Miss Tourism Ghana where Okyea Kwame stood and shot him (Wizchild) a video which showed a sign of real talent and Reggie Zippy also gifted him money. Wizchild as a new artiste in total performed on 110 different stages (Events) in 2017.

9. Sarauta

Saurata won the Upper East Artiste of the Year at the 2017 Northern Entertainment Awards. He performed on almost all the big events organized in Northern Region including Double Rave Show by Fancy Gadam and Ninsala Album Launch by Maccasio. The rapper/singer organized his own show dubbed Subanche Concert which was massively attended. Some of his hit songs are Sunbache ft Maccasio, We Run Dat City ft Iwan, Drop the Zani ft Fancy Gadam and Sunguna ft NT4.

8. Game Boy

Northern Ghana is one of the places where music fans living in it do not really give much interest and attention to the dancehall music. But with all these challenges, Game Boy worked hard throughout the year 2017 to prove that he really deserves to be recognized as one of the best young up and coming musicians in the Upper West Region. He won the Artiste of the Year, Upper West at the 2017, Northern Entertainment Awards and Artiste of the Year at the 2017 PROMAS. He had the largest fan base in Wa which was manifested when he had a sold out show at his album launch.

7. One9ra

One9ra has been consistent in his singing delivery since he won the Discovery of the Year at the 2017 Northern Entertainment Awards. He performed on about 90% events organized in Northern Region. He is the only singer who has been featured by about 90% musicians in the north particularly in 2017. Almost all the top northern based musicians featured him on their song and this shows how relevant he was in 2017 and how his talent was appreciated. Some of the top musicians who featured him on their songs include Maccasio, Ataaka, Double Tee, Don Sigli etc. Some of his hit tracks in 2017 that enjoyed massive radio play include Give It To Me ft Maccasio, Oyoyo, Pagdede, Party Hard ft Episode, Follow Follow and Eze ft Gaffachi.

6. Double Tee

Unndisputedly, Double Tee is the 3rd Force artiste/rapper in the Northern Region. Yes besides Fancy Gadam and Maccasio in the Northern Showbiz, in Tamale he is the 3rd most talked about artiste in the Northern Region. His creativity and rap skills have helped him to maintain his relevancy in the northern music industry in the north. Most music fans understand him to be a comic and controversial rapper in which he has being consistent since 2017. He appeared on about 80% big events organized in Tamale. His song Nzo Issah won the Best Music Video of the year 2017 at the 2017 Northern Entertainment Awards. He also organised his own show in 2017 which was quite patronized. He released several controversial songs like Gmaa, Shei Ko Shei and Kadi Puli which made him a topic for several discussions on both Radio and TV across the region. Beside the controversial songs, he also released couple of nice songs like 69, New Guy, Azaa Mbala etc which have been enjoying massive radio play since.

5. Sherifatu Ganu

Sherifatu Gunu since 2016 has not been enjoying the kind of stardom Fancy Gadam and Maccasio have being enjoying within the northern music fraternity. But she has always been that artiste who works hard to make herself relevant in the northern music industry. She recently won the Ghanaian Traditional Artiste of the Year at the 2017 Ghana Music Awards UK. She organized a free concert in Tamale in 2017 at the forecourt of Dakpema Placae to preach peace. Sharifatu Gunu performed Miss Ghana 2017 and she was honoured with International Diploma for promoting human sciences.

4. Wiyaala

The Ghanaian Afropop Artiste of international acclaim, Wiyaala may have not been given much attention or did not get much attention from the Northern music fans and industry players in 2017. This may be, because she has concentrated much to do her things beyond Northern Ghanas belt. But no doubt she is a hardworking songstress and she has been working hard since she made her name in reality shows in Accra, she established a solo career in 2013 with the hit single Rock My Body, which won her two awards at the 2014 first edition of the All Africa Music Awards, the Most Promising Artiste in Africa and Revelation of The African Continent. In 2017 she won the Young and Gifted Award at 2017 Ghana Women of the Year honors. Wiyaala headlined London African Music Festivals launch party which was held in London. She Spoke at the Impact Music Conference in 2017 held in Accra. She toured international countries and performed on high profile platforms.

3. Maccasio

As it is well and largely understood by people who follow northern music, you hardly here people discussing Fancy Gadam without discussing Maccasio. The two artistes have taken advantage of their rivalry to sell themselves and their music wisely, in the Ghana Music Industry. Beside this, Maccasio is one of the artistes who have worked so hard in 2017. Even though his last show for 2016 was 69 For Peace Concert and early 2017, he came up with Too Big Concert with Shatta Wale, both of them headlined the event. At the latter of 2017, he came up with Ninsala Album Launch at Aliu Mahama Sports Stadium and headlined MTN Damba Fest at the Tamale Jubilee Park. Some industry players couldnt tell whether the turnout of all the shows were more than or equaled Fancy Gadams show. All his events in 20017 were successful. The young rising rapper also recorded hit songs like Ninsala, Koo Nineey ft Don Sigli, Too Big ft Shatta Wale and Inside ft Zeal (VVIP). Maccasio also staged a show (Northern Explosion) at the Accra Sports Stadium which was successfully patronized. He won the 2017 Northern Entertainment Awards Best Collaboration of the Year with Koo Niney, 2017 Northern Entertainment Artiste of the Year, 2017 Northern Entertainment Best Rapper of the Year and 2017 Social Media Personality at the Peoples Celebrity Awards. No doubt the rivalry between him and Fancy Gadam gave them both a solid hype since 2016.

2. Rocky Dawuni

The first Ghana Grammy nominee, Rocky Dawuni, straddles the boundaries between Africa, the Caribbean and the U.S. to create his appealing Afro Roots sound that unites generations and cultures. Dawuni has shared the stage with Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel, Jack Johnson, Bono, Jason Mraz, Janelle Monae and John Legend, among many others. Named one of Africas Top 10 global stars by CNN, he has showcased his talent at prestigious venues such as The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center and The Hollywood Bowl. In June 2017 he joined the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau alongside musician / activist / surfer Jack Johnson in Toronto for World Environmental Day in association with the Government of Canada on the UN Environment. Rocky was also featured on two panels as a speaker at the prestigious Cannes International Festival of Creativity 2017 in France in association with the UN Foundation, the Global Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves and McCann World Group. He hosted and performed at the ozone Awards in Monttreal, Canada on 23rd November, 2017. Rocky Dawuni in 2017 together with H.E Samira Bawumia were appointed as Ambassadors for Clean Cook Stoves.

1. Fancy Gadam

Undoubtedly, Fancy Gadam is one of the artistes who have worked hard since 2016 in Ghana and not just in the Northern Region. Fancy Gadam as at 2016 was the first young rising singer in Ghana who set a record by filling the Tamale Sports Stadium now Aliu Mahama Sports Stadium and went to Accra to organise Gadam Nation Concert at the National Theatre which also had a massive turnout even though that was his first show organised outside the Northern Region and that got people talking about him. This effort all contributed to his success in winning the 2017 VGMA New Artist of the year and Bass Awards Discovery of the Year. After he had won these two prestigious awards in 2017, several people particularly who couldnt believe he (Fancy Gadam) deserved to win the award started observing him to weigh if indeed he deserved to win those awards. Again, he proved beyond expectations, he deserved the awards especially after releasing one of GH 2017 best songs Total Cheat which featured Africas best rapper Sarkodie. After the release of the song, he toured some parts of Ghana like Kumasi (Baba Yara Sports Stadium), Aliu Mahama Sports Stadium in Tamale and Bukum Arena in Accra, with massive succesful shows. He won the Favorite Music Video with his song Total Cheat at the latter of 2017 from Ghana Peoples Celebrities Awards and finished the year with one of the best song with quality video in Africa which trended on several media platforms across Ghana and even some parts of Africa.

Compiled by King Hassan/Ghana360news.com
16.01.2018 LISTEN

Husband of Ghanaian gospel diva-Joyce Blessing, Dave Joy, has said nothing will stop them from doing the work of God.

Speaking in an interview with on Suncity 97.1 FM in Sunyani, Dave Joy stated that the trial and temptations signifies growth, hence, they are not worried about it.

This job is physical and spiritual. My bible teaches me that if you know how to fight, he wont fight for you. The bible said on Matthew 5 that blessed are those how are being persecuted because of the name of God. It is like that in Ghana.

When you are going forward then your trial also increases, he preached.

Commenting on claims by some people that the report of Joyce Blessings accident during the festive season was false, Dave Joy said that they will leave the issue for God to be the judge.

Those who are saying it is not true. Were they around when the accident occurred or have they called to authenticate the story?

Did they visit Joyce at the hospital or have they asked how many people were in the vehicle? Some people even dont know her number.

Everybody is quick to say or post anything on social media for likes and comments. They wont even ask for details and they say whatever they want, he lamented.

The matter will die but relationship is also important. You were not there when God called Joyce and you do not know the covenant that He has with her.

We have left it all to God. He is the one that judges for the poor. It is God who will speak for us, Dave Joy added.

He disclosed that by the grace of God, Joyce Blessing is doing very welland nothing will stop them from doing the work of God.
Photo culled from mummybrown.com

16.01.2018 LISTEN

The Girls Get a Starring Role

Breastfeeding sounds simple enough: boob + baby = done. The reality, however, can be a bit more complicated. I just assumed that everything was going to come so naturally, and it really didn't, says Andrea Champagne of Middlebury, Connecticut, mom to Noah, 11 months.

Having a lactation consultant (find one through your hospital) or a been-there, done-that friend can help, especially with latching. (A baby with a good latch swallows regularly and doesn't leave your nipples sore.) Even for parents of bottle-fed babies, the schedule can be daunting. The average newborn will eat every two to three hours, says Nancy M. Silva M.D., a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a board-certified pediatrician in Brandon, Florida. Kirsten Taylor of Minneapolis nurses her 4-month-old daughter Margot, bottle-feeds her, then pumps. Sometimes I only have 30 minutes before she's ready to start the next feeding, Taylor says. The long hours are worth it. In addition to bonding, breastfeeding mamas burn about 500 calories daily, help their uterus contract and have lower rates of ovarian and breast cancer, says Dr. Silva. Plus, it's free!

Just the Two of Us

Your partner's back at work, and your mother-in-law just left for the airport. That means you're on your own. Eep! Start with a schedule: eat, play, nap, take a walk around the block. Keep expectations low on how much you'll get done  taking care of baby and sneaking in ZZZs should be your first priority. Help differentiate day and night by taking a shower and getting dressed, even if you'll be staying in all day. (Put the bouncy seat in the bathroom while you wash your hair.) Relish the cuddle time  especially in those first weeks. There's nothing better than reading a book with Margot sleeping against my chest, Taylor says. When your baby's alert and active, usually after eating, read to her, show her toys and give her wiggle time on the floor. Five to 10 minutes of playtime is plenty for a young baby, says clinical psychologist Elizabeth Lombardo Ph.D.

Chasing ZZZs

The good news? Newborns sleep an average of 14 to 16 hours a day. The not-so-good news? Most get their shut-eye just a few hours at a time. Avoid feeling like an extra on The Walking Dead by actually following that age-old advice: Nap when baby naps  and start immediately after you put baby down, says Ellen Robinson, a mom of two from Seattle. Don't go around and clean your house, she says. The clock is ticking; you need to lie down. Take comfort in knowing that the interrupted shut-eye won't last forever. Between 3 and 4 months, your baby may sleep for five-hour stretches, says Dr. Silva. Set the stage for longer snoozes with a consistent bedtime routine (bath, lullaby, snuggle) starting between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. Got a night owl? Reset his internal clock with eye contact and steady conversation in the morning and dim lights and hushed tones at night. Champagne gets extra sleep by sharing the night shift with her husband. She says, in the earliest days, he would change Noah's diaper and hand him over to me so I could nurse.

Don't forget the Kitchen Sink

Your new roommate comes with a lot of stuff, making trips out more complicated than planning Thanksgiving dinner. New mom Jacqueline Stone of Baltimore experienced that firsthand when she and her husband took 4-day-old Colton to his first doctor visit. He wanted to eat, and as soon as he ate, he pooped, then he wanted to eat again, she recalls. It took two hours to get him into the car seat. My husband and I were like, Are we ever going to leave the house again? Give yourself extra time  and bring a second set of hands if you can. Also, carry a shirt for you and changes of clothes for baby. I packed everything but socks for my firstborn son, says mom of two Renee Baumbarger. He peed on his feet  just his feet!

Spa Day Ahead

Sooner or later, even the most head-over-heels mom needs a break. Stone's mother played babysitter while she headed to the gym. It was weird not being with him, but it was nice to get away, she says. Aim to go out baby-free for at least a couple of hours or so every week to give yourself a breather. Head out immediately after a breastfeeding session to max out your time. (For longer trips, leave backup bottles.) One of the best parts of leaving is the reunion when you return. (Or sneak out during naptime, and she'll never know you left!)

Frisky Business

Nervous about jumping back into the sack? You're not alone. Many women are apprehensive at first, says Mary Rosser M.D., a women's health specialist at Montefiore Medical Center and assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. After all, your vajayjay has been through a lot. Most docs recommend holding off on intercourse until after your first postpartum checkup (usually four to six weeks after delivery). But don't be surprised if you want to wait longer. Let's face it, a post-baby belly, hormonal changes and constant fatigue can be worse than a cold shower. Ease into it with gentle foreplay and extra lubrication. Also, side-by-side or you on top may feel best. Go slow, says Kayla Riley-Abshire, a mom of two from Watonga, Oklahoma. Don't expect to be a vixen right out of the gate.

Milking It

Breastfeeding ? Check. Backup supply of milk? Now's the time. Pumping is key for daycare, me time and daddy's share of the feedings. Get the right equipment: a double electric breast pump if you plan to go back to work; a single hand-operated pump if you don't plan to pump regularly. Lanolin cream soothes sore nipples, and a hands-free nursing bra lets you multitask. Start by pumping once at about the same time every day  you may get more milk after baby's first morning feeding. If your baby isn't around, get things flowing by smelling a burp cloth with his scent. Start with gentle suction and adjust the pump to imitate your baby's nursing strength and style. (Cranking the dials to full-blast won't make more milk; it will just leave you sore.) You know what they say about a watched pot? The same applies here. Focus on a photo of baby and not how much milk is coming out. One session should last about 10 to 20 minutes  until the flow stops or a minute or two longer if you want to up your milk supply.

Office Space

After being with baby 24/7 for his first weeks, returning to work can be a shock to the system, to say the least. I'm not a big crier  my wedding day, not a tear  but I cried so much the first time I had to drop him off at daycare, says Champagne, who went back to her full-time job when Noah was 4 months old. Make the transition easier by restarting midweek and rehearsing your strategy for getting the whole family dressed, fed and out the door on time. Once you're back on the clock, maximize your time with baby by planning on quick meals or takeout for the first few weeks at least, and have your groceries delivered by netgrocer.com or another site. Got the missing-the-baby blues? Flip through photos of your little one, especially while pumping. And focus on the positive  adult interaction!
The Kumasi Central Police Command, on Thursday, January 11, intercepted a bus heading to Niger from Kumasi loaded with substances suspected to be Indian Hemp.

The bus was loaded with goods from the Boko Station in Kumasi and was intercepted at Buoho in the Afigya-Kwabre District of the Ashanti Region.

Briefing the press on the arrest, ACP Nuhu Jango, the Kumasi Central Police Commander, said 47 parcels the suspected narcotics were found in a large compartment under the car following a tip-off.

The driver Zack Yakubu, 37, and his mate Adamu Zibo, 30, have been arrested and are in police custody and assisting with further investigations.

The nationality of the two suspects has yet to be confirmed.

The vehicle was first impounded following which a thorough check for the suspected narcotics was conducted the next day [Friday, January 12].

We did not get any positive results [initially] but our intelligence was that there were substances suspected to be narcotics in the bus and that it was concealed somewhere under the back left tire. A compartment had been created there, ACP Jango.

The police eventually found the compartment under the vehicle and were able to retrieve well-compressed leaves suspected to be Indian hemp.

There were 47 parcels and we have retained those parcels. Our intention is to send them to the lab to confirm whether they are indeed narcotic drugs or otherwise, ACP Jango stated.
We all post photos of our loved ones  especially adorable children  on social media all the time without ever giving any thought to the potential legal consequences, but as this recent case in Italy proves, posting photos of other people online is not as simple as we all think it is.

Last year, a 16 year-old Italian boy took his mother to court for constantly posting photos of him on Facebook without his consent. The boy claimed that his mothers actions had such a serious impact on his social life that he was considering transferring to a high-school in the United States so he could start over.

One December 23, 2017, Judge Monica Velletti of the first section of the civil court in Rome made a historical decision, ruling in favor of the teen, and ordering the mother to delete all references of him from her social media account by February 1, 2018, or risk a fine of 10,000 ($12,270).

Italian media reports that, according to court documents, the 16-year-old and his mother have been in an open conflict since she and his father got divorced. After the separation, the mother allegedly started posting photos and details of her sons personal life almost compulsively, going as far as referring to him as a mental patient and comparing him to a killer.

In her 9-page sentence, judge Velletti argues that the massive presence of photos and private details of the 16-year-old on his mothers social media justifies his reluctance to continue studying in a social context in which intimate details of his personal life are widely accessible online.

The Italian judge that the teen requests that he be transferred to a school in the US, in order for him to stay away from the current social context, in which all of his fellow high-school students are aware of his personal details, made known by his mother with constant and systematic use of social networks.

Lawyer Giuseppe Croari told Euronews that the mother had violated Facebooks terms and conditions by posting her sons pictures and effectively claiming copyright over his data. Italian copyright law clearly states that the subject of the photo owns the copyright, and express permission is required before it can be published on social media.

The mother has been order to stop posting updates, photos or videos of her 16 year-old son and to delete all data on him from her social media accounts by February 1, 2018. Failure to comply with the judges ruling will result in a 10,000 euro fine.

This unusual case follows that of an 18-year-old, who, two years ago, sued her parents for posting over 500 photos of her on Facebook, without her consent. Such cases have become more frequent all around the world, and legal experts are warning parents not to post photos of their children on social media without first asking for permission. Apart from legal consequences, they also risk exposing the minors to more dangerous threats, like cyber-bullying by their peers.
Citi Business News' checks have shown that industry's growth as has been touted by the government have been largely influenced by the oil sector.

A development, some Economists also believe could have serious implications on the economy considering the exhaustive nature of the country's oil resources.

The revelation follows President Akufo Addo's claims that industry has seen phenomenal growth.

Speaking at the commissioning of the Twyford Ceramics Factory at Shama in the Western region over the weekend, President Akufo Addo narrated how his administration has transformed industries growth from (-0.5%) to 17 percent as at September 2017.

Figures from the Ghana Statistical Service show that between January and September 2017, industry grew by 15.6 percent on the average.

The industrial sector of the economy comprises mining and quarrying which also includes oil exploration activities, water and sewerage, manufacturing and construction.

For the nine months (January to September 2017), mining and quarrying led with the growth of 32.8%, 75% and 40.8 percent in the first, second and third quarters respectively.

The Director of Economic Statistics at the Ghana Statistical Service, Mr. Asuo Afram explains this development.

Following mining and quarrying in terms of increased growth is the water and sewerage subsector.

Meanwhile, the construction recorded the least growth under industries.

Its growth stood at 2.6 percent as at September 2017.

It is unclear what may have led to this but some have attributed the arrears owed contractors as possible reasons for the marginal growth.
The Deputy Information Minister has tasked the media to strengthen its watchdog role this year and shed light on neglected but important social challenges for redress.

Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah says the media as partners in development have a crucial role to play in helping draw attention to ignored problems in society so stakeholders can collectively find solutions to them.

The Member of Parliament for Ofoase-Ayirebi noted that although the government is tackling societys problems gradually, the media has the ability to stimulate quick action by highlighting issues that are yet to be attended to.

He said this over the weekend while addressing a press soiree organized by the Information Ministry for journalists in the Ashanti Region.

Citing CNNs story in 2017 on slave trade of Africans in Libya, he said, all over the world, you will notice that its not only about what government is doing and what the society is saying. But the media is gradually taking interest in certain social matters that ought to be brought to the attention of the entire society to tackle.

Mr Oppong-Nkrumah said the media has been crucial in channeling information on government policies to the people and giving the administration objective feedback that has helped shape its initiatives.

Our friends in the media are partnersif you dont give us the platform to explain issues to the people of Ghana, our message will not go far.

"If you dont help us understand what the people are saying and the kind of feedback that the people are giving us, we will go astray, he observed.

Mr Oppong-Nkrumah called for a deepening of that relationship this year.

As we start the New Year, we want to deepen that partnership and ask you to continue sharing with us that feedback, he added.

He told the media government will in 2018 prioritize job creation and improving economic conditions since it has succeeded in stabilizing the macroeconomy over the last one year.

Governments priority last year was to restore stability to the Ghanaian economy and to commence work on some of our major policy initiatives promised during the 2016 campaignwe have made significant strides in restoring macro stability

"In 2018, government seeks to focus very strongly on improving job creation and further improving economic conditions in the country, he said.
President Akufo-Addo has announced that as from January this year, non-residential users of electricity in the country would enjoy an average of 14% reduction in electricity tariffs.

According to President Akufo-Addo, not only has Government succeeded in normalising the power situation in the country, we now want to boost private business in our country.

Thus, the President indicated that from January this year, the non-residential tariff rate, which is the rate which includes all of you here, is being reduced by an average of 14%. For barbers, it is being reduced by 18%; for hairdressers and beauticians, 15.7%, and for tailors, 9.8%.

President Akufo-Addo continued, An average bill last year was GH562 a month. With this reduction from January, it is coming down to GH473 a month, which means GH88 has been taken from the electricity tariff that you pay. We want to encourage private business, and make business stand on its feet.

The President made this known on Monday, 15th January, 2017, at the opening of the 8th Salon Academy of the National Association of Beauticians and Hairdressers, held at the MensahSarbah Hall, University of Ghana, Legon.

Expressing his appreciation to the Association for their support of his candidature in the run-up to the 2016 elections, President Akufo-Addo noted that one of the pledges he made to them, the implementation of the Free Senior High School policy, is now a reality.

By the grace of God, Free SHS, which some said was not possible or would be possible only after 20 years, is now a reality in our country. Free SHS has come to stay. It is going to be a central feature of the education architecture of our country. We are not going to go back on it. By 2020, all students in form 1, form 2 and form 3, would enjoy the free SHS policy, he said.

The statement was met with a rapturous round of approval from the hundreds and hundreds of beauticians and hair dressers at the packed MensahSarbah Hall.

In response to the request by the President of the Association, Mrs Joyce Lamptey, for tax exemptions for start-up businesses, the President stated that in the 2018 budget, there is a provision which ensures that young entrepreneurs, up to the age of 35, will enjoy a tax holiday for the first five years of operation, before being taxed in the subsequent years.

Touching on the provision of skills training, he revealed that, up until now, all the institutions responsible for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in the country, were under so many organisations.

My government has made the decision to centralise all of them (TVET) under the Ministry of Education, so we can scale up TVET training, and make it better and more robust for you. The demand for an industrial park in every region is part of the NPP manifesto, and you know that all the pledges I have made to the Ghanaian people, I am going to fulfil each and every one of them, he said.

In conclusion, President Akufo-Addo appealed for the continued support of the Association, stressing that this government is your government; it is the government of the private sector. Whatever we can do to strengthen the private sector, we will do it. We have come to do a job to raise Ghana up, and, with your support, we will raise Ghana up. The Black Star is going to shine and shine and shine again.

-Starrfmonline
The Director-General of the Ghana Ports and Harbors Authority, Paul Asare Ansah, says Ave Maria Resort in Tema will be pulled down by the end of January 2018 as part of the $1.5 billion Tema Port Expansion Project.

According to him, the owner of the Resort, Theresa Ntim, is aware that the $10 million facility will be pulled down.

Mr. Asare Ansah explained to Citi News that the location of Ave Maria Resort was to be occupied by the railway terminal under the expansion project.

We sympathize and empathize with the owners of Ave Maria. We have been talking to them for the past couple of months, if not years. She did not understand why her facility must be taken out. We have impressed upon her. We have gone back and forth.

During the tussle that involved legal battles and accusations of intimidation, Mr. Asare Ansah suggested some inconsistency on the part of the Resorts owners saying, at certain points, she would agree that she would have to move out of the location at a certain point, she would come back and say no.

We have made offers and counter-offers as to compensation and so forth. The owner took us to court to place injunctions and restrain us from demolishing the facility. The court ruled in our favour and she wouldn't understand, he recounted.

But as at now, she [Theresa Ntim,] has come to appreciate the fact that the facility will go, Mr. Asare Ansah stated.

Demolishing the facility was the last option for the Authority, according to the GPHA Director-General, who said they tried to see if the project could be realigned to accommodate the Resort but they did all the scenarios and they came out with a defined decision that it was not possible to accommodate Ave Maria.

Alleged intimidation

In October 2017, staff of the Resort were reportedly accosted by some security personnel of the GPHA.

There was some earth movement by a bulldozer which blocked the front gate of the Resort, trapping staff and guests .

A Board Member of Ave Maria Beach Resort in Tema, has accused the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority (GPHA), of intimidating the resort for over two years.

A Board Member of the Resort, Charlotte Ntim, in a Citi News interview, also said the police offered little protection to the Resort and its staff during a recent attack by security personnel of GPHA.

Theresa Ntim previously lamented that the tension between the Resort and the GPHA was indicative of a country that doesn't value heritage.

Rooms at the resort that were used by Kwame Nkrumah and the Queen of England

This Resort is said to have been recommended to be preserved by the Center of the World Committee, as it is viewed as having great value for Ghana's tourism sector.

It has a long heritage for hosting the likes of Ghana's First President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah as a regular patron, and Queen Elizabeth when she visited Ghana.
16.01.2018 LISTEN

A security expert with the Kofi Annan International Peace Keeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) is asking the police to build trust with the citizens as it attempts to avert a possible terrorist attack on Ghana.

Dr Kwasi Anings appeal comes hours after three men were arrested in Odorkor a suburb of Accra, Monday, with hand grenades and other explosives.

It is unclear the motives of the suspects even though Joy News sources have linked one of the suspects to some international terrorist group.

The police have confirmed the attack but will not comment on the motives. They will not also comment on reports the suspects may have some ties with terrorist groups.

Dr Kwasi Aning

The explosives were intercepted based on police intelligence. Three persons (names withheld) have also been arrested in connection with the intercepted explosives and are in police custody, the police said in a statement.

The statement further asked the public to volunteer information related to the case.

Speaking to Joy News Editor Evans Mensah on the matter the head of research at KAIPTC said even though he is concerned about the arrest he is not surprised.

According to Dr Aning, Ghanas border security is completely non-existent adding getting small explosives into the country through our borders is terribly easy.

He said the way to fight the canker of a possible terrorist attack is to deepen inter-security partnership as well share information across borders.
The National Organiser of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has condemned the actions of the Economic and Organised Crime Offices (EOCO) against the Deputy EC Chair.

Kofi Adams said it is worrying the manner in which state institutions are acting in ways that violate peoples right.

He said it is wrong the manner in which EOCO went about getting Georgina Opoku Amankwah out of her office.

Mr Adams told Joy News Evans Mensah on the Newsnight programme Monday that the NDC is yet to meet to take a decision on the matter.

Hopefully tomorrow we will have a meeting and I am sure this matter will come up for detailed discussions," he said.

According to him, there are more civil and decorous ways of getting the Deputy EC Chair to give them more time to conclude their investigations than using Rambo-style to oust her.

His comment comes after EOCO officers invaded the premises of the EC at Ridge in Accra Monday with the sole aim of forcing Mrs Amankwah out of her office.

Mrs Amankwah is reported to have defied their orders to stay out of the office six months after she was interdicted by EOCO.

She has been under investigation after several claims of financial impropriety were made against her.

Related: Deputy EC boss refuses to leave as EOCO personnel invade office

Also indicted are two others; the EC Chairperson, Charlotte Osei and Deputy in charge of Operations Amadu Sulley.

All three are subjects of investigation and possible impeachment, however, the two have been going about their duties as mandated by the law.

This Mrs Amankwah thought was unfair and therefore decided to resume Monday.

However, Joy News' Latif Iddrisu says three operatives from EOCO made their way into the premises of the EC to force her out of office.

But she has resisted, insisting, the action by the EOCO is unconstitutional.

She said only the president has the power to interdict her. Mrs Amankwa has locked herself up in her office daring the EOCO officials to break in.

Cool heads later prevailed with Mrs Amankwaa agreeing to give the EOCO a 14-day grace period to conclude with investigations after which she will return to office.

The behaviour as if it is a military takeover that we are experiencing must seize and state institutions must work in a way that is acceptable, he said.

He said he watched events live on TV and was wondering what was happening to warrant fully armed military moving into the EC premises.

Mr Kofi Adams questioned if there were to engage in any counter-attack or there is some robbery that they were going to stop.

It is absolutely wrong. The settlement that they reached after all the show of power could have been reached easily if they had made time for engagement," he added.
The Government under President Akufo-Addo in 2017 chalked a historic feat in the macroeconomic sector by achieving its Fiscal Deficit Target.

This is the first since 2006.

A visibly elated Dr. Bawumia said the achievement was historic, expressing gratitude to government appointees for their diligence.

The Government created fiscal space by capping of earmarked funds to 25% of government revenue and realigning expenditures to government priorities, the Vice President of the Republic, Dr. Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia, disclosed at the opening of the 2018 New Year School and Conference at the University of Ghana, Legon on Monday, January 15, 2018.

No government has been able to do this even though many have expressed the intent to," the Vice President noted in relation to the capping initiative.

According to him, the government stayed current and focused on payments to statutory funds such as GETFund, NHIS, DACF, SSNIT, Road Fund in 2017 while paying arrears inherited from the previous Mahama administration.

He added that the government also validated arrears inherited for the Statutory Funds, Capex, Compensation, and goods and services at the end of 2016 which amounted to GH3.1 billion. About two-thirds of the total arrears was statutory, adding out of the total, the government has paid GH1.45 billion in 2017.

"In fact, in just one year we have paid almost half of the arrears accumulated by the NDC government while staying current on existing obligations, Dr. Bawumia emphasized.

He further added, "it was in this regard that I find it amusing that some latter day saints are asking government to pay arrears owed to contractors after recklessly accumulating the arrears in the first place and not paying it themselves."

The 69th edition of the New Year School and Conference is under the theme: Job Creation for Accelerated National Development: The Role of the Private Sector and is scheduled to end Friday, January 19, 2018.
16.01.2018 LISTEN

Ten illegal miners, who were arrested last week by the National Small Scale Mining Taskforce for engaging in illegal mining on the Offin River have been granted bail by a Cape Coast Circuit court.

The ten, all Ghanaians are Tokoli Joshua, student, 20, Ayiku Akle, mechanic, 30, Mumuni Ibrahim, unemployed, 16, Vidogo Atta, unemployed, 22, Evans Tetteh, unemployed, 22 and Richard Atogli, unemployed, 16.

They rest are, Ben Sabla, unemployed, 22, Nana Yaw Barima, driver, 25, Daniel Ayitey, fisherman, 26 and John Acquah, driver's mate, 20, they all pleaded not guilty and were granted bail to the sum of GH?6,000.00 each , with two sureties each to be justified.

They were charged with conspiracy to conduct illegal mining on River Ankobra and also undertaking small scale mining operations without licence contrary to section 23 of the Criminal Offences Act 1960, Act 29 and section 99 (2) of the Minerals and Mining Act 2006 Act 703, as amended as Act 900 of 2015.

The Court presided over by Mr. Kofi Seshie Ameteweewas adjourned the case to Monday February 5.

Prosecuting, Police Sergeant Comfort Akorfa Banini told the court that all accused were Ghanaians and were residents at Dominase near Dunkwa-On-Offin in the Upper Denkyira East District.

She said on Friday January 5,2018 at about 1300hours, the National Small Scale Taskforce was on its usual patrol at Bepotenten, near Dunkwa-On-Offin when they arrested accused who were prospecting for gold on the Offin River.

The Prosecutionn said they were handed over to the Central Regional Police Criminal Investigation Department for further investigations and after that they were charged.
Amandi Holding Limited, contractors working on the Ho Airport project will officially hand over the facility to government in March, this year.

This follows completion of work on the 25 million dollar project funded by the Ghana Airport Company Limited (GACL) to boost economic activities and tourism in the Volta Region, Dr Archibald Yao Letsa, the Volta Regional Minister has said at a press soiree organized by the Ministry of Information in Ho.

The project, which was scheduled for completion in September 2016, has 1,900 metres runway, traffic control tower, 1,150 capacity passenger waiting area, an ultramodern air bus terminal and an automatic fire detection system.

The Airport, with the slogan, 'Ho Airport, the New Destination' is expected to host domestic and commercial flights and open up the Region for growth.

'2018 is going to be very exciting because the Airport will be operational. It will be an action year as the Region opens up for investors,' Dr. Letsa stated.

He said foundations had been laid for rapid economic and infrastructure growth in the Region and hinted of resumption of work on the Ho dual carriage and the Eastern corridor roads soon.

Mr Perry Okudzeto, a Deputy Minister of Information, said government recognized the role of the media in the development of the country and was 'building more bridges' for mutual benefit.

He said 2017 marked 'good start' for government with the launching of projects and programmes to improve agriculture, education, and job creation among others and called for support from the media and the citizenry.
16.01.2018 LISTEN

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) of Ghana has given thumbs up to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for appointing Mr Martin Amidu as the first Independent Special Prosecutor, urging the latter to live up to expectation.

The TUC believed that the appointment of Martin Amidu showed the commitment of the President to fight corruption to the end and ensure that the menace was eradicated from the country.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr Joshua Ansah, the Deputy Secretary General of the Union, said he was overwhelmed when the news came to his attention on Thursday evening.

He said the appointment of Mr Amidu had proven wrong, all people who thought that the President would be appointing people from the New Patriotic Party (NPP), saying if Mr Amidu was able to fight his own political party, it was an indication that no one would be left off the hook.

He said the appointment reiterated the President's commitment to fighting corruption no matter those involved, adding 'It tells us that the government is very serious about fighting corruption'.

'There are a lot of good lawyers, people with integrity and very knowledgeable in his (the President's) Party, but the President has lived above partisanship for appointing someone who is not from his Party,' he said.

He noted that Mr Amidu's appointment sent a strong signal to people in government that 'no matter the political colour you wear, Martin would not spare you if you fall foul to the law'.

Mr Ansah said the TUC expected that when approved by Parliament, Mr Amidu would retrieve all public funds that have gone into wrong hands to advance the development agenda of the country.

He urged Mr Amidu to go after everybody saying, it was the highest interest of TUC that corruption was clamped down completely in the Ghanaian society.

He said the TUC expected that Mr Amidu would bring to book, any individual from the NPP or the National Democratic Congress, who had worked in a public office and had links with any act of corruption.

The Union expected that when he was able to retrieve the monies, it would be saved to enhance the National Health Insurance, payment of trainee allowances, the creating of more jobs and human resource development.

Mr Ansah advised all workers and leaders to deliver their best and stay clean in whatever they did, adding that 'If you are in a leadership position, know that you will be called someday to account for your stewardship'.

President Akufo-Addo on Thursday, January 11, this year, announced the nomination of Mr Amidu as the first Independent Special Prosecutor in the annals of Ghana.

The office of the Special Prosecutor is expected to lead the fight against corruption and hold public officials both former and present accountable for graft of the Public purse.
16.01.2018 LISTEN

The Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mr David Asante-Apeatu, has said the agenda to transform the Ghana Police Service to a first class policing institution in Africa and the world is on course.

He said the foundations had been laid in the past 12 months with the training of first line supervisors of the Service and some 6,000 community police personnel for local patrols and intelligence gathering in communities.

The IGP said this in a media engagement in Ho during his official tour of the Volta Region where he visited Alavanyo, Nkonya, Hohoe, Aflao and interacted with chiefs and opinion leaders of the communities.

He also met personnel of the Service and interacted with some chiefs in the Asogli State.

Mr Asante-Apeatu said the five thematic areas underpinning the transformation agenda were being vigorously pursued with the establishment of three emergency call centres in Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi supported with motorbikes and vehicles to improve police response time, which he said was an important indicator of a world class policing.

He said the Service's E-Policing concept was also being piloted at five stations, with 15 more to join, alongside capacity building for personnel at the Police Intelligence and Professional Standards (PIPS), all aimed at effective policing.

The IGP rated the Volta Region very high in crime management and commended the media for supporting the police in efforts at protecting life and property.
16.01.2018 LISTEN

The Deputy Minister of Information, Mr Perry Okudzato has assured that the government would do whatever it takes to revive all the state media under the Ministry including the Ghana News Agency(GNA), Ghana Broadcasting Corporation(GBC) and the Information Services Department(ISD).

He said under the 2018 budget, provision had been made for the acquisition of new vehicles with the requisite gadgets to replace all the old district information vans in the country.

Mr Okudzato was speaking at a media soiree for media personnel in the Eastern Region at Koforidua.

He said the government regarded the media as a development partner and urged the media personnel to thoroughly investigate their facts before they published them.

He said within a year in office, the government had employed 15,000 nurses and 185 medical doctors who had graduated and were sitting at home.

Mr Okudzato said the government had decided to extend the media interactions to the regions to get feedback on its policies and programmes.

The Eastern Regional Minister, Mr Eric Kwakye Darfour, said the country had made several efforts to get all the streets in the country properly named without success because many of the officials of the district assemblies were not prepared to ensure the success of the programme.

He appealed to the media to try and help to ensure the success of the street naming programme throughout the country.
16.01.2018 LISTEN

The Inspector General of Police (IGP) Mr David Asante Apeatu, has commended the Volta region for recording the lowest crime rate in the country.

The IGP who was addressing chiefs of the Asogli State in Ho as part of a duty tour of the Region, said statistics attested to the fact that the region did "extremely well" in crime management in the past year.

He said the feat was worth emulating and praised the chiefs for supporting the Police in maintaining law and order in the Region.

Mr Apeatu said the Service was working towards building a peaceful and business friendly environment and called for support from all.

Togbe Lakle Howusu XII, Chief of Ho Dome and Warlord of the Asogli State, said there was an increased use in narcotic drug by the youth and asked the Police to pay attention to the development.
Dr Yaw Adu Gyamfi, the President of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), has pledged to forge an extensive collaboration with government, policy makers and regulators to ensure the effective implementation of government's industrialisation agenda.

Speaking at the investiture dinner for the AGI President and national council members on Thursday night, Dr Gyamfi said the Association would do its best to ensure the realisation of the' One District, One Factory' industrialisation policy and urged government to give the Association the chance to see the execution of the programme.

'It is my considered opinion that this industrialisation programme along with a 'Buy Made in West Africa campaign' is crucial for addressing the problem of unemployment, particularly among the youth,' he said.

The investiture held on the theme: 'Effective Regional Integration for Industrial Development,' saw representatives from trade associations in the West Africa sub-region in attendance, including the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria.

Also in attendance was the special guest of honour General Abdulsalami Alhaji Abubakar, Former President of Nigeria and Mr Traore Kalilou Ecowas Commissioner for Industry and Private Sector Promotion.

Addressing the theme of Regional integration, Dr Gyamfi said it was the only means to resolve the unemployment problem in the West Africa sub-region, adding that the current slow pace of co-operation was hurting all economies in the bloc.

He said there was the need for all countries within the sub-region to work together to ensure the benefit of investments and a common big market to facilitate exports.

'The whole region is likely to continue to lose jobs to the tigers of Asia unless we learn to work together,' he said, adding that there was the need to encourage governments to coordinate industrial policies in the ECOWAS region.

Dr Gyamfi said AGI on its part planned to work with other Manufacturer Associations in the sub-region, especially Nigeria to promote investment, collaboration, training and trade for the benefit of ECOWAS.

He said the AGI would continue to engage stakeholders in its effort to help build the economy and called on government to lend its full support by creating the enabling business environment through the implementation of the 70 per cent local procurement, enforcement of business regulations to prevent importation of sub-standard products, among others.

In his keynote address, Dr Frank Udemba Jacobs, President Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, called on governments in the sub-region not to lose sight of the industrial development agenda for which ECOWAS was set up.

He said there was also the need for governments within the region to wield the necessary political will to reject trade agreements, which would derail the foundation of industrial development within the bloc.

There was also the need to fast track common standards to ensure products were accepted in the markets of others.

Dr. Yaw Adu-Gyamfi, the AGI President, is Founder and President of the Danpong Group of Companies in Ghana. He is the Group CEO for both Danadams Pharmaceuticals Industry (Ghana) Limited and Danadams - Bakai Pharmaceutical Industry (Nigeria) Limited.

Until his election as president, he was Vice President (large-scale) of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), and he is 1st Vice President of the Ghana Employers Association (GEA). He also serves as a Commissioner on the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission, and is a former Board Chairman of the Ghana Cylinder Manufacturing Company and the Ghana Pharmacy Council.

Dr. Gyamfi holds a Doctorate degree in Pharmacy from Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and is a fellow of the West African College of Postgraduate Pharmacists. He has also completed an Executive MBA degree at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA). He obtained two Bachelor of Science degrees in both Chemistry and Mathematics from Clark-Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
Dr Vladimir Antwi-Danso, a Researcher, Consultant and Governance Expert, says the President made the right choice by nominating Mr Martin Amidu as the Independent Special Prosecutor and it shows that Government has no intention of witch-hunting.

He said the nominee had endeared himself to Ghanaians in view of his relentless passion to root out corruption in the country.

Dr. Antwi-Danso, who is also the Director of Academic Affairs of the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency on Friday, said the nominee was a man of integrity, loved Ghana and knew his job very well.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Thursday, January 11, 2018, named Mr Amidu, a former Attorney-General for the position of Independent Special Prosecutor.

Mr Amidu, an astute politician and anti-corruption campaigner, served as the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice from January 2011 to January 2012.

The nominee is noted for his relentless campaign against the abuse of public funds, which is evident in the role he played in the State Versus Woyome during the famous Waterville financial saga.

Dr Antwi-Danso said what made the nominee a perfect choice for the position was that, he was from an opposition political party, instead of the ruling party.

He said Government wanted to make sure that, the law was applied to the letter without fear or favour, irrespective of the person's political party affiliation, hence the nomination of Mr Amidu.

He said the nominee was an independent-minded person who did not even spare members of his own party, the National Democratic Congress.

'So for the President to appoint him means that he wants the Special Prosecutor to be a neutral person and I think it is a good choice.

'Initially I thought he will not accept the position, so his acceptance shows that he is determined to ensure that corruption is a thing of the past and wished him well'.

Asked whether an independent commission should have selected the nominee, he said, if the law demanded that the President was supposed to appoint a Special Prosecutor then there was nothing wrong with the selection.

He noted that the appointee would be vetted by Parliament and Ghanaians would subject him to various criticisms, and that, his approval by the Legislature would signify his acceptance by the people.

The President is supposed to forward the name of the nominee to Parliament when the House reconvenes on January 23, 2018.

GNA

By Godwill Arthur-Mensah, GNA
Organisers of the Ghana Expatriate Business Award (GEBA) have refuted the authenticity of a document tendered in as evidence in the ongoing probe into the cash-for-seat scandal.

The five-member Parliamentary Committee begun sitting last to look into the Minoritys allegations that seats were sold to expatriate business owners by the Trades Ministry and the Millennium Excellence Foundation (MEF), the awards organisers, for a chance to sit close to President Akufo-Addo.

The Minority MPs hold that the sale of the seats was extortion and whittled the dignity of the Presidency.

Appearing before the Committee on Monday, January 15, 2018, President of the awards organising agency, Ashim Morton, said a document purported to be the sponsorship package sent out to expatriate businesses is forged.

I am deeply disturbed by what I am looking at. I am very deeply disturbed on the thinking of the personality who will fabricate...and change our sponsorship package...

This document is foreign to the Foundation. I have never seen this document before. As I mentioned early on, all our sponsorship packages were in colour and if you look at the font [of the document tendered in as evidence], the font has changed, he said.

It is not clear if the document Mr Morton refers to was among those presented by the Minority as evidence of wrongdoing in the ongoing probe, however, the Minority is known to have presented some documents to the Committee to firm up their case that huge sums of money were paid into the Trades Ministry accounts by expatriate business owners.

Related: Cash-for-seat probe: Ablakwa rubbishes Morton's claim

The 'misquote'

Mr Morton and other representatives of the MEF were the third witnesses to testify before the Committee on Monday, after Minoriy MPs, Okudzeto Ablakwa -- MP for North Tongu -- and Muntaka Mubarak -- MP for Asawase and Minority Chief Whip.

Mr Morton had testified that his Foundation received the sum of GHS2,367,426.06 as part of its share of the profit made at the Ghana Expatriate Business Awards (GEBA) last year.

The MEF boss also said the amount of GHS40,000 received from the Trades Ministry for event preparatory works was paid out of the overall amount.

But this account changed after Deputy Minority leader James Avedzi raised issues with some figures on a document submitted as evidence to the Committee.

"In total how much did you receive from the Ministry," Mr Avedzi asked Mr Morton to repeat the amount the Foundation received as its profit share.

"You told us and I wrote it down the amount you claim you received from the Ministry. I just want you to repeat it," the Deputy Minority leader said.

But the question was greeted with a loud silence from the MEF president.

Mr Avedzi then quoted a figure of GHS2.4million that had earlier been supplied to the Committee, but according to Mr Morton that figure rather represented the total expenditure for the [entire] event."

"Mr Chairman I misquoted myself," he admitted, adding he will later furnish the Committee with the amount the Foundation received as its profit.

On the sale of seats to expat businesses, the MEF boss said: no one company paid a $100,000.

He said the Trades Ministry advised the event planners not to sell any seat on the presidential table to expatriates who attended it.

Mr Morton maintained the word 'President' stated on the $100,000 sponsorship package was referring to him and not president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo who was not billed to attend the event.

"I am going through this carefully to erase that notion that someone paid to sit with the Head of State. No company paid $100,000 to sit on the table," he said.

Watch more in the video below:


Three persons died on the spot when a Yutong bus on which they were travelling from Kumasi to Accra, crashed into a Man diesel trailer truck at Asuboi near Suhum on the Accra Kumasi Highway.

The Eastern Regional Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Ebenezer Tetteh, who confirmed the incident to Citi News indicated that, the other injured passengers are currently receiving treatment at the Suhum Government Hospital.

At 12 :45 pm Monday afternoon, we received information that there has been an accident at Asuboi a village close to Suhum, and when we got to the scene we saw that a Yutong bus with registration number GM-1774-16 had crashed into a Man diesel trailer truck with registration number AS-21-12.

Preliminary investigations indicated that the Yutong bus, which was travelling from Kumasi to Accra on reaching Asuboi neglected traffic regulations from the opposite direction and in the process crashed into the trailer. The three persons who died on the spot included two females and a male, whose identities are yet to be verified.

ASP Ebenezer Tetteh added that men from the regional MTTD were quickly dispatched to the scene to control traffic, meanwhile other passengers who sustained various degrees of injury are currently receiving treatment at the Suhum Government Hospital, and the bodies of the deceased have also been deposited at the hospitals morgue.

ASP Ebenezer Tetteh cautioned motorists to adhere to all road regulations to avoid accidents.

I want to use this medium to caution drivers and all road users to strictly go according to all road regulations because a little restraint on our roads can save lives.
The Dean of Studies and Research at the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS) has faulted the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) for attempting to forcibly remove Deputy Electoral Commissioner, Georgina Opoku Amankwaah, from her office on Monday.

Dr. Eric Oduro Osae has described the incident as unacceptable.

According to him, the approach used by the specialised agency was very disturbing and disappointing.

Dr Oduro Osae told the host of Adom FMs current affairs program, Burning Issues , Afia Pokua that EOCO had no right to force the Deputy Commissioner from office without a court order.

EOCO has no right to execute its work in the manner in which it occurred on Monday at the electoral body office the local governance expert stressed.

His comment comes after EOCO officers invaded the premises of the EC at Ridge in Accra Monday with the sole aim of forcing Mrs Amankwaah out of her office, the Deputy EC Chair is reported to have defied orders to stay out of the office seven months after she was interdicted by EOCO.

After the failed attempt, a closed-door meeting was held.

A 14-day has been agreed upon for EOCO to conclude its investigations into the allegations against Mrs Opoku Amankwaah.

She has been under investigation after a claim of financial impropriety were made against her, whiles two others  the EC Chairperson, Charlotte Osei, and Deputy Chair in Charge of Operations, Amadu Sulley  are also subjects of investigation and possible impeachment.

However, the two have been going about their duties unrestrained.

Dr Oduro Osae told Afia Pokua that lawyers for the Deputy Commissioner must seek court injunction from a human right court against EOCO for violating her rights.

Her legal team must go to court over violation of it client right by officials of the investigating body without any court orders Dr Oduro Osae advised.

He also pleaded with Parliament to step into the impasse at the countrys electoral body to ensure the integrity of the Commission is protected.

Dr Oduro Osae also called on the Chief Justices Committee investigating the three commissioners to expedite its work.
16.01.2018 LISTEN

By Kofi Ata, Cambridge, UK January 15, 2018

Since the suspension of one of the two Deputy Chairpersons of the Electoral Commission (EC) in July 2017, I have held the view that the suspension was unconstitutional because it did not comply with Article 146 of the 1992 Constitution. This view was confirmed last week after reading a detailed thesis on Article 146 Probe by Samson Lardy Anyenini, a Barrister at Law and the host of Newsfile (see, EC set on fire: All about the Article 146 probe, Ghanaweb, Friday January 12, 2018). Why do I say so?

The framers of the 1992 Constitution were very careful in protecting the security of tenure office for the Chairs and their Deputies and non-interference by the Executive arm of government in the affairs of three constitutional bodies, namely: The Electoral Commission, Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) and National Council for Civic Education (NCCE). Consequently, they set out a clear road map for the removal, including suspension of the three heads of the aforementioned bodies in Article 146, (same for the removal of judges of the superior courts, except the Chief Justice). For easy read, I will not bore readers with the various sections of Article 146.

The removal, including suspension of any of the three named officers of the EC, CHRAJ and NCCE (the Chairperson and the two Deputies) must start with a petition to the president, who passes the petition onto the Chief Justice to determine whether there is prima facie case. If the Chief Justice determines that there is a prima facie case, the president is informed accordingly, and a committee is established by the Chief Justice to sit on the petition. The president may and not shall suspend on the advice of the committee. This according to Samson Lardy Anyenini, means that even after the Chief Justice has established the prima facie case suspension is not automatic but must be on the recommendation of Chief Justices committee. I refer to Article146(10) Where a petition has been referred to a committee under this article, the President may-: (b) in the case of any other Justice of a Superior court or of a Chairman of a Regional Tribunal, acting in accordance with the advice of the Judicial Council, suspend that Justice or that Chairman of a Regional Tribunal.

From the above, it appears Article 146 is being complied with in the case of EC Chairperson, Mrs Charlotte Osei and Deputy Chair, Mr Amadu Sulley. However, in the case of the other Deputy Chair, Mrs Georgina Opoku Amankwah, Article 146 has not been complied with.

It was reported that the Acting Executive Director of EOCO, ACP K. K Amoah (Rtd), wrote to the EC Chair on July 4, 2017, asking her to direct three officers including Mrs Opoku Amankwah to proceed on leave in connection with investigations into the loss of GHC480,000 from the Staff Endowment Fund. Sadly, Mrs Charlotte Osie, who is a lawyer and ought to have known that neither ACP KK Amoah (Rtd) from EOCO nor she as Chairperson had authority to suspend a Deputy EC Chair, went ahead and suspended Mrs Opoku Amankwah (see EOCO storms EC to 'uproot' Deputy EC boss, Ghanaweb, January 15, 2018).

The question is, did Act 804 which created EOCO also amend Article 146 of the 1992 Constitution? The answer is absolutely NOT. EOCO therefore has no powers to even recommend, let alone direct the EC Chair, Charlotte Osei to suspend a Deputy Chair of the EC. It is unconstitutional interference in the affairs of the EC by the Executive arm of government. That was a clear breach of Article 146 and therefore unconstitutional. In fact, and on a more serious note, it amounts to usurpation of presidential powers by EOCO and Charlotte Osie because under Article 146(10) and (b) of the 1992 Constitution, only the president can suspend the Chair and Deputy Chairs of EC on the advice of a committee established by the Chief Justice as part of the impeachment process.

I am not in anyway saying that if Mrs Opoku Amankwah has mismanaged Staff Endowment Funds she should not be held accountable. All I am pointing out is that Ghana is under the rule of law, so the laws of the land particularly, the supreme law of the land (the 1992 Constitution) must be respected by the Executive, otherwise, Ghanas democracy is in danger. EOCO has powers to investigate any officers of the EC including the Commissioners and can recommend suspension of other senior staff but not the Chairperson and the two Deputies because there is a special process called Impeachment under Article 146 for doing that.

The suspension of Mrs Opoku Amankwah by EOCO and Charlotte Osei is unconstitutional and the continued presence of EOCO in her office also amounts unconstitutional interference in the performance of her duties. EOCO should not behave as if they are above the law and turn Ghana into a plantain republic

I cannot understand why President Nana Akufo-Addo, an astute Barrister will allow such constitutional infractions and even usurpation of his presidential prerogative by OECO and Charlotte Osei. What is more worrying is the fact that there is already an ongoing impeachment process against the EC Chair and her two Deputies so where does EOCO fit into that under Article 146? OECOs action on Monday January 15, 2017 is harassment of Mrs Opoku Amankwah and they should put a stop it immediately. The Attorney General should advise President Akufo-Addo to order EOCO to stop their unconstitutional acts.

I cannot understand why Mrs Opoku Amankwahs Attorney has not gone to Supreme Court to challenge the unconstitutional acts of EOCO. He must do so immediately and ask for cost from EOCO.

Kofi Ata, Cambridge, UK
Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has indicated that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government, led by President Akufo-Addo-led, has prioritized the use of the country's resources to enable it provide education for all Ghanaians.

The Vice President disclosed this in an interview with international magazine, Forbes Africa, on the subject of building bridges between the public and private sectors.

Answering a question on how the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) government would ensure a brighter future and educate the population for the next 60 years, Dr Bawumia said so we can prioritize our resources to educating our people so they become an opportunity for the country. The hope for the youth is very significant.

Ghana, under President Akufo-Addo, has for the first time been successful in implementing the Free Senior High School (SHS) policy, which benefitted about 400,000 students in 2017.

The President has pledged to sustain the initiative, which has been bedeviled with some challenges.

We want to use our resources for the benefit of our people, coupled with good management, fiscal discipline and an environment that encourages private sector participation will result in a massive growth in the economy. That is the direction we are moving in and it makes us very optimistic, he said.

He revealed that Ghana is a great place for investors.

The Vice President reiterated that we will restore macroeconomic stability so investors will get good returns for their investment.

Our markets are quite good, even the financial markets. Someone buying Cedi Bonds over US Treasury Bonds will make close to 20 times more in Ghana, even allowing for exchange rate depreciation. I think it's reasonably attractive and we will continue to work to make it so, he said.
President of the Millennium Excellence Foundation, Ashim Morton, was yesterday grilled at the 'Cash for Seat' parliamentary probe by a member of the committee and National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament (MP) for Bolgatanga East, Dr Dominic Ayine.

It was about the role of the Foundation in the organization of Ghana Expatriate Business Awards, which was in collaboration with the Ministry of Trade and Industry on December 4, 2017, to recognize the contribution of expatriate businesses to the Ghanaian economy.

Mr Ashim Morton confirmed what the Minister of Trade and Industry, Alan Kyerematen, told the probe committee last Friday that nobody was made to pay $100,000 to sit on the high table with President Nana Akufo-Addo during the ceremony.

The witness, who was accompanied by his counsel, Charles W. Zwennes and Chairman of the Foundation, Ambassador Victor Gbeho, was particularly subjected to some critical questioning by Dr Ayine, who wanted to know whether it is a norm for the Foundation to charge fees for participants to attend such programmes.

The Millennium Excellence Foundation president said that it is not the norm to levy participants of such programmes but it had been the practice for the Foundation to seek sponsorship towards such programmes, including many others held in Nigeria and Kenya.

According to Mr Ashim Morton, his organization, which had been involved in such prestigious awards ceremonies, has unique fund-raising expertise, claiming that that had been significant in getting presidential assent in whichever country it had organized similar events.

He said that apart from Kenya and Nigeria where it had organized Lifetime African Achievement Awards with presidential support, the Foundation had also organized similar events during the regimes of President J.J. Rawlings, President J.A. Kufour, the late Prof Atta Mills and President John Mahama without charging any fees from any participants.

According to him, it goes out to potential sponsors and presents to them its objectives, the reasons for organizing such events and the benefits that would eventually go to them (sponsors) and based on that, corporate organisations and individuals voluntarily donate towards such cause.

Dr Ayine was insistent on how much the organization was able to raise during the time of former President J.J. Rawlings when the event was held in 1999, but counsel for the witness, Mr Zwennes, intervened and said that it had been a long time since that event was held and so his client did not have 'elephant memory' to remember that off-hand.

Mr Morton said that the impression also created by another witness, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa  NDC MP for North Tongu  when he appeared before the committee, that three companies paid $100,000 each before the event was held, is completely false.

According to him, the three companies mentioned by Mr Ablakwa are all subsidiaries of Interplast Group of Companies, which paid the only $100,000  not before the event but rather after it.

He explained that Mr Saeed Fakhry, chairman of the Interplast Group, had been a personal friend to him for years that was why he made that contribution towards the successful organization of the event.

He further explained to the committee that when he sent out the sponsorship proposals to prospective sponsors and said that those who would be able to pay the $100,000 accompanied by those other benefits would sit with the 'president' on the high table, he did not mean the President of the Republic of Ghana but rather he (the president of the Millennium Excellence Foundation).
It is no longer a secret. A new way to securely store and manage land transactions is set to hit the African Continent with promising outcomes. Earlier in November 2016, His Excellency Dr. Bawumia Vice President of Ghana announced the, shifting of focus to digitisation of land registration in 2018.

Land acquisition in Ghana, Kenya and other African countries is riddled with frequent cases of fraud, distrust and malfeasance at many levels. But all that would be a thing of the past.

The disruptive power of Blockchain Technology has been echoing across the global banking sector, whiles in Africa, countries like sierra Leone are aiming to be the first smart country on the Blockchain. Sounds of real estate blockchain revolution are already reverberating in Honduras, Sweden and India etc.

2018 is set to be a fine year as Africa's own Land LayBy Holdings throws in a commanding lead to the Land Blochchain revolution.

The unprecedented use of mobile financial remittance through personal mobile devices, the advancement in cryptoeconomic capabilities and unparalleled demand for land in Africa has now created the right atmosphere for blockchain to take root.

These days, many Africans in Diaspora and at home, have lost huge sums of money and property to friends, relatives and conmen posing as land agents and professionals.

The inefficiencies of existing structures make it difficult to verify the authenticity of the property ownership records. The lack of credible networks indicates there lacks a proven system and framework that facilitates proper, time efficient and costly due diligence. The Geographical Barrier, in the case of a diaspora investor, impedes the enforcement of legal contracts in instances of fraud and breach.

Land Layby Holdings, a leading African real estate and fintech company, operating in 4 other countries (Kenya, Australia, UK and USA) is propelling Africa's real estate into the Blockchain space with platforms built on this new technology on the block.

The company is set to launch the minimal viable product (MVP) for Africa's first Blockchain powered land registry early 2018. The platform, which shall be accessed using a special digital utility called the Harambee Token, will transform the way we buy and sell real estate by doing away with the hidden costs, unnecessary intermediaries, and reduce transaction time significantly. It will enhance data security and eliminate manual errors and duplication of verification processes.

Imagine If state land administrators could tax existing but undocumented land property, and landowners too could prove to the world beyond reasonable doubt that they owned the land that would be a Win-Win incentive (financial and material) for everyone to start recording their undocumented land.

If land property remains unrecorded, it is much harder to tax for revenue purposes

If land property remains only on paper, it would be easy for some to steal it

If land property is stored in only one place entries can be altered without trace

This Innovative blockchain land registry will make record-keeping more efficient especially in the real estate sector where land titles are susceptible to costly, fraudulent practices and extended legal litigations. The new digital land registry platform will create immutable records for land ownership, which are then digitized, secured and stored permanently on the blockchain. The Land LayBy Blockchain is designed with the following key features

Land Registry tracking ownership

Store digital copies of verified land little

Publish and document the process for land records.

Land Layby Holding hopes to permanently address the trust gap by disclosing land and land options to the public, but with special privacy requirements. The initial role of the platform will be to provide a mirror reflection of the Government Land Registry systems, thereby allowing local and international financial institution to access and validate land title.
Accra, Ghana. January 16, 2018 - Jumia Travel, the leading online travel agency in Africa, will hold the second edition of the Africa Travel Awards on January 25th. For this 2018 edition, the ceremony will be held simultaneously in 8 countries: Algeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Kenya,Nigeria, Uganda, Senegal and Tanzania. Ghna will celebrate its Awards on January 25, 2018.

The awards aim at promoting Ghanas tourism sector, and responds to the need of encouraging hoteliers to improve the quality of their services for further advancement of their respective destinations.

There are 7 categories to be awarded including: Customers Favorite Hotel 2017, Customers Favorite Airline Company 2017, Best Destination Website 2017, Jumia Travels Booking Award 2017, Travellers Choice Hotel 2017, Best Leisure Hotel in Ghana 2017, and Best Business Hotel in Ghana 2017.

A jury panel, made up of high-level tourism professionals in the country, have been put together to judge the nominated hotels and ultimately decide on the winners. The jurys decision will contribute 50% of the outcome, while the other 50% will be from the public through a voting process.

In Ghana, vote here

The winners of the African Travel Awards 2018 will be honored during a cocktail held on January 25, 2018 simultaneously in Lagos, Algiers, Dakar, Abidjan, Accra, Douala, Dar Es Salaam, and Kampala.

Senegal : Pullman Dakar Teranga

Algeria : Sofitel Algiers Hamma Garden

Cote dIvoire : Sofitel Abidjan Hotel Ivoire

Cameroun : Pullman Douala Rabingha, Douala

Kenya : Fairmont The Norfolk Hotel

Nigeria : Hotel ibis Lagos Ikeja

Ghana : Holiday Inn Accra Airport

Tanzanie : Jumia Travel Hotels

 Ouganda : Jumia Travel Hotels

PROMOTING TOURISM IN AFRICA

The annual event is supported by tourism organizations and stakeholders such as the Ghana Tourism Authority, The Ivorian Ministry of Tourism, the Senegalese Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of Tourism of Cameroon, Ivory Coast Tourism, Emirates, Air Coast of Ivory among others.

"By organizing these African Travel Awards, our mission is not only to recognize and reward the merit of local tourism stakeholders, but also to provide a credible benchmark for the African tourism industry," said Joe Falter, CEO of Jumia Travel.

Follow the Awards conversation on social networks: #JumiaTravelAwards2018
The Head of the Fulani community in Ghana, Sheik Osman Barry, has described as unlawful and a breach of ECOWAS protocol of free movement, the ongoing operation to flush out Fulani herdsmen and their cattle from the Eastern and Ashanti regions, respectively.

Some 200 joint police and military personnel have been deployed to the Asante Akyem North and Sekyere Afram Plains districts in response to recent attacks on residents and security personnel in the area by Fulani herdsmen.

Reacting to the development, Sheik Barry said the exercise is a breach of the rights of the herdsmen.

The way things are going, it's unconstitutional in the first place. It is also a clear flouting of the international convention, clear flouting of the regional protocols for the free movement of personsso, unless there is some other explanation or interpretation given to those conventions and agreements and protocols, then we can't understand [this exercise], he told Accra-based Joy FM.

The 200 joint military and police personnel including officers from the Air Force, have been given the mandate to push back the herdsmen from new areas they have occupied, arrest perpetrators of recent acts of violence for prosecution and augment the efforts of Operation Cowleg, an ongoing security operation aimed at dealing with the operations of the herdsmen in the area.
16.01.2018 LISTEN

African leaders and Ministers of Trade will be signing the document for the Continental Free Trade zone among African countries by March 2018.

This will be the beginning of the implementation process for the Trade agreement between African countries which is expected to improve intra-continental trade in Africa.

Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, Carlos Ahenkorah disclosed this at the 5th Edition of the Crystal Ball Africa in Accra.

He said, As far as Im concerned we are nearing that completion point and as I said, latest by end of March leaders of Africa are supposed to sign this document into action and by 2020 we should see a remarkable development where we will be heading towards the 2063 achievement of the goals.

The continental free trade zone in Africa is a trade agreement that seeks to promote industrialization of export oriented goods on the continent by removing some trade barriers.

Mr Ahenkorah said, Basically its a programme being adopted by African leaders to collapse all trade barriers within the African continent to have one big continental market to improve trade and collaboration between.

He highlighted what Ghana stands to benefit from the agreement: Infact it is the best thing that could have happen to us as far as I am concerned formally coming from the Trade Ministry because you can see for example in Ghana we have a very limited and closed market space, where you cant have more than 25million people in Ghana to sell products to.

We are looking at a situation that when the CFTA comes into being we are going to have about 1.3 billion market space for people to be able to showcase their products and trade between other African countries, he said.

The Deputy Minister also assured the agreement will not affect the fight against foreign retail in the Ghanaian Market.

Hope of increased foreign investment

A key motivation for the establishment of freer trade within Africa is that freer trade and more harmonized markets generate a more compelling case for foreign direct investment.

The less businesses have to deal with superfluous paperwork, long delays at borders, and a multiplicity of regulations and officials, the better the business case for investment.
Kandahar Boys, a Tamale based NPP Youth group in the Northern Region of Ghana have thrown their weight behind Kamal-Deen Abdulai, one of the contenders in the ruling partys National Youth Organiser (NYO) contest slated for June this year.

The group who are noted for their spirited defense for the party in the northern region and are popular and vociferous across the country believe, Kamal-Deen Abdulai has so far demonstrated through his hard work as a deputy operations director for the 2016 campaign and how he has managed the Nasara wing of the party is the most excellent man to be the next youth commander of the party.

Kamal-Deen who is himself a Dagomba who hails from Tamale and has lived most of his youthful days at Bolgatanga in the upper East Region took some time out of his busy schedule to visit the various youth groups in the Tamale and Bolgatanga townships during his recent visit to the north to interact with them.

The Kandahar boys who expressed their resentment at the seeming neglect of them by the party since the party won the 2016 general election stated that Kamal-Deen has demonstrated through several means that he still have them at heart. They stated that Kamal-Deen has never left them and continues to push for their needs, a reason why they will support him to win the youth organizer contest in order for him to continue to do his best for them.

They promised to follow Kamal-Deen everywhere and work so hard for him until he wins the NYO contest.

Kamal-Deen Abdulai on his part expressed his appreciation to the team for the wonderful love shown him. He assured them that he will continue to push for their interest and urged them not to lose hope in the government since the president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo will not let them down. He added that though things may not be perfect now, they should exercise some restraints and hope for the best from the government and the party in the coming days.
The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) on Tuesday, 16 January 2018, unveiled the party's reviewed constitution in Accra.

The NPP, in a bid to strengthen its constitution for better administration of party, held series of delegates conferences last year to solicit views from party members.

The party, on 17 December 2017, held an extraordinary delegates conference in Kumasi to consider all proposals and deliberate on the amendment of the constitution.

Acting General Secretary of the party, John Boadu, who unveiled the reviewed constitution, said it paves the way for the commencement of internal elections in the party, from 17 January, 2018.

According to him, the amendment process was a huge success and admonished party members to consider the new constitution as they embark on their internal elections.

-ClassFMonline.com
The Comptroller-General of the Ghana Immigration Service, Kwame Asuah Takyi, and the Commissioner of Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority, Isaac Crentsil, have called for teamwork, professionalism and effective corroboration among personnel of the two security agencies.

They made the call when the two Security Chiefs paid a days working visit to the Aflao-Segbe borders in the Volta Region,and took turns to address personnel of both agencies.

The joint visit by the two forms part of strategies to strengthen the Integrated Border Management (IBM) initiative being adopted by the two agencies, and was also to afford them the opportunity to interact with the personnel.

In his opening remarks, the Commissioner of CD-GRA underscored the need for personnel of the two agencies to work together in the interest of the country.

He illustrated the bond of friendship that exists between the two security chiefs as an example worthy of emulation by the personnel.

Mr. Isaac Crenstil further emphasized the need for both agencies to share intelligence and work together, adding that, the days of needless rivalry between the two agencies should be a thing of the past.

He noted that the success of the IBM project was dependent on a well-coordinated border management approach. He, therefore, encouraged personnel to emulate the good working relations that existed between the Senior Officers of the two agencies.

The Comptroller-General of Immigration, Kwame Asuah Takyi, admonished officers to eschew all forms of conflicts and perceived tension that existed between personnel of the two agencies at the border.

He noted that personnel should be mindful of such unnecessary perception, and that such perception could be a reality if not nipped in the bud.

Perception can be a reality if care is not taken. Allow a sense of unity and purpose to prevail among of you and work in the national interest, he said.

The Comptroller General intimated that, as a way to strengthen the bond of friendship among the two agencies, a joint end of year get-to-gather (WASSA) should be held among personnel of GIS and CD-GRA at the Aflao Sector Commands, adding that, the migrant band of the GIS will be in attendance to provide good music.



By: citifmonline.com/Ghana
A Moroccan court sentenced to death a man over the murder of a member of parliament and jailed his widow, in a case involving sex and money, the government said Tuesday.

Abdellatif Merdas, who was a member of the liberal Constitutional Union party, was gunned down near his house in Casablanca in March last year.

A local councillor, Hicham Mouchtari, was sentenced to death on Monday after he was convicted of "premeditated murder", the justice ministry said.

Merdas's widow, Ouafae Bensamadi, was given a life sentence, and a female acquaintance of hers described as a "fortune-teller" was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

According to media reports of the investigation, Bensamadi had been having an affair with Mouchtari, who killed Merdas with the help of a nephew -- who was sentenced Monday to 30 years in jail.

The motives were "sex, money and vengeance," the state prosecutor said during the investigation, dismissing any political reason for the killing of Merdas.

Bensamadi, who consulted the fortune-teller, had allegedly been abused by her husband and was seeking revenge, according to media reports citing the investigation.

Morocco has not abolished the death penalty but has not carried out any executions since 1993.
Trump

16.01.2018 LISTEN

If someone tells you that you have bad breath and youre not sick in the head, you are not expected to laugh or smile. But if you know you have bad breath, you will be embarrassed, but you dont get angry with the one who points it to you. You get a remedy.

No African country is expected to be happy after the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, called African countries shitholes. But are we not shithole countries? How different is this from what Tony Blair said at a Labour Party conference in 2001 about us? Blair said, The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. Do we dispute that too?

I cannot speak for Haiti and El Salvador, which Trump reportedly lumped together with Africa and described as shithole countries. But which honest African can beat their chest and say we have conducted ourselves well enough to deserve respect and dignified treatment on the global stage? There are great African individuals doing great things around the world, but collectively, we dont deserve the respect and dignity we fight for without doing much to earn a modicum of it.

In many instances, we have conducted and continue to conduct ourselves like wild beasts and have lost the moral right to be angry at the description Trump has given us. In 2018 a member of parliament is murdered and the pathologist says the autopsy report is missing. The court had to fight hard in order to get the autopsy report on Major Mahamas murder. These are two murders that shook Ghana and if this is the drama at their trial, what will not happen to ordinary mortals like you and me? The police are issuing conflicting reports on the rape case involving a Lebanese. And if you collapsed and were taken to any government hospital today, chances are that you will be turned away because there is no bed to treat you. This is Ghana in 2018.

Because we are human beings, we deserve to be accorded the fundamental human dignities and rights. But thats where it ends. The thief, drug addict or beggar has the right to life and to fair trial and the basic rights accorded to humankind. But do you respect them and value them the same way you value the hardworking man or woman who is impacting society in a positive way?

Im not out to defend Trump or endorse his words. Trump is incurably racist. He is irredeemably uncouth and unrepentantly crude in his ways. He is not any better than some of the worst so-called leaders with whom the Africa continent has been cursed since independence. Hes just like Yahaya Jammeh, the immediate past president of The Gambia. The only difference between their presidencies is that America is a fairly organized society, where institutions work. For this reason, any idiot can govern America and still succeed to some extent.

His stance on immigration is problematic but what got Africans worked out is his description of us as shithole countries. It is said that if someone speaks ill of you, live your life in such a way that people will not believe him. Unfortunately, every honest African believes Trump when he says we are shithole countries. Our elders say a child who washes its hands well eats with kings. But have Ghanaians and Africans washed our hands well?

As long as we remain beggars, we should not expect to be treated with equal dignity and respect in the League of Nations. We beg without shame. We beg from Europe to America, India to Indonesia and from China to Cuba, where we Ghanaians get medical doctors to treat our sick. We dont beg because we are poor. We beg because we are thieves who steal the resources meant to develop our continent and carry them to the Western World and some parts of Asia.

In 2017, Switzerland announced it was returning $321 million to Nigeria. This money was seized from Abba Abacha, son of former Nigerian Head of State, Sani Abacha. At the time of making this announcement, Switzerland had already recovered around $700 million of Abacha-related assets.

Nigeria was also pursuing $480 million, which had been seized in the United States. Nigeria lost $400 billion to corruption between 1960 and 1999, according to estimates cited by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Abacha alone is believed to have stolen $4 billion. And this country cannot feed its citizens, provide power, drinking water and other basic necessities of life.

Nigeria is not an exception. Neither is Abacha. It has become an unfortunate norm that the average African politicians, business people and middle class, are out there to fleece the poor. Honesty and integrity and the patriotism to serve and build African states are qualities that are rarer than snowfall in the Sahara Desert.

In 2015, one energy contract in Ghana was said to have been inflated by $150 million dollars. In 2016, $74 million waste bins contract was found to have been inflated by at least $34 million. A piece of bin liner sold on the market at 22 cents was invoiced to the state at $15.6 a piece. In the same country, the Ministry of Justice and Attorney-General received a donation of desktop computers from the Chinese Embassy in Accra and an amount of 10,000 cedis or $2,300.

Why do we take offence at the word shithole when cleaning our streets and markets appears more difficult than launching the most sophisticated spacecraft? We still die from preventable diseases such as cholera, malaria; and any time there is an outbreak, we look to the West or some UN agencies to deliver us.

How on earth do we expect to be treated with respect and dignity when we dont put any value on the lives of our citizens? For a long time, the European Union had made the plight of African migrants its top agenda. Every day we hear stories of how energetic young men and women from Africa drown in drones in the Mediterranean Sea in desperate attempts to escape from shitholes. Italian, Spanish and other European countries patrol these deadly waters daily and are able to rescue some. What has the African Union done about it? The AU, whose headquarters is a product of begging from China, does not seem to care about the lives of its citizens but it cares about the shithole description.

Last year news emerged of how these young men and women were sold to slavery in Libya. With as low as $400, one could get a slave to buy. The kind of uproar which greeted Donald Trumps comment was absent. The desperation of African migrants is because their leaders have specialized in looting their collective wealth and stashing the loot in foreign banks. Chances are that many of them will die leaving such funds in those banks and not even their children or spouses will know about some of them.

Some things do happen in Africa and one wonders if we were created the same way like other human beings elsewhere. Consider the following incidents that happened in Romania and Ghana in 2015.

In that year 32 people died in a nightclub fire disaster in Romania. About 20,000 protestors took the streets to protest and blamed the authorities for corruption and lack of supervision. The results? The Prime Minister, Victor Ponto, took responsibility, apologised to the people and resigned.

In that same year, more than 150 people were killed in an avoidable fire and flood disaster in Ghana. The June 3 disaster was caused by leaked oil from a fuel station and choked drains, which caused flooding in the city of Accra. The mayor who supervised the floods said he would not apologise to anybody. The President did not fire him.

A few weeks later, hundreds of people took to the streets of Accra, blocking traffic for hours. The reason, the mayor who supervised the causes of the disaster had picked up a form to contest as a member of parliament and the crowd was there to support him amidst dancing and drumming. They voted for him in the 2016 election and they call address him as Honourable!

The only person who was arrested by the security agencies over the deaths was a young man who was alleged to have smoked a cigar and thrown the tub in the floodwater. How can anybody defend this country when someone describes it as a shithole?

Africans are racists to the core. Our form of racism is nastier because we direct it at ourselves. Many ethnic groups in African countries see each other as superior to one another. In most cases, such frictions have influenced and continue to influence the politics in Africa. They have also led to deadly wars that have killed millions, the deadliest one being the Rwandan Genocide.

When I got to the Dulles International Airport in the US in 2014, the young immigration officer who processed me was a Chinese. There was also an Arab next to him. I met Ghanaians who were high ranking officials in the US Army and some served in very sensitive positions in state departments. Recently a Ghanaian was appointed a Minister of State in the UK and we were shouting all over.

In Ghana, hell broke loose when someone raised an alarm that he had seen a white man driving a Ghana Police Service vehicle. If a Chinese, American or Lebanese becomes a citizen of Ghana and tries to join the security services, what will our reaction be?

Trump may be wrong in trying to control immigration, but African countries have such bad histories. In 1969 the Aliens Compliance Act led to sacking of migrants from Ghana, including missionaries. In the early 1980s, Nigeria did same and sent Ghanaians who had fled the political turmoil back home fleeing leaving their landed properties. Around that time, Nelson Mandela and other freedom fighters of Apartheid South Africa were going round Africa begging for money and resources to go back and free the black race from oppression. Today, Black South Africans are hacking and killing citizens of other African countries who are there legally to work.

In 1957, when Ghana gained independence, our first President and champion of Pan Africanism, Kwame Nkrumah declared that the African was capable of managing his own affairs. Sixty years on, we have proved him wrong.

The stories of how African countries govern themselves are replete with barbaric tales of greed, mismanagement and corruption. In countries like Ghana, which the Western world fools us into believing that we are bastions of democracy in Africa, we are yet to understand what democracy is about. Apart from the violence-free periodic elections and freedom of speech for politicians and journalists (the rest are victimized for speaking out), there is nothing significant about our so-called democracy.

In the week Ghana celebrated the 25th anniversary of the 4th Republic, 84,600 youth were lined up in the sun to fight for 500 slots in the immigration service. Those who are daring enough are trekking in the desert in order to get to Libya and finally cross to Europe.

We are a shithole continent that has blamed the Whiteman for our woes but refused to say how we have been complicit in even the white mans sins. We helped in catching and selling our relatives into slavery and helped the colonisers to fight kingdoms such as Asante, which were determined to resist colonialism.

We accuse the colonialists of stealing our resources to build their empires but after independence, we steal from our own people and carry it to our colonial masters. The politicians, middle class and traditional rulers in Africa now see owning properties in the West as a necessity.

I can go on and on, but the message remains the same. Africa is a continent that cannot feed its people. It cannot provide healthcare for its people. Potable drinking water still remains a luxury. Power supply is erratic. Our educational system is collapsing and those who can afford now educate their children in Europe and America. Nine out of every 10 Africans you sample are likely to run out of the continent at the least opportunity. And a shithole continent is an apt description of our messy state of affairs.

Instead of fighting Trump, lets fix our mess. Fixing our mess will not change the perception of Trump about us. We wont do it to please anybody. But we deserve to live dignified lives.

The writer, Manasseh Azure Awuni, is a journalist with Joy 99.7 FM. He is the author of two books Voice of Conscience and Letters to My Future Wife. His email address is [email protected] The views expressed in this article are his personal opinions and do not reflect, in any form or shape, those of The Multimedia Group, where he works.
Prophet Nakoah Isaac of the Jericho International Church, located at Kuntunse in Nsawam, has staged a strong defence for internet scam popularly known as Sakawa saying that he believes is a pay back time and revenge since the Europeans came to steal from Africa.

According to the man of God, there is nothing wrong at all with internet fraud since the Europeans once stole from African Ancestors.

"The Europeans opened our eyes by stealing from us; they sold African people into slavery--so what our youth are doing today as Sakawa is not criminal but payback time," Prophet Nakoah Isaac told Blakk Rasta on the Taxi Driver Show on Zylofon 102.1 FM on Tuesday.

He further stated that he would encourage anybody on any day to go into internet fraud since he doesn't see it as stealing.

"These people took something from the land of Africa and our youth have masterminded ways and means to get jobs from the internet so there is nothing wrong with it at all," Prophet Nakoah Isaac told Blakk Rasta.

The Taxi Driver show has already drawn tens of thousands of listeners with the people asking for more through interactive tweets, emails, and WhatsApps.

From all indications, it appears the long wait for his comeback has lived up to the expectations.

Blakk Rasta has promoted reggae music at different levels with pure Ghanaian reggae music fused with insightful poetry and historical stories.

At any least opportunity, whether international or any space Blakk Rasta spews consciousness to the youth.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo will respond to questions from a number of the countrys top journalists in his second Media Encounter since he assumed office, at the Flagstaff House tomorrow [Wednesday].

The event, which will begin at 11:30 am, will give journalists the opportunity to quiz the President on controversial issues which have cropped up in his first year in office.

Hes also expected to answer questions on the progress of the governments flagship programmes as well as queries on the current state of the economy.

A similar exercise was conducted in July 2017, where Nana Akufo-Addo promised to meet the journalists in the country every six months in the entire duration of his tenure as President.

Scandals that rocked NPP government

The first year of the New Patriotic Party's administration has been rocked by a number of corruption allegations including the BOST contaminated fuel scandal, allegations of corruption by A-Plus against the two deputy chiefs of staff and allegations of conflict of interest against the Finance Minister over the issuance of a Bond.

The GHc800,000 budgetary allocation for the creation of a website for the Special Development Ministry, and the recent cash-for-seat scandal in which the Trade Ministry has been accused of extorting amounts of up to $100,000 from expatriates to enable them sit close to President Akufo-Addo at an awards ceremony, have also courted public attention.

Jobs

Unemployment continues to be a major headache for many especially the youth in the country despite government's assurance of creating thousands of employment.

The President has said that his administration laid the foundation for jobs in his first year in office but with Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia recently acknowledging unemployment as a national security threat , the President is expected to be queried on the governments attempts to address the situation.

Corruption

One year after the New Patriotic Party took over the administration of the country, not even one former appointee of the previous government have been jailed despite constant accusations of corruption against them when they were in opposition.

The recent nomination of Martin Amidu as the countrys first Special Prosecutor and charging of some former officials of the NCA might have raised the hopes of Ghanaians in the governments commitment to the fight against corruption but the relative lack of prosecutions might be on the agenda tomorrow.

Journalists are expected to quiz the president on these and many other issues including government's handling of the economy in the last one year.



By: citifmonline.com/Ghana
Almost every year, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) embarks on its routine decongestion exercise. This exercise is mainly characterised by threats and counter-threats between the sellers and the Metropolitan Security Committee which comprises of the police, the military and the AMA taskforce. Down the years, this exercise has proved to be highly ineffective. The traders move from their illegal spots, albeit temporarily only to move back when the heat cools off.

The AMA has made it an open secret that the activities of these hawkers go contrary to the AMA hawkers by-laws of 2011 and section 117(1) of the Road Traffic Regulation, 2012(LI 2180) and a breach of the above stated laws are punishable by the law. It is amazing how these laws exist and yet there is so much difficulty in enforcing them. The decongestion of Accra has always hinged on two factors namely: humanity and legality. Legality in the sense that, the activities of the hawkers/traders go contrary to the law and humanity in the sense that every human is entitled to the right to earn a living (second generation of human rights).

We must note that there is always a justification when one violates the law. In this case, the justification from the hawkers/traders is always that they have to feed themselves as well as their families. Due to the justification provided, they go ahead to breach the laws of the nation because man must survive. The effects of the activities of hawkers/traders in Accra are well profound. These include increase in vehicular traffic, choking of gutters, increase in the activities of pick pockets and excessive loitering of the environments, just to mention a few.

Of course, no one will be happy to deny these hawkers a source of livelihood. The issue is that the right thing must be done without giving room to emotional manipulations. As we have seen over the years, so much energy is spent on driving these people away but little is spent in preventing them from coming back. The AMA must note that Ghanas population has increased significantly and so there is a higher demand for goods and services. Adequate market centres would have to be provided to these hawkers at affordable costs so that they can also earn a source of living. Yes, they can be driven away but are adequate provisions made for them so that they can keep on doing their business?

It is as good as pouring water on stone if the AMA go about this decongestion exercise without having effective plans of building affordable trading centres for these hawkers/traders so as to contain them. Definitely, attempts will be made by these hawkers/traders to go back to their illegal sites and that is where the AMA must stamp their authority.

Mayor of Accra, Mohammed Adjei Sowah said We are encouraging all the hawkers and the petty traders to move back inside the markets. We want to fashion out a strategy to be able to sustain it. Is it to say that there is yet no plan on how to prevent these traders/hawkers from moving back?

Is it apt to go into a war without any strategy on how to win? Your guess is as good as mine.

Baiden Gideon

HPERS-UEW.

[email protected]

s
16.01.2018 LISTEN

Few days ago, the African continent received news on a comment levelled against them by the President of United States of America, Donald Trump, after a bi-partisan meeting with cabinet and some authorities, and was reported of referring Africa, Haiti and the rest as "shithole" countries.

The continent's mother body, African Union, and some African Heads of State, were quick in responding to the the alleged comment from Mr. Donald Trump, figuratively 'attacking' the US President, with some Ghanaian leaders following same.

A reply from former President H.E John Dramani Mahama and His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo all from Ghana and Africa at large is enough of a wake-up call on Africans to rethink.

Replying to a comment made by a leader of a first world country like the United States should spark the need for Africa to unite now more than before towards a mindset of achievement and economic independence, not necessarily calling for an apology.

What this mean is that Africa must set her priorities and fast track their collective economic agendas to ensure that they develop at a faster rate to widen the net to get their citizens employed and develop their home lands.

The dream of Nkrumah and Gaddafi must be put into action now! *such as the United States of Africa and industrialization policies*.

Most citizens of Africa literally spend their productive days to queue at the US and other embassies applying to acquire a Visa and travel. Yet, majority of applicants get denied of access.

Not quite long ago, Africa was ranked the most continent to be denied US visas. There are lots of Ghanaians and Africans who were tortured in the United States but has no voice because Africans are seen as inferior.

As Africans are reduced to inferior beings, it is needless to rely back and wait for an apology. It does not necessarily mean to demand an apology or insult back. Africa is heavily endowed with lots of resources -natural and human-, and has what it takes to be bigger than the US or the so called powerful nation.

Africans need to rethink, and put these resources they possess to use, in order to desist from their habit of consistently saying "Thank You" after begging and a token is been given because as the saying goes, "if you have your mouth in someone's kitchen, you have no say when the person goes or does wrong".

The time has come for the African Union (AU), Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS) to stand up today to form the bloc of Africa. The United States of Africa can only work if we tell the 'powerful nations' that we are not what they perceive us to be.

Africa's resources can be used to develop the whole continent if the rulers of our nations desist from forming family and friends government and also creating a loot and share government. Not forgetting of what has transpired in Libya where some Africans are sold in a broad day light, chained, and killed for their sensitive parts by their own black people, is enough for us to go back to our drawing board.

A modern day slavery in the African continent administered by Africans is adequate for Heads of State to unite to fight such menace. Such an inhumane act is what has projected Africa to the out world in such manner.

Let us not wait for the foreign nations to tell us what we are because we know who we are.

It is therefore needless and immature to be calling on the US President to render an apology. Would an apology take the words back to his mouth? Absolutely no!

Have Africans forgotten a wise saying that "when a mentally deranged man takes your pants and you run after him, both of you are regarded as mad".

Form the United States of Africa now and develop the sub regions to make the African continent great and strong. Let us prove that we are actually not from a "shithole" as perceived.

African leaders must act now!

Richard Adonu Mensah

[email protected]

Mensahrichardadonu.blogspot.com

+233247536773
The University for Development Studies (UDS) Wing of BONABOTO, will be marking its 10th Anniversary at the Wa Campus in the Upper West Region, in March this year.

The Anniversary will be on the theme; Consolidating Our Values through Sense of Unity and Purpose.

BONABOTO is an association of students in the various tertiary institutions in the country based in Bolgatanga, Nabdam, Bongo and Tongo in the Upper East Region.

The President of the BONABOTO National Tertiary Education Wing of the UDS, Joachim Tizaaba Elbazar, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Bolgatanga, said the anniversary will bring all the students who come from those areas together to discuss issues that would promote development.

He said education, agriculture, roads, and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) were issues of national concern and the association had started to develop proposals to address them.

While commending the leadership of the association for working towards the progress of the region and the nation as a whole, Mr Elbazar said that the body was developing plans to link up effectively with the BONABOTO Mother Union to achieve accelerated and sustained development in the Upper East Region.

He underscored the need for unity of purpose that would prevent conflicts and promote peace and harmony in the region to ensure smooth development.

Mr Elbazar appealed to the Municipal and District Assemblies, Non-Governmental Organisations, philanthropists and individuals to collaborate with the association to provide the necessary support the region needs.

He said some cultural and social beliefs and practices were very detrimental to the development of the region and called for effective education, sensitisation and advocacy to change the phenomena and promote development.

Negative cultural practices such as child marriages and teenage pregnancies are among the factors that affect the growth of the region. While some parents withdraw their female children from school for marriage, many of the girls also become pregnant and drop out of school.

These, we all need to join hands with each other to fight to pave way for rapid development, he said.
Four men suspected to be members of a gang that snatched a taxi at Gomoa Potsin in the Central Region are currently in the grips of the Winneba police.

The police arrested two of the suspects, named Emmanuel Osei and Abdul Razak aged 22 and 23 respectively just hours after they stole the taxi with registration number GX 3027-17 from a driver named Prince Amemoo.

Luck eluded the two other suspects who had been on the run until they were arrested by the Kasoa Police today [Tuesday].

The police say the suspects hailed the victims taxi from the Winneba Roundabout to Gomoa Potsin and forced him to drive to the outskirts of the town.

They stated that Emmanuel Osei, who was sitting next to the driver, allegedly threatened him with a machete while his accomplices pushed him out of the car.

They then tied the victim with a rope and gagged him with a handkerchief before absconding with the taxi.

The police explained that the Accra Central District Police Command received a tip-off that a group of young men were offering a taxi, similar to the stolen one, for sale at Agblogbloshie.

Police officers who were deployed to the scene feigned interest in the car and arrested the suspects who confessed to the robbery.

The Accra Central District Police then handed over the suspects to the Winneba Police who placed them in a lineup, where Emmanuel Osei was identified by the complainant as the assailant wielding the machete.

Both the complainant and the suspects were taken to the crime scene for a reconstruction of the crime.

The car is currently in police possession as evidence, while all four suspects will be put before the Winneba Magistrate Court tomorrow.
Democratic Republic of Congo's former military chief, who has been accused by Kinshasa of an attempted coup against President Joseph Kabila in 2011, has been arrested in Gabon, sources told AFP.

"General Faustin Munene has been arrested since Wednesday, January 10... in Gabon," said a statement from a party created by Munene, the Convention of the People for Progress and Democracy party (CPPD), on Tuesday.

The information was confirmed to AFP by a judicial official in the eastern province of Haut-Ogooue.

"Faustin Munene was arrested in Moanda and is in the hands of the DGDI in Libreville," the Gabonese capital, the official said, referring to the General Directorate for Documentation and Immigration, as the Gabonese intelligence agency is officially called.

The source said further details about the arrest were unclear, and it was unknown whether General Munene would be extradited to the DRC.

The Gabonese foreign and interior ministries did not confirm the arrest.

Munene was deputy interior minister and chief of the DRC's armed forces under Kabila's father, Laurent-Desire Kabila.

He is accused of being behind an attack on February 27, 2011, on Kabila's home and on a military camp. Eleven assailants and eight soldiers died.

He also allegedly carried out an attempted coup in the western province of Bandundu in 2010 for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia.

Kabila, 46, has been in power since 2001, succeeding his assassinated father at the age of 29.

He is at the helm of a regime widely criticised for corruption, repression and incompetence.

His constitutional term in office expired in December 2016, but he stayed on -- a move that stoked a bloody spiral of violence.

Under an agreement brokered by the Roman Catholic church, he was allowed to stay in office provided new elections were held in 2017. The date has since been postponed, to December 23 this year.

The DRC authorities have previously fallen out with the Republic of Congo over Munene.

In March 2011, the DRC recalled its ambassador to Congo, accusing Brazzaville of providing Munene with a safe haven and of failing to extradite him after he was arrested in Pointe-Noire.

AFP was not immediately able to confirm when Munene arrived in Gabon. The province of Haut-Ogooue abuts the Republic of Congo -- the two countries have a joint border than runs nearly 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles).
16.01.2018 LISTEN

On 13 January 2018, I received the following message on my WhatsApp page. So who are you? Third World? Poor countries? Banana Republics? Or Shitholes? Do we prefer any? What do we define ourselves as? My response was, As all of the above if we were to face the reality. Until we change our ways, we are worse than subhuman.

I could have done myself a great deal of service by delving into the folder containing my memoir to retrieve a page for public consumption or observation on my views regarding Africans with myself inclusive. However, the contents of that folder are for a future purpose hence deciding to spend a few minutes or hours of my precious time to write my comments on what the American President, Donald Trump, has said that is doing the heads of Africans in.

In Galatians 4:16, the Apostle Paul writes, Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth? Is it not said it hurts to tell the truth but in the end it brings comfort? Again, is it not said, He who does not know, and knows not that he does not know, is a fool?

Where has the American President gone wrong by telling Africans the truth as it should? Did we expect him to be a hypocrite who will be smiley on the face while being abusive behind your back? Why do we accuse him of racism by him being factual with us? For me, he is indirectly helping us by asking Africans to get their act together; to stand up tall to be counted by doing the right things that will make others recognise our usefulness on this planetary earth.

Even in the Ghanaian Akan language, there is a proverb that goes, wabodwe rewae na somu na me nkote ahoma mekyekyere a wose se wo amma nntem a meregye mu. In English it could mean, If you are in difficulty and I am coming to your aid, you turn round to say if you dont hurry up, then just leave it Who cares and who suffers? Is it not the victim but not the helper? This is exactly the situation Africans and Donald Trump find themselves in at the moment.

Instead of Africans, especially their Presidents, seeing sense and learning from what Donald Trump has said regardless of how, when and where it was said, they are rather making a fuss about his allegation which is nothing, but the absolute truth.

Is it not said, If you assume to be on top of the ladder whereas you are actually at the bottom, you cannot climb up any further but will rather have to climb down Why do Africans try to deceive themselves by believing they are a force to reckon with whereas they are nobody but a bunch of disgraced people hence being ridiculed by our white contemporaries all of the time?

Let us face the facts. Are majority of Africans not living in penury and being constantly tormented by hunger and various diseases? In the midst of plenty, we are permanently poor owing to our disgusting behavioural attitudes. Are we not always looking up to the Whites to help us with everything starting from digging us manholes to the provision of potable water and other essentials of life?

While they have compassion on us for good or hidden mischievous reasons, we see our leaders stealing their countries money in millions to billions of US dollars and taking them to hide in their foreign bank accounts in the Whitemans countries. They steal the money at the expense of their citizens. The citizens also do nothing. They sit watching; cowards as they are, while these leaders they have entrusted their lives and welfare get away with blue murder. In so doing, African nations are deprived of the financial resources to develop the nations. The politicians, the traditional leaders and the public servants in leadership positions amass wealth illegally and to the detriment of the masses hence our countries becoming poor and dirty. This is an indisputable fact! I dont care about the amount of defensive lies others will come up with or the insults they will hurl at me. A fact is a fact and the truth is only one.

Do we not factor donors contribution into our annual budget readings? When such projection fails, the budget is thrown into disarray. Does America, the United Kingdom, France or Germany prepare their annual budgets factoring in donors contribution as a component to achieving their goals or expectations for that particular year? The answer is a BIG NO! Why then Africans?

It is a fact that if you go to Accra today, in many areas, the people defecate in open spaces? I always question myself how the men could do that let alone, their women? Have we not been saying ourselves that Accra is being engulfed by stinking rubbish hence giving rise to outbreak of deadly diseases like cholera, typhoid fever and malaria?

I would rather Africans stopped burying their heads in the sand like the ostrich to see sense in what Donald Trump has said to begin to re-examine ourselves to see where we have gone wrong, and then start to do the right thing that will acquire us the recognition as useful people in the eyes of our fellow human beings in the other parts of the world.

The Late and Second World War British Prime Minster Winston Churchill said, A Pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an Optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. How do Africans, especially our leaders, make use of this wise saying by Sir Winston Churchill? Cant we for a minute be optimists to see a floodgate of opportunities opened before us by what Donald Trump has said rather than to keep on bitching and calling him racist and all sorts of names?

Africans must start to aggressively demand probity, accountability and transparency from their leaders or else, we shall forever remain shithole countries. I shall reserve my further comments for archiving in the folder of my memoir until God willing; it shall one day become a public knowledge.

To conclude, let me attempt to define the descriptions of African countries as stipulated above by referencing from some acclaimed sources.



A poor country is a weak and underdeveloped economy with a low per capita income (not appreciable Gross domestic product (GDP) based on purchasing-power-parity (PPP) per capita







Third World was first used in 1952, by a French demographer named Alfred Sauvy to describe how such poor countries are like the Third Estate of pre-revolutionary France, remarking this ignored Third World, exploited, scorned like the Third Estate. On the other hand, the term was supposedly first coined during the Cold War era and referred to the nations that were aligned with neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. Most often, these were the developing nations of Africa, Asia and South America. (Alfreds definition best suits Third World as implied by many)







Banana republic is disparagingly referred to any of the small countries in the tropics, especially in the Western Hemisphere, whose economies are largely dependent on fruit exports, tourism, and foreign investors.

Shithole means a disgusting place hence a shithole country is a country not worth living in because of its despicable state.





Why are Ghanaians and Africans in general seeking to risk their lives quitting their countries if their countries did not fall into all or any of the descriptions above? Look at how Black Africans are being maltreated and killed in Libya or in the Gulf States all in search of greener pastures because our countries are bad? Why are only Africans that take offence when immigration issues are raised in the Whitemans land?

Should we keep treating those telling us the truth as racists instead of learning a lesson from the bitter things they say to encourage us to develop, then God have mercy on us?

Africa in my estimation has never gone through any serious civil revolution that makes laws work and enforced hence our current derelict state; only to be left at the mercy of our shamelessly greedy and corrupt politicians. I am not talking about military junta and ethnic cleansing that go on in other African countries but real civil revolutions like that of the French in 1789 that liberated the commoners from the feudal lords and the autocratic monarchy. As said, every great nation on earth was built on the sweat and the blood of its citizens.

Africa is lacking something of which Donald Trump is helping us to find.

Lest I forget, the Japanese and the Chinese were once said to be teased by the Caucasians as short, yellow people with squinted eyes. However, ever since they excelled in technology with their economies booming, they are now kowtowed to by their former mockers. They exclude them when they talk about immigrants invading their countries. Therefore, it is not the colour of the Africans skin that makes him hated but his lack of intelligence to develop. Period!

Rockson Adofo
The Wasipe Traditional Council has in the wake of the recent clashes between the Gonjas and Tampulmas in the North Gonja District of Northern Ghana blamed the security for failing to act in averting the situation.

According to the council,the situation could have been totally averted from escalating if the security was timely in responding to early warning signals.They blame the security for failing to deal decisively with the perpetrators and brains behind the kidnap of the emissaries of the Wasipewura sent to collect royalties across the traditional area.

In a statement signed by Jantonwura and copied to Ghanaweb's Northern Regional Correspondent,the council said a country of laws such as Ghana should not wait to witness unfortunate results of disregard for the law before action is taken.

"The Wasipe traditional council is gravely shocked by the total breakdown of security allowing for miscreants to formant and visit mayhem on innocent law abiding citizens.The escalation of this incident could have been totally averted if the security was timeous in responding to the early warning signals and dealing decisively with the perpetrators of the said kidnap".The statement said.

According to the statement,Gonjas and Tampulmas in North Gonja District were not adversaries and have had mutual respect for each other and coexisted peacefully through intermarriages.Accordingly,Tampulmas have never had a paramountcy nor paramount chief.The Wasipewura is the paramount chief of Wasipe Traditional Area which includes the Tampulma settled communities.All setters adopting the Wasipe land for economic benefit pay royalties to Wasipewura.

The council revealed that one "Self-styled" Kadichara Mahamadu is the hidden face behind all the troubles being fomented in Daboya.And that,Kedichari Mahamadu succeeded his late father Musah Kadichara who was carrying himself as the paramount chief of the Tampulmas.

Mahamadu has succeeded in recruiting hatched men such as Mr.Braimah,Musah Bugri and Latif Muniru a two time parliamentary candidate for Daboya/Mankarigu on the ticket of the NPP for his trouble making endeavors.

Kadichara Mahamadu is believed scheming to add the lands Tampulmas have settled on in Daboya to Mamprugu land so they can make a strong case for an administrative region on their own.He is reported to have been included in Nayiri's delegation that met the commission of enquiry on the creation of new regions.

The council however wondered why the Regional Security Council has not taken any action on this man even though,several complaints have been made to it(RCC) about his actions.

The council has called on the security agencies to act as a matter of urgency to apprehend the perpetrators of the disturbance and to forestall a recurrence.It has also cautioned the media to do due diligence in conveying the facts of the incidence to avoid misinforming the general public.

Read the full statement below:

PRESS RELEASE BY THE WASIPE TRADITIONAL COUNCIL ON THE UNINFORMED AND MISLEADING MEDIA REPORTAGE ON THE RECENT DISTURBANCES IN SOME PARTS OF THE TRADITIONAL AREA.

In the wake of the unfortunate disturbances of the 13th and 14th of January 2018 in which the kidnapping of emissaries of the Wasipewura sent on a legitimate routine of collecting royalties across the traditional area turned nasty, the Wasipe traditional is deeply appalled by the misleading reportage carried on air and online. This must be clearly borne out of ignorance of some of the reporters as far as these worrying developments are concerned and we entreat more diligence and professionalism before conveying matters such as this to the listening public.

The undisputable fact as evidenced by history and the present is, that the Gonjas and Tampulmas in the North Gonja District are not adversaries in any way and in fact have enjoyed a very cordial and a seamless relationship of coexistence for over four decades now. A relationship that is anchored on mutual respect and has yielded and continue to yield mutually beneficial outcomes for the Gonjas and the Tampulmas in the Wasipe traditional area. Such reports in sections of the media to the effect that Gonjas disrespect and undermine the Tampulmas cannot be further from the truth. The fact of the countless intermarriages between Tampulmas and Gonjas even from royal families clearly debunks the perception of disrespect as intermarriages between two ethnic groups cannot thrive on the bedrock of disrespect and undermining of either of the ethnic groups. In fact, until the Tampulma populated communities got their own schools, they were mostly housed in the Wasipewuras palace whiles they schooled in the only middle school in Daboya.

Now, some background to the current happenings will suffice. Some few years ago, a certain imposter of a man called Musah from a village known as Solugu came out from nowhere and paraded himself as the paramount chief of the Tampulmas in the Gonja traditional area with wanton disregard for due process in such customary matters. He conferred on himself the title of Kadichara of Tampulmas. The original Kadichara of the Tampulmas was a leading warrior of the Tampulma people and was never a chief. In fact, historically, the Tampulmas have never neither had a paramountcy nor a paramount chief. The Wasipewura is the paramount chief of the Wasipe traditional area which includes the Tampulma settled communities. The custom and tradition over the time spanning when the Tampulmas were conquered and annexed is that, the Wasipewura enskins chiefs who are the traditional heads in all the communities under the Wasipe paramountcy. In line with customary administrative wisdom, the Wasipewura also installs selected Tampulmas to be their chiefs in these Tampulma settled communities for the sake of effective coordination between the Tampulmas and the Gonja traditional authority for the sake of peace and development of the area. This practice has been the case for centuries and has received unanimous support and cooperation from both the Gonja people and the Tampulma people.

It is very crucial to note that, a great majority of the Tampulmas flatly disagreed with the self-imposed Kadichara and vehemently questioned the legitimacy of Musah in carrying himself as the paramount chief of the Tampulmas. A few years down the line after the demise of Musah, his son called Mahamadu assumed the dubious and illegitimate position of his father. Several complains were made to the regional security council about his dubious posturing but unfortunately, no serious action was taken or seen to have been taken in this regard. The best that was done was to give Mahamadu some verbal warning and let go. This lack of action by the Regional Security Council has since emboldened him to devise strategies based on deceptive ethnic centred sentiments to expand the territories of his self- imposition to other areas of the Wasipe traditional area. So, out of over twenty communities, Mahamadu clandestinely managed to win some ignorant elements in the Dissah, Nabengu and Mankarigu communities to follow him.

This man Mahamadu is based in Tamale and has succeeded in recruiting an army of Tampulmas also domiciled in Tamale as his hatchet men who spearhead his nefarious trouble making endeavours in the Wasipe traditional area. These hatchet men include one Mr. Braimah, Musah Bugri, Latif Muniru also known as Naros and the two times parliamentary candidate of the NPP in the Daboya/Mankarigu constituency who interestingly served as the secretary to Mahamadu prior to becoming the parliamentary candidate of the NPP. We wish to on this note call on the National Security to pick up these individuals mentioned above for interrogation and subsequent action.

The most recent but outrageous claim in the schemes of Mahamadu and his operatives is laying claim to the land they are settled on and purporting to be adding this land to that of the Mamprugu land for the purposes of advancing a case for same as they seek an administrative region of their own. Quiet unfortunately, when the Mamprusis presented their petition to be considered for a new region, this same Mahamadu was paraded as the paramount chief of the Tampulma traditional area as part of the areas to fall under their proposed new region. He was subsequently included in the Nayiris delegation to meet the commission of enquiry on the creation of new regions. After having been part of the Mamprugu delegation to the commission of enquiry on creation of new regions, Mahamadu met with his supporters at a village called Solugu and assured them that they will soon be part of the Manprugu people and therefore should not have anything to do with Gonjas. He also charged them to resist any attempt by the Wasipewura to collect royalties of any kind from them. This is a rendition that is undisputed and verifiable. The unavoidable question one comes to is whether it is the Mamprusis who are pushing Mahamadu to do all these in a bid to advance their agenda of a new region. Whiles at that, the media would do the peace of the area and Ghana at large a lot of good if they can enquire from Mahamadu the imposter to answer to the question of whether he subjected himself to the procedures and requirements prescribed by the relevant chieftaincy laws of Ghana before becoming the supposed paramount chief he falsely claims to be.

The immediate result of Mahamadus incessant incitement was that, his supporters in a community called Mankarigu started harassing the people who profess allegiance or support the Wasipe traditional authority as the legitimate governors of the area. His supporters threatened to burn down the houses and shops of the pro Gonja people in the community. This threats and harassment raised tensions in the area for the past two weeks.

As I stated earlier, the most immediate spark to the recent disturbances was lighted when Wasipewura as its within his rights to so do as the overlord of the Wasipe traditional area, detailed a six man team of emissaries to go round the traditional area to collect royalties from Fulani herdsmen. The customary practice is that all settlers adopting the Wasipe land to beneficial economic usage pay royalties to the Wasipewura. Indeed, the Tampulmas regularly paid these royalties to the Wasipewura in time past until the lapse of time and closely knitted relationship developed between the two and brought about the Wasipewura giving a waiver to the Tampulmas in this regard. Before the Wasipewuras emissaries got to Mankarigu on the fateful day, the self-styled kadichara Mahamadu had set up a team of about ten heavily armed men to wait in ambush for the Wasipewuras emissaries. When Wasipewuras emissaries got to Mankarigu, they proceeded to Sekpege, the next community to plan towards the next days activity of meeting with the Fulanis for the royalties. Whiles in a house, Wasipewuras emissaries got surrounded by the armed men who shot warning shots and threatened to slaughter the emissaries of the Wasipewura on the royalty collection mission like fowls. Upon hearing the news, the Wasipewura immediately contacted the DCE to further inform the police to go and rescue his men. He as well sent another person to inform the police on the incident. The police were slow in responding and even upon getting to the Sekpege, all their attempts to rescue the kidnapped men proved futile. It had to take the intervention of the military for the men held hostage to be rescued.

The Wasipe traditional council is gravely shocked by the total breakdown of security allowing for miscreants to foment trouble and visit mayhem on innocent law abiding citizens. The escalation of this incident could have been totally averted if the security was timeous in responding appropriately to the early signals and decisively dealing with the perpetrators of the said kidnap. A country of laws cannot wait to witness nasty results of disregard for the law and customs before it acts. That is precisely why we urge the security agencies to take a very serious view of the recent happenings and put in the right measures to not just apprehend the imposters who foment these disturbances but also forestall a recurrence of same. The media must also do due diligence and appropriately convey the facts of incidents in their reportage to avoid a distortion and misinformation of the general public.

In conclusion, the Wasipewura together with the Wasipe traditional council hereby serves the sternest notice that Mahamadu should henceforth in his own interest, desist from stepping foot anywhere around Wasipe. And any hints of him indulging in any nefarious machinations that threaten the peace, security and development of Wasipe will be met with the fullest force ever.

Thank you.

Signed.

Jantonwura Awusi

Source:Ananpansah,B Abraham/ModernGhana.com/Northern Region
The Association of Hajj Watch has called on the Ghana Hajj Board to swiftly re-organize the current structure and designations at the Pilgrims Affairs Office of Ghana before the commencement of the 2018 Hajj season.

The association made this call in a press statement sighted by this reporter. The report revealed that the problems the board encountered last year was as a result of bad coordination and lack of respect for authority. This prompted the Head of Communication Unit Alhaji Abdul-Rahim Gomda, to call for its dissolution.

The association pointed out the negative press reportage which turned out to be the work of some insiders with the diabolical agenda of tarnishing the image of Chairman Sheikh I.C Quaye.

Hajj Watch is reliably informed that, at the fact finding meeting, the Head of Communication surprisingly owned up to these nefarious activities the association noted.

For peace to prevail this year, the Association of Hajj Watch recommend for a strong action to weed out those who have demonstrated that they cannot work in the team but rather involve the press to undermine the very Board they claim to serve.

This, the association expressed its view that the Head of Communication and the Secretary to the Board must resign or be made to resign, adding that they cannot pretend to work in the interest of all under one leadership.

They have lost the trust and faith reposed on them by the President and his Vice, they noted.

The Association of Hajj Watch congratulate the Board for a peaceful and successful Hajj last year and hope that this year will see a significant improvement in line with the wishes of President Nana Akufo-Addo and his Vice Dr. Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia.

In a related development, Four Muslims Associations, Ghana Muslim Association, Northerners and Zongos Concern Youth Association, Ghana Muslim.com and Ghana Muslim Broadcast Journalists Association also commended the Association of Hajj Watch by calling on the association to reorganize the current structure and designations at the Pilgrims Affairs Office of Ghana before the commencement of the 2018 Hajj season.

In a joint statement sighted by this reporter, the association further called on the Executive Body of the Ghana Hajj Board to quickly effect some changes to ensure sanity and total work output at the Hajj Board.

According to the associations, the erstwhile Hajj in 2017 encountered some serious challenges. This they said, later the Communication Department had to be blamed wrongly. It is in this regard, they calling on the authority to take immediate action to avoid recurring of such aforementioned challenges.

The associations also called on the authority to dissolve the communication department and reform it again.
Why are Yoruba ladies so cocky superficially but graceful inside? It is confidence! Be sure of yourself before even asking one for a date. Yoruba men know better than to ask a Yoruba lady above their standard for marriage. If you want to, the best way to do it, is to court your school mate from primary school. Once she finishes high school, you may as well proceed to college or show high potential in order to marry her. In order words, Yoruba ladies seldom marry down. If they do, consider yourself very lucky.

It is a fact that Yoruba ladies were the first to defy the norm in many cultures and marry men of their choice outside their ethnic group. We still remember when Yoruba ladies would not dare. While other men from different ethnic groups and cultures still have a hold on their ladies, most Yoruba men learn long time ago that they dare not tell most Yoruba ladies who to marry. Other ladies are not even allowed to marry outside their own clan from proximate villages.

So some Hausa and Igbo men are still cranky about their ladies marrying outside, especially to Yoruba men. They will learn just as most Yoruba men did that ladies have come a long way and no Yoruba, Igbo and lately Hausa men can control liberated and well informed ladies. It is not your place, so dont even try. Mind you, while inter-ethnic marriages have been encouraged by politicians for national unity, some find it hard to give their daughters away to other cultures.

However, if you have made it, if you do not have a Yoruba as a wife, you have failed to clinch the ultimate lady. It does not matter which ethnic group you belong to, Yoruba lady is it. Go to other cities or towns, once they know you have a Yoruba wife, you are entitled to a chieftaincy title and they brag about it too. One reason is what most of us know: Yoruba ladies do not marry down except when certain circumstances demand it.

Most men see nothing wrong in taking a wife from a different ethnic group especially when they think they have made it and deserve more. In the first place, if men are rich enough to support more than one wife, they are allowed. After all , studies show that polygamous men live longer than serial monogamists. The problem is those that cannot not support themselves, not to mention a wife, going after many ladies. They end up being dragged by those women and children they cannot support.

You may have heard about different types of stereotypes to degrade ladies from other ethnic groups. None of them are true. Most classy ladies depending on their levels behave decently and if you are too poor to pay either their dowry sooner or their exclusive taste later, say so.

Actually Yoruba ladies are too proud to pay attention to slights from ignorant sources. They laugh it off as comedy. Apart from the sophistication, Yoruba ladies are so elegant, they are difficult to replicate. One enchanting look at the man they really want, he will melt into their chests, even if their bosom is not as big. Most ladies may walk and look the same; after all the makeup and world exposure, even on television. Not Yoruba ladies, they are distinctive.

The darker Yoruba women are, the prettier they look. Only dark Hausa and Sudanese ladies can compete. So fine dark Igbo ladies are mistaken for Yoruba. Bleached skin does not matters, it is beauty in the genes that can be passed on to your children. Yoruba ladies carry themselves and exude some type of confidence that makes a poor man think twice before approaching them.

Indeed, unlike other ethnic groups, they would not suffer men considered below standard gently. Yoruba ladies must learn to give a poor brother a break and marry down like Igbo ladies. The same graceful look Yoruba ladies give to attract men can change into scorn of: me, emi ke?

However, when Yoruba ladies dress, you can differentiate their style from a distance. It does not matter if the occasion is in Timbuktu, Yoruba ladies would impress even foreigners not used to their majestic demeanor. It is their manner, mode of dressing and dancing that attract other ladies worldwide to dress like them. They are so easy to spot, from their distinctive appearance, even when they party outside their hometown. They project African pride with a bent!

Take the way Yoruba ladies dance for example. They never exert the energy common to most ladies especially now that twerking has gone worldwide. Yes, Yoruba ladies twerk like all the young girls do but twerking was not common to most Yoruba cultural dance. They can stand on one spot, seductively move or roll each part of their body without being forceful. It is more of a slow dance. The Yoruba musicians always remind them: sa ma mi!

Yoruba ladies work hard and love to party to owambe music as widely known. It is true that some of those parties may have gone to extreme mode by wearing attires like uniforms for different parties. A few may have turned it into business since they expect you to buy directly from the celebrant that buys it in bulk. But it does not take anything away from their creative styles of up and down or iro and buba not to mention their artistic or designer gele.

Watch out, owambe is addictive and infectious. They change the styles and patterns of each of these every season. Sometimes it is hard for their friends to cope as it drives some men crazy, even when most of the ladies spend their own money. Tell them to stop the extravaganza and they have answers: hardship in Nigeria is so depressing, it is their way of ameliorating stress and unpleasant situations. All of them seeking a place of sanctuary on weekends. Would you rather give the money they merry with to some pastors, imams or shrines?

The worst criticism is the display of wealth at parties where conspicuous spenders spray cash to impress the crowd. Well the display of cash started as modest appreciation to celebrants and the drummers. It went wild and has been discouraged by local governments. It is an unusual way to impress our ladies, especially for some of us crying about expensive dowries and high maintenance ladies. Haba, please pity a poor brother!

Unfortunately, some of the people that criticized spraying of cash to impress ladies most have gone wild with it. Outside Yoruba parties, some of their critics have gone wild. Cash is now sprayed with hand machines as the whole dancing floor is carpeted with all kinds of currencies. No Yoruba lady would be impressed with that charade. They are not for sale O!
16.01.2018 LISTEN

[This relates to Balkan war that eventually saw the disintegration of former Yugoslavia giving way to a number of independent countries. In the process thousands of Muslims were massacred. Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were eventually tried and jailed by the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands but another person who was no less responsible walked free and was never even questioned. This article is about the truth behind the killing of Muslims. Incidentally Slobodan Milosevic died during the trial.]

We all know about the massacre of Jews during the WWII in the Germany and Poland by the Hitlers forces. That was the biggest massacre of civilians in human history. Europes largest massacre of civilians since World War II happened in Bosnia in 1995 and this article exposes how it all happened.

Former Yugoslavia was a State comprising of six units/ republics. In the days of Marshal Tito the constituent units lived in peace and harmony even though Serbia always played a dominant role. Yugoslavia even enjoyed the status of a leading non-aligned nation. Things changed after the death of Tito. It was during the period of Slobodan Milosevic that the Serbs tried to maintain the national unity not by amity but by military force. This forced the units to defy Serb suppression and declare independence. Yugoslavia started to break up. Bosnia was the only state with Muslim majority, though Serbia and Croatia also had sizeable Muslim population. The Serbs were determined not to allow Bosnian independence. They incited the Serbian population within Bosnia to take up arms against Muslims. Milosevic appointed General Ratko Mladic as the military commander of the Bosnian Serb forces. Radovan Karadzic became their political head like the president of Bosnian Serbs. The idea was to deprive Bosnia from becoming an independent state. Bosnians had no arms except local police force. Serbs had weapons and they laid siege of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It appeared that Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic took up on them to take revenge of 500 years of Turkish Ottoman rule of Serbia.

Eventually UN Forces were deployed on peace mission. On 16 of April 1993, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 819, declaring Srebrenica and a 30 square mile area around the town as the UN ground. The UN French General Morillon came first came to the enclave to see the condition on the ground. He was kept there by the women of Srebrenica until UN promised enforcement of its resolution. On April 18 UNPROFOR soldiers entered the town. Bosnian troops in the enclave were told to give up their arms and surrender to the UN protection troops. The Bosnian Muslims complied with UN instruction as they felt safe under UN peace keepers.

In 2005, the Serb forces under General Ratkno Mliadic suddenly attacked and overran the town. They took full control of the town including the enclave where armless Muslims were supposed to be under UN protection. The Dutch Commander Lt-Col. Thomas Karremans of the UN contingent offered no resistance. They simply pulled off to their Potocari camp. It still remains a mystery as to why UN forces offered no resistance or asked for reinforcement or for air support from nearby UN/ NATO base. The UN troops kept looking as spectators when Serbs were separating the women and children from the enclave. The Serbs killed more than 8000 Muslims. The Bosnian Federal Commission of Missing Persons later compiled a list of 8373 names. The killing was eventually declared as genocide by the International Court of Justice in Hague and it was subsequently recognised so by the EU Parliament, the US, UK, Canada and many other States. By his total passive role the Dutch Colonel proved his connivance with Serbian forces in the killing of over 8000 innocent unarmed people. Col. Karremans is as guilty as General Mladic of Serb forces. He is still at large. He has never been questioned by the UN or by his higher command back in his country. Trial of Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic leaves a big gap in the trial process  and that gap is Col. Karremans. He and the soldiers under his command have tarnished the image of UN peace-keeping forces all over the world.

The bereaved families will still have some consolation if the United Nations conducts and inquiry into the role of Col. Karremans and his unit working under the banner of the UN. The United Nations belong to all peace-loving people of the world and they have a right to know about it.

London, 10-January-2018.
What did you say when President Donald Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations as s-hole countries?

What did you say when the president of the United States followed that comment by suggesting hed rather see more immigrants from countries like Norway?

Whether now or in the future, you will be asked this question: What did you say?

Did you call out the obvious racism behind those statements? Did you acknowledge that the leader of the free world  by title, anyway  had shown himself to be a white supremacist, casually expressing his dislike of brown-skinned immigrants and preference for white European immigrants?

Were you outraged that such comments from a sitting president were antithetical to the ideals that have always made America a beacon of hope and opportunity?

What did you say?

Did you speak out?

Did you denounce the comments, as Rep. Mia Love, a Utah Republican whose parents came to America from Haiti, did, saying in a statement: This behavior is unacceptable from the leader of our nation. ... The President must apologize to both the American people and the nations he so wantonly maligned.

Or did you keep quiet?

Take note, because you will be asked. Trumps has been a presidency filled with jaw-dropping moments of offensive behavior, but this one will stand out over time, both for its profane nature and its naked racism.

So what did you say?

Did you look for excuses? Did you toss out a Well, what about ... scenario you thought might take the heat off?

Did you scream something about identity politics and try to pretend that this is the fault of others, not the fault of the transparently racist old man in the White House?

Did you say he has a point? Did you say, Well, those countries are s-holes, arent they?

Did you forget how people once described immigrants from Italy and Ireland? Did you forget the words on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty?

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Did you forget those words, or just ignore them? Did you smile about a tax break and say nothing?

Did you not put the pieces together and consider all the other times Trump has shown us exactly who he is?

Did you tamp down memories of his calls for the execution of the Central Park Five, even after the young men, four black and one Latino, were found innocent?

Did you explain away what Trump was implying in this tweet from 2013: According to Bill OReilly, 80 percent of all the shootings in New York City are blacks-if you add Hispanics, that figure goes to 98 percent. 1 percent white.

Did you disregard his years-long birther crusade against the nations first black president? His description of Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals? His regular criticism that immigrants coming from predominately nonwhite nations are examples of those countries worst people?

Did you not let yourself see the pattern? Did you twist logic into knots and blame it on the media? On political correctness?

What did you say when our president called other countries s-holes and you had to shield your childrens ears from profanity on the nightly news?

What did you tell your children about this moment? How did you explain the presidents words?

Tell me, what did you say? Mark it down, let it be known. Because you will be asked this again someday.

And if you stayed silent, if you made excuses, if you tried to fool yourself into believing this is appropriate presidential behavior, if you let it slide because this presidency might somehow line your pocketbook, then you will be remembered as complicit, as one who stood by and let Americas decency get dragged through the mud.

And if you laughed, or if you smiled, or if you nodded your head in agreement, you will be remembered just as Trump will: as a racist, a fool and an absolute embarrassment.
Michigan Technological University will lead a team of experts in evaluating the economic and environmental impacts of a worst case scenario spill or release from the Line 5 Straits Pipelines.

The State of Michigan announced Friday that it reached a contract agreement with Michigan Tech to have Guy Meadows lead an independent risk analysis of the two parallel 20-inch pipelines that form the 4.5-mile section of Line 5 that runs beneath the Straits of Mackinac.

Meadows is the Robbins Professor of Sustainable Marine Engineering and director of the Great Lakes Research Center at Michigan Tech. The Agency for Energy (MAE), Attorney Generals Office (AG), Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and Department of Natural Resources (DNR) signed the contract with Michigan Tech.

The Straits of Mackinac is perhaps the most dynamically complex region of the Great Lakes, Meadows says. I am glad to have had the opportunity to study the region over the past several years, and to be able to apply that knowledge to this equally complex request from the State.

Protecting Against the Worst

In conducting the risk analysis, the team is tasked with evaluating:

The environmental fate and transport of oil or other products released from the Straits pipelines in a worst-case scenario.

How long it would take to contain and clean up the worst-case release.

The short- and long-term public health and safety impacts.

The short- and long-term ecological impacts.

Potential measures to restore the affected natural resources and mitigate the ecological impacts.

Estimate the amount of natural resource damages, the governmental costs, and all other economic damages  public and private  that would result from a worst-case release.

When the teams final report is issued, the State will require Enbridge Energy Limited Partners, which owns and operates Line 5, to maintain an adequate financial assurance mechanism to cover liability for all damages or losses to public and private property in the event of a worst-case scenario. The State has the authority to do so under the 1953 easement that granted permission for the pipelines construction.

The risk analysis will be paid for by funds in an escrow account the State controls and which was set up in August 2016. The funds were provided by Enbridge, but the company has no say in how the money is spent or in the findings of the independent report.

Risk Analysis Team and Timeline

On Sept. 18, 2017, the Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board (PSAB) unanimously recommended that Michigan Tech organize and lead state universities in an independent risk analysis of the Straits Pipelines. Last month, Meadowswho served on the PSAB as the state university representative before resigning to undertake the risk analysisprovided the PSAB with an update on the risk analysis proposal. After incorporating feedback from the PSAB and the States technical team, Meadows and his team submitted a final proposal to the State in mid-December. The parties finalized their contract agreement on January 12.

Meadows has organized a team of 41 researchers, 21 from Michigan Tech and 20 from external organizations. Nine universities are contributing to the analysis, and seven of those are within the state of Michigan. They include Michigan Tech, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Wayne State University, Western Michigan University, Grand Valley State University and Oakland University. The two out-of-state universities are North Dakota State University and Loyola University Chicago.

Three researchers on the project are from consulting organizations, and two are independent contractors. Two other contributors, both from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, will donate their time and services.

The risk analysis team is organized into nine sections, based on the States published scope of work. Each section has a section leader, a chief scientist and at least two section authors. In addition to the nine sections, a broader impacts team will provide a comprehensive overview of risks that various affected communities perceive in connection with the Straits pipelines. Affected groups include indigenous communities; local, state, federal and Canadian government officials; environmental and historic preservation groups; and tourism, fishing and recreation industries.

The risk analysis team will use the Michigan Tech high-performance computing cluster, and researchers will develop a multi-layer, web-based GIS portal to accumulate output from each team. This portal will be made available to the State upon completion of the risk analysis to serve as rapid response resource inventory.

When the State of Michigan made an investment in the Great Lakes Research Center at Michigan Tech, it did so knowing the University would become the leader in this field of study," Michigan Tech President Glenn Mroz says. "Professor Meadows has assembled a world-class team of experts from Michigans universities and other distinguished institutions. They will gather and analyze the data to understand the big picture and provide the State with the information it needs to best serve its citizens."

Barring any setbacks, the team will complete a draft risk analysis and hold a public presentation on the draft report in July 2018, followed by a 30-day public comment period that would end in mid-August. After responding to public and State input on the draft, the team would prepare a final report to be delivered by September 15, 2018.

Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, Michigans flagship technological university offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure.
Economic hardship not the outcome of ...
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Microphone and US Flag View Photos

During the Democratic weekly address, Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) discussed Martin Luther King Day and said that in honor of the holiday, congressional Democrats will be hosting events to talk with constituents about the consequences of the tax bill and our plan to fight for working families.

Sewell was Tuesdays KVML Newsmaker of the Day. Here are her words:

Hi, Im Congresswoman Terri Sewell, representing Alabamas 7th Congressional District, the civil rights district, and a member of the House Ways and Means Committee.

This weekend, our country will come together to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, and to remember Dr. Kings legacy of equality, compassion and action in the face of injustice.

But remembering is not enough. Fifty years after Kings death, many Americans continue to suffer from the same injustices they endured five decades ago.

Our country needs action.

We need action to ensure that working Americans have the resources and opportunities they need to compete in todays workforce.

We need action to provide our children with an education that prepares them for 21st Century jobs.

We need action to ensure that all Americans have a chance to compete on a level economic playing field.

Dr. King saw economic success for all Americans as a keystone of equality. He recognized that economic issues were civil rights issues. The struggle for genuine equality means economic equality, Dr. King told a rally of sanitation workers in Memphis, barely two weeks before his death. He said, For we know now that its not enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to integrate a lunch counter if he doesnt have enough money to buy a hamburger?

Five decades after his death, Dr. Kings words still ring true today. Income inequality is on the rise, our middle class is shrinking, and a competitive education is more expensive than ever.

So when I see families in my district who are struggling to find work, when I meet mothers who cant take time off to care for their children, when I see the poverty that still exists in America, I am reminded of what Dr. King said about the fierce urgency of now. He said, There is such a thing as being too late. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.

Our working families are facing real challenges that require immediate action, but instead of tackling these challenges, Republican leaders have spent their time pushing a tax bill that gives huge giveaways for special interests and the wealthy, while driving up costs for working and middle class Americans.

In fact, an estimated 83 percent of the tax bills cuts go to the top 1 percent of Americas wealthiest households. Meanwhile, the tax bills temporary benefits for the middle class workers evaporate after just a few years, resulting in a tax increase for 86 million middle class families.

Instead of simplifying the tax code or making it fairer, the GOP tax bill sticks working Americans with $1.5 trillion in debt in order to pay for corporate tax cuts.

While passage of the GOP tax bill will have tragic consequences for our working Americans, I can promise you this: I promise that our fight for middle class Americans is far from over.

This weekend in honor of Martin Luther King Day, Democratic Members of Congress from across the country will be hosting events to talk with constituents about the consequences of the tax bill and our plan to fight for working families.

The American people deserve better than what theyre getting from the Republican Congresss relentless campaign to put the wealthy and well-connected ahead of everyone else.

You deserve A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, and a Better Future  and thats the strong economic agenda that Democrats are fighting for in Washington.

A Better Deal means creating jobs and wages in communities that have lagged behind.

A Better Deal means lowering the cost of living for families across America.

And A Better Deal means giving every American the tool to thrive in the 21st Century.

This Martin Luther King Day, let us be imbued with renewed faith in our collective ability to bring about social and economic change. Let us recommit ourselves to the unfinished work of Kings vision.

There is a fierce urgency. The time for action is NOW, and thats why House Democrats are fighting for better jobs, better wages, and a better future.

Thank you and happy Martin Luther King Day!

The Newsmaker of the Day is heard every weekday morning at 6:45, 7:45 and 8:45 on AM 1450 and 102.7 FM.
President Donald Trump has denounced the book Fire and Fury as fiction. But, as his recent comments about shithole countries demonstrate (yes, there was some dispute about whether he said it), the nation didnt need a book to tell us who the president is. His own words and actions do that job well.

Where to begin?

Two senators, a Democrat and Republican, who were present say outright or appear to say that Trump made the comment. Two, both Republican, say it was a gross misrepresentation. And the White House first offered a nondenial denial, and then the president seemed to say he didnt say it, specifically about Haitians and African nations.

Given the presidents unfortunate history on racial and ethnic matters and his troubled grasp on the necessity for truth-telling, it appears virtually certain that what he said and how he said it fits into that so-called textbook definition of racism, a phrase this nation hasnt had to use as frequently in modern presidential history as it has with this man and this administration.

About that history. That textbook-definition phrase had to be invoked when he broadly characterized Mexicans as rapists and criminals. When he said an Indiana-born judge was incapable of doing his job because he was Mexican. When he hyperbolized African-American communities as toxic cauldrons of crime and poverty. When he proposed to ban all Muslims from coming here and then refined that via executive order to just people from specific Muslim-majority countries. When he fantasized about U.S. Muslims cheering the 9/11 attacks. When he became the chief birther questioning the citizenship and religion of the nations first African-American president. When he equated the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, with those protesting their racism. When he woefully underperformed in getting aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

And this doesnt even include his well-known comments about women  a subtopic that nonetheless fits into a broader category of divisive and offensive speech.

This is speech from our president, who reportedly was called out on this latest comment  when he said it  by that one Republican who appears to agree this is how Trump described some nations. That would be Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

After that comment, Trump expressed a preference for immigrants from Norway.

Whether or not he used the vulgarity, there is absolutely no way the president didnt realize that people from his undesirable countries are mostly brown and black, from Norway mostly white.

His supporters dutifully trot out a few predictable defenses. All fall flat.

First, thats not what he said, they say. But, aside from the presidents history on spouting vitriol, there were enough witnesses to the comments to make it a certainty that is precisely what he said. The president said maybe he should start recording his meetings. Yes, by all means.

Second, another defense is that he only meant to say that these are poor countries in which economic and other inequities exist. But if you examine his comments about these countries with his follow-up comments about more agreeable immigrants from Norway, the racial and ethnic comparison becomes clearer.

In any case, labeling entire countries as undesirable supposes a nations flaws entirely define it and its people. More important, the U.S. has traditionally welcomed immigrants fleeing those economic and other inequities  not to mention, war and other violence.

And if these are undesirable countries, what are we to think of Trumps views of the people who come here from there? Among these immigrants have been some of this nations best and most hardworking people. Moreover, if high standards of living were the metric on who we allow in, how many ancestors of Americans of Irish, Italian, Russian and German descent  among others  would have been allowed in?

But even if what he said is not what he meant, is it too much to expect that our president be able to communicate without stoking racial and ethnic divisions or insulting friendly nations?

A third defense: This is simply Trump speaking in the tongue of everyday, bar stool-sitting Americans, sans all the political correctness. Running in tandem with that is this notion that his comments wont hurt him with his base, these everyday Americans.

Sorry, this is an insult both to his base and to everyday Americans. But even if people in his base are unperturbed, does this render the views of the rest of America inconsequential? Not in the least.

The broad denunciation Trump is receiving for these comments is entirely deserved. And they demand both fuller explanation and apology.

No matter whether he used the vulgar description (and we believe the preponderance of evidence suggests he did), the message was all too clear.
Zimbabwe will never be the same again as Government is addressing all challenges facing the nation with renewed effort and vigour, President Mnangagwa has said.

Addressing Zimbabweans resident here after meeting his Namibian counterpart, President Hage Geingob on the third leg of his regional tour to apprise fellow Sadc leaders on developments in Zimbabwe that culminated in his ascension to the Presidency, Cde Mnangagwa revealed that his call for the return of externalised funds was being heeded and substantial millions had since been returned.

The President revealed that he had given all Cabinet ministers targets to meet within their first 100 days in office, and some opposition parties were already claiming that he had stolen their manifestos, saying as long as the ideas fell within the purview of the national interest, he was duty-bound to attend to them.

He explained amendments made to the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act as well as the vast opportunities presented by the new dispensation across all sectors.

Let me assure you that Zimbabwe is not the same again and will not be the same again, he said.

My administration focuses on the following issues, one  unity, unity, unity. Love, love, love. Work, work and work. All Zimbabweans we get united under our national flag and national anthem. We accept that we may have different views about how to run the country and that again, we accept it. So, we dont need violence at all whether with the family or the community or the country. If people differ, differ peacefully. It must be an intellectual difference in terms of approach. That should not be developed into violence. We must accept each other as sisters and brothers determined to develop our country. I think we have more than 27 opposition parties in the country but with my focused administration, I hardly see whether they will find ground left behind which I am not taking care of. I said so back home and the response is that, Cde Mnangagwa has taken over our various manifestos. No! My administration addresses the national interests of our country and where the ideas of any opposition party coincides with national interests, that I take on board and it becomes mine and not theirs. Secondly, as a party, which is Zanu-PF, we are determined to walk the talk.

President Mnangagwa explained the opportunities available for investment in areas such as mining, agriculture, education, tourism and infrastructure development among others.

With regards to mining, the President said Government had removed the 51 percent local shareholding requirement and restricted that to diamonds and platinum only.

He said in the agriculture sector, Zimbabwe had managed to restore its breadbasket status after successfully implementing the Command Agriculture programme last year.

Said President Mnangagwa: We have to look at our educational institutions. During our time, when we went to school a long time ago, we were educated in order to look for jobs to be a clerk or nurse or a driver but we are saying, our tertiary institutions should have curriculums that talk to the industry so that what industry requires, the institutions must produce products who can work in the industry meeting the requirements of the industry. There should be this inter-marriage between the needs of industry and the institutions producing graduates from our institutions. That time is now over where universities pride themselves for producing many graduates. They must produce graduates who can fit our economic times  the technology of today and not all of them should be products who look of employment. They must also be creators of employment.

President Mnangagwa said Government had set aside a fund to assist young people keen to start businesses that create employment.

On his visit to Namibia, President Mnangagwa was accompanied by Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Minister Lt General (Retired) Sibusiso Moyo and Presidential spokesperson Mr George Charamba.

Meanwhile President Mnangagwa returned back home last night and he was received at the Robert Mugabe International Airport by his two deputies General Constantino Guveya Dominic Nyikadzino Chiwenga (Retired) and Cde Kembo Mohadi among other Government officials.

 Herald

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Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa left hundreds of Zimbabweans living here in stitches yesterday when he offered practical tips on how to become President of a country.

First, you need to be poisoned and you need to survive the poisoning. Next, you need to become a border jumper. Thirdly, you need people like (Lt-General Sibusiso) Moyo somewhere, the President said to roars of laughter from Zimbabweans who gathered for a business forum with him in Windhoek.

The Zimbabwean Head of State and Government was taken violently ill while at a rally last year. He had to be airlifted to South Africa for treatment, which he now says was successful.

He survived another attempt on his life shortly after he was fired from Government and fled partly on foot to Mozambique before catching a flight to South Africa from the port city of Beira.

He returned to Zimbabwe to take control of the country as he had promised within weeks.

Lt-Gen Moyo(Rtd), now Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, announced the advent of Operation Restore Legacy that culminated in the resignation of Cde Robert Mugabe after 37 years in power.

Lt-Gen Moyo (Rtd) was a Major-General in the Zimbabwe National Army when the army stepped in to deal with what it described as a criminal cabal that had surrounded Cde Mugabe and was causing untold suffering to ordinary Zimbabweans.

The lot fell on Maj Gen Moyo, who holds a PhD in International Relations, to appear on state broadcaster the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and after saying Good morning Zimbabweans, to contextualise the military intervention.

On Monday Lt-Gen Moyos now familiar booming voice rang over the public address system in Windhoek as he introduced the President. Good afternoon Zimbabweans, he began, but had to wait for nearly a minute while those in the audience, familiar with his authoritative voice and events leading to Mugabes resignation, ululated and clapped.

On his part Mnangagwa, who was relaxed, friendly and joked most of the time, said when he spoke to his predecessor on the telephone shortly after his tactical retreat into South Africa, the then president had asked him to report to State House to help resolve things.

The new Commander-in-Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces who was in Namibia to meet his counterpart Hage Geingob, said after 37 years of sweet independence, it was time to work and to rebuild Zimbabwes economy.

He said he had set targets for his first 100 days in office and called for all hands on deck, saying he would not hesitate to crack the whip on uncooperative or incompetent Cabinet Ministers.

On food security, President Mnangagwa said the Command Agriculture Scheme, which he spearheaded while he was Vice President, had been a roaring success.

He revealed that there were plans to build more dams in the country so that Zimbabwe could be food self-sufficient come rain or shine.

He said work had begun on dualisation of Zimbabwes major highways as well as on upgrading the countrys railway network.

A former white commercial farmer, who now lives in Namibia asked the President if it would ever be possible for him and others to return to Zimbabwe and grow and export like we used to.

President Mnangagwa said white commercial farmers, like all other Zimbabweans, could apply for land from the Government and join the queue or go into joint ventures.

Asked by veteran former newscaster Joseph Madimba how calls for people who stashed money outside Zimbabwe had been received, The President said substantial amounts of money had already been returned.

He revealed that he had a list of people, who had spirited money out of the country and warned that appropriate measures would be taken after the grace period.

It was a hilarious moment when President Mnangagwa said: I thank you! at the end of his remarks and his captive audience roared back: Asante sana! which Mugabe once said to the disappointment of many, who expected him to resign when he addressed the nation at the height of the transition.

He only later stepped down when a joint sitting of the Zimbabwean legislature was in the process of impeaching him.

Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa, who accompanied President Mnangagwa to Namibia, called for Zimbabwes own currency, saying relying on foreign currency kutenga mazhanje ne mbeva (to buy African chewing gums or snot apples and mice) was not sustainable.

Mr George Charamba, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Media, Information and Broadcasting Services in Zimbabwe was also part of the delegation to Namibia. SADC PF Secretary-General Dr Esau Chiviya and Zimbabwes Ambassador to Namibia, Mrs Rofina Chikava moderated discussions during the forum.

 Herald

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The failure of the UK infrastructure firm Carillion demonstrates that public/private partnership means private gains and socialized losses. Carillion is being put into liquidation, with very little of value left within the business, despite it having had over 43,000 employees, with over 20,000 in the UK, as well as hundreds of subcontractors.

Due to the sprawl of Carillions activities, information about the implications of its collapse will come out over the coming days and weeks. However, some things are evident now. Well provide a starter list:

Many contractors to Carillion will go bust. As the Guardian explained:

Thousands of staff who worked for the collapsed construction firm Carillion inside private sector companies will have their wages stopped on Wednesday unless their jobs are rescued by other firms, the government has said. Experts also said up to 30,000 small firms were owed money by Carillion, which crashed into liquidation on Monday morning, with insolvency practitioners reporting an immediate rush of calls from worried business owners.

Clive flagged an article from the Building Services Engineering Association yesterday:

The liquidation of construction giant Carillion could lead to potentially catastrophic losses for thousands of SMEs, according to the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) and the electrotechnical and engineering services trade body ECA. According to its latest set of accounts, Carillion was holding over 800m in retentions payments owed to sub-contractors. There is growing alarm that much of this money will be lost leaving many more firms at risk of financial collapse.

As Clive explained:

Likely to never be repaid to their suppliers. Retentions are basically extortion  you (the supplier or subcontractor) agree to letting us withhold payment, we agree to cutting you in on new work. Maybe. If you dont rock the boat on other things (like turning a blind eye to site safety, engaging on-demand in phoney bidding scams and cover pricing, petty embezzlement by our managers)

Mind you, the retentions are no doubt the biggest chunk of funds that contractors will see go poof, but they likely had additional late payments on their current gigs.

Due to the importance of many of Carillions roles, government will step in to take up many of the projects and bear the costs. Due to the fact that the handoff to new workers and contractors is likely to result in cost increases, plus Carillion likely underbid some of its later projects out of a need to keep cash coming in no matter what, the various authorities are almost certain to face bigger bills than they had originally budgeted for this work. That translates into tax increases, higher user charges, and/or service cuts. As the Financial Times noted:

The collapse will have implications throughout the UK, where Carillion is the biggest manager of military bases for the Ministry of Defence as well as providing facilities management for hospitals, courts and schools, and work on key infrastructure projects.

Carillion continued to be awarded government contracts as it entered a financial crisis. Carillion put out a profit warning in July 2017, and reserved 845 million to cancel contracts and cover losses. Despite obvious and increasing desperation, in the form of two more profit warnings, it won three more government contracts worth almost 2 billion in the most recent six months. Oh, and Carillion was still paying dividends as its financial condition worsened, up until it suspended them over the summer: 370 million in the last five years and 72 million in June 2017.

Taxpayers will eat most of the pension underfunding costs. Carillions beneficiaries will take some relatively small hits as the public pays the pension bill. From the Financial Times:

About 28,000 members of Carillions 13 UK pension schemes will now be transferred to the Pension Protection Fund, the lifeboat for collapsed companies. Pension scheme members who are transferred to the PPF and not yet retired will receive 90 per cent of the pension they were expecting, up to a cap. Members already receiving their pensions will continue to receive 100 per cent of their benefits but may receive lower annual increases. The pension that a surviving spouse could inherit may also be smaller. The Carillion pension scheme will be one of the largest the PPF has had to take over. In 2017, the company estimated its pension deficit at 587m but on Monday, Carillions pension trustees estimated the schemes PPF deficit at up to 900m.

The Carillion liquidation will play into Brexit. Remember how the UK is going to need a lot of new facilities near ports to handle all of the customs checks? This is hardly a good time to lose capacity in the construction industry.

Last but not least, Carillions massive failure is an indictment of the UKs so-called public finance initiative, which in the US, we call public/private partnerships. It is an excuse for looting. The claim was that private businesses could build and run public infrastructure more cheaply than government bodies could. Never mind that in the US, the government has been the only body able to design and execute major projects like the electrification of Tennessee Valley or Hoover Dam. Even for smaller initiatives, the premise has never made sense. Why borrow privately when the government has the lowest funding costs? Why should one assume the private sector is cheaper when it brings in numerous operators, which means additional contracting and coordination costs? And even if there are cost advantages, why should one assume the public will capture them, rather than the financiers, the executives, and the shareholders?

As Don Quijones explained at Wolf Street:

PFI deals were invented in 1992 by the Conservative government and then enthusiastically rolled out by the subsequent Labour government. The schemes usually involved large scale public buildings such as new schools and hospitals which were previously funded by the UK Treasury. Under PFI they were put out to tender with bids invited from developers who put up the investment to build new schools, hospitals or other schemes and then leased them back. The schemes allowed ministers to harness big sums of private capital to invest in public projects, such as new schools and hospitals, without paying any money up front  and thus keeping the level of current public debt relatively low. Repayments are made over a long time scale, usually between 25 and 30 years but occasionally as long as 60 years, but often at an exorbitant rate of interest. For the developers involved, the returns are generous and relatively safe, backed as they are by the UK taxpayer. But if the developer doesnt want to hold on to the asset, theres always the option of flipping, or selling on to some other investor, invariably one based in a tax haven, so not even UK corporation tax is paid on the profits. As the UK Independent reports, Carillion was one of four companies (the other three being Balfour Beatty, Interserve and Kier) that recently pocketed over 300 million flipping PFI schools and hospitals to the highest bidder. In other words, many of Carillions PFI assets are already in the hands of foreign-domiciled investors, meaning that while the government will have to take over many of the services Carillion can no longer provide, it may still have to pay leasing costs to the foreign-owned firms that Carillion sold out to. Otherwise, those firms may sue the government for lost profits. This is all happening as the true cost of PFI is becoming apparent. In April 2017, a bombshell report by the National Audit Office warned that the price tag for paying PFI firms would reach 8.6 billion in 2018 alone. In total, taxpayers owe a mind-watering 121.4 billion on public projects that are worth just 52.9 billion. And the compound interest continues to grow.

And as Jon Trickett, Labor MP, wrote in The Independent:

The Governments dealings with Carillion is the perfect illustration of how the Conservatives are playing fast and loose with taxpayers money in pursuit of their ideological ambitions. This cavalier attitude was epitomised by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, who blithely insisted that Carillions financial problems were not an issue following its successful tender for HS2 contracts last July, despite the company issuing a profit warning just a few days earlier and even though hedge funds were betting on Carillions failure as early as 2015. How he is being proved wrong. Of course, it will not be Grayling, one of Theresa Mays closest allies, that suffers the consequences. Nor, I wager, will it be those involved at a senior level in Carillion, who will probably move on to pastures new, well-rewarded for their failure. Indeed, a few months before its difficulties became public, Carillion changed the wording of its pay policy to make it more difficult for investors to claw back bonuses paid to its executives in the event of financial difficulty. Once again, it will likely be the public that pays the price, be it through the cost of bringing all the services back in-house, necessary though this is, or through a repeat of the expensive tendering processes that gave Carillion its government contracts in the first place. This is to say nothing of potential job and pension losses. For what we know for sure about outsourcing is that when times are good and profits are to be had its shareholders that benefit, but when crisis hits and losses mount its the public that picks up the bill one way or another. Like the bailout of the banking sector, its a model that privatises profits and socialises risk. Its economics for the few, not the many, and its time to end it. We can start by bringing the affected public services back in-house on a permanent basis, and we can take it further by electing a Labour Government that will put a stop to the continued corporate sabotage of society.

Actually, Labour could go even further. While PFI has been a two-party affair, Corbyn has never had any truck with the Blairites who embraced it. Any financier with an operating brain cell should know that the 70 to 99 year leases that are common in PFI and public/private partnerships a very dodgy proposition. How many bonds have more than a 30 year maturity? Theres no sound reason to think that contracts that extend so long beyond other norms are either immutable or enforceable. Corbyn would be in a political position to demand that PFI deals be renegotiated and stare down the creditors. It would take some clever lawyering but one could likely come up with misrepresentations made by the deal organizers and other legal arguments for reopening the terms. And the beauty is that it would have the side effect of chilling, perhaps fatally, the market for these transactions, an outcome Labour would not mind either.

Mind you, I am not saying the odds of this happening are high. But if the shockwaves of the Carillion implosion become large enough, the seemingly impossible may start to look viable.
Yves here. It is telling that the very measured Bruegel website is pretty bothered that Intel looks likely to get away with relatively little in the way of financial consequences as a result of its Spectre and Meltdown security disasters. This is a marked contrast with Volkswagen, where the company paid huge fines and executives went to jail.

However, it was the US that went after a foreign national champion. The US-dominated tech press is still frustratingly given the Intel train wrecks paltry coverage relative to their importance.

One thing that could change the dynamic would be if a foreign regulator, say in the EU or China, were to lower the hammer on Intel. And that would take a while to develop, since that authority would want to have a very well thought out case before it took on such a high profile player. But the flip side is Intels lapse was glaring, and some of the comments on tech-savvy sites and threads suggest that Intel was not only not unaware, but understood the implications of its business/profit decisions.

Consider a discussion at Slashdot kicked off by this summary:

troublemaker_23 quotes ITWire: Disclosure of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, which affect mainly Intel CPUs, was handled in an incredibly bad way by both Intel and Google, the leader of the OpenBSD project Theo de Raadt claims. Only Tier-1 companies received advance information, and that is not responsible disclosure  it is selective disclosure, De Raadt told iTWire in response to queries. Everyone below Tier-1 has just gotten screwed. In the interview de Raadt also faults intel for moving too fast in an attempt to beat their competition. There are papers about the risky side-effects of speculative loads  people knew Intel engineers attended the same conferences as other company engineers, and read the same papers about performance enhancing strategies  so it is hard to believe they ignored the risky aspects. I bet they were instructed to ignore the risk.

Notice this reaction in particular:

I was one of those who called no way at first, but just yesterday I found this quote [danluu.com] from an Intel engineer. It was originally posted in a reddit thread [reddit.com] but has since been deleted  but not before being confirmed by other former engineers at Intel. As someone who worked in an Intel Validation group for SOCs until mid-2014 or so I can tell you, yes, you will see more CPU bugs from Intel than you have in the past from the post-FDIV-bug era until recently. Why? Let me set the scene: Its late in 2013. Intel is frantic about losing the mobile CPU wars to ARM. Meetings with all the validation groups. Head honcho in charge of Validation says something to the effect of: We need to move faster. Validation at Intel is taking much longer than it does for our competition. We need to do whatever we can to reduce those times we cant live forever in the shadow of the early 90s FDIV bug, we need to move on. Our competition is moving much faster than we are  Im paraphrasing. Many of the engineers in the room could remember the FDIV bug and the ensuing problems caused for Intel 20 years prior. Many of us were aghast that someone highly placed would suggest we needed to cut corners in validation  that wasnt explicitly said, of course, but that was the implicit message. That meeting there in late 2013 signalled a sea change at Intel to many of us who were there. And it didnt seem like it was going to be a good kind of sea change. Some of us chose to get out while the getting was good. As someone who worked in an Intel Validation group for SOCs until mid-2014 or so I can tell you, yes, you will see more CPU bugs from Intel than you have in the past from the post-FDIV-bug era until recently.

If this sort of thing is leaking out, Intel may be more vulnerable in discovery or regulatory proctology than Mr. Market is assuming now.

By Alexander Roth, a Research Intern at Bruegel who previously at the European Commission, the Centre for European Economic Research, Commerzbank AG and the University of Mannheim, and Georg Zachmann, a member of the German Advisory Group in Ukraine who has also worked at the German Ministry of Finance and the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. Originally published at Bruegel

Intel suffered only minimal pain in the stock market following revelations about the Meltdown hardware vulnerability. But if the market wont compel providers to ensure the safety of their hardware, what will?

On January 3, it became public that almost all microprocessors that Intel has sold in the past 20 years would allow attackers to extract data that are not supposed to be accessible. This hardware vulnerability termed Meltdown is depicted as one of the largest security flaws in recent chip designs.

Financial markets were relatively unimpressed with the news; Intels stock price fell initially by 5% but stabilised afterwards. This contrasts sharply with the Volkswagen diesel scandal of 2015, which saw the car companys value fall by almost 40% within a week. The two cases have more differences than similarities, but the striking resilience of Intels market valuation to the revelation that most Intel CPUs are vulnerable to specific attacks raises an interesting question:

Do hardware providers have sufficient incentives to make sure their products are as safe as possible?

Intel  having been made aware of the flaw more than six months ago  was able to provide guidance in how to address this security problem, so that patches to millions of computers could be rolled out. However, it is the providers of operation systems (such as Microsoft in the case of Windows) that provided these patches and that have to bear substantial cost.

We have already learned about the incompatibility of the original patch with AMD-processors or certain standard antivirus software. Administrators of complex IT infrastructures in particular will have to expend substantial resources on testing and adapting any patch on their critical hardware. Moreover, to date it remains unclear how severe the implications for processor performance are. As the security flaw lies in a feature to increase a processors computing power, modifying this feature could cost speed. First reports do not agree over the expected performance losses: some expect significant speed reductions, while Intel and Googleclaim that effects will most likely be minimal.

However, the reaction of the stock market suggests that Intel will not be held fully accountable for this incident, therefore will not have to bear the full cost of the flaws in its processors. This is somewhat worrisome, as it indicates that producers of essential IT hardware seem not be incentivised by the stock market to provide secure products, while the costs of the flaws in their products have to be paid by others.

Intels domination in the market of desktop and server processors could partly explain the gentle reaction of its stock. In a more competitive market, consumers would have more product choices and consequences for Intel would have been more severe. In contrast to Intels case, the stark drop of Volkswagens stock price could be explained  among other factors  by the more competitive market environment.

The question, however, of whether more competition in the processor market would have prevented a flaw such as Meltdown remains very much disputed. It is unlikely that higher investments by Intel, induced by stronger competition, would have prevented Meltdown  which has remained undetected by the entire chip industry for 20 years.

The most worrying aspect of the Intel case remains, though, the implication that providers of essential hardware might have more to lose from continuously searching for problems that do not exist, than from occasionally failing to spot a potential threat.
Gardai have issued an appeal for the public's help in tracing a Mitsubishi jeep used in an aggravated burglary of a house/shop in Clonea Power near Carrick-on-Suir last week.

The light blue short wheel base Mitsubishi Pajero jeep with a 09 registration was used as the getaway vehicle by the robbers who broke into the house attached to the village's local shop around 9.15pm last Tuesday, January 9.

The raiders armed with timber sticks threatened the elderly couple living in the house and stole a sum of money from the premises. Gardai received a report of the crime around 10pm.

A Tramore Garda Station spokesman said at least two men and possibly more were involved in the raid. Gardai can't confirm the exact number of culprits at this stage.

He said the elderly couple weren't assaulted or tied up by the criminals.

The Gardai have carried out a forensic examination of the premises and conducted door-to-door enquiries as well as enquiries outside Mass in the village last Saturday night.

The Garda spokesman said gardai are anxious to get information on the Mitsubishi Pajero used as the getaway vehicle. An unusual feature of the jeep was its blackened out back windows.

He urged anyone who witnessed suspicious activity in the Clonea area on Tuesday night, January 9 or anyone with information that may assist their investigation to contact Tramore Garda Station at (051) 391620 or any Garda Station.

Rathgormack based councillor Seanie Power visited the elderly couple last week and reported they were shaken by the raid but gave great praise to the Gardai for the assistance they have given them.

The Fine Gael councillor believes a lot of elderly residents and residents living alone in his community are fearful after this crime and urged neighbours and friends to visit them and look out for them.

He also urged residents to contact the gardai in Kilmacthomas or Tramore if they see any suspicious vehicles or activity in their area and to get involved in the Comeragh Text Alert Scheme that covers Clonea, Rathgormack, Carrickbeg and Windgap.
The NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, will travel to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on Wednesday, 17 and Thursday, 18 January 2018.

Mr. Stoltenberg will have meetings with the President, Mr. Gjorge Ivanov, the Prime Minister, Mr. Zoran Zaev, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Nikola Dimitrov, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, Ms. Radmila Sekerinska, the President of the Parliament, Mr. Talat Xhaferi and other high level officials.

The Secretary General will also address the Parliament.

Media Advisory

Thursday, 18 January

12:05 Secretary General address to the Parliament

16:05 Secretary General joint press conference with the Prime Minister  The press point and the Secretary Generals speech will be streamed live on the NATO website (TBC)

Still and video images will be available on the NATO website afterwards.

Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @jensstoltenberg)
Danish and Belgian commanders have taken the lead of two NATO naval groups which help provide security at sea. Commodore Sren Thinggard Larsen of the Royal Danish Navy now leads Standing NATO Maritime Group One (SNMG1), which was under Norwegian leadership throughout 2017. A special event was held in Bergen, Norway on Monday (15 January 2018) to mark the handover.

Meanwhile a ceremony was held at Zeebrugge, Belgium where Commander Peter Ramboer of the Belgian Navy assumed command of Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group One (SNMCMG1) from his Latvian counterpart. The group was recently involved in the safe disposal of historical bombs and mines found in European waters.

NATO has four standing maritime groups which are made up of ships from various nations, a demonstration of Allied solidarity. These vessels are permanently available to NATO to perform different tasks ranging from exercises to operations. They also serve as an on-call maritime force as a part of NATOs Spearhead Force - the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force.

The Danish and Belgian commanders will lead their respective maritime groups through 2018.
(Natural News) Federal prosecutors and the Bureau of Land Management could not have treated Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his family any more unjustly, but environmentalists are now pushing the government to go back to Bundys ranch and essentially steal his cattle again.

In case you missed it, in recent days a federal judge threw out a case against Bundy and two of his sons over flagrant prosecutorial misconduct stemming from a 2014 BLM raid. U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro had previously declared a mistrial after 3,000 pages of documents were turned over to Bundys defense team only after the trial had begun.

I personally have never seen anything like this, especially in a case of such importance, said Bundy attorney Bret D. Whipple.

In addition to prosecutorial misconduct, an internal investigation by BLM special agent Larry Clint Wooten found that personnel used incredible bias when they besieged the Bundys ranch in their initial raid, killing cattle and abusing family members and friends.

But now, extreme environmentalists want the federal government to take another shot  probably literally  at Bundy and his cattle-ranching operation near Bunkerville, Nevada, according to the Washington Times.

We urge Interior not to leave this business unfinished. Time is of the essence, says a letter from environmental groups to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. BLM falls under Interiors jurisdiction.

Interior must round up these cattle to ensure that a pattern of lawlessness backed up by violence does not perpetuate itself across the public lands of the Western U.S.

In response to the letter, another Bundy attorney, Larry Klayman, said, I would say, make our legal day.

The violence that these groups are referring to most likely relates to the fact that hundreds of Bundy supporters descended on his ranch to support and defend him after the BLM deployed heavily armed agents to round up his 400 cattle. Agents called off the roundup after they were met with such an overwhelming response.

But clearly, if there was any violence committed during the ordeal, it was against the Bundys and some of their supporters. As The National Sentinel noted, Wootens report included instances of physical abuse by BLM agents.

Wooten said in his 18-page report that BLM supervisory agent Daniel Love engaged in a punitive and ego-driven law-enforcement buildup at Bundys ranch that included at least one sniper, in addition to other officers with long-range rifles.

Also, at least one BLM agent kept a kill list that featured Americans who committed suicide while under investigation by the agency.

As for the Bundys themselves, agents referred to them as douche bags and retards. One boasted of grinding a Bundy family members face into gravel (which turned out to be Bundys son Dave; he was thrown to the ground and arrested for taking photos in violation of the BLMs self-appointed First Amendment Area set up to keep the press away from what was happening).

Regarding Love, Wooten concluded that he conducted the most intrusive, oppressive, large-scale and militaristic trespass cattle impound possible against the Bundy family ranch, which has run cattle in the same part of Nevada since the 1870s. And he found that lead prosecutor and then-Nevada acting U.S. Attorney Steve Myhre engaged in preferred ignorance of details regarding portions of the BLMs investigation and operations. (Related: Why its time to eliminate the BLM forever and return millions of acres to the people.)

And now environmental groups want the government to go back and essentially repeat these abuses.

Unbelievable.

Im guessing that if the Trump administration were to treat their organizations like the Obama administration treated the Bundys, theyd probably have an entirely different point of view.

As for Bundy himself, hes considering a lawsuit against the Feds.

Meanwhile, Congress wants answers. Two GOP lawmakers are pressing BLM interim Director Brian Steed for information on the agencys apparent culture of impunity for law enforcement misconduct.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources include:

WashingtonTimes.com

TheNationalSentinel.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) While its no secret that battery technology has come quite a long way since the first time it was used in mobile devices, there are still many pitfalls associated with its usage. For one thing, lithium batteries, like the ones used in most smartphones, laptops, and other kinds of consumer electronics, tend to fail after a certain number of cycles  or charges  and need outright replacement to prevent them from causing further problems. This is something that affects all kinds of gadgets, no matter what the price. Will there ever be a way to fix this?

Well, theres an invention created specifically to do just that. An expert in batteries from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore has successfully managed to create a prototype of a device that can reportedly restore a batterys life. And it has been so effective that a few major tech companies have already expressed their interest in it as a piece of technology that they can somehow benefit from.

This invention was made by Professor Rachid Yazami, who is an adjunct scientist at NTU. He sees it as a better way to prolong the lifespan of lithium batteries, which by design, tend to break down and need replacement after a certain number of years of use. In this view, it would be greatly beneficial to users of smartphones, laptops, and even bigger battery-powered devices such as electric vehicles. In fact, he says that the greatest potential of his invention can be in electric vehicles, mainly because people wouldnt be looking to replace them as often as they would other normal gadgets like phones, laptops, and tablets.

People dont change their cars as often as they do smartphones  some would change a phone every two years, but you would want a car to last for more than 10 years, said Yazami. He is currently the chief executive of a battery technology firm called KVI, which was set up to work directly under NTU. His invention, if applied correctly, could eventually lead to fewer batteries that need to be made and disposed of, which means that it is ultimately an environmentally friendly technology solution to Earths problems.

When he presented his idea and invention at the International Battery Seminar in the U.S. back in March of 2017, he garnered the interest of a few leading electronics manufacturers, such as Apple, Samsung, and Panasonic. This is no doubt due to the fact that, prior to him, no one else had thought of modifying the typical lithium battery design in order to eventually restore it to almost full capacity after a certain amount of use. His innovation is mainly adding a third electrode on top of two poles in the conventional design, and this allows him to drain residual lithium-ions in the battery, which are what causes inevitable battery decline. With his invention, its possible to restore a battery to up to 95 percent of its original capacity.

Thats almost an unbelievable level of restoration, and one that will surely be welcome among users of electronics with standard lithium batteries, since that would mean they will have the ability to use their devices far longer than what is currently possible, and that they wouldnt need to pay money just to buy replacements.

According to Yazami, the process of restoring a battery to almost its full original capacity by using his invention could take up to 10 hours per attempt. However, since it would only need to be done once every few years, thats still a net positive. Perhaps with some more work, it can be possible to reduce the time it takes for the process to be completed. For now, further research on the technology will be performed and hopefully, it can be applied to consumer tech one day very soon.

Find more news on unique inventions at Inventions.news.

Sources include:

StraitsTimes.com

BGR.com
(Natural News) Facebooks war against conservatives and those who expose the radical left is showing no signs of slowing down any time soon; as a matter of fact, if anything, the social media giants hostility towards those on the right is getting worse with each passing day.

Matt Margolis is a conservative author who has written multiple books exposing the scandalous behavior of former president Barack Obama, including The Worse President in History, which details the failures of Obamas administration, and most recently, The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. Just as millions of other authors do, Margolis traditionally uses social media sites such as Facebook to promote his work. This can be very effective, especially considering how easy Facebook makes it to select specific target audiences and intended demographics. However, because Matt Margolis is a conservative, Facebook decided they would shut him up by simply banning him from the platform for six days without any explanation whatsoever.

To make matters worse, Margolis paid for his book advertisement to be boosted using Facebooks advertising program, and while Mark Zuckerberg and his liberal friends had no problem taking his hard-earned money, they apparently had no issues with banning him immediately after Margolis posted his ad to several groups, either.

Margolis attempted to appeal the ban, but was unsuccessful.

I hate to think Im being censored, and hope thats not the case, Margolis said in an interview with PJ Media, but Facebooks reputation makes that possibility hard to ignore. Were seeing companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google actively censoring conservative ideas on their platforms. It is hardly far-fetched that big-tech censorship wouldnt include a book that doesnt fit the narrative they support.

Margolis went on to say that he fears that there is now a concerted effort to silence those who consider themselves to be more conservative than liberal. I fear this is only the beginning, he explained. Far-left trolls often posted bogus reviews of my last book on Amazon, calling it racist. Companies like Facebook/Twitter/Google are certainly likely to take bogus accusations of racism to justify their censorship. (Related: Facebook censors Natural News from users who want it, but wont allow you to block Mark Zuckerbergs feed.)

It appears as though Mr. Margolis believes that sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google silence conservative voices so often largely because of liberal Internet trolls that intentionally seek out right-leaning content (like the book Margolis recently published) and label it as racist, hateful or bigoted. While this is certainly true in a significant number of cases, there is also a strong case to be made that the employees at Facebook, Twitter and Google hold anti-conservative biases themselves. In this way, not only do they respond to complaints by liberal trolls and use them as justification for censoring conservatives, but in many cases, they silence those on the right based on their own political beliefs and philosophies.

To give just one example, back in May of 2016, Fox News reported that several unnamed former Facebook contractors had come forward and revealed that the social media giant often suppresses news stories that are of interest to conservative users. In addition, these former employees explained that they were instructed to inject certain topics into Facebooks trending list, even if they werent popular stories or necessarily relevant. One conservative contractor in particular said that hed often come into work and see that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldnt be trending either because the news curators didnt recognize these news topics or because they held personal anti-conservative biases. (Related: The Health Ranger has called for the First Amendment to be expanded to the online world.)

Facebook is most definitely at war with not only conservative Americans, but also free speech and the First Amendment. Sadly, it doesnt appear that the social media giant will be surrendering any time soon, a sign that this war will likely continue to rage on for years to come.

Sources include:

PJMedia.com

FoxNews.com
(Natural News) Robotic weeders are growing in popularity, an expert said, to support the growth and proliferation of specialty crops, or crops that are not mass-produced, and which include vegetables like broccoli, onions, lettuce, and tomatoes.

The necessity for the utilization of robotic weeders comes from two issues: one, a lack of herbicides that can be used for specialty crops; two, the fact that hand-weeding has become so expensive ($150 to $300 per acre). With the absence of pesticides, growers have had to employ the services of other people to hand-weed vast fields. (Related: Robots to take over jobs in human service industry, increasing the percentage of unemployed Americans.)

Ive been working with robotic weeders for about 10 years now, and the technology is really just starting to come into commercial use. Its really an economic incentive to consider them, said Steven Fennimore, an extension specialist under the Department of Vegetable Crops and Weed Science at the University of California, Davis.

The robotic weeders are calibrated in such a way that they are able to recognize a pattern and have the ability to tell the difference between a plant and the soil. Also, these robotic weeders are currently being trained to distinguish a lettuce plant from a weed.

The problem with the machines right now is that they are version 1.0, and theres tremendous room for improvement. The inability to be able to tell the difference between a weed and a crop requires the grower to be very exact when using them.

The rows have to be a little straighter, cleaner, and more consistent because the machines arent that sophisticated yet. The robots dont like surprises, Fennimore said.

The robotic weeders that are sold on the market are priced between $120,000 and $175,000. For some California growers, the new technology is too expensively priced, and have indicated that they will wait until costs have gone down. Other growers however, are willing to invest in a better long-term tool than expensive hand-weeding.

Fennimore is focusing his work on the physical control of weeds. He has also progressed from conducting work on lettuce to applying the technology on other crops such as onions and tomatoes. He said that each crop will require a different robotic weeder system.

I believe what makes the robotic weeders better than herbicide is that this electronic-based technology is very flexible and can be updated easily. We all update our phones and computers constantly, which is a sign of a robust and flexible technology, Fennimore said.

Other machines that are arising as robotic weeders

The rise of robotic weeders as an agricultural tool is being seen today as something that would revolutionize agriculture and farming as a whole. Robotic weeders have been so in demand lately that a lot of entrepreneurs and budding start-up aficionados are looking at manufacturing, marketing, and selling their own robotic weeder machines.

One of them is Benoit Carre, developer of Anatis autonomous weeder, who offers his own outlook of weed control for modern agriculture. Robots are creating a lot of excitement, but we did not set out to build a robot. Instead, we set out to produce a weeder that was automated.

We have been manufacturing inter-row weeders since 1975 and the next step was a camera-mounted, tractor-guided system, which we developed 15 years ago. These guided weeders will typically work at eight to 10 kilometers per hour. However, farmers dont want to spend hours on a weeder, as it is a boring job and they are under pressure to reduce costs, Carre said.

For more stories regarding artificial intelligence, automation, and the way robots are making our lives more convenient, visit Robotics.news.

Sources include:

NewsWise.com

FutureFarming.com
A Perris, California, mother and father are behind bars Tuesday after one of their children escaped their home and reported to sheriff's deputies that 12 of her siblings were still being held captive at their home, some of them shackled with chains and padlocks to their beds.

The children appeared malnourished when they were found Sunday, some so severely that deputies initially believed the adult children to be kids, according to a statement from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

"I wish I could come to you today with information to explain why this happened, but we do need to acknowledge the courage of the young girl who escaped from that residence to bring attention so they could get the help they so needed," said Captain Greg Fellows at a Tuesday morning news conference following the discovery that sent Southern California reeling.



David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, have been booked on charges of torture and child endangerment. They are each being held in lieu of $9 million bail.

According to the sheriff's department, a 17-year-old girl fled the house in the 100 block of Muir Woods Road early Sunday morning and was able to call 911 using a cellphone she had taken from the home.

Despite her age, deputies at first believed her to be around 10 years old because she was emaciated and malnourished.

At the home, deputies found children shackled to beds in "dark and foul-smelling surroundings."

"Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that 7 of them were actually adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29," police said in the statement. "The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty."

NBC Los Angeles has reached out to the Turpins' attorney for comment.

Neighbors say that the family kept to themselves, and when the children did come out, they did not look healthy.

"They looked very unnutrioned [sic], very white, like they never got sun at all," Wendy Martinez said. "I mean, they would never come out and when they did, the lady would stand there watching them."

Real estate records also reveal that Sandcastle Day School - a private school owned by David Turpin - is located at the couple's home.

The wedding officiant who served the couple as they renewed their vows said nothing seemed out of the ordinary in the family, other than its large size.

"Nothing seemed to be unusual, except the fact that there was a lot of them - a lot of kids," Kent Ripley said.

Ripley said the children appeared happy and well-behaved.

The couple's victims range in age from 2 to 29 years old. All of them have been hospitalized.

All six children were taken to the Riverside University Hospital System for treatment while the seven adults were transported to Corona Regional Medical Center, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

"We have seven of the adults," said Corona Regional Medical Center CEO Mark Uffer at a Tuesday news conference. "It's hard to think of them as adults when you first see them because they're small, and it's very clear that they're [malnourished]."

Uffer said the hospital couldn't reveal much do to pirvacy laws, but said the children were stable, being fed, and were in a comfortable and safe environment.

"I can tell you they're very friendly, they're very cooperative, and I believe that they're hopeful that life will get better for them," Uffer said.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is scheduled to discuss the future of Syria during an event at Stanford University on Wednesday morning.

Tillerson will be joined by Condoleezza Rice, the 66th Secretary of State who served under President George W. Bush, at 11:15 a.m. in Hauck Auditorium at 435 Lasuen Mall.

The event will be hosted by the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Organizers say that space is limited, but Tillerson's remarks will be streaming live online or on YouTube.
Dozens of South Florida Haitians gathered to protest President Donald Trump in West Palm Beach on Monday in response to the president reportedly calling Haitians and African nations "s--thole countries" during a White House meeting.

"What do we want? An apology!" the protesters chanted as they marched and waved Haitian flags with Trump not far away in Palm Beach County.

The White House has not denied that Trump said the word "s--thole," though Trump did push back on some depictions of the meeting.

"I don't want my kids to grow up thinking their parents are from a sh--hole country," protester James Leger said. "We're asking you to apologize to the Haitians."

A pro-Trump group across the street waved American flags.

Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office deputies and West Palm Beach Police officers were at the protest scene to make sure everyone stayed safe.

The president left Palm Beach County Monday afternoon.
An Army veteran who lived with a scalpel in his abdomen for four years after it was left inside him during surgery at the VA Hospital in West Haven, Connecticut has filed a malpractice lawsuit against the United States, Connecticut, according to the man's attorney.

Glenford Turner filed the lawsuit on Friday, months after an X-ray revealed a scalpel in his abdomen.

The 61-year-old Iraq war veteran, who lives in Bridgeport, was suffering from dizziness and abdominal pains, according to Faxon Law Group, the group that filed the malpractice lawsuit.

"Any one of those organs could have been pierced by this and he could have been killed," attorney Joel Faxon said.

Turner went to the West Haven campus of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System on March 29, 2017, for an MRI, but his pain got worse and the process was abruptly stopped, according to Faxon Law Group.

X-rays revealed that a scalpel had been left inside the veterans body, near his stomach and intestines. Doctors determined it was left from a prostate cancer procedure performed on Aug. 30, 2013, at the West Haven VA, according to Faxon Law Group.

"In my judgment, its clearly a seven-figure case when somebody leaves a scalpel like this in you and you have the future risk of having infections or adhesions or other problems that could necessitate additional surgery," Faxon said in an interview.

In April 2017, Turner went through surgery to remove the scalpel.

Faxon said he filed a claim with the Department of Veterans Affairs on Turner's behalf with the West Haven VA under the Federal Torts Claims Act a few months later in June, but the issue was not resolved, which is why they filed the federal lawsuit last week.

The lawyer calls it "an incomprehensible level of incompetence."

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal responded to the lawsuit with a statement, saying he was "appalled and stunned" by the "egregious" malpractice.

"While the court determines liability, I have asked for a detailed explanation from VA of this deeply troubling report," Blumenthal said in the statement. "I am demanding also full accountability so this kind of horrific negligence never happens again. America owes our veterans the worlds best medical care, nothing less."

The West Haven VA spokesperson said they haven't had a chance to review the lawsuit since they were closed on Monday for the holiday. They said they hope to provide a response to NBC Connecticut later in the week.

A federal judge in Bridgeport has been assigned to the case.
Police say the cold weather after Monday's snowfall has led to multiple crashes in southeastern Massachusetts.

State police tweeted around 1:30 p.m. that there had been "numerous" crashes and spin-outs on Route 3 in Duxbury and Route 44 in Carver because of black ice.

Police in Carver added that they were assisting Plymouth Police after "multiple accidents" on Federal Furnace Road, which leads to Tremont Street in Carver, where traffic was being detoured.

Authorities would like drivers to be cautious when traveling in the area.
An Amtrak employee was found dead in a rail yard Tuesday morning in Chicago's South Loop.

At about 7:15 a.m., officials said the employee was fatally injured at a mechanical facility near Canal Street and Roosevelt Road.

No other injuries were reported, Amtrak said in a statement.

"The incident occurred in the vicinity of a service and inspection building," the statement read.

The identity of the employee was not immediately released and the incident remained under investigation Tuesday.
Gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy left the stage during a forum on Monday after Republican State Rep. Jeanne Ives argued the solution to gun violence in Illinois was having more fathers in the home.



Kennedy, a Democrat, replied by pointing out he had grown up without a father before standing up and walking out of the venue.

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For the Winnetka businessman and politician, gun violence is personal. Both his father and uncle  Sen. Robert Kennedy (D) and President John F. Kennedy (D), respectively  were shot and killed during the turbulent 1960s.



Kennedy has made gun violence a top priority of his campaign since he declared his candidacy last February, earning endorsements from African-American Congressmen Bobby Rush and Danny Davis in the process.

"It hit a very special nerve for me," Kennedy said in an interview with NBC 5. "I lost my father to someone with a gun. For someone to say simply the solution is to have a father-in-law  I dont know. How shall I react? What should my family have done?"

Kathleen Murphy, a spokesperson for Ives, said in a statement Monday night that the representative did not mean to offend Mr. Kennedy during the forum.

However, Murphy also reiterated the importance of fathers in domestic life, citing "similar statements" like President Barack Obama's 2008 Father's Day speech at the Apostolic Church of God on Chicago's South Side. In his speech, the then-candidate said, "too many fathers also are is missing  missing from too many lives and too many homes."

"Those are President Obama's words, and that was what she was echoing today," Murphy said. "She certainly meant no offense to Mr. Kennedy."

Kennedy made the decision to leave after watching the 2016 Republican primary debates, where he said, the Republican Party allowed Donald Trump to say racist and simplistic things. Kennedy argued that Republicans should have vacated the stage in protest like he did when he heard simplistic solutions to tragic problems.

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Kennedys running mate, Ra Joy, has also been personally stricken by gun violence. His son Xavier was killed by gunfire in Hyde Park last June. After returning home from college for the summer, his family believes he was killed for his cell phone just two blocks from his home.

Kennedy quoted his running mate when it came to tackling violence.



As Ra points out, hurt people hurt people, he said. We need to be sensitive to that; think in terms of empathy and not in terms of punishment, and thats not what I was hearing today.
A former sheriff of Indiana's second most-populous county was sentenced to 188 months in prison Tuesday on bribery and wire fraud charges.

Federal prosecutors asked that John Buncich be sentenced to at least 15 years in prison for taking tens of thousands of dollars in bribes from towing businesses.

Buncich was removed from office as Lake County sheriff after a jury convicted him in August of bribery and wire fraud charges. Assistant U.S. Attorney Philip Benson asked in a court filing that Buncich be taken into custody immediately after his Jan. 16 sentencing hearing.

Benson argued Buncich's conduct was "a calculated abuse of power over a prolonged period of time for personal enrichment."

Defense attorney Bryan Truitt didn't immediately return a message seeking comment.

Buncich is a Democrat who was elected in 2015 to his fourth term as sheriff. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Officials in Hawaii have apologized after an alert warning of a ballistic missile launch went out by mistake, an error that caused widespread panic for more than half an hour on the island on Saturday. Among those sent seeking shelter was a couple with Connecticut ties, who now live in Wilmington, Del.

Kimberly and David Chianese got married just a few days before the alert. The couple was celebrating their honeymoon in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. Mr. and Mrs. Chianese spoke to NBC Connecticut about the chaotic moments.

"We were walking to the elevator to get our rental car to explore the island that day and my phone went off, said Kimberly. "Mine went off before David's did and he said 'What is that? Is that a weather alert?'," she said.

"When I looked at it I just turned pure white and I just started crying," she said.

"My phone went off in the elevator on the way down," said David. "You looked at it and you saw the alarm: 'Missile Alert. This is not a drill'. I said let's get to the lobby. Let's find the basement," David said.

The couple entered the lobby of their hotel and witnessed chaos, with people running and shouting.

David told Kimberly they had to find shelter to try to avoid the blast.

After 38 minutes of panic  and after frantic calls to loved ones in the continental United States  the Chianeses received the notification that the alert was not real and was instead a major mistake.

The newlyweds said they are still in the process of calming down from the situation. The couple said it will be trying to relax for the remaining days of their honeymoon.
More resources were expected to arrive in Kent Tuesday after officials declared a local state of emergency due to ice jam flooding along the Housatonic River, and officials are looking for volunteers to help with the preparations.

Ice jams formed Saturday, causing the river to overflow and forcing road closures and home evacuations.

Housatonic River Ice Jam Flooding in Kent

Now the town is in contact with the US Army Corps of Engineers.

"Theres kind of a stagnant period now where the ice jam is frozen in place. It hasnt moved. Water levels have receded but its one big ice barge right now. Theres no longer individual pieces of ice. Its just all frozen together in one. What that has done over the past few days with the freezing temperatures- its given us time to now properly plan for this," State Rep. Brian Ohler said during a press conference on Tuesday.

NBC Connecticut spoke with the towns emergency management director, Susie Rundall, who came down to check on the situation at the center of town, one of the two areas impacted by the flood waters.

Rundall said round the clock meetings are being held with local and state leaders.

She said they have plans in place, but for the time being they have to wait and see what happens.

"There is a plan, were just waiting for one flip of the coin to go one way or the other. Either its going to melt slowly or were going to have a big bang out here and its gonna go," Rundall said.

Right now officials are monitoring whether the ice will melt all at once, which would cause a rapid increase in the water level, or if theyll see a gradual thaw.

Among the contingency plans discussed is using a construction crane and wrecking ball to dislodge the ice that sits a mile wide over the Housatonic River.

"If this ice jam stays for the next week were going to have to do something to break it up mechanically," explained Rep. Brian Ohler.

On top of the ongoing flood concerns, a storm moving in Tuesday is expected to drop anywhere between 6 to 10 inches of snow in the area.

Officials are not taking any chances and expect some emergency equipment to arrive Tuesday.

"Were getting boats, hopefully, a hummer, weve got pumps, weve got about 20 pumps for pumping out cellars," Rundall said.

A trailer of cots was dropped off at the Kent Senior Center, which will become an emergency shelter if needed. Around two dozen homes are in the danger zone.

The town also also has 5,000 sandbags that theyre looking for volunteers to help fill at the town garage.

Rundall told NBC Connecticut her biggest concern is people walking on the ice because it is so unstable and unpredictable. She said shes already seen people walking their dogs on the ice.

Right now roads leading up to the Housatonic River and the surrounding recreational areas are closed to the public. Police will be out here patrolling the ice jams in the day ahead. Route 7 was closed, but it has reopened between Route 341 and Bulls Bridge.

Theres no timetable for when officials would plan to try to break the ice. But, if and when they do move forward it will be a carefully coordinated effort with the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, starting at the south end of the ice jam and working north.

They dont want it to break all at once because that would spell disaster for towns like Gaylordsville and New Milford downstream.

Town officials are in contact with the town leaders in Gaylordsville and New Milford.

The uncertainty has led Kent School, a private boarding school in town, to send its 580 students home. The school will remain closed through Sunday. The Kent Center School will reopen on Thursday and Friday.

Students at the Kent School were sent home due to flooding on campus after an ice jam sent waters up over the banks of the Housatonic River.
A 17-year-old girl called police after escaping from her family's home where she and her 12 brothers and sisters were locked up in filthy conditions, some so malnourished officers at first believed all were children even though seven are adults.



The girl, who was so small officers initially believed she was only 10, called 911 and was met by police who interviewed her and then went to the family home in Perris, about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

They found several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark, foul-smelling surroundings, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.



The children, ages 2 to 29, "appeared to be malnourished and very dirty," according to a press release announcing Sunday's arrest of the parents.

"The victims were provided with food and beverages after they claimed to be starving."



David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin, 49, each were held on $9 million bail and could face charges including torture and child endangerment.



It wasn't immediately known if they had attorneys. They were scheduled to appear in court Thursday morning.



State Department of Education records show the family home has the same address as Sandcastle Day School, where David Turpin is listed as principal.

In the 2016-17 school year it had an enrollment of six with one student in each of the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, 10th and 12th grades.



Neighbors in Perris said they were stunned by the arrests. Andrew Santillan, who lives around the corner, heard about the case from a friend.



"I had no idea this was going on," he told the Press-Enterprise newspaper of Riverside. "I didn't know there were kids in the house."



Other neighbors described the family as intensely private.



A few years ago, Robert Perkins said he and his mother saw a few family members constructing a Nativity scene in the Turpins' front yard. Perkins said he complimented them on it.



"They didn't say a word," he said.



The family moved to Southern California in 2011 from Rio Vista in Johnson County, near Fort Worth, according to property records.

Those living near the family's old Rio Vista home say they maybe saw the family once. Most in the small town had never heard their names and didn't recognize their pictures, shocked to learn the family making national headlines were once their neighbors.

The Turpins filed for bankruptcy that same year, stating in court documents they owed between $100,000 and $500,000.

At that time, Turpin worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman and earned $140,000 annually and his wife was a homemaker, records showed.



Their bankruptcy lawyer, Ivan Trahan, told the New York Times he never met the children but the couple "spoke about them highly."



"We remember them as a very nice couple," Trahan said, adding that Louise Turpin told him the family loved Disneyland and visited often.
It is a crucial week for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program.

With a looming deadline to avoid a government shutdown, Democrats say they will not approve a spending deal unless it includes a fix for the policy protecting an estimated 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump says he will not sign anything on immigration without money for a border wall.

Texas is home to more than 120,000 DACA recipients.

One Dallas teacher narrowly avoided living the uncertainty several of her colleagues and a family members are currently facing.

Esseiny Alanis had dreamed of obtaining a Green Card since she was brought to the United States illegally by her parents when she was just five years old.

When Alanis was 17, she reported being sexually abused as a child. That allowed her to qualify for a Humanitarian Visa.

Alanis was also eligible to apply for the DACA program. However, she could only chose one of the two programs to gain legal status.



Alanis opted for the Humanitarian visa, hoping that it would provide a faster path to legalization. It did. She is now breathing a sigh of relief when it comes to her immigration status.

I feel happy that I have my Permanent Residency because its a dream that Ive had for a long time, Alanis said, noting she is "glad that I chose that route."

If Alanis had chosen to apply for provisional legal status under DACA, she would likely be facing the same uncertainty current DACA recipients, including 36 fellow Dallas I.S.D. teachers, are feeling.

Its a bittersweet feeling, she said about her legal status. I feel sad because my brother, he has DACA right now. A lot of my friends, they have DACA. For them, its the uncertainty of not knowing whats going to happen to them if theyre going to lose their job, their career and for the children because right now children need teachers, bilingual teachers who are qualified.

Alanis said she wonders about the ripple effects deporting so-called Dreamers like her would have on cities like Dallas. The city's school district stands to lose a total of 68 DACA employees should the law expire before Congress takes action.

We have a dream also and we want to be a part of this big dream and make this country a better place, Alanis said.

A representative with the group North Texas Dream Team tells NBC 5 they will soon be holding workshops to help Dreamers renew their DACA status.

A federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to resume processing DACA renewals last week.
A Texas Tech University sophomore learned the hard way that sometimes she may have to contain her school spirit.



On the afternoon of January 6, Diana Durkin, 19, was traveling back to Lubbock after spending the holidays with her family in Houston.



While in the security line at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, she saw someone wearing a Texas Tech sweatshirt.



Durkin immediately threw her "Guns Up" signal at her fellow Red Raider. (The signal is each index finger and thumb pointing up in the shape of a gun.)



Soon after, Durkin said a Transportation Security Administration agent tapped her on the shoulder and said "you can't throw a gun signal up in an airport."



The agent quickly pulled Durkin to the side of the line.



"No, I'm so sorry. I go to Texas Tech," Durkin told the agent as she began to cry. "I meant nothing by it."



The security team then opened and inspected her luggage and patted her down.



Approximately 15 minutes later, they let her go with a warning.



In the airport security line and I see someone wearing a Texas Tech hoodie and I look at them and do the gun hand signal because wreck em amiright



tsa is now pulling me aside to talk to me :((  diana (@dianadurkin) January 6, 2018

Before her flight took off, she tweeted about what happened.



By the time the plane landed 90 minutes later, her tweet already had more than 5,000 likes.



Since then, Durkin's tweet has gone viral, with nearly 40,000 likes and 3,900 retweets.



Even Texas Governor Greg Abbott tweeted about it.

And Texas Tech said they're proud of Durkin's school pride.

Durkin told NBC 5 she was terrified at first, but then realized they were just doing their job.

"I laugh about it now, but it was really scary at the time," said Durkin.
Some Texas coastal towns where Hurricane Harvey made landfall are working to restore tourism and other economic attractions nearly five months after the storm.



Hundreds of businesses in Rockport and Fulton are now open amid recovery efforts assisted by Aransas County and other government officials, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reports.

Experts estimate the immediate impact of Harvey added up to $134 million in business losses in the county.



Harvey made landfall Aug. 25, leaving behind destroyed homes, businesses and infrastructure in Rockport, with about 10,000 residents.

Nearby Fulton, a town of nearly 1,600, also took a heavy hit.



Officials with the Rockport-Fulton Chamber of Commerce said about 460 businesses of 1,300 are now operating.



Allison Larsen, a volunteer with International Economic Development Corp., was part of a recent recovery meeting.

The area's charm -- with special events, hospitality and homegrown businesses -- is intact, according to Larsen.



"There's no doubt you have natural assets," she said in a presentation Thursday in Rockport. "Harvey didn't take that away from you."



The gathering was the culmination of a series of workshops examining how best to provide economic stability after disaster.



Immediate plans include investing in Rockport and Fulton's downtowns, supporting small businesses and embracing voluntourism -- a kind of tourism growing in popularity where visitors seek to combine vacations with volunteering for a cause, the newspaper reported.



"Our goal is really to attract volunteers that will spend money in our community and help with recovery," said Luis Puron, executive director of Rockport Center for the Arts.
The parents of a 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student killed and buried in a California park said Tuesday that the killing may have been a hate crime against their gay son.

The family statement came after a search warrant affidavit obtained by a newspaper revealed that Samuel Lincoln Woodward, 20, the high school friend arrested on suspicion of killing Blaze Bernstein, told investigators that Bernstein had kissed him and he had pushed him away before they went to the park.

As he described the kiss, Woodward clenched his jaw and his fists, saying "he wanted to tell Blaze to get off of him," investigators wrote in the affidavit obtained by the Orange County Register.

"Our son was a beautiful gentle soul who we loved more than anything," Gideon Bernstein and Jeanne Pepper Bernstein. "We were proud of everything he did and who he was. He had nothing to hide. We are in solidarity with our son and the LGBTQ community."

The couple added, "If it is determined that this was a hate crime, we will cry not only for our son, but for LGBTQ people everywhere that live in fear or who have been victims of hate crime."

Bernstein was then stabbed more than 20 times and buried in a shallow grave at the park, the Register and the Los Angeles Times reported.

"We are saddened to hear, on the day we laid our son to rest, that gruesome details of the cause of his death were published," Bernstein's parents said in their statement.

Carrie Braun, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff's Department, would not confirm to The Associated Press if Bernstein was stabbed but said "the condition of the body at the time it was discovered turned it from a missing person to a homicide immediately."

Woodward was interviewed by authorities after Bernstein was reported missing by his parents on Jan. 3.

Woodward was arrested Friday on suspicion of homicide after DNA evidence linked him to the death of Bernstein, Orange County Undersheriff Don Barnes said. The two knew each other from high school, he said.

Bernstein may have been planning to sexually pursue Woodward, according to the 16-page affidavit.

Bernstein texted two female friends about a June interaction where he felt Woodward was romantically interested in him, according to the document. Bernstein wrote that Woodward was about to "hit on me" and "he made me promise not to tell anyone."

Bernstein was visiting his family in Lake Forest, 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, during winter break. Woodward picked him up on Jan. 2 and drove with him to several places before they wound up at a park, authorities said.

A sheriff's investigator wrote in court filings that Woodward appeared nervous, had scratched hands and dirt under his fingernails, and avoided touching doors with his hands while leaving the sheriff's office building.

It was not immediately possible to reach Woodward in custody, where he listed his occupation as "Nerf games," according to the jail's website.

Authorities searched for Bernstein for nearly a week with assistance from drone pilots and found his body Jan. 9 after recent rains partially exposed it.
Twelve people are now facing misdemeanor charges in El Cajon, California, after handing out food to the homeless at a public park Sunday.

Volunteers and groups showed up to Wells Park to hand out food, clothes, shoes and toiletries. As of Monday, the 12 people said they plan to take legal action against the city of El Cajon.

If Im going to be arrested for something, let it be for feeding the homeless, said Matthew Schneck, who was cited Sunday. Im not going to apologize for doing the right thing."

El Cajon police wrote up citations to each person handing out food, including 14-year-old Ever Parmley.

I was passing out food and this guy was like can you step aside please," Parmley told NBC 7.

They were each charged with a misdemeanor for violating El Cajon municipal code 1.28.010. The ordinance dates back to October 2017, during the height of the Hepatitis A outbreak.

Charles Marks tells NBC 7, Ive been given a court date under the impression this represents being arrested on a misdemeanor, but its just a citation."



The city said the ordinance was passed in an effort to stop the spread of the virus, and prohibits "food sharing" in public spaces, which includes city parks.

In November, NBC 7 talked with councilmembers after signs were posted at Wells Park about the ordinance.

Councilmember Ben Kalasho told NBC 7,What we're saying is feeding them at city parks is a bad idea given the situation that we're in with the hepatitis A outbreak, and the fact that it makes the place completely messy afterward.

Kalasho continued, you can go out there, pick them up, take them back to your house and feed them and board them and room them and have them take a shower if you're really wanting to help."

The City of El Cajon told NBC 7 the ordinance is meant to be temporary until the County lifts the emergency health declaration on Hepatitis A. In a statement, the city also said there are over a dozen locations in the area that serve free food to the homeless.

An attorney representing the twelve people cited said he doesnt believe the motive behind the ordinance is to stop the spread of Hepatitis A, but rather an attempt to get the homeless out of the city.

It was really a disguise, said attorney Scott Dreher. People were complaining homeless people will come to the park if you give them free stuff.

Dreher plans to file motions to dismiss the misdemeanor charges and file an injunction against the city.

The twelve people cited will have scheduled court dates and could face a $1,000 fine and jail time.
The professor at the head of Florida Gulf Coast University's controversial "White Racism" class is back in spotlight.

Ted Thornhill told NBC affiliate WBBH-TV that he's getting death threats aimed at him and his family and has asked campus police to look into it.

Thornhill says he's turned over all emails and phone calls over to officers, but so far there have been no arrests.

The professor says the threats are now part of his class, using them as a teaching tool.
Officials in Venezuela confirmed Tuesday that a rebellious police officer who led a brazen helicopter attack in Caracas last year was among those killed in a violent shootout with security forces.

Oscar Perez was among the seven who died fighting against police and soldiers Monday in a small mountain community outside of Caracas, Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said.

Two police officers were killed and eight others gravely injured, he said.

"The terrorist acts committed by this terrorist cell showed the destabilizing objectives that they were pursuing," Reverol said.

A post shared by Oscar Perez (@equilibriogv) on Jan 15, 2018 at 5:25am PST

A post shared by Oscar Perez (@equilibriogv) on Jan 15, 2018 at 5:33am PST

Opposition lawmakers and human rights groups called for a transparent investigation into the deaths after video images showed Perez shouting over gunfire that they wished to surrender.

"We're going to turn ourselves in!" Perez said in the video.

A former police officer, action-movie star and pilot, Perez leaped into the spotlight in June, when he stole a helicopter and used it to lob grenades and fire at two government buildings in Caracas. Nobody was killed in the attack.

Perez, 36, had been one of Venezuela's most wanted fugitives ever since, periodically posting videos on Instagram calling upon Venezuelans to take to the streets against what he called President Nicolas Maduro's tyrannical government.

Perez claimed that he was fighting for Venezuela's freedom from a government that is starving its people. He garnered tens of thousands of followers online and has piqued the curiosity of Venezuelans who either hail him as hero, condemn him as a criminal or question if he might be a ruse to support Maduro's assertion that the nation is under attack by opposition conspirators.

In December, Perez posted videos showing him and a small armed band taking over a military outpost and smashing a portrait of Maduro with his foot. Perez and the assailants berated several detained guardsmen for doing nothing to help their fellow citizens.

Perez surfaced online again early Monday in videos  blood dripping across his face  and holed up in a mountainside house. Perez shouted over a spray of gunfire that the group wished to surrender, but that the police outside were set on killing them.

"I want to ask Venezuela not to lose heart  fight, take to the streets," he said. "It is time for us to be free, and only you have the power now."

Reverol said that an intense search finally led security forces to the house. Perez's group opened fire first, requiring a response from authorities, he said.

Troops arrested another six people identified as members, collaborators and financiers of the group. They also confiscated rifles, smoke grenades, military uniforms, ammunition, and a pickup, officials said.

Mystery surrounded Perez's fate for nearly 24 hours as officials remained silent until the announcement on state television that he was among the dead.

The Venezuelan Program of Education and Action on Human Rights has called for the government to provide a full report. The opposition-controlled National Assembly early Tuesday formed a special commission to conduct its own investigation.

"How is it possible that while surrendering, they riddled him with bullets?" said Delsa Solorzano, National Assembly deputy assigned to head the commission.

Solorzano called for the government turn the bodies over to relatives rather than cremate them, allowing for a transparent investigation.
A New Jersey man whose car plunged into the icy Delaware River Sunday is accused of leaving his girlfriend to die after he escaped from the submerged vehicle and fled the scene, authorities said.



Police say Jacob Garrett, 24, of Burlington City, was driving "at a high rate of speed" with Stephanie White, 23, also of Burlington City, in the passenger seat shortly before 1 p.m. along Riverbank Road when his car struck a parked minivan. The impact caused the car to vault over the river wall and fall into the ice-covered water below.

As the vehicle became submerged in water, witnesses helped Garrett get out of the car while White remained trapped in the passenger seat, the Burlington County Prosecutor's office said in a statement. Garrett then allegedly told witnesses to "help my girlfriend" before fleeing the scene.



"He left his girlfriend in the water to die," said Burlington City Police Captain John Fine. "When he crashed his car the vehicle went into the water, he got out, said take care of my girlfriend, and ran away. That's an offense in itself."



White was still wearing her seatbelt when responding firefighters pulled her out of the submerged vehicle. She was taken to Lourdes Medical Center where she was later pronounced dead.

A Burlington City police K-9 tracked Garrett to a nearby River Line light rail station. Authorities stopped the train at the Beverly/Edgewater Park station and arrested Garrett, who was soaking wet, the prosecutor's office said.

"I just can't believe that he was such a coward and left her there," said Victoria Wood, Garrett's neighbor.



Garrett was charged with leaving the scene of a fatal accident, causing death while driving with a suspended license and endangering an injured victim. He was held Monday in the Burlington County Jail and is scheduled to appear in Superior Court in Mount Holly, New Jersey.

"He was just always a bad seed," Wood said. "He'd come in here blasting his music. All of us called the cops all the time."

Those who knew White said she worked as a waitress to help her mother raise her younger foster brother.


What to Know Jerry Mercado, 25, escaped from a Connecticut prison on Jan. 7 and hasn't been seen since

Law enforcement sources say he may be in New York City riding the subway in an attempt to blend in

Authorities said Mercado, was serving a three-year sentence for third-degree burglary, might have fled by stowing away under a vehicle

The convict who escaped a Connecticut prison last week is thought to be in New York City, law enforcement sources told News 4.

Jerry Mercado, the 25-year-old burglar who busted out of Carl Robinson Correctional Institution in Enfield on Jan. 7, is likely riding the subway and other mass-transit systems in Manhattan in an attempt to blend in, according to sources.

Authorities said Mercado might have gotten out of the prison by stowing away under a vehicle on Jan. 7 -- either a state police van or a garbage truck.

Mercado, who is from Hartford, was serving a three-year sentence for third-degree burglary charges at the time of the escape. Officials from the DOC said he is classified as a "low risk" offender, but police had been asking people to be on alert.

He is 5 feet, 4 inches and weighs 137 pounds and might be wearing a combination of a tan jumpsuit, white T-shirt and gray sweatshirt. He has two visible tattoos: One on his neck reads "time waits for no one" and he has another on his left temple.

Anyone who thinks theyve seen Mercado should call 911 immediately, call the U.S. Marshals at (877) 926-8332 or email them here. Police stress that he should not be approached.

The U.S. Marshals service has also increased its reward from $1,500 to up to $2,500 for information leading to his arrest.



Carl Robinson is primarily a dormitory-style facility that houses around 1,500 inmates on Shaker Road in Enfield.
New Jersey Transit's board held a controversial meeting on Martin Luther King Day but didn't vote on purchasing a 3-acre site on Hoboken's waterfront to use as a ferry maintenance terminal.

In a surprise move, the proposed purchase was pulled from Monday's agenda.

The vote had been scheduled for last Wednesday, but not enough board members showed up to constitute a quorum. It was rescheduled for Friday, and then for Monday, a federal holiday.

Hoboken Mayor Ravinder Bhalla wants the site used as a public park and had vowed to fight the sale. Incoming Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy had urged a postponement of the vote.

In July, Republican Gov. Chris Christie signed a measure including $12 million for the purchase. Monday is Christie's last full day in office.
Joe Gale has long considered himself a breath of fresh air in Montgomery County Republican politics.

Now, the 28-year-old who in 2016 became one of the county's three elected commissioners is taking his brand of brash, upstart politics to all of Pennsylvania's voters.

Gale announced Tuesday that he is running for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in the May primary.

There is just one catch: Gale won't turn 30  the age required for office by the state constitution  until March 2019, two months after the inauguration would be scheduled to occur for the elected position.

He said in an email that a candidate doesn't have to be 30 years old to run, noting that he "had a legal team of lawyers and retired judges look into it."

"You do not have to be 30 to run or be elected  you just must be 30 at the time of the swearing-in," he said. "So, I would have to wait only two months to assume office."

The unusual plan of postponing a swearing-in is not new, Gale said, citing two other cases in which candidates won election to seats they were too young to occupy immediately.

"There was a U.S. Senator from West Virginia, Rush Holt Sr., who was under 30 and had to wait 6 months to take office. And a Congressman from Kentucky, John Y. Brown, who was under the required age of 25 and had to wait until the second year of his term to get sworn in," Gale said. "For me, its only two months."

He joins three others who have already entered the race on the Republican ticket: Gordon Denlinger, a former state representative from Lancaster County, Jeffrey Bartos, a real estate investor from the Philadelphia area, and Otto Voit, a businessman from Berks County.

A large field of Democratic candidates also has emerged to challenge current Lt. Gov. Mike Stack in the primary. Stack, a former Democratic state senator from Northeast Philadelphia, saw his security team taken away last year by Gov. Tom Wolf. Stack and his wife reportedly verbally abused security staffers.

The deadline for filing to run in the May 15 primary is March 6.

Gale told NBC10 in 2016 that his surprising win in the Nov. 2015 election for county commissioner was a pre-cursor to President Trump's rise the following year.

"My race was a microcosm of what's happening on the national scene now," he said in July 2016, alluding to Donald Trump's stunning rise to Republican nominee for president, and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' enduring influence on the Democratic presidential primary. "You have to remember there was no Donald Trump yet."

He often called himself Pennsylvania's first Trump supporter, and he made a bold prediction that came true.

"I'm very confident Donald Trump will be the next president," he told NBC10 at the time.

Gale said he is confident voters would find him worth the wait.

"I can tell you this, the people of Pennsylvania would rather wait two months for me to get in there and clean things up than be stuck with 4 more years of the same old politics as usual," he said.
Long before there was the #MeToo movement, women veterans were calling attention to the issue of harassment and abuse in the United States military.

It peaked last year with a nude picture sharing scandal that rocked the U.S. Marine Corps.

Nearly a year after that scandal broke, NBC 7 heard from one of the victims about a new effort to combat the problem.

In the spring of 2017, a veteran called attention to private Facebook groups where active-duty military and veterans were sharing nude pictures of female colleagues.

The commandant of the Marines testified before Congress and promised the branch would clamp down by increasing penalties and shutting down the groups that had as many as 30,000 users.

Kayla Carnivaleis, a Marine veteran, was one of the women who discovered her pictures were shared without her knowledge or permission.

No matter what, the rest of my life I am going to feel victimized because you know you can just copy and paste a picture, Carnivaleis said.

But nearly a year after the scandal broke, women in the military are still being exploited, according to Carnivaleis.

As new, smaller Facebook sites are popping up, Carnivale said, "Women's pictures are still being exploited on those sites and just recently, my picture was back up on another one.

She said she has asked Facebook to respond, but they have done nothing to remove the pictures.

NBC 7 has learned the Marine Corps was well aware of the issue long before the nude picture sharing scandal broke.

Officers were briefed by a Marine Colonel in Quantico, Virginia, in 2014 about the problem and were offered ways to deal with the culture of misogyny and harassment online, but little was done.

U.S. Marine Col. Scott Jenson, now a veteran, is heading up Protect Our Defenders, a non-profit devoted to stopping sexual assault in the military.

Carnivaleis said that news and the #MeToo movement is sending a strong message.

We're not in the shadows. This is 2018 now, you know? We are more empowered now and saying 'No more.'

As for holding military members accountable, several have been handled at court-martial. Two dozen military members faced administrative discipline.
Ice and snow turned travel treacherous across the South, shutting down interstates in Louisiana, causing highway crashes in Kentucky and closing airport runways in Texas as snow turned the red clay white and prompted schools to close across the region.

Snow began falling during the pre-dawn hours Tuesday in Louisiana, where freeways were closed in and around Baton Rouge as the winter weather system took aim at other states, forecasters said.

With the weather system moving east and plunging temperatures expected right behind it, winter storm warnings were issued for parts of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Dangerous wind chills prompted school systems to close Tuesday across Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Kansas and Missouri. Some colleges also canceled classes, including Wichita State University in Kansas, where wind chill values were expected to drop as low as minus-13 degrees (minus-25 Celsius), The National Weather Service said.

In Kentucky, multiple crashes closed a 10-mile (16-kilometer) section of Interstate 24 on the west side of the state and blocked southbound lanes of Interstate 65 in south-central Kentucky, including a five-vehicle pileup that involved a Greyhound bus, authorities said. That crash, which injured multiple people, also involved two commercial vehicles and two passenger vehicles Tuesday morning on I-65.

In Tennessee, forecasters called for up to 6 inches (15 centimeters) of snow in the central part of the state, which includes the Nashville area.

Hundreds of flights were canceled at Texas airports  including Houston, San Antonio and Austin  where frigid temperatures left runways dangerously icy. Forecasters warned mariners along the Texas coast to be on guard for gale-force winds.

Snow was falling Tuesday morning in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and was expected to move into Alabama and Georgia later in the day.

In Louisiana, state officials said both lanes of Interstate 49 in the Shreveport area were closed early Tuesday. Parts of Interstate 20 and Interstate 220 were also closed.

"We've got numerous crashes on the interstates and surface roads," Louisiana State Trooper Glenn Younger said Tuesday morning from Bossier City, Louisiana, just across the Red River from Shreveport.

"You can't see the black ice  it's invisible," said Younger, who had been driving on roads since 5 a.m. Tuesday and could feel the back end of his patrol car begin to slide at times.

"You want to just barely touch the brakes in that situation," he said. "A lot of people get scared and they want to jam on the brakes and that makes it worse."

What looked like about 1 inch (2 centimeters) of snow covered the hood of Glenn Springfield's truck when he went outside early Tuesday morning in northeast Louisiana, he said. Springfield, a spokesman for the Ouachita Parish Sheriff's Office, said the worst highway conditions were about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of him  but the snow was heading east.

"We're just advising people that if you don't have to work, stay home," Springfield said.

Ice had coated roads and bridges in 36 of Mississippi's 82 counties, mostly in the northern and central parts of the state, the Mississippi Department of Transportation said in a statement Tuesday morning. Some of the heaviest snow in Mississippi was expected in the state's Delta region, where up to 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) was possible.

In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey declared a state of emergency. Numerous businesses and government offices closed because of the threat.

Jim Wimberly was at work Tuesday morning managing a Dollar General story in Tuscumbia, in northwest Alabama, despite freezing precipitation on the ground and a forecast of more on the way. Shoppers had emptied the shelves of bread, but the milk case was still stocked because of a delivery on Monday.

"The roads are a little slick right now. It's been sleeting for about the last hour or two hours," said Wimberly. "Half of my parking lot is white and half of it is just regular asphalt."

Alabama officials were trying to avoid a repeat of four years ago, when a winter storm blanketed central Alabama and left motorists stranded on roads in metro Birmingham for hours. Teachers and students camped out in schools.

Forecasters aren't predicting a large amount of snow for Alabama  just 2 inches (5 centimeters) or less with more in spots. But they say temperatures steadily falling into the teens could freeze anything that comes down.

Drivers had a hard time navigating hills around the north Alabama city of Haleyville, where roads quickly turned white Tuesday morning, but there was still plenty of traffic because manufacturing plants that didn't close in advance began dismissing workers, store clerk Rose Payne said.

"It's coming down as snow, but with these cars driving over it looks ice on the ground," said Payne, who planned to walk home from her job at Friendly Shop if roads got too bad. "The driveways of businesses are white."

Reeves reported from Birmingham, Alabama. Associated Press writers David Warren in Dallas; Rebecca Reynolds Yonker in Louisville, Kentucky; Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee; and Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Missouri contributed to this report.
U.S. Capitol Police arrested a suspected stalker outside the Washington, D.C., office of Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.

According to a special agents affidavit, officers arrested Amos Olagunju at Sinemas seventh floor office in the Longworth House Office Building Friday. The affidavit said Olagunju has menaced Sinema since 2014, despite warnings from U.S. Capitol Police and two court-ordered injunctions that he not contact her.

The court filing from U.S. Capitol Police said the congresswomans staffers called police Friday to report Olagunju had arrived in-person at their office and stated he had a meeting with the congresswoman. Police arrested him for violating the court-ordered injunction.

The court filing said Olagunjus attempts to contact Sinema included 95 attempts to reach and express his love for the congresswoman in the summer of 2014. The affidavit said he made several other attempts to contact the congresswoman in 2015 and 2016, including a series of voicemail messages and by showing up at an April 2016 event in Chandler, Arizona, which Sinema attended.

According to the affidavit, Olagunju continued to attempt to reach Sinema in later months, sending a package to her campaign office, trying to volunteer for her campaign and calling her Washington office by phone in November 2017.

The police affidavit said Olagunju is from Brooklyn, New York, and was served with an injunction to stop contacting Sinema by the New York Police Department in July 2017. Court filings show Olagunju was arrested previously in New York for traffic offenses.

A Facebook page belonging to a user named Amos Olagunju includes a series of posts in 2015 about Rep. Sinema. Some of the postings, which remained publicly available Tuesday afternoon, included messages to Sinema. One posting said, Do you know youre killing me with your love? I have to see your face. I cannot sleep without you. Show me your love spiritually and physically.

Another Facebook post said, I believe by this time next year, you will be carrying our baby in Jesus name (Amen).

The Capitol Police affidavit said Olagunju wrote posts on Sinemas Facebook page, including a post in which he called himself her husband to be.

A federal law enforcement official told the News4 I-Team Olagunju entered a not guilty plea to a federal charge of stalking at a hearing Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Last year, he pleaded guilty to violating a different court order to stay away from Sinema, according to court records.

On Friday, a judge ruled he remain in custody until trial.

Sinemas office declined to comment, referring inquiries to police.

"We are in consistent contact with Capitol Police on all matters of member security but will refer you to them for any more information on this incident, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan's office said in a statement to News4.

A U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman declined to comment about the arrest or whether Olagunju was on a be-on-the-lookout list available to officers who staff the checkpoints at congressional office buildings.

Olagunjus attorney said it's too early in the case to comment.


A man who argued with a coworker over parking and hit him once faces an involuntary manslaughter charge after the second man died of his injuries six months after the assault, officials say.

Byron Darnell Powers, 63, was indicted in Howard County, Maryland, after police say he struck 47-year-old Brian Keith Gordon just "once with his hand" on July 15.

Gordon, of Upper Marlboro, was a father of three and truck driver for Stanley Concrete in Annapolis Junction. His coworkers and friends called him "Big Easy" because he was low-key, his obituary says.

"He was a great guy," coworker Gary Abernathy said. "Kind as can be."

The men argued over where their trucks were parked outside their workplace on the 11000 block of Guilford Road, police said Tuesday.

Powers, of Severn, hit the younger man once and he fell to the ground, hitting his head.

A coworker called 911, and medics rushed Gordon to the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore.

He was transferred to a long-term care facility, and he died on Jan. 1.

Gordon, who died at age 48, worked for Stanley Concrete for 17 years, his obituary says. He won awards for tractor-trailer racing and was in multiple bowling leagues.

"He was truly a family man," the obituary says.

Steve Stanley, field supervisor for Stanley Concrete, described the fatal incident as a tragedy for the families of both men.

"I don't think Byron meant to inflict the damage he did," Stanley said.

Neither Powers' lawyer nor Gordon's family members immediately responded to inquiries.

Powers is free on $20,000 bond.
A Virginia state Senate panel has defeated a Democratic push for stricter gun laws.

A Republican-led panel voted Monday to block legislation that would allow cities and counties to ban firearms at certain public events.

The bill came in response to a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville last summer, where several participants were heavily armed. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe enacted similar rules on a temporary basis last November.

The panel also voted down a bill to expand mandatory background checks on gun buyers. The vote comes two days after newly sworn-in Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, pushed for universal background checks during his inaugural address.

Fights over a gun laws are a perennial issue in Virginia's General Assembly, with Republicans favoring less restrictions and Democrats favoring additional ones.

But this year's fight comes a few months after a Democratic wave powered by voter dislike of President Donald Trump that saw Northam easily win election and Republicans take heavy losses in the state House. The GOP maintains a slim majority in both chambers.

The legislation's defeat came just two days after Northam's inaugural address, where he exhorted lawmakers to pass stricter gun laws.

After the vote, he told a crowd of gun-control advocates who held a rally on Capitol Square that he was "just getting warmed up" and would continue to press the issue forcefully.

"Don't give up," Northam said. "Continue your hope."
A Perris, California, couple kept their 13 children -- several of them adults -- in "conditions that were horrific," living in squalor, without enough to eat and even shackled to furniture to prevent them from leaving the residence, a Riverside County sheriff's official said Tuesday.

"Our deputies described a foul smell in the home. It was extremely dirty, and many of the children were malnourished," Capt. Greg Fellows said during a news briefing at the sheriff's Perris station. "If you can imagine a 17-year-old appearing to be 10 because of being malnourished, chained to a bed and with injuries associated with that -- I would call that torture."

Fellows was joined by Perris Mayor Michael Vargas, county Department of Public Social Services Director Susan Von Zabern and several medical professionals to provide additional information about the victims and the suspects, 56-year-old David Allen Turpin and his wife, 49-year-old Louise Ann Turpin.

The pair were arrested Sunday on suspicion of committing multiple acts of torture and child abuse. Each is being held in lieu of $9 million bail at the Robert Presley Jail in Riverside. Fellows said detectives are preparing to submit their case to the District Attorney's Office seeking charges against the suspects. The couple are tentatively due in court Thursday.

"The mother was perplexed why were at the residence," Fellows recounted, describing what investigators encountered on entering the single-story home in the 100 block of Muir Woods Road. "We have had no prior contacts there regarding allegations of child abuse and neglect. We have no call history to that residence."

The Turpins' 17-year-old daughter escaped the home by jumping through a window shortly before 6 a.m. Sunday, carrying a deactivated mobile phone with which she was still able to dial 911, according to Fellows.

The girl told dispatchers that her 12 siblings were in need of help, and when deputies arrived, she presented them with photographs documenting conditions inside the residence, the captain said.

"The photos she provided turned out to be accurate," Fellows said. "They were in conditions that were horrific."

He alleged three children were found chained to objects inside the residence, evidently to immobilize them. Six of the victims are under 18, while the others are adults. Fellows was at a loss to explain why the older children had failed to report alleged abuse in the home earlier.

The victims' ages range from 2 to 29, and according to published reports, the juveniles were home-schooled. David Turpin is a former aerospace engineer, and his wife a homemaker.

Neighbors were surprised.

Kimberly Milligan says she was told the family had a dozen kids when she moved into the neighborhood 2 years ago, but she never saw that many children.

Milligan says she didn't see friends or family coming to the home. She also never saw or heard children playing outside. But she didn't suspect anything like what authorities allege.

They have resided in Perris since 2014 and previously lived in Murrieta, as well as Texas.

Questions were raised regarding religious zealotry, or even cult-like behavior by the parents, but Fellows said the investigation was still in the early stages, and he had no information about the suspects' affiliations.

"There is no indication of mental illness affecting either parent," he said.

Von Zabern told reporters that DPSS is working to obtain court orders that will give Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services custody of the children and conservatorship over the adults until they're capable of making their own decisions.

She and Fellows both praised the "bravery" of the girl who escaped the residence to seek help for her siblings. A spokeswoman for the Riverside University Health System said the children are stable and being restored to health gradually.

According to Corona Regional Medical Center CEO Mark Uffer, the adults are also receiving expert care.

"They're comfortable and in a very secure environment," Uffer said. "They've been through a very traumatic ordeal, but they're very friendly, very cooperative and hopeful life will get better for them after this event."

Speaking for the community, Vargas extended "thoughts and prayers" to the 13 brothers and sisters.

"We're devastated by this act of cruelty," the mayor said. "Our hearts go out to the victims."

David Turpin's father says he was surprised by news of his son's arrest.

The older Turpin said he heard about the arrests Monday but declined further comment.

James Turpin confirmed that his son is an engineer and grew up in West Virginia.

It wasn't immediately known if they had attorneys.

Anyone with information on the case was asked to call the sheriff's Perris station at (951) 210-1000.
Three deputies and one officer were shot while responding to a domestic violence call in York, South Carolina, Monday night, authorities said.

The suspect, 47-year-old Christian Thomas McCall, fled following a domestic dispute and K-9 units were released to track him. Around 10:00 p.m., shots were fired at the K-9 officer and he was taken to the hospital in a patrol car for treatment, the York County Sheriff's office said.

Three more officers were shot after they continued the search for McCall.

Two officers were then flown to a local hospital.

Officials did not immediately release the names of the officers or the extent of their injuries.

McCall is believed to have assaulted a woman. He also sustained gunshot wounds and is now in custody.

Trent Farris, public information officer for the York County Sheriff's office, said the office is doing "as good as can be," but their main concern is for the four officers in the hospital.


The Trump administration on Tuesday cut tens of millions of dollars in money for Palestinian refugees, demanding that the U.N. agency responsible for the programs undertake a "fundamental re-examination," the State Department said.

In a letter, the State Department notified the U.N. Relief and Works Agency that the U.S. is withholding $65 million of a planned $125 million funding installment. The letter also makes clear that additional U.S. donations will be contingent on major changes by UNRWA, which has been heavily criticized by Israel.

"We would like to see some reforms be made," said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, adding that changes are needed to the way the agency operates and is funded. "This is not aimed at punishing anyone."

The State Department said it was releasing the rest of the installment  $60 million  to prevent the agency from running out of cash by the end of the month and closing down.

The U.S. is UNWRA's largest donor, supplying nearly 30 percent of its budget. The agency focuses on providing health care, education and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

"Given the long, trusted, and historic relationship between the United States and UNRWA, this reduced contribution threatens one of the most successful and innovative human development endeavors in the Middle-East," UNRWA chief Pierre Krahenbuhl said in a statement.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes during the war that led to Israel's establishment in 1948. Today, there are an estimated 5 million refugees and their descendants, mostly scattered across the region.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization reacted angrily to the move, saying it is targeting "the most vulnerable segment of the Palestinian people and depriving the refugees of the right to education, health, shelter and a dignified life."

"It is also creating conditions that will generate further instability throughout the region and will demonstrate that it has no compunction in targeting the innocent," the PLO leadership said in a statement.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was not aware of the decision, but warned that UNRWA provides "vital services."

"I am very concerned and I strongly hope that in the end it will be possible for the United States to maintain the funding of UNRWA in which the U.S. has a very important share," he told reporters at the U.N.

Israel's ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, praised the move, arguing that UNRWA misuses humanitarian aid to support propaganda against the Jewish state and perpetuate the Palestinians' plight.

"It is time for this absurdity to end and for humanitarian funds to be directed towards their intended purpose: the welfare of refugees," Danon said in a statement.

The U.S. donated $355 million to UNWRA in 2016 and was set to make a similar contribution in this year, with the first installment to have been sent this month. But after a highly critical Jan. 2 tweet from Trump on aid to the Palestinians, the State Department opted to wait for a formal policy decision before sending its first installment.

Trump's tweet expressed frustration over the lack of progress in his attempts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and he pointed the finger at the Palestinians. "We pay the Palestinians HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect," he said. "But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?"

Israelis accuse the U.N. agency of contributing to Palestinian militancy and allowing its facilities to be used by militants. They also complain that some of UNRWA's staff are biased against Israel.

Nauert said the United States believes there needs to be more "burden-sharing," a regular Trump complaint about multilateral organizations dependent on significant contributions of U.S. cash.

"We don't believe that taking care of other nations and other people have to be solely the United States' responsibility," she said.

The U.S. plan to withhold some, but not all, of the money was backed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis, who offered it as a compromise to demands for more drastic measures by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, officials said.

Haley wanted a complete cutoff in U.S. money until the Palestinians resumed peace talks with Israel that have been frozen for years. But Tillerson, Mattis and others argued that ending all assistance would exacerbate instability in the Mideast, notably in Jordan, a host to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and a crucial U.S. strategic partner.

Eliminating or sharply reducing the U.S. contribution could hamstring the agency and severely curtail its work, putting great pressure on Jordan and Lebanon as well as the Palestinian Authority. Gaza would be particularly hard hit. Some officials, including Israelis, warn that it might push people closer to the militant Hamas movement, which controls Gaza.

Associated Press writer Josh Lederman in Washington and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
More than a dozen cars are encased in ice along the Kennebec River in Hallowell, Maine, after an ice jam caused floodwaters to freeze around vehicles in a parking lot early Sunday morning.

"Unless you have scuba gear, there's no way to get them out," said Stephanie Arnio, a Hallowell resident who owns one of the trapped cars.

"It's a brand new car," said Andrew Terlesky, who owns a Subaru stuck in the ice. "You would never think it would flood this early in the wintertime."

According to Kennebec County Emergency Management Director Sean Goodwin, it could take several days for the cars to be towed out of the frozen lot.

The county EMA brought in a front-end loader to help break up the ice around the cars, in the hopes that the water will start to flow and recede out of the area.

"It's an ice jam, you can't predict when the ice jam is going to happen," said Goodwin.

Insurance agents say drivers without comprehensive coverage will have to pay out of pocket for this kind of flood damage.

"It's worth the coverage and worth the price to have comprehensive coverage on your auto policy," she said.

The ice jam and flooding has impacted Hallowell business owners, too. Wayne Hyde owns the Wharf bar and restaurant, and he said he heard a big crack around midnight Saturday. It was the ice breaking, and the flood starting.

"It happened so quickly," he said. "It looked like a river flowing onto the dance floor."

Hyde said he knows he lost food and possibly appliances in the flood, but he can't get inside to assess the damage.

"The doors are frozen shut," he said.
A robbery suspect was shot and killed by police Tuesday following a standoff outside a public school in Montpelier, Vermont, which had been placed in lockdown mode.

The suspect, who was later identified as 32-year-old Nathan Giffin, of Essex, was holding what appeared to be a handgun on the athletic complex behind Montpelier High School.

Earlier, Giffin allegedly held up the Vermont State Employees Credit Union across the street, then ran toward the school's football field.

That sparked what Brian Ricca, Montpelier's school superintendent, termed a "lockdown and lockout" - a security stance, to protect students, teachers and others inside.

"Since the suspect was contained entirely outside the building, the safest place for our students, faculty and staff was inside the building," Ricca noted.

After a standoff with officers, a hail of gunfire could be heard as police shot and killed Giffin.

"The suspect is deceased," Montpelier Police Chief Anthony Facos announced midday.

A preliminary investigation indicates that a total of nine officers discharged their firearms in the shooting, eight of whom were Vermont State Troopers and one Montpelier police officer.

The names of those officers are not being released at this time, and all nine have been placed on paid administrative leave in accordance with Vermont State Police policy.

No law enforcement officers were injured during this incident, according to Vermont State Police.



Giffin's body was taken to chief medical examiner in Burlington for an autopsy to determine the cause and manner of death.

Investigators from several area agencies remained at the school throughout the afternoon as the examination of the fatal officer-involved shooting got underway.

"A lot of people were really distressed about it," said Avery Hadick, a Montpelier High School freshman. "It was a threat right outside, and nobody had really experienced something like that before. The teachers did a good job trying to keep everyone calm."

"Everything was handled pretty good," said Nina Aziz, a Montpelier High School senior who arrived at the school during the lockdown, and had to return after it was over to get her homework assignments.

Aziz said she heard from classmates how the lockdown went, and said her friends felt well-supported during it.

"The teachers were really good about it," she said. "Instructions were given, and people followed them."

Ricca told necn that school will start at the normal time Wednesday. Extra mental health counselors will be on-hand, in case anyone wants to speak with them, the superintendent added.

No one inside the school was harmed during the lockdown, the district said. No staff members at the credit union were injured during the robbery, either, spokeswoman Rachel Feldman said.
Providence, Rhode Island police are searching for whoever shot a young man at the Providence Place Mall Monday afternoon.

Providence Public Safety confirms a 19-year-old was shot on the second floor of the mall, at the backdoor by the parking garage, near Nordstrom.

Police say the victim, who has not been identified, was targeted. His injuries are not considered life-threatening.

Detectives are reviewing security camera footage as police search for the suspect.

"The assailant is at large but there's no doubt in my mind that within a short amount of time we'll identify him and apprehend him," Hugh Clements Jr., the Providence police chief, said Monday night.

Clements said this was the first shooting in the mall that he can recall.

The mall was evacuated after the incident.

The shooting remains under investigation.
A plane collided with a de-icing truck at Boston Logan Airport on Monday.

It happened on a taxiway as Alaska Airlines flight 33 was about to take off for Portland, Oregon.

The aircraft has minor damage to the left wing and has been taken out of service for inspection.

No one was in the truck at the time of the collision.

The plane returned to the gate where all 166 passengers deplaned and were given new flights to the west coast.

Alaska Airlines said in a statement, "we apologize to our guests who have been inconvenienced this afternoon on AS Flight 33. The safety of our guests and our employees is our number one priority."

MassPort is investigating the incident.
Several dozen homeowners are bracing for losses after a major river flooded in northwestern Vermont.

"We came to get what's meant the most to her," said Shannon Davenport of St. Albans, who was helping her daughter collect belongings from her flooded home in Swanton.

Davenport trekked down a closed road and over an ice-covered yard to get to where her daughter lives, confronting thick ice from floodwaters in the garage.

"Everyone's safe and they're in good hands," Davenport said of her daughter and grandchild. "She plans on going back to work tomorrow and picking up the pieces."

The dangerous combo of last week's rapid snow melt, followed by heavy rain and a six-mile ice jam on the Missisquoi River, sent water gushing onto a stretch of Route 78 near the Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge.

Now that temperatures plunged back down into the deep freeze, those floodwaters have become ice. Cars are encased. A boat and its trailer were pushed toward the road. And the frozen high-water mark was still visible on trees.

Public safety officials evacuated two dozen homes over the weekend, according to Swanton Village Manager Reg Beliveau. That included 35 people and six dogs. Foundry Street and North and South River Lane were placed on voluntary evacuations.

Additional homes on Monument Road in nearby Highgate were also evacuated, according to Swanton officials.

"It put some folks in serious jeopardy here," said Dave Blackmore, the regional administrator for the Vermont Agency of Transportation, who was overseeing flooding cleanup of Route 78 and assessing the road condition Monday.

Village of Swanton officials asked people who were displaced from their homes to not return without checking with village leaders, so they can receive important safety information.

"I've never seen it like this," said Mike Rich, who lives on Route 78 in Swanton, and whose property and vehicles were affected by floodwaters.

Rich was strongly urged to leave his home with his neighbors, but took a riskchoosing to stay.

"I wanted to get as much out of my basement as possible  I wanted to save what I could," Rich told necn.

Monday, he watched Vermont's Transportation Agency pushing chunks of solid ice off Route 78, aiming to make it safe to drive on before it could be reopened to traffic.

"Throughout the last 24 to 48 hours, our team of VTrans folks have been out there battling the elements," Blackmore said. "It's getting better."

The good news from regional officials is the water is receding. However, with ice still jamming the Missisquoi, changing weather conditions mean the risk for flooding could return.
There was an epidemic in the Mexican highlands in 1545 and then again in 1576 that killed between 7 and 17 million people. These people had fever and vomiting and developed red spots over their skin before they died.

These two epidemics essentially spelled doom for the Aztec Empire that died out soon after. There had been no evidence in the archeological findings to suggest the actual cause behind this mass wipe out.

Culture of Salmonella bacteria. 3D illustration. Image Credit: Tatiana Shepeleva / Shutterstock

A new study that appeared in the latest episode of the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution appeared yesterday (15th of January 2018) that reveals that scientists have found evidence that the culprit of the epidemic was Salmonella bacteria.

Kirsten Bos, a molecular paleopathologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, author of this new study says that plague and typhoid have both been suspected as the cause behind this wipe out. Other diseases were suspected as well she added. The epidemic is referred to as cocoliztli or pestilence because of the bleeding and vomiting. It killed people over Guatemala, Mexico and even Peru wiping out 80 percent of the population in the area. In this study the team of researchers thus analyzed the DNA obtained from the teeth of around 10 people who had died in the epidemic. They found evidence that a deadly strain of Salmonella could have been responsible. The 10 skeletons from which the DNA was obtained were found in a cocoliztli cemetery in Oaxaca, Mexico.

The team used a new technique that Bos called a game changer. This helped them to piece together the fragments of the centuries old salmonella DNA and identify it with accuracy. DNA has been extracted from archeological finds previously she explained. However this program helped them match it to the available databases of DNA to find out exactly what it was. The new program is called MALT or Metagenome analyzer (Alignment Tool). She added that this program helped them accurately identify several small DNA pieces to make a complete picture and identify the species to which those pieces of DNA belongs to.

The team used MALT and like reconstructing a jigsaw puzzle pieced together the DNA pieces that came from the teeth of the victims of the epidemic. Then it compared the sequences with the DNA databases of several pathogens until it found a match. PhD student and study author Ashild Vagene often had to manually compare sequences too at some points. The results of hours of work finally revealed that the DNA fragments belonged to a deadly Salmonella enterica Paratyphi C bacteria.

Now that the source is known, the researchers are looking for an origin of the bacteria. Whether the bacteria travelled to those regions via European invaders during the early 16th Century is being speculated. What is unclear is whether the Europeans got it from the local population or vice versa. It can be said that the indigenous population was susceptible to the infection. Bos said that the invaders changed the social landscape and there was an introduction of new livestock etc. All of the changes could have increased their susceptibility to infectious disease, she said. This may not be the only infection killing those millions Bos added. There could have been other deadly infections that were missed in this analysis she said.
Energy drinks are beverages that contain concentrated amounts of caffeine and other stimulants, including sugar, sweeteners, herbal supplements, vitamins, and taurine.

Energy drinks are marketed to improve energy, stamina, concentration, athletic performance, and even weight loss. But, there are limited studies to prove these claims. In fact, many side effects have been linked to these products, raising the question of whether these are safe to consume.

Though these drinks arent recommended for children, the number of youngsters drinking these beverages have increased over the years. In the age group between 11 and 18 years, boys consume more energy drinks than girls. Also, the most and least sedentary individuals are those who consume more of these beverages.

Caffeine molecule, 3d illustration. Caffeine is found in coffee, tea and energy drinks. Image Credit: Kateryna Kon / Shutterstock

Are energy drinks safe for kids?

Energy drinks contain high and unregulated amounts of caffeine. Normally, children and adolescents aged 12 to 18 years old, should not drink more than 100mg of caffeine a day, which is equivalent to a cup of coffee.

Energy drinks contain from about 50 mg to a whopping 500 mg of caffeine per serving. Increased caffeine levels consumed by children can cause a wide range of health consequences. Some of these adverse effects are serious enough to require seeking medical help.

Overall, the number of annual emergency department visits linked to energy drinks consumption increased from 10,068 in 2007 to a staggering 20,783 in 2011. Plus, there have been 34 deaths associated with energy drinks, warranting investigation on the safety of these beverages.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 1,145 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 went to the emergency room for emergencies linked to drinking energy drinks in 2007. In 2011, the number soared to 1,499.

What are the health effects of energy drinks on children?

Although healthy individuals can tolerate caffeine in moderation, heavy caffeine consumption, just like drinking energy drinks, has been linked to serious health effects like mania, seizures, stroke, and even sudden death.

Children and adolescents are at a higher risk of developing adverse effects from drinking energy drinks. These include palpitations, sleeping problems, headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and seizures. Children who drank more energy drinks were likely to use alcohol or have binge drinking, to smoke, or use other drugs, and display hyperactivity and other high-risk behavior.

This was also linked to self-destructive behavior, problems with behavioral regulation and other social skills, as well as poor lifestyle choices such as junk food consumption. In the long term, the high sugar content of these drinks causes dental caries, weight gain, obesity or overweight, and type 2 diabetes mellitus.

Large amounts of caffeine may cause severe heart and blood vessel problems like heart rhythm disturbances, increased heart rate and high blood pressure. In children, caffeine may negatively impact their still-developing cardiovascular and nervous systems.

In some cases, children and adolescents drink these beverages without control. They gulp several bottles a day, which can turn deadly. Caffeine intoxication, caffeine withdrawal symptoms, sleep disturbances, dehydration and anxiety are among the immediate dangers of unregulated energy drink consumption.

In fact, the American Heart Association (AHA) warns against children drinking these beverages. In a randomized study conducted by experts, they found that caffeinated energy drinks markedly prolong the QTc interval, a measurement made on an electrocardiogram used to assess some of the electrical properties of the heart, and also increase the central and brachial blood pressure. Prolonged QTc interval increases the likelihood of ventricular tachycardia, a type of fast heart rate that comes from an altered electrical activity in the heart.

Sources Seifert S. M. et al., (2011). Health effects of energy drinks on children, adolescents, and young adults. Pediatrics. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3065144/

Hammond D. et al., (2018). Adverse effects of caffeinated energy drinks among youth and young adults in Canada: a Web-based survey. CMAJ Open. 10.9778/cmajo.20160154

Goldman R. (2013). Caffeinated energy drinks in children. Canadian Family Physicians. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3771720/

Visram S. et al., (2016). Consumption of energy drinks by children and young people: a rapid review examining evidence of physical effects and consumer attitudes. British Medical Journal (BMJ) Open. https://dx.doi.org/10.1136%2Fbmjopen-2015-010380

Shah S. et al., (2019). Impact of high volume energy drink consumption on electrocardiographic and blood pressure parameters: a randomized trial. Journal of the American Heart Association. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/JAHA.118.011318

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (2018). Energy Drinks. https://nccih.nih.gov/health/energy-drinks

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2016). Energy Drinks. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/nutrition/energy.htm

Further Reading
The Biomechanics Institute (IBV) of the Universitat de Valencia has developed a platform to diagnose the wellbeing of the workforce and help companies undertake health promotion measures. Furthermore, the tool makes it possible to analyze the effects of said measures by analyzing the evolution of the various wellbeing markers included in the platform.

This is the main result obtained in the Bienlabor project, financed by IVACE and ERDF according to the IBV's Innovation in Wellbeing and Workplace Health director, Mercedes Sanchis.

The IBV has developed its own methodology "which allows us to obtain different markers relating to the wellbeing of the workforce based on a series of questionnaires determined by the tool itself", Sanchis explains.

Specifically, "with Bienlabor we have designed and applied this methodology to an ICT multiplatform tool (responsive) for companies that is simple, intuitive, easy to use and accessible, so that the experience of use is completely satisfactory for all users. In this sense, it adapts the content and design to the different types of users: businesses and workers."

For the worker, the tool offers the possibility to complete questionnaires related to the different categories of wellbeing and obtain a personalized report with the diagnosis and evolution as the company performs different health promotion plans. Moreover, "we have taken into account that the tool ensures total confidentiality of the data guaranteeing that the company can not see individual information of the workers."

For the company, it offers a control panel that makes it easy to manage the various health promotion programs implemented and the effect they have on workers' wellbeing. "It also makes it possible to segment the results (always guaranteeing the workers' confidentiality), identifying possible health-promoting programs that could be set in motion and their prioritization", Sanchis adds.

Health promotion

Through this platform, "the IBV meets its objective of helping companies prevent, evaluate and promote health among their workers", Sanchis explains. In order to do so, "the results that evaluate the wellbeing of the workforce can be compared to the averages both on a national level as well as among companies of the same sector. With this comparison the company will have enough information to better understand its improvement margin.

"There is solid proof showing that companies that adopt health promotion programs at work reduce staff turnover and accidents at work. This evidence should not be ignored by companies, specially if they want to be sustainable and competitive, because promoting health at work contributes towards improving the wellbeing of the workers, and therefore their motivation and productivity", he adds.

We can also "contribute towards obtaining more safe and healthy work conditions, as well as improving the external image of the company to attract talent."

Wellbeing levels

The Bienlabor platform makes it possible to observe the changes in wellbeing through the evolution of different markers measured before and after kick starting the different health promotion programs.

Specifically, it identifies up to 50 markers that make for a holistic view of a person's wellbeing. "Implemented within this tool, their understanding allows us to establish the level of wellbeing of any given worker."

These markers analyze aspects related to one's lifestyle (physical activity, eating habits, rest or perceived health) and the wellbeing within the workplace (ergonomics, psychosocial risks such as anxiety, stress or a lack of motivation).

Valencian businesses' needs

Within the framework of the project, the IBV has collaborated with companies of the Valencia region such as SPB, 5 Tenedores, Cleanity, Embutidos Martinez, APISOL, Pinturas Monto and NUNSYS, among others, as well as entities such as the Union de Mutuas and UMIVALE to learn about their needs when defining requirements for the platform. They have also validated an experimental platform to detect aspects that can be improved and will be taken into account for the final version.

It must also be noted that during validation "these companies identified as strengths the platform's simplicity, ease of use and that it makes it possible to obtain a comprehensive vision of the state of the staff, but also to segment the information and focus on the wellbeing categories that the company identifies as a priority when undertaking health promotion initiatives", concludes Sanchis.
"Training" of precursors of white blood cells leads to a sustained positive response of the hematopoietic system. This effect could help accelerate the formation of new white blood cells, which are vitally needed during chemotherapy, a process that can slow down hematopoiesis. In a publication that appeared in the prestigious journal Cell, the scientists Dr. Ioannis Mitroulis and Prof. Triantafyllos Chavakis of the Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine of the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus at the TU Dresden together with international colleagues describe this groundbreaking training effect on the innate immune system, which could be exploited therapeutically to prevent specific side effects of chemotherapy.

Two main systems protect us from infections, the innate and the adaptive immunity. Innate immunity acts rapidly as the first line of defense to buy time until adaptive immunity is activated and takes over. Adaptive immunity targets and clears the pathogen in a very specific fashion and builds up immunological memory. In this way, the adaptive immune response 'remembers' the earlier infection and responds faster and stronger when it re-encounters the same pathogen in the future.

Although immunological memory has been considered to be an exclusive property of adaptive immunity, this dogma has been recently challenged by several research groups including Prof. Netea's laboratory (Nijmegen, The Netherlands). In particular, certain microbial infections or vaccines promote an enhanced response of white blood cells of innate immunity to a secondary infection with the same or even different pathogens. This process of innate immunological memory has been termed trained innate immunity, because white blood cells need to be 'trained' with appropriate stimuli (such as pathogen-derived molecules or vaccines) to be able to respond faster and stronger against future infections. Trained innate immunity has impressive long-term effects (up to months), which has been puzzling since white blood cells (such as monocytes) have a relatively short life in the circulation. This paradox has now been resolved by a study spearheaded by the Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine of the University Clinic Dresden, Germany. This study has shown for the first time that trained innate immunity acts on the precursors of the circulating white blood cells in the bone marrow, known as hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs). As HSPCs can give rise to many generations of white blood cells, the study may explain the long-term effects of trained innate immunity.

The research team of Prof. Chavakis (director of the Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine of the University Clinic Dresden) investigated together with the group of Prof. Hajishengallis (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA) and Prof. Netea (Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) the actions of beta-glucan, a molecule found in the cell walls of fungi and plants and a prototype stimulus of trained immunity, on precursor cells in the bone marrow. They found that the innate immune training of HSPCs by beta-glucan resulted in a sustained beneficial response by the hematopoietic system. This beneficial response involved actions of the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-1beta and changes in the metabolism (especially lipid metabolism) of HSPCs.

This beta-glucan-mediated beneficial response could be used to protect the bone marrow from the adverse effects of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy-associated myelosuppression (suppression of the generation of white blood cells in the bone marrow) is a common and serious complication in tumor patients being treated with chemotherapy. "We think that the principle of trained immunity could be used to prevent such adverse effects of chemotherapy", says Dr. Mitroulis, the first author of this article, from the Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine of the University Clinic Dresden, who has recently been awarded junior group leader status at the National Center for Tumor Diseases Dresden. Hence, the findings indicate a possible strategy to pre-condition the immune system prior to administration of chemotherapy to prevent myelosuppression and leukopenia. "It is also conceivable that this principle may find therapeutic application in malignant hematologic diseases", Prof. Chavakis added. The group plans to follow up on their work into this and other directions, including inflammatory disease.
Nonsmoking adolescents who use e-cigarettes, smokeless tobacco or tobacco water pipes are more likely to start smoking conventional cigarettes within a year, according to new research by UC San Francisco.

The study analyzed data from a nationally-representative sample of more than 10,000 adolescents, ages 12 to 17. It is the largest study to date to estimate the impact between alternative tobacco use and the subsequent start of conventional cigarette smoking in youth.

Any form of tobacco, including e-cigarettes, was associated with future smoking, the authors reported, especially when adolescents used more than one product. As a result, novel tobacco products have the potential to undermine public health gains in combatting smoking, the researchers said.

The study was published Jan. 2, 2018, in JAMA Pediatrics.

"We found that teens who experimented with tobacco in any form were at greater risk of future smoking," said senior author Benjamin W. Chaffee, DDS, PhD, an assistant professor at the UCSF School of Dentistry.

"In the last few years, research has focused on the potential of e-cigarettes to engage never-smoking adolescents in tobacco use," Chaffee said. "Our findings confirm that the use of the full range of tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, cigars, tobacco water pipes, and smokeless tobacco, is associated with greater odds of future cigarette smoking."

Approximately 90 percent of adult smokers smoked their first cigarette by the time they were 18. Earlier studies have shown that smoking a single cigarette per month during adolescence is tied to daily smoking during adulthood.

Non-Cigarette Tobacco Products Increasingly Popular

In recent years, non-cigarette tobacco products have become increasingly popular among youth, especially e-cigarettes, the most common form of tobacco used by youth. In 2016, nearly 4 million middle and high school students used at least one tobacco product, and 1.8 million of the students reported using two or more products, studies have shown.

The new UCSF study was based on some 10,384 respondents in the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study, who said theyd never tried a cigarette. The PATH Study is a collaboration between the FDA and the National Institutes of Health. Never-smoking youth were first interviewed from September 2013 to December 2014.

Questionnaires looked at eight types of combustible and noncombustible tobacco and nicotine products: bidis, cigarettes, cigars (traditional, filtered, and cigarillos), e-cigarettes, hookah (tobacco water pipes), kreteks, pipes, and smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco, dissolvable tobacco, moist snuff, and snus). All youth participants had parental consent.

This finding is particularly important because products like cigarillos and smokeless tobacco are often used by young people of vulnerable populations. A focus solely on e-cigarettes ignores health risks for those youth, said first author Shannon Lea Watkins, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

Effects on Subsequent Cigarette Smoking

The mean age for adolescents participating in the study was 14.3 years. The estimated effects of non-cigarette tobacco products on subsequent cigarette smoking were adjusted for sociodemographic, environmental and behavioral smoking risk factors.

A year later, 469 adolescents (4.6 percent) said theyd tried a cigarette; and 219 (2.1 percent) had smoked a cigarette within the past 30 days. Smoking was higher among adolescents who used e-cigarettes (19.1 percent); hookah (18.3 percent); non-cigarette combustible tobacco (19.2 percent); or smokeless tobacco (18.8 percent).

After adjusting for smoking risk factors, the odds of smoking the previous month were approximately twice as high among e-cigarette users and more than three times as high for those who used multiple products, an increasingly common use pattern in adolescents.

Various factors could explain the findings, the authors said: Using non-cigarette tobacco products might induce nicotine dependence; adolescents might find that such products are more convenient and effective in satisfying nicotine cravings; and use of the products could change how adolescents perceive cigarettes.

The authors note that even if young people dont progress to smoking cigarettes, any tobacco use is harmful. They suggest that policies such as restricting flavors in e-cigarettes and raising the age of tobacco purchasing could divert youth from becoming smokers. They also said that the paper provides support for legislation to ban flavored tobacco products on the grounds that flavors are used to attract youth to the non-cigarette tobacco products studied here. In San Francisco, a measure seeking to repeal the ban is heading to voters this year.

San Francisco and Oakland have both acted to ban the sale of flavored tobacco, Watkins said. These are measures that the tobacco industry is attempting to overturn. Any policy designed to keep kids from smoking needs to account for alternative products. Our findings suggest that flavor restrictions, raising the minimum purchase age to 21, and higher excise taxes on non-cigarette products not only make these non-cigarette products less appealing to youth, but have the benefit of fewer kids being led to cigarette smoking as well.
Gastroenterologists and patients have told us that CapsoCam Plus provided them with comfort and convenience compared to other capsule endoscopy systems, CapsoVision President Johnny Wang said. Since CapsoCam Plus does not require patients to wear a data recorder like with ordinary capsule endoscopes, these benefits are more pronounced for use with younger patients and their caregivers.

The incidence of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) in pediatric patients worldwide is on the rise, particularly in Europe. According to a recent report commissioned by United European Gastroenterology (UEG), childhood onset of IBD now accounts for 20-30% of all IBD cases. Capsule endoscopy is one of the tools that pediatric gastroenterologists use to identify abnormalities of the small bowel that may lead to an IBD diagnosis.

Dr. Salvatore Oliva, pediatric gastroenterologist at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, will discuss the use of CapsoCam Plus in patients ages 2 and above at the United European Gastroenterology Week (UEGW) in Barcelona on October 31, 2017 at the CapsoVision exhibit booth and at a Panel Presentation in the evening.
In a cornfield here, past the shuttered General Motors plant and the Janesville Terrace trailer home park, a facility not seen in the United States in three decades could soon rise: a manufacturing plant that will make a vital radioactive isotope used to detect cancer and other potentially fatal maladies in millions of people every year.

Nuclear medicine imaging, a staple of American health care since the 1970s, runs almost entirely on molybdenum-99, a radioisotope produced by nuclear fission of enriched uranium that decays so rapidly it becomes worthless within days. But moly-99, as it's called, is created in just six government-owned nuclear research reactors  none in North America  raising concerns about the reliability of the supply and even prompting federal scientists to warn of the possibility of severe shortages.

Some 50,000 Americans each day depend on a strange and precarious supply chain easily disrupted by a variety of menaces: shipments grounded by fog in Dubai, skittish commercial airline pilots who refuse to carry radioactive material and unplanned nuclear reactor shutdowns, including one in South Africa when a mischievous baboon sneaked into a reactor hall.

Delays that pose an inconvenience for other commercial goods are existential threats in the daily global relay race of medical isotopes that disappear hour by hour. "It's like running through the desert with an ice cream cone," said Ira Goldman, senior director of global strategic supply at Lantheus Medical Imaging in North Billerica, Mass.

But that race may soon be shortened. Propelled by persistent supply problems and fears that terrorists could seize American uranium en route to foreign facilities, President Barack Obama signed legislation in 2013 prodding American companies into the medical-isotope business.

The $100 million Janesville plant, in the hometown of Rep. Paul Ryan, speaker of the House, is the first construction project to pass through the labyrinthine nuclear regulatory approval process since 1985 and is being built by SHINE Medical Technologies with $25 million in federal funds.

Greg Piefer, the company's founder and a nuclear engineer (he drives a Tesla with the license plate "NEUTRON"), has big plans for the cornfield: a plant that could manufacture up to 50,000 doses of imaging agent a week. "Ryan called me out of the blue and he said, 'We really want you here,'" Piefer said.

Still, it could be years before moly-99 is manufactured in the United States. SHINE still needs more money to complete its manufacturing plant, and investors are wary of the many problems that can arise during construction. Already, construction deadlines promised by SHINE have come and gone. Other competitors, meanwhile, that received tens of millions of dollars in federal grants to build their own moly-99 manufacturing plants have been thwarted by protracted drug approvals and nuclear regulatory hurdles, and some have given up.

European rivals have also cautioned the American upstarts. At industry presentations, Goldman said, the producers have warned, "This is more difficult than it looks. You can't come up with a fancy slide that says, 'I'm going to be producing moly-99 in a couple of years.'"

Birth Of An Isotope

The radioactive isotope injected into the veins of potential heart attack victims or bone cancer patients begins its journey in the heavily guarded American nuclear stockpile.

The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration ships Cold War-era uranium overseas, where the containers  sought by terrorists for dirty bombs  are secretively trucked to government-owned nuclear research reactors in the Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic and Poland. (South Africa and Australia also use American uranium to produce moly-99 in research reactors.)

Private companies rent time in the reactors to irradiate enriched uranium targets, producing an atomic alphabet soup. Nearby processing facilities fish out the moly-99, and the radioactive material is loaded onto commercial airline flights bound for the United States in protective containers.

Three companies dominate the American market for moly-99  Lantheus, Curium and GE Healthcare. They distribute the material to specialized pharmacies around the country, where technicians process it into a diagnostic imaging agent called technetium-99. The companies work against a ticking clock: Because of its short half-life, just 66 hours for moly-99 and six hours for the imaging agent, the material must be quickly delivered to hospitals and administered to patients.

"The whole industry is like a duck going on a fast-flowing river," said Kevin Charlton, an analyst at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris. "On the surface, it looks like things are going very smoothly, but under the water, their legs are going really fast."

Countless things can go wrong, starting with the first step.

The worldwide supply of moly-99 relies on a fleet of government-subsidized nuclear research reactors built mostly during the Khrushchev-Eisenhower era.

Regular maintenance and major repairs can shutter the reactors, sometimes for months, and so-called scrams  caused by anything from a hiccup in a reactor's cooling system to an errant lightning strike  frequently halt production. "It's a nuclear reactor," Charlton said. "The only thing you can do is shut it off."

Even the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., a prestigious cancer treatment center, can be left waiting for shipments of the generators that contain the imaging agent. "We've had days when no generator comes in at all, or it's been cut in half," said Andrew Paulsen, supervisor of the clinic's radiopharmaceutical laboratory.

And the ephemeral nature of moly-99 always looms. On a recent afternoon, inside a locked laboratory at Stanford Hospital's nuclear medicine department in Palo Alto, Calif., a technician held a lead-lined, plastic cylinder containing a syringe of fragile atoms that had traveled around the globe.

Once the imaging agent is injected into a patient's body, it emits gamma rays that can be detected by gamma cameras that look like X-ray machines. The radioactive tracer lights up on a computer monitor wherever the heart's blood vessels are blocked or bones are riddled with potentially cancerous tumors. The imaging agent was first used in medical applications in the 1960s because its short half-life meant that patients were getting less exposure to radioactivity than from other diagnostic tracers.

But at Stanford's nuclear medicine department that day, a patient had missed his appointment. This meant the dose  which cost the hospital an irretrievable $500  had decayed and was now useless. The technician threw the syringe in the trash.

The supply chain's vulnerability, acutely felt during a severe worldwide shortage in 2009 and 2010 when two reactors shut down unexpectedly, has led some doctors to shift to more dependable, but more toxic, imaging agents. "For cardiac imaging, we had to shift to a more expensive agent and expose patients to more radiation," said Dr. Andrei Iagaru, chief of the division of nuclear medicine at Stanford Health Care.

After the worldwide shortage, the volume of nuclear medicine tests went down, and stayed down. "It definitely had an impact on the way many practices run their cardiac stress tests," Iagaru said.

Depending On Other Countries

American patients consume nearly half of the world's supply of moly-99. And despite plans to ramp up production in Australia, reactor construction is notoriously tricky. In addition, reactors that are converting for security reasons to low-enriched uranium have lower yields and more waste, according to nuclear scientists.

Concerns about moly-99 shortages heightened in October 2016, when the Canadian government mothballed a reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, that supplied about 40 percent of the American market. The government's decision to shutter the plant was, in part, due to frustration that Canada had had to spend $70 million in 2009 to repair the facility  in effect, subsidizing the American health care industry. That is a complaint of European governments as well.

William Magwood, director of the Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris, said that moly-99 production at Chalk River "went from being incidental to being the only reason to operate the reactor."

"Canadians didn't want to continue to operate a high-cost reactor to sell isotopes to the U.S.," he said.

Some European governments have begun charging moly-99 producers higher rates to rent reactor time, and prices are expected to rise sharply when governments strip for-profit companies of subsidies originally meant to support academic research.

"How much will get passed on to the health care providers?" said Leah Gannon, senior portfolio executive of radiopharmaceutical distribution sourcing for Vizient, a company that negotiates contracts for hospitals. "Probably almost all of it."

With no source of moly-99 anywhere in North America, American nuclear medicine specialists appointed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine warned in a 2016 report commissioned by Congress of a more than 50 percent likelihood of another severe shortage in the coming years.

Moly-99 suppliers refute the report's findings, a position echoed by the Nuclear Energy Agency, which has fostered closer ties among producing nations. Reactor operators, the suppliers say, work closely to stagger maintenance shutdowns to minimize shortages and respond to disruptions in production, and producers have increased the number of uranium targets.

"We're describing a glass that is half-full," Charlton said, "whereas the National Academy of Sciences sees the glass looking half empty."

Still, nuclear medicine physicians and nuclear pharmacists charged with filling patient orders each day say the supply remains fragile, especially for smaller pharmacies where the moly-99 imaging agent can account for 95 percent of their business. "It is inconceivable to believe that an outage will never occur on any of these old reactors in the future," said Dr. Joseph Hung, director of radiopharmaceutical operations at the Mayo Clinic and a member of the government committee.

Wendy Galbraith, a clinical associate professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Pharmacy in Oklahoma City who runs the university's pharmacy, said she frequently doesn't know if moly-99 is going to be available until the wee hours of the morning. Even when there are no major outages, she said, "it's a scramble."

That uncertainty means delays and on-the-fly triage for patients. "If we have a patient who can wait two days for their cardiac stress test, we'll put them off," Galbraith said.

Suppliers want to tamp down fears about reliability, physicians and pharmacists say, to dissuade them from seeking alternative imaging methods when possible, like positron emission tomography, a costly and complex type of medical scan.

"It's hard to stay relevant in an environment when things are not available every now and then," said Iagaru at Stanford.

Even more troubling, critics say, is the lack of redundancy in the supply chain. Of the four global suppliers, two rely on a single reactor. "If anything goes wrong with the reactors in South Africa and Australia," Dr. Hung said, "it will be deja vu again like in 2009."

The Wisconsin Project

If the United States is to grow a domestic moly-99 supply, it will probably rise from the corn and soybean fields in America's Dairyland.

Rock County, Wis., has become the unexpected home to two of the three companies vying for control: NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes in Beloit, which has been awarded $50 million in federal grants, and SHINE, or Subcritical Hybrid Intense Neutron Emitter, in Janesville.

Backed by $25 million in federal support, Piefer, SHINE's chief executive, has promised to build a nuclear accelerator and produce moly-99 by 2020. (The previous deadline was 2015.) In early 2017, the company opened its headquarters in Janesville above the Time Out Pub & Eatery and down the street from a fishing tackle shop and Speaker Ryan's district office.

Nuclear engineers have moved en masse to Janesville in recent months, decorating their cubicles with hand-painted signs with sayings like, "Think like a proton, stay positive."

Piefer zips along Highway 90 in his Model S Tesla between Janesville and Monona, a Madison suburb where his research lab, Phoenix Nuclear Labs is located. There, engineers have built a ghostly particle beam that looks like a giant, purple lightsaber.

Eight particle accelerators have been designed for the Janesville plant, which the Nuclear Regulatory Agency approved for construction in 2016. Piefer still needs to raise considerable private capital, a challenge with eager entrants like NorthStar and Nordion, an Ottawa-based company also with aggressive plans to enter the Moly-99 market.

"If we don't have significant production soon, we will continue to export highly enriched uranium," Piefer said. "And the National Nuclear Security Administration will have failed their mission."

The city of Janesville is banking on Piefer. Its economy reeling from the closing of the General Motors plant in 2008, the City Council aggressively pursued SHINE with a generous economic development package, besting two other Wisconsin cities.

In 2011, over the objections of some residents opposed to a nuclear facility in the town, the council authorized $1.53 million to buy 84 acres of farmland, which it has agreed to turn over to SHINE for $1. The city has also agreed to pay $345,000 to extend utilities to the site, provide $2 million in forgivable loans and co-sign a bank loan with SHINE for up to $4 million that it would have to pay should the company fail, a first for the city.

Gale Price, economic development director for the city of Janesville, said that although it was unusual to put public money into a startup, the city expected to recoup its investment within 10 years. "That's how we measure whether we're giving away the farm," he said.

Ryan has championed the project and spoke at a celebration marking nuclear regulatory approval. But Piefer said, except for the initial phone call urging him to come to Janesville, Ryan has played no part in the federal grant and construction approvals.

SHINE jumped at the chance at federal money for the private plant. But Piefer isn't solely focused on the need in American hospitals. The company has already announced lucrative deals to ship moly-99 to Chinese hospitals.

But first, it needs to start producing.

"You cannot just open a shop down the street and start nuclear medicine," said Iaragu, of Stanford. "The public comes with an expectation that if my oncologist wants me to get a bone scan, it's not big deal. But the truth is, it's a big deal."
Today, Metrohm USA welcomes its Tampa employees to their new North American headquarters in Riverview, Florida. Since breaking ground in February 2017, the 90,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility has evolved into a space that exemplifies Metrohms continued commitment to its customers and employees.

Metrohms dedication to the people that use our instruments and those who support them make us who we are as a company. This new facility demonstrates our commitments as we invest in providing our customers with innovative training facilities and our employees with modern and collaborative work areas, says Edward Colihan, President and CEO of Metrohm USA. This is a significant moment for Metrohm USA and Im excited to introduce a facility that will support our growth for years to come.

Innovation and collaboration are the major themes that run throughout the entire building, including training facilities for customers and employees, application development laboratories, technical and customer support areas and a 25,000 square foot warehouse. The modern and open layout is intended to enhance creativity and teamwork.

The new building is located at 9250 Camden Field Parkway in Riverview, Florida. A grand opening and ribbon cutting event will take place in mid-April in conjunction with Metrohms 75th anniversary.
When diagnosing a heart attack, accuracy and timing are everything.

A new test designed to better measure levels of troponin, a protein released when the heart muscle is damaged, could help emergency department physicians provide faster diagnosis and appropriate treatment.

Known as high-sensitivity troponin (hsTn) assays, these blood tests became available for clinical use in Europe in 2010. One type was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in January 2017.

Assays to measure troponin have been commonplace procedure for nearly 30 years. They're part of a standard range of diagnostics, including electrocardiogram and coronary angiography, which help doctors confirm a heart attack.

But the high-sensitivity blood tests, says Frederick Korley, M.D., Ph.D., can measure very low quantities of troponin and can therefore tell doctors whether a patient is having a heart attack or not shortly after symptoms begin.

Existing tests are less accurate in the initial hours after a heart attack begins, which can delay crucial intervention and clog waiting rooms as patients have to wait for repeat testing to be able to definitively rule out a heart attack.

"Now, we can give you that answer in a shorter timespan," says Korley, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.

The new tests, not yet in widespread domestic use, aren't perfect, says Korley, who wrote a JAMA Cardiology editorial about their potential and limitations. Greater precision, he notes, also could lead to overdiagnosis and undue hospitalization.

Still, "it's a big deal," says Korley, "and it's going to be paradigm-shifting."

Why is this new test significant?

Korley: The high-sensitivity assay is able to measure tenfold lower concentrations of troponin -; much smaller amounts than the current assay is able to. It takes some time for the proteins to leave the heart and get into the bloodstream, so this new test can tell us a lot sooner whether you're having a heart attack or not.

It's also a lot more reliable: If you measure a value now and you repeat that measurement again with the same blood sample, it doesn't change very much compared to the old assays where there was a larger amount of analytical change.

Another potential benefit is greater prevention of cardiovascular disease. A recent study in JAMA Cardiology found that people with higher levels of troponin, even without having a heart attack, are more likely to develop heart failure. Your annual physical might one day include a routine check of troponin levels. If you have a big bump, that raises a warning flag.

How do current troponin tests for diagnosing heart attack fall short?

Korley: Up until now, most of the existing assays were only able to accurately measure troponin levels in the blood about six hours after the onset of injury, when the measurements get more reliable. If you had a measurement before six hours and it's negative, you can't be confident it's truly negative. The first test may miss it.

If it's positive, you're done; it's easy. But if it's negative, we have to wait anywhere between three to six hours and then repeat the test -; depending on when a patient's symptoms started -; before we can confidently say we don't see signs of a heart attack.

How do accuracy levels differ between the two tests?

Korley: About 70 percent of people having a heart attack are going to have a positive result on the first blood draw (using the current troponin test). If it's a big heart attack, we're going to see it. Those having smaller heart attacks or those with a lot of blockage may have more delay.

Suffice to say, we're in the business where 70 percent is not good enough. This new test is a lot higher: About 82 percent of those having a heart attack have elevated troponin levels even if the initial blood test is measured within six hours of onset of symptoms.

Beyond prompting heart attack treatment, how else does greater speed aid the process?

Korley: It's closely tied to patient satisfaction, but also for the safety of other patients. As emergency physicians, the people we worry about the most are the people in the waiting room who we haven't yet seen.

A significant proportion of emergency department visits are for chest pain. By being able to reduce the amount of time we spend answering whether a patient has had a heart attack, we're able to focus a little bit more on other patients and decrease our wait times.

What are the downsides to high-sensitivity troponin testing?

Korley: In the past, very few people had noticeable elevations. Some time ago, we could only measure troponin levels in people having a big heart attack. Now, the assays are so sensitive we can measure it in healthy people. Most people have small amounts of circulating troponin.

With this test, then, we have to understand that elevations may sometimes be acute; some are chronic. For example, if someone has had uncontrolled blood pressure for a long time, that may cause damage to the heart. Therefore, if that person has an elevated troponin level, they might not require hospitalization. What they need is a good primary care doctor who can help them get their blood pressure down. Stress from an infection and injury to the brain can injure the heart as well.

As clinicians, we are going to need to be savvy in interpreting the results and not necessarily think that if someone's troponin value is high the person is having a heart attack. Institutions have to learn how well the test is operating in their hands -; and how best to use it to derive the benefits. The rollout has to be cautious.
Researchers at the St. Antonius Hospital Utrecht/Nieuwegein and the University of Twente in the Netherlands have developed software to better predict the risk of blood leaking around a patient's aortic stent. Last week, Richte Schuurmann, a Technical Physician, was awarded a PhD by the University of Twente for his research on this topic.

Each year, approximately 2700 people in the Netherlands undergo surgery for an aneurysm (dilation) in their abdominal aorta. These procedures usually involve inserting a stent into the aorta, using a minimally invasive surgical procedure. The purpose of this endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) procedure is to reduce the pressure on the aneurysm. A number of studies have shown that, within five years, approximately five percent of these patients experience leakage around the stent. This can cause renewed pressure on the aneurysm which, in the worst case scenario, could then rupture. If this were to happen it could have very serious consequences, possibly even resulting in the patient's death.

Researchers at the St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein and the University of Twente have developed and patented a new approach. Based on existing CT scans, this method is better at predicting the risk that a patient's aortic stent will leak.

How the stent works

The stent inserted into the aorta is shaped like a pair of trousers. At the top, it is anchored to the aorta by barbs. At the bottom, the stent's 'trouser legs' are inserted into the left and right iliac arteries. Ideally, the top of the stent should be located as close as possible to the lower renal artery. This maximizes the area of contact between the stent and the non-dilated section of aorta, creating the best possible connection. The top of the stent should preferably be located about 15 millimeters above the aneurysm. One month after surgery (and, often, once again a year after), the patient has a CT scan to check for any leakage, to see whether the aneurysm has shrunk, and to confirm that the stent is still in the right position. Dr Schuurmann explains that "This is necessary because the human heart beats at least 30 million times a year, which means that the stent is exposed to considerable forces."

Based on CT images alone, it is currently difficult to predict which patients will be at increased risk of leakage. "However," Richte Schuurmann points out "at the moment we are only using a small part of the information contained in these images". To remedy this situation, the researchers developed software to accurately determine the coordinates (position) of the stent, the aneurysm and the arteries. This enables you to clearly visualize the total area of stent that is physically anchored to the arteries. It also shows whether the stent has been fitted 'snugly enough' into the aorta.

The results to date have been very encouraging. However, according to Dr Schuurmann, more research is needed before this software can be routinely used in healthcare. For instance, the system has not yet been used 'predictively'. As a result, he is calling for extensive follow-up studies, involving data from an even larger group of patients.

Research

Richte Schuurmann's PhD research was an extension of the research he carried out during his Technical Medicine studies at the University of Twente. Dr Schuurmann conducted his research work at the St. Antonius Hospital. He was supervised by Dr Jean-Paul de Vries, Head of Vascular Surgery at the St. Antonius Hospital, and by Prof. Kees Slump of the University of Twente's Robotics and Mechatronics department. The study was partly funded by the Stichting Lijf en Leven (Body and Life Foundation). It was carried out in close cooperation with Syntactx, a New York based contract research organization.

Source: https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/!/2018/1/98580/new-software-better-able-to-predict-leakage-around-aortic-stents
Osaka University scientists, in collaboration with The University of Tokyo, describe the crystal structure of RNF168 bound to ubiquitin chains, a crucial interaction for DNA repair, to find a unique interaction DNA is like the computer code of the body, and it must be preserved for our bodies to survive. Yet, as cells grow and change, DNA is vulnerable to defects, especially double strand breaks (DSBs). In fact, DSBs regularly occur throughout one's lifetime. The DNA is protected, however, by DNA repair machinery. A new study from scientists at Osaka University and The University of Tokyo describes the crystal structure of a crucial part of this machinery, the binding of RNF168 to ubiquitylated proteins and find a unique binding not seen in other ubiquitylated protein interactions.

To activate the DNA repair machinery, DSBs stimulate ubiquitylation. RNF168 binds to polyubiquitylated proteins and accumulates at the damaged DNA as part of the repair process.

Ubiquitylation describes the binding of the protein ubiquitin to another protein. Ubiquitin will then further bind to itself through one of its seven lysine amino acid residues to form a ubiquitin chain. RNF168 binds with high specificity to ubiquitin chains linked at lysine 63.

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Because the binding of RNF168 to lysine 63 chains is imperative for the recruitment of other DNA repair proteins, the scientists investigated the molecular interactions that assure this binding. In particular, they were interested in two RNF168 domains appropriately named ubiquitin-dependent DSB recruitment module (UDM)1 and UDM2.

Crystal structures were made of each RNA168 domain bound to a lysine 63 chain two ubiquitin molecules long. The structures revealed that the RNF168-lysine 63 chain interaction is stabilized by many unique hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic interactions not seen in other ubiquitin lysine chains. Furthermore, UDM1 and UDM2 each folded as single -helices to bind to the distal and proximal ubiquitins, but the specificity for lysine 63 chains by RNF168 depended on the interaction with the distal ubiquitin. This, the study noted, is in striking contrast to other interactions where proximal ubiquitin defines the linkage specificity.

Using the crystal structures, the researchers could identify which regions in each UDM bound to the two ubiquitin molecules: LRM1 and UMI in UDM1, and UAD and MIU2 in UDM2. However, the conditions for binding were different. For UDM1, the specificity to lysine 63 chains depended on the distance and orientation between LRM1 and UMI while RNF168 was bound to ubiquitin. On the other hand, for UDM2, it was the space between the two ubiquitin molecules while RNF168 was bound to ubiquitin. Subsequent mutant experiments revealed that UDM2 binding was essential for RNF168 recruitment, while UDM1 was auxiliary.

The researchers expect the crystal structure will advance drug development for DNA repair.

Source: http://resou.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/research/2018/20180112_2
A pioneering technology that allows patients to control their Parkinsons disease symptoms using an iPod will be showcased at Arab Health by a renowned UK hospital.

The London Clinic, a private hospital and charity in the heart of the Harley Street Medical Area, will attend the exhibition to highlight one of their latest techniques - Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS).

DBS is a surgical procedure that involves implanting electrodes into the areas of the brain that control movement. These electrodes are then connected to a pulse generator via fine wires that is placed under the skin in the upper chest or stomach area. When the pulse generator (a device like a pacemaker), is turned on, it delivers precise electrical signals to the targeted area to modulate or disrupt abnormal signals that cause the motor symptoms of Parkinsons disease.

Parkinsons disease is a chronic progressive neurological disease that affects an estimated 6.9 million people worldwide, a figure expected to grow to 14.2 million by 2040. The main symptoms of Parkinsons disease are tremor, slow movement and stiffness. Many of the symptoms are caused by the loss of nerve cells in the brain that produce a chemical messenger called dopamine.

There is currently no cure for Parkinsons, but drugs that increase or substitute for dopamine can help manage the symptoms in the early stages of the disease. However, as the condition progresses, medication can be less effective at reliably controlling symptoms, making it increasingly difficult for people with Parkinsons disease to live healthy and independent lives. Evidence from clinical trials suggests that Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) should be considered soon after patients start to experience fluctuations in the control of symptoms with medication alone.

Mr Erlick Pereira, Consultant Neurosurgeon, explains:

The London Clinic is the first private hospital in the UK to use the innovative Abbott InfinityTM DBS System to treat Parkinsons disease patients. The electrodes implanted into the brain are segmented, which enables us to precisely steer electrical currents to the desired area in the brain, maximizing the therapeutic benefit whilst reducing the potential side effects. We perform DBS with a minimally invasive technique, without shaving the hair and under general anesthetic for patient comfort.

The Abbott Medical InfinityTM DBS system uses Bluetooth and iOS software, meaning the levels of stimulation from DBS can be adjusted with an external programmer to meet the patients specific needs. Patients are given an easy-to-use iPod controller that they can use to adjust their DBS settings within a pre-set range (set by their consultant), giving them greater control over their Parkinsons disease symptoms. An added benefit of using a system on iOS is that it can be easily upgraded as the latest therapy advancements are approved, and is available in multiple languages.

Patients with certain types of chronic pain and other movement disorders such as dystonia, essential tremor and epilepsy can also benefit from DBS when their medication is ineffective or results in intolerable side effects.

Dr Binith Cheeran, Consultant Neurologist, says:

Patients are carefully selected for DBS by multidisciplinary teams. Clinical nurse specialists and specialist physiotherapists also play a key role in the treatment and recovery of the patient.

As the symptoms of Parkinsons disease become harder to manage, patients are looking for ways to take back control over their lives. DBS can significantly improve a patients quality of life and help them reduce their medication, adds Dr Cheeran.

DBS is one form of neuromodulation, the alteration of nerve activity by electrical or pharmaceutical agents. The London Clinic also offers spinal cord stimulation to treat patients with chronic pain and dorsal root ganglion therapy for localized chronic pain. The London Clinic will be on stand to discuss the neuromodulation services and other pioneering therapies for a wide range of conditions at Arab Health 2018.

The Harley Street Medical Area is a collective of hospitals, clinics and specialists who deliver outstanding patient care through pioneering treatments and cutting-edge technologies. The Harley Street Medical Area Stand is a regular attender of Arab Health and will be located in the UK Pavilion on stand H7E30  The London Clinic can be found within this stand.

The Arab Health Exhibition & Congress, the largest healthcare exhibition in the Middle East, is taking place from 29th January to the 1st February 2018, at the Dubai Convention and Exhibition Centre.
ViLim Ball technology created at a Lithuanian startup company Fidens helps to reduce uncontrollable shaking hands, which is one of the symptoms of essential tremor. The technology is effective in 7 out of 10 cases, and it can also be used to alleviate morning stiffness of joints for rheumatoid arthritis sufferers.

According to various data, around 1% of population is suffering from essential tremor (ET). The incidence of ET rises with increasing age; approximately 4% of adults 40 years of age and older are affected by the condition. Although usually labeled as benign, essential tremor greatly influences the quality of life of those suffering from the condition - simple everyday tasks, such as pouring, writing or drinking become a challenge.

"My grandfather had this problem. Seeing a close person suffering from the condition it becomes clear that any device, which could reduce the symptoms would be of great assistance. To be honest, there are not many of them in the market today", says Dr Mantas Venslauskas, Fidens general manager, researcher at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU).

According to Dr Venslauskas, ViLim Ball created by the Lithuanian company is a more specialized version of a vibro trainer. However, he knows only one other specific technology for reducing hand tremor, which works on similar principle, and is being sold in the US market.

"In our laboratories we have modified the technology by applying certain features to the device - now ViLim Ball can also be used for reducing hand stiffness in the morning, which is a characteristic symptom of rheumatoid arthritis", says Venslauskas.

He says that the main inspiration for creating the hand tremor reducing technology was born during his doctoral study years. With KTU professor Vytautas Ostasevicius, who was Dr Venslauskas' PhD supervisor, they often discussed the need of similar technologies for sustaining and enhancing society's well-being. In KTU's Biomechanics Laboratory, the researchers have been developing and experimenting with various devices for improving circulation in body extremities, which is important for rheumatoid arthritis sufferers. The technology for circulation enhancement has been tested and patented together with the researchers of the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU).

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"However, while communicating with researchers from LSMU Neurology Clinic we found out that the technology can also be used for tremor diminishing. Therefore, at Fidens we have created a thoroughly new technology and concept of a device for reducing hand tremor and stiffness. At the moment, our device is being tested with human subjects in order to examine its impact on physiological parameters", says Dr Venslauskas, Fidens' director.

According to recent research, ViLim Ball is efficient in alleviating symptoms for 7 out of 10 essential tremor cases, and is beneficial in 9 out of 10 cases of rheumatoid arthritis.

In January 2018, beta version of ViLim Ball has been released into the market. The first sales highly rely on customer's feedback for further improvement of the product. Although, at the moment the device is aimed at Lithuanian market, after its perfecting based on further testing and correction, ViLim Ball will be also available in the US. The price for individual customers will be 195 euros.

ViLim Ball is not the only health technology, being developed by Fidens: the team is working on a wearable device, which can reduce hand tremor in real time. The technology would be especially beneficial for those suffering from Parkinson's disease.
X-Men: Sins of Sinister gets its own Sinister-ized Captain America and more new character designs

Mister Sinister is apparently about to pull off his very own Age of Apocalypse and remake reality in his image
Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam gives Rs 1 cr to Himachal CM's Relief Fund

Shimla : The public sector power generator Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam (SJVN), a company that owns and operates India's largest hydropower project in Himachal Pradesh, on Tuesday contributed Rs 1 crore to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund.

Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur was presented a cheque of Rs 1 crore by SJVN Chairman-cum-Chief Managing Director Nand Lal Sharma here.

The Chief Minister said the funds would go a long way in helping the poorest of poor to meet their medical expenses. The employees of boards and corporations should also voluntarily donate towards the Chief Minister's Relief Fund, he added.

Sharma informed the Chief Minister that against the target of generating 8,700 million units, the SJVN has generated 9,045 million units for the year 2016-17. In this fiscal, it has generated more than 8,660 million units till date.

He said the revenue from operation of the plant was Rs 2,468.66 crore and the net profit after tax was Rs 1,544.14 crore in 2016-17. The SJVN is a joint venture of the government of India and the Himachal Pradesh government.
Six Pakistani soldiers, 1 officer killed in cross-border firing

Islamabad : Indian Army has killed six Pakistani soldiers in shelling from across the Line of Control (LoC) in Pakistan-administered Kashmir's Kotli sector on Monday, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said.

Three Indian soldiers have also been martyred in the incident.

"Six Pakistan Army soldiers embraced shahadat along LOC in Jandrot, Kotli sector. Troops were busy in Line communication maintenance when they were fired upon and hit by heavy mortar round. Exchange of fire killed 3 Indian soldiers while few injured," the ISPR said in a statement.

The development comes as Indian Army chief General Bipin Rawat on Monday said that India will scale up "action" if Islamabad continues supporting terror and infiltration of militants.

The latest incident of cross-border firing also comes days after the Indian Army Chief threatened to call Pakistan's "nuclear bluff", which the Pakistani leadership has criticised as reckless and irresponsible.

(IANS with added inputs)
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DANBURY - Guest speaker Andre Swanston admitted Monday during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration that he had labored to write an inspirational speech.

He turned out to be inspirational  not because of what he said, but because of what he couldnt say.

The Danbury father of two was midway through his speech at New Hope Baptist Church when his emotions overtook him.

I remember being on the bus with my mom, who picked me up from day care after a full day of work, and she went to night school because she was working on ...

Swanstons voice choked, preventing him from continuing. People in the pews filled the silence with supportive applause.

Im sorry, said Swanston, the 36-year-old CEO and co-founder of Stamford-based Tru Optik, holding his hand up to the crowd, and stepping away from the pulpit.

Its all right, people said from multiple places in the pews.

When he couldnt continue, the crowd applauded with more encouragement.

It was one of the emotional highlights of a spirt-filled celebration that featured songs sung by a youth choir, a Duke Ellington number by the Danbury High School Jazz Band and a VIP appearance by Mayor Mark Boughton.

It was also an unexpected moment from a polished entrepreneur, who had been introduced as one of only a handful of African-American venture-backed tech startup CEOs in the country.

With tissues in his right hand given to him by a woman in the choir, Swanston changed the subject and spoke of his hard-working father, struggling to raise a family in the Bronx.

Again he was overcome.

People clapped again.

When my father told me my responsibility was to do better, and take advantage of my opportunity, it wasnt just talk - I saw the work he put in and I saw his journey, Swanston said, turning the corner on his tears and bringing the speech back to Kings righteous fight for civil rights in the 1960s.

Dr. King didnt just preach non-violence in Birmingham; he remained nonviolent when he was hosed with water cannons and beaten with batons and chased down by dogs, Swanston said. He didnt just tell others to march to Selma; he marched in front so that others that were afraid could follow him.

Swanston and other speakers on Monday did not refer specifically to the holiday controversy in Washington, D.C., over news reports last week that President Donald Trump questioned why the U.S. should welcome more immigrants from Haiti and shithole countries in Africa rather than places like Norway.

But speakers did rally the crowd around the idea that Kings dream of opportunity for all was a better vision for the country.

Despite what happens on the national level and the international level, Danbury...is a model of diversity and compassion and caring for each other, Boughton said. That is what I love about this city - we have the best people in America.

The churchs pastor agreed.

When we listen to the rhetoric we have in the White House, we ought to take this message today that we are better together, and do something about it - not just sit and hate, not just sit and talk about it, said the Rev. Leroy Parker, as the crowd roared with applause. We are going come together and show the White House that we are better together.

rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342
Robert Taylor, Stewart Granger, and Ann Blyth star in the seafaring adventure ALL THE BROTHERS WERE VALIANT (1953), available on DVD from the Warner Archive Thanks to recent discussion in the comments here I intend to review Taylor and Granger's Western THE LAST HUNT (1956) in the fairly near future. Before watching that for the first time, however, I wanted to return to ALL THE BROTHERS WERE VALIANT, which I hadn't seen in over a dozen years.ALL THE BROTHERS WERE VALIANT tells the story of Joel Shore (Taylor), a seaman from 19th century New Bedford, Massachusetts. Joel returns home from a long voyage to discover his brother Mark (Granger) didn't come back from his last voyage and is presumed dead. Joel also finds Priscilla (Blyth), the beautiful granddaughter of his friend Captain Holt (Lewis Stone), all grown up and eager to marry him.Joel is named captain of Mark's old ship and takes his bride Priscilla with him on his next whaling voyage, which is anticipated to last at least a couple of years. When the ship arrives in the South Pacific, who should turn up but Mark. Unfortunately things don't go well between the brothers...Mark had routinely taken away Joel's toys when they were children, and now he wants two things which are much more important, his ship and his wife.There is much to like about this film, starting with the stirring theme music by Miklos Rozsa ; I'd go so far as to say it might be worth watching the film at least once just for the score! The film was beautifully shot in Technicolor by the Oscar-nominated George Folsey , and the Warner Archive DVD looks especially good. I suspect it may be a remastered print but could not find confirmation.When I first saw the movie years ago it was one of the first Taylor films I'd seen, and I found his character a little too stoic compared to the more flamboyant Granger. Viewed now, with more context, I really appreciate Taylor's restrained performance. Both actor and character have a quiet confidence which contrasts effectively with Granger's animated persona. Blyth is enjoyable as Priscilla; I especially liked her exuberance in a scene where she climbs to the ship's crow's nest for the first time. Her character is young and innocent enough that it's believable she's able to be somewhat manipulated by Mark. Blyth looks beautiful in Technicolor, wearing dresses by Walter Plunkett.Where the movie falls short is in its central conflict between Joel and Mark. I like Granger tremendously in films such as KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1950), SCARAMOUCHE (1952), and GUN GLORY (1957), but here he's entirely too believable as a total heel, to the point I grew weary of his character's screen time.Mark is briefly sympathetic in a mid-movie romantic flashback sequence with Betta St. John, playing an unnamed native girl; however, that sympathy only goes so far -- what kind of man marries a woman and doesn't know her name? Unfortunately the flashback sequence goes on so long it becomes tedious and rather grinds the 95-minute movie to a halt.Mostly, the viewer just wants Mark to go away and leave Joel and Priscilla to be happy again. Mark is a bad boy without much rhyme or reason; I suppose he was just born that way, but his special brand of evil isn't all that interesting.Honestly, the movie would have been a lot more fun if it had simply been Joel and Priscilla's adventures at sea! All in all it's a film I enjoy and found worth watching a second time, but it's not wholly successful. It is worth noting that the special effects for this film are quite good; a whaling sequence obviously uses process shots and a tank, but it's done particularly well. Likewise a storm scene manages to be quite believable despite being filmed on a soundstage. Location scenes were filmed in Jamaica.The movie was directed by Richard Thorpe . Harry Brown's screenplay was based on a novel by Ben Ames Williams.The supporting cast includes Keenan Wynn, Lewis Stone, James Whitmore, Leo Gordon, Michael Pate, Kurt Kasznar, Peter Whitney, James Bell, and John Doucette.For more on this movie, please visit a typically thoughtful analysis by Jacqueline at Another Old Movie Blog The Warner Archive DVD includes the trailer.
CSE: MDM

OTCQX: MRPHF

KELOWNA, BC, Jan. 16, 2018 /CNW/ - Marapharm Ventures Inc. "Marapharm" is pleased to present its views along with state government comments in response to the Department of Justice's memo regarding marijuana enforcement policies for the United States, specifically for Nevada. Marapharm owns 9 cultivation, production, and delivery licenses and properties in Nevada. Marapharm is the largest holder of licenses with more than 300,000 square feet of medical and of recreational use licenses in Las Vegas.

The Department of Justice announcement is generating much needed discourse on the cannabis issue and may ultimately help the cannabis industry to lobby for some major changes at the federal level. For several years marijuana laws have been dealt with at state level. Eight states have legalized cannabis for recreational use. Twenty-nine states, two territories, and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis for medical purposes. In August 2017, a Quinnipiac poll found national support for cannabis was 94%. In October 2017, Marijuana Business Daily estimated that there were recreational marijuana sales of $1.2 in Nevada each day and that the market was growing rapidly.

"Marapharm's understanding of what Jeff Sessions said is that he did not actually announce that there would be a crackdown on cannabis businesses, but rather that it would be left to the discretion of the local US attorneys in the various districts to decide how and when to enforce federal laws. This does not amount to much of a change in policy and makes the announcement seem unnecessary. With regard to medical cannabis, since 2014 the federal budget has prohibited the government from using federal funds to prosecute medical cannabis businesses pursuant to a budget rider championed by US Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, a Republican.

Marapharm believes that the administration and the Department of Justice will uphold President Trump's campaign promise to not interfere with state-legal cannabis programs. Accordingly, we are on fast forward with growth in the United States. It's good business practice to diversify which is why we are investing resources in both medical marijuana as well as recreational. In addition, we are implementing changes to fast track our Canadian application and are looking at acquisitions in Europe as well." Linda Sampson, Marapharm CEO.

NOTABLE QUOTES RELATING TO NEVADA'S POLITICAL POSITION:

Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, a Republican, said in a statement he reiterates that he pledged to defend the law after it was approved by voters.

"Since Questions 2's enactment, my office has vigorously defended it against two related lawsuits that threatened to slow or even halt the implementation of the law, and has further assisted with the formulation and adoption of regulations to allow dispensaries to commence sales of recreational marijuana within just six months of the law's enactment," Laxalt said in a statement.

"My office has expeditiously facilitated the implementation of the law in the face of considerable uncertainty about the status of federal enforcement activity."

Nevada governor and Republican Brian Sandoval released a statement, calling Nevada's marijuana industry a model for other states.

"Since Nevada voters approved the legalization of recreational marijuana in 2016, I have called for a well-regulated, restricted and respected industry. My administration has worked to ensure these priorities are met while implementing the will of the voters and remaining within the guidelines of both the Cole and Wilkinson federal memos," he said.

U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, released a statement regarding the memo. "Attorney General Sessions says he is a headstrong advocate for states' rights. However, his decision giving free rein to federal prosecutors to target the cannabis industry in states where voters and legislatures have chosen to legalize and regulate the use of marijuana exposes his hypocrisy," Cortez Masto said in a statement. "In states like Nevada, voters have spoken loud and clear that marijuana must be regulated and taxed, and that the state should be able to enforce its marijuana laws without federal interference. By rescinding the Cole memo, this administration is trampling on the will of Nevadans and creating unnecessary confusion for our state. I call on the Attorney General to reinstate the memo and work with Congress to ensure we respect the will of states while ensuring prosecutorial resources are used effectively."

Republican Senator Dean Heller noted Sessions' deference to states' rights in his statement. "Knowing Attorney General Sessions' deference to states' rights, I strongly encourage the DOJ to meet with Governor Sandoval and Attorney General Laxalt to discuss the implications of changes to federal marijuana enforcement policy," he said. "I also urge the DOJ to work with the congressional delegations from states like Nevada that have legalized marijuana as they review and navigate the new policy."

Democrat and Las Vegas-area Representative Dina Titus also released a statement. She is a founder of the House Cannabis Caucus. "This latest move from Attorney General Sessions and the Trump Administration is a direct attack on the State of Nevada, sovereign tribal governments, and the rights of people in states, tribes, and territories all across the United States," Titus said. "The decision to rescind the Cole and Wilkinson memos undermines Nevada's $622 million-dollar industry, threatens nearly $1 billion in new investments, and jeopardizes thousands of new jobs and more than $60 million dollars in tax revenue for the State."

Democratic Representative Jacky Rosen released a statement calling the decision a "federal overreach. "Nevadans made it clear at the ballot box in 2016 that they support the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes, and their decision should stand," Rosen said. "Local changes in marijuana policy in recent years have resulted in millions of dollars in new revenue for Nevada's state budget, thousands of new jobs, and countless medical benefits for Nevadans suffering from PTSD, cancer, and other illnesses.

"This federal overreach by President Trump's Department of Justice will create uncertainty and confusion for Nevadans. These reported actions are an insult to Nevada voters, an affront to states' rights, and a threat to our local economy."

Danny Tarkanian, a Republican running for U.S. Senate in 2018, noted the will of the people in his statement." Regardless of how you personally feel about marijuana use, the citizens of Nevada have spoken. They voted to not just legalize medical marijuana, but recreational, as well," he said. "It's a decision Nevadans made for the State of Nevada and the federal government needs to recognize and honor our 10th Amendment right to do so. It's time for Big Brother to back off.

Representative Ruben Kihuen, a Democrat, also released a statement on the ruling. "Secretary Sessions' decision clashes with the will of hundreds of thousands of Nevadans and millions of Americans who have voted in favor of marijuana legalization," he said. "Mr. Sessions and the Department of Justice are reversing a years-long policy of respecting the rights of states in order to take out a personal vendetta on an industry that has sold nearly $130 million worth of product in Nevada and brought in $20 million in tax revenue to the state since July. This decision will not only impact the marijuana industry and the thousands of jobs it is creating, but it will put at risk a stable source of vital tax revenue for our state."

Clark County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak, a Democrat who is running for Nevada governor, also noted the economic impact.

"The people of Nevada have already spoken on legalized marijuana. Those in need of medicinal marijuana finally had access to relief. Entrepreneurs are now building businesses, hiring workers and paying taxes that will benefit the entire state," he said in a statement. "Now the Trump Administration wants to create a costly and confusing process to overrule the will of the voters and undo what has been a success so far. We cannot and will not stand for this or any threat by the Trump Administration to undo progress in Nevada."

Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani, a Democrat running for governor, called the decision "wrong" in a statement. "Attorney General Jeff Sessions is attempting to impose his personal agenda over the will of the more than 600,000 Nevadans who voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use," she said. "It's an egregious overstep by the federal government  and it puts millions of dollars in funding for public education in jeopardy.

We don't need this uncertainty for local dispensaries or the threat of wasting law enforcement resources on locking up non-violent drug offenders. Marijuana should be removed from Schedule 1 classification immediately."

Nevada state Sen. Aaron Ford, the Senate majority leader and candidate for Nevada attorney general, said the policy protects the state's marijuana industry from "overzealous federal intrusion" and rescinding it "could cost Nevada millions of dollars in revenue, kill jobs, and hurt our schools and local economy. "This clear example of federal government overreach is nothing more than an attempt to infringe on our state's sovereignty and is a direct insult to the Nevadans who voted in favor of a regulated marijuana industry," he said in a statement. "Nevada's burgeoning marijuana business sector has already created close to 7,000 new jobs and generated $19 million in revenue from marijuana taxes -- millions of which are deposited into the Distributive School Account for our children. "As Nevada attorney general, I will do everything within my power to defend our state's voter-approved and regulated industry and send a clear message to Attorney General Sessions and the Trump Administration that they should stay out of Nevada's business."

ABOUT MARAPHARM VENTURES INC.

www.marapharm.com

Marapharm is a publicly traded company investing in the medical and recreational cannabis space, since 2014. Marapharm has rapidly expanded to include having cultivation, production and dispensary locations in the key North American states of Washington, Nevada, and California, and are seeking expansion opportunities worldwide.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Facebook: facebook.com/marapharm

Twitter: twitter.com/marapharm

Web Program: marapharm.tv

STOCK EXCHANGES:

Marapharm trades in Canada, ticker symbol MDM on the CSE, in the United States, ticker symbol MRPHF on the OTCQB, and in Europe, ticker symbol 2Mo on the FSE. Marapharm also trades on other recognized platforms in Europe including Stuttgart, Tradegate, L & S, Quotnx, Dusseldorf, Munich, and Berlin.



Neither the CSE, the FSE nor the OTCQB has approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. Neither the CSE, the FSE nor the OTCQB accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

MARIJUANA INDUSTRY INVOLVEMENT:

Canadian listings (CSE) will remain in good standing as long as they provide the disclosure that is rightly required by regulators and complying with applicable licensing requirements and the regulatory framework enacted by the applicable state in which they operate.

Marapharm owns marijuana licenses in California and Nevada. Marijuana is legal in each state however marijuana remains illegal under US federal law and the approach to enforcement of US federal law against marijuana is subject to change. Shareholders and investors need to be aware that adverse enforcement actions could affect their investments and that Marapharm's ability to access private and public capital could be affected and or could not be available to support continuing operations. Marapharm's business is conducted in a manner consistent with state law and is in compliance with licensing requirements.

Copies of licenses are posted on Marapharm's website. Marapharm has internal compliance procedures in place and has compliance focused attorneys engaged in jurisdictions to monitor changes in laws for compliance with US federal and state law on an ongoing basis. These law firms inform any necessary changes to our policies and procedures for compliance in Canada and the US.

FORWARD - LOOKING STATEMENTS:

Certain statements contained in this news release constitute forward looking statements. The use of any of the words "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", 'may", "will", "project", "should", 'believe", and similar expressions are intended to identify forward- looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward- looking statements are based on reasonable assumption but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and the forward-looking statements included in this news release should not be unduly relied upon.

SOURCE Marapharm Ventures Inc.

For further information: www.marapharm.com or Linda Sampson, CEO, 778-583-4476, email [email protected]

Related Links

www.marapharm.com


Under the terms of the Arrangement, Vermilion has agreed to acquire (the "Acquisition") all of the issued and outstanding common shares ("Privateco Shares") in the capital of Privateco, including all Privateco Shares issuable, in accordance with the terms of existing grants of options or warrants, prior to the effective time of the Arrangement, and assume all outstanding debt of the Privateco. The Purchase Price will be funded from Vermilion's existing credit facilities.

The Board of Directors of Privateco has unanimously approved the Arrangement and recommended that Privateco shareholders vote in favour of the Arrangement. The Arrangement remains subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of applicable court, Privateco shareholder and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close on or about February 15th, 2018.

The Acquisition is comprised of high netback, low base decline, light oil producing fields in the Sinclair and Fertile areas, straddling the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border, approximately 55 km northeast of Vermilion's existing operations in southeast Saskatchewan (the "Assets"). The Assets include approximately 42,600 net acres of land (approximately 100% W.I.), three oil batteries, and associated pipelines, along with the necessary water infrastructure to facilitate the existing seven waterflood projects and initiate up to eight additional waterflood projects. The Assets produced approximately 1,150 bbl/d of 40 API oil during Q4 2017, sourced from the Bakken/Three Forks formation. All of the current production and infrastructure will be 100% owned and operated by Vermilion.

Total proved plus probable ("2P") reserves attributed to the Assets at December 31, 2017 are 6.7(1) mmboe (100% crude oil), based on an independent evaluation by GLJ Petroleum Consultants Ltd. The Assets demonstrate a low base decline rate of approximately 15% at present, and are expected to have even lower decline rates over time. Areas under waterflood have decline rates of less than 10% with certain areas of flat or increasing production. Approximately 45% of the production comes from active waterflood projects, leaving significant opportunity to expand the waterflood.

The Acquisition is accretive on a fully-diluted per share basis for all pertinent metrics including production, fund flows from operations(2), reserves and net asset value. Making no deduction for undeveloped land value, transaction metrics equate to $13.55 per boe of 2P reserves, and $79,000 per flowing barrel of production. Based on 2018 WTI strip pricing of US$61.83/bbl, the operating netback for the Assets is estimated at approximately $51.80 (2) per boe. Using the 2P finding, development and acquisition cost (based on the reserves in the GLJ report) of $19.02 per boe (including future development capital), the Assets are expected to deliver a 2P after-tax fund flows recycle ratio of 2.7 times.

Using the same strip pricing assumption, the total Acquisition cost (including assumed debt) is approximately 5.1 times estimated annualized 2018 fund flows from operations ("FFO"), after deducting incremental interest expense. Calculated on a debt-adjusted cash flow basis, the total Acquisition cost (including assumed debt) is approximately 4.6 times. Pro-forma the acquisition, our year end 2018 debt-to-FFO ratio is forecast to be 2.0 times based on January 11, 2018 strip pricing, as compared to 1.9 times prior to the acquisition.

The Acquisition complements our current southeast Saskatchewan operations and will be managed out of our existing field office in the area. Furthermore, the Acquisition aligns with our sustainable growth-and-income model by targeting low risk assets with high netbacks, strong free cash flow generation, low base decline rates and strong capital efficiencies on future development.

As a result of the Acquisition, and based on a mid-February closing date, we are revising our 2018 production guidance to between 75,000 and 77,500 boe/d (from 74,500 to 76,500 boe/d previously). We are also increasing our 2018 capital budget to $325 million (from $315 million previously) to reflect additional capital activity on these assets planned for the second half of the year.

About Vermilion

Vermilion is an international energy producer that seeks to create value through the acquisition, exploration, development and optimization of producing properties in North America, Europe and Australia. Our business model emphasizes organic production growth augmented with value-adding acquisitions, along with providing reliable and increasing dividends to investors. Vermilion is targeting growth in production primarily through the exploitation of light oil and liquids-rich natural gas conventional resource plays in Canada and the United States, the exploration and development of high impact natural gas opportunities in the Netherlands and Germany, and through oil drilling and workover programs in France and Australia. Vermilion currently holds an 18.5% working interest in the Corrib gas field in Ireland. Vermilion pays a monthly dividend of Canadian $0.215 per share, which provides a current yield of approximately 5.5%.

Vermilion's priorities are health and safety, the environment, and profitability, in that order. Nothing is more important to us than the safety of the public and those who work with us, and the protection of our natural surroundings. We have been recognized as a top decile performer amongst Canadian publicly listed companies in governance practices, as a Climate Leadership level (A-) performer by the CDP, and a Best Workplace in the Great Place to Work Institute's annual rankings in Canada, France and the Netherlands. In addition, Vermilion emphasizes strategic community investment in each of our operating areas.

Employees and directors hold approximately 6.5% of our fully diluted shares, are committed to consistently delivering superior rewards for all stakeholders, and have delivered over 20 years of market outperformance. Vermilion trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol VET.

Natural gas volumes have been converted on the basis of six thousand cubic feet ("mcf") of natural gas to one barrel equivalent of oil. Barrels of oil equivalent (boe) may be misleading, particularly if used in isolation. A boe conversion ratio of six thousand cubic feet to one barrel of oil is based on an energy equivalency conversion method primarily applicable at the burner tip and does not represent a value equivalency at the wellhead.

(1) Estimated total proved and proved plus probable reserves attributable to the Assets as evaluated by GLJ Petroleum Consultants Ltd. in a report dated January 12, 2018 with an effective date of December 31, 2017, in accordance with National Instrument 51-101  Standards for Disclosure for Oil and Gas Activities of the Canadian Securities Administrators, using the GLJ (2018-01) price forecast (the "GLJ Report")



(2) Non-GAAP Financial Measures: Netbacks, fund flows from operations, and free cash flow are non-GAAP (as defined herein) or additional GAAP financial measures that do not have standardized meanings prescribed by International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS" or, alternatively, "GAAP") and therefore may not be comparable with the calculations of similar measures for other entities. "Netbacks" are per boe and per mcf measures used in operational and capital allocation decisions. "Fund flows from operations" represents cash flows from operating activities before changes in non-cash operating working capital and asset retirement obligations settled. Management considers fund flows from operations and fund flows from operations per share to be key measures as they demonstrate Vermilion's ability to generate the cash necessary to pay dividends, repay debt, fund asset retirement obligations and make capital investments. Management believes that by excluding the temporary impact of changes in non-cash operating working capital, fund flows from operations provides a useful measure of Vermilion's ability to generate cash that is not subject to short-term movements in non-cash operating working capital. For relevant operating netback related disclosures please refer to the reconciliation in management's discussion and analysis contained in Vermilion's 2016 Annual Report for the year ended December 31, 2016 available on SEDAR or at the company's website (www.vermilionenergy.com).

DISCLAIMER

Certain statements included or incorporated by reference in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements under applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements or information typically contain statements with words such as "anticipate", "believe", "expect", "plan", "intend", "estimate", "propose", or similar words suggesting future outcomes or statements regarding an outlook. Forward looking statements or information in this press release may include, but are not limited to:

the anticipated closing date of the Acquisition;

the actual amount of debt assumed upon closing of the Acquisition;

the sources of existing production and future development drilling opportunities;

the annual decline rate of the Assets;

the number and classification of future development drilling opportunities;

the pricing received for production, and resulting operating and after-tax cash flow netbacks for the Assets;

the estimate of annualized 2018 fund flows from operations;

the anticipated acquisition metrics;

the expectation that fiscal and regulatory policies in Saskatchewan and Manitoba remain supportive of continued investment;

and remain supportive of continued investment; exploration and development capital expenditure expectations for 2018; and

development plans and strategic objectives.

Statements relating to reserves are deemed to be forward-looking statements as they involve the implied assessment, based on certain estimates and assumptions, that the reserves described exist in the quantities predicted or estimated, and can be profitably produced in the future. Such forward-looking statements or information are based on a number of assumptions all or any of which may prove to be incorrect. In addition to any other assumptions identified in this document, assumptions have been made regarding, among other things:

satisfaction of all conditions to the proposed Acquisition and receipt of all necessary approvals.

the ability of Vermilion to obtain equipment, services and supplies in a timely manner to carry out planned development activities;

the ability of Vermilion to market oil and natural gas successfully to current and new customers;

the timely receipt of required regulatory approvals;

currency, exchange and interest rates;

future oil and natural gas prices; and

Management's expectations relating to the timing and results of development activities.

Although Vermilion believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements or information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on forward looking statements because Vermilion can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements or information are based on current expectations, estimates and projections that involve a number of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by Vermilion and described in the forward looking statements or information. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to:

the ability of management to execute its business plan;

the risks of the oil and gas industry, both domestically and internationally, such as operational risks in exploring for, developing and producing crude oil and natural gas and market demand;

risks and uncertainties involving geology of oil and natural gas deposits;

risks inherent in Vermilion's marketing operations, including credit risk;

the uncertainty of reserves estimates and reserves life;

the uncertainty of estimates and projections relating to production, costs and expenses;

potential delays or changes in plans with respect to proposed acquisitions (including the Acquisition), exploration or development projects or capital expenditures;

Vermilion's ability to enter into or renew leases;

fluctuations in oil and natural gas prices, foreign currency exchange rates and interest rates;

health, safety and environmental risks;

uncertainties as to the availability and cost of financing;

the ability of Vermilion to add production and reserves through development and exploration activities;

general economic and business conditions;

the possibility that government policies or laws may change or governmental approvals may be delayed or withheld;

uncertainty in amounts and timing of royalty payments;

risks associated with existing and potential future law suits and regulatory actions against Vermilion; and

other risks and uncertainties described elsewhere in this document or in Vermilion's other filings with Canadian securities regulatory authorities.

The forward-looking statements or information contained in this document are made as of the date hereof and Vermilion undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless required by applicable securities laws.

SOURCE Vermilion Energy Inc.

For further information: Anthony Marino, President & CEO; Michael Kaluza, Executive VP & COO; Curtis W. Hicks, C.A., Executive VP & CFO; and/or Kyle Preston, Director Investor Relations; TEL (403) 269-4884 | IR TOLL FREE 1-866-895-8101 | [email protected] | www.vermilionenergy.com

Related Links

http://www.vermilionenergy.com


MONTREAL, Jan. 16, 2018 /CNW Telbec/ - Yellow Pages Limited (TSX: Y) (the "Company") announced today that it has taken a significant step forward in its program to reduce spending to drive improvement in its key operating measure of EBITDA less capital expenditures.

The Company will take measures to reduce its workforce by approximately 500 positions, representing close to 18% of its employees on a consolidated basis, with reductions occurring across Canada and in all functions of the business. The Company expects to incur a restructuring charge of roughly $17 million associated with these actions in the first quarter of fiscal 2018.

"Decisions that materially impact our employees are difficult but absolutely critical to securing the near-term health of the business while we build a great company that provides excellent opportunities in the future," said David A. Eckert, Chief Executive Officer. Eckert continued, "Today's actions are one element resulting from a comprehensive review of our operating and capital spending, aimed at creating a strong financial basis for stability and growth. We are continuing to make focused investments for profitable future growth."

About Yellow Pages Limited

Yellow Pages Limited (TSX: Y) is a Canadian digital media and marketing company that creates local opportunities for buyers and sellers to interact and transact in the local economy. Yellow Pages holds some of Canada's leading local online properties including YP.ca, RedFlagDeals.com, Canada411.ca, 411.ca, Bookenda.com, DuProprio.com, ComFree.com and YP NextHome. The Company also holds the YP, YP Shopwise, YP Dine, RedFlagDeals, Canada411, 411, DuProprio, ComFree and YP NextHome mobile applications and Yellow Pages print directories. In addition, Yellow Pages is a leader in national advertising through its businesses devoted to servicing the marketing needs of large North American brands, including Mediative and JUICE. For more information visit www.corporate.yp.ca.

SOURCE Yellow Pages Limited

For further information: Media: Joelle Langevin, Tel.: (514) 934-6979, [email protected]; Investor Relations: Kevin Chan, Tel.: (514) 938-6727, [email protected]

Related Links

corporate.yp.ca


Researchers from the Information and Navigation College, Air Force Engineering University and the Institute of China Electronic Equipment System Engineering Company performed computational analysis for using a space-based laser to remove space junk.

The orbital momentum models of small scale space debris and space-based laser station were established. The velocity variation of the space debris ablating by the space-based laser station was analyzed, and the orbit maneuver of the space debris irradiated by laser station was modeled and studied. The variations of orbital parameters of the space debris orbit respectively without and with irradiation of high-power pulsed laser were simulated and analyzed, and the impacts of the inclination and right ascension of ascending node (RAAN) of the space-based laser station on debris removal were analyzed and discussed. The simulation results show that, debris removal is affected by inclination and RAAN, and laser station with the same inclination and RAAN as debris has the highest removal efficiency. It provides necessary theoretical basis for the deployment of space-based laser station and the further application of space debris removal by using space-based laser.

NASA had a 2011 study of a ground-based laser for removing space junk

A laser broom is a proposed ground-based laser beam-powered propulsion system whose purpose is to sweep space debris out of the path of other artificial satellites such as the International Space Station. It would heat one side of an object enough to change its orbit and make it hit the atmosphere sooner.

Lasers are designed to target debris between one and ten centimeters in diameter. Collisions with such debris are commonly of such high velocity that considerable damage and numerous secondary fragments are the result. The laser broom is intended to be used at high enough power to penetrate through the atmosphere with enough remaining power to ablate material from the target. The ablating material imparts a small thrust that lowers its orbital perigee into the upper atmosphere, thereby increasing drag so that its remaining orbital life is short. The laser would operate in pulsed mode to avoid self-shielding of the target by the ablated plasma. The power levels of lasers in this concept are well below the power levels in concepts for more rapidly effective anti-satellite weapons.

NASA research in 2011 indicated that firing a laser beam at a piece of space junk could alter velocity by 0.04 inches (1.0 mm) per second. Persisting with these small velocity changes for a few hours per day could alter its course by 650 feet (200 m) per day. While not causing the junk to reenter, this could maneuver it to avoid a collision.

Other funded research into this area refutes NASAs claim and demonstrates the precise physics involved, which shows that space debris is re-entered regardless of the direction of laser illumination. Using a laser guide star and adaptive optics, a sufficiently large ground based laser (1 megajoule pulsed HF laser) can deorbit dozens of objects per day at reasonable cost.
The European Commission contribution in EuroHPC will be around EUR 486 million under the current Multiannual Financial Framework, matched by a similar amount from Member States and associated countries. Overall, around EUR 1 billion of public funding would be invested by 2020, and private members of the initiative would also add in-kind contributions. The 1 billion Euros will build a world-class supercomputer infrastructure.

Supercomputers are needed to process ever larger amounts of data and bring benefits to the society in many areas from health care and renewable energy to car safety and cybersecurity.

Todays step is crucial for the EUs competitiveness and independence in the data economy. Today, European scientists and industry increasingly process their data outside the EU because their needs are not matched by the computation time or computer performance available in the EU. This lack of independence threatens privacy, data protection, commercial trade secrets, and ownership of data in particular for sensitive applications.

A new legal and funding structure  the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking  shall acquire, build and deploy across Europe a world-class High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. It will also support a research and innovation programme to develop the technologies and machines (hardware) as well as the applications (software) that would run on these supercomputers.

Supercomputers are the engine to power the digital economy. It is a tough race and today the EU is lagging behind: we do not have any supercomputers in the worlds top-ten. With the EuroHPC initiative we want to give European researchers and companies world-leading supercomputer capacity by 2020  to develop technologies such as artificial intelligence and build the futures everyday applications in areas like health, security or engineering.

Supercomputers can reduce car production cycles from 60 months to 24 months.

Research and innovation matched with infrastructure

Todays initiative will pool investments to establish leading European supercomputers and big data infrastructure. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking aims to acquire systems with pre-exascale performance (100 PetaFLOPS), and support the development of exascale (an ExaFlop), performance systems based on EU technology, by 2022-2023.

The activities of the Joint Undertaking will consist of:

Acquisition and operation of two world-class pre-exascale supercomputing machines and at least two mid-range supercomputing machines (capable of around 10 Petaflops), and providing and managing access to these supercomputers to a wide range of public and private users starting from 2020.

Research and innovation programme on HPC: to support the development of European supercomputing technology including the first generation of European low-power microprocessor technology, and the co-design of European exascale machines, and to foster applications, skills development and a wider use of High-Performance Computing.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking will operate in 2019-2026. The planned infrastructure will be jointly owned and operated by its members consisting at first of the countries that have signed the EuroHPC declaration (list below) and private members from academia and industry. Other members can join this cooperation at any moment, provided their financial contribution.
Income inequality varies greatly across

world regions. It is lowest in Europe and highest in the Middle East.

Rising wealth inequality within countries has helped to spur increases in global wealth inequality. If we assume the world trend to be captured by the combined experience of China, Europe and the United States, the wealth share of the worlds top 1% wealthiest people increased from 28% to 33%, while the share commanded by the bottom 75% oscillated around 10% between 1980 and 2016.

The continuation of past wealth-inequality trends will see the wealth share of the top 0.1% global wealth owners (in a world represented by China, the EU, and the United States) catch up with the share of the global wealth middle class by 2050.

Global income inequality will also increase if countries prolong the income inequality path they have been on since 1980even with relatively high-income growth predictions in Africa, Latin America, and Asia in the coming three decades.

However, global inequality will decrease moderately if all countries follow the inequality trajectory followed by the EU between 1980 and today.

Depending on which inequality trajectory is followed by countries, the incomes of the bottom half of the world population may vary by factor of two by 2050, ranging from 4500 to  9100 per year, per adult.
2002 was the last time the USA led the number of space launches, but following the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, Russia topped the list every year from 2003 to 2015. In 2016, Russia fell to third place for the number of launch attempts, with U.S. and China  22 attempts each  overtaking its 19 attempts (of which 18 were successful).

Elon Musks SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket flew a record 18 missions during the year. United Launch Alliances (Boeing-Lockheed Martin) joint venture completed eight U.S. government missions this year aboard Atlas and Delta rockets, including five from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and three from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. That total was down from 12 last year, and half as many as SpaceX has launched in 2017.

ULA tentatively has a dozen government missions scheduled in 2018.

Analysis shows an estimated 2020 cost of $422 million per ULA launch if the Air Force selected United Launch Alliance to conduct them. That combines costs for launches using ULAs large Delta rocket as well as its smaller, less expensive Atlas V rocket. SpaceX has been awarded two Air Force contracts at far lower per-launch costs of $83 million and $96.5 million.

Despite SpaceX being less than one-fourth of the cost of ULA, there is still criticism from some politicians and The Federalist that SpaceX is somehow wasting US taxpayer money.

The September 2016 accident that blew up a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket does not count as a failed mission, since the rocket blew up while it was on the launch pad, and not during a mission.

United Space Launch is leading the Space Launch System heavy rocket development. This program has received $12 billion and yet to have one test launch. Currently the earliest first test launch is Dec 21, 2019. Two more years of funding will cost over $4 billion.

SpaceX will be performing a static fire test of the Falcon Heavy. Yes, the Falcon Heavy development has taken four years longer than originally planned but the Falcon Heavy will easily beat the Space Launch System to reach operational capability.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9 development will have gotten less than $1 billion in US government funding.

The Federalist shows it does not care about the US Taxpayer when they attack SpaceX government launch contracts and not the bloated United Launch Alliance contracts of the $12+ billion ULA Space Launch System.
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WINDSOR LOCKS  Norwegian Air, one of two foreign airlines serving Bradley International Airport, announced Monday it is ending service to Connecticut.

Service between Edinburgh Airport and Bradley  New Englands second busiest airport after Bostons Logan International Airport  will end as of March 25, said Anders Lindstrom, a U.S.-based spokesman for the airline. He said the decision by Norwegian Air was motivated by an ongoing tax dispute with the Scottish government.

The decision to pull the route, along with decreasing service to Edinburgh from other United States airports, is due to the Scottish Governments postponement of a reduction to air passenger taxes, Lindstrom said. Following Norwegians launch of affordable trans-atlantic routes from the U.S. to Edinburgh last year, the prospect of a reduction in air passenger taxes meant we had been planning for continued future growth to Scotland.

Norwegian Air has seen great potential in providing service out of Bradley and is continuously reviewing other future opportunities in Hartford, he said..

Lindstrom said all passengers who have been affected by the decision have been informed and offered alternative flights, or full refunds, if they chose to cancel their booking.

Bradley is operated by the Connecticut Airport Authority. Kevin Dillon, executive director of the state agency, said airport officials are disappointed by the discontinuation of Norwegians nonstop service.

Unfortunately, despite the strength of the Bradley business case for continuing the service, external factors have deteriorated the services viability at this time, Dillon said in a statement. The United Kingdoms Air Passenger Duty, which is levied on passengers who utilize Edinburgh Airport, has had a debilitating effect on Norwegians business model. For an airline that prides itself on serving as an ultra-low cost option for travelers, the APD incurred by passengers at Edinburgh Airport often essentially doubles the passengers total flight costs and undercuts the attractiveness of Norwegians low fares.

Bradley is not the only airport with Norwegian service to Edinburgh that is being impacted by these dynamics, he said.

We knew from the start that the lack of connecting options at Edinburgh Airport would make the Norwegian service a challenge to maintain, Dillon said. However, we were pleased to see that Norwegians performance was in line with expectations for a new airline entrant starting operations at Bradley.

Dillon said Aer Lingus route between Dublin and Bradley has shown promising growth, and, after recent discussions, we are confident that the Bradley route is currently in line for an aircraft upgrade in 2019.

This investment is indicative of the strong partnership between Bradley and Aer Lingus, and we look forward to growing together to continue meeting the regions trans-atlantic travel needs, he said.

luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com
Governor Pete Ricketts announced that he would hold a town hall in Lexington on Wednesday, January 17. The Governor invites the public to attend the town hall. Lunch will be available for purchase at the event.

Nebraskans are invited to join Governor Ricketts at his upcoming a town hall in Lexington, said Taylor Gage, the Governors Director of Strategic Communications. This is a great opportunity to hear an update on how our state is growing, and also to make your voice heard. The Governor looks forward to hearing your thoughts on how we can move our state forward together.

The Governor will make remarks before taking questions. This event is open to the public.

What: Town Hall discussing the recent State of the State address and the current direction of Nebraska.

When: 12:00-1:00 pm CT on Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Where: Lexington Town Hall, Kirk's, 3002 Plum Creek Parkway, LEXINGTON

Any questions regarding the event should be directed to the Governors Office at 402-471-2244
WEST HAVEN  When Sue Yamaguchi first married her husband, they had talked about becoming foster parents. But with four children between them, both working full time and maintaining a small home, it just wasnt feasible.

Upon asking herself what else could she do to give back to abused and abandoned children in the foster care system, Yamaguchi came up with the Blanket Fairy Mission of Greater New Haven.

I had to think of a way to help children in the system. Unfortunately, I cant give them a home, but I can at least give them the security of a blanket, Yamaguchi said.

Yamaguchi made 75 blankets that first year. Nine years later, her enterprise has flourished. In December, she distributed more than 725 handmade blankets  from two-sided, patterned, no-sew fleece blankets to painstakingly intricate patchwork quilts.

Orange Congregational Church adopted the program as an outreach mission last year, and Yamaguchi earlier this month donated 30 blankets to the West Haven Police Department.

Without interruption, it takes three hours to make one of the simpler patterns. Given the projects growth, Yamaguchi isnt able to make all the blankets herself. So she has enlisted help from her best friend in Massachusetts, her sewing guild and several youth organizations such as Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Orange Congregational Churchs confirmation class and students at Career High School in New Haven.

The nice part about involving teenagers is that  some of those kids came from an environment of not having a lot, so they do understand, she said.

Yamaguchi said each child receives a handmade blanket and a pillow case with his or her name embroidered on it. While privacy laws prevent Yamaguchi from meeting the children, she receives their first name, gender, age and a specific clue such as their favorite color or animal from a social worker to help personalize the gifts.

Along with her personal connection to foster care  her husband, Robert Terni, and his brothers were in the system  she specifically chose to focus on children because they dont have a voice, she said.

They have nobody to go to bat for them, Yamaguchi said. By doing this, Im hoping theyll recognize that there is somebody out there.

The blankets are handmade instead of store-bought to show the children that someone cares, she said. To emphasize her point, Yamaguchi recounted an anecdote of a high school student who wanted to know why they were making blankets. The boy didnt seem satisfied with the answer that it was for service hours and wanted to know whether he was really helping others, she recalled.

Yamaguchi then asked him if he slept in a bed at night, and he said he slept on a couch. She then asked him what he took with him when he laid on the couch, and he said just a pillow and blanket. When pressed if he could sleep without a blanket, he admitted he probably couldnt, she said.

This is why I focus on blankets because, regardless of who you are, if youre an adult or a child, if you go to bed at night after youve had a horrendous day, the first thing you do, whether its a sheet during the summer or a blanket during the winter, you put that sheet or blanket over you, Yamaguchi said. Its kind of like a calming thing that will actually help you sleep. Imagine a little kid thats cold, hungry and doesnt have any kind of security or comfort. This is what does it.

Yamaguchi said she and her husband fund most of the blankets out-of-pocket but receive both monetary and fabric donations to help with the project. Depending on the amount of donations, it usually costs about $10 per child. While she doesnt know where this endeavor will take her, she said the more people that are involved, the more children she can help.

jessica.lerner@hearstmediact.com; @jesslerner on Twitter
NEW HAVEN  Local residents pushing the city to move its funds from Wells Fargo over the banks contribution to the Dakota Access Pipeline could have an opportunity to address the Board of Alders as the board considers their request to hold a public hearing.

A letter from several city residents and activists requesting the city remove its municipal funds from Wells Fargo is being presented to the Board of Alders and could lead to a public hearing within the calendar year.

The request isnt new. Demonstrators held a rally outside City Hall last September urging the city to remove its money from the bank. They reiterated their reasoning in the letter, which was co-signed by six residents and addressed to Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers in August.

Wells Fargo Northeast Corporate Communications Manger Kevin Friedlander issued a statement Friday, saying in itthat Wells Fargo values the long-standing relationship with the city. Wells Fargo donated more than $307,000 in 2016 and similar figures in 2017 to local nonprofits and events, according to Friedlanders statement.

Regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline, we were one of the 17 financial institutions involved in the financing of the Pipeline, Friedlander said in the statement. That said, the pipeline has now been operational since June, and our facility has been fully funded. Our commitment to the responsible development of all forms of energy remains unchanged, and since 2012, we have invested more than $70 billion in clean technology and other environmentally sustainable businesses.

City spokesman Laurence Grotheer issued a statement Friday on the possible public hearing. Mayor Toni Harp had previously stated during a radio appearance on WNHH Radio that she would gradually withdraw funds.

Mayor Harp continues working with Controller Daryl Jones and the rest of her financial team to see how the City can distance itself from Wells Fargo with a competitive bank thats suitably equipped to safeguard the Citys assets and handle the high volume and complex transactions the City requires, Grotheer said in the statement.

Wooster Square resident Geremy Schulick was among the co-signers of the letter. On Friday, Schulick said the main reason some residents want the money removed is due to Wells Fargos investment in the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. The $3.8 billion project started shipping oil in June 2017, according to the Associated Press.

Schulick cited the Seattle city council voting last year to remove more than $3 billion in annual cash flow from the bank as an example that such a move is feasible.

We completely understand that this cant be done tomorrow, or even the next or next month, Schulick said. I recognize it would have be a long process.

Activists like Schulick and Newhallville resident Elias Estabrook, who also co-signed the August letter, opposed the pipelines construction due to its interference with the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Several tribes opposed the pipelines completion in North Dakota over concerns it would disrupt sacred sites and potentially pollute water supplies.

The letter also cites other issues with Wells Fargo. The group cites the banks admission last year that more than 3 million phony bank accounts and credit cards were created by staff. The bank was fined $185 million. Friedlander said Wells Fargo has, taken a series of significant steps to address improper sales practices, and we are making critical changes to rebuild the trust of our customers and team members.

Schulick said the pipeline is unnecessary fossil fuel infrastructure.

Its a particularly egregious example that fossil fuel projects can have, Schulick said. He added: Other fossil fuel projects have done tremendous damage to indigenous communities.

More investment should be made in renewable energy, which Schulick said to Wells Fargos credit, they also invest in. Schulick said he would like to see a public statement from Harp about a more concrete plan to withdraw city funds from Wells Fargo.

The request is filed under communications in the Board of Alders Jan. 16 meeting agenda. The item will likely be forwarded to a committee for further consideration.

A public hearing would likely occur at the committee level on a different date. At its conclusion, the committee could make a recommendation based on public input at the hearing, according to the citys Office of Legislative Services.

Reach Esteban L. Hernandez at 203-680-9901
News Release: NREL, University of Texas Scientists Determine Critical Factor for Improving Performance and Durability of Perovskite Solar Cells

A microscopic analysis of perovskite solar cells reveals new insight into how the devices degradeinformation necessary for moving the technology closer to commercialization.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Department of Energys National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and at the University of Texas at Austin and was published in Nature Communications. The paper, Impact of Grain Boundaries on Efficiency and Stability of Organic-Inorganic Trihalide Perovskites, outlined the first quantitative nanoscale photoconductivity imaging of two perovskite thin films with different power conversion efficiencies.

Highly efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskite solar cells have emerged as a revolutionary new technology with the potential to be more easily manufactured and at a lower cost than silicon solar cells. Ongoing research, including at NREL, focuses on moving perovskites beyond a laboratory setting.

The researchers took a close look at two organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite thin films made of methylammonium lead iodide (CH 3 NH 3 PbI 3 or MAPbI 3 ). Perovskite solar cells possess a polycrystalline structure with individual crystals grains. These grains are adjacent to other crystals and the area where the crystals touch is known as a grain boundary.

The general assumption is that degradation starts with grain boundaries, said Kai Zhu, a senior scientist in NRELs Chemistry & Nanoscience Department and co-author of the paper. We were able to show that degradation is not really starting from the visible boundaries between grains. Its coming from the grain surface. As a result, this implies that the surface of a perovskite solar cell should be targeted for improving device performance.

The two thin films examined varied slightly. The first, with smaller grains, had a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 15 percent. The second, with larger grains, had a PCE of 18 percent. Each film was protected by a layer of the plastic polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA); earlier research showed unprotected films tended to degrade within several hours under ambient conditions. The solar cells, illuminated by a focused laser beam from below, were examined by a novel instrument, termed light-stimulated microwave impedance microscopy (MIM). This allowed researchers to map the nanoscale photoconductivity of the samples.

With the MIM technique, for the first time we were able to visualize the intrinsic nanoscale photo-response, which is of fundamental importance to solar cell performance, said Keji Lai, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, Grain boundaries are usually the weak links in functional materials. Lai worked with his colleague, associate professor Xiaoqin Li, graduate student Zhaodong Chu, and postdoc researcher Di Wu.

The analysis showed the photoconductivity of the 18 percent sample, which contained a better crystallinity, was five to six times higher than that of the other thin film. The perovskite thin films were tested over the course of a week in an area that was 74 degrees Fahrenheit and had 35 percent relative humidity. Little change in photoconductivity was observed the first few days, but by the third day the measure began to drop as water molecules moved through the PMMA coating. The drop in the photoconductivity emerged from the disintegration of the grains and not from the grain boundaries, the research found. In this instance, the scientists noted, the grain boundaries are relatively benign and determined perovskite films with better crystallinity should be a direction of future research for improving perovskite solar cell performance and durability.

The research at University of Texas at Austin was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Welch Foundation. The research at NREL was funded by U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office.

Other co-authors from NREL were Mengjin Yang and Philip Schulz.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by The Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.
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GAC  which sold about 500,000 vehicles last year and markets several models under the name Trumpchi  is considering selling its car through dealerships tied to Fiat Chrysler. The two companies are already partners in China, where GAC manufactures Jeeps for the Italian-American automaker.

In the first half of this year, we will establish a North American sales company that will be responsible for developing the dealership network, Mr. Jun said. We will explore all sorts of channels including partnering with F.C.A. as well as others.

Sergio Marchionne, Fiat Chryslers chief executive, said his company was ready to assist GAC. We are talking to them about how and if we can help if they come to the U.S., Mr. Marchionne told reporters at his own news conference earlier in the day.

The potential for cooperation in the United States is sure to fuel further speculation about whether the two companies will move toward an even closer alliance. Fiat Chrysler has been in discussions with a number of Chinese companies about potential equity investments, a prospect that took on greater significance after Mr. Marchionne tried and failed to persuade General Motors to consider merging with his company in 2015.

Mr. Marchionne has said he hopes to merge or partner with another automaker to improve Fiat Chryslers long-term prospects as technology and new global markets reshape the industry. While the company is profitable, it has not earned enough to make significant investments in the kind of technologies that appear crucial to the future of the industry, such as electric vehicles and self-driving cars.
On Tuesday, the chief executives of the worlds largest public companies will be receiving a letter from one of the most influential investors in the world. And what it says is likely to cause a firestorm in the corner offices of companies everywhere and a debate over social responsibility that stretches from Wall Street to Washington.

Laurence D. Fink, founder and chief executive of the investment firm BlackRock, is going to inform business leaders that their companies need to do more than make profits  they need to contribute to society as well if they want to receive the support of BlackRock.

Mr. Fink has the clout to make this kind of demand: His firm manages more than $6 trillion in investments through 401(k) plans, exchange-traded funds and mutual funds, making it the largest investor in the world, and he has an outsize influence on whether directors are voted on and off boards.

Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose, he wrote in a draft of the letter that was shared with me. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.
The Trump administration is taking its campaign against illegal immigration to the workplace.

The raids by federal agents on dozens of 7-Eleven convenience stores last week were the administrations first big show of force meant to convey the consequences of employing undocumented people.

We are taking work-site enforcement very hard, said Thomas D. Homan, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in a speech in October. Not only are we going to prosecute the employers who knowingly hire the illegal aliens, we are going to detain and remove the illegal alien workers.

When agents raid workplaces, they often demand to see employees immigration documents and make arrests. But after the agents leave, it is difficult for the government to meaningfully penalize businesses that hire unauthorized immigrants.

Instead, according to law enforcement officials and experts with differing views of the immigration debate, a primary goal of such raids is to dissuade those working illegally from showing up for their jobs  and to warn prospective migrants that even if they make it across the border, they may end up being captured at work.
Maybe they loved it. Maybe they hated it. But to many New Yorkers, the granite office building at 550 Madison Avenue was a landmark from the moment it was unveiled almost 40 years ago. Now some preservationists are upset that only the exterior might become an official one.

With a Chippendale-inspired broken pediment at the top and a Renaissance-inspired colonnade at the bottom, the building was instantly identifiable, a shape as firmly fixed in the public imagination as the shapes of the Citicorp Center and the Chrysler Building. It was completed in the 1980s as the city marked 50 years of another instantly identifiable element of modern Manhattan, Rockefeller Center.

The building on Madison Avenue, at East 55th Street, was designed by the architect Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee. Mr. Johnson called it a symbolic shift from the flat top look of postwar office buildings like the Seagram Building, where Mr. Johnson had designed the original interiors of the Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants.

Last month, the Landmarks Preservation Commission decided that the interior of 550 Madison Avenue did not deserve landmark designation. It said the buildings lobby was not in original condition, mainly because a statue had been taken out in the 1990s when the buildings original occupant, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, moved away and the Sony Corporation moved in.
NEWARK  The boardroom at the headquarters of New Jersey Transit here does not often fill with spontaneous applause. But it did on Monday morning  not for an action the agencys board took, but for one it put off.

After the board took the unusual step of rescheduling its monthly meeting for Martin Luther Kings Birthday, a state and federal holiday, a crowd of Hoboken residents showed up to protest. The residents wanted to stop New Jersey Transit from helping a privately owned ferry company turn a site on the Hoboken waterfront into a maintenance facility for its fleet.

Hoboken officials had started moving toward seizing the property with plans for transforming it into a public park. To preserve it for industrial use, the ferry company, New York Waterway, asked New Jersey Transit to buy the site and lease it back to the company.

Over the objections of Hobokens new mayor, Ravinder S. Bhalla, and his predecessor, Dawn Zimmer, the agencys board had been scheduled to vote on the purchase last Wednesday. But the meeting was postponed because the board did not have a quorum of four members. The board then rescheduled the meeting for Monday, even though state and federal government agencies were closed.
Ms. Hochul, in contrast, had $144,000 in her campaign account as of last July.

The lieutenant governorship is an office far more symbolic than substantive, with a limited budget and few formal responsibilities. Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run independently in the primary in New York. But Mr. Cuomo and, by extension, the state Democratic Party apparatus, could weigh in heavily to ensure that Mr. Cuomos partner in the executive branch is an ally and not an agitator.

Challenging Ms. Hochul is to challenge the governors administration, said Charlie King, who ran for lieutenant governor with Mr. Cuomo in 2002, and who is now an informal adviser to the governor.

Mr. Cuomos and Ms. Hochuls office declined to comment.

Mr. Williams did not formally declare his candidacy, but he is now able to raise money while gauging whether there is a definite path and an appetite for his candidacy, he said. He most recently ran for New York City Council speaker but was not among the finalists.

Mr. Williams, who is African-American, would have some demographic advantages in a Democratic primary where an enormous number of votes come from New York City and minority communities. Ms. Hochul, a former congresswoman and clerk from Erie County, has traveled the state extensively in her years as Mr. Cuomos lieutenant governor, but is hardly a household name.

In a sign of the prominent role race could play, Mr. Williams announced he was exploring a bid on Martin Luther Kings Birthday. He later spoke at a rally in Harlem at the National Action Network, the Rev. Al Sharptons organization, and rattled off the all the prominent positions held by white leaders in New York, including governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller and New York City mayor.
But the solution to these problems does not begin with women torching men for failing to understand their nonverbal cues. It is for women to be more verbal. Its to say, This is what turns me on. Its to say, I dont want to do that. And, yes, sometimes it means saying goodbye.

The single most distressing thing to me about this story is that the only person with any agency in the story seems to be Aziz Ansari. The woman is merely acted upon.

All of this put me in mind of another article published this weekend, this one by the novelist and feminist icon Margaret Atwood. My fundamental position is that women are human beings, she writes. Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions. If they were, were back to the 19th century, and women should not own property, have credit cards, have access to higher education, control their own reproduction or vote. There are powerful groups in North America pushing this agenda, but they are not usually considered feminists.

Except, increasingly, they are.

The article in Babe was met with digital hosannas by young feminists who insisted that consent is consent only if it is affirmative, active, continuous and  and this is the word most used  enthusiastic. Consent isnt the only thing they are radically redefining. A recent survey by The Economist/YouGov found that approximately 25 percent of millennial-age American men think asking someone for a drink is harassment. More than a third of millennial men and women say that if a man compliments a womans looks it is harassment.

To judge from social media reaction, they also see a flagrant abuse of power in this sexual encounter. Yes, Mr. Ansari is a wealthy celebrity with a Netflix show. But he had no actual power over the woman  professionally or otherwise. And lumping him in with the same movement that brought down men who ran movie studios and forced themselves on actresses, or the factory-floor supervisors who demanded sex from female workers, trivializes what #MeToo first stood for.

Im sorry this woman had this experience. I too have had lousy romantic encounters, as has every adult woman I know. I have regretted these encounters, and not said anything at all. I have regretted them and said so, as she did. And I know I am lucky that these unpleasant moments were far from being anything approaching assault or rape, or even the worst night of my life.

But the response to her story makes me think that many of my fellow feminists might insist that my experience was just that, and for me to define it otherwise is nothing more than my internalized misogyny.
Mayor Bill de Blasios recent declaration of war on Big Oil for its contribution to climate change inspired, as is often the case with this mayor, some skepticism that he was once again seizing a big issue to propel himself into the national spotlight. Some also suggested that if he truly cared about the carbon emissions that cause global warming, he would mothball at least part of the fleet of SUVs that ferry him around the city.

All partly true, perhaps, but Mr. de Blasios decision to confront some of the worlds biggest polluters is possibly transformative and certainly timely. It comes just when the Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction, opening up Americas coastal waters to drilling and removing regulatory obstacles to oil exploration, and generally giving fossil fuel companies pretty much what they want. It follows a year of extreme weather events, including three major hurricanes, that collectively caused $306 billion in damage  the most expensive year on record for natural disasters in this country. And it comes as climate scientists are growing increasingly confident about linking these events, or at least their severity, to global warming.

The mayors attack is two-pronged. First, he intends to divest the citys $189 billion pension fund of an estimated $5 billion invested in fossil fuel companies. This puts the city on the same page as a number of other cities, New York State and many colleges, where the divestment movement first took root.

Second, of potentially more consequence, he announced that the city was suing five big oil companies  ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Conoco Phillips  to hold them accountable for emissions that have helped drive up global temperatures and to force the companies to fork over billions of dollars in damages to help cope with the effects of climate change, steps like fortifying coastal protections against flooding and upgrading sewer systems.
At the heart of his liberalism, Reeves writes, was a clearly and repeatedly articulated vision of a flourishing human life  self-improving, passionate, truth-seeking, engaged and colorful.

Mill believed that schooling should be compulsory and that education should elevate the tastes of each generation. He worried, as Reeves writes, that an ill-educated mass, with little time or inclination for moral musing, would threaten its own advancement if it simply adopted its own collective views, gathered up by the mass media and played back to the originating audience.

Mills life was as energetic as his writing. He served in Parliament, worked as a colonial administrator and a university rector. He championed the labor movement, was the first member of Parliament to call for women to be given the right to vote, was the leading British philosopher of the 19th century and served as a loving son, husband and friend.

Mill had an optimistic view of human nature and probably an insufficient appreciation of human depravity. As Isaiah Berlin wrote in his essay John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life, Mill was living in a Victorian moment when the chief problem was claustrophobia  the individual being smothered by society. He emphasized individual liberation. His emphases probably would have been different if he had lived today, when our problem is agoraphobia  too much freedom, too little cohesion, meaning and direction.

But Mill is a model for a life of balanced convictions. He had enough conscience to believe that there is moral truth, worth dying for. But he had enough humility to understand that none of us can ever fully know that truth, because it cannot be reduced to a single thing.

He championed the egalitarian belief that the best society allows maximum space for each member to craft his own life, but he had the civilized belief that there are clear distinctions between honor and dishonor, excellence and laziness.
In 1998, the professional moral scold William Bennett published a book titled The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. In it, Bennett described blase attitudes toward presidential adultery as corrosive. Clintons promiscuity, he argued, implicated his fitness for governing: Chronic indiscipline, compulsion, exploitation, the easy betrayal of vows, all suggest something wrong at a deep level  something habitual and beyond control, he wrote.

I was reminded of Bennetts words by David Friends fascinating recent book, The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido, about the sexual scandals and cultural upheavals of that decade. In retrospect, the dynamics of the Clinton-era culture wars seem blissfully simple, pitting a sexually libertarian left against an aggressively prudish right. It is a cosmic irony that, 20 years later, it is conservatives whove finally killed off the last remaining unspoken rules about presidential sexual ethics.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that, a month before the 2016 election, Donald Trumps lawyer Michael Cohen arranged a $130,000 payout to the porn star Stephanie Clifford, known by the stage name Stormy Daniels, to stop her from discussing a 2006 dalliance with Trump. The New York Times added new details. The Daily Beast then reported that another porn actress, Jessica Drake, who had accused Trump of offering her $10,000 for sex, signed a nondisclosure agreement barring her from talking about the president.

In any other administration, evidence that the president paid hush money to the star of Good Will Humping during the election would be a scandal. In this one it has, so far, elicited a collective shrug.
I had forgotten what it was like to live daily with terror until my 26-year-old son started sending me existential texts. Are we living in a PCP-laced version of the Cold War era? Sam asked me recently, in the wake of another mine-is-bigger-than-yours debate between President Trump and North Koreas leader, Kim Jong-un  the exchange followed by the Hawaiian missile attack that wasnt.

Literally with every passing day I get A) less worried about paying my student loans and B) more serious about buying a grill guard for the car, he continued.

Why a grill guard? I had to ask. To be ready to drive through the police states police barricades, he explained.

Such is the status of our mother-son discourse in the Trump era.

Our Obama years were far less apocalyptic. Sam and I talked about his fluctuating college grades, Scions versus Hondas and why he still refused to revisit the restaurant where he worked as a busboy at 15. We had political discussions, but they mostly served as Good Parenting Payoffs, since we were usually on the same side of most issues.
But conservatives dont see the rejection of their orthodoxies by people who know what theyre talking about as a sign that they might need to rethink. Instead, theyve soured on scholarship and education in general. Remarkably, a clear majority of Republicans now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on America.

So the party that currently controls all three branches of the federal government is increasingly for bigotry and against education. That should disturb you for multiple reasons, one of which is that the G.O.P. has rejected the very values that made America great.

Think of where wed be as a nation if we hadnt experienced those great waves of immigrants driven by the dream of a better life. Think of where wed be if we hadnt led the world, first in universal basic education, then in the creation of great institutions of higher education. Surely wed be a shrunken, stagnant, second-rate society.

And thats what well become if modern know-nothingism prevails.

Ive been rereading an important 2012 book, Enrico Morettis The New Geography of Jobs, about the growing divergence of regional fortunes within the United States. Until around 1980, America seemed on the path toward broadly spread prosperity, with poor regions like the Deep South rapidly catching up with the rest. Since then, however, the gaps have widened again, with incomes in some parts of the nation surging while other parts fall behind.

Moretti argues, rightly in the view of many economists, that this new divergence reflects the growing importance of clusters of highly skilled workers  many of them immigrants  often centered on great universities, that create virtuous circles of growth and innovation. And as it happens, the 2016 election largely pitted these rising regions against those left behind, which is why counties carried by Hillary Clinton, who won only a narrow majority of the popular vote, account for a remarkable 64 percent of U.S. G.D.P., almost twice as much as Trump counties.

Clearly, we need policies to spread the benefits of growth and innovation more widely. But one way to think of Trumpism is as an attempt to narrow regional disparities, not by bringing the lagging regions up, but by cutting the growing regions down. For thats what attacks on education and immigration, key drivers of the new economys success stories, would do.

So will our modern know-nothings prevail? I have no idea. Whats clear, however, is that if they do, they wont make America great again  theyll kill the very things that made it great.
The Hawaii emergency management employee who set off a statewide panic on Saturday morning by sending out a false alarm about an incoming ballistic missile has been temporarily reassigned, but there are no plans to fire him or identify him publicly, a state official said.

The employee, who has worked for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency for 10 years, sent the missile alert to cellphones across the state by picking the wrong option on his computer for a routine drill, and then confirming his choice, according to Richard Rapoza, the agencys public information officer.

Were not going to take action till we have all the facts, Mr. Rapoza said, adding that the employee has been temporarily reassigned to a part of the agencys emergency operations center where he does not have access to the warning system. Mr. Rapoza declined to describe the employees new duties.

During the 38 minutes it took the agency to send a corrective alert rescinding the warning on Saturday, residents and tourists in a state that was already on edge over escalating tensions between the United States and North Korea frantically said their goodbyes and took shelter. Fear turned to anger when the alert turned out to be a false alarm.
WASHINGTON  The most significant attempt to loosen rules imposed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis is underway in Congress as the Senate looks to pass legislation within the next month that would roll back restrictions on swaths of the finance industry.

Buoyed by their success in rewriting the tax code, the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have now set their sights on helping the financial industry, which has been engaged in a quiet but concerted push to relax many post-crisis rules and regulatory obligations, particularly for thousands of small- and medium-sized banks.

But unlike the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul, which passed along party lines, the effort to loosen the post-crisis rules is somewhat bipartisan. A group of Senate Democrats has joined Republicans to support legislation that would mark the first major revision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, a signature accomplishment of President Barack Obama that has been deemed a disaster by President Trump.

The bill would allow hundreds of smaller banks to avoid certain elements of federal oversight, including stress tests, which measure a banks ability to withstand a severe economic downturn. Under current law, banks with assets of $50 billion or more are considered systemically important financial institutions and therefore governed by stricter rules. The bill would raise that threshold to institutions with assets of $250 billion or more, leaving fewer than 10 big banks in the United States subject to the stricter oversight.
WASHINGTON  A potential backlash from the new tax law and President Trumps unpopularity in Democratic-leaning states could combine to turn swaths of blue America even bluer in this years elections, a development likely to deepen already intense polarization in Congress.

Recent retirement announcements of two senior House Republicans from California put control of their seats in jeopardy and, coupled with some recruiting failures, exacerbated Republican fears of steep midterm losses. The prospect of multiple Republican defeats in California as well as New York and New Jersey threatens to diminish the already thinning ranks of more centrist Republicans.

Democrats might cheer such an outcome. But the long-term result could be a Congress that is more insular, as well as an increase in situations such as the new tax law. In that case, Republicans squeezed revenue from states dominated by Democrats and returned the benefits to Republican strongholds elsewhere across the country.

If House delegations become more sharply divided by state, such geographic favoritism could become more prevalent because the majority party would have less incentive to consider the interests of states where they have little or no membership at political risk. The concern is that lawmakers would retreat even further into their ideological camps, staring warily across state lines.
WASHINGTON  President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey lashed out on Monday against a proposed American-trained force that would potentially position thousands of Kurdish militia fighters along Turkeys southern border.

The allied military headquarters in Baghdad that is leading the fight against the Islamic State in Syria said Sunday that it had started recruiting and retraining members of a Syrian Kurdish and Arab militia to protect the borders of territory captured by the group. The militia, the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces or S.D.F., currently controls a large swath of northeastern Syria.

The Trump administration has said it would gradually scale back its military assistance to the Kurds as major combat winds down. The proposed border force appears to signal how the Pentagon would support its Kurdish proxies in the longer term in Syria.

Over several years, the new border force could grow to 30,000 members, the headquarters said in an email.
A 17-year-old girl who said she was being held captive by her parents in her home about two hours southeast of Los Angeles escaped on Sunday and alerted the authorities, who then rescued her 12 siblings  several of whom were found shackled to their beds and malnourished  the authorities said on Monday.

The 17-year-old used a cellphone she found in the home to call the police with her startling claim about her siblings being held against their will, the Riverside County Sheriffs Department said. Officers found the girls 12 siblings  who range in age from 2 to 29  in the foul-smelling house in Perris, Calif., living in the dark without access to adequate food or water, the department said.

Some of the children were restrained with chains and padlocks. The parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner, the Sheriffs Department said in a statement.

The officers did not immediately recognize that seven of the 13 siblings were adults because they were emaciated. The sheriffs office said that the 17-year-old girl who called 911 looked to be 10 years old.
Earlier this month, we published an article on Mexican towns and cities that are dealing with public corruption and record violence by effectively seceding from the state. But we wanted to elaborate more on this story, to recount what it was like to report on each town, which we visited last year, and offer our thoughts on its larger lessons for Mexico and the world.

This is the second of a three-part series that originally appeared in our Interpreter newsletter. The third will publish later this month. So sign up the Interpreter newsletter here, and let us know what you think: interpreter@nytimes.com.

When we talk to political scientists who study American democracy about what worries them most  and they worry about many things these days  their answer is often political parties.

Whatever you think of President Trump, they argue, he has exposed the frailty of the Republican Party, which tried and failed to stop his nomination. The party has since bent on core issues, especially those related to the Russia investigation. Both the Republican and the Democratic parties, scholars argue, have grown dangerously weak, unable to play their informal but crucial role as institutional checks on power; as guardrails of democracy.
HONG KONG  An oil spill from an Iranian tanker that sank in the East China Sea is rapidly spreading, officials said Tuesday, alarming environmentalists about the threat to sea and bird life in the waterway.

The tanker, the Sanchi, was carrying 136,000 tons of highly flammable fuel oil when it crashed into a freighter on Jan. 6. On Sunday, the Sanchi sank after a huge blast sent up a great plume of black smoke and set the surface of the water on fire, China Central Television said.

The bodies of three crew members have been recovered, and the remaining 29 were presumed dead, the Iranian government said. Thirty Iranians and two Bangladeshis were believed to have died.

The oil slicks from the sunken tanker were growing in size, Chinas State Oceanic Administration said Tuesday. There are now two huge slicks covering 52 square miles, compared with just four square miles the previous day. Strong winds were pushing the spill toward Japan, away from China, and it was now less than 200 miles from Naha, Japan.
ATHENS  Greek lawmakers on Monday approved new measures demanded by international creditors, including cuts to benefits for large families and restrictions on trade unions, creating the basis for additional bailout funding.

Addressing Parliament, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who backed the legislation, said the vote would move Greece a step closer to emerging from its third international bailout, which expires in August.

We are a breath away from the end of the program and the definitive end to the memorandums, Mr. Tsipras said, referring to the three loan agreements Greece has signed with foreign creditors since it verged on bankruptcy in 2010.

This gives hope and courage to millions of our fellow citizens who all these years have made large sacrifices and now finally see light and a way out, Mr. Tsipras said, referring to years of pension cuts and tax increases.
Mr. Miller, 67, is not the only old-guard Wall Street figure with a background in philosophy. George Soros was heavily influenced by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. Carl Icahn was a philosophy major at Princeton, where he wrote a senior thesis titled The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning. (On the watchdog side of the street, Sheila Bair, the former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, was also a philosophy major.)

Image Bill Miller, a former Ph.D. student in philosophy at Johns Hopkins, said he was pleased to be making an investment in the infrastructure of the philosophy profession. Credit... Johns Hopkins University

Mr. Miller, whose father worked as a terminal manager for a trucking company, said he had essentially talked his way into the Ph.D. program at Hopkins, despite having taken only one six-week course in philosophy at the very end of his senior year.

They wanted to see three examples of your philosophical work, he recalled. I didnt have any, so I took 30 days off the Army and wrote three papers.

Mr. Miller, who worked part-time in accounting during graduate school, completed the coursework and qualifying exams. But when it came time to start a dissertation, he looked at the difficult prospects of getting a teaching job, and left for (much) greener pastures.

Philosophy is often derided as useless and impractical, and not always in as fond a way as in the classic Monty Python sketch Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion Visit Jean-Paul Sartre. But when Marco Rubio, on the campaign trail in 2015, said America needed more welders and less philosophers, defenders of Sophia rushed to note that postsecondary philosophy teachers earned nearly twice as much as welders, while former philosophy majors outearned most other liberal arts majors by midcareer.
Mr. Meedendorp said that the drawing is particularly interesting because it is more in keeping with van Goghs earlier style than his later work when he lived in Paris. He added that the drawing shows that van Goghs work evolved during his crucial years in the French capital from a formal style that he learned at the art academy in Antwerp just before arriving in Paris, and became increasingly experimental.

Its a kind of stylistic missing link between his Belgium and Paris time, said Fred Leeman, an independent van Gogh expert and curator of exhibitions by the artist, who is a consultant to the Van Vlissingen Foundation, which currently owns the drawing.

The last time a new van Gogh drawing was discovered was in 2012. A year later, a new van Gogh painting, Sunset at Montmajour (1888), was also found. But these findings are relatively rare. Since the publication of the complete catalog of van Goghs works in 1970, another nine drawings and seven paintings have been added, Mr. Meedendorp said.

When it came to the Van Gogh Museum for research in 2012, the drawing was owned by an American private collector whose Dutch relatives had purchased the work from a gallery in the Netherlands in 1917, Mr. Meedendorp explained. But the museum did not publicize the finding at the time, at the request of the previous owner.

Aside from Mr. Leeman, no other experts outside the museum have yet seen the drawing.

Research by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the worlds leading expertise center on the artist, found that The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry came into the hands of van Goghs sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, a meticulous keeper of van Goghs materials, who numbered it 123 in her inventory.
A longtime Hollywood stuntman, Joel Kramer, was accused of sexual misconduct by three women over the weekend, including one who said he assaulted her when she was just 12.

That accusation came from the actress Eliza Dushku, now 37, who said on Saturday in a Facebook post that Mr. Kramer abused her during the filming of True Lies, the 1994 summer blockbuster.

Mr. Kramer, who was responsible for Ms. Dushkus safety on set, built up trust with her and her parents before taking her to his Miami hotel for what he said would be a swim in the pool followed by her first sushi meal, she said.

He took her to his room, where he drew the shades, turned down the lights, turned up the air-conditioning and went to the bathroom, she said. He returned naked, covering himself with only a hand towel, she said.
The officers did not immediately realize that seven of the 13 siblings were adults, they were so emaciated. The eldest is 29, the youngest 2.

The parents were arrested on nine counts each of torture and child endangerment.

Above, the familys home in Perris, Calif.

_____

 A Senate hearing on President Trumps border wall plan was instead dominated by discussion of the presidents language during a White House meeting last week. Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, was quizzed about the vulgar words Mr. Trump reportedly used.

I dont dispute that the president was using tough language, said Ms. Nielsen, who was at the meeting. But she denied hearing Mr. Trump call African nations shithole countries.

The administration also released statistics showing that the vast majority of people convicted of terrorism charges in the United States were born in foreign countries, a finding that Ms. Nielsen called truly chilling data. But the statistics were notable as much for what they did not contain as for what they did.

_____
The snag with Citigroups decade-long climb back from the financial brink is that its been largely driven by forces that its chief executive, Mike Corbat, doesnt control. Changes to the United States tax regime show thats sometimes a good thing.

Tax cuts just left Citigroup with a big loss, and a bigger opportunity. The $203 billion lender took a $22 billion charge in the last quarter of 2017 as it wrote down deferred tax assets  credits against future tax bills  and took a hit for deemed repatriation of overseas earnings. That left it deep in the red. But its new corporate tax rate of an effective 25 percent will hike earnings in the future. If the tax law had been in effect last year, the 9.6 percent return on tangible common equity Citigroup just reported for the year would have risen above 10 percent  already beating his target for 2018, and suggesting that Mr. Corbat can be more ambitious.

Beyond that, the impact of the tax cuts becomes less clear, but they will probably still be helpful. If consumers and small businesses feel richer, as its rival JPMorgan Chase said last week they probably will, a beneficiary should be a company like Citigroup, which makes roughly one-quarter of its revenue from credit cards. Mr. Corbat warned last year that the cost of writing down unrecoverable loans was going to rise a little more than expected, and credit losses on its North American own-brand card business rose 10 percent in the quarter. More cash flow for households may keep that in check  and might actually encourage more borrowing.

Where Mr. Corbat can steer Citigroup directly, he is doing so. Expenses fell to 58 percent of revenue, compared with 59 percent a year ago. Investment banking was more mixed: Revenue from fixed-income trading, where Citigroup is heavily exposed to flaccid rate and currency movements, plunged by almost one-fifth. Yet the bank is collecting more advisory fees. Its share of the overall pot rose a little to 4.8 percent in 2017, according to data from Thomson Reuters.
Unfortunately for plaintiffs, there are onerous requirements for the complaint to show that there is enough evidence to allow the lawsuit to move forward as a RICO case. Judges take a dim view of efforts to turn what look like ordinary state law claims into federal cases by claiming a RICO violation. For that reason, RICO cases often dont survive the pleading stage.

A recent complaint that shows how broadly the law can be applied to areas far outside organized crime is the RICO lawsuit filed in December against Harvey Weinstein, the Weinstein Company and its directors, and others. The complaint accuses them of helping Mr. Weinstein cover up a pattern of sexual harassment through what it calls the Weinstein Sexual Enterprise. The class action, filed on behalf of women who dealt with Mr. Weinstein, claims that the enterprise was designed to harass, threaten, extort and mislead both Weinsteins victims and the media to prevent, hinder and avoid the prosecution, reporting or disclosure of his sexual misconduct.

How can that be a RICO case? The statute requires proving that an enterprise engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity in violation of federal criminal laws over a substantial period. In this case, the plaintiffs claim that part of covering up the harassment involved obstruction of justice and multiple instances of mail and wire fraud to show the criminal pattern, and that by acting to help Mr. Weinstein, the defendants formed an enterprise alleged to be an association in fact.

Federal fraud statutes are often the vehicle for turning a business dispute into a RICO case. Those statutes make it a crime to engage in a scheme or artifice to defraud, so proving deceptive conduct can be the basis for a RICO lawsuit. In many cases, one side claims it was misled in ways involving mail or wire communications, such as emails or bank transactions, that formed a pattern of racketeering activity.

A likely initial challenge by the defendants in the Weinstein case will be a motion to dismiss on the ground that the defendants cannot be shown to have done anything more than occasionally help Mr. Weinstein deal with the fallout of various episodes. In Boyle v. United States, the Supreme Court held that there must be three structural features to establish this type of enterprise: a purpose, relationships among those associated with the enterprise and longevity sufficient to permit these associates to pursue the enterprises purpose.
Tensions in Iran. Cold weather in the United States. A year of production cuts. With 2018 still young, there has been no shortage of reasons oil prices are pushing higher.

Prices for Brent crude, the international benchmark, have risen nearly 50 percent since June. They briefly passed $70 a barrel more than once in the last week  the first time the per-barrel price has reached $70 since December 2014. Stockpiles of oil that built up for years are declining. And a buoyant global economy has bolstered demand, meaning prices could go higher still.

The market has entered a new phase, said Richard Mallinson, an analyst at Energy Aspects, a research firm in London.

The dynamics at play are in sharp contrast with the situation just a year ago. The market has gradually realigned, in large part because of an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Russia  two of the worlds three largest oil producers  to restrain output.
In winter, momos are salvation: hot dumplings with swirled pleats, fresh from the steamer, arriving in a cloudy rush of ascending souls.

To eat them outdoors in winter, shivering, with numb, fumbling fingers, is even more of a wonder. At the Amdo Kitchen food truck in Jackson Heights, Queens, momos come huddled unceremoniously, eight for $5 on a disposable plate; bow your head over them and the steam kisses your face.

Thubten Amchok, the owner and chef, grew up in the Amdo region of Tibet and fled to Nepal and then India before settling in the U.S. in 1995. A former monk, he started selling momos from a pushcart six years ago. Now his truck  emblazoned with Tibetan and American flags, snow lions alongside stars and stripes  rolls out daily, weather permitting. (Snowdrifts from the recent storm piled up so high, he couldnt park on the street for two weeks.)
My name is Cezin Marie-Cecile Nottaway, and my occupation is chef-owner of Wawatay Catering. I was born and raised in Rapid Lake, Quebec. Its an Algonquin community in Parc de la Verendrye. And I grew up there learning how to hunt, how to live off the land, how to prepare the animals. This is our method. This is the traditional method that I still keep and practice on how to smoke our meats. The creator decides, the animal decides if he wants to give their life. You dont feel sorry for the animals when you kill it because you take their purpose in life away from them. And also, if you dont hunt the animals they feel like youve forgotten them. They feel neglected that their purpose in life is taken away. People might see that as not a good thing. But as an Anishinaabe person, I dont look at it like that. This is how I was raised. This is how I look at it. And this is how Ill respect it. And its through ceremony as well. My style of cooking is like rustic-slash-kokomis cooking, very grandmother-ish. Ill do some fancy recipes. But I really like to stick to the rustic kokomis recipes that I learned how to do when I was a kid. Its moose meat. Its beaver. Partridge. Its blueberries. This whole growing up has been geared to me like being this kid, alright, to prepare foods to share. Its what I do. Its who I am. And thats what Ill always do.
JORDAN, Ontario  Though his wines are found in many natural wine bars around the world, please do not call Francois Morissette a natural winemaker. And though Pearl Morissette, his estate near this small town on the Niagara Peninsula, produces wines that are luminous and inspiring, its better not to call him a winemaker at all.

He prefers the term vigneron, a French word without English equivalent, referring to a person who guides the grapes along their journey from vine to bottle. Indeed, shepherding is how Mr. Morissette sees his job, not so much manufacturing wine as helping the grapes realize their destiny.

Sometimes a wine never gets there. A 2009 chardonnay, one of Pearl Morissettes early vintages, is still resting in the winery, unsold. Mr. Morissette judged the wine to be too tight and unyielding, and did not want to release it.

It was telling us to go away, he said. Only recently has it become inviting.

More often, though, the wines are captivating. The lineup includes savory, textured chardonnays; cabernet francs of uncommon depth and purity; fresh, joyous gamays and pinot noirs that can vary from a pretty, floral 2011 that is delicious right now to a spicy, smoky 2012 that manages to be both brawny and elegant. Like the 09 chardonnay, it has not yet been released.
The host who met me at the head of the stairs wore a pressed white shirt and a trim little bow tie. Most of the people at the tables and the long bar were neatly dressed, too, without the straitjacketed stiffness you sometimes see at more expensive restaurants. Everybody seemed to have gotten dolled up just for the fun of it.

This is a rarity in the Pacific Northwest. I cant say its especially common in Los Angeles or New York right now, either. But after a decade or so of tumbling into no-reservations gastro pubs and ramen counters wearing rumpled morning-after T-shirts, diners seem to be growing curious about restaurants that offer a bit of costume drama, and invite some in return.

The world Kissa Tanto dreams up is so much more appealing than the one Id left behind that I can understand why reservations usually have to be made two months out, when you can find them. In the year and a half the restaurant has been in business, drawing national attention, tables have not gotten much easier to come by, and the few that are set aside each night for walk-ins tend to be claimed minutes after the doors open at 5:30 p.m.

What they will be eating could be described as Italian food made with Japanese sensibility and ingredients. Marriages of this sort are rumored to be successful in Japan, but for some reason they tend to fall apart almost anywhere else. (In Italy, Italian food is made with Italian ingredients, Japanese food with Japanese ingredients, and to suggest a different arrangement would be like bringing scuba gear to a ski slope.)
LONDON  Invite two passionate watch collectors to meet, ask them to bring along a few of their favorite watches and then just let the conversation flow. Thats what we did last October at the Arts Club here.

The men knew each other from local meetings of RedBar, which calls itself the worlds largest watch collectors club, and from watch fairs and other gatherings. They knew they both were big fans of the independents.

But neither started out that way.

Michael Hickcox, 44, chief executive of the technology executive search firm Expedition Partners, told his story first: My godfathers hobby was watches. He gave me a Patek Philippe Calatrava for my college graduation. The gift of a Rolex followed.

He then had the two brands that many collectors identify as the ones they would want if they were stranded on a desert island. And he had caught the watch-collecting bug.
For someone who was born, raised and still lives and works in the Vallee de Joux, the famed watchmaking hub of Switzerland, Los Angeles might seem like another world. But the City of Angels is, by far, Romain Gauthiers favorite place.

Its a way of life, the independent watchmaker said  more than once  during a recent interview, adding, You have access to everything and people have an open mind.

Its just one of the passions that make Mr. Gauthier, 42, stand out among his peers as he makes his debut this week at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, the fair commonly known as S.I.H.H.

Although both of his parents worked in the industry, Mr. Gauthier wasnt initially interested in watchmaking. I didnt want to do the same as everyone else, he said. When youre an entrepreneur, you have this desire to be different and to find your own way.
Millions of American children have been exposed to a parasite that could interfere with their breathing, liver function, eyesight and even intelligence. Yet few scientists have studied the infection in the United States, and most doctors are unaware of it.

The parasites, roundworms of the genus Toxocara, live in the intestines of cats and dogs, especially strays. Microscopic eggs from Toxocara are shed in the animals feces, contaminating yards, playgrounds and sandboxes.

These infectious particles cling to the hands of children playing outside. Once swallowed, the eggs soon hatch, releasing larvae that wriggle through the body and, evidence suggests, may even reach the brain, compromising learning and cognition.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention periodically tracks positive tests for Toxocara through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The latest report, published in September in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, estimated that about 5 percent of the United States population  or about 16 million people  carry Toxocara antibodies in their blood, a sign they have ingested the eggs.
What do you think of the state of race relations in the United States today? Do you think the presidency of Donald Trump has affected them one way or another? If so, how?

What are some of your recent observations and experiences?

In In Trumps Remarks, Black Churches See a Nation Backsliding, Sabrina Tavernise writes:

On the day before Martin Luther Kings Birthday, African-American churchgoers gathered as they always do, to pray, give thanks and reflect on the state of race in America. But after a disheartening week and an even more disheartening year, black Americans interviewed on Sunday said they were struggling to comprehend what was happening in a country that so recently had an African-American president. Ive been involved in the civil rights movement since my college days, and Im not sure Ive ever been more confused than I am right now, said Sterling Tucker, 94, a civil rights leader in Washington. Theres not a lot of honesty in the country now about who we are and where we are. In interviews at churches in Washington; Atlanta; Kansas City, Mo.; Miami; and Brockton, Mass., black Americans expressed frustration and disappointment about the direction of the country in Donald Trumps first year in office. They said they saw America slipping into an earlier, uglier version of itself. And when Mr. Trump used crude words to describe Haiti and African countries in an immigration discussion, they said, he was voicing what many Americans were thinking, even if it was something they no longer felt comfortable saying: America prefers white people.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

 When Sterling Tucker states, Theres not a lot of honesty in the country now about who we are and where we are, how do you interpret this? What do these words mean to you?

 Do you feel that America is slipping into an earlier, uglier version of itself? Why do you think the people quoted in the article feel that way?

 Do you believe, as the article contends, that Donald Trump was voicing what many Americans believe when he used crude language last week to describe African countries as well as Haiti?

 Have you seen, heard or read racist opinions about immigrants or any other groups?

 Do you feel racism is on the rise in the United States? Explain.
Before reading the article:

What have you heard or read about the situation in Hawaii on Saturday after text messages told people living across the state that a ballistic missile was headed their wayand later, that it was a false alarm? What do you imagine it must have been like during those 38 minutes, before the agency withdrew the alert?

Now, read the article, False Missile Alert Looms as a Black Eye for Hawaii and Its Governor, and answer the following questions:

1. Why did people in Hawaii receive text messages that contained a false alarm about an incoming ballistic missile on Saturday?

2. What government agency investigated the false alarm?

3. Who is the governor of Hawaii? Who is challenging him in the Democratic primary in August?

4. How much time passed before a second message was sent, stating that the earlier message was a false alarm?
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomos plan to charge drivers in Manhattans most congested neighborhoods finally began to take shape in his budget address on Tuesday, five months after he publicly embraced the idea.

The governor ruled out placing new tolls on bridges in favor of creating a geographic zone where drivers would be charged fees depending on the time of day and what kind of vehicle they drove. The overall goal of the so-called congestion pricing plan would be to reduce traffic and raise money to modernize the citys decrepit subway system.

Mr. Cuomo acknowledged that the contours of that zone had yet to be determined, as well as the times, the fees that would be charged and practically every other operational aspect. Its literally an ongoing spectrum of options,  he said.

Still, he added, my point is it has to be fair to all people and all industries.

Mr. Cuomo said a report by a state task force, called Fix NYC, that has been looking at the issue, would be released this week. The report may signal where Mr. Cuomo is heading, though he can also reject any of its recommendations.
Despite the challenges we face, I remain an optimist, Mr. Murphy said as he laid out an ambitious agenda. Heres a look at how his plans stack up against those challenges.

On Trump

PROMISE: We will resist every move from President Trump and a misguided congressional leadership that would worsen income inequality; or divide families or deny access to college for our Dreamers; or defund essential infrastructure; or gut health care for our children, seniors and the working poor; or provide a tax windfall to giant corporations and billionaires at the expense of our working- and middle-class families.

REALITY: Many White House policies will hurt New Jersey. The new federal tax plan will raise taxes for many residents who previously were able to deduct all of their property taxes. Commuters were dismayed when the Trump administration indicated that it would not  at least for now  provide financing for a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. To counter Washington, Mr. Murphy has shown a willingness to be creative with the state tax code, though finding sufficient money for the rail tunnel without help from the federal government will likely be impossible. The new governor can also take steps to protect undocumented immigrants, such as providing state identification cards and drivers licenses and making them eligible for college financial aid. But immigration policy is ultimately set by the federal government.

On the Economy

PROMISE: A stronger and fairer New Jersey is rooted in an economy that creates better jobs and provides higher wages that creates places where industries can grow and communities can rise, where innovative companies are born and where millennials want to live and where seniors want to retire. He added: for small businesses, and women, veteran and minority-owned businesses to thrive instead of delivering massive tax breaks to a handful of select and connected big corporations that dont need them in the first place.
By the time a Bronx jury acquitted Belkis Batista of attempted murder last August, her family had paid more than $16,000 to a bail bond company to help her stay out of jail while fighting the charge, which stemmed from a fight with her brother. A few weeks after the verdict, the bondsman returned about $5,740 and kept the rest.

Ms. Batista, a school bus aide who was making $250 a week, and her family could hardly afford the difference, but it had been the only option. At her arraignment 16 months earlier, a judge had given Ms. Batista the same two options courts give most defendants facing jail: pay cash bail up front, or hire a bondsman to post bail at a fraction of the upfront cost.

Judges reliance on commercial bail bonds, a routine practice in the United States that is uncommon or illegal in most other countries, is a significant reason that New York City spends $10 million each year to jail thousands of defendants who post bail within a few days and are released, according to Comptroller Scott M. Stringer, the citys chief financial officer. Mr. Stringer is set to release a report calling for commercial bail to be eliminated in the city.

For the accused in New York City, who are mostly poor African-American and Hispanic people, the financial burden is acute: about $28 million in lost wages, and between $16 million and $27 million in nonrefundable fees paid to bail bond companies, according to the report. The report says the fees, which are likely higher because bond companies do not always adhere to legal limits, represent a significant transfer of wealth from low-income communities.
Joseph A. Rice, who, as the head of a New York bank in the 1980s, played a leading role in a corporate battle that shook up an industry that had mostly avoided such fights, died on Jan. 8 at his home in New Paltz, N.Y. He was 93.

His death was confirmed by his son Philip.

Joseph Rice was the chairman and chief executive of the Irving Bank Corporation in 1987 when a regional rival, the Bank of New York, made a hostile takeover offer, a startling move in an industry known at the time for its genteel business codes.

Mr. Rice, mild-mannered by nature, fought the deal and warned against such aggressive tactics. The prospect of a Wild West shooting spree is not an admirable one in our business, he said.

But Bank of New York refused to take no for an answer. The battle lasted for more than a year, becoming the longest-running takeover fight in American business history to that point. Irving Bank drew on every resistance tool in the corporate armory, culminating in a close proxy fight.
Keorapetse Kgositsile, a South African poet whose writing and activism helped bridge his countrys freedom struggle with the Black Arts Movement in the United States, died on Jan. 3 in Johannesburg. He was 79.

His death was announced by the South African government, which did not give a cause.

Mr. Kgositsile  whose full name was pronounced KERR-ah-PET-seh HO-set-SEAL-eh, but who was affectionately known as Bra Willie  first received acclaim while living in the United States in the 1960s. When he returned to South Africa after the fall of apartheid in the early 90s, he was welcomed as a national hero. In 2006, he became the second person to be named the countrys poet laureate.

His poetry addressed themes of black solidarity, displacement and anticolonialism with an uncompromising directness. In their declaratory rhythms as well as their content, his poems often echoed the music of black America and of Africa.

I believe my work is contemporaneous with me, he told Callaloo, a journal of black literature, in 1972. After moving to the United States in 1962, he said, my acceptance of my environment did not erase my memories of Africa on the continent.
Before officials reckoned with those repercussions, market forces took hold: Migrants arrived seeking jobs and roofs over their heads, driving the citys population from 11 million in early 1990s to twice that size today.

The push to build subways and public parks in the last decade or so have been impressive in their efficiency, owing in no small part to migrants industriousness, but the local governments have not done enough to remedy the strains on urban life, especially environmental problems.

In 2015, a documentary directed by an investigative journalist about the citys toxic air set off a maelstrom of online criticism of government ineptitude. The countrys top environment official, acknowledging citizens response to the film, compared it to Silent Spring, the 1962 book that helped ignite the environmental movement in the United States.

Less visible yet equally threatening is Beijings impending water crisis. Groundwater supplies have been depleted to dangerously low levels.

When desperate, authorities turn toward those with the least power to resist. In recent years, on top of discriminative policies the government has been waging a war on the low-end population, as migrants are referred to in official documents. Regulations in the name of urban improvement  neighborhood gentrification, school and service-sector upgrades  have been tightening restrictions over migrant employment and residence, chipping away at their livelihood so that remaining in the city has become less viable.

As a result, the exodus of migrants has accelerated, and the population of Beijings six core districts dropped by 353,000 in 2016, the first decline since urbanization began four decades ago. Those migrants who have built national stadiums, ferried lunches for office workers, and nursed the babies of middle-class families are making their final contribution to the city by leaving. In its most recent five-year plan, Beijing has set the goal to cap its population at 23 million by 2020; the current number is inching close.
SACRAMENTO  One of the most brazen attacks on the rule of law by the Trump administration  and weve seen many  came last week after the Interior Department opened up 90 percent of Americas offshore waters to drilling for oil and gas, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke arbitrarily gave Florida a free pass.



It was a stunning demonstration of politically motivated policymaking that has provoked nearly a dozen coastal states, both red and blue, to protest. Perhaps no state faces more potential harm than California.

In a statement attached to a tweet, Secretary Zinke wrote that he was exempting Florida from the new drilling because the state is heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver.

Whether he was referring to the 7.7 million people who worked along Floridas coast in 2014, or to the $769 billion generated by Floridas coastal economy, according to a study by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, we can relate here in California.
I plead with Congress to stop Donald Trump before he gets us all killed. It is too bad that none of his congressional supporters were here to experience the idea that we were going to die.

Saturday was real. I dont know if we will ever fully recover.

L. A. WEBB, KEALAKEKUA, HAWAII

To the Editor:

I live in Honolulu. On Saturday morning I received a ballistic-missile attack alert over my cellphone in a hospital near downtown, along with staff members on the floor. There was nothing that we could do except to hope that it was a mistake.

No one was rattled. People went about their ordinary business. I called my loved ones, and we all tried to get information.

We are the early warning system for the mainland but are inadequately protected ourselves. My only emotion this morning was not fear. It was outrage. The idea that nuclear war is an option is insane.

JEAN E. ROSENFELD, HONOLULU

To the Editor:

My wife and I grew up in the days of duck and cover, so were both perhaps a little jaded when it comes to bomb alerts. We retired to Hawaii, but we still have some of that skeptical attitude so characteristic of the big cities on the mainland.
LONDON  Britains National Health Service, put in place by the countrys post-World War II Labour government, holds a unique place in the countrys psyche as both source of constant frustration, object of affection and  somehow  a central pillar of arguments both to leave and remain in the European Union. In a country riven over Brexit, at least most people can agree on the importance of the N.H.S.

What its future should be is less clear.

The N.H.S. suffered from staff shortages and tight budgets long before Brexit, but in the year following the referendum almost 10,000 nurses quit. In November, Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the service in England, said that after seven years of budget constraints the N.H.S. can no longer do everything that is being asked of it.

Amid a flu outbreak, colder weather and the continuing shortages of beds and staff this winter, some hospitals declared black alerts, meaning they were unable to deliver comprehensive care. Nonurgent surgeries were postponed and patients waited more than 12 hours in emergency wards before being tended to  undergraduate medical students were reportedly asked to volunteer to ease some of the strain.

In early January, Prime Minister Theresa May was asked if the service was in crisis, and responded that it was better prepared for winter than ever before.
Grab an opportunity to start your own business Business oi-Oneindia Staff

At some point in their life, everyone thinks of starting their own business and becoming an entrepreneur. For some, the chance to execute such a plan is easy especially if they come from a family of businessmen. However, for others who have never ventured into this terrain it can be intimidating. The toughest part of starting a business is enabling the support system to help your business take off like marketing, using the right software for maintaining accounts and purchases and a system for logistics.

A complete support system enables business opportunity is provided by Indiabazzars. Indiabazzars is an online trading company that has come through the recession relatively well. It is an online shopping E-commerce store that sells products that are price conditioned with latest offers. The products include Men's accessories, Women Accessories, Computer, Electronics, Furniture, Kitchenware, Beauty, Jewellery, Kids wear, Musical instruments.

All dealers who sign up received the following supports and benefits from the company:

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Order generation by company is 8 to 10 Orders to the dealers per day for registered pick-up address.

Company has its unique Software through which orders will be forwarded to Dealers with a tracker id.

The transaction of amount between the company and dealer is via bank process in company's account as per dealer's security.

Only dealers can receive and deliver orders from and to the customers. The process of becoming a dealer with Indiabazzars is simple and can be completed by submitting the following documents:

Aadhar card or Pan card for name and address verification of the dealer.

Pick-up address of the dealer.

Passport size photograph.

KYC form has to fill in given attachment of business proposal

A security deposit also has to be made directly to the company to complete the process of becoming a dealer. The security amount is totally refundable and it should be noted that the company accepts only bank transactions and no cash deposits.

Rs. 1,00,000/- For City

Rs. 2,00,000/- For district

Rs. 5,00,000/- For State

Some other requirements that a person needs to fulfill to become a Indiabazzar dealer are:

Internet Connection for operating tracker-id regarding orders.

Stock should be maintained and received by the dealer.

Delivery should be within 48 hours at consumer's address and cover minimum 50 km of registered pick-up address.

Dealers have to collect cash from the customer.

Delivery margin and transaction:

The company gives a margin of Rs 800/- per delivery and if the product price is less than 2000/- then the margin is 30% of product price.

The cash on delivery process will lead to give the dealer's margin in dealer's hand only and the remaining amount of the product should be deposited in the company's account within 15 days in a bulk.

Starting to deliver for Indiabazzars:

Once the dealers have provided the above information and documents, the verification has been done, the dealer has to sign a legal agreement with the company.

For more information, one can visit the company's website: http://indiabazzars.com, drop a mail at info@indiabazzars.com or contact on the below numbers:

Krishna Vyas - 9584848621

Anushka jaiswal - 9752297330

Diksha Solanki - 9111001206

OneIndia News
Baby Moshe, his grandparents visit Chabad House in Mumbai

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Moshe Holtzberg and his grandparents visited Nariman House also known as Chabad House in Mumbai, where his parents lost their lives in the 26/11 attack. This is Moshe's first visit to the Nariman House in over nine years.

Rabbi Holztberg Nachman, the grandfather of Moshe, said, " It's a very special day. Thank God that Moshe could come again. Mumbai is a lot safer now."

Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, Chabad Mumbai Director told media, "We are very excited for the upcoming visit of Baby Moshe, who is no more a baby, where his life was miraculously saved by Indian Army. His visit to Nariman House is very emotional and sensitive so we want you to co-operate with us."

Mumbai: Moshe Holtzberg (Baby Moshe) leaves for Chabad House; #Visuals from Taj Mahal hotel pic.twitter.com/ZC2JMYyOMN  ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

Moshe accompanying Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 18 for the inauguration of a memorial project dedicated to those killed in the 26/11 carnage.

Moshe was two years old when his parents - Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and Rivika - were killed during the siege at the Nariman House by 10 Pakistani terrorists in November 2008. The terrorists carried out the attacks over three days and killed 166 people.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had invited Sandra Samuels, the brave Indian nanny who saved Israeli child Moshe during the terror attack in 2008, for a meeting during his forthcoming Israel visit. India has given long-term visa to Moshe and his grandparents.

(With agency inputs)
After 10 years, Nariman House to be converted into 'living memorial': All you need to know

India

oi-Madhuri

The Nariman House, that witnessed the 26/11 terror attacks, is being converted into a 'living memorial' dedicated to those killed in the carnage.

Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, the Jewish couple who served as directors at the Nariman House, also known as the Chabad House, were killed along with six others when the place came under attack by 10 Pakistani terrorists during the November 2008 attacks. However, their son, Moshe Holtzberg, who was two years old then and was saved by his Indian nanny.

The memorial, being set up by Jewish organisation Chabad-Lubavitch, will be formally announced at an event during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit, Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, director of Nariman House, said.

Some interesting facts:

The 'living memorial' will include the apartment where the Holtzbergs lived, as well as the sites where the killings happened. The terrace of the Nariman House will be turned into a garden where names of all the victims will be engraved.

The 'living memorial' is being designed by an Israeli designer, who is a specialist in designing "experience centres" across the world.

The memorial has been designed to educate and inspire people of all faiths to act for the betterment of themselves, their communities and the world.

The memorial at the Nariman House will put the spotlight on the lives of Rabbi Gavriel and his wife and the ideals and values that catalysed them to pursue their lives for the benefit of the humanity.

The terrace of the Nariman House will be turned into a garden where names of all the victims will be engraved.

The fourth floor will house a museum, which will be open to visitors from India and the world.

OneIndia News
After a stormy Friday, a tense customary tea meet at the Supreme Court

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The customary tea meet before resuming work at the Supreme Court was a tense one. It was the first time that all the judges of the Supreme Court were meeting following the controversial press conference addressed by four senior-most judges led by Justice J Chelameswar.

The Attorney General of India, K K Venugopal and Bar Council of India chairman, Mannan Mishra claimed that the crisis has been resolved. However going by the sequence of events, it appears as though there is a quietus on the issue, but tensions still remain.

The main point that was made by the four judges was relating to the allocation of matters. They felt that junior judges were being sensitive matters and the seniors were not consulted.

This was not taken kindly at all by one of the judges who were part of the customary tea meet on Monday morning. He sought to know why the judges had gone to the press? Could you not have called or a full court meeting instead or at least spoken to us before rushing to the press, the judge sought to know.

Sources tell OneIndia that the judge was livid and felt that a platform had been created for all and sundry to debate on the internal matters of the Supreme Court. He further sought to know if the junior judges were incapable of handling sensitive issues.

At the court of the Chief Justice of India, a counsel sought to raise the matter. The advocate sought strict punishment against the four judges and also said that the presser was driven by anti-national elements. CJI, Dipal Misra listened to the counsel patiently and did not say a word. He ended the matter with a smile and resumed hearing of the matters posted before him.

Towards the end of the day, a Constitution Bench had been set up comprising five judges. None of the top four judges is part of this Bench.

OneIndia News
Army Chief should refrain from making 'controversial' remarks: NCP

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Tuesday said that Army Chief General Bipin Rawat's "controversial" statements are not in the interest of the nation and urged him to refrain from it.

General Bipin Rawat had on Monday warned strong action against Pakistan if it continues to encourage infiltration and violate Ceasefire across the borders. Last week, General Rawat, during a media briefing in Delhi, said the force was ready to call Pakistan's "nuclear bluff" and cross the border to carry out any operation if asked by the government.

"It is the duty of ministry's spokesperson to address media if anything is to be conveyed, not the Army chief. He (Bipin Rawat) should refrain from making any controversial statement, it will go against the interest of the country," NCP leader Majeed Memon told ANI.

General Rawat's comments left Pakistan fuming. Pakistan foreign minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif on Saturday issued a nuclear threat to India.

"Very irresponsible statement by Indian Army Chief, not befitting his office. Amounts to an invitation for a nuclear encounter. If that is what they (India) desire, they are welcome to test our resolve. The general's doubt would swiftly be removed, inshallah," Asif tweeted.

On China, Rawat had said the People's Liberation Army has occupied the area in the west of Torsa nullah called northern Doklam. China had criticised General Bipin Rawat for his comments, saying they were "unconstructive" and went against the consensus reached by leaders of both nations

OneIndia News
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PM Modi gifts Biden Kangra painting: What is the significance of this art from Himachal

From Kangara painting for Biden, here is what PM Modi gifted other leaders at G20 Summit

BJP fumes over Modis Ravana posters in Amethi, UP, blames Rahul for insulting PM

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia

Lucknow, Jan 16: In Hindu mythology, Ramayana, the character of Ravana, the king of Lanka, is shown as a demon who committed the crime of kidnapping Sita. Ram punished Ravana for kidnapping his wife by killing him and destroying his kingdom.

In general, Ravana is considered as a "villain" in the country, but there are communities which worship the ten-headed demon king for his valour and scholarly pursuits.

In popular parlance, anyone being compared to Ravana is considered as an insult. On Monday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) strongly protested against posters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi shown in Ravana avatar in Amethi, Uttar Pradesh.

The BJP blamed that the "poorly-tasted" posters of the PM were handiworks of the opposition Congress. Moreover, the posters appeared in Amethi, the Lok Sabha constituency of Congress president Rahul Gandhi, which further fueled the doubts of BJP leaders that the grand old party was behind the "insulting" act.

The BJP demanded an apology from Rahul for Modi posters appearing in his Lok Sabha constituency Amethi which "denigrated" PM Modi.

Senior BJP leader and UP cabinet minister Shrikant Sharma said Rahul must apologise before the entire nation for the "insulting poster."

In a statement, Sharma claimed, "It is at the behest of Rahul that his sycophants had shown the PM as Ravana in the poster. The Congress is intolerant towards Modiji. Former Congress president (Sonia Gandhi) had called Modiji "maut ka saudagar" (merchant of death)".

The posters had claimed that Rahul will usher in Ram Rajya in the country.

Taking a dig at the Congress chief, Sharma said that Rahul was suffering from attention seeking disorder, and was disappointed by the continuous shrinking mandate and electoral defeats.

"In this disappointment, he has forgotten the difference between national interest and national disinterest. In every talk, he is trying to search an opportunity to attack Modiji. Hence, even during his foreign visits, he ridicules the country," Sharma said.

Targeting the Congress chief further, Sharma said Rahul was unable to see the development work being carried out.

"Actually, he is viewing development through Italian glasses. Hence, he is unable to see the benefits of the schemes of PM Modi and UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath reaching the masses," Sharma said.

The minister claimed that Rahul's first visit to UP as Congress chief had proved to be a flop show.

"And in this frustration, his agitated party workers and Mughal-mindset public representatives unleashed anarchy, which was witnessed by the entire country on news channels," Sharma said.

On Monday, Rahul visited Amethi for the first time as the Congress president. Reports say, Rahul is trying his best to revive the Congress' prospect in UP and thus his visit to Amethi holds great meaning.

Rahul's two-day visit to Amethi also saw clashes between the BJP and Congress workers on Monday. Yogi advised Rahul to focus on development and shun negative politics.

OneIndia News
BJP workers 'purify' venue with 'gomoothra' where Praksh Raj spoke in Sirsi

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

BJP workers in Karnataka's Sirsi town purified the venue by sprinkling gomoothra (cow urine) on Monday where actor Prakash Raj spoke on Constitution of India.

Prakash Raj criticized Union Minister Anant Kumar Hegde's controversial remarks on Constitution of India during the address to the audience in Raghavendra Mutt in Sirsi. He was speaking on Namma Samvidhaan, Namma Hemme (Our Constitution, Our pride) organised by a local cultural organization.

Group of workers BJP Yuva Morcha President led by Vishal Marathe had announced that the mutt temple premises will be purified after Prakash Raj 's visit, a man who consumes beef and insults Hindu Gods.

Karwar: BJP Yuva Morcha workers 'cleanse' the stage with cow urine after an event by actor Prakash Raj earlier this week #Karnataka pic.twitter.com/jvelwBg48B  ANI (@ANI) January 17, 2018

In response, Prakash Raj tweeted with newspaper clipping which reported on the incident. "BJP workers cleaning and purifying the stage ..from where I spoke in Sirsi town ...by sprinkling cow urine (divine gomoothra) will you continue this cleaning and purification service where ever I go..... #justaskingBJP workers cleaning and purifying the stage ..from where I spoke in Sirsi town ...by sprinkling cow urine (divine gomoothra) will you continue this cleaning and purification service where ever I go..... #justasking." he tweeted.

BJP workers cleaning and purifying the stage ..from where I spoke in Sirsi town ...by sprinkling cow urine (divine gomoothra)......will you continue this cleaning and purification service where ever I go..... #justasking pic.twitter.com/zG1hKF8P4r  Prakash Raj (@prakashraaj) January 16, 2018

OneIndia
Caught on cam: Gang of women thieves loot meat shop in Bengaluru, engage little girl in theft

India

oi-Anusha

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A gang of women robbers, disguised as beggars were caught on camera looting a meat shop in Bengaluru. The act caught on CCTV cameras show how the women distracted two staff of the shop while a little child, part of the gang, stole money from the cash counter. The local police have launched an investigation into the matter based on the CCTV footage.

The incident took place in a frozen meat shop in R T Nagar locality of Bengaluru on Monday at around 11.30 AM. The CCTV installed at the counter of the shop has captured the entire act. Four women, disguised as beggars are seen entering the store and walking straight inside the counter. Two staff dressed in uniforms are seen attempting to stop the women from entering the storeroom area.

One by one, the women make their way into the storeroom area even as the staff attempt to stop them. The footage shows how while the women were keeping the staff distracted and engaged, a little girl who accompanied the women runs to the cash counter and steals money.

The footage shows the little girl shifting bundles of cash into a bag in her hand and run back to one of the women. As soon as the girl has finished her job, the women are seen walking out of the store. The gang managed to make away with Rs 20,000 kept in the cash counter. The staff who realise that the money has gone missing attempt to chase the gang unsuccessfully.

"The store has chosen not to file a complaint but we have taken up investigations. We even detained two suspects yesterday but the staff claim that those who committed the robbery were not the same people. We are in the process of identifying more suspects," said a source from the R T Nagar police station.

OneIndia News
Centre withdraws Haj subsidy, says decision taken to empower minorities

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

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The government on Tuesday withdrew Haj subsidy in a bid to end minority appeasement. Union minister for minority affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi confirmed that the Haj subsidy has been withdrawn.

Naqvi said that for the first time in independent India, 1.75 lakh pilgrims will go to Haj without a subsidy, a rise from the 1.25 lakh that went for the annual pilgrimage last year, reports News 18.

Haj subsidy funds will be used for educational empowerment of girls and women of minority community: Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi pic.twitter.com/p1GmpyyRyg  ANI (@ANI) January 16, 2018

"This is part of our policy to empower minorities with dignity and without appeasement," Naqvi said and cited a host of measures for the welfare of minorities.

Earlier this year, Naqvi had said the Centre would abolish the subsidy for Haj pilgrims in accordance with a Supreme Court order.

"A constitutional bench of the Supreme Court had, during the Congress regime in 2012, directed that the Haj subsidy be done away with. Hence, in the new policy, as per the recommendations of a committee, we have decided to do away with the Haj subsidy gradually," he had said.

A policy to withdraw the Haj subsidy had been drafted in light of a 2012 Supreme Court order asking the Centre to abolish it gradually by 2022.

The government will offer air and waterways option for the pilgrims as cost will go up.

The subsidy is given to those who go through the Haj committee of India and not through private operators. The quota this year has been raised to 1.70 lakh people. In 2011, when the pilgrim quota was 170, 162, the subsidy amount was Rs 685 crore and the expense of the external affairs ministry was Rs 33.16 crore.

"The Haj subsidy varies from Rs 600 crore to Rs 700 crore and external affairs ministry incurs expense of Rs 28 to Rs 33 crore for the same every year", says an official.

OneIndia News
Crisis in SC seems to be unresolved: Attorney General

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

Four days after four senior judges of the top court brought the rift out in open, Attorney General K K Venugopal on Tuesday said that the "judicial crisis seems to be not resolved".

"Yes, I think it has not been settled. Let's hope things will be fully settled within 2-3 days," Venugopal said.

Asked about reports about the impasse is continuing, Venugopal said he had to agree with the view.

On whether he had a meeting or had spoken with any of the four judges or the CJI, Venugopal said, "Nothing of that sort has happened."

However, he hoped things will be sorted out in the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, a report in The Hindu newspaper quotes sources close to the four judges as denying any reconciliation and saying that there had been "no attempts so far to resolve the issues raised by the judges".

On Sunday, CJI Misra met a seven-member delegation of the Bar Council of India and Supreme Court Bar Association President Vikas Singh and had assured them that the crisis would be sorted out soon.

Vikas Singh told PTI Tuesday that the crisis is likely to be resolved by the end of this week.

On Friday, four senior judges - Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph - questioned CJI Dipak Misra, who is the master of the roster, the way cases have been assigned to a select few benches.

Addressing a press conference at the residence of Justice Chelameswar, the four judges said they have failed to convince the CJI on certain issues concerning the apex court.

Their unprecedented move to go public came after the judge Loya case was assigned to Justice Arun Mishra, who is number 10 in the Supreme Court pecking order.

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Tuesday, January 16, 2018, 11:45 [IST]
Delhi govt committee suggests cap on 'exhorbitant' profit margins of pvt hospitals

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

After a series of a case brought to fore the exorbitant rates charged by the private hospitals in the national capital, a committee, formed by the Delhi government, has suggested norms that would put a cap on these rates.

One of the important recommendations is that private hospitals should only prescribe from the list of 376 drugs on the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM), said an HT report.

In case of diagnostic tests, the committee has recommended that labs and hospitals must not charge a premium of more than 15% over market rates.

If the hospital has to prescribe a drug which is not on the National List of Essential Medicines, the hospitals must not charge a profit of not more than 50% on the procurement price. It must be noted that profit mentioned in the committee's recommendation is not calculated based on the MRP, but on procurement price.

Professor Vijay Bhalla, the director, SGT College of Pharmacy, Gurgaon, welcomed the recommendations and said that "This will make a huge difference."

"The drug price control orders fix the rates of NLEM drugs by calculating a market average of the selling price of drugs in a particular category, ensuring some profit for manufacturers but not too much," an HT report quoted Bhalla as saying.

Last year in September, 7-year-old girl, Adya, was treated for dengue in Fortis Memorial Gurgaon and the family was given a bill that went into lakhs. The girl eventually died. An investigation into this particular case by the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) revealed that the hospital made a profit of more than 1,700% on drugs and consumables used for the treatment.

OneIndia News
Love is not crime: Rajasthan cops tweets after law to tackle honour killing passed

Hyderabad honour killing: Wife of deceased narrates sequence of events before the attack

Father, brother held by UP police for honour killing of 17-year-old girl

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia

Lucknow, Jan 16: In a shocking incident, a 17-year-old girl was allegedly shot dead by her father and brother in Uttar Pradesh's Ambedkar Nagar.

Both the culprits have been arrested by the UP police, stated a report on Tuesday.

"17 year old girl in Ambedkar Nagar murdered in a case of honour killing, accused father and brother arrested and sent to jail," says UP Police  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) January 16, 2018

The police officials claim the case was solved within 24-hours after the crime was committed. After killing the victim, the father-son duo buried her body in a field two kms away from their home.

The police had recovered the body along with the murder weapon, stated a report. Both the culprits are currently lodged in a jail, added the report.

According to police, the girl was killed as she had left her home almost four months ago against the wishes of her family. The class 10 student wanted to pursue her studies, but her parents and brother opposed her decision forcing the victim to leave her home.

At a time when the Narendra Modi government is promoting Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (Save the girl child, teach the girl child), the murder of a teenage girl by her family members as she wanted to pursue her studies is indeed shocking.

It seems the nation is becoming more unsafe for girls in the recent times, especially in the wake of three horrific rape cases of teenage girls in Haryana.

One of them, a 15-year-old student was kidnapped, gang-raped and mutilated by her alleged oppressors.

OneIndia News
90 Percent of Indias Online Skill Gaming Industry Says 28 Percent GST over GGV Will Be Catastrophic

GST collections up by 16.6% to Rs 1.52 lakh crore in October, says Centre

Government to discuss bringing real estate under GST on Jan 18

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

The issue of bringing real estate under the GST's ambit will be discussed in the next meeting of the GST Council to be held on January 18.

The meeting holds special significance as it is the last time the council will meet ahead of the Union Budget, to be presented on February 1.

"Discussion of real estate inclusion in GST is the key agenda of the GST Council which is scheduled to meet on January 18th," a senior government official told ANI privy to the deliberations.

He further added that the GST Council in all likelihood will not reach a decision on this, but a serious discussion is expected nonetheless.

The states like Delhi and Jammu Kashmir are very keen to bring real estate sector under the GST ambit.

Meanwhile, severely impacted by various reforms like RERA, GST and demonetisation, the realty sector is pinning its hopes on Budget 2018-19 for relief measures like lower taxes and infrastructure status.

Industry players are expecting rationalisation of the GST rates from the current 12 per cent to 6 per cent and bringing stamp duty under the ambit of GST.

"Also, industry status to the full real estate sector will help in creating surplus housing demand along with financing at a lower rate for long-term projects.

"Rationalisation of GST by capping it at 6 per cent with input tax credit for the entire segment in real estate will help revive and boost demand," Naredco National President Niranjan Hiranandani said.

During the pre-GST era, service tax was around 4.5 per cent and VAT 1 per cent -- resulting in total tax outgo of 5.5 per cent.

Earlier in November, Finance Ministry officials chaired a meeting with real estate developers over GST to be levied on properties owned by private developers.

According to the sources, more than one dozen issues are on agenda for the meeting on January 18.

The official added that the GST Council is likely to give a nod to rationalisation of rates on five-six items. These items are related to equipment which are used in agriculture.

OneIndia News (with agency inputs)
How a mobile recharge of Rs 20 helped NIA crack the court blast cases

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The Base Movement is the latest headache for security agencies in South India. The outfit came to the limelight after it had carried out a spate of attacks outside courts in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka.

After each attack, the group would leave a note claiming responsibility for the incident. For long it was a blind case and the National Investigation Agency entrusted with the probe had a tough time cracking the case.

There were four persons who were part of this group which was headed by Abbas Ali. He took the support of Dawood Suleiman to purchase SIM cards. Suleiman first prepared a fake voter id which was in turn used to purchase the SIM cards.

The NIA had managed to trace these numbers. However, when the NIA tried to arrest these persons based on the address they had used in the voter's id, they landed up at the wrong place. The operatives had used the address of an innocent person.

However, the big breakthrough came thanks to a Rs 20 recharge. The NIA checked the call detail record of the number beginning with the digit 9. This led them up to a crucial source of information and that was the Rs 20 recharge that these operatives had done. This proved to be the crucial breakthrough which helped the NIA crack the case.

An NIA officer who was part of the probe informed that the Base Movement is an ideology floated by a couple of youth. It subscribed to the ideology of the al-Qaeda and even derived its name from it. The NIA explains that the name was derived from the al-Qaeda in the Sub-Continent. The original name of the AQIS is Jamaat Qaidat al-jihad fi'shibhi al-qarrat al-Hindiya. When one translates this into English, it becomes Organisation of the Base of Jihad in the Indian Sub-Continent.

Further, the NIA states that the group had discussed at length the Charlie Hebdo attack in France. They had planned on replicating a similar operation against some media outlets in South India. The planned attack was however meant to be a series of bomb blasts and not a fidayeen strike as one had witnessed in the case of Charlie Hebdo.

It may be recalled that a newspaper in Tamil Nadu had been threatened for posting a comment post the Charlie Hebdo attack. The NIA has learnt that this threat message had been issued by the Base Movement itself.

OneIndia News
How Anna Hazare is ensuring that a second Kejriwal doesnt emerge from his future movements

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia

New Delhi, Jan 16: Veteran activist from Maharashtra Anna Hazare and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal share an unusual relationship. It was under the shadow of Hazare, Kejriwal grew his political wings.

During the 2011 anti-corruption movement, both attained national fame as the two main faces behind the protest which spread across the country.

While after a few months, Kejriwal floated his own political party, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and joined electoral politics, Hazare quietly went back to his spartan life in the obscurity of his village, Ralegan Siddhi, in Maharashtra.

Since then things went wrong between Hazare and Kejriwal. Hazare was seen as the political guru of Kejriwal. The Delhi CM's "love" for electoral politics created a chasm between the two. On several occasions in the past, Hazare has openly criticised his former pupil Kejriwal.

Now, as Hazare is all set to hold an agitation in the national capital on March 23 on Lokpal and other issues, the army man-turned-activist stated that he won't allow another Kejriwal like a politician to emerge from his future movements.

"No, it will never happen again, I will make sure. I was not very alert then but now before joining me, a person has to give an affidavit saying they won't join any political party or fight elections," Hazare told ANI on being asked if a leader like Kejriwal will come out of his movement again.

No it will never happen again,I will make sure. I was not very alert then but now before joining me person has to give affidavit saying they won't join any political party or fight elections: Anna Hazare on being asked if a leader like Kejriwal will come out of his movement again pic.twitter.com/aPCnJRaHL6  ANI (@ANI) January 15, 2018

The party-driven electoral system has fomented social ills like corruption, casteism and violence in the country, anti-graft crusader on Monday alleged even as he strongly pitched for removal of party symbols in polling exercises.

Addressing a gathering at a seminar at New Delhi, the 80-year-old veteran social activist added, "Various parties have vitiated the atmosphere in colleges and universities by opening their wings, and led the youth astray."

According to the Constitution, any person above a certain age can fight elections and it does not talk of any party or party symbol, he said. "So, we must do away with it, only then the democracy will come in the truest sense. And, a candidate's name and face are enough," Hazare added.

Dressed in his trademark starched white dhoti-kurta and Gandhi topi, the Maharashtra-born activist, said he was contemplating undertaking a journey from Kanyakumari to Kashmir to "awaken the masses to exert pressure on the Election Commission to jettison the party symbol system".

Hazare's latest attempt to cleanse the system is coming more than a year before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Hazare and his colleagues played a crucial role during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls by raising the issue of corruption.

It is said that scams during the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government were the main reasons behind the victory of the current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the last General elections.

OneIndia News
ICAI CA CPT 2017 results to be declared tomorrow, how, where and when to check

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The ICAI CA CPT 2017 results will be declared on January 17, tomorrow. The results once declared would be available on the official website.

The results are expected to be declared by around 2 pm on Wednesday. The finals were held in November 2017 and the CPT in December.

An all India merit list for the candidates securing a minimum of 55 per cent and above marks and up to the maximum of 50th rank in the case of final examination will also be prepared. It will be available on the above mentioned websites. Placed below is the data of the students that were admitted in final examination and CPT. The number of students appeared in the final exams is 1,28,853 at a total of 346 exam centres across the globe.A total of 63,035 candidates have sat for the CPT exams in 327 centres in India and other countries.

How and where to check ICAI CA CPT 2017 results:

icaiexam.icai.org

caresults.icai.org

icai.nic.in

Those students who wish to receive their results on their personal email IDs are required to pre-register their requests at the website - icaiexams.icai.org. They will then be provided with their results immediately after the declaration of the results. For accessing the result at the above websites, the student shall have to enter his registration no. or PIN no. along with his roll number.

Those who want to receive their result through SMS should follow the following steps:

i) For final examination result

CAFNL(space)XXXXXX (Where XXXXXX is the six digit Final examination roll number of the candidate)

e.g. CAFNL 000128

ii) For Common Proficiency Test (CPT) result

CACPT(space)XXXXXX(where XXXXXX is the six digit Common Proficiency Test roll number of the candidate)

e.g. CACPT 000171

They should then send the message to 58888

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Tuesday, January 16, 2018, 7:21 [IST]
Indian Army hits back: Major among 8 Pakistanis killed

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

On Monday, the Indian Army hit back at Pakistan in retaliation to the unprovoked firing. The Army said that seven Pakistani soldiers including a Major had been killed in action along the Line of Control in Janglote area opposite the Mendhar sector.

The Pakistan Major has been identified as Ahmed. Army sources, however, said that there was no raid that was conducted across the LoC. The casualties on the Pakistani side occurred during an effective counter to the ceasefire violation.

On Saturday, Lance Naik Yogesh Muralidhar Bhandane was killed in firing from across the LoC. India retaliated strongly on Saturday and the same continued on Monday as well.

On Monday due to heavy retaliation from the Indian side, seven Pakistani soldiers and a Major were killed. The dead were from the 801 Mujahid Battalion which falls under the PoK Brigade. The retaliation on Monday began when the Indian Army noticed movement by Pakistan forces opposite the Mendhar sector. The Pakistani troops resorted to unprovoked firing and this was retaliated to by India.

Pakistan has however said that only four of their troops had died. A statement issued by Pakistani Major General Asif Ghafoor said, " Pakistani soldiers attained shahadat along the LoC in Jandrot, Kotli sector. Troops were busy in line communication maintenance when they were fired upon and hit by heavy mortar round... Exchange of fire killed three Indian soldiers while a few (were) injured."

The Indian Army has however denied the three casualties as had been stated by Pakistan.

OneIndia News
Why Taj Mahal will not be illuminated with tricolor lights this Independence Day

Israeli PM Netanyahu, wife Sara visit iconic Taj Mahal

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and wife Sara were accorded a warm welcome in the Taj city on Tuesday. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath received the dignitaries at the airport amid tight security arrangements.

They stayed at the Taj Complex for a few hours, posed for photos and learnt about the 17th century monument. The Israeli Prime Minister first dropped in at a five-star hotel in Agra from where he directly went to see the Taj.

Later, the Israeli Prime Minister will inaugurate the third edition of Raisina Dialogue at Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi. The event will be attended by Prime Minister Modi and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.

The theme of the Raisina Dialogue this year is 'Managing Disruptive Transitions: Ideas, Institutions & Idioms', and the three-day event will witness addresses by chiefs of Army chief General Bipin Rawat and Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lamba.

Ministerial delegations from many countries like Australia, Russia, Singapore, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Mauritius and Poland will also attend the event.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be accompanying Netanyahu to Gujarat on Wednesday where he will be welcomed in the same fashion as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was with a roadshow in Ahmedabad.

The roadshow is said to be an 8-kilometre drive from the airport to the Sabarmati Ashram. The two leaders will also be witnessing several innovative technologies in the field of water, agriculture and health at iCreate and visit a Centre of Excellence.

OneIndia News
One Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist gunned down in Jammu and Kashmir

PMs dream of development in J&K is becoming a reality: Puri

Farooq Abdullah steps down as National Conference chief, says time for new generation

Hit-list against 76 J&K journalists issued and the guilds, committees which back liberals are silent

J&K: Accidental explosion in Army's ammunition depot leaves two injured

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Two porters were injured in an accidental explosion in Army's ammunition depot in Anantnag, Jammu and Kashmir, on Tuesday.

The exact cause of the explosion is yet to be ascertained.

In May last year, a mortar shell had exploded during exercises at a firing range near Arunachal Pradesh's Tawang, killing one soldier and injuring six others. A technical defect had caused the mortar shell to fall short of this expected range.

In April last year, an army soldier was killed and another injured in a TNT mine blast at a firing range in Madhya Pradesh's Sagar district.

OneIndia News
Kamala Mills owner moves SC against his arrest, says it's illegal detention

Kamala Mills fire: Mojo's Bistro owner Yug Tulli surrenders before Mumbai Police, claims innocence

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

The co-owner of Mojo's Bistro, where 14 people died on December 29 during the fire at Mumbai's Kamala Mills compound, has been arrested. He surrendered at the NM Joshi Marg Police Station early this morning.

Yug Tuli had been absconding ever since the incident. Police had, on Thursday, claimed that Tuli was spotted at Hyderabad airport but could not fly out. By the time, the police reached the spot he had disappeared.

A sessions court last Friday had rejected his anticipatory bail application. Seeking pre-arrest bail for his client, Tulli's lawyer had contended that the devastating fire at the Kamala Mills compound had started from the adjoining 1 Above pub. Hence, the owners of Mojo's Bistro could not be blamed for the tragedy, he argued.

Recently, Jigar Sanghvi and Kripesh Sanghvi, '1 Above' pub co-owners wanted in connection with the December 29 Kamala Mills fire that claimed 14 lives, were arrested.

Tuli's partner in Mojo's Yug Pathak, son of retired Director General of Police and former Commissioner of Police (Pune) KK Pathak, was arrested in the first week of January.

On December 29, a fire had swept through 1Above and adjacent Mojo's Bistro resto-pub in Kamala Mills compound in central Mumbai, resulting in the death of 14 people.

The arrest came just a day after hotelier Vishal Kariya was arrested for sheltering the three accused at his suburban residence in Juhu.

Meanwhile, the Bombay high court (HC) on Monday fixed February 12 as the next date of hearing the plea filed by former Mumbai Police Commissioner Julio Ribeiro, seeking a judicial inquiry into Kamala Mills Fire incident that claimed 14 lives.

While hearing the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) yesterday, the HC pulled up the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the fire department for failing to ensure that restaurants and pubs follow fire safety norms.

"It is time the BMC keeps its house in order," a division bench of Justice R.M. Borde and Justice R.G. Ketkar reportedly said.

OneIndia News
Blow to Nitish Kumar as 5 of 6 MLAs from JD(U) join BJP in Manipur

Manipur fake encounters case: SC pulls up CBI for not registering FIR

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The Supreme Court on Tuesday pulled up the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for not registering FIRs in the Manipur fake encounters case, which came to light after confessions of confession by Manipur Police head constable Thounaojam Herojit Singh.

The apex court was particularly referring to 42 alleged fake encounter cases, said to have taken place between 2003 and 2009.

Herojit, once considered an encounter specialist, had claimed that he witnessed a large number of fake encounters carried out in the state between 2003 and 2009.

The apex court directed the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to lodge 30 more FIRs on or before January 31 this year, after the SIT informed it that it has registered 12 FIRs till date.

While asking the CBI director to monitor the progress in the investigation, the Supreme Court bench, comprising of justices Madan B Lokur and U U Lalit, posted the matter for further hearing on March 12.

After being suspended, Herojit, in January 2016, made a startling revelation that he gunned down reformed militant Chungkham Sanjit inside a pharmacy on BT Road in Imphal after being instructed by a senior officer.

[Manipur fake encounter: Time to revisit Justice Hegde commission recommendations]

A commission, comprising of former Chief Election Commission J M Lyngdoh and retired IPS officer A K Singh, was also constituted to investigate the extrajudicial killings in Manipur. The commission noted that there has been a rampant misuse of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act or AFSPA. This act has failed to tackle insurgency, the commission noted. Further, it also noted that encounters being carried out were not genuine.

OneIndia News
NSA at BJP meeting: CPI(M) knocks EC's door

India

pti-PTI

New Delhi, Jan 16: The Tripura unit of the CPI(M) has requested the Election Commission (EC) to look into an "election meeting" of the BJP, which was attended by National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval.

The said meeting was held on January 14 at the official residence of Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in the national capital. In a letter written to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Tripura CPI(M) secretary Bijan Dhar had yesterday alleged that the BJP violated norms by engaging the NSA for a political purpose. He had also urged the EC to take stern legal measures against the saffron party.

"You, being an authority to oversee that no political party, either incumbent or in the opposition, does not get an undue electoral opportunity by the use of administration, may I request you to kindly order an appropriate authority for an investigation into the matter," the letter said and urged the poll panel to take stern legal measures if it found the allegation to be true.

The letter claimed that the meeting was convened "purely for a political purpose and to evolve the strategy of the BJP for the forthcoming Assembly elections in Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland".

Quoting a PTI news report that the NSA was present at the BJP meeting to discuss the poll strategy in the north-eastern states, the CPI(M) has alleged that it was a blatant misuse of the administration by the saffron party.

"The presence of any person holding a very important position like that of the NSA is not only undesirable and objectionable, it is a glaring instance of a blatant misuse of the administration by the ruling party at the Centre for garnering political mileage in the elections. "Thus, such a misuse of administration is nothing but a real threat to the democratic system of the country," the Left party has said.

Besides the home minister, BJP in-charge of the north- east Ram Madhav and senior RSS leader Krishna Gopal were also present at the meeting.

PTI
Congress and drought are twins: PM Modi in Rajasthan

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday inaugurated the commencement of work of an oil refinery at Pachpadra in Rajasthan's Barmer district. The Rajasthan Refinery will be the first and one of a kind in the state.

Addressing the gathering, PM Modi said the Congress and drought are 'twin brothers' because wherever the party goes, there is drought.

"Congress and drought are 'twin brothers', wherever the party will go there will be drought only. Some people mislead citizens often. Their misleading the nation on Barmer refinery is not the exception, but the norm. There are several such areas in which they have been misleading the nation for years," he said.

He added that the Congress-led UPA government allotted Rs 500 crore for One Rank, One Pension (OROP) even after knowing that this number is not the accurate figure.

"Is this the respect they had for the armed forces? For 40 years, nothing was done about OROP. Before the 2014 elections, a token sum was allocated towards OROP even when it was widely known this sum is unrealistic and too less. It was our commitment to make OROP a reality and we worked towards making that possible," said Modi.

He added that when the BJP assumed office, one of the first things it did was to see what work has been done on the promises in the Railway Budget.

"Just for a few claps in Parliament, some people made promises they could never keep. We were determined to end that culture of misleading. The manner in which chief minister Vasundhara Raje has managed the drought situation during both of her terms and helped the people is commendable. It is in contrast to the opposition in the state whose poor drought management in Rajasthan is widely known," said Modi.

He asserted that this is a time for 'Sankalp Se Siddhi', "We have to identify our targets and work towards achieving them by 2022, when we mark 75 years of freedom".

The Rajasthan Refinery will be the first and one of a kind in the state. It is a joint venture of the Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited and government of Rajasthan. It is envisaged as a nine million metric tonnes per annum (MMTA) refinery-cum-petrochemical complex. The estimated cost of the project is said to be over Rs 43,000 crore.

The refinery is expected to change the growth landscape of Rajasthan and western parts of the state in particular. The biggest advantage with the refinery is that it is being set up in the vicinity of its oil source.

The project promises to change the landscape of the state and generate employment as well. Later in the day, the Prime Minister will also address a public meeting.

The prime minister will also inaugurate 11 completed National Highway projects, covering a total length of about 873 km, a Rajasthan government spokesman said in Jaipur.

However, the Congress has slammed the state government for re-laying of the foundation stone, saying it had already been performed four years ago by Gandhi.

The function was earlier termed as a 'shilanyas karykram' or the foundation laying ceremony. Former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot today said the changing of the function's name is nothing but face-saving by the chief minister. He also alleged that the government stalled the project of an oil refinery for four years and misled the people of the state.

"All the welfare schemes started by the former Congress government were stalled by the present government and now it is trying to take credit for political advantage ahead of the elections," he told reporters.

OneIndia News
BRO Recruitment 2022: Check details for 328 vacancies, last date and salary details here

Caught on camera: Woman, child flung into air as car hits the bike

Police constable opens fire, 3 killed in Daund

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

A police head constable of India Reserve Battalion (IRB) Group-7 shot dead three people in Daund area, 80 km from Pune on Tuesday. Police investigation is underway.

Following the incident, the suspect locked himself inside a flat and the police was trying to bring him out, police official said. One of the deceased was a relative of the constable, the official said.

Police yet to find out the reason for the firing. Victims have not been identified yet.

Further details were awaited.

(With agency inputs)

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Tuesday, January 16, 2018, 17:05 [IST]
The Sikhs are fighting the biggest battle of their lives and that is forced conversion to Christianity

Punjab Minister Rana Gurjit Singh resigns over sand mine row

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Congress' Rana Gurjit Singh quit as Power and Irrigation Minister of Punjab and submitted his resignation to Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Tuesday. Rana Gurjit Singh had faced allegations of getting sand mine contracts worth crores in the name of his staff.

The Congress, which promised to end all kinds of the mafia in the state, found itself in a tight spot when Rana Gurjit Singh faced allegations of impropriety in the multi-crore sand mining, forcing Amarinder Singh to set up a one-man commission to probe the charges.

The inquiry had been handed over to Justice (Retd) J S Narang. The commission gave Rana Gurjit Singh a clean chit. The minister maintained that he had no role to play in the sand mine auctions and the charges levelled against him by the Opposition smacked of "political vendetta".

Opposition Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) alleged that Rana Gurjit Singh had put up his cook Amit Bahadur who successfully bid Rs 26 crore for a sand mine besides three other employees who together made bids of Rs 50 crore.

Rana had put up the name of a son of a 'businessman friend' - Capt J S Randhawa and had claimed that Randhawa's companies put up the money for the bids and that his cook and employees were working partners only in these companies.

OneIndia News
SC crisis: Sharad Pawar, Sitaram Yechury to lead Save Constitution march on Republic Day

India

oi-PTI

The Indian judiciary was thrown into a turmoil on Friday when four senior Supreme Court judges convened a press conference. The government is silent on the serious concerns expressed by the Justices. However, the Opposition has responded with a Republic Day march in the financial capital of India, to be led by senior leaders like Sharad Pawar (Nationalist Congress Party), Sitaram Yechury (CPI(M).

'Save the Constitutionmarch', spearheaded by NCP chief Sharad Pawar and independent MP Raju Shetty, will be attended by former JD(U) member Sharad Yadav, Patidar quota agitation spearhead Hardik Patel, Congress MLA Jignesh Thakor, Dalit rights activist and MLA Jignesh Mevani, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson Tushar Gandhi, and journalists Nikhil Wagle and Kumar Ketkar, among others.

When contacted, NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik said Pawar will participate in the march. However, he added, "it does not necessarily mean that the party is going to be a part of the march." Senior CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury, Congress MLA Alpesh Thakor, Dalit activist Jignesh Mevani, quota agitation spearhead Hardik Patel, and MP and farmers' leader Raju Shetti are also likely to attend the 'Samvidhan Bachao' march, one of its organisers said.

Rebel JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav, and Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, have also been invited to participate in the march, he said. Shetti, the Lok Sabha member from Maharashtra who fell out with the BJP last year, came up with the idea of holding the joint rally to express concerns about the Constitution.

"I was worried about BJP's constant attacks on the Constitution earlier and when the four judges went public, I decided to take some steps. I then decided to hold a march in Mumbai to save the Constitution and invite several leaders to it," Shetti said. He said he called on several social and political leaders and proposed the march from the Babasaheb Ambedkar's statue at Mantralaya to the Gateway of India.

"We will sit at the Gateway of India for the whole day and observe silence as a mark of protest against the attacks on our Constitution," Shetti said.

Hardik Patel also said on his twitter handle that he would participate in the march on the Republic Day. "I will be a part of #SaveConstitution rally in #Mumbai on 26Jan #Republic day. The country faces a serious threat to democracy and is inching towards #Fascism and we will not allow that to happen.... let's stand together and save our #Democracy and #Constitution," he tweeted.

PTI
Telecom to lose more jobs; on course to cut 90,000 jobs more

India

oi-PTI

Mumbai, Jan 15: According to CIEL HR Services report, the once-sunshine telecom sector will continue to witness a decline in headcounts for the next six-nine months taking the total number of job losses to 80,000-90,000.

The sector, which has been witnessing rough weather in terms of profitability due to rising competition and lower margins, has witnessed large scale layoffs making job scenario uncertain, said the report.

The report is based on a survey among around 100 senior and mid-level employees of 65 telco and software and hardware service providers to telecom companies.

According to the report, since last year the sector has already lost around 40,000 people and the trend is likely to continue for the next six-nine months and may see the culling touching 80,000-90,000.

"The attrition rate is like to remain high at least for the next two-three quarters and the sector is likely to reduce around 80,000-90,000". The attrition rate is like to remain high at least for the next two-three quarters and the sector is likely to reduce around 80,000-90,000 people," the Bengaluru-based company's chief executive Aditya Narayan Mishra told PTI.

He said employees worried over the uncertainties about their career with their present employer and the increased levels of anxieties are contributing to speculation.

The high cost of loan servicing, aggressive competition for market share, the uncertainty of mergers among others have been hindering further investment by telcos resulting in layoffs, the report said.

Further, the report said, salary hikes have been muted compared to other sectors and about 69 per cent got annual salary hike of 7 per cent, while almost one-third of them received less than 5 per cent hike, it added.

The report also revealed that most people leaving their telecom jobs are seeking opportunities outside the sector. "This trend highlights the fact that the sector is not recruiting unless it is a critical need that has to be filled by external talent," it added.

"The telecom industry has lost its lustre and this negative sentiment is failing to attract any talent into the sector. The vacant seats continue to remain vacant with no fresh applications," Mishra said.

The report estimates that 25 per cent of people leave or lose their jobs in the telecom sector without having another at hand. However, 69 per cent feel that they can find employment in other sectors.

This points to the fact that skilled employees are quick to find jobs in other sectors, hence, the sector has to put additional measures to retain their top talent.

Going forward, Mishra said, the sector will begin to recruit, which will mostly be freshers from campuses.

"Except for a few critical positions, we expect telcos to hire freshers. However, there is likely to be 25 per cent reverse movement mostly comprising those who had gone into consulting or not with any employment," he added.

PTI
Farooq Abdullah steps down as National Conference chief, says time for new generation

Hit-list against 76 J&K journalists issued and the guilds, committees which back liberals are silent

Uproar in J&K assembly, Congress and NC stage boycott

India

pti-PTI

Jammu, Jan 16: In protest against the marshalling out of NC legislator Sajjad Ahmed Kitchloo from the House, the opposition National Conference and Congress on Tuesday boycotted the proceedings of the Legislative Council in Jammu and Kashmir.

NC and Congress members, led by Kitchloo and Congress MLC Ghulam Nabi Monga, sat on the stairs at the entrance of the Legislative Complex on dharna and resorted to anti-government and anti-chairman slogans.

Holding protests, they boycotted the proceedings of the House and demanded an apology from the chairman.

"We have boycotted the House and are sitting on dharna. If they want that we should come back, the chairman should apologise for Marshalling out Kitchloo who was seeking a reply. This should have not done," Monga told reporters here.

During the Question Hour in the Upper House yesterday, Kitchloo asked a supplementary question about halting of the construction of few power projects in Kishtwar district when Minister of State Asiea Naqash was replying to his question. Naqash said that due to poor performance of contractor commissioned schedule is bound to be delayed of 48 MW Kalnai hydro electric project.

Unsatisfied by the reply, Kitchloo walked into the Well of the House, protesting the delay. On this, Chairman Legislative Council Haji Anayat Ali directed marshals to take him out.

PTI
26/11 Mumbai attack: US says it stands with India, remains resolute in fight against terrorism

Welcome back Baby Moshe, my recollection of you as a brave 2 year old

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Who can ever forget the 26/11 Mumbai attack? It was one of the most gruesome attacks that Pakistan carried out in India. Many lost their loved ones and for Baby Moshe the loss was irreparable.

The boy lost both his parents in the attack carried out by Islamic jihadis of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba. Today Moshe Holtzberg fondly known as Baby Moshe is back in Mumbai. It has been nine years and I am not sure if he remembers that horrific day.

Moshe is accompanied by his nanny Sandra Samuel, who ran out with him to safety as terrorists took control of the Chabad House during the attacks.

"This visit to Nariman House for him is very, very emotional. And it's very, very sensitive," Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, who runs the Chabad House, told reporters. "We are very excited to meet Moshe, who's not a baby anymore but will always remain a baby in our hearts," he also said.

Let us rewind a bit. Covering the attacks was probably one of the most challenging assignment. It was tough, challenging and not to mention, extremely emotional.

As Moshe arrived in Mumbai, my memories were drawn back to that fateful day. I can never forget or get over the cries of by a two-year-old baby.

It was December 1 2008 and the horrific Mumbai 26/11 attack had just come to an end. I wanted to be at the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue at Kala Ghoda, Mumbai and extend my support to Moshe who back then was referred by all of us as 'Baby Moshe.

Those brutal terrorists from Pakistan had launched an attack on the Nariman or Chabad House and killed Baby Moshe's parents Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg.

As the two-year-old boy sat on his caretaker's lap he would weep ask for his Imma. He clearly had not realised what had happened and only kept asking for his mother.

There was not a single person in the hall who did not have tears in their eyes. Baby Moshe would go quiet and be engrossed with the red ball in the hand. However, the silence would not be for long and he would call out for his mother again.

The baby cries interrupted the prayer service several times. The Rabbi too had to stop the service the emotion was written large on his face too. The entire hall stood in shock as Baby Moshe's cries filled the room.

OneIndia News
What happened at Nariman House when Baby Moshe was a toddler

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

Recommended Video

Nariman House : What happened on the fateful night of Nov 26, 2008 | Oneindia News

Only a few knew where the Chabad House (earlier known as the Nariman House) is located at Colaba Causeway, until the Lashkar-e-Taiba's fidayeen attack in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, happened. This made the place worldwide famous.

Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, the Jewish couple who served as directors at the Nariman House, also known as the Chabad House, were killed along with six others when the place came under attack by 10 Pakistani terrorists during the November 2008 attacks.

The couple ran a cultural and outreach centre for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in the five-storey landmark building in south Mumbai's Colaba area.

The couples son Moshe Holtzberg, who was two years old then and was saved by his Indian nanny, will return to the Nariman House this week for the first time since the tragedy struck the family more than nine years ago.

What happened at Chabad House?

Moshe lived with his parents at Chabad House in Mumbai. On the fateful night of Nov 26, 2008 terrorists attacked Chabad House and killed Moshe's parents.

It was 9.45 pm and baby Moshe had just been put to sleep by his nanny Sandra Samuel, in his room located on the fifth floor. After putting the child to sleep, Samuel went to the first floor when the door pushed open and she came face to face with a gunman.

Samuel slammed the door and hid herself in a storage room, frantically trying to reach the rabbi and the others on the second floor, as she heard several gunshots go off in succession.

Samuels, then grabbed a crying Moshe and rushed out of the building. It was later confirmed by the NSG Commandos that Moshe's parents died in the attack. Following the attack, Moshe alongwith Samuels returned to Israel to live with his grandparents. Even though Samuels didn't have a passport, she was given a special visa so that she could travel to Israel with Moshe to look after him. Samuels did so without thinking twice, even though she had her own family back in India.

Nanny Sandra Samuels- the hero

The nanny- Sandra Samuels emerged as a hero after she rescued Moshe. She now lives with Moshe in Israel. She was given an honorary citizenship by the Israeli government for her act of bravery. She was also granted permanent residency in the country. After the attacks, even though Samuels didn't have a passport, she was given a special visa so that she could travel to Israel with Moshe to look after him. In many interviews she had said that she would stay with Moshe for as long as he wanted her and wished that he grows to be a strong boy.

Samuels said that that particular evening when terrorists attacked Nariman House, she was not supposed to be there. She recollects how the terrosists had attacked Chabad House and killed his parents, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. She grabbed Moshe when she heard him screaming and ran out of the building. It was later confirmed by the NSG Commandos that Moshe's parents were dead in the attack.

OneIndia News
What is Hajj subsidy and here is the Supreme Court verdict that ordered its stopping

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The government on Tuesday decided to withdraw Hajj subsidy to pilgrims. It may be recalled that the Supreme Court had in 2012 directed that subsidy on air travel should be phased out in ten years.

The court had said that as regards the Hajj subsidy, from the figures for the past 19 years given in the affidavit filed by the Union of India, it appears that the amount of subsidy has been increasing every year.

The court said, " this is on account of increase both in number of pilgrims and the travel cost/air fare. In the year 1994, the number of pilgrims going for Hajj from India was as low as 21,035. In 2011 it was 12,5000. In the year 1994 the cost of travel per pilgrim was only Rs 17,000. In 2011 it went up to 54,800. As a result the total Hajj subsidy that was Rs 10.51 crore in the year 1994 swelled up to Rs 685 crore in 2011."

"It is clear that the Government of India has no control on the cost of travel for Hajj. The air fare to Jeddah for travelling for Haj is increased by airlines to more than double as a result of the regulations imposed by the Saudi Arabian authorities. It is stated in the affidavit that in the year 2011, the air fare for Haj was Rs 58,800, though the normal air fare to and from Jeddah should have been around Rs 25,000."

"In the same paragraph, it is also stated that for the Haj of 2011, each pilgrim was charged Rs 16,000, towards air fare. In other words, what was charged from the pilgrims is slightly less than 2/3rd of the otherwise normal fare, the Bench led by Justice Aftab Alam also observed."

The SC stated that it saw no justification for charging from the pilgrims an amount that is much lower than even the normal air fare for a return journey to Jeddah.

"As regards the difference between the normal air fare and increased fare, we appreciate the intent of the Government of India to provide subsidy to cover the additional burden resulting from the stringent regulation imposed by the Saudi Arabian Authorities."

"We also take note of the fact that the grant of subsidy has been found to be constitutionally valid by this court. We are also not oblivious of the fact that in many other purely religious events there are direct and indirect deployment of state funds and state resources. Nevertheless, we are of the view that Haj subsidy is something that is best done away with."

"This court has no claim to speak on behalf of all the Muslims of the country and it will be presumptuous for us to try to tell the Muslims what is for them a good or bad religious practice. Nevertheless, we have no doubt that a very large majority of Muslims applying to the Haj Committee for going to Haj would not be aware of the economics of their pilgrimage and if all the facts are made known a good many of the pilgrims would not be very comfortable in the knowledge that their Haj is funded to a substantial extent by the government," the court also said.

What is Hajj subsidy:

The Haj subsidy is a subsidy given to Indian Muslim Hajj pilgrims by the Government of India in form of discounted Air fares on Indian Government owned Air India. The programme has its origins in British colonial era.

In post-colonial era, the Government of India expanded the program in 1959 with the Hajj Act The subsidy initially applied to Indian Muslim pilgrims traveling for religious reasons to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Jordan. Hajj subsidy started in 1954, as an idea initiated by the then government, with flights between Mumbai and Jeddah. Additional flight legs were added over the years, and since 1984, all Hajj traffic has been shared by Air India and Saudia, the national carriers of India and Saudi Arabia.

Hajj subsidy has reduced:

Over the years the subsidy has gradually reduced. In the year 2012, the subsidy extended was Rs 836.56 crore. This amount reduced to Rs 680.03 crore in 2013. In 2014 it further reduced to Rs 533 crore. In the year 2015 the subsidy was at Rs 529.51 crore and in 2016 it reduced to Rs 405 crore.

Hajj pilgrims in 2017:

Indonesia - 221,000

Pakistan - 179,210

India - 170,000

Bangladesh - 127,198

Egypt - 108,000

Iran - 86,500

Nigeria - 79,000

Turkey - 79,000

Algeria - 36,000

Morocco - 31,000

OneIndia News
US Congressman Carter says India's future is brighter than ever

When India-Israel bonded over Ichak Dana, Bichak Dana

India

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The Indian diplomats were taken by surprise when their counterparts from Israel, told them they were familiar with the very hummable song, Ichak Dana Bichak Dana.

The song from the 1955 Raj Kapoor starrer Shri 420 was played during the luncheon hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to welcome his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When the live band at the lunch played the number, Indian diplomats were taken by surprise when their Israeli counterparts recognised the track. This was revealed by the secretary, Ministry for External Affairs, Vijay Gokhale during a press briefing.

"Interesting anecdote was that during lunch which PM hosted a short while ago, one of the music items played by the live band was 'Ichak Dana Bichak Dana'. Number of Israelis who knew that was amazing," Gokhale said.

Netanyahu is on a six-day visit to India. He received a ceremonial reception at the Rashtrapati Bhawan on Monday. He held delegation-level talks with Modi following which nine MoU's were signed.

OneIndia News
In Australia, isolation not mandatory for all in COVID anymore

Why Indians trust Akshay Kumar, Baba Ramdev more than doctors on health-related matters

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia

New Delhi, Jan 16: Isn't it strange that Indians would rather listen to the advice given by Bollywood star Akshay Kumar and yoga guru Baba Ramdev than professional doctors when it comes to health-related issues?

It is true that neither Kumar nor Ramdev are trained doctors. Both of them have never claimed that they are professional medical practitioners.

However, the latest survey finds out that Indians, in general, would rather listen to the actor and yoga guru-turned-business tycoon in matters of health than a well-trained doctor. Reason: lack of trust and transparency in the sphere of the healthcare system in the country.

The annual survey by fitness device firm GOQii has found out that over 92 per cent people do not trust healthcare system in India.

The survey further states that hospitals are the most distrusted organisations followed by pharma and insurance companies.

"As per the GOQii India Fit 2018 report, 92.3 per cent of citizens do not trust the healthcare system in India, which includes doctors, hospitals, pharma, insurance companies and diagnostic labs," the survey said.

The survey claims to have used inputs from about 2 lakh GoQii product users in the country.

As per the survey, 74 per cent people said that they do not trust hospitals, followed by pharma and insurance firms (62.8 per cent), medical clinics (52.6 per cent), 50.6 per cent doctors and diagnostic labs (46.1 per cent).

"The key reason for the erosion of trust is largely due to a series of failure in the healthcare system, particularly the negligence by hospitals in the recent past. In addition, lack of transparency also came out as the single biggest impediment to the healthcare system in India," the report said.

Interestingly, the survey found Bollywood actor Kumar as the most trusted celebrity or public figure for health advice, followed closely by Ramdev.

"Indians are no longer silent or docile patients, but instead they are now well-informed consumers keen to participate in the care process and demanding dignity and transparency from the healthcare providers," GoQii Founder and CEO Vishal Gondal said.

People in most of the cities expressed major concern on air-quality.

"The 'Quality of Air' is a major concern among people and rated it the lowest at 3.3. Quality of food got the highest rating followed by water, with a rating of 4.1 and 3.8, respectively. This indicates that most Indians feel the quality of air in their city is substandard," the report said.

People assigned a lowest air-quality rating of 1.8 in Delhi-NCR followed by Bengaluru and Mumbai with a score of 3 and 3.1, respectively.

The survey found more than half of the population is overweight with the highest number of such people in Ahmedabad, followed by Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi NCR and Pune.

In comparison to last year survey, there was a rise in the number of lifestyle diseases among people.

"Diabetes has increased from 7.7 to 7.9 per cent. Also, more Indians have high cholesterol this year, increasing from 9.4 to 10.1 per cent. With age as well people are more prone to lifestyle diseases. 23.8 per cent people below the age of 45 have one or more diseases such as diabetes, cardiac problems, including high cholesterol, blood pressure, thyroid and cancer," the report said.

The average sleeping hours of people came down to 6.54 hours in 2017 compared to 6.72 hours found in the previous survey.

As per the food habit, a survey found Kolkata has 82 per cent non-vegetarians and Ahmedabad least with 44 per cent.

At a time when cases of medical negligence and allegations of hospitals over-charging patients have almost become a norm, Indians want the authorities to intervene to bring transparency in the healthcare system.

"Once upon a time, the medical profession was considered noble. Today, doctors have lost respect and trust because of their greed.

"We all work to earn money, but we have no right to loot anyone as private hospitals are indulging in. The Centre and state governments need to improve the state of government hospitals. Otherwise, things won't change," said a Bengaluru-based retired bureaucrat, who worked in the health sector.

OneIndia News
'Will not get into partnership with foreign companies at any cost', says Ramdev

India

oi-Shreya

By Shreya

Refuting news of a partnership with Louis Vuitton, Ramdev on January 16 said that Patanjali will not get into partnership with any foreign company at any cost, and the only intention of Patanjali is to donate to charity.

He further said that Patanjali will not be listed in Mumbai, but in the "hearts of people" and that he aims to donate more than one lakh crore of Patanjali to charity and has already donated 11000 crores to charity.

He added that more than 5 crore people search for Patanjali on the internet and claimed that within the next 5-10 years Patanjali will be in top position in many countries and in the next 50 years it will be the best brand in the world.

He said, "Patanjali has the support of crores of people, and for other companies the country might be a marketplace for their products, for Patanjali, it's family,"

He also said that he is not in support of FDI, but also remarked, "Would not want to pick a bone with politicians,"

OneIndia News
13 siblings held captive in California rescued, parents arrested

International

pti-PTI

Perris (US), Jan 16: In a shocking incident, 13 malnourished children were found to be held captive in a home, with some shackled to beds in the dark. A California couple has been arrested in connection with the case.

Authorities yesterday said they were alerted to the harrowing scene after a 17-year-old girl managed to escape the house on Sunday and call police using a cellphone she found. She was so "emaciated" that officers said they originally thought she was just 10 years old. The 13 victims at the house in Perris, California, ranged in age from two to 29, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said in a statement.

"Further investigation revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul- smelling surroundings, but the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner," the statement said.

"Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29. The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty," the statement added.

The sheriff's office said "the victims were provided with food and beverages after they claimed to be starving". The parents, 57-year-old David Allen Turpin and 49-year- old Louise Anna Turpin, were booked on torture and child endangerment charges with bail set at USD 9 million.

The Spanish-style stucco house where the victims were allegedly held is located in a middle class neighbourhood of Perris, a small city some 110 kms southeast of Los Angeles. The home boasted three cars as well as a van with tinted windows. One of the cars, a blue compact, had a child's seat in the back. There are indications that the children were allowed outside the house in recent years.

A Facebook page under the name of David-Louise Turpin includes pictures of the couple attending various marriage or exchange of vows ceremonies from 2011 to 2016 with their children present. In the latest set, uploaded in April-July 2016, Louise Turpin wears a long white wedding gown while her husband is dressed in a suit.

An Elvis Presley impersonator holds a microphone and poses with the couple and children in a scene reminiscent of a Las Vegas wedding. Nine girls, all with long dark hair, wear matching fuchsia dresses with white tights, while a baby girl is dressed in a bright pink dress. Three boys, their dark hair in bowl cuts like David Turpin, are dressed in suits with red ties.

An April 2016 photograph shows the same smiling children and the couple wearing jeans and red t-shirts that read "Thing 1," "Thing 2," "Thing 3" and so on -- a take on the mischievous siblings in the popular Dr Seuss book "The Cat in the Hat."

Some of the children look gaunt, but not obviously so. In another September 2015 photograph, Louise Turpin lies holds a baby wearing t-shirt reading "Mommy loves me." Neighbour Kimberly Milligan told the Los Angeles Times that the children were very pale and never played outside despite being so numerous.

"I thought the kids were homeschooled... You know something is off, but you don't want to think bad of people," she said.

The neighbour recalled once seeing the pre-teenaged children hanging up Christmas lights at the home about two years ago, and said hello. "They looked at us like a child who wants to make themselves invisible," Milligan said, adding she felt guilty that the alleged cruelty went unnoticed.

"How did no one see anything?" she asked.

US media reported that the parents had previously filed for bankruptcy. David Turpin is registered in state records as head of a private school, but its address matches that of the Turpins' home. The school opened in March 2011 and only has six students according to the latest state education department data.

The Los Angeles Times said the couple had lived at the Perris house since 2010, after a move from Texas, adding they went bankrupt twice. According to court papers when they filed for bankruptcy in 2011, the couple said they accrued between $100,000 and USD 500,000 debts opening the school, The New York Times said.

The paper said the same year David Turpin was working as an engineer for defence contractor Northrop Grumman, earning USD 140,000 a year, while his wife was listed as a homemaker. The case recalls previous kidnapping horrors that have made global headlines in recent years.

Ariel Castro abducted three young women he repeatedly raped for a decade at his Cleveland home. He was arrested in May 2013 after one of his victims escaped. Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped as an 11-year-old and repeatedly raped over 18 years by convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido in California. She was rescued in August 2009. Austria has seen two high profile kidnaps -- Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned and raped over a period of 24 years by her father Josef while Natascha Kampusch was held for eight years by Wolfgang Priklopil before her 2006 escape.

PTI
With the number of anonymous rogues from Pak rising, here's how BSF is beating down the drones

Suicide bombings are 'un-islamic', 1,800 Pakistan clerics issue fatwa

International

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Pakistan has witnessed series of suicide attacks by extremist Islamic groups, who perpetrate violence in the name of jihad, in recent years. Invoking principles of Islam, over 1,800 Muslim clerics in Pakistan have issued a fatwa, forbidding suicide bombings.

Declaring the suicide bombings to be "haraam" (forbidden), the fatwa seeks to curb "terrorism" that has claimed lives of hundreds of people in the last two decades.

Pakistan has drawn widespread criticism for its selective approach in tackling the terrorist menace. US President Donald Trump had recently warned Islamabad of cutting-off all aid if it fails to act against terrorism. Trump had openly criticised Pakistan for not being tough enough in its actions against terrorism.

India has also been accusing Pakistan of its "good terrorist" and "bad terrorist" stance. India has maintained that terrorists sneaking into India through Kashmir get Islamabad's backing. India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has on many occasions asked Pakistan to shun its selective approach in tackling the terrorism problem and act against all terrorists.

Pakistani officials deny frequent US allegations about collaborating with militant Islamist proxies in Afghanistan and India and say vast gains have been made over the past decade against militant outfits such as the Pakistani Taliban, said an HT report.

The book, which terms suicide bombings as "un-Islamic", was prepared by the state-run International Islamic University.

OneIndia News
'Musharraf's threatening call to Benazir could not be traced'

Pakistan poll 2018: The tale of Pakistan Peoples Party has been like Indias Congress

'We killed Benazir Bhutto', claims Pakistan Taliban

International

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The Pakistan Taliban has claimed responsibility for the assassination of the former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto in 2007. The banned outfit said that it killed her as she had planned on collaborating with the US against the 'mujahideen' if she returned to power.

"The return of Benazir Bhutto was planned at the behest of the Americans as they had given her a plan against the 'Mujahideed-e-Islam'. Baitullah had received information about the plan," a book claimed, in a reference to slain Pakistani Taliban founder Baitullah Mehsud.

The Daily Times reported that no group had claimed responsibility for Bhutto's murder until the claim in the Taliban's Urdu-language book titled 'Inqilab Mehsood South Waziristan From British Raj to American Imperialism'.

Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chief Bhutto, 54, was killed in a suicide attack in Rawalpindi shortly after she had addressed an election rally on December 27, 2007.

Former president Pervez Musharraf had blamed the Tehreek- e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) for the attack but the outfit had denied it.

The book says suicide bombers Bilal, also known as Saeed, and Ikramullah were tasked to carry out the attack on Bhutto.

"Bomber Bilal first fired at Benazir Bhutto from his pistol and the bullet hit her neck. Then he detonated his explosive jacket and blew himself up among the participants of the procession," the book claimed.

TTP leader Abu Mansoor Asim Mufti Noor Wali has written the book and published it on November 30, 2017, at "Maseed Computer Centre in Barmal, in Afghanistan's Paktika province," according to details in the book.

The 588-page book, which contains many photographs of Taliban leaders, was posted online.

Military sources say most of the TTP fighters, belonging to the Mehsud tribe, had crossed into Afghanistan's Paktika and Paktia provinces after the military launched a major offensive in 2009.

The book says the TTP was also involved in a suicide bombing two months earlier at Bhutto's procession in Karachi in October 2007, which had killed nearly 140 people though Bhutto had escaped unhurt.

OneIndia News
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The Turkish Armed Forces collectively rank as the second-largest standing military force in NATO, after the U.S. Armed Forces, with an estimated strength in 2015 of 639,551 militaries, civilian and paramilitary personnel.

The modern history of the army began with its formation after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish military perceived itself as the guardian of Kemalist ideology, the official state ideology, especially of the secular aspects of Kemalism. After becoming a member of NATO on 18 February 1952, Turkey initiated a comprehensive modernization program for its armed forces.

The Turkish Armed Forces committed the crime against humanity but the international community never persecuted Turkish leaders for crime against humanity.

Also, the Turkish Armed Forces murdered millions of people from Kurds, Greek, Assyrian, and others but only Armenian people have recorded the Turkish Armed Forces' crime against humanity. The Armenian Genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust, was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, mostly citizens within the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders from Constantinople (now Istanbul) to the region of Ankara, the majority of whom were eventually murdered.

Since the establishment of the Republic on October 29, 1923, with Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) as its first president. The government was formed from the Ankara-based revolutionary group, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his colleagues. The Turkish Republic of Turkey did continue on with the final days of Ottoman Empire policies toward none_turks in Turkey.

One-third of the Turkey populations are the Caucasian Kurds. They are the original owner of the land before the arrival of Greek, Armenians, Assyrian and others from today India to take over the land of Caucasian people. The Turks came from Mongolia after the Islamic Arab of Africa destroyed the Sassanid Kurdish Empire (224 to 651 AD).

Turks of Mongolia killed millions of people before taking over the land of today Turkey.

Kurdish people in Syria are seeking freedom from Syrian Arabs. The ISIS Islamic Arab Sunni terrorist was planning to exterminate Kurds in Syria. But Kurdish people fought ISIS terrorist for survival. Turkish government helped ISIS terrorist during their war against Kurdish people in Syria. Kurdish people defeated ISIS with the help of the ally under the leadership of the US.

Turkish President Erdogan is not happy to see peaceful region for Kurds in Syria or Iraq while fighting Kurdish people within Turkish border too. The Turkish Armed Forces are attacking few thousand members of the YPG and YPJ Kurdish forces in the 'Afrin-Syria region'. The US government declared that it is helping Kurds from the East of 'Euphrates River' in Syria to Iraq and Turkey borders. It means that it is not going to protect Kurds from west of the 'Euphrates River', 'Afrin-Syria region' are west of the 'Euphrates River'.

Tens of thousands of the Turkish Armed Forces with Islamic Sunni Arab terrorist forces are going to attack YPG and YPJ Kurdish forces in the 'Afrin-Syria region' now.

References

Turkey to launch imminent Syria operation against YPG

click here

Turkish Armed Forces

wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Armed_Forces

Armenian Genocide

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From Greg Palast Website



(Image by Photo of Palast at King's church by Zach D Roberts) Details DMCA



It was a Republican, Martin Luther King Sr., who made John Kennedy president of the United States -- for JFK's saving Daddy King's son, Martin Jr., from lynching.

This harrowing and little known drama of terror and courage, confirmed for me by Martin Luther King III, changed American politics -- and America -- forever.

On October 19, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Georgia for driving with an Alabama license and sentenced to six months hard labor. No one expected King to survive the sentence -- he'd be lynched at the outset.

His father, Martin King Sr., had one desperate chance to save his son. Daddy King had endorsed Richard Nixon, a family friend, for the presidency. Nixon could count on King, a Republican like many African-Americans, who chose the party of Lincoln over the racist Democratic party of Jim Crow segregation.

A desperate King called Vice-President Nixon -- who refused to answer. But MLK's wife, Coretta, had a single hope. She called a friend, pacifist activist Harris (later Senator) Wofford who called Bobby Kennedy.

RFK didn't hesitate, calling from a pay phone on Long Island to his brother, demanding John save MLK Jr.

It was just three weeks before the presidential election, a race too close to call. This was a crisis. Three Southern governors warned the Kennedys that any help for Dr. King and JFK would lose three Deep South states.

John Kennedy, who'd just won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, knew this was his test. He gave Bobby the go-ahead to save King.

Bobby called Atlanta and told the judge he'd post King's bond -- though the judge had never offered bond. But this Democratic judge knew that with his party, the Kennedys could employ and destroy.

Meanwhile, according to Martin King III, his father was pulled from his Atlanta jail at 2am and told he would be transferred to Reidsville Prison hours from the city. King was certain he would not live to see the dawn.

But the judge had let it be known that King was now under the protective gaze of the Kennedy's. And MLK, said his son, was "the first prisoner ever to be thrilled and thankful to enter gates of Reidsville Prison."

But the warning came true. Word of Kennedy's saving King cost JFK the electoral votes of Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia. But then there was the miracle. Daddy King had written a pamphlet beginning, in block letters:

"No Comment" Nixon

versus

A Candidate with a Heart,

Senator Kennedy

*

THE CASE OF

MARTIN LUTHER KING

The pamphlet, on blue paper, was carried to the churches of half a million African-Americans.



(Image by Pamphlet by Martin Luther King Sr.) Details DMCA



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Trump's "shithole" moment was years in the making.

Once again, the political-media world is in a tizzy over a Donald Trump remark. In a White House meeting on Thursday, he...oh, you know what happened. "Shithole" -- he referred to African countries and possibly Haiti as "shithole countries." Yeah, Trump in a tweet -- half a day after the story broke -- denied it. But does anyone believe he didn't say that? News anchors -- notably CNN's Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon -- branded Trump a "racist." And, as could be predicted, a handful of hardly brave Republicans came forward with carefully calibrated wrist-slaps. Outgoing Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said, "The words used by the President, as related to me directly following the meeting by those in attendance, were not 'tough,' they were abhorrent and repulsive." And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) pointed out that Haitian Americans "are serving in public office as members of both political parties." But as with many of Trump's excesses, GOP outrage was muted, at best. (Some media reports portrayed White House aides as even bragging about the "shithole" comment, braying it would play well with Trump's base.)

With the nation -- or at least, part of it -- trying to come to terms with this latest manifestation of Trump's vileness, it's a good time to remember a fundamental reality: Trump became racist-in-chief because Republicans and conservatives embraced him and normalized his racism-driven politics.

Trump has a long history of what Axios once politely called "racial controversies." Being sued for racial discrimination in his housing developments, inflaming racial tensions in New York City related to crime, and more. But he didn't hit the big time in racial politics until 2011, when Trump, who was then considering running for president in 2012, became the nation's No. 1 birther. For reasons that still remain unclear -- perhaps he was looking to win over conservatives -- he seized upon the already discredited conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. That would mean that the first African American president had not been eligible for the presidency and, consequently, was wrongfully in the White House, as the most illegal illegal alien of all time.

Go to Mother Jones to read the rest of this article.
Surendra Singh, a legislator of the ruling Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) has said that once India becomes a "Hindu rashtra", only those Muslims will stay in the country who assimilate into the Hindu culture. "There are a very few Muslims who are patriotic. Once India becomes a Hindu rashtra (Hindu nation), Muslims who assimilate into our culture will stay in India. Those who will not are free to take asylum in any other country," Singh told reporters on Saturday (Jan 13).

He also claimed that by 2024, India would become a Hindu nation. Describing Prime Minister Narendra Modi as an "avatar purush" (reincarnation of a deity), Singh said: "As the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) completes 100 years in 2025, by 2024, India will become a Hindu rashtra. By the grace of god, India is going to be a global superpower thanks to the leadership of Modi and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Not only will India become a 'vishwa guru', it will also become a Hindu rashtra by 2024."

It may be recalled that Nathan Godse, a RSS member, assassinated the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

Surendra Singh had shot into limelight when he created a controversy in August 2017 after questioning recruitment of Muslims into the Indian Army.

"They cannot be trusted as they have no loyalty towards India. Once they are recruited into the Army, they owe their loyalty to Pakistan instead on India," he had alleged.

Singh had sought a thorough probe into functioning of madrasas in the country alleging that majority of them are breeding ground for churning out terrorists. "We respect only patriotic Muslims but those who are not loyal to country have no right to stay back India. They should leave and live in other countries," he had stated earlier.

Convention on Hindu Rashtra

In a bid to exploit Hindu Rashtra emotion of the people throughout the nation, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti is organizing 'All India Hindu Conventions' for the last 5 years.

To discuss the "Road Map to the Establishment Of The Hindu rashtra" by 2023, the Sixth 'All India Hindu Convention' was organized last year from 14th to 17th June at Shri Ramnath Temple, Ponda, Goa.

Other issues on the agenda were: "Need for a countrywide beef ban, failed policies of government in rehabilitation of Kashmiri Hindus and future of India: Islamic State or Hindu Rashtra."

The Convention was attended by about 400 delegates from more than 150 Hindu organizations from 21 States of Bharat, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

In the last three years since the Modi government came to power, the BJP's stated agenda - hiding the party's real self - has been exposed and continues to be exposed, according to Ashok Singh of Daily O.

"The BJP and the government have adopted the fringe group's agenda on cow and beef, leading to mass lynching of Muslims. The agenda of silencing dissenting voices that have sometimes resulted in killings of writers and rationalists have exposed the ruling party's virtual acquiescence," Singh said.

The protection of the cow and the ban on beef are important building blocks of the making of a Hindu rashtra - as is the well-planned demonization of minorities. In a significant move to adopt the fringe groups' agenda, the BJP cast aside the mask by appointing Yogi Adityanath, who has always unabashedly espoused the cause of making India a Hindu rashtra, as UP's chief minister, Singh argues.

We are living in Hindu/Hindutva Rashtra

Vrinda Gopinath of Daily O wrote on May 24, 2017 that 3 years of Modi government has turned India into Hindu Rashtra

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Yep, he Chose the wrong one. Now what?

(Image by Reverend Dan) Details DMCA



The Christian Right's most proffered (and most lame) excuse for supporting Donald Trump is that he is "The Chosen One". This is only second to the cop-out phrase "God works in mysterious ways." If all else fails to look passably reasonable about Trump, use the Chosen One defense.

On Martin Luther King Day, however, Trump's latest blunder, the (now) infamous "shithole countries" comment has made him not the Chosen One, but a pariah - chosen only to inflame racial tensions, and just before a memorial day to a man symbolizing racial unity.

At MLK's own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Rev. Raphael G. Warnak described Trump as a "willfully ignorant, racist, xenophobic, narcissistic con man."

"We will not allow the politics of division to get in the way of the vision of a shared humanity, the vision of what Dr. King called the beloved community, the vision of one nation under God," Warnock said.

The fallout from "shithole countries" has taken its toll on Trump's Evangelical base, mostly in the form of silence: Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. have not spoken up. To speak up and defend Trump might expose their own prejudices, like Robert Jeffress and his non-defense:

"What a lot of people miss is, America is not a church where everyone should be welcomed regardless of race and background," Jeffress told The Post.

Yes, that's a pastor putting his political imprimatur on bigotry and racism.

Free Will

Trump-rabid Evangelicals conveniently forget one thing: The Chosen One argument goes against man's free will. If God chooses to put someone in office, how does our vote count? If God manipulates our votes like Russian hackers, shouldn't He be indicted for His interference?

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President Trump's done it again. He's snatched away the patina of political correctness that normally conceals the brutal realities of a U.S. policy. His recent words about "shithole countries" say more than most imagine, not only about Haiti and Africa, but about history, colonialism, immigrants in general, and (surprisingly) about faith-inspired anti-colonial resistance. In other words, the offensive imagery is profoundly revealing and worth probing for its subconscious meaning and implications for immigration policy.

Begin by considering the operative words themselves. They were pronounced in the context of a White House meeting about immigration policy. There Mr. Trump wondered "Why do we want all these people from 'shithole countries' coming here?"

Such poetic metaphor suggests two meanings. On the one hand, it might imply that Haiti and Africa are somehow anal sphincters. They are orifices from which excrement exits a body. In other words, Haitians and Africans are nothing but human waste.

Alternatively, the geographical locations themselves would be places of defecation. They are toilets or outhouses. They exist to receive excrement -- presumably from the likes of Mr. Trump and the country he represents. Accordingly, the countries he referenced are thereby reduced to wastelands.

Either comparison (sphincters or toilets) distorts the brutal history of colonialism. In every case that process has impoverished previously prosperous populations of countries and whole continents characterized not by poverty, but by a wealth that far outstrips that of the colonizers.

In fact, the colonial world's wealth (three growing seasons, lavish biodiversity, rich rain forests, herds of exotic fauna, expansive acreage, abundant mineral deposits, and, in many cases, oil) are the very reasons why European and American colonists invaded them in the first place. They forced their ways in to transfer the colonies' wealth to the "Mother Country" to feed her voracious bestial but resource-starved industries.

In other words, rather than receptacles for receiving waste, the colonies' function became the enrichment of the much poorer imperial centers whose conquistadors invaded and plundered them. In that sense, Europe was the shithole. As sphincter, it exuded sickly white marauders who plundered the lavish wealth of thriving black and brown indigenous peoples.

And in every case, after the Second Inter-Capitalist War (aka World War II), when the colonized rebelled to reclaim their own abundance, the colonizers intervened repeatedly to keep the stolen resources flowing to the shitholes up north -- to keep in poverty those they had impoverished.

Ironically, Haiti represents a case in point. Their attempts at re-appropriating stolen land and other resources have repeatedly been repulsed by foreign invaders.

Haiti's rebellion began in 1791 shortly after the French Revolution. It was then that Toussaint Louverture led the first successful black slave rebellion -- against the country's French imperialists. Such effrontery to white supremacists has never been forgiven.

The unacceptability of blacks and browns in rebellion explains the U.S. support of the brutal Tonton Macoute under the Duvaliers ("Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc"). Their death squads were responsible for the assassinations, torture, and disappearances of thousands of Haitians from 1957 to 1986. The CIA supported them at every step.

The threat of Haitians struggling for liberation from foreign control also explains U.S. opposition to former priest and liberation theologian, Jean Bertrand Aristide. (And it's here that the previously-mentioned connection to faith enters in.) In 1993 Aristide was elected with 67% of the vote. Aristide's popularity and the reason for CIA opposition to his presidency is suggested by the connections the former priest made between his faith and his rejection of the U.S. rape of his homeland under the Duvaliers. In a January 1988 interview, he said "The solution is revolution, first in the spirit of the Gospel; Jesus could not accept people going hungry. It is a conflict between classes, rich and poor. My role is to preach and organize...."

Even before the 2010 earthquake (which killed 300,000 Haitians!), Haiti's infrastructure and social fabric were devastated by reactionary outrages against faith-inspired struggles for national control of the country's own resources. Haitian society still reels from the policies of American clients concerned only with preserving their own wealth and cooperating fully with the foreign agendas of their D.C. puppeteers.

None of this is acknowledged by the Trump Administration, the mainstream media, our TV talking heads, or even by the leadership of the Catholic Church. Instead, everything has disappeared down the shitholes (again, please excuse the crudeness of Mr. Trump's metaphor!) residing between the ears of those concerned.

The fact is that all colonized countries particularly in Africa have rich histories like Haiti's.

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Originally published at revcom.us

On January 11, Donald Trump, the Piece of sh*t of the U.S. (hereafter, "POSTUS"), came full out of his KKK closet in a room full of congressmen and aides, demanding to know why the U.S. should accept immigrants from "shithole countries" like Haiti, El Salvador, and the whole continent of Africa. POSTUS said the U.S. needs immigrants from countries like overwhelmingly white Norway. Referring to the hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the U.S., Trump said, "Take them out!"

All this was no "slip." No, this is "the new normal" Americans are supposed to accept--and by the way, you ARE accepting if you are not raising holy hell about it.

According to Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, POSTUS used this language repeatedly as part of laying out his position on immigrants and immigration. No one in the room clearly denied that he said this. A White House spokesman bragged that these remarks showed that POSTUS "will always fight for the American people," and unnamed sources in the White House said the comments would "resonate" with his base. And, while some have criticized his "vulgarity," almost the entire Republican Party has closed ranks around the content of what POSTUS said.

So let's be dead-clear on what just happened. First, no joke or exaggeration, "Make America Great Again" means "Make America White Again." Literally.



NAZIS TAKE BABY STEPS AT FIRST --

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This is Nazi sh*t--this is dividing up humanity into racial categories and saying some of them aren't human. Period. And under this "logic," the fascists won't even stop with driving out immigrants from these "shithole countries," but will go after their U.S.-born descendants as well.

The Trump/Pence regime is already enacting the policies that are racing down that road. It is throwing out 260,000 Salvadorans and 60,000 Haitians here under TPS (Temporary Protected Status, granted in the face of catastrophic conditions in their homelands). For many of these people, going back to those countries, devastated because of decades of what the U.S. has done, is a death sentence. And it is threatening to end protection for 800,000 mainly Latino "Dreamers" in the DACA program (people who came to the U.S. with their undocumented parents and have grown up and sunk roots in the U.S.). The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is cranking up deportations and building "detention centers" as fast as it can. POSTUS pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was in trouble with the courts because he profiled, harassed, brutalized and detained all people of Mexican-American descent, even if they were born in the USA. And POSTUS is already treating Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands like they are not part of the U.S., at the cost of tremendous suffering.

And this is also a message to the racist mob that is the hard-core base of this regime--it is normalizing the dehumanization of Black and Brown people, turning their families and communities into--in the eyes of the regime's followers--an "infestation" that is "destroying America."

This is the outlook that leads to pogroms, to lynchings, to massacres, to holocausts.

If you say "It can't happen here" when it IS happening here, then objectively, regardless of your wishes or intentions, you are complicit in it happening. And it is not going to get easier to stand up against this if you wait and do nothing.

And speaking of the Democrats! What the f*ck!?!?

Dick Durbin is a prominent, supposedly liberal and principled Democratic senator. And yes, after the meeting he publicly denounced Trump's racism.

But the real question is, why was he even in the room with POSTUS and these other virulent anti-immigrant fanatics to hear this ugly ranting in the first place? And why didn't he stand up and walk out when POSTUS said this sh*t the first time?

Because he was trying to "make a deal" on immigration. Durbin was offering to "trade": money for the fascists' Wall against Mexico and "discussion" about ending so-called "chain migration,"1 for a temporary reprieve for the Dreamers. (And by the way, the Dreamers themselves have made clear that they do NOT want to be the bait in such a deal, that they are not going to betray their families, their relatives, their principles, for a momentary reprieve from deportation.) This would amount to a "deal" to facilitate and smooth over the rough edges of ethnic cleansing. Once over this rough patch, the fascists would undoubtedly turn around and deport the Dreamers as well.

Durbin, along with Schumer, Pelosi, Sanders, Warren and all the major Democratic figures, are collaborators with this regime2 , and they showed it in their reaction to this watershed moment. Confronted with the undeniable reality that a white supremacist regime holds power, they doubled down on their "willingness to seek common ground," on their position of keeping impeachment "off the table," and their determination to funnel all the anger, outrage and fear of the majority of the population into "voting Democratic" in 2018, 2020, 2022... ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

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By Edward Curtin



Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial

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Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest, the promotion of individualism at the expense of a mass movement for radical institutional change.

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous," warned Dr. King, "than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

How true those words. For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know.

The word service is a loaded word, a smiley face word. It has also become a vogue word over the past 35 years. Its use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, or delivering meals to the elderly, activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet's radical message. After all, Martin Luther King's work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on.

The Assassination

King was not murdered because he had spent his heroic life promoting individual volunteerism. To understand his life and death -- to celebrate the man -- "it is essential to realize although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for a long overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation." Those are the words of William Pepper, the King family lawyer, from his comprehensive and definitive study of the King assassination, The Plot to Kill King, a book that should be read by anyone concerned with truth and justice.

Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels' efforts to transform society. If they can't buy them off, they knock them off. Fifty years after King's assassination, the causes he fought for -- civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression, and economic justice for all -- remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects. And King's message has been enervated by the sly trick of giving him a national holiday and then urging Americans to make it "a day of service." The vast majority of those who innocently participate in these activities have no idea who killed King, or why. If they did, they might pause in their tracks, and combine their "service" activities with a teach-in on the truth of these matters.

Because MLK repeatedly called the United States the "greatest purveyor of violence on earth," he was universally condemned by the mass media and government that later -- once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat -- praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.

Educating people about the fact that U.S. government forces conspired to kill Dr. King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory.

William Pepper's decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against the alleged assassin James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures.

The Trial

This shocking truth is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty day civil trial with over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK. The King family had brought the suit and Pepper represented them. They were grateful that the truth was confirmed, but saddened by the way the findings were buried by the media in cahoots with the government.

Pepper not only demolishes the government's self-serving case with a plethora of evidence, but shows how the mainstream media, academia, and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK's murder through lies and disinformation. Another way they have accomplished this is by convincing a gullible public that "service" is a substitute for truth.

But service without truth is a disservice to the life, legacy, and radical witness of this great American hero. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people that they are serving the essence of MLK's message while they are obeying their masters, the very government that murdered him.

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To see if the quicklink was renamed or re-published, please click here.


American Beauty and the Beasts

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That our 45th isn't a presidential fit preferred by most is less horrific than allowing him to enter us in a race against ourselves, denigrating the educational achievements of Africans, Haitians whose courageous ancestors helped transfer us from European tyranny to our Land of the Free Exceptionalism, and Puerto Ricans who, while not William Howard Taft's Little Brown Brothers, were nonetheless invaded into American WWI conscription.

Narrowing POVs, myopic jargon and oblivious tweets are a colossal misuse of life limited by weather extremes, food deserts, Flint water and halfhearted renewable-energy prep.

Nonetheless, unless we fail to vote ourselves outside the box where Conservatism and Corporatism build our future on sand, we will again be the masters of our soul -- with this caveat: if we persist in wallowing in the avalanche of 21st-century Republicanism, We the People could collude in a PAC with the devil, instead of being the beauty all life on earth would lovingly embrace, for a morsel of respect.

So, shaking off forever, the dust of gender inequality, income disparity, rainforest destruction and animal slaughter for sport, let us cleanse the racist excrement smeared on our Statue of Liberty heritage, by a Jim Crow immigration ethos.

It's not just opportunists appointed to ignore American international history, lacking any appreciation for the sacrifice of tens of thousands of female-American, LGBTQ-American, Muslim-American, African-American, Asian-American, Latino-American and Native-American citizens who preserve, protect and defend all, including Caucasians. It's unseen brokers hedging anti-American bets.

From Estcourt Station Maine to San Diego California, Americans deserve better than a Pilate president washing his hands of American protectorates/territories. Our beauty is being both Good Samaritans and Good Stewards:

First-responders to Domestic Terrorism

Firefighters conquering city & forest fires

Volunteers rebuilding Texas and Florida post-Harvey and -Irma -- still insisting on more than a neophyte's bread-toss response to the punishing Maria aftermath in Puerto Rico -- while beasts expose us to offshore drilling perils for profit

In sharp contrast, countless nurses & caregivers, teachers & social workers, parents & police, doctors & lawyers, military families -- even some bankers and lobbyists, who sacrifice daily to uplift, heal and untether us from our sometimes-beastly past, revealing an enlightened harmonious future -- many, bearing little resemblance to our paleface Founding Fathers' gender or sexual persuasion.

Still America, beware corporate, religious and political magicians who pledge to turn us against each other, disappearing both our beauty and prestige, like Walmart publicly proclaiming its new $11.00 minimum wage while quietly firing employees; NOW Television CEO, Pastor Mark Burns, whitewashing the darkness shaming American diplomacy and Sarah Huckabee-Sanders selling her soul for those devoid of empathy.

Believing Trump is America's only elected beast is what fuels the imbalance between our past good & current ugliness, harassment and the harassed and our habitual tendency to lockstep with short-term memory.

October 1962, on the brink of nuclear war with Soviet Union, President Kennedy's primary concern, for thirteen days: a chain-of-command miscalculation. January 2018, for thirty-eight minutes, Hawaii experienced a nuclear miscalculation -- still believing duck and cover saves us from nuclear holocaust.

Calling out foreign hackers and domestic hucksters attempting a hoax on our reason, will vanquish foes to America's diverse beauty and expose corporate and congressional self-aggrandizement for the treason it is.

A giving character aligns us with the integrity of all life on earth, thus preventing America's destruction by the braggadocios and morally bankrupt. Racism, sexism and refusal to progress forward, are the beasts that threaten our epiphany, haunt our good deeds and deplete our finite existence.

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From Strategic Culture



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US President Trump's outrageous remarks on various poor nations -- calling them "shitholes" -- not only reveal a heartless racist. Donald Trump also shows himself to be appallingly ignorant.

What does it say about our world when the leader of supposedly the most powerful military nation is a complete ignoramus about the most basic facts of history? Surely, this is an horrific danger to all of humanity from having someone so reckless and stupid with access to nuclear weapons.

The global indignation over Trump's foul denigration continues to mount days after he uttered it. The African Union representing 55 nations has demanded an apology from the president. He is now trying to walk back his incendiary comments in a blatant attempt to lie, which is only fueling more anger.

What's even more abhorrent is that the vast majority of the countries that Trump was referring to can trace their intractable problems of poverty and violence directly to US involvement in those countries. Yet, he crassly wonders why America has any obligation to shelter people fleeing from them.

During a meeting last Thursday with Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the White House to discuss US immigration policy, Trump reportedly became frustrated when the list of countries receiving Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was read out to him.

Currently there are 10 countries afforded TPS by official US immigration controls. Such status permits the entry of a certain quota of citizens.

They are: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen and Syria.

Trump reportedly blurted out: "What do we want Haitians here for? Why do we want all these people from Africa here? Why are we having all these people from shithole countries coming here?"

He then capped his racist, exploitative view of the world by adding: "We should have more people from places like Norway."

So, in Trump's shallow, utilitarian worldview, as long as you are blond, blue-eyed, educated and from a wealthy state then you are welcome in the US to be utilized for its economic growth.

Trump's disgust with the listed immigrant countries shows his astounding cluelessness, or maybe callousness.

For the fact is that nine of the 10 countries afforded TPS -- 90 percent -- can attribute their immigration tendency to the legacy of destructive US policies bearing down on those countries.

Only one of them, Nepal, has a humanitarian crisis unrelated directly to American foreign policy, resulting from a natural cause -- the earthquake that hit the Himalayan South Asian nation in April 2015.

Let's quickly review the 90 percent.

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From Paul Craig Roberts Website

Identity Politics is the ideology of the liberal/progressive/left and the Democratic Party. Identity Politics teaches hatred of white people, all white people. An article last November in the student newspaper at Texas State University declared that white DNA is an abomination.

Americans, assuming that they are aware of this hostile statement toward white people, dismiss it as student silliness. They do not understand that it is the logical conclusion of the reigning ideology in America today. Naomi Klein, for example, writing in the current issue of Sierra, takes for granted the explanations of Identity Politics when she writes that the stakes in the 2016 election were enormously high for "those targeted by racist attacks as Trump fanned the flames of rising white nationalism ... to the prospect of women losing the right to decide whether or not to become mothers, to the reality of sexual assault being normalized and trivialized at the highest reaches of power."

Formerly, the liberal/progressive/left and the Democratic Party stood for the working class. In those days societal conflict was understood in class terms, and the capitalist was seen as the exploiter. Today the conflict is identity driven, with the white heterosexual male placed in the role as the exploiter of blacks, homosexuals and women.

The idea that power resides in the white heterosexual male is obviously erroneous. Imagine if the Texas college student had written that black DNA is an abomination or homosexual DNA is an abomination. The article would not have been published. But it is perfectly OK to denigrate whites. Indeed, white males have no protection against abuse, because they are not protected by quotas, political correctness, and hate speech prohibitions.

Whites are easily discriminated against, as the recent firing of James Damore by Google illustrates. Damore simply stated a scientific fact that males and females have different traits that suit them to different jobs. But this is a fact that is inconsistent with Identity Politics. Just as Trofim Lysenko managed to destroy Soviet genetics by denying facts, Identity Politics is destroying American society by denying facts. Ideologies are only interested in facts that confirm the ideology. When no such facts exist, ideologues make up the facts.

Americans, especially white people who are the target of the deadly ideology of Identity Politics and are placed by the ideology in the same position as Jews in Nazi Germany and capitalists in Soviet Russia, are unaware of the extent to which Identity Politics is now the dominant force in American culture. For example, as James Damore's lawsuit against Google proves, Google's corporate culture is 100 percent Identity Politics. Damore was fired because he challenged Identity Politics.

Read here for examples of the raw hatred that Google employees expressed against Damore. None were fired for hateful and threatening language that went far beyond Damore's mild statement that males and females have different traits. Google actually rewards employees for beating up on white heterosexual males and conservatives and holds diversity training sessions, the purpose of which is to put whites on the defensive. The whites who survive at Google are the ones who deplore their whiteness.

Clearly, Identity Politics has turned Google into a totalitarian organization, one that cooperates with police state agencies in restricting access to non-approved information. We must hope that a blockchain Internet soon replaces Google and that Google's stock declines in value to zero.

As few people understand the role played by Identity Politics in the attack on President Trump and the American working class that elected him and the role of Identity Politics in falsifying American history, it is beneficial to revisit the Charlottesville, Virginia, staged show of last August and the way the presstitutes cast an Identity Politics explanation over the show.

As the liberal/progressive/left, the Democratic Party, major corporate cultures, and the print and TV media have no compunction about attacking white people in the most threatening and hurtful ways, Amnesty International's Margaret Huang is clearly wrong when she declares whites, with gags in their mouths, to be the "emboldened and empowered violent segments of our society."

Listening to NPR last August confirmed what I already knew. Charlottesville is being turned into another nail in President Trump's coffin. NPR had no interest whatsoever in reporting the actual facts about what had occurred in Charlottesville. The several "interviews" with the like-minded were orchestrated to produce the desired propaganda result: It was all Trump's fault. It was Trump's fault for many reasons. He had stirred up White Supremacists and Nazis by appealing during the presidential election campaign to their supremacist views with his slogan "America first."

Of course, what Trump means by "America first," is precisely what the voters understood him to mean -- the interest of the broad American public should come before trade deals that serve the interests of other countries and the narrow profit interests of global corporations. However, the NPR propagandists put words in Trump's mouth and twisted the meaning of the slogan to be "White America Comes First."

In other words, "America first" according to NPR is code language to white supremacists to take advantage of the electoral college and elect a leader over the popular vote of the heavy population densities in the narrow geographical areas that comprise the northeast and west coasts, the centers of moral rot. Thus, Trump was the candidate of white supremacists and, thereby, illegitimate.

NPR next conveyed the message that Trump proved he was the Nazis' candidate when he criticized both sides for the trouble in Charlottesville. NPR used its orchestrated interviews to place all blame for violence on the group that had a permit for their rally. According to NPR, the group that had no permit and formed in order to protest the rally consisted entirely of white hats defending America from free speech by alleged Nazis and racists.

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Today, the country commemorates the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King. More than ever, America desperately needs his healing and insightful words to position us in the direction of tolerance, understanding, and respect for all people.

Dr. King understood: Everything is interconnected. Those in the environmental justice space can point to him as a groundbreaker in recognizing how the inequity between the living circumstances of African-Americans and their white counterparts resulted in an impact on their health. (It continues to do so.)

In 1966, Dr. King protested the subpar housing conditions for African-Americans that predominated in the city of Chicago. He understood that hazardous work often fell to those at the bottom of the economic ladder. In March of 1968, he went to Memphis, Tennessee to lead a strike of black sanitation workers against their working conditions. It was upon his return to that city, to spearhead another action during the first week of April, that he was murdered.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the larger picture came into focus. It became evident that low-income people and minorities were having toxic dumps sited disproportionately near their homes and schools.

Environmental equity has since become a recognized component in the fight for social justice, even if the Trump administration shut down the Office of Environmental Justice.

Local leaders have taken up the fight against toxic waste sitings, polluting industrial locations, and incinerators near their frontline communities. From Standing Rock to Baltimore -- activists are moving forward on the example set by Dr. King.

In a letter composed while in jail in Birmingham, Dr. King wrote:

"All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

It is a painful time in our country; a divided time. The loudest and most powerful voices promote the concept that commerce and money are more important than people, health, and the survival of the planet. The focus is on the benefit of the few and not the many.

It is discouraging and can feel overwhelming. However, the numerous quotes given to us through the insights and wisdom of Dr. King help. They make it possible to continue the daily fight to make a difference in small but steady increments, as we each raise our voice against injustice.

Today is a day to depend on the eloquence of Dr. King to heal our hearts and put the truth succinctly:

"One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change."

This article originally appeared on the website Moms Clean Air Force.
UKRAINE:



ukraine

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CHARLOTTESVILLE:



charlottesville

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Letter from Charlottesville to Ukraine

Nazi rallies in the news in recent years have most prominently been held here in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, and in Ukraine. I want to send thoughts of solidarity to those in Ukraine resisting fascism. And I want to let you know that some of us are urging our government in Washington, D.C., to stop supporting fascism both in the United States and in Ukraine. In addition, we are pointing to the examples being set by so many shithole countries around the world that are 100% free of fascist rallies.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brandenberg v. Ohio in 1969 that "advocacy directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action . . . likely to incite or produce such action" is not protected by the First Amendment. Sheriff Shithole has said these things: "If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees." "Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing." "See, in the good old days this doesn't happen, because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it again so easily." "You know what I hate? There's a guy, totally disruptive, throwing punches, we're not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days--you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks." "See the first group, I was nice. Oh, take your time. The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I'll be a little more violent. And the fourth group, I'll say get the hell out of here!" "I'd like to punch him in the face, I tell ya." "You see, in the good old days, law enforcement acted a lot quicker than this. A lot quicker. In the good old days, they'd rip him out of that seat so fast -- but today, everybody's politically correct." "He was swinging, he was hitting people, and the audience hit back. That's what we need more of."

Numerous incidents of violence followed these comments. John Franklin McGraw punched a man in the face at a Trump event, and then told Inside Edition that "The next time we see him, we might have to kill him." Trump said that he was considering paying McGraw's legal bills. Since Trump's election and inauguration, his comments appearing to incite violence have continued, as have incidents of violence in which those participating in violence have pointed to Trump as justification. On July 2, 2017, Trump tweeted a video of himself body slamming a man with an image of "CNN" superimposed on him. In August 2017, participants in a racist rally here in Charlottesville credited Trump with boosting their cause. Their violence included actions that have led to a murder charge. Trump publicly minimized the offense and sought to blame "many sides."

Surprisingly perhaps to some Americans, though not to Ukrainians, U.S. support for Nazism in Ukraine did not begin with Trump. In fact, it is well established that in 2014 the U.S. government helped a new government come to power in Ukraine, a new government supported and armed and trained by the United States from that moment to this, a new government including and empowering Nazis. Professor Stephen Cohen's account of the Ukrainian coup is summarized in The Nation:

"Which brings Cohen to another prevailing media myth: that what occurred on Maidan in February 2014 was a 'democratic revolution.' Whether it was in fact a 'revolution' can be left to future historians, though most of the oligarchic powers that afflicted Ukraine before 2014 remain in place four years later, along with their corrupt practices. As for 'democratic,' removing a legally elected president by threatening his life hardly qualifies. Nor does the peremptory way the new government was formed, the constitution changed, and pro-Yanukovych parties banned. Though the overthrow involved people in the streets, this was a coup. How much of it was spontaneous and how much directed, or inspired, by high-level actors in the West also remains unclear. But one other myth needs to be dispelled. The rush to seize Yanukovych's residence was triggered by snipers who killed some 80 or more protesters and policemen on Maidan. It was long said that the snipers had been sent by Yanukovych, but it has now been virtually proven that the shooters were instead from the neo-fascist group Right Sector among the protesters on the square. (See, for example, the reports of the scholar Ivan Katchanovski.)

"The antidemocratic origins of today's Kiev regime continue to afflict it. Its president, Petro Poroshenko, is intensely unpopular at home. It remains pervasively corrupt. Its Western-financed economy continues to fail, as even some of its ardent American cheerleaders now admit. And for the most part it continues to refuse to implement its obligations under the 2015 Minsk II peace accords, above all granting the rebel Donbass territories enough home rule to keep them in the Ukrainian state. Meanwhile, Kiev is semi-hostage to armed ultranationalist battalions, whose ideology and symbols include proudly neo-fascist ones, which hate Russia and today's Western "civilizational" values almost equally. It may be said that the Donbass rebel 'republics' have their own ugly traits, but it should be added that they fight only in defense of their own territory against the armies of Kiev and are not sponsored by the US government.

"Adding to this explosive mix, the Trump administration now promises to supply more weapons. The official pretext is plainly contrived: to deter Putin from 'further aggression against Ukraine,' for which he has shown no desire or intention whatsoever. Nor does it make any geopolitical or strategic sense. Neighboring Russia can easily upgrade its weapons to the rebel provinces. Indeed, the danger is that Kiev's failing regime will interpret the American arms as a signal from Washington for a new offensive against the Donbass in order to regain support at home--but which will end again in military disaster for Kiev while perhaps bringing neo-fascists, who may well come into possession of the American weapons, closer to power, and the new US-Russian Cold War closer to a larger, more direct war between the nuclear superpowers. (US trainers will need to be sent with the weapons, adding to the some 300 already there. If any are killed by Russian-backed rebel forces, even if unintentionally, what will be Washington's reaction?)"

Let's recall with Max Blumenthal what happened in 2014:

"White supremacist banners and Confederate flags were draped inside Kiev's occupied City Hall, and demonstrators have hoisted Nazi SS and white power symbols over a toppled memorial to V.I. Lenin. After Yanukovich fled his palatial estate by helicopter, EuroMaidan protesters destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who died battling German occupation during World War II. Sieg heil salutes and the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol have become an increasingly common site in Maidan Square, and neo-Nazi forces have established 'autonomous zones' in and around Kiev.

"An Anarchist group called AntiFascist Union Ukraine attempted to join the Euromaidan demonstrations but found it difficult to avoid threats of violence and imprecations from the gangs of neo-Nazis roving the square. "They called the Anarchists things like Jews, blacks, Communists," one of its members said. 'There weren't even any Communists, that was just an insult.'

"'There are lots of Nationalists here, including Nazis,' the anti-fascist continued. 'They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of protesters. . . .

". . . Svoboda's openly pro-Nazi politics have not deterred Senator John McCain from addressing a EuroMaidan rally alongside Tyahnybok, nor did it prevent Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland from enjoying a friendly meeting with the Svoboda leader this February. . . . In a leaked phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland revealed her wish for Tyahnybok to remain 'on the outside,' but to consult with the US's replacement for Yanukovich, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, 'four times a week.' At a December 5, 2013 US-Ukraine Foundation Conference, Nuland boasted that the US had invested $5 billion to 'build democratic skills and institutions' in Ukraine, though she did not offer any details. 'The Euro-Maidan movement has come to embody the principles and values that are the cornerstones for all free democracies,' Nuland proclaimed. Two weeks later, 15,000 Svoboda members held a torchlight ceremony in the city of Lviv in honor of Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era Nazi collaborator."

This past November, The Hill reminded us that The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda:

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We already knew that Tulsi Gabbard was courageous, when the Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii resigned from her position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in disgust during the primary season in 2016, declaring publicly what we now know to have been true -- that the DNC was manipulating the primaries to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders -- was courageous. Now as basically the only member of Congress with the guts to call out the US as the cause of our current knife-edge threat of a nuclear war, she's demonstrated her courage again.

Gabbard, interviewed on ABC New s, declared unambiguously that the reason that North Korea has worked so diligently to develop nuclear weapons and missiles capable of delivering them to the US is that the United States over several decades and under a number of presidents, has had a policy of "regime change," and a history of violently attempting to overthrow governments that it doesn't like. As she put it in an interview over the weekend with ABC news host George Stephanopolos, "Our country's history of regime-change wars has led countries like North Korea to develop and hold on to these nuclear weapons because they see it as their only deterrent against regime change."

Rep. Gabbard, who has been calling for the US to negotiate directly "and without pre-conditions" with North Korea to resolve the crisis, says the US also needs to recognize the reality that North Korea already has nuclear weapons and is not going to give them up unless it feels secure from US attack.

She is firm in saying that the US history of overthrowing Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi after first convincing him that if he dropped his efforts to develop a nuclear weapon they would not attempt to overthrow his government, and then invading and overthrowing him, and of invading and overthrowing Saddam Hussein after trumping up a fake claim that he was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, will make it all the harder to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to agree to halt or scale back, much less eliminate his nuclear weapons and missile arsenal. She adds that President Trump's current threat to cancel an agreement reached by his predecessor, President Barack Obama and the leaders of Iran to terminate their nuclear fuel enrichment program in return for the US dropping sanctions on that country will also undermine any future efforts by the US to reach negotiated agreements on weapons and nuclear disarmament with Kim and any other countries that might seek to go nuclear.

It was all a little more than Stephanopolos, once a press spokesman for the administration of President Bill Clinton, who asked her, feigning incredulity, "Just to be clear, are you saying that Kim Jong-un's nuclear arsenal is our fault?"

That's the point in an interview where your typical American pol would backpedal like mad to defend the sanctity of American exceptionalism"

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3764

(Article changed on January 16, 2018 at 14:34)
It was convenient for the teaching moment that James Risen just recounted the New York Times' refusal back in 2004 to report on George W. Bush's (secret and criminal) warrantless spying prior to Bush's "re-election" for fear of costing Bush votes, at the same time that a harmoniously bipartisan Congress was just now voting to empower Donald Trump to (openly and legally) spy on everybody without any warrants.

How did a crime become a policy? Nobody, not even the "Constitutional law professor" who committed the same crime for the 8 years before Trump, re-wrote the Fourth Amendment. So, what transformed Bush's crimes into Trump's respectable policies was exactly what we said would do that: the failure to impeach Bush and remove him from office. The powers of the imperial president to spy, imprison, torture, and murder increased under Bush, and under Obama, and under Trump. And if we survive Trump, that trend will continue.

Not only will presidential powers expand, but the odiousness of the individuals occupying the office will increase. Those who say that's impossible also said it was impossible under one or the other of the previous two presidents, depending on partisanship.

Thankfully, a large and growing percentage of the public tells pollsters that Trump should be impeached and removed from office. Millions sign a petition or two. But they do little else. Most activist organizations do nothing at all. And most seasoned activists dismiss the very idea of ever impeaching anyone out of hand. Virtually none of them have ever heard anything about the frequency and potency of impeachment through U.S. history. Every last one of them imagines that a Trump impeachment is about Russia fantasies or nothing, as if the reasons that they themselves despise and fear Trump just don't exist. And you'll not find a single activist anywhere who believes their activism can change society in such a manner that following a successful impeachment, the next office holder will be expected to behave better or face impeachment too.

Thus, when you ask a random person if Trump should be impeached and removed from office, as often as not they will shout "Hell, yeah!" (And I strongly suspect that pattern would hold outside of the United States as well as here within it.) But if you ask an activist at a politically engaged conference or rally in the U.S., I can almost guarantee you that -- at the absolute best -- they will mumble that they wouldn't mind such an impossibility.

The majority of them will then tell you the very same things they told you pre-inauguration. Nothing has changed in the anti-impeachment song list during the past year. First and foremost, if you want Trump impeached, you are working on behalf of the Evil Mike Pence who will be worse. Never mind that if you allow Trump to do anything he wants, we may all die quickly and will certainly die slowly from climate destruction. Never mind that if you apply no limits to the presidency, you will offer unprecedented power to one or the other of two candidates as bad or worse than Trump. If you think I'm kidding, go ask a Democrat what Oprah should do, and then watch Oprah in 2003 pushing for a war on Iraq. Oprah does not approach Trump in odiousness, but Democrats seem completely incapable of swooning over anyone who hasn't pushed for major mass-murders, and they seem to be limiting their search to people hoarding billions of dollars while striving for vacuous corporate-friendly celebrity. This doesn't end well.

Next, activists will tell you that by pursuing impeachment you're helping the evil Democrats. Never mind that you can't be helping both Pence and Democrats in the worldview of people who recognize and wildly exaggerate the differences between the two parties. Never mind that Nancy Pelosi has made herself the leading opponent of impeachment, just as she did under George W. Bush. Never mind that Rahm Emanuel in January 2007 said they would keep Bush around and the war going for two more years in order to run "against" them again. Never mind that the Democrats' whole permanent election campaign strategy of simply not being Trump would collapse in the absence of Trump.

Next they'll tell you that you're failing to help the good Democrats who need you to focus on elections instead of silly distractions like establishing limits on dictatorial power. Never mind that you can't be doing this along with your other sins. Never mind that the focus on elections has given the Democrats election losses and the rest of us a country trending toward shitholery.

Next they'll tell you that impeachment is not what poor people's organizations want. And in the end they'll tell you that it just can't be done. But show me a poll of poor people who oppose impeaching Trump. I'd like to see that. The problem is not poor people, or their desperate needs for food and shelter, or middle-class people. The problem is the activists who have made the flabbergasting discoveries that there are lots of people, including Mike Pence, in the U.S. government with horrific records and that whole agencies and policies are corrupt and destructive. (I know, isn't it unbelievable? I'm shocked, I tell you.)

The answer, if there is one, is for the people who haven't been properly trained in wise activism to simply get active, to do more than sign a petition, to organize an event, to set up a lobby meeting, to put stories into both good and large media, and to engage in nonviolent civil resistance -- not to be confused with The Resistance. None of the big organizations who jumped onto Occupy when it made the corporate news had proposed creating it in the first place. If you build an impeachment movement, they will come. If you don't, I've warned you what's coming.
Military Training Aircraft Market 2018 Global Share, Trend, Segmentation and Forecast to 2023

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https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/military-training-aircraft-market-3984

Market Highlights:Military training aircraft are used by the air forces to train their pilots for future roles and responsibilities. The pilots are trained in different stages and as the stages advance the pilot numbers get reduced. Each pilot has a specific set of skills suited for either fixed wing or rotor aircraft so it is defined during the training regimen, what a pilot would operate. Increasing investments on the military aircraft from the emerging economies is a major factor driving the growth of the market. However, the increasing adoption of virtual training is a crucial factor that may hamper the growth of the market.On the basis of application, the global military training aircraft market was dominated by the armed aircraft, which is primarily designed to destroy enemy equipment with their own armament. Concurrently, the unarmed aircraft are designed specifically for transport and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) purposes.Therefore, the global military training aircraft market is expected to witness significant growth, during the forecast period.Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 40 market data tables and figures spread over 80 numbers of pages on the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on Military Training Aircraft Market Research Report  Global Forecast to 2023.Request a Sample Report @Major Key Players:The Boeing Company (US),Lockheed Martin Corporation (US),Irkut Corporation (Russia),Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (India),Diamond Aircraft Industries Inc. (Austria),Northrop Corporation (US),Fabrica Militaar De Aviones (Argentina),Grob Aircraft AG (Germany),Raytheon Aircraft Company (US),BAE Systems (UK).Market Research Analysis:On the basis of type, the global military training aircraft market was dominated by the fixed wing aircraft, in 2016. Rotary wing aircraft has one or more power-driven horizontal propellers or rotors that enable it to take off vertically and move in any direction, or remain stationary in the air. The market for rotary wing aircraft is expected to grow significantly and at a faster rate, during the forecast period.Scope of the Report:This study provides an overview of the global military training aircraft market, tracking two market segments across three geographic regions. The report studies the key players, providing a five-year annual trend analysis that highlights market size, volume and share for Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. The report also provides a forecast, focusing on the market opportunities for the next five years for each region. The scope of the study segments the global military training aircraft market as type and application.Access Report Details @Global Military Training Aircraft Market, By Type Fixed-Wing Aircraft Rotary-Wing AircraftGlobal Military Training Aircraft Market, By Application Armed UnarmedAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Border Surveillance Market

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https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/border-surveillance-market-4028

Market Highlights:The Global Border Surveillance Market is growing with the rapid pace; mainly due to the increasing prevalence of Terrorism activities across the globe. According to a recent study report published by the Market Research Future, The global market of Border Surveillance is booming and expected to gain prominence over the forecast period. The market is projected to demonstrate a spectacular growth by 2023, surpassing its previous growth records in terms of value with a striking CAGR of 5% during the anticipated period (2016  2023).Growing demand for surveillance drones, integration of IP technology in surveillance cameras, and introduction of thermal imaging and panoramic surveillance cameras are some of the primary factors driving the global border surveillance market. Furthermore, the increased adoption of the stealth surveillance drones in the vulnerable coastal/territorial borders and the growing usage of surveillance cameras for the protection of critical infrastructure is also expected to fuel the demand in the border surveillance market.Border surveillance is one of the key areas, where every country focuses upon, as these borders safeguard a nations security, sovereignty, and economic prosperity. Rapidly rising cross border conflicts and territory conflicts in specific regions is expected to propel the demand in the global border surveillance market. Development of new methods of surveillance through high end cameras and drones has resulted in opening of new revenue streams in this market. The recent Syrian refugee crisis (Aug.2017) beckons the need to increase the investments in the border surveillance market. In response to this demand, the US Department of Defence (DOD) and the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) have amplified the usage of unmanned systems, for the soul purpose of monitoring the national borders. Consequently, the increasing application of unmanned solutions has significantly contributed towards the growth of the global border surveillance market.Request a Sample Report @The key players of the global border surveillance market are: DJI (China), General Atomics (U.S.), Leonardo S.p.A (Italy), Lockheed Martin(U.S.), Northrop Grumman(U.S.), Thales Group(France), General Dynamics (U.S.), Honeywell International (U.S.), FLIR Systems (U.S.), and Moog (India).Competitive AnalysisCharacterized by the presence of several major well-established players, the global Market of Border Surveillance appears to be highly competitive. To maintain their market position and to drive the market growth, these players are focusing upon developing their product portfolio with the help of advance technologies. Innovation, mergers & acquisitions, and brand reinforcement remain the key trends for leading players. Major players are investing on internal R&D and, most of all, in acquiring other firms. Prominent manufacturers of Border Surveillance Equipment are targeting to invest more in technology and research and development activities to innovate their already existing products. The rising government funding is also expected to motivate key companies to manufacture new Border Surveillance Equipment that match the changing trends and needs of the patrons.These players possess state of art R&D labs and strong sales and distribution network which have helped them to gain leadership position in the market. An ever-increasing emphasis has been observed among Border Surveillance Equipment industry marketers on inbound lead generation over branding-oriented efforts.Browse Full Report @Regional AnalysisAsia-Pacific is expected to be one of the leading markets, by 2023, mainly due to increasing number of cross border conflicts in this region. In the recent years, nations like Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan have increased their military spending in order to secure their borders against China, due to the conflict at the South China Sea. Other countries such as India and South Korea are expected to implement incremental features on their borders to counter the threats from their disruptive neighbours. The Middle East countries, in particular, are expected to register a high growth rate, with Saudi Arabia heavily investing in the construction of a 60 mile-wall on the Iraq border. Moreover, the Middle Eastern region, specifically due to the emergence of the Islamic State (IS), is expected to step up their efforts in order to secure their borders.Table of Content1 Introduction1.1 Definition1.2 Scope of Study1.3 Research Objective1.4 Assumptions & Limitations1.5 Market Structure:2 Research Methodology2.1 Research Process2.2 Primary Research2.3 Secondary Research3 Market Dynamics3.1 Drivers3.2 Restraints3.3 Opportunities3.4 Challenges3.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4 Market Factor Analysis4.1 Porters five forces model4.1.1 Bargaining Power of suppliers4.1.2 Bargaining Power of Customer4.1.3 Intensity of Competitors4.1.4 Threat of New Entrants5 Border Surveillance Market, By ComponentsContinuedAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Aircraft Engine Fuel Systems Market 2018 Global Analysis,Research,Review,Applications and Forecast to 2023

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https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/aircraft-engine-fuel-systems-market-4104

Market Highlights:The aircraft engine fuel systems can be of various types, depending on the type of aircraft. For example, a single engine aircraft is equipped with a different fuel system as compared to a twin engine or multi engine plane. The chief function of the aircraft engine fuel system is its operability as a shut-off valve. In addition, it provides the option to the aircraft pilot, to select the tank that would feed the aircraft engine.The rapidly growing aircraft deliveries are one of the primary factors driving the global aircraft engine fuel systems market. In addition, the development of lightweight fuel delivery systems has also contributed towards the market growth. Moreover, as the airline companies are focusing on the attainment of increased aircraft efficiencies and reduction of the operational costs, the market for aircraft engine fuel systems is expected to witness a significant growth, during the forecast period. As a result, it is expected that the global aircraft engine fuel systems market would surpass USD XX billion, by 2023, growing at a CAGR of more than 6%, during the forecast period.Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 40 market data tables and figures spread over 80 numbers of pages on the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on the Global Aircraft Engine Fuel Systems Market Research Report - Forecast to 2023.Request a Sample Report @Key PlayersEaton Corporation Plc,Parker Hannifin Corporation,United Technologies Corporation,Triumph Group,Woodward, Inc.,GKN Plc,Honeywell International, Inc.,Zodiac Aerospace,Meggitt Plc.Global Aircraft Engine Fuel Systems Market:Since, the fuel costs approximately account for 30-40% of the airlines total operating costs, there has been an increased demand for the next-generation fuel efficient aircraft. Concurrently, the aircraft manufacturers have been incorporating advanced lightweight materials in both the aircrafts structural and semi-structural components, in order to reduce the aircraft weight, which improves the aircraft fuel efficiency. Furthermore, with the emergence of composite-manufactured fuel systems that make the aircraft more fuel efficient, the market provides immense opportunities for the associated companies. Therefore, it is expected that innovative refueling systems, in the next generation planes, along with the presence of emergency fuel systems would create ample opportunities for the market players to maximize their profits and in turn contribute towards the growth of the global aircraft engine fuel systems market.Regional AnalysisNorth America is expected to dominate the aircraft engine fuel systems market by 2023, primarily due to the presence of the established firms in the US. Moreover, since the region is a major hub of the aerospace industry, it directly contributes to the growth of the market in the region.It is expected that by 2023, the Asia-Pacific region would attain the fastest growth in the market, largely due to the rapidly rising commercial aircraft fleets in the region. Moreover, the high military expenses by countries like India and China, have also resulted in the market growth for the region.Access Report Details @Table of Content1 Introduction1.1 Definition1.2 Scope Of Study1.3 Research Objective1.4 Assumptions & Limitations1.5 Market Structure:2 Research Methodology2.1 Research Process2.2 Primary Research2.3 Secondary Research3 Market Dynamics3.1 Drivers3.2 Restraints3.3 Opportunities3.4 Challenges3.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4 Market Factor Analysis4.1 Porters Five Forces Model4.1.1 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers4.1.2 Bargaining Power Of Customer4.1.3 Intensity Of Competitors4.1.4 Threat Of New Entrants5 Aircraft Engine Fuel System Market, By Engine Type5.1 Introduction5.1.1 Jet Engine5.1.2 Helicopter Engine5.1.3 Tubroprop5.1.4 UAV Engine8 Aircraft Engine Fuel System Market, By RegionContinued..About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Anti-Tank Missile Market 2018 Global Market Size, Developments Status, Trends and Key Players Analysis, Forecast 2023

https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/3159

https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/anti-tank-missile-market-3159

Market Highlights:Anti-tank missiles are largely developed to hit and destroy tanks and other armored military vehicles. These weapons vary in size, ranging from man-portable tripod-mounted and shoulder-launched weapons to vehicle and aircraft-mounted weapons. These weapons enable the armed troops, ground-vehicles, and fighter aircraft to counter and defeat the small, medium-sized, and main battle tanks (MBTs) at great ranges. Of late, the anti-tank missiles are being extensively used by a number of defense authorities, across the globe, and the market is rapidly gaining momentum in Asia and the Middle East regions.With the growing defense expenses in some countries, there has been a simultaneous boost to the market. Moreover, factors such as the growing procurement of anti-tank missiles, increasing R&D investments on the existing missile systems, and the introduction of long-range anti-tank missiles would significantly propel the market growth. Concurrently, the continued usage of smokescreens by a number of armed and rebel forces along with the accuracy issues associated with the anti-tank guided missiles can prove to be a hurdle for the growth of the market.Request a Sample Report @Major Key PlayersDenel Dynamics (South Africa),General Dynamics (US),Israel Military Industries (Israel),KBP Instrument Design Bureau (Russia),Rocketsan Missiles Inc. (Turkey),Lockheed Martin (US),MBDA (UK),Rafael Advanced Defense Systems (Israel),Raytheon (US),Saab Bofors Dynamics (Sweden).In 2016, market was valued at USD 8,377.0 million and is anticipated that the market would grow at a CAGR of around 4.25%, during the forecast period.Browse Full Report @Global Anti-Tank Missile marketIn 2016, the market was led by Americas with a share of 39%. The technological advancements in warfare platforms and increasing defense budgets in countries such as the US and Canada, are some of the major factors driving the growth of the market. Asia-Pacific was the second-largest market in 2016, valued at USD 2,680.6 million in 2016. The increasing terrorism and border threats in the region, drives the demand in the region. EMEA is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.80%, during the orecast period.Intended Audience Defense authorities Missile manufacturers Government as well as Independent Regulatory AuthoritiesThe report for Global Anti-Tank Missile Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regionsAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Military Exoskeleton Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10% | Military Exoskeleton Market 2017 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2023

https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4134

https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/military-exoskeleton-market-4134

Market highlights:Modern-day soldiers are equipped with radios, night vision devices, global positioning system (GPS) equipment, and computers in their uniforms that provide them with real-time data, which assist the troops with satellite imagery of the battlefield and significantly enhance their situational awareness. As a result, there is a growing demand for integrated smart weapons and lightweight body armors. Military Exoskeletons are lighter than the conventional load carriage or armor systems, and they enable added protection and counter attack against hostile enemy advances. Therefore, there have been significant developments of light weight body suits, which would boost the efficiency of the armed troops in the battlefield. With a higher number of lethal and protective Exoskeletons being developed, the market is expected to witness tremendous growth during the forecast period.The growing number of volatile political unrests, security threats, and ongoing disputes in certain regions of the globe has increased the demand for military exoskeleton systems in the recent years. These systems offer additional combat capabilities along with extra strength and protection to the soldiers in a battlefield. They also enable the carriage of heavy loads during tough military missions/operations (such as during search and rescue or counter-insurgency operations). The rising concerns about soldier safety and injuries have increased the demand for these advanced military body suits. As a result, the global military Exoskeleton market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 25.87%Get a Sample Report @Major Key PlayersBAE Systems,General Atomics,Lockheed Martin,Raytheon,Safran,Bionic Power,Ekso Bionics,20 Knots Plus,Revision Military,SpringActive,SRI International.Regional AnalysisBy 2023, North America is expected to be the dominant region in the military Exoskeleton market primarily due to the presence of major manufacturers in this region. In addition, increasing military expenses by the US Department of Defense (DOD) on these body suits have resulted in the development of advanced military exoskeleton systems. Europe is expected to acquire the second largest market due to the high expenses on soldier modernization programs by countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK, which would come in aid of their soldiers, by enhancing their operational and attack capabilities.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.For further information on this report, visit @The report for Global Military Exoskeleton Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Construction Chemicals Market is Trending Worldwide due to Trends, Analysis & Forecast 2022

Construction Chemical Market

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https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/construction-chemicals-market-1960

Market Research Future Published a Half Cooked Research Global Construction Chemicals Market Research Report  Forecast to 2022  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast up to 2022.BASF SE (Germany), Arkema SA (France), Ashland Inc. (U.S.), Fosroc International Limited (U.K.), Mapie S.p.A (Italy), Pidilite Industries Limited (India), RPM International Inc. (U.S.), Sika AG (Switzerland), The Dow Chemical Co.(U.S.), and W.R. Grace & Company (U.S.) among others. are some of the prominent players at the forefront of competition in the Global Construction ChemicalsMarket and are profiled in MRFR Analysis.Construction Chemicals Market  Market OverviewConstruction Chemicals are specialty chemicals used in various construction activities residential, non-residential and renovation. These chemicals enhances the overall performance of end products used in the building and construction. The Construction Chemicals Market can be broadly classified into concrete admixtures, waterproofing chemicals, flooring compounds, and adhesives & sealants among others.As the name suggests, the market is highly dependent on the dynamics of construction industry across the globe. On a holistic, the emerging economies such as Asia Pacific and Middle East is expected to be the sweet spot for Construction Chemicals. For instance, Indias vision Housing for all by 2022 initiatives is expected to boost the demand. Whereas, regained stability of housing market and increasing reconstruction activities in developed economies is expected to drive the demand.Receive a Sample Report upon Request @The market consumption trends vary region to region, for instance, the economic downturn in 2008-09 in the U.S which had an adverse effect on the housing industry in the country witnessed sharp decline in the Ceramic Tile Industry. However, the recent stats showing a positive outlook for housing market in the U.S for 2017-18 with low mortgage rates in the country beefing up new construction activities. Hence, a positive prospect for the ceramic tile players operating in the region. Since, the construction chemicals are majorly consumed in its close vicinity of production.Construction Chemicals are widely consumed among new residential and non-residential constructions along with the reconstruction and renovation activities. With the increasing population, urbanization, and industrialization in the emerging economies such as Asia Pacific and Middles East are stimulating the construction activities. These are some of the protuberant market compelling factors for construction chemicals.Amidst the decline in oil prices in the GCC the Construction Activities in the region still remains as a strong indicator for economic growth in the region. The construction activities is expected to stimulate in the coming years with an overall capital spending in GCC estimated at USD 480 billion of which 65% will be towards infrastructure development. Accounting for the latter mentioned factors it is healthy to assume a pool of market opportunities for Construction Chemicals in the Middle East adding value to the Global Construction Chemicals Market as a whole.Protuberant trend in the Construction Chemicals Market includes. Furthermore, government initiatives in the emerging economies for infrastructural developments is expected to stimulate the market for Construction Chemicals. For instance, government of Indias proposed spending in infrastructure accounting for 10% of the countrys GDP in its 12Th five-year plans will boost the demand for Construction Chemicals In the country.Construction Chemicals Market  Competitive AnalysisThe Construction Chemicals is a fragmented market, the competition is intense among the players operating in this market with increasing demand for construction chemicals players operating in the market wants to capture maximum share in the market. Some of the strategies adopted by the players operating in the market includes, capacity expansions, product launches and expanding geographical presence.Access Complete Report @Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:August, 2016  BASF opened its first production plant in Sri Lanka for the production of standard and custom-made performance based construction chemicals. The plant was in line with companys geographic expansion strategy to cater the increasing demand from customers in Sri LankaApril, 2016-, BASF expanded its construction chemicals division in Russia. This expansion was in line with expanding the waterproofing chemicals portfolio for the Russian market.April, 2016-, In line with the rapid growth of construction industry in India, BASF launched three new constructions solutions in the India market. Low-viscosity concrete admixtures, waterproofing solutions and waterproofing solutions for parking structure. The solutions launched are cost-effective, durable thus minimising the resources used in construction and repairs.February, 2016- Sika AG, opened two construction chemicals plant in Southeast Asia addressing the increasing construction activities in the region. The plants are located in Myanmar and Cambodia. This expansion was in line with companys strategy 2018, which involves penetration into new markets by opening new factories.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by Components, Application, Logistics and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Global Fire Resistant Paints Market 2018-2023 PPG, JOTUN, Nippon, LANLING

Fire Resistant Paints Market

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http://qymarketsresearch.com/report/global-fire-resistant-paints-market-2018-size-gro-141506/

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Fire Resistant Paints Market Research 2018A market study "Global Fire Resistant Paints Market" examines the performance of the Fire Resistant Paints market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Fire Resistant Paints market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Fire Resistant Paints market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Fire Resistant Paints Market 2018 report includes Fire Resistant Paints market Revenue, market Share, Fire Resistant Paints industry volume, market Trends, Fire Resistant Paints Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Fire Resistant Paints Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Fire Resistant Paints Market 2018 :1. International2. PPG3. JOTUN4. Nippon5. LANLING6. YONGXIN7. Champion8. TH9. SKK10. DMD11. KUCK12. Sika13. Oasis14. AkzoNobelFire Resistant Paints Market : By ApplicationBuilding & constructionOil & gasAutomotiveAerospace & marineElectrical & electronicsFurnitureTextilesFire Resistant Paints Market : By TypeType IType IIFirstly, the report covers the top Fire Resistant Paints manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Fire Resistant Paints report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Fire Resistant Paints industry, Fire Resistant Paints industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Fire Resistant Paints Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Fire Resistant Paints research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Fire Resistant Paints market revenue worldwide.Finally, Fire Resistant Paints market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Us:"QY Markets Research" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.5001 Spring Valley Road,Suite 400 East,Dallas, TX 75244, USAContact: +1-214-661-1669Web:
Brushless DC Motors Market - Higher Growth,Ratio & Forecast 2017 - 2025

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Brushless DC Motors Market: SnapshotThe brushless DC motors market has become increasingly commercially important in recent years following the rising use of electronic systems in novel application streams such as the automotive sector. Brushless DC motors are more expensive than conventional brushed DC motors, but provide significant benefits in terms of operational efficiency and maintenance requirements, i.e. they offer a higher power-to-volume ratio, which has been a key factor driving the brushless DC motors market, and they require less maintenance than conventional brushed DC motors.The growth of the electric vehicles industry has been a key catalyst for the global brushless DC motors market. The higher per-volume output of brushless DC motors has allowed automotive manufacturers to utilize them to provide more torque than similar-sized engines using brushed DC motors. The vital importance of torque in the running of electric automobiles is likely to remain a key driver for the global brushless DC motors market in the coming years, as more automotive manufacturers are likely to enter the electric vehicles sector due to the increasingly lucrative prospects of the sector.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Governments across the world have adopted a supportive stance regarding the electric vehicles sector and public perception regarding the sector has also become increasingly supportive following consistent technological advancement, which has led to the availability of sophisticated and reliable electric vehicles. Automotive giants such as Toyota have made huge strides in the electric vehicles sector in recent years, while newcomers such as Tesla have also made vital contributions, which bodes well for the global brushless DC motors market in the coming years.Global Brushless DC Motors Market: OverviewOn account of the convenience and efficiency brushless DC motors offer, they are slated to exhibit substantial demand over the forecast period between 2017 and 2025. Also known as a BLDC motor, a brushless DC motor consists of a stator and a permanent magnet. Instead of brushes, the brushless DC motor uses an electronic drive for feeding stator windings.The report on the brushless DC motors market studies the key challenges, growth drivers, recent developments, trends, and opportunities. The market forecasts, market attractiveness, major segments, competitive landscape, technological advancements, along with relevant figures and charts, are provided. The major companies are described in detail, wherein their market shares, strategic overview, and SWOT analysis are discussed.Request TOC of the Report @Global Brushless DC Motors Market: Drivers and RestraintsBrushless DC motors offer high power-to-volume ratio, apart from being more reliable, efficient, and less noisy than brushed DC motors. Responsiveness, thermal resistance, safety, and quicker acceleration are some other major advantages offered by these products, fuelling their demand over numerous industrial applications. As brushless DC motors are capable of providing large amounts of torque at a rapid pace, the demand for them is likely to increase to a great extent over the coming period. Though they are comparatively costlier than brushed motors, brushless DC motors pay off in the long term by cutting down the maintenance costs and saving a lot of time otherwise required for repairing brushed DC motors. All these benefits offered by these motors will accelerate the growth of the global brushless DC motors market.Furthermore, there has been a towering demand for electric vehicles due to the widespread prevalence of environmental initiatives. The rising awareness about carbon emissions and the urgent need to combat environmental hazards have been prompting several government policies.Since electric vehicles and other green vehicles such as go-karts make use of brushless DC motors, the market for brushless DC motors will witness an upsurge on a global scale.On the contrary, factors such as high costs and lack of adequate skilled personnel might limit growth. However, the expansion of various industrial application segments such as electronics, manufacturing, chemicals, paper and pulp, food processing, aerospace, and will create newer revenue pockets for the global brushless DC motors market.Get Discount @Global Brushless DC Motors Market: Regional OutlookThe global market for brushless DC motors can be segmented into Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific is slated to emerge with maximum growth opportunities on account of the immense growth of the automotive industry, with countries such as India, Japan, Taiwan, and China among the prominent contributors. Whereas, the U.S. will be largely responsible for the growth of the North America segment. The growth of the brushless DC motors market in South Africa can be attributed to the growing demand for electric vehicles in this region.Companies Mentioned in the ReportSome of the major companies operating in the global market for brushless DC motors are Allied Motion Technologies, ABB, AMETEK, Danaher, Minebea, Asmo, Anaheim Automation, and Rockwell Automation. Numerous market players have been concentrating their energies on product development through investments in research and development activities. This might lead to intense competition among them.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
Automotive Radar Applications Industry Market Driven By Demand Surge to Grow Exceptionally, 2022

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Market Research Future published a research report on Automotive Radar Applications Industry Market Research Report- Forecast 2022  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2022.Global Automotive Radar Applications Industry Market Information Report by application (Parking Assistance, Forward Collision Warning System, Adaptive Cruise Control, Lane Departure Warning System, and Bling Spot Detection), By Frequency (24 GHz, 77 GHz, and 79 GHz), By Technology (LiDAR, Millimeter Wave Radar, Camera, and Ultrasonic Radar) and By Region - Global Forecast To 2022.Market Scenario of Global Automotive Radar ApplicationsThe automotive radars are devices used in advanced cruise control systems to direct a vehicles accelerator and braking systems. It also helps maintain a distance between two vehicles. The radar sensors take note of vital information, such as doppler velocity, range and angle. This information is used to determine the driving situation and intimate the driver of potentially dangerous events ahead.The major drivers for Automotive Radar Application Industry Market are increase in awareness about the driving safety among the end consumers and various government initiatives to reduce the road accidents.Get Sample of Report @Regional AnalysisEurope accounts for the largest share of 35.98% in the global automotive radar applications market in 2015. Europe is one of the major revenue generator as well as producer of automotive radar however, for the manufacturer there will be an extreme opportunity to invest or increase the production capacity. It is followed by North America which accounts for 26.16% for the market share.Key PlayersThe key players in the global automotive radar applications market are Robert Bosch GMBH (Germany), Panasonic Corporation (Japan), Valeo (France), Continental AG (Germany), TRW Automotive (U.S.), Hella KGAA Hueck & Co. (Germany), Delphi (U.K.), Sabertek (U.S.), Denso (Japan), Fujitsu Ten Ltd (U.S.).Intended Audience Automotive radar applications industry manufacturers Distributer & Supplier companies End Users consultants and Investment bankers Government as well as Independent Regulatory AuthoritiesAccess Full Report@Brief Toc:1. Executive Summary2. Research Methodology3. Market Dynamics4. Global Market, By Type5. Global Market, By Technology6. Global Market, By Application7. Global Market, By End-user8. Regional Market Analysis9. Competitive Analysis10. Conclusion11. List of Tables12. List of FiguresAsk for your specific company profile and country level customization on reports.About Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for , regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Akash Anand,Market Research FuturePune  411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone No. :+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Cellular IoT Market - Highest Growth Rate During Forecast Period 2017-2025

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Cellular IoT Market: SnapshotAs more and more devices are getting connected together, the internet of things (IoT) architecture is expanding. In the future, it is estimated that all the internet devices will be connected. IoT remains the way to deliver machine to machine and device to person communication on a large scale. Most of the devices are estimated to be connected via wireless area networks (WAN), which are made possible by cellular networks. This is projected to drive the growth prospects of the global cellular IoT market in the period from 2017 to 2025.In the IoT architecture, connectivity plays a major role and hence, cellular operators will be in a position to add value to the IoT market. Various roles can be played by cellular operators in the IoT market. This is a deciding factor for the value that a cellular operator can add to the IoT architecture. With so many devices communicating with each other and people communicating with machines, huge amount of data will be generated and this will create a need for data storage, data transfer, and data interpretation in real time. In addition to this, it is essential that data storage and data transfer can be done at minimal cost. This is fulfilled by cellular networks. Different cellular technologies are evolving in terms of functionality and new radio access technologies to form an effective solution and offering tailored IoT services. These cellular technologies include: WCDMA, GSM, LTE, and 5G.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Cellular IoT Market: OverviewSeveral significant technological advancements in the area of cellular IoT will widen the horizons of the global cellular IoT market over the coming period. While the Internet connects people, IoT connects all devices and objects to the Internet. By connecting various smart devices, cellular IoT can collect sensor data from them. Some of these connected devices can be industrial equipment, vehicle electrical systems, home alarm systems, and even refrigerators and air conditioners.The report covers key trends, growth drivers, challenges, and opportunities in the global market for cellular Iot. The major market players are discussed in the report, wherein their strengths, weaknesses, market strategies, market shares, and product portfolios are studied, in addition to a SWOT analysis. The market forecasts, market attractiveness, supply and demand ratio, competitive landscape, regional markets, and technological advancements in the field of cellular IoT have also been revealed.Global Cellular IoT Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe key growth drivers of the global cellular IoT market are the increasing demand for extended network coverage and large capacity that can connect innumerable devices. Conventional cellular options such as 4G and LTE networks require high amounts of power. Moreover, these networks cannot be incorporated with several applications wherein only a small amount of data is transmitted inconsistently. Some examples are gas or electricity consumption and meters used for reading water levels. Cellular IoT, on the other hand, is capable of meeting the demands of low-power and long range applications. The large number of applications for cellular IoT will also ensure market growth.Request TOC of the Report @Widespread awareness about environmental hazards and excessive energy consumption have been fuelling the need for energy management, which is offered by cellular IoT. The growing demand for green, eco-friendly homes is another key growth driver of the market. The increasing deployment of cellular IoT in smart meters and smart grids for inter-connectivity within individual meters is likely to aid the growth of the market. On the contrary, high fragmentation in terms of technology and inadequate regulation for spectrum allocation might pose a threat to market expansion.Another driving force of the market is the growth of the NB-IoT segment. NB-IoT enables low consumption of power and extends greater coverage when compared to prevailing technologies such as SigFox. Therefore, they are slated to experience an upsurge in terms of demand.Global Cellular IoT Market: Regional OutlookThe global market for cellular IoT can be segmented into Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and the Rest of the World on the basis of geography. The North America segment furnishes a multitude of opportunities for the expansion of the cellular IoT market as numerous IoT developments have been taking place in smart building, agriculture, transportation, and infrastructure. The U.S. has been carrying out large-scale investments in numerous sectors for the implementation of projects such as Smart America, wherein IoT will aid the efficiency of healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, security, energy conservation, and emergency services.Get Discount @The sprouting of smart cities in various countries of Asia Pacific such as India and Japan will provide further impetus to the global cellular IoT market. South Korea, China, Japan, and India are investing massively in the implementation of IoT in infrastructure, which will contribute towards the growth of the market.Companies Mentioned in the ReportSome of the major companies operating in the global market for cellular IoT are U-Blox Holding AG, Gemalto N.V., CommSolid GmbH, ZTE Corporation, MediaTek Inc., Qualcomm Inc, Sierra Wireless, Sequans Communications, and Telit Communications PLC.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
Thermal Paper Market Synopsis and Highlights, Key Findings, Major Companies Analysis and Forecast to 2023

https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/880

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https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/thermal-paper-market-880

Market Research Future published a research report on Thermal Paper Market Research Report- Forecast 2023  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Global Thermal Paper Market Information Report, By Technology (Direct Thermal, Thermal Transfer, and Others), By Application (POS, Lottery & Gaming, Labels & Tags, and Others) and By Region - Global Forecast To 2023Market ScenarioOn the basis of region, North America accounted for the largest market share of 37.27% in 2016, with a market value of USD 1,197.4 Million. The region has witnessed increased demand of thermal paper, from POS application, mainly due to the high internet penetration in countries such as U.S. and Canada. The POS applications demand thermal paper for receipts, acknowledgements, and bills. The U.S. is the major market in North America. The country houses one of the biggest international retail chains such as Walmart and Amazon. This makes it an important market for thermal paper. Europe was the second-largest market in 2016, valued at USD 883.8 Million in 2016. The region accounts for increasing sales of retail industry, from both brick and mortar and online stores. The retail industry is seen pacing significantly, especially in the countries of Netherlands, U.K., and Germany. Hence, Europe is projected to grow at a CAGR of 4.38%.Hence, Global Thermal Paper Market is expected to reach a market size of USD 4,391.0 million by the end of the forecast period at CAGR of 4.66%.Get Sample of Report @Asia Pacific region is expected to grow at the highest CAGR of 5.12% during the forecast period. The region is regarded as one of the fastest growing regions, in terms of sales from both retail and online stores. With increasing disposable income and changing consumer preferences, there has been an inclination towards purchasing from online platforms, especially the international ones such as Amazon. China is the major market in Asia Pacific region, owing to the increasing population and increasing demand for consumer goods.Based on technology, the market has been segmented as direct thermal, thermal transfer, and others. The direct thermal segment accounted for the largest market share of 49.37% in 2016, with a market value of USD 1,586.1 Million. In direct thermal technology, no ribbon is used in printing. It creates the image directly on the printed material. Direct thermal printing uses chemically treated, heat-sensitive media that turns black when it passes under the thermal print head. Thermal transfer technology is projected to grow at the highest CAGR of 4.43%. Thermal transfer printing uses a heated ribbon to produce durable, long-lasting images on a wide variety of materials. Thermal transfer printers can create highly durable wristbands, asset tags, and certification labels, in addition to common labels, tags, and tickets.On the basis of application, the market has been segmented as, POS, lottery & gaming, labels & tags, and others. POS accounted for the largest market share of 58.90% in 2016. POS (Point of Sale) application includes receipts and tags at the retails stores, online purchases, and ATMs. The paper is generally compatible with most transaction-style printers and cash registers, and multiple rolls come in a pack. POS paper ensures customers get a clear, legible, smudge-free receipt each time. The thermal paper for receipts come in various dimensions to suit the end-use. The segment is expected to grow at 4.93% CAGR during the forecast period. Lottery & Gaming was the second-largest market that was valued at USD 421.5 Million in 2016. Labels & tags is also another major application. Thermal papers are used extensively for barcodes and tags and similar applications. Such labels and barcodes come handy across the supply chain of FMCG goods, for theft and security reasons.The key players of global thermal paper market are Appvion, Inc. (U.S.), Oji Paper (Thailand) Ltd. (Thailand), Koehler Paper Group (Germany), Ricoh Company Ltd (Japan), Jujo Thermal Ltd. (Finland), Mitsubishi Paper Mills Ltd. (Japan), Hansol Paper Co., Ltd (South Korea), and Nakagawa Manufacturing , Inc. (U.S.).Enquiry before Buying @Scope of the Report:This study provides an overview of the global thermal paper market, tracking two market segments across four geographic regions. The report studies key players, providing a five-year annual trend analysis that highlights market size, volume and share for North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC) and ROW. The report also provides a forecast, focusing on the market opportunities for the next six years for each region. The scope of the study segments the global thermal paper market by its technology, application, and region.Global Thermal Paper Market, By Technology Direct Thermal Thermal Transfer OthersGlobal Thermal Paper Market, By Application POS Lottery & Gaming Labels & Tags OthersThe report for Global Thermal Paper market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.Access Full Report @About Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for , regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Akash Anand,Market Research FuturePune  411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone No. :+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Automotive Fuel Injection Pump Market to Witness Highest Growth by 2023

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Market Research Future published a research report on Automotive Fuel Injection Pump Market Research Report- Forecast 2023  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Global Automotive Fuel Injection Pump Market Information Report, By Engine Type (Gasoline and Diesel), By Pressure (Low Pressure Pump and High Pressure Pump), By Type (Common Rail and Rotary Distributor) By Vehicle Type (Passenger Vehicles and Commercial Vehicles) and By Region - Forecast To 2023Market Highlights:The global automotive fuel injection pump market is constantly evolving, and is expected to witness significant growth over the forecast period. Automotive fuel injection pump is one of the most crucial vehicle parts that have gaining a lot of attention among the major vehicle manufacturers. Automotive industry has become one of the major revenue generating industries, and has come up with several technological advancements in the last few years, automotive fuel injection pumps being one of them. The global automotive fuel injection pump market has seen remarkable growth in the global market and it has been observed that, its demand in the future is expected to grow with the CAGR of ~7.14%.Automotive fuel injection pumps perform an integral function within engines and enhance their efficiency and enable a smooth run of vehicle. The global automotive fuel injection pump market is mainly influenced by certain growing factors. Some of them are low emission & higher fuel efficiency, increasing sales of new vehicles, strict government regulations on reducing vehicles emission, technological advancements and emerging economies. A major hindrance could be the rising penetration of electric vehicles. Furthermore, the growing demand for gasoline engine vehicles and increasing disposable income, create major market opportunities.Get Sample of Report @Market Research Analysis:Region wise, the global automotive fuel injection pump market has been divided into the major regions of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World. Among these regions, Asia Pacific region has dominated the global market due the driving factors such as strict regulation on vehicle emission, rising disposable income and growing new vehicle registration. During the last few years, APAC has sold the highest number of vehicles, where countries such as China, Japan and Indonesia, contribute majorly. Moreover, the growing demand for passenger vehicles has become a major driving factor for APAC region. North America is the second leading region, in terms of revenue. Whereas, Europe holds the third leading region.Key Players:The prominent players in the automotive fuel injection pump market include Continental AG (Germany), Denso Corporation (Japan), Delphi Automotive (UK), Robert Bosch (Germany), Hitachi Ltd (Japan), Infineon Technologies (Germany), Schaeffler Group (Germany), Johnson Electric (Hong Kong), Mitsubishi Electric (Japan), Valeo (France), MAHLE GmbH (Germany), and Cummins, Inc (U.S.).Enquiry before Buying @Scope of the Report:This study provides an overview of the global automotive fuel injection pump market, tracking three market segments across four geographic regions. The report studies key players, providing a six year annual trend analysis that highlights market size and share for North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Rest of the World (ROW). The report also provides a forecast, focusing on the market opportunities for the next five years for each region. The scope of the study segments the global automotive fuel injection pump market by engine type, by pressure, by type, by vehicle type and by regions.By Engine Type Gasoline DieselBy Pressure Low Pressure Pump High Pressure PumpBy Type Common Rail Rotary DistributorBy Vehicle Type Passenger Vehicles Commercial VehiclesBy Regions North America Asia Pacific Europe Rest of the WorldAccess Full Report @About Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for , regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Akash Anand,Market Research FuturePune  411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone No. :+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Internet of Things (IoT) Testing Market 2017 Analytical Overview and Global Leaders: Cognizant, Infosys, HCL Technologies, Capgemini, TCS, SmartBear Software, Rapid7

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Market Research Future published a research report on Internet of Things (IoT) Testing Market Research Report- Forecast to 2022  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2022.Market HighlightsIn this rapidly changing and technologically developing environment, internet of things are ever increasing. The market trend towards the Internet of things (IoT) is driving the Internet of things (IoT) testing market. The study indicates that due to rapid increase in internet of things it is becoming increasingly fragmented which as a result increases the need for internet of things testing.The study indicates that internet of things (IoT) testing provide an integrated approach to validate the functional and non-functional requirements of IoT solutions which helps in future proofing of business using performance testing. This results in the increase of Internet of Things (Iot) Testing Market. The internet of things (IoT) testing has few challenges to overcome. The challenges include dynamic environment, real-time complexity, scalability of system, safety concerns, privacy issues, hardware quality, network availability, complex use cases and others.The recent industry news says that Frost & Sullivan has recently recognized Keysight technologies with the 2016 Global Frost & Sullivan Company of the year award based on its recent analysis of test and measurement (T&M) industry for internet of things. (IoT).The Internet of things (IoT) testing Market is growing rapidly over 33% of CAGR and is expected to reach at USD 1708 million by the end of forecast period.Get Sample of Report @Internet of things (IoT) testing Market SegmentationThe Internet of Things (IoT) Testing Market has been segmented on the basis of testing type, testing tools and applications. Looking through the testing type segment its been observed that network connectivity testing is expected to dominate the Internet of things (IoT) testing market by the forecast period. The network testing focuses on testing of uplink and downlink speed of a network and responsiveness of the network connecting IoT application. The Internet of things (IoT) testing market would be dominated by Smart appliances application by the forecast period.Key PlayersThe prominent players in the Internet of Things (IoT) Testing market are Cognizant (U.S.), Keysight technologies (U.S.), Infosys (India), HCL Technologies (India), Capgemini (France), TCS (India), Happiest Minds Technologies (India), AFour Technologies (U.S.), SmartBear Software (U.S.), Rapid Value Solutions (U.S.), and Rapid7 (U.S.) among othersMarket Research Analysis:Regional analysis for Internet of things (IoT) testing market is studied in different geographic regions as Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of world. It has been observed that North America region would account for larger share in Internet of things (IoT) testing market. It has been observed that North America region has high adoption of internet of things and higher technology developments which has resulted in the growth of Internet of things (IoT) testing market. The study reveals that Asia-Pacific region is expected to have a significant growth in Internet of things (IoT) testing market by the forecast period. The growing internet of things penetration has increased investments in innovation by Asia-Pacific region is expected to give a boost to Internet of things (IoT) testing market in this region.Get complete Report @Intended Audience Technology investors Key market innovators Hardware vendors Regulatory agencies IoT testing providers IoT service providers Communication service providers Quality assurance providers IoT platform providers Third-party system integrators Application providers Research/Consultancy firmsAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Male Hypogonadism Market - New Opportunities for Top Players & Forecast 2017 - 2025

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Global Male Hypogonadism Market: SnapshotHypogonadism in males refers to a condition in the male body where the testes show a significantly reduced level of functioning than normal. The overall result of male hypogonadism is a reduction in the rate of biosynthesis of male sex hormones. This state is more commonly known as interrupted stage 1 puberty. Hypoandrogenism, or the low androgen or testosterone level in a male can vary in severity from person to person. It is often the cause of partial or complete infertility. There are multiple forms of male hypogonadism and even more ways to classify them. Most endocrinologists commonly classify male hypogonadism on the basis of the level of defectiveness of the male reproductive system.In many cases, doctors also measure the level of gonadotropins to classify a patient between primary and secondary male hypogonadism. Primary male hypogonadism refers to the cause of the condition being due to defective gonads. There are different types of primary male hypogonadism, including Turner syndrome and Klinefelter syndrome. Secondary male hypogonadism is caused by defects in pituitary or hypothalamic glands. They include Kallmann syndrome and hypopituitarism.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Male Hypogonadism Market: OverviewMale Hypogonadism refers to a clinical condition, wherein the testes fail to produce enough testosterone leading to delayed puberty or incomplete development. The condition is related to impaired development of muscle mass, development of breast tissues, impaired body hair growth, and lack of deepening of the voice.The male Hypogonadism market can be segmented by therapy, type, drug delivery, and geography.The report presents an in-depth analysis of the global male hypogonadism market with current trends and future estimates to explain the imminent investment pockets. The quantitative analysis of the market for the forecast period from 2017 to 2025 will enable stakeholders to capitalize on the prevailing growth opportunities.Global Male Hypogonadism Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe top driver of the male hypogonadism market includes rising prevalence of testosterone deficiency among men, increasing infertility rates, and increasing awareness among individuals about hypogonadism treatment due to awareness drives organized by several governments across the world. Moreover, high risk of hypogonadism among the geriatric population with obesity and diabetes, and increasing prevalence of chronic disorders among the geriatrics are further expected to boost the markets growth.Request TOC of the Report @However, factors such as high side effects of testosterone products are challenging the growth of testosterone replacement therapy market. Top players in the market are focused on research and development to introduce newer products with fewer or negligible side effects and improved results. For example, LPCN 1111, a product which is under development from Lipocine Inc., is a newer testosterone prodrug that utilizes Lipral technology for enhanced systemic absorption and for enhanced solubility of testosterone. Nevertheless, technological advancements are anticipated to extend new opportunities to the markets growth.Global Male Hypogonadism Market: Regional OverviewThe global male Hypogonadism market can be analyzed with respect to the regional segments of North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa. North America held the majority share of the global market in the recent past and is expected to retain its dominant position in the near future. This is mainly due to the rise in the number of individuals suffering from primary and secondary conditions of hypogonadism, and rising awareness among individuals about treatment options for the condition. Moreover, the presence of ultra-modern healthcare infrastructure and increasing popularity of technologically advanced products are expected to offer new opportunities for top players in this market. The region is closely followed by Europe.Asia Pacific is expected to offer lucrative opportunities to this market due to the modernization of the healthcare infrastructure in the emerging economies of India and China and the increasing awareness about the treatment for the condition. In Asia Pacific, the increasing prevalence of hypogonadism and infertility rates along with the rising geriatric population base with diabetes and obesity are propelling the growth of this market. China, Taiwan, and Malaysia are some of the countries that display the highest rate of male hypogonadism.Get Discount @Major Companies Mentioned in ReportSome of the key players in the male Hypogonadism market include AbbVie Inc., Astrazeneca plc, Eli Lilly and Company Ltd., Merck & Co. Inc., SA, Finox Biotech, Laboratories Genevrier, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Allergan plc, Bayer AG, Endo International plc, IBSA Institut Biochimque, and Ferring.Key players are focused on product approval for growth considerations and to cater to the changing demand of the industry. The introduction of innovative and technologically advanced products is also the focus of key players to increase their market share and for serving patients in a better manner.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
Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) Market Global Trends 2017 and Key Players: NXP Semiconductors, Alien Technology, 3M Company, ACTAtek Technology, Ascendent, Checkpointt System, Avery Dennison

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Market Research Future published a research report on Global Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) Market Research Report- Forecast 2023  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market HighlightsThe study reveals that Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) is trending in North America region. The Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) Market is driven by the innovation and advancements RFID applications in medicine tracking, supply chain, people identification and tracking, equipment tracking, and medical report, samples and blood transfer tracking and it is cost effective as well.The study signifies that the adoption of RFID solutions has increased from larger customers such as Airbus, Boeing and the U.S. Department of Defense. Aerospace companies are increasingly leveraging RFID technology to garner benefits such as improved supply chain visibility, asset management and utilization, work-in-process (WIP) tracking, improved maintenance tracking and efficient logistics and manufacturing operations.Whereas Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), sensor networks, and Internet of things (IoT) are also act as a key driver for Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) market. Increasing trend of high adoption of RFID technology towards automation, supply chain management, real-time intelligence, asset tracking and payments, and NFC.The Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) Market is growing rapidly over ~ 15.76% of CAGR and is expected to reach at USD ~$31.8 billion by the end of forecast period.Get Sample of Report @Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) Market SegmentationThe Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) Market has been segmented on the basis of product type, wafer size, components, frequency, end users and region. Looking through the end-user segment it has been observed that healthcare sector is showing a rapid growth of usage of the RFID technology as it is being used widely in this sector for the medicine tracking, medical reports and blood transfer tracking. Furthermore, defense and the government sector is expected to grow as real time intelligence and NFC are getting good overview in these sectorKey PlayersThe prominent players in the Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) Market are: NXP Semiconductors N.V (Netherlands), Alien Technology (US), 3M Company (U.S), ACTAtek Technology (U.S), Axcess International, Inc. (U.S), : Impinj Inc. (US), Ascendent ID (U.S), ), Checkpointt System Inc. (U.S), and Avery Dennison Corporations (US), among others.Market Research Analysis:On geographic basis, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) Market is studied in different regions such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of world. It has been observed that the growth of the North America RFID market during the forecast period. RFID stores detailed information related to the product on which it is tagged. The prices and details of the products with RFID tags are automatically recorded when the customer approaches the counter, without the need to scan each and every product, which saves the time of the customer. Moreover, it allows cost tally in one scan, which saves the time of the user as well as the product retailer. These advantages have encouraged retail and manufacturing companies to adopt RFID for tagging their products.In the European region there has been a major focus onto the drug tracking to equipment and patient identification to monitoring blood transfer and supply chain and is expected to boost the radio frequency identification market in this region. However, Asia Pacific region has been significantly growing well in Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) market as these are the long term benefits which include cost savings, improved accuracy, and enhanced automationGet complete Report @Intended Audience Software investors Security solution vendors RFID service providers Value-added Resellers Distributers Investors and Venture Capitalist Security Management Service Provider Security Equipment Providers Security Agencies System Integrators Research/Consultancy firmsAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by Components, Application, Logistics and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Market 2017 Top Leaders: Expert System, Thales Group, CybelAngel, Intrinsic Technologies, Digimind, KB Crawl SAS, Verint

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Market Research Future published a research report on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Market Research Report  Global Forecast to 2023  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market ScenarioOSINT relies heavily on the open source data for the processing which is a raw, noisy and unstructured data which is easily accessible and can be retrieved and modified legally. Also the data is heavy in number. The biggest advantage of the Open source intelligence is the number of sources of data and its easy accessibility which gives rise to the analytics to play its part and filter out the useful, crucial and important data from the raw and noisy data. The market for the OSINT is increasing due to the advancements in analytics, like big data analytics, data analytics, text analytics, web analytics, and social media analytics. The data is available from a number of sources like Social media, Print media, digital media, articles, blog publications, online forums, videos, government reports, telephone directories, press conferences, journals, academic research papers, financial databases, patents, dissertation and newsletters. This data is openly available and legal to use. Other analytics such as behavioral analytics for customer experience for increasing the advertising, marketing, retention strategies. As huge amount of open data is available through the sources like social media and online surveys, it gets easy for the organizations to predict the behavior of the customers.The Open Source Intelligence Market is segmented on the basis of security type, technology, application and by region. On the basis of security type, the segmentation is further divided into Human Intelligence, content intelligence, dark web analysis, link/network analysis, data analytics, text analytics, artificial intelligence and big data. Out of these, big data, text analytics and link/network analytics lead the market. This is majorly due to increased technological advancements and analytics in cyber space leading to increased threat of cyber-attacks, piracy, and other illegal practices. The cyber threats complexity has increased the targets on national infrastructure and many different organizations. It has become easy for the organizations to collect and utilize data from different sources.Get Sample of Report @On the basis of technology, the market for open source intelligence is divided into Big Data analytics, video analytics, text analytics, cyber security, web analysis, and social media analysis. Big data software lets OSINT provide useful and necessary support for an organizations business strategies and intelligence.The open source intelligence market is divided under North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa of region. The market is led by North America followed by Asia pacific. This majorly due to the increased cyber-attacks in U.S. Also due to the progressive innovation and growth in research and development the organizations in the U.S and Canada have adopted to the technology earlier than others. However the market growth in Asia pacific is expected to grow significantly.Key Players:The open source intelligence market holds some of the major key players like, Palantir Technologies (U.S.), Expert System (Italy), Exalead Dassault Systemes (France), Thales Group (France), CybelAngel (France), Intrinsic Technologies (U.S.), SAIL LABS Technology GmbH (Austria), Digimind (U.S.), KB Crawl SAS (France), Verint (U.S.), Recorded Future (U.S.), Datalkz (UAE).SegmentsFor the purpose of this study, Market Research Future has segmented the market of open source intelligence market into security type, technology, application, and region.Security Type Human Intelligence Content Intelligence Dark Web Analysis Data Analytics Text analytics Artificial intelligence Big Data OthersTechnology Big Data Software Video Analytics Text Analytics Cyber Security Web Analysis Social Media Analysis OthersApplication Military & Defense Homeland Security Private sector Public sector National security OthersRegion North America Europe Asia pacific Latin America Middle East & AfricaGet Complete Report @Intended Audience Software providers Network Solutions providers Network security providers Consumer goods and retail units Logistics solutions providers Research firms Software investors Software Developers IT enablers Database providers Cloud service providers Wireless service providers Telecommunication companiesAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Ambient Light Sensor Market Forecast to 2023 and Top Players: ams AG, Texas Instruments, Broadcom Limited, Rohm Semiconductor, Intersil, Maxim Integrated, Panasonic, Vishay Semiconductor

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Market Research Future published a research report on Ambient Light Sensor Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market HighlightsIn this rapidly changing world of technology, ambient light sensor market is projected to show major growth prospects during the forecast period. Major factor driving the ambient light sensor market is the increasing adoption of smart homes and increasing implementation of ambient light sensors in smartphones and laptops. Growing demand from automotive sector is another major factor driving the growth of ambient light sensor market.The global Ambient Light Sensor Market, by geography, has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World. As compared to other regions, the ambient light sensor market in North America is expected to witness significant growth and hold the largest market share during the forecast period. U.S and Canada are anticipated to drive the growth of ambient light sensor market. This is owing to the presence of large number of established key players like Texas Instruments, ON Semiconductor and Broadcom Limited in that region. In addition to this, the region also has a well-established infrastructure which allows higher penetration of devices and ultimately provides better connectivity. Increasing demand for ambient light sensors in consumer electronics segment is expected to be one major factor for the growth of ambient light sensor market. Growing popularity of smart home appliances is another major factor driving the growth of ambient light sensor market in the region.Get Sample of Report @In the global ambient light sensor market, Asia Pacific is anticipated to witness relatively faster adoption and is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period as compared to other regions. Within Asia Pacific, ambient light sensor market is projected to contribute faster to the growth of revenue backed by increasing demand for consumer electronics and growing popularity of smart home applications in countries such as Japan, China, South Korea and India. This is owning to the presence of key players like ams AG and Panasonic Corporation in the region.The ambient light sensor market is growing rapidly over 10% of CAGR and is expected to reach at approx. USD 822 Million by the end of forecast period.Key Players:The prominent players in ambient light sensor market are  ams AG (Germany), Texas Instruments (U.S.), ON Semiconductor (U.S.), Broadcom Limited (U.S.), Rohm Semiconductor (Germany), OSRAM Opto Semiconductor (U.S.), Intersil (U.S.), Maxim Integrated (U.S.), Panasonic Corporation (Japan), Vishay Semiconductor (U.S.) among others.Ambient Light Sensor Market SegmentationThe ambient light sensor market has been segmented on the basis of sensor type, output type, mounting style and application. The mounting style segment is bifurcated into SMD/SMT and through hole. In surface mount technology, the components are mounted directly under the screen and these help in adjusting the display brightness according to the outside surroundings.Market Research Analysis:It has been observed that North America is estimated to account for the largest share of the market, whereas Asia-Pacific is projected to grow at the fastest rate during the forecast period. The major growth in Ambient Light Sensor market in North America is attributed to technical advancements and increasing demand for ambient light sensors in consumer electronics in that region.Get Complete Report @Intended Audience Technology Investors Research/Consultancy Firms Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) Technology Providers Government Bodies Automobile Companies ConsumersAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by Components, Application, Logistics and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Operational Intelligence Market New Opportunities for Top Players & Forecast 2016 - 2024

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Operational intelligence (OI) provides real-time dynamic business analytics of streaming events and business operations along with insight and visibility into the data. Operational intelligence is designed and developed to improve the overall efficiency of the organization by focusing on operational information and data of the organization. Operational intelligence enhances the organizations ability to make critical decisions based on the analytic insights, through automated or manual actions. It also enables organizations to gain further relevant information from machine data and reduce the time to detect important events.Operational intelligence market supports automation of decision-making process, which improves decision making, enhances market responses and reduces process delays. These solutions are strategically used by organizations to upgrade business processes and enhance their performance. Additionally, OI supports automation of operational data collection and data delivery consequently improving the visibility of performance and operating costs of the process.Request Brochure:Rising adoption of big data and artificial intelligence in industries due to increasing need for operational efficiency and escalating demand for centralized control and monitoring systems are driving the global operational intelligent market. The other factors driving the growth of operational intelligent market are advancement in technology, rising complexity of manufacturing process, increase in adoption of operational intelligence in financial sector, growing demand for real time remote monitoring of industrial activities. Moreover, growing automation in industrial sectors to avoid mishaps and provide safety of product and employees is also contributing to growth of operational intelligent market. However, lack of infrastructure, lack of skilled professionals, reluctance to expose operational data and difficulty in consolidation are restraining the growth of global operational intelligent market. The evolving operational intelligent systems platform and rising amount of machine generated data is expected to provide opportunities for expanding operational intelligent systems market.The global Operational intelligence market is segmented on the basis of end-use adoption, deployment type and geography. In terms of end-use adoption, the global operational intelligence market is segmented into IT and telecommunication industry, travel and financial industry, retail industry, healthcare industries and others. The other segment includes manufacturing, energy and power, and logistics industries. Based on deployment type, the global operational intelligence market is segmented into on-premise operational intelligent systems, cloud based operational intelligent systems and hybrid operational intelligent systems. Moreover, in terms of geographic regions the global operational intelligence market is classified into North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America. North America and Europe is expected to show sustainable growth due to growth in the adoption of operational intelligence tools and focus on improving overall process efficiency. Moreover, Middle East, Africa and Latin America are expected to show moderate growth in operational intelligence market during the forecast period due to increasing demand for analytics and mobile business intelligence.Browse Our Report:The key players in global operational intelligence market are concentrating on research and development activities to encounter the increasing demand for operational intelligence systems from the consumers. The key players in operational intelligence market are OpsVeda, Inc., Splunk Inc, SQLsteam, Vitria technology, Inc., Flexeye Ltd., Axway Inc., Intelligent InSites, Inc., Starview Inc., Oversight Systems, Inc., Space Time Insight, Inc., Software AG, OpenText Corp. and VisionWaves B.V.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.Pre Book Now This Report:Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Global Pharmacy Automation Systems Market Was Valued At US$ 3,344.7 Mn In 2016 And Is Expected To Expand At A CAGR Of 6.3% Over The Forecast Period (20172027)

Pharmacy Automation Systems Market

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Pharmacy Automation Systems Market: Inventory Management Expected to be the Second Most Lucrative Application Segment: Global Industry Analysis 2012 - 2016 and Opportunity Assessment 2017 - 2027" to its huge collection of research reports.This report by Future Market Insights (FMI) examines the pharmacy automation systems market for the period 20122027. The primary objective of the report is to offer updates and information related to market opportunities in the global pharmacy automation systems market.Report DescriptionThe global pharmacy automation systems market report begins by defining pharmacy automation systems and various types of systems used for automating the entire process in pharmacies. It is followed by an overview of market dynamics of the global pharmacy automation systems market, which includes FMI analysis of key trends, drivers, restraints and opportunities along with factors important for vendor selection criteria that is influencing the growth of the pharmacy automation systems market. It also includes an insight into region wise trends impacting market growth. Impact analysis of key growth drivers and restraints based on a weighted average model has been included in the global pharmacy automation systems market report after a detailed analysis of individual regions to better equip readers with meaningful insights on ongoing technological developments in the pharmacy automation systems market.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Based on product type, the market has been segmented into medication dispensing cabinets, packaging and labelling systems, IV pharmacy (automated drug compounding), robotic dispensing systems, carousal storage systems and tablet splitters. Based on application, the market has been segmented into drug dispensing & packaging, drug storage and inventory management. Based on end user, the market is segmented into hospital pharmacies, clinic pharmacies, retail pharmacies, mail order pharmacies and pharmaceutical SMEs. A detailed analysis has been provided for these segments in terms of market size, Y-o-Y growth rate, and historic market size analysis.The next section of the report highlights the pharmacy automation systems market by region and provides market outlook for 20122027. The report also discusses key regional trends contributing to the revenue growth of the pharmacy automation systems worldwide, as well as analyses the impact of drivers and restraints in each region. Key regions assessed in this report include North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan and Middle East & Africa (MEA).The above sectionsby product, application, end user and regionevaluate the present scenario and growth prospects of the pharmacy automation systems market for the forecast period 20172027. We have considered 2016 as the base year and provided data for the forecast period.To ascertain pharmacy automation systems market size, we have considered revenue generated by companies in the global pharmacy automation systems market. The forecast presented here assesses the total revenue by value across the pharmacy automation systems market. In order to offer an accurate forecast, we have started by sizing up the current market, which forms the basis of how the pharmacy automation systems market is expected to develop in the future. Given the characteristics of the market, we have triangulated the outcome of three different types of analysis based on supply side, downstream industry demand, and the economic envelope.In addition, it is imperative to note that in an ever-fluctuating global economy, we not only conduct forecasts in terms of CAGR, but also analyse it based on key parameters such as year-on-year (Y-o-Y) growth rates to understand the predictability of the market and to identify the right opportunities across the global pharmacy automation systems market. To understand key growth segments in terms of growth and sales of pharmacy automation systems globally, Future Market Insights has developed the pharmacy automation systems market Attractiveness Index to help providers identify real market opportunities in the global pharmacy automation systems market.In the final section of the report on the global pharmacy automation systems market, a Competitive Landscape is included to provide report audiences with detailed company profiles based on categories of providers in the pharmacy automation systems market and key differentiators. Key categories of providers covered in the report include companies manufacturing and developing pharmacy automation systems. This section is primarily designed to provide clients with an objective and detailed comparative assessment of the leading companies in the pharmacy automation systems market. Report audiences can gain segment-specific company insights to identify and evaluate key competitors based on an in-depth assessment of capabilities and successes in the pharmacy automation systems marketplace. Detailed profiles of pharmacy automation systems companies are also included in the scope of the report to evaluate their long- and short-term strategies, key offerings, SWOT analysis, and recent developments in the global pharmacy automation systems market.Key Segments CoveredBy Product Type- Medication Dispensing Cabinets- Packaging & Labelling Systems- IV Pharmacy (Drug Compounding Systems)- Robotic Dispensing Systems- Carousel Storage Systems- Tablet SplittersBy Application- Drug Dispensing & Packaging- Drug Storage- Inventory ManagementBy End User- Hospital Pharmacies- Clinic Pharmacies- Retail Pharmacies- Mail Order Pharmacies- Pharmaceutical SMEsGet Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Key Regions/Countries CoveredNorth America- U.S.- CanadaLatin America- Argentina- Brazil- Mexico- Rest of Latin AmericaWestern Europe- U.K.- Germany- France- Spain- Italy- Nordic- BENELUX- Rest of Western EuropeEastern Europe- Russia- Poland- Rest of Eastern EuropeAsia Pacific Ex. Japan (APEJ)- China- India- Australia and New Zealand- ASEAN- Rest of APACJapanMiddle East & Africa- GCC- North Africa- South Africa- Rest of MEAAbout 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 Bioabsorbable Stents Market Is Anticipated To Reach A Value Of More Than US$ 350 Mn By The End Of 2022 At A Robust Cagr Of 9.7%

Bioabsorbable Stents Market

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Bioabsorbable Stents Market: Europe to Dominate the Global Market in Terms of Revenue: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017-2022)" to its huge collection of research reports.Recently published a fully researched publication on Global Bioabsorbable Stents Market: Industry analysis (2012-2016) and Opportunity Analysis (2017-2022), which focuses on different aspects which influence the global market. The comprehensive research report on global bioabsorbable stents market focuses on trends, opportunities, challenges, restraints and growth drivers which have a one of a kind impact on the growth of the global market. The research report presents a holistic angle covering the global scenario, thereby putting across a 3600view of the global bioabsorbable stents market. Global scenario is covered with respect to important geographies of North America, Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Latin America, Europe, Japan and Middle East and Africa (MEA). A detailed level five segmentation adds to the credibility and the value addition that the research report brings.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Know What your Competition KnowsResearch report on global bioabsorbable stents market is well crafted and includes a separate section titled competitive analysis, which covers all details about the tier companies involved in the global bioabsorbable stents market. An in-depth analyses on these key companies includes a detailed SWOT, market share analysis, growth strategies, promotion tactics, mergers and acquisitions, expansion strategies, global presence, innovations and developments, etc. This competitive scenario will reinforce the readers decisions to gain competitive edge.To achieve this clarity and get acquainted with the various market components, and elements which impact the market, a powerful research approach is followed at Future Market Insights, which has proven useful in gathering data and achieving high accuracy of the results provided in the report. Initial steps to understand the market and get a certain direction based on the market definition is achieved with the help of secondary research. This vast research covers a wide angle of the market and points in the right direction based on which primary research is carried out. Across all important geographies, several primary interviews are conducted which give a shape to the current market understanding based on which inferences are slated. Moreover, each insight, each data point or each statement which is noted is cross checked at every stage in the primary research, re-evaluated during each primary interview and thereby all the data undergoes validation a couple of times. The key opinions from the market observers, industry experts and secondary sources are chalked and this extensive information overload is triangulated to arrive at conclusions with maximum accuracy. The research process includes profiling of the market, identifying and listing respondents, preparing a detailed conversation guide based on overall market understanding, collection of data points, validating the data and analysing it and providing meaningful insights.Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Value Addition at Your DoorstepMarket research report on global bioabsorbable stents market delivers the necessary value addition with which the user can extract meaningful insights and make informed decisions. Below are few highlights which will reflect the credibility of the research report.- The research study gives a holistic 3600 view of the entire market considering all major geographies- The study expresses unbiased opinion about the market and this realistic market contour can be used to slate important decisions from a strategic standpoint- Trends and developments are unmasked which drive the market in the future- Maximum accuracy which supports the research thesis and helps the readers to make strategic moves- Actionable intelligence adds to the feel and flavor of the research study- A detailed SWOT analysis to give a brief market understanding- Effective forecasting helps in judging current decisions and planning future moves- In depth weighted analysis that gives justice to the detailed segmentation covered in the studyAbout 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 @
Flexible OLED Display with Focus on The Foldable Smartphones Global Market 2017-2021 | New Release

Flexible OLED Display with Focus on The Foldable Smartphones Market

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Flexible OLED Display with Focus on The Foldable Smartphones Market 2017-2021 Edition" to its huge collection of research reports.The report entitled Global Flexible OLED Display with Focus on The Foldable Smartphones Market 2017-2021 Edition, provides analysis of the global flexible display market and flexible OLED display market, with detailed analysis of market size and growth, market share and economic impact of the industry. The analysis includes the market by value, by volume, by penetration and by segments.The report also gives the detailed analysis of the foldable smartphones market. This section includes the market analysis for OLED and flexible OLED display in the field of smartphones and foldable smartphones in specific, along with the discussion on key opportunities, challenges and players in this segment.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Growth of the overall global flexible display market and flexible OLED display market has also been forecasted for the period 2017-2021, taking into consideration the previous growth patterns, the growth drivers and the current and future trends.Samsung Display (Samsung Electronics) and LG Display are the key players, among few small players (like Japan Display, Sony, etc.), who are operating in the global flexible OLED display market. The company profiling of Samsung Electronics, LG Display and Japan Display has been done in the report, which includes business overview, financial overview and business strategies for each company.Company CoverageSamsung Electronics (Samsung Display)LG DisplayJapan DisplayExecutive SummaryThe flexible display market can be segmented on the basis of forms, into curved, foldable, rollable, stretchable and flat display. The market can also be segmented on the basis of technology into OLED, LCD, EPD and others. The OLED Display market can be segmented into the AMOLED and PMOLED, however, the report focuses on the AMOLED segment, due to its vast application and use.Global flexible OLED display market is expected to increase with a very healthy growth rate during the forecasted period (2017-2021). The global flexible OLED display market is supported by various growth drivers, such as increase in the adoption of OLED smartphones, continuous technological advancement, low costing as compared to LCD, introduction of foldable smartphones etc. Yet, the market faces certain challenges, such as, encapsulation, material challenge, stress challenge, etc.Table Of Content1. Executive Summary2. Introduction2.1 Flexible Display2.1.1 Flexible Display by Forms2.1.2 Flexible Display by Technology2.2 OLED2.2.1 OLED v/s LCD2.2.2 Types of OLED2.3 Flexible OLEDGet Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @3. Global Market Analysis3.1 Global Flexible Display Market: An Analysis3.1.1 Global Flexible Display Market by Value3.1.2 Global Flexible Display Market by Volume3.1.3 Global Flexible Display Market Penetration by Volume3.1.4 Global Flexible Display Market by Technology3.1.5 Global Flexible Display Market by Form Factor3.1.6 Global Flexible Display Market by Application3.2 Global AMOLED Display Market: An Analysis3.2.1 Global AMOLED Display Market by Value3.2.2 Global AMOLED Display Market by Volume3.2.3 Global AMOLED Display Market by Segments3.2.4 Global Rigid AMOLED Display Market by Volume3.2.5 Global AMOLED Display Market by Production Capacity3.3 Global Flexible AMOLED Display Market: An Analysis3.3.1 Global Flexible AMOLED Display Market by Penetration3.3.2 Global Flexible AMOLED Display Market by Volume4. Foldable Smartphones4.1 Foldable Smartphones: An Overview4.2 Comparison: Rigid, Curved and Foldable OLED4.3 Foldable Technology: Overcoming Challenges4.4 Smartphone Flexible Display Shipment by Form Factor4.5 Flexible Display Portion of AMOLED Displays for Smartphones4.6 OLED Panel Capacity for Smartphones4.7 Samsung Foldable OLED Smartphones: An Analysis5 Competitive Landscape5.1 Competition in Global OLED Display Market: An Overview5.2 Strategic Planning of the Leaders in Flexible OLED Display Market6. Company Profiling6.1 Samsung Electronics6.1.1 Business Overview6.1.2 Financial Overview6.2 LG Display6.2.1 Business Overview6.2.2 Financial Overview6.3 Japan Display6.3.1 Business Overview6.3.2 Financial OverviewAbout 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 @
Demand for Industrial Burner to Remain High in Petrochemicals Industry

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global industrial burner market has been escalated substantially. Since these systems provide efficient protection against the explosion of boilers, their demand in various industries has immensely increased, influencing the sales of industrial burners.The global industrial burner market has been envisaged in a report by Transparency Market Research (TMR) to witness the presence of an expansive pool of industry participants. The competitive landscape could be of a highly intensive nature and demonstrate a significantly fragmented characteristic. The rivalry between key players of the industry has been prognosticated to increase considerably in the coming years because of a greater acquisition of smaller companies, development of existing products, and increasing innovations in the market.Request Sample:As per TMR, the global industrial burner market could expand at a CAGR of 3.0% during the forecast tenure 2016-2024. By the completion of 2024, the market has been anticipated to be worth a US$25.6 bn. In 2015, the market had accumulated revenue of a US$19.6 bn. On the basis of end-user segmentation, the market could see the dominance of petrochemicals with regard to consumption. This segment collected revenue of a US$3.74 bn in 2015. In the same year, North America collected a US$6.3 bn to take the lead in the market.Government Regulations in Favor of Reduced Carbon Footprint Bode WellDeveloped regions such as North America have been prophesied to contribute to the overall growth of the world industrial burner market because of the availability of a plentitude of natural resources, greater productivity, and sophisticated infrastructure. In the foreseeable future, North America could be dominated by Canada and the U.S. where the latter is an important producer of oil and gas across the globe. Compared to other countries in North America, the U.S. has been predicted to exhibit a larger demand for industrial burner.Browse Our Report:On the other hand, the low cost of labor and raw materials in emerging regions such as Asia Pacific could help the world industrial burner market to showcase a faster growth in the near future. Furthermore, the rising implementation of several government policies for reducing carbon footprint and noticeable expansion of mining and petrochemicals industries have been foreseen to augment the demand for industrial burner in Asia Pacific.Difficulty in Retrofitting Pushes Possibility of Disappointed Demand in FutureDespite the staggering progress of the international industrial burner market, there could be certain challenges to be faced with. These have been envisioned to include the complexity associated with the retrofitting of industrial burners.Buy This Report:Nonetheless, the international industrial burner market could make a comeback while riding on the widespread installation of burner management systems (BMS) in sundry industries. The sales of industrial burner have significantly increased in the past few years owing to benefits such as effective protection against the explosion of boilers. Moreover, the growing industrial applications of boilers, increasing industrialization in emerging nations, and rise in the demand for industrial boilers have been envisaged to up market growth in the coming years.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Real Estate Software Market 2018 by Business Overview & Global Development Trends - Forecast to 2023

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In order to become great agents, good agents need great real estate software. In order to become top producers, great agents need the best real estate software.This report includes market status and forecast of global and major regions, with introduction of vendors, regions, product types and end industries; and this report counts product types and end industries in global and major regions.Request sample copy @Market Segment as follows:By CompanyAccruentArgus Financial SoftwareMRI SoftwareRealPageYardi SystemsAMSI Property ManagementCoStarPropertybaseIBM TririgaBy End-User / ApplicationSmall EnterpriseMedium EnterpriseLarge EnterpriseBy TypeERPRSMPMSCRMHave any query? Enquire about report @By RegionNorth America (U.S., Canada, Mexico)Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Italy, Russia, Spain etc)South America (Brazil, Argentina etc)Middle East & Africa (Saudi Arabia, South Africa etc)Fundamentals of Table of Content:1 Market Definition2 Global Market by Vendors2.1 Market Share2.2 Vendor Profile2.3 Dynamic of Vendors3 Global Market by Type3.1 Market Share3.2 Introduction of End-Use by Different Products4 Global Market by End-Use / Application4.1 Market Share4.2 Overview of Consumption Characteristics4.2.1 Preference Driven4.2.2 Substitutability4.2.3 Influence by Strategy4.2.4 Professional Needs5 Global Market by Regions6 North America Market7 Europe Market8 Asia-Pacific Market9 South America Market10 Middle East & Africa Market11 Market Forecast12 Key ManufacturersGet more information @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:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.com
Electric Vehicle Wiring Harness Market to 2025-Global Analysis and Forecast by Type (PHEV, BEV, HEV, FCBEV and RXBEV); and Product (High Voltage Wiring Harness and Medium Low Voltage Wiring Harness)

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Electric Vehicle Wiring Harness Reports 2018 - 2025 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.Electric vehicle wiring harness is composed of wires, connectors and terminals which run throughout the entire vehicle and transmit information and electric power. It has many several advantages over loose wires such as better stretch ability and it can withstand adverse effects of abrasions and moisture.Increasing demand for high voltage wiring harness system and development of autonomous electric vehicle are the major drivers which help in surging the growth of this market whereas lack of advanced technology for electric harness system may act as a restraining factor. Increasing demand for connected electric vehicles will create new opportunities for this market in the coming years.FREE |Request Sample Copy is Available atThe "Global Electric Vehicle Wiring Harness Market Analysis to 2025" is a specialized and in-depth study of the electric vehicle wiring harness industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global electric vehicle wiring harness market with detailed market segmentation by type, product, component, material type and geography. The global electric vehicle wiring harness market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the leading market players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.The report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global electric vehicle wiring harness market based on type, product, component, and material type. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall electric vehicle wiring harness market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America (SAM). The market by each region is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report covers analysis and forecast of 16 counties globally along with current trend and opportunities prevailing in the region.Besides this, the report analyzes factors affecting market from both demand and supply side and further evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend. The report also provides exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions namely; North America, Europe, APAC, MEA and South America after evaluating political, economic, social and technological factors effecting the market in these regions.Complete Report is Available atGlobal Electric Vehicle Wiring Harness Market Players:1. Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd.2. Delphi Automotive LLP.3. LEONI AG4. AISIN SEIKI Co.,Ltd.5. FURUKAWA ELECTRIC CO., LTD.6. Fujikura Ltd.7. KOREA ELECTRIC TERMINAL CO., LTD.8. PKC Group Plc9. Yazaki Corporation.10. THB Group Ltd11. THB Group12. THB Group LtdAbout ReportsWeb:ReportsWeb is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers.Contact Us:Phone: +1-646-491-9876Email Id: sales@reportsweb.com
Indoor Air Quality Monitor Market to Record an Exponential CAGR by 2026

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Most of the people spend their 70% to 80% daily time indoors. Several air impurities can cause respiratory disorders, allergies etc. The quality of indoor air can affect the comfort, health and productivity of a building occupants hence, determining the quality of indoor air around occupants is important. The air quality monitor is used to perform the indoor air quality parameter testing. It helps to detect a mold or any air-borne bacteria formed from outside pollutant before it becomes s serious health and safety concern as well as to develop effective air pollution monitoring system through public-private funding. Increasing level of awareness among the public about the hazards of pollution and healthcare is also fuelling the growth of global indoor air quality monitor market.A sample of this report is available upon request @Indoor Air Quality Monitor Market: Drivers and RestraintsTechnological advancement in the air quality monitor systems as well the its demand from the developing countries like India, China etc. are offering some new opportunities for the key market player. However the technical limitations available with the air quality monitor as well as its high price is acting as a restraint for indoor air quality monitor market. In developed regions the increasing consumer preference for pollution free indoor atmosphere, increasing demand for green building technologies and smart homes is also driving the indoor air quality monitor system. The development of indoor air quality monitor system and its customization is expected to drive this market during the forecast period.The indoor air quality monitor market can be segmented into portable and fixed indoor monitor. The market for portable indoor monitors is expected to exhibit high CAGR during the forecast period. Government agencies and academic institute are anticipated to create high demand for indoor air quality monitor among all end use segments.Indoor Air Quality Monitor Market: SegmentationOn the basis of Sampling Method,Continuous MonitoringManual MonitoringPassive MonitoringIntermittent MonitoringOn the basis of Pollutant,Chemical PollutantsPhysical PollutantsBiological PollutantsOn the basis of End User,Government Agencies & Academic InstitutesCommercial & Residential UsersPetrochemical IndustryGeneration PlantsPharmaceutical IndustryOther End UsersIndoor Air Quality Monitor Market: Region Wise OutlookThe global indoor air quality monitor Market is segmented into the seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan and Middle East and Africa (MEA). North America leads the global indoor air quality monitor market in terms of demand, followed by Western Europe. The APEJ market is anticipated to create huge demand during the forecast period. A large number of factors such as implementation s of stringent environment regulations and increasing industrialization in this region is likely to drive the indoor air quality market.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Indoor Air Quality Monitor Market: Key PlayersThermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.Teledyne Technologies Inc.Siemens AGEmerson Electric Co.General Electric CompanyServomex Group Ltd.MERCK KGaATSI, Inc.Testo AGAbout UsFuture Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centres in the U.S. and India.FMIs research and consulting services help businesses around the globe navigate the challenges in a rapidly evolving marketplace with confidence and clarity. Our customised and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. We continuously track emerging trends and events in a broad range of end industries to ensure our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Text Analytics Market: Popularity of Social Media to Offer Rich Market Opportunity

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Having realized that analysis of text data can allow a better understanding of consumers priorities and overall behavior, a constantly rising number of companies across the globe are focusing on the enhancement of their text analytics capabilities. Text data is being swarmed in from sources such as e-mails, social media platforms, and consumer reviews on company web portals, creating mounting volumes of business critical data. In the intensely competitive market, where competitors are leaving no stone unturned to align strategies with consumer preferences, text analytics prowess is expected to be a major determinant of success for companies in the near future.Transparency Market Research, in one of its recent market intelligence reports, states that the global text analytics market will exhibit an exponential 17.6% CAGR from 2015 to 2024. The market, which had a valuation of US$2.82 bn in 2015, will rise to US$12.16 bn by 2024.Request A Sample Of This Report -In 2015, the military and defense sector accounted for a dominant share of 19.7% of the overall text analytics market. However, this end-use segment is projected to lose its attractiveness to the IT and telecom sector in the next few years. These flourishing industries are expected to incorporate an increased number of text analytics solutions for achieving improvement in visibility in market trends, internal processes, and core operations.The world is currently on the verge of a digital revolution, and the telecom and IT sectors, which constitute the core competencies enabling digitization, will witness vast global expansion in the next few years, and will require effective text analytics solutions at a rapid pace. The market for text analytics will exhibit an 18.5% CAGR in the IT and telecom sector from 2016 to 2024.View Report -The on-premise mode of deployment is currently the most preferred for text analytics solutions across the globe. On-premise IT solutions that process critical data hold the promise of added security and low risks of breaches as the data remains confined within an organizations infrastructure or corporate network. Owing to these benefits of on-premise deployment, this medium accounted for a massive 84% share in the global text analytics market in 2015.However, on-premise solutions are expensive as they require installing added infrastructure capable of processing the application, resources that are dedicated solely to practice, and purchasing licensed copies of software products. As such, this mode of deployment is limited mostly to large enterprises with the necessary funds.As an increased number of small- and medium-sized companies demand text analytics solutions, the cloud mode of deployment, known for its cost-effective nature, is gaining increased prominence. It is expected that cloud-based text analytics solutions will expand at a CAGR of 20.2% from 2016 to 2024 in the global market. It is no doubt that cloud will present the most lucrative development opportunities ahead of text analytics companies in the near future.Buy This Report -Developed regions such as North America and Europe are equally attractive for the text analytics market owing to the large numbers of social media followers, technologically advanced industrial infrastructures, and rapid growth of digital platforms such as e-Commerce and social media marketing. These factors are projected to enable both these regions in presenting attractive growth opportunities for the global text analytics market in the next few years. Although North America is presently the dominant region in terms of market valuation among these two regions, it is expected to witness stiff competition from Europe in terms of the rate of development of the market. From 2015 to 2024, North America text analytics market is expected to exhibit a 17.8% CAGR, while Europe is expected to marginally lag, with 17.2% CAGR over the same period.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a next-generation provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMRs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendationsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
LED Lighting Market in Brazil Reflect a Significant CAGR Growth of 14.19% During The Period 2017 - 2021

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "LED Lighting Market in Brazil Reflect a Significant CAGR Growth of 14.19% During The Period 2017 - 2021" to its huge collection of research reports.A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor diode electronic device that emits visible light when current passes through it. The light is not very bright, but in a large number of LEDs, it is monochromatic and is of a single wavelength. LED output can range from red (approximately 700 nanometers wavelength) to blue-violet (about 400 nanometers wavelength). LEDs help to address the key issues like energy crisis, resource scarcity, and climate change due to their low cost and efficiency. Lighting uses up around 20% of the global power generated, and the use of LED lighting will help save around 40% energy annually.Technavios analysts forecast the LED Lighting Market in Brazil to grow at a CAGR of 14.19% during the period 2017-2021.Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the LED Lighting Market in Brazil for 2017-2021. To calculate the market size, the report considers the domestic demand and exports. The domestic demand also considers the imports. Market estimates also include the sales of LED lighting solutions in three applications segments including automotive lighting, backlighting, and general lighting.Technavio's report, LED Lighting Market in Brazil 2017-2021, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Key vendorsCreeGE LightingNICHIAOSRAM Opto SemiconductorsPhilips LightingSeoul SemiconductorOther prominent vendorsDialightEatonHELLATOSHIBAPanasonicMarket driverDeclining manufacturing cost of LEDsFor a full, detailed list, view our reportBrowse TOC @Market challengeHigh import dutiesFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trendEmergence of smart lightingFor a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this reportWhat will the market size be in 2021 and what will the growth rate be?What are the key market trends?What is driving this market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in this market space?What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @Follow us on Blogger @
Global Yoga Studio Software Market Applications & Technology Metrics 2025

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Yoga Studio Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.The market study on the global market for Yoga Studio Software examines current and historical values and provides projections based on accumulated database. The report examines both key regional and domestic markets to provide a conclusive analysis about the developments in the Yoga Studio Software market over the 2018-2025 period.The report is collated in a chapter-wise layout with each chapter consisting sub-sections to discuss key segments in detail. The annex section discusses market attractiveness and a feasibility analysis of new undertakings in the Yoga Studio Software market in the forthcoming years. The report that has been compiled after primary and secondary research phase involves reaching out to industry-centric databases and collecting data from publications and scientific journals pertaining to vital business aspects of the Yoga Studio Software market.Enter your information below to receive a free sample copy of this report @The beginning of the report outlines standard terms and terminologies used in the Yoga Studio Software market, before moving on to industry statutes, policies, and industry chain structure. Following this, the report covers the competitive landscape, profiling leading players based on their key competitive characteristics. Each of the companies is examined over a time period to comprehend the changing competitive structure of the Yoga Studio Software over the years.The report is divided into divisions with each division examining different industry aspects at length. Industry statues and industry structure, industry framework, and industry news and developments are the some of the key aspects that have been analyzed in this section of the report. The report includes a cost analysis of products coupled with insights into manufacturer profit in the Yoga Studio Software market. The dynamics between several applications of the Yoga Studio Software market and how they impact the industry chain have also been analyzed.Table of ContentsGlobal Yoga Studio Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Yoga Studio Software1.1 Yoga Studio Software Market Overview1.1.1 Yoga Studio Software Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook2 Global Yoga Studio Software Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Yoga Studio Software 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 EntrantsRead Complete Table of Content @3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Acuity Scheduling3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Yoga Studio Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Skedda3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Yoga Studio Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)4 Global Yoga Studio Software Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.1 Global Yoga Studio Software Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.2 Potential Application of Yoga Studio Software in Future4.3 Top Consumer/End Users of Yoga Studio SoftwareGet discount copy @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Global Yoga Studio Software Market Size (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2013-2018)Table Global Yoga Studio Software Revenue (Million USD) Comparison by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Global Yoga Studio Software Market Share by Regions (2013-2018)Figure United States Yoga Studio Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure EU Yoga Studio Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Japan Yoga Studio Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure China Yoga Studio Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure India Yoga Studio Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.comBlog:
Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market By Product Type | Slow AC, Fast AC and Fast DC

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market By Product Type | Slow AC, Fast AC and Fast DC" to its huge collection of research reports.In this report, the global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations market is valued at USD XX million in 2016 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2022, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2016 and 2022.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGlobal Electric Vehicle Charging Stations market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingChargepoint(US)ABB(Switzerland)Eaton(Ireland)Leviton(US)Blink(US)Schneider Electric(France)Siemens(Germany)General Electric(US)AeroVironment(US)Panasonic(Japan)Chargemaster(UK)Elektromotive(UK)Clipper Creek(US)DBT CEV(France)Pod Point(UK)BYD(China)NARI(China)Xuji Group(China)Potivio(China)Auto Electric Power Plant(China)Ruckus New Energy Tech(China)Huashang Sanyou(China)Wanbang(China)Qingdao Telaidian(China)To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoSlow ACFast ACFast DCOn 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, includingPublic UseOffice UseHome UseBrowse TOC @Table of ContentsGlobal Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market Research Report 20171 Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations1.2 Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2012-2022)1.2.2 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20161.2.3 Slow AC1.2.4 Fast AC1.2.5 Fast DC1.3 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Segment by Application1.3.1 Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2012-2022)1.3.2 Public Use1.3.3 Office Use1.3.4 Home Use1.4 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market by Region (2012-2022)2 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.1 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.2 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.2 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.3 Global Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Average Price by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.4 Manufacturers Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product TypeAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @Follow us on Blogger @
Remote Electrocardiogram Monitoring Market to Expand with Significant CAGR During 2016-2026

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Telemedicine is using Information Technology and telecommunications to provide medical assistance from a distance. It became especially widespread in the 20th century due to advances in both these fields. It helps to eliminate distance barriers and provide medical aid to distant & far-flung rural areas that would be inaccessible otherwise. The stress of a modern-day fast-paced lifestyle has led to many cases of hypertension, diabetes, heart attacks and various other diseases. That is why the remote electrocardiogram monitoring market has become increasingly important.As per data from the American Health Association (AHA), arrhythmia affects more than 4 million people and causes nearly half a million deaths in the U.S. alone. ECG instruments are the best way to detect & measure arrhythmia. Remote electrocardiogram devices are becoming commonplace for monitoring a patients heart condition. Recently, they have been applied for various heart diseases since the quality & transmission through telecommunications has improved substantially. There are three main components of a remote electrocardiogram monitoring machine  the patient, the doctor, and the remote server.A sample of this report is available upon request @Remote Electrocardiogram Monitoring Market DriversOne of the key drivers of the remote electrocardiogram monitoring market is the ageing population in western countries. People there have a strong sense of individuality & prefer living independently in their own homes. Remote electrocardiogram monitoring devices could help doctors provide them prompt medical attention. It saves the doctors time along with the need for patients to take a medical appointment unless their condition is very serious. It is also much more cost-effective than hiring a nurse to visit the individual from time to time. A second factor responsible for growth is improving Internet connectivity in rural areas. Telecommunication technology has progressed by leaps and bounds in the last 30 years and it is now quite easy for a doctor to provide medical aid to patients living in remote villages, which might be both underpenetrated & unserved. A remote electrocardiogram could be used to monitor patients with pacemakers there & the central control unit is able to correctly diagnose an arrhythmia. Electronic stethoscopes can also be used as recording devices, which can be vital in the area of telecardiology. There have been many successful cases of this worldwide already. These are the main drivers of the remote electrocardiogram monitoring market.Remote Electrocardiogram Monitoring Market RestraintsThere are several challenges present in the remote electrocardiogram monitoring market with a major one being unreliable connectivity. We have all faced the problem of a slow Internet connection, no cell phone network, too much line disturbance or rolling blackouts at some point in time. This can pose a serious problem to medical practitioners when they are checking their patients. Losing connectivity midway would cause great inconvenience to both parties. A second issue could be resistance to change. People might either be unaware of such medical aid or be hesitant to go in for it in the first place. There could also be resistance from hospital staff because they may not be trained to use it. The IT department of any organisation is frequently overloaded and even they might stall the adoption of this equipment since it will be added responsibility which they may be unable or unwilling to shoulder. There could also a question of who will provide the funding, especially in developing nations where government reimbursement is hard to come by.Remote Electrocardiogram Monitoring Market Key RegionsNorth America is the largest remote electrocardiogram monitoring market & is expected to remain so in the near future. This is due to a high prevalence of arrhythmia, hypertension and diabetes there along with awareness of these ailments & enhanced medical care. The geriatric populations of Europe, China, Japan and Korea will also ensure a steady demand for the remote electrocardiogram monitoring market there.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Remote Electrocardiogram Monitoring Market Key Market PlayersSome companies in the remote electrocardiogram monitoring market are Huntleigh Diagnostics, Intelesens, iRhythm Technologies, GE Healthcare, MD Biomedical, Kalamed, Labtech, and Life Watch & Jiangsu Konsung Medical Equipment.About UsFuture Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centres in the U.S. and India.FMIs research and consulting services help businesses around the globe navigate the challenges in a rapidly evolving marketplace with confidence and clarity. Our customised and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. We continuously track emerging trends and events in a broad range of end industries to ensure our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Global Smartphone Touch Screen Market 2018- TPK, Cando, CPT, ELK, Wintek, Young Fast

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Apex Market Reports, recently published a detailed market research study focused on the "Global Smartphone Touch Screen Market" across the global, regional and country level. The report provides 360 analysis of "Global Smartphone Touch Screen Market" from view of manufacturers, regions, product types and end industries. The research report analyses and provides the historical data along with current performance of the Global Smartphone Touch Screen industry, and estimates the future trend of Global Smartphone Touch Screen market on the basis of this detailed study. The study shares "Global Smartphone Touch Screen Market" performance both in terms of volume and revenue.Get Free Sample Copy of Report Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of This ReportTPKWintekYoung FastCandoCPTELKHannsTouchIljin DisplayInnoluxMelfasS-MacThe market research report explores the Global Smartphone Touch Screen market across the globe along with major regions and countries. The research report provides a detailed study on each and every aspect of "Global Smartphone Touch Screen Market". The research report studies the entire value chain from raw material to end user industries. The report also shares import/export statistics along with production and consumption for all major regions and countries. Moreover, the research study classifies the Global Smartphone Touch Screen market based on major product types, application and end users industries of Global Smartphone Touch Screen. Besides, the report also covers geographical segmentation for Global Smartphone Touch Screen market. The report further provides production, capacity, price per region, gross margin, production cost, for all major regions and countries listed in report.The competitive landscape of the global market for Global Smartphone Touch Screen is determined by assessing the major industry participants, production capacity, production capacity utilization rate, Global Smartphone Touch Screen market's production chain, pricing by each manufacturer and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Global Smartphone Touch Screen market globally.Enquire Before Buying @The Global Smartphone Touch Screen market 2018 is further analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Global Smartphone Touch Screen production volume, data pertaining to demand and Global Smartphone Touch Screen supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. The report provides upstream and downstream analysis covering major raw material used in manufacturing of Global Smartphone Touch Screen along with detailed manufacturing sources. The report also shares list of major raw material manufacturers along with their manufacturing locations. Detailed raw material price trend analysis along with manufacturing cost analysis is also incorporated into the report. Various methodical tools such as investment returns, feasibility, SWOT analysis and market attractiveness analysis has been implemented in the research study to present a comprehensive, detailed study of the industry for Global Smartphone Touch Screen across the world.About UsApex Market Reports offers elevating market research globally. We have collection of various syndicated reports of different categories. Apex Market Reports provides you to best services, weather youre searching for new trends in market or competitive scenario in emerging market.Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezCorporate Sales Specialist155 North Wacker Drive, Suite 4250Chicago, IL 60606Phone: +17739042683Email id - sales@apexmarketreports.comWebsite -
Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery Market Progresses for Huge Profits During 2016-2026

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Robotics is a science branch that includes electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and computer science. It is concerned with the design, manufacturing, operation and use of the robots, along with the computer systems required to control them and process information. This technology is slowly but surely moving from fiction to fact thanks to current research in the Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market. We will eventually reach a point when medical robots will be able to think, act independently or even take critical decisions without any assistance from doctors or medical professionals. Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery first came onto the scene in the first decade of the 21st century. These robots have already proved their mettle in assisting surgeons who perform hysterectomies or prostate cancer. Constant design improvements mean that the Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market will become increasingly vital in the days to come.A sample of this report is available upon request @Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery Market DriversA preference for minimally invasive procedures is anticipated to drive the Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market. Robots provide improved visualisation, greater dexterity and high precision & accuracy. Minimally invasive surgeries are very popular with surgeons, patients and also their insurance companies since incisions made are smaller, infection risk is less, hospital stays are much shorter and convalescence is greatly reduced. However, human limitations like hand-eye coordination and limited dexterity stifle treatments. The desire to overcome the challenges of current laparoscopic technologies and improve the scope of minimally invasive surgeries will benefit the Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market. An ageing and growing population will boost the Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market and growing acceptance of telesurgery is also going to help Robotics. A surgery can take several hours and be physically exhausting for surgeons and they could even experience hand tremors as a result. A surgical robot would be able to operate on several patients without any drop in precision or efficiency which would help medical professionals to serve a larger number of people in the long run.Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery Market RestraintsCost is a very critical challenge in the Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market. A top of the line robotics-assisted surgery system can easily cost somewhere in the region of Euro 1.5 million. The initial investment itself can make it difficult for underfunded medical institutions in developing countries to adopt it. That is also not the only expense incurred as thousands more need to be spent on medicines required to complete the surgery. Hence, there is ongoing research to make the medical assistant robots of the future not only smart but affordable too. The second constraint in the Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market is the lack of funding. In spite of dramatic innovations by scientists in robotics technology, investors are somewhat hesitant to invest in the industry until they are assured of a ready market for the devices.However, both patients & medical healthcare organisations are showing an increased readiness to pay for Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery equipment which will boost investor confidence and subsequently drive down development cost. The third restraint of the Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market is human resistance to change. Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery is still a relatively new concept which has had almost no long-term follow-up studies. These systems also have very large footprints and massive robotic arms. It might be difficult for medical organisations to accommodate them when they are already space constrained, to begin with.Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery Market Key RegionsThe largest Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery markets are North America, the European Union, Asia Pacific and then the rest of the world. China, Japan and South Korea are expected to lead the world in future growth rate. This is on account of their rapidly ageing population, strong government focus on both healthcare and manufacturing expertise, and providing training to their surgeons to adopt and perform Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery. Companies would be well advised to cater to the specific needs of the Asian Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market for their long term benefit.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery Market Key Market PlayersSome of the companies operating in the Robotics-Assisted Telesurgery market are Intuitive Surgical, Hansen Medical, Stryker Corp, IRobot Corporation and MAZOR Robotics.About UsFuture Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centres in the U.S. and India.FMIs research and consulting services help businesses around the globe navigate the challenges in a rapidly evolving marketplace with confidence and clarity. Our customised and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. We continuously track emerging trends and events in a broad range of end industries to ensure our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Global Cancer Supportive Care Products Market Value of over US$ 25.0 Billion by 2021

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Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) has recently added a new report to its vast online database. This research study is titled as With growing prevalence of cancer, the demand for cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy has also been consistently on the rise since the past decade. However, radiation therapy brings with it a host of side effects that are challenging for cancer patients to face while they undergo the course of treatment. While the cancer treatment realm is tremendously progressing, the incidences of side effects are increasing as well, which are addressed by cancer supportive care. The advent of technology in cancer supportive care has enabled to treat different signs and symptoms following the chemotherapy procedure, in addition to chemotherapy-induced vomiting, nausea, neutropenia, and anemia.Click here For Sample Report @The global market for cancer supportive care products is currently thriving at a sound pace and is anticipated to see steady growth over the next few years. In 2016, the global cancer supportive care products market will possibly attain a value of over US$ 25.0 Bn, which may ramp up by 2021 end to US$ 29.87 Bn. Burgeoning need for effective supportive care products will continue to drive the market during 2016-2021.Prominence of Cancer Incidences Spurs Adoption of Supportive CarePronounced incidences of different types of cancers will remain a primary factor driving the demand for quality supportive care. In addition, higher effectiveness of available anti-cancer drugs and a wide range of side-effects of various cancer treatments collectively support the market for cancer supportive care products on a global basis. The recent past has been observing increasing adoption of cancer supportive care drugs in order to deal with adverse effects of anti-cancer drugs. This will continue to provide a strong impetus to the demand for cancer supportive care products.Increasing Availability of Supportive Care Products and Rising Healthcare Spending Favour Market GrowthIncreasing awareness about the availability of supportive care products is expected to play a key role in promoting cancer supportive care products, especially in developing countries. Moreover, several governments have been proactively amplifying their healthcare expenditure, which is another driver the market growth. Consistent R&D activities related to cancer treatment and cancer supportive care are also foreseen to collectively fuel the market growth over the next few years.Outlook Complete Report With Table of Content @New Product Launches Persist to Fuel Global DemandManufacturers are constantly focusing on developing innovative drugs and other supportive care products, such as vaccines; over 20 molecular entities have been introduced to the market recently with an aim to implement an additional, more effective therapy or a combination therapy. This is identified as a major booster to the market growth for the forecast period, 2016-2021.Chemotherapy-induced Neutropenia Incidences Push Demand for Erythropoietin Stimulating AgentsThe global cancer supportive care products market is segmented on the basis of several classes. Erythropoietin stimulating agents segment is predicted to represent the largest market share of over 26% by 2021 end. This growth is attributed to increasing prevalence of chemotherapy-induced neutropenia. Granulocyte colony-stimulating factors are expected to maintain the second largest segment, expanding at a CAGR of 4.2% over 2016-2021.Lung Cancer Remains Leader in Terms of Disease ConditionOn the basis of disease indication, there are nine segments, including lung cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, liver cancer, bladder cancer, leukemia, ovarian cancer, melanoma, and others. Lung cancer segment is projected to remain dominant over the forecast period with maximum market value share by 2021 end. However, breast cancer segment will witness a higher CAGR during 2016-2021.APAC Projected for the Strongest Growth Rate, Followed by North AmericaBy regional analysis, North America is foreseen to witness robust growth at a CAGR of 4.7% over 2016-2021, led by the U.S. Healthcare spending of the U.S. is estimated to rake in at an average rate of 5% over the next few years. This will be a strong factor bolstering the existing expenditure of cancer-inflicted patients across the country. Europe, the second most attractive market, will possibly capture around 22% share of the global market by 2021 end. Asia Pacific is likely to witness the highest CAGR, attributed to improving healthcare infrastructure and spending. The market in Latin America will gain a slight uptick, attributed to stable growth of the cancer supportive care products market in Brazil. MEA will also exhibit improved growth over the forecast period.Make An Enquiry @About Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE)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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:
Global Digital Transaction Market 2017: Key Players: Insight Enterprises, Inc. (U.S.), Namirial Spa (Italy), ThinkSmart (U.S.) and More

Global Digital Transaction Market

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WiseGuyReports published new report, titled Global Digital Transaction MarketIntroductionDigital transaction is the emerging trend in digital market. It is a cloud service which manages document based transactions digitally. With growing advancement in technology, organizations are also rapidly growing and is adopting automation process to increase their operation frequency and efficiency. E-signature, authentication, document archival, workflow automation among others are some of the well-known solution in digital transaction management.The increase in number of transaction done by consumers by using digital tools such as net banking, mobile banking, or from digital wallets is building high growth opportunity for digital transaction services providers such as DocuSign, Namirial, eOriginal or ThinkSmart companies. The increasing acceptance of digital transactions by consumers is making these providers to offers more innovative but secure platform for monetary transactions to their customers. These factors thus expected to drive the digital transaction management market in coming years.Growth and development in cloud technology and services has broaden its capabilities and industry reach. Banking sector is also adopting cloud services to include more flexibility in its agile business model to meets the changing business as well as consumer needs. Cloud technology helps banking sector in automatically assemble, integrate the resources to meet the businesses demands. It also eliminates physical infrastructure costs and has make banks deployment services more efficient. Integration of customer real time data, incorporating third party services, and building a safe virtual environment of money transactions are some of benefits of online banking services. Banks can also collect clients real time data and their preferences which helps them to improve customer interactions, and can offer more improvised services to them.Online banking, mobile banking, digital wallets, ATMs, and other banking services are the well-known example of digital banking system. Moving bank on cloud has saved banks costs, improves its performance, agility, and efficiency. This move is not only making banking process easy but it also benefiting the customers.The global digital transaction market is expected to grow approximately at USD 5,552.91 Million by 2023, approx. 25.73% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Key PlayersThe key players of digital transaction market includes DocuSign Inc. (U.S.), Insight Enterprises, Inc. (U.S.), Namirial Spa (Italy), ThinkSmart (U.S.), AssureSign LLC (U.S.), EuroNoVate (Switzerland), ZorroSign (U.S.), eSignLive (U.S.), eORiginal (U.S.) and others.Global Digital Transaction Market Analysis & Forecast, from 2017 to 2023 To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the digital transaction market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyze the digital transaction market based on porters five force analysis etc. To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to four main geographies and their countries- North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of the World To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective To provide country level analysis of the market for segment on the basis of solutions, component and end user To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the digital transaction marketTarget Audience Technology Investors Research/Consultancy Firms Cloud Service Providers Security Service Providers Managed Service Providers Cloud Storage Providers Infrastructure ProvidersKey Findings The global digital transaction market is expected to reach USD 5,552.91 Million by 2023. By solution, e-signature sub segment in digital transaction market accounts for the largest market share and is growing with approximately 26.47% CAGR during forecast period. By component, hardware sub segment holds the largest market growing with approximately 23.78% CAGR by the end of forecast period. By end user, commercial sub segment holds the largest market share and is growing with approximately 28.58% CAGR by the end of forecast period. Geographically, North America region has been projected to hold the largest market share in global digital transaction market followed by Europe region, while Asia Pacific ranks third in the digital transaction market.Regional and Country Analysis of Digital transaction Market Estimation and ForecastDigital transaction market is growing with the positive growth in all the regions. Increasing application areas year on year and advancement in technology and developed network architecture is driving the market on global scale. On the basis of region, the market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World. North America is dominating the global digital transaction market share followed by Europe which stands as the second biggest market due to rising m-commerce market whereas, Asia Pacific stands as third largest...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
Metrology Global Market 2018: Key Players Faro Technologies, Exact, Nikon

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IntroductionMetrology is the scientific study of measurement which involves precise and accurate measurement solutions for industrial tools and components. It is used for inspection & quality control functions to ensure proper functioning of industrial products in the end-consumer market. It has a wide range of industrial applications, such as analyzing the surface, shape and dimension of the machine parts and tools at every stage of the manufacturing process.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Metrology is performed across industries to evaluate the uncertainty in tools and equipment as well as errors in products. It plays a crucial role in critical manufacturing and assembling operations in an industry. Laser trackers, coordinated measuring machines (CMM), flexible robotic systems, 3D scanners, digitizers and various other products are being used in industries to maintain precision and accuracy within a product. Industries such as automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, consumer electronics, medical and energy & power, follow international manufacturing standards in order to manufacture error and risk free product.The global metrology market had been valued at USD 607 million in the year 2016, which is expected to reach USD 1,255 million by the end of the forecast period growing at about 7% CAGR.The major growth driver for this market is the growing quality requirement in industrial products & services. It is further supported by factors such as increase in the use of technically advanced measurement devices in industries and growing adoption of high tech robots for industrial applications such as automation, energy harvesting, and semiconductor wafers inspection. However, lack of technical expertise for operating precision products especially in small & medium size industries, has restrained the adoption of coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) and optical digitizers & scanners (ODS).Key PlayersThe key players of Metrology market includes Hexagon AB (Sweden), Zeiss group (Germany), Mitutoyo Corporation (Japan), Nikon metrology NV (Belgium), Renishaw PLC (UK), Pantec Metrology (China), Perceptron, Inc. (U.S.), Faro Technologies (U.S.), Exact Metrology, Inc. (U.S.) and Jenoptik AG (Germany).Study Objectives To provide insights about factors influencing and affecting the market growth To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to regional markets and their countries To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments types, products, and end-users To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their market share, core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the marketTarget Audience OEMs Technology investors Semiconductor industries Manufacturing industries Research & consultant organization Market players Distributors GovernmentKey Findings The Global Metrology market is expected to reach USD 1,255 million by 2027 By Type, industrial segment accounts for the largest market share and is expected to grow at around 8% CAGR during forecast period Manufacturing industry end-users held a large chunk of the metrology market and is expected to grow at 9% CAGR during the forecast period Asia-Pacific is expected to emerge as the fastest growing market for metrology during the forecast periodRegional Analysis of Metrology MarketThe global metrology market is expected to grow at a promising rate of 6% CAGR during the forecast period. Europe is projected to have the largest market in metrology. The growing demand of measuring instruments within the medical industry, is estimated to drive the metrology market in Europe. North America is expected to show steady growth in metrology market due to its stable economic and industrial growth. Asia-Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing market due to the increase in technology adoption and the growing demand of quality driven products, especially in automation and manufacturing sectors.Table of Content: Key Points1 Introduction2 Research Methodologies3 Market Dynamics4 Executive Summary5 Market Factor Analysis6 Global Metrology Market, By Type7 Global Metrology Market, By ProductContinuedACCESS 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 Backhoe Loader Market is supposed to hike by 10% CAGR by 2022, Key Players- Caterpillar Inc., J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited, Komatsu Limited , AB Volvo, Case CE

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Market HighlightsThe construction industry has shown considerable growth in recent times. Owing to this growth, the global backhoe loaders market is witnessing a huge demand. Backhoe loaders are used in urban engineering and small construction projects, such as building a small house, fixing urban roads, and so on, which is driving the growth of this market. Other factors such as the versatility of backhoe loaders, increasing road construction activities, and the growing number of power projects have also boosted the growth of the global backhoe loader market. The recent technological development in the manufacturing and usage of backhoe loaders is also the major factor contributing to the growth of the global backhoe loader market.Market Research AnalysisAmong all applications, construction segment is expected to grow rapidly owing to the high growth in the construction industry. High growth of the construction industry is generating huge demand for backhoe loaders. In addition, flexibility of backhoe loaders for performing various tasks has led to the demand of backhoe loaders. The rapid increase in road construction activities and in the number of power projects in developing countries such as India, have also fueled the growth of global backhoe loader market.Asia-Pacific is the largest and fastest growing market for the backhoe loaders. China and India are the biggest markets in the region due to the recent technological developments, and increase in the number of power projects, construction of dams and canals resulting in the significant growth of the construction industry. In North America and Europe the growth of the backhoe loader market can be attributed to the significant infrastructural development in the region.Key PlayersThe key players of global backhoe loader market are Caterpillar Inc.(U.S.), J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited (U.K.), Komatsu Limited (Japan), AB Volvo (Sweden), Case CE (U.S.), Hitachi Construction Machinery (Japan), Liebherr Group (Bulle, Switzerland), CNH Global NV (Netherlands), Deere & Company (U.S.), Mahindra & Mahindra, Ltd.(India) and others.Request a sample @Intended Audience Backhoe loader manufacturers Distributer & Supplier companies End Users consultants and Investment bankers Government as well as Independent Regulatory AuthoritiesProduct Analysis Product matrix which gives a detailed comparison of the market for different recycled product typesAdditional Information Regulatory Landscape Pricing Analysis Macroeconomic IndicatorsGeographic Analysis Geographical analysis across 15 countriesCompany Information Profiling of 10 key market players In-depth analysis including SWOT analysis, and strategy information of related to report title Competitive landscape including emerging trends adopted by major companiesThe report for Backhoe loader market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.Browse report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Breast Biopsy Devices Market: Global Market Size, Industry Share, Approaches and Forecast 2017-2025, Acute Market Reports

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Breast Biopsy Devices Market - Growth, Share, Opportunities, Competitive Analysis, and Forecast, 2016 - 2022, the breast biopsy devices market was valued at USD 748.55 Mn in 2017, and is expected to reach USD 1383.32 Mn by 2025, expanding at a CAGR of 10.6% from 2017 to 2025.Market InsightsBreast cancer is among the most commonly diagnosed non-skin cancer across the world, with among the highest annual mortality. While the incidence of the disease is increasing at alarming rates in the developing markets, the breast cancer survival prognosis is reported to be con tenuously improving this proving development in the trends of early disease diagnosis and treatment outcomes.Browse Here For Full Report:Pathological detection of breast cancer has evolved a long way until present with biopsy becoming the standard route of disease detection. With the introduction of minimally invasive biopsy procedures, intimating with fine needle aspiration, the global breast biopsy devices market has witnessed phenomenal growth over the period. Rapidly aging population and the proven correlation of age with the incidence of breast cancer is among the biggest contributors to the breast biopsy devices market. Alarming disease incidence and technological development resulting in rapid adoption of breast biopsy devices and related solutions are observed to be the major market drivers in the developing regions of the world. Introduction of guidance enabled biopsy systems has further facilitated the market development and assisted in containment of breast cancer incidence.Market Competition AssessmentThe global breast biopsy devices market is consolidated with a few players dominating the major chunk of the market revenue. Players such as Hologic, Mammotome, C.R. Bar, Inc. are identified and recognized as the global market leaders. Other players such as Argon Medical Devices, Becton Dickinson and Company, Sterylab are the promising market players with their established positions in prime market segments.Key Market Movements Increased preference for minimally invasive biopsies Rapid shift towards guided biopsies Growth in adoption of disposable consumablesToC:Chapter 1 Preface1.1 Report Description1.1.1 Study Purpose1.1.2 Target Audience1.1.3 USP and Key Offerings1.2 Market Segmentation1.3 Research MethodologyChapter 2 Executive Summary2.1 Breast Biopsy Devices Market, by Biopsy Type, 2017 (USD Mn)2.2 Breast Biopsy Devices Market Share, by Product Type, 2017 & 2025 (Value %)2.3 Breast Biopsy Devices Market, by Guidance Type, 2017 (USD Mn)2.4 Breast Biopsy Devices Market Share, by Geography, 2017 (Value %)Chapter 3 Breast Biopsy Market: Market Dynamics and Outlook3.1 Introduction, Facts and Figures3.1.1 Breast Cancer Estimated Incidence & Mortality, Worldwide (2012)3.2 Drivers3.2.1 Population Aging Contributing to Mandate for Cancer Diagnostics3.2.1.1 Age-specific Breast Cancer Rates: United States3.2.1.2 Age Statistics Above 65, by Key Countries, 2015 - 20303.2.2 Excessive Disease Prevalence3.2.2.1 Estimated Incidence, Mortality and Prevalence of Breast Cancer, Worldwide, 20123.3 Challenges3.3.1 High Costs of Biopsy May Constrain Growth3.3.2 Susceptibility to Radiation Exposure3.4 Future Prospects3.4.1 Integrated Breast Centers3.5 Impact Analysis of Drivers and Challenges During the Forecast Period3.6 Attractive Investment Proposition.........Browse Here For Full Report:About Us:Acute Market Reports is the most sufficient collection of market intelligence services online. It is your only source that can fulfill all your market research requirements. We provide online reports from over 100 best publishers and upgrade our collection regularly to offer you direct online access to the worlds most comprehensive and recent database with expert perceptions on worldwide industries, products, establishments and trends. Our database consists of 200,000+ market research reports with detailed & minute market research.Browse Here For Same Category Reports:Latest Reports:Media ContactName: Chris PaulAddress: 105 N 1st ST #429,SAN JOSE, CA 95103 USE-mail: sales@acutemarketreports.comPh: +1-855-455-8662Web:
Dyestuff Textile Fibers Market Intelligence and Analysis for Period 2014 - 2020

Black Color Dyestuff Market

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Transparency Market Research (TMR) has released a market study on the global black color dyestuff market for textile fibers, estimating the market to expand at a CAGR of 8.0% between 2014 and 2020 and reach a value of US$1.88 billion by the end of the forecast period.The report, titled Dyestuff (Black Color) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2014 - 2020, signifies that, in 2013, this market stood at US$1.10 billion in terms of market value and 416.0 kilo tons in terms of production volume. According to the report, in 2013, the black color dyestuff market for polyester fibers accounted for a majority share among all product segments of the global black color dyestuff market for textile fibers. Over the forecast period, this product segment is expected to report the fastest growth owing to the steady rise in demand for black dyestuff.Browse Research Report With Complete TOC @The global apparel industry emerged as the biggest consumer of the black color dyestuff for textile fibers, accounting for 53% of the overall demand in 2013. Other end-use industries such as agricultural textiles, automotive textiles, and protective clothing are also registering significant growth on account of rising demand for black color dyestuff for textile fibers.The markets for automotive and agricultural textiles are experiencing a surge in the demand for black color dyestuff for textile fibers from technical textiles, which is expected to propel the market to a great extent. Other than this, the growing demand for polyester fibers and other technical textiles from the home textiles and apparel industries are projected to drive the demand for black color dyestuff over the forecast period.Among regional black color textile fiber dyestuff markets, Asia Pacific emerged as the leading consumer, accounting for more than 55% of the global demand for black color dyestuff for textile fibers in 2013. The rising demand from the markets for automotive, apparels, and home and agricultural textiles is likely to stimulate the global black color dyestuff market for textile fibers in the region during the period between 2014 and 2020, states the report.On the other hand, the black color dyestuff market for textile fiber in the Rest of the World regional segment is predicted to report the fastest growth during the forecast period. The high consumption of black color dye stuff for textile fibers in the Middle East and Latin America is propelling the demand for the same in these regions to a significant extent. In addition to this, North America and Europe are projected to exhibit positive movement owing to recovering economic conditions in these regions over the forecast period.Request a PDF Brochure with Research Report Analysis @The key players operating in the global black color textile fiber dyestuff market are Kemira, Huntsman Corp., Kiri Industries Ltd., Rockwood Pigments Inc., Lanxess AG, BASF SE, Arkema SA, Sumitomo Chemical Co. Ltd., Clariant AG, and DuPont, as per the report.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market Share will Increase US$ 546 Million By 2022

Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market

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Florida, January 16, 2018: Developing knowledge about genetic systems for identification of chromosomal variations from the norm and fetus screening for effective IVF holds development prospects for this vertical over the estimate time frame. Early discovery of the chromosomal maladies, which holds potential for lowering the quantity of individuals experiencing intrinsic ailments, PGD can be performed for screening of a scope of restorative conditions, for example, Down's syndrome, inheritable illnesses and qualities of other physiological anomaly. Expanding tolerant awareness about PGD system and rising predominance of hereditary issue among newborn children has prompted the ascent sought after for PGD alongside IVF methodology. The mix of PGD and IVF has enhanced the rate of fruitful pregnancy because of decreased odds of passing the undesired hereditary material in the developing life. Thus decreases the quantity of offsprings conceived with acquired chromosomal variations from the norm. This can be credited to the expanded interest for Preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) administrations.The Global Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market is segmented on the lines of its technology, product & service, procedure type, application, end user and regional. Based on technology segmentation it covers next generation sequencing (NGS), polymerase chain reaction (PCR), fluorescent in-situ hybridization (FISH), comparative genomic hybridization (CGH), single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). Based on product & service segmentation it covers reagents & consumables, instruments, software & services.The Global Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market is expected to exceed more than US$ 546.37 Million by 2022 at a CAGR of 10% in the given forecast period.You Can Browse Full Report @:Based on procedure type segmentation it covers preimplantation genetic screening, preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Based on application segmentation it covers aneuploidy, structural chromosomal abnormalities, and single gene disorders, x-linked disorders, hla typing, gender identification. Based on end user segmentation it covers maternity centers & fertility clinics, hospitals, diagnostic labs, and service providers, research laboratories & academic institutes.The Global Preimplantation Genetic 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 major driving factors of Global Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market are as follows: Decreasing fertility rates worldwide Growing public-private savings in the field of preimplantation genetic testing Increasing number of fertility clinics worldwide New development technological advancements in the field of genetic analysis Highly threat of chromosomal abnormalities with advancing maternal ageThe restraining factors of Global Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market are as follows: Adverse government regulations Expensive practical associated with preimplantation genetic testing Procedural drawbacks of Preimplantation Genetic Testing With Advancing Age Socio ethical interests Regarding Preimplantation Genetic examinationThis report provides:1) An overview of the global market for Global Preimplantation Genetic 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 Preimplantation Genetic Testing 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 report include Illumina, Inc. (U.S.), Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (U.S.), Agilent Technologies, Inc. (U.S.), PerkinElmer, Inc. (U.S.), CooperSurgical, Inc. (U.S.), and Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) (China) Company profile includes assign such as company summary, financial summary, business strategy and planning, SWOT analysis and current developments.REPORT SCOPE:The scope of the report includes a detailed study of global and regional markets on Global Preimplantation Genetic 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 Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market: Overview6 Industry Insights7 Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and Screening Market, By Procedure Type8 Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and Screening Market, By Technology9 Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and Screening Market, By Product and Service10 Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and Screening Market, By Application11 Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and Screening Market, By End User12 Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and Screening Market, By Region13 Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market: Competitive Landscape13.1 Introduction13.2 Leading Players in the Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market13.3 Competitive Situation and Trends13.3.1 Agreements, Collaborations, and Partnerships13.3.2 Product Launches and Approvals13.3.3 Acquisitions13.3.4 Expansions13.3.5 Other Developments13.4 Global Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and Screening Competitive Leadership Mapping, 201713.4.1 Visionary Leaders13.4.2 Innovators13.4.3 Dynamic Differentiators13.4.4 Emerging Companies13.5 Competitive Leadership Mapping13.5.1 Strength of Product Portfolio (For 25 Players)13.5.2 Business Strategy Excellence (For 25 Players)14 Company Profiles14.1 Top Product Manufacturers14.1.1 Illumina, Inc.14.1.2 Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.14.1.3 Agilent Technologies, Inc.14.1.4 Perkinelmer, Inc.14.1.5 Coopersurgical, Inc. (A Subsidiary of the Cooper Companies, Inc.)14.1.6 ABBott Laboratories14.1.7 Natera, Inc.14.1.8 Rubicon Genomics (A Subsidiary of Takara Bio Usa Holdings, Inc.)14.1.9 Oxford Gene Technology14.1.10 Yikon Genomics14.1.11 Scigene14.2 Top Service Provider Companies14.2.1 Beijing Genomics Institute14.2.2 Good Start Genetics, Inc.14.2.3 Invicta Genetics14.2.4 Combimatrix Corporation14.2.5 Genea Limited14.2.6 ProgenesisAbout MarketResearchEngineMarket 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 ContactContact 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
Nerve Monitoring Devices System Market In Technical Growth in Business Sectors To 2025

Nerve Monitoring Devices System Market

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Global Nerve Monitoring Devices System Market 2018 Analysis Report reviews a Market Regions, Product Categories, with Sales, Business Revenue, Goods cost, Global Nerve Monitoring Devices System Market bit of the general business and Growth outlines, concentrating on driving Nerve Monitoring Devices System key players, feature size, demand and supply examination, utilize volume, Forecast 2018 to 2025.QY Research Groups can be relied upon for the most updated and in depth information of the title Global Nerve Monitoring System Market this is estimated by experts to develop at the most elevated CAGR amid the estimate time frame 2013-2033.This market is segmented by Product and Applications. It provides a profound study of the leading players in the market and the prevailing regions in the business, thereby benefiting new entries in the business by proving the most updated insights of the market.For a detailed sight of the report find the sample of the Global Nerve Monitoring System Market here:The leading players in this market areMedtronicNuvasiveNihon KohdenBovie MedicalNatus MedicalCheckpoint SurgicalMagstimInomedERBE ElektromedizinNeurovision MedicalHalyard HealthEMS Handels GesellschaftDr. Langer MedicalXavant TechnologyBrowse full report with Table of Content @In terms of application the market is sectioned intoHospitals and Surgical CentersAmbulatory Surgical CentersBy Product the market is sectioned intoElectromyography (EMG)Electroencephalography (EEG)Electrocorticography (ECoG)Evoked Potential (EP)Top regions encompassed in this study areNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaWe at Market Research Globe provide the most upgraded and beneficial data to enhance your knowledge about the ongoing trends in the market, drivers, restraints and leading players in the market.Grab the best discount @Table of ContentsGlobal Nerve Monitoring System Market Research Report 20181 Nerve Monitoring System Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Nerve Monitoring System1.2 Nerve Monitoring System Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Nerve Monitoring System Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Nerve Monitoring System Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Electromyography (EMG)1.2.4 Electroencephalography (EEG)1.2.5 Electrocorticography (ECoG)1.2.6 Evoked Potential (EP)1.3 Global Nerve Monitoring System Segment by Application1.3.1 Nerve Monitoring System Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Hospitals and Surgical Centers1.3.3 Ambulatory Surgical Centers1.4 Global Nerve Monitoring System Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Nerve Monitoring System Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Nerve Monitoring System (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Nerve Monitoring System Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Nerve Monitoring System Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)7 Global Nerve Monitoring System Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Medtronic7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Nerve Monitoring System Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Medtronic Nerve Monitoring System Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Nuvasive7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Nerve Monitoring System Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Nuvasive Nerve Monitoring System Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Nihon Kohden7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Nerve Monitoring System Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Nihon Kohden Nerve Monitoring System Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 Bovie Medical7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Nerve Monitoring System Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 Bovie Medical Nerve Monitoring System Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 Natus Medical7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Nerve Monitoring System Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 Natus Medical Nerve Monitoring System Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview.About Us:QY Research Groups is a company that simplifies how analysts and decision makers get industry data for their business. Our unique colossal technology has been developed to offer refined search capabilities designed to exploit the long tail of free market research whilst eliminating irrelevant results. QY Research Groups is the collection of market intelligence products and services on the Web. We offer reports and update our collection daily to provide you with instant online access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on Global industries, companies, products, and trends.Contact us:Email- sales@qyresearchgroups.comWebsite-
Dyestuff Market to Grow at CAGR of 7.8% during 2014-2020 due to Rising Demand from Asia Pacific

Dyestuff Market

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Transparency Market Research has released a new research report on the global dyestuff (black color) market. The report, titled Dyestuff (Black Color) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2014 - 2020, forecasts the growth of the overall market at a CAGR of 7.8% during the period between 2014 and 2020. The global dyestuff (black color) market was worth US$120.8 million in 2013 and with the healthy growth prospects, the overall market is expected to reach US$204.3 million by 2020. The report attributes the increasing demand from the global dyestuff (black color) market to the increasing demand for technical textiles. Growth in the apparel market is also expected to fuel demand for dyestuff (black color). However, the market is expected to be restrained by volatile crude oil prices. Also, stringent environmental regulations regarding the production of dyestuff will hamper the growth of the market. However, this has evolved into an opportunity, as the global dyestuff (black color) market is shifting focus towards manufacturing natural dyes. The growing popularity of natural dyes will propel market growth during the period between 2014 and 2020.Browse Research Report With Complete TOC @The report categorizes the global dyestuff (black color) market on the basis of types of fibers such as monofilament fibers, staple fibers, and others including multifilament fibers and tow. The staple fiber segment generated the highest revenue in 2013 and accounted for more than 48% of total revenue generated in the market. It was the largest segment of the global dyestuff (black color) market for nylon fibers. Nylon staple fibers blend easily with other types of fibers available in the market, which will lead to the growth of this segment. During the forecast period, the segment is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8%.The report segments the global dyestuff (black color) market depending upon the end users. Apparel, home textiles, and others including automotive, protective clothing, and agriculture are the major end-use segments. Apparel was the leading segment of the market and accounted for more than 45% of total market revenue in 2013. As nylon fibers are widely used in manufacturing clothing of various kinds, the apparel segment is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.9% during the period between 2014 and 2020. Segments such as automotive, protective clothing, and agriculture are expected to grow rapidly in the next five years.Geographically, the global dyestuff (black color) market has been divided into Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. As the demand for technical textiles is high in Asia Pacific, the region accounted for close to 60% of the overall revenue generated in the market in 2013. With increased demand, the region will grow further during the forecast period, especially driven by the markets in countries such as India, Korea, Japan, and China.Request a PDF Brochure with Research Report Analysis @The report profiles some of the key players in the global dyestuff (black color) market, such as DuPont, Huntsman Corporation, Arkema SA, Clariant AG, Rockwood Pigments Inc., Kiri Industries Ltd., BASF SE, and Kemira.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Tunisia Zarat Oil and Gas Industry Market 2017- Develop Strategies Based on the Latest Regulatory Events

Tunisia Zarat Oil and Gas Industry

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WiseGuyReports published new report, titled Tunisia Zarat Project PanoramaSummaryTunisia Zarat Project Panorama, latest release, presents a comprehensive overview of the asset. This upstream report includes detailed qualitative and quantitative information on the asset, provides a full economic assessment and reflects several parameters including (but not limited to) geological profile, asset development and specific challenges. Based on this analysis, future outlook for the asset is presented with possible trends and related scenarios identifying upside/downside potential.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Scope- Overview of the asset based on an analysis of the economic indicators- Key financial indicators including Net Present Value and Internal Rate of Return- Review of factors affecting the economic outcome of the field including development overview, geology, challenges, reserves and production with qualitative perspective on of the overall assets life with analysis on the assets future outlook- Detailed production profile for the asset, giving annual output rates for each commodity produced- Cash flow statements from our economic analysis of the asset including capital expenditures, operating expenditures and tax liability- Individual valuations for equity holders- Sensitivity analysis for asset value considering a range of factorsKey points- Understand the economic and non-economic factors that affect production of an asset- Benefit from an asset valuation derived from detailed research and modeling by our analysts- Basic view of various scenarios and its effect on the asset for risk or strategy planning- Utilize the quantitative and qualitative evaluation to ascertain trends within the region to inform decision making- Identify economic trends of an asset to determine investment requirements..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
Global Mobile User Authentication Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022 : Authentify, TeleSign

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Mobile User Authentication Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022" to its huge collection of research reports.The market study on the global Mobile User Authentication market is a professional tool that scrutinizes vital market indicators to understand the progression of the said between 2017-2022. The research report on the global Mobile User Authentication market studies historical and current performance, which are used to provide projections for crucial market indices. The report is meticulously compiled after extensive data collection from industry-centric bodies that has been further endorsed by industry opinion leaders.The report examines the global Mobile User Authentication market based on a few key parameters; each criteria is examined to estimate revenue and volume figures in the said market over the forecast period. The key segments of the Mobile User Authentication market under various categories along with their growth behavior are analyzed in this report. An estimate of market size serves as an important tool for market participants to gauge the progression of the market over the forecast period. The report studies key regions for Mobile User Authentication including an in-depth assessment of major domestic markets in each region.Get Free Research Summary of the Report:The report is compiled in a chapter-wise format followed by annex section. The report begins with a prelude of the global Mobile User Authentication market, progressing into definitions, notations, and conventions that are relevant to this market. Following this, a discussion on industry statutes, industry policies, and regulatory framework in presented in this report. The report includes a snippet of the recent industry news in the concluding part of this section.Using standard analytical tools and proven research methodologies, the feasibility and profitability of new investments along with a market attractiveness analysis of the Mobile User Authentication market over the forecast period is presented herein. The SWOT analysis of major players in the global Mobile User Authentication market is useful to understand their winning strategies and the changing competitive hierarchy over the forecast period.Table of Contents1 Industry Overview of Mobile User Authentication1.1 Mobile User Authentication Market Overview1.1.1 Mobile User Authentication Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Mobile User Authentication Market Size and Analysis by Regions1.3 Mobile User Authentication Market by Type1.4 Mobile User Authentication Market by End Users/Application2 Global Mobile User Authentication Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Mobile User Authentication Market Size (Value) by Players (2016 and 2017)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in FutureCheck Discount For This Report @3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 CA Technologies(US)3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Mobile User Authentication Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 EMC Corporation(US)3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Mobile User Authentication Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.2.5 Recent Developments4 Global Mobile User Authentication Market Size by Type and Application (2012-2017)4.1 Global Mobile User Authentication Market Size by Type (2012-2017)4.2 Global Mobile User Authentication Market Size by Application (2012-2017)4.3 Potential Application of Mobile User Authentication in Future4.4 Top Consumer/End Users of Mobile User AuthenticationList of Tables and FiguresFigure Mobile User Authentication Product ScopeFigure Global Mobile User Authentication Market Size (Million USD) (2012-2017)Table Global Mobile User Authentication Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure Global Mobile User Authentication Market Share by Regions in 2016Figure United States Mobile User Authentication Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure EU Mobile User Authentication Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure Japan Mobile User Authentication Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure China Mobile User Authentication Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure India Mobile User Authentication Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)Figure Southeast Asia Mobile User Authentication Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2012-2017)About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
Fumaric Acid Market: Global Market Size, Industry Share, Approaches and Forecast 2017-2025, Acute Market Reports

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Fumaric Acid Market - Growth, Share, Opportunities, Competitive Analysis, and Forecast 2017 - 2025, the demand for fumaric acid is anticipated to witness high demand due to increase in use of processed food in the developed and developing region. Changing food patterns of people according to their busy lifestyle has driven the market for processed foods, thereby leading to high demand for fumaric acid in the market.Browse Here For Full Report:Fumaric acid is a nonhygroscopic, colorless and odorless crystalline powder which is produced synthetically and naturally occurs in plants. Human skin has a natural tendency of producing fumaric acid on exposure to sunlight. Naturally, fumaric acid is found in bolete mushrooms, lichens and moss. It is known to play an integral part in plants life. Fumaric acid is the known to be the strongest organic acid in sourness and titratable acidity. When fumaric acid is used as an additive in food, the hydrophobic nature of acid imparts long lasting and persistent sourness to it. It is also responsible in lowering the pH with minimal added sourness in products with pH greater than. Production of fumaric acid by fermentation process has lowered its cost to make it an inviting raw material in the chemical and other industries.Fumaric acid is used in the production of drinks, medicines, animal feed, food, cleansing agents, printing inks, unsaturated polyester resins, alkyd resins, etc. The major application of fumaric acid is in food and beverages industry. It is been used in the food industry since 1946. It is now used in corn and wheat tortillas, rye breads and sour doughs, neutraceuticals and drinks, gelatin desserts among others. According to a research in food, fumaric acid is proved to improve quality of food and reduce the costs of many food and beverage products. Therefore, food and beverage industry is the major application sector driving the growth of global fumaric acid market. Unsaturated polyester resin is the second largest application of fumaric acid in the market. Fumaric acid is used in the production of unsaturated polyester resins and alkyd resins which further are used in the manufacture of automobiles. Therefore, growing demand for unsaturated polyesters from the automobile industry has driven the growth of global fumaric acid market in 2015. Other applications such as printing inks, paper sizing, animal feed and cleansing agents are also projected to fuel demand for fumaric acid during the forecast period from 2016 to 2022.Asia Pacific accounted as the largest and fastest growing market for fumaric acid in 2015. The growing construction activities in the region have boosted demand for unsaturated polyester resins and alkyd resins in the market, thereby fueling demand for fumaric acid. Rising disposable income of people, especially in China and India has led to increased consumption of processed food and beverages in the region, thereby promoting demand for fumaric acid. North America was the second largest market for fumaric acid but is anticipated to experience steady demand due to stringent regulations on use of alkyd resins in the region. Europe is also expected to boost high demand for fumaric acid due to the growing demand for unsaturated polyesters from automobile industry especially from France and Germany. Middle East & Africa and Rest of the World are also expected to experience steady demand for fumaric acid during the forecast period from 2016 to 2022.ToC:Chapter 1 Preface1.1 Report Description1.1.1 Purpose of the Report1.1.2 Target Audience1.1.3 USP and Key Offerings1.2 Research scope1.3 Market Segmentation1.4 Research Methodology1.4.1 Phase I  Empirical Phase1.4.2 Phase II  Analytical Phase h1.4.3 Phase III  Dissemination Phase1.4.4 Approach AdoptedChapter 2 Executive Summary2.1 Market Snapshot: Global Fumaric Acid Market2.2 Global Fumaric Acid Market Market, By Application2.3 Global Fumaric Acid Market Market, By GeographyChapter 3 Market Dynamics3.1 Introduction3.1.1 Global Fumaric Acid Market Volume and Revenue, 2017  2025, (Kilo Tons) (US$ Mn)3.2 Key Market Strategies3.2.1 Product Pricing Analysis3.2.2 Regulatory Impact on Market3.3 Market Drivers3.4 Market Challenges3.4 Future Outlook of the Market3.5 See-Saw Analysis3.5.1 Impact Analysis of Drivers and Restraints3.6 Attractive Investment Proposition3.7 Competitive Analysis3.7.1 Market Positioning of Key Vendors.........Browse Here For Full Report:About Us:Acute Market Reports is the most sufficient collection of market intelligence services online. It is your only source that can fulfill all your market research requirements. We provide online reports from over 100 best publishers and upgrade our collection regularly to offer you direct online access to the worlds most comprehensive and recent database with expert perceptions on worldwide industries, products, establishments and trends. Our database consists of 200,000+ market research reports with detailed & minute market research.Latest Reports:Browse Here For Same Category Reports:Media ContactName: Chris PaulAddress: 105 N 1st ST #429,SAN JOSE, CA 95103 USE-mail: sales@acutemarketreports.comPh: +1-855-455-8662Web:
Future Research on Wood Coatings - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025

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"Wood Coatings Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025" The Report covers current Industries Trends, Worldwide Analysis, Global Forecast, Review, Share, Size, Growth, Effect.. .Description-' ' Global Wood Coatings Market: OverviewThe term wood coatings implies a wide range of products such as stains, varnishes, shellacs, and lacquers, which are commonly used in the domestic and industrial sectors. The significance of wood coatings is that they add depth and warmth to the appearance of the wooden structures. They can be applied in the form of surface coatings, natural finishes, pigmented finishes, penetrating finishes and wax polishes. Depending upon the applications, the usage of wood coatings also varies. The key applications of wood coatings include furniture, cabinets, and side and deck.. .Get Sample Report @' ' Global Wood Coatings Market: Drivers and Restraints and TrendsThe recovery of the housing industry all over the world is propelling the wood coatings market. Demand for side and deck in advanced countries is increasing. This is anticipated to drive the market for wood coatings in the near future. The recent recovery of the housing industry across the world is propelling the global wood coatings market. The rise in construction of new homes and the house modifications are factors driving the wood coatings market. Wood coatings are highly used for kitchen furnishings and flooring.Demand for side and deck in advanced countries is increasing, which is anticipated to fuel the market for wood coatings in the next few years. Increasing public awareness regarding coatings with low volatile organic compounds and the implementation of safety regulations are factors that significantly contribute to growth of the wood coatings market. Increasing disposable income is also considered as a propelling factor for global wood coatings market.Growth in the residential housing sector coupled with growing demand for furniture, decking, and siding products are considered as the growth opportunities for the wood coatings market. Also, the shift towards green technology is another opportunity creator, as it deals with the non-volatile emission of organic compounds. Strategic co-operation among manufacturers is also considered as the opportunity for the wood coatings marketThe report estimates and forecasts the wood coatings market on the global, regional and country levels. The study provides forecast between 2017 and 2025 based on volume (Tons) and revenue (US$ Mn) with 2016 as the base year. The report comprises an exhaustive value chain analysis for each of the segments. It provides a comprehensive view of the market. Value chain analysis also offers detailed information about value addition at each stage. The study includes drivers and restraints for the wood coatings market along with their impact on demand during the forecast period.The study also provides key market indicators affecting the growth of the market. The report analyzes opportunities in the wood coatings market on the global, regional and country level. Drivers, restraints, and opportunities mentioned in the report are justified through quantitative and qualitative data. These have been verified through primary and secondary resources. Furthermore, the report analyzes substitute analysis of wood coatings and global average price trend analysis. Global Wood Coatings Market: SegmentationThe report includes Porters Five Forces Model to determine the degree of competition in the wood coatings market. The report comprises a qualitative write-up on market attractiveness analysis, wherein end-users and regions have been analyzed based on attractiveness for each region. Growth rate, market size, raw material availability, profit margin, impact strength, technology, competition, and other factors (such as environmental and legal) have been evaluated in order to derive the general attractiveness of the market. The report comprises price trend analysis for wood coatings between 2017 and 2025.The study provides a comprehensive view of the wood coatings market by dividing it into resin, product, technology, application, and geography segments. Resin segment has been categorized into polyurethane, acrylics, melamine formaldehyde, nitrocellulose, and others. The product segment of the wood coatings market is classified as stains & varnishes, shellacs, lacquers, and others. The technology segmentation covers oil based wood coatings, water based wood coatings and also solvent based wood coatings.The wood coatings market, by application has been categorized into furniture, cabinets, side & deck, and others. The regional analysis of global wood coatings market include includes the current and forecast consumption of wood coatings in North America (U.S, Canada), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Rest of Latin America), Europe (Germany, France, Italy, U.K, Spain, and Rest of Europe) , Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan & ASEAN) , and Middle East & Africa (GCC, Egypt, South Africa and Rest of Middle East & Africa). Market segmentation includes demand for consumption in all the regions and countries individually. Global Wood Coatings Market: Competitive AnalysisThe report covers detailed competitive outlook that includes market share and profiles of key players operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include Akzo Nobel N.V, BASF SE, Nippon Paint Holding Co., Ltd, PPG Industries, Inc., RPM International Inc., The Sherwin Williams Company, and The Dow Chemical Company. Company profiles include attributes such as company overview, number of employees, brand overview, key competitors, business overview, business strategies, recent/key developments, acquisitions, and financial overview (wherever applicable).Secondary research sources that were typically referred to include, but were not limited to, The World Paint & Coatings Industry Association (WPCIA) , American Coatings Association (ACA), National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA), British Coating Federation (BCF) , The Society for Protective Coatings (SSPC) , Chemical Coaters Association International (CCAI) , American Wood Protection Association and European Wood Preservative Manufacturers Association (EWPMA),company websites, financial reports, annual reports, investor presentations, broker reports, and SEC filings. Other sources such as internal and external proprietary databases, statistical databases and market reports, news articles, national government documents, and webcasts specific to companies operating in the market have also been referred for the report.In-depth interviews and discussions with a wide range of key opinion leaders and industry participants were conducted to compile this research report. Primary research represents the bulk of research efforts, supplemented by extensive secondary research. Key players product literature, annual reports, press releases, and relevant documents were reviewed for competitive analysis and market understanding. This helped in validating and strengthening secondary research findings. Primary research further helped in developing the analysis teams expertise and market understanding.  The global wood coatings market has been segmented as follows: Global Wood Coatings Market, by Resin AnalysisPolyurethaneAcrylicsMelamine FormaldehydeNitrocelluloseOthers Global Wood Coatings Market, by Product AnalysisStains & VarnishesShellacsLacquersOthers Global Wood Coatings Market, by Technology AnalysisOil basedWater basedSolvent based Global Wood Coatings Market, by Application AnalysisFurnitureCabinetsSide & DeckOthers Global Wood Coatings Market, by Regional AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.CanadaLatin AmericaBrazilMexicoRest of Latin AmericaEuropeGermanyFranceU.K.SpainItalyRest of EuropeAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaASEANRest of Asia PacificMiddle East & AfricaGCCEgyptSouth AfricaRest of Middle East & Africa. .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
Automotive Interior LED Lighting Market is expected to reach a value US$ 670 million by 2022

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Fact.MR has recently added a new report to its vast online database. This research study is titled as Automotive Interior LED Lighting Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking: Global Review 2017 to 2022 which presents an in-depth study about the production, consumption, market volume, revenue (million USD) and market share across different geographical regions.Request Free Sample Report-Setting foot in the automotive interior LED lighting market today is considered a blue ocean strategy as there are comparatively few contestants that have divided the market amongst themselves. Even though consumers have expressed a preference for these modern day marvels, the high cost of LEDs is a major restraint challenging the long term growth prospects of the automotive interior LED lighting market. In addition to this, LED lighting is highly dependent on the temperature of the operational environment. Overheating could lead to automotive interior LED failure and this is especially relevant in todays age of global warming that has affected both emerging and developed markets equally.LED stands for light emitting diode technology and they are increasingly used as an alternative to halogen bulbs in the automotive interior LED lighting market. LED lights are used in almost all lighting applications indoors and outdoors today ranging from automotive interior lighting all the way to horticulture.5 Projections on Automotive Interior LED Lighting Market The high price of automotive interior LED lighting made compact carmakers shy away from this technology for some time. However, the consumer demand has compelled them to incorporate it in their products and this segment now contributes nearly a third of the revenue share in the automotive interior LED lighting market. Compact cars are extremely popular in Europe and APEJ and both these regions are anticipated to cross US$ 50 million by the end of the forecast period The mid-sized segment represents a quarter of the revenue share by vehicle type in the automotive interior LED lighting market. This segment is likely to be worth almost US$ 165 million by end 2022, making it imperative for key stakeholders to target it. On the other hand, the premium passenger car segment has a marginal contribution to the automotive interior LED lighting market and it is likely to decline over the study period Commercial vehicles are usually not the first that come to mind when one thinks of the automotive interior LED lighting market. Nonetheless, the light and heavy commercial vehicle segment combined have a revenue share slightly over a quarter of the automotive interior LED lighting market. Therefore, major players in the automotive interior LED lighting market can ignore this vital segment at their own peril The 12V segment dominates the automotive interior LED lighting market with a revenue share nearing 2/3rd in term of volts. A market opportunity just under US$ 440 million in 2022 should be large enough for all the companies to compete in. The 14V segment occupies the balance 1/3rd revenue share. Companies would do well to focus on Europe and APEJ in the 14V segment of the automotive interior LED lighting market The dashboard light segment is the most important in the automotive interior LED lighting market by product type and should remain so for the foreseeable future. The dashboard is usually the first touch point for vehicle occupants and it makes sense for manufacturers to embellish it with attractive LED interior lighting. Both APEJ and Europe are on track to push past US$ 50 million in end 2022 and companies in the automotive interior LED lighting market are advised to take this into considerationBrowse Full Report with TOC-Dashboard Lighting Attractive in Automotive Interior LED Lighting MarketThe dashboard lighting segment accounts for a third of the revenue share by product type in the automotive interior LED lighting market. Customers have shown a strong preference for interior LED lighting on the dashboard as this is often the first touch point in the vehicle and where companies can incorporate their greatest design flourishes in the automotive interior LED lighting market. A market opportunity exceeding US$ 210 million by the end of the forecast period makes it extremely lucrative for all key stakeholders.Ambient Lighting a Close Second in Automotive Interior LED Lighting MarketThe ambient lighting segment represents a quarter of the revenue share in the automotive interior LED lighting market. Ambient lighting across the vehicle dramatically transforms its look, making it very appealing to customers. Once reserved for luxury and premium passenger cars, it has slowly but surely made its way to compact cars as well. Companies may wish to target the North America ambient lighting market as the continent is predicted to record the highest CAGR of 3.8% from 2017 to 2022.Heads-Up Display a Niche in the Automotive Interior LED lighting marketA heads-up display as its name suggests, provides all the necessary information that occupants could possibly need directly on the windscreen and it is typically on the drivers side. This is largely the preserve of high end premium and luxury vehicles which is why Europe contributes the largest share to the heads-up display market in the automotive interior LED lighting market. The continent has a longstanding heritage in luxury cars and this segment is on track to exceed US$ 6 million by the end of the forecast period.Competition TrackingThe Fact.MR report on the automotive interior LED lighting market has analyzed the major players that compete in the automotive interior LED lighting market. Some of them are HELLA KGaA Hueck & Co, OSRAM Licht AG, Magneti Marelli Spa, Koito Manufacturing Co., Stanley Electric, Koninklijke Philips N.V, Valeo SA, Ichikoh Industries Ltd, Changzhou Xingyu Automotive Lighting Systems Co., and Texas Instruments.Check Discount-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized automotive 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; that's 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:
Skimmed Milk Yogurt Powder Market Size will Observe Substantial Growth by 2025

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Yogurt powder is manufactured by including cultures to non-fat drain, permitting the item to reach a indicated pH before it is dried. Yogurt powder can be utilized in a wide variety of nourishment applications, counting snacks, cake and breakfast cereals. A few of the more curiously items incorporate shelf-stable pastries, ice cream bars, and fruit-yogurt dressings. Yogurt powder is fermented milk processed in the form of dry yogurt and has preferences such as solidness, storability, comfort, and movability. A few nourishment producers need to procure the benefits of advertising items containing Greek yogurt but have struggled to effectively and efficiently incorporate it in their items, due to its brief rack life, capacity and refrigeration contemplations, chance of defilement and required licenses.View Report Preview @The Skimmed Milk Yogurt Powder Market is likely to witness more product innovations which will trigger the market growth during the forecast period.Wellbeing issues such as diabetes, weight, and sensitivities among shoppers have been on the rise for the past few a long time. Such issues are making shoppers to become progressively health-conscious and are indeed following a healthier way of life to avoid or decrease the occurrence of illnesses. All-natural items are being received over artificial ingredients, which is expanding the overall demand for items that offer added value. The growing affinity towards wellbeing is the key market driver for skimmed milk yogurt powder market. Also, the properties like easy storage, higher shelf life, and product stability drive the product demand. It also brings down the bundling and taking care of costs due to lighter weight and diminished volume. Even though yogurt powder does not give the live and dynamic cultures accessible in the new yogurtas the warm in the drying handle kills these accommodating bacteriait is still nutritious nourishment that permits for helpful and novel uses of the tangy yogurt flavor. Yogurt powder is exceptionally tall in calcium, carbohydrates, and proteins, and is moreover a wealthy source of vitamin A.Skimmed Milk Yogurt Powder is not a very popular product yet in developing economies, which are still in traditional yogurt. Consumers here are uncertain about new processed foods. This might hinder the growth of Skimmed Milk Yogurt Powder in such regions.Request for Table of Contents @Geographically, the Global Skimmed Milk Yogurt Powder Market is designed for seven regions namely, North-America, Western Europe, Asia Pacific except Japan (APEJ), Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East & Africa and Japan. The largest market for skimmed milk yogurt powder market is Western Europe closely followed by North America. Western Europe is also the largest producer of skimmed milk yogurt powder market The storage and stability benefits to drive the drive the market. APEJ market is also expected to show significant growth owing to the large dairy demands in countries in India and China.Skimmed Milk Yogurt Powder Market key players are: Batory Foods, Glanbia, EPI Ingredients, Bluegrass Dairy & Food, Inc., Prolactal, Bempresa, CP Ingredients, YogourmetKey manufacturers of Skimmed Milk Yogurt Powder t are focusing on product development including enabling wider industrial applications with the help of their R&D department.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Glanbia Nutritionals has launched OptiSol 1061 Greek Yogurt Powder in the Americas. OptiSol 1061 is a patent-pending ingredient that adds the distinct, authentic flavor and health halo of Greek yogurt to a wide range of food and beverage applications. Affording the powerful health advantage of 60 percent proteinthe highest in a yogurt powder on the marketthe ingredient creates new application opportunities for Greek yogurt and protein inclusions.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Flooring Market is expanding with the CAGR of 5% and Market Size over hundreds of Billions of dollars | Forecast MRFR

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The Analysis presents the study of Worldwide Flooring Market facilitating the regional and country wise analysis covering the strategic analysis of each market player and the market share they holdMarket Scenario:Flooring is the permanent covering of a floor. Rapid growth in construction industry across the globe is primarily driving the global flooring market. Additionally, rise in home improvement and renovation projects are also fueling the growth of the market. However, effective disposal of flooring waste may hamper the growth of global flooring market. A considerable amount of flooring waste is generated by both new installations and replacement procedures, leading to monetary losses for the consumers. Global flooring market is expected to grow at CAGR of 5% by 2022.Regional Analysis of Global Flooring Market:Asia-Pacific dominates the global flooring market followed by North America and Europe. Rapid growth in industrialization and urbanization in Asia-Pacific region is driving the demand of flooring market. This region is expected to grow at the fastest pace during the forecast period. North America is expected to grow at significant pace during the forecast period mainly due to the presence of a large number of construction industries in this region.Get Free Sample Report @Key Players:The key players of global flooring market are Gerflor Group (France), LG Hausys, Ltd. (Korea), Flowcrete Group Ltd. (U.K), Polyfloor Inc. (U.K.), Forbo Holding AG. (Switzerland), Tarkett Company (France), Floorworld LLC (Dubai), Mohawk Industries Inc. (U.S.), Shaw Industries, Inc. (U.S.) and Mannington Mills Inc. (U.S.)LIST OF FIGURESFIGURE 1 RESEARCH TYPEFIGURE 2 GLOBAL FLOORING MARKET: BY MATERIAL (%)FIGURE 3 GLOBAL FLOORING MARKET: BY TYPE (%)FIGURE 4 GLOBAL FLOORING MARKET: BY APPLICATION (%)FIGURE 5 GLOBAL FLOORING MARKET: BY REGIONFIGURE 6 NORTH AMERICA FLOORING MARKET, BY MATERIAL (%)FIGURE 7 NORTH AMERICA FLOORING MARKET, BY TYPE (%)FIGURE 8 NORTH AMERICA FLOORING MARKET, BY APPLICATION (%)Continue...Browse Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Epinephrine Market : Emerging Industry Volume & Analysis 2013 - 2019

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Epinephrine or adrenaline is a hormone secreted by adrenal glands in the blood stream. It is one of the two common hormones (the other being glucagon) that is responsible for glycogen breakdown. Secretion of epinephrine is characterized by the presence of extreme emotions such as anxiety or anger thereby resulting in elevated levels of blood pressure along with increased muscle strength and high sugar metabolism. Under strenuous conditions signals are transmitted to brain and brain in turn sends nerve impulses to the adrenal glands in the kidneys and result in the release or secretion of epinephrine. The presence of this hormone is essential for the body to maintain cardiovascular homeostasis as epinephrine can divert blood to tissues under stress. Epinephrine is used as a vasoconstrictor in shock, as a stimulant during cardiac arrest and as an antispasmodic and bronchodilator in bronchial asthma.During cardiac arrest, there is a need for maximum amount of blood flow in the coronary artery and this is facilitated when epinephrine is injected into an intravenous solution. Epinephrine has effects on various parts of the body such as liver, skin, heart and lungs. For instance, in lungs epinephrine causes the relaxation of smooth muscles of lungs. Patients suffering from asthma have constricted lung passages that are prone to inflammation and swelling. This swelling result in coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath and due to inhalation of epinephrine in small doses causes the widening of the bronchial tubes thereby allowing the air to pass through and provides short term relief.Request Brochure of the Report @Epinephrine injections are commonly used against life threatening allergic reactions caused by medications, insect bites and stings. Epinephrine injections are available as prefilled automatic injection device with the hormone in the liquid form. Epinephrine is a class of medications called as alpha and beta adrenergic agonists and these medications work by tightening the blood vessels and by relaxing the muscles in the airways. The direction for preparing and use of the injectors is dependent on different brands available in the market. This injection is usually administered on the thighs and effects of this medication are fast and quick but not long lasting. Epinephrine has both mild and serious side effects such as high blood pressure, severe headache, blurred vision, chest pain, uneven heartbeats, dizziness, nausea and vomiting.The market for epinephrine auto-injector market exhibits tremendous growth potential owing to several technological advances towards development of innovative epinephrine injectors. Epinephrine auto injectors market can be analyzed on the basis of the product penetration and availability across the four major geographical regions namely North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and RoW. Adrenaclick, EpiPen Auto-Injector, Adrenalin Chloride Solution and EpiPen Jr. Auto-Injector, epinephrine lidocaine hydrochloride are some of the brands of epinephrine autoinjectors.Some of the major factors favoring the growth of this market are increasing number of patient population susceptible to several allergic reactions along with increased focus of the market players towards development of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) free epinephrine auto-injectors. This is majorly due to the ban on the use of CFC as a propellant inhaler by the U.S. Government.Request Discount @In addition, continuous product modifications, increased need and demand of automatic injection devices further propel the growth and development of epinephrine auto injectors market. On the contrary, the side effects caused by epinephrine medications pose a challenge to the growth of the market. Owing to the potential side effects (dizziness, shortness of breath and severe headache) of epinephrine therapy, doctors recommend or prescribe other alternative pharmacotherapy and immunotherapy against allergic reactions. The key market players operating in this market are Abbott Laboratories, Lincoln Medical, Ltd., Mylan, Inc., Sanofi SA, Amedra Pharmaceuticals LLC and ALK Abello A/S.Report Details @About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Trauma Fixation Devices Market 2013 - 2019 : Future Market Projections for Forthcoming Years

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The physical injuries such as, burns, dislocations, fractures, sprains and strains caused by any external source (fire and accident) are termed as trauma. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) trauma has defined trauma as an injury or wound to a living body caused by the application of external force or violence. To treat trauma various procedures are available and their usage by surgeons is determined by the severity of injury. Trauma fixation devices are one of the key treatment methods for the aforementioned medical conditions.The trauma fixation devices can be categorized in two segments namely external trauma fixation devices and internal trauma fixation devices. External trauma fixation devices are used for temporary fracture fixation and help in providing support to the affected bone while their healing process. Since these fixation devices are applied externally, can be adjusted as per the individual requirements of the patient. Owing to the underdevelopment of the bones, this procedure is preferred in pediatric trauma cases. In addition, they are also applied on those patients whose skin over fracture has been damaged.Request Brochure of the Report @Internal fixation devices are helpful in fixing fractured bones in definite shape by implanting different devices. These devices includes various intramedullary nails, cannulated screws, hip screws, wires, cables, conventional hip screws, pins and plates. The materials utilized to build these devices are majorly made of stainless steel, cobalt and titanium. Internal fixation devices are gaining popularity over the external fixation devices, hence the demand for internal fixation devices are increasing. This is due to the fact that the raw materials utilized in manufacturing internal fixation devices are durable, stable and flexible which provide necessary support to the bone and results in quick recovery from the medical condition. In addition, it also reduces stay in hospitals and improper bone healing. All these mentioned parameters result in high growth rate of internal fixation devices during the forecast period 2013 to 2019.Rise in geriatric population across the globe will augment the growth of trauma fixation devices since elderly people possess higher risk for osteoporosis that will propel the demand for utilization of trauma fixation devices. It has been estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) that global elderly population was around 524 million in 2010 and is expected to grow to reach around 2,000 million by 2050. Increasing number of accidents throughout the world will further boost the growth of trauma fixation devices market. Recently, the U.S. reported around 42 million trauma cases. These trauma patients required immediate medical treatment (trauma fixation devices implantation) to recover from trauma.Increased disposable income and awareness in developed nations such as U.S. and U.K. have also contributed in the growth of trauma fixation devices market, since high disposable income increases the affordability for availing these medical services. Despite various advantages, growth of trauma fixation devices market may get hindered owing to infection and allergy associated with the utilization of external and internal trauma fixation devices. Similarly, high cost of these devices will also reduce the utilization of these devices and in turn will restrain the growth of trauma fixation devices market in developing nations (with low disposable income) such as India, China and Brazil.Request Discount @North America followed by Europe accounts for the largest share of total trauma fixation devices market owing to large patient population coupled with high disposable income of the population in the regions. Asia-Pacific is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period due to increasing healthcare expenditure in the nations such as India and China. High growth rate of geriatric population in the region will further support the growth of trauma fixation devices market. It has been estimated by WHO that around 12% of total Chinese population and 300 million of Indians will belong to elderly population by 2050. The major players operating in trauma fixation devices market include Bioretec, Inc., Medtronic, Inc., Advanced Orthopaedic Solutions and Integra LifeSciences Corporation amongst other significant players.Report Details @About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Anise Seed Market Show Exponential Growth by 2025

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Anise seed market witnessed a modest growth over the past few years and rarely reflected annual growth of over 3% till 2015. However, the market dynamics is rapidly changing and the global anise seed market is projected to grow at a CAGR over 3% between 2017 and 2026. The key factor driving the growth of the anise seed market are growing demand for health benefits of the plant widespread in the Middle East and Mediterranean regions. The rapidly increasing consumption owes to its usage in food & beverage industry, in traditional medicines such as antiseptic, stomachic, carminative, anti-spasmodic, digestive, expectorant, tonic agent and stimulant products.View Report Preview @Anise belongs to the family Apiaceae in the Pimpinella genus and known as Pimpinella anisum scientifically. This category of spice is largely found in Mediterranean and the Middle Eastern regions. The origins of these seeds can be found near the deltaic regions of Nile in the Egypt. Anise is a perennial and herbal plant; which generally, rises fully up to a height of nearly 2 feet with flowers white in colour. Anise spice have some of the most important plants derived chemical compounds that have antioxidant, health promoting and disease preventing properties.Food and beverage industry like several other industries benefitted from globalization, as a result of which demand for conventional food and spices spike across all regions. This transition further resulted in the demand for herbs and spices that enhance the flavor of local cuisines in international markets. Following the trend a lot of small and medium scale supplier of local spices in North African and Southern European countries climbed up in the value chain and begin to trade the products globally.While the market is submerged with other pharmaceuticals and nutraceutical products, consumers are inclining toward health awareness of the concerns rising from the surplus usage of essential B-complex vitamins such as pyridoxine, niacin, riboflavin, and thiamin present in the seed. Anise seeds are extremely helpful for the digestive system and reduces menopausal cramps and pain. Pyridoxine (vitamin B-6) helps increase GABA neurochemical levels in the brain. The spice also contains good amounts of anti-oxidant vitamins such as vitamin-C and vitamin-A and also act as good pain relief. It is also used in manufacture of various alcoholic beverages such as ouzo, anisette, absinthe and Sambuca.Request for Table of Contents @Regarding geography, anise seed market has been categorized into six key regions including North America, Latin America, Europe, APEJ, Japan, and the Middle East & Africa. Anise Seed market is expected to register healthy growth in upcoming years due to a high demand of spices in various end-user application across the globe. Middle East represents the considerably high market share and grows with the relatively high share in the forecast period. APEJ is experiencing the rapid increase in the production capacity of anise seed as demand for spices and essential oils has also reported double digit growth in the region.Moreover, the APEJ region accounts for healthy share in terms of consumption of anise seed products. In terms of developing region of Middle East, the growth of the is significantly high and with comparatively high CAGR in forecast period owed to factors such as such as rapid economic development, globalization and increasing demand of the spices in food & beverages industry and its sub-verticals, and high usage of the In addition, over the forecast period, Middle East market for is anticipated to grow significantly owing to the growth of hotel industry in the region. Overall, the global market for anise seed market is expected to grow significantly by the end of forecast period. Anise Seed market for the Asia Pacific is also expected to witness rapid growth during the forecast period primarily attributed to the growth of food and beverage industry, especially in China and India. The Anise Seed market is growing at a faster rate and is expected to grow at high CAGR in forecasted years.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the key players identified in the Anise Seed market are:- Albert Vieille, Berje, Elixens, Ernesto Ventos, Fleurchem, H.Interdonati, INDUKERN INTERNACIONAL, Penta Manufacturing Company, Robertet Group, Ultra international, Treatt Plc, PerfumersWorld, Ungerer & Company and Others.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
2017  2025 Chloroprene Rubber Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast

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"Chloroprene Rubber Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025" The Report covers current Industries Trends, Worldwide Analysis, Global Forecast, Review, Share, Size, Growth, Effect.. .Description-' ' Chloroprene is a colorless fluid which is utilized in the form of a monomer to produce polymer polychloroprene. Polychloroprene is a kind of synthetic rubber. The primary properties of this synthetic rubber are high flexibility, solvent resistance, heat resistance, perspiration, bond to various substrates, and weather aging. Chloroprene rubber is used in a wide range of applications such as the rubber and adhesive industries. Chloroprene rubber is employed to manufacture dipped articles such as gloves, to improve bitumen quality, and to manufacture molded foam.. .Get Sample Report @' ' The global chloroprene market has witnessed significant expansion due to increase in demand from the rubber industry, as raw material for adhesives and for various latex applications. Major demand for chloroprene rubber is witnessed from China, Japan, and the U.S. China, specifically, has a high consumption of chloroprene rubber and its utilization has increased due to the rise in number of manufacturing industries in the country. Developing countries in Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Eastern Europe witnessed robust demand for chloroprene. Economic growth, increasing automotive output, and emergence of manufacturing industries in these regions have led to the higher consumption of chloroprene rubber. In terms of application, the chloroprene rubber market can be segmented into industrial maintenance, automotive, food industries, sealing and bearings. Chloroprene rubber is employed extensively in industrial applications as hoses and belts in automotives, as architectural rubber products, and also as general industrial materials. Earlier the application of chloroprene rubber was limited to electrical wires and adhesives; however, the market has changed dramatically and currently experiences considerable demand from automobile and industrial sectors. In terms of geography, the global chloroprene rubber market can be segmented into Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific is estimated to be a significant and rapidly expanding market for chloroprene rubber due to consistent demand from China in diverse automobile and industrial component applications. The market in North America and Europe is anticipated to expand due to the increase in population and rapid industrialization. New technology development for replacing smoked rubber suppression with vulcanization in the chloroprene manufacturing process has also led to the expansion of the North America and Europe market. Key players operating in the global chloroprene rubber market include Denka Group, Asahi Kasei Chemicals Corporation, DuPont Performance Elastomers, Dow Chemical Company, Showa Denko K.K., Lanxess AG, Chongqing Longevity Salt and Chemical Co. Ltd., Tosoh Corporation, Nairit Plant CJSC, Zenith Industrial Rubber Products Pvt. Ltd., and Shanxi Synthetic Rubber Group Co. Ltd. The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications. The study is a source of reliable data on:Market segments and sub-segmentsMarket trends and dynamicsSupply and demandMarket sizeCurrent trends/opportunities/challengesCompetitive landscapeTechnological breakthroughsValue chain and stakeholder analysis The regional analysis covers:North America (U.S. and Canada)Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others)Western Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Nordic countries, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg)Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia)Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand)Middle East and Africa (GCC, Southern Africa, and North Africa)The report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through interviews, surveys, and observations of seasoned analysts) and secondary research (which entails reputable paid sources, trade journals, and industry body databases). The report also features a complete qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industrys value chain.A separate analysis of prevailing trends in the parent market, macro- and micro-economic indicators, and regulations and mandates is included under the purview of the study. By doing so, the report projects the attractiveness of each major segment over the forecast period. Highlights of the report:A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent marketImportant changes in market dynamicsMarket segmentation up to the second or third levelHistorical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volumeReporting and evaluation of recent industry developmentsMarket shares and strategies of key playersEmerging niche segments and regional marketsAn objective assessment of the trajectory of the marketRecommendations to companies for strengthening their foothold in the market. .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
Ocular Pain Market Size Demand Will Increase by 2020

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Ocular pain is also known as eye pain that occurs on the surface of the eye. Ocular pain is considered as a common medical condition that resolves on its own but, sometimes it creates emergency medical conditions. Possible causes for ocular pain includes corneal discomfort, pain in the sclera and discomfort in conjunctiva and pain in the iris. Moreover, few other etiology of ocular pain includes pain in extracellular muscle of the eye, burning sensation in nerves present in the eye and paining sensation on the eyelids. Sinusitis, migraines, traumatic events and glaucoma are considered as few of medical conditions that can cause ocular pain. possible signs and symptoms of ocular pain includes pain in the eye, partial loss of vision, light sensitivity, double vision, halos vision, severe headache, irregularly shaped pupil, bulging eye and blood inside the front of eye. Common test utilized for diagnosis of ocular pain includes slit-lamp exam, dilating drops test and tonometer test. Medications used for the treatment of ocular pain include antibacterial medications, antiviral medications and steroids.Increasing unhygienic lifestyle among population is considered as a major market driving factor for the global ocular pain treatment market because bacterial and viral ocular infections are primarily observed among people with unhygienic lifestyle. Moreover, increasing awareness among people about eye related diseases would further accentuate the market growth in few developed nations of the world. Technological advancement in diagnostic test and increasing disposable income among population is also considered as a market driving factor of ocular pain treatment. However, lack of awareness and proper healthcare facilities present in few of the developing nations is considered as a factor that might restrict the global market demand of ocular pain treatment.Request Brochure of the Report @North America and Europe was observed to be the largest ocular pain treatment market due to major market players are based in these regions. Moreover, technological advancement in diagnostic test and strong demand of diagnostic test would also account for the market growth in these regions. In addition, favorable initiative taken by the federal government also accounted for the ocular pain treatment market growth in North American and European regions. Increasing awareness among people about eye related diseases and its precautions is also considered as market deriving factor in North American and European regions. Similarly, Asia-Pacific is considered as an untapped market due to lack of proper diagnostic facilities in some Asian countries. Asian market growth will be fuelled by the presence of untapped opportunities due to extensive increase in the healthcare infrastructure (healthcare cost, healthcare facility and healthcare budget).Similarly, Asia-Pacific is considered as an emerging market due to growing market penetration in this region. Increasing disposable income among population is also accounted for the ocular pain treatment market growth in Asia-Pacific countries. Rest of the world (RoW) holds fourth position in the global ocular pain treatment market due to poor economic and health condition in most of the African countries. RoW market growth will be fuelled by extensive increase in healthcare infrastructure in Brazil and Mexico.Request Discount @Some of the major players in the Ocular Pain Market are Sylentis S.A., Bayer AG, InSite Vision Incorporated, Reata Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Kala Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Bristol Meyer Squibb, Merck and Co. among others.This research report analyzes this market on the basis of its market segments, major geographies, and current market trends. Geographies analyzed under this research report includeNorth AmericaAsia PacificEuropeRest of the WorldThis report provides comprehensive analysis ofMarket growth driversFactors limiting market growthCurrent market trendsMarket structureMarket projections for upcoming yearsThis report is a complete study of current trends in the market, industry growth drivers, and restraints. It provides market projections for the coming years. It includes analysis of recent developments in technology, Porters five force model analysis and detailed profiles of top industry players. The report also includes a review of micro and macro factors essential for the existing market players and new entrants along with detailed value chain analysis.Report Details @About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Global Market Research on IV Equipment Market insight, Trends & Forecast by 2022

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An ageing population suffering from chronic diseases, particularly in developed regions, is anticipated to demand ever-more surgical procedures. IV therapy is one of the best choices available and this should benefit companies in the IV equipment market. Strong economic growth in Latin America and APEJ are expected to provide significant growth opportunities for companies actively involved in the IV equipment market. Nonetheless, rising prevalence of medication errors, strict regulatory requirements for new equipment and the absence of wireless connectivity in surgical centers and hospitals could stifle the growth in the IV equipment market. The IV equipment market is predicted to record a steady CAGR of 5.0% from 2017 to 2022.Request For Free Sample Report @IV Catheters Popular in the IV Equipment MarketThe IV catheter segment accounted for a revenue share approaching one-third of the IV equipment market by product type in 2017 and may gain market share going forward. The IV catheter segment is poised to be worth just under US$ 3.5 billion at the end of the forecast period in 2022, making it large enough for all stakeholders in the IV equipment market. Infusion pumps follow IV catheters in the IV equipment market and have a revenue share of approx. a sixth in terms of product type segment. Europe is the largest region in the infusion pumps market as the continent has a well-developed medical infrastructure coupled with a geriatric population that would naturally demand such treatment.Marginal Opportunity in Securement Devices and Stopcocks & Valve SegmentA similar potential exists in the securement devices segment and the stopcocks & valve segments of the IV equipment market as they both have minimal revenue share in 2017. However, the securement devices segment is estimated to lose market share over the course of the forecast period while the stopcocks & valve segment is assessed to gain share. An absolute dollar opportunity of more than US$ 270 million exists in the stopcocks & valve segment of the IV equipment market from the year 2017 to 2022. Along with Europe, companies are advised to target APEJ as the region could record the highest CAGR for the five-year study period. As the region becomes more affluent, consumers there might demand better healthcare services and IV equipment should ready to take advantage of this.Browse Full Report With Table of Content @Drip Chamber and Needleless Connector Chosen Less in IV Equipment MarketThe drip chamber and needleless connector segment seem to be losing popularity as they represent a single digit revenue share in the IV equipment market and are still bleeding share. Therefore, it wouldnt be surprising if companies in the IV equipment market decided to overlook these two product types entirely in favor of more lucrative options in the IV equipment market. A comparatively higher CAGR of more than 4.5% is likely to be witnessed in the drip chamber segment and companies are recommended to take this into account while formulating their strategies.Make An Enquiry @About Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE)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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:
Corticosteroid-Responsive Dermatoses Market : Emerging Industry Volume & Analysis 2014 - 2020

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Dermatosis is a condition wherein the outer layer of the body, namely the skin (dermis) or hair, nail, etc has an irritation or an anomaly. Dermatoses involve condition of the skin that does not involve inflammation. In cases of inflammation, they are termed dermatitis. Corticosteroids are usually used to treat inflammation, but it is observed that corticosteroids sometimes also helped alleviate dermatoses. Dermatoses can be categorized as a cutaneous condition with following types of disorders: rheumatoid neutrophilic dermatoses, acute febrile neutrophilic dermatoses, dermatoses papulosa nigra, dermatoses neglecta, dermatoses cinecienta, linear lichenoid dermatoses, digitate dermatoses, contagious pustular dermatoses, transient acantholytic dermatoses, juvenile plantar dermatoses, etc to name a few. Corticosteroids, besides their inflammation control action are useful in treating disorders that are caused by hyperactivity of the immune response. They were first discovered in the adrenal cortex region of mammals; nowadays, they are synthetically designed variants of steroid hormones and are used to regulate immune response, stress and inflammation along with control of carbohydrate metabolism, blood electrolyte levels, and protein catabolism. Corticoids are of generally two types:Glucose based, hence named glucocorticoids, which regulate glucose/ carbohydrates/fats/proteins and thereby assist in controlling inflammation. E.g CortisolMineral based, hence named mineralocorticoids, which regulate/control water level in the body buy controlling sodium retention. E.g aldosterone, corticosterone, etcCorticosteroids use is accompanied by side effects, particularly allergic responses in some severe cases reported. This is why generally corticosteroids arent used to treat dermatoses, but some conditions like non-infectious dermatoses, etc, it has been found to be extremely useful. Clobetasol Propionate is one such example which has been prescribed to control inflammatory responses in common dermatoses as a topical medical aid. It showed 99% success rate in treating cases of psoriasis and other corticosteroid-responsive dermatoses.Request Brochure of the Report @Corticosteroids are to be used as a topical ointment only in skin regions with inflammation, the concentration of Corticosteroids are the main factors that inhibit inflammation, however too high concentrations can leave the skin vulnerable to infections from Staph and Streptococcus bacteria that are present in the normal skin flora and may lead to necrosis. Corticosteroids have been known to be a significant causative agent of allergies; this is owed due to the improper usage of ointment and self medication procedures. They are particularly dangerous if mistakenly applied to the eyes and hence notified as a caution on their labels. Pregnant women and children under 6 are also advised against its use.Corticosteroids have the highest market in the developed nations of North America and Europe, together with nearly 2/3rd of the worlds total demand. This was followed by the Asia-Pacific region and rest of the world. Growth is expected in the Asia-Pacific region with research and development done specifically for the indigenous populations of these regions as the global products are generally tested for Caucasian races. The skin condition of Asian populace is different hence change in combinations may be necessary. However the Asian markets are expected to grow larger than the North American market as they have the advantage of higher population.Request Discount @Some of the major players in the Corticosteroid-responsive Dermatoses market include: Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithKline plc, Novartis International AG, Medcis, Merck, Nycomed US Inc, among others.Report Details @About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments Market Global Outlook 2018: Eaton, Emerson, Atex, Miretti, VIMEX

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The report entitled Global Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments Market 2018 delivers the comprehensive and in-depth research analysis of the key regional industry standing of the Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments 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 Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments market report state and future prospects of the segment have jointly been examined. Additionally, key methods within the Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments 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, Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments market revenue, potentials, and challenges also project the growth rate. Producers Analysis and Prime Sellers of world Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments Offshore Market 2018:1. Eaton2. Emerson3. Pepperl+Fuchs4. R. STAHL5. WEG6. Atex System7. China Helon Explosion-proof Electric8. Miretti9. BARTEC FEAMInquiry for Buying, Visit Here: Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments Market (Type Analysis):- By Product Type, Explosion-proof Electric Machine, Explosion-proof Electric Apparatus, By Explosion Proof Type, Flame-proof Type, Increased Safety Type, Intrinsic Safety Type, Positive-pressure Type, Oil-immersed Type, Sand Filled Type, Others Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments Market (Application Analysis):- Oil and Gas, Coal Industry, Mining, Chemical & Material, OthersIn the first segment, The Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments report covers the marketing research and forecast of Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments Market on a regional also the world level. The Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments report is generically divided into six components and each half aims at the summary of the Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments past, present and future conditions of the market, the feasibility of the investment on many methods and policies. Excluding the classification and definition, the Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments market report conjointly discusses the analysis crucial and export and explain a comparison of the Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments market that is targeted at the trends and development. Key Emphasizes the Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments Market:1. Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments 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 Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments market estimations.6. Analyze the crucial market trends and new evolution technologically in the Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments Market.After that, This Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments 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 Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments 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 Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments market. The Electrical Explosion Proof Equipments 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
Invert Sugar Syrups Market to Incur Rapid Extension During 2017 - 2025

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The invert sugar syrups or invert sugars are chemically made up of a mixture of glucose and fructose. These products are known to have greater digestibility than the commonly used table sugar. Due to their unique properties, invert sugar syrups have been used extensively in the food and beverage industry. The appearance of the invert sugar syrups is transparent and sometimes yellow-brown and sticky consistency. The properties like providing extra sweetness, texturizing properties, etc. have provided an extra edge for invert syrup sugars over other natural sugars. They are also a potent substitutes for honey and sucrose.View Report Preview @The major application of invert sugar syrups is that they are sweeter than the regular sugars and have 20% less carbohydrates and hence are of great importance to the confectionary industry. The bakery industry is the major player contributing to the growth of the invert sugar syrups market. Its properties like retarding crystallization and offering a smooth texture to frozen desserts have triggered the demand for these products and have fuelled the growth of the invert sugar syrups market. In the flavoring industry, the invert sugar syrups act as moistening agent and are often used as a cheaper substitute for honey ultimately driving the growth of the invert sugar syrups market. Due to its unique flavor and texturizing properties, developing niche confectionary products is a good opportunity for the growth of the invert sugar syrups market. The awareness amongst consumers that invert sugar syrups have been known to promote obesity may retard the growth of the invert sugar syrups market. The growing demand for other natural and artificial sweeteners may suppress the growth of the invert sugar syrups market. Hence, educational marketing regarding the unique benefits of the invert sugar syrups may retain its existing market share in the sweetener market.Request for Table of Contents @The major producer of the invert sugar syrups market is Europe, owing to the presence of a large number of international companies. Europe remains one of the top exporters of the invert sugar syrups. The production and export of these products have also been dominated by countries like China and Indonesia due to the availability of raw materials and hence, Asia Pacific has also been an important contributor of the invert sugar syrups market. In the Asia Pacific, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines also have significant shares in the invert sugar syrups market. North America and Latin America exhibit a fairly steady growth over the forecast period. The consumption of maple syrup in this region has influenced the growth of the invert sugar syrups market. The Middle East and Africa region have shown a decline in the past decade and the growth of the invert sugar syrups market remains stagnant over the forecast period.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the key market players in the global Invert sugar syrups market are Nordzucker Ag, International Molasses Corporation, Ltd., Archer Daniels Midland Company, ZUCKERHANDELSUNION GMBH & CO. KG, Honey Sugar Product, Ragus Marketing, AP Multi Products Pvt. Ltd., The Sudzucker Group and others.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Fumed Silica In Paints And Coatings Market Research Study for the Period (2016-2026)

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Fumed Silica is a specialty type of silica which consist of microscopic droplets of amorphous silica. Due to its unique particle characteristics and large surface area Fumed Silica is used in variety of applications such as paints, adhesives, coatings ,plastics, sealants, inks, toner, cosmetics, food additives, and deformers and others. Due to its wide scope of properties paints and coating industry is one of the major consumers of fumed silica. In paints and Coating Fumed Silica is used to control rheological characteristics, as anti-settling agent, as thixotroping agent and to prevent from rust and corrosion. Fumed silica is estimated to be the second largest product type of silica in terms value type. The global fumed silica market in 2010 was estimated to be of EUR 800 million in which the fumed silica used for paints and coating is one of the major contributor in terms of value. It is forecasted that the Fumed silica marketFumed Silica Market: Drivers & RestraintsThe major factor driving the global fumed silica market is the exponential growth in application sectors such as paints and coating industry .The global paints and coating market is estimated to grow at CAGR of 5.5% in forecasted period of 2014 to 2020.It is also estimated that the Global paints and Coating industry will be of U.S. $176.5 BN.. The rise in demand of decorative articles, furniture and automotive are also expected to fuel the demand of application sector of fumed silica resulting in positive growth for fumed silica market.Request For Report Sample@On the other hand one of the major paints and coating industry market Europe was going through economic crisis which is expected to slow down the consumption of paints and coatings in the region. This might be a restraining factor in the Fumed Silica market because of dependency on the application sector. The growing popularity towards ecofriendly paints and stringent government regulation on paint composition might result restrain in the demand of fumed silica application sector such as paints and coatings.Fumed Silica Market: SegmentationOn the basis of type, the global specialty silica market is segmented intoHydrophilic fumed silicaHydrophobic fumed silicaFumed Silica Market: Key PlayerSome of the market participants in the specialty silica market are Evonik Industries AG, Akzo Nobel N.V., SOLVAY, Cabot Corporation, Wacker Chemie AG, Tokuyama Corporation DuPont, Bayer AG, PPG Industries Inc., Ceradyne Incorporated, DA NanoMaterials., Fuji Silysia Chemical Limited, Xinjiang TBEA Silicon Industry Co Ltd, Jilin Shuangji Chemical New Material Co Ltd, Zhejiang Wynca Chemical Industry Group Co Ltd .,Shandong Ruiyang Silicon Industry Technology Co Ltd, and othersVisit For TOC@Fumed Silica Market: Region Wise OutlookGlobal fumed silica market in paints and coating is driven by factors such as urbanization, industrial growth and strong economic growth in developing economies. The Europe is estimated to be the largest producer of Fumed silica. The Asia pacific is projected to be second largest market for fumed silica, especially Countries like China and India. North America is also one of the major contributing market for the global fumed silica market.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACTFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: http.futuremarketinsights.com
Raisin Juice Market to Witness Comprehensive Growth by 2025

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Raisin juice is prepared by processing raisins to obtain a concentrated paste. It is commercially available as raisin juice concentrate and used as a sweetener and shelf life enhancer in the food and beverage industry. Following consumer awareness about the health benefits of raisin juices, the raisin juice market is expected to witness a significant growth in the forecast period. The demand side factor like consumer acceptability for the taste and flavor of the raisins may also affect the raisin juice market. Considering the rise in trend for healthy and carb-free food, raisin is emerging as a sugar substitute and may gain a notable position in the natural sweetener market.View Report Preview @The raisin juice market is segmented on the basis of end use and applications.On the basis of application, the raisin juice market is segmented as flavoring agent, sweetener, texturizing agent and preservative. The raisin juice is known to enhance the texture and crunchiness of the bakery products and sometimes also used as dressing ingredient in confectionary.On the basis of end use, the raisin juice market is segmented as bakery, confectionary, frozen desserts, sauces & dressings, beverages and others. It is also widely used in marinades and seasonings.Request for Table of Contents @Government organizations which are taking various initiatives in spreading awareness about the health benefits and usage of raisins in the food industry are hugely responsible for the growth of the raisin juice market. The California Raisin Marketing Board has been taking great efforts in promoting the use of raisin and raisin products. It includes measures like Commodity Purchase programs which offer government funds to schools and banks and open sales opportunity for fruits and vegetables including raisins. These opportunities will ultimately fuel the growth of the raisin juice market. Lack of consumer awareness seems to be hindering the growth of the raisin juice market. Hence, the introduction of raisin juices to bakeries and other food manufacturers which have a strong foothold in the regional market will help in raising consumer awareness and boost the growth of the raisin juice market. Online marketing strategy also presents excellent opportunity to expand the market attractiveness of the raisin juice market. Regions with low raisin production where prices of raisins are high may exhibit slower growth in the raisin juice market.North America is the largest producer of raisins and the major contributor is the U.S. As the production and demand for raisins continue to grow, the demand for raisin juice is also expected to grow. Europe is the biggest importer of raisins. So, the California Raisins Board has been taking many initiatives for the promotion of raisin juice in Europe which is most likely to fuel the growth of the raisin juice market. Asia Pacific is in the introductory phase of the raisin juice market, as raisin is most commonly consumed as a dried fruit rather than as a juice or paste. Overall, this region exhibits less consumption of processed food products. The rising disposable income of the consumers coupled with consumer awareness may moderately boost the growth of the raisin juice market. In Middle East, the traditional food of the people includes raisins and as an innovative and better alternative, raisin juice is expected to appeal the consumers here and facilitate the growth of the raisin juice market. Africa is expected to show an appreciable growth in the raisin juice market as it occupies a dominant position in the fruit processing market.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the key market players in the global raisin juice market are Fineberry Foods Inc. , NationalRaisin Company, Arat Company Pjs., Lion Raisins, Horner International, Boghosian Brothers and others.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Non-Alcoholic Beer Global Market Top Key Players  Anheuser-Busch InBev , Heineken , Carlsberg , Behnoush Iran , Asahi Breweries and Forecast to 2021

Non-Alcoholic Beer Market

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Global Non-Alcoholic Beer MarketDescriptionWiseGuyReports.Com adds Global Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Report 2017 Research To Its Database.With the slowdown in world economic growth, the Non-Alcoholic Beer industry has also suffered a certain impact, but still maintained a relatively optimistic growth, the past four years, Non-Alcoholic Beer market size to maintain the average annual growth rate of 6.18% from 2030 million $ in 2013 to 2430 million $ in 2016,Bis Report analysts believe that in the next few years, Non-Alcoholic Beer market size will be further expanded, we expect that by 2021 , The market size of the Non-Alcoholic Beer will reach 2960 million $.This Report covers the manufacturers data, including: shipment, price, revenue, gross profit, interview record, business distribution etc., these data help the consumer know about the competitors better. This report also covers all the regions and countries of the world, which shows a regional development status, including market size, volume and value, as well as price data.Get sample Report @Besides, the report also covers segment data, including: type segment, industry segment, channel segment etc. cover different segment market size, both volume and value. Also cover different industries clients information, which is very important for the manufacturers. If you need more information, please contact BisReportSection 1: FreeDefinitionSection (2 3): 1200 USDManufacturer DetailAnheuser-Busch InBevHeinekenCarlsbergBehnoush IranAsahi BreweriesSuntory BeerArpanooshErdinger WeibbrauKrombacher BrauereiWeihenstephanAujan IndustriesKirinSection 4: 900 USDRegion SegmentationNorth America Country (United States, Canada)South AmericaAsia Country (China, Japan, India, Korea)Europe Country (Germany, UK, France, Italy)Other Country (Middle East, Africa, GCC)Section (5 6 7): 500 USDProduct Type Segmentation (Limit Fermentation, Dealcoholization Method , , , )Industry Segmentation (Man, Woman, , , )Channel (Direct Sales, Distributor) SegmentationSection 8: 400 USDTrend (2017-2021)Section 9: 300 USDProduct Type DetailSection 10: 700 USDDownstream ConsumerSection 11: 200 USDCost StructurSection 12: 500 USDConclusionEnquiry About Report @Table of Contents -Major Key PointsSection 1 Non-Alcoholic Beer Product DefinitionSection 2 Global Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Manufacturer Share and Market Overview2.1 Global Manufacturer Non-Alcoholic Beer Shipments2.2 Global Manufacturer Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Revenue2.3 Global Non-Alcoholic Beer Market OverviewSection 3 Manufacturer Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Introduction3.1 Anheuser-Busch InBev Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Introduction3.1.1 Anheuser-Busch InBev Non-Alcoholic Beer Shipments, Price, Revenue and Gross profit 2013-20163.1.2 Anheuser-Busch InBev Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Distribution by Region3.1.3 Anheuser-Busch InBev Interview Record3.1.4 Anheuser-Busch InBev Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Profile3.1.5 Anheuser-Busch InBev Non-Alcoholic Beer Product Specification3.2 Heineken Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Introduction3.2.1 Heineken Non-Alcoholic Beer Shipments, Price, Revenue and Gross profit 2013-20163.2.2 Heineken Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Distribution by Region3.2.3 Interview Record3.2.4 Heineken Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Overview3.2.5 Heineken Non-Alcoholic Beer Product Specification3.3 Carlsberg Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Introduction3.3.1 Carlsberg Non-Alcoholic Beer Shipments, Price, Revenue and Gross profit 2013-20163.3.2 Carlsberg Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Distribution by Region3.3.3 Interview Record3.3.4 Carlsberg Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Overview3.3.5 Carlsberg Non-Alcoholic Beer Product Specification3.4 Behnoush Iran Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Introduction3.5 Asahi Breweries Non-Alcoholic Beer Business Introduction3.6 Suntory Beer Non-Alcoholic Beer Business IntroductionSection 4 Global Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Segmentation (Region Level)4.1 North America Country4.1.1 United States Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.1.2 Canada Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.2 South America Country4.2.1 South America Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.3 Asia Country4.3.1 China Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.3.2 Japan Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.3.3 India Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.3.4 Korea Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.4 Europe Country4.4.1 Germany Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.4.2 UK Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.4.3 France Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.4.4 Italy Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.4.5 Europe Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.5 Other Country and Region4.5.1 Middle East Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.5.2 Africa Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.5.3 GCC Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Size and Price Analysis 2013-20164.6 Three Global Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Segmentation (Region Level) Analysis 2013-20164.7 Global Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Segmentation (Region Level) AnalysisSection 5 Global Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Segmentation (Product Type Level)5.1 Global Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Segmentation (Product Type Level) Market Size 2013-20165.2 Different Non-Alcoholic Beer Product Type Price 2013-20165.3 Global Non-Alcoholic Beer Market Segmentation (Product Type Level) Analysis..CONTINUEDAbout UsWise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, Industry 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.NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)
Data Center Power Market in North America Worth Over $4 billon by 2023 | Arizton

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The data center power market in North America was valued at $3,480 million in 2017 and is expected to generate revenue of $4,640 million, growing at a CAGR of 4.91% during the 2017-2023Ariztons recent market research report on the data center power market in Americas identifies ABB, Eaton, General Electric, Schneider Electric, and Vertiv as the leading vendors that are likely to dominate the market during the forecast period. The research report provides a detailed analysis of market segmentation by electrical infrastructure (UPS, generators, transfer switch & switchgear, rack PDU, and other electrical infrastructure), tier standards (Tier 1 and Tier 2, Tier 3, and Tier 4), and geography (North America and South America).The data center power market in Americas is projected to grow from $3,730 million in 2017 to $5,130 million by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 5.46% during the forecast period.Request for your free sample today!The data center power market in Americas is segmented into electrical infrastructure, tier standards, and geography.North America to dominate the market share in the data center power market in Americas during forecast periodThe data center power market in Americas by geography is divided into North America and South America. The data center power market in North America was valued at $3,480 million in 2017 and is expected to generate revenue of $4,640 million, growing at a CAGR of 4.91% during the forecast period. The growth in cloud computing, big data, and Internet of Thing (IoT) is driving the demand for data centers in America. The US contributes more than 85% to the total investments in the data center power market in North America. The development of edge computing in major North American cities such as the US and Canada will boost investment opportunities for data center power service providers in the region. Moreover, the shift to renewable energy as power sources for various new data center projects in Canada is encouraging vendors to develop innovative technologies in the data center power market in Americas.Rack PDUs in the data center power market in Americas to grow at the fastest CAGR during forecast periodThe electrical infrastructure segment in the data center market in Americas is classified into UPS, generators, transfer switch and switchgear, rack PDU, and other electrical infrastructure. The rack power distribution units (PDUs) segment is the fastest growing electrical infrastructure segment in the data center power market in Americas, growing at a CAGR of 6.23% and is expected to generate revenue about $692.29 million during the forecast period. The different types of PDUs available in the data center power market are basic PDU, metered PDU, monitored PDU, switched PDU, and automatic transfer switch PDUs. The introduction of innovative rack PDUs that are specifically designed for modern data centers with Tier 3 standards and 2N redundancy is likely to drive the demand for data center services. Vvendors are also planning to introduce accessories such as mounting brackets, circuit breakers, whip cables, and outlet covers to increase the market share in the data center power market in Americas during the forecast period. The development and launch of monitored or switched PDUs enabling remote monitoring of power supply to the IT infrastructure is likely to revolutionize the data center power market in Americas.Request for your free sample today!Tier 4 standards to be the fastest growing standard segment in the data center power market in Americas during forecast periodThe data center power market in Americas by tier standard is segmented into Tier 1 and Tier 2, Tier 3, and Tier 4. The Tier 4 segment, which is the fastest growing tier standard segment in the data center power market in Americas, was valued at $1,067 million in 2017 and growing at a CAGR of 7.23% by 2023. The development of hyperscale data centers by prominent developers such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google are driving the growth of the Tier 4 standards in the data center power market in Americas. These data centers are equipped with 2N+1 redundancy, which makes the facilities fault tolerant and reduces the possibility of downtime. The development of modular infrastructures such as switch facilities and highly efficient power systems will fuel the growth of this market segment in the data center power market in Americas during the forecast period.The other prominent players in the data center power market in Americas are Active Power (Piller Power Systems), Rittal, Caterpillar, Cummins, Cyber Power Systems, Delta Group, Geist Global, Genrac Power Systems, HighPower, Hitec Power Protection, Legrand, Nlyte Software, and Tripp Lite.The complete overview of the latest market research report on the data center power market in Americas 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 a free sample :About Arizton Advisory & IntelligenceArizton  Advisory and Intelligence is an innovation and quality-driven firm, which offers cutting-edge research solutions to clients across the world. We excel in providing comprehensive market intelligence reports and advisory and consulting services.We offer comprehensive market research reports on industries such as consumer goods & retail technology, automotive and mobility, smart tech, healthcare and life sciences, industrial machinery, chemicals and materials, IT and media, logistics and packaging. These reports contain detailed industry analysis, market size, share, growth drivers, and trend forecasts.Arizton comprises a team of exuberant and well-experienced analysts who have mastered in generating incisive reports. Our specialist analysts possess exemplary skills in market research. We train our team in advanced research practices, techniques, and ethics to outperform in fabricating impregnable research reports.Arizton Advisory & IntelligenceChicago, Illinois, 60605Mail: enquiry@arizton.comCall: +1-312-465-7864
Global Floating Power Plant Market is Expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.36%

Global Floating Power Plant Market

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WiseGuyReports published new report, titled Global Floating Power Plant MarketMarket ScenarioA floating power plant is a power generating unit mounted on power barges, powerships or floating structure that are installed over a water body to generate electricity. These floating power plants mainly utilizes renewable energy resources such as solar energy, wind energy and wave energy or conventional resources such as, coal, diesel, heavy fuel oils, natural gas and nuclear energy for the production of electricity.The global floating power plant market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.36%. Advantageous over conventional land-based power plants, lack of infrastructure in remote locations, and growing demand for clean energy are some of the other factors which contribute to the growth of the global floating power plants market.Floating power plant market is driven by its benefits over conventional power plants, as they have minimal environmental impact, while minimizing limitations affected by environmental regulations. Thus, they reduce the use of land for construction of power plants, supply electricity for specific facilities economically, and can be used as an emergency power source. These factors, majorly, are contributing to the growth of floating power plant market in near future.Floating power plant market by power plant type was dominated by floating solar power. A floating solar power plant is the best the option to overcome these problems. Electricity crisis are major is many developing nations, also the public opposition over the large scale land acquisition done by the governing authority to install a solar power plant is a major restraint, thus installing a floating solar power plant on a water body is the best in case scenario in todays world. Floating solar power plant has great scope in Asia-Pacific region due to growing scarcity of land mass and growing demand for power supply.Study Objectives of Global Floating Power Plant Market- To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast for the next 10 years of the various segments and sub-segments of the Floating Power Plant Market- To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth- To Analyze the Floating Power Plant market based on various factors- price analysis, supply chain analysis, Porters five force analysis.- To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to six main geographies and their countries-Europe, Asia-Pacific, Rest of the World- To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective- To provide country level analysis of the market for segments: power plant type, and platform type as well as its sub segments- To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market- To track and analyze competitive developments such as partnerships and collaborations, product launch, mergers and acquisitions, and expansions in the Global Floating Power Plant MarketIntended Audience Distributer & Supplier companies End-Users Consultants and Investment bankers Government as well as Independent Regulatory AuthoritiesGET SAMPLE REPORT @Key Findings- The key findings of the report Global Floating Power Plant Market includes: Increasing installations of solar technology worldwide, and awareness of clean energy generation in remote areas is driving the market of floating solar power plant. Geographically, Asia-Pacific dominates the Floating Power Plant Market Floating structures dominate the market by platform type in terms of market share.Global Floating Power Plant Market Share:Key PlayersSome of the key players in the Global Floating Power Plant Market are MAN Diesel & Turbo, Karadeniz Holding A.S., Vikram Solar Pvt. Ltd., Ciel & Terre International, Waller Marine, Inc., Power Barge Corporation, Floating Power Plant A/S, PRINCIPLE POWER, INC., Wartsila, Kyocera TCL Solar, and ROSATOM. The companies in this market have adopted various strategies such as partnerships and collaborations, product launch, mergers and acquisitions, and expansions to append their market share.SegmentsThe floating power plant market can be segmented on the basis of power plant type as floating solar power, floating wind power, floating wind & wave power, floating nuclear power, and others. On the basis of platform type, the market has been segmented as floating structures, power barges, and power ships.Regional Analysis of Floating Power Plant MarketAsia-Pacific is one of the leading markets mainly due to owing to increase in utilization of renewable energy resources and scarcity of land in the region. in Europe, the recent development in renewable energy resources, basically in floating solar, floating wind and floating wind & wave power plant market is driving the market in the region...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
Vials Market to Develop Rapidly by 2025

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A vial also known as a phial or a flacon is a small plastic or a glass bottle or vessel. Vials are primarily used to store medication such as powders, liquids or capsules. In the past vials were made of glass however as of today, vials are made of various plastic materials including polypropylene. Varieties of closed systems are used during the manufacture of vials including screw vials and crimp vials. In addition, plastic vials can have various other types of closure systems including flip-tops or snap caps. A vial can be either bottle shaped or can have a bottle-like shape with a neck. The volume that is defined by the neck of the vial is called as the headspace. However, the bottom of the vial is usually flat, unlike that of test tubes, which is circular or rounded. The small vials, which are bottle shaped, are typically used in chemical laboratories and are known as McCartneys bottles or bijou. The bijou bottles are usually smaller, and have holding capacities of around 10mm. Various laboratories use different types of vials depending on their need such as low adsorption vials, certified vials, screw top vials, 9mm screw top vials, snap ring vials, crimp top vials, polypropylene vials, interlocked vials, inserts, versa vials, shell vials, center drain vials and headspace vials.Request to Browse Full Table of Content, figure and Tables @Vials are primarily used as scientific sample vessels specifically in autosampler devices employed in the analytical chromatography process. In addition, vials are used as primary or secondary packaging material in order to store various medicines in their powder, granular or liquid form. Medications of highly sensitive nature can only be store in vials in order to protect it from the external environment.The chromatography accessory market as well as the packaging market boosts high demand for vials in the global market. The chromatography market is a technology driven market where new technologies and end-users witness continuous and rapid change. All major companies continue to invest in order to expand its research and development team with the main aim of introducing new products and technologies in the market. The vial market was the fastest growing segment in the chromatography accessory market. The vial market is expected to continue growing even further over the next few years owing to innovations in terms of various types of materials used in the manufacturing of vials as well as designing of vials. The demand for vials is essentially driven by the increasing demand for chromatography procedures in various industries including biotechnology, life sciences, chemicals, food and beverage, pesticides and insecticides. In addition, increasing investments made by the governments in the Asia Pacific region primarily in the biochemical industry is expected to boost the vial market during the projected period.Request Sample Report @The key regions in the vial market include North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World (RoW). Major players in the North American region as well as the European region are focusing on increasing their presence in various high growth markets in the Asia pacific region. Various companies plan to expand their base in emerging countries like India, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. These markets offer a wide range of opportunities for growth and are expected to be high investment regions as well as new revenue pockets for the global market. High population, new technologies, increasing number of chemical laboratories, high investment in various research and development activities and favorable demographics are expected to be the key drivers for the global vial market.The key players operating the vial industry include MeadWestvaco Corporation in the U.S., Amcor Ltd, in Australia, Schott AG located in Germany, Rexam PLC in U.K., Gerresheimer AG situated in Germany and West Pharmaceutical Services, which is located in the U.S...Read Report Overview @ABOUT US:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.CONTACT:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Uveal Coloboma Treatment Market to Reflect Impressive Growth Rate During 2017 - 2025

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The vision ability in the living being is a major factor for identifying the object based on dimensions. Ophthalmology deals with eye disorders. The eye disorders are treated by various mode such as medication, surgical, and others. Various type of diseases and disorder which affect the vision capability of the person. Among such disorder uveal coloboma is major problem which occurs in fetus by birth.The tissue is missing in or outside the eye. The middle layer of the eye is uvea, the uvea pigment is useful for vision. The coloboma disorder can affect the colour segment of the eye, the problem can also occur in iris of the eye and also affect part of the eye. The cause for uveal coloboma is may be the due to genetic disorder, the genes which is responsible for healthy eye development due to some reason that gene has stopped or any mismatch occurs then the coloboma occurs.Request Report for TOC @Uveal coloboma mainly occurs when the fetus development take place. Research scientists team are still owning to find the specific gene which is responsible for uveal coloboma, as of now based on some research articles the environment provided to fetus is also may be a factor for uveal coloboma. The uveal coloboma is found in seventh week of the pregnancy.Uveal Coloboma Treatment Market: Drivers & RestraintsUveal coloboma treatment is growing market over the forecast period, as many researchers are going on identifying the correct sources for occurring uveal coloboma disorder. The research in genetic technology can help the fetus to overcome from uveal coloboma disorder. Various government and non-government association are funding to find the solution. As of the hindrance the high cost of research methodology for diagnosis and lack of awareness are the major factor.Uveal Coloboma Treatment Market: SegmentationUveal coloboma treatment is based on the surgery which may be tradionation surgery or laser surgeries. Research scientist are working to find the solution via genetic technology to alter the infected genes, so that the disorder cannot affect the fetus.Uveal coloboma treatment and diagnosis is under research, genetic technology can help to identify the sources and prevent the occurring of uvel coloboma. As per the recent research conducted by scientist the uveal coloboma cause by improper finish of optic fissure in 5th week of pregnancy period. Awareness program is also conducted by various association, so that the fetus cannot be affected by any other factor to develop uveal coloboma disorder.Request to Sample of Report @As a geography conditions the uveal coloboma treatment Market is segmented into: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East & Africa. North America is growing market of uveal coloboma as various clinical trials is conduct by health association, for instance, according to ClinicalTrials.gov of U.S, NEI (National Eye Institute) conducting a research activity to find the solution for uveal coloboma, the research was started on December 2012 and going to complete by December 2018. Europe and Asia Pacific also have the present in the market as the awareness in increasing and technology advancement adaptations is increasing.Read Report Overview @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:
Electrophoresis Reagents Market Share will Increase US$ 1 Billion By 2022

Electrophoresis Reagents Market

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Florida, January 16, 2018: Electrophoresis is a system utilized for partition of DNA, RNA and Protein in light of their size and charge. The procedure is utilized to decide the size and sort of macromolecules from the specimen. The development of this market is significantly determined by the expanding research exercises in the fields of proteomics and genomics, changing administrative necessities in the pharmaceutical part, and the developing need to reduce healthcare expenses. The expanding appropriation of electrophoresis systems in biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry is relied upon to help the income development of electrophoresis reagents market.The Global Electrophoresis Reagents Market is segmented on the lines of its product, end user, application and regional. Based on product segmentation it covers dyes, gels, buffers, others reagents. Based on end user segmentation it covers academic & research institutions, pharmaceutical & biotechnology companies, hospitals & diagnostic centers, other end users. Based on application segmentation it covers protein analysis, DNA & RNA analysis. Based on technique segmentation it covers gel electrophoresis, capillary electrophoresis.The Global Electrophoresis Reagents Market is expected to exceed more than US$1.15 Billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 5.4% in the given forecast period.You Can Browse Full Report Here:The Global Electrophoresis Reagents 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 major driving factors of Global Electrophoresis Reagents Market are as follows: Increasing occurrence of cancer, infectious diseases, and genetic disorders Expanding funding for genomic and proteomic research Highly increasing geriatric population New innovations technological advancements in electrophoresis reagents Expansion number of industry academic research collaborationsThe restraining factors of Global Electrophoresis Reagents Market are as follows: Time-reduced operations and limited sample analysis through gel electrophoresis Safety affairs Associated With Mutagenic Nucleic Acid Dyes Presence of alternative technologies offering better efficiency and resultsThis report provides:1) An overview of the global market for Global Electrophoresis Reagents 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 Electrophoresis Reagents 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 report include Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. (U.S.), Sigma-Aldrich Corporation (U.S.), Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (U.S.), Lonza Group (Switzerland), and QIAGEN N.V. (Netherlands). Merck Millipore (U.S.), Agilent Technologies, Inc. (U.S.), and Takara Bio, Inc. (Japan). 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 on Global Electrophoresis Reagents 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 Insights7 Global Electrophoresis Reagents Market, By Product7.1 Introduction7.1.1 Gels7.1.1.1 Polyacrylamide Gels7.1.1.2 Agarose Gels7.1.1.3 Starch Gels7.1.2 Dyes7.1.2.1 Ethidium Bromide (ETBR) Dyes7.1.2.2 Sybr Dyes7.1.2.3 Other Dyes7.1.3 Buffers7.1.3.2 Tris-Acetate-Edta (TAE) Buffers7.1.3.3 Other Buffers7.1.4 Other Electrophoresis Reagents8 Global Electrophoresis Reagents Market, By Technique9 Global Electrophoresis Reagents Market, By Application10 Global Electrophoresis Reagents Market, By End User11 Global Electrophoresis Reagents Market, By Region12 Competitive Landscape13 Company Profiles13.1 Introduction13.2 Thermo Fisher Scientific13.3 Sigma-Aldrich Corporation13.4 Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.13.5 Qiagen N.V.13.6 Merck Millipore13.7 GE Healthcare13.8 Agilent Technologies, Inc.13.9 Lonza Group, AG13.10 Takara Bio, Inc.13.11 Harvard Bioscience, Inc.13.12 Sebia GroupAbout 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
Remote Healthcare Market is Projected to Worth Over $36 Billion by 2023 | Arizton

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The remote healthcare market is projected to grow from $13.86 billion in 2017 to $36.92 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 17.74%.Ariztons recent market research report on the remote healthcare market provides comprehensive industry analysis, trend forecasts, and competitive analysis. The research study segments the market by service (mHealth, tele-ICUs, and virtual health (audio visits, video visits, and chat consultations)), end-users (hospitals and clinics, individuals, and other medical service providers), and geography (APAC, Europe, North America, and ROW).The remote healthcare market is projected to grow from $13.86 billion in 2017 to $36.92 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 17.74%. The growing demand for health call centers, emergency toll-free telephone services, emergency and disaster management, mobile patient records, and health surveys is driving the growth of the remote healthcare market. The increasing penetration of mobile and wireless technology will revolutionize the remote healthcare market during the forecast period.Request for your free sample today!The leading three drivers and trends driving the remote healthcare market are discussed below:Increasing awareness toward self-care and disease managementThe growing awareness regarding self-care and disease management is driving the growth of the global remote healthcare market. The increasing adoption of next-generation medical devices such as electrocardiogram (ECG) monitors, sleep monitors, and other remote patient monitoring devices worldwide will encourage vendors to launch innovative products in the global market. The growing popularity of smartwatch, fit-bit, and other wearable devices to track day-to-day activities will increase the awareness among the population and boost the demand in the global remote healthcare market. These devices are designed to track daily health activities and monitor heart conditions and other physical health conditions. The introduction of innovative devices will propel the growth of the remote healthcare market.Rising incidence of chronic diseases worldwideThe high prevalence of various chronic diseases worldwide is fueling the need for real-time health monitoring and driving the growth of the remote healthcare market. The rising incidences of major chronic diseases such as cardiac diseases, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and arthritis are boosting the demand for remote healthcare services in the global market. The changes in the healthcare monitoring system and better disease management will ensure prevention and the early diagnosis of these chronic ailments. The introduction of virtual visits, virtual consults, and mHealth services will help to improve the patient-physician interaction in remote areas. The growing popularity of remote healthcare services will increase patient access and help in transforming the global healthcare market during the forecast period.Request for your free sample today!Increased usage of mHealth applicationThe increasing number of government initiatives to introduce health care planning, program development, and service delivery models in various rural locations across the world will augment the development of the global remote healthcare market. Vendors are focusing on introducing flexible and innovative healthcare solutions that offer real-time access to patients in rural areas. The collaborative partnerships between healthcare organizations and leading vendors will ensure proper patient care and disease management services is offered to people living in rural regions. Such developments and innovations will have a positive impact on the global remote healthcare market.Medtronic, Teladoc, American Well, Airstrip Technologies, and BioTelemetry/LifeWatch are the leading vendors in the remote healthcare market.The complete overview of the latest market research report on the remote healthcare 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.Order a report now for more information :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 & 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
Radioimmunotherapy Treatment Market Intelligence Research Reports for Actionable Insights 2017  2027

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Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide and is projected to rise with an estimated 11.5 million deaths in 2030. The most common cancer is lung cancer, accounting about 1.59 million deaths, other types of cancer include liver cancer, breast cancer, stomach cancer, liver cancer, etc. Cancer can be treated by surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, hormone therapy, targeted therapy, precision medicine, immunotherapy and stem cell transplantation. Immunotherapy involves the use of persons immune system to fight cancer; it involves the stimulation of immune system to attack the cancer cells or provide the immune system with a man-made immune system.Different types of immunotherapy include monoclonal antibodies, designed to attack the specific cells; immune checkpoint inhibitors, drugs that recognize and attack the cancer cells by removing the brakes of the T cell; cancer vaccines, used to trigger the immune response against specific disease and various other non-specific immunotherapy are used to boost the immune system. Radioimmunotherapy is the combination of radiation therapy and immunotherapy. Monoclonal antibody is engineered in the laboratory and paired with a radioactive material called radiotracers. When injected, radio labeled antibody to bind to the specific cancer cell and destroyed the cancer cell by its radioactivity. The radioactive agents used mainly are Yttrium-90 Ibritumomab Tiuxetan, Iodine-131 Tositumomab, and others.Request For Report Sample:Several clinical trials are ongoing to establish the potential of radio labeled monoclonal antibody. Radioimmunotherapy is also used to treat patients suffering from non-Hodgkin B-cell lymphoma, and other sub-types of lymphoma or patients who does not respond to chemotherapy. Generally, no side effects are seen during the treatment. In clinical field, clinical studies are done to enhance biological and chemical efficacy and treatment procedure improvements in radioimmunotherapy. Both direct and indirect method are used in the delivery of radioimmunotherapy molecules. Increasing discretionary funding for cancer research by government and federal agencies, increase in Medicare coverage, rising prevalence of cancer among growing population, availability of new cancer treatment, and various other factors are will booth the radioimmunotherapy market in the near future.Radioimmunotherapy Treatment Market: Drivers and RestrainsAccording to Word Health Organization, it is estimated that by 2030, about 23.6 million new cases of cancer will prevail worldwide. Governmental guidelines from American Society of Clinical Oncology and National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN /ASCO) are providing help to healthcare professionals in the management and treatment of cancer patients. Intense research and development in cancer therapeutics, the rise in the incidence of cancer cases, increased preference towards cancer research. In April 2016, the U.S. Government allocated US$ 5.2 Bn for the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a federal government agency, for cancer research and training. The budget increased by 5.3% as compared to the previous year. Insurance coverage and reimbursement issues, big companies are investing heavily in the cancer therapeutics involving both time and money, and there is no guarantee that the product will get coverage, radiation risk to healthcare professionals and patients are some factors that may decline the growth of radio-immunotherapy marketRadioimmunotherapy Treatment Market: SegmentationThe global radioimmunotherapy treatment market has been classified on the basis of drug type, procedure type, disease indication, target type and geography.Based on Drug Type, the radioimmunotherapy treatment market is divided into following:IbritumomabTositumomabRituximabEpratuzumabLintuzumabLabetuzumabTrastuzumabOthersBased on the Procedure Type, the global radioimmunotherapy treatment market is divided into following:Direct MethodIndirect MethodBased on the Disease Indication, the global radioimmunotherapy treatment market is divided into following:Non-Hodgkin lymphomaMyeloid leukemiaColorectal cancerBreast CancerMultiple MyelomaOthersBased on the End User, the global radioimmunotherapy treatment market is divided into following:HospitalsAmbulatory surgical centersCancer Research InstitutesOthersRadioimmunotherapy Treatment Market: OverviewBased on the drug type, the global radioimmunotherapy treatment market is segmented into ibritumomab, tositumomab, rituximab, epratuzumab, lintuzumab, labetuzumab and trastuzumab. On the basis of procedure type the radioimmunotherapy treatment market is segmented into direct and indirect method. O On the basis of disease indication, the market is segmented into non-hodgkin lymphoma, myeloid leukemia, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, multiple myeloma and others. Based on end user, the market is segmented into hospital, ambulatory surgical centers and cancer research institutes. The rise in cancer patient population, funding by the governmental bodies, focus on acquisition and merger by various key manufacturers is attributed towards the growth of radio-immunotherapy treatment marketRadioimmunotherapy Treatment Market: Regional OverviewRegion wise, the global Radioimmunotherapy Treatment Market is classified into regions namely, North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa. More than 70% of worlds cancer death occurs in Africa, Asia and South America. Around 33% of cancer cases worldwide are due to smoke and tobacco. Along with expansion in the emerging markets, and greater focus on early diagnosis, screening, monitoring and clinical development associated with radiotherapy treatment have been the major strategies adopted by major players in the global radioimmunotherapy treatment market.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Radioimmunotherapy Treatment Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in global Radioimmunotherapy Treatment Market are GlaxoSmithKline plc. Bayer AG, MabVax Therapeutics Holdings, Inc., Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Nordic Nanovector, Actinium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Immunomedics, Inc., Spectrum Pharmaceuticals, Inc.and others.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Abhishek Bhudoliya616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Low Vision Aids Market to Reflect Impressive Growth Rate During 2017 - 2025

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Low vision is a term used to describe the visual impairment condition that cannot be cured with the help of contact lenses, glasses, medicine, and eye surgery and person with the low vision condition is not able to perform the day to day task properly. Vision impairment has many forms and degree of the condition. Vision problem of a person cannot be predicted with the visual acuity. This condition is usually caused by various eye conditions and diseases such as, glaucoma, macular degeneration, cataracts, stroke, diabetic retinopathy, and retinitis pigmentosa. Low vision aids are used to help people to perform day-to-day activities.Request Report for TOC @Low Vision Aids Market: Driver and RestraintsGlobal low visual aids market is expected to be driven by the increasing prevalence of the low vision condition. Increasing focus of the companies on the development of the advanced devices is also expected to boost the growth of the low vision aids market. Increasing incidence of life style diseases such as, diabetes that are among the leading cause of low vision is expected to drive the market of low vision aids. Increasing geriatric population is also expected to be a growth driving facto of the low vision aids market as this condition is more prevalent in older people.The global low vision aids market is expected to show significant growth over the forecast period. Increase prevalence of low vision is expected to be a major factor in the growth of the low vision aids market. Increasing cases of the lifestyle diseases such as diabetes that are highly prevalent in developed countries, are among the leading cause of the low vision and increasing incidence of these disease is expected to boost the growth of the low vision aids market.High unmet need as this condition cannot be treated with currently available treatment methods is also expected to drive the market of the low vision aids market. Advancement in the technology and development of easy to use devices is also a major factor for the growth of the low vision aids market. Optical aids is expected to dominate the market of low vision aids over the forecast period these devices are easy to use and can be carried along.Request to Sample of Report @Low Vision Aids Market: Region Wise OutlookThe global low vision aids market can be segmented into various regions such as North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the low vision aids market and is expected to continue to dominate the low vision aids market over the forecast period. Europe is second biggest market for the low vision aids market. High awareness among people and better healthcare infrastructure is the reason for the dominance of North America and Europe in the global low vision aids market. Increasing advancement and government focus on reduction of healthcare burden is also expected to be a factor for the growth of the low vision aids market in the region. Asia Pacific low vision aids market is expected to be fastest growing owning to the presence of high patient pool, increasing geriatric population and increasing income.Low Vision Aids Market: Key PlayersSome of the players in the global low vision aids market are, Eschenbach Optik GmbH, Enhanced Vision, Freedom Scientific, Inc., VisionAid International, Jaggi Jaggi, HumanWare Group, CTP, Inc., Wipac Ltd. and Emerald Cost Vision Aids, Inc. These companies are increasing investment on the advancement of the products.Read Report Overview @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:
IV Equipment Market : Stopcocks & valve to Reach US$ 270 Mn by 2022

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The IV catheter segment is the most popular in the IV equipment market and should remain so for the foreseeable future. The IV catheter segment is expected to be worth more than US$ 2.7 billion in 2017 itself and companies are recommended to target this segment with gusto. The infusion pump segment is a close second in the IV equipment market in terms of product type segment and is likely to be the biggest winner in terms of market share. Key stakeholders in the IV equipment market would do well to focus their energy on the Europe infusion pumps market as the region accounts for more than a third of the revenue contribution.Rising cases of needle stick injuries, the shift in demand towards ambulatory surgical centers and fusion pumps, and a greater number of surgical procedures performed are poised to benefit the IV equipment market. Furthermore, a prevalence of chronic diseases in an ageing population in developed nations are positive signs for the IV equipment market. However, lack of wireless connectivity, regulatory mandates for new product launches and increasing cases of medication errors inhibit the unencumbered growth of the IV equipment market that is anticipated to witness a steady CAGR of 5% from 2017 to 2022.Global IV Equipment Market Research Report Overview @The securement device segment and stopclocks & valve segment have single digit revenue share in the IV equipment market. While the former is projected to lose market share, the latter is on track to gain share and companies may seek to take advantage of this. The stopcock & valves segment is estimated to grow with a CAGR of just under 6% from 2017 to 2022. Along with Europe, the stopcocks & valves segment has strong potential in APEJ.The drip chamber and needleless connector segment have a revenue share of less than a tenth in the IV equipment market at the end of 2017. The needleless connector segment is predicted to lose substantial share in the near future while the drip chamber segment should fall slowly. The Europe drip chamber segment is assessed to grow past more than US$ 285 million at the end of the forecast period. The needleless connector segment also has the greatest potential in Europe. Along with Europe, companies could additionally target the North America needleless connector segment.Request Sample Report@Hospitals hold the lions share in the IV equipment market by end user segment and are forecast to hold steady for the medium to long term. Hospitals are the most-well equipped to deal with any and every patient need pertaining to IV treatment. Europe is the largest region in the hospital segment of the IV equipment market but there is a close competition for the second place between APEJ and North America.The companies profiled in the IV equipment market are AngioDynamics, Moog Inc., Terumo Corporation, C. R. Bard, ICU Medical, Smiths Group, Baxter International Inc., Fresenius SE & Co., B. Braun Melsungen AG, and Becton, Dickinson and Company.Download and View Report TOC, Figures and Tables @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:
Ultrasonic Tissue Ablation System Market Intelligence and Forecast by Future Market Insights 2017  2027

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Ablation is an advanced treatment option for various diseases such as cancers, cardiac arrhythmias, and other medical conditions. Ablation is the procedure to remove destroyed tissue, harmful substances or abdominal growth from the body. Tumor ablation on bone and soft tissue has gained wide acceptance for the treatment of benign and malignant lesions. Different types of ablation techniques are used such as radiofrequency ablation, laser ablation, electrical ablation, cryoablation, microwave ablation, ultrasonic ablation, hydrothermal ablation and others. Mostly this procedure is used to treat atrial fibrillation either by catheter ablation or surgical ablation. During cardiac ablation small electrode (wire) is inserted to measure electrical activity, the tissue that causes the heart rhythm problems is detected by the electrode and is destroyed using ablation technique. For each application, ablation procedures differs according to ablation zone area, treatment period, and procedural method.Ultrasonic ablation is a noninvasive procedural technique that uses sound wave and is concentrated at the diseased area of the tissue, leading to heating and cellular destruction of the diseased tissue. Ultrasonic or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is performed that directs the ablation device to the diseased tissue. Ultrasonic tissue ablation system is designed. Radiofrequency and ultrasonic ablation devices are considered the most preferred and selected products by doctors and physicians. Ultrasonic ablation is a minimally invasive surgical procedure that involves a local anesthetic and mild sedation. This procedure is primarily used to reduce chronic low-back and neck pain caused due to degeneration of joints (due to arthritis and other spinal conditions). The procedure involves heating a small area of nervous tissue under controlled temperature. This results in blockage of pain signal receptor from that area, thereby relieving the patient from chronic pain.Request For Report Sample:Advancement in the ablation devices due to intense research and development supports the physicians for wide selection of surgical tips and handpieces, which allows the surgeon to select the right combination that is based on the surgical procedure. The advanced ultrasonic ablation tissue system optimizes the frequency delivered to each tip, enables simple user interface and allows immediate detection of the malfunction to reduce complications. According to National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Atrial fibrillation cost US $6 billion each year in the United States.Ultrasonic Tissue Ablation System Market: Drivers and RestrainsIncrease in prevalence of cardiovascular diseases such as arrhythmia, paroxysmal, persistent and permanent atrial fibrillation; rising incidence of chronic pain, cancer and increasing demand for minimally invasive procedure are the factors favoring market growth over the forecast period. The use of ultrasonic technology in radiofrequency devices is gaining popularity and enabling surgeons the power, precision, and control needed for selective dissection of soft or hard tissue. The factors limiting the market growth is high treatment cost, less awareness about the devices and other optional treatment system and devices used for tissue ablation. Growth opportunities such as increasing market share through mergers and acquisitions and investing in emerging economics, technological advancement in ultrasonic tissue ablation system is boosting the growth of the target marketUltrasonic Tissue Ablation System Market: SegmentationThe global ultrasonic tissue ablation systemmarket has been classified on the basis of product type, application, end user and geography.Based on Product Type, the global ultrasonic tissue ablation system market is divided into following:High-intensity Focused Ultrasonic (HIFU) AblatorsMagnetic Resonance-guided Focused Ultrasonic (MRGFUS) AblatorsUltrasonic Surgical Ablation SystemsShock wave therapy SystemsBased on the Application, the global ultrasonic tissue ablation system market is divided into following:Cardiovascular DiseaseCancerPain ManagementGynecologyUrologyOrthopedicOthersBased on the End User, the global ultrasonic tissue ablation system market is divided into following:HospitalAmbulatory Surgical centersClinicsSpecialty Care UnitOthersUltrasonic Tissue Ablation System Market: OverviewThe ultrasonic tissue ablation system market is segment based on product type, application, end-user and geography. Based on the product type, ultrasonic tissue ablation system market is segmented on the basis of magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasonic (MRGFUS) ablators, high-intensity focused ultrasonic (HIFU) ablators, ultrasonic surgical ablation systems and shock wave therapy systems. Based on the application segment, the market is sub-segmented on the basis of cardiovascular diseases, cancer, pain management, gynecology, urology, orthopedic and others. On the basis oF end user, the ultrasonic tissue ablation system market is segmented on the basis of hospital, ambulatory surgical center, clinics, and specialty care units. Increase in the number of patient population will lead to rise in the procedures of minimally invasive surgeries that will increased the demand for ultrasonic tissue ablation systems.Ultrasonic Tissue Ablation System Market: Regional OverviewRegion wise, the global ultrasonic tissue ablation systems market is classified into regions namely, North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa. North America is estimated to account for major share as according to world health organization, growth rate of geriatric population will be higher in developed nations, especially in the U.S., Japan, and several countries in Europe. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, around 89 million people would be aged over 65 years in the U.S. by 2050. Furthermore, around 40% people in Japan would be aged over 65 years by 2060. Significant economic development has led to an increase in healthcare availability in Asia Pacific region providing an opportunity for ultrasonic tissue ablation devices companies to penetrate Asia Pacific regions. The rapid increase in the geriatric population is likely to fuel the growth of the ultrasonic ablation devices market during the forecast period.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Ultrasonic Tissue Ablation System Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in global ultrasonic tissue ablation market are Ethicon, Inc. is a (Johnson & Johnson),Misonix Inc., SonaCare Medical, LLC., INSIGHTEC Ltd, Integra LifeSciences Corporation, ALPINION MEDICAL SYSTEMS Co., Ltd., Chongqing Haifu Medical Technology Co. ltd and othersABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Abhishek Bhudoliya616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
TWIN FALLS  Ataraxis Accounting and Advisory Services Chtd. announced that Michael Germone became an owner and director of the firm as of Jan. 1. He joins Lisa Donnelley and Nancy Wonderlich Koonce in those capacities.

Germone joined the firm in 2014 as a senior staff accountant, moving to Twin Falls from Broomfield, Colo.

Germone graduated from the University of California at Davis in 1997 with a Bachelor of Science in managerial economics. He immediately worked for Deloitte Tax LLP, through 2007. Germone received his California CPA license in 2003.

After leaving Deloitte, he moved to Colorado, where he worked for KPMG LLP as well as in private industry.

Germone is a member of the Idaho Society of Certified Public Accounts and the Association of International Certified Public Accountants. He and his family live in Kimberly.
Plasma Cell Neoplasm Treatment Market to receive overwhelming hike in Revenues by 2025

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Plasma cells are responsible for the development of antibodies in the immune system. Abnormal growth of plasma cells takes place in bone marrow and these cells start forming tumors, resulting in plasma cell neoplasms. Plasma neoplasm cells produce M protein instead of antibodies and causes the thickening of blood or damage to the kidney. According to the National Cancer Institute, there were 30,280 new cases of plasma cell neoplasms in 2016 in the U.S.Plasma Cell Neoplasm Treatment Market: Driver and RestraintsPlasma cell neoplasm treatment market is expected to show a significant growth over the forecast period due to increasing geriatric population, as older population is more vulnerable to plasma cell neoplasms. Increasing funding on cancer research and various awareness campaigns by governments around the world is also expected to fuel the growth of the plasma cell neoplasm treatment market.Request Report for TOC @Continuous development of new therapies by the pharmaceutical companies and development of biologics treatment options are also expected to boost the growth of the plasma cell neoplasm treatment market. Increasing development of generics & biosimilars and limited coverage by insurance companies, especially in emerging markets, is expected to stall the growth of the plasma cell neoplasm treatment market. Government and regulatory bodies pressure to reduce the price of drugs is also expected to restrict the growth of the plasma cell neoplasm treatment market.The global plasma cell neoplasm treatment market is expected to show a significant growth over the forecast period. Increasing incidence owing to increasing geriatric population is expected to drive the growth in the plasma cell neoplasm treatment market. Increasing investment on the development of various therapeutics for plasma cell neoplasm treatment is expected to boost market growth.Multiple myeloma segment is expected to be fastest growing disease indication segment due to the high mortality risk associated with this condition. Chemotherapy segment is expected to dominate the plasma cell neoplasm treatment market owning to availability of a significant number of products. But biologics treatment segment is expected to be fastest growing plasma cell neoplasm treatment segment owning to increasing approval and higher cost of therapy.Request to Sample of Report @Plasma Cell Neoplasm Treatment Market: Region Wise OutlookGeographically, the global plasma cell neoplasm treatment market can be segmented into five major regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the global plasma cell neoplasm treatment market and is expected to continue to do so over the forecast period due to better reimbursement policies and presence of key players in the region. Asia Pacific region is expected to be fastest growing market for plasma cell neoplasm treatment market owning to the presence of large patient pool and increasing investment on providing better healthcare facilities, especially in Japan and China.Plasma Cell Neoplasm Treatment Market: Key PlayersSome of the market participants in the global plasma cell neoplasm treatment market are, AbbVie, Inc., Amgen, Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Celgene Corporation, Janssen Biotech, Inc., Millennium Pharmaceutical, Inc., Novartis AG, Spectrum Pharmaceutical, Inc. and Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. Most of the top players focus on the collaborative distribution strategy for cost saving and increasing presence in emerging market.Read Report Overview @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:
Smart Tag Packaging Market Projected to Grow Steadily During 2017  2027

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The expansion of online retail format and the increased use of the internet for tracking of logistics has created the need for linking online transactions and physical products. A smart tag is one such technology which has been widely providing the solutions to link this gap. Commonly used smart tags are QR code, Electronic article surveillance (EAS) and RFID tags. A smart tag has an advantage of having the wide range of application over traditional bar codes. QR codes are not need to be aligned in particular direction. Electronic article surveillance are used to prevent thefts from the stores whereas RFID tags have multiple application of giving the information about the product. The penetration of the smart phones has widened the customer base for the smart tag packaging market. A smart tag is playing an important role in supply chain management by enabling the manufacturers and suppliers to keep track of logistics and optimally maintain the inventory level. Smart tags being a responsive form of packaging can play a vital role in future by making the transactions more efficient and faster thus benefiting both customer and seller.Smart Tag Packaging Market: Market DynamicsThe smart tag packaging market is related to the responsive packaging market. Packaging market is estimated to be over US$ 800 Mn and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4% over the forecast period. With the increase in the geographic spread of customer base, companies are now using more shipping services and to keep a track and account of the goods smart tag is playing an important role. With the increasing penetration of the e-commerce market in the APEJ region, online transaction is expected to increase while positively influencing the smart tag packaging market. Changing consumer lifestyle and increasing installation of modern retail outlets have boosted the growth in smart tag packaging market. The current trend of consuming the products in smaller quantity has increased the number of goods being packed and is expected to propel smart tag market over the forecast period. However, the lack of industrial standards and mechanical susceptibilities can limit the growth of smart tag market. The cost associated with the Smart tag is another factor resisting the proliferation of smart tag market. The application of the smart tag to keep the track and optimally maintain the inventory level hence protecting the production process can provide new opportunities for the smart tag market.Request For Report Sample:Smart Tag Packaging Market: Market SegmentationSmart tag packaging market can be segmented by the type of material used and by the end use sector.Based on the type of smart tags, the smart tag packaging market is segmented into:QR CodeElectronic Article Surveillance (EAS)RFIDBased on the end use sector, smart tag packaging market is segmented into:RetailManufacturingFMCG (fast moving consumer goods)MedicalAutomotiveOthersSmart Tag Packaging Market: Regional OutlookRegionally global smart tag packaging market is segmented intoNorth AmericaLatin AmericaEastern EuropeWestern EuropeAsia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ)Middle East & Africa (MEAJapanNorth America being the biggest organized region is expected to lead the smart tag packaging market over the forecast period. Eastern and Western Europe is expected to follow the North American market owing to its well-established retail sector in the region. Smart tag packaging market in APEJ region is expected to grow rapidly over the forecast period attributed to the changing lifestyle of the consumers in the region and presence of densely populated areas in the region. While Japan and MEA region are expected to witness moderate growth rate for smart tag packaging market.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Smart Tag Packaging Market: Key Players:Some key players of Smart tag packaging market are Smart Label Solutions, LLC, Shenzhen Jianhe Smartcard Technology Co., Ltd., Shenzhen Zdcard Tech Co., Ltd., Shenzhen Top tags Technology Co., Ltd., Chengdu Mind Golden Card System Co., Ltd., Zhejiang Laxcen Information Technology Inc. Limited, Alien Technology, Inc. (U.S.), Muehlbauer Holding AG, Thin Film Electronics ASA, Zebra Technologies.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Abhishek Bhudoliya616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Automotive Film Market: Industry Outlook, Growth Prospects and Key Opportunities 2017 - 2025

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An automotive film is a thin laminate film applied on the interior and exterior parts of a vehicle. Automotive films provide added security, privacy and comfort. Window films and paint protection films are two key types of automotive films. These films enhance the appearance of the vehicle and provide high transparency and high gloss. Automotive films block more than 92% of UV rays and provide comfort by blocking the unwanted sun glare. Window films with lighter tints often combine solid heat rejection performance and reduce fading, while accenting the look of a car. Furthermore, automotive dyeing films are beneficial in reducing winter heat loss & solar heat gain and help maintain a comfortable & sustainable environment inside the vehicle. In addition, the usage of UV filtering dyeing films lessens the risk of skin damage & skin cancer.These benefits offered by automotive films, along with increasing safety concerns among buyers, are estimated to fuel the market growth. Automotive films usually get their color either by a layer of a metal or dye. Dyed films characteristically fade faster over time and provide less protection from heat and light as compared to metal films. On the other hand, metallized films can interfere with the radio or GPS inside a car. Automotive films can also be applied in automotive interiors, such as audio remote control systems, control panels, dials, the console and door trims.Request for Table of Contents @High durability, availability in different shades and ability to prevent skin damage are some of the major drivers for the automotive film market. The ability of these films to provide privacy and offer a unique style for the vehicles interiors and exteriors escalate the demand for this market. Growing demand for passenger vehicles with technological advancement will surge the market growth. Automotive films are economically a better option as compared to paints and are easy to install. Growing industries, such as graphics and signs, are anticipated to support the growth of the automotive film market.The Indian government has banned the use of black films on car windscreens and windows. Australian states and territories demand the VLT (visible light transmission level) of approximately 35% on a light vehicles side windows. According to the U.K. government, the front and side screen of a vehicle must allow a minimum of 70% light through. Such government regulations related to automotive films hamper the market growth for automotive films.The new black chrome automotive window film utilizes a metalized film technology and provides significantly improved comfort and maximum heat rejection.North American countries, such as the U.S. and Canada, are anticipated to show vigorous growth in the automotive film market, owing to the high vehicle production in these countries. The same perspective holds true for European countries, such as Germany, Spain and France. These countries exhibit high potential growth in the automotive film market, due to escalating vehicle sales and a renewed interest in electric vehicles. India and China are anticipated to forefront the growth of the market in the Asia Pacific region, due to the major contribution of these two economies in the automotive industry.The aftermarket segment of the automotive film market is anticipated to increase in the MEA region, due to the augmented interest in vehicle customization among consumers. Japan is also expected to be a high potential country for the market, due to the presence of a large number of OEMs in the country. The market in the Latin America region is expected to register slow growth, due to a decline in the automotive industry in the regions largest economy, Brazil; however, the region projected to pick up steam in the later stages of the forecast period.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Examples of some of the prominent market participants in the automotive film market are: 3M Company, Ergis S.A.,, Akzo Nobel N.V., Eastman Chemical Company, Garware Polyester Limited, Avery Dennison Corporation, Hexis S.A., Johnson Window Film Inc., Lintec Corporation, Nexfil Co, Ltd., Zeofilms, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corporation, Madico, Inc., Kay Premium Marking Films Ltd., Prestige Film Technologies, Renolit Group, Xpel Technologies Corp.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Global Rehabilitation Equipment Market Set for Rapid Growth And Trend, by 2025

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Since the enactment of the long-term care insurance system in 2000, public interest in rehabilitation equipment, and thereby the number of users has increased. This trend further resulted into improvements in the function and design of such equipment, which greatly benefits the aged population and physically challenged to achieve greater independence and participate in society. Rehabilitation equipment is a re-usable aid which assists the patient with their daily activities.In the past decade, the market for these devices has expanded considerably due to government support and technological advancements to address the needs of the increasing geriatric and physically challenged population in developed countries with the purchasing power as well as need for rehabilitation equipment. However, high cost and maintenance expenses may hinder the growth of this market in developing and under-developed countries, which is otherwise estimated to be significant. This could be attributed to the entry of various government and private insurance players who cover various assistive devices under reimbursement plans, making them more affordable to consumers and enhancing the demand for them in the market. The combined effect of these factors is predicted to drive the rehabilitation equipment market during the forecast period.Download Report Brochure @The global market is segmented on the basis of product into the following categories: personal care aids, mobility devices, exercise equipment, respiratory & pressure care products, and other. The mobility devices segment, which is expected to register high growth in the near future, covers wheelchairs, scooters, and walking assistance devices. Wheelchairs are designed for physically challenged customers who face problems with mobility.The elderly and individuals with leg injuries, spinal cord injuries (SCIs), multiple sclerosis (MS), hemiplegia & other types of paralysis, cerebral palsy (CP), spinal bifida, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), lower limb amputees, and arthritis are major customers too. There are wheelchairs specially designed to perform in different infrastructural setups. Physically challenged sportspersons are also a major target segment for wheelchair manufacturers. Additionally, with advancements in technology, wheelchairs feature Bluetooth, Wi-Fi connectivity, and smart gadget access, which allow the users to lead a modern lifestyle.By application, the global rehabilitation equipment market is divided into two groups: physiotherapy and occupational therapy. The former is anticipated to hold a major market share owing to the increasing need for it among the aging population. Human life expectancy has increased worldwide due to general health consciousness and advancements in medical science to deal with fatal diseases. The total world population in 2014 was beyond 700 billion and is anticipated to rise to 714 million in 2020.In terms of end-user, the global rehabilitation equipment market is categorized into hospitals & clinics, ambulatory surgery centers, home health care, long-term care centers, and others. Hospitals & clinics are projected to constitute a prominent market share, while home health care is estimated to witness a major CAGR during the forecast period.Geographically, North America is likely to account for a major share in the global rehabilitation equipment market during the forecast period. The rising preference for an independent lifestyle, the elderly and physically challenged individuals need to explore the world, increased longevity, and the staggering cost of caregiver services have fuelled the demand for mobility devices globally, apart from increased government support and reimbursement facilities. Moreover, recent industry estimates suggest that over 1,60,000 people in the U.S. use electric wheelchairs and scooters.Pre-Book Full Report @Key players operating in the global market include Amigo Mobility International, Inc., Argo Medical, Access Rehabilitation Group, GF HEALTH PRODUCTS, INC., Stryker Corporation, Medline Industries, Inc., Invacare Corporation, Dynatronics Corporation, Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare, and Caremax Rehabilitation Equipment Co. Ltd.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:
Frozen Yogurt Market Report  Actionable Insights and Recommendation 2017  2027

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Frozen yogurt is a frozen dessert which is made up of yogurt and at times other dairy products are also used. The prime ingredient of frozen yogurt are milk fat, milk solid, sweetener (artificial sweetener such as aspartame is used) and culture of yogurt. Frozen yogurt are also known as frogurt. Frozen yogurt was originated in America and now its popular all over the world. Frozen yogurt are generally tarter than ice-cream and is also very much low in fat because of the use of milk instead of cream. It is a conventional soft serve but is very different from ice- cream. It is also termed as low fat light ice-cream. Unlike the normal yogurt, frozen yogurt is not regulated by FDI. There is a misconception in people that frozen yogurt is a probiotic, but its not always true, frozen yogurt may or may not contain live and active bacteria cultures in it. Frozen yogurt also contains vegetable additives such as guar gum, carrageenan, etc. and animal gelatin to stabilize the yogurt which reduces the crystallization of yogurt when it is kept in low temperature.Market Segmentation:Frozen yogurt marketis segment on the basis of type, fat content, flavour, distribution channel and region. On the basis of type the frozen yogurt market is segmented into regular frozen yogurt and sugar free frozen yogurt. On the basis of fat content the frozen yogurt market is segmented into low fat and no fat. The low fat frozen yogurt is made up of part-skim milk or low fat milk and the percentage milk fat is between 2% - 0.5%. No fat frozen yogurt is prepared from skim milk which contains milk fat less than 0.5%. On the basis of flavour the market is segmented into chocolate, peach, mango, strawberry, lemonade, banana, pineapple and others. In this category, strawberry and mango flavored frozen yogurt are gaining the popularity worldwide and is expected to remain dominant over the forecast period. On the basis of distribution channel the market is segmented into supermarket/hypermarket, online stores, specialty stores, grocery stores, and others. Frozen yogurt sold through the specialty stores is expected to hold relatively higher revenue share in the frozen yogurt market, which is followed by supermarket/hypermarketsegment.Request For Report Sample:Market Regional Outlook:Regional segment for the market of frozen yogurt is segmented into seven different regions: North America, Latin America, APAC, Europe and MEA. Among these region North America is expected to have the major market share globally. Europe has also emerged as a prominent market for frozen yogurt, as the popularity of frozen yogurt is increasing in the countries like France, U.K. and Germany, which is expected to fuel the growth of frozen yogurt.Market Drivers:Consumers are more health conscious these days, they tend to consume desserts that are low in fat and has minimal amount of sugar, and frozen yogurt becomes the best alternative to unhealthy desserts as frozen yogurts fulfill both the requirements of consumers, and these factors are expected to drive the market of frozen yogurt. Another factor which is anticipated to boost the sales of frozen yogurt is the distribution of these products through online channels, as online retailers offers a wide variety of frozen yogurt. Moreover, online stores offer frozen yogurt with lucrative offers or coupons. All these benefits combined are expected to act as positive factors driving growth of the global frozen yogurt market over the forecast period. The frozen yogurt market is also driven by the love for refreshing ice-cream alternative by the kids. Kids prefer chilled desserts in the summer seasons and frozen yogurt is a perfect answer to their demands. Moreover, increasing penetration of organized players ensures a highly competitive market scenario, and results in launch of an increasing variety of frozen yogurts, which is expected to boost overall growth of frozen yogurt globally to a substantial extent over the forecast period.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Market Key Players:Some of the key players in frozen yogurt market includes Menchie's Frozen Yogurt Company, Pinkberry, Honey Hill Farms, Scott Brothers Dairy, Red Mango, Inc., Yogurtland Inc., Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd., TCBY, and Nestle among others.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Abhishek Bhudoliya616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Electric Forklift Market competitors along with SWOT analysis & Forecast

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The research study with title, Global Electric Forklift Industry Market Analysis & Forecast 2018-2023 has been recently added in HTF MI repository to highlight the key areas of the industry in a comprehensive and detailed manner. Analyst behind this study have identified that there could be various critical segments by both type and application. Each of the segments, also the mentioned geographical markets, have been analyzed in one of the most prominent ways to deliver best insightful market research.The Global Electric Forklift Market research study is a designed especially for business strategists, industry executives, marketing, sales and product managers, consultants, analysts, and other people looking for key industry related data in readily accessible documents with easy to analyze visuals, graphs and tables. It provides the Electric Forklift industry overview with growth analysis, historical & futuristic cost, revenue by type & application classified by important regions as well and demand & supply data (if applicable).Some of the companies profiled in this research study are Toyota, Kion Group AG, Jungheinrich AG, Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Crown Equipment, Mitsubishi Nichiyu, UniCarriers Corp, Komatsu & Anhui HeliAccess Sample Copy @:By Regions, this report covers North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific etc.This Electric Forklift market study provides comprehensive data which enhances the understanding, scope and application of this report. A deeper knowledge of the Global Electric Forklift Market could be gained through this research as the analyst have attempted to reveal important distributors and traders along with market positioning and marketing channel. The report offers a useful analysis of marketing strategy for the sales while focusing on elements such as target client, brand strategy, cost analysis and pricing strategy. Some of the significant trends of marketing channel development, indirect marketing, and direct marketing is also included.Buy this research report @The report also make a deep dive into the influential factors that are going to affect the development of the Global Electric Forklift Market in the upcoming era. These include the technological framework of the industry and likely advances that may be expected in the future, consumer preference patterns, economic environment, and the demand for alternative innovation and R&D.Last but not the least, the report focuses on the manufacturers responsible for increasing the sales in the market and being analyzed in the last section. The analysis is based in terms of their manufacturing base, basic information, and competitors along with SWOT analysis. Additionally, the technology and product type introduced by each of these manufacturers are also covered in the report. The recent developments that took place in the Global Electric Forklift Market and their impact on the future growth of the market have also been presented through this study.Early buyers will receive 10% customization on reports. Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Extracts from Table of Contents are as followsGlobal Electric Forklift Industry Market Analysis & Forecast 2018-2023Chapter 1: Global Electric Forklift Market OverviewChapter 2: Global Economic Impact on IndustryChapter 3: Global Market Competition by ManufacturersChapter 4: Global Production, Revenue (Value) by Region i.e. by North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific etcChapter 5: Global Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by RegionsChapter 6: Global Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type that includes It covers Regional Segment Analysis, Type, Appliction, Major Manufactures, Industry Chain Analysis, Competitive Insights and Macroeconomic Analysis., Global Electric Forklift Market: Regional Segment Analysis, North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia & India.Chapter 7: Global Market Analysis by Application that includes Pharmaceutical Industry, Food Industry & Others.Chapter 8: Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9: Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10: Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11: Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12: Global Modular Building System Market ForecastEnquire for customization in Report @Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.About Author:HTF Market Report is a wholly owned brand of HTF market Intelligence Consulting Private Limited. HTF Market Report global research and market intelligence consulting organization is uniquely positioned to not only identify growth opportunities but to also empower and inspire you to create visionary growth strategies for futures, enabled by our extraordinary depth and breadth of thought leadership, research, tools, events and experience that assist you for making goals into a reality. Our understanding of the interplay between industry convergence, Mega Trends, technologies and market trends provides our clients with new business models and expansion opportunities. We are focused on identifying the Accurate Forecast in every industry we cover so our clients can reap the benefits of being early market entrants and can accomplish their Goals & Objectives.Contact Us:HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Private LimitedUnit No. 429, Parsonage Road, Edison, NJ USA - 08837sales@htfmarketreport.comPh: +1 (206) 317 1218
World Electrochemical Biosensors Market 2018 Analysis by Medtronics, Bayer AG, Abbott Laboratories, I-SENS, Inc, Siemens and more

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The Global Electrochemical Biosensors Market is growing rapidly at the CAGR of around 9.7% for the forecasted period. The growth of the market is likely to driven by increasing diabetic population, rising prevalence of chronic and lifestyle induced disease, increasing demand for POCT, increasing application of biosensors in various industries. However, factors such as strict regulatory requirements, reimbursement policies issues in healthcare systems is further hampering the market.The Global Electrochemical Biosensors Market, is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.7% and is expected to reach USD 23707.2 million by 2022. Globally North America accounted for the largest market share in 2016.Over the past few years nanotechnology has becoming increasingly essential in the field of biosensors. The performance and sensitivity of biosensors is incredibly enhanced with the combination of nanomaterials into their construction. The biosensors works on various technologies which include electrochemical biosensors, optical biosensors, thermal biosensors and piezoelectric biosensors. This report by MRFR majorly focuses on the electrochemical biosensors which holds the largest market share among all others biosensor technologies. The Electrochemical biosensors plays a major role in the field of healthcare which include applications such as diagnosis, patient monitoring and many others. The end user such as point of care testing, diagnostics centers, research laboratories and various others influence the growth of the market.Get Exclusive Sample Copy @Electrochemical Biosensors Market Segments:Global Electrochemical biosensors market has been segmented on the basis of applications which comprises of diagnosis, monitoring and others. Furthermore on the basis of end users the market is segmented into point of care testing, diagnostics center, research laboratories and others.Regional Analysis of Electrochemical biosensors Market:North America is the largest market of global electrochemical biosensors market which is expected to grow at the CAGR of 9.4%. In North America, electrochemical biosensor market is driven due to increasing health awareness, rising chronic and lifestyle diseases, technological developments in healthcare applications, and appropriate insurance coverage.Usage of biosensor technology in North America is higher as compared to other regions of the world due to technological advancements and broader application areas in different industries. Since, the healthcare expenditure is high in North America, biosensor devices are used extensively for accurate, reliable and quick results for early detection and prevention of diseases.Europe is the second largest market for electrochemical biosensors which is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.8%.Asia Pacific region is expected to be fastest growing region of this market. The electrochemical biosensors market in Asia-Pacific region is growing due to increasing awareness of clinical outcomes, large population base, rise in geriatric population, increase in diabetic population and technological advancement in medical devices and equipment. The awareness of various diseases and requirement of high quality care is increasing day by day. For instance, according to a study conducted by National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in 2012, approximately 60% of Asian population was suffering from diabetes and the prevalence of diabetes is increasing. In addition, Asia-Pacific has become one of the attractive markets for medical device companies due to low regulatory requirements and low cost manufacturing of devices.Key Players for Electrochemical Biosensors Market:Some of the key players in this market are: F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Medtronics, Bayer AG, Abbott Laboratories, I-SENS, Inc, Siemens Healthcare GmbH and others.Order The Premium 73 Pages Report Enabled with Respective Tables and Figures @The Major Table of Content for Electrochemical Biosensors Market:1 Report Prologue2 Market Introductions2.1 Introduction2.2 Scope of Study2.3 Research Objective2.4 Assumptions & Limitations2.4.1 Assumptions2.4.2 Limitations3 Research Methodologies3.1 Research Process3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary ResearchT.O.C ContinuedAsk Questions to Expertise @About US:Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact Us:Market Research Future,Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com .
Optical Test Equipment Market: Evolving Technology, Trends and Industry Analysis 2017 - 2025

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With the increasing experiments on physical properties light, the usability of the optical test equipment is also increasing day by day. Optical test equipment are also known as the optical measuring instruments. Increasing demand for improvised capacity in communication networks is fueling the demand for the optical test solutions across the different communication channels. The optical test equipment is increasingly deployed by different industry verticals for different applications such as environmental sensing operations, biophotonics, and other consumer products. Using the optical test equipment, the end users can analyze the light properties and other related physical properties of the light which are responsible for affecting the products.Request for Table of Contents @The end user base for the optical test equipments is growing day by day due to increasing penetration of the optical test equipment devices into the field of the research and development operations carried out by engineers, academic researchers, manufacturing engineers, and other field services. The use of the optical test equipment is increasing due to the precision offered by this equipment is used by end users for ensuring the design along with the performance specifications, network health, and, production quality.The global demand for the Optical Test Equipment is primarily driven by the increasing demand for the higher capacity communication networks from the end users as well as different industry verticals. The demand for optical test equipment is majorly driven by the increasing demand for improvised accuracy for the communication channel. Also, the optical test equipment is used as a tool for performing the operations such as cleaning, inspection, and other function along with the analysis of existing cabling. In addition to this factors, the optics cabling is establishing a very crucial role in the establishment of the modern data communication networks. On the other hand, higher cost and lack of technical knowledge are the major challenging factor for the growth of the optical test equipment market.The global market for Optical Test Equipment is divided by regions into North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Asia Pacific Excluding Japan, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. Among these regions, the North America region dominates the market regarding revenue generation because of the vast technological evolutions and continuous adaptations for new technologies in the field of research and manufacturing followed by Latin America and European countries. APEJ and Japan are expected to grow at the highest CAGR due to rapid advancements in the telecommunication and broadband, television networks, and other networks in this region. MEA region is expected to grow at moderate CAGR over the forecast period, due to less adaptation rate for more advanced devices such as optical test equipment.Request to View Sample of Research Report @The key players considered in the study of the Optical Test Equipment market are Yokogawa Test & Measurement Corporation, Aplab Limited, Optikos Corporation, Gold Lite Group and others. The key players are constantly focusing on developing a new functionality and adding new features to the existing products.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Molecular Modelling Market: Industry Demand, Trends, Research, Analysis and Global Forecast 2017-2024

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The Global Molecular Modelling Market accounted to grow at a CAGR of 15.8% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2024. The upcoming market report contains data for historic years 2015, the base year of calculation is 2016 and the forecast period is 2017 to 2024.Also the Global Molecular Modelling Market By Approach (Molecular Mechanics Approach, Quantum Chemistry Approach), By Product (Instruments, Reagents, Kits), By Application (Drug Development, Drug Discovery {Direct Drug Design, Indirect Drug Design, Molecular Mimicry}), By End User (Pharmaceutical & Biotechnological Companies, Research Organizations), By Geography  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024.Molecular modelling is the key aspect of medicinal chemistry in drug designing process. The modelling describes the three-dimensional structures of molecules, physic-chemical properties, generation or manipulation. This is also used in drug design, computational biology, computational chemistry, and materials science. The procedure involves wide array of computerized techniques based on theoretical chemistry methods and experimental data to analyze the biological and molecular property.Get Free Sample Copy of the Report @Major Market Drivers and Restraints: Increase in better drug treatment. Rise in varied diseases, leads to drug development. Increased investment of biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries in R&D. Technological advancements in drug design. Progress in the biology and biosimilars markets. High cost of the research & development hampers the market.Market Segmentation: Global Molecular Modelling MarketThe global molecular modelling market is segmented by approach into molecular mechanics approach and quantum chemistry approach.On the basis of product the market is segmented into instruments, reagents, kits and others.On the basis of application the market is segmented into drug development, drug discovery and other application. The drug discovery is further sub segmented into direct drug design, indirect drug design and molecular mimicry. The direct drug design is again sub-segmented into lead identification, target identification and others. The indirect drug design is again sub-segmented into pharmacophore, quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) and others.On the basis of end user the market is segmented into pharmaceutical & biotechnological companies, research organizations and others.On the basis of geography, molecular modelling market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies such as North America & South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Some of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Brazil among others. In 2017, North America is expected to dominate the market.Have Any Query? Ask Ours Expert @Competitive Analysis: Global Molecular Modelling MarketThe molecular modelling market is highly fragmented and is based on new product launches and clinical results of products. Hence the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, clinical trials, market initiatives, high expense on research and development, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of molecular modelling market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America.Major Market Competitors: Global Molecular Modelling MarketSome of the major players operating in molecular modelling market are Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Simulations Plus, Inc., Indigo Instruments, Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., Certara, L.P., Dassault Systemes, Schrodinger, LLC, Physiomics PLC, Genedata AG, Chemical Computing Group ULC, Rosa & Co., LLC., Agile Molecule, Acellera Ltd., Bioinformatics LLC., Bruker, Biomax Informatics AG, QIAGEN, Molecular Models Company, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. and INTELLIGENT PHARMA among others.Follow Link for More Information @About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Vishal DixitData Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: Sales@databridgemarketresearch.comInvestor: investors@databridgemarketresearch.comVisit Blog:
Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) Market: Key Trends and Forecast Research Report 2017 - 2025

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The television and broadcasting sector has been undergoing significant technological and structural changes, which have given consumers access to a great variety of broadcasting services. The existing Analogue TV Transmitters in world serve about 66% of world population. Constrained by limited frequency capacity, the analogue terrestrial television platform needed a new & more efficient transmission system to meet the demands of the future and to allow for the launch of new services. Whole world has adopted DVB Standard for its digitalization of terrestrial network. In todays growing market for electronic devices, Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) with advanced video and audio features are in constant demand. High definition video quality and voice clarity are a few of the major parameters that are needed for new Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT).Request for Table of Contents @Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) broadcasting allows the transmission of about 10 or more digital services in a single frequency channel, depending on the technical parameters used and the quality of services desired.The major growth drivers of the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) market include increasing demand of smart TVs and recent technological advancements in telecom and broadcast industry. In addition, Growth of smart residential properties will drive the growth of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) market. Increasing penetration of internet has led to growth of the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) across the globe.Worldwide financial uncertainty and macroeconomic situations such as currency exchange rates and economic difficulties are some of the major factors which are hindering the growth of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) Market.On the basis of product type Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) market is segmented into audio standard definition channel and video high definition channel.Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) are widely used in residential and commercial. Residential segment is becoming the prominent segment in global Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) market.Key Contracts in Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) market are as:In September 2015, Intelsat S.A., United States based communications satellite services provider entered into partnership with Sentech, a South Africa based broadcasting signal distributor. In order to Delivers Direct-to Home and Digital Terrestrial Television Services.North America is holding the largest market share for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) market due to adaptation in residential segment. Due to increasing demand for HD video channels Asia Pacific will hold maximum market share for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) in near future. Europe is fastest growing market for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT). Sturdy economic progress, driving the growth of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) market in MEA region. The Demand for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) market has risen dramatically over the past 18 months globally.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the major players in Global Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) Market are Humax Co., Ltd., Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Kaonmedia Co., Ltd., Technicolor SA, ADB (Advanced Digital Broadcast) SA, Sagemcom SAS, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., ARRIS Group, Inc., EchoStar Corporation, Intelsat S.A., Sentech and others.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Gift Boxes Market Forecast Report Offers Actionable Insights 2017  2027

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Gift Boxes  Market OverviewThe demand of the gift boxes is high because food and beverage products such as chocolate, ice-creme, sweets, wine, and toys are consumed globally. Food products look more lucent and attractive if they are packed within gift boxes. Gift boxes also used for packaging many other products such as jewelry, electronic gadgets, toys, sculpture, personal care products, cosmetic products, and goods. Gift boxes mainly manufactured by paperboard, plastic, tin, and aluminum.Gift Boxes - Market DynamicsThere are some factors which contribute to the growth of the gift box market, e-commerce is one of them. The increase in e-commerce market plays a significant role in the growth of the gift box packaging industries because they use gift boxes for the purpose of packaging the goods to provide the safe delivery of the product. Gift boxes are no longer used only for the purpose of protecting the product from the damage, but it has some special quality such as durability, reusability and attractive look. Due to some better characteristic as compared to alternatives, gift box market is gaining popularity throughout the global market. Few alternative options are available in the market for the gift packaging such as wrapper paper, bag etc. Over the past few years, e-commerce industry has emerged tremendously which has positively impacted the market for gift boxes. In addition to, paper or corrugated gift box is on trend due to the sustainability, and eco-friendly nature because they are easily recyclable and degradable. Furthermore, the factors which are contributing towards the growth of gift boxes market is the rise in per capita income of consumers which has increased the investment of income on the gift. The logistics and transport market is expanding at a high pace and is emerging as an opportunity for future growth of the global box packaging market.Request For Report Sample:Gift Boxes - Market SegmentationGift boxes market can be segmented on the basis of by material type, by the end user, and by product type, by printing technology.On the basis of raw material type, the gift boxes market is segmented into -PlasticsPaperOthersOn the basis of end use, the gift boxes market is segmented into -Consumer goodsFood and beveragesBakery & ConfectionaryAlcoholic DrinksFrozen DessertsOthersElectronic devicesCosmetic and personal careOn the basis of product type, the gift boxes market is segmented into -Slide sleeve boxesTelescopic boxesOn the basis printing technology, the gift boxes market is segmented into LithographyFlexographyElectrophotography TechnologyDry tonerLiquid tonerInkjet Photography TechnologyOthersGift Boxes Market - Regional outlookGift Boxes Market has been segmented on the basis of the region into North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. Among these regions, North America and Asia Pacific are expected to witness a high growth for gift boxes market. In Asia Pacific, China is anticipated to be the largest market for gift boxes because of the increasing trends towards aesthetic and convenience in packaging. Above average growth is expected in the Middle East and Africa for gift boxes market over the forecast period 2017-2025. Emerging economies across the globe have seen an increase in per capita income which is positively influencing the preferences for the usage of luxury packaging solutions such as gift boxes.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Gift Boxes Market - Key playersFew of the key players in the global gift boxes market are Qingdao Hongrui Industry Co. Ltd, Shenzhen Fuxiang Gifts & Packaging Co. Ltd, Bayley's Boxes, Varanna Industries, Shanghai Xianrong Packing Co., Ltd., Om Express Print Pack Private Limited, Valtenna Industria Cartotecnia, and Shenzhen Tianya Paper Products Co.,Ltd.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Abhishek Bhudoliya616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
New Trends of Wireless Health Market with Worldwide Industry Analysis to 2023

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The e-health monitoring system with wireless sensor network is used for patient telemonitoring and telemedicine. A 2012 article titled In-home health monitoring to leap six-fold by 2017 illustrated that Wireless remote monitoring devices will be used by more than 1.8 million people worldwide in the next four years. Of the billions of dollars spent on health care each year, 75% - 80% of it accountsfor patients with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, asthma and Alzheimers disease. Over a decade, healthcare industry has taken a measured approach pertaining tointegrationof information technology (IT). Recent federal legislation and emerging trends, however, are changing the landscape and driving the need to accelerate the adoption of health IT in healthcare especially in medical devices.Among wireless health products wearable medical devices is expected to be the fastest growing segment. Information delivered by modern wearable medical devices is easy to interpret and hence popularity is expected to increase rapidly within non-medical personnel. With these devices, peoplecan quickly modify their lifestyle to better improve their physical stature. Devices that measure temperature, heart rate and other parameters can be of paramount importance while determining physical fitness of a person. Over 65% of technologies are wrist held devices shaped like watches and the rest are wearable on other areas of the body such as arms, torso and waist.Download Report Brochure @Along with the aesthetics, several other features for durability of the device are included such as waterproofing and weatherproofing. The latest in developments is telecommunication, wireless connectivity and improved user interface. The advent of smartphones has resulted in multi-fold increase of growth in applications that can now extend to storage and retrieval of history for the individual for long term mapping and improvement of fitness.Some of the major factors driving this market are the decreasing costs of electronics that has now made these devices available to middle and even low income groups over the world, and increased use of internet globally. According to the World Bank, number of internet users per 100 people increased from 15.8 in 2005 to 38.1 in 2013. The global wireless health market by products encompasses ECG monitors, insulin monitors, neuromonitors such as EEG and EMG devices.There are several devices which have in-build capability to diagnose, detect and send patient records to a centralized servers which can be easily accessed by healthcare providers.Advantages of wireless health devices encompasses patient comfort, accurate detection and analysis, access to stored patient data for a considerable longer period of time i.e. weekly or monthly. Recently Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University have demonstrated stick-on patches which can be used on a daily basis to monitor patients ECG. Additionally, the patient record can be easily accessed through a cell phone or computer wirelessly.Geographically the market can be studied for four geographical regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the Word. Currently, North America in terms of revenue accounts for the largest share owing to burgeoning population of cardiovascular diseases, diabetic patients. Moreover government initiatives such as the Affordable Care Act and favorable reimbursement scenario also promotes the sales and adoption of innovative wireless health monitoring and diagnostic products. Followed by the U.S., Europe holds the second leading position in the current scenario.Historically, the major EU countries have always been at the forefront of developing innovative healthcare technologies.In November 2013, Belgium-based research center Imec showcased its ideas for wearable sensor technologies for remote healthcare and personal health applications. The company introduced a body patch that integrates an ultra-low power electrocardiogram (ECG) chip and a Bluetooth low-energy radio. The company has also developed a prototype of a patient-friendly wireless EEG headset together with Holst Centre and Panasonic. Asia Pacific and Rest of the World market are among the fastest growing and largely untapped market. High cost of devices and lack of awareness about these devices are among the major restraint to the current adoption of the products in emerging market.Pre-Book Full Report @Some of the key players operating in this market encompasses Omron Corporation, GE Healthcare, Koninklijke Philips N.V., Polar Electro, Nihon Kohden, Siemens A.G., Mckesson Corporation,and Cerner Corporation.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 Elevators Market Analysis, Share, Size ,key Players- - Kone Corporation, Thyssenkrupp AG, Dover, Fujitec, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Sigma, Schindler

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The Analysis presents the study of Worldwide Elevators Market facilitating the regional and country wise analysis covering the strategic analysis of each market player and the market share they holdGlobal Elevators Market - OverviewElevators have become very critical across all applications such as residential, commercial, and industrial. The market is expected to continue with the moderate growth trend during the forecast period. There have been few factors driving the market such as Rapid Urbanization, changing construction industry, and adoption of green building concept.Huge investments in infrastructural projects in Asia Pacific countries countries have spurred the demand for elevators for commercial and residential purpose. The region has given a tough competition to well established European and U.S. markets when it comes to the manufacturing base and price points. There is seen changing dynamics in construction industry in the region such as interest by foreign investors and increase in FDI in construction in countries such as Indonesia and India. This augments the demand for such elevators in the region.The construction sector in Brazil has witnessed a good growth with the development in Brazilian economy. Infrastructure projects in the region have been growing steadily. Consequently, there is a high demand for elevators, which is attracting big market players to enter the region for business expansionRequest a sample @Key PlayersThe leading market players in the global elevators market include Kone Corporation, Thyssenkrupp AG, Dover, Fujitec, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Sigma, Schindler, Armor, Omega Elevators and others.Global Elevators Market - Regional AnalysisThe Asia-Pacific region dominated the global elevators market in 2016. It is also expected to be the fastest growing region for the elevators. Rising urbanized population, increase in industrialization, and growth in construction activities along with increasing investment are the factors driving the growth of the market in Asia-Pacific region. The construction spending in China standouts followed by India, Indonesia and Vietnam. All sectors are likely to witness significant growth, largely led by non-residential construction. Additionally, China not only exhibits significant levels of growth but is also the largest market in the world. Construction spending in China is shifting from the coastal cities to the interior and western provinces that will lead to the higher use of construction machinery. India, on the other hand, is seeking increase in private funding solutions in the provision of much of the new infrastructure needed. In Southeast Asia relatively strong construction spending growth is also expected in Indonesia and Vietnam, as both countries upgrade infrastructure to support their growing populations.Browse Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312
Smart Grid Solution Market: Applications and Global Market Trends 2017- 2025

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The rise of advanced and digital technologies have led to the increased adoption of Smart Grid Solutions. Technological innovations are happening in every industry globally. The energy infrastructure is gaining traction and Utilities are under significant pressure to maximize grid efficiency, improve uptime, optimize assets, and integrate renewables, despite tight budgets and growing distribution network complexity. Smart grid technology helps conquer these challenges. With the emergence of new technologies investment into the smart grid is occurring globally. Smart grid solutions are gaining traction by government policies in various countries such as U.S., India, Germany, U.K., and China. In addition, increase demand for integration of renewable energy sources, and improved grid reliability and efficient outage response across the globe is resulting in the rising demand of Smart Grid Solutions.Request for Table of Contents @Grid Solutions provides a smart energy management solution which controls and optimizes the full range of local energy resources available to solar districts in real time through an array of flexible solutions that are compared and incorporated into the grid. Smart grid solutions offers self-service energy manager, innovative social media platforms, convenient mobility solutions, integrated data analytics.The major growth drivers of the Smart Grid Solution market include increasing spending on energy efficiency programs coupled with regulatory government mandates. In addition, need for centralized gird distribution management and control, and increasing concern for reducing carbon footprints shall drive the growth of Smart Grid Solution market. Adaptation due to mandatory regulations and policies across the globe has led to growth of the Smart Grid Solution across the globe.However, the major challenge faced by the Smart Grid Solutions providers are high cost and discrepancy in demand-supply ratio for smart grid solutions, may hamper the growth of the portable display market across the globe.Global Smart Grid Solution market on the basis of product type segmented into advance metering infrastructure (AMI), smart grid distribution management, smart grid communication, grid asset management, substation automation, billing and customer information system.Key Contracts in Smart Grid Solution market are as:In January 2017, Oracle Corporation and Huawei technologies entered into strategic partnership, with an aim to provide smart grid solutionsNorth America is holding the largest market share for Smart Grid Solution market due to 2016due to increasing spending on energy efficiency programs coupled with regulatory government mandates in the U.S. and Canada. Due to high technological innovations in Asia Pacific will hold maximum market share for Smart Grid Solution in near future. Europe is fastest growing market for Smart Grid Solution due to rapid smart grid deployments. Sturdy economic progress, driving the growth of Smart Grid Solution market in MEA region. The Demand for Smart Grid Solution market has risen dramatically over the past 2 years globally.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the major players in Global Smart Grid Solution Market Cisco Systems, Inc., Aclara Technologies LLC, Open Systems International, Inc., IBM Corporation, Wipro Ltd. Oracle Corporation, Infosys, Huawei and others.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Breathing Circuits Market Expected to Witness a CAGR of 3.1% through 2017 - 2022

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Surge in the number of emergency cases in the healthcare industry continues to rev up demand for breathing circuits in the global market. In addition, prevalence of asthma is projected to contribute towards the global market growth of breathing circuit. Future Market Insight states that the global market of breathing circuit is projected to reflect a CAGR of 3.1% over the forecast period, 2017-2022.Factors Fuelling Growth of the Global MarketGrowth of the global breathing circuits market is mainly bound to various macro-economic and micro-economic factors. Increasing prevalence of bronchial cancer, chronic coughing, and asthma has led to a surge in demand in the healthcare industry. Increasing preference of smoking is further expected to impact growth of the global market. Smoking leads to chronic inflammation and further increases the asthmatic effect in the patients. These factors lead to increasing adoption of breathing circuits in the hospitals, clinics and ambulatory surgical center.Request For Report Samlple@In its recent report, CDC reveals that 18.4 million in the age bracket of 18 years and over, which represents 7.6% of the adults who have asthma. Increasing prevalence of various diseases such as asthma and bronchial cancer has revved up demand for devices that facilitate deep breathing in the healthcare industry. Attributed to such factors, breathing circuits in the healthcare industry will continue to witness increasing adoption.Breathing circuits are equipped with features such as innovative face masks, tubes and heat, which provides ideal care and comfort to the patients. The healthcare professionals are also witnessed to be using breathing circuits for drug delivery to patients. Increasing demand for delivering medications to the children, old age patients and infants during emergency will continue to contribute towards the global market growth of breathing circuits.On the other hand, several factors are likely to impact the global market growth of breathing circuits negatively. Breathing circuits used in the ambulatory surgical centers, hospitals and clinics are equipped with unidirectional valve and increasingly absorb CO2. Due to these factors, the patients resist breathing through breathing circuits. Further, increasing complexities while operating breathing circuits can be fatal during the emergency cases. In addition, preference for practicing yoga in order to enhance health conditions is further expected to impact growth of the global market negatively. Attributed to such factors, sales of the breathing circuit devices will continue to drop in the global market over the forecast period.Hospitals to Represent a Major End UserIncreasing prevalence of breathing problems such as asthma has revved up adoption of the open breathing circuits in the healthcare industry. Based on the product type, the open breathing circuits segment is projected to generate significant revenues, recording more than US$ 2,000 Mn by 2022-end. On the other hand, the semi open breathing circuits segment is projected to reflect a robust CAGR throughout the forecast period. In terms of revenue, the hospitals end users segment is projected to represent the fastest growth, accounting for more than US$ 2,000 Mn by 2017-end.The anesthesia application segment is projected to represent robust revenue growth, recording more than US$ 2,000 Mn by 2022-end. In contrary to this, the respiratory dysfunction application segment is projected to reflect the highest CARG through 2022.Request For Report Table of Contents (TOC):Market PlayersMajor players operating in the global market of breathing circuits are C. R. Bard Inc., Ambu A/S, Armstrong Medical Industries, Inc., Altera Corp., Beijing Aeonmed Co., Ltd., Becton, Dickinson and Company, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare Corporation Limited, Bio-Med Devices, Flexicare Medical Ltd., Dragerwerk AG & Co. KGaA, Teleflex Incorporated, General Electric Company and Smiths Group plc.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Abhishek Bhudoliya616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Fortified Wine Market Growth with Worldwide Industry Analysis to 2025

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The niche market for wines that includes wine Varities such as fortified wine and sparkling wine is witnessing a steady growth around the globe. The wine which is fortified with distilled spirits, usually brandy, to arrest fermentation and prevent it from spoilage is called as the fortified wine. Depending on the time addition of brandy, there are two main product variants in the fortified wine- sweet wine and dry wine. Growing trend of alcohol consumption in developing countries is expected to drive the growth of the fortified wine market. Fortified wine market has met many obstacles in its growth since its invention and introduction in the Europe, but today, the demand from consumers signifies substantial growth for the market in the forecast period.Request for Table of Contents @The fortified wine market is especially driven by the growing trend of alcohol consumption in developing countries. The growth of the fortified wine market is also affected by seasonal variations, owing to the production of grapes. Consequently, the prices of grapes also affect the prices of the fortified wines. Macro-economic factors like improved disposable income is also boosting the growth of the fortified wine market in developing countries. The average selling price of fortified wines in common retail outlets is about US$ 75 per liter. The major factors driving the growth of the fortified wine market are consumption of the product as an end-of-meal drink, pairing it with a specific cuisine or the purchase of the product as a gift. Port wine forms the highest share in the fortified wine market, followed by dry sherry.The demand side factor like the preference of consumers for dry or sweet wine also affects the segment growth of the fortified wine market. Strategic marketing and promotion of the product to raise consumer awareness, especially outside Europe, is of utmost importance for the growth of the fortified wine market. In many regions, the growth of the fortified wine market is retarded due to the fact that the image and knowledge about fortified wines are unclear and many times the taste is also regarded as poor and unacceptable, and hence, educational marketing about fortified wines may also help to boost the growth of the fortified wine market.In North America, fortified wine is consumed mostly as an end-of-meal drink on special occasions. However, consumers are still consuming traditional alcoholic end-of-meals beverages due to lack of awareness about fortified wines. Raising awareness about the product is likely to boost the growth of the fortified wine market in this region. In Europe, the fortified wine market is a traditional and age-old market and is already in the maturity phase. Hence a very slow growth can be expected in this region. Sherry is often used in cooking and also paired with food in Latin America, which acts as a driving factor for the growth of the fortified wine market in this region. In Asia Pacific, the fortified wine market is a naive market and factors like raising consumer awareness along with an expansion of retail outlets could boost the growth of the fortified wine market here. In the Middle East, rising tourism and frequent consumption of niche varieties of alcoholic beverages is indirectly expected to boost the growth of the fortified wine market.Request to View Sample of Research Report @The Fortified Wine Market Key Players are: Vinbros, Mazurans Vineyards Limited, Lombardo winery, Curatolo Arini, Davide Campari-Milano S.p.A., EMILIO HIDALGO SA and othersAbout 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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Jan 16, 2018: Automotive EGR System Market Forecast 2023 BorgWarner, Cummins, Delphi Automotive

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Automotive EGR System Market Research 2018A market study  Global Automotive EGR System Market  examines the performance of the Automotive EGR System market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Automotive EGR System market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Automotive EGR System market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Automotive EGR System Market 2018 report includes Automotive EGR System market Revenue, market Share, Automotive EGR System industry volume, market Trends, Automotive EGR System Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Automotive EGR System Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2023.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Automotive EGR System Market 2018 : BorgWarner Cummins Delphi Automotive Faurecia MAHLE Tenneco Wuxi Longsheng Pierburg Zhejiang Yinlun MachineryFirstly, the report covers the top Automotive EGR System manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Automotive EGR System report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Automotive EGR System industry, Automotive EGR System industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Automotive EGR System Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Automotive EGR System research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Automotive EGR System market revenue worldwide.Finally, Automotive EGR System market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Us:"QYMarketsResearch" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us5001 Spring Valley Road,Suite 400 East,Dallas, TX 75244, USAWeb:Email: sales@qymarketsresearch
Snapshot of the Organic Wine Market, Forecast to 2025

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Organic wine is a type of wine that is produced without the use of artificial chemicals such as fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. Organic grapes are cultivated in vineyards on the principles of organic farming. The aging process is employed to lend the wine, obtained from the grapes, a fine taste. It is the most preferred alcoholic beverage among the consumers. Organic wine can be used as a medicine due to presence of resveratrol that prevents aging and helps to fight with the diseases. Additionally, it helps for better metabolism, body warmth, and enhances better immunity.Download PDF Brochure @In most parts of the world, sulfite is employed in some amounts for stabilizing and improving the shelf-life of wine. Organic wine can be classified into three categories such as 100% organic wine, organic wines (95% of its ingredients from certified organic sources, which may have an additional 100 ppm of sulfur dioxide added to them) and wines made from organic grapes (70% of its grapes are from organic sources). Based on the product type, the organic wine market can be segregated into red wine, white wine, rose wine, sparkling wine, dessert wine and fortified wine. In terms of distribution channel, the organic wine market can be segregated into online distribution and offline distribution. Organic wines are purchased primarily in hypermarkets and supermarkets. Such products of organic wine are certified by different certification bodies all over the globe to be organic such as USDA, EU organic Certification, and California Certified organic farmers certification.The global organic wine industry is witnessing significant expansion for the last ten years. Rising number of organic vineyards is a key driver of the market. Increasing demand for organic wine has also led to an increase in the production of organic grapes across the globe. Wine has been always a preferred choice for celebration or parties. Currently, awareness about the presence of hazardous chemicals in food and beverages and health consciousness is rising among consumers. Thus the organic sector is witnessing an increase in investments from private investors as well as the government in the last few years.Buy this Report at:Some of the restraints of the market are high price of organic products and the low shelf-life when compared to conventional wine. Retailer indifference has played a key role in the poor acceptance of organic wines. These wines are often found in organic sections set off from the rest of the wine. Furthermore, differing standards and regulations regarding organic wine is likely to hinder the expansion of the global organic wine market.Europe accounts for around 70% of global organic wine production. Italy, France, Sweden, U.K. and Spain are the leading manufacturers of organic wine. Organic wines made in Italy have better quality as compared to the wines produced in other countries. In North America, the U.S. as well as Canada witnessed a significant rise in the consumption of organic wines. Additionally, revenue generated by the export of organic wines from Italy is anticipated to rise remarkably due to rise in exports to countries such as U.S. and other European countries during the forecast period. In Asia Pacific, Japan, Singapore, Australia, South Korea, China, and India have shown good progress in organic wine consumption. Developing nations in the region are likely to present better growth potential in organic wine sector.There are more than 2,000 organic wine producers globally. The major global players include Kendall-Jackson Winery, The Wine Group, E&J Gallo Pernod-Ricard, Bronco Wine, King Estate Winery, Chateau Maris Winery, Castel, Treasury Wine E states, Hall wines, Lapostolle winery, Diageo, DE Loach Vineyards, Grgich Hills Estate, China Great Wall Wine, Emiliana Organic Vineyards, Armit wines ltd, The Organic Wine Company, and Distell Group.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Jan 16, 2018: Anti-corrosive Resin Market Forecast 2023 Ashland Inc., Oiln Corporation

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Anti-corrosive Resin Market Research 2018A market study  Global Anti-corrosive Resin Market  examines the performance of the Anti-corrosive Resin market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Anti-corrosive Resin market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Anti-corrosive Resin market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Anti-corrosive Resin Market 2018 report includes Anti-corrosive Resin market Revenue, market Share, Anti-corrosive Resin industry volume, market Trends, Anti-corrosive Resin Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Anti-corrosive Resin Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2023.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Anti-corrosive Resin Market 2018 : Ashland Inc. Oiln Corporation Hexion Inc. Huntsman Corporation Reichhold LLC Scott Bader Company Limited Alpha Owens-Corning (AOC) LLC Polynt SPA Aditya Birla Chemicals Sino Polymer Co. LtdFirstly, the report covers the top Anti-corrosive Resin manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Anti-corrosive Resin report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Anti-corrosive Resin industry, Anti-corrosive Resin industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Anti-corrosive Resin Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Anti-corrosive Resin research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Anti-corrosive Resin market revenue worldwide.Finally, Anti-corrosive Resin market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Us:"QYMarketsResearch" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us5001 Spring Valley Road,Suite 400 East,Dallas, TX 75244, USAWeb:Email: sales@qymarketsresearch
U.S. Asset Management IT Solution Market to Reach at US$1,298.2 mn by 2024: Risk of Loss of Critical Data Challenges Adoption

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The growth in exchange traded funds has also created a need for the management of IT solutions in the U.S. The market for asset management IT solutions in the country is projected to exhibit a CAGR of 5.1% from 2016 to 2024, rising from a valuation of US$828.5 mn in 2015 to US$1,298.2 mn by 2024.The growing need for IT solutions for the management of assets such as equity, fixed income, real estate, commodities, and international investments is the key factor boosting the deployment and adoption of asset management IT solutions across the globe. Within the U.S., the need for asset management IT solutions is spurred by the increasing number and value of asset managers in the country. The U.S. Department of Commerce states that in 2015, U.S. asset managers held over US$51 trillion worth of long-term conventional assets under management, which amounted to slightly over 47.0% of the global funds that year.Get the sample copy of this report :U.S. Asset Management IT Solution Market: OverviewAsset management refers to managing tangible or intangible assets. An asset management company serves as an advisor to clients, with a goal to maximize returns. Asset management firms are hired by institutional investors such as pension funds, corporations, and high net worth individuals. The asset management firms need IT solutions for managing assets such as equity, fixed income, real estate, commodities, and international investments. These IT solutions consist mainly of software solutions for business operations including portfolio management, compliance, and trade execution among others.U.S. Asset Management IT Solution Market: Scope and MethodologyThe U.S. asset management IT solution market report provides an analysis of the U.S. asset management IT solution market for the period 2014  2024, wherein 2015 is the base year and the period from 2016 to 2024 is the forecast period. Data for 2014 has been included as historical information. The report covers all the prevalent trends playing a major role in the growth of the asset management IT solution market over the forecast period. It also highlights various drivers, restraints, and opportunities expected to influence the market growth during the said period.Request for TOC of this report :The study provides a holistic perspective on market growth, throughout the above forecast period in terms of revenue estimates (in US$ Mn), across different geographies in the U.S., which include Northeast, Midwest, West and South. The report provides cross-sectional analysis of the U.S. asset management IT solution market in terms of market estimates and forecasts for all the segments across different geographic regions. This research report provides in-depth analysis of the U.S. asset management IT solution market on the basis components, deployment model and geography. The report also includes U.S. asset Management player profile and asset managers IT viewpoint deploying IT solutions and services for managing assets.Some of the key analytical pointers in the research study include Porters Five Force Analysis, and key market indicators which include industry outlook of investment management firms (asset managers) in the U.S. and key mergers and acquisition in the field of asset management IT solutions from vendor as well as buyers point of view.View full report here :Applications encompassed in the research study include portfolio management, compliance, risk management, client statements & reporting, trade order management, workflow automation, benchmarking, and cash flow & accounting. Whereas services encompassed in the report scope include enterprise data management, data integration, reporting solutions & services, operation support & monitoring, application development and maintenance, and resource managementThis research study on the U.S. asset management IT solution market provides a detailed analysis of various components and their respective applications and services. The report also offers in-depth analysis of various factors such as market drivers, restraints, and growth opportunities affecting the market dynamics. These factors enable the analysis of various trends that would impact the market during the forecast period from 2016 to 2024. The report includes a comprehensive coverage of the underlying economic and technological factors under key trend analysis influencing the asset management IT solution market.U.S. Asset Management IT Solution Market: Competitive DynamicsThe report aims to provide strategic insights about the investment management firms deploying IT solutions with the detailed analysis of their requirements pertaining to IT solutions. Some of the key industry players in the asset management IT solution include Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP, FundCount, SoftTarget Inc., SimCorp Inc, QED Financial System, eFront Financial Solutions, Broadridge Investment Management Solutions, ProTrak International, SunGard Financials and CreditPoint Software.Key asset managers profiled in the research study along with their IT viewpoints and requirements include Barings Corporate Investors, Geode Capital Management, The Carlyle Group LP, Voya Investment Management, Lazard Asset Management, Bridgewater Associates and Hartford Investment Management. Co among others.U.S. Asset Management IT Solution Market Segmentation:U.S. Asset Management IT Solution Market, by ComponentApplicationPortfolio ManagementComplianceRisk ManagementClient Statements & ReportingTrade Order ManagementWorkflow AutomationBenchmarkingCash Flow & AccountingServiceEnterprise Data ManagementData IntegrationReporting Solutions & ServicesOperation Support & MonitoringApplication Development and MaintenanceResource ManagementU.S. Asset Management IT Solution Market, by Deployment ModelOn-premiseCloud-basedHybridU.S. Asset Management IT Solution Market, by GeographyNortheastMidwestWestSouthMRRbiz 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 Propylene Glycol Market Analysis, Segments, Value Share and Key Trends Raise at 5.9% CAGR Through 2024

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The Global Propylene Glycol Market report offers a far reaching understanding into the advancement strategies and plans notwithstanding producing procedures and cost structures.The Global Propylene Glycol Market accounted for USD 3.49 billion in 2016 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.9% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2024. The upcoming market report contains data for historic years 2014, 2015, the base year of calculation is 2016 and the forecast period is 2017 to 2024.Request for Free Sample Report @Global Propylene Glycol Market by Source (Petroleum-Based, Bio-Based) Application (Antifreeze & Functional Fluids, Unsaturated Polyester Resin, Food, Pharmaceuticals & Cosmetics, Plasticizers, Liquid Detergents) End use (Building & Construction Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Market Definition: Global Propylene Glycol MarketPropylene glycol is a colorless, odorless and a tasteless liquid, also referred as PG with a chemical formula CHO. It is less toxic, stable, highly soluble and has a high boiling point. It is mostly used in cosmetic products, processed foods, medication, electronic cigarettes, hydraulic fluids, plasticizer and many more.Complete report on Global Propylene Glycol Market Research Report 2017-2024 spread across 350 Pages, profiling Top companies and supports with tables and figuresKey Questions Answered in Global Propylene Glycol Market Report:-Our Report offers:- What will the market growth rate, Overview and Analysis by Type of Global Propylene Glycol Market in 2024? What are the key factors driving, Analysis by Applications and Countries Global Propylene Glycol Market? What are Dynamics, This Overview Includes Analysis of Scope, and price analysis of top Vendors Profiles of Global Propylene Glycol Market? Who are Opportunities, Risk and Driving Force of Global Propylene Glycol Market? Who are the opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in Global Propylene Glycol Market? Business Overview by Type, Applications, Gross Margin and Market Share What are the Global Propylene Glycol Market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Market?Request for Detaild TOC:Major Market Drivers Environment friendly process Rising demand of petroleum based and bio based Growing demand in emerging economiesMarket Restraint High investment in research and development activities Demand switching to petroleum basedTop Key Players: BASF SE The DOW Chemical Company LyondellBasell Industries Holdings B.V. Archer Daniels Midland Company Huntsman Corporation Global Bio-Chem Technology Group Company Limited Dupont Tate & Lyle Bio Products LLC SKC Co., Ltd. Asahi Glass Limited HELM AG Chaoyang Chemicals, Inc. Temix International S.R.L. Qingdao Shida Chemical Co., Ltd. ADEKA CORPORATION Royal Dutch Shell PLC. Golden Dyechem TRInternational, Inc. Oleon NV Shandong Depu Chemical Industry Science and Technology Co., Ltd INEOS Oxide among others.For more insightful information visit @Customize report of "Global Propylene Glycol Market" as per customers requirement also available.Market Segmentations:Global Propylene Glycol Market is segmented on the basis of Source Application End Use GeographyMarket Segmentations in Details:On the basis of Source, the global propylene glycol market is segmented into petroleum based and bio based.On the basis of Application, the global propylene glycol market is segmented into antifreeze & functional fluids, unsaturated polyester resin, food, pharmaceuticals & cosmetics, plasticizers and liquid detergents.On the basis of End use, the global propylene glycol market is segmented into building & construction, pharmaceuticals & cosmetics, transportation and food & beverage.On the basis of geography North America South America Europe Asia-Pacific Middle East & AfricaCompetitive Landscape: Global Propylene Glycol MarketThe global propylene glycol market is consolidated due to the presence of limited number of players concentrated in few countries. These major players have adopted various organic as well as inorganic growth strategies such as mergers & acquisitions, new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, and others to strengthen their position in this market.Speak to Author of the Report@Other ReportGlobal Ransom Ware Protection Market  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Global Ransom ware protection Market, By Geography, Solution (Standalone Anti-Ransom Ware Software, Secure Web Gateways, Application Control, IDS/IPS, Web Filtering, Threat Intelligence), Service (Managed Services, Professional Services), Application, Deployment Mode, Organization Size, Vertical- Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Report Access:About Data Bridge Market ResearchData Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Vishal DixitData Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: Sales@databridgemarketresearch.comInvestor: investors@databridgemarketresearch.comVisit BlogFollow us on LinkedIn:
c-MET / HGF Inhibitors Market to Register Steady Growth During 2017- 2025

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c-Met is a proto-oncogene responsible for encoding the high-affinity receptor for hepatocyte growth factor (HGF). Hepatocyte growth factor is also known as scatter factor which participates in HGF/c-MET signaling pathway. This pathway plays vital role in mitogenesis and morphogenesis during embryonic development and wound healing. The controlled natural activity of c-Met and HGF is important in mammalian development, tissue maintenance, and repair. Binding of HGF to c-MET receptor induces several biological responses collectively known as invasive growth program. These responses are elicited due to activation of several pathways such as RAS pathway, PI3K pathway, STAT pathway, beta-catenin pathway and Notch pathway. However, dysregulation of the HGF/c-MET signaling pathway has been associated with the progression of cancers through activation of oncogenic pathways, angiogenesis and metastasis.Request for Table of Contents @c-Met kinase represents a novel target for cancer therapy and several research institutes and pharmaceuticals companies are engaged in developing new oncology drugs based on this inhibition of HGF or c-Met-dependent signaling pathway. Number of approaches being attempted to target c-Met include: c-Met biologic inhibitors, small molecule c-Met inhibitors, HGF antagonist antibodies, c-Met antagonist antibodies (MetMAb) and HGF kringle variant antagonists. A study undertaken by University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany demonstrated therapeutic potential of cabozantinib (Exelixis, Inc., Phase III) for against pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) and this molecule induced low-level of resistance compared to gemcitabine.The major cancers such as breast, colon and non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) are being examined for efficacy with c-MET / HGF inhibitors. Several small molecule c-Met kinase inhibitors have demonstrated clinical efficacy in cancer treatment and many clinical trials are underway. However, as the small molecule inhibitors lack specificity or selectivity they can cause toxicity. Therefore, researchers are increasing focus to develop antibody therapeutics against c-Met or HGF. Several drugs are in developmental stage and underway clinical trials in various phases of clinical trials. Some of the prominent molecules include ARQ 197 (Arcule, Inc., Phase II), AV-299 (AVEO Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Phase II), cabozantinib (Exelixis, Inc., Phase III), JNJ-38877605 (Johnson & Johnson), PF04217903 (Pfizer, Inc., Phase I), PF02341066 (Pfizer, Inc., Phase II), GSK1363089 (GlaxoSmithKline plc), MK-2461 (Merck & Co., Phase II), MP470 (SuperGen, Inc., Phase I), and MGCD265 (Methylgene, Inc., Phase I), AMG102 (Amgen, Inc., Phase II), HuL2G7 (Galaxy Biotech, LLC) and MetMAb (Genentech, Inc., Phase I).The global c-MET / HGF inhibitors market is yet to establish and hence every company is trying to expedite the research and development activity along with clinical trials. The larger multinationals are collaborating with companies having intellectual property rights but suffer from an insufficient capacity to commercialize the molecules. For instance, AstraZeneca signed a licensing deal with Hutchison MediPharma Ltd., to develop volitinib (HMPL-504/AZD6094) in non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC). Another recent development in the market was AVEO Oncology entering into a worldwide agreement with Biodexis in which latter companys companion diagnostic test will be commercialized with AVEOs ficlatuzumab (HGF inhibitory antibody).Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the companies having presence in the global c-MET / HGF inhibitors market are Abxign, Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Amgen, Inc., ArQule, Inc., Astex Therapeutics Ltd., AVEO Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) Co., Chroma Therapeutics Ltd., Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd., Deciphera Pharmaceuticals, LLC, Eisai Co., Ltd., Eli Lilly and Co., Exelixis, Inc., Genmab A/S, Galaxy Biotech, LLC, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) plc, Hutchison MediPharma Ltd., Johnson & Johnson, Kringle Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Merck & Co., Methylgene, Inc., Novartis AG, Pfizer, Inc., ProMetic BioTherapeutics, Inc., and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Community Care Facilities for the Elderly Market to Incur Rapid Extension During 2017 - 2025

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Community Care Facilities or Residential Care Facilities are services provided to geriatrics to assist their day-to-day routine of care, supervision and assistance with activities such as bathing and grooming and providing medicine as per regimen. In many cases high level of care and supervision is required when people are unable to ambulate by themselves but who do not need 24 hour nursing care. They are considered non-medical facilities and are not required to have nurses, certified nursing assistants or doctors on staff. These services are provided either home to home or at a private facility away from the patients home. Community care facilities are strictly regulated for quality of environment and expertise of the staff.Request to View Sample of Research Report @The demand for community care has increased exponentially over the years particularly due to decreased focus and attention meted out to geriatrics by family. This is further fueled with low awareness and training in handling of serious medical situation for old people such as Alzheimers Parkinsons, heart attack, post-surgical care and palliative care. In many situations, end-of-life care is required to be provided which cannot be given in hospitals due to over occupation of hospital premises. Other services may include adult day health care, companionship, delivery of consumables and medical supplies, counseling, emergency alert response, home repair, home-delivered meals, home nursing, legal assistance, material aid, medical therapeutic services, personal care, transportation, and other community-based services.The largest market for elderly community care services is estimated to be in North America which accounts for approximately 37% of the global market followed by Europe. China and Japan, are the worlds largest geriatric population regions where the market is expected to rise significantly in coming years. Cultural differentiation has affected the decision of hiring community care facility as aged people tend to misconstrue the move as abandonment by families which can strain health further. This is expected to remain a constant challenge in developing regions. Rapid urbanization and changing mindset may lead to better acceptance of these facilities in future. Home Community Care will be accepted much faster than care provided at a different facility such as an old age home.Request for Table of Contents @Since the facilities are strictly regulated, many of the facilities are government based facilities. Private companies such as Visiting Angels, Care Pathways, Home Instead, Senior Homes and Maxim Home Care are just a few examples in a market teeming with hundreds of players. Unique aspect of this industry is the fact that local players can have a market space of their own regardless of global leaders. Thus the market is expected to remain highly fragmented in coming years as well.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
ASEAN Smart Education and Learning Market Will Rise to US$88.97 mn by 2020 and Expand at a Whopping 19.7% CAGR from 2016 to 2020

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https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/893318/smart-education-and-learning-market-research-reports/toc

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The smart education and learning market in the ASEAN region is rising due to government initiatives towards digitizing education, increasing use of smartphones and tablets, internet penetration and developed information and communication (ICT) infrastructure. Virtual reality-infused classrooms and cloud-based smart education and learning solutions are gaining heightened popularity in the region and are becoming a standard across many educational institutions in countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.Transparency Market Research estimates that the ASEAN smart education and learning market holds immense growth potential in the near future. The market is expected to exhibit a remarkable 19.7% CAGR over the period between 2016 and 2020. If the prediction holds true, the market is expected to rise from US$36.84 bn to US$88.97 bn by 2020.Get the sample copy of this report :"Increasing Affordability of Smartphones and Easy Accessibility to High-Speed Internet Driving ASEAN Smart Education and Learning Market""Use of State Of Art Technology and Tools Making Smart Education Unaffordable For Small-Scale Learning Centers and Institutions"ASEAN Smart Education and Learning Market: Scope and OverviewThe ASEAN Smart Education and Learning Market report provides analysis of the ASEAN smart education and learning market for the period 20142020, wherein the years from 2016 to 2020 is the forecast period and 2015 is considered as the base year. The report precisely covers all the major trends and technologies playing a major role in the smart education and learning markets growth over the forecast period. It also highlights the drivers, restraints, and opportunities expected to influence the market growth during this period. The study provides a holistic perspective on the markets growth in terms of revenue (in US$ Bn), across different smart education and learning delivery models and end-uses.The market overview section of the report showcases the markets dynamics and trends such as the drivers, restraints, and opportunities that influence the current nature and future status of this market. Moreover, the report profiles the key players in the ASEAN smart education and learning market and provides the overview of various strategies adopted by them and analyzes their behavior in the prevailing market dynamics.Request for TOC of this report :ASEAN Smart Education and Learning Market: SegmentationBased on delivery model, the report segments the ASEAN smart education and learning market into classroom-based, desktop/mobile-based and simulation based. Majority of the countries in the ASEAN region have a high rate of smartphone penetration. This has led to the increased use of smartphones for learning purposes. Additionally, most of the ASEAN countries have access to high speed internet connections. This further facilitates the ease of using smartphones for education and learning purposes. As a result, the desktop/mobile-based segment is the largest segment in terms of delivery model. Application of virtual reality in classrooms and the use of smart tools for learning are contributing towards the growth of the simulation-based and classroom-based delivery models. However, high initial costs and maintenance costs are hindering the growth of these segments.On the basis of end-use, the ASEAN smart education and learning market has been segmented into higher education, transnational education, technical vocation & technical education (TVET), language training (English), early childcare & pre-school, continual professional development, and qualifications, assessment & standards. Owing to the wide scale popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for their diverse courses that are offered by various international universities, transnational education is one of the fastest growing segments in terms of end-use. Furthermore, there is a growing demand for English language learning courses to increase ones employability as English is the official language of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC).View full report :ASEAN Smart Education and Learning Market: Geographical DynamicsIn terms of country, the ASEAN smart education region has been divided into Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Rest of ASEAN countries (Cambodia, Laos, Burma & Brunei). Of these, Malaysia has a huge demand for English language learning courses and higher education courses. It is the largest segment as of 2015 in the ASEAN smart education and learning market. Malaysia is followed by Indonesia in terms of revenue share as a result of the developed state of ICT infrastructure in the country and availability of high speed internet. Additionally, high rate of smartphone penetration and the launch of AEC are also contributing factors towards the growth of the smart education and learning market in these countries.The report segments the ASEAN smart education and learning market on the basis of various delivery models such as classroom-based, desktop/ mobile-based and simulation-based. On the basis of end-use, the ASEAN smart education and learning market has been segmented into Higher Education, Transnational Education, TVET, Language Training (English), Early Childcare & Pre-School, Continual Professional Development, and Qualifications, Assessment & Standards.The ASEAN smart education and learning market has been segmented as below:The ASEAN Smart Education and Learning, By Delivery ModelClassroom- BasedDesktop/Mobile-BasedSimulation-BasedThe ASEAN Smart Education and Learning Analysis, By End-useHigher EducationTransnational EducationTVETLanguage TrainingEarly Childcare & Pre-SchoolContinual Professional DevelopmentQualifications, Assessment & StandardsThe ASEAN Smart Education and Learning Analysis, By CountryMalaysiaPhilippinesIndonesiaSingaporeThailandVietnamRest of ASEAN (Cambodia, Laos, Burma & Brunei)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 Polymer Filler Market will have major Growth in coming years | Forecast to 2022 | MRFR

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The Analysis presents the study of Worldwide Polymer Filler Market facilitating the regional and country wise analysis covering the strategic analysis of each market player and the market share they holdMarket Synopsis of Polymer Filler MarketHigh-quality properties and ability to replace expensive plastic resins makes polymer filler a popular material for various applications. Polymer fillers provide development opportunities to industries such as newer materials which improve molding properties. Moreover, increased demand for high strength and lightweight materials in the automotive and industrial applications along with eco-friendly nature is likely to propel the Polymer Filler Market. Abundant availability of natural fillers as well as lower cost is likely to be other factors driving the market. The global Polymer Filler Market size is expected to show staggering growth during the forecast periodRegional AnalysisAsia pacific is referred as the largest & fastest growing market for polymer filler, followed by North America and Europe. Asia Pacific is leading the global Polymer Filler Market due to the enormous demand for lightweight plastic products for automotive applications as well as growing consumption of Nano-filler for polymers. Whereas, North America is holding second place due to the presence of large players.Request a sample report for free @Key PlayersThe key players of Global Polymer Filler Market report include- Quarzwerke group, 20 Micron Limited, GCR group, Omya AG, Imerys S.A., Hoffman Minerals, Minerals Technologies, Unimin Corporation, and LKAB group.Target Audience Manufactures Raw Materials Suppliers Aftermarket suppliers Research Institute / Education Institute Potential Investors Key executive (CEO and COO) and strategy growth managerProduct Analysis Product matrix which gives a detailed comparison of the market for different recycled product typesAdditional Information Regulatory Landscape Pricing Analysis Macroeconomic IndicatorsGeographic Analysis Geographical analysis across 15 countriesCompany Information Profiling of 10 key market players In-depth analysis including SWOT analysis, and strategy information of related to report title Competitive landscape including emerging trends adopted by major companiesThe report for Global Polymer Filler Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.Browse report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Jan 16, 2018: AD Converters Market Size 2023 Analog Devices, Texas Instruments

AD Converters Market

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http://qymarketsresearch.com/report/global-ad-converters-market-2018-size-growth-rate-140128/

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AD Converters Market Research 2018A market study  Global AD Converters Market  examines the performance of the AD Converters market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the AD Converters market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of AD Converters market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global AD Converters Market 2018 report includes AD Converters market Revenue, market Share, AD Converters industry volume, market Trends, AD Converters Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, AD Converters Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2023.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global AD Converters Market 2018 : Analog Devices (Linear Technology) Texas Instruments Maxim Integrated Intersil (A Renesas Company) STMicroelectronics ON Semiconductor Microchip NXP Cirrus Logic XILINX Sillion Labs DATEL, Inc. Exar Corporation (A Part of MAXLINEAR) Toshiba AKM Semiconductor ROHM SemiconductorFirstly, the report covers the top AD Converters manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the AD Converters report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of AD Converters industry, AD Converters industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. AD Converters Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The AD Converters research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the AD Converters market revenue worldwide.Finally, AD Converters market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Us:"QYMarketsResearch" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us5001 Spring Valley Road,Suite 400 East,Dallas, TX 75244, USAWeb:Email: sales@qymarketsresearch
Congenital Heart Diseases Market to Partake Significant Development During 2017 - 2025

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Congenital diseases are disorders in a newborn due to certain genetic factors (and sometimes in association with the environment) that often results in malformations or underdeveloped organs. Congenital Heart Diseases (CHD) results in malformed or undeveloped heart that presents in a newborn with breathing and circulation disorders. According to Lancet medical journal, CHD caused death of 0.22 million individuals and newborns globally in the year 2010. CHD was earlier erroneously associated with premature births, the association has no direct correlation with all forms of CHD and is mainly one of the many factors that can cause it. The genetic factors causing CHD consist of chromosomal errors in fertilization and the following meiotic division, these include: large chromosomal defects in trisomal chromosomes; small chromosomal defects like microdeletion of long/short arm of chromosome and random/environmentally induced mutation of heart muscle cell proteins, or associated proteins etc.The environmental factors like rubella infections, thalidomide drugs, metals (lithium, lead, mercury, etc), chronic illness in the mother (systemic lupus, diabetes, phenylketonuria, etc). Embryological changes, hormonal changes in the mother and certain birth deficiencies can also cause CHD and other birth defects in children. Besides these, according to some medical research reports, maternal obesity increased the chances of CHD in newborns; obesity was shown to increase the risk of previously hidden genetic traits of CHD in the new born children of such obese mothers.Request for Table of Contents @CHD can be diagnosed before birth via ultrasound sonography; however some minute heart defects may go undetected for life. CHD is primarily classified as hypoplasia( underdeveloped heart chambers), obstructive (blockage/narrowing of valves/vessels) and septal defects (defects in the septum wall that divides the heart chambers). However, medical practitioners generally distinguish CHD at birth into Cyanotic (blue coloration of skin due to very low Hb/oxygen) or non-cyanotic. Cyanotic disorders usually present as problems that prevent normal circular of blood, therefore resulting in poor oxygen supply, some examples include: left ventricular hypoplastia, pulmonary atresia (abnormal closing/opening of a valve), tricuspid atresia, pulmonary venous return, etc. Non cyanotic disorders involve problems in the heart that may present difficulty for the child in the future and result in cardiac arrhythmia, chest pain and difficulty in breathing, some examples include: Aortic stenosis, Atrial/ventricular septal defect (ASD), pulmonic stenosis, coarctation (turners syndrome), patent ductus arteriosus, etc. CHD are in some cases associated with certain chromosome syndromes e.g.: Down syndrome, Marfan syndrome, Noonan Syndrome, Turner Syndrome and 22q11 sequence deletion syndrome (DiGeorge syndrome), etc.The treatment of CHD varies from case to case; genetic testing/screening is mandatory in case the doctor suspects a genetic cause for the disease, in developed countries this is done for all newborns. The next step would be surgery or drug treatment, again this depends upon the severity of the condition. In most cases CHD presents itself as serious conditions with high risk of complications, hence surgery is the most followed procedure. In certain disorders like ASD a pediatric surgeon may ask the parents of a CHD child to wait for the childs growth as ASD is known to disappear gradually, a surgery is performed if ASD persists after the childs growth. Certain cases also require multiple surgeries and stenting in order to restore a malformed tract in the lungs, etc. Drugs like diuretics are given to regulate vasoconstriction that alleviates deoxygenation and helps remove toxins from the body, besides reducing the heartbeat.CHD is commonly reported through the world and is known to affect one in 5000 newborn births. Treatment and surgeries are done in large numbers in both developed and developing countries. At present the market is largest in the North American, Asia-Pacific and European region because these regions together form the most populated yet urbanized region in the world. Asia-pacific region leads the global market at present and is expected to maintain its position in the near future.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the diuretic manufacturers include: Pfizer inc., Abbott Laboratories Inc., Eli Lilly & Co, Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals Inc., et to name a few.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Jan 16, 2018: 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride Market Share 2023 Formedium, Arisun ChemPharm

5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride Market

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http://qymarketsresearch.com/report/global-5-aminolevulinic-acid-hydrochloride-market-140120/

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5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride Market Research 2018A market study  Global 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride Market  examines the performance of the 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride Market 2018 report includes 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride market Revenue, market Share, 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride industry volume, market Trends, 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2023.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride Market 2018 : Formedium Arisun ChemPharm Cayman Chemical Abcam AdooQ BioScience Thermo Fisher Bio-TechneFirstly, the report covers the top 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride industry, 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride market revenue worldwide.Finally, 5-Aminolevulinic Acid Hydrochloride market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Us:"QYMarketsResearch" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us5001 Spring Valley Road,Suite 400 East,Dallas, TX 75244, USAWeb:Email: sales@qymarketsresearch
Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage Market to Rear Excessive Growth During 2017 - 2025

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Aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage is sudden bleeding into the subarachnoid space. It might spill into the cerebrospinal liquid in the space around the brain. The most widely recognized reason for unconstrained blood draining is a cracked aneurysm. Side effects may incorporate sudden and extreme cerebral pain. In more genuine cases, the bleeding may cause total brain damage with loss of motion or coma. In the most serious cases, the draining may lead to severe death of an individual. It is an overall wellbeing burden with high casualty and perpetual disability rates. The general anticipation relies upon the volume of the underlying bleed, and level of postponed cerebral ischemia (DCI). The neurogenic pulmonary edema and cardiac manifestations indicate the severity of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage. Aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage is frequently an irresistible event. Around 10% of patients with aneurysmal SAH pass on preceding achieving the clinic, 25% of patients die inside 24 hours of SAH onset, and around 45 % pass on inside 30 days; only 33% of patients will have a decent result after treatment.Request for Table of Contents @Seasonal variations in the incidence of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage suggest a possible infective origin, however, current evidence are mixed. In the U.S., every year around 25000 to 30000 people (6 11 for every 100000) encounter aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage. Burst of cerebral aneurysms represents 50%-70% of these cases. Different causes incorporate bleeding from a cerebral tumor, drug abuse, anticoagulant treatment, ruptured arteriovenous deformities and hypertensive cerebral hemorrhage. Developing frequency of road accidents prompting head wounds and break of cerebral aneurysm cases, enhanced healthcare framework in developing nations; and development in awareness about SAH is driving the global market during the forecast period.Growing awareness and technological assessments in upcoming medical devices and diagnostic imaging technologies are encouraging people to opt for modern treatment procedures to treat giant surgical and brain hemorrhage procedures. This is anticipated to boost the growth of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage market.Regionally, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East and Africa. The most critical reason for SAH (aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage) is trauma or injury. Some different reasons for this condition are severe headache, intra-cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis and meningitis. Likewise, various lifestyle factors including smoking, hereditary disorders, hypertension, and extreme liquor utilization are additionally critical components for driving the global aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage market during the forecast period. The most critical reason for SAH is trauma or injury. Some different reasons for this condition are severe headache, intra-cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis and meningitis. Likewise, various lifestyle factors including smoking, hereditary disorders, hypertension, and extreme liquor utilization are additionally critical components for driving the global aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage market during the forecast period.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Edge Therapeutics, Inc., Actelion Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Arbor Pharmaceuticals Inc., Mayfield Brain & Spine, Europa Group, GE Healthcare, Koninklijke Philips N.V., Siemens AG, Trivitron Healthcare, and Toshiba Medical Systems Corporation. Patients must be instructed about the risk of complications and symptomatic bleeding or brain hemorrhage. Patients should immediately consult a physician if they experience symptoms of stokes, migraine, or severe pain because of the possibility of impending trauma or bleeding.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
2-Methylfuran Market to Witness Steady Expansion During 2016-2026

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The global pharmaceuticals market is expected to increase at a CAGR of over 4-5% during forecast period. 2-Methylfuran is expected to gain traction in the near future as it is primarily used in pharmaceuticals industry. It is a light yellowish green volatile organic compound with an ethereal odor and is also known as sylvan. 2-Methylfuran changes its shading to black or yellow when exposed to sunlight. It is highly flammable and hence is stored in a ventilated, cool dry place far from heat & fire. 2-Methylfuran is widely used in manufacturing of drugs like atropine, sodium acetate, furadantine, anisodamine and thiamine furan. In pharmaceuticals industry, synthesis of vitamin B1 is done using 2-Methylfuran. It is less dense than water but its vapors are heavier when contrastedwith air. 2-Methylfuran also finds application as a tool for screening of lung cancer and production of anti-malarial drug like chloroquine. It is also used to produce methyl furfural, aliphatic compounds and sulfur and nitrogen heterocycles. Moreover, 2-Methylfuran is also used for making pesticides, flavors or fragrances and has narcotic effect. Hence, the global 2-Methylfuran market is expected to grow at a moderate CAGR during the forecast period.Global 2-Methylfuran Market Dynamics:2-Methyl furan is soluble in alcohol and ether and has the potential to be used as an alternative fuel. This factor is expected to drive the demand for 2-Methylfuran in chemical industry. The growing pharmaceutical industry is also anticipated to be the major driving factor for the growth of global 2-Methylfuran market. Moreover, increasing demand for pesticides coupled with growing agricultural sector is expected to set an opportunity for the growth of 2-Methyl furan market. One of the major factor restricting the growth of the global 2-Methylfuran market is its high flammability and lower flash point. This makes the transportation of 2-Methylfuran difficult, which in turn is expected to restrain the growth of 2-methylfuran market in the near future. Moreover, environmental regulation are imposed for limited usage of 2-Methylfuran because of its toxic effects and thus expected to challenge the overall growth of the market. Additionally, the key players are responding to the challenges and are expanding their global presence in order to sustain their share in the global 2-Methylfuran market.Request For Report Sample@Global 2-Methylfuran Market: SegmentationThe global 2-Methylfuran market can be segmented on the basis of applications and regions. On the basis of applications, the global 2-Methylfuran market is segmented into pharmaceuticals, agricultural and chemical industry. Pharmaceutical industry is estimated to account the largest share in global 2-Methylfuran market. On the basis of regions, the global 2-Methylfuran market can be segmented into North America, Western Europe, Middle East and Africa, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Japan and Eastern Europe.Global 2-Methylfuran Market: Region wise OutlookNorth America is expected to be the most dominant region in global 2-Methylfuran market. Asia Pacific is anticipated to be the most promising revenue generating region for 2-Methylfuran and is expected to grow at significant rate. Due to availability of labor and low cost of raw material, China is projected to be one of the highest revenue generating country in Asia Pacific region in 2-Methylfuran market. Middle East & Africa and Latin America are also expected to show positive growth in the near future.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Global 2-Methylfuran Market: Key PlayersSome of the major key players identified in the global 2-Methylfuran market are as follows:Capot Chemical Co. Ltd.Angene ChemicalA&J Pharmtech Co. Ltd.Sigma-AldrichFinetech Industry Ltd.ChemExper Inc.MP Biomedicals, LLC.Amadis Chemical Co. Ltd.AN PharmaTech Co. Ltd.Tractus Company Ltd.Haihang Industry Co. Ltd.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
BURLEY  Juanita Villa of D. L. Evans Bank has been promoted to the position of sales manager of the Mini-Cassia Real Estate Department. In her new position, she will continue to assist her customers with all of their mortgage lending needs.

Villa has been with D. L. Evans Bank since 2011. She was raised in the Mini-Cassia area and graduated from Minico High School. Juanita is involved with both the Rupert Rotary Club and the Mini-Cassia Association of Realtors. She is fluent in both the Spanish and English languages.

Villa has more than 11 years of banking experience in the Mini-Cassia area and is looking forward to building and expanding the personal and business relationships she has developed.

She works at the North Burley branch at 397 N. Overland Ave and can be reached at 208-678-9076 or 208-312-4208.
Dental Filling material Market to Perceive Substantial Growth During 2017 - 2025

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/21556

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/21556

http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com

Dental filling alludes to the method for restoring a harmed tooth bring it back to its ordinary shape and capacity. It is additionally used to repair tooth decay, insignificant tooth fractures, and other harmed surfaces of the teeth. Dental filling materials can likewise be utilized to try and out tooth surfaces for better biting or chewing. Filling material are the substances designed to interact with the oral system to treat, repair, augment or replace a tissue function of body. Filling materials can be natural or synthetic, and usually made of multiple components. Dental filling materials can be of gold, ceramics, silver or amalgamated filling used to restore damaged or fractured tissues and tooth decay. Overall sensitivity (mainly affected by enamel loss) can be essentially enhanced or totally disposed of once a suitable dental filling material is utilized to restore the smooth tooth surface. Contingent upon the level of tooth decay, the influenced or harmed tooth may require extra or elective systems, for example, root canal treatment, dental crowns, dental bridges or implants.Request for Table of Contents @The global dental filling material market is expected to be driven by increasing number of dentists and patient awareness and demand. Due to the changing life style people are suffering from various types of oral diseases, leading to the dental conditions. Change in life style conditions is expected to drive the growth of dental filling material market. Other factors driving the growth of dental filling material market includes, increasing investment, grants and funds by government bodies. Increasing number of geriatric population and advancement in the filling material technology is also driving the growth of the market. Inflammatory reactions caused by filling materials, stringent regulation and reluctance of insurance agencies to reimburse dental filling material is challenging the growth of the dental filling material market.The global dental filling material market is expected to show a significant growth over the forecast period. Increasing investment by the companies and rising government funds are expected to drive the growth of the dental filling material market. Growing geriatric population as these are biggest population for the dental filling material and increasing number of dental practitioners are expected to fuel the growth of dental filling material market. The silver amalgam tooth filling material is growing exponentially during the forecast period. Growing trend of dental medical tourism and advancement in the dental products is also expected to drive the growth of the dental filling material market. According to world health organization statistics 60-90% of children and adults are suffering from tooth decay, dental cavities and other dental disorders. Dental filling material market is also expected to be fueled by increasing awareness among patients and changing life style conditions. As fabricated materials has longer period and less chances of getting deteriorated, materials that are engaged as dental fillings are an amalgam, i.e. an alloy of silver, copper, zinc and mercury, a compound resin fillings, porcelain, gold and others.Dental clinics are expected to dominate the end used segment in the global dental filling material market. The healthcare services framework and high per capita salary in the developed nations pushes the interest for dental filling material for corrective and restorative application. The market is required to additionally supplement by positive approaches with respect to reimbursements regarding dental filling procedures and heightened people awareness relating to oral cleanliness. The rising predominance of dental disorders in teeth among the geriatric populace is additionally anticipated that would help the development of the market during the forecast period.The global dental filling material market can be segmented into regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the global dental filling material market over the forecast period. Presence of large number of dental clinics, rising patient awareness and better reimbursement of therapies in the region are expected to be growth driving factors for dental filling materials. Asia Pacific is expected to be fastest growing dental filling material market over the forecast period. Presence of large patient pool, improving healthcare infrastructure and increasing investment on the development of advanced dental products is expected to be growth driving factor for dental filling material market in the region.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the market participants in the global dental filling material market are, DMG Chemisch-Pharmazeutische Fabrik, Coltene Whaledent Dentsply, SDI Limited, Kerr Corporation, GC America, Kuraray Noritake Dental, Pentron Clinical Technologies, DenMat Holdings, Kettenbach and others.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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Hastings Insurance Market 2018 Global Industry Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast To 2022

Hastings Insurance

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Summary"Insurance Company Profile: Hastings Insurance", profile provides a comprehensive review of the company and its UK business. This includes its strategy for growth and focus on digitization as well as its performance in the UK and marketing and distribution strategy.Hastings Group is a general insurance provider in the UK offering car, van, bike, and home insurance products. It operates through two subsidiaries: Hastings Insurance Services and Advantage Insurance Company.GET SAMPLE REPORT @It serves 2.35 million customers in the UK with 2,680 employees, as of December 31, 2016.This profile offers a review of Hastings Insurance, its business structure and strategy, its financial performance, and a SWOT analysis. It also covers its activities around insurtech.Key Questions Answered- What are Hastings strengths and weaknesses?- What opportunities and challenges does the company face going forward?Scope- Hastings business strategy is centered on six components: growth, investment in technology and distribution, expansion of product offerings, focus on cash generation, disciplined underwriting, and an agile business model to effectively respond to changes in the market.- Advantage Insurance Company is Hastings Groups underwriting business. It underwrites 90% of the groups policies.Reasons to buy- Learn about Hastings organizational structure and its core business segments.- Gain insight into its underwriting and distribution strategy.- Understand the group's advertising strategy.Table of Content: Key PointsOperationsHastings: SubsidiariesHistoric MilestonesWhat Does Hastings Do Today?Product OverviewStrategyFuture StrategyPartnershipsAdvertising ExpenditureSWOT AnalysisStrengthsWeaknessesOpportunitiesThreatsContinuedACCESS 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
Travel Insurance Market (Allianz, Munich Re Group, AIG) Is Thriving Worldwide

Travel Insurance Market

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The research study with title,  Global Travel Insurance Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022 has been recently added in HTF MI repository to highlight the key areas of the industry in a comprehensive and detailed manner. Analyst behind this study have identified that there could be various critical segments by both type and application. Each of the segments, also the mentioned geographical markets, have been analyzed in one of the most prominent ways to deliver best insightful market research.The Global Travel Insurance Market research study is a designed especially for business strategists, industry executives, marketing, sales and product managers, consultants, analysts, and other people looking for key industry related data in readily accessible documents with easy to analyze visuals, graphs and tables. It provides the Travel Insurance industry overview with growth analysis, historical & futuristic cost, revenue by type & application classified by important regions as well and demand & supply data (if applicable).Some of the companies profiled in this research study are Allianz, Munich Re Group, AIG, Assicurazioni Generali, Prudential, ACE&Chubb, Manulife, UnitedHealthcare Global, Mapfre, AXA, Tokio Marine Holdings, China Pacific insurance, Hanse Merkur, Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, People's insurance company of China, China Life & Sompo Japan NipponkoaAccess Sample Copy @:By Regions, this report covers United States, EU, Japan, China, India & Southeast Asia.This Travel Insurance market study provides comprehensive data which enhances the understanding, scope and application of this report. A deeper knowledge of the Global Travel Insurance Market could be gained through this research as the analyst have attempted to reveal important distributors and traders along with market positioning and marketing channel. The report offers a useful analysis of marketing strategy for the sales while focusing on elements such as target client, brand strategy, cost analysis and pricing strategy. Some of the significant trends of marketing channel development, indirect marketing, and direct marketing is also included.Buy this research report @The report also make a deep dive into the influential factors that are going to affect the development of the Global Travel Insurance Market in the upcoming era. These include the technological framework of the industry and likely advances that may be expected in the future, consumer preference patterns, economic environment, and the demand for alternative innovation and R&D.Last but not the least, the report focuses on the manufacturers responsible for increasing the sales in the market and being analyzed in the last section. The analysis is based in terms of their manufacturing base, basic information, and competitors along with SWOT analysis. Additionally, the technology and product type introduced by each of these manufacturers are also covered in the report. The recent developments that took place in the Global Travel Insurance Market and their impact on the future growth of the market have also been presented through this study.Early buyers will receive 10% customization on reports. Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Extracts from Table of Contents are as followsGlobal Travel Insurance Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022Chapter 1: Global Travel Insurance Market OverviewChapter 2: Global Economic Impact on IndustryChapter 3: Global Market Competition by ManufacturersChapter 4: Global Production, Revenue (Value) by Region i.e. by United States, EU, Japan, China, India & Southeast AsiaChapter 5: Global Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by RegionsChapter 6: Global Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type  that includes Medical Expense, Trip Cancellation, Trip Delay, Property Damage & Other.Chapter 7: Global Market Analysis by Application  that includes Domestic Travel & Outbound Travel.Chapter 8: Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9: Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10: Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11: Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12: Global Modular Building System Market ForecastEnquire for customization in Report @Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.HTF Market Report is a wholly owned brand of HTF market Intelligence Consulting Private Limited. HTF Market Report global research and market intelligence consulting organization is uniquely positioned to not only identify growth opportunities but to also empower and inspire you to create visionary growth strategies for futures, enabled by our extraordinary depth and breadth of thought leadership, research, tools, events and experience that assist you for making goals into a reality. Our understanding of the interplay between industry convergence, Mega Trends, technologies and market trends provides our clients with new business models and expansion opportunities. We are focused on identifying the Accurate Forecast in every industry we cover so our clients can reap the benefits of being early market entrants and can accomplish their Goals & Objectives.Contact us :HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Private LimitedUnit No. 429, Parsonage Road Edison, NJNew Jersey USA  08837sales@htfmarketreport.com+1 (206) 317 1218
Future Aspects of Biofertilizers Market in Global Industry : Market Analysis, Market Size, Regional Outlook, Competitive Strategies and Forecasts 2017-2025

Market Research Report

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Biofertilizers Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.Global Biofertilizers Market: OverviewBiofertilizers are the substances which make use of the living micro-organisms and are applied to seed, plant surfaces, or soil. They promote the growth of the plants by supplying adequate amount of nutrients and improve the quality and yield of the crops. The three major biofertilizers existing in the market are nitrogen fixing bio-fertilizer, phosphate mobilizing bio-fertilizer and potassium mobilizing bio-fertilizer. Biofertilizers add nutrients through the natural processes of fixing atmospheric nitrogen, solubilizing phosphorous, and stimulating plant growth through the synthesis of growth promoting substances.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The benefits of Biofertilizers include longer shelf life, less contamination, better survival on seeds and soil, high commercial revenues and export potential. Biofertilizers help to increase the nutrient absorbing surface area beyond the depletion zone of the root. Different kinds of soil micro-organisms belonging to several taxa of the bacteria, fungi, and protozoa kingdoms, colonizing the rhizosphere or the plant tissues and promoting plant growth, can be utilized for the production of Biofertilizers.Global Biofertilizers Market: SegmentationGlobal bio-fertilizer market can be segmented on the basis of product and applications. The product segment of bio-fertilizer market includes nitrogen fixing bio-fertilizer, phosphate mobilizing bio-fertilizer and potassium mobilizing bio-fertilizer. In terms of application, global biofertilizer market can be categorized into cereals and grains, fruits and vegetables, oil seeds and pulses and others segment including nursery turfs and ornamental plants.The report estimates and forecasts the Bio Fertilizers market on the global, regional and country levels. The study provides forecast between 2017 and 2025 based on volume (Tons) and revenue (US$ Mn) with 2016 as the base year. The report comprises an exhaustive value chain analysis for each of the segments. It provides a comprehensive view of the market. Value chain analysis also offers detailed information about value addition at each stage. The study includes drivers and restraints for the Biofertilizers market along with their impact on demand during the forecast period. The study also provides key market indicators affecting the growth of the market. The report analyzes opportunities in the Bio Fertilizers market on the global, regional and country level. Drivers, restraints, and opportunities mentioned in the report are justified through quantitative and qualitative data. These have been verified through primary and secondary resources. Furthermore, the report analyzes substitute analysis of Biofertilizers and global average price trend analysis.Make an Enquiry about TOC @Global Biofertilizers Market: Research MethodologyThe report includes Porters Five Forces Model to determine the degree of competition in the Biofertilizers market. The report comprises a qualitative write-up on market attractiveness analysis, wherein end-users and regions have been analyzed based on attractiveness for each region. Growth rate, market size, raw material availability, profit margin, impact strength, technology, competition, and other factors (such as environmental and legal) have been evaluated in order to derive the general attractiveness of the market. The report comprises price trend analysis for Biofertilizers between 2017 and 2025.The study provides a comprehensive view of the Biofertilizers market by dividing it into, product, application, and geography segments. The product segment of the biofertilizers market is classified as nitrogen fixing, phosphate mobilizing and potassium mobilizing fertilizers The Biofertilizers market, by application has been categorized into oil seeds & pulses, cereals & grains, fruits & vegetables and others. The regional analysis of global biofertilizer market include includes the current and forecast consumption of biofertilizers in North America (U.S, Canada), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Rest of Latin America) , Europe (Germany, France, Russia, Spain, CIS, Greece, Ukraine, Italy, Serbia, and Rest of Europe),Asia Pacific (China, India, ASEAN (Excluding Indonesia and Vietnam), Japan, Australia, Rest of Asia Pacific), and Middle East & Africa (Iran, Israel, Nigeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Rest of Middle East & Africa).Favorable regulatory scenario in highly developed regions such as North America and Europe are driving the market of global biofertilizers.Global Biofertilizers Market: Competitive LandscapeThe report covers detailed competitive outlook that includes market share and profiles of key players operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include PotashCorp Agri Life, Bodisen Biotech, Inc. , Italpollina SpA , Protan AG , Novozymes A/S , Gujarat State Fertilizers and Chemicals Ltd. , T. Stanes & Company Limited , Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers Limited Symborg S.L, & Rizobacters Argentina S.A. Company profiles include attributes such as company overview, number of employees, brand overview, key competitors, business overview, business strategies, recent/key developments, acquisitions, and financial overview (wherever applicable).Secondary research sources that were typically referred to include, but were not limited to Food & Agricultural Organization(FAO), International Fertilizer Association (IFA), National Centre of Organic Farming (NCOF) and International Fertilizer Society (IFS). Other sources such as internal and external proprietary databases, statistical databases and market reports, news articles, national government documents, and webcasts specific to companies operating in the market have also been referred for the report.ResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us
Nuclear Fuels Market growth and what factors driving the industry as per New Research 2018

Nuclear Fuels Market

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https://www.qyresearchgroups.com

Nuclear Fuels Market report covers data on market status and trend of the report by 2018-2025 with top key player which offers a total evaluation of the most recent patterns of the Nuclear Fuels Market. Nuclear Fuels Market report concentrates on CAGR, drivers, opportunities, challenges, players, regions, product, and applications.The Global Nuclear Fuels Market research report provided by QY Research Groups is the most detailed study about Nuclear Fuels that is estimated to grow at a tremendous rate over the forecast period 2013-2025. This report contains precise and updated insights in respect with the leading market players and prevailing regions of the business.To avail a sample of this report click here:The market is segmented on the basis of Product and Application. The section provides beneficial knowledge about the segments of the report.The major players in the market areARMZ Uranium Holding CompanyCamecoEnergy Resources of AustraliaBHP BillitonCanalaska UraniumKazAtomPromBerkeley EnergiaGlobex Mining EnterprisesInternational Montoro ResourcesChina National Nuclear CorporationJapan, Oil, Gas and Metals National CorporationChina General Nuclear PowerDenison MinesEagle Plains ResourcesAzimut ExplorationBannerman ResourcesForsys MetalsRio TintoNMMCPaladin EnergyUrencoVattenfallAnglo-Canadian Mining CorpAREVABrowse full report with Table of Content @The Nuclear Fuels market in terms of application is classified intoNuclear Power PlantsNuclear Research LabsOtheDepending on the Product the Nuclear Fuels Market is classified intoMixed Oxide (MOX) FuelUranium FuelOtherThe market is sectioned by prevailing regions such asNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaAt Market Research Globe we render the most authentic and elaborate information for the utmost benefit of our clients.Get the best offer of this study @Table of ContentsGlobal Nuclear Fuels Market Research Report 20181 Nuclear Fuels Market Overview2 Global Nuclear Fuels Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Nuclear Fuels Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Nuclear Fuels Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Nuclear Fuels Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Nuclear Fuels Market Analysis by Application7 Global Nuclear Fuels Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Nuclear Fuels Manufacturing Cost Analysis.About Us:QY Research Groups is a company that simplifies how analysts and decision makers get industry data for their business. Our unique colossal technology has been developed to offer refined search capabilities designed to exploit the long tail of free market research whilst eliminating irrelevant results. QY Research Groups is the collection of market intelligence products and services on the Web. We offer reports and update our collection daily to provide you with instant online access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on Global industries, companies, products, and trends.Contact us:Email- sales@qyresearchgroups.comWebsite-
Pallet Conveyor Market Research Report 2017 Forecast to 2022: Ssi Schaefer, Daifuku, Dematic, Intelligrated

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https://www.globalinforeports.com/report/global-north-america-europe-and-asia-pacific-south-america-middle-east-and-africa-pallet-conveyor-market-2017-forecast-to-2022-d-50

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"Pallet Conveyor is a type of conveyor that transport pallets from one point to another. It is also a mechanically-operated material handling equipment, which are used to transport material within premises.This report is mainly focus on the pallet conveyors for EURO pallet, GMA pallet, GKN Chep pallet, plastic pallet etc. The conveyors can bear 500 to 5000 pounds of weight, so it can also be called for heavy duty pallet conveyors. The belt type products usually cannot bear the products above 100 kg, so it is not included in this report."To Request For a Sample Copy Of This Report, Please Visit:Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Pallet Conveyor in Global market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversSsi SchaeferDaifukuDematicIntelligratedMarket 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, coversDrag ChainRoller (driven or gravity)Plastic TypeSlat TypeMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoRetail/LogisticIndustrialFoodBeverage (separate from Food)OtherFor Browsing the Entire Report, Please Visit:There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Pallet Conveyor market.Chapter 1, to describe Pallet Conveyor Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Pallet Conveyor, with sales, revenue, and price of Pallet Conveyor, 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 Pallet Conveyor, 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;.About Us:Global Info Reports, a market research company that renders broad analysis of global market sizing, determines the industry intelligence, wrapping markets where advancements in science and technology are persistently improving the entire standard, quality and business upkeep. We have the most copious collection of market intelligence services online. We provide market reports and update our collection frequently to offer you with immediate online access to complete enhanced database of expert insights on global industries, products, market players, companies, and latest trends.Contact us:Email- sales@globalinforeports.comFollow Us:Twitter:Facebook:Google Plus:
Global Prostate Cancer Therapeutics Market Insight, Outlook, Trends & Forecast by 2024

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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 Prostate Cancer Therapeutics Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024 Get Free Sample Report @Prostate cancer is a serious health issue among men and has a large socioeconomic impact on the society. It is the most common cancer diagnosed among men in developed regions, while it is the fourth-most common cancer diagnosed globally. Routine screening, early diagnosis, and recent treatment options have enabled increased survival of prostate cancer patients. Prostate cancer is an abnormal and uncontrolled growth of cells in prostate gland of a male individual.Approximately 75% of prostate cancers are developed sporadically, in which genetic changes occur after birth. Although, the real cause of prostate cancer is largely unknown, some of the prime factors associated with the disease include obesity, overweight, and past history of certain cancers. The global prostate cancer therapeutics market was valued at US$8.78 bn in 2015. Rising at a CAGR of 8.1% between 2016 and 2024, the market is expected to reach US$17.53 bn by the end of 2025. The overall market is segmented on the basis of therapy type, and distribution channel segments.Hormone Therapy to Remain Dominant Segment Based on Therapy TypeBased on therapy type, the global prostate cancer therapeutics market is segmented into hormone therapy, chemotherapy, biologic therapy, and targeted therapy. Of these, the hormone therapy segment dominated global prostate cancer therapeutics market with a share of 82.7% in 2015. Hormone therapy offers excellent efficacy in castration resistant prostate cancer patients, which is a chief factor fuelling its demand in the treatment of prostate cancer patients. The dominance of the segment is thus forecast to remain unaffected through the forecast period.Besides this, the targeted therapy segment is anticipated to gain market share during forecast period due to expected new product launches in this segment. The biologic therapy segment is expected to have a moderate market share and is likely to expand with a high CAGR during the forecast period due to introduction of novel therapy products in prostate cancer therapeutics market and increase in prevalence of prostate cancer globally.Browse Full Report With Table of Content @Based on distribution channel, the global prostate cancer therapeutics market is segmented into hospital pharmacy, online sales, retail pharmacy, and others. Of these, the hospital pharmacy segment emerged dominant in 2015. The segment is gaining momentum on account of the rising incidence of prostate cancer around the world and advancements in diagnosis techniques. As an increasing number of patients seek medical care in hospitals, the hospital pharmacy segment will witness accelerated pace of gains in response. In addition, the online sales segment is forecast to witness significant growth over the forecast period. This segment will gain from the rising use of mobile based applications for placing online orders for medicines.North America and Europe Cumulatively Hold Leading Market ShareRegionally, North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa constitute the key segments in the global prostate cancer therapeutics market. Among these, North America and Europe cumulatively held the leading market share in 2015. This trend is likely to continue through the forecast period. While in 2015, North America emerged dominant holding a marginally higher share of 39.8% as compared to Europe, in the coming years the table is expected to turn in favor of Europe.The rising diseased population and a sophisticated healthcare infrastructure will support growth of the prostate cancer therapeutics market in North America and Europe. Besides this, Asia Pacific and Latin America are expected to emerge as promising market owing to the increasing awareness about prostate cancer and the available treatment and diagnosis options. The rising healthcare spending will also support the markets expansion in Asia Pacific and Latin America.Enquire about this Report @About Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE)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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:
Basal Cell Carcinoma Therapeutics Market is likely to register double digit CAGR during 2017 - 2025

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/basal-cell-carcinoma-therapeutics-market.asp

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/15772

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https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/

Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) is a form of non-melanocytic skin cancer that arises from basal cells, the small, round cells present in the lower epidermis. Around 85% of BCCs occur on the face, head and neck. BCCs usually do not spread or metastasize to other parts of body, they become life threatening by metastasis only in extremely rare cases. According to the American Cancer Society, BCCs constitute around 80% of all non-melanoma skin cancers. Australia has been found to have the highest rate of basal cell carcinoma across the globe. Exposure to ultraviolet radiation is considered as the major cause behind BCC. Use of immunosuppressant drugs further enhance the chances of BCC as the immune system is compromised. White people are more vulnerable to BCC comparatively, according to a research published in the British Medical Journal. The symptoms of BCCs include waxy papules (slightly transparent bump) with pearly appearance and central depression and bleeding from the papules.Read Report Overview @The factors driving the growth of the global Basal Cell Carcinoma Therapeutics market is increasing incidence of Basal cell carcinoma by up to 10% annually across the globe. The incidence rate is much higher specifically in White population. Expanding geriatric population pool will also add to the market growth since the elderly people are more sensitive to BCCs. Changing habits of the urban population living in the developed countries such as the USA and European countries and a shift of population in the US from northerly cool areas to the sunbelt of the Southern and South-western United States will definitely give rise to incidence rate, leading to market growth.Global Basal Cell Carcinoma Therapeutics market has been segmented on the basis of therapy, route of administration, distribution channels and region.Global Basal Cell Carcinoma Therapeutics market is consolidated due to the lack of number of available treatment options and companies. The market is expected to increase globally owing to increasing incidence rate and environmental factors leading to exposure of UV radiation. According to a published article in the journal Deutsches Arzteblatt International, 115 cases of BCC per 100,000 of population are reported in the Great Britain annually, similarly 7080 BCC in Germany, Switzerland and Italy; 170 BCC in the USA; and over 800 BCC cases in Australia are reported annually. Last 3 decades have observed the rise in incidence at a minimum 23 fold.Request Report For TOC @Geographically, Basal Cell Carcinoma Therapeutics market is segmented into regions viz. North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The market in North America is expected to grow due to increase in the incidence in white population and ageing population. European market is also expected to grow because of their fair toned skin. Currently, Australia is the leading market globally because of the highest incidence rate. Asian and African countries would report a slow market growth rate as the incidence rate and prevalence of BCC is uncommon in Asians and Black African races. However, Chinese and Japanese have a higher incidence rate in Asia.Some of the players in the global Basal Cell Carcinoma Therapeutics market include Allergan, Inc., Genentech USA, Inc., Taro Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Perrigo Company plc, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Inc., Apotex Inc., Sandoz AG, Strides Arcolab Ltd., TOLMAR Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and G&W Laboratories, Inc.Request To Sample Of Report @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:
Hysteroscopy Instruments Market to Cross US$ 1.5 Billion By 2022

Hysteroscopy Instruments Market

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Florida, January 16, 2018: Market Research Engine has published a new report titled as Hysteroscopy Instruments Market By Application Type (Diagnostic Hysteroscopy, Operative Hysteroscopy, Myomectomy, Polypectomy, Endometrial ablation, Tubal sterilization); By Type (Hysteroscopes, Hand-held Instruments, Resectoscopes, Hysterosheaths, Fluid management systems, Hysteroscopic Tissue Removal Systems); By Usability Type (Reusable Instruments, Disposable Instruments); By End-user Type (Hospitals, Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs)) and by Regional Analysis - Global Forecast by 2016 - 2022.Hysteroscopy can be defined as the examination of the uterine cavity with an endoscope inserted through the cervix with the purpose of diagnosis or treatment of possible abnormalities.The Hysteroscopy Instruments Market is expected to exceed more than US$ 1.5 Billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 7.5% in the given forecast period.Browse Full Report @:The major driving factors of Hysteroscopy Instruments Market are as follows: Growth in feminine Geriatric Population and Rising Incidence of medical specialty Diseases Increasing Adoption of Minimally Invasive Treatments Increasing Adoption of workplace hysteroscopy Technological AdvancementsThe restraining factors of Hysteroscopy Instruments Market are as follows: Side Effects related to hysteroscopy Procedures Availability of other choices for identification and Treatment of medical specialty ConditionsThe Hysteroscopy Instruments Market is segmented on the lines of its type, usability, end-user application and regional. Based on type segmentation it covers handheld instruments, hysteroscopes, resectoscopes, hysterosheaths, fluid management systems, and tissue removal systems. Based on usability type it covers Reusable Instruments and Disposable Instruments. Based on end-user analysis it covers Hospitals, Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs), Other End Users. Based on application it covers Diagnostic Hysteroscopy, Operative Hysteroscopy, Myomectomy, Polypectomy, Endometrial ablation and Tubal sterilization. Based on Others Hysteroscopy Instruments 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.This report provides:1) An overview of the global market for Hysteroscopy Instruments Market and related technologies.2) Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2015, estimates for 2016 and 2017, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2022.3) Identifications of new market opportunities and targeted promotional plans for prefilled syringes for Hysteroscopy Instruments 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.Report Scope:The scope of the report includes a detailed study of Hysteroscopy Instruments Market with the reasons given for variations in the growth of the industry in certain regions.The report covers detailed competitive outlook including the market share and company profiles of the key participants operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include KARL STORZ (Germany), Olympus (Japan), Richard Wolf (Germany), Stryker (US), Hologic (US), Medtronic (Ireland), Ethicon (Scotland), B. Braun (Germany), Boston Scientific (US), MedGyn Products (US), CooperSurgical (US) , Cook Medical (US), Medicon (Germany), Maxer Medizintechnik (Germany), and Hospiline Equipments (India). Company profile includes assign such as company summary, financial summary, business strategy and planning, SWOT analysis and current developments.Request Sample Report:The Hysteroscopy Instruments Market has been segmented as below:By Application Type: Diagnostic Hysteroscopy Operative Hysteroscopy Myomectomy Polypectomy Endometrial ablation Tubal sterilizationBy Type: Hand-held Instruments Forceps Scissors Dilators Other Hand-held Instruments Hysteroscopes Rigid Hysteroscopes Flexible Hysteroscopes Resectoscopes Unipolar Resectoscopes Bipolar Resectoscopes Hysterosheaths Fluid management systems Hysteroscopic Tissue Removal SystemsBy Usability Type: Reusable Instruments Disposable InstrumentsBy End-user Type: Hospitals Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs) Other End UsersBy Regional Analysis: North America Europe Asia-Pacific Rest of the WorldAbout 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
Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market Projected To Grow At a Steady CAGR During The Forecast Period 2018-2023

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The report systematically analyzes the most essential details of the Global Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market with the help of an in-depth and specialized analysis. Defined in a ground-up manner, the report presents a comprehensive synopsis of the market based on the factors that are predictable to have a considerable and determinate impact on the markets developmental prospects over the prognosis period.Get Sample PDF now @Key Players include:CAVAC, Green Cross Veterinary Products, Harrisvaccines, Inc., Komipharm, Nisseiken Co., Ltd., Qilu Animal Health, ZoetisSome cars and trucks are equipped with headway sensors that detect the distance between a vehicle and any vehicles or large objects in front of the vehicle. These sensors are used by adaptive cruise control and/or collision avoidance systems.This report of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market studies Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market in Global market, especially in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, focuses on top manufacturers in Global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer.With this report, organizations can have easy access to the details that will have the most substantial bearing on the overall development of the Global Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market or the sectors that matter the most to organizations. The report is assembled with the intent of providing necessary market information to vendors operating in the Global Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market.Thus, it makes for a resourceful data collection that can help decision makers devise most effective business strategies and includes a thorough overview of the competitive landscape and regulatory framework of the Global Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market which will offer clients a strong understanding of the current state of competition, threats, major opportunities, and the major rules, regulations, plans, & policies impacting the market.Table of Contents1 Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market Overview2 Global Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market Sales (Volume) and Revenue (Value) by Type (2013-2017)4 Global Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market Sales (Volume) by Application (2013-2017)5 Global Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis6 Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market Manufacturing Cost Analysis6.1 Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market Key Raw Materials Analysis7 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers8 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders9 Market Effect Factors Analysis10 Global Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Vaccines Market Forecast (2018-2023)11 Research Findings and ConclusionAbout 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
A High Single-Digit CAGR Projected for Super Absorbent Polymer (SAP) Market During 2015-2020

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Global demand for super absorbent polymers (SAP) is set to reach 2.37 Mn tonnes by 2016, up from 2.1 Mn tonnes in 2014. Nippon Shokubai Co. Ltd., BASF SE, and Evonik Industries are the dominant players in the global super absorbent polymer market, with Nippon Shokubai Co. Ltd. holding the largest revenue share in 2014. These findings are according to a research report, titled, Super Absorbent Polymer Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 2015-2020 by market research firm Future Market Insights (FMI).Key Players Focusing on Innovation to Gain Competitive EdgeKey stakeholders in the super absorbent polymer market are bolstering their research and development capabilities to launch innovative products in the market. For example, in November 2014, Sumitomo Seika launched Aqua Keep HP, a high-function SAP for making thin baby- and adult-diapers. BASE SE also made an announcement in November 2014 that it will invest nearly US$ 550 Mn in pioneering superabsorbent technology. Other key players including Evonik Industries and Nippon Shokubai are focusing on increasing SAP production.Request For Report Sample@Disposable Diapers Largest Application Segment for Super Absorbent PolymersMajority of the global demand for super absorbent polymers is concentrated in three industries  disposable diapers, adult incontinence products, and female hygiene products.Disposable diapers is the largest end-use application segment for super absorbent polymers, accounting for nearly one-thirds of overall demand. FMI estimates demand from disposable diapers industry to reach 1.79 Mn tonnes in 2016, up from 1.59 Mn tonnes in 2014. In terms of revenues, disposable diapers segment is expected to account for US$ 5.81 Bn in 2016.Sodium polyacrylate co-polymers Account for Highest DemandSodium polyacrylate-based super absorbent polymers are preferred over poly acrylamide, ethylene-maleic anhydride, and polyvinyl alcohol co-polymers. Of the total 2.24 Mn tonnes of super absorbent polymers consumed in 2015, sodium polyacrylate co-polymers accounted for 1.45 Mn tonnes. FMI expects demand for poly acrylamide co-polymers to witness an increase in the future owing to their high water retention and non-toxic properties.Asia Pacific Excluding Japan Most Lucrative RegionDemand for super absorbent polymers was highest in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), followed by Europe and North America.Demand for super absorbent polymers in APEJ is anticipated to reach 705 Mn tonnes by 2016, up from 666 Mn tonnes in 2015. Rising awareness levels and increase in purchasing power are the macro-economic factors driving the super absorbent polymers market in APEJ.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Demand for super absorbent polymers in Europe -- the second largest market for super absorbent polymers globally  is expected to reach 645 Mn tonnes in 2016. By 2020, the Europe super absorbent polymer market is anticipated to reach US$ 2.6 Bn in revenues.The North America super absorbent polymers market was valued at 493.6 Mn tonnes in terms of volume in 2015. FMI estimates this to increase to 518 Mn tonnes by 2016. Demand for disposable diapers and other incontinence products has remained constant in North America in the past, owing to which demand for super absorbent polymers is expected to grow at a steady rate. By 2020, demand for super absorbent polymers is expected to reach 612 Mn tonnes in North America.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Occupational Medicine Market to receive overwhelming hike in Revenues By 2025

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/occupational-medicine-market.asp

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/15787

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Occupational Medicine is a concept of providing medical assistance and other healthcare services to the workers or employees focused on prevention, assessment, treatment and resolution of health conditions caused by the workplace environment. Occupational medicine protects workers from diseases and injuries as the employers regularly provide services such as health check-up, diagnosis and monitoring etc. as per the regulatory policies. It reduces the burden of healthcare expenditure and increase productivity as the workers are provided proper training and assistance for both prevention and treatment of any disease or injury. The occupational medicine specialists are trained to evaluate the origin of injury and illness so that treatment could be earlier and better. These specialists also provide training and assistance through education programmes on workplace hazards and confirming workplace compliance with regulatory rules and safety norms.Read Report Overview @The key factor driving the growth of the global Occupational Medicine market is the rising awareness of working people about the impact of working environment and the disease and disorders associated with it along with mass awareness programs organized by either government or NGOs. Across the world, the governments are paying a significant attention towards the occupational health and have framed new policies or renewed the existing policies to raise the health level of all workers. However, instead of rising number employers providing these services, health insurance providers and expanded coverage of health services in the past decade the adoption rate is still sub-optimal for a number of different reasons, which is impeding the market growth. Some of employers do not follow the regulatory norms strictly and hence, they do not provide quality occupational medicine services to their employees, which impacts the market growth negatively.Global Occupational Medicine market has been segmented on the basis of interventions, specialities, end user and region.Request Report For TOC @Global Occupational Medicine market is highly fragmented due to presence of numerous players. The overall market is expected to grow in the future as governments have been focusing on reforming healthcare services. According to the statistics of the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 100 million workers are deceased and 200,000 die annually in accidents while on work and 68-157 million new cases of occupational disease are ascribed to hazardous exposures or workloads. Occupational injuries and diseases can worse affect developing countries having 70% of the working population of the globe.Geographically, Occupational Medicine market is segmented into regions viz. North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Developed countries such as North America and European countries have a well-established occupational medicine market due to the awareness of people. Rules and regulations in the developed regions imparting significant importance to the health of working population also promote the growth of the market. The market in Asian countries will witness rapid growth as the governments are paying attention to it and are focused on reforming overall healthcare services. African countries are lagging behind owing to poor healthcare infrastructure but it is expected to improve as the region is getting funding from all over the world for betterment of healthcare.The key players in the global Occupational Medicine market include Occucare International, C-HCA, Inc, Concentra Operating Corporation, Proactive Occupational Medicine Inc., Workwell Occupational Medicine, Healthcare Success, LLC. Holzer Health System and U.S. HealthWorks Medical Group.Request To Sample Of Report @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:
Commercial Dryers Market Research Report - Forecast 2017  2025

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https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/19963

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Global Commercial Dryers Market: IntroductionCommercial dryers are designed to remove the water content from the fabric on the expense of energy utilization. Commercial dryers work on basic scientific principle of centrifugal force. In the past years, commercial dryers market was mainly concentrated in European countries. With the growing utility of commercial dryers in the places such as hotels, motels, public institution, hospitals and schools, the market expanded in a significant manner and expected to grow in the coming period.Report overview @Encouraging growth in the travel & hospitality industry is expected to trigger the commercial dryers market. Continued growth will likely to be sustained by the population expansion across the globe. Subsequently, propels the demand growth for the utilization of commercial dryers in the urban localities. Additionally, commercial dryers are sold on the basis of the specification by drum volume and dryer weight capacity. In the U.S., large capacity tumble commercial dryers are mainly gas fired.With the growing awareness about the energy conservation, the manufacturers are under immense pressure to reduce the environmental impacts. Commercial dryers have to deal with a lot of fabrics in a wide range of varieties. Hence, the energy utilization by commercial dryers is much higher than residential dryers. Progressively, these commercial dryers areGlobal Commercial Dryers Market: Market DynamicsCommercial dryers market is foreseen to witness substantial growth rate in the foreseeable future. The booming travel market will likely to reinforce additional demands on hospitality services and consequently, large-scale demand for laundry. The rise of laundry startups is likely to boost the demands for commercial dryers. The global commercial dryers market is set to post moderate growth in the coming years mainly driven by increasing demand for hospitality services, consumer laundry services and the advent of online on-demand laundry services. The positive outlook for travel and tourism coupled with an upsurge in outbound travel growth is anticipated to fuel the commercial dryers market.Some countries lack the basic infrastructure required for the installations of commercial dryers. There are enormous opportunities for the need of developing infrastructure in order to deploy commercial dryers. Small dry-cleaning units are in operation that hampers the growth of central laundry services. Consequently, decelerate the global commercial dryers market. Presence of unorganized sector and conventional washers in the countries such as India hampers the demand growth of commercial dryers market.Manufacturers are striving to develop energy efficient commercial dryers in order to comply environmental friendly concerns. Commercial dryers market is rapidly moving towards sophisticated and environment-friendly technologies. In the forthcoming years, increased use of wireless connectivity and IOT is likely to be incorporated in the commercial dryers.Request Report for TOC @Global Commercial Dryers Market: Regional OutlookNew mega projects are currently in the pipeline in the U.S. that in turn push the North America commercial dryers market in the coming years. Moreover, a prolific tourism industry in the Middle East will lead to an increasing demand for the commercial dryers in hotels. Subsequently, this factor will likely to aid in the growth of commercial dryers market. With an additional 20,000 new hotel rooms are likely to be added to the existing dwelling spaces in Dubai based hotels. The Expo 2020 is anticipated to trigger the laundry sector and thus, elevated demand growth for the commercial dryers market. The commercial dryers have tremendous potential to grow in Asia Pacific region owing to increase in per capita income of the people. This allows them to spend on laundry services. In Europe, the demand for the commercial dryers is expected to remain stable owing to weaker demand from the public institutions and hotels.Global Commercial Dryers Market: Key ParticipantsExample of some of the market participants in the global commercial dryers market discerned across the value chain includeAlliance Laundry Systems LLCWhirlpool CorporationAmerican Dryer Corporation (acquired by Whirlpool Corporation)AB ElectroluxGeneral Electric CompanyFagor IndustrialLG ElectronicsDexter Apache Holdings, Inc., (Dexter Laundry)Continental Girbau Inc.Jinan Oasis Dry Cleaning And Laundry Equipment Co., LtdMiele & Cie. KGRamsons IndiaIFB Industries LtdTosei CorporationAqualogicStefab India LimitedA. Braun, Inc.Request to Sample of Report-About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Body Protection Products 2018 Global Key Players  3M Company, Honeywell, DuPont, Cooper Tire & Rubber, Kimberly-Clark Corporation Market Analysis And Forecast To 2025

Body Protection Products Market 2018

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Body Protection Products Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Body Protection Products  Global Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2025 To Its Research Database.Description:This report studies Body Protection Products 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, covering3M CompanyHoneywellDuPontCooper Tire & RubberKimberly-Clark CorporationCintas CorporationAnsellLakeland IndustriesRadiansAlpha Pro TechRequest for Sample Report@On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoSurgical GownsLaboratory CoatsVests & JacketsCoverallsFull Body SuitsApronsBy Application, the market can be split intoManufacturingConstructionOil & GasTransportationPharmaceuticalsChemical IndustryFood IndustryMiningOthersBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaEnquiry before Buying @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of Contents:Global Body Protection Products Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of Body Protection Products1.1 Definition and Specifications of Body Protection Products1.1.1 Definition of Body Protection Products1.1.2 Specifications of Body Protection Products1.2 Classification of Body Protection Products1.2.1 Surgical Gowns1.2.2 Laboratory Coats1.2.3 Vests & Jackets1.2.4 Coveralls1.2.5 Full Body Suits1.2.6 Aprons1.3 Applications of Body Protection Products1.3.1 Manufacturing1.3.2 Construction1.3.3 Oil & Gas1.3.4 Transportation1.3.5 Pharmaceuticals1.3.6 Chemical Industry1.3.7 Food Industry1.3.8 Mining1.3.9 Others1.4 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 Body Protection Products2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Body Protection Products2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Body Protection Products2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Body Protection Products8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Body Protection Products8.1 3M Company8.1.1 Company Profile8.1.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.1.2.1 Product A8.1.2.2 Product B8.1.3 3M Company 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.1.4 3M Company 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution Analysis8.2 Honeywell8.2.1 Company Profile8.2.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.2.2.1 Product A8.2.2.2 Product B8.2.3 Honeywell 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.2.4 Honeywell 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution Analysis8.3 DuPont8.3.1 Company Profile8.3.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.3.2.1 Product A8.3.2.2 Product B8.3.3 DuPont 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.3.4 DuPont 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution Analysis8.4 Cooper Tire & Rubber8.4.1 Company Profile8.4.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.4.2.1 Product A8.4.2.2 Product B8.4.3 Cooper Tire & Rubber 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.4.4 Cooper Tire & Rubber 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution Analysis8.5 Kimberly-Clark Corporation8.5.1 Company Profile8.5.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.5.2.1 Product A8.5.2.2 Product B8.5.3 Kimberly-Clark Corporation 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.5.4 Kimberly-Clark Corporation 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution Analysis8.6 Cintas Corporation8.6.1 Company Profile8.6.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.6.2.1 Product A8.6.2.2 Product B8.6.3 Cintas Corporation 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.6.4 Cintas Corporation 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution Analysis8.7 Ansell8.7.1 Company Profile8.7.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.7.2.1 Product A8.7.2.2 Product B8.7.3 Ansell 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.7.4 Ansell 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution Analysis8.8 Lakeland Industries8.8.1 Company Profile8.8.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.8.2.1 Product A8.8.2.2 Product B8.8.3 Lakeland Industries 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.8.4 Lakeland Industries 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution Analysis8.9 Radians8.9.1 Company Profile8.9.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.9.2.1 Product A8.9.2.2 Product B8.9.3 Radians 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.9.4 Radians 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution Analysis8.10 Alpha Pro Tech8.10.1 Company Profile8.10.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.10.2.1 Product A8.10.2.2 Product B8.10.3 Alpha Pro Tech 2016 Body Protection Products Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.10.4 Alpha Pro Tech 2016 Body Protection Products Business Region Distribution AnalysisContinued..Buy now @Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune  411028: Maharashtra,: Ph: +91 841 198 5042
Future and Scope of Radar Simulator Market by 2025

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/radar-simulator-market.asp

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/19870

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Radar simulator market is on upward scale, owing to increase in adaptation of modern technologies for the training purpose in commercial and military aircrafts & ships. Radar simulator is either software solution or combination of both software and hardware. Radar simulators emulate various radars and initiate their working to provide users with an artificial and apt environment for radar training and functional/system testing. The software solutions can be installed in any computer with minimum required configuration and hardware solution is come with installed software which are utilized in the control room of aircraft, ship and ground base radar stations.Report overview @The hardware segment consist of antenna, transmitters, receiver, waveform generator and micro controller, among others. The demand of radar simulator is increasing due to increase in budget of military and high concern about the safety and security. Radar simulator basically utilized for the purpose of training to train the commercial aircraft and ship pilots and commanders & officers of military. Some organizations that are using radar simulator are military, the British Royal navy, U.S coast guard and police units throughout the U.S and Britain. Radar simulator display the intuitive graphical controls for its operation and for scenario creation as well as simulate radar video and target.Radar Simulator Market: Market DynamicsGrowing demand of radar simulator in military for the training with the emergence or modern warfare systems and also the necessity to check and test the radar system is one of the prominent driver for the growth of the radar simulator market. Radar simulator simulates the variety of functions that are found in modern marine radar such as control over traffic density, waterways, sea state and weather conditions. This factor is expected to accelerate the growth of radar simulator market in the upcoming years.Some factor that provide highly realistic environmental features during training such as True and Relative Motion Displays, Target Data Display, Roll and Pitch Effects, Set and Drift Effects, among others are the important factor that boosted the growth of radar simulator market. Radar simulator can be used in various application such as for airborne application radar simulator is used for training the fighter pilots and radar operators. For Marine and ground application this is used for training centers for training electronic warfare personnel. These factor are responsible for the growth of said market.Request Report for TOC @Nowadays, commercial aircrafts and ships are also utilizing radar simulator for security & safety and also for the purpose of training the pilots and operators of the ships and aircrafts. This factor will become the driver in the future.However, the high cost of installation and limited use in developed countries is consider to be as a restraint for the growth of radar simulator market in the forecast period.Radar Simulator Market: Regional OverviewThe Radar Simulator Market in North America region is expected to grow with healthy pace, owing to presence of prominent manufacturers in the region and adaptation of advanced technology by military aircraft and marine forces. The countries in Asia Pacific are progressively increasing their military budget for the safety, security and training purposes. This factor in turn contribute a significant growth for radar simulator market in the upcoming years. Moreover, Commercial aircraft carriers also uses this technology for enhance the training of their pilots. Europe and other regions are also projected to grow with moderate rate in the upcoming years.Radar Simulator Market: Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants in the global Radar Simulator market identified across the value chain includes:-Ultra Electronics Inc.Textron SystemsRockwell CollinsPresagis Canada Inc.Micro Nav LimitedMercury Systems, Inc.Harris CorporationCambridge Pixel LtdBuffalo Computer GraphicsARI SimulationAdacel Technologies LimitedAceWavetechRequest to Sample of Report-About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Future Trends and Growth Analysis of 3D Radar Market by 2025

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https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/19804

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3D Radar Market: Introduction3D Radar is an integral part of any defense inventory and this technology is used for detecting & tracking the insights and information. The 3D Radar provides a complete subsurface detection system which is utilizing a combination of COTS (commercial off the shelf) GPR components and custom software to accomplish robust metallic and non-metallic object detection performance. The 3D Radar determine the elevation, range and velocity of the object. These radar have some features such as automatic detection of airborne targets and operate 24/7 under all weather conditions, among others. These radar are utilized in some applications such as gap filler to main air defense radar system, for protection of sensitive sites and for local air defense C3 system, among others.Report overview @3D Radar Market: DynamicsThe market of 3D Radar is anticipated to grow, owing to increasing use of modern warfare techniques by the defense system. Increasing deployment of the ballistic missiles and various defense system are the factor that boost the growth of 3D Radar market in the upcoming years. Increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is one of the prominent driver that accelerate the growth of 3D Radar market. Moreover, UAVs are operated by radio signals and nowadays these UAVs are used for detecting of moving objects such as tanks, chopper and aircrafts with the help of 3D radar.This has resulted in the procurement of UAVs for military operations, which in turn, propel the demand of 3D radar in the said market. Rapid technological development has led to the replacement of the conventional radar system with 3D radar system which in turn increases the demand of 3D radar in the market. The manufacturers are making efforts to develop specialized airborne 3D radar for airborne applications that enables easy data collection of fast changing terrain such as snow slopes and active volcanoes. This factor is another important driver for the 3D radar market.High installation cost and skilled expertise is required for operating and maintaining the system are some challenges that can hinder the growth of 3D radar market in the forecast period.In current scenario, airborne 3D radar is deployed in both military and civil aircrafts that is utilized for the purpose of detecting another aircraft without requiring visual contact during condition of reduced visibility. This factor will become the driver for the said market in the future.Request Report for TOC @3D Radar Market: Regional OutlookThe Global 3D Radar Market can be segmented into five geographical regions such as North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa. The 3D Radar Market in North America region is expected to grow with healthy pace, owing to increase demand for different types of radar that are utilized in surveillance activities. Additionally, the defense force of U.S adapted the advance 3D radar which in turn, boosted the growth of the market in the region. The countries in Asia Pacific are progressively increasing their defense budget for the safety & security and also replacing the legacy radar system with 3D radar. This factor in turn contribute a significant growth for 3D radar market in the upcoming years. Moreover, Commercial aircraft carriers also uses this technology for enhance the security and for weather forecast. Europe and other regions are also projected to grow with moderate rate in the upcoming years.3D Radar Market: Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants in the global 3D Radar Market, identified across the value chain include:Airbus Defense and SpaceASELSAN A.S.BAE Systems PlcELTA Systems LtdHarris CorporationHoneywell International Inc.Leonardo S.p.ANorthrop Grumman CorporationRaytheon CompanyRheinmetall AGSAAB GroupThales GroupRequest to Sample of Report-About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Thin Film Materials Market to Record Study Growth by 2024

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A new research report by Transparency Market Research offers a comprehensive evaluation of the global Thin Film Materials Market. The study, titled Thin Film Materials Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024, is available for sale on the firms website.Global Thin Film Materials Market: SnapshotThanks to the increasing demand from existing and emerging applications, the global market for thin films is witnessing significant growth. The increased need efficacy in operations, high demand for miniaturization of products, continual advancements in technology, and the rising implementation of government rules and policies and subsidies across the world are fueling the demand for thin film materials across the world and are anticipated to continue the proliferation in this market over the next few years.View Report Preview:On the other hand, the low conversion efficacy and the need for a massive amount in investments to increase the research activities for the development of the technology may restrict this market from rising steadily in the years to come. Nonetheless, with extensive application of thin film materials in photovoltaic solar cells, electrical, semiconductor, MEMS, and optical coating, the market is anticipated to overcome these glitches easily in the near future.The high growth of the solar photovoltaic cell and the MEMS industry is likely to present lucrative opportunities for growth to market players over the forthcoming years, especially in Asia Pacific and Europe. China is projected to emerge as the leading domestic market for thin films materials across the world in future.A thin film is a layer of material ranging from a nanometer to micrometers in thickness. Optical coatings and electronic semiconductors are the primary applications of thin film materials. Additionally, thin film materials are used in the manufacture of household mirrors. These films are widely used for high density and high frequency applications. They are used in photovoltaic solar cells, among others.Increase in technological miniaturization is expected to be the prime driver of the thin materials market during the forecast period. Rising awareness regarding the usage of solar energy is also anticipated to boost the thin film material market during the forecast period. Industrial applications of thin film materials such as optical coatings and semiconductors coupled with domestic applications are estimated to drive the demand for thin film materials over the next few years. Furthermore, companies manufacturing thin films rely on the government for funding and subsidies. Thus, government funding provided to thin film material industries may open up new avenues for the market. This is projected to propel the demand for these materials in the near future. However, volatility in the availability of raw materials may hamper the market over the next few years. Research is being carried out on a new class of thin-film inorganic oxide materials called amorphous heavy-metal cation multicomponent oxides. These could be used to manufacture transparent transistors that are inexpensive, stable, and environment-friendly.Thin film materials are divided into amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride, and copper indium gallium selenide. Technologies include chemical process and physical process. Thin film materials are used in various applications such as solar cells, micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS), semiconductor, and electrical and optical coating.In terms of demand, Asia Pacific was the leading region in the thin film materials market in 2013. China accounted for the largest demand for thin film materials in Asia Pacific owing to high demand in the coatings industry in 2013. However, other countries such as India, Japan, and South Korea are likely to exhibit higher demand for thin film materials in the near future. Rising population and changing lifestyles of consumers have been directly or indirectly driving the market. This trend is projected to continue in the next few years. Furthermore, growing awareness regarding exhaustible resources is expected to boost market growth. Asia Pacific has experienced dynamic economic growth in the past decade. This trend is anticipated to continue in the next fewyears. Asia Pacific was followed by North America. The U.S. accounted for the largest demand for thin film materials in the past decade. Demand for thin film materials was high owing to increasing demand in various applications. Europe held the third largest share of the thin film materials market. Increasing demand for thin film materials in the automobile industry is driving the thin film materials market in Europe. Countries such as Germany and the U.K. were the major consumers of thin film materials in Europe. However, stringent environmental regulations associated with the Paints and coatings industry in the European Union can act as a major restraint for the market in the near future. The Rest of the World is anticipated to experience stable demand for thin film materials in the near future. Latin America is one of the largest markets for thin film materials in the Rest of the World.Request to view Sample Report:The thin film materials market is highly competitive. It is an oligopolistic market, wherein a few players dominate the market. First Solar is the major player that holds monopoly in the Cadmium telluride CdTe) market. Other players include Hanergy Holding Group Limited, Kaneka Corporation, Ascent Solar Technologies, Inc., Anwell Solar, Suntech Power Co. Ltd., and Moser Baer India Limited.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.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:
Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market to Exceed US$ 417 Million By 2022

Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market

https://www.marketresearchengine.com/bioabsorbable-stent-bioresorbable-scaffold-market

https://www.marketresearchengine.com/bioabsorbable-stent-bioresorbable-scaffold-market

https://www.marketresearchengine.com/

Florida, January 16, 2018: Market Research Engine has published a new report titled as Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market By Application Type (Coronary Artery Diseases, Peripheral Artery Diseases); By Material type (Bioresorbable polymer based stents, Bioresorbable metallic stents); By Absorption Type (Slow- absorption stents, Fast- absorption stents); By End Consumers (Hospitals, Cardiac Centers) and by Regional Analysis - Global Forecast by 2016 - 2022.In drugs, tubing is any device that is inserted into a vessel or alternative internal duct so as to expand the vessel to stop or alleviate a blockage. Historically, such devices are unreal from metal mesh and stay within the body for good or till removed through more surgical intervention. A bioresorbable tubing, (also known as perishable, or naturally-dissolving) serves a similar purpose, however is factory-made from a fabric which will dissolve or be absorbed within the body.The Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market is expected to exceed more than US$ 417 Million by 2022 at a CAGR of 11% in the given forecast period.Browse Full Report @:The major driving factors of Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market are as follows: Rapidly Growing Geriatric Population and increased Risk of CAD and PAD within the older robust Product PipelineThe restraining factors of Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market are as follows: Presence of SubstitutesThe Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market is segmented on the lines of its material, absorption rate, application end-user and regional. Based on material type, the market is segmented bioresorbable polymer-based stents and bioresorbable metallic stents. Based on absorption type it covers slow-absorption stents and fast-absorption stents. Based on application it covers Coronary Artery Diseases and Peripheral Artery Diseases. Based on end-users it covers hospitals and cardiac centers. Allergy Diagnostics 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.This report provides:1) An overview of the global market for Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market.2) Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2015, estimates for 2016 and 2017, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2022.3) Identifications of new market opportunities and targeted promotional plans for Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market4) Discussion of research and development, and the demand for new products and new applications.5) Comprehensive company profiles of major players in the industry.Report scope:The scope of the report includes a detailed study of Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market with the reasons given for variations in the growth of the industry in certain regions.The report covers detailed competitive outlook including the market share and company profiles of the key participants operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include Abbott Laboratories (U.S.), BIOTRONIK SE & Co. KG (Germany), REVA Medical, Inc. (U.S.), Elixir Medical Corporation (U.S.), and Kyoto Medical Planning Co., Ltd. (Japan). Company profile includes assign such as company summary, financial summary, business strategy and planning, SWOT analysis and current developments.Request Sample Report:The Bioabsorbable Stent/Bioresorbable Scaffold Market has been segmented as below:By Application Type: Coronary Artery Diseases Peripheral Artery DiseasesBy Material type: Bioresorbable polymer based stents Bioresorbable metallic stentsBy Absorption Type: Slow- absorption stents Fast- absorption stentsBy End Consumers: Hospitals Cardiac CentersBy Regional Analysis: North America Europe Asia-Pacific Rest of the WorldAbout 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
Fluorochemicals Market Size Observe Significant Surge during 2025

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Keen players operating in the global fluorochemicals market, mostly domiciled in North America and Europe, are shifting their gaze to emerging nations in Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America that offer a lot of opportunities. This is also because the market in Europe and North America are saturated and provide limited growth opportunities. Such manufacturers are also resorting to bettering their product portfolio in keeping with the demand from domestic and commercial sectors.Some of the key players in the fluorochemicals market are DuPont Inc, Daikin, Solvay SA, Asahi Glass, Arkema, Honeywell, Dongyue, Pelchem, Mitsui Chemicals Inc., and Air Products and Chemicals Inc.View Report Preview:As per a report by Transparency Market Research, the global fluorochemicals market will likely rise at steady CAGR of 5.3% from 2017 to 2025 to become worth US$26.71 bn by 2025 from US$16.88 bn in 2016.The various products available in the global fluorochemicals market are fluorocarbons, fluoropolymers, fluoroelastomers, aluminium fluoride (AIF3), etc. The fluorocarbons can be further sub-segmented into hydrofluorocarbon (HFC), hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC), and others. The segment of fluorocarbons, of them, dominates the market vis-a-vis share by dint of its wide-ranging applications as refrigerants, solvents, lubricants, propellants, and stain-repellent products.The main regions in the global fluorochemicals market studied in the report are North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific, at present, dominates the market owing to the ever-increasing demand from different applications and industries in the numerous developing countries in the region. By outpacing most other regions in terms of growth, the market in the region will likely become worth US$15.21 bn by 2025.Demand for Refrigerants Boosts UptakeAt the forefront of driving demand in the global fluorochemicals market is the ever-growing demand for refrigerants, which are mostly required in the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) industry and the food and beverages industry. Fluorochemical products like hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) and hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) play an important role in the production of refrigerants.The rising demand for HVAC industry products like air-conditioners, refrigerators, chillers, pumps, de-humidifiers, etc. has propelled the demand for refrigerants. This is because of the commercial-level use of HVAC products in rapidly expanding industries such as food and beverages, oil and gas, automobile, pharmaceuticals, and construction. As such, the demand for refrigerants has received a considerable boost, explains the lead analyst of the TMR report.Fluorochemicals also have numerous unique perceived benefits such as high tensile strength, electrical insulation, heat- and chemical-resistance, anti-corrosion, and others like durable oil-, water-, soil- and stain repellency. This has also served to boost their uptake.Lack of Smooth Availability of Raw Materials Hits Market GrowthPosing a roadblock to the healthy growth in the global fluorochemicals market is the lack of uniform availability of raw materials like fluorspar. This has had a direct bearing on the price and thereby demand of the fluorochemical products.Request to view Sample Report:A noticeable trend in the market is that most of the worlds fluorspar production is concentrated in China. This has created a high dependency on the country for price as well as availability. This has a direct effect on the final price of the fluorochemical products.This review is based on the findings of a TMR report, titled, Fluorochemicals Market (Product - Fluorocarbons (HCFC and HFC), Fluoropolymers, and Fluoroelastomers; Application  Refrigerants, Aluminum Production, Aluminum Foams, and Electricals and Electronics)  Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 20172025.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:
Global North American Long Term Acute Care Market Made Impressive Gains By 2020

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/north-american-long-term-acute-care-market.asp

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/3336

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3336

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A long-term acute care refers a specialty care provided by long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs) to the patients in their serious medical conditions. In these medical conditions patient requires intense and special treatment for an intended period of time. In long-term acute care, a patient needs to stay for 25 to 30 days in hospitals for their Medicare. On the basis of types of patient, long-term acute care market can be segmented into respiratory patients, multiple IV medications or transfusions required patients, renal failure patients, prolonged ventilator use patients, wound care patients and others. Long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs) provide services such as cardiopulmonary monitoring, respiratory therapy, dialysis, mechanical ventilation, wound care and others.Read Report Overview @Respiratory therapy includes products such as ventilators, oxygen delivery devices and aerosol delivery devices. Wound care includes product such as standards and advanced wound dressings, negative pressure wound therapy, skin substitutes and other products. Dialysis includes therapy such as hemodialysis, hemofiltration and peritoneal dialysis. Some of the monitoring technologies used by long-term acute care hospitals are cardiac monitors, pulse oximeters and blood pressure monitors.Request Report For TOC @Various factors such as increasing aging population, technological advancement in patient care, rise in need for long-term care services, increasing number of patients in long-term acute care facilities are expected to drive the North American long-term acute care market. In addition, increasing government spending in healthcare sector is expected to drive the North American long-term acute care market. However, high cost of new technologies, time consuming technical interfaces and complicated workflow are some of the factors restraining the growth for long-term acute care market in North America.Adoption of technological advancement and growing demand for long-term acute care due to continuous rise in aging population are expected to offer good opportunities for long-term acute care market. Increasing patient centric approach and new product launches are some of the latest trends have been observed in North American long-term acute care market. Some of the major companies operating in the North American long-term acute care market are CareFusion, Fresenius Medical Care, Philips Healthcare, Prism Medical Ltd., Covidien, Kinetic Concepts, Inc., SelectMark and Promise Healthcare, Inc.Request To Sample Of Report @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:
It sounds like the perfect job. Get paid to shop with someone elses money.

While the role of a mystery shopper may sound enticing, not all of those job offers are legitimate.

Your Better Business Bureau recently heard of a local resident who nearly became the latest victim of a long-running mystery shopper scam.

The woman applied for the position months ago but had never heard back from the company. Then a few weeks ago she was contacted via text by someone going by the name Richard informing her she had been hired and would be receiving her instructions in the mail. Sure enough, she received a priority letter from Texas with a check for $2,480. She was told to deposit the check in her account and withdraw $2,100 and perform money transfers at Walmart for $1,200 and $800.

Fortunately, the woman was able to spot the red flags and instead of depositing the money into her account, she reached out to her local police department. While her money stayed safe, scammers are always look for their next victims.

To steer clear of get-rich-quick offers, your BBB advises mystery shopper applicants to:

Ignore claims that you will make big profits easily. Mystery shopping will not make you rich; at best it provides part-time income.

Avoid falling for claims that guarantee a position, without training.

Be cautious of unsolicited e-mails offering work-from-home.

Never pay money up-front. A legitimate mystery shopping service will not charge money for materials, training or recruiting.

Obtain the name of the company and check the business out with the BBB, local consumer protection agency, and state attorney general.

If the thought of being a legitimate mystery shopper intrigues you, there are better ways to find a trustworthy employer.

Visit the Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA) website at mysteryshop.org for information on how to register to be a mystery shopper with an MSPA-member company. They provide a database of available jobs and additional information on the industry in general.

Look for reputable firms that:

Qualify and train mystery shoppers to perform specific evaluations.

Enjoy a good reputation with their clients and shoppers.

Do not charge a fee to complete an application.

Avoid doing business with mystery shopping promoters who contact you out of the blue and that require payment for certification or charge additional fees or sell directories of companies that hire mystery shoppers. If you suspect a Secret or Mystery Shopper Scam, report it to the Federal Trade Commission, State Attorney General Office or BBBs Scam Tracker at bbb.org/scamtracker.
Automotive Chassis Systems Market, Analysis Of Quality Improvement, Demand And Forecast 2023

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http://bit.ly/2EMgQey

http://bit.ly/2rhh8Zd

Global automotive chassis systems market would reach $97 billion by 2022 from $71 billion in 2015; growing at a CAGR of 4.5% from 2016 to 2022. Chassis is the internal frame that supports all the body parts of the vehicle. Automotive chassis systems are attached to the vehicle and used to anchor the other vehicular systems such as suspension systems and steering systems to the vehicle frame. Moreover, chassis are expected to be light, sturdy, and with improved aerodynamic quality to improve the fuel efficiency. The improved production of the vehicles has increased the demand for the chassis system parts, which drives the market worldwide.For More Info, Get Sample :Increase in production of automobiles across all regions and change in automobile manufacturers preferences largely drive the global automotive chassis systems market. Moreover, substantial technological advancements in the global automotive chassis system market fuels the market growth. However, huge investment by the companies on R&D for the new chassis systems is restraining the growth of the market. Introduction of new technologies for manufacturing and non-standardization of automotive chassis are some of the factors that are providing huge opportunities.The report divides the market into different segments on the basis of components type, chassis systems type, vehicle type, and geography. Based on components, the market is segmented into tie-rods, stabilizer links, suspension ball joints, cross-axis joints, control arms, and knuckles & hubs. By systems type, the market is divided into front axles, rear axles, corner modules, and active kinematics control. Based on vehicle type, the market is classified into cars, light commercial vehicles, intermediate commercial vehicles, heavy commercial vehicles, construction equipment, off-road vehicles, defense vehicles, and farm tractors. By geography, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and LAMEA.Key market players are Continental AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, American Axle & Manufacturing, Magna International Inc., Benteler International AG, ZF Friedrichafen, Aisin Seiki Co., Schaeffler AG, Hyundai Mobis, and Gestamp Automocion SA.POTENTIAL BENEFITS FOR STAKEHOLDERS Comprehensive analysis of the current trends and future estimations are discussed in the global automotive chassis systems market. The report provides a competitive scenario of the market with growth trends, structure, driving factors, scope, opportunities, and challenges. A detailed analysis of the key segments provide insights on the market dynamics. Porters Five Forces analysis highlights the potential of buyers and suppliers and threat of substitutes and new entrants, elucidating the competitive structure of the market.MARKET SEGMENTATION The global automotive chassis systems market is segmented by component, type of vehicle, type of chassis systems, and geographyEnquire About Report :BY COMPONENTS Tie-Rods Stabilizer Links Suspension Ball Joints Cross-Axis Joints Control Arms Knuckles and HubsBY TYPE OF VEHICLE Cars Light Commercial Vehicles Intermediate Commercial Vehicles Heavy Commercial Vehicles Off-Road Vehicles Construction Equipment Defense Vehicles Farm TractorsBY TYPE OF CHASSIS SYSTEMS Front Axle Rear Axle Corner Modules Active Kinematics ControlBY GEOGRAPHY North America U.S. Canada Mexico Europe UK France Germany Italy Rest of Europe Asia-Pacific China India South Korea Japan Rest of Asia-Pacific LAMEA Latin America Middle East AfricaAlso Request For Discount :KEY PLAYERS Continental AG Robert Bosch GmbH American Axle & Manufacturing Magna International Inc. Benteler International AG ZF Friedrichafen Aisin Seiki Co. Schaeffler AG Hyundai Mobis Gestamp Automocion SATable Of Content Chapter: 1 Introduction Chapter: 2 Executive Summary Chapter: 3 Market Overview Chapter: 4 Global Automotive Chassis Systems Market By Components Chapter: 5 Automotive Chassis Systems Market By Chassis System Chapter: 6 Global Automotive Chassis Systems Market, By Vehicle Type Chapter: 7 Global Automotive Chassis Systems Market, By Geography Chapter: 8 Company ProfileAbout UsWe have a large database of quality and precise market research reports that will be very beneficial for your organization. Reports that we sell our authentic in nature and from reputed publishers, hence it can definitely help you with your growth opportunities. Research Beam will always make sure to bring most ethical and high quality reports. We value your relationship with us and look forward for a long term relation.Contact UsGlobal Head Quarters5933 NE Win Sivers Drive,#205, Portland, OR 97220United States+1 (800) 910-6452help@researchbeam.com
Hyperloop Technology Market, New Tech, High Demand, 2026

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Hyperloop is a conceptual high-speed transportation system, the route of which was initially proposed from Los Angeles to San Francisco. This technology is a pod-like vehicle, which operates through a reduced pressure tube, potentially exceeding airliner speeds. The average travelling speed is expected to be 600 mph with a maximum speed of 760 mph. Passenger and freight are loaded into the hyperloop, and accelerate gradually through electric propulsion via a low-pressure tube. The tubes are made out of thick, strong steel and can handle 100 Pa of pressure or even more.For More Info, Get Sample :Thru growth of the global hyperloop technology market is significantly driven by rise in demand for faster transportation mode. Furthermore, low cost of the transportation technology as compared to other transportation modes such as road, water, air, and rail, and its energy-efficient & environment-friendly nature boost the market growth. However, the possibility of technical glitches and shortage of power act as the considerable restraints of the market. On the contrary, decongestion of traffic is anticipated to provide lucrative opportunities for the manufacturers operating in the market.The hyperloop technology market is segmented on the basis of technology type, carriage type, and region. Based on technology type, the market is categorized into tube, propulsion, capsule, and route. According to carriage type, it is bifurcated into passenger and cargo/freight. Geographical breakdown and deep analysis of each of the aforesaid segments is included for North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and LAMEA.Key players operating in the market include AECOM, Dinclix Ground Works, Hyperloop India, Hyperloop One, Inc., Hyperloop Transportation Technology, Space Exploration Technologies Crop., Tesla, Inc., TransPod Inc., Uwashington Hyperloop, and VicHyper.KEY BENEFITS FOR STAKEHOLDERS THIS STUDY COMPRISES ANALYTICAL DEPICTION OF THE GLOBAL HYPERLOOP TECHNOLOGY MARKET WITH CURRENT TRENDS AND FUTURE ESTIMATIONS TO ILLUSTRATE THE IMMINENT INVESTMENT POCKETS. THE OVERALL MARKET POTENTIAL IS DETERMINED TO UNDERSTAND THE PROFITABLE TRENDS TO GAIN A STRONGER COVERAGE IN THE MARKET. THE REPORT PRESENTS INFORMATION RELATED TO KEY DRIVERS, RESTRAINTS, AND OPPORTUNITIES WITH A DETAILED IMPACT ANALYSIS. THE CURRENT MARKET IS QUANTITATIVELY ANALYZED FROM 2022 TO 2026 TO HIGHLIGHT THE FINANCIAL COMPETENCY OF THE MARKET. PORTERS FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS ILLUSTRATES THE POTENCY OF THE BUYERS AND SUPPLIERS.KEY MARKET SEGMENTSEnquire About Report :By Transportation System Tube Propulsion Capsule RouteBy Carriage Type Passenger Cargo/FreightBy Region North America U.S. Canada Mexico Europe UK Germany France Russia Rest of Europe Asia-Pacific China India Japan Australia Rest of Asia-Pacific LAMEA Latin America Middle East AfricaKEY MARKET PLAYERS PROFILED AECOM Dinclix Ground Works Hyperloop India Hyperloop One, Inc. Hyperloop Transportation Technology Space Exploration Technologies Crop. Tesla, Inc. TransPod Inc. Uwashington Hyperloop VicHyperAlso Request For Discount :Table Of Content CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER 2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY CHAPTER 3 MARKET OVERVIEW CHAPTER 4 HYPERLOOP TECHNOLOGY MARKET, BY CARRIAGE TYPE CHAPTER 5 HYPERLOOP TECHNOLOGY MARKET, BY TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM CHAPTER 6 HYPERLOOP TECHNOLOGY MARKET, BY REGION CHAPTER 7 COMPANY PROFILESAbout UsWe have a large database of quality and precise market research reports that will be very beneficial for your organization. Reports that we sell our authentic in nature and from reputed publishers, hence it can definitely help you with your growth opportunities. Research Beam will always make sure to bring most ethical and high quality reports. We value your relationship with us and look forward for a long term relation.Contact UsGlobal Head Quarters5933 NE Win Sivers Drive,#205, Portland, OR 97220United States+1 (800) 910-6452help@researchbeam.com
Fluid Handling System Market: Advanced Technologies & Growth Opportunities in Global Industry

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/fluid-handling-system-market.asp

https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/19423

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Global Fluid Handling System Market: IntroductionFluid handling systems are used to measure, direct and control the flow of liquid and other types of fluid. These include sewage water, slurries, toxic gases, chemicals and mixtures. According to an estimation of International Energy Agency (IEA), about 40% of the global CO2 emission reductions necessary to limit global warming less than 2 C by the year 2050, can be attained by enhancing the efficiency of end-use energy. One of the significant factors in the global energy consumption is electric-motor operated fluid handling systems.Report overview @Established players and new players are forced to limit the emissions through manufacturing efficient and eco-friendly fluid handling systems. Thus, proliferating the demand for the amelioration in the material and energy efficiency through new design and control method of the fluid handling system. Economic growth, oil and gas industry and other end-use industry are the parameters that meters the global fluid handling system market. In the coming years, with the rapid developments in the technological arena, fluid handling system market is anticipated to observe healthy growth rate.Global Fluid Handling System Market: Market DynamicsThe fluid handling systems that are installed in chemical and oil & gas industry have to deal with lubricants hazardous chemicals and other toxic substances. Handling of such compounds is of prime concern. Continuous filtering of lubricants can dramatically improve industrial equipment performance and lubricant life, high machinery repair costs and preventing production downtime. Moreover, during the production process of pulp & paper, multiple chemicals require to be supplemented and a large number of parameters need to be measured and controlled. Aforementioned utilities of fluid handling system bolster the global market.Fluid handling system is a vital part of the pharmaceutical industry. Inefficient handling of chemicals may result in contamination. An industry faces numerous challenges in order to prevent contamination and ensure product safety & quality during the production. The global need for high-quality pharmaceutical products strengthens the incorporation of the fluid handling system in the industry.Lower adoption rate and replacement rate of the components are expected to dampen the global fluid handling system market. Manufacturing of components utilized in fluid handling system by unorganized sector also affects the market share of established players.Global Fluid Handling System Market: Regional OutlookFluid handling system market in Asia Pacific is expected to be mostly steer by India and China. India has many pharmaceutical industries that demands an extensive need for fluid handling system. Significant growth is anticipated in India and China owing to growth of end-use industries in these region. Additionally, oil producing regions are expected to witness hefty demands for the fluid handling system in the foreseeable future. Investments in the upcoming oil and gas projects will likely to raise the demand for fluid handling system in Middle East. South Africa is one of the prominent region for in the field of gas-to-liquid technologies. Consequently, the demand for fluid handling system is likely to grow.Request Report for TOC @A dwindling demand for paper and growing digitalization dampens the new infrastructural developments for pulp & paper industry in any part of the globe. Despite, huge demand from Asia, sluggish demand from Western Europe and Latin America bolsters the need for efficient equipment in the industry. Subsequently, drives the global fluid handling system market.Active development of oil and gas production in Russia and the launching of new projects in this area drives the fluid handling system market in Eastern Europe. Despite the maturity of centrifugal pump market in Russia, the country is one of the prominent markets for oil pumps and this is the reason why the market looks lucrative and attractive for the foreign investors. This, in turn, will likely to boost the fluid handling system market.Global Fluid Handling System Market: Key ParticipantsExample of some of the market participants in the global fluid handling system market discerned across the value chain includeSulzer LtdColfax CorporationALFA LAVAL ABGraco Inc.Des-Case CorporationEBARA International CorporationIFH GroupAlfa Wassermann, Inc.Raumedic AGPSG - DOVER CORPORATIONGRUNDFOSPentair Ltd.Ingersoll Rand Inc.Entegris, INC.Malema Engineering CorporationCummins-Wagner Co., Inc.Kadant Inc.Flowserve CorporationANEST IWATA CorporationGoldring Industries LimitedRequest to Sample of Report-About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Pregnancy Pillow Market Solid Segments and Top Players - Leachco, My Best Friend, Pharmedoc, Naomi Homes, Boppy, Todays Moms, etc. by 2023

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The Global Pregnancy Pillow Market is segmented on the basis of type or shape of pillows, and materials. Based on the type or shape of the pillow, the market has been segmented as C shaped, J shaped, U shaped and others, other types comprises of low selling types such as wedge and full length etc. Based on materials, the market has been segmented into hypoallergenic fillings, memory foam, organic fillings and others. Further on the basis of end users, the market has been segmented as hospitals, maternity homes or clinics, household and others.A pregnancy pillow can be defined as the highly specialized pillows which are designed in order to accommodate the changing body of a pregnant mother, commonly known as maternity pillow. It is generally used in the later stages of pregnancy where expecting mothers finds difficulty in sleeping and sitting.Rising number of cases for pregnancy losses due to pregnancy complications, uncomfortable sleeping positions, rising risk of stillbirth due to wrong sleeping positions are some of the major reason for the market growth. On the other hand high price of the products are the major factors restricting the market growth.Exclusive Sample Copy @Regional analysisUS accounts for the maximum market share of the global pregnancy pillow market and the market is expected to increase continuously in coming years. This can be attributed to increasing pool of aware females along with need for proper sleep during pregnancy. Advancing technologies within the pregnancy pillow or pregnancy solutions available is also driving the market and will see strategic growth over the next five years. Asia pacific with the upcoming developments in healthcare, increasing awareness and rising per capita income is expected to be the fastest growing region of the global pregnancy pillow market.Key players of Global Pregnancy Pillow Market:Key players profiled in the report are Leachco (US), My Best Friend (US), Pharmedoc (US), Naomi Homes (US), Boppy (US), Todays Moms (US), etc.Main TOC for Pregnancy Pillow Market:Report Prologue2. Market Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope of the Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 Limitations3. Research Methodology3.1 Introduction3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary research3.4 Market Size EstimationContinuedAsk to Expertise @About US:Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact Us:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com .
Controlled Release Cannabis Pills Market: Key Trends and Forecast Research Report

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Cannabis is a psychoactive drug extracted from a genus of flowering plant of Cannabaceae family. It is also called as, marijuana. Over the last few decades use of cannabis for the medical purpose has increased and is described as medical marijuana. Increasing research in this area has suggested that it can be prescribed to treat a number of health conditions such as, chronic pain, insomnia, muscle spasm, and reduce nausea and vomiting during chemotherapy among other health conditions. Companies are increasingly investing on the research in the field of medical marijuana or cannabis. These research has led to the development of controlled release cannabis pills that can provide long lasting effect.Report overview @Controlled release cannabis pills market is expected to show a significant growth over the forecast period owning to the increasing adoption of controlled release cannabis pills or capsule among people and prescribers as these drugs has lower side effects and can be used without much of the concern of feeling of unease. Long lasting effect of controlled release cannabis pills and increasing number of government legalizing distribution of medical marijuana is also expected to fuel the growth of controlled release cannabis pills market. Even though number of government legalizing the medical marijuana is increasing but regulatory bodies are posing as a restraint for the growth of controlled release cannabis pill market as they cannot legalize the use of narcotic substances under federal law.An Israeli-American company, Cannnabics Pharmaceuticals has developed a revolutionary technology to put the medicinal compound of cannabis into a controlled release cannabis pills. This drug provide a long lasting effect up to 10 to 12 hours. The market of controlled release cannabis pills is expected to show a significant growth over the forecast period as these drugs can be administered orally to fulfill the urgent unmet need that is not possible with the tradition smoking and vaporizing way of administration. Standardization of drug and sustain release is also expected to fuel the growth of controlled release cannabis pills market.Request Report for TOC @Controlled release cannabis pills are sold directly by the manufacturer or distributor to the patients who has license to get medical marijuana prescription. Requirement of license under the federal law can restrict the growth of controlled release cannabis pills market. Currently, there are there types of controlled release cannabis pills or capsules available; High THC Capsule, THC/CBD Balanced Capsules and High CBD Capsules. Minimum side effect by controlled release cannabis pills such as, disorientation and dizziness that are common in non- controlled release cannabis pills is also expected to drive the growth of the market. Increasing number of players and research in this highly potential controlled release cannabis pills market is also expected to boost the growth of the market.Controlled Release Cannabis Pills Market: Region Wise OutlookThe controlled release cannabis pills market can be segmented into regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the controlled release cannabis pills market and is expected to continue to dominate the market over the forecast period. Increasing adoption of controlled release cannabis pills in US to treat conditions such as, chronic pain is expected to drive the market. Various state governments in the US has also legalized the use of marijuana for medical purpose. Due to these factor market of controlled release cannabis pills is expected to show significant growth in the region.Controlled Release Cannabis Pills Market: Key PlayersSome of the major players in the global controlled release pill market are, Cannabics Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Wana Edibles, and Intec Pharma. These players are focusing on collaborative agreement for the distribution of controlled release cannabis pills. Also, increasing investment on further research on controlled release cannabis pills to prove the benefit of drugs.Request to Sample of Report-About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Leukemia Therapeutics Treatment Market Segments, Value Share and Key Trends 2015-2025

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Leukemia is defined as a cancer observed in white blood cell (WBC) in our body. White blood cell helps our body to fight against infection caused by harmful pathogen. Bone marrow is the center for the production of RBC (carry oxygen to all part of body), WBC (fight against infection) and platelets (help in blood clotting). Our bone marrow produces abnormal WBC when we are suffering from leukemia. Moreover abnormal WBCs are not able to perform normal functioning or WBC loses its ability to fight against infection. Etiology for leukemia includes artificial ionizing radiation, benzene and petrochemicals, alkylation chemotherapy agents, genetic predisposition and electromagnetic energy. Genetic predisposition and electromagnetic energy is the most common cause of leukemia observed among people. Signs and symptoms of leukemia includes a new lump or swollen gland in neck and arm, frequent nosebleed, pain in the bone, night sweat and frequent fever. Leukemia can be diagnosed by bone marrow tests, platelet count and WBC (white blood cell) differential count test. Leukemia can be treated by blood transfusion, immunotherapy, bone marrow transplantation, radiation therapy and chemotherapy.Commercially available drug in the market for the treatment of leukemia includes Gleevec, Bosulif, Sprycel, Iclusig and others. Drugs which are in clinical trials expected to launch in the marketwithin next few (3 to 5)years include Bosutinib, Omapro, ga101/rg7159, Vidaza, Dacogen, Midostaurin, Vosaroxin, Quizartinib, Graspa, Marqibo.Request Report Sample@The global market for leukemia treatment can be segmented as follows:Based on the developmental and progression rateChronic leukemiaAcute leukemiaChronic leukemia is a type of blood cancer caused by uncontrolled growth of the WBC cells in our body. Chronic leukemia is a type of myeloproliferative disease which is characterized by the chromosomal translocation. Patients suffering from chronic leukemia show increased susceptibility to bacterial infections, thrombocytopenia and anemia and may also have enlarged spleen which causes pain on the left side. Incidence rate of chronic leukemia is high in men and is the second most common type of cancer occurring in male adults. Women who are above 50 years in age are expected to suffer from this chronic disease. Treatment for chronic leukemia depends on the phase of the disease that can be chronic, accelerated or the blast phase and the treatment for chronic leukemia includes chemotherapy, stem cell transplants and biologic therapies.Acute myeloid leukemia develops at a speedy pace and is found in the blood and bone marrow. In the disease process, immature blood cells are present in the bone marrow. Symptoms found in patients due to the disease are flu, loss of weight, body ache, body pain and spots on skin.Treatment for acute leukemia includes chemotherapy, stem cell transplants and biologic therapies.About 90% of the leukemia cases occur in the middle age and progresses with the aging. Therefore, leukemia therapeutics market is poised to grow with the rise in aging population and increasing incidences of leukemia. Drugs such as Bosulif, Gleevec, Sprycel andIclusigare commercially available for the treatment of leukemia. Gleevec was the first leukemia drug introduced in 2001, since then there has been a revolutionary change in the quality life of patients as compared to the former chemotherapy drugs.Globally the numbers of elderly people, 60 years and above are growing and it is expected that this age group will cross the 2 billion mark in 2050 stated by United Nations Population Division. Hence the leukemia therapeutics market will also grow significantly.However adverse event (cytotoxic) associated with nearly all kinds of leukemia therapeutics treatment might restrict the global market demand of leukemia therapeutics market.North America dominates the global market for leukemia therapeutics treatment due to high prevalence rate of leukemia (acute, chronic) and extensive technological advancement (diagnosis) in this region. Europe represents the second largest market share due to its large geriatric population base. In addition Asia-Pacific and RoW hold the third and fourth position in the global leukemia therapeutics market respectively due to less prevalence rate of leukemia and lack of proper healthcare facilities in few Asian and African countries.Visit For TOC@North America accounted for 62% sales of leukemia drugs in the therapeutics market during 2010 followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. Leukemia therapeutics market will grow significantlyand the total growth will depend on pipeline products and metabolic inhibitors, a tyrosine kinase receptor FLT -3 of Novartis and some other capable molecules, improving the therapeutics market.Major market playerscontributing the global market share of leukemia therapeutics treatment includes Ambit Biosciences Corporation, AriadPharmaceuticals,Inc., Biogen Idec, Inc., Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer and others.About Us  Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Market Status of Butachlor Market in Global Industry : By Type Supply, Demand, Market size, Analysis, Research and Forecast 2017-2025

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Butachlor Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.Butachlor is an herbicide of the acetanilide class, primarily used to control the growth of grass weeds and broadleaf weeds. It is generally applied prior to the emergence of weed. It checks the formation of protein synthesis in grasses and weeds, thereby stopping them from further growth. The molecular formula of butachlor is C17H26CINO2, and it is an amber liquid, insoluble in water but soluble in most of the organic solvents. Its boiling point is 196C and its density ranges between 1.059-1.07 below 25C. The liquid is chemically stable under room temperature, but can get decomposed quickly under the influence of a strong acid, or get degraded by soil.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Butachlor can be applied to a wide range of crops including rice, wheat, barley, cotton, corn, onion, chilies, and sugar beet. It is commonly used in paddy fields in many parts of Asia Pacific such as Taiwan and in South-east Asian countries, mostly for rice farming. Asia Pacific contributes significantly to the global butachlor market. Butachlor, however, is highly toxic and may prove to be a reason for several health and environmental hazards.The toxicity of butachlor can be reduced using ample quantity of water with it when it is applied, which is a key requirement in paddy fields. Nevertheless, it remains a concern for its users, as most of the countries in Asia Pacific face scarcity of water. Rise in awareness about the harmful effects of butachlor in Asia Pacific is anticipated to hamper the growth of market in the near future. Furthermore, stringent policies and rules for environmental protection are expected to restrain the growth of the butachlor market. Nonetheless, Asia Pacific and the agrarian countries in the region, such as India, Indonesia, and China contribute significantly to the butachlor market. High growth of population of these countries is responsible for propelling the demand of food grains, which in turn drives the growth of the butachlor market in the region.Based on application, the butachlor market can be segmented into rice crop, wheat crop, barely, and others. The butachlor market at present is dominated by the rice crop segment, especially in Asia Pacific, and is anticipated to retain its position during the forecast period.Make an Enquiry about TOC @In terms of geography, the butachlor market can be divided into North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific is projected to lead the butachlor market during the forecast period, due to high consumption of butachlor in the major agrarian countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. North America follows Asia Pacific in the consumption of butachlor. Furthermore, Brazil and some of the countries in South Africa are among the key contributors to the butachlor market. However, stringent government policies in North America and Europe regarding the use of butachlor is expected to restrain the growth of market during the forecast period.Major players operating in the butachlor market are Shanghai Tenglong Agrochemical Co. Ltd., Monsanto, Shanghai Mingdou Agrochemical Co. Ltd., Syngenta AG, SinoHarvest Corporation, Dow AgroSciences, Bayer CropScience, Zhejiang Rayfull Chemicals, Nantong Jiangshan Agrochemical & Chemicals Co. Ltd., Qingfeng Agro-chemical, Binnong Technology, and Green Land.The study is a source of reliable data on:Market segments and sub-segmentsMarket trends and dynamicsSupply and demandMarket sizeCurrent trends/opportunities/challengesCompetitive landscapeTechnological breakthroughsValue chain and stakeholder analysisResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us
Global Software Defined Security Market Expected to be Valued US$ 3,800 Mn in the Year 2022

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One of the major growth factor for the adoption of software defined security is the growing concern amongst the organizations using the virtual infrastructure and services of a cloud based system. The software defined security system is used by the enterprises to automate their network security management. Due to the growing usage of the cloud technology, many enterprises are demanding security solutions that are easy to manage, can be highly customized and provide security without the presence of any hardware. Software defined security provides all these facilities and in addition, it is also used to prevent data loss and identify and access management solutions. With the growing adoption of cloud based services and infrastructure, the adoption of software defined security solutions is also on the rise.The global software defined security market is slated to touch a value of about US$ 3,800 Mn in the year 2022 and grow at a robust CAGR during the assessment period.4 Forecast Highlights on Global Software defined security MarketAs per the forecast of Persistence Market Research, the services component type segment is slated to touch a value of about US$ 1050 Mn in the year 2022. This represents a robust CAGR growth during the assessment period of 2017-2022. The services component type segment is estimated to account for nearly one-fourth of the revenue share of the component type segment by the year 2017 and is forecasted to gain market share by 2022 over 2017.As per the forecast of Persistence Market Research, the small and medium enterprise segment will reach a value of about US$ 640 Mn in the year 2017. This represents a robust CAGR growth during the forecast period. The small and medium enterprise segment is forecasted to account for more than one-fourth of the total revenue share of the end user segment by the end of the year 2017 and is expected to lose in market share by 2022 as compared with the year 2017.As per the forecast of Persistence Market Research, the network monitoring segment is slated to reach a value of nearly US$ 1,300 Mn in 2022. The network monitoring segment is expected to lose market share by the end of the year 2022. The largest share is contributed by the North America region in the network monitoring segment.Persistence Market Research forecasts the U.S. software defined security market to exhibit a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7% from 2017 to 2022.Request to sample reportThe report has also included the profiles of some of the leading companies in the software defined security market like Catbird, VMware, Inc., SAS Institute Inc., Fortinet, Cisco Systems, Inc., Symantec Corporation, Intel Corp., EMC Corp., Palo Alto Networks and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company.Get Full Report nowAbout UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated re-search, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Con-sumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Floatless Level Controller Market : By type Opportunity Assessment, Competitive Landscape, Growth Factors and Trends by Forecast 2017-2025

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Floatless Level Controller Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.Floatless Level Controller Market: OverviewA floatless level controller is a device that controls the level of liquid electrically. They find usage in various application like water and sewer services for office and apartment buildings, industrial applications for iron and steel, food, chemical, pharmaceutical, and semiconductor industries, and liquid level control for agricultural water, water treatment plants, and wastewater plants. Immersing the electrodes in the liquid completes the circuit letting the current flow. Various conducting liquids can be controlled using a floatless level controller. Detecting the resistance between the electrodes and comparing it to see if it is larger or smaller than a reference resistance is used to detect the surface of the liquid.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Floatless Level Controller Market: DynamicsThe floatless level controller market is being driven by factors like need for optimum production process quality, operational excellence and improved productivity. The key driving factor for the market is growing automation industrialization around the globe. Macroeconomic factors like government initiatives and urbanization supplement the market further.Floatless Level Controller Market: SegmentationThe global Floatless Level Controller Market is segmented by product type and application.The global Floatless Level Controller Market is segmented by product type as:General-purpose ControllerFor control of ordinary purified water or sewage waterHigh temperature ControllerFor control of ordinary purified water or sewage water in cases where the ambient temperature is highLong-distance ControllersFor control of ordinary purified water in cases where the distance between sewage pumps and water tanks or between receiver tanks and supply tanks is long or where remote control is requiredHigh-sensitivity ControllersFor control of liquids with high specific resistance such as distilled waterLow-sensitivity ControllerFor control of liquids with low specific resistance such as salt water, sewage water, acid chemicals, alkali chemicalsTwo-wire ControllerFor control of ordinary purified water or sewage water used in combination with Two-wire Electrode HolderMake an Enquiry about TOC @The global Floatless Level Controller Market is segmented by application as:Water/Waste water ProcessingOil & Gas IndustryChemical IndustryBoiler Control and etc.Food & BeverageFloatless Level Controller Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the Global Floatless Level Controller Market is designed for seven regions namely, North-America, Western Europe, Asia Pacific except Japan (APEJ), Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East & Africa and Japan. Over the forecast period Asia pacific is expected to contribute about 35% of the total Global Floatless Level Controller Market. The market for Floatless Level Controller is highly fragmented in nature with a lot of tier 2 and tier 3 companies entering constantly.Floatless Level Controller Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in Floatless Level Controller Market are:Gems Sensors and ControlsOmron CorporationSJE-RhombusWIKA Alexander Wiegand SE & Co. KGEmerson Electric CompanyEndress+Hauser Inc.zhejiang huanli electric co. ltdMagnetrol InternationalRIKO Float Technology co.,ltd.FineTek Co., Ltd.ResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.us
Compression Therapy Market Global Industry Analysis and Forecast Till 2025

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Compression Therapy is a process of applying external pressure to the limbs or other parts of the body through which different chronic disease can be treated. Compression therapy is a very effective technique for disease indication such as, Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT), Venous Thrombolism (VTE), Varicose Veins, Lymphedema, Chronic and Diabetic Ulcers.A gradual pressure is being given to infected area or the veins which in turn increases the blood flow in the veins, increases the drainage of nocious substances, reduces pain and inflammation.A common myth prevailing among people is that compression bandages and clothes hinder the blood circulation but in reality these products are designed in such a way that when applied properly they assist in blood flow.The annual incidence of DVT is around 1 per 1000 people. As per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), around 60,000-100,000 patients have DVT in United States.Request Report Sample@Compression Therapy Market: Drivers and RestraintsCompression therapy market is driven by aging population, high incidence of disease indications, rising awareness among patients and ease of application and durability of the products.Other factors include regular product training to physicians that helps them to better understand the product and use of fancy garment to manufacture stockings and bandages.Lack of knowledge about the disease indication among patients and inadequate reimbursement for compression therapy products from government agencies in developed countries will slow down the market in the forecast period.Compression Therapy Market: SegmentationGlobal Compression Therapy Devices is further segmented into these following types:Static Compression TherapyCompression GarmentsUpper Compression GarmentsLower Compression GarmentsCompression BandagesAnti-Embolism StockingsDiabetic ShoesDiabetic Compression SocksDynamic Compression TherapySegmented Compression PumpsNon-Segmented Compression PumpsCompression SleevesCompression Therapy Market: OverviewWith the advancement of technology and increase incidence in disease population, compression therapy is gaining wide acceptance as a method of choice among patients. This market is expected to grow at a healthy CAGR in the forecast period (2015-2025).Advances in garments, textile technology, compression stockings, and bandages aimed at improving patient comfort are expected to drive the market in the forecast period.Compression Therapy Market: Region-wise OutlookDepending on geographic regions, global compression therapy market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, South America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan, and Middle East & Africa.In terms of geography, North America dominates the compression therapy market, followed by Europe. Growing aging population and increasing prevalence of diabetes are also supporting the growth of compression therapy market in this regions. India, China, and Japan are expected to be the fastest-growing markets for compression therapy in Asia.Visit For TOC@Compression Therapy Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in compression therapy market are SIGVARIS, BSN medical GmbH, Covidien Plc. PAUL HARTMANN AG, 3M Co., ArjoHuntleigh, Thuasne SA, Smith & Nephew plc and medi GmbH & Co.About Us  Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Microneedling Devices Market to Reflect Impressive Growth Rate During 2025

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Micro-needling is a safe, minimally effective therapeutic procedure which is associated with chemical, laser or IPL treatments for treating the skin. The micro-needling process is also known as collagen induction therapy. The Microneeding treatment involves rolling a small device which is covered by hundreds of tiny needles over a skin. These tiny needles penetrate in the skin which triggered the body response, causing an increase in the production of collagen and elastin. Micro-needling devices are basically used to lift, tighten, and rejuvenate the skin of all ages.Report Overview @Micro-needling is a trendy cosmetic procedure which can use for a very wide range of indications. Micro-needling devices are used to improve the appearance of fine lines, surgical acne or trauma scars, stretch marks, pigmentation, wrinkles and many more problems related to skin. It is often performed in the plastic surgery centers. Micro-needling devices help to activate the bodys cellular regeneration.The global micro-needling devices market is anticipated to register a significant CAGR over a forecast period. The global market of micro-needling devices is driven by the increasing incidence of chronic hyperpigmentation, the skin infectious disease etc. The high cost of the other surgical procedure such as plastic surgery can upsurge the market growth of micro-needling devices propositionally. Changes in lifestyle will increase the incidence of skin related diseases which will ultimately enhance the growth of the global micro-needling devices market. The home treatment, lack of experience in using these advanced technology act as a restraint to the market. Besides that lack of awareness of people regarding the skin treatment and the side effects of the treatment such as swelling, redness or pinkness or mild to moderate sunburn will hamper the growth of this market.Request Report for TOC @The increasing investment by the hospital facilities and government for better healthcare is expected to drive the market. The companies are engrossed in introducing the products with innovative technology. The microneedling devices market is classified by product type, by needle material and end user. In terms of product type the global microneedling devices market is segmented into derma-stamp, dermapen and dermarollers. There are a variety of microneedling devices are available in the market depending on needle size, dermaroller etc. By needle material, microneedling devices market is classified as Silicon Microneedle, metal microneedle and glass hollow microneedle. The silicon microneedles are further divided into silicon hollow microneedle and solid microneedle. The Metal microneedles are further divided into Hollow Metal Microneedle and Solid Metal Microneedle. By end user, microneedling devices market is classified as hospitals, dermatology clinics and others. Among all end user, hospitals are expected to gain maximum value share over the forecast period.On the basis of geography, microneedling devices market is segmented as North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East & Africa. North America is expected to dominate the micro-needling devices market due to the advent of new technologies and favorable reimbursement scenario for laser treatment in this region. The Europe is also contributing the moderate shares to the market due to the advanced medical facilities and easy availability of the micro-needling devices in the market. APAC is the most lucrative market for the micro-needling devices due to increasing trend of being slim and toned and developing cosmetic industry in the region is expected to show a robust growth to the global micro-needling devices market. MEA is at a nascent stage to the global micro-needling devices market and anticipated to register a decent growth to the market over a forecast period. Overall, the global micro-needling devices market is expected to show significant growth over a forecast period.Some of the key players of micro-needling devices market globally are Dermapen, Dermaroller GmbH, MDPen Fractional Microdermal Needling, DermaConcepts, ConceptSkincare, Ramboll Environ, Inc., Edge Systems LLC., Weyergans High Care, BOMTECH ELECTRONICS CO., Ltd. and others. The global micro-needling devices market is currently witnessing a number of strategic collaboration and partnership activities by manufacturers and end users.Request to Sample of Report @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:
Printed Battery Market -Manufacturers, Suppliers & Exports Research Report and Forecast to 2018

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ReportsWeb.com has announced the addition of the Global Printed Battery Market Research Report The report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification.The recent report from Publisher on the Global Printed Battery Market Research has the complete assessment of the latest trends of the Printed Battery market. The report focuses on the manufacturing challenges that are being faced and provides the solutions and the strategies that have been implemented to overcome the problems. Deep researches and analysis were done during the preparation of the report.The information and the data that was collected was checked and validated by the industry experts. The readers will find this report very helpful in understanding the Printed Battery market in depth. The prime objective of this report is to help the user understand the Printed Battery market in terms of its definition, segmentation, market potential, influential trends, and the challenges that the market is facing.The data and the information regarding the market are taken from reliable sources such as websites, annual reports of the companies, journals, and others. The facts and data are represented in the report using diagrams, graphs, pie charts, and other pictorial representations. This enhances the visual representation and also helps in understanding the facts much better. The attributes that are explained in the report are the technological advancements that are made in the Printed Battery market, the sales made in the global market, the annual production, the profit made by the industry, the investments made by the manufacturers and the initiatives that are taken by the government to boost the growth of the market.Get Free Sample of this Report@The Printed Battery market revenue generation is also included in the report. The various segments from which major sales of the market is obtained is included within the report along with the regional segmentation. The regional segmentation helps the market players to understand where to make investments and where there will support from both the consumers and government.Points Covered in The Report:The points that are discussed within the report are the major market players that are involved in the Printed Battery market.The complete profile of the companies is mentioned.The production, sales, future strategies, and the technological developments that they are making are also included within the report.The growth factors of the Printed Battery market is discussed in detail wherein the different end users of the market are explained in detail.The application areas of the Printed Battery market are also discussed thus giving a broad idea about the market to the clients.The report contains the SWOT analysis of the market. Finally, the report contains the conclusion part where the opinions of the industrial experts are included.Get complete access of this report@Key Reasons to PurchaseTo gain insightful analyses of the market and have comprehensive understanding of the global Printed Battery market and its commercial landscape.Assess the Printed Battery production processes, major issues, and solutions to mitigate the development risk.To understand the most affecting driving and restraining forces in the Printed Battery market and its impact in the global market.Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by leading respective organizations.To understand the future outlook and prospects forPrinted Battery market.This report focus on Global and regional market, providing information on major players like manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, traders, customers, investors and etc., major types, major applications and etc. Data type include capacity, production, market share, price, revenue, cost, gross, gross margin, growth rate, consumption, import, export and etc. Industry chain, manufacturing process, cost structure, marketing channel are also analyzed in this report.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 queriesPune:505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Global and China Automotive LED Lighting Market Report 2020 : Stanley, Varroc, Ichikoh

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global and China Automotive LED Lighting Sales Market Report 2020" to its huge collection of research reports.The report on the Global and China Automotive LED Lighting market offers elaborate and comprehensive assessment of key growth drivers, challenges, noteworthy trends, major technological advances, and strategic landscape. The analysis presents a detailed overview of the current market offerings, their scope in various regions, and major research and development activities influencing their growth. The study presents a detailed assessment of various types of business risks, notably operational and strategic, and highlights the prevailing governmental regulations in various regions. It further takes a closer look at expected growth areas and lucrative prospects emerging in the Global and China Automotive LED Lighting market. Key innovations likely to open up new revenue streams in untapped markets are also covered in the report.Get Complimentary Research Summary of the Report:A diverse range of trends is causing considerable shifts in consumer preferences in the Global and China Automotive LED Lighting market in various developing and developed regions. The study offers a granular analysis of such aspects and the likely opportunities that will emerge on account of this are covered. It further zeroes in key factors that will support public and private investments in the Global and China Automotive LED Lighting market.The study highlights major recent developments in end-use sectors likely to change the competitive dynamics of the overall market. It estimates the current revenue share and size of various players in the Automotive LED Lighting market and analyzes the factors that will account for the dominant position of some over the assessment timeline.The research methodology employed in analyzing the Automotive LED Lighting market draws from approaches universally accepted by industries and reflects the findings from a wide spectrum of primary and secondary research. This is supported by extensive rounds of interviews with CXOs, business executives, policy makers, and industry leaders. The findings offered in the research study is invaluable for various market participants, stakeholders, and budding entrepreneurs.Table of Contents1 Automotive LED Lighting Overview and Price of Each Type1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Automotive LED Lighting1.2 Global and China Automotive LED Lighting Production, Growth Rate 2011 to 20201.3 Global and China Automotive LED Lighting Revenue, Growth Rate 2011 to 20201.4 Product Segments and Price of Each Type1.5 Price List (Interviewed) of Each Type for Key Manufacturers in 2015 and 20161.5.1 Price List (Interviewed) of Exterior Lighting by Key Manufacturers1.5.2 Price List (Interviewed) of Interior Lighting by Key Manufacturers1.6 Global and China Automotive LED Lighting Market Share by Type in 20152 Global and China Market Competition Analysis by Manufacturers2.1 Global Market Automotive LED Lighting Production, Revenue and Share List of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 20162.1.1 Global Market Automotive LED Lighting Production and Share of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 20162.1.2 Global Market Automotive LED Lighting Revenue and Share of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 20162.1.3 Global Market Automotive LED Lighting Average Price of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 20162.2 China Market Automotive LED Lighting Production, Revenue and Share of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 20162.2.1 China Market Automotive LED Lighting Production and Share of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 20162.2.2 China Market Automotive LED Lighting Revenue and Share of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 20162.3 Global Automotive LED Lighting Manufacturing Base Distribution and Product Type of each ManufacturerMake An Enquiry For Discount :3 Global and China Automotive LED Lighting Production, Revenue and Growth Rate by Type3.1 Global Automotive LED Lighting Production, Revenue and Growth Rate by Type (2011-2020)3.1.1 Global Automotive LED Lighting Production and Market Share by Type (2011-2020)3.1.2 Global Automotive LED Lighting Revenue and Market Share by Type (2011-2020)3.1.3 Global Automotive LED Lighting Price by Type (2011-2020)3.2 Global Automotive LED Lighting Production Growth Rate by Type (2011-2020)3.2.1 Exterior Lighting Production and Production Growth Rate 2011-20203.2.2 Interior Lighting Production and Production Growth Rate 2011-20205 Global Automotive LED Lighting Production by Regions 2011-20205.1 Global Automotive LED Lighting Production and Revenue by Regions 2011-20205.1.1 Global Automotive LED Lighting Production by Regions 2011-20205.1.2 Global Automotive LED Lighting Revenue by Regions 2011-20205.2 China Automotive LED Lighting Production and Revenue Growth Rate 2011-20205.3 USA Automotive LED Lighting Production and Revenue Growth Rate 2011-20205.4 EU Automotive LED Lighting Production and Revenue Growth Rate 2011-20205.5 Japan Automotive LED Lighting Production and Revenue Growth Rate 2011-2020List of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Automotive LED LightingFigure Global Automotive LED Lighting Production and Growth Rate 2011 to 2020Figure China Automotive LED Lighting Production and Growth Rate 2011 to 2020Figure Global Automotive LED Lighting Revenue and Growth Rate 2011 to 2020Figure China Automotive LED Lighting Revenue and Growth Rate 2011 to 2020Table Price List (Interviewed) of Exterior Lighting by Key Manufacturers in 2015 and 2016Table Price List (Interviewed) of Interior Lighting by Key Manufacturers in 2015 and 2016Table Global Market Automotive LED Lighting Production of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 2016Table Global Market Automotive LED Lighting Production Share of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 2016Table Global Market Automotive LED Lighting Revenue of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 2016Table Global Market Automotive LED Lighting Revenue Share of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 2016Table Global Market Automotive LED Lighting Average Price of Key Manufacturers 2015 to 2016About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
2017-2022 Global and United States Luxury Car Rental Market Status and Forecast by Players, Types and Applications

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "2017-2022 Luxury Car Rental Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications" to its huge collection of research reports.A holistic and detailed overview of the Global and United States Luxury Car Rental market that includes information derived from utilizing various quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques has been compiled in this latest market report. This compilation offers its readers a great overview of the Luxury Car Rental market during a forecast period from 2018 to 2025. The report also describes various limitations that may depict themselves as substantial obstacles to businesses during the above-mentioned forecast period. These hindrances have been described in detail in the report, along with possible counter activities and expectations that might cause the dilution of these hindrances up to a certain degree.For more info, Get a Free Sample Report:Every market has a skeleton of its own, and this published report too includes a detailed skeleton for the Luxury Car Rental market. Various factors such as production capacities of businesses, profiles of major players in the market, import and export sales data, etc. have been covered under this report. This compilation describes a detailed assessment of the fundamental factors associated with the Luxury Car Rental market such as promising trends, growth opportunities, prime market drivers, regional market spread, market valuation in past, present as well future quotations, along with several others. The report also includes graphical data in the form of charts, graphs, pie diagrams, figures, and tables. Such graphical data can enable readers to carefully understand detailed information about the Luxury Car Rental market. All of this data is presented in various chapters and segmented as per requirement for an easier understanding from the readers perspective.Every market player needs to establish itself firmly in a market scenario, and the published report on the Luxury Car Rental market exists as an aid just for the same cause. Not only the already established companies, but new players as well as startups can gain a lot from this report compiled on the Luxury Car Rental market, in order to confirm their presence in the industry.Table of Contents1 Industry Overview1.1 Luxury Car Rental Market Overview1.1.1 Luxury Car Rental Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Luxury Car Rental Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2012-2017)1.2.1 United States Luxury Car Rental Market Status and Outlook1.2.2 EU Luxury Car Rental Market Status and Outlook1.3 Classification of Luxury Car Rental by Product1.3.1 Global Luxury Car Rental Revenue (Million USD) and Growth (%) Comparison by Product (2012-2022)1.3.2 Global Luxury Car Rental Revenue (Million USD) Market Share (%) by Product in 20162 Global Luxury Car Rental Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Global Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) by Players (2012-2017)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in FutureTo Get Discount On This Report Click here @3 Company (Top Players) Profiles and Key Data3.1 Sixt3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Sixt Luxury Car Rental Revenue (Million USD) (2012-2017)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Europe Luxury Car Hire3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Europe Luxury Car Hire Luxury Car Rental Revenue (Million USD) (2012-2017)3.2.5 Recent Developments4 Global Luxury Car Rental Market Size by Product and Application (2012-2017)4.1 Global Luxury Car Rental Market Size by Product (2012-2017)4.2 Global Luxury Car Rental Market Size by Application (2012-2017)4.3 Potential Application of Luxury Car Rental in Future4.4 Top Consumer / End Users of Luxury Car RentalList of Tables and FiguresFigure Global Market Size (Million USD) Status and Outlook 2012-2022Table Global Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) Split by ProductTable Global Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) by Application (2016-2022)Figure Global Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2012-2022)Table Global Market Luxury Car Rental Revenue (Million USD) Comparison by Regions 2012-2022Figure United States Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2017)Figure EU Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2017)Figure Japan Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2017)Figure China Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2017)Figure India Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2017)Figure Southeast Asia Luxury Car Rental Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2012-2017)About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
Environmental Monitoring Top Key Player 2017 by Key Players Agilent Technologies, Danaher, Honeywell International, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated

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http://www.reportsweb.com/environmental-monitoring-global-market-status-and-trend-report-2013-2023

ReportsWeb.com has announced the addition of the Global Environmental Monitoring Market Research Report The report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification.Environmental Monitoring-Global Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 offers a comprehensive analysis on Environmental Monitoring industry, standing on the readers' perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information. Key questions answered by this report include:Get Free Sample of this ReportWorldwide and Regional Market Size of Environmental Monitoring 2013-2017, and development forecast 2018-2023Main manufacturers/suppliers of Environmental Monitoring worldwide, with company and product introduction, position in the Environmental Monitoring marketMarket status and development trend of Environmental Monitoring by types and applicationsCost and profit status of Environmental Monitoring, and marketing statusMarket growth drivers and challengesThe report segments the global Environmental Monitoring market as:Global Environmental Monitoring Market: Regional Segment Analysis (Regional Production Volume, Consumption Volume, Revenue and Growth Rate 2013-2023):North AmericaEuropeChinaJapanRest APACLatin AmericaGlobal Environmental Monitoring Market: Type Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume, Average Price, Revenue, Market Share and Trend 2013-2023):IntermittentContinuousActivePassiveGlobal Environmental Monitoring Market: Application Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume and Market Share 2013-2023; Downstream Customers and Market Analysis)Particulate MatterAirGasOtherGet complete access of this report@Environmental Monitoring Company ProfilingAgilent TechnologiesDanaherHoneywell InternationalSiemensThermo Fisher ScientificTE ConnectivityGeneral ElectricEmerson ElectricTeledyne Technologies IncorporatedMerck KGaAAbout 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 queriesPune:505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Enzyme Replacement Therapy Market Industry Analysis, Trend and Growth, 2017-2027

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https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3167

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Enzymes are portentous molecules that are present in cells, to perform catalytic functions in number of biochemical reactions in the body. Enzymes aids in biochemical reactions without get used up in the biochemical reactions. Deficiency of the enzymes in the body lead to malfunction of the body organs and there by systems that lead to Lysosomal Storage Diseases (LSD). Enzyme replacement therapy is the method of medical management, in which healthcare professionals replaces an enzyme in patients who are deficient of particular enzyme with artificial enzymes. Enzyme replacement therapy done by administering patient with an intravenous infusion or oral administration of enzyme containing preparations. Enzyme replacement therapy is available for few disease like fabry disease, hunter syndrome, gaucher disease, digestive disease and pomp syndrome etc. Enzyme replacement therapies are meant for increasing the concentration of enzymes but not for correcting underline cause of the diseases.Enzyme Replacement Therapy Market: Drivers and RestraintsGlobal enzyme replacement therapy market is continue to witness positive growth owing to ease of regulations for approving enzyme replacement therapies by designating Orphan Drug Status (ODS) and advantages associated with ERT like fewer side effects, wider availability would expected to fuel demand for enzyme replacement therapy market over the forecast period. The market for enzyme replacement therapy driven by financial assistance to the patients by several nations foundations, non-profit organizations like National Gaucher Foundations care and care+ plus programmes, patient access network etc., which makes enzyme replacement therapy accessible to the patients. Potential beneficial treatment outcomes, ease of access to the treatment in developed healthcare setups, and pharma companies initiative to support the patient groups will help to bolster growth of enzyme replacement therapy market. However, inconvenience associated with parenteral IV infusion, cost of therapy or insurance concerns, fewer side effects, and black box warnings on few products may hamper the growth of the enzyme replacement therapy market over the forecast period.Request Report Sample@Enzyme Replacement Therapy Market: SegmentationGlobal enzyme replacement therapy market has been segmented on the basis of enzyme type, clinical indication, route of administration, end user, and region.Based on the enzyme type, the global enzyme replacement therapy market is segmented into the following:Agalsidase BetaImigluceraseVelaglucerase AlfaTaligluceraseAlglucosidase AlfaLaronidaseIdursulfaseGalsulfasePegademasePancreatic EnzymesOthersBased on the clinical indication, the global enzyme replacement therapy market is segmented into the following:Fabry DiseaseGaucher DiseasePompe DiseaseScheie SyndromeHunter DiseaseMaroteaux-Lamy SyndromeSevere Combined Immunodeficiency Disease (SCID)DigestionOthersBased on the route of administration, the global enzyme replacement therapy market is segmented into the following:Parenteral RouteOralBased on the end user, the global enzyme replacement therapy market is segmented into the following:HospitalsClinics/Infusion CentersHomecare SettingsEnzyme Replacement Therapy Market: OverviewGlobal enzyme replacement therapy market is dominated with handful of players who are offering these products. Market for enzyme replacement therapy is consistently witnessing newer challenges as patients are increasingly witnessing side effects associated with treatment regimen. Players in the enzyme replacement therapy market coming up with several patient centric initiatives in order to assist the patients in terms of offering free therapies, patient education regarding disease and continuous medical education to the healthcare professionals regarding the disease and its management.Enzyme Replacement Therapy Market: Region-wise OutlookGeographically, enzyme replacement therapy market is segmented into regions viz. North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan, Japan, Middle East and Africa. North America and Europe will remain key markets for enzyme replacement therapy market. North America and Europe region are expected to witness strong growth owing to drug availability, favourable reimbursement policies and advanced healthcare infrastructure.Visit For TOC@Enzyme Replacement Therapy Market: Key PlayersSome players in enzyme replacement therapy market include Genzyme Corporation, Shire plc., Pfizer Inc., BioMarin Pharmaceutical, Inc., Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Essential Pharmaceuticals Limited, Merck KGa, AbbVie Inc. to name a few.About Us  Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Rapid Advancements will boost Enzyme Inhibitors Market Size Further 2017-2027

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Enzyme inhibition means interruption or decrease in the enzyme activity. The enzyme inhibitors are substances that abolish or reduce the rate of enzyme action. Though enzymes are essential for life, abnormally high enzyme activity can lead to disease conditions. Hence, manipulation of enzyme catalysis with inhibitors is critical for prevention of infectious diseases, treatment of hypertension, control of inflammatory response, intervention in cell growth and cell cycle and much more. Also, besides acting as therapeutic agents, enzyme inhibitors play important roles in biological and clinical research.Enzyme Inhibitors Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe route of inhibitor administration is dependent on the properties and objective of the experiment to be carried out. Immobilized enzymes are used in industries and have a high value for industrial and medicinal enzyme products. Some of the examples of industrial enzymes are glucoamylase, amylase, pepsin, trypsin, glucose isomerase, cellulase and many others. With the emergence of new inhibitor enzymes in the quest for drug discovery, several new inhibition mechanisms are expected. Recently, several software programs have emerged to visualize custom visual interface to see curve fits in real-time, graph transforms, equations using kinetic data and these data tables are directly generated. The challenge is that most times, basic presumptions do not hold true in enzyme reactions and addition of new factors further complicate the calculation of reactor outcome. The outcomes of computer-based kinetic calculations are less realistic with more chances of variants. Another major challenge in the enzyme inhibitor market is that it is less reproducible and bio-applications are unpredictable because of synergy, the interplay of known and unknown physiological, biological, physical, and molecular factors affecting the reaction kinetics.Request Report Sample@Enzyme Inhibitors Market: SegmentationOn the basis of disease indication, the enzyme inhibitor market can be segmented into:Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary DisordersCardiovascular DiseaseGastrointestinal DisordersArthritisInflammatory DiseasesOthersOn the basis of end use industry, the enzyme inhibitor market can be segmented into:PharmaceuticalBiotechnologyFood & BeverageOthersThe majority of drugs to treat a number of chronic and life-threatening diseases are developed with a mechanism of action directed towards enzyme inhibition. Enzyme specificity and potency are the important factors considered while developing a drug. A high specificity and potency ensure that a drug will have fewer side effects and a strong therapeutic effect. Enzyme inhibitors are used as diagnostic agents to screen various diseases thus propelling the growth of enzyme inhibitor market.Enzyme Inhibitors Market: OverviewThe emerging therapeutic market for enzyme inhibitors used in human therapeutics is very high. New information is available on biochemistry for enzyme inhibitors and classes of enzyme-inhibiting products with broad current or potential therapeutic applications in large markets. However, more than 90 enzyme inhibitors are currently marketed and double those are under development. A better understanding of the emerging enzyme inhibitors on enzyme mechanism is key. In recent years, use of chemical immobilization has extended to immobilized antibodies or antigens in bio-affinity chromatography. In coming years, it is speculated that immobilization techniques of proteins and enzymes will have a greater impact on point-of-care medical and health business in the enzyme inhibitor market.Visit For TOC@Enzyme Inhibitors Market: Region-wise OutlookOn the basis of region, the market is segmented into North America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan, Japan, Latin America and the Middle East and Africa. The market for enzyme inhibitors is expanding with the rising incidence of enzyme-based diseases and increasing research and development activities. In developed countries like the U.S. and Europe, the market growth for enzyme inhibitors is high because of better availability of medical facilities, diagnosis rate for the diseases, infrastructure, awareness and available treatment options. In Asia Pacific region, China, Japan, and India are most potential markets for enzyme inhibitors due to growing population, improvement in medical facilities and economic development.Enzyme Inhibitors Market: Key PlayersSome of the players in the enzyme inhibitors market are AstraZeneca, Merck and Co. Inc., Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc., Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, Roche-Genentech Holding Ltd., and Takeda Pharmaceuticals. Other prominent players are Abbott Laboratories Inc., Bayer AG, and Johnson and Johnson Ltd. Vendors in this market are outsourcing different parts of their research work such as toxicology testing, product characterization testing to various contract research organizations. Also, vendors are increasingly engaged in outsourcing part of their enzyme inhibitor drug manufacturing or the entire manufacturing process to various contract manufacturing organizations. Thus, the increase in outsourcing of drug manufacturing is one of the trends witnessed in the enzyme inhibitors market.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Fetal Bovine Serum Market is Determined to Reach US$ 872 Million By 2022

Fetal Bovine Serum Market

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Florida, January 16, 2018: Fetal Bovine Serum is a critical raw material for several research areas, animal health, biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. Fetal bovine Serum is a mainly utilized serum supplement for the in-vitro-cell culture, because it has a very low level of antibodies and containing more growth factors. It allows versatility in many various cell culture applications. Fetal Bovine Serum boosts cell cycle and cell metabolism; it is also an important component of the nutrients which includes hormones, vitamins and nutrients. As Fetal bovine Serum is dependent on environmental conditions which are affecting the increase in product cost.The Global Fetal bovine serum Market is expected to exceed more than US$ 872 million by 2022 in the given forecast period.You can browse full report here:The major driving factors of Global Fetal Bovine Serum Market are as follows: Easy for regulatory approvals Cost effectiveThe restraining factors of Global Fetal bovine Serum Market are as follows: No replacement of FBS Dependent on environmental conditions Ethical problems relating to blood collection methodThis report provides:1) An overview of the global market for Fetal Bovine Serum 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 Fetal Serum Bovine 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 report include Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC., GE Healthcare, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., TCS Biosciences Ltd., HiMedia Laboratories, Atlanta Biologicals, Inc., PAN-Biotech, Rocky Mountain Biologicals, BovogenBiologicals Pty Ltd., and Tissue Culture Biologicals, among others. Company profile includes such as company summary, financial summary, business strategy and planning, SWOT analysis and current developments.Request Sample Report:Table of Contents1 INTRODUCTION2 Research Methodology3 MARKET OVERVIEW4 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY5 PREMIUM INSIGHTS6 Fetal Bovine Serum by Key Players 2012-20177 Fetal Bovine Serum Market Research Report 2017-2022 by Players, Regions, Product Types & Applications8 COMPANY PROFILES8.1 Life Technologies8.2 Thermo Fisher8.3 GE Healthcare8.4 Sigma-Aldrich8.5 Merck8.7 Gemini8.8 Atlanta Biologicals8.9 Tissue Culture BiologicalsAbout 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
Value Based Healthcare Services Market Size to Grow Steadily during Forecast period 2017-2027

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The introduction of value based healthcare services has changed the traditional way in which providers used to bill for care. Providers need to pay on the value of care they provide instead of paying based on the number of visits and treatment the patients undergo. This change in the reimbursement platform is driving the value based healthcare services by directing better care at low costs. But for those healthcare providers who cannot achieve the required targets, the financial fines and lower reimbursement can create a prominent financial liability. As a patient and a healthcare customer, they pay more for the services and the treatment they get, where sometimes the cost can go out of the control of the patient. But with the introduction of new health plans and value based healthcare services are coming together on the solutions which will benefit the patients wallet and health. Value based healthcare services address to the rising healthcare expenditure, clinical inefficiency and repetition of services.Global Value Based Healthcare Services Market- Market Segmentation:On the basis of Models, the Global Value Based Healthcare Services market can be segmented into,Accountable care organization (ACO)Patient-centered medical home (PCMH)Pay for performance (P4P)Bundled paymentsOn the basis of End User, the Global Value Based Healthcare Services market can be segmented intoProvidersHospitalsClinicsOthersPayersInsurance CompaniesGovernmentOthersOn the basis of Deployment, the Global Value Based Healthcare Services market can be segmented intoCloud BasedOn-PremiseOn the basis of Platform, the Global Value Based Healthcare Services market can be segmented intoStand-aloneIntegratedOn the basis of Region, the Global Value Based Healthcare Services market can be segmented into,North AmericaWestern EuropeEastern EuropeAsia Pacific Excluding JapanJapanLatin AmericaMiddle East & AfricaRequest Report Sample@Global Value Based Healthcare Services Market- Market Dynamics:The most significant driver for the rapid development of the global Value Based Healthcare Services market is the healthcare-related risks shifting from the patients to their healthcare providers. With patient focused healthcare policies having changed the way medical care is delivered, it is now easy to see why the demand for Value Based Healthcare Services rising steadily. Where until a few years ago manual processes were the only means of carrying out everyday operations, automation and interconnectivity have made that approach nearly obsolete. Also, the global medical tourism industry is recording good growth numbers every year. This has helped healthcare providers in emerging economies adopt a positive investment option as far as care management solutions are concerned. However, it would be too early to say that the growth of the Value Based Healthcare Services market has taken off in the real sense. Several regions that have high investment potential but are restrained by the lack of internet connectivity are a missed opportunity for companies in the global Value Based Healthcare Services market. Moreover, in some countries in Asia and Latin America where basic healthcare infrastructure still remains below the desired levels, it will be a while before the environment becomes conducive to the adoption of Value Based Healthcare Services.Visit For TOC@Global Value Based Healthcare Services Market-Regional Outlook:Geographically, the Value Based Healthcare Services market has been segmented into North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. Regionally, North America was the largest market for Value Based Healthcare Services and North America is anticipated to maintain its dominance during the forecast period due to rise in the healthcare reforms. Followed by Europe and then Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is the most progressive market for Value Based Healthcare Services. This growth is mainly attributed to factors such as improving population perspective and increasing awareness Furthermore, the Value Based Healthcare Services market in Latin America is likely to expand at a significant CAGR. Brazil and Mexico are driving the Value Based Healthcare Services market in the region due to favorable initiatives taken by the respective governments. Moreover, rising research and development would fuel market growth in Latin America.Global Value Based Healthcare Services Market- Major Players:Currently, the global Value Based Healthcare Services market is highly competitive owing to the involvement of many established players and government policies. Some of the key players in the global Value Based Healthcare Services market are Deloitte, McKesson Corporation, NextGen Healthcare, Genpact Limited, Athena Healthcare, Siemens Healthcare and many others.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Technological Advancements to Influence Carob Market Growth 2017-2027

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Carob (Ceratonia siliqua) is a native plant to the eastern Mediterranean especially to the Middle East countries. Carob is also called as locust bean and is primarily cultivated for its edible pods in majorly Mediterranean region which includes Southern Europe, Northern Africa and the Canary Islands. Carob powder is also used as a substitute for cocoa powder in various bakery products. Carob based bars is consumed as an alternative to chocolate based bars worldwide. Carob do not contain caffeine and theobromine (which is intolerant to some animals) and therefore is widely used in chocolate flavored pet food for dogs and other animals. Carob pod meal is widely used as a rich source of energy for livestock, particularly for ruminants. Carob in food industry is used as a thickening agent, gelling agent, stabilizing agent or as a substitute for low-calorie food products. Carob is fat-free, rich in pectin and contains high amount of proteins. Carob is primarily used in the production of confectionery and bakery products and variety of beverages. Carob is also used for making flour, molasses and is a substitute for coffee.Global Carob: Market SegmentationThe global carob market is segmented on the basis of form, distribution channel, application and region. The carob market is segmented on the basis of form such as solid and liquid. The carob market is segmented on the basis of distribution channel which includes fitness stores, health stores, online and others. The carob market is segmented on the basis of application such as bakery products which includes cakes, cookies, pancakes, bread. Carob is also used in snack bars, cocoa based food products and beverages, cereals, dairy products and others. Carob pod meal is widely used for livestock. Carob syrup is used as a natural sweetener and is considered as a rich source of calcium. Hence, the global carob market is expected to significantly increase the revenue contribution over the forecast period.Request Report Sample@Global Carob Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the global carob industry can be divided by major regions which include North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East and Africa. Globally, among all regions, Europe has developed as the dominant region in global carob market followed by Asia Pacific. Increasing demand for carob powder in various bakery products and confectionery, has strengthened the growth of global carob market and hence is projected to significantly expand the revenue contribution of the market over the forecast period.Global Carob Market: Growth DriversThe global carob market driving factors are increasing demand for bakery products coupled with the convenience of foods. Increasing opportunities in bakery and confectionery industry is also another factor in driving the carob market along with rise in production of carob. Carob is also used for treating diarrhea, cancer, helps in reducing cholesterol level, and are some of the factors driving the global carob market. Carob powder is widely used as an alternative for cocoa powder due to its health benefits which is a major driving factor for the global carob market. Hence, the global carob market is expected to observe robust growth over the forecast period.Visit For TOC@Global Carob Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players identified across the value chain of the global carob market include Australian Carobs Pty Ltd., CAROB S.A., EURODUNA AMERICAS INC., CyberColloids Ltd., The Hain Celestial Group, Inc., Savvy Foods Ltd., Carobs Australia Inc., Creta Carob, Lewis Confectionery Pty Ltd and MADANARGAN. The companies are expected to expand their business by enhancing their product portfolio in global carob market. The companies are projected to frame certain strategies in future in order to gain the competitive advantage in global carob market till 2027.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Global Transdermal Scopolamine Market Expected to Touch US$585.3 Million by the end of 2024

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Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) has recently publicized a new study to its vast repository, which is titled as Transdermal Scopolamine Market is an alkaloid, a secondary metabolite produced by plants of nightshade family such as henbane, Datura, Duboisia, etc. Scopolamine is used to treat motion sickness, and post-operative and anesthesia induced nausea and vomiting. It is often used to treat gastrointestinal spasm, irritable bowel syndrome and eye inflammation. Scopolamine is also used for nausea and vomiting prevention in chemotherapy for cancer treatment. Scopolamine can be administered orally as tablets or syrups, intravenously as injections and solutions, or as transdermal in form of patch or gel. Transdermal scopolamine is a scopolamine patch used to treat motion sickness and post-operative nausea and vomiting. Transdermal scopolamine available today are reservoir patches which can be used for up to 3 days. These patches are applied at back side of ear. These patches are applied 20 minutes to 4 hours before the intended use such as travel, surgery etc.Get Free Sample Report @The first transdermal scopolamine patch was approved in 1979, manufactured by Alza Corporation and marketed by Novartis AG by brand name Transderm Scop. There are very few generics approved by FDA for Transderm Scop, which makes the market less competitive. Though there are few small players operating on regional level, however they hold a meager share in global transdermal scopolamine market. The global market for transdermal scopolamine is expected to grow at CAGR of 6.7% over the forecast period from 2016 to 2024. The launch of recently approved generics and projected expansion of international players is expected to drive the growth for this market. Moreover many of the industry players and researchers are investing on development of new transdermal scopolamine products.Transdermal scopolamine is a preferred choice to treat motion sickness owing to its ease in administration, cost effectiveness and availability. Rise in number of travelers across globe is expected to drive the growth for transdermal scopolamine market over the forecast period. Moreover some of the industry players and researchers are investing on development of improved transdermal scopolamine patch on material, adhesion, drug bioavailability and other aspects. Expected introduction of such improved products coupled with launch of new entrants is expected to trigger the growth for transdermal scopolamine market. However there are few concern factors with transdermal scopolamine such as adverse effects, specifically the withdrawal symptoms which are anticipated to restrain growth.Global Transdermal Scopolamine Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the transdermal scopolamine market has been segmented into five regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. These regions have been further segmented to country and sub-regional level. North America is expected to contribute largest share in global transdermal scopolamine market owing to high number of travelers, well established healthcare industry. Europe is expected to hold second position in global transdermal scopolamine market with growing number of surgeries and rising number of travelers.Get Full Report With TOC @The competition matrix section included in the report is likely to assist the existing players to increase their market shares and new companies to establish their presence in the global transdermal scopolamine market.Companies Mentioned in the ReportThe report also profiles major players in the market based on various attributes such as company overview, financial overview, SWOT analysis, key business strategies, product portfolio, and recent developments. Key companies profiled in the report include Novartis AG, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Baxter International Inc., Perrigo Company plc, Caleb Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Myungmoon Pharma Co. Ltd.The global transdermal scopolamine market has been segmented as follows:By RegionNorth AmericaEuropeAsia PacificLatin AmericaMiddle East and AfricaSend An Enquiry @About Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE)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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:
Ascites Treatment Market Projected to Garner Significant Revenues by 2025-end

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Peritoneal cavity is the space between lining of abdominal organs and abdomen. Accumulation of fluid in peritoneal cavity is refereed as ascites. In some cases, the condition is also referred as portal hypertension. Low levels of proteins (albumin) and portal hypertension i.e. high pressure in blood vessels of the liver results in ascites. Only 30% to 40% of the people suffering from ascites survive for around five years.Report Overview @Liver cirrhosis, acute liver failure, Budd-Chiari syndrome, cancer, heart failure, nephritic syndrome, pancreatic disorders, ovarian diseases in females and hypothyroidism are some of the conditions that lead to ascites. Common symptoms of ascites include nausea, vomiting, bloating, heartburn, abdominal pain, distended abdomen, lack of appetite, and difficulty breathing while laying flat. Diagnosis of ascites is done using imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) scan, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, ultrasound and tests such as blood tests and urinanalysis. In addition, angiography and laparoscopy are also performed for diagnosis of ascites.Ascites is commonly seen in people suffering from liver cirrhosis. More than 60% of patients suffering liver cirrhosis are also the patients of ascites. Therefore, with increasing prevalence of liver cirrhosis, prevalence of ascites is increasing. In addition, rise in the alcohol consumption globally, is resulting in the increase in the number of patients suffering liver cirrhosis and ascites. Thus, rising prevalence of liver cirrhosis, and increasing alcohol consuming population are the factors that are driving the global ascites treatment market.Presently available treatment for ascites is symptoms specific. Treatment specific to ascites is not available. Thus, many companies and medical researchers worldwide are focusing on development of ascites specific treatment.Request Report for TOC @Regionally, the global ascites treatment market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World (RoW). Presently, North America and Europe together account for largest market share in the overall ascites treatment market. Highly developed healthcare infrastructure, higher rate of awareness about ascites and related treatments and diagnostic tests and availability of skilled and knowledgeable healthcare professionals are some of the factors that are driving the ascites treatment market in North America and Europe. Asia Pacific is anticipated to be the fastest growing market in the global ascites treatment market.Rising literacy rate, rising awareness about ascites and related treatments, rapidly developing healthcare infrastructure and rising disposable income are some of the factors that are expected to fuel the growth of ascites treatment market in Asia Pacific. Brazil, Mexico and Argentina are the countries in the Rest of the World (RoW) that are expected to show faster growth rate owing to availability of advanced healthcare facilities and well defined regulatory framework. African countries are expected to show slower growth rate owing to poorly developed healthcare infrastructure and poor economy.Some of the companies and organizations involved in the research and development of drugs for ascites include, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, North Central Cancer Treatment Group, Nihon University, Baylor College of Medicine, Chiba University, Peking University, Masonic Cancer Center, AIO-Studien-g GmbH, Japan Interventional Radiology in Oncology Study Group, MRC Biotech Pty Ltd, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, Sanofi S.A., and Neopharm Ltd.Request to Sample of Report @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:
Passenger Vehicles Market in India 2017

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ReportsWeb.com has announced the addition of the Global Passenger Vehicles Market Research Report The report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification.Publisher' latest market research report titled Passenger Vehicles Market in India 2017 states that the passenger vehicles in India is expected to reach 5.4 mn units by FY 2022, expanding at a CAGR of 12%. The passenger vehicles market is segmented into Passenger Cars, Utility Vehicles and Vans. Passenger cars has 69% share and occupies the larger pie of the passenger vehicles market. Utility Vehicles and Vans have 25% and 6% share respectively. With advancements in technology, car manufacturers are gearing efforts to bring cutting edge technology to their vehicles. New technological developments such as connected cars, autonomous driving systems, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and IoT related technologies is redefining the automotive industry in India.In Mar 2017, ban on sale and registration of BS III vehicles put pressure on several vehicle manufacturing companies in India. Demonetization has severely affected the domestic sales of passenger vehicles in India. The major players in the market such as Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., Honda Cars India Ltd., Tata Motors Ltd. have witnessed a sharp decline in sales of vehicles across the country. However, several government initiatives such as implementation of GST and Make in India campaign is fueling the passenger vehicles segment in the country. Implementation of GST is expected to act as an antidote against demonetization.Get Free Sample of this ReportCoverage:Overview of the passenger vehicles market, and historical and forecasted market size data over FY 2011 to FY 2026eOverview of the passenger cars market, and historical and forecasted market size data over FY 2011 to FY 2026eOverview of the utility vehicles market, and historical and forecasted market size data over FY 2011 to FY 2026eOverview of the vans market, and historical and forecasted market size data over FY 2011 to FY 2026eTrade analysis of passenger vehicles in IndiaQualitative analysis of the major drivers and challenges affecting the passenger vehicles marketAnalysis of the competitive landscape and profiles of major public and private players operating in the marketKey recent developments in the Indian passenger vehicles marketWhy Buy-Get a broad understanding of the passenger vehicles market in India, the dynamics of the market and the current state of the industryDevise market-entry strategies by understanding the factors driving the growth of the marketUnderstand major competitors' business and market dynamics, and respond accordinglyGet complete access of this report@Passenger Vehicles Market Company ProfilingPublic Companies1. Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.2. Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.3. Tata Motors Ltd.Private Companies1. Ford India Pvt. Ltd.2. Honda Cars India Ltd.3. Hyundai Motor India Ltd.4. Renault India Pvt. Ltd.5. Toyota Kirloskar Motor Pvt. Ltd.6. Volkswagen India Pvt. Ltd.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 queriesPune:505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Automated Suturing Devices Market is Expected to Reach a CAGR of 5.3% During 2015  2025

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Future Market Insights (FMI), in its latest report titled, Automated Suturing Devices Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 20152025, forecasts the global automated suturing devices market revenue to expand at a CAGR of 5.3% during the forecast period (20152025). Global automated suturing devices market is estimated to account for US$ 471.0 Mn by the end of 2015, mainly driven by rising number of minimally invasive surgical procedures.Use of automated suturing devices in minimal invasive surgeries, open surgical procedures and major trauma cases that require surgery is expected to drive the market during the forecast period. Preference for automated suturing devices over conventional suturing devices during laparoscopic surgeries is a key reason for growth. Further, the device is also preferred by procurement teams at hospitals as it labelled under green products, resulting in considerably less impact on the environment as compared to plastic single-use disposable suturing devices.Rise in geriatric population is a macro factor thats driving demand for automated suturing devices.Request For Sample@High cost along with negative perception about certain automated suturing devices due tosome FDA-approved devices facing criticism regarding performance can impede the growth of the market.The report analyses the global automated suturing devices market in terms of market value (US$ Mn) and market volume (units) by product type, region, end-user and application. The report also offers information regarding market dynamics, regulatory compliances, competitive landscape, current trends, market estimations and forecast.Region-wise, North America is expected to account for maximum volume share in the global market by 2015 and this is expected to double over the forecast period. Western Europe is the second-most lucrative market for automated suturing devices companies. The market revenue in this region is projected to witness a healthy CAGR of 5.6% during the forecast period.Among product types, disposable automated suturing devices segment is expected to dominate the global automated suturing devices market,followed by the reusable automated suturing devices segment. Increasing prevalence of obesity is expected to boost overall demand for disposable automated suturing devices at a comparatively higher pace.Request Report Methodology@On the basis of application, automated suturing devices market is segmented into minimally invasive surgeries, open surgeries and trauma cases. Minimally invasive surgeries segment is expected to dominate the overall automated suturing devices market by the end of forecast period. The segment revenue is projected to register fastest growth rate over the forecast period. Open surgeries is projected to be the second fastest growing segment in terms of revenue. Increasing adoption of automated suturing devices among surgeons is fuelling growth of the minimally invasive surgeries segment.On the basis of end user, global automated suturing devices market has been segmented into hospitals, clinics and ambulatory surgical centers. Hospitals segment is expected to register fastest CAGR in terms of revenue over the forecast period.Key players profiled in FMIs market study include Medtronic Plc., Inc., Apollo Endosurgery, LSI Solutions, Inc., Boston Scientific, C. R. Bard, SuturTek Inc. and EndoEvolution, LLC.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:
Heart Transplant Market 2017-2023; By Surgery Type, End User and Region

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Heart Transplant or Heart Implant sometimes also referred as Cardiac Transplant surgery is proving to be a boon for the heart patients worldwide enhancing their quality of life by delivering miraculous results. This year, on 3rd. December, 2017 the world celebrated 50th anniversary of this block buster surgery and the worlds first heart transplant by Dr. Christian Barnard. Over the past half a century many innovations have transpired in the field of Heart Transplant allowing patients an extended life span of 13 years approximately with the new heart. The advancement of effective drugs to suppress the immune system ascended the success rate of heart transplants to further heights allowing the Heart Transplant Market to ascend to achieve upsurge. Another predominant factor that contributes to the Heart Transplant Market growth is growing prevalence of heart failure and severe coronary artery diseases across the globe. Statistics state that the North America Region alone is forecasted to observe around 1 million cases of end-stage heart failure.Accrediting the numerous innovations transpired in the Heart Transplant market over the past 5 decades with which the surging traction the market is gaining currently and the potential of the market to expand in the years to come: the Market Research Future has recently published a meticulous study report, in which MRFR asserts that the pervasively accruing Global Heart Transplant Market will gradually subside within a decade with the emergence of artificial pumps and stem cell therapy that will replace the Heart Transplant. Until then however, the Heart Transplant Market will continue to grow pervasively by 2023 owing to the augmenting technological advancements transpired in the field of Heart Transplant. The Heart Transplant market is projected to perceive booming accruals by 2023, registering a striking CAGR during the estimated period  2017  2023.Get a Sample Report @The Heart Transplant market is accruing owing to the advancements of surgical techniques, immunosuppressive modalities, and postoperative care. Growing prevalence of Heart failures and heart related diseases are boosting the revenues in the heart transplantation sector per year. In recent years, lower availability of donors has prompted significant investments in R&D activities to invent advent technologies and new surgical techniques. These investments in turn are defining the immense growth landscape of the Heart Transplant market.On the other hand, insufficient availability of suitable donors pool is a paramount challenge confronted by the Heart Transplant Industry. Another challenge is complications of a heart transplant such as chances of rejection which basically is immune systems attacks on transplanted heart. The potential donor heart must be compatible with the recipient's immune system to decrease the chance of problems with rejection. However, emergence of advent powerful Immunosuppressive Medications that can control the Rejection issues ruling out further chances of acute rejection of organ, this in turn will contribute the Heart Transplant market growth. Moreover emergence of the Endomyocardial Biopsy coupled with the new high-tech analysis is expected to boost growth of the Heart Transplant market.Endomyocardial Biopsy is a simple operation can be performed as an outpatient procedure by the experienced cardiologist, has already achieved the title as the gold standard for monitoring rejection. While the high-tech analysis, performed over a mere blood sample is proving to be a very promising process owning to the ease and comfort it offers to patients without the need to go under knife. This test looks at the expression of specific genes in cells in the blood. The amount of expression of key genes indicates whether or not rejection is occurring. While this method has still not replaced the gold standard endomyocardial biopsy, it has certainly minimized the frequency of biopsies for many patients.Heart Transplant, also known as Cardiac Transplant, is a surgical transplant procedure performed on patients with end-stage heart failure or severe coronary artery disease when other medical or surgical treatments have failed. In Heart Transplant surgery patients affected or damaged heart is extracted and replaced with a healthy heart from a deceased donor. Mostly it is done on patients who have end-stage heart failure. Heart transplantation has emerged as a viable therapeutic strategy for some patients with end-stage heart disease by offering them extended survival and improved quality of life. Approximately 4000 heart transplantation procedures are performed annually worldwide.Order Copy of 80 Premium Pages is Available @Highly competitive global Market of Heart Transplant is adorned by the several well-established players having regional and international presence. These well established players incorporate acquisition, collaboration, partnership, expansion, and technology launch in order to gain competitive advantage in this market and to maintain their market position and invest substantial funds in R&D and clinical trials to develop effective heart transplant program which is comprehensive, advanced and state-of-the-art. Some hospitals strive to provide tailor-made transplant surgeries based on the ailments, age and other complications. With advanced diagnostics, and comprehensive rehabilitation schedule these hospitals ensure that patient has access to the best care at every stage of the transplant journey.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:February 2017 - The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Microsoft announced their partnership launching an initiative to build three specialty hospitals with a digital focus. UPMC declared the investment of USD 2 billion to add three tech-based hospitals to its healthcare system in Pittsburgh, including the UPMC Heart and Transplant Hospital, UPMC Hillman Cancer Hospital and UPMC Vision and Rehabilitation Hospital. Microsoft will act as creative force for developing the digital hospitals in this collaboration providing developers and leveraging its digital tools.March 2017 - Research Team at the University of Minnesota, announced that they have discovered a groundbreaking process to successfully re-warm large-scale animal heart valves and blood vessels preserved at very low temperatures. The discovery is a major step forward in saving millions of human lives by increasing the availability of organs and tissues for transplantation through the establishment of tissue and organ banks.November 2017 - Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic revealed the new understanding of cholesterol after a number of trials that have recently shown a 20 percent reduction in the risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack, and stroke in patients who took statins combined with a new class of cholesterol-lowering drugs (PCSK9 inhibitors) to reach ultra-low LDL levels. This means now, doctors will have the tools and the research to take the fight to LDL cholesterol. With over 400,000 coronary disease deaths and 102 million Americans living with high cholesterol levels, these new strategies hold the promise to turn the tide in 2018.Heart Transplant Market - Regional AnalysisGlobally North America is the largest market for heart transplant and is expected to reach to the further astronomical amounts attributing to the rising procurement of transplant diagnostic instruments among medical facilities. Europe is the second-largest market for heart transplant which is expected to grow at a substantial CAGR. Asia pacific is expected to be the fastest growing Heart transplant market, owing to the burgeoning Medical Tourism market in the region.Ask to Expert @About US:Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
ADME-Tox Screening Systems Market Report  Actionable Insights and Recommendation 2017-2025

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ADME-Tox is pharmacology term which stands for absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion with toxicity testing. These four criteria are important for the kinetics of drugs exposure to the tissue level, therefore testing ADME-Tox is crucial for drug development. ADME-Tox screening is system is an integrated workstation for describing of the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion properties of drug molecules. ADME-Tox screening system includes biochemical assay tester which measures the physicochemical properties of a drug molecule.Report overview @This system also supports the permeability assays testing which measures the drug affinity toward metabolic enzyme. ADME-Tox screening system is enabled with highly integrated software which has an inbuilt protocol for the sample testing. The protocol feed in the software can be edited as per the customized need of sample testing. ADME-Tox screening system is connected to the multi-mode reader which allows runs the wide range of protocol on primary and secondary screen. This system provide accurate toxicity test for the drug development and biopharmaceutical production.The increasing focus of drug manufacturer to reduce the development cost of drug with least toxicological issue is the major factor driving the growth of ADME-Tox screening system market. Beside the ADME-Toxicological testing increases the potential of drug which increases the efficiency of the drug to target the desired tissue. Moreover, increasing demand for specialized drug due to rising prevalence of various chronic diseases will also upsurge the growth of AME-Tox screening system market. High installation and maintenance cost of this system will hamper the growth of this market. Additionally, lack of skilled professional to operate this system will also responsible for the sluggish growth of this market.Request Report for TOC @The ADME-Tox screening system market is expected to show exponential growth owing to increased drug development and biopharmaceutical production. This market is supposed to grow with higher rate due to the development of innovative techniques and an escalating consumer preference. ADME-Tox screening market has given the huge growth opportunity to the leading biopharmaceutical companies. By application, drug development segment is expected to gain the maximum market share for ADME-Tox screening system market. Biopharmaceutical companies will dominate the ADME-Tox screening system market by end user over the forecast period.Based on geography, ADME-Tox screening system market is classified is five key region, North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East & Africa. North America is expected to dominate the ADME-Tox screening system market due to the presence of a large number of biopharmaceutical companies in this region. Europe and Asia-Pacific will follow the North America for the ADME-Tox screening system market. In Asia-Pacific India and China are expected to be fastest growing market over the forecast period owing increased focus of leading biopharmaceutical manufacturer to expand their subsidiaries in these countries.Some of the key players found across the value chain of ADME-Tox Screening Systems market are Hudson Robotics Inc., ACEA Biosciences Inc., Agilent Tsechnologies Inc., ADMEcell Inc., Albany Molecular Research Inc., BioreclamationIVT, LLC, Beckman Counter Inc., Cerep SA, and other.Request to Sample of Report-About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Worldwide Dental CAM/CAD Milling machine market Analysis & Foresight to 2022

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CAD/CAM dental systems is a software used to both design and mill dental prosthetics. CAD (Computer Aided Design) consist of digitally scanning and designing prosthetics, while CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) is the process of sending final models to the output device and manufacturing them through milling or 3D printing. DGSHAPE devices and software are particularly manufactured to perfectly fit into this digital workflow.The dental CAM milling machine global market and is expected to reach $1415.6 million by 2022. Lab Scale milling machines holds the largest share of 65.2% of the market.Get a Copy of Sample Report @In the last few years computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) have occupied many practices and is so precise that dental restorations made by CAM milling machines often fits more better than those made manually in a dental laboratory. Patient satisfaction is constantly increasing as the tooth gets repaired in a single day instead of having to return for repeat appointments. This time saving factor is hugely helping the market growth of Dental CAM Milling Machine Market. CAD/CAM dentistry technology is assisting patients move on faster than ever before. By using the technology dentist can completely control the final result. CAD/CAM technology was developed to solve 3 important challenges. The first challenge was to ensure adequate strength of the restoration, especially for posterior teeth. The second challenge was to create restorations with a natural and beautiful appearance. The third challenge was to make tooth restoration easier, faster, and more accurate. In some cases, CAD/CAM technology provides patients with same-day restorations. All these factors benefitted the growth of dental cam milling machine market globally.The global dental CAM milling machine market has been estimated as vastly growing market and expected that the market will reach high growth figures. There has been high adoption of the CAD CAM systems and dental CAM milling machines in the field of dentistry in the last few years. The benefits like high accuracy and the precision provided by the dental CAM milling machines in the process of dental restorations is boosting the growth of the Dental CAM Milling Machines Market globally.Some of the factors restraining the market growth of CAD/CAM milling machine market are Computers can be affected by software problems, viruses and corrupted files meaning work could be lost. Lesser workers are needed, so unemployment will increase and conventional skills will be lost.Dental CAM Milling Machine Market-Competitive Analysis:Being launched at IDS Cologne, hall 3.2, stand G18, Renishaws incise dental milling system will permit dental laboratories to create zirconia frameworks in-house. Styled and sized to match carve dental scanning machine it uses a highly accurate Renishaw contact probe for job set-up and monitoring of the cutting tool. Organized with Renishaws central milling option, dental laboratories now have access to a dental CAD/CAM system that offers both in-lab and out sourced manufacturing options.Several major players in this market are: Axsys Incorporated, B&D Dental Technologies, DATRON AG, Dentsply Sirona, KaVo Dental GmbH, Planmeca OY, Straumann, and Yenadent Ltd.Browse Full Report Details @Dental CAD/CAM Milling Machine Market- Segmentation:Dental Cam Milling Market- Regional Analysis:Geographically, Europe is the biggest market for dental CAM milling machines. North America is the second-largest market Primary US is contributing in the market growth of dental cam milling market. Next market of Asia pacific is expected to be the fastest growing market for dental CAM milling machines. However, Middle East & Africa are expected to have a limited growth but it is expected that these regions will also help greatly in the market growth in the forecasted period.Dental CAD milling machine market can be segmented into 4 divisions:Segmentation by Type: in-lab scale milling machines, and office scale milling machines.Segmentation by Application: crowns, dentures, bridges, veneers and inlays/onlays.Segmentation by End User: dental laboratory, dental clinic, and research/academic institutes.ContinueWe are thankful for the support and assistance from Dental CAM Milling Machine Market Research Report- Global Forecast To 2022 chain related technical experts and marketing experts during Research Team survey and interviews.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Global Aerosol Can Market 2018: Industry Key Players, Share, Trend, Applications, Forecast to 2022

Aerosol Can Market

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Global Aerosol Can Market Research Report - Forecast to 2022Aerosol Can Market Information Report by Type (Straight wall, Necked-in and Shaped), by Material (Metal, Glass and Plastic) and by Application (Personal Care, Industrial, Pharmaceutical, and Automotive), and by Region - Global Forecast to 2022Market Scenario:Aerosol can are handheld container or dispenser from which an aerosol is released. Aerosol can provides high performance while storage, transportation and high convenience to consumers due to its effective packaging solution. The presence of established retailers requires FMCG companies to innovate the packaging solution so as to attract more customers and it is one of the major drivers of the global aerosol can market.Increasing demand for alcoholic beverages owing to changing lifestyle patterns is also augmenting the demand for metal aerosol cans. The global aerosol cans market is expected to account for USD 6,697.3 by 2022 with 4.06% CAGR.Key Players:The leading players in Aerosol Can market are Crown Holdings (U.S.), Ball Corporation (U.S.), Ardagh Group (Luxembourg), CCL Industries (Canada), Toyo Seikan Group Holdings, Ltd. (Japan), Kian Joo Can Factory Berhad (Malaysia), Exal Corporation (U.S.), CPMC Holdings Ltd. (China), Al-Can exports (India), Shanghai Sunhome Industrial Company (China).Request For Sample Report @Regional Analysis of Aerosol Can Market:The aerosol cans can be geographically segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC) and Rest of the World (ROW). Europe is expected to dominate the global aerosol can market wherein, the U.K is expected to be largest manufacturer of aerosol cans followed by Germany due to increased demand for personal care products. Asia is expected to witness fastest growth due to growing economies such as China & India, where the number of consumer are increasing. Europe accounted for the largest market share of 36.40% in 2015, with a market value of USD 1,857.1 million and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 3.60% during the forecast period.Intended Audience: Aerosol can manufacturers Distributer & Supplier companies End Users consultants and Investment bankers Government as well as Independent Regulatory AuthoritiesProduct Analysis: Product matrix which gives a detailed comparison of the market for different recycled product typesAdditional Information: Regulatory Landscape Pricing Analysis Macroeconomic IndicatorsGeographic Analysis: Geographical analysis across 15 countriesCompany Information: Profiling of 10 key market players In-depth analysis including SWOT analysis, and strategy information of related to report title Competitive landscape including emerging trends adopted by major companiesThe report for Aerosol Can Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.Complete Report Details @Table of Contents1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY2 INTRODUCTION.10 COMPANY PROFILES11.1 Crown Holdings 8711.1.1 Company Overview 8711.1.2 Financial Overview 8811.1.1 Product/Service Offering 8911.1.2 Strategy 8911.1.3 SWOT Analysis 9011.2 Ball Corporation 9111.2.1 Company Overview 9111.2.2 Financial Overview 9111.2.3 Product/Service Offering 9211.2.4 Strategy 9211.2.5 SWOT Analysis 9311.3 Ardagh Group 9411.3.1 Company Overview 9411.3.2 Financial Overview 9411.3.3 Product/Service Offering 9611.3.4 Strategy 9611.3.5 SWOT Analysis 9711.4 CCL Industries 9811.4.1 Company Overview 9811.4.2 Financial Overview 9811.4.3 Product/Business Segment Overview 9911.4.4 Strategy 9911.4.5 SWOT Analysis 10011.5 Toyo Seikan Group Holdings, Ltd. 10111.5.1 Company Overview 10111.5.2 Financial Overview 10111.5.3 Product/Business Segment Overview 10211.5.4 Strategy 10311.5.5 SWOT Analysis 10311.6 Kian Joo Can Factory Berhad 10411.6.1 Company Overview 10411.6.2 Financial Overview 10411.6.3 Product/Business Segment Overview 10511.6.4 Strategy 10511.7 Exal Corporation 10711.7.1 Company Overview 10711.7.2 Financial Overview 10711.7.3 Product/Service Offering 10711.7.4 Strategy 10811.8 CPMC Holdings Ltd. 10911.8.1 Company Overview 10911.8.2 Financial Overview 10911.8.3 Product/Business Segment Overview 10911.9 Al-Can Exports 11011.9.1 Company Overview 11011.9.2 Financial Overview 11011.9.3 Product/Service Offering 11011.10 Shanghai Sunhome Industrial Company 11011.10.1 Company Overview 11011.10.2 Financial Overview 11111.10.3 Product/Business Segment Overview 111Continued.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.CONTACT US:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Wind Power in Chile Market Outlook to 2030

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ReportsWeb.com published Wind Power 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."Wind Power in Chile, 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 wind power market in Chile.The Wind Power in Chile Market report provides in depth analysis on global renewable power market and global wind power market with forecasts up to 2030. The report analyzes the power market scenario in Chile (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 wind, small hydro, biopower and solar PV) and provides forecasts up to 2030. The report highlights installed capacity and power generation trends from 2006 to 2030 in Chile wind power market. A detailed coverage of renewable energy policy framework governing the market with specific policies pertaining to wind power 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.Scope:The report analyses global renewable power market, global wind power (Onshore and Offshore) market, Chile power market, Chile renewable power market and Chile wind power 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 2016-2030.-Renewable power sources include wind (both onshore and offshore), solar photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), small hydropower (SHP), biomass, biogas and geothermal.-Detailed overview of the global wind power market with installed capacity and generation trends, installed capacity split by major hydropower countries in 2016 and key owners information of various regions.-Power market scenario in Chile 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.Get Discount for Report@-An overview on Chile 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 Chile wind power market with installed capacity and generation trends and major active and upcoming wind projects.-Deal analysis of Chile wind power 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 wind power in particular.-Company snapshots of some of the major market participants in the country.Companies Mentioned:Pattern Energy Group LPEngieEnel S.p.A.Enel Green Power S.p.A.Barrick Gold CorporationAcciona Energia, S.A.Buy this Report@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 Chile wind power market.-Facilitate decision-making based on strong historic and forecast data for wind power 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.Table of Content:1 Table of Contents 22 Executive Summary 73 Introduction 114 Renewable Power Market, Global, 2006-2030 195 Wind Power Market, Global, 2006-2030 356 Power Market, Chile, 2006-2030 537 Renewable Power Market, Chile, 2006-2030 688 Wind Power Market, Chile, 2006-2030 849 Power Market, Regulatory Scenario, Chile 9610 Wind Power Market, Chile, Company Profiles 10111 Appendix 128For more information about this 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
CBCT Dental Imaging Market: Valuation USD 325.5 Million by 2023, CAGR of ~ 11.41%

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Dental Cone Beam Computed Tomography or CBCT is a special type of X-ray equipment used when regular dental or facial X-rays are not sufficient. This technology is used to produce three dimensional (3-D) images of the teeth, soft tissues, nerve pathways, and bones in a single scan.Increasing funding for research is leading to new and innovative device development that is driving the market growth. Rapid adoption of advanced devices by dental professionals for accurate and effective diagnosis is also important for the market growth. The use of 3D radiographic imaging in orthodontics is growing rapidly which has fueled the market demand. Changing technology and healthcare practices also play major role in the growth of this market. Some other factors include growing aging population, rising awareness, investment made by hospitals for technology up gradation, increasing cases of gum diseases and sport injuries that are spurring the market growth.Government support to encourage research and development also plays an important role here. Academic and research institutes are leading new researches that are expanding the application of CBCT imaging devices. Increasing use of CBCT imaging in cosmetic dentistry treatments is another key driving force for the market.However, some factors are inhibiting the growth of Europe CBCT Dental Imaging market such as lack of awareness for the use of advanced technologies which results in slow adoption of advanced technologies in many European countries, risk of radiations in children and teens etc.CBCT dental imaging industry is growing rapidly and is expected to continue its growth during 2017-2023. Europe CBCT Dental Imaging market is expected to grow at the CAGR of ~ 11.41% during the forecast period and is estimated to reach USD 325.5 million by 2023.Get a Copy of Sample Report @Key players for Europe CBCT Dental Imaging market: Carestream Health (US) Dentsply Sirona (US) FONA Dental S.R.O. (Slovak Republic) Gendex (Danaher Corporation) (US) Imaging Sciences International, LLC. (Danaher Corporation) (US) J.MORITA MFG.CORP (Japan) KaVo Dental GmbH (Danaher Corporation) (Germany) NewTom (Italy) Planmeca OY (Finland)Key Findings: France CBCT dental imaging market is expected to reach USD 4.5 million by 2023. Flat panel detector accounted for the largest market share in 2016, with a market value of USD 302.5 million by 2023. Orthodontics was the second-largest market by application and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.61% during 2017-2023.Segments:Europe CBCT Dental Imaging market has been segmented on the basis of type of detector which comprises of flat panel detector and image intensifier. Flat panel detector is sub-segmented into indirect conversion flat panel detectors and direct conversion flat panel detectors.On the basis of application, it is segmented into dental implants, orthodontics, endodontics, and others. Dental Implants is sub-segmented into endosteal implants and subperiosteal implants.On the basis of end user, this market is segmented into hospitals & dental clinics, academics and research institutes, and others.Browse Full Report Details @Regional analysis of Europe CBCT Dental Imaging market:Considering the scenario of the market, in 2016, Germany accounted for the largest market in Europe CBCT dental imaging market. The highest number of CBCT machines are sold each year in Germany among other European countries. Innovation and technologically advanced product development is leading the market growth. Germany is expected to reach 93.8 million by 2023. Some other factors such as growing aging population, funding for research, and availability of advanced imaging products are driving the market growth.Italy holds second position in Europe CBCT dental imaging market due to rapid adoption of advanced imaging devices and top class medical facilities. This market was valued around USD 29.0 million in 2016 and expected to continue its growth during the forecast period. Availability of advanced healthcare facilities, large amount of money invested for technology up gradation, and high awareness among the medical professional as well as people are spurring the market growth.UK is expected to grow at fastest CAGR of 11.89% during 2017-2023. Some major factors are driving the market growth such as government support to encourage research and new product development, growing aging population, increasing cases of various dental problems, increasing number of people suffering from gum problems etc.Rest of Europe is expected to grow slower than other European countries in this market and this lag can be attributed to slow adoption of advanced devices, low investment for research and technology up gradation, slow economic growth, traditional approach toward the healthcare etc.The report for Europe CBCT Dental Imaging Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain deeper insight to the market and industry performance. The report gives a clear picture of the current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regionsContinueWe are thankful for the support and assistance from Europe CBCT Dental Imaging Market Research Report - Forecast till 2023 chain related technical experts and marketing experts during Research Team survey and interviews.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
TWIN FALLS  The fourth and final suspect in the 2015 beating and robbery of Tigre Darin Martinez pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit robbery.

Dwayne McCormick of Twin Falls faced felony charges of robbery, robbery conspiracy, and aggravated battery for his alleged role in robbing and beating Martinez in May 2015.

McCormick, 34, was the only suspect not to plead guilty in the assault until this point. He was scheduled to appear before a jury for the second time on Tuesday but instead entered a Count 2 Alford Plea, which dismisses the charges of robbery and aggravated battery.

A jury trial for McCormick last May was declared a mistrial two days in due to the introduction of new evidence.

Also implicated in the robbery and beating were Caleb Hinton of Twin Falls, who pleaded guilty to felony counts of robbery and intimidating a witness; Katie Lynn Pingree of Twin Falls, who pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting robbery; and Laaken Shai Draper of Twin Falls, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery.

While Martinez, 45, was found dead just hours after the robbery occurred, prosecutors did not pursue homicide charges because an autopsy determined that Martinez died from toxic amounts of methamphetamine.

A sentencing hearing for McCormick is scheduled for March 5.
Solar Photovoltaic in Chile Market Outlook to 2030

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"Solar Photovoltaic (PV) in Chile, 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 Chile.The Solar Photovoltaic (PV) in Chile Market 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 Chile (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 Chile 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.Scope:The report analyses global renewable power market, global Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market, Chile power market, Chile renewable power market and Chile 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 Chile 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.Get Discount for Report@-An overview on Chile 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 Chile Solar Photovoltaic (PV) market with installed capacity and generation trends and major active and upcoming Solar Photovoltaic (PV) projects.-Deal analysis of Chile 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.Companies Mentioned:TerraForm Power, Inc.SunEdison, Inc.Etrion CorporationEnel Green Power S.p.A.Buy this Report@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 Chile 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.Table of Content:1 Table of Contents 22 Executive Summary 73 Introduction 104 Renewable Power Market, Global, 2006-2030 165 Solar Photovoltaic (PV) Market, Global, 2006-2030 326 Power Market, Chile, 2006-2030 457 Renewable Power Market, Chile, 2006-2030 608 Solar Photovoltaic (PV) Market, Chile 769 Power Market, Regulatory Scenario, Chile 8810 Solar Photovoltaic (PV) Market, Chile, Company Profiles 9311 Appendix 106For 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-411028Phone : +91-20-67278686E-Mail : info@reportsweb.com
Global Flow Cytometer Reagents Market Analysis, Trend & Foresight to 2023

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Flow cytometer reagents market Analysis by applications, Key Companies, type, end users & Is expected to reach US$ 8.88 billion by 2023, and the market is projected to grow at a CAGR of ~ 12.0 % during the forecast period 2017-2023Flow cytometer reagents are used for calibrating, maintaining, validating and conducting or supporting the experiments. Thus, they are essential for the normal and satisfactory working of the instrument. Calibration reagents are used for validating that the instrument records the values consistent with the actual or real concentration or number of cells. These are proprietary and contain particle concentration in a narrow range. The buffers are used to maintain the pH of the solutions used in flow cytometry. Specificity reagents are used to bind selectively to the sample particles so as to ease detectability.The global Flow Cytometer Reagents Market is expected to reach US$ 8.88 billion by 2023, and the market is projected to grow at a CAGR of ~ 12.0 % during the forecast period 2017-2023.Get a Copy of Sample Report @The market for flow cytometer reagents is rising fast due to increasing use of flow cytometry in pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry, launch of new reagents for specific applications like diagnostics & drug discovery, development of user-friendly & software, growing prevalence of infectious diseases etc. The market restraints are the high cost of the flow cytometer reagents because of the proprietary nature of most reagents and the lack of transparency in the market.A close look at the market reveals that product development is the most attractive strategy which has been exploited by many market players. The high profit margin and returns on investment on the flow cytometer reagents has led to the growth of the market with many large firms entering the market. The growing adoption of flow cytometry techniques in research activities especially drug development has led to growth of the market for flow cytometer reagents. Another important driver has been the increasing adaptation and automation of flow cytometer in diagnostics especially infectious diseases.Key Players in the Global Flow cytometer reagents Market Biocompare Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. Miltenyi Biotec BioLegend, Inc. Becton Dickinson and Company Beckman Coulter, Inc. Merck KGaA ImmunoReagents, Inc. Thermo Fisher ScientificSegments:The global flow cytometer reagents market has been segmented on the basis of types, applications, and end users.Based on types, the market has been segmented as the calibration and validation reagents, specificity reagents, supporting reagents, secondary reagents, isotype controls, buffers and others.Based on the applications, the market has been segmented into diagnostics, drug discovery and others.Based on the end users, the market has been segmented as pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, academic and research centers, diagnostic centers and others.Browse Full Report Details @Regional analysis:The Americas account for the significant market share owing to extensive use of medications and high expenditure on the health care. Additionally, the fastest uptake of new technology in the US drives the global flow cytometer reagents market. Also, the concentration of the major research companies and biotechnology sector in the developed countries of this region is adding fuel to the market.Europe is the second largest market in the world due to high industrial and research base.Asia Pacific region is expected to grow rapidly and China and India are likely to lead this market due to fast growing industrial sector during the forecast period.Gulf nations such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE drive the Middle East & African market. The African region is expected to witness a moderate growth owing to poor economic and political conditions and poor healthcare development.Get Discount @The report for Global Flow cytometer reagents market by Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain a deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives a clear picture of the current market scenario which includes past and estimated future market size with respect to value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides detail information about and strategies used by top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.ContinueWe are thankful for the support and assistance from Flow Cytometer Reagents Market Research Report- Global Forecast till 2023 chain related technical experts and marketing experts during Research Team survey and interviews.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Media Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com
Saudi Arabia Midstream Oil and Gas Industry Outlook to 2022- Market Forecasts for Oil Storage, Pipelines and Gas Processing

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ReportsWeb.com published Oil and Gas 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."Saudi Arabia Midstream Oil and Gas Industry Outlook to 2022-Market Forecasts for Oil Storage, Pipelines and Gas Processing", is a comprehensive report on midstream oil and gas industry in Saudi Arabia. The report provides details such as name, type, operational status and operator for all active and planned (new build) oil storage terminals, major trunk pipelines and gas processing plants in Saudi Arabia till 2022. Further, the report also offers recent developmets and latest contracts awarded in the country's midstream sector.For more information about this report@Scope:-Updated information related to all active and planned oil storage terminals, major trunk pipelines and gas processing plants in the country, including operator and equity details-Key mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, private equity and initial public offerings in the country's midstream oil and gas industry, where available-Latest developments and awarded contracts related to midstream oil and gas industry in the countryReasons to buy:-Gain a strong understanding of the country's midstream oil and gas industry-Facilitate decision making on the basis of strong historic and forecast of capacity data-Assess your competitor's major oil storage terminals, major trunk pipelines and gas processing plants in the country-Analyze the latest developments and awarded contracts related to the country's midstream oil and gas industryRequest a sample copy@Table of Contents1 Table of Contents 12. Introduction 72.1. What is This Report About-72.2. Market Definition 73. Saudi Arabia Oil Storage Industry 94. Saudi Arabia Oil and Gas Pipelines Industry 375. Saudi Arabia Gas Processing Industry 1456. Recent Contracts 1696.1. Detailed Contract Summary 1696.1.1. Awarded Contracts 1697. Recent Developments 1967.1. Other Significant Developments 1967.1.1. May 18, 2017: CPP Completes First Hot Tapping In Saudi Arabia 1967.1.2. Mar 30, 2017: CPP: Site Work Started In Ras Tanura Pipeline Project 1967.1.3. Dec 23, 2016: CPP Starts Hot Tapping Work For MGS In Saudi Arabia 1967.1.4. Oct 17, 2016: Saudi Aramco Updates On Midyan Gas Plant 1967.1.5. Sep 26, 2016: Saudi Aramco To Invest Around $334bn In Infrastructure And Projects By 2025 1997.1.6. Sep 26, 2016: CPP Kicks Off Ras Tanura Pipeline Project 1997.1.7. Sep 20, 2016: Saudi Aramco Contains Minor Fire At Ras Tanura 2007.1.8. Aug 16, 2016: Petrofac, Tecnicas Reunidas May Secure Contracts For Uthmaniyah And Ras Tanura Projects 2007.2. New Contracts Announcements 2017.2.1. Apr 27, 2017: SNC-Lavalin Wins Engineering And Project Management Services Contract For Gas Oil Separation Plant In Saudi Arabia 2017.2.2. Apr 24, 2017: SNC-Lavalin Wins Contract To Perform Design Work For Gas-Oil Separation Plant Expansion At Berri Oilfield 2017.2.3. Apr 17, 2017: Punj Lloyd Awarded Project Worth INR 312 Crore In Saudi Arabia 2027.2.4. Mar 02, 2017: CPP Signs First Procurement Contract In Ras Tanura Project 2027.2.5. Oct 28, 2016: Hyundai E&C Wins $735 mln Order From Aramco To Build Gas Processing Plant 2037.2.6. Sep 19, 2016: Saudi KAD Awarded Contract To Execute Pipeline Projects Under Saudi Aramco's Master Gas Program Phase II and Fadhili Gas Program 2038. Appendix 204Inquire for 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-411028Phone : +91-20-67278686E-Mail : info@reportsweb.com
Portable Cash Counting Machine 2018 Global Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.11% and Forecast to 2022

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On  Portable Cash Counting Machine 2018 Global Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.11% and Forecast to 2022.Description:The analysts forecast the global portable cash counting machine market to grow at a CAGR of 4.11% during the period 2018-2022.Currency is an accepted form of money used in exchange of goods and services. Currency is of two types namely, banknotes and coins. It is issued by the governments of countries and are legally accepted. A portable cash counting machine is used for either counting or sorting of banknotes or detection of counterfeit currency or all the three. It is also called an automatic counting machine, money counting machine, money counters, cash counters and bill counters.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comCovered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global portable cash counting machine market for 2018-2022. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sales of portable cash counting machine.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography: Americas APAC EMEAThe report, Global Portable Cash Counting Machine Market 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendors Cummins-Allison Glory Global Solutions Giesecke+Devrient Godrej.com Royal SovereignMarket driver Increased availability of fake currency For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend rising adoption of low-weight-based portable cash counting machines For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this report What will the market size be in 2022 and what will the growth rate be? What are the key market trends? What is driving this market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key vendors in this market space?Ask Query @Table Of Contents  Major Key PointsPART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARYPART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORTPART 03: RESEARCH METHODOLOGYPART 04: INTRODUCTION Market outlinePART 05: MARKET LANDSCAPE Market ecosystem Market characteristics Market segmentation analysisPART 06: MARKET SIZING Market definition Market sizing 2017 Market size and forecast 2017-2022PART 07: FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS Bargaining power of buyers Bargaining power of suppliers Threat of new entrants Threat of substitutes Threat of rivalry Market conditionPART 08: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY PRODUCT Segmentation by product Comparison by product Countertop cash counting machine  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Mini-portable cash counting machine  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunity by productPART 09: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPEPART 10: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY END-USER Segmentation by end-user Comparison by end-user BFSI  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Retail  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Casinos  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Others  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunity by end-userPART 11: REGIONAL LANDSCAPE Geographical segmentation Regional comparison APAC  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 EMEA  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Americas  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Key leading countries Market opportunityPART 12: DECISION FRAMEWORKPART 13: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES Market drivers Market challengesPART 14: MARKET TRENDS Rise in adoption of low-weight-based portable cash counting machines Development of portable cash counting machines with enhanced functionality Market consolidation through M&AsContinue.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.
Forecast and Analysis on Trichomonas Rapid Testing Market for Period 2017-2025

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Trichomoniasis is a sexually transmitted disease (STD) caused by a protozoan parasite known as Trichomonas vaginalis. The symptoms of the disease is common to other sexually transmitted infection. The trichomoniasis can be easily treated, but proper diagnosis is necessary. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about 3.7 million people in United States suffer from trichomoniasis. The common symptoms of the disease includes vaginal discharge, genital redness or swelling, urge to urinate frequently and others and are usually symptoms are visible after 28 days after a person is infected.Report overview @The diagnosis of the disease cannot be only done alone by diagnosing the symptoms. The laboratory test for the diagnosis of the disease includes cell culture, antigen tests, Trichomonas DNA test, examining vaginal fluid under the microscope and others. The infection is increases with time if not treated, the treatment is usually cured within a week. The reinfection rate for the disease in common among women. The reinfection rate is high as 17% in the beginning of three months after infection. Some cases are reported in which the trichomonas get resistant to certain medications.The trichomonas rapid testing are highly accurate compared to other testing types such as culture testing and other wet preparation examination (WP) testing. The trichomonas rapid testing kits are simple to perform and takes only 10 minutes or less to perform. The trichomonas rapid test kits are an immunochro-matographic assay that detects antigens from from vaginal swabs. Recent studies shows that Trichomonas vaginalis is the cause of the premature rupture of membranes, urethritis, pelvic diseases. Trichomoniasis is common curable sexually transmitted disease. According to the center for disease control and prevention, the prevalence of trichomonas vaginalis in the U.S. is estimated to be about 3.1% in the women between ages 14 to 49. The African American women had the prevalence of trichomoniasis among African American women in and Mexican American women prevalence is about 1.8%. People generally reach out for prescription support.Medication (metronidazole or tinidazole) pills are used as a common treatment for trichomoniasis. On an average 1 in 5 women get reinfection after three months of treatment. Lifestyle changes such as lack of physical exercise, limiting alcohol intake, etc., may also help in the treatment process. Rising awareness about the right diagnosis and treatment, rise in the prevalence of the trichomoniasis disease help to fuel revenue growth.Request Report for TOC @Global trichomonas rapid testing is segmented by product type and end user. Based on the treatment type, global trichomonas rapid testing market is segmented as wet mount trichomonas rapid diagnostic test kits and PCR based trichomonas rapid diagnostic test kits. On the basis of end user, the global Trichomonas rapid testing market is segmented into hospital, diagnostic laboratories, speciality clinics, and others. Rise in incidence of trichomonas, increased awareness about diagnosis and rapid test kits new product launch and others are some of the factors drive the global trichomonas rapid testing market during the forecast period. Whereas inadequate access to health care, cost and availability of essential medicines and lack of standardized tools for diagnosis and treatment will hamper the growth of global trichomonas rapid testing market.By Geography, the global trichomonas rapid testing market is segmented into five broad regions viz. North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa. North America is estimated to lead the global Trichomonas rapid testing market due to rise in prevalence of trichomonas in United States. In the U.S., a large base of population, especially women, suffer from STDs. Europe market is also projected to experience high growth in the near future. Asia Pacific market is anticipated to grow at the fastest growth rate during the forecast period, owing to factors such as rising standard of living, lifestyle changes, rise in awareness about STDs and focusing on healthcare expenditures.Some of the major players in global trichomonas rapid testing market are Quidel Corporation, McKesson Medical-Surgical Inc., Sekisui Diagnostics, Genzyme Diagnostics, Nanjing Liming Bio-Products Co., Ltd., and Others.Request to Sample of Report-About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Animal Pharmaceutical Global Market 2018: Key Players  Zoetis, Merck, Merial, Elanco, Bayer Animal Health

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Animal Pharmaceutical IndustryDescriptionWiseguyreports.Com Adds Animal Pharmaceutical -Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities and Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecast To 2022 To Its Research DatabaseThis report studies Animal Pharmaceutical 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, coveringZoetisMerckMerialElancoBayer Animal HealthBoehringer Ingelheim VetmedicaVirbacCeva Sante AnimaleVetoquinolJuroxMSD Animal Health AustraliaPARNELLCAHICRingpu BiologyRequest for Sample Report @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoVaccineVeterinary DrugsOtherBy Application, the market can be split intoCompanion AnimalPoultryOtherBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaLeave a Query @Table of ContentsGlobal Animal Pharmaceutical Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of Animal Pharmaceutical1.1 Definition and Specifications of Animal Pharmaceutical1.1.1 Definition of Animal Pharmaceutical1.1.2 Specifications of Animal Pharmaceutical1.2 Classification of Animal Pharmaceutical1.2.1 Vaccine1.2.2 Veterinary Drugs1.2.3 Other1.3 Applications of Animal Pharmaceutical1.3.1 Companion Animal1.3.2 Poultry1.3.3 Other1.4 Market Segment by Regions1.4.1 North America1.4.2 China1.4.3 Europe1.4.4 Southeast Asia1.4.5 Japan1.4.6 India....8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Animal Pharmaceutical8.1 Zoetis8.1.1 Company Profile8.1.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.1.2.1 Product A8.1.2.2 Product B8.1.3 Zoetis 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.1.4 Zoetis 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.2 Merck8.2.1 Company Profile8.2.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.2.2.1 Product A8.2.2.2 Product B8.2.3 Merck 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.2.4 Merck 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.3 Merial8.3.1 Company Profile8.3.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.3.2.1 Product A8.3.2.2 Product B8.3.3 Merial 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.3.4 Merial 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.4 Elanco8.4.1 Company Profile8.4.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.4.2.1 Product A8.4.2.2 Product B8.4.3 Elanco 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.4.4 Elanco 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.5 Bayer Animal Health8.5.1 Company Profile8.5.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.5.2.1 Product A8.5.2.2 Product B8.5.3 Bayer Animal Health 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.5.4 Bayer Animal Health 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.6 Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica8.6.1 Company Profile8.6.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.6.2.1 Product A8.6.2.2 Product B8.6.3 Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.6.4 Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.7 Virbac8.7.1 Company Profile8.7.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.7.2.1 Product A8.7.2.2 Product B8.7.3 Virbac 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.7.4 Virbac 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.8 Ceva Sante Animale8.8.1 Company Profile8.8.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.8.2.1 Product A8.8.2.2 Product B8.8.3 Ceva Sante Animale 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.8.4 Ceva Sante Animale 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.9 Vetoquinol8.9.1 Company Profile8.9.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.9.2.1 Product A8.9.2.2 Product B8.9.3 Vetoquinol 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.9.4 Vetoquinol 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.10 Jurox8.10.1 Company Profile8.10.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.10.2.1 Product A8.10.2.2 Product B8.10.3 Jurox 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.10.4 Jurox 2016 Animal Pharmaceutical Business Region Distribution Analysis8.11 MSD Animal Health Australia8.12 PARNELL8.13 CAHIC8.14 Ringpu BiologyBuy Now @Continued...Contact Us: Sales@Wiseguyreports.Com Ph: +1-646-845-9349 (Us) Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (Uk)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt LtdPune  411028Maharashtra, GlobalPh: +91 841 198 5042
Veterinary Diagnostics Market Sales Revenue Analysis, Major Manufacturers Performance, Market Followed By Top Companies Idvet, Pfizer, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. and +9.6% CAGR Rapidly Increasing in 2017

Global Veterinary Diagnostics Market Trend 2024

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Data Bridge Market Research Report added  Global Veterinary Diagnostics Market. The Veterinary diagnostic imaging equipment is primarily used for imaging the animal body with the help of various imaging technologies. Diagnostic imaging is the noninvasive method of making medical images of the body to diagnose disease.Global Veterinary Diagnostics Market accounted to USD 2.06 billion in 2016 growing at a CAGR of 9.6% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2024.This Report Contains Below Details: No of Pages: 350 No of Tables: 220 No of Figures: 60Click Here for Sample Report Visit @Top Market Competitors Abaxis Henry Schein Heska Corporation IDvet Pfizer Thermo Fisher Scientific Virbac Life Technologies Corporation Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., Among othersMarket Segmentation of Global Veterinary Diagnostics MarketBy technology, the market for veterinary diagnostics is segmented into clinical biochemistry, urinalysis, immuno diagnostics, hematology, and molecular diagnostics.By product type, the veterinary diagnostics market is segmented into instruments and consumables.By animal type, the segmentation of the market is dogs, cats, horses, cattle, pigs, and poultry. On the basis of end-users the veterinary diagnostics market is segmented into hospitals and clinics, reference laboratories, universities/research institutions.On the basis of geography, veterinary diagnostics market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies such as North America & South America Europe Asia-Pacific Middle East & AfricaSome of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Brazil among others. In 2017, North America is expected to dominate the market.Read more about Report Visit @TABLE OF CONTENTS1 INTRODUCTION1.1 OVERVIEW OF THE GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET1.2 CURRENCY AND PRICING1.3 LIMITATION1.4 MARKETS COVERED2 MARKET SEGMENTATION2.1 KEY TAKEAWAYS2.2 ARRIVING AT THE GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET SIZE2.3 GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET: RESEARCH SNAPSHOT2.4 ASSUMPTIONS3 MARKET OVERVIEW3.1 DRIVERS3.2 RESTRAINTS3.3 OPPORTUNITIES3.4 CHALLENGES4 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY5 PREMIUM INSIGHTS6 GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET, BY PRODUCT TYPE6.1 OVERVIEW6.2 IMMUNODIAGNOSTICS6.3 CLINICAL BIOCHEMISTRY6.4 HEMATOLOGY6.5 MOLECULAR DIAGNOSTICS7 GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET, BY ANIMAL7.1 OVERVIEW7.2 LIVESTOCK CATTLE7.3 DOMESTIC PETS8 GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET, BY END USERS9 GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET,BY DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL10 GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET, BY GEOGRAPHY10.1 COUNTRYWISE GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET,(ALL SEGMENTATION PROVIDED ABOVE IS REPRESENTED IN THIS CHAPTER BY COUNTRY)10.1.1 NORTH AMERICA10.1.2 EUROPE10.1.3 ASIA-PACIFIC (APAC)10.1.4 SOUTH AMERICA10.1.5 MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA10.2 KEY PRIMARY INSIGHTS: BY MAJOR COUNTRIES11 GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET: COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE11.1. GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET:COMPANY SHARE ANALYSIS11.2. NORTH AMERICA VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET:COMPANY SHARE ANALYSIS11.3. EUROPE VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET:COMPANY SHARE ANALYSIS11.4. APAC VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET:COMPANY SHARE ANALYSIS11.5. MEA VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET:COMPANY SHARE ANALYSIS12 GLOBAL VETERINARY DIAGNOSTICS MARKET, COMPANY PROFILES12.1 ABAXIS, INC.12.2 HESKA CORPORATION12.3 NEOGEN CORPORATION12.4 QIAGEN N.V12.5 VIRBAC13 APPENDIX14 ABOUT DATA BRIDGE MARKET RESEARCHTo Know More about Detail TOC Visit us @:Related ReportGlobal Anesthesia and Respiratory Devices Market  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Global Anesthesia and Respiratory Devices Market By Type (Anesthesia Monitoring Devices Market, Anesthesia Delivery Systems Market, Respiratory Devices), By Product Type, By Application, By Distribution Channel, By End Users, By Geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Europe, South America, Middle East and Africa)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Report Access:About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Vishal DixitData Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: Sales@databridgemarketresearch.comInvestor: investors@databridgemarketresearch.comVisit Blog:Follow us on LinkedIn:
Global Medical Device Technologies Market Research Report 2018

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Global Medical Device Technologies Market Research Report 2017. While the threat of substitutes and technological risks could have an unfavorable impact on the global market, potential applications and opportunities from emerging regions have been anticipated to raise the hopes of industry players.The healthcare industry recognizes medical devices as all equipment and tools that are used either individually or together for diagnostics or therapy. This spectrum includes medical instruments, materials, devices, software, and electronic devices. The competitive landscape of the global Medical Device Technologies market is currently hinged around the top players. Most of the players are focusing heavily on enhancement of existing technologies while still dedicating a huge chunk of their resources for product innovation. The nature of the market is such that entry for newer players can be challenging, but not impossible due to the desperate need for newer technologies and innovative patents in the market.Top Key Operating Vendors:Abbott Laboratories, Boston Scientific Corporation, Baxter International Inc., Medtronic plc, Cardinal Health Inc., F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., GE Healthcare, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens Healthineers, Smith & Nephew plc, Stryker Corporation, Koninklijke Philips N.V.Get Sample Copy of this report:The Global Medical Device Technologies Market is segmented on the basis of type, treatment, end-user, and applications. Among these, the Medical Device Technologies subdivision accounted for the widely held market share during 2017 and will continue to overlook the market throughout the forecast period. The most important driving factor for the market is the growing demand for active delivery mechanisms of novel biopharmaceuticals. On the basis of the end-user segment, the hospitals segment is anticipated to account for the biggest share of the market. This can be mainly accredited to advantages such as the noteworthy number of inpatient and outpatient visits in hospitals in comparison to other end users and the necessity of large capacities of drugs and their corresponding delivery devices to cater to the demand of this patient pool.The report provides both, qualitative and quantitative research of the Global Medical Device Technologies Market, as well as encompasses worthy insights into the rational scenario and favored improvement methods adopted by key contenders. The manufacturing base of each key player and their share in the market for each product and application section of the market have been explained in the report. Distinctive promoting channels and methodology inclined to bear fruit in the 2017-2025 figure period have been assigned in the report to empower readers to plan winning methodologies.To get more information, Ask for Sample PDF illustration with TOC, Tables, Figures and Charts @Table Of Content:Chapter 1 Medical Device Technologies Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic Impact on IndustryChapter 3 Global Market Competition by ManufacturersChapter 4 Global Production, Revenue (Value) by RegionChapter 5 Global Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by RegionsChapter 6 Global Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 Global Market Analysis by ApplicationChapter 8 Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11 Market Effect Factors AnalysisEarly buyers will receive up to 40% Discount on this reportAbout Healthcare Intelligence Markets:At HealthCare Intelligence Market, we supply market intelligence reports in the domain of personalized drugs & diagnostics after going through a rigorous research process. The healthcare industry is constantly evolving as trends are getting replaced at a rapid pace.These new trends along with the changing demands of patients and healthcare organizations, are collectively contributing to the development of the global healthcare industry.namer: Shreyas TannaHealthcare Intelligence Markets601, Winterberry Purple, Koregaon Park, Pune, 411001sales@healthcareintelligencemarkets.com+91 7400242424
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Gentleman and Student of the Year star, Sidharth Malhotra celebrated his birthday on January 16 with Army Jawans and his upcoming movie Aiyaary star cast. The cast and crew of Aiyaary were invited by the Jawans and visited the BSF Camps in Jaisalmer. Not only did the the star spend the day, singing and dancing with them but also shared a birthday cake) with them.The team of the movie then took a jeep and camel ride along the border. The movie crew paid gratitude to the Jawans for their hospitality and also to their bravery along the border.After the celebrations, Sidharth is said to have had a wonderful day and a fulfilling birthday gift (). According to News 18 article, he said to the army officials, "I feel very special, thank you so much for entertaining us so well and celebrating my birthday. Thank you, Ajay and Amit sir (Army officers), when we did activities throughout the day with you, we realised how hard you work for our security. We just wanted to spend a day with you, some recreation, singing, dancing, this is all that we can give you back because what you all do for us is too high in value, what we are doing for you is too less. I'm hoping that you continue to protect us and we come back to entertain you. Thank you so much for making it special."Later, Sidharth Malhotra also celebrated his birthday bash with friends Karan Johar amongst others. The actor who turned 33 wore a black and white t-shirt teamed with black jeans for the party. Sidharth Malhotra made his debut with the KJO Movie, student of the year and since has acted in around 15 Bollyoowd movies. He has played key roles in Hasee to Phasee, Ek Villain, Kapoor and Sons amongst other movies. He was also flooded with birthday greetings on Twitter from celebs. His Aiyaary co-stars Rakul Preet Singh and Pooja Chopra also sent him birthday wishes through twitter.IndiaGift.in is new generation gifting website which offers gift delivery in India. The website has more than 1000 delivery partners in India and boasts of the largest gift delivery network. You can surprisingly present the impressive personalized gift item in the Diwlai, Valentine Day, Anniversary, Friendship Day and so on. We delivers Cakes, Gifts & Flowers overall India like Pune, Delhi, Banglore, Gurgaon, Kolkata, Hydrabaad and many more cities. Keep the uniqueness in choosing online gift items and make sure you get the best online gifts. The price of all the gift items is affordable and online gifting site provides various benefits like ease of purchase, quick delivery, reliable customer support service, securable payment option, etc.Rupal BansalJ-17, South City 1, Gurgaon, 122001
Point of Care Blood Gas and Electrolyte Market is estimated to cross USD 2,543.1 million by 2023

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Market Research Future published a cooked research report on the global point of care blood gas and electrolyte devices market.Point of care blood gas and electrolyte analyzers is the new technology, which helps in reducing therapeutic turnaround time, enhancing patient satisfaction, accuracy, and help to improve hospital operations. Rising prevalence of chronic diseases and cancer across the globe, increasing the treatment of NICUs, ICUs, Cardiovascular Operating Room (CVOR), and emergency department, which drives the global point of care blood gas and electrolyte devices market growth. In 2017, due to changes in the regulatory policies of the U.S., R&D investment is affected to some extent. In 2016, R&D spending of the US was 527.5 billion, which grew by 1.6% in 2017. Currently, the major shares of the global market are dominated by few leading players, and they can fluctuate the costs of the products. In developing regions such as Asia Pacific the suppliers are trying to provide their products at affordable price.The global point of care blood gas and electrolyte devices market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.8% during the forecast period 2017-2023.Get a sample report atThe global point of care blood gas and electrolyte gas devices market has been segmented on the basis of types and end users.On the basis of the types, the market is segmented into consumables and Instruments. The instrument type is sub-segmented into benchtop and portable devices. The consumable devices are further segmented into reagents, cartridges, and others.On the basis of the end users, the market is segmented into hospitals & clinics, home care, research institutions, and others.Regional AnalysisThe Americas dominate the global market owing to a huge population with chronic diseases such as diabetes, kidney, and liver disease, increasing government support for research & development, and high health care expenditure. According to the WHO, in 2014, 9.7% of the total America population is having diabetes. Thus, increasing prevalence of diabetes has boosted the market growth. Additionally, changing lifestyle and the presence of major players in the market have fuelled the growth of the market.Europe is the second largest point of care devices market across the globe, which is followed by Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market and majorly driven by India and China owing to a huge number patients with chronic diseases and rapidly growing economy. According to the WHO, 60% of the global diabetic population lives in Asia Pacific region. The healthcare expenditure of Asia Pacific has increased over the last few years, which has contributed to the growth of the market.The Middle East and Africa region account for the least share of the global market. Whereas, Africa holds the least share of the global market due to limited availability of medical facilities and poor economic condition of the region.Key PlayersSome of the major players in this market: Siemens, Abbott, F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd., Radiometer, Nova medical, Edan Instruments Inc., and Instrumentation LaboratoryBrowse Complete Report atAccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2015, the number of adults with diagnosed chronic bronchitis and emphysema were 9.3 million and 3.5 million respectively. Additionally, according to WHO in 2016, over 1.9 billion adults aged 18 years and older were obese, which was approximately 650 million. Overall 13% of worlds adult population (11% of men and 15% of women) were obese. These diseases are the main cause of the immense growth of treatment in NICUs, ICUs, Cardiovascular Operating Room (CVOR), and emergency department. Point of care blood gas developers is now focusing on developing automated and user-friendly devices, which may lead the market of this product in the coming future. Healthcare expenditure across the world is rapidly increasing. From the last decade, healthcare expenditure in regions like the Americas and Europe has been growing rapidly. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in 2015, the U.S. healthcare spending was increased by 5.8% and reached USD 3.2 trillion.About usAt Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Market Research FutureP: +1 646 845 9312W:sales@marketresearchfuture.com
BURLEY  A father and son were the supply source for several large-scale meth traffickers in the Treasure Valley, federal prosecutors say. Now, Sergio Chavez-Verduzco and Sergio Chavez-Macias, both from Burley, have been sentenced to federal prison.

Chavez-Verduzco was also sentenced for his participation in a continuing criminal enterprise, U.S. Attorney Bart Davis said in a statement.

Chief U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill sentenced Chavez-Verduzco to 35 years in prison, and Chavez-Macias to 12 years. Judge Winmill also ordered that both serve five years of supervised release and to forfeit $420,000 in drug proceeds.

In June a federal jury found the two guilty after a five day trial.

Evidence presented in court showed that, in 2015 and early 2016, Chavez-Verduzco and Chavez-Macias supplied Boise-area traffickers with hundreds of pounds of methamphetamine, prosecutors said.

Investigators from the Ada County Sheriffs Office, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the City County Narcotics Unit of Canyon County, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Gooding County Sheriffs Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Idaho State Police helped in the case.
The World Unnatural Amino Acids Market is Estimated to Grow at a CAGR of ~ 9.5 % by 2023

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The global unnatural amino acids market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.2% during the forecast period 2017-2023.Evolution of pharmaceutical industry has led to the development of new pharmaceutical products. Unnatural amino acids are important raw materials or the building blocks of number of finished pharmaceutical products. They are either synthesised chemically or occur naturally, and are also known as non-proteinogenic amino acids. Number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies are engaged in the manufacturing of unnatural amino acids, whose demand is increasing continuously.The global market is majorly driven by increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, and development of pharmaceutical industry fuel the market growth. The growth of the market is also affected by the increasing demand for new treatment options for chronic diseases. Large number of key market players restrain the entry of new players in the market.Sample Report Available atKey Players : Merck KGaA (Germany), CordenPharma International (Germany), YONEYAMA YAKUHIN KOGYO CO.,LTD. (Japan), Sekisui XenoTech, LLC. (U.S.) , Varsal (U.S.), Biosyn (U.S.), NAGASE & CO., LTD. (Japan), Kyowa Hakko Europe GmbH, AbbVie, Inc. (U.S.), Ajinomoto Co., Inc. (Japan), AminoLogics Co. Ltd. (South Korea), AnaSpec, Inc. (U.S.), BASF SE (Germany), Biological E Ltd. (India), C-TRI Co., Ltd. (South Korea), and Evonik Industries AG (Germany), Divis Laboratories Ltd. (India), Donboo Amino Acid Co., Ltd. (China), DSM Sinochem Pharmaceuticals (Singapore), EMD Millipore (USA), Enzo Life Sciences, Inc. (USA), Evonik Industries AG (Germany), GlaxoSmithKline plc (U.K), Novartis AG (Switzerland), Pfizer, Inc. (USA), Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. (India), Sanofi (France).Regional AnalysisThe American market is expected to show an exponential growth owing to booming pharmaceutical industry, increasing healthcare expenditure, and concentration of major market players. The key players are engaged in strategic approaches such as merger, acquisitions, partnership, and collaboration to maintain their leading position in the market.In Europe, Germany, and the U.K are expected to show growth due to increasing demand for active pharmaceutical ingredients, and rising number of patients with chronic diseases. Increasing research and development activities, and overall growth of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies also accelerate the growth of the market. Additionally, strong government support is also sustaining the investment in research & development in Europe. According to the report published in the R&D magazine, Europe holds 20.8% of the global R&D spending share.Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market for unnatural amino acids. It is majorly driven by India, China, and Japan owing to a rising patient pool with chronic diseases and rapidly growing economy. Governments in Asia Pacific region are supporting manufacturers for research & development, which can serve as a path for the development of the market. Prevalence of chronic diseases such as cancer, liver diseases, and other diseases.In the Middle East and Africa, U.A.E, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait hold the largest market share. However, the growth of the African market is high due to the presence of opportunities for the development of the market. Africa holds the least share of the global market due to limited availability of medical facilities and poor economic condition of the region.Browse complete report atOn the other hand, the Middle East & Africa hold the least share of the market due to poor healthcare infrastructure in Africa and limited availability of funds and medical facilities. The Middle East market is driven by increasing prevalence of chronic disease, lack of physical exercise, and others. Development of healthcare industry in the Middle East & Africa also fuels the growth of the market.The global market is segmented on the basis of types, indication, and end users.On the basis of types, the market is segmented into non-alpha, D-Amino Acids, L-Amino Acid, and others. Non-alpha is further segmented into -Amino Acids, -Amino Acid Derivatives, -Aminobutyric acid, and others. D-Amino Acids is further segmented into D-alanine, D-glutamate, and others.On the basis of the indication, the market is segmented into liver diseases, cancer, genetic diseases, inflammatory disease, and others.On the basis of the end users, the market is segmented into pharmaceutical & biotechnological companies, hospital & clinics, academic institutes, and others.Ask Question to Expert atLIST OF TABLESTable 1 Unnatural Amino Acids Industry Synopsis, 2017  2023Table 2 Global Unnatural Amino Acids Market Estimates And Forecast, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 3 Global Unnatural Amino Acids Market By Region, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 4 Global Unnatural Amino Acids Market By Types, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 5 Global Unnatural Amino Acids Market By Indication, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 6 Global Unnatural Amino Acids Market By End Users, 2017  2023, (USD Million)ContinueAbout usAt Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research FutureMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@Marketresearchfuture.Com
The World Mental Health Market is Expected to Grow at a CAGR over 4.5% from 2017 to 2023

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Market Research Future has a half cooked research report on the global Depression Screening/Mental Health market. The global Depression Screening/Mental Health market is growing continuously and expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.5% from 2017 to 2023.The global depression screening/mental health market has been evaluated as a moderately growing market and it is expected to continue growing in the near future. Increasing cases of patients with various mental disorders, rising investments in R&D, changing and stressful lifestyle are driving the growth for the market.The market for depression screening/mental health was around USD 8263.6 million in 2016 and is expected to reach USD 11245.6 million which is projected to grow at a CAGR of 4.5% by 2023.Major players in Depression Screening/Mental Health market:There are plenty of large and small market players which operate in this market: Alkermes (Republic of Ireland), ALLERGAN (Republic of Ireland), AstraZeneca (UK), Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (US), Eli Lilly and Company (US), F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd (Switzerland), Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc. (US), Novartis AG (Switzerland), Otsuka Holdings Co.,Ltd. (Japan), Pfizer Inc. (US), and others.Major players of this industry are funding R&D to derive effective solutions for mental health. Major players of this market are holding majority of market share while due to high investment cost, medium and small companies mainly focusing only on manufacturing of drugs rather than R&D.In 2015, U S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved three major drugs which can be useful for the treatment of schizophrenia and other mental disorders. These drugs are Alkermess Aristada (aripiprazole lauroxil) extended-release injectable, Otsuka Holdings Co.,Ltd.s Rexulti (brexpiprazole), and ALLERGANs Vraylar (cariprazine).Sample Report Available atKey companies to watch out for:Pacifica Labs, Inc. is mobile healthcare solutions provider has developed an app which can detect stress and anxiety. This app is very helpful in management of stress and anxiety.Regional Analysis:Considering the global scenario of the Depression Screening/Mental Health market, the Americas are holding the largest market share in global depression screening/mental health in 2016. America is top revenue generator in global market that is mainly due to some factors like increasing funding for research and clinical trials. European market is the second largest market for depression screening/mental health. Increasing prevalence and growing knowledge of mental disorders are key drivers for the growth of Asia Pacific Depression Screening/Mental Health market. Middle East and Africa depression screening/mental health market is expected to limited growth it is mostly because of limited lack of knowledge of disorders and treatments, access to the healthcare, traditional healthcare practices etc.Segmentation:Global Depression Screening/Mental Health market has been segmented on the basis of disorder which comprise anxiety, mood disorders, depression, bipolar, psychotic, eating disorders, impulse control and addiction disorders, personality disorders, stress response syndromes, dissociative disorder, somatic symptom disorder, factitious disorder, and others. Anxiety is further sub-segmented into Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), panic disorder, phobias, social phobia, agoraphobia, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Mood disorder is further sub-segmented into dysthymia, substance-induced mood disorder, major depression, and others. Depression is further sub-segmented into atypical depression, chronic depression, melancholic depression, catatonic depression, Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and others. Bipolar disorder is further sub-segmented into bipolar I disorder, bipolar II disorder, cyclothymic disorder, and others. Psychotic disorder is further sub-segmented into schizophrenia, delusional disorder, and others. Eating disorder is further sub-segmented into anorexia nervosa, binge eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, and others. Impulse control and addiction disorder is further sub-segmented into intermittent explosive disorder, pyromania, kleptomania, and others. Personality disorders includes emotional and impulsive, suspicious, anxious, and others. Dissociative disorder sub-segmented into dissociative amnesia, dissociative identity disorder, depersonalization-derealization disorder, and others. Somatic symptom disorder somatization disorder, conversion disorder, hypochondriasis, factitious disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, and others. Factitious disorder is further sub-segmented into factitious disorder with mostly psychological symptoms, factitious disorder with mostly physical symptoms, factitious disorder with both psychological and physical symptoms, and others.Browse complete report atOn the basis of diagnosis, the market has been segmented into psychological test, Lab tests, Depression Screening Tests and others. Psychological test is further sub-segmented into intelligence tests, attitude tests, personality tests, achievement tests, and others. Lab tests sub-segmented into blood tests, CT scan or MRI of the brain, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Electrocardiogram (ECG). Depression Screening Tests includes Patient Health Questionnaire-10 (PHQ-10), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D), Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD).On the basis of treatment, the market has been segmented into medication, psychotherapy, brain-stimulation treatments, hospitalization, substance abuse treatment, and others. Medication includes anti-anxiety medications, antidepressants, antipsychotic medications, mood-stabilizing medications, opioid antagonists, atypical neuroleptics, glutamatergic agents, and others. Psychotherapy is further sub-segmented into cognitive and behavioral therapies, humanistic therapies, psychoanalytical and psychodynamic therapies, and others. Brain-stimulation treatments includes repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS), Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS), Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS), and others.On the basis of end user, it is segmented into hospitals & clinics, medical research centers, academic institutes, and others.Ask Question to Expert atBipolar disorder is further sub-segmented into bipolar I disorder, bipolar II disorder, cyclothymic disorder, and others. Psychotic disorder is further sub-segmented into schizophrenia, delusional disorder, and others. Eating disorder is further sub-segmented into anorexia nervosa, binge eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, and others. Impulse control and addiction disorder is further sub-segmented into intermittent explosive disorder, pyromania, kleptomania, and others. Personality disorders include various traits such as emotional & impulsive, suspicious, anxious, and others. Dissociative disorder is sub-segmented into dissociative amnesia, dissociative identity disorder, depersonalization- derealization disorder, and others. Somatic symptom disorder somatization disorder, conversion disorder, hypochondriasis, factitious disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, and others. Factitious disorder is further sub-segmented into factitious disorder with mostly psychological symptoms, factitious disorder with mostly physical symptoms, factitious disorder with both psychological and physical symptoms, and others.ContinueAbout usAt Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research FutureMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@Marketresearchfuture.Com
Global Catheters Market at a CAGR of 6.14% During Forecasted Period 2017-2023

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Catheters, a thin tube like medical devices inserted into a body cavity, duct, or vessel. They are used in drainage, administration of fluids or gases, and also to perform a wide variety of other tasks depending on the type of catheter. Increasing prevalence of the patients cardiac and urological diseases have increased the demand for the catheters. To increase the market demand, many manufacturers are trying to introduce the new and advanced types of catheters. The global catheter market is majorly driven by increasing prevalence of cardiac & urological diseases, increasing preference for minimal invasive therapy, and increasing geriatric population. Additionally, changing lifestyle and rising healthcare spending have spurred the growth of the market. However, long time for approval, and risk of infection may slow the growth of the market over the review period.Get a sample report atThe Americas dominate the global market owing to a huge population with cardiac diseases, increasing geriatric population, strong government support for research & development and high health care spending. According to the WHO, in 2014, 9.7% of total America population had diabetes. Increasing prevalence of the diabetes has boosted the market growth in America. Additionally, changing lifestyle and the presence of major players in the market have fueled the growth of the market.Europe is the second leading region in the global catheters market, which is followed by Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing catheters market majorly driven by India, China, and Japan owing to a huge number of patients and rapidly growing economy. The healthcare expenditure in in Asia Pacific has increased during last few years, which has contributed to the growth of market.The Middle East and Africa contribute the least to the growth of the global market. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait lead the Middle East & Africa market. Africa holds the least share of the global market due to limited availability of medical facilities and poor economic condition of the region. However, the growth of the African market is high due to the presence of opportunities for the development of the market.Key PlayersSome of the major players in this market are Boston Scientific Corporation, Koninklijke Philips N.V, Abbott, Medtronic plc, B. Braun Melsungen AG, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Terumo Corporation, LuMend Corporation (US), Covidien AG (Ireland), ACIST Medical Systems (US), and Cook Medical Inc. (US).Browse Complete Report atThe catheter is thin tube medical device made from high graded material used in the healthcare to deliver medications, gases or fluids to patients or to drain bodily fluids such as urine. These are inserted into the body for the treatment of a number of diseases and while performing surgeries. A number of catheter types such as cardiovascular catheters, specialty catheters, intravenous catheters, urinary catheters, and neurological catheters are available in the market for the treatment of diseases such as like cardiovascular, neurovascular, urology and many more. According to the National Institutes of Health, in 2016, over 661,000 Americans had kidney failure. Among which, 468,000 individuals were on dialysis and 193,000 were living with a functioning kidney transplant. Additionally, according to the American College of Cardiology, in 2013, cardiovascular deaths represented 31% of all global deaths and over 790,000 people in the U.S. have heart attacks every year. Increasing number of patients with cardiac and urological diseases has boosted the growth of the market. At the University of Chicago Medicine, over 70% of major lung resection surgeries are performed using minimally invasive techniques. Nowadays, people are preferring minimal invasive techniques for the treatment. Geriatric people and diabetic patients are more prone to becoming cardiac and urological diseases. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2015, globally the people over age 65 were around 617 million. Due to a sedentary lifestyle, people are more prone to cardiovascular diseases or other related diseases. Thus, increasing geriatric population, elevating a number of diabetic patients, increasing preferring minimal invasive techniques, and changing lifestyle have fuelled the growth of the market. However, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2015, in 5% of the causes, catheter-associated urinary tract infection was observed. Risk of infection due to use of catheter may slow the growth of the market.About usAt Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Market Research FutureP: +1 646 845 9312W:sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Outdoor Flooring Market by Manufacturers,Types,Regions and Applications Research Report Forecast to 2025

Outdoor Flooring Market

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On  Outdoor Flooring Market by Manufacturers,Types,Regions and Applications Research Report Forecast to 2025.Description:In this report, the global Outdoor Flooring market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Outdoor Flooring in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGet a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comGlobal Outdoor Flooring market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingArmstrong FlooringFiberonMohawk IndustriesTimber Holdings USAAZEK Building ProductsDuPont (EI) De NemoursBeaulieu InternationalThe BiltriteTandus CentivaCongoleumConnor Sport Court InternationalCitadel FloorsFlorim CeramicheForbo HoldingFritztileInterfaceInternacional De CeramicaKaindl FlooringLonsealMarley FloorsMullican FlooringPolyflorPorcelanosaRoppe HoldingSuperior ManufacturingWitex Flooring ProductsOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoTileDeckingOthers (Rugs, Carpet, and Stones)On 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, includingParkTourist AttractionsHome Furnishing Outdoor InfrastructureOtherAsk Query @Table Of Contents  Major Key PointsGlobal Outdoor Flooring Market Research Report 20181 Outdoor Flooring Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Outdoor Flooring1.2 Outdoor Flooring Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Outdoor Flooring Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Outdoor Flooring Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Tile1.2.4 Decking1.2.5 Others (Rugs, Carpet, and Stones)1.3 Global Outdoor Flooring Segment by Application1.3.1 Outdoor Flooring Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Park1.3.3 Tourist Attractions1.3.4 Home Furnishing Outdoor Infrastructure1.3.5 Other1.4 Global Outdoor Flooring Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Outdoor Flooring Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Outdoor Flooring (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Outdoor Flooring Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Outdoor Flooring Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025).7 Global Outdoor Flooring Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Armstrong Flooring7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Outdoor Flooring Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Armstrong Flooring Outdoor Flooring Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Fiberon7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Outdoor Flooring Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Fiberon Outdoor Flooring Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Mohawk Industries7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Outdoor Flooring Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Mohawk Industries Outdoor Flooring Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 Timber Holdings USA7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Outdoor Flooring Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 Timber Holdings USA Outdoor Flooring Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 AZEK Building Products7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Outdoor Flooring Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 AZEK Building Products Outdoor Flooring Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 DuPont (EI) De Nemours7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Outdoor Flooring Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 DuPont (EI) De Nemours Outdoor Flooring Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 Beaulieu International7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Outdoor Flooring Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 Beaulieu International Outdoor Flooring Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.8 The Biltrite7.8.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.8.2 Outdoor Flooring Product Category, Application and Specification7.8.2.1 Product A7.8.2.2 Product B7.8.3 The Biltrite Outdoor Flooring Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.8.4 Main Business/Business OverviewContinue.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.
Glucose Tolerance Test Market Ready to touch at 10.4% CAGR by 2023

Glucose Tolerance Test Market

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The Analysis presents the study of Worldwide Glucose Tolerance Test `facilitating the regional and country wise analysis covering the strategic analysis of each market player and the market share they holdA glucose tolerance test measures how well a bodys cells is capable to engross glucose, or sugar, after a patient consume a given amount of sugar. Doctors and specialists use fasting blood sugar levels and haemoglobin A1c values to identify type 1 and type 2 diabetes, and pre-diabetes whereas a glucose tolerance test can also be used. Doctors primarily use a glucose tolerance test to diagnose gestational diabetes in patients.The Global Glucose Tolerance Test Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.4% during the forecast period 2017-2023.Specialists and doctors often diagnose type 1 diabetes swiftly because it frequently develops quickly and includes high blood sugar levels. Type 2 diabetes, on the other hand regularly develops over years. Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes, and it generally develops during adulthood. Gestational diabetes arises when a pregnant woman who do not have diabetes before pregnancy, thus has high blood sugar levels as a result of the pregnancy. The American Diabetes Association estimates that gestational diabetes occurs in 9.2 percent of pregnancies.The Global Glucose Tolerance Test Market is expected to reach high growth figures in 2023, this market is expected to grow at a healthy CAGR of 10.4% during the forecast period 2017-2023. Factors such as Increasing prevalence and incidence of diabetes mellitus (DM), Rise in technological innovations, Research funding in diabetes diagnosis and treatment, and rising awareness and screening for Diabetes Mellitus are some of the major factors driving the growth of the market. Further Stringent reimbursement and insurance policies in developing nations, High cost associated with diagnosis and treatment of diabetes can hamper the market growth in coming future.Glucose Tolerance Test Market Segmentation:The Global Glucose Tolerance Test Market is segmented on the basis of products, indications, end user.On the basis of the products, it is further segmented into intramedullary Blood glucose testing kit (Lancet, Meters, Test strips and others), Smart sensors and other .On the basis of the indication, the market is segmented into Diabetes, Gestational diabetes, Insulin resistance, Reactive hypoglycemia.On the basis of the end user, the market is segmented into Diagnostic Clinics, Hospitals, Home, and others.Glucose Tolerance Test Market Key Findings:On the basis of indications, Diabetes is the fastest growing market and is expected to reach USD 21,796.0 million by 2023 from USD 10,579.1million in 2016 at a CAGR of 10.7% during the forecast period of 2017-2023.On the basis of products, Blood glucose testing kit is expected to reach USD 36,164.0million by 2023 from USD 17,676.0 million in 2016, at a CAGR of 10.6% during the forecast period of 2017-2023.On the basis of End users, Diagnostic Clinics is expected to reach USD 15,335.9 million in 2023 for USD 7,999.9 million in 2016. Home segment is expected to be the fastest growing segment which is growing at a healthy CAGR of 10.9%Glucose Tolerance Test Market Key Players:Some of the key players in this market are Panasonic, Dexcom, Inc, Abbott Laboratories, F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd, LifeScan, Inc Sanofi, Medtronic Plc and othersGet Sample Copy @Regional AnalysisThe Americas dominate the Diabetes Monitors Market owing to the presence of patient population, a well-developed technology, high healthcare expenditure, and the presence of the leading players. Due to high prevalence of the condition, companies, private organization, and government associations actively participates to improve diabetes care. For instance, The Merck Foundation provided funding of USD 10,000,000 for the projects designed to improve access to diabetes care and to reduce health disparities for vulnerable populations with type 2 diabetes in the United States.Europe holds the second position in the diabetes monitors market. It is expected that the support provided by the government bodies for research & development, along with a well-developed technology drives the market in European region. According to the German maternity guidelines, every pregnant women can undergo glucose-challenge test for early diagnosis of Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). The charges for the test are completely covered by womens health insurance.TABLE OF CONTENTS1 Report Prologue2 Market Introduction3 Research Methodology4 Market Dynamics5 Market Factor Analysis6 Global Glucose Tolerance Test Market By Products7 Global Glucose Tolerance Test Market By Indication8 Global Glucose Tolerance Test Market By End Users9 Global Glucose Tolerance Test Market By Regions10 Competitive Landscape11 Company Profile12 Conclusion T.O.C. ContinuedGet Discount @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comMRFR has the distinguished objective of providing the optimal quality research and granular research to clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help answer your most important questions.Our Research Analysts are eager to share their knowledge and assist you in refining market research parameters, choosing right market studies, and evaluating both the market scope and the research methodologies of varied segments.We bridge the gap between our clients and their clients by identifying and decoding just the target group, while generating leads with the highest accuracy.Years of research into diverse fields of work has ingrained within us, a proficiency so distinguished that our industry-specific specialists identify with your business ideas and feel the pulse of your challenges and opportunities. This enables us for providing assistance, through our consulting and strategic consulting services, in informed managerial decision making. In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industries, WantStats Research and Media often conducts industrial visits for its research analysts. Relevant inputs from various established market participants, help our clients make significant contribution in respective markets are a huge motivation for all of us to endlessly furnish quality. We depend greatly on profound insights into complex realms of our study.Pune, India
Vibration Monitoring Market: Demand, Overview, Price and Forecasts To 2023

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Vibration Monitoring Market, By Component (Hardware, Software, Services), By System Types (Vibration analyzers, Embedded systems, Vibration meters), By End-Users (Automotive, Metal and Mining, Food & Beverages, Chemicals, Oil & Gas) - Global Forecast 2023Market Scenario:The Vibration Monitoring provides early warning which enables to detect the fault and failure in the system. The vibration monitoring has prompt the market due to its response for fast failure source localization and process optimization at machines in operation. It also offers high diagnostic authoritativeness and greater diagnostic accuracy. The vibration monitoring system is integrated with the sensors with low noise system and is functionally tested for circuit continuity and output response, which is highly recognized by the organizations. The introduction of online vibration monitoring systems, used for protection of critical machinery, reduced maintenance costs and suggest the possibility of faultlessness in the system.The study indicates that the vibrational monitoring is rapidly becoming standard practice in most industrial predictive maintenance programs. The vibration monitoring is driven by various factor such as advance indication of developing problems, protect health, safety, and environment, monitor inaccessible equipment, complement portable monitoring programs which increase the demand of vibration monitoring market growth, globally.The global Vibration Monitoring Market is expected to grow at USD$ ~2.03 Billion by 2023, at ~6.6% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023.Study Objectives of Vibration Monitoring Market: To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of theVibration Monitoring market. To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth. To analyze the Vibration Monitoring market based porters five force analysis etc. To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to four main geographies and their countries- North America, Europe, Vibration Monitoring a, and Rest of the World (ROW). To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective. To provide country level analysis of the market for segment on the basis component, system type, end-users, and region. To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market. To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Vibration Monitoring systemGet Sample Report @Key Players:The prominent players in the Vibration Monitoring Market are  Honeywell International Inc. (US), Emerson Electric Co. (US), General Electric (US), Analog Devices Inc.(US), SKF AB (Sweden), National Instruments Corp. (US), Rockwell Automation, Inc. (US), Schaeffler Technologies AG & Co. KG (Germany), Bruel & Kiaer Sound & Vibration Measurement A/S (Denmark), and Meggitt PLC (UK), among others.Segments:The global Vibration Monitoring market has been segmented on the basis of component, system type, end-users, and region.Vibration Monitoring Market by Component:Hardware Transmitters Accelerometers Proximity probes Velocity sensors OthersSoftware Services OthersVibration Monitoring Market by System Type: Vibration analyzers Embedded systems Vibration meters OthersVibration Monitoring Market by End-Users: Automotive Metal and Mining Food & Beverages Chemicals Oil & Gas OthersVibration Monitoring Market by Regions: North America Europe APAC Rest of the WorldGet Report Details @Regional Analysis:The regional analysis of Vibration Monitoring market is being studied for region such as Asia pacific, North America, Europe and Rest of the World. North America region is dominating the global vibration monitoring market and accounted for a largest market share. The Key Vendors such as Honeywell International Inc. (US), Emerson Electric Co. (US), General Electric (US), and many more are the major player in this market. In Europe region, the vibration market is gaining momentum due to the vibration monitoring equipment which is providing the computerized information that will interlink with the investigations of machine manufacturer, the operator in industrial production, as well as to the related insurance companies. This region is expected to grow further in the coming years of the Vibration Monitoring market. Asia Pacific will emerge to the highest CAGR in the vibration monitoring market.Intended Audience Raw material providers Vibration monitoring manufacturers Original equipment manufacturers Research organizations and consulting companies Vibration monitoring-related associations Distributors and traders Government bodies Semiconductor product designers and fabricators Research institutes and organizations Technology standards organizations Technology investors Research institutes, System Integrators Research/Consultancy firmsAt Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by Components, Application, Logistics and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar, Pune - 411028 Maharashtra, India
Cyber Liability Insurance Market - Global Industry Analysis 2022

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Cyber liability insurance is introduced to cover business liability from data breach and other cyber threats. Cyber insurance helps to protect the business in the event of a data breach or other cyber threat. The business environment is changing across the globe on account of rising number of startups and increasing penetration of internet services.This report 2017 Global Cyber Liability Insurance Market principally highlights thoughtful facts and intelligence of Cyber Liability Insurance market along with prevailing and upcoming market trends during the forecast period from 2017 to 2022. It also executes the comprehensive study of cost, current geographical zones, technology, demand-supply and the consequences it would have on the market growth of Cyber Liability Insurance industry.This report systematically analyzes the most vital details of the Global Cyber Liability Insurance Market with the help of an in-depth and professional analysis. Described in a ground-up way, the report presents an all-inclusive overview of the market based on the aspects that are expected to have a substantial and measurable impact on the markets developmental prospects over the forecast period.Get Sample Copy of This Report @The Cyber Liability Insurance market has developed and grown to accommodate the increasingly digital business landscape. This relatively new market was designed to mitigate the risk of client businesses providing services online by reimbursing them with damages they must pay to customers for various liabilities. Businesses such as retailers, financial institutions and healthcare establishments have been increasingly moving operations online. As the percentage of services conducted online has risen, more consumers have been disclosing personal information online, increasing the potential for exposure to hacker attacks. The global Cyber Liability Insurance market will grow at a CAGR of more than +11% between 2017 and 2022As per the findings of the report, Cyber Liability Insurance is a product generated by processing many high advanced technology. This application is found in several products. The report has discovered that the Cyber Liability Insurance market is marked by several segments. A transitory idea about the dynamic forces which help make the market more prosperous are deliberated in order to help customer appreciate the future market situation. Projected revenue progression in terms of capacity with respect to the market for the forthcoming years have been stated in-depth.For More Information/ Ask for Queries @The graph of Cyber Liability Insurance industry will show increase growth rate within next five years which will, in turn, lead to the conclusive outlook of future for various marketing players considering the profit chain of Cyber Liability Insurance market. The report also performs in-depth analysis and appraisal of Cyber Liability Insurance industry that will embellish consumers to have a considerable share in the Cyber Liability Insurance market.The report wraps major countries involved in Cyber Liability Insurance market. It also imparts effective study on various sections of Cyber Liability Insurance market such as opportunities and market arrangement of top leading players.Cyber Liability Insurance Market analysis based on leading market players: Lloyd, Berkshire Hathaway, AXA, Allianz, Japan Post Holdings, Assicurazioni Generali, Prudential Plc, China Life Insurance, Ping An Insurance, Legal & General Group, Munich Re, Cyence,Lemonade, Oscar, PolicyGenius, Safeshare, SimpleSurance, SynerScope, TrovRegions Covered in This Report: USA, China, Europe, Japan, India, Southeast AsiaAsk for Discount @This report offers a multi-step view of the Global Cyber Liability Insurance Market. The first approach focuses through an impression of the market. This section also integrates an all-inclusive analysis of the different enlargement plans and government strategies that influence the market, its cost assemblies and industrialized processes.Table of ContentChapter 1 Cyber Liability Insurance OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic Impact on IndustryChapter 3 Global Market Competition by ManufacturersChapter 4 Global Production, Revenue (Value) by Region `Chapter 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 AnalysisAbout 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,
Extreme snowfall expected to last through weekend

Snowfall is expected to continue through Sunday, Nov. 20, according Matt Gillen, meteorologist at the National Weather Service.
RUPERT  The Minidoka County School District and the city of Rupert are working with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Magic Valley to bring a club to Rupert.

The club will serve children in kindergarten through fifth grade in Minidoka County.

It really gives parents peace of mind that their children are in a safe place, said Bri Owen, director for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Magic Valley.

The organization is applying for a grant to expand its services into Rupert. It currently has locations in Twin Falls and Buhl.

Whether we get the grant or not we want and plan to expand services out there, Owen said.

The amount of the 21st Century Learning grant will be based on the number of children that will be served. The programs goal, Owen said, is to serve 101 children.

There is a lot of need for this, said Michele Widmier, student achievement director for the school district. We are excited to have it be part of the community. There arent a lot of options for activities for students in the county.

Organizers should find out in April whether they receive the grant.

Owen said the plan is to open a Boys and Girls Club center in the building where the office of the Mini-Cassia Shelter Haven of Hope is now, and operate a program at Rupert Elementary School, to start.

The afterschool program will be the first program implemented in September.

The program runs after school until 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Children choose different programs each quarter. There is also homework help, snack time and monitored free time to be active.

The programs provide focused activities and academic learning.

The club hopes to eventually expand to offer programs to middle school and high school-age students.

Busing will be provided from the students school to the Rupert center or Rupert elementary, and then parents will pick the child up from there, Owen said.

Once the club is established it will also offer programs through the summer.

Under the grant there will be no cost for students. Some of the additional activities offered have costs, but the club offers scholarships.

No student is ever turned down because they cant pay, Owen said.
It [was] refreshing to see a course, and all these courses, that no one has ridden, so the whole vibe of the event is different because no one knows where they are going. It makes everyone friendlier and all the transfers more friendly, they talk about the riding more.

 Mark Weir
Patrick Phillips has written a century-long history of racial violence and suppression in a Georgia county that, at every level, seems to mirror contemporary politics and social unrest in America. Forsyth County was like many places around the South after the Civil War. Its diversity comprised both economic and racial hierarchies in a rural setting where self-governance and secrecy bred by the communitys isolation allowed white residents to force black landowners and laborers out of the county or face the promise of being murdered. In the decades that followed, the whites only attitude continued a culture of intimidation.

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America demonstrates an environment that allowed hate and fear to become the norm. It covers many stories of personal experience as well as public acts of terror and hatred. Instead of focusing on the details of the book, this article focuses on broader elements readers can relate to within the contemporary political climate in the US.

Like many civil rights violations of the era, the unrest started with the accusation that black men defiled and murdered a white woman. This commonly held rhetorical frame, promoted widely during the Jim Crow South, cultivated easy scapegoating because the communitys belief in the rhetoric would allow motive to be placed on any man with potential means. Phillips history describes a moral panic that leads Forsyth to a complete disavowal of the law by the community. From the opening example of a lynching that began by a woman claiming to have awoken with a black man in her bed through the January 1987 civil rights marches, Phillips shows a white culture that fears both the individual black man and the perceived threat of a violent population of black men rising to destroy it.

Much like Alabamas contemporary Roy Moore, Forsyth had Sheriff William Reid, who defied the courts through public spectacles he used for self-promotion. Operating with a populist agenda, Reid not only allowed a mob easy access to his deputy and the black man in custody, he later defied a judge and allowed a public hanging before a crowd of thousands. Phillips describes a sheriff so focused on his own political career that he was willing to allow murder and defy the outsiders imposing the law that went against his voters desire for a pound of flesh. The fact that he was a charter member of the local Ku Klux Klan will not surprise any reader.

Reid was the leader in the primary spark that led to the expulsion of blacks from Forsyth in 1912. When a local white woman, Mae Crow, was found unconscious with a head injury, the investigation quickly turned from a hunt for a perpetrator to a desire for vengeance when a young black teen claimed ownership of a mirror found near the victim. What follows is a series of escalations of the illegal action. Some acts were done in the blasphemed name of justice, but most were terrorist acts carried out by the common people who tormented and stole property and land from the people who were being threatened out of their livelihood. While Phillips outlines a complex set of occurrences, the key to the violence from the beginning was a desire to punish blacks and explicitly act against the state government. In other words, they were an early group of populists who had no tangible objective beyond forcibly isolating themselves from the rest of the world.

One questionable element in Phillips narrative is how the economic classes were divided in the original expulsion. For much of the book, Phillips places responsibility on poor whites for being the instigators of the night raids that terrorized the black population into leaving. Readers only get acquainted with the very wealthy of Forsyth, who wanted to protect their cheap labor, and the educated man who tried to bring the railroad to the county in order to build the local economy. The terrorists seem to be the poor who came to see anyone with dark skin as a problem that must be removed. While very likely, the book does not demonstrate the involvement or resistance of those who fell somewhere between.

Forsyth County seemed to be a dormant place for nearly 70 years. It stayed all white, but left to their own devices, the population didnt promote any public displays of defiance. That changed in 1980. An Atlanta company held a picnic, and a black employee and her boyfriend attended. When a local man saw a black couple enjoying Lake Lanier, he enlisted a buddy and shot the man in the head as he was driving out of town. Both men were found guilty of aggravated assault. Seven years later, a local business owner enlisted civil rights activist Hosea Williams to lead a Brotherhood march in Forsyth.

Much like the recent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, many of the people who turned out to counter protest the marchers were armed. As they yelled racist chants, the marchers were pelted with debris. When the danger became too great for the police to protect the group, they were bused away from the mob. They came back a week later with 20,000 Brotherhood marchers, but change was slow to come.

Scholars and academics will find a good notes section with citations. While much of the history is laid out in facts and document research, theres a narrative tendency to imply how someone thought or felt. This might be enough of a problem for some professors to avoid assigning the book for a class. Phillips uses hedging language in these sections, so it shouldnt be a deal breaker for someone willing to give a basic warning to their students about this potential scholarly issue.

Blood at the Root is timely. In 2017, Georgia state Representative Jason Spencer posted a threatening message on Facebook to LaDawn Jones, a black lawyer calling for Confederate monuments to be removed from state property. It could have come straight from Forsyth in 1912. He wrote: The truth. Not a warning. Those folks wont put up with it like they do in Atlanta. It best you move on. History does not exist as a separate past form todays reality, and Phillips demonstrates how a culture based on fear can persist through generations. While an exceptional history of a specific rural Georgia community, Blood at the Root demonstrates the machinations of historys ghosts and the fear that feeds hate  and grows in isolation.
Dominion Energy Chief Executive Officer Thomas Farrell (left) addressed members of the South Carolina Senate Tuesday about his company's proposed takeover of SCANA. Andy Shain/The Post and Courier
Some utility rates could go down after US corporate tax cuts
The forthcoming HOPE Center will serve as a hub for various services such as housing and financial assistance and medical care. The fundraising drive is part of regional effort led by the Mayor's Commission on Homelessness which is a collaboration between Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg, Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie and North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey. Read moreCharleston seeks fundraising boost for new homeless outreach center
Washington insider and sugar industry attack dog Nick Pyle is at it again. Hes been sending the same letter to papers round the country attacking members of Congress who support the U.S. sugar industry. This week, he targeted U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo in a letter published Wednesday by the Times-News.

Its peculiar that Mr. Pyle would criticize Sen. Crapo for backing a program that: 1) supports farmers; 2) doesnt cost U.S. taxpayers a cent; and 3) provides jobs and boosts the economy statewide and nationally. In Idaho alone, the sugar industry creates over 15,000 jobs and pumps over $2 billion into the states economy.

Supporting the U.S. sugar program does one other important thing: It keeps sugar prices low and stable for consumers by limiting the influx of highly-subsidized, market-distorting, foreign sugar from entering the U.S.

Without the sugar program, U.S. farmers would have to compete against farmers in foreign countries who are subsidized and sell sugar for prices far below their production cost. Thats about as anti-American as you can possibly get.

We need a domestic sugar program. Sen. Crapo should be thanked for his support and not criticized for it.

Randall Grant

Twin Falls

President, Idaho Sugarbeet Growers Association
The day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would step aside, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York announced his own history-making bid Friday to become the first Black American to helm a major U.S. political party in Congress as leader of the House Democrats. The 52-year-old Jeffries gave nod to the "legendary figures" before him, Pelosi and her leadership team, while encouraging his colleagues to embrace this "once-in-a-generation opportunity to further unleash our full potential as a team." Read moreHakeem Jeffries makes historic bid to lead House Democrats after Nancy Pelosi
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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Alba Minerals--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - Alba Minerals (TSX Venture:AA). has issued a press release with the following headline:Alba - Noram Disclose Clayton Valley Joint Venture Use of ProceedsTo 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 Alba Minerals, 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/Alba MineralsSource: Alba Minerals (TSX Venture: AA, WKN: A117RU, ISIN: CA0120271089, OTC Pink: AXVEF)Date: January 16, 2018Time: 5:00 AM EST--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Alba Minerals 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.)
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Breed Reply Portfolio of IoT Start-Ups Raise in Excess of $50 Million in Series A Funding in 2017

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Breed Reply, a leading operational investor in early-stage internet of things (IoT) businesses, saw one third of its 18-strong portfolio of investee companies, complete series A funding rounds in 2017. In total, six companies raised in excess of $50 million during the year with funds coming from notable investors including Accel, Aviva Ventures, Finance Wales, Intu and MunichRE. More companies in the growing portfolio are expected to be ready for Series A investment in 2018.

The successful companies span a broad range of IoT sectors: Callsign (Cyber Security); Cocoon (Smart Home); enModus (Smart Building); Senseye (Industrial); WePredict (Big Data); and Zeetta Networks (Platforms).

Helping start-ups prepare for future funding is a crucial part of Breed Replys commitment to companies when it invests. As an active operational investor, Breed Reply works closely with management to accelerate the companys development to achieve Series A funding and beyond. The team has significant experience in scaling up early-stage businesses, in-depth understanding of different markets, proven track record in sales channel development and strong technological DNA. They also work closely with Reply Group, a leading consulting, systems integration and digital services company with a market presence all over Europe and the USA to help the investee companies commercialise their products.

Emanuele Angelidis, CEO of Breed Reply, said: To be able to raise so much in Series A funding from such a high-calibre of investors is a fantastic endorsement of these companies. Each of them has demonstrated that there is a clear demand for their innovative IoT technologies which meet the needs of people and companies. Founded in 2014, Breed Reply already has an exciting and growing portfolio of companies. We are pleased that we have been able to help accelerate their development and 2018 is already looking to be another outstanding year.

-ENDS-

About Breed Reply

Breed Reply, Reply's active operational investor, funds and supports the development of early-stage companies in the Internet of Things (IoT) in Europe and the USA. Based in London, with operational offices in Germany and Italy, Breed Reply supports entrepreneurs and young talent by quickly bringing new ideas to the market. This is done via three fundamental services:

funding at early-stage level; active operational involvement with significant know how transfer of business, managerial and technological expertise; and go-to market support through the extensive Reply network. Breed Reply focuses on Health, Fitness & Wellness, Smart Building & Cities, Security, Industrial IoT, Big Data, Platforms, Drones.

www.breedreply.com

About the companies

CallSign: Intelligence Driven Mobile Authentication (IDA) protects identities and defends against data breaches. Applying AI to understand users and intelligently adjust authentication journeys.

Cocoon: All-in-one home security. With just one single device, Cocoon covers every room in your home. It detects subtle sounds and vibrations from a distance, through walls and doors using Subsound technology.

enModus: Smart Buildings Technology Company. Its patented Power-Line Communication technology (PLC), Wattwave, enables the monitoring, control and internet connectivity of any mains powered device.

Senseye: Predictive maintenance for industrial IoT. Senseye has developed a cloud-based solution that helps manufacturers avoid downtime, and reduce maintenance costs.

WePredict: Cost-effective and installation-free predictive analytics as a service. WePredict a global leader in turning big data into actionable insights for some of the worlds largest companies including in the automotive sector.

Zeetta Networks: An Open Platform for Software Defined Networks. Zeetta Networks sells NetOS to Smart Cities, Service Providers and Enterprises who want to drive down their networking costs while improving its scalability and flexibility.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201801160054
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PR & Communications Manager+44 (0) 330 122 2230Anja Eckervogt03301222648

buzzbox Telecom, a leading UK telecoms company that offers fully featured cloud-based phone systems, is helping its potential customers to brighten up their Blue Monday  the saddest day of the year- by offering a 20% discount for three months for business telephone line rental, if they sign up within this week.If a business phone contract is coming to an end or a potential client is in the process of starting up a new business empire this January, buzzbox can change their existing phone service with a package rich in features (call recording, diverting to mobile, voicemail, hold music, keeping your number), at a fraction of the cost. The offer for this week, until 19 January 2018, will be 20% off a business telephone line rental for three months and thereafter it is a monthly rolling contract, which means that potential customers can cancel their contract at any time.Stuart Spice, Founder and Director of buzzbox Telecom comments: A lot of people have New Years Resolutions, new business aspirations and want to sort out their finances at the start of the year. We offer no bill shocks, which means that we are a transparent and cost-effective alternative to the traditional telecom incumbents and we make it possible to save businesses an awful lot of money by switching to our services. Spice continues: Today, on the saddest day of the year and the longest month between paydays, we thought it would be a great opportunity to offer this discount. I hope that this will help new or established businesses get back into the swing of things and feel less depressed on this miserable day. To qualify for the offer customers must:* have a working broadband connection* sign up for the service before 22ndth JanuaryFor more information visit www.buzzbox.cc EndsAbout buzzbox:buzzbox Telecom is a prominent UK based phone provider with a focus on open, honest pricing and relatable staff. buzzbox provides cloud based phone systems and wireless broadband services that enables you to replace your existing phone services with a phone service rich with features at a fraction of the cost. Theres no long-term contract either, all contracts are only 3 months and then rolling monthly after. Since 2011, buzzbox has grown rapidly and its network currently processes around 18,000 active phone calls per day for customers based all over the globe.Stuart Spice is the founder and director of buzzbox. He has worked in the IT and telecoms industry for decades, founding one of the UKs most innovative and successful web hosting companies  Mr Site Ltd.For more information visit www.buzzbox.cc , email hello@ buzzboxuk.com or call +44 (0) 330 122 2230
PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-16 09:03:02

Business Wire Presents Future Award in the Media Category to University Students

Business Wire

Seval Dogan, +49 69 91 50 66 0

Germany@BusinessWire.com

Sandweg 94F, 60316 Frankfurt am Main

Business Wire, the worlds leading service provider for global press releases, once again gave out this years Future Award, which is presented as part of the Future Convention. Business Wires prize in the media category went to university student Laura Hess from the European School of Design, Frankfurt am Main, for her innovative BikeBello project. The innovation is an app incorporating GPS that makes it easier to track down bicycle thieves. Tracking can be started by ringing the bicycle bell.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201801160053

Winner of the Future Award 2017 (Photo: Business Wire)

At the event, Business Wire also presented another media event as part of its event series. Around the topic Public Relations in the age of communication 4.0  are women better communicators? Business Wire drew attention not only to the changes occurring in the communications industry, but also to the challenges and opportunities women experience in the PR sector. The media event was moderated by Mrs. Christine Riedmann-Streitz, Managing Director of Marken Factory GmbH and author of Will there still be brands [..], which was published by Springer Gabler.

More than 500 visitors came to the Future Convention in the new Langen town hall to learn about ideas and concepts for the future of business and society. Thirty-three Future Award finalists presented their projects, and eight among them were awarded prizes during the evening.

The Future Award was presented for the twelfth time this year. For the first time, Future Convention visitors were able to decide who the winners should be. Audience voting strengthens the network character of the Future Convention, and this is entirely in line with our goal of promoting interdisciplinary, cross-industry dialog, says Anja Basta, Project Manager for Future Initiatives at DVPT.

Ralph Dittmar, Regional Sales Manager at Business Wire, commented on the young talents dedication: It is incredible what these young people achieve. Despite being aware of their low chances of succeeding in marketing their products in todays fast-moving world, they still have the courage to implement their ideas. It is the spirit of these young thinkers that makes us all winners.

The eight winners of Future Award 2017:

1st Place, EUR 1,500

Blobb Bottle, Bruder-Grimm Professional Vocational Academy, Hanau

The bottle allows people with impaired vision to detect the level of their drink.

2nd Place, EUR 1,000

Haptocube, Miami Ad School Europe

The tool connects patients haptically with relatives in other rooms.

3rd Place, EUR 500

REIZ VOLL, Trier University of Applied Sciences

A game that plays on the senses  as a counterbalance to the digital world for children.

4th Place, EUR 250

Mixcuit, Karlsruher Institute of Technology

A hollow biscuit which can be used to sweeten and stir a drink at the same time.

5th Place, EUR 250

rehear, School of Design, Schwabisch Gmund

The control app helps hearing-impaired people to adjust their hearing aids optimally.

Volkwagen AG special prize, EUR 5,000

Ecotopia, University of Applied Sciences Berlin

Three-dimensional board game that introduces sustainable urban planning and encourages ecological thinking.

BKK.VBU special prize, EUR 1,000

rehapp, Baden-Wuerttemberg Ravensburg Dual University

Interactive app that combines speech therapy exercises with mini-games.

Business Wire special prize, EUR 500

Bike Bello, European School of Design

An app and a bicycle bell equipped with GPS to help track down stolen bicycles.

All details about the Future Convention and the Future Award: www.future-convention.com

We will be happy to provide you with press photos for your media coverage.

Patroness: Brigitte Zypries, Federal Minister for Economy and Energy

Funding: LPR Hessen

Academic partner: University of Applied Management Studies, Mannheim

Partners: BKKVBU, Business Wire, IHK Offenbach am Main, Spectos GmbH, Standort Plus (Economic Development District of Offenbach), Volkswagen AG

About Business Wire:

Business Wire, a Berkshire Hathaway company, is the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure. Investor relations, public relations, public policy and marketing professionals rely on Business Wire to accurately distribute market-moving news and multimedia, host online newsrooms and IR websites, build content marketing platforms, generate social engagements and provide audience analysis that improves interaction with specified target markets. Founded in 1961, Business Wire is a trusted source for news organizations, journalists, investment professionals and regulatory authorities, delivering news directly into editorial systems and leading online news sources via its multi-patented NX Network. Business Wire has 29 offices worldwide to securely meet the varying needs of communications professionals and news consumers.

Learn more at services.BusinessWire.com and Tempo, the Business Wire resource for industry trends; follow updates on Twitter: @BusinessWireDE, @BusinessWire or on Facebook.

Click here to subscribe to [..]

About Future Convention and Future Network

Through the Future Network, and Future Award and Future Convention initiatives, DVPT promotes holistic, interdisciplinary thinking as a user association with the aim of meeting the constant challenges arising from our digitized society at an early stage and by implementing forward-looking strategies.

The original source-language text of this announcement is the official, authoritative version. Translations are provided as an accommodation only, and should be cross-referenced with the source-language text, which is the only version of the text intended to have legal effect.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201801160053

Business Wire vergab den Future Award, Kategorie Media, an Universitatsstudenten auf der Future Convention 2017!
PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-16 14:00:35

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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Canarc Resources Corp.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - Canarc Resources Corp. (TSX:CCM). has issued a press release with the following headline:Canarc Continues to Intersect High-Grade Gold at Fondaway Canyon, Nevada, Including 3.24 Grams per Tonne Gold over 12.8 MetersTo 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 Canarc Resources Corp., 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/Canarc Resources Corp.Source: Canarc Resources Corp. (TSX: CCM, OTCQB: CRCUF, ISIN: 876 981, WKN: CA13722D1015)Date: January 16, 2018Time: 8:00 AM EST--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Canarc Resources Corp. 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: 2018-01-16 13:56:01

HONG KONG, Jan. 16, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Chayora Limited, a Hong Kong-based data centre infrastructure company, announces today it has finalised agreements with the government of Beichen, Tianjin, to begin construction of the company's first hyperscale data centre campus in China. The 300MW, 32-hectare / 80-acre campus will serve the greater Beijing region that is home to more than 150 million people in the JingJinJi mega-metropolitan area of northern China.

Commencing the first phase of development of Chayora's initial data centre building, construction is already underway with a completion and live operations target date of the end of 2018. This first building on Chayora's Tianjin Data Centre campus is designed for up to full 2N resilience and redundancy with dedicated substations for a 25MW IT load. Both gas turbine power generation and advanced grid power will support the site.

Chayora is leveraging industry-leading, prefabricated modular data centre design and construction that will enable world-class standards to be delivered quickly and to precisely assured tolerances while providing companies with flexible capacity growth options as more international businesses begin to expand in China.

The Chayora Tianjin campus, when completely built-out, will comprise six large 3000 rack data centres and three smaller 1000 rack high performance computing facilities. Each will be tailored to meet international enterprise or colocation operators' design and operational standards within an agreed masterplan and flexible building configurations. Assured scalability from 2MW to 100MW+ and full turnkey financed solutions are a core feature of Chayora customer agreements.

"The continued development of China and its importance to the global economy was underlined by China's leadership at the 19th National People's Congress in Beijing in October," says Oliver Jones, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Chayora. "The creation of world-class technology infrastructure will play a key part in underpinning these goals and Chayora is committed to supporting this achievement. Recent predictions from Forward Intelligence Group indicate that China will represent approximately 25 percent of world cloud revenues by 2020. This aligns with our own expectations and reinforces our strategy of creating some of the world's largest and most advanced data centre sites to accommodate these developments."

Forthcoming in the second quarter of 2018, Chayora will begin construction of its second hyperscale campus, a 280MW data centre to serve the greater Shanghai region. Unlike most other options for Shanghai, Chayora's facilities will be newly-built and designed from the ground up to international standards with all necessary permits to enable global corporates to access Shanghai and the surrounding provinces of eastern China, a population of more than 200 million. Shanghai is a key location for global organisations, including financial services, e-commerce and cloud service providers, and is in need of significant high performance data centre capacity.

Chayora's core offering is to develop and operate large-scale, built-to-suit, high-performance data centres for individual clients on long-term contracts across multiple strategically-located campuses, complete with ready-to-operate, robust and scalable infrastructure capable of supporting world-class data centre operational standards. Chayora is also raising further investment resources to augment its existing capital, and to pursue its plan to design and build additional data centre campuses in key connectivity hubs across China.

For more information about Chayora, visit www.chayora.com.

About Chayora

Chayora Limited, headquartered in Hong Kong, is wholly-owned by Chayora Holdings Limited, a Cayman Island-based company. Chayora develops large-scale, world-class designed and operated, long-term scalable data centres and data centre campuses in China. Chayora serves global Fortune 500 companies and premium Chinese data centre users offering cloud services, ICT services, financial services or other services offerings relying on intensive, high quality data centre infrastructure in China.
PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-16 02:31:01

A largest creative awards supporting students across Asia

GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS Selects Top Candidates in COMMERCIAL and ART Categories as Asian Students Approach the Final Awards Showdown!

Mandom Corporation

Koshiro Omoda, +81-6-6767-5013

GB Marketing Headquarters

Communication Strategy Div.

omoda-k@mandom.co.jp

(Please contact us in English.)

The 12th GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS, sponsored by Mandom Corp. (TOKYO:4917), is one of Asia's largest creative awards for students, and is held in 12 Asian countries and regions with the focus on supporting and encouraging students across Asia.

In the two categories of COMMERCIAL and ART, which began accepting entries on Friday, September 1, award candidates for each country and region have been selected through primary judging and web-based voting. In the upcoming 12th GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS FINAL, scheduled to be held in Tokyo on Saturday, March 10, 2018, Asia's top awards in each category will be chosen from among the nominated candidates selected in this round.

An impressive 526 entries from 12 countries were submitted in the COMMERCIAL category while 241 entries from 4 countries were submitted in the newly established ART category. The entries succeeded in conveying a sense of GATSBY's uniqueness in ways that transcend borders and language.

37 of the 526 entries received from the 12 countries and regions participating in the COMMERCIAL category passed the stringent primary judging. Similarly, 48 of the 241 entries received from 4 countries and regions participating in the ART category passed.

After the ensuing popular vote conducted online, on Friday, December 15 the pool of candidates was narrowed down to the final top award candidates for each country and region in each category. Despite the many different countries and languages, all selected works shared a common point in that they all conveyed a sense of GATSBY's uniqueness.

Participating countries / regions in the COMMERCIAL category: Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand

Participating countries / regions in the ART category: Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand

Click here for top award candidates in each category

COMMERCIAL category: https://award.gatsby.jp/12/cm

ART category: https://award.gatsby.jp/12/art

Student creators' final showdown is scheduled to take place on Saturday, March 10, 2018 at the 12th GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS FINAL!

Representatives from each country and region will be invited to the 12th GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS FINAL to be held in Shibuya, Tokyo on Saturday, March 10, 2018 to attend the final judging and awards ceremony. General audiences will also be invited to enjoy the exhibit of outstanding works and showcase of dance performances. This event will provide an ideal forum for students from across Asia to broadly interact.

Overview of the 12th GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS

The GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS is one of the largest award events in Asia aimed at students. Provided by "GATSBY," a men's grooming brand with a strong presence across Asian countries, the event initially began as the "GATSBY Student CM Awards" in 2006 from the company's desire to provide a forum for students to express and display their creative talent.

Young persons interested in becoming creators or performers in the future are naturally interested in 'creating' things and 'expressing' themselves. The GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS is aimed at just such students across Asia and invites even beginners to casually submit their own creative ideas.

The 12th GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS on Web: https://award.gatsby.jp/12/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/GATSBY_CREATIVE

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gatsby_creative/?hl=ja

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/201801150051

12th GATSBY CREATIVE AWARDS as the largest creative award event supporting students across Asia
PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-16 13:00:16

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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Kings Bay Resources Corp.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver BC. (FSCWire) - Kings Bay Resources Corp. (TSX Venture:KBG). has issued a press release with the following headline:Kings Bay Receives Assays for Lynx Lake Copper- Cobalt Property in LabradorTo 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 Kings Bay Resources Corp., 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/Kings Bay Resources Corp.Source: Kings Bay Resources Corp. (TSX Venture: KBG)Date: January 16, 2018Time: 7:00 AM EST--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Kings Bay Resources Corp. 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.)
These beautiful gemstones have been around for centuries; they are rare, yet dominate the market in value.

Premier Diamond Group (North America) Ltd

PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-16 20:33:38

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GroupWeb EmailWire.Com281-645-4086http://www.emailwire.com

(EMAILWIRE.COM) Toronto, Canada -- Colored diamonds are precious and rear, but why should they be considered as an investor's best friend? Before answering this question. One needs to know what exactly colored diamonds are. A colored diamond, according to Wikipedia, is a diamond that "may be affected by chemical impurities and/or structural defects in the crystal lattice." It turns out that these chemical and structural imperfections make some diamonds beautiful. Today, color diamonds are mesmerizing and spellbinding such that royalties, celebrities, the woman or man next door cherishes them. These beautiful gemstones have been around for centuries, ever increasing in value and are becoming rare; hence investors are considering them as investment vehicle. See Premier Diamond Group (North America) Ltd. for details: http://premierdiamondltd.com/why-own-colored-diamonds/ .1. Diamonds are well establishedColor diamond grading came to use in the sixth-Century India where different hues of diamonds were assigned to different classes of people. Class was defined by the color of diamond individuals wear  rulers, priests, farmers, merchants, landowners, warriors and the commons were assigned diamonds of different colors. In the 1980s the Agyle diamond mine in Australia introduced brown stones and today the mine markets rare pink diamonds.The color diamond is well established. The London Diamond Syndicate is said to participate in the color grading of diamond for sale in the market. According to Wikipedia, "the value of diamonds as an investment is of significant interest to the general public, because they are expensive gemstones, often purchased in engagement rings, due in part to a successful 20th century marketing campaign by De Beers." Today's savvy investors believe that "investments in physical diamonds exhibit greater safe haven characteristics than investments in diamond indices." The diamond market is well established; there is a growing interest in investing in colored diamonds, but the gemstones are rare.2. Color diamonds are rareWhile color diamond market is well established and there is a growing awareness as an investing vehicle, color diamonds are becoming rare. Vladimir Malakhov of Rough & Polish states that "colored diamonds account for just 1 percent of the entire diamond market." Mr. Malakhov adds that "some industry observers estimate that there is just one carat of colored diamonds for every 100,000 carats of white stones! "A well-known Australian diamond veteran Miles Kennedy, who once owned the Ellendale mine with his former company Kimberley Diamonds, illustrated the degree of diamond scarcity; he emphasized that there was no point of comparison between mining ore like coal, iron ore, gold and base metals with mining diamonds. The hardest game in town is undoubtedly diamond exploration and then turning that into a mine. Diamonds are very, very rare because theyre very, very hard to find," he adds. As we all know, the value and price of goods increases when they become rare.3. Color diamonds Increase in value over timeWhile it is very difficult to find diamonds, the value of color diamonds is on the rise. In the past 30 years, according to experts, "the price appreciation of natural fancy colored diamonds has dominated the market. Auction results prove the strength of colored diamonds in todays market, not to mention that they have repeatedly broken auction house records for the highest price per carat ever paid at auction for a diamond or jewel," reports Malakhov. SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP of New York Times writes, "Colored diamonds are continuing to climb in value as the market realizes that the supply is dwindling. The Rio Tintos Argyle mine, which produces more than 90 percent of the worlds natural pink diamonds, is expected to be closed in 2020."Colored Diamonds could become any investor's best friend. Like with any investment, the investor must do some due diligence. There are many resources on color diamonds on the web. However, Premier Diamond Group (North America) Ltd have resources and Mr. David Metcalfe for consultation. Mr. Metcalfe is "a pioneer in the branding of natural colored diamonds as a hedge against excessive market volatility brought about by speculation and government credit excesses."About Premier Diamond Group (North America) LtdPremier Diamond Group specializes in the purchase and sale of natural colored diamonds for wealth accumulation and estate planning purposes and holds membership in the International Colored Gemstone Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. For more information, go to http://premierdiamondltd.com/.Contact InformationPremier Diamond Group (North America) Ltd.Skyway Business Park,170 Attwell Drive, Suite 100Toronto, Ontario M9W 5Z5Phone: 416-679-9306DisclaimerThis news release is based on information available to the public. The information and any statistical data contained herein has been obtained from sources we believe reliable, but we do not represent that they are accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as such. The material contained herein is for information purposes only.
PR-Inside.com: 2018-01-16 14:00:39

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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Sunvest Minerals Corp.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - Sunvest Minerals Corp. (TSX Venture:SSS). has issued a press release with the following headline:Sunvest Minerals Corp. Discovers New Zone of Mineralization with Chip Sample Over 0.15 Meters of 25.9 g/t Au, 102 g/t Ag, and 1.01% Cu on the Evening Star Property, NevadaTo 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 Sunvest Minerals Corp., 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/Sunvest Minerals Corp.Source: Sunvest Minerals Corp. (TSX Venture: SSS, WKN: A2AFZ5, ISIN: CA86804N1069)Date: January 16, 2018Time: 8:00 AM EST--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Sunvest Minerals Corp. 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.)
The African Development Bank, AfDB, on Tuesday restated its commitment to Nigerias development and partnership, just as it identified specific programmes it plans to focus its attention on in 2018.

The Banks Country Director, Faal Ebrima, stated this in Abuja during a media briefing to announce the official commissioning of its Nigerian office complex by President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday.

Mr. Ebrima, who disclosed that AfDBs annual support to Nigeria in the last four years averaged between $700 million and $900 million, said the banks focal programmes would be on power, health, small and medium scale industries, agriculture and allied businesses, ICT and youth empowerment.

The country director said some of the projects to be executed in partnership with the World Bank and other partners as well as the private sector, include those in Jigawa, Bauchi, Sokoto, Akwa Ibom and Lagos states.

Apart from the power projects under the Light Programme, we anticipate supporting the private sector in Nigeria in developing two large world class fertilizer plants, with capacity for internal use and for exports.

There is also a Santa Clara Clinic in Lagos, which we are working on to provide world class medical facilities to Nigerians, rather than allow them travel outside the country.

We are also working to provide lines of credit to support cassava processioning and other agric businesses. Those are the broad areas we will be supporting Nigeria this year, he said.

Besides, the director said the bank would support the transformation of agriculture by developing special crop processing zones, not only in Nigeria, but across Africa, to address the issue of rural agricultural transformation.

He said the zones would help create in the rural areas Zones of Prosperity, where all necessary infrastructure, including power, works, roads, others would be provided to agricultural communities.

In addition, the bank hopes to develop a farmer out-growers scheme, anchor borrowers scheme, water and irrigations projects, etc. that would support the special crop processing zones programme.

So, AfDBs approach in transforming the rural area is going to revolve around the special crop processing zones. This will be a positive development and could help in addressing the problems in the agric sector not only in Nigeria, but also in Africa, he said.

On the details of specific projects to be executed by the bank during the year, Mr. Ebrima said the Santa Clara Clinic, and a Cassava project (two private sector financed initiatives) would gulp about $27 million and $36million respectively.

Others include a $200 million Jigawa Solar project; $100million 55MW capacity solar project in Sokoto; a 540 MW Qua Iboe power project that would take about $900 million; a $170 million Bauchi solar project and Skypower solar project.

He said the bank is also planning a transmission lines development project with the Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN this year, to help distribute available electricity across the country.

Apart from the physical projects, he said the bank was equally partnering with the Nigerian government to develop the policy and regulatory framework needed to support the power programmes of the government.

On jobs, the director said the bank would be working with the private sector under its flagship initiative, Jobs for Youth programme to mainstream  gender (women) and youth engagements on skills development.

We will be working with the private sector as part of their corporate social respnsibility programmes, to see how we can develop skills among women and youth.

We are currently working with the Office of the Vice President and Finance Ministry to develop an ICT programme to develop the capacity of youths in ICT to become entrepreneurs.

The idea is to identify five to six universities that could be developed as centres of excellence to offer these trainings, same as was done in agriculture under the young farmers programme so that rather than rely on government for jobs, the youth could create their jobs, he said.

On the new Nigerian office Complex, Mr Ebrima said the construction of the building, which gulped about $17million, is a demonstration of the commitment of the bank to Nigerias continued development.

The building is the first permanent structure to be designed and constructed outside the headquarters building in Abidjan. It provides additional evidence about the importance of Nigeria to the bank as its largest shareholder.

We are saying we are here to stay, to support Nigeria; together with Nigeria to support the regional economy of West Africa. It shows we are committed as the premier African financial institution to Nigeria, the director said.
The lingering marital drama between Nollywood actress, Tonto Dikeh ,and her estranged husband, Olakunle Churchill, has taken another twist.

This time Mr. Churchill has filed a suit against his ex-wife at the family court of the Lagos State Magistrate court. He is challenging

Tontos decision to feature their son, King, in a reality show.

According to him, the aim is to exploit his son for financial gains, expose the life and times of the little boy at a period when he cannot make a decision for himself. According to him, the production is entirely an adult content.

Thus, the Reality Show called King Tonto being produced by Linda Ikeji Media Limited and featuring King Andre cannot be released or aired.

PREMIUM TIMES had reported that Tonto had decided to lay bare her life for all to see on a new reality show titled, King Tonto.

In the footage, Tonto strips stark naked whilst surrounded by a surgical team and is seen undergoing a breast and butt enlargement in a popular Lagos-based cosmetic surgery hospital.

The procedure was filmed in real time.

My body has been something that I have always been extremely ashamed of, she revealed in the clip.

In the trailer of the reality show, Tonto also talks about life as a single mum, life as an actress, her fears, her struggles and finances.

This is said to be the first step to be taken by Mr. Churchill towards protecting his sons rights as captured under the Child Rights Law of Lagos State.

Following this development, the reality show which was originally expected to debut in the first quarter of 2018 might be halted.

The estranged couple met two and a half years ago at Escape Nightclub in Lagos during his brothers birthday party.

Tonto got pregnant six months after they met, and they later married.

In February 2017, the Nollywood star confirmed there were cracks in her 17-month-old marriage.

She revealed she had moved out of the house with her son. By June 2017, Tontos dad returned her traditional marriage bride price to his ex-son in law.
Ethiopian Airlines said on Tuesday it had signed an agreement with the Zambian Government to re-launch Zambias national carrier, which was shut down more than two decades ago.

Ethiopian Airlines said in a statement in Addis Ababa that the Zambia Airways would initially serve national and regional destinations before embarking on international flights.

The airline said that the deal with the shareholders of Zambia Airways enabled it to acquire a 45 per cent stake in the firm.

The statement, however, did not disclose how much it had paid for the stake.

State-owned Zambia Airways went into liquidation in 1994.

Ethiopias state-owned flag carrier is ranked by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) as the largest airline in Africa both in terms of revenue and profit.

It is in talks with a number of airline companies across the continent to acquire stakes and manage operations.

Ethiopian Airlines operates and manages Malawi Airlines through a deal signed in 2013.

It also has a deal with ASKY, a West African airline with shareholders, which include the ECOWAS regional bloc of countries and a number of banks.

The airlines revenue rose by 10.3 per cent to 54.5 billion birr ($2.43 billion) in the 2015/16 fiscal year, while passenger numbers climbed by 18 per cent to 7.6 million. Net profit was up by 70 per cent at six billion birr.

Ethiopian Airlines wants to increase revenue to 10 billion dollars by 2025, as well as expand its fleet to 140 aircraft from less than 90 now, with its sights set on Asia.

(Reuters/NAN)
Gambian President Adama Barrow on Tuesday said a single statement made by President Muhammadu Buhari changed everything during the political impasse in the small West African country.

Mr. Barrow as an opposition candidate ended the 22-year reign of former President Yahya Jammeh in the presidential election of December 2016.

He won 54.54 percent ( 263,515 votes) while the former presidents scored 36.66 ( 212,099 votes).

Mr. Jammeh at first accepted defeat and congratulated Mr. Barrow but later, in a televised address to the country, rejected the outcome of the election and called for fresh one to be conducted by a God-fearing and independent electoral commission.

The decision by Mr. Jammeh led to a political crisis which forced the intervention of regional leaders.

Mr. Barrow, who visited Mr. Buhari on Tuesday, said while addressing State House correspondents that during a meeting in Mali he (Buhari) took a decision as a leader in a closed door meeting, he made one statement that changed everything: that if The Gambian President wants to challenge the sub-region, he is welcome.

This was his words and that made a big difference as a leader. And that leadership role was very important not just for The Gambians but for Africa, because the problem was an African problem with an African solution.

Mr. Barrow said his visit to Nigeria was very important to Gambians.

We have always wanted to say thank you when Nigeria gave us all the support during and after the impasse. Nigeria has been supporting The Gambia for a long time in different areas like technical assistance in the area of education, judiciary. We are really happy to come, he said.

Mr. Barrow said his visit was simply to thank Mr. Buhari for his support, saying it is a tradition in Gambia that if you want to thank a farmer for a good job, you have to visit him at his farm and that is why we are here.

On the deal entered with the former President that made him eventually leave office, Mr. Jammeh said it was fostered through ECOWAS, the UNDP and the international community.

Nigeria was involved and Liberia as the chair was involved, the Guinean President and the Mauritanian President were also involved. The Guinean President and the Mauritanian President were physically on the ground, for him to accept the will of the people, exit to allow us assume office.

This was the deal, he accepted to go on exile which we couldnt guarantee his security. This was the deal, he said.

Mr. Buhari also responded to a question from a Gambian journalist on the role that Nigeria will continue to play to help The Gambia overcome some of the reforms it is undertaking such as in security.

The Nigerian president said the regional body did its best in the most critical time adding that hopefully now the president will raise his team and we will raise a corresponding team and we will sit together and see how we can draw a political programme that will complement each others effort on development. So this is the next line we are going.
The children of the late civil rights icon, Martin Luther King Jr., decried the disparaging remarks allegedly made by U.S. President Donald Trump against Africa.

The 2018 Martin Luther King Jr. Day was used to slam Trump at various protests tagged: Rally against Trump in several cities in the U.S. on Monday, the official Federal holiday in the U.S. to honour King.

At gatherings across the nation, activists, residents and teachers honoured the late civil rights leader on what would have been his 89th birthday and ahead of the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Tennessee.

Trump allegedly used a vulgarity to describe African countries and questioned the need to allow more Haitians into the U.S. during a meeting with senators on immigration last week.

He also is said to have asked why the country could not have more immigrants from nations like Norway but Trump had said that was not the language he used.

Kings daughter, Bernice King, told hundreds of people who attended the Day at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta that civilisation originated from Africa.

We cannot allow the nations of the world to embrace the words that come from our president as a reflection of the true spirit of America.

We are one people, one nation, one blood, one destiny. All of civilisation and humanity originated from the soils of Africa.

Our collective voice in this hour must always be louder than the one who sometimes does not reflect the legacy of my father, she said.

In Washington, Kings eldest son, Martin Luther King III, also criticised Trumps racist remarks.

When a president insists that our nation needs more citizens from white states like Norway, I dont even think we need to spend any time even talking about what it says and what it is.

We got to find a way to work on this mans heart, King III, said.

The pastor of the Church, Rev. Raphael Warnock, also took issue with Trumps campaign slogan to Make America Great Again.

Warnock said he believed America is already great in large measure because of Africa and African people.

He urged people in the audience to speak out against such remarks about other countries, noting Kings own words that silence is betrayal.

Down the street from Trumps Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, Haitian protesters and their supporters shouted: Our country is not a shithole, referring to comments Trump reportedly made.

Trump, while signing the proclamation for Kings Day on Wednesday, praised him for dedicating his life to all Americans while also dedicating his weekly address to the nation, released on Monday, to King.

Dr Kings dream is our dream, it is the American dream, its the promise stitched into the fabric of our nation, etched into the hearts of our people and written into the soul of humankind.

It is the dream of a world where people are judged by who they are, not how they look or where they come from, Trump has said.

Kings writings spoke of injustices against African-Americans, Native Americans and colonisation, among others. (NAN)
The Catholic Bishop Conference of Nigeria has asked the Federal Government to suggest better alternatives to the establishment of grazing colonies proposed by the presidency.

In a press statement signed by the president of the CBCN, Ignatius Kaigama, on Tuesday, the conference said the government should rather encourage cattle owners to establish ranches in line with international best practice.

The recent mass slaughter of unarmed citizens by these armed herdsmen in some communities in Benue, Adamawa, Kaduna and Taraba states has caused national shock, grief and outcry.

We commiserate with the families of the deceased, whilst we pray for the blissful repose of the dead and the quick recovery of the wounded. At the same time, we totally condemn such brutal massacres of innocent people. Herdsmen may be under pressure to save their livestock and economy but this is never to be done at the expense of other peoples lives or livelihoods.

It is, therefore, madness to slaughter fellow human beings and shameful that we had to show the world this ugly picture of our country. If government is incapable or unwilling to protect the lives of her citizens before marauding herdsmen, people might be tempted to resort to self-help in defence of their lives and property when threatened or attacked.

This will, no doubt, lead to the complete breakdown of law and order in the country. To forestall this, government should urgently and seriously rise up to her primary responsibility of protecting the lives and property of her citizens and ensure that such mindless killings should not reoccur.

With the array of intelligence officers at her disposal, government should also expeditiously take measures to unmask the perpetrators of these dastardly acts and their sponsors, disarm them and bring them to book. Our perilous situation calls for more security consciousness.

It would be stressing the obvious to state that a better alternative to open grazing should be sought rather than introducing grazing colonies in the country. Government should rather encourage cattle owners to establish ranches in line with international best practice.

Farmers and herdsmen have a lot to contribute to the socio-economic prosperity of our nation. A more enduring strategy must be worked out for their peaceful co-existence and mutual respect, the bishops said.

According to the statement, the CBCN said the current situation has put Nigeria under siege. Citing the various cases of crimes in the country, it urged the Federal Government to ensure an end to the many cases of kidnapping in parts of the country, while addressing the poor economic state of the country.

Due to unfavourable climatic factors, herders are constrained to move in search of greener pastures to save the lives of their cattle and to protect their economy and so, some unscrupulous ones mindlessly drive their cattle into farmlands to graze on peoples crops. When local farmers resist such wanton destruction of their means of livelihood, they are visited with deadly attacks.

It is very sad to note that the spate of kidnapping in our country has risen to unimaginable proportion. Day after day, citizens are taken captive, humiliated and traumatised by heavily armed gangsters. No institution or individual is spared by kidnappers, no matter how old, sacred or highly placed.

The victims of kidnapping and their families should no longer be left at the mercy of heartless and greedy kidnappers. There is an urgent need to deal decisively with kidnappers and drastically curb their excesses.

Given the effective security equipment available in the modern world of high technology and considering the huge security votes set aside every month at the state and federal levels, our communities should be better policed by security agents, who are better equipped and well trained to handle the security challenge of kidnapping that is bringing our nation to its knees.

The CBCN further called for immediate action to end the growing rate of crimes in IDP camps across the country.

One of the bitter fruits of bloody conflicts is the ugly phenomenon of internally displaced people and refugees. Thousands of people in our country have been displaced and have fled their homes to seek a more peaceful environment for themselves and their families.

Similarly, due to the protracted political unrest in the Cameroons, many Cameroonians have also fled their country and have taken refuge in some communities in Taraba, Benue and Cross River States.

Reports have it that there are some abuses going on in some IDP and refugee camps. Some officials in those camps diverted materials meant for the IDPs and refugees.

There are also reports of sexual harassment in some camps. Government should as a matter of urgency conduct investigation into those allegations with a view to checking these abuses.

The CBCN warned security operatives and government that an urgent address of the security situation is necessary to avoid an impending war.

Since the repeated outbreaks of bloody conflicts in different communities across the nation, we observe with great sadness that thousands of innocent people have been hacked down in cold blood. Others have been exposed to situations of unspeakable suffering. Many others have been crushed and silenced, while their rights and dignity are trampled with impunity.

We believe that, if there is some degree of political will, our public authorities can take adequate steps to put an end to these human tragedies and save the country from the calamities of a civil war.

It is wiser and easier to prevent a war than to stop it after it has broken out. We, therefore, urge all aggrieved parties to seek reconciliation through dialogue and mutual forgiveness. Above all, we passionately appeal to them to beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.

Seventy three victims of herdsmen attacks were given a mass burial last week in Benue State following various attacks by the herdsmen during the new year celebration.

The sad event has attracted wide recrimination against the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administrations fight against terror, with many calling for the declaration of herdsmen as a terrorist group.
One week into the new year, Tuesday, January 9, the air in Abuja was dry, dusty, and clammy. The nations capital was sluggishly waking into a new rhythm of calm and relative order after the chaos of the Christmas season prompted by a debilitating fuel crisis.

That day, at the headquarters of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), in the south east corner of Maitama district of the city, Mohammed Dauda, the then acting director of the agency was getting ready for an official briefing with President Mohammed Buhari. It was his first of such briefing after he was plucked out of the Nigerian embassy in the Republic of Chad October last year, to come serve as acting head of the spy agency tasked with overseeing foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations.

Last year April, the NIA became the butt of a bumpy controversy on account of a botched undercover operation and a $43million lodgement at an Ikoyi apartment that eventually led to the suspension and subsequent investigation of Mr. Ayodele Oke, a career diplomat and erstwhile director general of the agency.

Dauda the NIA boss in cheery mood

When Mr. Dauda emerged from his meeting, according to PREMIUM TIMES sources at the Aso Rock Villa, he was in such an expansive and cheery mood, and it started looking as if he was now on an assured path to reinforcing his position, and probably earning confirmation as substantive head of the agency.

As ambassador to Chad, a major theatre in the war against the Boko haram insurgency, and with a pedigree in financial and economic crimes intelligence, two of the major organised crimes posing severe and existential threats to the national image profile, agency insiders say Mr. Dauda, with his added ecumenical, even if under-stated, mien had the requisite qualities for the new office.

He had reasons to be upbeat. Mr. Daudas appointment, like many done before by the Buhari presidency, may trigger another round of controversy. In his case, the man he will be directly reporting to, the National Security Adviser to the president, Babagana Monguno, a retired major general, and a fellow Kanuri, was unaware of, and was certainly not consulted, on his appointment. For the two months now that he has served at NIA, Mr. Dauda was forced to walk a delicate balance, trying tirelessly to build trust and confidence internally, and in the immediate outer-rim of the NIA political universe.

Two events, the very next day, will finally change all that for Mr. Dauda.

First, in the early hours of Wednesday, January 10, an operational truck of State Security Services (SSS) agents drove quietly towards the eastern end of the city and pulled up at the gate of Defence House in the Maitama District. They wanted to see the Chief of Staff to the President, Abba Kyari, and their mission, they said, was to defend Mr. Kyari, a usually taciturn but fiercely loyal aide of the president in the event of an attempted arrest.

Administration sources told PREMIUM TIMES at the weekend that the orders for the SSS deployment came directly from the director general of the agency, Mr. Lawal Daura.

The NNPC TSA controversy

At the beginning of October last year, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), found itself at the centre of a scandal that it was flouting the governments policy on TSA accounts, by failing to remit N50 billion of its income and interests from five banks. Mr. Kyari was named in the scandal, with the Senate claiming he provided the directive for the NNPC to by pass the TSA account.

The NNPC, through its public communication office, strongly shot back saying, By virtue of the operations of the NNPC, the Corporation had made series of compelling cases to the Presidency and the Central Bank of Nigeria to allow certain categories of accounts operate outside the TSA, as they contain co-mingled funds governed by detailed agreements with local and international implications. It concluded that to claim that the Chief of Staff single-handedly approved these exemptions was not only unfair, but is a complete misrepresentation of facts to mislead the general public.

Political and security sources familiar with the matter, in Abuja, said both the NSAs office and the presidency became sufficiently worried about the story and got the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to show interest in the matter. The spokesman for the commission, Wilson Uwujaren, suggested he was unaware of this claim but promised to broach it with the upper deck of the organisation and get back. His phone became unreachable throughout the weekend. The EFCC acting chairman, Ibrahim Magu, in response to PREMIUM TIMES inquiries later disclaimed that operatives of his agency were on any such assignment.

Interpreting all these manouvres from the sidelines, the director general of the SSS, Lawal Daura, reportedly felt a mischief was apace, and in response, rapidly deployed the team of armed operatives to forestall any eventuality. It was like a preemptory move a source told PREMIUM TIMES.

This will be the second time that Mr. Daura would muscularly wade into an interagency storm on perceived grounds of EFCCs operational overreach. About two months ago, on November 21, the SSS triggered an inter-agency war with the EFCC when it frustrated an attempt to arrest the former head of the NIA, Ayo Oke, and former head of the SSS, Ita Ekpeyong, from their homes on Mamman Nasir Street in the Asokoro District of Abuja.

The drama at Defence House

Defence House is one of the presidential guest houses in Abuja, and among its famous occupants these days has been the president himself who used it as his transition home before his inauguration in 2015. Currently, however, the two most celebrated occupiers of the posh real estate are Mr. Kyari and Mr Monguno, whose houses are adjacent each other.

The Kyari-Monguno relationship is one of the fascinating and defining narratives of the Buhari presidency, one which a presidential aide, in response to questions from PREMIUM TIMES for the reporting of this story, characterized as a truly enthralling history of animosity.

Both men, from the same Kanuri stock, entrenched within the topmost rack and influential ladder of the administration, represent, by all indication, the spiky edges of the problematic policy making space of the Buhari presidency.

With the SSS agents prowling the perimeter of the Kyari household, this Wednesday, all armed to the teeth, Mr. Monguno, according to sources, could not hide his shock when he encountered them as he made ready to head to work. Who are these men? he reportedly asked, in anger and distaste. In a short while after, a truck load of soldiers, ordered by Mr. Monguno, had descended on Defence House with a mission to disarm the SSS agents. After some indecent trade in language, reasons prevailed, and both combatants, the soldiers and the SSS operatives, went back to their bases.

The very next day, Thursday, the president met separately with Mr. Monguno and then with Mr. Kyari, according to sources, in the effort to mend the breached relationship of his two principal aides. Later that night, the presidency issued a statement announcing the appointment of Ahmed Rufai Abubakar, a senior special adviser to the president as the substantive head of the NIA.

Mr. Abubakar, a polyglot who is reputed to speak and write excellently in French, English, and Arabic was previously a director at the United Nations Political office for West Africa in Dakar Senegal where he oversaw the patterns of conflict, peace building, and the democratic transition in the region.

As in the case of Mr. Daudas appointment, again, Mr. Monguno, who had been reportedly prepping another candidate for the job, heard of this announcement, which he ought to have had a hand in determining, like every Nigerian through the late new hours. It was a humbling and stinging jolt on the NSAs profile. This was a particularly neutralizing episode in the thorny relationship of the two presidential aides whose contrastive visions regarding policy directions of the administration had now come full circle. In this particular case, Mr. Dauda, who himself heard of his replacement over the news, turns out as a victim of an enormous power play that acutely expresses the Buhari political cosmos.

The Magu conundrum

No issue, however, best describes the divergent vision of the Kyari-Monguno challenge as the question of Mr. Magus continued suitability for the office of the anti-corruption czar of the country.

During the long Christmas and New Year holiday, the team of Mr. Kyari; the interior minister, Bello Dambazau; the DG of the SSS, Mr. Daura; and the Attorney General of the Federation, Mr. Malami convinced the president to remove Mr. Magu who they thought had become a major liability to the progress of the administration. The president reportedly advised them to clear with his vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, a law professor who, with Mr. Monguno remain the two prominent life-lines of Mr. Magu in the administration.

When Mr. Osinbajo returned from his holiday trip to Dubai, they met with him and tabled the request arguing that Mr. Magu had become a burden for the administration, stalling progress on the budget and several other engagements with the National Assembly for which, in their view, the president was suffering costly reputational damage.

They illustrated their claims with several appointments awaiting confirmation at the senate. The vice president reportedly told them that the international community as indeed many Nigerians continue to credit the Buhari administration on account of its anti-corruption profile, and that removing Magu would send a dangerously wrong signal in an election year.

According to those familiar with the exchange, Mr. Osinbajo suggested that in the event of a Magu transition, a fitting position for him would be an elevation as Special Adviser on anti-corruption in the presidency while a new chair for the EFCC is appointed.

Irreversibly committed to the removal of Mr. Magu, the group is said to be uncomfortable with the arrangement. In the larger narrative of the Kyari-Monguno relationship, presidency sources reason that matters have gotten to a peak where one of them will have to eventually cancel the other for peace to reign.
Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, has taunted distraught parents of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls, telling them to accept the insurgents as their sons-in-law.

At least 100 of over 200 Chibok girls kidnapped by the terror group in 2014 remain in captivity.

A new video released on Monday by the group showed more than a dozen girls who identified themselves as the abducted Chibok girls.

Many of them had babies, an indication they had been sexually abused by the militants.

A young woman who spoke on behalf of the girls said the captives were doing well and were unwilling to return to their families. The speaker wore full face veil and could not be identified.

Mr. Shekau said the parents of the girls should consider himself and his men as their in-laws because their daughters were happily married to his fighters.

The 36-minute video which the Boko Haram leader claimed was recorded on Sunday, January 14, also faulted the claims of the Nigerian military that he was unhealthy and a spent horse.

Mr. Shekau said the 107 girls that had so far regained their freedom were released by his group because they refused to convert to Islam or get married.

He said he also had in custody 10 policewomen that were abducted along Damboa-Maiduguri Road when his men ambushed a military convoy in 2017.

Mr. Shekau, who spoke largely in Hausa, said the latest attempt by the Nigerian military to invade his enclave and rescue the policewomen was met with severe resistance that caused the government heavy losses including an helicopter, armoured tank, armoured personnel carrier and trucks.

Mr. Shekau said his group would not give up the fight because they are devoted to the cause.

He also claimed responsibility for most of the suicide bombings that took place recently.

The video later showed the abducted 10 policewomen, many of who wept as they looked into camera.

Mr. Shekaus comments are transcribed below:

Oh you people of Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, here is my message to you all . The God that created all of us and enjoined us in His holy book, just as he sent it through our holy prophet, Muhammad (peace be upon him) gave him the instruction to say that Allah has sanctioned mankind this straight path and make clear this path that does not lead one astray. This path is the only path prescribed to all mankind in the world. May God take our lives on this path.

The government of Nigeria cannot end what we are doing; they can only die trying.

Particularly you the people of Nigeria and government of Nigeria; please stop deceiving yourselves about what you cannot achieve. You cannot stop us. And stop following the path that is not right.

God has instructed us to catch whoever that is not following our path and detained such persons in our prisons, or we could set him free and let him go ; or we could as well take our revenge on their lives. Whatever we see in the holy book is what we do. We dont look elsewhere.

That is why we hold unto the Chibok girls; that is why we still have the police women. Among the Chibok schoolgirls that insisted on following the ways of their parents religion, we allowed them to go back and joined their people. And here with us we have the police women who have not converted to Islam and we are not going to force them to do so. They are here begging for you to come release them.

But for the remaining Chibok girls, you cant get them again because they have all accepted and understood the religion of God. They did not accept Islam because of us; who are we to force them? That is why we say our ways is not that of the mortal being, but that of God.

You have said that I, Abubakar Shekau, is tired and unhealthy. But you forget that no one gets tired on the path of God. I am still strong and ready to carry on the work of God. That is why the Chibok schoolgirls, who have gone through the western education, are today following the book of God, because they have come to understand that the constitution is not the right path but a deception. They have now realised that your laws in Nigeria is not for good for them. It is written in the first article of your constitution that the constitution takes precedence over and above any other law book including the holy books. But how come these Chibok girls still come to accept the laws and constitution of God?

You use to teach children in iyour schools to say I pledge to Nigeria my country, to be faithful loyal and honest, to serve Nigeria with all my strength, to defend her honour and glory. Is that not what you teach your pupils?

It is still the same you that ask the children to sing Arise O Compatriots, Nigerians call obey. To serve our father land, with love and strength and faith, the labor of hour heroes past shall never be in vain. Is that not what you teach our young children in school that they should not allow the labour of past leaders to waste in vain.

Do you think all the prophets of God will allow that to happen? Never!

President Buhari you are now 76 years old, but let me tell you that many like you have attempted fighting the soldiers of God in the past and they are destroyed. I swear by Allah that you cannot defeat us. That is how you come to tell all kinds of lies. But God knows that his faithful servants cannot be ridiculed before his enemies.

The Chibok girls that have become Muslims, and got married peacefully, are even calling on your parents to come accept Islam. May God bless you all. And we call on the parents of the Chibok girls that have become good Muslims to accept our ways and be part of us. You have become our in-laws by the virtue of your daughters marrying us. We are now in-laws. We are not fighting with the people, but those that stand against Gods commandment. That is why we reject your books and constitution. That is why I have said it in the past that No rule and regulation in the world rather than Quran.

We still have the policewomen and here are they crying for help. For all that we do, we do for the sake of God. That is why various of our brethren who go out to detonate bombs do so for Gods sake and not for our sake.

The government should stop telling all these lies, especially the elders of Nigeria. Many elders have lied and did not end up well.

The military have come to us but did not end well. That is why your helicopter went down, that is why your armoured tanks got destroyed, that is why your armored trucks from Cameroon did not return. We killed many of you and you took their corpses to conceal the truth.

This message is from me Abubakar Shekau and it was released on the day that coincides with the Sunday 14th day of January 2018 in the Islamic calendar.

The speech by a representative of the abducted girls is transcribed:

Oh you our parents in Nigeria, I call on you to repent and worship Allah. We are very happy because we have found a way to Worship Allah. It is Him alone that we worship here; do repent and come to worship your creator. We pity you our parents that you have not accept the ways of Allah. You are only worshipping the country and its constitution. What a pity. It is ignorance.

It is even funny that you want the government to come and set us free and take us away. If you come to take us, where will you take us? Back to the land of infidels? God forbid! May God spare us from that your land of infidels. Dont ever hope that we will ever go back to you. Our hope is to go and join our creator. We are the Chibok schoolgirls and we have come to stay here because here is where we belong, so dont ever think you will see us again.

We pity the other girls who refuse to accept but rather chose going back to Nigeria, after God has given them His grace and brought you to the caliphate. You chose to return to infidelity. You girls will come to regret your actions. You will surely regret it on the day of judgment. Any persons that is in Nigeria and worships the constitution has only one destination which is hell fire. Repent today and worship God.

Finally we thank our father, Abubakar Shekau, he is the one that got us married to our husbands. We are all living here with dignity; we lack nothing because he gives us everything that we want. We never lack anything here. May God accept his devotion; may he die as a faithful Muslim. May God give him the ability to continue leading his followers upon the injunctions of holy book and the traditions of the prophet.

The speech by a representative of the police women is transcribed:

Assalamu alaikum to the people of Nigeria, here we are in the captivity of Boko Haram. Since our abduction we have been kept alive and well. But our plea is to the president of Nigeria and his vice president to have mercy on us and help us out of here.

We are Nigerian citizens and we plead with you to come and rescue us just as you had promised to do in the past.

We want you to rescue us in the same manner you rescued the Chibok girls. The other day that your troops invaded this place, was it meant to rescue us or to kill us. We want you to kindly deploy safe means of rescuing us all. We are 10 of us that are held here.
Five people, including two insurgents, were killed in an early Tuesday attack in Pallam village of Madagali in Adamawa, the chairman of the local government, Yusuf Mohammed, confirmed to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday.

Mr. Mohammed said the insurgents attacked the village around midnight in an operation that lasted over one hour, killing three people.

They shot and killed a security man guarding the village clinic and slaughtered a man that tried to escape, while the third victim was a shop owner who was burnt to death in his shop when they set fire on 18 lock-up shops in the village, he said.

He said soldiers and local hunters who chased the insurgents were able to shoot two dead.

The spokesman of the police command in Adamawa, Othman Abubakar, also confirmed the incident but said he had no details yet.

Mr. Abubakar said information reaching him was that three people lost their lives with shops destroyed.

Also commenting, the Administrative Officer of Hunters Association in Madagali Local Government Area, Malam Bakura Madagali, said three villagers were kill with one injured.

Two Boko members were also killed, Madagali said.

(NAN)
The House of Representatives on Tuesday called on the federal government to declare a state of emergency on security in the wake of deadly attacks in Benue and other states.

In a motion by Babatunde Kolawole (Ekiti  PDP) and Benue state caucus of the House led by the member representing Guma/Makurdi federal constituency, Dickson Tarkhighir, the house mandated an ad hoc committee to conduct a public hearing to hear from both sides and proffer a lasting solution.

While presenting the motion, Mr. Kolawole said scores of farmers have been killed in attacks, including women and children, a development that has brought a great sense of insecurity and distrust among ethnic groups, thus raising a spectre of instability in the country.

He also listed the possible outcomes of insecurity.

That incessant attacks on farmers and farming communities will ultimately result in food shortages, artificial scarcity and hampering of the drive of the Federal Government to diversify the nations economy through agriculture, he said.

Also speaking on behalf of the Benue caucus, Mr. Tarkighir called on the federal government to show commitment to the Benue States anti open-grazing law by compelling relevant security agencies to comply with the enforcement and implementation of the law.

The federal government should direct the security agencies to not only secure peace but also bring the culprits to book, he said.

Earlier during the plenary, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, condemned the killings in Benue and some parts of the country, describing it as senseless.

From the senseless killings in Rivers State, to the killing rampages in Benue, Taraba, Kaduna, Zamfara, Adamawa, Edo and other States, our dear country is now being painted red with the blood of the innocents on account of unremitting bedlam callously promoted by cold hearted merchants of death, he said.

He commiserated with the families of the deceased and affected states.

I wish to convey our heartfelt condolences to the governments, people, and especially families of those who have lost loved ones in these primitive, mindless and despicable rounds of bloodletting across our dear country, he added.

Over 70 residents were killed when suspected herdsmen invaded villages in Logo and Guma Local Government Areas in Benue State earlier in January. The violence has been linked to the recent passage of the anti-grazing law by the state.

The attackers also ambushed a police patrol team and killed three officers on January 8.

The state government conducted a mass burial for the victims in a village near the Air Force Base in Makurdi, the state capital, on January 12.

As part of his administrations response to the incidents, President Muhammadu Buhari on January 9 ordered the immediate relocation of Inspector-General of Police Ibrahim Idris to Benue.

Mr. Idris, who arrived the state on January 11, said he had deployed over 660 police officers in more than 10 units across the state, promising to deploy additional officers to five more units in the coming days.

Security agencies lackadaisical

Meanwhile, Dino Melaye, the All Progressives Congress senator for Kogi West, Tuesday lamented what he called the slow response by the Federal Government and security agencies to the killings in Benue State.

Mr. Melaye criticised the response by the political and security authorities at the senate plenary while speaking on a motion on Security Infrastructure in Nigeria; An Emergency Visit to Benue State.

Mr. President, this is the voice of a human witness of Nigeria calling for justice. Mr. President, what happened in Benue State has shown like never before that in this country, we live in perilous times. We live in times where justice is the most scarce commodity in the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

What we demand is not a lackadaisical approach from the Federal Government. This issue has been approached with kid gloves. If this happens in the United States of America, the lives of over 70 Americans murdered in cold blood including unborn children and women, will President Trump be comfortable in the White House without paying critical attention to psychologically assuage the pain of the people?

The Federal Government, the security agencies are extremely lackadaisical about the issue. If we dont begin to give justice where it is needed in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, be it in Taraba or in Benue, be it in Enugu or Ogbomosho. Justice from North to South, from East to West, if we dont give justice, we will be inviting a political and insecurity tsunami that we may not be able to curtail, he said.

Mr. Melaye called on President Muhammadu Buhari, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and the Senate to ring the bell of justice and demanded that reports from committees set up to investigate the killings be implemented.

The president must be tough enough to take bold decisions on this matter. While I do not support killings on any side, I want to say without fear or favor, that cattle rearing is a personal business. It is a personal business and should be treated as such.
The Senate has given the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, 14 days to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators of violence in Benue, saying the identities

A Senate report on Wednesday said faceless people were sponsoring and harbouring foreign mercenaries who have been perpetrating killings in Benue and other parts of Nigeria.

Over 70 people have been killed in the last two weeks by suspected herdsmen, sparking widespread outrage. The victims were given mass burial on Thursday.

The Senates interim report by the ad-hoc committee on the review of the current security infrastructure in Nigeria noted that the situation in Benue is a manifestation of the larger security crisis in Nigeria.

The chairman of the committee, Ahmed Lawan, who led the committee on a visit to Benue state presented the report on Tuesday.

It is very clear from our interaction that some faceless people are sponsoring and harbouring the well trained foreign mercenary elements and using them to unleash violence and criminality in Nigerias rural space, Mr. Lawan said reading the report.

These elements and their domestic acolytes of various ethnic nationalities could also be largely responsible for kidnappings, abductions, armed robberies and unresolved murders.

The report emphasised the need to take urgent action against the perpetrators.

Failure to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators of these gruesome acts could play into the hands of those ethnic entrepreneurs whose aim is to break the nation into ethnic principalities. It is deepening the countrys ethno-religious faultlines by entrenching the perception of the conflict in ethno-religious dimensions.

Buttressing this, a member of the committee, Barnabas Gemade, said the armed bandits killing people are known and in fact, a list comprising their names had been sent to Abuja.

I do recall in the committees interactive sessions with the heads of securities in Benue State. It is in this meeting that security personnel did inform the committee that those harbouring foreign armed bandits are known and they have in fact compiled a list and sent to Abuja and that if the high leadership requires to know the list they have sent to Abuja, the Director General of the Nigerian security system can be approached and they will provide that list, he stated.

In his contribution, Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, urged the federal government to declare a state of emergency.

The government should look at section 305 (3) of the constitution dealing with state of emergency. When we are talking about state of emergency, its not about removing the governors and putting administrators, the constitution didnt envisage that. It is about taking extra ordinary measures to safeguard the unity of the country, to protect lives. Countries have declared state of emergencies in the whole nation. So when Im talking about state of emergency, its not only in Benue, Plateau or Zamfara, Im talking about state of emergency in the Nigerian country to enable government to take extra ordinary measures.

Former Senate President, David Mark, Benue-PDP, argued that a break in intelligence transmission between the indigenes and security operatives is a major cause of the killings.

Presently, there is no intelligence transmission between the organs, villagers, and government and if there is, government is not proactive. Nigeria is not the country with the largest cattle in the world. Are they having all these crises in other countries? There are modern ways of doing things and we must grow with time. We cannot be operating an archaic system that we have if it doesnt fit into the modern situation.

If there are so many people bringing in AK-47 all over this country and government cannot do anything about it, you know what will happen next, people are going to resort to self-defence and that will be worse for everybody because nobody will want to sit at home and see his family members taken away and do nothing if government cannot protect people.

The report says the sponsors are known, they can be arrested first thing tomorrow morning and if they are not known, then government is failing, Mr. Mark said.

Adopting recommendations of the committee, the lawmakers mandated the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to arrest and investigate perpetrators of this heinous crime within 14 days.

Other resolutions include that the federal government should review the nations security to ensure full compliance with the ECOWAS protocol on free movement of persons, cattle and goods to preserve safety and security of Nigerians.

The lawmakers also adopted additional prayers that; the federal government constitute a joint police/military operation to ensure that the carnage is brought to an end and establish a military base in the area.

They urged National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA to provide relief materials to large number of IDPs in Logo and Goma Local Government and that the federal government support Benue state government to take care of expenditure incurred on security personnel deployed, refund other states that committed state funds to maintain security in their states and pay adequate compensation to families who lost loved ones and property in the destruction.

The committee was also tasked on the need to undertake a reconsideration of state/ community police to strengthen the countrys security.

The senate resolved that the recommendations should be presented to the president by the Senate President for immediate action.
The Nigerian presidency has reacted to accusations by the General Secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, Musa Asake, that President Muhammadu Buhari of bias in his handling of attacks by suspected herdsmen across the country.

Mr. Asake had addressed journalists on Tuesday in reaction to attacks that led to the death of several persons in Benue State since the beginning of the year.

The Christian leader reiterated CANs earlier accusation that the Buhari administration was slowly accomplishing a purportedly hidden agenda to Islamise Nigeria through the recent killings.

Under President Buhari, the murderous Fulani herdsmen enjoyed unprecedented protection and favouritism to the extent that the herdsmen treat Nigeria as a conquered territory. Rather than arrest and prosecute the Fulani herdsmen, security forces usually manned by Muslims from the North offer them protection as they unleash terror with impunity on the Nigerian people.

The bottom line is that President Buhari failed woefully to protect Nigerians. He wilfully permitted the Fulani herdsmen to operate killing people, destroying communities wholesale, destroying farmlands and turning the entire Middle Belt into killing fields, all the while enjoying government protection from counter attack, arrest or prosecution, Mr. Asake said.

In an email response sent to PREMIUM TIMES Tuesday evening, spokesperson of the president, Garba Shehu said it was unfortunate that Mr. Asake could not cite any valid cases of constitutional violations by Mr. Buhari.

Mr. Shehu said Mr. Buharis government poses no threat to the countrys democracy and Constitution.

There are no cases of any violation of our sacred constitution and there will be none under this President.

The respected religious leader should stick to his religious duties and leave politics for politicians, the presidential spokesperson said.
The United States Embassy Education Advising Centre, Nigeria, has called on the Federal University of Technology, Minna to identify first class graduates for further studies in the U.S.

Joseph Schaller, its Coordinator, made the call during a courtesy visit to the university on Monday in Minna.

The centre is ready to assist high-achieving low income students to access funding opportunities from institutions in the U.S.

Normally, the tuition and fees range between 20,000 dollars and 70,000 dollars; the financial aid is limited, highly competitive and usually based on merit, he said.

He said there were more funding opportunities at the graduate level than at the undergraduate level.

To compete favourably for financial aid, a student must have at least six to seven As in WAEC senior secondary school examination, or a minimum of Second Class Upper Division.

In most cases, the financial aid is largely determined by the field of study, he said.

Responding, the Vice-Chancellor, PAbdullahi Bala, who was represented by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, (Academic), Oluwole Morenikeji, thanked the visiting team for choosing FUT, Minna.

He said that staff of the institution would be encouraged to attend U.S. schools for their higher degrees, especially with funding opportunities from the U.S.

(NAN)
A former Governor of Cross River State, Donald Duke, has indicated his interest to run for president.

According to a report by Vanguard, Mr. Duke made his interest known at the third Mike Omotosho annual lecture titled: Millennials as Protagonists in Nation Building on Sunday night in Abuja.

Mr. Duke was governor of Cross Rivers State between 1999 and 2007.

He promised to start up the process at, the right time and circumstance.

I am entitled to run for the presidency of this country. Only on right circumstances I will aspire for it. I dont shy away from responsibility, I will aspire for presidency of this country. I have what it takes to be president of this country.

Mr. Duke challenged the youth to be active in the electoral process by getting their Permanent Voters Cards, PVCs, and sensitise others ahead of the general election, rather than, loafing around, looking for who to heap their problems on.

He noted that country once had young leadership in its first republic.

It is high time Nigerians begun to project people with the technical know-how to take the country to the Promised Land.

I hear young people say to me that why would they spend hours queuing and casting their votes when at the end their votes wont count. And I tell that if their parents conceived them they never gave up on them considering the high mortality rate, so why would they not take a chance in building this nation?

We had young leadership at one stage or the other. Even in our first republic, besides the likes of Awolowo, Tafawa Balewa, M. T. Mbu was in his twenties when he became a minister.

Gowon was 30 when he became the head of state. It comes back to the disaster therein because most of them didnt have experience in governance, which led us into war. We need the combination of both. What I think we should be doing is to ensure a government that is youth-friendly to provide opportunities because we need to groom the next set of leadership.

Mr. Duke lamented the recent death of Nigerian migrants on Mediterranean sea, slavery in Libya, job loss and the rate of unemployment in Nigeria.

I dont know what a definition of failed state is and I dont want to categorise Nigeria as a failed state yet, however, a state that was unable to provide for its people has faded up.

So, if we are not there yet, we are walking with our eyes open towards it. And we need to pull the hand break now before it gets late.

The ex-governor, speaking on the activities of the current administration, said the challenge is that there is disconnection between President Muhammadu Buhari and his cabinet members. He attributed the failure of governance on the lack of consequences for erring leaders which has given room for incompetence.

The challenge we have today is the disconnect. That is the challenge of the governance today. Because if you speak with the folks in government, and I am being candid here, I think we should stop to deceive ourselves here and stop all these political correctness. There is disconnect between the president and even the ministers.
The Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria has warned against indiscriminate or misuse of paracetamol, saying such practice damages the liver and kidney.

Jelili Kilani, PSN Chairman, FCT chapter, who disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Tuesday emphasised that paracetamol, an analgesic, was not supposed to be misused.

Mr. Kilani defined drug misuse as the use of drug for purposes for which it was not intended or using a drug in excessive quantities.

He further described drug abuse as an ill-wind which its effect might not manifest immediately but later in life.

The chairman, however, decried the usual practice of taking about three or more tablet of paracetamol at once to fast track healing processes.

By engaging in such practice, you are damaging your internal organs like the liver and kidney, which if care is not taken, such damages cannot be remedied, he said.

Mr. Kilani, therefore, urged the general public to desist from misuse of paracetamol in order to avert inflicting injury to their system.

Misuse of drug is when somebody is tired and decides to take three or more tablet of Paracetamol simply because he wants a quicker or higher effect.

As good as paracetamol is, if not properly taken, it damages the liver and kidney; the only drug that is harmless to the body is water.

I advise the public to desist from self medication.

If anyone is experiencing feverish condition or body pains after taking paracetamol once and the symptoms persist, they should consult medical doctors rather than taking the drug continuously, he said. (NAN)
Three million women and youth nationwide will benefit from an agro-business programme of the Livelihood Improvement Family Enterprises (LIFE) scheme of the Federal Government, an official said on Tuesday.

Chinyere Ikechukwu-Eneh, Assistant Director, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, said in Enugu that 24 states will be captured under the pilot phase of the programme.

The official who was on advocacy visit to Enugu State Ministry of Agriculture, disclosed that the beneficiaries would be between the ages of 18 and 40.

The overall objective of this programme is to contribute to the attainment of food security and economic growth of Nigeria through job creation, value addition and business enterprises and improved livelihood.

Beneficiaries shall consist largely of young people selected across several agriculture disciplines in a gender-balanced manner with a minimum of 50 per cent women, she said.

She said 1, 200 farmers would also be empowered in the state under the programme.

Mrs. Ikechukwu-Eneh, who is the Team Leader for the LIFE in Enugu, stated that the programme would be implemented at the ward level through the establishment of LIFE clusters.

She explained that the clusters would receive agricultural inputs for sustainable production, agro-processing and packaging facilities and a marketing system designed to connect rural food surplus to urban cities.

The official added that two communities from two local government areas in each of the three senatorial districts benefit.

She said the selected communities would form five cooperative societies that would be empowered in their chosen areas of enterprise.

Mrs. Ikechukwu-Eneh, therefore, appealed to the people of the state to make good use of the programme to develop their capacities.

This programme will address the needs of existing cooperative groups that will be encouraged to own enterprises that will help their communities.

The minister has also requested that the states identify available rivers, streams and dams for utilisation going forward, Mrs. Ikechukwu-Eneh added.

Responding, the Permanent Secretary in the ministry, Samuel Onyiaji, described the programme as bold, and advised that prospective beneficiaries be given adequate information on the programme.

There are other intervention schemes running in the state and our farmers will like to compare notes.

They should have all the information with no hidden agenda in order to make good decisions, he said.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the team will be in Enugu for four days to inspect communities, facilities and sensitise groups selected for the programme.

(NAN)
A Lagos Division of the Federal High Court on Tuesday dismissed the N300 million fundamental rights enforcement suit filed by alleged billionaire kidnapper, Chukwudumeme Onwuamadike, otherwise known as Evans.

The judge, Abdulaziz Anka, dismissed the suit for lacking merit.

The alleged notorious kidnapper had earlier pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy and kidnapping before a judge but later changed his plea to not guilty.

Evans had dragged the Inspector-General of Police, the Nigeria Police Force, Commissioner of Police in Lagos State, and Special Anti-Robbery Squad before the court for alleged illegal detention.

The alleged kidnapper, through his lawyer, Olukoya Ogungbeje, claimed that his prolonged detention in police custody was a violation of his fundamental human rights.

He also accused the police of subjecting him to a media trial.

But the police had responded that they obtained a court order to detain the suspect for 90 days for proper investigation.

Delivering his judgment on the suit, Mr. Anka said the polices decision to detain Evans was reasonable since the police had shown they had an order to detain him for 90 days.

On the allegation of subjecting the suspect to a media trial, the judge said no law stops the media from carrying out their constitutional duty.

This case does not succeed and is accordingly dismissed. All parties have the right of appeal, Mr. Anka said.
A Chief Magistrates Court in Abuja on Tuesday remanded two brothers in prison for allegedly impersonating ownership of the Daily Times Newspapers.

Fidelis and Noel Anosike were arraigned before the Mpape Magistrates Court Tuesday morning on charges of criminal conspiracy, fraud and theft, PREMIUM TIMES learnt from those who attended the proceeding.

They were arrested by the police on Monday on allegations of forgery and impersonation as the owners of Daily Times.

The journalist brothers have been enmeshed in a long-drawn court battle for the ownership of the vintage publishing house, which has been in publication since 1925.

A former Nigerian senator, Ikechukwu Obiorah, had sued the Anosikes, accusing them of forging Daily Times documents and claiming ownership of the newspaper.

Mr. Obiorah accused the brothers of opening bank accounts with which they allegedly used to receive billions of naira when they held an event in commemoration of the papers 91st anniversary, according to court filings seen by PREMIUM TIMES.

The offences contravene section 96, 321, 286 and 362 of the penal code and the brothers face up to 14 years imprisonment if convicted of the charges.

Mr. Obiorah also accused the brothers of receiving N100 million from him for a non-existing printing house in Abuja.

The brothers denied the allegations before the magistrate Azubuike Ukagu, who rejected the pleas of their lawyers not to send them to prison remand.

Wole Olanipekun, a lawyer to Mr. Anosike, did not immediately return PREMIUM TIMES phone calls and text messages seeking comments about Tuesdays court proceeding.

The matter has been adjourned to February 14,and the Anosikes were transported to Kuje Prisons, PREMIUM TIMES learnt.
The Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, has demanded the immediate sack of the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, over his handling of core problems in the nations security.

The association was apparently referring to the spike in insecurity, communal attacks, particularly the killings of persons by suspected herdsmen in Benue state and other parts of the nation.

Addressing journalists in Abuja on Tuesday, the associations Secretary General, Musa Asake, also described the suggestion by government to introduce cattle colonies across the country, as an insult to the Nigerian people.

We call for immediate replacement of the Inspector General of Police because our security can no longer be guaranteed. We also demand immediate redeployment of all the Commissioners of Police. When it (attacks) happened in Southern Kaduna, he (IGP) said it was a communal clash and refuted the number of people killed. Recently he repeated the same statement in the Benue killings. That is an insult to the Christian community from a leader who is supposed to protect our lives and property what a shame.

Every Nigerian should condemn in strong terms and resist the attempt by this pro-Fulani government that cattle colonies shall be established all over the country. This is an insult on all Nigerians.

The idea of cattle colony presupposes that the Fulanis are colonial masters. How and when one ethnic group transmuted into a colonial master over all the other 388 ethnic nationalities in Nigeria is unknown. Besides, after Nigerians roundly rejected grazing reserves who are the Islamists trying to deceive with change of nomenclature? the statement said.

CAN reiterated its earlier accusation that the President Muhammadu Buhari led administration was slowly accomplishing a purportedly hidden agenda to Islamise Nigeria through the recent killings.

Under President Buhari, the murderous Fulani herdsmen enjoyed unprecedented protection and favouritism to the extent that the herdsmen treat Nigeria as a conquered territory. Rather than arrest and prosecute the Fulani herdsmen, security forces usually manned by Muslims from the North offer them protection as they unleash terror with impunity on the Nigerian people.

The bottom line is that President Buhari failed woefully to protect Nigerians. He wilfully permitted the Fulani herdsmen to operate killing people, destroying communities wholesale, destroying farmlands and turning the entire Middle Belt into killing fields, all the while enjoying government protection from counter attack, arrest or prosecution.

CAN accused military operatives of perpetrating an alleged premeditated bloodshed of refugees in Kala-Balge local government area of Borno State, in a reported accidental discharge by aircrafts, January 2017.

The association called for the publication of the reported investigation into the incident.

It called for the immediate proscription of the Myetti Allah organisation among other demands.

It listed other demands.

The Myetti Allah organisation should be tagged a terrorist organisation. Its leaders should be arrested and prosecuted for the genocide against the Christian minorities in the Middle belt.

President Muhammadu Buhari should overhaul the National Security Council with a view to sharing its membership equally between Christians and Muslims and possibly those who do not belong to either. No religion has a monopoly of competency, commitment and patriotism, the statement said.

The Catholic Bishop Conference of Nigeria CBCN, had also spoken about the attacks in a statement on Tuesday.

The CBCN warned against what it described as an impending war.
Despite a court order declaring the Kogi East Senatorial seat vacant, Atai Aidoko Ali, who until the courts pronouncement represented the district, on Tuesday attended plenary as a Senator.

Mr. Alis presence was announced by the Senate Chief Whip.

Before the announcement, he had participated in a closed-door session that lasted an hour.

The Court of Appeal in Abuja had on December 18, 2017 declared the Kogi East senatorial district seat vacant.

But Mr. Aidoko denied the ruling, claiming that the issue of, candidacy or vacant seat did not come up during the judgement.

Mr. Aidoko said the Appeal Court judgement did not declare the seat vacant but ordered parties to return to the High Court, to seek requirement for reference which he filed before the Appeal court.

However, court documents exclusively sourced by PREMIUM TIMES showed that the Senator lied as the seat was actually declared vacant.

The judgement showed that the seat should be empty until a decision of the Federal High Court is made, as directed by the Supreme Court on June 16, 2017.

The Appeal Court in a unanimous judgement condemned the decision of Mr. Aidoko to return to the court to seek interpretation of a matter that had been resolved by the Supreme Court.

A three-member panel of judges led by Abdul Aboki described as reckless and bizarre the application brought by Mr. Aidoko.

It ordered the senator to pay N1 million compensation to his contender to the seat, Isaac Alfa.
A former Interim National Chairman of All Progressives Congress (APC), Bisi Akande, says the presidential system of government Nigeria is practicing can no longer sustain its growth and success.

Mr. Akande made the remark while addressing a news conference in his country home, Ila, Osun state as part of activities to mark his 79th birthday.

He said that multi-party parliamentary democracy was the best form of government for Nigeria, if it wanted to catch up with the rest of the civilised world.

Mr. Akande, a former governor of Osun State, said that the American democracy system of multi-party presidentialism was too complicated and costly for a country of poor people with large illiteracy rate like Nigeria.

According to him, the Nigerian nation is currently running a difficult government under an unworkable set up.

President Buhari is my friend and I want him to succeed but he is running a difficult system of government.

Nigerias democracy is a military democracy of sharing and if we continue like this, there is no how we can succeed.

Up to this present age, evidence based analyses has proven parliamentary democracy to be the most accountable transparent form of government in the whole world, he said.

He said that parliamentary democracy had helped countries like the United Kingdom rich, stable and respectable globally and also made the very young Israel very strong economically and militarily.

It is also transforming India from acute poverty and hunger into self- sufficiency and reliability virtually in all fields.

Apart from being transparent and accountable, parliamentary democracy is absolutely inclusive.

It appears to be the best form of governmental structure for Nigeria now, he said.

Mr. Akande maintained that anything less accountable and transparent would not help the development of the country.

(NAN)
In reaction to recent killings in Benue State, Sam Anyanwu, senator representing Imo East, has called on the President Muhammadu Buhari-led executive to declare the perpetrators as terrorists.

Mr. Anyanwu spoke on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday.

His submission followed the Senates consideration of an interim report by the ad-hoc committee on the review of security infrastructure of Nigeria.

He wants the perpetrators to be tagged terrorists just as members of the Independent People of Biafra, IPOB.

They said these people are not Fulani cattle rearers, that they are foreigners. Then if they are foreigners, they should be tagged terrorists, he said.

If IPOB was tagged a terrorist group because they are agitating, what about foreigners who come into Nigeria to kill people and then we see them as herdsmen, I dont believe they are herdsmen.

Mr. Anyanwu called on the executive and other senators to solve the problem instead of shifting blames.

If we dont solve this, I bet you Mr. President, this blame game will continue. Now, 2019 is coming, politics is by the corner, everybody wants to play politics with everything.
A civic group says it would commence a daily sit-out on Wednesday to press for the release of Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, the leader of Islamic Movement of Nigeria who has been in custody since 2015.

Concerned Nigerians have condemned the prolonged incarceration of the Shiite leader, who was detained alongside his wife.

The couple was arrested on December 14, 2015, following a clampdown on Shiites by the Nigerian Army in Zaria, Kaduna State.

At least 347 members Shiites were killed and secretly buried in mass graves by the army.

A Federal High Court in Abuja in December 2016 ordered the release of Mr. Zakzaky and his wife by the State Security Service, SSS.

The SSS refused to obey the order, saying it kept Mr. El-Zakzaky in protective custody.

Mr. El-Zakzaky was publicly seen for the first time since the 2015 massacre after he was paraded before some reporters selected by the SSS on Saturday.

A spokesperson for the IMN said on Sunday that the organisation was not convinced by the brief interview that Mr. El-Zakzaky and his wife are doing fine.

Members of the IMN group have been staging series of processions across the northern states demanding their release.

In a statement to PREMIUM TIMES Tuesday evening, Theophilus Agada, a spokesperson for Concerned Nigerians, said the sit-out would hold daily between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. at Unity Fountain, Abuja.

The group invited top human rights advocates to observe the sit-out when it commences.

on Wednesday.
Despite opposition by some civic groups, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, IITA, said it is to carry out confined field trials, CFT, on genetically modified cassava.

In a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES on Tuesday, the Institute said it had received permission to carry out the research in collaboration with ETHZ Plant Biotechnology Laboratory in Zurich.

It said CFT permit was issued by the National Biosafety Management Agency in accordance with the National Biosafety Agency Act 2015 and is for the period September 22, 2017 to December 31, 2018.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how an anti-GMO coalition in Nigeria condemned the permit issues by the biosafety agency saying it is harmful on the countrys food security.

Among our concerns is the fact that the genetic engineering technique used by IITA and ETZ to product this cassava has never been approved anywhere else in the world. This effectively makes Nigeria a testing field for risky, unregulated technologies, the opposing groups said.

The Institute, however, said the exercise was aimed at reducing starch breakdown in storage roots of cassava after pruning the shoots, prior to harvest of the crop.

A spokesperson of the Institute, Katherine Lopez, said the objective of the field trials is to obtain storage roots with lower post-harvest physiological degradation without any loss of the nutritious starch.

Cassava is an important starchy food crop in sub-Saharan Africa as well as other tropical and subtropical regions.

However, one of the challenges faced by cassava farmers is the high level of postharvest loss caused by rapid deterioration of the starch-rich roots, which occurs naturally after harvesting.

Although the post-harvest deterioration could be reduced by pruning the shoots of cassava plants without unearthing the roots, researchers say that poses a problem as the desirable starch stored in the root could be degraded by the plant after pruning, which in turn lowers the harvest yield and root quality.

To address this problem, the IITA said a research project was conceived at ETH Zurich where cassava plants using cultivar 60444 were generated using RNAi as the tool to try to reduce starch breakdown in the root after pruning of the shoots.

Ms. Lopez said extensive testing was carried out in greenhouses in Switzerland, where the plants were grown for three consecutive years.

Our greenhouse experiments were an important first step, but they cannot substitute for genuine field conditions, said Samuel Zeema, a professor in the institute.

Hence, it is necessary to grow the plants in a tropical climate such as that of Nigeria. IITA is an excellently equipped and well-staffed institute at which to perform such a confined field trial.

IITA adheres strictly to national and international biosafety standards and will ensure that these are enforced during the trials, which will be carried out within the IITA campus in Ibadan.

The research is a fact gathering process to gain fundamental knowledge about starch metabolism in the storage root and about cassava as a crop. The cassava plants from the confined field trial are not destined for the market nor for commercial development and therefore will not be consumed, the institute said. It added that according to national regulations, all plants will be destroyed within the CFT site after analysis.

As part of the experiment, regrowth of stem cuttings from the plants will also be assessed, since regrowth may also depend on starch stored in the stem.

The IITA is an institution that generates agricultural innovations to meet Africas most pressing challenges of hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and natural resource degradation.

Working with various partners across sub-Saharan Africa, IITA said it improves livelihoods, enhances food and nutrition security, increases employment, and preserves natural resource integrity.

IITA is a member of CGIAR, a global agriculture research partnership for a food secure future.
Members of a group demanding the secession of the southwest of Cameroon, as Republic of Ambazonia, have demanded the release of their leaders detained by security operatives in Nigeria.

They said the detained leaders can be compared to Nigerias late leaders who fought for independence including Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo.

The secessionist leaders were taken into custody by the Nigerian Defence Intelligence Agency after they crossed the border into Nigeria for a meeting on January 5.

The Anglophone Cameroonians, led by their president, Julius Tabe, declared the secession of Federal Republic of Ambazonia from Cameroon in October 2017.

Various groups, including Amnesty International have warned against their extradition to Cameroon by the Nigerian government.

In a statement on Tuesday signed by Ambazonias secretary for communication and information technology, Chris Anu, the group condemned the silence of the Nigerian government since the arrest of its leaders.

It expressed dismay that Nigeria has not considered even a press statement on the matter.

The Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia (the former British Southern Cameroons), notes with dismay, the fact that since abducted at gunpoint on January 5th, 2018, the President, Julius Ayuk Tabe and 10 other members of his Cabinet have not been granted access to any lawyers and family members by the Nigerian Government which we are now aware that in complicity with the Cameroon regime in Yaounde, engineered their abduction.

We condemn vehemently, the fact that the Nigerian government, more than a week after the abductions, has not as much considered a press statement on the abductions even when the majority of those abducted are duly registered refugees in Nigeria.

Nigeria is a signatory to International conventions on human rights, and to be acting recklessly as it is doing in this case, is a bridge of those conventions.

The Interim Government IG, of Ambazonia calls on the Nigerian authorities to immediately effect the unconditional release of our President and the 10 others abducted along with him on January 5th.

We are demanding for the immediate and unconditional release of: Dr. Nfor Ngala Nfor, Dr. Fidelis Nde Che, Dr. Henry Kimeng, Prof. Che Awasum, Dr. Cornelius Kwanga, Mr. Tassang Wilfred, Dr. Ojong Okonghor, Barrister Nalowa Bih, Barrister Shufai Blaise Berinyuh and Barrister Eyambe Elias.

The statement said the detainees are not Cameroonians and should not be considered as attempting to foment trouble in Cameroon. It warned that Ambazonia would commence the process for destabilising the economy of Cameroon, if assaults on its citizens continued.

We like to bring to the attention of the Nigerian Government, and the world at large the fact that these victims abducted in the guise of fomenting trouble in the nation of Cameroon are not Cameroonians. They are Ambazonians. And as long as the Cameroon Government continues the military occupation, assault, rape, killings and the savagery on property in the Ambazonian territory, our resolve to launch a campaign aimed at economic divestment in la Republic du Cameroun will not relent.

We will target foreign companies that do business in La Republique du Cameroun and whose revenue supports Mr. Paul Biyas corrupt and inefficient functionaries. It is time for Western Governments to pass a Cameroon Divestment Act that will force their governments to cut investment ties with companies doing business in La Republique du Cameroun. But if they dont, our actions will definitely force them to do so.

The Interim Government will like to make this clarification; The Cameroon crisis isnt about secessionists or separatists, as is being widely reported. Ours is rather a classic problem of a failed decolonization from British colonial rule.

If Britain had granted Southern Cameroons independence like all other colonial powers did to their territories, this problem would not be here now. So let it be made plain and clear, Ambazonians are not separatists or secessionists, we are freedom fighters in the order of Nkrumah, Lumumba, Awolowo, Azikiwe, John Garang, Nyerere etc., fighting colonization by La Republique du Cameroun.

The Union between La Republique du Cameroun and the Southern Cameroons was never consummated, the statement said.

According to the statement, the Republic of Ambazonia will continue its campaign across global regions until it lives free or dies trying to attain freedom. It vowed that Ambazonia Republic would not give in, despite lack of support from the international community.

The IG of Ambazonia, will continue worldwide campaigns for Southern Cameroons right to self-determination and continuous nonviolent protest within Cameroon until our dream of a completely free and independent Ambazonia is achieved. Nothing less.

Abducting our leaders isnt going to deter us, it will only just spur us the more. And killing, arrest, torture, rape and even a hundred thousand more refugees will not deter our resolve.

We have battled the injustice forced upon us by the British Government for 56 years. If the International Community thinks we are now ready to let go at this juncture, it is mistaken. If the UN, EU, Commonwealth, the AU, the US and British governments want to stop a bloodbath in Cameroon, THE TIME IS NOW, not tomorrow. Every one of us, eight million Ambazonians will be killed before our territory will be made part of Cameroun again.

Since the declaration of secession from Cameroon in October, members of the group had clashed several times with Cameroonian authorities.

In December, a delegation from President Paul Biya was received by Nigerian authorities in what was regarded as a meeting to strengthen the diplomatic bond between the two countries.

Credible sources however told PREMIUM TIMES that the delegations mission was to ask for the help of the Nigerian government for the arrest of about 15 leaders of the Ambazonia agitation.
Yobe State Governor, Ibrahim Gaidam, on Tuesday signed the N92 billion 2018 appropriation bill into law.

In his speech while signing the bill in Damaturu, the state capital, Mr. Gaidam commended the state House of Assembly for the speedy passage of the document 32 days after its presentation to the lawmakers.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the budgetary proposals presented by the governor was retained by the assembly.

The appropriation bill as presented remains the same except for some internal adjustments decreasing allocation for recurrent services and increasing capital programmes.

He said the budget would improve education, healthcare, water supply, agriculture and job creation to the citizenry.

The governor assured that Damaturu International Cargo Airport, which is under construction, would be completed soon.

He also said that the state government would intensify its efforts in revenue generation, promotion of transparency and probity.

Mr. Gaidam directed the state Governance Policy Reform Committee to come up with budget implementation guidelines for the attainment of the budgets objectives.

(NAN)
The FADAMA III Additional Financing (AF) Programme in Niger State says it has spent N437 million on constructing a road and rehabilitating two dams in three local government areas of the state.

Baba Shaba, the Communication Officer of FADAMA III (AF) Programme in Niger, said this known in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Minna on Tuesday.

He said that N270 million was spent on the nine- kilometre road in Edozhigi community of Gbako Local Government Area to facilitate the efforts of farmers to transport their produce to the markets.

The newly constructed road covers about nine kilometres and each kilometre costs N30 million. This road is very important to farmers in the area, particularly because we are encouraging them to adopt all-year round farming.

The irrigation dam is located along the road, hence the need to construct the road to make the dams accessible to the farmers, he said.

Mr. Shaba appealed to farmers in the area to take due advantage of the road to increase their productivity, while shunning middlemen who were always interested in buying their crops at giveaway prices.

In a related development, the communication officer said that the FADAMA III (AF) programme had rehabilitated an irrigation dam in Edu, Lapai Local Government Area at the cost of N70 million.

Besides, Mr. Shaba said that N97 million was spent on construction of an irrigation dam in Loguma, Agaie Local Government Area of the state.

He said that the rehabilitation and construction of the irrigation dams were aimed at facilitating the efforts of the farmers to engage in dry-season farming and boost food security in the country.

(NAN)
The National Directorate for Employment (NDE) in Kebbi has so far trained 2,150 unemployed youths in various vocational skills to encourage them to be self-reliant and entrepreneurs.

The NDE Coordinator in the state, Mohammad Zogirma, told journalists in Birnin Kebbi, the state capital, that the quoted figure was for the period of January to December 2017.

He explained that those who specialised in cosmetology had completed their training, while others were still undergoing training in computer application, furniture making, vulcanising, shoes and bags making, fashion design and barbing.

He advised the beneficiaries to be focused and disciplined as productive members of their respective communities who acquired training different fields.

Mr. Zogirma added that some youth organisations in the state facilitated the training beside the state government and national assembly members and traditional rulers.

The coordinator said the purpose of the training was to fulfill NDEs mandate of combating mass unemployment and creating jobs for the teeming unemployed youth in the state.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the beneficiaries were drawn from the 21 local government areas of the state.

(NAN)
The Delta State Government says it has entered into a partnership with the Nigeria Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) in its commitment towards the prevention of new and re-emerging infectious diseases in the state.

The state Commissioner for Health, Nicholas Azinge, disclosed this on Tuesday in Asaba at one-day training on Monkey pox disease organised for healthcare workers in the state.

He noted that the partnership with the NIMR would help for early diagnoses and research on infectious diseases in the state.

Mr. Azinge said the establishment of NIMRs sub-station in the state, which covers states in the South-South zone, has afforded Delta to leverage on the institutes available skilled human resources.

According to him, the availability of both skilled human resources and infrastructure has provided the state the platform to enable it address issues concerning management and control of infectious diseases.

The commissioner was represented at the event by the Director of Public Health, state Ministry of Health, Philomena Okeowo.

He said the objectives of the training on Monkey pox and other infectious diseases include the sensitisation of healthcare workers on the prevention and control of infectious disease, and how to handle suspected cases.

Mr. Azinge disclosed that the training would keep the participants abreast on how to contain infectious diseases, carry out outbreak investigations and know the due processes as regards the flow of reports and collection of specimen.

He said that though no death has been recorded so far in the state, however, the state government has made provisions for free treatment of detected cases of monkey pox disease in both public and private health facilities.

The commissioner said that the Governor Ifeanyi Okowa-led administration in the state has supported all diseases outbreak intervention in the state through the procurements and prepositioning of outbreak management materials.

According to him, the state government efforts has helped for the detection and management of the disease, provision of logistics for border patrols through migration or displacement of people from neighbouring or other states of the federation.

Mr. Azinge said that other measures aimed at addressing the disease by the state government include the activation of the State Rapid Response Team, sensitization/mobilisation of Disease Surveillance and Notification Officers (DSNOs).

He said the DSNOs are positions in all the 25 local government areas of the State working in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that resource persons who made presentations at the training include Bassey Anya, the WHO state Coordinator  Surveillance and Contact Tracing.

Anastacia Ojimba, a Consultant Public Health Physician, Federal Medical Centre, (FMC) Asaba, also made a presentation.

Not less than 135 medical workers drawn from 64 government hospitals, Delta State Teaching Hospital, Oghara, and Federal Medical Centre, Asaba, participated in the training.

(NAN)
A bomb explosion is reported to have killed one person in Edo State on Monday, according to a statement from the state government.

The statement issued by the Government House, Benin City, on Tuesday said the explosion occurred in Okpella community, Etsako East Local Government Area.

The statement said a bomb-making facility has also been discovered in the area.

There has been tension and skirmishes lately in Okpella because of a festering dispute between Obu Cement Company and a rival company, Dangote Group over the ownership of a mining site in the area.

The state government claimed, about two weeks ago, that Governor Godwin Obasekis convoy was attacked in Okpella by militants allegedly instigated by the Managing Director of Obu Cement Company, Yusuf Binji. The police had said that they were not aware of the attack.

Mr. Obaseki on Tuesday directed the police and the State Security Service, SSS, to search for explosives and other weapons in Okpella and also disarm local militia operating in the area.

We cannot pretend that things are fine. We must move arms out of private hands in that community and ensure peace returns to that domain, Mr. Obaseki was quoted as telling the traditional ruler of Okpella, Andrew Dirisu, who led other chiefs on a courtesy visit to the governor.

Your Royal Highness, if not for the explosion that rocked the community where one person died, you would not have known that explosives of such nature were in private hands in your domain, the governor said.

In the last one year, Okpella has recorded the highest rate of incidents in Edo State. I cannot sit down without taking action.

The governor gave the assurance that his administration would do its best to make the state secure and safe.

The traditional ruler was said to have appealed to the governor to find an alternative means of resolving the dispute between the Obu Cement Company and the Dangote Group, outside the court.

PREMIUM TIMES couldnt get the police to comment immediately on the reported bomb explosion in the state.

The police spokesperson in the state, Chidi Nwabuzor, did not pick calls or respond to the text message sent to his phone line.
The National Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, has confirmed that Ebonyi State has notified it of a cluster breakout of Lassa fever in the state.

The health agency in a press statement on its website on Monday said it was notified of four cases of Lassa fever among health care workers in the state on Sunday.

Three of the four cases have subsequently passed away, it stated.

PREMIUM TIMES on Monday reported that the state government confirmed the death of one doctor and a nurse from suspected Lassa fever infection.

The health agency, in response to the outbreak of the disease in the state, said the Federal Ministry of Health through the NCDC in collaboration with the World Health Organization, WHO had commenced public health response supporting for Ebonyi State Ministry of Health.

A rapid response team has been deployed to support the state in response coordination, contact tracing, case management and strengthening infection prevention and control, IPC procedures. Medical supplies and drugs have also being supplied to support case management in the state, it said.

The executive director, NCDC, Chikwe Ihekweazu, while commiserating with the Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki, FETHA, and Ebonyi State government said health care workers in health facilities are particularly at risk of contacting the disease, especially where infection prevention and control (IPC) procedures are not strictly adhered to.

He urged health workers to always practise universal care precautions while handling patients, not just when Lassa fever is suspected, and also pledged support of the agency to help the state avert future occurrence.

Ebonyi State Commissioner of Health, Daniel Umezuruike, during a press briefing in Abakaliki, the state capital on Monday, had said the index patient who was treated by one of the doctors and deceased nurse survived and has been discharged.

He explained that after suspicion of the disease, 12 samples of suspected cases were sent to the laboratory for confirmation in which four came out positive. He however blamed the late presentation of the cases to the hospital by the deceased for their death.

Lassa fever is a viral hemorrhagic disease caused by contact with food or household items contaminated with rodent urine or faeces. The Lassa virus may also spread between humans through direct contact with blood, urine, faeces, or other bodily secretions of a person infected with Lassa fever.

Although there is no vaccine currently available for Lassa fever, the disease can be prevented.

NCDC has advised Nigerians to keep their environments clean in order to discourage rats from entering homes.

Food stuff should be stored in rodent-proof containers, garbage should be disposed properly and far from the home, and hand washing should be practised frequently.

NCDC has also advised families to take extra caution when providing care for patients with Lassa fever and in addition, states are encouraged to ensure safe burial practices for patients who die from Lassa fever.
The trial of a former governor of Abia State, Orji Kalu, was stalled Tuesday after the prosecution, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), failed to present one of its major witnesses.

Rotimi Jacobs, counsel to the EFCC, told Mohammed Idris of a Lagos Division of the Federal High Court that the Commission had been having difficulties tracking down its next witness, M.A Udoh.

Our main witness that we intend to call, we have approached him for more than six months, said Mr. Jacobs, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria.

We have noticed that each time the matter is coming up, he would just travel to Umuahia or Calabar or Cameroon.

He always has the dates of the matter and I was forced to apply for a subpoena. Your Lordship signed one, which we took to the Abia State Government House, Umuahia because we found out that he was a civil servant, but on getting there, we were told that he had since left service.

He was supposed to come today but he switched off his phone. EFCC operatives went to his house in Umuahia, yesterday (Monday) and this morning, they met his wife who said he had travelled to Calabar. Despite all the efforts we have not been able to bring him to court.

Mr. Jacobs alleged that some persons were behind Mr. Udohs uneasiness and urged the court to give a short adjournment to enable him locate and bring Mr. Udoh, a retired employee of the Abia State Government House, Umuahia, to testify in court.

The defence lawyers, however, objected vehemently to the request for a short adjournment saying it was frivolous.

Awa Kalu, Solo Akoma, and K.C.Nwofor (all Senior Advocates of Nigeria) expressed disappointment at the prosecutions request for adjournment, noting that they had abandoned other pressing matters in Abuja and flown to Lagos just to ensure that there was no further delay in the case that had lasted for over 10 years.

We are not going to agree to a request that will force Your Lordship to close for one week, said Mr. Kalu, a professor of Law.

Mr. Akoma, while aligning himself with Mr. Kalu, recalled that on November 30, last year, while the judge was adjourning the matter, Mr. Jacobs had told the court that he had four more witnesses to call, including Mr. Udoh.

He wondered why any of the other three witnesses was also not produced in court, even if the prosecution were unable to locate Mr. Udoh.

That shows the frivolity of the steps they have taken to bring their witnesses to court, Mr. Akoma said.

He urged the court to either foreclose the prosecutions case or if the request for an adjournment would be granted, the court should order the prosecution to bear the cost of the defences transportation and hotel accommodation.

This, he said, was in line with the provisions of Section 396(6) of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015.

Toeing the same line of argument, Mr. Nwofor said it was regrettable that since the trial resumed, all the adjournments had been at the instance of the prosecution.

He said on account of the slow pace of the case, his client, which is a company, had lost huge amount in foreign currency in terms of contracts.

We had 3,000 workers who have lost their jobs; we had 250 expatriates, they have lost their jobs and my friend is here asking for an adjournment, he added.

Mr. Nwofor added that he had been unable to get his legal fee as his client was broke and was eagerly waiting for the trial to end.

He urged the court to award a cost of N10 million against the prosecution in favour of his client for the delay.

But Mr. Jacobs argued that the case was delayed for over 10 years at the instance of the defendants who pursued an interlocutory appeal  an appeal against an aspect of a case before trial has concluded  all the way to the Supreme Court.

He said it was due to the time spent by the defendants pursuing the interlocutory appeal that the prosecution was experiencing difficulties in assembling its witnesses some of whom had died, retired or relocated out of the jurisdiction.

If they had allowed us to go on within two to three years of the case, all our witnesses would have been assembled in one day, he said, urging the judge to grant his request for an adjournment and to reject the award of cost.

In his ruling, the judge noted that the case had been adjourned on four different occasions at the request of the prosecution.

Where a witness that ought to attend court fails to attend court and summons has been issued and served on the same witness, then the prosecution would pursue the appropriate provisions of the ACJA to compel the attendance of the witness in court, the judge said.

This trial will no longer be adjourned on account of unavailability of witness to attend court It is unfortunate that a trial, which has been adjourned for hearing from day to day could not proceed due to witness unavailability.

The judge, however, conceded to an adjournment but warned that it would be the last of its kind.

The matter was subsequently adjourned till January 22 and 23.

Mr. Kalu, Udeh Jones Udeogu, and Slok Nigeria Limited are facing a 34-count charge of alleged N32.2 billion fraud.

They were re-arraigned in October 2016 before Mr. Idris and they pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
Medical Doctors in Ebonyi state, Tuesday, blamed the Federal Government for the death of their colleagues through Lassa Fever as they staged a peaceful protest at the Government House Abakaliki.

PREMIUM TIMES had reported the death of two doctors and a nurse working at Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki, FETHA to suspected Lassa Fever infection.

The doctors gave the names of the deceased personnel as Felix Ali, an indigene of Ebonyi State, Abel Udo, who hails from Akwa Ibom state and a nurse, Innocent Iwe from Imo state.

The doctors carried placards with inscriptions to vent their anger over the development.

They noted that apart from those confirmed dead, another house officer is currently in a critical situation at the Irrua Specialist Hospital, Edo state, an information PREMIUM TIMES could not immediately verify.

Leader of the protesting doctors, Onwe Mbam said that since 2005 till date, there has not been any year that Lassa fever has not killed a health worker.

He said that the state governor, David Umahi after the construction of a virology center in Ebonyi handed it to the Federal government which promised to equip the center. He said nothing had been done since then.

He said some of the doctors and the nurses who later died as a result of the outbreak were first taken to the virology center before they were taken to Irrua Specialist Hospital.

We had expected the federal government who had before now promised to equip the place to do so. Dr. Felix stayed there a day and his counterpart, Dr. Udo while the nurse stayed four days there before he was also taken to Irrua where he also died, he said.

He said the dead doctor was buried immediately to avoid spread of the diseases.

Immediately Dr. Felix died, they wrapped him in a body bag, put him in an ambulance and moved him down from Irrua to Federal Teaching Hospital gate where we followed him to his village. Before then, we had already communicated them to dig a grave before our arrival. On getting to the village, we put on our hazmat suit, brought out the corpse put it in the casket we bought and dumped him in the grave.

Unfortunately, it was only the brother and four villagers that summoned the courage to come close because the disease is highly contagious. Regretablly, the second doctor, Dr. Udo is still lying in a wooden box close to the mortuary at the Teaching hospital. The fact is that, they cannot take him inside the mortuary because he will conterminate other bodies in the mortuary, he added.

Mr. Mbam urged the federal government to fulfil its promise by fully equipping the virology center.

Reacting, the senior special assistant to Governor Umahi on health services, Sunday Nwangele said that the state has taken some measure to avert the spread.

He added that a virologist has been invited by the state government to manage the center and train other virologists in the state on how to run the center.

He said that on arrival this evening, the virologist will manage all outstanding cases for about 2 months and put in place every outstanding machine in the centre before leaving the state.

He said the contact tracing committee has commenced work while the state governor has released substantial amount of money to ensure that the situation is brought under control.

He urged the doctors to remain calm and go about their normal business and assured of governments commitment to their safety and welfare.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian Medical Association, Ebonyi branch also in a communique after its emergency meeting on Tuesday called on the Federal Government to equip the lassa fever virology centre in the state which it took over from the state government.

Federal government should live up to their promises through the Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole on 5th of September, 2016 to make the virology centre in Abakaliki a National Referral Centre by making it functional.

The voting by the National Council on Health stepping down the acquisition of the virology Centre in Abakaliki as a National Referral Centre should be promptly reversed in the overriding interest of justice, equity and public health.

The management of Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki and other hospitals in the state should acknowledge the endemicity of Lassa fever in the state and promptly provide basic personnel protective equipment for save health service delivery, the communique read.
Monday marked the first day of the week-long annual Obatala festival at Ile-Ife in Osun State.

At the Oduduwa hall of Obafemi Awolowo University, where the opening colloquium held, the the Vice Chancellor of the school, Eyitope Ogunbodede, emphasised the need for the promotion of African culture in Nigeria and beyond.

Speaking in Yoruba, he explained how the university has been upholding the culture of the Yorubas.

OAU is not only for academics, said the professor. The motto of the school, which is for learning and culture, isnt a coincidence but what Ile-Ife and her residents are known for.

The 4th colloquium of the annual festival of the Obatala worshippers, a religious group, was witnessed by people from Africa and other continents. Dignitaries, leaders of traditional religion, royal fathers, representative of the Ooni of Ile-Ife and the representative of the Governor of Osun State were in attendance.

After dancing and cultural performances by different groups, the speakers lectured the audience on the significance of the celebration of Obatala, the god of creativity, according to the Yoruba mythology of creation. All the worshippers wore white clothes as it represents the holiness of the god, Obatala.

Isoro Dada, the spiritual leader of the World Obatala Religious Congress, spoke extensively about the beliefs of the devotees of Obatala, also known as Oorisa nla among the Yorubas.

The prominent messenger of the Almighty God aided the creation of humans by helping with the formation of human head, he said.

Also, the director of the institute of African culture at the OAU, Felix Omidire, opined that the contemporary religious groups draw the worship of their gods from the worship of Obatala. He illustrated using some Christian lyrics, which refers to the holiness of God.

The President of the international council of Ifa religion, A.F Agboola and one of the chiefs in Europe, Willy Adrande, spoke further on the worship of the god in Africa and beyond.

Willy Adrande, a European, talked about the Oxala  Obatala in Brazil and Latin American Diaspora.
The Police Command in Lagos State has arrested 27 suspects for various crimes in the state, within two weeks.

The Commissioner of Police, Edgal Imohimi, who presented the suspects to newsmen at the Commands premises in Ikeja on Tuesday, said they were picked up at different locations in the state.

Mr. Imohimi said that five suspects were arrested for conspiracy and stealing of street lights and Nitel cables.

On January 11, the Operatives of the command intercepted five suspects, Mohammend Rabiu 41, Musiliu Iyanda 35, Musa Ibrahim 32, Sherrif Usman 22 and David Okpako; 28 in possession of NITEL cables at Fatai Atere Street, Mushin.

When the information got to the police, they swooped on the hoodlums who were cutting cables buried underground and five of them were arrested.

Recovered from them are: one unregistered Mack truck containing 15 long pieces of cables, a mercury space wagon vehicle with registration number RSA 686 AJ containing two heavy duty batteries and three jack chains.

During investigation the suspects confessed that they have been vandalising NITEL cables for a while.

This has become worrisome because this syndicate is operating around Lagos, they are not only stealing NITEL cables but also cables that take care of infrastructure such as streetlights and they are sabotaging the governments efforts.

An armed robber who disguised as a lunatic but actually carries out robbery at Anifowose area of Ikeja was also arrested.

The suspected armed robber identified as Ogundeyi Olayinka of No.12 Ayuba Adewale Street, Ajao Esate, Lagos, was arrested by policemen attached to Central Division who have been observing his behaviour for a while.

A pistol; POS machine; 3 tokens belonging to First Bank and Zenith Bank; 2 Identity Cards belonging to different people; a bunch of keys of various sizes; a live tortoise; Tecno cell phone; ladies bangles; different types of chains; laptop charger, and wristwatches were recovered from him.

The suspect could not give satisfactory account of himself or why he had all this items with him, he said.

The commissioner also disclosed the arrest of Miss Munachi Gift, 32, who specialises in illegal printing of national security documents.

She was arrested at her business center at 16 Alonge Ojo Ibede road. Fake documents recovered from her are; two fake Drivers Licence; two fake Voter Cards; one fake Statement of Result from Federal College of Education, Uyo.

Other items are: fake Degree course result from Enugu State School of science and Technology, Enugu; fake WASSCE; fake First School Leaving Certificate, one computer and one printer, he said.

He said the command also arrested a wanted armed robber, Mutu Azeez on December 16 2017.

Mr. Imohimi said during interrogation, Azeez confessed to being involved in series of armed robbery operation within Egbeda, Akowonjo, Iyana-Ipaja areas.

The suspect revealed that most of the robberies that they carried out were perpetrated with the use of commercial motorcycle.

Items recovered from him include; one locally made gun and one Infinix cell phone which must have been stolen.

On January 15, the operatives of the command arrested members of a gang that attacked one Abubakar Jubril at Rural Street, Mile 12 Lagos, and dispossessed him of his motorcycle at gunpoint.

A locally made pistol and four live cartridges were recovered from them, the commissioner said.

He said investigation had begun after which all the suspects would be charged to court.

(NAN)
The Governor of Oyo State, Abiola Ajimobi, has said that the era of mass promotion in the state civil service has come to an end.

A statement by Yomi Katinka, Mr. Ajimobis spokesperson, said the governor reiterated that the culture, which encourages indolence and inefficiency, has gone for good.

Promotion in the state civil service would henceforth be based on competence, hard work, efficiency and a service-oriented public service, the governor said.

Mr. Ajimobi spoke at the 2018 edition of annual new year interfaith service, held at the Governors Office Car Park, Ibadan, on Tuesday.

As we have started doing, highfliers and those who make a meaningful and significant contribution to the development of Oyo State will be identified and adequately, Mr. Ajimobi said.

By so doing, we will unlock the potential within the system. In this wise, the present appraisal system in the public service will be reviewed. Some innovations will be introduced to make an assessment of the performance of workers more objective and quantifiable.

We have jettisoned mass promotion, which encourages indolence and inefficiency. Henceforth, only those who deserve to be promoted, and have been found worthy in efficiency and competence, will be promoted.

Meanwhile, the outgoing Head of Service in the state, Soji Eniade, was offered a political appointment as executive assistant to the governor, for what he called his exceptional performance, intelligence, diligence and efficiency.

The governor also announced a donation of N250,000 to a civil servant who he adjudged as the best dressed at the occasion.

The statement said Mr. Ajimobi also announced that with effect from January 2018, civil servants in the state would be made to participate in the recently-launched state health insurance scheme, which attracts free medical service on payment of N650 per month.
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.

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Q4'17 saw the third strongest quarter of VC investment of the decade, despite plummeting deal volume.

$23.75 billion in US VC investment accounts for more than 50 percent of global VC funding during Q4'17.

TORONTO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - The final quarter of 2017 saw US$46 billion* in venture capital (VC) investment globally, propelling the VC market to a new annual high of $155 billion of investment according to the Q4'17 edition of Venture Pulse  a quarterly report on global VC trends published by KPMG Enterprise.

While VC investment was up dramatically, the VC market saw a continued decline in the volume of deals  with just 2,662 global VC deals in Q4'17, the lowest quarter of deal volume since Q4'11.

The decline in deal volume only emphasized the increasing importance of mega-deals in the health of the global VC market. Q4'17 saw a record six $1 billion+ mega-deals, including $4 billion funding rounds to China-based companies Didi-Chuxing and online retail services provider Meituan-Dianping. Automotive-focused companies were big winners this quarter, with ride hailing company Lyft, and electric car manufacturers Nio and Faraday Future joining Didi-Chuxing in raising $1 billion+ rounds.

Companies in China raised the largest deals this quarter, however, the Americas continued to see the largest amount of quarterly investment, with $24.5 billion raised across 1,858 deals. The US accounted for $23.75 billion of the Americas' total. Meanwhile, Asia saw $15.6 billion in VC investment, while Europe saw a new quarterly high of $5.7 billion in investment.

"Global venture capital investment surged, powered by mega funding rounds in Asia and new quarterly investment highs in the US and Europe," said Brian Hughes, National Co-Lead Partner, KPMG Venture Capital Practice, and a partner for KPMG in the US. "Investors continued to plow money into late stage rounds as part of a broader trend for the year that saw 70 percent of VC investment concentrated in rounds of $25 million or more. Looking ahead to 2018, we expect investors to continue to focus on late stage deals with proven business models and a path to profitability."

Key Q4'17 highlights

Global VC investment rose from $40.8 billion in Q3'17 to $46 billion in Q4'17, a solid increase buoyed by six $1 billion+ mega-deals globally and numerous $100 million+ deals in all major markets.

in Q3'17 to in Q4'17, a solid increase buoyed by six $1 billion+ mega-deals globally and numerous $100 million+ deals in all major markets. Artificial intelligence and machine learning saw a massive $4.1 billion in investment in Q4'17, compared to $3.1 billion in Q3'17.

in investment in Q4'17, compared to in Q3'17. Corporate participation in global VC deals reached a record high of 18.7 percent in Q4'17, with $26.5 billion invested in associated deals  the second highest quarter of Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) ever.

invested in associated deals  the second highest quarter of Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) ever. Companies in China and the US dominated the quarter's list of top 10 deals, with each country accounting for five of the largest deals.

Key 2017 annual highlights

Global median deal size rose for every deal stage in 2017, with the median deal size of angel and seed deals rising to $1 million from $800,000 , early stage deals rising to $5 million from $3.7 million , and later stage deals rising to $10.8 million from $9.5 million .

from , early stage deals rising to from , and later stage deals rising to from . Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology saw a massive year-over-year increase in VC investment, from $12.2 billion in 2016 to $16.6 billion in 2017.

in 2016 to in 2017. VC investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning doubled from $6 billion in 2016 to $12 billion in 2017.

in 2016 to in 2017. Global first-time VC financing fell for the third straight year  to $13 billion across 3,813 deals.

Record level of VC investment in Americas led by US deals

VC investment in the Americas reached a record high of $24.5 billion in Q4'17, with the US accounting for the vast majority of investment: $23.75 billion. The US saw a strong increase in mega-deals, led by three $1 billion+ deals  to Lyft ($1.5 billion), Grail Biotechnology ($1.2 billion) and Faraday Future ($1 billion). The last three quarters of 2017 were particularly strong in the US, with more than $20 billion raised each quarter. Investment with CVC participation in the US reached $11 billion during Q4'17, in the country's second highest quarter of CVC funding.

In the Americas more broadly, VC investment in Canada was down quarter-over-quarter, yet annual investment total remained positive, reaching the second highest level of VC investment ever. After a multi-year quarterly low in Q3'17, Brazil saw a massive increase in investment with $233 million raised including $82 million raised by Movile.

Europe sets quarterly and annual records of VC investment

Q4'17 saw a new high of VC investment in Europe, with $5.7 billion raised across 535 deals. This high helped propel the region to a new annual high of $19.1 billion for 2017, compared to the previous record of $18.7 billion in 2015. Growing deal sizes in Europe were readily apparent this quarter, with 10 $100 million+ mega-deals, including $482 million to Deliveroo, $336 million to Truphone and $280 million to TransferWise. The UK accounted for the majority of Europe's largest deals: Switzerland-based ADC Therapeutics ($200 million); Sweden-based Bima ($107 million) and Germany-based CureVac ($100 million) represented the only non-UK based companies in the region's biggest deals in Q4'17. France showed the strength of its rapidly growing innovation ecosystem, with median deal size doubling year-over-year  from $1.3 million in 2016 to $2.6 million in 2017.

Asia-based VC investment increases slightly while deals fall

Asia-based VC investment reached an annual high of more than $48 billion in 2017, propelled by 3 $1 billion+ deals in China during Q4'17, including $1 billion to electric car company Nio in addition to the $4 billion raised by Didi Chuxing and Meituan-Dianping. Q4'17 saw a strong increase over the previous quarter, with $15.6 billion invested. CVC participation in Asia reached a whopping 32.2 percent in Q4'17  a new high by a significant margin. CVC-affiliated investment was the third-highest quarter on record at $12.5 billion.

China dominated the Asian VC market during the quarter, accounting for $13.9 billion in investment during Q4'17. India saw a quarter-over-quarter drop to $523 million, however, 2017 as a whole was reasonably robust in the country with seven $100 million mega-deals over the course of the year.

The VC future looks bright in 2018

Looking ahead to Q1'18 and beyond, there are many positive signs that the global VC market will continue to be strong in terms of investment, although the declining number of deals could create some challenges down the road.

VC fundraising could see an uptick in 2018 as VC firms globally look to create larger global funds than they have in the past in order to compete with the $100 billion Softbank Vision Fund.

Areas like healthtech, biotech and autotech are expected to continue to grow at a rapid pace, while artificial intelligence across industries will likely help drive significant investment rounds. Newer areas like foodtech and agtech are also expected to gain traction heading into 2018.

"Cross-industry solutions will likely be a key focus of VC investors heading into the next few quarters," said Arik Speier, Head of Technology, KPMG Somekh Chaikin in Israel. "The applicability of innovative technologies, whether AI and machine learning or blockchain, to different sectors will likely keep investors focused and investment high regardless of any pauses among specific industries."

*All dollar values cited are US$

About KPMG Enterprise

You know KPMG, you might not know KPMG Enterprise. We're dedicated to working with businesses like yours. It's all we do. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a family business, or a fast growing company, we understand what's important to you.

The KPMG Enterprise global network for Innovative Start-ups has extensive knowledge and experience working with the start-up ecosystem. From seed to speed, we're here throughout your journey. You gain access to KPMG's global resources through a single point of contacta trusted adviser to your company. It's a local touch with a global reach.

About KPMG International

KPMG is a global network of professional services firms providing Audit, Tax and Advisory services. We operate in 154 countries and territories and have 200,000 people working in member firms around the world. The independent member firms of the KPMG network are affiliated with KPMG International Cooperative ("KPMG International"), a Swiss entity. Each KPMG firm is a legally distinct and separate entity and describes itself as such.

SOURCE KPMG International
LOUISVILLE, Ky., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Les Dames d'Escoffier International (LDEI) is awarding nine cash prizes totaling $2,450 for its 2018 M.F.K. Fisher Awards. In addition to the $1000 cash prize, the grand prize winner will receive an expenses-paid trip to LDEI's Annual Conference at the Renaissance Seattle Downtown Hotel in Seattle, Washington, October 11-12, to attend the awards presentation.

The M.F.K. Fisher Awards for Excellence in Culinary Writing are named for lauded culinary writer Mary Frances Fisher, considered one of America's greatest food writers and appreciated for quotes such as "First we eat, then we do everything else." Through these awards, LDEI recognizes and showcases excellence in culinary writing.

Eligible entries may be from three categories: books, print (magazines, newspapers, newsletters), and Internet published articles.

Entries must have been published in 2017, be nonfiction and may include analytical pieces, autobiographical explorations and forays into culinary history.

Entries must be no longer than 2,000 words.

Entries are judged on writing, knowledge of subject matter, topic, relevance and creative approach.

The awards are presented to women writers whose work:

reflects creativity and insight

illuminates the pivotal roles of food, beverages and the arts of the table

and/or contributes to our knowledge of those who grow, produce or prepare nourishment

The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2018.

For complete details of the awards and online registration, go to http://www.ldei.org/index.php?com=awards&c=how_to_enter_mfk

The M.F.K Fisher Awards judges include editors, authors, educators and other food professionals who are leaders in their field and not members of LDEI.

Les Dames d'Escoffier is a by-invitation philanthropic organization of women leaders in the fields of food, fine beverage and hospitality. Over 2,300 members in 40 chapters worldwide provide leadership and educational opportunities in their communities. For more information, go to: LDEI.org.

SOURCE Les Dames dEscoffier International (LDEI)

Related Links

http://www.ldei.org


JAMESTOWN, Va., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- When English settlers arrived in present-day Virginia, there were about 30 tribes that inhabited the area including among them, the Chickahominy, the Eastern Chickahominy, the Upper Mattaponi, the Rappahannock, the Monacan and the Nansemond tribes. Because these tribes, along with the Pamunkey tribe, negotiated treaties with the English government, they have been without U.S. federal recognition for over 240 years. Last week, the U.S. Senate passed legislation that finally recognizes these tribes, providing protections and benefits to their members that are received by other Native tribes across the country.

"The 2019 Commemoration, American Evolution focuses on a pivotal time in the Virginia Colony which laid the groundwork for our diverse, democratic nation. The Virginia tribes are a key part of this history and we will continue to amplify their stories. Federal recognition for these tribes is long overdue and we applaud the passage of this momentous legislation," said Kathy Spangler, executive director of the 2019 Commemoration.

American Evolution commemorates the 400th anniversary of several pivotal events that took place in 1619 Virginia, which have had an enduring impact on Virginia and America's history. These events include; the First Representative Legislative Assembly in the New World, the arrival of the first recorded Africans to English North America, the recruitment of English Women in significant numbers to the Virginia colony, the first official English Thanksgiving in North America, and the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit of the Virginia Colony.

About the 2019 Commemoration

The 2019 Commemoration, American Evolution highlights events that occurred in Virginia in 1619 that continue to influence America today. Featured programs, events and legacy projects will position Virginia as a leader in education, tourism and economic development. American Evolution commemorates the ongoing journey toward the key ideals of democracy, diversity and opportunity. Dominion Resources is an AMERICAN EVOLUTION Founding Partner and Altria Group is a Virginia Colony Partner.

SOURCE 2019 Commemoration
BANGALORE, India, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

42Gears Mobility Systems, a leading provider of digital workspace technologies announces that its EMM solution, SureMDM, now supports Screen Sharing feature for iOS 11 devices. The new update has been released with the latest SureMDM version, now available on the App Store.

(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/517153/42Gears_Mobility_Systems_Logo.jpg )



SureMDM Screen Sharing for iOS allows enterprises to remotely view enrolled iPhone and iPad screens in real-time, allowing better and effective remote tech support. Support for screen recording and broadcasting capabilities was launched by Apple along with the release of iOS 11.

SureMDM is the first EMM solution that offers inbuilt iOS Screen Sharing support for iPhones and iPads. Read how to use SureMDM iOS screen sharing - Click here.

Prakash Gupta, CTO of 42Gears Mobility Systems, said, "With the Screen Sharing update, SureMDM becomes a one stop solution for iOS enterprise management and IT support. IT can now remotely view iOS device screens in real-time directly on desktop or mobile screens, allowing easy integration with their remote support processes." He added, "This feature will not only ensure an integrated approach towards tech support across different device, platform, or operating system, it will also improve end-user experience. SureMDM iOS Screen Sharing will prove to be a secure way of simplifying remote tech support for iPhone and iPad devices."

About 42Gears

42Gears Mobility Systems provides SaaS and on-premise UEM solutions. It offers enterprise-ready products to help companies secure, monitor and manage enterprise mobile devices, desktops, IoT and more. More than 7,000 customers across 107 countries use 42Gears for managing BYOD and Company Owned Device devices deployment scenarios. 42Gears products are used in verticals like healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, education and retail. For more information, please visit http://www.42gears.com.

For more information contact: [email protected]

SOURCE 42 Gears Mobility Systems
BROOKLYN, N.Y., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AbelCine, a leading provider of products and services to the production, broadcast and media industries, today announced the completion of their newest flagship at 88 35th Street in Brooklyn. The company moved more than 85 employees from Manhattan to Industry City and expanded their services to better meet the needs of creatives working in all levels of a rapidly changing media industry.

"At AbelCine, we support filmmakers and content producers in all their creative and business endeavors. We do this by offering a range of services focused on gear, support and learning," said Pete Abel, CEO of AbelCine. "This combination of technology, innovation, and creativity is also central to Industry City. With a healthy mix of artists, designers, media producers, and makers, we immediately recognized that IC was our natural home."

"AbelCine is a key component to the film and media ecosystem that continues to grow at Industry City," said Industry City CEO Andrew Kimball. "The company's commitment to the industry through innovation and ongoing education fit well with the ethos of the vibrant Industry City campus."

The vision for AbelCine's 44,000 sq ft New York flagship location was developed by Rich Abel, AbelCine's Co-founder and COO, and Liz McGill, AbelCine's Creative Director. The concept for the facility's layout was to create a physical space that reimagines how creatives work and interact.

The design provides industry creatives seamless access to gear, support and education. The floorplan eliminates physical barriers between these services as much as possible  just as AbelCine does in their business model. Visitors enter into a large interactive showroom, with sales, rental, tech services and training easily accessible from this central area. There is plenty of community space where creatives and technical experts can meet and share ideas, also a core tenet of AbelCine's philosophy.

Highlights of the new facility, include:

Large, interactive sales showroom of professional cameras, lenses, accessories, audio, lighting and expendables

Spacious rental check-out bays with amenities for large and small productions

State-of-the-art maintenance and service center for cameras, lenses and ancillaries

107-seat training theater equipped with 4K projection, a 15-foot screen, 7.1 surround sound and multi-camera live switch / live stream broadcast capabilities

projection, a 15-foot screen, 7.1 surround sound and multi-camera live switch / live stream broadcast capabilities Multi-purpose rooms for custom training and technical consultations

Lounge and community area for special events and informal gatherings

Engineering lab and machine room for product design, prototyping and manufacturing

Integration area for design, building, and staging of broadcast, live stream and studio solutions

The First CineMakers exhibit, featuring some of the earliest motion picture cameras, coming in 2018

Early in the design process, Rich Abel and Liz McGill decided to bring elements of Industry City's rich history as a turn-of-the-century manufacturing center into the design aesthetic. The resulting iron and glass architectural appointments are juxtaposed against AbelCine's digital production gear and high-tech services. A wrought iron grate above the Tech Services counter was fabricated by Industry City's ATH Studios from materials salvaged from the original IC warehouses. The showroom display tables and unique oval reception desk were designed in collaboration with Ivory Build, a custom woodworking shop located in Industry City. For conference rooms, offices, and the community lounge, lighting fixtures were chosen that are elegantly industrial, including a number made by Rail Road Ware from upcycled antique glass electrical insulators.

AbelCine's theater and other spaces are available to rent for private industry events, screenings, training classes, and community events. For more information on AbelCine and its new Industry City flagship, visit www.abelcine.com.

About AbelCine

AbelCine, established in 1989, is a full-service equipment and technology provider to the broadcast, production, and media industries. The company's services, designed to support customers through every stage of the production cycle, include: equipment sales and rental, training and consultation, tech services and integration, financing and assurance programs. AbelCine has flagship locations in Burbank, CA and Brooklyn, NY; a Learning Point in Chicago, IL serves the Midwestern region.

About Industry City

Industry City is a 6 million-square-foot mixed-use complex comprised of 16 buildings spanning 35 acres situated on the waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The property's ownership  led by Belvedere Capital, Jamestown, and Angelo Gordon & Co.  is transforming the complex, while cultivating a diverse tenant mix that fuses today's burgeoning innovation economy with traditional manufacturing and artisanal craft. To date, the transformation has included over $250 million of infrastructure improvements, the addition of destination courtyards, experience-driven dining, retail and other amenitization and event programing. This work is paving the way toward a vibrant and diverse community of forward-thinking companies that support good-paying jobs for workers across skill and experience levels. Since the new partnership was forged in August 2013, businesses based at Industry city have grown by an average of 100 jobs per month, increasing employment from 1,900 jobs in 2013 to more than 6,500 jobs today. www.industrycity.com

Media Contact: North 6th Agency, Inc. (For AbelCine)

212.334.9753 ext. 111, [email protected]

SOURCE AbelCine

Related Links

https://www.abelcine.com


BERLIN, N.J., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A.C. Moore has announced the appointment of Anthony Piperno as President of the arts and crafts specialty retailer, which operates 135 locations along the East Coast as well as global offices in the U.S. and Asia. He will assume responsibilities on Jan. 16, succeeding long-time leader and industry pioneer Pepe Piperno, who has both championed and sculpted the arts and crafts marketspace for the past 55 years. Pepe Piperno will remain actively involved in the company as Chairman and CEO, consulting on long-term strategy and leveraging his extensive industry expertise and knowledge.

Since joining the company in 2005, Anthony Piperno has led A.C. Moore's merchandising team, overseeing product development, global sourcing and store operations. Together with Pepe Piperno, the duo has positioned the company on the leading edge of creative innovation, revolutionizing the brand and developing products to enhance the craft experience. In November, under Anthony Piperno's leadership, the company announced two major investments; the acquisition of leading online arts and craft retailer Blitsy, and a major investment and exclusive partnership with handcraft marketplace Zibbet. The investments position the company for groundbreaking digital expansion, including the redesign and relaunch of acmoore.com, and set the stage for an unprecedented omni-channel experience for the creative consumer.

"I am honored to follow in the footsteps of such an exceptional leader and role model," said Anthony Piperno. "It is a privilege to be part of an organization filled with such dedicated and talented individuals. I plan to deliver on the shared vision that we have established, and take A.C. Moore to the forefront of creative consumers worldwide."

"I am thrilled to pass the torch and watch Anthony drive the company we love to the next level," said Pepe Piperno. "We've selected a very strong leader at a time when A.C. Moore is in a prime position for growth. He brings a dynamic mix of leadership, operational excellence and passion to his new role. This, combined with Anthony's industry knowledge and acumen, make him uniquely qualified to lead A.C. Moore into the future."

About A.C. Moore: Established in Moorestown, N.J. in 1985, A.C. Moore is devoted to being the first choice for product selection, value and service that inspires and fulfills unlimited creative possibilities. For more information, visit www.acmoore.com/about.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Anastasia Barbalios

856.768.4930 x399

[email protected]

SOURCE A.C. Moore

Related Links

www.acmoore.com


DETROIT, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Adient, plc (NYSE: ADNT) and Boeing (NYSE: BA) today announced the formation of Adient Aerospace, a joint venture that will develop, manufacture, and sell a portfolio of seating products to airlines and aircraft leasing companies. The seats will be available for installation on new airplanes and as retrofit configurations for aircraft produced by Boeing and other commercial airplane manufacturers.

The joint venture between Adient, the global leader in automotive seating, and Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company, addresses the aviation industry's need for more capacity in the seating category, superior quality and reliable on-time performance. Adient Aerospace will benefit from the world-class engineering teams and innovative cultures at both companies, as well as shared expertise in managing complex, global supply chains.

"Adient has a strong set of transferable competencies that will offer a unique opportunity to create value for our company and for Boeing, our shareholders and the broader commercial aircraft market," said Adient chairman and CEO Bruce McDonald. "To enhance the customer experience for passengers, airlines and commercial airplane manufacturers, we will apply our unmatched expertise for comfort and craftsmanship along with our reputation for operational excellence."

"Seats have been a persistent challenge for our customers, the industry and Boeing, and we are taking action to help address constraints in the market. Adient Aerospace will leverage Boeing's industry leadership and deep understanding of customer needs and technical requirements, to provide a superior seating product for airlines and passengers around the world," said Kevin Schemm, senior vice president of Supply Chain Management, Finance & Business Operations and chief financial officer for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. "This joint venture supports Boeing's vertical integration strategy to develop in-house capabilities and depth in key areas to offer better products, grow services and generate higher lifecycle value."

Adient Aerospace's headquarters, technology center and initial production plant will be located in Kaiserslautern, Germany, near Frankfurt. The joint venture's initial customer service center will be based in Seattle, Washington. Adient Aerospace aftermarket spare parts distribution will be performed exclusively through Aviall, a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing.

Adient is the majority stakeholder in the new company (50.01 percent share) and expects the joint venture to be included in its consolidated financial statements. Boeing (as 49.99 percent partner) will receive a proportionate share of the earnings and cash flow. Both will have representation on Adient Aerospace's board of directors.

Industry analysts forecast the commercial aircraft seating market to grow from approximately $4.5 billion in 2017 to $6 billion by 2026.

About Adient:

Adient is the global leader in automotive seating. With 85,000 employees operating 238 manufacturing/assembly plants in 34 countries worldwide, we produce and deliver automotive seating for all vehicle classes and all major OEMs. From complete seating systems to individual components, our expertise spans every step of the automotive seat making process. Our integrated, in-house skills allow us to take our products from research and design all the way to engineering and manufacturing  and into more than 25 million vehicles every year. For more information on Adient, please visit adient.com.

About Boeing:

Boeing is the world's largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial airplanes and defense, space and security systems. Boeing is also the world leader in combined commercial airlines and government services with customers in more than 150 countries. The company's products and tailored services include commercial and military aircraft, satellites, weapons, electronic and defense systems, launch systems, advanced information and communication systems, and performance-based logistics and training. Boeing employs approximately 140,000 people across the United States and in more than 65 countries. Company revenues for 2016 were $94.6 billion.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements:

Adient has made statements in this document that are forward-looking and, therefore, are subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements in this document other than statements of historical fact are statements that are, or could be, deemed "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In this document, statements regarding Adient's future financial position, sales, costs, earnings, cash flows, other measures of results of operations, capital expenditures or debt levels and plans, objectives, outlook, targets, guidance or goals are forward-looking statements. Words such as "may," "will," "expect," "intend," "estimate," "anticipate," "believe," "should," "forecast," "project" or "plan" or terms of similar meaning are also generally intended to identify forward-looking statements. Adient cautions that these statements are subject to numerous important risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors, some of which are beyond Adient's control, that could cause Adient's actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including, among others, risks related to: the ability of Adient Aerospace to successfully implement its strategic initiatives or realize the expected benefits of the joint venture, the ability of Adient to meet debt service requirements, the ability and terms of financing, general economic and business conditions, the strength of the U.S. or other economies, automotive vehicle production levels, mix and schedules, energy and commodity prices, the availability of raw materials and component products, currency exchange rates, the ability of Adient to effectively integrate the Futuris business, and cancellation of or changes to commercial arrangements. A detailed discussion of risks related to Adient's business is included in the section entitled "Risk Factors" in Adient's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2017 filed with the SEC on November 22, 2017 and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC, available at www.sec.gov. Potential investors and others should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements and should not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements included in this document are made only as of the date of this document, unless otherwise specified, and, except as required by law, Adient assumes no obligation, and disclaims any obligation, to update such statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this document.

In addition, this document includes certain projections provided by Adient with respect to the anticipated future performance of Adient's businesses. Such projections reflect various assumptions of Adient's management concerning the future performance of Adient's businesses, which may or may not prove to be correct. The actual results may vary from the anticipated results and such variations may be material. Adient does not undertake any obligation to update the projections to reflect events or circumstances or changes in expectations after the date of this document or to reflect the occurrence of subsequent events. No representations or warranties are made as to the accuracy or reasonableness of such assumptions or the projections based thereon.

SOURCE Adient

Related Links

http://www.adient.com


Mr. Tin Mok, founder and CEO of Trend Lab is ambitious about developing Big Data and AI systems: "The application of AI technology in the FinTech industry across the Asia-Pacific region is still in its embryonic stage, and most technologies - including smart customer service, Big Data analysis, customer relations management, enterprise resource planning, business acquisitions, electronic payments, corporate credit rating systems and more - require a high degree of integration to unleash their full corporate value. Of these, Big Data, Block Chain and AI are integral to a successful and progressive FinTech industry, allowing for the analysis of huge amount of information, for example, hard data like consumers' income and soft data like consumers' behaviour, to provide credible insights that will, in turn, optimise the value chain. With more data and increased computing efficiency, AI technology can establish new and more accurate monetary and financial systems for corporates to better understand consumers' needs, as well as more efficient services for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. Instead of financial informatisation, we target to translate current financial systems into smart systems, exploring the unseen values and opportunities for businesses. We are poised to witness a revolution of the financial industry, which will integrate the segregated front, middle and back office vertically, leading the financial industry into a new, 4.0 era of rapid development growth."

Hitting unicorn mark with the highest angel round valuation in Hong Kong in 86 days

Mr. Tin Mok continues: "The establishment of Trend Lab was incredibly smooth and took just 86 days. We are honoured to have recruited talents with experience in Big Data, AI technologies and internet finance, with a core team of professionals from leading technology companies like Tencent, 360 and DJI, all of whom possess mature AI computing knowledge and Big Data analysis experience, as well as a thirst for innovation. Under the lead of former LeEco management executives and professional talents, it is believed that Trend Lab will first develop its own Big Data and AI technologies, and, together with the application of block chain, cloud systems and SaaS in the financial industry in Asia-Pacific, a new internet finance system will be built."

SOURCE Trend Lab
DENVER, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Smashburger launches the award-winning Twin Cities Burger nationwide, tempting burger lovers everywhere with the chance to enjoy this regional favorite for a limited time. Beating out 102 other burgers ranked by Mpls.StPaul Magazine, Smashburger's Twin Cities Burger landed at the top spot, named No. 1 with a near perfect 96 rating.

Smashburger's Twin Cities Burger features the rich, decadent flavors Minnesotans love and the rest of the country will crave. The Twin Cities Burger starts with a fresh, never frozen, beef patty, smashed and seared on a hot grill to lock in the flavor and juices. And to satisfy the Twin Cities love for cheese, it is topped with melted aged cheddar and melted Swiss, plus decadent garlic grilled onions. Finished with crisp lettuce, fresh tomato and rich, creamy mayo, all on a butter-toasted onion bun.

"Double the cheese, and double the oniony flavor make this burger a true standout," said Tom Ryan, co-founder and CEO of Smashburger. "It's been a favorite of Smash fans in Minneapolis-St. Paul since 2009 and we look forward to sharing our award-winning burger with the rest of the country."

The Twin Cities Burger will be available for just $5 at most full menu US Smashburger restaurants for a limited time. The Twin Cities Burger is the latest featured product on the Everyday Smash Specials. New product offerings at great values can be found on www.smashburger.com or check us out on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

About Smashburger

Smashburger is a leading fast casual better burger restaurant known for its fresh never frozen, beef burgers that are smashed on the grill to sear in the juices and seal in the flavor. In addition to burgers, Smashburger offers grilled or crispy chicken sandwiches, black bean burgers, fresh salads, signature side items such as haystack onions and veggie frites, and hand-spun shakes made with Haagen-Dazs ice cream. On each market menu, Smashburger offers locally inspired items like the regional burger, as well as regional sides and local craft beer. Smashburger began in 2007 with the vision of Rick Schaden and funding by Consumer Capital Partnersthe private equity firm that Rick and his father Richard own. There are currently more than 360 corporate and franchise restaurants operating in 38 states and nine countries. To learn more, visit www.smashburger.com.

Media Contact:

Katy Michael

720-378-1931

[email protected]

SOURCE Smashburger

Related Links

http://www.smashburger.com


TUPELO, Miss., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- BancorpSouth Bank (NYSE: BXS) welcomed Ouachita Independent Bank (OIB) in Louisiana and First State Bank of Central Texas (FSB) to its eight-state company. Effective January 15, 2018, BancorpSouth completed the respective mergers with the parent company of OIB, Ouachita Bancshares Corp. which is based in Monroe, Louisiana, and with the parent company of FSB, Central Community Corporation which is based in Temple, Texas.

"We are pleased to welcome the teams at OIB and FSB to BancorpSouth as we are like-minded bankers who are customer-focused and community-oriented," said BancorpSouth Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dan Rollins. "The strength and resources we bring to our newest partners will generate mutual benefits."

At this time, customers should continue using their current branches, checks, bank cards, online banking and other banking services. Detailed communications will be provided to all OIB and FSB customers prior to the system conversions.

"The opportunities ahead are exciting," said BancorpSouth Northeast Louisiana Division President Kevin Koh, former OIB Chief Executive Officer. "Our combined team of proven and experienced bankers will have access to new products and services as well as a greater network of branches to serve and benefit our customers. BancorpSouth's commitment to supporting our communities provides additional strength and the stronger we become, the better for everyone across the entire organization."

"This merger will accelerate our growth in a strong Texas market, and that is good news for everyone involved," said Don Grobowsky, former FSB chairman and Chief Executive Officer who now serves as BancorpSouth's Central Texas Area Chairman and a member of the board of directors. "By joining a powerful regional partner, we are excited about the new products and services we can bring to our customers as well as the additional support we can provide in the communities across our service area."

Rollins concluded, "We saw value in the people, the markets and the futures of these two outstanding organizations, and we are pleased to put our strength, resources and reputation behind good people doing good work in serving their customers and their communities."

About BancorpSouth Bank

BancorpSouth Bank (NYSE: BXS) is headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi, with approximately $17 billion in assets. BancorpSouth operates 276 full-service branch locations as well as additional mortgage, insurance and loan production offices in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas, including an insurance location in Illinois. BancorpSouth is committed to a culture of respect, diversity and inclusion in both its workplace and communities. To learn more, visit our Community Commitment page at www.bancorpsouth.com. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@MyBXS); or connect with us through LinkedIn.

SOURCE BancorpSouth Bank

Related Links

http://www.bancorpsouth.com


WACO, Texas, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Beginning in the fall of 2018, Baylor Law will offer the first Executive LL.M. in Litigation Management in the nation. The Master's Degree program was created to address a critical problem facing professionals in the legal field: how to strategically manage litigation to control the continued escalation of litigation costs. Open only to attorneys with a minimum of three years in practice, this unique online and in-person program is led by a group of the nation's top experts, leading attorneys, and judges. Courses include instruction on the fundamentals of 21st century litigation management and strategy, proving and attacking damages, managing complex arbitration and ADR issues, data analytics and cyber security, managing e-discovery, regulatory issues, and practical strategies for successfully navigating through trial.

"Litigation is a fact of life for businesses in America," said David Dial, name partner at Weinberg Wheeler Hudgins Gunn & Dial. "Generally, I inform clients that litigation is 'bad for business.' However, the negative impact can be minimized by effectively managing cases. Doing that necessarily involves understanding the process, procedures and tactics of litigation and developing a working relationship with your attorneys. Successfully and efficiently managing litigation involves teamwork between the client and the attorneys. This cannot happen unless one truly understands the process and has the tools necessary for managing litigation. I believe the Baylor Executive LL.M. in Litigation Management will provide that understanding and equip its participants with the necessary tools."

Baylor Law's Executive LL.M. in Litigation Management has been designed with the working legal professional in mind. Over the course of 14 months, attorneys should expect to spend approximately 10 hours per week working on the LL.M. through interactive online learning. Then, three times throughout the program, attorneys will gather in Waco at Baylor Law for intense, two-week residential learning experiences, where they will work closely with the nation's top experts to synthesize and master the materials.

"Graduates of the program will leave with an agile sense of both the business and the strategy of litigation," said Liz Fraley, Baylor Law Professor and co-creator of the degree plan. "We're addressing a key issue both for clients and for attorneys: how to manage complex and expensive litigation in a way that is both cost-effective and goal-oriented."

Throughout the program, students will learn from national leaders in the field. "We have been talking almost every day to people from around the nation who are the cream of the crop and who are already doing litigation management well," said Jim Wren, Baylor Law Professor and creative drive behind the degree. "We're going out there and finding the people doing various aspects in the very best way and we're bringing them in. It's going to be a melting pot of the best of practices out there."

With benefits apparent for both employers and prospective students, the launch of the Executive LL.M. in Litigation Management is eagerly awaited. Baylor Law is now accepting applications for the inaugural class, set to begin class in Fall 2018. To apply or to find more information about Baylor Law's Executive LL.M. in Litigation Management, please visit: http://llm.baylor.edu or email Ed Nelson at [email protected].

About Baylor Law School

Established in 1857, Baylor Law School was one of the first law schools in Texas and one of the first west of the Mississippi River. Today, the school has more than 7,400 living alumni. It is accredited by the American Bar Association and is a member of the Association of American Law Schools. Baylor Law School has a record of producing outstanding lawyers, many of whom decide upon a career in public service. The Law School boasts two governors, members or former members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, two former directors of the FBI, U.S. ambassadors, federal judges, justices of the Texas Supreme Court and members of the Texas Legislature, among its notable alumni. In its law specialties rankings, U.S. News & World Report ranked Baylor Law's trial advocacy program as #3 in the nation. Baylor Law School is also ranked #51 in the magazine's 2018 edition of "America's Best Graduate Schools." The National Jurist ranks Baylor Law as one of the "Best School for Practical Training," and #4 in the nation in its most recent "Best Law School Facilities" listing. The Business Insider places Baylor Law among the top 50 law schools in the nation. Baylor Law School received the 2015 American Bar Association Pro Bono Publico Award, making it only the third law school in the nation to be honored with the award since the award's inception in 1984. Learn more at baylor.edu/law.

About Baylor University

Baylor University is a private Christian University and a nationally ranked research institution. The University provides a vibrant campus community for more than 17,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating University in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 80 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 12 nationally recognized academic divisions.

Media Contact:

Ed Nelson, Marketing & Communications Director

(254) 710-8861  [email protected]

SOURCE Baylor Law School

Related Links

http://baylor.edu/law


FORT WORTH, Texas, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ben E. Keith Company announced today the launch of a new, modernized website, www.benekeith.com. The new site allows the visitor and customers to access either the company's food or beverage divisions' digital properties, with an enhanced user experience.

The new site design highlights Ben E. Keith's rich corporate history, mission, commitment to social and corporate responsibility, and focus on providing superior customer service. Content emphasizes the collaborative relationships Ben E. Keith has worked to establish with national brands consumers know and trust and highlights the high-quality products available to customers.

"We are thrilled that the new website provides a better web experience for our customers, partners, visitors, and employees that reflects the quality of our brand," said Kevin Bartholomew, President of Ben E. Keith Beverages.

The site also demonstrates a forward-looking business strategy that supports an increasingly digital marketplace and intuitive navigation that helps customers make informed decisions about products. Food customers, for example, can utilize the fully integrated, award-winning Entree System, a robust e-commerce site that allows customers to place orders, view invoices, and manage inventory, along with other business solutions.

"We are excited to engage with our customers in a manner reflecting how they conduct business today," said Mike Sweet, president of Ben E. Keith Foods. "In such a fast-changing landscape, partnerships that deliver business-building features add value. This new site is not just optimized for mobile, but across all devices so our customers have access anytime, from anywhere."

Visit www.benekeith.com.

About Ben E. Keith Company

For more than a century, Ben E. Keith has been a leader in fine food and premium beverage distribution, and we strive to provide excellent customer service to all our partners. Our food division is a complete broad line distributor servicing fourteen states, and our beverage division serves more than 62 Texas counties and is a proud distributor of Anheuser-Busch InBev products, craft and import beer brands, sensational spirits, and fine wine. We are dedicated to the growth and success of our customers, our industry, our partners, and our employeescontinuing our commitment to delivering quality since 1906.

For more information about Ben E. Keith contact:





Jennifer Fitton David Werner Director Brand Marketing, Beverage Division VP Independent Sales and Marketing, Food Division [email protected] [email protected] 214-267-6496 817-759-6800

SOURCE Ben E. Keith Company

Related Links

http://www.benekeith.com


PORTSMOUTH, Va., Jan. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The City of Portsmouth, Virginia, along with The Portsmouth Museums and Portsmouth Public Library are proud to present the third annual Black History Now - Celebrating Today's Change Makers. The museums and library branches will host events and activities from Jan. 13-Feb. 24.

This year's highlights include musical performances from violinist Mr. Erik Taylor, Kuumba African Dance and the Porte Towne Magic Orchestra. Master storyteller Sheila Arnold will captivate visitors. There will also be special presentations and performances by The Hurrah Players and The Not-Just-For-February Players. Visitors will enjoy participating in workshops and forums including a Black History Expo. A Salute to African-Americans in the Military will round out the programs.

A complete schedule of events and activities is included below.

SATURDAY, JAN. 13

What: Erik Taylor: Sound Safari

Where: Portsmouth Colored Community Library Museum

When: 121 p.m.

It's a sound safari with violinist Erik Taylor. Join Mr. Taylor on a musical journey through African-American history. Mr. Taylor's engaging high-energy performance will pay tribute to the 17th19th century African-Americans with the traditional spirituals that were roadmaps to freedom.

SATURDAY, JAN. 20

What: Join the Bantaba

Where: Children's Museum of Virginia / 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. (included with Museum admission)

John Tyler Elementary / 3 p.m. (Free and open to the public)

Kuumba African Dance's corps of percussionists and dancers will perform traditional Bantaba (dance circle) style of Guinea, West Africa.

SATURDAY, JAN. 27

What: The Buffalo Riders

Where: Portsmouth Colored Community Library Museum (Free and open to the public)

When: 10 a.m.

Join us as we celebrate the legacy of the Buffalo Riders, the designated African-American unit from 18661951. Meet Ken Wright, president of the Buffalo Riders of Hampton Roads, as he discusses how this group of troops has impacted the local area and nationwide through his research and images.

What: Porte Towne Magic Orchestra

Where: Main Branch Library: 1 p.m. (Free and open to the public)

Join the fun as the Porte Town Magic Orchestra performs favorites old and new for all ages.

SATURDAY, FEB. 3

What: Safari  Tales of the Griot

Where: Children's Museum of Virginia (Presentation is included with admission)

When: 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.

The Hurrah Players bring vignettes from their February production Safari  Tales of the Griot to the Children's Museum of Virginia. Each 20-minute performance will feature songs, dances, dialogue and costumed animal characters from the actual stage play.

SATURDAY, FEB. 10

What: The Not-Just-For-February Players

Where: Emanuel AME Church (Free and open to the public)

When: 10 a.m.

Come out and celebrate Black History Month and enjoy a moment in time with The Not-Just-For February Players as they portray local African-Americans and their struggles to prosper. The program is being held in the historical Emanuel AME Church on North Street in historic Olde Towne Portsmouth. This program is sponsored by the African American Historical Society of Portsmouth.

What: Oney Judge

Where: Portsmouth Colored Community Library Museum (Free and open to the public)

When: 11 a.m.

Shelia Arnold, master storyteller, will be presenting a program based on the life of Oney Judge.

What: Keepin' Heritage Alive

Where: Portsmouth Main Library (Free and open to the public)

When: 2 p.m.

Shelia Arnold, master storyteller, will be presenting Keepin' Heritage Alive.

SATURDAY, FEB. 17

What: Neighborhood Black History Sidewalk Parade

Where: Effingham and King Streets

When: 10:30 a.m.

Wear your favorite costume representing an African-American, past, present, local, city, state, national or international. To register, contact Joyce White Tasby at 202-812-2804. Registration fees are $10 for an individual and $50 for 10 or more. The line-up begins at 10:30 a.m. at Effingham and King Streets.

What: STEMulating Minds with Little Bits Workshop

Where: Children's Museum of Virginia (Included with Museum admission)

When: 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Let Little Bits be a spark of imagination for your young inventor while they learn a little about influential black scientists and inventors. Bits are electronic building blocks that allow inventors to make amazing things, both big and small.

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 21

What: Black History Expo

Where: Churchland Branch Library (Free and open to the public)

When: 5:307:30 p.m.

A choral performance by Portsmouth Public Schools with a presentation, author talk and book signing by Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander. Newby-Alexander is the author of Virginia Waterways and the Underground Railroad.

SATURDAY, FEB. 24

What: A Salute to African-Americans in the Military

Where: Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center (Free and open to the public)

When: 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

A. United States Colored Troops, 35th Regiment of New Bern  Tryon Palace's United States Colored Troops, 35th Regiment of New Bern will provide living history demonstrations of African-American soldiers' lives in the Union Army during the Civil War (1863-1865). The presentation will include raising and striking of the United States' flag, the regimental colors, marching drills, camp songs and demonstration of camp supplies that the 35th Regiment of New Bern, North Carolina, used after being founded in June of 1863.

B. Marvin Greer, Yorktown Reenactor  Mr. Greer will present living history demonstrations as he recounts the American Revolutionary War as James Armistead La Fayette, an African-American spy who aided in George Washington's and the Marquis de La Fayette's defeat of the British at Yorktown. Mr. Greer's presentation will feature period clothing and a black powder musket demonstration.

C. Howard Baugh, Vietnam Pilot  Mr. Baugh will present stories, photographs, collectible items and airplane models from his father's days of service as a Tuskegee Airman. He will also contrast his own days of service in the United States Air Force as a pilot during the Vietnam Conflict with those of his father's.

About Portsmouth Museums

The City of Portsmouth maintains five museums which provide the citizens of Portsmouth, Hampton Roads, the Commonwealth of Virginia and beyond with high-quality educational and cultural experiences in the arts, humanities and the sciences through the use of exhibitions, programs and collections. Three museums will host many of the Black History Now events: the Children's Museum of Virginia | 757-393-5258 | http://childrensmuseumvirginia.com/, the Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center | 757-393-8543 | http://portsmouthartcenter.com/event-directory/ and the Portsmouth Colored Community Library Museum | 757-393-8591| http://portsvaafricanamericanheritage.com/.

About the Portsmouth Public Library

The Portsmouth Public Library has been a cornerstone of the Portsmouth community for over 100 years providing free access to information and resources. Portsmouth Public Library serves the community through four locations; Main Library, Cradock Branch, Churchland Branch and Manor Branch. For more information, call 757-393-8501 or visit www.portsmouthpubliclibrary.org.

About the City of Portsmouth, Virginia

The City of Portsmouth, Virginia is the geographical center of Hampton Roads located in the southeastern corner of Virginia. Over 250 years old, the city is a true historical gem with stories and architecture dating back to the American Revolution and earlier. For more information, call

757-393-8000 or visit http://www.PortsmouthVa.gov.

Media Contact: Lynette James, 757-393-8983

SOURCE City of Portsmouth, Virginia
TEL AVIV, Israel and CHICAGO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Bringg, the leading delivery logistics platform for enterprises, announced today that it has raised additional funding from strategic partners, bringing its Series B investment total to $22 million. The current $12 million round includes automotive leader Dr. Shmuel Harlap, shipping and real estate magnate Eyal Ofer, and Salesforce Ventures. The company received earlier investments from Aleph VC, Cambridge Capital, Coca-Cola, Ituran and Pereg Ventures.

Bringg's delivery logistics platform is used by leading retail, ecommerce, food, services and logistics providers in over 50 countries, including some of the world's best-known brands such as Coca-Cola, Kimberly Clark, Panera Bread, Cdiscount and Hilti. With offices in Chicago, New York and Tel Aviv, the company plans to leverage the funding to address the growing demand for its solution by increasing its international reach and expanding teams across the company.

Customer demand for more convenient, faster and affordable deliveries is putting an unprecedented amount of pressure on companies. Bringg's technology enables customers to digitize their entire supply chain - creating a competitive delivery ecosystem that focuses on end-to-end operational efficiency and perfect customer experiences.

Raanan Cohen, Co-Founder & CEO of Bringg said: "The $23 trillion ecommerce industry is ripe for disruption, and we're on a mission to help the world's most loved brands remain competitive. We are excited to have Dr. Harlap, Eyal Ofer's O.G. Tech Ventures and Salesforce Ventures as partners in the business to support our growth, and help us fulfill our mission to enable enterprises worldwide to modernize their delivery infrastructure and improve their operational efficiency."

"Salesforce Ventures is committed to investing in technology that extends our offerings and makes our customers even more successful," said Alex Kayyal, EMEA Head, Salesforce Ventures. "As a leading delivery logistics platform, Bringg will help our customers create more competitive delivery ecosystems that result in faster, more affordable deliveries for their customers."

About Bringg

Bringg is a leading delivery logistics solution, providing enterprises with a highly efficient way to manage their complex delivery operations. Some of the world's best-known brands in more than 50 countries are already gaining clear strategic value from our powerful SaaS platform which offers them the real-time capabilities they need in order to achieve logistical excellence across their delivery ecosystem.

Companies from the retail, grocery, restaurant, consumer goods, logistics, healthcare and services industries trust Bringg's technology to help streamline their logistical operations for peak efficiency and create perfect delivery experiences for their customers. By using our platform, they can establish successful cost-effective operations that balance the needs of all the participants in the delivery ecosystem - from management at headquarters, through the teams in the field, and all the way to the end-customers who are at the heart of the entire process. For more information and to request a demo, please visit our website at: www.bringg.com.

About Salesforce Ventures

Salesforce, the global CRM leader, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. Salesforce Venturesthe company's corporate investment groupinvests in the next generation of enterprise technology that extends the power of the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, helping companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding as well as access to the world's largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of Salesforce's innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage Salesforce's expertise in corporate philanthropy by joining Pledge 1% to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 250 enterprise cloud startups in 14 different countries since 2009. For more information, please visit: www.salesforce.com/ventures.

About O.G. Tech Ventures

Launched in May 2017, as Eyal Ofer's Ofer Global group tech investment arm, O.G. Tech Ventures is a VC investing in the most exciting, early-growth stage startups either by leading investments or by co-investing alongside other professional investors. It has a full-time team on the ground in Israel led by a Managing Partner with over 15 years' experience and success in the tech sector and venture capital investments. With a single LP structure and a dedicated fund, it is committed to being a unique VC  combining long term investment perspective, leading cross-sector expertise and far-reaching global networks with a transparent process and a personal, agile, flexible approach to investments.

Contact:

[email protected]

SOURCE Bringg

Related Links

http://www.bringg.com


HOUSTON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Bristow Group Inc. (NYSE: BRS), the leading provider of global industrial aviation services, announced today it will release financial results for its fiscal 2018 third quarter ended December 31, 2017, after the market closes on Thursday, February 8, 2018. In conjunction with the release, Bristow has scheduled a conference call, which will be broadcast live over the internet on Friday, February 9, 2018, starting at 10:00 a.m. ET (9:00 a.m. CT). Investors may participate in the call either by phone or audio webcast.

By Phone: Dial 1-877-404-9648 for domestic callers or 412-902-0030 for international callers at least 10 minutes before the call. A telephone replay will be available through February 23, 2018 by dialing 1-877-660-6853 for domestic callers or 201-612-7415 for international callers, using passcode 13674996#.



By Webcast: Visit the Investor Relations page of Bristow's website at www.bristowgroup.com. Please log on at least 10 minutes in advance to register and download any necessary software. A replay will be available shortly after the call and will be accessible for approximately 90 days.

ABOUT BRISTOW GROUP INC.

Bristow Group Inc. is the leading global industrial aviation services provider offering helicopter transportation, search and rescue (SAR) and aircraft support services to government and civil organizations worldwide. Bristow has major operations in the North Sea, Nigeria and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, and in most of the other major offshore oil and gas producing regions of the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Russia and Trinidad. Bristow provides SAR services to the private sector worldwide and to the public sector for all of the U.K. on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. For more information, visit bristowgroup.com.

Contact: Linda McNeill

Investor Relations

(713) 267-7622

SOURCE Bristow Group Inc.

Related Links

http://www.bristowgroup.com


TORONTO, Jan. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A perfect technological storm may be brewing in Canada, as emerging smartphone company Utopya Innovations Inc. (OTC: ANDI) announces a strategic partnership with IT consulting firm Cycloides Inc., also headquartered in Canada. The two companies are positioned to make waves across the Canadian tech landscape, and the rest of the world seems ready to dive in.

Utopya Innovations Inc., the Canadian smartphone company that has the tech and investment community all abuzz, has been busy making a name for itself recently, as members of its executive team attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, last week. The team reportedly spent much of the week in meetings, and has remained tight-lipped about deal negotiations, but did make it clear to investors that at least one major announcement is expected in the coming weeks, pending approval from the company's lawyers.

In the meantime, Utopya continues to demonstrate to shareholders that it means business, by announcing that it has engaged and begun working with Cycloides Inc., a widely-respected consulting firm in the software development and IT industry. In 2017 alone, Cycloides received the Research Award from the National Research Council of Canada, won numerous highly sought-after contracts from some of North America's largest firms, including two Fortune 500 companies, and opened their Global Delivery Centre in India's TechnoPark Trivandrum. The company was recognized as one of the Fastest Growing IT Companies in Canada, opened an office in New York, USA, and strengthened its presence in the Asia-Pacific Region by setting up Cycloides Innovations Pte Ltd, in Singapore.

Mike Starkweather, CEO of Utopya, commented on the partnership: "After an incredible week in Las Vegas, we are thrilled to formally announce our partnership with Cycloides Inc. Given our commitment to offering a unique software ecosystem on Utopya devices, we are very pleased with our decision to engage an IT consulting firm of this calibre. With the ability to leverage Cycloides' extensive software development and IT expertise, we are now more confident than ever before that Utopya will live up to its name, and much more. We're just getting started with plenty more to come, and the future is looking brighter and brighter everyday."

Safe Harbor Act: This release includes forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involves risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, the impact of competitive products, the ability to meet customer demand, the ability to manage growth, acquisitions of technology, equipment, or human resources, the effect of economic business conditions, and the ability to attract and retain skilled personnel. The Company is not obligated to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this release.

Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Utopya Innovations Inc.
NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Capitol Indemnity Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CapSpecialty, Inc. (CapSpecialty), announces that it has acquired the renewal rights to Rockhill Insurance Group's (Rockhill) environmental book of business. CapSpecialty is an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Alleghany Corporation and Rockhill is a member of the State Auto Insurance Group (State Auto). CapSpecialty, through its specialty carrier, Capitol Specialty Insurance Corporation, will begin quoting all new business submissions made to Rockhill as well as renewals sometime in the first quarter of 2018. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc., a Stifel Company, served as financial advisor to State Auto in the transaction.

Stephen Sills, CEO of CapSpecialty, commented, "By adding Rockhill's environmental book to CapSpecialty's existing environmental book, the Company will further strengthen its presence in this important coverage segment for small to mid-sized businesses. Rockhill's brokers will be happy to hear that we are bringing on the Rockhill employees currently working on this book. "

"CapSpecialty is committed to offering our wholesale brokers and insured customers access to strong environmental coverage, and Rockhill's appetite, products and focus on small to mid-sized business are all well aligned with those of CapSpecialty," said Tony Anzalone, Head of Specialty Casualty at CapSpecialty.

Mike LaRocco, president and CEO of State Auto, noted, "We're pleased we've reached this agreement with CapSpecialty, which will leverage the strong Rockhill environmental team that's already in place. I wish them all great success."

About State Auto

State Automobile Mutual Insurance Company, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, is a super-regional property and casualty insurance holding company. The company is primarily engaged in writing personal and business insurance products exclusively through independent insurance agencies in 33 states and is proud to be a Trusted Choice company partner.

State Auto Mutual is part of the State Auto Group. The State Auto Group markets its insurance products throughout the United States, through independent insurance agencies, which include retail agencies and wholesale brokers. The State Auto Group is rated A- (Excellent) by the A.M. Best Company and includes State Automobile Mutual, State Auto Financial Corporation, State Auto Property & Casualty, State Auto Ohio, State Auto Wisconsin, Milbank, Meridian Security, Patrons Mutual, Rockhill Insurance, Plaza Insurance, American Compensation and Bloomington Compensation. Additional information can be found online at http://www.StateAuto.com.

About CapSpecialty

CapSpecialty, Inc. provides specialty insurance solutions for small and mid-sized business across the U.S. CapSpecialty's experienced management and underwriting teams come from top insurance companies and bring with them a wealth of knowledge and an innovative approach to risk, providing the pricing its customers need for the exposures they are trying to protect. CapSpecialty's affiliates, Capitol Indemnity Corporation, Platte River Insurance Company, and Capitol Specialty Insurance Corporation, offer a full inventory of specialty lines, including casualty, fidelity, surety, healthcare, professional lines and commercial property on both an admitted and non-admitted basis. CapSpecialty's affiliates are rated A (Excellent) by the A.M. Best Company.

SOURCE CapSpecialty

Related Links

http://www.capspecialty.com


AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Catapult, a digital solutions and services firm, announced today that its CEO, David Fuess, has been featured in the book Supreme Leadership by best-selling author Alinka Rutowska. Supreme Leadership, which compiles insights from 34 select CEOs who've been at the helm of successful companies, spotlights Fuess's commitment to cultivating an exceptional corporate culture. The 12-page section stories Fuess's efforts to help build and maintain a workplace that gives employees a strong sense of purpose and belonging.

A piece of wisdom from David, "hire wisely," sets the tone for his interview in Supreme Leadership, which traces his people-first values back to Catapult's roots. He explains how the business was built on the belief that personal interactions between clients and consultants are what set service-based companies like Catapult apart, crediting employees as the organization's biggest asset. Fuess goes on to share the details of Catapult's hiring and interview methodology  Top Grading, invented by General Electric  which he claims has played a key role in Catapult's long-lived success.

Fuess clarifies that you must also keep talented employees on board  a rare feat in the consulting industry, which often demands 60+ hours a week from employees. But Fuess's respect for work-life balance has helped keep many of its leaders around for over 10 years  just reasons why Catapult has been named a "Best Place to Work" around 50 times.

On having been selected to share his story in Supreme Leadership, Fuess says, "I'm honored by this chance to attribute Catapult's legacy to the strength and commitment of our people. As we continue to expand globally, I strive to maintain a work environment where every single employee knows that their efforts make difference to both Catapult and our customers."



ABOUT CATAPULT

Catapult is a modern digital solutions and services firm that uses technology to solve complex business challenges, delivering exceptional value to our clients. As Microsoft's 2017 Partner of the Year Finalist in Cloud Productivity and the 2016 Partner of the Year (U.S.), Catapult specializes in digital transformation and cloud-based technologies. We work on behalf of our clients to imagine, build, and sustain IT-enabled business solutions that people love to use. Catapult has offices in Austin, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Tampa, and Washington, D.C.

Press Contact:

Mindy Russell

Vice President, Marketing

Catapult Systems

512.425.0475

SOURCE Catapult
ALBANY, New York, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The report provides detailed analysis of the current and emerging trends of global catheters market. The market size has been provided for product type and end users segment. Based on product type, the market is segmented into cardiovascular catheters, urology catheters, intravenous catheters, neurovascular catheters, and specialty catheters. By end users the global catheters market is segmented into hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, dialysis centers and other. The global catheter market is anticipated to see moderate growth during the forecast period, owing to the increasing demand of minimally invasive procedures and rise in number of surgeries. In addition, geriatric population is expected to increase the patient pool worldwide and rise in demand for sterile & disposable catheters supplement the market growth. The report provides forecasts for revenue (US$ Mn) of the products from 2017-2025.

According to the report, the cardiovascular catheters market is projected to reach US$ 55.98 Bn in 2025 at a CAGR of 7.4% from 2017 to 2025.

View Report Preview at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/catheters-market.html

The cardiovascular segment is further segmented into electrophysiology catheters, PTCA balloon catheters, IVUS catheters, PTA balloon catheters and others. The others segment of the cardiovascular catheters includes angiography catheters, guiding catheters and pulmonary artery catheters. The cardiovascular catheters segment is the highest contributing segment in terms of revenue for the growth of global catheters market. PTCA balloon catheters are also growing significantly due to the rising incidences of coronary heart diseases globally. According to WHO, an estimated 7.4 million people died due to coronary heart disease and 6.7 million were due to stroke in 2015 globally.

Urology catheters is the second largest segment contributing highly for the growth of global catheters market. The urology catheter segment is further segmented into hemodialysis catheters, peritoneal catheters, foley catheters, intermittent catheters and external catheters. The foley catheters dominates the urology catheters segment in terms of revenue, followed by the intermittent catheters and then hemodialysis catheters. The rise in the number of geriatric population which suffers from a wide range of urinary disorders, especially urinary incontinence and urinary retention is increasing globally. Moreover, catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) have become a major cause of concern for health care providers and professionals across the world, which is also increasing demand of technologically advanced urinary catheters globally, especially in developed economies such as the U.S. and Europe.

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The intravenous catheters segment is segmented into peripheral catheters, midline peripheral catheters and central venous catheters. Intravenous catheters are used to administer parenteral nutrition, drugs, blood products, and intravenous fluids during illness and also in routine elective procedures. There has been a noticeable rise in the number of cancer patients, patients with renal impairment, diabetes and obesity. Target pool of patients undergoing hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, and chemotherapy has been on a consistent rise. Hence, this segment is expected to grow at a constant CAGR.

Neurovascular catheters are used to diagnose and treat neurovascular complications with minimally invasive micro catheters and access catheters. Cerebrovascular disease or stroke are treated with neurovascular catheters. Neurovascular diseases have an effect on network of blood vessels in the brain which give rise to potentially fatal conditions such as aneurysms and strokes. Here comes the role of neurovascular catheters, by using minimally invasive approaches neurovascular catheters are used for diagnosis and treatment of such conditions. Around 6 million Americans are affected by cerebral aneurysms alone annually. Specialty catheter are used for inflammations and categorized as oximetry catheters, wound drainage catheters, suction catheters, and thermo dilution catheters. Wound drainage catheters are designed for goal of drain liquids and semisolids from an otherwise closed wound.

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Based on end users, the global catheters market is segmented into hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, dialysis centers and others. The hospital segment is the major contributing segment for the growth of the global catheters market. Increasing number of hospital facility across globe with the aim to provide high quality services at affordable cost is driving the growth the hospital segment. The ambulatory surgical segment is the second largest segment contributing for the growth of the global catheters market. Ambulatory surgical centers are well established in developed countries of North America and Europe. The dialysis centers are highly concentrated in the countries of Asia Pacific.

Major players operating in the global catheters market are Abbott Laboratories, Becton, Dickinson and Company, B. Braun Melsungen AG, C. R. Bard, Inc., Medtronic plc. Boston Scientific Corporation, Teleflex Incorporated, JOHNSON & JOHNSON, Cook Group Incorporated, Cardinal Health, Inc.(Cordis Corporation) and others.

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EDISON, N.J., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS today announced that it has renewed its franchise affiliation with Century 21 Real Estate LLC, franchisor of the iconic CENTURY 21 brand. CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS will continue to be brand ambassadors and real estate leaders with consumers and industry professionals alike for years to come. The result will be approximately 45 CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS affiliated agents continuing to make a difference in the lives and communities of consumers in Edison, Middlesex County, throughout New Jersey, and with its peers in 78 countries and territories around the world. According to John Pepe, broker-owner of CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS, his office is as diverse as the people it serves. The firm has affiliated sales agents who originally hail from China, Korea, Taiwan, India, Italy, and Vietnam.

"When I examined the needs of my agents and those of my business to thrive today and well into the future, the answer became clear: renew my franchise with the CENTURY 21 brand," added Pepe. "Not only do we have the iconic global brand recognition, but the company provides access to the tools and technology and support systems that help enable our agents to provide the best services available in the industry. We're excited by the opportunities afforded to us by continuing our relationship with this great franchise."

"This is terrific news for us and for real estate consumers throughout central Jersey," explained Nick Bailey, president and chief executive officer, Century 21 Real Estate LLC. "CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS has proven itself to be a team of relentless go-getters who are led by owner John Pepe whose edict is to never be done until an extraordinary experience is delivered to their clients."

About CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS

CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS is a full service real estate company that has been serving the buyers and sellers of Edison and Middlesex County for nearly 30 years. The Edison office is located at 1815 Oak Tree Rd., Edison, NJ 08820.

CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS is an independently owned and operated franchise affiliate of Century 21 Real Estate LLC (century21.com), franchisor of the iconic CENTURY 21 brand, comprised of approximately 7,700 independently owned and operated franchised broker offices in 78 countries and territories worldwide with more than 117,000 independent sales professionals.

Media Contact:

Lauren Nickl

MullenLowe for CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS

617.226.9766

[email protected]

SOURCE CENTURY 21 John Anthony, REALTORS

Related Links

http://century21.com


DENVER, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The NAHB's National Sales and Marketing Council (NSMC) has announced the Silver Award Winners for The National new home sales and marketing awards. Century Communities, named Fortune's 26th Fastest Growing Company for 2017, received the 2018 Silver Award honors for "Best Website for a Builder." The Nationals salutes and honors the best in the building industry for their determination, integrity, creativity and endurance. During a three-day judging process, a panel of seven industry professionals from across the country determined the Silver and Gold award winners from a field of over 1,300 entries.

Century Communities was the only U.S. based builder to finalize in the website category. Century Communities' content rich website is a dynamic marketing tool for a rapidly expanding company that joined the ranks of the top sixteen public builders in 2017. The company's customer-centered messaging is visible throughout the website, positioning the buyers' desires at the center of attention. Recognizing the importance of being thoughtful and identifiable Century Communities carefully selected iconic and familiar images and crafted meaningful content for each page. A consistent navigation scheme guides visitors through a natural 'fact-finding' path whether the buyer wants to learn more about the builder, locate a new community or view floorplans.

"Century Communities has worked tirelessly to create a first-class website that enables buyers to experience our brand before setting foot in a sales office," said Julie Satalowich, Vice President of Corporate Marketing. "We are thrilled to have been recognized by the NSMC and look forward to continuing to provide a seamless online experience for our buyers."

Started in 1982 as the Institute of Residential Marketing, The Nationals award program continues to recognize superior new home sales and marketing achievements. With 57 categories across various disciplines of the new home industry, the awards honor excellence in product and community design, advertising, marketing and sales achievements by individuals and sales teams.

About Century Communities:

Century Communities, Inc. (NYSE: CCS) is one of the nation's largest U.S. homebuilders, engaged in all aspects of homebuilding, including the acquisition, entitlement and development of land and the construction, marketing and sale of quality homes designed to appeal to a wide range of homebuyers. The Colorado-based Company operates in 10 states across the West, Mountain, Texas and Southeast Regions and offers title and lending services in select markets through its Parkway Title and Inspire Home Loan subsidiaries. To learn more about Century Communities please visit www.centurycommunities.com.

SOURCE Century Communities

Related Links

www.centurycommunities.com


CHENGDU, China, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On December 27, Chengdu Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone (CDHT) announced that Chengdu Tianfu Software Park had won the title of "Leading Park in China Software and Information Service Industry" at the 2017 China Software Conference held in Beijing recently. This is the 7th time the Park had been awarded the honor.

The China Software Conference is sponsored by the China Center for Information Industry Development, and is the highest-level conference in the software and information service industry of China. Receiving close attention and recognition from government authorities and insiders, this conference is held in high regard in the development of software and information service industry, and has evaluated and unveiled authoritative lists for 15 consecutive years.

As the first western Independent Innovation Demonstration Zone, as well as the first comprehensive innovation and reform area in Sichuan, and the core zone of China (Sichuan) Pilot Free Trade Zone, CDHT is striving to achieve high quality economic development. In the process of building the National Independent Innovation Demonstration Zone, CDHT saw the high-tech park as an important facilitator of in-depth international cooperation on all fronts. It aims to integrate and aggregate international innovation resources, and continuously explore new models for innovation and development by strengthening international cooperation on all fronts.

"The fact that the Park has been awarded with such an honor so many times highlights the Park's comprehensive strength in a variety of aspects such as influence, innovation, execution, foresight, development and contribution, and also showcases the new Chengdu Central Activity Zone." According to officials, CDHT is committed to establishing an international innovation and entrepreneurship center valued at one trillion RMB and creating a layout featuring "one zone, four parks and multiple pivots." In addition, economic geography will be reshaped in the southern Hi-Tech Zone where the Park lies, and the "river-embracing development" will be achieved. CDHT is sparing no effort in creating the Chengdu Central Activity Zone as it seeks to become a new global economic source.

New Economy Enterprises Clustering, Regional Brand Value Hits RMB 415,62 million

As new economies are emerging and developing, generally the one who is first to grasp the opportunity of new economic development is likely to occupy center stage in international competition.

As a leader of economic development in Chengdu, CDHT has successfully incubated an array of high-growth enterprises including XinChao Media, XW Bank and XGimi Technology. It has also introduced Tencent Chengdu R&D Center, HIT (Chengdu) Technology Institute for Robots and Intelligent Equipment Industry, and other R&D institutions owned by star enterprises, which lays a solid foundation for further economic development.

Chengdu Tianfu Software Park is situated in the south of the High-tech Zone and in the core area of Sichuan Pilot Free Trade Zone. The park and its periphery has an area of 10 square kilometers and is intended to be the international demonstration base for innovation and entrepreneurship. Since coming into service in 2005, CDHT has attracted over 600 internationally and domestically renowned enterprises such as IBM, SAP, EMC, Phillips, Maersk, Siemens, Ericsson, Dell, Wipro, DHL, PwC, NCS, Garmin, Alibaba, Tencent and Manulife Financial, including 34 Fortune 500 enterprises, top 10 global software companies, top 100 Chinese software companies and state-planned key software enterprises, in addition to numerous CMMI-certified companies. The Park is currently seeing a strong industrial cluster taking shape in the software and information service industry. The industrial cluster has become an important carrier for the innovation and development of the new-generation information technology industry and the major innovation and entrepreneurship hub in western China, while also being a significant base for building international innovation and entrepreneurship center in CDHT.

According to an official of the Park, by making full use of new-generation information technologies such as Internet of Things, big data and mobile internet, the Park has been renewing its efforts in advancing the incubation of startups, SMEs management, and the construction of sharing service platforms and smart parks in 2017. On March 21, 2017, China Quality Certification Center announced the evaluation results of 160 regional brands, among which the Park came in 2nd in the service industry, with a brand value of RMB 415,62 million. On November 10, the Park also won the title of "2017 Leading Park in China Software and Information Service Industry" granted by China Information Technology and Service Alliance. Later on November 18, Tianfu Software Park. Lab was awarded with the title of "CESS2017 Best Entrepreneurship Incubator" at the China Entrepreneurs Services Summit 2017. Finally in December, the Park was included in "The Fourth Batch of Pilot Units for Industrial Cluster Regional Brand Construction" by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Fostering a New Driver of Economic Growth and Establishing Benchmark of a Modern Economic System

As a new global economic source in Chengdu, CDHT has been constantly fostering this new driver of economic growth and vigorously supporting the improvement in new technologies, organizations, models and values. Additionally, introducing new types of businesses, accelerating the establishment of the library of specially fostered new economy enterprises and setting up a multi-level system for fostering enterprises such as "Micro Giant" enterprises, "Gazelle Enterprises", "Unicorn Enterprises" and listed enterprises have been high on the priority list.

Within the existing incubation field of 35,000m2, Tianfu Software Park. Lab has incubated over 1,100 projects and over 260 projects are currently under incubation. So far, a whole-chain incubation system of "startup nursery - incubator - accelerator - industrial park" has been completed, providing multiple Makerspaces like workstations, open workspaces, and independent spaces. This marks the successful formation of an all-round and multi-layered "5C's" cultivation program, covering funds, talent, business start up circles, market guidance for starting a business and other services. The Lab has successfully incubated domestic and international leading enterprises and products, including Tap4fun, Camera360, TestBird, Codoon, LionMobi, XGIMI, 56QQ (Truck Alliance), Medlinker, MAIZIEDU and Ludashi, as well as mobile phone games with a monthly turnover exceeding RMB ten million, such as Galaxy Empire, King's Empire, Spartan Wars, Three Blade Masters, Empire Defense 3, Hua Qian Gu, Ninja Story and Invasion.

On December 6, Medlinker, a real-name doctor platform which was successfully built by the Tianfu Software Park. Lab, announced that it had secured RMB 400 million in Series C financing. Founded in 2014, Medlinker, according to estimates, has been valued at RMB 5 billion or so in a short span of three years, and been rated as a potential unicorn by Greatwall Strategy Consultants, a professional consulting institute of China. Wang Shirui, CEO of Medlinker, expressed that CDHT's enabling policies and environment were of significance to Medlinker's achievement as an industrial leader. "When our enterprise was incubated in the Tianfu Software Park. Lab, CDHT offered many preferential policies for us on reduction of house rent and others. And the government paid close attention to the development of our enterprise and also helped us a lot."

The Park has been approved by several ministries and institutes. For example, it is recognized as the "National Science and Technology Enterprise Incubator", "State-level Maker Space" and "Demonstration Base of Innovative Talents Cultivation" by the Ministry of Science and Technology, "National Business Incubation Demonstration Base" by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, "National Public Service Demonstration Platform for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises" by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and "Chinese College Students Venture Park (Chengdu)" by the China Central Communist Youth League. It has become a renowned venture incubation park nationwide. In the Park, an increasing number of world-renowned IT enterprises are doing business while an increasing number of local enterprises are going global and edging themselves into the global innovation system, which indicates that the Park has enjoyed great popularity and established itself as a benchmark for a modern economic system in Sichuan.

Creating a Favorable Environment for Entrepreneurial Talents to Settle down and Forging a New Core of Innovation and Creativity

As the first Independent Innovation Demonstration Zone in western China, CDHT has built an enabling environment for industrial development, international innovation and creativity. It is also a talents service, and is attracting a growing number of talents at home and abroad to work or start business here. In order to create more favorable environment for overseas talents, CDHT is about to initiate the "Golden Panda" Talent Plan. Oriented by globalization, flexibility, marketization, professionalization, and branding, it aims to become a "magnet" for international high-caliber talents, featuring talent aggregation, active technological innovation, a well-established system and a first-class living environment.

Adhering to the talent strategies sponsored by CDHT, the Park launched talent recruitment campaigns in the United States, Europe and other regions on several occasions. In the first half of 2017, a number of Chengdu Tianfu Software Park-based enterprises participated in the 2017 Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Festival, in a bid to seek more opportunities for international innovation cooperation and attract a pool of high-caliber talents from overseas. Also in 2017, a string of activities such as "Tianfu Talent Action" and "Open Day" were held in the Park and supported college students with entrepreneurial intentions and ability to settle in. As the core area with the most active entrepreneurial atmosphere, the largest carrier and best services in Chengdu, the Park is receiving great attention and favor from a growing number of high-caliber talents at home and abroad, with over 60,000 staff employed.

An official of the Park indicated that after being awarded as the 'Leading Park in China Software and Information Service Industry', the Park would place greater effort in developing its platform strategy. It is striving to make the resources accessible and effectively share and forge a new core of innovation and creativity. It plans to do this by upholding the new target and development philosophy of "a different platform for a different future" as well as the following approaches: firstly, the Park aims to set up a shared service platform relying on its rich enterprise resources. It attempts to develop in-depth cooperation with industry leading enterprises, and create a public technical and industrial incubation platform in vertical industry sectors together with its enterprises; secondly, the Park works to enrich its service function as the "first market". It assists start-ups to establish cooperation with excellent enterprises in the Park, and further expand business and market among its more than 60,000 targeted customers; thirdly, the Park will build more industrial exchange and social platforms, in a bid to advance the communication, exchange and cooperation among enterprises; fourthly, the Park concentrates efforts to build itself into a learning-oriented base and create a strong learning atmosphere based on such carriers as "Tianfu Software Park Auditorium", "Online Education Platform" and "HR Elite Club"; fifthly, the Park endeavors to upgrade the incubation platform. It forges an intelligent incubation system in the Tianfu Software Park . Lab and improves capital connection and tutorial systems, for the sake of establishing an online platform helping startup projects under incubation accessible to global capital; sixthly, the Park makes great efforts to enhance its vitality and attractiveness. By constantly holding a string of events, it is committed to encouraging active participation from enterprises and shaping an abundant and diverse park culture, therefore showcasing the cultural attractiveness of the Park.

SOURCE Chengdu Tianfu Software Park
BEIJING, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Zhaopin Limited ("Zhaopin" or the "Company"), a leading career platform in China focused on connecting users with relevant job opportunities through their career lifecycle, released its 2017 White-collar Worker Satisfaction Index Report. The report found that white-collar workers in China had low satisfaction with their work in 2017 due to limited promotion opportunities, working overtime, and lack of vacations.

Zhaopin conducted its annual survey to gauge white-collar workers' satisfaction levels with their work in 2017. The satisfaction at work was measured by salary, welfare, training, promotion, and interpersonal relationship. More than 12,000 white-collar workers participated in the survey.

Key Findings of Zhaopin Report on Satisfaction Index for White-collar Workers:

White-collar workers in China had low satisfaction with their work in 2017, with a satisfaction index of 2.64 (measured from 0 to 5, with 5 as the highest).

had low satisfaction with their work in 2017, with a satisfaction index of 2.64 (measured from 0 to 5, with 5 as the highest). White-collar workers were most dissatisfied with promotion opportunities, with a satisfaction index of 2.17. Only 27.5% of white-collar workers got promoted in 2017.

About 85% of white-collar workers in China had to work overtime each week, and 21.3% had to work overtime 5 to 10 hours each week.

had to work overtime each week, and 21.3% had to work overtime 5 to 10 hours each week. About 33.3% of white-collar workers did not take any vacation in 2017, and 25.5% had vacations less than five days.

24% of white-collar workers choose "anxiety" as their keyword for 2017, followed by "poor" with 22.1%.

Most dissatisfied with promotion opportunities

Zhaopin's survey found that the satisfaction index for work was 2.64 in 2017 for white-collar workers. The satisfaction is measured from 0 to 5 with 5 as the highest. The 2017 satisfaction index for work improved from 2.33 in 2016 and 2.28 in 2015, but still remained at a low level.

White-collar workers in China were most dissatisfied with promotion opportunities in 2017, with an index of 2.17, followed by 2.43 for welfare and 2.47 for salary.

2017 work satisfaction index for white-collar workers Category Index Interpersonal relationship 3.14 Training 3.00 Salary 2.47 Welfare 2.43 Promotion 2.17

According to the Zhaopin survey, only 27.5% of white-collar workers got promoted in 2017, and 54.7% said they had no promotion opportunities in 2017.

Breakdown of promotion status in 2017 Status Percentage Promoted to mid-level and senior management positions 8.9% Promoted to senior technical positions 5.1% Promoted to junior management positions 13.5% Almost got promoted 13.5% No promotion opportunities 54.7% Did not want promotions 4.3%

As to reasons for promotions, 24.2% of white-collar workers believed promotions were based on personal efforts, while 32.8% attributed promotions to company policies.

Reasons concerning promotions in 2017 Reason Percentage Company policies 32.8% Personal efforts 24.2% High opinion by colleagues and bosses 16.6% Others 26.4%

About 85% of white-collar workers in China had to work overtime each week, Zhaopin found, and 21.3% of white-collar workers had to work 5 to 10 hours for overtime each week.

Overtime status in 2017 Status (per week) Percentage 1 to 3 hours 19.3% 3 to 5 hours 17.0% 5 to 10 hours 21.3% 10 to 15 hours 10.1% 15 to 20 hours 9.3% Over 20 hours 7.9% Did not work overtime 15.1%

Job satisfaction affected by income and experience

Job satisfaction is highly correlated with income level and work experience, Zhaopin found. White-collar workers with an average monthly salary of RMB8,001 to 10,000 had the highest job satisfaction (2.93), while workers with a salary below RMB2,000 were most dissatisfied with their jobs (1.83).

2017 work satisfaction index by monthly salaries Monthly salary (RMB) Index Above 25,000 2.83 10,001 to 25,000 2.92 8,001 to 10,000 2.93 5,001 to 8,000 2.78 3,001 to 5,000 2.52 2,001 to 3,000 2.31 Below 2,000 1.83

White-collar workers with more accumulated work experience were more rational with their jobs, and tended to have higher satisfaction. Newly-graduated employees with less than one year experience, disillusioned by the reality of moving into the workforce, had the lowest job satisfaction (2.36).

2017 work satisfaction index by experience Experience Index Within 1 year 2.36 1 to 3 years 2.49 3 to 5 years 2.62 5 to 8 years 2.80 8 to 10 years 2.81 Over 10 years 2.68

Among different types of companies, white-collar workers in joint ventures had the highest job satisfaction with an index of 3.08, followed by 2.79 for wholly foreign-owned enterprises (including HK, Macao and Taiwan). Employees at private companies had the lowest job satisfaction (2.58).

2017 work satisfaction index by types of companies Type of company Index Joint ventures 3.08 Wholly foreign-owned enterprises

(including HK, Macao and Taiwan) 2.79 State-owned enterprises 2.74 Public institutions 2.69 Private companies 2.58

In terms of age groups, white-collar workers born in the 1980s and 1970s had relatively high job satisfaction as they had more work experience. With limited work experience, workers born after 1995 were most dissatisfied with their jobs (2.42).

2017 work satisfaction index by demographics Age Group Index Born after 1995 2.42 Born between 1990 and 1995 2.53 Born in the 1980s 2.76 Born in the 1970s 2.75 Born in the 1960s 2.50

One third had no vacations in 2017

Zhaopin survey found that 33.3% of white-collar workers did not take any vacation in 2017, and 25.5% had vacations less than five days in 2017.

Breakdown of vacations by white-collar workers in 2017 Details Percentage Too busy with work and no vacations 33.3% 1 to 5 days 25.5% 5 to 10 days 19.2% 10 to 15 days 9.6% 15 to 20 days 3.6% More than 20 days 8.8%

When asked to summarize 2017 with one keyword, 24% of white-collar workers choose "anxiety", followed by "poor" with 22.1%.

2017 keyword for white-collar workers Word Percentage Anxiety 24.0% Poor 22.1% Upgrade of knowledge and skill 15.2% Challenge 11.2% Sang (dispirited) 7.0% Self-value realization 7.0% pass a day as if it were a year 6.3% Confidence 4.5% Hard to tell in one word 1.5% Other 1.3%

For more information, please contact:

Zhaopin Limited

Ms. Daisy Wang

Investor Relations

[email protected]

ICR Beijing

Mr. Edmond Lococo

Phone: +86 10 6583-7510

[email protected]

SOURCE Zhaopin Limited
AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ClearBlade, Inc., the high-growth Internet of Things (IoT) software company, has announced joining the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII) located within UI LABS. UI LABS was established to bring together top talent from universities + industry (the "UI" in the name), harnessing the power of collaboration of its partners by leveraging their collective resources to pursue innovation and drive tech-based economic development.

ClearBlade has made a multi-year commitment to DMDII and is joining a network of over 300 organizations who recognize that collaboration is key to addressing the world's most pressing problems.

DMDII is where innovative manufacturers plan their future. As a public-private partnership, DMDII has the capabilities, innovative spirit, and collaborative expertise to help American manufacturers tackle problems far too big for any one company to solve in its own.

"We're thrilled to have ClearBlade as a partner and greatly value their experiential insights into the digital conversation," said Lizabeth Stuck, Director of Membership Engagement, UI LABS. "ClearBlade is experienced in providing complete IoT solutions to connect machines and people to operations and business systems while maintaining a secure and flexible deployment architecture."

The mission of DMDII is to transform American manufacturing by getting new technology into the hands of its partners, so they can build things more quickly, less expensively and at a higher quality. Using software and sensors, DMDII helps embed the Internet into production lines, enabling them to send and receive data securely.

Other key members of DMDII include: Boeing, Caterpillar, Dow, Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman, and Stanley Black & Decker.

The ClearBlade Cloud, On-Premise, and Edge IoT Platforms are specifically engineered to ensure a solid foundation for building complete IoT solutions for the enterprise, with unprecedented architecture flexibility and security. It is designed to allow businesses to rapidly implement and run their unique IoT solution where it's required, which automatically syncs across on-premise, cloud, and edge deployments. The ClearBlade IoT Platforms eliminate costly delays and the risk of building an ineffective or obsolete solution.

"ClearBlade strongly believes in pushing the envelope when it comes to revolutionizing IoT technology, transforming industries and enterprises to create a secure and seamlessly connected world. We actively pursue sharing our innovations with our peers across industries, leveraging collaborative efforts to create complete solutions on a much grander scale," says Eric Simone, CEO of ClearBlade. He adds, "Joining a consortium such as UI Labs and DMDII and its partners provides the opportunity to extend the digital thread to the entire supply chain ecosystem, achieving many transformational benefits evidenced by reducing operational costs and increasing profitability."

About ClearBlade, Inc. ClearBlade is the enterprise Internet of Things software company to rapidly engineer and run secure, real-time, scalable IoT applications. ClearBlade enables companies to build IoT solutions that make streaming data actionable by combining business rules and machine learning with powerful visualizations and integrations to existing business systems. Built from an enterprise-first perspective, the ClearBlade Platform runs securely in any cloud, on-premise, and at the edge.

The ClearBlade Edge Platform brings the full power of the ClearBlade IoT Cloud Platform to gateways and industrial servers on the plant floor, job site or building facility. Safely behind the firewall, the ClearBlade Edge Platform intelligently syncs with the ClearBlade IoT Cloud Platform guaranteeing security, connectivity, execution and speed.

ClearBlade is developer focused with an extensive library of proven and tested pre-built components and integrations. ClearBlade accelerates the time-to-market while significantly reducing the cost and risk of delivering IoT solutions, creating new business models and revenue streams.

ClearBlade is headquartered in Austin, TX. For more information about the company and our software, please visit https://clearblade.com/

ClearBlade, Inc.

103 E. 5th Street

Austin, Texas 78701

512-686-3037

[email protected]

Headquarters: Austin, Texas - Website https://www.clearblade.com

 ClearBlade Inc. All rights reserved

Twitter

LinkedIn

Email

About DMDII

The Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII) is where innovative manufacturers plan their future. In partnership with UI Labs and the Department of Defense, DMDII provides factories with the digital tools and expertise they need to build things more quickly, less expensively and at a higher quality. As a result, our more than 300 partners increase their productivity and win more business. To learn more about DMDII visit http://www.uilabs.org/innovation-platforms/manufacturing/

About UI LABS

UI LABS is a tech organization driving the digital future of manufacturing and cities. We help our more than 300 partners across universities + industry solve problems far too big for them to solve on their own. By guiding these partners through complex projects, we help them deliver cutting-edge solutions to their customers, improve their financial performance and transform industries. To learn more about UI LABS visit http://www.uilabs.org

SOURCE ClearBlade Inc.

Related Links

http://www.clearblade.com


NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cole Haan, the iconic American lifestyle accessories brand and retailer, today announces the appointment of Tom Linko as Chief Financial Officer.

"We are delighted Tom Linko has joined Cole Haan as CFO. His unique pedigree makes him ideal for Cole Haan. His experience in growth-oriented, multi-channel, global fashion and lifestyle brands will serve a vital role on our management team at a time when Cole Haan is gaining marketshare and expanding globally," said Jack Boys, Chief Executive Officer of Cole Haan.

Linko brings a wealth of experience to this role, having served most recently as CFO of Kate Spade & Co., where he oversaw and lead their global finance team that included accounting, reporting, treasury, tax, internal audit, FP&A and global planning.

"I am thrilled to be joining one of the strongest American brands in the marketplace that is bridging technology and innovation with classic style. It is an exciting opportunity to be able to bring my experience in the fashion industry to a growth brand such as Cole Haan," said Tom Linko.

Since 1928, the Cole Haan name has been synonymous with quality, craftsmanship and vision. In February of 2013, Apax Partners acquired Cole Haan, making it privately owned for the first time in 25 years. As a great American brand, Cole Haan believes in the importance of substance, craft, style and innovation. With this, Cole Haan has continued to expand domestically in category and internationally through best-in-class partners and distribution agreements.

About Cole Haan

Cole Haan LLC, with its Global Headquarters in Greenland, New Hampshire and Creative Center in New York City, is an iconic American lifestyle accessories brand and retailer of premium men's, women's footwear, handbags, leather accessories, outerwear and eyewear. Cole Haan stands for its commitment to craftsmanship, timeless style and design innovation. For more information, visit ColeHaan.com and follow @ColeHaan.

For more information, contact:

Kimry Blackwelder, Cole Haan

Phone: +1 (212) 763-3060

E-mail: [email protected]

SOURCE Cole Haan

Related Links

http://www.colehaan.com


WASHINGTON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ColorComm, Inc., the nation's leading women's platform addressing diversity and inclusion from across the communications, marketing, media, and advertising industries, will launch Men of Color in Communications (MCC) on Friday, January 26, 2018 in Washington, DC.

MCC will focus on advancing the visibility and accomplishments of men of color in communications. The focus of MCC is to personally connect men with other like- minded individuals to build a strong network of leaders by creating mentors, business relationships and friendships.

MCC aims to share the stories of men of color in leadership and provide the skills that help men of color advance in the industry.

MCC will launch with a signature luncheon on Friday, January 26, 2018 at Charlie Palmer Steakhouse in Washington, DC featuring keynote speaker Art Collins, CEO, theGROUP.

The goal of the luncheon is to create an environment that connects industry thought leaders to strategize, collaborate, and create conversations that yield to business partnerships and best practices.

"Men of color working in communications face unique challenges in the workplace and often work in environments where there are less than a handful of men of color at their company and in leadership," said ColorComm and Men of Color in Communications Founder Lauren Wesley Wilson.

"We created MCC to provide a community for men to come together to become a resource for one another to grow and advance," said Wesley Wilson.

Men of Color in Communications will launch in Washington, DC and will expand to major cities across the nation in 2018.

About ColorComm, Inc.

ColorComm Conference: www.colorcommconference.com

ColorComm Network: www.colorcommnetwork.com

ColorComm Fellows Program: https://colorcommfellows.tumblr.com

SOURCE ColorComm, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.colorcommconference.com


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Browse 65 market data Tables and 25 Figures spread through 120 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Cryotherapy Market"

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cryotherapy-market-33280524.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

The key factors driving the growth of this market are the increasing demand for minimally invasive surgical procedures, growing incidence of cancer and cardiac conditions, technological advancements in cryotherapy equipment, and growing popularity in beauty wellness and fitness industry.

By product, the cryosurgery devices segment is expected to account for the largest share of the market in 2017

On the basis of product, the Cryotherapy Market is broadly segmented into cryosurgery devices, localized cryotherapy devices, and cryochambers & cryosaunas. The cryosurgery devices segment is further divided into tissue contact probes, tissue spray probes, and epidermal & subcutaneous cryoablation devices. In 2017, the cryosurgery devices segment is expected to account for the largest share of this market. The high growth in this segment can be attributed to the increasing preference for minimally invasive procedures and technological advancement in cryosurgery devices.

Inquiry Before Buying @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=33280524

By application, the surgical applications segment is expected to command the largest share of the market in 2017

On the basis of application, the market has been segmented into surgical applications, pain management and recovery, health & beauty. Surgical applications are further subsegmented into oncology, cardiology, dermatology, and other surgical applications (gynecology, rheumatology, podiatry, and urology). The surgical applications segment is expected to command the largest share of the market in 2017. The large share and high growth of this segment can be attributed to factors such as the rising number of global cryoablation surgeries especially for oncology, dermatology, and cardiology coupled with low complications involved.

By end user, the hospitals and specialty clinics segment is expected to account for the largest share of the market in 2017

On the basis of end user, the Cryotherapy Market is broadly segmented into hospitals and specialty clinics, cryotherapy centers, and spas & fitness centers. In 2017, hospitals and specialty clinics are expected to account for the largest share of this market. The large share of this segment can be attributed to the increasing popularity and benefits of cryoablation procedures which are performed at hospitals.

Download PDF [email protected] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=33280524

North America to dominate the market in 2017

North America is expected to account for the largest share of the Cryotherapy Market in 2017, followed by Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), and the Rest of the World. The large share of this region can be attributed to the increasing popularity of cryosaunas and rising prevalence of CVD and cancer in the US, along with the increasing number of cardiac arrest cases in Canada. However, Asia Pacific is expected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period, owing to the rapid growth in geriatric population in Japan, booming medical tourism and healthcare reforms in China, and increasing cancer incidences in India.

Medtronic (Ireland), Galil Medical (US), CooperSurgical (US), Impact Cryotherapy (US), and Zimmer MedizinSysteme (Germany) are the key players in the Cryotherapy Market. Other players involved in this market are Metrum CryoFlex (Poland), Erbe Elektromedizin (Germany), Brymill Cryogenic Systems (US), CryoConcepts (US), US Cryotherapy (US), Professional Products (US), and Kriosystem Life (Poland).

Browse Related Reports:

Ablation Technology Market by Product (Radiofrequency, Ultrasound (ESWL, HIFU), Laser, Electrical (Argon Plasma, IRE), Cryotherapy, Microwave, Hydrothermal) & Application (Cardiovascular, Cancer, Pain Management, Orthopedics) - Global Forecasts to 2021

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/ablation-devices-market-791.html



Surgical Ablation Market by Technology (Radiofrequency, Light/Laser, Electrical, Cryoablation, Microwave, Ultrasound, Hydromechanical), Application (Open Surgery, Minimally Invasive, Cosmetic Surgery, Oncology, Cardiovascular, Orthopedic, Urology) - Global Forecast to 2019

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/surgical-ablation-market-5400609.html

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The Founder and Chairman of DAMAC Properties, Hussain Sajwani, will be speaking about the increasing demand for advanced digital skills on day one of the World Economic Forum (WEF), taking place on 23 - 26 January, in Davos, Switzerland.

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Sajwani's session participation brings into focus the Middle East's efforts in developing ICT skills among its young population, where Sajwani was the main supporter of the recently launched 'One Million Arab Coders' Initiative in October 2017. The initiative was conceived from the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, for the creation of an empowered, happier society through learning and skills development.

The 'Digital Skills Imperative' session will bring top decision makers and thinkers together to discuss the need for advancing digital skills as a priority, in response to rapid global digitalization and mass automation. The session aims to identify whether existing skill-building efforts can scale up to address the changing nature of the digital workforce.

"As the world moves towards the adoption of a digital economy, it is becoming increasingly dependent on the availability of a skilled workforce, where each nation's economic success and failure is dependent on its efforts in developing a talent pool of highly skilled workers to cope with this disruption," said Sajwani.

'One Million Coders' is a first-of-its-kind pan-Arab education initiative supported by the Hussain Sajwani - DAMAC Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the DAMAC Group and its Chairman. Launched in collaboration with Dubai Future Foundation, the initiative aims to create a pool of one million software coders to lead the Arab world into a digital era.

The 'Digital Skills Imperative' session at WEF aims to highlight some of the key industry trends driving demand for advanced skills, and raises a number of discussions around the topic including shifting mindsets on lifelong learning and inclusive opportunities, designing incentives for collective action and investment, and understanding the role of emerging technologies.

"The digital skills gap is a global dilemma, not just one for the emerging markets, as millions of jobs in software development already need to be filled right now. What happens when these jobs increase by 20, 30 or 40 percent in the near future? Where will the global community find a sustainable stream of talent to tap into? The global community needs more initiatives like 'One Million Coders' to empower their societies with the skills and technical expertise required for jobs of the future. This is a strategic imperative for the economic success of any nation, as the world enters the Fourth Industrial Revolution," Sajwani added.

Get more information at www.damacproperties.com

DAMAC Properties has been at the forefront of the Middle East's luxury real estate market since 2002 - bringing luxury living experiences to residents from all over the world. Making its mark at the highest end of stylish living, DAMAC Properties has cemented its place as the leading luxury developer in the region, offering iconic design and the utmost quality. The company's footprint now extends across the Middle East with projects in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Lebanon and the United Kingdom.

As of 30th September 2017, DAMAC Properties has delivered over 19,900 homes. The company has a development portfolio of over 44,000 units at various stages of progress and planning, comprising more than 13,000 hotel rooms, serviced apartments and hotel villas, which will be managed by its hospitality arm, DAMAC Hotels & Resorts. With vision and momentum, DAMAC Properties is building the next generation of Middle East luxury living.

Visit us at www.damacproperties.com .

Follow DAMAC Properties on Facebook, Twitter (@DAMACofficial) and YouTube.

SOURCE DAMAC Properties
CHONGQING, China, Jan. 16, 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 the appointment of Mr. Longgen Zhang as the chief executive officer and executive board member with immediate effect. Concurrently, Mr. Guangfu Xu, the Company's Chairman and founder, has stepped down from his position as the acting chief executive officer.

Mr. Longgen Zhang has strong expertise across the global solar industry and financial markets. From 2008 to 2014, Mr. Zhang served as the chief financial officer of Jinko Solar (NYSE: JKS), a global leader in the solar industry that distributes solar products and sells solutions and services to a diversified international utility, commercial, and residential customers. Prior to that, Mr. Zhang served as a director and the chief financial officer of Xinyuan Real Estate (NYSE: XIN), from 2006 to 2008. Mr. Zhang served as the chief financial officer at Crystal Window and Door Systems, Ltd. in New York from 2002 to 2006. Currently, Mr. Zhang serves as a director of Jinko Solar and ZZ Capital International Limited (HKSE: 08295). Mr. Zhang received master's degrees in professional accounting and in business administration from West Texas A&M University and a bachelor's degree in economic management from Nanjing University in China. Mr. Zhang is a member of American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

"We are very excited to welcome Longgen on board as our chief executive officer," commented Mr. Guangfu Xu, Chairman and founder of Daqo New Energy. "Mr. Zhang's extraordinary experience and deep knowledge of the global solar industry and financial markets will greatly benefit Daqo as we continue to focus on lowering costs and improving the quality of our polysilicon. I look forward to working closely with Longgen to strengthen and expand our position as the supplier of choice for high quality polysilicon."

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.
BURLINGTON, Mass. and PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Decision Resources Group (DRG), a leading provider of healthcare information, analytics, and advisory services, and the University City Science Center, a non-profit committed to catalyzing and connecting innovation to entrepreneurship and technology commercialization, today announce a collaboration that will connect entrepreneurs participating in the Science Center's Phase 1 Ventures (P1V) program with the expert insights and guidance of DRG's experienced life sciences consultants in order to accelerate the development of early-stage biopharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Phase 1 Ventures is a startup accelerator that helps launch and grow companies that have specific technology and/or regulatory development needs, such as healthcare, materials, or energy. P1V participants include entrepreneurs that are matched to a technology at one of P1V's participating universities or recently formed companies that have not yet raised financing. Since it was launched in 2015, P1V has committed more than $1.7 million to 22 startups, typically as the first investment. Collectively, these participants have raised over to $2 million in non-dilutive funding and $1 million in follow-on investment to date.

DRG Consulting has been informally involved with Phase 1 Ventures for the past two years, advising many new entrepreneurs and scientists on the US healthcare market, funding considerations, pricing and reimbursement dynamics, and commercial strategy. 2018 marks a deepened collaboration between the organizations to provide commercialization guidance and support for budding organizations focused on employing ground-breaking concepts to drive the evolution of the healthcare industry.

DRG Consulting provides guidance, support, and commercialization strategies for life sciences companies with products at every phase of development  from clinical trial and pre-planning through market launch, growth, and maturity. With particular focus on new product planning, commercial strategy, pricing and market access, DRG Consulting applies an insight-enabled consulting approach which combines robust healthcare patient and market data, analytics, and industry experience.

"Over the next decade, we will witness some of the most dramatic advances in scientific innovation," said DRG Consulting Managing Partner, Brian Corvino. "Whether we consider the advances in gene therapy, regenerative medicine, or the integration of drug therapy with device and digital technology, the future has never been brighter for those of us who are dedicated to propelling innovative therapies for the benefit of patients. Philadelphia's ecosystem is a unique epicenter for the advancement of these novel developments, and we are pleased to grow our support of the Philly community."

"Phase 1 Ventures was designed to give recently established companies focused on long-horizon, high-potential technologies the best chance of success," says Wenyong Wang, Ph.D., MBA, Vice President of Science & Technology at the University City Science Center. "Our enhanced partnership with DRG Consulting only increases the program's ability to support these startups."

About the Science Center

Located in the heart of uCity Square, the Science Center is a mission-driven nonprofit organization that catalyzes and connects innovation to entrepreneurship and technology commercialization. For 50+ years, the Science Center has supported startups, research, and economic development in the life sciences, healthcare, physical sciences, and emerging technology sectors. As a result, graduate firms and current residents of the Science Center's incubator support one out of every 100 jobs in the Greater Philadelphia region and drive $13 billion in economic activity in the region annually. By providing resources and programming for any stage of a business's lifecycle, the Science Center helps scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators take their concepts from idea to IPO  and beyond. For more information about the Science Center, go to www.sciencecenter.org

About Decision Resources Group

Decision Resources Group, a subsidiary of Piramal Enterprises Ltd., is the premier source for global healthcare data and market intelligence. A trusted partner for over 20 years, DRG helps companies competing in the global healthcare industry make informed business decisions. Organizations committed to the development and delivery of life-changing therapies rely on DRG's in-house team of expert healthcare analysts, data scientists, and consultants for critical guidance. DRG products and services, built on extensive data assets and delivered by experts, empower organizations to succeed in complex healthcare markets.

Contact:

Tori Gillern

781-993-2001

[email protected]

SOURCE Decision Resources Group

Related Links

http://www.decisionresourcesgroup.com


COLUMBUS, Ohio, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tridster recently announced that it will display the current Financial Stability Rating assigned to Title underwriters on www.tridster.com. Demotech, Inc. is pleased to assist Tridster in its efforts to arm consumers with additional insights on the cost and coverage of insurance, the quality of services, and the financial stability of the Title underwriter.

"As the first company to review and rate Title underwriters, Demotech combines breadth and depth of knowledge with thought leadership. No one has rated more Title underwriters and no one has done it longer. Providing Tridster with our opinions of the financial stability of Title underwriters assists consumers," according to Demotech's President and co-founder Joseph Petrelli.

"Our interactive quarterly review and analysis process, headed by Barry Koestler and Douglas Powell, provides an affirmation or revision to Financial Stability Ratings on a quarterly basis," added Sharon M. Romano, CPCU, AIAF, CCP, ARC, Vice President and co-founder of Demotech. "Real estate is often the largest purchase a consumer will ever make. Transparency and peace of mind are important. Tridster and Demotech now provide consumers with both."

About Demotech, Inc.

Demotech, Inc. is a financial analysis firm located in Columbus, Ohio. Since 1985, Demotech, Inc. has been serving the insurance industry by providing actuarial consulting as well as accurate and proven Financial Stability Ratings (FSRs) for Property & Casualty insurance companies and Title underwriters. FSRs are a leading indicator of the financial stability of an insurer. The rating process provides an objective baseline as well as insight as to the financial stability of an insurer. Demotech levels the playing field by offering FSRs to insurers of all sizes. Visit www.demotech.com for more information.

About Tridster

Tridster is the leading price comparison provider for Title insurance and settlement services, dedicated to re-engineering the shopping process from the ground up to make it simple, fast, and transparent. By providing market information, powerful tools, and support, Tridster empowers real estate consumers to discover savings and make better decisions as buyers, owners, and sellers of homes. For more information, visit www.tridster.com.

SOURCE Demotech, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.demotech.com


CINCINNATI, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Salvation Army received $100,000 from Duke Energy Ohio in addition to $210,000 in customer contributions and matching funds for the 2018 HeatShare program. The program provides people in need with financial assistance to pay for utilities. In many cases, these individuals and families face disconnection of utilities and possible eviction as a result of their inability to stay current on their utility bills.

The HeatShare program is available to eligible Duke Energy customers in southwest Ohio and provides heating assistance from Jan. 16 to April 30, 2018, or until funds are all used. If funds are available after April 30, they may be used for cooling assistance until depleted. People in need of assistance may call The Salvation Army HeatShare line at 513.762.5636 to schedule an appointment for the program or to get more information.

"HeatShare has been a vital program in Ohio for over 30 years, helping families and individuals in need," explained Cindy Givens, program manager at Duke Energy. "We're delighted to partner with our customers and The Salvation Army to help ensure those in need won't be cold this winter, especially with the single-digit temperatures we experienced earlier this month."

HeatShare was established in 1986 to assist Ohio residents in need with winter heating bills and is funded by Duke Energy customers, employees and shareholders. In 2017, over 19,000 Duke Energy Ohio customers voluntarily added a HeatShare contribution to their monthly bill and contributed $110,000 to the fund. Duke Energy Ohio provided a $100,000 donation and then matched all customer and employee donations up to $100,000. In 2017, the HeatShare program provided utility assistance to 810 families across southwest Ohio. Additional information about the program can be found on the Duke Energy Ohio website.

Duke Energy customers in Northern Kentucky can receive WinterCare assistance and should contact their county's Neighborhood Center or the Northern Kentucky Community Action Commission at 859.581.6607.

About The Salvation Army

The Salvation Army, an evangelical part of the universal Christian church, has been supporting those in need in His name without discrimination since 1865. Nearly 33 million Americans receive assistance from The Salvation Army each year through the broadest array of social services that range from providing food for the hungry, relief for disaster victims, assistance for the disabled, outreach to the elderly and ill, clothing and shelter to the homeless and opportunities for underprivileged children. About 82 cents of every dollar raised is used to support those services in nearly 9,000 communities nationwide. For more information, please visit salvationarmycincinnati.org.

About Duke Energy

Duke Energy Ohio/Kentucky's operations provide electric service to about 850,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in a 3,000-square-mile service area and natural gas service to approximately 529,000 customers.

The Duke Energy News Center serves as a multimedia resource for journalists and features news releases, helpful links, photos and videos. Hosted by Duke Energy, illumination is an online destination for stories about remarkable people, innovations, and community and environmental topics. It also offers glimpses into the past and insights into the future of energy.

Follow Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK) on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Duke Energy Contact: Sally Thelen

Office: 513.287.2432 | 24-Hour: 800.559.3853

The Salvation Army Contact: Julie Budden

Office: 513.704.4244

SOURCE Duke Energy

Related Links

http://www.duke-energy.com


BOSTON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Eaton Vance Corp. (NYSE: EV) (Eaton Vance) announced today that Chief Administrative Officer Jeffrey P. Beale will retire on May 1, 2018. He will be replaced by Daniel C. Cataldo, the firm's Treasurer. Mr. Cataldo will report to Thomas E. Faust Jr., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and will join the Management Committee.

Related developments include the appointment of John L. Shea, Eaton Vance's Chief Information Officer, to the Management Committee and the election of Lawrence L. Fahey, Director of Corporate Operations, as President of the Eaton Vance-sponsored U.S. Charitable Gift Trust, in which capacity he will replace Mr. Beale. Mr. Shea and Mr. Fahey will each retain their current responsibilities and will report to Mr. Cataldo. Laurie G. Hylton, Chief Financial Officer, will serve as Treasurer on an interim basis while a search for Mr. Cataldo's replacement in that role is conducted.

Mr. Beale first joined Eaton Vance in 1992 and has served as Chief Administrative Officer since 1999. In that capacity he oversees the firm's information technology, operations, mutual fund and dealer services, fund administration, human resources and facilities management.

Mr. Cataldo began his career in the investment management industry with Eaton Vance in 1984 and has served as Treasurer since 2012. Over the past 34 years, his responsibilities with the firm have included leadership of treasury, investor relations, budgeting and financial analysis, operations and internal audit functions.

"Over his more than 25 years with the Company, Jeff Beale has demonstrated outstanding commitment to our clients, staff members and business partners, and has worked tirelessly to ensure that Eaton Vance maintains an exemplary service record and corporate culture," said Mr. Faust. "We are fortunate to replace him with Dan Cataldo, one of our most accomplished senior business leaders and longtime carrier of the Company's core values. While Jeff will be greatly missed, I am confident in our ability to effect a seamless transition."

Eaton Vance (NYSE: EV) is a leading global asset manager whose history dates to 1924. With offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, Eaton Vance and its affiliates managed $432.2 billion in assets as of December 31, 2017, offering institutions and individuals a broad array of investment strategies and wealth management solutions. The Company's long record of providing exemplary service, timely innovation and attractive returns through a variety of market conditions has made Eaton Vance the investment manager of choice for many of today's most discerning investors. For more information, visit eatonvance.com.

SOURCE Eaton Vance Corp.

Related Links

http://www.eatonvance.com


VANCOUVER, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - eCobalt Solutions Inc. ("eCobalt" or "the Company") (TSX: ECS, OTCQX: ECSIF) has made significant progress in identifying strategic off-take partners for its clean cobalt concentrate. The Company has signed multiple Letters of Intent (the "LOIs") with reputable firms across different markets and cobalt supply chains. Due diligence is currently in progress as the Company works towards negotiating definitive terms in parallel with continued advancement of the Idaho Cobalt Project ("ICP").

With rapidly growing market demand, eCobalt's clean cobalt product has garnered a significant amount of interest providing further support for the Company's decision to produce a cobalt concentrate from the ICP. The ICP is the only environmentally permitted, near-term primary cobalt deposit in the United States, positioning eCobalt to capitalize on the strengthening fundamentals of the cobalt market.

"Marketing of the ICP and clean cobalt concentrate during the past few months has been successful and has culminated in the receipt of multiple proposals for off-take arrangements," stated Paul Farquharson, President and CEO of eCobalt. "This demonstrates the increasing demand for ethically-sourced cobalt in a supply deficit market. These LOIs present many options with various potential off-take partners. Our goal is to form a long-term partnership with a strong off-take partner who can provide support and flexibility, and deliver value for the ICP. Not only is this a critical component of project financing, but it is also critical for the long-term success of the project."

About eCobalt Solutions Inc.

eCobalt is a well-established Toronto Stock Exchange listed company committed to providing ethically produced, environmentally sound, battery grade cobalt products, essential for the rapidly growing rechargeable battery and renewable energy sectors, made safely, responsibly, and transparently in the United States. The Company's ICP, located in East Central Idaho, is the only environmentally permitted, primary cobalt project in the United States. It is 100% owned by the Company's wholly owned subsidiary, Formation Capital Corporation, U.S.

For more information visit www.eCobalt.com.

Cautionary Statement on Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Statements in this news release pertaining to expected financings, filings, uses of proceeds or project completion dates are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results, performance or achievement. These risks, uncertainties and factors include general business, economic, competitive, political, regulatory and social uncertainties; actual results of exploration activities and economic evaluations; fluctuations in currency exchange rates; changes in project parameters; changes in costs, including labour, infrastructure, operating and production costs; future prices of cobalt; variations of mineral grade or recovery rates; operating or technical difficulties in connection with exploration, development or mining activities, including the failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; delays in completion of exploration, development or construction activities; changes in government legislation and regulation; the ability to maintain and renew existing licenses and permits or obtain required licenses and permits in a timely manner; the ability to obtain financing on acceptable terms in a timely manner; contests over title to properties; employee relations and shortages of skilled personnel and contractors; the speculative nature of, and the risks involved in, the exploration, development and mining business.

Such projections are and will inevitably always be dependent on assumptions about future mineral prices and development costs which will be subject to fluctuation due to global and local economic and industry conditions. Further information regarding risks and uncertainties which may cause results to differ from those contained in forward-looking statements is included in filings by the Company with securities regulatory authorities and is available at www.sedar.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Although the Company has disclosed that the ICP remains the sole, near term, environmentally permitted, primary cobalt deposit in the United States and offers a unique potential for North American consumers to secure an ethically sourced, environmentally sound supply of battery grade cobalt products, there is no guarantee that the Company will attain commercial production of such cobalt products for use in the rechargeable battery sector. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that are contained herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

The statements contained in this news release in regard to eCobalt that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including eCobalt's beliefs, expectations, hopes or intentions regarding the future. All forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and are based on information available to eCobalt as of such date. It is important to note that actual outcome and the actual results could differ from those in such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include risks and uncertainties such as technological, legislative, corporate, commodity price and marketplace changes.

SOURCE eCobalt Solutions Inc.

Related Links

http://www.ecobalt.com/


DENVER, CO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Energy Fuels Inc. (NYSE American: UUUU; TSX: EFR) ("Energy Fuels") and Ur-Energy Inc. (NYSE American: URG; TSX: URE) ("Ur-Energy") today jointly submitted a Petition to the U.S. Department of Commerce ("DOC") for Relief Under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (as amended) from Imports of Uranium Products that Threaten National Security (the "Petition").

Imports of uranium from state-owned and state-subsidized enterprises in Russia , Kazakhstan , and Uzbekistan now fulfill nearly 40% of U.S. demand, while domestic production fulfills less than 5%.

, , and now fulfill nearly 40% of U.S. demand, while domestic production fulfills less than 5%. Increasing levels of nuclear fuel are expected to be imported from Russia and China in the coming years, which will compete directly with U.S. uranium production.

and in the coming years, which will compete directly with U.S. uranium production. In 2017, U.S. uranium production fell to near historic lows due in large part to uranium and nuclear fuel imported from state-subsidized foreign entities; 2018 domestic production is likely to be even lower.

A healthy uranium mining industry is vital to U.S. national security, because it supplies fuel for nuclear power plants that are a key component of the nation's critical energy infrastructure and essential defense needs.

Ur-Energy and Energy Fuels, both headquartered in Denver, Colorado , are the two main U.S. uranium producers, together supplying more than half of all U.S. uranium in 2017.

, are the two main U.S. uranium producers, together supplying more than half of all U.S. uranium in 2017. Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy have filed a Section 232 Petition requesting (1) the Department of Commerce to investigate the effects of uranium imports on U.S. national security and (2) the President to use his authority to adjust imports to ensure the long-term viability of the U.S. uranium mining industry.

Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy have proposed sensible remedies that will support a viable domestic uranium mining industry with a negligible impact on U.S. nuclear utilities

Uranium is primarily used as the fuel for non-emitting, zero-carbon nuclear energy, but also plays a key role in national defense. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, nuclear energy provides about 20% of all electricity, and nearly 60% of the carbon-free electricity, generated in the U.S. Uranium is also the backbone of the U.S. nuclear deterrent and fuels ships and submarines in the U.S. Navy. Despite uranium's critical role in supporting clean electricity and national defense, imports of cheap, foreign state-subsidized uranium have swelled in recent years to the point that domestic suppliers currently provide less than 5% of our nation's demand. As recently as 1980, U.S. producers supplied nearly 100% of our domestic uranium needs, and in 1989 the DOC initiated a Section 232 investigation at the request of the U.S. Department of Energy ("DOE") because of concerns that uranium imports exceeded 37.5% at that time. The problem is far worse now.

In 2016, the combined uranium imports from three geopolitically and commercially linked countries  Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan  fulfilled nearly 40% of U.S. requirements. While the U.S. does not import significant quantities of uranium from China at this time, China has significantly grown their state-owned nuclear enterprises and announced that they intend to penetrate the U.S. nuclear market with nuclear fuel that will compete directly with U.S. uranium miners. Further, the approaching expiration of the Russian Suspension Agreement will remove existing limits on Russian uranium imports. This will create additional pressure on U.S. uranium producers, as Russia has announced plans to increase its U.S. market share after that agreement expires in 2020.

Today's extreme dependence is not a matter of foreign competition legitimately underpricing domestic production. It is the result of certain foreign state-subsidy policies that undermine U.S. companies who could otherwise compete fairly on a global basis.

The Petition filed today is a response to this threat to U.S. energy and national security. The Petitioners urge Commerce Secretary Ross and President Trump to act decisively to help restore the long-term viability of the U.S. uranium mining industry. Without a viable nuclear fuel cycle, the commercial and nuclear capabilities of the U.S. will be diminished, and the nation is likely to become 100% dependent on foreign parties that compete with the U.S. for geopolitical influence and commercial advantage to fuel a majority of our clean, baseload electricity. Further, international treaties require that the uranium necessary for defense programs be sourced from the U.S. Unless steps are taken now to foster a healthy domestic uranium mining industry, the defense stockpiles currently held by the DOE will be depleted, and it is unlikely that domestic producers will have sufficient capabilities to meet our defense needs in the future.

Legal Basis and Process

The Petition was filed by Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy pursuant to the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, as amended (the "Act"), and 15 C.F.R.  705.5. The Act was promulgated by Congress to protect essential national security industries whose survival is threatened by imports. As such, the Act authorizes the Secretary of Commerce (the "Secretary") to conduct investigations to evaluate the effects of imports of any item on the national security of the U.S. In the Petition, Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy describe in detail how the loss of a viable U.S. uranium mining industry would have a significant detrimental impact on the national, energy, and economic security of the U.S. and the ability of the country to sustain an independent nuclear fuel cycle.

Once the DOC initiates an investigation, the Secretary has 270 days to prepare a report to the President. Following receipt of the Secretary's report, the President then has 90 days to act on the Secretary's recommendations, and if necessary take action to "adjust the imports of an article and its derivatives" and/or pursue other lawful non-trade related actions necessary to address the threat.

Benefits of Trade Remedies

The Petition seeks remedies which will set a quota to limit imports of uranium into the U.S., effectively reserving 25% of the U.S. nuclear market for U.S. uranium production. Additionally, the Petition suggests implementation of a requirement for U.S. federal utilities and agencies to buy U.S. uranium in accordance with the President's Buy American Policy. These remedies are expected to result in U.S. utilities purchasing approximately 12 million pounds of uranium per year from U.S. production, based on recent data. This would be expected to create a healthy U.S. uranium mining industry, bolster national defense, and improve supply diversification for U.S. utilities and their customers. Greater diversification will lessen the exposure of the U.S. government, U.S. utilities and their customers to the policies of nations like Russia, Kazakhstan, and China. U.S. utilities and their customers will also receive greater protection from supply shocks, price increases, and other geopolitically motivated actions of foreign state-controlled uranium producers. Likewise, a strong domestic uranium mining industry will be able to reliably supply the required domestic uranium that is critical to our national defense programs. The U.S. government will provide support to a vital national security industry, while maintaining a high degree of competition that encourages innovation and lower prices. These remedies will reduce dependence on imports that fuel clean energy, and support reductions in air pollution and carbon emissions.

U.S. uranium producers will continue to compete with global uranium producers, but on a more level playing field. U.S. production will come from existing U.S. producers, from other U.S. producers that are on standby as a result of low uranium prices, and from new U.S. producers. Pricing for U.S. uranium would be expected to increase through domestic competition to levels more consistent with un-subsidized global costs of uranium production, but not to a level that will have a significant impact on the bottom lines of U.S. utilities or the rates their customers pay. An econometric model included in the Petition demonstrates that the average price impact to consumers will be negligible.

Additional information regarding the trade action, including the full text of the Section 232 Petition, can be found on the companies' respective websites shown below. There can be no certainty of the outcome of the investigation or the recommendation of the Secretary, and therefore the outcome of this process is uncertain.

About Energy Fuels: Energy Fuels is a leading integrated U.S. uranium mining company, supplying U 3 O 8 to major nuclear utilities. Its corporate offices are in Denver, Colorado, and all of its assets and employees are in the western United States. Energy Fuels holds three of America's key uranium production centers, the White Mesa Mill in Utah, the Nichols Ranch Processing Facility in Wyoming, and the Alta Mesa Project in Texas. The White Mesa Mill is the only conventional uranium mill operating in the U.S. today and has a licensed capacity of over 8 million pounds of U 3 O 8 per year. The Nichols Ranch Processing Facility is an in-situ recovery production center with a licensed capacity of 2 million pounds of U 3 O 8 per year. Alta Mesa is an in-situ recovery production center with a licensed capacity of 1.5 million pounds of U 3 O 8 per year, which is currently on care and maintenance due to low uranium prices. Energy Fuels also has the largest uranium resource portfolio in the U.S. among producers, and uranium mining projects located in a number of Western U.S. states, including one producing in-situ recovery project, mines on standby, and mineral properties in various stages of permitting and development. Energy Fuels also produces vanadium as a co-product of its uranium production from certain of its mines on the Colorado Plateau, as market conditions warrant. The primary trading market for Energy Fuels' common shares is the NYSE American under the trading symbol "UUUU", and the Company's common shares are also listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the trading symbol "EFR". Energy Fuels' website is www.energyfuels.com.

About Ur-Energy: Ur-Energy is a U.S. uranium mining company with corporate and operations offices in Denver, Colorado and Casper, Wyoming. Ur-Energy operates the Lost Creek in-situ recovery uranium facility in south-central Wyoming. Ur-Energy has produced, packaged and shipped more than two million pounds from Lost Creek since the commencement of operations. Applications are under review by various agencies to incorporate Ur-Energy's LC East project area into the Lost Creek permits, and the company has begun to submit applications for permits and licenses to construct and operate its Shirley Basin Project. Ur-Energy is engaged in uranium mining, recovery and processing activities in the United States, including the acquisition, exploration, development and operation of uranium mineral properties. The primary trading market for Ur-Energy's common shares is the NYSE American under the trading symbol "URG;" Ur-Energy's common shares also trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the trading symbol "URE." Ur-Energy's website is www.ur-energy.com .

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: Certain information contained in this news release, including any information relating to: the expected increases in foreign state-subsidized imports of uranium in coming years; the expected further negative impacts of such imports on U.S. uranium production and national security, including the depletion of stockpiles held by the Department of Energy; the potential of the U.S. to be unable to sustain an independent nuclear fuel cycle and to become 100% dependent on foreign parties; the outcome of the Department of Commerce Section 232 investigation, including whether or not the Secretary of Commerce will make a recommendation to the President and the nature of the recommendation; whether or not the President will act on the recommendation and, if so, the nature of the action and remedy; the expected benefits of the proposed remedies, including: the expected impacts on U.S. production and the U.S. uranium mining industry, the expected impacts on purchases of U.S. production by U.S. utilities, the expected impacts on supply diversification and the expected benefits of such diversification on domestic utilities and national defense, the expected ability of the U.S. uranium mining industry to reliably supply the required domestic uranium production, the expected impact of the proposed remedy on improved competition, innovation and lower prices, and the reduction of dependence on imports; the expected impact on pricing for U.S. uranium production and the negligible price impact on electricity rates paid by consumers; and any other statements regarding Energy Fuels' or Ur-Energy's future expectations, beliefs, goals or prospects; constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively, "forward-looking statements"). All statements in this news release that are not statements of historical fact (including statements containing the words "expects", "does not expect", "plans", "anticipates", "does not anticipate", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential", "scheduled", "forecast", "budget" and similar expressions) should be considered forward-looking statements. All such forward-looking statements are subject to important risk factors and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Energy Fuels' and Ur-Energy's ability to control or predict. A number of important factors could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those indicated or implied by such forward-looking statements, including without limitation factors relating to: the expected increases in foreign state-subsidized imports of uranium in coming years; the expected further negative impacts of such imports on U.S. uranium production and national security, including the depletion of stockpiles held by the Department of Energy; the outcome of the Department of Commerce Section 232 investigation, including whether or not the Secretary of Commerce will make a recommendation to the President and the nature of the recommendation; whether or not the President will act on the recommendation and, if so, the nature of the action and remedy; the expected benefits of the proposed remedies; the expected impact on pricing for U.S. uranium production and the negligible price impact on electricity rates paid by consumers; and other risk factors as described in Energy Fuels' and Ur-Energy's most recent annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly financial reports. Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy assume no obligation to update the information in this communication, except as otherwise required by law. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties is contained in Energy Fuels' and Ur-Energy's filings with the various securities commissions which are available online at www.sec.gov and www.sedar.com. Forward-looking statements are provided for the purpose of providing information about the current expectations, beliefs and plans of the management of Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy relating to the future. Readers are cautioned that such statements may not be appropriate for other purposes. Readers are also cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, that speak only as of the date hereof.

SOURCE Energy Fuels Inc.

Related Links

http://www.energyfuels.com


NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Erica Vladimer, a former staff member of New York state senator Jeffrey D. Klein, has, through her attorney Jim Walden, of Walden Macht & Haran LLP, issued the following statement:

"Last week, I ended my silence regarding Senator Klein's misconduct of April 1, 2015, when he abused his position and forced himself on me during my tenure as a junior policy analyst in his office.

Senator Klein's response to my statement employs all-too-familiar gaslighting methods and serves as another reminder of what compels victims of abuse to remain silent, particularly when abuse comes from men in positions of high authority.

It is disappointing, but not surprising, that Senator Klein hired his own lawyer to 'investigate,' but his lawyers have yet to interview me, despite hastily publicizing the results of their shallow inquiry. Senator Klein and his staff have also started an aggressive backchannel campaign, contacting my friends and associates, in an attempt to disparage me and manipulate public perception.

Despite an evolving landscape  where victims of workplace harassment are being encouraged to come forward about their experiences  the system continues to fail the vulnerable and protect predators. I hope the Senate will investigate thoroughly and hold Senator Klein to account. I understand Senator Klein, too, has called for an 'independent investigation' by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE). I would gladly cooperate, because I am telling the truth. I hope this is the next important step to introducing legislation to protect people against misconduct both in government and beyond.

For all the women standing in the shadows, wrestling with the same sad choices to keep quiet or speak up, I empathize with you. I lived with the shame of it for too long. That shame ends now. I hope JCOPE and the State Senate work together to help me secure justice and closure.

I have no intention of suing Senator Klein for his actions, although he richly deserves it. But, given his aggressive actions thus far, I too have hired counsel to protect my rights as I speak out  and to make sure, if and when there is an investigation, it will not be a white wash, like the one hastily conducted by Senator Klein and backed immediately by his colleagues in the IDC. I, too, served the IDC, yet it shamefully adopted his narrative without investigation or reflection."

SOURCE Walden Macht & Haran LLP

Related Links

http://wmhlaw.com


SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Expanding and increasing funding for school choice programs, creating a stronger classroom environment for digital learning, and ensuring every child is safe at school are among the recommendations in a new "American Education Agenda" released today by the Pacific Research Institute.

Click here to download a copy of the "American Education Agenda"

"A new Administration in Washington and a new California governor on the horizon presents a good opportunity to see what areas of American education need the greatest reform," said PRI's Lance Izumi, the report's author. "The 'American Education Agenda' offers policymakers concrete reforms they can adopt today to ensure every student learns in a safe and nurturing environment, and is well-prepared to meet the changing demands of the 21st century workforce."

At the federal level, Izumi recommends that U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos restructure the U.S. Department of Education to reduce the number of programs for which it is responsible, and the appointment of an independent task force to review the effectiveness of federal education programs.

Among the state and local recommendations in the "American Education Agenda":

Repealing the controversial Common Core education standards and replacing them with rigorous, high-quality, pre-Common Core standards as models for new standards

Implementing private school choice programs such as state education savings accounts, and repealing restrictive laws that impede the expansion of school choice

Reforming state teacher layoff policies so they are based on teacher quality rather than seniority

Ensuring safe campus learning environments by repealing anti-suspension laws that endanger student safety and adopting policies that guarantee significant consequences for violence and criminal activity by students

Lance Izumi is the Koret Senior Fellow in Education Studies and the Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of numerous books, including his most recent, The Corrupt Classroom. He has authored many studies and articles on education policy issues, and is a regular opinion contributor to Education Week. In 2016-17, Lance served on President Trump's transition Agency Action Team for education policy.

The Pacific Research Institute (www.pacificresearch.org) champions freedom, opportunity, and personal responsibility by advancing free-market policy ideas. Follow PRI on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

CONTACT:

Madeline Auerbach

(202) 471-4228 ext. 101

[email protected]

SOURCE Pacific Research Institute

Related Links

http://www.pacificresearch.org


NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Extreme Reach, the cloud technology platform for TV and video ad workflow and Talent & Rights management, today announced that Matt Timothy has been named Chief Revenue Officer. Matt has been consulting with the company since June in a business development role during which time his strategic thinking, industry knowledge and management skills earned him widespread support. With decades of experience in digital and traditional media, he is now a member of the executive team and responsible for leading the entire sales operation.

Matt helped launch Vindico, the first MRC accredited video ad server, which was acquired by Specific Media (now Viant) two years later. He led the company for six years in all, growing it to a market leader with over 40% share of the video market. Earlier in his career, Matt spent many years at CBS, where he was the network's first interactive sales hire and ultimately rose to the role of VP, General Manager of both CBS.com and CBSNews.com. He went on to serve as Senior Vice President of Advanced Advertising at National Cable Communications, where he oversaw the monetization of interactive and addressable capabilities for the set top box for multiple companies including Comcast, Time Warner, Cox and others. Most recently he served as CMO for Sorenson Media, the industry leader in leveraging data and targeting capabilities of Smart TVs.

"Matt's deep experience in video and TV advertising coupled with his passion for driving success for brand and agency clients, make him an excellent new addition to our executive team," said Tim Conley, President of Extreme Reach. "He has honed his management skills based on experience in corporate sales as well as several years as an entrepreneur -- a combination well suited for the fast-moving, innovative culture of Extreme Reach."

"I've long been impressed with Extreme Reach's commitment to transforming and simplifying video advertising," said Matt. "I couldn't be happier to join this team and help an even greater number of marketers and agencies successfully execute their cross screen campaigns with greater efficiency in this exciting and ever-changing industry."

Matt is based in the company's New York City office.

About Extreme Reach

Extreme Reach offers the only enterprise technology designed distinctly to bring together the TV and video ad workflow and all aspects of Talent & Rights management in a single, easy-to-use cloud platform. One platform and one process make brand advertising easier, and analytics more insightful, with the assurance of rights compliance wherever ads play. Founded in 2008, Extreme Reach proudly serves the world's biggest brands, agencies, post-production houses, all media destinations, and the talent community, altogether simplifying the process for every team that touches an ad campaign from start to finish. Headquartered in Needham, MA, Extreme Reach has offices in 19 cities worldwide.

Press Contact

Tess VandenDolder

Clarity PR for Extreme Reach

[email protected]

646.934.6924

SOURCE Extreme Reach

Related Links

http://extremereach.com


NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Parents of adopted children can now consult with a nationally recognized expert in adoption medicine at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM). The new Adoption Program is led by Elaine Schulte, M.D., M.P.H. The goal of the program is to provide pre-adoption consultation services to families, as well as post-adoption evaluation and ongoing medical care to adopted children. Domestically adopted newborns, children adopted from foster care, and internationally adopted children are all included.

Approximately 120,000 children are adopted each year in the United States. The Adoption Program at CHAM supports families at every stage of the process. Dr. Schulte provides families with general information about adoption and can also review a prospective child's medical records. In addition, newly adopted children receive a comprehensive medical exam to screen for a variety of health issues and previously undiagnosed conditions.

Dr. Schulte, a professor of Pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is a board-certified general pediatrician well known for developing comprehensive adoption medicine programs at leading institutions around the country, including the Cleveland Clinic. She has two daughters adopted from China, so she has both professional and personal expertise on the unique health needs of adopted children.

"Having been in this field for decades and provided care for thousands of adopted children, I know how to prepare parents for the challenges their child may experience and advise on the best treatment plan for each individual child," said Dr. Schulte, who is an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Foster Care, Adoption and Kinship Care. "It requires a special set of skills and understanding, because we know that being adopted is an integral part of who a person is, not just part of their history," said Dr. Schulte.

Nutritional and behavioral health needs are among the most common concerns for adopted children and their families. Many also have learning and attention challenges. Dr. Schulte is committed to ongoing support for children and their families and will connect them to sub-specialty care if needed.

"Dr. Schulte is a leader in the field of adoption medicine," said Judy Aschner, M.D., physician-in-chief, CHAM, and Michael I. Cohen, M.D., university chair and professor of pediatrics, Einstein. "She has created policy and clinical guidelines, served on national committees and created education programs for pediatricians and adoption agencies. There is a huge need for her expertise in New York, and our patients and families will truly benefit from her knowledge and care."

The Adoption Program is located at the CHAM Hartsdale practice at 141 South Central Avenue, Suite 300. For more information contact: 855-5-ADOPTMD.

About Montefiore Health System

Montefiore Health System is one of New York's premier academic health systems and is a recognized leader in providing exceptional quality and personalized, accountable care to approximately three million people in communities across the Bronx, Westchester and the Hudson Valley. It is comprised of 11 hospitals, including the Children's Hospital at Montefiore, Burke Rehabilitation Hospital and close to 200 outpatient care sites. The advanced clinical and translational research at its medical school, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, directly informs patient care and improves outcomes. From the Montefiore-Einstein Centers of Excellence in cancer, cardiology and vascular care, pediatrics, and transplantation, to its preeminent school-based health program, Montefiore is a fully integrated healthcare delivery system providing coordinated, comprehensive care to patients and their families. For more information please visit www.montefiore.org. Follow us on Twitter and view us on Facebook and YouTube.

SOURCE Montefiore Health System

Related Links

http://www.montefiore.org


HOBOKEN, N.J., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Flatbread Grill, the fast casual Mediterranean bakery and grill founded by the Esendemir Sisters in 2007, is now available as a franchise.

Flatbread Grill, headquartered in the sisters' hometown of Hoboken, NJ, will avail its franchise model to qualified operators interested in single or multi-location opportunities and regional territories all over the world.

The Esendemir Sisters, Arzu, Fusun, and Gonca are the first Turkish-American women to start and expand a global fast casual concept Flatbread Grill was founded in 2007 in Upper Montclair, NJ and currently operates a store in Hoboken, NJ with another one in Jersey City

"My sisters and I built this very unique concept with passion and dedication," says Arzu Esendemir, co-founder and CEO of Flatbread Grill, who has spent the past decade developing the business model with her two sisters.

"We built our concept out of a desire to help our sick parents. We had no idea it would take off the way it did, drawing customers from across all demographics," she adds.

The sisters have fielded multiple franchise requests over the years for their concept. The strong brand identity, their worldwide social media following, their inspiring story about growing up in poverty, and proprietary recipes have drawn the attention of people from all walks of life.

Fusun, Gonca, and Arzu Esendemir, who become the first Turkish-American women in the world to start and expand a fast casual restaurant concept, built Flatbread Grill entirely on their own. They developed the menu, brand identity, oversaw the buildout of their company stores, directed the operations, and did all of their marketing in-house.

"We wanted to take our time in expanding because we were truly building this business from nothing," says Arzu Esendemir, who oversees business operations for the brand. "My sisters and I wanted to be absolutely certain that our business model was flawless before we invited other people along for the ride."

The Esendemir Sisters bring not only their immense restaurant expertise to the franchise system, but they also bring their extreme resourcefulness. When the sisters opened their first Flatbread Grill location back in 2008, they had no money to market the brand. Customers sought them out from day one and they landed an extraordinary review in the New York Times after being open for two months.

"A big part of our appeal was the love that went into building the concept," says Gonca Esendemir, who oversees marketing for the brand.

Flatbread Grill is the only fast casual Mediterranean restaurant concept that not only serves a proprietary bread, but it is the only concept founded and operated by Turkish-American women.

Fusun adds, "Our family values and our bond as sisters are two of the factors that contributed to our success. We always had each other's backs and that's one of the reasons we have been able to forge forward in this industry."

The sisters will be very actively involved in supporting the buildout and operations of franchised locations.

More Franchise Info: http://www.franchiseflatbread.com or email [email protected] for an e-brochure

Media contact:

Gonca Esendemir

[email protected]

551-689-9748

SOURCE Flatbread Grill
DENVER, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The construction industry continues to boom in Colorado, providing a unique opportunity for industry employers who need trained laborers and individuals looking for meaningful, well-paying jobs. The Skilled Trades Education Program (STEP) meets the needs of both groups by offering free training in four high-demand construction trades.

"Construction in Colorado is booming, and the STEP program positions these graduates for a bright future," said Krystin Garcia, STEP coordinator. "Some are young and just starting out, and some are looking for a career change that offers better benefits and job security. Through STEP, they all get the training they need for union-based jobs that will be in demand for a long time."

For four weeks, STEP students attend free day or night classes in the plumbing, HVAC/sheet metal, electrical or pipe fitting trades. After the four-week session, graduates can apply for a paid apprenticeship in their chosen field, and after three to five years of on-the-job training will attain licensed journeyman status with 35 hours of college credit. These union-based jobs typically include health insurance, pensions and many other benefits.

The program is offered through a partnership between Servicios de La Raza, a Denver-based nonprofit working to break the cycle of poverty, and MEP (Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing) Alliance.

The classes are open to adult Coloradans and those who will turn 18 before May 2018. As they train, STEP students learn about the history of their fields as well as energy efficiency standards, blueprint reading, and other industry-leading practices that prepare them for a future in the construction industry. They receive OSHA, First Aid and CPR certifications as well.

For more information on STEP, visit stepcolorado.org.

STEP (Skilled Trades Education Program) is a free training administered through Servicios de La Raza, a Latino-based metro Denver nonprofit that advocates for culturally responsive human services. Servicios assists the low-income population to break the cycle of poverty. More than 18,000 individuals have been served through Servicios' work with schools, churches, and community groups in Denver's Spanish-speaking community. For more information about Servicios, visit serviciosdelaraza.org.

Contact:

Krystin Garcia

STEP Coordinator

303.458.5851

[email protected]

SOURCE Servicios de La Raza
BETHESDA, Md., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Friends of Yemin Orde will honor acclaimed visionary educator, Chaim Peri, with its Tikkun Ha'Lev Award at an international gala, May 8, 2018, at the Mandarin Oriental, New York City. The private event will feature an acoustic concert by Jewish American vocalist, Matisyahu. At the gala, Chaim Peri will be honored for his lifetime of devotion and advocacy on behalf of Israel's at-risk and immigrant youth. Tikkun Ha'Lev means mending the heart in Hebrew and is part of the Village Way methodology developed by Chaim when he served as Director of Yemin Orde Youth Village for 30 years. Visit www.yeminordegala.org.

Friends of Yemin Orde will honor acclaimed Israeli visionary educator, Chaim Peri, at an international gala on May 8, 2018, in New York City, featuring an acoustic concert by vocalist, Matisyahu. Dr. Peri will receive the Tikkun Ha'Lev Award for his lifetime of devotion and advocacy on behalf of Israel's at-risk and immigrant youth. Tikkun Ha'Lev is Hebrew for "mending the heart", an important healing element for fragile children everywhere.

Today, Chaim Peri serves as Founder, Village Way Educational Initiatives (VWEI), as well as Director-Emeritus, of Yemin Orde Youth Village, located in northern Israel. The Village provides a home, school and safe haven to 430 fragile immigrant youth from around the world. VWEI expands the Village Way methodology to 36 other youth villages and high schools in Israel.

Matisyahu's most recent album, Undercurrent, is the result of a lifelong musical journey inward and speaks to listeners on a personal level. He said: "All of my songs are influenced and inspired by the teachings that inspire me. I want my music to have meaning, to be able to touch people and make them think."

Gala Co-Chairs Jeffrey and Kimberly Hirschfeld said Matisyahu's international popularity and his unique acoustic styling will provide for an intimate and one-of-a-kind performance.

"Matisyahu's acoustic concerts are both moving and spiritual. His performance will be appreciated and enjoyed by all generations of guests at our gala," Jeffrey Hirschfeld said.

The Hirschfelds are principals at Hirschfeld Properties LLC and Hirschfeld Management, Inc. (HMI), a diversified real estate development company in New York City. Jeffrey Hirschfeld has

served on the Friends of Yemin Orde Board of Directors since 2011 and, along with his wife, Kimberly, actively advocates on behalf of Yemin Orde.

"Chaim Peri is not only a close friend, but also one of our personal heroes," said Jeffrey Hirschfeld. "It will be a special evening that will inspire you and remind you that without our children and those who nurture, guide and protect them, the world cannot and would not exist."

CONTACT: Barbara Sherbill, 202-237-0286, [email protected]

SOURCE Friends of Yemin Orde

Related Links

https://www.yeminorde.org


WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Fully Promoted, a branded products and marketing consulting company, is pleased to announce impressive growth in 2017, including the opening of 28 new stores, taking its total to more than 310 locations. Fully Promoted began as EmbroidMe in the year 2000, and is part of the United Franchise Group (UFG) family of companies, comprised of more than 1,400 franchise locations in over 80 countries. In 2018, 56 new store locations are planned, as demand for the brand's products and services are rapidly growing.

Fully Promoted helps local businesses get new customers. Each highly-trained marketing expert works with businesses to help them build their names, either through traditional promotional products or branded apparel, or through a wide range of marketing services that include online marketing campaigns, printed marketing materials, lead generation services, social media programs, awards, gifts, and other products. Consistently ranking among Entrepreneur magazine's Top Franchises to Own, in 2017, the brand was included in Entrepreneur's "Franchise 500" and "Best for Vets" lists.

"We're incredibly pleased with the growth the brand is experiencing," said Joe Loch, Fully Promoted Brand President. "There is a huge demand for the branded products and custom marketing services Fully Promoted provides, and we are exploding with growth opportunities. We expect a very exciting and productive 2018."

Each Fully Promoted store is individually owned and operated by highly trained experts who know the local community and how to promote brand messaging in that city or town. Turnkey franchise opportunities are available, which include a full complement of franchisee training from the UFG training centers in Florida. To learn more, visit www.FullyPromotedFranchise.com.

About Fully Promoted

The new Fully Promoted has more than 350 Resource Centers throughout the United States, Australia, and in 12 other countries. The company plans to open 56 new resource centers throughout the country by the end of 2018. For more information, visit www.FullyPromotedFranchise.com.

About UFG

Led by CEO Ray Titus, United Franchise Group is home to a variety of internationally recognized brands including Signarama, Fully Promoted, Experimac, Jon Smith Subs, Venture X, SuperGreen Solutions, Transworld Business Advisors and Paramount Tax & Accounting CPAs. With over three decades in the franchising industry and more than 1400 franchisees throughout the world, United Franchise Group offers unprecedented leadership and solid business opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Media Contact:

Ashley Soto

305-631-2283 x1005

[email protected]

SOURCE Fully Promoted

Related Links

http://www.FullyPromotedFranchise.com


The GA4 is a brand new compact sedan independently developed by GAC Motor for the A-class sedan market. Its overall design displays a grand and fashionable vision with ample interior space and excellent driving comfort. The introduction of GA4 further enriches GAC Motor's product matrix, which covers A-level to C-level sedan market. The company is bringing this new sedan to market on January 18 in Shanghai.

GAC Motor unveiled its first compact sport-utility new energy concept vehicle, the Enverge, to demonstrate its innovative leadership in core environmental technologies. The Enverge is GAC Motor's brand-new exploration in the field of electric crossover vehicles. Featuring many technological achievements, Enverge demonstrates the innovative allure of NEVs and creates a new driving experience for energetic young drivers.

GAC Motor's high-end strategic models, GA8, GS8, and GM8 are also at 2018 NAIAS to demonstrate the company's product strength together with other signature models, including GS3, GS4, GS7, and GA6. With the release of GA8, GS8, and GM8, GAC Motor has covered the high-end sedan, SUV and minivan market with a complete layout of luxury C-Class vehicles, which is a major milestone for GAC Motor as the company begins to transition to a new era of Chinese-led global products.

GAC Motor aspires to take an active part in integrating China into the tide of the global auto industry. GAC Motor is well prepared to embrace the challenges of entering the mature US market by offering leading quality, technology, and design. The company has been the highest-ranking Chinese brand in the Asia Pacific's China Initial Quality Study (IQS) for five consecutive years, showcasing the significant achievements of Chinese brands in terms of quality improvement.

In 2017, GAC Motor established its North American R&D center in Silicon Valley and hosted job fairs in Silicon Valley, Detroit and Boston. Since January this year, GAC Motor has started another round of recruitment programs in America to attract emerging talent in diverse fields.

GAC Motor is also expanding its efforts to raise brand awareness and increase its influence. Later this year, GAC Motor will announce a new branding strategy to the world, as well as the new English brand name to better serve our consumers across countries. GAC Motor North America Sales Company is set to be established in 2018. The company will, for the first time ever, attend the annual convention of the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) in Las Vegas this March, further expanding its distribution network and dealership resources.

It is also noteworthy that GAC Motor has attached great significance to CSR beside keeping fast growth. The company has continuously engaged in major public welfare activities with a focus on global environmental protection, including building China's first-ever "Three-River Source National Park" with WWF.

"We look forward to the increasing attention and support worldwide," added Yu Jun. "In our pursuit of the North American market, GAC Motor stands ready to share our high-quality products and work with all of you to create a better life of mobility."

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 ranks 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 had a production and sales volume of 500,000 vehicles in 2017 and aims to reach 1,000,000 vehicles by 2020.With sales and services networks established in 14 countries supported by top global suppliers, GAC Motor is to enter US market in 2019.

For more information, visit:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GACMotor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gac_motor

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/gac_motor

Media Contact:

Sukie Wong

+86-186-8058-2829

[email protected]

SOURCE GAC Motor
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Students in grades 7-12: pioneer research on the International Space Station (ISS) by designing DNA experiments for space! Genes in SpaceTM, a competition that seeks to inspire the next generation of space scientists, opened a call for entries today.

Genes in SpaceTM challenges students to design original DNA experiments that address real-life challenges and opportunities of space exploration. Proposals are submitted by teams of one to four students and must use the ISS as a testbed for space exploration. The contest is a collaboration between miniPCRTM and Boeing with generous support from CASIS, Math for America, and New England Biolabs, Inc. Genes in SpaceTM is free, and does not require equipment.

The winning experiment is conducted in space, and samples are returned to Earth for winners to analyze! Submission deadline is April 20th, 2018.

25 teams win a miniPCR DNA Discovery System for their educational institutions. Five Finalist teams additionally receive mentoring from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists and attend the 2018 ISS R&D Conference, where they present their ideas to a panel of judges. The winning team attends Space Biology Camp and watches their experiment launch into space!

"We've seen some outstanding experiments performed through this program that are helping decipher fundamental elements of health in space," said Boeing's Scott Copeland, co-founder of the Genes in Space program. "Inspiration was at the center of this effort so it's very rewarding to see how many students are getting excited about these opportunities."

"This competition gives students access to an innovative science research program and provides teachers with exciting opportunities to engage students in science and mathematics, often mentoring them throughout the application process," said John Ewing, MA President.

Anna-Sophia Boguraev from Bedford, New York won the first Genes in Space competition in 2015. Her experiment was the first PCR experiment conducted in space and was recently published in the Nature Partner Journal npj Microgravity. A total of five students have won the contest. Julian Rubinfien (2016) and Alia Al Mansoori (UAE) have conducted experiments aboard ISS. The two winners of the 2017 contest, Elizabeth Reizis and Sophia Chen, are scheduled to launch their experiments to space in March.

Learn more: www.genesinspace.org

Media contacts:

miniPCR: Emily Gleason, [email protected], 781-990-8727

Boeing: Steven Siceloff, [email protected], 281-226-4872

SOURCE Genes in Space

Related Links

http://www.genesinspace.org


RICHMOND, Va., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Genworth Mortgage Insurance ("Genworth"), an operating segment of Genworth Financial, Inc. (NYSE: GNW), today announced the appointment of Steve Hitchings to HFA Director. Steve is a 32-year veteran of GE/Genworth Mortgage Insurance, most recently serving as an Account Development Manager, where for the past five years he has supported Genworth's market-leading Housing Finance Authority (HFA) segment.

In his new role, Hitchings will work directly with Genworth's sales team to continue delivering on the company's already strong HFA value proposition and support the company's growth initiatives. This includes aligning HFA, customer and investor needs to create differentiated and unique borrower solutions, helping more people achieve the dream of homeownership.

"Over the years Steve has brought an unparalleled mix of experience and expertise to our HFA segment, and we're thrilled to have him assume control as we continue growing the platform," said John Clifford, Senior Vice President of Commercial Operations, Genworth Mortgage Insurance. "His deep HFA and business acumen, stellar sales collaboration, exceptional customer focus and robust problem-solving skills make him uniquely qualified to deliver the value and service that our customers have come to expect from us."

Since it first began insuring HFA loans nearly forty years ago, Genworth Mortgage Insurance has paid claims on more than 6,000 HFA loans, and in the last two decades alone has insured over 80,000 HFA loans. Genworth's long-standing HFA Advisory Board, which works to ensure the company is attuned to the unique needs of the segment, illustrates the company's commitment to the HFA space and deep integration with each of its state-level partners. The company also has an array of dedicated HFA experts, including underwriters, risk managers, and industry trainers and consultants.

"We have a long, mutually beneficial history with Genworth," said Tim Hsu, CalHFA's Director of Single Family Lending. "What's made that history work is Genworth's dedication to personal relationships with their clients, and Steve is a great fit to fill the role of HFA Segment Leader. We're all looking forward to working with him to continue our great history."

Hitchings holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife.

About Genworth Financial

Genworth Financial, Inc. (NYSE: GNW) is a Fortune 500 insurance holding company committed to helping families achieve the dream of homeownership and address the financial challenges of aging through its leadership positions in mortgage insurance and long term care insurance. Headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, Genworth traces its roots back to 1871 and became a public company in 2004. For more information, visit genworth.com.

From time to time, Genworth releases important information via postings on its corporate website. Accordingly, investors and other interested parties are encouraged to enroll to receive automatic email alerts and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds regarding new postings. Enrollment information is found under the "Investors" section of genworth.com. From time to time, Genworth's publicly traded subsidiaries, Genworth MI Canada Inc. and Genworth Mortgage Insurance Australia Limited, separately release financial and other information about their operations. This information can be found at http://genworth.ca and http://www.genworth.com.au.

SOURCE Genworth Financial, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.genworth.com


GWINNETT, Ga., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In keeping with its promise to provide $100,000 in complimentary orthodontic care to deserving children in Georgia, the Georgia School of Orthodontics (GSO) has selected three youths in Gwinnett County to receive complimentary orthodontic treatment at its newly opened Duluth facility. Currently, ten individuals are receiving complimentary treatment since the school opened in August of 2016.

Smiles for Gwinnett Winners Jennifer Assamoah, Madeline Jones and Jordan Jones

"We chose three children whose stories touched our hearts and inspired us. We want to help boost their confidence by giving them the smile they have always dreamed of and deserve," said Dr. Ricky E. Harrell, Program Director at GSO. During the event, Harrell also asked them to take a pledge to brush and floss daily, which they recited through laughs.

Through Smiles for Gwinnett, GSO's program that provides the complimentary orthodontic care, the orthodontic school also donated $500 toward school supplies to each of the four Gwinnett County schools that nominated the most children. Three dental practices that nominated the most children won a $200 gift card for their practice.

The three children selected for Smiles for Gwinnett are*:

Jennifer Assamoah of Lawrenceville . An honor roll student, this fourth grader is an avid writer, school chorus singer and Peer Leader . After a recent and sudden loss of Jennifer's close family member, the family has sought counseling and free grief support camp opportunities for her. Jennifer's parents are also financially challenged. The guidance counselor who nominated her said she is a remarkable girl and very deserving of this gift.

of An honor roll student, this fourth grader is an avid writer, school chorus singer and . After a recent and sudden loss of Jennifer's close family member, the family has sought counseling and free grief support camp opportunities for her. Jennifer's parents are also financially challenged. The guidance counselor who nominated her said she is a remarkable girl and very deserving of this gift. Madeline Jones of Norcross . Thirteen-year-old Madeline is too self-conscious to smile for the camera. She also experienced recent family issues, including a family member who moved into the household after a medical emergency. Yet, she has maintained a sense of humor and enjoys helping others. Her parents are excited that GSO is giving her a winning smile to match her cheerful personality.

of . Thirteen-year-old Madeline is too self-conscious to smile for the camera. She also experienced recent family issues, including a family member who moved into the household after a medical emergency. Yet, she has maintained a sense of humor and enjoys helping others. Her parents are excited that GSO is giving her a winning smile to match her cheerful personality. Jordan Jones of Norcross . At 12 years old, Jordan is a great student who gets good grades, is a basketball star and has been Student of the Month. He has overcrowded and crooked teeth, but manages to keep smiling every day. He has asked for braces and has had several orthodontic appointments, but his family has been unable to afford them. He and his family are grateful for this gift.

* Recipient descriptions based on nomination forms

The four schools receiving $500 each are:

Camp Creek Elementary School in Lilburn

Grayson High School in Loganville

in Kanoheda Elementary School in Lawrenceville

Arcado Elementary School in Lilburn

The winning dental practices are:

Apple Tree Pediatric Dentistry in Lawrenceville

Hamilton Mill Dental Associates in Dacula

Mall of Georgia Dentistry in Buford

Now with locations in Duluth and Atlanta, GSO's mission to provide a team approach to exceptional orthodontic care using the latest technology makes the dream of a beautiful smile attainable at a value all families can afford.

Schedule a complimentary consultation today by calling 770-351-7737 or visiting www.BracesToday.com.

About Georgia School of Orthodontics

Georgia School of Orthodontics (GSO), based in Atlanta, offers an advanced specialty education program in orthodontics and dentofacial orthopedics. The 36-month residency program is structured to provide collaborative and evidence-based learning for residents while providing quality orthodontic care to patients in the school's two patient clinics in metro Atlanta. GSO's mission is to educate outstanding dentists to be proficient in the clinical specialty of orthodontics, while providing Georgians with the highest level of patient care available. GSO faculty and staff are dedicated to diversity in both education and practice. For more information about GSO, visit GSOrthodontics.org. To schedule a complimentary consultation, visit bracestoday.com or call 770.351.7737.

Media contact

Lauren Bovard

[email protected]

770-645-4545

SOURCE Georgia School of Orthodontics

Related Links

http://www.bracestoday.com


SAN ANTONIO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Globalgig announced today the launch of our Global Channel Program and the appointment of Gregg Rowe to lead the effort as Senior Vice President of Channel Sales and Strategic Alliances.

Mr. Rowe is a 27 year veteran of the Cloud, IT, Telecom, Robotics industries having a tremendous leadership track record with CenturyLink, Vonage, Lightstream, and HP. Rowe's background as an electrical engineer from the University of Illinois, experience across multiple industries, success as a sales professional and leader, and his most recent experience in channel make him a tremendous addition to the Globalgig executive team.

Ernest Cunningham CEO of Globalgig commented, "Greg is somebody who we worked with at the executive level previously supporting us as a customer. He really understands the types of our target partners." Cunningham added, "We are moving fast to establish ourselves as the go-to provider for our channel partners to help their clients with their technology migration. We are positioned with solutions and from a thought leadership perspective to take on the market globally and will beaggressive in winning new business opportunities and supporting and collaborating with our partners."

Gregg Rowe noted that "The Channel has proven to be an unrivaled asset to enterprises of all sizes as they navigate the complexities associated with securely, resiliently, and cost effectively connecting the offices, suppliers, customers, devices, data centers, cloud, and applications that are their business. I am extremely excited to be bringing Globalgig's worldwide, wireless connectivity solutions to the channel community. Whether the use case is fixed wireless backup for a multinational corporation or IoT, most enterprises will have pervasive 3G/4G connectivity needs in their networks and I can't wait to help the Channel sell it to them."

About Globalgig:

With a wireless first focus, Globalgig orchestrates hyperconnectivity for the enterprise business continuum using managed communications solutions. Globalgig provides wireless connectivity across a 200-plus country footprint and offers a full suite of communications services and products including Hosted VoIP, Mobile Device Management, Wi-Fi Hotspots, Remote Office and Backup, Technology Expense Management and IoT/M2M connectivity solutions. Globalgig is a registered brand of iGEM Communications Holdings LLC, which does business as Globalgig. Globalgig is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, with offices across the U.S., and in London and Sydney.

Media contact:

Greg Casey

[email protected]

832-952-2796

SOURCE Globalgig
Highlights:

The Crucero NI 43-101 resource estimate includes an indicated resource of 1.0 Moz gold (30,653,000 tonnes at an average grade of 1.0 g/t gold) and an inferred resource of 1.1 Moz gold (35,779,000 tonnes at an average grade of 1.0 g/t gold) at a 0.4 g/t gold cut-off ( See Tables 1 and 2 for details); and





(30,653,000 tonnes at an average grade of 1.0 g/t gold) and an (35,779,000 tonnes at an average grade of 1.0 g/t gold) at a 0.4 g/t gold cut-off ( 1 and 2 for details); and This resource estimate increases GoldMining's global measured and indicated resource to 9.5 Moz gold (12.4 Moz gold equivalent) and inferred resource to 11.7 Moz gold (14.2 Moz gold equivalent) across all of its projects resulting in a 13% increase in the indicated category and an 11% increase in the inferred category (see Table 4 for details).

VANCOUVER, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - GoldMining Inc. (the "Company" or "GoldMining") (TSX-V: GOLD; OTCQX: GLDLF) is pleased to announce the results of a National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") mineral resource estimate for its Crucero Gold Project (the "Crucero Project" or the "Project") located in the Department of Puno, southeastern Peru. The estimate includes an indicated resource of 30,653,000 tonnes grading 1.0 g/t gold (1.0 Moz) and an inferred resource of 35,779,000 tonnes grading 1.0 g/t gold (1.1 Moz) at a 0.4 g/t gold cut-off.

Amir Adnani, Chairman of GoldMining, commented: "We are pleased to announce the resource estimate for our Crucero Project, which represents another milestone in the execution of our long-term growth strategy. In 2017, we worked towards furthering this strategy by successfully completing three acquisitions  the Crucero, La Mina and Yellowknife Gold Projects. Our plan in 2018 is to continue this strategy and build upon our vision of maximizing gold leverage for our shareholders."

Garnet Dawson, CEO of GoldMining, commented: "We are pleased to report this conceptual pit constrained resource estimate for the A1 deposit, one of several targets identified by geochemistry and geophysics on the Crucero Project by previous owners. Future exploration programs will look to expand the existing resource at the A1 deposit, test several of the nearby targets and complete additional metallurgical testwork."

The Project

The Crucero Project occurs within the Puno Orogenic Belt, which is host to orogenic gold deposits and associated extensive alluvial deposits in eastern Peru and Bolivia. The Project is road accessible by paved road from Juliaca to the town of Crucero, approximately 150 km to the northeast, with the remaining 50 km to the site by gravel road. High-power electrical lines pass within 8 km of the property.

The Project is comprised of three mining and five exploration concessions with an aggregate area of 4,600 hectares. The three mining concessions are held indirectly by a subsidiary of GoldMining through a 30-year assignment from a third party running until 2038 and are subject to certain net smelter return royalties of 1 to 5%, based on monthly gold prices.

The A1 deposit, as currently defined by trenching and drilling, strikes northwest and dips vertically to steeply to the northeast. The deposit is approximately 750 m long by 100 m in width and has been traced to a vertical depth of 400 m, but most of the drilling is confined to within 250 m of surface. The deposit is open at depth and along strike to the northwest and southeast. The structurally controlled gold mineralization is associated with sulphide veins hosted within strongly deformed metasedimentary rocks.

Historic exploration programs have focused on the A1 deposit, however geophysical and geochemical surveys have identified additional targets for follow-up exploration.

Crucero Resource Estimate

GoldMining engaged Global Mineral Resource Services to prepare an independent NI 43-101 technical report for the Crucero Project, including an updated pit constrained resource estimate for the A1 deposit. The indicated and inferred resource estimates, which have an effective date of December 20, 2017, are shown in Tables 1 and 2, respectively. Assumptions used for the pit modelling are shown in Table 3. A gold cut-off grade of 0.40 g/t was utilized based on similar types of mineralization found at other near surface deposits in the world and is highlighted in the tables below.

Table 1: NI 43-101 indicated resource estimate for the A1 deposit.

Gold Cut-off Tonnage Grade Contained Metal (g/t) (Mt) Gold (g/t) Gold (Moz) 2.0 876,000 2.3 64,000 1.0 13,504,000 1.4 606,000 0.8 19,617,000 1.2 783,000 0.6 25,378,000 1.1 912,000 0.4 30,653,000 1.0 993,000 0.2 33,019,000 1.0 1,013,000 0.0 33,341,000 0.9 1,013,000

Table 2: NI 43-101 inferred resource estimate for the A1 deposit.

Gold Cut-off Tonnage Grade Contained Metal (g/t) (Mt) Gold (g/t) Gold (Moz) 2.0 827,000 2.4 63,000 1.0 14,265,000 1.4 656,000 0.8 21,662,000 1.3 874,000 0.6 28,958,000 1.1 1,038,000 0.4 35,779,000 1.0 1,147,000 0.2 38,706,000 0.9 1,173,000 0.0 39,479,000 0.9 1,174,000

Table 3: Assumptions utilized to establish the conceptual pit for the purposes of the above resource estimate.

Parameter Value Unit Gold Price 1,500 US$/oz Mine Operating Cost (Mineralization and Waste) 1.65 US$/t milled Process Operating Cost 16.00 US$/t milled Overall Pit Slope 47 Degrees

The A1 deposit was modelled on a series of cross-sections and level plans from which a three-dimensional wireframe model was constructed for the mineralized zone at an approximate grade boundary of 0.1 g/t gold. Diamond drill holes (72) totaling approximately 23,000 metres and eleven trenches totaling approximately 3,285 metres were used to define the model (Figs. 1 and 2). High-grade gold values were capped at 17 g/t gold with 19 assays falling above this value. Assay sample lengths were composited at 2.5 metres within the domain. Variography was used to model the grade continuity and to determine the search ellipse orientations and dimensions for interpolation. Ordinary kriging was used to estimate gold into blocks measuring 10 x 10 x 10 metres in dimension. Average bulk density of 2.85 g/cm3 was used to convert block model volumes to tonnages.

Validation of the model was completed by comparison of the block model and drill hole grades by visual inspections in section and plan across the deposit.

Figure 1: Plan Map showing A1 deposit drill holes, trenching (rock channel samples) and projection of mineralized solid.

Figure 2: Cross-section through the A1 Zone showing drill hole grade, block grades and conceptual pit outline.

Quality Control  Quality Assurance Program

The above resource estimate was based on drilling and trenching programs completed by previous operators. The drill programs incorporated control samples including blanks, duplicates and standards as part of their Quality Control  Quality Assurance Program. The control samples from the drill programs have been reviewed and verified by the Qualified Persons (as defined herein) and the assay results were deemed suitable for resource estimation. No information is available regarding the Quality Assurance  Quality Control Program from the trench sampling carried out between 1996 and 2003, however these samples represent only a small percentage (approx. 4%) of the overall assay database used in the resource estimate. The Qualified Persons (as defined herein) are of the opinion that the inclusion of these samples would not have a material effect on the reliability of the overall estimate.

Qualified Person

The resource estimate disclosed herein on the Crucero Project was prepared for GoldMining by Mr. Greg Z. Mosher, B.Sc., M.Sc., P.Geo., of Global Mineral Resource Services (the "Qualified Person"). Mr. Mosher is recognized as a qualified person as defined in NI 43-101, is independent of the Company and has reviewed and approved the disclosure regarding the resource estimate for the Crucero Project disclosed herein.

A technical report respecting the above resource estimate will be filed under the Company's profile on SEDAR in due course. There is no new material scientific or technical information respecting the Crucero Project since the effective date of the resource estimate.

Paulo Pereira, President of GoldMining Inc. has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release. Mr. Pereira holds a Bachelors degree in Geology from Universidade do Amazonas in Brazil, is a Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101 and is a member of the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario.

Cautionary Note

Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of the mineral deposits in the "measured", "indicated" and "inferred" categories will ever be converted into mineral reserves with demonstrated economic viability or that inferred mineral resources will be converted to the measured and/or indicated categories through further drilling. In addition, the estimation of inferred resources involves far greater uncertainty as to their existence and economic viability than the estimation of other categories of resources. Under Canadian rules, estimates of Inferred Mineral Resources may not form the basis of pre-feasibility or feasibility studies.

About GoldMining Inc.

GoldMining is a public mineral exploration company focused on the acquisition and development of gold assets in the Americas. Through its disciplined acquisition strategy, GoldMining now controls a diversified portfolio of resource-stage gold and gold-copper projects in Canada, U.S.A., Brazil, Colombia and Peru. Additionally, GoldMining owns a 75% interest in the Rea Uranium Project, located in the Western Athabasca Basin of Alberta, Canada.

Table 4: GoldMining's Global Estimated Measured, Indicated and Inferred Resource Statement1,2,3.

Deposit Cut-off4 (g/t) Tonnage (Mt) Grade Contained Metal Gold (g/t) Silver (g/t) Copper (%) Gold Eq (g/t) Gold (Moz) Silver (Moz) Copper (Mlbs) Gold Eq (Moz) Measured Resources Titiribi5 0.3 51.60 0.49 - 0.17 0.78 0.820 - 195.1 1.290 Indicated Resources Titiribi5 0.3 234.20 0.51 - 0.09 0.65 3.820 - 459.3 4.930 Sao Jorge6 0.3 14.42 1.54 - - 1.54 0.715 - - 0.715 Cachoeira7 0.35 17.47 1.23 - - 1.23 0.692 - - 0.692 Whistler8 0.3 110.28 0.50 1.76 0.14 0.79 1.765 6.130 343.1 2.797 La Mina9 0.25 28.17 0.74 1.77 0.24 1.12 0.667 1.607 150.2 1.013 Crucero12 0.4 30.65 1.00 - - 1.00 0.993 - - 0.993



435.19 0.62 0.55 0.10 0.79 8.651 7.737 952.7 11.080 Measured and Indicated Resources Total

486.79 0.61 0.49 0.11 0.79 9.471 7.737 1,147.8 12.370 Inferred Resources Titiribi5 0.3 207.90 0.49 - 0.02 0.51 3.260 - 77.9 3.440 Sao Jorge6 0.3 28.19 1.14 - - 1.14 1.035 - - 1.035 Cachoeira7 0.35 15.67 1.07 - - 1.07 0.538 - - 0.538 Whistler8 0.3/0.6 311.26 0.47 2.26 0.11 0.68 4.626 22.617 713.5 6.731 La Mina9 0.25 12.39 0.65 1.75 0.27 1.07 0.260 0.697 73.3 0.427 Boa Vista10 0.5 8.47 1.23 - - 1.23 0.336 - - 0.336 Surubim11 0.3 19.44 0.81 - - 0.81 0.503 - - 0.503 Crucero12 0.4 35.78 1.00 - - 1.00 1.147 - - 1.147 Total

639.10 0.57 1.13 0.06 0.69 11.705 23.311 794.5 14.157

Table 4 Notes:



1. Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. There is no certainty that all or any part of the mineral resources will be converted into mineral reserves. The estimate of mineral resources may be materially affected by environmental permitting, legal, title, taxation, sociopolitical, marketing or other relevant issues.



2. The above global resource estimate table is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to represent the viability of any project on a standalone or global basis. The exploration and development of each project, project geology and the assumptions and other factors underlying each estimate, are not uniform and will vary from project to project. Please refer to the technical report for each respective project, as referenced herein, for detailed information respecting each individual project.



3. All quantities are rounded to the appropriate number of significant figures; consequently, sums may not add up due to rounding.



4. Gold cut-off for all projects except for Whistler, which is gold equivalent cut-off.



5. Notes for Titiribi:









Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the Titiribi Project Department of Antioquia, Colombia" prepared by Joseph A. Cantor and Robert E. Cameron of Behre Dolbear & Company (USA), Inc., with an effective date of September 14, 2016, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile.



Gold equivalent estimated for the Titiribi deposit assumes metal prices of US$1,300/oz gold and US$2.90/lb copper and recoveries of 83% for gold and 90% for copper. 6. Notesfor Sao Jorge:









Based on technical report titled "Technical Report and Resource Estimate on the Sao Jorge Gold Project, Para State, Brazil" prepared by Porfirio Rodriguez and Leonardo de Moraes of Coffey Mining Pty Ltd. ("Coffey"), with an effective date of November 22, 2013, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. 7. Notes for Cachoeira:









Based on technical report titled "Technical Report and Resource Estimate on the Cachoeira Property, Para State, Brazil" prepared by Gregory Z. Mosher, P.Geo. of Tetratech, Inc. with an effective date of April 17, 2013 and amended and re-stated October 2, 2013, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. 8. Notes for Whistler:









Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the Whistler Project" prepared by Gary Giroux of Giroux Consultants Inc., with an effective date of March 24, 2016, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile.



The Whistler Project is comprised of three deposits: Whistler, Raintree West and Island Mountain.



Gold equivalent estimated for the Whistler deposit assumes metal prices of US$990/oz gold, US$15.40/oz silver and US$2.91/lb copper and recoveries of 75% for gold and silver and 85% for copper.



Gold equivalent estimated for the Raintree West deposit assumes metal prices of US$1,250/oz gold, US$16.50/oz silver and US$2.10/lb copper and recoveries of 75% for gold, 85% for copper and 75% for silver.



Gold equivalent estimated for the Island Mountain deposit assumes metal prices of US$1,250/oz gold, US$16.50/oz silver and US$2.10/lb copper and recoveries of 75% for gold, 85% for copper and 25% for silver (recovered in copper concentrate).



A gold equivalent cut-off of 0.3 g/t was highlighted in the estimate as a possible open pit cut-off (Whistler, Raintree-shallow and Island Mountain), and a gold equivalent cut-off of 0.6 g/t was highlighted in the estimate as a possible underground cut-off (Raintree-deep). 9. Notes for La Mina:









Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the La Mina Project" prepared by Scott E. Wilson, C.P.G. of Metals Mining Consultants, Inc. ("MMC") with an effective date of October 24, 2016, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile.



Gold equivalent estimated for the La Mina project assumes metal prices of US$1,275/oz gold, US$17.75/oz for silver and US$2.75/lb for copper and recoveries of 93% for gold and 90% for copper. 10. Notes for Boa Vista:









Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the Boa Vista Project and Resource Estimate on the VG1 Prospect, Tapajos Area, Para State, Northern Brazil" prepared by Jim Cuttle, Gary Giroux and Michael Schmulian, with an effective date of November 22, 2013, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. 11. Notes for Surubim:









Based on technical report titled "Technical Report on the Rio Novo Gold Project and Resource Estimate on the Jau Prospect, Tapajos Area, Para State, Northern Brazil" ("Surubim Project") prepared by Jim Cuttle and Gary Giroux, with an effective date of November 22, 2013, which is available at www.sedar.com under GoldMinings SEDAR profile. 12. Notes for Crucero:









Pit constrained resource estimate based on US$1,500/oz gold, mining cost of US$1.60/t, processing cost of US$16.00/t and pit slope of 47 degrees.



A technical report documenting the Crucero resource estimate, amongst other items, will be filed in due course and will be available at www.sedar.com under GoldMining's SEDAR profile.

The above global estimated resource statement is provided for information purposes only. Investors should refer to the underlying technical reports referenced above for project-specific factors relating to each resource estimate.

Forward-looking Statements

This document contains certain forward-looking statements that reflect the current views and/or expectations of GoldMining with respect to its business and future events, including expectations and future plans respecting the Project and statements with respect to the details of the mineral resource estimate. Forward-looking statements are based on the then-current expectations, beliefs, assumptions, estimates and forecasts about the business and the markets in which GoldMining operates. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including: the inherent risks involved in resource estimation and the exploration and development of mineral properties, the uncertainties involved in resource estimation and interpreting drill results and other exploration data, the potential for delays in exploration or development activities, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits, the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with GoldMinings expectations, accidents, equipment breakdowns, title and permitting matters, labour disputes or other unanticipated difficulties with or interruptions in operations, fluctuating metal prices, unanticipated costs and expenses, uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future, including to fund any exploration programs on the Project. These risks, as well as others, including those set forth in GoldMinings filings with Canadian securities regulators, could cause actual results and events to vary significantly. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and information. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information, or the material factors or assumptions used to develop such forward looking information, will prove to be accurate. GoldMining does not undertake any obligations to release publicly any revisions for updating any voluntary forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable securities law.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange, nor its Regulation Services Providers (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

SOURCE GoldMining Inc.

Related Links

www.brazilresources.com


LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Grupo Radio Centro ("Radio Centro") and Spanish Broadcasting System ("SBS") have settled a two-year-long lawsuit surrounding SBS employees' and radio talents' disputed move from SBS to Radio Centro. The confidential settlement marks an end to all matters in the proceeding.

"Radio Centro believes it is in the best interest of its employees and radio talent to resolve the litigation in order to allow its employees to continue to enjoy the atmosphere at Radio Centro as well as allow KXOS 93.9 FM to focus on bringing quality programming to the Los Angeles community without the distraction of litigation," stated Radio Centro counsel. "Radio Centro will continue to entertain requests by any person to join Radio Centro's team."

Grupo Radio Centro is the top radio broadcaster in Mexico with a powerful influence in the United States. KXOS 93.9 FM continues to serve and advocate for Los Angeles' Hispanic community. The 93.9 FM portfolio includes strategically programmed radio, diverse social media offerings, annual live events, private concerts with top trending artists, local activations, and top ranked local and network on-air talent.

SOURCE Grupo Radio Centro
AUSTIN, Minn., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE: HRL) announced today that it will issue its earnings press release before the markets open on Thursday, February 22, 2018. Jim Snee, chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer and Jim Sheehan, senior vice president and chief financial officer, will discuss the company's first quarter results at 4:00 p.m. CT on Thursday, February 22, 2018, during their presentation at the 2018 CAGNY Conference.

WHEN: Thursday, February 22, 2018 4:00 p.m. CT (5:00 p.m. ET)

WEBCAST: To listen to a live Webcast of the presentation, go to the company's website, http://www.hormelfoods.com, click on Investors, and you will find a link to the webcast.

AUDIO

REPLAY:

To listen to a replay of the conference call, go to the company's website http://www.hormelfoods.com, then click on News & Events and you will find a link to the webcast.

About Hormel Foods  Inspired People. Inspired Food.

Hormel Foods Corporation, based in Austin, Minn., is a global branded food company with over $9 billion in annual revenues across more than 80 countries worldwide. Its brands include Skippy, SPAM, Hormel Natural Choice, Applegate, Justin's, Wholly Guacamole, Hormel Black Label and more than 30 other beloved brands. The company is a member of the S&P 500 Index and the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats, was named one of "The 100 Best Corporate Citizens" by Corporate Responsibility Magazine for the ninth year in a row, and has received numerous other awards and accolades for its corporate responsibility and community service efforts. In 2016, the company celebrated its 125th anniversary and announced its new vision for the future - Inspired People. Inspired Food. - focusing on its legacy of innovation. For more information, visit www.hormelfoods.com and http://csr.hormelfoods.com/.

SOURCE Hormel Foods Corporation

Related Links

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DALLAS, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of the ongoing multi-million dollar renovation, Hotel Crescent Court celebrates the opening of Beau Nash, a swanky new champagne bar and cocktail lounge, centrally located on the lobby level of the Uptown icon. Designed to reanimate remnants of its namesake restaurant, Beau Nash is set to be the place to see and be seen, where the energized and inviting atmosphere is enlivened by music, the buzz of conversation and the clinking of glasses in toasts until midnight, seven days a week.

"Hotel Crescent Court has an established history and reputation for creating novel, yet unique experiences for our guests," said Andrew Davidson, general manager of Hotel Crescent Court. "We're pleased to revive the vision and spirit of Beau Nash, a true Dallas staple, and we're proud to welcome guests, members and locals alike to the centerpiece of The Crescent."

Beau Nash touts generous, anticipatory service and features more than 30 world-class champagnes and international sparkling wines, making this sophisticated lounge the ultimate stop for any bubbly craving. Patrons can also imbibe Texas craft beers, wine and signature handcrafted cocktails, such as the Uptown '86, Dallas Kiss, Skyline Spritz or the Maple Old Fashioned, as well as choose from one of the largest selections of Scotch and Whiskey in Dallas.

The cuisine at Beau Nash features American classics with a Texas twist, boasting both small and large plates as well as desserts, perfect for sharing or savoring alone. Flavorful varieties include everything from Truffled Caviar Eggs and Tuna Poke to Local Cheese & Charcuterie and Braised Short Rib Tagliatelle. Each dish has a flair and richness that pairs impeccably with the champagne and sparkling selections.

Designed by waldrop + nichols studio to be the focal point of the artfully choreographed lobby, Beau Nash exudes timeless elegance with a beautiful marble bar top imported from Spain, tasteful brass light fixtures and rich materials. The Dallas-based interior architectural design firm created an ambiance that invites guests and locals alike to socialize and linger. A sophisticated palette of slate, ink and silver textiles adds depth and mood to the space. Strategically placed architectural lighting and a pair of bespoke sconces place a spotlight on the bar, while a custom leather art panel serves as the main feature for the back bar.

"Beau Nash sets the scene in the lobby and infuses an atmosphere conducive for socializing, relaxing and connecting," said Andrea Waldrop, Vice President of waldrop+nichols studio. "The reimagination of this inviting full-service bar brings to life original components of Hotel Crescent Court, such as warm brass accent finishes complementing the existing stone floors with refined bar millwork in Macassar Ebony."

Beau Nash is open daily for locals, hotel guests and private Club members, and can accommodate groups, company happy hours, private parties and business mixers. For more information, please visit www.crescentcourt.com or call 214-871-3200.

For More Media Information:

Anna Peterson

The Zimmerman Agency

[email protected]

SOURCE Hotel Crescent Court

Related Links

http://www.crescentcourt.com


In his role, Moseson will lead MUFG Americas strategy development and strategic planning efforts, including management of the annual and triennial strategic planning processes and driving strategic and transformational initiatives as the firm's internal strategy consultant to business and support unit leadership.

"Howard is an outstanding addition to our talented strategy team and will play an instrumental role in leading and integrating our strategic planning processes and driving strategic and transformational initiatives across the firm," said Worsoe.

Prior to joining MUFG, Moseson was the Head of Strategy for Citibank's Global Consumer Banking Operations. Prior to this role, he was the Global Head of Strategy for Citi Commercial Bank. Before joining Citi in 2012, he was a Partner at McKinsey & Company where he led the Middle Market Banking Practice and was a senior member of Investment and Corporate Banking and Risk Practices. Prior to McKinsey, Moseson was an investment banker for 15 years at firms including Chase, CSFB and WestLB.

Moseson holds BA degrees in Math/Computer Science and Philosophy from Emory University and an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

About MUFG Americas Holdings Corporation

Headquartered in New York, MUFG Americas Holdings Corporation is a financial holding company, bank holding company and intermediate holding company with total assets of $154.9 billion at September 30, 2017. Its main subsidiaries are MUFG Union Bank, N.A. and MUFG Securities Americas Inc. MUFG Union Bank, N.A. provides an array of financial services to individuals, small businesses, middle-market companies, and major corporations. As of September 30, 2017, MUFG Union Bank, N.A. operated 361 branches, comprised primarily of retail banking branches in the West Coast states, along with commercial branches in Texas, Illinois, New York and Georgia, as well as 18 PurePoint Financial Centers and two international offices. MUFG Securities Americas Inc. is a registered securities broker-dealer which engages in capital markets origination transactions, private placements, collateralized financings, securities borrowing and lending transactions, and domestic and foreign debt and equities securities transactions. MUFG Americas Holdings Corporation is owned by The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc. The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc., which is one of the world's leading financial groups. Visit www.unionbank.com or www.mufgamericas.com for more information.

About Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc. (MUFG) is one of the world's leading financial groups, with total assets of approximately US$2.7 trillion as of 30 September 2017. Headquartered in Tokyo and with approximately 350 years of history, MUFG is a global network with over 2,300 offices across more than 50 countries. The Group has about 150,000 employees and close to 300 entities, offering services including commercial banking, trust banking, securities, credit cards, consumer finance, asset management, and leasing. The Group's operating companies include Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation (Japan's leading trust bank), and Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Holdings Co., Ltd., one of Japan's largest securities firms. The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. is Japan's premier bank, with a global network spanning around 50 countries. Outside of Japan, the bank offers an extensive scope of commercial and investment banking products and services to businesses, governments and individuals worldwide. Through close partnerships among our operating companies, the Group aims to "be the world's most trusted financial group", flexibly responding to all of the financial needs of our customers, serving society, and fostering shared and sustainable growth for a better world. MUFG's shares trade on the Tokyo, Nagoya, and New York (NYSE: MTU) stock exchanges. For more information, visit www.mufg.jp/english.

SOURCE MUFG Americas Holdings Corporation
DETROIT, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hyundai Motor America will continue its commitment to helping serve the needs of the greater Detroit community through its annual Hyundai Coats for Kids program. This event occurs during the 2018 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS). In its eighth consecutive year, Hyundai will donate 1,000 new winter coats to underserved youth in Detroit. This year, the coats will be distributed through Carstens Academy, a Detroit-based youth organization, and is in partnership with Orchards Children's Services. The event takes place on Wednesday, January 17th from 9:30am-12:00pm at Carstens Academy. Coats will be available while supplies last.

"Hyundai is committed to being a partner to society and helping to build strong communities," said Zafar Brooks, Director of Corporate Social Responsibility and Diversity & Inclusion, Hyundai Motor America. "With our annual Hyundai Coats for Kids initiatives, our goal is to serve the needs of kids in Detroit with a practical donation of warm winter coats. We are proud to partner with Carstens Academy and Orchards Children's Services, in their important work to support the community."

The Hyundai Coats for Kids program is a part of the company's ongoing corporate social responsibility mission to give back and serve our local communities. To date, Hyundai has donated over 13,000 winter coats through the program across the U.S.

"We are honored to work with Hyundai Motor America and their commitment to the youth of our community," says, Mike Williams, CEO, Orchards Children's Services. "We believe Hyundai exemplifies the kind of leadership that companies should have, to help communities in need. This year's coat donation will not only keep young bodies warm, but will encourage kids to fulfill their potential through hard work."

In addition to the Hyundai Coats for Kids event, Hyundai is hosting several initiatives in support of diversity events while in Detroit during the auto show week, including a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday event with Rainbow PUSH; sponsor of Real Times Media Driven to recognize diverse leaders in Automotive, and the Ajamu Group Multicultural Media Luncheon.

Hyundai Motor America

Hyundai Motor America is focused on delivering an outstanding customer experience grounded in design leadership, engineering excellence and exceptional value in every vehicle we sell. Hyundai's technology-rich product lineup of cars, SUVs and alternative-powered electric and fuel cell vehicles is backed by Hyundai Assuranceour promise to deliver peace of mind to our customers. Hyundai vehicles are sold and serviced through more than 830 dealerships nationwide and the majority sold in the U.S. are built at U.S. manufacturing facilities, including Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama. Hyundai Motor America is headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, and is a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Company of Korea.

Please visit our media website at www.HyundaiNews.com

Hyundai Motor America on Twitter | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

SOURCE Hyundai Motor America

Related Links

http://www.hyundaiusa.com


BRIDGEWATER, N.J., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- iconectiv, the next Local Number Portability Administrator (LNPA) for all U.S. regions, announced the launch of an informational website to support the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) transition for law enforcement agencies and Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP).

Law enforcement agencies and PSAP users rely on NPAC data to identify the service provider of ported telephone numbers. The transition website offers information on registration, the NPAC transition and the benefits of the two services: the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service and the Enhanced Law Enforcement Platform (ELEP).

The IVR service is a free phone-based system that provides information on the service provider of record for a telephone number as well as the company's Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act's (CALEA) contact information. IVR users can get information for up to 20 ported telephone numbers at a time. ELEP is a fee-based online search service that offers porting history and the ability to query up to 100 telephone numbers per request, in addition to the information provided by the IVR service.

Law enforcement agencies and PSAP that wish to continue accessing this data must register with iconectiv immediately. The iconectiv service replaces the existing system beginning March 4, 2018.

For general questions, agencies that use the IVR service can contact [email protected] and agencies that use the ELEP service can contact [email protected]. Agencies can also call 844-511-3537 Monday through Friday between 7:00 AM and 9:00 PM ET.

About iconectiv

As the authoritative partner of the communications industry for more than 30 years, iconectiv's market-leading solutions enable the interconnection of networks, devices, and applications for more than two billion people every day. Working closely with private, government and non-governmental organizations, iconectiv continues to protect and secure telecommunication infrastructures for service providers, governments and enterprises, while providing network and operations management, numbering, registry, messaging and fraud and identity solutions to more than 1,200 organizations globally.

A US-based company, Telcordia Technologies does business as iconectiv. For more information, visit www.iconectiv.com.

Media Contact

Sharon Oddy

732-699-5130 / 908-809-2268

[email protected]

SOURCE iconectiv

Related Links

http://www.iconectiv.com


NEW YORK and TEL AVIV, Israel, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Illusive Networks, the leader in deception-based cybersecurity and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) solutions announced it has achieved triple-digit growth in global 2017 bookings compared to its already strong 2016 performance. Furthermore, this breakthrough in results, combined with massive scale, industry-wide implementation, and very large enterprise adoption, has led to expansion of the company's executive leadership team.

The impressive 2017 growth was driven by new and existing clients adopting Illusive's Deception Everywhere approach in their efforts to thwart Advanced Persistent Threats. Building on the company's successful 2016 release of Wire Transfer Guard, a solution for APT's targeting SWIFT and other money funds transfer systems, the Feb. 2017 release of the Illusive Deception Management System (DMS) further fueled growth by harnessing advanced machine-learning capabilities to automate creation, deployment, and updates to deceptions at massive scale.

"In 2017, a new level of attack sophistication including the widespread adoption of nation state hacking tools and technologies  including use by private criminal organizations  generated headline news, and drove enterprises to seek new approaches to APT defense," said Ofer Israel, CEO at Illusive. "Clients worldwide are now embracing Illusive's distributed agentless deception technology to enhance their APT security posture, increase security team efficiency, and reduce business risk."

According to Gartner, "In 2017, the threat level to enterprise IT continues to be at very high levels, with daily accounts in the media of large breaches and attacks. As attackers improve their capabilities, enterprises must also improve their ability to protect access and protect from attacks. Security and risk leaders must evaluate and engage with the latest technologies to protect against advanced attacks, better enable digital business transformation and embrace new computing styles such as cloud, mobile and DevOps."*

Illusive's experience in 2017 indicates that enterprises are rapidly moving from proof of concept to implementation of deception-based cybersecurity at scale. With seven US patents granted, a diverse client base including several multi-million dollar installations, and deployments scaling endpoints to hundreds of thousands per customer, the company is seeing broad adoption across many industries including financial, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, legal, and technology.

Growing Team

This market-driven growth has also resulted in a major expansion of Illusive's leadership team including the following newly appointed executives:

Kirby Wadsworth , CMO, has undertaken executive marketing roles for a host of both venture-backed startups and global technology leaders including Bayshore, Mendix, Limelight, and F5 Networks

, CMO, has undertaken executive marketing roles for a host of both venture-backed startups and global technology leaders including Bayshore, Mendix, Limelight, and F5 Networks Kirk Appelman , VP North America Sales, previously served as VP Sales for Cynet, CounterTack, and Damballa

, VP North America Sales, previously served as VP Sales for Cynet, CounterTack, and Damballa Ivan Foreman , VP Sales EMEA, previously held executive sales positions at Wandera, Cisco, and Scansafe

, VP Sales EMEA, previously held executive sales positions at Wandera, Cisco, and Scansafe Gil Shulman , VP Product, previously held senior product roles at Check Point, Radware, and Verint

A Year of Successes

In early 2017, Illusive announced a funding round lead by Microsoft Ventures, followed by a collaboration with Intel to develop an innovative approach to combating Advanced Persistent Threats that combines both software and hardware competencies.

Dave DeWalt, former CEO of FireEye and McAfee, was appointed Vice Chairman, and Mandiant VP, Charles Carmakal, joined as an Advisor, both providing deep insight in the cybersecurity market landscape.

Bolstering its core solution, Illusive streamlined the adoption process by adding advanced machine learning capabilities which preemptively identify attack pathways and autonomously create best-fit deceptions based on continuous real-time environment analysis.

Building on the success of 2016's Wire Transfer Guard, 2017 brought new solution offerings including:

Mainframe Guard  protecting mainframe systems and critical business services

To help customers minimize manpower and significantly reduce cost and time required to manage high impact incidents, an external forensics API, risk metrics tool, and dashboard were released. These capabilities help SOC teams quantify advanced attack risk, expedite investigation, and prioritize remediation.

During 2017, the company received recognition by The Wall Street Journal in its inaugural Tech Companies to Watch, was honored as a finalist in CRN's Tech Innovators Awards, named as one of CRN's '25 Coolest Network Security Vendors', by Momentum Partners as one of ten cybersecurity companies on their Watch List and more recently, by InformationWeek as a Top Vendor to Watch in 2018.

*Gartner Press Release, "Gartner Identifies the Top Technologies for Security in 2017," 14 June 2017. https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3744917.

About Illusive Networks

Illusive Networks is pioneering deception-based cybersecurity with its patented Deceptions Everywhere technology that neutralizes targeted attacks and Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) by creating a deceptive layer across an enterprise network. By providing an endless source of false information, Illusive disrupts and detects attacks with real-time forensics and without disruption to business, while real-time forensic and risk insights support more effective and efficient incident resolution.

For more information, please visit www.illusivenetworks.com or follow on LinkedIn, @Illusivenw on Twitter and Facebook.

SOURCE Illusive Networks

Related Links

http://www.illusivenetworks.com


WASHINGTON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- According to the new 4-volume report by HSRC ; Global Industry 4.0 Market & Technologies 2018-2023, the Industry 4.0 market is projected to reach $214B by 2023, outweighing the projected 2023 cybersecurity market by 33%. The Industry 4.0 market is dominated by global technology giants including Alphabet-Google, HP, Samsung, IBM, NEC, Microsoft, and more.

The new report is based on extensive research activities including:

31 Industry 4.0 round table focus groups with 87 leading industry executives from 17 countries

79 face-to-face interviews with industry 4.0 executives

Meta-research based on >4000 industry respondents in 27 countries and over 2000 companies

Review of 477 reports and papers

49 Industry 4.0 vendors research

Cross-check of 188 submarkets via 5 bottom-up research vectors

With 640 pages, this 4-volume report covers 10 industries, 10 technologies, 4 revenue sources, 5 regional markets and 22 national markets, offering for each of the 188 submarkets 2016-2017 market size and 2018-2023 forecasts and detailed analyses.

Following three decades of decline in the manufacturing sector of Western and other economies, governments and private companies are adopting technologies of the 4th industrial revolution to resuscitate manufacturing and create R&D and management jobs in their home countries. The 4th Industrial revolution is set to swiftly alter the competitiveness of nearly all industrial sectors across the world, as well as change long-held dynamics in commerce and global economic balance of power.

In the U.S., despite the country's long-time dependency on imports, since 2010 there have been signs of gradual change, with rises in both domestic and export demand. One of President Donald Trump's principal campaign promises was restoring manufacturing jobs in the United States' struggling Rust Belt communities. It is expected that the Trump administration will follow the Obama government's 2011 Industry 4.0 policy, bringing together the industry and federal government to invest in Industry 4.0 technologies. Such efforts to reinvent the U.S. manufacturing industry by creating smart factories will have a substantial impact on U.S. economic growth.

The industrial sector is also important to the EU economy, which comprises 2 million manufacturing companies and is responsible for over 80% of EU exports. In response to a four-decade deterioration of the industrial sector, the EU set a target that manufacturing should represent 20% of total value added in the EU by 2020. As part of its new Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission wants to help all industrial sectors exploit new technologies and manage the transition to a smart, Industry 4.0 industrial system.

On the one hand, these changes may add to the traditional business pressure on manufacturers, but on the other hand, they offer unprecedented opportunities to optimize production and manufacturing processes.

According to the report, the Industry 4.0 revolution will be driven by an ensemble of emerging technologies, such as Industrial Internet of Things (Industrial IoT), Big Data analytics, advanced industrial robots, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and predictive maintenance. In the next decades, businesses will establish global networks that incorporate their machinery, warehousing systems, and production facilities in the shape of cyber-physical systems that can be managed in real time. These extremely flexible value networks will require new forms of collaboration between companies, both nationally and globally.

The Industry 4.0 "market race" is led by global tech giants that have already invested billions in Industry 4.0 products, R&D, commercialization, and M&A.

HSRC "Meta-Research" through industry experts and executives revealed that:

63% of the respondents stated that their business future depends on the Industry 4.0 transformation

88% of the respondents agreed that delaying the Industry 4.0 transformation of their enterprises may risk their business future

12% of the respondents have already implemented some Industry 4.0 conversion and reported clear improvements in their value chain performance

Respondents forecast that internal Industry 4.0 manufacturing efficiencies and improved value chain management will lead to a cost reduction of 4.1% per annum, as well as a revenue increase of 3.0% per annum over 2018-2023, driven by customized products, predictive maintenance, and additional services.

55% of the respondents assume a two-year full Return on Investment (ROI) and enormous long-term gains

According to the report, the manufacturing industry, once considered inherently brick-and-mortar, will experience a major growth due to the following drivers:

Fierce global competition in the manufacturing sector

Unprecedented opportunities to optimize production processes

Investment in Industry 4.0 by economies featuring high labor costs, in order to increase their industrial base and jobs taken by low labor cost countries

Investment in Industry 4.0 by governments with low labor costs to maintain their industrial base, which could be jeopardized by high labor cost countries with Industry 4.0 investments

Government-funded Industry 4.0 projects, R&D, subsidies, and tax incentives

The opportunity Industry 4.0 offers start-ups and SMEs to develop and provide downstream services

The flexibility that Industry 4.0 dynamic business and engineering processes allows in terms of response to production disruptions or failures on behalf of suppliers/customers

The fact that Industry 4.0 provides a link to the consumer and can help forecast consumer demand

The new business opportunities that Industry 4.0 opens-up to both suppliers and adaptors

Related HSRC reports available on our Website:

Explore more HSRC reports at www.hsrc.biz

About HSRC

HSRC is an international market and technology research firm specializing in transformational technologies, homeland security & public safety industries. HSRC provides premium market off-the-shelf and custom reports on present and emerging technologies and industry expertise, enabling global clients to gain time-critical insight into business opportunities. HSRC's clients include the EU, NATO, U.S. Congress, Army, DOD and DOT among others; as well as government agencies in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Canada, UK, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Finland and Singapore. With over 1000 private sector clients (72% repeat customers), including major Fortune 2000 companies, HSRC has earned the reputation as the industry's Gold Standard for Transformational Technologies, Homeland Security & Public Safety off-the-shelf and customized market reports.

Washington D.C. 20004, 601 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Suite 900,

Tel: 202-455-0966, [email protected]

SOURCE HSRC

Related Links

http://www.hsrc.biz


WHITEHOUSE STATION, N.J., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Brokers and risk managers who conduct business with Chubb are the most satisfied in the industry when it comes to property, management and professional liability claims handling, according to the Advisen Claims Satisfaction Survey recently released by Advisen, an industry-leading provider of insurance data, media and technology solutions for the commercial property and casualty insurance market.

Chubb claims services and processes valued most by survey participants included: good communication, equitable settlements, expertise, national footprint, flexibility around contentious and complex issues, and accessibility.

In 2017, Chubb was the only carrier to be recognized by brokers as the number one carrier for claims handling in more than one category, including management, professional liability and property. The company also placed in the top three in almost every business category surveyed.

"Exceptional service and expertise are hallmarks of the Chubb brand," said Paul Krump, President of North America Commercial and Personal Insurance for Chubb. "We take great pride in providing industry-leading services and solutions and are constantly looking for ways to make it easier for partners to do business with us. This type of recognition further reinforces our commitment to the business and helping clients meet very specific needs."

About Advisen's Claims Satisfaction Survey

The 2017 Advisen Claims Satisfaction Survey Report details how the industry is handling claims and identifies the carriers and TPAs that provide the highest quality claims services based upon a variety of claims handling best practices. The survey was administered by Advisen in September and October of 2017 and sent to 560 respondents, including risk managers and brokers/agents who answered a series of questions about their property, casualty, management/professional liability, and cyber claims experiences.

About Advisen

Advisen Ltd. equals success for insurance professionals, driving growth and profitability through the broadest platform of analytics and information services. Designed and evolved by risk and insurance experts, and used daily by more than 100,000 professionals, Advisen combines the industry's deepest data sets with proprietary analytics and applications that drive the risk and insurance lifecycle. Advisen is headquartered in New York with offices in London. For more information, visit www.advisen.com or call 212.897.4800.

About Chubb

Chubb is the world's largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company. With operations in 54 countries, Chubb provides commercial and personal property and casualty insurance, personal accident and supplemental health insurance, reinsurance and life insurance to a diverse group of clients. As an underwriting company, we assess, assume and manage risk with insight and discipline. We service and pay our claims fairly and promptly. The company is also defined by its extensive product and service offerings, broad distribution capabilities, exceptional financial strength and local operations globally. Parent company Chubb Limited is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: CB) and is a component of the S&P 500 index. Chubb maintains executive offices in Zurich, New York, London, and other locations, and employs approximately 31,000 people worldwide. Additional information can be found at: chubb.com.

SOURCE Chubb

Related Links

http://www.chubb.com


(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130122/589162 )



The Infosys Business Assurance Store is built on the experience of the Infosys validation teams, and integrates with third-party solutions like HPE Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), MS SharePoint among others. The store helps clients drive greater operational efficiencies and accelerate business agility through improved test design. This solution uses machine learning tools for traceability, knowledge clustering and optimization. Clients can access the solution through the Infosys Quality Assurance Workbench, an artificial intelligence-based platform built for supporting all leading digital technologies such as Mobile, Internet of Things, and Cloud among others.

Highlights

Infosys' Business Assurance Store fast forwards the testing lifecycle across industry domains - such as financial services, retail, insurance, health care, life sciences, manufacturing, telecom, energy, utilities, services and others, using technologies such as Java, .Net, MDM, Mainframe, and Middleware

The solution covers industry leading products and packages like VisionPLUS, Global Pay Plus (GPP), Calypso, Murex, SAP modules, Oracle EBIS, Warehouse Management System (WMS), among many others, and will provide customers starter kits for specialized testing services like security, Internet of Things, big data, and other validation services

The solution also has numerous test cases on various regulations and compliances which will ensure extensive risk coverage and help customers adhere to different standards across geographies

Dominique Raviart, IT Services Practice Director, NelsonHall, said, "With Infosys Business Assurance Store, Infosys has invested in a systematic approach for creating a repository of test scenarios, across industries, and across application technology. This repository is part of Infosys' strategy to continue automating the full testing lifecycle, adding its own proprietary IP to complement commercial off the shelf solutions (COTS)."

Ravi Kumar S, President and Deputy Chief Operating Officer, Infosys, said, "Testing has taken a paradigm shift from being an end-of-lifecycle activity to managing user experience in the digital landscape. This solution is about expediting testing and utilizing test cases, built through our years of experience in delivering agility to our customers' businesses. Infosys Business Assurance Store is an endeavor to bring in transformation and fuel automation in the testing space and this solution is testimony of our deep experience of over 15 years."

About Infosys Ltd.

Infosys is a global leader in technology services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to create and execute strategies for their digital transformation. From engineering to application development, knowledge management and business process management, we help our clients find the right problems to solve, and to solve these effectively. Our team of 200,000+ innovators, across the globe, is differentiated by the imagination, knowledge and experience, across industries and technologies that we bring to every project we undertake.

Visit http://www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise thrive in the digital age.

Safe Harbor

Certain statements in this press release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017. These filings are available at http://www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of the date of this press release. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law.

SOURCE Infosys
CHICAGO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Innventure and Elanco Animal Health, a division of Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY), announced a strategic initiative to explore the development of technologies for animal health. The collaboration builds upon Innventure's model, which identifies promising enterprise technologies and then develops and scales them in external startups. Following P&G, Elanco is the second company to enter into a strategic initiative with Innventure.

"Since the Great Recession, most large companies have focused on cutting costs and driving efficiencies," said Greg Wasson, Founder and Chairman of Innventure. "Now, most are looking for real growth, which comes through innovation. I applaud P&G and Elanco for reimagining how companies can innovate disruptive technologies and bring them to market. Their feedback has been instrumental in helping us construct and refine Innventure's commercialization model."

Elanco products and knowledge services help animals live longer, healthier, higher-quality lives in more than 70 countries. The company serves veterinarians, food producers, pet owners, and others who care for animals. Innventure and Elanco intend to collaborate to commercialize emerging technologies with the potential to improve animal health.

Earlier in his career, Innventure Founder and CEO Mike Otworth worked with Elanco to source outside technologies that could enhance the company's products and services. The new relationship builds upon this history, aiming to launch startups that gain a competitive edge from Elanco's 60+ years of R&D and Innventure's startup expertise.

"The Innventure model, coupled with Elanco's expertise in research and innovation, is well-positioned to further disruptive technology in animal health, an industry that is projected to grow in the coming years," said Aaron Schacht, VP of global research and development at Elanco. "Innventure's model is an exciting approach that may advance new technologies, platforms and products in animal health."

"Our model combines the sophistication of enterprise R&D with the agility of startup businesses," said Mike Otworth, CEO of Innventure. "Having worked on strategic initiatives with P&G -- and now Elanco -- demonstrates that our model resonates with industry leaders and fills a void in the tech ecosystem. Essentially, we're pioneering a way to accelerate the commercialization of new technology."

About Innventure

Innventure, a Wasson Enterprise Partnership, has more than 20 years of experience identifying disruptive technologies and creating successful new companies. The group combines the expertise of Wasson Enterprise (WE), a family-based investment firm led by former Walgreens Boots Alliance CEO Greg Wasson, and XL Tech Group (XLTG), Innventure's precursor company. The team has a long history of identifying breakthrough technology solutions that address unmet needs and have sufficient economic impact to drive and sustain changed customer behaviors. Of the 11 new companies the Innventure founders created over 20 years, 10 achieved late-stage funding, including six successful IPOs. Innventure's initial sourcing deal with Procter & Gamble took place on December 2015. Learn more at innventure.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements (as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995) about a strategic initiative between Innventure and Elanco Animal health, and reflects Elanco's and Lilly's current belief. However, as with any technology development initiative, there are substantial risks and uncertainties in the process of development and commercialization. Among other things, there can be no guarantee that Lilly will realize the expected benefits of the initiative or that the initiative will yield commercially successful products on the anticipated timeline or at all.For further discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties, see Lilly's most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, Lilly undertakes no duty to update forward-looking statements to reflect events after the date of this release.

SOURCE Innventure

Related Links

http://innventure.com


NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Insight Venture Partners (Insight), a leading global venture capital and private equity firm, announced today the appointments of Anika Agarwal, Rachel Geller and Ross Devor to Managing Director. In addition, the firm has announced the appointments of Matt Gatto, Kevin Hurth and Philip Vorobeychik to Principal, and the hiring of Teddie Wardi as Principal.

Anika Agarwal Rachel Geller Ross Devor

"At Insight Venture Partners, we could not be more thrilled to elevate our team through these key promotions and additions," said Deven Parekh, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners. "These individuals reflect the best Insight has to offer, which is an asset to the growth of our firm and our diverse portfolio. We are excited to kick off 2018 with a spotlight on not just these individuals, but their collective accomplishments on behalf of Insight."

Insight Venture Partners' team is more than 130 professionals strong, with over $18 billion raised, and has overseen investments in more than 300 companies across the globe.

"At Insight, we understand that growth equals opportunity, and take immense pride in driving that vision forward both internally and externally," said Ian Sandler, Chief Operating Officer, Insight Venture Partners. "Insight works to ensure greater opportunity for all, and we are excited for our new promotions and their commitment to building our future. Congratulations to all on these tremendous accomplishments."

About Anika Agarwal

Agarwal joined the Insight team in 2014. She focuses on leveraged buyouts and majority recapitalizations of application and infrastructure software companies. Agarwal was included in The Wall Street Journal's Private Equity Women to Watch 2017 list and profiled as a Private Equity Rising Star. Prior to Insight, she was a member of the investment team at Vista Equity Partners and the Merchant Banking Division at Goldman Sachs.

About Rachel Geller

Geller has been a member of Insight since 2008. As a Managing Director on the Insight Onsite team, she leads due diligence for Insight investments and engagements with portfolio company executives, focused on strategy, pricing and M&A. She has been a key team member for several portfolio company exits over the past three years. Geller previously worked as a strategy consultant and marketer at American Express. She mentors emerging leaders as part of the Parity Professional Program and is active in several Chicago non-profits.

About Ross Devor

Devor joined Insight in 2013 and has consummated seven platform investments across enterprise software while at the firm. He is a board member at several Insight portfolio companies and leads new investments in high growth application and infrastructure software companies. Prior to joining Insight, Devor was a member of the investment team at Thoma Bravo.

About Teddie Wardi

Wardi joined Insight in 2017 as Principal, and was previously a Partner at Atomico, one of the largest European venture funds based in London, and a VP at Dawn Capital, a SaaS focused early stage fund. Prior to venture investing, he served as co-founder and CTO of Nervogrid, a leading cloud service marketplace platform, which was acquired by ALSO.

About Matt Gatto

Gatto has grown his career at Insight Venture Partners since 2010 and was recently named as a "Rising Star" on GrowthCap's 40 Under 40 Growth Investors of 2017. Before joining Insight, Gatto's career included online advertising optimization at Verizon Information Services, debt restructuring and issuance at Deutsche Bank Asia, and electronic communications risk management at Merrill Lynch.

About Philip Vorobeychik

Another longtime member of the Insight team, Vorobeychik joined in 2010 and has been involved with 22 stand-alone investments and 23 add-on acquisitions, many of which he has led. These deals have spanned over 10 countries, and involved 12 board appointments for Vorobeychik. He focuses on infrastructure and application software companies. Before joining Insight, Vorobeychik founded several internet ventures, including a series of specialty eCommerce stores.

About Kevin Hurth

Hurth joined Insight in 2016 in a dedicated Capital Markets role. He manages Insight's relationships with financing partners and investment banks and coordinates debt and equity capital markets activities across the portfolio. Prior to joining Insight, Hurth was a member of BMO Harris Bank's Sponsor Finance group.

About Insight Venture Partners

Insight Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight has raised more than $18 billion and invested in over 300 companies worldwide. Our mission is to find, fund and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. Across our people and our portfolio, we encourage a culture around a core belief: growth equals opportunity. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit www.insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.

SOURCE Insight Venture Partners

Related Links

http://www.insightpartners.com


In a value-add for brick-and-mortar retailers across North America, Instacart and Unata join forces to enable the future of online grocery shopping

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Instacart, the technology-driven, nationwide on-demand grocery delivery service, announced today it has acquired Unata, the award-winning provider of 1-to-1 digital solutions for grocers. Together, the ecommerce pioneers plan to enable the future of online grocery shopping, combining their talented teams, vibrant cultures, and innovative products to accelerate the process.

The acquisition, which bridges Unata's comprehensive white-label digital grocery platform with Instacart's established technology and scale, will create a one-stop shop for brick-and-mortar retailers to effectively compete in an increasingly online world.

"Instacart's mission has always been to be an independent partner to retailers and enable them to give their customers the best experiences using the best technology," said Apoorva Mehta, Founder and CEO of Instacart. "This acquisition allows us to take that commitment to the next level. It represents a landmark win for retailers, who will benefit from Instacart's scale, Unata's highly configurable technology, and the deep grocery industry integrations this acquisition will enable."

"Unata and Instacart have long shared a vision of innovating the grocery industry and building the online grocery shopping experience of the future," said Chris Bryson, CEO of Unata. "By combining the power of our teams and technologies, we can achieve this vision faster and for the first time ever offer a fully comprehensive, configurable digital solution for grocery retailers of all sizes."

Unata  whose headquarters will remain in Toronto  will become an independent subsidiary of Instacart, maintaining its name and brand. Instacart will continue to invest in innovation and resources for both Unata and Instacart as the companies merge into a single powerhouse platform. Chris Bryson, Unata's Chief Executive Officer, will remain in his current role, and will report to Instacart's Chief Business Officer, Nilam Ganenthiran. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.

Instacart, which expanded from 30 to over 190 markets in 2017 alone, is confident that Unata is the ideal partner to complement and expand its technology as the company looks to continue its blistering growth in 2018.

About Instacart

Instacart helps people cross grocery shopping off their to-do lists with just a few clicks. Customers use the Instacart website or app to fill their virtual shopping cart with items from their favorite, local stores and Instacart connects them with shoppers who hand pick the items and deliver them straight to their door. Founded in San Francisco in 2012, Instacart has quickly scaled to over 190 markets nationwide and partnered with retailers across the United States, including popular national chains as well as local, regional grocers. By combining a personal touch with cutting-edge technology, Instacart offers customers a simple solution to save time and eat fresh food from the most trusted grocery brands. Instacart is the only grocery service that can meet today's on-demand lifestyle by delivering in as little as one hour. First delivery is free at www.instacart.com.

About Unata

Unata powers industry-leading digital experiences for North America's most well-respected grocers, with the mission to innovate the future of the grocery shopping experience. Unata enables 1-to-1 eCommerce, eCircular and eLoyalty experiences, powering the entire digital grocery experience through a single platform. Unata's award-winning work is featured by retailers including Lowes Foods, SpartanNash, Raley's, and more. To learn more, visit www.unata.com or follow Unata on Twitter or LinkedIn.

SOURCE Instacart

Related Links

http://www.instacart.com


HOUSTON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ION Geophysical Corporation (NYSE: IO) today announced that the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the previously-reported lawsuit of WesternGeco L.L.C. v. ION Geophysical Corporation, agreeing to review the lower court's judgment for legal error on whether a patent holder can obtain lost-profits damages for use of ION's products outside of the United States. We would like to take this opportunity to provide information about the case and its current status.

WesternGeco sued ION and one of ION's customers for patent infringement in 2009. In 2012, a jury issued a verdict in favor of WesternGeco and awarded WesternGeco damages for reasonable royalties and lost profits. The lost-profits damages were based on the use of ION's products outside of the United States. On appeal, ION argued that WesternGeco was not entitled to lost-profits damages for two reasons: one, that under applicable law, WesternGeco cannot recoup lost profits for the overseas use of ION's products by ION's customers; two, that lost-profits can only be recouped from a direct competitor, and that ION and WesternGeco are not direct competitors in this market.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed with ION on the first issue and, as a result, overturned the award of lost-profits damages. Since the court decided in favor of ION on this first issue, it did not decide the second issue, which ION reserved the right to re-visit in the future.

WesternGeco filed a petition for a writ of certiorari asking the United States Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeals' ruling, and on January 12, 2018, the Supreme Court granted WesternGeco's petition. WesternGeco and ION will now submit briefs to the Supreme Court on the merits of the Court of Appeals' ruling. We expect that the Supreme Court will hold oral argument in April 2018 and will issue a decision by the end of June 2018. ION firmly believes in its legal position on this issue and that the Federal Circuit made the correct decision. If the Supreme Court upholds the Court of Appeals' decision, the case will be over and ION will owe no further damages.

If the Supreme Court overturns the Federal Circuit's decision, the case will be remanded back to the Court of Appeals, at which point ION will present its second argument for eliminating the award of lost profits.

Other proceedings may have an impact on WesternGeco's ability to recover lost profits damages even if WesternGeco prevails in the Supreme Court. ION was a party to a challenge to the validity of WesternGeco's patents by means of an Inter Partes Review ("IPR") with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board ("PTAB"). While the patent infringement lawsuit was pending on appeal, the PTAB invalidated four of the six patent claims that formed the basis for the jury verdict in this case. WesternGeco appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is scheduled to hear oral argument on January 23, 2018. If the Court of Appeals affirms the PTAB's invalidation of the patents, that may provide a separate ground for reducing or vacating any lost-profits award. In addition, there may be additional bases for challenging the amount of any lost-profits damages, which remain to be litigated in further proceedings.

"We understand this is an important area of law for the Supreme Court to consider and we will continue to defend vigorously against WesternGeco's claims and the award of lost-profits damages," stated Brian Hanson, ION's President and Chief Executive Officer. "We firmly believe our legal position is correct and we will advocate our position forcefully in the Supreme Court. While we would like to see closure to this litigation as soon as possible, if the Supreme Court reverses the decision, we are confident about re-visiting our second argument at the Court of Appeals. In addition, we believe the IPR process underway is also very positive for our legal position. This is clearly a David and Goliath situation where a company like Schlumberger has the luxury of unlimited legal expenditure without having to rationalize the additional expense of continuing these proceedings. In any case, if the Supreme Court does not put this issue to rest this year, we expect this lawsuit will continue for years, potentially beyond 2020."

To learn more about the possible timing of these proceedings, visit iongeo.com/lawsuit.

About ION

ION is a leading provider of technology-driven solutions to the global oil and gas industry. ION's offerings are designed to help companies reduce risk and optimize assets throughout the E&P lifecycle. For more information, visit iongeo.com.

Contacts

ION (Investor relations)

Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Steve Bate, +1 281.552.3011

[email protected]

ION (Legal)

EVP, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary

Matthew Powers, +1 713.366.7226

[email protected]

The information herein 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. These forward-looking statements may include information and other statements that are not of historical fact. Actual results may vary materially from those described in these forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements reflect numerous assumptions and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include risks associated with the WesternGeco litigation and other related proceedings. We cannot predict the outcome of this litigation or proceedings. For additional information regarding the WesternGeco litigation see our Form 10-Q for the quarter ending September 30, 2017, filed on November 2, 2017. Additional risk factors, which could affect actual results are disclosed by the Company in its fillings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including its Form 10-K, Form 10-Qs and Form 8-Ks filed during the year. The Company expressly disclaims any obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements.

SOURCE ION Geophysical Corporation

Related Links

http://www.iongeo.com


MUNICH, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

ipan, a leading global provider of IP management services and software, is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Jens Lutcke as new Chief Executive Officer of the Group. Prior to joining the ipan Group, Dr. Jens Lutcke served as co-founder and managing director of the fintech company SOFORT, which developed under his leadership from a start-up to an important player in the European payment market. After SOFORT was acquired by Klarna Group in 2014, he headed the DACH region for Klarna. He will succeed the current CEO and founder of ipan, Anton Bory, who will continue to be closely involved with the Group as an Advisory Board member. Dr. Jens Lutcke will start his new role in February 2018.

Since inception in 2004, the ipan Group has developed into a leading provider of world class IP software and services, managing more than two million IP rights for more than 400 customers and across a network of more than 100 leading IP firms representing more than 240 global jurisdictions. Following its acquisition by leading global private equity firm Warburg Pincus in 2014, the ipan Group has added over 100 new customers and more than doubled its revenues and the number of IP payments processed. This strong momentum has been driven by the continued underlying growth of the IP services and software market as well as, more importantly, ipan's expansion into new locations in the US, UK, the Nordics, and Benelux as well as the acquisition of software providers Unycom and ipss. Most recently, the Group announced its investment into and strategic partnership with US-based IPfolio Corporation, a provider of Saas-based next-generation IP management software. In early 2018, the ipan Group will launch ip-x-change, its new open platform for IP, data and software services.

Dr. Jens Lutcke commented: "I am excited to join ipan as its Chief Executive and support the company through its next stage of growth. The business is strongly positioned in an attractive market environment based on its unique partnership model and the broad services and software product range provided by its group companies."

Anton Bory, founder and CEO of ipan, said: "We are proud to welcome Jens to ipan as our new Chief Executive. His track record as both an entrepreneur, as well as an executive, provides him with a compelling combination of operational, technical and managerial expertise. I am confident he will successfully continue the growth and strategic development of the Group."

Max Fowinkel, Managing Director at Warburg Pincus International LLC, said: "We are delighted to welcome Jens to ipan. He is joining the company during a strong period of growth and with a compelling range of IP services and software solutions. We are excited to enter the next phase of strategic development under his leadership. At the same time, I would like to also thank Anton for his vital role in the development of the company since inception in 2004 and for his trusted partnership with Warburg Pincus since our investment in 2014. We look forward to his continued support as an Advisory Board member."

About ipan

ipan (Intellectual Property Associates Network), is a leading provider of IP management services and software, supporting the largest IP owners around the globe. Founded in 2004, ipan is a strategic alliance of renowned IP experts committed to providing clients a level of quality, transparency and cost savings not available through any other source in the IP market. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, with offices in UK, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria and the United States, the company's disruptive approach to optimizing process and cost has made it the solution of choice for the largest IP owners and one of the world's fastest growing IP service companies.

SOURCE ipan
TORONTO, Jan. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - iSIGN Media Solutions Inc. ("iSIGN" or "Company") (TSX-V: ISD) (OTC: ISDSF), a leading provider of interactive mobile advertising solutions that serves brands, commercial locations, retailers and service providers throughout North America today announced it has closed the shares for debt transaction ("Transaction") that it had entered into as previously announced on January 9, 2018.

The Company completed the Transaction by issuing 495,505 common shares ("Shares") at a deemed price of $0.14 per share. The Shares issued are subject to a four month hold period, ending May 16, 2018.

The total amount of indebtedness settled by this arrangement is $69,371. The Company agreed to satisfy this outstanding indebtedness with shares in order to preserve its cash for operational purposes.

About iSIGN Media

iSIGN Media, based in Toronto, is a data-focused, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that is a pioneering leader in gathering point-of-sale data and mobile shopper preferences to generate actionable data and reveal valuable consumer insights. Creators of the Smart suite of products, a patented interactive proximity marketing technology, iSIGN enables brands to deliver targeted messaging, personalized offers and loyalty perks to consumers' mobile devices in proximity and with real-time proof of redemption. iSIGN's data gathering capabilities provide analytics on price points, typical purchases, in-store dwell time and other shopper metrics that identify emerging consumer behaviors. These insights enable smarter business decisions and provide increased ROI metrics for more transparent marketing. iSIGN delivers relevant, timely messages on an opt-in basis at no charge to consumers, transmitting rich media to consumer mobile devices via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity in complete privacy as opposed to iBeacons, apps, downloads and required surrendering of personal information. Proven to increase brand engagement and customer loyalty, iSIGN generates preference-based, predictive "clean data" without compromising consumer privacy. Partners include: IBM, Keyser Retail Solutions, Baylor University, Verizon Wireless, TELUS and AOpen America Inc. www.isignmedia.com

 2018 iSIGN Media Solutions Inc. All Rights Reserved. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.

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 or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE iSIGN Media Solutions Inc.
Whether you love fishing or have never fished before, the nearly 20,000 rainbow trout that are stocked in the Guadalupe River are a great incentive to try it.

Gruene Outfitters in New Braunfels Gruene Historic District offer expert instruction for beginner fly anglers to learn key components of fly fishing. Novices can learn the basics of fly fishing on a two-hour, on the water class. Trips include rods and tackle and lunch, snacks, and beverages.

Troutfest 2018, February 16-18, hosted at the Lazy L & L Campground by the largest chapter of Trout Unlimited in the country (5,500+ members) includes an Expo with fly-casting lessons, presentations by expert guides, outfitters, and gear manufacturers. There are women-focused events, on-water watercraft demos, kids events and a banquet featuring Trout Unlimited CEO Chris Wood.

Live Music

The Texas Hill Country is hopping with live music venues  honkey-tonks, dance halls, outdoor concert venues, and theaters. Coming up soon:

On January 20, John McEuen, member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, producer (and musician) on the recent Steve Martin banjo album, and American Banjo Museum Hall of Famer, plays at the Brauntex Performing Arts Theatre.

There's a George Jones Tribute February 8, polka king Alex Meixner celebrates Fat Tuesday on Feb 13, Marty Stuart and Country Music Hall of Famer Connie Smith perform February 15, and there's a Guy Clark and Steve Earle Tribute February 19.

Gruene Hall, the oldest dance hall in Texas, hosts a New Orleans-styled Gospel Brunch with a Texas Twist at the Hall Feb 11.

Food, beer and wine

With its own great restaurants, wine bars, and craft breweries, New Braunfels is a perfect headquarters for exploring nearby Texas Hill Country culinary destinations.

Food

In New Braunfels check out the local German fare at several restaurants:

Krause's Biergarten and Cafe  Serves classic Deutsche meals - with a Texas flair. The biergarten houses one of the largest tap walls in New Braunfels, offering a wide selection of local craft brews and hometown favorites.

Alpine Haus Restaurant  Specializes in Bavarian style cooking with influences from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. They also offer an extensive collection of German beers and wine with pairing information on the menu.

Friesenhaus Restaurant features classic German fare and 16 German beers all on draft and served in traditional 0.3 liter to 2-liter glassware. Favorite German wines like Pinot Gris or Spatlese are also available.

New Braunfels is headquarters for the Hill Country Craft Beer Tour and makes a great home base for a tour of the Texas Hill Country's 52 wineries  now second only to Napa Valley in popularity.

Beer

New Braunfels Brewing Company, a reincarnation of the original 1915 brewery, produces an assortment of wheat and sour beers along with experimental and limited brews.

Guadalupe Brewing Company focuses on beer made from local ingredients, such as honey from an Amish community in Beeville, TX, and wheat from Marion, TX.

The Faust Brewing Company, housed in the 1929 Faust Hotel, has two signature beers, three "Character Signature" beers and a selection of seasonal drafts on tap.

Wine

"Come & Taste It" in the Gruene Historic District of New Braunfels, offers tastings of a Texas winery's newest release, top-selling or hard-to-find wines February 15.

Dry Comal Creek Vineyards, a small boutique wine producer, makes a "Texas Style" wine that includes wines made with native Black Spanish Lenoir grapes.

La Cruz de Comal Winery produces wines processed in a "natural" way - fermentations on natural yeasts; and no additions of acid, sugar, grape concentrate, powdered tannins, artificial coloring agents or sulfites.

More Outdoor Fun

Check out these favorite local attractions for more outdoor fun in New Braunfels:

Think out of the box and find a new experience in January and February. Make some great memories and break up that long cold time of the year. For more information, see vacationing in NewBraunfels.

SOURCE Greater New Braunfels Convention & Visitors Bureau

Related Links

http://innewbraunfels.com


RALEIGH, N.C. and SACRAMENTO, Calif., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Eskaton, a nonprofit community-based senior living provider offering innovative housing, healthcare and social services, and K4Connect, a mission-centered technology company, today announced a strategic partnership to deploy K4Connect's groundbreaking senior living solution, K4Community, in communities across California. K4Community will be integrated into 10 of Eskaton's existing and planned senior living communities throughout 2018.

Eskaton's multi-community rollout of K4Community highlights its continued commitment to providing life-enriching programs and innovative health and wellness initiatives for residents. The deployment will offer the latest in "connected-life" technology to over 1,000 residents, beginning with Eskaton Village Roseville in early 2018. Other Eskaton locations that will benefit from K4Community in 2018 include The Trousdale in the Bay Area Peninsula region, Eskaton Monroe Lodge in Sacramento, Eskaton Village Carmichael and Eskaton Lodge Granite Bay. Additional Eskaton communities in Cameron Park, Gold River, Grass Valley, Placerville and Orangevale will follow soon thereafter.

"We're thrilled to be working with such a forward-thinking team at Eskaton," said F. Scott Moody, Co-founder and CEO of K4Connect. "Eskaton is at the forefront of innovation in many ways and our connected-life platform provides a solid foundation for these innovations, both now and into the future. K4Community goes well beyond the idea a smart home by integrating every aspect of community living into a single easy-to-use resident application. With technology advancing so rapidly today, a plug-and-play platform that can change and expand with the latest innovations is well aligned with Eskaton's focus on long-term life enrichment initiatives."

K4Community's connected-life technology integrates the latest in-home automation, connected health and wellness products, as well as social engagement services, all focused on making the lives of residents, "simpler, healthier and happier." K4Community enables residents to manage multiple aspects of their lives  including more personalized and responsive living environments, the streamlined capability to connect with loved ones and other community members, and the ability stay up to date with the latest dining, events, wellness programs and community news  all through an easy to use application designed specifically for older adults. Moreover, K4Community provides staff in-depth management and analytics tools that further enable them to provide the very best in care and hospitality.

"Innovation continues to be an integral part of Eskaton's mission to enhance the lives of older adults. Our partners at K4Connect have successfully worked closely with residents and staff at two pilot locations to create a meaningful experience of connection with family, friends and community life," said Sheri Peifer, Eskaton Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer. "Eskaton strives to be one of the most innovative senior living community operators in the country. The challenge has always been figuring out how to integrate so many disparate technologies and do so in a way that engages our residents. Our pilots last year proved to us that K4Community was the solution we were looking for today and into the future, and as importantly, that the two companies' missions were very much aligned. K4Community will help give our residents easier access to the things that matter most to them, whether in their homes, the community at large or with family and friends outside the community."

To learn more about K4Connect and K4Community, please visit: www.k4connect.com.

About K4Connect

K4Connect is a mission-centered technology company creating solutions that serve and empower older adults and individuals living with disabilities. K4Connect's products enable simpler, smarter living environments and healthier lives, while fostering connections among members, family and staff. The Company's first product, K4Community, is specifically designed for the residents and operators of senior living communities and is currently serving thousands of older adults across the U.S. For more information, please visit http://www.k4connect.com/.

About Eskaton

The Sacramento region in Northern California is home to Eskaton, a nonprofit senior living provider offering innovative housing, healthcare and social services. Every day thousands of older adults enjoy living life to its fullest at our many senior living communities offering independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, memory care and rehabilitation; or at home with our robust home support programs. With five decades of experience and a national reputation for innovation, Eskaton is Transforming the Aging Experience. For more information, please call 1-866-ESKATON, or visit www.eskaton.org.

Media Contact:

Lindsay Hull

Zer0 to 5ive for K4Connect

(508) 963-1356

[email protected]

SOURCE K4Connect

Related Links

https://www.k4connect.com


HOUSTON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- KBR, Inc. (NYSE: KBR) announced today that its joint venture with SOCAR has been awarded two separate Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) contracts for a new Production, Drilling, Quarters (PDQ) platform  the Azeri Central East (ACE) platform  to be located in the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) field in the Azerbaijan sector of the Caspian Sea.

The contracts, which were awarded by the Azerbaijan International Oil Company, cover the provision of FEED services for the new platform, along with associated brownfield tie-ins to other existing platforms in the ACG field, and a separate contract for the subsea services FEED.

Following previous awards to other regional and international clients, these contracts mark the 4th and 5th awards to the joint venture, SOCAR-KBR Limited Liability Company (SOCAR-KBR), since its inception in mid-2015. SOCAR-KBR was formed to help further Azerbaijan's ambition for creating a world-class Azerbaijan based engineering company.

"Through the Azerbaijani engineering company, SOCAR-KBR we are partnering KBR's proven tools, systems, and procedures and our project track record in the Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia (AGT) region with SOCAR's operation knowledge and experience in the oil and gas sector," said Jay Ibrahim, President, EMEA. "KBR has been working in the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey (AGT) region since 1993 which gives us unrivalled experience and knowledge of existing on and offshore greenfield and brownfield assets. During that time, KBR has completed over 25 million man-hours of work with zero lost time incidents."

"These projects will be led by the Caspian engineering team in London with maximum local execution support from the Baku office where local engineers are delivering various projects under the SOCAR-KBR umbrella," Ibrahim continued. "We are proud that currently more than 75% of our Baku based SOCAR-KBR team are Azerbaijani engineers."

The value of the contract was booked into the backlog of unfilled orders for KBR's Engineering & Construction business segment in Q4 of 2017.

About KBR, Inc.

KBR is a global provider of differentiated professional services and technologies across the asset and program life cycle within the Government Services and Hydrocarbons sectors. KBR employs over 34,000 people worldwide (including our joint ventures), with customers in more than 80 countries, and operations in 40 countries, across three synergistic global businesses:

Government Services, serving government customers globally, including capabilities that cover the full life-cycle of defense, space, aviation and other government programs and missions from research and development, through systems engineering, test and evaluation, program management, to operations, maintenance, and field logistics

Technology & Consulting, including proprietary technology focused on the monetization of hydrocarbons (especially natural gas and natural gas liquids) in ethylene and petrochemicals; ammonia, nitric acid and fertilizers; oil refining; gasification; oil and gas consulting; integrity management; naval architecture and proprietary hulls; and downstream consulting

Engineering & Construction, including onshore oil and gas; LNG (liquefaction and regasification)/GTL; oil refining; petrochemicals; chemicals; fertilizers; differentiated EPC; maintenance services (Brown & Root Industrial Services); offshore oil and gas (shallow-water, deep-water, subsea); floating solutions (FPU, FPSO, FLNG & FSRU) and program management

KBR is proud to work with its customers across the globe to provide technology, value-added services, integrated EPC delivery and long term operations and maintenance services to ensure consistent delivery with predictable results. At KBR, We Deliver.

Visit www.kbr.com

Forward Looking Statement

The statements in this press release that are not historical statements, including statements regarding future financial performance, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the company's control that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: the outcome of and the publicity surrounding audits and investigations by domestic and foreign government agencies and legislative bodies; potential adverse proceedings by such agencies and potential adverse results and consequences from such proceedings; the scope and enforceability of the company's indemnities from its former parent; changes in capital spending by the company's customers; the company's ability to obtain contracts from existing and new customers and perform under those contracts; structural changes in the industries in which the company operates; escalating costs associated with and the performance of fixed-fee projects and the company's ability to control its cost under its contracts; claims negotiations and contract disputes with the company's customers; changes in the demand for or price of oil and/or natural gas; protection of intellectual property rights; compliance with environmental laws; changes in government regulations and regulatory requirements; compliance with laws related to income taxes; unsettled political conditions, war and the effects of terrorism; foreign operations and foreign exchange rates and controls; the development and installation of financial systems; increased competition for employees; the ability to successfully complete and integrate acquisitions; and operations of joint ventures, including joint ventures that are not controlled by the company.

KBR's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K, any subsequent Form 10-Qs and 8-Ks, and other Securities and Exchange Commission filings discuss some of the important risk factors that KBR has identified that may affect the business, results of operations and financial condition. Except as required by law, KBR undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason.

SOURCE KBR, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.kbr.com


PITTSBURGH, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Kennametal Inc. (NYSE: KMT) announced today two changes to its business segment leadership and executive management team.

Effective January 16, 2018, Peter Dragich will become Kennametal vice president and president of the Industrial business with global responsibility for growth and modernization of the company's metalworking solutions and services.

At the same time, Ron Port will become Kennametal vice president and president of the Infrastructure business segment with global responsibility for the company's advanced materials, earth cutting tools, engineering components and ceramics business.

"These leadership changes are designed to position the company to well execute the growth, simplification and modernization plans we presented during Analyst Day in December 2017," said Chris Rossi, Kennametal president and CEO.

"I want to take this opportunity to thank Chuck Byrnes for his leadership of the Industrial business and certainly wish him well as he pursues other opportunities. Pete will continue to execute the strategies Chuck has started, while working to accelerate the execution of our modernization program. Pete's nearly 30 years of experience in supply chain, operations and cross-functional collaboration make him uniquely qualified to lead this effort. Furthermore, Ron brings 25 years of experience leading large P&L's, strategy and corporate business development. In addition, he was integral to the development of the current Infrastructure business segment strategy. Both leaders have a record of delivering results," he added.

Dragich has led Kennametal's Infrastructure business for the past two years, and served as the company's vice president of supply chain and logistics before that. Prior to joining Kennametal, he was vice president, global field operations, climate, controls and security for United Technologies Corporation. He also served in several manufacturing management positions at Ford Motor Company and was a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps.

Dragich holds a master of business administration in strategy and operations from the University of Michigan and a bachelor of science in operations research and management from Case Western Reserve University.

Port joined Kennametal in 2015 and most recently led the company's global engineered components business within the Infrastructure team. Prior to Kennametal, he led global P&L roles at Xylem, Inc. and ITT Corporation, and led strategy and business development for SPX Corp. (Flow Industrial).

Port holds a master of business administration from University of Pittsburgh, a master of science degree in chemical engineering from Florida Institute of Technology and a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from University of Pittsburgh.

Dragich and Port will report directly to Kennametal President and CEO Chris Rossi.

About Kennametal

At the forefront of advanced materials innovation for more than 75 years, Kennametal Inc. is a global industrial technology leader delivering productivity to customers through materials science, tooling and wear-resistant solutions. Customers across aerospace, earthworks, energy, general engineering and transportation turn to Kennametal to help them manufacture with precision and efficiency. Every day approximately 11,000 employees are helping customers in more than 60 countries stay competitive. Kennametal generated nearly $2.1 billion in revenues in fiscal 2017. Learn more at www.kennametal.com

SOURCE Kennametal Inc.

Related Links

http://www.kennametal.com


SANTA ANA, Calif., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Kush Bottles, Inc. (OTCQB: KSHB), a leading provider of packaging, supplies, vaporizers, accessories and branding solutions for the regulated cannabis industry, today reported financial results for its first fiscal quarter of 2018, for the period ended November 30, 2017.

Fiscal First Quarter Financial Summary

Revenue was up 258% Year-over-Year to $8.85 million .

. Gross margins were 30%, compared with 34% in the prior year period, which is attributed to increased business in the lower margin vaporizer product segment.

Net income, including $382,000 in non-cash stock compensation, $202,000 in depreciation and amortization expense and $1.9 million in SG&A, was $94,615 compared to net loss of $161,000 in the fiscal first quarter of 2017.

in non-cash stock compensation, in depreciation and amortization expense and in SG&A, was compared to net loss of in the fiscal first quarter of 2017. Cash balance was $5.5 million as of November 30, 2017 compared to $0.9 million at August 31, 2017 .

as of compared to at . Working capital was $8.6 million as of November 30, 2017 compared to $3.4 million at August 31, 2017 .

Nick Kovacevich, Chairman and CEO of Kush Bottles, commented, "We entered fiscal 2018 with excellent momentum as we saw the impact of the strategic initiatives implemented throughout 2017 start to take hold. Revenues for the first fiscal quarter of 2018 reached approximately $8.85 million, representing a 258% increase compared with fiscal Q1 2017. This strength in the business led to net profits of $94,615 in fiscal Q1 2018. We also saw our cash balance increase to $5.5 million, which we plan to invest towards inventory purchasing, development of proprietary products, and other strategic initiatives."

Mr. Kovacevich continued, "During the first fiscal quarter of 2018, we saw the release of California's new temporary regulations for medical and adult-use cannabis sales, which took effect on January 1, 2018. California is not only the U.S.'s largest cannabis market, but also our home market where we have already extensively invested in sales, marketing and infrastructure. We consider the legalization of adult-use cannabis sales to be a major opportunity to scale the business throughout 2018 and beyond, and we have made significant headway to establish the Company as a leader in this market. Many of our clients have been granted temporary licenses and we are working with them closely during this hectic transition period as California finalizes its permanent regulations over the next 6 to 12 months."

Earnings Results Conference Call

The company will also host a conference call today, Tuesday, January 16, 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.

For more information on Kush Bottles, Inc., call: 888-920-5874, or visit: www.kushbottles.com.

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:

Phil Carlson / Elizabeth Barker

KCSA Strategic Communications

212-896-1233 / 212-896-1203

[email protected]

PR Contact:

Anne Donohoe

KCSA Strategic Communications

212-896-1265

[email protected]

***Tables Follow***

KUSH BOTTLES, INC.

Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations

(Unaudited)





For the Three Months Ended November 30,





2017



2016

REVENUE

$ 8,847,115



$ 2,472,295

COST OF GOODS SOLD



6,162,120





1,637,652

GROSS PROFIT



2,684,995





834,643

OPERATING EXPENSES















Depreciation and amortization



201,814





9,304

Stock compensation expense



381,743





115,244

Selling, general and administrative



1,949,995





847,076

Total Operating Expenses



2,533,552





971,624

INCOME (LOSS) FROM OPERATIONS



151,443





(136,981)

OTHER INCOME (EXPENSES)















Other expense









(23,944)

Interest expense



(2,413)





(1,033)

Total Other Income (Expenses)



(2,413)





(24,977)

INCOME (LOSS) BEFORE INCOME TAXES



149,030





(161,958)

PROVISION FOR INCOME TAXES



54,415









NET INCOME (LOSS)

$ 94,615



$ (161,958)

BASIC INCOME (LOSS) PER SHARE

$ 0.00



$ (0.00)

DILUTED INCOME (LOSS) PER SHARE

$ 0.00



$ (0.00)

WEIGHTED AVERAGE NUMBER OF COMMON SHARES OUTSTANDING - BASIC



59,194,323





48,713,496

WEIGHTED AVERAGE NUMBER OF COMMON SHARES OUTSTANDING - DILUTED



65,908,368





50,511,299



See accompanying notes to the unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements

KUSH BOTTLES, INC.

Condensed Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows

(Unaudited)





For the Three Months Ended





November 30,





2017



2016

CASH FLOWS FROM OPERATING ACTIVITIES















Net income (loss)

$ 94,615



$ (161,958)

Adjustments to reconcile net income (loss) to net cash provided by (used in) operating activities:















Depreciation and amortization



201,814





29,735

Depreciation cost of goods sold



41,776







Stock compensation expense



381,743





115,244

Changes in operating assets and liabilities















Accounts receivable



(1,069,410)





(66,174)

Prepaids



(1,545,793)





(366,550)

Inventory



(96,507)





(94,262)

Accounts payable



760,577





176,696

Accrued expenses and other current liabilities



270,868





(111,351)

Net cash used in operating activities



(960,317)





(478,620)

CASH FLOWS FROM INVESTING ACTIVITIES















Acquisition of web domain



(44,321)







Purchase of property and equipment



(48,580)





(164,976)

Net cash used in investing activities



(92,901)





(164,976)

CASH FLOWS FROM FINANCING ACTIVITIES















Repayment of car loan



(5,495)







Earn out payable



(85,000)







Repayment of note payable



(333,395)





(4,967)

Proceeds from line of credit



1,500,000







Proceeds from sale of stock



4,609,555





1,621,999

Net cash provided by financing activities



5,685,665





1,617,032

NET INCREASE (DECREASE) IN CASH



4,632,447





973,436

CASH AT BEGINNING OF PERIOD



916,984





1,027,003

CASH AT END OF PERIOD

$ 5,549,431



$ 2,000,439

SUPPLEMENTAL DISCLOSURES OF CASH FLOW INFORMATION:















CASH PAID FOR:















Interest

$ 2,370



$ 1,033

Income taxes

$ 



$ 

NON-CASH INVESTING AND FINANCING ACTIVITIES















Services prepaid for in common stock



34,077



$ 103,617



See accompanying notes to the condensed consolidated financial statements

SOURCE Kush Bottles

Related Links

http://www.kushbottles.com


"In this era of unprecedented disruption, visionary executive leadership is critical for identifying and acting on opportunities for business innovation," said Hunter Muller, HMG Strategy's President & CEO. "To help their companies to accomplish their objectives, CIOs and technology executives must act as the CEOs of technology to successfully guide the enterprise into the next era of digital transformation."

The Phoenix CIO Executive Leadership Summit will kick-off with a distinguished executive panel featuring Steve Phillips, Chairman of the Board, Wick Communications and David Jarvis, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Honeywell, who will explore what it takes to lead, reimagine and reinvent the enterprise along with their roles in leading digital transformation strategies and opportunities for working with fellow members of the C-suite to ensure successful execution.

Other compelling sessions will include an executive panel that will focus on best practices for balancing cyber security with agility and innovation; a panel of leading search executives who will examine the top attributes of effective technology executives; an executive panel that will share valuable approaches for providing a 360-degree omnichannel customer experience and strengthening share of wallet; a panel of technology executives that will explore emerging technologies that are driving speed to market and opportunities to obtain a competitive advantage; and an executive panel featuring admired technology executives including Cynthia Nustad, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, HMS; Kevin Haskew, SVP & CIO, ON Semiconductor; and Jim Haskin, SVP & CIO, Aspect Software who will share experiences of how courageous leadership can create value and generate new waves of business growth in the modern enterprise.

Prominent speakers at the summit will include:

Michael Guggemos , CIO, Insight Enterprises

, CIO, Insight Enterprises David Jarvis , Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Honeywell

, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Honeywell Steve Phillips , Chairman of the Board, Wick Communications

, Chairman of the Board, Wick Communications Morgan Reed , CIO, State of Arizona

, CIO, Caren Shiozaki , EVP & CIO, TMST, Inc.

, EVP & CIO, TMST, Inc. Michael Spandau, SVP Global IT & CIO, Fender Musical Instruments

Platinum Partners for the Phoenix Summit include Neudesic and Nutanix. Gold Partners include Cylance, Rubrik, Technical & Business Consulting, LLC, and Zerto. Supporting Partners include Gemalto. The Digital Cybersecurity Partner of the Year includes SecurityScorecard. Strategic Partners include Egon Zehnder, Heidrick & Struggles, Korn Ferry, Russell Reynolds Associates, and Spencer Stuart. Alliance Partners include Amplify Partners, Glynn Capital, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia. Association Partners include Arizona Technology Council, the Arizona Chapter of the Society for Information Management (SIM), and Year Up Arizona.

To visit the Phoenix summit website and register for the event, click here.

About HMG Strategy

HMG Strategy is the world's largest independent and most trusted provider of executive networking events and thought leadership to support the 360-degree needs of technology leaders. Our regional CIO and CISO Executive Leadership Series, newsletters, authored books, and online Resource Center deliver proprietary research on leadership, innovation, transformation, and career ascent.

The HMG Strategy global network consists of over 300,000 senior IT executives, industry experts and world-class thought leaders. HMG Strategy's exclusive CIO and CISO Executive Leadership Alliance (CELA) program provides top-tier technology executives with unparalleled peer-to-peer off-the-record straight talk to strengthen their decision-making capabilities and accelerate their career ascent. The CELA program is complemented by the CELA Executive Decision Support services (EDS) which connects enterprise technology executives with their contemporaries who are able to offer their expertise, practical experience, and insights in disciplines ranging from effective C-suite communication strategies to crafting successful 1-3-5-year technology roadmaps.

Additionally, our partnerships with the world's leading search firms provide vital insights into the evolving roles of the CIO and CISO.

The HMG Strategy CIO Executive Leadership Series offers a completely unique experience for IT executives to gain the latest insights and best practices for driving increased business value through the use of IT, and build invaluable relationships with peers and industry experts. The HMG Strategy CISO Executive Leadership Series is designed to provide information security leaders with the insights and best practices they need to tackle the most pressing cyber security challenges facing the enterprise today and going forward.

For more information on joining the strongest executive leadership network and exploring our independent, forward-thinking thought leadership platform, please visit www.hmgstrategy.com.

SOURCE HMG Strategy

Related Links

http://www.hmgstrategy.com


NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- HIROMI ASAI, New York-based rising fashion brand, designed by Hiromi Asai, who made her runway debut for her women's collection at New York Fashion Week in 2016, presented her menswear collection at Pitti Uomo and Capsule Show in 2017. For the Autumn/Winter 2018-2019 season, HIROMI ASAI presents a new collection at Capsule Show New York Men's AW18, held at Pier 94 in New York on January 23-25, 2018.

Silk Coat by Nishijin-ori technique "Venus", Kimono Silk Bow Tie, by Raden technique "Purple Cobweb", Pongee Silk Suit "Baron", and Dress Shirt, Cotton and Silk mix - HIROMI ASAI AW 18 Men's Collection Kimono Silk Jacket "New York Night" and Bottom, Pongee Silk - HIROMI ASAI AW 18 Men's Collection

The theme of the new HIROMI ASAI collection 18-19 A/W is "Baron." Its design concept is menswear for a baron who lives in a corner of New York Manhattan. The collection consists of suits, jackets, coats, shirts, bottoms and ties, for both casual and business settings (http://www.hiromiasainy.com).

One of the highlights of the HIROMI ASAI menswear collection for this season is a golden-black coat "Venus," which was woven with the traditional Japanese Nishijin-ori brocade technique, mainly used for manufacturing Obi sashes (belts). This coat makes an ambiguous outfit: gorgeous and chic. HIROMI ASAI also provides a wide range of jacket collections for this season. One of them is a silk jacket "Starry Night," which looks similar to a tweed jacket, but was made with hand-woven silk textiles using hand-dyed wide thread. All textiles of the HIROMI ASAI collection were woven and/or dyed in workshops all over Japan, using traditional Kimono manufacturing techniques.

"This is my third season for our Men's collection. We always try to revive the essence of Japanese Kimono for the modern fashion on the world market. For this new collection, I am convinced that we can develop luxurious and sophisticated menswear, more suitable for a worldwide market, without sticking to Japanese design motifs," said Ms. Asai.

HIROMI ASAI will also display several shoes that fit into the new collection, made by H.KATSUKAWA, a unique leather shoe maker in Japan.

"We would like to propose men's fashion styling from head to toe. This time we can proudly display a shoe collection that fits to our collection, with the cooperation of H. KATSUKAWA," said Ms. Asai. "The art of Kimono creation is still on the verge of crisis. I desire to bring the HIROMI ASAI collection made by Kimono textiles to its rightful forefront in world fashion. Please come to see our new collection at Capsule Show."

DETAILED INFORMATION



Exhibition Name: Capsule Show New York Men's AW18

Venue: Pier 94

Address: 711 12th Ave, New York, NY 10019, USA

Booth No: b13

Duration: January 23-25, 2018

http://www.hiromiasainy.com/ (HP)

https://www.instagram.com/hiromi.asai/ (Instagram)

https://www.facebook.com/modeandclassic/ (Facebook)

http://www.pittimmagine.com/en/corporate/fairs/uomo/specials/make91/hitomiasai.html (Pitti Uomo Page)

ABOUT HIROMI ASAI

Hiromi Asai is a New York-based fashion designer. Hiromi Asai established New York-based fashion brand, HIROMI ASAI, in 2016. HIROMI ASAI creates simple and sophisticated women's and men's styles, all made by finest Japanese textiles, which are produced by traditional handmade Kimono manufacturing techniques.

HIROMI ASAI first presented a womenswear collection on the runway at 2016 F/W New York Fashion Week, which was covered by many media, including NBC News, Newsweek, and The Independent. HIROMI ASAI expanded her collection to menswear and debuted the first menswear collection at Pitti Uomo in January, 2017. HIROMI ASAI presented the second men's collection at Pitti Uomo in June, 2017 and at Capsule Show New York Men's in July, 2017. HIROMI ASAI collection is internationally distributed and the neckties are now available at Amazon Fashion (www.amazon.com/shops/hiromiasainy).

Media Contact:

Hiromi Asai

646-242-4156

[email protected]

SOURCE HIROMI ASAI - Mode & Classic LLC

Related Links

https://www.hiromiasainy.com


CSE: MDM

OTCQX: MRPHF

KELOWNA, BC, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Marapharm Ventures Inc. "Marapharm" is pleased to present its views along with state government comments in response to the Department of Justice's memo regarding marijuana enforcement policies for the United States, specifically for Nevada. Marapharm owns 9 cultivation, production, and delivery licenses and properties in Nevada. Marapharm is the largest holder of licenses with more than 300,000 square feet of medical and of recreational use licenses in Las Vegas.

The Department of Justice announcement is generating much needed discourse on the cannabis issue and may ultimately help the cannabis industry to lobby for some major changes at the federal level. For several years marijuana laws have been dealt with at state level. Eight states have legalized cannabis for recreational use. Twenty-nine states, two territories, and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis for medical purposes. In August 2017, a Quinnipiac poll found national support for cannabis was 94%. In October 2017, Marijuana Business Daily estimated that there were recreational marijuana sales of $1.2 in Nevada each day and that the market was growing rapidly.

"Marapharm's understanding of what Jeff Sessions said is that he did not actually announce that there would be a crackdown on cannabis businesses, but rather that it would be left to the discretion of the local US attorneys in the various districts to decide how and when to enforce federal laws. This does not amount to much of a change in policy and makes the announcement seem unnecessary. With regard to medical cannabis, since 2014 the federal budget has prohibited the government from using federal funds to prosecute medical cannabis businesses pursuant to a budget rider championed by US Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, a Republican.

Marapharm believes that the administration and the Department of Justice will uphold President Trump's campaign promise to not interfere with state-legal cannabis programs. Accordingly, we are on fast forward with growth in the United States. It's good business practice to diversify which is why we are investing resources in both medical marijuana as well as recreational. In addition, we are implementing changes to fast track our Canadian application and are looking at acquisitions in Europe as well." Linda Sampson, Marapharm CEO.

NOTABLE QUOTES RELATING TO NEVADA'S POLITICAL POSITION:

Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, a Republican, said in a statement he reiterates that he pledged to defend the law after it was approved by voters.

"Since Questions 2's enactment, my office has vigorously defended it against two related lawsuits that threatened to slow or even halt the implementation of the law, and has further assisted with the formulation and adoption of regulations to allow dispensaries to commence sales of recreational marijuana within just six months of the law's enactment," Laxalt said in a statement.

"My office has expeditiously facilitated the implementation of the law in the face of considerable uncertainty about the status of federal enforcement activity."

Nevada governor and Republican Brian Sandoval released a statement, calling Nevada's marijuana industry a model for other states.

"Since Nevada voters approved the legalization of recreational marijuana in 2016, I have called for a well-regulated, restricted and respected industry. My administration has worked to ensure these priorities are met while implementing the will of the voters and remaining within the guidelines of both the Cole and Wilkinson federal memos," he said.

U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, released a statement regarding the memo. "Attorney General Sessions says he is a headstrong advocate for states' rights. However, his decision giving free rein to federal prosecutors to target the cannabis industry in states where voters and legislatures have chosen to legalize and regulate the use of marijuana exposes his hypocrisy," Cortez Masto said in a statement. "In states like Nevada, voters have spoken loud and clear that marijuana must be regulated and taxed, and that the state should be able to enforce its marijuana laws without federal interference. By rescinding the Cole memo, this administration is trampling on the will of Nevadans and creating unnecessary confusion for our state. I call on the Attorney General to reinstate the memo and work with Congress to ensure we respect the will of states while ensuring prosecutorial resources are used effectively."

Republican Senator Dean Heller noted Sessions' deference to states' rights in his statement. "Knowing Attorney General Sessions' deference to states' rights, I strongly encourage the DOJ to meet with Governor Sandoval and Attorney General Laxalt to discuss the implications of changes to federal marijuana enforcement policy," he said. "I also urge the DOJ to work with the congressional delegations from states like Nevada that have legalized marijuana as they review and navigate the new policy."

Democrat and Las Vegas-area Representative Dina Titus also released a statement. She is a founder of the House Cannabis Caucus. "This latest move from Attorney General Sessions and the Trump Administration is a direct attack on the State of Nevada, sovereign tribal governments, and the rights of people in states, tribes, and territories all across the United States," Titus said. "The decision to rescind the Cole and Wilkinson memos undermines Nevada's $622 million-dollar industry, threatens nearly $1 billion in new investments, and jeopardizes thousands of new jobs and more than $60 million dollars in tax revenue for the State."

Democratic Representative Jacky Rosen released a statement calling the decision a "federal overreach. "Nevadans made it clear at the ballot box in 2016 that they support the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes, and their decision should stand," Rosen said. "Local changes in marijuana policy in recent years have resulted in millions of dollars in new revenue for Nevada's state budget, thousands of new jobs, and countless medical benefits for Nevadans suffering from PTSD, cancer, and other illnesses.

"This federal overreach by President Trump's Department of Justice will create uncertainty and confusion for Nevadans. These reported actions are an insult to Nevada voters, an affront to states' rights, and a threat to our local economy."

Danny Tarkanian, a Republican running for U.S. Senate in 2018, noted the will of the people in his statement." Regardless of how you personally feel about marijuana use, the citizens of Nevada have spoken. They voted to not just legalize medical marijuana, but recreational, as well," he said. "It's a decision Nevadans made for the State of Nevada and the federal government needs to recognize and honor our 10th Amendment right to do so. It's time for Big Brother to back off.

Representative Ruben Kihuen, a Democrat, also released a statement on the ruling. "Secretary Sessions' decision clashes with the will of hundreds of thousands of Nevadans and millions of Americans who have voted in favor of marijuana legalization," he said. "Mr. Sessions and the Department of Justice are reversing a years-long policy of respecting the rights of states in order to take out a personal vendetta on an industry that has sold nearly $130 million worth of product in Nevada and brought in $20 million in tax revenue to the state since July. This decision will not only impact the marijuana industry and the thousands of jobs it is creating, but it will put at risk a stable source of vital tax revenue for our state."

Clark County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak, a Democrat who is running for Nevada governor, also noted the economic impact.

"The people of Nevada have already spoken on legalized marijuana. Those in need of medicinal marijuana finally had access to relief. Entrepreneurs are now building businesses, hiring workers and paying taxes that will benefit the entire state," he said in a statement. "Now the Trump Administration wants to create a costly and confusing process to overrule the will of the voters and undo what has been a success so far. We cannot and will not stand for this or any threat by the Trump Administration to undo progress in Nevada."

Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani, a Democrat running for governor, called the decision "wrong" in a statement. "Attorney General Jeff Sessions is attempting to impose his personal agenda over the will of the more than 600,000 Nevadans who voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use," she said. "It's an egregious overstep by the federal government  and it puts millions of dollars in funding for public education in jeopardy.

We don't need this uncertainty for local dispensaries or the threat of wasting law enforcement resources on locking up non-violent drug offenders. Marijuana should be removed from Schedule 1 classification immediately."

Nevada state Sen. Aaron Ford, the Senate majority leader and candidate for Nevada attorney general, said the policy protects the state's marijuana industry from "overzealous federal intrusion" and rescinding it "could cost Nevada millions of dollars in revenue, kill jobs, and hurt our schools and local economy. "This clear example of federal government overreach is nothing more than an attempt to infringe on our state's sovereignty and is a direct insult to the Nevadans who voted in favor of a regulated marijuana industry," he said in a statement. "Nevada's burgeoning marijuana business sector has already created close to 7,000 new jobs and generated $19 million in revenue from marijuana taxes -- millions of which are deposited into the Distributive School Account for our children. "As Nevada attorney general, I will do everything within my power to defend our state's voter-approved and regulated industry and send a clear message to Attorney General Sessions and the Trump Administration that they should stay out of Nevada's business."

ABOUT MARAPHARM VENTURES INC.

www.marapharm.com

Marapharm is a publicly traded company investing in the medical and recreational cannabis space, since 2014. Marapharm has rapidly expanded to include having cultivation, production and dispensary locations in the key North American states of Washington, Nevada, and California, and are seeking expansion opportunities worldwide.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Facebook: facebook.com/marapharm

Twitter: twitter.com/marapharm

Web Program: marapharm.tv

STOCK EXCHANGES:

Marapharm trades in Canada, ticker symbol MDM on the CSE, in the United States, ticker symbol MRPHF on the OTCQB, and in Europe, ticker symbol 2Mo on the FSE. Marapharm also trades on other recognized platforms in Europe including Stuttgart, Tradegate, L & S, Quotnx, Dusseldorf, Munich, and Berlin.



Neither the CSE, the FSE nor the OTCQB has approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. Neither the CSE, the FSE nor the OTCQB accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

MARIJUANA INDUSTRY INVOLVEMENT:

Canadian listings (CSE) will remain in good standing as long as they provide the disclosure that is rightly required by regulators and complying with applicable licensing requirements and the regulatory framework enacted by the applicable state in which they operate.

Marapharm owns marijuana licenses in California and Nevada. Marijuana is legal in each state however marijuana remains illegal under US federal law and the approach to enforcement of US federal law against marijuana is subject to change. Shareholders and investors need to be aware that adverse enforcement actions could affect their investments and that Marapharm's ability to access private and public capital could be affected and or could not be available to support continuing operations. Marapharm's business is conducted in a manner consistent with state law and is in compliance with licensing requirements.

Copies of licenses are posted on Marapharm's website. Marapharm has internal compliance procedures in place and has compliance focused attorneys engaged in jurisdictions to monitor changes in laws for compliance with US federal and state law on an ongoing basis. These law firms inform any necessary changes to our policies and procedures for compliance in Canada and the US.

FORWARD - LOOKING STATEMENTS:

Certain statements contained in this news release constitute forward looking statements. The use of any of the words "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", 'may", "will", "project", "should", 'believe", and similar expressions are intended to identify forward- looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward- looking statements are based on reasonable assumption but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and the forward-looking statements included in this news release should not be unduly relied upon.

SOURCE Marapharm Ventures Inc.

Related Links

www.marapharm.com


TOLEDO, Ohio, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Marco's Pizza, the nation's fastest-growing pizza franchise, announced today the promotion of Chief Operations Officer Tony Libardi to President, effective as of the first of the year. The move comes at a pivotal time as the brand rapidly approaches the opening of its 1,000th store and celebrates its 40th anniversary year.

Libardi, a firm believer in the service profit model, will ramp up the company's focus on people, product and process to uphold the brand promise and grow to new heights. Accordingly, Libardi's Priorities will center on employee development, franchisee support, maximizing technology, and maintaining steady and rapid growth.

Key initiatives driving this new era of growth will include the addition of franchise advisory boards, an unveiling of a new restaurant prototype and a celebration of the brand's Italian heritage as it approaches its 40th anniversary. Combined, these efforts will drive Marco's larger mission of being the Pizza of Choice, Employer of Choice, and Partner of Choice in markets across the country.

"Marco's Pizza is only as successful as the people behind the brand. As I step into this new role, my energies will focus on building future leaders at the corporate and store-level to accelerate our success in becoming a premier 1,000+ unit company," said Libardi. "Our leadership team has built a culture of accountability vital to our growth. As we move forward, we plan to enhance this culture and encourage collaboration, unity, and trust among our franchisees, employees, and guests. When everyone grows together, we become an unstoppable force."

Prior to joining Marco's Pizza in 2014, Libardi spent 10 years running a $1 billion division for Burger King, leading a restaurant portfolio of 750 locations with combined sales of approximately $900 million annually as the Vice President of U.S. Company Operations. With nearly three decades of operations experience, Libardi will remain laser-focused on streamlining and simplifying internal processes while placing a strong emphasis on relationship building.

Jack Butorac, CEO of Marco's Pizza who recently accepted the prestigious Golden Chain Award and Operator of the Year awards from Nation's Restaurant News, said Libardi is the ideal leader to continue the momentum and legacy of Marco's Pizza.

"I am confident Tony will be a driving force behind the continued success of Marco's Pizza as we head into a new era," Butorac said. "With a deep understanding of the Marco's culture, he's been responsible for upgrading many of our systems and culture. His commitment to the "people" element of our mission is authentic, and will be what keeps us strong and growing long-term."

Opening a new store on average every three days, Marco's Pizza is committed to a comparable pace in 2018 and aims to have 1,500 locations open by 2020. As the only national franchise chain founded by a native Italian, Marco's Pizza has carved out a niche in the industry as the expert in authentic Italian pizza, known for its fresh never-frozen dough made daily on site, a proprietary cheese blend that is fresh never-frozen and a secret pizza sauce recipe.

ABOUT MARCO'S PIZZA:

Headquartered in Toledo, Ohio, Marco's Pizza is the fastest-growing pizza company in the United States). Marco's was founded in 1978 by Italian born, Pasquale ("Pat") Giammarco and thrives by making Italian Pizza with fresh ingredients. The company has grown from its roots as a beloved Ohio brand to operate 900 stores in over 35 states and in four countries. Most recently, Marco's Pizza was ranked No.38 on Entrepreneur's Franchise 500 list, the lead spot for Pizza companies. Other recent accolades include landing No. 2 on Forbes' Top 10 Franchises to Invest In in the medium investment range, No. 3 on the Military Times Best For Vets list, No. 4 on the Franchise Times Fast and Serious list, and the No. 2 fastest growing U.S. chain on the Nation's Restaurant News Top 100 report. To inquire about franchise opportunities with Marco's Pizza visit marcosfranchising.com.

SOURCE Marcos Pizza

Related Links

http://www.marcos.com


FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Mark A. Tepper law firm has filed claim against UBS (NYSE: UBS) on behalf of a retired school teacher and her husband.

The claim, filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), seeks recovery for unsuitable recommendations and other violations of FINRA Rules.

The claim contends that a UBS broker purchased highly leveraged oil and gas stocks and development stage biotech which were unsuitable for a retired couple because of the high risk. Claimants expressed dissatisfaction, yet the broker continued exercising discretion without written authority, making unsuitable purchases, the claim alleges. After big losses, when questioned about the mishandling of the couple's retirement accounts, the claim alleges that the UBS broker said he would be fired if the couple complained to UBS.

The broker asked the couple to postpone their complaint and he would help them successfully recover their losses, the claim alleges.

The claim further alleges that the broker wrote in a text message, "I am going to clean up my mess and make good by you."

Despite "indications of wrongdoing" (red flags), [UBS] failed to supervise the activities of its broker in its customers' accounts, the claim alleges.

How Investors May Recover losses

Investors may be eligible to file claims for recovery against UBS. Did UBS recommend highly leveraged oil and gas stocks and/or development stage biotech or other high-risk investments to you?

If the answer is "yes" you may have a claim against UBS or your broker to recover losses you sustained. For a free case evaluation from the law firm of Mark A. Tepper P.A., email attorney Mark A. Tepper at [email protected] or telephone 954-961-0096.

About Mark A. Tepper, P.A. (www.MarkTepper.com)

Attorney Mark A. Tepper is the former Chief Trial Counsel at the New York Attorney General's Bureau of Investor Protection and Securities. He has earned the reputation of "Investor Advocate" while practicing law for over 35 years representing individual investors. FINRA arbitrators have upheld stockbroker fraud claims filed by Mr. Tepper against many brokerage firms. A member of the Florida, New York and California Bars, Mr. Tepper is peer-reviewed for 17 consecutive years as AV PREEMINENT for ethical standards and legal ability. It's the highest rating of lawyers in the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Mark Hopkinson, NewsMark Public Relations

561-852-5767 [email protected]

http://www.newsmarkpr.com

SOURCE Mark A. Tepper, P.A.

Related Links

http://www.newsmarkpr.com


WASHINGTON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Students at Framingham State University (FSU) in Massachusetts will speak with astronauts living, working, and doing research aboard the International Space Station at 12:15 p.m. EST Friday, Jan. 19. The 20-minute, Earth-to-space call will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

Students will make the call to Expedition 54 astronauts Joe Acaba, Scott Tingle, of NASA, and Norishige Kanai, of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), aboard the space station, posing questions about life aboard the space station, NASA's deep space exploration plans, and doing science in space.

Acaba arrived at the station Sept. 12 on his third space mission, and is scheduled to return to Earth in February. Tingle and Kanai arrived Dec. 19 and are scheduled to return to Earth in June.

FSU is the alma mater of Christa McAuliffe, a payload specialist on space shuttle Challenger's STS 51-L, which was lost during launch in 1986. McAuliffe was going to be the world's first teacher in space, and FSU is the home of the McAuliffe Center, one of Challenger Center's more than 40 learning centers. The McAuliffe Center received more than 200 questions from 83 students from a wide range of majors at FSU, and chose 25 questions to be asked during the downlink. Some 250 students are expected to attend.

Media interested in attending the event should contact Lisa Vernal via email at [email protected] or phone at 412-337-3880. The event will take place at the McCarthy Center Forum at Framingham State University 93 State Street, Framingham.

Linking students directly to astronauts aboard the space station provides unique, authentic experiences designed to enhance student learning, performance and interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). This in-flight education downlink is an integral component of NASA's Year of Education on Station, which provides extensive space station-related resources and opportunities to students and educators.

Follow the astronauts on social media:

https://www.twitter.com/NASA_astronauts/

See videos and lesson plans highlighting research on the International Space Station at:

https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstation/

SOURCE NASA

Related Links

http://www.nasa.gov


BEIJING, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Meituan-Dianping, China's largest service-focused e-commerce platform, today launched its first Black Pearl Restaurant Guide, an ultimate list of quality restaurants, each selected from a unique Chinese perspective. The inaugural edition highlights a total of 330 restaurants in 22 Chinese cities and five overseas cities, namely, Bangkok, New York, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo.

Restaurants selected by the Black Pearl Restaurant Guide are put through a vigorous critiquing process by a team consisting of master chefs, culinary experts, special advisors with long-standing expertise in China's dining sector, and gourmets identified by big data analytics from the Company's one-stop local dining and lifestyle service platform. The Guide fully reflects the nation's unique culinary preferences. The selection process is overseen by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers Zhong Tian LLP, with selected restaurants awarded with one to three diamonds:

One diamond: Great for family/friends gathering.

Two diamonds: Perfect for special occasions.

Three diamonds: Must visit once in a lifetime.

Mr. Xing Wang, CEO of Meituan-Dianping, stated: "Chinese cuisine is an important part of the country's culture and the unique and sophisticated gastronomy landscape in China represents one of the richest and most diverse culinary heritages in the world. In response to Chinese consumers' evolving taste for traditional and modern cuisines in China and across the world, we are excited to introduce the Black Pearl Restaurant Guide from a unique Chinese perspective, showcasing the dynamic dining scene both in China and globally. We are grateful that our leading position and exclusive resources in the dining industry have enabled us to do so."

Chinese cuisine varies in style and taste from region to region, and there are eight highly-recognized culinary traditions, including Lu (Shandong), Chuan (Sichuan), Yue (Cantonese), Su (Jiangsu), Zhe (Zhejiang), Min (Fujian), Xiang (Hunan), and Hui (Anhui). The 2018 Guide provides a complete list of the selected restaurants including those showcasing the best of these traditions.

28 restaurants have been awarded with the highest rating of three diamonds, including: Da Dong (Beijing), Fu He Hui (Shanghai), Fu 1015 (Shanghai), Amazing Chinese Cuisine (Shanghai), Yutang Chunnuan Restaurant (Guangzhou), Four Seasons Hotel West Lake Chinese Food Restaurant (Hangzhou), Longjing Caotang (Hangzhou), Park Hyatt Ningbo Seafood House (Ningbo), Yu Zhi Lan (Chengdu), Lung King Heen (Hong Kong), Howard's Gourmet (Hong Kong), Jade Dragon Restaurant (Macau), The Eight 8 (Macau). 85 restaurants have been awarded two diamonds and 217 restaurants received one diamond.

Commenting on the newly launched restaurant guide, Mr. Chuan Zhang, Senior Vice President and President of In-Store Business Group at Meituan-Dianping, said: "Our mission at Meituan-Dianping is to 'Help People Eat Better and Live Better' with our comprehensive and quality offerings and services. The launch of the Black Pearl Restaurant Guide is part of our ongoing efforts to provide the finest culinary experience for our customers."

Meituan-Dianping is a leader in the dining sector and in other service-focused industries in China. Its comprehensive platform processes over 20 million orders per day. Drawing on its 1.2 billion reviews and more than 320 million annual active buyers, Meituan-Dianping has accumulated extensive data that reflects dining preferences of Chinese consumers. "Meituan" and "Dianping" are well recognized leading brands for restaurants and a broad range of local life services in China.

Meituan-Dianping recently regrouped its businesses into four core Business Groups: In-Store, Retail, Hotel & Travel, and Transportation, with offerings covering a broad range of life scenarios corresponding to four big location-based service (LBS) categories: in store, at home, on trip, and on road. The In-Store Business Group combines the largest and most comprehensive online dining platform in China with market leading online services for verticals such as wedding, beauty, moms & kids, karaoke and more.

Click here to view the "2018 Black Pearl Restaurant Guide".

About Meituan-Dianping

Meituan-Dianping is China's largest service-focused e-commerce platform, processing over 20 million orders a day and serving more than 320 million annual active buyers and more than four million annual active local merchants across 2800 cities in China.

With its "We Help People Eat Better and Live Better" mission, the Company offers a one-stop life-services platform that enhances customers' daily lives through location-based services solutions across more than 250 service and product groups in four categories: in store; at home; on trip; and on road.

By leveraging AI technology and innovation within its platform strategy, Meituan-Dianping is empowering local businesses to improve their business performance, and is transforming the whole service industry into a digital ecosystem.

Follow Meituan-Dianping on Twitter for more news and updates.

For enquiries, please contact:

Meituan-Dianping

Jane Zuo

Investor Relations

Email: [email protected]

FTI Consulting Daniel Wong Phone: +852 3768 4549 Email: [email protected] Sawyer Liu Phone: +86 21 2315 1065 Email: [email protected]

SOURCE MEITUAN DIANPING
As America's busiest airport for international freight, with more flights to Latin America and the Caribbean than any other U.S. airport, Miami International Airport is uniquely poised to leverage the e-commerce boom responsible for $1.85 trillion in worldwide sales in 2016  a figure that is projected to double in the next four years. Market research firm eMarketer forecasts Latin America to be a strong e-commerce growth region during that span, with a projected doubling of annual sales from $47.4 billion in 2015 to $84.8 billion in 2019.

Additionally, MIA's overall trade with Asia  the world's e-commerce leader at more than $1 trillion in sales annually  has grown 40 percent in value from $4.8 billion in 2011 to $6.7 billion in 2016.

"I appreciate the MIA team for leading the charge to make Miami-Dade County not only the e-commerce hub of the Americas, but a global leader as well in one of the world's largest growth industries," said Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez.

Local representatives from cargo carriers and industry advocacy groups heard presentations from e-commerce experts and participated in break-out sessions, to gain a better understanding of e-commerce trends, regulations, challenges and potential collaborative opportunities. At the close of the workshop, MDAD Chief of Staff Joseph Napoli invited attendees to move the initiative forward through the creation of an e-commerce task force, which will hold its first meeting before the end of February.

"As the cargo gateway of the Americas, and given our increasing trade growth with leading e-commerce regions like Asia and Europe, MIA is perfectly positioned to become an e-commerce powerhouse," said MDAD Chief of Staff Joseph Napoli. "We look forward to collaborating with our task force partners to develop and implement a strategy that capitalizes on this seismic shift in the air cargo industry."

Miami International Airport offers more flights to Latin America and the Caribbean than any other U.S. airport, is America's third-busiest airport for international passengers, boasts a lineup of more than 100 air carriers and is the top U.S. airport for international freight. MIA, along with its general aviation airports, is also the leading economic engine for Miami-Dade County and the state of Florida, generating business revenue of $33.7 billion annually and welcoming 70 percent of all international visitors to Florida. MIA's vision is to grow from a recognized hemispheric hub to a global airport of choice that offers customers a world-class experience and an expanded route network with direct passenger and cargo access to all world regions. MIA is committed to sustainable practices. Learn more at www.MIAefficiency.com.

Click here for hi-res images

Follow us online:

https://www.facebook.com/IflyMIA/

https://mobile.twitter.com/iflymia

https://www.instagram.com/iflymia/

MEDIA CONTACT:

Greg Chin

305.876.7017

[email protected]

www.miami-airport.com



SOURCE Miami International Airport
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab today announce the joint appointment of Gary Gensler as Senior Advisor to the Director of the Media Lab and Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management.

Gensler, former Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), will teach graduate classes at MIT Sloan on public policy and the private sector, as well as on the functioning of global markets. He will also work with Media Lab Director Joi Ito, including as senior advisor to the Lab's Digital Currency Initiative and the Ethics and Governance of AI (Artificial Intelligence) project.

At MIT Sloan, Gensler will join the faculty of the Global Economics and Management Group as a Senior Lecturer, teaching a new course, "Public Policy and the Private Sector", along with Professor Simon Johnson.

At the Media Lab, Gensler will work on an array of projects, including blockchain technology, the future of accounting, the application of cryptography and machine learning to markets and accounting, and viral communications.

Gensler comes to MIT after a distinguished career in both the public and private sectors. As Chairman of the CFTC, he led the Obama Administration's post-crisis reform of the $400 trillion over-the-counter derivatives, or swaps, market. Previously, he was Senior Advisor to U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes, helping to draft the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; served as Assistant Secretary and then Undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance during the Clinton Administration; and co-authored The Great Mutual Fund Trap, a book on personal finance. Gensler also has worked on various political campaigns, most recently as chief financial officer for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. He currently is Chairman of the Maryland Financial Consumer Protection Commission.

Prior to his public service, Gensler worked at Goldman Sachs for 18 years, where he became a partner in the Mergers and Acquisition department, headed up fixed income and currency trading in Asia, and lastly was co-head of Finance worldwide. Gensler earned his undergraduate degree in economics summa cum laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also received an M.B.A. He is a recipient of the 2014 Tamar Frankel Fiduciary Prize.

"I am honored to be joining MIT, whose faculty, staff and students have long been at the cutting edge of research and technology," said Gary Gensler upon his appointment. "I'm very excited to collaborate with MIT's distinguished team of scholars trying to create a better future through blockchain technology and the ethics & governance of artificial intelligence."

Joi Ito, Director and Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT's Media Lab, said Gensler is a thought leader with regard to financial regulation and the organization of markets. "Gary will be a tremendous asset to our research teams, particularly as we explore the emerging standards that will help support the development of more decentralized solutions to the exchange of value, like cryptocurrencies," Mr. Ito said.

Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, Deputy Dean and Alvin J. Siteman (1948) Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at MIT's Sloan School of Management adds: "MIT Sloan has a long tradition of outstanding courses related to global economic policy issues. Gary will strengthen our classroom offerings and the mentoring we provide to students along multiple dimensions. We are delighted to have him join our faculty."

About the MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management is where smart, independent leaders come together to solve problems, create new organizations, and improve the world.



About the MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab transcends known boundaries and disciplines by actively promoting a unique, antidisciplinary culture that encourages the unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate research areas.

SOURCE MIT Sloan School of Management

Related Links

http://www.mitsloan.mit.edu


NEW YORK, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The lithium industry could be in for a big M&A consolidation in 2018. Lithium X Energy Corp. (TSX-V: LIX) (OTC: LIXXF) ended 2018 with an announcement of a definitive agreement with Nextview New Energy Lion acquiring all of the issued and outstanding shares and warrants of Lithium X. Other junior and major lithium miners to potentially keep a close eye on are Standard Lithium Ltd. (TSX-V: SLL) (OTC: STLHF) (FRA: S5L) (STLHF Profile), Nemaska Lithium Inc. (TSX: NMX) (OTC: NMKEF), NRG Metals Inc. (TSX-V: NGZ), and Lithium Americas Corp. (TSX: LAC) (OTC: LACDF).

As reported by Forbes, U.S. electric vehicle sales jumped by a record 37 percent in 2016 (http://nnw.fm/0bL77), adding EV companies into an already-strained space and putting lithium supply and demand at an even greater imbalance, with supply for lithium already having trouble supporting the needs of the laptop and smartphone industries.

According to an interview with Chris Berry, president and founder of House Mountain Partners LLC, an energy and natural resource research company, 2018 will be the year of consolidation for the lithium market. This could be in the form of some of the more junior mining companies joining forces to amp-up production or even the major mining companies coming together to work on evolving technologies and improving techniques to increase the production of lithium. Consolidation in this manner will help to add a long-term supply of lithium.

As lithium production companies begin to join forces, the market will become more aggressive: companies that once had a multitude of focuses will begin to zero in and focus solely on lithium. This will help to create a pure play lithium market that is better equipped to handle the increasing demand for lithium that will result from the growing EV industry. As companies grow through consolidation, their grip on the lithium market will expand and their resulting ability to produce more lithium will drastically help to find a balance between supply and demand.



Junior Miners in The Mix

Standard Lithium Ltd. (TSX-V: SLL) (FRA: S5L) (OTCQX: STLHF) launched in 2017 and is led by a management team harboring decades of experience in the lithium mining space. Standard Lithium stands out in this market because SLL is one of the few small cap investment options available in lithium mining that offers a pure play in the U.S. lithium market. This gives Standard Lithium a key strategic advantage when the U.S. market begins to seek domestic sources of metals like lithium, as per Trump's executive order .

Standard Lithium's sole focus is on unlocking the value of existing large-scale U.S.-based lithium bearing brine resources that can be brought into production quickly. The current projects that Standard Lithium is working on highlight this, such as the Bristol Dry Lake and Cadiz Dry Lake lithium brine projects in California's Mojave Desert and the recently announced Smackover Formation lithium brine project in Arkansas.

In the Bristol Dry Lake area, Standard Lithium is working quickly to capitalize on the growing demand for lithium, as it outlined in a mid-December update (http://nnw.fm/1Cc5Z ). Standard Lithium installed a total of six new test evaporation ponds at the Bristol Dry Lake property in order to further assess the role that short-duration passive solar evaporation may play in pre-concentrating the near surface lithium brines encountered at the project. Standard Lithium also took samples of lithium brine from all surface pits in the Bristol Dry Lake property, with results expected in the coming weeks. The Cadiz Dry Lake property will be assessed in a similar manner.

The Smackover Project consists of up to 33,000 acres of brine leases located in a key brine production fairway in southern Arkansas, at the disposal of Standard Lithium for exploration, production, and extraction focus on lithium. Based on historical data, these areas have reported values of 370-424 mg/L of lithium in the brines. This elevates the Smackover Formation as a lower-risk exploration opportunity, which will aid in Standard Lithium's endeavors to accelerate new production sources of lithium such as this one.

New Technologies and New Approaches

Standard Lithium is looking not just to be a pure play lithium provider, but is also looking to innovate the lithium mining space in ways not yet capitalized upon by other lithium players.

According to Standard Lithium CEO Robert Mintak, a large portion of the lithium resources currently available "haven't been viewed through the right lens" (http://nnw.fm/0tS9Y). New technologies and new approaches need to be applied in order to accelerate development timeframes in the lithium space. Standard Lithium is working towards unlocking value on projects that have been overlooked by conventional mining companies. One of the main methods that Standard Lithium uses is locating areas overlooked but actively producing brine deposits throughout North America, as SLL has done in Arkansas. The investment community has taken notice. Standard Lithium's U.S.-listed shares rose from under $0.70 at IPO in June 2017 to a high of $2.23 in late October. Standard Lithium is also limiting its geological risk and startup expenses, as Mintak further details in the interview.

"With the Bristol Dry Lake project in California, we have inked agreements with both of the regions permitted brine operators," he noted. "They have been producing industrial minerals, for decades, - calcium chloride, sodium chloride from the near surface brine at Bristol Lake, but there's highly anomalous lithium concentrations in that same brine. We know that from historic USGS drilling that was done in the area, and we know that because we have sampled brine, because they're currently producing brine Because of the agreements we have struck we are able to immediately sample raw brine and begin working on the important hydrometallurgy and processing work that any lithium project has to do Having access immediately to raw brine to begin that important work was key for us."

In addition to its sampling efforts, Standard Lithium has completed drilling work on four of five exploration targets identified at the Bristol Dry Lake property. These results from these targets are expected to play a key role in the development of the project, as they will form the basis of an initial maiden resource assessment under way on the 35,000+ acre land package. As a result, the company intends to be able to produce a single resource statement for the total land package at Bristol Dry Lake. Standard aims to have a National Instrument 43-101 inferred resource report, which outlines the quantity and quality of minerals estimated on the basis of geological evidence and limited sampling, completed during the first half of 2018.

Standard Lithium's fast-track approach to lithium production makes it an intriguing option for investors seeking to gain exposure to the massive upside forecast for the lithium industry. Though other small cap investment options are available in lithium mining, few offer a pure play market like Standard Lithium.

Another Canadian lithium mining firm, Nemaska Lithium (TSX: NMX) (OTCQX: NMKEF) has also recorded significant increases in value in recent weeks, closing trading of its Canada-listed shares at new 52-week highs three separate times from December 28 to January 2. Nemaska's flagship asset is its Whabouchi Property, which is composed of one block totaling 33 claims that are 100 percent-owned by the company. Nemaska intends to construct a demonstration plant in Quebec, Canada, to process the lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate extracted from the Whabouchi mine, positioning the company as a vertically-integrated lithium supplier. The company's Canadian shares are currently trading near $2.32, up from a 52-week low of $0.95.

Outside of the North American market, NRG Metals (TSX-V: NGZ) is developing a lithium project in Argentina's Caramarca province. Just last month, NRG announced the completion of its first drill hole at the Salar Escondido lithium project, which uncovered lithium-saturated brine. Although the company's property lacks the existing infrastructure of some of its North American counterparts, its PPS has shown significant appreciation in recent weeks, owing, at least in part, to the bullish conditions of the lithium sector. In late November, NRG's U.S.-listed shares hit a 52-week high of $0.49, up from just $0.07 in early 2017.

Lithium Americas (TSX: LAC) (OTCQX: LACDF) is targeting the U.S. market through its Lithium Nevada Corp. subsidiary. The company's Humboldt County, Nevada, mining project includes five mineralized lenses that span approximately 19 miles. Similar to other mining outfits targeting the lithium market, Lithium Americas has enjoyed a substantial rise in PPS over recent months, as its Canada-listed shares rose from a 52-week low of $3.85 to a high of $14.06 in late 2017. Its U.S.-listed shares recorded similarly impressive gains, and Lithium Americas, in late December, announced plans to uplist from the OTCQX Best Market to the NYSE later this month, pending formal approval from the NYSE. This move could set a favorable precedent as other companies in the lithium space look to capitalize on growing market interest.

Lithium X Energy (TSX-V: LIX) (OTCQX: LIXXF) is looking to be the low-cost supplier of lithium in the growing lithium-ion battery market. Lithium X is a prime example of the consolidation set to happen for the lithium market in the upcoming years. In December, an announcement was released that Lithium X and Nextview New Energy Lion Hong Kong Limited had entered into a definitive agreement, in which Nextview will be acquiring all of the issued and outstanding common shares and warrants of Lithium X. For Lithium X shareholders, this means, among other things, the risk of future financing, dilution, commodity, construction, execution, and country have been removed. For the lithium market on the whole, this means greater advancement can now be done on the high-quality lithium deposits already in Lithium X's possession. By being a part of a larger company, these deposits can now be used to the greater advantage of the lithium market.

The acquisition of Lithium X by Nextview is the beginning to a consolidated market for lithium. With that consolidation comes greater efficiency, more widespread knowledge coming together, and evolving technologies to help make the production of lithium an even more profitable market for investors and consumers. The above-mentioned companies are working in stride towards a common goal and soon that common goal could also mean joint projects, joint ideas, and joint companies.

For more information on Standard Lithium, visit Standard Lithium Ltd. (OTCQX: STLHF) (TSX-V: SLL) (FRA: S5L)

For a more in-depth look into Standard Lithium (TSX-V: SLL) (FRA: S5L) (OTCQX: STLHF) you can view the full report on Streetsignals.com.



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"Nate is a respected leader and innovator who has a keen understanding of Lockton's value to clients," said Tim Noonan, CEO of Lockton's Pacific operations. "He embodies our values and culture, including our entrepreneurial mindset and performance-driven approach, which will help us drive continued growth in the Pacific Series."

Mundy has more than 13 years of experience with Lockton and most recently held the position of senior vice president of operations of the Pacific Series. He has served in various client service and business development support roles at Lockton, including as a member of the merger and acquisition team (PECAP) in New York. Mundy started his insurance career as a trainee with Jardine Lloyd Thompson (JLT) in London. He is a graduate of the University of Kansas.

"Gary Petrosino is a tremendous leader and an industry icon," adds Noonan. "He has served Lockton, our clients and the industry with integrity and distinction. We wish him and his wife Judy all the best as they begin their next chapter."

Petrosino joined Lockton as COO of the Pacific Series in 2016 after serving more than 35 years in underwriting and leadership roles at Chubb. He was executive vice president and western US field operations officer for Chubb when he joined Lockton.

Lockton's Pacific operation includes offices in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, San Fernando Valley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Seattle and Portland. Lockton's 600 Pacific Associates serve a wide array of clients with advice and support on commercial insurance, employee benefits and retirement services.

About Lockton

Lockton is a global professional services firm with 6,500 Associates who advise clients on protecting their people, property and reputations. Lockton has grown to become the world's largest privately held, independent insurance broker by helping clients achieve their business objectives.

For nine consecutive years, Business Insurance magazine has recognized Lockton as a "Best Place to Work in Insurance."

SOURCE Lockton

Related Links

http://www.lockton.com


KANSAS CITY, Mo., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tesuque Radio Company has completed the divestiture of three communications towers located near Santa Fe, New Mexico with over 15 current tenants.

John Herklotz, sole owner of Tesuque Radio Company, stated, "Justin Chamness worked tirelessly on this project for two years and was not only instrumental in procuring the perfect buyer, but was available to me at all times of the day and evening. I am very pleased with Nations' work and would highly recommend the firm for any company exploring a divestiture of their tower assets." Mr. Herklotz has owned these sites since 1975 and has committed the sale proceeds for donation to charity.

Additionally, Justin Chamness, Managing Director of the Towers Division, added, "John was a great client and I cannot express how much we enjoyed working with him. The lease with the Park Services department contributed significantly to the delay in closing this transaction causing our first buyer to withdraw during due diligence. My team and I took aggressive actions, going beyond the Park Services to the Department of Agriculture to overcome the obstacles with this lease."

The tower industry continues to experience steady growth, with the largest US Tower operator, American Tower Corporation posting a 15% growth rate in 2017. T-Mobile is launching their newly acquired 600 MHz spectrum currently, primarily in rural markets. "T-Mobile is effectively executing in six months what would normally be a two-year process," said Neville Ray, Chief Technology Officer for T-Mobile.

"Nations Media Partners has become a major conduit between buyers and sellers of communications towers," said Paul Spurgeon, Founder of Nations Media Partners. "Our 20-year longevity in this industry has allowed us to leverage our long-term relationships with the industry awareness that we are the firm to choose when new entrants are looking for acquisitions for growth and our seller's success in completing a transaction is a result of that dedication and connections in the industry."

ABOUT NATIONS MEDIA PARTNERS: Nations Media is a leading Technology and Communications Merger & Acquisition Advisory firm founded in 1996, completing over $3 billion dollars in closed transactions. The tower division has been active since the birth of the industry in 1997. For more information, visit: www.nationsmedia.com.

Media Contact:

Paul Spurgeon

[email protected]

(816) 979-1711 (office)

SOURCE Nations Media Partners
Real-time Dynamic Reporting makes it easier than ever to understand campaign performance. Delivering data in a visual dashboard, clients can quickly absorb information and convert metrics into tactics. Unlike traditional static-based reports, marketers can interact with data elements for deeper analysis, customize reporting configurations, and benefit from interactive data visualization tools, such as dynamic pivot tables and heatmaps. Another feature of the enhancement provides the capability to drill down on prospect data instantly by viewing in-market prospects without having to navigate outside of the report. The user's custom configurations can be saved for future analysis, making it faster and simpler to stay up-to-date on campaign performance and leads.

Enhancements also include the release of a dedicated Impression Report. This report delivers a comprehensive view of impressions and audience engagement outside the scope of the lead profile. Understanding the discrete syndication footprint of a campaign will provide marketers with the ability to quickly quantify the net-reach and scale of their content; this provides insight well beyond the final output of the prospects engaging with and downloading their content. Being able to visually interpret which assets are most efficiently yielding qualified prospects will directly aid in timely campaign optimization and the refinement of content placement.

On the release of the enhancements, NetLine CEO and Founder, Robert Alvin discussed the value of innovation in an industry that relies so heavily upon audience behavior and data. "This is an exciting release as we continue to empower marketers through innovation. Content-based lead generation requires an always-on and data-centric approach to truly understand campaign performance. The increased visibility into behavior with the Portal means marketers have more insight and control over how content works for their brand and what is truly driving their business forward."

To try NetLine's trusted content syndication lead generation solution for B2B marketers, go to the NetLine Portal. To learn more or request a demo from their experts, contact NetLine.

About NetLine Corporation:

NetLine Corporation empowers B2B Marketers with the reach, technology, and expertise required to drive scalable lead generation results and accelerate the sales funnel. Operating the largest B2B content syndication lead generation network, NetLine reaches 125 million unique visitors and processes more than 700 thousand leads monthly across 300 industry sectors. NetLine's AudienceTarget technology drives prospect discovery, quality customer lead acquisition, and buyer engagement from real prospect intent as professionals consume content directly across the network. Superior quality, on demand access, and advanced campaign reports enable all clients to achieve lead generation success. Founded in 1994, NetLine is privately held and headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Successful B2B Marketers Start with NetLine, visit www.netline.com.

CONTACT: Elizabeth Van Osten, [email protected], 215-855-3547

SOURCE NetLine Corporation

Related Links

http://www.netline.com


VANCOUVER, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Nevsun Resources Ltd. (TSX:NSU) (NYSE American:NSU) ("Nevsun" or the "Company") is pleased to announce new assay results from ongoing exploration drilling targeting new high grade Upper Zone-style mineralization at the Timok copper-gold project ("Timok Project") in Serbia.

Highlights

2.93% Cu and 2.54g/t Au (4.71% Cu equivalent) over 27.0 meters starting at 396 meters in TC170189

3.10% Cu and 0.80g/t Au (3.66% Cu equivalent) over 18.0 meters starting at 569 meters in TC170182R

3.91% Cu and 1.61g/t Au (5.04% Cu equivalent) over 7.5 meters starting at 474 meters in TC170188R

Follow-up exploration electromagnetic surveying and drilling in 2018

Cu equivalent calculated as 1g/t Au = 0.7% Cu

Intersections estimated to be approximately 50-95% of true width

Drilling has intersected new high-sulphidation epithermal ("HSE" or "Upper Zone-style") copper-gold mineralization 500 meters to the east of the Upper Zone deposit at Timok. Mineralization occurs over a 250 by 250 meter area which is similar in plan size to the Timok Upper Zone. The new zone of mineralization has similar characteristics to the Upper Zone with massive, semi-massive and disseminated mineralization that is dominated by pyrite with lesser covellite and energite. Exploration drilling will continue in 2018 aided by downhole electromagnetic surveying and will focus on expansion of this new zone of mineralization.

Nevsun CEO, Peter Kukielski, commented, "The assay results reported today are part of the 2017 exploration program for new Timok Upper Zone style mineralization on the license covering the Upper and Lower Zone projects. While the quantum of this new discovery is still unknown, mineralization of a similar tenor could be processed at the Timok Upper Zone mill, further enhancing the already stellar project economics. These results demonstrate the tremendous upside potential of the Timok project area for additional new discoveries. At the Bor deposits five kilometers to the north, approximately144 million tonnes of HSE mineralization was mined from 27 separate bodies."

Detailed drill results, sections and a plan map of drill hole locations are attached to this news release. Hole TC170189 is a vertical Lower Zone hole and does not represent true width. The other reported holes, suffixed with R, are angled regional exploration holes targeting true width.

Timok Copper-Gold Project

The Timok Project is located in eastern Serbia near the Bor mining and smelting complex. The Timok Project is focussed on the Cukaru Peki ("Timok") deposit which includes the high grade Upper Zone (characterized by HSE-style massive and semi-massive sulphide mineralization) and the Lower Zone (characterized by porphyry-style mineralization).

This news release is solely about new Upper Zone mineralization. Please refer to the Company's news release dated October 26, 2017 highlighting the updated Preliminary Economic Assessment for the Upper Zone.

Geology of the Timok Upper Zone

The HSE mineralization in the Upper Zone comprises pyrite-covellite-enargite bearing massive, semi-massive and hydrothermal breccia matrix sulphides that transition to vein and stockwork dominated sulphides at depth. Mineralization is hosted by a strongly advanced argillic altered volcanic and volcaniclastic andesite sequence. The HSE mineralization forms a single coherent zone at depths ranging from 400 to over 800 metres below surface and underlies fresh andesite and Upper Cretaceous sediments. Pyrite is the dominant sulphide mineral and covellite the principal copper mineral with lesser enargite, bornite and chalcocite occurring in veins, hydrothermal breccias and disseminations. Gold correlates with the copper sulphides and occurs within the associated pyrite.

Quality Assurance

Drill core samples were collected in accordance with protocols that are compatible with accepted industry procedures and best practice. The Company conducts its own analysis of QAQC generated by the systematic inclusion of certified reference materials, blank samples and duplicate samples. The analytical results from the quality control samples have been evaluated and have been demonstrated to conform to best practice standards.

Mr. Peter Manojlovic, P.Geo., Nevsun's VP Exploration, is a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101. Mr. Manojlovic has reviewed the technical content of this press release and approved its dissemination.

About Nevsun Resources Ltd.

Nevsun Resources Ltd. is the 100% owner of the high-grade copper-gold Timok Upper Zone and 60.4% owner of the Timok Lower Zone in Serbia. The Timok Lower Zone is a partnership with Freeport-McMoRan Exploration Corporation ("Freeport"), which currently owns 39.6% and upon completion of any Feasibility Study, Nevsun Resources Ltd. will own 46% and Freeport will own 54%. Nevsun generates cash flow from its 60% owned copper-zinc Bisha Mine in Eritrea. Nevsun is well positioned with a strong debt-free balance sheet to grow shareholder value through advancing Timok to production.

Forward Looking Statements

The above contains forward-looking statements or forward-looking information within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "hopes", "intends", "estimated", "potential", "possible" and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions or results "will", "may", "could" or "should" occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements are statements concerning the Company's current beliefs, plans and expectations about the future, including but not limited to statements and information made concerning: statements relating to the business, prospects and future activities of, and developments related to the Company, anticipated dividends, goals, strategies, future growth, planned future acquisitions and explorations activities, the adequacy of financial resources and other events or conditions that may occur in the future, and are inherently uncertain. The actual achievements of the Company or other future events or conditions may differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of risks, uncertainties and other factors, including, without limitation, the risks more fully described in the Company's Annual Information Form for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2016, which are incorporated herein by reference. The Company's forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management on the date the statements are made and the Company assumes no obligation to update such forward-looking statements in the future, except as required by law. For the reasons set forth above, investors should not place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements.

Further information concerning risks and uncertainties associated with these forward-looking statements and our business can be found in our Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2016, which is available on the Company's website (www.nevsun.com), filed under our profile on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) and on EDGAR (www.sec.gov) under cover of Form 40-F.

NEVSUN RESOURCES LTD.



"Peter Kukielski"

Peter Kukielski

President & Chief Executive Officer

SOURCE Nevsun Resources Ltd.
LONDON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Noble Corporation plc (NYSE: NE) today announced that its report of drilling rig status and contract information has been updated as of January 16, 2018. The report, titled "Fleet Status Report," can be found on the Company's Website www.noblecorp.com, under the "Investor Relations" section of the Website.

About Noble Corporation plc

Noble is a leading offshore drilling contractor for the oil and gas industry. The Company owns and operates one of the most modern, versatile and technically advanced fleets in the offshore drilling industry. Noble performs, through its subsidiaries, contract drilling services with a fleet of 28 offshore drilling units, consisting of 14 drillships and semisubmersibles and 14 jackups, focused largely on ultra-deepwater and high-specification jackup drilling opportunities in both established and emerging regions worldwide. Noble is a public limited company registered in England and Wales with company number 08354954 and registered office at Devonshire House, 1 Mayfair Place, London, W1J 8AJ England. Additional information on Noble is available at www.noblecorp.com.

SOURCE Noble Corporation

Related Links

http://www.noblecorp.com


EAST HANOVER, N.J., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Novartis announced today results from the head-to-head CLARITY study demonstrating the superiority of Cosentyx (secukinumab) compared to Stelara (ustekinumab) in delivering clear and almost clear skin in adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis at 12 weeks. The study results show 66.5% and 72.3% of patients treated with Cosentyx (p < 0.0001) achieved both co-primary endpoints PASI 90 and IGA mod 2011 0/1, respectively, compared to 47.9% and 55.4% of patients, respectively, treated with Stelara (p < 0.0001).1 At Week 12, patients receiving Cosentyx had significantly greater PASI 100 responses (key secondary objective) compared to those taking Stelara (38.1% vs. 20.1%, respectively; p < 0.0001). The study findings, which support previously presented data from the CLEAR study demonstrating the superiority of Cosentyx to Stelara in achieving sustained skin clearance (PASI 90 response rates) at 52 weeks, were presented as a poster on January 16th at the Winter Clinical Dermatology Conference in Hawaii.2

Clear skin is the aim of psoriasis treatment, and a Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) 75, 90 or 100 response is considered an important measure of treatment success.4-7 All key secondary endpoints in the CLARITY study were met. At Week 4, PASI 75 response rates were significantly superior with Cosentyx compared to Stelara (40.2% vs. 16.3%; p < 0.0001). At Week 16, Cosentyx demonstrated significantly superior response rates compared to Stelara for PASI 75 (91.7% vs. 79.8%; p < 0.0001), PASI 90 (76.6% vs. 54.2%; p < 0.0001), PASI 100 (45.3% vs. 26.7%; p < 0.0001), and IGA mod 2011 0/1 (78.6% vs. 59.1%; p < 0.0001).1

"These data add to the robust body of evidence supporting the use of Cosentyx to treat moderate to severe plaque psoriasis," said Mark Lebwohl, MD and Chairman of the Waldman Department of Dermatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. "With these findings, clinicians can have even greater confidence including Cosentyx in their treatment plans."

The safety profile of Cosentyx was in line with the known safety profile.1

To date, more than 125,000 patients worldwide have been prescribed Cosentyx in the post-marketing setting across all indications.8

About Cosentyx (secukinumab) and IL-17A

Cosentyx, launched in 2015, is the first and only fully-human interleukin-17A (IL-17A) antagonist approved to treat moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis (PsA) and ankylosing spondylitis (AS).9 By specifically targeting IL-17A, Cosentyx addresses an important cytokine involved in the development of psoriasis.9,10 IL-17A plays a significant role in the pathogenesis of plaque psoriasis, PsA and AS.9-12 Inhibiting IL-17A is important as up to 30% of patients with psoriasis may have PsA.13

In psoriasis, Cosentyx delivers long-lasting skin clearance with a sustained response and favorable safety profile out to 5 years, as demonstrated in a clinical study, along with convenient dosing in a patient-friendly auto injector.3,14 Cosentyx has been studied in dedicated trials for the most difficult-to-treat types of plaque psoriasis  palmoplantar psoriasis (psoriasis of the hands and feet), scalp psoriasis, and nail psoriasis.15-17

Cosentyx is approved in more than 75 countries for the treatment of moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, which includes the European Union countries, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, the US and Canada. In Europe, Cosentyx is approved for the treatment of moderate to severe plaque psoriasis in adult patients who are candidates for systemic therapy.18 In the US, Cosentyx is approved as a treatment for moderate to severe plaque psoriasis in adult patients who are candidates for systemic therapy or phototherapy (light therapy).9

In addition, Cosentyx is the first IL-17A antagonist approved in more than 65 countries for the treatment of active AS and PsA, which includes the European Union countries and the US. Cosentyx is also approved for the treatment of PsA and pustular psoriasis in Japan.19

About the CLARITY study1,20

CLARITY (NCT02826603) is a 52-week, multicenter, randomized, double-blind study to demonstrate the superiority of Cosentyx (secukinumab) 300 mg vs. Stelara (ustekinumab) in moderate to severe plaque psoriasis patients. Co-primary endpoints were 90% or more improvement from Baseline Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI 90) and Investigator's Global Assessment (IGA) mod 2011 0/1 (clear or almost clear) response rates at Week 12. Key secondary objectives included demonstrating superiority of secukinumab vs. ustekinumab with respect to PASI 75 at Week 4; PASI 75 and 100 at Week 12; PASI 75, 90, 100 and IGA mod 2011 0/1 at Week 16. Missing values were handled by multiple imputation.

Patients were randomized 1:1 to receive subcutaneous secukinumab 300 mg (n = 550) at Baseline, Weeks 1, 2 and 3, then every 4 weeks from Week 4 to 48, or ustekinumab (n = 552) 45 mg or 90 mg subcutaneously (depending upon body weight at randomization), according to approved label.

About psoriasis

Psoriasis is a common, non-contagious, auto-immune disease that affects more than 125 million people worldwide.21 Plaque psoriasis is the most common form of the disease and appears as raised, red patches covered with a silvery white build-up of dead skin cells.22

Psoriasis is not simply a cosmetic problem, but a persistent, chronic (long-lasting), and sometimes distressing disease, which can affect even the smallest aspects of people's lives on a daily basis.22 Up to 30% of patients with psoriasis may have PsA.13 PsA is a condition in which the joints are also affected, causing debilitating symptoms including pain, stiffness and for some people, irreversible joint damage.23 Psoriasis is also associated with other serious health conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease and depression.22

INDICATIONS

Cosentyx is a human interleukin-17A antagonist indicated for the treatment of:

moderate to severe plaque psoriasis in adult patients who are candidates for systemic therapy or phototherapy

adults with active psoriatic arthritis (PsA)

adults with active ankylosing spondylitis (AS)

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

Do not use Cosentyx if you have had a severe allergic reaction to secukinumab or any of the other ingredients in Cosentyx. See the Medication Guide for a complete list of ingredients.

Cosentyx is a medicine that affects your immune system. Cosentyx may increase your risk of having serious side effects such as:

Infections

Cosentyx may lower the ability of your immune system to fight infections and may increase your risk of infections.

Your doctor should check you for tuberculosis (TB) before starting treatment with Cosentyx.

If your doctor feels that you are at risk for TB, you may be treated with medicine for TB before you begin treatment with Cosentyx and during treatment with Cosentyx.

Your doctor should watch you closely for signs and symptoms of TB during treatment with Cosentyx. Do not take Cosentyx if you have an active TB infection.



Before starting Cosentyx, tell your doctor if you:



are being treated for an infection

have an infection that does not go away or that keeps coming back

have TB or have been in close contact with someone with TB

think you have an infection or have symptoms of an infection such as:





fevers, sweats, or chills

muscle aches

cough

shortness of breath

blood in your phlegm

weight loss warm, red, or painful skin or

sores on your body

diarrhea or stomach pain

burning when you urinate

or urinate more often than

normal

After starting Cosentyx, call your doctor right away if you have any signs of infection listed above. Do not use Cosentyx if you have any signs of infection unless you are instructed to by your doctor.

Inflammatory Bowel Disease

New cases of inflammatory bowel disease or "flare-ups" can happen with Cosentyx, and can sometimes be serious. If you have inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease), tell your doctor if you have worsening disease symptoms during treatment with Cosentyx or develop new symptoms of stomach pain or diarrhea.

Serious Allergic Reactions

Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get emergency medical help right away if you get any of the following symptoms: feeling faint; swelling of your face, eyelids, lips, mouth, tongue, or throat; trouble breathing or throat tightness; chest tightness; or skin rash. If you have a severe allergic reaction, do not give another injection of Cosentyx.

Before starting Cosentyx, tell your doctor if you:

have any of the conditions or symptoms listed above for infections

have inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis)

are allergic to latex. The needle caps contain latex.

have recently received or are scheduled to receive an immunization (vaccine). People who take Cosentyx should not receive live vaccines.

receive live vaccines. have any other medical conditions

are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if Cosentyx can harm your unborn baby. You and your doctor should decide if you will use Cosentyx.

are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. It is not known if Cosentyx passes into your breast milk.

Tell your doctor about all the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. Know the medicines you take. Keep a list of your medicines to show your doctor and pharmacist when you get a new medicine.

How should I use Cosentyx?

See the detailed Instructions for Use that comes with your Cosentyx for information on how to prepare and inject a dose of Cosentyx, and how to properly throw away (dispose of) used Cosentyx Sensoready pens and prefilled syringes.

Use Cosentyx exactly as prescribed by your doctor.

If your doctor decides that you or a caregiver may give your injections of Cosentyx at home, you should receive training on the right way to prepare and inject Cosentyx. Do not try to inject Cosentyx yourself, until you or your caregiver has been shown how to inject Cosentyx by your doctor or nurse.

The most common side effects of Cosentyx include: cold symptoms, diarrhea, and upper respiratory infections. These are not all of the possible side effects of Cosentyx. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects.



You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

Please see accompanying full Prescribing Information, including Medication Guide.

Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as "potential," "can," "will," "plan," "expect," "anticipate," "look forward," "believe," "committed," "investigational," "pipeline," "launch," or similar terms, or by express or implied discussions regarding potential marketing approvals, new indications or labeling for the investigational or approved products described in this press release, or regarding potential future revenues from such products. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations regarding future events, and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. There can be no guarantee that the investigational or approved products described in this press release will be submitted or approved for sale or for any additional indications or labeling in any market, or at any particular time. Nor can there be any guarantee that such products will be commercially successful in the future. In particular, our expectations regarding such products could be affected by, among other things, the uncertainties inherent in research and development, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; our ability to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; the particular prescribing preferences of physicians and patients; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures; general economic and industry conditions, including the effects of the persistently weak economic and financial environment in many countries; safety, quality or manufacturing issues, and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Novartis

Located in East Hanover, NJ Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation is an affiliate of Novartis which provides innovative healthcare solutions that address the evolving needs of patients and societies. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Novartis offers a diversified portfolio to best meet these needs: innovative medicines, cost-saving generic and biosimilar pharmaceuticals and eye care. Novartis has leading positions globally in each of these areas. In 2016, the Group achieved net sales of USD 48.5 billion, while R&D throughout the Group amounted to approximately USD 9.0 billion. Novartis Group companies employ approximately 121,000 full-time-equivalent associates. Novartis products are sold in approximately 155 countries around the world. For more information, please visit http://www.novartis.com.

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References

Bagel J, Nia J, Hashim P, et al. Secukinumab is Superior to Ustekinumab in Clearing Skin of Patients With Moderate to Severe Plaque Psoriasis: CLARITY, a Randomized, Controlled, Phase 3b Trial. Poster presented at Winter Clinical Dermatology Conference; January 12-17, 2018 , Hawaii, USA . Poster #98. Blauvelt A, Reich K, Tsai T-F, et al. Secukinumab is superior to ustekinumab in clearing skin of subjects with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis up to 1 year: Results from the CLEAR study. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2017;76(1). Bissonnette R, Luger T, Thaci D, et al. Secukinumab demonstrates high sustained efficacy and a favorable safety profile through 5 years of treatment in moderate to severe psoriasis. EPoster presented at 26th EADV Congress; September 13-17, 2017 , Geneva, Switzerland . Poster #P2223. European Medicines Agency. Guideline on clinical investigation of medicinal products indicated for the treatment of psoriasis. http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/Scientific_guideline/2009/09/WC500003329.pdf. Published November 18, 2004 . Accessed January 2, 2018 . ACTAS Dermo-Sifiliograficas. Spanish Evidence-Based Guidelines on the Treatment of Psoriasis With Biologic Agents. http://www.actasdermo.org/en/spanish-evidence-based-guidelines-on-treatment/articulo/S1578219013001789/. Published September 7, 2013 . Accessed January 2, 2018 . Canadian Dermatology Association. Canadian Guidelines for the Management of Plaque Psoriasis. http://www.dermatology.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cdnpsoriasisguidelines.pdf. Published June 2009 . Accessed January 20, 2018 . Langley RGB, Feldman SR, Nyirady J, et al. The 5point Investigator's Global Assessment (IGA) Scale: a modified tool for evaluating plaque psoriasis severity in clinical trials. J Dermatolog Treat. 2015;26(1):2331. Data on File. Number of Patients Prescribed Cosentyx. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp; Nov. 2017 . Cosentyx [Prescribing Information]. East Hanover, NJ : Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; 2017. Zeichner J, Armstrong A. The Role of IL-17 in the Pathogenesis and Treatment of Psoriasis. J Clin Aesthetic Dermatol. 2016 9(6 Suppl 1):S3S6 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5395242/. Accessed January 2, 2018 . Barker J, Kaplan DH, Nestle FO, Psoriasis. N Engl J Med. 2009;361:496-509. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0804595#t=article. Accessed January 2, 2018 . Girolomoni G, Mrowietz U, Paul C. Psoriasis: rationale for targeting interleukin-17. Br J Dermatol. 2012;167:717-24. Mease PJ, Gladman DD, Papp KA, et al. Prevalence of rheumatologist-diagnosed psoriatic arthritis in patients with psoriasis in European/North American dermatology clinics. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2013;69(5): 729-735. Lacour JP, Paul C, Jazayeri S, et al. Secukinumab administration by autoinjector maintains reduction of plaque psoriasis severity over 52 weeks: results of the randomized controlled JUNCTURE trial. J Eur Acad Dermatol Venereol. 2017;31(5):847-856. Study of Safety, Tolerability, and Efficacy of Secukinumab in Subjects With Moderate to Severe Palmoplantar Psoriasis. ClinicalTrials.gov.https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01806597?term=secukinumab&cond=palmoplantar%2Bpsoriasis&cntry1=NA%3AUS&rank=1. Published March 7, 2013 . Accessed January 2, 2018 . Study of, Efficacy and Safety of Subcutaneous Secukinumab in Adults With Moderate to Severe Scalp Psoriasis. ClinicalTrials.gov. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02267135?term=Scalp&cond=secukinumab&rank=1. Published October 17, 2014 . Accessed January 2, 2018 . Study of Safety, Tolerability, and Efficacy of Secukinumab in Subjects With Moderate to Severe Nail Psoriasis.ClinicalTrials.gov. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01807520?term=secukinumab&draw=4&rank=13. Published March 8, 2013 . Accessed January 2, 2018 . European Medicines Agency. Cosentyx Summary of Product Characteristics. http://www.ema.europa.eu/ema/index.jsp?curl=pages/medicines/human/medicines/003729/human_med_001832.jsp&mid=WC0b01ac058001d124. Updated July 17, 2017 . Accessed January 2018 . Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency. Review Report. Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency http://www.pmda.go.jp/files/000216877.pdf. Published November 12, 2015 . Accessed January 2, 2018 . Data on File. CAIN457A2326 (CLARITY) Clinical Trial Protocol. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp; Nov. 2015 . Profile of Psoriasis. International Federation of Psoriasis Associations. http://www.worldpsoriasisday.com/web/page.aspx?refid=114. Published March 1, 2016 . Accessed January 2, 2018 . Global Report on Psoriasis. World Health Organization. http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/204417/1/9789241565189_eng.pdf. Published 2016. Accessed January 2, 2018 . Mease PJ, Armstrong AW. Managing patients with psoriatic disease: the diagnosis and pharmacologic treatment of psoriatic arthritis in patients with psoriasis. Drugs. 2014;74:423-441.

Novartis Media Relations

Central media line: +41 61 324 2200

E-mail: [email protected]

Eric Althoff Novartis Global Media Relations +41 61 324 7999 (direct) +41 79 593 4202 (mobile) [email protected] Jeannie Neufeld Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation +1 862 778 2104 (direct) +1 201 650 2728 (mobile) [email protected]

Novartis Investor Relations

Central investor relations line: +41 61 324 7944

E-mail: [email protected]

Central

North America

Samir Shah +41 61 324 7944 Richard Pulik +1 212 830 2448 Pierre-Michel Bringer +41 61 324 1065 Cory Twining +1 212 830 2417 Thomas Hungerbuehler +41 61 324 8425



Isabella Zinck +41 61 324 7188





SOURCE Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation
NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading online travel agency, OneTravel, has released a summary of key travel trends, showcasing findings that occurred within the industry this past year, as well as a look at what's on the horizon in 2018.

From the most expensive months to book airline tickets to the most popular destinations, key takeaways from 2017 include:

The three busiest months for travel in 2017 were December, July, and August. The quietest months were February, April, and January. 1 Despite being a slow month, April was the most expensive while September and October were the cheapest. 2

Despite being a slow month, April was the most expensive while September and October were the cheapest. In 2017, OneTravel saw an increase in popularity for travel to Asia destinations. The Philippines , India , China , Thailand , and Vietnam were all ranked in the top 20 most popular countries for the year, up from only three Asian countries on the list in 2014. Vietnam saw a significant jump of 21 spots over the three year period. In 2014, the up-and-coming Southeast Asian destination was ranked as the 37 th most popular country, but surged to number 16 in 2017. 1

destinations. , , , , and were all ranked in the top 20 most popular countries for the year, up from only three Asian countries on the list in 2014. saw a significant jump of 21 spots over the three year period. In 2014, the up-and-coming Southeast Asian destination was ranked as the 37 most popular country, but surged to number 16 in 2017. In 2017, travelers generally booked airline tickets just over a month ahead of their departure date, but the online booking site noticed there are still a few destinations where travelers prefer to plan ahead. Places where travelers consistently booked more than three months in advance include Iceland , Maldives , Madagascar , and Denmark .3

"After the record-breaking cold that hit the northern U.S. at the beginning of January, we saw a spike in bookings to warm weather destinations," said Sanjay Hathiramani, Global SVP of Supplier Relations at OneTravel. "Our early data indicates that travelers will continue to head south in February and March as well."

Florida dominates the list of most popular destinations in the U.S. with five cities in the top ten. Other warm weather destinations such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix also made the list.

Top Domestic and International Destinations for Travel First Quarter 20184

U.S. Domestic Cities International Countries Orlando, FL Mexico Los Angeles, CA Philippines Las Vegas, NV India Ft. Lauderdale, FL China Miami, FL Vietnam Phoenix, AZ Canada Denver, CO Thailand Tampa, FL Colombia Fort Myers, FL Dominican Republic New York, NY Jamaica

Along with these top destinations for the first quarter, OneTravel's data also revealed a few international cities that should expect to see more visitors this year than last. Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City moved up three rankings since last year, making it the second most popular international destination.

"OneTravel's top five destinations, both internationally and domestically, typically remain fairly consistent, so this is a notable step up for Vietnam," added Hathiramani. "Several other cities that travelers should keep an eye on in 2018 are Guangzhou, Dublin, and Auckland, as they also made significant jumps in the rankings."

OneTravel's Top International Destinations on the Rise in 20185

City Rank for 2018 travel Rank for 2017 travel Position Change Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam #2 #5 +3 Lima, Peru #8 #13 +5 Mumbai, India #23 #29 +7 Dubai, U.A.E. #41 #53 +12 Guangzhou, China #32 #55 +23 Dublin, Ireland #38 #65 +27 Auckland, New Zealand #30 #62 +32

About OneTravel

OneTravel is a leading online travel agency that offers deals for savvy travelers seeking both quality and value. Part of Fareportal's family of travel brands, OneTravel is recognized globally for providing one-stop shopping for all travel needs. Customers have access to millions of cheap flights including business class and first class airfares, hotel rooms, car rentals, and cheap vacation packages to top destinations around the world. Visit OneTravel's social media pages at www.facebook.com/onetravel and www.twitter.com/onetravel. For an on-the-go travel concierge experience, download OneTravel's app for Apple or Android

_______________

1 Based on passenger numbers from 1/1/17  12/31/17

2 Based on average airfare purchased from 1/1/17  12/31/17

3 Based on average number of days travelers book in advance of their departure date from 1/1/17  12/31/17

4 Based on number of passengers booked to travel U.S domestic and from the U.S. to international countries 1/1/18  3/31/18 compared to the number of passengers who traveled during the same time period in 2017.

5 Based on number of passengers booked to travel from the U.S. to international cities 1/1/18  3/31/18 compared to the number of passengers who traveled during the same time period in 2017.

SOURCE OneTravel

Related Links

https://www.onetravel.com


"Steve's extensive background in credit, coupled with his proven record of leadership at high-performing credit unions across the West, is a strong asset for our members," said OnPoint President and CEO Rob Stuart. "We are excited about the talent and expertise Steve brings to the OnPoint family, and can't wait to introduce the Leugers family to all that the Pacific Northwest has to offer."

Prior to joining OnPoint, Leugers served as Chief Lending Officer at Nusenda Credit Union in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Leugers previously held senior leadership positions at Del Norte Credit Union, Westerra Credit Union and Elevations Credit Union. Leugers will utilize his more than 20 years' experience in financial services and his passion for the credit union mission to continue to invest in and improve OnPoint's credit and lending services.

"I am honored to join a financial institution with the strong member focus, performance record and reputation that OnPoint has earned," said Leugers. "I'm eager to invest my expertise and talents serving OnPoint members."

Leugers earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Public and Environmental Services from Indiana University and is a graduate of the Western CUNA Management School. He recently moved to Oregon with his wife Jami, and their three daughters, Emily, Abbie and Hannah.

The OnPoint Executive Team is comprised of the following members:

Rob Stuart , President/Chief Executive Officer

, President/Chief Executive Officer Jim Armstrong , Senior Vice President/Chief Information Officer & HR Executive

, Senior Vice President/Chief Information Officer & HR Executive Veronica Ervin , Senior Vice President/Chief Compliance Officer

, Senior Vice President/Chief Compliance Officer Jim Hunt , Senior Vice President/Chief Financial Officer

, Senior Vice President/Chief Financial Officer Steve Leugers , Senior Vice President/Chief Credit Officer

, Senior Vice President/Chief Credit Officer Tory McVay , Senior Vice President/Chief Retail Officer & Wealth Management Executive

, Senior Vice President/Chief Retail Officer & Wealth Management Executive Stephen Owen , Senior Vice President/Chief Operations Officer

ABOUT ONPOINT COMMUNITY CREDIT UNION

OnPoint Community Credit Union is the largest credit union in Oregon, serving more than 336,000 members and with assets of $5 billion. Founded in 1932, OnPoint Community Credit Union's membership is available to anyone who lives or works in one of 13 Oregon counties (Benton, Clackamas, Columbia, Crook, Deschutes, Jefferson, Lane, Linn, Marion, Multnomah, Polk, Washington and Yamhill) and two Washington counties (Skamania and Clark) and their immediate family members. More information is available at www.onpointcu.com or 503-228-7077 or 800-527-3932.

SOURCE OnPoint Community Credit Union

Related Links

http://www.onpointcu.com


DALLAS, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Palm Beach Tan, the nation's largest indoor tanning provider, today announced it has acquired Atlanta, Georgia-based Solar Dimensions tanning salons. The acquisition, which more than doubles the Palm Beach Tan footprint in the Atlanta market, includes all Solar Dimensions branded salons, but does not include one Solarium salon in Alpharetta, Ga.

"We're thrilled to expand our presence in the Peach State and welcome all Solar Dimensions customers to the Palm Beach Tan family," said Diane Lucas, President and CEO of Palm Beach Tan.

After more than 20 years in business, the owners of Solar Dimensions teamed up with Palm Beach Tan to ensure their customers and team members would be well taken care of as they begin to pursue other opportunities.

"We were confident that Palm Beach Tan would be our best acquisition partner because of their distinction as leaders in the industry," said Alex Royter, CEO of Solar Dimensions. "The entire acquisition process has been smooth and direct, and we thank the Palm Beach Tan team for their hard work and professionalism throughout this transition. We know that our customers and employees will be served well under their leadership."

The following Solar Dimensions salons will be rebranded to Palm Beach Tan. All previously purchased memberships, packages and sessions have already been transferred to Palm Beach Tan:

Midtown  950 West Peachtree St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30309

30309 East Cobb  4475 Roswell Road, Marietta, GA 30062

 4475 Roswell Road, 30062 Peachtree City  312 City Circle, Peachtree City, GA 30269

 312 City Circle, 30269 Buckhead Solarium  2900 Peachtree Road, Atlanta, GA 30305

30305 Collier  857 Collier Road NW, Atlanta, GA 30309

30309 Brookhaven  4060 Peachtree Road, Atlanta, GA 30319

30319 Glenridge  5610 Glenridge Drive, Atlanta, GA 30342

30342 Dacula  525 Dacula Road, Dacula, GA 30019

 525 Dacula Road, 30019 Cumming  410 Peachtree Parkway, Cumming, GA 30341

 410 Peachtree Parkway, 30341 Dunwoody  4468 Chamblee Dunwoody Road, Dunwoody, GA 30338

 4468 Chamblee Dunwoody Road, 30338 Webb Gin  1250 Scenic Highway, Lawrenceville, GA 30045

Because of their proximity to existing Palm Beach Tan salons, Solar Dimensions will close the following locations. Existing memberships, packages and sessions purchased at these stores will be honored at all Palm Beach Tan locations.

Woodstock Roswell  4905 Alabama Road NE, Roswell, GA 30075

 4905 Alabama Road NE, 30075 Smyrna  2430 Cobb Parkway, Smyrna, GA 30080

 2430 Cobb Parkway, 30080 Acworth  1720 Mars Hill Road, Acworth, GA 30101

 1720 Mars Hill Road, 30101 Vinings  2810 Paces Ferry Road, Atlanta, GA 30339

30339 Buckhead  3872 Roswell Road, Atlanta, GA 30342

30342 Kennesaw  1200 Barrett Parkway, Kennesaw, GA 30144

 1200 Barrett Parkway, 30144 Emory  1520 Avenue Place, Atlanta, GA 30329

Founded in 1990, Palm Beach Tan, Inc. is the leader in the indoor tanning industry, operating more than 460 locations, both corporate and franchised owned under the brands Palm Beach Tan, Palm Beach Tan Sunless, and Planet Tan. The company has revolutionized the industry through innovative technology, a continued focus on the education of its team members and a strict focus on tanning in moderation. Palm Beach Tan offers convenience and a full range of services: multiple levels of tanning beds, sunless Mystic Tanning and Versa Spa tanning and skin care, as well as premium skin care products. For more information about Palm Beach Tan, Inc., please visit www.palmbeachtan.com or www.facebook.com/PBTOfficial.

SOURCE Palm Beach Tan
VICTORIA, Texas, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Post Acute Medical, LLC (PAM), announced today that it will relocate PAM Specialty Hospital of Victoria North, which is currently located at 102 Medical Drive, to Citizens Medical Center, 2701 Hospital Drive.

Following renovations to the new location, the long-term acute care hospital will be housed within the medical center and is expected to open by the end of 2018.

"Having Post Acute Medical, which is committed to providing high-quality care, onsite at Citizens Medical Center provides patients with exceptional care when they need continued acute treatment beyond their appropriate hospital stay. The transition to this care will be much simpler for the patients and physicians, since they won't need to leave the building. We look forward to the benefits this new opportunity will bring to our patients, physicians, and our hospital," says Mike Olson, Citizens Medical Center CEO.

Once the move is complete, Post Acute Medical will expand PAM Rehabilitation Hospital of Victoria, which is adjacent to the specialty hospital's current location at 101 James Coleman Drive, beyond its current 26-bed capacity. The size of the expansion has yet to be determined.

"Post Acute Medical is pleased to make these enhancements to our hospital operations in Victoria that meet the changing healthcare needs of the community," says Anthony Misitano, PAM president and CEO. "Throughout all the communities we serve, we put the patient first and provide comprehensive, individualized treatment that fosters meaningful improvement and recovery for people with injuries, illnesses, and disabilities."

About Post Acute Medical, LLC:

Post Acute Medical, LLC, (PAM) based in Enola, Pa., provides post-acute healthcare services through 26 long-term acute care hospitals and medical rehabilitation hospitals, as well as multiple outpatient physical therapy locations, in seven states. PAM is committed to providing high-quality patient care and outstanding customer service, coupled with loyalty and dedication of highly trained staff, to be the most trusted source for post-acute services in every community it serves. Our mission is to serve people by providing compassionate, expert care and to support recovery through education and research. Learn more at www.postacutemedical.com.

SOURCE Post Acute Medical

Related Links

http://www.postacutecorporate.com


ORANGEBURG, N.Y., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- PDI, a leader in infection prevention products and solutions, announces the appointment of Tom McCurdy as Senior Vice President and General Manager for its healthcare division and promotes Esperanza "Espie" Carrion, the former Vice President of Marketing for Sani Professional, the food safety division of PDI, to Vice President and General Manager of Sani Professional. Tom and Espie join Cheryl Mallon, Vice President and General Manager, PDI Contract Manufacturing, in these important roles driving the company's growth and further elevating it as a leader in the fight against preventable infections.

Tom has a proven track record as a people-centered and results-driven senior executive and will lead the development and the execution of the growth strategy for PDI Healthcare. In his most recent role as President of Global Plasma for Haemonetics Corporation, Tom achieved impressive revenue and profit growth by implementing a new-product-technology and customer-value-centered strategy founded in innovation, clinical value, and commercial excellence. Earlier in his career, Tom spent 18 years at Boston Scientific Corporation holding multiple roles of increasing commercial leadership responsibility and contributing to the impressive growth.

Espie has successfully led the Sani Professional marketing organization for the last six years. She is an accomplished leader with diverse consumer and business-to-business experience. In this new role, Espie will lead Sani Professional's plan execution as well as crafting its future growth strategy. Prior to joining PDI, Esperanza held roles of increasing responsibility with top Fortune 100 companies such as The Colgate-Palmolive Company, The Coca-Cola Company, and Kraft Foods International.

"We are thrilled to make these new leadership appointments, adding depth, talent, and experience to PDI's senior team," said Kent Davies, President and Chief Operating Officer, PDI. "PDI has become an infection prevention leader through our market leading products, dedicated associates, and long-term commitment to eliminating pathogenic risks in health care, food service, and other settings. With strong general managers leading each of our three market and customer facing businesses, we are well positioned to continue our legacy of growth and innovation."

About PDI

PDI helps reduce preventable infections, control associated costs and, ultimately, save lives by delivering a broad range of evidence-based, market leading environmental hygiene, patientcare and food safety solutions in the community and healthcare environments. PDII has three divisions, PDI Contract Manufacturing, Sani Professional and PDI Healthcare. Visit wearepdi.com.

Contacts:

Shawn Smith, PDI

845-792-5220

[email protected]

SOURCE PDI
CHILLICOTHE, Ohio, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Petland is honored to once again be ranked among top-ranked franchises in the United States.

Petland placed in the top 250 spots this year, ranking 209 overall in the Entrepreneur Magazine's 39th Annual Franchise 500. According to World Franchising Network, there are more than 4,000 active franchisors in North America.

"We spend months gathering and analyzing data in order to produce our annual Franchise 500 list and with over 1,000 franchisees applying for the first time in 25 years, this may have been our most competitive ranking ever," wrote Jason Feifer, Entrepreneur's Editor in Chief.

"We are honored to be recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the top 500 franchise concepts in the United States," said Petland, Inc. President and CEO Joe Watson. "Petland is proud to be your neighborhood pet store with stores around the world. This recognition is a testament to the hard work and success of our franchisees and the continued relevance of the Petland brand and proprietary operating model."

Petland, Inc.'s Vice President of Business Development Steve Huggins stated, "With the Petland brand continuing to grow around the globe, the strength of the Petland franchise system directly correlates to the dedication and hard work of Petland franchisees."

In conducting its annual rating of franchises in the world, Entrepreneur considers numerous factors including financial strength, stability, growth rate and size of the franchise system. Other rating factors include number of years in business, length of time franchising, start-up costs, litigation, percentage of terminations and whether the company provides financing. An independent CPA firm audits financial data. Every company with verifiable data receives a cumulative score. The franchises with the highest cumulative scores become the Franchise 500.

Petland, Inc. is a franchise operation with quality, full service retail pet centers across the United States, Canada, China, Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, and El Salvador. The first Petland in Saudi Arabia will open in spring 2018.

For 50 years, Petland Pet Counselors have been dedicated to matching the right pet with the right customer and meeting the needs of both. To its customers who already have pets, Petland is dedicated to enhancing their knowledge and enjoyment of the human-animal bond.

Petland was founded in 1967 and is headquartered in south central Ohio. For more information on Petland, visit www.petland.com .

Contact: Elizabeth Kunzelman

Director of Public Affairs

Petland, Inc.

740-775-2464

SOURCE Petland

Related Links

http://www.petland.com


When patients are admitted to the hospital, they are frequently transferred between departments, which can make it difficult for healthcare professionals to obtain complete data from monitoring systems that operate independently of one another. Incomplete data not only limits clinicians' view into the patient's condition, but can put a patient's safety at risk. In a recent Philips-sponsored study , results revealed patient safety is still a top concern for physician and nurse leaders in the U.S. The results showed data is playing an increasingly important role in patient safety, with 74 percent of physician and nurse leaders saying they believe lack of patient data during in-hospital transport is a risk to patients.

"The healthcare industry is making strides to address clinician pain points, but issues such as lack of complete patient data and exhaustive alarm fatigue still remain," said Felix Baader, Business Leader, Monitoring & Analytics at Philips. "While challenges persist, there is an opportunity to improve and address the barriers that clinicians are currently facing with technology. We are aiming to provide clinicians with smarter alarms and seamless solutions to lower the chances of preventable adverse events, while helping them to improve patient care."

The IntelliVue X3 is a highly portable, dual-purpose monitor with intuitive smart-phone-style operation. With this monitor, there is no need for caregivers to change patient cables during transport or at bedside, allowing them to spend less time dealing with equipment and more time caring for the patient. With alarm fatigue a top concern for healthcare professionals, the Patient Monitoring solution also includes IntelliVue bedside monitors with Alarm Advisor, a tool that tracks how clinicians respond to alarms and alerts them when set thresholds may be too sensitive.

As a comprehensive system, the Patient Monitoring solution captures a steady stream of detailed patient data from monitors and medical devices, and feeds it securely to the hospital's EMR for virtually gap-free patient records from admission to discharge, even during transport. The integrated solution fits securely into health systems' existing IT environment, delivering vital signs, waveforms and alarms directly to caregivers. By incorporating these clinical decision support tools and advanced algorithms, caregivers have better visibility into a patient's changing condition. All Philips bedside, transport, and mobile monitors share the same look, feel, and interface for consistency and to reduce complexity, accelerate care, making it easier for clinicians to provide the best quality care throughout patients' transports around the hospital.

The Patient Monitoring solution is available in the U.S. The newest offering in the solution, IntelliVue X3, has recently received 510(k) clearance in the U.S.

For more information on Philips' full suite of integrated patient monitoring solutions, visit booth #3812 at the 2018 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition taking place March 5-9 at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas, NV. For updates on Philips' presence at HIMSS, follow @PhilipsLiveFrom and visit www.philips.com/himss.

For further information about Philips, please contact:

Kathy O'Reilly

Senior Group Press Officer, Philips

Tel: +1-978-659-2638

Mobile: +1-978-221-8919

Email: [email protected]

Silvie Casanova

Director of Communications, Philips North America

Tel: +1-978-659-7467

Mobile: +1-781-879-0692

Email: [email protected]

About Royal Philips

Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) is a leading health technology company focused on improving people's health and enabling better outcomes across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention, to diagnosis, treatment and home care. Philips leverages advanced technology and deep clinical and consumer insights to deliver integrated solutions. Headquartered in the Netherlands, the company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care. Philips' health technology portfolio generated 2016 sales of EUR 17.4 billion and employs approximately 73,000 employees with sales and services in more than 100 countries. News about Philips can be found at www.philips.com/newscenter.

SOURCE Royal Philips
PORTLAND, Ore., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Jama Software, a leading product-development platform for companies building complex products and integrated systems, today announced it has acquired Notion. Notion is a software-as-a-service analytics provider with reporting and business intelligence dashboards for metrics-focused product teams. The acquisition, which closed this week, will accelerate Jama's roadmap to deliver strategic insights from the product development process to customers.

Developing smart, connected products is becoming increasingly complex. Innovative companies need better access to data across their product development ecosystem to maintain a competitive advantage in this era of digital transformation. With Notion, Jama's product suite will now include cutting-edge analytics that empower customers to collect, track and act on performance data from multiple sources.

"Notion's team and technology are second-to-none when it comes to turning data into actionable insights that help product development teams improve their performance," said Jama CEO Scott Roth. "We are excited to offer customers an unprecedented level of strategic insights to make their product development process more predictive. Acquiring Notion enables us to do just that  by combining Jama's expertise in product development best practices, the expansive data and processes that our customers are managing with Jama's software platform, and Notion's leading edge analytical capabilities."

Notion's current product offers out-of-the box integration with the leading tools modern product development teams use, such as Jira, GitHub, Slack and Pivotal Tracker. Going forward, Jama will integrate its data  as well as data from other popular product lifecycle management, application lifecycle management and customer service sources  into Notion's cloud analytics platform and offer it as a part of Jama's overall product-development platform.

"By combining forces, we will be able to bring best-in-class analytics solutions to product development teams everywhere," said Notion co-founder Dave Shanley. "We are thrilled to join Jama and become part of such an innovative company and team."

Notion was founded in 2015 in Portland, Oregon by Dave Shanley and Kevin Steigerwald. Shanley will report directly to Roth, with Notion's entire team joining Jama. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The news of the acquisition of Notion comes on the heels of announcing significant year-over-year growth in Jama's business  with over 150 new and expansion customer wins and a 73 percent increase in new license bookings.

About Jama Software

Jama Software is the product development platform for companies building complex, smart and connected products. The Jama solution enables enterprises to accelerate development time, mitigate risk, slash complexity and verify regulatory compliance. More than 600 product-centric organizations, including NASA, Thales and Caterpillar, use Jama Software to modernize their process for bringing complex products to market. The company is headquartered in Portland, Ore. For more information, visit www.jamasoftware.com.

About Notion

Founded in 2015, Notion is a software-as-a-service analytics provider based in Portland, Oregon. Notion is the analytics layer for product-focused teams  offering an innovative, cloud-based SaaS platform to collect and track performance metrics together in one place. Notion is characterized by simple plug-and-play integrations with the SaaS tools product teams use every day for instant reporting with customizable dashboards, best practice KPI recipes, and recommended cross-team insights.

SOURCE Jama Software

Related Links

http://www.jamasoftware.com


BUCHANAN, Va., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Bank of Botetourt (OTCPK: BORT) announced today a new opportunity to trade its common shares.

Bank of Botetourt constantly looks for ways to improve the value and the marketability of its common stock. In that effort, we spoke with Raymond James and Associates about trading our shares. Our shares trade irregularly, and we would like to improve ability of shareholders to buy and sell shares. Raymond James agreed to trade our shares. Raymond James is one of North America's leading full-service investment banks, with an extensive presence across the United States, Western Europe and Canada. Some Highlights of the firm include:

Over 500 Equity Capital Markets and over 300 Debt Capital Markets professionals

Over 120 institutional equity sales professionals and traders in the United States and Europe including:

and including: 100 institutional fixed income sales professionals covering more than 2,400 accounts

Approximately 6,300 retail financial advisors with offices in all 50 states

The Financial Services group of Raymond James combines extensive experience across all sectors of the financial services industry. The group has closed more than 650 financial services transactions representing more than $200 billion in deal value since 2000. Raymond James makes markets in more than 600 financial institutions and publishes research on 160 U.S. depository institutions.

Raymond James and Associates is now quoting a market in Bank of Botetourt under the symbol BORT on the Over the Counter Markets. We hope that this will provide shareholders improved liquidity for their shares. The quoted price of our stock will change over time, depending primarily upon the supply and demand for shares.

Shareholders inquiries are welcome regarding buying and selling shares of Bank of Botetourt. Please feel free to contact the following individual at Raymond James.

Lou Coines

Office Line: 800-800-4693

Direct Line: 312-655-2964

222 S. Riverside Plaza

7th Floor

Chicago, IL 60606

Bank of Botetourt was chartered in 1899 and operates twelve retail offices in Botetourt, Rockbridge, Roanoke, and Franklin counties and the City of Salem, all in Virginia. Bank of Botetourt also operates a mortgage division, Virginia Mountain Mortgage and a financial services division, Botetourt Wealth Management.

SOURCE Bank of Botetourt

Related Links

http://www.bankofbotetourt.com


Dr. Phillips has extensive expertise leading large research groups in Academia, Biotech, Pharma and Hospital settings for drug target discovery, biomarker research, clinical diagnostics, and technology development. His positions include roles at Merck & Co., Orchid BioSciences, Genome Quebec, Universite de Montreal, Montreal Heart Institute and Centre Hospitalier de L'Universite de Montreal (CHUM) Research Centre. In his most recent role as VP Genomics at Genomics Medicine Ireland, Dr. Phillips was responsible for developing a state of the art clinical genomics laboratory, building highly skilled teams and contributing to the company's scientific direction. He has published over 70 articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and delivered hundreds of international presentations on his work.

As Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Phillips will lead all scientific development projects and genomic and precision medicine research for Sequence Bio. He joins the team full-time as they prepare for a period of rapid expansion and growth in their operations. Dr. Phillips' work will focus on deep and complete multi-omic and longitudinal health information in disease-specific cohorts and the NL Genome Project - a proposed large-scale genome sequencing project in the Newfoundland & Labrador genetic isolate founder population to drive novel therapeutic discovery and development.

Sequence Bio takes a unique participant-centric approach to its research and discovery efforts by aiming to return findings to participants and better the province of Newfoundland & Labrador and the people and communities within. Dr. Phillips will join Dr. Gerald Mugford, Ms. Diane Power, and the rest of the team in ensuring the highest standards for participant research, privacy and ethical research behaviour are practiced and maintained.

Quotes

"I am thrilled to be returning home to Canada to join Sequence Bio, an exciting new biotech company planning to use cutting-edge genomic technology and science to identify drug targets and disease biomarkers that have the potential to directly benefit the people of Newfoundland & Labrador in a real and meaningful way."

Dr. Michael Phillips, Chief Scientific Officer - Sequence Bio

"We are incredibly proud to have Dr. Phillips and his international expertise with population genetics research projects join the team. He recognizes Sequence Bio's unique opportunity to innovate drug discovery and embraces our participant-centric approach to benefit the people of Newfoundland & Labrador. We're excited to strengthen our team with Dr. Phillip's appointment."

Chris Gardner, CEO - Sequence Bio

SOURCE Sequence Bio

Related Links

sequencebio.co


GENT, Belgium, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- SGK, the leading global brand development, activation and brand deployment company, has signed an agreement with HYBRID Software to license its PACKZ Native PDF editor for use in all SGK facilities worldwide. This agreement was reached after an extensive pilot program in multiple facilities in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

PACKZ is a powerful object-based Native PDF artwork editor for packaging, with sophisticated color handling, intelligent objects, trapping, warping, and stepping capabilities. It can also import and export native Adobe Illustrator files for SGK to exchange with designers, brand customers, and print providers.

In the coming year, SGK plans to install 425 PACKZ licenses at their production facilities in North and South America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Gary R. Kohl, President, SGK Brand Solutions, stated, "The relationship with HYBRID Software gives us the opportunity to fundamentally reimagine how we manage our workflows, and will allow us to drive efficiency across our platform so that we can continue to be the most competitive graphics provider in our industry."

"HYBRID Software is honored to be an instrumental part in SGK's quest for generating the technology of the future in Order Lifecycle Management," states Guido Van der Schueren, Chairman of the Board of HYBRID Software. "This partnership is natural since HYBRID is targeting the production side of the Label and Packaging pre-media market, and SGK is strongly focused on the brand owners which form a large part of its customer base. Together, SGK and HYBRID Software can provide better productivity tools resulting in superior service towards the brand owner community. The goal is seamless connectivity across product management, marketing, and advertising to be able to take action across the different platforms."

ABOUT SGK

SGK is a leading global brand development, activation and deployment company that drives brand performance. By creating brands, helping sell brands, producing brand assets and protecting brand equities, SGK helps their clients achieve higher brand performance. SGK's global footprint spans more than 20 countries. SGK was formerly marketed as Schawk, Inc. and is a division of Matthews International Corporation.

ABOUT HYBRID SOFTWARE

With offices in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the US plus a global partner network, HYBRID Software is a software development company focused on innovative productivity tools for the graphic arts industry. HYBRID Software's CLOUDFLOW workflow, PACKZ editor and integration products offer a unique set of advantages that include native PDF workflows, vendor-independent solutions based on industry standards, scalable technology and low cost of ownership. These products are used by hundreds of customers worldwide in all areas of pre-press and print, including labels and packaging, folding cartons, corrugated, wide format and digital printing. For more information visit: www.hybridsoftware.com

SOURCE SGK
CHICAGO, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Sphera, the largest global provider of Integrated Risk Management software and information services with a focus on Operational Risk, Environmental Health & Safety (EHS), and Product Stewardship, today announced the release of a series of new Health & Safety applications for its SpheraCloud software platform.

Recently unveiled at Sphera's inspire user conference in October 2017, SpheraCloud is a cloud-based, multitenant SaaS platform that provides an integrated suite of applications helping customers mitigate risk, manage compliance and achieve Operational Excellence. With this release, SpheraCloud includes a portfolio of newly enhanced health and safety modules with prebuilt configurations that include:

Incident Management

Audits & Inspections

Actions & Remediation

Risk Assessments

Training & Competence

Documents & Policies

Compliance

Monitoring & Testing

Mobile

Analytics

Delivered as a SaaS offering, these new capabilities make it easier for companies of all sizes to leverage sophisticated technologies that address the growing Operational Risk and Environmental, Health and Safety requirements they face every day.

SpheraCloud complements Sphera's on-premise solutions and provides customers the flexibility to leverage on-premise, cloud, or hybrid models to meet their situational needs.

"SpheraCloud represents an important milestone in Sphera's history," said Paul Marushka, Sphera's CEO and president. "It is the first cloud-based integrated risk management software platform of its kind on the market; and, we are proud to lead the way in providing customers innovative solutions while maintaining the agility to serve the full spectrum of need and functionality.

When Sphera launched as a standalone entity just over a year ago, our mission was to lead the industry in innovation. Through strategic acquisitions and technological developments we have accelerated the pace of research and development, pioneering a new approach for creating a safer, more sustainable and more productive world."

In addition to these developments, Sphera has also released a series of pre-configured, out-of-the-box risk and compliance-based applications designed to better serve organizations seeking to bridge the gap as recordkeeping evolves from dated spreadsheets to more rigorous and compliant digital platforms.

The SpheraCloud integrated risk management software platform was first announced at inspire North America on Oct. 23, 2017: http://prn.to/2Ax0Ev9.

Additional information can be found at www.spherasolutions.com/spheracloud.

About Sphera

For more than 30 years Sphera has been committed to creating a safer, more sustainable and productive world by advancing operational excellence. Sphera is the largest global provider of Integrated Risk Management software and information services with a focus on Environmental Health & Safety (EH&S), Operational Risk and Product Stewardship. The company serves more than 2,500 customers and over 1 million individual users across 70 countries. Sphera is a portfolio company of Genstar Capital, a leading middle-market private equity firm focused on the software, industrial technology, financial services and healthcare industries. Learn more at www.spherasolutions.com. Follow Sphera on LinkedIn and Twitter @SpheraSolutions.

Media Contact:

Diana Dixon 419.297.0222 [email protected]

SOURCE Sphera

Related Links

https://spherasolutions.com


When Williams first heard about Ashford University during a benefits fair at work, it had been nearly two decades since she had been in school. That 19-year break would prove to be both her biggest obstacle and her greatest motivation when she decided to return to school to pursue her master's degree.

"My undergraduate degreewas actually in information technology, which is still the field that I work in, but I was interested in moving into management within the company and I felt this was a good match and a good opportunity for me," she explains.

Williams' employer, T-Mobile, participates in Ashford's Leader Development Grant* program. With this program, T-Mobile's tuition assistance benefits combine with a grant from Ashford to cover the costs of earning a degree.

"I believe T-Mobile really cares about their employees and they want us to be the best we can be. It's the main reason, I believe, they have done this partnership with Ashford," Williams says. "You have a great support system at the company: your managers, your other team members who are probably right there with you."

Williams completed her master's degree in 2017 and attended the commencement ceremony in San Diego. She reports that she has already been able to apply many of the concepts she learned at Ashford to her current job as a Principal Systems Analyst at T-Mobile, and she sees her new degree as a springboard to even greater things.

"I was able to complete my degree at Ashford with a 4.0, even with all that's on my plate, so I kind of feel like Superwoman a little bit, like there's nothing I can't do," says Williams.

To read more of Williams' story, visit https://www.ashford.edu/online-learning-experience/student-success-stories/kenitra-williams.

* Now known as the Full Tuition Grant.

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


AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- T3, the Austin-based innovation agency, has been named Digital and Social Media Agency of Record for FOCUS Brands Inc. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, FOCUS is the franchisor and operator of more than 5,000 ice cream shoppes, bakeries, restaurants and cafes in the United States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and 60 countries worldwide. T3 will assume digital and social media planning responsibilities for the entire portfolio of brands: Auntie Anne's, Carvel, Cinnabon, McAlister's Deli, Moe's Southwest Grill and Schlotzsky's.

"As a leading developer of global multi-channel foodservice brands, a great deal of our success is driven through consumer insight and engagement," said Kristen Hartman, SVP Brand Marketing Strategy. "T3 has an outstanding reputation for helping category-defining brands like ours build loyalty through their digital media capabilities, social engagement and top-notch creative."

Digital and social planning as well as effective media buying will be major components of T3's body of work for the brands, which will be achieved in part by leveraging data to strategically enhance the customer experience. "At T3, we are in the business of utilityeverything we bring to market for clients is purposefully designed to strengthen their relationships with consumers. We bring a modern lens to loyalty, and are really excited to help FOCUS expand its current programs while thinking through new opportunities to spur engagement and customer excitement for the individual brands," said Ben Gaddis, president of T3.

In a year of record growth with revenue increasing 30 percent, T3 has added eight more QSR clients to its roster of existing brands, including 7-Eleven and Pizza Hut.

ABOUT FOCUS BRANDS

Atlanta-based FOCUS Brands Inc. is a leading developer of global multi-channel foodservice brands. FOCUS is the franchisor and operator of more than 5,000 ice cream shoppes, bakeries, restaurants and cafes in the United States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and 60 foreign countries under the iconic brand names you know and love: Carvel, Cinnabon, Schlotzsky's, Moe's Southwest Grill, Auntie Anne's and McAlister's Deli, as well as Seattle's Best Coffee on certain military bases and in certain international markets. FOCUS is also the sixth largest food and beverage licensor in the world, extending its brands into alternative channels through grocery, consumer products, foodservice and ecommerce. Please visit www.focusbrands.com for more information.

ABOUT T3

T3 helps clients build Useful Brands. It is one of the largest independent agencies in the country with offices nationwide. Ranked alongside the world's top innovation agencies, T3 supports Fortune 200 clients, including Allstate, UPS, 7-Eleven, Capital One, Pizza Hut and Staples.

Media Contact:

Courtney Meola

[email protected]

SOURCE T3

Related Links

http://www.t-3.com


VANCOUVER, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - TAG Oil Ltd. (the "Company" or "TAG Oil") (TSX: TAO andOTCQX: TAOIF) is pleased to provide the following update on its operations in New Zealand and Australia.

Please click here to view a video update of TAG Oil's operations from its CEO, Toby Pierce.

New Zealand Exploration Drilling

TAG Oil and its joint venture partner (Melbana Energy - 30% WI) have begun operations on the Pukatea-1 exploration well. The Nova-1 drill rig is expected to be mobilized to the drilling pad by mid-January, with drilling expected to commence on or around January 25, 2018 from the existing production pad. The Puka permit (PEP 51135, 70% TAG Oil) covers an area of approximately 85km2 (21,000 acres) and is located close to existing infrastructure and several low-cost alternative development paths.

The primary objective of the Pukatea-1 well will be the deep Tikorangi Limestone formation, which will be drilled to a total depth of ~3,170m. The Pukatea-1 well is adjacent to the Waihapa oil field that has produced more than 23 MMbbl from the Tikorangi Limestone and where individual wells produced up to ~5,000 bbl/d. In addition to the high impact Tikorangi Limestone exploration opportunity, TAG Oil has identified a secondary objective to intersect in the shallower Mt. Messenger formation while drilling on the way to the deeper target. This has resulted in some technical adjustments to the drilling plan, which include adding an additional wireline logging run for data gathering and an additional casing string to isolate the Mt. Messenger formation.

The updated design for the wellbore path is expected to intersect the Mt. Messenger sands approximately 150m east of the Puka-2 wellbore (currently shut-in and awaiting a work-over). The Puka-2 well tested 719 bbl/d of oil over a 12-hour period on a 22/64" choke back in April 2013.

New Zealand Production

TAG Oil expects to exit fiscal 2018 at March 31, 2018 in New Zealand with production of ~1,300 boe/d. Between now and fiscal year-end, the Company is planning a number of well clean-outs, pump changes, and workovers. In addition, TAG Oil will focus a moderate amount of time and capital on optimizing the waterflood program.

TAG Oil's waterflood program is continuing, with water injection rates of ~1,400 bw/d at the Cheal permit (PMP 38156, 100% TAG Oil) and ~800 bw/d at the Cheal East permit (PEP 54877, 70% TAG Oil). Based on injection rates and pressure data in the main Cheal permit field, current expectations are that a more definitive uplift of production and recovery factors will likely be seen by mid-2018.

Australia

In Australia, production from the Bennett field is approximately 20 bbl/d of light, sweet crude following improvements to the surface facilities at PL-17 and a pump change on the Bennett-4 well. Further, TAG Oil is encouraged by the continued steady production from the field despite it having been on production for approximately 50 years. The current mapping (ahead of the interpreted 3D seismic data) indicates the potential for further upside. TAG Oil will continue its work on enhancing production from the existing wells on the block.

TAG Oil's interpretation and processing of the first modern 3D seismic recently acquired over of the core of the PL-17 acreage is nearing completion. The 70km2 of 3D seismic will provide an enhanced subsurface understanding of the Bennett and Leichardt fields and allow various drilling targets to be identified, with future drilling likely occur in late calendar 2018 or 2019.

Toby Pierce, TAG Oil's CEO commented, "I am excited that Pukatea-1 is about to commence drilling. Along with the significant potential in the Tikorangi Limestone, we also have a secondary target in the Mt. Messenger formation that is expected to be part of the existing Puka field. Further, with the significant increase in Brent Oil prices over the last few months (~50% in six months) TAG Oil will generate more cashflow per barrel of oil produced and may see an appreciation in its equity value as the stock market starts to appreciate the strengthening fundamentals in the market. Finally, I'd like to highlight the fact that our waterflood is starting to work on the Cheal East pool with an increase in pressures month over month, and we expect pressures and production to continue to rise accordingly from all four of our waterflood projects through 2018."

About TAG Oil Ltd.

TAG Oil (http://www.tagoil.com/) is an international oil and gas explorer with established high netback production, development and exploration assets, including production infrastructure in New Zealand and Australia. TAG Oil is poised for significant reserve and production growth with several oil and gas fields under development and high-impact exploration in proven oil and gas fairways. TAG Oil is debt-free and currently has 85,282,252 shares outstanding.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements and Disclaimer

Statements contained in this release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainty affecting the business of TAG Oil. Such statements can generally, but not always, be identified by words such as "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "intends", "estimates", "forecasts", "schedules", "prepares", "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. All estimates and statements that describe TAG Oil's plans relating to operations, including the Cheal permit, Cheal East permit, Puka permit, and PL-17 are forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws and necessarily involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may vary materially from the information provided in this release, and there is no representation by TAG Oil that the actual results realized in the future will be the same in whole or in part as those presented herein.

Other factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements are also set forth in filings that TAG Oil and its independent evaluator have made, including TAG Oil's most recently filed reports in Canada under National Instrument 51-101, which can be found under TAG Oil's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. TAG Oil undertakes no obligation, except as otherwise required by law, to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors change.

TAG Oil has adopted the standard of six thousand cubic feet of gas to equal one barrel of oil when converting natural gas to "boes" that may be misleading, particularly if used in isolation. A boe conversion ratio of 6 Mcf: 1 Bbl is based on an energy equivalency conversion method primarily applicable at the burner tip and does not represent a value equivalency at the wellhead.

Certain information in this release may constitute "analogous information" as defined in NI 51-101, including, but not limited to, information relating to areas with similar geological characteristics to the lands held by the Company. Such information is derived from a variety of publicly available information from government sources, regulatory agencies, public databases or other industry participants (as at the date stated therein) that the Company believes are predominantly independent in nature. The Company believes this information is relevant as it helps to define the reservoir characteristics in which the Company may hold an interest. The Company is unable to confirm that the analogous information was prepared by a qualified reserves evaluator or auditor and in accordance with the COGE Handbook. Such information is not an estimate of the reserves or resources attributable to lands held or to be held by the Company and there is no certainty that the reservoir data and economics information for the lands held by the Company will be similar to the information presented therein. The reader is cautioned that the data relied upon by the Company may be in error and/or may not be analogous to the Company's land holdings.

SOURCE TAG Oil Ltd.

Related Links

www.tagoil.com


TEL AVIV, Israel, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

TechSee, a leading SoT ('Support of Things') company merging artificial intelligence and augmented reality to streamline technical support, today released the results of a wide-ranging survey exploring customer experiences and preferences for in-home electronics installation. The research revealed self-installation - the process that enables customers to install home electronic devices without the help of a technician or a contact center - was preferred by 71 percent of consumers. While 67 percent of consumers self-installed home electronics in the last 12 months, 30 percent had to abandon their efforts mid-process to contact customer support, costing consumer electronics and telecommunication companies additional time and money, with costly technician dispatches or no fault found refunds estimated at more than 16 billion USD each year.

The survey further explored consumer sentiment toward new technical support guidance tools, including visual guidance and AI-powered virtual assistance. Key findings include:

Self-installation was preferred over any other support model: 68 percent of consumers are willing to spend more than 15 minutes trying to self-install in order to avoid contacting a call center 70 percent would rather visit their dentist than fail at self-installation and wait for a technician

Complexity is a barrier to mass adoption of self-installation: 59 percent of respondents did not find the installation process easy Baby Boomers were the demographic that struggled the most with self-installation (87 percent)

71 percent of consumers preferred "visual guidance" - images, videos, and visual prompts over other any other methods such as user manuals or online forums

The majority of respondents preferred to receive instructions via their smartphones, and 28 percent already prefer receiving help via virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa

"The Survey results reconfirm what we all know. Consumers don't like to call tech support or wait for a technician. They rather do things themselves if they had the right knowledge and tools. TechSee makes that possible with its Virtual Technical Assistant powered by AI & Augmented Reality to bring technical expertise to the masses," said Eitan Cohen, CEO of TechSee. "TechSee empowers consumers to install and operate their devices without the need to call for assistance or read manuals. Technical guidance is simply teleported to their mobile device and visually augmented into their environment, creating a simple visual and interactive customer experience."

The "Internet of Things" has become a buzzword for an increasingly networked world where everything from the garage door to the coffee machine is assigned an IP address. As the IoT matures, and the range and complexity of connected devices multiplies, there will be an increasing need for assistance with installations. In light of the inevitable shift to self-service, self-installation becomes a move necessary to enhance the customer experience and reduce costs.

For more information on the survey as well as related infographics, visit Techsee's website

About TechSee:

TechSee is global Leader in Visual Support technologies for the smart home. TechSee revolutionizes the customer support domain by providing the first intelligent visual support solution powered by artificial intelligence and augmented reality. TechSee empowers technical support teams across the globe to execute visually-interactive remote diagnoses and resolutions of problems. The company is building a massive database of interactions and resolutions to enable customers to experience rapid, fully automated, robotic visual resolution of technical issues via their smartphones. TechSee is headquartered in Tel Aviv with offices in New York and Madrid.

Contact:

Liad Churchill

[email protected]



SOURCE TechSee
Colleges That Pay You Back contains detailed profiles of the schools, plus seven ranking lists: one titled "Top 50 Colleges That Pay You Back" based on Princeton Review's ROI ratings, and six "Top 25" lists (highlights follow). The full lists, profiles, and information on the project methodology are accessible at www.princetonreview.com/colleges-pay-you-back.

The Princeton Review chose the 200 schools for this edition based on a comprehensive analysis of data from its surveys of administrators at more than 650 colleges in 2016-17. Survey topics broadly covered academics, cost, financial aid, career services, graduation rates, student debt, and alumni support.

The company also factored in data from PayScale.com surveys of alumni of the schools about their starting and mid-career salaries and job satisfaction. In all, more than 40+ data points were crunched to select the 200 schools for the book and tally its seven ranking lists.

"Only 7% of the nation's four-year colleges made it into this book," noted Robert Franek, its lead author and The Princeton Review's Editor-in-Chief. "These schools were bona fide standouts for the return they deliver on one's college investment. They offer stellar academics, generous aid awards to students with need and/or merit, and provide all of their undergrads with career services from day one plus a lifetime of alumni connections."

Ranking Highlights

Stanford University (CA) took the #1 spot on the book's main ranking list, "Top 50 Colleges That Pay You Back." Midlist at #26 was the University of Chicago (IL) while the University of Florida was #50.

Six other ranking lists report top 25 schools in high-interest categories. The list titles and #1 and #25 schools on them are:

"Best Financial Aid"

#1 Bowdoin College (ME) / #25 Macalester College (MN)

"Best Career Placement"

#1 Harvey Mudd College (CA) / #25 Cornell University (NY)

"Best Alumni Network"

#1 Pennsylvania State University / #25 Union College (NY)

"Best Schools for Internships"

#1 Northeastern University (MA) / #25 Gettysburg College (PA)

"Best Schools for Making an Impact"

#1 Wesleyan University (CT) / #25 Kalamazoo College (MI)

"Top Colleges That Pay You Back for Students with No Demonstrated Need"

#1 Harvey Mudd College (CA) / #25 University of MichiganAnn Arbor

Extraordinary Facts About the Colleges That Pay You Back 2018 Edition

Among the 200 colleges (135 private and 65 public) in the book:

the average grant to students with need is $26,800

the median starting salary of graduates is $55,700 and mid-career salary is $108,700 .

Among the book's 65 public colleges:

the average net cost of attendance (sticker price minus average grant) for in-state students receiving need-based aid is $12,700

the average admission rate is 53% and 12 colleges admit over 70%

Colleges That Pay You Back also has nine profiles of tuition-free colleges and a section listing "Great Schools for the Highest Paying Majors." It is one of 150 Princeton Review books published by Penguin Random House in a line that includes The Best 382 Colleges, Colleges That Create Futures, and Paying for College Without Going Broke.

The Princeton Review's Colleges That Pay You Back project is an expansion of its America's Best Value Colleges guide that debuted in 2004 and was inspired by the findings of the company's 2003 College Hopes & Worries Survey. This annual survey, now in its 16th year has polled more than 141,000 college applicants and parents about their college perspectives.

Among the 2017 survey findings reported in March 2017: 99% of respondents viewed college as "worth it," but 98% said "financial aid would be necessary" to pay for it (65% of that cohort deemed aid "extremely necessary"). A plurality saw the main benefit of the degree "a potentially better job and higher income."

About The Princeton Review

The Princeton Review is a leading tutoring, test prep, and college admission services company. Every year, it helps millions of college- and graduate school-bound students achieve their education and career goals through online and in person courses delivered by a network of more than 4,000 teachers and tutors, online resources, and its more than 150 print and digital books published by Penguin Random House. Its Tutor.com brand is the largest online tutoring service in the U.S. It comprises a community of more than 3,000 tutors who have delivered more than 15 million one-to-one tutoring sessions. The Princeton Review is headquartered in New York, NY. The Princeton Review is not affiliated with Princeton University. For more information, visit The Princeton Review. Follow the company on Twitter @ThePrincetonRev.

WEBSITE: www.princetonreview.com

SOURCE The Princeton Review, Inc.

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http://www.princetonreview.com


ATLANTA, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Jackson Healthcare, a leading provider of healthcare staffing, search and technology services, today announced that former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, M.D., has been named to the nearly $1 billion, Atlanta-based company's advisory board.

Dr. Tom Price, who is known for his strong work ethic, has spent his career working to ensure quality care for patients. He has also served as a physician, business leader of Resurgens Orthopedics, state legislator and member of the U.S. Congress.

"Nobody has as profound an understanding of the national healthcare landscape as Dr. Price," said Richard L. Jackson, chairman and CEO of Jackson Healthcare. "Tom has exhibited an unwavering commitment to preserving the patient-physician relationship. That mindset, along with his physician, business and policy experience, will make him an invaluable addition to our board."

After receiving both his bachelor's and M.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Price completed his residency in orthopedic surgery at Emory University. He entered private practice in 1984 and was one of the founders of Resurgens Orthopedics. While working to move Resurgens Orthopedics into a nationwide leader, he was elected to the Georgia Senate, where he served from 1997 to 2005. While he was a member of the state Senate, he became an assistant professor at Emory, starting in 2002. He was also medical director of the Orthopedic Clinic at Grady Memorial Hospital, overseeing the training of resident doctors. He was elected to Congress in 2004 and served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2005 to 2017. For two of those years  2015 to 2017  he was Chair of the House Budget Committee. He also served as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from February 2017 through September 2017.

"I am honored to join the advisory board at Jackson Healthcare," Price said. "Jackson Healthcare's mission of working to improve patient care is wholly aligned with the work I have done for over four decades, and I look forward to helping them navigate the always changing healthcare environment."

Jackson Healthcare , the third-largest U.S. healthcare staffing firm by revenue, is comprised of highly-specialized healthcare staffing and technology companies which help over 1,300 healthcare facilities serve more than 7 million patients annually. It is the 17th largest private company in Atlanta, with nearly $1 billion in revenue. Its 1,200+ associates live the mission of improving the delivery of patient care and the lives of everyone they touch. This mission is also seen in its community outreach, including LoveLifts initiatives for healthcare access and disadvantaged children's well-being, the creation of Georgia's goBeyondProfit.org initiative, and Connecting Kids with Care, a nonprofit venture that pairs global orphans with needed healthcare. Jackson Healthcare is routinely acknowledged as an employer of choice, including Atlanta Business Chronicle's "Best Place to Work" from 2014 to 2016 and certification as a Fortune "Great Place to Work" in 2017.

SOURCE Jackson Healthcare

Related Links

http://www.jacksonhealthcare.com


NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Trumark announced today that the company received several honors at the 2018 National Association of Home Builders' (NAHB) Annual Sales and Marketing Awards. Most notably, Trumark's Tribella community in Santa Ana was awarded gold for "Best Architectural Design of a Single-Family Home Under 2,000 Square Feet."

Honoring the best in new home sales, marketing and design, "The NationalsSM" awards are one of the highlights for the NAHB's annual International Builders' Show, the premier event for home building industry professionals in North America. The awards gala, held on Tuesday, January 9 at the Hyatt Regency Orlando, drew more than 1,000 esteemed industry professionals. Trumark was honored with 10 total awards in the following categories:

Gold Awards

Best Architectural Design of a Single-Family Home Under 2,000 Square Feet  Tribella ( Santa Ana )

Silver Awards

Marketing Professional of the Year  Tabatha Petersen

Sales Manager of the Year  Rochelle Vandermerwe

Best Landscape Design  Knox ( San Francisco )

) Best Computer-Generated Sales Tool  Rowan ( San Francisco )

) Best Email Marketing/Web Banners  Rowan ( San Francisco )

) Best Digital Home Tour  The Pacific ( San Francisco )

) Best Lifestyle Program for a Community  The Pacific ( San Francisco )

) Best Digital Home Tour  Founders ( Chino Hills )

) Best Digital Home Tour  Bristol ( Chino Hills )

"We are pleased to receive recognition from such a prestigious industry organization," said Michael Maples, Co-founder of Trumark Companies. "Following an exciting expansion of our portfolio across California coupled with a number of recent sellouts for both Trumark Homes and Trumark Urban communities, we look forward to introducing innovative and thoughtful new home designs to more key growing target markets."

Now in its 37th year, The NationalsSMNational Sales and Marketing Awards pay tribute to superior new home sales and marketing achievements by individual sales and marketing professionals, homebuilders and associates, and sales and marketing councils. The nation's largest competition for new home sales and marketing professionals and communities, The Nationals showcases winners in distinguished national, regional, and local publications.

About The Trumark Group of Companies

Trumark Urban develops high-density condominiums and commercial projects in global gateway markets with a focus on core urban neighborhoods close to jobs, transit and local businesses. With offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the firm has a portfolio of more than 1,000 condominiums and over one million square feet representing more than $1 billion of revenue. www.trumarkurban.com

The Trumark Group of Companies is a diversified real estate developer and builder with expertise in land acquisition, homebuilding, community design, entitlements and office, R&D and retail development. Trumark has raised more than $460 million of equity and funded 25 projects since the depth of the recession in 2009. www.trumarkco.com

Trumark Homes is a visionary, next generation homebuilder with a robust portfolio of new home neighborhoods spanning the state of California. Emphasizing distinction and innovation in every home, Trumark Homes focuses on core infill developments in locations that exhibit strong job growth and provide access to major job centers. www.trumarkhomes.com, TruBlu Blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

Trumark Communities is a residential land development platform focused on acquiring, developing and selling improved lots in master planned communities. Its current pipeline includes 1,500+ lots representing total projected revenue in excess of $300 million. Trumark Communities realized lot sales to builders of over $200 million in 2015. www.trumarkcommunities.com

Trumark Commercial, which builds, leases and sells commercial buildings, has entitled or developed approximately two million square feet of office, R&D, retail and hotel properties in the northern portion of the Golden State. www.trumarkco.com

SOURCE Trumark Homes

Related Links

http://trumarkco.com


CHANTILLY, Va., Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tuknik Government Services, LLC (TGS), subsidiary of Koniag Government Services and an SBA 8(a) certified small business and Indian Economic Enterprise, has been awarded a contract to support the Department of Interior Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians. Under this new contract, TGS will ensure mission data integration, optimization, availability and integrity for hierarchical operational reporting, analysis, dashboards and visualization, in support of OST's enterprise business systems and performance data requirements. This is part of the DOI IT modernization effort which will result in significant cost savings.

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 to support OST with ensuring the integrity and availability of the information housed in these systems to fulfill the requirements of the American Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act of 1994," said Koniag Government Services CEO Ed O'Hare.



About Tuknik Government Services LLC

Tuknik Government Services, LLC (TGS) is a small disadvantaged Alaska Native Corporation and Indian Economic Enterprise that is part of the Koniag Government Services sector. TGS provides information technology solutions and professional services to Government clients. Our approach is to provide experienced and talented teams that utilize industry best practices to support our clients in identifying and implementing "Best of Breed" solutions for their vital Program requirements. For more information, please visit www.tuknikgs.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 Tuknik Government Services. 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]

SOURCE Tuknik Government Services, LLC

Related Links

http://www.tuknikgs.com


AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Twyla, the contemporary art site for discovering and buying exclusive limited-edition prints, today announced Thomas Galbraith as new CEO. He replaces co-founder and acting CEO Brian Sharples who continues to serve as company chairman.

New Twyla CEO, Thomas Galbraith

Galbraith, formerly Managing Director of online auction company Paddle8, has a wealth of experience growing luxury brands and art e-commerce platforms. At Paddle8 he helped scale the company from a startup to a global brand, leading the profit center, a 60-person team and increasing sales 350% each year. Galbraith also founded and is a former partner at The Petraeus Group where he provided his services to clients including Marc Jacobs, artnet, Art Dubai and Arthena.

"I strongly believe in Twyla's goal to make beautiful art accessible and I was drawn to the company because I see a big opportunity to expand on this vision by broadening the product and services we offer, how we source art and who we sell to," says Galbraith.

Under Galbraith's direction, Twyla today launched a financing option giving consumers the ability to buy now and pay over time. Plans also include subscriptions for corporations, building art collections to help inspire employees and partnering with local arts organizations to bring new talent to the fold and give back to communities. The latter initiative will kick-off in Twyla's hometown of Austin.

"Thomas has helped grow some of the of the biggest names in the online art world and so I'm confident he's the right person to take Twyla to the next level," says Sharples. "His expertise and passion will introduce consumers to art they love while creating new revenue streams for the business."

Twyla will continue to make it easy for every customer  whether they be a first-time art buyer, interior designer or corporate client  to have beautiful art at the size and price that fits their needs.

About TWYLA

Twyla offers limited-edition works by vetted artists made exclusively for the company. Twyla is on a mission to bring affordable contemporary art into homes and offices across America while creating a new revenue stream for artists and the organizations that support them.

SOURCE Twyla
Organized by Uoolu.com, a leading Chinese platform for property investment globally, and attended by top developers and media outlets, GREIS is set to be a major event of the sector in 2018. Mr. Huang Xiaodan, founder and CEO of Uoolu.com will launch the company's brand and platform upgrade at the summit. Heavyweights in real estate, private equity and hedge funds will share their insights in global asset allocation of China's new affluent class.

Breaking New Grounds

1. First meetup of 100 top developers from 22 countries

100 prestigious developers from 22 countries, including EMAAR, the largest developer in UAE, CONCORD, the largest community developer in Canada , Mitsubishi Estate, a leading Japanese developer, and Berkeley, one of the largest developers in the UK, are invited.

2. In the spotlight of over 100 media outlets

Influential international media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Bangkok Post, and Reuters will be invited, according to plan. The summit will be covered and live-streamed by top Chinese strategic media partners Hexun.com, ifeng.com, and Jiemian.com.

3. Shedding light on the formula of real estate + finance + AI

Industry insiders will share their perspectives on the purchasing power of Chinese consumers, global real estate trends, and blockchain's application in the sector. A big-data based investigation into global property investments by Chinese consumers and a forecast for trends in 2018 is to be released in Chinese and English versions for the first time.

4. Launching of the Uoolu Global Real Estate Awards

Uoolu Global Real Estate Awards will be unveiled for the first time:

The Most Popular Global Real Estate Brands

The Most Popular Global Real Estate Projects

The Most Popular Innovative Global Real Estate Funds

The Driving Force of Global Assets Allocation

The rankings will assist investors in their search for the best properties worldwide.

The ground-breaking GREIS reflects Uoolu's market insights and ability to assemble the best properties. GREIS is meant to be a gathering of industry insiders and a bridge between quality assets and China's massive purchasing power.

SOURCE Uoolu.com
DENVER, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ur-Energy Inc. (NYSE American: URG; TSX: URE) ("Ur-Energy") and Energy Fuels Inc. (NYSE American: UUUU; TSX: EFR) ("Energy Fuels") today jointly submitted a Petition to the U.S. Department of Commerce ("DOC") for Relief Under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (as amended) from Imports of Uranium Products that Threaten National Security (the "Petition").

Imports of uranium from state-owned and state-subsidized enterprises in Russia , Kazakhstan , and Uzbekistan now fulfill nearly 40% of U.S. demand, while domestic production fulfills less than 5%.

, , and now fulfill nearly 40% of U.S. demand, while domestic production fulfills less than 5%. Increasing levels of nuclear fuel are expected to be imported from Russia and China in the coming years, which will compete directly with U.S. uranium production.

and in the coming years, which will compete directly with U.S. uranium production. In 2017, U.S. uranium production fell to near historic lows due in large part to uranium and nuclear fuel imported from state-subsidized foreign entities; 2018 domestic production is likely to be even lower.

A healthy uranium mining industry is vital to U.S. national security, because it supplies fuel for nuclear power plants that are a key component of the nation's critical energy infrastructure and essential defense needs.

Ur-Energy and Energy Fuels, both headquartered in Denver, Colorado , are the two main U.S. uranium producers, together supplying more than half of all U.S. uranium in 2017.

, are the two main U.S. uranium producers, together supplying more than half of all U.S. uranium in 2017. Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy have filed a Section 232 Petition requesting (1) the Department of Commerce to investigate the effects of uranium imports on U.S. national security and (2) the President to use his authority to adjust imports to ensure the long-term viability of the U.S. uranium mining industry.

Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy have proposed sensible remedies that will support a viable domestic uranium mining industry with a negligible impact on U.S. nuclear utilities.

Uranium is primarily used as the fuel for non-emitting, zero-carbon nuclear energy, but also plays a key role in national defense. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, nuclear energy provides about 20% of all electricity, and nearly 60% of the carbon-free electricity, generated in the U.S. Uranium is also the backbone of the U.S. nuclear deterrent and fuels ships and submarines in the U.S. Navy. Despite uranium's critical role in supporting clean electricity and national defense, imports of cheap, foreign state-subsidized uranium have swelled in recent years to the point that domestic suppliers currently provide less than 5% of our nation's demand. As recently as 1980, U.S. producers supplied nearly 100% of our domestic uranium needs, and in 1989 the DOC initiated a Section 232 investigation at the request of the U.S. Department of Energy ("DOE") because of concerns that uranium imports exceeded 37.5% at that time. The problem is far worse now.

In 2016, the combined uranium imports from three geopolitically and commercially linked countries  Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan  fulfilled nearly 40% of U.S. requirements. While the U.S. does not import significant quantities of uranium from China at this time, China has significantly grown their state-owned nuclear enterprises and announced that they intend to penetrate the U.S. nuclear market with nuclear fuel that will compete directly with U.S. uranium miners. Further, the approaching expiration of the Russian Suspension Agreement will remove existing limits on Russian uranium imports. This will create additional pressure on U.S. uranium producers, as Russia has announced plans to increase its U.S. market share after that agreement expires in 2020.

Today's extreme dependence is not a matter of foreign competition legitimately underpricing domestic production. It is the result of certain foreign state-subsidy policies that undermine U.S. companies who could otherwise compete fairly on a global basis.

The Petition filed today is a response to this threat to U.S. energy and national security. The Petitioners urge Commerce Secretary Ross and President Trump to act decisively to help restore the long-term viability of the U.S. uranium mining industry. Without a viable nuclear fuel cycle, the commercial and nuclear capabilities of the U.S. will be diminished, and the nation is likely to become 100% dependent on foreign parties that compete with the U.S. for geopolitical influence and commercial advantage to fuel a majority of our clean, baseload electricity. Further, international treaties require that the uranium necessary for defense programs be sourced from the U.S. Unless steps are taken now to foster a healthy domestic uranium mining industry, the defense stockpiles currently held by the DOE will be depleted, and it is unlikely that domestic producers will have sufficient capabilities to meet our defense needs in the future.

Legal Basis and Process

The Petition was filed by Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy pursuant to the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, as amended (the "Act"), and 15 C.F.R.  705.5. The Act was promulgated by Congress to protect essential national security industries whose survival is threatened by imports. As such, the Act authorizes the Secretary of Commerce (the "Secretary") to conduct investigations to evaluate the effects of imports of any item on the national security of the U.S. In the Petition, Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy describe in detail how the loss of a viable U.S. uranium mining industry would have a significant detrimental impact on the national, energy, and economic security of the U.S. and the ability of the country to sustain an independent nuclear fuel cycle.

Once the DOC initiates an investigation, the Secretary has 270 days to prepare a report to the President. Following receipt of the Secretary's report, the President then has 90 days to act on the Secretary's recommendations, and if necessary take action to "adjust the imports of an article and its derivatives" and/or pursue other lawful non-trade related actions necessary to address the threat.

Benefits of Trade Remedies

The Petition seeks remedies which will set a quota to limit imports of uranium into the U.S., effectively reserving 25% of the U.S. nuclear market for U.S. uranium production. Additionally, the Petition suggests implementation of a requirement for U.S. federal utilities and agencies to buy U.S. uranium in accordance with the President's Buy American Policy. These remedies are expected to result in U.S. utilities purchasing approximately 12 million pounds of uranium per year from U.S. production, based on recent data. This would be expected to create a healthy U.S. uranium mining industry, bolster national defense, and improve supply diversification for U.S. utilities and their customers. Greater diversification will lessen the exposure of the U.S. government, U.S. utilities and their customers to the policies of nations like Russia, Kazakhstan, and China. U.S. utilities and their customers will also receive greater protection from supply shocks, price increases, and other geopolitically motivated actions of foreign state-controlled uranium producers. Likewise, a strong domestic uranium mining industry will be able to reliably supply the required domestic uranium that is critical to our national defense programs. The U.S. government will provide support to a vital national security industry, while maintaining a high degree of competition that encourages innovation and lower prices. These remedies will reduce dependence on imports that fuel clean energy, and support reductions in air pollution and carbon emissions.

U.S. uranium producers will continue to compete with global uranium producers, but on a more level playing field. U.S. production will come from existing U.S. producers, from other U.S. producers that are on standby as a result of low uranium prices, and from new U.S. producers. Pricing for U.S. uranium would be expected to increase through domestic competition to levels more consistent with un-subsidized global costs of uranium production, but not to a level that will have a significant impact on the bottom lines of U.S. utilities or the rates their customers pay. An econometric model included in the Petition demonstrates that the average price impact to consumers will be negligible.

Additional information regarding the trade action, including the full text of the Section 232 Petition, can be found on the companies' respective websites shown below. There can be no certainty of the outcome of the investigation or the recommendation of the Secretary, and therefore the outcome of this process is uncertain.

About Ur-Energy: Ur-Energy is a U.S. uranium mining company with corporate and operations offices in Denver, Colorado and Casper, Wyoming. Ur-Energy operates the Lost Creek in-situ recovery uranium facility in south-central Wyoming. Ur-Energy has produced, packaged and shipped more than two million pounds from Lost Creek since the commencement of operations. Applications are under review by various agencies to incorporate Ur-Energy's LC East project area into the Lost Creek permits, and the company has begun to submit applications for permits and licenses to construct and operate its Shirley Basin Project. Ur-Energy is engaged in uranium mining, recovery and processing activities in the United States, including the acquisition, exploration, development and operation of uranium mineral properties. The primary trading market for Ur-Energy's common shares is the NYSE American under the trading symbol "URG;" Ur-Energy's common shares also trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the trading symbol "URE." Ur-Energy's website is www.ur-energy.com.

About Energy Fuels: Energy Fuels is a leading integrated U.S. uranium mining company, supplying U 3 O 8 to major nuclear utilities. Its corporate offices are in Denver, Colorado, and all of its assets and employees are in the western United States. Energy Fuels holds three of America's key uranium production centers, the White Mesa Mill in Utah, the Nichols Ranch Processing Facility in Wyoming, and the Alta Mesa Project in Texas. The White Mesa Mill is the only conventional uranium mill operating in the U.S. today and has a licensed capacity of over 8 million pounds of U 3 O 8 per year. The Nichols Ranch Processing Facility is an in-situ recovery production center with a licensed capacity of 2 million pounds of U 3 O 8 per year. Alta Mesa is an in-situ recovery production center with a licensed capacity of 1.5 million pounds of U 3 O 8 per year, which is currently on care and maintenance due to low uranium prices. Energy Fuels also has the largest uranium resource portfolio in the U.S. among producers, and uranium mining projects located in a number of Western U.S. states, including one producing in-situ recovery project, mines on standby, and mineral properties in various stages of permitting and development. Energy Fuels also produces vanadium as a co-product of its uranium production from certain of its mines on the Colorado Plateau, as market conditions warrant. The primary trading market for Energy Fuels' common shares is the NYSE American under the trading symbol "UUUU", and the Company's common shares are also listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the trading symbol "EFR". Energy Fuels' website is www.energyfuels.com.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: Certain information contained in this news release, including any information relating to: the expected increases in foreign state-subsidized imports of uranium in coming years; the expected further negative impacts of such imports on U.S. uranium production and national security, including the depletion of stockpiles held by the Department of Energy; the potential of the U.S. to be unable to sustain an independent nuclear fuel cycle and to become 100% dependent on foreign parties; the outcome of the Department of Commerce Section 232 investigation, including whether or not the Secretary of Commerce will make a recommendation to the President and the nature of the recommendation; whether or not the President will act on the recommendation and, if so, the nature of the action and remedy; the expected benefits of the proposed remedies, including: the expected impacts on U.S. production and the U.S. uranium mining industry, the expected impacts on purchases of U.S. production by U.S. utilities, the expected impacts on supply diversification and the expected benefits of such diversification on domestic utilities and national defense, the expected ability of the U.S. uranium mining industry to reliably supply the required domestic uranium production, the expected impact of the proposed remedy on improved competition, innovation and lower prices, and the reduction of dependence on imports; the expected impact on pricing for U.S. uranium production and the negligible price impact on electricity rates paid by consumers; and any other statements regarding Energy Fuels' or Ur-Energy's future expectations, beliefs, goals or prospects; constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively, "forward-looking statements"). All statements in this news release that are not statements of historical fact (including statements containing the words "expects", "does not expect", "plans", "anticipates", "does not anticipate", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential", "scheduled", "forecast", "budget" and similar expressions) should be considered forward-looking statements. All such forward-looking statements are subject to important risk factors and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Energy Fuels' and Ur-Energy's ability to control or predict. A number of important factors could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those indicated or implied by such forward-looking statements, including without limitation factors relating to: the expected increases in foreign state-subsidized imports of uranium in coming years; the expected further negative impacts of such imports on U.S. uranium production and national security, including the depletion of stockpiles held by the Department of Energy; the outcome of the Department of Commerce Section 232 investigation, including whether or not the Secretary of Commerce will make a recommendation to the President and the nature of the recommendation; whether or not the President will act on the recommendation and, if so, the nature of the action and remedy; the expected benefits of the proposed remedies; the expected impact on pricing for U.S. uranium production and the negligible price impact on electricity rates paid by consumers; and other risk factors as described in Energy Fuels' and Ur-Energy's most recent annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly financial reports. Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy assume no obligation to update the information in this communication, except as otherwise required by law. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties is contained in Energy Fuels' and Ur-Energy's filings with the various securities commissions which are available online at www.sec.gov and www.sedar.com. Forward-looking statements are provided for the purpose of providing information about the current expectations, beliefs and plans of the management of Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy relating to the future. Readers are cautioned that such statements may not be appropriate for other purposes. Readers are also cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, that speak only as of the date hereof.

For Further Information, Please Contact:

Karen Heinold

[email protected]

202.379.6358



SOURCE Ur-Energy Inc.

Related Links

http://www.ur-energy.com


SUNNYVALE, California, January 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Xoriant, a Silicon Valley based product engineering, software development and technology services firm that delivers innovative solutions for technology companies and enterprises, announced today the opening of a new state-of-the-art delivery center in Pune, India.



(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/449859/PRNE_Xoriant_Logo.jpg )



The facility will accommodate approximately 1,000 additional employees above the 1,250 people already employed by Xoriant in Pune. The company plans to leverage the expanded footprint to deliver services and solutions in core focus areas including Product Engineering, Cloud and Big Data & Analytics as well as in expanding focus areas including IoT and Digital.

As a top technology hub, Pune has been an ideal location for Xoriant to grow its footprint in India. The city has developed a very healthy ecosystem for startups and other innovative businesses, and there is a substantial presence of IT companies and training institutes that ensure a high-quality knowledge base and an excellent IT talent pool.

"As technology becomes an even more pervasive part of every organization, demand for product engineering and technology services partners with next-generation technology expertise continues to grow, and Xoriant is excited to be contributing to the client needs for these technology solutions," said Arun Tendulkar, COO Xoriant.

The Pune facility has world-class infrastructure and in addition to the delivery center, it also has a dedicated training facility and innovation labs for innovating next-generation solutions. It is ISO 27001 certified for Information Security, with policies and procedures that include all legal, physical and technical controls. It has multiple secured access clusters for ODCs and is LEED certified, a reflection of Xoriant's commitment to environmental sustainability.

Click here to see pictures of the new facility

The new Pune facility address is:

7th floor, IT-7 Building,

Qubix Business Park Pvt. Ltd. SEZ,

Phase - 1, Hinjewadi, Pune 411 057

About Xoriant

Xoriant is a Silicon Valley based product engineering, software development and technology services firm with offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia. For both technology companies and enterprises, from startups to the Fortune 100, we leverage our expertise in emerging technologies and our high-performing teams to deliver innovative solutions that accelerate time to market and keep our clients competitive.

Across all our technology focus areas - Product Engineering, DevOps, Cloud & Infrastructure, Security, Big Data & Analytics, Data Management & Governance, Digital and IoT - every solution we develop benefits from our product engineering pedigree. For 25 years and counting we have taken great pride in the long-lasting, deep relationships we have with our clients. Learn more at http://www.xoriant.com.

Media Contact

U.S. Media Contact:

Amrita Joshi

[email protected]

Tel: +1-530-304-9026



India Media Contact:

Ritu Rungta

[email protected]

Tel: +91(22)3051-1000



.

SOURCE Xoriant
Adelaide has overtaken Sydney as the mainland capital with the second strongest growth in property values.

Sydney house values are down 0.2 percent in the quiet first two weeks of the new year, Corelogic data shows.

There was no movement for the other major markets, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide in the year to date.

Perth was also down 0.2 percent.

Sydney's annualised growth sits at 2.5 percent.

The last time Sydney posted such a low level of growth was at the start of the boom in mid-2012.

There was a 70.8 per cent rise since 2012, Corelogic says.

Adelaide's annualised growth sits at 2.7 percent.

Melbourne is still the market leader.

In December Sydney house prices fell 0.5 percent.

The start of the year is always quiet, but last January (below) saw Sydney prices sitting at an annualised 15.6 percent growth, with 0.7 percent growth just in January, according to CoreLogic.
Veronica Macpherson, once the head of the collapsed Macro Realty Group, plans to publish a book which she has given a working title, "The Great Australian Ponzi".

Her Pilbara property scheme fell over leaving thousands of investors owed millions in 2015. But bizarrely she suggests there could be a happy ending.

The local media says she will launch the book in April featuring "political backflips, errors, mismanagement of the Australian economies  suicides, nasty threats and wild accusations."

Ms Macpherson says it was a book "to get the truth known".

Featuring the Pilbara Cities that were meant to be, she will be pedalling the line that "ASIC was their own worst enemy."

"One of my sayings is that I am a big fan of the truth and unfortunately many people have been left wondering what the truth of the matter actually is with our Pilbara developments," she suggested.

"Please do pre-order a copy... it will help with the print costs and put you in a draw to receive an early addition, which you are welcome to sell to the media if you wish."

She said anyone signing up to the launch would receive an advance copy. There was also an online auction planned of the first release suggested on the trybooking website.

In online material advertising the book, Ms Macpherson was using a picture of herself with Gina Rinehart, believed to have been taken at the CEO Magazines Australian Executive of the Year awards in late 2015.

That photograph posted alongside the book title was causing some consternation amongst Ms Hancocks inner circle yesterday.

A spokeswoman for Mrs Rinehart confirmed to the Perthnow website that the event was the only time the two had ever met.

Mrs Rinehart had no business relationship with the would-be property developer and accused Ponzi queen.

Macpherson, in a five-page letter to investors, affiliates and associates sent out under a Macro Investments and Securities letterhead, also contemplated the establishment of a Pilbara Cooperative which she claims could provide hope to her many investors.

The media has not bothered to showcase our past successes, but dont worry there will be many more through this collaborative structure and great, like minded individuals, the letter advises.

Macro Realty Developments former brand ambassador was former rugby champion, David Campese.
A nation like Australia should be able to have a sensible, rational, balanced debate on issues like housing affordability  but it seems we cannot because we have the media from hell.

Mainstream media has been having a feeding frenzy recently over two documents about negative gearing and its impact on affordability  one a leaked report from Federal Treasury and the other a half-finished research paper by Melbourne University economists.

Both apparently claim that scrapping negative gearing tax benefits would have only a minor impact on home values but at the same time would bring about a major improvement in housing affordability.

Theres been lots of commentary on the significance of these documents, especially with regard to Federal Government policy, but I have not seen any media reports from writers who have challenged the documents.

Their findings, apparently, are deemed to be factual and beyond scrutiny.

The worst contribution to this endless and seemingly fruitless debate about affordability, its causes and its solutions, has come from the Melbourne University research paper.

My first question about this is: why would the authors publish research that is not yet finished? It is, according to the authors, preliminary and incomplete. One of them says that when the research modelling is complete, the results may change, particularly the forecast size of the lift in home ownership.

Given the sad record of this discussion being blighted by claims, counter-claims, pet theories and silver bullet solutions, why would academics who want to be taken seriously publish something that just adds to the quagmire of confusion because its still a work in progress.

This paper makes some pretty big claims. Three-quarters of households would be better off, home ownership would surge and rents would rise but renters would be somehow better off.

These are big statements. But theyre not justified or substantiated in any of the reports Ive read.

To try to understand why the authors think the suggested policy changes would have the big impacts they claim, I studied reports from six sources, including The Australian, the Financial Review, The Age and The Guardian.

Im still waiting for an explanation of the claimed outcomes. And Im still waiting to come across a journalist who challenged the authors of the report on a number of matters, including their credentials, their motivations, their methodology and their assumptions.

Id love to see the mathematics thats led them to their preliminary and incomplete conclusions.

Heres a core question they should be asked: how can you claim that the suggested policy would cause a 30% reduction in rental property supply, and therefore an increase in rents, but also claim that renters everywhere would be better off?

From my study of media reports, it seems the authors are assuming that a 30% reduction in supply would cause a rental rise of only 2.4 percent  and that the Federal Government would financially compensate tenants for the higher rents that would result.

Those are massive assumptions. No one in Australian media has challenged them.

If theyre wrong and theres no government compensation for higher rents, which would cost billions of dollars according to the report, tenants will be disadvantaged by having higher weekly occupancy costs, which would make it harder to save a deposit to get into home ownership.

That whole argument falls apart if a future government offers no compensation.

And keep in mind that other research tells us that last year, without any taxation policy changes to limit the supply of rental properties, house rents rose 7 percent in Canberra, 9 percent in Hobart and 5 percent in Melbourne.

But, according to the Melbourne University boffins, eliminating one-third of the supply of rental properties would cause rents to change barely at all.

Its worth remembering that significantly higher rents resulted when a Labor Government scrapped negative gearing in the 1980s and then had to re-instate it a short time later because of the unforeseen adverse impacts.

The university paper claims that property values would fall only 1.2 percent but somehow this insignificant decline in house prices would generate a massive rise in home ownership  from 66.7 percent to 72.2 percent.

How have they come up with these very precise but unexplained estimates?

They claim 30 percent of rental properties would be freed up and bought by Australians who would otherwise have rented. So were asked to accept that a 1.2% drop in prices would turn those who cant afford to buy into people who now can do so.

Thats another massive assumption that no one has challenged.

Think about it. The Asking Price Index for Sydney houses sits at $1,356,500, according to SQM Research. A 1.2 percent reduction in prices would bring that down to $1,340,222. Apparently $1.356 million is unaffordable but $1.34 million is affordable to heaps of people.

But those are Sydney prices. Lets look at a city thats a little less extreme, like Brisbane. The Asking Price Index for the Queensland capital sits around $614,000 and a 1.2 percent reduction would bring it down to about $607,000.

The report authors want us to believe that this small change will cause a surge in home ownership rates in Brisbane.

In a parallel universe, maybe, but not in the real world.

There are other aspects of this paper that ought to be challenged  and would be if journalism played a part in the reporting of the housing industry.

The claim that only the rich benefit from negative gearing is outrageous - and patently false, according to ATO data.

Theres no explanation in any report Ive read for the claim that 76 percent of households would be better off under the suggested policy change. Were told only that the authors used an economic model.

Surely Australia as a nation can do better than this. But while were saddled with such mediocre media and clueless politicians, were doomed to having this festering issue drone on for years to come.

Terry Ryder is the founder of hotspotting.com.au ryder@hotspotting.com.au

twitter.com/hotspotting
News

From Bulgaria

SOCAR Interested in Bulgarian Gas Transmission Network Investments

AUTHOR: publics.bg

President Ilham Aliyev stressed that Azerbaijan and Bulgaria are strategic partners in the realisation of the Southern Gas Corridor project which will guarantee Europes energy security.

 Council of Ministers



The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) has expressed interest in investing in Bulgarian gas transmission network, the press service of the Council of Ministers announced after a meeting between the Prime Minister of Bulgaria Boyko Borissov and the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.

Only 3% of Bulgarias territory has access to natural gas, while the air is polluted due to usage of solid fuels for heating. We set an ambitious goal to expand the utilisation of materials for heating which do not lead to pollution, PM Borissov said. In Alievs words, 93% of Azerbaijans territory has access to gas. The country has invested successfully in the development of gas infrastructure in Georgia and can offer its experience and good practices to Bulgaria.

Following the meeting, the energy and economic ministers of both countries are going to develop an investment plan for the gas transmission system in Bulgaria.

President Ilham Aliyev stressed that Azerbaijan and Bulgaria are strategic partners in the realisation of the Southern Gas Corridor project which will guarantee Europes energy security. We expect the construction of the Gas Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB) to start in June, and the extension to Turkey to be ready by July. Thus, the delivery of the contracted 1 billion cubic metres of natural gas annually from the Shah Deniz Stage 2 to Bulgaria will be guaranteed, PM Borissov commented. According to him, social welfare for natural gas heating could be drawn up and provided to the population.

Prime Minister Borissov and President Aliyev discussed the importance of Pan-European Corridors VIII and X, which are going to connect Europe and Asia. The direct Sofia-Baku airline was officially opened today. The new transport link will help business ties between the two countries and strengthen economical, commercial and trade relations.
After Donald Trump made headlines last week for reportedly referring to Haiti and African nations as shithole countries during a meeting with lawmakers, an indie bookstore in Michigan seized on the news as a cheeky, and politically charged, way to promote books.

Over the weekend, McLean and Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Mich., began pushing books via social media by authors from the countries that Trump had supposedly derided. (Since news initially broke about the comments, the President has denied using the phrase "shithole countries.") The effort, which went viral, also wound up impacting sales. Bookstore co-owner Matt Norcross said that, over the weekend, sales in-store and online climbed by more than 10% over the same holiday weekend last year. The bookseller also noted that many of the sales came from first-time customers.

On Friday, the store set up a dedicated page on its website featuring a list of five books under the headline Shithole Country Reading. The list included titles by, among others, Nigerian expat Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie and Haitian expat Edwidge Danticat.

On social media, McLean and Eakin asked: Whats your favorite book from a shithole country?" The retailer said it was compiling a list and welcomed suggestions from its followers. At press time, the list on the bookstore's website had grown to nearly 30 titles.

Norcross said the store has received primarily positive feedback on the promotion. Since the social media push, the indie has lost eight Facebook followers but gained over 250. An in-store display is also in the process of being created, and it will highlight select titles from the list that is being crowdsourced. The display will not, though, feature the phrase "shithole," because Norcross does not want to "offend" any customers.

Concern about angering customers by using the President's supposed language is something booksellers do need to consider. At least two other indies have, within 24 hours of set up, removed in-store displays featuring Trumps supposed off-color comments.

On Saturday, a photograph of a book display at Rough Draft Bar & Books in Kingston, N.Y., went viral after the writer Michele Filgate (who has 4,000 Facebook friends and 27,500 Twitter followers) posted it on her social media accounts. The photo featured a table of books by writers like Junot Diaz and Mohsin Hamid with a sign stating in all-caps: Writers from Sh#thole Countries. Although celebrities like J.K. Rowling and Patton Oswalt re-tweeted Filgates photo, the bookstore changed the sign on Saturday evening. The sign now reads E Pluribus Unum.

Owner Amanda Stromoski said that her husband came up with the idea on Thursday evening. We heard the news and it was really a gut reaction. We were angry and frustrated, Stromoski said. The sign was taken down, however, after the store received complaints from customers who identified themselves as immigrants and said the sign was insulting to them and their homelands. (Filgate has also since deleted her tweets about the display from her social media accounts. In a comment she posted on Sunday afternoon, Filgate disclosed that she did so after "many people I respect" complained to her that the photo, as well as the Rough Draft display itself, offended them.)

The Portland, Me., shop Print: A Bookstore had a similar experience with a sign it put up over the weekend. After sharing a photo on social media of a table of books under a sign reading: "Books from S***hole Countries," the store has since removed the sign from the display. When PW contacted the store about the situation, bookstore owner Emily Russo declined comment.
Canadas Edwige Magazine, aimed at working women around the world, has chosen Arkena to support its launch of a TV channel in Europe.





With interviews, reports, documentaries on music, fashion, beauty, decoration or current trends, Edgy TV offers programmes with diverse and varied themes to women, from 20 to 55, mixing all the cultural differences that accompany them and enrich their daily lives.On 1 December, the media group launched the Edgy TV channel on the Luxembourgish bouquet POST Telecom, the country's leading telecom services operator.The group relied on the Arkena content management services for the preparation and homogenisation of a hundred hours of programmes (including transcoding, storage and security). Edgy TV also used Arkena's playout services, with the support of their technical teams, to air their programmes, providing the Luxembourg operator with a broadcast signal.The TV channel will continue to expand in Europe, with other telecom operators, contributing to expand their influence on the old continent."By leaving all technical aspects to a trustworthy provider such as Arkena , we were able to save time to focus on our job, the editorial, said Edwige Dazogbo, MD of Edwige Magazine. Arkena has proved to be a true partner, and we would like to congratulate the technical teams who accompanied us throughout this project, from the preparation of the content, to the launching of our channel.
As it looks to introduce developments such as 4KTV and HDR across the MENA region, Abu Dhabi Media has embarked upon a major enhancement of its central technical facilities.





The centre, which includes playout facilities for 15 HDTV channels, was first established ten years ago. The upgrade of the facility has been carried out with the services of Imagine Communications.The new installation has been designed to provide an end-to-end broadcast chain, from ingest to delivery. Central to the design of the refreshed technology platform is the flexibility to meet changing market demands. The system currently supports baseband/SDI, but now can incorporate IP connectivity, as required. The hybrid architecture supports a mix of on-premises and cloud-ready solutions, including Imagines Broadcast Master and xG Schedule for traffic and programme scheduling. In 2017, Imagine and Abu Dhabi Media implemented a proof-of-concept cloud playout system for disaster recovery in cooperation with du Media Cloud The new ingest and asset management system is based on the Imagine Nexio Motion, which manages content workflows across the system while the Versio playout solution, running as software instances on Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) workstations, supports the playout automation, including Nexio+ AMP, branding and master control switching. The Nexio Motion also provides browse access to content and low-resolution editing. High-resolution editing software has direct access to content on Versio IOX storage solutions for highly efficient post production. Also incorporated into the network at the software level are applications such as QC, file transfer and production graphics, which reside alongside the central archival storage.Today, the direction of technology is more towards software-defined solutions and away from hardware, explained Ahmed Al-Menhali, director of projects at Abu Dhabi Media. The concept of software-defined technology is helping everybody. Imagine Communications www.imaginecommunications.com is following that direction, and that serves the roadmap we have planned to roll out. Abu Dhabi Media has elected to make a managed transition to IP, primarily to protect its capital investment in legacy equipment. Currently we do not feel the need to invest in replacing all the existing infrastructure, Al-Menhali added. We have the HD-SDI infrastructure in place, and we intend to continue with this infrastructure for routing until we decided to move on, perhaps to some form of Ultra HD. The important thing is that what we are building now will survive the coming four or five years, but is capable of shifting the underlying routing from SDI to IP without changing anything else.This major programme of work has now been designed, with installation starting at the beginning of 2018 for an on-air date in May.
The assumption about North Koreas nuclear program has been that it is primarily needed for regime preservation. North Korea has been perpetually concerned about an American intervention, along with other threats. It sees Japan as a potential enemy that has attacked and occupied Korea before. It also has historical animosity toward Russia and China. The Soviets supported the North Korean invasion of the South but when North Korean forces faced American forces, and crumbled, the Soviets avoided taking risks on North Koreas behalf. China similarly was unwilling to intervene in support of North Korea until U.S. forces neared the Yalu River and threatened China. The North was subsequently devastated as the United States and China used it as an arena to fight their war. Finally, North Korea has viewed South Korea as a U.S. proxy, bound to the United States by treaty and national strategy.

From the North Koreans point of view, they live in a tough neighborhood, filled with threats former and current and with putative allies that did not raise a finger to help North Korea in times of need. Some of these threats emerged long ago, from the American perspective. The Korean view of history has a longer timeframe. The view that the North Koreans wanted a nuclear weapon to guarantee their national security seemed accurate and seemed to forecast the American response: taking steps to prevent a nuclear North Korea. But the situation has become more complicated than that.

Shared Views

Seoul saw a potential American strike on Pyongyang as a direct threat to South Korean interests. The ability of North Korea to impose a massive bombardment on South Koreas capital was a risk the South couldnt accept. Whats more, it wasnt obvious that South Korea and the United States, acting together, could mitigate the threat. South Korea, therefore, resisted any American military operation. Japan continued to maintain a more aggressive attitude toward North Korea. South Korea saw China and Russia as pretending to mediate, while in fact both were content to see the U.S. get bogged down in the Korean Peninsula.

In this sense, the North and the South had similar views. The United States, Japan, China and Russia each had their own interests and each saw the Korean Peninsula today as serving the same purpose it served decades before. For them, it was an arena for playing out their own national ambitions and fears. The North Koreans had always felt this way. The South Koreans, however, were comfortable with their relations with the United States and its military guarantees. But the value of those guarantees had changed with the threat of a pre-emptive strike.

The placement of massive artillery, ancient as much of it might be, north of the Demilitarized Zone was in retrospect a brilliant move. Artillery does not have to be state of the art to hurl explosives for miles. Large concentrations of fortified artillery are difficult to destroy, and Seouls position so close to the border makes it an easy target.

Artillery also compelled South Korea to rethink its view of North Korea as its primary adversary. Instead, it began to see the North as a country with a shared basic interest. The devastation of the Korean War is seared into both countries memories. It led North Korea to develop a nuclear capability. It led South Korea to refuse to participate in an attack on Pyongyang with the primary aim of destroying its nuclear capability. They both have an interest in not permitting the peninsula to become a battlefield again.

The issue now is how far this joint vision goes. Each has fears of the other. The North is poor and oppressive. The South is economically vibrant. The North sees South Koreas economic well-being and culture as a threat to the authority of its regime. The South does not intend to be conquered by the North.

A Basis for Cooperation

The two states, however, understand that the logic they have been following necessarily leads to different outcomes. If the primary goal is to exclude third parties who might wage war or be sanguine about a war being waged, then neither state can allow itself to be drawn into these foreign ambitions. And if that is the case, then each must find a degree of trust in the other, and a basis for cooperation.

North Korea seems to have seen this most clearly, or at least it has a more immediate interest in splitting South Korea from the United States and, to a lesser extent, from Japan. Pyongyang would like to see South Koreas refusal to allow a strike on the North expand into a rupture, particularly when it comes to defense, between Seoul and Washington. Forcing the United States out of the Korean Peninsula is unlikely. But it is a goal shared by China and North Korea. To an extent, this is a replay of 1950.

For South Korea, ejecting the U.S. from the peninsula carries enormous risks. It is North Koreas task to make those risks seem far less dangerous than the risk of war. North Korea cannot pretend to abandon its regime nor can the South Koreans pretend to abandon theirs. The logical outcome is for North Korea to propose some agreement in which the two Koreas maintain separate regimes and political orders, but act toward the rest of the world with some unity.

The Norths fear of the Souths economic dominance and the Souths fear of being subjugated by the North likely make any such entente impossible. But there are major powers, namely China and Russia, that would give a great deal to see the U.S. expelled from the Korean Peninsula. That would shift the balance of power in the Northwest Pacific dramatically. Of course, South Korea  and North Korea  would not want Russia and China to operate in the region without fear. Worse, their old enemy Japan would now have to rearm and that would resurrect a historic nightmare.

Unless the North or the South dramatically reforms their regimes, it is difficult to imagine an entente, or South Korea breaking its alliance with the United States. And using a nuclear threat against the South would cement that relationship. Still, it is worth trying from the Norths point of view, and worth considering from the Souths. The near nuclear capability gives the North opportunities it did not have before. But South Korea is an industrial democracy of the first order, and North Korea is not, to say the least. But having split South Korea and the United States on pre-emptive strike, the North has nothing to lose in seeing how far reconciliation between Pyongyang and Seoul can go. And China and Russia can only be smiling, while Japan must be contemplating its own nuclear plans.
During his speech, Knight talked about his experience as an up-and-coming Athens entrepreneur as well as the trials and tribulations he faced while co-founding the startup, HW Creative Marketing, in 2010.
How many steps will it take to walk off Thanksgiving dinner?
A Las Vegas man who fell behind on his mortgage payments was facing foreclosure on his property and filed a qualified written request (QWR) with his servicer.

The day his servicer responded, he also received notice of sale for the foreclosure sale of his property. The borrower sued, citing violations of RESPA for failure to comply in responding to his QWR and alleging his servicer secretly encouraged the lender to foreclose.

The district court found the borrower was able to sufficiently plead that his servicer failed to comply with RESPA. But did he sufficiently allege actual damages? Read on for the ruling.
As work progresses on a high-speed railway linking Laos with China, Beijing is pouring billions of dollars in aid and investment into its poorer neighbor to fund other projects, pulling it closer into Chinas orbit, sources say.



Lao Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith has urged government ministries and other departments to efficiently spend a 5.2 billion yuan (U.S. $800 million) package of foreign development assistance recently given by China for unspecified projects, the official KPL news service said in a report last week.



Speaking to RFAs Lao Service on condition of anonymity, a Laos-China Cooperation Department official of the Planning and Investment Ministry confirmed the amount of the aid under discussion, adding, But this figure is still a secret, since we are still planning the projects.



Meanwhile, Lao Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Khamphao Ernthavanh and Chinese ambassador to Laos Wang Wentian signed an agreement on Jan. 3 providing U.S. $3.4 million in aid for projects planned along the Mekong River, including improvements on Lao ports.



Chinese money is funding other major projects in Laos, Lao state media say, with U.S. $90 million in funds pledged during a visit in November 2017 by Chinese president Xi Jinping for construction of a hospital in Vientiane, and U.S. $615 million promised toward improvements in the countrys health sector over the next three years.



China is now also Laoss top investor, with Chinese companies putting up to U.S. $7 billion toward the development of Special Economic Zones, dams, mines, and rubber plantations, with a new SEZ worth a further U.S. $9 billion now planned for the countrys southern Champassak province, official sources say.



Writing in the Dec. 20, 2017 issue of World Politics Review, researcher Michael Hart outlined in an article titled Chinas Influence Steadily Grows in Laos the benefits to Laos of closer ties with China, with China now also able to count on Lao support in ASEAN for Chinas claims in the South China Sea.



[Laos was] left with no real alternative but to accept large-scale Chinese investment in infrastructure, even if it meant accepting the economic and political influence that comes with it, Hart wrote.



The risk of rebuffing Beijing was too great, as sustained growth and faster development are vital to ensure the legitimacy of the ruling party.



Reported by RFAs Lao Service. Translated by Max Avary. Written in English by Richard Finney.
At least five people have been killed in a mortar attack on a market in northern Afghanistan.

Officials said that 45 people, including women and children, were also wounded in the attack in Faryab Province on January 16.

A local police spokesman said three mortar shells slammed into the weekly bazaar in Khwaja Sabz Push district in the morning attack.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the incident, although local officials suspected the Taliban.

A spokesman for the provincial governor was quoted as saying that the attack may have targeted a provincial delegation, including the governor, which has been in the district since January 15 to assess an ongoing military operation.

Elsewhere, a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry said that security forces arrested three suspects following a rocket attack late on January 15 on Wazir Akbar Khan, a central neighborhood in Kabul that houses many diplomatic missions, news agencies, and non-governmental groups.

The spokesman said no casualties were reported in that attack.

The Western-backed government in Kabul has been struggling to fend off the Taliban and other militant groups since the withdrawal of most NATO troops in 2014.

U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled in August his new strategy for the South Asia region, under which the United States has deployed 3,000 more troops to Afghanistan to train, advise, and assist and to conduct counterterrorism missions.

The United States currently has about 14,000 uniformed personnel in the country.

Based on reporting by dpa and AP
U.S. President Donald Trumps former chief strategist Steve Bannon has been summoned to testify before a grand jury, The New York Times reports.

Citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter, the U.S. newspaper said on January 16 that Bannon was subpoenaed last week by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading an inquiry into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion by associates of Trump.

However, the summons could be a tactic to induce Bannon to cooperate fully with Muellers investigation, the paper said.

A spokesman for Mueller's office declined comment. A lawyer for Bannon could not be immediately reached.

The report came as Bannon appeared on January 16 before the U.S. House Intelligence Committee that is also probing alleged Russian interference in last year's presidential campaign, an accusation denied by Moscow.

Four people have been charged in Muellers probe, including Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Based on reporting by Reuters and The New York Times


Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) has scrambled two fighter jets to intercept Russian strategic bombers near U.K. airspace.

The RAF said on January 15 that it sent Typhoon aircraft from the Lossiemouth base in Scotland on a "quick reaction alert" as two Tupolev Tu-160 Blackjack bombers approached Britain.

"The Russian aircraft were initially monitored by a variety of friendly-nation fighters and subsequently intercepted by the RAF in the North Sea," the air force said. "At no point did the Russian aircraft enter sovereign U.K. airspace."

Russia's Defense Ministry said the pair of bombers flew over the Barents, Norwegian, and North seas during a 13-hour training mission that covered neutral waters, in line with international norms.

"All flights by Russian aircraft are performed in strict accordance with international rules for using airspace without infringement on any countries' borders," the ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said the bombers executed midair refueling during the mission, and were escorted by Belgian F-16 fighters as well as British Typhoon fighters at different stages of their journey.

Encounters between Russian and NATO warplanes have increased as Moscow has demonstrated its resurgent military might.

Russia also has increased its navy's presence in the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and other areas.

Last week, the HMS Westminster, a Portsmouth-based Type 23 frigate, was ordered to intercept two Russian corvettes and two supporting vessels that neared U.K. waters en route to their Baltic home base.

Based on reporting by AP and Interfax
3 A worker strolls between the solar arrays. The company was quoted in January as saying it expects the $1.2 million project to begin operation "within weeks." Despite the gloomy weather in these photos, Chernobyl reportedly shares the same number of sunlight hours as southern Germany.
Twenty-seven years ago this week, Muscovites took to the streets -- in support of Lithuania.

After Soviet troops killed 14 civilians and injured hundreds more in an attempt to crush the Lithuanian independence movement in January 1991, tens of thousands -- and by some estimates hundreds of thousands -- of demonstrators poured into Moscow's Manezh Square.

They held signs that read: "Hands off Lithuania" and "Today Lithuania, tomorrow Russia."

In a tweet this week, Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza recalled the demonstration as "part of a noble tradition, for your freedom and ours."

Sadly, it's a noble tradition that has become dormant in Russia today; it's a noble tradition that Vladimir Putin's regime has done everything in its power to crush.

There are, of course, precious few public manifestations of support for Ukraine these days.

But it's a noble tradition that has not been forgotten in Vilnius.

This week, Lithuania issued its first blacklist of 49 Russian officials who would be sanctioned for violating human rights or engaging in corruption and money laundering under the country's new Magnitsky law.

Russia's ambassador to Lithuania called the move an "unfriendly act" and vowed that Moscow would retaliate.

But unfriendly toward whom?

It's unfriendly, of course, only toward those who have violated the rights of Russian citizens.

So just as ordinary Muscovites took to the streets 17 years ago in support of the rights and freedoms of Lithuanians; today the Lithuanian authorities are returning the favor and acting in support of the rights and freedoms of Russians.

For your freedom, and ours.

Keep telling me what you think on The Power Vertical's Twitter feed and on our Facebook page.
Responding to concerns voiced by privately-owned TV stations and civil society organizations, Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili announced on January 15 that he has vetoed amendments to the law regulating the Public Broadcaster passed by parliament in the third and final reading on December 22.

Private TV stations and civil society organizations had criticized the proposed changes as creating unfair conditions for the Public Broadcaster, which has only a minuscule audience share, to the detriment of smaller privately owned TV channels.

The amendments were drafted by a group of 13 lawmakers from the ruling Georgian Dream party. As summarized by Civil.ge, they envisage exempting the Public Broadcaster from the existing requirement to announce tenders for products or services; allow it to increase the duration of paid commercials broadcast within the space of 24 hours on working days from 30 to 60 minutes; abolish the requirement that it return unspent funds to the state budget at the end of the year; and reduce the powers of the broadcaster's nine-member oversight board.

Announcing his veto, Margvelashvili focused on just two of the proposed changes. He singled out as "problematic" the provision enabling the Public Broadcaster to air more commercials, pointing out that advertising is the life-blood of smaller private TV channels. Increasing the amount of airtime the Public Broadcaster may devote to paid commercials, Margvelashvili continued, thus risks undermining media diversity, which he described as "an important value for Georgians and Georgian democracy."

Margvelashvili also criticized the exemption of the Public Broadcaster from compliance with the Law On State Procurement as "the removal of regulations intended to ensure that taxpayers' money is spent economically and transparently." He said that while he fully agrees that the latter legislation needs amending in terms of the procurement of intellectual property, and should be brought into line with EU guidelines, the amendment in question fails to do so.

In conclusion, Margvelashvili expressed the hope that parliament would ponder his objections and make a decision that will, on the one hand, preserve media diversity and healthy competition, and on the other, ensure transparency in the spending by the Public Broadcaster of budget funds, InterPressNews reported.

'Unfair Advantages'

Margvelashvili's arguments echo criticisms by media professionals during the parliament debate on the bill that they grant unfair financial advantages to the Public Broadcaster and consequently pose a threat to the survival of smaller TV channels, and thus, by extension, to media pluralism.

Lasha Tughushi, who is chief editor of the newspaper Rezonansi, described the bill as "bad, it opens the door to corruption, destroys the advertising market, is directed against commercial channels, and cannot in any way help the Public Broadcaster," InterPressNews.ge reported.

The same news portal similarly quoted Ketevan Mtskhiladze, a member of the Public Broadcaster's oversight board, as admitting that given the advertising market is shrinking, granting the Public Broadcaster the right to air more paid advertisements would negatively affect private TV stations.

Public Broadcaster General Director Vasil Maghlaperidze denied this, however. "Don't paint a tragic situation in which we are trying to deprive someone of their livelihood," InterPressNews.ge quoted him as saying. "Media pluralism is a universal gain and essential for every citizen."

The parliamentary opposition, too, categorically rejects the bill. Roman Gotsiridze (United National Movement) protested last month that "we don't need a monster controlled by the state that consumes 50 million [laris, $19.68 million] and has a popularity rating that doesn't exceed 0.3 percent,"

while his party colleague Giga Bokeria advocated renaming the bill "On State Television."

Even within the ruling Georgian Dream parliament faction the amendments do not enjoy broad support. Meeting on December 20, members of the parliament's Sector Economy and Economic Policy Committee unanimously withheld their formal approval of them. Roman Kakulia, who chairs that committee, branded the bill "unfair." He said he would like to see the Public Broadcaster develop successfully "on the basis of justice and the principles of economic development declared by our team. Healthy competition is the main foundation on which our main economic principles are based."

'Risk Of Double Standards'

Kakulia went on to point out that the Public Broadcaster already enjoys a huge advantage in terms of the sums which it receives in state funding, and that allowing it to increase the amount of advertising it airs "is not a fair decision with regard to other TV channels, especially small ones."

As for the legal provision that the Public Broadcaster may allocate budget funds to support start-ups and innovative television, Kakulia argued that it creates the risk of double standards, and that the government should treat all such commercial projects equally.

Just 63 of the 150 lawmakers endorsed the bill in the final reading; three abstained.

President Margvelashvili met separately on December 18 (between the second and final readings of the bill) with representatives of commercial TV channels and civil society organizations, and with members of the Public Broadcaster's oversight board. He reassured the former group that he would raise their concerns with the board, but gave no indication whether he would veto the bill.

Maghlaperidze for his part said he and other board members tried to explain to the president precisely what their plans are, and how their opponents are distorting the essence of the amendments.

Maghlaperidze further claimed that the provision exempting the broadcaster from the need to announce tenders -- which media expert Zviad Koridze believes will facilitate corrupt practice -- has been misrepresented, and will apply only to creative programming. "We shouldn't set about acquiring programming and films the way you declare a tender for cement or air conditioners," InterPressNews.ge quoted him as saying.

Parliament speaker Irakli Kobakhidze, who crossed swords time and again last year with Margvelashvili during the drafting and adoption of constitutional amendments, said lawmakers will review the amendments in light of Margvelashvili's stated objections. At the same time, he stressed that the amendments were intended to address the problem that the Public Broadcaster's rating is very low. The Public Broadcaster announced in early 2017 an ambitious three-year modernization program intended to address that problem.

Nino Djangirashvili, who is general director of the private TV channel Kavkasia, expressed the hope that lawmakers will avail themselves of the opportunity to amend the bill in light of Margvelashvili's comments which, she pointed out, are no harsher than the criticisms expressed last month by parliament committee chair Kakulia. But senior Georgia Dream lawmaker Gia Volsky is already on record as saying he thinks parliament will ignore the veto. Volsky said Margvelashvili "went beyond professional analysis and took a political position.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL.


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.
From the first days after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the newly independent countries, the United States has had a unique relationship with Kazakhstan in comparison with other Central Asian states.

The two have disagreed on many issues -- notably on respect for human rights, freedom of speech, and the media, as well as their respective commitments to political pluralism -- but there are many spheres where the two have common interests.

RFE/RL spoke to a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, William Courtney, about Kazakh-U.S. relations ahead of an official visit to Washington by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev. The January 16-19 visit will include a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Courtney described Astana as reliably "moderate [and] pragmatic" in its decisions.

"One of the great strengths of Kazakhstan is that it has had moderate traditions, if you will, economic policy, political policy, other areas," Courtney said, "and that moderation in Kazakhstan's policies is probably a good sign for the future of Kazakhstan that whatever changes happen in the region,... one can count on Kazakhstan to take a moderate, pragmatic approach."

Courtney, the first U.S. ambassador to independent Kazakhstan, cited the U.S. recognition of Kazakh sovereignty. "The U.S. was the first country to recognize Kazakhstan. Our embassy was set up about five weeks after [Mikhail] Gorbachev signed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, right at the beginning of February 1992."

Denuclearization, Oil Wealth

Washington was quick to establish relations with all the former Soviet republics but, as Courtney noted, there were two areas of particular importance where the United States wished to engage with Kazakhstan.

"One was denuclearization. Kazakhstan had suffered horrible consequences of atmospheric nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk. And so, the [Kazakhs] were quite ready and willing to cooperate with the West and the United States, and Russia on denuclearization," Courtney said.

Belarus and Ukraine also relinquished nuclear arsenals that they inherited from the Soviet Union, but "Kazakhstan was the first of the three to eliminate...its strategic nuclear weapons."

"The second early priority," Courtney said, "was [that] Kazakhstan has immense oil wealth in western Kazakhstan right on the edge of the Caspian Sea, both onshore and offshore."

Many knew the oil was there, but a newly independent Kazakhstan faced enormous challenges to taking advantage of that resource.

"The oil, which was of a high quality of light oil, was very hard to get," Courtney said. "It's deep, it's below a salt dome, and it has high sulfur content. The Soviet Union did not have the technology to exploit that. So Kazakhstan was looking for Western investment. The U.S. company Chevron had been exploring that possibility, and so Chevron ended up negotiating what was the first huge foreign investment anywhere in the former Soviet Union for the rights to develop the Tengiz deposit."

Chevron continues to work the Tengiz deposit; another U.S. company, ExxonMobil, joined that project.

ExxonMobil is also a partner in another huge Kazakh oil field, at Kashagan, in the Caspian Sea.

"Those two projects have been by far the dominant major investments of Western companies in Central Asia," Courtney said. But he added that "General Electric has a locomotive factory close to Astana and there are other projects as well."

Multinational Force

Astana's relations with Washington have another unique feature: Kazakhstan is the only Central Asian country that sent troops (demining units) to participate in the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq.

Courtney called that "part of [Kazakhstan's] overall strategy to play not only a regional role but really a global role." He added that Kazakhstan has trained some of its troops to serve as peacekeepers, should the need arise.

Courtney noted that Kazakhstan has chaired the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (2010), the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (2011), and founded and hosts the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures with "over 25 countries now participating in that organization." It currently has a rotating seat on the UN Security Council and took over the Security Council's rotating presidency in January.

All of which hints at a higher international diplomatic profile than other Central Asian states.

Topics on Nazarbaev's agenda in Washington include the situation in Afghanistan, which the Kazakh government has been watching carefully for more than two decades. "Kazakhstan is relatively well informed about Afghanistan and the subtleties of political and economic, and security life there," Courtney said.

International Terrorism

International terrorism will probably also be a subject of discussion. "Kazakhstan is also relatively well informed about the [militant group] Islamic State and activities surrounded that in Iraq and Syria," Courtney told RFE/RL. Hundreds of Kazakhs have left their own country to join extremist groups in Syria and Iraq, and Kazakhstan has hosted Syrian peace talks since last year.

Kazakhstan also hosted talks on Iran's nuclear program that contributed to the landmark deal between Tehran and world powers in 2015 that traded sanctions relief for curbs on Iran's nuclear activities. Trump has derided the agreement as "the worst deal ever" and urged the U.S. Congress and U.S. allies to seek modifications.

But Kazakhstan's position on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons is likely to be welcomed by the Trump administration as it ponders the situations in Iran and a nuclear North Korea.

Courtney said there are reasons why the United States is likely to continue to seek strong ties with Kazakhstan.

"Kazakhstan is likely to be one of the top 10 oil producers in the world in a few years in great part because of Tengiz and Kashagan, and the United States also is a large producer of oil and will have a strategic interest in maintaining a close dialogue with Kazakhstan," Courtney said.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL


WASHINGTON -- Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev thanked U.S. President Donald Trump for Washingtons support of his countrys territorial integrity, as the two leaders met for talks focusing on regional security, economic issues, and bilateral relations.

In brief comments to reporters on January 16 before a scheduled luncheon, Nazarbaev also congratulated Trump on his first year in office.

"Kazakhstan has always enjoyed the very good political relations, and we appreciate the American support for independence and territorial integrity," he said, speaking through a translator.

Nazarbaev did not elaborate on the remarks. However, the Central Asian nation has been uneasy about Russias policies toward former Soviet states like Kazakhstan ever since Moscow seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and stoked an insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

Predominantly populated by ethnic Kazakhs, Kazakhstan has a sizable ethnic Russian population, estimated at around 20 percent, much of it concentrated in northern parts of Kazakhstan along its winding border with Russia.

Trump is at least the fifth U.S. president that Nazarbaev has dealt with during his 26 years in office, since Kazakhstan gained independence from the Soviet Union.

During that time, Nazarbaev has helped shepherd the country into a regional economic powerhouse, and attracted sizable foreign investment for extracting natural resources, first and foremost oil and gas.

The country's Tengiz and Kashagan fields in the Caspian Sea hold some of the world's largest proven reserves of oil.

But Nazarbaev has also overseen the virtual elimination of any opposition political forces and made it difficult for civic organizations or human rights activists to operate independently.

'Strategic Partner'

At 77, he is the oldest serving president of any ex-Soviet republic, and questions about who will succeed him -- and how -- have grown in recent years.

In remarks later at the White House's Roosevelt Room, Trump called Kazakhstan "strong, sovereign, independent" and added that the country was "a friend and strategic partner" to the United States. He also thanked Nazarbaev for helping in the transit of U.S. military equipment and personnel to Afghanistan.

Nazarbaev, meanwhile, made reference to Kazakhstans location between two regional superpowers -- Russia to the north and China to the east -- and asked for continued U.S. support for an effort known as "C5 + 1." Started by Trump's predecessor Barack Obama, that program aims to deepen U.S. cooperation with Kazakhstan and the four other ex-Soviet Central Asian countries: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.

"Kazakhstan, being a neighbor of Russia, physically, of course is following closely the dynamics between the United States and Russia, which suddenly plunged into the abyss," Nazarbaev said.

Nazarbaev also said his country had reached $7.5 billion worth of deals with U.S. companies, including agreements to purchase more Boeing-made airlines and to assemble 900 new General Electric locomotives in Kazakhstan.

The two leaders also discussed North Korea, with Trump calling Kazakhstan a "valued partner in our efforts to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons."

"Together we are determined to prevent the North Korean regime from threatening the world with nuclear devastation," Trump said.

Nazarbaev said he hopes to serve as an intermediary between the United States and both North Korea and Iran, neither of which have formal diplomatic relations with Washington.

Trump has harshly criticized Iran's 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers and has threatened to withdraw from it.

Nazarbaev said he is in a good position to mediate because his country once had one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals, but voluntarily gave it up after the Soviet Union collapsed.

"Kazakhstan has a moral right to talk to the nations that are seeking nuclear weapons, and this is the way we're talking to Iran, and this is the way we will be talking to North Korea," he said.

Neither president took any questions from the press.

Ahead of the meeting, the White House said the two were expected to discuss the deteriorating security situation in nearby Afghanistan.

Russia, Syria Talks

The Kazakh state news agency Kazinform said Trump and Nazarbaev would also be discussing relations with Russia and the war in Syria, along with trade issues.

"From a political perspective, we cooperate on solutions and promotion of regional and global security. The meeting will focus on the situation in Afghanistan, the Syrian conflict, and relations with Russia," Sanat Kushkumbaev, deputy director of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, which advises the president, was quoted as saying.

Kazakhstan also currently holds the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council.

On January 14, Kazakh Ambassador Kairat Umarov headed a UN delegation that met in Kabul with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.

That delegation also included the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, and diplomats from China, Russia, and Britain.

Nazarbaev's press service said he would attend a meeting of the UN Security Council on January 18 to preside over talks focusing on nuclear nonproliferation.

After a January 9 meeting with U.S. Ambassador George Krol in Astana, the Kazakh president said he was seeking to build on the "amicable relationship" that Kazakhstan and the United States have established in the past 26 years.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, TASS, AP, and Interfax


Lithuania has issued its first blacklist of 49 Russians banned for allegedly violating human rights or engaging in corruption and money laundering under its new Magnitsky law.

The blacklist was published by Lithuania's Interior Ministry on January 15 and included Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia's Chechnya region, among other prominent Russians.

Human rights groups say that Kadyrov, who was appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2007 to head Chechnya, rules through repressive measures and has created a climate of impunity for security forces.

They claim Kadyrov has been responsible for abuses that include kidnappings, disappearances, torture, and killings of political opponents.

Also targeted on the Lithuanian blacklist are Russian Investigative Committee chief Aleksandr Bastrykin, who is accused of carrying out numerous politically charged cases against Putin opponents, and Russian lawmaker Andrei Lugovoi, who is accused in the poisoning death of Kremlin critic Aleksandr Litvinenko at a hotel in London in 2006.

The Lithuanian law was modeled on the U.S. Magnitsky Act. The Magnitsky laws are named for Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in a Moscow jail in 2009 after suffering what his supporters said amounted to torture.

Magnitsky had been jailed by Russian authorities after he helped uncover a $230 million tax-fraud scheme. He was later convicted posthumously of the crime.

Lithuania was the fifth Western country to adopt Magnitsky legislation, following the United States, Canada, Britain, and Estonia.

The Lithuanian law authorizes the Foreign Ministry to identify people it considers to be violators of human rights or engaged in corruption and money laundering. The Interior Ministry can then act on those recommendations and ban the people from the country for five years.

Russia had no immediate response to publication of the blacklist. The Russian ambassador to Vilnius, Aleksandr Udaltsov, has previously warned that Moscow will retaliate over the new law.

"We will have to respond to yet another unfriendly step by Lithuania and bar entry to Russia to a number of unwelcome individuals from this country," Russian news agency Interfax has quoted him as saying.

With reporting by dpa, Baltic Times, and Sundaily.com
It will not happen tomorrow, but a cloud hanging over neighbors Greece and Macedonia for more than two decades might soon be lifted.

Delegations from the two states, headed by their respective negotiators, Adamantios Vassilakis and Vasko Naumovski, are due to meet with UN mediator Matthew Nimetz in New York on January 17 to resume talks over Macedonia's official name, frozen since 2014.

Greece has objected to Macedonia's use of that name -- also a region of northern Greece -- since the former Yugoslav republic's declaration of independence in 1991. Unlike some, Macedonia did not have to fight a war to secure its statehood; but it has been engaged in a diplomatic struggle to keep its name for 26 years.

As a constituent part of Yugoslavia, it had been known as the "Socialist Republic of Macedonia," but its bid to simply drop the Socialist designation and become the sovereign "Republic of Macedonia" was repeatedly thwarted by EU member Greece.

At the forthcoming meeting, Nimetz is expected once again to present the parties with a list of names that have been under discussion before, with only minor changes.

So no one is expected to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

But the meeting could be a major step in the right direction.

'Positive Momentum'

Driving from Thessaloniki toward the Macedonian border, one will not come across any road signs for the state of Macedonia. There is a sign indicating an international border crossing, and the direction of the Macedonian capital, Skopje, is indicated.

Nimetz is nevertheless optimistic about resolving the dispute. He told Greek state television this week that there was "positive momentum" in both countries: "I think the people in both countries are maybe ready to hear some solutions that are consistent with national interests but also have some element of compromise that would resolve the problem."

So far Greece would only countenance referring to its neighbor by the acronym FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). The country was admitted to the United Nations under that name in 1993, and that designation is used by the EU among others. (Others, including the United States, China, and Russia, routinely use the name Republic of Macedonia in communications with Skopje.)

A compromise solution could involve substituting a new qualifier, such as "Upper," "Northern" or "New Macedonia."

But for many Greeks, even this might be unacceptable. According to a recent poll, more than two-thirds of Greeks are opposed to any mention of "Macedonia," and there are rallies planned in Athens and northern Greece in the weeks ahead.

Reportedly in order to avoid tensions, the Greek prime minister has called on the influential Orthodox Church to refrain from commenting on the Macedonian question.

Clash Of Identities

In Macedonia itself, opinion is divided.

An informal poll conducted by RFE/RL's Balkan Service on January 11 on the streets of Skopje found that many people would like to see the issue resolved one way or another. Yet others are firmly against any concessions, convinced that Macedonia has the right to its own choice of name.

Behind the dispute over the name is a deeper clash of identities. Among other things, there is a tug-of-war over the figure of Alexander the Great -- claimed by Macedonians as an important part of their national identity. The Greeks, meanwhile, argue that their own ancient heritage is being hijacked by their Slavic-speaking neighbors.

"The hardest part of the bargain is that we have to renounce our mythology in order to allow Greek nationalism to incorporate the newly created Greek-Macedonian identity into Ancient Greek mythology," Denko Maleski a professor at the Skopje University Law School, told RFE/RL.

However, Maleski, who was Macedonia's first foreign minister following independence, is optimistic.

"A solution to the name issue is both possible [and desirable], as it would improve [Macedonia's] chances of getting NATO membership," Maleski added.

Indeed, the day before the New York meeting, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was due to visit Skopje in what was being seen as a clear show of support for Macedonia's Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.

Ismet Ramadani, head of the Macedonian Euro Atlantic Council and adviser to Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, spoke of "a decisive week" ahead and a "historical moment."

But he also cautioned that optimism and good intentions alone were not enough, telling regional news agency IBNA that "there must be concrete results in reaching an acceptable compromises [sic] on the name dispute."

Having just emerged from a prolonged internal political crisis, the new Macedonian government may be keen to resolve a longstanding dispute with its neighbor -- particularly as it may smooth the way to EU and NATO membership.

'Historic Chance'

Greece, too, has an interest in shoring up regional stability.

According to Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov, both sides are obliged to seize the "historic chance" following a turbulent few months in the wider Balkan region.

"I think the public can be very happy that now someone is raising the name issue as it indicates that the country's stability has returned," said Skopje professor Toni Deskoski.

The focus on EU and NATO integration, and better relations among neighbors, appear to contrast with the policy of the previous Macedonian government. The government has shown a willingness to compromise, for instance by agreeing to become a NATO member as "FYROM" rather than Macedonia -- even if this is unpopular at home.

But political analyst Albert Musliu suggests that this flexibility could strengthen Macedonia's hand in future negotiations.

"We had to change the narrative while resolving the name issue, because we cannot box with Greece while negotiating, and I think that is exactly the strategy of the new government," Musliu said. "Let's not forget that Greece is a full member of NATO, and it's a voice we depend on for gaining membership in European institutions. I believe that the strategy now is improving and softening the relations with our neighbors, especially Greece, but it is for our partners to also help for Athens to understand Macedonia's position."

For most Macedonians, nomen est omen. But there appears to be a recognition on someone's part that short-term compromises on the name issue may benefit their country over the long term.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL.


More than 1,800 Pakistani clerics from different schools of Islamic thought have issued a fatwa declaring that suicide bombings are un-Islamic.

The clerics declared that suicide bombings are forbidden, or "haram," under the principles of Islam.

The Islamic directive was revealed on January 16 in a book unveiled by Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain and the state-run International Islamic University.

Hussain wrote in the book that the fatwa "provides a strong base for the stability of a moderate Islamic society."

He said Pakistanis can "seek guidance" from the fatwa "for building a national narrative in order to curb extremism in keeping with the golden principles of Islam."

Pakistan has been plagued for decades by Islamic militants who teach followers that suicide bombers are "martyrs" in a "holy war" to impose Islamic rule.

Foreign and domestic critics accuse the government and Pakistan's security forces of collaborating with Islamic militants in order to use them as proxies in Afghanistan and India to achieve Islamabad's political and military goals.

They say the government has turned a blind eye to radical clerics in Pakistan's mosques for too long.

Although Pakistani authorities frequently condemn suicide attacks as fanatical and immoral, especially when civilians are killed, insurgents see the tactic as one of their most effective weapons.

Based on reporting by Reuters and GEO-TV
A man who lit himself on fire to protest being fired from his job with Gazprom's subsidiary in the Russian region of Bashkortostan has died.

Doctors in Bashkortostan's central city of Ishimbai said that Dmitry Rudov died in hospital on January 16, a day after his self-immolation protest.

Rudov, 39, was hospitalized with severe burns after he poured gasoline on himself and ignited it on January 15 in front of the mayor's office in the city of Ishimbai.

He shouted "I protest! Corruption!" before setting himself on fire.

Local media reports cite Rudov's friends as saying that he had been laid off from the firm Gazpromneftekhim Salavat, where he had worked as an engineer.

They say Rudov viewed his sacking as an illegal dismissal and wrote an open letter to President Vladimir Putin, asking him to intervene.

With reporting by mkset.ru and gorobzor.ru
A human rights activist who has been detained on a drug-possession charge in Chechnya has written a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin saying that he is innocent.

In the letter published by the newspaper Novaya Gazeta on January 16, Oyub Titiyev accused police of planting drugs in his car and voiced concern that he could be tortured in an attempt to force a confession.

"The criminal case against me is fabricated.... I have not and will not admit guilt," Titiyev wrote in the letter, which is scrawled in ink and dated January 12.

"I want to inform you that if I in any way acknowledge that I am guilty of what I am accused of, it will mean that I have been forced to admit guilt by means of physical coercion or blackmail," he wrote.

The letter is addressed to Putin, federal Investigative Committee Chairman Aleksandr Bastrykin, and Federal Security Service (FSB) chief Aleksandr Bortnikov.

Titiyev, the head of the prominent Russian human rights group Memorial's office in Chechnya, was detained on January 9 by police who claimed they had found about 180 grams of marijuana in his car.

His arrest, on charges colleagues and other supporters also contend were fabricated, has underscored concerns in Russia and the West about the tactics employed by security forces under Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

Publication of the letter came a day after a lawyer for Titiyev said that he had been suffering severe pain and been denied the medical help he needs.

Almost a week after he was detained, Titiyev remained in a temporary police detention unit that has no medical staff, attorney Pavel Zaikin said on January 15.

Under Russian regulations for handling detainees, he should have been transferred to a facility with medical services, Zaikin said.

The lawyer said that Titiyev, 60, was on his way to get a new dental prosthesis when he was detained.

"He feels excruciating pain," Zaikin said, adding that Titiyev "is unable to eat without the prosthesis, and therefore the only food he is eating now is a puree for toddlers."

He said that the authorities had not allowed medical personnel from clinics outside the penitentiary system to visit Titiyev.

Zaikin also said that investigators told him that Titiyev -- the head of the prominent Russian human rights group Memorial's office in Chechnya -- would be transferred no earlier than January 19.

"Titiyev's colleagues have every reason to believe that such an attitude toward Titiyev is a way putting political pressure on him," Zaikin said.

On January 14, Zaikin said that some of Titiyev's relatives left Chechnya after police imposed pressure on them.

Memorial has charged that the case against Titiyev was "fabricated" to retaliate against the activist's human rights activities.

Colleagues say he is a devout Muslim and a teetotaler who does not use drugs, and call the possession charge absurd.

Putin's advisory council on human rights has urged the Investigative Committee to look into the circumstances of Titiyev's detention, saying there were "grounds to believe" the marijuana "could have been planted" in his car.

Western governments and human rights organizations condemned Titiyev's arrest and called for his release.

Chechen authorities have denied any political motivation behind Titiyev's arrest.

Activists say that Kadyrov, who was appointed by Putin in 2007 to head the region in the North Caucasus, rules through repressive measures and has created a climate of impunity for security forces.

They also charge that Kadyrov has been responsible for abuses that include kidnappings, disappearances, torture, and killings of political opponents.

Natalya Estemirova, who was Titiyev's predecessor at Memorial in Chechnya and was investigating alleged rights abuses in Chechnya by regional authorities and Russian military forces, was abducted and killed in Grozny in 2009.

Kremlin critics say Putin turns a blind eye to alleged abuses and violations of the Russian Constitution by Kadyrov because he relies on the former rebel to control separatist sentiments and violence in Chechnya, the site of two devastating post-Soviet wars and an Islamist insurgency that spread to Russia's other mostly Muslim regions in the North Caucasus.

With reporting by Current Time TV, Novaya Gazeta and Interfax
Viktor Anpilov, a communist politician who was an ardent opponent of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, has died at the age of 72 after suffering a stroke.

Friends and colleagues of Anpilov told Russian media outlets that the leader of the radical leftist Working Russia movement died on January 16.

Anpilov's group is associated with the Communist Party and was created in 1992, a year after the Soviet Union's collapse.

In the early 1990s, when he was a Moscow City Council member, Anpilov founded the newspaper Molniya (Lightning) and led a series of protests against Yeltsin and in support of the Communist Party.

After the standoff between Yeltsin and Russian parliament members that ended with an assault on the parliament building in October 1993, Anpilov was arrested and spent several months in jail.

Up until days before his death, Anpilov attended rallies held by leftist opposition groups. Last week, he was seen at demonstrations in support of Pavel Grudinin, the Communist Party candidate in Russia's March 18 presidential election.

A journalist by profession, Anpilov was fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. In the Soviet era, he worked as an interpreter in Cuba and at the Latin American service of the Soviet Union's international broadcasting corporation, Inoveshchaniye.

With reporting by TASS and Interfax


Kremlin economic aide Andrei Belousov has said that the Russian government is considering a possible boost in social spending, as President Vladimir Putin steps up his campaign for the March presidential election.

Belousov said on January 16 that expenditures on health, education, and infrastructure could be raised by 1.5-2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to the TASS news agency.

Expenditures on the three currently amount to about 9 percent of GDP.

Spending cuts in other areas, tax increases, and the "optimization" of taxes were among the options being considered to free up funds, Belousov said, adding that no final decision has been made.

Meanwhile, former Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, who is reportedly on close terms with Putin, tweeted that "consensus is emerging about the need to seriously increase spending on education, health, and infrastructure."

The move will have a "long-term positive effect for the country," Kudrin added.

If it materializes, the boost in social spending would start to take effect in late 2018, Bloomberg quoted two people familiar with the plan as saying.

The debate comes as Putin is widely expected to win a fourth presidential term in the March 18 election.

Analysts say Putin is eager to score a strong win with a high turnout in the polls to make his mandate as strong as possible in what could be his final term, as the constitution bars presidents from serving more than two consecutive terms.

Last week, the Russian president announced that the minimum wage would be raised on May 1, adding that the change would affect "about 4 million people."

The hike had previously been expected to come later in the year.

The minimum wage in Russia is 9,489 rubles a month ($166).

Official figures show that more than 20.3 million Russians are living under the poverty line.

With reporting by AP and Bloomberg


Trying to gauge what Russians are thinking about the upcoming presidential election just got tougher.

The country's main independent polling agency, the Levada Center, has said it has stopped publishing results of opinion polls on the election.

The reason? Levada fears legal repercussions if it does.

That's because the center was listed as a foreign agent in 2016 under a new law aimed at countering what the Kremlin claims is outside influence on public life in Russia.

Levada is not a foreign company, but has received foreign funding. And, in the eyes of authorities, that makes it a foreign agent.

Lev Gudkov, Levada's director, told the Russian daily Vedomosti on January 16 that the agency is conducting election polling but will not publish the results during the campaign.

Why? Gudkov said he fears if that data was published now it could be interpreted as election meddling. And if that happens, it could lead to moves to close down the pollster, Gudkov said.

Commenting on the pollster's announcement, Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on January 16 that it was "unfortunate" that Levada would not be able to publish its polls, but said it was a matter of following the law.

Putin, whose approval ratings top 80 percent, is set to easily win a fourth, nonconsecutive, term in the March 18 vote.

Polling on Putin's public support is largely consistent among Levada and state-owned polling agencies, including the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM).

Voter Turnout

Where they have differed, however, is on recent polling on possible turnout for the presidential election.

In December, Levada polling data found that 28 percent of respondents said they would definitely cast a ballot in the election. A further 30 percent said they were "likely" to vote.

Polling numbers from VTsIOM were much more optimistic. According to its polling, 70 percent of respondents were set on voting, with a further 11 percent "likely."

Gudkov noted to Vedomosti that no Russian election has had a voter turnout higher than 78 percent.

Valery Fedorov, the director of TVsIOM, told the daily that his agency was predicting voter turnout for the Russian presidential election at between 67 and 70 percent.

He also offered an explanation as to why his agency's polling data on possible turnout differed from Levada's.

"We carry out telephone polling, while Levada, probably, does it door to door. I trust the quality of our polls," said Fedorov.

While it may seem a point of dispute only among experts, possible voter turnout for the Russian presidential election is turning out to be a key factor in what is expected to be a predictable Russian presidential election outcome.

Anticorruption crusader and opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has been barred due to a fraud conviction that he and his backers say is politically motivated. Navalny has called on supporters to boycott the election.

Many others have declared their intention to run in March. They include veterans of past campaigns -- ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and liberal Grigory Yavlinsky -- as well as Communist nominee Pavel Grudinin and TV personality Ksenia Sobchak.

While none poses a serious challenge to Putin, the Kremlin is worried about voter apathy and has focused on boosting turnout to make Putin's victory as impressive as possible.


The two teenage boys were armed with knives when they entered the fourth-grade classroom in Russia's Urals city of Perm on January 15. Witness accounts suggest that a premeditated attack ensued, leaving one teacher and nine young students hospitalized with knife wounds.

Russian authorities, however, are painting a different picture of an incident that is drawing comparisons to the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado that left a total of 15 people dead.

Regional police have both issued statements saying that the violence erupted after an argument broke out between the two knife-wielding teenage boys, one of whom was reportedly a current student at Perm's School No. 127.

The regional branch of the powerful federal Investigative Committee said in a January 15 statement that the teacher, 46-year-old Natalya Shagulina, and several students were injured after they "tried to stop" the fight between the two suspects.

Russian state media has largely taken its cue from these official statements, characterizing the incident as a "fight" that spun out of control. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meanwhile, urged the media not to jump to conclusions.

"This is a knife fight between students at a school. It is not an outside attack on a school. Let's wait for the opinions of experts," Peskov was quoted as saying January 15.

But witness accounts given to RFE/RL and other media outlets suggests that the two suspected assailants -- reportedly both 16 years old -- were acting in coordination.

The grandmother of a fourth-grader injured in the incident told RFE/RL's Russian Service that the teacher was the first to be attacked, and that the assailants began stabbing anyone who came near them in the ensuing panic. One of the attackers was standing near the door, she said, citing her granddaughter's account.

"They placed my granddaughter face down on the desk and stabbed her twice in the neck with a knife," the grandmother said on condition of anonymity. "Some of the kids made it to the exit, including my little girl."

'They Started Slashing'

While federal state TV networks characterized the incident as the result of an altercation between the two assailants, other Russian state media cited witness accounts contradicting this portrayal.

"There was no fight between the two older students. And the teacher didn't try to separate them," Russia's state-backed international news network, RT, quoted a woman identified as a mother of one of the fourth graders in the classroom as saying.

"These two guys in black masks came in, and then almost silently removed the knives from their sheaths and started slashing the teacher's neck. This is what my daughter told me," RT cited the woman, identified as Inessa Titova, as saying.

Precisely how the suspects sustained their injuries remains unclear.

At least one of the suspected assailants was linked in media reports to a social-media group related to the Columbine massacre, in which two students killed 13 people and wounded more than 20 others before taking their own lives.

The office of the Kremlin's top official for children's rights, Anna Kuznetsova, said in a January 16 statement that one of the suspects had a record of violent behavior toward fellow students as early as 2012. It added that the boy's parents had asked regional social services for help last year, but that instead the parents themselves had been fined.

"This tragedy might not have happened," Kuznetsova was quoted as saying, citing what she called the "unprofessionalism of experts" and a "lack of communication and consistency in the work of state agencies."

Kuznetsova a day earlier had criticized what she called insufficient security measures at the school. "Can it be that there was no one other than 10-year-old children to stop the hooligans," she wrote on Facebook.

'Convenient Explanation'

Citing unidentified sources, the Kommersant newspaper reported on January 16 that investigators had questioned the two suspected attackers earlier in the day.

The attack at the Perm school comes in the wake of a September 5 attack by a 15-year-old student in a suburb of Moscow. The schoolboy attacked his teacher with a meat cleaver and shot her in the face with an air gun.

Anton Orekh, a political commentator for the liberal-minded Russian radio broadcaster Ekho Moskvy, said violent incidents like those as the Perm school force Russia to "take a long, hard look at an array of problems" and criticized federal television channels for giving insufficient coverage

"You can give any diagnosis and play up the problem any way you want. But you can't pretend that nothing serious happened," Orekh wrote.

Sergei Smirnov, editor in chief of the Russian news portal MediaZona -- which focuses on the country's criminal-justice system -- told RFE/RL that authorities' portrayal of the incident as the result of a fight between the suspected assailants appears "strange."

"Based on what we know, it was a premeditated attack," Smirnov said. "But a fight is a convenient explanation. No one in the local authorities wants to take responsibility and make any bombshell statements."


MOSCOW -- A low-level Twitter spat between Russian opposition camps got more close and personal on January 15 when presidential hopeful Ksenia Sobchak burst into the studio of a radio talk show as it was hosting would-be candidate Aleksei Navalny's campaign manager.

As the Ekho Moskvy program was preparing to go on air, Sobchak confronted Leonid Volkov, accusing the Navalny camp of lying by supporting the notion she had chosen to host a glamorous corporate party for a Russian billionaire in Bali earlier this month rather than campaigning.

Two camera operators who were flanking Sobchak recorded the incident for posterity.

"I would simply like for Leonid to apologize on camera and say, 'Yes, I made a mistake'. It's that easy, Leonid," she said as she stood over him.

Looking slightly uncomfortable, Volkov reached for a glass of water and typed away at his laptop as Sobchak scolded him before ultimately declining to apologize. "You're lying," he countered, asking her to leave the studio. "You aren't being rude to me, you're being rude to viewers, Ekho Moskvy's listeners and the station."

Sobchak left without an apology, saying: "Make sure you check your information next time so that you don't look so pathetic."

A Twitter post circulated on January 11 by Navalny allies alleged that Sobchak had hosted a corporate party in Bali instead of collecting signatures for her presidential bid. Volkov, specifically, accused her of deliberately falsifying the geotags in her publicly released photos in order to cover her tracks and conceal her real location.

She has strenuously denied the allegation, saying she traveled to Bali merely to raise funds for her campaign, and has been traveling constantly to meet with supporters.

'Caricature Liberal Candidate'

Sobchak has made it through the preliminary registration phase for taking part in the elections, although she must still produce the requisite number of signatures of support to officially be named a candidate.

Navalny, the anticorruption campaigner and by far the opposition's most prominent figure, has been barred from running against incumbent President Vladimir Putin in the March 18 elections. Navalny is calling on his supporters to boycott the vote entirely, and to campaign for others to do so as well.

Navalny has criticized Sobchak's bid, calling her an unelectable "caricature liberal candidate" whose candidacy the Kremlin is using to project the illusion of an open electoral process while simultaneously discrediting true opposition candidates.

Chiding Sobchak for collaring Volkov on air, Navalny alluded to Sobchak's past as the celebrity host of Dom-2, a reality TV dating show. "You can take the girl out of Dom-2, but you can't take the Dom-2 out of the girl," Navalny wrote on Twitter.


The de facto leadership of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh is ready to negotiate with Azerbaijan, but only in an international format with the participation of mediators, a senior representative in Stepanakert said on November 18.



The official, Davit Babayan, was responding to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyevs statement that Baku was ready to talk to Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh but considered it an internal affair.



What Aliyev suggests is nothing but an ultimate surrender for us in which a aboriginal group who have realized their 'guilt' will show repentance and beg Mother Azerbaijan to forgive them and allow them to live in the Azerbaijani land, Babayan, the ethnic Armenians' de facto foreign minister in the region, told RFE/RLs Armenian Service in an interview.



He said that instead, Stepanakert suggests using the format of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), even though it has been largely inactive since the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijan war over Nagorno-Karabakh.



Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh for decades. Some 30,000 people were killed in a war in the early 1990s that left ethnic Armenians in control of the breakaway region and seven adjacent districts of Azerbaijan proper.



The two sides fought another war in 2020 that lasted six weeks and killed thousands of people on both sides before a Russia-brokered cease-fire, resulting in Armenians' losing control over parts of the region and the adjacent districts.

There can be some meetings, but not in the format of Azerbaijan-Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh]," Babayan said. "It can be a format involving Azerbaijan, Artsakh, Armenia, Russia, the United States, France; it could be in various compositions, at different places, but it must be internationally recognized. And the only internationally recognized format [for talks on Nagorno-Karabakh] is the format of the OSCE Minsk Group."



Since the 2020 intensification, Baku has publicly refused to talk to Armenia or any other country regarding the future of the region.



Under the terms of a Russia-brokered cease-fire, Moscow currently deploys about 2,000 peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh and along a five-kilometer-wide corridor linking the region with Armenia.



Officials in Baku frequently assert that the Russian peacekeeping mission is deployed in the Karabakh region on a temporary basis.



In his public statements, Aliyev has also repeatedly said that the activities of the Minsk Group are no longer necessary since, as he puts it, the conflict is now history.



On November 17, Aliyev rejected the idea of negotiations with Ruben Vardanyan, a former Russian businessman of Armenian descent who recently renounced his Russian citizenship, moved to Nagorno-Karabakh, and took on a leadership role in its government. The Azerbaijani leader described Vardanyan as a person sent from Moscow with a clear agenda.



Yerevan-born Vardanyan, who currently holds the post of de facto state minister, an equivalent of prime minister in Nagorno-Karabakh, responded with a call for a more constructive tone. He said he fully met the criteria for a negotiator put forward by the Azerbaijani president as someone who lives in Karabakh and wants to live there.



Vardanyan also said talks between Stepanakert and Baku should be conducted through international mediators, including Russia, the United States, and France.



Meanwhile, in a Twitter post on November 18, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinians ambassador-at-large, Edmon Marukian, contested Aliyevs claim that the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh is an internal matter for Azerbaijan.



No internal matter has ever been dealt with for decades by three permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the OSCE and now also by the EU. The issue of human rights hasnt been considered an internal issue for seven decades, since World War II, Marukian wrote.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine has increased the spread of HIV throughout the country as people have been uprooted by the violence, a new study finds.

Areas such as Donetsk and Luhansk, two large cities in the east deeply affected by the violence that erupted in 2014, were the main exporters of the HIV virus to other parts of the country such as Kyiv and Odesa, the report published on January 15 in the U.S. journal PNAS found.

Ukraine has among the highest HIV rates in Europe, with an estimated 220,000 infected in a country of about 45 million.

The study says the HIV crisis in Ukraine has become a "silent epidemic" because half of HIV-infected people are unaware they have the infection, and around 40 percent of newly diagnosed people are in the later stages of the disease.

To produce the study, an international team of scientists led by Oxford University and Public Health England analyzed viral migration patterns in Ukraine from 2012 to 2015. They found a correlation between the movement of 1.7 million people uprooted by the war and the spread of HIV.

"The war changed a lot of things in Ukraine and the HIV epidemic is one of them," lead author Tetyana Vasylyeva of Oxford University's zoology department said.

"When we conducted our analysis, we were able to show that the viral spread from the east to the rest of the country had been intensified after the war."

The HIV epidemic has shifted from being associated with drug injections in the 1990s to most new infections now being spread by sexual transmission, the study found.

The study also found an alarmingly high resistance, compared to the rest of Europe, to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a common treatment for HIV, senior author and medical virologist Gkikas Magiorkinis said.

"It's a worrying development and the policymakers should be alerted because it's going to be very, very difficult to use it [PrEP] in the near future in Ukraine," Magiorkinis said.

Ukraine needs to scale up interventions to prevent further transmissions of HIV, and seek international support to prevent a new public health tragedy, he said.

The study's findings are in line with previous research on the spread of HIV in the West, which was shown to have mirrored geopolitical events.

Almost 37 million people worldwide have the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

Since the first cases of HIV were reported more than 35 years ago, 35 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses according to the United Nations AIDS program.

Ukraine's war with Russia-backed separatists in the industrialized east broke out in 2014 and has caused the death of more than 10,300 people.

Russia denies that it supports Ukrainian separatists with troops and weapons.

With reporting by Reuters, Xinhua, and Eurekalert.org
KYIV -- Police and protesters have clashed near the Ukrainian parliament, where lawmakers discussed legislation on the "reintegration" of regions held by Russia-backed separatists.

The clashes on January 16 started after some of the protesters torched tires and burned a Russian flag in an area near the Verkhovna Rada and a tent camp set up by antigovernment protesters last year.

Police and firefighters extinguished the burning tires and threw them toward the tent camp. Law enforcement officers also used a chemical spray during the confrontation.

Ukraine's national police reported that one officer had been wounded in the scuffles, and one protester had been taken into custody.

Kyiv police said earlier that more than 3,800 officers were deployed near government buildings and the parliament ahead of the session in the Rada, Ukraine's single-chamber parliament. They greatly outnumbered the few dozen protesters.

Demonstrators want lawmakers to swiftly pass a "reintegration" bill that states that Russia -- which controls Crimea and backs separatists who have held parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces in eastern Ukraine since 2014 -- is an aggressor.

Hotly Contested

The bill has been a hotly contested issue even before it passed in a first reading in October, amid scuffles between lawmakers. Opponents of the bill are displeased because they say it uncouples the issue of Russian-occupied Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, and could lead to the restoration of trade with the territories under the control of the Russia-backed separatists because it does not include language to support the current ban, Rada Deputy Speaker and Samopomich (Self Reliance) party member Oksana Syroyid told Channel 5 news.

President Petro Poroshenko reluctantly cut all but humanitarian trade with the separatist-held parts of the region known as the Donbas in March 2017, under pressure from nationalist activists who had blocked rail and road routes between the two sides. The controversial move has made life even more difficult for those civilians living in the war-torn area, according to humanitarian groups.

Yuriy Boyko, leader of the Opposition Bloc, formerly the Party of Regions, claimed the bill "contradicts all international agreements and treaties" that Ukraine is party to in regard to solving the conflict, notably the February 2015 deal known as the Minsk accord.

Language regarding the Minsk accord, which has been criticized for not producing a lasting cease-fire -- let alone peace -- since it was signed, was removed after much debate ahead of the first reading of the bill.

Supporters of the bill, including lawmakers from the presidents ruling party and the Peoples Front party of former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, say it is necessary for the defense of the country, the possible expansion of international sanctions against the Kremlin, for the peace process, and potential compensation for losses stemming from Russias military actions.

Legislative recognition of these facts will extend to the Kremlin the international legal obligations of the invader, Yatsenyuk said on Facebook on January 15.

The parliament said earlier that lawmakers might also discuss a bill on the creation of a Supreme Anticorruption Court, which Poroshenko proposed last month amid rallies demanding the adoption of such a law.

'IMF Letter'

The creation of an anticorruption court has been one of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) conditions for Ukraine to qualify for the next loan tranche of around $2 billion.

However, both the IMF and World Bank are not satisfied with the Ukrainian draft law on the anticorruption court, Ukrayinska Pravda reported.

The online newspaper reported on January 15 that the IMF has told Poroshenko's administration that it did not support the bill in its current form because it would not guarantee the court's independence.

Ukrayinska Pravda published what it said was the text of a January 11 letter from the IMF mission chief for Ukraine, Ron van Rooden, in which he wrote that the IMF has "serious concerns about the draft law."

"Several provisions are not consistent with the authorities' commitments under Ukraine's IMF-supported program," the letter said.

On January 16, Ukrayinska Pravda cited a letter from the World Bank's country director, Satu Kahkonen, to the presidential administration to express the bank's concerns about the bill.

"We believe that the draft law requires the following revisions to bring it into alignment with the recommendations of the Venice Commission and satisfy the requirements of the World Bank's estimated $800 million Policy-Based Guarantee to support key reforms in Ukraine," she said in a letter dated January 15.

Ukraine's backers have repeatedly urged the country to step up its fight against corruption. Western governments say tackling graft is crucial to curbing Russian influence.

Progress on reforms has been stalled since 2016, raising concerns in Ukraine and the West that little will be done ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections in 2019.
A court in Ukraine's Russia-controlled Crimea region has sentenced pro-Kyiv activist Volodymyr Balukh to three years and seven months in a high-profile retrial on a weapons- and explosives-possession charge.

The Rozdolne district court on January 16 also ordered Balukh to pay a 10,000-ruble ($175) fine.

In his final statement in court on January 15, Balukh reiterated that he was innocent and that the case against him will "never make me love my so-called new motherland," a reference to Russia.

He suggested the accusations against him were politically motivated and part of what Kyiv and rights groups say is a campaign of pressure on Crimeans who opposed Russia's takeover of the Black Sea peninsula.

"The tears of the mothers of those who today are fighting for their right to be free will [haunt] those who are persecuting people in Crimea," Balukh said. "But no matter what, victory will be ours. Glory to Ukraine!"

In August, the same court convicted Balukh and sentenced him to three years and seven months in prison. But an appeals court canceled the ruling, sent the case for additional investigation, and transferred Balukh to house arrest.

Balukh is one of dozens of Crimeans whom Russia has prosecuted in what rights groups say has been a persistent campaign to silence dissent since Moscow seized control over the Ukrainian region in March 2014.

He was arrested in December 2016, after the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said explosives and 90 bullets were found in the attic of his home.

The search was conducted shortly after Balukh planted a Ukrainian flag in his yard and affixed a sign to his house that read "Heavenly Hundred Street, 18."

"Heavenly Hundred" is a term Ukrainians use for the dozens of people killed when security forces sought to disperse protesters in Kyiv whose demonstrations drove Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych from power in February 2014.

After Yanukovych's ouster, Russia seized Crimea by sending in troops and staging a referendum dismissed as illegal by Ukraine, the United States, and a total of 100 countries.

The Russian takeover badly damaged Moscow's relations with Kyiv and the West and resulted in the imposition of sanctions by the European Union, the United States, and several other countries.

Rights groups say Crimea residents who opposed Russia's takeover have faced discrimination and abuse at the hands of the Moscow-imposed authorities.

In March 2017, the European Parliament called on Moscow to free more than 30 Ukrainian citizens who were in prison or other conditions of restricted freedom in Russia, Crimea, and parts of eastern Ukraine that are controlled by Russia-backed separatists.

Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maryana Betsa condemned the court's January 16 ruling.

Betsa told RFE/RL that the court's decision was "illegal", adding that "the occupational authorities use our citizens as hostages of their aggression."

"We condemn the court's decision and express our protest to the Russian Federation.... Actually, Balukh is sentenced for his patriotic position, for a flag on his house. There are no doubts that Russia is trying to eradicate the Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar population in Crimea," Betsa said.
Ukraine's central bank says an investigation into the country's largest lender, PrivatBank, shows that it had been "subjected to a large-scale and coordinated fraud" over at least a decade.

The fraud resulted in the bank, which was taken into state control in 2016, suffering a loss of at least $5.5 billion, the central bank said in a statement on January 16.

One of the bank's former main shareholders, Ihor Kolomoyskiy, dismissed the results of the probe as "nonsense."

The central bank commissioned the independent audit conducted by the global investigation firm Kroll and other international companies.

Central bank deputy governor Kateryna Rozhkova said that the findings have been passed to the Prosecutor-General's Office for use in a possible criminal investigation into the deals made before PrivatBank was nationalized.

PrivatBanks nationalization occurred in December 2016 with the backing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), after risky lending practices left it with a capital shortfall of more than $5.5 billion.

At the time, the central bank estimated that 97 percent of its corporate loans had gone to companies linked to Kolomoyskiy and the other main shareholder, Hennadiy Boholyubov.

Boholyubov has said that authorities in Kyiv declared PrivatBank insolvent on grounds that were fabricated and unfounded, creating an "artificial hole" in the balance sheet.

Kolomoyskiy, a former regional governor, has turned to the courts to challenge the nationalization, and tried to prevent Ukrainian authorities from cooperating with external companies to investigate the reasons for PrivatBanks insolvency.

Kolomoyskiy, one of Ukraine's richest men, served briefly as head of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast before President Petro Poroshenko dismissed him in 2015, accusing him of setting up a private militia and trying to take over a state-affiliated oil company.

Kolomoyskiy had been credited with preventing the spread of separatist sentiment in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast following Russia's seizure of Crimea in March 2014 and backing of armed separatists further east in the Donbas.

The region Kolomoyskiy governed, which is now called Dnipro Oblast, borders the Donesk Oblast -- one of two regions held in part by Russia-backed separatists whose conflict with Kyiv's forces has killed more than 10,300 people since April 2014.

With reporting by Reuters, Ukrayinska Pravda, and Interfax
TASHKENT -- Uzbekistan plans to build numerous small mosques along roads and streets across the Central Asian country of 30 million.

A senior imam in the capital, Tashkent, Anvar-qori Tursunov, told RFE/RL on January 15 that "mini-mosques" will be built to help practicing Muslims pray five times a day.

An official in the government's Committee on Religions told RFE/RL the mosques would also meet the needs of tourists from Islamic countries, adding that if there were requests, similar small prayer buildings would be built for people of other faiths.

The official said that that 22 "mini-mosques" will be built soon in the capital, Tashkent.

Also on January 15, Uzbekistan's top tourism official, Aziz Abduxalikov, said that in order to attract more tourists from mainly Muslim countries, up to 10 percent of hotels in Uzbekistan will provide Korans in their rooms in the near future.

Abduxalikov also said that up to 30 percent of the hotel rooms in Uzbekistan will have signs of the Qibla, the direction that should be faced when Muslims pray. Qibla is fixed as the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

During the tenure of Uzbekistan's late President Islam Karimov, who ruled the former Soviet republic from 1989 until his death in 2016, the activities of Muslims in the country with deep Islamic roots were very restricted.

President Shavkat Mirziyoev, who took over after Karimov's death, has sought to make social and economic reforms and decrease Uzbekistan's isolation.
Several injured children are aged 10-12. Most have knife cuts to the head and neck. Reports suggest some of the children fled to a nearby shopping centre during the attack. Anna Kuznetsova, Vladimir Putins ombudsman for children, said: Fourth year pupils were protecting their teacher who was trying to stop older guys fighting with knives. Some wounded pupils are at the hospital.



Blood at the scene of attack

The female teacher is in the gravest condition. She was badly wounded and is said to be fighting for her life in hospital. The teacher was identified as Natalya Shagunina, 47. The two knifemen are also among the injured after both suffered serious wounds. One of them had been expelled from the school over drug use and mental health problems. The school was evacuated and children said they had seen a trail of blood on the floor. Russian police cordoned off the school. Worried parents gathered at the school gates. The Investigative Committee has opened an investigation. The incident is being treated as attempted murder.
The 14th edition of one of the worlds largest automotive show, 2018 Auto Expo is scheduled to be held from 9th  14th February, 2018 in Greater Noida, will be missing out on action from some of the biggest automotive brands like Ford, Volkswagen group, Bajaj Auto & Harley Davidson.

Companies have cited low Return on Investment as one major reason to stay away from the Auto Expo. As per statistics, 7 car manufacturers, 2 big two-wheeler players and 3 truck manufacturers will not be participating in the upcoming Auto Expo.

The cost of participation in the Auto Expo ranges between INR 30  INR 50 crores, depending upon the space bought for display.

Experts believe that low return on investment (ROI), expensive participation costs, lack of new products and the profile of the visitors at Greater Noida are some of the main reasons why OEMs have shied away from the event. Instead, these companies would rather plan one-off engagement events, which work out to be cheaper and are specifically designed to cater to the brands target audience.

For example, if a company launches or showcases its product at Auto Expo, its coverage will get diluted, as there with be 100s of other products getting showcased / launched on the same day. If the same company launches that product on any other day, when no one else is going to launch, will get full coverage with maximum concentration. And on top it, at a fraction of a cost than what they spend at Auto Expo launch.

Bajaj Auto, Royal Enfield, Harley Davidson, Fiat, Jeep, Nissan, Volvo, Ford, Nissan, Triumph, Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda, Chevrolet, General Motors, Man Trucks, Scania will not be participating in the expo.

Industry veterans, Mahindra & Mahindras MD, Dr. Pawan Goenka & Mr. Vikram Kirloskar, Vice-Chairman, Toyota Kirloskar, both were disappointed with the lack of participation from some of the major brands and believed that auto companies should ideally not miss out on the opportunity which the Asias largest Auto Expo provides.

Previous Auto Expo in Images
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The company that wants to transport coal by rail to the Port of Oakland for overseas shipment says the citys ban on coal-handling violates the Constitution, federal law and common sense.

The city says it agreed to let the company build a $250 million shipping terminal after the firms officials stated the site would not be used for coal storage and shipments  an assertion that turned out to be false.

The two sides also disagree on greenhouse gases and pollution controls.

But the trial that begins Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco will most likely come down to a single question: whether Oakland, when it outlawed coal-handling and storage within its borders in July 2016, had reasons to conclude that the substance was a health hazard.

The City Council has to have substantial evidence that theres a substantial danger, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, who will conduct the nonjury trial, said at a pretrial hearing last week.

Oakland doesnt need airtight proof, just enough evidence of potential health risks to support its ban, Chhabria told a lawyer for Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal, the shipping company known as OBOT and controlled by developer Phil Tagami. But the judge also told the citys lawyer, You have to show a substantial danger.

The city says the primary danger comes from coal-dust emissions in a low-income neighborhood already suffering from air pollution and high rates of illnesses such as asthma. The company says it can minimize emissions with rail-car covers and other safety measures, and also contests the citys warnings of potentially disastrous explosions and fires.

Tagami is a longtime friend of Gov. Jerry Brown and owns the seven-story building near Oakland City Hall where Brown and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, were married in 2005. As mayor of Oakland, Brown appointed Tagami to positions on the Oakland Port Commission and, as governor, appointed him to the state medical board. But the governor has also praised the citys 2016 ordinance and said California should eliminate the shipment of coal through its ports.

Tagamis project would move coal from Utah by rail to the terminal his company would build on city-owned land in West Oakland, at the site of a former Army base, and from there to ships for export.

In a court filing, city lawyers said Tagami had secretly discussed coal with potential partners on the project since 2011, but told city officials in 2013, shortly after signing the terminal contract, that his company had no interest or involvement in the pursuit of coal-related operations.

As late as September 2015, the city said, the companys formal design plan said the facility would handle Commodity A, which later turned out to be coal.

But the company says it was Oakland that acted deceptively in passing the 2016 ordinance.

The City Council showed its hand in June 2014 by unanimously adopting a resolution opposing coal shipments through Oakland, lawyers for OBOT said in court filings. As council members posted No Coal in Oakland signs on social media, and Mayor Libby Schaaf told Tagami in a May 2015 letter that we will not have coal shipped through our city, the council commissioned dubious studies to support its preordained decision to ban the shipments, the lawyers said.

The city ignored evidence of safe handling of coal at terminals in Long Beach and Pittsburg, and brushed off recommendations by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to prevent coal-dust emissions by putting protective covers on rail cars, OBOT lawyers said.

If the covers dont work, we get shut down and wont object, company lawyer Robert Feldman told Chhabria at the pretrial hearing, arguing that the districts clean-air standards would protect the public without the need for a ban.

But city lawyers said Oakland cant rely on OBOTs safety promises or assume that the air districts rules will protect a West Oakland population that the air quality district itself has described as most vulnerable to air pollutions health impacts. The district has also acknowledged that residents in nearby Richmond have been harmed by emissions from a coal terminal in that city, despite clean-air rules, the citys lawyers said.

Oaklands residents cant afford to allow 4 to 5 million tons of coal to be stored and handled based on mere assertions by the developer that they will be protected, Kevin Siegel, a lawyer for the city, told Chhabria.

The city also says the coal shipments, and their later use as fuel, would emit planet-warming greenhouse gases that, over the long term, pose numerous substantial dangers to Oakland, including heat and flooding. The company counters that any emissions from its shipments would have no measurable effect in Oakland.

On another issue, OBOT contends the Oakland ordinance is an attempt to regulate rail transportation, which is under the sole authority of the federal government. The city says it is regulating only coal handling and storage.

OBOT additionally contends that the coal ban unconstitutionally interferes with interstate commerce by saddling out-of-state coal producers with unjustified costs and obstacles to exports. Chhabria said Friday he would rule on that issue, if necessary, after the trial.

The trial will focus on OBOTs claim that Oakland breached its contract with the company by banning coal. The 2013 contract said it would be governed by the laws that were then in effect, with one key exception  the city could enforce new laws, like the 2016 coal-ban ordinance, if it determined, after public hearings, that they were needed to protect public health and safety.

Chhabria said each side would have up to six hours in the trial to call witnesses and argue its case, with further proceedings tentatively scheduled for Wednesday and Friday. The Sierra Club and Baykeeper have intervened on the citys side in the case and may participate in the trial.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko
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When two New York Times reporters learned in 2004 that the George W. Bush administration was secretly wiretapping Americans, and collecting their phone and email records, the reporters attempt to publish their findings were thwarted by the administrations intense and successful lobbying of their editors.

In that effort, the Republican president had an unlikely ally: Rep. Jane Harman of Los Angeles, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Harman, now the president of a research organization in Washington, D.C., asked recently about her intervention, expressed no regrets.

There are times when classified materials must be protected, she told The Chronicle.

Details of the far-reaching, legally unauthorized surveillance program remained secret until the Times published the article in late 2005, more than a year after Bush was narrowly elected to a second term.

The programs secrecy made court challenges virtually impossible, except for the rare occasions in which surveillance led to criminal charges. Congress authorized the program in 2008 while narrowing it somewhat.

The newspapers interactions with administration officials, and Harmans role, were described by former Times reporter James Risen this month in the Intercept, the investigative publication where he now works.

Risen said he and Times colleague Eric Lichtblau had learned in the summer of 2004 that the National Security Agency, with Bushs approval, was wiretapping Americans in cases of alleged terrorism without seeking legally required judicial warrants, and was also collecting email and phone records of millions of Americans.

The story on the program known as Stellar Wind was ready for publication before the November 2004 election, when Bush was on the ballot, but NSA Director Michael Hayden and other administration officials told Times editors, in phone calls and face-to-face meetings, that publication would damage national security and endanger lives, Risen said.

He said the officials were joined in that effort by Harman, one of a handful of congressional leaders who had been briefed on the program and were enlisted by the White House to contact the Times.

Harman, first elected in 1992, spent six years in Congress before leaving to run for governor of California and then regaining her congressional seat in 2000. She was a generally moderate Democrat who supported the war in Iraq. She resigned in 2011 to become president of the Woodrow Wilson International Institute of Scholars, a research organization that focuses on foreign policy.

In his story for the Intercept, Risen wrote that Philip Taubman, the newspapers Washington bureau chief, recently recalled the phone call he received from Harman. The call came after Taubman told an administration official that the Times needed to hear from leaders of congressional intelligence committees who knew about Stellar Wind.

Risen quoted Taubman as saying, She told me that she and her colleagues, Democrat and Republican, strongly supported the NSA effort and requested that the (Times) not disclose it.

In 2005, Risen said, Lichtblau, his coauthor, was covering a House Intelligence Committee hearing at which Harman called for tighter restrictions in federal information-gathering law to protect civil liberties. He said Lichtblau approached her in the hall and asked how she could square those comments with what she knew about the NSA program, and that Harman moved her aides out of hearing distance, grabbed him by the arm and reprimanded him for bringing up the subject.

You should not be talking about that here, the congresswoman told Lichtblau in a whisper, according to Risens article. They (her aides) dont even know about that. And, she added, The Times did the right thing by not publishing that story.

The newspaper published the story later in 2005. The revelations angered civil-liberties advocates but produced no significant legal action, because the secrecy of the program made court challenges virtually impossible, except in the rare cases when the surveillance could be tied to specific criminal charges.

Contacted last week, Harman did not dispute the accuracy of the Intercepts description of her actions. Asked whether she had any regrets, she did not answer directly, but said, I strongly believe in a free press. But I think there are times when classified materials must be protected. I tried to act responsibly in a very tricky situation. In hindsight, I did not have all the facts.

She did not elaborate on what she didnt know at the time. But members of Congress learned later that the NSA had not been seeking warrants from a secret court, as required by law, before wiretapping calls between Americans and foreigners who were targeted for U.S. surveillance. The law that finally authorized the program in 2008 specified that the wiretaps must be aimed at foreigners and not at the Americans with whom they were in contact.

Risen said he also contacted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, in late 2005, at the suggestion of Taubman, the Washington bureau chief, who wanted approval from Democratic leaders before running the story.

He said he went to see Pelosi, previously the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, showed her the story, and asked if she would call Taubman. He said she replied, The Times is a big institution. It can make its own decisions.

Risen said she never said one way or the other whether the story was accurate.

Asked for comment on the incident, Pelosis office did not respond.

Bush himself got involved in December 2005, telling the Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, that there would be blood on your hands if the story was published, Risen said, quoting an editor who attended the meeting. But the newspaper published it later that month, shortly before Risen published a book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, which also described the NSA program.

Risen said in his article that the Times editors decided on publication after learning that the administration had considered going to court to stop them.

Risen and Lichtblau were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for their reporting. While Bush administration officials criticized the publication, they never cited any resulting terrorist acts or damage to national security.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko
If you're willing to trade free samples of pork belly and a bazaar-like Sunday afternoon for a delivery service, Boxed might have you covered.

The grocery delivery website, which describes itself as the "Costco for Millennials," launched in 2013 as an alternative to bulk shopping. They deliver non-perishable grocery items such as pet treats, toilet paper, and party-size bags of Fritos for free on orders totaling $49 or more.
"Excuse me, sir. Is it possible for me to sneak in and just see the gift shop?"

Visiting Washington, D.C., for business in late 2016, I was drawn to the brand-new National Museum of African American History & Culture. At the time (shortly after its gala opening) the waiting list for tickets was eight months long to get in, but it was a warm, sunny day so I walked there from my hotel just to see what it looked like.

"No sir, you have to have a ticket for that," I was told.

"Well, OK, just thought I'd try. I'll come back next time I'm in town."

The ticket-taker paused, looked me up and down and gave me a conspiratorial smile.

"Hold on."

He reached into his coat pocket and produced a ticket, then he winked conspiratorially and told me to go on inside and enjoy myself.

It was as though Shirley was looking out for me...again.

Chris McGinnis

Shirley Louise Walker came into my life in 1968 when I was 8 years old. She was employed by my family as a "maid," as we said in those days, at our home by the Chattahoochee River in the northwestern suburbs of Atlanta. I was the second of four children born to my father, a surgeon, and my mother, a part-time nurse and stay-at-home mom.

Shirley worked at our house three days a week  Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays  and would occasionally spend the night with us when my parents went out of town.

She had six sons of her own, the first she had when she was 14, and a grandmother who looked after them while Shirley worked. At one time she had a husband, but he was out of the picture. She was an attractive woman with many friends and a busy social life. I know that because I would listen intently to the racy phone conversations she had while ironing in the den when my mother was out of earshot.

Chris McGinnis

Growing up gay in the Bible Belt in the '70s, the outside world did not feel like a very fun or friendly place to me. So I'd spend hours with Shirley, laughing and talking while she smoked Kool Filter King cigarettes, ironed and drank iced tea. We'd talk about school, her boys, our friends. You may think that she was a maternal figure to me, like something out of "The Help," but she wasn't. Shirley was like my sassy, protective, fun and kind of dirty older sister.

We'd cuss and discuss sex, food, Al Green, Marvin, Aretha, Gladys, what was playing on WAOK-AM radio, Coretta Scott King, the latest scandal in the National Enquirer, riding the bus, her wig, the other maids on our street or Shirley Chisholm's run for president. We'd spend a few dollars each week to play the "numbers game," which was an illegal lottery popular on the south side of Atlanta. We each won $46 once because we played a number that I dreamed about. She knew that was a sign!

When she stayed weekends, one of the highlights was watching "Soul Train" together when it came on television Saturday afternoons. I'd try to match the moves of some of the show's famous line dancers, and Shirley would look at me and say, "You got soul baby, I can tell. You black on the inside." Then she'd clap her hands and break into a few funky moves of her own.

Around this time in the 1970s, racial labeling was making the shift from "negro" to "black," causing consternation on both sides of the issue. I still laugh to myself remembering one of our conversations about that. "I don't know why I'm supposed to be calling myself black. I ain't black, I'm ebony," she said. "And you ain't white. You pink!"

In 1974, when I was away at summer sailing camp in North Carolina being bullied and bashed by older boys, it was Shirley who I called on rainy days when camp counselors would take us into Morehead City for a movie. Although I never told her what was going on, she knew I was distressed and we'd talk and talk as I shoved quarters into the pay phone. I never even saw or cared much about the movies.

Chris McGinnis

We never talked much about what was going on in my head as I entered adolescence, but Shirley had an inkling.

"Chris, is you a sissy?" she asked me one day when I was 14. I'll never forget those words. I was dumbstruck. I did not know what to say and was horrified that someone  anyone  might somehow figure me out, even if it was Shirley. I did not talk to her for about a month after that. (At that time, "gay" was not widely used; "sissy" was a term used primarily in the black community.)

She knew she'd hit a nerve, but she did not say anything to me or anyone else. She wouldn't press the issue. But I could tell she was upset about being frozen out by the way she'd give me long, sad looks.

Eventually, I could not resist getting back on the fun ship with her, so as the shock of that question wore off, we resumed our good times and fell back into our routines, like watching "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" on TV at 11 p.m.  she from her house, me from mine  then calling each other afterward to review it and laugh again at all the funny parts. I still have Shirley's telephone number memorized. I think of all the numbers I've forgotten over the years, but that one sticks.

By the time I turned 15 and had my learner's permit, my mom started allowing me to drive Shirley to the MARTA bus stop at the end of the day. On the days that she worked, I could hardly wait to get home from school for a chance to take her to the bus all by myself in Mom's Chevrolet Caprice station wagon.

Once we got in the car, she'd reach into her enormous pocketbook and extract two pieces of Doublemint gum  one for her and another for me. Then she'd pull out a full-size bottle of Jergens lotion, squeeze a dab out and then slowly rub it in all over her hands and arms up to her elbows. (My mom used to say "Shirley has the most beautiful skin of any woman I know.") She'd also pull out her 15-cent bus fare and the latest issue of Jet magazine to read on the way home. To this day, the smell of Jergens, Doublemint and Niagara spray starch reminds me of Shirley  I can smell it as I type this.

Chris McGinnis

Our friendship was super strong but also kind of a secret. I did not talk much about it to my family, and they did not talk to me much about it, but everyone knew that Chris and Shirley were two peas in a pod. If my parents only knew some of the things we talked about, they would have separated us!

Time went on, and I grew up, turning into a pimply-faced, awkward teenager. I was a band geek and a closet case, but Shirley was always there as my friend and protector. I knew I could count on her, especially when I was living in fear that somehow, someway, someone would figure out what was going on in my head. Shirley would understand in a quiet way  she knew and I knew what was going on, but we never talked about it. That was the way most Southerners dealt with homosexuality at that time. Some still do.

In April 1978, I took a four-day bus trip with the band to Walt Disney World in Orlando. When I returned, my mother broke the horrible news to me: Shirley had died in her sleep over the weekend, apparently due to complications from a hiatal hernia.

Boom. I was a mess. The clothes she'd washed and folded were still in my drawers. I owed her a phone call. It was like losing a mother, sibling and best friend at the same time. She was only 33 years old. On the inside the tears poured and my heart pounded for weeks, but I didn't feel like I could let anyone know that the death of our housekeeper hurt me so much. I didn't know who would understand that?

At high school I always liked going to Miss Jenkins' math class because she was not only a good teacher, but she reminded me of Shirley. A few days after Shirley's funeral, I recall having a panic attack in class and asking Miss Jenkins' permission to leave and go to the school clinic.

"My stomach hurts," I said, when it was really my heart that was broken.

Over the next few months I kept my emotions bottled up and did not talk about it. I cried only in my bed at night or in the car when I drove home from my summer job as a cook at Six Flags Over Georgia.

Chris McGinnis

It took a year or so for me to shake that loss. I continued on with my life, attending high school proms, applying to colleges, going through fraternity rush at UGA in Athens, and then expanding my horizons beyond Georgia by transferring to the University of Colorado. But I never forgot Shirley, and her spirit never left my side. I felt like she became my guardian angel who protected me from too much pain during the coming out years of my early 20s. She kept me out of harm's way when I was backpacking or working on oil rigs and ski resorts in the Rockies. Sometimes I reached out and heard from her in private seances.

I believe it was Shirley who kept AIDS at bay when I blossomed into a handsome young gay man living in New York City, Puerto Rico and Australia, and watched the horrible, untimely deaths of many friends. Whenever anything mysteriously good comes my way, like Barkley, my partner and spouse of 12 years, or getting this essay published, I feel like Shirley's up there pulling strings and making it happen.

So when I mysteriously got that ticket to enter the National Museum of African American History & Culture that day, I proudly walked in, one of about 50 white folks among the thousands of African-Americans there to witness a defining moment in their fight for equality  the opening of a spectacular museum on Washington's National Mall that tells the story of the struggles and highlights of black history in America.

I could hear Shirley squealing with delight as I walked by booths and exhibitions and images of afro picks and pomade, Chuck Berry's shiny red Cadillac Eldorado, mock prison cells, Al Green and Marvin Gaye music, videos about having light or dark skin, iron skillet cooking, freedom marches and black entrepreneurs. Shirley was there! She got me in the door.

Chris McGinnis

As I stood there admiring Berry's spectacular car, I noticed an elderly woman visiting alone who was attempting to take a selfie in front of it. I offered to help take her picture, and we had a moment talking about how we both wished we could drive around D.C. on a sunny day with that ragtop down. She had a big purse and a mouthful of Doublemint gum with that unforgettable scent. I realized that if Shirley were still alive, she'd be about the same age.

And I swelled up with warm memories, internal tears and black pride as I walked through the rest of that museum with my head held high knowing that Chris and Shirley were doing this together. It was her magic that got me in that door that day, and continues to keep me happy and safe, I hope, for the rest of my life.

Chris McGinnis

Chris McGinnis is a travel writer and consultant living in San Francisco with his spouse and a succession of black Labrador retrievers named Shirley, Louise and Walker. Email him here

 2017 Christopher J. McGinnis

This item first appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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Chris McGinnis is the founder of of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis.
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.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

One of the highlights of 2017 was the discovery of the first object in our solar system that definitely came from somewhere else. At first we thought it was a comet, then an asteroid, and now the International Astronomical Union has reclassified it as something new entirely, an interstellar object. The Hawaiian astronomers who discovered it aptly named it 'Oumuamua, which means "a messenger from afar arriving first," reflecting that this object is like a scout sent from the past to reach out to us.

Research has already helped us learn a lot about 'Oumuamua's rare cigar-like shape (opens in new tab), what it's made of (ice with a carbon-rich surface (opens in new tab)) and its highly unusual orbit, which will take it out of our solar system at a speed of around 26 km/s. The Breakthrough Listen research program has even investigated whether 'Oumuamua is an alien space ship by scanning the object for life forms with the Green Bank Telescope. No intelligent signals have been identified so far, though further observations are planned.

Now my latest study gives us a glimpse of exactly where 'Oumuamua may have come from. Reconstructing the object's motion, my research suggests it probably came from the nearby "Pleiades moving group" of young stars, also known as the "Local Association." It was likely ejected from its home solar system and sent out to travel interstellar space.

'Oumuamuas journey.

Based on 'Oumuamua's trajectory, I simulated how it has probably travelled through the galaxy and compared this to the motions of nearby stars. I found the object passed 109 stars within a distance of 16 light years. It went by five of these stars from in the Local Association (a group of young stars likely to have formed together), at a very slow speed relative to their movement.

It's likely that when 'Oumuamua was first ejected into space, it was travelling at just enough speed to break away from the gravity of its planet or star of origin, rather than at a much faster speed that would require even more energy. This means we'd expect the object to move relatively slowly at the start of its interstellar journey, and so its slow encounters with these five stars suggests it was ejected from one of the group.

When was it kicked out of its home?

Stars typically move with an average speed when they are formed and gradually change speed as they encounter very large objects, such as massive stars and molecular clouds and are affected by their gravity. Unlike most nearby stars, 'Oumuamua moves very slowly compared to the average motion of the rest of the galaxy. This suggests it has only been travelling in interstellar space for a relatively short time and hasn't had a chance to encounter many massive objects that would speed it up.

We also have evidence for 'Oumuamua's relatively young age from the colour of its surface. Outside of the protection of a star's magnetic field, objects in space are bombarded with cosmic rays and interstellar dust and gas that gradually alter their surfaces (opens in new tab) and turn them very red in colour. But 'Oumuamua has a more neutral colour, suggesting it has only been impacted by cosmic rays for, at most, hundreds of million years rather than for the billions of years that our solar system has existed.

How was it ejected?

'Oumuamua is extremely elongated and has quite a different shape from other objects in our solar system. It was probably formed by a relatively high-energy process such as a collision, or ejected from a forming star. Most objects in the outer part of a planetary system are made more of ice and most objects in the inner regions are made more of rocks. Since 'Oumuamua is a more even mix of ice (opens in new tab) and rocks (opens in new tab), it's likely it came from the middle part of a solar system, similar to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that features a mixture of icy and rocky asteroids.

Young visitor. (Image credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO)

Perhaps the most plausible scenario is that 'Oumuamua was ejected from a closely separated binary star system made of two stars closely orbiting each other. Objects orbiting one of the stars in a binary system will be strongly affected by the gravity of the other and so can be more easily ejected from the system than if it had just one star.

'Oumuamua is probably just the tip of the iceberg. My research suggests there are likely more than 46m similar interstellar objects crossing the solar system every year. Most of them will be too far away for us to see with our current telescopes. But new telescopes and surveys should soon be able to find these interstellar messengers, which may be sending us important information about how stars and planets formed. Studying more objects like 'Oumuamua will enable us to work out how much debris is left over from star formation and how much this adds to the mass of our galaxy.

Another reason to study these interstellar objects is that they could one day threaten to collide with the Earth and cause catastrophic events such as mass extinctions. The more we know, the better prepared we'll be if that day ever comes.

Fabo Feng, Postdoctoral fellow, University of Hertfordshire

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates  and become part of the discussion  on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.
Our solar system may be an oddball in the universe. A new study using data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope shows that in most cases, exoplanets orbiting the same star have similar sizes and regular spacing between their orbits.

By contrast, our own solar system has a range of planetary sizes and distances between neighbors. The smallest planet, Mercury, is about one-third the size of Earth  and the biggest planet, Jupiter, is roughly 11 times the diameter of Earth. There also are very different spacings between individual planets, particularly the inner planets.

This means our solar system may have formed differently than other solar systems did, the research team suggested, although more observations are needed to learn what the different mechanisms were. [The Most Intriguing Alien Planet Discoveries of 2017]

"The planets in a system tend to be the same size and regularly spaced, like peas in a pod. These patterns would not occur if the planet sizes or spacings were drawn at random," Lauren Weiss, the study's lead author and an astrophysicist at the University of Montreal, said in a statement.

The research team examined 355 stars that had a total of 909 planets, which periodically transit across their faces (as seen from Earth). The planets are between 1,000 and 4,000 light-years away from Earth.

After running a statistical analysis, the team found that a system with a small planet would tend to have other small planets nearby  and vice-versa, with big planets tending to have big neighbors. These extrasolar systems also had regular orbital spacing between the planets.

"The similar sizes and orbital spacing of planets have implications for how most planetary systems form," researchers said in the statement. "In classic planet-formation theory, planets form in the protoplanetary disk that surrounds a newly formed star. The planets might form in compact configurations with similar sizes and a regular orbital spacing, in a manner similar to the newly observed pattern in exoplanetary systems."

In our own solar system, however, the story is very different. The four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) are very widely spaced apart. The team pointed to evidence from other research that Jupiter and Saturn may have disrupted the structure of the young solar system. While the statement did not specify how, several other research studies have examined the movements of these giant planets and their potential impact on the solar system.

Each of the exoplanets examined in the study was originally found by Kepler, which launched in 2009 and continues to send data today. But more-detailed information was obtained with the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii; Weiss is a member of the California-Kepler Survey team there, which is examining the light signatures of thousands of planets discovered by Kepler.

Weiss said she plans a follow-up study at Keck to look for Jupiter-like planets in multiplanet systems. The aim is to better understand if the presence of a Jupiter-size planet would alter the position of other planets in the same system.

"Regardless of their outer populations, the similarity of planets in the inner regions of extrasolar systems requires an explanation," researchers said in the statement. "If the deciding factor for planet sizes can be identified, it might help determine which stars are likely to have terrestrial planets that are suitable for life."

The study was published Jan. 3 in The Astronomical Journal.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
WASHINGTON  The U.S. military's newest missile-warning satellite is set to lift off later this week just as tensions continue to mount over North Korea's ICBM program.

Crews at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, are preparing to launch the SBIRS GEO Flight-4 satellite on Thursday (Jan. 18) from a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

"Everything is progressing toward the ULA Atlas V launch carrying the Space Based Infrared System GEO Flight 4 mission for the U.S. Air Force," ULA announced on Monday. The forecast shows an 80 percent chance of favorable weather conditions for the planned 7:52PM EST liftoff on Thursday. [How Ballistic Missiles Work (Infographic)]

Lockheed Martin manufactured the satellite in Sunnyvale, California. It was delivered to Florida on Oct. 31 and encapsulated on Jan. 9. During encapsulation, the satellite was sealed in its launch fairing, an aerodynamic, nose-cone shell that protects the satellite during launch. In the days leading up to the launch, the fairing with the satellite enclosed will be mounted on top of the Atlas V rocket.

SBIRS is the United States' main source of persistent, space-based surveillance of missile launches around the globe.

The Flight-4 launch comes less than a year since SBIRS GEO Flight-3 sent its first images down to Earth in a milestone known as "first light." These two satellites join SBIRS GEO-1 and GEO-2, which have been in operation since 2013.

The constellation includes four geostationary satellites, two SBIRS hosted payloads on satellites in highly elliptical orbit, two replenishment satellites and sensors, and fixed and mobile ground stations.

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimated that total costs for the two payloads and four geo satellites, plus ground support, come to approximately $13.6 billion. Each satellite with spares and accessories is estimated to cost $1.7 billion. The Pentagon requested $1.3 billion in 2018 for SBIRS  $862 million more than was appropriated in 2017.

The Air Force plans to soon move forward with the next batch of satellites, GEO-5 and GEO-6. Lockheed Martin intends to use a modernized LM 2100 satellite bus. After a "critical design review" in September, the Air Force, authorized the GEO 5 and 6 satellites to begin the manufacturing and integration phase.

The SBIRS satellites are equipped with powerful scanning and staring infrared surveillance sensors that collect data for use by the U.S. military to detect missile launches, support ballistic missile defense and gather broader intelligence.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
lmmaker Darren Aronofsky joins producers and the astronauts behind National Geographic's "One Strange Rock" ten-part series at the Television Critics Association's press tour, Jan. 13. Pictured from top left to bottom right: Astronauts Nicole Stott, Jeff Hoffman, Leland Melvin, Mike Massimino, Peggy Whitson, Jerry Linenger and (bottom left) Chris Hadfield; "One Strange Rock" showrunner Arif Nurmohamed, Jane Root of Nutopia, Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel with Protozoa Pictures and astronaut Mae Jemison.

"This is the story of Earth, from the only people who have ever left it."

That, in a tagline, is the premise of "One Strange Rock," a ten-part television documentary series premiering in March on National Geographic Channel. Presented by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky ("mother!", "Black Swan") and hosted by actor Will Smith, "One Strange Rock" reframes our view of the planet Earth from the perspective of eight of astronauts who spent time on board the International Space Station.

"I think this is the first time astronauts have narrated and shared their stories about how it felt and what it was like to be in space, but also how it applies back to the planet," said Leland Melvin, who helped build the space station on two shuttle missions and who is featured in "One Strange Rock." [2017's Must-Read Space Books]

"We haven't found another planet like this, with lifeforms that are building and creating these incredible systems and working together  and sometimes not working together," said Melvin. "It's really a strange and complicated rock that is able to do some pretty miraculous things."

Filmed in space and across 45 countries on six continents over the course of more than a year, "One Strange Rock" reaches beyond being a nature documentary by weaving in the astronauts' personal and emotional experiences to shape how the planet is shown.

"They are part of the planet that have left the planet and looked back," said Alice Jones, who directed the tenth and final episode of the series. "It is that perspective shift that takes [the series] from being about the world we know to being the strange rock."

"I think the astronauts are really what makes this series unique," Jones told collectSPACE.com. "What they bring is that emotional experience being there and seeing it with their eyes. They all say, 'We have seen photos of Earth and you kind of know what to expect, but when you go up there and look at it, it hits you here, [in the heart].'"

"It is the emotional, personal storytelling that is interwoven throughout the factual content that I think is what probably makes it unique," she said.

In addition to Melvin, "One Strange Rock" also features the experiences of astronauts Chris Hadfield, Jeffrey Hoffman, Mae Jemison, Nicole Stott, Jerry Linenger, Peggy Whitson and Michael Massimino.

"We have chosen scientists or science-minded astronauts, not just military pilots, but people who have a real insight into the inner workings of the world and universe, who also happen to fly in space on the side, to host our series," said Jones.

A ninth astronaut, Paolo Nespoli with the European Space Agency (ESA), also contributed to "One Strange Rock" but from behind the camera.

"We have got fantastic footage from the space station over the last few years," said Jones, "but we were also able to work with ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli. Darren Aronofsky spoke with him and we gave him training on a RED [HD] camera and in his spare time, Paolo filmed for us."

Astronauts from "One Strange Rock" (left to right): Mae Jemison, Jeff Hoffman, Peggy Whitson, Leland Melvin, Jerry Linenger, Chris Hadfield, Nicole Stott and Mike Massimino. (Image credit: Mike Massimino via Twitter)

"We were super lucky that Paolo's [stay] overlapped with Peggy Whitson," said Jones. "So we've got beautifully shot footage of Peggy living aboard the space station."

As the series' host, Will Smith ("Ali," "Men in Black") gives voice to the everyman.

"Will Smith just fits perfectly, he is great," Jones said. "We wanted someone who was accessible and approachable, and had a warmth and charisma the audience could relate to. I think he'll be a great counterpoint with the astronauts."

"One Strange Rock," produced by Protozoa Pictures and Nutopia, is set for a two-hour premiere on March 26 in 172 countries and 43 languages. In addition to the program for television, National Geographic also worked with NASA to launch a virtual reality (VR) camera to the space station to support the production of a 3D, 360-degree short film that will debut alongside the series.

"When you are here on this strange rock, it is hard to look outside it," said Aronofsky, speaking Saturday (Jan. 13) at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, California, as reported by Nerdist. "What was interesting for me in this journey was that all of these amazing people [the astronauts], whether they went up in space for eight days or 600 days, they all had a very similar experience.

Watch the new trailer for National Geographic's "One Strange Rock" at collectSPACE.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2017 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.
Welcome To SpoilerTV



We bring you a comprehensive and up to date spoiler service on all the major US TV shows and Movies. You can find specific show content by clicking the menu system at the top of the screen. We scour the Internet for spoilers as well as posting our own exclusive spoilers (Scripts, Casting Calls, Set Photos etc) as well as recaps and other fun articles and polls. We hope you enjoy your stay.




C arillion  the shimmering brand dreamed up 20 years ago after the break-up of the earthier-sounding Tarmac building empire  takes its name from a carillon, a musical instrument of pealing bells.

But it was only the death knell tolling this week for a firm with more than 40,000 staff facing an uncertain future, or cut pensions. That also goes for thousands of suppliers of Carillion who face losses and potential insolvency as a result of the collapse. Carillions glitzy corporate motto of making tomorrow a better place will soon ring hollow for firms expected to get back just pennies in the pound.

Throughout the Noughties, Carillion was a pushy acquisition machine, snapping up storied names such as Mowlem and then Alfred McAlpine. It even made a tilt at Balfour Beatty in 2014 when its larger rival hit trouble.

But for industry observers  and the short-sellers in the City  their demise has been a disaster foretold as its balance sheet creaked. Besides the immediate fall-out, the failure should also prompt soul-searching about how the industry operates, and the way the Government  whose ministers are always so keen to make political capital out of major projects  buys its buildings.

Even before its failure, Carillion was always keener to talk about its support services work, such as maintaining thousands of homes for Forces families, or cleaning hospitals. That provided the bulk of revenues, the City liked it, and the margins were better compared with construction, the fusty old aunt in the corner.

But it was construction which eventually killed the company as Carillion was sunk by problems on three major private-finance projects in the UK  the 350 million Midland Metropolitan hospital in Birmingham, the 335 million Royal Liverpool University hospital and the 745 million Aberdeen bypass  as well as payment problems with the vast Msheireb Downtown development in Qatar. Carillion was owed a rumoured 200 million on the project.

Though mismanagement played a big part  particularly on the delayed and now-shuttered Liverpool project  Carillion is not alone in paying a heavy price when PFI contracts go wrong.

As far back as 2000, Laing Construction was sold for 1 after racking up huge losses on a PFI project to build the new National Physical Laboratory in west London, among other projects. Much more recently another major player, Interserve, was forced to defer a test of its banking covenants after hundreds of millions in losses on energy-from-waste plants.

One former Carillion veteran traces recent difficulties faced by contractors to a much more hard-nosed approach from the Government after the Coalition took office in 2010, when minister Francis Maude set out to maximise the public sectors buying power. And after the financial crisis, it was a buyers market. Some contractors were guilty of racking up exorbitant profits on early PFI deals, but now the pendulum has swung too far the other way, he reckons, adding: The two other bidders for the Midland Metropolitan pulled out. Contracting has always been about what degree of risk youre prepared to bear for the margin, but the Government was determined to become a much more aggressive purchaser. Thats good for the taxpayer but there are contractors now who wont work for the Government.

Contractors are supposed to bear the risk  thats the whole point  but as Carillions demise shows, the margins between success and disaster are slender. Like other firms it balanced its business on the cash of others, taking up to 120 days to pay its suppliers.

Industry sources said that since Julys profit warnings, when the problems became clear, many subcontractors would have insisted on more stringent terms, exacerbating the flood of cash out of Carillion and the rise in its debts, creating a doom loop.

A company only goes bust because it runs out of cash, and that is what it has done, says a source at one of Carillions lenders. Unlike in Balfour Beattys recent rough patch, Carillion didnt have a strong balance sheet to fall back on and give it the breathing space to sort itself out. The source adds: Theres a difference between extending covenants and going to a credit committee and asking to put more money in. There was no sustainable future, just limping to its next crisis point.

The question now is how many others Carillion will bring down with it. For Rudi Klein, chief executive of the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group, which represents smaller contractors, the episode is another argument for the use of project bank accounts: under this system a construction client releases cash to all suppliers on a project at the same time when agreed milestones are hit  rather than letting the main contractor distribute the cash.

He says Carillion should be a catalyst for change, adding: Is it right to continue to use large undercapitalised companies to deliver these works which, in reality, are being delivered by the supply chain?

But project bank accounts have only limited traction in the public sector, and the SEC is writing to the Cabinet Office minister David Lidington to clarify the extent of the protection available for Carillions suppliers on public projects.

But the truth is that most of the pain is yet to unfold: We do not know the full extent of this yet, Klein warned. It is potentially disastrous.
T he founder of Momentum, Jon Lansman, triumphantly tweeted a Lan-slide, having just been elected by a generous margin to one of three newly created seats on Labours National Executive Committee. The three seats have been invented to ensure that Corbynites achieve more representation in Labours ruling body.

One important facet of politics, whichever creed you belong to, is outwitting your enemies. That was as true of the Blairites and Cameroonians, seizing power against dull Old Labour and dusty conventional Tories in their day, as it is of Labour today  except that the outcome is a different one in a time of more brutal insurgencies.

The ease with which this has occurred is a sign of the decline of moderate Labour as a force. Lansman has fought on the hard Left for so long that he figures widely in the Seventies chapters of Tony Benns diaries as a dedicated factotum of the great pipe-sucker.

As for the vanquished Labour centrists, its too glib to mock Eddie Izzard, who ran against Lansmans clique, as a serial loser in his campaigns on behalf of the metropolitan soft Left. At least Eddie showed up for the fight. Thats more than can be said for the erstwhile Blairites, Brownites and Ed Milibandites, who can be found doing almost everything in public life except campaigning for a kind of Labour politics with a residue of liberalism and a role for markets.

The tension between the role of a populist socialism and a more technocratic variety which wants to harness markets and innovations for the good of the widest number of people is a longstanding one. It takes us back to the tangled co-operative and utopian roots of the credo in the 19th century, the ensuing capture by Engels and Marx and the divisions ever since about how statist the Left should be.

But what makes Corbynism different and riskier than previous turf wars is that it poses a threat to parliamentary democracy itself. What happens to mere elected MPs who do not agreed with the Corbyn credo of control? Are they, like the hens in George Orwells Animal Farm, driven to rebel, only to be seen off by the loyal hounds of Momentum, bent on consolidating the power of their revolutionary masters?

I ask because not even avid supporters of Messrs Corbyn and McDonnell seem to be candid about what the line is on internal Andersdenkende  those who think differently, in Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburgs phrase.

Adherents believe MPs should fall into line or get out of the way. In hard power terms, this sounds like a recipe for de-selections. Formally, this is denied (something has been learned from Comrade Squealer here). But de-selection is a mentality, long before it is a trend. And from Haringey to Merseyside, constituency parties are developing splits redolent of the nastier end of the Leftist politics I grew up with in the Eighties.

Corbynism is a curious mix of the visceral and the benign. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell used the phrase lynching about a female Tory minister and then defended it in an exchange in Parliament as honest. It is one thing to say something daft or even inflammatory when passions run high. But Labours second-in-command is clearly determined to stand by the sentiment, which indicates a certain way of pursuing political goals. You cannot be in a lynching frame of mind towards Tories one minute and then head to Davos (as McDonnell is doing) to suggest openness to urbane dialogue about post-crash economic models the next.

Labour now presents its political DNA as a saintly defence of the poor, with a renewed push at community level to become the representative of benefit claimants and food-bank users. It is a kind of identity which can start as a laudable interest in those at the sharp end of capitalism but easily cross into mawkishness and a tendency to corral all social ills into a pre-agreed framework of pat phrases. A party serious about government needs to recognise the difference between rhetoric and deliverables.

Yesterday Corbyn made rather a good Opposition leader fist of sounding cross about the collapse of Carillion and the mismanagement behind it. But is anyone the wiser about how he would replace PFI contracts or any other form of public-private mix? Of course not and neither is he, because there is no real interest in alternatives, beyond the cosh of nationalisation.

You cannot be in a lynching frame of mind towards Tories one minute and then head to Davos

If the plan for state ownership applies to the railways, water and the energy companies, where would it leave other monopolies broken up in the Thatcher era? And how would a Corbyn-led government decide how to ensure state ownership becomes more efficient? Its hard to see any coherence on this.

Among Labour centrists, a Pollyanna-ish denial about the implications for a more nuanced Centre-Left has crept in. When Corbyn insists that he does not want Britain to be in the single market, they insist on telling each other that Keir Starmer will somehow persuade his boss to be properly anti-Brexit. When the mood turns toxic in Haringey, they insist it could never happen where they are. The new daydream is that Corbyn will somehow wither away and someone palpably nice, if a bit muddled, like Angela Rayner, will end up in charge.

But the milk of human kindness in Labour is semi-skimmed for those who dont share the prix-fixe menu of acceptable ideas served at Chez Jeremy. My guess is that what Billy Bragg once dubbed the softy tendency will lose in the next couple of years, because in this brand of pitched ideological politics it usually does. No amount of hip-hop videos can alter that. It is the difference between the role of a political party, as derived from Marxist-Leninist thinking, and social democracy.

Lansman understands this and pursues his brand of beliefs with intelligence and ruthlessness. Far wiser, then, to take his quest at face value than to assume that an ideology about uncompromising struggle is more elastic, flexible or forgiving than it ever said it was.

Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist
W hen I first met the fashion photographer Mario Testino, who has recently denied accusations of sexually exploiting male models and assistants, the situation was deeply intimidating. It was 2015, and as the newly appointed fashion editor of British Vogue I had been sent to New York to interview the supermodel Gisele  my first big cover story.

I found Testino in a gigantic whitewashed studio on the banks of the Hudson, surrounded by an army of assistants. They were all young, gorgeous men, well-coiffed and dressed in black. It did cross my mind that they were all incredibly handsome (I was single).

As a rule, people in the visual arts like to surround themselves with beauty, and this troupe was no exception. I felt as though I was intruding  no one likes a jet-lagged journalist getting in the way  but before long I was introduced to Testino. He was tall and tanned, with a black blazer swinging from his shoulders. He shook my hand, he was cordial and charming.

On set with Gisele the two of them flirted, laughed and gossiped in Spanish or Portuguese (she is from Brazil, he Peru). They spent the shoot reminiscing about old times  he made her feel like a queen, while she smouldered for the camera. The photos from that shoot were sensational. I got my interview and everyone trotted off home. If you want gossip or, darker still, evidence of complicity, then I dont have it, not from that day.

That is what is most frightening about allegations of men abusing their power in the fashion industry, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and beyond. The inference is that they not only hide in plain sight but they dazzle with confidence and charisma. For so long  too long, it is claimed  these men have been immune, the disgraceful behaviour they are accused of excused by awful behaviour that has gone before them. They are seemingly badly advised, all-powerful and horrifyingly inept at revising their conduct for modern times.

Testino photographed Diana, Princess of Wales, and more recently the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. He has shot advertising campaigns for the globes biggest brands and editorials with the most famous pop stars and figures in the world, such as Madonna and Kate Moss.

These men arent cartoon character villains; they are knitted into the social fabric of the most glamorous, exclusive parts of our society. They rub shoulders with royalty and are friends with the worlds elite.

Testino has been accused by 13 male assistants and models of subjecting them to sexual advances that in some cases included groping and masturbation. In repsonse, Conde Nast, the publisher of British Vogue has severed ties with him and with Bruce Weber, another photographer who is accused of a pattern of unnecessary nudity and coercive sexual behaviour, an accuser told The New York Times. Both of them vigorously deny the allegations.

I believe strongly in the value of remorse and forgiveness, said Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of US Vogue, in response to the revelations, but I take the allegations very seriously, and we at Conde Nast have decided to put our working relationship with both photographers on hold for the foreseeable future.

That cover shoot in New York was three years ago, but the glamour, gloss and naive frisson from that day makes it feel like 20 years ago  a different era even. The industry has lost its shine and, if rumours are to be believed, there are more dark days to come.

Facebooks been messing with me

The new Facebook algorithm, which launched this week in a bid to bring users closer together, is way off the mark. The site has changed tack, and has pledged to phase out more commercial content from brands and news providers from your feed.

So far so understandable (if not a little frustrating for those of us who get our news via our social channels). Facebook has always been about personal connections. By focusing on bringing people closer together we can help make sure that time on Facebook is time well spent, said founder Mark Zuckerberg. He wants to make the experience more meaningful. Well, it would mean a lot to me if I didnt feel like an addict being duped every time I log in.

I have read all about the tactics; the emotionally charged like button, the enslaving pull-down screen refresh, the blue ticks on WhatsApp to make me feel anxious if I dont respond immediately. I have read that Instagram hijacks my mental quirks by withholding information to prolong my longing for a like, or a comment.

These are just some of the manpulative ploys to get my dopamine flowing and to make sure I keep returning for more. The emotional manipulation is what I want you to call time on, Zuckerberg. That would be meaningful.

* Dear Mr Kipling, its been a while but our paths crossed again recently over a packet of your delicious Bakewell slices, and it seems I wasnt alone. My Twitter feed was alive with debate this week over what on earth you were thinking when you devised the packaging strategy for your sponges.

Where you thinking? Theres the box, the cellophane, the tray, multiplied by three per packet. This year is about green consumption, and Im not talking smoothies. Our household is doing everything we can to minimise plastic and packaging. Its exceedingly wasteful.

For more on the Evening Standards Last Straw campaign visit standard.co.uk/laststraw
In previous seasons, Dolce & Gabbana have reinvented their runways by ditching models in favour of upcoming millennials.

Recent shows have seen the luxury Italian label enlist the help of YouTube star Jim Chapman, singer Pixie Lott and even Princess Dianas niece, Kitty Spencer.

However, for their AW18 show during Milan Fashion Week Men's, they were obviously keen to recruit a few new faces.

This time, they asked some of Hollywood's most handsome dads if their sons would be interested in strutting their stuff.

And who would say no to that?

So, with their good genes, model credentials and supportive fathers the offspring of P Diddy, Pierce Brosnan and James Marson (to name a few) have all been welcomed into the D&G family - and we're sure we will be seeing a lot of these striking young lads in the future.

DG_Man-FW18-19

Christian Combs

NPictures / Splash News

Age: 19

Father: P Diddy

Modelling Experience: The teenager is just one of P Diddy's six children. Holding a striking resemblance to his hip hop father, it's no surprise that the youngster is already making quite a name for himself in the fashion industry. This is his second time walking a D&G show and he was recently named as the face of their spring/summer 2018 campaign.

Paris Brosnan

AFP/Getty Images

Age: 16

Father: Pierce Brosnan

Modelling Experience: The 16-year-old showed off his good genes and modelling potential by making his catwalk debut at the D&G show. From what we can see, we're sure thing will only be the start for this dapper young chap.

Jack Marsden

NPictures / Splash News

Age: 16

Father: James Marsden

Modelling Experience: With his dad's famous cheekbones, Jack was always sure to follow James's lead into showbiz. The D&G show also marked his catwalk debut and we're going to keeping a close eye on the teen from now on.

Gabriel Day Lewis

NPictures / Splash News

Age: 22

Father: Daniel Day Lewis

Modelling Experience: The actor's son is making big strides in the industry, with multiple D&G campaigns under his belt, a thriving Instagram and model mates including Presley Gerber - he's definitely heading in the right direction.

Rafferty Law

AFP/Getty Images

Age: 21

Father: Jude Law

Modelling Experience: He's walked more D&G shows than we can count, graced the covers of GQ and worked for brands including DKNY and Hugo Boss - so he's basically bossing it.

Dylan Jagger Lee

NPictures / Splash News

Age: 20

Father: Tommy Lee

Modelling Experience: The youngest son of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee has graced the cover of Wonderland, walked a D&G show and is signed to Next Management - not a bad start.

Brandon Thomas Lee

NPictures / Splash News

Age: 21

Father: Tommy Lee

Modelling Experience: Meanwhile, his brother Brandon is another model who has become a D&G regular, as well as walking for the likes of Philipp Plein. He also dates model Pyper America Smith, making them one powerful model couple.

Visit this page to discover which 12 male models you should be following on Instagram.
Beady-eyed royal fans may have noticed that Meghan Markle has ditched two of her rings during the royal tour in Africa; the first being her 3-stone engagement ring, the second being the eternity ring she reportedly received from Prince Harry as a push present.

But in lieu of the show-stopping jewels she normally sports, 38-year-old Meghan so far has opted to model some more affordable jewellery designs.

So, while we may never be able to get our hands on rings as stunning as Meghan's, we sure can copy a few of her other accessory choices.

Here are a few of the affordable brands she's been loving on the royal tour and closer to home.

GAS Bijoux

Getty Images

On her first solo engagement of the royal tour in Africa, Meghan sported a pair of earrings by French brand, GAS Bijoux. The Duchess was last seen in the brand's 'Gourmette' earrings in Morocco in February 2019.

Get the look

24ct Gold Plated Brass Gourmette Earrings by GAS Bijoux, 172, Shop it now / Shopbopgasearringsshopbop

Zofia

Meghan in the Open Diamond Cuff on the third day of the royal tour (Getty Images ) / Getty Images

She also took the occasion to sport one of her favourites, the Open Diamond Cuff by Los Angeles-based brand, Zofia. It's not the first time she's been spotted in the brand: she's also worn their 14-carat-yellow gold Bar Stack Rings before, most notably when she visited Reprezent FM in Brixton with Prince Harry last year.

Get the look

Open Diamond Cuff by Zofia, 1,100 Shop it now / Zofia jewellery

Shaun Leane

(Getty Images ) / Getty Images

She's been spotted in London-based Shaun Leane's designs on multiple occasions, most notably in his Tusk bangle for the Queen's Birthday at the Royal Albert Hall in April 2018 and more recently at the launch of her Smart Works collection. Meghan is proof that you can never have enough gold bangles on one wrist - the more the merrier!

18ct Yellow Gold Vermeil Diamond Tusk Bangle by Shaun Leane, 995, Shop it now / Shaun Leane

Pippa Small

Meghan in the Pippa Small Turquoise Mountain Bangles on WE Day in March 2019 (Getty Images ) / Getty Images

And Leane isn't the only British jeweller Meghan favours; she's also regularly spotted wearing designs by London-based Pippa Small. She wore the brand's Herkimer Diamond Cup Ring whilst at Buckingham Palace in March 2019, their Goddess Durga Ring and Nosheen Stud earrings at Wimbledon in July 2019 and their Oshna bangle to the launch of her Smart Works collection.

Pippa Small 18kt Gold Vermeil Afghanistan Omeen Bangle, 160, Shop it now / Pippa Small

Verse Fine Jewellery

Meghan at Wimbledon in July 2019, wearing her personalised "A" necklace (Getty Images ) / Getty Images

Meghan appeared to cause something of an internet rucus when she made a surprise appearance at this summer's Wimbledon Championship to support her close friend Serena Williams in her defeat against Kaja Juvan. In an apparent nod to her then two-month-old son, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, Meghan sported a delicate necklace with a small "A" charm, by Sydney-based jeweller, Verse Fine Jewellery.

Love Letters One Letter Necklace, 330, Shop it now / Verse Fine jewellery

Catbird

Meghan in Catbird's classic stacking rings during a visit to Reprezent FM in January 2018 (Getty Images ) / Getty Images

Meghan is also a fan of stacking rings; while they're dainty in size, they make enough of a statement when wearing several of them. Her favourite stacking rings are the 14k yellow gold threadbare rings from New York-based brand, Catbird, all of which are handmade in their Brooklyn studio. The minimalist jewellery brand was founded by Rony Vardi in 2004 and offers the daintiest designs.

Get the look

The Catbird Threadbare ring in yellow gold, 35, Shop it now / Getty Images

Missoma

AFP/Getty Images

Meghan was ahead of the trend when it came to British jewellery brand, Missoma. The stylish royal can't get enough of the affordable brand, and sported their 45 Interstellar Ring on her visit to Scotland with Prince Harry last year.

Get The Look

18ct Gold Vermeil Interstellar ring by Missoma, 45, Shop it now

Birks

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Much like her wardrobe, Meghan also likes to support Canadian brands when it comes to her jewellery collection.

For her official engagement announcement to Prince Harry the actress chose to wear a dazzling pair of 18k gold and opal earrings from Birks.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle engagement announcement 1 /36 Prince Harry and Meghan Markle engagement announcement Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Eddie Mulholland-WPA Pool/Getty Images Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry and Ms Meghan Markle photo call today on the announcement of their engagement in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Getty Images Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace AP Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace PA Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace EPA Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace AP Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Getty Images Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Reuters Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Sky News Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace PA Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace EPA Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace EPA Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Getty Images Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace EPA Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace AP Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace, London, after the announcement of their engagement PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leave following a photocall after announcing their engagement in the Sunken Garden in Kensington Palace EPA Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle during an official photocall to announce their engagement at The Sunken Gardens at Kensington Palace Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and Meghan Markle walk away after posing for the media in the grounds of Kensington Palace AP

Founded in 1979, Birks has become one of Canada's leading high-end jewellery designers and a firm favourite of Meghan's who continues to wear them on multiple occasions - including to the Queen's Christmas lunch.

Get The Look

Yellow Gold and Opal Stud Earrings by Birks, 850, Shop them now

Natalie Marie

Although Meghan's Instagram account is now extinct, her love for Natalie Marie jewellery lives on.

During the actress's time on the hit show Suits she regularly showed off the independent Australian jewellery brand on her social media.

Captioning her selfies with statements including, "When you get the package of jewelry that makes your heart go pitter pat and "absolute favourite".

From its dotted oval necklaces to minimalist stacking rings - Meghan has it all. And we are sure her love for the brand is still as strong as ever.

Get The Look

Dotted Oval Necklace by Natalie Marie, 178, Shop it now

Visit this page to steal more of Meghan's style.
W ine, bread and cheese. Its a godly combination, isnt it?

Popularised by the Swiss and mastered jointly with the French, cheese fondue was created with the sole purpose of increasing cheese consumption throughout 1930s continental Europe. An excellent reason if you ask us.

With the winter air setting in, it's important to keep your happy levels way, way up, and what better way is there to make a human person happier than with a caerphilly chosen list of five fabulous cheese fondues? From boho shacks in Spitalfields to south London secrets, fill your bellies with the ultimate comfort food this season at these top spots for a dairy overdose.

Androuet

This Parisian institution located deep inside Spitalfields market is an absolute gem. There are two devilishly thick and generous fondues to choose from: the classic gourmet fondue of the day or a very creamy blue cheese option which can be ordered at the charcuterie with baby potatoes. If youre a sucker for all things racelette, try Androuets without hesitation. Just imagine smooth, silky fromage gently caressing a bed of meat and taytos. It's incredible. After you've recovered from your cheese sweats, head to Androuet's cheese shop for a formidable selection of French and British cheeses, innumerable tangy chutneys and fine artisan meats.

Walluc

Say bonjour to Walluc, a delectable and charming little Bohemian bistro in bustling Shoreditch. Instagrammably rustic, the buzzing little place is nestled on the ever-so-trendy Redchurch Street and offers two decently priced fondues which combine a great mix of gruyere, garlic, emmenthal and gorgonzola. Youll be pleased to know all come with side salads and potatoes to cleanse the palette  and make you feel less guilty about all those extra carbs.

St Moritz

St Moritz always has a place on any fondue round-up. Why? In short, its exceptional. The oldest Swiss gaff in the capital offers seasonal fare in the form of meats, wines, artisanal boards and all things fondue. Exactly eight fondues are on offer and come in the form of a traditional bubbling fondue neuchateloise with gruyere and emmental or fondue bourguignonne served with dippable cubes of prime beef. Its also one of the few fondue bars in the capital which offer a veggie option, too.

The French House, Various Locations

Ditch the city and head south to either Crystal Palace or east Dulwich to discover the wondrous world that is the French House. Casual and effortlessly romantic at heart, this authentic Alsatian eatery rustles up a far from average fondue with a variety of nommable sides. Choose everything from mushrooms to apples, cornichons and saucisses de Strasbourg.

The Devonshires Balham Peaks

Get a taste for the Alps with a sweet or savoury fondue in one of Balhams apres-ski chalets. The melted cheese is served with campaillou bread, pickles, cured meats and roasted garlic, while the chocolate fondue comes with marshmallows, honeycomb and fruit.

Tramshed

Share Tramsheds salted caramel fondue with three of your friends. It comes with fluffy pink marshmallows and sugary doughnuts for dunking. 

The Cheese Bar

Famous are these cheese melting maestros for their molten cheddar porn antics. Special Cheese Bar fondue nights with changing menus take place every Thursday from 6pm, but be quick fromage fiends: youve only got until February 2018 before their fondue disappears forever.

Blanchette

This French bistro serves a hot melted Mont Dor cheese with potatoes, cornichon and charcuterie.

Love cheese? Here are nine places in London to go to if you're obsessed with the stuff!
Pantone releases a new colour each December for the new year, which influences many areas of interiors, fashion and design. With last years hue being Greenery, this year has brought a shock to many as the bold selection for 2018 was Ultraviolet. Alongside Dulux, who launched Heartwood as their colour for 2018, it seems that the various shades of purple will be very much in vogue in the coming months.

Pantone has stated that Ultraviolet lights the way to what is yet to come, and it is not wrong. Often associated with cosmic and inter-galactic design schemes, Ultraviolet is a very strong tone which could easily dominate any setting. It is therefore recommended to use the colour wisely, but dont let that scare you off. Look at softer pastel shades which may have undertones of ultraviolet or perhaps consider small bursts of the colour to add just a hint into your interior scheme. The key is to work with its vibrancy to add playfulness and a lively feel to the home.

Pairing the colour with complementary shades and materials is the secret to avoiding an outdated surrounding. Use rich purple velvets and add them alongside dark navy and green for a luxurious edge. Alternatively, for a softer shade of purple, bring in darker woods and terracotta for an earthy composition.

Here are some great ways to add Ultraviolet to your home:

Now is the perfect time to be more daring and start looking at new colours and shades you may otherwise shy away from. This colour play stool by the wonderful &New is part of a collection that celebrates colours by combining them together to create powerful showstoppers. This stool has a vibrant purple top along with angled red legs to create a unique design which will brighten up any dining or kitchen area.

&New's colourful stool

Buy now

Italian design brand Calligaris are masters at embracing new colours with their designs. Their Lazy Chair is a wonderful option for a comfortable reading chair to relax in. Available in this opulent purple cotton, you can add that pop of colour into the home with minimum effort.

Simple design from Calligaris

Buy now

Dark tones of blue and purple can work beautifully in a bedroom to create a decadent boutique setting. Darker walls, metallic accessories and luxurious velvets all combine to create a special and atmospheric space. This AJ Table lamp by Louis Poulsen was originally created for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen in 1960. Its simple and sleek design will work with many themes and a pair would make perfect bedside lights. It can be found at Scandinavian design retailer, Skandium.

Contemporary table lamp found in Skandium

Buy now

Adding small touches of a strong colour such as ultraviolet is the best method for those who prefer more neutral tones. This iridescent jewellery box is an innovative way of adding the colour into a room. Its simple design allows focus on the kaleidoscopic finish, creating an eye-catching piece for your dressing table or sideboard.

Pelican Story unique jewellery box

Buy now

Purple can also be accompanied perfectly with gold, brass and other metallic elements. This gorgeous vase from Perch and Parrow is a definite must-have if purple is your chosen theme. The contrasting gold intensifies its luxuriousness, and if you work from home, its the perfect addition to your desk to help brighten each day!

Purple vase can be found at Perch & Parrow

Buy now

This stunning mirror has a variety of hues running through it, and the simple gold frame allows the rich purple to truly stand out. It adds elegance and sophistication into whichever room it is placed and it celebrates the use of Ultraviolet spectacularly.

Mirror can be found at Athropologie

Buy now

Ultraviolet may not have been your first choice for 2018s Colour of the Year, but have no doubt that this rich and vibrant colour has the ability to transform any room in which it is placed.

Embrace it and see how bold your 2018 can be.

Roddy Clarke is a Design Journalist and Interior Stylist. Email him at contact@roddyclarke.com or follow him on Instagram @roddyclarkedesign
B read is Gold is the culmination of recipes donated by more than 45 of the worlds top chefs who have spent time cooking at Refettorio Ambrosiano, the Milan based community kitchen set up by Bottura. Using every day humble, imperfect and often out of date ingredients, the chefs create simplistic yet incredible dishes and ones those that are easy to replicate at home. Theres a focus on food waste, creativity and, as youd expect from Bottura, a passion for good food.

All of the royalty proceeds from Bread is Gold go to Food For Soul community kitchens, which are being set up across the world over with the aim to fight food waste and feed those less privileged. This book is an essential for your cookery book collection.

Here, I spoke to Bottura to find out more:

Wheres home for you or where do you spend the most of your time?

I live in Modena, my hometown. I couldnt live anywhere else in the world. That is where Osteria Francescana is located. I am so lucky to have such incredible ingredients around me to work with, from Parmigiano Reggiano to Balsamic Vinegar. I also travel a lot, and although I love the kitchens from around the world, I will always be true to my Italian roots.

What inspired you to write the book?

It was October 2015, and we were celebrating six months of success of Refettorio Ambrosiano, the community kitchen we set up in Milan as our own interpretation of the theme launched by Expo: Feed the Planet  Energy for life. Chefs from all over the world came and joined us to transform food surplus from the pavilions into tasty and nutritious meals, served to our guests from vulnerable conditions. We had no idea of what we were doing or the impact of such a project on the overall community. It was amazing: people who were complaining about the opening of a community kitchen were now volunteering day and night.

Chefs were so enthusiastic that they wanted to come back as well as set a new community kitchen in their towns. From the first weeks where guests were sitting in silence and ate as quick as they could, we couldn'tt let them leave. They were celebrating every single night. The Caritas Ambrosiana decided to keep the Refettorio open and alive, whereas Lara and me decided to found Food for Soul to replicate the same model around the world and reach as many communities as possible. But then we thought: how can we reach the wider public? How can we involve the people at home in the fight against food waste? And the answer was just in front of us: not only did the chefs come all the way from their restaurants to Milan, but they also found the time to write down the recipes they had made for our guests.

Bread is Gold collects all these recipes, as well as the stories of Refettorio Ambrosiano. But more than a cookbook, Bread is Gold is a book for ideas. You wont learn how to make pesto, but how to make pesto with what you have left in your fridge. The fight against food waste starts from your home.

Who should buy it?

Everyone should, because everyone can be part of the solution.

What's your favourite recipe from the book and why?

I love them all... but maybe the Banana peel chutney by Gastromotiva is my favourite because it is is totally unexpected. By making resourceful even something that we usually throw away, youre making visible the invisible. I also like the two variations of the original pesto alla genovese: instead of pine nuts, I used breadcrumbs and Rene Rezdepi used popcorn. Both results are lighter than the original recipe and give more attention to the herbs.

Banana Peel Chutney created by Gastromotiva

BANANA PEEL CHUTNEY

By Gastromotiva

Ingredients (makes about 1 cups (600 g)

1 tablespoon mustard seeds

2 tablespoons (30 g) butter

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

9 oz (250 g) red onions, diced

2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

2 malagueta or habanero chilies, chopped

 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 teaspoons coriander seeds

1 teaspoons whole cloves

1 teaspoons cardamom pods

2 whole star anise

Peels from 5 overripe bananas, finely diced

1 teaspoon salt

5 tablespoons packed light brown sugar

Juice of 2 oranges, plus more if needed

 cup (50 g) whole green grapes

Juice of 2 limes

Method

In a saucepan, heat the mustard seeds over medium heat until they start to pop. Add the butter, oil, and onions and saute until golden. Add the ginger, chilies, and spices and cook until fragrant, about 15 seconds. Add the banana peels, salt, brown sugar, and orange juice and let cook for 15 minutes, or until a thick chutney consistency is obtained. Add the grapes and cook for 5 minutes more. Remove from the heat and add more orange juice or filtered water if necessary to obtain a jammy consistency. Season to taste with salt and sweeten with sugar if necessary. Add the lime juice and stir. Transfer to a sterilized jar and store in the fridge for up to 1 week.

Meatballs with porcini mash

Which recipe should we head to for your favourite quick mid week, no fuss dinner?

There are recipes for meatballs that are easy and delicious, as well as gazpachos and soups for every season, like the gazpacho with strawberries made by Daniel Humm at early summer; the one with watermelon by Matias Perdomo in late summer; and the one by Mark Moriarty with roasted vegetables. They dont require any professional expertise nor luxury products: all these extraordinary meals are made from ordinary ingredients. Exactly the same as you can find at home, in your pantry or fridge.

Pasta alla parmigiana by Viviana Varese

What's your ultimate dinner party dish from the book, failsafe and impressive?

I would start with a mole dellorto that Enrique Olvera made for our first charity dinner at Refettorio Ambrosiano. The intense flavour and the vibrant colour are a good way to say welcome to your guest. As main course, I would serve the rich, heartwarming baked pasta alla parmigiana by Viviana Varese - it makes you feel like home. And to end up with a smile and I literally mean it, the banana smile by Michel Troisgros. The simplest yet the most impressive dishes.

What's your favourite dessert from the book?

Ricotta ice cream with tropical fruit sauce and balsamic vinegar by Daniel Patterson. I love ice cream. Everyone used to love it at Refettorio Ambrosiano. We kept our ice cream machine running day and night, because it was the easiest way to recover fruit and milk. Then some chef, like Daniel, found out how to make ice cream even with cheese, vegetables and other unexpected ingredients. Daniel enriched this very delicate ricotta ice cream with a sweet twist of tropical fruit, balanced with the acidity of my favourite ingredient: balsamic vinegar.

Alain Ducasse (left) Ferran Adria and Massimo Bottura (right)

Which chefs have influenced you and your approach to food the most?

I have been very lucky to have several culinary mentors. Some are more famous than others. My first mentor was George Cogny, a French chef living in Piacenza. He taught me how to apply classic French techniques to the ingredients from our local terroir in Emilia-Romagna. Then came Lidia Cristoni, a true Rezdora, who taught me everything about traditional cooking and how to run a clean and efficient kitchen. Then came my encounter with the one and only Alain Ducasse who taught me the value of using locally sourced ingredients and establishing trusting relationships with artisans, farmers, fishmongers and so forth. These lessons at Louis VX were very valuable to me and helped guide my decision to open Osteria Francescana. My last mentor was Ferran Adria. During the summer of 2000 I was able to cook with his incredible team at El Buli. He pushed me over the edge and taught me not to be afraid of my ideas. He let the cat out of the bag you could say.

What cookery books do you always reach for from the shelf, do you collect cookery books?

The art of eating well by Pellegrino Artusi, which is the cornerstone of the Italian Cuisine. When Garibaldi unified Italy through battles, Artusi made it with a cooking book, by stating its uniqueness through the wide diversity of regional cuisines. Artusi is also an example of cucina povera, the philosophy of recovering every single breadcrumb, leaf, and peel; every animal from nose to tail. Moreover, it is a book addressed to domestic kitchen, hence a book for everyone. In this way, I hope that Bread is Gold will be the new Artusi.

Whats next for you?

Massimo and colleague all smiles in the kitchen

After Milan, Rio de Janeiro and London, the next Refettorio will open in Paris in early spring. Weve also been very lucky to receive a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that will help us grow sustainably and expand our model even in the US. And then there are many other plans for Montreal, Thessaloniki, Rome, Naples, Turin, Burkina Faso, and who knows where else. As I always say, in my future I see more future.

Bread is Gold: Extraordinary Meals with Ordinary Ingredients by Massimo Bottura & friends is published by Phaidon, buy your copy here.
 Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis was left feeling scared and let down because a stalker who has harassed her for more than 25 years was able to continue his campaign from behind bars.

Edward Vines, 47, has developed what one judge has described as an unshakeable obsession with the journalist since they attended Cambridge University in 1989.

He has since bombarded her with letters, Oxford crown court heard today, where he was sentenced to a 45 months in jail for two counts of breaching a restraining order.

Vines was jailed for three years in September 2016 after breaching a previous restraining order, but was able to contact Maitlis from prison in something of a scandal, the court heard.

One breach took place when Vines tried to contact Maitlis from prison where he was serving a sentence for ignoring a previous restraining order. One letter, sent to the BBC and addressed to her, said: I will not relent until you talk to me.

In a victim impact report read to the court, Maitlis, who was not present, said: When I heard that Edward Vines had breached his restraining order I felt scared and let down  let down because it meant that even within the prison system the perpetrator was able to reach me.

It has affected my relationship with my husband, who is frustrated that we cannot get to the bottom of this problem, even though we have been tackling it through the CPS and courts for over 20 years, and it has scared my children who thought the threat had gone away  albeit while he was temporarily behind bars.

It has affected my ability to work  I am constantly thinking of where I am being sent and whether he will be attempting to track me down. The journalist said she was jumpy around strangers and worried about coming home late, adding: This man remains a threat in my life and my familys life.

My ability to do my work, hang out with my children, and lead a normal family life without constant suspicion and fear has been badly damaged.

Jailed for a further 45 months: Stalker Edward Vines

The court heard that Vines had refused to give up his pursuit of Maitlis after she shunned his advances.

Sentencing him today, Judge Peter Ross said: This sort of harassment has a crippling effect on the victim. Its psychological torture. You scared her children and affected her ability to work. Its disgraceful conduct.

He said the fact that Vines had been able to send a letter to her from Bullingdon prison in Oxfordshire was something of a scandal and demanded an explanation from the governor. He accepted Vines had mental health issues but that doctors had said they had not triggered the harassment.

Vines, who was representing himself, said: The police did not listen to me. I dont personally fear years in jail will resolve this.

Vines was first hit with a restraining order not to contact Maitlis, 47, in 2002 after she became alarmed following the murder of fellow TV presenter Jill Dando in 1999.
M inisters were today accused of threatening the independence of the justice system by meddling in the black cab rapist case, as the head of the Parole Board lashed out over the failure to keep victims informed.

Nick Hardwick said it would be a bad day for us all if the rightful abhorrence over John Worboys crimes was allowed to overturn the basic principles of justice, as he vowed to defy political interference designed to keep Worboys behind bars.

He said he expected any judicial review  which the Government has said it is considering  would uphold the decision to approve Worboys release. However, he expressed sympathy for the victims and said the licence conditions imposed could be tightened in response to concerns.

Professor Hardwick blamed the Government for any failure to alert victims of his impending release and called for an independent inquiry. The comments, in an article for the Evening Standard, follow the fierce controversy prompted by the Parole Boards decision to approve Worboys release after nearly 10 years in jail. Worboys was convicted in 2009 of 19 offences against 12 women, including one rape and five sexual assaults, carried out after he drugged drinks he gave them in his cab. The judge imposed an indeterminate sentence for public protection and police later estimated the actual number of victims was more than 100.

However, the Parole Board decided that Worboys, 60, was safe to release after a secret hearing based on evidence which in law must keep secret.

After an outcry, Justice Secretary David Gauke said he was considering applying for a judicial review of the decision and Conservative Party chairman Brandon Lewis said his colleague was doing everything he can to make sure this man stays behind bars.

Today, Professor Hardwick admitted the Parole Board could not be certain that Worboys would not commit further crime. However, he hit out at politicians for trying to undermine the independence of his organisation.

We should be open to legal challenge, but I hope when people think about it, they will agree it is right we resist political interference in our decisions, he said.

It would be a bad day for us all if peoples rightful abhorrence of Worboys crimes or even justified concern about a Parole Board decision allowed these basic principles of justice to be overturned. Not on my watch.

He said responsibility for contacting victims ultimately lay with the Justice Secretary because the Parole Board had no role in liaising with victims. He said the task was supposed to be performed by the Victim Contact Service run by the National Probation Service on behalf of the Justice Secretary.

Some victims, supported by MPs, have called for Worboys to be banned from London after his release. However, it is expected that he will be free to live in the capital, although under strict conditions.
A n Islamic State-obsessed teacher showed beheading videos to children as young as 11 as he plotted attacks on Parliament, the City, shopping centres and the transport network, a court heard today.

Umar Ahmed Haque, 25, is accused of planning to attack civilians at locations including Heathrow airport, and target royal protection officers, police, embassy officials and journalists, it is said.

The court heard he was inspired by the Westminster Bridge attack last March that left five dead and was recorded outlining his plans to a 19-year-old accomplice.

Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC told jurors that Haque was a teacher at the Lantern of Knowledge Islamic School in Leyton between September 2015 and September 2016, and also took classes of youngsters at a mosque in Ripple Road, Barking.

Mr Heywood said: Umar Haque had determined in 2016 and early 2017 to carry out a violent attack or attacks, with others if he could, in this country.

He said Haque had tried to indoctrinate his students, aged between 11 and 14, adding: His methods were to expose them to information and video recordings, of the kind that no one should expose to children, and even have them enact scenarios of violent action against police.

The Old Bailey heard he played videos showing beheadings, people with guns, and burning passports to classes at the school and the mosque.

Mr Heywood said Haque began plotting after being stripped of his passport in 2016.

He said covert recordings of Haque talking to his alleged accomplice, Abuthather Mamun, 19, show he had spent a great deal of time planning for terrorist attack, including praising Westminster killer Khalid Masood and identifying targets.

Mr Heywood said Haque, of Forest Gate, was fascinated by the warped and extreme ideology of Islamic State. As he later told the police after his arrest, he was their loyal follower.

Mamun, of Barking, who knew Haque through the mosque, is accused of helping him to raise funds for the plot.

He denies a charge of preparation of terrorist acts. Mohammed Abid, 27, of Manor Park, is accused of failing to tell the authorities after learning of Haques plans.

He denies failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism. Nadeem Patel, 26, of Forest Gate, allegedly agreed to help Haque acquire a gun.

He denies conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence. He has pleaded guilty to possession of a prohibited weapon.

Haque denies two counts of preparing to commit terrorist acts, one charge of conspiracy to possess a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence, and a count of dissemination of terrorist publications.

He has admitted possessing three copies of a terrorist publication and a second charge of dissemination of terrorist publications. The trial continues.
T his is the first picture of a cyclist left fighting for his life in hospital after a suspected hit-and-run crash in north London.

Father-of-four Abdul Hadi, 47, from Belsize Park, was cycling home from a shift at work when he was knocked unconscious opposite Camden Road Overground station late on Wednesday evening.

Mr Hadi, who works as a chef at an Indian restaurant on Grays Inn Road, has been in a coma since the accident as police continue to hunt for the driver of the car which was found abandoned half a mile away.

His devastated family have been praying for him at his bedside in hospital as doctors say he may be left with permanent disabilities after suffering a bleed to the brain.

He is breathing through a machine and has a machine for his blood pressure, son Azhar Ahmed, 20, told the Standard.

Mr Hadi, 47, works as a chef in a restaurant on Gray's Inn Road.

Hes in a coma, the doctors want to keep him there while his brain recovers. He went for a head scan yesterday.

His condition was unstable but it is now stable. We have been going to the hospital every day.

Mr Ahmed, who has two younger sisters and a brother, added: The doctors say if he does make it out of this he will be very disabled. Theres a very low chance of him being normal.

The crash happened late on Wednesday, January 10. / @ASAPBus Twitter

Its just affected us so negatively. Its mainly my mum Im worrying about, she lives with my nan and looks after her and my dad brings in everything.

Paramedics rushed Mr Hadi to hospital following the crash on Camden Road, at the junction with Royal College Road, at shortly after 11.30pm last Wednesday.

The car which was believed to be involved in the crash was found abandoned half a mile away on Kings Terrace.

Campaigners have previously called the road an accident black spot and last September staged a die in vigil and protest following the death of cyclist Ardian Zagani.

Officers are continuing to appeal for witnesses or anyone with any information about the driver to come forward.

No one has yet been arrested and enquiries continue, the Met said on Monday.

Anyone who can help is asked to call the Met's Serious Collision Investigation Unit on 0208 991 9555, or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
A man who tried to board a flight in eight pairs of trousers and 10 shirts has said he did it because he was broke and homeless and that his luggage was his livelihood.

Ryan Hawaii, real name Ryan Carney Williams, attempted to board the British Airways plane bound for London wearing extra clothes in an apparent effort to dodge an excess baggage charge.

But he was denied entry to the plane at Keflavik Airport in Iceland and later arrested for causing a disruption, according to reports.

Mr Williams said he was then banned from boarding an easyJet flight the following day after the airline heard about his behaviour.

The artist and designer from south London posted two videos on Twitter in which he asked employees why he was not being allowed to board and has since sought to clarify his actions.

He said on Tuesday that he put all his clothes on because he had no luggage on his booking and was broke so could not afford to pay any extra charges.

He described his clothes as his livelihood claiming they were worth between 2,000 and 3,000.

In a series of tweets, he said: LAST TIME IM SPEAKING ON THIS.

Londoner wears eight pairs of trousers and 10 shirts 'in effort to dodge excess baggage fee' - but gets barred from plane

Arrived to airport in Iceland with no luggage on my booking.

My sister-in-law booked my flight because I was FLAT broke from being homeless in Iceland.

He claims that British Airways initially told him that he would be allowed to board the flight but that later his boarding pass was refused.

He said: I asked POLITELY if I could wear all the clothes in my case and still board.

The BA staff told me Yes after a bit of a back and forth and me refusing to leave the desk because I weren't given a valid reason to leave.

I then left to put on my clothes.

I waited in the queue politely with other passengers and once I made it to the desk I was still refused my boarding pass.

Security were called. At this point I started to film. Security tried to slap my phone out my hand.

I moved. Continued to film and explain that I was well within my rights.

Mr Williams added: Yes it was comical what I did but I am an Artist/Designer so all my luggage is my livelihood. Worth somewhere 2,000-3,000.

Police were called. I spoke to 2 v polite officers explained my story.

BA said he was refused entry to the first flight when he tried to board with an oversized bag.

He had paid a hand baggage only fare that meant he could only bring a small bag on to the plane, according to BA, which led to his apparent brazen attempt to avoid excess fees.

After security guards got involved police were called to intervene, according to local news service Mbl.

When he returned to the airport and booked a second flight home with easyJet the next day, Mr Williams said he was once again prevented from boarding after the pilot heard about his previous behaviour.

A spokeswoman for British Airways said: We give our customers a wide range of fares to choose from to meet their needs.

Our hand baggage only fares from Iceland are as low as 47 each way and are designed for customers who are travelling without any hold baggage.

We do understand that our customers' plans can change so they can choose to pay a fee at the airport if they need an extra bag. 

We explained our policy to our customer and arranged an alternative flight to London.

A spokesman from easyJet said: "The captain and the ground crew were concerned about reports from the previous day so we provided a refund and he travelled with another airline."
U ber will bring in a new driver hours policy to help address widespread concerns over passenger safety, the Standard has learned.

The US technology giant will next week make changes to the taxi app that will force drivers to take a six-hour break for every 10 hours they work.

Drivers not taking a long enough rest break will not be able to log into the app to find passengers for trips.

MPs criticised Uber last month after it emerged that hundreds of drivers were working the equivalent of almost 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Commons business committee said the scale of long hours would be a concern for anyone booking a journey with an overworked driver.

Uber licence revoked in London

Unions have also warned that drivers were incentivised by the firm to work long hours and under existing rules represented a danger to public safety.

Uber, currently fighting a ban from Londons streets in the courts, said it wanted to play its part in ensuring drivers were not tired behind the wheel.

Transport for London insiders have also expressed concerns over drivers hours, although this was not one of the reasons it revoked Ubers licence.

Andrew Byrne, Ubers head of policy, said: Licensed drivers who use our app really value the freedom and flexibility to choose if, when and where they work. And while drivers only spend an average of 30 hours a week logged into our app, we want to do our part to ensure they dont drive tired.

Thats why weve been sending drivers regular reminders to take rest breaks and why were now bringing in these new limits. Its another example of how Uber uses technology to enhance driver and passenger safety.

Lib Dem London Assembly member Caroline Pidgeon said: It is right that Uber gets its house in order and reduces the hours drivers continuously drive. Passenger safety must always come first.

Meanwhile Uber has thrown its weight behind plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street, it emerged today.

The company said it believes that reduced use of private cars in the city centre would allow public transport and firms like Uber to fill in the gaps.
A man was banned from boarding a flight back to London because he was wearing eight pairs of trousers and 10 shirts.

Ryan Hawaii, real name Ryan Carney Williams, was held at Keflavik Airport in Iceland after he attempted to board the British Airways plane wearing the extra clothes in an apparent effort to dodge an excess baggage charge.

He was denied entry to the plane and later arrested for causing a disruption, according to reports.

Mr Williams says he was then banned from boarding an easyJet flight the following day after the airline heard about his behaviour.

Ryan Hawaii was denied a boarding pass for a BA flight after he wore too many clothes, he claimed / Twitter/@Ryan_Hawaii

The airline offered him a refund for his ticket.

The artist and clothing designer from south London was refused entry to his original flight when he tried to board with an oversized bag, BA said.

He had paid a hand baggage only fare that meant he could only bring a small bag on to the plane, according to BA.

In an apparent brazen bid to avoid paying excess fees, Mr Williams donned his extra clothing in an attempt to board the flight.

He was still refused entry and the dispute escalated after he confronted security staff.

Mr Williams posted two videos on Twitter asking employees why he was not allowed to board.

Two security guards in high-vis jackets are seen approaching the man as he asks: "Why can't I get on this flight?"

One of the airline staff responds: "Do we need to call the police?"

Police were called to intervene, according to local news service Mbl.

The airline arranged an alternative flight to London for the customer, a spokesman added.

After questioning, he was sent back to the airport and booked a second flight home with easyJet the next day.

But after a two hour delay at the gate, Mr Williams said he was once again prevented from boarding after the pilot heard about his previous behaviour.

He wrote on Twitter: And again! Refused from two flights in two days for no valid reason."

A spokeswoman for British Airways said: We give our customers a wide range of fares to choose from to meet their needs.

Our hand baggage only fares from Iceland are as low as 47 each way and are designed for customers who are travelling without any hold baggage.

We do understand that our customers' plans can change so they can choose to pay a fee at the airport if they need an extra bag. 

We explained our policy to our customer and arranged an alternative flight to London.

A spokesman from easyJet said: "The captain and the ground crew were concerned about reports from the previous day so we provided a refund and he travelled with another airline."
T HERES more than meets the eye to the sad case of Veronica, the Dowager Countess of Lucan. She died last year at the age of 80, and this week it was revealed that she cut her estranged family from her will in favour of homelessness charity Shelter. Now her son George, pictured with wife Fie and daughter Daphne, has spoken out.

I applaud the decision by my mother to make a legacy to Shelter, a fantastic and worthwhile charity, he told The Londoner yesterday. I would also like it noted that the property in which Lady Lucan lived in Belgravia was made available to her rent-free for the latter part of her life under an arrangement with the family trust and does not form part of her personal estate. This arrangement was put in place by my sisters and I.

This was despite the fact that Lady Lucan was estranged from her three children. As well as George, she and her husband  who was finally declared dead in 2016 after disappearing in 1974 following the murder of their nanny  also had daughters Frances and Camilla. We felt it was the least we could do even though Lady Lucan wanted no contact with us, George says.

The divisions within the family go back decades. But the family showed their respects at the funeral, releasing a statement calling her courageous and, at times, outrageous, with a mischievous sense of humour.

George and Fie are now looking firmly to the future, with the launch of new fashion brand Lucan, inspired by their country lifestyle. Time for a happy chapter in the family history.

---

Today is the first day of business at the new US Embassy at Nine Elms, and it didnt exactly receive a big celebration. Donald Trump was, of course, meant to do the honours before pulling out of his visit and criticising the relocation, and theres no sign yet of his rumoured replacement Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State. So this is how it opens, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Zac helps human dynamo to go South

ZAC Goldsmith, multi-millionaire and Richmond Park MP, has donated 400 to an anti-forced-marriage campaigner from Yemen. Tasleem Mulhall is walking across the Antarctic to plant her countrys flag at the South Pole but it wont be any old flag: Goldsmith joined Mulhall at the Yemeni Embassy in South Kensington last week to collect the flag. She will travel across more than 500 miles of Antarctic ice for two months. You are a human dynamo, a force of energy, Goldsmith said. If theres anyone who can do it, its you.

Were sure shell make Pole position.

Quote of the day

A head for figures: Boris Johnson (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images) / Getty Images

"There was an error on the side of the bus. We grossly underestimated the sum." Boris Johnson doubles down on Vote Leave's referendum claims. There's still no news on when the NHS can expect to see any of it.

Kettners Townhouse reopens returned to splendour

Welcome back: India Rose James, Derrick Santini and Gracie Egan at Kettner's Townhouse pre-opening dinner (Photo Dave Benett/Redferns for Soho House ) / Dave Benett/Redferns for Soho Ho

QUEENS of Soho, sisters India Rose James and Fawn Lawson, held a pre-opening dinner at Kettners Townhouse in Soho last night. The brasserie closed its doors in 2016 after 149 years of trading, but Soho House & Co group have returned the restaurant to its former grandeur.

King Edward VII courted his mistress Lillie Langtry there, even ordering a secret tunnel be built between the restaurant and the Palace Theatre, where she performed. Nowadays that would get you in to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: thats one way to save on admission.

---

Fitness group Body Camp Ibiza is popping up on Osea, the exclusive island off the Essex coast. Normally Osea is more popular with the raving set  it has hosted A-list festivals, was once a favourite of Amy Winehouse and at one point the Beckhams were rumoured to be keen on buying it  but not any more.

Osea will be the perfect chilled vibe for what we do best, retreat founder Kate Whale says. Get people fit in the mind and body.

Jameelas lessons for life

Try a little tenderness: Jameela Jamil's guide for men (Photo by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic) / FilmMagic

A GUIDE to consent from Jameela Jamil, pictured. In the wake of questions raised over comedian Aziz Ansaris romantic practices, the presenter and star of US sitcom The Good Place has some tips for men confused by the #MeToo movement, writing a guide to hardcore pornography, music videos and aggressive song lyrics in an essay on her website.

We have music videos where the girls are always practically naked and performing rehearsed dance routines for the men, who are sitting there on their arses, sometimes in outdoor winter layers, doing nothing other than enjoying their needs being met, she writes. Then you have lyrics which go from, Try a little tenderness to MURDER THAT P****.

She also warns those whose viewing habits may be shaping their sex lives. Learning sex from pornography is like learning how to drive from The Fast and the Furious, she says. A terrible idea.

Time for men to learn some dulce et decorum?

---

Warning of the day: newly discovered correspondence show Eve Larkin, mother of poet Philip, told him marriage is no guarantee as to socks being mended, or meals ready when they wanted. Wise words.

Tweet of the day

European Council president Donald Tusk is still open for offers

We shall fight them on the dance floor ...

Its Churchill as youve not seen him before. Heres Gary Oldman, playing the wartime PM in Darkest Hour, dancing to James Brown and captured on film by make-up artists from the Stan Winston School. We hope it doesnt ruin his Oscar chances.
E uropean leaders today pressed Britain to accept free movement of EU citizens for an extra two years or see its hopes of a transition deal and a free trade agreement blocked.

In a series of interventions, senior EU officials said they would seek tougher conditions for any long-term deal, while Euro MPs warned they could veto Britains request for a deal on financial services if unfettered migration was brought to an end next year.

European Council president Donald Tusk issued a love letter to British voters to abandon Brexit and promised in an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg: Our hearts are still open for you. But he called on Theresa May to be clearer about what she wants after Brexit in March 2019.

The overall message from a series of EU grandees was that Britain must conform with the 27 remaining states if it wants a long-term deal.

European Council President Donald Tusk speaks during a debate at the European Parliament in Strasbourg / AFP/Getty Images

German MEP Manfred Weber warned that a cliff-edge Brexit is far from being avoided.

He said his centre-Right group would vote down a transition deal, due to be agreed by the end of March, if the conditions are not good enough.

PM Theresa May and Donald Tusk in Brussels in October. / AFP/Getty Images

Guy Verhofstadt, the parliaments Brexit coordinator, said MEPs will not allow the UK to cherry-pick and warned: No sector by sector approach, nor a deal on financial services without freedom of movement for people.

The blocs lead Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, has taken a hard line on financial services, offering the Government nothing better than the sort of free trade deal struck with Canada, which omits special rights for foreign banks to sell and move across the EU.

Meanwhile there were signs of hardening divisions on the Brexit war cabinet between ministers led by Chancellor Philip Hammond, who want a trade deal that starts with close alignment with the EU, and Brexit-backers led by Boris Johnson who think the starting point should be maximum freedom to set different rules.

Todays Financial Times said Mrs May would hold three meetings of the committee to thrash out differences between the top downers and the bottom uppers before setting out a Government position in a speech next month.

Brexit: Article 50 Triggered - In pictures 1 /26 Brexit: Article 50 Triggered - In pictures Britain's ambassador to the EU Tim Barrow delivers British Prime Minister Theresa May's formal notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to European Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Common PA Britain's ambassador to the EU Tim Barrow delivers British Prime Minister Theresa May's formal notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to European Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels AFP/Getty Images European Council President Donald Tusk holds a news conference after receiving British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit letter in notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to EU Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels, Belgium Yves Herman/Reuters Prime Minister Theresa May takes her seat after announcing in the House of Commons PA The time 12:20pm shows on Big Ben on March 29, 2017 in London, England. The British Prime Minister Theresa May addresses the Houses of Parliament as Article 50 is triggered and the process that will take the United Kingdom out of the European Union begins Carl Court/Getty Images D-day: pro-EU protesters outside of the Houses of Parliament today as Theresa May prepares to trigger Article 50 AFP/Getty Images EU Council President Donald Tusk holds British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit letter which was delivered by Britain's permanent representative to the European Union Tim Barrow (not pictured) that gives notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty in Brussels, Belgium Yves Herman/Reuters PMQ's in The House of Commons PA Jeremy Corbyn speaking at PMQ's in The House of Commons Sky News Theresa May leaving for the House of Commons Jeremy Selwyn Mayor of London Sadiq Khan at the headquarters of Vivendi in Paris where he took part in TV interviews to discuss the imminent triggering of Article 50 by the UK to leave the EU Stefan Rousseau/PA Britain's permanent representative to the European Union Tim Barrow arrives at the EU Council headquarters for as meeting before hand delivering British Prime Minister Theresa May's notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to EU Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels, Belgium Yves Herman/Reuters Britain's ambassador to the EU Tim Barrow arrives at the British representation of the European Union in Brussels Aurore Belot/AFP/Getty Images A giant headed Theresa May in Parliament Square, London during a protest by Avaaz after PM signed a letter to trigger Article 50 that starts the formal exit process by the UK from the European Union David Mirzoeff/PA British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson walks down Whitehall Jack Taylor/Getty Images Britain's PM Theresa May signs the official letter to European Council President Donald Tusk, invoking Article 50. AFP/Getty Images

Mr Tusk told MEPs: What we need today is more clarity on the UKs vision. Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said he hoped Mr Tusks message will be heard clearly in London.

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage was mocked for changing his mind about a second referendum. Mr Verhofstadt called him hugely disorientated and not himself after a meeting with Mr Barnier last week. He said he wanted a second Brexit referendum. I presume hes seen the polls?

He asked Mr Barnier: Did you put something in his coffee or in his tea?

Boris Johnson has said the Brexit campaigns claim that leaving would free 350 million a week for the NHS or other priorities was an underestimate. The Foreign Secretary told The Guardian that the true figure would be 438 million by 2021.
M ichael Gove handed out reusable coffee cups to members of the Cabinet after some were spotted entering Number 10 with disposable ones.

A host of ministers came under scrutiny after they were spotted carrying environmentally unfriendly disposable cups to Cabinet meetings.

The environment secretary recently confirmed the Government was considering an "exciting idea" to impose a 25p "latte levy" on coffee sold in disposable cups, prompting his switch to a disposable cup earlier this week.

Communities secretary Sajid Javid, minister of state Caroline Nokes, health secretary Jeremy Hunt, and Wales secretary Alun Cairns were all spotted leaving Downing Street with their new gifts on Tuesday.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt (left) and Wales Secretary Alun Cairns holding reusable coffee cups / PA Wire/PA Images

Mr Hunt and Mr Gove have previously often been spotted outside Downing Street carrying disposable cups.

Ms Nokes tweeted: "My Cabinet colleague [Michael Gove] has been very generous today, giving us all a bamboo coffee cup helping to cut waste."

Earlier this month, Theresa May said Britain must end its "throwaway culture", promising to lead the way by banning single-use plastic.

A Downing Street spokesman told the Mail: "Each member of the cabinet was given a reusable coffee cup at the end of the meeting."

Communities Secretary Sajid Javid holds a reusable coffee cup as he leaves 10 Downing Street / PA Wire/PA Images

Current figures show less than one per cent of disposable coffee cups are recycled because the mix of plastic lining and cardboard makes them more difficult to process.

High street coffee chains have backed renewed Government plans, with Pret a Manger offering a 50p discount to customers using their own cup, as well as 25p off at Costa Coffee and 20p at Greggs.
S miling for the camera, Richard Howson appears in a relaxed mood just weeks after quitting as boss of the stricken Carillion construction giant with a fat-cat financial package.

The birthday picture was taken last August at the Hotel le Kandahar in the Alpine resort of Chatel, where his family is understood to own a six-bedroom chalet with an outdoor hot tub.

Carillion said in July that Mr Howson had stepped down as chief executive after five years with immediate effect as it announced a profit warning and strategic review.

But since then it has emerged that the ex-boss walked away with a hefty financial deal, said to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Mr Howson is also reported to have received pay and perks totalling 1.5 million in 2016 and to have had an annual salary of 660,000.

Simple yet luxurious: Richard Howsons family is understood to own a chalet in the Alpine resort of Chatel

Anger over his pay package has grown after the company collapsed yesterday, putting tens of thousands of jobs at risk, as well as future pension payments for many workers.

Shadow minister for the Cabinet Office Jon Trickett said today: While thousands of construction workers, cleaners and others employed by Carillion will from tomorrow have little way of paying their rent and mortgages and be struggling to put food on the table, the people responsible must be held to account. Its unacceptable to allow bosses in charge of Carillion to walk away with their privileged lives untouched.

The Government stepped in to ensure that staff employed by Carillion delivering public services in schools, hospitals, prisons and construction projects get paid.

But it only offered this safety blanket to thousands of workers on private-sector Carillion contracts for 48 hours, which runs out tomorrow. Theresa May today chaired Cabinet with the firms demise top of the agenda.

It was one of the biggest failures in recent corporate history in Britain and trade unions were warning of the knock-on effect to hundreds of sub-contractors.

Mr Howson could not be contacted today and his whereabouts were not known. After stepping down as Carillion boss, he appears to have headed shortly afterwards for the family chalet.

It offers catered accommodation during the ski season for up to 10 guests with a chef, according to its website, which reveals the high-life enjoyed by the Howsons. In the summer, it can cater for 18 people.

The website says: We have created a terrace area on the side of the property with the view of the mountains of the portes du soleil and installed a hot tub which is a great place to relax those aching muscles after a day in the mountains.

Mr Howson and his wife Geri say the chalet in the French resort is the result of more than a decade of dreaming, having both learned to ski in their twenties. The Howsons also have a large home in North Yorkshire and a Range Rover.

Cabinet Office minister David Lidington told Parliament yesterday that the Official Receiver would investigate the role of the companys former and current directors, warning they could face severe penalties if found to have committed any wrongdoing.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Carillions collapse was a watershed moment that should bring an end to rip-off privatisation of public services.

Carillion, which employs around 20,000 workers in Britain and a further 23,000 overseas, went bust with 900 million of debt and a 587 million pension deficit.

Shareholders will be wiped out and lenders including HSBC, Barclays, Santander and Royal Bank of Scotland are reportedly set to lose an estimated 2 billion.
O nline clothing brand ASOS has been praised for featuring a disabled model in its new advert.

Haitian-American blogger and model Mama Cax, whose leg was amputated when she was a teenager, appeared in the websites new activewear advert released earlier this week.

Disability charity Scope welcomed the move, calling it great to see a highly-recognised fashion brand like ASOS featuring a disabled model.

Richard Lane, head of communications at the charity, told the Huffington Post: There are 13 million disabled people in the UK, but they rarely see their lives reflected in marketing campaigns, the media, in advertising and in popular culture.

Seeing more disabled people in the media is key to challenging societys attitudes to disability.

Ms Cax, who lives in New York, is known for championing body positivity and diversity in the media.

ASOS' decision has been praised. / @mamacaxx Instagram

After being diagnosed with bone and lung cancer at the age of the 14, she had a hip replacement which was unsuccessful and led to her right leg getting amputated.

She joined the White Houses first ever fashion show in September 2016 which celebrated prosthetic technology.

Fashion website ASOS was praised on Twitter, with one woman Rianna Davis telling the brand: You just made many disabled consumers who shop with you smile. Thank you.

Another person called it a huge step forward, adding: Disabled people have been missed out of these kind of ads from ASOS in the past so this is awesome.

The Standard has contacted ASOS for comment.
A lmost all the gritters in Scotland have hilarious names like "Gritty Gritty Bang Bang" and "Sir Salter Scott" and you can track them live on a map.

Weather warnings have been upgraded to amber in parts of Scotland as snow and ice continue to blight large swathes of the country.

Scotland's snow-busting vehicles therefore have their work cut out and Transport Scotland's Trunk Road Gritter Tracker shows where they are in real time.

The map reveals that many of the trucks have entertaining names such as "Sir Salter Scott", "Gritallica" and "Grittie McVittie".

Grittie McVittie is seen serving the Glasgow area / Transport Scotland

One is even named "Sir Andy Flurry".

Others have more straightforward names, with one called "Rainbow" and one simply known as "Jack".

The delightful naming system was pointed out on Twitter by Harry Moore, who works at the BBC.

"Shout out to Luke Snowalker whos putting in a big shift down the west coast right now," he wrote.

Ready Spready Go spreading a bit of grit in Inverness / Transport Scotland

People have responded with glee on Twitter with one woman writing: "My favourites are Snow Destroyer and Fred."

One woman meanwhile took her local council Doncaster to task by saying: "Youre lagging behind on the whole naming of snowplough thing."

The official Twitter for Doncaster council replied: "The live map is very cool, we'll admit. How have they done it? Is it witchcraft?

"More like the GRITCHES amiright."

Not everybody was a fan of the map, however.

One critic took to Twitter to complain: "As always the islands are excluded."
S ome of Londons top West End restaurants today joined the Standards new campaign The Last Straw and pledged to use a green alternative to plastic from now on.

Sexy Fish  where Kate Moss, Ellie Goulding, Jennifer Lawrence and Bella Hadid regularly dine  is one of the venues that have signed up to our campaign and pledged to ditch plastic straws for good.

Also among those joining up are the Michelin-starred Galvin restaurants, The Wolseley, The Delaunay, and east London taco joint Del74.

The Standard launched its campaign yesterday as figures showed London is the plastic straw capital of Europe, with two billion thrown away each year.

Because of their small size only a fraction are recycled. The rest end up in landfill or rivers and ultimately oceans, adding to the plague of plastic harming wildlife and ruining coastlines.

The Government has announced plans to eliminate all plastic waste in Britain within 25 years.

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Sexy Fish, in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, currently uses about 300 straws a day  but from next month it will stock only biodegradable ones, and only give them to guests if they are specifically requested.

Chris Galvin  who with brother Jeff has six London restaurants, with two Michelin stars between them  replaced plastic straws with biodegradable alternatives in his pub The Green Man, in Chelmsford, Essex, last month.He is now looking to roll out the initiative at Galvin La Chapelle in Spitalfields in the next few weeks, with other venues to follow.

Straw toll: 2 billion Number of straws thrown away in London each year 1,000 tonnes Weight of two billion straws 500 years length of time for plastic straws to break down 8m tonnes Amount of plastic that ends up in the sea globally each year 8.5billion Number thrown away in the UK

He said: I have been moaning about this for a long time. There is so much plastic on the beaches it is ridiculous. Dealing with it is a huge challenge. I have always liked to be sustainable in our restaurants. About three months ago I said to my guys, Right we need to do something about straws.

The 59-year-old chef added that he was keen to introduce paper: I like the paper ones. I am so old I remember back before Maggie Thatcher took away the milk at schools. We used to get paper straws. I really want to use those as they are nostalgic to me.

While replacing plastic ones would be challenging for his team, where there is a will, there is a way, he said.

All Corbin and King restaurants  including The Wolseley, The Delaunay and Brasserie Zedel  have switched to biodegradable after removing the plastic variety from their venues.

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Dalston restaurant Del74 will only give out a biodegradable straw if it is asked for. A 5p charge will be added to the customers bill, with the money going to charity Surfers Against Sewage. Japanese venue Four Degree in Vauxhall, has stepped up. General manager Roger Gibbons, said: The harm plastic causes to the ocean was first brought to my attention when I saw a picture online of a poor little seahorse clinging onto a cotton bud. We need to take a stand. Lots of big corporations have already phased out plastic and were aiming to do the same by the end of January.

Already, 50 per cent of the straws used behind our bar are made from sustainable materials; paper, bamboo and metal, and were currently researching other alternatives.

Its an ethos that runs through the whole business, our head chef Kyoichi Kai is committed to sourcing sustainable seafood and other fresh ingredients. Scottish restaurant Mac and Wild, which has venues in Great Titchfield Street and Devonshire Square, is now looking into biodegradable options.

Soho House Group, Mexican chain Wahaca, Deliciously Ella delis, and D&D London  which runs 40 venues including Quaglinos, Le Pont de la Tour and Skylon  have also switched from plastic.@JonPrynn
T he UK is set to be battered by heavy snow, hail and strong winds, with weather warnings issued across large parts of the country.

A yellow warning for snow and ice has been in place across much of Scotland and Northern Ireland since Monday, however the Met Office has issued one for northern England and Wales throughout Tuesday.

Travel delays are possible and there is a chance of power cuts throughout the day.

London has been issued with a weather warning for wind on Wednesday and Thursday, with disruption likely on roads and railways.

A Met Office spokesman said: "You could sum up the whole week by saying it will be cold with strong winds and periods of sunshine.

"Any kind of weather you want we have got it - apart from heat.

"There's going to be an awful lot of sun showers, which we weren't seeing last week. This week there will be a lot more changing.

"There will be low temperatures by day, peaking around five or six degrees.

"But with the strength of the winds it will feel closer to one or two degrees."

UK snow December 2017: Heavy snow falls in northern England 1 /29 UK snow December 2017: Heavy snow falls in northern England PA People walk through a flurry of snow in York. PA PA PA The runway and grounds at Glasgow Airport being cleared of snow. PA Flights from Glasgow airport were temporarily suspended. PA PA PA PA PA PA Getty Images PA PA Getty Images PA PA PA PA PA PA PA

Snow showers will be heaviest and most frequent across western Scotland, where high ground is likely to see 10 to 20cm building up.

There may also be more than 15cm over the hills of Northern Ireland, especially in the north.

At low levels throughout the warning area, two to eight centimetres will be more typical.

Showers will be accompanied by hail and lightning at times, particularly across western Scotland, with potential for disruption to power supplies from lightning strikes.

Strong winds bring the potential for temporary blizzard conditions and drifting of lying snow, mainly over high ground.

This warning is to remain in place until Wednesday at 6pm.

Meanwhile, northern England and Wales could see two to six centimetres accumulate in places, especially above 100 metres.

On lower levels, there is likely to be a slushy cover of one or two centimetres.

The warning is in force between 4am on Tuesday and 11am on Wednesday.

Wednesday will also see yellow alerts for snow and wind later in the day.
B itcoin - the largest and best-known cryptocurrency - was born from a rising distrust of government and financial institutions after the global financial crisis of 2008.

Using Bitcoin, people could send money directly to someone without using intermediaries such as banks or Paypal.

In recent years, Bitcoin has been a roller-coaster ride for investors. It hit a record record-high of over 54,000 in November 2021 before plunging to around 14,000 earlier this year. Now it is trading around the 19,000 mark, although the number can change dramatically from one day to the next.

It can also be highly volatile over the short-term, with some intra-day high-low fluctuations of 20-40% over the last few years, according to data from Cointelegraph.

Each Bitcoin is mined by the use of high-technology computer hardware to solve complex maths problems. However, Satoshi Nakamoto, often cited as the original creator of Bitcoin, put a cap of 21 million on the total number of Bitcoins to preserve their value by limiting supply.

Around 19 million Bitcoins have already been mined, with experts predicting the remaining two million may be mined by 2140.

Bitcoin remains the most-popular global crypto-currency and is becoming more widely accepted. El Salvador was the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, followed by ProShares launch of the first Bitcoin-based exchange-traded fund (ticker: BITO).

Several major US retailers now accept payment in Bitcoin, including Microsoft, Home Depot and Starbucks, although, to date, few UK retailers have followed suit.

Investment giant Fidelity is reportedly planning to enable employees in the United States to include Bitcoin in their pension plans .

However, investing in Bitcoin is inherently risky. As with traditional so-called fiat currencies (such as sterling), Bitcoin has no intrinsic value other than the trust of other parties in accepting it as a form of tender.

eToro  a crypto brand trusted by millions Buy 70+ crypto assets with a fixed & transparent 1% fee on a highly secure platform. Join 25M Users

Cryptoassets are highly volatile and unregulated in the UK. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.

Bitcoins price is therefore a function of supply and demand and, as such, could plummet if its no longer accepted as a means of payment. As a result, Elon Musks announcement that Tesla would stop accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment for its cars led to a 17% fall in the Bitcoin price in May 2021.

Here we look at the process of buying Bitcoin, together with alternative ways of investing in cryptocurrency.

Please note that investing in cryptocurrencies is a high-risk proposition and you may lose some or all of your money. There is no guarantee that you will make a profit.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UKs financial regulator, issues regular warnings about the risk associated with the crypto sector.

Crypto assets are unregulated. The FCA says those buying cryptocurrency are very unlikely to have any protection if things go wrong, so people should be prepared to lose all their money if they choose to invest in them.

How to buy Bitcoin in 4 steps

1. Find an exchange or broker

The first step is to choose a broker or crypto exchange.

A cryptocurrency broker provides an online mechanism to facilitate your contact with a cryptocurrency exchange.

A cryptocurrency exchange is an online platform that brings together buyers and sellers in order to trade cryptocurrencies.

With some exchanges, you can buy crypto using normal currency, such as sterling. Others require you to use one form of crypto to buy another. Here, youd need to find a second exchange to buy coins that your chosen exchange uses, before you could start trading.

With brokers, check the rules regarding moving your cryptocurrencies away from a given platform. Some brokers stop customers transferring crypto holdings away from their account. This could become an issue if you decided to lodge your cryptocurrencies in a crypto wallet.

The FCA has a UK list of registered crypto asset firms .

2. Decide on a payment option

Having chosen an exchange or broker, youll need to add funds to your account before youre able to start trading. Depending on your chosen provider, you can add money from your current account, via an electronic transfer, payment service or from a cryptocurrency wallet.

Remember, taking on debt to purchase highly-volatile assets is not recommended.

3. Place an order

Once youve transferred money into your account, youre able to buy Bitcoins. You should enter the currencys ticker symbol (BTC), select the appropriate button on your trading menu and enter the amount that you wish to invest.

4. Choose a safe storage option

Its important to note that cryptocurrency exchanges are not covered under regulatory protection such as the Financial Services Compensation Scheme in the UK. Despite investment in cyber-security measures, providers remain at risk of theft or hacking.

You risk losing your Bitcoin investment if you mislay or forget the access codes to your account. Its also vital to ensure that your Bitcoins are held in a secure storage place.

You may have little choice in the storage mechanism if you buy Bitcoins via a broker. However, if youre using a crypto exchange and trading leading currencies, you will probably have access to an integrated wallet (or preferred partner) where you can securely hold your Bitcoins.

If you would rather not use the provider that your exchange is partnered with, you could transfer your Bitcoins from an exchange to a separate hot or cold wallet:

Hot wallets: crypto wallets stored online that work on internet-connected devices, such as tablets, computers and phones. They are convenient but may have a greater risk of theft due to their internet connection.

Cold wallets: external devices such as USBs or hard drives that arent connected to the internet and therefore potentially more secure. However, you will lose access to your Bitcoins if you lose or mislay the codes.

Transferring Bitcoins to a hot or cold wallet may incur a fee, depending on the exchange.

Alternative ways of buying cryptocurrency

If you would rather not buy Bitcoins via an exchange or broker, there are two indirect ways of gaining exposure to Bitcoin assets.

1) Investing in cryptocurrency-connected businesses

One option is to buy shares in companies that use, or own, Bitcoins and the blockchain that powers them. These may enable you to have some exposure to Bitcoins via tangible products or services that are subject to regulatory oversight.

Here are some indicative examples of companies, although these are not recommendations:

Nvidia (NVDA): a technology company that designs and sells processing units specifically for mining currency such as Bitcoin.

PayPal (PYPL): the global payments platform has expanded its offering to allow customers to buy and sell certain cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, with their PayPal and Venmo accounts.

Square (SQ): the payment services provider for small businesses which has bought millions of dollars of Bitcoin since October 2020.

You will need an online investing platform or trading app to purchase shares in publicly-listed companies. Please note that the usual warnings about investments apply and that there is no guarantee that stock market investments will make money.

2) Investing in crypto exchange-traded funds

Another option is to invest in funds based on holding cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are passive investments that typically track traditional stock market indices such as the FTSE 100 or S&P 500.

Crypto ETFs are relatively new products that are currently available only in certain jurisdictions such as the US. They are not yet available in the UK.

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A crocodile has been forced to live with a motorbike tyre around its neck for more than a year in Indonesia.

Local conservation officials are currently trying to find the saltwater crocodile, who resides nearby the island of Sulawesi.

The 13ft long beast has been spotted a number of times with his rubber appendage in a river running through Sulawesi's capital, Palu.

Officials fear the tyre could be killing the animal after it was spotted gasping for air.

A saltwater crocodile with a tyre around its neck is seen in Palu river / AFP/Getty Images

A spokesman for local conservation agency Haruna told the Straits Times: "In the past year, we saw that theres still enough room for the crocodiles neck to move around.

"But we are not going to wait until the tyre strangles the animal. We will rescue it."

Haruna now plans to construct an iron trap to ensnare the reptile when the river's waters run low.

"We will definitely save the crocodile but at the same time we also need to consider our mens safety."
T he grandparents of 13 siblings allegedly held captive by their parents in the US have described them as a good Christian family and spoken of their shock.

Police in LA arrested David and Louise Turpin, 57 and 49, after discovering their children chained to their beds, emaciated and living in shocking conditions.

Officials had been alerted to the familys condition after one child, a 17-year-old girl, managed to escape and call the police on Sunday morning.

Mr Turpins parents have spoken out to say do not understand any of this and said they had been in touch with their son and daughter-in-law regularly.

The family seen in Dr Seuss-style shirts in a group photo which appears to have been taken in April 2016 / Facebook

James and Betty Turpin, from West Virginia, told ABC News they are surprised and shocked by the allegations of torture and child endangerment against the couple, who they said were considered a good Christian couple amongst the community.

They had not seen the family since visiting them around five years ago and stayed in contact over the phone.

But they said they had not spoken to any of their 13 grandchildren, adding that David and Louise Turpin would phone when their children were not around.

David and Louise Turpin (Riverside Sheriffs Department) / Riverside Sheriff's Department

Police said the 17-year-old was so malnourished when she was interviewed that officers initially believed her to be a girl aged just 10.

When officers visited the home in Perris, they found her 12 brothers and sisters locked up in filthy conditions, some so malnourished officers at first believed all were children even though seven are aged between 18 and 29-years-old.

They found several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark, foul-smelling surroundings, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

The children, one aged as young as two, "appeared to be malnourished and very dirty," according to a press release announcing Sunday's arrest of the parents.

"The victims were provided with food and beverages after they claimed to be starving."

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The Turpins were held on $9 million bail (6.5m) and could face charges including torture and child endangerment.

The children were believed to have been homeschooled by their parents, as records show the family home was registered as Sandcastle Day School, where David Turpin is listed as principal.

Media report from 160 Muir Woods Road in Perris, California, / AFP/Getty Images

Neighbours said they were stunned by the arrests, with some saying they had no idea there were children living in the house.

The Turpins filed for bankruptcy in 2011, stating in court documents they owed between $100,000 and $500,000, The New York Times reported. At that time, Turpin worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman and earned $140,000 annually and his wife was a homemaker, records showed.

Their bankruptcy lawyer, Ivan Trahan, told the Times he never met the children but the couple "spoke about them highly."

"We remember them as a very nice couple," Trahan said, adding that Louise Turpin told him the family loved Disneyland and visited often.
N orth Korea has hit back at Donald Trump's taunt that he has a "bigger and more powerful" nuclear button than Kim Jong-Un.

The isolated country's state-run media said the US president's tweet was the "spasm of a lunatic".

Rodong Sinmun, the ruling party newspaper, lashed out at Mr Trump's tweet that said: "I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"

"The spasm of Trump in the new year reflects the desperate mental state of a loser who failed to check the vigorous advance of the army and people of the DPRK," the article said, using the acronym for North Koreas formal name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

Trump to Kim: My nuclear button is bigger than yours

"He is making [a] bluff only to be diagnosed as a psychopath."

Mr Trumps outburst on January 3 came after Kim, 33, boasted on New Years Day that he had a nuclear button on his desk and that the whole of America was within range.

The dictator had claimed: "The United States can never fight a war against me and our state."

Since taking office a year ago, Mr Trump has branded Kim a "Little Rocket Man" and called him "short and fat".

Kim has meanwhile called the president, 71, a "mentally deranged dotard" and a "frightened dog".
S omaliland has introduced a bill to outlaw rape and violent sexual crimes in the first piece of legislation to address gender based violence in the countrys history.

The bill could see rapists imprisoned for up to 30 years and would criminalise rape, gang rape, sexual assault, child marriage and trafficking. Rapists who infect their victims with HIV would be jailed for life.

Although the bill has been approved by the lower house of Somalilands parliament, it still needs approval from the upper house to become law.

Ayan Mahamoud Somaliland's representative in Britain, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that it is possible that the bill could face resistance when it comes before the House of Elders as members in the upper house tend to be more traditional."

In the past, rape victims have been forced to marry their rapist by their family to avoid being shamed.

However, it is hoped that the bill will be passed by President Musa Bihi Adbi on 1 March.

Mr Mahamoud said that the new government is very serious about tackling violence against women and see it as a priority to bring it (the bill) in to Parliament.

Somaliland is a self-declared nation and became independent from Somalia in 1991 after a civil war.

Currently the nation does not have any legislation against violent sexual crimes.

Although it is a big achievement to get the bill into Parliament, Guleid Ahmed Jama, chairperson of Human Rights Centre Somaliland told the Guardian that there are still some shortcomings in it.

The bill does not cover domestic violence or female genital mutilation.

He said: The shortcoming of the bill is that it does not make lack of consent the key determinant of rape. The victim has to prove use of force, intimidation or threat.

Figures released by the World Health Organisation show that one in three women will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.

Despite the shocking figures, some countries still have laws in place which allow perpetrators to escape justice.

In Greece, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Russia, Serbia, Thailand and Tunisia rapists can escape justice if they marry their victim.

In some countries such as Philippines, Serbia, Thailand, Turkey, Romania and Singapore rapists can escape punishment if the survivor forgives the perpetrator.
S pain is set to usurp the US as the worlds second most popular tourism destination behind France, according to the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).

The final figures are not due to be published until spring but early estimates put the European countries in the top spots.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy recently announced a record number of international visitors to the country in 2017, totalling more than 82 million.

He said this led to a 12 per cent rise in earnings in the tourism sector to 87bn (77bn).

Meanwhile, Donald Trump's first year as president of the US has been mired in controversy, from the decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement to the on-going war of words with North Korea.

Tourist numbers dropped five per cent in the first quarter of 2017 and three per cent in the second quarter.

Tourism figures in the US have dropped during Trump's first year as president / AP

The UNWTO said: "Led by Mediterranean destinations, Europe recorded extraordinary results for such a large and rather mature region."

It comes after a year in which Spain has been gripped by the on-going dispute over Catalonias demand for an independence referendum, with protesters on both sides demonstrating across the country.

Barcelona also suffered a major terror attack when a van ploughed through pedestrians on the busy La Rambla shopping street, killing 14 and injuring over 100.

Overall, the number of international tourists rose by 7 per cent during the past year to 1.3bn. The growth is expected to continue in 2018.

"International travel continues to grow strongly, consolidating the tourism sector as a key driver in economic development," said UNWTO chief Zurab Pololikashvili.

"As the third export sector in the world, tourism is essential for job creation and the prosperity of communities around the world."
H ollywood actor Steven Seagal has denied a fresh sexual assault allegation made against him by a former James Bond actress.

Rachel Grant, best known for her supporting role in Die Another Day alongside Pierce Brosnan, told the BBC Mr Seagal pinned her down on a bed and asked her if she wanted to "see [his] private parts".

The alleged assault is said to have taken place in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2002.

She said: "Somehow he managed to force my top down so I was exposed on top.

The Bond actress claims the assault took place in 2002 / PA

"I was extremely embarrassed and somehow he managed to get me sat on the bed.

"I remember him saying, 'Maybe you want to see my private parts?' Or 'I suppose you want to see my private parts?'

"He was undoing his zip...his flies...and I just burst into tears - I couldn't take it anymore...And he stopped."

Seagal is already being investigated over an allegation of sexual assault said to have taken place in 2005, the Los Angeles Police Department has said.

The action movie star, 65, has faced allegations of sexual harassment under the increased scrutiny on Hollywood since the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke.

On Friday a spokeswoman for the police force said a complaint is being handled by the Robbery-Homicide Division but offered no more information.

"All we can do is confirm that there's an open investigation from 2005," she said, adding it is an allegation of sexual assault.

In recent months, Seagal has been accused of sexual harassment by actresses Julianna Margulies and Portia de Rossi.

De Rossi claimed that during a final audition for a Seagal movie in his office, he unzipped his leather trousers in front of her as he discussed off-screen chemistry.

"I ran out and called my agent. Unfazed, she replied, 'Well, I didn't know if he was your type'," de Rossi wrote online.

The Good Wife star Margulies claimed she was 23 when she went to Seagal's hotel room under the pretences of a casting, but when she arrived he was alone.

She managed to flee "unscathed" after "I sort of screamed my way out", she told radio station Sirius XM.

Their claims led actress Jenny McCarthy to renew her allegation that she was sexually harassed by Seagal during an audition for Under Siege 2 in 1995.

McCarthy alleged Seagal asked her to remove her clothes despite no nudity being required for the role.

A spokesman for Mr Seagal said: "Our client denies having such contact with Ms Grant and further vehemently denies any alleged assault at all.

"In particular, [he denies] the alleged assault occurring in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2002."

Additional reporting by the Press Association
T he US Government is withholding 47 million ($65 million) worth of aid from the Palestinians, reports say.

Donald Trump's administration was expected to approve its annual contribution to UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), worth 90 million ($125 million).

Officials have said the US will provide just under half of that, withholding the rest "for future consideration".

Mr Trump has previously threatened to cut aid to the Palestinians if they failed to engage in peace talks with Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas (right) has criticised the president's actions / EPA

Relations between Washington and the Palestinians have sunk to a new low, boding poorly for a peace plan the White House has promised to present.

Mr Trump infuriated Palestinians and Muslims around the world when he announced late last year that the US would recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move its embassy there.

This move was seen as upending decades of US policy and countering an international consensus that the fate of Jerusalem should be decided in negotiations between the two sides.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said: "[Trump] said in a tweet: 'We won't give money to the Palestinians because they rejected the negotiations'.

"Shame on you. When did we reject the talks? Where is the negotiation that we rejected?"

Protests erupt after Trump's Jerusalem decision 1 /62 Protests erupt after Trump's Jerusalem decision Palestinian protestors clash with Israeli forces near an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank city of Ramallah AFP/Getty Images Israeli forces take position during clashes with Palestinian protestors near an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank city of Ramallah AFP/Getty Images Palestinian protesters burn an effigy of U.S. President Donald Trump AP AFP/Getty Images Palestinians burn posters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump, during a protest against the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, in Gaza City AP Israeli forces disperse Palestinian protestors outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City AFP/Getty Images Palestinian youths take part in a protest against US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images Pakistanis burn a representation of the U.S. flag during a protest rally in Hyderabad, Pakistan AP Palestinian protestors set fire to a picture of US president Donald J. Trump during a protest in the West Bank City of Nablus EPA Smoke billows from burning tyres as Palestinian demonstrators clash with Isralei troops AFP/Getty Images Palestinian youths take part in a protest against US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images Jordanian police stand guard near the American Embassy in Amman, Jordan REUTERS Palestinian demonstrators clash with Israeli troops during protests in the West Bank city of Ramallah AFP/Getty Images Palestinians paint an 'X' over the face of a picture of US president Donald J. Trump on the Israeli separation wall in Bethlehem, West Bank EPA Supporters of a Pakistani religious party rally against the United States and Israel, in Lahore, Pakistan AP A supporter of the Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC) an Islamic organization burns US flags Reuters A view from Armon Hanaziv promenade on the old city of Jerusalem, EPA Palestinian protesters chant angry slogans as one burns a representation of the American flag AP Palestinian protestors shout slogans against US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in the West Bank city of Nablus AFP/Getty Images Iraqi Shi'ite Muslim leader Moqtada al-Sadr gestures as he delivers a speech over U.S.President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Baghdad, Iraq Reuters Children stand on U.S. and Israeli flags during a protest following U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement that he has recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, in Islamabad, Pakistan Reuters Protests erupt in Middle East after Donald Trump declares Jerusalem capital of Israel AP Hamas Chief Ismail Haniyeh gestures as he delivers a speech over U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City Reuters Protesters chant anti-American slogans in Gaza city AP Young Palestinians wave flags in protest at Mr Trump's decision in Gaza EPA People gather in protest to wave flags and chant in Gaza EPA Protesters pray in the street outside the US Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey Getty Images The Christmas tree in front of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity had its lights turned off in protest EPA Protesters burn posters of Donald Trump in Manger Square, Bethlehem AFP/Getty Images A demonstration against the US and Israel at Fatih Mosque in Istanbul AFP/Getty Images Protesters wave Palestinian and Turkish flags during a demonstration in Istanbul AFP/Getty Images Protesters burn the Israeli flag in Cairo, Egypt EPA Pro-Palestinian protesters in Berlin, Germany EPA Palestinians burn Israeli and US flags and posters of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during protest against the US intention to move its embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize the city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip EPA Protesters wave flags and shout slogans outside the U.S. Consulate on December 6, 2017 in Istanbul, Turkey Getty Images The Hamas organization's top leader Sheikh Ismaeil Haneiya (C) attends a protest against the US decision to recognize the city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City, Gaza Strip EPA US President Donald J. Trump signs his proclamation about his controversial decision to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and his plan to relocate the US embassy to that city, in the Diplomatic Room of the White House in Washington, DC EPA The US and Israeli flags hang at the entrance of Jerusalem Municipality building following US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise the city as the capital of Israel AFP/Getty Images Christian worshipers carry a wooden cross through an alley of Jerusalem's old city EPA Israeli policemen scuffle with a Palestinian man during a protest following U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement that he has recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City Reuters Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses an international conference on digital diplomacy at the foreign ministry in Jerusalem AFP/Getty Images Palestinians shout slogans during a protest following U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement that he has recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City Reuters Protesters chant slogans and wave Palestinian flags during a demonstration against the US and Israel in front of the US consulate in Istanbul AFP/Getty Images Palestinians take part in a protest against US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images A wounded Palestinian protester is evacuated during clashes with Israeli troops at a protest against U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, near the border with Israel in the southern Gaza Strip Reuters Israel policemen stand guard at the Damascus gate of Jerusalem's old city EPA Palestinian youths take part in a protest against US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images

Mr Abbas has said that by siding with the Israelis on a sensitive issue, the announcement had destroyed Mr Trump's credibility as a Middle East peace broker.

"We can say no to anyone if things are related to our fate and our people, and now we have said no to Mr Trump," he said.

"We told him the deal of the century was the slap of the century. But we will slap back."

The US funds almost 30 per cent of UNRWA's work.

Additional reporting by the Press Association
P akistani women have taken to social media to share their own accounts of sexual abuse in protest of the murder and rape of child that sent shockwaves through the country.

Zainab Ansari, who was believed to be between six and eight years old, was abducted on January 4 as she walked to her Quran lesson. Her body was found days later, dumped on a rubbish heap.

The distressing autopsy results suggested she had been sexually assaulted, raped and possibly tortured before she was strangled.

Her killing sparked furious clashes between police and protesters demanding justice and re-ignited the debate on the prevalence of child sex abuse in a country that often neglects sexual education.

Protest: A girl holds a sign as she chants slogans with others to condemn the rape and killing of Zainab Ansari / REUTERS

Women have spoken out about their own personal experiences, sharing the hashtag #JusticeForZainab, in an attempt to raise awareness of sexual assault and the lack of crucial education in teaching children about predators.

Actor Nadia Jamil was one of the better-known victims to speak out, saying she was just four-years-old when she was first sexually abused.

I was four the first time I was abused sexually. I was in college when it blew out of proportion, she wrote.

Highlighting that, in Pakistan, victims are often shamed for speaking out about abuse, she added: People tell me not to talk to respect my familys honour. Is my familys honour packed in my body? I am a proud, strong, loving survivor. No shame on me or my kids. Only pride 4 being me.

Model Frieha Altaf also claimed she was abused by her cook when she was six-years-old. My parents took action but everyone remained silent as if it was my shame, she wrote.

At 34 I realised how it had impacted my life. The only shame is keeping SILENT #ChildAbuse #shame #NoMoreChildAbuse #MeToo #JusticeForZainab #HowToStopChildAbuse.

Campaigners and experts have responded to the murder by calling for Pakistani authorities to educate children better on what is inappropriate and show teachers how to recognise signs of abuse.

The conservative country sees speaking openly about sex, even in an educational manner, as a taboo that should not be done in front of innocent children.

But experts have suggested that, according to cases reported in the media, there has been a 10 per cent increase in child sex abuse in Pakistan in the past year. And the city that Zaiab was from, Kasur, is no exception.

As recently as 2015, a paedophile ring was discovered in Kasur which abused more than 200 children and sold videos of the abuse.

And the wider region of Punjab has, according child abuse prevention agency Sahil, the highest rate of sex crimes against minors in the country.

In the last year alone, 11 girls, including Zainab, have been attacked in a similar way and dumped within a 3km radius.

Traces of the same DNA have been found on six of the victims, including Zainab, linking them together and sparking fears they may have been the victim of a serial killer.

Victim: Zainab was one of 11 girls to be attacked in the same way in the last year / EPA

Only one of the young girls, aged six, survived the attack but remains in hospital, paralysed from the waist down and unable to talk or recognise her family.

But it was Zainabs death, in particular, that sparked fury across the Punjab region  possibly because her family are believed to be well-connected and wealthy  and caused three days of violence.

A young Pakistani girl holds a picture of Zainab Ansari at a protest / AP

The family and residents of her town have accused authorities of being slow to respond to the girl's disappearance, charges denied by police.

The Ansari's said that crucial CCTV footage of the girl walking hand in hand with a man  the last time she was seen alive  was discovered by the family with no help from the authorities.

But police said the head of the investigation was replaced by another seasoned officer following complaints by Zainabs father and eight people have been detained over the murder, including two relatives.

Evidence: CCTV shows the last time Zainab was seen alive, walking hand in hand with a man

Over the weekend, businesses reopened in the city but police and paramilitary troops were still out in force and guarding government buildings.

In the clashes last week, crowds stormed official buildings before police opened fire on the angry mob. Two people were killed and several injured.
W hile summer is a while away, that doesnt mean we cant plan ahead by snapping up the hottest shades on and off the catwalk.

If you havent heard already, tiny sunglasses are the only shades you'll be needing in your accessory arsenal. Just ask Kim Kardashian, who recently received an email from her husband Kanye West telling her to stop wearing big sunglasses, writing that its all about tiny little glasses.

And he couldnt be more right. Designers including Balenciaga, Anya Hindmarch and Adam Selman sent models down the runway sporting the 90s trend and the likes of Kendall Jenner, Rihanna and Gigi Hadid (to name a few) have given their seal of approval.

Ready to make the switch? Here are our favourite miniscule sunglasses, from high-street to high-end.

Le Specs' 'The Last Lolita' sunglasses

A collaboration between Adam Selman and cult Australian label Le Specs, these exaggerated cat-eye frames are made up of soft charcoal-tinted lenses and thick black acetate frames. We love how the sleek angular points bring attention to the eyes. Providing 100 per cent UV protection, theyre a hit with Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid and Leandra Medine. They also come with a tough protective case, making them handbag-friendly.

75, Selfridges, Buy it now

Valentino VA4018 Studded Cat's Eye Sunglasses

For modern fashionists with a weakness for Italian luxury. Featuring a lower-designed cat's eye frame and bold square stud embellishment, these slim frames ought to bring some serious edge to your wardrobe. Total UV protection means you can handle the rays while looking cool. Being Valentino they dont come cheap, but are currently 30 per cent off at John Lewis (discount applied).

185, John Lewis, Buy it now

QUAY x Kylie Jenner Purple Honey

Bring the glamour in these metal geometric sunglasses, which are straight from Kylie Jenners collaboration with QUAY. The flat diamond-shaped lenses and delicate gold-tone frames make for a sophisticated yet playful vibe. This minimalist style works best with small and medium-shaped faces. Each pair comes complete with a premium leather case finished with gold hardware.

55, Topshop, Buy it now

ASOS Small Cat Eye Fashion Glasses

You can rely on ASOS for some Insta-friendly wardrobe steals, including sunglasses in every shape and colour you can think of. Our top pick from the range is this super-slick cat eye pair. Here, dark-tinted lenses are met by slim arms with curved temple tips and moulded nose pads for a comfortable fit. You get some slight UV protection, but not enough for bright sun rays.

12, ASOS, Buy it now

PrettyLittleThing White Thin Retro Sunglasses

Heres a budget-friendly dupe of the Andy Wolf frames worn by Rihanna at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Featuring teeny tiny frames that Kanye West would no doubt approve of, this design pairs well with pastel-coloured clothing  think lilac and light blue.

10, PrettyLittleThing, Buy it now

Free People Whats Your Angle Sunglasses

Best known for its hippie-style bohemian clothing, Urban Outfitters' little sister brand knows a thing or two about embracing vintage trends. These deadstock sunnies boast dark green lenses and plastic frames in a tortoise shell finish. As its strong angular shape adds length to the visage, this pair is a perfect option for round faces.

24, Free People, Buy it now

Skinnydip Lola Black Sunglasses

From the quirky London-based accessory brand, these lightweight shades are giving us major Clueless vibes. The design is complete with high UV protection, making it perfect for your summer-vacay wardrobe. Whats more, it comes with an equally cute pouch in an iridescent finish.

25, Skinnydip, Buy it now

Urban Outfitters Extreme Cat Eye Sunglasses

Modern meets classic in this take on the cat eye style from high-street hero Urban Outfitters. Dark purple-tinted lenses are held in glossy white plastic frames, providing a polished touch to every ensemble. A contour moulded nose bridge gives the wearer an easy comfortable fit. Also available for Click + Collect at Oxford Street and Westfield White City stores.
H olly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield knocked back shots as they joined a star-studded crowd at Davina McCalls 50th birthday bash at Cafe De Paris.

The exclusive London club was home to an array of stars as they partied with McCall, who recently split from her husband Matthew Robertson after 17 years.

The presenter turned 50 in October 2017, a month before the split was announced, and the belated celebrations were in full swing on Monday night.

Both regular Snapchatters Willoughby and Schofield kept their followers up to date with their party antics as they posted videos of themselves doing shots.

Phillip Schofield and Davina McCall danced the night away / Snapchat/Phillip Schofield

The night began with a dinner at Mexican haunt La Bodega Negra, alongside Willoughbys husband Dan Baldwin, and the shots and margaritas were in full flow.

They then danced the night away at the party before getting a cab home, knowing they were live on air on This Morning in a matter of hours.

Holly Willoughby singing along to a video in the cab home from Davina McCall's party. / Snapchat/Phillip Schofield

In the cab, Schofield posted another update with Willoughby singing along to a video playing on her phone.

The celebrity pair proved last year that they know how to party by downing shots with their famous friends on holiday in Portugal.

Schofield posted a Snapchat of their raucous night as they sipped on glasses of wine around a huge table before being presented with a wooden tray of shot, which Willoughby later knocked over.

Also attending McCall's party was presenter Laura Whitmore alongside her Love Island narrator and comedian boyfriend Iain Sterling.

Celebrity Big Brother host Emma Willis joined in the fun as well.
G ood Morning Britain viewers have praised producer Big Narstie after he helped the shows weatherman Alex Beresford give Tuesdays forecast.

Fans of the ITV breakfast show said that the producer had "made [their] morning" and called for him to present their weather every day.

One wrote on Twitter: Can I have Big Narstie present the weather every morning please n thanks.

Another tweeted: Big Narstie on GMB has me howling, while a third posted: #GMB Big Narstie for weather man on GMB that was TV gold. Made my morning.

As well as alerting those watching to the incoming cold conditions, the producer advised fans of the show on what they should wear to stay warm.

Boom, the streets of England, what Im trying to say to you yeah, no one T-shirt business. Its cold nuh rass down here. See it all down here? Blitzkrieg. Double up, double up.

See it over here, extra clothes. Wellies, mudfest. Anybody got pets, no saving them we getting bare mud in your yard. Edinburgh  peak times. Highlands  a bag of snow.

Even Beresford tried to mimic Narsties style threatening to spit two two bars in an attempt to compete with the musician.

The exchange caused much hilarity in the GMB studio, and hosts Susanna Reid, Piers Morgan and Kate Garraway could be heard giggling away in the background.

Good Morning Britain continues weekdays at 6am on ITV.
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President Klaus Iohannis welcomed on Tuesday at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, within an official visit that the high Japanese official is paying to Bucharest.

This first visit to Romania of a Japanese Prime Minister takes place in the context of celebrating five years since agreeing on, in 2013, the Renewed Partnership between Romania and Japan.The official visit will occasion discussions in an exclusive format, talks in the delegations' plenary, press statements and an official dinner which President Iohannis will offer in honor of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.The discussion agenda includes, according to the Presidential Administration, "the stage and outlooks on strengthening the very good relations of the Renewed Partnership between Romania and Japan, in terms of politics, economy, culture, security and interhuman relationships."Moreover, several topics will be tackled such as Japan's cooperation with the EU, including in the context of the Economic Partnership Agreement between Japan and the Union, developments on a regional level, with an emphasis on the North-Korean file, the Romanian-Japanese cooperation on a multilateral level, respectively.According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe carries out a diplomatic tour in Central and Eastern Europe, which includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, in the context in which Japan tries to obtain support for its firm politics towards North-Korea.Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is scheduled to meet leaders of the six visited countries, will be accompanied by over 30 Japanese companies.

AGERPRES .
Chairman of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) Liviu Dragnea on Tuesday stated that there is a chance a part of the current ministers of the Cabinet to still be a part of the next government and he said that "the activity of each minister will be assessed very seriously."

"There is a chance, but only after each minister's activity is assessed very seriously (...), and if we propose that some of the current ministers to be left aside then we shall have serious arguments for that. What I say is that we will have a discussion first, maybe painful for some, but still necessary," Dragnea told a press conference held at the PSD headquarters.Asked if an assessment of the ministers will be done at the net CExN meeting, the PSD head said: "It should be." However, he said that they will analyze the data and the manner in which the ministers observed the governing programme.He also said that, "unfortunately", Prime Minister Mihai Tudose did not receive a serious assessment of the secretaries of state from all the members of his Cabinet."We will make it in the next interval. We have already started. Our colleagues from both the Government and the party began to organize and in a short while we will have the assessment of each secretary of state's activity and we will see how each of them got there," said the PSD leader.

AGERPRES .
At the end of 2017 the Philippines ordered six Brazilian A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft. These A-29s will be service by the end of 2019. The A-29 is basically an armed trainer. The Super Tucano already has most of the market for such trainer/warplanes. This single engine, single seat aircraft was built for pilot training, but also performs quite well for counter-insurgency work. The Super Tucano is basically a prop driven trainer that has structural features making it easy to equip it for combat missions as the A-29. The A-29 comes with armor for the pilot, a pressurized cockpit, and an ejection seat. The A-29 has a max takeoff weight of 5.4 tons and can carry up to 1.5 tons of weapons, including 12.7mm machine-guns (one under each wing), bombs and missiles. The Super Tucano has a GPS based navigation system as standard and can also carry a number of optional electronics systems. One is a FLIR (infrared radar that produces a photo realistic video image in any weather) and a fire control system for bombing.

Cruising speed is 500 kilometers an hour and average endurance is six hours. Max altitude is 11,300 meters (35,000 feet) and stall (slowest speed) is 150 kilometers an hour. Naturally, this aircraft can move in lower and slower than any jet can. A-29s can be equipped to use small (250 and 500 pound) GBU-12 and GBU-58 laser guided bombs.

Several nations are using A-29s for counter-insurgency work. The aircraft is also used for border patrol. The Super Tucano costs $9 million each, and come in one or two seat versions. The Super Tucano suited Filipino needs. That is a smaller, slower aircraft that can double as trainers. It's easier to train pilots to use the Super Tucano, cheaper to buy them, and much cheaper to operate them. It costs about $500 an hour to operate an A-29, which less than a tenth of what it costs for an F-16.

The Philippines selected the A-29 because of earlier experience with a similar aircraft. Since the 1990s the Philippines received 32 used OV-10s from the U.S. and Thailand. Similar in function to the A-29, the OV-10 is a 6.5 ton, twin prop aircraft that could carry over two tons of weapons and stay in the air for three hours per sortie. Wingspan is 40 feet (12.2 meters), and length is 41.6 feet (12.7 meters). The first one was delivered to the U.S. Air Force, for use in Vietnam, in 1968. The last one was produced (for export to Indonesia) in 1976. The U.S. Air Force and Marines were the primary users of OV-10s, and the last of these was retired, by the marines, in 1994. Over a hundred were exported to Germany, Thailand, Colombia, Venezuela, Philippines and Indonesia. Several dozen of these are still in use out of over 300 manufactured. In Vietnam, the OV-10 was used more for reconnaissance and directing air and artillery strikes, than in using its own firepower. Since the 1960s advances in technology (materials, electronics and aircraft design) made the propeller driven single engine basic pilot training aircraft more robust and adaptable. By the 1990s it was obvious that these aircraft were suitable, and often superior, for counter-insurgency work. The A-29 is one of the best examples of that.
The security forces continue to hold their own, bolstered by more frequent and effective air support plus more distractions for Afghanistans two meddling neighbors (Iran and Pakistan). Iran is undergoing another popular uprising. The last one, in 2009, was suppressed with the help of indifference from the United States and the West in general. Not this time, and the Iranians are demanding an end to their religious dictatorship this time around. In Pakistan the military (which controls the government but does not run the country) is under growing pressure to allow needed reforms. The Americans are demanding the Pakistani military half support for Haqqani Network and the Afghan Taliban. The United States has cut aid (nearly a billion dollars worth) and India now has an inexpensive way to trade with Afghanistan (via an Iranian port). China is more concerned about the security of its growing investments in Pakistan.

The Cost

Internally Afghanistan is still very much at war with the drug gangs and their local muscle (mainly the Taliban and Haqqani Network) as well as ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), which takes on everyone. Afghanistan us still the most violent place in the world. But some parts of the country are much more violent than others. Some 40 percent of the 14,600 people killed (and 10,200 seriously wounded) in 2017 were in Nangarhar, Kandahar, Helmand and Kabul provinces. There were about 2,000 attacks in 2017 but sixty percent of them took place in ten (of 35) provinces. Nangarhar alone suffered 17 percent of all the attacks. Overall about 55 percent of casualties were the result of close combat (gunfire, mostly, but also RPGs, grenades and knives). Nearly 20 percent of casualties were from airstrikes while a quarter of causlties were from bombs of various types, about half of them during suicide attacks. Nearly all the dead and wounded were Afghans although a large percentage of the ISIL dead are found to be foreigners as are a smaller percentage of al Qaeda. Foreign troops supporting the government (mostly NATO and American) account for a miniscule number of casualties. A third of the casualties are civilians

Nangarhar has been the scene of about half the combat American troops were involved with on the ground during 2107 and about half of American casualties in Afghanistan occurred there as well. That is not a lot of casualties (15 U.S. troops died in Afghanistan during 2017, plus two NATO.) Currently the 13,000 or so foreign troops are suffering losses of about 130 per 100,000. That loss rate peaked at about 400 per 100,000 in 2012. At the peak of the fighting (2005-7) in Iraq, the losses were nearly 600 per 100,000. The rate for U.S. troops in Vietnam and World War II was about 1,500 per 100,000 troops. It was higher for German and Russian troops, more like what Afghan security forces have suffered since 2014. As high as this is, its higher (twice what the army and police lose) for the Taliban and such loss rates were always common in Afghanistan. When the tribal irregulars fought Russian troops in the 1980s they suffered even higher losses. During that period the invading Russians never suffered more than 1,000 per 100,000 dead per year and eventually left because they could not afford the financial cost of seemingly endless fighting in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union fell apart a few years later and nearly three decades later Afghanistan is still a mess.

The Big Picture

A recent terrorism survey (GTI or Global Terrorism Index) showed Afghanistan stuck in its efforts to eliminate Islamic terrorism from the country, especially when compared to the rest of the world. In 2016 Afghanistan ranked among the most violent of 163 nations. The top four slots were filled by the usual suspects (Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Syria). Being part of the top ten nations (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Syria, India, Somalia, Yemen, Philippines and Thailand) is more volatile and the bottom two positions are the only ones that seem to show a lot of change. Note that most of the terror related deaths are Moslem related. Only India and the Philippines had a significant minority of terrorist deaths that were not carried out by Moslems. In those two countries the minority terrorists were leftist rebels who are slowly fading away. Afghanistan lost its leftist rebels in the 1970s and 80s and now its mainly religious fanatics, and plenty of them.

While Pakistan continues to support Haqqani and some of the Afghan Taliban, ISIL is on its own in Afghanistan and is finding a small, but steady supply of recruits in urban areas, especially Kabul (the capital). As is typical in Moslem majority countries citizens will often conclude that the only solution for the corruption and inefficient government is a religious dictatorship and for Sunni Moslems that means ISIL is the most effective (the baddest of the bad if you will) for that. Thus Afghan police intel believes there at least twenty ISIL cells (each with up to a dozen members) in Kabul and these have been responsible for at least half the terror attacks in the capital over the last year. Many of ISIL members from Kabul are educated or have technical skills. This is the old, if we cant save the country lets burn it down attitude that shows up regularly in the West, but usually as secular groups (like the anarchists, various types of radical socialists, and so on). In Afghanistan ISIL is mainly Pushtun and Sunni and is particularly eager to kill a lot of Shia and non-Pushtun Afghans in order to get a larger war going. That is a favorite strategy for Islamic terror groups who believe it is Gods plan for them to survive all the chaos and take over. This is a fantasy with little basis in reality but it survives. Afghan intelligence is not sure ISIL is as active in the capital and believes it is actually Haqqani that is behind most of the terror attacks. One of the complicating factors is that many of the essential services (hideouts, lookouts, stolen vehicles and weapons) terrorists require for attacks are obtained from criminal gangs (contractors in effect) that work for anyone who can pay. That includes Haqqani, which has long been seen more as gangsters than Islamic terrorists and while they mostly do terrorism-for-hire in Afghanistan for Pakistan, they apparently are willing to work for ISIL as well.

Options For Able Afghans

There is another alternative for skilled Afghans seeking a more constructive approach for fighting terrorists. The best is the ASSF (Afghan Special Security Forces), who in the second half of 2017 were carrying out an average of 105 operations a week. As was noted in 2016 American SOCOM (Special Operations Command) troops in Afghanistan accompany their Afghan counterparts on about ten percent of combat missions and also help plan or support most of the other 90 percent. In 2017 ASSF were able to carry out 17 percent of their operations without any assistance from foreign forces. Thats up from about ten percent in 2016.

The ASSF is also in the process of doubling its strength, from two brigades (about 11,000 Afghan personnel) to four brigades (23,000 Afghans). The Afghan government wants to accomplish this this by 2020 but the foreign advisors (mainly from SOCOM) believe 2025 is a more realistic date. Moreover to make ASSF work you need a lot of support troops (about one for every two special operations soldiers) plus additional foreign aid to hire more foreign support specialists to do skilled jobs Afghans are not available for. The Afghans want more ASSF troops because they are the most competent and reliable Afghanistan has. The rest of the Afghan Army, by comparison, is hobbled by a shortage of trained officers and NCOS as well as constant pressure from the drug gangs and their Taliban enforcers to take bribes or desert. In contrast the higher standards and longer training for the ASSF attracts Afghans who are looking for a more professional environment. As a result some 80 percent of offensive operations by the Afghan Army are carried out by the ASSF. The main function of ASSF is not commando (direct action) operations or even the more mundane (but just as important) intelligence collecting but rather to provide an example of Afghan troops, from dozens of different tribes, working together in jobs that require international standards for skills mastered and put to use. This is a big deal in a country like Afghanistan. While some Afghans have become physicians, pilots, scientists and the like ASSF enables a wider range of Afghans to demonstrate high standards of skill and performance.

Moreover ASSF provides accurate (and understandable to Afghans) intelligence on what is going on in the country so the senior leaders cannot say they didnt know. Moreover the ASSF are relatively incorruptible and the best Afghan combat troops in in Afghanistan. In the largely warrior culture of tribal Afghanistan that is a big deal. So the Western nations that fund and train ASSF are going along with the Afghan plan to double the size of ASSF.

The Afghan Air Force has been a lot more active, averaging some 3,000 sorties a month in 2017. Only about 12 percent of those sorties were for airstrikes, the non-airstrike sorties were for combat support (surveillance and transport), especially for special operations. Efforts to expand and improve the Afghan Air Force are crippled by corruption, and not just in Afghanistan. For example contracts for foreign maintenance personnel (paid for by the United States) are written in such a way that the contractors are able to avoid turning maintenance jobs over to Afghans they are also supposed to be training. In other words the contractor has a way to prevent working themselves out of a job. This is typical with a lot of civilian contractor support operations. The pay is good and the contract lasts only as long as there are not enough Afghans to get the work done. While the contractor personnel are less vulnerable to bribery or intimidation by local criminals or Islamic terrorists, it is an expensive solution Afghanistan cannot afford in the short or long term.

Purported Possible Peace Parley

In the last week it became known that Turkey has been hosting secret (until now) peace talks with the Rasool faction of the Taliban. The third meeting was recently held but there were no official government representatives, only men who informally monitor such activities for the Afghan government. This meeting was arranged with the assistance of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of Islamic terror group Hezb I Islami. Back in November when the first meetings took place, Hekmatyar was the key organizer. Hezb I Islami made peace with the government in mid-2017. The group had survived since the 1990s civil war but had not been a major military presence in Afghanistan since the late 1990s because of factionalism, hostility towards any foreigners (Moslem or otherwise) and losses suffered fighting rival Islamic terror groups (including al Qaeda). Terms include amnesty for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the release of some imprisoned Hezb I Islami members as well as a ceasefire. The UN took Hekmatyar off its list of international terrorists. Hekmatyar created and led an Islamic radical group that lost out to the Taliban in the late 1990s and has been trying to make a comeback ever since. As a result Hezb I Islami spent most of its time fighting other Islamic terrorists, mainly Pakistan sponsored groups like the Taliban and Haqqani network. The Hekmatyar organization has been surviving as bandits in various areas of eastern and central Afghanistan. This peace deal was mostly symbolic for the government and recognizing the fact that Hekmatyar and the government had some common enemies; drug gangs and Pakistan-backed Islamic terrorists. Hekmatyar also had a lot of very useful contacts in the Islamic terrorist community, especially the many factions of the Taliban.

The Rasool faction was one that broke away from the Pakistan based Taliban leadership because of a dispute over who should run the Taliban. The new head of the Taliban, Mullah Hebatullah Akhundzada, is unpopular with many Taliban faction leaders, in part because Akhundzada is seen as a figurehead because one of his deputies, the head of the Haqqani Network, is believed to be in charge. The most active dissident faction is led by the Rasool clan and its current leader Mullah Mohammad Rasool.

During the late 1990s Mullah Rasool was the Taliban strongman in the southwest as governor of Nimroz province until 2001. The Rasool clan made a fortune by controlling the drug smuggling down there. Rasool had lots of contacts in Iran and saw himself as a potential supreme leader of the Afghan Taliban. This Taliban civil war is the result of disagreement over who should take over as Taliban leader after 2015 when it was revealed that founder Mullah Omar had died in 2013 (in a Pakistani hospital). The information was kept to a few key Omar associates who were accused of doing this as part of a plot to install an Omar successor (Mullah Mansour ) who was second-rate but backed by the Pakistan military (which provided sanctuary for Taliban leaders in southwest Pakistan since 2002).

From late 2015 to mid-2016 Rasool fought other Taliban factions for control of the organization. Heavy fighting began in late November 2015 when Mullah Mansour ordered attacks against the forces loyal to rival Mullah Rasool. This marked a major defeat for the Taliban as they lost a major asset; unity. Most of the fighting took place in Herat, Zabul and Farah provinces. There were apparently several thousand casualties and the heavy fighting did not cease until July 2016. Meanwhile Pakistan sided with Mansour, who was then killed in May 2016 by an American air strike. Pakistan then used its considerable control over the Afghan Taliban to get the head of the Pakistan backed Haqqani Network appointed as one of the three senior Taliban leaders. Rasool apparently backed down in the face of all this and was thought to have fled left the country. That was not the case.

Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and the United States have been trying to restart the peace talks with the Taliban but were stymied by the two factions that kept trying to outdo each other in making new demands. The latest one if direct talks with the United States. That will never happen. In the meantime the Afghan government maintains informal (and unofficial) links with Taliban representatives living in Qatar and, apparently, Turkey. Unofficial negotiations in the Persian Gulf are nothing new nor are informal contacts with Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. Thats another way of describing the growing number of politicians who take money from drug gangs and socialize with Taliban or drug gang middlemen (tribal leaders or former senior politicians). Its hard to be an honest government employee in Afghanistan. If bribes dont work theres also intimidation or assassination. The gold (bribe) or lead (a bullet) offer is also applied to journalists, businessmen and anyone else the drug gangs feel they need some cooperation from.

In Qatar talks with the Taliban have been going on (and off) since 2013. The Taliban demands dont change much. The Taliban still demand the removal of all foreign troops and elimination of any security agreements with non-Moslem nations. Another permanent demand is getting the Taliban off the list of international terrorist organizations and the removal of Taliban leaders from the UN blacklist (that restricts their movements outside of Afghanistan) and official recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political entity. The Taliban are also demanding the imposition of Islamic law.

In the past there were demands for the immediate release of all convicted Taliban from prison. This last item has always been very unpopular with most Afghans, who have long memories of the many friends and family killed by these terrorists. In light of that the Taliban simply demand the release of a few essential (for peace talks) Taliban leaders. The Afghan government refuses to agree to any of that and demands that the Taliban comply with a ceasefire and partial disarmament before formal peace talks can begin. The Taliban will have none of that.

Meanwhile the U.S. revealed evidence of the Taliban getting some help (sanctuary and information) from Iran and Russia in return for assistance in keeping ISIL out of Iran and Russia. The U.S. also confirms the belief that Saudi supporters of Islamic radicalism continue to make major financial contributions to the Taliban. The Saudi government knows about this and rather than shut it down (difficult in a region infamous for its rampant smuggling and money laundering) uses the contributors to provide access with the Taliban leadership and the leaders of any allied groups. When confronted by Afghanistan over this Iran admitted that it has the ability to communicate with Taliban leaders, but does this mainly to gather intelligence.

January 15, 2018: In Kabul the Indian embassy compound was hit by a rocket, causing some damage to a building but no injuries. Several times a year Pakistan-backed groups attempt to attack embassies in Kabul, especially the Indian compound.

The government revealed that earlier in the month the NDS (National Directorate of Security) had arrested a government official in Herat province (bordering Iran), charged him with being a spy for Iran, and taken him to Kabul. The NDS has been around since 2002 and is often called the Afghan CIA. While the NDS does a lot of same intel work as the CIA it is part of the Defense Ministry and also functions like the American FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) as well. The NDS has over 20,000 personnel including many former Islamic terrorists as well as Russian trained operatives (from the 1980s when there was a pro-Russian national government). The NDS has been very successful in identifying Islamic terrorist supporters who make it possible for major attacks to be carried out in urban areas. NDS also seeks out foreign agents, especially from Iran and Pakistan.

January 11, 2018: In the east (Nangarhar province) a U.S. airstrike hit a group of Taliban pretending to be part of pro-government militia and killed ten of the Islamic terrorists. This happened after a Taliban man infiltrated a local militia led by a tribal leader and member of parliament who suspected his group had been infiltrated by the Taliban or ISIL. This was confirmed when the infiltrator set up a meeting that turned into ambush leaving a pro-government militia leader dead and an American soldier wounded. This led to the airstrike.

January 10, 2018: The U.S. has agreed to supply Afghanistan with another seven C-208B single engine commercial aircraft equipped with sensors and a laser designator (and able to carry two Hellfire missiles) for use as armed surveillance aircraft. Afghanistan already has 24 of these aircraft, which were first used like this in Iraq. In effect these are manned UAVs but the two man crews are Afghans who are often in radio contact with Afghan troops below and have proved extremely useful in finding and eliminating Islamic terrorists and gangsters of all sorts.

January 9, 2018: As U.S. marines return to Afghanistan the U.S. Navy (which supplies the marines with most combat support) has arranged to obtain additional MQ-9 Reaper UAVs for surveillance (not firing weapons) by leasing the UAVs and civilian (former military) personnel to maintain and operate these UAVs. Most of what UAVs do, even the ones built for combat (like MQ-9) is surveillance. This arrangement for the marines will involve at least four MQ-9s.

January 5, 2018: Iranian media reported that Afghan mercenaries in the Iran created Fatemiyoun Brigade in Syria had suffered over 10,000 casualties since 2013. Over 20 percent of the casualties were fatal. Some 20,000 Afghan Shia have (or still are) served in the Fatemiyoun Brigade. Most of these Afghans were recruited from the three million Afghan refugees still in eastern Iran. Nearly all of these Afghans are Shia who fear returning as long as the Afghan Taliban (and ISIL) are active in Afghanistan. These two groups, and Sunni Islamic terror groups in general, consider Shia heretics and targets them for death on a regular basis. It was also reported that over 3,000 Afghan Shia mercenaries died fighting against Iraq in the 1980s. Then as now the Afghans were recruited with the promise of Iranian citizenship for them and their families as well as regular pay while fighting and medical care if wounded. The Iranian mercenary force in Syria has been a decisive factor in keeping the Syrian security forces from being completely destroyed. Occasionally the recruiting of Afghans for this becomes a political issue in Afghanistan but Iran simply points out that the Afghan volunteers are exiles who do not want to return to Afghanistan because the Afghan government cannot protect them from attack just for being Shia.

January 1, 2018: The U.S. openly accused Pakistan of providing the U.S. with mostly lies and deceit, especially since 2001, in return for over $33 billion in aid since 2002. The American said they would withhold $2 billion in aid until Pakistan shuts down the sanctuaries it provides for Haqqani Network and the Afghan Taliban. The commander of the Pakistani military denied the accusations, as the Pakistanis always do and insisted there was nothing Pakistan could do. The U.S. responded to that by saying there would be more attacks on Islamic terrorists operating inside Pakistan and that was more worrisome for Pakistan because those attacks include the 2011 raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden and a more recent UAV attack that killed the head of the Afghan Taliban and so on. Afghanistan and India backed the Americans and so does most of the international community and the UN. Within a week Pakistan had suspended all military and intelligence cooperation with the United States.

December 31, 2017: At the end of 2017 Pakistan reported it had completed 150 kilometers of its new security fence along the Afghan border during the first six months of construction. The fence consists of two three-meter (nine foot) high chain link fences running parallel, two meters apart, with three rolls of barbed wire in that two meter gap. Construction began in South Waziristan (which borders Afghanistans Paktika province and Pakistans Baluchistan, where the Afghan Taliban still maintain a sanctuary). The fence construction was announced in March 2017 and will eventually extend along the entire 2,600 kilometer border with Afghanistan. This is part of an effort to hinder the Pakistani Taliban, and other illegal groups (terrorists and smugglers) from easily moving back and forth. After the Paktika portion of the fence is completed construction will continue along the border with the Afghan provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar. These provinces are where there has always been a lot of lawless activity and these days it is full of Islamic terrorists hostile to either Pakistan or working for Pakistan (against Afghanistan). The new plan will continue giving priority to areas where there are the most problems but will not stop there and eventually (by about 2025) have a fence along the entire Afghan border.

December 30, 2017: Afghanistan revealed that in 2o17 over 8,800 shells and rockets have been fired from Pakistan into Afghanistan in 2017 and is part of a dispute between Pakistan and Afghanistan about where the border is and how it is supposed to be guarded.

December 28, 2017: In northeast and central Iran anti-government street demonstrations took place in several cities. The first one was apparently in the northeast (Razavi Khorasan Province) city of Mashhad, with 3.3 million people, is the second largest city in the country. It is near the borders with Afghanistan and Turkmenistan and was long a stronghold of Islamic conservatives. It still is. Such public gatherings are illegal but video of the ones that took place today spread via the Internet and new demonstrations took place in more cities. The demonstrators were criticizing the government involvement in foreign wars and Islamic terror groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Other complaints were mainly economic, including the corruption in the government and lack of opportunity for young Iranians.

December 26, 2017: In northwest Pakistan (Kurram) Jamil ud Din, a Haqqani Network leader and several of his associates died when their vehicle was hit by two missiles as it drove near the Afghan border (Paktia province). If this was an American UAV attack it would be the first inside Pakistan since October (when two attacks hit Haqqani targets). Pakistan threatens retaliation for such illegal attacks, which the U.S. will not comment on and Pakistan has not yet acted on.

December 14, 2017: In southwest Pakistan (Baluchistan) an Iranian engineer was kidnapped and taken to Afghanistan (Nimroz province) where his kidnappers contacted the Iranian government demanding a ransom. Two weeks later Iranian commandos (from the Quds Force) reported they had gone into Afghanistan (apparently without permission) on December 24th and rescued the hostage and captured five of the kidnappers.
The mushrooming popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home will fuel e-commerce in the coming year.

Youre going to have a whole new frontier of commerce space driven through voice and brand recognition, said Michael Levine, marketing vice president at Photon.

Its going to be a different type of playing field for these brands, he told the E-Commerce Times. Where it used to be more visual, its now going to be driven by voice.

As smart speakers and speech recognition spread throughout living rooms in America, retailers will start adapting to the new technology and learning how to engage consumers with it.

Brands will use these to create enhanced connections with consumers and augment their voice assistant offerings to deliver tailored, data-driven buying experiences, said Bob Glazer, managing director of Acceleration Partners.

That will occur especially as voice-enabled search becomes more accurate and user friendly, he told the E-Commerce Times.

More Voice Buys in 2018

Advertisers also will feel the impact of smart speakers in the coming months.

A recent study by Walker Sands revealed that one in three consumers plan to make a purchase through a voice-controlled device in the next year, noted Andrew Mimault, a senior digital media specialist at Chacka Marketing.

This should serve as a wake-up call to increase emphasis on how advertisers  both big and small  integrate voice into their search program and how to use it creatively, he told the E-Commerce Times.

Voice and pay-per-click will merge in the same way weve seen programmatic buy placements with television, Mimault added.

Online merchants can expect to see smart speakers getting smarter next year, too, which will impact sales and customer engagement.

We will see intelligence that will better understand our preferences, said Patti Doyle, CEO of Vennli.

It will impact how those voice assistants drive customer engagement from before the sale all the way though to customer experience, she told the E-Commerce Times.

New Agnostic Voice UI

Voice interfaces for retailers wont be limited to the smart speaker leaders, either.

Look for new, merchant-agnostic voice interfaces as well, said Mike Comstock, a senior adviser at GrandCanals.

You can speak to TVs now  and perhaps Xfinity from Comcast, which already has voice navigation, will enter the retail interface arena, he told the E-Commerce Times.

While retailers and advertisers will be discovering the benefits of voice-driven sales and engagement next year, they will discover its limitations as well.

Retail is a highly visual space, noted Judge Graham, CMO of Ansira.

Consumers may use home assistants to place their usual and routine Amazon orders or fulfill their Amazon Fresh grocery lists, but for larger and more unique retail purchases, mobile and desktop shopping will remain essential, he told the E-Commerce Times.

Theres a long way to go before the ideal voice shopping experience emerges in the market, said Jack OLeary, an analyst with PlanetRetail RNG.

Still, I do think the tech will get there, and retailers and brands should be prepared, he told the E-Commerce Times.

Subscription Mania

A hot trend in 2017 that will get hotter in 2018 is product subscriptions.

Anything that saves consumers time will grow, so anything that requires continuous, frequent purchases will shift toward the subscription model, Crowdtap CEO Matt Britton told the E-Commerce Times.

The addition of connected devices in the home will contribute to an increased use of the subscription model. For example, Brita is connected to Amazons Dash system, so when a filter needs to be replaced in a Brita device, a new one is ordered automatically.

Competition also will fuel the subscription fires.

The subscription landscape is one of the fastest-growing ones, said Erich Litch, chief revenue officer at 2Checkout.

Traditional retailers realize more and more that they are now in direct competition with a new breed of companies focused on subscription offerings, he told the E-Commerce Times.

Meanwhile, online retailers may go beyond auto replacement in the coming year and into auto procurement.

Amazon is going to start sending you things before you order them, based on the history of what you bought, CrowdTaps Britton predicted. As they integrate their purchase of Whole Foods, I think thats more likely to happen.

Make It Personal

Personalization will be another sweeping trend next year.

Personalization will dominate the e-commerce space in 2018, Ansiras Graham said.

Creating unique customer experiences will be an important part of the industry, and product suggestions based on past purchase history, geographic location and personal information will be key, he noted.

The focus will no longer be on closing the sale, but on understanding the customer decisions that ultimately impact their purchase and loyalty, said Vennlis Doyle.

Customization will become increasingly important next year, because the target demographics of retailers will be changing.

Retailers are coming to the realization that their main target demographics  millennials and, increasingly, Gen Z  connect with brands that are proactive in engaging them, Acceleration Partners Glazer observed.

In 2018, well see more brands looking to create free-flowing channels of open dialog and product customization options with audiences to deepen brand connections and drive product interest, he predicted.

Omnichannel Becomes Table Stakes

For the first time in history, millennials and Gen Zers have the greatest percentage of purchasing power, GrandCanals Comstock noted.

So you can expect increasing approaches that cater to those segments behavior in the use of mobile and social platforms they already use, such as Instagram and Snapchat  and even virtual or augmented reality, he said.

2018 also will be the year that omnichannel will become entrenched in the e-commerce industry.

You want to have a seamless presence across all platforms  retail store, branded online store, mobile app  because people are judging all those experiences as one, explained Evan Tennant, national director of e-commerce for Adtaxi.

Up to now, that idea of a seamless presence across platforms has just been a best practice, he told the E-Commerce Times.

Thats about to change, though.

Omnichannel is going to go from something thats a suggestion or recommendation, Tennant predicted, to something thats going to be table stakes.
The quality of the air in China's urban areas is notoriously poor. And while the country did cut air pollution levels by 4.5 percent last year, this marked the smallest decline since 2013. To help combat the problem, a 328-foot air purification tower, supposedly the biggest in the world, has been built in Xian, in the Shaanxi province of northern China.

As much of Xian's heating relies on coal, the city experiences heavy pollution during the winter months. But one of the scientists working on the tower said it has already resulted in a noticeable improvement in the air quality over an area of 10 square kilometers (3.86 miles), according to the South China Morning Post.

Scientists at the Institute of Earth Environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences continue to test the tower. The head of research, Cao Junji, said it had produced over 353 million cubic feet of clean air every day since it launched a few months ago.

The system uses the greenhouses around the base of the construction; these suck up the polluted air, which is then heated by solar energy. The hot air rises through the tower and passes through multiple cleaning filters on its way up, before the final, clean result is pumped out the top.

"The tower has no peer in terms of size [...] the results are quite encouraging," said Cao.

The last large smog tower in China ran on electricity powered by coal-fired plants, which defeated its purpose slightly, but the one in Xian requires little power to run. "It barely requires any power input throughout daylight hours. The idea has worked very well in the test run," added Cao.

As large as it is, the tower will be dwarfed by those that Cao and his team aim to build in other Chinese cities. According to a patent they filed in 2014, the full-sized versions will reach 1640 feet into the air, have a 656 diameter, and the greenhouses will cover an area of 11.6 miles.

Image credit: South China Morning Post
Back in December, the price of Bitcoin plummeted when South Korea introduced tighter regulations and said it was considering shutting down exchanges. Now, cryptocurrencies are falling once again after finance minister Kim Dong-yeon suggested a trading ban could still happen, pending a government review.

Kim said: "There are no disagreements over regulating speculation," which includes a ban on anonymous cryptocurrency accounts and taxing the income made on virtual currency. He added that shutting down the exchanges was "a live option but government ministries need to very seriously review it."

The news has seen Bitcoin drop to its lowest point since the start of December last year. At the time of writing, the price is at $11,913; around the same time yesterday, it was $13,773. Almost exactly one month ago, Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $19,783. Since then, about $125 billion has been wiped from its market cap.

Other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Ripple, have also seen steep declines of more than 15 percent this morning. In the last 24 hours, Ripple has dropped from $1.84 to $1.35.

South Korea is trying to rein in the cryptocurrency craze sweeping the country. Prime Minister Lee Nak-yeon said it could "lead to some serious distorted or pathological phenomenon."

But the people of South Korea are pushing back against the cryptocurrency regulations. A petition demanding their removal was filed with the Presidential Office on December 28 and has now reached over 200,000 signatures. The government is required to give an official response once a petition gains 200,000 names in a month.

While the petition agrees with taxing profits on cryptocurrencies, it is against extreme measures such as closing down exchanges.
A new report by Counterpoint Research shows only one overseas smartphone maker made it into China's top ten best-selling handsets list of 2017: Apple. The Cupertino firm found that two of its devices were extremely popular among the country's citizens---one of them almost took the number one spot.

Chinese consumers appear to be fans of large-screen devices, which may explain how the iPhone 7 Plus, which was released in September 2016, took 2.8 percent of all sales in the country's market last year. It marginally lost out on the number one place to the Oppo R9S, which gained a 3 percent share.

Sales of Apple's handset were boosted in the second half of the year thanks to a price cut following the launch of the iPhone 8/8 Plus/X---the iPhone 7 Plus with 128GB storage got a 16% reduction, lowering its price to $900.

The standard iPhone 7 also made the top ten. It came in fifth place, thanks to a 2.4 percent market share. The rest of the list was made up of devices from Chinese brands Vivo, Honor, and Xiaomi.

"iPhone 7 Plus performed better than iPhone 7, demonstrating that currently in China market price may not be the only concern among consumers. Apple users may value more on better specs [...] than extra budget," said Counterpoint analyst James Yan.

China is the biggest smartphone market in the world in terms of sales volume, and Apple is the fifth best-selling phone company in the country, according to IDC. While it remains behind Huawei, OPPO, Vivo, and Xiaomi, Apple's position could improve once sales of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X are taken into account in the Q4 results.
Last week brought the not totally unexpected news that the next Samsung flagship handsets, the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus, would be unveiled sometime during Mobile World Congress (MWC) next month; not, as some suspected, at CES. Now, the alleged pre-order and release dates have been revealed.

The information once again comes from reliable leaker Evan Blass. He tweeted that, according to a C-level executive at a major case maker, the S9 handsets will debut on February 26, which is the start date for MWC.

According to a C-level executive at a major casemaker, the go-to-market schedule for Galaxy S9 / S9+ is as follows:



Launch - 2/26

Pre-orders - 3/1

Ships/releases - 3/16 --- Evan Blass (@evleaks) January 16, 2018

More importantly, Blass says pre-orders for the smartphones will begin on the last day of the conference: March 1. The shipping/release date, meanwhile, is said to be a little over two weeks later. March 16 is when consumers should get their hands on the devices.

It was suspected that the S9/S9 Plus would follow this timeline. 2017's S8 phones were revealed at a dedicated Unpacked event in New York last March, with the devices going on sale on April 21. But this was due to delays as Samsung did extra checks in the wake of the Note 7 disaster. 2016's S7 and S7 Edge, however, were unveiled at that year's MWC and launched in March.

The new phones will almost certainly be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 SoC, with international versions expected to come with Samsung's Exynos 9810 chip. It's thought that the 5.8-inch S9 will have a single camera setup and 4GB of RAM, while the S9 Plus will feature two lenses and 6GB. Both handsets will reportedly feature 64GB of internal storage as a base specification, with prices starting at $700 for the smaller phone and $800 for the S9 Plus.
The corporate espionage case that is Waymo v. Uber has been percolating for almost a year now. The lawsuit brought by Google's autonomous vehicle division claims Anthony Levandowski stole 14,000 company-owned documents relating to various self-driving technologies including LiDAR when he left the company. Levandowski, who had since become the vice president of Uber's self-driving operations, was fired from that company when he pleaded the fifth during preliminary hearings over the matter.

Now, Wired is reporting that Levandowski's former nanny, Erika Wong, has filed suit against him for back wages, violating health and labor laws and causing her emotional distress. The lawsuit is not surprising considering the engineer's troubles over the last year. What is surprising is what has come out in these allegations.

In the course of deposing Wong, details regarding Levandowski's business practices have come to light that include the buying of trade secrets from employees at other companies involved with self-driving technologies and plans to flee the country to avoid prosecution.

"The allegations in the lawsuit are a work of fiction."

According to the filing, Wong claims Levandowski mentioned making payments to a person named Pat Green who is or was an employee at Tesla. Green was allegedly supplying him with information regarding Tesla's autonomous trucking technology.

"Just arrange with Suzanna, dad, and Hazlett [another relative] to keep working with Pat Green," Wong claims Levandowski said in a telephone conversation. "I need updates on Tesla trucking, the non-lidar technology is crucial and Nvidia chips. We can make money on both."

Wong also alleges that she overheard Levandowski talking with his brother Mike about driving up to Canada to avoid going to prison.

A spokesperson for Levandowski stated that all the allegations are false and the lawsuit is without merit.

"On January 5, a frivolous lawsuit was filed against Anthony Levandowski in US District Court," said the spokesperson. "The allegations in the lawsuit are a work of fiction. Levandowski is confident that the lawsuit will be dismissed by the courts."

Wong is seeking over $6 million in damages. Levandowski has already been summoned for a preliminary case management conference which is scheduled for April.
Samsung was among the first major technology players to reveal its hand ahead of CES, refreshing its Notebook 9 line of Ultrabooks nearly a month before the big show. The laptops were constructed of a premium material called Metal 12 which was instrumental in keeping weight at a minimum (the lightest example weighed just 2.2 pounds).

Now, Samsung is ready to utilize the lightweight material in other electronics.

Metal 12 isn't a revolutionary material but rather, a proprietary magnesium-aluminum alloy that Samsung recently filed a trademark for (the name Metal 12, likely for marketing purposes).

Filed on January 12 with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, the application outlines the use of the material in several non-laptop products including 3D eye glasses, smartphones and tablets, portable media players, wireless headphones and wearable computer peripherals, just to name a few.

Unfortunately, trademarks are even less of an indicator of intent than patent applications. While it's possible that the upcoming Galaxy S9 could utilize a lightweight magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis, it's too early to state that as fact.

This isn't the first time Samsung's Galaxy line has been associated with such a chassis. In 2015, rumors surfaced suggesting the upcoming Galaxy S7 would employ a magnesium alloy body with a glass back but that intel ultimately proved inaccurate.

Either way, it looks as if we won't have to wait too much longer to hear about Samsung's next flagship. Serial leaker Evan Blass on Tuesday said Samsung plans to unveil the Galaxy S9 on February 26 to coincide with the start of Mobile World Congress ahead of a March 16 launch.
Lyft has released its annual economic impact report, which details various statistics related to the business.

In 2017, Lyft provided 23 million riders with 400 million rides. The company claims this earned its drivers over $3.6 billion --- double the earnings from 2016. It also contributed to passengers spending nearly $2 billion in their local communities.

The quality of the ridesharing service is quite high in the opinion of its passengers as well. Ninety percent of rides in 2017 were given five out of five stars, and riders have tipped drivers more than $240 million. Riders also feel that Lyft rides are safe with 95 percent saying that their drivers drove safely.

More interesting is the claim that people are doing away with their personal vehicles in favor of using ridesharing services.

"Passengers are exploring their cities, spending more at local businesses, and staying out longer with a reliable ride home."

"Hundreds of thousands of passengers got rid of a household vehicle thanks to the availability of ridesharing," says the company.

According to a survey of 30,000 people from 52 major cities, 50 percent say that they use their car less because of Lyft, and 25 percent say that it is less critical for them to own a car now. In larger cities, people seem more inclined to give up their cars than in the towns with lower populations. This makes sense considering the traffic problems and congestion that you see in places like New York City.

However, for those who choose ridesharing over their own personal transportation, smaller cities seem to have a higher number of riders per capita. For example, in Portland Oregon, which has a population of around 600,000, 53 percent say they use their cars less in favor of ridesharing. By contrast, only 40 percent of riders in New York (pop. 8.5 million) say that they use their vehicles less.

Lyft, like competing services Uber and Waymo, is working on self-driving vehicles, which it says that 83 percent of its ridership is interested in using. I would like to revisit these stats once autonomous vehicles start hitting the roads. It's a tech that personally makes me nervous, and I would like to think that more than 17 percent of the population shares my concerns.
Delcy Rodriguez denounced the impact of unilateral sanctions on the living conditions of the Venezuelan people. | Read More
All-New Lincoln Navigator Named North American Truck of the Year

DETROIT Januaery 15, 2018; The all-new Lincoln Navigator has been named North American Truck of the Year, marking the first time a Lincoln vehicle has captured this prestigious honor, now in its 24th year. The 2018 Lincoln Navigator took the honors over the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 and all-new Ford Expedition to win the award presented today at the 2018 North American International Auto Show.

Lincoln is honored to be named the best among such a strong field of competitors, said Kumar Galhotra, president, The Lincoln Motor Company. The entire Lincoln team is very proud of the work that was done to create a truly differentiated, luxury Lincoln experience in our all-new Navigator.

North American Car, Truck and Utility of the Year awards are based on innovation, design, safety, handling, driver satisfaction and value. Nearly 60 veteran journalists from the United States and Canada vote for the vehicles, which must be all-new or substantially changed from the previous model to qualify.

Modern luxury plus advanced technology

Navigator is Lincolns flagship SUV, combining modern luxury with advanced technology to elevate family travel to first-class. A modern design turns heads, while Navigators smooth power helps families move confidently along the road. A luxurious, spacious interior allows first-class seating for everyone aboard, with 10 power outlets to keep all passengers charged and connected.

The refined capability of the all-new Navigator is unmatched. Its powered by a twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter V6 engine that delivers 450 horsepower and 510 lb.-ft. of torque, and offers the most towing capability in its class  up to 8,700 pounds.

The 2018 Navigator offers all-new Lincoln drive mode technology, an advanced system that allows owners to adjust the vehicle to make driving easier and more enjoyable in any weather or terrain with the twist of a knob. An all-new head-up display is customizable to complement the 12.3-inch digital cluster  incorporating the same groundbreaking digital light processing technology used in movie theaters.

The all-new Lincoln Navigator is available in dealerships now.

About The Lincoln Motor Company

The Lincoln Motor Company is the luxury automotive brand of Ford Motor Company, committed to creating compelling vehicles with an exceptional ownership experience to match. For more information about The Lincoln Motor Company, please visit media.lincoln.com or www.lincoln.com. Follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/lincoln.
Abex Brand Introduces New Brake Rotors for Commercial Vehicle Market

SOUTHFIELD, Mich., Jan. 15, 2018; Abex, one of Federal-Mogul Motorparts' leading commercial vehicle (CV) brands, has recently introduced a new series of premium brake rotors for the heavy-duty market. Designed to work in conjunction with its Air Disc Brake (ADB) pads, these new products are available across 8 different Class Eight applications, covering nearly 98 percent of the HD ADB market. Abex offers a pad and rotor combination for the most popular Bendix, Meritor and Wabco Air Disc Brake systems.

Featuring E-Shield protective coating technology, Abex rotors are easier to remove, due to less corrosion and rusting on the attaching surface. Each rotor also contains a directionally smooth finish and offers quality design for maximum performance and reliability. Abex premium brake rotors feature precision mill balance technology to prevent common performance issues such as pedal pulsation and brake noise caused by improper balance. Each rotor's micro finish aids in proper seating of the friction material, reducing pad break-in time. Abex pad and rotor combinations are engineered to work together to provide optimum stopping and extended life.

"More and more fleets have started utilizing ADB applications, and as such, we recognize their desire for a premium solution to all their wheel-end needs," said Dennis Griffin, product manager, Abex, Federal-Mogul Motorparts. "Abex rotors not only offer the quality that customers expect, but also address common complaints such as unsightly corrosion of the rotors and ease of installation."

About Federal-Mogul

Federal-Mogul LLC is a leading global supplier of products and services to the world's manufacturers and servicers of vehicles and equipment in the automotive, light, medium and heavy-duty commercial, marine, rail, aerospace, power generation and industrial markets. The company's products and services enable improved fuel economy, reduced emissions and enhanced vehicle safety.

Federal-Mogul operates two independent business divisions, each with a chief executive officer reporting to Federal-Mogul's Board of Directors.

Federal-Mogul Motorparts sells and distributes a broad portfolio of products through more than 20 of the world's most recognized brands in the global vehicle aftermarket, while also serving original equipment vehicle manufacturers with products including braking, wipers and a range of chassis components. The company's aftermarket brands include ANCO wipers; Beck/Arnley premium OE quality parts and fluids; BERU* ignition systems; Champion lighting, spark plugs, wipers and filters; Interfil filters; AE, Fel-Pro, FP Diesel, Goetze, Glyco, National, Nural, Payen, Sealed Power and Speed-Pro engine products; MOOG chassis components; and Abex, Ferodo, Jurid and Wagner brake products and lighting.

Federal-Mogul Powertrain designs and manufactures original equipment powertrain components and systems protection products for automotive, heavy-duty, industrial and transport applications.

Federal-Mogul was founded in Detroit in 1899 and maintains its worldwide headquarters in Southfield, Michigan. The company employs nearly 53,000 in 24 countries. For more information, please visit www.FMmotorparts.com.

*BERU is a registered trademark of BorgWarner Ludwigsburg GmbH
David and Louise Turpin.

On Sunday, police discovered a horrifying scene in a Perris, California, home: 13 severely neglected and malnourished siblings from the ages of 2 to 29, some of them shackled to their beds. Their parents, 57-year-old David Allen Turpin and 49-year-old Louise Anna Turpin, were arrested under suspicion of torture and child endangerment and are each being held on a $9 million bail.

Heres what we know about the case so far.

How did police find out about the situation in the Turpin home in the first place?

Per a sheriffs report, one of the daughters, aged 17, somehow managed to escape with a cell phone and call 911 to describe her and her siblings ordeal. When they met her, she was so small and emaciated that they thought she was only 10 years old.

What did they find when they arrived?

They found several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings. (The parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner.) Police thought all of them were children and were shocked when they learned that seven of the siblings were from 18 to 29 years old. The youngest was only 2 years old.

Where are the siblings now?

They were interviewed by the police, given food and drinks, and now theyre all in the hospital  the seven adults are at the Corona Regional Medical Center and the six children are at the Riverside University Hospital System.

What do we know about the parents, David and Louise Turpin?

Per the Los Angeles Times, Louise was a homemaker and David once worked as an engineer for Northrop Grumman and at Lockheed Martin but filed for bankruptcy twice  the latest time in 2011. Hes also listed as the principal of Sandcastle Day School, a private school at their home address that records show only had six students enrolled. Public entries on their joint Facebook page are filled with smiling family photos, some taken at Disneyland, and usually with their children all wearing matching outfits.

What are neighbors and family members saying?

Davids parents, James and Betty Turpin, told ABC News that while they havent seen their son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren in about five years  they were surprised and shocked by the allegations. They added that God called on David and Louise to have so many children and that the children received very strict homeschooling. This reportedly included trying to memorize the entire Bible.

Neighbors who spoke to the L.A. Times said they found the family weird. I thought the kids were home-schooled, said across-the-street neighbor Kimberley Milligan. You know something is off, but you dont want to think bad of people.
Photo: Getty Images

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump love it in Washington and are in it for the long haul, according to an anonymous friend of Ivankas who was quoted on Page Six by Richard Johnson, a columnist who has covered Trump for the New York Post since the 1990s.

Whenever she invites people, they all want to come see her in Washington, the friend said, adding that not only do Jared and Ivanka Trump love it in the swamp, but their children love it, too.

Page Six reported that this friend made his or her remarks after seeing Trump (which Trump? Its not clear) at Mar-a-Lago (its also not specified when this visit supposedly occurred).

On its own, the Page Six item is odd: 75 words, none of them important or revealing anything that Ivanka and Jared havent themselves said on the record. But its purpose this week is obvious: Among the many colorful stories and outlandish quotes in Michael Wolffs Fire and Fury, released earlier this month, is a grim portrait of the Washington existence of the First Daughter and her husband, who both serve as advisers to the president.

In Wolffs telling, Ivanka and Jared  whom he refers to as Jarvanka, which he claims is what Steve Bannon calls them, which he does not; he calls them Javanka  employ their shallow intelligence and boundless ambition strictly to self-serving ends, often finding themselves openly at war with other members of the senior staff in the West Wing and covertly at war with other Trumps. Wolff writes that in the presidents rambling late-night phone calls to various friends and advisers, he would offer this assessment of the couple: Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.

Throughout their short time as political figures, Ivanka and Jared have appeared to use blind sources to shape their public image rather than risk calamity with on-the-record interviews with any outlet more hard-hitting than Us Weekly or the Dr. Oz Show. These sources are referred to as friends of the couple or sources close to or sources with knowledge of their thinking, and so on.

As for the story about the friend from Mar-a-Lago, whose certainty that Ivanka and Jared love this awful town very much was enough to warrant its own gossip item in the presidents hometown tabloid, a White House official told New York Magazine, I dont even know what this is.

The official declined to confirm or deny the Page Six story, referring instead to Ivanka and Jareds own public statements on the matter.

This is actually an amazing moment in time, Ivanka told Gayle King back in April. Every week, I take my children to a different museum or cultural institution. We went to the Supreme Court. Weve been to five or six museums, she said.

Case closed.
Guests at David Zwirner Gallerys 25th anniversary party. Photo: Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

On Saturday night, New York City art gallery owner David Zwirner celebrated 25 years of business with a stylish opening party for the new exhibition David Zwirner: 25 Years. Fashion editors and art-world insiders gathered for the anniversary fete to preview the show, which features Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Ruth Asawa, and 55 other artists represented by the gallery. After a viewing of the show, selected guests made their way to the Standard Hotels Boom Boom Room for the after-party. There, the Champagne was flowing, several people wore elegant robe dresses, and 80s tracks pounded from the speakers. And there was a dog! Photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcias date, Buddy, was the most photographed guest of the night.

David Zwirner was 28 when his opened his first gallery in Soho, in 1993. If you asked him then what he hoped to accomplish, he would have said, To stay open a couple of years, as he told the Cut. After 25 years of business, Zwirner now owns four galleries: three in New York, and one in London. His fifth space opens later this month in Hong Kong. And the latest news: Famed architect Renzo Piano will design Zwirners largest upcoming project, a sixth location on West 21st Street, which Zwirner said he hopes will be a headquarters of sorts. Zwirner has no plans to slow down. I probably have one more space somewhere else in me, he added. I dont quite know where thats going to be, but I think well keep growing. he said.

Click ahead to see the best looks from the party, including a floral dress worn by Zwirners wife, Monica Zwirner, and Creative Times Alyssa Nitchun in a statement long-sleeve leather dress.

Photo: Joe Schildhorn /BFA.com/Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Rachelle Hruska MacPherson, Monica Zwirner

Photo: Joe Schildhorn /BFA.com/Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Buddy

Photo: Joe Schildhorn /BFA.com/Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Heather Cardinale, Jessamyn Fiore

Photo: Joe Schildhorn /BFA.com/Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Alyssa Nitchun

Photo: Joe Schildhorn /BFA.com/Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Natalie Miller, Ashley Tickle, Hyatt Mannix

Photo: Joe Schildhorn /BFA.com/Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Hanna Schouwink, Angela Choon, Alissa Friedman

Photo: Joe Schildhorn /BFA.com/Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Janiena Janssen, Sabrina Geraldino, Natacha Roberts

Photo: Joe Schildhorn /BFA.com/Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Victoria Crowbar, Octavius Seven, Buddy
Welcome to Its Complicated, stories on the sometimes frustrating, sometimes confusing, always engrossing subject of modern relationships. (Want to share yours? Email pitches to itscomplicated@nymag.com.)

Its a Saturday at 6:30 in the morning, and theres a man trying to break into my apartment building through the back door.

I know this because I invited him, having just woken up to his wyd come over text from the night before.

These brief late-night texts have become a standard exchange between us ever since we reconnected as old friends turned fuck buddies on Tinder several months earlier. I tell him I cant come over because my foot is broken, and Im surprised to find that hes not only awake, but also seemingly turned on by this response. He asks to see a photo of my cast, which is hot pink with neon yellow stripes and covers the length of my right calf, and tells me hes jumping in an Uber to my place. Never mind that its dawn, he lives on the opposite end of town, and has to be at work at noon.

The problem, when he arrives for the earliest booty call Ive ever had, is that I physically cant walk down the stairs to let him in. My 100-year-old building doesnt have an elevator or an intercom, and Im on crutches, which makes it difficult for me to do just about anything that involves leaving my studio apartment. Eventually, he gives up on trying to get into the building without a key, so he waits on the porch while I get out of bed and strap on my least sexy accessory: a hands-free crutch I bought on Amazon that locks around my upper thigh. It takes a few minutes to put on, and it makes me look a bit like a cyborg  eliciting plenty of stares when I wear it in public  but it helps me get up and down the stairs when I absolutely need to, which, apparently, is right now.

It wouldnt be the last time I found myself in this predicament. I spent weeks that summer on a kind of house arrest, my right foot fractured in three places (the result of tripping on some steps, a story that is far less interesting than any of my inquiring Uber drivers wouldve liked).

During that time, basic errands like grocery shopping became an able-bodied luxury I could no longer accomplish on my own. Even taking a shower required a level of time and strategy Id never considered back when I took my two functioning feet for granted. But in spite of these challenges, there was one thing that became noticeably easier: getting laid.

While nearly every aspect of my work and social life had slowed to a halt, my sex life was never more active than when I was incapacitated.

Not only were men chasing after me  kind of an ironic phrase, considering I really couldnt go anywhere at all  but I also no longer had to leave my house or get dressed up to see them. The same suitors who previously hadnt returned my texts or couldnt be bothered to meet me for a drink unless I drove to their side of town were now eager to dote on me.

One guy Id been casually dating on and off for months offered to bring me dinner, despite the fact that we almost never hung out at my place. Id ended things with him earlier that summer, but something about his text  Can I be your Kathy Bates?  made me reconsider. It was a reference to the Stephen King movie Misery, in which Batess character holds a writer hostage and chops off his foot with an axe. In hindsight, I probably shouldve found the joke creepy rather than charming, but I proceeded to ask him if hed like to come over and sign my cast  a question I never imagined Id utter as an adult, and certainly not as a pickup line.

Another guy Id only gone out with once pledged to come over with a bag of groceries and cook for me. Normally Id think this idea was too forward for a second date, but it was hard to resist the idea of a home-cooked meal after living on the canned and frozen foods a friend had helped me stockpile so I wouldnt have to make multiple trips to the store. I decided to take him up on the offer.

The newfound attention was flattering, but I wondered if I was inadvertently fulfilling some kind of damsel-in-distress fantasy that allowed men to feel like my savior. When I expressed this concern to a friend, he mused aloud that some of these guys might even be taking it a step further. There was a whole category of cast and injury porn on the internet, he told me  and sure enough, a quick Google search showed dozens of websites, multiple Reddit communities, and thousands of pornhub.com videos dedicated to cast, injury, and broken bone fetishes. The appeal, it seems, is the cast as a form of bondage or submission. A little more digging led me to a related phenomenon known as abasiophilia, a term coined by Johns Hopkins professor John Money to refer to an erotic fixation with a partner who is unable to walk. Had I suddenly become more desirable because Id lost my mobility?

The thought of it made me cringe  but it didnt stop me from embracing the circumstance. Before long, Come over and sign my cast had become my coded sexual proposition of choice, akin to asking someone if they wanted to Netflix and chill. (It was also the quickest way to a UTI, as I soon discovered, which meant that I spent that summer going back and forth from the urgent-care clinic for reasons that had nothing to do with my foot.)

It was a new phenomenon for me, asking for what I wanted and demanding it on my own terms. In the past, Id often made too many concessions for men I liked: Id say yes to dates even if the time was inconvenient or the location was far out of the way, because I didnt want to come off as difficult. More often than not, Id trek to see them at their place rather than mine, making excuses for my small apartment or the lack of nearby parking. But being temporarily physically disabled forced me to put my own needs before anyone elses, even if that meant telling a date that what I really needed was someone to drop off groceries.

As I became more vocal, I also found myself caring less about how I presented myself on social media. Id previously used Instagram Stories to show only the more glamorous aspects of my life, projecting an image of myself as the kind of person who got dressed up and went out with friends multiple times a week. But when I could no longer go out, I passed the time by documenting the parts of me that were messy and literally broken. Out of boredom, I frequently posted mundane videos of my motionless gauze- and cotton-wrapped foot, or my bizarre attempts to walk using my robotlike hands-free crutch. Later, I took videos of my cast being cut off twice  the first time, my foot hadnt fully healed so I had to do the whole process over again  and my eventual graduation into a medical boot and, later, an orthopedic black shoe with a foam sole and Velcro straps. Like the hands-free crutch, this shoe was one of the least sexy things Id ever put on my body, but the fact that I could actually wear it felt like a small victory worth celebrating. Each time I posted a video, responses flooded in from friends and acquaintances  including guys I occasionally flirted with  asking how they could help and what they could bring me. My cast, it turns out, was the biggest thirst trap of all.

In the end, though, I dont think it was really the cast or the impaired mobility that made me so alluring to the people in my life. It was likely the fact that I finally stopped trying so hard and let myself be vulnerable at a time when I genuinely needed help. I asked for what I wanted, and most of the time, I got it  even if none of the men I dated that summer ever did sign my cast.
100 Dogs Seized From Ohio Home, 76-Year-Old Woman Faces Charges

One hundred dogs have been seized from a residence in Ohio, and police have charged the owner with cruelty against a companion animal.

Authorities say Bernice Robertson, 76, confined a large number of dogs at her home and failed to provide veterinary care, failed to provide sufficient exchange of fresh air, failed to provide normal grooming and failed to clean fecal matter and urine from the dwelling, reported the Athens Messenger.

After Athens County received complaints about the dogs, a search warrant was obtained.

Count 'em, 100 dogs rescued from apparent hoarding situation  Athens NEWS https://t.co/0YG5Qv1CZ8  Tom (@thedogdiet) January 15, 2018

"These dogs really tugged at our hearts when we saw the conditions they were living in." https://t.co/NCjm99Oqsl  The Post (@ThePost) January 13, 2018

Officials found 100 dogsan assortment of mixed-breedsliving in Robertsons home.

County Dog Warden Mary Beth Brown said that a number of the dogs were in poor health but none were in danger of dying, following an assessment by veterinarians.

They were not skinny, and had good body conditions (overall), but some of them have injuries, and they have very poor skin condition, Brown told the Messenger. They were very, very dirty.

However, neighbors told officials that they had seen Robertson bury dead dogs in the past.

On Friday, Robertson pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charge.

The rescued dogs will be placed in a temporary home pending what happens with the case, Brown said in a statement obtained by the Athens Post.

These dogs will receive veterinary care, grooming and have a warm, clean place to live pending review of the case by the Athens Municipal Court, Brown said. These dogs really tugged at our hearts when we saw the conditions they were living in.

From NTD.tv

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L: A screen shot of a mobile phone with an alert text message sent to all Hawaiian citizens on Jan. 13, 2018. (ALISON TEAL/AFP/Getty Images); R: Hawaii Gov. David Ige speaks at a press conference on Jan. 13, 2018. (Hawaii Emergency Management Agency)

Hawaii Government on Damage Control After Missile Attack Scare

Hawaiians havent taken kindly to their local government after it terrified them with an imminent missile attack warning on the morning of Saturday, Jan. 13, only to call it off 38 minutes later. Now the government is trying to convince Hawaiians they can trust it if it cries missile threat again.

I know first-hand how todays false alarm affected all of us here in Hawaii, and I am sorry for the pain and confusion it caused. I, too, am extremely upset about this and am doing everything I can do to immediately improve our emergency management systems, procedures, and staffing, said Hawaii Gov. David Ige in a Saturday statement.

The alarm was issued at 8:07 a.m. local time via a message to all Hawaiian cell phones that read: Missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.

An employee triggered the message by pushing the wrong button during a routine check of the Hawaii Warning System that was performed when a new shift was taking over the 24/7 State Warning Point, said Vern Miyagi, administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, during a Saturday press conference.

The employee, 10-year veteran of the agency, has since been reassigned, Hawaii News Now reported.

For safety reasons, the employees name hasnt been released. The agency itself has been harshly criticised by the public and even reportedly received death threats.

You gotta know this guy feels bad, right? Miyagi said.

Ige and Miyagi stressed the agency made changes to procedures to prevent a false alarm in the future, including a rule that two people need to be present during the routine checks of the Warning System. The systems app will also be modified to include a function to automatically send out a false alarm notification. This time the false alarm notification had to be prepared manually, which caused part of the delay, Miyagi said. Employees will be counseled and drilled too, he said.

Miyagi asked the public to take government emergency alerts seriously in the future, but acknowledged his agencys credibility has taken a hit.

The consequence of this is obviously bad. Im working on credibility now because we worked so hard to get this [Warning System] in place, he said.

Unanswered Questions

The official description of events still leaves some unanswered questions, however.

Miyagi said the State Warning Point alert system is managed through a computer application and there are three to four people manning it. The shift changes every eight hours, and at unspecified unscheduled intervals, the employees perform a routine check of the system.

Miyagi said that as a part of the check, an employee is supposed to click on a button on the Warning System screen used to test the system, and then confirm it. The employee supposedly pushed a button that starts the actual warning and then confirmed it.

There is a screen that says, are you sure you want to do this? Miyagi said. That thing was pushed anyway.

Miyagi didnt say why the employee did it. I cant explain that, he said.

Theres another part to the story that seems not to fit the official explanation: Some of the sirens on the islands went off.

The sirens are a separate system from the cell phone alert messages and are triggered by a different person, Miyagi said. Those two people are sitting side by side, he said.

He didnt explain how were the sirens were triggered. We have to review that, he said.

Ige also didnt say who triggered the sirens. We dont know, he said.

It was not initiated up here in the office, another official at the press conference said.

Most of the sirens that went off were within the proximity of military bases, one of the reporters at the press conference said.

Ige said the government is investigating how the sirens were triggered.

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View of a bridge under construction that collapsed leaving dead and injured workers in Chirajara near Bogota, Colombia January 15, 2018. (REUTERS/Jaime Saldarriaga)

At Least 9 Workers Killed After Colombian Bridge Collapsed

BOGOTAAt least 9 construction workers were killed and multiple injured when a partially-constructed bridge collapsed in central Colombia on Monday, an official from the disaster response agency said.

The bridge, located in Chirajara on the border of Cundinamarca and Meta provinces, was to be part of the highway that connects the capital Bogota and the city of Villavicencio, and was not yet in public use.

View of a bridge under construction that collapsed leaving dead and injured workers in Chirajara near Bogota, Colombia January 15, 2018. (REUTERS/Jaime Saldarriaga)

View of a bridge under construction that collapsed leaving dead and injured workers in Chirajara near Bogota, Colombia January 15, 2018. (REUTERS/Jaime Saldarriaga)

The cause of the collapse, which sent pieces of the bridge down into a canyon below, is under investigation, Reinaldo Romero, head of disaster response for Meta province, told Reuters.

Up to now there are nine dead and five injured, Romero said. We are doing a check to rule out other victims.

A bridge under construction in Colombia collapses, killing at least ten workers and injuring eight pic.twitter.com/6FhIngpq2F  AFP news agency (@AFP) January 16, 2018

Transportation Minister German Cardona flew over the site of the collapse later on Monday and visited rescue staff on the ground with Dimitri Zaninovich, the head of the national infrastructure agency.

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Rohingya refugees line up for daily essentials distribution at Balukhali camp, near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh Jan. 15, 2018. (Reuters/Tyrone Siu)

Bangladesh Agrees With Burma to Complete Rohingya Return in Two Years

DHAKABangladesh has agreed to complete the process of returning Rohingya refugees to Burma within two years after repatriation begins, the south Asian nation said on Tuesday, following a meeting of the neighbors to implement a pact signed last year.

A statement by the Bangladesh foreign ministry did not say when the process would begin. But it said the return effort envisages considering the family as a unit, with Burma, also known as Myanmar, to provide temporary shelter for those returning before rebuilding houses for them.

The statement said Bangladesh would set up five transit camps which would send Rohingyas to two reception centers on the Burmese side of the border.

Myanmar has reiterated its commitment to stop outflow of Myanmar residents to Bangladesh, it said.

The meeting in Burmas capital Naypyitaw was the first for a joint working group set up to hammer out the details of the November repatriation agreement.

The Burmese government has not issued its own statement after the meeting and government spokesman Zaw Htay was not immediately available for comment.

Verification Process

Zaw Htay said earlier, however, that returnees would be able to apply for citizenship after they pass the verification process.

A Burmese agency set up to oversee repatriation said in a statement last Thursday that two temporary repatriation and assessment camps and one other site to accommodate returnees had been set up.

Myint Kyaing, permanent secretary at Burmas Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population, told Reuters earlier this month Burma would be ready to begin processing least 150 people a day through each of the two camps by Jan. 23.

The Rohingya crisis erupted after insurgents of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), better know locally as the Harakah al-Yaqin (faith movement in Arabic), attacked security posts on Aug. 25 in the western state of Rakhine, triggering a fierce military response that the United Nations denounced as ethnic cleansing. Some 650,000 people fled the violence.

Burma denies ethnic cleansing, saying its security forces had mounted legitimate counter-insurgency clearance operations.

By Ruma Paul

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Convicted Canterbury Cannibal Now in a Nebraska Jail

Formally, the Washington County Sheriff is not at liberty to disclose why Dale Bolinger, a convicted sex offender dubbed by the British media as the Canterbury Cannibal, is in jail.

Hes here, but I cannot tell you why, Washington County Sheriff Mike Robinson told Omaha World-Herald reporters. Legally, I cannot say anything.

But, according to the Washington County Corrections Facility online inmate list, the man who was previously sentenced to nine years for plotting to rape, decapitate, and eat a 14-year-old girl in Britain has been incarcerated in the United States since Jan. 12.

KETV7 reporters reached a man Bolinger had been living with in Blair, Nebraska, and he told them the registered sex offender was no longer a resident there and is never coming back.

Nebraska state law states that a registered sex offender with no place to live can be arrested after three days if that individual fails to notify the authorities.

The sheriff and I have been closely involved with the Bolinger situation, Washington County Attorney Scott Vander Schaaf said in a statement, ABC news reported. We want to inform the citizens of Washington County that law enforcement and the county attorneys office know the location of Mr. Bolinger and you can rest assured that hes not a threat to the community at this time.

Bolinger, an American citizen who worked as a nurse in the U.K., spent time in a British jail for a range of sex offenses.

British media accounts painted a terrifying picture of his crimes and his persona. Reports said Bolinger had cannibalistic fantasies and schemed in online chatrooms with the likes of Gilberto Valle, a New York police officer dubbed the Cannibal Cop and convicted of plotting to carry out a macabre plan involving kidnapping and cannibalism.

The judge at Bolingers trial described his behavior as abhorrent, shocking and dangerous.

Sylvia Kasper, a local area resident, told ABC shes concerned about the safety of the neighborhood children.

Its making my heart race. Its scary, considering I have a small day care, and now I really have to watch and keep doors locked, Kasper said.

This is just demented, Kasper added, according to RT. This neighborhood is filled with children.

In exchange for agreeing to a deportation back to the United States he received a commuted sentence.

Bolinger relocated to Blair, Nebraska, at the beginning of January, much to the dismay of locals, who found out after the Omaha World-Herald broke the news that the ex-con had taken up residence in their community.

Capt. Robert Bellamy, a jail administrator at the Washington County Sheriffs Office, reportedly confirmed to the Sun reporters that Bolinger was at the jail.

He is here for a mental health evaluationhe has not committed any new crimes. We need to consider how best to protect this man, and also how to best protect our community, he said.

In all my years on this job I have never experienced anything like this. The public is concerned, Bellamy said.

Bolinger served three years of a nine-year sentence before arriving in the Blair area and registering on Jan. 4 as a sex offender.

It is surprising that he was released from prison in England so early, Bellamy told reporters.

Neighbors told the Omaha World-Herald they feared for the safety of their children with Bolinger in the community.

It is unclear whats next for Bolinger, but it is expected the county attorney will release more information about his fate in the coming days.

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Crossbow Killer Who Allegedly Murdered Neighbor Over Noise Was Found Dead

A man wanted for the suspected murder of his neighbor was found dead in a vehicle on Sunday, Jan. 14, according to police.

Police found Anthony Lawrences body in a vehicle in a rural location in the United Kingdom, Humberside Police said in a statement on Jan. 14.

The 55-year-old, who went missing two days prior, was wanted by police in connection to the murder of Shane Gilmer, 30, and the attempted murder of his pregnant girlfriend Laura Sugden, 27, on Friday, Jan. 12.

Our officers have discovered a body believed to be Anthony Lawrence in a vehicle in North Yorkshire. Mr Lawrence was wanted in relation to the murder of Shane Gilmer (30) and the attempted murder of his pregnant girlfriend Laura Sugden on Friday 12 Jan. https://t.co/uPFI2yEKqI  Humberside Police (@Humberbeat) January 14, 2018

We are able to confirm that the victim killed in the incident last night was 30 year old Shane Gilmer. We are supporting Mr Gilmer's family during this difficult and sad time. The investigation to find the person responsible is ongoing'.  Humberside Police (@Humberbeat) January 13, 2018

We will now look to establish the full details of the incident and continue to gather witness statements and evidence as part of this ongoing investigation, police spokesperson Stewart Miller said in a statement on Jan. 15.

The scene in Southburn near #Driffield as police continue investigate murder of 30-year-old Shane Gilmer. Officers are still searching for Anthony Lawrence over incident here on Friday pic.twitter.com/p9mNeiPREJ  VikingNews (@VikingFMNews) January 14, 2018

According to locals, the couple was attacked by their neighbor, Lawrence, after an ongoing row over loud noise, reported the Telegraph. Neighbors in the area said Lawrence had reportedly complained about the sound coming from the couples house in recent months.

Thanks for all your help in the search for Anthony Lawrence, 55, in connection with a suspected murder in Driffield. We believe we have located his car but the search for him continues. Pls don't approach him. Call 999 if you see him.https://t.co/ZzARkL8vuK pic.twitter.com/Gzv9N0Tt2D  Humberside Police (@Humberbeat) January 13, 2018

Hed gone round a month before and threatened them to keep the noise down, one neighbor, who was unnamed, told the newspaper.

They were apparently being too noisy. Shane and Laura lived next door to him, but hadnt been there long. This Anthony Lawrence guy wasnt happy about the noise, he said.

It sounds like a horror movie, he added.

@Humberbeat confirm a crossbow was recovered from the scene of the murder of Shane Gilmer in Southburn in #Driffield pic.twitter.com/3OVVCgNshb  VikingNews (@VikingFMNews) January 14, 2018

On Friday, Lawrence complained to the couple again about the noise but things turned ugly. Both Gilmer and Sugden were found injured in their home and rushed to the hospital. A crossbow was found at the scene, reported Sky News.

Gilmer later died at the hospital while Sugden suffered from non-life threatening injuries. Both she and her unborn child were in a stable condition on Jan. 15, reported the news station.

Shanes family continues to be supported by our specially trained officers and we would ask for consideration as they come to terms with their tragic loss, police said.

From NTD.tv

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Grandparents of 13 Kids Kept Shackled in Dingy California Home Speak Out

More details have been revealed about parents who were accused of abusing their 13 kids, keeping them shackled up in foul conditions in Southern California, according to the parents.

David Turpins parents James and Betty Turpin told ABC News that the parents thought that God called on them to have so many children.

The children were given very strict homeschooling, the grandparents said.

They said that David and Louise were members of the Pentecostal faith, but they didnt go to a church in the area.

The grandparents, however, said that they are surprised and shocked at the allegations against them.

The grandparents added that the couple had no friends or community that they were aware of.

David, they said, worked as an engineer, having graduated from Virginia Tech.

Officials said on Monday, Jan. 15, that the couple abused their own progenyages 2 to 29by withholding food and keeping them chained inside their dark and filthy Perris, California home.

Officials were alerted after their 17-year-old daughter escaped the home and called authorities via a cellphone.

David and Louise were arrested on torture and child-endangerment charges. Theyre being held on $9 million bail each, according to local officials.

Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults, police said in a statement. The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty.

The girl, who officers had initially thought was about 10 years old, contacted police on Sunday after escaping the one-story house, Reuters reported.

Neighbors said the Turpins and their children rarely emerged from their unkempt home in the new built development of closely spaced single-family houses.

Police said six of the couples children were minors, while the other seven were over 18.

The siblings told officers that they were starving and police did not give the parents motive for holding the children captive.

A Facebook page that appeared to have been created by the parents showed the couple dressed in wedding clothes, surrounded by 10 girls in matching purple plaid dresses and three male children in suits.

California state records list David Turpin as the principal of the Sandcastle Day School, with its address at the Turpin house, according to Reuters.

Records show the Turpins filed for bankruptcy in 2011. Nancy Trahan, who works in the Temecula, California, law office that handled the bankruptcy, said the couple were friendly and spoke highly of their children.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Gymnastics Star Simone Biles Says She, Too, Was Sexually Abused by Larry Nassar

Four-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles has come forward to say she also suffered sexual abuse at the hands of former USA Gymnastics team physician Larry Nassar, as he faces sentencing on Tuesday, Jan. 16.

I too am one of the many survivors that was sexually abused by Larry Nassar, Biles wrote in a letter that was posted to Twitter on Monday, Jan. 15, with the hashtag #MeToo.

The sexual misconduct accusation is the latest in a list of allegations leveled against the now-incarcerated doctor by female athletes.

In the letter, Biles described Nassers behavior as completely unacceptable, disgusting, and abusive, especially coming from someone whom I was TOLD to trust.

The 20-year-old American, who was a key member of the U.S. team that won gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics, joins a number of top-level gymnasts who have accused Nassar of abuse, including Gabby Douglas, Aly Raisman and McKayla Maroney.

Please believe me when I say it was a lot harder to first speak those words out loud than it is now to put them on paper. There are many reasons that I have been reluctant to share my story, but I know now it is not my fault.

Nassars attorney, Matt Newburg, said he had no comment on the latest allegations.

Nassar was sentenced last month to 60 years in prison on federal child pornography charges and is set to be sentenced this week in Michigan after pleading guilty to additional counts of criminal sexual conduct related to allegations he assaulted girls under the guise of medical treatment.

It is not normal to receive any type of treatment from a trusted team physician and refer to it horrifyingly as the special treatment, Biles wrote.

The young women that accuse Nassar of sexual abuse are expected to begin the emotionally trying process of delivering victim impact statements in court on Tuesday. According to CNN, the court has scheduled several days to hear from victims or their parents. A spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Attorney General, speaking to CNN, said 88 individuals are expected to give impact statements.

Biles, who won a record three successive world all around titles before winning four gold medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics, said the alleged incidents left her broken and the more she tried to shut off the voice in my head the louder it screams.

USA Gymnastics said in a statement it is heartbroken, sorry and angry that Biles and other athletes were harmed by Nassar.

USA Gymnastics support is unwavering for Simone and all athletes who courageously came forward to share their experiences, the organization said in a release. We are our athletes advocates. USA Gymnastics will continue to listen to our athletes and our members in our efforts of creating a culture of empowerment with a relentless focus on athlete safety every single day.

At Nassars previous sentencing on Thursday, Dec. 7, he was sentenced to 60 years in prison on federal child pornography charges that grew out of a sex abuse investigation.

U.S. District Judge Janet Neff in Grand Rapids, Michigan handed down the sentences that were sought by prosecutors, and she called him a threat to children.

Its imperative Mr. Nassar be deterred as long as possible, Neff said, ESPN reported. Mr. Nassar was, is and, in my view, will continue to be a danger to children. He has demonstrated that he should never again have access to children.

You have to wonder whether he felt he was omnipotent, whether he felt he was getting away with something so cleverly, Neff said, according to the Lansing State Journal.

Nassar, 54, pleaded guilty in July to possessing thousands of images and videos of child pornography between 2003 and 2016. He also pleaded guilty to charges of trying to destroyed evidence, CNN reported.

According to ESPN, FBI agents found 37,000 illegal pornographic images on a hard drive in a trash bin when they searched Nassars home.

Nassar was the team physician for the Michigan State University gymnastics and womens crew teams, and an associate professor at MSUs College of Osteopathic Medicine. He served as the USA Gymnastics physician through four Olympic Games.

Reuters contributed to this report

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Kentucky Doctor Arrested for Allegedly Showing Up Drunk for Surgery

A Kentucky doctor was arrested after allegedly showing up intoxicated to perform a surgical procedure, Lex18 reported.

Cosmetic surgeon Theodore Gerstle allegedly arrived around noon on Monday, Jan. 15, at a hospital in Lexington, due to perform what would have been his only surgery that day.

But he never made it into the operating room.

According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, Ruth Ann Childers, a spokesperson for Baptist Health Lexington, said that Gerstle raised the suspicion of an unnamed individual on the premises. He was suspected of being under the influence of alcohol. Childers said the surgeon was confronted by the chief medical officer about the suspected intoxication, prompting Gerstle to leave the premises.

The police were called and the doctor was arrested near the hospital, WKYT reported.

Lexington doctor arrested after report he showed up for surgery intoxicated https://t.co/Vbe1R83bom ?Hes a plastic surgeon. Good thing he got caught before cutting on someone!  ??Resista-ImaGenius-Sista? (@debiowens) January 16, 2018

In a statement, Childers pledged to investigate the incident. Patient safety is always our number one concern. This will be thoroughly investigated, said Childers in a statement.

Speaking to WKYT, Childers also said that Gerstle has been suspended from practicing at Baptist Health Lexington, pending the conclusion of the investigation.

Gerstle was booked at the Fayette County jail on a charge of alcohol intoxication in a public place and has been subsequently released.

The New York native is employed at Lexington Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, according to the organizations website.

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Man Arrested at Airport for Wearing Too Many Clothes When Trying to Board Plane

A British tourist in Iceland was arrested after trying to board a flight home because he was wearing too many clothes, according to airport officials.

Ryan Carney Williams, known on his Twitter account as Ryan Hawaii, was barred entry to the terminal after he tried to get around luggage rules by wearing it. Williams was wearing eight pairs of pants and 10 shirts.

The reason they gave was that Williams was rude and when asked to leave the flight desk, he refused, reported the Iceland Monitor. Security was then called to get him to leave.

I asked POLITELY if I could wear all the clothes in my case and still board, Williams wrote on Twitter. The BA staff told me Yes after a bit of a back and forth and me refusing to leave the desk because I werent given a valid reason to leave.

The tourist told the outlet that police officers arrived at the scene and used pepper spray while holding him on the ground.

Williams made it initially through security but the events unfolded after he arrived at the British Airways flight desk.

Williams posted on Twitter that he believed what took place happened due to racial profiling.

After his first ejection from the airport, he booked a new flight with EasyJet the next day.

However, an airport official told him at the EasyJet gate that he wouldnt be allowed to fly due to what happened the day prior.

The captain and the ground crew were concerned about reports from the previous day so we provided a refund and he traveled with another airline, an EasyJet spokesman told the Mirror.

Williams was eventually able to make it home on a Norwegian Airlines flight but is focused on directing attention on British Airways and EasyJet, threatening a lawsuit against the latter.

@British_Airways hi being held at Iceland Keflavik airport because I had no baggage put all the clothes on and they still won't let me on. Racial profiling? Or.. pic.twitter.com/NKgpe1cPFP  Ryan Hawaii (@RYAN_HAWAII) January 10, 2018

A spokesman for British Airways told the Daily Mirror that no pepper spray was used, contrary to Williams claim.

We do understand that our customers plans can change so they can choose to pay a fee at the airport if they need an extra bag, the spokesman added. Our hand baggage only fares from Iceland are as low as 47 each way, and are designed for customers who are traveling without any hold baggage.

Spoke to @easyjet via dm and this was there response, can't believe this is real life right now pic.twitter.com/h8EqkEwTpH  Ryan Hawaii (@RYAN_HAWAII) January 13, 2018

We explained our policy to our customer, and arranged an alternative flight to London, the spokesman said.

Williams has been in contact with British Airways, who are refunding him, according to Iceland Monitor. EasyJet has also refunded him.

Arrived to airport in Iceland with no luggage on my booking. My sister-in-law booked my flight because I was FLAT broke from being homeless in Iceland. WHOLE other story, Williams wrote.

I moved. Continued to film and explain that I was well within my rights. Yes it was comical what I did but I am an Artist/Designer so all my luggage is my livelihood. Worth somewhere 2,000-3,000. Police were called. I spoke to 2 v polite officers explained my story.  Ryan Hawaii (@RYAN_HAWAII) January 16, 2018

Some Twitter users responded to his story with sympathy.

Hope youre all good bro. Sorry youve had to deal with this. Respect respect respect ??  MIKE G (@MIKEV_G) January 11, 2018

Others, however, didnt agree with his take on events, nor take kindly to his saying that it was due to racism.

Or stupidity

Listen, it's a cute try to wear the extra clothes. But if it doesn't work, then give it up and pay the overweight fee.. the world isn't here to support your sorry shtick  DoctorMike (@DoctorMike15) January 16, 2018

People gave their lives to fight real issues of racism. You should be ashamed of yourself for making such fake BS claims.  Ben A (@iminfrontofyou) January 16, 2018

From NTD.tv

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Man Ruptures His Throat by Stifling a Sneeze in Rare Medical Case

A bizarre medical case suggests you might want to think twice before stifling that next sneeze.

A man ruptured his throat after trying to stop a sneeze, according to case report in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), colourfully entitled Snap, crackle and pop: when sneezing leads to crackling in the neck

He was admitted to hospital after doctors found he had perforated his pharynx and he had to be fed via a tube for a week as he recovered.

A previously fit and well 34-year-old man presented to the emergency department with an acute onset of odynophagia [pain and difficulty swallowing] and change of voice after a forceful sneeze, wrote the authors of the case, which took place at Leicester Royal Infirmary in the UK.

He described a popping sensation in his neck and some bilateral neck swelling after he tried to halt a sneeze by pinching the nose and holding his mouth closed, according to the report.

Air was leaking through the rupture into his tissues and muscles, from his neck down into his chest, causing something known as crepitus: grating, crackling or popping sounds and sensations due to air under the skin.

An X-ray showed streaks of air in his throat and neck. A CT scan detected air in the tissue, mostly centered in his neck, but reaching as far down as the middle of his back.

The doctors concluded that the condition was caused by a pharyngeal tear, which is typically caused by vomiting, heavy coughing, retching or some kind of trauma.

The man was fed through a nasal tube for a week while he recovered in hospital.

The authors noted that such a case is raresomething echoed by other medical experts.

Dr. Zi Yang Jiang, a head and neck surgeon at University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, told AP such cases were an exceedingly rare occurrence.

But holding back a sneeze can produce surprising levels of damage, he said, resulting in trauma comparable to that of a gunshot wound to the neck. A collapsed lung is among the problems that can ultimately be caused.

When you sneeze, air comes out of you at about 150 miles per hour, Dr. Anthony Aymat, director for ear, nose and throat services at Londons University Hospital Lewisham told AP. If you retain all that pressure, it could do a lot of damage and you could end up like the Michelin Man with air trapped in your body.

The British man in the case study was able to eat soft foods after a week and had made a full recovery within 2 months, according to the report

Halting sneezing via blocking [the] nostrils and mouth is a dangerous manoeuvre, and should be avoided, noted the authors.

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American special forces soldiers advance as a Chinook helicopter takes off during the "Swift Response" airborne training exercise in Hohenfels, southern Germany on Aug. 26, 2015. (Philipp Guelland/AFP/Getty Images)

Military Receives Largest Pay Increase in 8 Years

Members of the U.S. military this month will receive their largest pay increase in eight years.

President Donald Trump approved the pay raise of 2.4 percent for uniformed service members, and 1.9 percent for federal workers, in an executive order on Dec. 22.

The raise is more than the 2.1 percent increase the military service members received in 2017 and the biggest since 2010 when they received a 3.4 percent increase.

The pay increase was included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Trump signed on Dec. 12.

U.S. soldiers lining up as they wait to bid farewell to wounded veterans during Operation Proper Exit at Forward Operating Base Shank in Afghanistans Logar Province on on May 28, 2014. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

The act saw an overall increase in military spending and the acquisition of new defense equipment. Among the budgeted expenses are F-35 Joint Strike fighters, ground combat vehicles, and Virginia-class submarines.

The bill will also increase the size of the American Armed Forces for the first time in seven years.

History teaches us that when you weaken your defenses, you invite aggression, Trump said at a ceremony signing the bill. The best way to prevent conflict is to be prepared, and really be prepared. Only when the good are strong will peace prevail.

The bill marks the beginning of an undoing of a series of budget cuts to the military in recent years.

Trump said those cuts had severely impacted our readiness, shrunk our capabilities, and placed substantial burdens on our warfighters.

US Army soldiers from 2-506 Infantry 101st Airborne Division and Afghan National Army soldiers take positions after racing off the back of a UH-47 Chinook helicopter during the launch of Operation Shir Pacha into the Derezda Valley in the rugged Spira mountains in Khost province, along the Afghan-Pakistan Border, directly across the border from Pakistans lawless Waziristan region, on Nov. 20, 2008. (DAVID FURST/AFP/Getty Images)

Defense Secretary James Mattis told Congress in June that No enemy in the field has done more to harm the combat readiness of our military than sequestration. Sequestration refers to automatic, across-the-board budget cuts to discretionary spending, which includes spending on the military.

The NDAA, however, has yet to receive funding from the appropriations committees in Congress.

Last month the House and Senate passed a continuing resolution to keep the government funded to Jan. 22, 2018.

On Tuesday, the president said that the Democrats are seeking to shut down the government over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty they are seeking.

Trump and other Republican leaders have tried to negotiate a deal with Democrats that include a solution to DACA as well as the funding for a border wall, and changes to the immigration system, including limitations to chain-migration and an end to the diversity lottery program.

The Democrats want to shut down the Government over Amnesty for all and Border Security, Trump wrote on Twitter. The biggest loser will be our rapidly rebuilding Military, at a time we need it more than ever. We need a merit based system of immigration, and we need it now! No more dangerous Lottery.

The Democrats want to shut down the Government over Amnesty for all and Border Security. The biggest loser will be our rapidly rebuilding Military, at a time we need it more than ever. We need a merit based system of immigration, and we need it now! No more dangerous Lottery.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 16, 2018

Trump has stressed the importance of increased security on the southern border to stem the influx of illegal aliens and opioids. He has demanded that any deal on DACA would include improved border protection, to prevent a new wave of illegal crossings.

We must have Security at our VERY DANGEROUS SOUTHERN BORDER, and we must have a great WALL to help protect us, and to help stop the massive inflow of drugs pouring into our country!, Trump wrote on Twitter.

We must have Security at our VERY DANGEROUS SOUTHERN BORDER, and we must have a great WALL to help protect us, and to help stop the massive inflow of drugs pouring into our country!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 16, 2018

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Mary Ann Clark was found safe and alive in bed in a room at Mount Sinai hospital in New York City. (Union Township Police)

Missing 74-Year-Old New Jersey Woman Turns Up in Hospital

A 74-year-old woman from Union, New Jersey, who was reported missing on the morning of Friday, Jan. 12, was located Monday in Mount Sinai Hospital where she is in stable condition.



Mary Ann Clark left her apartment around 5 a.m. Friday morning, headed for the subway station to catch a train to take her to her job in New York City.

Clark, who works for CM&F Group, an insurance underwriter on Hudson Avenue in Manhattans Tribeca neighborhood, didnt show up Friday morning. Her co-workers called the police.

Its not like her at all, co-worker Hilary Ginther told ABC7 News on Friday. Shes very sharp. She basically runs the place. Shes the office manager, shes kind of like a mother to all of us.

Were very worried about her, Ginther continued. She doesnt have any immediate family in the area.

On Monday morning, Clarks co-workers got good news.

Mary Ann Clark had gotten aboard the #1 train as usual on Friday morning, but around 6:30 a.m. suffered a medical episode.



Lt. Robert Christie of the Union Police told News-12 New Jersey that two other passengers on the train saw the Clark was in distress and called 911. Police met the train and took Clark, then unconscious, to Mount Sinai hospital in New York City.

One of the two passengers who called police saw a news report Monday morning, recognized Clarks photo, and called Union police.

No details about precisely what sort of medical episode Clark suffered have been released, but the latest report is that Mary Ann Clark is awake and alert and in stable condition.

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Neighbor Said Mom of 13 Kids Allegedly Kept Captive Kept Smirking and Spit Twice When Arrested

The mother of the 13 children who were allegedly kept malnourished and chained in their Southern California home apparently smirked and spit on the floor when police arrested her and her husband, a neighbor has claimed.

Police officer kept talking and she kept just, like, smirking and, like, kinda, like, she spit twice down at the floor, an unnamed neighbor told The Mirror about Louise Turpin, 49, who is accused of torturing and endangering her children.

David Allen Turpin, 57, and Louise Anna Turpin were arrested on Sunday and each charged with nine counts of torture and 10 counts of child endangerment after a 17-year-old, emaciated girl escaped the house in Perris, about 70 miles east of Los Angeles and called police, the Riverside County Sheriffs Office said on Monday, Reuters reported.

She was, like, just coughing, acting a little weird, just, like, kept looking, the neighbor added.

Their children ranged in age from 2 years old to 29 years old.

I cant believe this. I cant believe this. Its so sad, said neighbor Jennifer Luna, CBS News reported. The older kids, I thought they were, like, 12, because they looked so malnourished, so pale, Kimberly Milligan added.

Why dont we ever see the kids? Milligan said she asked herself, Reuters reported. In hindsight, we would have never thought this. But there were red flags. You never dont hear or see nine kids.

They said that the kids rarely went outside.

The children were homeschooled, and their father was listed in state records as the principal of Sandcastle Day School, which is located at the homes address.

Two years ago, while walking around the neighborhood looking at Christmas lights and decorations, Milligan said she encountered three of the Turpin children and complimented them on their decorations. Milligan said that the children froze, as if by doing so they could become invisible, according to Reuters.

Twenty-year-olds never act like that, she said. They didnt want to have a social conversation.

'As a forensic psychologist, this is why I think David and Louise Turpin might have been holding their children captive' https://t.co/PI0lEZh2H9  The Independent (@Independent) January 16, 2018

Nicole Gooding, 35, who has lived in the neighborhood for three years, said she saw the family for the first time two months ago when the mother and children were cleaning up the yard that was full of weeds and overflowing trash cans.

Housewife reveals bizarre evening encounter with pale Turpin childrenhttps://t.co/gqcTFg7Q4e via @MailOnline  John B Tawn (@27Tawnyowl) January 16, 2018

On Facebook, images showed the family outside, including a group shot at Disneyland. In another image, the kids can be seen smiling as their parents renewed their marriage vows in Las Vegas as an Elvis impersonator presided over the ceremony.

The way the kids looked physically? Thin, but not excessively thin. I thought they were very active as a family, the Elvis impersonator, Kent Ripley, told the BBC. I didnt think that they didnt eat or there was punishment or anything like that. They smiled a lot.

The couple left a positive review of the Elvis chapel. If youre in Vegas, this is defintely [sic] the best chapel to marry or renew your vows, they said online.

Ivan Trahan, a lawyer who represented the couple as they filed for bankruptcy in 2011, told the Los Angeles Times: To me and my wife, Nancy, who was with me during the interviews, we always thought of them as very nice people who spoke highly of their children.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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New Jersey Man Leaves Girlfriend to Die After Crashing Into Frozen River

A man who left his girlfriend belted into his car after he crashed through the ice into a frozen river has been arrested and charged with her death.

Jacob Garrett, 24, of Burlington City, New Jersey, was speeding along Riverbank Road with his 23-year-old girlfriend, Stephanie White, also of Burlington City. Garrett slammed into a parked minivan near Wood Street, sending his car flying over a metal barrier and into the ice-covered Delaware River below, the Burlington County Times reported.

The accident occurred around 1 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 14.

Garrett escaped from the car but left his girlfriend behind. Witnesses who saw the crash and rushed to help told Patch.com that Garret told them, Help my girlfriend, before fleeing the scene.

Emergency workers, who found White in the car still wearing her seatbelt, extricated her and transported her to Lourdes Medical Center of Burlington County in Willingboro, where was pronounced dead.

Burlington County police used a K9 team to follow Garretts scent trail to Burlington Towne Center North light rail platform on West Broad Street.

According to ABC-6, the police ordered the train Garret was on to stop at Beverly/Edgewater Park station, where officers from the Beverly City, Edgewater Park and Burlington City police departments arrested him.

Garrett was then transported to Lourdes Medical Center for evaluation, before being taken to the Burlington City jail.

Garrett was charged with leaving the scene of a fatal accident, causing death while driving with a suspended license, and endangering an injured victim, the Burlington County Times reported. Further criminal charges may be pending, as well as motor vehicle summonses.

Second Fatal Crash Into Icy Water

The tragic death of White was the third resulting from cars crashing into icy waters in Burlington County over the weekend.

Two cars collided on Route 130 at Bridgeboro Road on around 5 p.m. on Saturday, Jan 13, nj.com reported.

Burlington County Prosecutors Office Spokesman Joel Bewley told nj.com that one of the cars slid down an embankment into a frozen lake. Both occupants died.

Robert Stephens, 52, and his wife, Janet, 50, were heading north on Route 130 when 29-year-old Amish Patel, who was driving at excessive speed, lost control and hit the Stephens minivan, nj.com reported.

The van went over the guardrail, down an embankment, and plunged into Olympia Lake.

Emergency responders removed the couple from the submerged vehicle and transported them to Lourdes Medical Center, where they were pronounced dead.

The investigation will focus on whether criminal behavior was responsible for the collision and the subsequent deaths, County Prosecutor Scott Coffina said in a statement. Several factors are involved in forming a conclusion, including the results of toxicology tests conducted on blood drawn from Patel following the collision, nj.com reported.

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Newborn Baby Found Murdered With Multiple Head Injuries in Park

A newborn baby girl has been murdered and left in the bushes of a town centre park, police say.

The baby died within six hours of her birth, with a post-mortem examination showing she suffered multiple blunt force injuries to her head.

Detectives are hunting for the murderer of the baby who was discovered in a park in Aldershot, Hampshire, around 40 miles southwest of London, on May 19, 2017.

Detective Chief Inspector Dave Storey, of Hampshire police, said DNA evidence showed that both the baby and her mother are of East Asian ethnicity, and most likely the father too.

He said the baby, who has been named Baby M by officers, was probably born between 6 p.m. on May 15 and 8 a.m. the next day, according to scientific analysis by the National History Museum.

Police are appealing for help to find two people captured on CCTV walking past the birth place 10 times between 11:30 p.m. on May 15 and 12:30 a.m. on May 16 2017.

Detective Storey said in a statement, It saddens us greatly that despite months of complex and detailed investigation we havent identified the newborn baby girl and her parents. We need to know why she was killed and bring the person or people responsible to justice.

Identifying the babys parents is key to us understanding why the baby was killed and the circumstances leading to her tragic death. We have a baby girl, without a name and a proper burial, please help us find out what happened.

Further appealing for the publics help, Storey said, Please contact us if you think you can help, what happened to this newborn baby girl is unthinkable, we need to find out who is responsible.

He told the Evening Standard that police are launching house-to-house enquiries around the area where the murder took place to identify witnesses or people who have knowledge of the murder.
Iranian students protest at the University of Tehran during a demonstration on Dec. 30, 2017. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Opinion: Trump Stands Up Against Human Rights Abuses

Swift retaliation against human rights abusers in Iran shows Trump is committed to standing up for human rights

President Donald Trump has proven that he is not afraid to stand up for whats right.

On Jan. 12, his administration announced sanctions against 14 Iranian entities and individuals.

Under the sanctions, some of Irans worst perpetrators of human rights abuses were targeted.

One such person is Gholamreza Ziaei, director of the notorious Rajaee Shahr prison west of Tehran, known for jailing political opponents.

Thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets since late December, calling for a change to the Islamic regime that has ruled since 1979, have been jailed.

At the Rajaee Shahr prison, protesters have been sexually abused, tortured, andin some casesunlawfully executed. In one horrific scenario at the prison, a protester had his eye gouged out by prison officials.

The sanctions go all the way to the top of the Iranian regime by targeting Sadegh Amoli Larijani, the head of Irans judiciary, whose brother is the head of Irans parliament.

The swift action, in response to the popular uprising in Iran in more than 100 cities, shows that the Trump administration is serious about standing up to rights abusers.

For many years, U.S. administrations countered human rights mostly in name only, without concrete action against the wrongdoers.

In China, millions of practitioners of the spiritual discipline, Falun Gong, have been subjected to extreme forms of persecution, including torture and murder, and even the forcible removal of their organs.

Falun Gong practitioners in Ottowa, Canada, stage a protest in 2008 in which they re-enact the horrific practice of organ harvesting. Researchers say that Chinese authorities have used military hospitals to forcibly remove the organs of Falun Gong practitioners, a group persecuted in China, to sell them to foreigners for transplants. (Epoch Times)

Estimates hold that since 1999, the year Chinas communist party began persecuting this peaceful group, millions have been illegally imprisoned and thousands have been killed through torture and abuse.

Last December, Trump sent his strongest message yet that the United States will no longer allow such abuses to continue.

In an executive order signed on Dec. 21, Trump declared a national emergency over severe human rights abuses and corruption taking place around the world.

For many years, U.S. administrations countered human rights mostly in name only, without concrete action against the wrongdoers.

The executive order, which relies in part on the authority given by the Global Magnitsky Act, can result in the perpetrators of such abuses being banned from the United States and having their assets frozen.

Among the first targeted under the executive order was Gao Yan, the director of the Beijing Public Security Bureau Chaoyang Branch, over the death of a human rights activist in detention in March 2014.

In the coming months, we will see how this powerful tool against rights abusers around the world will be used by the Trump administration.

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Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Bao Lanfang, a Chinese relative of missing passengers on Malaysia Airlines flight MH 370 cries as she waits for information outside the airline's office in Beijing, China on Aug. 6, 2015. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Passengers Wife Claims Missing MH370 Plane Has Nothing to Do With Pilot

The wife of one of the passengers on the MH370 flight, which vanished while flying from Malaysia to Beijing, says that whatever happened to the plane has nothing to do with the pilot.

Ive always believed the fault was with the plane, which is why I put a court case out against Boeing in the USto prove that the Boeing 777s that are still flying are safe, Danica Weeks told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777, vanished on March 8, 2014.

Her 38-year-old husband Paul Weeks was one of 239 people on board the plane.

Weeks said that Boeing has a responsibility to continue paying for search efforts to try to locate the aircraft, as well as issuing an official statement that the Boeing 777s are safe to fly in.

If theyve got nothing to hide then, why not? Theyve got the money, theyve got the resources, she told Stuff, a New Zealand outlet.

So lets hear from them, lets hear from the horses mouth that those planes are safe, because quite frankly their silence has been pretty scary.

Exactly 1000 days since MH370 vanished, widow Danica Weeks says she just wants her husband found. https://t.co/SKQhXQeoQX #7News pic.twitter.com/0xfqMrELkD  7 News Melbourne (@7NewsMelbourne) December 2, 2016

Weeks spoke as she launched a lawsuit against the major airline maker, saying the disappearance was due to a mechanical fault.

The wife refuses to call herself a widower and is still holding out hope that the plane is found.

I just want to find him. That was the start goal and thats still the end goalto find Paulie, she said.

And indeed the search is still ongoing.

Just this week, it was reported that a new American company specializing in high-tech seabed exploration had been handed a contract to search for the missing flight in the Indian Ocean.

The search will begin on Jan. 21 and will feature up to 55,900 square miles being looked at, reported AIN Online.

Don Thompson, a member of The Independent Group, which has served in an advisory role to the officials heading the effort to find the vanished plane, told the media outlet that he thinks the new search has at least a 70 percent chance of finding the plane.

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A Pegasus Airlines aircraft is pictured after it skidded off the runway at Trabzon airport by the Black Sea in Trabzon, Turkey, Jan. 14, 2018. (Muhammed Kacar/Dogan News Agency via Reuters)

Pilot Tells Investigators of Engine Problem Before Turkey Plane Crash

The Turkish aircraft that careered off a runway and nearly into the sea had a problem with one of its engines said the pilot, according to Sky News, citing Turkish news agency Dogan.

Previously released photographs of the crash site, which show the plane just meters from the edge of the sea, also show an engine lying in the sea.

The Pegasus Airlines flight skidded off the runway after landing at an airport in northeast Turkey, stopping just short of the Black Sea as its wheels got stuck in mud.

On Monday Jan. 15, the Turkish news agency reported that the pilot said there was something wrong with one engine.

When we were going to make our usual manoeuvre towards the right from the seaside by reducing our speed, the right engine suddenly gained speed for a reason we do not know, the pilot told investigators, reported the Sun, citing Dogan.

Due to this speed, the plane got out of our control and suddenly swung to the left and got stuck into the mud in the cliff.

According to passenger reports, the plane lurched to one side before the plane plunged off the edge of the runway.

Pegasus Airlines confirmed in a statement that the Boeing 737-800 aircraft, flying from Ankara to Trabzon, had a runway excursion incident. The 162 passengers, two pilots and four cabin crew onboard were all unhurt, according to the airline.

We tilted to the side, the front was down while the planes rear was up. There was panic; people shouting, screaming, Fatma Gordu told state-run news agency Anadolu, reported AFP.

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Police Identify Three Young People Killed in Iowa Car Crash

Authorities are still investigating the details of a car accident in Cedar Falls, Iowa, that claimed the lives of three young people.

The crash took place on East Viking Road near the shopping center in Cedar Falls. Police said the young driver and two of his passengers were speeding when they lost control of the vehicle on Friday, Jan. 12.

Their car ended up colliding with an SUV carrying a couple and their nine-year-old daughter, KWWL reported.

Cedar Falls Police said Elijah Showalter, 20, Daniel Delagardelle, 21, and Brady Hagenstein, 16, were all thrown from their car when they crashed into the SUV.

All three men were pronounced dead at the scene on Friday.

Public Safety Director and Chief of Police, Jeff Olson, told The Courier that officers have not yet uncovered who was the driver, only adding that Showalter and Delargedelle were in the front seat at the time.

KWWL  Eastern Iowa Breaking News, Weather, Closings

Witnesses told police that it seemed the car was traveling 80 miles an hour.

However, the posted speed limit near the crash was 45 miles an hour, according to The Courier.

Showalters aunt, Tracy McNamara said the car belonged to her nephew. But she said she does not know who was driving, adding that she will miss Showalter.

Eli was an amazing boy and man, he was always fun, McNamara told KWWL. Hed come into a room and light it uphe sparkled.

Delagardelle worked at a pub called the Brass Tap. The bars owner told the network that he was a phenomenal person and worker. The other boy, Hagenstein, was already an uncle at the age of 16.

Authorities were still not sure why the trio was speeding down Viking Road.

Olson told The Courier that the occupants of the SUV received non-life-threatening injuries.

The police chief reminded everyone that accidents could be avoided.

We find a cause of the accident and almost every one of them, quite frankly, they are human error and if you could just take driving a little more seriously and just be a little more careful we could avoid a lot of these accidents, Olson said.

Family members and first responders said the scene of the accident was hard to stomach.

Its heart wrenchingyou dont wish that on anybody, McNamara told KWWL. Parents arent supposed to have to bury their children and these boys werent supposed to be in an accident.

It could all be over in a blink of an eye. Be careful because you have family that loves you unconditionally and dont put your parents through this, she added.

A Gofundme page has been set up for the trio Daniel, Elijah and Brady to help with any funeral costs.

Autopsies and toxicology results will come back in a months time.

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A ship sails up the Huangpu River as heavy smog engulfs the city of Shanghai on Dec. 25, 2013. (VCG via Getty Images)

Protecting the Environment Is Chinas Latest Excuse to Bully Taiwanese Businesses

Taiwanese businesses that operate and invest in China face many risksgetting scammed, bullied, and beaten by local mafia, and getting ensnared in local political infightingall this without any form of legal redress.

The latest hurdle comes in the form of restrictive environmental protection regulations that have suffocated businesses, forcing them to close down.

Since China enacted laws to open up trade and business with Taiwan in the 1990s, many companies from the island across the strait have capitalized on the opportunity in Chinas sizeable market.

However, for some, the investments havent paid off.

Late last year, a leaked online document revealed that Kunshan City in Jiangsu Provincea hub for Taiwan businesseshad requested 270 factories to stop production from Dec. 25 to Jan. 10 because the local freshwater quality was not up to standard. About a half of the affected companies were Taiwanese, according to the BBC.

The directive was issued by a local government office dedicated to implementing the provincial authorities 263 project to improve air and water quality, which included measures to reach specific numerical benchmarks by the year 2020.

Chinese authorities are known to zealously execute policies in the name of achieving targets and scoring political pointsfrom curbing air pollution through forcing citizens to use natural gas instead of coal, causing those in areas without the appropriate infrastructure to live without heat during the height of winter, to exaggerating local revenue numbers to appear more economically productive. The 263 project also includes goals to minimize coal-burning in the region.

Zhuhai City in Guangdong Province also announced in late December that due to anticipated weather conditions and the likelihood of air pollution, the provincial department of environmental protection requested 75 businessesfour of which were Taiwaneseto limit production from Dec. 26 to Dec. 29, according to United Daily News, a Taiwanese newspaper.

On Jan. 4, Taiwanese media reported that a factory belonging to Taiwanese furniture maker Lacquer Craft Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in Dongguan City, Guangdong Province issued a notice announcing its closure.

The company said severe environment regulations had caused major financial losses, leading to the decision to stop production beginning on Feb. 1. About 2,000 factory employees were laid off with severance pay, according to Taiwanese broadcaster Sanlih Television.

The factory started operating in 2005. According to Taiwanese newspaper Liberty Times, a local real estate developer wanted to drive out the factory because the nearby area was becoming a residential neighborhood. He thus repeatedly reported Lacquer Craft to the Dongguan environment protection office, claiming that the factory was producing waste with a strange smell. However, the office did not find any issue upon inspection.

The office said that according to their records, the factory had registered with them in October 2014 and passed an inspection in January 2016, the Liberty Times reported.

Taiwanese media Central News Agency reported that despite passing inspection, local authorities had listed the company as one of the top 10 environmental pollution corporations in Dongguan in 2015 and 2016.

Taiwanese companies are no stranger to government malfeasance leading to business losses. Kao Wei-Pang, founder of the Taiwanese Victims of Investment in China Association, told his own story of a Chinese venture he once invested in. The vice general manager not only drove him out of the venture but colluded with local bank officials to set up a rival company.

Kaos organization publicizes cases of Taiwanese businesspeople who have been cheated, wrongly imprisoned, and even killed while conducting business in China. There are over 60,000 cases of victims registered in China, with total investment losses estimated to reach $30 billion, according to the association.

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Providence Place Mall in Rhode Island on Lockdown Amid Shooting

Providence Place Mall in Providence, Rhode Island, was placed on lockdown after reports of a shooting, according to reports.

WCVB reported that one person was shot inside a parking garage at the mall, and a Providence Journal employee witnessed a man being wheeled outside on a stretcher.

Young man with most of one pant leg ripped off is led handcuffed out of Providence Place. Shooting under investigation @projo pic.twitter.com/X62wbOLj83  Amanda Milkovits (@AmandaMilkovits) January 15, 2018

The shooting appeared to have taken place near the malls Nordstrom.

Officials told the station that the man had non-life-threatening injuries.

Two police officers were seen on the first level of the mall and told people to leave the mall.

The mall was then placed on lockdown, according to Fox25.

Police are still looking for a suspect and dont believe its an active shooter incident.

Source: There is a shooting at Providence Place Mall. It happened in the parking garage outside of Nordstrom. 1 person was shot. More details to come.@boston25  Malini Basu (@WFXTMalini) January 15, 2018

Providence Police are looking for a suspect. They are searching the parking garage area now. Officer's are going from car to car. @boston25  Malini Basu (@WFXTMalini) January 15, 2018

Scene outside of Providence place mall, after one person was shot in the parking garage area of Nordstrom. @boston25 https://t.co/Ex0Bg7gzwO  Malini Basu (@WFXTMalini) January 15, 2018

More scene at the Providence Place Mall. pic.twitter.com/JzX32EoshO  Johnny Villella (@JohnnyVillella) January 15, 2018

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Several plagues that swept through Mexico and Guatemala after the Europeans arrived desecrated the native populations there. (UrikAmador/Pixabay [CC0 Creative Commons])

Researchers Believe Theyve Narrowed Down Cause of 16th Century Epidemic that Killed Most of Mexico

For hundreds of years, scientists have been trying to uncover the cause of the plagues that killed millions of residents in Mexico and present-day Guatemala.

Europeans who came to the area brought germs that the indigenous populations didnt have an immunity to, and after their arrival, the area was hit by several epidemics.

The epidemic of cocoliztli from 1545 to 1548 killed an estimated 5 million to 15 million people, or up to 80 percent of the native population of Mexico, NCBI reported.

It was a cataclysmic population decline, Kirsten Bos, a physical anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, told Newsweek.

The cocoliztli plague had symptoms which included fever, headaches, and bleeding from the nose, mouth, and eyes. In just a few days, most die from it.

An international team of researchers, using DNA testing, think they may have come closer answering the question of what contributed to this devastating disease.

Researchers from Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), and the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) used DNA from plague victims to match strains of bacteria that are known today.

They worked from a cemetery in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, that had cocoliztli victims, along with those who died of other causes.

Using DNA from the pulpy part inside their teeth, the researchers discovered in 10 of the 29 bodies they tested a strain of Salmonella enterica, called Paratyphi C, a bacterial cause of enteric fever. Typhoid fever is the best known variety of enteric fever today.

The strain is not well studied, but it has about a 10 to 15 percent mortality rate today, The Atlantic reports.

While the researchers believe they may have narrowed down the possibilities as to what caused the epidemic, the findings arent conclusive.

The 2002 NCBI study says the epidemic was likely a hemorrhagic fever.

And the authors of the most recent study, published in the science journal Nature Ecology and Evolution on Jan. 15, admit that it might have crossed with other pathogens at the time. The team only tested DNA, but some viruses carry RNA.

If all these people died from RNA viruses, we will never know, at least not with these techniques, Nicolas Rascovan, a microbiologist at Aix-Marseille Universite, who also studies dental-pulp DNA among people in the Americas, told The Atlantic.

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Sister of Parent Who Kept Kids Chained in California: Something Didnt Seem Right

The sister of Louise Turpin, who, along with husband David Turpin, allegedly kept 13 of their children shackled in a dingy California home, has spoken out.

Elizabeth Jane Flores, 41, from Cleveland, Tennessee, told the Daily Mail that she hasnt seen her sister in 19 years, but they still kept in touch by telephone. Turpin refused to invite her over to their home and never allowed her to speak to her nephews and nieces.

Something didnt seem right about her parenting but never would I have expected it to be like this, she said.

She said, We have been so worried about them because its been so strange but there was nothing we could do. They wouldnt let anyone visit and we didnt know their address. I havent seen her in 19 years. We would talk on the phone from time to time, but every time I would ask to talk to her kids, she wouldnt let me.

Flores said their parents had flown out to visit their family but Louise wouldnt give them their address.

She never let us talk to her kids. She wouldnt even accept my Facebook request. We all wondered what was going on. My parents booked several flights to go see them but when they got there they wouldnt tell them where to go and my parents left crying every time. They died before they got to see them again. Its just heartbreaking and Im so embarrassed about all of this, she said.

Louise and David Turpin were arrested and charged with child endangerment and torture on Sunday when their 17-year-old daughter, whom officials thought was only 10, escaped their Perris, California, home and contacted authorities, according to police. Theyre now being held on $9 million bail each.

The 13 kids were aged 2 to 29. They were taken to a hospital and were given food and drink.

The children were, as police said, shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings.

The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty, a news release from police said.

Flores, who is an author and Christian motivational speaker, said she was a victim of child abuse, but she never mentioned her sister, according to the Mail.

Neighbors, meanwhile, revealed that the kids rarely left the home. When they did, the children appeared pale and acted in an odd manner.

Why dont we ever see the kids? Kimberly Milligan, 50, who lives across the street from the family, said she asked herself, according to Reuters. In hindsight, we would have never thought this. But there were red flags. You never dont hear or see nine kids.

Police are due to hold a news conference at 10 a.m. PST on Tuesday, Jan. 16, about the case.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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The Stories Behind Aboriginal Star Names Now Recognised by the Worlds Astronomical Body

Four stars in the night sky have been formally recognised by their Australian Aboriginal names.

The names include three from the Wardaman people of the Northern Territory and one from the Boorong people of western Victoria. The Wardaman star names are Larawag, Wurren and Ginan in the Western constellations Scorpius, Phoenix and Crux (the Southern Cross). The Boorong star name is Unurgunite in Canis Majoris (the Great Dog).

They are among 86 new star names drawn from Chinese, Coptic, Hindu, Mayan, Polynesian, South African and Aboriginal Australian cultures.

These names represent a step forward by the International Astronomical Union (IAU)  the global network of the worlds roughly 12,000 professional astronomers  in recognising the importance of traditional language and Indigenous starlore.

Whats That Star Called?

Many cultures around the world have their own names for the stars scattered across the night sky. But until 2016, the IAU never officially recognised any popular name for any star.

Instead, each star is assigned a Bayer Designation, thanks to a book published in 1603 by German astronomer Johann Bayer. He systematically assigned visible stars a designation: a combination of a Greek letter and the Latin name of the constellation in which it is found.

He gave the brightest star in a constellation the letter Alpha, then the next brightest star Beta, and so on down the list. For example, the brightest star in the Southern Cross is Alpha Crucis.

Alpha Crucis is the bottom star on the Southern Cross constellation on the right of this image, photographed from the Northern Territory over a two minute exposure. (Flickr/Eddie Yip, CC BY-SA)

The IAU recognised that the lack of official star names was a problem. So the Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) was formed in 2016 to officially assign popular names to the hundreds of stars visible in the night sky.

That year the working group officiated 313 star names, derived mainly from the most commonly used Arabic, Roman and Greek names in astronomy. But the list contained few Indigenous or non-Western names.

That changed last year when the WGSN formally approved the 86 new star names drawn from other cultures. Aboriginal Australian cultures stretch back at least 65,000 years, representing the most ancient star names on the list.

The WGSN is looking to identify even more star names from Australia and other Indigenous cultures around the world. As Indigenous cultures have a rich collection of names for even the faintest stars, many new star names could gain IAU recognition.

So what do we know about these four stars and the origin of their names?

Wardaman star names

The Wardaman people live 145km southwest of Katherine in the Northern Territory. Wardaman star names come from Senior Elder Bill Yidumduma Harney, a well known artist, author and musician.

He worked with Dr Hugh Cairns to publish some of his traditional star knowledge in the books Dark Sparklers (2003) and Four Circles (2015). These books remain the most detailed records of the astronomical knowledge of any Aboriginal group in Australia.

Uncle Bill Yidumduma Harney, Senior Wardaman Elder. (Jayne Nankivell, Author provided)

Larawag (Epsilon Scorpii)

The stars of the Western constellation Scorpius feature prominently in Wardaman traditions, which inform the procedures of initiation ceremonies.

Merrerrebena is the wife of the Sky Boss, Nardi. She mandates ceremonial law, which is embodied in the red star Antares (Alpha Scorpii). Each star in the body of Scorpius represents a different person involved in the ceremony.

Larawag is the signal watcher, noting when only legitimate participants are present and in view of the ceremony. He gives the All clear signal, allowing the secret part of the ceremony to continue.

Epsilon Scorpii is an orange giant star, lying 63.7 light years away.

Epsilon Scorpii in the constellation Scorpius. Scorpius is not to be confused with the Wardaman scorpion constellation, Mundarla, in the Western constellation Serpens. (International Astronomical Union, CC BY)

Wurren (Zeta Phoenicis)

Wurren means child in Wardaman. In this context it refers to the Little Fish, a child of Dungdung  the life-creating Frog Lady. Wurren gives water to Gawalyan, the echidna (the star Achernar), which they direct Earthly initiates to carry in small bowls. The water came from a great waterfall used to cool the people during ceremony.

Just as the water at the base of the waterfall keeps people cool and rises to the sky as mist, the water in the initiates bowls keeps them cool and symbolically transforms into clouds that bring the wet rains of the monsoon season. These ceremonies occur in late December when the weather is hot and these stars are high in the evening sky, signalling the start of the monsoon.

Zeta Phoenicis comprises two blue stars orbiting each other, 300 light years away. From our perspective, these two stars eclipse each other, changing in brightness from magnitude 3.9 to 4.4 every 1.7 days.

Ginan (Epsilon Crucis)

Ginan is the fifth-brightest star in the Southern Cross. It represents a red dilly-bag filled with special songs of knowledge.

Ginan was found by Mulugurnden (the crayfish), who brought the red flying foxes from the underworld to the sky. The bats flew up the track of the Milky Way and traded the spiritual song to Guyaru, the Night Owl (the star Sirius). The bats fly through the constellation Scorpius on their way to the Southern Cross, trading songs as they go.

The song informs the people about initiation, which is managed by the stars in Scorpius and related to Larawag (who ensures the appropriate personnel are present for the final stages of the ceremony).

The brownish-red colour of the dilly bag is represented by the colour of Epsilon Crucis, which is an orange giant that lies 228 light years away.

Boorong star name

Unurgunite (Sigma Canis Majoris)

The Boorong people of the Wergaia language group near Lake Tyrell in northwestern Victoria pride themselves on their detailed astronomical knowledge. In the 1840s, they imparted more than 40 star and planet names and their associated stories to the Englishman William Stanbridge, which he published in 1857.

In Boorong astronomy, Unurgunite is an ancestral figure with two wives. The Moon is called Mityan, the quoll. Mityan fell in love with one of the wives of Unurgunite and tried to lure her away.

Unurgunite discovered Mityans trickery and attacked him, leading to a great fight in which Mityan was defeated. The Moon has been wandering the heavens ever since, the scars of the battle still visible on his face.

Unurgunite can be seen as the star Sigma Canis Majoris (the Great Dog), with the two brighter stars on either side representing his wives.

One of the wives (Delta Canis Majoris) lies further away from Unurgunite and is closer to the Moon than the other wife (Epsilon Canis Majoris). This is the wife Mityan tried to lure away.

On rare occasions, the Moon passes directly over the wife of his desires, symbolising his attempts to draw her away. He also passes over Unurgunite, representing their battle in the sky. But Mityan, and Moon, never passes over the other wife (with the Arabic name Adhara).

Delta Canis Majoris is an orange-red supergiant that lies 1,120 light years away.

By Duane W. Hamacher, Senior Research Fellow, Monash University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Wildlife Protection or Persecution?

The goldfish and koi started surrendering to the surface around Halloween. Bass, crappie, catfish and the distinctive sunfish/bluegill hybrids that inhabited the pond for 140 years followed. Soon the 5.2 acre South Pond in Chicagos Lincoln Park sported a slick of shiny, golden and still moving fish, kind of like a macabre womans drink.

It has been ten years since the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (DNR) deliberately laced the Lincoln Park pond with the South American poison Rotenone to restore the water body into a model Illinois freshwater habitat. It would be impractical to relocate thousands or tens of thousands of fish, explained DNR spokesman Chris McCloud at the time.

The irony of killing the fish to save the pond was not lost on Chicago residents who for generations have enjoyed the fish from rented paddleboats on the pond. It takes such a long time for them to grow and theyre just gonna kill them off, lamented Carlos de la Pena to a CBS TV news station. But Neal David, Lincoln Park Zoos vice president of facilities at the time, maintained that a fish kill is the standard technique used when restoring a pond.

The next year, the Illinois DNR practiced its poisonomics again, dosing six miles of the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal (CSSC) to hopefully kill invasive Asian carp. The three-day poisoning spree cost $3 million to taxpayers, used 2,200 gallons of Rotenone and produced 90 tons of non-sport fish like goldfish and gizzard shad. Only one carp was retrieved.

The three-day poisoning spree cost $3 million to taxpayers, used 2,200 gallons of Rotenone and produced 90 tons of non-sport fish like goldfish and gizzard shad.

State DNRs are not the only government agencies annihilating animals for controversial reasons. The USDAs Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS) Wildlife Services aggressively provides free pest control for livestock operations of private meat producers, farmers and aquaculture operators.

It has killed more than 34 million animals in the last decade according to official records. Deaths in 2015 alone included 68,905 coyotes 731 bobcats, 480 bears, 385 wolves and 284 mountain lions. Between 2004 and 2016, 19,200 cormorants were killed in Minnesota alone to protect aquaculture interests. Otters are also killed to protect aquaculture interests though many are also killed by Wildlife Services errors. From 2006 to 2012 Wildlife Services killed an astounding 7,800 animals by mistake in cruel steel body-grip traps reports the Sacramento Bee.

In 2009 APHIS records show it poisoned 489,444 red-winged blackbirds in Texas, 461,669 in Louisiana and shot 4,217 blackbirds in California. It also shot 29 great blue herons, 820 cattle egrets and 115 white-faced ibises that yearbeautiful shorebirds beloved by many. Blackbirds, herons, egrets, ibises and almost all of the birds Wildlife Services kills are protected species under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It is unlawful to pursue, hunt, take, capture or kill or such birds without a waiver according to the Act, one of the first federal environmental laws. It was drafted to stop the plunder and threatened extinction caused by the bird and feather trade especially in the hat industry.

The APHIS k illed more than 34 million animals in the last decade according to official records.

To kill blackbirds, the government even uses caged red-winged blackbirds as decoys to attract wild ones says Audubon magazine, pre-baiting an area with unpoisoned food to win the birds confidence and ensure the most deaths. Wildlife Services also used traps, snares, poisons, gas, aerial gunning and spring-loaded metal cylinders baited with the scent that fire sodium cyanide powder into the mouth of whatever tugs on them. In 2012, APHIS killed over 10,000 double-crested cormorants and 2,500 mute swans.

At least one judge has objected to the governments war on wildlife, particularly its decimation of cormorants. In 2016, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates of Washington, D.C. terminated the culling of double-crested cormorants across the country saying that shooting cormorants for eating fish is like shooting buffalo for eating grass. More recently, in Oregon, Wildlife Services has agreed to stop killing hundreds of beavers as it checks its compliance with the federal Endangered Species Act after Northwest Environmental Advocates threatened a lawsuit.

According to legal scholars, public lands and the animals who dwell on them are held in the public trust and belong to all of us. Why are our tax dollars used for such wanton eradification?

Martha Rosenberg is the author of the award-cited food expose Born With a Junk Food Deficiency, distributed by Random House. A nationally known muckraker, she has lectured at the university and medical school level and appeared on radio and television.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Epoch Times.
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